The Kosovo Independence Thread {P+R}

[Run DMB]

God I hate those people. Drop a MOAB on them please George.

Now you're speaking my language!

 

[Deisler]

Serbs and their short fuse.

But I'm still against Kosovo independence.

Why is that if i may ask?

 

[RobbieD_PL]

I'm pretty sure the Duma will recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the first place. Then probably Transnistria. The situation with Crimea is much more complicated and I don't anything is going to change there. Let alone the Baltics.

Hmm so in that case, Georgia is going to declare war on you. Fantastic. But that's of course if both armies can make it through the minefield of autonomous republics within Russia's Caucuses region to fight eachother .

Anyway That Northern caucuses area under Russian sovereignty is pretty volatile in itself. Now it's just going to get even worse. I know about Chechnya, but what about the allegiances of the other republics/kraj etc. over there? From what I know there's North Ossetia-Alania, Ingushetia and Dagestan as well.

Ah and one more Q Bonzi: What are you going to do in regards to Nagorno-Karabakh?

 

[::shinji::]

God I hate those people. Drop a MOAB on them please George.

They're white and Christian, it'll never happen

Now you're speaking my language!

now, now.. WWJD?

 

[RobbieD_PL]

Hahaha, designer-whores !

As the Cameraman posted, they don't represent Serbia.

Thaci, a drugdealer and a monopolizer of power by assasinating his political opponents in the KLA, on the other hand?

 

[Hopeunited]

Why is that if i may ask?

Because the way I see it, Kosovo is Serbian territory, and its "independence" would simply mean that it will eventually become a state of Albania due to the immensely increased Albanian population. This is nothing more than a way of Albania taking over a piece of land from Serbia, via indirect means. This would also set a bad precedent for separatists all over the world. You already have Chechenya, and then there is Taiwan, Tibet, next thing you know, Quebec even. Next, what right does USA have in this whole issue? They obviously want to reap the benefits of this "allegiance" so they can just have another outpost in the Balkans and take control of the drugs or whatever that go through Albania, and also control the general political situation, like they try to do everywhere else around the world. If the USA were so concerned about the peace of the Balkan region and middle east, why haven't they given a flaming f*ck about Turks prosecuting Kurdish people?

Serbs are volatile with their fuse and are, let's say, low in tolerance of other races. But I firmly believe that Kosovo belongs to Serbia as it is a place of Serbian heritage and mainly, the incentives behind this conflict are completely unjust. This is not independence, this is territory take-over, and the USA government benefiting. This so called "independence" will absolutely not lead to peace not only in the Balkans, but also in the rest of the world with separatists trying to create havoc.

 

[Help?]

Exactly. This is not just about giving independance to some little part of land and that's that. There are many lands like that in the world, but they don't retaliate to such an extent yet, however if one piece falls off, then the rest follows the suit. That is the exact reason why Russian is not giving up Chechnya, which is rightfully russian land. Its not that they need it, but if they do, then all the other small so-called provinces will want to separate as well and the world is gonna be full of crappy little countries.

 

[RobbieD_PL]

Bad argument calling them crappy little countries.

But yeh basically, In Yugoslavia and USSR, all federal republics gained independence and rightfully so. If you go further down the administrative level, who knows where it should end.

EDIT: bybuti, Even if you're not going to recognize that Kosovo was ever Serbian because of the overwhelming Albanian majority demographic there, it is a literal transfer of territory. The state of Kosovo is a false state. If you held a referendum tommorow, you would join with Albania, and you are not going to say to me "No we will never do that! Ahtisaarii the guy who gave us independence said, we couldn't join with any other state and we have to be as grateful to him as we are to Clinton, and respect his Plan forever!"

Serbia is not asking you to apologize for anything, nor should you have to. They wanted to give you internal autonomy for everything except foreign policy, defence and the external border posts with Albania, FYROM and CG, as is acceptable for a state's jurisdiction over its whole territory. You did not budge from your independence claims, so it was never going to be a proper discussion. No matter how much you hate them, Serbia has and should have sovereignty over all its territory. Same goes for FYROM, Montenegro and Greece - the other countries you want land from. You can't just take territory because you feel like it. There are international borders between states and they must be respected. What if Greece decided that all the Orthodox Albanians are Greek and an integral part of its nation and wanted to take the territory that they inhabit? They should not be able to?
But you don't really care about other nations concerns.

And yes you should be able to make a distinction between Tadic and Milosevic. If not then you might as well take revenge on those minority Serbs in Kosovo now, they're all the same as Milosevic to you. Well not now, but as soon as you join with Albania. Because if you are able to change the Article saying that you cannot join with another state, you can also change the Articles that give minorities protected rights. For you its all Albanian land, no other nation has the right to live on that territory anyway.

In anycase, you said yourself, that maybe independence is not the right way of achieving your aims, but it will lead to the right conclusion. Why then isnt Tirana sending soldiers to protect its citizens?

 

[Ubik Valis]

But I firmly believe that Kosovo belongs to Serbia as it is a place of Serbian heritage and mainly, the incentives behind this conflict are completely unjust.

Yeah, because they lost some great battle to the Turks there some 620 years ago. What a load of sh!t. The Serbs had plenty of non-Serb allies in that battle, so it belongs to those people as much as the Serbs then?

I'm gonna go proclaim Croatia as winners of World Cup 98, even though we lost to France in the semis.

The way I see it, it's not really Albanian land nor Serbian, but since the Serbs have treated the Kosovars like sh!t throughout history (but let's not forget that the Kosovars/Albanians have been just as good at retaliating) then it's no surprise that they want the Serbs to fu*k off. So yeah...too bad.

 

[RobbieD_PL]

Hey Croatia won 3rd place.

And before you take a Turkish Stabby-jab at me, We've won 3rd place twice.

 

[Ubik Valis]

Hey Croatia won 3rd place.

No! The gold medal was stolen from us! It is rightfully Croatian gold and has been since 1389!

 

[RobbieD_PL]

No it's not the fact that he was part of KLA that's my problem. It's the other stuff in that sentence.

I think he means to increase % of Albanians, but I'm not sure.

 

[RobbieD_PL]

No! The gold medal was stolen from us! It is rightfully Croatian gold and has been since 1389!

Gold that was Mined from the Mountains of Dubrovnik?

Mila, Kura si planina

 

[Parra Power]

He was commander of KLA

Which would make him a commander of an internationally recognised terrorist group. One that instigated conflict in 98/99. And as a high ranking official of a group with strong links with and backing from al qaeda he should be rotting in Guantanamo Bay.

 

[Parra Power]

Wall Street Journal Europe
November 1, 2001
Marcia Christoff Kurop

The Balkans' uncharacteristically silent exit from the world stage as the most prominent international hot spot of the last decade belies its status as a major recruiting and training center of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. By feeding off the region's impoverished republics and taking root in the unsettled diplomatic aftermath of the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts, al Qaeda, along with Iranian Revolutionary Guard-sponsored terrorists, have burrowed their way into Europe's backyard.

For the past 10 years, the most senior leaders of al Qaeda have visited the Balkans, including bin Laden himself on three occasions between 1994 and 1996. The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps, weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia. This has gone on for a decade. Many recruits to the Balkan wars came originally from Chechnya, a jihad in which Al Qaeda has also played a part.

These activities have been exhaustively researched by Yossef Bodansky, the former director of the U.S. House of Representatives' Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare. The February testimony of an Islamist ringleader associated with the East Africa bombings have also helped throw light on these actions.

They have however been disguised under the cover of dozens of "humanitarian" agencies spread throughout Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania. Funding has come from now-defunct banks such as the Albanian-Arab Islamic Bank and from bin Laden's so-called Advisory and Reformation Committee. One of his largest Islamist front agencies, it was established in London in 1994.

Narco-Jihad Culture

The overnight rise of heroin trafficking through Kosovo -- now the most important Balkan route between Southeast Asia and Europe after Turkey -- helped also to fund terrorist activity directly associated with al Qaeda and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Opium poppies, which barely existed in the Balkans before 1995, have become the No. 1 drug cultivated in the Balkans after marijuana. Operatives of two al Qaeda-sponsored Islamist cells who were arrested in Bosnia on Oct. 23 were linked to the heroin trade, underscoring the narco-jihad culture of today's post-war Balkans.

These drug rings in turn form part of an estimated $8 billion a year Taliban annual income from global drug trafficking, predominantly in heroin. According to Mr. Bodansky, the terrorism expert, bin Laden administers much of that trade through Russian mafia groups for a commission of 10% to 15% -- or around $1 billion annually.

The settling of Afghan-trained mujahideen in the Balkans began around 1992, when recruits were brought into Bosnia by the ruling Islamic party of Bosnia, the Party of Democratic Action, from Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, as well as Italy, Germany and Turkey. They were all given journalists' credentials to avoid explicit detection by the West. Others were married immediately to Bosnian Muslim women and incorporated into regular army ranks.

Intelligence services of the Nordic-Polish SFOR (previously IFOR) sector alerted the U.S. of their presence in 1992 while the number of mujahideen operating in Bosnia alone continued to grow from a few hundred to around 6,000 in 1995. Though the Clinton administration had been briefed extensively by the State Department in 1993 on the growing Islamist threat in former Yugoslavia, little was done to follow through.

The Bosnian Embassy in Vienna issued a passport to bin Laden in 1993, according to various reports in the Yugoslav press at the time. The reports add that bin Laden then visited a terrorist camp in Zenica, Bosnia in 1994. The Bosnian government denies all of this, but admits that some passport records have been lost. Around that time, bin Laden directed al Qaeda "senior commanders" to incorporate the Balkans into an complete southeastern approach to Europe, an area stretching from the Caucasus to Italy. Al Zawahiri, the Egyptian surgeon reputed to be the second in command of the entire al Qaeda network, headed up this southeastern frontline.

By 1994, major Balkan terrorist training camps included Zenica, and Malisevo and Mitrovica in Kosovo. Elaborate command-and-control centers were further established in Croatia, and Tetovo, Macedonia as well as around Sofia, Bulgaria, according to the U.S. Congress's task force on terrorism. In Albania, the main training camp included even the property of former Albanian premier Sali Berisha in Tropje, Albania, who was then very close to the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Not even stalwart NATO ally Turkey escaped the network. Areas beyond government control were also visited by bin Laden in 1996 according to London-based Jane's Intelligence Review. The government has been battling two terrorist groups: Jund al Islam, whose assassinated Syrian leader was one of bin Laden's closets confidantes, and the Kurdish PKK, whose leader, Abdullah Ocalan, merged his group's activities with those of Iran's Hezbollah in 1998.

Furthermore, as revealed in the February 2001 East Africa bombing trial testimony of Jamal al Fadl -- an al Qaeda operative in charge of weapons development in Sudan -- uranium used in "dirty bombs" that release lethal radioactive material, had been tested in 1994 by members of the Sudan-based Islamic National Front in the town of Hilat Koko, in Turkish-held northern Cyprus. Cyprus, both its north and southern sides, has also become a center for offshore money laundering by Arab banks fronting al Qaeda funds into the Balkans. The CIA puts al Qaeda's specific Balkan-directed funds -- those tied to the "humanitarian" agencies and local banks and not explicitly counting the significant drug profits added to that -- at around $500 million to $700 million between 1992 and 1998.

So where was the U.S. in all this? It was not until 1995 that the Clinton administration was forced to start pursuing the Islamist network in the Balkans. Not quite a month after the Dayton accords had been signed in November 1995, an influx of Iranian arms came into Bosnia with the apparent tacit approval of the administration, in violation of U.N. sanctions. While publicly pressing Bosnian President Alia Izebegovic to purge remaining Islamist elements, the administration was loath to confront Sarajevo and Tehran over their presence.

Instead, Islamist groups went quietly underground as the windfall of weapons landed in their hands. They later joined up with a new Islamist center in Sofia established as a kind of rear guard by the al Zawahiri. Following the Zagreb arrest and extradition of renowned Egyptian militant Faud Qassim, an al Zawahiri favorite, the Sofia-based militants planned the deployment in Bosnia of terrorists capable of planning and leading possible major terrorist strikes against U.S. and SFOR facilities, according to al Fadl's testimony to the House Task Force on Terrorism.

Islamist infiltration of the Kosovo Liberation Army advanced, meanwhile. Bin Laden is said to have visited Albania in 1996 and 1997, according to the murder-trial testimony of an Algerian-born French national, Claude Kader, himself an Afghanistan-trained mujahideen fronting at the Albanian-Arab Islamic Bank. He recruited some Albanians to fight with the KLA in Kosovo, according to the Paris-based Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues.

Controversial Relationship

By early 1998 the U.S. had already entered into its controversial relationship with the KLA to help fight off Serbian oppression of that province. While in February the U.S. gave into KLA demands to remove it from the State Department's terrorism list, the gesture amounted to little. That summer the CIA and CIA-modernized Albanian intelligence (SHIK) were engaged in one of the largest seizures of Islamic Jihad cells operating in Kosovo.

Fearing terrorist reprisal from al Qaeda, the U.S. temporarily closed its embassy in Tirana and a trip to Albania by then Defense Secretary William Cohen was canceled out of fear of an assassination attempt. Meanwhile, Albanian separatism in Kosovo and Metohija was formally characterized as a "jihad" in October 1998 at an annual international Islamic conference in Pakistan.

Nonetheless, the 25,000 strong KLA continued to receive official NATO/U.S. arms and training support and, at the talks in Rambouillet, France, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright shook hands with "freedom fighter" Hashim Thaci, a KLA leader. As this was taking place, Europol (the European Police Organization based in The Hague) was preparing a scathing report on the connection between the KLA and international drug gangs. Even Robert Gelbard, America's special envoy to Bosnia, officially described the KLA as Islamic terrorists.

With the future status of Kosovo still in question, the only real development that may be said to be taking place there is the rise of Wahhabi Islam -- the puritanical Saudi variety favored by bin Laden -- and the fastest growing variety of Islam in the Balkans. Today, in general, the Balkans are left without the money, political resources, or institutional strength to fight a war on terrorism. And that, for the Balkan Islamists, is a Godsend.

When Thaci was leader it was considered a terrorist organisation even by it's to-be allies America.
When Thaci was leader, Bin Laden himself made visits recruiting for him.

A country of African/SE Asian levels of poverty, with known terrorists in high ranking positions of government, within Europe. Just what the world needs.

EDIT: And that's without mentioning the precedent that has now been set. Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Chechnya, Basque Republic, Catalonia.......... will do wonders for global stability.

 

[Parra Power]

http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/Kosovo/Kosovo-Massacres.htm

if you dont scary from these things

It took about twenty seconds on Google to find about a dozen sites showing the exact same thing, from the opposite point of view, with nationalities vice versa.

 

[Jaboldinho]

Congratulations to everybody in Kosovo. It's about-f*cking-time.

 

[RobbieD_PL]

Gayness.

That's what you get when you have a liberal PM and Foreign Minister.

 

[Ubik Valis]

Stop bitching, ffs.

 

[RobbieD_PL]

Stop bitching, ffs.

It was meant to be a joke