Albanians Turn on NATO 'Liberators,' as War Explodes in Kosovo
Posted on Thursday, March 18 @ 11:40:00 EST by CDeliso 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. According to Itar-Tass, heroic American troops saved the lives of another 10 wounded international soldiers. Now, Belgrade is waiting for the green light from NATO to send in the troops, as Minister for Kosovo Nebosja Covic invokes Serbs' right to self-defense. Indeed, it's all come full circle in Kosovo. 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. http://www.balkanalysis.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=297 Serbian News Network - SNN [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.antic.org/