The Kosovo Times - Kosovo's Leading Electronic News Journal


 

From 2009 -2010 this was the website for the KOSOVO TIMES.
Content is from the site's 2009 archived pages providing a glimpse of what this site offered its readership.

The Kosovo Times was an English language independent electronic news journal published and based in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. It published news and regional news about Kosovo and the Balkans, and provided interviews and analyses on Kosovo.

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“The Kosovo Times” is an independent electronic news journal published from Prishtina. 

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29 May 2009  
Letter from the Editor
Written by Administrator  

Dear Readers,

It is my profound pleasure to greet you warmly from Prishtina, Republic of Kosovo, and thank you for your time and interest shown in our news journal.

I am honored to report that only within days of existence “The Kosovo Times” has managed to have an average of 1200 unique IP visits per day. We already have 70 subscribers for our daily Newsletter, average of 72 readers following us on RSS feed and over 600 followers following us on Twitter. At present we are being read in 166 countries around the globe.

“The Kosovo Arab Chamber for Friendship and Cooperation” is extremely proud for this success and commits itself that together with the support of our partners we are going to increase our efforts and expand the scope of services provided by “The Kosovo Times”.

I would like to thank our webmaster Tahir Hoxha who is giving his maximum to keep our site up to the beat.

Thank you Tahir, we couldn't have done it without you.

I would like also to thank our news team whose members, far away from the spotlights of public attention, are working hard to spread the image of new Kosovo throughout the world.

Kosovo is a unique place in the world and it has a lot to offer to the international family of nations. We are proud to be a link between the West and East and give our contribution for the increase of communication and cooperation between different civilizations. We are also proud to be one of the few places in the world where the west and the east have worked together in securing our freedom as was rightfully noted by the UK Secretary Miliband. 

It is my pleasure also to inform you that in the center of Prishtina, in the location of the former Kukri bar, CLICK Bar  – Café Lounge of The Kosovo Times, is open every day. You are all invited to visit us there.

World class air companies like Austrian Airlines, Turkish Airlines and Malev offer daily flight to Prishtina. If by any chance you end up in this part of the world drop by for coffee.

Best regards
your friend
Artan Rugova

 



 

LATEST NEWS 2009

 


 

Slobodan Miloševic – bad man of the millennium

23 Sep 2009 | Written by Editor
Slobodan Milošević represented the last gasp of a discredited type of politics, but he was also the harbinger of a new one – not just in the former Communist East, but also in the West. His policies ensured that Communist dictatorship would not go peacefully to its grave in Yugoslavia, as it had in most of Eastern Europe, but would instead create a spectacular conflagration, claiming the lives of tens of thousands of innocent victims before burning itself out in total defeat. Yet despite this record, or perhaps in some sense because of it, Milošević’s cause became the cause of all those across Europe and the world – conservatives of the left and conservatives of the right – for whom the idea of progress under liberal capitalism was and remains anathema.



Milošević deliberately promoted the break-up of Yugoslavia and the independence of Croatia and Slovenia; he championed free-market reforms; he struggled to build good relations with the West, even supporting the US in the 1991 Gulf conflict; he waged wars against sovereign independent states without a mandate from the UN Security Council; and he initially endorsed the activities of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The Western alliance was very slow to confront him, treating him more as a partner and collaborator than as an enemy, right up until the late 1990s. As an anti-imperialist, Milošević was no more successful, and was considerably less sincere, than he was as a Great Serbian nationalist. Yet it is not the real historical figure, rather the myth of Milošević, that has made him a hero to so many of those opposed to the ‘new world order’: he was the conservative’s Communist; the Communist’s champion of free-market reform; the peacenik’s warmonger; the UN-worshipper’s defier of international law. In sum, a paradoxical poster-boy for an anti-modern coalition comprised of opposites.

Secessionist rebellion

The real Milošević – as opposed to the myth created by his Western admirers – cannot be understood without reference to the long-term Serbian and Yugoslav historical context. Milošević was the leader of a secessionist Serbian rebellion against a Titoist Yugoslavia that had kept Serbia in check. Josip Broz Tito’s Communist-led Partisans, who fought against the Nazi occupiers of Yugoslavia, founded their federal Yugoslav state on the ruins of the Third Reich – but also on the ruins of Great Serbian nationalism. The Partisans were essentially a west-Yugoslav movement whose strongest wing was in Croatia: its leader, Tito, was a Croat, and the Communist Party of Croatia mobilized more Partisans than any other section of the Yugoslav Communist organisation. The most important source of Partisan manpower was the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia – but they fought under the banners of a free Croatia and a free Bosnia within a Yugoslav union of equals, and against the goal of a Great Serbia that was being championed by the Partisans’ anti-Communist rivals – the royalist Chetniks. The latter’s bastion was in Serbia. It was only with massive Soviet assistance that the Partisans were able to conquer Serbia and defeat the Chetniks, and in doing so the Partisans cut Serbia down to size: countries considered by many Serbs to be ‘Serb lands’ - Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro - were established as republics in their own right, while Vojvodina and Kosovo were made autonomous entities within Serbia. From the 1960s, Tito’s regime moved Yugoslavia further from the centralist constitutional model that Serb politicians had traditionally favoured, toward a semi-confederacy in which not just the republics, but the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo, increasingly behaved like sovereign entities outside the control of Belgrade. It was this ‘anti-Serb’ constitutional order that Milošević set out to destroy.

Milošević was a creature of the Titoist Communist system who rebelled against the system. He pursued an independent Serbian political line that was at variance with the wishes of other Yugoslavs, tearing apart the fragile Titoist system that depended upon consensus and compromise for its functioning; he undermined and destroyed federal institutions; and from mid 1990 he pursued a policy of expelling Croatia and Slovenia from Yugoslavia. The new Serbian constitution promulgated by Milošević in 1990 declared the ‘independence’ of Serbia and its right to pursue its own international relations; in March 1991 Milošević effectively seceded from Yugoslavia, declaring that Serbia would no longer respect the authority of the Yugoslav Presidency; in May 1991 Milošević decapitated Yugoslavia, by blocking the election of Croatia’s Stipe Mesić as Yugoslav president, thereby leaving the country without a functioning executive. Yet all this was done in the name of defending ‘Yugoslavia’. In attempting to carve out new Serbian borders, Milošević attempted to merge Titoism with Great Serbian nationalism by establishing a ‘new Yugoslavia’ composed entirely of Serb and Montenegrin entities - as defined by Milošević’s ‘socialist’ ideologue Mihailo Marković in October 1991, this meant Serbia, Montenegro and an additional Serb unit made up of ‘Serb’ lands conquered from Croatia and Bosnia - Titoist and Yugoslav in form but Great Serbian in content.

Caught in contradictions

In seeking to reconcile these irreconcilables, Milošević fell between two stools, for the young people of Serbia were unwilling to fight and die for such confused goals, in a ‘Yugoslav’ army that was neither genuinely Yugoslav, nor pursuing real, open Serb-national goals. Wracked by desertion, the military forces of Serbia and the Yugoslav People’s Army were rescued from defeat in Croatia only by Western diplomacy – not for the last time the ‘anti-imperialist’ side being saved by the ‘imperialists’. In Bosnia, Milošević’s Bosnian Serb satellites pursued an equally contradictory goal – seeking to conquer Bosnia and secede from it at the same time. The Serb genocide of Bosnian Muslims and Croats provoked a powerful Bosnian resistance, while the dirty character of the war waged by the Serbs, and the confusion over their goals and their borders, again ensured a Serb defeat.

Despite the readiness of John Major’s British Conservative government, François Mitterrand’s French Socialist regime and Bill Clinton’s vacillating US Democrat administration, to collude in Milošević’s aggression and genocide, the world-wide revulsion caused by the latter eventually mobilized a powerful global counter-current uniting principled opinion from across the political spectrum. The Srebrenica massacre marked the turning point in Western policy, which gradually shifted. NATO attacked Bosnian Serb forces in 1995; Clinton then rescued the Bosnian Serbs from defeat at the hands of the Bosnians and Croatians, forcing the latter to abandon their victorious advance, and followed this up with the ambiguous Dayton Accord, which recognized the Bosnian Serb statelet created by genocide, but nevertheless buried forever the possibility of a Great Serbia. Milošević was Clinton’s ally at Dayton, even pledging Serb cooperation with the ICTY. But the tide had turned, and when Milošević attempted a third round of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in the late 1990s, the Western alliance partially redeemed its earlier disgrace and this time took resolute action to stop him.

The movement in opposition to the Kosovo War in the West marked the scraping of the bottom of the ‘anti-imperialist’ barrel, with its selective opposition to war (it did not oppose Milošević’s), selective support for national sovereignty (it did not uphold Bosnia’s or Kosovo’s) and selective respect for UN resolutions (it did not support those directed against Milošević). This was a precursor to the equally unprincipled stance of part of the ‘anti-war’ movement over Iraq, involving support for Arab dictators, Iraqi Sunni sectarian murderers and Islamic fundamentalist fascists. Milošević – the phoney socialist, phoney anti-imperialist and phoney champion of national sovereignty – remains an appropriate hero to all those for whom opposition to ‘Bush and Blair’ is so absolute as to override all principles – such as democracy, anti-fascism, human rights, gender equality and national self-determination – that might once have been unquestionable for all politically honourable people. Milošević personifies the link between the Communist dictatorships of the twentieth century and the anti-American left of the twenty-first.

The author is a senior research fellow at Kingston University.


 

Voinovich: Kosovo issue is concluded

23 Sep 2009
Senator George Voinovich, member of the US Senate and also distinguished member of the Serbian lobby in Washington DC recently met with President Tadic of Serbia during his visit to the state of Ohio. Senator Voinovich has issued a statement, which was also published in Belgrade’s based “Danas”, saying that he fully supports the American view that the issue of Kosovo, in practical terms, is finished, and evaluated that the independence of Kosovo was the only solution for to the situation of injustice brought about by Milosevic upon the KosovoAlbanian population.

 

Kosovo is coordinating with allies

23 Sep 2009
President Fatmir Sejdiu and Kosovo’s Foreign Minister Skender Hyseni have decided to coordinate lobbying activities for new recognitions for Kosovo also with the Albanian delegation in the UN General Assembly, which is led by Prime Minister, Sali Berisha. During the next two weeks, there will also be intensive lobbying for Kosovo on the part of the USA and some European countries. The British Ambassador to Kosovo, Andrew Sparkes, has also announced that exactly will be new recognitions for Kosovo during this month.

Serbian President Boris Tadic and Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic are also visiting New York. Jeremic has stated that the Serb delegation will use all efforts to prevent new countries from recognizing Kosovo. Serbian officials will also be supported by the Russian delegation, in addition to the European countries that have refused to recognize Kosovo as independent.

 

 


 

Kosovo Serbs participating in the Kosovo local elections

23 Sep 2009
Eight Kosovo Serbs are expected to run as candidates for Mayor of Graçanica, new Municipality to be created in Kosovo as foreseen in the Ahtisari Plan. Elections will take place on November 15 which is the day of local elections throughout Kosovo.
Five of the candidates work in Serb parallel institutions, two in Kosovo institutions, whereas the eighth is Momcilo Trajkovic, well known Kosovo Serb politician and at present owner of an agricultural company.

Rada Trajkovic, another well known Kosovo Serb politician, earlier had announced her participation in the race for Graçanica mayor but she gave up at the last moment. No Kosovo Albanian candidates will run for the mayor position of this new municipality.

 

 


 

Prime Minister of Kosovo sents a letter of condolences to the Prime Minister of Bulgaria

07 Sep 2009
Prime Minister Hashim Thaçi sent a letter of condolences to his counterpart, the Prime Minister of the Republic of Bulgaria, Boyko Borissov, regarding the tragic death of Bulgarian citizens at Lake Ohrid.

The following is the letter of condolences.

Dear Prime Minister Borissov,
It was with deep sorrow that I received the tragic news of the death of your Republic’s citizens at Lake Ohrid.
The Government of the Republic of Kosovo and the people of Kosovo, have great sympathy for you, your government and the Bulgarian people.
We know that you will find the courage and strength to deal with this terrible loss.
Once again, on behalf of the Government of the Republic of Kosovo and on my personal behalf, I offer you my most sincere condolences.
Hashim Thaçi
Prime Minister of the Republic of Kosovo

+++ 

Prime Minister Thaçi also sent a letter to the Prime Minister of Macedonia.

Dear Prime Minister Gruevski,
It was with great sadness that I received the news on the tragic death of Bulgarian citizens at Lake Ohrid, in the Republic of Macedonia.
The Government of the Republic of Kosovo and Kosovo’s people have great sympathy for you, your government and the Macedonian people.>
We are convinced that, even in these difficult moments, you will find the courage and strength to deal with this great loss.
Once again, on behalf of the Government of the Republic of Kosovo and on my personal behalf, I offer you my most sincere condolences.
Hashim Thaçi
Prime Minister of the Republic of Kosovo

 


 

New Kosovo Serb political entity running for Kosovo elections

07 Sep 2009
Civic Initiative for the Municipality of Ranilug is the latest Kosovo Serb political entity which has been certified to run for the upcoming local elections. The Municipality of Ranilug is a new Kosovo Serb municipality to be created under the decentralisation plan as foreseen by the Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo. The authorities in Serbia are doing their outmost to discourage Kosovo Serbs from participating in the Kosovo local elections.

 


 

President decrees Kosovo's Ambassador to Austria

07 Sep 2009
Dr. Fatmir Sejdiu, President of the Republic of Kosovo,decreed today the Ambassador of the Republic of Kosovo to the Republic of Austria, Sabri Kiqmari. The decree was signed in accordance with article 84.10 and 84.25 of the Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo. The Republic Kosovo Diplomatic Mission is expected to open 18 Embassies in full capacity this year. Recenty Kosovo has established diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia as well.

 


 

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