The EU and the US seem to be getting the message at last: the idea of Kosovo as an sovereign state is completely preposterous, and Russia will rightly veto any attempt to give effect to it.
Would even that be the final dismemberment of independent, multi-ethnic, Socialist Yugoslavia? Somehow, I doubt it. After all, if Kosovo can become a state, then anywhere can.
In fact, when (in accordance with current trends) the "free" market has produced a Muslim majority in the former Metropolitan Counties of South and West Yorkshire, will they be entitled to secede from the United Kingdom? The Kosovo "Liberation" Army, reflecting the region's history, is a striking cross between the "militant Islam" of the Pennines and its antagonists in the BNP or Combat 18: black-shirted Wahhabi Holocaust-deniers who smuggle the Taliban's heroin into Europe.
For that matter, when (in accordance with current trends) the "free" market has produced a Hispanic majority right along the American border with Mexico, will those areas be entitled to secede from the United States?
If not, why not?
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Very pertinent questions that our mainstream media seem incapable of posing.
ReplyDeletewhat are you talking about
ReplyDeleteall that you are saying is flat out lies
A little bloated, however Kosovo is by no means able to substain that US forced status. If it could, then Scotland should be first in line, and many more before Kosovo.
ReplyDeleteThe bigger picture of Kosovo is only disporia and dust.
What "flat out lies"? I can't see any.
ReplyDeleteRussia will always veto independence for Kosovo, so that is that. Neither the US nor the EU will ever consider this worth risking war with Russia. So forget about it: some things simply are not going to happen. Thank God.
"KLA ... black-shirted Wahhabi Holocaust-deniers who smuggle the Taliban's heroin into Europe."
ReplyDeleteThis is clearly a lie spread out by the Serbian propaganda and parroted by bigots such as the author of this site. Provide one single (authentic) statement by the KLA, where they have one single sentence about religion, Holocaust or anything that can render your statement true. If you can't, than your accusations are baseless.
Concerning the break-up of Yugoslavia, it was elements in Serbian society that led to its breakup. They wanted to revert to the 1920 unitary state constitution and started it by closing down autonomy first of all Vordinja (where the there is a large Hungarian minority) autonomous region within the Serbian Republic. The Serb nationalists then turned their eye to Kosovo and closing down its autonomy.
ReplyDeleteThis panicked Slovenia and Croatia. Slovenia, which has no historical beef with Serbia (unlike the Croats and the Bosniaks) was the first republic to secede due to fears that the Serbs would try and close down the autonomous governments of the other republics.
The Serb nationalists should have learned from this and not treated Kosovo so badly. Stripping the region of its autonomy and banning the Albanian-language media in Kosovo was provocative and not a very smart move---- whatever your thoughts on the activities of the KLA.
Concerning religion, there is a saying that "Albania is a land of many faiths united by one religion - Albanianism". And the bibles of that religion are the three "kunas" or codes of conduct. Probably the most notorious is the Kuna of Lek which provides regulation of hospitality and family honour - usually leading to blood feuds.
The satarist P J O'Rourke gave an example of this in action. A man was knocked to the floor of the lobby of the Tirana Hilton by an assailant who then pulled out an axe and beheaded him. The gyuy's crime - his father had killed a distant cousin of his killer 40 years before.
Whilst most ethnic Albanians are Muslim, a significant proportion are Christian. The most famous of course is Mother Theresa who was born in Skopje, Macedonia. Her birthplace was destroyed in the 1960's earthquake there but its site is marked by a plaque at the entrance to the shopping mall on its site.
Tirana airport is named after her as is one of the main streets in Prishtina. When King Zog took over in 1920 or so, he took his oath on both the Koran and the Bible.
It might be added that there have been tensions of course in Mother Theresa's homeland. This was partly due to the fact that the Macedonian state refused to recognise the Albanian language even though it was spoken by something like a quarter-third of the population as a first language.
Of course the KLA and Macedonia's NLA dream of a greater Albania feeling their people have been partitioned between Albania, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro simply due to the machinations of the Balkan Wars. Fortunately Tirana does not seem to have much truck with these dreams.
As Neil Clark wrote in May:
ReplyDelete"Serb-bashing, the last acceptable form of racism in Europe, sadly shows no sign of abating. The news that Serbia is to take over the presidency of the Council of Europe this week has sent Serbo-phobes into paroxysms of rage. "If European countries can't find the courage to act against Serbia, they can't find the courage to act against anyone," complains George Monbiot in the Guardian.
But the Serb-bashers are wrong: the Balkan republic has every right to be considered a valued member of the European family. Of all the constituent republics of the former Yugoslavia, Serbia was the least responsible for its violent break-up. The conflict was precipitated, not by Serb aggression, but by the illegal breakaway of Slovenia, egged on by Germany, in 1991.
Foreign intervention was also responsible for the war in Bosnia: the touch-paper being lit by the US ambassador Warren Zimmerman when he persuaded the Bosnian separatist leader Izetbegovic to renege on the EU-sponsored 1992 Lisbon agreement.
While no one denies that Bosnian Serbs committed atrocities, it's important to remember that the International Court of Justice recently exonerated Serbia of responsibility for the massacre at Srebrenica. Serbo-phobes castigate Serbia for not extraditing Mladic and Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leaders, to The Hague. But can one really blame Serbs for questioning the impartiality of a court which was set up by the very Nato powers which illegally bombed their country in 1999, and which, from its inception, has shown a blatant anti-Serb bias?
Far from being a pariah state, Serbia has played a positive role in modern European history: it was the Serb uprising against the Nazis in 1941 which postponed the Wehrmacht's invasion of the Soviet Union by a crucial five weeks. Were it not for the bravery of the most unjustly demonised people on the continent, Europe would look a very different place today."
Quite.
Contrast the Serb record, up to and beyond the absence of any racist statement ever known to have been made by Slobodan Milosevic, with that of Alija Izetbegovic, a Wahhabi rabble-rouser who had been a recruitment sergeant for the SS; or with that of Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, a Holocaust-denier who re-created in 1990s Europe the whole panoply of 1930s Fascism, and who remarked that he would never allow a Serb, Jew or Gypsy to marry into his family; or with that of the KLA, black-shirted in deference to their SS fathers and grandfathers, Wahhabi to the core, and smugglers of Afghan heroin into Europe via Italy, with the effect that Kosovo has become a Mafia fiefdom. Which part of this is false?
And that is to name but a few.
European Islam is ignored, treated as a product only of recent Arab or Asian immigration. But in fact it has a long history, and a key part of that history was its widespread support for Hitler, himself an admirer of Islam who felt that if Vienna had fallen to the Turks then German-speaking Europe would never have fallen into the decadence from which he believed that he needed to rescue it.
But, in any case, talk of an independent Kosovo, never mind talk of a Greater Albania (for which there seems to be almost as little enthusiasm in Albania as there is for a united Ireland in the Irish Republic), is academic: Russia will never allow it, and neither the US nor the EU will ever regard it as worth risking war with Russia. So it simply isn't going to happen, and that is that. Forget about it.
David
ReplyDeleteTrawling through the net, the only person that seems to be claiming that Alija Izetbegovic was a Wahabi is yourself. He certainly imported them from Afghanistan to fight in the civil war but was not one himself. His fairly ornate tomb (forbidden by Wahabism) is probably a physical testimony to that. He was a supporter of islam being involved in the mechanics of the state but never implimented it as normal policy.
Concerning Slovenia's secession from Yugoslavia, how was it illegal? Under the constitution of the Federation republics could seceede and they did hold a referendum on it. What else could they do?
Concerning Tudjman, I have some Serb propaganda claiming Tudjman was in the Ustasa when of course he was with the partisans. Yes he was not fond of Jews (as unpalatible as this view is) but he never denied the holocaust. He however did deny the extent of the killings of the Serbs by the Ustasa - an organisation whose policy was one third Sebs exterminated, one third expelled, one third converted to Catholicism.
I don't do Serb bashing. However there seems to be some denial by the Serbs as a nation of their treatment of Kosovans in the last decade to that of the Macedonians in the early 20th century. Even some extremists claimed that Albania has no right to exist as it did not exist as nation before 1912. If they had not determined to dominate the old Yugoslavia (particuarly the kingdom) and allowed a federation from 1918 onwards then a lot of problems would not be here today. The benefit of hindsight.