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<p>"No general had the authority to command us, former Quaida activist Ali Hamad reports about his time as commander of a Mujaheddin unit in the war in Bosnia. In the Interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE the former terrorist warns of a sleeper network in the Balkan.</p>

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...

November 19, 2006: The United Nations Mission in Kosova (UNMIK) will probably leave Kosovo sometime in 2007. The UN intends to reach (or force) a decision on Kosovo's ultimate status. Serbia vehemently rejects Kosovo independence. The Kosovar government is demanding independence. November 17, 2006: Kosovo has decided to court the Russians. The Russians have objected to Kosovar independence from Serbia. Kosovo has decided to send a delegation to Moscow. Analysts have suggested that Kosovo intends to assure the Russians that Kosovo independence will not set a precedent for other independence movements in Europe. However, various ethnic groups and independence movements...

Pristina, 21 Nov. (AKI) - An explosive device went off early on Tuesday morning in a Serbian elementary school in the central Kosovo village of Ropotovo, but there were no casualties, police said. Kosovo police spokesman Veton Elsani said the device was placed in a storage cupboard. Fortunately, the classroom, which can hold up to 200 pupils, was empty, because the teacher didn’t show up for the classes and, apart from material damage, there were no injuries, he said. “By chance, due to the teacher’s absence, the fifth grade classroom in which the explosion took place was empty and the...

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...

Are the cases of missing persons in Kosovo science fiction or consciously closed files? Unexpectedly for many Kosovo crisis observers, proliferation of terrorism and violence resulted with huge number of cases of missing and kidnapped civilians, mostly non-Albanians (especially Serbs): in the summer of 1998, spring 1999 and during 2000. Actually, last reported kidnappings occurred in 2004. Although such acts of terror were well known to local population and local authorities, eccentric doubts could be summarized with only one question: If victims were held in hidden prisons and if after some time they were executed, where are the bodies? Searches,...

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...

In a statement for FoNet news agency, Serbian president Boris Tadic assessed the decision by United Nations special envoy for Kosovo status Martti Ahtisaari to publish his proposal for resolving the status of Kosovo after parliamentary elections in Serbia as useful. "This whole time I have supported the position that artificial deadlines are something that does not contribute to either a solution for Kosovo and Metohija or the stabilization of the situation in Serbia," said Tadic. According to Tadic, Ahtisaari was influenced by the fact that Serbia is to hold parliamentary elections but also the fact that there are different...

The trial of the former leader of the rebel Serb authorities in Croatia Milan Martic this week heard testimony from a witness who accused the UN of favouring the Croats over the Serbs and claimed that the US and Germany were instrumental in providing Croatian troops with weapons during the bloody Balkan wars. Patrick Bariot, a former UN Protection Force, UNPROFOR, soldier, strongly defended Martic and the Serbs, portraying the Serb population in the self-proclaimed Serbian Autonomous District of Krajina, SAO Krajina, as victims of an aggressive Croatian government and military and an international community that intentionally ignored their pleas...

A decision to make the Serb province independent is near. Will Serbia and Russia obstruct it? THE SERBIAN parliament formally adopted a new national constitution on Wednesday, following its narrow approval by voters in a referendum last month. The document was a necessary replacement of the previous charter, which was adopted during the rule of nationalist warlord Slobodan Milosevic. But it may have won acceptance only because it included a preamble that would have warmed Mr. Milosevic's heart: a declaration that the province of Kosovo, which Serbia in effect lost seven years ago, is an "integral" and "inalienable" part of...

Pristina, 9 Nov. (AKI) - Ethnic Albanian leaders in the breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo have said they are ready to unilaterally declare independence if the United Nations Security Council postpones a decision on the future status of the province, which has been under UN control since 1999. Most of Kosovo's overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian majority want independence, which is opposed by Belgrade and by the tiny minority of Serbs remaining in the province. Members of the ethnic Albanian negotiating team on the status issue told Kosovo television Wednesday night that they were ready to activate the so called 'Plan B'...

It took years of hatred-propaganda by NATO, the US and the EU to have a puppet regime installed in Serbia. It was also facilitated by the months long bombing of Serbia by NATO planes. And during this bombing they managed, by riding roughshod over the Serbian Constitution, to arrest Milosevic and bring him to The Hague. When I saw the picture of this not young man, shuffling across the tarmac in handcuffs, I felt that he would not emerge alive. Too much hatred had been spilled from the pens of the enemy, from the pens of people like Michael Ignatieff....

THE HAGUE -- The Hague prosecution spokesman says Paris Match has published an unauthorized interview with Carla Del Ponte. ”We have received the interview for authorization and made several corrections. Unfortunately, the unauthorized version was not published”, Anton Nikiforov said. He denied the chief Hague prosecutor said there was evidence international community was involved in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. ”Judging by the Paris Match version, we have evidence on the involvement of the international community in the Srebrenica massacre. We have no such evidence, there was speculation, but we have no proof. If we had such evidence, we would have...

PRISTINA, Kosovo All expectations are that, in the next few months, Kosovo will claim an internationally sanctioned independence, concluding a titanic struggle by the United Nations and Western governments to close a chapter that began with its bloody ethnic war. But it is unlikely to be the conclusion the United Nations hoped for, after having invested seven years supervising the enclave at a cost of about $1.3 billion a year. That is because it seems increasingly evident that the West will need to retain far greater responsibilities than it wanted. "I think the EU is going to be in for...

Serbia set itself against the international community and Kosovo's ethnic Albanians yesterday by endorsing a new constitution declaring Kosovo for ever part of Serbia, only a few months before it is expected to lose the province. The new constitution, Serbia's first as an independent state since 1918, was rushed through by the nationalist prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, to pre-empt a UN security council decision on the status of Kosovo due by the end of the year. US, EU and Kosovo Albanian officials dismissed the vote as irrelevant, but Mr Kostunica insisted the new constitution would safeguard Serbia's "territorial integrity". "We...

BERLIN -- Less than a week after he urged the German Army to play a more active role in resolving regional conflicts and fighting terrorism, Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said Germany would begin as early as December to withdraw troops from Bosnia and Herzegovina, a former republic of Yugoslavia that was ravaged by civil war from 1992 to 1995. Article Tools Printer friendly E-mail to a friend World RSS feed Reprints & Licensing Save this article powered by Del.icio.us More: Globe World stories Latest world news It is the first time Jung has publicly raised the idea of pulling...

The Belgrade-based Center for Free Elections and Democracy said their sample count after polls closed in the two-day vote indicated the draft charter secured a 51.6 percent of voters' support. Related news Serbia votes to keep breakaway Kosovo Serbian voters narrowly approved a new constitution reasserting Serbia's claim over the breakaway Kosovo province, according to independent observers. The Belgrade-based Center for Free Elections and Democracy said their sample count after polls closed in the two-day vote indicated the draft charter secured a 51.6 percent of voters' support. The group estimated the turnout among Serbia's 6.6 million electorate was 53.5 -...

Diplomats and politicians on all sides expect a messy and inconclusive outcome, and fear further ethnic violence in Kosovo with peacekeepers from Nato caught in the middle. Few believe that Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish president acting as UN mediator, can broker a compromise. This weekend Serbian voters are likely to approve by referendum a new constitution reaffirming Kosovo as part of Serbia, while the province’s ethnic Albanian majority overwhelmingly aspires to, and expects, full independence. As Russia reasserts itself on the world stage, the US and Europe are wondering what price President Vladimir Putin will exact at the UN...

In an exclusive interview with ISN Security Watch, one of the men charged in Bosnia's first-ever terror case describes how his life of petty crime led him to mix with Muslim extremists. By Anes Alic in Sarajevo for ISN Security Watch (26/10/06) A former boxer, petty criminal and drug addict-turned-radical Muslim, Amir Bajric, a 28-year-old Bosnian from the Sarajevo suburb of Hadzici, never expected to find himself a key player in a terror plot against foreign installations in Bosnia. But his decision to sell explosives to a group of Muslim extremists of various origins meeting in Bosnia has landed him...

Arrogantly strutting around the opulent OSCE restaurant, on an upper floor of its Pristina headquarters, Richard Holbrooke cut an imposing figure. The “Balkan peace negotiator” whose bloody legacy stretched from Vietnam and Indonesia to Belgrade minced no words about US policy for the region. In front of the five heads of UNMIK he bellowed: “Forget multi-ethnic Kosovo. Forget Resolution 1244. We only signed that to get rid of the Serbs.”