From aki at alb-net.com Tue Nov 27 16:50:07 2001 From: aki at alb-net.com (AKI News) Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 13:50:07 -0800 Subject: [AKI] Advocates for Kosova Independence (AKI) Newsletter Message-ID: We welcome you to the Advocates for Kosova Independence (AKI) Newsletter. The Advocates for Kosova Independence was formed in November, 2001. It is an advocacy effort coordinated by Kosova Action Network* to aid in the stabilization of Kosova in the Balkans. The AKI newsletter: Features: Articles, Op-Ed pieces, Reports and Discussion on the pros and cons of independence for Kosova. Purpose: To create a useful archive of reliable information to be used for lobbying, petitions, speaking, and research on the issue of creating a safe and stable future for the people of Kosova. Distribution: Newsletters will distributed throughout our list several times per month highlighting various topics that pertain to Kosova's political status and political reforms in the region. The newsletters will also be archived for future reference. If you are interested in participating, please send/write articles and information pertaining to the issue to: aki at alb-net.com or if you would like us or remove your email address from our list, please send an email to: aki at alb-net.com with the words "remove" in the subject line. The AKI website will be available soon. The URL web address will be posted on our newsletter in December. The AKI website will serve as a tool for easy accessibility to our database of articles, documents, newsletters and any other pertinent information relating to the issue of Kosova's Independence. We hope you appreciate and participate in our efforts. We look forward to seeing Kosova's citizens free of fear and free of oppression. And this newsletter is an effort to ensure this freedom. This independence. Sincerely, The AKI Team ---------------------------------------------------------- * History of the Kosova Action Network efforts focused on: 1) Specific human rights issues 2) Rights of the University of Prishtina to be open to Albanian students 3) Rights to liberty and freedom for the 2,300 Albanian prisoners detained in Serbia ---------------------------------------------------------- ### -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: winmail.dat Type: application/ms-tnef Size: 2464 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.alb-net.com/pipermail/aki-news/attachments/20011127/cd88fb08/attachment.bin From aki at alb-net.com Tue Nov 27 18:22:29 2001 From: aki at alb-net.com (AKI News) Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 15:22:29 -0800 Subject: [AKI] Kosova's UNMIKians : A Protectorate without a Vision Message-ID: Advocates for Kosova Independence (AKI) November 17, 2001 On the day of Kosova's historic turning point, during the difficult process of establishing the rule of law throughout the tumultuous central Balkan peninsula, a new action campaign was formed to advocate for the right to self-determination for the people of Kosova. Sponsored by the Kosova Action Network, the Advocates for Kosova Independence (AKI) has been created for the purpose of providing a forum for discussion and research to evaluate as to what form that self-determination should take. During the past 5 years, Kosova Action Network has advocated for human rights and principles of equality first by supporting the Independent Student's Union (UPSUP) demand for education and then by advocating for the release of 2,300 illegally detained Kosova Albanian prisoners, some 200 of whom still remain in Serb prisons. ================================= ** AKI Newsletter, Issue 1 ** ================================= News: November 17, 2001 : Elections held in Kosova Elections held in Kosova on November 17 for the first time since 1989. After twelve years without elected representation, the Kosovars elect representatives with limited power. Real power will remain with UNMIK leaders. News: November 16, 2001 : Macedonia adopts a new constitution Arben Xhaferi, leader of the Democratic Party of Albanians, welcomed the constitutional changes. "We repaired the constitution and now we have to repair the mentality that created ethnic conflicts." -- Kosova's UNMIKians: A Protectorate Without a Vision There are many reasons for beginning this effort. Kosova's future cannot be left vulnerable and dependent upon such random factors as: 1) The half-hearted inattention and fluctuations of the US political leadership regarding a vision for Kosova and a stable future for the Balkans 2) The recalcitrance of Russia and China's veto power on the UN Security Council and their steadfast lack of concern for human rights, subverting the very principles the UN was formed to protect fifty years ago. 3) The hypocrisy implicit in the EU's haphazard application of principles of sovereignty they consistently award to the tattered remnants of the Former Yugoslavia while stating in all their by-laws that protection of minorities and human rights is the priority of every member of the EU and Council of Europe 4) Kosova and Serbia's political leadership vacuum and absolute lack of tolerance, generosity, and moral vision 5) The failure of Kosova's citizens to understand the expectations of Western leaders regarding protection of minorities, the rule of law, and fundamental human rights. These factors spiral around and around each other. Each sector points a finger of anger and blame at the other instead of acknowledging and shouldering the responsibilities needed to create a shared vision that is safe and meaningful for all citizens. This fact remains: Kosova is unique. It lies at the geopolitical center of the Balkans and therefore, if for no other reason, will always be crucial in establishing a stable region. The large Albanian population has never enjoyed full representation or legal equality in the way that other European ethnic groups have during the past fifty years. The freedom that arose from the collapse of Communism never reached Kosova. In 1989 they slipped into an imposed totalitarian repression. The strange borders drawn up at the collapse of the Ottoman Empire did not reflect the needs of the Albanian population and divided them from each other. The Albanians have never had a chance to formally express these historic wrongs in a setting where they have representation. This is one stream of experience. In Kosova there is a confluence of historic and present-day expectations. Here is another stream, the international one. We are all familiar with the difficulties that surrounded NATO's decision to intervene in Kosova. The decision marked a historic change in the status of principles of human rights. It signaled a historic end to totalitarianism. It marked a turning point away from the laissez-faire policy of non-intervention in the affairs of sovereign states (which resulted in the terrible disasters in Bosnia and Rwanda). Kosova was supposed to be the test case, in which international policy-makers decided that the world need NOT stand idly by watching ethnic, intra-state slaughter of thousands on CNN. The people of Kosova did not deserve to die at the hands of an army that had already killed 250,000 others. We took the responsibility of intervening. But we, all five parties mentioned above, avoided the responsibility of structuring a legitimate, planned solution. The result has been so far - defacto partitioning (like Mitrovica) or enclaves or the location of a semi-permanent Russian tank at the Prishtina airport. UNMIK is forced to lurch from crisis to crisis dragging a reluctant population behind it. But what to do? Kosova cannot remain for long as a protectorate without a future while Serb politicians ludicrously bluster about now being the time to plan to re-enter Kosova. And the Bush administration pays no attention to either the significance of this region nor what America has invested in it so far. And the EU considers Serbia and Macedonia to be the two significant countries, with their rights and principles a priority to Kosova's. That leaves a political power vacuum at the center of a region where minorities now know for a fact that only violence gets the attention of outsiders. The peaceful method, the referendum stated in UN1244, for now, has been postponed. Until when? By denying Kosova the chance for self-determination, are we denying a population the right to freedom of speech? Are we then creating a defacto country called UNMIK? Will UNMIKians some day vote in the FRY legislature? Will that make FRY an international protectorate as well? ---------------------------------------------------------- RECOMMENDED ACTION: Read the Kosovo Report by the Independent International Commission on Kosovo. Oxford University Press. 2000. or visit them on the web at www.kosovocommission.org ---------------------------------------------------------- ### From aki at alb-net.com Fri Nov 30 18:03:12 2001 From: aki at alb-net.com (AKI News) Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 15:03:12 -0800 Subject: [AKI] Statement - November 26, 2001 Message-ID: Advocates for Kosova's Independence November 26, 2001 ================================= ** AKI Newsletter, Issue 2 ** ================================= To no one's surprise, Ibrahim Rugova won the recently held elections in Kosova, though LDK will share parliamentary seats with PDK, AK, and the Serb party, which won eleven per-cent of the votes. Then, oddly, President Rugova sent out a statement saying that Kosova should now be recognized as independent by the international community. Internationals sputtered. Kostunica vowed to retain KosMet (this is not an abbreviation for the name of a life insurance company but an abbreviation for the Serbian term Kosovo Metohija). Does Kostunica know that he lost the NATO war? Does NATO know the FRY lost? If this all sounds contradictory and confusing, it is. If this sounds like once again, international powers are ignoring this high level of semi-institutionalized conflict regarding the final status of Kosova in the Balkans, they are. Somehow following the NATO war, which NATO "won", there was no peace agreement. The Serbs were allowed to retain their entire army as well as sovereignty over the province they had just been driven out of, thus creating an imbalance of power weighted towards Serbia that now cannot be addressed by any particular current organization. The Albanians, realizing that their only real advantage is not military but a population imbalance of 90 per-cent, seek the elusive referendum that was promised them in 1999. Now it seems that "the will of the people" has been reneged on at meetings they were not invited to. Isn't "the will of the people" the true meaning of sovereignty in the year 2001? Or are we now promoting a unilateral statehood based on hegemony and repression, similar to the states involved in the Cold War? Where do charters for the UN and NATO state this as a goal? Nowhere. What's missing behind this hodge-podge of mismanagement is, step one: Accountability. Actions should result in meaningful consequences. Under the Clinton/Holbrooke expediency method embodied in the Dayton Peace Accord of 1995 this never happened. Instead, short-term deals were substituted for just, principled, long-term strategies. Milosevic, now in The Hague, was treated as the Balkan "peacemaker." So he suffered some consequences. But nearly all others involved in these murderous acts still go free. The ICTY cannot and should not be a substitute for all levels of appropriate consequences. Certainly more than four Serb leaders were involved in killing and torturing Albanians. But only four have been indicted. Mladic and Karadzic go free. In the same vein, following ten years of armed conflict during the break-up of Yugoslavia, the Serbs were allowed to keep the Yugoslav Army - an army that had brutally killed its own countrymen in three separate wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosova. There was no disarmament for the Serbs in 1999, only for the Albanian KLA. Thus the FRY, the most violent nation in the Balkans, has been allowed to remain heavily armed. Even when mass graves were being excavated in the Serb capital, Belgrade, there was no discussion of any consequences. Instead, a country that drove hundreds of thousands into the mountains, destabilized neighboring countries, deceived its own citizens, murdered Kosovar civilians and hid the evidence in its capital is allowed to retain sovereignty over the population it tried to drive from its jurisdiction. In this instance, sovereignty was not used to defend and protect a group of citizens within its borders, but the opposite. At the same time, sovereignty for Serbs has been used by the Milosevic regime and to an extent by the Kostunica government as a shield to hide behind, to perpetrate murder, social chaos, crime and an ongoing injustice from which ordinary people must feel that they will never escape. Internationals have clung to the principle of sovereignty of the FRY (a former country that is still a country) causing: an exhaustion of diplomacy, severe strains in the NATO alliance, failure to promote human rights by the UN Security Council, the economic destruction of an entire region resulting in smuggling, weapons trafficking, and drug running. This is not a protection of the principle of sovereignty. Sovereignty means that a nation will lawfully defend and protect all its citizens. It is, instead, half-hearted international intervention followed by a wish that the problems would simply go away. Well they won't. Not until an equitable sovereignty is redefined and redistributed among all citizens. That should have been done in a Kosova Peace Accord in June, 1999. ### Questions/Comments, email us at aki at alb-net.com