On Sunday, Kosovo declared independence and was recognized by the European Union and President Bush. But this is not the end of the story.
by Patrick J. Buchanan
When the http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2763.”
On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot the archduke and heir to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand, in http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3195, 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 http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2526 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. http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3404’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. 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.
http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=951