SALON

United Nations

Monday, Oct 23, 2000 8:00 AM UTC

Propping up the walls

As international support for Kosovar independence wanes, hatred still seethes between Albanians and Serbs. And the U.N. oversees their division.

By

The road out of Pristina to the Serbian monument at the Field of Blackbirds, where the Serbs lost the mythic Battle of Kosovo in 1389, is littered with the carcasses of dogs. When Kosovar Albanians fled Serbian destruction last year, they abandoned their pets. Now the dogs roam the streets of Pristina, scavenging alone and in small packs, eerily indifferent to humans — and, sometimes, to cars.

Albanians despise this monument. It’s where, in 1989, Slobodan Milosevic gave his infamous “never again” speech initiating Serbia’s crackdown on Kosovo’s autonomy.

For such a reviled object, it is surprisingly unimposing. A brown obelisk maybe 30 feet high, the monument resembles a stone wall turned on end. Though nothing seems to grow on the farmland it overlooks, blackbirds still fly overhead, huge clouds of them filling the sky at dusk, blocking out the sun. To the Serbs, who lost the Battle of Kosovo, the birds represent the souls of slain Serbian warriors. Kosovars point to the two-headed black eagle that adorns the Albanian flag and claim the blackbirds as their own.

Serbs and Albanians live divided in Kosovo, separated by centuries-old hatreds and more recent bloodshed. Standing awkwardly between the two, compelled to prop up the very barriers of separation, are the bureaucrats and soldiers of the United Nations. More than a year after the NATO bombing, the world has turned its attention elsewhere. George W. Bush has even called for the return of the 7,000 American troops in the region. The U.N., meanwhile, is struggling to keep the peace in a desolate part of the world where violence has never been conquered.

A British journalist standing at the monument asks if I can translate the Serbian inscription on its front. With Serbia having erupted in protest against Milosevic, he’s writing a feature about the place where the Serbian leader launched his career. I can’t read Serbian, so he asks the two machine-gun-toting soldiers from the United Arab Emirates who guard the monument. In hesitant English they explain that they used to have a translation, but the previous day, somebody stole it.

I’m not surprised. Since NATO’s bombing halted Milosevic’s terror campaign, Kosovo’s Albanians have become the aggressor here, and language is one of their weapons. Serbian names for towns have been scratched out on virtually every road sign. New businesses proclaim themselves part of Kosova, using the Albanian word (pronounced Kuh-SO-va) for the territory. A few months ago, a Bulgarian soldier made the mistake of speaking Serbian to a group of Albanians, and they beat him to death.

The next day, I visit the Serbian Orthodox monastery in the Serbian enclave of Gracanica, about 15 minutes outside Pristina. To enter Gracanica one has to pass through a checkpoint manned by NATO’s Kosovo Force, or KFOR. A Swedish soldier carrying a machine gun checks cars. Behind him is a sandbag fort big enough to house a couple of soldiers, with peepholes to see and shoot out of. A tank looms over the fort.

Maybe half a mile down the pothole-strewn road, another guard stands outside the monastery’s front wall, and another tank is parked in its driveway. Inside the modest, graceful building, a nun, her face furrowed with age, peers over the shoulder of a young monk who is surfing the Internet. (The monks and nuns used to live apart, but now they share the monastery, for safety.)

Another Serb, a local politician, is talking hopefully about the Yugoslav election. He has family in Serbia, and he thinks they will be safe. “It will be OK,” he says. “The police, they are with us now.”

Days later, he was proved right. But both Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo have mixed feelings about the downfall of Milosevic. Most Serbs here supported Milosevic because they thought he stood up for them. The Albanians, of course, hate Milosevic, though his departure now worries them. Newly elected President Vojislav Kostunica takes an equally hard line against Kosovar independence and has done nothing about the hundreds of Albanians imprisoned in Serbian jails. U.N. officials say that while one path toward healing would be a Serbian apology, they don’t expect one to come from Kostunica.

Unfortunately for the Albanians, however, Kostunica isn’t the convenient boogeyman that Milosevic was. While Milosevic reigned, Kosovo automatically had the world’s sympathy. Not anymore. It’s easier to argue for independence when you’re trying to separate from a war criminal.

When the Serbian politician is done talking, the monk shows me the Orthodox chapel some 200 feet from the monastery. He is perhaps 23 or 24, with gentle eyes and a light brown beard. He wants to leave the monastery to teach theology, so that he won’t always be the youngest monk he knows. The church, he tells me, was built around 1320. In 1950, Marshal Tito honored it with a visit. A small stone structure that couldn’t hold more than 20 worshippers, it’s simple, beautiful, powerfully holy.

As he talks, an American soldier strolls by. He looks about 18, and his machine gun, which is about half his height, bounces against his hip as he walks.

I have come to Kosovo on the eve of the U.N.-sponsored municipal elections, which will be held Saturday, in the aftermath of Yugoslavia’s. Touring the countryside, I can see why the Kosovars are so angry. The Serbs destroyed about one in four homes in Kosovo, and the landscape is pockmarked with house after house reduced to piles of rubble — roofs gone, interiors decimated, maybe a wall or two partially intact. These were solid, durable homes made of brick, stone and cement. The Serbs knew their business.

One answer to the resulting housing problem was for returning Albanians to seize Serbian homes, but that has only perpetuated the hatred. An American diplomat told me of a Serbian man who fled Kosovo during the war, then returned to find his home occupied by an Albanian family. When they refused to leave, he asked an official at the U.N. Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) for an armed guard. To protect you while you try to get your home back? the official asked. No, the Serb said, to protect me while I burn it down.

More typical, however, is the sight of Albanians building, building, building. Everywhere you look new houses are springing up, surrounded by stacks of red brick and piles of the saplings the Albanians use as floor supports.

But the Albanians are also constructing walls of division, and these days it is the estimated 100,000 Serbs who remain in Kosovo who live in fear. Though international visitors can rarely tell a Serb from an Albanian by sight, Albanians can — and in most of Kosovo Serbs dare not walk alone. Not if they want to live.

After the bombing, under KFOR’s guard, some Serbs remained in Pristina, but the Albanians did their best to expel them. In one two-towered apartment building, Albanians lived on one side, Serbs on the other. Last winter the Serbian side was always dark, because the Albanians who run the power plant cut off its electricity. (Other Albanians cut the Serbs’ phone lines.) Winters in Kosovo are brutal. So the Serbs huddled in freezing apartments, because to step outside meant risking their lives.

Most of Kosovo’s Serbs have taken refuge in Serb-only enclaves scattered throughout the countryside — ghettos, some people call them. The enclaves are safer than Pristina, but they’re not really that safe. Albanians can drive through the enclaves, and a few weeks ago an Albanian man aimed his car at a group of Serbian children and hit the accelerator. He killed one and tried to kill another before speeding away. Not long after that, in a municipality called Obilic, someone threw a hand grenade into a Serbian playground, wounding several children.

Such acts may seem like random, arbitrary violence, but they aren’t. Murdering Serbian children is both an expression of the enduring hatred and a blow against the Serbs’ future in Kosovo. But ask an Albanian about such terrorism, and he is likely to explain, in all seriousness, that Serbs are killing their own children to make Albanians look bad.

“You have to understand, this is different from Bosnia,” one foreign worker said to me. “After four years of war there, they were really exhausted. They were ready for peace. But here there was a very short war with very few participants” — the Kosovo Liberation Army rebels were a small minority of Kosovo’s population — “and a lot of people are not at all sick of the violence.” He said this as a hopeful remark, implying that one day they will be.

In the municipality of Strpce, I get out of the car to photograph a particularly stark ruin. When I step off the road for a better angle, my guide slams on the horn. “Don’t walk on the grass,” she shouts. Thousands of unexploded mines still pollute the countryside. Another U.N. worker told me of an Albanian farmer who, thinking he was being helpful, walked toward two NATO soldiers, carrying a mine in his outstretched hands. “He’s gone,” one of the soldiers said. A second later, in a spray of red, he was.

After the NATO bombing, the Albanians returned the favor by mining some of the dirt roads in Serbian enclaves. So at considerable expense, UNMIK had to detonate the mines and pave the roads. More recently, UNMIK has been building roads that will allow Albanians to drive around the Serbian enclaves — which has had the ironic effect of making the divides of hatred even more enduring.

Ironic, but necessary. If the Serbs are to survive, UNMIK must isolate them and KFOR must guard them. “We are not trapped under the myth of multiethnicity,” one U.N. official explained. “NATO intervened to stabilize the region, not to strike a blow for social engineering.”

Among the many international personnel from UNMIK and various nongovernmental agencies I spoke with, frustration with (if not outright dislike of) the Albanians was nearly universal. This is partly because many Europeans have long considered Albanians the riffraff of the continent. But more than that, these U.N. workers speak the language of reason, of process and diplomacy, and they cannot comprehend the Albanians’ lust for revenge, their faith in the Serbs’ collective guilt, their self-serving interpretation of history.

One American said to me, “The Albanians think they’re the new chosen people,” as if the NATO bombings were the hand of fate pushing Kosovo on its inexorable march toward independence, rather than a geopolitical move to counter Milosevic and stabilize the Balkans.

And if the Albanians were grateful at first when the U.N. arrived, now they seem to view UNMIK as a benign occupying force that will protect them while they recover their strength, set them on the path toward independence and then get the hell out. An example: UNMIK has attempted to convert the members of the KLA into a sort of National Guard-like group called the Kosovo Protection Corps, or KPC. The members of the KPC are supposed to disarm and engage in public works projects, but no one really believes that they are changing their stripes. The Albanian acronym for KPC is TMK, which, everyone jokes, stands for “Tomorrow’s Masters of Kosovo.”

One morning as I walked along one of Pristina’s dirty, muddy streets, a little girl sitting on a stoop smiled at me and said hello in English. I was so surprised I almost forgot to answer her — she was the only local during my visit who had given any sign of noticing me. Why should the locals notice me? The Albanians don’t want to integrate with anyone. Even in Bosnia, there was intermarriage among Serbs and Croats and Muslims. Not here. In Kosovo, Serbs and Albanians have always lived and slept apart.

The same tribal instincts apply to visitors. Last summer, several foreigners who made the mistake of dancing with some Albanian women at a local club were so viciously beaten they had to be evacuated by helicopter. Sooner or later, the Albanians know, I will be gone, as eventually, they think, all the other foreigners will too — including, especially, the Serbs.

The U.N. has an immense task in Kosovo. It must help create all the structures, from the noble to the mundane, that define a country — a government, a legal system, an economy, an infrastructure, law enforcement, postal and telephone service, garbage collection. But it must do that without furthering the Albanians’ faith that Kosovo will become a separate country.

That’s a fine line to walk, and despite the efforts of UNMIK’s many smart and dedicated people, working seven days a week and living in hardship, it may be an impossible mission.

The logistical aspects alone are daunting enough. Consider the economy. For the past 20 years Kosovars survived on a wildly inefficient socialist economy and money sent from relatives working abroad. Kosovo doesn’t have welfare mothers; it has welfare everyone.

“The attitude of many people here is that Yugoslavia circa 1985 was excellent,” one U.N. official told me. Of the 300 companies that existed in Kosovo before the war, perhaps a couple of dozen are still viable, but they will need to make sizable layoffs. There is some farming and some timber, although reforestation is a foreign concept. If meaningful trade is even possible for a tiny region without any distinctive natural assets, it will be years, if not decades, away. So UNMIK has tried to implement the collection of revenue through things like an airport tax, the licensing of gas stations and auto registration.

But at the moment, Kosovo lives off international aid and the service economy generated by foreigners. Neither will last indefinitely. One of the 29 political parties campaigning in the upcoming municipal elections is actually promoting tourism as a source of income. I can’t think of a single reason why a tourist would want to visit Kosovo.

Organized crime thrived in Kosovo before the bombing, and its grip has probably tightened since. It’s said that, for 1,000 marks (UNMIK imposed the deutsche mark as Kosovo’s currency), or about $430, you can buy a Mercedes, a BMW, any car you want, as long as you don’t mind that it belongs to someone else.

Pristina is also full of illegal construction. Built without safety regulations or building codes on land that the builders usually don’t even own, such structures are ubiquitous — a seven-story building across the street from UNMIK headquarters, a hotel going up in a public park.

UNMIK tries to identify the illegal buildings and condemn them for destruction, but it isn’t easy. A few weeks ago, the U.N. appointed an Albanian to head the process. He condemned three buildings before being gunned down, gangland style. For Kosovo’s criminals, killing an Albanian is simpler than killing a foreigner, and UNMIK’s decision to put a local in such a visible, vulnerable position was a stinging mistake.

UNMIK’s challenge of rebuilding Kosovo is also complicated by the separation of public institutions that the hatred here renders necessary. Hospitals are segregated because a Serb in an Albanian hospital would not fare well. So are schools. “I do not think,” one U.N. official said, “that a Serbian child in a mixed classroom could survive more than a couple of hours.”

Kosovo, you might say, is making the U.N. schizophrenic. An organization devoted to bringing the peoples of the world together has conceded that, in Kosovo, peace requires separatism.

I asked one U.N. official how the Serbian enclaves could possibly become self-sustaining. They can’t, he said. So KFOR will guard them indefinitely? I asked. Not indefinitely, he said. For 10, maybe 20 years. The solution lies in “generational attrition.” Most young Serbs have left Kosovo; those remaining tend to be middle-aged and older. “I can’t see that we can sustain these people in any real way,” he admitted. “But in 20 years, the problem will probably be solved.”

Such words are chilling, but they’re also realistic. Because no matter how much some things change in Kosovo, others stay the same, just as they have for hundreds of years. The blackbirds still fly at dusk, tens of thousands of them swooping and whirling as they fill the sky with black clouds. And when night falls, wild dogs roam the streets.

Richard Blow is the author of "American SonA Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr.," and is currently a book about Harvard University. More Richard Blow.

Thursday, Mar 15, 2012 10:30 AM UTC

Is Agenda 21 a U.N. plot to kill the suburbs?

Or is "sustainable growth" a sensible policy demonized by a right-wing conspiracy theory?

By McMansions endangered from on high (Credit: iStockphoto/Dmitry Galanternik)

In a resolution approved in January, the Republican National Committee characterized the United Nations’ Agenda 21 as “destructive strategies for sustainable development.” Included in this resolution was the RNC’s condemnation of the “insidious nature” of Agenda 21, and the recommendation by the RNC to adopt this resolution at the 2012 RNC Convention. An increasing backlash against this 19-year-old nonbinding U.N. plan shows how a conspiracy theory can become part of a major party’s platform.

How did a 40-chapter U.N. work plan on sustainable development, published in 1992, foster such a fervent backlash among conservative groups? Agenda 21, first revealed at the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, aimed to address environmental and development concerns through global partnership initiatives. While the plan covered everything from the sharing of educational resources to strategies for economic and environmental development, conservative groups have focused primarily on its fourth section — titled “the means for implementation” — as revealing Agenda 21’s true and, for them, insidious nature.

While a recent New York Times article described anti-Agenda 21 activism as emerging roughly two years ago, the roots of the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory go back at least a decade. As early as 2002 Dr. Stanley Monteith, a Santa Cruz County, Calif., physician, who runs the conservative Christian website Radio Liberty, hosted a series of lectures on the dangers of Agenda 21. An insurance salesperson named  Joan Peros gave a nearly hour-long lecture on the perils of Agenda 21, warning, it “doesn’t matter which party is in power or control … some of our leaders totally understand and embrace the ushering in of a one-world order.”

The paranoia behind such fears was expressed by another guest lecturer on Monteith’s program, Jean Soderman, a self-professed former participant in Local Agenda 21 planning in Santa Cruz. When asked whether Agenda 21 would be worse than what Hitler did, she responded, “Yes. We are controlled by computers now and it has been said … that they have been trying this for two times already … first with Hitler, and it is going to be much, much worse.”

Michael Shaw, also from Santa Cruz and founder of the anti-Agenda 21 website Freedom Advocates, gave a lecture in 2006 at the Eagle Forum Conference in Santa Rosa, titled “Speaking of Agenda 21.” Shaw spoke about the loss of property rights through the ruse of “sustainable development,” and described Agenda 21 as “political globalists … moving toward a form of … state capitalism.  It is an assault on land and that is where we have to stand up and protect our land.”

The anti-Agenda 21 critique entered the conservative mainstream in an October 2009 article in the American Thinker. Scott Strzelcky and Richard Rothschild charged that, through the implementation of “smart growth” initiatives,  Agenda 21 would  force people to relocate into highly urbanized areas — what anti-Agenda 21 activists commonly describe as “stack ‘em and pack ‘em” housing, evoking the image of Soviet-era East Berlin apartments. According to Strzelcky and Rothschild, Agenda 21 will ultimately lead to the demise of the suburban way of life.

Such concerns over the loss of private property rights are not a new phenomenon in the United States. The Wise Use movement in the West of the late 1980s brought together farmers, loggers, industries, religious groups, libertarians and conservatives to oppose the Endangered Species Act and other federal environment laws. According to investigative journalist Jeffery St. Clair, the Wise Use members saw themselves as players in “a high-stakes-chess game” against the environmental movement, whose members were “overtly carrying out a sinister master plan, a vast socialist experiment to depopulate the rural West.” When asked about the evolution of property rights movements, Jeffery St. Clair told me, “in the West, many of the Tea Party activists are the same old Wise Users in new hairstyles.”

But while the Wise Use movement centered around protecting rural and federal lands from perceived government encroachment, anti-Agenda 21 activists are concerned that private property, for them an extension of one’s liberties and freedoms, will cease to exist entirely.

The movement really took off in July 2011 after Glenn Beck devoted a show to those “who had mastered the art of hiding it in plain sight and then dismissing it as a joke.” Beck held up  a copy of United Nations Earth Summit Agenda 21. “Sustainable development is just a really nice way of saying centralized control over all of human life on Planet Earth,” he stated. “Whenever you start unraveling this, it is like an onion … its real intentions are being masked with environmental issues.”

With his patented chalkboard, Beck drew the web of connections that has been fueling Agenda 21 panic ever since: the activities of a group called the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, known as  ICLEI — or Local Agenda 21. Started in San Francisco in 1990, ICLEI’s primary goal is to provide consultation, training and information to support sustainable development at the local level.  For Anti-Agenda 21 activists, ICLEI is the real enemy.

As Andrew Cohen wrote in a recent article for the Atlantic:

You would think that the Tea Party, with its disdain for large government, would be delighted with the ICLEI’s emphasis on “locally designed initiatives.” No. To the “Agender” crowd, as they are called, the ICLEI is the local instrument by which the UN forces its “sustainability” agenda upon the U.S.

It’s only within the last few months that the New York Times and the Atlantic have reported on this backlash by anti-Agenda 21 activists against local planning projects. Recently in Florida, a Tea Party group in Citrus County argued against the restriction of boating rights in Kings Bay (designed to protect the Kings Bay manatees). Edna Mattos, the leader of the Citrus County Tea Party Patriots, cited Agenda 21 as being behind this proposed restriction.

At the same time, Agenda 21 has become a talking point for presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich. Speaking in South Carolina on the perils of Agenda 21,  Gingrich decried what he called “taking control of your private property and turning it into a publicly controlled property.” Gingrich has also proposed an executive order “to cease all federal funding of any kind of activity that relates to United Nations Agenda 21.” In addition, bills publicly condemning Agenda 21 have been introduced by Republican state representatives in Tennessee, New Hampshire and Georgia.

Anti-Agenda 21 rhetoric not only plays into fears over the declining suburban lifestyle, but has changed the vocabulary of city planners. Many of the planners that I have spoken with are taking to heart Andrew Whittemon’s recommendations to take the concerns of Agenda 21 more seriously and to speak more clearly.

Whittemon, a professor of planning at the University of Texas, Arlington, said, “Planners can avoid conflict by being explicit about the most direct harms coming to residents and businesses, giving attention to local solutions, and certainly dropping the jargon.”

The impact of the movement is already felt. One city planner I spoke with, who wished to remain anonymous, told me: “The Agenda 21 accusations that we hear in public meetings are the most counterproductive to reaching consensus or middle ground in land use planning. So we are staying away from using words like ‘sustainable development.’”

Continue Reading Close

Liam Hysjulien is a freelance writer. Reach him by e-mail at LiamHAIOTB@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @Liam_Hysjulien. More Liam Hysjulien.

Friday, Sep 23, 2011 5:31 PM UTC

Palestinian leader asks UN to recognize state

Mahmoud Abbas defies U.S., Israeli opposition, requests recognition as member state

By and , Associated Press Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas holds his hands to his face as U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during the 66th session of the General Assembly at United Nations headquarters Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2011. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)(Credit: AP/Seth Wenig)

The Palestinian president on Friday formally asked the United Nations to recognize a state of Palestine, defying U.S. and Israeli opposition.

The application for full U.N. member sidesteps nearly two decades of troubled negotiations and risks a threatened American veto.

More Mohammed Daragameh.

More Amy Teibel.

Wednesday, Sep 21, 2011 7:51 PM UTC

Palestinians won’t seek vote delay on UN bid

President Mahmoud Abbas reportedly won't cave to U.S., French pressure to push back vote on statehood

By and , Associated Press French President Nicolas Sarkozy, left, meets with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Millennium Hotel in New York during the 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2011. (AP Photo/Andrew Burton)(Credit: AP)

A top Palestinian official said Wednesday that President Mahmoud Abbas had no plans to agree to a delayed vote on his bid for membership in the United Nations, rejecting mounting pressure from the United States and France.

The Palestinians plan to submit their letter of application on Friday when Abbas is to speak to the U.N. General Assembly, but he faced a withering lack of support as the world body opened its annual meeting. President Barack Obama said there could be no “shortcuts” in the quest for Middle East peace, a message that was echoed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

“We will not allow any political manoeuvring on this issue,” said Saeb Erekat, a senior aide to Abbas and former chief of negotiations.

Erekat said Abbas had made that plain in discussions with all parties involved over the last three days of meetings in the lead-up to the annual UN global gathering of presidents, heads of state and ruling royalty.

Sarkozy proposed a one-year timetable Wednesday for Israel and the Palestinians to reach a peace accord, part of a concerted push with the United States to steer the Palestinians away from an application for U.N. membership.

Sarkozy spoke shortly after Obama warned against action on the Palestinian bid before there was a peace agreement. He said negotiations, not U.N. declarations, were essential to a lasting peace.

While Obama stopped short of calling directly for the Palestinians to drop their bid for full membership — an effort the U.S. has vowed to veto in the Security Council — Sarkozy sounded a more compromising tone and urged each side, and the international community, to approach the deadlocked process with new ideas and tactics.

“Let us cease our endless debates on the parameters and let us begin negotiations and adopt a precise and ambitious timetable,” Sarkozy told the leaders and officials gathered at the U.N. “Sixty years without moving one centimeter forward, doesn’t that suggest that we should change the method and the scheduling here?”

“Let’s have one month to resume discussions, six months to find agreement on borders and security, one year to reach a definitive agreement,” he said.

A senior European Union official said the proposal laid out by Sarkozy matched one by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton during a meeting with EU foreign ministers on Tuesday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.

Abbas’ push for full membership, which he has said would be submitted on Friday, has dominated this year’s U.N. meeting, pushing the U.S. and Israel against a wall of international sympathy for Palestinians. While the full membership bid would meet with a certain U.S. veto in the Security Council, assuming the Palestinians muster enough votes to have it approved, they have succeeded in bringing the issue again to the forefront of the world’s political discussions after years of failed negotiations, bickering and sporadic outbreaks of violence.

Sarkozy said that by setting preconditions, “we doom ourselves to failure. … There must be no preconditions.”

It remained unclear whether the latest proposal would be enough to avert a showdown over statehood that has consumed the U.N. over the past few days and sparked a frenzy of last-minute diplomatic door-knocking by the Israelis and the Palestinians, as well as a flurry of discussions between the Quartet of Mideast negotiators — the U.S., the E.U., the U.N. and Russia.

But the proposal outlined by Sarkozy received a warmer welcome from the Palestinians than Obama’s comments.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior Abbas aide, told The Associated Press that the Palestinians “appreciate the speech and the positions included in that speech.”

“The Palestinian leadership will study seriously the positions and the ideas in that speech,” he said.

Obama’s remarks, however, drew a lukewarm response, with the Palestinian delegation wearing stern and disapproving looks as the U.S. president spoke.

“Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the United Nations — if it were that easy, it would have been accomplished by now,” the president told U.N. delegates. “Ultimately, it is the Israelis and the Palestinians who must live side by side. Ultimately, it is the Israelis and the Palestinians — not us — who must reach agreement on the issues that divide them.”

Obama showed solidarity with Israel, not mentioning a return to the borders before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war in which Israel annexed territory. The remarks may rile some in the Arab world where mass uprisings against authoritarian regimes have also sparked a new measure of anti-U.S. sentiment. Obama’s words also stood in stark contrast to the image he left behind when he addressed the Muslim world from Cairo in 2009, pledging to improve relations and cooperation.

Senior Palestinian officials said Abbas will reiterate to Obama his decision to move forward with the application for membership that will be submitted to the Security Council. But they also said that the Palestinians seek to cooperate with the U.S. and will be ready to return to the negotiating table once a solid foundation for talks was in place.

Nabil Abu Redeineh said that “peace in the Middle East needs an immediate end of the Israeli occupation” and that the U.S. needs to pressure Israel to immediately withdraw from lands annexed in 1967. The Palestinians are ready to return to talks “the minute Israel accepts” those borders and stops settlement building, he said.

Obama was scheduled to meet later Wednesday with Abbas.

He met earlier in the day with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

With Obama at his side, the Israeli premier said the Palestinian bid to appeal directly to the U.N. was a short cut that “will not succeed.” Netanyahu also lauded Obama for speaking up on principle.

The issue of Palestinian statehood has gained new momentum in the Arab world amid the so-called Arab Spring uprisings that have ousted the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya and laid the still rocky foundations for a new era of freedom and democratic nations in a region dominated by dictators, monarchs and other entrenched regimes.

Associated Press writers Mohammed Daraghmeh, Amy Teibel and Julie Pace in New York contributed reporting.

Continue Reading Close

More Tarek El-tablawy.

More Steven R. Hurst.

Tuesday, Sep 20, 2011 5:01 PM UTC

Obama should support Palestinian statehood

If the president wants to foster peace and be on the right side of history, he must back the Palestinian U.N. bid

By , GlobalPost A Palestinian waves a flag during a demonstration in the West Bank, Friday, Sept. 9, 2011

BOSTON — President Obama should not veto Palestinian national aspirations in the United Nations Security Council.

The president is not wrong in thinking that this would be better handled in negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel. It would be wonderful if Israel itself were to sponsor a Palestinian state, but this is not going to happen as long as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in power.

He has spent his entire career trying to avoid Palestinian statehood with delaying tactics and maneuvers — seemingly willing to negotiate everything anywhere, but in reality putting up every obstacle he can in the path of peace and permanent settlement with the Palestinians.

Not that the Palestinians are guiltless in this stand off. They have had offers and opportunities they have not taken. But the entire Middle East is now in a state of flux and transition, and, as a practical matter, to try to keep the Palestinians frozen in their status as an occupied people without political rights is to ask for serious trouble — both for Israel and the U.S. The next Intifada will be far more destructive than the last two.

As a moral matter it is simply time to let the Palestinians have their state just as Harry Truman recognized that the Jews, after all they had been through in Europe in World War II, should have their state in 1948.

Many Israelis understand this. Former Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told The New York Times that “the world is tired of this conflict and angry at us because we are viewed as conquerors, ruling over another people. If I were Bibi Netanyahu I would recognize a Palestinian State. We would then negotiate borders and security.” But Netanyahu comes from the so-called “Revisionist” wing of Zionism that is reluctant to give up any part of what they consider the biblical land of Israel.

When David Ben Gurion on May 14th, 1948, declared that the state of Israel would come into being at midnight, America responded with de-facto recognition almost immediately. But the Soviet Union came through first with de-jure recognition, something the U.S. did not grant until an elected government had been formed in January of 1949.

Even with the two superpowers onboard, the U.N. Security Council did not grant Israel U.N. membership until May 11, 1949 — a full year after the state was declared — and after a long fight to physically secure its borders.

Palestine might come into being in reverse order — declare sovereignty now, gain admittance to the U.N., and then negotiate the borders with Israel, as Ben-Eliezer suggested.

There are many who say there are dangers involved in a Palestinian state, and they are right, just as those in Truman’s State Department, including George C. Marshall, were right in warning that the creation of a Jewish state would cause a sea of troubles.

And there are those who say that the Palestinian problem is exaggerated, that it doesn’t really matter if they remain an occupied people, because giving them their freedom would not solve all the issues of the Middle East or placate Islamic extremists. And they, too, are right. Giving the Palestinians their state would not solve all the issues of the Middle East, but it would surely help. Again and again, year in and year out, the centrality of the Palestinian problem never goes away. Even General David Petraeus, from his command post in Afghanistan, recognized that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians was hurting America’s war efforts as far away as Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Richard Perle and David Frum, in their book, “An End to Evil, How to Win the War on Terror,” submit that “in the Arab and Muslim World, the Palestinian issue has never been about compassion, mercy, or even justice. First and always, this issue has been about vengeance…”, i.e., “the destruction of Israel and the re-conquest of the Holy Land.” This might be true of some, but this is akin to saying the Jews in Israel want to take over Jordan just because that was an original “revisionist” goal back in 1947, or because David Ben Gurion once put feelers out to the British and French in 1956 that Jordan should be divided up between Israel and Iraq. Yes, some Arabs still might want to destroy Israel, just as some Israelis want to expel all the Palestinians, but that does not represent the vast majority nor government policy in either Israel or the Arab world.

The Obama administration tried its best to talk the Palestinians out of going to the United Nations to legitimize their state but failed. Given the administration’s record, this failure was entirely predictable. Obama came into office seeming to promise a renewed energy toward trying to solve the Palestinian problem, following President Bush’s near-total support for whatever Israel wanted.

Obama went eyeball to eyeball with Netanyahu over settlements, and the Palestinians saw that Obama blinked first. It was obvious then that Obama might talk a good game, but that the Israeli tail was always going to wag the American dog. The sight of Netanyahu who, having defied and insulted the American president, addressing a joint session of Congress with congressmen and senators of both parties jumping to their feet like jack-in-the-boxes to show their support, was all anyone needed to understand Israel’s power in the American Congress.

The Democratic Party has to be mindful of pro-Zionist political support. But it is in America’s strategic interest, and ultimately in Israel’s interest too, to lance the boil of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

If it was the right thing to do to recognize the state of Israel when it was first born, it is time now to grant the same rights and privileges to the Palestinian people. The Obama administration is always talking about being on the right side of history in the Middle East. The United States could abstain, if it must, but vetoing Palestinian nationalist aspirations would put us on the wrong side of history.

More GlobalPost

Continue Reading Close

More HDS Greenway.

Wednesday, Jul 20, 2011 12:48 PM UTC

Serbia arrests last war crimes fugitive

The U.N. charged Goran Hadzic with crimes against humanity for activities during Balkan wars

By , Associated Press FILE - In this Feb. 6, 1993 file photo, Goran Hadzic, who heads representatives of the Krajina Serbs, talks with reporters at the United Nations in New York, United States. It has been reported on Wednesday, July 20, 2011 by Serbian TV station B92 that authorities have arrested Goran Hadzic, the last remaining fugitive sought by the U.N. war crimes court. Hadzic has been on the run for eight years. He is wanted for atrocities stemming from the 1991-1995 war in Croatia. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)(Credit: AP)

The last fugitive sought by the U.N. Balkan war crimes tribunal was arrested by Serbian authorities Wednesday, answering intense international demands for his capture and boosting the country’s hopes of becoming a candidate for European Union membership.

Former Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic was taken into custody as he met a man delivering him money in a forest in a mountainous region of northern Serbia where many of his relatives live, authorities said. He had dramatically changed his appearance and was armed but did not resist, they said.

Hours later, Hadzic was brought in for questioning at the war crimes court in the capital Belgrade, a key step toward his extradition to the tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands. His lawyer said Hadzic will not appeal the process, paving the way for a quick extradition, possibly within the next few days.

State TV footage showed Hadzic entering the courtroom escorted by guards. He walked slowly, slightly hunched, wearing a gray shirt, short hair and a mustache. His black beard had been shaved.

An unknown figure before the 1991-1995 ethnic war for control of Croatia, Hadzic suddenly rose to prominence through his links to Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic’s secret police. Put in charge of the self-styled Serb ministate in eastern Croatia, he was seen as a pawn of criminal gangs that collaborated heavily with the secret police and made huge profits from smuggled cars, gasoline and cigarettes.

The Hague tribunal indicted him in 2004 on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity including the murder, torture, deportation and forcible transfer of Croats and other non-Serbs from the territories he controlled.

Less than two months after the capture of Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic, Serbia’s Western-leaning president announced live on national television that “Serbia has concluded its most difficult chapter in the cooperation with the Hague Tribunal.”

“It was our moral duty,” President Boris Tadic said. “We have done this for the sake of citizens of Serbia, we have done this for the sake of the victims amongst other nations, we have done this for the sake of reconciliation, we have done this for the sake of establishing credibility of all societies, not only Serbian society.”

In his indictment Hadzic is accused of responsibility for the 1991 leveling of Vukovar, said to be the first European city entirely destroyed since World War II.

In one of the worst massacres in the Croatian conflict, Serb forces seized at least 264 non-Serbs from Vukovar Hospital after a three-month siege of the city, took them to a nearby pig farm, tortured, shot and buried them in an unmarked mass grave.

A month before about 20 kilometers (12.43 miles) southwest of Vukovar, about 50 Croats who had been detained for forced labor were made to walk through a minefield to render it safe for the Serbs, according to the indictment.

“Upon reaching the minefield, the detainees were forced to enter the minefield and sweep their feet in front of them to clear the field of mines,” it said.

Hadzic worked with paramilitary forces that became notorious for their brutality, including the “Tigers,” led by Zeljko Raznatovic, known as Arkan. In that same month of October 1991, Arkan’s men captured 28 civilians from a police facility in Dalj, tortured them and threw their bodies in the Danube. Arkan was assassinated in a Belgrade hotel in 2000.

Serge Brammertz, chief prosecutor of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, said the arrests of Mladic and Hadzic “mark a long-awaited step forward in Serbia’s cooperation.”

EU leaders immediately welcomed the arrest and saluted “the determination and commitment” of Tadic’s government.

“This is a further important step for Serbia in realizing its European perspective and equally crucial for international justice,” said a joint statement by EU president Herman Van Rompuy, European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barrios and foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.

A tribunal statement said Hadzic will be transferred to The Hague as soon as judicial procedures are completed in Serbia. That normally takes several days.

He will then be brought before a judge to hear a reading of the 14 charges against him. He may enter a plea or delay for a month.

Tribunal president O-Gon Kwon said the arrest was a milestone in the history of the court, which has indicted 161 leaders from the former Yugoslavia since it was created in 1993 at the height of the fighting.

The tribunal has been under U.N. pressure to wind up its cases and close its doors.

Serbian security police found out that Hadzic was meeting a money courier and arrested him Wednesday morning outside the village of Krusedol, Serbian war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic told reports.

Until this week, Tadic said, Serbian officials did not know where Goran Hadzic was, despite suspicions that he had been sheltered by former allies.

In the past, Hadzic had narrowly escaped arrest, apparently due to tips from within the Serbian security authorities. Serbia’s post-war authorities have for years faced accusations that they are not doing enough to hunt down the war crimes suspects.

Serbia, widely viewed as the main culprit for the wars in the Balkans, has been working to reintegrate into the international community following years of sanctions and pariah status in the 1990s.

Milosevic was extradited to the Hague tribunal in 2001 and died there in 2006, while on trial for genocide.

Along with Mladic, Serbia has also arrested war crimes fugitives Radovan Karadzic. Both are currently facing war crimes charges in the Hague.

Dusan Stojanovic and Slobodan Lekic contributed.

Continue Reading Close

More Jovana Gec.

Page 1 of 42 in United Nations

Recommendations