MikeL-The issue was self-determination or the inviability of borders. Kosovo was not unique; if the solution was independence, then questions remained about the Serbs in Republika Srpska in Bosnia, the Albanians in Macedonia, Montenegro, or Greece. Lord Russell-Johnston had said ten years ago that he favored independence for Kosovo, so your argument is nothing new.
Albanian Muslims in Serbian Kosovo province demanded independence before Slobodan Milošević came on the scene! Before 1999, Serbs had formed a majority in Kosovo, but as a consequence of ethnic cleansing they were now in a minority. The rapporteur was telling a state to accept a division of itself, but how would he have reacted if somebody had proposed independence for Northern Ireland, Catalonia, Chechnya, South Ossetia or Nagorno-Karabakh? If, in a hundred years’ time, Albanians were the majority in Strasbourg, should Strasbourg become an Albanian state?
The Albanians say they were treated like second-class citizens in Yugoslavia with the best jobs and most powerful positions reserved for Serbs.There is no support among them for a return to rule from Serbia, and they have the sympathy of Western powers who believe Serbia forfeited its moral right to govern the province with its brutal handling of the 1998 revolt.
But since 1999, acts of violent revenge against Serbs and other non-Albanians and a strain of extremism apparently bent on driving them out of Kosovo have tarnished the Albanian cause.
Rushing to grant Kosovo independence would be to “succumb to the blackmail of those who argue that violence will follow if their demands are not met.
Again you claim Serbia lost it’s moral right to govern Kosovo, by the same token Albanians in Kosovo lost that right too.For the past eight years, since June 1999, these principles and ethical norms have been expelled from Kosovo and Metohija, despite of the presence of the international community as represented by KFOR, UNMIK, the OSCE, as well as other international institutions and organizations.
Innumerable crimes have been committed in Kosovo and Metohijia over these eight years: Ethnic cleansing, by expelling 250.000 Serbs and members of other non-Albanian communities — Roma, Ashkali, Egyptians, Jews … ; the killing of innocent civilians (roughly 1.300), from infants to 90-year old men and women; the abduction of more than 1.000 persons whose fate remains unknown this day; the razing of hundreds of villages to the ground; reducing tens of thousands of houses to ashes, sacking and brutally usurpating them;burning down 150 churches and monasteries, devastating and vandalizing them. You shall find a complete account in “Kosovo Crucified” and “The March Pogrom”). Not even the dead could rest in peace. Many graves have been vandalized, the tombstones destroyed, the graves dug open and the remains scattered.
These crimes have reached their culmination in an atrocious pogrom perpetrated by more than 50.000 Albanian extremists against the Serbs and other non-Albanians on the 17 th and the 18th of March of 2004.
One third of the Serbs who had been living in Kosovo and Metohija prior to 1999, and who continue to live here, has entered their eighth year of living in ghettos, camps, enclaves surrounded by barbed wire. These people are completely deprived of all of their human rights: The right to life, the right to free movement, the freedom of religion and worship (visiting places of worship, cemetaries), the right to work (even working their own fields), the right to normal health care, the education of their children, and so on.
The Serbian province of Kosovo has been ethnically cleansed from Serbs Roma and other non-Albanians while 150 churches and many medieval monasteries have been destroyed during 10 years of U.N. governance!
the interim Albanian government often turned a blind eye to reprisal attacks against Kosovo Serb civilians (often allegedly by KLA splinter groups) and watched with indifference as Serbs, Roma and other minorities were expelled, trapped and harassed in enclaves. Now Pristina claims the moral high ground, with Agim Ceku calling on the international community to stand up to Serbian extremists to protect Kosovo’s freedom.
Pristina will get nowhere by insisting on the purity of its moral position while remaining blind to the sins of the KLA or to the needs of its most vulnerable!
Milosevic as well as his era is gone . Serbian democratically elected pro-EU, post Milosevic government offered Albanians in Kosovo self-rule ,the broadest possible autonomy similar to Hong Kong’s status within China or Oland Islands .One country, two systems” kind of policy. But Kosovo Albanians Took No Part in Negotiations, Passively Waiting for what they were Promised by Western Sponsors.It all boiled down to Serbs constantly offering new models, showing the kind of flexibility which is without precedent, and offering the most one country can offer — everything but independence, while the Albanian separatists simply ignored all of it.
Behind almost all these Western pledges that Kosovo will be independent even contrary to the will of the United Nations lies the theory that the Albanians will be pleased, that the Serbs will swallow the bitter pill, and that the Western Balkans’ ‘Euro-Atlantic integrations’ will receive new impetus and move forward at a faster pace.
Rather than the multiethnic democracy U.S. President Bill Clinton invoked on the day he dispatched the bombers, Kosovo is nowadays one of the most ethnically pure regions in Europe. I repeat yet AGAIN, hundreds of Serb medieval monasteries, churches and cemeteries have been desecrated, dynamited, burned or razed to the ground. The few Serbs left in Albanian-majority areas live in NATO-guarded enclaves, fearful for their lives. Lawlessness is pervasive, crime is rampant, intolerance is the norm. Compared to Kosovo, post-Milosevic Serbia is a multiethnic paradise.
Why, then, the unseemly rush to grant Kosovo independence? Serbs are told “Milosevic lost Kosovo”, and that they should blame him for the fate of the thousands and thousands of our co-nationals who have been cleansed from the mythical “old Serbia.” But Milosevic is six feet under, and in Belgrade Serbs feel as if they’re witnessing the resurgence of the notion of “fundamentally evil” groups. If the Serbs’ repression of Albanians in the 1990s lost them the right to govern Kosovo, as we were repeatedly told while NATO bombs rained on our heads, surely the Albanians lost political and moral high ground through ruthless discrimination against Serbs, Roma and other minorities?
Whatever Milosevic’s transgressions, the Albanians’ radical nationalism should neither have been encouraged nor rewarded in Kosovo
