Posted on 03/05/2008 4:08:54 PM PST by Bokababe
BELGRADE, Serbia -- As editor-in-chief of Serbia's oldest and most prestigious daily newspaper, Politika, I am at a loss to explain the West's stubborn support for Kosovo independence to my readers. Only nine years ago, my country was bombed for 78 days by the most powerful military alliance the world has ever seen, and the last thing I want is to pour oil over the fire of anti-Western sentiment. But the truth is, I find myself grappling with the same bitterness and resentment as most of my countrymen.
I was very much part of the democratic upheaveal that rid Serbia of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, and all Serbia has done since was to mend its ways.
We sought to come to terms with the past, put old quarrels behind us, make peace with our neighbors and become friends with the United States and European countries that bombed us in 1999.
We set up war crimes courts and tried suspected war criminals, while extraditing others to the Hague Tribunal, where we sent a score of ex-presidents, including Milosevic himself, and roughly half of the former Army leadership.
We signed peace and cooperation treaties, invited Western companies to invest in Serbia's economy, and NGOs to monitor our progress in democracy and human rights.
We elected democratic rulers with impeccable anti-Milosevic credentials who carried out responsible and moderate policies, to the applause of Washington and Brussels.
We oppressed no ethnic minorities and violated no universal declarations.
In the meantime, a very different storyline unfolded in our southern province of Kosovo. As soon as Serb forces left Kosovo in June 1999, a massive campaign of reverse ethnic cleansing against 200,000 non-Albanians took place under the noses of 50,000 NATO troops.
Rather than the multiethnic democracy U.S. President Bill Clinton invoked on the day he dispatched the bombers, Kosovo is nowadays one of the most ethnically pure regions in Europe. Hundreds of Serb medieval monasteries, churches and cemeteries have been desecrated, dynamited, burned or razed to the ground. The few Serbs left in Albanian-majority areas live in NATO-guarded enclaves, fearful for their lives. Lawlessness is pervasive, crime is rampant, intolerance is the norm. Compared to Kosovo, post-Milosevic Serbia is a multiethnic paradise.
Why, then, the unseemly rush to grant Kosovo independence? Western officials grasp at straws to explain their motives. We are told "Milosevic lost Kosovo", and that we should blame him for the fate of the thousands and thousands of our co-nationals who have been cleansed from the mythical "old Serbia." But Milosevic is six feet under, and in Belgrade we feel as if we're witnessing the resurgence of the notion of "fundamentally evil" groups. If the Serbs' repression of Albanians in the 1990s lost them the right to govern Kosovo, as we were repeatedly told while NATO bombs rained on our heads, surely the Albanians lost political and moral high ground through ruthless discrimination against Serbs, Roma and other minorities?
Whatever Milosevic's transgressions, the Albanians' radical nationalism should neither have been encouraged nor rewarded in Kosovo. I am particularly disappointed by Chancellor Angela Merkel's championing of Kosovo's unilateral independence.
German history shows that radical solutions to the national question cannot be good, even when discontent is justified and minorities have legitimate grievances. It does not do to encourage secession or advocate annexation. Turning Kosovo into an independent state, with its half-terrorist, ultra-chauvinist leadership and its monoethnic population, is a radical event in European history. Of all countries, Germany should have opposed hasty independence for Kosovo.
Intellectually and morally, I do not know how to come to terms with Western democracies' support for Kosovo secessionists. For once, Serbs and their leaders did everything by the book. All they set out to do was to preserve their country's territorial integrity and sovereignty, guaranteed under Security Council Resolution 1244, which ended NATO's bombing. Serbia agreed to permanent international guarantees of Kosovo's political autonomy within the formal territory of Serbia, Kosovo's membership in international financial institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, and Kosovo's right to enter different types of international agreements. Its leaders presented only legal arguments and negotiated peacefully under international auspices.
It did them no good. International law was broken. Under the pretext that Serbia's late dictator had been a terrible person, Serbia's Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt have been denied and scorned, while the leader of Kosovo's brutal guerrilla army, the KLA, is being hailed as a democrat and a statesman.
And no, I am not proud that hundreds of angry demonstrators went on a rampage in Belgrade last Thursday, shouting anti-American slogans, burning embassies and pillaging shops. But just like my fellow countrymen, I cannot help but note the irony in Washington's outrage. The Bush administration angrily denounced Serbia for failing to uphold its responsibility under international law to protect embassies.
The Belgrade rally that turned violent had been called to do the very same thing: chastise countries who conveniently ignore their responsibilites to protect sovereignty guaranteeed under the U.N. Charter. The last time I checked, international law was also supposed to protect small countries.
Ljiljana Smajlovic is the editor in chief of the Belgrade-based daily Politika. Her article "The Story of Kosovo" first appeared in German in the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche.
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The West gave the Sudetenland to Germany.
Czechoslovakia was not even invited to the talks. The Czechs were free to fight if they wished, but they had no support. They chose not to fight.
The rest is catastrophe...just like today.
The rest of your reasoning is bogus. Makes no sense at all..given that Poland was a communist state. The Polish people were our enemies as much the Russian people under the bolsheviks. Which means they were not.
The OPEC cartel sets prices and production.
Here they are:
Algeria, Angola, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and Ecuador
10 Muslim states and two terror supporting states and 2 failed states run by OPEC.
You knew that right?
The Austrians dangled the Archduke (whom they didn't even like) on a purposely important Serbian holiday to provoke them and didn't supply him with protection (even though they had some of their army stationed in Sarajevo and had control of the Bosnian Muslim soldiers.)
The assassination team was mostly teenagers and included a Muslim. When one of them threw a grenade at his motorcade, they still didn't beef up security.
His car stopped 5 feet from Gavrilo Princip - which appeared the only way the inept, bumbling crew could do the job.
Once accomplished there were suddenly the thousands of soldiers and police on the streets to arrest him and then begin the hangings of civilian Serbs (including women) all around the locations where the Austrian army was stationed in Bosnia.
The Austrians wanted an excuse and German especially was keen on pushing them into a war and subsequently getting a jump on a war with Russia.
And remember this (from wiks):
“On November 19, 2007, global oil prices reacted strongly as OPEC members spoke openly about potentially converting their cash reserves to the euro and away from the US dollar.”
We are being royally screwed.
...and we aren't even being royally kissed....just kissed off
No, the argument is not bogus. Alliances and nations change. Serbia in 1995 is not Serbia in 1914, and so forth.
Not sure how to be polite and still say that's utter crap.
Nationalism is steeped in a culture for a long time, and always emerges when it has an opportunity. German nationalism was hatched from an egg, that sense of German superiority and entitlement pre-dated Nazi Germany by centuries.
Serbia had a multitude of opportunities in the last 100 years to drive out all the Muslims (Bosnian and Albanians, both)in the Balkan wars and take what they wanted of Yugoslavia -- especially post-WWI. If they had, Croatia would have never had Dalmatia or the Krajina, and would have been confined to a small dot on the map. Serbia did none of that, but instead chose to share. That was their mistake. Because by the time, Tito came along, he made sure that Serbia stayed weak and small so that he could be the only glue holding Yugoslavia together.
If Serbs had been the raving nationalists you claim, they wouldn't be where they are today. The difference is that Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Albanians can all be hardcore nationalists and get called "freedom fighters" for it. Serbs, on the other hand, get called "hardcore nationalists" just for trying to preserve their sovereign borders and not cave in to globalist attempts to ravage them..
Pure idiocy on the part of the West.
The real question is why would we possibly support Jihad in Kosovo?
You didn't get your kiss yet?
Your changing scenario theory makes no sense. Unless we deliberately seek the destabilization of the region.
If so, we repeat mistakes of the past instead of learning from them.
Our beyond bizarrre and destructive interference in the Balkans has led not to a deflation of tensions but just the opposite. There are now two separate entities with Albanians and the clamor to join has begun...the Albanians in FYROM and Greece are next...A historical parallel is England let’s say supporting Nazi Germany in its demand for Sudetenland.
We are on the wrong side of history and we won’t even talk about being on the wrong side of morality.
You talk like there is a difference between the Clinton administration and the Bush administration.
The only difference is rhetoric.
UP to 105-106 today. No end in sight. OPEC refuses to increase production..and why should they?
They get everything they want from our govt without anything in return.
Americans who KNOW ANYTHING about Kosovo, Serbia, etc. struggle to understand why we are backing Kosovo’s Muhammadan savages and criminals.
Americans who only know what the MSM tells them like our Kosovo policy just fine, especially if they are of the liberal or neocon persuasion.
save for later
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