By Douglas Hamilton
Reuters
Monday, March 24, 2008; 9:21 AM
BELGRADE
(Reuters) - Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica marked the anniversary of
NATO's bombing of Serbia on Monday with an attack accusing the West of
cynically grabbing territory in the name of humanitarian intervention.
"Now
it is more than obvious that the cruel destruction of Serbia during the
NATO bombardment had only one aim: to turn the province of Kosovo into
the world's first NATO state," he told the state news agency Tanjug.
NATO
began bombing strategic targets in Serbia on March 24, 1999, and kept
it up for 78 days until the late strongman Slobodan Milosevic agreed to
pull his forces from Kosovo and end the killing of Albanian civilians
in a counter-insurgency war.
Launching the first war in its
history, and freighted with a failure to act in Bosnia, the alliance
said it would not stand by and watch another bloodbath in the Balkans
by Serb forces.
Kosovo has been run by the United Nations and
patrolled by NATO troops since June 11, 1999. Its 90 percent Albanian
majority declared independence on February 17 with Western support.
The
European Union, which Serbia wants to join, plans to deploy a
supervisory mission in the country, following a blueprint set out by
United Nations envoy Martti Ahtisaari.
"The illegal construction
of the huge American military base Bondsteel and Annex 11 of the
Ahtisaari plan -- which enshrines NATO as the ultimate authority in
Kosovo -- reveal the true reason why Serbia was mindlessly devastated
and why on February 17 a NATO state was illegally declared," Kostunica
said.
When Serb voters toppled Milosevic in 2000 and elected
Kostunica, the West greeted him as a reformist. But Kostunica is now
the loudest voice of Serb nationalism, leaning to Russia for support and strongly anti-Western in his daily rhetoric.
"UNPATRIOTIC" LABELLING
Kostunica's
10-month-old coalition government collapsed this month under the strain
of deep divisions over Kosovo. President Boris Tadic would not agree to
freeze Serbia's EU aspirations as Kostunica wants, until it revokes its
recognition of Kosovo.
Serbia faces a May 11 election with this as the key issue.
"The
next two months are going to be potentially very difficult, if not
dangerous," said former U.S. ambassador to Serbia, William Montgomery,
in a weekly commentary.
He predicted Kostunica and fellow
"isolationists" would try to keep Kosovo centre stage by means of
provocations and confrontations with NATO and the United Nations.
"The
Prime Minister will continue his tactic of taking hard, nationalistic
positions and forcing his political opponents to choose between meekly
swallowing their objections and following his lead like sheep or
appearing 'unpatriotic'," he wrote.
Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, a guerrilla in the 1998-99 conflict, said NATO fought for the right reasons.
"The
people of Kosovo express their life-long gratitude to NATO and all
countries that supported this just war...in support of the highest
values of western civilization -- freedom, peace and democracy," he
said in a statement. "Today Kosovo is free."
Kostunica on Sunday
accused NATO troops and U.N. police of using "snipers and banned
ammunition" to quell a riot in the Kosovo Serb stronghold of Mitrovica
last week.
A Ukrainian U.N. policeman was killed by a Serb
grenade and a Serb rioter badly wounded. The United Nations and NATO
say the violence was instigated by Belgrade.
Defense Minister
Dragan Sutanovac, of Tadic's pro-EU party, said the start of NATO
bombing was "the saddest day in the recent history of our nation, when
we showed that we didn't understand the world, and the world understood
us even less."
"I hope we've learned the lesson from those
events, that we think much more in political not military terms, and
that it's better to negotiate for 100 years than to have a day of war."
(Edited by Ibon Villelabeitia)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/24/AR2008032400902_pf.html
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