"Bosniaks" vs. Bosnia

The recent flurry of nationalist rhetoric in Bosnia brought to mind something I read a couple of months ago. In March this year, former Bosnian politician - now an analyst - Nenad Kecmanovic gave an extensive interview to Nova Srpska Politicka Misao. Excerpts from it have since appeared elsewhere, but the full article is not available in English.

I've taken the liberty of translating the passages most relevant to the current situation:

[NSPM] Contrary to the widespread thesis that Serbs and Croats are the main opponents of Bosnia-Herzegovina, your opinion is that Bosniaks [Bosnian Muslims] are the destroyers of B-H. What is the basis of your judgment?

Kecmanović: If you have a project you care about, but you cannot implement it without voluntary cooperation of two partners who are not interested, the only reasonable way is to try to persuade them, win them over. Bosniaks, who are precisely in such a situation regarding their desired integration of B-H and the position of Serbs and Croats towards it, are doing precisely the opposite. They label their partners - Serbs, but Croats as well - incessantly as genocidal, fascist war criminals and push them even farther from their project. [...] They simply do not want voluntary, equitable integration that would be achieved through democratic dialog, mutual concessions, compromises and consensus. What they want is a unitary, centralized state, dominated by them, that would be forcibly imposed on Serbs and Croats by the international community.

NSPM: How much room to maneuver do Serbs and Croats have within that concept?

Kecmanović: The right of their neighbors, as constituent people, not to accept their project the Bosniaks don't see as a right to self-determination up through secession, but only as the right to submit or simply leave Bosnia [emphasis added]. So that Serbs and Croats wouldn't have any illusions that this project might actually be beneficial to them, Bosniaks are already declaring themselves the "fundamental people," meaning the other two are not fundamental, but minorities, interlopers, afterthoughts. Their language, invented like the name of their ethnicity, is called not "Bosniak," but Bosnian, in an effort to impose it as the only official language simply by its name. Their historiographers and publicists glorify Ottoman occupation as a Golden Age and a period of tolerance towards Christians, and invent their aristocratic genealogy. Naturally, this provokes in their Christian neighbors the collective memory of centuries of occupation and Turkish atrocities.

On top of all this, they still live in a conviction that, unlike Serbs and Croats, they bear no responsibility for the war, that they were solely the innocent victims, that they killed their neighbors only in self-defense, that only their national movement was not chauvinistic, that Izetbegović was the leader of all Bosnians, that with him they were building a civil society and defended multiethnic tolerance, that the mujahedeen came from somewhere out there, that their connections with Islamic terrorism are malicious fiction, that they embody the values of democracy... and that for all of this, of course, the West simply idolizes them.

Remembering the Storm

I got a blast from the past this afternoon, when someone re-posted a column I wrote last year, on the eve of "Homeland Thanksgiving Day" in Croatia.

The original piece, Remembering the Storm, is available on Antiwar.com. One year later, there's nothing to add, or subtract.

I've just got word that B92, a media house known for its promotion of the globalist, Serbophobic agenda, has actually shown a video clip of Croat and Muslim troops killing Serb soldiers and civilians. (Links: RealVideo, or Avi) It's a surprise, to be sure.

Still, I doubt much will come of it. As a result of over a decade of Serbophobic hysteria, murder of Serbs has just about been absolved as a crime - and in case of people like Ramush Haradinaj or Agim Ceku is actually considered a virtue.

Banned Solitude

Ananova.com reported on 24 July that a Belgrade cafe was forced (presumably by local authorities) to change its name, after U.S. Embassy officials complained it offended them.

Milomir Jeftic's establishment was called "Osama" which in Serbian means "solitude" or "seclusion." The Imperial bureaucrats must have thought it was a paean to Osama bin Laden, a onetime ally of Washington who now leads the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization dedicated to global jihad.

Instead of explaining to the ignorant Americans that:

a) no self-respecting Serb could name an establishment after an Islamic fundamentalist, not after 500 years of Islamic oppression, or after the 1990s wars where Islamic fanatics perpetrated horrendous crimes against Serbs;

b) the man has a right to name his cafe as he damn well pleases, and that's none of the government's damn business, be it Serbian or American,

the quislings in Belgrade leaned on the cafe-owner, rather than risk offending the almighty Empire.

This kind of spineless kowtowing is precisely what's led to the present situation, in which Serbia's about to be raped yet again, and told to enjoy it or risk another beating. If the government's job is to protect its citizens, then whoever was supposed to protect Jeftic from arrogant Americans' whining failed miserably, and should be sent back to under whatever rock he crawled up from.

Whose Intransigence?

The Washington Post is usually somewhat tragicomic in its imperialist cheerleading and dripping Russophobia (which often turns into Serbophobia, as the WaPo sees Serbs as nothing more than surrogate Russians), but its Monday iditorial on "Serbia's intransigence" surely deserves the grand prize in the "Arrogance of Power" contest.

As they see it, a "firm Western consensus" is that Kosovo should become independent so that poor victimized Albanians would never again have to suffer from Serb oppression, while the Serbs would be reunited with their cultural heritage when both Kosovo and Serbia end up as provinces of the EU, along with the rest of the Balkans, in some indeterminate but hopefully soonish future. It's billed as a "forward-looking vision" that most people in the region - including Serbia, they claim - support. Alas, the "problem, as so often during the past 20 years, is Serbia's political leadership, which remains addicted to the poisonous nationalism that drove the country into a series of disastrous wars during the 1990s."

Why, Prime Minister Kostunica dared turn a deaf ear to Western threats and actually had the gall to declare "Kosovo is a part of Serbia," just like the evil Milosevic did in the 1980s! (But, wasn't it? Isn't it? Would saying "California is a part of America" be considered evil, or poisonous, or nationalist?) And even the poor Imperial busboy Boris Tadic is pilloried by the Posties, for "threatening" border changes across Europe, something only the vile Russians ever talk about. And so, sayeth the Post,

"All of this means that the West's attempt to resolve the legacy of the Balkan wars of the 1990s and position the region inside the liberal Europe of the 21st century is in jeopardy of being defeated by Serbia's 20th-century-style nationalism and Russia's 19th-century game of power politics."

Never you mind that the "West" engaged in unprovoked aggression; violated its own laws, treaties, charters and principles to carve up Yugoslavia illegally and illegitimately in the first place (all this talk about a "liberal Europe" is horse-droppings; why did they so wholeheartedly destroy Yugoslavia, if they disliked the notion of a dozen mini-states in its stead?); and that its "solution" is unadulterated thievery. No, it's clearly the evil Serbs and vile Russians who threaten peace in Europe.

The WaPo ends the iditorial on a hopeful note: "The country remains, at least, a democracy: There remains the hope that, if its leaders cannot adjust, its people will eventually choose better leaders."

"Adjusting" means "obeying the Empire," and "electing better leaders" means "electing better quislings." If Tadic, Draskovic and their ilk are not subservient enough for the Washington Post,
probably nothing short of a triumvirate dictatorship by Sonja Biserko, Natasa Kandic and Biljana Kovacevic-Vuco would do.

The Post represents Washington's "liberal-imperialist" establishment, which has been responsible for the U.S. Balkans policy over the past 20 years or so. Sunday's collection of vitriolic drivel encapsulates their view of the Serbs, one that no amount of sycophancy will change. Serbia's spineless leaders ought to show the uppity mandarins in Washington just how severe their intransigence can be. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

Hegemonic Maniacs

Sometimes the sheer absurdity of the world we live in, the wrongness of it, tends to overload my synapses and I just stop paying attention for a while. If I ever allow that condition to become permanent, I would of course become one of the docile drones the Empire counts on to support its continued existence.

Paul Craig Roberts keeps paying attention, though. Just the other day, he listened to two Imperial officials prattle about the need for hegemony on NPR (where else?). In discussing North Korea, Roberts says,

"Both Hill and Carter agreed that no country, with the exception of Israel, has a right to any interests of its own unless it is an interest that coincides with U.S. interests. No other interest is legitimate."

Roberts continues:

"Listening to the pair of hegemonic maniacs, I realized that the United States is the new Rome—there is no legitimate power but us. Any other power is a potential threat to our interests and must be eliminated before it gets any independent ideas."

Yet for all the Neocon prattle about the US being the sole superpower with the world at its mercy, there are billions of people who disagree - and many of them belligerently so. If the USA is the modern equivalent of the Roman Empire, this must be what the Empire looked like in its waning days, its power still considered supreme even as it was in practice nothing more than a cruel joke.

At Last We Understand

Ever since the "October revolution" of 2000, the majority of people in Serbia - and at the very least, the deafeningly vocal minority that controls the media-political space - has maintained the dangerous delusion about Serbia's "democratic partnership" with the Empire. Both Vojislav Kostunica (currently the prime minister) and Boris Tadic (currently the president) have on many occasions called for "partnership" and "reciprocity" in the treatment of Serbia by the soi-disant "international community."

But that delusion has grown more difficult to maintain with the ever-increasing onslaught of demands and threats from Washington and Brussels, which in their supreme arrogance the Imperialists haven't even bothered to disguise with so much as a pretense of propriety. Having established early on that Serbia was not only bending its knee, but prostrate, they've considered only natural to do with it as they wished.

Now that even the weak, sniveling protests of Serbia's "democratic" rulers have met with nothing but scorn in the Imperial capitals, perhaps the delusion will finally be broken beyond mending, and the Serbs will realize their "partnership" with the West was but a different name for slavery. Them as who have eyes can now see clearly.

Nova Srpska Politicka Misao, June 26, 2006

Nikola Malbaški

Complete Defeat!

That analogies between politics and sports are definitely becoming fashionable can be seen from the "football exchange" between Olli Rehn the Government. More important than figuring out whether the "EU is to blame for the loss against Argentina" or if "some countries didn't even qualify, after all" is that we've just suffered a coincidental humiliation in both politics and sports. It is finally clear that our ideas about being a "football nation" and "partners to EU and the U.S." have been delusions. No offense to football, but the defeat of Serbia's policy towards the West, and the West's policy towards Serbia, is the more significant of the two.

Whether speaking for himself or on behalf of the entire society, Prime Minister Koštunica has said what we more or less knew. The Fifth-Octobrist illusion about the West that "supported democratic processes in Serbia" has finally come to an end. That disappontment with the West that euphemistically terms its incessant demands a "partner relationship" is a source of apathy in the Serbian public, especially those in the "democratic forces." The dogma that "Europe has no alternative" is no longer valid, to the joy of some and the sorrow of others. Even the domestic supporters of the "international community" admit that we are being extorted, even if it is for "educational purposes." It's not that the small nations should have the same rights as the great powers, as that's never happened in history, but that even the small nations would have the right to a place under the sun. The incessant barrage of pressure reminds us that we are still on the "vanquished list," and nurtures the Weimar Syndrome.

After all the actual defeats of Serbia, as well as those perceived as such - independent Montenegro, pressure from The Hague and what seems to be in store regarding Kosovo - the least we need are unnecessary humiliations. One can only hope that we've hit rock bottom with the arrival of two U.S. F-16s from the same squadron that bombed Serbia in 1999, piloted by the same people. Between the symbolic football disaster and the "welcome to American heroes" who bombed us, our feelings and frustrations have been confirmed. We must admit to ourselves that we are a nation defeated, that our country is ruined, and tha we need renewal.

One could ask, with good reason, whether we had to lose 0:6 to Argentina, or if those very planes and those very pilots had to land on Serbian soil. Of course that it could have been different. Our defeats in both football and politics could have been more dignified. We could have scored a couple times against Argentina, and made a couple more saves, just as we could have asked not to be "visited" by those very "veterans of humanitarian intervention". They could have sent some other pilots, some other planes from another squadron, maybe even another NATO country that hadn't been so zealous in bombing us. The humiliation would have been lessened, the the taste of defeat less bitter.

Yet that indicates that someone, both here and in the West, does not care much for such "details," and sent whoever was sent to specifically remind us who won and who lost. Football-wise, the Argentines only did their job; we failed completely. But what about the "welcome to our American allies," besides the bitterness of the military so visible on the faces of our airmen and those who consider this an insult to the remnants of our national dignity? Were we fans of conspiracy theories, we'd say that someone is deliberately acting in the fashion calculated to bring the Radicals to power.

While everything looks bleak, however, we ought to consider if there is anything positive in all this. If there is, it would be the end of some illusions, first and foremost the "partnership with Europe," and the naive belief in "quick entry into the EU. " Once a man or a society finally understand the cruel reality surrounding them, they face a choice. Either they will fall into depressing defeatism, or they will snap back and try to improve their precarious position by doing better. Alas, the former now appears more likely.

I haven't been to Serbia in a while, so I don't really know the feeling there. From the media, one would conclude that indeed, defeatism is inevitable and resistance to the Empire is completely unlikely. But the media lie - it is both their job and their pleasure. And maybe those who have forgotten their history, their faith and their identity in order to become "progressive" postmodernists obsessed with material wealth, status and "rights" (i.e. entitlements) of the welfare state are at this point likely to despair that the masters whose boots they've faithfully licked for years are still kicking them. Perhaps they will rail in anger at those who protest the kicking, and advocate an even harder kicking, so the Great Unwashed would finally understand the glory of being Empire's whipping boy. After all, they could have chosen anyone out there, and they chose us! We are not worthy!

But there are those who know better, those who still remember, those who are not yet corrupted, or can be redeemed. Those who should stand up and declare that enough is enough - and has been enough for quite some time. Slavery is not freedom, humiliation is not partnership, occupation is not liberty, and entitlements are not rights. That obedience to the Empire and slavish following of orders are not values to live by. That the causes for which several million of our people have perished - liberty, independence, dignity, freedom, honor - are worth more than all the paper money thrown out of helicopters and stuffed in suitcases for the use of mercenary missionaries.

The world has lied about us enough. We should stop lying to ourselves as well. That alone will not solve our problems. But it's a start.

Peace at last!

UPI reports that, after over 100 years, Montenegro and Japan are about to conclude a peace treaty.

Back in 1904, the Principality of Montenegro declared war on Japan as an act of solidarity with Russia. The Russo-Japanese war ended in 1905 through the mediation of Theodore Roosevelt, but Montenegro never signed a peace treaty with the Japanese Empire. The most likely reason is that no one, including the Japanese, knew that Montenegro had declared war - and even if they did, would have thought it a joke.

I wonder if the Vujanovic-Djukanovic regime will now teach the children in Montenegro how their brave, absolutely non-Serb-related ancestors preemptively stood up to Japanese aggression decades before Pearl Harbor, and how the Japanese finally sued for peace out of fear of Montenegrin military might. Or something.

Voluntary Rape

The drama over Montenegro's separation from Serbia that has taken place over the past two weeks has been but an interlude in the much bigger play - or ploy? - by the Empire in the Balkans. Montenegro was a sideshow, albeit and important one, designed to further the main event: separation of Kosovo from Serbia. Just look at the names of those supporting the "independence" of Montenegro in Washington, and you'll see the same snouts promoting the independence of "Kosova."

In February, when former ICG board member Martti Ahtisaari opened the "negotiations" between Belgrade and the Albanian separatists in Vienna, Stanko Cerovic of the RFI ran a commentary which I've translated below. He described - with all too much sympathy for the poor little Powers That Be in the West - the quandary with Kosovo, and the likely thrust of Imperial policy. While I disagree with several of his assertions, as far as Imperial policy is concerned he has been right so far. That makes this commentary worth revisiting.

Concerning the Kosovo Negotiations

Stanko Cerovic, Radio France Internationale, 20 February 2006

Such as they are, the talks between Pristina and Belgrade that began in Vienna today have no real importance for the future of Kosovo. Even so, they indicate the difficulty of the problem facing not only the Serbs and the Albanians, but also the international diplomacy

This problem is so difficult, complicated and important, that literally nothing can be left up to the Serbs and the Albanians themselves. It is said they would negotiate only the internal arrangements in Kosovo, i.e. the rights of the remaining Serbs, but even those technical details are meaningless until there is a decision on Kosovo's actual official status.

Obviously, there is no point discussing internal arrangements of a state before it is actually a state. International diplomats sponsoring these so-called talks know this very well. The talks are needed to create an impression the Serbs and the Albanians are talking, so the Contact Group could then step in and cut the Gordian knot between them, since they are unable to reach an agreement. That way the Contact Group can feign neutrality and claim it was forced to step in because the Serbs and the Albanians could not find the solution themselves. The “solution” imposed by the Contact Group, after what it would claim was long and neutral deliberation, would be independence.

Arguments for such a decision are familiar already. As Kosovo governor Jessen-Petersen has said, “After all, you have to heed the will of the majority.” This is a sort of a democratic argument. Another is the economic argument, mentioned in every report from Kosovo: that the province is backwards, with over 60% unemployment, and that only independence could fix that. There’s also the strategic argument: so long as there is no security in Kosovo, this would feed Albanian extremism that destabilizes the region – Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro. Resolving the status of Kosovo is the key to regional stability – this is suggested by today’s Financial Times.

There is even a security argument, albeit unrelated to moral and human concerns. According to this, Albanians will be violent towards the Serbs for as long as their desire for independence goes unmet – but would be open to tolerance once independence is achieved. This argument appeared after the great anti-Serb pogrom of March 2004. The pogrom was condemned by the international community, which then promptly concluded it was grounds for fulfilling Albanian demands...

This sort of logic – showcasing just about all the corruption and hypocrisy politics is capable of – isn’t actually as rotten as it appears to its victims, in this case the Serbs and Serbia. International diplomacy is no longer especially partial to the Albanians; unofficially, many admit that NATO’s war was probably a mistake – but such is reality right now that none of those diplomats sees any other choice. Western troops in Kosovo can’t fight the Albanians, and why would they? Even if everyone wanted it, it’s unrealistic to imagine Kosovo in Serbia.

It is obvious that the diplomats are also aware that giving Kosovo independence would create tremendous problems not only in Serbia, but elsewhere in the region and in international relations in general. However much one twists the diplomatic tongue, the brutal truth is that Kosovo is an ancient Serb territory occupied by foreign troops, and if that is how one achieves independence, then any borders of any country are not subject to revision, as it only depends on who does the revising. However, when they weigh the negative consequences of their plan to Kosovo, Western diplomats still think it’s a little easier to impose independence on Belgrade than enter a permanent war with Kosovo Albanians. And they may not be wrong.

The trouble is that only one people and only one state are being violated here: the Serbs and Serbia. Belgrade has the grounds to wonder “Why us?” The answer is, because it is easy. Western diplomacy is trying to soften this injustice through various incentives. The recent visit of the European Commission chairman Barroso to Belgrade was intended to communicate that while taking away Kosovo, Europe is opening a door to integration. There is hope this could assuage the bitterness of Serbs that could bring the Radical Party to power, although no one knows how. The Radicals claim they would defend Kosovo better than the current government.

Concerning this policy, Le Figaro quotes one high UN official, who said:

Serbia will be “voluntarily raped”– namely, Belgrade will be required to declare the rape consensual after the fact, and then be given hush money by the rich playboy responsible for the act, in this case the EU.

Unpleasant, yes, and certainly not even the Western diplomats enjoy such open injustice and brutality, but no one sees another way of untangling the Kosovo knot.

An additional problem is that the various incentives the diplomats offer are far from convincing. Opening the perspective of European integrations to Serbia in return for its acceptance of independence is hardly credible. The Union is not open to further enlargement, and even if it were, only the entire region from Bosnia to Macedonia would be considered as a bloc. No one could even begin to guess when the entire region could satisfy even the minimal criteria for entry. Furthermore, none of the supposed conditions of Kosovo’s independence sound convincing, either. No conditional independence could restrain the Albanian extremiss. For, if the international community could not force them into moderation so far, it’s hard to see how it could do so in the future. The proposed ban on unification of Kosovo and Albania does not sound convincing either. Who could deny the Albanians the right to abolish the border separating them, and why would anyone try?

Under such circumstances, hardly any government in Serbia could accept the Western scenario of voluntary rape, even if it wanted to. But if Belgrade rejects this imposition and declares Kosovo occupied, as has been rumored, the consequences would be harsh and impossible to predict. Both for the Serbian people, in Kosovo and elsewhere, who would need tremendous strength to resist their own extremism as well as international political and economic pressure, and for the entire Balkans – as well as the international community, which would then have to face the consequences of its violation of basic rules governing the affairs between nations.

Together Longer

A joke I heard this morning:

A Montenegrin asks a Serb, "So, where are you going this summer?"
"Turkey," answers the Serb.
"Why?!" asks the Montenegrin in surprise, and a little insulted.
"The sea is cleaner, the beaches are nicer, the prices are better - and we had been in the same country a lot longer..." comes the response.

(thanks to Jelena)

Pots and Kettles

Lew Rockwell raises a valid question concerning the "trial" of Saddam Hussein: on what grounds, exactly, does one put a government on trial?

The essence of government is the right to obey a different set of laws from that which prevails in the rest of society. What we call the rule of law is really the rule of two laws: one for the state and one for everyone else.

Theft is illegal but taxation is not. Kidnapping is illegal but stop-loss orders are not. Counterfeiting is illegal but inflating the money supply is not. Lying about its budget is all in a day's work for the government, but the business that does that is shut down.

So this raises many questions. Under what law should the heads of governments be tried? If they are tried according to everyday moral law, they would all be in big trouble. Did you plot to steal the property of millions of people in the name of "taxing" them? Oh sure! Did you send people to kill and be killed in an aggressive war? Thousands! Did you mislead people about your spending? Every day! Did you water down the value of the money stock by electronically printing new money that you passed out to your friends? Hey, it's called central banking!

Judged by this standard, all states are guilty. And all heads of state are guilty of criminal wrongdoing if we are using a normal, everyday kind of moral standard to judge them. Thus are they all vulnerable.

To be clear, I'm not talking about states in our age, or just particular gangster states. I'm speaking of all states in all times, since by definition the state is permitted to engage in activities that if pursued privately would be considered egregious and intolerable.

So on what basis can one state put another state on trial? Yes, some regimes are worse than other regimes, but who is to decide and on what grounds?

Rockwell isn't a moral relativist - quite the contrary. He isn't advocating letting the government off the hook, but rather arguing against the hypocrisy of one government putting another on trial. "Pot, meet kettle," and all that.

When people like me raised that issue concerning the NATO-sponsored ICTY putting Slobodan Milosevic on trial, we got slammed for "defending the monster Milosevic," as if his misdeeds (both real and imagined) were somehow an excuse for outright war crimes committed by Clinton, Albright, Clark, Solana and the rest of that particular "joint criminal enterprise." When Rockwell and others criticize the show trial of Saddam Hussein and the occupation of Iraq, they are "countered" by "arguments" that Saddam was evil. Evil enough to justify starting an aggressive war, murdering tens of thousands, occupying a country, unleashing a jihad...?

I don't think so, and I wonder how anyone, in good conscience, can.

"Montenegrin" Victory

I don't suppose it will really matter if the 55.4% of votes supposedly giving Montenegro independence in this weekend's referendum are confirmed to be fair and square - the separatists have already declared victory, and the imperial media have already joined them in congratulations. I guess the world is safe, the global peril of Yugoslavia won't bother anyone any more.

Then again, even the New York Times notes that the "diaspora" from Brooklyn (i.e. Gusinje) may have been the deciding factor. It is buried down towards the bottom of the article, but it is there nonetheless. Something the NYT did not mention, however, is that while every pro-separatist "Montenegrin" was registered as a voter in the run-up to the referendum, tens of thousands who lived in Serbia were excluded from voting.

Three photographs came to me today (I have no idea who took them, when and where, so if anyone does, let me know). They show, beyond any doubt, that in addition to Serbs from Montenegro who backed secession for whatever reason, separatist voters were also Croats and Albanians.

Separatists carrying new flags of Montenegro are joined by a supporter sporting the Croatian flag.

Ethnic Albanians (a large bloc of pro-independence voters) wave Montenegrin and Albanian flags, celebrating secession.


Croat and Montenegrin flags, tied together, at an outdoor pro-independence event. Bosnian Muslim SDA party and the Croat HDZ had tied their flags together like this back in 1991...

I've got nothing against Croats, or Albanians, or Muslims (I won't call them "Bosniaks," that's just silly). But there is something wrong with their votes deciding the fate of Serbs in Montenegro. You see, "Montenegrin," like "Bosnian," is a territorial identity; until it was invented by the Communists, there was no "Montenegrin nation." (See here.) However, in the separatist drive to split from Serbia over the past 8-9 years, they've tried to assert a different language, church, even a completely separate ethnogenesis from the Serbs. The government of Milo Djukanovic has done everything in its power to deny its people their Serb identity.

As former Communists who pragmatically switched allegiances to first become "nationalists," then vassals of the Empire, denying their own ethnic identity did not come hard - they never had it to begin with. And now they are in charge of Montenegro, including the 300-odd thousand people who consider themselves ethnic Serbs, and still remember that Njegos, King Nikola and all the other great Montenegrins in history shared that sentiment.

One can only hope that their character and faith will be strong enough to withstand the systematic de-Serbification the separatists are about to begin. If they keep the faith, then perhaps those misguided "Montenegrins" will realize the value of their scorned heritage once their new "independent" state is taken over by folks who'd like to see Albania extend to Dubrovnik, or Croatia to Skadar, or Bosnia to the sea...

"We've already torched them all"

According to Belgrade daily Vecernje Novosti, Italian police released transcripts of wiretapped conversations between Albanian crime lords, boasting to each other of the "brave deeds" from the March 2004 pogrom:

Hazer: Why don't you ask your brother where he is?
Muharem: Why, you're in Mitrovica, right?
Hazer: No, I'm not in Mitrovica... We've torched all the churches in Prizren.
Muharem: Hell, torch them all!
Hazer: We've already torched them all, turn on the television so you can see them burning!
Muharem: I just turned it on.
Hazer: They're showing Prizren right now... All the church have been torched, not one is left.

(Serbian original here.)

Yes, obviously, such "humanitarian" acts and sentiments should absolutely be rewarded by an ethnically cleansed independent state.

How much is truth worth?

I know Balkan Express has been on-and-off lately, but if you'd like to keep reading it, you may want to consider sending a contribution to Antiwar.com. Think about it - you fund Imperial propaganda every time you buy a mainstream newspaper. How much do you value the ability to read something different? Perhaps we don't know the true value of things till they are gone - but by then it is too late.

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"Undertakers of Bosnia"

After the narrow defeat of the proposed constitutional amendments in the Bosnian legislature last week, the Social-democratic Party of Bosnia plastered the country with posters showing the "undertakers of European Bosnia" - the faces of 16 delegates whose votes defeated the proposal (see photo below).

Legislators who voted against the "April package" constitutional reforms. Source: SDP BiH

Now to see whether the choice of these men and women will have any effect on their candidacies in the general elections this fall. If not, then perhaps Bosnians have the exact kind of government they deserve...

Sovietization of America

The problem with being jaded is that few things surprise and outrage any more. For instance, when I saw what Dick Cheney said in Vilnius last week, I thought "How typical," rather than "Dear God, who does this man think he is!?"

But then, that's precisely what the advocates of Empire and its nefarious workings desire: that we should become weary and complacent - and always, always fearful of the world, from which only the Empire can protect us.

So I'm grateful Justin Raimondo is still capable of crying "bullshit" and letting slip the words of criticism. In his Friday column, "Comrade Cheney vs. President Putin : The Sovietization of American foreign policy," there's nothing I would not have written myself. And I should have.

Democratic Censorship

Last night (April 25), Serbian authorities forcibly closed BK Television. According to the ANEM (Independent Electronic Media Association), this was done on the orders of the Broadcast Council, following BK's criticism of the council's allocation of public frequencies.

There's so much wrong with this picture, it's hard to pick a place to start. First of all, the existence of the Broadcast Council, modeled after the FCC, is an abomination. How can any country have media that are free and independent of government pressure if a government regulatory agency can yank their license or levy fines on them if their content is deemed "inappropriate"? Long and short of it is - it can't.

Second, there's such a thing as due process - or at least there should be. The government should not have the power to simply send over the cops and shut down a TV station, or a newspaper - or anything, really - without properly filed warrants that could be contested in court. Something all too many people aren't aware of is that laws (starting from the Constitution onward) exist to protect them from the government, not the other way around.

This isn't about BKTV - I've hardly ever seen their programming, and its content is frankly irrelevant; if content were grounds for government censorship, B92 would have been eligible for shutdown ages ago (as if that will ever happen to the flagship of Imperial/Jacobin propaganda...). Making its protest a "Yes, but" criticism, ANEM says that the Broadcast Council "is faced with the difficult task of bringing order to the chaotic situation in the Serbian media sector and will have to make many difficult and unpopular decisions..." But what is so chaotic about the Serbian media sector that requires government "ordering," with police batons no less? How is that morally different from the Milosevic-era Media Law that was held up as the paragon of oppression?

I thank God and human ingenuity that with the advent of the Internet age, the whole mainstream-media model is becoming rapidly obsolete, and that soon enough people will be able to generate and distribute information and entertainment content directly to consumers, without government licensing, censorship or "ordering." Yes, this will require readers/viewers to actually think for themselves and decide whether their sources of information are credible or not. But considering how many people buy into outright lies at worst and negligent stupidity at best, only because it comes from the mainstream newspapers and TV, that can only be a good thing.

Absence explained

I've been in Bosnia for the past three weeks, and deprived of reliable internet access, so I haven't been able to post anything about the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic, the elections in Belarus, the Montenegro vote-buying scandal, or even the Bosnian constitutional reform (boring though it may sound, it was actually quite an interesting topic).

Now that I am back Stateside, I'll post some thoughts in the days to come.

Les pieds d'argile

While in Bosnia-Herzegovina this past month, I saw reports of student riots in France over the new employment law, and thought: "Wait a minute... they object to the possibility of being fired, even though they haven't been allowed to work at all before?" Reading up on the French labor laws confirmed my original snap judgment: the minds of the French seem to have been permanently addled by the welfare-state intoxication.

I've nothing to add to Alan Bock's excellent analysis of the situation, except perhaps to recall a post from last year, invoking a Sci-fi analogy to describe the EUSSR. The "People's Republic of Haven," much like France - and its brainchild, the EU - is a giant with the feet of clay.

Chasing a Non-Story

A strange story appeared in the New York Times on March 5. (A version of the story also ran in Australia's The Age the following day. However, The Age's version leaves out the most interesting part, so it's somewhat less useful here.)

Nicholas Wood, writing from Novi Sad, tells of a bizarre incident in which a family was told its father had passed away, only to find representatives of a private funeral home at their doorstep minutes after the hospital's call. Only trouble was, the patriarch was not dead - merely transferred to another ward, and the nurse, seeing the empty bed, jumped to conclusion. She also, allegedly, called the funeral home with the tip, so she could get a "finder's fee." The funeral home director denies the existence of such an arrangement, but Wood's sources in Serbian healthcare testify it is commonplace.

So far, it's a relatively harmless exercise in scorn ("OMG, Serbia's healthcare is so corrupt, nurses call funeral homes to get paid for dead people! Such savages!"), the kind of which wafts from every NYT article about Serbs and Serbia. But then Wood decides to take it to the next level:

"The collusion between health workers and funeral homes echoes a scandal that emerged in Zodz, Poland, in 2002. Prosecutors there investigated a similar trade and found that ambulance workers were deliberately arriving late at emergencies to increase their chances of finding business for funeral homes.

Prosecutors also discovered the widespread use of a muscle relaxant, which they believe was used to kill patients. Two doctors and two ambulance workers are on trial charged in the deaths of 18 people.

No evidence of such practices has come to light in Serbia..."

So, an ethically dubious practice of alerting funeral homes of deaths in hospitals has, in Nick Wood's mind, a lot in common with a criminal affair in Poland, where healthcare workers actually murdered their patients or deliberately allowed them to die. What exactly is the correlation? There isn't any. Oh, but Wood's choice of phrase ("No evidence... has come to light") implies that something like that may have happened in Serbia, it's just that no evidence has been found, yet. A false analogy, garnished with slick verbiage, leaving the impression that Serbian health workers are so corrupt, they are killing their own patients for a payout from funeral homes. Of course, Wood's story claims no such thing; but if it didn't mean to suggest it, why in the heavens did he mention the completely different, unrelated affair in Poland?

This reeks of the same technique used when mentioning "Srebrenica" in the mainstream press, where the (inaccurate) mention of "8000 unarmed men and boys" is inevitably followed with the qualifier, "the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II." And since it's part of the world's collective consciousness that WWII = the Holocaust, there is the Srebrenica = Holocaust (hence Serbs = Nazis) parallel the figure of speech is meant to invoke.

I have no idea how NYT decides on headlines; those choices are probably made in a New York newsroom, not by field reporters like Wood. This one was, "In Serbia, Deaths Set Off a Lucrative Race for Profit." It is by no means an ode to free enterprise (funeral homes), but a piece of filthy propaganda aimed to suggest that Serbs profit from death. The original non-story (nurses tip off funeral directors; amusing, but not criminal) is thus transformed into a vessel for demonization.

Think I'm reading too much into it? If you replaced "Serb" and "Serbian" with, say, "Kenya" or "Kenyan", there'd be an outcry that NYT engaged in racism. But Serbs, man, them you are allowed to hate. Doesn't everybody?

Our Man Agim

Prologue: Tuesday afternoon I received a phone call from a friend in Washington, who told me of information from a trusted source that Bajram Kosumi, "Prime minister" of the provisional Albanian government of occupied Kosovo, will be forced to resign and replaced by than Agim Ceku. 
"Can they do that?" my friend asked. 
"Sure they can, " I replied. "They are the Empire, and Kosumi is a client; they can do anything in Kosovo." 
Well, except protect non-Albanians, their property and culture, anyway - but why belabor the obvious?

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Kosovo PM Bajram Kosumi resigned from office, "under pressure" from "Western mentor states shepherding the U.N.-run Serbian province through talks that could lead to its independence." UN's viceroy and steadfast partisan of the Albanian cause, Soeren Jessen-Petersen, commented: "...we want to support Kosovo, but at the same time we want the leaders and the people to work very, very hard to earn that which they want to see in Kosovo."

(Handy translation: We = Empire; Kosovo = Albanians. Carry on.)

And sure enough, Kosumi's successor is Agim Ceku, the butcher of Krajina and the highest-ranking "military" commander of the terrorist KLA (Hashim "Snake" Thaci was its political leader). He is a natural choice to fill the shoes of Ramush "Golden Boy" Haradinaj, another KLA veteran who resigned as Prime Minister last March to face charges before the Hague Inqusition - which promptly released him and sent him back to Kosovo. Writes Chris Deliso of Balkanalysis.com:

"There's certainly no one as good as Ceku at removing 'unnecessary delays,' especially if it involves removing unnecessary populations."

So let's review here. First Bush II adopts a Balkans policy strategy written by the Clintonites, which amounts to secession of Kosovo, secession of Montenegro, a Muslim-dominated centralized Bosnia and preferably the smallest, weakest Serbia imaginable. Then Kai Eide, the Whitewasher of March, green-lights the final-status talks despite the UN standards (from "standards before status") manifestly nowhere near being met. Then Martti Ahtisaari, who was instrumental in tricking Belgrade to sign a truce in 1999 that NATO interpreted as unconditional surrender of Kosovo, and who then joined the Serbophobic and pro-Albanian ICG, is chosen to chair the negotiations. Then, following the death and beatification of Ibrahim Rugova, American and UK diplomats openly declare that independence of "Kosova" is inevitable, and Belgrade should deal with it. Now the "international community" shows the precise extent to which it controls the Kosovo Albanians, by forcing their top officials (Nexhat Daci, speaker of the Albanian parliament, was also forced to resign) out to make way for their KLA pets.

Despite his involvement in the deliberate slaughter of Serb civilians in present-day Croatia (for which the Inquisition has hounded his immediate superior, Ante Gotovina), Ceku not only didn't get indicted, he was put on UN payroll as commander of the "Kosovo Protection Corps," a sinecure for KLA veterans established after the occupation. When Ceku was arrested on a stopover in Slovenia, on a perfectly valid and legal Interpol warrant based on criminal charges in Serbia, he was bailed out by Viceroy Harri Holkeri who declared that "Serbia-Montenegro no longer had jurisdiction over the citizens [sic] of Kosovo." Holkeri displayed no such decisiveness during the Albanian Kristallnacht a few months later, hiding instead with the best of the rabbits.

After all this, can anyone in Belgrade who still has even a single functioning brain cell honestly believe that the "international community" (i.e. Washington, Brussels and satellites) has anything but an Albanian "Kosova" in mind? There is no doubt about it any more.

The plot to separate Kosovo from Serbia de jure as well as de facto should be the primary concern of whoever heads the government in Belgrade. Not chasing Ratko Mladic, or negotiating the possibility of a theoretical consideration of a promise to maybe negotiate the notion of eventually entering the EU - the preservation of Serbia's territorial integrity, here and now. Acquiescing to the "independence" of "Kosova" is treason. Trouble is, these days treason is trendy in Belgrade. It's progressive, civilized, "democratic" even...