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BELGRADE: Kosovo Serbs and the influential Serbian Orthodox Church on Tuesday urged the government in Belgrade to reject a UN plan for Kosovo, saying it opens the way for secession of the southern province. The government of Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica immediately convened to adopt a “resolution” that would serve as Serbia’s official response to the recently presented UN plan on Kosovo’s future. The plan by UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari envisages internationally supervised statehood for the disputed territory. The Serbian National Council, which represents some 100,000 Serbs still living in the province amid an overwhelming majority of independence-seeking ethnic Albanians,...

11.2.2007 16:34 DECANI, (Tanjug) - The Serbian Orthodox Church has condemned in the strongest terms ''barbaric'' messages of Self-Determination movement leader Albin Kurti and other participants of the Saturday demonstrations in Pristina who shouted that ''Serbs occupied Albanian churches and monasteries'' in Kosovo and that they should ''be destroyed.'' Several thousand Kosovo Albanian members of the Self-Determination movement and supporters of the so-called Kosovo liberation army protested against UN special envoy Martti Ahtisaari's plan for the status of Kosovo in Pristina on Saturday.

United Nations (UN) police in Kosovo have fired tear gas and rubber bullets during clashes with ethnic Albanians protesting against a UN plan they say falls short of full independence from Serbia. Hospital officials say they have treated 70 people, including four who were seriously wounded. Fourteen people were arrested as Kosovo and UN riot police advanced on hundreds of demonstrators who were hurling stones and bottles. The clashes, a repeat of riots in November, underscored Western fears of what the United States described last week as a possible "breakdown in order" if a decision on the Albanian majority's demand...

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia: Slovak President Ivan Gasparovic on Friday criticized a U.N. plan for the future of Serbia's breakaway province of Kosovo, describing it as disadvantageous for the government in Belgrade. "It is impossible in the 21st century to create an agreement with provisions that are advantageous for one party and disadvantageous for another," Gasparovic said in a broadcast by the Bratislava's TA3 TV. "After NATO's invasion of Serbia that was staged to protect Kosovo Albanians the (Western) allies forgot about the protection of Serbs," Gasparovic said. On Thursday, Jan Slota, the head of the nationalist Slovak National Party, labeled Ahtisaari's...

from Christopher Walker, Jerusalem About 40 Israeli volunteers have been fighting alongside the Serbs as a gesture of gratitude for Serb support for Yugoslav Jews against the Nazis in the Second World War. The existence of the Israeli fighters - they do not like the term mercenaries - was revealed by Ron Ben Yishai, an Israeli war correspondent who was injured by Kosovo Liberation Army sniper fire this week while reporting from the province for the Tel Aviv daily Yediot Aharonot. The paper said that all the Israeli fighters had emigrated to the Jewish state from the former Soviet Union...

Belgrade, Feb 7, 2007 – President of the Coordinating Centre for Kosovo-Metohija Sanda Raskovic-Ivic stated last night that Kosovo independence is unacceptable to the Serbian side as the solution of the province's status, adding that there are realistic reasons for postponing the talks until after new Serbian parliament is formed. Raskovic-Ivic told RTS television last night that the government lost its legitimacy after the elections of January 21 and the Serbian President was the only legitimate representative who could meet with UN Special Envoy for Kosovo-Metohija Martti Ahtisaari when he presented his plan for the province's future status to Serbia....

Kosovo Prime Minister Agim Ceku has warned Kosovo Serbs not to try to break away from the rest of the province out of anger at a draft UN plan that would set it on a path to independence from Serbia. Ceku said no one was fully satisfied with the plan, which falls short of Kosovo Albanian demands for full sovereignty, but any bid by Serbs in the north to split the territory in two would not work. "They have to understand that this is not 1991. They cannot do what the Croatian Serbs did," he told Reuters in an interview....

The United Nations emissary of Finnish and Common Market origins has yesterday reported back. He has in effect made Kosovo an independent state and separated it forever from Serbia. From now on it will be a crime to be a Serb, a Jew, or a Romany in Kosovo. Kosovo will be ruled by a Fascist, Islamist and brutal regime and the future for Muslim Kosovons will be more destitution, more brutality and the complete imprisonment of the mind by the “ideas” of Islamofascism. What a future the US cum EU Empiricists have managed to map out for this once beautiful...

The comparisons of the destruction of Yugoslavia with the destruction of Israel are chilling and instructive.

“The independence of Kosovo is a reality, so we demand recognition of Kosovo’s international subjectivity without any delays,” said Agim Ceku, its Prime Minister. The main parties in the elections are opposed to independence for Kosovo, regarded as the cradle of Serb history and culture. Russia, Serbia’s traditional Orthodox Christian ally, has made it clear that it would not support any plan for Kosovo that went against Belgrade’s wishes. “Russia believes it is unacceptable that a decision on the status of Kosovo be imposed from the outside,” said President Putin on Sunday. As a permanent member of the UN Security...

... Now that plan is in chaos. Milorad Dodik, the premier of the Republika Srpska, the Serb part of Bosnia, wants the same right to self-determination as that exercised by Montenegro last year, and possibly by Kosovo soon. The latter analogy is a powerful one. If a province of Serbia can decide its own future, he argues, why not his fief? ...

4 Bosnian Muslims convicted of plotting terror attacks in Europe4 Bosnian Muslims convicted of plotting terror attacks in Europe January 14, 2007 10:32 AM SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina-Four men were convicted Wednesday of plotting to blow up an unidentified European target and sentenced to lengthy prison terms, court officials said. Prosecutors said the four men, two Bosnians, a Swede and a Turkish citizen, were preparing to launch a terror attack a European country to force to pull foreign troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. The exact target of the plot remains unclear. Police found a "suicide belt" rigged with a powerful homemade explosive...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 (UPI) -- A U.S. diplomat in Washington said a solution to the future status of Serbia's mainly ethnic-Albanian Kosovo province could be decided by April. U.S. Undersecretary for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns told Voice of America that U.N. special envoy to Kosovo Martti Ahtisaari will begin a series of talks with Kosovo ethnic-Albanian leaders in Pristina and Serbian authorities in Belgrade soon after Serbia's parliamentary elections set for Jan. 21. Burns said he hoped the Kosovo solution could be found "one to two months" after the Serbian elections. He said Washington does not support any option nor...

In March 2007 it will be eight years since the Kosovo war and the US-led NATO intervention in gross violation of a host of international laws including the UN Charter. The Western part of the international community was determined to resolve the Kosovo status issue by the end of 2006. However, the UN Kosovo mediator, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, has delayed his proposal until after the Serbian parliamentary elections on January 21, 2007 in order to reinforce the democratic camp within Serbia. The Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija, Kosmet in Serbian but for brevity reduced to Kosovo in...

January 2, 2007 -- A Kosovo Serb, Vladimir Radosavljevic and his wife Bosiljka were shot at in the Kosovo Muslim Albanian stronghold of Klina after Radosavljevic filed papers with the Kosovo Housing and Property Directorate to have his illegally confiscated home returned. Radosavljevic's were asleep when unidentified gunmen fired a round from an automatic weapon at their temporary shelter in Kosovo town of Klina where they were awaiting the authorities to evict the illegal Muslim Albanian occupiers of their property. Police found 23 bullets among the broken glass and empty chargers in the street. The evidence, according to the police,...

Amid signs that the Bush administration may be backing away from unequivocal support for independence for Kosovo, the head of the Albanian American Civic League is appealing to the American Jewish community to advocate on behalf of Kosovo, a region of the former Yugoslavia that is predominantly inhabited by ethnic Albanians. “When Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic was massacring Albanians in Kosovo in 1998-99, the American Jewish community took the lead in pressing President [Bill] Clinton to bomb Serbia, because they instinctively understood the nature of genocide and were determined to keep it from being repeated,” said Joseph DioGuardi, a onetime...

15 Serbs face questions about past Accused of lying on immigration forms, they are asked about the '90s war. By LANE DEGREGORY Published December 13, 2006 ST. PETERSBURG - The immigration officers came before 5 a.m. Monday, pounding on the doors of 15 St. Petersburg homes. Slavko Krsmanovic, 17, woke to flashlights on his porch, eight agents pointing guns at his house. They wanted his dad. He told them his dad was driving his mom to work. So the agents waited until Strahinja Krsmanovic came home. "As soon as he got out of the car, they handcuffed him behind his...

It's not so pristine in Pristina. That's still our problem. REMEMBER KOSOVO? The little statelet of 2 million, still technically an "integral part" of Serbia, was the inspiration for an unprecedented NATO campaign, the first of its kind: bombing, in those less sensitive times, Christian troops on Easter. The prevention of genocide and the resulting stability of the whole Balkan region were secured, peacekeepers took up their positions in and around the capital, Pristina, and no one lived happily ever after. Serbia threw out its mad leadership--that has to count for something--but the old wounds burn even for democratic Prime...

New York, 18 Dec. (AKI) - Serbs living in the United States are reported to be deeply disturbed and worried by recent arrests of fellow Serbs in connection with the 1990s Balkan wars, community leaders have said. In a six-state swoop, American agents arrested 13 Serb immigrants last week and are looking for another three who are still at large. One of those arrested, Nedjo Ikonic, is being investigated for allegedly having taken part in the massacre of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica when it was overrun by Serb forces in...

Associated Press Balkan expert Tim Judah stated: "There is a real potential for renewed violence in Kosovo. If there is a delay or if the resolution is unclear, (Kosovo) Albanian hard-liners will start to lose patience." Since the United Nations and NATO began the international administration of Kosovo in 1999, similar Muslim Albanian violence has resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of non-Albanians, the destruction and desecration of hundreds of Serbian Orthodox churches and the deaths of thousands of non-Albanians. AntiWar.com columnist Christopher Deliso also reported on the rise of jihad terrorism in the Serbian province and the...