More money spent to save the Dinar

In the past few days, Serb central bank has spent 50 million Euros buying up its own currency amid reports that there is a great deal of demand for foreign currency.

An economist Goran Nikolic tells Serbian daily Glas Javnosti that the 50 million spent is a dramatic action and says that there is a large demand for foreign currency. He did not specify who wants out of Dinar but said that bankers in Serbia are expecting the inflow of foreign capital to slow, so just like their banking kin in the West, the bankers in Serbia maybe the first to move and hoard foreign denominated cash.

Further, with private, non government debt at $20 billion and payments for it coming due, there is a likelihood that these private firms may soon themselves move to convert their Dinar holdings into foreign currency. As the financial contagion spreads across the world, these firms may realize that moving in first to convert has the advantage because being last means no money can be converted and that will force them to default on their debt. While the decision to move first may be rational, it is often a trigger for a run on the currency.

Serbian chief central banker, Radovan Jelasic, went public in number of venues to reassure soundness of the financial system and expressed his resolve to defend the Serbian currency. Jelasic told the public today that savings in Serbian banks are safe by citing that 45% of foreign currency deposits are with the central bank and that the banks are well capitalized up to one third.

Jelasic tells Belgrade daily Vecernje Novosti that savings accounts denominated in foreign currency are near 6 billion Euros of which 30% can be withdrawn at any time, while deposits of up to one year account for 27% of that.

According to these figures then, if there was a run on foreign denominated savings deposits central bank will immediately lose about 1.8 billion Euros or $2.43 billion (the 30%).

This translates into a depletion of official reserves down to $7.1 billion and that moves the debt-to-reserve ratio to the really alarming level of 52%.

An ordinary, conventional mortgage on a house in the US requires that this ratio must not exceed 37.5%.

These 3 sources as a possible trigger for a run on the currency whose effect is ballooning the debt-to-reserve ratio will cause a serious downgrade in creditworthiness of Serbia by the credit rating agencies such as the Moody’s. Such downgrade is followed by some serious consequences to the ability of the government to borrow.

Meanwhile, capital flight is collapsing the Belgrade stock exchange which has gone below 1000 from the height of 3000. The bourse is planning to introduce curbs on trading by limiting the bid-ask spreads to within 20%. Trading curbs are in effect in the US and the drastic collapse of the US Dow Jones during that time suggests that the curbs may do more damage then good.

One the bright spot in these negative news is the capitalization of the banks that operate in the Serbian market. According to Nikolic, the ratio of capital to exposure to risk is 3 times higher in Serbia then in rest of the Europe, and perhaps this conservatism in lending, may be the magic bullet that dissuades depositors from a run on their deposits.

Is Serbia setting up for a run on its currency?

States and countries have became the latest victims of the financial hemorrhaging that is sweeping the globe.

Over the weekend the debt laden California is seeking emergency loans from Washington in order to avoid bankruptcy while Iceland is doing the same kind of begging from their neighbors to rescue them from reckless lending their banks did.

Bankers are suddenly alarmed that Pakistan may default on its debt as its debt-to-reserve ratio rose from 30% to 32%.

Turkey’s debt-to-reserve ratio of 31% is already alarming the IMF and may table that country at this week’s IMF/World Bank meeting in the US.

If what is happening to these countries is any suggestive what may await the debt strapped “developing” Serbia, the picture, at least for next several weeks, may look very alarming.

Serbia’s public debt obligations of $3.7 billion are a whopping 39% of its foreign reserves of $9.5 billion that the Central Bank has in the vault.

The larger the ratio the less money country has come bill payment time.

In addition, Serbia’s private debt is over $20 billion and to pay their payments, private firms will soon seek to convert their domestic Dinars from the Central Bank and deplete the savings even more.

The way to reduce this percent and have more money for paying bills, is for Serbia to export more, or attract more foreign investment or borrow on more favorable terms to pay its bills.

Serbia is paying only lip service to exports, globe trots for the diminishing pool of investment money and is running out of favorable borrowing terms.

IMFs recent report on its visit to Serbia assesses that “exports are not keeping up with surging imports” and has already warned of Serbia’s “unsustainable external current account deficit.”

The word “unsustainable” is often a code word to speculators that country’s currency may soon take a hit.

This outflow of reserves, says IMF, is offset by “abundant capital inflows [that] have, at least until now, largely defused macroeconomic tensions.”

But what about after now?

With borrowing terms now reduced to only 24 hours at a time, it will be a long time when banks will become willing to borrow long so that a country may pay off its short funding demands.

IMFs optimistic prognosis that Serbia’s “real GDP to continue to expand at a robust 6-7 percent during 2008-09″ is then predicated more on hopes then reality that foreign investors will have enough money in the future to pump into Serbia’s economy and keep its local currency propped up.

So, we have a 1-2-3 knock out set up on the currency - unsustainable trade deficit, prospect of diminishing foreign investment inflow and tight borrowing terms - all a culmination of an 8 year old borrow-and-spend policy.

Hungary proposes regional gas network

Hungary is proposing a New European Transmission System for gas that will form a regional country network including Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Bosnia.

The rationally for this initiative is to drive the price of gas all these countries individually buy from Russia down. In addition, the network would share the risk in an event of some pipeline problems.

Croatian Plinacro, Hungarian FGSZ Natural Gas Transmission and Romanian Transgaz have signed a memorandum of understanding on this proposal, and in all likelihood, will lead the project.

Serbian Srbijagas and Slovenian Plinovidija are waiting it out to develop their own internal consensus and evaluate the strategy.

Serbia itself is trying to finalize a gas deal with Russia.

Is Kosovo precedent set for China?

As U.S. Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham held hands with Dalai Lama recently (July 25, 2008) the constant carping drumbeat on China and a cherubic portrayal of Tibetans holds flavor similar to what was done in the media with the Serbs who opposed separatists in Kosovo in order to pave the way for Serbia’s eventual decapitation.

Now that Kosovo precedent is set so that other separatists can be recognized, Washington may be debating whether to sideline Tibet in order to woo China away from Russia, as Tony Blair recently argued, or to move Tibet on the main burner now that Moscow and Beijing do not see eye to an eye on Russian recognition of separatists in Georgia.

The decision on China may have to come soon because, in the immediate future, now that the Olympics are over, it is likely that China will seek to avenge the deaths of their 16 policemen and inflict some playback for being embarrassed by Tibet. The looming prospect of violence in China could force a definitive decision on China policy.

McCain with Kosovo Albanian separatists

For China, intervention in Tibet could definitively remind them of CIAs involvement with Dalai Lama, alas through his older brother as the proxy.

The story below, substituting “freedom movement” as euphemism for separatism and decapitation of China, may very well be the preemptive media blitz prior to shifting the action away from Georgia.

With the main point of the story below being CIA’s involvement in destabilization of China up through the end of the 1960s, the subtler message is that the destabilization of China, like of Serbia in the 1990s that led to its later dismemberment, could be repeated again because, after all, CIA would have something to prove here after “Most of the agents the CIA sent into Tibet were captured or killed,” by the Chinese.

Revolt of the Monks

How a Secret CIA Campaign Against China
50 Years Ago Continues to Fester;
A Role for Dalai Lama’s Brother

By PETER WONACOTT
August 30, 2008; Page A1

DARJEELING, India — Chodak, an 83-year-old former monk, fled Tibet in the wake of a bloody Chinese invasion more than 50 years ago. Today, he spends his days trimming wool carpets at a refugee center perched above the tranquil tea plantations of this Indian hill town. The plight of Tibetan exiles like Chodak, and their Buddhist message of nonviolence, has drawn world-wide sympathy to their cause.

But Chodak’s story has a twist. He’s one of the last surviving guerrilla fighters who took up arms against the Chinese during a little-known chapter in Tibet’s history. His life has been one of war, not peace.

Starting in the late 1950s, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency trained scores of Tibetans, many of them monks, and then air dropped them back to their country with weapons and wireless radios. The linchpin of the operation was an older brother of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of 2.7 million Tibetans and today a Nobel Prize-winning symbol of peaceful resistance.

“We were fighting to protect Buddhism from those who wanted to harm it,” said Chodak in an interview, his eyes now clouded with cataracts.

These days, armed with little more than his message of peace and the occasional chortle at Beijing’s expense, the 73-year-old Dalai Lama enjoys the upper hand in an international public-relations war. He inspires protests that embarrass the Chinese government around the world, including during the recently concluded Beijing Olympics. He also provokes over-the-top denunciations from Chinese officials. During the unrest in March, Tibet’s Communist Party Secretary, Zhang Qingli, accused the Dalai Lama of sabotaging the region’s stability and described the Buddhist leader as a “a wolf in monk’s clothes, a devil with a human face.”

The Dalai Lama deflects such accusations with dry humor, saying repeatedly that if Tibet’s freedom movement ever became violent, he’d step away from politics. “Please investigate,” he said of the charges that he inflamed Tibetan protests in March. “If we are really the instigator, we are awaiting punishment.”

He has said that he wasn’t aware of the 1950s-era armed resistance in the beginning, and that upon learning about it, he didn’t encourage Tibetans to join it. He also disavows any plan to see Tibet become independent, pressing merely for China to allow Tibetans more local autonomy to preserve their customs and language.

But the history of the resistance movement — and the Dalai Lama’s close family connection to it — remains very much a part of the ongoing tensions with China. It helps explain why even rudimentary reconciliation talks — the next round is expected in October — have gone nowhere.

* * *

John Kenneth Knaus, a retired CIA officer who led a covert Tibet command center from New Delhi in the 1960s, remembers the Dalai Lama as torn — personally sympathetic to his brave compatriots but unwilling publicly to support a bloody rebellion that ran counter to his Buddhist belief in protecting life.

“The Dalai Lama knew everything that was going on, but he couldn’t give his blessing,” says Mr. Knaus, author of the 1999 book “Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival.”

Gyalo Thondup, one of the Dalai Lama’s brothers and the former resistance leader, declined to be interviewed for this story. “It’s a very sensitive and inopportune time to talk, from the points of view of many different parties,” said one of his sons, Tempa Thondup, in a message conveyed from the elder Mr. Thondup. People who answered the door at Gyalo Thondup’s residences in New Delhi and Kalimpong, India, said the 80-year-old wasn’t at home.

Stories recounted by Tibetan resistance fighters, including six surviving guerrillas, demonstrate the deep involvement of Mr. Thondup in the CIA-backed operation.

Mr. Thondup came to the resistance movement with rare qualities for Tibetans of his generation — a fluency in Mandarin and an understanding of China’s history. In 1949, he was studying in the wartime capital of Nanjing when the People’s Liberation Army vanquished the Nationalist forces. Mr. Thondup and his Chinese wife, the daughter of a Nationalist general, eventually settled in Darjeeling, near the Indian border with Nepal.

When the CIA made contact with him in the early 1950s, Mr. Thondup had been organizing escape routes for Tibetans fleeing Chinese rule. His wife, Nancy Chu, helped establish the center where refugees learned handicrafts so they could make a living on Indian soil.

A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment on the Tibetan operation.

The refugees arrived with tales of misery and horror. Tsering Dakpa, a Tibetan farmer, says in 1954 he watched Chinese soldiers drag suspected rebels outside a village and force them to dig a trench filled with freezing water. The men were stripped, thrown into the trench and — when they didn’t answer questions satisfactorily — shot, according to Mr. Dakpa.

“My heart stopped,” the 77-year-old says of the execution. “I decided then I’d join the resistance.”

That same year, the Dalai Lama had gone to Beijing to meet with China’s leaders, including Mao Zedong, in hopes of securing more religious and political autonomy for Tibet. But back home, in the Tibetan region of Kham, an anti-China resistance had already taken root.

The Battle at Litang

It was in Kham, in 1956, that one of the most violent clashes occurred, a days-long battle at the Litang Monastery. One of the Litang monks was Chodak, who now works at the refugee center in Darjeeling. He recalls a meeting in which a Chinese general urged them to abandon their weapons. The monks carried weapons to defend themselves from bandits. Chodak says the general threatened to burn down the monastery if they didn’t comply.

“The Chinese said they were protecting us, and that there was no need to carry weapons,” says Nawang Datha, another monk. “We refused.”

Instead, the Litang monks sneaked up at night and attacked a nearby Chinese camp, according to Mr. Datha and Chodak.

The Chinese army responded by charging the monastery in a pre-dawn raid. The Tibetans fought back with homemade pistols, antique rifles, axes and knives.

“Everybody was rushing here and there,” says Chodak. “We didn’t know who we were killing.”

Mr. Datha’s younger brother, Tenlay Tenzing, managed to flee the monastery earlier on the family’s black horse. Chinese troops shot the horse, but the monk kept running. Coming upon the horse carcass later, Mr. Datha feared his younger brother had been killed — only to be reunited later at their parents’ home. When bombs from Chinese airplanes were dropped on the monastery, Chodak fled to Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, a weeks-long walk, but far from the fighting in Kham.

China’s official history of the fighting at Litang says the monks reacted violently to Chinese efforts to abolish a “feudal serf system” and “slavery,” according to the Web site of the Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture People’s Government, a part of Sichuan province that includes Litang. The government accused Tibetan rebels in the area of attacking military and government officials, damaging roads and bridges as well as raping, looting and killing. As a result, the Communist Party of China extended “important orders for the suppression of unrest,” the Web site says, calling it a “war of liberation.”

The events at Litang inflamed passions across Tibet and helped fuel the resistance movement. Many monks, left without a monastery, shed their robes to fight the Chinese. Warring Tibetan clans set aside grievances to unite in battle. The CIA later would gain several recruits from Litang, who wanted to match China’s soldiers with modern firepower and military training of their own.

Flight to Darjeeling

One of the Litang monks, who went by the name Lhotse and was the older brother of Messrs. Datha and Tenzing, fled to Darjeeling, posing as a trader. When he arrived, he knocked on the door of Mr. Thondup.

The brother of the 14th Dalai Lama, Mr. Thondup was already a prominent figure among Tibetans and his political sympathies were well known. After listening to Lhotse recount the failed uprising, Mr. Thondup responded with a proposition.

“If you want to go for training,” he said, “I may have a place to send you.”

The monk agreed to the secret mission, according to interviews with his two surviving brothers, whom he later told about the conversation.

In addition to Lhotse, Mr. Thondup recruited five Tibetan fighters and sent them in early 1957 for training with CIA instructors on the Pacific island of Saipan. The Tibetans learned how to operate a radio transmitter, fire modern weapons and set up ambushes.

The Dalai Lama’s oldest brother, Thubten Jigme Norbu, served as a translator on Saipan. Mr. Norbu, a retired professor of Tibetan studies at Indiana University, is now in poor health and unable to respond to comment, according to his youngest brother, Tendzin Choegyal.

After six months in Saipan, Lhotse and a monk named Athar parachuted back into Tibet. Traveling with other rebels, the pair relayed radio requests for weapons and supplies and kept the CIA apprised of the resistance inside Tibet.

Arms Deliveries

Mr. Knaus, the former CIA officer, testified in writing to the U.S. Congress in 1999 that the CIA made two arms drops into Tibet in July 1958 and Feb. 1959. These included 403 Lee Enfield rifles, 60 hand grenades, 20 machine guns and 26,000 rounds of ammunition. By the late 1960s, Mr. Knaus estimates, the CIA had dropped 700,000 pounds of supplies to the rebels.

China’s attempts to quell unrest around Lhasa worsened tensions. In March 1959, the Dalai Lama sneaked out of the city’s Potala Palace and headed for India on horseback. The CIA-trained rebels hooked up with the Dalai Lama, sending radio updates on his whereabouts to Washington.

As Tibet’s spiritual leader was about to cross safely into India, the rebels cheered and waved. The Dalai Lama waved back.

Chodak interpreted the wave as “a long-distance blessing,” he says. “Then we went back to fighting.”

The Dalai Lama’s aides say that at the time the Tibetan leader didn’t have a good grasp of the resistance, or of how the CIA was involved. “His brother really kept him in the dark — for his own sake,” says Tempa Tsering, the Dalai Lama’s representative in New Delhi.

Secret Training

As Mr. Thondup filled out the ranks of the CIA-backed resistance, Mr. Datha and his brother Mr. Tenzing also enlisted. Mr. Tenzing recalls arriving in 1959 at a secluded training base in the Colorado Rockies called Camp Hale. He gazed at the pine forests and snow-covered peaks. “I felt I was back in Tibet,” he says. Tibetans would train secretly in Colorado until 1964, according to Mr. Knaus’s written testimony to Congress.

Mr. Thondup traveled extensively to publicize Tibet’s plight, recruit fighters and forge links with foreign intelligence agencies, according to another of his sons, Khedroob Thondup, who acted as his private secretary.

During Mr. Thondup’s rare breaks at home, the family went on picnics in the misty hills of Darjeeling. The children practiced shooting Mr. Thondup’s old Winchester rifle. He also taught them how to prune his prize roses.

But inside Tibet, the resistance was wilting. China’s superior radio communications allowed it to outmaneuver fighters. Its air power crushed Tibetan fighters. Most of the agents the CIA sent into Tibet were captured or killed.

In disarray, the rebels retreated to a mountainous base known as Mustang just beyond southern Tibet inside Nepal. Fighters at Mustang say Mr. Thondup showed up periodically to rally spirits. “You don’t have to worry about food and supplies. We have sponsors that will take care of that,” Mr. Thondup said, according to Nyima Namgyal, one of the rebels who heard the Dalai Lama’s brother speak at Mustang.

“We had an idea it was America,” added Mr. Namgyal, now 65 years old and living in a retirement home in Dharmsala.

So many arrived at Mustang that supplies were stretched thin. Chodak says he sold his sword and charm box — an amulet he wore around his neck — to buy provisions. The rebels raided farms inside Tibet for sheep that would provide food and wool to fend off the cold.

Infighting posed as grave a threat to the Mustang operation as the Chinese army. Several of the Tibetan fighters complained that the commander was pocketing funds, according to Mr. Tenzing. In 1968, disgusted with what had become of the resistance, Mr. Tenzing returned to Darjeeling and opened a dumpling restaurant.

For the Americans in the late 1960s, the operation was reaching the end of its usefulness. The CIA had closed training camps years earlier and was winding down supply runs. Mired in Vietnam, the U.S. government worried about getting drawn deeper into another Asian conflict. In 1972, President Nixon met with Chinese leader Mao Zedong, ushering in a new era of the U.S. and China relationship.

For the Dalai Lama, a new stance toward China would take shape, too. In the early 1970s, he sought to disband the rebels and end the bloodshed. Chodak says he concluded his war with the Chinese after a tearful 1972 meeting with the Dalai Lama in Dharmsala.

Not everyone agreed to leave Mustang. Some fighters shot themselves or slit their own throats rather than disobey the Dalai Lama’s orders, according to his spokesman Tenzin Taklha.

By then, the fighting with China was essentially over. In 1974, the Dalai Lama huddled with aides in a sunlit meeting room at his residence. “We made up our minds that, sooner or later, we would have to talk with the Chinese government,” he said in a recent interview. “Independence was no longer relevant.”

The man who would serve as the go-between with the Chinese government was someone both sides knew well. He was the Dalai Lama’s older brother, Gyalo Thondup.

Write to Peter Wonacott at peter.wonacott@wsj.com

Islam’s swipe at liberty again

Islam’s latest global swipe on liberty, peculiarly enough, starts from Serbia where the western media has been telling us, despite the evidence, that Muslims do not exhibit militancy but tolerance.

To the delusions in the Western media, particularly UKs, the ‘I told you so’ moment came yesterday when a Serbian book publisher Aleksandar Jasic pulled a book after the official Islamic Community in Serbia attacked Sherry Jones’ novel The Jewel of Medina set to go on sale this week.

Jasic apologized but the chief Imam in Serbia went public pretending to be the sage of a human soul and said that the apology is not enough and that he needs to “sincerely repent”.

Similar calls for sincerity in atonement were also heard in Denmark or Holland in prior cases where authors of books and artwork did not repent sufficiently enough in the eyes of the Muslims who beheaded them.

Of course, Imam Zukorlic of Serbia never read Jones’ novel and some more sane do understand that the Imam is just part of the world-wide Islamic mob mentality, the Umma, that has one of the lowest number of books published per head.

To compensate for their own bliss of stupidity, wealthy Muslims buy the intellectual allegiance to Islam by funding “scholars” in western universities that are in the perennial shortage of money. Several Muslims from Serbia are on faculty boards of some of those purchases.

So may be the case of the University of Texas in Austin associate professor of Islamic history Denise Spellberg who started this latest Islamic mob attack after she read Jones’ advanced copy, phoned her influential Islamic blogger and her friend, Shahed Amanullah, frantically alerting him that the book has “made fun of Muslims and their history”.

Amanullah then sent an email to a listserv of Middle East and Islamic studies graduate student saying that he knows nothing about this book but a trusted source, who cares for Islam, told him that it was offensive.

The triumph of the ignorant comes after another blogger, Shahid Pradhan, who also hasn’t read the book, posts a headline on a Shiite website: “upcoming book, ‘Jewel of Medina’: A new attempt to slander the Prophet of Islam” to which, two and a half hours later, another Muslim by name of Ali Hemani responds with a 7-point plan on a strategy to ensure “the writer withdraws this book from the stores and apologize all the muslims across the world”, a plan that an Imam in Serbia is now executing.

So what are all these Muslims upset about?

Jones’ attempt to write historical novel about Aisha, wife of the prophet Mohammed, is described by Spellberg as a book that plays “with a sacred history and turn[s] it into soft core pornography”.

For her part, Jones says that she is devastated adding “I wanted to honor Aisha and all the wives of Mohammed by giving voice to them, remarkable women whose crucial roles in the shaping of Islam have so often been ignored - silenced - by historians.”

Consider the passage that honors Aisha’s consummation of marriage to the 40-something Mohammed:

the pain of consummation soon melted away. Mohammed was so gentle. I hardly felt the scorpion’s sting. To be in his arms, skin to skin, was the bliss I had longed for all my life.

It may be “soft core pornography” as Spellberg says only until one realizes that Aisha novelized here was only 9 years old!

How many 9 year olds, including Jones, fantasize about “scorpion’s sting” by a 40 year old murderer?

Is child-rape really the “sacred history” of Islam?

Then again, a book that may answer this curiosity will, in all likelihood, get pulled off the shelf just like this Jones’ glorification of pedophilia.

Fighting over Georgia… in quotes

“The Russian army is trying to enforce peace, and to do that, we have to attack the Georgian military,” which is shelling South Ossetian villages and towns from outside the region’s nominal border, Sergei Ivanov, Russia’s deputy prime minister, said on CNN.

Are there any additional reasons, usually ones denied?

“We don’t want regime change in Tbilisi. Our goal is the peaceful settlement of the conflict,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Boris Malakhov. “However, the fate of Saakashvili is in the hands of his own people.”

“I’d like to say straightaway that regime change is an American expression. We do not use such an expression. But sometimes there are occasions, and we know from history, that there are different leaders who come to power, either democratically or semi-democratically, and they become an obstacle,” says Ambassador Vitaly Churkin.

Could a reverse-Milosevic await Saakashvili…

“We have to stop the genocide,” said Sergei Ivanov, Russia’s deputy prime minister.

 

Saakashvili aside, but for now…

Georgian collapse “certainly raised concerns about Georgia’s reliability as a transit route” says Julian Lee, a specialist on the Caspian at the Centre for Global Energy Studies in London so, as a result of Russia’s proximity bombing of the pipeline, British Petroleum duly closed down the pipeline it operates in Georgia, days after having BPs CEO driven out of Russia and the defeated UKs Prime Minister Gordon Brown can only wield a rhetorical scimitar that “Russia’s military actions would damage its relations with other countries.”

Such as which?

“This is clearly part of a bigger game, which is the expansion of NATO,” Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said. “Today Georgia’s entry [into NATO] is more complicated,” he said. “It doesn’t behoove us to pit ourselves against Russia. Russia is a strategic partner.”

 

Could Sarkozy’s Moscow visit confirm this?

“I think what you have confirmed here is good news,” that Russia stopped the opertions. “A cease-fire now has to take shape… We must draw up a rapid calendar so that each side can go back to the positions of before the crisis.”

Is Russia backward looking as Sarkozy?

“I cannot see us accepting this French draft of the resolution,” says Vitaly Churkin although Russia’s deputy chief of General Staff, Col.-Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn suggested that “some sort of international mediation effort to watch how both sides comply with a cease-fire agreement” is in the offing.

So who is to blame?

“It was Germany that led the opposition …for Georgia… not [to] be allowed to enter NATO. We presumably won’t know for some time what the precise calculations were inside the Kremlin when it came to the decision to send troops into Georgia, but one can surely assume that the German position did nothing to discourage Russia’s plans,” write Gary Schmitt, director of the American Enterprise Institute’s program on advanced strategic studies and Mauro Lorenzo, an AEI resident fellow.

However, unnamed sources paraphrased in the media say that “many officials in the U.S. government who have worked on the Russia relationship in recent years said, President Bush lionized Mr. Saakashvili as a model for democracy in the region to a point that the Georgian leader may have held unrealistic expectations about the amount of support he might receive from the U.S. and the West.”

“The Bush administration didn’t in any way encourage Saakashvili’s move against the Russians, but it didn’t do enough to rein him in,” said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It encouraged the creation of a Georgian president who was too big for his britches.”

The Gruzya opportunity

For the West, warfare in Georgia is a wonderful opportunity to impose itself as a mediator in matters in the region and thus reduce Russia to a status of an aggressor to whom it will be dictated.

As we see no NATO troops bombing Russia on Saakashvili’s behalf, as NATO did on behalf of Kosovo Albanian separatists, Russia would be foolish to accept Western “mediation” whose nature and objectives are amply evidenced on Serbia, since Dayton through Rambulliet and as recently as with supposed talks on the Kosovo status.

On the other hand, events in Georgia are a perfect opportunity for Russia to demonstrate that it is a great power and to successfully do that it should squash Saakashvili like a worm, establish a new ruler in Georgia, then find another country that is totally innocent of anything, accuse them of something, apropos Iraq, then overthrow its ruler quicker then Saddam hung on the string… to postpone Desert Storm like armada on its southern flank which may come there anyway once Iran is taken out.

Kerry opens Islamic gab-fest

John Kerry opens Islamic gab-fest at the Yale University where, among other Islamic dignitaries, Bosnia’s Muslim Chief Imam Mustafa Ceric preached that Europe must stop genociding Jews and Muslims.

Well, Newt Gingrich has it wrong when he says, in his Winning the Future, that the “Western civilization joins us at this crossroads” because he may be all alone at that intersection.

John Kerry, a man who wanted to rule over Americans, has already crossed and surrendered to those that Newt correctly describes as ones that “would censor our civilization and accept[sic] lectures on tolerance from theocrats who oppress women and outlaw all religions but their own.”

Below we see John Kerry with his friends.

Videos of all speeches are available here:
http://www.yale.edu/divinity/video/commonword/video.shtml

Bosnian Muslim Lesbian Liaisons

Hana Hadžiavdagic, Bosnian Muslim socialite, halo on the picture, claims to be a heterosexual as much as George Michael.

In the picture above, recently shot, she is enjoying some feminine palpation that quickly turned into a public tongue-fest (see below).

Muslim Hana says that she is not involved with the Serbian singer Marija Serifovic, a winner the Eurovision song contest in 2007 not known to be in any specific lesbian relationship.

“Marija Serifovic was not the only female I kissed in the mouth,” Hana said.

As an aside though, Bosnia’s Islamic leaders are rather silent on these lesbian liaisons by one of their own.

Croats upset at Serb-made beer bottles

While some in the US are upset at the sale of the Anheuser Busch, the quintessential German American beer, to a Belgian-Brazilian beer consortium, Croatians are upset not that Danish Carlsberg already owns their favorite brew, the Pan, but that its bottles are made in Serbia.

“Is it possible that this Croatian product, that is a symbol of the entire northern Croatia, became an imported product so that by purchasing Pan, instead of the Croatian, now strengthen Serbian owners, they ask,” Vecernji List quotes the Croatian masses.

For Croatians, of course, it is very upsetting, not that their favorite Croatian beer is not even Croat, but that the bottle the average brew-loving Croat has to hold as he pours the drunken malt into the mouth is Serb-made… so scandalous that an average Croat may suddenly choke if he finds out about his bottle while engaging the heart-warming beer gulp.

…and why so?

Well, Vecernji List itself has found that up to 40% of Croatians approve of their genocide of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies in WWII: 25% of educated Croats believe that WWII Croat Nazi Ustasa are “freedom fighters” and additional 12.5% believe that Ustasa are patriots and good Catholics. Slap the usual statistical margin of error, say 3%, and, viola, 40% of Croats believe Nazis are the good guys.

Given these statistics, it is rather axiomatic then that some Croats would be, indeed, very upset that their beloved beer bottles are made by the people that they did not succeed in killing.

For some visual context to the survey view the video below:

VIDEO: Dodik removes Bosnian Muslim flag hoisted in front of him

Dodik on July 4, 2008 in Trebinje accused by Muslims of “attacking” Bosian flag. 

Senator who canned Holbrooke dies

Senator Jessie Helms died and to Serbs he should be remembered as a man that canned Richard Holbrooke. Explained New York Times then:

Senator Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said today that it would be ”insane” to hold confirmation hearings for Richard C. Holbrooke until the Justice Department had turned over internal documents about its ethics investigation of the longtime diplomat.

Besides Holbrooke’s morals that Helms questioned… well, lets leave it at that.

Are Egypt’s spies converging on Bosnia?

During a visit to the Bosnian city of Mostar, Egypt’s representative for Bosnia Ahmed ElSayed Khattab donated about $3,000 (4,000 Bosnian Marks) to be spent on trinkets and promised to develop “tourism” of that city currently split between Croats on one side of the Neretva river and Bosnian Muslims on the other.

After a visit to Mostar’s Islamic Center, Khattab then announced the big plan Egypt has for “tourism” in the region.

“Starting next season,” says Khattab for Dnevni List “every weekend 165 Egyptians will come and spend 2 nights in Mostar and with that support development of tourism in the Hercegovina center”.

Khattab’s promise translates into 8,580 Egyptian visits annually to a city that is deeply divided and whose only tourist attraction is an old bridge and tall rocks from which Serbs were thrown to their deaths into Neretva river twice in the twentieth century.

Financing this stupid “tourist” plan is not the only initiative Egypt is undertaking in Bosnia.

Last year, Egypt seized on another stupid idea by a Bosnian Muslim adventurer Samir Osmanagic who claims that he has discovered man-made pyramids in Bosnia that possibly date to pre ice age!

“In the future we will call this land [Bosnia]: ‘The land of pyramids.’”, said Egypt’s Prof. Dr. Hamed from Cairo University.

“This is an unbelievable discovery! It will take some time in order to understand the mystery of these amazing stone structures and how they have been built,” declared Prof. Dr. Soleiman Hamed El Heweli an alleged expert in the field of Pharaonic periods from Egypt’s Department for Archaeological Conservation from the Cairo University.

…and how much time will Egypt need to understand the supposed “mystery”?

By having the Egyptian Geological Survey & Mining Authority joining on the fun, it could take decades to discover a “mystery” that has already been amply surveyed and diagnosed by the President of the European Association of Archaeologists Anthony Harding, an archaeology professor at England’s University of Exeter, who said that he and his colleagues think the “pyramids” are a natural phenomena.

“My opinion and the opinion of my colleagues is what we saw was entirely geological in nature,” said Harding. “Further work of the same kind would simply produce the same results. I don’t think it would change any view about what the nature of the hill is,” Harding said.

Meanwhile, Samir Osmanagic’s “archeological” work was elevated to the diplomatic status between Egypt and Bosnian Muslims.

Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosny and the Secretary General of the High Council for Culture of Egypt Gaber Asfour sponsored Osmanagic’s archeological presentation in Cairo and summoned “number of embassies in Egypt, Bosnian students, archeology professors and other guests” so they can all marvel at this archeological fiction.

With degrees in Political Science, Economics, readings in Sociology and a Masters in International Economy, Osmanagic is, at least on paper, nowhere near qualified to even talk about archeology but, nuh!, he has a foundation the Archaeological Park: Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun, perhaps Huston-based where he lives and that is mysteriously funded to peddle bogus archeological claims in Bosnia.

So we have Egypt peddling stupid “tourist” plan for Bosnia designed to establish a free flow of 8,500 “tourists” and a “scientific” engagement that establishes a free flow of Egyptian “experts” into Bosnia: What’s Hosni Mubarak up to here?

Former Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the US House of Representatives, Yossef Bodansky, says that, back in the 1990s, Clinton was willing to see al-Qaeda overthrow Mubarak “as an acceptable price for reducing the terrorist threat to US forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina.”

What Bodansky suggests is that, back then, Mubarak was unable to control the Islamists he was exporting out of Egypt into Bosnia and Mubarak’s insistent requests to extradite these coup plotters has not yielded fruit: witness wrangling over Amgad Fath Allah Yusuf ‘Amir who married an Albanian woman, has 3 children with her and a Bosnian citizenship.

Mubarak’s problem in Bosnia is that these Egyptian jihadists that are threatening him are also intimidating to the Bosnian Muslim judges who use the fact that they married “locally” as a pretext to block Hosni’s extradition requests.

“We are all code red,” said Aiman Elhamalaway, a Jihadist who works for the Bosnia-based Human Relief International, an Egyptian foundation that is outlawed in Egypt. “If we ever go back to Egypt, which we will not, our names come up bright red on a computer so the police know we should be immediately arrested.”

Financing highly publicized stupid projects is a non-intrusve way for Egypt to establish a spy network across Bosnia and use it to eliminate the Jihadists, something no Bosnian Muslim authority wants to do not just out of fear but also out of their debt of gratitude. Supposing that 10% of the 8,500 planned touring Egyptians are spies and some among the pyramid experts are Hosni’s spy masters, then about 1,000 of Mubarak’s security may soon infiltrate Bosnia in search of a pay back for the coup plotting in the earlier decade.

As Egypt’s Khattab says, we’ll know whether this is happening only a year from now by reports, often that will be ignored, of mysterious deaths of domiciled Bosnian Jihadists.

Bosnian Muslims award Biden

Bosnian Muslims, led by their chief Imam Ceric, have designated an award Srebrenica 1995 to the US Senator Joseph Biden citing his support for the Bosnian Muslim Jihad during 1990s and singling out, in particular, Biden’s vehement support for lifting an arms embargo so Bosnian Muslims could arm themselves and thus kill more Christian Serbs.

Need we ask the rhetorical: why is an Islamic religious leader, once again, singular in his spiritual gratitude to weapons and killing?

US apologizes to a terrorist

At first it was “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” then the war on Islamic terror mutated to providing luxurious amenities to Gitmo killers. Few days ago the US-led war on terror hit another new nadir: US Embassy in Bosnia apologizes to Abu Hamza al-Suri who made Bosnia his new home after he successfully concluded his Jihad there.

Plastered on the web site of the US Embassy in Bosnia is a footnote, itself an irony on the giant degeneration of the war on terror, that apologizes to a Muslim terrorist whom even his terror-loving native Syria wants extradited so they can kill him.

“This paragraph was edited on June 4, 2008 to correct an error. Imad Al-Hussein, who is also known as Abu Hamza al-Suri, was incorrectly identified as convicted terrorist Abu Hamza al-Masri. We deeply regret this error,” reads the footnote.

Bosnian Muslim extremist media quickly seized on the footnote and made it a headline.

Abu Hamza talks on al-Qaeda as part of the Bosnian Army.

Hamza came out in the public in an anti-American offensive by appealing to the Bosnian Muslim Supreme Court for advice claiming that it needs a court protection from wild-eyed Americans that are assigning onto him criminal acts done by a similarly named Abu Hamza but al-Masri because, Hamza says, US has no proof that he is involved in al-Qaeda terror.

“For the sake of truth and justice I beg you to come forth for me and advise me what to do next,” Hamza wrote to the Bosnian Muslim Court.

That the Bosnian Muslim courts are a showcase for Bosnian Muslim extremists illustrates the latest front page story of the SAFF Magazine, an arm of al-Qaeda with offshoot websites such as BH Muslim Monitor with whom it shares the same favorites browser icon, a subtle but significant ideological identifier for web-surfing Muslims.

After Bosnian Muslim court freed 4 terrorists for an alleged lack of evidence, the terrorists -  Rijad Rustempašic, Muhamed Meco, Abdulah Handžic and Edis Velic - went on a public arousal of believing Bosnian Muslims claiming to them that their own Islamic police cussed at Allah.

“When they brought me at the central of the Federal MUP, there came one inspector, sits by the table where I was and deliberately loudly cussed at Allah,” said Muhamed Meco.

Swell for the Bosnian Muslim institutions for botching this bunch of terrorists but what does the terror-unfriendly Serb portion of Bosnia, the Republika Srpska, got to do with corrupt and inept Bosnian Muslim courts that routinely set free known terrorists as well as the potential ones.

Well, according to the US Embassy in Bosnia, Serbs are guilty for the dysfunctional and terror-friendly Bosnian Muslim institutions.

“The dysfunctional Bosnian state government and efforts by Republika Srpska officials to undermine state-level institutions contributed to a slowdown, and in some cases, setbacks in efforts to improve operational capabilities to combat terrorism and terrorism finance,” claims the Embassy.

Of course, bashing on Bosnian Serbs and favoring Muslims is the favorite pastime for the official Washington ever since James Baker, after getting Eagleburger to whip up some media fervor for Muslims, found the dog to side with in the Balkans.

Having set the State Department on the “anti-Serb” automatic pilot through those proxies, it is easy for the Saudi Sultan to claim on his website that he has been instrumental in charting and determining the course in the Balkans.

Bosnian Muslim ordained by UK Muslims

Association of Islamic scientists of Britain gave the highest award to Bosnian Muslim chief Mustafa Ceric for his life’s work. He was proud that the award was also shared by such “dignitaries” as Alija Izetbegovic who has a street in Saudi Arabia named after him because, surmise it to say, it was Izetbegovic who brought Jihad to the west.

“There is no contemporary Islam and non contemporary one,” said Ceric. “Islam is one - contemporary and eternal.”

Ceric was enthroned as the chief by Izetbegovic who issued passports to the Jihadis by the thousands. At least, two of the 19 hijackers that hit on 9/11 got their training is Bosnia.

“My vision is, as in all of Islam, is simple: believe and do good deeds in the name of Allah,” says Ceric.

Most consider Ceric to be a “moderate” Muslim… so lets wait and see the “immoderate” one.

Rumor: Albanian terrorist claimed to be CIA agent

Let’s be clear: this is a rumor made by a blogger from Athens and it claims that after the burning down of the US Embassy in Belgrade, a document has appeared which states that the militant leader of the Albanian National Army, an Albanian group designated as terrorist, is a CIA Agent.

This could very well be a miracle of the digital software that can play tricks on the truth and of notice here is the blurring of the vital information as well as the picture which could indicate that the con man may be weak on his software abilities. Those in the know of these kinds of documents may point to more flaws in the above picture.

Then again, I am just re-blogging a rumor originating elsewhere that rings little suspicions because, during the burning down of the Belgrade Embassy, the emphasis was on whether the sensitive areas of the building have been penetrated by the rioters.

Post-Kosovo Musings

- With his recognition of Kosovo’s independence, Bush managed to enter the anals of Serbian history right along with the distinguished Murad II whose rule was marked by the long war he fought against the Christian peoples, says Wikipedia. Then again, Daniel Fried at the State Department says that Serbs are mistaken about their own history.

- Speaking of history, Maryland became the first colony to institutionalize slavery in 1640 - 1640!. “I mean, after all, we’re talking about something from 1389 — 1389! It’s time to move forward,” says Condolezza Rice. Oups! My bad, she was talking about Serbs.

- As for Noel Malcolm’s Is Kosovo Serbia? We ask a historian in the Guardian it is worthy to remember that the stupidest fool is the one that always shouts the loudest mistaking his noise for wisdom.

- On the blowback on US Embassy attack in Belgrade: Attacking fools in Belgrade insipire a fool to attack Melissa Bean.

- Serbia is devotedly accused of violating minority rights for so long until, suddenly, the minority carves out a Serb-free state that the accusers recognize.

- The corollary to the above axiom: Every time Serbia refuses to recognize an ethnically Serb-free state, it is accussed of a return to Milosevic-style hardline nationalism.

- Don’t let anyone fool you, you Serb! Losing your own land in exchange for joining the EU is a great deal. Just wait few years for reasons as those who will tell them to you are being recruited.

Kosovo and the missing Pope

With the election of Pope Benedict, Vatican has initiated a noble pursuit of shrinking the divide between the Catholic Church and the Christian Orthodox Church body with the ultimate goal of reuniting the Church.

Many Orthodox Christians and their leaders, including the Patriarch of Russia, are keenly warm on the initiative.

All these good intentions, however, may quickly spiral off and break down unless the Vatican takes a more concerted effort among European states in containing the declaration of independence by the Kosovo separatists. Doing nothing while a fellow Christian Orthodox country is victimized by Islamic extreme radicals in the Kosovo province will not go unnoticed among the Orthodox nations.

For Pope Benedict, a good place to exert some of its positive effort is on his native Germany.

Little Musings

The ‘pro-Western” President of Serbia, Tadic has sidelined any discussion on a membership deal with EU for post-Kosovo days and for any European nation that recognizes this rogue state, Tadic’s job will become proportionally harder by a factor larger then one. After such diplomatic gang-rape, Tadic may have to stop any “integration” talks, at least to upkeep his dignity among the Serb electorate if anything.

***

Speaking of dignity, Rice has made an offer to Tadic that will really enhance his dignity among Serbian voters. Rice proposes, wink! wink!, that Washington send “aid” to Serbia so to ease the pain of losing Kosovo. Now that is a real bargain that even the most corrupt rulers in history managed to pass by.

***

How do we know we are talking to a sadist?

Council On Foreign Relations: “Is that agreeable to the Serbs in Kosovo?”

Frank Wisner: “Now, will Serbs, despite that, be incited, or in a tense environment pick up an incident or two and take fright…”

Again, How do we know we are talking to a sadist? Can’t be when the victim is accused of violence, could it?!

***

Col. Richard Hayes, deputy commander of Task Force Falcon, the U.S. contingent in the 15,000-strong Kosovo Force recalling an incident of Albanian Muslim youths throwing Molotov cocktails at a Serbian church:

“But was that ethnic violence or kids just being stupid?” Hayes asked. “We’ve had a couple of instances like that.”

Gee, Colonel, those Muslim kids and Molotov cocktails. We should ban churches.

***

Lie of the week:

“Russia doesn’t have among its political instruments any measures for punishing anyone,” says Russia’s FM Lavrov. We see Ukraine agrees with that.