17.5.2007 by admin.

17/05/2007

BRÜSSEL, Belgien — US behilflicher Staatssekretär für europäische Angelegenheiten Daniel briet vorgeschlagen am Mittwoch (Mai 16.) den die Vereinigten Staaten keine einseitige Bewegung betreffend ist die Anerkennung von Unabhängigkeit Kosovos bilden würden. Mit Reportern an den NATO Hauptsitzen sprechen, besagtes gebraten, das alle mögliche Schritte in Richtung zur Unabhängigkeit ohne eine neue UNO Sicherheit Ratauflösung riskant sein würden. Obgleich die neuesten Gespräche zwischen den Vereinigten Staaten und dem Rußland die Unterschiede auf der Zukunft der Provinz überwinden nicht konnten, würde gebratenes besagtes Washington fortfahren, für eine UNO Auflösung zu arbeiten. (Blic, Balkanweb - 17/05/07; RTK, RFE, Telegrafi, RTS, Beta - 16/05/07)

US may not unilaterally recognise Kosovo

17/05/2007

BRUSSELS, Belgium — US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Daniel Fried suggested on Wednesday (May 16th) that the United States would not make any unilateral move regarding the recognition of Kosovo’s independence. Speaking to reporters at NATO Headquarters, Fried said that any steps towards independence without a new UN Security Council resolution would be risky. Although the latest talks between the United States and Russia failed to overcome the differences on the province’s future, Fried said Washington would continue to work for a UN resolution. (Blic, Balkanweb - 17/05/07; RTK, RFE, Telegrafi, RTS, Beta - 16/05/07)

http://setimes.com/cocoon/setimes/xhtml/en_GB/newsbriefs/setimes/newsbriefs/2007/05/17/nb-06 

Geschrieben in Balkan (Englisch), Balkan | Drucken | 1 Kommentar »

17.5.2007 by admin.

17/05/2007

Although the political situation in Serbia seems to be stabilising, the economic damage will not be easy to repair.

By Georgi Mitev-Shantek for Southeast European Times — 17/05/07

The country’s political turmoil affected the stock market. [Getty Images]

A last-minute coalition deal has ended six months of political limbo in Serbia, clearing the way for a new government. As a result, Serbia’s financial markets have regained some of their stability. Financial experts, however, say this year is lost as far as the country’s economic growth goals are concerned.

The dinar dropped sharply after Tomislav Nikolic, a hardline nationalist who wants Serbia to break with the West and join a new bloc led by Russia, became parliament speaker on May 8th. After Nikolic resigned on Sunday (May 13th), the dinar revived, and has now nearly returned to its level at the start of the month.

http://setimes.com/cocoon/setimes/xhtml/en_GB/features/setimes/features/2007/05/17/feature-02 

Geschrieben in Economy - Wirtschaft | Drucken | Keine Kommentare »

17.5.2007 by admin.

17/05/2007

After 11 years and many dramatic changes, OSCE says its mandate in Croatia has been fulfilled.

By Natasa Radic for Southeast European Times in Zagreb – 17/05/07

The OSCE Mission to Croatia has been in the country since 1996. [OSCE]

After a more than decade-long presence in Croatia, the OSCE is ready to close its mission. Its mandate expires on the last day of 2007. For the Croatian government, the occasion is a milestone demonstrating that the country has reached a higher level of democracy and civil stabilty, with no further need for OSCE supervision.

The situation has changed markedly since April 1996, when the mission was established. At the time, Croatia faced serious human rights problems and other obstacles characteristic of a country in transition. The OSCE’s task was to help Croatia move forward.

Speaking recently to the Croatian weekly Globus, OSCE’s first ambassador to Croatia said he had a “difficult job in tha latter half of the 1990s”.

Both he and the organisation were considered to be “foreign watch dogs, not always welcomed by the highest Croatian authorities”, Tim Guldimann said.

…………….

http://setimes.com/cocoon/setimes/xhtml/en_GB/features/setimes/features/2007/05/17/feature-03 

Geschrieben in Balkan | Drucken | Keine Kommentare »

17.5.2007 by Lupo.

29.05.2006
Die EU-Perspektiven von Serbien und Montenegro
Der montenegrinische Premier Milo Djukanovic
Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Der montenegrinische Premier Milo Djukanovic
Wird das bald unabhängige Montenegro der EU schneller beitreten können, als im Verbund mit Serbien? Ministerpräsident Milo Djukanovic glaubt daran, doch westliche Experten sind skeptischer.

Jubelnde Monteneginer nach dem Unabhängigkeits-VotumBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Jubelnde Monteneginer nach dem Unabhängigkeits-Votum Die Europäische Union akzeptiert das Unabhängigkeits-Referendum von Serbiens Teilrepublik Montenegro. Man sei zu Verhandlungen über eine engere Anbindung des Landes an die EU bereit, sagt Reinhard Priebe, Direktor des EU-Büros für den Westlichen Balkan. Gleichzeitig warnt er aber vor zu großen Erwartungen: “Dann wird Montenegro den Weg zur europäischen Integration alleine gehen, und das heißt, dass wir die Kriterien, die erfüllt sein müssen, separat für Montenegro prüfen werden.” Es sei noch zu früh, um darüber zu spekulieren, ob dieser Prozess nun schneller oder langsamer als im Verbund mit Serbien vonstatten gehe. “Das Wichtigste ist, dass jetzt Montenegro eigenverantwortlich dafür zu sorgen hat, dass die notwendigen Bedingungen erfüllt werden.”

Interesse an einer Annäherung

Die montenegrinische Führung hofft indes, dass ihr Land alleine größere Chancen auf einen schnellen EU-Beitritt hat als im Verbund mit Serbien. Ein Optimismus, den Vladimir Gligorov, Wirtschaftsexperte beim Wiener Institut für Internationale Wirtschaftsvergleiche, teilt. Serbien habe etwa mit dem Status des Kosovo und der Verfassungsfrage noch interne Probleme zu lösen. “Ich glaube, Montenegro - falls sie nichts Dummes unternehmen, wovon ich nicht ausgehe - könnte in der Lage sein, alleine die Gespräche mit der EU zu beginnen”, sagt Gligorov. “Vielleicht könnten sie mit den Verhandlungen für das Assoziierungs- und Stabilisierungsabkommen beginnen - und ich denke, dass sie gute Chancen hätten, dieses Abkommen im nächsten Jahr zu unterschreiben.” Als kleines Land mit guten wirtschaftlichen Möglichkeiten werde Montenegro sehr bald versuchen, sich der EU anzunähern.

Entscheidungen verschoben

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2032704,00.html

Geschrieben in Balkan | Drucken | Keine Kommentare »

17.5.2007 by Lupo.

Haliburton 18,5 Millairden $
Dyncorps die Terror Ausbilder 1,9 Milliarden $

usw…

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=…q=iraq+for+sale

VIDEO: Iraq for Sale, the War Profiteers
The privatisation of war

by Robert Greenwald

Global Research, May 16, 2007

Email this article to a friend
Print this article

VIDEO:

click to view

Iraq for Sale, the War Profiteers

A Robert Greenwald film

Global Research Editor’s Note

The privatisation of War is a carefully researched documentary on the role of “Private Military Contractors” in Iraq.

“Efficiency in war”.

-Iraq, a profit-driven war.
-Killing for profit.
-The Corporate Money-Makers behind Abu Ghraib

Outsourcing War to Private Companies.

The justification was “to rebuild Iraq”

Who are they?

–Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Roots (KBR),
–CACI, involved in “interrogation” in Abu Ghraib
–Blackwater,
–TITAN,
–DynCorp
–Military Professional Resources Inc, (MPRI)

A multibillion dollar business financed by US tax-payers

A massive transfer of wealth into the hands of several Fortune 500 companies. “There is nothing but the money” for these companies.

Human life is unimportant.

“Contract profit became more important than the lives of the men they hired”.

Halliburton and KBR, which are featured in the film, are making profit out of war. Halliburton got the contracts without competitive bidding.

“There is a lack of competition in the defense industry”. KBR was pre-selected in a corrupt system protected at the highest levels of the Bush administration. Run up the costs of war and make money…

Payback to Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a former CEO of Halliburton… Tax-payers are being ripped off…

Congress turns a blind eye.

This war has been privatised. Say no to the War Profiteers… Impeach Dick Cheney.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 16 May 2007

click to view

Iraq for Sale, the War Profiteers

Global Research Articles by Robert Greenwald

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=…&articleId=5666

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=544476389136766337&q=iraq+for+sale

Geschrieben in Welt News Spezial | Drucken | Keine Kommentare »

17.5.2007 by Lupo.

Balkan Muslim Gratitude
By Julia Gorin
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 9, 2007

On Monday, the FBI arrested six Muslims who were planning a commando-style attack on Fort Dix in New Jersey, to “kill as many soldiers as possible,” authorities said.

Four of the six men are Albanians, a fact that Fox News — which apparently thinks that “Yugoslavia” and “Albanians” are the same, and isn’t sure what those two things might have to do with “the Balkans” — reported thus:

The Associated Press reported that those captured were nationals of the former Yugoslavia, but the law enforcement source told FOX News that not all of them are of Albanian ethnicity. Federal sources also said the group is from the “Balkans.”

The only clue we get from other news sources that the four “Yugoslavs” are Albanian, and from Kosovo, is in sentences like these, which appeared in an earlier version of an AP report:

In 1999, [Fort Dix] sheltered more than 4,000 ethnic Albanian refugees during the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia…After that war, refugees were allowed to return to the U.N.-run province of Kosovo in Serbia or to seek permanent residency in the United States.

Pat ourselves on the back for resettling those “rescuees” here. Terrorism aside, the Albanian mafia has already overtaken both the Russian and Italian ones. There was also that Kosovo Albanian whose al-Qaeda application was discovered in Afghanistan, to name just one of many such collaborators.

This is Balkan blowback, and it’s been happening since we stuck our nose where it didn’t belong throughout the 1990s and, for good measure, bombed the wrong side. Maybe one day we’ll finally start talking about it. This morning, Balkan experts Jim Jatras, director of the American Council for Kosovo, and Dr. Serge Trifkovic alerted all major on-air media of their availability to discuss this development and were told, “We have our usual terror experts.”

Those would be the same terror experts who, in their daily opining on the War on Terror, haven’t touched the Balkans — a key region in the War on Terror, as it was the site of al-Qaeda’s proliferation into a truly global network and now serves as the organization’s European base and entryway for attacks on that continent and others. (Note to Fox News: “Balkans” includes Kosovo, Bosnia, Albania and others.)

So, we’re in for yet another round of terror “experts” painting terrorism in and from the Balkans as a unique thing, suspended in a vacuum of context, lest Americans start piecing things together and surmising that perhaps what happened to the Serbs is in some way related to what’s happening everywhere else on the globe.

Just so no one has to look too far, here’s an excerpt from a New York Times article that was written before we decided that, in the Balkans, the terrorists are the good guys:

A young Army conscript of ethnic Albanian origin shot up his barracks, killing four sleeping Slavic bunkmates and wounding six others.

The army says it has uncovered hundreds of subversive ethnic Albanian cells in its ranks. Some arsenals have been raided.

But watch the Fort Dix story go away faster than the one about the Bosnian Muslim who killed five Americans and injured another four in Salt Lake City for Valentine’s Day three months ago. Who even knows that at least two of the 9/11 hijackers were veterans of the Bosnian jihad, as Muslim sources now openly call it?

Reports NBC: “The alleged terror cell is described by investigators as disciples of Osama Bin Laden. Among the evidence seized was the downloaded will and testament of two Sept. 11 hijackers…On the videotape there is significant discussion of martyrdom.”

As I always say, Damn those Serbs! Good thing we were busy deporting those and not these ones who are trying to kill us — such as the killer Bosnian Sulejman Talovic in Salt Lake City or, for example, Agron Abdullahu (one of the six arrested on Monday), who was a sniper in Kosovo and residing here legally. Speaking of Serbs, one wonders how soon the arrested parties will think of pinning this one on the Serbs the way the Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret Morning News managed to do in reporting on Talovic (eventually coaxing his family to follow suit).

But those Balkan people were supposed to be only nominal Muslims! Secular, we were told. Europeans, they said. Non-practicing, too. They may have been such under Communism, but soon enough they found themselves and their faith. That we threw our support behind the region’s radicals, with whom the “nominal” Muslims also cast their secessionist lot — in Bosnia as well as in Kosovo — didn’t help either. And, of course, you don’t have to be a practicing Muslim to feel that universal Muslim sense of grievance against the non-Muslim world.

From an AP report: “Asked if those arrested had any ties to al-Qaida, Snow referred questions to the FBI and the U.S. attorney, but said those officials ‘seem to indicate that there is no direct evidence of a foreign terrorist tie.’”

As we know, Sudden Jihad Syndrome doesn’t require any foreign terrorist ties. But since it’s being brought up, let’s not forget that the Albanians of Kosovo received material assistance from Osama bin Laden during the “liberation” leg of the movement, which we were simultaneously helping them with. Here’s how these things work — courtesy of Jim Jatras:

Typically these begin as what are represented as “national liberation movements,” the desire of a group of people described in national or ethnic terms — Algerians, Afghanis, Kosovo Albanians, Pakistanis, Palestinians, Iraqis, etc. — to have their own independent national state. But at some point — either after achieving that goal (Afghanistan, Pakistan) or in the process of the “national liberation” struggle (”Palestine,” “Kosovo,” Iraq) — the movement shifts to a primarily Islamic jihad orientation, in which the national element is downplayed and the jihad element is emphasized. This transition coincides with the marginalization or elimination of the non-Muslim social elements (Christian Arabs, Albanian Catholics, etc.), some of whom may have been militant supporters of the first, national phase but who will have no future in the Islamic new order.

Jatras also points out that “as usual, the FBI is focusing on the worm’s-eye view of who did what, rather than the big picture of how these creeps got entrenched in the U.S. through our pro-KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) policy [which] helped create a haven for their operations. Even worse, KLA supporters in the United States have operated with virtual impunity, collecting money and weapons to support KLA operations not only in Kosovo, but in neighboring areas of southern Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and northern Greece.”

Therefore, says Chronicles Magazine foreign editor Trifkovic, “Hastily denying the group’s link to al-Qaeda and other global networks is a political necessity for the proponents of Kosovo’s independence, not necessarily the reality.” (Trifkovic can be reached for interviews at Trifkovic@netzero.net, and Jatras at JJatras@ssd.com.)

As an aside, the two suspects who were not Albanian come from Jordan and Turkey. Here are two heartwarming posts about Turkish troops in Kosovo. And let’s remember the even more heartwarming story of the Jordanian “peacekeepers” who opened fire on female American peacekeepers in Kosovo in 2004.

Meanwhile, our lawmakers continue to support an independent Kosovo, no longer as the multi-ethnic experiment it was originally sold as, but as an example of America using its “military might to create a Muslim country” in Europe, as Congressman Robert Wexler, D-FL, said recently. It appears that the jihadists whom Messrs. Wexler and Lantos had hoped would take note of our kind gesture, have done so.

What we’ve wrought in the Balkans truly is poetry in motion. The timing on these arrests, on the heels of the STATE-DEPARTMENT-SPONSORED tour of the Kosovo mufti couldn’t have been better. But no doubt the damage control machine is kicking into gear from the mufti-led State Dept. and our Albanian-bought politicians such as Tom Lantos, Eliot Engel, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, Wesley Clark and — what the heck — let’s dig up the earliest Albanian purchase: Bob Dole, after whom a street is named in Kosovo. The imperiled soldiers of Fort Dix and the other military bases that were being considered for the attack thank you all!

So, let’s continue pushing for Kosovo independence, giving the Albanian Muslims massive monetary support and covert assistance while they continue cleansing the remaining non-Albanian-Muslim population. This Fort Dix plot is just another tiny bump on the road to burying this hot potato. Of course, it may get a little harder next month to wash our hands of all this business, since that’s when John R. Schindler’s book Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qa’ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad comes out.

Schindler is professor of strategy at the Naval War College and a former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. In an e-mail to me, he said this book should finally blow the lid off the aggressively ignored Balkans mess. His book deals mainly with Bosnia, but that serves as a good reference point for Kosovo as well. From Amazon.com:

This book provides the missing piece in the puzzle of al-Qa’ida’s transformation from an isolated fighting force into a lethal global threat: the Bosnian war of 1992 to 1995. John R. Schindler reveals the unexamined role that radical Islam played in that terrible conflict — and the ill-considered contributions of American policy to al-Qa’ida’s growth.…

Schindler exposes how Osama bin Laden exploited the Bosnian conflict for his own ends and the disturbing level of support the U.S. government gave to the Bosnian mujahidin…[which] contributed to blowback of epic proportions: Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (the mastermind of 9/11) and two of the 9/11 hijacker pilots were veterans of the Bosnian jihad.…

John R. Schindler served for nearly a decade with the National Security Agency — work which took him to many countries in support of U.S. and allied forces operating in the Balkans — and was NSA’s top Balkans expert. He is uniquely qualified to demonstrate

* how the Bosnian conflict has been misrepresented by the mainstream media, covering up the large role played by radical Islam and al-Qa’ida;
* how Osama bin Laden used Bosnia as a base for terrorist operations worldwide—including attacks on the United States from the Millennium Plot to 9/11;
* how veterans of the Bosnian jihad have murdered thousands of Americans and conducted terrorist attacks around the world;
* how the Clinton administration, in collaboration with Iran, secretly supplied Bosnia’s mujahidin, including al-Qa’ida, with millions of dollars of weapons and supplies;
* how America’s Bosnian allies have been in covert alliances with radical anti-American regimes in several countries;
* why Bosnia and its secret jihad matter to America and our War on Terrorism today.

Since 1999, I have been screaming from the rooftops both about the injustice and hoax of our Balkans intervention, and about the security risk posed to us by it — warning that it would come back to bite us. Because when you don’t stop to figure out the historical context of a conflict that will tell you who the actual aggressor is; when you don’t corroborate horror stories by the complainant; when you don’t try to figure out which belligerent happens to also be hostile to your own society; and you instead go full throttle for a cheap moral victory and a Pulitzer, the bad guys will get you next.

But, again, let’s don’t put two and two together. To help us move along-nothing-to-see-here are the authorities:

While authorities are glad to have arrested them, the individuals are “hardly hard core terrorists,” one law enforcement source said.

Another source said that while the allegations are “troubling,” they are “not the type that made the hair on the back of your neck stand up.”

Heck, they were just going after expendable military personnel. Besides, targeting Yugoslavia’s police and military installations was a favorite Albanian hobby throughout 1980s and ’90s Kosovo.
Julia Gorin blogs at www.JuliaGorin.com and is a contributing editor to www.JewishWorldReview.com.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28234

Geschrieben in Balkan (Englisch), Balkan | Drucken | Keine Kommentare »