Is Kosovo’s independence a good thing for the world?

The international community's campaign against Islamic terrorism, drug trafficking, the sex trade and gun smuggling has been dealt a major blow by the emergence of an independent Kosovo, encouraged and coordinated by planners in the United States and the European Union.

As members of the Kosovo Assembly declared independence from Serbia, most western commentators expressed sympathy with the Albanian-majority of Kosovo whom they argued had been the victims of “genocidal Serb maniacs”.

As a consequence of the demonisation of the Serbian race by western governments, journalists and public relation companies during the wars in the former Yugoslavia from 1991-1999, few commentators in the West were prepared to openly oppose Kosovan independence because of the all too predictable backlash they would receive from their colleagues, namely accusations of either being apologists for Serb nationalism and former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic or being die-hard communists.

The standard thesis, propagated by the West, was that it was Serbian aspirations for a “greater Serbia” which brought about the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), and that the Serbs implemented policies of genocide against Croats, Bosniaks and later on Albanians. The western-projected view was that the former were “bad” and the latter “good”. However, no conflict is ever as simple as this.

Albeit slowly, more and more scholars are emerging to offer a legitimate revisionist explanation of events which occurred in the former SFRY from 1991-1999. They argue that the West, principally Germany, Austria and the US, played a crucial role in igniting the wars in the SFRY.

These revisionist writers vary from senior diplomats to former officers of America’s National Security Agency.

According to Lord Peter Carrington, former British foreign secretary, secretary-general of Nato and chairman of the Geneva-based conference on Yugoslavia, the actions of the Europeans and the Americans “made it sure there was going to be a conflict” in the SFRY.

According to the standard western narrative, the Nato air offensive against Yugoslavia in 1999 was a response to Belgrade’s policy of “ethnic cleansing” against the Albanian population of Kosovo. But did this “ethnic cleansing” actually occur, and had the Kosovan Albanians been subjected to the discriminatory measures by Belgrade as claimed by the West?

Western commentators frequently cite a sentence from a speech made by Milosevic to Serbs in Kosovo in April 1987 as evidence that the Serb leader was from the outset intent on carrying out ethnic cleansing: “No one should be allowed to beat you!” However, there was nothing either implicit or explicit in this sentence which was tantamount to having encouraged ethnic cleansing.

The background as to why Milosevic visited Kosovo to deliver this speech is hardly told in the West. Far from having been an oppressed people themselves, it was actually the Albanian majority which since 1974 had been employing acts of violence and intimidation against Kosovo’s ethnic minorities: Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, Croats, Ashkalis and Goranis (the latter two being Muslim peoples).

Tito’s ill-thought-out 1974 constitution, which decentralised the SFRY, handed sole power in the running of Kosovo to Albanian communists, who subsequently enacted a policy of ethnic cleansing against the non-Albanian populations. As the renowned Balkan expert and former British diplomat, the late Nora Beloff, commented: “Life had become increasingly insecure for the rapidly diminished Serb population, whom the Albanians were resolved to drive out of Kosovo... I visited Kosovo several times and saw for myself that the Serbs still living in Kosovo were harassed and terrified, and had no recourse to legal protection for themselves or their families.”

To counter the injustices being experienced by Kosovo's minorities, Milosevic in 1989 stripped the province of its autonomy with the intention of safeguarding the territorial integrity of the SFRY. Indeed, Milosevic’s credentials in favour of a multi-ethnic state were evident in a speech he made in 1989 at Kosovo Field and which is barely referred to in the West: “Serbia has never had only Serbs living in it. Today, more than in the past, members of other peoples and nationalities also live in it. This is not a disadvantage for Serbia. I am truly convinced that it is its advantage.”

Despite Kosovo having lost its autonomy, the Albanian population continued to enjoy widespread freedoms. In fact, the province was allowed to continue with a parallel structure of government with the rest of Serbia, including a president, a parliament and Albanian universities and schools. But Belgrade chose to accept this as long as Albanian secession was restricted to passive resistance.

It was, however, the terrorist actions of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA-trained and armed by the intelligence service of Germany, the BND) which left the authorities in Belgrade with no alternative but to launch an armed response (as any self-respecting country would) to neutralise these illegally armed, murderous secessionists who were not only killing Serb police officers but also Albanian civilians and members of Kosovo's other ethnic minorities who did not support independence.

Leading up to Nato’s air war against Yugoslavia in 1999, American officials repeatedly claimed that “hundreds of thousands” of Albanians had been “murdered” by the Yugoslav Army (VJ) and Serb paramilitaries. The US State Department claimed a figure of 500,000. Few commentators publicly questioned the wisdom of these figures at a time when the West had no personnel on the ground in Kosovo.

The fighting between the VJ and the KLA (a previously listed terrorist organisation by Washington and which still maintains a brutal reputation for being at the forefront in the sex trade and drug and gun smuggling in Europe) was, due to the geopolitical agenda of Washington and Brussels, presented in the West as a battle between “genocidal Serbs” and “heroic freedom fighters”. This image, however, contradicted what the American special envoy to Bosnia, Robert Gelbard, had said in 1998: “The UCK [KLA] is without any question a terrorist group.”

As it stands today, forensic experts acting on behalf of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia have exhumed 2,788 bodies believed to be Albanians and Serbs who had died of various causes. The West had fabricated a story as a pretext for sending in its troops to secure geopolitical and economic objectives.

Since 1999, Nato and the EU have allowed Kosovo's ethnic minorities to be cleansed by the Albanian authorities. Over 200,000 Kosovan Serbs have been forced to flee by armed Albanian groups which have also been responsible for the destruction of scores of Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries (some of which are listed by UNESCO).

For example, the Church of the Holy Virgin of Ljeviska in Prizren was set ablaze by Albanians in March 2004 during a pogrom against Serbs, and this was described by UNESCO as “an unpardonable act of vandalism against one of the most important medieval monuments in the Balkans.” Yet nothing is said by western governments because by doing so their pro-Albanian policy would be undermined in full-view of their domestic audiences.

Nonetheless, planners in the US and the EU have now achieved what they set out to when having planned and coordinated Kosovan independence. From an economic perspective, ensuring that the Trepca mining complex in Kosovo, estimated to be worth $5 billion (£2.54 billion), remains within the western orbit is paramount for planners in both Washington and Brussels.

And from a strategic perspective, maintaining the existence of Camp Bondsteel, the largest overseas American military base constructed since Vietnam, near the city of Ferizaj/Urosevac in Kosovo, enables the Americans to limit a resurgent Russia (a historic ally of Serbia) from exercising influence in the Balkans.

However, this short-term and short-sighted objective will come back to haunt the US and the EU (the Americans on September 11, 2001, learnt the price of having supported the mujahadeen, including those aligned to Osama bin Laden, firstly against the Soviets in Afghanistan and then against the Bosnian Serbs during the Bosnian civil-war).

Since Nato and the EU took control of Kosovo, it has become a major exporter of drugs, prostitution and guns to Western Europe. In Britain alone, over 70 per cent of the sex trade is run by Kosovan Albanians. Kosovo is now referred to by narcotics police as the “Republic of Heroin”.

On top of this is another critical dimension: that Kosovo has become a transit route and safe-haven for international jihadists and is showing increasing signs of Islamic fundamentalism amongst its Albanian population. Since Belgrade lost control over Kosovo, Saudi Arabia has been exporting Wahhabism to this region. Wahhabism is slowly extending its influence through the financing and building of Wahhabi mosques by the Saudi government and through Islamic charities, such as the Islamic Youth Organisation.

Countless numbers of western military and police officials who have served in Kosovo testify to the growing Islamist threat emulating from there, according to an investigation by the experienced Balkans journalist, Christopher Deliso.

An American special police investigator with the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) states that the Kosovan government is being filled with Islamists: “Islamist-sympathising officials are increasingly being inserted into the bureaucracy, and they are the ones deciding who gets to own what, who will go free in court cases, who gets permission to build things, who gets licenses, and so on.”

Former British UNMIK Field Coordinator for Protection of Minorities, Michael Stephen Harrison, asserts that in relation to counter-terrorist information concerning known Islamic terrorists, “the Kosovo Department of Justice won't act... because the people inside the institution are from the ‘other side’.” A former security officer for the OSCE, Thomas Gambill, comments: “We have terrorists here, and the Wahhabis coming in from everywhere.”

By having masterminded Kosovo’s independence, international law and the mechanisms of the UN have once again been disregarded by Western governments. However, international terrorism has received an important boost by these actions. The intolerant, cancerous independent state of Kosovo will serve only to weaken the efforts of the international community’s fight against Islamism.

With a growing Wahhabist influence in Kosovo, this country could become a crucial base for international jihadists plotting terrorist attacks in Europe and the wider world. As Deliso avers: “Perilous times lie ahead for the West in the battle with Islamic extremism-and that a big part of this threat involves the Balkans. The fact that through two decades of intervention, inattention, and criminal complicity the West has brought this scourge upon itself is, unfortunately, the most damning indictment of all.”