In the following interview for Strategic Culture Foundation, Daniel Kovalik explains how the U.S.-led war against the former Yugoslavia in 1999 was a fateful and brutal assault against the international order. It opened the door for the rapid eastward expansion of the NATO military bloc in breach of assurances to Russian leaders. And it thus created the conditions for today’s war in Ukraine. Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine is the culmination of U.S. and NATO aggression that can be traced back to their blitzkrieg against Serbia 23 years ago.

Daniel Kovalik is a world-renowned American human rights lawyer, author and commentator on international politics. He teaches international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Law. He is a human and labor rights attorney who has worked on many cases in Latin America, including helping Colombian workers sue the Coca-Cola Company over alleged widespread abuses. He writes extensively for Counterpunch and Huffington Post. Kovalik is the author of several books including The Plot to Scapegoat Russia.

Interview

Question: Western governments and media have condemned Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine as the worst inter-state violence in Europe since the Second World War. But last week we just saw the 23rd anniversary of the U.S. and NATO bombing of former Yugoslavia when American warplanes attacked Serbia for 78 days, a war that has been all but scrubbed from Western public memory. Are you surprised by the blatant double standards?

Daniel Kovalik: In truth, I’m not surprised at all. We live in a world of Orwellian double-speak which functions to create consent amongst the masses for war. It is always the case that we are encouraged to condemn the actions of those we are told are our enemies while we are to ignore and even forget the crimes of our own governments. The bombing of Serbia, premised upon claims of defending human rights, was an abomination that focused on destroying civilians and civilian infrastructure though it is remembered in the collective consciousness as some type of noble pursuit.

Question: Do you see the two wars as comparable? Russia claims it acted on the principle of self-defense of Russian-speaking people; the US and NATO claim they acted in defense of Kosovo-Albanians whom they claim were being ethnically cleansed by Serbian forces?

Daniel Kovalik: There are certainly some similarities between these two military operations as both were premised, at least in large part, on the defense of people under attack. However, there are major differences. First, Russia actually borders Ukraine, and those being attacked in Ukraine by the government of Ukraine have been ethnic Russians, most of whom are also Russian citizens. And so, Russia certainly has a greater stake in what is happening in Ukraine than the U.S., as the leader of the NATO operation in Serbia, had in that far-flung country. Second, Russia is also claiming, unlike the U.S. or other NATO countries, that it is acting in its own defense in the operations in Ukraine. Russia has seen Ukraine being used as a staging group in order to destabilize if not destroy Russia, and the U.S. has been open about those aims, including in statements by American President Joe Biden himself in the last several days. The U.S. and NATO had no such self-defense concerns in Serbia and did not even claim such. Third, Russia has actually taken pains in Ukraine to avoid civilian deaths and casualties while NATO specifically targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure.

Question: The U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia and its capital Belgrade endured for 78 days; Russian forces have been striking Ukrainian locations for just over 38 days. How do the two operations differ in terms of damage inflicted, including civilian casualties?

Daniel Kovalik: Again, at least so far, Russia has tried to avoid attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure while NATO actually targeted them. Of course, that doesn’t mean that there haven’t been extensive civilian casualties in Ukraine as well as destruction to civilian buildings. And the war in Ukraine is still ongoing so we will have to see how the war progresses or devolves to know the full extent of damage to that country. That is why it is critical to find a negotiated solution to this conflict as soon as possible.

Question: Madeleine Albright, the former U.S. Secretary of State who died last week on the 23rd anniversary of NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia, was a major player in the supposed peace talks – the Rambouillet talks in February 1999 – that led up to the NATO campaign in March 1999. Why did the diplomatic effort fail to prevent the war?

Daniel Kovalik: We know very well that the peace talks in the former Yugoslavia failed precisely because the U.S. wanted them to fail. There were two separate peace agreements that could have prevented much of the bloodshed which took place there and the U.S. went out of its way to scuttle both of these agreements. The United States did so because it wanted a war in the former Yugoslavia just as it has wanted a war in Ukraine. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, the U.S. wanted the war to be able to destroy the last vestiges of socialism in Europe. It also wanted the war to show the world that it could go to war unilaterally and without UN Security Council authorization. That is, it wanted the war precisely so that it could show the world that it could invade any country it wanted and at any time. This was, indeed, a war against the international legal order.

Question: Do you think the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 was pivotal for the subsequent rapid eastwards expansion of NATO as a military organization?

Daniel Kovalik: I certainly think the bombing of Serbia facilitated the eastward expansion of NATO. It also set the precedent for NATO to serve as the United States’ air force throughout the world, including in places beyond Europe, such as Libya.

Question: Would you assess that the U.S./NATO bombing of Serbia is at the root of the present conflict in Ukraine? In other words, the ongoing war in Ukraine is but one part of a bigger global picture?

Daniel Kovalik: The bombing of Serbia continues to linger in the minds of the Russians who were horrified by a brother country in Europe being bombed by NATO. The memory of this event is certainly a motivating factor in Russia’s fears that it too could be a victim of NATO, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has said as much quite recently.  And so, certainly, that bombing played a role in leading to the conflict in Ukraine.

Question: The late Madeleine Albright, like many U.S. politicians, was a big advocate of “American exceptionalism” and America’s right to unilaterally use violence to achieve its geopolitical goals. Is that doctrine at the heart of today’s international conflict between the West and Russia and indeed China?

Daniel Kovalik: Yes, it certainly is. The idea that the U.S. is the “essential nation”, as both Albright and former President Barack Obama claimed, has been used to justify the United States’ claim to be able to act unilaterally against any nation in the world in order to protect its perceived interests. Of course, other countries have interests too, including the interest to have peace and security – these being the most fundamental rights of any nation as set forth in the United Nations Charter that was established in 1945 after the Second World War. The U.S.’ ceaseless aggression has destroyed this right of nations and the UN system itself, and countries like Russia and China are keen on restoring this right. The UN Charter, by its terms, is premised on the notion that all nations are equal under international law. The U.S. has claimed that, somehow, it is more equal than others, and it has acted on this claim to the detriment of millions around the world. The world is now pushing back against this.

As the Latin saying goes, De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Fair enough, and for most deceased a modest effort would probably suffice to act in the spirit of this sentiment and find something decent to say. However, in the case of the recently departed Madeleine Albright, one is genuinely hard put to find even a minimum of virtue to balance the wickedness.

For all we know she may indeed be remembered as a “loving mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, and friend” in her private circle, as claimed by her family when they announced her death. But outside of that circle, one suspects that few will remember her that way.

Her passing, which occurred on precisely the day which marked the 23^rd anniversary of the decision to commit one of the most infamous acts with which her name is associated, the savage and illegal bombing in 1999 of Yugoslavia, must impress everyone capable of perceiving meaning in human events as a mighty portent. Assuredly, Albright had committed in her public life other acts of malfeasance and moral turpitude which in terms of destruction and victim count may exceed the devastation which her policies inflicted on the people of Serbia and Montenegro. But ensconced in her relationship with the Serbian nation there is an important and telling detail, and it lays bare the depravity.

In the years preceding the outbreak of World War II, Madeleine Albright, known then as Jana Korbelova, and her family took refuge in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to escape from the ethnic persecution and almost certain death in a Nazi concentration camp as Germany occupied Czechoslovakia. The Korbel refugee family were amicably welcomed and generously accommodated in the Serbian resort town of Vrnjačka Banja, where Jana attended school and reportedly learned the Serbian language. Later in life, after the war, when Jana landed in America, becoming Madeleine, and ambition for personal advancement began to direct her life, not a trace of gratitude or empathy for the people who saved her life could be detected. If on some of her “diplomatic missions” the objects of her contempt rewarded her with stones, who could really blame them? Throughout the nineties, she championed the vilification of the very people who most likely shielded her from a gruesome death in Auschwitz, slanderously denouncing them as reincarnated Nazis and hailing with glee the mayhem and destruction wrought by NATO upon them. Her intemperate calumnies speak volumes about her character.

As a public figure, Albright never gave an inkling of the noble attributes which now fill the official eulogies. Her casual remark during an interview in 1996 with Leslie Stahl of “60 Minutes”, that in her opinion sanctions laid on Iraq which cost the lives of half a million children (more than died in Hiroshima, Stahl reminded her) were “worth it,” was shocking beyond words. But that was just a “loving grandmother” in charge of superpower foreign policy sharing her most cherished values with a global audience.

Her academic output was rather thin, compared to her father’s, who had a successful career as a political science professor on his own merits and without agreeing to any moral compromises to get ahead after the family immigrated to America in the post-war period. One has the distinct impression that in order to get ahead Madeleine relied less on her scholarship and more on who she hung around with. In her rise to prominence she tended always to keep in lockstep with political heavyweights such as Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Clintons. It was a career strategy that paid off. In the topsy-turvy Beltway world, a person with her flimsy professional and moral qualifications could indeed scale unimaginable heights, as long as she toed the party line and in her diatribes publicly spouted all the right opinions. It is thus that Madeleine Albright became not just a “diplomat” representing her adopted country in the United Nations and later even Secretary of State. As allegedly “one of the world’s most respected diplomats [so goes one of establishment puff pieces dedicated to her] Dr. Madeleine K. Albright, continues to advocate for democracy and human rights across the world, while also championing the important impact international relations and educational exchanges have on the United States today,” as the fawning blurb disingenuously put it, but there is more than that. The grateful and admiring establishment, whose obsequious servant she had been, in the final stages of her career made her professor, of all things, in the practice of diplomacy at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.

Thus, the bogus diplomat, who in 1999 orchestrated multiple violations of international law by using her position to destroy and dismember a European country by using the most egregious force and violence, was put in charge of training future diplomats.

That was rather akin to appointing Dr. Mengele professor of medicine so that he could apply his accumulated professional experience to the training of future doctors.

In Orthodox teaching, for forty days after death the soul passes through a series of toll-houses where the record of sins committed during its past life is put before it by jeering demons who, of course, have it all written down. Perhaps this scenario should be modified slightly just for the passage of Madeleine Albright, nee Korbelova, so that in her descent to the netherworld she might be met at the toll-houses by the reproachful gaze of her numberless child victims, whose innocent deaths she engineered and proclaimed to be “worth it.” Naturally, the demons will still be there at the end of the journey, waiting for her arrival and for the pleasure of her company.

To any Serb who has not lost his mind or has just become numb from three decades of relentless anti-Serbian propaganda and lies emanating from the “free and democratic” West’s power centers and media – the speed and totalitarian scope of anti-Russian measures and the intensity of anti-Russian propaganda censorship that has captured the West cannot come as a surprise. As Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic stated a few days before the beginning of Russia’s denazification and demilitarization campaign in the Ukraine, about 85% of Serbs are “always” on the side of Russia. Even as Serbia has, over the past several days, come under immense Western pressure as the lone independent enclave in Europe, a sort of a West Berlin of the new multipolar world in the making, surrounded by NATO and/or EU countries that have been, with varying degrees of voluntarity, sucked into the ongoing anti-Russian hysteria and the accompanying sanctions, closing of airspace to Russian planes, etc.

The reason is simple, even if one sets aside the centuries-old spiritual, ethnic and just plain fraternal ties between the two peoples. For the Serbs were, so to speak, the canaries in the coal mine in the years that followed George Bush Senior’s proclamation of a “new world order.” Early on after the fall of the Berlin Wall, at the beginning of the 1990s, while innocents and just plain people of good will were still enamored with the announced “end of history” and the glorious triumph of “liberal democracy,” in the Serbian parts of Yugoslavia, we were experiencing, firsthand, something completely different, dark and ominous. We were witnessing the gradual return of pure, cynical power politics, only this time couched in the clothing of politically correct, sugarcoated homilies invoking “human rights,” “democracy,” “European integration” and “peace,” which, as it soon enough turned out, served as a mere “liberal” fog of war, as a preparatory rhetorical, diplomatic and media artillery fire for legitimizing the West’s self-anointed right to define what is good and what is not and to, on the basis of the newly prescribed definitions, interfere and expand its purely pragmatic, base interests wherever it could. The world was the victorious West’s oyster, “democracy expansion” its new quasi-religion, putting a moral veneer on its newest geopolitical outreach, a modernized version of the “white man’s burden” couched in the newfangled terminology of a supposedly post-ideological era.

Thus, during the violent dismemberment of Yugoslavia, its chief external instigators and facilitators – led by Germany and Austria, with essential help from the U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia – could, thanks to their vast domination of the media-informational space, present themselves as “peace brokers” and, even more sickening, as moral arbiters. The new-old expansionist West could portray itself to the uninformed and the gullible as some sort of force for good, while painting the enemy – the Serbs then, the Russians today – as evil incarnate. It was on the ashes of the Western-fomented destruction of Yugoslavia that the myth of “indispensable NATO”, “benevolent EU” and the “good West” received much of their subsequent affirmation and post-Cold War soft power. And therein lies much of the reason why Russia’s – and not only Russia’s – endless polite requests and pleas to halt the North Atlantic military pact’s steady expansion to the east, were not taken seriously, or at least seriously enough, by a critical mass of those who had no direct contact with the Western wolves in sheep’s clothing, like the Serbs (and the Syrians, Libyans, Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Somalis, Venezuelans, etc.) did. Simply put, the West was only starting to spend the huge surplus moral value it had accrued as victor of a global struggle with an “evil empire,” the chinks in the (artificially manufactured) armor were still too microscopic for the ordinary, inexperienced, well-meaning eye to detect.

Even NATO’s illegal bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in spring of 1999, in the name of “prevention of genocide” in Serbia’s historic and sacred Kosovo province – of which no evidence has ever been presented over the ensuing 23 years – did not awaken the critical mass of Western public opinion and decision-makers necessary to reexamine the wisdom and necessity of continuing on the path of, essentially, a new Drang nach Osten (however, seeing what happened with Trump, much later in the game, it’s beyond obvious that election outcomes and decision-making in the West have been captured by the military-industrial complex even then, just as Eisenhower had warned back in 1961) .

It did, however, finally awaken Moscow, opening the way to Vladimir Putin’s ascendance to Russia’s highest office on the last day of that fateful year. Like the Serbs, the Russians still remembered the true horrors of the last world war and could recognize the all-too-familiar patterns far more easily than most on the European continent. Unfortunately, Moscow could not do much about them initially, other than to ceaselessly warn, beginning with Munich in early 2007, ask for a general reassessment and renegotiation of common European security and – aware that its tactful warnings, suggestions and proposals were being blithely ignored in the key Western capitals – rearm and prepare itself for the inevitable. Which finally came with the collective West’s refusal to talk about Ukraine’s neutrality and the halting of NATO’s further expansion, in parallel with the Ukrainian puppet president’s raising of the threat of Ukraine becoming a nuclear state.

Why would Moscow agree to the very real possibility of nuclear missiles deployed at its borders, which could reach it in 7-8 minutes (and, in the case of future hypersonic missiles, in 5-6 minutes)? Why would it trust NATO’s (true) power centers, whose leading figures had assured it that not one further inch would be taken to the east as the Warsaw pact self-dissolved – and then proceeded to do precisely the opposite?

So, no, the endless verbal assurances and endless empty talk of the past three decades would no longer work, as all Russia had gotten out of it was a hostile, Axis-like alliance at its borders and a campaign of steadily rising demonization that had, of late, in many aspects exceeded that experienced by the U.S.S.R. at the height of the Cold War. When threatened with nuclear missiles under its nose in Cuba, the U.S. was willing to launch nuclear war to prevent it. Russia has threatened no such thing.

A day after the beginning of the Russian demilitarization and denazification campaign, Serbia’s president announced Serbia’s official position regarding the situation in Ukraine, as outlined in the conclusions of the Serbian National Security Council. In essence, Serbia’s position is that it respects Ukraine’s territorial integrity as it respects the territorial integrity of all states in accordance with the UN Charter and the Helsinki Act of 1975, that it considers the violation of the territorial integrity of any state, including Ukraine “very wrong,” but that it will not impose sanctions against the Russian Federation.

It is enough just to look at a current political map of Europe to see the significance, courage and difficulty of Serbia’s decision. Serbia and neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) are islands in the NATO sea that surrounds them – and BiH is not a NATO member only due to the opposition of the Serbs in that country, led by the Serbian member of the BiH Presidency, Milorad Dodik. In addition, all the surrounding states have joined the Western condemnations of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and have joined or voiced support for the newest sanctions imposed on Russia, including the EU’s closure of air space to Russian planes.

As expected, over the past few days, as testified by Vucic himself, Serbia has been subjected to “intense” Western pressure to join the sanctions and condemnations front against Russia. The EU Parliament Rapporteur for Serbia, Vladimir Bilchik has already stated that Serbia’s decision not to join the EU’s sanctions against Russia is a “defining foreign policy decision for much broader relations between the EU and Serbia.” Former Swedish foreign and prime minister and the first High Representative for BiH Carl Bildt Tweeted that Serbia has “de facto disqualified itself from the EU accession process,” as new members are expected to share in the EU’s “fundamental values and interests.” European Commission spokespeople Ana Pisonero and Eric Mamer have also voiced expectations that Serbia would join the EU sanctions policy.

These are all rather ominous words – and not because anyone in Serbia, other than a handful of well-paid diehards and hopeless cases, truly believes that the country will ever be admitted to the self-proclaimed “most successful peace project in human history” (which expressly approved the sending of fighter jets to neo-Nazi “democrats” in Ukraine), but because the out-of-control Western elites’ “either you’re with us or against us” mentality is certain to find ways to make its displeasure known to all dissidents. Especially to an encircled, friendly-to-Russia enclave that stubbornly refuses to join the anti-Russian hysteria being fanned all over the Western “liberal” landscape. After all, Serbia was viciously and illegally bombed by NATO in 1999 for not voluntarily agreeing to its own occupation by the alliance of “democratic values.” Since then, the alliance has gained 11 more members and about a thousand kilometers to the east. So, we shall wait and see in the coming days and weeks what practical measures of punishment or censure will be applied by the EU (and NATO) against Serbia, which has been an official candidate for EU membership since 2012 and is, thus, obliged to gradually harmonize its policies, including foreign policy, with the “peace loving” union.

Russia has shown appreciation and understanding for Serbia’s position. In his reaction to Serbia’s official stance, the Russian ambassador in Belgrade stated that Russia “understands that Serbia is being pressured and does not ask anything of Serbia,” being well aware of the mutual respect and trust that exist between President Vucic and Russia’s President Putin, that Serbia “respects Russia’s national interest,” and that Russia is “at peace” with Serbia’s position and its foreign policy.

In addition, as stated in the National Security Council conclusions, Serbia was itself a victim of Western sanctions during the 1990s and, even more importantly, aggression on the part of 19 NATO states in 1999 precisely for defending its own territorial integrity. In other words, Serbia is not only refusing to join Western sanctions against a traditional friend and ally but also to be a part of traditional Western double standards, which it has felt on its own skin both in the past and in the present. Towards that end, the speaker of the Serbian parliament, Ivica Dacic, clearly stated that, unlike the rest of “democratic” Europe, Serbia would not join in the “totalitarian” methods and close or censor either Sputnik or RT. So, as things stand, Sputnik’s last non-Russian European outpost now sits in Belgrade, which is, nevertheless, still not sufficiently “democratic” to pass muster with the free-thinking bureaucrats in Brussels

On that same tangent, because you can never have too much trans-Atlantic hypocrisy, the U.S. embassy in Belgrade also reacted to Serbia’s position regarding the Russian intervention in Ukraine by Tweeting that the U.S. “salute Serbia’s and President Aleksandar Vucic’s repeated position of support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity, which was violated by Russia’s illegal and completely unprovoked attacks.”

Aside from the brazen twisting and pure invention in which the U.S. embassy engaged – as no Serbian official has used any remotely harsh words to describe Russia’s intervention – American diplomats are conveniently ignoring the fact that their own country has been consistently and aggressively violating Serbia’s own territorial integrity since February 2008, when the U.S. recognized the independence of Serbia’s historical and sacred province of Kosovo (Kosovo and Metohija is the full name of the province, in accordance with the Serbian constitution). And, of course, except for the 5 EU states that have refused to recognize the secession of so-called Kosovo from Serbia (Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Spain and Slovakia) – the rest of the EU, headed by its most powerful members (Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux countries), is also being its usual hypocritical self in expecting Serbia to condemn violations of other’s territories when the majority of its own member states have also recognized the violation of Serbia’s territorial integrity by recognizing “Kosovo” and, indeed, actively promoting its “independence” which, in practice, is non-existent, as the territory is a black hole of drug and human trafficking, whose politicians take orders from abroad, as well as home to a large U.S. military base built on land stolen from Serbs.

The Serbian leadership’s initial decision met with the support of the great majority of the Serbian public, which is, nevertheless, well aware of Serbia’s difficult position.  However, on March 2, Serbia joined the majority in the UN General Assembly and condemned the Russian “aggression against Ukraine.” In a rather sorry display of public self-pity, Vucic tried to justify the vote at a press conference by explaining that Serbia still refused calls to join the anti-Russian sanctions, as well as resisting new Western pressures to nationalize Russian-owned property in Serbia. However, his popularity will suffer as a result, so it’s still a win-win for Western interests in Belgrade, because they always prefer to weak(ened) leaderships, as they are more pliable and, thus, sensitive to outside pressure.

Serbia’s current position is eerily reminiscent of the country’s position in the spring of 1941. At that time as well, the Serbian elite in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was the lone voice of opposition in the country against joining the Axis powers, even though Yugoslavia itself was, along with Greece, surrounded by countries that had fallen under the occupation or political domination of the Axis powers. As a result of the coup of March 27, 1941, organized by Serbian officers opposed to a pact with the Axis, Yugoslavia was attacked by Germany and its allies on April 6, 1941, the country itself dismembered and occupied, and the Serbian population subjected to political repression and genocidal annihilation over the next four years. Although the Serbs organized two large guerilla liberation fronts, it was only with the aid of the Soviet Red Army that the territory of Yugoslavia was fully liberated in the fall of 1944. Alone among the former peoples that made up Yugoslavia (which also included Croats, Slovenes and Slavic Muslims, along with substantial Albanian and Hungarian minorities), the Serbs still remember

this, just as many Russians remember that only the Serbs refused to join Nazi German troops on the Eastern Front against the U.S.S.R.

Might this be, in Yogi Berra’s immortal words, déjà vu all over again?

No pun intended, really. On one level, Serbian tennis player Novak Djoković certainly was prevented unwillingly from playing ball in the Australian Open. But on another, deeper and archetypal level, it was he as a sovereign individual who refused to “play ball” with the movers and shakers of this world. The savage treatment he got was punishment for the choice he deliberately made.

Moving beyond Australian visa technicalities that were thoroughly ventilated in court and ultimately adjudicated to Djoković’s detriment, the core moral issue has got to do not with bureaucratic paperwork but a matter of vastly greater significance. It is an individual’s exemplary defiance of an oppressive system which illegitimately claims unrestrained global reach. It is in that context that the Djoković affair has erupted and his behaviour makes sense.

All that was required of Djoković in order to be able to play tennis without hindrance in the Dominion of Australia was to sacrifice his principles, privacy, and freedom of choice in a very intimate matter, and to opportunistically set aside his convictions. As an archetypal Serb (though far from being in that regard truly representative of the critical mass of his contemporary fellow Serbs) Djoković, on the contrary, just shrugged his shoulders and pronounced a historic “No” which has literally reverberated around the world. But as we know from Edmund Burke, a nation is the fusion of past, present, and future generations. A nation is an entity larger and more inclusive than any single contemporary generation, no matter how heroic or spineless it might happen to be.

It is only in that larger, trans-generational framework, crossing time, space, and successive historical eras, that Novak Djoković’s conduct in the face of Australian chicanery can be properly understood. The essence of his reaction was a refusal to bend. Even as what for him must have been the juiciest of carrots – the possibility of winning another Grand Slam and thus reaching the absolute pinnacle of tennis glory – was not being waived, but literally shoved in his face, the only condition being that he publically comply and accept the jab which he reasonably distrusts, Djoković calmly stood his ground. Yes, he has dabbled in all sorts of awkward things and Serbian churchmen, archimandrite Nikodim Bogosavljevic and Bishop Maksim, have rightly pointed out that Djoković has hardly been an exemplary role model for Orthodox believers, notwithstanding his amply demonstrated respect and support for the Church. But when push came to shove, and Australia pettily deprived him of the opportunity to play his sport on its territory and expelled him under circumstances it foolishly assumed would humiliate him, instead of handing a crushing blow the down-under nastiness just awakened the primal Serb within him. Instead of retreating to a confidential location to sulk, Djoković was happy to fly to Belgrade, to mingle with his people, and the first thing he did was to attend liturgy in the historic Ružica church, after which he flew to his native Montenegro to pray at the renowned Ostrog monastery.

The Djoković saga has reverberated not just with the Serbian public, as should have been expected; it touched also numerous nerves, both defiant and servile, world-wide. Support for the Serbian tennis player has been pouring in from all directions, just as the equally passionate contempt and even hatred aimed at him by zombified Corona cultists, demonstrating once again the correctness of the old adage that misery loves company.

But if Serbian company is what they were hoping for, partisans of Covid misery have been left sorely disappointedеф. It is with Serbs in mind that Israel Shamir exclaimed in July 2020 that “the relentless advance of coronavirus terror has been broken … by recalcitrant Serbs. After two days of street battles with dozens of policemen hospitalised, the sturdy protesters won; the authorities surrendered and gave up their plans to lock Belgrade down.” That surrender has still not been reversed.

As Shamir must certainly have known, these acts of defiance, springing up when least expected and most annoying, Djoković’s “No” to Australia being just the latest example, are an inherent feature of Serbian culture and mentality. Countless examples could be cited but just three will suffice. In March 1941, when a cowardly government signed on to the Axis alliance, Serbs poured into the streets expressing an unequivocal mass preference for “being in the grave rather than a slave.” The following day, the army staged a coup leading to a confrontation with Nazi Germany which literally cost hundreds of thousands of Serbian lives. While the anti-Axis commotion in the wake of the coup was still on and before the Nazi invasion on April 6, 1941, a lone individual, retired municipal official from Paraćin by the name of Svetolik Dragačevac, sent off a scathing letter to Berlin, addressed to Adolph Hitler personally, to denounce his bloody tyranny.

The German translation of the letter, from Nazi files, follows:

Meticulous Germans archived the offending letter and did not forget Dragačevac after they occupied Yugoslavia. He was soon thereafter hunted down and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp, where he perished in 1942.

The same spirit of disobedience was again ignited in 1999, at the time of NATO aggression.

In today’s largely compliant world Novak Djoković stands out as an anomaly. But on his home turf, in Serbia, he is an easily recognisable symbol of his nation’s historic soul, although one wishes that many more Serbs today would actively emulate his example rather than merely cheering it.

Talk about “malign influence” in the Balkans! A distinguished Serbian academic, historian Dr. Miloš Ković, is fighting for his professional life with few seeming to notice. A NATO controlled cabal entrenched in the Department of History at the University of Belgrade is pulling strings to prevent his appointment to full professor, although Dr. Ković amply satisfies all requirements, and it is working assiduously to ultimately oust him altogether from the faculty. It had earlier managed to dismiss three of Dr. Ković’s academically promising like-minded colleagues.

Dr. Ković’s “sins” are from the point of view of his detractors manifold and on the face of it they fully justify his persecutors’ vengeance. He is publicly on record as an opponent of the fabricated history of Serbia and the Balkans that was generated by the Hague Tribunal through its contrived verdicts. He is also boldly swimming against the current by  rejecting the de rigueur characterisation of Srebrenica as “genocide.” And he has infuriated the dominant establishment as well as colleagues on NATO and Western “NGO” payrolls by insisting that occupied Kosovo is an inalienable part of Serbia. Impudently, he teaches that Kosovo is Serbia’s religious and cultural heartland, and he frequently takes his history students there to observe the evidence for themselves, in the form of innumerable Serbian monuments which dot it.

With such odd views, it is no wonder that Dr. Ković’s professional agony has not been noticed by the „New York Times“ nor been the subject of indignant denunciations by the usual gaggle of organizations that unfailingly react to the slightest violation of „human rights“ or infringement of „academic freedom“ in even the remotest corner of the globe.

Quite the contrary, Ković’s ideas qualify, without exception, as unpardonable thought offences that thoroughly enrage the paladins of “diversity” and “open society.” True to form, the chairman of the history department where Ković has been teaching, Prof. Slobodan Samardžić, appointed a commission, riddled with conflicts of interest, assigning it the suspected task of glossing over Dr. Ković’s sterling qualifications and blocking his appointment to full professor. Incidentally, Prof. Samardžić has been virtue signalling his allegiances for some time by referring to the Serbian people  (from whose governmental budget he is salaried) as unwashed „scum“ which had coming to it the mass extermination in satellite Croatia’s World War II Jasenovac concentration camp that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

While understandably painful for the targeted individual, the broader context of this intellectual suppression campaign is equally important. It is the effort to fully dominate discourse and thinking in the politically and economically conquered territories, and amongst the younger generation in particular. It is a multilevel project starting with the interdiction of information that challenges coloniser-approved narratives. The youth are, naturally, a prime target in this no quarter war for the control of purposefully zombified human minds, preferably emptied of knowledge and certainly deprived of the faculty of critical analysis. Such is the profile of the ideal helots of the order that is being constructed. Non-party line teachers such as Dr. Ković are simply not allowed to interfere with the dumbing-down process.

So the Ković affair, as shameful an example as it is of ruthless trampling by Western – and why not say it openly? – NATO minions in Serbia of every known principle of academic integrity, including the sacrosanct canon of diversity that Transatlantic hypocrites relentlessly preach to others, is about much more than just a single individual. If these principles were sincerely held, instead of serving rather as mere weapons in the arsenal of political warfare, the undeserved torments of this outstanding, Oxford-educated Serbian academic, opposing almost single-handedly the tidal wave of NATO-sponsored garbage education in his country, would be front-page news in the farthest reaches of the “free world.”

Instead, it is an ignored scenario that nevertheless keeps repeating itself in one institution of higher learning after another throughout the still captive nations of Eastern Europe.

As Ković correctly puts it, at stake is not just his own future as an educator, but an issue that should be of transcendent importance for society in general: who will shape our children’s perception of their own past? Obviously, and without even having to refer to Orwell explicitly, whoever seizes the power to do that will also largely determine the future that those suggestible young souls will be allowed to have.

So far, a respectable number of colleagues from various university departments have rallied to Dr. Ković’s cause and expressed support, many at some cost to their own position in a fragile land dominated by the not so soft but certifiably malign influence of its Western ill-wishers. Among the most hopeful signs that in the end the Belgrade History Department cabal’s plans may be thwarted is a rally in support of the beleaguered Dr. Ković, organised the other day by several hundred students who admire his academic excellence and unflinching integrity.

The news may not have made “The New York Times,” London “Guardian,” “Le Monde,” or CNN (regrettably not even RT as far as it is known) but it is sure to be noted with some chagrin by both the instigators and their foreign puppeteers.

They have made some strides but still have a very long way to go before finally congratulating themselves on successfully flushing the brains and emptying the minds of Serbia’s intellectual youth.

Twenty-two years ago today the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was subjected to the 55th straight day of bombardment from the then 19-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with 23 days more to go. Many families in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Niš daily fled to bomb shelters during the aerial onslaught. The permanent trauma inflicted on millions of civilians, especially children, is perhaps impossible to calculate. And it has been denied or ignored by Europe and the world. As forgotten as the cluster bomb fragments and depleted uranium left behind by NATO’s “humanitarian intervention.”

The air war was justified by U.S. President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and NATO Secretary General Javier Solana as a noble crusade to stop, to employ an expression not uncommon at the time, the “worst genocide since Hitler” in the Serbian province of Kosovo. The operation, Operation Allied Force for NATO, Operation Noble Anvil for the U.S., began with a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from ships and submarines in the Adriatic Sea. In all over 1,000 NATO military aircraft flew 30,000 combat sorties over a nation of slightly more than 10 million people, two million of those in Kosovo; a military bloc whose combined population at the time was some 850 million and which included three of the world’s nuclear powers.

During the war, arguably the most lopsided since the U.S.’s invasion of Grenada in 1983, American and other Western officials maintained a steady drumbeat of increasingly hyperbolic, and criminally unconscionable, claims of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo killed by Yugoslav forces. On May 16 Defense Secretary William Cohen appeared on Face the Nation and said: “We’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing….They may have been murdered.” Almost immediately afterward another American official raised that number to 200,000.

The scare tactics worked, as NATO’s top military commander, General Wesley Clark, was able to continue daily bombing missions over the small nation months after all targets of military value had been hit and hit repeatedly. A passenger train, a religious procession, a refugee column, Radio Television of Serbia headquarters. a vacuum cleaner factory, bridges, marketplaces, apartment courtyards, the Swiss embassy in Belgrade and the Chinese embassy as well, with three journalists killed and 27 other Chinese injured. Cluster bombs, graphite bombs and depleted uranium ordnance were used widely. No one, not a single individual, has been held accountable for those war crimes. Nor for what should be a war crime and one of the most grave at that: intentionally fabricating and exaggerating atrocity stories to agitate for and escalate a war. Few Western politicians and journalists would have escaped that charge over their roles in 1999.

When the Yugoslav government of President Slobodan Milosevic was compelled to accede to NATO diktat on June 10, over 200,000 ethnic Serbs, Roma and other minorities left Kosovo with Yugoslav troops, and NATO and its so-called Kosovo Liberation Army cutthroats – for whom and with whom it waged the war – marched into Kosovo. After the latter arrived even more, perhaps a hundred thousand or more, Serbs, Roma, Turks, Jews, Egyptians, Ashkali and members of other ethnic minority communities, along with no few Albanians, fled the province. Numerous Serbs, Roma and Albanian “collaborators” were murdered in what the Western press invariably described as revenge killings. (During the air war Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported 100,000 ethnic Albanians fled Kosovo to other parts of Serbia.)

The permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of non-ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and the expulsion of over a quarter of a million Serbs from Croatia in the early 1990s are the two largest cases of irreversible ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II. Decades later no one has been held accountable for those crimes either.

Most all of the above has been forgotten if it was ever known. That’s how it was planned. While NATO was celebrating its fiftieth-anniversary jubilee in Washington, D.C. and inducting the first new members since Spain in 1986, and former members of the Warsaw Pact at that – the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland – a high-profile, low-risk war was just the thing to launch new global NATO on the world.

The victim, Yugoslavia, had been mortally wounded; four years later it no longer existed, even on the map. The corpse was expected to rest silently.

But its ghost refuses to disappear. On May 14 Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, responding to a comment by his Slovenian counterpart, Borut Pahor, to the effect that there should be no redrawing of borders in Europe, said:

“We have a differing view on Kosovo’s independence. When I hear that, as Pahor says, there are no border changes without conflict, I agree, and that should be clear to all who have been generating conflicts and wanted to change Serbia’s borders.” That is a reference to the West – the U.S., European Union and NATO – successfully wrenching Kosovo from Serbia in 2008, in violation of the 1999 Kumanovo Agreement. Vucic backed up his contention that national borders should not be arbitrarily or unilaterally changed by stating that only borders recognized by the United Nations are legitimate. However, he said that a contrary practice had been at work since 1999, the result of “the brutal hypocrisy of Western powers that have no principles, or have principles as needed.”

President Vucic was in Prague, the Czech Republic on May 18 and met there with President Miloš Zeman. Zeman was prime minister of the Czech Republic in 1999 when his country joined NATO and the war against Yugoslavia was launched.

The Czech leader’s spokesman, Jiri Ovcacec, confirmed that “President Miloš Zeman presented public apologies to President Aleksandar Vucic for the [NATO] bombardments of Yugoslavia in 1999,” and that he “personally asked the Serbian people for forgiveness.”

During the war Prague refused NATO’s warplanes the right to land in Czech territory. Today Zeman himself told the press after his meeting with Serbia’s president:

“We were hopelessly looking for at least one more [NATO] country that would join us and come out against [the bombardments of Yugoslavia]. We remained all alone.” Displaying that rarest of virtues for a politician, penitence, he also said his government should have exercised more resolve in demanding the end of the bombing once it had commenced.

When the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999 it was accompanied by Hungary and Poland, fellow members of the Visegrad Four group in Central Europe. The fourth member, Slovakia, was not invited because the party of three-time prime minister Vladimír Mečiar was not to the liking of the U.S., NATO and the EU. The following year Mečiar dropped out of politics, with his Movement for a Democratic Slovakia party colleague Augustín Marián Húska disclosing: “The NATO war against Yugoslavia in 1999 was also a signal to us, to not pursue any vision of political independence anymore. We have seen what will happen to forces that want to be independent.”

On May 7 the governments of Serbia and China commemorated the NATO bombing of China’s embassy in Serbia in 1999. Serbian Minister of Labor, Employment, Veteran and Social Affairs Dr. Darija Kisic Tepavcevic, head of the Association of Journalists of Serbia Vladimir Radomirovic, Chinese ambassador to Serbia Chen Bo and others laid wreaths in honor of three Chinese journalists killed in the attack.

The Chinese ambassador thanked the Serbian people for keeping alive the memory of the victims who, she said, “paid the price of truth, justice, and righteousness with their lives.

“We will never forget the crime conducted by the aggressor, who most brutally violated human rights, in the name of the so-called protection of human rights.”

If most of the rest of the world has forgotten NATO’s first war and its bloody emergence on the world stage, China and Serbia have not.

On March 26, to mark the beginning of NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia and Serbia’s Remembrance Day for the Victims of the NATO Aggression, Hua Chunying, spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, stated:

“China would like to remind NATO that they still owe a debt of blood to the Chinese people….The dead have passed away, but the living need more vigilance and reflection.”

It’s worth quoting him further as a reminder that the crime of 1999 has indeed haunted not only Europe but the world ever since it was perpetrated; that what is seemingly past is really both prologue and precedent.

“Whether in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya or Syria, we should never forget the lives of ordinary people lost to repeated bombardment, the crumbling walls under the shells, the glorious historical sites consumed by the flames.

“The US and some Western countries have kept their mouths open about human rights and kept their mouths shut about their responsibilities….When they blatantly launched a war against a sovereign country without the Security Council’s authorization, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and the dispersal of millions of people, did they ever care about the human rights of the people in those countries? Is this what they mean by international rules? Shouldn’t they be held accountable for their war actions?”

Those questions, which had they been asked twenty-two years ago might have spared millions of lives in the nations the Chinese diplomat enumerated and others, need to be asked now and with a passion and insistence hitherto absent.

Anti-Bellum

The weekend of March 27-28, thousands of vehicles from neighboring countries formed lines waiting to enter Serbia. The reason? Vaccines. For free. Lots of them, from both East and West. Sputnik V, Sinopharm, AstraZeneca, Pfizer. More than the rest of the ex-Yugoslav republics combined. And Serbia decided to open its doors to those among its former compatriots who have lost all hope that their Western-approved “democracies” would obtain them in respectable quantities any time soon.

So, does this humane gesture make Serbia a white hat in Western eyes? Of course not. Silly question. Did the saintly Western democracies spend all those years and millions in demonizing the region’s largest and most influential country only to blithely give up the divide et impera policy so successfully applied during the dismantling of ex-Yugoslavia? Just because lives are at stake? Another silly question. Come on, this is the zero-sum West we’re talking about. The world is divided into winners and losers. Those that obey, even at their own expense, are the “good guys,” and those that don’t – are not. “Win-win” is not an option.

In fact, the collective West is busy showing this spring just what it thinks of Serbia’s determination to conduct an independent, multilateral and – egads! – pro-multipolar policy through an old-fashioned show of force. In a rare journalistic display of directness, the EU-related EURACTIV news site ran the following headline announcing the entire enterprise: “NATO, U.S. to stage large-scale military exercises around Serbia until summer.” The accompanying map of the Defender-Europe 21 operation, as it is officially called, is even more to the point, eerily recalling the encirclement of Yugoslavia by Axis forces in April 1941. Hard to find clearer messaging that that.

Imagine if the 30,000 or so soldiers slated to participate in the event were instead deployed to deliver vaccines and mobile field hospitals to the virus-stricken region. But it seems that the Serbian pro-multipolar “virus” is raising more alarm in Western capitals than the actual pandemic. And it needs to be contained, or at least isolated. Can’t have the entire region weaning itself off the neoliberal, er… democratic teat and start looking collectively in any other direction but due West, can we?

Consider the recently adopted European Parliament resolution on Serbia, especially its “concerns” regarding the country’s efforts to pursue balanced external relations:

“77. [The EP] Expresses concern about China’s increasing influence in Serbia and across the Western Balkans and the lack of transparency and environmental and social impact assessment of Chinese investments and loans; calls on Serbia to strengthen its legal compliance standards for Chinese business activities;

“87. Reiterates the importance of alignment with the EU common foreign and security policy (CFSP), which must progressively become an integral part of Serbia’s foreign policy as a condition for the accession process; expresses concern about Serbia’s alignment rate, which is the lowest in the region; notes that some government officials and some politicians continue to make occasional statements that call into question Serbia’s foreign policy orientation; is concerned by Serbia’s repeated support for Russia in the UN General Assembly over the annexation of Crimea;

“88. Welcomes the fact that Serbia aligned with the EU’s position on the presidential elections in Belarus; remains concerned, however, that Serbia has failed to align with the sanctioning of Belarusian officials and with the EU’s position on the new security law in China; calls on Serbia to increase its level of alignment with the declarations of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy on behalf of the EU, and with Council decisions;

“98. Expresses concern over Serbia’s increasing dependence on defence and security  equipment and technologies from the People’s Republic of China, including a mass surveillance system in Belgrade and mass personal data collection without appropriate safeguards, and the insufficient transparency of the security sector’s public procurement practices; continues to be concerned about Serbia’s close political and military cooperation with Russia, including the continued presence of Russian air facilities in Niš; calls on Serbia to align with the CSDP and its instruments…”

Add to this the periodic calls for NATO to wrap up its “unfinished business” in the Balkans, or the constant stream of “concern” with Russian or Chinese “malign influence” in the region, and the picture of the never-ending Western obsession with Serbia and its stubborn independent streak becomes complete.

Recently, the country marked the 22^nd anniversary of the beginning of NATO’s illegal “humanitarian” intervention against ex-Yugoslavia, which took an untold human(itarian) and, yes, ecological, toll on Serbia’s population. Unlike the totally unrepentant West, both Russia and China made sure to call this Western campaign by its real name – “aggression” – and made a public show of solidarity with Serbia. This was especially the case with the Chinese defense minister Wei Fenghe, whose three-day visit to Serbia, fortuitously coinciding with the anniversary, also provided the opportunity for China to send some unequivocal messages of its own.

As he laid wreaths at the site of the Chinese embassy “accidentally” bombed by a U.S. B-2 “stealth” bomber on May 7, 1999, when three Chinese journalists were killed and 20 people injured, Wei stated that “the Chinese military will never allow history to repeat itself as China is capable and determined to defend its national interests.” For her part, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying added that NATO “still owes blood debt” to the Chinese people and that “it shall not be forgotten that the U.S.-led NATO blatantly bombed Yugoslavia in 1999 in a severe violation of relevant international conventions and basic norms of international relations.”

In fact, there is ample proof that NATO’s 78-day attack on Serbia and Montenegro was not the least bit “humanitarian” in its purpose but had an ice-cold geopolitical raison. Perhaps the key public proof of this was provided by Willy Wimmer, former member of the German Bundestag and Vice President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE, in a letter written to then German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder on May 2, 2000, or less than a year after NATO’s illegal operation.

Wimmer’s 11-point brief of what was said at a closed security conference organized in Bratislava by the U.S. State Department included the following key points:

“4. The war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was waged in order to rectify General Eisenhower’s erroneous decision during World War II. Therefore, for strategic reasons, American troops must be stationed there, in order to compensate for the missed opportunity from 1945.

“7. It would be good, during NATO’s current enlargement, to restore the territorial situation in the area between the Baltic Sea and Anatolia such as existed during the Roman Empire, at the time of its greatest power and greatest territorial expansion.

“8. For this reason, Poland must be flanked to the north and to the south with democratic neighbor states, while Romania and Bulgaria are to secure a land connection with Turkey. Serbia (probably for the purposes of securing an unhindered U.S. military presence) must be permanently excluded from European development.

“11. The claim that, during its attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, NATO violated all international rules, and especially all the relevant provisions of international law – was not disputed.”

No less devastating was the experienced German diplomat’s own conclusion:

“It seems that the American side, for the sake of its own goals, is willing and ready to undermine, on a global scale, the international legal order, which came about as a result of the two world wars in the previous century. Force is to stand above law. Wherever international law stands in the way, it is to be removed.

“When the League of Nations experienced a similar fate, World War II was not far off. The manner of thought that takes into regard solely its own interests can only be referred to as totalitarian.”

This is the stuff for some future iteration of the Nuremberg trials, where the crime of aggression was identified as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” For now, it can at least serve as a handy tool in the current global info war, another reminder of the foreign policy roots of some of the self-styled moral crusaders staffing the Biden Administration, such as Anthony Blinken, who openly invokes the reprehensible Madeleine Albright as a “role model.”

So, if having a war of aggression named after you and causing the death of half a million Iraqi children was “worth it” in Albright’s mind, the untold millions being spent in efforts at eradicating all traces of multipolarity from European soil, instead of helping alleviate the region’s health crisis, are most certainly “worth it” in the minds of her political and spiritual successors in the White House and across the Atlantic.

In any case, the situation in and around Serbia, Europe’s most stubborn multipolar outpost, is bound to heat up in the near future.

While March 24 passed largely unnoticed in the West, where it should have evoked enormous outpourings of shame and repentance, in Moscow it was remembered by Maria Zakharova who correctly called it “a forever stain on NATO’s reputation.” On that day in 1999, invoking as its the pretext the urgent need to protect from persecution Kosovo’s Albanian minority, the NATO alliance, under the coordinated leadership  of major Western countries, began its Blitzkrieg against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Initially modelled after Hitler’s rapid war-winning strategy, the NATO offensive was not expected to last more than three or four days before Yugoslavia folded. In the event, it lasted more than seventy days, with a military and political ending in the field that was not among the brightest moments in NATO’s annals. In the final days of the unequal struggle to subdue a brave nation which had only a fraction of the aggressor’s resources to fight with, it was practically as if Hitler had been compelled to sue for peace from one of his intended victims. Other than being mindlessly destructive of civilian infrastructure, schools, hospitals, post offices, and bridges, and after killing several thousand civilians, the NATO offensive was getting precisely nowhere. Chastened by their full spectrum failure to dent Serbian ground defences, NATO generals repeatedly postponed and finally discarded the option of a ground invasion that in their probably correct estimate would have led to a politically unacceptable carnage of their troops.

What remained was to redouble the effort to vindictively and systematically, from the safe altitude of 30,000 feet, raze the victim country’s wherewithal for any semblance of civilized life. It was a practical application in the heart of Europe (not that it would have been justified anywhere else) of the neanderthal refrain of “free world” military planners that this or that country must either obey or be “bombed back to the stone age.” The neanderthals were, of course, safely ensconced in their Pentagon and Brussels offices while their acolytes were conducting murderous raids from heights that were largely unreachable for Yugoslavia’s air defences. The steady obliteration of Yugoslavia’s assets was taking its toll while the immense popular mobilization against barbarism that was taking place on the streets of Europe and America posed a severe political challenge to vassal European governments and began to strain the very fabric the NATO alliance.

In the end, NATO was ready for almost any sort of face-saving peace. Parallel to the intensification of bombing raids, it played its last card in the person of a corrupt Finnish politician, Martti Ahtisaari, who blustered President Slobodan Milosevic into adopting a more “flexible” stance by threatening to carpet bomb Belgrade, a clear war crime even if not actually enacted and used only as a tool of perverse neanderthal diplomacy. President Milosevic made the judgment call, rightly or wrongly, and decided in return for a badly needed respite to give the wicked alliance the face saver it needed by bringing its aggression to a close on something akin to “honourable” terms.

The political price for the cease fire that Yugoslavia exacted was formidable, at least in purely theoretical terms. It was UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which stipulated that the provinces of Kosovo and Metohija were inalienably Yugoslav (and with the subsequent dissolution of Yugoslavia, successor-state Serbia’s) territory and that under UN auspices NATO troops would be allowed to enter it only for the purpose of policing the peace and ensuring the safety of all ethnic groups residing there, pending a negotiated resolution of outstanding issues. Considering the gross disproportion in strength between the parties, for the Serbs that was on its face an epic moral and political victory even though NATO had not the slightest intention of honouring the terms of the agreement it signed. To rub it in, in plain view of the entire world the Serbian army withdrew from Kosovo virtually intact and in perfect order after over two months of bombardment which had almost entirely missed its target.

What remained, however, were tons of illegal toxic uranium munitions with a half-life of several million years to contaminate the soil and ruin the health of generations to come. But that was the predictable price of NATO “liberation.”

By far the most world-historical and plainly unintended consequence of NATO’s Kosovo adventure is what happened next, something that the Alliance and the Western political leadership will rue until their dying day. As noted in the Tweet of the Russian Embassy in Washington, “For the first time since WWII an aggression was committed against a sovereign European nation, an active participant in the anti-Hitler coalition, one of the UN founders.” The implications of these sombre facts did not pass without being thoroughly grasped in Moscow. In fact, they were firmly grasped and in real time by Prime Minister Evgeny Primakov who was on his way to Washington when the aggression started and immediately ordered his aeroplane, without further ado, to make a mid-Atlantic U-turn and return home. That sobering experience inaugurated a new era in geopolitics, further elaboration of this point being entirely unnecessary.

This writer, who in 2004 was seeing Mr. Primakov on another matter, upon the specific request of his mother and on behalf of the Serbian people, had the extraordinary honour of thanking the Russian statesman for his courageous and inspiring gesture which – now in retrospect we can confidently conclude – truly changed the world.

Serbia has been one of the stars of the first weeks of the global vaccination effort to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic. Differently from other European, and especially EU countries – despite its official EU candidate status – it has sought to secure vaccines from anywhere it could get them – both East and West, without waiting for Brussels’ bureaucracy to get its act together or trying to win political brownie points from wannabe defenders of liberal values, whatever that may mean. As a result, by the beginning of February, it achieved the second highest vaccination rate in Europe, behind only the United Kingdom. Moreover, its population can actually choose between the three currently most available global options – Pfizer Inc-BioNTech, China’s Sinopharm or Russia’s Sputnik V.

Clearly, lack of either EU or NATO membership has proven to be an advantage in a time of crisis, giving the country much-needed flexibility to react and seek alternatives. And its EU and/or NATO neighbors have been closely watching.

At the end of January, Hungary became the first EU country to approve the Sinopharm vaccine after carefully monitoring its mass rollout in Serbia. It also became the first EU country to grant emergency approval of Sputnik V, some three weeks after Serbia.

NATO member Macedonia’s prime minister has publicly thanked Serbia’s president Aleksandar Vučić for providing his country with 8.000 doses of Pfizer’s vaccine at purchase price, calling it “an act of solidarity from our neighbor and a reinforcement of our friendship.”

And Vedrana Rudan, a best-selling author and columnist from neighboring and not-terribly-friendly NATO/EU member Croatia, caused quite a regional stir with an article describing her end-of-January trip to Belgrade in order to get vaccinated. Technically, all residents of Serbia, including foreigners, are eligible for free shots. Although Ms. Rudan is not a resident, she claims she was able to get one on account of some of her dramas being played at Belgrade’s theaters and books sold in Serbian bookstores, and the fact that artists have been classified among the priority groups, together with the elderly, medical personnel, the military, the police and media workers. However, according to Serbia’s IT and electronic administration chief Mihailo Jovanović, even non-resident foreigners are welcome to get a jab.

But even if that were not the case, why wouldn’t Serbia take advantage of the opportunity to get some much-needed positive publicity? Especially having in mind the perennial pariah status it has been apportioned by the collective West for refusing to get totally on board with the post-Yugoslav neocolonial program, and for becoming the regional hub of “malign” Russian and Chinese influence due to its avowed military neutrality and steady refusal to join in on the West’s sanction mania vis-à-vis the two great Eurasian powers.

So, if you are Serbian, why not, for a change, at least briefly indulge in reading about an EU citizen’s near-religious experience, after “months of lockdown,” of being able to walk freely through the streets of your capital city, where bars and restaurants where one can “drink coffee like a human being” are full, and people stand in line to see an art exhibit? Or even in sympathizing with Ms. Rudan as she gets ready to return to “a locked-down city, a locked-down country, to a people that expected salvation from their politicians and Europe, but got… Here in Croatia, they talk of Serbia ‘sitting on several chairs,’ of ‘conspiring’ with the Chinese, Russians and all others from whom it can buy vaccines. Unlike Croatia, which doesn’t ‘conspire’ with anyone. Croatia isn’t sitting on any chair, it is sitting on its behind, its gaze fixed, waiting for the mercy of its masters.”

Still, as far as most of the local audience is concerned, the coup de grâce against the West’s incorrigible zero-summing during a global health crisis was delivered by none other than one of Serbia’s most ardent NATO supporters (and, until recently, Russophobes), Jelena Milić, who proudly Tweeted that she’d received none other than Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine on February 4. In an announcement posted on the website of the Center for Euro-Atlantic Studies, whose director she (still) is, Ms. Milić happily shared her reasons: “I opted for the Sputnik vaccine for several reasons. Reputable international periodicals have said that the Sputnik vaccine possesses all the qualities of the other available vaccines, as well as certain advantages. Many thanks to the Russian scientists. I sincerely hope that the process of producing the Sputnik V vaccine will soon begin in Serbia as well.”

And begin it shall. As announced following the February 3 telephone call between Vučić and Russia’s president Putin, Serbia will build facilities for the independent production of vaccines with the help of experts from Russia. If NATO’s motives were ever, even for a moment, truly “humanitarian,” there should be some very happy people at its Brussels headquarters about now.

In any case, let us sincerely hope that last October’s successfully organized 10^th annual Belgrade NATO Week won’t be Ms. Milić’s last, and not just thanks to the 91% effectiveness of Sputnik V. To paraphrase the immortal Hawkeye Pierce – if NATO had more people like her, it’d have less people like her. Cold War II would finally begin to thaw, and everyone could get down to the serious business of building a single Eurasian space with indivisible military and health security for all.

One can dream, can’t one…?

A controversy has recently erupted in Mexico, of the type that may quite often be seen in other similarly defrauded countries. Its focus is the magnificent quetzal-plumed headdress of the last Aztec emperor Moctezuma which, contrary to the misleading impression encouraged by the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, is not displayed there at all. It is actually located, of all places, in the Ethnological Museum in Vienna, Austria.

The impression is misleading because as recalled by all visitors to the Mexican Museo de Antropologia the headdress occupies a deservedly prominent position among the museum’s numerous artefacts. Viewers are not informed, however, that what is on display there is not the genuine item but a skilfully manufactured replica. Nor are they told where the genuine article is located, or what unusual circumstances explain its transfer to a minor European country that has no visible connection to the safekeeping of Mexican people’s national heritage. Unless, of course, we take into account the brief reign of Maximillian von Habsburg as the foreign-imposed emperor of Mexico in the nineteenth century. But as it turns out, that seemingly plausible assumption is a false trail. The defeated Aztec emperor’s headdress was purloined and removed to Europe by the victorious Spanish conquistadors half a millennium ago, and it ended up in Hapsburg Vienna through labyrinthine dynastic channels. But that is a pedantic clarification of the artefact’s odyssey which in principle scarcely makes any difference.

Moctezuma’s headdress

The fate of this national treasure par excellence of the people of Mexico is vividly illustrative of the policy of cultural appropriation (or, perhaps, expropriation would be just as good a word) that has been and still is zealously practiced by shameless Western imperialists. Cultural vandalism would probably be the best terms of all.

The fabled Elgin Marbles immediately come to mind. The history of this section of the Parthenon that was brazenly looted by the Earl of Elgin, at the time the Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of His Britannic Majesty to the Sublime Porte of Selim III, Sultan of Turkey, of whose realm Greece then formed a part, is emblematic of Western looting of other nations’ cultural patrimony. Lord Elgin cast an eye on the Parthenon and saw an opportunity to acquire what he could of it by bribing the corruptible Ottoman bureaucracy. After making a sweetheart deal with the local pasha (camouflaged with a forged imperial firman the original copy of which was never found in the meticulously kept Turkish archives) he arranged for the artefacts to be shipped by sea to Britain, where they are now on display in the Duveen Gallery of the British Museum. The pattern of iniquitous deal making with third parties, while excluding the party with the direct and natural interest in the matter, henceforth became a feature of Western and in particular British policy. Greece’s attempts going back two centuries to reclaim its stolen treasure have been stonewalled and, obviously, have had no success.

One of the arguments advanced by Western opponents of restitution is that, were all similar claims to be honoured, Western museums would be emptied of the objects on display there. Their argument is breathtakingly cynical, but they also make a valid point. Yes, of course, the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin’s Neues Museum in this connection readily comes to mind, as well as thousands of other looted objects in museums throughout the continent. Goering’s robbery spree across occupied Europe was but a crude imitation of the way these artistic treasures were acquired in the first place. Though scathingly denounced for his depredations after the war, in Marxian terms in the milieu in which he operated the Reichsmarschall was not an aberration. He was merely expropriating the expropriators.

The point was brilliantly illustrated much later, at the time of the memorable liberation of Iraq by coalition armies. Specially trained units made a bee line to Iraq’s National Museum immediately upon the taking of Baghdad, and not because anyone thought that the elusive weapons of mass destruction were hidden among its treasures. The Museum was systematically pillaged, Goering-style, never mind the irksome 1954 Hague Convention on the protection of cultural property which sternly forbids it. Shortly thereafter, Iraqi artefacts began to emerge and were being offered in copious quantities to eager collectors all over Europe and North America.

Predictably, the rapacious conduct of the big hyenas is being replicated by their camp followers. Not to be outdone, Kosovo Albanians are laying claim to Serbian cultural monuments in Kosovo and Metohija.

Serbian cultural monuments in Kosovo and Metohija

As seen in the map, Serbian cultural markers thickly cover the entirety of the tiny province’s territory, with none reflecting a culturally significant historical presence by another ethnicity. Undaunted by that, a pseudo-scholarly rationale for the cultural expropriation of Serbian monuments in Kosovo and their reclassification as Albanian is currently being developed in leading Western institutions of learning, on behalf of their Kosovo Albanian clients. The work of Sir Noel Malcolm, a King’s Scholar at Eton College, “Kosovo: A Short History”, is a case in point in that regard. It is a companion volume to his earlier hit piece of similar inspiration, “Bosnia: A Short History”.

Returning to Moctezuma’s headdress, or penacho as they call it in Mexico, Vienna Ethnological Museum director Christian Schicklbruber offered some revealing views in the matter. “The Museum,” he stated, “cannot make any decisions with respect to political issues.” As to who the penacho should belong to, he indicated that he preferred to call it “shared cultural patrimony,” stressing that “legally it belongs to Austria, but ethically and morally it is a shared cultural item. I would call it ‘ours,’ not mine, it is not Austrian, all of us share it.” Anyway, according to Herr Schicklgruber, it is a matter for the Austrian parliament and Ministry of Culture to decide.

Bank robbers should take note and be inspired by the Schicklgruber Doctrine (and we will not trivialize it by speculating what famous individual the museum director might be related to). They should try arguing in court that their heist is not really the property of the bank at all, but a shared financial asset to which they are entirely entitled to lay an equal and valid claim.