Kosovo is Serbian, Forever!!!-News from Kosovo in english-History

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http://arirusila.cafebabel.com/en/cbtag/13216

Serbs, Kosovo, Balkans,crisis management

Did one word launch Nato bombings to Serbia?

Former Italian FM Lamberto Dini says the 1999 NATO military intervention against Serbia could have been avoided. According to this, the 78 days of attacks would have been averted "if a single word had been removed from the agreement which was offered at the Rambouillet conference". The problem was one adjective and Serbia insisted that the word “military” be taken out of the agreement leaving only “international presence” in Kosovo, but the United States insisted that the NATO gets permission to enter the province, Dini said while addressing students at the Bocconi University in Milan. (Sources Tanjug and B92 Oct.28th2008)

Rambouillet

Rambouillet negotiations were the decisive moment to go either for peace or war in Kosovo. The Rambouillet Agreement - Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo - includes two parts – the political part and the implementation part. The later part has two appendix A and B. By the end of the first round of Rambouillet in February, the Serb side had agreed to the essentials of a political deal. Agence France Presse (2/20/99) quoted a U.S. official as saying that the "political part" of a peace accord "is almost not a problem, while the implementation part has been reconsidered many times." The situation was same to last days of peace.

If I remember right Serbs were accepting political part but not the Appendix B which in reality was giving NATO and the West unlimited access to move around the entire country – not only Kosovo province - , to use airwaves, and radiowaves etc like in occupied country. There is also some conspiracy theories about that negotiators were not even aware about Appendix B and when it came on table it was so designed that Serbs could only reject it. The winter with this was to show Serbs as the pro-war nation and to justify Nato aggressions with this cause.

Rambouillet agreement (draft) can be found from here .

Bombings

Dini said also that in the crisis that followed, Italy advocated that the bombing be limited strictly to military objectives, but that Pentagon wanted a blank permission for all targets, Italy's ANSA news agency has reported. Nato bombings hit in Serbia 33 hospitals and 480 education facilities as well one (China) embassy and a lot of civil infrastructure. Nato was bombing 78 days and one excuse to hit civilian targets was that bombings against military targets were so unsuccessful.

I could conclude that Rambouillet loaded the gun and firing started after - probably fabricated - Racak massacre. In Rambouillet Serbs were accepting UN peace presence, maybe the whole war could be avoided by selecting word peace instead military. But if there is no will and real motivations are hidden so maybe changing one word would not be enough.

[PD]

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

edited by alexander cockburn and jeffrey st. clair

October 22, 1999

Genocide in Kosovo?

So, is there serious evidence of a Serbian campaign of genocide in Kosovo? It's an important issue, since the NATO powers, fortified by a chorus from the liberal intelligentsia, flourished the charge of genocide as justification for bombing that destroyed much of Serbia's economy and killed around 2,000 civilians, with elevated death levels predicted for years to come.

Whatever horrors they may have been planning, the Serbs were not engaged in genocidal activities in Kosovo before the bombing began. They were fighting a separatist movement, led by the KLA, and behaving with the brutality typical of security forces, though to a degree infinitely more restrained than those backed by the United States in Central America. One common estimate of the number of Kosovar Albanians killed in the year before the bombing is 2,500. With NATO's bombing came the flights and expulsions and charges that the Serbs were accelerating a genocidal plan; on some accounts, as many as 100,000 were already dead. An alternative assessment was that NATO's bombing was largely to blame for the expulsions and killings.

After the war was over, on June 25, Bill Clinton told a White House press conference that on Slobodan Milosevic's orders "tens of thousands of people" had been killed in Kosovo. A week before, from the British Foreign Office came the statement from Geoff Hoon that "according to the reports we had gathered, mostly from the refugees, it appeared that around 10,000 people [that is, Kosovar Albanians] had been killed in more than 100 massacres." Of course, the US and British governments had an obvious motive in painting as horrifying a picture as possible of what the Serbs had been up to, since the bombing had come under increasingly fierce attack, with rifts in the NATO alliance.

The NATO powers had plenty of reasons to rush charges of genocide into the headlines. For one thing, it was becoming embarrassingly clear that the bombing had inflicted no significant damage on the Serbian Army. All the more reason, therefore, to propose that the Serbs were collectively guilty of genocide and thus deserved everything they got.

Throughout the end of June and July there were plenty of press accounts running along lines similar to a July 4 dispatch in the New York Times from John Kifner with this sentence in its lead paragraph: "The bodies keep turning up, day after day, and are expected now to number 10,000 or more." On August 2 Bernard Kouchner, the UN's chief administrator in Kosovo, said that 11,000 bodies had already been discovered in mass graves in the province.

According to a useful and interesting analysis put out on October 17 by Stratfor.com (an independent operation based in Austin, Texas, that offers intelligence briefings gratis on the Internet), Kouchner cited the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Republic of Yugoslavia as his authority, but the tribunal has said it hadn't provided any such information. Nonetheless, the 10,000 figure became the baseline, with some estimates soaring far higher. Teams of forensic investigators from fifteen nations, including a detachment from the FBI, have been at work since June. To date they've examined about 150 of 400 sites of alleged mass murder.

There's still immense uncertainty, but at this point it's plain there are not enough bodies to warrant the claim that the Serbs had a program of extermination. The FBI team has made two trips to Kosovo and investigated thirty sites, containing nearly 200 bodies. In early October, the Spanish newspaper El País reported what the Spanish forensic team had found in its appointed zone in northern Kosovo. "The UN figures," said Perez Pujol, director of the Instituto Anatómico Forense de Cartagena, "began with 44,000 dead, dropped to 22,000 and now stand at 11,000." He and his fellows were prepared to perform at least 2,000 autopsies in their zone. To date they've found 187 corpses.

A colleague of Pujol, Juan Lopez Palafox, told El País, "In the former Yugoslavia there have been horrible crimes, but they stemmed from the war. In Rwanda we saw 450 bodies of women and children in church, all with their heads split open." Palafox said he had the impression that the Serbs had given families the option of leaving. If they refused, or came back, they were killed. Like any murder of civilians, these were war crimes, just as any mass grave, whatever the number of bodies, indicates a massacre. But genocide?

One persistent story held that 700 Kosovars had been dumped in the Trepca lead and zinc mines. On October 12 Kelly Moore, a spokeswoman for the international tribunal, announced that the investigators had "found absolutely nothing." The Stratfor analysis cites another claim of a mass grave containing 350 bodies in Ljubenic that turned out to hold seven. In Pusto Selo, villagers said 106 had been killed by the Serbs, and NATO rushed out satellite photos of "mass graves." Nothing to buttress that charge has yet been found. Another eighty-two were allegedly killed in Kraljan. No bodies have as yet been turned up.

There's an estimate that of the people living in Kosovo before the war, 17,000 are unaccounted for. But as Stratfor's analyst points out, it's unclear how this figure popped up. There's been no census in Kosovo since the war ended, and no one knows how many Kosovars are still in exile or in Serbian prisons. Roy Gutman of Newsday conjectures that 20,000 were killed and believes there was a Serbian program of genocide. He offers no hard evidence to back up this claim, and one has to note that Gutman has co-edited a book, Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, with David Rieff, a man fanatically parti pris on the question of Serbian monstrosity.

Although surely by now investigators would have been pointed to all probable sites, it's conceivable that thousands of Kosovar corpses await discovery. But as matters stand, the number of bodies turned up by the tribunal's teams is in the hundreds, not thousands, which tends to confirm the view of those who hold that NATO bombing provoked a wave of Serbian killings and expulsions, but that there was and is no hard evidence of a genocidal program. Count another victory for the Big Lie. CP

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http://1389blog.com/2008/02/03/serbianfighters-commentary-on-balkans-for-dummies-part-i/

Nothing new about the push to Islamize the Balkans

However, the Islamization of the territory around Albania - especially the effort to force Islamization upon Kosovo and Metohia - isn’t a recent process. It has been active for centuries and has gone through a number of phases. In certain phases, Islamization was interlaced with solving a national territorial question; that is, joining all territories with Islamic populations in one state.

At this point, I would like to point out that Kosovo and Metohia (the full name of the region) was Serbian before the first Albanian tribe came down from the mountains and set up there. In 1389 there was a famous Battle of Kosovo, of Serbs and their allies against the Ottoman Turkish empire. The Turks conquered Serbia and stayed there for 500 years before they were forced out, and Serbia was declared an independent state once more. When Turks came and brought Islam on Balkan soil, the Serbs and other people had a choice to join Islam or to become a form of slave to the newly-established and mighty Ottoman Empire.

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http://balkania.tripod.com/resources/terrorism/kla-drugs.html

MEN OF PURPOSE: THE GROWTH OF ALBANIAN CRIMINAL ACTIVITY, published in TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME; Published by Frank Cass & Co. Ltd. (London) and The Ridgway Center for International Security Studies, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA to be available through: (www.pitt.edu/~rcss/ridgway.html). Volume 2, Spring 1996, Number 1, pp. 1-20 (ISSN 1357-7387)

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INDEX

The Wall Street Journal, Monday, September 9, 1985, pp.1,18:

Giuliani and Kosovo-Alb. Drug Mafia in NYC

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH 13th January 1999, page 13:

Crisis talks as Milan is hit by wave of killings

Corriere della Sera (Milan) 15 October 1998:

Albanian Mafia, This Is How It Helps The Kosovo Guerrilla Fighters

Corriere della Sera (Milan) Janury 19, 1999:

Crimes Committed In Italy Provide Funds For Kosovo Guerrillas

Reuters 23-JAN-99:

Albanian Gang Recaptures Boats Seized by Police

Agence France-Presse / Tue, 9 Jun 1998 14:16:15 PDT:

Major Italian drug bust breaks Kosovo arms trafficking

Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet) / Tue, 16 Jun 1998 13:35:21 PDT:

Kosovo Albanians arrested in Spain after hundreds of break-ins

AP: MADRID, SPAIN, 16-JUN-1998

Special to The Washington Post Tuesday, May 26, 1998; Page A12:

Albanian Americans Funding Rebels' Cause

From: thomas coonan <[email protected]>:

Albanian Discussion List

National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee (NNICC) The NNICC Report 1996:

The Supply of Illicit Drugs to the United States

Romania Libera: Albanian Terrorists Of Kla Pay Weapon In Heroin

kosovo.net: Heroin Roads

The Globe And Mail, Monday, November 9, 1998 International News; p. A14:

Unrepentant KLA Dismisses Accusations

The Guardian 30th September 1998; Main Section page 15:

Thousands of Albanian children in hiding to escape blood feuds

The Guardian (London) November 1, 1994:

Albanian Drug Barons Find Their Way Around The War

BBC Summary of World Broadcasts: Yugoslav police catch ethnic Albanians smuggling heroin

Washington Post Writes About s Kosovo Albanian Drug Clan

The Christian Science Monitor / October 20, 1994, Thursday ; Pg. 6:

Albanian Mafias Find New Drug Routes Around Yugoslavia

CTK National News Wire: CTK: Two Kilogrammes of Pure Heroin Detained by Czech Police

Defense & Foreign Affairs' Strategic Policy: "Albanian Role in Drug Trade"

BBC Summary of World Broadcasts:

Drugs and weapons seized; murders committed in Kosovo in January- August

The International Herald Tribune, Paris, June 6, 1994:

In Balkans, Arms For Drugs

The Independent (London): Drug profits fund weapons for Balkans;

Jane's Intelligence Review / February 1, 1995: The 'Balkan Medellin'

The San Francisco Chronicle / JUNE 10, 1994, Friday, Final Edition:

Drugs Paying for Conflict in Europe (Separatists supporting themselves with traffic in narcotics)

The Times / October 18, 1994, Tuesday: Albanian mafias target drug routes

The Washington Post/Houston Chronicle / November 14, 1993, Sunday, 2 Star Edition:

Merchants of death and drugs; Porous borders, Balkan war bring epidemics of heroin smuggling, arms sales

SOFIA, Feb. 12, 1999 -- (Reuters): UN, EU Launch $7.6 Anti-Drug Project in Balkans

Chronicles (A Magazine of American Culture) December 1998: "Cultural Revolutions"

Reuters 14-FEB-99: Analysis-West Has Little Leverage Over Kosovo Guerrillas

NEW YORK, Feb 20 (AFP) -- Date: Sat, 20 Feb 99 10:07:25 EST: Subject: [KDN]

AFP: Albanian-Americans help fund the KLA

CTK(Prague) 11 March 1999: Albanian Drug Lord and confederates arrested

From Radio B 92, March 12, 1999; Rugova meets with Albanian narco boss in Prague

The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 15, 1999: Italy battling a new wave of criminals -- Albanians

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