Kosovo Mission Accomplished?

Kosovo: Mission Accomplished? Condi shakes hands with yet another unsavory ally.

Any visitor to the Balkans knows that to sit down for coffee or throat-rasping rakia with a person from any ethnicity in the region is to risk a not so quick, uninterruptible, vitriolic five-hundred-year history lesson so skewed that it doesn’t deserve the name of history . . . real history just about ceased to exist within Albanian and Serbian discourse. It has largely been replaced by monologues of myth and prejudice. It is now a weapon of survival.

So wrote Matthew McAllester in Beyond the Mountains of the Damned, a recounting of the late-1990s bloodshed in Kosovo. While Balkan history has lately lost its vogue in Washington, this is a good time for some brushing up. And since the conventional wisdom is so relentlessly romantic about the valiant Kosovars struggling against Serb oppression, I'll present here a side of the story that is rarely heard.

Seven years ago, an American-led NATO campaign drove Serbia out of Kosovo, which has since enjoyed semi-autonomy. Now the United Nations wants to broker an agreement over Kosovo's status. Independence for the majority-Albanian province seems to be the preferred position of most European governments and of the Bush Administration, though U.S. officials insist that no decision has been made.

The administration's tilt was evident last June, when Agim Ceku, who carries the title of Kosovar prime minister and who seeks to gain full independence from Serbia, made a quiet visit to Washington—so quiet that it was almost entirely unreported at the time. Ceku met with Condoleezza Rice, joining the growing list of thugs and crooks welcomed to town by the secretary of state.

Who is Ceku? As a brigadier general in the Croatian Army, he commanded Croat forces in the 1993 Medak offensive, in which the “Croatian Army perpetrated abuses against Serbian civilians and conducted a ‘scorched earth’ policy,” according to Human Rights Watch. In August 1995, Ceku was the organizational force behind “Operation Storm.” In the course of that campaign, which the New York Times described as “the largest single ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the war,” more than 100,000 Serbs were driven from the Krajina region of Croatia.

Ceku, who is a Kosovar Albanian, took command of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1999. He is widely credited with transforming it into a guerrilla group, and for drawing NATO into direct conflict with Serbia. After the war, the KLA morphed into the Kosovo Protection Force, still commanded by Ceku. This is a sort of first-responder outfit but any future army for an independent Kosovo would clearly be drawn from the ranks of the KPC. A leaked UN report, written in 2000 but not released (probably because it was too embarrassing) found that members of the Corps were involved in murder, torture, illegal detention, and extortion of local businesses.

The late writer Michael Kelly said at the time that former KLA leaders had formed a “criminal mobocracy” and “joined forces with former Serb paramilitary gangsters to establish themselves in drug peddling and prostitution.” Meanwhile, Kelly wrote, an “ongoing campaign to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of all but Kosovar Albanians” had forced more than 100,000 Serbs and other non-Albanians to flee the province; about 400 Serbs have been murdered, and many of those who remain live under constant, heavy guard.

Periodic violence has erupted in the succeeding years. Two years ago, anti-Serb riots across Kosovo—which occurred despite the presence of NATO and UN forces on the ground—left 19 Serbs dead and hundreds injured and displaced.

In recent years, Ceku has made public statements to the international community about guaranteeing the rights of Kosovar minorities, but many suspect that he remains a hard-nosed, thuggish Balkan commander whose constituent base remains dangerously nationalistic. Two months after meeting with Rice, Ceku paid a jailhouse visit to Selim Krasniqi , a KLA general who had just been convicted by an international tribunal of war crimes committed in 1998. “Kosovo,” Ceku remarked afterwards, “needs more men like Krasniqi.”

Ceku's visit and the Bush Administration's general pro-Kosovo tilt reinforces what Balkanists have maintained since the early 1990s, namely that the United States is not an evenhanded player. Instead, it has sought to shine a bright light on Serb atrocities—of which there have been many and which should be condemned—while applying different standards to Bosnian, Croat, and Kosovar Albanian thuggery. The White House subscribes to the same theories of history that can be heard in those Balkan cafes—theories that remain largely ungrounded in reality.

This was from April of this year, but is just as valid today. For those who haven't seen it:

Kosovo: The real test of U.S. foreign policy

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=49604

Posted: April 5, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Aleksandar Pavic

If you want to see a place where Christians are outside of the law on their own ancestral land – come to Kosovo.

If you want to see American troops committed to establishing a narco-Islamic state on Christian land – come to Kosovo.

If you want to see Christian churches, monasteries and cemeteries desecrated on an almost daily basis, under the noses of thousands of Western soldiers – look no further than Kosovo.

Seven years after William Jefferson Clinton launched a bombing campaign against a European Christian land in support of the Islamic terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army, it's as though the bombs have never stopped falling on the Christian remnant in Kosovo. Whether Clinton did it to divert attention from a burgeoning sex scandal, or whether it was part of a global anti-Christian campaign by Western liberals with a cultural death-wish, the results for the Kosovo Christians – and all non-Albanians in Kosovo – are the same.

And the U.S. State Department is doing everything to make sure it stays that way, with a strong supporting role of the United Nations, Britain and Germany.

That's right, the might and the resources of U.S. diplomacy are being used to tear away a Christian European nation's spiritual and historical cradle and hand it over to a terrorist-breeding, white-slavery peddling, heroin-pushing narco-Islamic camarilla in Kosovo, which has, by all accounts, made the province into "Afghanistan in Europe." During the current U.N.-brokered talks on Kosovo's "final status," U.S. diplomats are tirelessly promoting the "necessity" and "inevitability" of Kosovo's independence.

There are well over 1,000 Christian churches and monasteries in Kosovo, many filled with priceless medieval frescoes from the Byzantine era, in which Italian art historians have spotted the beginnings of the Renaissance about a century before it appeared in Western Europe. At least 150 have been destroyed by Muslim Albanian mobs since Clinton's post-bombing deployment of NATO "peacekeepers" in 1999. The rest are menaced on a daily basis. Those that are lucky enough to be protected have armed NATO troops and barbed wire around them.

In its drive to secure Kosovo's independence from Serbia, preferably by the end of 2006, U.S. (and U.N.) diplomacy has helped install Islamic hardliners to top Kosovo political posts – people with gallons of Christian (and Roma, and moderate Albanian) blood on their hands. It has supported the revocation of international arrest warrants against them, as in the case of new Kosovo "Prime Minister," Agim Ceku, a man whom Canadian U.N. troops wounded in Croatia in 1995 to stop a killing spree against unarmed Serbian villagers in another "U.N. protected area." Ceku had an Interpol warrant against him lifted in March "in line with his new duties of prime minister." And U.S. diplomacy brings other terrorists, such as Hashim Tachi, aka "the Snake," to Washington, D.C., as it did this January, to promote the cause of narco-Islam on Christian soil in the highest forums of American foreign policy.

Why?

It is said that more than 600 years ago, when the first news of the Battle of Kosovo came to Western Europe, telling of a victory of the Christian Serb army against the Ottoman Turks, the bells of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris rang out joyously in celebration.

Actually, this fierce battle on the Field of Blackbirds (the meaning of the name of Kosovo) ended in a draw, with both the Serbian Prince Lazar and the Turkish Sultan Murat being killed in battle. But the weakened Serbia, pressed from the north by the rival Hungarian kingdom, never recovered. It is then, as the story goes, that the bright red peonies that bloom by the millions each year on Kosovo's plains made their appearance, growing out of the soil consecrated by the spilt Christian blood. And it wasn't only Serbian blood that would be shed in the coming centuries. It was not until combined Slavic and German forces threw back the huge army commanded by Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha at the walls of Vienna in 1683 that the tide against Ottoman Turkey began to be turned back and the Christian West could finally breathe easier.

Now, 323 years later, the West's secularized elites are doing everything to help Islam – an especially aggressive and corrupt variety of it – make a big comeback in Europe, with the United States taking the leading role.

Why?

Some say that it is because the State Department, at least the part dealing with the Balkans, is still staffed with Clinton-era secular globalists pursuing their own agenda. But this cannot be an excuse for an administration that sees itself as Christian. We know what the Bible says about pragmatism when moral issues are at hand: Better that you are hot or cold than lukewarm, for you shall be spewed out like salt that has lost its flavor. And that's the present U.S. policy in Kosovo.

To what end this "pragmatism" (if that's what it is) except straight to Hell? There is no getting around it. Jesus said, "Whoever is not with me is against me." So, what of those who actively or passively give aid to the burning of His churches on Kosovo? What sayest thou, Christian soldiers?

Where were you when Christian Kosovo burned? Did you cry real tears and help, or give aid and comfort to His enemies? Take heed, Christian Americans: A great anti-Christian crime is currently being committed in your name on Christian Kosovo. You cannot say that you haven't been warned. Now it is up to you to do something.

You cannot in good conscience support Kosovo's independence. For that shall mean its final destruction as a Christian land. What can you do? What is the only consequent Kosovo policy for American Christian policy makers? Demand that the destruction of churches, monasteries and cemeteries stop, that anti-Christian persecution stop, that Christian Serbs and other non-Albanians be allowed to return to their ancestral homes protected by their own armed forces. Help them renew their houses of worship, which were destroyed under the "protection" of U.S.-led international troops.

You can support Kosovo's autonomy within Serbia, with equal rights for all. But not independence for the Islamic narco-bosses running the place and their brand of anti-civilization. That's the current State Department agenda, the same as the agenda of the United Nations and European secularized, suicidal elites. That would be abomination. And, make no mistake, that would, ultimately, be the end of Christian America. For this crime will not be forgiven in the only place that counts.

The Serbs have been my people's enemies for almost a century now, but when I asked my father about Kosovo, he said sternly "Kosovo je Srpsko" (Kosovo is Serbian)

Your father knows the truth. In Serbian hearts Kosovo will always be theirs. The Serbian Parliament almost unanimously (unheard of) approved a resolution to include a paragraph in the forthcoming new Serbian Constitution that unequivocally states what your father said: that Kosovo is an inalienable part of Serbia.

That provides legal grounds for Serbian officials to use any means to realize that statement and and in the future. It also establishes a legal precedent that any cha nge of borders against Serbia's wishes will be a violation of the Helsinki Agreement (1974) and therefore null and void.

Of course, the new constitution would have to be passed prior to Kosovo's proclamation of independence. Given that Serbia has been dragging feet on this issue for quite some time now, I wouldn't be surprised if the independence cathces them beofre they had a chance pass the new Constitution.

But if they do, one can ask what does thta mean? Immediately, probably nothing. However, geopolitical realities on the ground will change in "due time," as they always do (just think how different the world looked 30 years ago) and, as we say "with God all things are possible."

Perhaps at this time Serbia is better off without Kosovo. Albanian natality rate is so high that in 15-20 years the Serbs would be a minority in their own country (the same problme Israel will be facing in about the the same time frame; Israel's Arab population is like Kosovo's, baout 20% of the country's total, yet Arab natality rate far aout numbers Israeli imigration and natural population growth).

Serbia needs time to recuperate, to rediscover itself. As is right now, the Serbs are a confused and lost people, not even sure of what their own identity really means.

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