The Lessons of Kosovo
The United Nations will vote this week whether to grant "supervised" independence to Kosovo. It is a good time to review the developments in Kosovo since 1999, which highlight the dire consequences of excessively ambitious long-distance social engineering and centralism in name of nation-building and the pitfalls of imported regime designs.
The most important fact about Kosovo is the split between the Serbs and the Albanians. The main failing of foreign forces has been their desire to foster, impose or otherwise bring about a multi-ethnic society in Kosovo in which Serbs and Albanians would enjoy equal status. Five days before his assassination in March 2003, the reformist Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic put it this way: "Serbs and Albanians have never lived together in Kosovo and Metohija. They have always lived next to each other. A multiethnic Kosovo society is a great illusion. It has never existed. It has always been a society of ethnic co-existence." Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations echoed these sentiments: "In spirit as well as fact, multiethnic society is nowhere to be found. Pretending otherwise and denying or delaying independence risks a return to disorder and bloodshed."
Despite their long residence in a province of Serbia, most Albanian Kosovars do not identify with Serbia, nor do they share a sense of loyalty to the Serbian state. Even before the beginning of Milosevic’s 1998 campaign to kill or expel large numbers of Albanians from Kosovo, the Serbian government had instituted a policy of wide-ranging discrimination. Milosevic oversaw policies that sought to replace Albanian workers with Serbs, to close Albanian-run schools and universities, and to shut down Albanian language television, radio and newspapers. At same time, the Albanian Kosovars hardly turned the other cheek; the Kosovo Liberation Army engaged in terroristic brutalities of its ownmainly against Serbs, such as the massacre at a bar in Pec. Hence, when the main armed conflict ended in 1999, the two groups remained extremely hostile to each other. It was into this climate of historical segregation and mutual hostility that the United States, its NATO allies, Russia and the United Nations stepped in, with their designs.
The exercise in nation-building in Kosovo began immediately after the end of the NATO bombing campaign, when the United Nations assumed governance of the province. The attempt at social engineering in Kosovo is of special interest because it resembles in many ways other unrealistic, grandiose plans crafted by superpowers to democratize and develop one nation after another. The plans for Kosovo were laid out in the several documents that were endorsed by the United Nations, NATO and Russia.
These documents, especially UN Security Council Resolution 1244 and the UN Mission in Kosovo’s "Standards for Kosovo", call for the introduction of democratic institutions, a competitive market economy, and the rule of law and protection of minority rights, among other lofty goals. The documents that lay out Kosovo’s fate display an almost instinctive aversion to partitions and population exchanges on the part of the United States and its allies. Although they affirm a belief in pluralism, this is to be achieved only in the context of a single national community. They hence set out to form "a sustainable, multi-ethnic, democratic society, in which members of all communities can live in dignity and security." America adamantly opposed suggestions of partition, cantonization or ethnic separation. U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns stated at one point, "It’s a perilous exercise to begin drawingfor foreigners to begin to draw lines and redefine other people’s reality, their borders." He may not have noted that he was himself not exactly a native son of Kosovo and that he too was drawing bordersonly those that suited the lofty goal of nation-building, which conflicts starkly with the assessments of those who truly know Kosovo and who are acquainted with the facts on the ground.
To this a critic might respond: "You could argue that any international effort to induce domestic change of any kind is by nature an attempt to ‘disregard facts on the ground’, because the facts on the ground are deplorable. The reason for the international community’s interest in statebuilding in Kosovo wasn’t a response to a whim but, as you write above, a moral imperative to end ethnic cleansingyou can’t fault the international community for seeming to ‘disregard facts on the ground’ when there is a moral imperative to change those facts." I readily grant that the US and UN plans were not drafted on a whim, but they were nevertheless predicated on mistaken assumptions. Surely the ethnic cleansing had to be stopped; however, the plans for a sustainable, multi-ethnic and democratic Kosovo were hatched for the most part after the ethnic cleansing had already been halted. No one is denying the extremely deplorable character of what transpired between Serbs and Albanians; but historical facts do not vanish because of good intentions. Nor were these intentions morally justifiedfor instance, trying to prevent Kosovo from breaking away from Serbia does not have the kind of a moral imperative attached to halting ethnic cleansing.
In accordance with the plans drawn up after the bombing ended, the foreign powers sought to impose their conception of nation-building on the province. I say "impose" because, as of 1999, United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) has maintained de facto trusteeship of the province, with powers to shape the civil and political society of Kosovo as it deems fit. Established by the UN Security Council in the aftermath of the war, UNMIK styles itself as an interim civilian administration, with all the powers and authority due a normal government. The administrator of UNMIK, under whose authority Kosovo is run, acts as "proconsul of an imperial exercise in pacification and nation-building." This arrogance is well captured in the following passage from a 2006 report by the International Crisis Group: "Although it will move the process closer to arbitration and imposition as the year deepens, the international community still risks deciding Kosovo by the wrong process. A negotiated settlement is the ideal, but by setting this as the target the international community implies that cutting a deal is a higher priority than ensuring lasting stability and development for Kosovo and the region. Imposition of an independence backing, if it should come to that, would be a better bet than attempting to finesse Pristinë and Belgrade’s differences."
Bernard Kushner, the former head administrator in Kosovo, acted very much the part of the proconsul. To "create democracy where none has ever taken root before", he banned newspapers from printing divisive information, appointed specific judges to attain multi-ethnicity on judicial councils and even declared the Deutsche Mark the official Kosovo currency. UNMIK tried to form an ethnically mixed Kosovo Police Service; the judiciary and criminal justice system were to be reconstituted similarly with a mix of ethnicities, and the United Nations has labored to appoint multiethnic municipal councils in mixed communities.
Eight years later, the futility of seeking to impose such plans on people who suffered as much as the Albanian Kosovars did, and who yearn as strongly as they do for independence, and who are mostly of one ethnicity, stands out. Many Serbian civilians have also suffered greatly, to the point that they too have become more favorable to separation in one form or another. Serbs, who mainly live in their own segregated enclaves, often even fear to travel to other parts of Kosovo or non-Serbian areas of the cities in which they are concentrated. Inter-ethnic crime remains high. Collaboration between the two groups in many matters ranges from minimal to nonexistent.
It is time for various foreign powers plan to greatly scale down their forces from the area. It is time to acknowledge that UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which lays out UNMIK’s mission and role, is "political science fiction" written without regard to the realities of life and ethnic interactions in Kosovo.
For the last few years Kosovo has remained a part of Serbia essentially as a technicality, as most forms of Serbian power and control have been removed from the province. The United Nations kept pretending otherwise because it was reluctant to set a precedent that would encourage the right of self-determination to be realized through violent means especially in other parts of the Balkans, such as Macedonia. In particular, Russia and Spain feared such a precedent would encourage breakaway communities within those states to intensify their violence in order to achieve their own state.
In contrast to the nation-building that has enjoyed such limited success in Kosovo, independence would not only take into account the history and current reality of the ethno-religious divide in Kosovo, but also largely replace U.S. and UN imposition from outside with decisions by the people of Kosovo themselves. Most remaining Serbs after the conflict are concentrated in the north, in a region that abuts Serbia. That part could have been annexed to Serbia, or these Serbs could have traded places with a similar number of Albanian Kosovars who live in Serbia proper. For those few Serbs who would choose to remain in an independent Kosovo, such as those around Pristina and in other areas not adjacent to Serbia, their rights and privileges must be secured as part of the breakup agreement, and special protection must be given to Kosovo’s medieval Orthodox Christian monuments.
Far from destabilizing the region, the 2006 secession of Montenegro from Serbia was affected peacefully, legitimately and in accord with the wishes of the majority of the Montenegrin population. If Kosovo were to follow a similar path, there is no reason to expect that it would destabilize the Balkans any more than Montenegro has.
Next, one should apply this lesson to Iraq and elsewhere, if not by granting ethnic and confessional groups full independence, then a high level of autonomy, including in matters concerning regional security.
Amitai Etzioni is a professor of sociology and international relations at The George Washington University. This text draws on his book Security First: For A Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy to be published by Yale University Press this spring.
(This piece originally appeared in the National Interest Online)
Amb. Holbrook admitted that diplomacy with Serbia hinged on two points only. One was that Serbia allow foreign troops to move freely about the sovereign soil of Serbia (not just Kosovo) and second, that Serbia agree to total independence of Kosovo.
As Clinton began to Ramp up for war, Holbrook later admitted he started to worry that the Serbs might agree to the previous conditions. No one expected the above two conditions to be met which is why they were placed on the table.
A decade later, our troops did not come home by Christmas, and the ceasefire agreement did not include the two pivotal prewar conditions. So we bombed Serbia into submission so they would "not submit"? We could have had the same agreement without all the killing. Where was the hundreds of thousands of civilians the Administration had claimed were killed and buried in the Genocide of Kosovo? They found a few thousand at most and that was ambigous. How does that compare to 850,000 dead in 4 months of machete hacking Rwandans?
The Kosovo war was a setup where we were manipulated by Muslim invaders who openly admitted that the KLA was invading Kosovo to draw the US into it. It went from a majority Serb and christian province to a majority Muslim province run by Al-Qaeda allies and a leader who is currently being tried for war crimes.
Europe couldn't handle their own problems and dragged us into it and it was botched by them and a poor choice for us to get involved.
April 4, 2007 12:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
I lived in Macedonia during the conflict. Nearly 250,000 refugees flooded into the border between Kosovo and Macedonia. Given Macedonia's own problems, this could have set off still another conflict and very nearly did. The decision to intervene with air strikes at that time was viewed by the Serbs as supporting terroism by the KLA. The decision was very unpopular in Macedonia and Greece. The US Embassy in Macedonia was stormed and the vehicles were burned. Rightly or wrongly, the NATO intervention was viewed as granting de facto independence to Kosovo. And so, it appears, it has.
If there is a lesson to be learned for Iraq, it may be that it will be difficult or impossible to reintegrate the Kurds into Iraq. The Kurds have had an independent, protected, position for more than 15 years and would not give it up any more than the Kosovars would. I do not see the same situation in the rest of Iraq. There it looks like an outright struggle for mastery of the same ground. The rest of Iraq maybe could take some notes from how Macedonia resolved its problems instead of Kosovo.
April 4, 2007 12:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: The Kosovo war was a setup where we were manipulated by Muslim invaders who openly admitted that the KLA was invading Kosovo to draw the US into it. It went from a majority Serb and christian province to a majority Muslim province run by Al-Qaeda allies and a leader who is currently being tried for war crimes.
You should replace "Muslim" with "Albanian". This has been an ethnic conflict not a religious one, and it is utterly unrelated to anything in the Middle East. In the former Yugoslavia 40 years of avowedly atheistic government left a population (Albanians in Kosovo included) which is as secularized as any in Western Europe, while in Albania the fierce anti-religious Hoxha regime (which was equally anti-Christian and anti-Islamic) all but completely destroyed all religion. The KLA, like the Milosevic regime itself, is far better seen as a post-Communist thugocracy than as any sort of Islamic organization. Its roots are in the Cold War.
April 4, 2007 12:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Several interesting half-truths here. Amb Holbrooke was out of the picture by the time of the Kosovo action. He and Madeleine Albright were not the best of friends. Holbrooke ended the earlier Bosnian war.
No one ever suggested that there were hundreds of thousands of dead. There were hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Kosovo has not been a majority Serb province for a long, long time. Already a minority during the Tito era, many Serbs left for greener pastures in Belgrad or beyond. By the time the troubles began, Serbs were a tiny minority, perhaps 10%. Consequently, the measures put in place by Slobodan Milosivic (no one can hurt you now)were about as popular as apartheid with the ethnic Albanian population.
April 4, 2007 12:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
"....Several interesting half-truths here...."
They must be interesting half truths, because I would like to know which half you are calling "not truth". First of all I should say, I do not consider either side in this conflict innocent. I just think our involvement was wrong.
I said:
"...As Clinton began to Ramp up for war, Holbrook later admitted he started to worry that the Serbs might agree to the previous conditions. No one expected the above two conditions to be met which is why they were placed on the table...."
Madison said:
"... Amb Holbrooke was out of the picture by the time of the Kosovo action. He and Madeleine Albright were not the best of friends. Holbrooke ended the earlier Bosnian war...."
Richard Holbrooke was famous for saying we need to "drop bombs for peace on bosnia". He was the US Special Envoy Clinton sent in the run up to the War. Here is a link to the NATO secretary Solana referring to the Special Envoy. He was one of the last negotiators to deal with Milosovic before the Bombs of Peace blew the country apart. If your statement of him being "out of the picture by the time of the Kosovo action" means he went home and went fishing the day before the War began, then,...well...ummm, ok. Any timeline or comprehensive account of last ditch diplomatic efforts will include his name.
I said: "...Where was the hundreds of thousands of civilians the Administration had claimed were killed and buried in the Genocide of Kosovo? They found a few thousand at most and that was ambiguous. How does that compare to 850,000 dead in 4 months of machete hacking Rwandans?..."
Madison said:
"...No one ever suggested that there were hundreds of thousands of dead. There were hundreds of thousands of refugees...."
Actually I underestimated this one. They were actually throwing around numbers of half a million. I'm not sure where you were in the late 1990s. Virtually everyone at the highest levels of the administration used the term 100s of thousands including the President. William Cohen on "Face the nation" and in numerous speeches said it. The New York Times Quotes the Dept of State of saying 500,000 Kosovar Albanian civilians were supposedly dead. The actual body count was in the hundreds or at best two to three thousand. Considering this was a war zone, that amounts to a complete and total hoax. The UN officially stated after the conflict that there was no So-called Genocide. Ironically, the thousands of civilians killed by Clinton's war against Serbia was arguably the same as was actually killed by the so called genocide.
I said:
"...It went from a majority Serb and christian province to a majority Muslim province run by Al-Qaeda allies and a leader who is currently being tried for war crimes...."
Madison said:
"...Kosovo has not been a majority Serb province for a long, long time. Already a minority during the Tito era, many Serbs left for greener pastures in Belgrad or beyond. By the time the troubles began, Serbs were a tiny minority, perhaps 10%. Consequently, the measures put in place by Slobodan Milosivic (no one can hurt you now)were about as popular as apartheid with the ethnic Albanian population...."
Kosovo had been a majority Serb region for millenium. At the turn of the century, during a series of conflicts, the Ottoman turks ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Serbs out of the region. Not long after this Serbia retook Kosovo around the time of WWI. Although Serbs now were a minority in Kosovo, they no longer suffered from the ethnic cleansing and attacks. By the time of the Balkan wars, Serbians made up about the same percentage of population as African Americans make up the US (about 200,000). If 10% is a tiny minority to you, regardless they were not in need of protection in Tito's day. By 1995, with ethnic hostilities raging many had been forced out by Albanian hostilities. about 60,000 refugees had left in 3 years. What you call "Serbs left for greener pastures" sounds like the Clampetts loading up the truck for Beverly hills. Its called ethnic cleansing.
About 100,000 Serbs were run out of Kosovo during the war never to return. Pristina had about 20,000 Serbs, there is an estimated 700 now, most of whom can not leave their homes. Your comparison to Apartheid I suppose is supposed to make the Ethnic serb populace seem bad, but the only thing these families of ethnically cleansed minority have with the former South African government is skin color. In the end, during the course of the 20th century, The population that had been the majority for hundreds of years, was nearly completely removed and the ones that remain are still being attacked and hide indoors. If this had happened in South Africa where the Zulus and other blacks had been almost completely removed, it would be unacceptable.
The agreement I was refering to was the Rambouillet talks which were either fumbled or botched by the Clinton team or as Holbrooke alluded to, they were not intended to succeed. Clinton wanted war and Diplomacy would not stand in the way.
Regarding the two sticking points that Clinton went to war over, An international tribunal investigated the inclusion of the condition of allowing NATO forces free reign over Serbia, and the conclusion was that as Holbrooke had alluded to, the talks were a sham:
The Albanian muslim leader, Rugova was known as the Ghandi of Kosovo. He preached to the Albanians to have faith in the Dayton accords, but in 1995 when Holbrooke and Clinton left the Kosovar Albanians out of the agreement they were stunned. The militant KLA convinced Muslim Albanians that Rugova held no influence with Clinton and violence was the only answer. They developed a plan to invade Kosovo, start killing people and the US would come to their aid when Milosevic retaliated. That is what happened. The KLA played the US like a fiddle. Clinton rewarded the hopes of a non-violent leader by kicking him to the curb, and then turned around and rewarded a terrorist group by acting as their personal air force. Holbrooke even admitted later that in Public they were doing nothing but photo ops with Rugova, but in secret they were coordinating with the KLA.
Lord Gilbert was right. This was messed up from every angle. An avoidable war, aiding allies of Al-Qaeda using weapons that the administration had helped Iran ship into the war zone, based on lies, against the wishes of the UN and against the charter of the NATO in place of impudent Western European powers and alienating Russia at a fragile crossroads in our relationship. All of it resulting in needless bloodshed for no apparent reason.
As you can see by the few comments to this topic, this is a war that most on the left would like to pretend never happened.
I'm not sure what point you are saying is untrue Madison, but if you have any links, please share them. Thanks for your response.
April 4, 2007 4:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
As you can see by the few comments to this topic, this is a war that most on the left would like to pretend never happened.
Were that truly the case, you would not feel compelled to challenge the conventional wisdom which still prevails, that is, that the Kosovo venture was an "international humanitarian" intervention and possibly, a template for future leftist interventions.
While I have my own views as to why history (Milosevic in 1989, Srebenica, Dayton, refugee trains at the border, Clinton's amour propre, etc.) compelled intervention, I appreciate your demands that present arguments be based on historical facts. But --
Can't you break up your responses? make your "replies" short and attach them to the comment to which you're replying?
I simply will not (cannot) read more than a screen's worth of content; in fact a half a screen's about my limit. And my shortcomings may not be as idiosyncratic as you might hope!
April 4, 2007 6:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
"...Were that truly the case, you would not feel compelled to challenge the conventional wisdom which still prevails,..."
Without implying that this was your interpretation, I would say that this might be true only in the fact that the war was a wag the dog scenario not because of the Monica angle which, to this day I "prefer" not to want to believe, but in the fact that it was the first war that was completely pitched, sold, and filmed through the eyes of a false premise that was made for TV. The media wanted to believe it so bad, they gave up all critical analysis. The mythology of the war turned out to be false and the media in their complicity buried the facts and never covered it after that.
The fact that the myth lives on does not prove that the conventional wisdom is true, it only proves that most Americans are not aware of the truth. When Oliver Stone's movie, "JFK" came out a majority of people polled believed it was plausible. In retrospect that is laughable. It's pop history.
"... that is, that the Kosovo venture was an "international humanitarian" intervention and possibly, a template for future leftist interventions..."
Most leftist groups, socialists and antiwar groups opposed the war, but received very little media attention. Another aspect of the myth.
I don't care much for conventional wisdom if it is not factual.
"...Can't you break up your responses? make your "replies" short and attach them to the comment to which you're replying?..."
My failure to attach to madison's comment was an accident and as far as keeping them short, you are right, I will endeavor to keep them shorter. I have no hopes that your shortcomings are idiosyncratic. I appreciate your thoughtful response. I hope this is short enough.
April 4, 2007 7:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
I mistakenly posted my Response here
April 4, 2007 7:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Can we separate the reasons an elite goes to war from how it sells that war to the public?
"Naturally, the common people don't want war ... but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." Hermann Goering
I offer the Goering quotation as proof that the Kosovo venture wasn't a "war."
But to return to the question of how we bleeding heart leftists can prevent our liberal elites from wandering the world solving humanitarian crises. There will always be plenty of babies skewered on Hun bayonets or ripped from incubators by Saddamists to exercize the public's emotions and convince it that a slendid little war is just what's called for.
April 4, 2007 7:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sir,
One correction: by most estimates, most of the Serbs remaining in Kosovo live south of the Ibar. While the municipalities north of the Ibar are ethnic Serb and geographically compact and contiguous with Serbia, those areas are unlikely to secede a newly independent Kosovo and attempt to join Serbia proper, precisely because they will be sacrificing their property, their religious sites, and thier ethnic brethren in the south to Albanian violence.
April 4, 2007 10:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is an undercurrent of malevolence in your logic that I can't help but point out. You're basically saying that outside intervention to prevent dominance by one ethnic group of people over another has not worked and so should not be continued. Whatever happens after that is simply the way of the world, at least in that part of the world, and the world should face that fact. Maybe I've over simplified the situation but in actuality I think it is you who has grossly misrepresented what you are proposing.
Your logic might be fine except it's applied based on an imposed circumstance - the current one. The very same imposition that you now call for an end. But where were you before the Kosovo bombing? Why do you now call for a hands off approach? Why do you not call for pushing what you call "Kosovars," to a narrow strip of land next to Albania and allow Serbia to return to its "natural" state?
It's obvious that your definition of "Kosovars" means ethnic Muslims while the Christians that have traditionally lived in the Kosovo province you call "Serbians." You've done back flips to avoid describing the ethnic situation. Muslims and Christians. (Your use of the separation of Montenegro from Serbia as comparable and a favorable example for your proposal of separation of Kosovo from Serbia completely ignores the glaringly different ethnic aspects of those situations and the resulting differences in the circumstances and violence involved.) Your logic implies that now that there is an imposed situation of Muslim population dominance then let the Muslims dominate without outside intervention. Any Christians there can leave.
Those Christians that stay will be guaranteed minority rights to protect them, though the entire basis of your logic is that protections cannot be maintained since any attempts at democratic institutional measures have been demonstrated to be doomed to failure. This is a dodge for an ethnic cleansing of Christians which you gloss over. But the key point is that your logic could have been applied when dominance by Christians was the case and the only reason that dominance doesn't exist is outside intervention, democracy inspired or not.
Just to make matters clear, I believed that the U.S. policy to end ethnic cleansing by Serbia against Muslims in Kosovo was right and justified, including the bombing of Serbia (since the bombing of Serbian forces in Kosovo alone was ineffective at ending the genocide). I see no reason to believe that now I should feel fine about ethnic cleansing of Christians there - solely because it will be on a smaller scale.
Your logic reminds me of that old joke about the woman and the million dollar offer dropped to ten dollars. I think we've established what you're in favor of. We're just haggling over who gets murdered and how many.
April 5, 2007 4:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
"...Just to make matters clear, I believed that the U.S. policy to end ethnic cleansing by Serbia against Muslims in Kosovo was right and justified, including the bombing of Serbia (since the bombing of Serbian forces in Kosovo alone was ineffective at ending the genocide)..."
You make some excellent points throughout, but I have one question. What "genocide" are you referring to?
April 5, 2007 6:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
I, too, wish he'd not used the highly fraught term of "genocide."
What was happening in 1999 to the Albanians in Kosovo seems comparable to what happened to the Greeks in Smyrna post-WWI or to the Germans in the Sudetenland, Pomerania, and Silesia post-WWII.
And I think that there's a difference between the movement of ethnic groups under the threat of violence (2000) and under the supervision of an international force (today).
April 5, 2007 8:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
The religious element in the Kosovo conflict is trivial, in part because both Serbs and Albanians are highly secularized, courtesy of Communism, and in part because Albanians, when they are religious, are not exclusively Muslim, but may be Catholic (see: Mother Teresa) or Orthodox.
Dop not try to shoe-horn this bsuiness into the War on Terror. It isn't part of that. It's rather a lingering hangover from the Cold War.
April 5, 2007 9:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think your comparisons are good ones, Ellen. It is fascinating how when this happens in Africa we are talking about millions of refugees, if they are lucky enough to survive, and you don't see the same storyline.
April 5, 2007 12:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
"...Dop not try to shoe-horn this bsuiness into the War on Terror. It isn't part of that. It's rather a lingering hangover from the Cold War...."
Sometimes its a bit of both. It is not shoe horning to say that previous foreign policy decisions have ancillary consequences. No one is saying all Albanians are Muslims, but it is the Muslims that are radical that concern us. Here are some remarks about Islamic radicals in the Balkans from the Washington Post:
The brother they are referring to was the brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri who ran an Al Qaeda terrorist camp in Kosovo near the city of Ropotovo. It is also open source information that Clinton not only allowed the import of weapons from Radicals in Iran and Al-Qaeda run Third world Relief Agency into the war zone, he actually instructed American inspectors to check the weapons as they arrived from the middle east.
Nobody is "shoe horning" Kosovo into the war on terror. OBL made the shoe fit and he has walked all over the globe in it.
[Sorry so long, Ellen]
April 5, 2007 12:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, nonsense. Wahhabi preachers who have gone to the Balkans hoping to export fundamentalist Islam have gone back home muttering in their beards. Not only are the peoples of the Balkans no more devoutly Muslim than they are devoutly Christian, but even those who are religious have a very lax view of Islam-- alcohol use, for example, is ubiqitous, women are completely at liberty, and apostacy is rife. Now, I wouldn't put it past the KLA (a step-child of the brutally anti-religious Enver Hoxha) to take money and weapons from Al Qaida or anyone else, but they aren't felllow travellers, just nasty opportunists.
April 5, 2007 1:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
I will agree with you in one regard, the world is full of nasty opportunists that will partner up with Al-Qaeda and if that is what you are arguing here, then it is one more example of Al-Qaeda willing to partner up with non-believers, like communists and atheists.
It is often said that Al-Qaeda would have never dealt with Saddam. He was the biggest opportunist of all.
April 5, 2007 7:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
No.
I would be interested in your theory on why we went to war in Somalia. My guess is that it was to avoid the pressure for deeper involvement in the Balkans.
One interesting theory as to why we fought the Korean War was because of tungsten.
And then "my war" in Vietnam? Rice, you think?
Iraq was clearly about oil but how about Panama? Surely you don't think it was about the Panama Canal. Probably pique over challenge by a former CIA asset as Saddam Hussein was. Which brings up the question about why either was a CIA asset?
Seldom do you have a transparent band of fanatics running things as we have now.
Best, Terry
April 6, 2007 6:40 AM | Reply | Permalink