http://www.savekosovo.org American Council for Kosovo - Growing International Opposition to Imposed Solution 3.9.2010. en 2006-2010 American Council for Kosovo http://www.savekosovo.org/default.asp?p=10&leader=0&sp=557 Last week's International Court of Justice decision on Kosovo could have a significant global effect. While there is less there than meets the eye in legal terms, how the ruling is read politically may be quite different.

The ICJ decided that Kosovo's 2008 declaration of independence from Serbia "did not violate any applicable rule of international law." Although the world media first headlined that the court had approved Kosovo's actual independence, the real result was much more limited. The ICJ made it very clear it was merely providing an "advisory opinion" to answer the United Nations General Assembly's question whether Kosovo's declaration of independence was valid.

And indeed, the ICJ decision has not really clarified the situation in the Balkans. While Kosovo's declaration of independence, according to the court, did not violate the applicable international law, the underlying, and far more important, issue is still unresolved: Is Kosovo legitimately independent or not?

Serbia immediately rejected both the ICJ opinion and any broader conclusions about Kosovo's status. Belgrade held firm to its long-standing view that Security Council Resolution 1244 of 1999 expressly reaffirmed "the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity" of former Yugoslavia, and did not decide the "final status" of the province. T

Therefore, Serbia argued, Kosovo remains part of Serbia until and unless the parties to the dispute agree otherwise. Russia and China, echoing Belgrade's position, have consistently said that Resolution 1244 simply provided a political framework to allow the parties to reach their own conclusions.

By contrast, the European Union and the United States welcomed the ICJ decision. Unfortunately, Brussels and Washington have long held confused and inconsistent positions, simultaneously holding that Serbia and Kosovo should resolve the status issue by negotiation, while at every opportunity encouraging and assisting Kosovo's leaders to make their country independent.

Small wonder that Kosovo has never shown much inclination to negotiate. With the kind of external political support it has received for unilateral independence, why should it compromise on anything less?

Politically, Kosovo's continued de facto sovereignty means it has achieved essentially what it sought by declaring independence. But because Kosovo's independence was imposed on Serbia, rather than negotiated mutually, there is a basis for yet another unresolved Balkan conflict that could later return to haunt us.

The larger, global implications are even more troubling, despite the very limited nature of the ICJ's advisory opinion. Even the Palestinian-Israeli conflict might be affected.

Separatist regions in Europe and around the world will draw their own conclusions from the decision, thus precipitating unnecessary confrontations between separatists and central governments, but without any real guidance beyond the specifics of the Kosovo situation.

Concerns about these potential ramifications undoubtedly shaped the positions not only of Russia and China, but even those of European nations like Spain, which faces several regional separatist movements.

The real conclusion is that lasting, peaceful solutions to separatist conflicts ultimately can only emerge from agreements among the parties themselves. Until and unless they find the means to do so (or to live with them until a better idea arises), they are only postponing the day of reckoning.

The blunt truth is that some will only be resolved by military conflict. But as its Kosovo opinion makes clear, the artificial and inadequate ICJ is probably the least useful approach of all.

John R. Bolton is the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

]]> http://www.savekosovo.org/default.asp?p=10&leader=0&sp=552 BELGRADE -- Spanish Ambassador Inigo de Palacio Espana today addressed the issue of participation of Kosovo Albanian officials at EU-organized gatherings.

The top Spanish diplomat in Belgrade said the authorities in Priština can be present at international conferences organized by the EU only under the UNMIK auspices and in accordance with UNSC Resolution 1244.

Espana added that this will be the condition for the Kosovo authorities to be invited to the conference planned for early June in Sarajevo.

"Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos has repeated several times since January that at the conference organized by Spain, as the country currently presiding over the EU, the Kosovo authorities can only be presented in accordance with the conditions and frameworks set by all EU member states," Espana told Tanjug news agency in Belgrade on Thursday.

"Taking into account that there is no consensus within the EU on Kosovo's independence, the only possibility to reach a consensus is to maintain the practice that the Kosovo authorities are presented under UNMIK and in accordance with Resolution 1244," the ambassador stressed.

]]> http://www.savekosovo.org/default.asp?p=10&leader=0&sp=551 Something happened after President Clinton's 1999 war in Kosovo: It never ended. Its continuation was characterized by anti-Serb arson, kidnappings, bombings of NATO-escorted civilian buses and efforts to kill everyone from schoolgirls to octogenarians, plus the rare peacekeeper who tried to prevent any of this.

Toward the end of 1999, several major newspapers reported on findings that mass graves such as the infamous Trepca zinc mine turned up empty, as did the stadium we were told was being used as a concentration camp. Anyone reading this one-time follow-up also would have learned that the "cleansing" of 800,000 Albanians had more to do with NATO bombs and Kosovo Liberation Army orders than with the outrageous claim that Serbia was trying to empty the province of 90 percent of its population.

But the bombshell postwar story had no legs. No media outlet, human rights organization or congressional subcommittee launched an investigation, and the press moved on, taking the public with it. So Americans don't know that within months of our serving as the Kosovo Liberation Army's (KLA) air force, the Albanian insurgents also tried to seize the Presevo Valley area in southern Serbia and by early 2001 started a civil war in Macedonia, which had sheltered 400,000 refugees during the Kosovo war.

At the same time, the Albanian fighters started to engage NATO troops openly. In February 2000, the U.N. and NATO in Kosovo issued a joint statement that "two young French soldiers, who came here as peacekeepers, are lying in hospital beds suffering from gunshot wounds inflicted on them by the very people that they came here to protect," the CATO Institute's Gary Dempsey reported. He added, "As a candid intelligence officer with the U.N. Mission in Kosovo [UNMIK] explained to me in November, 'We are their tool, and when we stop being useful to them, they will turn against us.'"

In March 2000, The Washington Post reported, "A senior Pentagon official warned yesterday that U.S. troops in Kosovo this spring may have to fight their former allies, ethnic Albanian guerrillas who are rearming themselves and threatening cross-border attacks against Serbia. 'This has got to cease and desist, and if not, ultimately it is going to lead to confrontation between the Albanians and KFOR [NATO Kosovo Force].' "

But that didn't happen. Instead, we came around to seeing things the Albanian way. In November 2005, CNSNews.com explained why: "Rebels have blown up several vehicles belonging to UNMIK and the Kosovo [Police] Service, leading UNMIK to warn employees to check their vehicles for bombs before starting the engines. ... [G]raffiti across Kosovo warned 'UNMIK get out!' ... NATO's Kosovo Force has an emergency plan called 'Operation Safe Haven' in place to evacuate internationals. ... [Ex-OSCE security chief Tom] Gambill believes that Albanian frustration over the independence issue could lead armed rebels to forge an alliance with al Qaeda. Both groups want the international presence out of Kosovo and al Qaeda has a history of attempting to destabilize the Balkans region. ... The threats are played down, Gambill said, because 'it does not suit the internationals to have a serious crisis such as this at the time when they are sending out reports on how much improvement has been made in Kosovo.' "

We didn't want Albanians to start killing us, so we let them keep killing Serbs. Rather than see what would happen if we tried saying "no" to Albanian demands and designs, and risk Americans discerning the real nature of their new best friends - which of course would compound the domestic terror threat - we guaranteed ourselves a bigger, more entrenched and more global problem.

When Kosovo re-entered the headlines in 2008, some started catching on. In March 2008, Northwestern University law professor Eugene Kontorovich wrote in the New York Sun, "An important ingredient of Kosovo's success in achieving self-determination seems to be their constant threats of violence. The Kosovar prime minister ... often warned of 'dangers' and 'unforeseeable consequences' if the province were not allowed to secede. ... As a result, NATO and America have become parties to the carve-up of a sovereign state that they subdued by force. ... For international law, the entire process is a string of humiliations ... peacekeepers are hostages; and sovereignty is trumped by the threat of terror."

"Hostages" precisely describes the West in Kosovo. If anyone wonders why the George W. Bush administration joined the Clintonites in the belief that "independence is the only viable option" and "there can be no compromise," it's because in the gangster's paradise of Kosovo, the United States alternates between hostage and gangster. The Albanians give us ultimatums, and we give the Serbs ultimatums. Our government toes the Albanian line, and our press toes the government line. United Press International's Robert M. Hayden gave a glimpse of it in March 2008: "The problem is not that 'Serb nationalists' are resisting 'the West,' as it is put by those U.S. journalists who honor the First Amendment by parroting the State Department. ... [A political solution] could have been reached with Serbia, but neither the Clinton administration nor that of George W. Bush wanted one."

A clearer picture emerges of the "failed" negotiations between Belgrade and Pristina, to which the Serbian delegation would come with lists of various broad compromises, and the Albanian delegation would look at their watches. Sabotaging the "negotiations" before each round - and redefining the term - Mr. Bush or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would announce that the end result would be independence.

An excerpt from a 1999 Q&A in Time magazine illuminates how far we swerved from our original goals: "The alliance wants Kosovo to be given autonomy within the Yugoslav federation, but opposes the full independence that the KLA is fighting for, fearing that creating a new Kosovar-Albanian state would further destabilize an already volatile region."

Today, however, even the language is reversed: that which we knew would destabilize the region is now promoted as what is needed to "stabilize" the region. And so our military is being used to enforce KLA directives and make the last of the resisting Serbs comply with the new reality.

Most of the last resisting Serbs are in the only remaining part of Kosovo where it is still safe to be Serbian, Northern Kosovska Mitrovica, along the boundary with Serbia. The Serbs there have been open to a partition that would allow them to stay within the internationally recognized borders of their country, Serbia. But we were informed by our Albanian "partners" that a partition was out of the question, ironically invoking "territorial integrity" - which our leaders then repeated.

Rather than Kosovo's diabolical path to statehood, our bureaucrats and media point to Belgrade as the problem, because it backs Northern Mitrovica, where Serbian institutions are still in place. We are warned that the real threat is Belgrade's refusal to recognize the land grab, its turning to Moscow for support and its creation of "parallel institutions." A rich admonition indeed, given that Kosovo's parallel Albanian institutions within the host society were what brought us to the hailed secession itself.

NATO troops have been amassing around Northern Mitrovica, and in a few months, with or without Belgrade finally selling out the Kosovo Serbs (always a looming possibility), we will witness the next act of war by U.S.-led NATO against an ally that has never been a threat to America. We will be enforcing borders that only one-third of U.N. member states even recognize to deliver nothing less than the full territory that our masters demand.

This time, when Americans watch our military "contain" the Serbs, they should recognize it for what it is. The troops themselves would do well to understand what is being enforced with their hands. And when the images gracing American TVs are again exclusively of the "wild" Serbian reaction, meant to depict Serbs as violent and therefore justifying the aggression that caused it, Americans should ask themselves how they might react if coerced to secede from their country by an ethnic group that reached majority status in their area.

In February 2007, Jim Jatras, a former senior analyst for the Senate Republican Foreign Policy Committee, asked a Hungarian member of the European Parliament, "Why are you rewarding Albanian violence with state power?" The member replied, "Because we're afraid of them."

]]> http://www.savekosovo.org/default.asp?p=10&leader=0&sp=549 TBILISI -- The chairman of Georgia's opposition Labor Party is in Washington to discuss Georgian-U.S.-Russian relations and the recognition of Kosovo and Georgia's breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, RFE/RL's Georgian and Russian services report.

Labor Party Secretary-General Joseph Shatberashvili told RFE/RL that the main goal of Shalva Natelashvili's visit to Washington is "to start a dialogue with Moscow and Washington” on Moscow’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and Washington’s recognition of Kosovo.

Shatberashvili says that Labor Party leaders believe that if Washington would revoke its recognition of Kosovo's independence it would cause Russia to reconsider its decision to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states.

Shatberashvili did not specify with whom Natelashvili is scheduled to meet in Washington.

Shatberashvili said that after the talks in the United States, Natelashvili -- who is known as one of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's "most consistent critics" -- will travel to Moscow to hold similar talks with Russian officials.

Moscow recognized the Georgian republics as independent countries after a brief war with Georgia in August 2008.

Only Russia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua have recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but 62 countries have recognized Kosovo's independence from Serbia.

]]> http://www.savekosovo.org/default.asp?p=10&leader=0&sp=548 AS EVERYONE scrambles to predict a possible future outlook for war-ravaged Afghanistan, the negative variables continue to mount.

The Taliban have boldly stepped up their attacks in the power vacuum created by the failed August elections and the countrywide apathy in anticipation of the upcoming Nov. 7 presidential run-off vote.

October was by far the deadliest month of the war with 50 Allied soldiers killed, including yet another Canadian. The daring assault against the United States guest house in the fortified centre of Kabul last Tuesday — coincidental with an equally brash attack against the posh foreigners-only Serena Hotel — indicates that even in areas previously considered secure, the Taliban can now instigate violence and terror.

The steady stream of negative news has caused one international observer to warn us that "Afghanistan could become Somalia." Simon Chesterman uttered this dire warning while he was in Ottawa to deliver a speech to the International Development Research Centre.

Cited by the media as an Oxford-educated lawyer who is a specialist in state building, it was Chesterman’s quotes about the Balkans that disturbed me the most.

"The successes we’ve had in state building, such as they are, are places like Kosovo," he said.

While Chesterman is certainly not alone in his attempt to paint the Kosovo fiasco as a "success," I think that if we are going to use it as a yardstick to measure progress in Afghanistan, a little dose of objective reality needs to be injected into the equation.

Kosovo was recognized as the sovereign territory and religious heartland of Serbia prior to the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The ethnic Albanian majority of Kosovo, behind the armed instigation of the Kosovo Liberation Army, began a serious quest for independence in 1998 through a campaign of terror attacks on Serb police and civilians.

For years, the Central Intelligence Agency listed the army as a terrorist organization, but then had a change of heart in January 1999 when they were declared "freedom fighters."

In March 1999, the U.S. pressured the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into intervening in Kosovo on behalf of the ethnic Albanians.

The NATO bombing campaign, which lasted 78 days, triggered a massive exodus of Albanian refugees fleeing the war zone. This horde of humanity fled into neighbouring countries like Macedonia and created a humanitarian crisis the world could not ignore.

As NATO air strikes against targets in both Kosovo and Serbia failed to wear down the will of Serbs to resist, the NATO propaganda machine began spinning tales of widespread slaughter and genocide being perpetrated against the ethnic Albanians. While this may have kept morale up on the NATO home front, the body count and mass graves failed to materialize when the Serbs forced a negotiated peace settlement with the alliance.

As part of the terms of agreement for NATO soldiers to enter Kosovo unopposed, the West agreed to continued recognition of the sovereignty of the territory as that of Serbia. It was also stated in the UN Resolution 1244 ceasefire agreement that NATO would disarm and disband the Kosovo Liberation Army and protect the ethnic Serb minority and their Orthodox Christian religious sites.

As events unfolded, the army was never disbanded — it was simply renamed the Kosovo Protection Corps — and the Albanians launched an immediate wave of slaughter and destruction against Serbs and their property.

NATO troops initially dismissed these attacks against the Serbs as reprisals, but in March 2004 — five years into the international occupation — the Albanians staged a massive three-day pogrom of violence against the remaining Serbian enclaves.

The status of Kosovo remained in disputed limbo until February 2008, when Albanian leadership followed the U.S. State Department’s advice and unilaterally declared independence from Serbia. The U.S. knew that Russia and China would block such a secession at the UN Security Council, and they thought that by having the Kosovo Albanians deliver a fait accompli, they could bypass the procedural roadblock.

Given that Kosovo is occupied by some 17,000 foreign troops and is entirely dependent on foreign aid for survival, one could easily argue that there is nothing truly independent about it. When you add in the fact that it is an unstable administration headed by indicted war criminals and drug lords, one has to once again question what constitutes a success in the mind of Chesterman.

Kosovo’s current prime minister is Hashim (The Snake) Thaci, who was the political leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army when Agim Ceku was its military commander. Keen-eyed Canadian readers may recall that Agim Ceku commanded the Croatian troops who committed the barbaric massacre of Serbs at the Medak Pocket in September 1993. It was the Canadian soldiers of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry who bore witness to those events and who still question how individuals like Ceku can avoid being brought to justice. But I digress.

Despite incredible pressure from the U.S., only 62 United Nations countries to date have recognized Kosovo’s declared independence. On the flip side, some 92 nations have opposed that declaration. With Russian and Chinese vetoes at the Security Council, Kosovo cannot join the UN. As there are five European Union and four NATO members opposed to its independence, Kosovo cannot hope to join those organizations either.

On Oct. 8, 2008, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted to support Serbia’s request to have the legality of Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence reviewed by the International Court of Justice. Those hearings are set to begin in December of this year. Should the Serbian government successfully make its case, Canada may have to revoke recognition of Kosovo in order to respect the international rule of law.

Awash in violence, a rampant drug trade, war criminal leadership, occupied by foreign troops, dependant on foreign aid and a future status in limbo sounds a lot more like Afghanistan than Chesterman would care to admit.

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