Resistance to break-up of Serbia-Montenegro

On Tuesday, May 30, the European Union-appointed head of the Montenegrin Referendum Commission, Slovakian diplomat František Lipka, officially announced that voters in Montenegro, the smaller of the two republics making up the Serbia-Montenegro federation in the Balkans, had voted for independence by a margin of 55.5 percent to 44.5 percent, or 230,661 to 185,002 votes.

However, revolted by the fact that Lipka had turned down all 200 of their objections to the referendum process, the pro-union political parties have announced that they "won't recognize" the referendum's results, vowing to remain in coalition for next fall's parliamentary elections, and to continue fighting to maintain ties with Serbia.

Over the previous decade, the EU and the U.S. had given both diplomatic and financial support to the regime of Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, a former Communist youth leader, encouraging him on his path of secession from the Serbia-Montenegro federation, the final remnant of the former 6-republic Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia seceded from Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, thanks primarily to German-led E.U. diplomacy), using a two-pronged approach of "rewarding" Montenegro while "punishing" Serbia both diplomatically and financially. This was the best way to drive a wedge within the Montenegrin population, 80 percent of which is of Serb origin, but with a strong tradition of statehood of its own. Indeed, parts of today's Montenegro had become known as the "Serbian Sparta" between the 16th and the 19th centuries, as the only unconquered territory in this part of Europe during the rule of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, and their own, Christian "prince-bishops" that ruled them. However, after Yugoslavia fell to communism in 1945, the new regime started encouraging the formation of a new, "Montenegrin" identity, as a way of diluting the influence of the Serbs, by far the most numerous nation within Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and with the opening up of both the educational system and the media, many Montenegrins started rediscovering their Serbian roots. Thus, in a 1992-referendum, about two-thirds of the population voted for union with Serbia.

It was with the pretext of seeking to weaken Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia that the West began to encourage a new separatist sentiment in Montenegro in the second half of the 1990s. However, Western policy did not change even after Milosevic's fall in October 2000, and Montenegrin separatism continued to be tacitly encouraged as a way to force Serbia to give up its Muslim Albanian-dominated Kosovo province - which is what ultimately led to the May 21st referendum and Montenegro's new, independent status.

However, Montenegro's pro-union coalition charges that the EU, in addition to favoring the Muslim Albanian element in Kosovo, has also used the Kosovo Albanians to tilt the scales in favor of Montenegrin independence. Namely, while Albanians officially make up slightly more than 7 percent of Montenegro's population, there were widespread allegations of polling irregularities in Albanian-dominated areas of Montenegro, and suspicions that thousands of Albanians were shipped in from Kosovo, Albania and the West to illegally vote in the referendum.

Indeed, in the week before the elections, sources from the UN mission in Kosovo claimed that "6-7,000" Kosovo Albanians "in that week alone" had been "issued fake ID cards" in order to vote in the referendum. Furthermore, an official of the National Democratic Institute stationed in Montenegro, stated that "at least 16,000 Albanians had been flown in from Western states (most of them free of charge, courtesy of the Montenegrin state airline) to vote, while the Kosovo "Koha Ditore" daily boasted that "the 2,000 Albanians" that flew in from the U.S. alone had secured victory for the secessionists. (At the same time, as mentioned in the previous G2B report, the EU had barred the more than 250,000 Montenegrin citizens living in Serbia from voting in the referendum, whose votes would have overwhelmingly secured a pro-union result.)

As mentioned above, the EU's Lipka foreclosed all possibility of officially investigating these claims by rejecting every single one of the more than 200 polling objections lodged by the pro-union bloc. And, even before Lipka's official announcement, the EU's foreign affairs commissioner, Javier Solana, announced that, as far as the EU was concerned, "the referendum process was finished." At the same time, in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina, the E.U.-appointed "High Commissioner" stated that "there was no possibility" of allowing Republika Srpska, the Bosnian entity with a 90 percent+ Serb population, to hold a Montenegrin-style independence referendum.

Both the EU and the U.S. have now openly declared their policy of using Muslim populations in the Balkans to destabilize or even disintegrate national states, while forcing Christian populations to live inside Muslim-dominated states. And, with the unabated influx of Muslim immigrants into the Western countries themselves, it appears that this has become the chosen way of the present Western elites to dilute the traditional nation-state, on the way to its elimination. It shall be seen whether the announced determination to fight this trend inside Montenegro, by the remnants of the "Serbian Sparta," shall bear fruit.

Thanks to sorabia.net and G2B contributor Aleksandar Pavic

This entry was posted by rodoyf, on Sunday, June 04, 2006. You can leave your response.