This past September 11, Western leaders hailed the “fully” and “irreversibly”
independent Kosovo – still unrecognized by most UN members – for achieving
additional “full independence.”
The International Steering Group’s
Civilian Office, which had the power to block laws or ministerial appointments,
closed up shop, and Dutch international representative Pieter Feith gave a
speech in Albanian which concluded that “Kosovo has realistic prospects” for EU
membership.
The ISG – composed of American, European and Turkish
overseers – explained its decision to grant Serbia’s Albanian separatists this
full autonomy by citing the region’s “clear support of a democratic and
multi-ethnic state.” US President Barack Obama said Kosovo has made “significant
progress,” parroting Kosovo prime minister Hashim Thaci, who said that “Kosovo
has made significant progress... in building the institutions of a modern,
multi-ethnic, inclusive and democratic state.”
A week earlier, a standard
military news item by the American Forces Press Services reported on the
deployment of the South Carolina National Guard: “As part of KFOR [NATO’s Kosovo
Force], they will... help set conditions for a stable, democratic, multi-ethnic
and peaceful Kosovo.”
Always on hand to promote the American-made Muslim
state of Kosovo, The Wall Street Journal praised Obama’s praise and
editorialized in typical Slavophobic tones about how in 1999 president Bill
Clinton had “bypassed the United Nations and sent in the US Air Force...
president [George W.] Bush stood up to Russian bluster and European ambivalence
to push for its independence....
though Serbia and Russia have tried to
undermine it.”
The editorial closed with a fully serious reference to
something that widely elicits snickers among those in the know: “The capital,
Pristina, has streets named after Bush and Clinton.”
Indeed, at least one
of those honored presidents knows he wasn’t standing up to anything, but rather
giving in to the blackmail of violence. The disconnect between Kosovo on paper
and Kosovo in reality is what happens when US bureaucrats, relying on American
disinterest, distance and short memories are able to operate in the shadows,
birthing what international observers have called a mafia statelet in Europe,
run by an “ethnic tyranny,” with an economy based on heroin and international
aid.
AND YET at this moment our National Guard soldiers, in conjunction
with German, Austrian, Hungarian, Croatian, Slovenian and other Axis allies –
have their guns trained on the reluctant Serbs, in preparation for a final
solution to the “northern problem.” The climate has turned explosive as the
police – stocked with former KLA terrorists-cum-freedom-fighters – have been
given increased autonomy, which on June 28 they used to harass, undress, drag
and beat Serbian pilgrims coming for the Patriarch’s liturgy on St. Vitus
Day.
To seal the next stage of Kosovo’s dark evolution, KFOR will
dismantle the last of the barricades, during which we are likely to see a
provocation – used intermittently to goad Serbs into reacting – which then will
“necessitate” forceful action to finally integrate them into Kosovo’s
institutions. This will achieve a de facto acceptance of Kosovo as reality and,
for our part, the fulfillment of Albanian territorial demands.
The Serbs
will be the ones fingered, yet again, for causing the problems – since that’s
whom NATO troops are being pitted against as they extend the thugocracy to the
north. Just in time, the otherwise sparse cameras will be invited back in, to
get the approved Kosovo story, reinforcing the edifice of lies upon which “the
world’s newest country” is built.
“KFOR announces reinforcements with the
new unit that should discipline Serbs in northern Kosovo,” is how Radenko
Nedeljkovic, head of Kosovska Mitrovica county, put it. He called on Serbs not
to be provoked but to continue with peaceful means of staying in
Kosovo.
However, the organized Kosovo-wide pogroms of March 2004 – one of
those truly defining events that nonetheless manages to slip into Balkan
oblivion – gave us a taste of their likely fate, should they stay in an
independent Kosovo.
Internationals there noted that the deadly riots only
stopped when Thaci and Kosovo’s Security Forces Minister Agim Ceku said “stop” –
three days in. Forty-thousand Serbs fled the province then, joining the 200,000
who had fled upon the terror unleashed by the KLA as NATO’s ground force in June
1999. The pogrom was a message to the international community to move faster on
independence. It was successful.
Our Kosovo intervention “demonstrated to
the world that terrorists can indeed successfully alter the borders of sovereign
nations,” read a recent letter in this newspaper by reader Michael Pravica, “and
encourages secessionists the world over as national borders unravel because of
the desecration and erosion of international law.”
Indeed, as of this
writing, European media are reporting that Spain’s Catalonia region is following
the Kosovo precedent and planning a secession referendum for
2014.
ATTESTING TO the State Department’s vast efforts on behalf of its
ill-begotten progeny, Thaci’s byline has been popping up in American newspapers,
where he called the end of supervision “a recognition that Kosovo has evolved
into a mature, independent democracy,” and referred to Kosovo as a “success
story for democratic values.”
This is a man whose criminal history and
countless rackets are legendary in Albania. A recent two-year Council of Europe
investigation exposed that Hashim “the Snake” Thaci “is the head of a
‘mafia-like’ Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human
organs,” read The Guardian in December 2010.
These are more than mere
accusations, as several Albanians recently have risked their lives to come clean
about what they witnessed in 1999-2000 as guards of the holding pens, drivers of
the doomed, and organ-deliverers.
Yet even with this macabre Kosovo story
that finally, uncharacteristically managed to make it to American shores, the
confounding Kosovo pattern prevailed: the story had no legs and was soon
forgotten. Such that 18 months later we were treated to the spectacle of Thaci
ringing the NASDAQ bell.
A notorious gangster widely known to have killed
his own roommate, Thaci executed his political rivals including six of his
lieutenants the very week he was meeting with then-US secretary of state
Madeleine Albright. In February 2002, a UN Mission in Kosovo police officer told
the Reality Macedonia news site how he was ordered to nix the investigation of a
close Thaci associate named Kadolj, who had the KLA evicting people and
collecting illegal taxes for Thaci’s party, the PDK (Democratic Party of
Kosovo). Kadolj further “threatened to kill the local UNMIK administrator...
[when he] was asked to move his office out of the Municipality
building.”
Indeed, this summer the EU’s justice mission in Kosovo, EULEX
– under pressure from a Kosovo opposition party – came out with a report that
PDK pursued a strategy of eliminating dozens of senior political figures and
activists from rival parties after the war, including as recently as
2003.
Thaci’s predecessor, Ramush Haradinaj, also a prolific killer, was
airlifted to a US hospital in 2000 after he started a gunfight with a rival
clan. US officials from Camp Bondsteel removed evidence in the case and
suppressed the investigation, according to The London Observer of September 10,
2000, and AFP on October 25, 2000.
In the course of his 2007 war crimes
trial at The Hague, several witnesses were killed and others were threatened and
dropped out.
“United Nations prosecutors in The Hague accused him of
having organized the slaughter of civilians during the war,” read an otherwise
pro-Haradinaj article by Vanity Fair writer William Langewiesche in December
2008.
“Innocent Serbs and suspected Albanian
collaborators.
Mothers, children, simple farmers. Christ, like pigs in a
ditch. He has always denied it.”
Meanwhile, Kosovo president Atifete
Jahjaga – heralded in the West as a female president of a Muslim country – has
been making the rounds to America’s editorial boards, universities and Women in
the World conferences, her hosts blissfully clueless as to her
activities.
Kosovo is a gangster’s paradise where even the newspapers
publish threats against journalists as “letters to the editor,” in defense of
the homicidal officials who subsidize the papers through ads. This “modern
democracy” is ruled by fear, with a mafia grip over the population, some of whom
are now commenting that there were never such media constrictions under
Belgrade.
LAST YEAR, a Foreign Policy article titled “Thug Life” called
Washington out for entrenching an elite that operates above the law: “It is
difficult to see how democracy or respect [for] the rule of law could develop
and flourish amid such overt displays of American support for a corrupt and
criminal leadership... [It] has undercut efforts to pursue indictments for war
crimes and investigate high-level corruption.
The war crimes... have
never been fully investigated – in fact, in some cases they have been covered
up.”
In early 1999, some newspapers tried to give Americans a sense of
the nature and genesis of Thaci’s narco-terrorist KLA, which had been a purely
criminal outfit until we ruthlessly backed and rebranded it. But with none of
the bad news sticking, today we are helping seal a fait accompli of yet another
terror-won, ethnically pure state in the Balkans. In this case, a second
Albanian state that will eventually form a Greater Albania, as was the ultimate
goal, and the open secret, from the start.
The EU and NATO likewise are
talking Kosovo membership already, while putting Serbia off until it says “Uncle
(Sam).” In other words, a Muslim non-country is on a faster track than an
ancient Christian country that was a founding UN member.
Now having a
creeping sense that “liberated Kosovo” was only ever intended as a base of
criminal operations, lawful-minded Albanians and Serbs alike should demand that
some of the compromise solutions that had been swept off the table be put back
on.
The writer specializes in the Balkans, and is an unpaid advisory
board member of the American Council for Kosovo.
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