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December 14, 2005 Serbian arguments in negotiations on Kosovo and Metohija Nova Srpska Politicka Misao, Belgrade Monday, December 05, 2005 Sanda Raskovic-Ivic Chief of the Coordination Center for Kosovo and Metohija The constitutional name of the southern Serbian province is Kosovo and Metohija, originating from the word "kos" meaning blackbird and the word "metoh" meaning monastery estate. Kosovo and Metohija comprise slightly over 12 percent of the territory of the Republic of Serbia. It is the cradle of our medieval Serbian state, and the location of the seat of the Patriarchate of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Kosovo and Metohija has...

13 December 2005 – A Romanian Special Police Unit working under the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) came under fire yesterday during an unsuccessful prison breakout by 14 inmates in the western part of the province, which the world body has administered since 1999. There were no casualties, but two vehicles were hit by gunfire, a UN spokesman said today. Within the prison, staff managed to reassert control after initially being overpowered. Simultaneously, however, the Romanian Unit was shot at by unknown persons. Police are investigating the events both inside and outside the prison. The UN has...

here's a reason for the conspicuous three-year near silence by all major media on this oh-so-momentous Second Nuremberg, as it was billed — a silence broken only one or two days a year, when they're finally able to offer up a damning piece of evidence that will perpetuate the version of events we've been sold from the beginning. What even the most sporadic trial observer would know is that the Court has spent the last three years discovering what many of us knew in 1999: Milosevic was "a thug whose brutality played into the terrorists' hands," as former Boston Herald...

LJUBLJANA (Reuters) - Independence for Serbia's breakaway province of Kosovo would open up a Pandora's box of separatism and lead to new ethnic conflicts in Europe, the foreign minister of Serbia-Montenegro said on Monday. Kosovo has been a U.N. protectorate since 1999, when 78 days of NATO bombing drove out Serb forces accused of atrocities against civilians while fighting an ethnic Albanian insurgency. Last month, U.N. envoy Martti Ahtisaari started shuttle diplomacy aimed at reconciling two opposing visions -- the Albanian majority's demands for independence on the basis of self-determination, and Serbia's insistence on sovereignty. Speaking on the sidelines of...

The Serbian province of Kosovo, largely populated by the Albanian majority, has failed to meet basic human rights and political standards set as prerequisites by the international community, but it should nevertheless enter - in the months to come - talks on its future status. This basic conclusion of the long-awaited report by UN special envoy Kai Eide was approved by the UN secretary general Kofi Annan and fully supported by the EU and the US. But it fails to demystify the paradox. From a legal point of view, Kosovo is an integral part of the sovereign state of Serbia...

Below we have posted an analysis of what happened in Srebrenica, written by Carlos Martins Branco, a Portuguese military officer who served in Bosnia as a UNMO (UN Military Observers) Deputy Chief Operations Officer in the UNPF (UN Peace Forces) at theatre level. Meaning he knew a whole lot about what was happening on the ground. Branco argues that the extremist Bosnian Muslim leadership made it easy for Serbian forces to re-take Srebrenica in 1995, setting the stage to sell the world a false massacre story, with the purpose of isolating the Bosnian Serbs, internationally. He argues that it was...

What took so long for it to become obvious that Bosnia and other parts of the Balkans are the launching pad for terrorist attacks in Europe? The Washington Post writes on 1 December, "Terrorist Cells Find Foothold in Balkans." What a revelation! The fact is, Bosnia became a launching pad as far back as 1992 when the Bosnian Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic - the government that was supported by the Clinton administration - issued a passport to Osama bin Laden which he used to visit Bosnia and Kosovo on several occasions. More and more newspapers are finally beginning to...

At the most recent meeting of the Serbian Orthodox Church's Council for Kosovo and Metohija of the Holy Assembly of Bishops, Bishop Teodosije of Lipljan, a e that in future Kosovo there will be no room for eithersuperior of Visoki Decani Monastery, informed the members of the Council and the Holy Synod of Bishops with the critical present situation of Serbian Orthodox holy shrines, especially in Metohija (the Western part of the Province) , and emphasized the need to find mechanisms for internationally guaranteed protection as soon as possible in cooperation with relevant experts in order to enable the survival...

Things look promising in Kosovo, despite the tender ministrations of the United Nations. -------------------------------------------------- Prishtina, Kosovo SOME OF THE FRESHEST and most distinctive voices of "new Europe"--Donald Rumsfeld's term for the former-Communist states that have joined the reunited continent as ardent supporters of capitalism, democracy, and other conservative values--are sounding off in a place so new, in its own way, that less than a decade ago most Americans had never heard of it: Kosovo. Isolated by the Albanian language, an ancient Indo-European tongue with no obvious relatives, as well as by the long-standing hostility of their rapacious neighbors, the Kosovars...

According to the data from the investigators, radical Islamic organization Al-Asifa from the Balkans is involved in this terrorist act. It unites Slavic adherents of the Islamic fundamentalism and natives of the Arab countries, who settled in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and in Croatia after the 1992-95 war. According to the Israeli secret services, during this war the major part of the present members of Al-Asifa served in the "Al - Mojahid" and "Kataeb Talaat Yasin" divisions. They were a part of the Bosnian Muslim army (by the way, Israel secretly supported the Bosnian Serbs at that time).

CAMP BONDSTEEL, KOSOVO (Army News Service, Dec 8, 2005) – Families of U.S. troops in the Kosovo Force have donated clothing and school supplies to an elementary school in a small mountainside village. In the village of Ukzmajl, Kosovo, 600 Euro dollars, or $750 USD is the yearly budget allotted by the municipality for the Skenderbeu School. Aware of the scarcity of funding for the school, Kosovo Force Soldiers and their families decided to do something to help out. Eight soldiers from the Headquarters and Headquarters Operations Company, 628th Military Intelligence Battalion, 28th Infantry Division from Harrisburg, Pa., visited the...

PRISTINA (AP)--U.N. officials will Thursday hand over to Serbian authorities the bodies of seven Serb civilians killed during the 1998-1999 war in Kosovo. The bodies, exhumed in Kosovo, will be turned over at a checkpoint 40 kilometers north of the provincial capital Pristina, officials said. Some 2,490 people are still listed as missing since the war pitted Serb government forces against ethnic Albanian rebels. That conflict ended when a North Atlantic Treaty Organization aerial bombing campaign persuaded then-president Slobodan Milosevic to end the crackdown on separatists. Thousands perished during the brief war. The fate of the missing remains one of...

Albania Seizes Assets Of Bin Laden Associate TIRANA (AP)--The Albanian government has seized the assets and bank accounts of a man who allegedly worked with Osama bin Laden and others to provide support to terror networks in Albania, the Finance Ministry said Wednesday. Abdul Latif Saleh, who holds Jordanian and Albanian citizenship, was placed on a U.N. sanctions list in September, requiring all U.N. members to impose a travel ban on him and block his assets. Albania earlier had blocked 33 bank accounts in three commercial banks as well as assets and investments in Saleh's businesses and civic organizations he...

www.slobodan-milosevic.org - December 6, 2005 Written by: Andy Wilcoxson The trial of Slobodan Milosevic continued at the Hague Tribunal on Tuesday. Lt. Col. Janos Sel's cross-examination did not continue as scheduled. No explanation was given for that change. Instead, the tribunal heard the continuation of the testimony of Gen. Krsman Jelic, the commander of the 243rd Armored Brigade of the Yugoslav Army, stationed in the Urosevac area of Kosovo. The witness gave evidence refuting the indictment's charges relating to alleged crimes in: Kotlina, Dubrava, Kacanik, Slatina, Stagovo, and Urosevac. In Kotlina, the indictment alleges that Serbian troops massacred civilian men...

The outgoing commander of international peacekeepers in Bosnia says the two top indicted war crimes suspects are very unlikely to be arrested soon. Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his former top general Ratko Mladic have been on the run for 10 years, accused of genocide. British Major-General David Leakey has been commanding the EU's largest ever peacekeeping mission for the past year. He is handing over command to his Italian successor on Tuesday. General Leakey said coordinated international action had now made it virtually impossible for Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to move around freely. The EU peacekeeping...

Bosnian Dayton Minus By M. Bozinovich Back in July of 2005, during the commemoration in Srebrenica, US ambassador to Bosnia Douglas McElhaney and Bosnian peace accords architect Richard Holbrooke were seen chatting at the field around Srebrenica, and according to the AFP report, McElhaney made the announcement that the US wants the Bosnian constitution changed. Expressing the demand euphemistically McElhaney said that "The US wishes to encourage [Bosnian] citizens to discuss the Constitution and ways in which they could change it." In November, presidents of the three ethnic groups in Bosnia were summoned in Washington to participate in ceremonies congratulatory...

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia Portions of southern Yugoslavia have reached such a state of ethnic friction that Yugoslavs have begun to talk of the horrifying possibility of ''civil war'' in a land that lost one-tenth of its population, or 1.7 million people, in World War II. The current hostilities pit separatist-minded ethnic Albanians against the various Slavic populations of Yugoslavia and occur at all levels of society, from the highest officials to the humblest peasants. A young Army conscript of ethnic Albanian origin shot up his barracks, killing four sleeping Slavic bunkmates and wounding six others. The army says it has uncovered...

[This] article written for the [Bosnian Institute] website argues that Western politicians have been mistaken in accepting the notion that Kosova is 'an integral part of Serbia', so that Belgrade must necessarily be involved in discussions about Kosova's statusAs negotiations between Serbia and Kosova about the latter’s status are about to begin under UN auspices, one is prompted to pose the obvious question: ‘Why is Serbia involved at all?’ Or, to put it in another way: ‘Why do Western governments assume that the wishes of Kosova’s inhabitants are insufficient grounds for recognising its independence, and that such a step requires also Belgrade’s acquiescence?’Answers to such questions refer...

02 Dec 2005 13:57:06 GMT Source: Reuters Background CRISIS PROFILE: Can Kosovo put violence behind it? MORE PRISTINA, Serbia and Montenegro, Dec 2 (Reuters) - The weak judicial response in U.N.-run Kosovo to mass Albanian attacks on Serbs last year added to a sense of impunity in the province for ethnically motivated crimes, the OSCE said on Friday. Nineteen people died and more than 4,000 fled their homes in 48 hours of Albanian violence in March 2004 that thrust Serbia's southern province back onto the international agenda. Police estimated 51,000 people took part in torching 800 Serb homes and dozens...

Tribunal Update Tribunal home Kosovo Jubilant at KLA Acquittals Kosovo’s majority Albanian population welcomes result of Hague tribunal’s first case against former guerrillas. By Janet Anderson in The Hague (TU No 432, 2-Dec-05) The streets of Pristina erupted with flags, horns and celebratory gunfire on December 1 as news spread that the Hague tribunal had acquitted two of the first three members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, ever to face trial there for war crimes. Judges in The Hague sentenced one former foot soldier, Haradin Bala, to 13 years in prison for his role in a KLA prison camp...