In the end, after 4 years of civil war on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia, much inspired and fuelled by Washington, the US administration designed the Dayton Peace Accord in December 1995.
After February 2008 when Kosovo Albanian-dominated parliament proclaimed Kosovo independence (without organizing a referendum) with obvious US diplomatic support (unilateral recognition) with the explanation that the Kosovo case is unique in the World (i.e., it will be not repeated) one can ask the question: is the problem of the southern Serbian province of Kosovo really unique and surely unrepeatable in some other parts of the world as US administration was trying to convince the rest of the international community?
Since the 1878 League of Prizren onward, any Albanian program on the creation of a Greater Albania was supported by unproven claims that the Albanians are direct descendants of the ancient Balkan Illyrians.
The UN had designed the region of Srebrenica to be “safe area” in April 1993, meaning its civilian population had to be ostensibly protected by the presence of a contingent of UN troops – in the case of July 1995, from the Netherlands, the “Dutchbat” or Dutch Battalion, of only 570 lightly armed soldiers under the flag of UNPROFOR.
Formally, the US administration of Bill Clinton established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, the Netherlands, by a May 1993 resolution of the UN Security Council as a step toward fostering the principle of individual responsibility for war crimes (however, Bill Clinton personally never was charged by the same tribunal for war crimes in ex-Yugoslavia for some reason).
The collective West is busy showing what it thinks of Serbia’s determination to conduct an independent policy through an old-fashioned show of force.
Part III of our exclusive Biden Series on Joe Biden’s foreign policy positions through the years: The Balkans In his 2008 memoir, Promises to Keep, then Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden touted his leadership on the Balkan conflict as one of his two proudest moments in public life. He pushed a reluctant Clinton administration to […]
Remember the Brezhnev Doctrine? The informally named foreign policy put forth by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1968 following the Prague Spring, by which no communist country was to be allowed to abandon communism or even leave its sphere of influence, at the cost of armed intervention by other communist countries?
The August 30 parliamentary elections in Montenegro are a game changing event, no matter what the immediate outcome. The three decade-old NATO-friendly regime has been dealt a blow which may not be lethal in the near term, but it certainly marks the beginning of its terminal decline.
To some it may seem like hyperbole, but members of the victorious Montenegrin opposition could be excused for exclaiming late Sunday, August 30, 2020, that the Berlin Wall had finally fallen in their country as well – albeit a “mere” three decades after it had fallen everywhere else in Europe, materially and figuratively.
