A street sweeper cleans the area around the American embassy in Belgrade February 22, 2008. Serbian rioters, enraged by Kosovo's secession, stormed the U.S. embassy in Belgrade and set it on fire on Thursday.
Photo: Reuters
| Other Photos |
 |
|
 |
Fed Council Steps In to Support Protesting Serbs
The adherents of Kosovo separatism should think not about the Moscow arm but rather about democracy in Serbia, said Mikhail Margelov, who chairs the RF Federation Council Foreign Committee.
“There is democracy in Serbia and its citizens have the rights for freedom of meetings and rallies. They may protest against unprecedented cutting of an original piece of their land,” the senator told RBC.
“Richard Holbrooke, U.S. former envoy to U.N. and ally of Kosovo separatists, has striped them of this right,” Margelov concluded.
Margelov reminded that the Serbs had voted nearly 50/50 for pro-European and nationalist candidates in the presidential election there. “In other words even then, the chances of one or another political orientation of the country were equal. Only a gentle push was needed to shift the unsteady balance to nationalism. And provoking independence of Kosovo isn’t a gentle push, it is the backhand blow on already injured national vanity of the Serbs.”
“The fact that [declaring independence has] not happened as peacefully as people had hoped is the direct result of the incitement to violence by extremist elements in Belgrade, implicitly and privately supported by the Russians,” Richard Holbrooke, top foreign advisor in the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and chief architect of the Dayton peace accords for former Yugoslavia, told CNN in live air, provoking the Russians to respond.
www.kommersant.com
|
|
|
