Kosovo
Kirill PankratovThe Exile (Russia)
Why should the Kosovar Albanians get their own state? asked Kirill Pankratov in Moscow’s The Exile. The U.N. Security Council this week began debating whether to grant the Muslim province of Kosovo independence from Orthodox Christian Serbia, and the Western powers are firmly in favor. Kosovo has been run by the U.N. since the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, a misguided adventure born of Western guilt over abandoning the Muslims of Bosnia to Serbian militias five years earlier. Under cover of NATO airpower, the Kosovar Liberation Army—a group the U.S. State Department called terrorists right up until the eve of the war—expelled Serbs from the province. Eight years later, the few ethnic Serbs who remain in Kosovo live in fear for their lives, and must be protected by NATO troops. In Serbia, by contrast, more than 100,000 Kosovars live “without being brutally harassed.” Which is the more tolerant society? Westerners say the “poor, long–suffering” Kosovars deserve independence, but these same Westerners vehemently oppose independence for separatists in Georgia’s Abkhazia province or in the Transdniester region of Moldova. The difference is obvious. In Western eyes, “peoples sympathetic to Russia don’t deserve independence,” while those, like the Kosovars, who are hostile to Russia do. Russia will be fully justified in vetoing Kosovar independence.
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