Colonel Macgregor: Wrong status quo created in Kosovo as the worst possible solution

Military analyst and senior advisor to former US President Donald Trump, retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor, believes that a wrong status quo has been created in Kosovo, which cannot be sustained without the presence of foreign military forces, Serbian Radio Chicago reports.

Macgregor, who was involved in events in Kosovo under the direct command of Wesley Clark in the 1990s, emphasized that the proposal for the division of Kosovo from the Rambouillet negotiations had been rejected at that time.

"The solution that would divide Kosovo, especially the part populated almost exclusively by Serbs along the Serbian border, with the provision to then relocate additional Serbian citizens from other parts of Kosovo, with the costs borne by the international community, was, of course, rejected. The Germans were quite prepared to give money to create a community that everyone could agree on," Macgregor says.

He adds that the key actors in the current administration are the same as in the 1990s.

"From 1995 to 2000, and now we see some of the same individuals who were younger then and have now grown older, but it's the same problem, so we have a lingering wound that won't heal," Macgregor adds.

He claims that there is a Western unwillingness to accept the fact that the Muslim Albanian regime in Pristina wants to control the whole of Kosovo and it is being imposed on the Serbian population, noting that the Serbian Orthodox Christians, of course, do not allow that.

"Territorial division occurs when those in power, in other words, various representatives, sit down and say - if we don't come up with some kind of partition, we'll have another war. We understand that division is not a permanent solution, but it is the best we can do at the moment, and it would buy us time," he said.

He added that there must be a willingness to do something that the Serbian leadership must consider and examine a solution that is imperfect but not permanent, which can result in some kind of division, and that decision can later be revised when favorable conditions are created for it.

"The provision must guarantee that the property belonging to the Orthodox Church will not be damaged or desecrated, and it will be treated as international historical monuments because these are the beginnings of what we today consider as the early Christian world," he says.

Macgregor states that there is no perfect solution, but there is a transitional one.

"War is not a pleasant experience for Serbs, and everyone in Yugoslavia knows that. Then you have us, America, we intervened wrongly in a big way. We talked about B-1B bombers flying over Bosnia the other day, which is essentially a kind of signal to the Serbian state that we are still here and that we can still bomb you, which I think is terrible because the majority of us in the 1990s believed that it was a great shame," he says.

Commenting on the actions of Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti, Macgregor notes that Kurti currently feels he has the wind at his back, especially due to the events in Ukraine, but he may soon discover that the wind has disappeared.

"There are many people who notice the large amount of weapons that Kurti has and is receiving, which were initially sent to Ukraine and then appeared in Kosovo and are being moved somewhere else, into the hands of people we in the West wouldn't want to arm, so he has to think again about what he is currently doing and whether he has support," Macgregor emphasizes.