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Archive für 23.9.2007

GIS Report: Albanian Separatists Expected to Mobilize in Spring if Kosovo Does Not Get Independence

23.9.2007 by CrniLabudovi.

Special Report; Arms Smuggling Routes Enhance Extremist Capabilities in South-West Balkans; Albanian Separatists Expected to Mobilize in Spring if Kosovo Does Not Get Independence
Defense & Foreign Affairs Special Analysis - January 31, 2007, Wednesday

Analysis. By Valentine Spyroglou, GIS South-Eastern Europe Station Chief. Virtually all intelligence sources in the Serbian province of Kosovo anticipate that a major upsurge in violence will occur in the March-April 2007 timeframe, and exclusive new evidence obtained by GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs highlights how Albanian extremists have developed comprehensive networks of arms supply to ensure a broadly-based conflict in both Kosovo and neighboring FYROM.

For several years, the possibility of a “hot Spring” in the Balkans, generally motivated by ethnic Albanian extremists, has been contemplated, and it has occurred in each year, although not necessarily to the degree predicted predicted. However, 2007 is likely to be the year that a large-scale violence becomes possible. The UN head negotiator for the future of the Serbian province of Kosovo, Martti Ahtisaari, is soon to present a plan of recommendations for Kosovo which is believed to say conditional independence — which Belgrade opposes directly — is the best course of action.

Regardless of the content of the upcoming report or the diplomatic results, the picture which emerges from media reports and GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs secure sources in Greece, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), and from Kosovo itself, shows a strong tendency towards violence in the Balkans around the March-April 2007 timeframe, directed by Kosovo and FYROM Albanian paramilitary leaders and politicians.

Their groups have been quiet until now, but the international authorities, especially those in the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), know very well that strong pressure exists from Albanian militants, who have a significant capacity to act should the province (90 percent ethnic Albanian) not get independence from Serbia in the near future.

The evidence for a resurgence of paramilitary activity in Kosovo includes the recent reappearance of uniformed and masked gunmen manning checkpoints in Western Kosovo villages; a bomb attack on a railroad line; and intercepted weapons shipments and discovered weapons stashes in rural parts of the province.

The place of the checkpoint, the village of Grci, near Djakovica in western Kosovo, was exposed on December 7, 2006. The Serbian media B-92 reported from there that Kosovo police coming to the scene after public calls engaged in gunfire with the masked men. The existence of such checkpoints, a provocation tactic which also was used in the 1997-1999 war between Yugoslav authorities and the Albanian UCK/KLA, has not gone away in Kosovo today. However, UNMIK security has recognized the danger of certain areas in western Kosovo and stopped patrolling there, which may be why reports of such activities are now not heard so frequently. A few days before the checkpoint incident, officials announced the existence of serious threats to UNMIK and KFOR (NATO Kosovo Force) installations and personnel.

The second major recent incident, an explosion near the village of Mijalic on December 9, 2006, damaged a railway line in central Kosovo. The attack was targeting about 100 passengers, mostly Serbs from central Kosovo enclaves of Priluzje, Plemetina, etc., but the bomb went off before the train arrived and the passengers were evacuated safely. UNMIK authorities restored the train line, making it a big example of how much “progress” Kosovo has made since 1999 towards a peaceful and stable society. However, for the extremists behind the attack this railroad which provides the minority Serbs with rare freedom to leave their enclaves is thus another strategic target.

Another subsequent attack which showed psychological intimidation against the minority Christians was on January 14, 2007, when a Serbian Orthodox church in the village of Gornja Brnjica near Pristina was robbed and looted on Orthodox Christmas Eve.

These small but significant recent events are only representing the tip of the iceberg, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs sources state, compared to what could come in the Spring if the Albanians of Kosovo fail to win independence. Russia has threatened to use a veto in the UN Security Council to support Serbia’s position of no independence, but instead granting considerable autonomy. In this case, the Albanian secessionists have more severe methods to pressure the situation towards the result they want.

Primarily, this will involve increased attacks on Serbs and UN personnel in Kosovo, but will also involve attempts to destabilize the neighboring FYROM and Montenegro, and thus drawing in the US and Europe to the reality of a greater region-wide danger if Kosovo is not made independent. At the same time, the long-term strategy of annexing and assimilating large areas of these countries into a Greater or Ethnic Albania is being prepared.

A ranking police source in Pristina, presenting credible documentary evidence, told GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs that the extremist checkpoints - associated with the banned organization, Albanian National Army (ANA, or AKSH in Albanian) - have not gone away but instead are being encountered across Kosovo. For example, near the eastern Kosovo village of Kosovska Kamenica, in the early hours of January 12, 2006, armed and masked Albanian extremists were found running another illegal checkpoint on a local road connecting to the internal border of Serbia.

The next day, in the town of Srbica (Skenderaj in the Albanian language) in north central Kosovo, armed AKSH members stopped cars and fired at one Albanian man who did manage to escape (it is well known that this town is under the control of militias controlled by prominent politician/KLA veteran Hashim Thaci). This police source disclosed that the expansion of the AKSH activity to eastern Kosovo was meant to expand the area of provocations which the extremist group could make to pressure the political situation, and that they were related to the terrorists in the Presevo Valley of South Serbia, across the border. Albanian terrorist activity against Serbs has been seen there and, unusually across the internal border as far as Kursumlija. At the same time, over the past few months there has been a re-activation of militant activity as well in the Presevo Valley.

Illegal Weapons Smuggling Networks: The possibility that Kosovo-based extremists trying to make political pressure will destabilize neighboring countries was detected in December 2006, when KFOR announced that it had seized a large amount of weapons in and around Pec, another hotbed for radical activity in western Kosovo. The weapons were destined for Montenegro. They were discovered by Italian troops who afterwards arrested five Albanians involved.

According to news reports, these weapons included dozens of Zolja anti-tank rocket launchers and anti-tank mines, hand grenades, rifle grenades, light machineguns, pistols, various explosive, detonators and more than 9,000 rounds of ammunition. It also emerged that blasting caps were stolen from a munitions factory in Berane, northern Montenegro, and the expected shipment involved a group of Albanians allegedly preparing internal attacks in Malesija, near Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro.

Montenegro ended its state union with Serbia, the devolution of the former Yugoslavia, with a referendum in Summer 2006 but this result was largely seen as being obtained by corrupt means by the pro-independence Djukanovic Government, and especially with a strong turnout from the Albanian and Bosnian Muslims who make up around 20 percent of the Montenegro population. The possibility that a weak Montenegro, without assistance from Serbian security structures, could easily be dominated by Kosovo and Albania-supplied extremists, was not taken into consideration. The threat remains high and will continue to remain so throughout 2007.

More to the south, in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), a series of arms smuggling routes exist and are controlled by political leaders associated with the former National Liberation Army (NLA), such as Ali Ahmeti of the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI). In fact, the major convergence point for two of the biggest routes is Ahmeti’s home village, Zajas, north of Kicevo town in the center-west of the country. According to three very reliable official sources in the security services, the weapons shipments are coming in regularly from Albania, through the mafia-run village of Veleshta, near Struga. This Albanian-populated village has exceptionally close clan ties with Kosovo Albanians (the residents originally came from Kosovo) and did not share the same origins and history of the other Albanian-population towns in the region.

In the village, according to one of the GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs sources, a local clan with command of 20 to 25 men has been in charge of circulating the weapons which come in through concealed containers on the Kafasan border from Albania, or through the mountains on goat-trails to the villages of Radolishta and Frangovo and then to Veleshta, where the local clan loyal to Mr Ahmeti is engaged with smuggling them north to major Albanian-controlled areas such as Tetovo, Aracinovo near Skopje, and the villages of the Kumanovo area. All in all, there are eight to 10 major bandit groups trading in weapons in FYROM among the Albanian ex-militants………………………………………

GIS-Report

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The Big Lie: NATO’s Campaign of Deception in Kosovo

23.9.2007 by Lupo.

The Big Lie
NATO’s Campaign of Deception in Kosovo

Citizens of a free country ought to expect they won’t be burdened with the kind of propaganda barrage that has come to be associated with Nazi “interior ministers” such as Josef Goebbles or Soviet “media spokesmen” like Vladimir Posner. However, the more information that comes out about the NATO war in Kosovo, the more evident is the fact that NATO made an apparent “policy decision” to lie about Serbian atrocities. It seems the western democracies “stole a page from the play books” of their former totalitarian adversaries in Germany and the Soviet Union.
Writing recently in Liberty Magazine, David Ramsey Steele points out that in Kosovo we were told before the bombings that there was mass genocide occurring, the figure of “100,000 or more” was tossed around even though there was no evidence to back-up this claim. One media pundit suggested the number would be a quarter-of-a-million dead. NATO even gave a name to this “campaign of mass genocide,” it was dubbed “Operation Horseshoe” but, as Steele says, the factual basis for the existence of such a genocide is spurious at best. In fact, Steele likens it to the Bryce report that reported falsified claims of genocide in Belgium in World War I.
Later after the NATO bombs began dropping, the official NATO claim was dropped to around 10,000 as it became clear no mass graves or killing fields even existed. The actual number of people found in the reported mass-graves totals slightly more than 2,000, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands that we were told originally. The loss of 2,000 lives is a great tragedy, but there are more Americans than that killed domestically every year and it hardly warrants the kind of violent response we saw in Kosovo. In fact, Mr. Steele states that Kosovo was safer than any major U.S. city prior to the NATO bombing. Moreover, as Steele shows, it is hardly evident that each of those bodies was killed as a result of a campaign of genocide.
Finally, Steele points out that the stories about Kosovo came not only from NATO officers but also from officials of the United Nations as well as from our own government. However, a few sources closely followed developments and seemed to get the story about right. Pablo Ordaz of El Pais magazine, Audrey Gillan of the London Review of Books and even two members of an inspection team sent to Kosovo for the purpose of investigating purported mass graves all challenged the stories of the propaganda machine.
Steele also shows that while we were told of ethnic cleansing and Kosovars who were being forced from their homes, the truth of the matter is they were being forced from their homes because of the danger and destruction being caused by NATO bombing in the region. If anything, this so-called ethnic cleansing appears as a direct result of NATO action. In fact, as Steele states, now that NATO and the KLA have control of Kosovo there have been widespread reports that the people we were supposedly protecting, the Kosovars, are now engaged in a murdering spree against the Serbians.
Instead of hearing the truth from our leadership, we were fed emotional tales of mass killing that were entirely blown out of proportion in order to justify force and violence in the region.
The sad trail of lies in Kosovo merely reinforces two facts. The first is that our republic depends upon a press that will question the claims of our leaders instead of just accepting them. The second is that Congress has shirked both its Constitutional responsibility to declare war before U.S. troops are sent into battle and its oversight responsibility to closely monitor the administration in its carrying out of foreign policy.

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=139

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KFOR: “December 10th is a day everybody is expecting. It may be a critical day, and it may not be,”

23.9.2007 by CrniLabudovi.

KFOR Kommanda geht davon aus, das es zu keiner Status Änderung noch in 2007 kommt und die KFOR wird speziell ab 10.Dezember sich auf einen robusten Einsatz einstellen.


“December 10th is a day everybody is expecting. It may be a critical day, and it may not be,” KFOR Commander General Xavier Bout de Marnhac said on Friday.

KFOR commander suggests Kosovo’s status may not be resolved this year

23/09/2007

PRISTINA, Kosovo, Serbia — KFOR’s recently appointed commander, French General Xavier Bout de Marnhac, said on Friday (September 21st) that he does not expect the province’s future status issue to be resolved this year. “Everybody in Kosovo was speaking in February 2006 about independence by July. Today we are in 2007 and still with a big question mark ahead of us,” de Marnhac told a news conference. He added that NATO has been planning for the period after December 10th, when ongoing talks are scheduled to end, saying KFOR is more prepared than ever to respond to threats.

In other news, Deputy Chinese Foreign Minister Qiao Zonghuai visited Belgrade on Friday and said Beijing, being a permanent member of the UN Security Council, respects the UN Charter and supports talks between Belgrade and Pristina without any time limitations. Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica told him Belgrade welcomes that position.

Visiting Washington on Saturday, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said that while Kosovo is predominantly a European issue, US support in resolving its final status is crucial. (BETA, DPA, Deutsche Welle, B92, Xinhua, People’s Daily online, RTRS, Makfax - 22/09/07)

Setimes

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Thousands fear as blood feuds sweep Albania (outsourcing causing increase)

23.9.2007 by Lupo.

By Bojan Pancevski and Nita Hoxha in Tirana, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:39am BST 03/06/2007

Stuck in their cottage outside the northern Albanian village of Mnela, 14-year-old Flori Bardoku and his younger sisters watch suspiciously whenever anybody makes the hour-long journey up the path to their home.

The reason for their caution is understandable: while most of their trickle of visitors are villagers bearing food and gifts, they know that one day someone may come to kill them.

The four siblings and their mother have lived in fear of their lives ever since their father, Martin, killed his cousin’s wife in Mnela after discovering her in bed with another man. He is serving 10 years in jail for her death, but in conservative rural Albania, justice is seldom served by courts alone. In accordance with ancient clan tradition, the murdered woman’s brothers have declared a “blood feud” against Bardoku’s family - which means any of his nearest and dearest can be killed in exchange.

Bardoku’s family is believed to be one of more than 20,000 in the country who live under an ever-present death sentence because of such blood feuds. After his arrest, his children had to stop going to school and can never leave their homestead, a ramshackle place with no electricity and only a half a roof. It is, in many ways, just as much a prison as their father’s.

“We would like to be able to go outside to play with our friends, but we can’t” said Flori. “Here we have no books or magazines to read. I want to go back to school.”

By rights, medieval customs such as blood feuds should be a thing of the past. While Albania remains a clan-based society, today’s younger generation are generally much more reluctant than their ancestors were to spill blood in defence of family honour. Yet recently, the problem has got much worse - after clan chiefs, in a bizarre adaptation to 21st century ways, ruled that families could “outsource” blood feuds to professional contract killers.

The ruling, last year, has seen blood feuds being pursued with far more ruthless efficiency than before, resulting in an explosion in the number of the killings. The government is desperately trying to curb the problem by setting up a database of families affected by blood feuds in an attempt to provide monitoring and protection.

“Times have changed,” said Edmond Dragoti, a sociologist based in the capital, Tirana, who has studied the history of blood feuds. “We no longer see men saying proudly ‘I am the avenger’; on the contrary, the executors are anonymous, hired killers.”

The blood feuds are regulated by a set of harsh tribal laws called the Kanun - The Code - drafted by Lek Dukagjini, a feudal lord who fought against the Ottoman invaders in the 15th century. It served as the country’s constitution for centuries and was upheld by the council of elders, a tribal legislative body consisting of the oldest males from prominent families of each village or region.

The Kanun was banned during the totalitarian rule of the Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha, whose hard-line communist regime

………..

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/03/wfeud03.xml

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“Great Albania”: A Project for Europe and the faschist Universität from Tetova

23.9.2007 by Lupo.

Tetovo - AKI reports Macedonian authorities are investigating a professor who spoke Thursday in Tetovo at the opening of the Macedonian branch of the Unity of World Albanians (UWA) movement. The professor, Miljiam Fejziu, teaches at a university in Tetovo whose population of 80,000 is 70% ethnic Albanian, but Albanians are just 25% of the Macedonian population. Fejziu stated, “It is our universal right to live in one country. The institutions that exist in Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia are to achieve close relations and cooperation on cultural, scientific, economic and every other level. The cooperation should be later polarised towards the tendency to form one body with all-national character. We refer to Macedonia as the third Albanian country in the Balkans.” Fejziu sounds like the intellectual leader of the UWA and with such logic; he can claim Greece as the fourth Albanian nation and Serbia the fifth. [AKI]

Tetovo is near the area where heavy fighting began between Albanian nationalist groups and the Macedonian government in Skopje for seven months in 2001. If the fighting had continued every nation, bordering the country could have been caught up in it. The nationalist vision of Greater Albania or re-creating the ancient state of Illyrium is very much active and heavily armed especially with increased relations with Tehran. Iran will use the next war in Southeast Europe, however it begins, to not only keep NATO and the West occupied away from Iran, but the Iranian government will also use the war to silence Vienna and end the investigation into Tehran’s nuclear weapons program by the United Nations agency based there.

Fifteen members compose the Macedonian branch of the UWA, a membership that includes Tetovo’s Muslim Mufti Alifekri Esati. The congress of the UWA is scheduled to meet in Tirana late November and by then we should know the extent, if any, of their military successes.

http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Politics/?id=1.0.1331532297

oder

http://newsblaze.com/story/20070921144959payn.nb/newsblaze/OPINIONS/Opinions.html

5.07.2007

Pyotr ISKENDEROV

“Great Albania”: A Project for Europe

So, the secret is out. The “premier” of the Kosovo government, the former ringleader of the terrorist “Kosovo Liberation Army” Agim Ceku has named the date, to which the Albanian leaders of the province would time their declaration of independence. That is slated for November 28,2007, when the neighbouring Albania will celebrate its principal state holiday - Day of the Flag.

But the holiday has to do with Albania but indirectly. It has long been viewed by the Albanian diaspora scattered all over the world as Day of All Albanians. To understand what Kosovo separatists mean by selecting this particular date for declaring independence, suffice it to recollect the two key events in the ALBANIAN history, not the history of a state of Albanians but rather of their ethnic origins.

The first milestone is the period when the All-Albanian Prizren League worked in 1878-1881. Prizren is a town in Kosovo. In September 1878 the leaders of the Prizren League adopted a programme of unification of ALL Albanian provinces into a single autonomous state and political formation, introducing Albanian as the language to be used for making official documents and for educational purposes, as well as creation of the Albanian national army. Following that the demand to establish of a single Albanian vilayet under the formal suzerainty of the Turkish Sultan for the above purposes. Using the slogan “United Albania for all Albanians” their troops clashed with Turkish and Montenegro armies that attempted to implement the decisions of the 1878 Berlin Congress on the territorial rebuilding of the Balkans.

The idea of the creating of the ethnic Albania was rejuvenated in the autumn of 1912 when the armed forces of the Balkan states led by Serbia liberated the originally Slav lands from Turksl. November 18, 1912 leaders of the Albanian national movement presented to diplomats from the great powers in Istanbul what was called “The Call of the Albanian Nation”. It expressed the firm resolve of Albanians to fight with an eye to “guaranteeing to the Albanian people its ethnic and political existence.” What the reference to “guarantees” meant was the establishment of Albania in its ethnic borders and its further international recognition. A few days later in Vlera the National assembly gathered to declare Albania’s independence under the banner of the Middle-Age Albanian hero Skanderbeg, a black double-headed eagle on the red background. Since then residents of Albania and Albanians in Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Southern Serbia and Greece regard this flag as their national symbol.

As early as 1913 a multi-colour map of “Ethnic Albania” was disseminated in the Balkans that was drawn by someone Ahmet Gasi, also known as “doctor” and “professor”. The map showed the internationalborders of the state-to-be that included Albania, all of Kosovo, the greater part of Macedonia, a part of Greece and Montenegro. Nowadays, all the bookstores in Pristina, the administrative centre of Kosovo feature this map so that it could catch anyone willing to purchase it. The price is 5 euros.

The danger of such ethno-demographic “novelties” by “professor “ Gasi and his present-day Albanian followers should in no case be underestimated. Western researchers and observers have a knack of being constantly surprised at finding how comparatively low the religious sentiment of Albanians is, compared with, for one, with the role their faith plays for Orthodox Serbs and Greeks, and Catholic Croats. However, this Albanian secret is an open secret. The faith of Albanians is Albanism – an anti-Christian idea of bringing together all Albanians within the borders of their single state, deliberately cleansed from any impregnation by any other ethnicity. Given that Albanians have in the present-day Europe the highest per capita birth rate, the stake for ethnocracy and ethno-etatism in the plans of building the “Great Albania” is more than vindicated, allowing them to avoid restriction of the limits of Albanian expansion within the territory of the Balkans only.

….

http://en.fondsk.ru/article.php?id=867

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Serbia warns U.S. and NATO not to “snatch” Kosovo

23.9.2007 by Lupo.

September 22, 2007 - 2:32 PM

Serbia warns U.S. and NATO not to “snatch” Kosovo

Serbia’s Prime Minister Kostunica speaks during final pre-elections rally in Belgrade

BELGRADE (Reuters) - Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica warned the United States, NATO and Kosovo Albanians on Saturday they would be responsible for devastating consequences if they “snatch” Kosovo and declare it independent.

Serbia is offering wide autonomy for Kosovo. The Albanians, who have been under U.N. rule for eight years, want full independence. They are to hold direct talks in New York next week and have until December 10 before a report must go to the U.N.

“This time, they will implement a different strategy — unilateral recognition of independent Kosovo,” Kostunica predicted in an interview with Vecernje Novosti newspaper.

Asked what Serbia could do, Kostunica said: “One must clearly warn of the devastating consequences of such violence, which has not happened since the U.N. was established. And that’s what we do all the time.”

He did not elaborate, but he appeared to be speaking of “violence” that would be done to international law.

Kostunica said there were differences in his coalition government on how Serbia should respond to an independence declaration, but said Belgrade would focus diplomatic reprisals on NATO states that he believes instigated secession.

“We must make a difference between the main player, without whom the whole issue of independence would have never been raised. That is NATO,” he said.

“This has nothing to do with the European Union. Not for the slightest moment have we questioned Serbia’s European integration. Besides, a number of EU members are not NATO members.”

LAST DITCH TALKS

Kostunica said he believed a solution could still be found to settle the status of Kosovo on the basis of the United Nations Charter, which upholds Serbian sovereignty over the 90-percent Albanian majority.

……

http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/international/ticker/detail/Serbia_warns_U_S_and_NATO_not_to_snatch_Kosovo.html?siteSect=143&sid=8242366&cKey=1190471951000&ty=ti
But “the Albanians, supported especially by their American partners” were simply waiting for the clock to run out on the 120-day period set for last-ditch negotiations before declaring an impasse and doing what they have planned all along, he said.

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