Bombs and Bombast

Here is the full text, but you really should go to the Guardian site to read the comments. The chilling insouciance about mass murder from the Slobbophiles is really quite disgusting and runs the full gamut of every excuse made for the Purges and the Holocaust. Others did it first, not that many died. Some of our guys got killed as well. Sickening stuff.

Ian

Bodies, bombast and bombs in the Balkans
Joint diplomacy could ease the way to Kosovar independence, and stop revival of the cold war in eastern Europe.

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June 6, 2007 8:30 PM | Printable version
Right on cue, just as the UN Security Council moves to consider the independence plan for Kosovo, news reports from Belgrade announce the opening of a mass grave where authorities suspect the bodies of some 500 Kosovars whom Milosevic's Serb forces killed were dumped in a quarry.

Towards the end of the war, the Serbian army and police conducted a macabre exercise, digging up already rotting bodies and smuggling them into Serbia. The largest such was a cache of 800 bodies reburied under a police training ground near Belgrade. The beginning was the discovery of a freezer truck with 86 bodies, men, women and children, found in the Danube.

Needless to say (except to deranged Serbophiles and hard leftists), Milosevic's men did not do this to show respect for their enemies killed in honourable combat. They were hiding the evidence of mass murder before Nato could discover it.

That alone explains why Kosovo is not going to revert to Serbia anytime soon. Quite apart from the right to self-determination, a state whose organs so recently practiced ethnically motivated mass murder against its alleged citizens has forfeited any claim to sovereignty over them.

A hundred years ago Boutros Ghali, grandfather of the former secretary general of the United Nations, was nominated to be prime minister of Egypt by the Khedive - at the prompting of Lord Cromer, the British de facto viceroy to Cairo. Since Cromer could call upon the British troops who had been occupying Egypt for over thirty years and since he had already appointed the Khedive there was no doubt who was in charge. But they had to go to Istanbul to get a firman from the sultan to confirm his appointment, since the Ottomans, very nominally, had sovereignty. No one in Pristina bothers to go to Belgrade to confirm a change of government.

In the Security Council is another residual authority. Russia has a veto, which it wisely has not committed itself to using. For Moscow, the veto is like the nuclear deterrent, best waved about but never actually used, except on symbolic occasions that do not lead to a showdown.

Putin would be ill-advised to use it on behalf of the Serbs. Even if Moscow says "nyet", the Kosovars will declare independence, and it will be recognized by almost every state in Europe, the US, and many of the Non-Aligned, particularly the Islamic states. So, because the Serb parties dare not recognize the reality on the ground in Kosovo for fear of a nationalist backlog, the Russian veto would be converted from a putative big stick to an actual limp wand. The Serbs would do both themselves and their chums in Moscow a big favour by taking advantage of the hint of a Russian veto to climb down as gracefully as possible, negotiating the best deal they can with Pristina before the inevitable happens.

That does not excuse Washington from action, even if, for once, and without a big domestic lobby for it, the US is doing the right thing over Kosovo. But there are ways to make it more palatable for Putin and the Russians. American diplomacy with Russia has been even more inept than in many other places. Surely, all it would take would be some discreet back channel talks to drop the ridiculous missile shield in eastern Europe, which is ineffective, offensive and clearly not directed against fissionable flying carpets or whatever is currently the best that Iran could throw in the direction of Europe.

Washington is being provocative and ideologically motivated in reviving the cold war in the missile case, and Moscow's atavistic attachment to Serb Orthodoxy is equally counterproductive. There is an obvious deal waiting to be made.