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I have no apriori stake in anything involving the balkans. I am not of slavic origin, a member of the orthodox church etc. and in fact I do not really even know any Serbs. I speak Russian halfway well and can at least read and type in Russian/
I have a reasonably good idea of how Russians think, and there was a big question mark in 95, i.e. assuming everything you read in the media was correct and the Serbs really were the assholes of the world, was it worth damaging relations with Russia over? To me the answer was not really, but I could not have framed an argument or a case very easily.
When the whole process started up again in 99, the Internet had come of age to a point at which it was possible to find good answers to such questions; I decided to make it my business to go out on the internet and learn as much as possible on the subject.
Here's what all I learned:
As nearly as I can tell, the Serbs are the closest thing there are to normal decent people in the Balkans. There were 25 or 26 ethnic groups in the Yugoslav federation, only three or four of which had any sort of a problem dealing with Serbs, and those are the three or four which sided with Adolf Hitler in WW-II.
In fact the Serbs declared war on Hitler and held him for many months and sent him into Russia in the dead of winter instead of on schedule, but for which we might all be working in Nazi coal mines. In fact, the Serbs rescued something like 500 allied airmen who were downed coming back from the raids over Ploesti and other balkan targets. Any allied airman who ever parachuted into Croatia, Albania, or any of the other parts of the Balkans was tortured and killed. The Serbs paid a huge price for this, two or three million being killed in death camps in the surrounding states, which sided with Hitler.
Kosovo in fact had been majority Serb prior to the war and was the ancient heartland of Serbia, with 1500 or so orthodox shrines and monasteries. Many Serbs living in Kosovo were killed by the Nazis, and Tito, a Croat, moved many more out of Kosovo, and then you started getting large numbers of Albanians moving into Kosovo to escape one of the worst regimes in the commie world in Albania. Most Albanian Kosovars are in fact illegal immigrants.
Bad went to worse after the war until Milosevic ended up having to rescind the autonomy of the province in 89, and that was the genesis of the modern problems of Kosovo. Milosevic had no options; every other ethnic group in Kosovo was being brutalized by the Albanians. According to every account I was able to read, in the winter of 99, what you had in Kosovo did not involve anything that anybody would call genocide or ethnic cleansing; only a bunch of innocent people trying to protect themselves from a low-grade guerilla war being waged by narco-terrorists with money and arms being supplied by other nations.
In fact the whole problem in Kosovo was the Albanians, who appear to be universally hated in the region. Reasons for that include criminal proclivities as well as what others in the reason call "rabbit breeding their way to power".
That means averaging ten or twelve children per family, and taking over little corners of other peoples' countries and then breaking those corners off into a "greater Albania".
From everything I was able to read, Albanians are responsible for as much as 90% of European heroin trafficking, most of the prostitution south of Germany, most of the traffic in stolen vehicles moving from Europe to Russia and the Levant, and on and on and on. Therefore it came as no surprise to to learn that the real reasons such as they were for our involvement had basically nothing to do with Albanian Kosovars.
There were six or eight real reasons for wanting to get into Kosovo and together they did not add up to a believable case and the pentagon advised Slick Clinton not to do it. The most major of those reasons involved a pipeline scheme through Albania which Albanians wanted Kosovo as payment for. The hell of it was that Russians had an alternative pipeline plan at the time that US oil companies actually liked better.
Nonetheless, none of that really matterred. The thing which was on the front page of virtually all American journals at the time was the Juanita Broaddrick story, i.e. a credible allegation of a brutal rape by a sitting president of the United States, and Slick clearly needed something to get that story off the papers. A week after Kosovo started, there were pictures of Slick and his toadies doing high-fives and talking about hitting a home run. A home run, in fact, which cost the lives of several thousand little slavic orthodox children.
As near as I could tell, NATO commanders realized that this thing was another episode of dog-wagging for which they could not ask pilots to risk their lives and ordered bombing attacks practically from orbit. Then when they realized they could not harm the Serbian military from 25,000', they embarked upon a wholesale campaign of what most people would call war crimes, targeting the Serbian people and their infrastructure hundreds of kilometers from any legitimate military target.
This was Milica Rakic:
At three years of age when she was killed by a NATO/Clintonista bomb hundreds of kilometers from anything anybody might have called a legitimate military target in 1999, Milica likely has the dubious distinction of being Slick's youngest female victim.
The other image of Milica which is common in the Orthodox world is this:
In other words, Milica has become a Martyr of the Orthodox faith. That means that the people responsible for this gigantic and abominable political crime, Slick and Hildabeast Clinton, Madeline Albright, Wesley Clark and a number of others, are likely going into the history books on the same page as the idiots who burned Joan of Arc.
Aside from every other problem with Kosovo, the precedent which it represents cannot possibly be allowed to stand. If ethnicity is everything and ownership and sovereignty don't mean anything anymore, then what are we going to say when the UN comes here demanding that we hand Texas, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and California over to Mexico on the same perverted basis?