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Riots in Kosovo. Albanians attack Greek peacekeepers
Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
I suppose that mass graves don't count.
There were none of the mass-slaughter type graves being invoked found in Kosovo, where "mass grave" was described as a grave with more than one body in it.
2108 bodies were exhumed from the 98-99 period in the main investigation with a few hundred more found later - Serb and Albanian, civilian and military. Over a thousand were killed before the bombing, mainly by the KLA, and including many pro-Jugo Albanians - who were the first to die.
The Trepca mines mass-graves, freezer-trucks in the Danube, and more have all been debunked as BS stories justify to NATO actions.
What NATO did, but the Western Media can never admit to because of their complicity is this: They stoked, fuelled, propagandised for, and provided an air force for KLA facist terrorists in their drive to set up an ethnically pure, gangster statelet.
I'll dig out the quote from the USA's own general at camp Bondsteel, who video'd the attacks on his own KFOR troops and post it. Having a US official finally tell the truth about Kosovo after 5 years of deception and coverup is amazing. Watch this space ....
I am leaning heavily in that direction. I think we were lied to by Clark, Albright and Blair for some reason. I am now prepared to believe the other side's contentions that Serbia was battling the KLA, not conducting genocide.
They say that it was Tito who kept Yugoslavia together. I know nothing of that, or how he did it if it is true. But the fact that the various people managed to co-operate peacefully together within one state for thirty or forty years must mean that they could perfectly well now decide to abandon all the traditional rivalry.
Tito swept problems under the carpet.
The 'traditional rivalry' is a bit more than rivalry. The conflicts following the disintegration of Yugoslavia were in some horrific ways a continuation of WW2. Tito (like NATO) could only freeze conflicts and make them worse for the future.
The Nazi's themselves were horrified at the brutality of their own allies in WW2 Yugoslavia. Strangely, Hitler's allies were the same sides that NATO supported - with not only the might of 19 countires, but the biggest propaganda barrage ever seen. Hitler would be delighted with the current arrangements in the Balkans, with Serbia nearly destroyed as nation, Jews expelled, and nationalist independence for Croatia and Kosovo effectively assured.
Originally posted by VetLegion
Oh yeah, paiktis you forgot to mention Serbs burnt the mosques in Belgrade and Nis.
... and Muslims burned orthodox churches in Bosnia. These were individual criminal acts by football hooligans in Belgrade and their equivalents in Bosnia. Both will be dealt with by the authorities and steps taked to protect the religious sites. What happened in Kosovo was completely different, and no parallel exists. The Albanian Nationalist leadership in Kosovo refused to condem the attacks on non-Albanians, showing themselves to be the instigators of the terror themselves.
UNMIK, NATO, EU and even US officials are now unambiguously clear that this was both a co-ordinated act of ethnic cleansing and an attack on the UN and NATO. They also know who did it.
Don't worry, though. The perpetrators will not be punished. They never are. 300,000 non-Albanians ethnically cleansed from a land under NATO/UN protection, hundreds of murders and hundreds of destroyed churches over five years- all under NATO's watch and NOT A SINGLE CONVICTION.
KosovA's future is assured. The violence will be rewarded, and independence will come, no doubt whatsoever. It's what NATO are there for.
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"Insane acts of violence, destruction of holy sites and attacks on
innocent civilians have painted a picture that the world will not soon forget. I don't know their motives and I don't care about them. "
...
When asked how much truth there was in the rumor launched in the meanwhile by the Albanians ("that the U.S. troops incited attacks by terrorists", general Erlandson says:
"I heard stories from the media that some of my soldiers incited these incidents. It's not true. These false witnesses forgot to say how my Greek and U.S. soldiers came under fire while they were guarding the church of St. Uros. How some 20 hand grenades were lobbed at them and how the soldiers were targeted by flaming bombs with the intent to wound or kill them. One of my soldiers was wounded when a grenade was thrown from a mob of hooligans. I filmed the incident on videotape and know exactly how events unfolded.
"The people who took part in those attacks will be brought to justice! I also believe that all leaders are responsible for such attacks, and here I am thinking primarily of the leadership of the Urosevac municipal assembly. Civil authorities are responsible for such incidents and their task is to maintain order and peace. Some of them have been very unsuccessful in doing so. This responsibility is something the leadership of Urosevac must not be allowed to forget."
Originally posted by Cort Haus with Serbia nearly destroyed as nation
That's your problem, right there.
The United Kingdom is a nation state. Within it englishmen, scots and welsh live peaceably one with the other. No one burns anyone else's churches.
And virtually all other nation states are the same.
For forty years the people of Yugoslavia managed to do likewise.
But for some reason you have all, serb, croat, ethnic albanian gone back to yearning for a "Serbia" or for a "Croatia" or to join Albania.
While you all remain detrermined only to get on with neighbours who share your own ethnicity you are doomed to make yourselves miserable and territory will go on endlessly being feuded over.
A thing you should know is that your behaviour is despised by the rest of us. And no one else is willing to join in your ridiculous game of each blaming the other. You are all exactly and precisely as despicable as each other.
Who started it does not matter. Ending it does.
Unless you are willing to apologise for what your particular group has done or to offer some forgiveness for what the other factions has done you do best to do what you appear to have done ... leave.
And then you do well to keep your own counsel about the wretched hate which continues to fill you.
EST: The Balkans are filled with the same type of passion and hatred that filled Britain and Ireland in past centuries. It took centuries to end it in the British isles and it will take centuries to end it in the Balkans.
Originally posted by East Street Trader
Unless you are willing to apologise for what your particular group has done or to offer some forgiveness for what the other factions has done you do best to do what you appear to have done ... leave.
Yes, I think all parties should take responsibility for their actions. Seeing as 'my particular group' is the British Government, I certainly feel they have something to apologise for, yes.
A thing you should know is that your behaviour is despised by the rest of us. And no one else is willing to join in your ridiculous game of each blaming the other. You are all exactly and precisely as despicable as each other.
EST, you are being offensive.
The volatile situation as it is in the Balkans nowadays can not, and should not among reasonable persons, be justified by history or condoned because of it.
It is however a result of historical processes and not of a case of the average Balkan denizen being more violent or xenophobic than the average English gentleman.
In fact, Ireland breaking up with UK was a very similar situation to what is going on here. It happened through a lot of blood, and if you were not physically separated but had a contended border instead, it is concievable that there would have been a lot more. That was less than a century ago.
I could not care less about you despising me. But if you think you are any better than me, or that Britons are in any way better than Croats, I assure you it is not supported by fact. It is, actually, a product of your imagination.
Originally posted by Cort Haus
The Nazi's themselves were horrified at the brutality of their own allies in WW2 Yugoslavia. Strangely, Hitler's allies were the same sides that NATO supported - with not only the might of 19 countires, but the biggest propaganda barrage ever seen. Hitler would be delighted with the current arrangements in the Balkans, with Serbia nearly destroyed as nation, Jews expelled, and nationalist independence for Croatia and Kosovo effectively assured.
That is a strange analogy. If there are serious forces for an independence of the parts of ex-Yugoslavia (which always remained more a construct, unlike historical grown nation-states), would you rather advocate they should be oppressed, just to hold Yugoslavia at all costs - against the will of large parts of the non-Serbian people? That is exactly what the Serbs tried in Croatia and Bosnia before, not to mention the little dirty details, although warcrimes like ethnic cleansing were done without doubt by all sides.
I just came across this editorial in the Toronto Star. It's really about the UN, but it touches on both Kosovo and Iraq.
A glass house full of cracks
Battered on many fronts, the United Nations must clean up its own act before throwing stones at the United States
RICHARD GWYN
The attacks on coalition soldiers left 80 wounded and, among citizens, the death toll reached 28, with some 900 injured. The inter-religious and inter-ethnic riots resulted in damage to 30 mosques and churches while almost 300 houses were destroyed.
All of this wasn't happening in Iraq, though. It was happening in Kosovo. And the blame for the killings and violence rests not with the United States but with those proper multilateral institutions, the United Nations and NATO.
While the Americans have been trying to get Iraq turned around in the right direction for only a year, the U.N. and Atlantic alliance have been at work in the much smaller society of Kosovo for almost five years now.
Kosovo's economy, though, is probably weaker than Iraq's despite the ongoing insurgency in the Middle Eastern country. Kosovo's only successful "industries" (not counting those working for one or other of the many international agencies there) are prostitution, drug smuggling, money-laundering, illegal immigrant smuggling and car theft.
The only alternative to a unipolar world that revolves around the U.S. is a multipolar one revolving around the U.N., with, from time to time, international organizations such as NATO working jointly with the U.N.
This multipolar world has a political legitimacy that no U.S.-led "coalition of the willing" can ever match, even remotely. It combines the efforts and talents of all kinds of national partners.
That's the theory, and it's a good one. But does it actually work in practice? Can a multipolar world, in other words, actually make the world a better place?
In all kinds of small and practical, and often unnoticed ways, the U.N. and its agencies often do good work. But often, far too often, they fail abysmally.
And, as is really disturbing, the root cause is often the defining characteristic of multilateral projects. This is, that they involve many partners so that no one is responsible nor can be blamed— in contrast to all the contemporary never-ending barrage of criticism of the U.S. and of President George W. Bush. (Not that most of that isn't merited).
For quite a while now, the U.N. has escaped criticism, not least because so many commentators were anxious to shore up its credibility as a counterweight to the overweening power of the U.S.
Suddenly, the U.N. is in the spotlight. And it isn't a pretty sight.
Kosovo: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization intervened in Kosovo to end ethnic cleansing. Under U.N. rule, the cleansing has continued without interruption, except that yesterday's villains and victims, Serbs and Kosovo Albanians, have changed places with the Albanians now torching Serb houses and driving them out of the province.
Oil scandal: Far and away the most serious of the U.N.'s present troubles. While U.N. sanctions were in effect on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, many commentators blamed the organization for the high death toll there because of the lack of goods and medicines.
It turns out that the cause of many of these deaths was because the food was often bad and the drugs and medical equipment substandard. This, in turn, was because the supplier companies, most of them French and Russian, were paying Saddam a commission and reducing the quality of their goods.
At least $5 billion in kickbacks was creamed off the top of the revenues Iraq received from U.N.-approved sales of its oil.
The U.N. now claims it had no idea of this year-by-year scandal. One reason is that its own officials may have been involved. The program's director, Benon Sevan, has made accusations. The son of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was a senior executive of the companies active in the scheme.
Insecure security: The principal cause of the terrible bomb explosion at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad last year that killed 22 and forced the U.N. to leave the country, was, it turns out, the U.N. itself.
A scathing report published this week concluded that almost no security measures were implemented, not even blast-resistant film over the windows to prevent injuries caused by flying glass. Several senior U.N. officials have either resigned or been demoted.
And, this week, the U.N. was reminded of the worst single failure of its history. This was the 10th anniversary of the genocidal massacre in Rwanda that took some 800,000 lives because no U.N. peacekeepers were sent in to keep order.
This doesn't make the U.N. unfit to replace the U.S.-led "coalition of the willing" to police the world or to push and pull and tug failed states toward reconstruction and even toward democracy.
But if the U.N. and others want the U.S. to do less on its own, they are going to have to do far, far better while doing it multilaterally.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Gwyn's column appears Wednesday and Sunday.
Originally posted by VetLegion
US and Europe imposed a weapons embargo on the region when the conflics began.
A question for you: did the embargo help:
a) Serbs, in control of Yugoslavian army, at the time third strongest army in Europe by some, or
b) virtually unarmed Slovenians, Croats and Bosniaks, who had only what their police was left with?
I was referring to the Kosovo campaign, rather than the break-up 10 years earlier, so I don't know what you mean about timelines, but since you mentioned it ...
First, the only people killed in the Slovenian secession were a handful of Jugo border-guards, so that can't really be called a war.
Second, the embargo was only for show, and the secessionists had the backing of the West from the off. Arms were covertly flooding in. 'Lift and Strike' became the unofficial policy. Saudi Arabia and Iran sent their ex-Afghan Muhajedeen (with US approval). In '95 The US (via MPRI) backed and trained Operation Storm in Krajina (250,000 expulsions). Britain also delivered arms to secessionists via Slovenia. Sure, maybe in '91 the JNA had the lion's share of available fire power, but I don't believe their opponents were short-stocked for long.
My bottom-line position is that Western intervention excacerbated, rather than alleviated the conflict. War might even have been averted in Bosnia had Warren Zimmerman not encouraged Izetbegovic to hold out for more.
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