Canada blows Kosova's question

By SCOTT TAYLOR

Last week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper quietly announced that Canada would formally recognize Kosova's unilateral declaration of independence, a full month after the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo declared their disputed province to be the world's newest nation.

The U.S., U.K. and Germany helped orchestrate this bit of political manoeuvring by the Albanian Kosovars as they knew that any attempt to follow the legal course of independent statehood through UN channels would be vetoed by the Russians.

Canada sat on the fence for 30 days, but finally caved in to the pressure from the U.S. State Department.

Kosovo is a tiny, land-locked, mountainous, underdeveloped province in the centre of the Balkans. It is located between Serbia and Albania and, not surprisingly, its current population of two million is a mix of Serbs (10%) and Albanians (90%).

Over the past several centuries, Kosovo has been the battleground for clashing empires. Yet, despite the ebb and flow of invaders and the exodus and influx of ethnic groups, this impoverished province has always remained the religious heartland of the Serbian Orthodox church.

It is for this reason that the Serbian political leadership in Belgrade cannot concede the loss of Kosovo from their sovereign territory.

SERBIA'S JERUSALEM

As Major-General Lewis MacKenzie has opined, denying Kosovo to the Serbs would be akin to denying the Jews access to Jerusalem.

If the Serbs were to take a purely logical approach to the future of this region, they would have been the first to cut Kosovo loose.

When Kosovo was a semi-autonomous province in Yugoslavia, residents of all six Yugoslav republics had to pay a special tax to subsidize the Kosovars. This drain on the federal treasury was one of the contributing factors to the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early '90s.

Underground criminal activity has made Kosovo the illegal drug capital of Europe and the region boasts the highest prostitute per capita ratio in the world. The unemployment rate in Kosovo stands at 50%.

Despite the presence of NATO, the Albanian majority has continued attacks on protected ethnic Serbian enclaves.

The largest of these pogroms was a three-day bloodbath in March 2004, which left three-dozen people dead, hundreds injured, 800 houses burned and a number of Serbian Orthodox churches destroyed. As a result of the ethnic cleansing of all non-Albanians from the region since 1999, Kosovo is now one of the most racially "pure" territories in the entire world.

In making his announcement that Canada will recognize an independent Kosovo, Prime Minister Harper made a point of stressing the fact that this situation was completely unique from that of Quebec.

I will agree with that, but only to note that Quebec is already far more independent than Kosovo can ever be. Quebec has a resource-rich, vibrant economy, its own national assembly, foreign consulates abroad, a unique cultural identity and even a distinct flag.

OCCUPIED

In comparison, Kosovo is entirely dependant on foreign aid, will be occupied for the foreseeable future by foreign security forces, and those jubilantly celebrating their "independence" are waving the Albanian flag -- not the American-designed new Kosovo flag.

Let's hope that by the time the UN general assembly convenes in September to vote on the legality of Kosovo's independence, the Canadian government will come to its senses and withdraw its recognition. (EdmontonSun)