Free Republic

SERBIANS marked the 10th anniversary of the start of a NATO blitz on the former federal republic of Yugoslavia on Tuesday with commemorations honouring over 3,000 victims. Air-raid sirens sounded at noon throughout the country, while schools opened classes with a minute's silence for the 89 children who were killed in the 78-day bombing campaign, which was initiated without UN security council backing. NATO claimed that it had launched Operation Allied Force in order to force then president Slobodan Milosevic to stop a military crackdown against Western-backed separatist insurgents in Kosovo province and pull out his troops. But the US...

Last week, Russia's lower house of parliament passed a resolution insisting that Josef Stalin's man-made 1932-33 famine -- called the Holodomor in Ukrainian -- wasn't genocide. Virtually no one, including the Russians, disputes that the Soviet government was involved in the deliberate forced starving of millions of people. But the Russian resolution indignantly insists: "There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines." It notes that victims included "different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas" of the Soviet Union. Translation: We didn't kill millions of farmers and their families because they were Ukrainians, we...

Specialist Robert Terrio and his wife, Kary, thought they had avoided a dangerous deployment a few months ago when he learned that his Missouri National Guard unit would do a tour in Kosovo instead of Iraq or Afghanistan. "There's a certain amount of relief that we weren't being deployed to an active war zone,'' Robert Terrio said. Then, last month, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, a move Serbia refused to recognize. Suddenly, Kosovo started to look a little more dicey. Demonstrators torched the U.S. Embassy in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, mobs attacked several United Nations border posts, and gun...

MOSCOW, April 8 (Itar-Tass) - Russia does not see any sense in sending troops to Kosovo, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an exclusive interview with the Echo of Moscow radio. He indicated that the situation around the UN mission in the breakaway Serbian province has not witnessed any dramatic changes compared with the period several years ago when Russia decided to pull its military contingent out of there. "We took this decision because we were unwilling to get associated with the policies conducted by KFOR, which could be described as 'the reverted ethnic cleansing'," Lavrov said.