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Dragan Vidic
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Hahaha
Go turn on the TV and put it on CNN. The news is starting. |
Miles Baker
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OK so we get our "facts" from the horrible racist bigoted self serving Western media. But what is your source for facts Dragan? Some completely neutral, guaranteed honest tome of truth? Were you in Kosovo in 99? Who told you there was no ethnic cleansing en mass? They don't have any motivation to lie about it do they?
We all hear our side from someone who is inevitably self serving in their presentation of the "truth". Any of us who thinks he knows "the real truth" is almost always mistaken. The real judge is who is going to start a war over it? |
Dragan Vidic
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Just a quick reply because I'm about to hit the bed. No, i wasn’t there and I don’t know it all and as i said before I’m sure as hell that individuals did commit war crimes and what not but it’s nowhere near to the scale that its made out to be. If you can show me a mass grave with 500,000 Albanians in it, then i will apologise to everyone for even having started this topic and I'll take back most of the things i said.
There's a big difference between around 10,000 and 500,000, don’t you think? Keeping in mind that there was a war going on and casualties are expected AND some were even killed by NATO bombs.
I personally haven't seen any reports or heard of any claims about Albanians committing war crimes from the Western media. Perhaps you could give me a few links to show that the West is completely neutral or an explanation as to why the 4 KLA members who plotted Fort Dix were labeled as from former YU and not KOSOVO ALBANIANS??? I could sit here for hours and it would be no use. I could show you images/videos of massacred Serbs and it would be no use. Footage of them burning our churches and everything else and you'd still think its all bullshit. But keep in mind that it made headlines, here in Australia (country which has little to do with the Balkans) when Serbs burnt down a single mosque. I have yet to see one report on almost 200 churches which went up in flames or were blown up.
Pen:
lol, mate that’s opening up a whole new Pandora’s Box and i really cbf with it. |
David Vaughan
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A. I do not see CNN. You are silly to make presumptions about my sources or to create straw men about what I might think.
B. The largest massacre by Serbians of which I have read was indeed 10,000 and I have never seen a figure of 500,000. For that matter, I have never seen a figure of fifty million either, but apparently in your mind the possibility of fictional numbers makes ten thousand people murdered a minor affair, hence the vehemence in my previous post.
C. I have personally seen reports of Albanians and Bosnians committing atrocities as well, in western media. I have personally read of orthodox churches being attacked.
So ••••••• what?
In your fevered mind, these supposed "injustices" somehow allow you to pass lightly over, as you have several times, brutal ethnic cleansing by Serbian forces and to maintain the hate in a war over centuries rather than to consider a solution which does not invest solely in your own interests.
If you were supporting the KLA I would be expressing exactly the same sentiments on the converse positions. You may as well be supporting them because you would not look any different to us. |
Dragan Vidic
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A. You sure sound like someone who does or have something agains serbs.
B.
A "minor affair"??? Ummm, like i said, it was a war going on and people are expected to get killed. Serbs too were killed, both in Kosovo and during the bombing throughout the country. Thousands of them yet no one made a big deal about it but hardly mentioned it.
"War & Peace
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Where Are All the
Bodies Buried?
NATO commits acts of aggression
By Michael Parenti
In March 1999, NATO forces launched an 11-week nonstop aerial attack upon Yugoslavia that violated the UN charter, NATO’s own charter, the U.S. Constitution, and the War Powers Act. Yugoslavia had invaded no UN or NATO member. The Congress had made no declaration of war. No matter. The moral imperatives and humanitarian concerns were heralded as being so overwhelming that legalities would have to be brushed aside. Here were mass atrocities perpetrated by the demonic Serbs and their fiendish leader, Slobodan Milosevic not seen since the Nazis rampaged across Europe; something had to be done—so we were told.
Thus, a week before the bombings began, David Scheffer, U.S. State Department ambassador at large for war crime issues, announced that “we have upwards [of] about 100,000 [ethnic Albanian] men that we cannot account for in Kosovo. A month later, the State Department claimed that up to 500,000 Kosovo Albanians were missing and feared dead. By mid-May U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen stated that 100,000 military-aged men had vanished and might have been killed by the Serbs. Not long after—as public support for the war began to wane—Ambassador Scheffer escalated the 100,000 figure to “as many as 225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59” who remained unaccounted. He considered this to be one of the greatest genocidal crimes against a civilian population. Indeed it was, if true.
As the war dragged on and NATO officials saw press attention drifting toward the contrary story—namely that civilians were being killed by NATO’s bombs—NATO stepped up its claims about Serb “killing fields.” Widely varying but horrendous figures from official sources went largely unchallenged by the media and by the many liberals who supported the “humanitarian rescue operation.”
Just before the end of the air campaign, British Foreign Office Minister Geoff Hoon said that in more than 100 massacres some 10,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed (averaging 100 victims per massacre). Though substantially reduced from the 100,000 to 500,000 bandied about by U.S. officials, this was still a considerable number. A day or two after the bombings stopped, the Associated Press, echoing Hoon, reported that 10,000 Albanians had been killed by the Serbs. No explanation was offered as to how this figure was arrived at, given that not a single war site had yet been investigated and NATO forces were just beginning to roll into Kosovo. A few weeks later, the New York Times reported that “at least 10,000 people were slaughtered by Serbian forces during their three-month campaign to drive the Albanians from Kosovo.” The story went on to tell of “war crimes investigators, NATO peacekeeping troops, and aid agencies struggling to keep up with fresh reports each day of newly discovered bodies and graves.”
On August 2, another remarkable pronouncement, this time from the irrepressible Bernard Kouchner, the United Nations chief administrator in Kosovo (and head of Doctors Without Borders and friend of KLA leaders), who claimed that 11,000 bodies had been found in common graves throughout the province. He cited as his source the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Republic of Yugoslavia (ICTY). But the ICTY denied providing any such information to Kouchner or anyone else. To this day, it is not clear how he came up with his estimate.
The Kosovo-based Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms, staffed in part by KLA officials, first promulgated the figure of 10,000 missing, purportedly based on interviews with refugees. The U.S. State Department and Western media echoed the council’s estimate. But the number had to be taken on faith because the council would not share its list of missing persons.
As in the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts, the image of mass killings by vicious brutal Serbs was ceaselessly hyped. Humanitarian organizations, KLA militants, NATO and State Department officials, and the news media fed off each other. Through a process of unconfirmed assertion and tireless repetition, evidence became irrelevant. Unsubstantiated references to mass graves, each purportedly filled with hundreds or even thousands of victims were daily publicized as established facts. From June through August 1999, the New York Times alone ran eighty articles, nearly one a day, that made some reference to mass graves in Kosovo. Yet when it came down to hard evidence, the graves seemed to disappear, as the FBI discovered for itself.
In mid-June, the FBI sent a team to investigate two of the sites listed in the war crimes indictment against Slobodan Milosevic, one said to contain 6 victims and the other 20. The team lugged 107,000 pounds of equipment into Kosovo to handle what was called the “largest crime scene in the FBI’s forensic history,” but it came up with no reports about mass graves. Some weeks after its arrival, the FBI team returned home, oddly with not a word to say about their investigation. Months later, the London Financial Times reported that the FBI had found not thousands but 200 bodies at 30 sites.
Forensic experts from other NATO countries had similar experiences in Kosovo. “French investigators were frustrated at Izbica,” reported the New York Times (July 18), “when a widely publicized mass grave in which they expected to find about 150 bodies turned out to be empty.” It must have been “dug up with a backhoe and the bodies spirited off, investigators said, between the indictment and the arrival of NATO troops.” A Spanish forensic team was told to prepare for at least 2,000 autopsies, but found only 187 bodies, usually buried in individual graves, and showing no signs of massacre or torture, contrary to the stories bandied about by humanitarian groups and local residents. Most seemed to have been killed by mortar shells and firearms. As reported in the Times of London (October 31), one Spanish forensic expert, Emilio Perez Puhola, acknowledged that his team did not find one mass grave. He dismissed the widely publicized references about mass graves as being part of the “machinery of war propaganda.”
That same edition of the London Times reported that Stratfor, a private research team, basing their analysis on reports from forensic teams involved in the exhumation of bodies, determined that the final total of those killed in Kosovo came to “hundreds not thousands.”
In July 1999, the Washington Post reported that 350 ethnic Albanians “might be buried in mass graves around a mountain village in western Kosovo. Might be? Such speculations were based on sources that NATO officials refused to identify. Getting down to specifics, the article mentions “four decomposing bodies discovered near a large ash heap, with no details as to who they were or how they died.
By late August 1999, the frantic hunt for dead bodies continued to disappoint NATO officials and their media minions. The Los Angeles Times tried to salvage the genocide theme with a story about how the wells of Kosovo might be mass graves in their own right. The Times claimed that many corpses have been dumped into wells in Kosovo...Serbian forces apparently stuffed...many bodies of ethnic Albanians into wells during their campaign of terror. Apparently? When the story got down to specifics, it dwelled on only one well in one village—in which the body of a 39-year-old male was found, along with three dead cows and a dog. Neither his nationality nor cause of death was given. “No other human remains were discovered, the Times lamely concluded.
An earlier New York Times story (July 18) told of French investigators who pulled the decomposed bodies of eight women from wells in the destroyed village of Cirez, acting on reports from local residents. Unconfirmed reports, from 44 villages in the district around Decani, of 39 dead bodies in wells, had yet to be investigated. As far as I know, there were no further stories about bodies in wells, which would suggest that no more bodies were found.
At one reported grave site after another, bodies were failing to materialize in any substantial numbers—or any numbers at all. In July 1999, a mass grave in Ljubenic, near Pec—an area of extensive fighting—believed to be holding some 350 corpses, produced only seven after the exhumation. In Izbica, refugees reported that 150 ethnic Albanians were executed in March. But their bodies were nowhere to be found. In Kraljan, 82 men were supposedly killed, but investigators discovered not a single cadaver. In Djacovica, town officials claimed that 100 ethnic Albanians had been murdered, but there were no bodies because the Serbs had returned in the middle of the night, dug them up and carted all of them away, the officials believed. In Pusto Selo, villagers claimed that 106 men were captured and killed by Serbs at the end of March, but again no remains were discovered. Villagers once more suggested that Serbian forces must have come back and removed them. How the Serbs accomplished these mass-grave disappearing acts without being detected is not explained. Where was the evidence of mass grave sites having been disinterred? Where were the new grave sites now presumably chock full of bodies? And why were they so impossible to detect? Questions of this sort were never posed.
The worst allegation of mass atrocities, a war crime ascribed to Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, was said to have occurred at the Trepca mine. As reported by U.S. and NATO officials, the Serbs threw 1,000 or more bodies down the shafts or disposed of them in the mine’s vats of hydrochloric acid. In October 1999, the ICTY released the findings of Western forensic teams investigating Trepca. Not a single body was found in the mine shafts, nor was there any evidence that the vats had ever been used in an attempt to dissolve human remains. Additional stories about a Nazi-like body disposal facility in a furnace on the other side of the mountain from the mine motivated a forensic team to analyze ashes in the furnace. They found no teeth or other signs of burnt bodies.
The war crimes tribunal checked the largest reported grave sites first, and found most to contain no more than five bodies, suggesting intimate killings rather than mass murder. By the end of the year, the media hype about mass graves had noticeably fizzled. The designated mass grave sites, considered the most notorious, offered up a few hundred bodies altogether, not the thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands previously trumpeted, and with no evidence of torture or mass execution. In many cases, there was no certain evidence regarding the nationality of victims; and no report on cause of death. All this did not prevent the Associate Press from reiterating the charge, as late as November 30, 1999, that 10,000 people were killed in Kosovo.
No doubt there were graves in Kosovo that contained two or more persons—which was NATO’s definition of a “mass grave.” As of November 1999, the total number of bodies that the Western grave diggers claimed to have discovered was 2,108, and not all of them necessarily war crimes victims, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal (December 31). People were killed by bombs and by the extensive land war that went on between Yugoslav and KLA forces. Some of the dead, as even the New York Times allowed, are fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army or may have died ordinary deaths—as would happen in any population of over two million over the course of a year. No doubt there were despicable grudge killings and executions of prisoners and innocent civilians as in any war, especially a civil war, but not on a scale that would warrant the label of “genocide” or justify the death and destruction and continuing misery inflicted upon Yugoslavia by the Western powers.
No mass killings means that The Hague war crimes tribunal indictment of Milosevic becomes highly questionable, argues Richard Gwyn, in the Toronto Star. Even more questionable is the West’s continued punishment of the Serbs. In sum, NATO leaders used vastly inflated estimates of murdered Kosovo Albanians as a pretext to intrude on the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, destroy much of its infrastructure and social production, badly damage its ecology, kill a substantial number of its citizens, and invade and occupy a large portion of its territory in what can only be termed a war of aggression. Z
Michael Parenti’s most recent books are History as Mystery (City Lights) and To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (Verso, forthcoming)."
http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/parentijune2000.htm
Now let’s look at it logically.
Almost 2 million Albanians in Kosovo, their KLA being no challenge for the Serb army who had everything from tanks and armored vehicles to helicopters and war plains. Two million Albanian lives in the hands of 100,000-150,000 "Serbs butchers" yet only 10,000 bodies after a "brutal ethnic cleansing" campaign by the Serbs.
I don't know about you and everyone else but that only tells me two things.
1. Serbs did not send their army to commit mass murder/ethnic cleansing OR
2. Serbs can't shoot/aim for sh!t.
Which one do you think it was??? I’ve herd of tribes in Africa doing a better job with knifes and machetes alone, in less time and just find it hard to believe.
C. But it never made the headline news did it? Is one mosque more significant to the West then 200 churches???
My "fevered mind" never just lightly passed over those claims. For the third time, YES I’m sure war crimes were committed by the Serbs, BUT NOT TO THE SCALE IT HAS BEEN MADE OUT TO BE.
Now may be your "fevered mind" could tell me what happened here?
The headlines were "BOSNAIN SERBS RUNNING CONCENTRATION CAMPS!!!"
I ask you and others like your self, has the truth about this photo ever been publicly reveled??? And if NO, then why NOT???
Pretty racist comment but i won't bring my self down to your level, so i just won't say anything, however im sure we would look different if one of your loved ones was to die here in australia in a terrorist attack plotted by one of them. |
Graham Dollisson
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I just think that as soon as they all nuke each other the better. Other wise it's just never going to stop. (no offence to anyone )
That's just from an aussie perspective!! |
Miles Baker
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Oh so the Serbs didn't do as bad a job as the Africans? OK well then I guess I was wrong, let them invade again. Sounds fine. Just another 10,000 civilians dead.
Our perspective is they bred you out, they don't want you any more, and they don't seem to be the ones wanting to invade you. The Serbs are the ones crying "it's ours give it back" and we all see that as leading to bullsh!t neighbour-on-neighbour never-ending wars like the middle east. Perhaps you should have had better and more reasonable immigration control.
The Serbs appear to us to be the aggressors in this imminent war and the only justification is "but look what they did X years ago".
Are you actually trying to argue that anything more than zero dead is acceptable? |
Dragan Vidic
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You're either very, very, very stupid or just plain ignorant. Or both.
I WASN'T referring to it as being a "job well done" but if that's how you want to take it, be my guest. Although I'm sure everyone else with half a brain knows what i meant. (I hope)
Most were NOT civilians and for the 10th fu$king time, there was a war going on and people get killed when there is a war! Do you understand that or should I try to explain in a little more detail?
So is that what you're going to say when muslims or asians or wogs or anyone else for that matter breed you out and ask for more rights or even an independent state??? (I hope not)
Yes!!!! Spot on mate!!! That's what i've been trying to tell you all along...Serbs APPEAR to be the aggressors, but is that the truth??? Or are you just happy being lied to most of the time?
And NO, i don't think that anything more than zero dead is acceptable.
The serbian government has tried and tried to negotiate the whole Kosovo situation but the albanians thought fu$k that and just went ahead with declaring independence.
Now you tell me. Who is asking for trouble when they know Kosovo is part of serbia and serbs aren't just going to let it go. |
David Vaughan
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quote:Thousands of them yet no one made a big deal about it but hardly mentioned it
Oh crap. You keep building these unsupported claims that we ignore things by non-Serbs and on that basis alone (your own imagination that we are not being fair) you say I am biassed against Serbs. This presumably allows you to continue your sense of injustice which authorises you to promote or commit injustices on others.
If you read Mr Parenti less selectively, you would discover that his general views support the idea that attained democracy in a society is the outcome of genuine struggle for political, social and economic equality. Sounds rather what the Kosovians are doing and the Serbs opposing, doesn't it?
I am not aware that he has said that justice is achieved by removing autonomy (1989), invading and then claiming ownership on the basis of some traditional but contestable "heartland" idea.
Rather than telling me I am anti-Serb, go back many posts and read my direct answer to your first question, in post of Friday, February 22, 2008 - 06:38 pm. If you prefer I can put it Shakespearean terms, paraphrasing Graham: A plague on both your houses!
I repeat, IMO your position is not rationally supportable by independent people and you argue nothing to change that position.
European nations would not support support America's improper invasion of Iraq so presumably European nations are not all in thrall to CNN. Yet Serbia has only Russia in support on this issue and a string of European nations have recognised or promised to recognise Kosovoian independence. Have you wondered why the weight of rational opinion is so far against you? More "injustice" perhaps? |
Miles Baker
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Dragan Vidic wrote on Sunday, February 24, 2008 - 03:20 pm:there was a war going on and people get killed when there is a war! Do you understand that or should I try to explain in a little more detail?
I perfectly well understand that. And if you had bothered to read my post, you would see that my point of view is that is not good enough. Starting OR continuing wars is deplorable. I condemn it and I challenge you to as well.
Serbs appear to be the aggressors but they're not? Oh.. I guess they didn't roll the tanks in like you said then? Starting or continuing wars is NOT GOOD ENOUGH. And blaming it on Kosovo "oh they made us attack them" is not good enough.
When we get bred out? If you hadn't noticed, we have immigration control in Australia. And if we are stupid enough to let ourselves get outnumbered 10:1 or whatever, then that's our own fault. I don't expect to start a war over it, no. It's your heartland? Well perhaps you should have lived in it and kept its borders safe then? Why are the Serbs not in Kosovo if it's their heartland?
OK well you've started calling me stupid so this discussion has reached a level I won't continue to participate in. You asked for a mature discussion but it's not any more. I'm out. |
David Vaughan
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quote:Who is asking for trouble when they know Kosovo is part of serbia...
What if it isn't?
Does the only pertinent part become:
quote:... and serbs aren't just going to let it go.
?
What you want is right because that is in what you believe?
Kosovo was an autonomous region within Serbia before Milosevic revoked that autonomy on the 600th anniversary of a Serbian defeat on that site. Great negotiation tactics, those. |
Dragan Vidic
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Unsupported???? My imagination again??? lol oh mate, i cbf any more. It’s like talking to a wall.
Yes i read that and I agree up to a point. But as you know the US and the Australian gov don't and that's the problem. I said you're biast because you refused to admit that the western media doesnt show both sides.
No European country wants 2 million Albanian refugees at their doorstep. Don't you think that has anything to do with it?
Russia, Greece, Spain, Cyprus, Romania, Slovakia, Belarus as far as Europe goes, not just Russia.
Michael: I do condemn it and so does the Serbian government, which 3 weeks ago declared that regardless of what happens they will not resort to force but only a diplomatic solution which would suit both sides. You could say they gave the green light to the Albanians by doing so but they wanted the world to know that the Serbs aren't interested in violence.
Umm, yes we rolled our tanks in to protect our civilian population against the KLA just like what Israel does and Turkey has just done, only they have the US support because the US already has an army base in Turkey and isn’t interested in tearing them apart just yet.
Well may be not in our lifetime but if Cronulla is anything to go by it will be close.
Serbs are in Kosovo, 200,000 of them. Numbers have been falling due to mistreatments and discrimination.
I didn't call you stupid. Read it again. It's possible that you completely missed the point although I don't think i could've said it in any simpler terms.
David: if you read a few posts back you will see that i wrote, the problem started a few decades before 1989. Milosevic was just trying to insure he had the Serbian people behind him, and what better way to do so if not to reach out to them with the "Kosovo Battle 1389" topic. The sh!t was going to hit the fan either way. |
David Vaughan
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I will stop now because the core components of my arguments have been set out and remain unanswered nor even addressed for the most part. For example, in my first response pages ago I spoke of centuries yet in your posts you speak mostly since 1990, and introduced "a few decades" before 1989 only when faced with the inconvenience of Milosevic's actions in that year, not to mention later years.
However I shall respond to the following comment because it is personally addressed and really so contrary to my prior posts that I will have one more try to help.
Dragan wrote on , , :I said you're biast [sic] because you refused to admit that the western media doesnt show both sides.
I said very clearly and explicitly that I personally had read information on both sides inconsistent with what you presume to be the message I am receiving, so what that vast generalisation "the western media" does, or what you think it does, is irrelevant.
It appears to me that your definition of "the western media" encompasses any medium you judge unsympathetic to your position. Miles pointed this out in slightly different terms some time ago. |
Dragan Vidic
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The core components of your argument? The fact that Serbs were defeated by the Turks 619 years ago and that Serbia was under the Ottoman rule for half a millennium is the core of your argument? Was Kosovo not Serbian before all this happened? How do you explain thousand year old Serbian churches in this very region? The roots of Serbian civilisation are in Kosovo. What is it exactly that you would like me to address because medieval history has little to do with what’s happening there now other then that it gets Serbs fired up more then anything else.
I’m sure you read a few articles supporting the Serbs and what not but the truth is "BOSNIAN MUSLIMS/CROS BUTCHERED SERBIAN CIVILIANS" never made "Time" headlines nor the headlines of any other media source in the west.
I have proven you wrong on a few of your points now and you've said nothing other then all i have is "unsupported arguments".
Unless you're biast, I seriously don’t know how it can appear to you that my definition of the western media encompasses any medium i judge unsympathetic to my position.
Tell me something...
750,000 Serbs forced to leave Croatia and USA and the west in full support of their "operation storm".
Why didn't they grant independence to those people instead of forcing them out. They've been living in that region of Croatia for decades so I don't see why they were forced to leave. Mind you, over 10,000 people were killed in that operation same as in Kosovo. NO ONE made a big deal about it and the west was IMPRESSED, not horrified the way Croatian army handled the situation. NATO war plains covered the Croatian attack, yet bombed Serbia when they tried to do the same thing with the Albanians.
FACT: Serbs are the most displaced race in the former YU, having the highest number of refugees, yet we "appear" to be the aggressors.
PLZ EXPLAIN!!!
Or am I just hallucinating again? |
David Vaughan
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You should read more widely, including what I and others here wrote rather than what you choose to imagine we said or thought.
If your intention in starting this thread was to have a rational discussion then you could not hold it together.
If your intention was to gain sympathy for the Serbian position, then you have made it most difficult for anyone not to lose sympathy. |
Dragan Vidic
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Lol....Ok mate. Whatever you say. Sooner or later we were going to have to agree to disagree anyways. Although I'll tell you again that your claims (history, religion, milosevic, autonomy) had very little to do with this.
If serbia was kissing USA's ass just like every other former YU state, we wouldn't be in this mess now but we choose not to. We have our pride unlike some.
You call your discussion rational??? hmmm, ok...
I'm not so sure about the sympathy part. We'll let the 3rd party be the judge of that.
In the meantime may be you could answer some of the questions i asked you, instead of just accusing me of imagining what i choose to imagen. |
Graham Dollisson
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Dragan, I personally think that the idea of a large group of people, that have lived next to each other for literally hundreds of years, wanting to kill each other is just so beyond the understanding of the average Australian. We just don't get it!! It just shows you how good we have it here.
Oh also, having any sort of arguement/disscussion with David V is pointless. He is way too good it it. I haven't seen him lose one yet. |
Dave Billings
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A quote from our esteemed Rodney King: "can't we all just get along???"
War sucks!!! For everybody involved...there are NO winners. Seriously, I hate the fact of USA being the "worlds police and peace keepers"(gets expensive for us tax payers) But being as we are, we must make an example on how to live harmoniously on this small rock floating through space. my 2 cents |
Miles Baker
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Pity we aren't Dave  |
David Vaughan
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[Exit, stage right] 
 |
Dragan Vidic
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Graham I agree with you a 110%. Sometimes I find it hard to understand my self but it is what it is.
I wouldn't say pointless as a lot of my points/questions remain ignored/unanswered but like i said...agree to disagree.
The US economy isnt exactly peaking at the moment so a few weapon deals wouldn't be a bad thing considering that Kosovo independence has the potential to set off a chain reaction world wide, starting from kosovo and bosnia all the way to russia and middle east, etc etc. And if that fails, no big deal. They still get what they want.
-------------------------
In 1998, fighting breaks out between Serbian forces and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Milosevic (president) sends in troops, and atrocities were committed. This opens the door for NATO’s Operation Allied Force, occupying Kosovo in 1999 and then handing it over to the UN, with a huge American presence in the area. UN resolution 1244 is drafted stipulating that Kosovo is Serbian land, and at the same time gives Kosovars governance autonomy.
Nonetheless, on the 16th of February 2008, Kosovo declared its independence unilaterally.
Why does the USA care?
June 1999, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Yugoslavia, US forces seized 1,000 acres of farmland in southeast Kosovo at Uresevic, near the Macedonian border, and began the construction of a camp.
Camp Bondsteel is the biggest construction project of a US military base since the war in Vietnam. Now, why would the United States build such a massive camp in Kosovo?
AMBO Pipeline
Bill Richardson, US energy secretary in 1998, spelt it perfectly when he said: “This is about America’s energy security. It’s also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don’t share our values. We’re trying to move these newly independent countries toward the west.
Kosovo does not have oil, what Richardson is talking about here is the oil in the Caspian Sea, it’s the an unpublicized project of the Trans-Balkan Pipeline, its purpose is to secure a passage for oil from the Caspian sea.
The line will run from the Black sea port of Burgas to the Adriatic at Vlore, passing through Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania. It is likely to become the main route to the west for the oil and gas now being extracted in central Asia. It will carry 750,000 barrels a day.
The project is necessary, according to a paper published by the US Trade and Development Agency last May, because the oil coming from the Caspian sea will quickly surpass the safe capacity of the Bosphorus as a shipping lane. The scheme, the agency notes, will provide a consistent source of crude oil to American refineries, provide American companies with a key role in developing the vital east-west corridor, advance the privatization aspirations of the US government in the region and facilitate rapid integration of the Balkans with western Europe.
The project has been discussed for years. The US trade agency notes that the Trans-Balkan pipeline will become a part of the region’s critical east-west Corridor 8 infrastructure. This transportation corridor was approved by the transport ministers of the European Union in April 1994?. The pipeline itself, the agency says, has also been formally supported “since 1994?. The first feasibility study, backed by the US, was conducted in 1996.
The pipeline does not pass through the former Yugoslavia, but there’s no question that it featured prominently in Balkan war politics. On December 9 1998, the Albanian president attended a meeting about the scheme in Sofia, and linked it inextricably to Kosovo. It is my personal opinion, he noted, that no solution confined within Serbian borders will bring lasting peace. The message could scarcely have been blunter: if you want Albanian consent for the Trans-Balkan pipeline, you had better wrest Kosovo out of the hands of the Serbs.
To put things into perspective, the United States aided by the rest of the NATO forces invaded Serbia in 1999, once in control of Kosovo, camp BondSteel. The camp was established to house US troops, part of a 'PEACE' keeping mission. The real intentions of the United States was to establish a stepping stone for her troops in the Balkan , in preparation of intimidating the Balkan countries to accept the AMBO pipeline. The last obstacle was Albania that refused the passage of the pipeline into its territory unless the independence of Kosovo was guaranteed and that’s exactly what happened.
With the Kosovo independence guaranteed by the United State a precedent was established. Whereby an ethnic group unilaterally declared its independence and at the same time secured the recognition of countries like the US and this sends a clear message to all separatist movements all over the world. Now, the Kurds in Iraq, the Turks in Cyprus, and the Eta in the Basque region and many other ethnicities in the world can use this independence of Kosovo as an example that they can follow.
Oh silly me. And all this time I've been thinking that the US was there to prevent the "blood thirsty serbs" from wiping out the albanians. |
Dave Billings
Goo Roo
Louisiana
SC 300, 2JZE, 5 Speed
Posts: 1139
Reg: 06-2007
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I hate to be rude...but  |
Miles Baker
Goo Roo
Vic
66 Mustang GT Convertible, 55 Chevy Bel Air, 69 Firebird 455, 73 Corvette 4sp T-Tops
Posts: 1197
Reg: 08-2005
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Hey Dave, this morning America blocked my toilet. And America also gave me a flat tyre on the way to the gym. And then America stopped me having the right change for the parking meter. I sneezed a couple of times. Guess who was behind that. |
Dragan Vidic
DieHard
Vic
soarer tt
Posts: 776
Reg: 07-2005
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Dave Billings wrote on Thursday, February 28, 2008 - 04:45 am:I hate to be rude...but
Do your self a favor and ignore it.
Miles Baker wrote on Thursday, February 28, 2008 - 11:03 am:Hey Dave, this morning America blocked my toilet.
Doesn't surprise me considering the amount of sh!t they've been spinning lately. |
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