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Speaking of the Serb protesters along Kosovo’s northern border, Vučić said they were his “brothers and sisters,” and that he would continue to fight for them.

Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani described the situation along the border as very dangerous, and warned that “the lives of our policemen, [NATO mission] KFOR soldiers, [EU rule-of-law mission] EULEX personnel, and above all civilians may be at risk.”

The head of the UN Mission in Kosovo, Caroline Ziadeh, welcomed the barricade removal, while stressing “the importance of upholding commitments and resuming talks to fully address outstanding issues and normalize relations without delay.”

The dispute along Kosovo’s northern border is just the latest in a series of events that have drawn international concern in the disputed territory, including a wave of attacks on journalists stationed in the area. Tensions have risen in Kosovo’s north between minority Serbs and majority Kosovar Albanians over recent political developments, most notably Kosovo’s plan to phase out Serbian-issued license plates.

NATO maintains around 4,000 peacekeepers and support staff in Kosovo.

From Jurist, Dec. 29. Used with permission.

Photo: Marco Fieber via e-International Relations

Music: Attitude!, featuring Rose Tang on vocals

Production by Chris Rywalt

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Civil society organizations are also angry over a recent reform of Serbia’s referendum law, which they say is aimed at effectively stopping popular initiatives against polluting projects by imposing hefty administrative fees. They are also opposed to a new expropriation law, which allows mandatory sale of private lands to the state for development projects, with only eight days prior notice. (AFP, Al Jazeera, Balkan Insight)

Scattered clashes with police were reported during the Nov. 27 demonstrations. At the town of Šabac a group of unidentified masked men assaulted protesters at a road-block and attempted to drive a bulldozer through the human blockade. (European Western Balkans)

The legal reforms were clearly pushed through to facilitate a new thrust of mineral exploitation in Serbia. China’s Zijin Mining Group just began operations at the Cukaru Peki copper and gold mine near the town of Bor. The project is anticipated to make Serbia Europe’s second top copper producer after Russia.

But Zijin’s plans for a mine at nearby Jama, also part of the overall Timok mega-project, were held up by a court order earlier this year. The court found the company failed to comply with environmental standards, and ordered construction of a waste water treatment plant before the facility can open. (Mining.com, Reuters)

Water is life —regardless of ethnicity
Meanwhile, across the border in Kosova, environmentalists claimed a victory Nov. 29 as the country’s Supreme Court suspended the permit for the proposed Brezovica hydro-power plant on the Lepenc River. Legal challenge had been brought by the local Group for Legal & Political Studies (GLPS) and GAIA Kosovo. Over the past years, plans for the project, to be built by the private Matkos Group, have repeatedly sparked angry protests by residents of the nearby village known to ethnic Albanians as Shterpce and to Serbs as Štrpče. Albanians and Serbs alike came together to oppose the project, which would flood agricultural lands while depriving water to downstream communities. (BIRN, BIRN, Prishtina Insight)

Both the movements against the Loznica mine and Brezovica dam have adopted the slogan “Water is life.” The protesters at Shterpce/Štrpče coming together across ethnic lines is a very significant sign of hope. Kosova declared independence from Serbia in 2008, nine years after a bitter war that pitted its ethnic Albanian and Serb populations against each other. Since then, many countries around the world—prominently excluding Serbia—have come to recognize Kosova’s independence, but NATO continues to maintain a troop presence in the country. More than a generation after the outbreak of the last round of Balkan Wars, it looks like the peoples of the ex-Yugoslavia are starting to grasp an inevitable reality… The ethno-nationalist extremism that has caused so much suffering in the region has been concommitant with a loss of any real local control over land, labor and resouces to multi-national entities like Rio Tinto and Zijin Mining Group. And, a corollary: reclaiming any real local control will entail rebuilding cross-ethnic solidarity.

See our last post on the global lithium wars.

Photo: Masina

In contrast, Russia’s Foreign Ministry protested the upholding of the convictions. Said spokesperson Maria Zakharova: “The conviction of Ratko Mladic has once again demonstrated that the international mechanisms that were established to hold accountable those guilty of crimes committed during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia are in practice biased against one party to the conflict.” Zakharova asserted that the verdict against Mladic was hypocritical after The Hague court acquitted Bosnian Croat and Kosovar Albanian defendants.

“[T]he Residual Mechanism and its predecessor, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ignore the facts and historical context of the events related to Yugoslavia’s breakup,” she charged. (TASS)

However, Bosnian Croat, Bosnian Muslim and Kosovar Albanian defendants have indeed been convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and other Serbs have been acquitted.

Pro-government tabloids in Serbia also expressed outrage at the final verdict. One, Informer, declared that Mladic is “forever a Serbian hero,” who was convicted despite “absolutely no evidence” that he was responsible for “alleged war crimes.” Another, Kurir, ran with the headline “Hague injustice for Mladic,” while Vecernje Novosti featured a photo of a shocked-looked Mladic with the caption: “They dealt the final blow.” (Balkan Insight)

Photo of Srebrenica Genocide Memorial via Wikipedia

Thaci is currently in custody at the Detention Facilities of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague. Thaci’s first court appearance is scheduled for this week. KLA leadership members Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi, Jakup Krasniqi were also indicted on the same crimes and transferred to detention facilities in The Hague.

Victims are allowed to apply to participate in the proceedings if they can demonstrate that they personally suffered harm, including physical, mental or material harm, from the crimes listed in the indictment.

During a special swearing-in ceremony in Kosovo on Nov. 5, University of Pittsburgh School of Law alumna Vjosa Osmani officially became the acting president of Kosovo. Osmani is the second woman to serve as head of state out of post-war Kosovo’s six presidents.

From Jurist, Nov. 6. Used with permission.

Kosovo and Serbia have been at odds since November 2018 when Kosovo imposed a 100% tariff on goods made in Serbia. This move will cause further delays in normalization of relations between the two countries. Both Serbia and Kosovo have been told that they will not be able to join the EU until they normalize relations.

In his resignation speech, Hardinaj defended the tariff, saying, “As Prime Minister of the Government of Kosovo I strongly believe that the price for recognition is our market, and for that the 100% tariff should be the price of recognition.”

Haradinaj previously resigned as prime minister in 2005 when he was indicted by the UN War Crimes Tribunal for former Yugoslavia; he was acquitted twice by that court.

From Jurist, July 23. Used with permission.

Note: Ramush Haradinaj has been ordered to appear before the Kosovo Specialist Chambers. Although technically a body of the Kosovo government, it is based at The Hague and made up of foreign prosecutors and judges to adjudicate crimes from the 1998-9 war. This unusual arrangement points to the limited sovereignty of ostensibly independent Kosovo.

Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, and is now recognized by 113 countries around the world, including the US. (Be In Kosovo) Among those not recognizing Kosovo are, of course, Serbia and its patron Russia. The failure to win general recognition has prevented Kosovo from taking a UN seat, relegating it to the position of what some have called the world’s “phantom republics.”

The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, overseen by the UN, officially closed in 2017.

Photo of Kosova Liberation Army via IBNA

The removal is ill-considered, as being ignorant of the rhetoric employed to justify mass murder only makes potential recruits more vulnerable to such propaganda. CounterVortex was able to review the document before it was scrubbed from the web, and it is a study in Red-Brown politics—employing populist phrases appropriated directly from the left and wedding them to a white-supremacist ideology.

California-based journalist Matthew Keys posted a link on his Twitter account  to Tarrant’s manifesto on the doucment-hosting site Scribd. It has since been removed from Scribd, although exceprts can still be seen in Keys’ tweets. Entitled “The Great Replacement” (a reference to white Christians being “replaced” by Muslim immigrants), it has the hippie-sounding subhead of “Towards a New Society.” Below this is a logo that vaguely resembles an eight-spoked Buddhist wheel, with each section invoking a political principle. These include “anti-imperialism,” “environmentalism,” “workers’ rights” and “responsible markets,” as well as “law & order,” “ethnic autonomy” and “protection of heritage & culture.” The image seems to have originated with a US-based outfit called the Patriot Front, which Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as an offshoot of the now possibly defunct Vanguard America, whose Red-Brown procilivities was have noted before.

After an introduction ranting about “White Genocide,” the document lists among the reasons for the attack, “to drive a wedge between the nations of NATO that are European and the Turks… and thereby ensure that never again can a situation such as the US involvement in Kosovo ever occur (where US/NATO forces fought beside muslims and slaughtered Christian Europeans attempting to remove the Islamic occupiers from Europe).”

Tarrant openly admits to being a “fascist,” but more specifically an “eco-fascist.” He cites British wartime fascist leader Oswald Mosley as an inspiration, and says, “The nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the People’s Republic of China.”

In a Q&A format, worded to acknowledge the uncertainty that he would survive the attack, are the following exchanges:

Were/are you “right wing”?
Depending on the definition, sure.

Were/are you “left wing”?
Depending on the definition, sure.

Were/are you a socialist?
Depending on the definition. Worker ownership of the means of proudction? Depends who the workers are…. [as long as they’re white, we may assume.]

Were/are you a supporter of Donald Trump?
As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure.

[Tho not as a “policy maker and leader”…]

Also cited as an “influence” is conservative commentator Candace Owens, and as an “inspiration” Anders Breivik, the author of the 2011 Oslo massacre who likewise penned a lengthy and pretentious manifesto before his attack.

Tarrant writes that he expects “an eventual Nobel peace prize. As was awarded to the Terrorist Nelson Mandela once his own people took power and acheived victory.”

His page on protecting the “natural environment” is entitled “Green nationalism is the only true nationalism.”

A section entitled “Support Your Brother Nations” bizarrely lists “even Venezuela” along with Poland, Austria, France and more likely suspects as places where the “movement may begin.” He writes that “Globalized capitalist markets are the enemy of racial autonomists.”

Yet his message “To Antifa/Marxists/Communists” concludes: “SEE YOU ON THE STREETS YOU ANTI-WHITE SCUM.”

The appropriation of left-wing rhetoric in the service of white supremacy should come as no surprise to those who understand the rise of classical fascism in the 1920s and ’30s. Fascism always exploits populism, especially in its incipient phases. Failing to understand this renders the disaffected more susceptible to fascist entryism. So does purging Tarrant’s sick manifesto from the Internet—no matter how well-intentioned this decision was.

Photo via Ma’an