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Fifteen years ago this week, I broke a promise I'd given to myself: After being captured and threatened with execution by Kosovar guerrillas the year before, I had sworn to give up war reporting. Now I was on my way to Belgrade to report on the effects the NATO bombing campaign was having on Serbia. When friends challenged my decision, I explained that I thought the course of history was changing at that very moment and I had to document it. I was wrong about the documenting-it part: I stayed in the region for six weeks, writing a number of...

In Kosovo and Honduras, Obama-ite foreign policy gave Putin effective precedent.‘Your independence is irreversible, absolutely irreversible.” So declared Vice President Joe Biden, thrilling a parliamentary assembly in Pristina, Kosovo. These were still the early months of the Obama administration, and the vice president was touring the Balkans to take a victory lap in the breakaway Serbian territory whose independence he’d done so much to champion as an influential senator. As Vladimir Putin tucks away Crimea, just as he clawed South Ossetia and Abkhazia back from Georgia five years ago, Kosovo is worth remembering. So is President Obama’s staunch support of...

MADRID—When Crimeans voted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia—under the watchful gaze of Russian troops—some Spaniards viewed the drama through the lens of a conflict much closer to home. Spain's Foreign Minister José Manuel García-Margallo said "the parallelism is absolute" between Crimea and Catalonia, the wealthy industrial region that has scheduled a nonbinding referendum on independence from Spain for November. Sunday's referendum in Crimea and the one planned in Catalonia each violates its nation's constitution, Mr. Garcia-Margallo said Monday, and thus "by definition violates international law." Catalan officials ridiculed his attempt to tar Catalonia with the Crimean brush. Catalans...

Seventy-six years ago, the “Sudetenland crisis” was the headline in the world’s newspapers. This revolved around the right of ethnic Germans living in what was then called Czechoslovakia, whom it was claimed were living under an oppressive Czech government who banned their language, traditions and free speech. Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Czech NSDAP (Nazi party), led the effort for Sudeten independence, with ever-increasing demands on the Czech government. In reality, Henlein was working under strict orders from Berlin, and when the Czech government capitulated to every demand to avoid a German invasion, the demands turned into manufactured and...

KIEV - The man Russian President Vladimir Putin has cast as one of Europe's potential new Adolf Hitlers is a little late for coffee this Saturday morning. Igor Mazur, or Topoyla (Poplar) as he's known because he's 6'7" is the leader of the Ukranian Right Sector at Maidan, Kiev's Independence Square. The Right Sector are the radical nationalists of this Ukranian Revolution. There are others: the right-wing Svoboda (Freedom) Party, for one, which has an actual political following, 12 percent of the vote in the last elections. It used to identify itself as a national socialist movement, just like the...

There will be a vote in Crimea on Sunday on whether to split from the Ukraine and join Russia. It is likely to pass. So there will not be a return to the status quo ante. The best the United States and Western Europe can hope for would be an outcome in which Crimea is not formally detached from Ukraine, but has a very high degree of autonomy. This autonomy would include not just choices about domestic policies but about some aspects of foreign policy as well. Ukraine would be a confederal state where at least one of the component...

As the U.S. Senate took up a bill to provide financial aid to Ukraine, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, rose to object to an IMF bailout Majority Leader Harry Reid attached to the legislation. In the process he blasted Reid for repeatedly demonizing the billionaire Koch brothers - Reid tried to blame the Koch brothers for halting progress on the Ukraine bill. "I'm beginning to think [the Koch brothers] are a character almost out of Dr. Seuss in the majority leader's mind, they are the grinch who stole Christmas in his telling," Cruz said. Cruz accused Reid of "using his...

Russia could launch a 'full scale' invasion that would see troops overrun Ukraine in hours, a senior security official warned today. The secretary of Ukraine's National Security and National Defence Committee Andriy Parubiy claimed Russia has 80,000 troops, 280 tanks and 170 aircraft massed on the border ready to invade. 'They are adding to this military potential,' he said. 'We have a critical situation on the entire southeastern border. The Russian army is only two to three hours from Kiev.' Ukraine's defences would be incapable in the face of a Russian invasion, he said.

Despite the relentless protests of Kiev, and of course the G7 group of world's most indebted nations, in the past two weeks Vladimir Putin once again succeeded in outplaying the west and annexed the Crimea peninsula without firing a single shot (granted there is still potential for material situational deterioration, one which would involve military participation by NATO whose outcome is not exactly clear). The market has "priced in" as much, with prevailing consensus now dictating that Russia will preserve its foothold in the Crimea however without additional attempts for annexation: certainly Poland is hoping and praying as much. However,...

Ron Paul has basically said that Crimea has the right to self-determination and by extension a right to an independence referendum vote. The Obama administration seems to be goading Europe (not that it would take that much) into agreeing with it that Crimea (and Eastern Ukraine) do not have the right to self-determination, and that Western powers will not accept a referendum vote in Crimea (or Eastern Ukraine for that matter) that leads to Crimea joining Russia, or becoming independent. Margeurite, yesterday, nailed it on the head, though, in a thread of mine: "The West cannot have it both ways....

Sensational confession of Ibran Mustafic, Bosnian Muslim war veteran and politician: "We were killing our own people in Srebrenica."At least 1,000 Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica were killed by their compatriots during the breakthrough to Tuzla in July 1995, because there were lists of those who ” have to be prevented from reaching the freedom,at any cost” said one of the founders of the SDA in Srebrenica, Ibran Mustafic. ** Ibran Mustafic is the author of the book “Planned Chaos” whereas some of the crimes committed by soldiers of the (Muslim) Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina against Serbs are for the...

A tradition a thousand years old, passed on to generations in today's remote Donje Ljubinje in the Zhupa area in south Kosovo. Today, this tradition is at the verge of extinction, as only a 65-year-old lady continues preparing young brides according to their traditions. The bride's face is painted in many beautiful layers of color. Three golden circles symbolizing the cycles of life are tied to one another by the golden roads that one crosses over their lifetime. The inner red circles are symbols of fertility, where red and blue dots are born from, and the whole face is covered...

AFTER 40 years of hesitation and seven hard years of reform and lobbying, Turkey is basking today in the most qualified of invitations to begin the process of joining Europe - a continent whose eastern half the Ottoman empire controlled for centuries. A European Commission report released yesterday, which paves the way for a deciding vote by the 25-member European Union at its December summit, was heavily qualified, and Turkish leaders were muted in their expressions of delight at their initial success. Presenting the decision to the European parliament last night, commission president Romano Prodi said it was a "qualified...

Delegates at the U.N. General Assembly applauded enthusiastically on Monday as the Palestinian representative to the world body for the first time cast a vote on behalf of the “State of Palestine.” The vote itself—for a judge to serve on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)—was a relatively minor one, but Palestinian delegate Riyad Mansour called it symbolically significant. … The modern-day State of Israel came into being as a result of a U.N. resolution in 1947, which partitioned the then-British mandated territory into a Jewish and an Arab state. The resolution was accepted by the Jewish...

BELGRADE, November 13 (RIA Novosti) – Russia and Serbia signed an agreement Wednesday on military cooperation as part of further development of the strategic partnership between the two countries. The deal was overseen in Belgrade by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, whose visit is being seen as a prelude to a possibly imminent deal on the sale of Russian fighter jets to Serbia. Shoigu said contacts between the countries had recently reached new heights. The agreements reached Wednesday included provisions, among other things, for collaboration in peacekeeping operations under the aegis of the United Nations. Russia and Serbia have agreed...

Two decades after Serb soldiers conducted house-to-house searches in a campaign of ethnic killings in Bosnia, forensic scientists are digging up what could turn out to be the largest mass grave from the 1992-95 war.

Serbia's president says he won't take part in a Balkan initiative with Turkey in protest over reported remarks by Turkey's prime minister in Kosovo. Serbian media have quoted Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan as saying in Kosovo on Oct. 23 that "Turkey is Kosovo and Kosovo is Turkey." The comment has been widely criticized in Serbia which is sensitive to past Ottoman rule in the Balkans and to any acknowledgement of Kosovo's independence. Kosovo is a former Serbian province that declared independence in 2008, a move rejected by Belgrade. President Tomislav Nikolic on Oct. 26 sought an apology for the "scandal," saying...

The government of George Bush Sr's planned bombing of Bosnia and Herzegovina , Serbia and Montenegro , according to a secret CIA document from which the recently declassified "top secret " BELGRADE - thoroughly prepared plan. The government of George Bush the Elder early in 1993. had planned the bombing of Bosnia and Herzegovina , Serbia and Montenegro , according to secret documents from the CIA which was recently declassified "top secret " . Bombing campaign was the official name of the "Plan Three " , and included the air attacks on military and industrial targets and the institutions of...

The DF-21D is China’s answer to America’s carriers, with an unusual origin in the Kosovo War In 1999, the U.S. was engaged in an air and missile war with Serbia. As NATO bombs exploded around Belgrade — part of a campaign to force an end to the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians by Serb forces — several U.S. missiles slammed into the Chinese embassy. It was the most controversial U.S. action of the war. China’s leaders were outraged, but could do little in response. The result? The bombing became a pivotal moment in the decision to pursue a sophisticated weapons project: a ballistic missile...

European banks would leave London “in very short order” if Britain voted to exit the European Union, a senior Goldman Sachs executive said in a newspaper interview published on Monday. Michael Sherwood, a vice-chairman at the bank, said the prospect of a British withdrawal was a real worry given Prime Minister David Cameron’s plans to hold a referendum on the subject if re-elected in 2015. … Goldman’s Sherwood predicted European banks would quickly relocate if Britain did sever its EU ties. “Forget what we would do. Every European firm would be gone in very short order,” he was quoted as...