Talks over Kosovo fail…*
The prospect of a new Balkans conflict came closer last night after Serbia made threats of “war” with the breakaway province of Kosovo.
After a four-month peace initiative failed to resolve the fate of the disputed territory, European diplomats, and even the Pope, made fresh appeals for Serbs and Albanians to avoid violence.
Nato foreign ministers will meet in Brussels today to discuss contingency measures should violence flare.
Concerns grew after Aleksandar Simic, adviser to Vojislav Kostunica, the Serbian Prime Minister, said that his country would defend its sovereignty “using all means” at its disposal.
“The State has no recourse other than war when someone does not respect the UN Security Council,” he told Serbian state television.
“Serbia has had negative experiences from certain armed clashes during the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, and this is why we are more prudent and cautious now, but, of course, state interests are defended by war,” said Mr Simic, a member of the Serb negotiating team.
His remarks provoked an angry response from Wolfgang Ischinger, the Germany Ambassador to London and EU peace envoy, whose 120-day diplomatic mission to find a settlement to the dispute expires at the weekend.
“One of the reasons none of these measures will work, is because the Serbs are a magnificently gutsy people, a “primitive” folk who don’t give a tinker’s damn for “world opinion” the “respect of the international community,” and all the rest of the pretentious cant that so impresses readers of the New York Times. What do the Serbs want? It’s very clear what they want, and there is no need for the sort of eternal kvetching that Freud indulged in about “what do women want?” The Serbs want all the Serbs in former Yugoslavia to be part of a new Greater Serbia being carved out of the ethnic mess in the Balkans. They want a Serb nation, and they don’t give a rap for any of the considerations that so intensely motivate Establishment World Opinion, and God bless them for that. World Opinion, in turn, doesn’t give a rap for a Serb nation. But why should World Opinion hold sway anywhere?
But first let us name these traitorous ex-anti-warriors, now shilling for global military intervention on behalf of the Muslim government. The signatories include: Israeli Hegelian political theorist Shlomo “vineri; Noam Chomsky; Christopher Hitchens; CUNY shrink Robert Jay Lifton; Michael Lerner, editor of the “pro-peace” Tikkun; Michael Foot, dotty guru of the left-wing of the British Labor Party; Bogdan Denitch, of CUNY and long-time socialist; Chilean pest Ariel Dorfman; Berkeley sociologist Todd Gitlin, participant-historian of the old New Left; Joanne Landy, of the “Campaign for Peace (sic) and Democracy,” former leader of the Draperite “Third Camp” wing of international Trotskyism; Phyllis Jacobson, of New Politics magazine, another spinoff magazine of “independent Marxist-Leninists”; Peter Weiss, long-time financier of leftist causes in New York; and Columbia University’s lionized moderate Palestinian Arab and literary deconstructionist, Edward Said.
May they all wind up in Srebrencia to greet the Serbs as they come marching in!” — Murray Rothbard