Karadzic boycotts opening of trial

THE HAGUE: The trial of Radovan Karadzic was adjourned last night after the accused war criminal boycotted the opening -- claiming he needed more time to prepare his case.

"In light of the absence of the accused and of counsel to represent him, the chamber will adjourn these proceedings today," judge O-Gon Kwon said within 15 minutes of the opening of the trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The judge adjourned the hearing until Tuesday afternoon, local time, when the prosecution will present its opening statement. "We request Mr Karadzic to attend so that his trial is not further obstructed," he said.

Karadzic's refusal to show up was a disappointment for the many relatives of victims who travelled to the court.

Nevertheless, Munira Subasic, who lost a husband and a son when Bosnian Serb forces murdered 8000 Muslim men in the UN-protected Srebrenica enclave in July 1995, said the case came as a relief after the trial of Karadzic's mentor Slobodan Milosevic collapsed without a verdict when he died in 2006. "We want to remind the Europeans that for 14 years we are waiting for justice. The Milosevic trial failed and now is the time for this justice to come," she said.

Observers agreed that the accused's absence should not overshadow the case's significance.

"The Karadzic trial is really the trial that the Yugoslavia tribunal was designed for," said Michael Scharf, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Professor Scharf said evidence presented at the Milosevic trial made it "absolutely clear that Karadzic was a much greater monster and much more responsible for the atrocities than Milosevic ever was". This is also seen as a chance for the tribunal to make amends for Milosevic's trial, which dragged on for four years before his fatal heart attack.

Karadzic, 64, is charged with genocide -- one count for the 1995 murder of 8000 Muslim men in Srebrenica and a second for the Bosnian Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing against Muslim and Croat populations. He faces nine other charges including extermination, persecution and taking peacekeepers hostage.

He has repeatedly refused to enter pleas, but insists he is innocent. He faces a maximum life sentence if convicted at his trial, which is expected to last at least two years. He is boycotting the hearing to protest at his lack of time to prepare for the trial.

Seeing Karadzic finally face justice is enormously significant to victims, said the chief prosecutor, Belgian Serge Brammertz.

He recalled meeting a woman who lost 21 family members in the war and still has not found all their bodies. "If you see what those crimes have done to the people in the region, you easily understand the importance of bringing the alleged perpetrators to justice," he said. continues here

Serbian politicians receive death threats

BELGRADE, Serbia -- League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina (LSV) leader Nenad Canak and his deputy, Bojan Kostres, have received death threats, the party announced on Monday (September 21st). A threatening letter said the two have one month to withdraw from politics or be killed. The LSV, a member of the ruling coalition, has informed the police. This is not the first time the pair have received threats. Kostres said on Monday that he believes the threats came from people unhappy with party activities against far-right organisations. The LSV proposed a law, which parliament passed in late May, banning neo-Nazi and fascist organisations from gathering at events and using Nazi symbols. The law also prohibits the fuelling of national, religious and racial intolerance.

Separately Monday, the Justice Ministry announced an initiative to ban the activities of all organisations that call for violence. Dozens of ultranationalists have been arrested in Belgrade over the past week for disturbing public order. continues here

Death squad leader ‘was top CIA agent’

THE LATE President Milosevic's secret police chief and organiser of Serb death squads during the genocidal ethnic cleansing of disintegrating Yugoslavia was the United States' top CIA agent in Belgrade, according to the independent Belgrade Radio B92.

The claim that from 1992 until the end of the decade, Jovica Stanisic, head of Serbia's murderous DB Secret Police, was regularly informing his CIA handlers of the thinking in Milosevic's inner circle has shocked the region.

Stanisic is said to have loyally served his two masters for eight years. He is facing war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

In the terrifying years of Yugoslavia's internecine wars, he acted as the willing "muscle" behind Milosevic's genocidal campaigns in Croatia, Kosovo and Bosnia, including Sebrenica.

According to the charges he faces, Stanisic was "part of a joint criminal enterprise that included former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and other Serbian politicians".

Dermot Groome, The Hague's chief prosecutor, has specifically accused him of sending in the Serb Scorpion and Red Beret death squads into the states seeking independence from Belgrade. Stanisic has pleaded not guilty.

Like in a Cold War spy thriller, Serbia's secret police chief met his CIA handlers in safe houses, parks and boats on the river Sava to betray his master's action plans. He provided, it is claimed, information on the whereabouts of Nato hostages, aided CIA operatives in their search for Muslim mass graves and helped the US set up secret bases in Bosnia to monitor the implementation of the 1995 Dayton peace accord.

This has raised awkward questions for Washington. With Stanisic providing chapter and verse of the genocidal slaughter of Croats, Bosnians and Albanians from the early 1990s, should President Clinton have cut a deal with Milosevic at Dayton, Ohio, ending the Bosnian war on such equitable terms for the Serbs? Or, using Stanisic's evidence, should the Americans not have unmasked Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, the then head of Republika Srpska, as genocidal war criminals and demanded their surrender?

From his prison cell at The Hague, Stanisic countered the charges facing him with an aide memoir portraying himself as "a person who had sought to moderate Milosevic and had done a great deal to moderate the crisis".

In an unusual move, the CIA has submitted classified documents to the court that confirm Stanisic's "undercover operative role in helping to bring peace to the region and aiding the agency's work. He helped defuse some of the most explosive actions of the Bosnian war."

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, William Lofgren, his original CIA recruiter and handler, now retired, said: "Stanisic provided valuable information from Milosevic's inner circle. But he never took money from the CIA, worked with the agency on operations or took steps that he would have considered a blatant betrayal of his boss."

Thus the judges at The Hague are having to judge a man who allegedly sent the Scorpion death squads to Srebrenica to "deal" with men and boys fleeing the UN-protected Muslim enclave, while working with the CIA trying to end Milosevic's ethnic wars.

The way the CIA apparently viewed their Belgrade "asset" is revealed in an interview with Balkan Insight, a little known south-east European publication.

The emerging picture is a quaint reflection from a hall of mirrors. Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times, writing about the links between the CIA and the Serb secret police chief, is quoted as saying: "As I said in the LAT story, the CIA do not see Stanisic as a choirboy. When you talk to people who work in espionage, this is often the case.

"Because of the nature of that job, of that assignment, they are working with people who do not have unblemished records, it would be difficult for them to be effective if they only worked with people who had unblemished records.

"People in Belgrade who have been following the career of Jovica Stanisic would say that this was a guy who was an expert in his field; he was a highly-trained and highly-effective spy. His motivation may have been that he wanted to know what the United States was up to.

"He did not believe that Milosevic was taking the country in the right direction - so he wanted to influence events. He saw himself as an important guy who could pull strings behind the scenes to make things happen in Belgrade." continues here

The Lessons Kosovo Teaches

As readers of AAWR will know, the European Union has endorsed and plans to act in support of the illegal and completely immoral Kosovan 'independence' action. With senior Western officials claiming that the butchering of the nation of Serbia is worth clashing with Russia over, the UN and NATO sending reinforcements to the new 'border', and many EU member states joining the US in 'recognising' Kosovo as a nation state, it would seem that the whole Western world stands unified in support of the legal atrocity. Or, rather, much of its government. The populace of the West, those within it who know the score on Kosovo, Serbia, and the Albanian demographic invasion, are not happy with this, and I hope many readers will join AAWR in cheering on the Serbians who refuse to tolerate and actively demonstrate against this evil.

While the saga unfolds, it is worth taking a moment to look at the reasons behind the actions of Western governments in all of this. The strangely un-named Western official mentioned above is reported by the Telegraph as saying that 'Europe has stood up and been counted' in backing Kosovan 'independence, and as far as that goes he's absolutely right. When diplomats like that talk about 'Europe', the last thing on their minds is the real Europe of historical and cultural and ethnic history. What they mean is the EU (sometimes jokingly and more accurately described as the EUSSR) and that has certainly been counted, it has been measured and found wanting time and again. Yet still it goes on, an empty, meaningless and soul-less entity with no real tangible goal other than to dissolve nationalities, peoples, histories, and everything that makes European identities real. What we are seeing in the actions of the EU (and the US, sadly) is nothing else than a continuation of an ongoing international effort to abolish nationhood, race, and natural identity itself.

A commenter at View From the Right illustrates this principle very well by pulling out an excerpt of a congratulatory letter sent by US president George W Bush to the 'president' of 'Kosovo' :

"In your request to establish diplomatic relations with the United States, you expressed Kosovo's desire to attain the highest standards of democracy and freedom," Bush wrote. "I fully welcome this sentiment. In particular, I support your embrace of multi-ethnicity as a principle of good governance and your commitment to developing accountable institutions in which all citizens are equal under the law." [emphasis added by commenter]"

Kosovan demographics are about 95% Albanian, with a surviving 5% Serbian. The 'multi' in this equation is horribly one-sided. British readers may remember the remarks made by Greg Dyke on becoming director of the BBC that the BBC was 'hideously white'. It appears that Mr Bush has been taking notes from Mr Dyke and is now rejoicing that Kosovo is no longer 'hideously Serb'. The base line in all 'diversity' and 'multi-' talk, whether the talk is of multiculturalism or multiethnicism, is always that the greater the dilution of the indigenous population, the closer to the extermination of the homeland and the people thereof, the better. The Serbs, having had to face the sharp end of this truth unmasked, are simply faster to realise this than many of us in the anaesthetised West, with the result that as well as protesting and planning rallies against this genocidal plan, some Serbs are taking matters literally into their own hands.


The Brussels Journal explains the matter well when it says:

"[After the Kosovo civil war of the 1990s, t]he Western leaders aimed for the establishment of a multicultural (Christian and Muslim), multi-ethnic (Albanian and Serb) artificial state of Kosovo – a “Kosovar nation” not based on a genuine nation, but on the idealist, postmodern utopias of Western liberalism. They wanted to create another Belgium, a state without national loyalty, without an identity, without a sense of nationhood. The postmodernists reckon that if people have no identity they will stop fighting each other, because there is no flag worth dying for. In order to achieve this chimera, the American and EU armies allied themselves in the Kosovo civil war with the Kosovo Liberation Army, an Albanian Muslim militia trained by al-Qa’eda.

It is no wonder that Belgium, this multinational artificial bogus state that serves as the EU’s model in its attempts to transform the whole of Europe into a multicultural, multinational superstate, was one of the very first to recognize the independence of Kosovo. So did the governing elites of France and Germany, the cheerleaders of the EU project, and the liberal elites that rule Britain and America and that do not believe in national identities either."

The Brussels Journal mistakes Mr Bush's comments for an inability to understand that there is no Kosovan nation. I think the inability lies with the Brussels Journal, in an inability to accept that Mr Bush knows damn well there is no such thing as a Kosovar nation (one doesn't become the absolute leader of the most powerful nation on earth by being a complete dunce), but he does not care. Why should he? The governments of the world are moving away from all the old tried and true models of governance and care for the populace towards a New World Order model where the people are answerable to the government (not the government to the people) and the State defines the Nation rather than the Nation defining the State. The old models arose in a bottom-upwards way from a racial and ethnic group organising itself for its benefit and health, looking for and trying methods to improve its lot in a way that benefitted its members, but the new models are imposed arbitrarily in a top-down way that benefits nobody but the social engineers at the top. The controlling interests, the people pulling the strings, are the ones behind this and benefitting from it, and this plan of genocidal destruction of national and ethnic integrity is shown at its most explicit and educational in today's Kosovan situation. More recent events, especially condemnation from international forces such as the UN and EU of Serbs' protests in Belgrade and Serbs' attacks on embassies of the powers who would so butcher their nation, only serve to highlight this truth.

In the absence of a way to make a concrete difference to help our Serbian friends, we in the West and the rest of the world have the responsibility to at least learn from their misfortunes. Western nations, Christian nations, White nations, these are all on the international social engineer hitlist, and are all under assault to different degrees and in different ways. It is simply the case that in the Serbian Kosovo situation this is easiest to see. What the West, and all white Christian nations must learn from Serbia's troubles is that our culture, our people, our homelands and our futures are all under severe threat, and that if the rot and infection of this genocide are resisted, the 'proper authorities' will come down on the resistance hard and fast. We must make arrangements for the resistance in our own places, in whatever ways and levels we can. Those are the lessons we outside Serbia must learn from Kosovo. For the Serbs themselves, AAWR can only offer the immortal words of British seaside legend Mr Punch:

"That's the way to do it!"

Serb anger and frustration over Kosovo

Nick Hawton

The morning after Serbia lost Kosovo, the street cleaners in Belgrade were out picking up the glass from the pavements.

It followed hours of rioting when up to 1,000 people, mainly football hooligans, rampaged through the city centre smashing windows, pushing huge rubbish bins into the road and wrenching up traffic signs.

The violence was interspersed with chants of "Serbia" and "Kosovo is Serbia".

Earlier they had targeted the US embassy and the embassy of Slovenia, which currently holds the European Union Presidency.

A few rocks were thrown, a few windows were smashed. People were injured and there were a number of arrests.

Show of unity

The scale of the violence, and the numbers involved, were pretty small.

But, in a sense, the anger and frustration that spilled onto the streets did fairly represent the feelings of the vast majority of the Serb people.

The country's cultural and spiritual heartland was gone. It was now part of another country and that was hard to take.

In fact, the official attitude is that nothing has changed.

Independence will not be recognised, it will never be recognised, chorused the main political leaders in Belgrade.

Indeed, Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said Serbia would broaden and strengthen its support for Kosovo's Serbs.

In a rare show of unity, the leaders of the three main political parties in Belgrade agreed to call for a mass demonstration in the capital on Thursday to show the widespread opposition to independence.

EU 'betrayal'

Serbia and the Serbs feel hurt and betrayed, especially by countries in the EU......Article conts (-)

New nation of Kosovo in the balance

NICOLE ITANO

PRISTINA, Kosovo | To the beat of drums and blasts of fireworks, jubilant ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo declared themselves the world’s newest nation Sunday.

But the declaration of independence, which is backed by the United States and other Western powers, is likely to trigger an international diplomatic crisis over whether to recognize the new state.

“Now, all together, we are creating history,” declared Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, before presenting the declaration to Kosovo’s assembly for approval. “We are becoming an equal in the democratic world.”

Despite conciliatory words from Kosovo’s Albanian leaders, who promised to create a secular, democratic state that protects the rights of all its citizens, the declaration was met with fear and hostility by the region’s isolated Serb minority. Serbian leaders pledged never to recognize an independent Kosovo and called on Serbs there to resist the new state. But they also ruled out a violent response.

Most of the estimated 100,000 Serbs still remaining live primarily in isolated enclaves under the protection of NATO troops, about 16,000 of whom still keep the peace here.

In Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, ethnic Albanians celebrated the declaration of independence with honking horns and gunfire, dancing to the sounds of American hip-hop and enjoying free beer and cake provided by local companies. Thousands waited in the freezing cold to sign a giant metal sculpture with 10-foot-tall letters spelling out the word “Newborn.”.....Article conts (-)

Violence Sparked By Kosovo's Split

An explosion has rocked a UN building in northern Kosovo, just hours after leaders in the capital Pristina proclaimed Kosovo's independence.

The blast, apparently caused by a hurled hand grenade, caused damage but no injuries, while another unexploded hand grenade was discovered near a hotel that houses EU officials.

Meanwhile, hundreds of ultra-nationalist Serbians rallied outside the US Embassy in Belgrade, prompting the EU to call for calm.

Kosovo declared itself as a new, independent nation at an extraordinary parliamentary session on Sunday - sparking a furious response from Serbia.

While Serb leaders rejected Kosovo's "unilateral and illegal" declaration of independence, Russia's foreign ministry called for an emergency UN meeting.

The ministry claimed Kosovo's independence violated Serbia's sovereignty and threatened "the escalation of tension and ethnic violence in the region, a new conflict in the Balkans".

It also warned other nations against "supporting separatism" by recognizing Kosovo.

Meanwhile, thousands of Kosovo's majority Albanian population took to the streets to celebrate their independence.

In the capital Pristina, cavalcades of cars circled with horns blaring and supporters holding Albanian flags aloft.

Prime Minister Hashim Thaci said: "From today onwards, Kosovo is proud, independent and free.

"We never lost faith in the dream that one day we would stand among the free nations of the world, and today we do."

Parliament speaker Jakup Krasniqi told the assembly: "Kosovo is turning a new page in its history."

The declaration of independence will be backed by most Western powers......Article conts (-)

Serb head in stark Kosovo warning
Jonathan Marcus

Serbian President Boris Tadic has warned of an escalation in conflicts if Kosovo declares independence as expected later this month.

Mr Tadic said he could not accept the dismemberment of his country and called for renewed talks on the issue.

The pro-Western leader was speaking at the opening of an annual security conference in Munich.

The US and most members of the EU say they will support independence for Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority.

"Should Serbia be partitioned against its will... it could in turn result in the escalation of many existing conflicts, the reactivation of a number of frozen conflicts, and the instigation of who knows how many new conflicts," said Mr Tadic.

While he described Kosovan independence as unacceptable, Mr Tadic added that he did not want to see Serbia isolated from the EU.

"There is still time to prevent the situation from spiralling needlessly out of control," he told the gathering of the world's top security officials, urging international talks......Article conts (-)

Serbia: Kosovo Set to Declare Independence, Serbia Says

The Serbian minister for Kosovo, Slobodan Samardzic, said his government had received “relevant information” that the province’s Albanian leadership would declare independence on Feb. 17, a Sunday. He did not specify the source. Western diplomats speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter said the move would be made on Feb......Article conts (-)

EU says Serbia agreement on hold

The EU enlargement commissioner has said a political deal due to be signed with Serbia has been postponed because of a political dispute in Belgrade.

Olli Rehn spoke of "the obstruction by certain politicians", in a clear reference to PM Vojislav Kostunica.

And Serbian President Boris Tadic later complained that Mr Kostunica had blocked a cabinet meeting on the issue.

Mr Kostunica has denounced the accord as a trick which will help pave the way for independence in Kosovo.

The EU offer of closer trade relations and relaxed visa requirements was due to be signed on Thursday.

Sovereignty 'undermined'

But the Serbian prime minister said a formal agreement made this week by the EU's 27 member states for a 1,800-strong civilian mission to Kosovo had undermined his country's sovereignty.

Kosovo's leadership is expected to proclaim independence in

the next few weeks.


Mr Kostunica's stance on the EU is strongly at odds with that of President Tadic, who won re-election on Sunday and whose party is part of the same ruling coalition.

He accused Mr Tadic's Democrats of putting Serbia's constitutional order in "grave danger" by refusing to convene a session of parliament.

In a separate development, two allies of the Serbian president - the deputy prime minister and foreign minister - were among 17 ministers who signed a letter to Mr Kostunica calling for a regular government meeting to take place on Thursday.......article conts (-)