De Juana to Leave Hospital

Seems like Basque political prisoner Iñaki de Juana will be discharged from the hospital were he was being treated after his long hunger strike to be allowed to serve the reminder of his sentence at home.

An article regarding this issue was published by EITb:

Iñaki de Juana could leave hospital within next few hours

Spanish radio station Radio Nacional reported ETA prisoner Iñaki de Juana Chaos has been already discharged from hospital, but Penitentiary Institutions said they have no information about that.

The General Direction of Penitentiary Institutions didn't know on Thursday at midday if the Hospital of Donostia-San Sebastian had discharged ETA prisoner Iñaki de Juana Chaos, as penitentiary sources said.

The source noted that even if doctors discharge De Juana today, he won't be able to leave hospital on the same day, as procedures have not been met.

Nevertheless, Radio Nacional informed he could leave hospital within the next few hours.

The prisoner will leave hospital when Penitentiary Institutions send the permit both to the Basque Public Health Services and Basque Police through fax.

De Juana Chaos was taken to the Basque Hospital from Madrid's Doce de Octubre on March 1 after a 115-day hunger strike.

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Nagasaki and Gernika

This note was published at The Japan Times:

Guernica to get national peace hall annual show

NAGASAKI (Kyodo) The national peace hall in Nagasaki said Tuesday it will hold this year's antinuclear exhibition at the Gernika Peace Museum Foundation in Guernica, Spain, from June 27 to Sept. 9.

The Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims will exhibit about 40 photographs showing the devastation in Nagasaki and Hiroshima following the 1945 atomic bombings and 10 items, including ruined school clothing and a piece of glass taken from a victim's body.

Guernica is commemorating the 70th anniversary of Nazi Germany's bombing of the northern Spanish city in 1937.

Sharing a similar past, Nagasaki and Guernica have developed friendly ties. Guernica Mayor Miguel Angel Aranaz paid a courtesy call in January on Nagasaki Mayor Itcho Ito, who was murdered in April.

"I would like to call for the eradication of nuclear arms by joining hands with people in Guernica who experienced a tragedy just like us," said Sakue Shimohira, the head of an organization of families of Nagasaki victims.

Actually, the bombing took place in the Basque Country, not in northern Spain.

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Eusko Flickr : Hamaika ikusteko

Hamaika ikusteko
Originally uploaded by asier pagoaga.

Orson Wells in Euskal Herria II

This is a segment of a documentary that Orson Wells produced about the Basque Country.

The segment shows a bit of the everyday life in Iparralde, the northern Basque Country. But pay attention to the last few minutes when it goes into the part that the Basques played in WWII, specially the very end when it describes how a young boy was tortured by the Nazis to obtain information about the boy's father who was in charge of smuggling Allied pilots, political dissidents and Jewish children into the southern Basque Country were they would be transferred to England.

I mention this because you will not find any information about this in the Yad Vashem nor the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

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Sol

We just published an entry about Eva Forest, now we present you this bio about Solomon Frankel and how he aided the Basque children that found refugee from Franco's genocidal campaign in England and how he fought against Franco's forces in Spain. It was published at The Independent, here you have it:

Sol Frankel

Veteran of the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of Cable Street

Jim Jump

Solomon Frankel, tailor and political activist: born London 31 March 1914; married 1943 Pearl Simonson (died 1999; one son, one daughter); died London 18 May 2007.

Sol Frankel was one of the generation of secular Jews who embraced Communism in the 1930s and 1940s and made the Communist Party an influential force in the political life of London's East End. He took part in the Battle of Cable Street against Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts, fought in the Spanish Civil War against General Franco's Fascist-backed rebellion and returned home injured to pursue his political activism for another three decades.

Frankel was among a small group of Communists who defied the Home Secretary Herbert Morrison in 1941 and published the Stepney Worker after their party's newspaper, the Daily Worker, had been banned because of its criticism of the war effort and aims. Though naturally right-handed, he supplied cartoons for the stencil-duplicated paper drawn with his left hand, his other having been disabled by a bullet wound in Spain. The Stepney Worker continued to appear during the 19 months of the ban, leaving plenty of time for Frankel to fall in love with its editor, Pearl Simonson. They were married in 1943.

The high point of Communist influence in the East End came soon afterwards, with the election in 1945 of the Jewish Phil Piratin as the local MP, one of two Communists in the House of Commons. Frankel and his wife stayed loyal to the Party longer than most, the last straw being the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, when they left and joined the Labour Party. "Socialism is my religion," he would tell his family and friends.

One of nine children of Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, Frankel was born in 1914 in Whitechapel, in the East End, and left school at the age of 14 to work as a tailor in the sweatshops of the local clothing trade. He witnessed the rise of Fascism and anti-Semitism in the 1930s, when Jewish-owned shop-windows were frequently smashed. He was a member of the Labour League of Youth but later left to join the Communist Party over what he saw as the Labour Party's failure to stand up to Fascism at home and in Europe.

Frankel was always proud of his involvement in the Battle of Cable Street when, on 4 October 1936, Blackshirts were prevented from marching through the streets where many of Stepney's 60,000 Jewish residents lived. The Communist Party mobilised its supporters to block Mosley's path. In contrast, the Labour Party urged everyone to stay away from the area - a hands-off approach that was mirrored in its initial support for the government's embargo on arms sales to the Spanish Republic. Frankel was in the thick of the Cable Street fighting, digging up paving stones and building the barricades.

The slogan chosen by the Cable Street demonstrators, "No pasarán" ("They shall not pass"), was the one used by the defenders of Madrid as they faced Franco's attempt to overrun the Spanish capital with help from Hitler and Mussolini. Frankel, like many other Jewish socialists, saw the Spanish Civil War as an opportunity to fight back against Hitler and Fascism. As many as 20 per cent of the 2,300 International Brigaders from the British Isles were Jewish.

Before going to Spain, Frankel was a volunteer at the refugee camp outside Southampton for nearly 4,000 Basque children who had arrived in May 1937 following the bombing of Guernica by Hitler's Condor Legion. He helped put up tents and dig latrines. Being in the camp on the day it was announced that Bilbao had fallen to the Fascists left a big impression on him. The children were distraught and the older ones rioted and broke camp. "We were up all night looking for them, trying to round them up. They called us 'fascistas'. They were trying to get away so that they could go back to Spain to fight against Franco."

The experience helped convince him that he should go to Spain. Aged 23, he arrived at the British battalion's base in Tarazona de la Mancha in December 1937 and, after training, was promoted to sergeant in the machine-gun company. He saw action in the Battle of the Ebro in July 1938 and was wounded in the fierce fighting around Gandesa. "I poked my head above the trench and a bullet grazed my hat," he said.

When I was shot I remember seeing the glint of an enemy rifle. I didn't realise I'd been shot, but I was thrown backwards. I had taken a bullet through the arm. When the stretcher-bearers came, they carried me away under fire. They were incredibly brave.

Nerves and tendons in his right arm had been severed and he remained in hospital in Barcelona for three months. His hand was left permanently partially paralysed.

His injury disqualified him from military service in the Second World War - though he was a volunteer air-raid patrol warden in the Blitz - but not from resuming his work as a tailor. He became a shop steward for the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers and worked in East End factories until retirement in the early 1970s. He learnt to grip the cloth with his disabled hand clenched while sewing with his left hand.

After the war, with their home bombed out, Frankel moved to the suburbs of Golders Green, then Edgware and, in 1958, Crawley, though he still commuted to his work in the East End. Living in the north-west of London made him a member of the Wembley branch of the Communist Party, the same as Harry Pollitt, the Party's general secretary for 25 years. Pollitt was a frequent visitor to the Frankel family home, both on Party business and for social evenings. In 1973, Frankel and his wife moved to Wales and ran a guest-house near Aberystwyth, before settling in Leeds until Pearl's death in 1999, when he returned to London.

His idealism and political activism found expression during the 1950s and 1960s in the CND and anti-apartheid movements. He didn't return to Spain until democracy was restored after Franco's death in 1975. His final visit was in 2003, on the 65th anniversary of the Battle of the Ebro, when International Brigaders from around the world were reunited in significant numbers for probably the last time.

One small little detail, democracy has not been fully restored in Spain yet, and the Basque Country is still occupied, against the will of its people.

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Eva

This bio about the great freedom fighter Eva Forest was published at ZNet:

Eva Forest: The Passing of a Spanish Icon

Supriyo Chatterjee

It was typical of Eva Forest, who died after an illness on May 19 at Hondarribia in Basque country, Spain, at the age of 79, to tell a friend days before her passing that she was living the best days of her life. A Left-wing icon whom the Spanish state could never silence nor smear, defiant till the very end of the harsh Spanish political system, and a great friend of Vietnam, Cuba and latterly of Venezuela and Bolivia, she is being remembered with great affection throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

Eva was born into a politically active family in Barcelona in 1928. Her painter father, an anarchist who felt that schools were a repressive institution, kept her at home for as long as he lived. It was some time after his death in 1936 that she set foot in a formal educational institute. That also was the year in which the civil war started and in 1939 Eva was at the point of being flown out to Russia from a nursery created with Swiss help for Spanish children, when her mother pulled her out of the truck moments before it set off towards the evacuation point.

Eva Forest gained a degree in psychiatry at Madrid and at the final year of her studies in 1955 she met and married Alfonso Sastre, playwright, essayist and a relentless critic of censorship lf the Franco era. They stayed together till the end, a couple who collaborated so closely in their work that they progressively thought and wrote alike.

With Aflonso's persecution in Spain, the couple left for Paris in 1956, where their first son was born. At this time, she moved away from psychiatry towards a "sui generis sociology" and wrote her first novel, Febrero. They returned to Spain in 1962 and she was detained after joining other women demonstrating in support of Asturian miners. She was fined, refused to pay it and was sent to prison with her new-born daughter.

In 1968, Franco imposed a state of emergency. Eva's response was to edit, along with her friends, a clandestine journal, Information, and the more widely circulated samizdat publication, State of Emergency. A Catalan by birth, her identification with the Basque cause started with characteristic fearlessness in 1970, when she was among those who worked to set up a solidarity committee during the farcical Burgos trial of 1970 against Basque prisoners, which ended with death sentences being handed out and later commuted following an international outcry. She was arrested in 1974 for writing under the pseudonym of Julen Agirre Operation Ogre, a book that detailed the car bomb assassination in 1973 by the Basque group, ETA, of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Spanish premier and Franco's most intimate collaborator. Eva was tortured and kept in preventive custody for three years, accused of collaborating with ETA, a charge never proven.

Her account of imprisonment, translated as From a Spanish Prison, shone light on the arbitrariness of the Spanish justice system and her own humanity and capacity for love for her children, her family and others amid great adversity. Prison was also the impulse for her to set up TAT, a group dedicated to working against torture, and to write extensively on the subject. As a torture victim herself, she campaigned till the very end against torture, ruing that despite years of all the work, it still tended to be common place.

After her release, the family moved to Basque country where Eva lived till the end. She aligned herself with the Basque Left and was at one time elected as a regional Senator on a Left ticket. She was also an incorrigible internationalist who could feel as her own the pain of others. We are responsible for own actions and our own silences, she said and Eva did not do silence. She visited Iraq in 1998 and wrote a book about it, 'Iraq, a Challenge to the New World Order?' She was intrigued by the anthropology of the 'new man' emerging in Cuba, interviewing peasants who learn for the first time to speak out in public and live in solidarity with others.

Eva Forest was a prolific writer, of novels and polemical reports on issues that were not profitable to commercial publishers. Since 1990 she kept herself busy with Hitu, her own publishing company that functioned on cooperative lines. She would edit, translate, pack and even sell books. The most eloquent homage to her is something she had written as an eulogy for one of her companions: "Pick up the sleep of our deaths and turn them into a creative arm that perforates impossibles and drills through utopia in search of new ways of speeding up the process of humanisation." Alfonso, her own companion of a lifetime, survives her and so does his little prophecy: "And one day, companion, we will return in triumph to the inhabited space that never was ours".

(Eva Forest 1928-2007)

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Spain Shows Its Fascist Colors

Throughout his 40 years at the head of a murderous regime Francisco Franco enjoyed of an special treatment by the international community and the main stream media, everyone looked the other way. He was after all a "formidable ally" against Socialism, so, his numerous crimes were forgiven, and sadly, it seems like they were also forgotten.

How else can you explain the gusto with which Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and his allegedly socialist government had used the Francoist minded Law of Political Parties against the nationalist Basque electoral lists?

Rodriguez Zapatero claims to represent the dreams and projects of those Spanish Republicans who escaped Franco's slaughter house, yet, he does not hesitate to use a repressive tool left to him by his predecessor, José María Aznar, a rabid extreme-right thug.

If the members of the Partido Popular have shown a complete disdain for the Basque people right to their self determination it is understandable, they are after all the ideological children of the likes of Hitler, Franco and Mussolini. But to see the members of the PSOE wanting to outdo the PP tells us a story of how democracy never truly arrived in Spain.

This note was issued by UPI:

Spain bans Basque party from elections

MADRID, May 16 (UPI) -- Spain's highest court has banned the Basque separatist group Abertzale Sozialisten Batasuna, or ABS, from participating in elections.

However, ABS party officials said they would field candidates in local and regional elections scheduled for May 27, EFE news agency reported Wednesday.

The head of the political wing of Basque separatists Batasuna, Joseba Alvarez, accused Spanish President Jose Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of abandoning the fragile peace process between the Spanish government and the Basque separatist group ETA.

Oh yeah, and I removed the biased 800 paragraph.

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The Fueros

Some history, courtesy of EITb:

Fiestas & traditions

The Fueros: Origin of the Basques' special status

05/21/2007

These Fueros consisted of a set of ordinances in public and private law which regulated the way the Basque Provinces and Navarra were administered.

In historical terms, the word Fuero usually refers to the foundational charters of cities and boroughs. These charters were designed to concentrate families in specific places and often included a number of privileges and exemptions. But where the Basque provinces and Navarra are concerned, the term Fueros does not refer to local dispensations but to a series of general laws that these territories laid down for themselves at a time when they enjoyed a large degree of autonomy. These Fueros consisted of a set of ordinances in public and private law which regulated the way the Basque Provinces and Navarra were administered.

The Fueros took shape as a body of law arising from a series of customs and habitual practices that were themselves a reflection of a specific way of thinking and feeling. Perhaps one of the most distinctive features of the Fueros as a whole is their flexibility in the face of changing social conditions.

As one expert put it: "A fuero isn't something that suddenly appears, like a new constitution; rather, it is something that is shaped gradually, grounded in history itself. So foral [the adjective derives from fuero] formulas cannot be discarded as inadequate; they are formed continually, are constantly renewed, and do not attempt to base their ultimate justification on preceding formulations. So each formulation is another landmark on the path to their final completion."

The term fuero has often been associated with privilege. But it should be said that the two have nothing in common. The Fueros do not derive from a supreme authority, but from the repeated practices of a community. To be able to draft such Fueros a community has to be autonomous, i.e., it must have the capacity to endow itself with the legal framework within which it carries on all its activities. So the Fueros are best defined not as a gratia, but rather as a ius.

These principles, defended by prestigious jurists, were repeated by Javier Pérez Anaiz in his El Concierto Económico: evolución, caracteres y fundamentos de la financiación vasca [Economic Agreement: evolution, nature and foundations of the system of Basque financing] published by the Basque Institute of Public Administration (IVAP) in 1992.

So it can be fairly said that the Fueros are an exceptional distinguishing feature of the Basque Country. Each territory (Bizkaia, Alava, Gipuzkoa and Navarra, in Spain; Benavarre, Laburdi and Zuberoa in France) has its own history and has shaped its own law, with a number of similarities and common forms.

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Cynical Conde-Pumpido

When you know you are part of a repressive state and that your actions will be met with impunity, you can pretty much say whatever you want, and that is exactly what Candido Conde-Pumpido just did regarding the banning of the nationalist Basque electoral lists by the out of the closet fascist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

Here you have a note published by EITB about this topic:

Politics

Public Prosecutor: "We possibly went too far, but it washed"

05/17/2007

Candido Conde-Pumpido voiced his doubts on their intervention barring so many lists of candidates for local and regional elections, since "there are towns in which there is practically no list of candidates left."

Spain's Public Prosecutor, Candido Conde-Pumpido, said he didn't know if "we have gone too far" after banning so many lists of candidates supposedly linked to outlawed Batasuna. The process culminated on Wednesday as the Supreme Court barred the registration of ASB (Union of Socialist Nationalists) as a political party at the Interior Ministry. As Conde-Pumpido said, there are towns in which there are "almost no lists of candidates. We possibly went too far, but it washed," he said, to highlight later that both the Supreme and Constitutional Courts endorsed his interpretation abiding by Parties' Law.

At an informative breakfast, Conde-Pumpido affirmed that in the process to hinder Batasuna's presence in elections what worked was "scalpel, and not garrotte. We removed the tumour, without hurting the patient."

The State's Public Prosecutor assured that some people believe the Parties' Law is "some kind of electoral Guantanamo," where there are 150,000 people that can't vote, even if the target of this law is "to push towards peace, and not towards violence." "The Parties' Law doesn't say that Batasuna's voters can't vote" and noted that if every time they vote for a list it has to be outlawed "we are pushing them towards violence," even if the law aims at integrating even those who reject a democratic system into it.

Anyway, he warned that Public Prosecution will be on the alert to see if there are judicially relevant circumstances that can be considered as a reason to outlaw a party. He specified that the public petition by Batasuna for the ballot for ANV (Basque Nationalist Action) is not a sufficient reason for its outlawing, citing the case of the Communist Party of the Basque Lands, legal leftwing nationalist party with representation in the Basque Parliament.

And some idiots insist on calling Spain a democracy.

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One More Albanian Nation

The note you are about to read is a perfect example of just how sick and twisted international politics really are.

It tells us about the decision by the UN to go ahead and provide the Albanians with a second nation, since Albania was not enough apparently.

The note by Slobodan Lekic appeared at Yahoo News, it is called "Other Separatists Buoyed by Kosovo Push" and it starts out like this:

From the jungles of Indonesia to Spain's Basque country, separatists of the world are drawing hope from the approach of U.N.-approved independence of Kosovo.

"The Kosovo precedent will be important for us," said Igor Smirnov, leader of the Trans-Dniester region that seeks to break away from Moldova. He maintains that his tiny enclave has an even better case for independence than Kosovo.

Another hopeful Kosovo-watcher is Iraqi Kurdistan. "It's important that Kosovo achieves independence through a U.N. Security Council resolution because that will establish a legal principle which will also some day apply to Kurdistan," said Mahmoud Othman, a senior Kurdish member of the Iraqi parliament.

So far so good, but then things start to turn for the worst:

The United States and European Union, which are backing a U.N. plan to grant "supervised independence" to the predominantly ethnic Albanian province of Serbia, dismiss suggestions that it would encourage separatist movements elsewhere.

Excuse me?

What did I miss here?

Let me start by saying that is quite appalling that the USA and the EU have the gall to dismiss what they call "separatist movements elsewhere". For Christ sake, they are about to provide the Albanians with a second nation just like that, out of the blue, but they refuse to acknowledge the legitimate demand by other nations to their own sovereignty?

Does Europe really need a second Albanian state? I mean, lets be honest, the first one is not faring that well and at least it has a coast line, the new one is landlocked besides being tiny and sadly underdeveloped.

How can the Europeans thinks that a second Albanian state is a good thing while at the same time openly stating that a Basque state, or a Scottish state, or a Corsican state are not needed.

And how come the Albanians can be called ethnic Albanians but according to the extreme right in the USA and other parts of the world if the Basques or the Sami claim to be an ethnic group they are labeled racists?

And so it is that the Albanians are different from the Serbians, but the Basques are not different from the Spaniards, how inconsistent don't you think?

Then the article goes on telling us about how Russia and of course Serbia, oppose the creation of this new Albanian state:

But the plan is strongly opposed by Serbia and Russia, which will settle at most for wide local autonomy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned in February that independence for Kosovo would be taken as a precedent by others, including pro-Russian breakaway provinces in the ex-Soviet republics of Georgia and Moldova.

This issue has become a major irritant in the already strained relations between the West and a resurgent Russia.

The latest attempt to defuse tensions foundered this week after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Putin failed to find common ground. Kosovo also figures in Russia's wider dispute with the EU, jeopardizing plans to create a "strategic partnership" between Moscow and Brussels.

But wait, there is more, check out this paragraph by this Finnish gentleman:

The author of the Kosovo plan, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, said he did not believe a precedent would be set by granting the province independence. "No two problem areas are the same," he said.

How so?

How come Kosovo and Euskal Herria are not the same? Could he be more explicit please?

The author of the article provides an answer for double faced Ahtisaari:

But in some of the four dozen territories around the world aspiring to break free, Kosovo's future looks set to have far-reaching effects — especially if separation is engineered through a Security Council resolution.

"Kosovo's independence would certainly have broad and destabilizing consequences for many other secessionist conflicts," warns Bruno Coppieters, head of the Political Sciences Department at Brussels Free University.

In Indonesia, it could have a powerful impact on the two separatist-minded provinces of Aceh and West Papua, said Damien Kingsbury, a key adviser to the separatist Free Aceh Movement.

Indonesia, which has already lost East Timor, "is always sensitive about issues affecting territorial integrity, so it will be very worried," Kingsbury said.

The U.S. and EU insist Kosovo is a special case because it has been a ward of the international community since a U.N. administration was set up in 1999. That followed a brief aerial war during which NATO ejected Serb forces accused of mounting a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the 2 million Albanian inhabitants.

Oh yes, and then the fail to mention the ethnic cleansing of Serbians and Macedonians carried out by the ethnic Albanian KLA/NLA.

Now check out this Daniel Fried idiot being just plain fascitious:

"A new Security Council resolution would clearly specify that this was a unique case not applicable to other regions," Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried said in a recent interview.

Fried said the Bush administration intends to sponsor the new resolution, based on Ahtisaari's plan. "Kosovo will be independent one way or the other," he said.

What he is saying is, the world will do whatever the USA says, hey, the Albanian Americans are paying me good money to say this.

Enter the European Union:

While the European Union also insists Kosovo is no precedent, some of its member states have their own restive regions to contend with — Catalonia and the Basque country in Spain, Flanders in Belgium, Hungarian nationalists in Slovakia and Cyprus' breakaway Turkish Republic.

Hold your wild horses European Union.

Kosovo is not a precedent?

Are Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Montenegro a precedent?

Why is Europe being so blind about what just happened in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland?

Why nothing seems to be a precedent for the hopes of self determination of the Basques, Catalans, Corsicans and Britons among others?

Well, according to the article, Basque and Kurds have something to say about it:

A parliamentary spokesman for the Basque Nationalist Party, the main party in the regional government of northern Spain's Basque region, sees the Kosovo plan as "a very positive development."

"We think this could be a very good precedent, and someday we could aspire to something similar," said Josu Erkoreka.

Othman, the Kurd, said it is inaccurate to argue Kosovo is somehow special.

"Just like Kosovo, Iraqi Kurdistan has also been under international protection (since the 1991 Gulf War). There is no difference," he said in a telephone interview from Baghdad.

Any move by Iraq's Kurdish provinces to break free would create a major political headache for Washington and invite armed intervention from neighboring Turkey, which has its own restless Kurdish minority.

And finally, some rather cryptic words by some Tim Judah:

Tim Judah, a London-based Balkan analyst and author, said the Security Council ideally should grant Kosovo independence but simultaneously repudiate unilateral secessions elsewhere.

But he expects that "whatever the Security Council does may nonetheless encourage some secessionist groups somewhere."

But of course Judah, because no matter how many colonialist minded lunatics like yourself are out there, the will of the people will always prevail.

Because you know what Tim Judah?

The Security Council is telling people that when the United Nations demand from the nations without statehood to find a peaceful and negotiated solution to their self-determination dreams it is plain out being deceptive, because the Security Council is about to grant independence to a region of Serbia as a feeble response to the pressure exercised by the Albanian-American community and the lobbyists they hired to turn the Congress members attention over the issue.

As always the media has played an important role by creating a wall of lies and misconceptions around the Kosovo Liberation Army, a murderous organization that under the protection of the UN Blue Helmets carried out authentic ethnic cleansing operations against the Serbian population of Kosovo. This KLA later morphed into the National Liberation Army because many Albanians wish to wrestle away portions of land from Macedonia, Greece, Croatia and Montenegro to create what they call the Greater Albania. The NLA had its 15 minutes of fame a few years ago when again, protected by the UN, tried to spark conflict in neighboring Macedonia claiming that the Albanians were too being mistreated by the Macedonians.

They failed then, but after Kosovo gains its independence the NLA will make sure to keep expanding Albania. And a whole new ethnic cleansing era will start, because these NLA thugs really enjoy murdering defenceless people.

One last thing, the UN is being so hypocritical about the whole issue that it is not mentioning that one of the reason why this independence is supposed to be "supervised" is because they are requesting from Kosovo not to join Albania at the most pure Texan style.

But I am telling you now, Kosovo will become part of Albania within five years of winning its independence.

I leave you with a couple of questions; why is the UN so adamant about telling other ethnic groups to forgo of their self determination plans when the own UN Charter enshrines the right of all people to their self determination?

Why is the European Union, a union of European nations playing by the rules of the states, forgetting about all the nations within those states?

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