Playing Games With Kosovo

This is a typical example of why Americans are so hated in much of the world be it Europe, South America or the Middle East. Russia is interested in Serbia because of its Slavic Christian soul. It also knows that the Americans bombed the Serbian factories, television stations and schools because it wanted to build another base . It also is aware that after the American bombing the Islamists destroyed hundreds of medieval Christian churches and monuments.

go clark.You were the greatest commander NATO ever had.

The article is extremely biased. Politicians and ordinary people know that the declaration of so-called "Kosovo's independence" declares in the first place the US and NATO huge interests in keeping their military presence in Kosovo. Kosovo has the biggest US military base in Europe "Bond-steel". Here is "Bond-steel"' website: http://kosova.org/kfor/bondsteel/index.asp
(Camp Bondsteel is quite large: 955 acres or 360,000 square meters. If you were to run the outer perimeter, it is about 7 miles.
Bondsteel is located on rolling hills and farmland near the city of Ferizaj/Urosevac.
There are about 250 SEA Huts for living quarters and offices.)
The hypocrisy and cynicism of the US government's international policy have reached the limits of tolerance in the world. The US government destroys international peace and instigates the Cold War atmosphere in the world which is being divided by the US aggression into spheres of interests again.

In every country you have some sort of authority. Press is the press, but in every country you have the academics. Professors of law, history...There is a great American school called the Tufts School of Law and Diplomacy...Check what the professor Gary Leupp of the Tufts thinks and documents about the whole situation at the site: http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp02192008.html

Peace and love to all

If bad treatment of the local population were to disqualify a state from exercising sovereignty over part of its territory, then an awful lot of countries would be eligible for enforced amputation: Turkey would have to be stripped of Turkish Kurdistan; Israel would long ago have been given the boot from the West Bank and other occupied territories; Indonesia would be denied Aceh and Papua; Pakistan would lose Waziristan.Moreover, Kosovo has hardly made an even remotely plausible case for its having earned independence. First, for all the talk of "Kosovars" and "Kosovans," the residents of Kosovo identify themselves as either Serb or as Albanian; the languages they speak is either Serbian or Albanian. Creating a second Albanian state in Europe makes no sense whatsoever. It doesn't govern itself. It is a ward of various international bodies. Economically, it is a basket case, and lives off vast handouts. Kosovo is an example of an ethnic minority grabbing a piece of territory, permitting unrestricted immigration by its co-nationals from a neighboring state, ethnically cleansing the territory of all other groups and thereby creating an artificial overwhelming ethnic majority, and then demanding that these actions be rewarded by the bestowal of independent statehood

Moderator, please: I know that there are discussions that you dislike, but publish them still. Let us be fair and democratic at these dramatic times for the world order. I also discovored some triple question marks in my comment on the Guardian article. I never put in those, so please would you remove them? Thank you.

Truth is a constant value; it does not depend on an individual's approach to it. But truth actively distorts the minds of those who distort it.

Gen. Clarke speaks of the Battle at the Field of Blackbirds in 1389. Serbs lost that battle straight, argues the General. It seems that the General himself was overseeing the battle from one of his NATO planes, when his country, as ancient as Serbian, was populated by the Indians?

The truth as to the number of victims in Kosovo war in 1999 can easily be found in the Hague Tribunal transcript , the Milosevic case, pages 2225-2227. There were no more than 4,400 victims and according to the ICTY's "expert" Patrik Ball only 1,912 Albanian victims were identified by name. At the end of the day, Gen. Clark testified before the Tribunal in that case: big chunk of his testimony was closed for the public. This was because the General was to "testify" together with his NATO colleague Klaus Naumann that it was Slobodan Milosevic himself who allegedly told them in the meeting in October 1988 "that he would shoot all the Albanians". At the very same time, Clark and Naumann were in Belgrade to threaten him with bombardment!? Look, you can think about Milosevic whatever you like, but he is not that crazy. And when the bombradment begun in March 1999 after the Racak set-up, the Generals unsuccessfully tried to kill Milosevic hitting his residence.When that failed, they went to The Hague to provide a false mens rea. Very honourable, indeed. By the way, I beleieved that according to the US doctrine it was illegal to try to assassinate a Head of State.

Remember the ourageous press conferences during the NATO bombardment? Remember what Gen. Clark, Jamie Shea and their masters were telling us? That at least 100,000 Albanians were dead or missing!? The truth about the NATO bombardment is given by mseen on this thread @ 02/23/2008 ,8.31 PM. Gen. Clark and his colleagues bombed the civilian targets, but the Yugoslav army remained nearly intact. General, please tell us, how many wooden tanks - decoys have your planes hit in Kosovo, while you claimed that great many of the real ones were destroyed? While bringing destruction to Serbia, have you not, in fact, been out-manouvred by your Serbian counter-parts Generals Pavkovic and Lazarevic?

Serbia and Iraq were bombarded without the approval of the UN Security Council, now the US push for the independence of Kosovo is made without approval of the SC. This is the dismantlement of the international law and order. What all the fuss is about, asks. Gen. Clark? "We only want to get "closer" to Russia,???we want to advance". You also want to appease al-Qaeda at the Serbian expense, I would add. That is exactly what all the fuss is about. General, truth has a healing properties. Try it.

I don't understand why is this discussion Re: Kosovo's unilateral declaration of secession constantly being derailed by mostly irrelevant arguments, some try to "rationalize" and offer "historical" and "humanitarian" contexts.
Why is our attention being diverted from the main issue?
Here are the relevant facts:
The International Law is very clear, so is UN's resolution 1244. Acting against the International Law and UN's resolutions is illegal. Both Kosovo's declaration of secession and all subsequent statements of "recognition" are illegal.

It also sets a dangerous precedent, never mind thos who claim that Kosovo's case is "special", because it isn't.

The world needs to decide -- de we want the rule of Law, do we need the UN as a regulatory body?
Or do we want to establish some new rules -- the rule of "biggest gun" comes to mind?
We can't have both, as they contradict each other.

I think that Gen. Clark would like to hear one of his colleagues. General Lewis MacKenzie wrote the following on April 6th 2004 in the article for the Canadian National Post entitled "We Bombed the Wrong Side": " The Kosovo-Albanians have played us like a Stradivarius. We have subsidized and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically pure and independent Kosovo.We have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of the violence in the early '90s and we continue to portray them as the designated victim today in spite of evidence to the contrary. When they achieve independence with the help of our tax dollars combined with those of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, just consider the message of encouragement this sends to other terrorist-supported independence movements around the world. Funny how we just keep digging the hole deeper! "

Maj-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, now retired, commanded UN troops during the Bosnian civil war of 1992.

Gen. Clark would also like to hear this about his bombardment of Serbia. Mr. Walter J. Rockler wrote in 1999: " We have engaged in a flagrant military aggression, ceaselessly attacking a small country primarily to demonstrate that we run the world...As a primary source of international law, the judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal in the 1945-1946 case of the major Nazi war criminals is plain and clear. Our leaders often invoke and praise that judgment, but obviously have not read it. The International Court declared:
"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

(Walter J. Rockler was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. This essay originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune.)

Commentator sen_sdi was "clever" enough to publish Noel Malcolm's historical forgeries. The answer to this article was given by historian William Dorich to the Guardian. It is also published on the following site: http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=515#more-515. See comment no. 183. The taster: "
February 26, 2008

The Guardian
Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor:

"The ugliest form of racism is to demean an ethnic group???s religion, history or culture. This has not stopped Malcolm from revealing his closeted bigotry. He manipulates his access to the media knowing full well that most readers and editors are ignorant of Balkan history. People of Malcolm???s ilk have found it easy to paint Serbs with collective guilt by demeaning them in this alleged ???historical??? context. What we see at play here is the Goebbles concept of ???Tell a lie a hundred times and it becomes the truth.???

Kosovo independence is not about history, it is about equal human rights, and the absurd violation of UN Resolution 1244, the amputation of sovereign territory and in the process the violation of the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, and the Geneva Conventions...Equally disgraceful, the Guardian grants little to no access to your pages to any Serbian historian or journalists to give opposing views. This is hardly freedom of the press, the press is being used in this case to bludgeon Serbia???s cultural aspirations.

William Dorich

The writer is the author of 5 books on Balkan history.

Gen. Clarke should note that the illegal declaration of independence of Kosovo and illegal recognition of it leads to the total break-down of international law the world order as we know it. Proof? Costa Rica regognized Palestine yesterday. Costa Rica Recognizes "State of Palestine"
According to the AP, Israeli diplomat has postponed a planned meeting with Costa Rican officials over the Central American nation's decision to formally recognize a Palestinian state.

"We would like to express our disappointment over this regretful decision of the government of Costa Rica to establish full diplomatic relations with the 'state of Palestine,'" Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said. "This act of Costa Rica totally contradicts the traditional friendship that characterized its relations with Israel since its establishment."

"

the name is KOSOVO as in KOSOVO IS SERBIA

kosova is a bastardization of the term

Never serbian regime in KOSOVA.The Kosova now is Independent that is all for serbs and russian.Serbian regime finish of in Kosova since 1999.Thank you, USA,KLINTON,Olbright,CLARK,TONI BLER ,never komunism ond pan slavism in Kosova.

Likewise, the West is also taking Kosovo as their slice, isn't it?

Btw, "Westerners didn't hold triumphal parades at the end of the cold war...", is that true?