Serge Trifkovic of Sword of the Prophet and Defeating Jihad fame has an excellent analysis in Chronicles Magazine of the continued international pressure on Serbia to hand over Kosovo to Albanian Muslims and the terrorist KLA:
On February 2, U.N. special envoy Martti Ahtisaari finally unveiled his much-anticipated plan for the final status of the Serbian province of Kosovo which has been under NATO-UN occupation since Bill Clinton’s war against the Serbs in 1999. While avoiding the contentious word “independence,” Ahtisaari presented the framework for a new Albanian state that would have all key attributes of sovereign statehood. […]
The period of international supervision envisaged by the plan, as well as a host of “guarantees” and promises of “substantial” municipal autonomy for the few remaining Serbs and other non-Albanians in the province, are but a fig leaf meant to conceal the plan’s reality: that on the fundamental issue of Kosovo’s legal, constitutional and political status Ahtisaari gives everything to the Albanians and nothing to the Serbs. Even without using the “I” word, the plan proposes de facto separation of Kosovo from Serbia. Its primary focus is to finalize the detachment of Kosovo from the last formal vestiges of Serbia’s authority, with the definition of its future status a secondary consideration.
The promise of a “review” after two years is mendacious: if on their current church-burning, dope-smuggling form, the KLA terrorists and criminals who run Kosovo are deemed worthy of independence, it is preposterous to assume that someone””anyone””would dare suggest otherwise two years from now, once they are even more firmly entrenched in power. If 150 Serbian churches went up in flames, and a quarter-million Serbs and other non-Albanians were ethnically cleansed while tens of thousands of KFOR soldiers and UNMIK policemen were stationed in the Province, what would be the worth of Ahtisaari’s “guarantees” once they all leave and the KLA (under whatever current name) takes over?
Ahtissari’s plan is […] deeply destabilizing because it helps create a base for jihad-terrorism in the heart of Europe and sets a dangerous precedent that will be emulated by each and every disenchanted minority around the world: from Transylvania, to southern Slovakia to the Basque Country to Northern Cyprus to the Crimea, not to mention Transdnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Nagorno-Karabakh. (To this there may come yet another assurance from the State Department that “no precedent would be set”; yet, while Foggy Bottom bureaucrats may impact reality, they certainly cannot control it.)
[…]
The 1999 NATO war against the Serbs was ostensibly waged for human rights, but””judged by any rational standard””the NATO-UN mission in Kosovo has been, and still is, an unmitigated disaster. The pretense that this is not so is nevertheless maintained by Ahtisaari and his mentors, amidst murders, unreversed ethnic cleansing, rampant crime, prostitution, drug-smuggling, and general dysfunctionality of a thoroughly failed, violent, and dysfunctional polity, a black hole utterly devoid of a single redeeming feature.
[…]
[Ahtisaari’s] goal is to create a new Muslim state in the heart of Europe that would be a veritable black hole of criminality, lawlessness, and jihad terrorism. He must not succeed: pandering to Islam’s geopolitical designs””in the Balkans, or anywhere else””is not only bad, it is counterproductive, and violating laws of God and man along the way is evil.
Sadly, the whole sorry process of wrenching Kosovo away from Serbia (analogous to handing New England over to a Quebec full of jihadists) has been driven by American and Western foreign policy that seems to think that throwing the Serbs to the jihadist wolves will sate their appetite. Not likely. For those who want to get up to speed on the whole Balkan situation, may I recommend Diane Johnston’s Fool’s Crusade, which blows out of the water the persistent myths of the Balkan wars of the past fifteen years.