Kosovo Independence Quotes

The Kosovars were granted autonomy at the end of World War II, but then aspiring president Milosevic had the autonomy revoked in 1989, and the Dayton Accords of 1995, which ended the recent war in Bosnia and Croatia, failed to address the issue of Kosovo's status.

Serbs can only leave Kosovo.

You think Vietnam was bad? Vietnam is nothing next to Kosovo.

The ideal of all Kosovo is membership in the E.U. and a permanent friendship with the United States. I believe and I am convinced our dreams will come true.

I want to emphasize the fact that the independence of Kosovo should and will be recognized.

The speed of movement towards independence will depend on Kosovo demonstrating that it is capable of treating minorities well. We have not always seen that.

The Russians are going to be expansionist whether we [USA] provoke them to it or not. Russians keep saying that we're trying to encircle them. In what sense does the independence of Kosovo, a land-locked province, former Yugoslavia, with no common border with Russia, threaten Russia with encirclement? This is insulting. In what sense does the independence of Georgia constitute an encirclement? What we are facing, and we may as well give it its right name, is what I called it earlier, a chauvinistic, theocratic in part, xenophobic Russian imperialism.

Just take Kosovo: back then, UN bodies decided that Kosovo should become independent of Serbia and that the interests of Serbia's central government had to be subordinated. You can read that in all the records, also in the German ones.