Forum: Anti-Serb programs in Kosovo

Greek Foreign Minister Panayiotis wrote in these pages March 25, “A return to the pre-1999 status quo is no longer a realistic option. Kosovo must remain multiethnic.”

With all due respect, Mr. Molyviatis is way off base. “Remain multiethnic”? Multiethnicity in Kosovo died when President Clinton supported Osama bin Laden’s Kosovo Liberation Army, an army of which The Washington Times’ own Jerry Seper wrote in May 1999, “Some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has financed its war effort through the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by international fugitive Osama bin Laden.”

Further, while the Clinton administration was supporting the Bosnian Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic, his embassy in Vienna in 1992 issued a passport to Osama bin Laden that enabled him to visit Bosnia and Kosovo at least three different times. (The Wall Street Journal Europe, Nov. 1, 2001, “Al Qaeda’s Balkan links”).

Barely covered by the national media, a National Review report of March 19, 2004, said: “A pogrom started in Europe on Wednesday. A U.N. official is quoted as saying ‘Kristallnacht is under way in Kosovo.’ Serbs are being murdered and their 800-year-old churches are aflame. Much of the Christian heritage in Kosovo and Metohija is on fire and could be lost forever. By these deeds too many of Kosovo’s Albanians have shown that all the speeches about democracy and multiethnicity we have been hearing in Kosovo since June 1999, and the naive repetition of them by the international community, are false. These words too are burning, as is the hope in the hearts of right-thinking policymakers across the world that Kosovo’s barbarians can be civilized at little cost to the West.”

Former UNPROFOR Commander, Canadian Maj. Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, said it best in the National Post report: “The Kosovo-Albanians have played us like a Stradivarius. We have subsidized and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically pure and independent Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of the violence in the early ‘90s and we continue to portray them as the designated victim today in spite of evidence to the contrary. When they achieve independence with the help of our tax dollars combined with those of bin Laden and al Qaeda, just consider the message of encouragement this sends to other terrorist-supported independence movements around the world.”

Mr. Molyviatis writes, “Finally, it is necessary we proceed to a strictly monitored process for collecting small arms and ammunition in the region.” Does he not know that, when the Kosovo Liberation Army morphed into the alleged Kosovo Peace Corps, it took along its arms and weapons for use against the Serbian minority?

So much for a multiethnic Kosovo. While the rest of the world stands by, all vestiges of Serbian culture, religion, language and religion are being eradicated from their Jerusalem, Kosovo being the seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

However, I do agree with Mr. Molyviatis’ statement that: “The year 2005 will see the Balkans return as one of the top issues on the international agenda by reason, once again, of the uncertain situation in Kosovo.” Granting independence to Kosovar Albanian extremists would reward terrorism.

STELLA L. JATRAS

Camp Hill, Pa.