Kosovo War

We did get the verdict in the Hasim Taci trials, which is the former president of Kosovo.

He was found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Welcome to the Talk Eastern Europe Weekly News Roundup, where each week we discuss the latest news and developments in Central and Eastern Europe.

My name is Alexandra Karpi, and with me is one of the other co-hosts of the podcast, Adam Reichert.

basically.

Yes, yes.

Literally just a few hours ago, we did get the verdict in the Hasim Taci trials, which is the former president of Kosovo, who has been in a very extended war crimes trial at the Hague.

And against my expectations, I have to say, honestly, he was found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

I think it was written by Lawrence Friedman, who now has a famous sub stack and is involved in the Ukraine issue quite vociferously.

But he's a very well-regarded academic, and he wrote this, I believe I'm right in saying, he was involved in writing a speech for Tony Blair in 1997 in Chicago, where he was trying to bounce Bill Clinton into the Kosovo War, essentially to get the Americans to do what Tony Blair wanted, which was to side with the Kosovans, to liberate them from these evil Serbians.

And it kind of worked.

And that so-called Blair Doctrine was really adopted very widely within Democrat circles within America.

And this is over how many years?

Uh, well this was between 1980, 1998 and 1999, uh, the period of the Kosovo War until the time of, uh, NATO's intervention in, um, uh, in, in the spring of 1999.

And Tim, why did it take so long for this case to be prosecuted?

All of these war crimes trials, uh, this, this Kosovo special tribe, special...

They do not meet us on our field of battle.

They go after our innocent bystanders, just as we do in our bombings of places like Serbia during the Kosovo War, bombings from 35,000 to 50,000 feet.

And we haven't any idea whom we're going to hit.

But Johnson added that he was not hopeful the U.S. would analyze why the attack happened.

Don't just get down and dirty about you were this in Kosovo, and even when he said I was unprincipled and all that, I didn't even respond.

If I go back to the time when we were virtually opposite numbers, he was Milošević's right-hand man, I was Tony Blair's right-hand man, and I was working at NATO during the Kosovo War, would I have thought that somebody who was so close to Milošević had the capacity to be as na- nationalist and aggressive and, your word, fascist as, as, as, as now can be seen? Um, probably.

Yeah, probably.

Did I think that because of his political skill he had navigated a very, very different approach to this that had made, maybe made me think he was, he'd become a bit different? Yeah, probably.

For all of his literary gifts, absolute lack of judgment rendered him finally ridiculous.

During the Kosovo War, he writes this, a well-known young right-wing historian rang me up to offer an article proposing that we should employ nuclear weapons in the Balkans.

I told him that to run such a piece would damage our credibility as a newspaper almost as much as it would injure his own.

You get that sense, right? That there's just like, there's a wall against the lunatics.

And missiles go astray.

During the Kosovo War, an American missile mistakenly, I'm sure, hit the Chinese embassy.

China is a lot more powerful than it was in 1999 and a lot more anti-American.

On the first day of the American-Israeli attack on Iran, an American missile went astray and destroyed a If an Ukrainian missile goes astray and kills 200 children in Moscow or St. Petersburg, and especially if that's a British missile, if it's a British missile, Russia will launch some kind of attack on Britain.