Behind Kosovo lie Vojvodina, the Presevo Valley and Sandzak in Serbia, where ethnic separatism, cross-border armed attacks and outright terrorism have raised their heads, respectively.
Macedonia faces the same alarming prospect. Attacks by adjuncts of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army - the National Liberation Army (NLA) of Ali Ahmeti - from inside Kosovo in 2001 placed the new nation on the precipice of all-out war and violent fragmentation.
Last week, Menduh Thaci, head of the Democratic Party of Albanians, called on his sponsors in the West to reduce Macedonia to an international protectorate. Speaking of a current political crisis largely of his making, Thaci said "I am convinced that the only way out is an urgent international protection, which will be a preventive measure for possible events." The next step is for the name of the nation to be changed or adjusted and for whatever it will then be called to be brought into NATO. Both the Greek government and pan-Albanian forces in Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, South Serbia and Montenegro will be satisfied with the result and NATO will acquire its 29th (or 31st) member state. [7]
Montenegro, barely three years old, will soon deploy the first contingent of its armed forces to serve under NATO in Afghanistan. When it arrives it will join troops from Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania and Slovenia. The last seven nations also provided soldiers for the military occupation of Iraq after 2003. Montenegro didn't exist as an independent state at that time, so its initiation as a NATO candidate country will be in Afghanistan.
With Serbia as an observer nation of the Adriatic Charter and with it having joined NATO's Partnership for Peace transitional program in 2006, Washington and Brussels will also soon call on it to prove its right to Alliance candidacy by dispatching troops to the Afghan war front. As the U.S. and NATO are on the verge of a qualitative escalation of the war in South Asia, the Serbian foreign and defense ministries have announced the opening of a mission at NATO headquarters in Brussels. "[T]he point of the mission will be to improve cooperation and everyday communication with NATO, participate in the work of 100 expert committees, and improve...cooperation with '50 member-states' of the 'political' alliance." [8] Fifty states are almost exactly the number that have provided NATO troops for the war in Afghanistan. Serbia could be the 51st.
Even for the representative of a battered, splintered, demoralized nation, recent statements by current Serbian Defense Minister Dragan Sutanovac are offensive in their shameless fawning and obsequiousness.
He will soon be the first Serbian defense chief to visit the Pentagon in a quarter of a century, a fact he is proud of, and recently said that his trip will be "without a doubt, politically and militarily very important," as much of the money - $500 million - Washington has bribed Belgrade authorities with since the overthrow of President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 "[was] used by the Serbian military."
Sutanovac, who graduated from the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, jointly run by the U.S. Department of Defense and the German Defense Ministry, and who is described as "speaking perfect English," added these revealing details:
"The Serbian MoD [Ministry of Defense] has stable relations with the U.S. military and we can say that cooperation in defense is the backbone of relations between the United States and Serbia at the moment."
"Considering the fact that the U.S. defense budget is as large as the defense budget of the rest of the world, it is crystal clear what the most important thing is to U.S. foreign policy and international relations." [9]
The former Kosovo Liberation Army, then Kosovo Protection Corps (and now Kosovo Security Force) offered troops to the U.S. for the war in Iraq shortly after the invasion of 2003 and the NATO-equipped and trained Kosovo Security Force, a nascent national army in all but name, will offer troops to NATO for the Afghan war as it drags on indefinitely. [10]
During recent municipal elections in Kosovo, the first since its nominal independence, one not recognized by 140 of 192 nations and by few outside the NATO world (the exceptions including Afghanistan, Liechtenstein, Monaco, the Marshall Islands, San Marino, Belize, Malta, Samoa, the Maldives, the Comoros, the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru and Palau), supporters of former KLA chieftains Hashim Thaci - the Western-recognized prime minister - and war criminal Ramush Haradinaj were at daggers drawn and "people used rocks to attack a line of cars that transported Hashim Thaci....Thaci's party accused Haradinaj of directly inciting and organizing [the] attack...." [11]
A Russian report on the Western-endorsed and -celebrated elections placed the West's Kosovo strategy in a broader context:
"EU officials are the ones forcing the Serbian government to accept several very unpleasant decisions - recognition of the municipal elections in Kosovo, dissociation from Russia and the pullout of joint energy projects with Russia.
"As for democratic values in the EU policy with regard to Serbia, they are hard to believe in, given the EU officials' open sympathies with the Albanian militants of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Incidentally, the supporters of two KLA leaders, former 'prime minister' Ramush Haradinaj and his successor Hashim Thaci, caused a violent clash in one of the Albanian enclaves.
"It is worth reminding here that Haradinaj was allowed to leave the Hague occasionally 'to rule' Kosovo during his trial, while Thaci was eventually cleared by the Hague Tribunal of all charges of genocide against Serbs." [12]
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