Albanians Turn on NATO ‘Liberators,’ as War Explodes in Kosovo

[Andrej Tisma]

http://www.balkanalysis.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=297

FORWARDED COMMENT ON RECENT KOSOVO EVENTS:


The seemingly spontaneous street war that erupted yesterday between
Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo confirms exactly what kind of a ‘success’ the
West has created in Kosovo. At least 22 people, including a French KFOR
peacekeeper reported dead and hundreds more wounded; machine gunners firing
at will, churches and mosques ablaze, whole populations chafing at the bit,
programmed to seek and destroy.

And through it all, the NATO “liberators” have become everyone’s target.
Aside from the French casualty, 10 Irish soldiers, 20 Norwegian troops, some
Swedes, Bulgarians and several Greeks have also been attacked.

The biggest surprise in all this is that anyone could be surprised. Really,
how many times and for how long did they need to hear it just to admit what’
s really been going on in Kosovo?

While the violence seemed spontaneous, now a “senior international United
Nations police official” charged that the attacks began according to the
plan that has predominated since NATO’s 1999 intervention:

“…this is planned, co-ordinated, one-way violence from the Albanians against
the Serbs. It is spreading and has been brewing for the past week. Nothing
in Kosovo happens spontaneously.”

According to another UN official,

“…Kristallnacht is under way in Kosovo… what is happening in Kosovo must
unfortunately be described as a pogrom against Serbs: churches are on fire
and people are being attacked for no other reason than their ethnic
background.”

Now, hundreds of fresh NATO reinforcements dragged in from Bosnia and
elsewhere are in Kosovo, where Reuters relays that “…Albanians in southern
Mitrovica were again clashing with U.N. police and NATO peacekeepers.” The
Albanians became livid when they saw NATO protecting the Serbian minority it
accuses of beginning the aggression. According to Albanians, fighting began
after 2 of their young were unnecessarily drowned. They claim that vengeful
Serbs had unleashed a dog on them and they were chased into the river
separating the city into its ethnic halves. Serbs claim that this was
preceded on Monday, when a Serb teen in the village of Caglavica was
severely wounded in an Albanian drive-by shooting. In any case, what is not
reassuring for Kosovo’s long-term peace and prosperity is that a war between
adults has sprung up from the antagonisms of children.

The Albanian drowning story came from a third boy who claimed he was with
the 2 who died, but then somehow escaped. Although their bodies were found,
UN officials “expressed shock” that the cause of death wasn’t confirmed. Yet
UNMIK’s attempts to cool the situation couldn’t keep pace with the chain
reaction of rumor-fed violence engulfing the whole province.

Indeed, most telling of all is that the Mitrovica clashes triggered
reflexive waves of violence throughout Kosovo. An Albanian hospital in South
Mitrovica, its floors “stained with blood” catered to over 200 wounded. Some
Albanian mosques were torched, including within Serbia proper.

Yet the helpless Serb minority felt the brunt of it. An Orthodox church and
several Serb houses “…were seen in flames in the ethnically mixed town of
Obilic on Thursday and NATO troops blocked the town center with armored
vehicles.” According to Tanjug, in Caglavica “…UNMIK and KFOR couldn’t stop
the many Albanians who wanted to go in the village… they demolished 2 houses
and detonations and shootings were heard. Serbian villagers are defending
themselves with farm equipment.” A photo carried by Skopje’s ‘Dnevnik’
showed a scene of carnage, the fleeing elderly, NATO tanks and general
mayhem.

KFOR troops who got in the way of angry Albanians in Pristina found out the
hard way about the price of humanitarianism. “People were trapped inside [a]
burning building,” U.N. spokesman Derek Chappell told Reuters. “Police came
under repeated gunfire when they tried to rescue them.” He added for another
report, “…this is a very dangerous situation. This is very large-scale.”

In Kosovo Polje, site of the famous 1389 battle between the Serbs and
Ottoman Turk invaders that helped make the Balkans what it is, Albanians
burned down a Serb health centre. In Belopolje, the Albanians drove out Serb
residents and burned houses, according to UNMIK. Albanians reportedly set
fire to three Serb homes in Pec and “…30 Serbs took shelter in a church,
which was then stoned by Albanians,” the Scotsman reports. “Shooting was
also reported in the area.”

Now, the KFOR peacekeepers’ involvement in Albanian-Serb violence seems to
be increasing in direct proportion to the speed with which those forces are
being reduced. Or, were being reduced, that is. Now, with all hell breaking
loose in Kosovo, “…a company of 100 to 150 U.S. troops and 80 Italian
carabinieri were already on the way.” Britain is sending 750 additional
British troops. The province, currently has 17,500 KFOR peacekeepers and
9,000 police, both UN and the “local” Kosovo Protection Corps force.
However, the latter are largely composed of the same paramilitaries that
provoked the fighting throughout the 1990’s as the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Hardly a confidence-builder.

KFOR and the UNMIK civilian administration have worn out their welcome in
Kosovo, as has been attested for a long time. Yet the colossal stupidity of
the West- in assuming that solving other people’s conflicts would somehow
leave them free from retribution- is being confirmed and increasingly
quickly. Now, we are only one major provocation away from a full-scale war.

Already the last few months have seen threats and attempted terrorist
attacks on UN facilities and vehicles. Yesterday’s exposion of violence only
increased this trend. In Pec, Albanians attacked the local UNMIK base and
damaged vehicles. In Mitrovica, several UN police trucks were seen ablaze.
Everywhere, UN offices were attacked.

So much for Kosovo’s stable, “multi-ethnic” future. If the West thinks they
can pull out without immediate interethnic war breaking out, they are
severely deluded. Any future Albanian-dominated regime will brush aside any
of the typical Western threats, such as economic sanctions and diplomatic
pressure. The West has only itself to thank for that. Demonizing and then
eliminating Milosevic ensured that it would go from having quite a lot of
influence to having none, once the legitimate center of authority and power
was destroyed. The result is a black hole, amorphous and irresistible, that
is dragging NATO and the US into yet another quagmire- not good timing
considering the deteriorating situations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, the determined little Jamie Shea is saying “we will contain this.”

Indeed. We’re sure Shea is ready to roll up his sleeves, don his body armor
and hunker down with the grunts who are risking their lives to end the
violence which he and the other effete little chickenhawks in Washington,
London and Brussels began. It’ll be just like the way Wolfie, Perle and
Cheney are pitching in to help the conscripts in Iraq.

The most telling part of any mass media news story is its postscript. Here
is where resides the kernel of conventional wisdom, that aggregation of
falsehood that allows interventionists to prevail time and again,
manipulating the media and the public towards the endless production of war.

In this light, Reuters’ postscript is truly revealing: “…Kosovo has been
under U.N. control since NATO bombing forced out Serbian forces in mid-1999,
halting Serb repression of Muslim Albanian civilians. Now there are fears
Albanians may turn on their saviours if demands for independence are
delayed.”

The mass media, like the powers-that-be, is timid. It confuses objectivity
with outspokenness and takes the press dispatches of formidable institutions
for truth itself. The first bit- about “Serb repression of Muslim citizens”
is fundamentally a lie. Yet admitting so would expose the utter fraud that
was the NATO bombing of 1999.

True to form, the second sentence is weak, self-evident and belated. Only
now are there fears that Albanians will “turn on” their saviors? Anyone with
the slightest bit of common sense could have predicted this months ago, when
the signs of physical intimidation of Western forces began to accumulate.

Indeed, it would not have taken a Nostradamus to predict, even before the
intervention began, that this would be the final result- a hopeless quagmire
marked by a colossal waste of time, money and most of all, by a needless
loss of life. As with all the others, this intervention has succeeded only
in radicalizing the world through violence; the ascendancy of the
terroristic.