And in this case for Washington, like it or not, the “Islamic State” is the most suitable to advance its plans, although it seems to be carrying out only its own plans […]
At a time when the Kremlin has called on the Culture Ministry to investigate anti-Russian propaganda and Russophobia in the West, this question isn’t very hard to answer […]
This was the European Union of the sixteenth century. No coal, nor steel, nor LGBT, nor consumer credits—only the same arrogance of a colonizer with regard to aborigines; and the same pride and impenitence […]
The demonization of Islam cannot be accomplished no matter what as it is a religious ideology just as much as are the Buddhist, Hindu, Christian or Judaic ideologies but it is Muslims being demonized through terror tactics […]
The escalation of tensions between the United States, Britain and France, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other, should not surprise anyone. In the last few years, the US leadership and mainstream British media have presented Russia as a major threat to global peace and the international order. Russian president Vladimir Putin in particular has been demonised as a ‘war-monger,’ an ‘aggressor,’ an ‘unscrupulous politician’ hell-bent on restoring Russia’s past glory’ at whatever cost […]
We could only hope that Saudi Arabia, which is currently suffering from defeats in the war with the Houthi rebels in Yemen, is not going to undermine the Astana talks to sabotage the peaceful settlement process […]
This historical fact is recognized even by objective Albanian historians, who are not under the political pressure by the ruling regime in Tirana, like Stefano Pollo and Arben Puto […]
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At the beginning of March 2017, it will be exactly six years since the beginning of the conflict in Syria. Some journalists even make unfavorable forecasts wondering about the very possibility of reconciliation. Complicated by the foreign intervention on the part of Israel war in Lebanon, for example, had been for about 15 years. But even a six-year term it is too long.
That is why we may hope that the meeting in Astana scheduled on January 23 will eventually lead to a positive result. And then there will be an occasion to consolidate the success of the negotiations in Geneva under the auspices of the UN. So what the negotiations in Astana may lead to?
THE LATEST STATEMENTS OF THE MAIN ACTORS
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev backed the initiative to conduct the negotiations and announced its readiness to provide a platform and to support unconditional assistance to the peace process.
Syrian President Bashar al Assad considers the possibility of reaching the agreement on the Syrian crisis settlement and is ready to discuss with the anti-government forces any questions regarding fixing the conflict up to the referendum on the new constitution of Syria.
Russian President Vladimir Putin hopes that it is possible to give birth to the idea of Syrian-Syrian talks in Astana and that a nationwide cease-fire will be signed as a result. Then practical negotiations on a political reconciliation might be launched.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu expresses concerns about the violations of the ceasefire agreement because the talks planned could not take place as a result of that. Therefore Russia and Turkey are working on the issue of implementing sanctions against those violating the ceasefire.
UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura also said at the briefing that the meeting in Kazakhstan is very important and depends on the truce observance in Syria. The UN expects that Russia and Turkey will influence the parties of the conflict to stop violence. The UN guess to have positive results which might be used in Geneva talks scheduled on February 8.
Some opposition members expressed strange attitude. They have repeatedly stated about the termination of the preparations for the meeting despite their commitments to form a delegation for the talks with the Syrian authorities in Astana.
So it’s strange in this context to hear the words of John Kirby, the press secretary of the US State Department. The United States won’t object if the UN secretary general’s special envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura abandon the meeting on Syria in Astana. It turns out in fact the U.S. opposes UN involvement and tries to distance from the talks, isn’t it? It may benefit the meeting’s participants. The cooperation of Russia, Turkey and Iran without the US has proved its effectiveness: more than 100,000 people were evacuated from Aleppo during the largest humanitarian campaign in history.
REASONS WHY ASTANA COULD WORK OUT
First, Ala’a Arafat, a member from the Change and Liberation Front opposition party, expected commitment from the parties involved in the current cease-fire, despite breaches each side accuses the other for. According to CCTV, he pointed out that the recent deal was concluded between Russia and Turkey only, excluding the U.S. and other regional players, such as Gulf States, at least for now, which means two of the most influential powers from each party of the conflict are directly involved.
The absence of the U.S. involvement in the deal will have a positive impact because Americans and Europeans were behind the failure of previous deals, either directly or indirectly. And the current Turkish-Russian agreement seems better than the one struck between Russia and the United States late last year, Arafat said, noting that the U.S.-Russian deal was criticized by the U.S.-led strike on Syria’s army posts in Deir al-Zour last September, killing over 90 Syrian soldiers, enabling IS to benefit from the Syrian army’s losses.
Second, it’s also worth noting that Russia and Turkey named themselves as “guarantors” of the cease-fire, and stated that the next step will be holding talks in Astana. Both pledged to monitor the deal and prevent any potential breach, which translated into a strong guarantee for both the government and the opposition forces.
Third, Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said last week that the cease-fire is a potential starting point for a political process, speaking highly of the chances of success, due to what he called the “strong guarantees” from Moscow. The opposition rebels hold the same view, as they have unwavering trust in Ankara due to Turkey’s support of the rebels in Syria which was crucial for their survival when facing the Russian-backed administration of President Bashar al-Assad.
Forth, in the new talks, armed factions are going to be present and they agree on the political negotiations. The main obstacle was the representation of the opposition groups, particularly the Saudi-backed Higher Negotiations Committee, which played an “obstructionist role,” seen by many as an adamant stance, demanding the departure of Assad as a prerequisite to any negotiations, which of course was the stance of the supporters.
CONCLUSION
Although Russia and Turkey seek different goals in the Syrian conflict but the sides were able to broker. The large-scale operation of evacuating militants from Aleppo, the successful cooperation between the two sides may hold on. Moreover, on January 9, 2017, the Turkey will witness the start of consultations between Iranian, Russian and Turkish diplomats held to discuss the Astana meeting.
Thus, the Astana meeting is highly demanded, and it has to be expanded. A road map of regulating the Syrian crisis in short terms. It could envisage the form of power transition and the date of the referendum on Constitution, and amnesty for the opposition. Moreover, the full ceasefire agreement is expected to be fully implemented during the meeting in Astana. The sides should also draft the further peace process and the issues to be discussed in Geneva.
The Astana talks could be a historic chance to end the crisis and should succeed.
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It was NATO’s first out-of-area operation, against its own Treaty and without a UN mandate. On March 24, 1999.Independent Kosovo was established – against UN SC resolution 1244. Thanks to the Clinton administration and Madeleine Albright. CNN’s Amanpour endorsed it generously on TV with her State Department husband, James Rubin, a chief operator in the non-negotiations at Rambouillet. And TIME of course knew the truth too.Serbia suffered tremendously from the 78 days of indiscriminate, hard bombing. I know because I was there.Finally, Serbia and its president Milosevic was threatened with total destruction of Belgrade. And gave in.Western hubris after the ...
PRISTINA, Kosovo — It was the fall of 2000, just over a year after the end of the war in Kosovo, when two NATO military intelligence officers produced the first known report on local organized crime, painting the former political leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), Hashim Thaci, as having “established influence on local criminal organizations, which control [a] large part of Kosovo.”
The report, the existence of which has not been previously reported, was widely distributed among all NATO countries, according to former NATO sources interviewed by GlobalPost. And year after year as the nascent democracy of Kosovo struggled ...
The U.S. military base in Kosovo was constructed in 1999 without consulting with the government of Serbia and is the largest U.S. military base built outside of the U.S. since the Vietnam War. The site was apparently used for extraordinary renditions and has been referred to as a “little Guantanamo”. This is a very little known fact as NATO, the U.S., the European Union and the West are in the process of forcing Serbia to effectively give up Kosovo, and indicates the real motive for the West’s support of the Kosovo Liberation Army which it had deemed a terrorist organization ...
Chris Deliso of Balkanalysis points out the latest travesty of the Western media: 59,000 stories on Auschwitz, three on Jasenovac. As if the third-largest death camp in Nazi-occupied Europe simply never existed. Franjo Tudjman certainly thought so, and it appears the current Croatian leadership shares his "historical" perspective.Contemporary German estimates of Serbs murdered by the Ustasha (in Jasenovac and elsewhere) ranged as high as 750,000. Wiesenthal center uses the number of 600,000. Serbian researchers have spoken of up to 700,000 victims. Modern revisionists, Croat and otherwise, talk of 30-100,000, at most. Among them is the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which ...
In this Talking Point Dr Marcus Papadopoulos says that ordinary people in the West were not told that after Serbia lost control of Kosovo, following the Nato bombing campaign against Belgrade and other Serbian cities in 1999, the region became a centre-point in Europe for the trafficking of people, drugs and organs. When Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, Western politicians hailed the event.
The United States, which engineered the disputed act of independence, led the way in recognising the new Balkan state, with its allies quickly following suit.
Many of the leading figures in today’s Kosovan government are ...
Note: This article was first published in January 2015.Since 9/11, the imperial playbook has consisted of a favorite and time-tested tactic: the false flag operation.Carry out or facilitate a spectacular atrocity. Blame it on the enemy of choice. Issue a lie-infested official narrative, and have the corporate media repeat the lie. Rile up ignorant militant crowds, stoke the hatred, and war-mongering imperial policy planners and their criminal functionaries get what they want: war with the public stamp of approval.Here we are again.The Charlie Hebdo incident is being sold as “the French 9/11”. It certainly is, in all of the most ...
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague quietly acknowledged the innocence of former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic. Ten years after the very suspicious death of the Serbian leader in a Dutch prison, the 1,300th page of the 2,000-page document on the case of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, acknowledged that Milosevic had not committed crimes against humanity, nor had he organized any mass killings or deportations of Croats and Bosnians. In other words, it was an innocent man who died in a UN prison. French journalist Dimitri De Koshko was working in Yugoslavia ...
The Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center is pleased to announce a new book, Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, 1913-1923. Edited by George N. Shirinian. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017. 433 pages.The final years of the Ottoman Empire were catastrophic for its non-Turkish, non-Muslim minorities. From 1913 to 1923, its rulers deported, killed, or otherwise persecuted staggering numbers of men, women and children in an attempt to preserve “Turkey for the Turks,” setting a modern precedent for how a regime can commit genocide against its own citizens in pursuit of political ends, while ...
Stalinist “Land of Eagles” As in neighboring Yugoslavia, the communist revolutionary guerrilla forces, established by the aid and crucially supported by the Yugoslav communists led by local Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxha, took over the power in Albania in 1944.[1] From 1945 to 1948 Albania was under the strong influence of Titoist Yugoslavia and both counties being under the hand of J. V. Stalin. Yugoslavia lavishly supplied Albania with deficient material, mainly nutritious ones, like wheat, etc. As testified by the Montenegrin zealot communist and revolutionist Milovan Đilas, one of the leading Yugoslav politicians at the time, and a member ...
Big Brother in the Aisles of HyVeeRepeat a lie often enough, the conventional Nazi propaganda wisdom ran, and it will become an accepted truth.This last Veterans Day weekend, I couldn’t watch a sporting event, listen to a car radio, or even go shopping at the local grocery store without hearing a Great American Lie repeated over and over.Sports announcers, radio talk-show hosts, commercials, and even a recorded voice blasted into the aisles of the HyVeee supermarket told me again and again that I owed my great American “freedom” to veterans and current enlistees of the U.S. military – in other ...
US duopoly power replaced the eras of Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. No JFKs exist, President Kennedy as we recall was a peacemaker assassinated for opposing war, urging nuclear disarmament and the normalization of relations with the Soviet Union. New Deal, Fair Deal and Great Society programs are heading for history’s dust bin. Bipartisan neocons infesting Washington want social justice ended, neoliberal enslavement replacing it, fascist police state harshness enforcing it.America is a gangster state, criminals running it – beginning in the 1990s under Bill Clinton, hardened under George W. Bush, institutionalized under Obama, certain to worsen no matter who succeeds him.US ...
The U.S. State Department annually publishes an extremely biased report on human rights around the world. Conveniently, the report omits one of the most systemic violators of human rights on the planet. Under Donald Trump, the United States has graduated from systemic human rights violator to human rights pariah, as witnessed by recent murders and assaults by police of innocent people on the streets of America. Although the United States has historically been more than willing to criticize the human rights policies of other countries, including in the venue of the United Nations, it has bristled at attempts to have ...
Since the fall of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Albanians are among the main actors of instability in the Balkans. At the same time they are the most loyal servants of the US in the Balkans.
The Greater Albania project, which dates back to the 19th century is an idea of the unification of all Albanians into one state. Namely, the Prizren League then demanded the recognition of the national identity of Albanians and the autonomy of Albania within the Ottoman Empire.
Today, Albanians live in two countries Albania and Kosovo (Serbian breakaway southern province) and in neighboring countries. The scenario ...
Israel will soon bar all access to a Palestinian village whose farmers have continued a tradition stretching back thousands of years of tending stone terraces to grow crops in the fertile uplands outside Jerusalem.
These farmers are among the latest victims of Israeli efforts to put in place the final pieces of a Greater Jewish Jerusalem that will require “ethnically cleansing” tens of thousands of Palestinians from a city their families have lived and worked in for generations, human rights groups have warned.
The villagers of Walaja, many of them holding Israeli papers as “residents” of Jerusalem, were warned in November that they ...
GR Editor’s Note: This incisive article was written on April 30, 2003, by historian and political scientist Jacques Pauwels. A timely question: Why Does Hillary Want War… ? And why do people support her?
* * *
Wars are a terrible waste of lives and resources, and for that reason most people are in principle opposed to wars. The American President, on the other hand, seems to love war. Why? Many commentators have sought the answer in psychological factors. Some opined that George W. Bush considered it his duty to finish the job started, but for some obscure reason ...
Amid a divisive debate in Ukraine on state honors for nationalists viewed as responsible for anti-Semitic pogroms, the country for the first time observed a minute of silence in memory of Symon Petliura, a 1920s statesman blamed for the murder of 50,000 Jewish compatriots.The minute was observed on May 25, the 90th anniversary of Petliura’s assassination in Paris. National television channels interrupted their programs and broadcast the image of a burning candle for 60 seconds, Ukraine’s Federal News Agency reported.A French court acquitted Sholom Schwartzbard, a Russia-born Jew, of the murder even though he admitted to it after the court ...
A map of the wanted territories of the Balkan states in 1915There are many talks about nationalism among the peoples from the former Yugoslavia during the last three decades what is quite understandable taking into consideration the post-Cold War conflicts and atrocities, as a continuation of WWII crimes based on certain political ideologies,[i] committed on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia.Historia est magistra vitaeI want to argue that there is a direct link between contemporary nationalism(s) among the Yugoslavs and their national ideologies, which are developed in the previous decades and even centuries. What happened with the Yugoslavs from 1991 to 1999 ...
June 5 marks the 50th anniversary of Israel’s Six-Day War of conquest. Any objective examination of that war, and the events leading to and following it, make clear that the dominant narrative in the United States is reality turned upside down. It is “fake news” that is perpetrated on the public by the corporate media continually, right up to the present day.The Six Day War began on June 5, 1967. Israel launched the war against Egypt, Syria and Jordan with what could correctly called a “sneak attack,” although it is never referred to that way here. In the vocabulary of ...
SERBIAN SETTLEMENT IN BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA BEGAN IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY A.D.Note: Croats settled much later and in insignificant numbers. That is why they are not mentioned much in the literature.THE EMPEROR CONSTANTINE VII PORPHYROGENITUS (reigned 913-957) REFERRED TO BOSNIA AS PART OF *THE LAND OF THE SERBS*.BOSNIA-HERCEGOVINA… THE LARGEST SINGLE NATIONAL ELEMENT IS THE ORTHODOX SERBS, followed by Moslem Slavs (few of whom can trace their origin to Turkish colonists) and Catholic Croats……The republics of Croatia and Slovenia are predominantly Roman Catholic, while the republics of Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and BOSNIA-HERCEGOVINA (!!!) are predominantly ORTHODOXIn the ’90-ies Alija Izetbegovic, former SS ...
How Dumb is the CIA? With the hydrogen bomb test by North Korea, it should be recalled the CIA was dumb enough to be responsible for North Korea acquiring nukes.Reorganized Murder IncorporatedAccording to a Washington Post article, John Brennan has set out to restructure the CIA's longstanding model:"At issue is a basic structure that has been in place since the agency’s inception, with employees divided by function among four major directorates. The best known are the National Clandestine Service, which sends case officers overseas on spying missions and carries out covert operations, and the Directorate of Intelligence, which employs thousands ...
Those responsible, including Nicolas Sarkozy, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, David Cameron, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and Emir Tamin bin Hamad Al Thani should be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity […]
As with Kosovo, an internal conflict between a government and armed rebels is being cast as a “humanitarian crisis” in which one side only, the government, is assumed to be “criminal” […]
The real war here is a power struggle within the US in the context of ruling parties no longer having legitimacy to govern. This is an American implosion […]
It is interesting to note here that Orthodox Christianity, which Muslims called “Rum” as in Rome, in no way challenges the legitimacy or identity of Islam […]
After World War II ended in May of 1945, on the basis of this earlier territorial agreement, time was provided for a sizeable transfer of people into these new boundaries […]
Every informed person knows that there is no need of a defense force against Russia in the Baltics and Poland. Aside from this fact, only an absolute idiot could think that three or four thousand troops constitute a defense against the Russian Army. In June 1941 Operation Barbarossa hit Russia with an invasion of four million troops, the majority German component of which was probably the most highly trained and disciplined troops in military history, excepting only the Spartans […]
CIA did indeed have a considerable number of journalist “assets” in Europe but they were generally stringers or mid-level and had only limited capability to actually shape the news […]
According to a report issued on June 6th in German Economic News (Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, or DWN), the German government is preparing to go to war against Russia, and has in draft-form a Bundeswehr report declaring Russia to be an enemy nation […]
In the summer of 1944, in Hungary, the remnants of the Crimean Tatar units were used to form the Tatar mountain-Jaeger SS Regiment, which was soon reorganized into the 1st Tatar mountain-Jaeger SS Brigade […]
Almost all governments counted as democracies are really oligarchies, government by the few; the few being a political class backed by money and corporate power […]
We are witnessing a presidential election of epic farce. The Republican Party nominates the caricature of a tinpot dictator. The Democratic National Committee is a caricature too, of comic opera: exposed in collusion with a favored candidate it anoints a felon, shown to be such but unindicted […]
It is well to remember the significance of this attempt by the Americans and British to conclude a separate peace with the Nazis, while Soviet forces were still engaged in the fierce Battle of Berlin and what a betrayal it was of the promised solidarity between the nations fighting against fascist aggression to which the Soviet forces at Stalingrad had dealt the fatal blow […]
Having the financial and technical support of US and European monopolies, Hitler’s Germany began to strengthen its armed forces in the mid-1930s. In 1936, the Nazis proceeded to the militarization of Rhineland, helped Mussolini in capturing Abyssinia (Ethiopia) while they played a crucial role in the imposition of Franco’s fascist dictatorship in Spain […]
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