By pledging his support of Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia, President George W. Bush has sanctioned the genocide of thousands of Serbian Christians in the Balkans and the creation, thanks to al Qaeda, of a radical Muslim state at the doorway to Europe.
After announcing their independence from Serbia on February 16, thousands of ethnic Albanians (Muslims) took to the streets waving American flags and singing patriotic songs.
While the national press provided glowing coverage of these demonstrations as proof that the “Kosovars” were adamantly pro-America, few media outlets took notice that the demonstrations were preceded by the sacking of Christian churches and the burning of thousands of Serbian books.
But book-burning is the least of the sins of our new friend and ally. The Kosovars have also sacked churches, raped nuns, and mass-murdered approximately 4,000 Christian Serbs in and around the town of Srebrenica and its adjoining towns and villages (Bratunac, Skelani, Milici, et al) as well as the town of Gorazde.
In a letter to Fatmir Sejdui, the president of the new “republic,” Bush wrote: “On behalf of the American people, I hereby recognize Kosovo as an independent and sovereign state. I congratulate you and Kosovo’s citizens for having taken this important step in your democratic and national development.” He also pledged to increase the amount of foreign aid to the Balkan state from $77 million in 2007 to $335 million in 2008.
Kosovo had formally remained a part of Serbia even though it has been administered by the United Nations and NATO since 1999, when strategic NATO bombings ended the Serbian crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists.
Ninety percent of Kosovo’s two million people are ethnic Albanian and Muslim— and they see no reason to stay joined to Christian Orthodox Serbia. Despite calls for restraint in the wake of the announcement of Kosovo’s independence, tensions flared on February 19 in northern Kosovo, home to most of the territory’s 100,000 minority Serbs. An explosion damaged a U.N. vehicle outside the ethnically divided town of Kosovska Mitrovica, where thousands of Serbs chanted, “This is Serbia!”
The crowds in Kosovska marched to a bridge spanning a river dividing the town between the ethnic Albanian and Serbian sides. They were confronted by NATO peacekeepers guarding the bridge, but there were no outbursts of violence.
Another 800 Serbs staged a noisy but peaceful demonstration in the Serb-dominated enclave of Gracanica outside Pristina.
Former UN Ambassador John Bolton maintains that the creation of an independent Kosovo “will give a boost to Islam extremism.” Bolton voices his agreement with Alekandr Botsan-Kharcenko, Russia’s ambassador to the Balkans, who said: “Any unilateral declaration of independence by Pristina [capital of the new nation] would not be legal and could trigger separatist movements in the world and could undermine international order and the structure of international relations.”
The turmoil in Kosovo began in 1989 when Slovodan Milosevic, president of Serbia and the Free Republic of Yugoslavia, set out to create a greater Serbia by annexing Kosovo. When the Kosovo assembly approved this measure, ethnic Albanians (the sanitized way of saying native Muslims) rebelled. In 1990, Milosevic dispatched troops into Kosovo to squelch the rebellion and restore order. In 1992, the ethnic Albanians responded to this military measure by establishing their own government in Kosovo - - the Republic of Kosovo - - with self proclaimed pacifist Ibrahim Rugova as its president.
With two governments in one tiny country, the situation quickly became downright ugly. In 1993, Milosevic ordered the arrest of thirty ethnic Albanians for planning an armed uprising. In 1995, a Serbian court sentenced sixty-eight members of Rugova’s government to prison for setting up a parallel police force.
To aid in the struggle for independence, the ethnic Albanians turned to Osama bin Laden and the mujahadeen. Muslim warriors from Chechnya, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia traveled in droves to Kosovo. By 1995, more than sixty thousand holy warriors, including members of al Qaeda, had made their way to the Balkans to prepare for the struggle against Milosevic and the Christian Serbs.
Bin Laden visited the area three times between 1994 and 1996. In the wake of these visits, al Qaeda training camps popped up in Zenica in Bosnia and Malisevo and Mitrovica in Kosovo; elaborate command and control centers were set up in Croatia, Macedonia, and Bulgaria; and a central headquarters for the mujahadeen was established in Tropje, Albania, on the property of Sali Betisha, the former Albanian premier.
In addition, Bin Laden provided seven hundred million dollars to establish the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The purpose of the KLA was to drive Christian Serbs from Kosovo, to topple the government of Milosevic, to undermine the peace initiatives of Ibrahim Rugova, and to unite the Muslims of Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania into the Islamic Republic of Greater Albania.
By 1997, President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and Secretary of Defense William Cohen came to view the KLA as “freedom fighters.” Millions in U.S. aid began to flow to the Muslim rebels. America, unbeknown to its citizens, was now in league with the terrorists who were intent upon the destruction of western civilization. Human history, going back to the tree-swinging apes, does not get much crazier than this.
By 1998, the KLA became a formidable army of 30,000 highly trained troops with sophisticated weaponry that included shoulder-launched antitank rocket launchers, mortars, recoilless rifles, and antiaircraft machine guns. From Tropje, the KLA began to conduct hit and run terror attacks throughout Kosovo. They bombed police stations, killed scores of police officers and government workers, and desecrated Christian cemeteries.
Milosevic, in outrage, responded by burning homes and killing dozens of KLA foot soldiers in the Drenica region. A full-scale conflict erupted, culminating in the infamous massacre of January 15, 1999, when the bodies of forty-five ethnic Albanians were discovered in a gully near the small village of Racak.
Confronted with the crime of genocide, Milosevic insisted that the bodies had been planted by the KLA to implicate the Serbs and to justify Western involvement in the conflict. Milosevic’s claims were supported by investigative journalists from Le Figaro and Le Monde, who discovered that the bodies had been placed in un-natural positions; that the site of the so-called “massacre” was devoid of cartridge shells; and that the villagers were unable to identify a single victim.
Convinced that Milosevic was engaging in ethnic cleansing, President Clinton summoned his NATO allies and began a bombing campaign that reduced Kosovo to a heap of rubble. At the start of the campaign, Secretary of Defense Cohen said that 100,000 ethnic Albanians of military age were missing and may have been deported by the Serbs to Albania and Macedonia. “They may have been murdered,” Cohen added.
Between March 24 and June 10, 1999, 37,465 bombing missions took place, destroying 400 Serbian artillery weapons and 270 armored personnel carriers, and causing 1.4 ethnic Albanians to flee for their lives - - the greatest mass migration of refugees since World War II.
Milosevic and the Serbs were forced to toss in the towel. The accord of June 21, 1999 ended the air strikes, eliminated the presence of a Serbian government in Kosovo, and authorized a NATO force of 1,700 police officers to establish law and order until democratic elections could be held.
But the situation in Kosovo was far beyond the capability of 1,700 police officers. The ethnic Albanians who had fled for safety from the Serbs now returned with a vengeance. A pogrom got underway in the Balkans, and neither Bill Clinton nor the United Nations uttered a word of protest.
The Muslims wasted no time in exacting their pounds of flesh. More than two hundred Christian churches and monasteries were destroyed before the NATO peace-keeping force. Some of these Christian shrines, including the Devic Monastery, the Cathedral of St. George, and the Monastery of the Holy Archangels, had been built in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Reports surfaced of mass executions of Serbian farmers, the murders of scores of priests, the rape of nuns, and “granny killings” - - the drowning of old Christian women in bathtubs.
Of the two hundred thousand Serbs who lived in Kosovo before the conflict, only four hundred remained after Kosovo became a NATO protectorate. The vast majority of the Christians had gathered their belongings and fled for their lives. The 400 Serbs who remained in Kosovo were sequestered in three gloomy apartment buildings, where the international police stood guard day and night.
In the aftermath of the war, hundreds of Wahhabi mosques and schools, thanks to the contributions of wealthy Saudis, now appeared in every town and hamlet throughout the country. The back-door to Europe had been pried open by bin Laden and the mujahadeen for the drug trade and the movement of weapons of mass destruction.
In 2000, NATO dispatched forensic teams from fifteen countries and eight human-rights organizations into Kosovo to find the killing fields and evidence of Milosevic’s crimes against the ethnic Albanians. Mass murder is difficult to hide. One need only recall the entry of war-crime inspectors into Nazi Germany, Cambodia, and Rwanda to understand that the execution of thousands of people leaves behind massive and undeniable evidence for the world to see. But the bodies of the ten thousand victims of Milosevic’s “reign of terror” were nowhere to be found.
Despite the failure to uncover mass graves, Milosevic was accused of crimes against humanity and placed on trial in February 2002 before an international criminal tribunal in The Hague. There was scant chance that he would receive a favorable verdict. The United States, in an unprecedented move, demanded and received the right to censor all evidence. Slobodan’s goose was cooked. He was found dead in his cell on March 11, 2006, after court officials denied his request to seek medical treatment at a cardiology clinic.
The real genocide in Kosovo, i. e., the killing of Christian Serbs, continued under the collective noses of the George W. Bush Administration. In March 2004, the ethnic Albanians, in a last ditch effort to eradicate the remaining Serbs, torched Serbian homes and destroyed almost all of the remaining Serbian Orthodox Church sites, and even the UN facilities. But no protest came from the White House.
Instead, President Bush visited Albania on June 11, 2007 and declared: “At some point, sooner rather than later, you’ve got to say, ‘Enough is enough - - Kosovo is independent.’”
On February 17, 2008, enough became enough. Kosovo declared its independence and the mujahadeen dream of the Islamic Republic of Greater Albania began to crystallize into a reality.
BELGRADE -- If the ICJ rules Kosovo declared independence illegally it will deter other states from recognition, says an expert.
Such a decision could also encourage other states to reconsider their decision, says Jim Jatras, director of the Squire Sanders agency, which represents Serbian interests in the U.S.
In an interview with daily Novosti, Jatras says that withdrawals of recognition, even by only one or two countries, would be very significant, depending on which countries are concerned.
“Western countries are exerting pressure on Serbia to reduce diplomatic efforts ahead of the vote in the General Assembly, where the initiative to consult the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the legality of Kosovo’s independence declaration will be considered, as these ’friends’ of Serbia know fine well that their position is illegal, and that they will most probably lose that vote,“ says Jatras.
At the same time, he says that even if the ICJ ruling is positive, it will be very difficult to renew talks on Kosovo’s status--something which has been mooted in Belgrade recently--as the long-term aim of Serbian policy.
“In spite of the U.S.’s failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now in Georgia, U.S. policy creators clearly do not like to admit that they are ever in the wrong. Renewing talks would, de facto, mean admitting a U.S. mistake,“ says Jatras.
“However, if a consequence of the Hague court’s verdict was a full cessation of the Kosovo recognition process, as could very easily happen, the impression in the global community would be that Kosovo was not a state and that some other solution had to be found,“ he says, and that in that event, talks would resume, although not necessarily in the first couple of years.
The topic today is bringing long-term stability and peace to the Balkans, by which we primarily mean the bloody breakup of former Yugoslavia. It is a region that figured prominently in the news in the 1990s but which most Americans have been happy to forget ever since.
Forgetting is not always bad. Sometime to move forward on a productive basis, we need to stop reopening old wounds and focus on what can be done now and in the future.
That, however, is not possible when the dead hand of the past continues to exert a tenacious grip on the present, and preclude fresh and honest approaches. That, unfortunately, is the case with the Balkans, where outside powers – primarily the American and secondarily the European foreign policy establishments – insist that the Balkans’ future must be confined by the reverent preservation of past idols.
We can discuss the specifics in detail today, but two idols that have distorted our understanding of the Balkans and block genuine progress are especially noteworthy:
First, the notion that the United States and NATO intervened in the Bosnian war of 1992-95 to rescue European failures, and brought “peace” by imposing the Dayton Agreement (To End a War, in the self-congratulatory and dishonest title of the book by the late Richard Holbrooke). But in fact, not only did Washington play a key role in touching off the Bosnian war in 1992, the U.S. was instrumental in prolonging the war and opening the door to radical Islamic influences, including Iran and al-Qaeda.
Second, the notion – even more zealously maintained as an article of faith – that in the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija in 1999 the U.S.-led NATO war was the textbook example of a successful “humanitarian intervention.” But in fact, far from stopping a claimed “genocide” of Albanians in Kosovo – a claim about as real as Saddam Hussein’s WMDs – it precipitated a genuine eradication of most of the province’s Serbian community, along with Roma and others. Even more dangerously, the “Kosovo precedent” has become the template for U.S. interventions in contempt of the international legal order (in Iraq, Libya, and now in Syria – see, for example, “To deter extremists in Syria, Obama must heed lessons of Kosovo intervention,” The Christian Science Monitor, 1/7/13.) outside the authority of the Security Council; has led to more instability, not less; and has empowered not “moderates” and “democrats” but Islamic radicals and criminal groups.
At the macro-level, the Balkan interventions and their legacies have fed the dangerous notion that “American exceptionalism” means that the rules of international conduct don’t apply to us, and that whatever we do is right because we claim as our goals promotion of democracy and human rights. It also has reinforced NATO as the favored mechanism for U.S. hegemony, first in Europe, then globally.
At the micro-level, U.S. policy in the Balkans is based on two simple identity-based rules and one corollary, which apply to all questions in a variant of the game “rock-paper-scissors,” where right and wrong are determined not by actions but by the identities of the actors and of those acted upon.
These rules and the corollary apply in all circumstance: verdicts at the Hague so-called “tribunal” (cf., treatment of Gotovina, Markac, Oric, Haradinaj, vs. Serbian defendants), allocations of territory, constitutional arrangements, participation in international organizations, and others.
In closing, I wish to note the predominance of the second rule: in U.S. eyes, the Muslims are always right. It cannot be emphasized enough that American policy-makers trotted out a commitment to Muslim causes in the Balkans specifically because they are Muslim causes. This is a complex phenomenon, going back at least to our support for the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, and continuing to our support for jihadists in Syria today. In general, the idea seems to be that if Washington continues to adopt the political agendas of Muslim (especially, Sunni) communities they will reject violence and be friendly toward the United States. It appears this idea was consciously patterned on American support during the Cold War for socialist and social-democratic parties as the best “antidote” to possible sympathy for communism.
In the Balkans, this has meant support for Bosnia’s Muslim community and Albanians in Kosovo specifically because they are Islamic movements. For example, the late Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) -- Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee -- said the following at a hearing on Kosovo in 2007:
“Just a reminder to the predominantly Muslim-led government[s] in this world that here is yet another example [i.e., “another” example after Bosnia and Herzegovina] that the United States leads the way for the creation of a predominantly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe. This should be noted by both responsible leaders of Islamic governments, such as Indonesia, and also for jihadists of all color and hue. The United States' principles are universal, and in this instance, the United States stands foursquare for the creation of an overwhelmingly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe.” (emphasis added)
Not to be outdone, Mr. Lantos’ Senate counterpart at the time, now Vice President Joseph Biden, expressed similar views (Financial Times, January 3, 2007):
“ . . . [A]droit diplomacy to secure Kosovo’s independence could yield a victory for Muslim democracy, . . . a much-needed example of a successful US-Muslim partnership . . .”
In other words, American support for Islamic communities in the Balkans is not primarily driven by Balkan realities. Rather, this aspect is guided by a larger, global concept regarding how the United States wants to be perceived in the Islamic world.
Still, it remains paramount to our approach to the Balkans today, for example in a recent American proposal to reform the absurd Dayton structure of Bosnia and Herzegovina in favor an even more absurd structure to strengthen the hand of the Muslim community over Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats. To this day, real progress is stymied because Washington insists on championing the concept of Bosnia as a “Muslim country” (in Mr. Lantos’s words) even though it in fact has a Christian majority. Similar observations could be made with respect to Kosovo and to Albanian efforts in the name of “natural Albania” to dominate parts of FYROMacedonia, Montenegro (the so-called “Malesia” region), the Presevo Valley in southern Serbia, and southern Epirus (“Çameria”) in Greece.
Until the dead hand of the idols that were wrong in the 1990s and even more out of place today is removed, real progress – which might otherwise be achieved – will be blocked. Instead, what we will have is a permanent lock consisting of:
Re-Islamization of the region – in effect, reversal of the liberation wars fought by the Balkan Christian peoples in the 19th and early 20th centures – with major roles assigned to a neo-Ottomanized Turkey under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and secondarily to Saudi Arabia, UAE, and other Sunni states.
Continued imposition of a “Carthaginian peace” on Serbia, abetted by successive quisling governments in Belgrade.
And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds returned glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.
When I grow up I wanna take pictures just like you..............wait! I'm thinking I'm older than you, oy!! Hope I still have some time left. LOL!!