Posted on 12/03/2001 8:55:47 AM PST by Pericles
West haunted by Balkans blunder
© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
As the war in Afghanistan goes on, the ghost of interventions past sits in a courtroom in The Hague.
America can drop tons of explosives and send in the Marines to fight Taliban terrorism. But when the Serbs confronted a similar menace, they were demonized and bombed for 78 days, and had a province wrested from them and presented to Osama bin Laden's Balkan brigade.
Slobodan Milosevic has been charged with complicity to commit genocide and crimes against humanity. Before the travesty is over, he will doubtless be convicted of running the rail line to Auschwitz.
The former Yugoslav president is a thug whose brutality played into the terrorists' hands. Even so, the trial of Milosevic before a U.N. tribunal is intended to justify our Balkans blunder and discourage serious consideration of its consequences.
If what happened to Kosovo Albanians and Bosnian Moslems was genocide, what of the treatment of Orthodox Serbs? After NATO's air war, 200,000 were driven from Kosovo. Most who remain cower behind barbed-wire barricades in Mitrovica.
Altogether, 2 million Serbs were expelled from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, and 240 of their churches were destroyed. When this happens to anyone else, it's called ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide.
The tragedy has its roots in the early 1990s, when the West decided Bosnians and Croatians were entitled to their own states. Fine, said Belgrade, but why should 2 million Serbs living there be forcibly expatriated? Who would protect their rights – the Bosnian Muslims who committed genocide against Serbs in World War II?
When local Serbs tried to secede from the secessionist states, they were reviled as racists who hated all non-Serbs and lived to rape and plunder.
After Bosnia and Croatia came Kosovo. Albanian Muslims became a majority in Serbia's ancient heartland through illegal immigration. They started when the Kosovo Liberation Army (on the State Department's terrorist list as late as 1998) began murdering Serb policemen.
Milosevic overreacted. At Rambouillet, then-President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave him an ultimatum (surrender of sovereignty over all of Yugoslavia) no self-respecting nation could accept. After the Gulf War, Washington was determined to prove its human-rights commitment by coming to the aid of persecuted Muslims. The result was the creation of a second de facto Islamic republic in Europe.
In October, NATO's secretary general, Lord Robertson, warned that the Balkans must not become another "black hole" of terrorism, like Afghanistan. He was referring to the operations of our erstwhile allies.
On Oct. 3, the Los Angeles Times reported, "Hundreds of foreign Islamic extremists who became Bosnian citizens after battling Serbian and Croatian forces present a potential security threat to Europe and the United States."
Bin Laden, who's been heavily involved in the region since 1992, was reportedly presented with a Bosnian passport for services rendered. The same international legion that's fighting with the Taliban earlier served the Islamic cause in Bosnia and Kosovo.
In his Islamic Declaration, former Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic (celebrated in the West as a multiculturalist) proclaimed, "There can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies and political institutions."
The Kosovo "freedom fighters" (as Sen. Joe Lieberman once called them) are equally grateful for Western support. In one of the al-Qaida camps overrun in Afghanistan, Americans found an entry application from a Kosovo Albanian that read, "I have Kosovo Liberation Army combat experience against Serb forces. ... I recommend suicide operations against parks like Disney."
After the subjugation of Kosovo, Muslims moved on Macedonia. Despite a NATO-brokered cease-fire, on Nov. 11 terrorists killed three Macedonian policemen who were trying to guard a mass grave said to hold the remains of civilians killed by the guerrillas.
Is the Albanian area of Macedonia destined to become Europe's third Islamic republic?
The circus surrounding Milosevic's trial is meant to distract us from the reality of our Balkans misadventure – when we went to war not against terrorism, but in its behalf.
not quite, the full text read......
...combat experience against Serb and American forces......
The KLA and Bosnian Mujhadeen were funded in large part by x42's Humanitarian warriors.
Thankfully, GWB is starting to put the pressure on these Balkan Mujhadeen.
Dittos, for sure.
You're close but not exactly correct. What happened at that time was Belgrade reversed the rules that only Albanians could work for the government and that the school would only teach the Albanian language, and so forth.
That oppression radicalized the opposition. The KLA gained recruits and started killing Serb police...
Close again, but no cigar. This situation was stable for years with the Rugova leadership seeking restored Albanian autonomy. The KLA represented the most extreme elements, largely supported by criminal elements and foreign interests, most notably the Saudis and Osama bin Laden.
That is why the State Dept. rightfully recognized the KLA as a terrorist organization. The KLA began playing cat-and-mouse with the Serb Army the same way as the Viet Cong had played against the Americans in Vietnam.
So, which side were YOU on in Vietnam?
Seems you left out some "details".
Tito died in 1980. The "civil war" didn't break out until Slovenia and Croatia ceceded from Yugoslavia in 1991 and Bosnia in 1992. Macedonia ceceded without "civil war" at that time.
While you mention Milosevich, you neglect to mention Tudjman who had been imprisoned by Tito in 1971 and wrote Wastelands where he denied the holocaust of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies.
You also fail to mention Izebegovich, the author of Islamic Declarations, who advocted a Muslim state.
Why are you so selective in the "facts" you present?
Boy, where do you get your "facts"?
Boy, where do you get your "facts"?
If I shut my eyes I can see Alan Colms giving out the same set of not-quite-truths and the where was Bob Dole part is straight from a play-book.
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