Free Republic

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses why all anti-jihadists should support Serbia today Monday, 15 May 2006 The jihad in Serbia is one that is obscured in a particularly vexing way. Accordingly it must be emphasized that in alerting people to attacks on the Serbs, and to the destruction of ancient churches and monasteries, and on the infiltration into the area of Arabs bringing a brand of Islam quite different from the relaxed, syncretistic local version (not exactly full-bodied Islam in practice, because that local practice was affected by the centuries of proximity to non-Muslims, and to the...

Kosovo Prime Minister Agim Ceku has says independence for mostly ethnic-Albanian Kosovo of Serbia's government in Belgrade is near. "A great dream of independence is close and it is only months away," said Ceku Monday in his regular weekly address in Kosovo, Serbia's southern province whose population of 1.8 million is 90 percent ethnic-Albanian........

Skoplje, May 13 (SRNA) - In the Tetovo village of Neprosteno for the past 20 or so days armed Kosovo Albanians, former members of the KLA, have been patrolling in order to provoke new ethnic tensions in Macedonia in this and other neighboring villages with an ethnic Albanian population, writes the Skoplje daily "Vecer". According to the sources of that Skoplje paper, the leaders of the group are putting pressure on the Albanian political parties in Macedonia, the Democratic Union for Integration and the Democratic Party of Albanians to demand the annexation of a part of western Macedonia to neighboring...

Russian state-owned company Technopromexport has announced it will build a thermal power plant in Serbia within three years. The company Wednesday signed a contract with Serbia and Switzerland's Mentor Energy, company officials said. The construction of the plant, with two 450-megawatt blocks, is estimated to cost $877 million. Maja Gojkovich, mayor of the Serbian town Novi Sad, where the plant will be built, said the project will greatly benefit the economy of the town and the country, the RIA Novosti news agency reported. "It will provide work for 5,000 to 6,000 Serbs and guarantee orders for a number of Serbian...

Among the most important priorities of U.S. global policy is combating the international traffic in drugs and in persons (often a euphemism for women and children forced into prostitution). Because of the linkage and overlap among terrorist networks and organized criminal gangs, the battle against trafficking is also an integral part of the war on terror. Amazingly, that's what the international community seems to want to help establish in the Serbian province of Kosovo. When Kosovo was placed under United Nations administration and NATO military control at the end of the 1999 war, some hoped the province soon would meet...

(Title too long, sorry) Jessen-Petersen Signs Act for Protection of Families of KLA Members 3 May 2006 | 14:32 | FOCUS News Agency Pristina. Head of UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) Søren Jessen-Petersen signed a law that ensures institutional protection to the families of the over 20,000 members of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), thus acknowledging their contribution to “Kosovo’s liberation”, Pristina media inform cited by TANJUG. Petersen stated the wounds from the war will heal slowly but “the law acknowledges the contribution of the militaries to Kosovo’s freedom,” Koha Ditore newspaper reads.

Mass of conflicting property claims since war leads many Kosovars to try solving disputes with guns. By Krenar Gashi in Pristina (Balkan Insight, 26 Apr 06) A bloody shootout in a town in Kosovo has come as an unwelcome reminder to many Kosovars of how many battles over real estate end in death. Two people were killed, including a deputy mayor, and eight others were injured, in the shooting on April 22, in Shtime/Stimlje, 25 kilometres from the capital Pristina. The Kosovo Police Service, KPS, confirmed nine arrests over the shootings in which Aziz Xhelili and Vezir Bajrami, a deputy...

7 May 2006 | 14:54 | FOCUS News Agency Sofia. The Sarajevo based newspaper Free Bosnia published on its title page pictures of killed Serbs in Sarajevo in 1992, Radio TV Serbia reports. The killed from the Sarjevo municipality of Novi Grad and from Ali Pasino Pole have been displayed on the pictures. The publication pointed that during the war in Sarjevo 850 Serbs were massacred while the official representatives of Republic Serbia claim that their number is several thousand, RTS reports.

WASHINGTON - Catholics in Bosnia-Herzegovina feel pressure, threats and discrimination from an unfair political system and from Muslims financially backed by Islamic countries, said the head of the Bosnian bishops' conference. Successful dialogue between Catholics and Muslims, which is solely "about coexistence," depends on the political situation, Cardinal Vinko Puljic of Sarajevo told Catholic News Service in a May 2 interview. During the 1992-1995 war for independence and up to today, radical influences from Eastern Islamic countries infiltrated into Bosnia, the cardinal said through a translator during a visit to Washington. Bosnian Muslims have access to funding and permits to...

Vocabulary of Denial By Boba Borojevic May 4, 2006 -- According to news reports, officials in Brussels have been working on producing new politically correct terminology in order to ban words and phrases that could cause offense. The Saudi based Organization for the Islamic Conference (OIC) and its 56 member states, for their part, are pressing ahead and requesting from the United Nations and European Union to take steps, including legal ones to ensure that the freedom of speech and expression does not interfere with the "respect for cultural diversity, religious beliefs and religious symbols." The aim is to "...

Exactly twenty years ago the Soviet leadership was in deep denial about the catastrophe that had struck Chernobyl on April 26, 1986. It pretended that life could go on as before, that nothing of great importance had happened. The Comrades hoped, absurdly, that Chernobyl’s awful consequences could be concealed from all those untold millions of people doomed to suffer its short and long-term consequences. Two decades later, Western elites are behaving in exactly the same manner on the subject of Islam. It is ironic that the misnamed National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and various lesser...

The bloody collapse of Yugoslavia shamed Europe. But those of us who live in the Balkans know particularly well that dismantling that artificial state involved a series of murderous ethnic and religious wars and cost at least 100,000 lives, while hundreds of thousands had to flee their homes. This is not to mention the physical devastation. Such appalling and widespread massacres and ethnic cleansing Europe had not seen since the defeat of Nazism. There is, however, one positive story from those dreadful years. It involves my own small but fiercely proud multi-ethnic country, Montenegro, which was wiped off the map...

Pristina. The debatable issues in connection to the border with Macedonia will be discussed after Kosovo’s status is determined, Kosovo’s Parliament Speaker Kol Berisa stated today cited by Macedonian agency Makfax.Kol Berisa pointed out it is also extremely important for Kosovo to have good relations with neighboring Macedonia because a lot of Albanians live there. He added the issue of the border with Macedonia will be discussed after Kosovo’s status is determined and that for Kosovo the contract between Belgrade and Skopje signed in 2001 is debatable.

Standing on the side of justice, as he said, and always with the victims, Austrian writer Peter Handke visited Kosovo several days ago. Standing at burnt homes of the Nikolices, Kostices, Bozanices and Bandices in the villages of Retimlje and Opterusa near Orahovac, Handke said: 'These are universes of pain. I do not have the right to speak. I shall keep silent, I have to keep silent. Thank you for making it possible for me to see this horror personally. This is not the 21st century'. Together with a group of domestic and foreign writers, Handke visited the most jeopardized...

BAGHDAD, 25 April (IRIN) - The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced on Monday that some 1,000 people living near the former Tuwaitha nuclear site faced serious health risks from lingering radiation. Tuwaitha, situated some 20 km south of the capital, Baghdad, "is one of a number of sites in the country identified as needing decommissioning or remediation, where radioactive material was used or waste buried," according to an IAEA statement. Residents of the nearby Ishtar village, for example, are exposed to levels of radiation higher than normal, the agency noted, which – in the case of prolonged exposure...

"Since 1999, we saw the departure of the last remaining Jewish family out of Kosovo. Why is Washington shy at actually doing something to protect the minorities in Kosovo? Back in February, we spoke with Julia Gorin, a contributing commentator for the Jewish World Report and Front Page Magazine, about Kosovo and its links with the Islamic terror. The conversation eventually lended a front page cover for the Belgrade independent Weekly Telegraph, abut here we are transmitting it in its original, long format. Why does the US have an ambiguous position on the Kosovo status: it publicly supports a negotiated...

Kosovo: The emerging terror state By M. Bozinovich Back in February, we spoke with Julia Gorin, a contributing commentator for the Jewish World Report and Front Page Magazine, about Kosovo and its links with the Islamic terror. The conversation eventually lended a front page cover for the Belgrade independent Weekly Telegraph, abut here we are transmitting it in its original, long format. Why does the US have an ambiguous position on the Kosovo status: it publicly supports a negotiated solution, while privately numerous individuals involved in those negotiations support independence? What does that mean? Bush does want a negotiated solution,...

…Khalid fought in Afghanistan for two years...Afghanistan represented the birth of the global struggle... In 1993, after Khalid had returned home from Afghanistan,...he went to join the fighting in Bosnia... The combat was much more intense than the action he had seen in Afghanistan...In Bosnia, the enemy was right in front of you, and you had to kill or be killed each day. Khalid fought alongside a group called the Green Berets, named not after the American Special Forces but after the colour of Islam. One day, after a year at war in Bosnia, Khalid was on the front line...

Tucep. Home of Danilo Dzolic (75) was attacked by armed group at about 1 a.m. this morning in Kosovo village of Tucep, RTS reports. No one was injured during the attack but the house in which Dzolic and his wife were at that moment is damaged. The attackers most probably wanted to steal Dzolic’s tractor because so far four tractors had been stolen in the village. Tucep residents chased away the attackers by firing their hunting guns, which Kosovo police and KFOR confiscated today. The Serbs living in the village expressed their concerns the attacks might happen again.

Released : Apr 22, 2006 9:27 AM PRISTINA, Serbia-Montenegro-Two ethnic Albanians were killed and seven were wounded Saturday in a shootout between two families allegedly over a property dispute, police said. The exchange of gunfire occurred in the town of Stimlje, 25 kilometers (15 miles) southwest of Kosovo's capital Pristina following an argument, said Violeta Elezaj, a police spokeswoman. Among the dead was the town's deputy mayor, Vezir Bajrami, an official from the opposition Democratic Party of Kosovo, the party's spokeswoman said. Most of the injured were being treated at a hospital. Several suspects were arrested, Elezaj said, adding that...