From Michael J. Totten:“The war in Bosnia will look like a tea party if Serbian nationalism runs wild in Kosovo.” U.S. Representative Eliot Engel
“The whole world is a vast Kosovo, an abominable blood-logged plain.” From Black Lamb and Gray Falcon by Rebecca West, 1941.
Strange country, Kosovo.
It’s European, but it isn’t Christian. It’s majority-Muslim, but it is not anti-American. Foreign soldiers are hailed as liberators and protectors rather than occupiers. Most Western countries recognize the majority-Muslim nation’s recent declaration of independence from Serbia, but not a single Arab country has done so – partly, perhaps, because Israelis as well as Americans are thought of as allies and friends. The United Nations is widely perceived as offensive, incompetent, corrupt, and deserving of banishment.
Ethnic Albanians – who make up 90 percent of Kosovo’s population – suffered apartheid-like conditions and ethnic-cleansing by Serbian Nationalists in the 1990s. They were history’s winners, though, in 1999 when NATO finally had enough of Belgrade’s tyrant Slobodan Milosevic. He and his Serb allies kicked off four wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the final war in Kosovo threatened to overwhelm and destabilize the rest of Southeastern Europe.
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My Comment: Kosovo is like Poland, Czech Republic, the Baltic States .... they are more pro-American than some Americans. As a traveler I am always surprised to meet people who are so voracious in their support of the United States ...... Michael Totten has clearly found this to be the case in Kosovo.
A few months ago I was voicing my concerns that if history is any indication, Kosovo was going to enter a period of ethnic violence if they declared independence. Happily, I can say that I was wrong. I can now only hope that peace is there to stay.
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