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This week, the Globe and Mail asked General Lewis McKenzie (Retired) to write the obituary of American diplomat Richard Holbrooke. It was a good idea. The two men had crossed paths more than once on the global stage of the Great Game. McKenzie declined. Holbrooke had just died and the general knew that what he had to say would hardly produce the standard panegyric. When I caught up with McKenzie, he was shoveling snow after a spell away from home. I asked for an interview and to my surprise, he agreed. “I’m just going to tell you what I thought...

Sharks Wary of Drunk Serbs Dragan Stevic of Serbia is the new Egyptian hero who killed a large shark which had previously terrorized numerous tourists (injured 4 and killed 1) at the famous Egyptian resort Sarm El Sheikh. The Serbian hero was too drunk to remember what had happened, though one of his friends who witnessed the incident explained it all for the Belgrade based media. Dragan Stevic was dubbed by the Egyptian media as "Shark El Sheikh" and thanked him for saving their tourist season. Milovan Ubirapa, one of Stevic’s friend who witnessed the incident explained that Dragan had...

WESTERN leaders have been accused of turning a blind eye to murders, drug running and organ trafficking in Kosovo. The West elevated a man it knew to be a criminal boss to the rank of European statesman. Although Western intelligence agencies warned that Hashim Thaci ran an organised crime network in the late 1990s, Western political leaders backed his Kosovo Liberation Army, according to a report published by the Council of Europe. The report, adopted unanimously by the council's 47 member states, will add to pressure for an independent criminal inquiry into Mr Thaci, now Kosovo's Prime Minister. It also...

Paris (CNN) -- Authorities in Kosovo must conduct a "tough, independent investigation" into allegations of organ harvesting from prisoners of war, a leading European human rights activist demanded Thursday. "These things were known by intelligence agencies in various countries, by police, by many people," said Dick Marty, whose report into the allegations was approved by a Council of Europe committee Thursday. But people in Kosovo are afraid to come forward and give evidence, he said. "In private they said, 'Yes, we know,' but because of political opportunism they decided to keep quiet," he said. The report links Kosovar Prime Minister...

PARIS — A two-year international inquiry has concluded that the prime minister of Kosovo led a clan of criminal entrepreneurs whose activities included trafficking in organs extracted from Serbian prisoners executed during the Kosovo conflict in 1999. The inquiry, prepared for the Council of Europe, names the prime minister, Hashim Thaci, as the boss of the Drenica Group, an organized crime network that flourished in Kosovo and Albania after the war and exerted control over numerous rackets, including the heroin trade, and six secret detention centers in Albania, some used in a black market in human organs.

Far from being Tony Blair's 'good' war, the assault on Yugoslavia was as wrong as the invasion of Iraq 'The United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same human values and principles ... Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values." So declared the neocon US senator (and current foe of WikiLeaks) Joseph Lieberman back in 1999 at the height of the US-led military intervention against Slobodan Miloševic's Yugoslavia. It would be interesting to hear what Senator Lieberman makes of the report of the Council of Europe – Europe's premier human...

The conflict that raged throughout the former Yugoslavia was met by a wall of silence when it came to important issues. These important issues apply to America and the United Kingdom supporting Islamists in a brutal civil war in Bosnia and then installing a new nation by ignoring international law in Kosovo. Also, is it credible to believe that the vast majority of major news agencies and national governments did not know about thousands of Islamists in Europe who were sent to slit the throats and behead Orthodox Christians? Shoeless Holbrooke sits with Muslim Albanian gunmen that ran the organ...

A few hours before Richard Holbrooke’s death last Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a group of America’s top diplomats gathered at the State Department for a Christmas party that he was “practically synonymous with American foreign policy.” Her assessment is correct: Richard Holbrooke’s career embodies some of the least attractive traits of contemporary American diplomacy. As assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under Jimmy Carter, Holbrooke was instrumental in securing continued U.S. support for Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor. In 1997 he authorized arms deliveries to Indonesia in violation of the supposed U.S. arms...

Kosovo's prime minister is the head of a "mafia-like" Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs through eastern Europe, according to a Council of Europe inquiry report on organised crime. Hashim Thaçi is identified as "the boss" of a network that began operating criminal rackets in the run-up to the 1999 Kosovo war, and has held powerful sway over the country's government since. The report of the two-year inquiry, which cites FBI and other intelligence sources, has been obtained by the Guardian. It names Thaçi as having over the last decade exerted "violent control" over the heroin...

ABC News has learned that Richard Holbrooke, the US Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, has died. On Friday, Holbrooke was rushed to the hospital with a torn aorta. He went through more than 20 hours of surgery. Earlier this evening, speaking at the US State Department, President Obama sang Holbrooke's praises and called him "a tough son of a gun." Holbrooke, 69, was a former ambassador to the United Nations and served as chief negotiator at the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. The New Yorker's George Packer wrote a nice story about Holbrooke last year,...

U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke has died. He recently underwent operations to repair a tear in his aorta, the large artery that moves blood from the heart to the rest of the body. Holbrooke, who had been serving the Obama administration as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, was stricken on Friday during a meeting at the State Department with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He was rushed to the hospital for a 20-hour operation that was followed by an additional procedure on Sunday. Clinton said Monday there has been an "outpouring of support" for Holbrooke from around the world. Afghan...

America's biggest strategic problem in the Balkans is the role of Turkey, through its pawn, Haris Silajdzic is trying to compete with neootomannic position in the Balkans and the Middle East - said in a dispatch of the U.S. ambassador in Ankara since January this year, which was sent to the State Department called " Ankara87 ", published on page Wikiliks. Comparing the Turkish efforts as "ambition" Rolls-Royce ', but with the resources of' Rover ', "the ambassador wrote that, being aware that they have their own resources for this policy, they must find" your own errand boy in the...

Bosnian Islamic fighters during their Jihad which was blessed by President Bill Clinton I come from a member state of the European Union which is meant to uphold the rights of all religions, political ideologies, acknowledge national and cultural rights, and is meant to spread “European brotherhood.” However, it appears that this does not apply to the Orthodox Christians of Bosnia and Kosovo respectively because not only have they been abandoned but outside Islamic powers are stepping up their Islamization agenda in both Bosnia and Kosovo. In Kosovo the de-Christianization of the Orthodox Christian community continues and hundreds of Orthodox...

The former Croatian president Stjepan Mesic is just one of some 6,000 Croatian retirees receiving pensions from Serbia, the Serbian press has reported. These people used to work in Serbia and have paid contributions to the country’s fund for pension and disability insurance (PIO Fond). The director of public relations sector of the PIO Fond Jelica Timotijevic says that all of those who had worked for the presidency of the former Yugoslavia, for example – and have later become state officials and politicians in their own countries – have a right to a Serbian pension based on individual agreements between...

Mark Imblum Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation (ODC) at the US Embassy in Sofia. Interview with Mark Imblum, Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation at the US Embassy in Sofia, for the Bulgaria-US Survey of Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency)Mark Imblum, a Commander in the US Navy, is the Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation at the US Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria. He is a graduate of the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. A former helicopter pilot, he now serves the US Navy as a Foreign Area...

PRAGUE — At least seven people have been charged with participating in an international organ-trafficking network based in Kosovo that sold kidneys and other organs from impoverished victims for up to $200,000 to patients from as far away as Israel and Canada, police and senior European Union officials said Monday.

.... Americans out there still think it’s merely a coincidence that everything we touch turns to Islam, think again. Anyone who finds it strange that 9/11 led not to increased restrictions on people, money and influence flowing into America from the Middle East but to increased openness to these will be interested to know that in 9/11 our government saw not a formidable enemy to be dealt with, but a new market to be tapped....

The Hague - A witness for the prosecution testifying in the trial of wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, told the United Nations war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), that the Bosnian Muslim army at least on one occasion fired at their own people to blame the Serbs during 1992-1995 war. Canadian general David Fraser, who served with the UN peacekeepers in Bosnia, told the tribunal that Bosnian Serbs shelled the capital Sarajevo “excessively and unselectively” during 44-month siege, But “at least in one case”, it was determined that a mortar fired from Muslim positions hit the centre

Drazen Petrovic and Vlade Divac were two friends who grew up together sharing the common bond of basketball. Together, they lifted the Yugoslavian National team to unimaginable heights. After conquering Europe, they both went to America where they became the first two foreign players to attain NBA stardom. But with the fall of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991, Yugoslavia split up. A war broke out between Petrovic's Croatia and Divac's Serbia. Long buried ethnic tensions surfaced. And these two men, once brothers, were now on opposite sides of a deadly civil war. As Petrovic and Divac continued to...

...In the somewhat intellectually perverse foreign policy salons of New York and Washington, the more ties a Balkan politician has to drug smuggling, human trafficking, and al-Qaeda, the bigger their fan club is likely to be.....