http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsViews.htm http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic04/NewsST101404.html ChroniclesExtra! October 14, 2004 KERRY'S BALKAN POLICY MAY DEFEAT HIM by Srdja Trifkovic There is a bloc of voters that may easily decide the forthcoming election. A little over a million Serbian-Americans�their exact number is uncertain but this is a conservative estimate�are likely to vote this year in greater numbers than ever before. The significance of this group becomes obvious if we look at its geographic distribution. After Chicago, the main Serbian-American centers are Pittsburgh, PA; Cleveland, OH; and Milwaukee, WI. There are thousands of retirees in Florida and sizeable pockets in St. Louis (MO) and suburban New Jersey. In each of those states the size of the community exceeds the likely margin of victory for either candidate on November 2. In the past this was not a homogenous voting bloc. The old Serbian diaspora in the Rust Belt�third and fourth-generation, often unionized�was sympathetic to the Democrats, while most post-1945 anti-Tito �migr�s and their descendents tended to support the GOP on the account of its more solid anti-communist credentials. This time, however, both these groups will be united against Senator John Kerry. As serbsforbush.com explains, "Serbian Americans believe a Bush administration will have the integrity and wisdom to pursue even-handed and objective policies with respect to their ancestral homeland." As individuals many Serbian-Americans�steel mill retirees and yuppies alike�disagree with some aspects of President Bush's policies, but as members of the community they take note of the fact that John Kerry's foreign policy is being molded by Clinton's veterans whose zeal for anti-Serb interventions has been abundantly proven. On his web site Senator Kerry says of the Balkans, "We will continue to support the ethnic re-integration of Bosnia" and "The people of Kosovo must be able to determine their own future." "Re-integration of Bosnia" is the code for the revision of the Dayton Agreement and the liquidation of the Republika Srpska demanded by the Muslims. "Self-determination" is the code for Kosovo's independence. Candidate Kerry declared last month, "Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell, but that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war." Six years earlier, however, Senator John Forbes Kerry voted Yes to S Con Res 21 (introduced by Biden, D-DE, the "Kosovo Resolution") to authorize the war against Yugoslavia, which was adopted 58-41 on March 23, 1999. Last summer Mr. Kerry sent a vacuous note to the Serbian National Federation in Pittsburgh, ending it in Serbian with "Ziveli i mnogaja ljeta!" ("Long life and many years," a traditional Serbian greeting). One week later, however, he addressed a much longer and politically binding message to the Albanian-American community (July 23, 2004) in which he said he was proud to receive support from Albanians, promised to takcle the final status of Kosovo immediately, and attacked the Bush administration for "turning its back" on the region: "The people of Kosovo must be able to determine their own future, including how they want to be governed . . . Continued delay�which is all the Bush administration has offered�hardens the positions of extremists on all sides . . . I will need your help in building the support we will need in Congress and with the American people to carry out this historic task . . . I am proud that we will, together, help make real the dream of Albanians, of Americans, of our allies." The KLA chief Hashim Thaci was subsequently invited to the Democratic National Convention, which in itself was scandalous. On his return to Pristina declared: "It was confirmed once again that a Democratic administration would recognize and respect the will of the people of Kosova [sic!] for self-determination." "People are policy," they say in Washington, and history suggests that �range of opinion' will shape a new president's foreign policy as much as the specific ideas the candidate advances during the campaign. Richard Holbrooke, who infamously called Serbs "murderous assholes" (in an interview with Ted Koppel, Nov. 6, 1995), is slated for a top diplomatic post if Kerry is elected. Another candidate for Powell's office is Senator Joseph Biden, who sponsored the Senate resolution (March 23, 1999) authorizing Clinton to bomb Serbia. James Rubin, Albright's chief propagandist during the Kosovo war, is Kerry's senior foreign policy advisor. General Wesley Clark is also an advisor to Kerry, and tipped to be a likely successor to Donald Rumsfeld. While commanding the military campaign against Serbia he bombed civilian targets and presided over the massive use of depeleted uranium weapons. "He would rise out of his seat and slap the table. �I've got to get the maximum violence out of this campaign�now!'" (The Washington Post, 21 September 1999) Then there's Dr. Ronald D. Asmus, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs under Albright and now Kerry's foreign policy advisor, who says that the "unfinished business in the Balkans" is the most pressing foreign policy issue and who hailed the decision "to wage a war to stop Serbian aggression in Kosovo" as the defining moment for NATO. There's Will Marshall, also Kerry's foreign policy advisor, who enthuses over "the exemplary nature of the 1999 U.S.-led intervention in Kosovo"�a policy that, he says, was "consciously based on a mix of moral values and security interests with the parallel goals of halting a humanitarian tragedy and ensuring NATO's credibility." There's Philip James, former senior Democratic Party strategist, who says that Abu Ghriab was "sickeningly reminiscent of the darkest days of Serbian supremacy in the Balkans." The list is long, but the quotes are all alike. As The New York Times noted (April 11, 2004) Kerry's foreign policy advisors are more hawkish than most Democrats: "He routinely consults [with] Biden, Berger and Holbrooke� Potential secretaries of State Biden and Holbrooke, for instance, were leading advocates of military intervention against Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic during the 1990s� Many of the key figures around Kerry staunchly supported the Kosovo war." In brief, Serbian-American voters are aware that an incoming Kerry regime would seek to "finish the job" in the Balkans by dismembering Serbia, recognizing Kosovo's "independence", encouraging Montenegro's secession, destroying Republika Srpska, and "internationalizing" the crisis (non-existent for now, but certain to be duly procured) in Vojvodina and the Sanjak. Kerry's proposed Balkan policy is reckless in the extreme, and it should be a matter of concern not only to the ethnic group most adversely affected, but also to all Americans who are sick and tired of foreign adventures�by either party�that are not related to this country's security interests. Kerry wants to unleash a chain reaction he won't be able to control. If Kosovo is granted independence on the grounds that a geographically compact ethnic minority is entitled to secession, will the Albanians in Macedonia not demand the same right, based on the same model? Theoretically, the Hungarians in Rumania, who are more numerous than Kosovo's Albanians, could also invoke it. What will stop the Russians in the Ukraine (Crimea), in Moldova, in Estonia, and in northern Kazakhstan from following suit? What about the Turks in Thrace, and the chronically unstable and unviable Dayton-Bosnia, to mention but some of the European dominos that may fall in the wake of Kosovo's evolution under NATO? And finally, will the same apply when the Mexicans in southern California, New Mexico, Arizona, or Texas eventually outnumber their Anglo neighbors and start demanding bilingual statehood, leading to reunification with Mexico? Kerry's advocacy of Kosovo's independence would reward mass ethnic cleansing and murder, carried out on a massive scale by the Albanians ever since the beginning of the NATO occupation four years ago. It would condone the principle that an ethnic minority's plurality in a given locale or region provides grounds for that region's secession�a precedent that may yet come to haunt America in the increasingly mono-ethnic and mono-lingual Southwest. It would terminally alienate the Serbs, whose cooperation is crucial to making the Balkans finally stable and peaceful, at a time when American energy, money and manpower is more pressingly needed further east. It would create an inherently unstable polity that will be an even safer haven for assorted criminals and Islamic extremists than it is today. It would re-ignite the war in neighboring Macedonia, where the current semblance of peace is absolutely predicated upon the continuing status quo in Kosovo. Last but not least, it would commit the United States to continuing the Clinton-Gore "nation-building" Balkan obsession that culminated with the bombing of Serbia in 1999�an illogical, immoral, and utterly untenable rearrangement of the regional architecture which it would be in America's interest to reverse, not ratify and make semi-permanent. The Serbian-American community is determined to deny Senator Kerry an opportunity to pursue policies that would be destablizing to peace and stability in the Balkans, catastrophic to the interests of their ancestral land, deeply detrimental to the reputation of the United States, and contrary to all American ideals. * * * Dr. S. Trifkovic Foreign Affairs Editor, CHRONICLES 928 N Main Street, Rockford, IL 61103 voice (815) 964-5054 fax (815) 964-9403 http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsViews.htm |
