18 February 2008
Superpower divide over Kosovo widens
Posted by Roy Bischoff under: What's News .
Well no one is rattling their sabers so to speak. At least not yet. Other places may try to follow suit and then things may change. It may also cause countries to change their stance on peace keepers. If letting them in to your country precedes independence then they will think twice about agreeing to a cease fire and allowing in peace keepers.
BRUSSELS, Belgium
A day after Kosovo declared independence, ethnic Serbs in the north angrily denounced the United States and urged Russia to help Serbia hold on to the territory that Serbs consider the birthplace of their civilization…
Protesters also marched in Serbia’s capital, and that nation recalled its ambassador to the U.S. to protest American recognition for an independent Kosovo…
But the dispute is likely to worsen already strained relations between the West and Russia, which is a traditional ally of Serbia and seeks to restore its influence in former Soviet bloc states. The Kremlin could become less likely to help in international efforts important to the U.S. and its allies, such as pressuring Iran to rein in its nuclear program.
Speaking in Tanzania, President Bush declared: “The Kosovars are now independent” — and Washington formally recognized Kosovo as an independent country soon afterward. Germany, Britain and France also gave their heavyweight backing, saying they planned to issue formal recognitions.
But Russia, Serbia’s key ally, and emerging global power China remained adamantly opposed to Kosovo’s independence, warning of the danger of inspiring separatist movements around the world, including in their own sprawling territories.
As veto-wielding Security Council members, Russia and China both have the power to block any attempt by Kosovo to gain a seat on the international body…
Serbia vowed to fight to the end against any U.N. recognition.
“The so-called Kosovo state will never be a member of the United Nations. Serbia will use all diplomatic means at its disposal to block Kosovo’s recognition,” said Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic.
The Kremlin was already working diplomatic levers to help Serbia achieve that aim…
Serbian President Boris Tadic, who attended the U.N. meeting, urged the council to oppose Kosovo’s move and to intervene as a last resort.”The Republic of Serbia will not resort to force,” said Tadic. “On the other hand, this arbitrary decision represents a precedent, which will cause irreparable damage to the international order.”
He said Kosovo’s declaration “annuls international law, tramples upon justice and enthrones injustice.”
Serbia recalled its ambassador to Washington in protest of U.S. recognition for Kosovo, but said it was not severing diplomatic ties. It also withdrew envoys to France and Turkey and was expected to recall others as more nations formally recognized Kosovo as a new state.
“America and the European Union are stealing Kosovo from us, everyone must realize that,” said Tomislav Nikolic, the head of Serbia’s ultra-nationalist Radical Party…
Russian President Vladimir Putin has argued that independence without U.N. approval sets a dangerous precedent for the former Soviet Union, where separatists in Russia’s Chechnya region and two areas of Georgia are agitating for independence.Russian officials hinted last week that if Kosovo declared independence it might retaliate by recognizing the independence claims of Abkhazia and South Ossetia — two Russian-supported provinces in Georgia. Russia’s parliament repeated the threat Monday.
On Monday, Kosovo independence took center stage in China’s diplomatic jousting with Taiwan, which has been self-governing since the Chinese civil war in 1949 but which the Beijing regime considers to still be part of China.
China’s Foreign Ministry criticized Taiwan for welcoming Kosovo’s independence, saying the island’s government did not meet the criteria for recognizing other countries.
“It is known to all that Taiwan, as a part of China, has no right and qualification at all to make the so-called recognition,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said in a statement posted on the ministry’s Web site.
China has good ties with Serbia and expressed “deep concern” over Kosovo’s independence declaration.
17 Comments so far...
Hank Says:
18 February 2008 at 10:25 pm.
Tensions in Yugoslavia erupted during the first Balkan War, WWI and WWII. People get nervous when there is trouble here because it seems get so many other countries involved. I don’t really know why this is but I have read about it.
Angela Rogin Says:
18 February 2008 at 10:27 pm.
Were things this bad between Russia and the west two weeks ago or did it just get bad since we started talking about it? I think someone asked this before but I didn’t see an answer.
Cavetrollhead Says:
18 February 2008 at 10:38 pm.
Hank, (or anyone) I am pretty ignorant on this so forgive if this is a dumb question.
Do you think that the Christian/Muslim history of conflict contributes to why outside countries involved?
Or maybe it is just where Western influence collides with Eastern influence, as this article seems to hint.
What is the religious demography of Kosovo? Could it be the US is trying to ingratiate itself to the Muslim world?
E.E. Says:
18 February 2008 at 11:06 pm.
I know we aren’t supposed to put whole articles but I am doing it anyway. I tried to cut out parts but I thought it was all important to help us understand about the tensions and where they come from. This is from NPR:
Observers of Russia would be forgiven if they believed it’s the height of the Cold War.President Vladimir Putin recently accused Western countries of “poking their snotty noses” in the parliamentary elections campaigns. Diplomatic relations with Britain over the poisoning of KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko have all but broken off. And earlier this year, Putin implicitly compared the United States to Nazi Germany before saying American actions during the Vietnam War were worse than the repressions of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Putin’s vehemence toward the West has ballooned this year. But Russia’s decade-long post-communist honeymoon with the United States ended in 1999, the year NATO bombed Yugoslavia over the breakaway province of Kosovo.
Moscow’s reaction was a far cry from its initial embrace of Washington during Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika — when decades of Cold War antagonisms melted within months — or the euphoria of the Soviet collapse in 1991, when many Russians believed they would soon be living like their Western counterparts.
Kosovo Marks a Shift in Thought
Russians were sick of their country’s backward image and tired of a decade of humiliating economic ruin, rampant corruption and lectures from the West about politics and economics. Nostalgia for Moscow’s lost superpower status began to outweigh memories of food shortages and Soviet repression.
Russians were also upset by NATO’s expansion into the new Eastern European democracies in their backyard. In 1999, they saw Serbia as a traditional Slavic ally, a former member of the Soviet Bloc now under threat from the Soviet Union’s one-time Western adversaries.
Then-Prime Minister of Russia Yevgeny Primakov was on a plane to Washington when he heard that the bombing had begun. He turned his plane around over the Atlantic and headed home, providing the central and enduring image of Russia’s growing antagonism toward the United States.
When NATO troops began entering Kosovo later that spring, Russian peacekeepers in nearby Bosnia abandoned their posts and rushed to occupy Kosovo’s main airport, blocking British soldiers from setting up there. Russians back home hailed the move as an important victory over NATO.
At the time, George W. Bush was campaigning for the presidency, lambasting President Clinton’s chummy relationship with Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Bush promised to end personal favoritism and protect American national security. Taking office the following year, he began by expelling 50 Russian diplomats from Washington for alleged spying. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld snubbed the Russian defense minister soon after by refusing to meet him on the sidelines of a NATO conference.
Personal and Political Relationships
But Bush’s Russia policy took an about-face during his first meeting with his Russian counterpart, Putin, in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana in June 2001. President Bush emerged smiling.
“I looked the man in the eye,” he said. “I was able to get a sense of his soul.”
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Putin was the first head of state to call Bush with his condolences and an offer of support. He agreed to new U.S. bases in former Soviet Central Asia, and he didn’t complain when the White House pulled out of the cornerstone 1972 Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty, as part of its plan to set up a new missile defense system.
But despite two presidents’ seemingly personal relationship, bilateral relations soon resumed a downward spiral. Putin helped lead international protests against the U.S.-led war in Iraq. And the Kremlin saw a new security threat when old, corrupt administrations in the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia fell during their so-called “color revolutions.” The new governments were led by young, pro-Western leaders; Moscow believed Western countries had helped bring them to power to further erode Russia’s sphere of influence.
Newly flush with money from high global prices for oil, Russia’s top export, Moscow began fighting back, reheating Cold War-era anti-Western rhetoric. In a bid to restore his country’s great-power status, Putin began flexing his foreign policy muscles through Russia’s top commodity, energy.
A Battle of Accusations
In January 2006, Moscow cut off natural gas supplies to Ukraine during a price dispute. The disruption affected supplies to Europe during a bitter cold spell, prompting fears of a continentwide energy crisis. In September 2006, Moscow cut off transportation and trade ties with the former Soviet republic of Georgia and deported hundreds of Georgians after officials in Tbilisi briefly arrested four Russian military officers on espionage charges.
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney later responded by accusing Russia of using energy as a political tool to blackmail its neighbors. Russia shot back. Earlier this year, Putin accused the United States of increasing tension and violence around the world.
Washington’s plan for a missile defense system, which Moscow says is a threat to its national security, has become the focus of Russia’s recent anger with the West. The Kremlin is especially upset over plans to install components of the missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, both former Soviet Bloc countries that are now members of NATO and the European Union. The United States says the missile shield would protect against rogue states such as Iran and North Korea. But Putin says the shield would start a new arms race and has threatened to direct Russian missiles at sites in Europe, should the United States proceed with the system.
By issuing increasingly strong criticism of the West, the authoritarian Putin is seen as strengthening his own position among Russian politicians. Analysts say his rhetoric plays well to a domestic audience ahead of presidential elections next year, when Putin’s two-term limit ends. Many believe he’ll use an expected landslide by the pro-Putin United Russia Party in December’s parliamentary elections to justify holding on to power, possibly by becoming prime minister. Putin has already indicated he may take the post; his supporters say the president’s popularity gives him the “moral duty” to become the country’s national leader.
As the elections neared, authorities delayed granting visas to international vote monitors from the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, the main European election watchdog and part of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE. When the group decided against coming to Russia, saying Russian authorities were preventing it from properly monitoring the elections, Putin accused Washington of influencing the group’s decision to discredit the elections. He said Russia would push to reform the OSCE, partly by limiting its human rights monitoring.
U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns responded by calling Putin’s accusations “preposterous,” saying Washington would “not give a millimeter” to any proposal that would weaken the monitoring organization.
As Russia prepares for the end of Putin’s presidential term next year, the country’s standoff with the West looks set only to deepen.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11473661
Cavetrollhead Says:
18 February 2008 at 11:24 pm.
Wow,
E.E. that was a good article. I have special interest in Russia because I served in intelligence during the cold war as a Russian Linguist. (I married a Russian speaking Ukrainian) I have felt for a long time that Putin threatens Ukraine as well as all ’satellite’ (for lack of a better word) nations of Russia.
It really irritates me to hear that Bush said that he looked into the man’s soul and thereby inferred that he could trust him. It drives me crazy when religious people think they can get revelations without reason or thought as if god doesn’t require any effort from his children -and as if the devil has no power to deceive them. Lots of people FELT great about Hitler. Maybe I am assuming too much about Bush’s thought process, but he was obviously wrong about Putin. Weather Putin is wicked or righteous, his attitude is a threat to the region and to the west. I can tell you that Ukrainians are very wary of him.
E.E. Says:
18 February 2008 at 11:30 pm.
Dang, that is so interesting, Cave. It’s great that you speak Russian. From what I know of the Ukrainian people, they are warm heart and kind. You are lucky to have a wife from there. Putin has a hard demeanor so I don’t buy what Bush said. His past shows he is no angel.
Chuck C Says:
19 February 2008 at 1:32 pm.
Good article EE. Its like you’re “Putin” out a call for us all to wake up! Don’t go “Putin” this information aside like it don’t matter. Or they’ll be “Putin” the hurt on our poor little heads! I been “Putin” up with enough already!
E.E. Says:
19 February 2008 at 3:19 pm.
Thanks Mr. Chuck Stumpy.
Vlajko Says:
19 February 2008 at 6:03 pm.
Greeting,democratic brothers of USA…This is my first post here.
I am from Serbia.I was looking for some forums or blogs where I can tell my feelings and opinions about current situation in my country aka Serbia.
USA and other countries have made a big mistake recognizing Kosovo as independent state.It is against law and against justice.I feel terrible this days.The justice is on our side but the force and power are on the wrong side(Kosovo Albanians helped by USA).
On the other side I think that nothing would change because nobody listens to my small but great country.From 14th century Albanians is killing Serbs there and forcing them to migrate in other parts of Serbia.The proportion Serbs:Albanians at Kosovo in 1900 was 50:50.But during the WW1,WW2 and communist regime held by Croat Tito Albanians become majority and in 1981 is proportion 10:90 or 9 times more Albanians than Serbs.And that was natural that 2 million Serbs 1989 at Gazimestan support Slobodan Milosevic and his statement:No one can repress you. But this guy was cheating on every election during the 90s,he had no Serbian people support in that decade.NATO bombed the whole one nation because of one man.NATO aggression in 1999 was very evil and mean.Since that no Serb is safe in Kosovo and I could not believe that the independence will bring peace(like Bush says,but it will bring coal to world leaders).
The prime minister of so called Kosova Republic Hasim Taci was a leader of terroristic movement UCK(Liberation Army of Kosovo?!) and he is responsible for dozen thousands missing and killed Serbs and other non-Albanians,also he is responsible for hundreds of thousands Serbian fugitives from Kosovo.He had a BIG SUPPORT from mujahedins from Close East who where sent there by Osama Bin Laden,the same Osama Bin Laden who responsible for killing innocent people on 9/11.How Taci can be a prime minister?!How he can be a democrat?!How he can be out of jail?!How he can have USA support,the same USA who learned us democracy?!
We don’t want to brush your brain but we just want to ask you to watch things and situation at Kosovo on both sides.Serbs are not angles like no other in the world.Serbs were also killing innocent Albanians,but it hurts when this is showed like the only truth.The Serbs were killed also.
Sorry on my bad English,I hope that I have touched the point and I hope you have understood it.
Good day to you all…
Ghost Says:
19 February 2008 at 8:11 pm.
Whoah, has anyone seen this buried down here? This is fascinating and should be where more people will see it. Vlajko, I am glad you posted here. It is very interesting to read your feelings on a very touchy situation. Good luck with what you and your family are going through.
Joy Bischoff Says:
19 February 2008 at 8:23 pm.
I am very sad and feel hurt for your people when I read your words, Vlajko. Please do not feel bad about your English. You do very well. It is wonderful that you know another language. It is very wrong that this is the first time I am hearing your side to the story. I wish the media was more fair in reporting. Thank you for posting here and please feel free to do it again.
Roy Bischoff Says:
19 February 2008 at 9:27 pm.
Thanks for the inside information on Kosovo. I am not sure exactly how this fits in with our purpose, but we need to educate ourselves on what our country is doing in the world and we should be taking a look at both sides. Sometimes our government does things that they shouldn’t and we should hold them accountable.
Cavetrollhead Says:
19 February 2008 at 11:21 pm.
So, since no-one has answered my questions on this blog, I want to ask Vlajko.
Isn’t Kosovo a Muslim country? Could it be the US is trying to impress and win friends with Muslims around the world?
Please forgive my ignorance on the matter. I guess I just don’t have the time to research this.
And Vlajko, as far as Putin goes, what do you think of him? He makes me very nervous.
Joy Bischoff Says:
20 February 2008 at 12:06 am.
Cave, yes Kosovo is Muslim. I am afraid there may be something to what Vlajko is saying. Let’s say that the Mexicans in California, AZ, NV, NM and TX rise up and demand the land be given to them as the country of Aztland. They are fighting very hard for this to happen. The international community decides that since there is such a high concentration of Mexicans there, then they have the right to break away from America and have their our country. How would we feel about that? From what I understand, there has been violence on both sides but it seems there are Muslim terrorists in Kosovo who are targeting and killing Serbian Christians. It breaks my heart.
Joy Bischoff Says:
20 February 2008 at 12:08 am.
I want to add one more thing. We see that three different people have signed up for our website from Serbia. I think you may be feeling lonely and misunderstood, judged by the outside world. I want you to know that there are Americans who would understand if they knew the truth. I know there are bad things that happened on both sides but I have been reading some things and I feel your people have been treated very badly and I am very sorry. Good luck and please feel welcome here.
Cavetrollhead Says:
20 February 2008 at 12:19 am.
Thanks Joy,
OK so they are Muslim. So do you think the US is trying to ingratiate itself?
You know, what you said about AZTland is kind of like what the Arab Muslims think about what NATO did to Israel- Isn’t it? (or was it the UN?)
Of course, the Holocaust and the ancient Jewish history were persuasive arguments for that.
Vlajko Says:
20 February 2008 at 9:54 am.
Thanks everyone who had read my lines here an who find something good in them.I’m glad to see that I have your support.Means a lot.
Sorry,for the late answering,we are in the different time zones,you know.
Ghost,thanks for your wishes,I hope that it would end ok for my people and everyone else.
Mr Joy Bischoff the right question is why you are hearing this from me or why the western medias are not objective?And thanks for the welcome…
Mr Roy Bischoff,yes my lines do not fit to the purpose,it’s true,but I want to give some information how the politcs of the big leaders break our backs and souls.
And now,Cavetrollhead…Kosovo is not a muslim country.Look,the full name of this province is Kosovo and Metohija.It is both serbian words.Kosovo comes from the word “Kos” which means a kind of a bird,and the word “Metohija” is used to describe the church lands and properties. “Metoh” means church land.So,just in the name you can see that is Serbian and Christian land and so the word “Metohija” is eliminated purposly because of its Christianic meaning.
There is no river,mountain,town,village at Kosovo and Metohija that carries Albanian name.The town of Prizren was Serbian capital at 14th century.
There was only a few Albanians.As you now the Serbs are the Slavs and they came from their fatherland(which was in todays Ukraine and Poland) to the Balkans during the 7th century.They found there Ilirs.You can hear that Albanians called themselves the descenders of the Ilirs,which is not true.They want to say that they are not pilgrims there and Kosovo is their land.But as you don’t know they came from Asia and were joined in the bands who attack frequently Serbs,Greeks and others.They had a lot of support by Turks,because they had changed their religion in islam,(Alah give more in the stomach than Jesus in soul.)
So it cannot be a Muslim country.
On the other side,the Russians had never helped Serbs during the history!!!
And I don’t think that would be changed in nowadays.Putin is good for the Russian people,but I don’t know his foreign politics.But it is certain that there is some trade between USA and Russia. And that is always because of oil and coal.
Thanks again for the posts and understanding.The next time I hope I’ll find some documents to prove this,but they are rare on English…
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