Posted on 03/28/2004 8:04:49 AM PST by MarMema
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:03:24 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
WASHINGTON: It is time for all good Democrats to come to the aid of their party -- and avoid mentioning certain countries of the world. They must defend the political legacy of William Jefferson Clinton and, with it, the legacies of Madeleine Albright (remember Mad Halfwit?), Strobe Talbott and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
(Excerpt) Read more at pittsburghlive.com ...
Absurd Kosovo policy has facilitated violence
03/26/04
I am still amazed by the idiocy of our foreign policy. Five years ago, we launched a savage, 78-day bombing campaign against the citizens of Yugoslavia (now Serbia-Montenegro). This, despite the fact that our own State Department had labeled the Kosovo Liberation Army a terrorist organization. Yet we became their de facto mercenary army. That blunder sent hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing NATO bombs.
Never mind that most of the Albanians living in Kosovo were not even citizens, but emigres from Albania. Ignore also that the KLA had been conducting continuous, systematic terrorist raids on the Serb civilians of that region. People whose birthright and history in that region goes back more than 1,000 years - five times longer than the United States has even existed.
Now, five years later, more than 100 historic Christian churches have been blown to bits by ethnic Albanians, and thousands of civilians, mostly the elderly and defenseless children, have been murdered by Albanian Muslim extremists. Radical Albanians are shooting at NATO troops, their "liberators," who are trying to stop them from murdering Serbs. Yet we are surprised at the level of violence happening today. What, in God's name, were we thinking? We didn't stop any "holocaust" or "ethnic cleansing"; we enabled it.
Stop the the bloodshed. Get the terrorists out of Kosovo.
Nikola Djukich
This seems to be an error but I posted it as I found it.
Oh how I would treasure such a day. I am trying to keep faith in Bush and hoping that he is involved here somehow. But it has been very hard since he has said nothing so far.
For the US, peace in Israel was the prize.
For France, (and Europe) whose Muslim populations are approaching 10%, a show of solidaridy with respect for this religon was imperative to keeping the lid of the failed state of immigration.
Today, the failed immigration of Muslims into the Western societies of Europe is posing a problem. In Muslim society, people generally are taken care of by the leaders of their various social groups or clans, who are in turn financed by Arab Governments.... In the West, individuals are expected to flourish by their own toil, yet nothing is actually required in the failed nation-states from whince Middle Eastern'ers originate.
The only solution of the war on terror is to save the internation order predicated upon Nation States. At the same time it is essential that a rapid transition of Arab Governments into countries who have democratice societies that have work, rather than handouts is effected. Iraq holds out the prospect that this vision can be created (conversely, Afarat's misuse of EU funds and his person power to subjicate his people to poverty in turn to breed discontent and warriors).
Clinton over-reached and his choice of Mad-dame Not-So-Bright, a person of Serb heritage whose family stands accused of stealing from that country was a definite slight to the Serbs (much as the US appointing a Black Andrew Young as Ambassador to the Aparthid Regime of South Africa....). Rambling, rambling....
That's what happens when '60s flower children get in charge of the US government.
I fear this story will never be told properly.
By DANICA KIRKA, Associated Press Writer
PRISTINA, Serbia-Montenegro - Five years after international forces took over Kosovo, a sudden and sweeping spasm of violence has them worrying they are being pushed back to square one.
The rampage by ethnic Albanian mobs through Serb areas has dealt a stunning blow to the slow and painstaking effort to reduce the presence of NATO (news - web sites)-led peacekeepers and rebuild civilian government.
Caught by surprise and stung by its failure to head off the violence or quell it fast, the military is overhauling operations.
It has taken back some powers it had ceded to the United Nations (news - web sites) international police force. Watchtowers, barbed wire and barricades are going up again. Commanding officers across the province are meeting ethnic Albanian leaders in groups, demanding they exert their moral authority or be held responsible for any further violence.
The two-day rampage in mid-March hit all the major towns, leaving 28 dead, 600 wounded and hundreds of homes and churches in ruins.
"We had started to trust them," Ljiljana Stajic, a 20-year-old Serb, said of the peacekeepers. "Now it's back to 1999 - war."
Though the top U.N. official here, Harri Holkeri, has said efforts to rebuild a multiethnic society are not over, interviews with U.N. officials, diplomats and other officials speaking on condition of anonymity show a mission in uproar, shocked at the strength of extremist elements of the ethnic Albanian population.
"In terms of Kosovo's prospects... (the violence) is an absolute disaster," said Alex Anderson, the project director in Kosovo for the International Crisis Group, the Brussels, Belgium-based think tank.
Although the province has quieted down, attackers ambushed U.N. police and killed two officers in northern Kosovo last week, and NATO says it is deploying 2,600 troops to augment the 18,500-strong international peacekeeping force.
NATO and the United Nations took over in 1999 after Slobodan Milosevic (news - web sites)'s crackdown, in which an estimated 10,000 ethnic Albanians died. The conflict ended when the Serbian leader accepted a peace plan to stop NATO's 78-day bombing of his country. Tens of thousands of Serbs fled Kosovo, leaving about 100,000 in the midst of a population of 2 million ethnic Albanians.
But U.N. resolutions left the future of Kosovo unresolved: although it's under U.N. control, Serbia-Montenegro has sovereignty.
Ethnic Albanians have grown frustrated with this state of limbo, and the failure of international officials to deliver what they prize above all else - independence. Now radical parties are tapping into that anger.
Kosovo society "has lost hope that the international bureaucrats can work out a serious plan," said Ylber Hysa, head of Kosovo Action for Civic Initiative, a think tank.
Swedish Brig. Gen. Anders Braennstroem's fury is evident as he describes some of his soldiers narrowly escaping death in the rampage, and he vows to meet any further violence with force.
"I am going to protect the minorities that were nearly killed and ethnically cleansed last week," he said. "And I will use every means I have. I have 3,000 soldiers with weapons in their hands."
Weapons were used to stop the recent violence, but both NATO and U.N. police sources suggest the response next time will be more aggressive.
Although triggered by the deaths of two children who were allegedly chased into a river by Serbs, investigations show elements of organization in the unrest. Buses ferried some rioters to staging points, Western diplomats speaking on condition of anonymity said, and Braennstroem said the way objects were thrown at riot police smacked of prior training.
Some military officers, also speaking anonymously, say they saw officers in the Kosovo Police Service - the civilian police agency set up under international guidance - standing by or sitting in their cars as crowds burned homes.
Braennstroem wouldn't comment on that allegation. U.N. mission spokeswoman Hua Jiang said any wrongdoing would examined, but wouldn't spell out what investigation, if any, was under way.
Stanka Kaliskic, 68, and her daughter Gordana, 42, said at least one local policeman helped teenagers to drag them from their home near Pristina, the capital.
The mother lifted her hospital gown to reveal breasts and back blackened by the beating. "The entire world took care of the ethnic Albanians. And for the Serbs? Nothing," she said.
Mobs had already started fires when two Irish officers, Capt. Ronan Dillon and Maj. David Hathaway, arrived with seven other peacekeepers to evacuate Serbs from their apartment complex in Pristina.
The rioters threw stones and fired small arms, but the thinly stretched force went in anyway using directions given by a Serb translator, Dillon said. Doors on most of the apartments were open. People were screaming for help.
Dillon said his force reclaimed eight buildings floor by floor. A trail of red drops and a bloody handprint led to a man whom they rescued and who survived to thank them later.
The terrified Serbs, many of them elderly, got only a few moments to collect their belongings. Then it was down the stairs.
"If someone wasn't fast enough, I carried them," said Dillon, 28.
He said the peacekeepers rescued 120 people that night, 40 at a time in three trips in an armored personnel carrier.
Days later, some of them returned home briefly under escort. They scooped up teddy bears, dried soup - whatever they could stuff in garbage bags in 15 minutes or less before being hurried away to an evacuation center in a Serb enclave a few miles away.
It wasn't home. But it would for now, hopefully, be safe.
"Vecernje Novosti daily, Belgrade
March 25, 2004
By Milena Markovic
Mali Zvecan. Veliki Zvecan. The name doesn't matter. It's the greatest tragedy among the Kosovo Serbs who fled their burned and looted villages. They stopped them near northern Mitrovica with their bundles.
What could these homeowners, who have spent half a century building and furnishing their homes, have possibly put in their bundles in ten minutes?
"The icon and a rug," says Milica Savic (62) from Slatina near Vucitrn.
"I took the icon, an incense burner and some incense," adds Jelisava Janackovic.
Mali Zvecan, unfinished lamellate houses intended for those whom Operation Storm swept from Croatia. They stopped here, the new exiles, on top of the hill. In March of this year, they went back down the hill and now they have nowhere else to go. Going up the hill, it seemed that the sky was within arm's reach.
"I do love Serbia. That's where my brothers are. But I don't want to inconvenience anybody. You understand? Maybe you don't understand. There I am a guest, here I am closer to my home," says Milica Savic in one breath.
Her house is gone. Everything went up in flames.
"Here, take the rug... take it to remember me by. It's all I have left of my property," Milica offers us the rug. It's a moment when horror convulses the body. When the chest is too tight for the heart, ready to burst. These people have been piecing together their homes and everything in them for decades.
"The soldiers came, Germans. One of them took me by the hand, like this. He said: Come, you must come... Should I take anything from the cellar, I asked him. We have no time, the German replied," Milica Savic testifies about the drama of her expulsion.
"In Slatina near Vucitrn, before 1999, there were 46 houses. By March 17 only eight remained."
"We struggled to stay. We did not win in our struggle. The Albanians attacked us. They hit Goroljub Janackovic on the head with a shovel. He's in the hospital. They told me: We will slaughter you and no one will be here to see it."
The lamellate house on the left, Mali Zvecan. The sign on the door says: "Occupied. Andjelkovic family, Veliko Svinjare". We ring the bell. Two children, Filip (5) and Ivana (4), answer the door The boy does the talking; he sounds like an old man.
"I left my cow tied up. And my dog on a chain... I keep dreaming of my home. I loved the tractor and the dog. Especially the tractor."
These children had no toys to miss.
Radoslav Mihajlovic earned his pension in Trepca. He was a firefighter in the zinc plant. He left two houses in Svinjare.
"They're not just houses; they're 42 years of my work. And see what's happened to me now." He spreads his arms as if to show us. "I would go back, why not. But where?"
"Even to the wilderness, if necessary, but only accompanied by the Serbian army and police. Only with them," say Radoslav Mihajlovic from Svinjare and Milica Savic from Slatina, speaking all at once.
"There's Kosara! She's returning from Slatina," someone says. The people turn to face the approaching woman. Journalists are of secondary importance right now. The most important thing for these people is to hear what Kosara saw in Slatina. The woman managed to convince UNMIK police to take her there. She came back with a broken flush tank.
"This... this is all that I found. Everything else has been burned, looted," says Kosara.
"But why did you take it, Kosara? When you look at it, your heart wants to break," Svetislav Savic tells the woman.
"Let it break. That's why I took it," answers Kosara.
This is the 68-year-old woman and her daughter in the hospital:
More of others who were brutalized:
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