What Goes Around...

The following excellent letter appears in this morning's Guardian:

You suggest (Leaders, October 31) Serbian foolishness in not giving up Kosovo. To Serbs, Kosovo is an integral part of Serbia, legitimised by the London agreement of 1916 and by UN security council resolution 1244 of 2001. Kosovo is also the historical, religious and emotional heartland of Serbia. The change from a Serb to an Albanian majority does not change its historical, legal and political status.

Serbia's claim to Kosovo is no different from Russia's claim to Chechnya, China's to Xinjiang, India's to Kashmir, Thailand's to Panni Marathiwad and Philippines to Mindanao - all Muslim majority provinces in non-Muslim majority states where violence for independence has taken place for decades. The Serb majority of the Krajina region in Croatia broke away and declared independence. They were not recognised. The Krajina Serbs have all been driven out of Croatia in the largest ethnic cleansing of the Yugoslav wars. Republika Srpska has been denied independence from Bosnia.

As long as the independence of these provinces are denied, Kosovo has no special right to independence either. Serbia must not be treated differently.

Professor George Thomas
Marquette University, Wisconsin, USA

It never ceases to amaze me that the necons, so many of whom are Jewish (as is Madeleine Albright), backed not only Franjo Tudjman of Croatia when he recreated the full panoply of 1930s Fascism right there in Central Europe, but even the Wahhabist and erstwhile SS recruitment seargent Alija Izetbegovic, and even the Kosovo Liberation Army. The KLA insisted on wearing balck shirts in deference to their fathers and grandfathers who had fought for Hitler, and funded themselves by smuggling heroin into Western Europe. From which country do you suppose that that heroin had come, oh neocons?