International intervention, peacekeeping, and “The Eastern Question”

Here's an interesting look at the long history of international intervention in the Kosovo region and on Crete. Islamic political beheading of enemies is not a new phenomenon just invented by al Qaeda and its clones. Beheadings of course predates Islam, but present day Islamists seem to have made it the “terror weapon du jour”.
FROM SERBIANNA.COM:
By Carl Savich
September 3, 2007
Introduction: International intervention, peacekeeping, and “The Eastern Question”
International intervention in Kosovo did not occur for the first time in 1999. International intervention in Macedonia did not occur for the first time in 2001. Beginning in 1902, “the international community”, then known as “the Great Powers”, intervened diplomatically in the Kosovo Vilayet, then a district or province of Ottoman Turkey. Skopje was then the capital of the Kosovo Vilayet or district. This was an instance of international intervention that created an international peacekeeping force. Earlier, the Great Powers had intervened in the 1897 conflict on the island of Crete. The purported objectives were humanitarianism and peacekeeping. Was the international intervention in the Kosovo Vilayet successful and effective in 1904 when an international peacekeeping force arrived there? What are the lessons, if any, of that intervention? What can be learned from that intervention?

Insurgency in the Kosovo Vilayet

In 1902, present-day Macedonia, then part of the Kosovo Vilayet, was ravaged by an ongoing insurgency and guerrilla movement while a new insurrection was threatened for 1903. Austria-Hungary and Russia, seeking to restore stability and the status quo, sought to intervene in the conflict. Both Great Powers proposed to Turkey that administrative reforms were urgently needed. Other Balkan nations were warned “to keep their turbulent elements in check in order not to lay themselves open to the suspicion of wanting to create complications” in Macedonia. Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Romania all had rival and competing claims to Macedonia and each sent comitadji guerrilla groups into the region.
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