Although the Serbs are different from the Israelis, it seems that they have a lot in common. Both believe that the whole world is against them and are completely convinced that they are absolutely in the right, even when everybody else is telling them otherwise. Like the Israelis, the Serbs are also immersed in their past for whom, history is more important than the present. A general question that arises is when a national minority has the right to secede and establish a nation-state of its own. If the Kosovars have this right then so should the Basques in Spain, the Corsicans in France, the Tibetans in China, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, etc? The matter is decided in practice: when a particular population is determined to achieve independence at any cost and when it is ready to fight and sacrifice for its independence then they have the right to independence.
When the dominant people mistreat the minority – as the Serbs did in Kosovo and the Russians are doing in Chechnya – they reinforce the motivation to achieve independence. When the genocidal Milosevic, the midwife of the independent Republic of Kosovo, decided to carry out a murderous ethnic cleansing and to drive out millions of Kosovars from their country, he put an end to the right of Serbia to go on ruling Kosovo.
Safiya Sameena
Vijayawada, AP