To Block a Nation’s Birth
The world's eyes were fixed on Belgrade last Thursday when some 2,000 rioters broke off from a protest march against Kosovo's Feb. 17 declaration of independence and torched the U.S. Embassy. But the more telling attack came two days earlier, when angry Serbs burned down U.N. border posts between Kosovo and Serbia. In an interview with B92 Television in Belgrade, the Serbian minister for Kosovo, Slobodan Samardzic, gloated, "We saved part of Kosovo!"
Not quite—NATO quickly retook the sites. But Serbia seems to feel that if it can't have the entire former province, no one can. While the United States and major European countries now recognize Kosovo, Russia and others are balking, worried about their own restive regions. Russia's Security Council veto can block any move to affirm Kosovo as an independent country, not a U.N. protectorate. Meanwhile, Serbia announced that its judges would start holding court in northern Kosovo, where ethnic Serbs are clustered. When NATO peacekeepers shut the border for a day, Serb officials and traders took mountain paths.
Officially, no one wants partition. But that seems to be what's happening by default. "They can't control it, so what are they going to do about it?" Aleksandar Vasovic, an analyst with Belgrade's Balkan Insight journal, says about the European Union mission that hopes to take over from the United Nations in Kosovo. "It is a de facto partition already." An EU official, unnamed because of the issue's sensitivity, confirmed there's no timetable for establishing Kosovo's international borders. "We'd have to see what precise arrangements were made," the official said. "It's unwise in the present circumstances to make precise predictions."
Serbia's leaders won't settle for part of Kosovo, says Ljiljana Smajlovic, editor in chief of the newspaper Politika, who is close to Serbia's ardently nationalist president, Vojislav Kostunica. "They'll do everything they can simply to treat Kosovo as part of Serbia, provide Serbs there with all the government services they can," she says. "But Kostunica will never put his signature on anything recognizing the partition of Kosovo." Instead, she says, Belgrade will keep trying to bar Kosovo from international organizations and sporting events while calling on other countries to reject Kosovo's. The point? "To make [Kosovo's independence] less real."
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Member Comments
Posted By: openmindedserbia @ 03/15/2008 5:43:29 PM
Comment: It's not o.k. to say that Declaration of Kosovo is bullshit because it is document from one legal Government and Parliament! The truth is that Albanian people is dominated in Kosovo but Serbian people also have right to leave on place where they leave all life. And also everyone have to know that all Serbian history is made in Kosovo from 10 to 15 century.
Posted By: historian2008 @ 03/11/2008 1:32:26 AM
Comment: 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.
Posted By: historian2008 @ 03/11/2008 1:31:34 AM
Comment: 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."