OSINFO - Open Sources Information

Kosovo has declared independence on the 3rd Sunday of February, 2008 and the expectation is that it will be recognised by USA, UK and many other countries immediately. As soon as these western powers do recognise Kosovo as an independent country, it will immediately cause a huge dislocation in the fabric of all other separatist terrorist campaigns, their supporters and the states/groups who oppose them. We have examples ranging from the Turkish, Iranian, Syrian or Iranian Kurds, Northern Irish Catholics, Palestine, Malaysian Indians, Kashmiri Muslims, Naga’s etc. in India, Thai Muslims, Sri Lankan Tamils, Darfurians against Arab Sudanese to the Turkish Cypriots. This will make the international political scenario very complicated and the hypocrisy galore of almost all countries will be exposed. How so? Well, let us take a look.

But first, a brief look at Kosovo. A country which can be said to be part of the Bulgarian (Christian) Empire, which then became part of the Byzantine Empire in 1018 AD. The local Slavs fought against the Byzantines and then finally became independent in 1208, but that did not last for long. Then the Ottomans came in 1389 and the epic battle of Kosovo happened, something that has been seared into people’s minds. This battle is at the same level of the Battle of Hastings for the English, the Battle of Panipat for the Indians, the Battle of Karbala and the Battle of Badr for the Muslims, etc. That battle defined what Serbia is, some of the leaders of the Serb armies were even canonised as saints! But to no avail, over the next hundred or so years, the Ottomans won and Islamisation happened rapidly till 1871 when Serbian Nationalism again arose. Wars erupted, the Turks ethnically cleansed a very large number of Slavs from Kosovo and it was a big fur ball, but by the end of the 19^th century, effectively, the land of the Serbs was now the land of the Albanians.

Then in 1912, the Balkan wars broke out again, and this time, the Serbs won and did a re-colonisation of Kosovo, and the Albanians had to move out. Then the World War I broke out, which ended in a confused mess. In 1929, the kingdom of Yugoslavia was formed lasting till 1941 when the Italians invaded and then again after some confused to’ing and fro’ing, the Republic of Yugoslavia was formed. Now the Albanians lived under the atrocious and horrible regime of Hoxha in Albania proper, and for them, Kosovo seemed like paradise. So all the Serbian re-colonisation and wars were frankly useless, as the population of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo rose rapidly to the low 90% by the late 1970’s.

Then the Slobodan Milošević phenomena happened and all hell broke lose. Whether it was him to blame or he was just a conduit for long festering religious/ethnic tensions will be long debated, but Yugoslavia broke apart into civil war, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Kosovo problem is just one step in the still to be completed Balkan saga. After the Bosnian war, the attention of the Serbs turned to Kosovo and then the Albanians reacted, peacefully at first and then violently. Horrible atrocities were carried out by both sides and then the Serbs got pounded by NATO who stepped into the breach on behalf of the Albanians. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs and Albanians were ethnically cleansed, thousands were killed, and it even degenerated to the destruction of houses of worship, both churches and mosques.

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