Byzantine Blog

Serbia Rejects Replacing UN with (Solana’s) EU Mission

The UN Security Council is the only international body with a mandate to decide about the Kosovo-Metohija administration and security — this can in no way become the issue which the EU High Representative Javier Solana can solve to his liking, the cabinet of the Serbian Prime Minister told Beta news agency Friday.

The same source confirmed that Serbian government has strongly reacted on numerous occasions to the signals that the “EU Mission” could take over the UN posts in Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija without the UN Security Council mandate, which is the only international body that can provide the legal framework for such setup.

Solana Should Submit his Ingenious Ideas to the UN SC for Approval

Serbian government has rejected the deployment of the EU Mission that was to replace the United Nations Mission in Kosovo back in July, when United States representatives have submitted the so-called minimalist resolution to the UN Security Council for adoption. This document was envisioning the replacement of the UNMIK with the EU mission, in accordance with the Martti Athisaari’s (i.e. The Nazi’s) proposal.

The joint position of Russia and Serbia has succeeded in securing the political will in the UN Security Council which rejected such resolution.

The Serbian government source assessed that it is obvious certain Western powers are now working on finding ways to bypass the UN Security Council entirely.

“They decided that, if what they want can’t be done in accordance with the legal norms, they’ll bypass the law altogether. Serbia will reject every decision regarding its Kosovo-Metohija province which has not been approved by the UN Security Council, including the one regarding the EU mission. Javier Solana should submit all of his ideas to the Security Council, which is the only authoritative body that can reach decisions,” the Premier Cabinet representative said.

Both the EU and OSCE Missions in Kosovo Illegal Without the UN SC Resolution

According to the Beta agency, the EU diplomatic sources have confirmed that the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has met with Havier Solana on Thursday to discuss EU High Representative’s request to deploy the EU mission in Serbian Kosovo province at the start of next year.

Reportedly, Solana insists on replacing the UN Mission in Kosovo province with the EU bureaucrats, policemen and special troops, despite the lack of the legal basis for such a move. Backed by the US State Department and the few of the wealthiest Western European states, Solana proposes that the UN Secretary General issues a declaration which would enable the EU to secure thousands of jobs in war-ravaged southern Serbian province for EU’s incompetent, unemployable and useless bureaucrats.

Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica today reiterated that “there is no way in which contrary to Resolution 1244 an EU mission can be set up to replace UNMIK.”

Russia shares Serbian opposition to the attempts at bypassing the UN Security Council. Russian representative in the international mediating troika, Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko joined Serbian officials yesterday, stressing that Russia is not against the EU mission in Kosovo province in general, but that Moscow could support such mission only if there is the new UN Security Council resolution which would legalize the move.

“Without the UN SC resolution, such mission would be illegal. OSCE also needs the legal basis for continuing its mission in the Serbian province,” Botsan-Kharchenko reminded.

UN Legal Experts: Secretary General Cannot Overrule Security Council Resolutions with “Declarations”

Today, the United Nations legal experts have said that there is virtually no possibility for the UN Secretary General to issue a special declaration that would be based on specific (mis)interpretations of the elements of Resolution 1244, thus providing a semi-legal cover for the deployment of the EU mission in Serbian province.

“It is highly unlikely, even impossible, for something like that to happen, since the Secretary General’s role in such situations is merely procedural,” Tanjug news agency was told by the UN law office.

The UN legal experts explained that, when it comes to giving a legal mandate to missions, the Secretary General’s involvement ends at the moment the Security Council adopts a resolution.

“During his mandate, the Secretary General can issue appeals and insist on the full implementation of the resolution, but there is absolutely no way for him to influence the content of the resolution,” the UN lawyers said.

Tough Luck: Only the Security Council Can Annul or Change Security Council Resolutions

According to the UN lawyers, the UN Security Council resolution such as Resolution 1244 which has enabled the UNMIK deployment in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, can be annulled only by the sole international executive body — the UN Security Council itself.

The East River legal experts and diplomats told Tanjug that the announced attempt of the replacement of the UN Mission in Kosovo with the civil and security administration of the European Union will present the severe challenge to the Western diplomats, mostly because there are no hints that the Security Council could agree to end the involvement of the world’s organization in Kosovo-Metohija province.

Artwork by Zoran Spasojevic (Serbia)

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Weakened OSCE Fails to Adopt Kosovo Declaration and Joint Political Declaration

At the annual OSCE meeting attended by more than forty foreign ministers in Madrid, the decision about the extension of the OSCE Mission in southern Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija was blocked from being adopted. The joint political declaration was also not adopted, due to the “deepening rift” between United States and Russia.

The final OSCE document cites that the failure to adopt a joint declaration has weakened the organization, leaving it without the political roadmap and less effective, the German DPA agency reports.

The decision about the future of its Kosovo mission has been postponed. The US and its Western allies have failed to persuade Russia to revoke its decision on suspending Russian participation in the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty. Reportedly, Russian President Vladimir Putin has on Friday signed a law coming into force on December 12, about Russia’s withdrawal from the CFE Treaty.

Serbia Blocked Adoption of Declaration on its Kosovo Province: OSCE Mission in Kosovo to End in Case of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence

At the OSCE ministerial meeting in Madrid on Friday, Serbia blocked adoption of a final declaration on its Kosovo-Metohija province because the draft document included a determinant that the OSCE Mission in Kosovo should be extended for another year, “regardless of the outcome of the status process.”

“That element is absolutely unacceptable to Serbia,” Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic told Tanjug.

“We believe that the status process is of essential importance for the province’s future, the way of governing the province, peace and stability in the region as a whole. In keeping with that, the process may be observed only as a whole, we may not separate any aspect of international presence or administration from the package,” Jeremic told the Serbian national agency.

He stressed that Serbian stand is that such issues have to be resolved “with a single joint decision, a single joint document, just as it was done in 1999 with UN Security Council Resolution 1244.”

“So, I believe that the future of international presence in Kosovo, including the OSCE, may be regulated exclusively with an appropriate decision of the UN Security Council and may not be backed at the OSCE ministerial meeting, outside of what is going to happen in the status process,” said Jeremic.

“Since decisions are made through a consensus in the OSCE, Serbia disagreed with such a text. Serbia offered the text to be amended in order to reflect our standpoint, but some countries did not agree with the amendment and that is why the final statement on our province of Kosovo was not adopted,” said Jeremic.

Posted by Svetlana at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

German Mediator Misrepresenting the Facts

The Ministry for Kosovo and Metohija warned late on Thursday that the statement EU representative to the Contact Group mediating troika Wolfgang Ischinger has made at the recent press conference in Vienna, claiming that several proposals had been presented during negotiations, but “the Serbian side had not found any of them suitable” — does not correspond to reality.

Ischinger is Already Rewriting the History

Expressing surprise and disapproval of Ischinger’s statement, the Ministry pointed out that of all the papers the troika had presented to the state negotiating team during the negotiations, only the 14-item working paper had been presented as a joint document of all three members of the troika.

All the other suggestions were made by individual members of the troika and can in no way be subsequently viewed as troika’s joint proposals, Kosovo-Metohija Ministry said.

The Ministry warns of the possible consequences of such statements ahead of the drafting and presentation of the troika’s report, since the body is expected to present an objective account of the negotiations which will rely on facts.

Serbian Officials Were the Only Ones Negotiating

The Ministry reminded that during the whole period of negotiations, the Serbian side has taken a very active role, presenting a detailed, fully worked-out proposals on essential autonomy for Serbian province of Kosovo-Metohija. During the 120-days of negotiations, Serbian officials have offered comparative proposals corresponding with the models of similar wide autonomies existing in today’s world, such as the ones of Hong Kong, the Aland Islands, Iceland and others. Belgrade’s constructiveness has been acknowledged and recognized by the international public, as well as in expert and diplomatic circles.

Kosovo Albanian representatives, on the other hand, have offered nothing except a demand for independence.

Posted by Svetlana at 12:57 PM | Permalink

Mediating Troika Member on What’s Next

The international mediating troika — the representatives of Russia, EU and US — have started to prepare negotiations’ progress report to be submitted to the UN Secretary General on December 10, the Russian representative of the troika Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko said.

He told the RIA Novosti news agency it has been planned for the main part of the report to be put together on Sunday, December 3, when the troika members will head off for Belgrade and Pristina.

These meetings, according to Kharchenko, will serve to present the sides with the contents of the report. On December 9, in Vienna, the document will be presented to the representatives of the Contact Group members (Russia, Italy, France, UK, US and Germany).

The report is not expected to contain any conclusions or recommendations, because that was not the task mediating troika was assigned with.

Kosovo Albanians Took No Part in Negotiations, Passively Waiting for what they were Promised by Western Sponsors

In an interview to the Itar-Tass agency, Botsan-Kharchenko stressed that the main reason for the lack of success during the Belgrade-Pristina negotiations mediated by the Contact Group troika can be traced down to countless statements by the Western officials who kept claiming that Kosovo independence was “inevitable”.

“To expect Kosovo Albanians to be flexible and constructive in such a climate has proven entirely ludicrous. Pristina decided to simply wait for what it was promised, while Belgrade kept trying to find a way to reach a compromise,” the mediating troika member said.

“Unilateral actions will prove to be extremely dangerous for the region. The bad Kosovo example is already destabilizing Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Kharchenko, the representative of the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry in the Contact Group, said.

He pointed out that Serbian officials offered new constructive proposals during every round of talks, while their Kosovo Albanian opponents failed to introduce a single new element within their demand for independence — “according to the Ahtisaari recipe.” They only showed signs of willingness to cooperate on the subject of post-status problems, the Russian diplomat attests.

Botsan-Kharchenko reiterated Moscow’s dedication to solving the Serbian province issue within the international legal norms:

“The process of determining the status of Kosovo should remain within the legal framework and Resolution 1244 and should lead to some agreements. I fully agree with the thesis that only the U.N. Security Council can complete what it has started.”

Cartoon by Zoran Matic Mazos (Serbia)

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Bosnian Serbs: Independent Kosovo Paves Way for Independent RS

The Serb Popular Movement (SNP) "Izbor je nas" ("The Choice Is Ours") on Thursday sent an open letter to European Parliament Delegation to South East Europe Chairwoman Doris Pack, informing that a possible proclamation of independence by the Kosovo Albanian provincial parliament would pave the way to the Republika Srpska (RS) National Assembly automatically proclaiming the RS an independent state.

“The RS and Kosovo-Metohija have nothing in common, provided Kosovo-Metohija remains within the composition of the state of Serbia, since that is in keeping with international law and justice. But there is a connection if the Kosovo Albanian parliament proclaims independence, because that would give the National Assembly the right to proclaim the RS an independent state,” SNP President Dane Cankovic told a press conference at the Tanjug Press Center in Banjaluka, capital of Republika Srpska in Bosnia.

Serbs in Bosnia Should Exercise Their Right to Self-Determination

The RS can take advantage of its right to self-determination, guaranteed under the United Nations Charter, because Serbs are a constituent nation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, while Kosovo-Metohija Albanians do not have that right, Cankovic said.

Kosovo-Metohija “Albanians are a national minority, and they have created the demographic majority in Kosovo through illegal ways during the communist times, when Serbs had been banished and banned from returning to the ancestral Serb lands - Kosovo and Metohija,” Cankovic said.

The letter was sent to Pack on the occasion of her statement that the RS has no interest in leaving Bosnia-Herzegovina, and on the occasion of the letter by RS Prime Minister Milorad Dodik to Pack, telling her that the outcome of the status talks regarding the southern Serbian province has nothing in common with the RS, Cankovic elaborated.

Posted by Svetlana at 01:31 PM | Permalink

Russian Senate: No Breakthrough in Kosovo Negotiations Due to West’s Pro-Independence Bias

There has been no progress in negotiations regarding the future status of the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija because of the biased stance of the West, assessed the President of the Committee for International Relations in Russian Senate, Michael Margelov.

“The fact that Kosovo Albanian leaders are prepared to declare the unilateral independence is something everyone ignores,” said Margelov, adding that the reason for the failure of three-day talks that ended today is “the position of Pristina, and not that of Belgrade.”

Senator Margelov reminded that Serbian officials have went over and beyond any arrangement that exists in today’s world in trying to reach a compromise solution, practically giving everything to the Albanian minority in their country, while merely preserving the state borders.

“It is the position of Pristina that has to be subjected to corrections, and not the position of Belgrade, and that is the assessment that should be presented to the UN Secretary General within a report of the mediating troika,” Margelov said.

He warned that the imposed severing of the southern Serbian province is “a ticking time bomb under the principle of the inviolability of the borders.”

If the Serbian province’s independence gets unilaterally declared, “the similar scenarios ought to be expected in Kurdistan, Palestine, North Ossetia, Transdniestra, North Ireland, Basque Country and in a number of other places,” the Russian senator said.

Russian Duma Foreign Affairs Committee: Only One Side is Negotiating

Only one side is negotiating in the talks on the future status of Kosovo and Metohija, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Russian Duma and a ranking official of the Unity Party of Russia Konstantin Kosachov assessed on Tuesday.

According to him, it all boils down to Serbs constantly offering new models, showing the kind of flexibility which is without precedent, and offering the most one country can offer — everything but independence, while the Albanian separatists are simply ignoring all of it.

Qualifying the talks as “so-called negotiations,” Kosachov said that, in reality, the Kosovo Albanian separatists had not been taking part in them for some time now, but have limited their participation to demanding that their conditions be fulfilled and setting their own deadlines, without paying any attention to what other participants in the process were doing.

In spite of all the constructiveness of such an approach by the Serbs, the Euro-Atlantic patrons of Pristina hold that it is Belgrade that should be further pressured and keep threatening with an inevitable proclamation of Kosovo’s independence, the Russian parliamentarian underlined in the article for the Russian daily Izvestia.

Cartoon by Milenko Kosanovic (Serbia)

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Time to End the Era of Dictates and Force

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Wednesday that the time has come to stop imposing solutions, since no regional problem, be it Kosovo, Iran or Sudan, can be resolved by force.

“It is time to make a decisive break with a past in which ideology split and divided the world. It is time to abandon the policy of dictates and the concept of superpowers. Unfortunately, practice shows us that these past attitudes still linger on today,” Putin told a luncheon he hosted for the diplomatic corps in Moscow four days ahead of the parliamentary elections in Russia.

“We cannot forge ahead until we agree on new and clear rules and principles for cooperation in international affairs, universal principles that are accepted and recognised by all. But if we are to achieve this we first need honest debate and direct dialogue. Without this we will not succeed in developing meaningful and realistic solutions to the urgent issues facing the world in this era of globalisation. It was precisely this kind of discussion that I called for when I spoke at the Munich conference in February,” said Putin.

Strengthen the Legal Dimension in International Relations

“Russia wants to strengthen the collective and legal dimension in international relations. I am convinced that there is not a single regional problem in the world today that can be resolved using force, using the sword, to speak figuratively, whether it be Kosovo, Iran, Sudan or any of the other problems we see in the world around us,” Putin said, adding that the “international missions can succeed only if the emphasis is not on military force but on other modern factors that influence global processes.”

What’s Good for the Goose...

Among other issues, Russian president also noted the phenomenon developed during the past few decades, of a flood of western-financed non-governmental organizations religiously policing the eastern European governments and expressed hope that eastern democracies will be afforded the same luxury in the West:

“We hope that our NGOs will be able to work in North America, in the United States and in other countries in as comfortable an environment as that which we provide for their counterparts working in Russia.”

The luncheon in the Kremlin for all foreign ambassadors to Moscow was the first in modern Russian diplomatic history and it could become a tradition, the Kremlin administration indicated.

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Snake in Prime Minister’s Cabinet: Hashim Thaci on Arrest Warrant Since 1997

Hashim Thaci, whose Democratic Party of Kosovo won at the recent parliamentary elections in Serbian province of Kosovo, has been on an arrest warrant list, which the police in Kosovo-Metohija issued upon the order of the District Court in Pristina, for ten years now, the Belgrade daily Politika reminded on Tuesday.

The arrest warrant specifies that Thaci, who goes under the name of Snake, is a member of an ethnic Albanian terrorist gang, a commander of the so-called KLA Political Directorate, and that he has taken part in a number of terrorist attacks against members of the police in southern Serbian province, because of which the District Court in Pristina has sentenced him in absentia to ten years in prison.

By the Court Council verdict, Thaci and his 14 fellow fighters were found guilty on July 11, 1997 of a number of terrorist acts.

Trained and Infiltrated from Albania to Terrorize Serbian Province

The Court Council found that, starting with 1992 when they infiltrated Serbian Kosovo province from Albania where they were trained, members of the group formed the terrorist gang under Thaci’s leadership. Their goal was to “inflict organized and coordinated acts of violence throughout southern Serbian province, inspired by the political goal of severing this region from Serbia and forming a separate state in its territory.”

The accused Hashim Thaci, along with fourteen members of his gang, have been found guilty on all counts of the indictment which charged them with the preparation, planning and execution of the attacks on members of the Yugoslav police since May 13, 1993. Armed with automatic rifles, guns and hand grenades, they were ambushing the official police vehicles and killing police officers throughout the province in the 1990s. Apart from ambushing and attacking police officers, Thaci’s gang also organized an attack on Secondary school center (they threw hand grenades into the students’ rooms) and a terrorist attack on the military barracks in Vucitrn, where the Yugoslav Army conscripts were trained, in 1996.

According to the Pristina District Court verdict from July 1997, the main characteristic of this criminal gang was conducting terrorist acts simultaneously in the number of Kosovo-Metohija towns. The police was being attacked at the same time in Vucitrn, Podujevo, Mitrovica, along with attacks on the centers for internally displaced and the attacks on residents of Serbian nationality in the towns of Decani, Stimlje and Pec.

Criminal Charges Against Thaci and Ceku in the Hague Tribunal Amended in 2002

The daily reminds that the Serbian Interior Ministry presented to The Hague Tribunal in 2002 an amendment to the criminal charges filed against Thaci and Agim Ceku, which, for most of its part, refer to crimes committed against members of the Roma population.

The charges that were filed against Thaci, as a political and military leader of KLA, and Ceku, as chief of staff of the KLA Headquarters, refer to the acts of violation of the Geneva Convention, violation of law and customs of war, genocide and crimes against humanity.

In the charges, the Serbian Interior Ministry specified the acts of murder of 18 Roma people, which were committed by KLA members under Thaci's and Ceku's command.

The document also specifies the same number of attempted murders, more than 10 rapes and rape attempts, 41 incidents of kidnapping. According to the Interior Ministry, at the time there was no information as regards the fate of 30 kidnapped people, over 50 cases referring to the KLA members’ forcing the Roma to leave Kosovo, whose houses were, as rule, plundered and then torched or destroyed by explosive devices.

According to the Interior Ministry, all the victims were civilians and only a few of them dared resist the KLA terror, the daily Politika reported.

Posted by Svetlana at 12:53 PM | Permalink

Russian Missile Shield in Serbia?

According to the Sunday edition of Belgrade daily Kurir, Moscow has decided to respond to the announced U.S. missile shields in Poland and Czech Republic by installing its missile shield on the river Drina, in Serbia. Allegedly, Serbia has already given its consent.

Presumably, this latest development is part of the detailed plans Moscow intends to carry out in order to take Serbia and Republic of Srpska in Bosnia entirely under its wing, outside the EU/U.S. sphere of influence.

The greatest majority of Serbs, disillusioned with the West during the past two decades of harsh sanctions, merciless vilification, bombardments, aggression and colonization, during which they were treated as the enemy of the West and continually punished both individually and as a collective, would welcome the more direct Russian involvement.

This is especially true at the point where the U.S., UK, German, French et al. drive to dismember Serbia and sever its southern province of Kosovo and Metohija appears to be entering the final stage, goading Kosovo Albanian separatist to obstruct every attempt at negotiated settlement and declare the unilateral independence, which the Western powers have promised to recognize soon after.

Twelve years after the Dayton Accords, US, EU and NATO have also continued their anti-Serbian policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina, consistently siding with Bosnian Muslims and backing their drive to obliterate Serbian Republic created in Dayton in 1995. The latest decisions of the EU High Representative Miroslav Lajcak, strongly opposed by the Bosnian Serbs, are aimed at rendering Serbian nation in Bosnia voiceless — a first step in dissolution of the Serb entity through imposed “reforms”.

Kurir quotes the international politics expert and university professor Darko Trifunovic saying that the possibility of installing the Russian missile shield in Serbia is very real. According to him, United States are targeting Iran for dismemberment by promising an independent state modeled after the Serbian Kosovo province to the Kurds who, together with Azerbaijanis, comprise 48% of total Iran population. Russia and China are opposed.

“Serbia has been turned over to Russia not by its choice, because the West views and targets Serbia as a part of the Russian interest zone,” said Trifunovic.

Pro-Western Serbs Abused by the West Like No European Nation Since WWII

Russian daily Izvestya recently noted that “pro-Western Serbs have been hammered by the West like no other European nation since the WWII [...] their common state of Yugoslavia destroyed, their people expelled from each of the former republics with the U.S., German and British help, sanctioned and finally bombed for 78 days by NATO, at the hight of cynicism, Serbs were also scapegoated and blamed for all the civil wars and all the victims.”

“As if twenty years of suffering was not enough, Western powers are now insisting on further destruction of Serbia and Republika Srpska, the only two swaths of land where Serbs are allowed to live and call home,” Izvestya writes, concluding that Russia is the only country that can help Serbian nation regain its dignity and peace, and the only one Serbs today trust. The editorial calls for “decisive action on behalf of official Russia” which will put an end to further Western “abuse and killing of a nation.”

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Serbia Prepares for War as Talks are Nearing the Western-Imposed Deadline

Serbian Defense Ministry has worked out plans for action in the event of a presumed threat, Tanjug was told at that Ministry on the occasion of a Serbian government announcement that all ministries will prepare plans for helping the Serb population in Kosovo and Metohija province in the event of the unilateral proclamation of the independence of that province.

"Different scenarios were considered, and a reaction is possible in the event of any attempts at violating security or on the grounds of a political decision made by the Serbian government or the head of state," the sources at the Serbian Defense Ministry told Tanjug.

The force deployment and unequivocal messages have already preventively made it clear to everyone that Serbia is ready to react in a serious manner should the need arise to do so, the Ministry sources said.

Mobilization and Bringing Up the Army Readiness to Combat Level

Serbian Army (Vojska Srbije, VS) last week sent out a call for recruiting more than 700 professional soldiers on contract for different posts in the garrisons in Vranje, Leskovac and Bujanovac (the region surrounding southern Serbian province of Kosovo-Metohija). The Army overall readiness was brought up to a combat level.

It was agreed at yesterday's Serbian government session that all ministries should make action plans in the event of the unilateral proclamation of that province, Minister of Labor and Social Policy Rasim Ljajic said after the session.

Ljajic told a press conference it was agreed that the action plans would be sent in by the next government session.

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International Legal Expert: Resolution 1244 the Only Legal Basis for Talks

Director of the Swiss Institute of Federalism and legal adviser of the Serbian negotiation team for the talks on the status of southern Serbian Kosovo province Thomas Fleiner told Tanjug on Thursday that the only legal basis for the talks on the future status of Kosovo and Metohija is UN SC Resolution 1244, which instructs respect of Serbia's sovereignty and search for a solution for the status of Serbian province within the essential autonomy framework.

“Every decision that would step out of that framework would require consensus of both sides and an amendment to Resolution 1244,” clarified Fleiner, who is Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Freiburg, Switzerland, and the President of the international Association of Constitutional Law.

Disappointed by the Mediators Ignoring the Law, Resolution 1244 Crystal Clear to Any Lawyer

Professor Fleiner is disappointed over the fact that the mediating Troika (representatives of the EU, Russia and the United States of America — Wolfgang Ischinger, Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko and Frank Wiesner, respectively) had so far refused to present their opinion on the contents of UN Security Council Resolution 1244 and its implications on the status issue or to request an independent expert opinion in that respect.

“Text of the resolution is quite clear to any lawyer and it calls for respect of sovereignty and search of a solution for Kosovo only within the essential autonomy framework,” stressed Fleiner in an interview with the national news agency, adding that every decision on the status that would step out of the framework would require a consensus of both sides and an amendment to Resolution 1244.

Posted by Svetlana at 02:53 AM | Permalink

Anti-Terrorism and Human Rights’ Language Irregular Verbs

Following one of the recent Al Guardian editorials Tim Fenton properly characterized as “typically loathsome,” where “in a strange twist of logic they suggest that it is the Albanians who are in danger and for some reason they think that their status as "Muslims" should elicit more concern from Europeans,” a commenter signing as Joseph1832 wrote:

[...] Of course, being wildly inaccurate over Kosovo is a Western habit. The 100,000 dead failed to materialise. Also, I am not sure if the Serbian methods for putting down the KLA were as bad as those Britain and America have used in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the language of anti-terrorism and human rights involves many irregular verbs:

—I conduct a successful operation against militants;
—You use grossly disproportionate force.

—I inflict unfortunate collateral damage;
—You massacre civilians.

Posted by Svetlana at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Big Lie... was defined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf as a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Charges of “systematic mass rape,” “concentration camps,” “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” used against Serbs during the Yugoslav civil wars, and of the “weapons of mass destruction” used as a pretext to invade Iraq fall into this category of propaganda techniques.

‘Big Lie’ and Breakup of Yugoslavia

By Leslie Feinberg, Workers’ World

The Pentagon is not a vehicle to liberate women or same-sex love, and it is certainly not a rape-crisis intervention force. But these truths get blurred when there is a war in progress.

When U.S. imperialism is gearing up for war, ad agency spin doctors are put on the payroll to sell the aggression as defensive or humanitarian.

U.S. and German imperialists used a public relations psychological operation to cover up their violent covert and overt war to destabilize and dismantle the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia from 1990 to 2000. That media agitation, broadcast by the imperialist monopoly news industry, helped to isolate the peoples of Yugoslavia from the world solidarity they deserved.

After finally undermining and breaking up the Soviet Union, U.S. imperialism no longer needed to tolerate non-aligned Yugoslavia.

Some of the countries of Eastern Europe had already acceded to all the privatization and austerity measures drawn up by imperialist bankers. The Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia was the last of the Eastern European workers’ states trying to hold on to what was left of its planned, socialized framework of production and its collective ownership.

In a Jan. 2, 1996, New York Times opinion piece headlined “The Third American Empire,” Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind, two editors of the right-leaning magazine The New Republic that supported the Clinton administration’s war on Yugoslavia, wrote: “Now, in the years after the cold war, the United States is again establishing suzerainty over the empire of a former foe. The disintegration of the Soviet Union has prompted the United States to expand its zone of military hegemony into Eastern Europe (through NATO) and into formerly neutral Yugoslavia. And—most of all—the end of the cold war has permitted America to deepen its involvement in the Middle East.”

Heilbrunn and Lind argued that Bosnia should become the western border of a new U.S. imperialist empire in the Middle East “encompassing the regions once ruled by the Ottoman Turks.” That’s a swath of territory from Iraq to the Balkans—a geo-strategic area that Britain, Germany and France ruled over before World War I, the first world conflagration caused by inter-imperialist rivalry over economic “spheres of interest.”

It would take a “Big Lie” propaganda campaign to cover up this imperialist dismemberment of the multinational Yugoslavia federation.

Using Charge of ‘Mass Rape’ to Sell the War

The imperialist pro-war campaign—covert and overt—was based on two charges, repeated often and loudly: “systematic mass rape” and “ethnic cleansing.”

The very suggestion that U.S. imperialism and its military are a rape-rescue team, and that they bring equality and peace between nationalities, should give immediate pause.

Rape has been a constant feature of class-divided societies—a weapon of mass terror and reinforcement of patriarchal ownership and control. Rape, the violence and the threat, has enforced enslavement, racist domination, oppression of women and punishment for those who bridge or blur the partitioning of the sexes.

U.S. finance capital is bloody with the “ethnic cleansing” that facilitated stealing the labor and land of African and Native peoples. “Defense of white Southern womanhood” was the white-supremacist ideological cover for mass lynching of Black men. At the same time, the white slaveocracy and those in its hire were carrying out mass rape of African peoples.

The U.S. military—from its early Cavalry to today’s high-tech Pentagon—has brought rape, prostitution and sexual enslavement in the wake of its invasions and the establishment of its bases, from the Philippines to South Korea.

Women GIs are survivors of mass rape in the Pentagon’s own ranks.

The U.S. and German ruling classes, their politicians, and their embedded media and public relations demonstrate cruel and callous contempt for the lives of all women—particularly Muslim women—and for all rape survivors, when they use the charge of “systematic mass rape” as a pretext for imperialist aggression.

Croats and Bosnian Muslims Feed the Stories of “Systematic Mass Rape” by the Serbs to the West

Mass rape is a serious charge that warrants meticulous and thoughtful attention.

Between the fall of 1992 and spring of 1993, imperialist corporate news sources carried coordinated reports that an estimated 20,000 to 100,000 Muslim women had been systematically raped by the Bosnian Serb Army.

The public accusation came first from Haris Silajdzic, then foreign minister of Bosnia-Herzegovina, who stated that 30,000 women and girls had been raped.

A cover story in Ms. magazine charged that Bosnian Serb forces were raping women in order to make pornographic films. No films were ever discovered. And even the findings of Helsinki Watch and Human Rights Watch—which are often in accord with U.S. imperialist interests—did not support those charges.

The Warburton Report in January 1993, authorized by the European Community, got big headlines when it released its estimate that 20,000 Muslim women had been raped. But Simone Veil—a former French minister and president of the European Parliament—got virtually no air time as a dissenting member of the Warburton report group. Veil disclosed that the estimate was based on interviews with only four individuals. The New York Times admitted on Oct. 19, 1993, that the Croatian Ministry of Health in Zagreb was the source for the Warburton Report figures.

Newsweek reported in its Jan. 4, 1993, issue that up to 50,000 Bosnian Muslim women had been raped. This estimate, according to Tom Post, a contributor to the article, was based on interviews with 28 individuals.

French television reporter Jerome Bony summed up his pursuit of the charge of mass rape: “When I was 50 kilometers from Tuxla, I was told: ‘Go to the Tuxla [Tuzla] high school grounds. There are 4,000 raped women.’ At 20 kilometers this figure dropped to 400. At 10 kilometers only 40 were left. Once at the site, I found only four women willing to testify.”

The point of these facts is not to diminish the impact of rape on a single life. Rather, the pattern in these facts demonstrates how cynically, callously and contemptuously the real “butchers of Belgrade”—in Washington and in Bonn—can create rumors of tens of thousands of rapes in order to re-shackle the peoples of the former Yugoslav federation to exploitation and steal the rich natural resources and industries that were once the collective property of all.

Raped Serbian Women Not News-Worthy

Nadja Tesich—Serb writer, filmmaker and professor of film—went back to Yugoslavia when the civil war started in 1991. In response to misreporting by corporate news accounts, Tesich wrote that she contacted PBS, Nightline, Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, the Times magazine section, women’s magazines, Mother Jones, Harper’s, the New Yorker and other media. She concluded: “They wanted to hear about rapes. (Got any rape stories, we want to hear about rapes.) But the moment I mentioned Serb women raped, they were not interested.”

Posted by Svetlana at 05:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Serbia Dismisses Threats and Rejects All the Rewards for Giving its Kosovo Province Up

Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said in an interview for Tanjug Thursday, that Serbia rejects all threats and rewards offered in case it voluntarily gives up its Kosovo and Metohija province.

“Serbia has of lately been exposed to daily pressures of this kind and open threats coming from the outside, which have turned into an abuse of Serbia and its people, and we have to respond to that,” the Serbian prime minister said.

He specified that the most powerful countries of the West demanded from Serbia to give up its southern province voluntarily, to become an accessory and a partner in West’s crime of dismembering Serbian state and creation of the second Albanian state on its territory.

“Now it is to be decided whether Serbia will yield to such abuse and be the first country in Europe from which the big powers of the West have snatched part of the territory after the humiliating Munich Agreement,” Kostinica specified for the national news agency.

“I am convinced,” Serbian prime minister said, “that as an old and historical European nation we have no other answer but to tell the Western powers that we are aware of all the threats and of all of their rewards in case we agreed to be their accessories. But at the same time, we have to tell them that Serbia, relying on the law and justice, resolutely rejects all the threats and all the rewards in entirety.”

No One Can Take Kosovo Away From Us

Kostunica reminded that “it was not the first time that Serbia was faced with such a choice and the answer had always been the same.”

“Serbia fights violence with justice. This means that for the state of Serbia, according to the Serbian Constitution and the UN Charter, Kosovo will always be an integral part of the Serbian territory and Serbs in the province will remain the rightful citizens of Serbia. Simply put, unilateral independence does not exist and will never exist for Serbia,” Premier Kostunica said.

According to the law, Kostunica stressed, Kosovo belongs only and solely to Serbia and no one can ever take it away from us.

“Since Serbia cannot be deprived of its right by force, because we do not accept that, we want to make it clear to everyone that Kosovo is Serbia and that threats and violence can only intensify the strongly-embedded historical consciousness of the Serbian nation that Kosovo can never be severed from Serbia,” Prime Minister concluded.

Posted by Svetlana at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

The Dismantling of Yugoslavia: A Study in INhumanitarian Intervention (and a Western Liberal-Left Intellectual and Moral Collapse)

Four Part Study by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, Monthly Review

The breakup of Yugoslavia provided the fodder for what may have been the most misrepresented series of major events over the past twenty years. The journalistic and historical narratives that were imposed upon these wars have systematically distorted their nature, and were deeply prejudicial, downplaying the external factors that drove Yugoslavia’s breakup while selectively exaggerating and misrepresenting the internal factors.

Western Inflaming and Exploiting Yugoslav Civil Wars: The Tsunami of Lies

Perhaps no civil wars—and Yugoslavia suffered multiple civil wars across several theaters, at least two of which remain unresolved—have ever been harvested as cynically by foreign powers to establish legal precedents and new categories of international duties and norms. Nor have any other civil wars been turned into such a proving ground for the related notions of “humanitarian intervention” and the “right [or responsibility] to protect.” Yugoslavia’s conflicts were not so much mediated by foreign powers as they were inflamed and exploited by them to advance policy goals. The result was a tsunami of lies and misrepresentations in whose wake the world is still reeling.

Realpolitik Creates an Utterly Risible Caricature

From 1991 on, Yugoslavia and its successor states were exploited for ends as crass and as classically realpolitik as: (1) preserving the NATO military alliance despite the disintegration of the Soviet bloc—NATO’s putative reason for existence; (2) overthrowing the UN Charter’s historic commitments to non-interference and respect for the sovereign equality, territorial integrity, and political independence of all states in favor of the right of those more enlightened to interfere in the affairs of “failing” states, and even to wage wars against “rogue” states; (3) humiliating the European Union (EU) (formerly the European Community [EC]) over its inability to act decisively as a threat-making and militarily punitive force in its own backyard; (4) and of course dismantling the last economic and social holdout on the European continent yet to be integrated into the “Washington consensus.” The pursuit of these goals required that certain agents within Yugoslavia be cast in the role of the victims, and others as villains—the latter not just belligerents engaged in a civil war, but evil and murderous perpetrators of mass crimes which, in turn, would legitimate military intervention. At its extreme, in the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Yugoslavia has been cast as one gigantic crime scene, with the wars in their totality to be explained as a “Joint Criminal Enterprise,” the alleged purpose of which was the expulsion of non-Serbs from territories the Serbs wanted all to themselves—an utterly risible caricature, as we show below, but taken seriously in Western commentary, much as Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” were to be taken early in the next decade.

The Freak Gallery of Western Propagandists and Warmongers

While the destruction of Yugoslavia had both internal and external causes, it is easy to overlook the external causes, despite their great importance, because Western political interests and ideology have masked them by focusing entirely on the alleged resurgence of Serb nationalism and drive for a “Greater Serbia” as the root of the collapse. In a widely read book that accompanied their BBC documentary, Laura Silber and Allan Little wrote that “under Milosevic’s stewardship” the Serbs were “the key secessionists,” as Milosevic sought the “creation of a new enlarged Serbian state, encompassing as much territory of Yugoslavia as possible,” his “politics of ethnic intolerance provok[ing] the other nations of Yugoslavia, convincing them that it was impossible to stay in the Yugoslav federation and propelling them down the road to independence.” In another widely read book, Misha Glenny wrote that “without question, it was Milosevic who had willfully allowed the genie [of violent, intolerant nationalism] out of the bottle, knowing that the consequences might be dramatic and even bloody.” Noel Malcolm found that by the late 1980s, “Two processes seemed fused into one: the gathering of power into Milosevic’s hands, and the gathering of the Serbs into a single political unit which could either dominate Yugoslavia or break it apart.” For Roy Gutman, the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina “was the third in a series of wars launched by Serbia....Serbia had harnessed the powerful military machine of the Yugoslav state to achieve the dream of its extreme nationalists: Greater Serbia.” For David Rieff, “even if [Croatia’s President Franjo] Tudjman had been an angel, Slobodan Milosevic would still have launched his war for Greater Serbia.”1

In a commentary in 2000, Tim Judah wrote that Milosevic was responsible for wars in “Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo: four wars since 1991 and [that] the result of these terrible conflicts, which began with the slogan ‘All Serbs in One State,’ is the cruelest irony.” Sometime journalist, sometime spokesperson for the ICTY at The Hague, Florence Hartmann, wrote that “Long before the war began, Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and, following his example, Franjo Tudjman in Croatia, had turned their backs on the Yugoslav ideal of an ethnically mixed federal State and set about carving out their own ethnically homogeneous States. With Milosevic’s failure, in 1991, to take control of all of Yugoslavia, the die was cast for war.” After Milosevic’s death in 2006, the New York Times’s Marlise Simons wrote about the “incendiary nationalism” of the man who “rose and then clung to power by resurrecting old nationalist grudges and inciting dreams of a Greater Serbia...the prime engineer of wars that pitted his fellow Serbs against the Slovenes, the Croats, the Bosnians, the Albanians of Kosovo and ultimately the combined forces of the entire NATO alliance.” And at the more frenzied end of the media spectrum, Mark Danner traced the Balkan war dynamic to the Serbs’ “unquenchable blood lust,” while Ed Vulliamy asserted that “Once Milosevic had back-stabbed his way to power and had switched from communism to fascism, he and Mirjana set out to establish their dream of an ethnically pure Greater Serbia cleansed of Croats and ‘mongrel races’ such as Bosnia’s Muslims and Kosovo’s Albanians.”2

Ignorance, Gullibility and Purposeful Misrepresentations Unite to Create a Myth of Serb Villainy

This version of history—or ideology under the guise of history—fails at multiple levels. For one, it ignores the economic and financial turbulence within which Yugoslavia’s highly indebted, unevenly developed republics and autonomous regions found themselves in the years following Tito’s death in 1980, the aptly named “great reversal” during which the “standard of living whose previous growth had muted most regional grievances and legitimized Communist rule declined by fully one-quarter.”3 It also ignores the geopolitical context marked by the decline and eventual dissolution of the Soviet bloc, just as it ignores the German, Austrian, Vatican, EU, and eventual U.S. interest in the dismantlement of the socialist as well as federal dimensions of a unitary Yugoslav state, and the actions that brought about that result. Furthermore, it underrates the importance of Albanian (Kosovo), Slovene, Croat, Macedonian, Bosnian Muslim, Montenegrin, and even Hungarian (Vojvodina) nationalisms, and the competing interests of each of these groups as they sought sovereignty within, and later independence from, Yugoslavia. Perhaps most critical of all, it overrates the Serbs’ and Milosevic’s nationalism, gives these an unwarranted causal force, and transforms their expressed interest in preserving the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) and/or allowing Serbs to remain within a single unified successor state into wars of aggression whose goal was “Greater Serbia.”

Standard Narrative: Western Interventions Were Humanitarian in Purpose

The standard narrative also fails egregiously in claiming the Western interventions humanitarian in purpose and result. In that narrative those interventions came late but did their work well. We will show on the contrary that they came early, encouraged divisions and ethnic wars, and in the end had extremely damaging effects on the freedom, independence, and welfare of the inhabitants, although they served well the ends of Croatian, Bosnian Muslim, and Kosovo Albanian nationalists, as well as those of the United States and NATO. Furthermore, NATO’s 1999 bombing war against Yugoslavia, in violation of the UN Charter, built upon precedents set by NATO’s late summer 1995 bombing attacks on the Bosnian Serbs. More important, it provided additional precedents which advanced the same law-of-the-jungle lineage under the cover of “human rights.” It thus served as a precursor and a model for the subsequent U.S. regime’s attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, and the lies that enabled them.

Western Intellectuals and Journalists Exasperate the Suffering and Injustice

Another notable feature of the dismantling of Yugoslavia was the very widespread support for the Western interventions expressed by liberals and leftists. These intellectuals and journalists swallowed and helped propagate the standard narrative with remarkable gullibility, and their work made a major contribution to engineering consent to the ethnic cleansing wars, the NATO bombing attacks, the neocolonial occupations of Bosnia and Kosovo, and the wars that followed against Afghanistan and Iraq [...]

Entire study »

Posted by Svetlana at 07:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Der Spiegel: Peace in Kosovo Was Never More than a Ceasefire

Former guerilla leader Hashim Thaci has won elections in Kosovo and says he intends to declare independence by December. German commentators say that could mean that war is on the horizon.

Former rebel leader Hashim Thaci is likely to become Kosovo's next [provisional] prime minister following the resounding victory of his Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) in elections on Saturday.

The initial results indicate that the PDK won 34 percent of the vote, eclipsing the [so-called] moderate League of Democratic Kosovo (LDK) which only won 22 percent of the vote.

Ethnic Serbs, who make up 10 percent of the province's 1.5 million inhabitants, boycotted the elections, but turnout overall was alarmingly low at just 45 percent. Doris Pack, a member of the Council of Europe's election monitoring team, said it was a reflection of people's "profound dissatisfaction." "People in Kosovo are really fed up with their political situation," she told Reuters.

Thaci's PDK will now be expected to try to form a coalition with their rivals in the LDK, whose late leader was the pacifist Ibrahim Rogova. Thaci was a former leader in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) which fought Serbia is the 1998-99 war during which almost a million civilians fled Serbian repression.

Thaci has said that he would declare independence from Serbia after Dec. 10, the date on which international mediators are due to report to the United Nations on their efforts to resolve the province's final status. "With our victory today begins the new century," Thaci told cheering supporters on Sunday. "We showed that Kosovo is ready to move forward towards freedom and independence."

Since 1999 Kosovo has been under UN control and Serbia has offered broad autonomy to the region but the Kosovo Albanians say they will accept nothing less than independence. European politicians urged Kosovo not to rush to declare independence in the light of the PDK victory. Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said any hasty moves could lead to Kosovo's international isolation. "Mr. Thaci has to understand there is a difference between being a politician in opposition and a responsible prime minister," he told Reuters. "I don't think they [Kosovo Albanians] want to be independent from the international community."

Wolfgang Ischinger, the German diplomat who is leading mediation along with American and Russian officials is due to meet Serb and Kosovo Albanian leaders in Brussels on Tuesday.

German commentators on Monday are pessimistic about Kosovo's future and many newspapers predict that violence will once again flare up in the region.

Berliner Zeitung: Mock-Democracy, Thaci’s Party Mixture of Criminals and Extremists

"The landslide victory of the former rebels PDK will not lead to a radicalization of Kosovo. But neither does the result point to the triumph of a stable democracy .... Kosovo is not a democracy. Power is not with the people but is exercised by international diplomats. The elections only imitated democratic techniques. The stifling domination of the bureaucrats leaves little room for responsibility, ideas, change, productive crises or true reconciliation."

"It is little wonder that the turnout has dropped below 45 percent. Hashim Thaci's PDK ... is a clientele party with mafia traits. ...Thaci has taken some measures to counter this but he hasn't still hasn't succeeded. And the partly criminal, partly extremist scene near the northern and southern borders have at least indirect links with the PDK."

Süddeutsche Zeitung: Corrupt Kosovo Albanian Pseudo Elite Propped by UNMIK, NATO and EU

"Hopes of a better life have been disappointed far too often in the UN protectorate and the people are tired of hearing hollow words. That is why more than half the voters stayed at home on Saturday. Eight years of constant uncertainty about the future of the province and the dominance of a corrupt Kosovo-Albanian pseudo elite have paralyzed the people. The fact that the godfathers of democracy -- the UN, NATO and the EU -- have tolerated these offenses so as not to endanger political stability has made the crisis worse."

Die Welt: Provisional Elections Set the Stage for War

"The elections do not mark the end of the Kosovo crisis, rather they mark the way towards difficult conflicts, which could become violent. The consequences will not be confined to the Balkans."

"Washington has already announced that it will recognize Kosovo, as has the majority of EU countries. Russia is giving the hardliners in Belgrade encouragement and support not only because of the pre-1914 sympathies and affinities due to their shared Orthodox religion, but much more because Moscow fears the uncontrollable effect on other national and ethnic egos."

"If the north of Kosovo, which is mostly inhabited by Serbs, splits off from Kosovo and rushes into the open arms of Serbia, then the forces will be unleashed that showed their strength during the wars that marked the break up of Yugoslavia from 1991 and which could only been subdued from the outside -- with force."

"Is the EU and NATO ready for this? And where will the frontlines form? Firstly the Republika Srpska will break away from Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Europeans are involved there as they are in Kosovo -- in order to preserve a peace that was never anything more than a ceasefire."

American Council for Kosovo, Hashim ‘the Snake’ Thaci Set to Take Power in Kosovo: Culmination of Long Criminal and Terrorist Career

Will Bush Administration Recognize Jihad 'State' in Europe?

Posted by Svetlana at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Kosovo and Diplomatic Terrorism

By Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY, Pravda.ru

Any unilateral recognition of Kosovo’s status as an independent state will be a flagrant violation of international law, without any binding legal significance whatsoever and will constitute an act of diplomatic terrorism which strikes at the heart of an international community based on the rule of law, with the UN at centre stage for crisis management.

Hashim Thaci, bin Laden of the Balkans

Hashim Thaci is the bin Laden of the Balkans. This Albanian terrorist, ex-leader of the now disbanded KLA – Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK – Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves) spent years perpetrating provocative acts of intimidation against Serbian civilians, police and military forces, using human shields when the authorities imposed law and order. A carefully staged orchestration of events in which several hundred KLA terrorists were killed by Serbia’s security forces, led a gullible and eager West to believe in the slaughter of 50,000 civilians, and President Clinton, at odds with his genitalia and desperate to create a smokescreen to hide his sordid, irresponsible and depraved lecherous activities in the Oval Office, jumped at the occasion.

The rest is history. Thaci and his cronies were wined and dined on Capitol Hill by American politicians who had no idea whatsoever of Balkans history and politics and the plans for a Greater Albania, something which 500 years of history has been trying to prevent, were made. At the same time, Albanian civilians were running towards the Serbian lines, asking for protection against the KLA, whose mass rapes and prostitution and trafficking rackets were well known.

As we stated in this column at the time, the NATO-led interference in Kosovo and Metohija was a disastrous mistake, giving the Albanian minority (this is after all Serbian territory, not Albania) a taste of independence which obviously they do not want to lose – however it was not theirs to taste in the first place.

Who is Hashim Thaci?

Dressed in a suit and tie, and standing for election as Prime Minister for the Partise Demokratike te Kosoves (Kosovo Democratic Party), an election which he has won (in a process boycotted by most of the Serbian population), Thaci looks the part. He may dupe Washington (hardly a difficult feat these days) but behind the facade is a monster and any attempt to legitimise a government led by him would be paramount to collusion with murderers and constitute an act of diplomatic terrorism.

The Massacre of Prizren, Conveniently Forgotten by the Western Press

To Hashim Thaci, one has only to address one word: Prizren. What would Hashim Thaci have to say about the massacre at Prizren in 1999? The KLA, led by Thaci, viciously attacked 300 defenceless Serb civilians, including 10 Orthodox priests and the Bishop Artemije at the Monastery, urinated on religious effigies, smashed statues, raped tens of nuns, destroyed the Statue of Emperor Dusan and slaughtered those who resisted.

This massacre is one of countless others perpetrated by these Albanian terrorists against Serbs – at Grace, at Pec, at Racak and as recently as August 2003, when Serbian children were massacred at Gorazdevac.

Therefore how any member of the international community can sit at the same table as Thaci, let alone recognise him as any head of government, defies logic and spits in the face of all notions of decency and the rule of law. One might as well grant political asylum to bin Laden or the Butchers of Beslan.

The Legal Issue

One of the fundamental roles of the United Nations Organization is to protect and defend the international frontiers which have already been established. Kosovo lies within such frontiers, inside Serbia. It is not Serbia’s fault if Albanian women poured over the frontier to bear children and to receive social benefits from Yugoslavia. Herefore, within the Security Council, any recognition of Kosovo as anything other than a province of Serbia – which it is, and always has been – bears no legality. As for unilateral acts of recognition of statehood outside the UNSC, this has as much legal foundation as some eccentric declaring himself King of the Moon or setting up an independent republic in his back yard, issuing passports written on toilet paper.

Furthermore, such collusion with a terrorist organization would be the same thing as legitimizing the atrocities of bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the same thing as any foreign power aiding and instigating the citizens of Aztlan (the southern States of the USA) to perpetrate acts of terrorism in a separatist campaign.

Nationalist questions are for nations to decide at the national level. Therefore the question of Kosovo is for Serbia, its Government and people to decide, and nobody else, for it is an integral part of Serbia, the heart of the Serb Nation. How would Spain like it if some foreign power declared support for an independent Euskadi, Galicia or Catalunya, how would France like it if the Bretons and Corsicans were armed and equipped from abroad to rise up against Paris, not to mention the scores of other national questions in Europe, and the more so in Africa and Asia.

The history of America’s connection with terrorist organizations is very well documented (support for the IRA, Operation Condor, support for African despots and tin-pot dictators, the launching of the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan, which mutated into the Taleban and ultimately Al Qaeda, contacts with bin Laden, the international terrorist attack against Iraq, NATO terrorist attacks in the Balkans involving countless massacres of civilians). However, any eventual international support for Kosovo as a State does not render it valid or legal. It would be well for the international community to remember this as the events of the forthcoming weeks unfold.

For videos about KLA atrocities, see youtube “KLA terrorist murder”

Posted by Svetlana at 07:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Serbian PM: Ischinger’s Proposal is Tantamount to Independence

Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger's proposal on the neutral status of Kosovo represents just another name for independence of Kosovo-Metohija, Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said on Sunday.

"The response to the question whether Serbia will agree to have another Albanian state be created under any name in its territory would have to be known to everybody already. It is quite certain that the way to an agreement cannot lead through the making up of new names for the province's independence," Kostunica told Tanjug in a statement.

The Serbian prime minister recalled that this was "right time to have international representatives come out for the first time with a proposal which would observe Serbia's sovereignty and territorial integrity" and added that they "cannot come out with proposals on independent Kosovo all the time."

Western “Proposals”: Independence or Independence or, if Not Independence, Then Independence

Kostunica recalled that the proposals which had been presented by international mediators so far had been “supervised independence”, “limited independence”, confederation, different variations of the model of two German states and the “neutral status”.

"It is now time for the international mediators to show objectivity and propose some form of essential autonomy. We will help them in this in Brussels, by showing how essential autonomies function successfully in the world," the Serbian prime minister said.

"And if the result of the negotiations has been determined in advance and this means that Kosovo will be independent one way or another, then one can count in advance on Serbia's answer — that this is a brutal policy of force which will bring nothing good to anybody and which will never force Serbia to give up 15 percent of its territory," Kostunica concluded.

Serbian President: No New State Can be Created on the Territory of Serbia

Serbia will not allow a creation of a new state on its territory, nor will it accept the violation of the international law, said Serbian President Boris Tadic.

“Everyone needs to understand the danger creating such a precedent would have for the region and the world. This is destruction of the existing world order and a severe threat to the economic and political stability of the world,” said Tadic in a statement given to a Russian TV channel ‘Russia.’

“Our position is one of the utmost seriousness and responsibility,” said Tadic, adding that the provisional elections held by the UNMIK in Serbian Kosovo-Metohija province merely represent the internal ethnic Albanian political relations.

“Belgrade hopes that they are not the only ones who understand what the imposed severing of the Serbian province could cause,” Russian TV reporter commented in the central information broadcast of the Russian state television, “Weekly News.”

Russian Duma: Deactivating the Ticking Timebomb for Destruction of the World Law and Order

The potential independence of southern Serbian province is a mine being placed under the international law and a dangerous initiative to replace the “power of law with the right of might”, warned the Chairman of the Russian Duma Foreign Affairs Board, Konstantin Kosachev.

Right now, Russia is defending the international law both in Europe and in the rest of the world by trying to deactivate that ticking timebomb, Kosachev said in an interview to Russian NTV station.

Kosachev pointed out that imposing dismemberment of a UN member state such as Serbia, for the sake of one of its minorities, would cause a chain reaction throughout the world.

“Anything like that would be logically mirrored in the other disputed territories, which will apply the Kosovo recipe to advancing their own interests, and everyone will use the self-determination interpretation, while disregarding the principle of territorial integrity of the existing UN member-states,” warned Kosachev.

Stressing that the Kosovo issue is being drummed up as if the independence should be the result of the bombardment of Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was conducted without the authorization of the UN Security Council or the United Nations, Kosachev reminded that no one after the NATO aggression was talking about the independence, but in the past few years severing of the Serbian province became the main Western goal in the Balkans.

Speaking about the apparently inexplicable randomness of the Western support and obvious double standards which are applied when it comes to separatist territories in the Caucasus or the rest of Europe which United States treats with animosity and Serbian Kosovo province, which it insists on severing from the rest of Serbia, Kosachev said it was quite clear why is the West behaving so differently in similar situations.

Only Russia is Capable of Removing the Geopolitical Chokehold Strangling Serbia

“United States’ geopolitical interests and the geopolitical interests of their NATO allies are the reason for this behavior. Wherever NATO has an interest in supporting their bloc-partners or the potential allies, they issue entirely opposite views than regarding Serbia, where the largest number of the population is against the NATO membership. Therefore, it is in their interest to support Kosovo Albanian separatism as the new Kosovo state established on the territory of Serbia is the potential member of their Alliance,” the influential representative of the governing United Russia said.

According to him, with all due respect to Serbia, only Russia is capable of “removing the shackles of the geopolitical games and interests” currently strangling Serbian state over its Kosovo province.

“We are presented with the choice between two models for the future world order: it will either continue to be built according to the principle of the shared interests of the group of states, like NATO or the EU; those of us who are demanding that the same principles and norms be applied in all the similar situations are in the other group,” Kosachev said.

Kosovo Elections Clear Violation of UN Security Council Decisions

Kosachev assessed that the so-called parliamentary elections in southern Serbian Kosovo province were “carried out in clear violation of all the UN Security Council decisions, which requested the fulfillment of standards, prior to raising up any other issues.”

“Serbian population has boycotted these elections, there is a massive number of ethnically cleansed and displaced province residents, but we can see that none of those facts bear any significance in the congratulatory Western assessments of the elections,” Kosachev said.

Cartoon by Milenko Kosanovic (Serbia)

Posted by Svetlana at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Record Low Turnout in Serbian Province’s Mock-Elections, Boycotted by the Serbs

Reuters reports that provisional elections staged by the UNMIK and NATO in Serbian southern province of Kosovo and Metohija, are at the record low turnout since the 1998-1999 KLA insurgency war. According to the OSCE observers and UNMIK chief administrator Joachim Ruecker, only between 40-45 percent of ethnic Albanians voted in these elections, while the Serbs entirely boycotted the NATO/Albanian show.

“This is not about independence. Turnout was low because people are depressed. This is about the economic situation — no water, no electricity, no jobs,” said analyst Berat Buzhala of the Albanian-language daily Express.

The total of five Serbs voted at eight alternative polling stations in northern Kosovo-Metohija. Observers in the municipality of Leposavic told Tanjug that two Serbs had voted there, while three of them voted in the Zvecan municipality. Not a single Serb voted in Northern Mitrovica, the town with the greatest number of Serbs remaining in Kosovo-Metohija province after eight and a half years of being subjected to the ferocious ethnic cleansing by Albanian Muslims.

Kosovo Serbs: We Shall Not Help Legitimize Our Annihilation

“Why would we take part in this charade,” asked Milisav Petrovic from northern part of Serbian province. “Our government, ministers and president are in Belgrade, we have already elected our leaders. This is Serbia, there is no Kosovo state.”

“It’s insulting that they actually expected us to take part in an effort designed to disintegrate our own state,” said Dragan Jovanovic to local reporter. “Serbs are not going to legitimize ten years of their own destruction by taking part in this macabre play, and by dancing in the rhythm of those who are trying to annihilate our state, Church, culture and us as a people.”

Kosovo Albanian Mafia Boss Leading in the Polls

According to the preliminary counts, one of the main criminal figures and Kosovo Albanian mafia boss Hashim Snake Thaci has won the most of ethnic Albanian votes (around 32 percent). Thaci’s PDK party is formed from the terrorist KLA which started the armed insurrection in Serbia by terrorizing local population and killing the state representatives (policemen, local mayors, municipal leaders, etc), of both Serbian and Albanian ethnicity, in order to provoke the regular state army response and create an excuse for U.S.-led NATO to attack Serbia.

According to the report by the German intelligence agency BND, published by the Berliner Zeitung, Hashim Thaci is one of the four heads of Kosovo Albanian mafia who have no interest in a rule-of-law state, but have the goal to turn Serbian Kosovo province into a crime state and are using their political leverage to control the underground forces in order to strengthen their personal interests and create links in politics, economy and justice.

According to the German daily, Hashim Thaçi, Agim Çeku, Ramush Haradinaj and Xhavit Haliti cover the “entire spectrum of criminal, political and military activities,” and are mainly involved in the smuggling of arms, drugs and cigarettes, illegal fuel trade, people smuggling and extortion. German intelligence agency reported that they control mafia gangs in the Drenica region and regularly hold secret meetings at Hotel Grand in Pristina to synchronize their underground activities.

Posted by Svetlana at 11:58 PM | Permalink

Serbia Rejects Ischinger’s Proposal to Consent to Voluntary Dismemberment

Serbian government rejects proposal of the EU representative in the mediating troika, German Wolfgang Ischinger, on the “neutral status” of Serbia's southern province, Serbian prime minister's media advisor Srdjan Djuric told Tanjug on Saturday.

"This proposal actually means that Serbia itself would create an independent Albanian state on its territory. The other important feature of Ischinger's proposal is that it is essentially the same as the Albanian platform on ‘good neighborly relations between the two independent states’," Djuric said.

He added that "Ischinger's proposal on the neutral status of Kosovo-Metohija is based on the example of the agreement between two independent German states of 1972."

"For more than obvious reasons, Serbia rejects this proposal in advance. We believe it is especially important that (Russian representative in the mediating troika) Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko clearly said that this was not the troika's proposal, Djuric said.

Ischinger said on Wednesday that the mediating troika would present to Belgrade and Pristina a new proposal for the so-called neutral status.

Posted by Svetlana at 11:20 PM | Permalink

Establish Responsibility for Fabricated Accusations Against Serbia

14:06 BELGRADE, Nov 15 (Tanjug) - Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica on Thursday stated that the Serbian government would set up a commission to establish the true situation in specialized institutions and will also raise the issue of responsibility for fabricated accusations on account of Serbia in the Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI) report.

The Serbian government will set up a special commission that would immediately draw up a report on the existing situation in social care institutions for persons with mental disability, Vojislav Kostunica said in a statement.

Malevolent Fake Accusations

"The department ministers have informed me that numerous evaluations presented in the report by the Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI) are fake. Particularly tendencious and malevolent are the accusations that torture is used as a form of treatment of children and that they are housed in children's concentration camps instead of social care institutions," said Kostunica.

The Serbian government will insist on shedding light on all facts relating to the real situation in those specialized institutions and will simultaneously raise the issue of responsibility for the fabricated accusations against Serbia presented in the report 'Torture as Treatment,' said Kostunica in his statement.

"We are witnesses to a systematic propaganda against Serbia, that it is overwhelmed by fascism, although every citizen of our country feels deepest bitterness towards both fascism and fascists, who had killed hundreds of thousands of innocent members of our nation," it was said in the statement.

"It is now turn to speak about camps for helpless children, and the moment to do so had not been picked accidentally," evaluated Kostunica, underscoring that the Serbian government will confront such dark propaganda with all democratic and legal means.

Soros Organizations Working Hand-in-Hand on Continued Aggressive Vilification of Serbia

Established in 1993, MDRI is funded by the George Soros’ “Open Society.” Another Soros-funded NGO also based in Washington DC, Helsinki Board, that has been spread in the 1990s throughout Eastern European countries like cancerous tumors and has its representatives in Belgrade too, has been “helping” MDRI “research” and “collect information” in a number of former Eastern Bloc countries, such as Russia and Romania, for smear campaigns like this latest one against Serbia.

Few facts surrounding this spurious “report” have enraged all of Serbia: respectable media outlets, ministries, medical and social workers, directors of the listed institutions, and the government itself.

Orchestrated Smear Campaign

The day after this report was drummed up in the New York Times (where else!) and International Herald Tribune, on November 14, Serbian Minister of Work and Social Policy Rasim Ljajic (who happens to be a Muslim and a medical doctor by profession), held a news conference regarding the articles that showed up in the Western mass media Agitprop Hubs. Visibly shaken, Minister Ljajic questioned how was it possible that a set of such devastating allegations gets to be submitted to New York Times and mass media in general first, before any of the Serbian medical and social centers, Serbian officials and the appropriate ministries even had the chance to lay eyes on it.

“I don’t know who is behind this, but I know for a fact that this is a propaganda campaign,” said Minister Ljajic. He explained that, while the conditions in the six institutions listed are not easy due to lack of funds and the shortage of the medical staff (which in Serbia works for appallingly low wages that any Western nurse or doctor would consider downright insulting), no one in their right mind can say that these workers are purposely torturing and abusing children in their care.

He immediately denied that anyone is being tied up in any of the Serbian medical and social institutions, citing the inspection consisting of medical and social workers that have visited these six and all the other institutions, while he personally inspected the centers a month earlier. According to Minister Ljajic, the staff in those institutions ought to be congratulated on their humanity and the efforts they are investing in helping ease the patients’ suffering, while working in the very difficult conditions, “and then someone from Washington swoops down and smears them like this.”

“No one can persuade me that there are good intentions behind this report,” stressed Ljajic and asked if anyone sat beside any of the patients for 11 years, watching them being tied up all the time.

“Is this even possible?! Can anyone sane even think that someone is purposely torturing children in our institutions?,” Rasim Ljajic asked.

Vrsac Hospital: Rosenthal’s Praises Inexplicably Mutated into Most Severe Allegations

“On July 23, when our hospital was visited by the representatives of the MDRI, among them was also Eric Rosenthal [executive director of the group who has submitted this “report”]. He said that he was exceptionally pleased with everything he saw in our institution and stressed that our care for the patients is of much higher quality than in the neighboring countries. Therefore, I’m even more surprised with this report. The praises have in the meantime been replaced with the allegations,” said Dr. Veselin Savic, the deputy director of the Special Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Vrsac, one among the six listed in Rosenthal’s report as the torture camp of sorts.

Dr. Savic also informed the Politika reporters of the therapies applied in his hospital: “The therapies prescribed here are exactly the same as those given in German or American hospitals. We have some fifty mentally disabled patients too and, objectively, they do belong in the social institutions. Our hospital is only for the adults, so we do not have either the children ward, nor the patients below the age of 18,” said Dr. Savic.

Kulina Center: Shocking Photo of the Tied-Up Dehydrated Girl Used Along the MDRI Report a Fake

Director of the Home for Disabled Children and Youth in Kulina, near Aleksinac, Mr. Dragoljub Markovic, revealed to the visiting Politika reporters that the shocking photo of the suffering dehydrated girl tied to a metal bed that was supposedly taken in Kulina institution by someone by the name of Marc Schneider — has never been taken in his center.

“We really can’t tell where could that photo have been taken. I would even say it must be at least ten years old, if not more, since it shows very gloomy surroundings from the ancient past, but I really don’t know where could it have been taken,” director Markovic said, adding that nothing has been hidden from the MDRI, but that they have “maliciously abused our hospitality.”

The accusations that the children are being tortured, that they are tied by the ropes and left in the metal cribs awaiting death have also been disproved in entirety, within one day since the NYT Agitprop rushed to publish a devastating propaganda piece, smearing the Serbs once again.

Absolutely No Mistreatment Whatsoever

“Our home houses 560 protegees, from only 6 months old, up to 70 years of age, from around Serbia, Republika Srpska (Bosnia), Macedonia and Montenegro,” said Vojislav Cvetkovic, a medical doctor in Kulina Home. He explained that these are the individuals born with the Down syndrome, cerebral paralysis, hidro- and encephalitis, and with the missing parts of the vertebral column.

“Simply put, these are the individuals born with severe mental and physical disabilities. Protegees are protected in our Home and they are cared for around the clock here, from the day one. All of them are undergoing a specific neuropsychiatric care which occasionally, through the consultations with the team of psychiatric consultants, gets further adjusted,” Kulina Home Dr. Cvetkovic said.

“There is absolutely no abuse, maltreatment or torture of Home for Disabled Children and Youth protegees in Kulina,” said Minister Rasim Ljajic after a surprise visit to Kulina Center yesterday. Minister Ljajic dropped to the institution unannounced, due to the MDRI charges.

“There is no torture of the children, no inhumane treatment. Only few days ago there was another unannounced inspection and control here. I believe our country is being subjected to the organized smear campaign,” Dr. Ljajic said.

Sremcica Center: Praised by Slovenian Ambassador for the Most Affectionate Staff and the Happiest Children

Treatment of the children and youth with mental disabilities is much more humane in Serbia than in a number of European countries, said the Director of the Home for Children and Youth with Mental Disabilities in Sremcica, Milenko Curovic.

“We work at the highly specialized level, we have a multi-disciplinary approach which absolutely fulfills all the standards and the treatment of that category of protegees is extremely professional, which sets our institutions up to the highest standards,” said Curovic. “Of course, there is the lack of funds being felt, but not everything is in the money, either. It takes a smile and warmth that employees in this and the other institutions in Serbia are generously giving to those children,” Director of the Center said.

He rejected the MDRI allegations in entirety and stressed that in the Center he heads, they also run a work therapy to allow their children to feel the life’s pleasures. Some 300 children that are currently accommodated in Sremcica Center, rented out as B-category hotel, have complete freedom of movement, they can go out into the town, as well as the freedom to do what they wish and as long as they want.

Director Curovic believes that Soros-funded MDRI has purposely abused the opportunity to give its assessment, being that they visited only the six centers where the patients with severe psychiatric illnesses are also housed.

“They haven’t reported about any of the good things that can be seen in our institutions, like the fact that children from our Center are regularly taking part in the Olympic games for the Disabled, European and International competitions in various disciplines, where they have even won numerous medals and recognitions,” said Director Curovic.

He added that, during the recent visit and the handing of the donations to the Sremcica Home, Slovenian Ambassador and his wife were pleasantly surprised by the care of the workers, commenting that they haven’t seen the nicer, more affectionate staff in the way they relate to the children, nor the more joyous children in any of the European institutions of that kind.

Kovin Clinic: Brief Immobilization of the Aggressive Psychiatric Patients Very Rare, No Different Than Everywhere in the World

Director of the Neuropsychiatric Clinic in Kovin, another institution among the six listed in the MDRI report, Milan Milicic said that the MDRI report is almost entirely false. As a guest of Serbian TV studio RTS, he said that the information about the mortality in his hospital reaching high 26% in 2006 is also a lie, and that the actual mortality rate in 2006 was 4% and that “only because we have had some extremely hard cases of illness in neuropathology ward and the geriatric ward”.

Milicic said that even though the “report” mentions methods like immobilization, fixation and tying the patients up, generally labeled as “torture,” he has no idea where has the MDRI gotten the information that even the severe psychiatric patients in Serbia are treated like that as a common practice. According to Director Milicic, only the most aggressive psychiatric patients that are endangering their own or the safety of other patients get immobilized, but even those cases happen once in six months at the most, and then it takes no longer than half an hour, until the sedative takes effect.

“This is something that is being done throughout the world and it can by no means be characterized as torture, because that would simply mean that all the medical staff working with severely ill psychiatric patients are sadists,” said Milicic.

Undeniably Political Background of the MDRI Report

“This issue will have to be pushed to the very end, and each allegation from Eric Rosenthal’s report will be thoroughly investigated, because someone is not telling the truth,” said Minister Rasim Ljajic after visiting the Special Center for Disabled Children ‘Dr Nikola Sumenkovic’ in the village Stamnica near Petrovac na Mlavi.

According to Ljajic, the MDRI report has an undeniable political background, since it contains very wide general accusations, along with the recommendation that Serbia should not be allowed to join the European Union due to alleged mistreatment of the individuals with special needs.

“I don’t understand why would someone need a story like this. I certainly would not accept to be appointed minister in the state where ill children are being tortured, nor would I want to live in such country. If someone is using these means for political purposes, then we are in two entirely opposite camps,” said Ljajic.

Stamnica Center: Clean, Freshly Painted and Warm, with Numerous Creative Workshops Where Children with Disabilities Spend Daytime

The most respectable Serbian daily Politika reported that, after touring the Center in Stamnica right after the articles promoting the MDRI allegations were published in the Western press, “media representatives concluded that the children’s rooms are clean, freshly painted and warm, and that the Center itself houses a number of creative workshops, even a bakery which produces over 400 loafs of bread daily,” where the protegees are playing, working and spending time during the day.

Director of the Center in Stamnica Ivica Stevic is satisfied with the care medical staff is providing to the protegees of the institution he heads.

“We have a number of volunteers coming to Stamnica, mostly students from the various countries, like Holland and Czech Republic. We have an exceptional cooperation with the Czechs and I can even say that, despite the shortage of staff, our institutions are in no way lagging behind those of the same type in Czech Republic,” said Stevic.

Rosenthal Loved Our Center Few Months Ago — What Happened?

He explained that the MDRI delegation spent only one day in Stamnica Center, and that the statements of the members of this Soros’ organization were entirely opposite from the content of the published report.

Director Stevic told the representatives of the Austrian and Japanese embassy, as well to the members from the Office of the European Comission in Belgrade (all of whom have visited these centers after Soros/Rosenthal allegations were published), that each of the 19 buildings of Stamnica Center complex were renovated after the year 2000. The center houses 458 people and they are taken care of by the 197 employees, including 100 care workers, 23 medical nurses, 10 therapists and 5 disability specialists. The protegees in Stamnica Center come from almost all former Yugoslav republics, and it houses both children and adults, from 6 to 80 years of age.

President of the Board of Parents of Disabled Children: This is the Second Home for Our Children

The president of the Board of Parents of the children the Center accommodates, Radoje Djurovic from Trstenik also spoke to reporters. His 21-year-old daughter, diagnosed with the cerebral paralysis and severe mental disability, has been living in Stanmnica Center since the age of 10.

“This institution is a second home to our children and I assure you that all the protegees are living in dignifying, humane conditions,” said Djurovic.

European Commission: MDRI Report Will Have No Influence

Alberto Camarata, the Chief of the Section for European Integrations and Economy of the European Comission in Serbia told Politika he was satisfied with the conditions for disabled children in Stamnica.

“The European Commission will not evaluate the MDRI report, nor will we comment that organizations’ allegations. This report will have no effect on Serbia’s bid to join the European Union,” said Mr. Camarata.

Helping or Nailing the Entire Country to a Pillar of Shame?

The measures to be taken to improve the conditions in the institutions of social care in Serbia will be defined only after the Serbian Special Commi