New York Times Article, Use laexaminer/laexaminer for registration...
Quote:VINJARE, Kosovo, March 23 — There is not much left of this village. Every Serbian house has been burned — all 136 of them. Smoke still rises from some of the embers of buildings where some 320 people lived until last week, when they were forced from their homes by an ethnic Albanian mob.
The only houses left standing were a group in the center of the village, each with an Albanian flag on the door or roof to ward off intruders.
Yet Svinjare is in a region of Kosovo under the authority of the United Nations. It lies just 600 yards from a camp of United Nations peacekeepers whose task is to protect the people living there.
The village was among dozens of Serbian communities across Kosovo attacked by ethnic Albanians during two days of violence last week, during which United Nations officials now say 28 people died.
More than 400 Serbian homes were ruined, 30 churches were destroyed and 11 damaged, and 72 United Nations vehicles were destroyed, United Nations officials said. They acknowledged that Svinjare (pronounced SVIN-yah-reh) was among the worst cases, though no one died there. United Nations police and soldiers managed to evacuate the village in time.
There were mirror-image scenes in Kosovo just less five years ago. Then, hundreds of villages were burned as Serbian security forces sought to expel the majority ethnic Albanians — some 1.8 million people — from the territory.
The United States government estimates that up to 10,000 Albanians were killed in massacres by the Serbian police and paramilitaries.
In March 1999, NATO forces intervened with a bombing campaign. By June, the Serbian forces withdrew and the United Nations was placed in charge of the province. Some 800,000 Albanian refugees began to return home. Many of them sought revenge against their Serbian neighbors, and once again whole villages went up in flames.
United Nations officials have said that progress has been made and that interethnic violence has declined. But analysts say the underlying cause of those conflicts has never been addressed, even by the United Nations: What should become of Kosovo?
The ethnic Albanians want independence. The Serbs, who make up less than 10 percent of the population, want to return to Serbian rule. Albanian hard-liners, some United Nations officials believe, want to redraw the province's ethnic map again, by seeking to fuel interethnic hatred.
A senior police commander said the apparent failure of the peacekeepers demonstrated how their concern over possible mass violence had diminished as interethnic relations appeared to improving.
"Maybe we were a little bit sleepy," said Lt. Col. Jerzy Szezytynski, the commander of the Polish Special Police Unit in Kosovo, who has worked in the province since 1999. "It was a big surprise for all of us." But he said the United Nations — with more than 3,000 troops in the northern region, bolstered by several hundred police officers — should have been able to stop the violence. "It was a failure," he said.
A spokesman for the French brigade in charge in northern Kosovo, Lt. Matthieu Mabin, said the violence had spread too quickly and across too wide an area. "We can't protect everywhere all of the time," he said. "It's the reality on the ground, very simply."
The United Nations' spokeswoman in Kosovo, Jing Hua, said the United Nations troops had restored order quickly. "The developments here took everyone by surprise," she said, "but within two days they had gained control of the situation."
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Need Help coming up with arguments against mine?
Getting involved in the Balkans was a bad idea. I said it when Clinton did it, and I'll say it again. Jeebus himself can't bring peace to this corner of the planet. Too many different factions, and they all have 500 year old grudges.
My disdain for the UN is already known, so I'll leave it at that... other than to say "That's horrible."
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To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.
~ Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
Only 28 dead is a huge win for the region, I'm sure the numbers would have been far higher without the UN evacuations. Short of turning machine guns on the Albanians, I'm not sure what else you expect them to do.
Just truck in some Kurdish refugees - for some reason EVERYONE hates the Kurds, and no one remembers why. (Back In Black)
Delissandra Splitshadow - Marauder of Clan X
Grandmaster Poisoner (250), Master Potter (195), Grandmaster Lush (200)
Why is it that the last piece I've needed from EVERY armor set, from Ravenscale on up to Stanos' Wicked is the PANTS?
I honestly am beginning to think it's a conspiracy founded by Glip!
If you want the UN to start killing Albanians, you better send them some more troops. With only 3000 UN in the area, it'd look like some of the battles in the Anglo-Zulu War...
Another issue here is that the Serbian minority can't move to Serbia, I mean the ones that do want to move can't - the stance from Serbia is that they have to stay there so Serbia will hold a claim to the area. Not that any of this matters since the UN is so impotent they can't do anything other than watch when bad things happen other than go "Uh you really shouldn't be killing those men and raping those children - please". It doesn't help that no one really wants the UN to have power either.
But yeah, that entire area is a mess. I sometimes think the best solution would be to move all the people in Kosovo to Israel, move the Israelis and Palestinians to Kongo, and then move the Hutu and Tutsi to Kosovo. At the very least this way everyone would be stuck in a land they had no historical claim to and then they could decide whether to keep on killing each other. Plus it would add to ethnic diversity in the areas and show how absurd all this crap really is. If I had the powers of God that sort of mischief would be high on my to-do list.
and this is why we shouldnt help these hotzones, as cruel as it sounds it seems to be sending troops there a few years ago didnt to anything so why risk american lives for whats honestly a lost cause. theres so much hate there that not even TV could brainwash it away.
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Theres something on the
