[BRIGADE] PJB: Does Balkanization Beckon Anew?
Published: Tue, 02/19/08
"By intervening in a civil war to aid the secession of an ancient
province, to create a new nation that has never before existed and,
to erect it along ethnic, religious and tribal lines, we have
established a dangerous precedent..."
Brigade, see Pat's latest below. Note we have much more on our site
for those of you who might want to read up on how Pres. Clinton got
us into the middle of this war.
Here's a few to get you started:
End Clinton's War Now!
by Patrick J. Buchanan - May 28, 1999
http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=322
The Mess They Made
by Patrick J. Buchanan - April 13, 1999
http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=300
Why Are We in Kosovo?
by Patrick J. Buchanan - January 22, 1999
http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=286
For the Cause, Linda
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Does Balkanization Beckon Anew?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
February 18, 2008
When the Great War comes, said old Bismarck, it will come out of
"some damn fool thing in the Balkans."
On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot the archduke and heir to the
Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo, setting in motion
the train of events that led to the first world war.
In the spring 1999, the United States bombed Serbia for 78 days to
force its army out of that nation's cradle province of Kosovo. The
Serbs were fighting Albanian separatists of the Kosovo Liberation
Army, or KLA. And we had no more right to bomb Belgrade than the
Royal Navy would have had to bombard New York in our Civil War.
We bombed Serbia, we were told, to stop the genocide in Kosovo. But
there was no genocide. This was propaganda. The United Nations'
final casualty count of Serbs and Albanians in Slobodan Milosevic's
war did not add up to 1 percent of the dead in Mr. Lincoln's war.
Albanians did flee in the tens of thousands during the war. But
since that war's end, the Serbs of Kosovo have seen their churches
and monasteries smashed and vandalized and have been ethnically
cleansed in the scores of thousands from their ancestral province.
In the exodus, they have lost everything. The remaining Serb
population of 120,000 is largely confined to enclaves guarded by
NATO troops.
"At a Serb monastery in Pec," writes the Washington Post, "Italian
troops protect the holy site, which is surrounded by a massive new
wall to shield elderly nuns from stone-throwing and other abuse by
passing ethnic Albanians."
On Sunday, Kosovo declared independence and was recognized by the
European Union and President Bush. But this is not the end of the
story. It is only the preface to a new history of the Balkans, a
region that has known too much history.
By intervening in a civil war to aid the secession of an ancient
province, to create a new nation that has never before existed and,
to erect it along ethnic, religious and tribal lines, we have
established a dangerous precedent. Muslim and Albanian extremists
are already talking of a Greater Albania, consisting of Albania,
Kosovo and the Albanian-Muslim sectors of Serbia, Montenegro and
Macedonia.
If these Albanian minorities should demand the right to secede and
join their kinsmen in Kosovo, on what grounds would we oppose them?
The inviolability of borders? What if the Serb majority in the
Mitrovica region of northern Kosovo, who reject Albanian rule,
secede and call on their kinsmen in Serbia to protect them?
Would we go to war against Serbia, once again, to maintain the
territorial integrity of Kosovo, after we played the lead role in
destroying the territorial integrity of Serbia?
Inside the U.S.-sponsored Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the
autonomous Serb Republic of Srpska is already talking secession and
unification with Serbia. On what grounds would we deny them?
The U.S. war on Serbia was unconstitutional, unjust and unwise.
Congress never authorized it. Serbia, an ally in two world wars,
had never attacked us. We made an enemy of the Serbs, and alienated
Russia, to create a second Muslim state in the Balkans.
By intervening in a civil war where no vital interest was at risk,
the United States, which is being denounced as loudly in Belgrade
today as we are being cheered in Pristina, has acquired another
dependency. And our new allies, the KLA, have been credibly charged
with human trafficking, drug dealing, atrocities and terrorism.
And the clamor for ethnic self-rule has only begun to be heard.
Rumania has refused to recognize the new Republic of Kosovo, for
the best of reasons. Bucharest rules a large Hungarian minority in
Transylvania, acquired at the same Paris Peace Conference of 1919
where Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were detached from
Vienna and united with Serbia.
Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two provinces that have broken away
from Georgia, are invoking the Kosovo precedent to demand
recognition as independent nations. As our NATO expansionists are
anxious to bring Georgia into NATO, here is yet another occasion
for a potential Washington-Moscow clash.
Spain, too, opposed the severing of Kosovo from Serbia, as Madrid
faces similar demands from Basque and Catalan separatists.
The Muslim world will enthusiastically endorse the creation of a
new Muslim state in Europe at the expense of Orthodox Christian
Serbs. But Turkey is also likely to re-raise the issue as to why
the EU and United States do not formally recognize the Turkish
Republic of Northern Cyprus. Like Kosovo, it, too, is an ethnically
homogeneous community that declared independence 25 years ago.
Breakaway Transneistria is seeking independence from Moldova, the
nation wedged between Rumania and Ukraine, and President Putin of
Russia has threatened to recognize it, Abkhazia and South Ossetia
in retaliation for the West's recognition of Kosovo.
If Putin pauses, it will be because he recognizes that of all the
nations of Europe, Russia is high among those most threatened by
the serial Balkanization we may have just reignited in the Balkans.
SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=951
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