Dear Editor,

Mr R Chickerie has the habit of using your columns to support anything Muslim, right or wrong. In his letter calling for the recognition of the renegade Serbian province of Kosovo whose Albanian majority recently declared independence with the instigation of President Bush of the USA and some Western European states, Chickerie quotes profusely from a biased and unreliable Islamic newspaper named Khaleej Times.

Kosovo has always been part of Serbia and was the land from which the Serbian nation originated. Mussolini, the Italian dictator, conquered part of the Balkans where Albania is and it was he who transported Albanian Muslims to live in the Serbian province of Kosovo. And since they had a massive birth rate, they eventually outnumbered the Serbs.

The Albanian Muslim population who had now become a majority in this Serbian province attempted to break away in the 1990s but the Serbian army prevented them. The European Union and its NATO forces which included the United States, with overwhelming might, bombed the small Serbian state into submission, and then put a multi-national European force to hold the territory as a protectorate. And some Western European countries and the United States, in keeping with their own national interest, had decided to recognize the so-called independence of Kosovo and the illegal dismemberment of Serbia, a small state in the United Nations.

The recognition of the Independence of Kosovo and the dismemberment of the Serbian state are against international law and is a dangerous precedent.

Small states such as Guyana have to uphold and maintain international law since it is one of the few protections such states enjoy against the force and depredations of bigger and more powerful states. To recognize Kosovo and the dismemberment of the Serbian state, is to approve of the erosion and flouting of international law and is against Guyana’s long and short term interests. Guyana must never fall into the trap of recognizing Kosovo.

Yours faithfully,

V Redman