Kosovo - a big and fatal mistake of the West: New and difficult threats

Let's imagine the unthinkable - for Serbia to recognize the "independence of Kosovo"! I guess it's a Western code for "normalization of relations", for "comprehensive agreement", or for ending the "frozen conflict". Will that end the abuse of the Serbs just because they are Serbs; the shooting of Serbian children and young men just because they are Serbs; the desecration of Serbian monuments and the demolition of Serbian temples just because they are Serbian, and so on without end?

Because that Serbian space and Serbian cradle were under different authorities and administrations, both "dependent" and "independent" - from Turkish to Italian and German, and now to American and Albanian; the Albanian terror against the Serbs has never stopped. They have always been (which, according to the logic of things, means - and will be) in some kind of "frozen", "semi-frozen", or openly "thawed" conflict towards the Serbs.

Historian Slavenko Terzic testifies to this, since the time of the Russian consuls in Shkoder and Prizren, and we see it every day even today. To enumerate, from those "consular times" (to use Andric's phrase) until today, we would need incomparably more space than a newspaper article and a historical supplement, although it would be necessary to list all the Serbian victims of Albanian terror for some future international court of justice, which it will not be selective like the current ones. To that, for the sake of truth and justice, we should also add Albanians - victims of Albanian terror, for the sake of violent and cruel, anti-Serb, homogenization of the Albanian people. Only the KLA, for example, killed a large number of Albanians, loyal citizens of Serbia and Yugoslavia, or potential witnesses to the war crimes of the KLA leaders, applying the cruelest methods of torture to them, as well as to the Serbs, after all, up to organ harvesting in the "yellow house".

And until that documentation about the cruelty of the Albanian terrorists towards the Serbs, but also towards the Albanians, is established, and instead - let's return to the hypothetical claims from the beginning of the text that the "frozen conflict", and thus the terror of the Albanians, will disappear with a comprehensive agreement. This is either great naivety or great manipulation, with the manipulation coming primarily from the Western side, and the naivety primarily from our side. The Kosmet problem cannot be solved, it can only, and must, be solved, with the fact that its latest escalation was caused by the fact that the West entered a kind of final phase of the battle for the realization of its (and the Albanian) conception of an independent Kosmet.

As Milosevic once said, they were not doing it out of strength but out of weakness. He uttered that sentence at that time and for that time, but it is still valid today, maybe the same, maybe even more. And more than twenty years have passed since then. After all, if they were working out of strength, would there be any sense or explanation for 19 of the strongest and most developed countries in Europe and the world to bomb a small Serbia, which they had already devastated with sanctions?! If they worked and are working from strength and not from weakness, would they have to lie so much?! That they do not respect themselves and their word so much. To turn upside down logic, facts, truth, and justice - all human and ethical values, up to the forgotten state sovereignty and the principle of equality of nations and people, and all this, allegedly and precisely, in the name of human rights, angelic mercy, and democracy. That's why they're stealing Kosmet from us and that's why they intend to finish the work they started a long time ago right now.

It is not about that, and especially not only about that, that we Serbs cannot accept it at any price. No, but with all that, and even regardless of all that - there is a big, perhaps fatal mistake of the West and the united Western power, or powerlessness. Even before that, here, on the land of the former Yugoslavia, but also elsewhere in the white world, they did all kinds of things - killed people and destroyed states, bombed and stole resources, but to build another state on the land of one sovereign and internationally recognized state, and to demand that the country and the people agree to it - they are trying to perform this type of perversion for the first time.

First, in their overheated self-awareness, they started false media satanization of the Serbs, and then they believed that lie and took it as a justification for the bombing; then, also for confiscating part of the territory of Serbia - the province of Kosovo and Metohija - which they declared an independent state. And just a few years before that, in 1999 - with the Kumanovo Agreement and UN Security Council Resolution 1244 - that province was recognized as part of the sovereign state of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, that is, Serbia as its legal successor. What they produced by bombing - a humanitarian disaster - they attributed to the Serbs and, in a further spiral of lies and nonsense, came up with an explanation that Serbia and the Serbs, as they are, lose their right to Kosmet, that is, to part of their national territory. They marked their own recognition of the previously self-proclaimed "state of Kosovo" as a sui generis case (in the sense of unique and unrepeatable), which is otherwise the absolute pinnacle of "unique and unrepeatable" legal nonsense and logical absurdity. It opened the eyes not only of the Russians, as Putin himself says, but it opened the eyes of the whole world. Because there is almost no country that does not face a smaller or bigger problem of secessionism and that does not understand what it is about, i.e. what the West is doing to Serbia and what it can prepare for each of them tomorrow under some new sui generis explanation. In other words, the sober part of humanity did not, of course, accept that "explanation", so most countries did not recognize that fake state, despite huge pressures, blackmail, and threats.

Faced with the consequences of their big and fatal mistake, which they are not ready to admit and which is costing them an increasing loss of credibility, the West continues to pressure and taunt Serbia to accept that blunder, which would bring the other countries to a fait accompli. These days, those pressures are entering the culmination phase. This forced the government in Serbia, but also the entire nation, to ask what to do. Despite the huge and hard-to-endure threats and "punishments", which include the introduction of visas, the suspension of accession negotiations for Serbia's accession to the EU, the withdrawal of foreign investments, and who knows what else, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that nothing related with Kosmet and its status can happen without our consent. And it is not disputed that Kosmet has no alternative for a huge part of Serbia. Or, to be more precise, it refers to membership in the European Union, as well as visas and foreign investments. These are simply not values and categories of the same order and rank, of the same nature and essence. That each of those punishments would be painful and difficult, and that each should be fought against and tried to be avoided, there is no dispute, but Kosmet would be a wound from which one dies, while others can somehow be overcome and survive.

Written by: Slobodan Jovanovic, journalist, former editor-in-chief of Politika Ekspres, and former director of Tanjug