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Blog PostsPhantom Statehood III
By David Peterson at Mar 24, 2008 |
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Coverage out of Belgrade today, on this, the ninth anniversary of the first bombs of Operation Allied Force, the U.S.-led NATO bloc's aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999, is both depressingly and dangerously familiar. For as the opening lines of a report in the International Herald Tribune inform us, "
Note that, as is customary in Western reporting, indeed, as is little and perhaps nothing more than habit and reflex, language the meaning of which turns on division, partition, and separation along ethnic lines is attributed to Serbs, who, once again, are cast as the fount of ethnic hatred in the region.
This has been standard practice dating at least as far back as 1991. And maybe even earlier.
But in what meaningful historical sense of these terms -- division, partition, separation -- are ethnic Serbs, whether they live in
In point of fact, the Kosovo Serbs today -- exactly like the Krajina Serbs in 1991 (mutatis mutandis, of course), as the ethnic Croat majority in Zagreb declared the republic of Croatia's independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia -- are proposing to the United Nations that the UN permit them to remain where they already are -- inside the Republic of Serbia, that is, rather than force them to transfer out of the Republic of Serbia and into the "newly independent" Republic of Kosovo, the very existence and legitimacy of which are what both the Serbs of Kosovo and the Serbs of Belgrade are contesting.
Looking back to 1991, every time the capital of a republic within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia opted to break away from
In the republic of Slovenia and the republic of Macedonia, the number of people willing to contest these republics' right to break away from Yugoslavia, and to carry people with them who did not want to leave Yugoslavia, were the smallest; as a consequence, the violence of the civil wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia was least in Slovenia and Macedonia.
But in the republic of Croatia and in the republic of Bosnia - Herzegovina, the numbers willing to contest Zagreb's and Sarajevo's right to break away from Yugoslavia were much larger -- and in Bosnia - Herzegovina, they included both ethnic Croats as well as ethnic Serbs, who outnumbered the only faction that really wanted an independent state of Bosnia - Herzegovina recognized along its old republican boundaries, the Sarajevo Muslims.
The massive foreign interference aside (about which, see "The Dismantling of Yugoslavia"), these constitutional contests were what the wars over the fate of
Exactly so today. Nor can one help but notice how, in the newly independent Republic of Kosovo -- "independent" in name only, of course -- for all intents and purposes, Kosovo is a U.S. and NATO military base protected by the razor-wire of phantom statehood -- the ethnic Serb population which, straight through the U.S.-KLA declaration of independence in February, had demanded to remain within the Republic of Serbia -- itself an internationally recognized state and member of the United Nations -- have been denied this right.
Thus the same pattern as was instituted in each of the former republican units of
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"The Dismantling of
"Phantom Statehood II," Z.Com, February 22, 2008
"Phantom Statehood III," Z.Com, March 24, 2008
Reply to Matthew
By Peterson, David at Mar 27, 2008 18:45 PM
Matthew:
Thanks for the links. -- It seems to me that the surest way to stave-off serious escalation of the conflict over Kosovo is to permit the ethnic Serbs concentrated in the northern-most communities to remain where they have been living for so many years: Within Serbia, that is, rather than forcing them to follow the dictates of the newly "independent" phantom state of NATO-land.
About the "Mafia-State of Kosovo" (Michel Chossoduvsky, June 10, 2000), a report was circulated under the auspices of the Institute for European Politics some time in early 2007 that I myself have never been able to acquire, but that David Binder did and translated as “Operationalizing of the Security Sector Reform in the Western Balkans."
According to Binder\'s summary ("Kosovo auf Deutsch," Balkananalysis.com, November 18, 2007):
“[Kosovo] is a Mafia society” based on “capture of the state” by criminal elements. (”State capture” is a term coined in 2000 by a group of World Bank analysts to describe countries where government structures have been seized by corrupt financial oligarchies. This study applied the term to Montenegro’s Milo Djukanovic, by way of his cigarette smuggling and to Slovenia, with the arms smuggling conducted by Janez Jansa). In Kosovo, it says, “There is a need for thorough change of the elite.”
In the authors’ definition, Kosovan organized crime “consists of multimillion-Euro organizations with guerrilla experience and espionage expertise.” They quote a German intelligence service report of “closest ties between leading political decision makers and the dominant criminal class” and name Ramush Haradinaj, Hashim Thaci and Xhavit Haliti as compromised leaders who are “internally protected by parliamentary immunity and abroad by international law.”
Separately, Svante Cornell and Michael Jonsson once wrote in the International Herald Tribune that, in 2003, "a spokesman for the UN police said that Kosovo \'is not a society affected by organized crime, but a society founded on organized crime\'.\'\' ("Creating a state of denial," March 23, 2007.)
But if you thnk about it, who are the bigger criminals: The KLA? Or the U.S. military?
David Peterson
Chicago, USA
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