Foreign Digest: Kosovo, China and Poland

Kosovo: There were violent protests by ethnic Serbs in northern Kosovo last week, in which dozens of international peacekeeping troops were injured against the taking of office of Albanian-speaking mayors in the area. Ethnic Serbs had boycotted the elections. Majority ethnic Albanian Kosovo became independent, with Western military support, of then Communist-led Serbia in 1999 after a war of independence, but Serbia and ethnic Serbs share ethno-religious ties and are backed by the Russian Federation. The former Yugoslavia broke up into its constituent parts following the end of the Cold War in 1991, leading to a series of bloody wars inspired by Communist tyrant and war criminal Slobodan Milosevic. There remain tensions in the Western Balkans, aggravated by Serbs and Russia. Communist China: There has been a wave of arrests of dissidents in Hong Kong attempting to acknowledge the anniversary of Communist China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, in which thousands of democratic protestors were killed. Peking has broken its promise to preserve the former British territory’s autonomy and liberty that it made when the city-state reverted to Chinese control in 1997. Meanwhile, Canada joined the United States in enforcing the freedom of navigation in the international waters of the Taiwan Strait, which Red China claims. Poland: A demonstration was held yesterday against the nationalist/populist Polish Government attended by a post-Communist record half million people, led by the conservative opposition leader, former President Donald Tusk, and attended by former President Lech Walesa, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader of the Solidarity labor movement during the Communist era. They protested the increasingly authoritarian leadership and in favor of Poland’s association with Europe and its Western European values of liberty and representative government.