Free Republic

A journalist and politician, who prior to his appointment was president of the Reform Democratic Party in Vojvodina, Isakov reviewed his country's chequered history until the present day. The upside of that, he observed, was that they are all multi-lingual. Looking back on the number of times that Serbia lost its independence and its autonomy, Isakov said: "It doesn't matter how many times you fall, but how many times you get up and go on." What bothered him, he said, when reflecting on his nation's history, was "how the good guys became the bad guys." It was a phenomenon that...

THE HAGUE -- The International Court of Justice today decides on Bosnia’s genocide lawsuit against FRY. The lawsuit, brought against the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in 1993, claims that FRY was responsible for alleged genocide that took place during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia. The United Nation’s highest court’s ruling in the case will be presented to the public on February 26, by Judge Rosaline Higgins, on behalf of a panel of 15 judges. Belgrade daily Blic reports today quoting from sources close to the court that Serbia will not be found guilty of having committed genocide against...

from Christopher Walker, Jerusalem About 40 Israeli volunteers have been fighting alongside the Serbs as a gesture of gratitude for Serb support for Yugoslav Jews against the Nazis in the Second World War. The existence of the Israeli fighters - they do not like the term mercenaries - was revealed by Ron Ben Yishai, an Israeli war correspondent who was injured by Kosovo Liberation Army sniper fire this week while reporting from the province for the Tel Aviv daily Yediot Aharonot. The paper said that all the Israeli fighters had emigrated to the Jewish state from the former Soviet Union...

Kosovo Prime Minister Agim Ceku has warned Kosovo Serbs not to try to break away from the rest of the province out of anger at a draft UN plan that would set it on a path to independence from Serbia. Ceku said no one was fully satisfied with the plan, which falls short of Kosovo Albanian demands for full sovereignty, but any bid by Serbs in the north to split the territory in two would not work. "They have to understand that this is not 1991. They cannot do what the Croatian Serbs did," he told Reuters in an interview....

The United Nations emissary of Finnish and Common Market origins has yesterday reported back. He has in effect made Kosovo an independent state and separated it forever from Serbia. From now on it will be a crime to be a Serb, a Jew, or a Romany in Kosovo. Kosovo will be ruled by a Fascist, Islamist and brutal regime and the future for Muslim Kosovons will be more destitution, more brutality and the complete imprisonment of the mind by the “ideas” of Islamofascism. What a future the US cum EU Empiricists have managed to map out for this once beautiful...

The comparisons of the destruction of Yugoslavia with the destruction of Israel are chilling and instructive.

“The independence of Kosovo is a reality, so we demand recognition of Kosovo’s international subjectivity without any delays,” said Agim Ceku, its Prime Minister. The main parties in the elections are opposed to independence for Kosovo, regarded as the cradle of Serb history and culture. Russia, Serbia’s traditional Orthodox Christian ally, has made it clear that it would not support any plan for Kosovo that went against Belgrade’s wishes. “Russia believes it is unacceptable that a decision on the status of Kosovo be imposed from the outside,” said President Putin on Sunday. As a permanent member of the UN Security...

Fears are growing in western European capitals, and even more clearly in Washington, about the increasingly assertive role Russia is playing in international diplomacy. [...] It is about Moscow’s involvement in the politics of the former Yugoslavia, and the delicate attempt to broker a deal between Serbia and its disputed former province of Kosovo. [...] On the face of it, the elections in Serbia will have little bearing on the international plans for a “supervised independence” for the territory. All the main political parties in Belgrade are opposed to any such move. But the balance of power could still be...

Amid signs that the Bush administration may be backing away from unequivocal support for independence for Kosovo, the head of the Albanian American Civic League is appealing to the American Jewish community to advocate on behalf of Kosovo, a region of the former Yugoslavia that is predominantly inhabited by ethnic Albanians. “When Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic was massacring Albanians in Kosovo in 1998-99, the American Jewish community took the lead in pressing President [Bill] Clinton to bomb Serbia, because they instinctively understood the nature of genocide and were determined to keep it from being repeated,” said Joseph DioGuardi, a onetime...

After the 9/11, a worldwide “War on terror” begun in order to disband and neutralize Islamic terrorist networks across the globe. The main focus of the largest anti-terrorist campaign in history is focused in the Middle East area, as well as in Afghanistan. The Balkan Peninsula is the European area where this campaign has also taken place, with numerous arrests and a continuous effort into riding the fundamentalist out of the area. The question arising though, is how did the extremists gain a foothold in South Eastern Europe in the first place, and what was the reaction of the international...

15 Serbs face questions about past Accused of lying on immigration forms, they are asked about the '90s war. By LANE DEGREGORY Published December 13, 2006 ST. PETERSBURG - The immigration officers came before 5 a.m. Monday, pounding on the doors of 15 St. Petersburg homes. Slavko Krsmanovic, 17, woke to flashlights on his porch, eight agents pointing guns at his house. They wanted his dad. He told them his dad was driving his mom to work. So the agents waited until Strahinja Krsmanovic came home. "As soon as he got out of the car, they handcuffed him behind his...

New York, 18 Dec. (AKI) - Serbs living in the United States are reported to be deeply disturbed and worried by recent arrests of fellow Serbs in connection with the 1990s Balkan wars, community leaders have said. In a six-state swoop, American agents arrested 13 Serb immigrants last week and are looking for another three who are still at large. One of those arrested, Nedjo Ikonic, is being investigated for allegedly having taken part in the massacre of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica when it was overrun by Serb forces in...

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti military commentator Alexander Bogatyrev) - The other day, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said it would be counterproductive to introduce UN sanctions against either side in the Kosovo conflict. Before that, the Russian ambassador to Belgrade had said that Russia would veto any "harsh" UN Security Council resolution on Kosovo. The sanctions in question are directed against Serbia. According to the Kremlin, the Kosovo dispute can be resolved only at the negotiating table and there should be no deadlines. The sides involved in the conflict need time to resolve their problems. Criminal organizations have taken over the...

The White House -- finally -- began pushing back against irresponsible charges that Bush "lied" to the American people in making the case for war. The garrulous Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., made many "Bush lied" accusations: "There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January [2003] to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud." And Kennedy later intoned on the Senate floor, "Before the war, week after week after week after week, we were told lie after lie after...

For years, the role of the United States in conniving with Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in the destruction of the Bosnian Muslim town of Srebrenica has been shrouded in mystery. When heavily armed Bosnian Serb nationalists seized the town from Dutch United Nations “peace-keepers” in July 1995, along with expelling tens of thousands of Muslims, they led away 8000 men and boys and slaughtered them in captivity, the largest single massacre in Europe since World War II. Now the “smoking gun” is being uncovered. Richard Holbrooke, who at the time was assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, recently...

The Nov. 6 article “Training helps Guardsmen get Kosovo-savvy” deserves a response. The Stars and Stripes reporter states that ethnic Albanians in Kosovo make up 90 percent of the population. Actually, a more precise number is 97 percent. It is also necessary for your readers to understand just how the Kosovo (Muslim) Albanians became the majority — considering the Christian Serbs were once the majority until hundreds of thousands of them were either ethnically cleansed or killed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi troops, followed by the communist Josip Broz Tito, who, in his hatred for the Christian Orthodox Serbs, encouraged Albanians...

BELGRADE -- Aleksandar Popovi? says Ahtisaari’s postponement of Kosovo status due to Serbia’s elections is an excuse. “Ahtisaari’s plan to secretly, working behind our backs, draft a paper on Kosovo’s independence fell through. The real reason why it fell through is Russia’s firm and principled position that UN Charter cannot be breached, and it would appear Ahtisaari understood the Russian ‘no’ quite clearly”, science minister Aleksandar Popovi? says. Popovi?, of prime minister Koštunica’s Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), believes that the best option Martti Ahtisaari has at this time is to step down and let an impartial and objective international...

At one point in the film, we witness Bosnian Muslims relishing in the destruction of an Orthodox Church in Bosnia. With this one brief segment, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” becomes the first film to recieve wide attention in the U.S., that truthfully shows Muslim aggression in the Balkans as well as the Balkan connection to the worldwide Islamic jihad — rather than falsely portraying Balkan Muslims as nothing more than hapless genocide victims, as they have been depicted for more than a decade. Airing on Fox tomorrow at 8:00 pm and repeating on Sunday at 1:00 am,...

Belgrade, 26 Oct. (AKI) - The United States is showing signs of jitteriness over the status of the breakaway province of Kosovo, as the international community moves away from granting Kosovo the independence wanted by most of its overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian majority, the Serbian government coordinator for Kosovo, Sanda Raskovic Ivic, has said. Raskovic Ivic was commenting on a "slip of tongue" by American envoy to Kosovo Frank Wiesner, who stated in the Kosovo capital Pristina on Tuesday that Washington wants the status issue resolved this year. "We will insist on independence – excuse me – we will insist on...

I feel duped because I supported the actions we took against the Serbs in 1999. The Clinton Administration and our media never told us that the atrocities committed by the Serbians were a response to centuries of brutalities by Muslims on them or that, in routing the Serbs from Bosnia and Kosovo, we were aiding and abetting Al Qaeda in their reconquest of Europe.