Kosovo fieldwork: Madeleine Albright and the Ottomans

Kosova/Kosovo fieldwork notes extracts

At 2.30pm on the 14th of July 2005, I noted that:

Madeleine Albright [who was US Secretary of State during the Kosovo War and is now a lecturer at Georgetown University], brightest of bulbs in the American box, visited here just after the last bombings and announced, 'we're going to be here longer than the Ottomans' - 'and they were here for six [actually, four] hundred years', as the UN official noted.

The UN official went on to say that, in Kosovo:

'this isn't international law being made - this isn't even EU law - it's American law', [in its] 'liberalising' [deregulating, state-minimising, privatising nature]. 'They don't know it, but they're getting fucked' [though he later conceded that at least some were 'playing the game - "they bombed us, but they saved us" - so they ignore it'.

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Technorati tags: Madeleine Albright; American law; bombings; international law; Kosova/Kosovo; Kosovo War; Ottomans.