A moment of perspective.

I am never sure what to make of Christopher Hitchens. Mostly he reminds me of my great-grandfather who use to drink himself senseless in the backyard and then would have to be hosed down before he was carried into his bed by my uncles. The thing, about my great-grandfather Joe, was that he would have these strange moments where he would rage in a multitude of languages at imaginary demons with rare eloquence and insight - usually just before the drink rendered him completely blotto for the night. Hitchens in Slate on Serbian riots:

You will by now have read dark remarks made by partisans of the Russian and Serb Orthodox viewpoint, to the effect that if one "secession" is allowed, then what is to prevent every Gypsy or Chechen or Ossetian from proclaiming their own statelet? You should, first, ask if the Bosnian Serbs ought not to have thought of this first and been better advised by the "realist" or Kissinger school that now weeps such hypocritical tears. You should, second, ask if you know of any case comparable to the Kosovo one, where a national minority was so long imprisoned within an artificial state.

Of course, one ought to acknowledge that this is a calamity for the Serbs and indeed an injustice in the sense of an insult to their pride and history. But the injustice was self-inflicted. I remember seeing, in Kosovo, the "settlements" for Serbs that the Milosevic regime was building in a vain effort to alter the demography. And who were the bedraggled "settlers"? The luckless Serbian civilians who had been living in the Krajina area of Croatia until their fearless leader's war of conquest for "Greater Serbia" had brought general disaster and seen them finally evicted from farms and homesteads they had garrisoned for centuries. Promised new land on colonized Albanian territory, they had been uprooted and evicted once again. Where are they now, I wonder? Perhaps stupidly stoning the McDonald's in Belgrade, and vowing fervently never to forget the lost glories of 1389, and maybe occasionally wondering where they made their original mistake.

And isn't odd how the Serbs are starting to whine and pin just like Osama et al do over the collapse of Muslim rule in al-Andalus.