Kosovo: News, Politics & Issues

[DirtyCodingHabitz]

Same can be said for the Jews in Israel.

You're right, they are fighting for their future. But I will never agree with their tactics to cleans out the Palestinians just so they can have a 100% jewish state.

A) Our revolutionaries never strapped bombs to them selves and walked into buses or Markets and annihilated innocent women or children.

B) Our revolutionaries never caused violent acts which were intended to create fear (terror), and deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatants (civilians).

Macedonian Knights of Death.

Anyone can be considered a terrorist if they fight against any government.

THeir so called revolutinaris have caused not only acts of terror but violent acts unspeakable on the civilians.

Same goes for the israelis.

[Bill77]

Macedonian Knights of Death.

I was waiting for this example.

IMO, this MKD would have been a vrmo splinter group of few men who took matters into their own hands. It wasn't common Macedonian revolutionary practice (aim at civilians) and you would have to give more than one example/incident of such atrocity occurring. I guarantee you in history, in every battle/war, every nation or group you would have more than one example of an individual or group straying and causing an act of such terror or a war crime. Therfor, every army or group in history would come under the umbrella of terrorists.

Anyone can be considered a terrorist if they fight against any government.

That's coming from a US government dictionary (which gives justice to their own actions) and its inaccurate.

But you are wrong, Anyone can't be considered a terrorist simply if they fight against any government.
Even though terrorism has no universally agreed, legally binding, criminal law definition, the common definitions of terrorism refer only to those violent acts which are intended to create fear (terror), and deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatants (civilians).

Every thing has an opposite, May i ask you what is the opposite of terrorist?

[Vangelovski]

If they kill just because the person or people were jewish, then they should be prosecuted. But far as I know they are fighting for their future.

I think Bill's response to this will suffice.

Our revolutionaries were terrorists to the enemies because they were fighting for our future. Same goes for Palestinian freedom fighters.

But one that kills to dominate another should be prosecuted. Unfortunately no one seems to be even raising the issue to prosecute the jewish leaders that are involved in the war crimes.

DCH, I've already told you that I will not indulge your superficiality. I have already dealt with your point about Jews who have committed war crimes.

[Risto the Great]

Every thing has an opposite, May i ask you what is the opposite of terrorist?

Good question.
I have no idea but this man is seen as a pacifist yet terrifies me:

[Bill77]

Please dear Sir, stop regurgitating that "wipe off the map" lie. No such a thing was ever said. You end up sounding like a Likudnik apologist.

This is what was said:

"The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."

There is only one way to interpret that, and if you can't see it, then you are blinded by Jewish hatred.

[Vangelovski]

Please dear Sir, stop regurgitating that "wipe off the map" lie. No such a thing was ever said. You end up sounding like a Likudnik apologist.

This is what was said:

Voshtarets, Iran's supporters can reinterpret that particular statement as much as they like, but the Iranian Government has many statements that clearly indicate they would like to see Israel destroyed, in addition to their unwillingness to recognise Israel's right to exist.

[Vangelovski]

I'm certainly no fan of Iran or it's regime, but I also respect John Adams as much as you do. Perhaps this quote of his is apropos:

Voshtarets, your post does not add anything further to the discussion. As such, I can only repeat what I have already said and you have plainly ignored - the Iranian regime has made it more than clear that it wants the complete destruction of Israel as a Jewish state through a number of statements and its unwillingness to recognise Israel's right to exist.

[Vangelovski]

Voshtarets,

Here's ONE of them:

"Iran's stance has always been clear on this ugly phenomenon (Israel). We have repeatedly said that this cancerous tumor of a state should be removed from the region," Khamenei told thousands of Muslim worshippers in Tehran.

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/m...ast.iran.reut/

Try not to lose sight of the ocean when dissecting this drop.

[Vangelovski]

Thanks Vangelovski. Very strong and harsh words indeed. But again, like the "wipe off the map" quote, it would be nice to know what, if anything, might have been lost in the translation. US media like CNN are notorious war cheerleaders.

I don't think you can lose all that much in translation. Like I said, don't lose sight of the ocean when dissecting this drop. As in most cases, Iran's actions speak louder than words. As an example, Iran funds Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria, who have all sought Israel's total destruction.

Here's another quote for you to chew on and wonder how much of it has been "lost" in translation...very little I suspect, particularly seeing it comes from the left-wing, 'America is bad' LA times:

Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei left little doubt about Iran's position on relations with Israel, saying he was raising the issue "to spell an end to any debates" on it. "It is incorrect, irrational, pointless and nonsense to say that we are friends of Israeli people," said Khamenei, who delivers prayer sermons only on special occasions..."But we are on a collision course with the occupiers of Palestine and the occupiers are the Zionist regime," he said. "This is the position of our regime, our revolution and our people."

"The Iranian nation never recognized Israel and will never ever recognize it".

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/sep/20/world/fg-iran20

[Bill77]

Voshtarets, Iran's supporters can reinterpret that particular statement as much as they like, but the Iranian Government has many statements that clearly indicate they would like to see Israel destroyed, in addition to their unwillingness to recognise Israel's right to exist.

Apparently its not directed solely at Israel.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Quotes:

"Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury".

Ahmadinejad: The Secret History of Iran's Radical Leader by Kasra Naji

Yeh this might be all talk just coming from a nut case.

Even more of a reason to stop him from controlling a nuclear bomb.

[EgejskaMakedonia]

I don't think that Kosovo poses a territorial threat to Macedonia in that, contrary to popular belief, Kosovo Albanians and Macedonian Albanians do have diverging interests. The Albanians in Macedonia, ironically, do pose an existential threat, but not in the classical sense. They don't really seek to destroy the existing state, but rather to convert it from a Macedonian one (which they have succeeded) into an Albanian one (which they are clearly working on, albeit in a highly disorganised manner). They pose this existential threat only because we allow them to.

I guess they are like termites then, destroy everything from the inside before the outer structure gives way. Despite conflicting interests between Albanians of different areas, and of course the Ghegs and tosks...surely they all believe in a 'Greater Albania'? Is this enough reason for them to unite or are they that divided?


In terms of Israel, I don't agree with a lot of their actions. There are criminals on both sides of the conflict, however I think that Israel's reaction or 'attack' is sometimes extremely beyond proportions. A few Hamas militants hiding somewhere will often constitute an attack that ends up killing dozens or hundreds of civilians at a time. However, it's not often that you see the 'west' or those aligned with them significantly punished for war crimes.

[Vangelovski]

I guess they are like termites then, destroy everything from the inside before the outer structure gives way. Despite conflicting interests between Albanians of different areas, and of course the Ghegs and tosks...surely they all believe in a 'Greater Albania'? Is this enough reason for them to unite or are they that divided?

I think the whole idea about a 'greater Albania' is just wishful thinking and its appeal is limited. After living in different states for 100 years (together under the Ottoman Empire before that), the Albanians of Kosovo and Macedonia have too many differences with the Albanians of Albania - political, economic, social and religious.

This is a very broad topic, but the jist of it is that they would not be able to live together, much like West and East Germany are still coming to terms with each other and they were only divided for 40 years, have been reunited for 20 and have spent hundreds of billions of dollars attempting to breach the political, economic and social divide.

Further, Kosovo has far too much to lose to risk causing further problems in the Balkans. I think they will focus on their own internal day to day problems from here on end simply because they don't have the capacity or energy to do anything else.

[VMRO]

Happy Kosovo Independence day

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2015/02/17/happy-kosovo-independence-day/

Happy Kosovo Independence Day?
Not quite …


Kosovars are celebrating the seventh anniversary of Kosovo’s independence – by leaving in record numbers. By some estimates as many as 100,000 have fled the country in the past few months. Germany is dispatching policemen to the Hungary-Serbia border to stem the rising tide, since most wind up there so they can apply for asylum.

It’s a tragic end to a long and difficult journey, however, as more than 99 percent of asylum applications from Kosovars are rejected. Germany, which supported the US-backed Kosovo "Liberation" Army (KLA), wanted an independent Kosovo: the Kosovars, not so much….

Fourteen years after the end of the Kosovo war, the "liberation" of the Kosovars has delivered them into the hands of a despotic clan of thugs who have turned the country into the crime capital of Europe, and the continent’s major source of heroin smuggling and human trafficking – a place where the former President has been credibly accused of organ harvesting. The Albanian Mafia has ruled the country ever since the "liberation," and Kosovo’s government has taken its place among the most corrupt in the world. The unemployment rate is close to 50 percent. A piece in the Guardian quotes a refugee fleeing with his family:

"I don’t know exactly where I am heading but I am dreaming of a place where my children will have proper education and where they won’t need connections to get a job once they graduate and where neither of us need to bribe the doctor if we need health services. The government did not prove they can provide us with any of this, and I never thought I would be here 15 years after the war."

Associated Press cites a disappointed worker:

“‘I am so disappointed with my own place, I just want to leave,’ said Bislim Shabani, an ethnic Albanian heading to Germany with his wife and four children. Shabani said he worked in a company that went bust in a botched privatization, leaving many workers mired in debt: ‘They owe me 12 months of wages. I couldn’t provide for my family any longer.'”

The last official in charge of privatizing Kosovo’s state-own industries, Blerim Rexha, had to resign after questions were raised when the agency sold off entire industries on the cheap to buyers with political connections. The previous privatization minister had been found dead at home with 11 stab wounds – officially ruled a "suicide." Under Prime Minister Hacim Thaci, leader of the KLA, and his Democratic Party, the wholesale looting of the economy took place: not only the privatization agency but also the Central Bank (whose chieftain was arrested), and virtually every other government body is rife with corruption.

The Drenas mine, worth billions, was snapped up by an Israeli company for a pittance. PTK, the state-owned telecommunications company, was bid on by Albright Capital – former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s investment consortium – but was forced out by the pretty obvious conflict of interest. Albright was a prime architect of the Kosovo war during her tenure at Foggy Bottom and apparently became quite enthralled with tall, dark and handsome Hacim Thaci, who later became Kosovo’s chief executive and de facto strongman. The PTK sale has been canceled twice due to a power struggle within the ruling party.

Organized violence against the Serb minority, which began during the civil war and continued, unabated, after independence, is worse than ever. Over 100 Serbian Orthodox churches have been burned to the ground by Kosovar mobs. In March, 2004, the "Kristallnacht of Kosovo" saw Serbs murdered in the streets, entire towns ethnically cleansed, hospitals burned to the ground, and thousands of Serbs forced to flee their homes: an estimated 50,000 Kosovars took part in the rioting. NATO’s "peacekeeping" force stood by and watched.

The Kosovo war was sold to the American people under the rubric of a "humanitarian intervention" – a precedent and a pretext that was used many times since. It was also the first phase of Washington’s post-cold war regime change campaign, which sought to push Russian influence out of Europe – and eventually threaten regime change in Russia itself. While today we hear much talk of a new cold war, there is nothing all that new in the present policy: it began with the Clinton administration, when Gen. Wesley Clark threatened to start World War III by attacking Russian peacekeepers in Pristina, and NATO started bombing Serbia.

It is continuing today in Ukraine, another country where corruption is a way of life, and where the regime-changers have been busy for years. In coordination with the European Union, Washington finally succeeded in ousting – by force – the elected government, perceived as "pro-Russian," and installing the oligarch Petro Poroshenko. A civil war ensued, pitting the pro-Russian east against the puppet regime in Kiev: the war is going badly for Poroshennko, who has recently begun arresting journalists and has threatened to impose martial law in response to rising dissent on the home front.

Along with Albright, and, of course, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton was one of the prime movers of the Kosovo intervention. Her biographer, Gail Sheehy, documents that it was pressure from Hillary that finally hectored the President into ordering the first air strikes. There’s a "Bill Clinton Boulevard" in Pristina, which sports a ten-foot statue of the Great Pants Dropper, and near it is a store – "Hillary" – which sells clothing associated with the former First Lady and putative presidential candidate: red pants suits are a hot-selling item.

Hillary’s story about having come under fire in a visit to the region has been thoroughly debunked, but her lies haven’t stopped there: in spite of Kosovo’s ever-worsening condition, she defends the US invasion to this day, hailing the war as more than a mere triumph of American "global leadership": "For me, my family and my fellow Americans this is more than a foreign policy issue, it is personal," she blabbers.

The Clintons, in short, own the Kosovo war – and what a sorry heritage it is.

The coalition that bamboozled us into war in Kosovo – neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and his friends, in league with "humanitarian interventionist" progressives and billionaire speculator George Soros – is identical to the one trying to push us into a new cold war with Russia over Ukraine. Back then, groups like the "Balkan Action Council" sprang up like mushrooms after a rain, fueled with Soros money and long lists of neoconservative endorsers, along with their "progressive" comrades-in-arms.

The media joined in the fun, with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour playing the role of Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who played a key role into lying us into the Iraq war. Amanpour greatly exaggerated the charges of "ethnic cleansing" and "mass murder" aimed at the Serb authorities and played a major part in demonizing Belgrade to the point where US planes were bombing civilian targets – such as a television station, in which 16 staff members were murdered in cold blood – without so much as a peep from either the Western media or our resident "humanitarians." Over 5,000 citizens of Serbia were killed by NATO’s war planes.

And what was the result? The creation of a gangster state where corruption is the first principle of "governance" and US and European "peacekeepers" stand by while savages destroy churches and murder their ethnic rivals with impunity. In short: yet another failed state, just like Libya and Syria, two other sites where the Clintonian murder machine has been hard at work creating chaos out of order.

[VMRO]

http://rt.com/op-edge/233403-kosovo-...-migration-eu/

Failed Kosovo project: people leaving, but NATO demands met



A Kosovo man carries his baby as he crosses illegally the Hungarian-Serbian border near the village of Asotthalom February 6, 2015 (Reuters / Laszlo Balogh)A Kosovo man carries his baby as he crosses illegally the Hungarian-Serbian border near the village of Asotthalom February 6, 2015 (Reuters / Laszlo Balogh)
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Anniversary, Arms, Crime, EU, Germany, History, Human rights, Kosovo, Law, Military, NATO, Politics, USA
Although the EU and NATO have delivered nothing to Kosovo in the way of prosperity, being there still meets the criteria of allowing expansion further east, Serbian affairs commentator Marko Gasic told RT.

January 17 marked seven years since Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. However because of high unemployment and poverty thousands of Kosovans look for a better life elsewhere making their way to European countries. Berlin, Vienna and Geneva have plans deport those who recently arrived, and are asking the Kosovo government to cover the expense. Hungary also wants tougher controls to stop the flow of illegal migrant from Kosovo.

RT: Do you think we will see mass deportations in the coming months?

Marko Gasic: Well I expect something of that order, yes. But the key thing here is that the population of Kosovo appears to be voting with their feet and leaving the failed Kosovo project. It is clearly a failure economically and in every sense. And this is what created the crisis. There is of course another school of thought that suggests that the leadership in Kosovo perhaps is helping this crisis to occur in order to give the EU a choice between billions of euro of aid going to Kosovo, or half a million refugees going to the EU. So everything is possible…We had scenarios in the past of crises in Kosovo which have been manufactured. But the main thing is that the ordinary person seems to have no future in a place which is riddled with corruption, crime from drug trafficking, from forced prostitution, organ trading. There is nothing of a viable industry in Kosovo at the moment which is the situation that the people are reacting to.

RT: The number of immigrants from Kosovo skyrocketed by 86 percent last month. The problem of immigration is nothing new, but why the sudden surge?

MG: Well that’s an interesting thing. As I said, there are elements here of almost programming that these people are suddenly leaving, and it does indicate the degree of organization on somebody’s part. So that goes back to the question who might be involved in creating this scenario. But whoever is behind it, the fact is, in practice it can be a very big headache for the EU, because of course we have the pan-European far-right already concerned with legal migrant flows within the EU, and are now faced with the illegal migrant flow from without the EU. So clearly Europe and the EU will not want to take the domestic consequences of what’s going on and will want to pass this headache back outside the EU, further south perhaps towards Serbia which may have been the plan all along.

RT: The US and the EU were both very vocal supporters of Kosovo's independence.Why are they turning their backs when the independent region is in need of them again?

MG: The EU together with NATO has attempted to manage the Kosovo project and has utterly failed to do so. If Kosovo had been under Serbian control, the Serbians would be to blame for these consequences; we would be hearing all sorts of accusations. But the fact is that Kosovo is now under NATO control and aided and abetted by the EU. And in 16 years the EU and NATO have delivered nothing to Kosovo in the way of prosperity. It has been a complete failure on all counts. Even the EU itself is now accused to be part of the corrupt society that they have helped to create in Kosovo. So clearly this is not something that the EU wants to see blowback from the failure of its policies, externally back into the EU. But from NATO’S point of view Kosovo still meets the main reason why the whole crisis began 16 years ago which was the ability of NATO to relocate from Germany in force into the biggest military base since Vietnam, that’s Camp Bondsteel sitting there in the heart of Kosovo which doesn’t require anybody’s permission as it continues its encirclement of strategic targets further east. So Kosovo still fulfills NATO’s demands for its function even if doesn’t fulfill any demands of the population, and any demands for what economic prosperity should involve.

[Soldier of Macedon]

Some valid points made above in relation to Kosovo, however, I don't think the Ukrainian situation can be entirely dismissed as a western creation given that there are millions of Ukrainians who no longer accept being treated as Russian proxies.