-Caveat Lector-
<<After researching my recollection for the specificity of facts about
"Albania", I recalled that Albania {to/with whom the Kosovars are aligned}
was (one of) the only European Communist nations that was wholly aligned
with China. Hmmmm ... and you notice how "Britain" {formerly the owner of
HongKong [and a variety of other currently unstable places], key player in
the 'Opium Wars'} keeps popping up as an influence in all the areas in which
we have committed military resources? A<>E<>R>>
>From www.albania.co.uk
<<begin excerpt -- excerpted to present 20th century history of Albania>>
Independent Albania.
Creating the new state.
Shortly after the defeat of Turkey by the Balkan allies, a conference of
ambassadors of the Great Powers (Britain, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary,
France, and Italy) convened in London in December 1912 to settle the
outstanding issues raised by the conflict. With support given to the
Albanians by Austria-Hungary and Italy, the conference agreed to create an
independent state of Albania. But, in drawing the borders of the new state,
owing to strong pressure from Albania's neighbours, the Great Powers largely
ignored demographic realities and ceded the vast region of Kosovo to Serbia,
while, in the south, Greece was given the greater part of Çamria, a part of
the old region of Epirus centred on the Thamis River. Many observers doubted
whether the new state would be viable with about one-half of Albanian lands
and population left outside its borders, especially since these lands were
the most productive in food grains and livestock. On the other hand, a small
community of about 35,000 ethnic Greeks was included within Albania's
borders. (However, Greece, which counted all Albanians of the Orthodox
faith--20 percent of the population--as Greeks, claimed that the number of
ethnic Greeks was considerably larger.) Thereafter, Kosovo and the Çamria
remained troublesome issues in Albanian-Greek and Albanian-Yugoslav
relations.
The Great Powers also appointed a German prince, Wilhelm zu Wied, as ruler
of Albania. Wilhelm arrived in Albania in March 1914, but his unfamiliarity
with Albania and its problems, compounded by complications arising from the
outbreak of World War I, led him to depart from Albania six months later.
The war plunged the country into a new crisis, as the armies of
Austria-Hungary, France, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia invaded and
occupied it. Left without any political leadership or authority, the country
was in chaos, and its very fate hung in the balance. At the Paris Peace
Conference after the war, the extinction of Albania was averted largely
through the efforts of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, who vetoed a plan by
Britain, France, and Italy to partition Albania among its neighbours.
A national congress, held in Lushnje in January 1920, laid the foundations
of a new government. In December of that year Albania, this time with the
help of Britain, gained admission to the League of Nations, thereby winning
for the first time international recognition as a sovereign nation and
state.
Bishop Noli and King Zog.
At the start of the 1920s, Albanian society was divided by two apparently
irreconcilable forces. One, made up mainly of deeply conservative landowning
beys and tribal bajraktars who were tied to the Ottoman and feudal past, was
led by Ahmed Bey Zogu, a chieftain from the Mat region of north-central
Albania. The other, made up of liberal intellectuals, democratic
politicians, and progressive merchants who looked to the West and wanted to
modernize and Westernize Albania, was led by Fan S. Noli, an
American-educated bishop of the Orthodox church. In the event, this
East-West polarization of Albanian society was of such magnitude and
complexity that neither leader could master and overcome it.
In the unusually open and free political, social, and cultural climate that
prevailed in Albania between 1920 and 1924, the liberal forces gathered
strength, and, by mid-1924, a popular revolt forced Zogu to flee to
Yugoslavia. Installed as prime minister of the new government in June 1924,
Noli set out to build a Western-style democracy in Albania, and toward that
end he announced a radical program of land reform and modernization. But his
vacillation in carrying out the program, coupled with a depleted state
treasury and a failure to obtain international recognition for his
revolutionary, left-of-centre government, quickly alienated most of Noli's
supporters, and six months later he was overthrown by an armed assault led
by Zogu and aided by Yugoslavia.
Zogu began his 14-year reign in Albania--first as president (1925-28), then
as King Zog I (1928-39)--in a country rife with political and social
instability. Greatly in need of foreign aid and credit in order to stabilize
the country, Zog signed a number of accords with Italy. These provided
transitory financial relief to Albania, but they effected no basic change in
its economy, especially under the conditions of the Great Depression of the
1930s. Italy, on the other hand, viewed Albania primarily as a bridgehead
for military expansion into the Balkans. On April 7, 1939, Italy invaded and
shortly after occupied the country. King Zog fled to Greece.
The social base of Zog's power was a coalition of southern beys and northern
bajraktars. With the support of this coalition--plus a vast Oriental
bureaucracy, an efficient police force, and Italian money--King Zog brought
a large measure of stability to Albania. He extended the authority of the
government to the highlands, reduced the brigandage that had formerly
plagued the country, laid the foundations of a modern educational system,
and took a few steps to Westernize Albanian social life. On balance,
however, his achievements were outweighed by his failures. Although formally
a constitutional monarch, in reality Zog was a dictator, and Albania under
him experienced the fragile stability of a dictatorship. Zog failed to
resolve Albania's fundamental problem, that of land reform, leaving the
peasantry as impoverished as before. In order to stave off famine, the
government had to import food grains annually, but, even so, thousands of
people migrated abroad in search of a better life. Moreover, Zog denied
democratic freedoms to Albanians and created conditions that spawned
periodic revolts against his regime, alienated most of the educated class,
fomented labour unrest, and led to the formation of the first communist
groups in the country.
World War II.
Using Albania as a military base, in October 1940, Italian forces invaded
Greece, but they were quickly thrown back into Albania. After Nazi Germany
defeated Greece and Yugoslavia in 1941, the regions of Kosovo and Çamria
were joined to Albania, thus creating an ethnically united Albanian state.
The new state lasted until November 1944, when the Germans--who had replaced
the Italian occupation forces following Italy's surrender in 1943--withdrew
from Albania. Kosovo was then reincorporated into the Serbian part of
Yugoslavia, and Çamria into Greece.
Meanwhile, the various communist groups that had germinated in Zog's Albania
merged in November 1941 to form the Albanian Communist Party and began to
fight the occupiers as a unified resistance force. After a successful
struggle against the fascists and two other resistance groups--the National
Front (Balli Kombtar) and the pro-Zog Legality Party(Legaliteti)--which
contended for power with them, the communists seized control of the country
on Nov. 29, 1944. Enver Hoxha, a college instructor who had led the
resistance struggle of communist forces, became the leader of Albania by
virtue of his post as secretary-general of the party. Albania, which before
the war had been under the personal dictatorship of King Zog, now fell under
the collective dictatorship of the Albanian Communist Party. The country
became officially the People's Republic of Albania in 1946 and, in 1976, the
People's Socialist Republic of Albania.
The man who became the dominating figure of the Communist resistance
movement almost from the beginning was the party leader Enver Hoxha
(1908-85). Hoxha rose from a boiling crucible made up of several explosive
ingredients: the daily travail of poorly armed and badly organised guerrilla
units fighting against well-equipped and highly trained occupying armies; a
nationalist determination to prevent the more powerful Yugoslav resistance
movement from interfering unduly in Albanian domestic affairs; constant
bickering with mainly right-wing British liaison Officers operating in
Albania during the war years; and the civil war of 1943-4. Hoxha emerged
from this blood-stained period as a very ambitious, ruthless, cunning and
fanatical Communist guerrilla leader and politician. He also managed to
combine very dogmatic Communist beliefs with fierce nationalism.
After pursuing the retreating Nazi armies from Albania and defeating their
right-wing rivals the Communists set up their own government, under Hoxha's
leadership, in November 1944. Unlike the Yugoslav Communists, their Albanian
counterparts had no direct links with Moscow during the war. This state of
affairs continued in the early post-war years, when the Albanian regime was
in effect a Yugoslav satellite. But Tito and his colleagues soon discovered
that their desire to make Albania part of the Yugoslav federation was
strongly opposed by Hoxha himself. They consequently tried hard to replace
him with a more pliant leader. But Hoxha employed all his machiavellian
deviousness to thwart Yugoslav efforts to topple him, and in fact succeeded
in doing so. Hoxha came to display the same ruthlessness in his
determination to create a one-party state. All opposition - political,
economic, social and cultural - was crushed with the utmost brutality. The
only group towards whom he showed any wariness or consideration during the
early years was the peasants, who made up the great majority of the
population. He first introduced a mild agrarian reform in order to win their
support. But later, when he had consolidated his own position in the party
and the country, he embarked upon a fierce campaign of full collectivisation
of agriculture.
The Yugoslav ambition to annex Albania created a split within the Albanian
party between a pro-Yugoslav and an anti-Yugoslav faction. The situation was
aggravated by the fact that the leader of the pro-Yugoslav faction, Koci
Xoxe, was appointed Minister of the Interior, thus in control of the secret
police and all other security forces. The 1948 schism between Stalin and
Tito suddenly gave Hoxha an opportunity to achieve three main political
ambitions: to escape once and for all from Yugoslavia's clutches; eliminate
pro-Tito opponents who had made life difficult for him for several years;
and to establish his first direct links with Moscow. From 1948 onwards he
was to embrace Stalinism with unparalleled eagerness and fervour. One could
say he became one of the Soviet dictator's most natural and consistent
disciples. Hoxha visited Stalin in Moscow on several occasions, when he
discovered, to his delight, that there was great affinity between them.
Although the Albanian leader had been a natural pro-Stalinist most of his
life, the close alliance and friendship with Stalin served to confirm and
reinforce all his innate domineering and bloodthirsty propensities. Both
believed in absolute personal power, which was justified by a very flexible
ideology which could be manipulated to suit all possible situations. Like
Stalin, Hoxha was utterly determined to destroy all opponents, real or
imaginary, and remove every obstacle his policies encountered. Hence under
his rule every trace of natural justice, of freedom of thought and
expression, as these terms are understood in the civilised world, was wiped
out in his country, just as it had been in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Stalin's death in 1953 and the emergence of Nikita Khrushchev as party
leader in Moscow were a severe blow to Hoxha. Not only did he lose a
powerful friend and like-minded teacher, he suddenly passed under the
control of a highly volatile and unpredictable political leader who held
dangerous reformist ideas. Hoxha's first shock came in 1955 when Khrushchev
decided to bring about a reconciliation between Moscow and Yugoslavia, whose
relations had remained frozen since 1948. The Albanian leader was asked to
bring to an end his regime's long hostility towards Yugoslavia and establish
normal relations with it. Although he made a few superficial friendly
gestures towards his neighbour, Hoxha was at heart opposed to any genuine
reconciliation, and he remained so mainly because he feared Tito's reformist
ideas. Another greater shock was Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in his
'secret speech' of 1956. Hoxha saw this as an attack not only against the
policies of his regime but also against his own personal position in the
Party and government. The Soviet leader's efforts to persuade Hoxha to
reform his rule and give up some of his Stalinist policies also proved
ineffective. As a result, tension between Moscow and Albania steadily grew
from 1955-61, when the final break occurred. The first signs of trouble in
the Soviet-Albanian alliance appeared in 1960, when Hoxha sided with China
in the early stages of the Soviet-Chinese ideological dispute. Matters came
to a head at the international conference of 81 Communist parties held in
Moscow in November 1960, where the Albanian leader openly defied Moscow by
supporting China's cause. A year later Moscow broke off diplomatic relations
with Albania and stopped all economic, industrial and military aid. The
Chinese quickly came to the rescue of their small ally in Europe with a
package of economic help. They undertook to build 25 industrial plants in
Albania with the assistance of Chinese technicians. But relations between
the two countries faced great difficulties from the beginning because of
their immense difference in size and the huge cultural and political chasm
that divided them. Nevertheless, Mao's cultural revolution did have a
profound impact on Hoxha: it led him to make all religious practices illegal
in 1967. However, serious strains between the two countries arose when the
Chinese government opened up to the USA and Yugoslavia in the early 1970's.
Hoxha rejected China's advice that his government should do the same. The
alliance finally came to an end in 1978, when Peking stopped all economic
and military aid and withdrew its experts. As a result, not only was Albania
left completely isolated, it was also deprived of all foreign aid it so
desperately needed.
The end of the alliance with China marked the beginning of a period of
steady economic and industrial decline. Factories and industrial plants
built in the 1950's with Soviet bloc aid became outdated and derelict.
Shortage of new machinery and equipment led to the widespread use of manual
labour in collective farms. The situation was aggravated by a highly
centralised bureaucratic system and inefficient management. At the same
time, incessant official propaganda exhorted people to increase production
and to rely more than ever on their own efforts and on natural resources.
1985 was an important watershed for all communist countries of Europe,
especially for Albania. In March, Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet Communist
leader. In April, Enver Hoxha died at the age of 76, after having ruled the
country almost like his private life for over 40 years. He was succeeded by
Ramiz Alia, a member of the Politburo who had served for several years as
Hoxha's principal deputy.
February 20th 1991, thousands of demonstrators protesting in the capital,
Tirana, topple down the statue of Enver Hoxha. Religion is legalised, the
religious institutions are opened and the ex-persecuted priests and hoxha's
are allowed to exercise their profession freely. March 31, elections are
organised all over Albania. The Party of Labour (reformed as Socialist
Party) wins the elections. In June, the formation of coalition government
for national stability. In December the collapse of the coalition government
is forced by the Democratic Party, because the Socialists are seen to be
stalling on the reform programme. Fresh general election is held in March
1992, the Democratic Party wins a landslide victory with over 65% of the
popular vote. In April, Dr Sali Berisha is sworn in as the new President.
The new government vowed to implement a wide-ranging reform programme which
will affect all aspects of life in Albania.
Throughout the life of the present Government, the focus of reform has been
to radically change the economic and social foundations of the country. It
has achieved many of its goals, and as a consequence, the DP won a landslide
victory in the General Election of 26th May 1996. The new Government has
vowed to continue with its wide ranging reform program and intends to bring
Albania into the the 21st Century.
<<end excerpt>>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>From Free Serbia: Other Voices from Serbia
http://freehosting.at.webjump.com/am/aman-bre-webjump/e-index.html
WHO ARE WE?
We are group of people from Serbia who have been struggling in the past
decade for democracy and a better future through various political parties,
non-government organisations, student organisations and other means of
political activity. Our goal is to present the current events in Serbia from
our own point of view. We shall try our best to present facts as they are
and opinions and analyses promoting a peaceful solution that can satisfy
all. We are against NATO intervention and we are also against the Milosevic
policy. We think that leaders of US and other NATO countries and the
leadership of Serbia alike, share their portion of guilt for what is
happening in Yugoslavia.
The true victims of NATO bombs are completely innocent people -
civilians, while those who are to blame are completely unaffected. This
whole tragedy goes way back when UN sanctions against Yugoslavia were
imposed in 1992 (and are still in effect), bringing our country to the brink
of economic breakdown, it's people to the edge of starvation, while
Milosevic and others who are responsible never even felt it...
March 28th, 1999.
Moral Imperatives and Geopolitical Interests: Kosovo
The New York Times of Saturday, March 27, quotes Laura Leslie, a senior
from Miramonte High School, San Francisco: "I don't want to see another
thing like what happened with Hitler, with a terrible person taking over
countries". Laura reads the newspaper and listens to the news, and in her
innocent way sums up the message of the propaganda war-supporting machine.
She is not to be blamed for oversimplifying what is going on in Kosovo and
why her country is at war again. The media will try to convince you that
this is true and that you should support the men and women of your armed
forces for the sake of your values and your children's future. But I would
like to offer you a less simplistic explanation.
To begin with, the rebellion in Kosovo is not the result of the last 10
years. Albanian separatism is the oldest nationalistic movement in what used
to be Tito's Yugoslavia, and it has started the circle of mutual mistrust,
hatred and eventually war in there. At the beginning of this century,
Albanians made only one third of the Kosovo population. At the beginning of
the fifties, after somewhat prolonged fight with the remains of what used to
be the Albanian qvisling state established by Mussolini's Italy, Tito's
regime decided to give this part of Serbia a political, cultural, economical
and juridical autonomy, as well as generous subventions from the federal
budget.
At the beginning of sixties, Albanian population made 2/3 of the Kosovo
population. At that time the first public demand for independence was
raised, during the riots in 1968 and again in 1981, several months after
Tito's death. None of us had at that time heard anything about Milosevic,
who was a banker with no political influence whatsoever. Their demand for
independence had nothing to do with repression, for if there was any
repression at that time, it could only have been an Albanian repression
against the Serbs in Kosovo. The New York Times, which can hardly be said to
be in favor of the Serbs, wrote at that time: "Serbs have been harassed by
Albanians and have packed up and left the region. The Albanian nationalists
have a two-point platform, first to establish what they call an ethnically
clean Albanian republic and then to merge with Albania to for a greater
Albania. Some 57.000 Serbs have left Kosovo in the last decade" (NYT, July
12, 1982) Rape, murder, threats, the destruction of property were the
instruments of such a platform, and with the police and courts in Albanian
hands, nobody could get protection from the state. In his book Origins of a
Catastrophe Warren Zimmermann, the last US ambassador to Yugoslavia, writes:
I had been warned by American journalists not to believe anything I heard in
Kosovo, so I decided to give Rugova a truth test. Refering to the Serbian
abuses against Albanians, I asked him how Albanians had treated Serbs when
they held the upper hand before the Milosevic period. 'Unfortunately", he
answered without hesitation, "there were many crimes committed against Serbs
' ".
Milosevic rose to power and gained popular support in 1988 with the
promise that he would put an end to the violence against Serbs in Kosovo.
The autonomy of the region was abolished in 1990, several months before the
dismembering of Yugoslavia started, just as the regional parliament declared
Kosovo's independence from Serbia. At that moment Albanians started to
organize parallel state institutions, such as schools, a tax collecting
system, courts and the police.
There is no doubt that during the eighties Albanians in Kosovo were
exposed to repression. The police searched their houses looking for arms,
arrested them without warrant and often avoided the legal procedure.
However, at the same time, Serbs were exposed to the same police harassment
by the same regime in Serbia, although not to the same extent.
All political forces among Albanians have publicly acknowledged that
their aim was not the democratization of Kosovo, but independence, which
means secession form Serbia, and joining Albania. They differ as to what
means should be most appropriate for achieving this goal, but they have
never made a secret that the creation of Great Albania, and not democracy in
Serbia or autonomy in it, is their aim.
Refusing to take part in Serbia's political life, especially in
elections, Albanians helped Milosevic stay in power. Instead of Albanian
elected political representatives, Kosovo was represented in Serbia's
parliament by representatives of the tiny Serbian population from Kosovo,
who were all, needless to say, Milosevics supporters. If Albanians had
decided to vote for their representatives only once, and they had a chance
four times in the last ten years, Milosevic would have lost the power. The
Serbian democratic opposition and independent intellectuals close to the
opposition have tried to organize meetings with leading Albanian politicians
several times during this period in order to convince them to vote, to take
part in Serbia's political life, which would immediately mean the fall of
the Milosevic regime, the protection of Albanian political rights and the
end of repression, but Albanian leaders declined any such proposal, with the
answer that the only thing they were interested in would be independence for
Kosovo. Thus Milosevic and Albanian leaders helped one another: he ruled
Serbia by using their votes, and, on the other hand, with repression helped
them radicalize the political situation in Kosovo.
Last year the Kosovo Liberation Army emerged as an important player in
Kosovo's political game. Reading The New York Times or listening to NATO
leaders, one might get the impression that the KLA is something like The Red
Cross, or a group of peaceful old ladies who every day bring flowers to
Serbian houses. But it is not so. It is an armed paramilitary formation
which last summer had two thirds of Kosovo under its control. The KLA has
ethnically pure and independent Kosovo as its only aim. It struggles for it
not with political, but with violent means: attacking police patrols,
Serbian civilians and their houses, forcing them to leave Kosovo, and
bombing coffee-shops in which Serbian kids gather. I would like to stress
the fact that what they do is ethnic cleansing as well. Killing civilians is
killing civilians, and I expect your indignation to be the same in any
criminal case of this sort. Not a single day has passed in the year and a
half without a report that at least three people were killed by the KLA,
Serbs as well as Albanians loyal to the state. It would be highly
hypocritical to refer to the KLA as to "unarmed civilians", when it calls
itself an Army. On the other hand, in the process of regaining control over
the parts of Kosovo under the rule of the KLA, Serbian authorities performed
actions in which civilians were murdered as in the village of Racak in
January. There is not any excuse for this, and The Hague Tribunal has
already started an investigation about it and all similar cases.
Last October a peace agreement between the Serbian authorities and the
leaders of the KLA was reached. According to it, the Serbian government
would withdraw all the special police and some of the military units, and
the KLA would cease its operations until the final peace agreement was
reached. Only the first part of this deal was fulfilled. The KLA never
stopped the killings, the excuse being that it had no central command and
that the local units cannot be controlled by anyone. After the Serbian
police and military units withdrew from Kosovo, the KLA simply walked into
the empty space and gained control over a large part of Kosovo and continued
the violence.
As you can see, the demand for Kosovo's independence led to the
repression, the repression led to KLA and terrorism, terrorism led to
Serbian military and police intervention, and it led to NATO's assault on
Yugoslavia. None of the steps I have listed was unavoidable. Nevertheless,
everything eventually comes down to the question of Kosovo's independence.
As I was never tempted to support the idea of Great Serbia, I do not
understand why anyone should think that Great Albania is a noble aim. This
aim can be achieved only at the cost of changing borders and by ethnically
cleansing Kosovo of Serbs in the first phase, and then by repeating the same
procedure in Macedonia, which also has a numerous Albanian minority.
Not Milosevic, but Yugoslavia is being bombed today for the failure of
its representatives to sign the document offered in Rambouillet. This
document is not the result of negotiations and peace talks, and it meets all
the demands of only one side in the conflict. According to it, Kosovo will
stay in Serbia as a self-governed region only for the next three years,
after which period it may declare its independence. The Albanian delegation
has signed the document, but they have enclosed a written statement which
says that they do not give up their central aim, the independence or Kosovo.
The Serbian side accepts a broad autonomy, but declines both the possibility
of independence, and the occupation by some 28000 NATO solders.
As the leaders of the NATO countries say, the bombing will stop the
moment "Milosevic", who has become a general name for 10 million Serbs,
their state and their president, agrees with the Rambouillet document. This
means that the bombing will last as long as there is anything in Serbia
left. Neither Milosevic, nor anybody in Serbia can sign such a document, for
it would mean signing that part of our country will become part of Albania
in three years. Even though I think that Serbia would be better off without
Kosovo, I wouldn't sign it either. This is neither a matter of Serbian
sentimentality, nor has it anything to do with the battle of Kosovo in 1389,
as some crash-course experts would have it. It has to do with the principles
and with the right of any country to protect its borders and its integrity.
In spite of repeated claims that the NATO countries are not in favor of
Kosovo's independence, this is exactly what they are supporting by their
military intervention. In Rambouillet Serbia was confronted with the
alternatives to agree with the secession, or to be bombed and thus forced to
agree with it; not much of a choice, as you see.
If the term ethnic cleansing is to be used, it has been committed by
both Albanians and Serbs over the last 20 years, but a genocide has not
taken place, and the killings happen on a much smaller scale than in Algeria
or Ethiopia, to name only two current crises in the world. Yugoslavia is a
sovereign state and Kosovo is a part of it; Yugoslavia has not committed an
aggression against any neighboring state. On the contrary: it is being
threatened by Albania as a KLA base and by Macedonia as a NATO base.
(Leaving the Yugoslav territory the other day U.S. diplomat William Walker
said "Next time I will not need a visa to enter Yugoslavia", a sentence
which, as you might assume, does not mean that the visa regime between our
countries will be suspended.) The assault on Yugoslavia is a clear case of
violating the UN Charter, and no rhetoric can change this fact. If Serbia
refuses to allow a province to secede, outsiders have no right to label such
defense of its national borders an "aggression" and to support the rebels.
Great Britain fought for the Falkland Islands, the small leftover of its
colonial empire, and nobody bombed London for that.
The ongoing bombing of Serbian cities has taken its first victims. As I
write this text, the number of civilian casualties among Serbs is 1000, and
I invite you to compare it with the number of Albanian casualties in the
village of Racak in January this year, which was 40. Among other things,
NATO bombs have destroyed or damaged 50 schools, the printing facilities of
Koha Ditore, the leading Albanian daily newspaper, the ice cream factory in
Sombor, the 600 year old monastery Gracanica in Kosovo and the monastery
Rakovica in Belgrade. Recalling high human values and morality, the NATO
leaders do exactly the same thing of which they accuse the Serbs.
The bombing of Yugoslavia has produced exactly what NATO claims to have
tried to prevent: more destruction, more dead bodies, more violence and more
refugees. While the KLA is in offensive, rightly understanding the NATO
missiles and planes as its own airforce, Serbian extremists are taking their
revenge, thus taking into the conflict the parts of Kosovo spared killings
and destruction so far.
The further result of NATO's aggression on Yugoslavia seems to me easy
to foresee. A new era of insecurity has begun, for nobody knows when the
NATO leaders are going to invoke values, principles, and moral imperatives
as a pretext of attacking some other country without the authorization of
the UN. It can be Macedonia when Albanians take arms, or Romania, with its
huge Hungarian minority, or any other multi-ethnic state in the world. I am
pretty sure it will not be Turkey, even if a new Kurd upsurge breaks out,
and you probably do not need my help to understand why not. Second: from now
on no argument can prevent Bosnian Serbs to secede stating the very same
arguments the NATO leaders used in case of Kosovo, - to be able to live in
their own country - and that means the end of the Dayton peace agreement.
Thirdly: it doesn't take much to predict that Yugoslavia cannot defend
itself against the overwhelming power of NATO. It is only a matter of time
when NATO accomplishes its goal of seceding Kosovo from Serbia. The new,
greater Albania will not be a democratic and peaceful state, but aggressive
and violent, and the region will be shaken with violence and conflicts even
more than so far. As far as Serbia is concerned, Milosevic will emerge from
this crisis even stronger than before, but no Western oriented and
democratic Serb will be able to say aloud words like democracy, the rule of
law, and justice.
If the states usually identified with these values were able to violate
international laws and the UN Charter, hypocritically recalling the values
that were renounced by their deeds at the same moment, in order to help
dismember Yugoslavia, then we in the opposition are left without any
argument. The same applies to the International War Crimes Tribunal in The
Hague, established to investigate war crimes against the civilians committed
in last ten years in the former Yugoslavia, for there is no difference
between Serbian officers who planned and executed the bombing of the
Croatian city of Vukovar, and people who plan and execute the bombing of
Serbian cities and villages today. They can both list their reasons
endlessly, and the words like "moral imperative", "defenseless people", "our
children", as well as the sentence "the enemy understands only the language
of force" can be heard from them very often. Moreover, this will give a
perfect justification for all those who during the wars in the former
Yugoslavia supported or took part in assaults on civilians, and a perfect
excuse for further crimes.
What are the rules in the game of dismembering the former Yugoslavia?
Addressing the nation President Clinton made a hardly understandable analogy
with the holocaust, which would suppose that the Jews in Germany had a
Jewish Liberation Army, that they controlled part of, say, Bavaria and
intended to join it with Israel. However, the real analogy with Albanians in
Kosovo can be found in comparison with Serbs in Croatia. As Albanians in
Kosovo, Serbs in Krajina, Croatia, were the majority. As Albanians in
Kosovo, Serbs in Krajina were repressed and frightened by President
Tudjman's resurrection of Ustasa-Nazi ideology and its symbols. As Albanians
were deprived of their autonomy, Serbs in Krajina were deprived of their
constitutional rights. And, finally, as Albanians now, Serbs then took arms
and started to fight. In August 1995 the Croatian forces attacked Krajina,
bombed cities and villages and killed civilians, even fleeing refugees. In
only three days 250 000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed from Croatia and made
to join other 200 000 who came to Serbia from other parts of Croatia,
without being so far allowed to return to their homes. NATO was silent and
nobody said a word about bombing Croatia Consequently, the U.S. did not
cooperate in this matter with The Hague Tribunal, which investigated it as a
case of large-scale ethnic cleansing, by refusing to give the satelite
photos taken during the action of the Croatian army.
What were the principles and the values defended by the U.S. in 1995?
The principle was that no border in the former Yugoslavia could be changed,
and that no national minority had the right to form a new state on other
state territories. Four years later, the principle has been changed, new
values defended, and we witness the U.S. pushing Kosovo towards
independence, helping Albanians change the borders within three years and
form a new state on Yugoslavia's territory. This is what happened in
Rambouillet, and no high-flown rhetoric can make it look better, as no
rhetoric can diminish the fact that the number of refugees, according to
NATO sources, was 40 000, and six days after the assault on Yugoslavia the
same sources claim almost half a million. If this is not just a belated
justification for the assault, then somebody must be able to recognize the
fact that the number of refugees increased during the assault, and that the
assault produces the result NATO leaders say they want to prevent. Smart
bombs fall on Albanian heads as well.
If the U.S. are really interested in the peace in the region, then their
policy is totally counterproductive. Instead of supporting non-nationalist
and democratic forces, the U.S. keep supporting one nationalistic and
anti-democratic group against the other. Robert Gelbard, the U.S. diplomat
and former Clinton's special envoy to the Balkans, was the first to
understand that. He publicly said that the KLA was a terrorist organization,
and promised moral support for democratic forces in Serbia, thus isolating
extremists on both sides and announcing the only solution for this part of
Europe: Kosovo without terrorism and Serbia without autocracy. The current
U.S. policy towards Yugoslavia took another turn: supporting terrorism and
antagonizing even democrats among Serbs.
Zoran Milutinovic
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© Copyrights Free Serbia, 1999.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
>From http://www.pbs.org/pov/hongkong/timeline/opium.shtml
"The British Royal Charter formally established Hong Kong as "a separate
colony," and the U.S. became the first foreign government to establish a
consulate there."
THE OPIUM WARS (1839-1858)
The story of the British colonization of Hong Kong began with the advent of
trade with China in the 1500's. However, the importation of tea and silks to
Britain was not matched by exports to the East, and by the 1700's a huge
trade deficit had accumulated. As a means to reduce this imbalance, Britain
began growing opium in Bengal (overseen by the British East India Company)
and exporting it to China, where it quickly made a profit for Britain by
creating a huge market of addicts. In 1839, the Chinese "Middle Kingdom"
finally grew alarmed, as up to one fifth of the country's silver was lost to
European opium sales. This tension finally erupted in the First Opium War
(1839), with Britain easily overpowering the China's imperial navy. By 1841,
China formerly surrendered to Britain, and the ensuing Convention of Chuenpi
ceded Hong Kong to the victor.
Many in Britain felt the country had been duped by the Chinese. Hong Kong
was sparsely populated and far from any of the centers of imperial Chinese
trade. One correspondent wrote, "a worse situation could not have been
selected for trade, and that is the reason why the Chinese have so readily
ceded it. It may be considered as a banishment from the more civilized parts
of the empire by the Chinese authorities, who have insulted, tricked and
cajoled us." Despite these misgivings, the treaty stood, and Britain gave
assurances that the native inhabitants would be given full protection and
social and religious freedom.
The first Opium War officially ended with the Treaty of Nanking (1842), and
Britain proclaimed Hong Kong a free port in 1842, leading to an influx of
immigrants from the mainland. The British Royal Charter formally established
Hong Kong as "a separate colony," and the U.S. became the first foreign
government to establish a consulate there. But trouble soon arose between
the Hong Kong Chinese and their British rulers. In 1844, the Hong Kong
Legislative Council (LEGCO) passed a law to control the Chinese population,
which had grown to 20,000. The general strike and exodus of important
workers back to China brought business to a standstill, forcing LEGCO to
amend the law.
By 1852, the political unrest of the Taiping Rebellion in China caused
refugees to flee to Hong Kong. For the first time, it had become a safe
haven from the frequent upheavals on the mainland in a scenario that would
repeat itself numerous times in the following years. This immigration, along
with the continuing opium trade, led to a renewed period of tensions between
Britain and China. Finally, in 1856, these tensions climaxed with the
seizure of the British ship, the Arrow, igniting the Second Opium War
(1856-58). Once again, Hong Kong's Chinese workers interrupted commerce by
striking and boycotting in protest. During this period, in 1857, the
poisoning of 500 Europeans at the E Sing Bakery led to indiscriminate mass
arrests by the British. This reprisal was to leave a lasting legacy of
bitterness among the Hong Kong Chinese.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
A<>E<>R
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