Tag Archives: Kosovo

Theater Opening, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

A war in the Balkans among nations who haven’t liked each other for centuries makes perfect sense. It will be a nice sideshow to the Ukraine-Russia war. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

If you’re Chinese or Russian, and you watch videos of the top three “most powerful” people in the US, Biden, Kamala and Pelosi, what do you think? You think all three are incoherent and should not be anywhere near any decisive, let alone nuclear, lever.

If you’re anybody anywhere, and you look at the top three “most powerful” people in the world, Xi, Putin and Biden, what do you think? You think two of them have got it together (nothing to do with you liking them or not), and one can’t even read coherently from a teleprompter.

Nowhere near half of Americans understand these two things to be true, but probably some 90% of Chinese and Russians do, as well as a vast majority of people in other non-US/NATO/EU countries.

Another threesome: Sergei Lavrov (Russia), Tony Blinken (US) and Liz Truss (UK) are all foreign ministers (or Secretaries of State, give the beast a name). Who would you trust to represent your own interests best in the field of diplomacy? It’s not even a question, is it? If the US or UK had a Lavrov, he would be their man (he would most likely decline). But they don’t. The US has a nobody (they have lots of those!) in the role, and the UK has someone with zero qualifications who dreams of getting the top job.

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What Is the Difference Between Kosovo & Donbass? By Vladimir Golstein

The U.S. has supported secession in the past, when it serves U.S. interests. From Vladimir Golstein at consortiumnews.com:

The U.S. has declared that Donbass is different. How it is different, nobody will say, because you are not supposed to ask, writes Vladimir Golstein.

Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, the largest U.S. military base in Europe, is called a smaller Guantanamo for housing terrorism suspects. ( KFOR, Task Force Falcon Public Affairs Office)

There once was a country called Yugoslavia. It was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious federalist country, rather prosperous by Socialist standards, and consisting of proud people who stood up to Adolph Hitler and even Joseph Stalin.

There were intermarriages, great food, and great films too. And then the West — once the Soviet Union began to collapse — decided that it was Yugoslavia’s time to collapse too. It would no longer be a country but the land of ancient Balkan hatreds. And they began to foment them and foment them, blaming one republic in particular: Serbia.

Serbian villains were blamed for slowing the rapid European integration of all the other republics, which began to declare their independence. This independence — Slovenia, Croatia and so on — was quickly embraced by the West. Germans were there first, trying out their new role as the masters of Europe, so all these republics were eventually recognized and then — since the population was mixed — civil strive began within each newly, independent republic.

Serbian minorities from every republic began to be harassed and kicked out. All this was condoned and supported by the West, which started a new narrative: great separatists, bad Serbians. [The Clinton administration, including then U.N. ambassador Madeleine Albright, gave a green light to Croatia to ethnically cleanse a quarter of a million Serbs from the Krajina region. Years later, angry Czechs in solidarity with Serbs, confronted Albright at a book signing in Prague. She called them “disgusting Serbs.”]

Kosovo

Those who remember, can recall wars, and bombing and propaganda campaigns. In 1999, NATO intervened militarily to help the largely ethnic Albanian Kosovo gain its independence from Serbia. The autonomous province of Kosovo had voted 99 percent in favor of independence in a 1991 referendum. Eight years later NATO was bombing Belgrade on its behalf.

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The Bogus ‘Humanitarian’ War on Serbia, by John Pilger

Hillary Clinton and her cohorts like to wage “humanitarian” wars. Her husband waged a humanitarian war, in Serbia, and it didn’t turn out so well. It’s way past time to retrive this one from the memory hole, because that war had Hillary’s full-throated support and she’s running for president. For a look at the past that offers a view of the future if she is elected, John Pilger at consortiumnews.com:

The exoneration of a man accused of the worst of crimes, genocide, made no headlines. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it. The Guardian allowed a brief commentary. Such a rare official admission was buried or suppressed, understandably. It would explain too much about how the rulers of the world rule.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica.

Far from conspiring with the convicted Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, Milosevic actually “condemned ethnic cleansing,” opposed Karadzic and tried to stop the war that dismembered Yugoslavia. Buried near the end of a 2,590-page judgment on Karadzic last February, this truth further demolishes the propaganda that justified NATO’s illegal onslaught on Serbia in 1999.

Milosevic died of a heart attack in 2006, alone in his cell in The Hague, during what amounted to a bogus trial by an American-invented “international tribunal.” Denied heart surgery that might have saved his life, his condition worsened and was monitored and kept secret by U.S. officials, as WikiLeaks has since revealed.

Milosevic was the victim of war propaganda that today runs like a torrent across our screens and newspapers and beckons great danger for us all. He was the prototype demon, vilified by the Western media as the “butcher of the Balkans” who was responsible for “genocide,” especially in the secessionist Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Prime Minister Tony Blair said so, invoked the Holocaust and demanded action against “this new Hitler.”

Exaggerating the Death Toll

David Scheffer, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, declared that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59” may have been murdered by Milocevic’s forces.

This was the justification for NATO’s bombing, led by Bill Clinton and Blair, that killed hundreds of civilians in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and television studios and destroyed Serbia’s economic infrastructure.

It was blatantly ideological; at a notorious “peace conference” in Rambouillet in France, Milosevic was confronted by Madeleine Albright, the U.S. Secretary of State, who was to achieve infamy with her remark that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were “worth it.”

Albright delivered an “offer” to Milosevic that no national leader could accept. Unless he agreed to the foreign military occupation of his country, with the occupying forces “outside the legal process,” and to the imposition of a neo-liberal “free market,” Serbia would be bombed.

This was contained in an “Appendix B,” which the media failed to read or suppressed. The aim was to crush Europe’s last independent “socialist” state.

Once NATO began bombing, there was a stampede of Kosovar refugees “fleeing a holocaust.” When it was over, international police teams descended on Kosovo to exhume the victims.

The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines.”

The final count of the dead in Kosovo was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the pro-NATO Kosovo Liberation Front. There was no genocide. The NATO attack was both a fraud and a war crime.

To continue reading: The Bogus ‘Humanitarian’ War on Serbia

Happy Kosovo Independence Day? by Justin Raimondo

Kosovo, the first in a series of foreign interventions that didn’t quite turn out as planned by Mr. and then Mrs. Clinton. From Justin Raimondo, at antiwar.com:

Kosovars are celebrating the seventh anniversary of Kosovo’s independence – by leaving in record numbers. By some estimates as many as 100,000 have fled the country in the past few months. Germany is dispatching policemen to the Hungary-Serbia border to stem the rising tide, since most wind up there so they can apply for asylum.

It’s a tragic end to a long and difficult journey, however, as more than 99 percent of asylum applications from Kosovars are rejected. Germany, which supported the US-backed Kosovo “Liberation” Army (KLA), wanted an independent Kosovo: the Kosovars, not so much….

Fourteen years after the end of the Kosovo war, the “liberation” of the Kosovars has delivered them into the hands of a despotic clan of thugs who have turned the country into the crime capital of Europe, and the continent’s major source of heroin smuggling and human trafficking – a place where the former President has been credibly accused of organ harvesting. The Albanian Mafia has ruled the country ever since the “liberation,” and Kosovo’s government has taken its place among the most corrupt in the world. The unemployment rate is close to 50 percent. A piece in the Guardian quotes a refugee fleeing with his family:

“I don’t know exactly where I am heading but I am dreaming of a place where my children will have proper education and where they won’t need connections to get a job once they graduate and where neither of us need to bribe the doctor if we need health services. The government did not prove they can provide us with any of this, and I never thought I would be here 15 years after the war.”

Associated Press cites a disappointed worker:

“‘I am so disappointed with my own place, I just want to leave,’ said Bislim Shabani, an ethnic Albanian heading to Germany with his wife and four children. Shabani said he worked in a company that went bust in a botched privatization, leaving many workers mired in debt: ‘They owe me 12 months of wages. I couldn’t provide for my family any longer.’”

The last official in charge of privatizing Kosovo’s state-own industries, Blerim Rexha, had to resign after questions were raised when the agency sold off entire industries on the cheap to buyers with political connections. The previous privatization minister had been found dead at home with 11 stab wounds – officially ruled a “suicide.” Under Prime Minister Hacim Thaci, leader of the KLA, and his Democratic Party, the wholesale looting of the economy took place: not only the privatization agency but also the Central Bank (whose chieftain was arrested), and virtually every other government body is rife with corruption.

The Drenas mine, worth billions, was snapped up by an Israeli company for a pittance. PTK, the state-owned telecommunications company, was bid on by Albright Capital – former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s investment consortium – but was forced out by the pretty obvious conflict of interest. Albright was a prime architect of the Kosovo war during her tenure at Foggy Bottom and apparently became quite enthralled with tall, dark and handsome Hacim Thaci, who later became Kosovo’s chief executive and de facto strongman. The PTK sale has been canceled twice due to a power struggle within the ruling party.

Organized violence against the Serb minority, which began during the civil war and continued, unabated, after independence, is worse than ever. Over 100 Serbian Orthodox churches have been burned to the ground by Kosovar mobs. In March, 2004, the “Kristallnacht of Kosovo” saw Serbs murdered in the streets, entire towns ethnically cleansed, hospitals burned to the ground, and thousands of Serbs forced to flee their homes: an estimated 50,000 Kosovars took part in the rioting. NATO’s “peacekeeping” force stood by and watched.

The Kosovo war was sold to the American people under the rubric of a “humanitarian intervention” – a precedent and a pretext that was used many times since. It was also the first phase of Washington’s post-cold war regime change campaign, which sought to push Russian influence out of Europe – and eventually threaten regime change in Russia itself. While today we hear much talk of a new cold war, there is nothing all that new in the present policy: it began with the Clinton administration, when Gen. Wesley Clark threatened to start World War III by attacking Russian peacekeepers in Pristina, and NATO started bombing Serbia.

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2015/02/17/happy-kosovo-independence-day/

To continue reading: Happy Kosovo Independence Day?