Bosnia in worst crisis since war as Serb leader calls referendum

Milorad Dodik faces heavy EU sanctions if vote goes ahead, international community's representative in Sarajevo warns

• Ian Traynor, Europe editor
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 April 2011 15.55 BST

Bosnia is facing its worst crisis since the end of the war 16 years ago because of Serb secessionist policies aimed at paralysing the country, according to the leading international official overseeing the state.

Valentin Inzko, the Austrian diplomat who is the international community's high representative in Sarajevo, told the Guardian he would act to halt a referendum called by Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian Serb leader, on whether to reject Bosnia's state war crimes court and special prosecutor's office established in 2005 by international decree.

Inzko said heavy European Union sanctions could be imposed on Dodik and his coterie if he did not back down from the vote, which the Bosnian Serb parliament approved by a huge majority this month.

"This is definitely the most serious crisis since the signing of the Dayton agreement [which ended the four-year war in 1995]," said Inzko. "Never before has such a referendum been planned. The intention is to roll back all the achievements. It challenges the role of the high representative. It would be a direct attack on the Dayton settlement ... I would repeal this law."

Dodik, the president of the Serbian half of Bosnia known as the Republika Srpska, pledged this week that he would not back down and that the vote would go ahead.

The decision to stage the referendum was posted officially on Wednesday, meaning the vote must take place within eight weeks. Dodik argued that the court and prosecutors were biased against Serbs and the court's authority should be rejected.

He claimed the Bosnian Muslim leadership, with international support, was bent on creating a domineering Islamic state.

Dodik regularly taunts the international envoys, who have struggled to manage Bosnia since the 90s. He professes no loyalty to a state called Bosnia-Herzegovina, and questions its viability. The referendum is seen as his most destabilising move and as a step towards Bosnia's breakup, which could trigger a war.

"Many think this referendum is a rehearsal for a future one on Republika Srpska status [secession], but those are just speculations, unrealistic at this time," he said last week.

The EU's new Balkan envoy, Miroslav Lajcak, is to go to Banja Luka, Dodik's base, to read him the riot act and order him to call off the vote, according to senior diplomats.

Inzko indicated that the international community was heading for a showdown with Dodik and that at some point in the next fortnight he would invoke his official powers to try to stop the referendum.

"I hope [Lajcak] can talk them out of doing this. Otherwise I will have to act. The [Bosnian Serb] law would be annulled. The deadline can't be very long, 10 days to two weeks maximum."

Lajcak is expected to warn Dodik that if he defies the international referendum ban, he could face EU sanctions similar to those placed on Robert Mugabe and Muammar Gaddafi: a ban on travel and the freezing of his assets and bank accounts.

EU governments recently agreed a "toolbox" of carrots and sticks to reverse years of failure in Bosnia. Catherine Ashton, the EU's foreign policy chief, is about to appoint a new "special representative" in Sarajevo with beefed up powers.

The showdown with Dodik is likely to intensify Bosnia's dangerous drift and paralysist. The deadlock since elections last October has left the country without a central government for seven months, with no breakthrough in sight.

Describing Bosnia as the "principal challenge to stability in Europe this year", James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, has called Bosnia the "principal challenge to stability in Europe this year"last month said last month that the country was "in disarray".

"Ethnic Serb rhetoric about seceding from Bosnia will continue to inflame passions," he reported. "Ethnic agendas still dominate the political process … US-EU efforts to broker compromises have met with little success."

The Muslim-Croat half of the country is also acutely dysfunctional. Bosnian Croat leaders, based in Mostar in the south-west, are in effect boycotting the federation government and parliament after losing out in coalition negotiations. They are complaining bitterly about being ignored by the larger Bosnian Muslim community, and last week formed the Croatian National Assembly to co-ordinate policy-making across ethnic Croat majority areas. "I don't have a problem with this if it is constitutional," said Inzko. "We will see if they establish parallel structures or not. That's very important. Then I'd have to do something."

The Croats are demanding that Bosnia be split into three along ethnic lines to include a separate Croatian entity. Dodik is encouraging these demands to hasten the breakup of the country he constantly calls illegitimate and unworkable.

Senior diplomats in Sarajevo say that would be a belated triumph for Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, the Serbian and Bosnian Serb leaders who led the war effort to destroy the country and were indicted for genocide. "That would mean Srebrenica [where Serbs murdered 8,000 Bosnian Muslim males] would be abroad for the Bosnian Muslims," said a senior diplomat. "The international community will never accept that."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/28/bosnia-crisis-serb-leader-referendum

Admission about the KLA: Gunter / Worthington... - by Julia Gorin

 

...  After Worthington's gentle chiding of Gunter, a slightly adjusted version of the Gunter article appeared in The Edmonton Journal. It's only a little less stupid than the first, lamenting toward the end that the West wasn't serious about "bringing Serbia to its knees."    ... ...  And the war was not won until NATO inserted troops on the ground.   [What? It did?  Or is he talking about the peacekeeping mission that "won the war" by helping the Albanians ethnically purify the province?]  ...   http://www.juliagorin.com/wordpress/?p=2614 A Confused National Post Writer Makes an Easy Admission about the KLA by Julia Gorin            April 25th 2011 In this otherwise retarded March 25th National Post article regurgitating all the old NATO propaganda and cheering the targeting of civilian infrastructure in 1999 — plus advocating help to the Libyan rebels who he admits are Qaeda-connected — writer Lorne Gunter easily makes an admission that our political elite still won't. Indicating that more people know this than are letting on: There's yet another parallel with Kosovo: The rebels we are defending may yet turn out to be our enemies. In 1999, the Kosovo Liberation Army was our ally against the Serbs, but they were also al-Qaeda's drug mules for opium from Afghanistan into central and Western Europe. The very people we were fighting to liberate had been criminals whom Western police agencies were attempting to drive out of business. There's a potential for the same in Libya. At the very least, the rebels in the eastern half of the country are said to have al-Qaeda ties. Maybe they do, maybe they don't; but until it had a falling out with Gaddafi in the 1990s, al-Qaeda did much of its training in eastern Libya, so claims of al-Qaeda connections for the rebels are plausible. All this is what comes from being late to the fight. Had the West intervened a week earlier, when the rebels had the upper hand, we might now not be contemplating stepping up our involvement. Back then, the rebels had the manpower and momentum to move on Gaddafi's strongholds without Western support. But dithering by the United States, NATO and the United Nations cost the rebels their advantage… Huh? One wonders if he read the preceding part of his article before writing the last part. At least God made Peter Worthington, to straighten the man out, and in the same newspaper: Peter Worthington: Why Libya is not the new Kosovo (March 29) Lorne Gunter, one of the wiser columnists in the media [oh shit!], opines in the National Post that there are a lot of parallels between the war in Libya and the 1999 NATO war against Serbia in Kosovo. While there are some parallels in the air war, that's where the comparison ends. Kosovo was a phony war orchestrated by the U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on the fabricated grounds that Slobodan Milosevic was waging genocide in Kosovo…Forensic people poured into "liberated" Kosovo to document genocide and exhume mass graves. They found evidence of atrocities – both by Serbs and by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) — but no mass graves…Last week marked the 12th anniversary of the air attack on Belgrade and select [sic] Serbian targets, yet in that 12 year period, no mass graves have been found. Investigations showed that prior to the air war, atrocities abounded in Kosovo on roughly a 50% basis – half by Kosovars, half by Serbs. NOTE: The investigators put it that way because they were striving for parity. In fact, even Lord Robertson admitted that before the NATO bombing, the majority of deaths were caused by the KLA; a British parliamentary inquiry concluded that until January 1999 most of the crimes were the KLA's; according to confidential minutes of the North Atlantic Council (NAC), even William "Massacre at Racak!" Walker admitted the KLA was "the main initiator of the violence…It has launched what appears to be a deliberate campaign of provocation". This is how William walker himself reported the situation then, in private. GENERAL KLAUS NAUMANN CHAIRMAN, NATO MILITARY COMMITTEE Ambassador Walker stated in the NAC that the majority of violations was caused by the KLA. [Reporter ALLAN LITTLE] Walker didn't admit that in public at the time. He still doesn't. Back to Worthington: One of the prime reasons for the war was a so-called massacre of 45 Kosovar civilians by Serbs at the town of Racak…Thanks largely to French journalists and forensic investigators from Finland, it became more likely (depending on one's objectivity) that the Racak victims had been killed during fighting between Serbs and the KLA, and the bodies moved and arranged to appear that they'd been massacred. Examination showed most had been killed from a distance — little evidence to indicate executions. Nonetheless, the cursory walk-through by William Walker led to charges of massacre against Milosevic which, had he not died before his trial was completed, might have been a huge embarrassment to NATO and the International Court. The air war over Kosovo was not the U.S.'s or NATO's finest hour. […] After Worthington's gentle chiding of Gunter, a slightly adjusted version of the Gunter article appeared in The Edmonton Journal. It's only a little less stupid than the first, lamenting toward the end that the West wasn't serious about "bringing Serbia to its knees." Bringing Serbia to its knees? "On behalf of whom?" asks Liz, who circulated the item today. "Muslims? Why 'target' Serbia at all, an ally in two world wars?" Because most people aren't even as smart as this guy. Yikes. Libyan conflict Kosovo war all over again Militarily, NATO's campaign in Libya reminds me of its 1999 war in Kosovo. Then, as now, there was a great rush to enter the conflict, largely because of media-driven claims of human rights abuses. A dozen years ago, the allegation was ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians by bloodthirsty Serbs. In Libya today, it is threats by Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi to annihilate his enemies, live, as the world watches on CNN. In Kosovo, claims of genocide proved false. After the war had ended, several attempts were made to find the mass graves of innocent Kosovars that the Serbs had purportedly filled with corpses. Nothing was ever found on the scale described prewar, when Western voters were being sold on the need to intervene. Investigators from the European Union in particular scoured Kosovo's countryside in vain for years. United Nations prosecutors told their forensic investigators again and again to dip more, to find the bodies they were sure were there. But none showed up. In all, about 5,000 people were killed in the three-month war, but about equal numbers were killed by both sides. I suspect something similar will be found in Libya years from now when the din of war permits sober analysis: Col. Gadhafi, as evil and cruel as he has been to stay in power for 41 years, was mostly engaging in bravado when he threatened to "wipe out" the rebels opposing his regime. The threat that prompted NATO's air war against Gadhafi and his forces was no more real than Kosovarian claims [there it is! and check out "Kosovoians" here] of crimes against humanity inflicted on them by Belgrade's forces. But the greatest parallel between Kosovo and Libya is the feckless (and, therefore, largely useless) air campaign that is the strategic centrepiece of either war. …I'll admit I was rooting for those Libyans seeking to free themselves from the clutches of a brutal strongman. Who doesn't cheer the freedom-seeking [sic: sharia-seeking] underdog? But I forgot that many on the left have no clue how to run a war once they've begun one. And as we've seen by now, neither do those on the right. Then Gunter again goes into lamenting that we didn't do more damage to civilians in 1999, and advocates for more Western testosterone in Libya: In the spring of 1999, NATO spent 79 days blowing up stuff in Kosovo and Serbia on the premise that enough big, loud explosions would frighten Serbia strongman Slobodan Milosevic into capitulating to Western demands that he free Kosovo. For at least 69 of those 79 days, the bombing was ineffectual. This was mostly due to the NATO belief it was wrong to destroy land and public works during a war and the hopeless and arrogant prediction Milosevic would be persuaded to give up power by the mere awesomeness of NATO air power…[F]or much of the war, the West was bombing barns, tractors and cattle…Milosevic and his cronies quickly figured out we weren't serious. They then correctly calculated that if they were prepared to sustain some damage - or, more correctly, let their people sustain the damage - they could retain power more or less indefinitely. This is what Gadhafi has figured out, too: The West is a toothless tiger in this war. We are not always unprepared to fight seriously. We are fighting very real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq [Not!]. And part of us - the French - are fighting an actual war in Ivory Coast while at the same time helping with the phoney war in Libya. Yet occasionally, when we don't want to look like Imperialists or bullies or Crusaders, we pull our punches in the hope our gleaming military might will win the day for us and we won't have to resort to total war. There is a scene from the Kosovo campaign that more than any other typified what I came to believe about that war. On day 44 or 45, ordinary Serbs demonstrated in support of the Serbian president on a bridge over the Danube at night. The remarkable features - at least from a military point of view - were that the bridge was intact six weeks into a "war" and it was well illuminated by street lights that, obviously, were still drawing reliable electrical power. The West wasn't serious about bringing Serbia to its knees. It was only in the air campaign's last 10 days that NATO began targeting power stations, refineries, rail lines, bridges and water treatment plants - facilities whose destruction would squeeze the Serbians and their government. And the war was not won until NATO inserted troops on the ground. [What? It did? Or is he talking about the peacekeeping mission that "won the war" by helping the Albanians ethnically purify the province?] If the West is now not prepared to blow up targets that matter to Col. Gadhafi and it is not prepared to send troops, then it is not serious enough to have rattled its sabre in the first place.

 

UNMIK: Kosovo is country "stuck in the middle"

UNMIK: Kosovo is country "stuck in the middle"

 

25 April 2011 - Issue : 932

 

The head of the United Nations mission (UNMIK) in Pristina has warned the international community not to repeat in Libya the mistakes made in the armed intervention in Kosovo.

In an interview for the German Press Agency dpa, Lamberto Zannier called for an exit strategy, recalling that the UN and NATO were left ruling and policing Kosovo once hostilities ended after 78 days almost ten years ago.

In Kosovo "there was no clear strategy," with decisions on the key status question "being constantly postponed in the spirit of 'we'll see,'" Zannier said.

"Today, we are still 'seeing'." "The Kosovars assumed that the international community would have, in some way or another, de facto recognized the events, but we have seen a different result," Zannier was quoted as saying.

A large part of the international community has sided with Serbia, among them Russia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

"With the declaration of independence, Kosovo set out on an autonomous path, but it has not managed to go the whole way, it is still stuck in the middle," Zannier observed. Commenting on the Council of Europe report that accuses Prime Minister Hashim Thaci of having directed organ-trafficking, drug and arms smuggling operations over the past decade, under the eyes of UNMIK and the rest of the international community, Zannier said that "things that are not written" in the report but which are known could lead to a reopening of the case.

Zannier said UNMIK had collected some evidence from witnesses and passed them on to the UN tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which could not substantiate the allegations, amid suspicions that key witnesses were intimidated into silence.

http://www.neurope.eu/articles/106163.php

Western Policy Makers Play With Threat Of New Balkans War

 

http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/04/25/49426351.html

Voice of Russia
April 25, 2011

Do the Balkans want a War?
Igor Siletsky

-The first thought that comes to mind after reading all these "journalist investigations" is that the West wants to preserve the status quo in the Balkans, which suits it. In this system Belgrade acts as a "guilty child", who is still under punishment.
-Should The Hague Tribunal start conducting an unbiased investigation, many influential persons will be surely hurt. And not only in the Balkans.
Suffice it to mention here the information concerning the current Kosovo authorities that was made public by the former ICTY chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte - that Pristina was involved in the trafficking of human organs.

The Balkans are on the verge of a new war, Western political observers and analysts have been saying. They believe that a precedent for the worsening of the situation was given to the countries of the former Yugoslavia by the international community, when it sentenced Croatian General Ante Gotovina. For their part, Russian political analysts, who see no prerequisites for a new conflict, say that a new outbreak of tensions is beneficial for the West.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY or The Hague Tribunal) delivered a verdict for three Croatian generals on April 15th. All of them were accused of committing crimes against the Serbs during Operation Storm 1995. According to the court ruling, Ante Gotovina was sentenced to 24 years in prison, Mladen Markac to 18 years, and the third defendant, Ivan Cermac, was acquitted. 

So why has the verdict triggered such stormy emotions not only among the Croats but also in the Western countries?

The point is that throughout the history of the existence of The Hague Tribunal the key defendant for the UN court, who was often referred to as "Doctor Evil," was Yugoslavia's last president Milosevic and of course his supporters and Serbia itself.

There even appeared people in some countries in Europe and in the USA who started saying that the justice of The Hague was one-sided. This postulate needed no proofs for either Russia or the other countries which were not involved in the "anti-Yugoslav coalition". However, judging by the facts, those in The Hague have decided to improve their image and to put into life the principle that was declared by the tribunal itself, that is, that "all sides are to blame for the atrocities and that no nation was more responsible than the other". As a result, the Croatian generals, who were accused of ousting 100,000 peaceful civilians and of murdering hundreds of Serbs, were jailed. As it might seem, justice was obtained. And the fact that the Croats have got angry is simply an expected "side effect".

However, what followed was that the angry "progressive public"- meaning the leading Western media - has undertaken to conduct an investigation of its own. "The Washington Times", "The Wall Street Journal", Newsweek, and "The Jerusalem Post", after studying Storm Operation 1995, came to the conclusion that Ante Gotovina had committed no crimes at all. Moreover, the general is a real Croatian patriot and hero, and his campaign had not only restored Croatia's territorial integrity but had also destroyed the dream of the deceased Serb ruler Slobodan Milosevic about "Greater Serbia". Besides, the Western editions said that by its irresponsible verdicts The Hague Tribunal is stirring up a new war.

The first thought that comes to mind after reading all these "journalist investigations" is that the West wants to preserve the status quo in the Balkans, which suits it. In this system Belgrade acts as a "guilty child", who is still under punishment. And all the other parts of the former Yugoslavia act as sufferers, whose sufferings are linked to the violent "senior" and who receive small presents and bonuses in consolation. Thus, Kosovo has obtained independence, and Croatia is only one step away from accession into the European Union (EU). By the way, the Croats themselves are looking forward to this. 

However, there aree other reasons as well. Should The Hague Tribunal start conducting an unbiased investigation, many influential persons will be surely hurt. And not only in the Balkans.

Suffice it to mention here the information concerning the current Kosovo authorities that was made public by the former ICTY chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte - that Pristina was involved in the trafficking of human organs. Which means that not only Croats also killed the Serbs and not only vice versa. That is why it is necessary to continue studying the latest Balkan crisis, the head of the Centre For the Study of the Modern Balkan Crisis  under the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yelena Guskova says:

"The new data about the human organ trafficking and about the atrocities committed  by the Croats offer proof that it is necessary to study the Balkan crisis and that it is necessary to be objective while doing this. Of course, there're many conflicts in the world. But if we start analyzing how all the other countries developed in the 90s and what occurred to the Balkans and to the post-Yugoslav space, we'll undoubtedly arrive at the conclusion that the Serbs, the Croats and the Muslims have already suffered too much. They have no potential to take up arms again. Thus, to say that a new war will break out in the Balkans soon is no good."

"Thus, instead of intimidating the Balkan nations by saying that a new war will break out, it is necessary to afford the UN court an opportunity to go on with its investigations. And the Croats, the Serbs, the Albanians, and the Bosnians will decide themselves how they should coexist together. One thing is certain though: they will not start fighting because they had enough of it."

A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity

Priznanje da je na Dunavu nastala civilizacija pre svih

 

December 1, 2009

A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.

For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.

The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture's visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta "goddess" figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.

New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have approached the threshold of "civilization" status. Writing had yet to be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe.

The little-known culture is being rescued from obscurity in an exhibition, "The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.," which opened last month at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. More than 250 artifacts from museums in Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania are on display for the first time in the United States. The show will run through April 25.

At its peak, around 4500 B.C., said David W. Anthony, the exhibition's guest curator, "Old Europe was among the most sophisticated and technologically advanced places in the world" and was developing "many of the political, technological and ideological signs of civilization."

Dr. Anthony is a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., and author of "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World." Historians suggest that the arrival in southeastern Europe of people from the steppes may have contributed to the collapse of the Old Europe culture by 3500 B.C.

At the exhibition preview, Roger S. Bagnall, director of the institute, confessed that until now "a great many archaeologists had not heard of these Old Europe cultures." Admiring the colorful ceramics, Dr. Bagnall, a specialist in Egyptian archaeology, remarked that at the time "Egyptians were certainly not making pottery like this."

A show catalog, published by Princeton University Press, is the first compendium in English of research on Old Europe discoveries. The book, edited by Dr. Anthony, with Jennifer Y. Chi, the institute's associate director for exhibitions, includes essays by experts from Britain, France, Germany, the United States and the countries where the culture existed.

Dr. Chi said the exhibition reflected the institute's interest in studying the relationships of well-known cultures and the "underappreciated ones."

Although excavations over the last century uncovered traces of ancient settlements and the goddess figurines, it was not until local archaeologists in 1972 discovered a large fifth-millennium B.C. cemetery at Varna, Bulgaria, that they began to suspect these were not poor people living in unstructured egalitarian societies. Even then, confined in cold war isolation behind the Iron Curtain, Bulgarians and Romanians were unable to spread their knowledge to the West.

The story now emerging is of pioneer farmers after about 6200 B.C. moving north into Old Europe from Greece and Macedonia, bringing wheat and barley seeds and domesticated cattle and sheep. They established colonies along the Black Sea and in the river plains and hills, and these evolved into related but somewhat distinct cultures, archaeologists have learned. The settlements maintained close contact through networks of trade in copper and gold and also shared patterns of ceramics.

The Spondylus shell from the Aegean Sea was a special item of trade. Perhaps the shells, used in pendants and bracelets, were symbols of their Aegean ancestors. Other scholars view such long-distance acquisitions as being motivated in part by ideology in which goods are not commodities in the modern sense but rather "valuables," symbols of status and recognition.

Noting the diffusion of these shells at this time, Michel Louis Seferiades, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, suspects "the objects were part of a halo of mysteries, an ensemble of beliefs and myths."

In any event, Dr. Seferiades wrote in the exhibition catalog that the prevalence of the shells suggested the culture had links to "a network of access routes and a social framework of elaborate exchange systems — including bartering, gift exchange and reciprocity."

Over a wide area of what is now Bulgaria and Romania, the people settled into villages of single- and multiroom houses crowded inside palisades. The houses, some with two stories, were framed in wood with clay-plaster walls and beaten-earth floors. For some reason, the people liked making fired clay models of multilevel dwellings, examples of which are exhibited.

A few towns of the Cucuteni people, a later and apparently robust culture in the north of Old Europe, grew to more than 800 acres, which archaeologists consider larger than any other known human settlements at the time. But excavations have yet to turn up definitive evidence of palaces, temples or large civic buildings. Archaeologists concluded that rituals of belief seemed to be practiced in the homes, where cultic artifacts have been found.

The household pottery decorated in diverse, complex styles suggested the practice of elaborate at-home dining rituals. Huge serving bowls on stands were typical of the culture's "socializing of food presentation," Dr. Chi said.

At first, the absence of elite architecture led scholars to assume that Old Europe had little or no hierarchical power structure. This was dispelled by the graves in the Varna cemetery. For two decades after 1972, archaeologists found 310 graves dated to about 4500 B.C. Dr. Anthony said this was "the best evidence for the existence of a clearly distinct upper social and political rank."

Vladimir Slavchev, a curator at the Varna Regional Museum of History, said the "richness and variety of the Varna grave gifts was a surprise," even to the Bulgarian archaeologist Ivan Ivanov, who directed the discoveries. "Varna is the oldest cemetery yet found where humans were buried with golden ornaments," Dr. Slavchev said.

More than 3,000 pieces of gold were found in 62 of the graves, along with copper weapons and tools, and ornaments, necklaces and bracelets of the prized Aegean shells. "The concentration of imported prestige objects in a distinct minority of graves suggest that institutionalized higher ranks did exist," exhibition curators noted in a text panel accompanying the Varna gold.

Yet it is puzzling that the elite seemed not to indulge in private lives of excess. "The people who donned gold costumes for public events while they were alive," Dr. Anthony wrote, "went home to fairly ordinary houses."

Copper, not gold, may have been the main source of Old Europe's economic success, Dr. Anthony said. As copper smelting developed about 5400 B.C., the Old Europe cultures tapped abundant ores in Bulgaria and what is now Serbia and learned the high-heat technique of extracting pure metallic copper.

Smelted copper, cast as axes, hammered into knife blades and coiled in bracelets, became valuable exports. Old Europe copper pieces have been found in graves along the Volga River, 1,200 miles east of Bulgaria. Archaeologists have recovered more than five tons of pieces from Old Europe sites.

An entire gallery is devoted to the figurines, the more familiar and provocative of the culture's treasures. They have been found in virtually every Old Europe culture and in several contexts: in graves, house shrines and other possibly "religious spaces."

One of the best known is the fired clay figure of a seated man, his shoulders bent and hands to his face in apparent contemplation. Called the "Thinker," the piece and a comparable female figurine were found in a cemetery of the Hamangia culture, in Romania. Were they thinking, or mourning?

Many of the figurines represent women in stylized abstraction, with truncated or elongated bodies and heaping breasts and expansive hips. The explicit sexuality of these figurines invites interpretations relating to earthly and human fertility.

An arresting set of 21 small female figurines, seated in a circle, was found at a pre-Cucuteni village site in northeastern Romania. "It is not difficult to imagine," said Douglass W. Bailey of San Francisco State University, the Old Europe people "arranging sets of seated figurines into one or several groups of miniature activities, perhaps with the smaller figurines at the feet or even on the laps of the larger, seated ones."

Others imagined the figurines as the "Council of Goddesses." In her influential books three decades ago, Marija Gimbutas, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, offered these and other so-called Venus figurines as representatives of divinities in cults to a Mother Goddess that reigned in prehistoric Europe.

Although the late Dr. Gimbutas still has an ardent following, many scholars hew to more conservative, nondivine explanations. The power of the objects, Dr. Bailey said, was not in any specific reference to the divine, but in "a shared understanding of group identity."

As Dr. Bailey wrote in the exhibition catalog, the figurines should perhaps be defined only in terms of their actual appearance: miniature, representational depictions of the human form. He thus "assumed (as is justified by our knowledge of human evolution) that the ability to make, use and understand symbolic objects such as figurines is an ability that is shared by all modern humans and thus is a capability that connects you, me, Neolithic men, women and children, and the Paleolithic painters in caves."

Or else the "Thinker," for instance, is the image of you, me, the archaeologists and historians confronted and perplexed by a "lost" culture in southeastern Europe that had quite a go with life back before a single word was written or a wheel turned.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01arch.html?pagewanted=print

Thank you, Muammar

17.04.2011

 

Thank you, Muammar Al-Qathafi. For the vast majority of human beings, time on this planet is an anonymous passage. They are born naked, leave nothing and die lying down. In your case, you have left a legacy and a philosophy of Governance which will serve as a beacon of light for thousands of generations. And you  refuse to lie down.

Thank you Muammar Al-Qathafi. I sincerely hope that you live among us for many years to come and that you weather this imperialistic storm, dampening the flames of religious extremism and terrorism, fanned by a clique of sickening protagonists who wish to rape Libya and Africa, whose murderous campaign is based around greed and lies.

Many of us in the international community saw this coming. They tried and failed in (where else?) Benghazi in the 1990s and have been itching for a second attempt. The "innocent civilians" they refer to are none other than the terrorists they have trained and into whose ranks the Benghazi Islamist extremists have flocked. They lied about Libyan bombing campaigns, they now lie about cluster bombs (why would your forces deploy cluster weaponry into areas they have to pass through?) and let us be honest, if a "regime" is turning "the full weight of its heavy weaponry" on unarmed civilians the death toll would thousands, not six. Lies and stupidity go hand in hand and the ones who believe in the nonsense being spread by the mainstream media are those sheep whose passage on Earth will remain anonymous, as indeed it should.

In your case, Muammar Al-Qathafi, your passage among us will never be anonymous and you will be remembered for generations to come, thousands of years in the future, as a man who showed us a Third Option and who has left a written legacy which should be fundamental and compulsory reading for every primary school student. It is a manual of Governance for a perfect society.

Your Green Book is not a Utopic treatise but indeed the blueprint behind what you successfully implemented in your country, which was the poorest in the world when you received it and which you have transformed into the richest in Africa in terms of human development indices. For this you will be remembered.

You will be remembered for the system of Governance which was going to receive a UN humanitarian prize in March. You will be remembered for your model which provided free education, free healthcare, free houses. You will be remembered for your agricultural revolution which turned the desert green. You will be remembered for making your people prosperous and proud to be Libyans while taking little for yourself.

 

You will be remembered for living in a tent when others built palaces and you will be remembered for never turning your back on your roots and your people. You will be remembered for your system of democratic governance through People's Committees and Popular Congresses (Jamahiriya) - real democracy which rises above the mafia-style governance of western "parliamentary democracy". What sort of democracy is that?

You will be remembered for providing a social model which answers the needs of Humankind, taking into account the need for an umbrella State and also introducing the vector to reward human endeavour. Decades ago you saw through the weak points in the Socialist Model and the Capitalist Model and gave us a Third Way.

You will be remembered for your Third Universal Theory providing a manual of economic government which you successfully introduced into your country. Your enemies - they are few but powerful - whatever the result of today's debacle, will be remembered as the self-seeking protagonists they are. Within a single decade, they will be seen as the failures that are and their entry into the annals of history may be a few lines, maybe less and they will have contributed absolutely nothing whatsoever towards the future of humanity. Nothing.

 You will be remembered for your political, economic and social axes of your Third Universal Theory which is truly universal and will, I have no doubt, provide a model of Governance for this Planet and all those discovered in the Cosmos in the millennia to come. For this, Muammar Al-Qathafi, you will be remembered.

Yet your work did not end in Libya and with your people. After freeing thousands from the tyranny of colonialist practices and the humiliating yolk of Imperialism, you exported your ideas and ideals, benefiting not just a few cronies (like your enemies do) but directly affecting and building institutions for hundreds of millions of people across Africa. That is why Africans call you the King of Kings.

Your African legacy

The media controlled by your enemies are certainly not ignorant of the facts I am about to refer to but for sure they will never mention them. You will be remembered for your pioneering work in the African Continent - it was you who gave Africa the possibility to connect all countries and cities - and rural areas - in a vast telecommunications project facilitating distance learning, telemedicine and so on.

You will be remembered for your satellite technology which cost 400 million USD, freeing Africa from the burden of paying 500 million USD a year for the use of Western satellites. You paid 300 million USD of this. You will be remembered for having that 30 billion USD set aside - which Obama stole - money destined for African banking projects which would have circumvented western financial interests, holding Africa down for decades with high interest rates. That is why they attacked.

You will be remembered for standing up for the entire African continent at a time when Europeans were trying to fan the flames of racism, dividing North Africa from the rest of the continent. You will be remembered for your support of the ANC against apartheid, for your open approach to religious tolerance, you will be remembered for bringing prosperity, dignity and above all, hope, to Africa.

So nobody is fooled by the lies of your enemies. Hoping you will remain among us for many more years, understanding that nobody is eternal, and respecting your tremendous legacy...

In the name of thousands of millions of human beings, here today or to come tomorrow, thank you, from the bottom of our hearts.

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

Pravda.Ru

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/17-04-2011/117596-thank_muammar-0/

Bill Dorich responds to "Two U.S. Citizens from Bosnia Held in Wartime Killings," - Los Angeles Times

April 14, 2011

 

Letter to the Editor

Los Angeles Times:

 

In your article, Two U.S. Citizens from Bosnia Held in Wartime Killings, the Times once again reveals the ugly 'partisan press' that your newspaper perpetrate throughout the Bosnian Civil War when these pages never published one single article during the breakup of former Yugoslavia that was written by a Serbian journalist, author, scholar or political leader. Your one-sided reporting has been contemptible.

 

Your so-called journalist, Stephen Ceasar is equally culpable of a lack of ethics and morals. If these were two Serbs accused of these war crimes the headline would have surely screamed SERBS! But because these alleged killers are Muslims your reporter and this newspaper hoodwink your readers leaving the obvious conclusion that these two criminals are Serbians.

 

Your reporter knows full well the identity of these monsters but like the Times lap dog he grovels at the feet of some sick editor who continues his campaign to paint Serbs with collective guilt… a pox on all of your houses. Your subscribers deserve to read the facts and the truth and determine for themselves if the identity of the accused deserve protection by a major metropolitan newspaper.  Shame on the Times.

 

Do I expect this letter to appear on your pages?  I am not that stupid or gullible. But it will be published on every Serbian website around the world to expose the Los Angeles Times' continued ugly and irresponsible display of yellow journalism.

 

William Dorich

Los Angeles, CA 

 

The writer is the author of 5 books on Balkan history including his 1992 book, Kosovo.

 

Message from Colonel Mu'ummar Qaddafi

13.04.2011

 

Gaddafi Unplugged and Uncensored

 Translated by Professor Sam Hamod, Ph.D.

Recollections of My Life: Col. Mu'ummar Qaddafi, The Leader of the Revolution. April 5, 2011.

In the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful...

For 40 years, or was it longer, I can't remember, I did all I could to give people houses, hospitals, schools, and when they were hungry, I gave them food. I even made Benghazi into farmland from the desert, I stood up to attacks from that cowboy Reagan, when he killed my adopted orphaned daughter, he was trying to kill me, instead he killed that poor innocent child. Then I helped my brothers and sisters from Africa with money for the African Union.

I did all I could to help people understand the concept of real democracy, where people's committees ran our country. But that was never enough, as some told me, even people who had 10 room homes, new suits and furniture, were never satisfied, as selfish as they were they wanted more. They told Americans and other visitors, that they needed "democracy" and "freedom" never realizing it was a cut throat system, where the biggest dog eats the rest, but they were enchanted with those words, never realizing that in America, there was no free medicine, no free hospitals, no free housing, no free education and no free food, except when people had to beg or go to long lines to get soup.

No, no matter what I did, it was never enough for some, but for others, they knew I was the son of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the only true Arab and Muslim leader we've had since Salah-al-Deen, when he claimed the Suez Canal for his people, as I claimed Libya, for my people, it was his footsteps I tried to follow, to keep my people free from colonial domination - from thieves who would steal from us.

Now, I am under attack by the biggest force in military history, my little African son, Obama wants to kill me, to take away the freedom of our country, to take away our free housing, our free medicine, our free education, our free food, and replace it with American style thievery, called "capitalism," but all of us in the Third World know what that means, it means corporations run the countries, run the world, and the people suffer. So, there is no alternative for me, I must make my stand, and if Allah wishes, I shall die by following His path, the path that has made our country rich with farmland, with food and health, and even allowed us to help our African and Arab brothers and sisters to work here with us, in the Libyan Jamahiriya.

I do not wish to die, but if it comes to that, to save this land, my people, all the thousands who are all my children, then so be it.

Let this testament be my voice to the world, that I stood up to crusader attacks of NATO, stood up to cruelty, stood up to betrayal, stood up to the West and its colonialist ambitions, and that I stood with my African brothers, my true Arab and Muslim brothers, as a beacon of light. When others were building castles, I lived in a modest house, and in a tent. I never forgot my youth in Sirte, I did not spend our national treasury foolishly, and like Salah-al-Deen, our great Muslim leader, who rescued Jerusalem for Islam, I took little for myself...

In the West, some have called me "mad", "crazy", but they know the truth yet continue to lie, they know that our land is independent and free, not in the colonial grip, that my vision, my path, is, and has been clear and for my people and that I will fight to my last breath to keep us free, may Allah almighty help us to remain faithful and free.

　

c: Col. Mu'ummar Qaddafi, 2011/05/04

Copyright Col. Mu'ummar Qaddafi, - Mathaba.Net

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/13-04-2011/117563-message_from_qaddafi-0/

La guerre contre la Libye

 

1.

Komnen  Becirovic 

 L'Aube de l'Odyssée ou le crépuscule de la Mediterranée

 

http://www.medias-france-libre.fr/index.php/chroniques/27-komnen-becirovic-kosovo/1286-laube-de-lodyssee-ou-le-crepuscule-de-la-mediterraneeparkomnen-becirovic-.html

 

2.

Komnen Becirovic

La Serbie et la Libye, soeurs en martyre du même mal

 

 http://www.medias-france-libre.fr/index.php/chroniques/27-komnen-becirovic-kosovo/1315-la-serbie-et-la-libye-surs-en-martyre-du-meme-mal-par-komnen-becirovic.html

 

Kosovo's Dirty Secrets

Serbs and Dissident Albanians Kidnapped and Murdered

Kosovo's Dirty Secrets

By JEAN-ARNAULT DÉRENS

On October 27, 1999 Budimir Baljosevic, a teacher aged 50, and four friends tried to escape from the ghetto to which the Serbs of the Kosovan town of Orahovac/Rahovec had been confined. Kosovo had been placed under interim United Nations administration in June that year, and a Nato-led peacekeeping force, KFOR, had moved in.

A Roma resident of the town, Agron N, had offered to guide them to Rozaje in Montenegro, for a fee of $840 each. His credentials justified the high price: he worked with the TMK (Kosovo Protection Corps), an organization supervised by Nato; its mission was the social reintegration of former guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA); he had already completed four successful "exfiltrations" of Serbs from Orahovac; a bricklayer by trade, he was involved in the construction of a new TMK base in the neighbouring town of Djakovica/Gjakove – where the five Serbs were last seen.

Agron N explained: "I stopped to look for my brother-in-law, who was supposed to come with us, driving in convoy. I left the Serbs in the car. When I came out of my brother-in-law's house, someone shouted to me to hide and strangers took the Serbs. No one's heard from them since." He decided it was better for his own safety to spend a few months in Novi Pazar, in Serbia. Baljosevic's brother tried many times to get news of the five Serbs, without success: "Some Italian soldiers from KFOR came to see me, and the UN police, too, but I never heard anything."

Their fate is commonplace. Negovan Mavric keeps a small café at Velika Hoca, a Serb enclave a few kilometers from Orahovac/Rahovec, and runs the local branch of the Association of Families of Kidnapped and Missing Persons in Kosovo and Metohija. He showed me a list of the village's dead and missing: the remains of 19 Serbs kidnapped in 1998 and 1999 have been found, but 55 Serbs and nine Roma are still missing. The first murder of a Serb civilian was recorded on May 12, 1998, when the Serbian police and the KLA began to fight for control of the district, where many Serbs then lived. The last kidnapping was on July 28, 2000, more than a year after the UN protectorate was established.

The hills around Velika Hoca are covered with vineyards; the mountains high above them mark the border between Kosovo and Albania. In the past, Albanians and Serbs coexisted peacefully in the Orahovac/Rahovec district. Since June 1999 the Serb population has fallen from nearly 10,000 to 700 in Velika Hoca, and 300 in the upper part of the town of Orahovac. The Serbs have been driven out of mixed villages such as Zociste, Opterusa and Retimlije.

The majority of the missing Serbs were kidnapped as early as July 1998, when the KLA briefly besieged Orahovac. Then a large number of Serb civilians from Retimlije were taken to a KLA base in the nearby village of Semetiste. The women were freed four days later, after the Red Cross intervened; none of the men (one just 16 years old) were seen alive again. In April 2005 some were identified among the remains of 21 people buried in a mass grave some distance away, in the village of Volujak/Valljake, near Klina.

Held on suspicion

Olgica Bozanic, a Serb from Orahovac who has taken refuge in Belgrade, is a member of the Association of Families of Kidnapped and Missing Persons. She may have lost as many as 10 relatives, including her two brothers, uncles and cousins. She heard news of one from Albanian former neighbors, who were held for several months by the guerrillas on suspicion of collaboration with the Serbian regime. They said that some Serbs from the Orahovac area were initially held near the main KLA base in the area, in the village of Drenovac/Drenovce. After the fighting stopped, they were transferred to Deva, a village in the Has mountains, near the Albanian border. It seems the KLA had occupied a base abandoned by the Yugoslav army when it withdrew in June 1999, and converted it into a detention centre. The Orahovac Serbs were then taken to Kukes, in Albania, and later to Durres, on the Albanian coast, where Bozanic's former neighbours claimed to have seen them alive, in a KLA prison, in 2001.

Most Serbs kidnapped before the end of the war were probably killed inside Kosovo. The idea that those kidnapped after KFOR drove in were taken to Albania was put forward some time ago, but there has been no trace of them. In autumn 1999 Sefko Alomerovic, president of the district of Novi Pazar's Helsinki Committee (a local organization, independent of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia), conducted a long inquiry, but the report has been lost and Alomerovic died in 2003. In interviews in 2000, he claimed to have visited five detention centers in Kosovo. These were small facilities – often converted garages or industrial buildings on the outskirts of towns – housing 10-50 detainees. The centers were under the authority of a Commandant "Mala" (real name Alush Agushi), a close associate of Ramush Haradinaj. Some families had tried to ransom detainees, but although large sums of money had been paid to intermediaries, none had ever been freed.

Some Serbs had been kept with a view to exchanging them for Albanian prisoners in Serbia, whose numbers were estimated at around 800 in 2000. There is no evidence that any exchanges ever took place. Some sources claim that many Serb detainees were executed in 2001, when Serbia passed an amnesty law and freed Albanians suspected of having belonged to the KLA. Some detention centers in Kosovo were used as staging camps for both Serb and Albanian prisoners awaiting transfer to Albania. Alomerovic was the first to mention human organ trafficking, suspecting that international criminal networks were buying organs supplied by members of the KLA.

Wall of silence

His revelations were not followed up and were in fact rejected by international organizations in Kosovo, including the UN interim administration mission, then led by Bernard Kouchner. Alomerovic, well known as a human rights militant and a long-term opponent of the Milosevic regime, talked of a "wall of silence"; KFOR denied the existence of any detention centers in Kosovo, in spite of evidence. Carla Del Ponte, former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, has also described this wall of silence, which she encountered when attempting to investigate the disappearance of Serb civilians and rumours of human organ trafficking.

As Dick Marty has emphasised in many interviews since the publication of his report to the Council of Europe "everybody in Kosovo" knew of the disappearance of Serb civilians, and of the detention during the war of many Albanians suspected of collaborating with the Serbian regime. Since 1999 the Pristina daily Bota Sot has never stopped denouncing the elimination of sympathizers of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK, founded by the late Ibrahim Rugova), during and since the war. The paper's editor Bajrush Morina summed it up: "Three thousand people have been murdered in Kosovo since 1999, and only 600 of those murders have been solved. There's been a lot of talk of revenge killings by families, but most are political murders." Two of the paper's reporters have been killed and Morina had to hire private bodyguards for a time. Yet the stories Bota Sot publishes have always been regarded with suspicion, given its relationship with the LDK.

Bota Sot has regularly reported the existence of detention centers in Kosovo and Albania, where Albanians accused of collaboration were held. In February this year the trial of former KLA commanders Sabit Geci and Riza Alijaj began in Mitrovica. They are accused of committing serious crimes against detainees in a camp at Cahan, in the mountains of northern As from the Kosovo border.
During the war, the secluded village of Cahan was used by the KLA as a logistics centre and a rear base for volunteers going to fight in Kosovo. Local strongman Bedri Cahani admitted that the inhabitants of Cahan smuggled cigarettes into Kosovo and that he was recruited by the KLA in autumn 1997, mainly to smuggle fighters over the mountains at night. The KLA was using an Albanian army barracks, abandoned in 1992, which still stands at the entrance to the village: this also housed a detention centre, mentioned by Marty. Cahan is a secluded spot, nearly 10km by rough mountain tracks from the town of Kruma.

ZZ spent two and a half months in "hell" at Cahan, and will be a key protected witness at the trial of Geci and Alijaj. He remembers systematic abuse and serious torture. Some detainees were forced to have sexual relations with each other; others were subjected to simulated executions. But, he told me, "I was probably the longest-serving prisoner at Cahan, and I only saw Albanians." He had also seen some of the KLA's most important commanders in Cahan, especially Hashim Thaci, Kosovo's current prime minister.

All the detainees there in 1999 were, like ZZ, senior figures in the LDK. Most were arrested in the towns of Kukes and Kruma, which were full of refugees driven out of Kosovo by the Serbian forces. Some were members of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Kosovo (Fark), a guerrilla movement rival to the KLA, started, without much success on the ground, by supporters of Ibrahim Rugova.

The Drenica Group

Marty's report singles out as responsible an internal faction of the KLA, which it refers to as the "Drenica Group", listing as members Hashim Thaci, Azem Syla, Xhavit Haliti, Kadri Veseli, Fatmir Limaj, Sabit Geci and Riza Alijaj. These former guerrilla commanders are all from the Drenica area; they were also members of the Popular Movement of Kosovo (LPK), a secret Marxist-Leninist organization favorable to the Albanian Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha. The movement emerged among the Albanian diaspora in Switzerland, and had an extensive network of clandestine militants in Kosovo. It was the LPK that created the KLA in 1996, bringing together a number of groups of independent militants already operating in Kosovo, mainly in the Drenica area. The best known, Adem Jashari, a great hero who is virtually worshipped in Kosovo, was killed by the Serbian police on March 6, 1998. His cousin, Gani Geci, survived and narrowly escaped an attempt on his life in 2001. Geci has never joined the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), the direct successor to the LPK. He is from the family of the bajraktar (hereditary village chieftain) of the village of Llausha, in the Drenica area. He remained a member of the LDK and later of a small splinter group, whom he represented during the last Kosovo parliament.
Geci told me: "We were faithful to Ibrahim Rugova, and we had never heard of the LPK, nor of Fark: as far as we were concerned, the KLA badge united all the fighters. When the LPK people arrived from Switzerland, we made them welcome. They had money and promised us weapons, but we quickly realized they were only interested in power. In any case, they never fought the Serbs. They relied on Nato to do that. They only fought other Albanians, to gain absolute power, and, since the end of the war they have systematically bled Kosovo dry."

His claims are largely confirmed by a recently declassified Nato report from 2003, which identifies Haliti as the "godfather" of Kosovo, controlling most illegal activities, including smuggling, drug trafficking and prostitution. As well as being a senior figure in the LPK, Haliti was notorious as an agent of the Sigurimi, the secret service of Stalinist Albania. He is a top leader of the Drenica Group, which is synonymous with the leadership of the LPK and today's PDK.

The PDK had a powerful tool in the Sherbimi Informativ i Kosoves (Shik), an intelligence service headed by Veseli and Syla. In 2009 Kosovo was shaken by the revelations of a former Shik agent, Nazim Bllaca, who admitted having murdered an Albanian who had collaborated with the Serbian police. Under house arrest while awaiting trial, Bllaca is once more free to speak to the press. In an interview in Koha Ditore this January, he claimed that Shik had killed "600 people in the first few months after the establishment of the UN protectorate and 1,000 over 12 months".

People are beginning to talk in Kosovo about the violence by the KLA against Albanians accused of collaboration, or those whose political persuasion differed from the guerrillas. However, nobody yet wants to talk about the fate of the missing Serbs. ZZ explained that, at the end of the war, he was transferred from the camp at Cahan to the town of Prizren, in Kosovo: "For several days, they kept me in the cellar of a house, with seven elderly Serbs and one Roma. There were two of us Albanian prisoners from the camp at Cahan, and our gaolers forced us to hit the old Serbs. In the end, some German soldiers from KFOR freed me, but the Serbs had already been taken away, I don't know where."

I was unable to find any evidence that, after the war was over, the camp at Cahan had also housed Serbs intended to supply the trade in human organs. However, when Cahan housed a torture centre for "dissident" members of the KLA, in spring 1999, it was visited regularly by members of US special forces.

Translated by Charles Goulden

Jean-Arnault Dérens is editor of Le Courrier des Balkan (balkans.courriers.info); his latest book, co-authored with Laurent Geslin, is Voyage au pays des Gorani: Balkans, début du XXIe siècle (Journey to the Land of the Gorani: the Balkans at the Start of the 21st Century), Cartouche, Paris, 2010.

This article appears in the Apriledition of the excellent monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com. This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features two or three articles from LMD every month.

http://www.counterpunch.org/derens04062011.html

Russia to rescue Serbia from NATO's claws

05.04.2011

 

Serbia may become one of the largest buyers of Russian arms. This can become possible after Vladimir Putin's recent visit to the country. Belgrade may receive a ten-billion-dollar loan soon. Three billion dollars of the amount will be spent to modernize outdated Soviet arms and purchase state-of-the-art Russian arms.

What exactly do the Serbs want to buy from Russia? No official statement on the matter has been made during Putin's visit. However, both Russian and Serbian experts discuss the subject very actively.

The Blic, a Serbian newspaper, wrote that the security of the country was in danger because of the deplorable situation in the Air Force of the country. Prior to the war of 1999, up to 80 percent of the Serbian Air Force consisted of outdated aircraft, such as MiG-21 fighters. Most of MiG-29 planes were either downed or could not be used because of the shortage of spare parts.

In the beginning of 2010, the Serbian Defense Ministry supposedly sent inquiries to world's leading manufacturers of fourth-generation fighter jets. Pursuant to that information, the Serbs were going to conduct a tender to replace outdated aircraft.

They were presumably interested in American F-16 and F-18 fighter jets, Swedish Gripens, French Rafales and Eurofighters, as well as Russian MiG-29M and Su-30. Apparently, the Russian fighters are the priority from the point of view of price-quality ratio.

The Serbian missile defense system was practically destroyed during the war in 1999. Moreover, the results of the war showed that it was impossible to repulse the aggression of such an enemy as NATO with the use of missile complexes developed during the 1960s and the 1970s. Serbia may purchase two divisions of Russia's renowned S-300 systems or an export variant of S-400.

Practically all radar stations in the country were also destroyed during the war. The country was deprived of the opportunity to control its own air space. This gives every reason to believe that Belgrade may purchase Russian radar stations as well.

However, thee billion dollars is not enough to modernize the air force, to rebuild the missile defense system and reequip radar troops. Two divisions of S-300 systems will not improve the situation. What can these two divisions do if the alliance can use hundreds of its fighter jets?

Will NATO let Serbia rearm the army at all? The administration of the alliance previously announced the intention to cut the Serbian armed forces to 21,000 men.

Viktor Litovkin, an observer with Independent Military Survey newspaper said in an interview with Pravda.Ru that NATO would not impede Serbia's initiative to rearm its armed forces with the use of Russian arms. Belgrade wants to join the alliance, but the possession of Russian hardware did not become an obstacle for other countries of Europe in obtaining NATO membership. Take a look at Greece, for example. This country is a member of NATO, but it still buys S-300 systems from Russia," the experts said.

Elena Guskova, an expert for Balkans, does not share the same point of view.

"It is quite doubtful that the EU and the USA would welcome such a deal. They do not conceal their plans to separate Serbia from Russia as much as possible. Many Serbs believe that their problems have not been solved. Many conflict areas remained in Serbia after the collapse of Yugoslavia. There's every reason to believe that NATO will not be able to defend Serbia in case a serious conflict occurs in the north or in the south of the country. It happened so in Macedonia in 2001. The alliance simply took the side of the Albanians as it happened two years earlier with Kosovo," the expert said.

Sergei Balmasov

Pravda.Ru

http://english.pravda.ru/russia/economics/05-04-2011/117464-russia_serbia-0/

Will the US stop digging its Kosovo hole?

Will the US stop digging its Kosovo hole?

The current talks between Belgrade and Pristina may provide the US with an opportunity to shift away from a policy that has become dependent on one leader and upon giving full backing to all of Pristina's political claims.

By Gerard Gallucci

Since December, news from Kosovo has been increasingly about the involvement of its political leaders in corruption, organ trafficking and organized crime, extending back to acts committed by the KLA during the war. EULEX is currently investigating the alleged involvement of senior officials who are former KLA members. These investigations may be, in part, an effort to make-up for EULEX's failure to pursue allegations in a report, by Swiss Senator Dick Marty, on Prime Minister Thaci's involvement in KLA organ trafficking. EULEX tried to deflect calls for it to investigate Thaci by blaming Marty for not passing on the names of witnesses. But some witnesses are dead and those living seem reluctant to entrust themselves into Kosovo's witness protection scheme. So, EULEX apparently dug through its files and came up with the current investigation. But in the Balkans, it is hard to please everyone and former-KLA have been quite active in criticizing and demonstrating against EULEX.

All this has led some to suggest that perhaps the creation of an Albanian-majority, independent Kosovo was a mistake. Some have charged too that none of the information on corruption and criminal involvement is really new but was previously covered up and ignored for political reasons. This is almost certainly true. Anyone working in the Balkans since the collapse of Yugoslavia will be quite familiar with the near ubiquitous links between political and criminal circles. Of course, traditional brigandage has characterized certain areas of Kosovo since time immemorial. And stories of human rights abuses and criminal activity by KLA figures were common in Kosovo. Some of these may not stand up to the demands for evidence, but the general picture has been known for some time.

It seems certain that someone was protecting the Kosovo leadership from being investigated. Some cite reports that the US pressured UNMIK not to investigate charges into Thaci's leadership. The US may also have played a role in ensuring that former KLA leader and prime minister, Ramush Haradinaj, was pulled in front of the Hague to get him out of Thaci's way. Indeed, the US may have sought to punish a high-ranking UNMIK official for seeking to help Haradinaj as it had helped Thaci.

It is no secret that the US judged Thaci to be key to maintaining control over the Kosovo Albanians. Keeping him as a trusted and cooperative prime minister became in itself an important element of US policy. In return for him keeping the lid on Albanian irredentism and for accepting the form – if not the substance – of the Ahtisaari Plan, Thaci received complete US backing both for him and for Pristina's claim of independence and "territorial integrity" (meaning control of the north). Thus the US followed the path it has often used in backing the likes of the Shah of Iran, Mobutu, Pinochet, Saddam (before 9/11), Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gaddafi – swallow any reservations about the behavior of "your man" as long as he remains "your man." Typically, the US was unable to extricate itself from these relationships until it was too late for a happy ending.

This is not to say that Thaci is in the same category as these others. He is not a mass murderer and he continues to operate within the context of a constitutional democracy. The real problem is the stance the US has taken to avoid having to deal with the mess it – and its Quint partners – helped create in Kosovo by picking a favorite, overlooking the problems and digging in to keep things "stable." One result has been the reckless US effort to distract attention from the problems in Pristina by focusing on alleged threats to security and legality from the northern Kosovo Serbs. US policy for Kosovo can be boiled down into two parts: help Thaci, blame Serbs. If this continues to take the form of seeking to bully the north into accepting Pristina, it will lead to further conflict. Unfortunately, it is a trait of many who have dug themselves into a hole to dig further. Somebody should instead help the US get out of its hole. The current discussions between Belgrade and Pristina could be the ladder.

Gerard M. Gallucci is a retired US diplomat and UN peacekeeper. He worked as part of US efforts to resolve the conflicts in Angola, South Africa and Sudan and as Director for Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council. He served as UN Regional Representative in Mitrovica, Kosovo from July 2005 until October 2008. Gerard is also a member ofTransCconflict's advisory board. The views expressed in this piece are his own and do not represent the position of any organization.

You can read more of Mr. Gallucci's analysis of current developments in Kosovo and elsewhere by clicking here. To read other articles by Gerard for TransConflict, please click here.

http://www.transconflict.com/2011/04/will-the-us-stop-digging-its-kosovo-hole-054/

LIBYA: FORCE DOES NOT BRING DEMOCRACY, SERBIAN AMBASSADOR

 

 LIBYA: FORCE DOES NOT BRING DEMOCRACY, SERBIAN AMBASSADOR

29 March , 15:51

(ANSAmed) - ROME, MARCH 29 - "The Western powers should have exhausted all diplomatic avenues before deciding to intervene with force in Libya. Bombs do not bring democracy," said the Serbian Ambassador to Italy, Sanda Raskovic-Ivic, regarding military operations in Libya recently transferred to NATO command, which began 12 years after the NATO mission against Serbia under the rule of Milosevic. "It certainly wasn't NATO's bombs that brought democracy to Serbia," said the diplomat. Rather, that use of force at the time only reinforced Slobodan Milosevic's power." Those air strikes, said Raskovic-Ivic, "delayed the fall by at least a year". Democracy in Serbia, she continued, "arrived when the time was right". The time will be right for the people in the Arab world too. "Whosoever," she underlined, "says that Islam is incompatible with democracy is wrong. Rather, the two are strongly related." History, she said, "will show us that what inspired countries like France are pure economic interests, not their conscience". Proof of this," she concluded, "is the fact that the French authorities continue to refuse entry to Tunisia immigrants at the border between Ventimiglia and Menton".

http://www.ansamed.info/en/news/ME.XEF67923.html

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