Why Kosovo but not Palestine?

---

By Zoltan Grossman

 

Sunday, September 25, 2011

 

 

In his September 21 speech to the United Nations, President Obama announced that he would veto U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state, because its independence was not a result of a negotiated settlement with Israel. He said that "peace depends upon compromise among people who must live together long after our…votes have been tallied….That's the lesson of Sudan, where a negotiated settlement led to an independent state. And that is and will be the path to a Palestinian state -- negotiations between the parties."

But President Obama neglected to mention a recent prominent example of unilateral independence, the State of Kosovo, which was recognized by the United States three years ago--even though its statehood did not come about through a negotiated settlement with Serbia. If an independent state of Palestine should only be recognized with Israel's approval, then why did the U.S. recognize the independence of Kosovo in 2008, over the objections of Serbia? Why recognize Kosovo but not Palestine?

Serbs view Kosovo as the cradle of their national identity, where the Ottoman Empire defeated them in 1389. Kosovo maintained a Serb majority for centuries, but in the late 1800s it became a seat of Albanians' national awakening, and eventually gained an ethnic Albanian majority. It became part of Serb-dominated Yugoslavia after World War I, and (after the Axis occupation in World War II), the Yugoslav Communist government made Kosovo into a province within the republic of Serbia, recognizing the rights of its Kosovar Albanian majority. In 1989, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic vastly reduced Kosovo's autonomy, citing threats to the Serb minority, as the opening move in his nationalist crusade for a Greater Serbia.

Like Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat first declared Palestinian sovereignty in 1988, Kosovar Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova first declared Kosovo independent in 1990. No foreign powers recognized Kosovo at that time, but 127 UN member states have since recognized the State of Palestine.

Civil war erupted between Serbian forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1998, and more than 2,000 people died in the fighting. KLA fighters targeted ethnic Serb civilians in the province, as well as moderate Kosovar Albanians, and Serbian forces targeted Albanian civilians. In February 1999, President Clinton led NATO in a bombing campaign against Serbia, triggering Milosevic's plan for the "ethnic cleansing" (or forced removal) of Kosovo's Albanian majority, which began after the bombs started falling.

When the KLA came to power with backing from NATO troops in June 1999, it in turn ethnically cleansed thousands of Serbs, Roma (Gypsies), Turks and Jews from its territory, based on the accusation that these groups had sided with Serbian forces. These minority groups had been living in Kosovo for centuries, unlike the Israeli settlers who are mostly recent transplants imported to Palestinian soil. When Serbia had settled some Serb war refugees in Kosovo from other ex-Yugoslav republics during the 1990s, Washington condemned the program as an attempt to shift the demographics of the province. The few Serbs living in Kosovo since 1999 have been subject to periodic pogroms, and a Serb enclave in the north has periodically threatened to rejoin Serbia, generating instability in the new state.

Whereas the prevailing mythology in the United States is that Clinton bombed former Yugoslavia to stop ethnic cleansing, people in the Balkans understand that U.S. forces intervened against Serb ethnic cleansers, but intervened on the side of Croat and Albanian ethnic cleansers. After the fighting was over, NATO rubberstamped the results on the ground of these forced removals, and deemed the silence of the graveyard a "lasting peace."

Kosovo's parliament redeclared independence in 2008, in a move that was boycotted by Kosovo Serb delegates. So far, 83 UN member states (including the U.S.) have recognized Kosovo—44 fewer than the total members states that have recognized Palestine. Serbia asked the International Court of Justice to rule on the secession, and last year the Court issued an advisory opinion that unilateral declarations of independence are not prohibited under international law.

Serbia has a stronger legal case than Israel to object to unilateral independence, and not only because of the Kosovo's expulsion of most Serbs. Kosovo was not only recognized as a part of Yugoslavia before the 1990s, not as a Yugoslav republic of its own, but as a province within the republic of Serbia. On the other hand, the West Bank and Gaza (not to mention Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem) have never been recognized as a part of Israel. In addition, after coming to power, KLA fighters blatantly endangered the security of neighboring states, by seeking to militarily "liberate" ethnic Albanians in western Macedonia and Serbia's Presevo Valley.

The difference is that Kosovo is under occupation by a foreign military alliance that backs the self-determination of its ethnic Albanian majority. The West Bank and East Jerusalem are under the occupation of a foreign military force that seeks to prevent the self-determination of its majority Palestinian population, and seeks to settle its own population in their place.

Serbia and Israel have remarkably similar messages toward the West. They contend that their military occupations have been justified to prevent a repeat of the genocide directed against them in World War II. (The Palestinians had nothing to do with this genocide, though Croatia and Albania were allied with the Axis Powers.) Serbia and Israel present themselves as bulwarks defending Western civilization against Islamist extremism, even though both the Palestinian and Kosovar national movements began with secular ethnic-based identities, and include members of Christian minorities. Serbia and Israel have also used ancient religious justifications (such as shrines and archeological sites) for their military presence in lands where they do not have a demographic majority.

The difference is that the Israeli lobby in Washington is far stronger than the Serbian lobby. Milosevic's massive ethnic cleansings of Kosovar Albanians (as well as Croats and Bosnians) were more recent and televised than Israel's forced removal of Palestinians from their ancestral lands, in what they term the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948.

The KLA has long been implicated in heroin trafficking to raise funds for the cause and cash for personal enrichment. Former KLA commanders, including Prime Minister Hashim Thaci (who led the Croatian Army's 1995 ethnic cleansing of Serbs) have even been accused of trafficking in human organs. Kosovo is also a notorious center of sex trafficking in the Balkans, especially as Western troops have been stationed there. Whatever the veracity of any of these particular charges, none of them have prevented U.S. support for Kosovo's independence.

The difference is that the Palestinian national movement has not been implicated in such international crime syndicates.  We can be sure that if any Palestinian leaders were accused of just one of these crimes, the Israeli lobby would trumpet the charge loudly as an argument against a Palestinian state, and the White House would echo the claim.

Palestine and Israel have come down on different sides on Kosovo independence. Senior adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Yasser Abed Rabbo, cited Kosovo's example for unilateral independence when he said, "Kosovo is not better than us. We are worthy of independence before them and we ask for backing from the United States and European Union." Meanwhile, Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman categorically refused to recognize Kosovo, claiming that its independence is a "sensitive issue" that should be part of  "a really comprehensive and peaceful solution" established through negotiations.  So both the Palestinians and Israelis are consistent in their consideration of Kosovo's example. The party that is not consistent is the United States, which with one hand recognizes a new state, and with the other hand blocks another new state.

The difference may be that, since the days of Woodrow Wilson, Washington tends to support the unilateral self-determination of peoples only if they are white Europeans. More to the point, Israel serves U.S. foreign policy interests in the Middle East, but Orthodox Christian Serbia has historically been more aligned with Russia.

The United Nations has not recognized Kosovo because it would set a negative precedent for unilateral secession around the world. Many states in the Arab League and European Union, on the other hand, view Kosovo as a positive precedent for Palestine. Some governments may oppose sovereignty for both Kosovo and Palestine. But the U.S. is virtually alone in its backing for the State of Kosovo, while at the same time hypocritically blocking a State of Palestine.

Americans should start asking President Obama: if Kosovo has a right to exist, why doesn't Palestine also have a right to exist?


Dr. Zoltán Grossman is a professor of geography and world indigenous peoples studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. His website is at http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz and can be reached at grossmaz@evergreen.edu  He is a civilian Member of the Board of G.I. Voice, an antiwar veterans group that runs the Coffee Strong resource center for soldiers outside Fort Lewis:http://www.coffeestrong.org  His list of U.S. military interventions since 1890 is at http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html

http://www.zcommunications.org/why-kosovo-but-not-palestine-by-zoltan-grossman

Showdown at Goat Gate - by Nebojsa Malic

 

Subject: Antiwar: Showdown at Goat Gate - by Nebojsa Malic  Date: Thursday, September 22, 2011, 8:36 AM    ...  Over the past two weeks, the Serbian public has been shaken by the revelations from U.S. diplomatic dispatches published by Wikileaks — that almost the entire political establishment of the country has been taking its marching orders from the Empire. Washington's envoys even interfered in the selection of the present head of the Church, following the passing of the previous Patriarch. With his empty promises of EU membership quashed in late August by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Tadic has absolutely nothing to offer the Serbian public.  ...   http://original.antiwar.com/malic/2011/09/16/showdown-at-goat-gate/  Showdown at Goat Gate Empire's Kosovo Gamble by Nebojsa Malic, September 17, 2011 Antiwar Forum "Are there no Serbs in this room?" thundered Alexander Vasilevich Konuzin, Russia's Ambassador to Belgrade, before the shocked audience at the Serbian capital's Army House. It was Thursday, September 15, and the first reports began coming in of NATO's movements to seize "customs posts" in the north of occupied Kosovo and turn them over to the self-proclaimed ethnic Albanian government. Yet nobody at the "international security" conference, organized by NGOs lavishly funded by EU and U.S. taxpayers, had said so much as a word. Not even the president of Serbia, Boris Tadic, who had given the opening speech. After listening to hours of pointless prattle, Konuzin had had enough. He paced as he addressed the hostile crowd, blasting their slavish devotion to powers that sought to dismember Serbia. "We have common interests, and we will defend the country even though it seems that some Serbs wish to see their country under foreign control," Konuzin concluded. Interrupted by the moderator and not allowed to continue, Russia's Ambassador left the hall. Illegal and Criminal Meanwhile, NATO's Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen flew into the occupied province to personally support the much-heralded plan by the "government" of Hashim Thaci to "restore law and order" to the sliver of province still inhabited by Serbs. There would be "no turning back," Rasmussen announced, and echoing the words of "Prime Minister" Thaci, declared that NATO would not "back away from illegal and criminal structures." By this he meant the remaining Serb institutions in the province Thaci and his backers claim is a sovereign state — yet it is Thaci's regime that matches the description. Kosovo was seized from Serbia in a manifestly illegal and illegitimate war, occupied under a flimsy pretext of a UN resolution (that the Empire and its allies have shamelessly violated over the years) and eventually declared independent in a way that simply defied logic as well as law. And that's without even considering that Thaci and his entire establishment — descended from the terrorist KLA - stand accused of being an organized crime syndicate involved in drug-running, sex slavery and trafficking of human organs harvested from tortured and murdered prisoners. Outlaws International All of this has happened before. At the end of July, Thaci sent his Special Forces to seize two checkpoints — Jarinje ("Goat gate") and Brnjak — at the administrative line between Kosovo and the rest of Serbia, located in the Serb-inhabited north. Officially it was a bid to establish proper customs controls at what Pristina claims it is an international border. In practice, however, it was a ploy to cut off the Serb-inhabited north from its lifeline, and end its 12-year resistance to KLA rule. Either way, it failed miserably. Heralded as a "law and order" operation, there was nothing legal or orderly about it. Worse yet, Thaci's thugs were aided by EU's "legal assistance" mission (EULEX) and NATO's "peacekeepers" (KFOR), supposedly "status neutral" institutions that had to be in compliance with UNSCR 1244. In the words of former UN official Gerard Galucci back in July, "When the international peacekeepers act outside international law, they become outlaws." According to Galucci, the "chief threat to security" is actually NATO, whose behavior in support of Thaci constitutes "anti-peacekeeping." As for the self-appointed guardians of Kosovo, they are sowing the wind: "The Quint [U.S., UK, Germany, France, and Italy] is either bluffing, prevaricating with the Kosovo Albanians, or totally abandoning the UN peacekeeping mandate under which their agents — KFOR & EULEX — are in Kosovo. Whichever turns out to be true, they are acting shamefully." Galucci is not naïve; he knows KFOR and UNMIK have violated 1244 in the past — but never to this extent, and never so openly. It ought to be noted that KFOR's principal role in the province was never to protect the Serbs from the rampaging Albanians, but to protect the Albanians from Yugoslav and Serbian authorities. Even though KFOR has saved many Serb lives over the years, its mission has always been to serve the interests of Hashim Thaci, insofar as they coincided with those of the Empire. UNSCR 1244 was just the fig leaf allowing NATO a measure of modesty; now that UNSCR 1973 has essentially been used as a condom during the Rape of Libya, even that is being dispensed with. A Threat to Tadic Having installed Boris Tadic as the President of Serbia in 2004, and engineered his complete control of Serbian politics in 2008, the Empire has come to rely on near-absolute obedience of its quislings in Belgrade. Yet even Tadic and his cronies are now pleading with the Empire to stop Thaci, as the events in Kosovo are seriously threatening their survival. In July, Tadic had sworn that Serbia's army and the police would not fight. So the Serb civilians in Kosovo fought back by themselves. All this week, social networks have been abuzz with preparations for renewed resistance. A major opposition movement issued a call Wednesday to back the Kosovo Serbs with volunteers from all over Serbia. On Thursday, head of the Serbian Orthodox Church came to the province himself, and issued a call to the nation to pray and endure. A major opposition movement issued a call Wednesday to back the Kosovo Serbs with volunteers from all over Serbia. On Thursday, head of the Serbian Orthodox Church came to the province himself, and issued a call to the nation to pray and endure. Over the past two weeks, the Serbian public has been shaken by the revelations from U.S. diplomatic dispatches published by Wikileaks — that almost the entire political establishment of the country has been taking its marching orders from the Empire. Washington's envoys even interfered in the selection of the present head of the Church, following the passing of the previous Patriarch. With his empty promises of EU membership quashed in late August by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Tadic has absolutely nothing to offer the Serbian public. Their palpable panic may help explain why the pro-government daily Blic (owned by the Swiss-German conglomerate Ringier) claimed on Thursday that the U.S. envoy to Kosovo, Christopher Dell, had a financial interest in backing the Thaci regime. According to the paper, Thaci's regime is broke, and desperately needs hundreds of millions of Euros to pay a Turkish-American consortium (Bechtel-Enka) for a major highway contract. The paper's source claims Dell has been helping Thaci plan the customs takeover, as well as negotiate the sale of "Kosovo Telecom" (illegally carved out of its Serbian parent) to Croatia, in exchange for a substantial kickback from the consortium. Yet even if there was truth to these claims, it still remains a mystery why EULEX, KFOR and the Quint governments are all on board with Thaci's insistence on "sovereign Kosovo." Foundations of Empire The Serbs often wonder what has earned them, Washington's ally in both world wars, such unrelenting hatred. What they don't realize is that the Empire doesn't think in terms of history — but rather seeks to end it. In answering why the Empire is so set on breaking Serbia, everyone has a favorite point of departure: Yugoslavia was destroyed because it practiced a working form of socialism, which posed a threat. It was all Germany, driven by a desire for revenge from defeats in both world wars. It's all about the oil, ore, control of pipeline or trade routes. It isn't about the Balkans at all, but about preserving dominance in Europe and fighting Russia. It's all about making the jihadists love the Empire… Some of these are fanciful conspiracy theories, others a matter of public record. There is at least some truth in all of them. NATO's Rasmussen hints at consistency, arguing that NATO spent "12 years ensuring stability and security and we will not allow that achievement to be put at risk." (Reuters) Since when is consistency a concern for the Empire, though? Wasn't Saddam Hussein an ally for 12 years, before the U.S. turned on him over Kuwait? What makes "Thacistan" so different? The answer might lie in the carefully constructed perception of the great crusade against "Serb aggression" in the Balkans as Empire's founding myth, and the fear that abandoning that narrative could be detrimental to Empire's continued survival. But that might be a moot point soon enough. Castles in the Sand Taking upon himself to articulate the Grand Idea of the Atlantic Empire, Tony Blair once argued that the Balkans heralded a brave new age of "liberal interventions". He could not have been more wrong. All the Empire managed to do is dismantle the Westphalian order, destroying the very foundations of its own power in the process. All it built was a perception-managed, virtual reality — a sandcastle. And now the tide is coming in. If there is one cardinal rule of authority, it is to never give an order that cannot be obeyed. By demanding of Serbia to give up Kosovo, that is precisely what the Empire did. No matter how sycophantic or spineless the government in Belgrade might be, that was one thing it could not do and survive. The sight of Serbs manning the barricades to defend Kosovo, and reports of people coming from the rest of Serbia to reinforce them, are Boris Tadic's worst nightmare. It means that the people have decided that their government won't do its job. How long before they decide that Tadic and his cronies need to face a reckoning for their long and hard abuse of Serbia? That prospect promises to be most unpleasant. KFOR's helicopters bringing Thaci's "police" to the north of Kosovo may well spell the beginning of the end for Tadic — and with him, Empire's entire Balkans sandcastle. Reality can only be bullied so much, before it strikes back. Read more by Nebojsa Malic Winter is Coming – August 26th, 2011 Hostage to Hubris – August 18th, 2011 Law and Disorder – July 29th, 2011 An End to Surrender – July 21st, 2011 A Tale of Two Secessions – July 1st, 2011

 

Serbia's authorities side with whom?

Serbia's authorities side with whom?

22.09.2011 | 19:12

There are times when a wave of madness sweeps through the international community, times when things cease to make sense any more, when logic is defied and when we question whether everything and everyone has lost their sanity. In northern Kosovo, foreign forces are colluding against Serbs and what are the Serbian authorities doing?

 The answer to the question is crystal clear: they appear to be working with them. True, the European Union must have presented a long and humiliating list of demands to Belgrade, yet the capacity which the Serbian authorities demonstrate in their resilience and stamina as they stand bent over with their trousers down, is staggering.

The latest incident happened yesterday as the Serbian Orthodox Bishop Artemije carried food aid for the Serbs barricading their checkpoints in the Serbian privince of Kosovo, together with a group of Orthodox monks and nuns... and the vehicles in which they were travelling were intercepted by the Serbian police who stated they did not have the right to cross the checkpoints.

How can the Serbian police prevent Serbian Orthodox monks crossing into Kosovo and Metohija, which is under international law a province of the Republic of Serbia?

What is worse, the Bishop was the victim of police brutality. Not only was he physically prevented from entering Kosovo I Matohija, but he was forcefelly removed to Belgrade. Instead of enjoying the freedom of movement to visit his people in the diocese of Serbian Kosovo, his freedom of movement was denied to him, not by Croatian elements in KFOR, not by Albanian terrorists led by their organ and drug-trafficking masters who the EU and NATO love so much, but by the Serbian authorities themselves.

Apart from this incident, other groups of monks were prevented from travelling to Kosovo. They were surrounded by the police and forced to turn back.

This is the freedom and democracy exercised by President Boris Tadic's Serbia today. Yes, the world has gone stark raving mad.

To the Serbian authorities - bend over further, your masters will enjoy it more.

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

Pravda.Ru

http://www.moscowtopnews.com/

20 Sep 2011 / 14:51

Serb Machiavelli Has Bosnia's Future in His Hands

Having fanned the flame of Croat-Bosniak discord, the canny Serb leader, Milorad Dodik, has Bosnia just where he wants it - on its knees.

Matthew Parish

Just before Bosnia's October 2010 election, I predicted that the Bosnian Serb leader, Milorad Dodik, would do everything he could after that election to frustrate the formation of a new state government for as long as possible. My pessimistic forecast has been proved all too right.

Dodik's masterstroke was to notice irreconcilable divisions between Bosniaks [Muslims] and Croats that emerged after the SDP's respectable victory amongst Bosniak voters.

The Social Democratic Party purports to be multi-ethnic but in reality is overwhelmingly Bosniak. The party stole an electoral march on the Croats by a quirk of Bosnia's lop-sided electoral system.

In theory, Bosnia's constitution treats Croats as one of the country's three constituent peoples, entitling them to representation equivalent to as much as a third of the positions in the country's public institutions.

In reality Croats may represent only 10 per cent or less of the country's current residents. Hence, quotas in theory reserved for Croat interests in practice may be expropriated by Bosniaks.

This happens when Bosniaks vote for Croat politicians sympathetic to the Bosniak position. Because there are far more Bosniaks than Croats, Bosniak votes carry the day over those of Croats and the officials occupying quotas reserved for Croats end up representing Bosniak, not Croat, points of view.

The country's tripartite Presidency is the most glaring example of this outcome. Bosnia's constitution provides for three presidents: a Bosniak, a Croat and a Serb. Since the country is ethnically partitioned into two entities, the Serb President is to be elected from Republika Srpska and the Bosniak and Croat presidents are to be elected from the Federation entity.

But 80 to 85 per cent of the population of the Federation is Bosniak. Thus, if a Bosniak political party fields a Croat candidate sympathetic to Bosniak goals, Bosniak votes may elect two members of the Presidency, Serb votes one and Croat votes none.

This happened with the Croat incumbent for the last two Presidential terms, Zeljko Komsic. Having fought for the Bosniak army in the war and been awarded the Golden Lily in recognition of his services, it is hard to imagine a Croat more sympathetic to the Bosniak cause.

Komsic's candidacy in both 2006 and 2010 elections was supported by the SDP, and he was elected by Bosniak, not Croat, votes. This infuriated the Croats who felt disenfranchised, with some justification.

In the meantime, the SDP used Komsic's election and its support in the polls amongst Bosniaks as evidence to the international community of its commitment to multi-ethnic ideals. It thereby insisted on the right to take the position of State Prime Minister in the coalition government, which needed to be formed after the October elections.

At this stage Dodik played his trump card. Appealing to the notion of inter-ethnic rotation of senior government positions, Dodik decreed that the Prime Minister must be a Croat.

This is because the former Prime Minister (who remains as caretaker) is a Serb; prior to that the officeholder was a Bosniak. Hence, Dodik reasoned, it was the turn of the Croats. Nevertheless this principle of rotation is without foundation.

No strict rules have been applied in determining the nationalities of Bosnian prime ministers, the question turning in each case on the vagaries of coalition negotiations rather than on a rigid ethnic formula.

Nevertheless Dodik's political positioning yielded immediate dividends. It was open to him to insist that, as the largest parliamentary party, his Serb-dominated Alliance of Social Democrats, SNSD, should again appoint the Prime Minister, as it had done after the 2006 elections.

But this would have caused Bosniaks and Croats to align against him. By conceding the Prime Minister's job to a Croat instead, he stoked Bosniak-Croat tensions already inflamed by the Komsic affair.

As the party with the second largest number of seats, the SDP then took the position that it had the right to appoint the State Prime Minister, and would nominate another Croat in the vein of Komsic to occupy the role. At that point the Croat Democratic Union, HDZ, and its sister party, HDZ-1990, for whom the vast majority of Bosnian Croats had voted, objected.

Seeing themselves as representatives of mainstream Bosnian Croat opinion, they interpreted Dodik's remarks as annointing their candidate for the post of Prime Minister. Thus Bosniaks and Croats were immediately split and they remain so.

For as long as Dodik can keep the two non-Serb peoples of Bosnia divided, he can rule the whole country. Dodik's man, Nikola Spiric, a member of the SNSD, remains State Prime Minister.

Under Spiric's watch the state institutions have a plentiful excuse for doing nothing: pending the formation of a new government, they represent the results of the 2006 elections and have no democratic legitimacy.

This is what Dodik wants, as his goal is to strengthen Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb federal entity of which he is President, at the expense of the multi-ethnic central government.

By keeping the state weak, he demonstrates to the world that multi-ethnic Bosnian democracy – which for Serbs means a democracy dominated by Bosniaks – cannot work. He thus gradually strengthens his case for dissolution of the central state and its replacement with a radically different constitutional model.

It is in this context that we must understand the failures of the interminable negotiations between Bosnia's principal political parties to form a new government. The most recent discussions were in Mostar and towards the end of the month another negotiation will take place in Brcko.

Dodik's agenda is to ensure that no government is formed for as long as possible, while pretending to maintain Olympian distance from the issue. Dodik's rhetoric is that it is a dispute between Bosniaks and Croats in which he plays no role. Dodik understands that the SDP is the most dangerous of the Bosniak parties for his agenda.

Under pretence that multi-ethnicity remains a realistic political goal in modern Bosnia, the SDP can perpetuate the international community's illusion that the country has a viable multi-ethnic future. The unrealistic vision embraced by foreign diplomats is the main, or maybe the sole, constraint on Dodik's political freedom of action.

He would far rather deal with the SDA, the Bosniak Party for Democratic Action. The SDA, while ideologically more uncompromising in practice, is more pragmatic in reality. It tacitly accepts the ethno-territorial division of territory that ended Bosnia's war.

The now mostly forgotten "Prud Agreement" in 2008 between Dodik and the SDA leader, Sulejman Tihic, anticipated a constitutional reorganisation, devolving power to regions in each of which one ethnic group would dominate.

This was anathema to the SDP's agenda of a Bosniak-led central government and to the international community's goals for the country. Hence Bosnia's colonial governor, the Office of the High Representative, scuttled it.

Now that the SDP has an ascendancy over the SDA within Bosniak politics, Dodik's strategy has changed.

Rather than negotiate his way towards an impossible agreement with an adversary whose ideology is diametrically opposed to his own, he aims to demonstrate that the SDP's goal is hopeless. This is achieved by supporting Bosnia's Croats in their efforts to preserve genuine representation of their political interests (like Serbs, for the most part centrifugal) in the central government.

He thereby simultaneously denies the SDP their crown of Prime Minister, and indefinitely holds Bosnia's state political institutions in stasis. An advantageous by-product of this policy is that it makes Bosnia's High Representative, Valentin Inzko, look effete.

Inzko had hoped to depart from Bosnia by the end of August, quietly abandoning his gubernatorial powers and leaving the remainder of his mission, assisting preparation for the non-existent EU accession process, to the new EU Ambassador, Peter Sorensen.

But with no prospects of a government being formed, Inzko's premature departure would give the impression of a hands-down political victory for Dodik over international resolve. So Inzko hangs on reluctantly in his diplomatic prison, frustrated by the ruthless logic of Bosnian politics in his endeavours to retire to Vienna.

How can Dodik be stopped? Should he be? Most opinion among independent scholars outside the Balkans now is that the experiment in Bosnian state building was misconceived from the start. The 1995 Dayton peace settlement, imposed by American diplomatic and military force, came too late to prevent ethnic partition.

The Constitution, drafted by American lawyers, was irremediably defective in balancing competing groups' interests. The temptation to resort to oppression, exemplified in endowing the High Representative with dictatorial powers, was foolish and unsustainable.

The desire on the part of outsiders to steer Bosnian politics through financial support for and targeted sanctions against selected political parties, has backfired.

Back in 1998 Dodik was a darling of the international community without whose support he would never have come to power. It is long forgotten that US diplomat Richard Holbrooke nurtured the monster who now threatens his Dayton creation.

Now we see the inevitable end game in a series of chapters of shocking mismanagement by the international community. Further intervention cannot hope to succeed where earlier attempts have proved so misguided.

While Dodik's politics may result in the country's eventual disintegration, it is not clear that any credible strategy remains open to the international community to prevent it. 

Dodik must feel grimly self-satisfied as he keeps his unloved country, of which he is the de facto premier, on its knees. In the midst of the global financial crisis, no European leader has more than the most tangential interest in Bosnia.

The country remains the Serb leader's plaything, and will continue to do so for as long as Bosniak politics remain so irreconcilably divided and the international community disinterested. The international community created the constitutional structure that allowed Dodik to manoeuvre into this position.

Rather than condemning him, they should perhaps condemn themselves for having immersed this tragic country in a political maelstrom and then carelessly turned their backs on the results.

Matthew Parish is an international lawyer based in Geneva, Switzerland. He was formerly the Chief Legal Adviser to the International Supervisor and is a frequent writer and commentator on Balkan affairs. He has written three books: A Free City in the Balkans: Reconstructing a Divided Society in Bosnia (I.B.Tauris 2009); Mirages of International Justice: The Elusive Pursuit of a Transnational Legal Order (Edward Elgar 2011); and Ethnic Civil War and the Promise of Law (Edward Elgar 2012, forthcoming). www.matthewparish.com  

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/serb-machiavelli-has-bosnia-s-future-in-his-hands

Bare-Handed Kosovo Serbs Battle NATO

 

Here's my latest piece Bare-Handed Kosovo Serbs Battle NATO published by the Modern Tokyo Times. Would be interested in your comments.

Dr. Vojin Joksimovich

http://moderntokyotimes.com/2011/09/20/bare-handed-kosovo-serbs-battle-nato/
 
http://global-security-news.com/2011/09/20/bare-handed-kosovo-serbs-battle-nato/
 
 
Hello everybody and sorry for sending a group email because I know some people don't like.
 
Please check the above links for the latest article by Dr. Vojin Joksimovich.
 
Now over 350,000 individuals have visited both Modern Tokyo Times and Global Security News but still
problems about investment and advertisement.  However, a MTT identity is growing more stronger and links
with several senior politicians is happening.
 
MTT is aimed at a wide audience (geopolitics, japanese culture, fashion, human rights, cosplay and other) and is meant to be
commercial.  Also, the idea of MTT is to reach a new audience with news that many people would avoid or not read in usual ejournals.
 
50% of all articles in the last 6 weeks on MTT have been in-house and around 40% of recent articles on GSN have been
in-house.  This is essential because it shows that MTT is independent and providing sufficient news.
 
The latest article by Dr. Vojin Joksimovich gives in depth news about latest events in Kosovo and very interesting information
about Russia.  I also highlight two books by Dr. Vojin Joksimovich and I myself bought both and fantastic information like always.
 
If MTT and GSN fail in the future it will be related to financial issues and not numbers visiting - because the growth rate is very high and links
with News On Japan http://www.newsonjapan.com/rss/society/moderntokyotimes.php and The Seoul Times and many others is strong and developing.
 
I wish everyone well.
 
Lee Jay
 
 
 
 
 

 

Serbia and the EU - Dancing with the Devil

19.09.2011

 

After the recent events in Kosovo, and after the EU's stand on cavorting with Albanian terrorist elements and insulting the Serbs in what is after all an integral part of the Republic of Serbia, as the EU works with the USA to sideline Serbia as a major player in the Balkans, what use is the European Union to the Serbs?

 If the European Union, the United Nations Organization and NATO - the mainstay of the so-called international community (and I do not use the term World Community on purpose) - are not trying to insult Serbia and the psyche of the Serbian people to the core, it certainly seems like it. In recent days we have seen US Apache helicopters flying over Northern Kosovo to intimidate the Serbian population (after all, we have seen what they can do against unarmed civilians in Libya), we have seen Albanian terrorist attacks against Serbian civilians and we have seen an alleged case, reported in the Serbian press, of German KFOR members turning away a very sick elderly Serbian man in an ambulance so that he could not get to hospital. So what gives?

True, we now discover that Kosovo has gold and that a British mining company has interests there. Well, surprise, surprise, since it did not have oil, now the story starts to fit into the geopolitical jigsaw puzzle these days where interests and resources coveted by the greedy few set imperialistic and colonialist approaches into full swing, yet again. It seems that little changes, if anything. We have the British and French drawing lines on maps in Libya and holding conferences to steal its resources as the international community looks the other way and what do we have in Kosovo?

After the September 15 agreement expired for KFOR's force to remain in place in northern Kosovo, already by September 16 it was apparent that the Albanian elements were planning to take over the Serbian checkpoints, in effect cutting this Serbian province off from the rest of the country. In case anyone has forgotten, Kosovo is Serbia.

KFOR it seems was part of this demonic plan, for KFOR elements closed the crossing at Jarinje on September 14 and set up signposts "Stop or you will be shot". Next we discover that Croatian members of KFOR and EULEX are transporting Albanians to northern Kosovo checkpoints. (What are the Croatians doing there? Surely their very presence is a provocation after the way they started behaving in the Balkans Wars and their attitude since, complete with an identity crisis as they deny their Slavic roots and try to change vocabulary almost daily, claiming they are Germanic. Try Chinese, it would be closer to the truth).

As regards the ambulance mentioned above, it was reported by the local KIM radio and quoted in the press that the German KFOR troops did not allow an ambulance from KBC Kosovska Mitrovica to cross the Jarinje checkpoint from the Serbian province of Kosovo. The patient inside was "seriously ill," according to the reports.

The violence then escalated - at 02.38 local time on September 17, Albanian terrorists opened fire on Serbian civilians at a checkpoint while the KFOR and EULEX elements looked on doing nothing. The terrorists were firing from the nearby village of Cupra but NATO's forces, as usual, looked the other way. After all, in Libya, we have seen how NATO cavorts with terrorists for its own dirty deeds to be done by proxy.

And after all this, Serbia is to join the EU? It becomes crystal clear that the patience of the Serbian people must be elastic. With a leadership like they have, who needs enemies? Or could it be that the Serbian youth has no mettle and is more interested in beer than preventing their nation from being humiliated in this way? Surely there is a political alternative for them to follow?

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

Pravda.Ru

http://english.pravda.ru/hotspots/terror/19-09-2011/119083-serbia_eu-0/

Kosovo: West Continues To Coddle Cutthroat Clients

 

http://www.adnkronos.com/IGN/Aki/English/Politics/Kosovo-Witness-gets-two-months-jail-for-contempt-of-UN-court_312457106352.html

ADN Kronos International
September 16, 2011

Kosovo: Witness gets two months jail for contempt of UN court

The Hague: A witness for the in the trial of former Kosovo prime minister Ramus Haradinaj was sentenced to two months in jail on Friday by the United Nation War Crimes Tribunal for contempt of court.

Sefcet Kabashi, a key witness against Haradinaj, who is accused of war crimes against Serb, Roma and non-loyal Albanian civilians during 1998/99 conflict, refused to testify in 2007, saying several witnesses had been killed.

He was arrested by Netherlands authorities in August and handed over to the tribunal. But he again refused to answer questions by the prosecution at Haradinaj's retrial which is currently going on in The Hague.

Haradinaj, a former military commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which fought against Serbian rule, was acquitted in the first trial for "lack of evidence". But the tribunal's appeals panel said the first trial was conducted in an "atmosphere of intimidation of witnesses" and ordered a retrial.

Kabashi could have been sentenced up to seven years in jail and/or 100,000 euros for contempt of court. But the tribunal said it took into account Akashi's "family situation and post-traumatic problems" as mitigating circumstances.

He has already served one month in jail and will be freed after serving another thirty days.

Russia Backs Urgent UN Session Over Kosovo Conflict Escalation

http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/09/15/56212560.html

Voice of Russia
September 15, 2011

Russia warns of Kosovo conflict escalation

       
The Kosovo conflict is highly probable to escalate, warns Russia's UN envoy Vitaly Churkin talking to the Russia Today channel.

He referred to Albanian authorities in Pristina who intend to get North Kosovo under their control saying that it's in line with customs agreements reached at the volatile border between Serbia and Kosovo.

Albanians are ready to resort to violence to make Kosovo customs officers control border posts. Another point of concern is that peacekeepers seem to support this dangerous plan.

Russia, in its turn supports Serbia's claim for an urgent UN session preventing further conflict, the envoy said.

Orthodox Christian ghettoization and anti-Serb clampdown in Kosovo

Thursday, September 1st, 2011 | Filed under Balkans,Europe,Latest Articles | Posted by whiteleejay1

Orthodox Christian ghettoization and anti-Serb clampdown in Kosovo

Lee Jay Walker

Modern Tokyo Times

If you reside in a parallel universe then welcome to Kosovo, the land of Albanianization and Islamization and all in the name of democracy. A flick back into history tells us that the Serbs were 98% of the population of Kosovo 600 years ago but today the Orthodox Christian Serbs are between 6% and 8% depending on various figures.

Of course, the Kosovo Serbs became a minority because of the ravages of the Ottoman Empire, dhimmitude, Islamization, and Albanian support of fascism　during the German Nazi period. Communism in the old Yugoslavia was the final nail in the coffin because Albanian long-term objectives became a reality and this applies to immigration and other important areas. However, this reality is ignored and instead the dehumanization of the Kosovo Serbs goes hand in hand in this parallel universe.

Irrespective of the rights or wrongs of who is to blame for the Kosovo crisis the simple cold reality exists. Let us say that Serbian nationalism was to blame based on the Western and Islamic propaganda machine.  Does a short period of a clampdown allow over 600 years of Kosovo Serbian persecution and marginalization to be ignored and thrown away?

In truth, it sadly does because this is what happened, therefore, the children of the enslavers and supporters of Nazism have been rewarded and the "Orthodox Christian lamb" was allowed to be slaughtered by Western intervention.

The ghosts of World War Two and ethnic and religious hatred towards the Kosovo Serbs is highlighted in the article titled 21st Waffen-Gebirgs Division "Skanderberg" on Wotan's Children.

Albanian Skanderberg Division supported Nazi Germany

"Kosovo Albanian nationalist militias called the "Balli Kombëtar" (or "Ballistas") carried out a campaign of deportation and murder of Serbs in 1943 and 1944. Then, on Hitler's express order, the Germans formed the 21st "Waffen-Gebirgs Division der SS" – the Skanderbeg Division. It was hoped that Skanderberg Division Albanians could achieve its well-known political objective of creating a viable "Greater Albania" including Kosovo."

"In general, policy was to organize volunteer military units among sympathizers in occupied countries. Of all the occupied nations only the Serbs, Greeks and Poles refused to form volunteer units. The Germans recruited the 9,000 man Skanderbeg division to fight resistance groups but the Skanderbeg's Albanians had little interest in going up against soldiers; they mainly wanted to terrorize local Serbs, "Gypsies" and Jews. Many of these Kosovo Albanians had seen prior service in the Bosnian Muslim and Croatian SS divisions which were notorious for slaughtering civilians."

"Why such passionate hatred for non-Albanians? A big factor was militant Islam. The Fundamentalist "Second League of Prizren" was created in September 1943 by Xhafer Deva, a Kosovo Albanian, to work with the German authorities. The League proclaimed a jihad (holy war) against Christians. They were backed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, El Haj Emin Huseini, who had called for getting rid of all Jews in what was at that time British-occupied Palestine. Albanian religious intolerance was shown by their targeting Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries for destruction."

"In 1945, but the remnants of the Kosovo Albanian fascist groups continued fighting the Yugoslav government for six years, with a major rebellion from 1945 to 1948 in the Drenica region. That rebellion was under the command of Shabhan Paluzha and it is called the Shabhan Paluzha rebellion. Sporadic violence continued until 1951. It is literally true to say that the last shots of World War II were fired in Kosovo."

In recent times it wasn't only the Kosovo Albanians who persecuted the Kosovo Serbs because outside Western forces had a grand plan and a huge propaganda machine took place under Western support for the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army. The organ scandal tainted leadership of course is fine because Hashim Thaci and the Kosovo Albanian clique are friends of London and Washington. 

For over a decade in Europe the systematic destruction and abandonment of a religious and ethnic minority took place under the watch of the international community.  Of course, certain photo opportunities take place and the resemblance of trying to protect can be seen on the ground but in the cold reality of Kosovo the Serbian Orthodox Christians have been ghettoized and have either been forced to flee or to face even more pressure.

Orthodox Christians don't have a rightful place at the table in Europe unlike secular, Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim dominated nations.  Three wars since World War Two in Europe involving Orthodox Christians and Muslims in Bosnia, Cyprus, and Kosovo respectively, and each time Western powers supported Muslims over Orthodox Christians.

The Russian Federation which is mainly Orthodox Christian but with a sizeable Muslim minority, is also deemed to be a nation to contain, therefore, NATO expansion is aimed at containing the most powerful mainly Orthodox Christian nation in the world. 

Therefore, the same international community which was robust about Kosovo and supporting the mainly Muslim Albanians of this region; is the same international community which did zilch about Turkey taking control of northern Cyprus.  Of course, Orthodox Christian nations are welcome in the "European club" and "NATO club" but on conditions that they fall into line and agree to join a military pact which is aimed at containing and reducing the power of the Russian Federation.

However, it appears that Western cliques who rule Kosovo and maintain a favorable relationship with the organ tainted Albanian leadership desire not only ghettoization but the complete humiliation of Kosovo Serbs. Therefore, while many areas of Kosovo have witnessed de-Christianization of Orthodox Christianity this is fine with the powers that be in London and Washington.

Yet, if the Kosovo Serbs dare to challenge Albanianization, Islamization, and de-Christianization of Orthodox Christianity, then "the rule of law" and implementing shared themes with the organ tainted Albanian leadership comes into place in order to cut the Kosovo Serbs down to size. 

Therefore, in this parallel universe where a minority is being squeezed even more in order to placate the majority, more anti-Kosovo Serb policies are being implemented.

A fresh operation against Kosovo Serbs will take place in northern Kosovo after the death of one policeman during recent demonstrations by Kosovo Serbs.  Therefore, the usual "rule of law" mantra is being ushered but where was the "rule of law" during the organ scandal and ethnic pogroms which took place against many vulnerable Kosovo Serb communities and other minorities.

Western morality is that the victims of history who suffered 600 years of victimhood at the hands of so many external forces must be taught a lesson for trying to defend their land.  NATO and other institutions which have helped to take Kosovo away from Serbia would have been welcomed with open arms by the slave master Turks of the Ottoman Empire and the grand designs of Nazi Germany.

Who said history is dead? After all, Germany and Turkey welcome the downsizing of Serbia and both nations are intent on spreading their power base in the Balkans in the modern period and only a compliant and weakened Serbia will be allowed.

leejay@moderntokyotimes.com

http://moderntokyotimes.com

 

UK minister bribed by Gaddafi

UK minister bribed by Gaddafi

Sun Sep 11, 2011 3:17PM GMT

 

Revelations have been made about a British minister asking for £1 million in bribes from Muammar Gaddafi's fugitive son in exchange for Lockerbie bomber's release.

In a letter found in an abandoned farmhouse in the outskirts of Tripoli, former British Premier Margaret Thatcher's Conservative minister, Lord Trefgarne, has demanded £1 million in "fees owed" for his efforts to advise Gaddafi regime's intelligent agents prior to the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's appeal case.

The letter was written to the overthrown Libyan dictator's son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, who is now wanted by the International Criminal Court for committing crimes against humanity.

In the letter, which was on House of Lords notepaper and dated back to June 4, 2007, a reference to a meeting in Britain acknowledged that the fee "may seem a large sum" of money but was the payment for "nine years' work."

In the letter, Trefgarne, who worked with Scottish QC Professor Robert Black to provide political and legal advice, said, "During the course of our conversations in London I ventured to draw your attention to the problem being experienced by Professor Robert Black and myself in relation to fees owed over a considerable number of years."

The chairman of the Libyan British Business Council, who maintained that the bribe "barely covered expenses," went on to say that, "The amount now owing following a small payment on account is 1.5m USD. This may seem a large sum but in fact represents nine years' remuneration, no less, for two senior professionals and is measurably below, we are told, the hourly/daily rates paid to some others."

The leaked letter showed the "entirely proper" arrangements including the circumstances of the time. Trefgarne also admitted that their cooperation with the Libyan intelligence services had begun as early as 1993.

As more and more revelations are made about the British government's links with the Gaddafi regime, the international community is growing more skeptical about Britain's integrity accusing it of hypocrisy as it attempts to present itself as a supporter of human rights.

ISH/PKH/HE

 

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/198583.html

US War on Terror: Provocations, Mystifications, and Illusory Feats

Nil NIKANDROV | 08.09.2011 | 00:00

A decade ago, the World Trade Center was destroyed in "a terrorist attack" on September 11 in New York. Contrary to all efforts made by the Empire's propaganda and (dis)information machine, the belief in the complicity of hawks from G. Bush's Administration in the whole story did not recede from public discourse but, instead, gained tens of millions of followers worldwide... Even those who take no interest in global politics are beginning to discern the agenda behind the drama which shook the heart of New York: after the collapse of the USSR, the US military-industrial complex desperately needed a credible threat posed by a strong and lethally dangerous enemy. The hawks gave the role to Al Qaeda and its leader Usama Bin Laden, a former CIA agent who had led the mujahideen resistance to the Soviets in Afghanistan. Serious preparations were made, in part by Bin Laden's former patrons from the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence service, to help him stage a comeback in the new era and in the new role of a leader of the global terrorist underground, with new agents from Muslim countries infiltrating Al Qaeda in the process. It is practically irrelevant whether Bin Laden was being used or knowingly joined the game – in any case, he fully accomplished his mission. In the distant past, the Saudi billionaire and notorious schemer possibly hoped to outsmart his puppeteers by imitating loyalty and readiness to stay under control, but when the plan failed Bin Laden broke the links with the CIA and turned into the elusive champion of the anti-American and anti-Western Jihad. It is hitherto unclear which of the US Administration members could have sanctioned the Al Qaeda offensive within the US. Hypotheses tend to converge on Dick Cheney, a risk-taking decision-maker and a secret admirer of A. Hitler. Cheney's motivation was beyond doubt patriotic: he sought to preserve at any cost the United States' hyperpower status, to ensure the Empire's control over the oil riches of Iraq, Libya, and Iran, to bring to completion the process of locking Russia within a circle of US military bases, and to avert the economic crisis into which the US was evidently sliding. Eventually, the CNN demonstrated live the appalling potential of Bin Laden's heavily disguised groups which seized several liners flying over the US and crashed them into the targets condemned by Al Qaeda: the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and, unsuccessfully, the White House. The destruction of the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon's ruined massive wall were broadcast by all of the world's TV channels. The White House was luckier: the doomed liner taken by the attackers fell on the way, either due to the passengers rebellion or because it was downed by a fighter jet. Authors of the show got what they were after: the world was left in a state of shock. By the way, initial reports mentioned a total of 12 liners. With almost no exceptions, countries across the world – even Cuba which for decades endured attacks by terrorists the CIA supported financially and sheltered in Miami - rushed to express solidarity with Washington. Bush unnecessarily explained at the time that those who failed to side with Washington automatically became its enemies – even apart from that, no accepted politician thought of distancing oneself from the global war against US foes. The worldwide spell cast by the attack actually took a short time to fade away, but the goal was reached: Al Qaeda managed to infect the world with an unprecedented phobia. Virtual reality technologies made it seem like the numbers of terrorists attacking the Western civilization at all azimuths, using whatever means to cause irreparable damage to it grew day by day. Washington was warning its allies that they would have to fight till the end lest terrorists drill holes in the defense of Europe and Latin America or get entrenched even deeper in Asia and Africa. Challenges notwithstanding, true friends of the US were thus obliged to sacrifice lives in the name of freedom and democracy. The Pentagon does not give in to emotions, letting Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians risk their lives under NATO flags in Afghanistan. Out of the same solidarity, Washington's Latin American allies – Columbia, Honduras, and El Salvador – ended up contributing to the XXI century neocolonial wars. In 2003-2005, Venezuela's defiant H. Chavez challenged a number of times Washington's account of the September 11 attacks. In September, 2006, he stressed unequivocally the increasing credibility of the hypothesis by which, to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that immediately followed and the threats which Venezuela, among others, had to face, the Empire actually had masterminded and implemented the bloody terrorist act against its own nation and foreign nationals who worked inside the World Trade Center. Chavez upheld the version laid out by journalist Carlos Sicilia in a state-run TV program and supported by well-known engineers and architects that the World Trade Center buildings were blown up with preloaded dynamite, pointing to the fact that no remnant of the liner including the titanium turbines that can always be found on crash sites had been located. Chavez pinpointed the key weakness of the US account of the alleged terrorist attack against the Pentagon. Reportedly, the liner that hit the Pentagon wall at 9:38 was Boeing 757-200, American Airlines, flight 77, but the fact of its seizure was never proven. It was suggested later that the Pentagon could have been hit by a cruise missile. The site was promptly isolated by plain-clothed officers, tentatively CIA agents, who carefully searched the territory to pick up whatever remained of the vehicle. Videos from nearby surveillance cams were classified, and a legible theory of the incident that should have been formulated by the US Administration is still missing. Bloggers expressed a view that the cruise missile hypothetic parameters matched those of the Russian Navy's Granit, which prompted speculations that implicating Russia was an element of the initial plan. Moscow could be confronted with tough questions about the circumstances under which the terrorists grabbed the cruise missile and about the state of security of Russia's arsenals, or even come under pressure to consent to placing them under international control. There is no information why the plan was not put into practice – perhaps, it was suspended due to Moscow's readiness to cooperate with Washington in the war on terror. Later on, Russia offered to host on its territory the supply routes nourishing the international coalition in Afghanistan... The killing of Bin Laden in Pakistan was another example of a mystification pulled off by the US intelligence community. Officially, after years of hunting, the US spotted its number one enemy in Pakistan's affluent city of Abbottabad, some 50 km northeast of Islamabad, where he was killed in a fierce firefight with the US Navy Seals. US President B. Obama and his team, including the US Secretary of State H. Clinton, watched the operation online. The same night, B. Obama broke the news to the nation that justice had been delivered to Bin Laden, the man responsible for thousands of deaths. Bin Laden's body was dumped to the Arabian Sea, with no posthumous photos released due to ethical regards. Representatives of the Iranian, Turkish, and other intelligence communities do claim that Bin Laden died of natural causes. Turkish politician, an ethnic Chechen Berkan Yashar who knew Bin Laden closely in the early 1990ies told Russia's Channel 1 that Bin Laden died on June 26, 2006 (purportedly of Typhoid fever) and was secretly buried in a mountainous region at the interface between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yashar learned about Bin Laden's death from his bodyguards and believes that the CIA obtained information about the location of the grave. The Abbottabad operation was supposed to "legalize " the US possession of Bin Laden's corps and mark the triumphant completion of the years-long anti-terrorist operation. Since showing the long-rotten corps would have rendered the killing version implausible, the body was hurriedly dumped to the sea. The Navy Seals who took part in the raid and could unveil the actual story were killed under suspicious circumstances shortly thereafter. That altogether combines into a relatively minor branching of the wide drama of the death of thousands of people at the World Trade Center. The first decade of the Empire's war on terror, a campaign quite successful in terms of the actual pragmatic agenda behind it, is over. What Washington needs at the moment is another striking case of terrorism that would help drum up support for the US globally and convince Americans to embrace hardline policies. Some of the conspiracy theories were built around the assumption that Obama's presidency was a priori meant to end with his getting killed by terrorists. Hopefully, this will not happen, but those who rule the US from behind the curtain have their own designs. It may be that a new Lee Harvey Oswald, possibly a Venezuelan, a Nicaraguan, or an Ecuadoran, and a highly professional support team are already there, ready to do the ordered job.

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2011/09/08/us-war-terror-provocations-mystifications-and-illusory-feats.html

On Germany's fanatical anti-Serbian efforts

01.09.2011

 

Recently, German Chancellor Angel Merkel visited Belgrade to deliver yet more arbitrary demands on Serbia before the nation will be considered for the problematic and possibly soon-to-collapse European Union. This reminded me of the brutal ultimatum that Austria delivered to Serbia just before the outbreak of WWI and after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, and which led to the popular phrase: "Serbien muss sterbien" ("Serbs must die!").

Of course, to those of us with a modicum of historical knowledge pertaining to Germany's shameful mistreatment of the Serbs during the entire 20th Century these unrealistic, illegal, and harsh demands (such as forcing the Serbs to give up their Jerusalem, the heart of their Serbian Orthodox Christian Faith in Kosovo) were no surprise to anyone except perhaps Serbia's President, Boris Tadic who more often than not appears as a NATO-sponsored quisling/puppet overseeing the planned-well-in-advance dismantling of Tito's rump Serbia in the "reduce Serbia at all costs" and "divide and conquer" spirit that generations of German governments have obsessively and fanatically pursued in the Balkans. This uninterrupted continuity of anti-Serbian bullying and behavior calls into question the claims by post-WWII German leaders that Germany has atoned for its shameful Nazi past.

No people infuriated Hitler more than the Serbs when Serbian officers led a putsch and tore up the Tripartite Pact in 1941 inflicting "Operation Punishment" on Yugoslavia as a result. The racist and savage Nazi and Nazi quisling brutality initiated a massive yet largely unacknowledged genocide of some one million Serbian Orthodox Christians, ethnic cleansing of another million of them from lands they had inhabited for centuries within Yugoslavia, and the forced conversion to Roman Catholicism of over 200,000 of them in the Nazi quisling "Independent State of Croatia" which encompassed Croatia, Bosnia, and a large chunk of Serbia all the way to Belgrade. For every Nazi soldier killed by the Serbs (either as Partisans or Chetniks), 100 Serbian civilians would be slaughtered and for every Nazi soldier wounded, 50 civilians would be murdered. An entire class of high school children in Kragujevac, Serbia was systematically used for target practice and murdered in cold blood as a result.

The post-WWII West, eager to please and court half-Croat/half-Slovene Josip Broz Tito (the post WWII communist dictator of Yugoslavia), the war criminals who committed genocide against the Serbs (Germans, Croatian Ustashe, Albanians, Bosnian Muslim Handzars, Hungarians) were largely never brought to justice including Kurt Waldheim, former UN Secretary General and President of Austria, reterrorizing the Serbs some 60 years later and creating a stain in the Balkans that just won't go away regardless of the mainstream corporate-controlled media's Goebbelesque efforts to whitewash and deny Balkan history. The fact that the Serbs dared to resist Hitler, delayed Operation Barbarossa by at least three weeks and tied up dozens of Nazi divisions in the Balkans that were needed on the Eastern front, and even succeeded in temporarily defeating the Nazis, forming the first liberated republic in Nazi-occupied Europe in Uzice, Serbia for over two months, demonstrating to the world that the Nazis were not as invincible as claimed (and thus giving hope to the Russians who ultimately proved this) have not been forgotten by post-WWII German leaders and form a nucleus of their hatred against all Serbs.

Thus, German leaders have largely not confronted the shameful Nazi past of their predecessors as they are repeating the exact same 19^th Century program to chop up and destroy Serbia and leave the suddenly alienated Serbs to the mercy of their WWII Nazi-puppet enemies and live in ethnically and religiously "pure" fascist banana republics (such as Croatia and Kosovo) that treat them as fifth-class citizens. The problem is thus that history is repeating itself in Europe and the Russians, who suffered more casualties than any other people in history during WWII should be extremely concerned at this resurgence of anti-Serbian and anti-Orthodox Christian fascist and racist attitudes and actions coming from "civilized" German leaders and their quisling puppets in the Balkans.

As one who admires many aspects of German culture and who always harbors hope of Slavic-Germanic reconciliation, I am deeply saddened at the horrible anti-Serbian actions perpetrated by Germany in the recent Yugoslav civil wars which include illegally recognizing Croatia and Slovenia before issues of civilized treatment of minorities could be guaranteed, illegally invading and bombing the Serbs under the guise of NATO (just as in 1941), illegally recognizing and promoting the Islamic terrorist drug- organ- and sex slave- trafficking "safe haven" of Kosovo, and invading this Serbian territory (supposedly as "peacekeepers" but really to aid the Kosovo Liberation Army in terrorizing the local Serbian population there) effectively stealing the territory from the Serbs, and maintaining their fanatical anti-Serbian rhetoric. Germany had an opportunity to square with Her horrible past after the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent reunification courtesy of Russia.

Tragically for the world, German leaders have demonstrated that they weren't yet ready for the world stage with their immature, underhanded/surreptitious behavior against the Serbs and have yet to come to terms with their shameful past. I only hope that Russian leaders take notice of the fate that has befallen the Serbs and act to remind the Allied nations such as the US of the dangers of German fascism if left unchecked and the ridiculousness of squandering US taxpayer dollars supporting German national interests at the expense of one of the best allies that the United States ever had (and probably ever will have) in both World Wars: Serbia. After what Germany did to the Serbs in WWII, she never should have been allowed to interfere in the Balkans. The Serbs also need to be aware that they will never be accepted by Germany and thus the European Union except as defeated and converted untermensch slaves and should seek alliances based on historical and proven reality and not media-brainwashed fantasy. The European Union needs the ever independently-minded Serbs far more than the Serbs need the EU.

The mistreatment of the Serbs by Germany should never be forgotten by all those who seek true justice in this tainted world and should serve as a reminder to us all that freedom requires eternal vigilance. We also need to be aware that those who forget or ignore history will be doomed to repeat it.

Michael Pravica, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Physics
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/feedback/01-09-2011/118925-germany_serbia-0/