As about 30,000 euphoric ethnic Albanians swarmed through the streets, Kosovo’s leader on Sunday declared independence from Serbia in a ceremony intended to cap a long and bloody struggle for national self-determination.
The proclamation of what hopes to be Europe’s newest country – a decade after a civil war that killed 10,000 people and years of limbo under United Nations rule – marks the final dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia 17 years after its dissolution began.
It brings to a climax a showdown between the West – which argues that Slobodan Milosevic’s brutal subjugation of Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanians negated Serbia’s moral and legal claim to rule the territory – and Belgrade and its ally Moscow, which counter that Kosovo’s independence is a reckless breach of international law that will spur other secessionist movements around the world.
Check out the satire on SF, the “Schori response”; it is rather amusing…
Nice job by the US. We bomb Serbia back to the stone age and remove all Serbian military from Kosovo province. Then we watch while the Albanians ethnically cleanse Kosovo of Serbs. Then we support an independant state for Kosovo. Why?
Stirring up conflicts within countries by reviving and emphasizing ethnic/religious problems that through the generations had become only celebratory memories can have serious consequences all over the world.
How about this sort of headline thirty years from now.
“Mexican -Americans who have been fighting the colonization of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona and California over the past thirty years are now poised, after bloody and ceaseless ethnic conflict, to declare the independence of these areas from the United States and to restore them to Mexico.”
What the Kosovans fail to mention is that their extremo-nationalists started the ethnic conflict and that before the long past invasion of Europe by the muslim Turks, the islamic faith was not an internal European problem.
What is neglected in my hypothetical is that those states of the southwestern United States, mentioned in it, had been only relatively recently been colonized and taken from the native Americans by Spanish Americans prior to Texan-Mexican War and the Mexican American War. The Mexico based Spaniards of that era were just as much colonists as we were in our settlement of the rest of North America.
The native Americans in those southwest states were not consulted by either party.
So, if anyone has a claim, it is the native Americans. A claim that I emotionally understand as a person with strong ties to Gaelic language and culture, in Scotland and Ireland.
But the past is the past. If you dig the past up and regenerate hatred and bloodshed, who are you serving spiritually?
Note that this was Bill Clinton’s war.
Well, perhaps now the narco-terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA] will finally be revealed for what it is, much as the PLO was. Being a nation state has different rules from being a terrorist mob. Klinton and the NATO facisists lied about the ethnic cleansing there and got a free pass for a bombing campaign against the “christians” there while supporting muslim narco-terrorists.
1999 U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen’s claimed that “we’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged [Albanian] men missing … they may have been murdered.” David Scheffer, the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes, announced that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59” may have been killed. An April 1999 statement of the US State Department asserted that 500,000 Albanian Kosovars had been killed by Serb forces. It was all lies.
2000 The International War Crimes Tribunal announced that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo’s “mass graves” was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army.
The majority of the people killed in the NATO airstrikes were widely reported to be civilians, both Serbs and Albanians. Human Rights Watch confirmed ninety incidents in which civilians died as a result of NATO bombing. It reported that as few as 489 and as many as 528 Yugoslav civilians were killed in the ninety separate incidents in Operation Allied Force.
Welcome to the New World Order.
So, let’s undo the victory at the Battle of Lepanto where the Turks were turned back by the Christian forces.
That whole area is the “meeting point” for three contrasting religous forces. There are the Muslims from the East, The Orthodox from the North (mostly) and the Catholics from the West. This is seen in microcosm in Bosnia-Hertzegovina. You have serbs (Orthodox), Croats (Catholic) and “Bosniacs” (Muslim).
Why are we helping the downfall of Christendom???
I have to say that I am with Russia on this one!!!
We’re on the wrong side here. We had no business supporting the thugs of Kosovo against Serbia, however unsavory we found the Serbs. We had no business going in and carving up a sovereign state.
Reply to #7. who said,
“We had no business going in and carving up a sovereign state.”
Ahhhh, the political irony is such a tempting target.
When Clinton intervened in Yugoslavia, it was presidential decisiveness. When Bush intervened in Iraq it was presidential folly.
The dishonesty of the radical-leftists leading the Democrat Party is monumental.
What an appalling disaster.
This explains how it came to the bombing of Serbia in 1999
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3-9tqEBWBM
And this is is the picture how US sponsored country of Kosovo will protect Cristian minority rights:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFPSMK6ftWs&feature=related