Hillary Clinton wisely chose to spend her 23rd wedding anniversary at a women’s conference in Bulgaria rather than in Washington with her husband. The White House claimed that Mrs. Clinton had decided to attend the October conference months earlier, but the timing—less than a week after the House of Representatives voted to open an impeachment inquiry—raised eyebrows, as did Mrs. Clinton’s failure to mention her husband.

While journalists seemed more interested in what Mrs. Clinton failed to say than in what she actually said, her speech should have raised some eyebrows as well. Before an audience which included the first ladies of Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Macedonia, Greece, and Turkey, Mrs, Clinton condemned the Serbian response to armed Albanian uprisings in Kosovo, calling the situation there “both [a] humanitarian crisis and a violation of humanity,” according to Reuters. Yugoslavia’s first lady was not in attendance; instead, Yugoslavia was represented by a woman whom Reuters simply called an “opposition figure”: “Sonja Liht [sic], president of the Fund for Open Society [sic] in Yugoslavia, ‘overcame tremendous difficulties to be with us today,’ Mrs. Clinton said.”

Sonja Licht, however, is no mere “opposition figure”: She is the president of the executive board of the Fund for an Open Society-Yugoslavia, one of the many branches of the Soros Foundation Network operating in the Balkans (there are other branches in Albania, Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Slovenia). Although no one who has followed George Soros’s “philanthropic” activities can doubt that they are politically motivated, the Soros Foundation Network has —until now—maintained the fiction of nonpartisanship. According to the network’s website (www.soros.org, of course), the “Fund for an Open Society is a Yugoslav non-governmental, non-political and non-profit organization which supports and introduces programs and activities aimed at the development of democratic culture, tolerance and peace. By supporting programs in the fields of education, science, culture and art, health-care system and communications, the Fund aims to build on preconditions for the overall development of the Yugoslav society, essential for establishing democratic relations and stability of the whole Balkan region.”

Since 1991, when he established the Fund for an Open Society-Yugoslavia, George Soros has taken an unhealthy interest in the Balkans, and the construction of a multicultural state (an “Open Society”) in Bosnia is an experiment that he would like to see recreated throughout the Balkans and eventually around the world. To that end, the Fund for an Open Society-Yugoslavia spent $11.1 million in 1996, a considerable sum in the Balkans.

Like Soros, Uncle Sam can’t seem to mind his own business: Reuters reported that Mrs. Clinton announced that the “Agency for International Development had allocated a fresh $15 million grant to foster civic society in the region.” Even Soros, one of the richest men in the world, can’t match the U.S. government’s “generosity.” But if Hillary Clinton’s embrace of Sonja Licht is any sign, he may not have to. The United States seems prepared to use its citizens’ tax dollars (not to mention their lives) to make Soros’s dream of a world-wide “Open Society” a reality.