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PRISTINA, Feb 28 (IPS) - After the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo on Feb. 17, ethnic tensions are rising dangerously again in the region, especially in Northern Kosovo and the other Serbian enclaves scattered around the province. Daily protests in northern Mitrovica, an area with an ethnic Serb majority, the attacks on border checkpoints Jarinje and Brnjak by thousands of Serbs, and regular damaging of buildings and vehicles used by United Nations staff indicate a Serb determination to counteract the proclaimed independence of Kosovo. But there is something more than raw anger that cultivates tensions in this case. A...

In this exclusive interview with one of Canada’s most experienced police detectives, Stu Kellock, readers get the inside story of how UN investigators in Kosovo sought to crack down on criminals and terrorists – but were systematically stopped, because of the perceived need to safeguard the interests of the Western political elite and their local protégés. Stu Kellock, the former head of UNMIK’s Regional Serious Crime Unit in Pristina, provides an extraordinary insider’s perspective on the difficult and oftentimes dangerous work of investigating organized crime in Kosovo. This article, which contains several minor bombshells regarding the interlinked topics of organized...

Following five years of United Nations control and billions of dollars of international aid, Kosovo is a lawless region "owned" by the Albanian mafia, characterized by continuing ethnic cleansing and subject to increasing infiltration by al Qaeda-linked Muslim jihadists, according to a whistleblower interviewed by Cybercast News Service. The U.N.'s repeated failure to act on received intelligence has allowed illegal paramilitary groups to flourish and engage in terrorist attacks aimed at destabilizing regional governments in the Balkans, said Thomas Gambill, a former security chief with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), self-described as the world's largest regional...

On this Memorial Day weekend, we think back and remember the valiant courage and heroic sacrifices of those United States Military men and women who gave their all for us. War is almost always bloody. But the peace it can bring soothes some of the pain for those left behind.This is all the more reason to regret a situation in which fecklessness squanders the gains paid for in blood. A prime example is found in Kosovo, where the United Nations has played a leading role.The Deutsche Welle yesterday relayed a report from the Brussels-based International Crises Group (ICG) that says...

Mon 18 Apr 2005 3:54pm (UK) UN Discovers Human Remains in Kosovo Cave "PA" The United Nations in Kosovo said today they had discovered a cave allegedly used to secretly dispose of the human remains of non-Albanians in Kosovo killed during a war in 1998-1999. Initial findings indicated the area “was used to secretly dispose of human remains, and could be related to the disappearances” of non-Albanians in Kosovo in 1998, the UN statement said. The UN-run Office on Missing Persons and Forensics began excavating the cave and its surrounding area in Klina, some 30 miles west of the province’s...

The UN in Kosovo praises potential war criminal - why?    PressInfo # 208  March 10, 2005 By Jan Oberg, TFF director   Danish diplomat, Søren Jessen-Petersen is the highest authority in Kosovo and SRSG, Special Representative of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, there. In spite of that, his unconditional embrace of Mr. Ramush Haradinaj, a former leader of the illegal Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and former prime minister in the non-independent Kosovo and now indicted for war crimes by the Hague Tribunal seems to raise no eyebrows in any capital, media or at the UN in New York. All...

FIVE hundred British troops were last night rushed to Kosovo amid fears of a new explosion in ethnic violence. The men from the 1st Battalion, The Royal Green Jackets have been deployed after an urgent request from NATO. Commanders of the force in Kosovo want to make a show of strength as tensions rise. The Green Jackets will patrol the capital Pristina to keep ethnic Albanians and Serbs apart. This time last year 31 died and 500 were wounded in violence.

Remember Kosovo? By Cliff Kincaid | December 28, 2004 Clinton's policy was not to bomb those terrorists but to support them and bomb the Christian Serbs. AIM put together a list of the most underreported or buried stories of 2004, and one of them was the resurgence of anti-Serb, anti-Christian violence in Kosovo. Dozens were killed and more Christian churches were destroyed there. Kosovo got some attention near the end of the year when newspapers covered the fact that a former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the KLA, became prime minister in a new Kosovo-based government. A story in...

In the negotiations that brought Macedonia’s 2001 war to an end, Albanian militants were amnestied and took up new jobs in the state administration - some even in the ministry of defense. With the farcical situation now unfolding in Kondovo, you have the lunacy of the same people who benefited in such a way going AWOL from their jobs, and now showing up in black uniforms in the hills and demanding to be amnestied again. Yes indeed, the Balkans is truly an exercise in pointless, futile cyclic idiocy. But the militant demands – if not met, the gunmen promise to...

December 6, 2004 U.N.-APPROVED TERRORIST TO RUN KOSOVOby Srdja Trifkovic Imagine a "multi-ethnic" Palestine, administered by the United Nations, in which a Hamas leader notorious for terrorist attacks on Jewish civilians is certified as the Authority's "democratically" elected chief executive. Imagine Abu Musab al-Zarqawi being approved by a future UN governor as Iraq's prime minister. Imagine that in Kosovo a KLA murderer . . . but then in Kosovo you don't have to imagine anything. On December 3 the provincial parliament in Pristina voted to elect Ramush Haradinaj as prime minister. This 36-year-old former commander of the "Kosovo Liberation...

Kosovo is in the news again, this time with the election of the new prime minister, nationalist and former guerilla fighter Ramush Haradinaj. In a power-sharing agreement with the Democratic League of Kosovo led by Dr. Ibrahim Rugova, Haradinaj is the new leader of the government while Rugova carries on as president of the Serbian province. The new PM brings some troubling baggage to the position, however. Most recently, he has been questioned, twice, by Carla del Ponte the head of the International War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. While he is innocent until indicted and proven guilty, the questioning,...

Defense and Foreign Affairs, October 21, 2004 KLA Video Shows Holbrooke, Clark Raising Funds for Kerry Campaign from KLA-linked Albanians, and Shows Ongoing Acquisitions From GIS Station Amsterdam and other sources. A recent video produced by Albanians who identified themselves as members of the ostensibly-banned Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) has been broadcast on Dutch television, showing KLA members giving donations to members of the US Presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry. The video also shows former US Presidential candidate and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Wesley Clark and former US Ass. Sec. of State Richard Holbrooke - now both...

KERRY CAMPAIGN FINANCED BY TERRORISTS October 18, 2004 Written by: Andy Wilcoxson Introduction John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, is being given money by an Albanian terrorist organization known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA or UCK in Albanian). The KLA is currently smuggling weapons into Kosovo as part of a plot to attack American and other UN peacekeepers, should the UN Security Counsel refuse their demand for Kosovo's secession from Serbia and Montenegro. About the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA/UCK) In order to fully understand the significance of John Kerry's involvement with the KLA it is first necessary to understand what sort of an organization the...

Visiting areas where Serbs have returned to Kosovo, the senior United Nations envoy to the troubled province today observed minority populations facing an uphill climb on the road to integration. Søren Jessen-Petersen expressed dissatisfaction at the situation in Bica, where Kosovo Serb villagers are protected by barbed wire barricades and the 24-hour presence of peacekeeping troops. He pledged to work with the local community and municipal authorities to find more sustainable solutions to the current problems. “In Kosovo in October 2004, a Kosovo that is determined to move towards review of standards and status talks, there should and must be...

19:07 BUJANOVAC , Sept 20 (Tanjug) - Finnish KFOR troops removed Monday a security barbed wire fence around the church in Lipljan, the sole safe area for local Serbs in this Kosovo town. KFOR removed the fence without the consent of the local Serb community, Lipljan municipality President Borivoje Vignjevic told Tanjug. The local UNMIK administrator was not informed of this move either, Vignjevic said, adding that when he insisted to learn who had given the order to remove the fence, KFOR told him it was done at the insistence of the Kosovo police

Five years after 'liberation,' UN officials this week are again work-ing on a plan for the political status of the province. PRISTINA, KOSOVO – When US and other foreign troops rolled into this predominantly Muslim province in 1999, they got the kind of reception once dreamed of in Iraq: They were showered with flowers and candy, and hailed as liberators from Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic. The main street through the capital city of Pristina was renamed "Bill Clinton Boulevard." But five years after the world's first "humanitarian war," Kosovars say the promises of democracy and European integration now seem to...

Five years after Nato's attack on Yugoslavia, its administration in Kosovo is pushing through mass privatisation 'Wars, conflict - it's all business," sighs Monsieur Verdoux in Charlie Chaplin's 1947 film of the same name. Many will not need to be convinced of the link between US corporations now busily helping themselves to Iraqi state assets and the military machine that prised Iraq open for global business. But what is less widely known is that a similar process is already well under way in a part of the world where B52s were not so long ago dropping bombs in another "liberation"...

Arson and vandalism after 17th March, 2004 Introduction and a precedent for violence On 17th March, 2004, rioting spread across the UN-administered province of Kosovo. At least nineteen people, mainly Serbs trapped in village ghettoes since June, 1999, were murdered. Many Serb houses were damaged or destroyed by fire. A number of important historical monuments also came under attack. BHHRG has sent observers to Kosovo on numerous occasions since the end of the NATO air war in June, 1999. In March 2003, the Group had warned that the steady withdrawal of KFOR troops from Serb enclaves left both the ghettoised...

BELGRADE (Kyodo) U.N. police in Kosovo temporarily detained a Japanese tourist in Kosovska Mitrovica on Saturday for taking photos without authorization, a U.N. police official said Sunday. The tourist, a man apparently in his late 20s, was freed after being questioned for over one hour Saturday night, said a spokeswoman for the police force for the U.N. Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo. Only accredited journalists are allowed to take photos in the Serb province of Kosovo, the spokeswoman said. The Japanese man's identity could not be obtained from the Bisevac motel in the city where he was staying. The clerk...

The forgotten land Violence is bound to escalate if the UN's new representative in Kosovo fails to get the international community to deliver support Misha Glenny Tuesday June 22, 2004 The Guardian Last week, Kofi Annan named the Danish civil servant Soren Jessen-Petersen as his new representative in Kosovo almost five years to the day after Nato proclaimed its victory in its war against the Yugoslav army. A time, then, for celebration and moving forward? Not a bit. Nobody, neither Albanians nor Serbs nor internationals, was celebrating the fifth anniversary. And many diplomats were very unhappy at the mechanism which...