By Boba Borojevic
September 16, 2008
• If there is a Balkan parallel to the situation that we have in Georgia vs. South Ossetia and Abkhazia, it is the one with Croatia vs. the Krajina.
• The current Serbian Government is “a joint criminal conspiracy which has the objective of stealing public property at home and betraying the nation and the state abroad.”
Georgia’s aggression against South Ossetia and subsequent recognition of independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia by Russia prompted political analysts to make comparisons with the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija. Such parallels overstate the case, Srdja Trifkovic, Foreign Affairs Editor of Chronicles magazine and Director of the Rockford Institute’s Center for International Affairs, told CKCU Radio in Ottawa.
“Neither constitutionally nor morally do the Kosovo Albanians have a claim to independence that is equal – let alone more valid – than that of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Unlike Kosovo, both Abkhazia and South Ossetia were autonomous regions that entered the Soviet Union as parts of Georgia only at the time of Georgia’s inclusion in the USSR after a brief period of independence immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution. In other words, their inclusion in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic was predicated upon Georgia being a member of that wider entity, that is, the SSSR.”Secondly, in South Ossetia it was the Georgians who attempted to ethnically cleanse those territories, Tudjman-style, Trifkovic points out:
“When Kosovo Albanians sought independence at the time of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, they acted in a manner that clearly demonstrated their desire to dominate the Province and to expel the Serbs. They had been subjected to a massive campaign of quiet ethnic cleansing under communism, under Tito and his successors, which accelerated with the purchase of Serbian land and violence against the remaining Serbs, and culminated in the aftermath of the NATO bombing in 1999.”
If there is a Balkan parallel between the situation that we have in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, it is the one with Croatia and the Krajina, Trifkovic adds:
“What Georgian President Mikhel Saakashvili tried to do on August 7-8, 2008, was the repeat performance of Franjo Tudjman’s ethnic cleansing of a quarter-million Serbs from the Krajina in August of 1995. The Krajina Serbs faced a US trained and supplied Croatian military on one side and the Milosevic’s regime in Belgrade on the other, that was not only willing to help them but had in fact made prior arrangements with Zagreb to facilitate the speedy collapse of the Krajina. In Saakashvili’s case he faced a determined Russia. If he thought that he could pull it off Tudjman like and that the US would back him up, then he is very stupid or insane.”
Although Kosovo and Georgia crisis could well mean the end of the American world dominance, Trifkovic is of the opinion that America had never been the world’s only power.
“There was only a brief period in-between 1991 and 2000 when other major powers were unable or unwilling to act in the way that would combine their recourses and political weight to counter American unilateralism. This was due to Russia’s weakness, China’s primary focus on economic development, and Europe’s incoherence. That period was known as the American moment of unilateral dominance. In a historical prospective, it was fleeting, as transient as Napoleon’s full dominance over the European continent in 1806-1812, or the German attempt at hegemony under the Kaiser, which quickly produced a countervailing alliance of France, Russia, and finally Great Britain. There is a law of international politics that a power that seeks hegemony will cause the creation of a counterveiling alliance composed of those powers that resist that hegemony.”
In the end, Napoleon faced such an alliance composed of Russia, Prussia, Britain and Austria that defeated him in 1814 and finished the job at Waterloo in 1815. Likewise Germany in 1914-1918. Whether this will happen with the USA in an incremental, non-violent way, or whether the acceptance of this reality in Washington requires a major military defeat, remains to be seen. We see increasingly close relations between Russia and China focused on the Shangai Cooperation Organization; the rise of India, which knows that for many decades the USA has treated Pakistan as its strategic partner in the Indian subcontinent. We see other potential power centers, such as Brazil. Some of European countries are not too happy with the attempt from Washington to expend NATO along the northern shore of the Black Sea or to jeopardize relations with Russia at the time when Europe is hugely dependent on Russia for energy resources.
“It would be in the interest of the United States to accept the principle of multi-polarity, the principle of self-limiting mechanisms in world affairs that act as a global system of checks and balances. With the current state of political forces in Washington it is too much to expect this. Obama would be a global interventionist in the name of politicaly correct notions of enforcing democracy, equality, non-discriminationsm, or any other ideological notion dear to the liberal heart. John McCain would be out-and-out hegemonist-interventionist. He has never seen a US military intervention that he didn’t like or that he did not want to escalate.”
So, is George Bush Starting the Cold War Again? For the USA the Cold War had never stopped, Trifkovic says.
“During the 1990s, the time of Russia’s extreme weakness, they expended NATO, contrary to George Bush the senior’s promise to Gorbachev. We have seen a massive robbery of Russia’s natural resources by the Western multinationals and by their Russian cohorts, the robber barons. We have seen two color-coded revolutions, in Georgia and the Ukraine, which obviously had the long-term geopolitical objective of encircling Russia, squeezing it and forcing into a position of submissive irrelevance, in the end possibly partitioning it as Zbigniew Brzezinski has suggested many a time. What we are witnessing now is simply the beginning of a sustained Russian response to this project, which will heighten the tensions in this new Cold War. It has been in existence for a good many years because of the policies pursued from Washington.”
Is the Serbian Government capable of sensing these changes in the world and is it capable of positioning itself accordingly? Trifkovic believes that it is not:
“The Serbian government is dominated by the Democratic Party (DS) of President Boris Tadic. The DS is not really a political party. It is a criminal conspiracy which has the objective of stealing public property at home and betraying the nation and the state abroad. So, domestically their primary focus is on distributing portfolios that enable them to treat Serbia as a cow to be milked for all it’s worth, so the DS bigwigs can line their pockets. Abroad, they go through the motions of resisting the secession of Kosovo but at the same time not doing anything meaningful to defend the Serbian claim. It absolutely doesn’t matter what happens in Georgia or anywhere else: the Serbian government will repeat its tired old mantra of European integrations and act in the manner that is primarily focused on the interests of the DS nomenclature at home and the Diktat from Washington and Brussels abroad.”
The adoption of the Stabilization and Association Agreement with the EU and the energy agreement with Russia by the Serbian Parliament is anything but a “historic moment” for Serbia. Trifkovic thinks that, whatever Serbia’s Parliament does, with the current distribution of political forces and under the current government such actions cannot have any – let alone “historical significance.” Serbia is not the master of its own destiny. Its Assembly resolutions are as significant vis-à-vis Brussels today, as a decision by the Slovak parliament was vis-a-vis the Third Reich in 1942.
“Let’s be clear once and for all: Serbia will never be a member of the EU, no matter what any government of Serbia does. Secondly, in order to proceed on this elusive and ultimately self-defeating road to “Europe,” Serbia will be asked to accept the culpability for everything that happened in the former Yugoslavia, to accept The Hague Tribunal’s caricature of the wars of Yugoslav secession and to recognize Kosovo as a sovereign and independent state. These demands will be wrapped in the old formula of “normalizing relations with all neighbouring countries.” Even if Serbia does all that, even it accepts the absurd claim that in Srebrenica 8000 Muslims were executed in cold blood , which is rubbish; even it accept that it should pay indemnity and compensation to the victims of Serbia’s “aggression,” it will still not be accepted into the EU. It is irrelevant what the Serbian Parliament voted for, or what the Serbian government does, it will not happen. Not next year, not next decade, but never.”
Serbia not entering the EU is a blessing in disguise, Trifkovic concludes. The EU is a pernicious organization which is geared to the gradual erosion of its members’ sovereignty and the manipulation of hose countries by various means such as we’ve seen with the transformation of the European Constitution into the Lisbon Treaty. Subsequently, the ratification of that Treaty in most countries (Ireland excepted) was pushed through their national assemblies, avoiding the uncertainty presented by referenda.
“It is tragic that Serbia is ruled by a bunch of thieves and traitors, but at least we can console ourselves by the fact that it will not be accepted into the EU. In many ways, not being in the EU is the precondition of a sustained national recovery at a later date.”
