to the devil a daughter

Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski's eldest child has come of age. Events set in motion by Mr Clinton's dalliance with Miss Lewinski have come to fruition this week with the establishment of the new Islamic nation of Kosovo. In 1999 to distract attention from his Lewinski problem, Mr Clinton unleashed American and Nato bombers on the Serbs. He did so without a UN resolution. In seventy days of continuous bombing Mr Clinton worked an extraordinary miracle. He managed to put the psychotic Serbian President Slobodan Milosevich firmly in the right. It was a frivolous and useless war in every sense except in the sense that it saved Mr Clinton's job. He had been facing impeachment proceedings at the time, on foot of his aforementioned Lewinski pecadillos. (For more on this, you might googlesearch "cigars," "Lewinski," and the phrase "That depends on what your definition of is is.") Mr Clinton bombed Serb power out of Kosovo. Now nearly nine years later Kosovan Muslims have declared independence from Serbia. Did the Kosovan Muslims have any right to do so? When Mr Clinton started his bombing, the region had been home to at least 400,000 Serbs. Less than 200,000 Serbs remain there. The Muslims in Kosovo today number one million six hundred thousand. It's not that many, is it? Now they have their own country. The first Muslim nation to be established in Europe in five hundred years. Thank you Bill. Kosovo has been a part of Serbia for centuries. The Muslims who live there, are descendants of those who in-migrated originally from Albania. The descendants of these Muslims have now driven out hundreds of thousands of Serbs and declared Kosovo an independent state. It was invisible ethnic cleansing. That is to say it was ethnic cleansing the international media didn't want to know about because for once the Serbs, so long accustomed to dishing out the ethnic violence, were the victims of it. There will be hell to pay. What are the ramifications of new Kosovo for other European countries? Can the Islamic terrorists who murdered film maker Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands now secede a designated province of the Netherlands should they take it into their heads to do so? Can the Islamic terrorists who blew up 200 people on trains in Spain, can they hope to eventually secede Andalucia from Spain as Osama Bin Laden has charged them to do? Can the Islamic terrorists who slaughtered commuters on trains and buses in London, can they secede, say Bradford, from Great Britain? Can the Algerian Arab Islamic terrorists who murdered an Irish teenager on Grafton Street with baseball bats five years ago, and then found other Arabs to testify that the Irish teenager had made a racist remark to them, and then got released from jail by Judge Liberal because Judge Liberal opposes the death penalty except apparently when Arabs carry it out on Grafton street, can these murdering scum, can they... Oh but you get the idea. And if one million six hundred thousand Muslims in Kosovo are entitled to call themselves a country at Serbia's expense, what about the five million Muslims in France? Are the Muslims in France entitled to riot on the streets, declare Sharia law in their enclaves and ultimately secede some arbitrarily selected region from France? Oh right. They're doing that already. Well, most of it. Kosovo was never anything other than a region of Serbia. And secession is a dangerous genie to release from the bottle. At this moment President Vladimir Putin of Russia is trying to persuade his countrymen to adopt an inimical cold war posture towards the free world. President Putin is also once more trying to project Russian power into free countries on his borders. He has sponsored secessionist movements among ethnic Russian communities in Georgia and in the Donetski region of Ukraine. Those are the ones we know about. The Kosovan secession from Serbia means President Putin has a real pretext, a quite genuine precedent, for any act of piracy he may be contemplating with regard to the countries he covets on Russia's borders. It doesn't help that the Serbs and Russians have had close knit, almost familial, ties going back into the mists of time. You may be sure President Putin intends to be avenged for the Kosovan secession which he regards as an incompetent, opportunistic and invidious piece of Western sponsored adventurism. For the first time in my life I agree with President Vladimir Putin. Let me say again. Generally speaking, secession is bad. Secession in a particular country, creates a precedent that can lead to instability in any country nearby with a significant ethnic minority. There may be genuine cases for secession of course. Let me see. The Arab Islamist government of Sudan has murdered three million of its own citizens in Southern Sudan over the past twenty years. Clearly Southern Sudan should be an independent nation and should be liberated and policed by the UN. Or better yet by the Americans and British who at least have an inkling of what liberty is. The Arab Islamist government of Sudan are also currently murdering hundreds of thousands of their own citizens in the Western Sudanese province of Darfur. The murders in Darfur have taken two years. Clearly the UN should reconquer Darfur and hand the region over to its own people. Never going to happen. The UN will go to Chad and make some show of protecting the Darfurans who have fled there. Short of America and Russia and China getting together to end Arabist terror in Sudan, the Darfurans will never get their country back. Meanwhile the Sudanese government has just sponsored an invasion of Chad. I kid you not. The do get around, don't they? But I digress. My figures may be inaccurate (Hundreds of thousands dead in Darfur, two million refugees) because they are UN figures. When has the UN ever been right about anything? Revenons a nos moutons. Darfur and Southern Sudan are the two immediate cases we might recognise as having a legitimate imperative to secede from their corrupt nation state. I'd make a case too for half of Angola which really should be let walk away from the horrendous Marxian government of Jose Maria Dos Santos. Jose's been murdering citizens for forty years. Admittedly for a longer time but at a slower rate than the Sudanese. Still though, millions dead. (Memo to Bono and Bob Geldoff: Stop trying to get debts cancelled for murdering African dictators. The only time a debt should be cancelled in Africa is when the dictator has gone and the mass murder of human beings has been stopped.) I'd also accept that East Timor had the right to secede from Indonsia which it did some years ago. Again it's an extreme case. The Muslim Indonesians had murdered at least a quarter of a million East Timorese out of a total population of about a million. I think the people of East Timor were entitled to breathe free. Or just to breathe. Enough. There are some cases where secession is called for. Secession generally is not acceptable. The Americans themselves don't tolerate it within their own country. Nor do the Spanish. Nor the Greeks. In fact none of the free nations of the world recognise any inherent right of secession for minorities within their established borders. The Kosovan secession from Serbia must not stand.