Here We Go: Serbs Go Ape Shit, Set U.S. Embassy on Fire

Bubba Clinton’s Balkans abortion has come back to haunt us.

BELGRADE (Reuters) - Scores of protesters broke into the U.S. embassy in Belgrade on Thursday and set rooms on fire in protest at Kosovo’s independence, before riot police moved in and dispersed the crowd.

Police had earlier been nowhere to be seen at the building which had been closed and boarded up after rioters stoned it earlier in the week.

Black smoke billowed out of the embassy. Papers and chairs were thrown out of the windows, with doors wedged in the window frames and burning.

One protester climbed up to the first floor of the building, ripped the Stars and Stripes off its pole and briefly put up a Serbian flag in its place.

Some protesters jumped up and down on the embassy balcony, holding up a Serbian flag as the crowd below of about 1,000 people cheered them on, shouting “Serbia, Serbia.”

Some 200 riot police finally arrived about half an hour later, beating and arresting some of the rioters and driving the rest away. Some protesters sat on the ground, bleeding.

The storming of the building came during a state-backed rally to protest at Kosovo’s secession on Sunday attended by some 200,000 people, which was largely peaceful.

While the embassy was attacked, the main rally proceeded as planned with a march to the city’s biggest Orthodox cathedral for a prayer service, just several hundred meters (yards) away.

State television switched between scenes of the rioting and the choral singing of the church service. http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL2174715620080221

Kosovo’s announcement of independence has set off a firestorm of violence across Belgrade.
This popular uprising is being pushed by two things: generational hatred and the Serbian government.  The Croatians, Serbians, and Bosniaks (Bosnian muslims) have been at each others’ throats for hundreds of years.  Each of them has shed the blood of the other two throughout their turbulent history. Contention over ancestral territory, as well as religious differences, is at the crux of the anger.

For a good, comprehensive history of the Balkans, go here:

http://www.answers.com/topic/history-of-the-balkans

My previous blogs on this:

http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2008/02/17/kosovo-declares-independence/

and here:

http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2008/02/17/kosovo-declares-independence-update/

We went into Bosnia in 1995, (Operation Joint Endeavour, Link: http://www.answers.com/topic/operation-joint-endeavor) as part of a NATO contingency (IFOR) to stop the “ethnic cleansing” by the Serbs on the Bosniaks. I was there in 1999 as part of SFOR.

Since our entry into Bosnia (Kosovo, in particular) as part of Clinton’s wag-the-dog tactic, the reactions of three major groups have been sharply divided. The Bosniaks loved us, the Croatians were somewhat ambivilent, but cautious, and the Serbians just outright hated our guts.

The U.S. and Britain encouraged Kosovo to move forward with independence, while Russia and Serbia have vehemently opposed it.

This could very well result in another civil war in Bosnia.