Neglected by Croatia: The Realities of Dubrovnik

source: hu.wikipedia.org

The political battle to build the Pelješac bridge that would connect the Dubrovnik region with the rest of Croatia has taken on a new dimension: the Free Dalmatia newspaper from Split published a story (link in Croatian) warning of the increase in the separatist mood among the Dubrovnik population due to the negligence of Croatia's authorities towards this remote region.

How is this a topic for the Serbian Roundup, you ask. Dubrovnik was a Serb-inhabited medieval city whose survival through centuries of foreign occupation of other Serb lands ensured the survival of great historical and cultural heritage, invaluable to Serbdom. Since its inclusion in the Croatian Banovina in 1939 and in the Independent State of Croatia, it's been divesting itself of its Serb Dalmatian character. Now it is a part of the Republic of Croatia and almost no Serbs live there, but it is still a part of the Serb cultural heritage and one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. The mere fact that it belongs to Croatia as of lately cannot erase the Serb millennium of its ethnic character and its political independence. As a historic Serb city, it is, of course, of interest to the Serbian Roundup.

Now, this is not a call to return Dubrovnik to its Serb origins in any way. Serbian dreams and Dubrovnik realities diverged significantly after the Croat genocide against Serbs of 1941-1945, perhaps even before that. After Napoleon Bonaparte abolished the Dubrovnik Republic in 1808, according to the local lore the Dubrovnik gentry decided to stop having children as they refused to raise offspring without freedom. Many did heed that call and entire noble families died out. The Croat genocide against the Serbs did not exclude the Dubrovnik area and most of the Serb inhabitants were eradicated from the city and from the vicinity. The Austro-Hungarian abolition of Serb rights in 1908, the croatization of the Serb Catholics, the influx of Croats from other parts of Dalmatia, the genocide against Serbs and the revival of Croat ultra-nationalism and chauvinism of the 1990s turned Dubrovnik into an all-Croat area. Serbs can't stake a claim to it anymore and, obviously, Dubrovnik is neither a Serbian problem nor on the radar as a Serbian political issue.

source: forum.krstarica.com

Although this article in Free Dalmatia was clearly a lobbying effort aimed at Croatia's government to push through with the stalled building of a bridge to the Peljesac peninsula, probably aided by financial interests that are in a hurry to make good on their investments, it cited some definite reasons for dissatisfaction in Dubrovnik, which, coupled with Dubrovnik historic statehood and independence, can indeed increase separatist tendencies. Namely, the Dubrovnik coast, since it is not a Croat historic land, is geographically isolated from the rest of Croatia, with very weak transportation connections, which, according to Free Dalmatia, significantly deteriorated after Croatia's independence in 1992, mainly due to neglect. It is not easy for Croatia to maintain the connection with Dubrovnik. Dubrovnik was an independent merchant state, a rival of Venice, and its overland trade networks, as well as other relationships, ethnic and cultural, were mainly leaning on its most natural logistical partner, the Serb hinterland of Herzegovina, Bosnia, Zeta and Rascia. The inhabitants of Dubrovnik were mostly Serbs of Hum (Herzegovina) and their descendants, the most famous of them being Ruđer Bošković (Ruggero Boscovich), one of the most important European astronomers of the 18th century. The Ottomans, after the conquest of the Serb hinterland, knowing the significance of Dubrovnik's Western connections allowed its trade with the hinterland to continued unimpeded. All this has been well-documented in the Dubrovnik Archive, one of the most precious resources for students of Serbian history. Dubrovnik is simply not near the rest of Croatia and that, apparently, is a problem.

Free Dalmatia sources cited not only a lack of transportation connections, especially during the off-season months between October and April when Dubrovnik is not as important to Croatia's economy as during summer, a lack of drinking water, sanitation services, including the sewer system, and the increased transfer of local institutions of political and economic self-governance out of Dubrovnik and into Split and the port of Ploče. Corruption and budget misappropriations are rampant, according to the article. Now, we are not talking about some fishing village where tourists like to come, bathe and eat figs; this is Dubrovnik, whose Old City - under UNESCO protection - is one of the pearls of the Mediterranean and whose history and architectural beauty transcends politics of Zagreb or Split. Increasingly a remote province and a milking cow, Dubrovnik and its citizens like artist Davor Lucianović, who contributed to the Free Dalmatia story, are right to feel aggrieved.

The Free Dalmatia article suggested: if you don't build this bridge, expect Dubrovnik to request more autonomy. Since Dubrovnik's history of independence is much longer than Croatia's own, this would not be an unreasonable request even if Free Dalmatia's only motivation was to lobby for the bridge.

Even if Dubrovnik became completely croatized during the fascist Independent State of Croatia, it is not unreasonable to find popular dissatisfaction in this historically independent region, especially with the prospects of economic prosperity an increased independence would carry. A renewal of the spirit of independence among the people of Dubrovnik would, due to its traditional outlooks and geographic position, also renew its historic role as a cultural and economic bridge between the quarreling states of the Southeast Europe. Croatia supports secession in neighboring countries, and although one shouldn't deduce too much from one article, I'm sure the region wouldn't stand in the way of Dubrovnik gaining more independence from Croatia. A case in point is the international affair surrounding the very bridge that started all this, with Istanbul, I mean, Sarajevo, conveniently invoking an agreement between Franjo Tuđman and Alija Izetbegović to block Croatia from connecting with Dubrovnik.

Kill the Beast: Grading the Regime Change in Serbia

source: vestinet.rs

Surrounded with cheers, hope, suspicion, hypocrisy, sycophancy, indifference, loathing and fear, Ivica Dačić and Aleksandar Vučić have grabbed the levers of state power in Serbia with a necessary resolve in the past week. The road from a Milošević protege who narrowly escaped lustration to the Prime Minister of Serbia was long for Dačić. The road from a Šešelj protege to the state intelligence czar and the Minister of Defense was even rougher and longer for Vučić. Who would've thought on the eve of the parliamentary election on May 6th that these two men would stand together in the ouster of the corrupt regime of Boris Tadić, which, in its own blinded self-righteousness, thought it was destined to rule Serbia into the ground?

To round up all the twists and turns in Serbia's post-election coalition building, dismantling, patching and finally corralling, one would be remiss to start with May 6th, let alone on May 20th. If I wanted to analyze the fall of Boris Tadić's Western client regime, I'd had to revisit the December 9th rejection of Serbia's EU candidacy and the subsequent humanitarian sortie of Russian Ambassador Konuzin into North Kosovo, i.e. the EU-Russia Summit in Brussels that accompanied it. If we look at this series of events as a watershed moment, the victory of Tomislav Nikolić should be seen as the spring of the river that is Serbia liberated from Boris Tadić.

Since the Fifth of October of 2000, Serbia hasn't seen a change so dramatic. When the election fraud not only marred the results but also to devalue the democratic process and to discourage any hope for a regime change in Serbia, the unexpected victory of Nikolić unleashed a chain of events that can hopefully provide a chance for Serbia's salvation and recovery. The victory wasn't unexpected because Nikolić was an underdog, but because Tadić was inclined to steal the election.
From this perspective, wiser by a couple of months, there are several questions that must be answered before Serbia can grapple with the effects of the regime change.

First, how much of a regime change was it really?
Commentators on both sides of the aisle question, for differing reasons, the direction of a regime change in which almost half of the previous administration remains in office and in which some of the most reputedly corrupt public figures of the past 12 years get to not only go unpunished, but to stay in power. Mlađan Dinkić, for example, served as the Governor of the National Bank of Serbia, the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Economy in previous administrations - all positions of key relevance to the economy that is lying in ruins as a consequence. Dačić himself was the key ally to Boris Tadić since 2008. On top of these two, an array of former Tadić allies has crossed over to the winning team. What the hell is Vučić, the new head of Serbian Progressive Party, thinking taking in all these no-good appendices of the corrupt regime he invested 12 years into beating? Well, whoever thought the Progressives, the plain-clothed derivative of Vojislav Šešelj's Radicals with 25 percent of popular support, can just barge in and bring down the system created by a corrupt regime with such a firm hold of the state and economic power, was plain naive. Tentacles of the power Tadić's Democratic Party was an umbrella for extended much deeper than the power to simply cut them off at will. The Democrats were the octopus, even if all the tentacles were not their own, e.g. Dinkić and his clique. To change the regime, one had to kill the beast at its helm and it does appear that the Democrat beast is not only out of power on thenational level and gradually being pushed out in most municipalities it had held, but its nervous system has become a wreck due to betrayals of allies and infighting. If the ouster of the ruling party is a regime change, then the Progressives, with the willing cooperation of the former junior partners in the regime, did pull it off. Just compare the power of Boris Tadić and his cohorts before and after May 20th.

source: novosti.rs

Second, outside of a violent street uprising or a coup d'etat, how does one conduct a total regime change? Gradually, of course.
Nikolić and Vučić correctly understood that the election victory was just a ticket into the fray, not a championship belt. If the goal was to kill the beast, one had to be a fool to engage it in a hand-to-hand combat, but had to instead utilize everything at his disposal, even Mlađan Dinkić, if that's what it took to cut the legs from underneath the beast. And it did. What were the alternatives? Street protests over the well-documented election fraud, which could have led to instability, unpredictable outcomes and more suffering of the people quick to demolish, but slow to build. Co-habitation, meaning Nikolić as an ineffective president with constitutionally limited power, ignored, sabotaged or smeared by the Democrat-led cabinet, Democrat-controlled institutions and Democrat-owned media. If the Progressives abstained from coalition-building out of moral considerations, Boris Tadić would've kept on destroying the country. It wasn't much of a choice, one had to admit. It's better to have Dinkić as a junior, junior partner than Tadić as the Prime Minister.

Third, are the Progressives, combined with Dačić's Socialists and Dinkić's United Regions, ideologically and behaviorally more of the same in comparison to Tadić's regime? In short, no.
Some commentators tend to base this notion on the EU-related rhetoric. True, the Progressives are stuck on the pro-EU rhetoric as well. True, the Socialists have been beating the EU drums, although a lot more shyly than the Democrats, for the past four years. True, Dinkić, with his ideologically amorphous coalition/party, has been in the service of EU and every other foreign interest in Serbia for as long as the Democrats have. It is also true that this time around, Dinkić is showing significantly less inclination to act independently, out of fear of falling out of the line with the coalition and falling victim to the Vučić-promised anti-corruption offensive, or due to an inexplicable change of heart (just kidding). It is also true that Dačić finds himself in an ideologically way more comfortable coalition this time around, due to his somewhat nationalist leanings and a chance for his Socialists to actually replace the Democrats as the main ostensibly leftist party on the political scene. (If you wonder how a party can be nationalist and leftist at the same time, it is time for you to stop thinking about Left and Right in the conventional terms and start observing the dichotomy as merely elementary to the globalist-anti-globalist spectrum.) Finally, we'd be fools if we thought that it is enough for Šešelj's disciples to change their party emblem and to declare themselves pro-EU, to actually and completely abandon the Radical pillars they had been building themselves for two decades. When Dačić made the last-minute deal with Tadić in 2008, breaking the coalition promise to Nikolić and Vojislav Koštunica, it became clear that the West will never allow the Radical Party to get into power and that some kind of transformation was necessary. Now, I'm not saying Nikolić and Vučić would absolutely reveal their true Radical self once they took the helm. This game is way more serious than that, the powers that are may be weaker than in 2008, but will not allow Serbian nationalists to play them for fools. The line Nikolić and Vučić are walking is very thin. Still, if we base our conclusions in the rhetoric only, Nikolić and, to a slightly lesser degree, Vučić, have shown significantly more of a nationalist strain than it could have been expected from someone who'd continue Tadić's anti-Serbian policies.

source: tanjug.rs

To make any sustainable improvements, the new administration had to wrestle away the control of the levers of power from the corrupt, but deeply entrenched Democrat machine. It was neither an easy task, nor would it be smart to kid oneself that it is a finished task. At this point, nothing is more important for Serbia than to minimize the influence of the Democrat Party and the foreign-sponsored NGO networks in Serbia. To actually judge the new administration against the old one, the public needs to be fully apprehensive of the fact that Serbia cannot hope to improve without halting the downward spiral first. It would be a grave mistake to expect miracles, economic, Kosovo-related or in foreign policy, from this administration; if they prevent the crash which the Tadić Democrats have pushed the country very close to, that will be a miracle enough. Although there are more important issues than corruption, if ten corrupt politicians or businessmen actually end up going to jail, and both God and the entire Serbia know there are hundreds who should, I'll take my hat off to Dačić and Vučić. Low expectations? Not at all. Serbia is not stagnating, it is sinking fast, not unlike the rest of Europe.

The election of Tomislav Nikolić on May 20th and all the developments stemming from it, including the Constitutional Court decision on the Vojvodina Statute and today's change at the helm of the insofar uncontrollable National Bank of Serbia, instill hope that the reversal of the sinking trajectory is possible. I'm willing to criticize the new leadership for their failures, but every Serb is obligated to give them time to fail or succeed.

I know one thing: I'll take President Nikolić and the cabinet led by Dačić and Vučić over Tadić as the dictator usurping all the power any day and it's not even a choice of a lesser evil. The failure of democracy on May 6^th was somewhat vindicated on May 20^th and although the Nikolić victory cannot erase the injustice of the electoral fraud, it did default at less than a maximalist democratic ambition would desire and under the circumstances unfavorable to any kind of a democratic outcome. In other words, it was as much of a victory for democracy as pre-May 20 Serbia could yield.

Crimes against Kosovo Serbs: Burning the Evidence

The news on war crimes against Serbs could be considered rare news in the Western media. On the burning of the remains of Serb miners in a Kosovo mine, killed in June of 1998, the basic Google search produced this one UPI article. Is it a lack of newsworthiness, a busy news week or something else that prevented news media from reporting on the fires that have most likely devoured the remains of 12, perhaps more, Serb miners, thrown by Albanians in the mine pits near Obilić, in the NATO-occupied Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija?

source: smedia.rs

Not only that the so-called "international justice system" has been indifferent, even ill-disposed, to the suffering of Serbs in the wars of Yugoslav succession, conveniently positing them as the all-guilty side despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, but it has allowed even the most obvious and best documented cases of terrorism and war crimes against Serb civilians to be ignored, excused, tampered with, hidden in plain sight and the evidence most blatantly destroyed. To an informed Serb, it is needless to prove that the Western-imposed justice is but a justice of a mace and, as such, it should have no moral or historical bearing on the future and the consciousness of the Serbian nation. However, since a lot of Serbs, out of a specific ideological proclivity, a base material interest or mere ignorance, simply accept the imposed and unwarranted blame in the most masochistic of ways, the struggle to keep educating Serbdom and its friends on the truth of the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s is ongoing and perhaps harder than ever. 

In a continued effort to inform and educate, I am relaying here my translation of the text of the latest press release of the Serb National Council of North Kosovo and Metohija, the local organization of the North Kosovo Serbs, led by Milan Ivanović, on the subject of the burning of Serb remains in the mine pit. The publishing of the translated press release on the Serbian Roundup has been approved by the organization. The Serbian original is posted here.

Serb National Council of North Kosovo and Metohija

Press Release

June 16, 2012

In the makeshift coal mine of the village of Žilivode near Obilić, fires have been burning for the third day in the pits in which the Albanian terrorists had thrown bodies of 12 Serb miners, kidnapped on June 22, 1998. Outside of these confirmed findings, it is believed that the Albanians had thrown 14 additional bodies of Kosovo Serbs in the mine pits.

To thwart the already started exhumation of remains of the ill-fated Serbs, local Albanians filled the pits with large amounts of gasoline-soaked rugs and burned them two days ago. The fire which engulfed both the coal and the bones of the kidnapped Serbs is burning for the third consecutive day. However, neither the Albanian authorities nor KFOR and EULEX moved to send emergency fire units to Žilivode, because the morbid cover-up of the crimes against Serbs did not bother them, to say the least.

Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General, will most likely not be informed of the fact that Albanian terrorists are unimpeded in killing the 12 Serbs for the second time ahead of his visits to Belgrade and Priština, since he expressed his ''concern'' only over ''the security situation in the North of Kosovo'' and praised the efforts of KFOR and EULEX aimed to ''calm the situation,'' not even mentioning the unprovoked armed attacks of KFOR against the barehanded Serb civilians.

In accord with the famous saying: ''After me – the deluge,'' there has not been even a formal reaction by the technical cabinet of [Serbia's] Democratic Party and its Ministry for Kosovo and Metohija on the repeated killing of the 12 Serbs in Obilić, which is, mildly put, a moral crime of the outgoing government.

Dr Milan Ivanović

President of the Serb National Council of North Kosovo and Metohija

And while the evidently orchestrated events the Western media called "the Račak massacre'' served as a pretext for NATO to bomb Serbia in 1999, this crime, committed by the local Albanian terrorists six months prior to the Račak hoax, has never been punished and, as things stand, no Albanian will ever be held accountable for it, since NATO and EU occupiers of Kosovo gave their Albanian proteges a free hand in destroying the evidence.

The Right to Seek the Truth against the Srebrenica Myth

source: vaseljenska.com

It appears the Serb Republic-funded Srebrenica Historical Project has been doing a good job of providing evidence and arguments that the allegations of genocide committed in and around Srebrenica in July of 1995 have been standing on a shaky ground all along. How do I know this? Well, if Michael Dobbs, a watchful anti-Serb pundit writing for Foreign Policy magazine goes on the offensive against Stephen Karganović and his project, that means Karganović has made progress dangerous enough for the continued standing of the myth Bosniaks and their allies like to call “the Srebrenica genocide.”

Before I get into the argument, I want to underline a couple of technical issues. I am not a genocide "denier" because it is impossible to deny something that doesn't exist. I am a Srebrenica “truther” and the truth about Srebrenica encapsulates historical developments stretching from 1992 to 1995 that can in no way be limited to July of 1995. On the other side of the spectrum, we have the Srebrenica “mythers,” whose version of events currently “prevails” with the North Atlantic community’s interested public. The difference between the “truthers” and the “mythers” is in the fact the “truthers” are willing to seek the truth, while the “mythers” are only obstinate in defending the myth they have fabricated to favor their political agenda. And the litmus test for "mythers" is their complete denial of more than 3000 Serb victims in and around Srebrenica at the hands of Naser Orić and his "unarmed" cohorts. The very basis for the Srebrenica myth is the monopolization of victimhood by the Bosnian Muslims. 

Dobbs has been performing an unofficial function of the public advocate for the anti-Serb Republic interest, with the Srebrenica genocide allegations being the central theme of his watchdog career. He is a typical “myther” of a Western variety. Karganović, on the other hand, is a Serb-American lawyer who heads the Srebrenica Historical Project, funded by the government of the Serb Republic. This project was undertaken to seek the truth and challenge the myth surrounding the Army of the Serb Republic’s capture of Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, fabricated by the Sarajevo government and its Western allies. These two men, one on a serious mission of defending the legitimate interest of the Serbian people to free the besieged truth, the other seriously attempting to undermine that defense, were bound to clash. 

source: kurir-info.rs

In a “revolutionary” turn of perfidious events, Dobbs triumphantly ''uncovered'' that the Serb Republic is actually financing Srebrenica Historical Project! Well, I ask you, Mr. Dobbs, if someone accuses you of committing a crime you know you haven’t committed and based on that accusation your entire existence is being threatened, wouldn’t you try to defend your claims? 

It was about time the Serb Republic has encouraged projects such as this one to finally and decisively clarify the events surrounding the capture of Srebrenica to the Serbian public. The leadership of the Serb Republic would be committing injustice towards generations of young Serbs who would have to learn their history from the decisions of a foreign court, evidently hostile to Serbs, if it has not attempted to seek the truth in a non-compromised way.

Since he cannot produce any substantiated offense against Karganović’s findings other than the reiteration of the very genocide qualifications Karganović has been arguing against, Dobbs tries to appear understanding by seemingly allowing the disagreement and differing interpretations of the events, but expressing outrage at what he called “the unsubstantiated challenges to underlying facts that have been proven beyond reasonable doubt.” This construction is a spin in itself because it doesn’t make logical sense to not mind dissent on one end but to disprove of the right to express the substance of that dissent on the other. On a more important note, Dobbs cunningly slips in expressions like ‘’proven beyond reasonable doubt’’ or, in another place “suppressing the truth,” instituting the acceptance of what he wants the reader to believe is the truth. Not many allegations related to Srebrenica have been proven beyond reasonable doubt and no one honestly seeking the truth can afford to claim so. By doing this, Dobbs sets the audience up for denying the Serb Republic a right to challenge what the “mythers” established as “the truth.” In their eyes, there can be no truth but their truth and people like Karganović and, by implication, Milorad Dodik, are, in such a twisted paradigm, naturally branded ‘’deniers’’ of such a truth. By extension, this qualification applies to the entire Bosnian Serb population. He finishes with a punch, best he could muster, err, parrot: 

“For the government and parliament of Republika Srpska to finance such outlandish theories makes the Bosnian Serb statelet complicit with efforts to suppress the truth about the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.” 

What kind of a “myther” would Dobbs be without the Amanpourian references?

source: glassrpske.com

Instead of me boring you with intepretations, I’ll quote Karganović is his response to Dobbs’ panicked finger-pointing:

“…we receive a grant which is voted by the National Assembly of the Republic of Srpska. Those deputies are elected by the people of the Republic of Srpska. The people of the Republic of Srpska are not complaining, presumably because they regard our work as worthwhile. So why is Dobbs unhappy? Is he a Republic of Srpska taxpayer? He unctuously claims that 'I have no objection at all to a vigorous and open debate about the evidence presented to the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, which deserves to be fully scrutinized.’ So even if he were personally contributing to our budget as a taxpayer shouldn’t he still be expected to be consistent and to put his money where his mouth is?”

Enough said.

The leadership of the Serb Republic owes the search for the truth to the men and women who bled to build the Republic, as defenders of their own, not as genocidal killers the ‘’mythers” and the overzealous Western anti-Serb crusaders made them out to be. The Banja Luka government owes to these people the truth they could continue to build their Republic on. Moreover, whatever the truth turns out to be, children of the Serb Republic must learn it from their parents and their teachers, not from their war enemies, malevolent foreign agents, anti-Serb trial chambers and the prosecutors of the Republic’s founding fathers.

The Final Ahtisaari: No 1244, Just Juggernaut

source: fi.wikipedia.org

The Kosovo paradox peaked on Monday; nothing out of the ordinarily deviating path, but a development nevertheless. The International Steering Group (ISG), a self-appointed group of Western countries that "supervised" the so-called independence of the rogue state of Kosovo, declared the end of that supervision. According to the decision, the International Civilian Representative (ICR) for Kosovo, Peter Feith, will close his office in Priština in September, a move that will supposedly remove the babysitting element from the Kosovo Albanian attempt at statehood. All of this sounds fine, right? Wrong.

The end of the supervision is just the latest in the series of illegitimate moves by a group of countries that have recognized Kosovo's independence from Serbia. Although these countries, including the United States and most of the European Union members, called themselves ''the international community,'' there was nothing as global about them as the moniker leads one to believe. The attempt to add weight to Kosovo's illegitimate independence by backing it with an "international" support can indeed fool a lot of observers. This "international" community, consisting of only 25 countries, excluded two permanent members of the UN Security Council, China and Russia and five EU members. It was not a UN body; these countries simply decided they had enough power to carve a new map of Europe, like Hitler thought he could do in 1938. 

Namely, the ISG is a creation of the Ahtisaari Plan, a failed 2007 attempt by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari to impose a complicated anti-Serbian solution for the occupied southern province of Serbia. Ahtisaari won the Nobel Peace Prize for this plan, despite the fact that the plan failed miserably. But hey, other people have received the devalued prize for nothing, too. 

Ahtisaari does not matter, but his plan does. The Plan, or the draft Settlement, as it ended up being called, proposed creating provisional governing structures that would in effect serve as a transitional mechanism towards Kosovo's statehood. Serbia's Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica rejected the Plan, claiming it violated the UN Charter and undermined Serbia's sovereignty, seriously deviating from the UNSCR 1244, which governed the relationships since the occupation of Kosovo and Metohia by NATO in 1999. Instead of the Plan dead-ending there, the Western countries that would go on to recognize Kosovo a year later, actually went ahead and began implementing it in cooperation with the Kosovo Albanian leadership. Thus, the ISG and the ICR were created. This failed and utterly one-sided proposal ended up clearing the path for Kosovo Albanians' declaration of independence a year later. Serbia's disagreement counted for nothing; Serbia had no say in it, despite its sovereignty and territory being blatantly ripped away from it. The North Atlantic community, led by the United States, disregarded the UN Security Council again, just like in 1999 when it attacked Serbia and occupied Kosovo and Metohia, and implemented a proposal that sides did not agree upon, in order to grant independence to the rogue Kosovo Albanian state.

source: rtvbn.com

In Vienna on Monday, the gang of 25 just finished the job. Serbia, still stuck on the UNSCR 1244, did not even react. How could it? For the official Belgrade, even if it had a standing government, Kosovo's independence is illegal and illegitimate, regardless of what a bunch of Western countries decided. However, the reality on the ground, just or not, legitimate or not, denies one after another of Serbia's claims to its occupied southern province.

I know might makes right. I also know that no matter what the Albanian sponsors unilaterally decide, Kosovo is Serbia until Serbia decides it isn't, even if it can't effectively control the province. But the blatant disregard of the United States and NATO for the internationally accepted norms and standards, not only in respect to Serbia, leads me to believe that the world order in which the UN Security Council served as a hub for global political communications and conflict resolution is over. There are no more conflict resolution forums of the kind and the North Atlantic alliance's steamrolling through the Kosovo case, imposing solutions favorable to one side and carving new states out of the existing UN members, is only the latest example of the intent to dominate at all costs. A complete disregard for the complexity of the problem, which the recurring attacks against the North Kosovo Serbs by NATO remind us of a couple of times a month, shows the world what NATO countries really are: an aggressive military juggernaut bent on obliterating every opposition it isn't afraid of. 

The Monday decision in Vienna is a relatively insignificant one in terms of the developments in the Kosovo case, but it does show the intent to further the agenda, to keep pushing forward. Camp Bondsteel is staying put, so it is not like NATO is withdrawing. Ending the supervision only attempted to give the further legitimacy to Hashim Thaci's government, the legitimacy that upholds the reality on the ground, very unfavorable to Serbia and, more directly, to the Kosovo Serbs. The ISG countries did not pretend to trust the Albanians with governing themselves, but the prolonged official babysitting would not make anyone look good.

One question remains unanswered: how long can Serbia ignore the reality and play the Euro-integration game in denial of the hostilities the EU countries and the United States would not stop bombarding it with? 

Revising History for the Holocaust Leverage

source: en.wikipedia.org

Whether it was the words out of Stuart Eizenstat’s mouth or it was, as Julia Gorin claims, Haaretz’s “strained insertion,” the article published in the Israeli Haaretz newspaper on Friday did accuse Serbia of participating in the Holocaust and did call on the European Union “to exact the maximum amount of leverage” against countries applying for membership, namely Croatia and Serbia, to coerce them “to take responsibility for their roles in the Holocaust.” Those were loaded words regardless of who spoke them. They were loaded on many levels.

It would not be the first time a newspaper with agenda puts words in people’s mouth to “set the mood” for furthering that agenda. However, Stuart Eizenstat is not just anybody. Before he was a lobbyist for Covington and Burling and a senior strategist for APCO Worldwide communications consultancy firm, Eizenstat was, among other things, the U.S. Ambassador to the EU (1993-1996). In this capacity, he served as a kind of a Holocaust compensation czar, i.e. he was one of the foremost agents of what Norman Finkelstein famously branded “the Holocaust industry.’’ Namely, Eizenstat went after selected European countries, beginning with Switzerland, who ostensibly profited from the persecution of Jews. With Switzerland in particular, Eizenstat negotiated a $1.5 billion payout to Jewish organizations that represented victims. Similar efforts against countries like Poland and Belarus appear to be ongoing.

I will not get into Finkelstein’s criticism; you can check The Holocaust Industry online. I can’t even say that I am against the shakedown where it is proven to be warranted, although there is a question of reverse injustice. This mini highlight reel of Eizenstat’s career should just serve as the backdrop for his motivation for the Haaretz statement. It is neither unexpected nor unusual for Eizenstat to engage in such rhetoric and it is almost certain that Eizenstat did point the finger at Croatia and Serbia as potential targets for a restitution shakedown and that Haaretz dutifully relayed it. Even outside the official capacity, Eizenstat is continuing his mission; if there are more countries to shake down, the agenda is set and he is on top of it. Eizenstat is lining up targets, that’s all. But to line Serbia up next to Croatia is not only outrageous, but very devious on his part.

Forget about the fact that Serbia - the political entity - did not exist during the Holocaust even as a German puppet, but as a divided, occupied and ever-restless region whose guerrilla brigades tied up in fighting a disproportionate number of Nazi troops that would otherwise be adding to the German power at Stalingrad. Forget about the fact that the largest part of what is Serbia today was under direct occupation of Wehrmacht. Forget about the fact that Srem was annexed to the Independent State of Croatia; that Bačka was annexed to Nazi ally Hungary; that Banat was under a direct control of the Volksdeutsche, its German minority; that Kosovo and Metohia were under the fascist Albania and that southern parts, today’s Macedonia, were annexed to Nazi ally Bulgaria. Forget about the facts that Serbia accepted Jewish refugees prior to the Nazi occupation, at the time when FDR was turning away from the U.S. coast the ships with fleeing Jews and when American companies were enjoying great business relationships with Adolf Hitler’s government. Historical findings and analyses cemented the notion that Serbs were the primary victims of genocide on the territory of Kingdom of Yugoslavia and that Serbia, which did not exist as a separate political entity since 1918, could not be held responsible for crimes against Jews committed by German, Croat, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Albanian fascists on its territory at the time these same occupiers committed the same horrible crimes against the Serbs. How could the occupied Serbia be responsible for crimes against Jews when it didn’t even possess so much power to prevent the German policy of executing 100 Serbian civilians for every German soldier killed by the Serbian anti-fascist guerrilla on its territory? Germany had allies and puppets; Serbia was neither. Serbia was a German, Croat, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Albanian-occupied, torn up land with citizens bleeding and dying without discrimination. The Semlin death camp, the largest death camp in the territory that is Serbia today was a Croat-run camp, in the Croat-occupied Srem, to which Serbs, Jews and Roma alike were brought to die.

source: rts.rs

It is especially egregious that Eizenstat puts Serbia into the same basket with Croatia. If there is a moral or legal ground to go after the Republic of Croatia for crimes committed by Croat fascists in the World War II, it is at least helped by a proven fact that the genocide committed against Jews, and especially Serbs, on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia was indeed committed by Croats, not by Germans or Italians. The Croatian defense against the shakedown attempts is entirely up to the Croats. Two things are certain: Croatia committed the genocide against Serbs, Jews and Roma and it was a country ruled by Croats. There is a catch in Eizenstat’s proposal, though. Leveraging, the key word he used, will not be possible with Croatia, because Croatia’s membership in the EU has been approved. The levers can only be pulled in the case of Serbia, who is only a candidate and whose membership is very uncertain and far down the road, at best. I am sure Eizenstat would like to shake any country down indiscriminately, but in this instance, the general idea of his proposal allows only for Serbia to be blackmailed in such a way. Of my particular concern is not whether Serbia’s road to the EU membership would be impeded by a sudden condition from EU related to the restitution. As a eurorealist, I advise against Serbia even encroaching on the suicidal path towards the EU membership. I am alarmed by the grave danger of Serbian history being revised to accommodate Eizenstat’s vision, equating victims of the genocide with the murderers.

Eizenstat’s “advice” to the European Union is a matter of policy that he and his cause can utilize, it is not about history. However, without revising history, the policy he proposed can neither be implemented nor can the Jewish organizations utilize it for their ends. Unfortunately, policymakers that ostensibly aim to rectify past injustices rarely consult historians in good faith, other than those who are willing to manufacture “findings” in service of the set agenda. To hold Serbia responsible for Holocaust, the policymakers Eizenstat tries to influence have to undertake a serious revision of history of the World War II. Revising history in any way that paves the road for holding Serbia responsible for Holocaust would mean equating victims and the perpetrators. Such a revision would not only leave Serbia open for a shakedown; it would unjustly negate the historical role Serbia and the Serbs played in the anti-fascist struggle, including the salvation of fleeing Jews at the time it was still possible to do. It would negate the fact that the first uprising against Hitler's rule in the occupied Europe was started in Serbia and by the Serbian Royalists of general Draža Mihailović. It would open a Pandora’s box of radical misinterpretations that would further strain Serbian wits and deeper distort the consciousness about the just struggle Serbs embarked on in service of anti-fascism and freedom.

George Orwell famously wrote in 1984: “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past.” A conscious and forward-looking Serb cannot afford any further revision of the Serbian history by self-serving agents of foreign interests consistently seeking leverage to undermine Serbian defenses or simply to increase their own gains, even if those gains are tied to a righteous cause on some level, as is Eizenstat’s motivation. Eizenstat is justified to seek revenge against the injustice committed against his Jewish brethren and he has no obligation to feel sympathy towards the Swiss or the Croats, if he feels their governments had a hand in it. But by going after the nations that suffered under the same fate as his Jews, Eizenstat’s cause loses the high moral ground it operates on. Finkelstein would negate the existence of the high moral ground in the first place, but I will not. To each his own.

Holding Serbs responsible for Holocaust opens a door into future in which anyone, without exceptions, can be held responsible for the World War II genocides committed against Jews, Serbs, Russians, Poles, Roma and every other European and non-European people. Once you equate victims and perpetrators, anyone can fall into either group and no one can monopolize either group.

Balkan Benelux: Sneaking in Greater Albania

When one runs into a headline "Balkan 'Benelux' would speed up EU entry" the thought of a successful regional customs union gets squashed by the oxymoron created by mingling the word "Balkan" with the word "Benelux." There is nothing "Beneluxian" about the Balkans, nor there is a genuine desire among the warring Balkan nations to erase borders between them; if anything, the tendency to carve additional borders is as present as ever. Benelux Customs Union served as a core for the economic powerhouse of European Coal and Steel Community, the predecessor of the European Economic Community, which deteriorated into a political empire and a stumbling economic behemoth with an uncertain direction and an even less certain future. The Dutch, the Belgians and the Luxembourg Germans formed it to advance business interests of their economic elites, to make production and trade cheaper for the already advanced local markets.

source: euobserver.com

The cynic in me turned into a shocked cynic after I began reading the opinion piece and saw that the "Balkan Benelux" proposal is in fact a veiled promotion of the Prizren League-inspired ideal of Greater Albania! Yes, the writers, an Albanian from the Serbian province of Kosovo and an Austrian living in Albania, proposed that this union include Albania, Montenegro, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and the rogue state of Kosovo. In other words, forget insurgency, terrorism, organ trafficking and other state-building methods; let the EU buy off the surrounding countries and give them on a silver plate to the "unifying" factor that is the Albanian people. If this hasn't been the goal of the pan-Albanian elites since at least 1878, I would laugh this proposal off. But it is far from a laughing matter, although the authors do add a form of a caveat:

               "It is important to convince the international audiences that this is not some kind of Greater Albania through the back door." 

Of course it is important. And they will take your word for it.

The proposed union, regardless of the pretenses it was proposed under, would round up the three countries and Kosovo, the NATO-occupied province of Serbia in which Albanians control close to 90 percent of the territory. Assuming the authors of the article meant for the entire NATO-occupied Kosovo to be subjugated to this "union," such a creation would be populated by about 7.5 million people and 5 million of them would be Albanians! Yes, the ethnic cleansing they have been conducting would produce a greater degree of domination, if completed, but the geopolitical situation may be changing and I'm not surprised that alternative, cleaner solutions for the question of Albanian expansionist appetites are being sought.  Regardless of the laws governing relationships between the four entities, Albanians dominate two of them, share power in the third and, as such, can hold the fourth one, Montenegro, a hostage to its Albanian minority. 

source: en.wikipedia.org

The economic parallel of this proposal with the Beneluxian principle is as irrelevant as it is non-existent; there is no border between Albania and Kosovo to speak of; the one between Albania and Macedonia is as porous as any considering Albanians live on both sides of it and the Macedonian Albanians are more loyal to the cause of Greater Albania that to the state they live in; Montenegro is similar to Macedonia in this aspect. Add to this the fact that criminal industries such as drug trade, prostitution, human trafficking are often cited to take up a large portion of this region's economy, with a hub in Kosovo. It is easy to conclude that economic reasons cannot be the basis for creation of the Balkan Benelux, as the "goods'' already flow through "freely" and the production is virtually non-existent. You don't combine broken parts to make the engine work.

It is not surprising that this proposal is being peddled at the time of the seemingly no pasaran situation in North Kosovo. As Serbia continues to block Kosovo Albanians' independence and as the Kosovo Serbs continue to resist the Albanian occupation of the North, this new concoction could be seen as a circumvention maneuver. The authors are somewhat honest about it:

"Albania, Montenegro and Macedonia can also serve as stepping-stones for Kosovo towards Italy, Greece and the rest of EU."

They forget that Kosovo is not an independent state, and that after all, Greece does not recognize it. 

If the rogue state of Kosovo illegally joins a union of independent states for the ostensible purpose of advancing regional cooperation and expediting the EU accession, then it automatically gets the international representation and recognition. If such a union is fast-tracked into the status of an EU candidate, then the question of the North Kosovo and of the Kosovo independence in general becomes a matter of a relationship between two EU candidates and a subject to even more pressure on Serbia from Brussels. In other words, it becomes an EU matter rather than a UN Security Council matter, negotiated according to Brussels-imposed rules rather than under the UNR 1244. And we have seen how the EU involvement has damaged Serbia's interests in its occupied province's status negotiations. What the EU members like Spain or Greece, who haven't recognized Kosovo, have to say to that has been rendered irrelevant by the current economic tumult they are in. In case this proposal surfaces as a viable political initiative, Greece may want to keep its head down and pray that the Greater Albania architects leave it outside of all the combinations.

Albania and the Kosovo Albanians would rush headfirst into this unification. Macedonia has never been a country that made its own decisions and, since 2001, its government is a power-sharing structure that mandates the active participation of its Albanian minority. The constant threat of an Albanian insurgency has Macedonia teetering on the brink of implosion. Montenegro, on the other hand, is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and since the entire country can be bought off by an average Western European bank, it is not crazy to expect that proposals like the ridiculously sounding Balkan Benelux do appeal to the already-blackmailed Montenegrin leadership, if arranged on some type of a bailout platter.

It would be a small step for the EU, but a gigantic one towards building a Greater Albania.

Following the trajectory of the Albanian aggressive expansionism, this looks like another fast one their pundits are trying to sneak in and pass as a viable option. Considering it serves the Euro-Atlantic expansionism as well as the Turkish inroads back into the Balkans - remember, the Prizren League promoted the Greater Albania ideals under the sovereignty of the Ottoman sultan - one has to be a fool to wave it off as a pipe dream. 

Hamlet's Soliloquy by the Ibar River

Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory. - Sun Tzu

source: smedia.rs

While Serbia’s politicians continue to betray the electoral will of the people, keeping the country in limbo, haggling over one unholy post-electoral alliance after another and widening the disconnect between the consent of the governed and the license to rule, KFOR bulldozers have been cutting off the North Kosovo Serbs from the central Serbia, roadblock by roadblock. As the agony of the coalition-building power grab, void of any ideological premise or context, further deteriorates Serbia’s ability to sustain itself politically and economically, the North Kosovo Serbs seem to be in the care of no one. The roadblocks, the only security the unarmed population of North Kosovo has at its disposal, are being dismantled one by one, strategically, apparently severing all the physical connections these Serbs had with central Serbia. The Serbs standing on the left bank of the Ibar River find themselves increasingly alone.

After the German and American NATO troops fired at the people of the village of Rudare on June 1 with live ammo, wounding six, another attack occurred on June 16, in which another roadblock was removed, close to Brnjak, and two more people were wounded, this time by rubber bullets. It is a path the NATO occupiers have chosen and they appear determined to gradually and systematically steamroll the remaining free Kosovo Serbs out of Kosovo.

Serbia’s government, with the constitutionally limited new president, the acting prime minister who was irrelevant even during his mandate, and the new cabinet still being bartered over, is incapacitated and seems to be fine with it. Who would want to have to make difficult decisions about Kosovo anyway? In the power vacuum, KFOR and the Albanians can do what they please and no one in Belgrade will lose sleep over it because everyone has an excuse. President Nikolić, the only legitimate agent of Serbia’s government, is waiting on the cabinet to be formed and even if he weren’t what could he do? Threaten to mobilize the Army like President Milorad Dodik of the Serb Republic hinted at? No one believes the Serbian Army can fight NATO. No one even believes the Serbian Army can bluff NATO. Hell, I believe NATO, through Boris Tadić and Dragan Šutanovac, made sure the Serbian Army can’t even fight the Kosovo Protection Corpse. And these two stooges have even better an excuse: they are effectively out of power and, sorry, they can’t do anything to stop the ethnic cleansing of the North Kosovo Serbs. Not that they broke a sweat over it when they were in power. (Technically, Šutanovac is still the minister of defense, but no one expects anything patriotic of him.)

source: mondo.rs

The only ones with no excuse and literally no way around are the North Kosovo Serbs. Their situation is precarious. Somewhere between fifty and eighty thousand people – closer to fifty, I’d say – are trapped in one corner of the province, unarmed and put in a headlock by the enemy force. They have been denied the right of self-determination granted to the Kosovo Albanians by the NATO bombs. Well, the Serbs have no bombs, no powerful overlords, so they cannot claim the right to determine their own political fate. Their democratic will to reject the Kosovo Albanian authority, expressed in the February referendum, was ignored. And, as the North Atlantic community’s excuse goes, borders in the Balkans cannot be changed any further so the Serb-populated territory of the North Kosovo cannot hope for any solution that carves them out of the rogue state of Kosovo, like NATO and the Albanians carved Kosovo out of Serbia, 13 and 4 years ago, respectively. Sure, these borders could be changed all up until 2008 when most of the North Atlantic community recognized Kosovo Albanians’ declaration of independence. But that was a precedent because the North Atlantic community said so to the rest of the world. Most of the world did not fall for this browbeating, the rogue state of Kosovo has not been recognized by 60 percent of the UN members, but the boot stomping on the Kosovo Serbs has spoken: the Kosovo Albanians and the Kosovo Serbs are not to have the same rights and will not be treated equally. To uphold this principle, the North Atlantic community is bent on subjugating the Kosovo Serbs to the rule of the Kosovo Albanians. And although there is a number of Serb communities that have so far allowed to survive the subjugation, most notably in Gračanica and Štrpce, it is clear that these are token communities, allowed to survive only to portray the false picture of tolerance and multi-ethnic society that the Albanian Kosovo is most definitely not. A more believable picture of tolerance could have been painted if the Albanians didn’t eradicate a number of similar enclaves in the three-day pogrom in March of 2004, killing Serbs, looting and burning Serb homes and churches across the province, drastically reducing the number of Serbs living in Kosovo and crucially changing the more even demographic distribution that testified to the past demographic character of the region. It had to be a rude awakening for any Serb who thought that a cohabitation setup was possible under the Albanian rule and the NATO occupation. Fool me twice – shame on me. The survival of the enclaves south of Ibar is not fooling the North Kosovo Serbs. If the North falls, it will be a matter of Albanian convenience as to how quickly the life of the southern Serb enclaves becomes a hell on Earth. Despite the somewhat successful tug-of-war in the international legal and diplomatic arena, Serbia’s dwindling chances to keep Kosovo hinge on the presence of Serbs in the province. In the end, the North Kosovo Serbs have nowhere to go, but to become refugees in Serbia, which, under the specific economic conditions, is a prospect as catastrophic as staring into NATO’s gun barrels. Blocking the roads with gravel and their bodies is the road they are forced to take. 

source: rtv.rs

The geopolitical paradigm in which the Kosovo issues operate has ostensibly been shifting and NATO and the Albanians are striving to adjust. The Konuzin humanitarian “sortie” combined with the Tadić election loss has caused some uneasiness in Priština and the time of reckoning with the North has seemingly come. No chance to chip away at Serbia can go underutilized, Camp Bondsteel has to be secured long-term by rounding off the rogue state of Kosovo, and most importantly, a door to a Russian return to Kosovo in any capacity, even a peacekeeping one, has to be shut tight as soon as possible, especially in the light of the impending proxy war in Syria between the North Atlantic –Sunni Muslim axis and the Russo-Sino-Shia Muslim alliance. The peaceful resistance of the North Kosovo Serbs has denied the aggressor the needed pretext for an all-out overrun, which has forced NATO to resort to a more methodical approach. Nevertheless, the Albanian and NATO determination to drive the Serbs out of Kosovo seems to be so strong that it can only be alleviated by an agreement to have Russian peacekeepers indeed stand on the Ibar River and guarantee the physical survival of the North Kosovo Serbs. This should be the official demand by Belgrade, if its bark had any teeth, and all the status negotiations should be conditioned on this. Reverse any concessions Borislav Stefanović made and refuse to negotiate the status without the security guarantees. 

Kosovo Albanians’ aggressive maximalist agenda backed by NATO has left the Serbs with no choice. They cannot surrender. And, although alone, they have survived so far.

Boris, the Prime Minister: Election? What Election?

source: kurir-info.rs

The elections in Serbia were finally annulled on Wednesday! No, not the election results, but the actual legitimacy of the act of free election. Boris Tadić, whose party won a mere 22 percent of the popular vote - notwithstanding the evident election fraud it was accused of perpetrating - and who personally got beat in the presidential election, will be allowed to lead the Serbian government for another, well, few months, in all likeliness. (Finally, I can put my two cents in without being worried that the Serbian news media have been duping the public with false reports, as is their ‘’professional’’ manner.)

Outside of the election fraud that no one but Dveri still talks about, there is nothing illegal about this development. All the illegal moves have already happened, and judging from Tadić's past disregard for law, will keep happening, but his candidacy for the post of the head of government is not illegal, but merely immoral and deeply offensive. Tadić's Democratic Party won 67 seats in the National Assembly and, combined with 45 seats won by Ivica Dačić's Socialists, it is a couple of promises to either Čedomir Jovanović or Mlađan Dinkić away from securing the support of a parliamentary majority, necessary to form the new cabinet. The largest party, the Progressives, is well below the 126-seat threshold in any of the coalition-building combinations. Tomislav Nikolić won the presidency, but will not exercise any significant executive power under the so-called ''cohabitation'' setup. I would love to do a real-value election outcome recap for you, since you will not get it from the regime-controlled media web of Serbia, but to what end? Nikolić will be inaugurated on Thursday before a parliament assembled as a result of the fraudulent first round of the election; he is constitutionally obligated to offer the mandate to a candidate who can win the support of a parliamentary majority and Tadić is that candidate; finally, Nikolić, unlike Tadić before him, promised to uphold the Constitution. Unless the recent series of earthquakes in Italy and Bulgaria somehow shake up Belgrade, Tadić will be appointed the Prime Minister of Serbia. I take that back: I doubt that even an earthquake can stop Tadić from grabbing the power back.

Let's dwell on Tadić. As I said, there is nothing illegal about his party maneuvering back into leading the government, but Tadić personally lost the trust of the Serbian people. The people told him on May 20 that they do not want him to lead them anymore, yet he, the unwanted, will take the power back even after decisively rejecting the idea in his concession speech on May 20. Therein lies the macro-moral failure of the Serbian political elite, epitomized by Tadić. As Nikolić pointed out several times in the post-victory interview, there is no place for a former president to go but down. But Tadić, only 54 and unaccustomed to politics outside of a position of power, decided that it is important to remain in power without regard to any political norm. George Washington defined, stabilized and ennobled the office of the U.S. president by refusing to hold it more than twice, thus setting a precedent that lasted for a century and a half. After he bowed out, he went back to managing his Mt. Vernon plantation. Serbia, desperately needing any sort of stabilization of political institutions, had to suffer through Boris Tadić, the opposite of Washington, until he lost, and discouragingly enough, even after the loss. The most natural outcome of the election defeat would be for Tadić to utilize the high esteem he claims to be held in all over the world and make some money off of appearances, speeches, consultancy fees and such. If someone like Bill Clinton, who is not held in high esteem around the world, could make tens of millions of dollars, so should Boris Tadić. Honestly, the only time I believed the guy's words was when his weary eyes spoke louder than his claim that he would not accept the prime minister mandate, during the concession speech. But, Tadić, the man Vesna Pešić, the icon of Serbia's pro-democracy movement of the 1990s and a 1997 Nobel Prize nominee, called ''Serbian Al Capone'' on Wednesday (links to an article in Serbian) would not disappoint his staunchest critics.

source: pressonline.com

The Tadić candidacy, coming after a week and a half of unnerving the public and turning the election process into a joke, cannot, however, only be looked at under the light of Tadić's ambition, hypocrisy or blatant disregard for political norms, although he definitely possesses all three epithets.

Nikolić’s victory was a surprise. Tadić did not resign to see himself out of the presidency – he intended to rule for another five years, at least. Caught by surprise and advised by its EU sponsors against any undemocratic measures that characterized the first round and its rule in general, the Democratic Party responded to Tadić’s defeat a bit confused. I expected Tadić to step down from the leadership of the party after losing the presidential election and also losing one third of the parliamentary election vote compared to 2008. It especially made sense considering the fact that there were at least two up-and-coming younger men who held on to their electorate in a more steadfast manner than he did: Dragan Đilas, the mayor of Belgrade, and Bojan Pajtić, the prime minister of the province of Vojvodina. Tadić lost and these two men won in their respective domains, in Serbian electoral terms - decisively. The mayor of the capital city, Đilas is known to have control over much of the Serbian news media, through direct ownership or indirectly, an invaluable asset to any politician’s job security. He is considered a tycoon in Serbia and arguably its single most powerful politician. Pajtić, having escaped unscathed from serious political scandals and having led Serbia’s northern province, however ineptly, showed survival skills and political stamina at a young age that rightfully puts him up for a promotion, undoubtedly desired soon. Based on their current strength, there is no doubt that both of these men want to lead the party with Tadić out of their way. Considering the way Tadić won the leadership after the death of Zoran Đinđić, the battle for power promised to be bloody. Tadić had to stay, for at least a while longer. The power struggle between Đilas and Pajtić has already started, with news coming out on Wednesday about a grant-receiving scientist in Novi Sad being denied the already-awarded grant after refusing to shake hands with Pajtić. Also, the news of a Hungarian neo-Nazi rally in Kanjiža is bound to take a stab at Pajtić.

To have pro- and anti-Nikolić nationalists consider the fact that Nikolić may not have as much power as some of us would want, especially under the possibility of a cohabitation, I have been repeating this one on Twitter since May 20: no ambitious politician would want to occupy the hot seat of the head of the Serbian cabinet through the upcoming economic mess. Not Đilas, if he can push someone else to the forefront. Pajtić, a runner-up to Đilas in any scenario, wouldn’t be so stupid either. Tadić was the only one with no choice. If he didn’t accept this job, he wouldn’t last in the party leadership for another six months. He is expended and disposable and his only use at this point is his willingness to be a pawn even within his own party, to succumb to party and international pressures and to sabotage the new president.

source: trojka.rs

Do not underestimate the Brussels impact. Yes, the Eurocrats sent the ‘’premature’’ congratulatory note to Nikolić. It was a clear signal that they weren’t surprised, that they had no use for Tadić since December 9, 2011, unless they wanted to incite the people to riot and that Nikolić could, in his own way, suit their ambition as well. Until they can sort things out and come up with some kind of power-sharing deal between Đilas and Pajtić that would allow them to continue undermining Serbia’s legitimacy in Vojvodina, who better to pose as a person of importance than Tadić? Through his media, Đilas will insist on subtly blaming the cohabitation setup for anything that goes wrong, taking stabs at Nikolić, even though the president is the only official elected directly by the people and the one whose constitutional limitations render him unable to significantly affect the executive decisions. In other words, Nikolić will not be making decisions, but the Đilas-controlled media will gently spin any failure of this government to smear Nikolić. The early insistence by media on setting the cohabitation up as a problematic solution is clearly pointing at the planned exploitation of all the negatives this setup produces for the purpose of damaging Nikolić. Tadić was incapable of governing effectively and democratically while he was in office, although he usurped both the presidential and the cabinet powers by appointing a weak prime minister, but he is definitely capable, backed by the EU support and Đilas’ logistics, of seriously hurting the president and allowing the Vojvodina separatists to make ever greater gains. If the EU really does not care for Serbia, it does care to make it weaker and it does care for Vojvodina. With Pajtić pitting Vojvodina against Đilas behind the curtains, Đilas pitting Belgrade against Pajtić, both shielded by the ineffectiveness of Tadić - the recipe for a further destabilization of Serbia is set. As for Nikolić, when he voices his stand against joining NATO or against negotiating with the alleged war criminals in Kosovo, the North Atlantic community will handily fabricate the notion that he is a stubborn nationalist, striving to pull Serbia away from the ‘’European’’ integration and back into the 1990s. (I hear more and more Serbs reminiscing about the economic prosperity of the Milošević era, however incredible it sounds.)

The looming economic collapse in the Eurozone will undoubtedly affect Serbia as well. Go no further: Serbia GDP is projected to grow 0.1 percent this year. The fiscal deficit is projected at 6.2 percent for the end of the year. The public debt is approaching 55 percent of the GDP. Yes, the United States’ numbers in this category are far worse, but the Americans can obliterate a random country out of existence to feed their faltering growth that hovers a little over 2 percent anyway. Tadić brought the country to its knees, no one expects him to recover it. No one can recover it, expect maybe Putin, but I doubt he is going to want to throw significant money into a pit. He promised $800 million to Nikolić, but not to Tadić. The way Tadić spends, I’d be careful if I was Putin. Đilas, or Pajtić, cannot possibly want to take the blame for a failing economy of the country when they can position themselves for a potential showdown from the more comfortable, yet almost equally powerful positions they firmly hold now. Or, they can use the extra few months to clean up possible corruption trails leading to them, if they are in anticipation of some sort of an anti-corruption offensive, err, a regime change. So, the best for everybody is to throw Tadić under a bus, he is expendable.

The conclusion is, Tadić agreed to rule just to extend his political life and life in power, in front of flashing cameras, to satisfy Western interests, to stave off the tumult in his own party, to sabotage Nikolić… When has he ever said "no" to anti-Serbian interests anyway? It is a shame, but Serbia is less and less able to recognize it and call it what it is. No one talks about the electoral fraud that delegitimized the entire first round. Off the Đilas wire, off Serbia’s mind.

The Tease Note and the Rough Road Ahead for the New President of Serbia

source: telegraph.co.uk

When Jose Manuel Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy congratulated Tomislav Nikolić on his presidential election victory – three hours before the closing of the polls on Sunday, mind you – it was clear the game was on. The press release was quickly taken off the Council of Europe web site, but not before Croatian daily Večernji List launched it into the serbophone media space. Of course, I refused to believe this was a mistake; I believed it was a signal, although I had a dilemma as to what kind of signal.  A pair of Eurocrats of the highest order such as Barroso and Van Rompuy would do this for one of the two reasons: (1) project the winner to the Tadić voters to urge them to come out in a more feverish fashion; (2) project to Serbia that the Nikolić victory, or anyone’s victory for that matter, is within their absolute control so much that they dared to announce the winner any time they wanted, without regard for electoral procedures. Serbian media did not pick this release up until much later, but the fact that a Croat daily did told me the intention was for Serbs to be able to receive it. Nikolić won the election, as Barroso and Van Rompuy projected hours before all the voters slipped their ballot through the box slot. How could they know? This outcome all but eliminated the first possibility in my dilemma and left me with the one that was less realistic, but more likely. Of course, it is possible and plausible that congratulatory notes for both outcomes were prepared in advance and some trigger-happy editor in Brussels was just way too impatient. Of course.

Nikolić did win. I can’t say that doesn’t please me. If I was in Serbia, I’d probably be celebrating with the people. Boris Tadić conceded the loss, congratulated Nikolić and it is unfortunate that Tadić’s congratulatory note was not the most important of the day. Tadić looked awful, a totally deteriorated man ending his political career, in Serbia at least. It is too bad that Eurocrats from Brussels rather than the Eurocrat from Belgrade ushered in the Nikolić era. The signal “the Tease Note” sent begged too many questions for one blog post to answer. 

source: rts.rs

But Nikolić did win, that is a fact. Whether people voted against Tadić or for Nikolić is irrelevant. Both men are way less popular than four years ago when they squared off in the same contest. Nikolić the Radical was way more convincing than Nikolić the Progressive. Toma the Undertaker was more natural than Toma the Master of Management. But, to get rid of Tadić, patriotic Serbs will take whatever Toma they can get. However, a more important question is what side of Nikolić was promised to and made acceptable by the Eurocrat pair of kingmakers. Even devoid of his innate nationalist ideology that made him a symbol of post-Šešelj Serbian nationalism, and with weak and hollow rhetoric that avoided most of the crucial issues, Nikolić was supposed to be able to thrash Tadić, whose political capital was completely gambled away, or purposefully spent, if you wish. And he did. At the meager 46 percent turnout, it was clear Tadić lost support of his outer core voters who saw him as ineffective or who felt the change was in the air and did not want to be on the losing side. If you add the nationalist voters who sided with Dveri in the election fraud protest and boycotted the second round altogether, it is obvious that this race was about which candidate would experience less of abandonment by his natural supporter groups. It was a race to the bottom and Nikolić won. It is nothing unusual for democracy; democracy is about not being denied the right and good democracy is about exercising it. No one claims Serbia is a good democracy. One would be hard-pressed to find such a “good” democracy anywhere on the planet.

Van Rompuy and Barroso surely couldn’t be happy that Nikolić, the former hardline nationalist-turned-pro EU moderate, won the Serbian presidency in which Tadić wielded the almost absolute power, indispensable to the process of Serbia’s EU subjugation. Why the dog-and-pony show then? Did Nikolić really become that acceptable? I’d say yes and no.

source: telegraf.rs

The last four years of Tadić could in no way be compared to what awaits Nikolić in his newly won seat, if the constellations in the National Assembly remain. Tadić, maneuvering in the executive arena with much more power that the Constitution allowed due to being able to appoint and manhandle the weak Prime Minister Mirko Cvetković and encroach onto his turf with reckless regularity, literally grabbed all the executive power since he won the second time in 2008. In his first term, sharing power with legalistic Vojislav Koštunica as the Prime Minister, Tadić was constitutionally limited and that is exactly what looms ahead for Nikolić. He will not be able to affect policies and personnel appointments nearly as much as Tadić has done in the last four years. As the coalition-building stands now, Tadić’s Democratic Party will form the parliamentary majority and the cabinet with Ivica Dačić’s Socialists, leaving Nikolić isolated in the presidency. For Nikolić personally, the presidency is the paramount of his expectations and ambitions, a hard-earned honor and a vindication. For his party and for the nationalist cause, it is just a tease of greater gains to be won through more years of heavy political fighting. To sum up, Nikolić is not expected to have a lot of power. And he declared himself to be decisively pro-EU. Considering the popular outrage against Tadić, the arrogance with which Tadić and his allies treated the election fraud protests and the fact that Tadić has done more than enough to please the Western globalist desires, thus spending his political capital with the Serbian people, perhaps Nikolić, as a factor of stability in the country and a man who drastically changed his foreign policy stance, indeed was accepted as a crony, err, partner by the Eurocrats. Tomislav Nikolić, the former chetnik vojvoda, and a man who once said he’d like to see Serbia as a Russian province rather than an EU member, a crony of the Western imperialism? Come on. Not even apparatchiks like Van Rompuy and Barroso would believe that, even if such a determination was their call. No one in their right mind can believe this. Yet, no one should be so naïve to believe that Nikolić would win the presidency without a Brussels nod or at least a shrug.

source: b92.net

The EU is in a hell hole with the entire eurozone mess. Not only that they do not look at Serbia as a prospective member, but for most of the EU power structures, Serbia is not on the horizon of their priorities. This does not mean they do not care if a Eurosceptic wins the presidency. This does not mean there are not special interests within the Western power structure that are not interested in Serbia either. In Serbia’s demolition that is. When the EU rejected Serbia’s candidacy on December 9, 2011, it meant the demise of Boris Tadić, despite the fact that Serbia won the candidacy on the second try in February of 2012. Tadić complied with everything Brussels demanded. Brussels wanted more, showing utter disregard for Tadić’s political future. It should have become clear to all the doubters that the EU, or at least certain powerful interests associated with it, did not want Serbia in the Union, but Serbia on its knees. Serbia has in no way benefited from the EU integrations, while being forced to comply with the most unreasonable demands. Now, after Angela Merkel dropped Tadić like a dirty sock and still got what she wanted in relation to Kosovo, and after Tadić lost not only the trust of the Serbian people, but any legitimacy as well, and after the streets of Belgrade became a ground fertile for an anti-EU revolution, who but Tomislav Nikolić could jump in to stabilize the situation? No, he is not a Western ally and although his political agenda will be obstructed to the point where to some it will appear as if he served the Western interests, he will never be a Western ally.

On the other hand, if the West only wants to demolish and dismember Serbia, that process has been well into its finishing stages and I don’t only mean in terms of Kosovo, Vojvodina or Raška. Nikolić and the cabinet he will be in a constant power struggle with will inherit a dependency status in relation to the international financial bodies and foreign investors. The destruction of Serbia’s heavily damaged economy would be a matter of weeks if those interests wished to punish Serbia, regardless of who is in power. In fact, if they treated Tadić, the servile, pro-Western puppet, like a bastard child, imagine what kind of pretext will Nikolić’s presidency create if someone in Brussels, Berlin or Washington decides that Serbia can continue to be picked apart.

source: novosti.rs

Why, then, would Van Rompuy and Barroso not applaud Nikolić’s win? Tadić could realistically give no more without causing havoc on the streets of Belgrade and such occasions would divert the subjugation processes into an unpredicted direction. Nikolić hasn’t spent 20 years fighting for power to risk it now by starting a revolution. He wants stability, the EU wants stability, and while they may not necessarily want the same kind of stability, both their positions are tenable as long as they agreed on this.

As I’ve said, one blog post cannot explain the new reality in Serbia. How could one talk about Nikolić and not mention Russia? Any attempt to predict Nikolić’s future is closely tied with the formation of the cabinet. While all the musings and conclusions above have been conditioned on the present parliamentary alliances, however tentative, any serious contemplation on Serbia’s near political future has to also dwell on the instability of any alliance whose one member is Ivica Dačić. No one in Serbia would be surprised if Dačić, who already committed to continue in the coalition with the Democratic Party, jumps ship, switches alliances in the coming weeks and joins Nikolić and Koštunica. Oh, and what about Koštunica… What an interesting twist his alliance with Nikolić has been! The declared Eurorejectionist, err, Eurorealist, joined forces with the nominally pro-EU Nikolić, ostensibly leaving the question of EU integration aside for now and vowing to let the people’s will prevail in a referendum. Koštunica, with a steadfast political demeanor and a methodical, unwavering style, is still alive and kicking, despite the relatively successful push against him by the Western ambassadors in Serbia. He is bound to make his presence felt in any coalition and in any political agenda he is a part of, regardless of the relative strength or the role his party plays in the partnership. The last, but not the least, the effect of Dveri, which have become a grassroots organizing force among nationalists, will be felt as well, and they will inadvertently benefit from Nikolić’s every lapse.

So, the road ahead for Nikolić is going to be rough, as Tadić sneeringly warned in his concession speech. Nikolić is a better option for Serbdom than Tadić, that is for sure. But the Serbs should not get their hopes high. This is a small step in essence, however gigantic in symbolic significance. He must be cunning, quick and ready to compromise with the enemies and utilize potential allies without pride and arrogance.