SEPTEMBER 1999
OUR NEW ALLIES
Adding confirmation to TPR's
reports on the true nature of our friends in the KLA, Chris Hedges
of the New York Times writes that the drug-trafficking, Albanian-backed
force "carried out assassinations, arrests and purges within
their ranks to thwart potential rivals ... The campaign, in which
as many as a dozen top rebel commanders were shot dead, was directed
by Hashim Thaci and two of his lieutenants ... Thaci denied through
a spokesman that he had been responsible for any such killings."
As TPR has reported, the 29-year-old
warlord Thaci [or Thaqi] liquidated the pro-democracy, nonviolent
rebel government of Ibrahim Rugova who was elected in a shadow
vote never recognized either by Yugoslavia or NATO. Rugova's
more moderate politics, which dominated the Kosovo freedom movement
for nearly a decade, did not fit the aggressive, expansionist
agenda of Clinton and Albright.
Hedges reports that while a student
at Pristina University, Thaci -- later known as "Snake"
-- joined a secret organization called the Kosovo Popular Movement,
which had been "financed and backed by the Stalinist dictator
of Albania, Enver Hoxha, until his death in 1985." Members
of this group are at the core of Thaci's organization.
Says Bujar Bukoshi, Rugova's
prime minister in exile, "Cadavers have never been an obstacle
in Thaci's career." He should know. According to one western
diplomat, Bukoshi almost became one of them last May, but the
plot failed.
The World Food Program says that
only 30 percent of Kosovo's arable land had been planted. It
is now too late to plant and, besides, there are too many unexploded
mines in the fields. Agriculture supplies work for 60% of Kosovo.
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV, HOUSTON CHRONICLE:
As I see it, much of what we have witnessed recently is rooted
in the way U.S. leaders interpreted the end of the Cold War.
They saw the breakup of the Soviet Union - a product of complex
internal processes -as their victory. No longer having to deal
with a serious partner in world affairs, the United States decided
it could act at will. It had little use for the United Nations.
Having lined up other Western countries under the pretext of
fighting ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, it has now tested a new
doctrine that openly contradicts the principles of international
law. A precedent has been set - of intervening in violation of
any international norms, anywhere .... The prospect is stark:
Instead of the principles of international law, it is armed intervention
by the United States (or, "at best," by a group of
countries) in any internal conflict .... The leading nations
of the West, however powerful they are, are unable to replace
the United Nations. I am convinced that any such attempts will
not work. It is a good sign that the architects of the Kosovo
"blitzkrieg" were compelled - by the logic of events
and by the force of world opinion - to turn to the United Nations.
All one can say is better late than never.
KLA TAKES OVER KOSOVO
A lead New York Times story supports
TPR reports that far from producing democracy in Kosovo, the
NATO war and invasion has turned the province over to the KLA
which "has taken sweeping control .... establishing a network
of ministries, seizing businesses and apartments, and collecting
taxes and customs payments in the absence of a strong international
police presence."
Despite the fact that the KLA
"has no legal standing, they have created a fait accompli,
and these days they talk not of ceding power to the United Nations
but of cooperating as if they were equals." The KLA has
ousted moderate Kosovo leaders, tried to assassinate at least
one of them, and has been closely linked to Europe's major drug
trafficking operations.
TELEGRAPH, LONDON: NATO's bombing
campaign against Yugoslavia had almost no military effect on
the regime of President Milosevic, which gave in only after Russia
withdrew its diplomatic backing. This is the gloomy assessment
of a private, preliminary review by NATO experts of the alliance's
78-day Operation Allied Force bombing campaign against Yugoslavia
over Kosovo. At the same time, British diplomats have concluded
that Milosevic had no intention of honoring any diplomatic agreement
which reduced his hold on Kosovo - despite his vaunted willingness
to enter the negotiations at Rambouillet and the peace talks
in Paris which preceded the bombing campaign. The experts nevertheless
judge that, diplomatically and politically, the operation was
a success because the 19-member alliance remained united throughout
and left Belgrade so isolated that it was forced to submit to
NATO's terms.
WASHINGTON TIMES: UN administrators
in Kosovo say a deal worked out with the Kosovo Liberation Army
in June by State Department spokesman James P. Rubin is not binding
and will undermine UN efforts to police the province. KLA leaders
are pressing for enforcement of the agreement, struck in the
closing days of NATO's bombing campaign over Yugoslavia, which
would give members of the ethnic Albanian guerrilla force favorable
consideration in recruitment of a civil police force.
BRITISH CONSERVATIVE SPOKESMAN
IAIN DUNCAN SMITH: "The security situation [in Kosovo] is
deteriorating and if the government does not act soon the whole
region will be destabilized .... Urgent action, not platitudes,
are needed to stop the creation of a Balkan Northern Ireland
and another Balkan war."
ALBANIAN ECONOMIC TRIBUNE: Albanian
criminals wanted by the police have moved into Kosovo on the
heels of the deployment of NATO troops to escape justice, police
sources confirmed on Thursday. A police spokesman said that investigators
have compiled a list with the names of the 72 most wanted criminals
believed to have found safe haven in Kosovo .... Reports from
Kosovo say that Albanian gangs are already running lucrative
operations, smuggling drugs, cars, petrol and cigarettes. On
the Kosovo roads the mobsters' are easy to spot in their glossy
black Mercedes with tinted windows and no number-plates, and
in the flashy four-wheeled drives registered in Vlora, southern
Albania.
TELEGRAPH, LONDON: A tour around
some of Kosovo's ubiquitous minefields
makes painfully clear that many of the casualties suffered by
civilians are
being caused by cluster bombs dropped by NATO from the air rather
than mines
sown by the Serbs or Kosovo Liberation Army. Since the refugees
returned to
Kosovo in June there have been 232 casualties attributed to mines,
or around
80 a month. It is officially admitted that at least a third of
these have
been victims of the cluster bomb; and some estimates put it higher.
NATO is
known to have dropped a total of 1,300 containers of cluster
bombs over
Kosovo. Each container carried 208 of these bomblets. So something
like
270,000 of these dead
UPI: The Philadelphia-based Foreign
Policy Research Institute, an independent think tank, says NATO's
military forces in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo are failing
to deter or halt a new ethnic cleansing campaign being conducted
by the Kosovo Liberation Army. In a study released Sept 8 ....
senior analyst Michael Radu says, "The war in Kosovo ended
a few months ago, but the practice of 'ethnic cleansing' is flourishing,
this time perpetrated by ethnic Albanians who are proving even
more adept at it than the Serbs." He said that although
Serb military and police, along with NATO bombing, pushed out
"only about half of the Albanian population into temporary
exile, fully 90 percent of the non-Albanian minority (which numbered
about 200,000 at the beginning of the year) have now left the
region - this, during three months of 'peace' and under the oversight
of the United Nations and NATO."
AUGUST 1999
THIS WILL ONLY HURT A LITTLE
BIT
UPI: To bring democracy to Kosovo,
international officials must act undemocratically in the short
run based on lessons learned in implementing peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
according to the newly appointed Southeastern Europe coordinator
for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe ....
In Kosovo, which is likely to become a protectorate, international
officials must create the government institutions, and elections
should be postponed, possibly for two years, Barry said. Creating
an apolitical judiciary and independent media should be priorities.
Days of bombing: 73
Sorties by aircraft: 32,000
Targets hit: 900
Cost: Up to $2.6 billion
Civilian death toll: 1,500
Yugoslavian military death toll: 5,000
Cost of rebuilding Kosovo province: Up to $30 billion
[US News & World Report]
BALKAN BELIEVE IT OR NOT
-- Yugoslavia is actually a sovereign
country.
-- Kosovo is actually a province of Yugoslavia.
-- Historically, the term for what is now happening in Kosovo
is not "peacekeeping mission" but "invasion and
occupation."
-- One way to tell this is to ask a simple question: just who
asked NAT0 to bomb and invade Yugoslavia?
-- No representatives of any indigenous group has had any formal
role in the decisions that led to the destruction and occupation
of Yugoslavia. They have no formal role now. One way to tell
this is to take this simple test: Name one or two indigenous
leaders on whose behalf we just killed 6,500 people and blew
$2.6 billion
FROM A SPEECH BY HAROLD PINTER
TO THE CONFEDERATION
OF ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGISTS, LONDON
Why is NATO in Yugoslavia? This
question is related to another. Why has NATO, which was effectively
made redundant at the end of the Cold War, in fact expanded?
Why are Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary members of NATO? The
answer appears to lie in the considerable potential oil wealth
in the Caspian Sea region. One of the Guardian newspaper intellectuals
had this to say the other day: "How absurd it is,"
he jeered, "to refer to the oil in the Caspian Sea region
as having anything to do with the NATO operation. The Caspian
Sea is over a thousand miles from Yugoslavia." It is indeed.
But to get the oil from the Caspian Sea into the hands of the
West you can't use buckets. You need pipelines and those pipelines
have to be installed and protected. The oil reserves in the Caspian
Sea are vast. The pipelines mean that security in the Balkans
is of concrete economic and strategic importance. The US Energy
Secretary, Bill Richardson has explained it quite clearly "This
is about America's energy security. It's also about preventing
strategic inroads by those who don't share our values. We are
trying to move these newly independent countries toward the West.
We would like to see them reliant on Western commercial and political
interests. We've made a substantial political investment in the
Caspian and it's important that both the pipeline map and the
politics come out right."
.... I suggest that it was in
the interest of the imperialist states -- the USA, the United
Kingdom and Germany -- to fragment what was an effectively, if
precariously, unified Yugoslavia. The way to do this was to demand
the break-up of nationalized industries and to impose austere
neo-liberal policies which exacerbated simmering ethnic tensions.
The economic pressure exerted upon Yugoslavia lay the objective
foundations for the dissolution of the Balkan State. The break
up was accelerated by Germany which abruptly recognized the independence
of Croatia and Slovenia in 1991 and the US which gave its approval
to Bosnian succession in 1992. Naturally to break up a state
into many parts is to reduce the strength of that state.
The dismantling of the USSR has
created a power vacuum in Eastern Europe, Russia and Central
Asia. The principle significance of Yugoslavia at this critical
juncture is that it lies on the Western periphery of a massive
swathe of territory into which the major world powers aim to
expand .... The greatest untapped oil reserves in the world are
located in the former Soviet Republics bordering the Caspian
Sea. These resources are now being divided between the major
capitalist countries. This is the fuel that is feeding militarism
and which threatens to lead to new wars of conquest by imperialist
powers against local powers. Brezinski, the former national security
chief under Carter stated in 1997: "America's status as
the world premier power is unlikely to be contested by any single
challenger for more than a generation. No state is likely to
match the United States in the four key positions of power --
military, economic, technological and cultural -- that confer
global political clout."
Having consolidated its power
in its base in the Western Hemisphere, the US, Brezinski argues,
must make sustained efforts to penetrate the two continents of
Europe and Asia. "America's emergence as the sole global
superpower" he continues, "now makes an integrated
and comprehensive strategy for Eurasia imperative. A power that
dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two
of the world's most economically productive regions, Western
Europe and East Asia.
.... The US House Committee on
International Relations has begun holding hearings on the strategic
importance of the Caspian region. Doug Bereutter, the committee
chairman spoke as follows: "Stated US policy goals regarding
energy resources in this region include fostering the independence
of the new states and their ties to the West, breaking Russia's
monopoly over oil and gas transport routes, encouraging the construction
of East/West pipelines that do not transit Iran and denying Iran
dangerous leverage over the central Asian economies." Mortimer
Zuckerman, the editor of US News and World Report said last month
that the "Central Asian resources may revert back to the
control of Russia or to a Russian led alliance. This would be
a nightmare situation. We had better wake up to the dangers or
one day the certainties on which we base our prosperity will
be certainties no more. The potential prize in oil and gas riches
in the Caspian sea, valued up to 4 trillion dollars, would give
Russia both wealth and strategic dominance. The potential economic
rewards of Caspian energy will draw in their train Western military
forces to protect our investment if necessary." It could
be argued that the significance of the military action against
Yugoslavia rests in the fact that Kosovo was a testing ground
for wars that might follow in the former Soviet region -- to
protect the interests of the United States.
CLINTON FLACK
TELLS NEW YORK TIMES
WHAT TO WRITE
When he was not busy writing
international agreements, State Department flack James Rubin
took the Clinton Administration's new propaganda strategy out
for a test ride. UPI reports that Rubin "has demanded that
the New York Times issue a formal correction to a story that
claims $1 billion of U.S. assistance has been misappropriated
in Bosnia-Herzegovina." The State Department denied the
story, in fact denied there even was a 4,000 page report on the
subject as the NYT had alleged. It arranged a conference call
with a Balkan aid official and several Washington reporters incuding
a UPI correspondent who wrote:
"Apparently discarding Clinton
administration protests and explanations, the Times repeated
the central claims of the story in an editorial today and called
for a crackdown against official corruption in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Albright's spokesman, James Rubin, appeared flabbergasted with
the Times today for not correcting the original mistake and then
compounding it with an editorial. Rubin also called on the Times
to correct the 'false, unjustified and unsubstantiated' story,
the first time in recent memory that any State Department spokesman
has publicly made such a demand. 'We would like to see corrective
measures taken that create the truth, rather than false perceptions,'
he said. The Times had no immediate response to the demand from
the State Department.
Today some NATO leaders scorn
the UN and tell us human rights must prevail over sovereign rights.
Yet none of them are able to suggest new rules to replace the
ones in place. Those who express concern about this are regarded
as old-fashioned, but is it old-fashioned to assume that until
new laws are proclaimed the old ones should be respected? It
may be some of our NATO leaders are not old enough to remember
that the founders of the United Nations had lived through two
cataclysmic world wars in less than 20 years. They had witnessed
the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs. Those
who drafted the United Nations framework for world peace and
security did so in the conviction of one simple truth, that if
mankind were to survive it had to learn at all costs to put an
end to war and to learn to settle disputes by peaceful means.
To their everlasting shame, our NATO leaders have chosen war
over peace in Kosovo. They have abandoned diplomacy in favor
of bloodshed. They have taken us back to the Cold War and the
arms race. They have smashed the framework of world security.
They have guaranteed that we will start the new century as we
did this one, with killing and carnage. They have left us with
a terrible legacy. With six months to go before the millennium,
they have taken us back to barbarism. -- James Bissett, former
Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, in the National Post
NEWS FROM THE COLONIES
ASSOCIATED PRESS: Kosovo Liberation Army fighters who have
taken charge of towns and cities will be removed from power unless
they are committed to a democratic, multiethnic society, the
former top UN administrator in Kosovo said. UN Undersecretary-General
Sergio Vieira de Mello said the fact that members of the KLA
moved in to fill a power vacuum in Kosovo after NATO troops occupied
the province seven weeks ago shouldn't be viewed "as a purely
negative development."
His view of the KLA is somewhat at odds with that of U.S. Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright. During a visit to Kosovo on Thursday,
she expressed the administration's concern that the KLA is basically
filling the power vacuum in the southern Serb province, according
to U.S. officials.
"What a glorious victory. NATO killed more civilians
than soldiers, accelerated the displacement of hundreds of thousands
of refugees, destroyed the infrastructure and poisoned the environment
of southeastern Europe -- and in the name of humanitarianism.
-- Left Business Observer
LBO http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/:LBO_home.html
ECO NOTES
BBC: A British biologist, Roger Coghill, says he expects the
depleted uranium weapons used by U.S. aircraft over Kosovo will
cause more than 10,000 fatal cancer cases .... In mid-June scientists
at Kozani in northern Greece were reporting that radiation levels
were 25% above normal whenever the wind blew from the direction
of Kosovo. And Bulgarian researchers reported finding levels
eight times higher than usual within Bulgaria itself, and up
to 30 times higher in Yugoslavia. DU is a by-product of the enrichment
of uranium for making nuclear weapons and reactor fuel. It is
1.7 times heavier than lead, and is used for making armor-piercing
rounds.
PROBABLY JUST TRYING TO PLEASE CLINTON
TELEGRAPH, LONDON: SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC yesterday dropped his
plans to use a special session of the Serbian parliament to make
major changes to the country's election procedures in the face
of mounting protests against his regime .... Under the draft
legislation the voting system would have been changed from proportional
representation to a first-past-the post poll in local elections,
which would have been called soon. The aim, said Mr. Draskovic,
was to wipe out opposition gains in elections three years ago.
TELEGRAPH, ENGLAND: Albanians in Kosovo are
behaving as violently as the Serbs before them and taking advantage
of NATO's presence to settle scores, Lt. Gen. Sir Mike Jackson,
alliance commander, has told The Telegraph. In an exclusive interview,
Gen. Jackson said: "Too many Albanians haven't realized
we're trying to do something new and different here. Some Albanians
have behaved in a very similar way to those who have just left."
JULY 1999
PROFILING
It seems that the international war crimes tribunal has been
taking selective enforcement lessons from the New Jersey State
Police. The only war criminals it indicted this week were those
with hard-to-spell foreign names. No one with a simple Anglican
name -- say like Clinton or Blair -- was charged.
THE REAL PLAN
BY BARTON GELLMAN AND R. JEFFREY SMITH, WASHINGTON POST [6/6]:
In a three-page confidential memo to Clinton in April, Albright
foresaw "a rebuilt Kosovo and a post-Milosevic Serbia,"
but her ambitions actually were greater. For southeastern Europe
as a whole, the United States and the European Union "need
to play a catalytic role in helping them develop their economies,
their civil societies, their democratic infrastructure and their
security relations," she wrote. "And we need to condition
such help, as we did fifty years ago in Western Europe, on close
cooperation among the beneficiaries and new understandings of
sovereignty." .... Senior White House officials said Clinton
has now accepted that the Balkans and their neighbors are "a
kind of cancer in the middle of Europe," .... "We are
going to stay engaged in this until this part of Europe looks
like the rest of Europe," one senior State Department official
said. "We're not talking about troops for two years. We're
talking about a long-run engagement in the region."
FUN FACTS ABOUT OUR NEW ALLIES
-- Hashim Thaqi, now mildly referred to in media like the
Washington Post as the leader of the provisional Kosovo government,
is a 29-year-old precocious KLA warlord known in the field as
"Snake." Putting him in charge of the reconstruction
of Kosovo is a bit like having let General Patton run the Marshall
Plan or having a Contra leader coordinate post-hurricane aid
to Central America.
-- Thaqi, a radical university student who helped to organize
the KLA, rose to the top in early March by liquidating the more
democratic and moderate government-in-exile of the moderate reconciliationist,
Ibrahim Rugova. Rugova had been elected shadow president during
a 1992 rump election but received little support from the US
or NATO and was not recognized by Yugoslavia. While there is
no evidence of direct American involvement in Thaqi's elevation,
Madeline Albright quickly hailed him with a State Department
announcement declaring KLA's support of the Rambouillet surrender
terms "a welcome development and an important step forward
in the negotiating process, one that furthers prospects for a
peaceful resolution to the Kosovo conflict."
-- Thaqi had been a regional commander in the rebel army and
was convicted in absentia by Yugoslav courts and sentenced to
22 years in prison. He has vowed to fight for Kosovo's independence
although he is quite close to Albania. According to one regional
news report this spring, Albania spokesman Sokol Quoka said that
"Tirana had established contacts with the [KLA] long ago
and that the organization was steering its activities to the
political sphere. Quoka went on to say that Tirana had already
given its support to Hasim Thaqi, the head of the Kosovo negotiating
team in Paris, Adem Demaqi, Blerim Shala and Yakup Krasniqi."
-- GARY WILSON, INTERNATIONAL ACTION CENTER: The origins of
the KLA are murky at best. Some say it was founded in 1993. Others
put the organization's beginnings in 1996, when a letter was
sent to the media announcing its formation. The letter took credit
for a February 1996 massacre of Serbian refugees from the Krajina
region of Croatia who had fled to Kosovo for safety. Throughout
1996 and 1997, most of the KLA attacks were on Albanians who
it called "collaborators." These were Albanian opponents
of the separatist movement in Kosovo.
The KLA was never an organization like the liberation armies
well known around the world. It never had a recognized leadership.
It never even had a spokesperson until last year. It never issued
any documents or statements of purpose. It doesn't even have
a newspaper or magazine.
The grouping that called itself the KLA at first was actually
an odd assortment of various opponents of the Yugoslav government
who joined together with gangsters, mercenaries and other opportunists.
Those who called themselves KLA ranged from people claiming to
be followers of Albania's former Marxist leader, Enver Hoxha,
to those who claimed roots in the fascist, nationalist Greater
Albanian organizations of the 1940s. It was a combination of
convenience, with no central agreement on anything but their
hatred of the Yugoslav government.
.... In late 1997 and early 1998, there was a sudden shift.
The KLA went through a "rapid and startling growth,"
according to a report in the April 25, 1998, New York Times.
Foreign mercenaries, money and arms started to pour in to the
KLA. The erstwhile KLA bands were quickly overwhelmed by an influx
of mercenaries coming from Germany and the United States, who
quickly took over command. It took a year before a representative
from Kosovo could be produced to represent the KLA publicly.
The new KLA began serious military operations-not only killing
isolated Albanian and Serbian individuals but attacking government
buildings and police stations. This open warfare could only be
stopped by strong police measures. But when the government forces
responded, the U.S. and NATO powers accused them of repression.
This became the excuse for their war on Yugoslavia.
-- CHRIS HEDGES, FOREIGN AFFAIRS: [The KLA inside Kosovo is]
"led by the sons and grandsons of rightist Albanian fighters
[from the]Skanderbeg volunteer SS division raised by the Nazis,
or the descendants of the rightist Albanian kacak rebels who
rose up against the Serbs 80 years ago. Although never much of
a fighting force, the Skanderbeg division took part in the shameful
roundup and deportation of the province's few hundred Jews during
the Holocaust. The division's remnants fought Tito's Partisans
at the end of the war, leaving thousands of ethnic Albanians
dead. The decision by KLA commanders to dress their police in
black fatigues and order their fighters to salute with a clenched
fist to the forehead has led many to worry about these fascist
antecedents."
-- FRANK VIVIANO, MOTHER JONES: The Kosovo Albanians ~~ are
part of an immense tidal wave of desperation that will fuel organized
crime recruiting long into the next century. Put simply, the
world's stateless nations -- Kosovan Albanians, Kurds from Turkey
and Iraq, Tamils from Sri Lanka, Chechens from Russia, Ibos and
Ogoni from Nigeria, and hundreds of other tribes and ethnic groups
whose names are not yet in the headlines -- are the army-in-waiting
of the new criminal super state. Or the army already in the field,
altering its composition at a rate that befuddles law enforcement
authorities.
-- SENATOR MITCH MCCONNELL: I don't think we have to do a
background check [on the KLA] any more than we did on the Contras.
-- Raymond Bonner of New York Times has written that Albania
has become a major hub for the movement of heroin and cocaine
into Western Europe. As for the KLA's politics, one European
diplomat told Bonner, "We really don't know what they are.
There is an Islamic component, a left-wing component and there
are those who are just guerillas." Said another diplomat,
"They are not a people we would feel comfortable getting
too close to. It is not like they are the military wing of a
democratic resistance movement."
-- While the CIA's role in the Balkan disaster is not clear,
it appears certain that NATO's chief military ally in the war
against Yugoslavia, the KLA, is deeply involved in the heroin
trade. And as late as last year, the KLA was still listed by
the State Department as a terrorist organization.
-- Jerry Seper has reported in the Washington Times that some
members of the KLA, which has financed its war effort through
the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by international
fugitive Osama bin Laden -- who is wanted in the 1998 bombing
of two US embassies in Africa that killed 224 persons, including
12 Americans. Seper wrote:
"Recently obtained intelligence documents show that drug
agents in five countries, including the United States, believe
the KLA has aligned itself with an extensive organized crime
network centered in Albania that smuggles heroin and some cocaine
to buyers throughout Western Europe and, to a lesser extent,
the United States....
"The Greek representative of Interpol reported in 1998
that Kosovo's ethnic Albanians were 'the primary sources of supply
for cocaine and heroin in that country.' .... France's Geopolitical
Observatory of Drugs said that the KLA was a key player in the
rapidly expanding drugs-for-arms business and helped transport
$2 billion worth of drugs annually into Western Europe. German
drug agents have estimated that $1.5 billion in drug profits
is laundered annually by Kosovo smugglers, through as many as
200 private banks or currency-exchange offices."
-- In July 1998, PBS Newshour reported that U.S. Vietnam War
veterans were training KLA mercenaries in Albania.
-- Jane's Defense Weekly reported April 20: "Special
forces involvement confirmed." The report also said that
that special units from Britain, the United States, France "and
other NATO groups'' were working undercover in Kosovo.
-- The April 18 London Sunday Telegraph reported that SAS,
a unit of the British special forces, was running two KLA training
camps near Tirana, the Albanian capital. The same report said
that the KLA also has contact with the Virginia-based MPRI, a
corporate supplier of mercenaries set up by top US military officers.
MPRI also trained the Croatian Army that carried out a vicious
campaign against Serbs in 1995. For more on this see the July
28,1997, Nation magazine.
-- On April 8 the Party of Democratic Socialism in Germany,
an opponent of the war, issued a report describing an alleged
CIA covert operation named "Operation Roots" aimed
at sowing ethnic divisions in Yugoslavia to encourage its breakup.
The report claimed that this operation has been going on "since
the beginning of Clinton's presidency." It was supposedly
a joint operation with the German secret service, which also
sought to destabilize Yugoslavia. The final objective "is
the separation of Kosovo, with the aim of it becoming part of
Albania; the separation of Montenegro, as the last means of access
to the Mediterranean; and the separation of the Vojvodina, which
produces most of the food for Yugoslavia. This would lead to
the total collapse of Yugoslavia as a viable independent state."
The report also asserts that the KLA was founded by the CIA with
funding was funneled through drug-smuggling operations in Europe.
-- GARY WILSON, INTERNATIONAL ACTION CENTER: The top commander
of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army is Agim Ceku, a brigadier
general who took a leave from the Croatian Army in February ....
In August 1995 Ceku presided over "Operation Storm,"
the massive bombing and displacement of hundreds of thousands
of Serb farmers from the part of Croatia known as the Krajina
.... Ceku's military career began in the Yugoslav Army. But after
Croatia became a separate state under the reactionary leadership
of Franjo Tudjman, he defected to the Croatian Army. Ceku, an
ethnic Albanian, was then trained by the United States. He is
closely tied to Military Professional Resources, Inc .... Jane's
Defense Weekly describes Ceku as "one of the key planners
of the successful 'Operation Storm.'" Many reports have
shown in detail that MPRI planned and directed this operation
in the Krajina. "Operation Storm" was, until the current
U.S. bombing, the bloodiest and most brutal military campaign
in the Balkans since the Nazi invasion during World War II ....
This March 21, the New York Times carried a front-page story
about a report from the International War Crimes Tribunal in
The Hague that characterized this attack as probably the most
brutal event in the Balkans in the last decade. But no commentators
picked up on this. The report was quickly forgotten.
INTERNATIONAL ACTION CENTER http://www.iacenter.org
COMMITTEE AGAINST US INTERVENTION http://www.antiwar.com
COUNTERPUNCH http://www.counterpunch.org
NONVIOLENCE WEB http://www.nonviolence.org
OUR BALKAN ARCHIVES: http://prorev.com/balkan.htm
STRATFOR INTELLIGENCE SERVICE http://www.stratfor.com/crisis/kosovo/Default.htm
NEWS FROM THE COLONIES
The World Health Organization reports that as much half of
emergency drug shipments to Kosovo will go unused because US
are dumping unsuitable drugs for tax breaks. Relief workers,
desperate for antibiotics and other life-savers, have been finding
boxes of chap sticks, hemorrhoid ointment and anti-smoking inhalers.
MOTHER JONES: Ecologists say the authorities in Serbia are
concealing the extent of the ecological and health threats caused
by NATO bombing .... A massive environmental disaster is at hand,
with untold health problems to come .... Teams from the United
Nations Environmental Program and the United Nations Center for
Human Settlements in Yugoslavia have already sent a report to
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan warning of the dangers of "miscarriages,
birth defects as well as incurable diseases of the nervous system
and liver."
STRATFOR INTELLIGENCE ON THE KLA PROBLEM: The problem is,
NATO simply has no options. It has so elevated the KLA throughout
Operation Allied Force, so marginalized Rugova and the moderates,
and so demonized the Serbs, that it can not now tear down Thaci's
organization. NATO was successfully manipulated into waging a
war on behalf of the KLA and its backers in the Albanian government.
NATO is now learning that it is impossible not to take sides
in a conflict .... NATO attempted to wage an even-handed humanitarian
war to impose a peaceful tie between hostile camps engaged in
a very messy, centuries-old blood feud. Now, too late, it learns
what it stepped into.
GUARDIAN, LONDON: The son of Slobodan Milosevic surfaced from
months of hiding to unveil the latest venture in the family's
business empire: Bambipark. Speculation that Marko Milosevic
had fled abroad ended when he opened Serbia's first recreational
theme park. The Yugoslav president's son spent the past six weeks
hammering and painting to ensure that the site would be ready
for children needing to recover from NATO's bombing, workers
claimed.
A Portrait of America survey finds that only 29% of all adults
think that we achieved our goals in Yugoslavia while 35% do not.
36% are not sure. Sixty-eight percent think that Yugoslavian
President Slobodan Milosevic will act like Saddam Hussein and
continue to harass the United States for years to come. Overall,
25% of Americans think that our nation's international image
was helped by the war; 38% say it was hurt; and 15% say the war
had no impact on our International reputation.
PORTRAIT OF AMERICA http://portraitofamerica.com
GUARDIAN, LONDON: Up to 50,000 K-For troops could be struck
by a "Kosovo syndrome" similar to the illness which
blighted veterans in the Gulf war, a senior environmentalist
warned. Kent Cassels, head of training and education at the World
Conservation Monitoring Center in Cambridge, will visit the Balkans
next month to assess the environmental damage caused by the crisis,
on behalf of the UN Balkans taskforce. He said the use of depleted
uranium in NATO cruise missiles, shells and bombs could pose
a threat to the peace force .... Last year an American nuclear
physicist said up to 90,000 British services personnel in the
area might have been poisoned by DU.
GUARDIAN, LONDON: The United Nations agency resettling nearly
1 million refugees in Kosovo yesterday warned that it was close
to bankruptcy because NATO governments that spent billions on
the war were not prepared to pay for peace. "I just find
it quite incredible, after a hugely expensive conflict in Europe,
that we have to keep on saying, 'We haven't got any money,' "
said Dennis McNamara of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
"We haven't. We're just about bankrupt in terms of cash
flow." The UNHCR had received only $140 million of the $400
million it needed for its work in Kosovo in 1999, he said. "We
are just not getting the cash from donor governments to make
this a viable operation."
LORRIE GOLDSTEIN TORONTO SUN: The "genocide" NATO
claims it had to stop in Kosovo is being increasingly revealed
not to have been "genocide" at all, but the typical
evil unleashed by civil wars all over the world - which the West
usually ignores - and which had been going on in Kosovo prior
to NATO's intervention. In that war between Serbs and the Kosovo
Liberation Army, there had been atrocities on both sides. It
is also becoming very clear that most of the atrocities and ethnic
cleansing occurred only after the air war began, suggesting the
Serbs, predictably, wreaked vengeance on ethnic Albanians on
the ground because they had no defense against NATO's bombs.
That doesn't excuse Serb atrocities, although atrocities on all
sides are nothing new in the Balkans. But it does make NATO's
motives in declaring war on Yugoslavia, in the absence of having
the threat of the Soviet Union to justify its existence any longer,
suspect.
BARRY GREY, WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE: According to Clinton
and his NATO allies, all of the tragedy and turmoil of the past
decade in the former Yugoslavia are the result of Milosevic's
grand design to forge a Greater Serbia at the expense, even the
destruction, of the Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians.
That Milosevic is a Serb nationalist, and that Greater Serbian
chauvinism is a reactionary political force, are truisms. This,
however, is only one part of the picture. What is left out is
the disruptive and destructive role played by US-dominated financial
institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, which
imposed austerity and capitalist market policies on Yugoslavia
throughout the 1980s, driving up unemployment and poverty and
undermining the economic foundations of the federated Yugoslav
state. These policies encouraged the growth of nationalist tendencies
among all ethnic groups.
WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE http://www.wsws.org/
THE CASPIAN CONNECTION
UPI: The U.S. government has given Bulgaria a half-million
dollar grant to explore building a pipeline across the Balkans
to pump Caspian Sea oil to the West, sending shock waves through
Turkey, a key U.S. ally that wants the potentially lucrative
pipeline for itself .... The decision has raised speculation
among regional experts that it may be part of a larger economic
development plan envisioned by the Clinton administration to
stabilize the southern Balkans after the massive dislocations
and infrastructure damage caused by the Serbian repression in
Kosovo and the US -led NATO bombing of Serbia.
NEWS FROM THE COLONIES
ROBERT FISK, INDEPENDENT, LONDON: [A CNN reporter] "astounded
one of his English colleagues after NATO had bombed a narrow
road bridge in the Yugoslav village of Varvarin, killing dozens
of civilians, many of whom fell to their death in the River Morava.
'That'll teach them not to stand on bridges,' he roared"
This was not the kind of language he used on air, of course,
where CNN's report on the bridge killings was accompanied by
the remark that there had been civilian casualties 'according
to the Serb authorities'-all this when CNN's own crew had been
there and filmed the decapitated corpse of the local priest ....
Two days before NATO bombed the Serb Television headquarters
in Belgrade, CNN received a tip from its Atlanta headquarters
that the building was to be destroyed. They were told to remove
their facilities from the premises at once, which they did. A
day later, Serbian Information Minister Aleksander Vucic received
a faxed invitation from the Larry King Live show in the US to
appear on CNN. They wanted him on air at 2:30 in the morning
of 23 April and asked him to arrive at Serb Television half an
hour early for make-up. Vucic was late-which was just as well
for him since NATO missiles slammed into the building at six
minutes past two. The first one exploded in the make-up room
where [a] young Serb assistant was burned to death. CNN calls
this all a coincidence, saying that the Larry King show, put
out by the entertainment division, did not know of the news department's
instruction to its men to leave the Belgrade building."
PRESCIENT WARFARE
ASSOCIATED PRESS: British forensic experts in Kosovo have
uncovered the bodies of 11 children, some as young as 2 years
old, shot at close range by Serb forces, Britain's foreign secretary
said Tuesday .... British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said the
bodies of the children - aged 2 to 16 years old - had been discovered
among 20 corpses found in the southwestern village of Celine.
Sources at the British Foreign Office, speaking on customary
condition of anonymity, said the 20 dead were believed to have
come from one family, shot by Serb forces on March 25 or March
26 - a day or two **after** NATO began its bombing campaign against
Yugoslavia .... Cook, speaking to a parliamentary committee in
London, said **such massacres were "compelling evidence"
as to why NATO had to wage its 78-day air campaign** against
Yugoslavia and then deploy a peacekeeping force in the Serbian
province.
HUMANITARIAN HYPOCRISY
Robert Hayden Director,
Center for Russian & East European Studies
University of Pittsburgh
In October 1998 NATO faced a dilemma: while its member states
were threatening air attacks against Yugoslavia in response to
Yugoslav attacks on Kosovo Albanians, they also recognized that
Kosovo is clearly within the sovereign territory of Yugoslavia.
On March 24, 1999, NATO resolved this dilemma by committing the
first unprovoked, opposed military aggression in Europe since
Soviet troops invaded Hungary in 1956. The attacks were clearly
contrary to international law and to the UN charter. The aggression
took the form of intensive bombing of the Yugoslav "infrastructure,"
the first such massive use of air attacks in Europe since World
War II. As of May 23, after 60 days of bombing, NATO had mounted
7,000 air attacks on more than 500 targets, with munitions alone
costing about $20 million per day. While Yugoslav military casualty
figures in the first 60 days of the attacks were estimated at
being "in the hundreds," NATO had in that time killed
as many as 1500 civilians. Further, in the third week of May
NATO began to commit textbook war crimes, aimed at depriving
the civilian population of Serbia of water and electrical power,
and explicitly not aimed at military forces in Kosovo ....
LONDON TIMES: THE Kosovo conflict has turned the province
into a magnet for many of the world's notorious drug barons,
according to a director of the International Narcotics Enforcement
Officers' Association. More than 40 per cent of the heroin reaching
Western Europe comes through the Serb province because of a lack
of border controls, says Marko Nicovic. "Kosovo is now the
Colombia of Europe."
JUNE 1999
THE REVIEW LIST
Differences between Slobodan Milosevic
and Adolph Hitler as observed
by Regis Debray in an article
for Le Monde
-- Milosevic has been elected three times; dictators are usually
only elected once.
-- Milosevic has observed the Yugoslavian constitution
-- There are multiple parties in Yugoslavia and Milosevic's does
not have the majority in parliament.
-- He is virtually absent from the everyday landscape.
-- People criticize him in public.
-- On the whole nobody pays much attention to him
-- The West seems a hundred times more befogged by Mr. Milosevic
than his fellow-countrymen.
Debray also wrote: "You can buy a country's foreign policy
- as the United States is doing with various countries in the
region - but not its dreams or its memory. If you could see the
looks of hatred on the faces of Macedonian police and customs
officers when the nightly convoys of tanks from Salonika to Skopje
are passing, driven by arrogant escorts wholly unaware of what
surrounds them, you would understand without difficulty how much
easier it will be to enter this 'theatre' than to get out of
it. Would you then, like the Italian president, have the courage
or the intelligence to abandon unrealistic postulates, to seek
with Ibrahim Rugova what he has called 'a political solution
on realistic foundations?'
"If you do, a number of realities will force themselves
on your attention. The first is that there is no solution without
a modus vivendi between Albanians and Serbs, as Mr. Rugova insists,
for there are two or more communities in Kosovo, not just one
.... My understanding is that there are a million or more Albanians,
a quarter of a million Serbs and another quarter of a million
members of other communities: Islamized Serbs, Turks, Gorans
or Montagnards, Romanies, "Egyptians" or Albanian-speaking
gypsies, these last having taken the Serbian side for fear of
what a Greater Albania would mean to them. The second reality
is the high probability of a resurgence of fierce internal warfare.
. ."
NEWS FROM THE COLONIES
MICHAEL EVANS, TIMES [LONDON]: NATO's 79-day bombing campaign
against Yugoslavia, which involved thousands of sorties and some
of the most sophisticated precision weapons, succeeded in damaging
only 13 of the Serbs' 300 battle tanks in Kosovo .... It was
claimed that up to 60 per cent of Serb artillery and mortar pieces
had been hit and about 40 per cent of the Yugoslav Army's main
battle tanks had been damaged or destroyed. KFOR troops have
found just three damaged T55 tanks left behind in Kosovo. "What
we have found is a huge number of dummy tanks and artillery,"
one KFOR source said.
WAR DISPATCHES
STRATFOR INTELLIGENCE: Russia's top military negotiator on
Kosovo, General Leonid Ivashov, threatened today to bypass NATO
and negotiate a Russian-controlled sector directly with Belgrade
if the Atlantic alliance refuses to agree to one. He said that
Russia would not be bullied into placing Russian forces under
a unified Kosovo peace force command run by NATO general, Sir
Mike Jackson. "We are not going to beg the United States
to give us a specific sector," Interfax news agency quoted
Ivashov as saying. "If we do not reach an agreement (with
the Americans), we will work out with Yugoslavia the sector we
will control," he said.
NPR, which has never met a White House news release it didn't
like, described the war against Yugoslavia as Clinton's "most
significant foreign policy success." Your tax dollars at
work at home and abroad.
WAR DISPATCHES
Legal advocates from the United Kingdom, Canada, Greece, and
Norway met for two and a half hours with the Chief Prosecutor
of the International Criminal Tribunal, Louise Arbour and three
senior members of her legal staff in The Hague. The lawyers presented
what they believe to be compelling evidence of war crimes committed
by NATO. The lawyers charged NATO leaders with grave violations
of international criminal law in causing civilian death, injury
and destruction. They underlined that ample evidence was available
to justify prosecution of individual NATO leaders and promised
to continue providing the Prosecutor with evidence to further
substantiate the charges. Justice Arbour reaffirmed that NATO
leaders were not immune from prosecution, but added that the
tribunal has a firm rule not to disclose the existence or nature
of its ongoing investigations.
SUBMISSION TO TRIBUNAL http://ban.joh.cam.ac.uk/~maicl/
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
BBC: NATO has admitted dumping unexploded bombs into the Adriatic
Sea after fishermen found several in their nets off the coast
of Venice. A NATO spokesman said bombs had been dumped on several
occasions. ~~ During the past week two fishermen were injured
in explosions and about 30 bombs were caught in fishing nets.
PRIMARY SOURCES
Ethnic "cleaner" Milan Petrovic speaks to the Guardian's
Maggie O'Kane
We're not allowed to kill them; no beating and no mutilation
allowed ....
We give most of them 24 hours to get out. The rich ones and they're
all criminals you know, with satellite TVs and big houses were
tougher to move. But if you push hard enough, they all go in
the end. They're cowards, those Albanians, they run like rabbits.
Most of the cleaning was done by the time we got there .... There
was no raping - a Serb soldier wouldn't be interested in raping
an Albanian woman, it would be against our nature. Don't get
me wrong, there were some pretty ones and even if we did want
to, we didn't, because the army didn't allow it' .... We came
from all over the country. One guy turned up who was 72. They
told him he was too old, that the limit was 65 .... If I'd been
in charge, I would have executed the KLA terrorists on the spot
with their families, but my orders were to hand them over to
the army. I don't know what they did to them they're probably
holding them as prisoners of war....
One in a hundred, I'd say, did raping or killing and that
kind of thing, not more. About six guys in my unit got a bit
out of hand one night and started killing Albanians. But they
only killed three or four of them before they started taking
stuff out of their houses. The next day our army came and took
the six of them away.
Six or seven of us would go from door to door. We'd get one
of the Albanians who lived in the village to help us out. He'd
have to tell us who was who, how long they'd been there, and
where the terrorists were. That made things a lot easier.
PROFILES IN WHATEVER
"I don't think it's necessary to declare
war, but I think it is important for use to express ourselves."
-- Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
BBC: NATO has admitted dumping unexploded
bombs into the Adriatic Sea after fishermen found several in
their nets off the coast of Venice. A NATO spokesman said bombs
had been dumped on several occasions. ~~ During the past week
two fishermen were injured in explosions and about 30 bombs were
caught in fishing nets.
THE REVIEW LIST
Collateral Damage.
[From a May 18 report
by John Pilger in the Guardian,
with updates]
DESTROYED OR DAMAGED
19 hospitals and clinics
200 nurseries, schools, colleges and dormitories
Various estates, hotels, libraries, youth centers, theaters,
museums, churches, 14th century monasteries on the World Heritage
list.
5 embassies or ambassadorial residences
38 NATO aircraft
NUREMBERG PROSECUTOR SPEAKS OUT
Chicago Tribune, Monday, May 10, 1999
[Walter J. Rockler is a former prosecutor
at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials]
For the United States, alias "NATO,"
the planning and launching of this war by the president heightens
the abuse and undermining of war-making authority under the Constitution.
(It seems to be accepted that the president can order his personal
army to attack any country he pleases). The bombing war also
violates and shreds the basic provisions of the United Nations
Charter and other conventions and treaties; the attack on Yugoslavia
constitutes the most brazen international aggression since the
Nazis attacked Poland to prevent "Polish atrocities"
against Germans. The United States has discarded pretensions
to international legality and decency, and embarked on a course
of raw imperialism run amok. Our alleged concern with human rights
borders on the ludicrous.
We dropped twice as many bombs on Vietnam
as all the countries involved in World War II dropped on each
other. We killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the course
of that war. Very recently, in Central America, we sponsored,
trained and endorsed the local armies - Guatemalan, Salvadoran,
and Nicaraguan Contras - in the killing of at least 200,000 people.
We encouraged the Pinochet coup in Chile
with the resulting killing of another few thousand or so people,
including the democratically elected president. We saw nothing
wrong with the Croat slaughter and expulsion of 200,000 Serbs
from the Krajina area. We have taken very little stand on the
monumental slaughters of hundreds of thousands, if not millions,
of people in Africa. We have restrained the Iraqis from attacking
Kurds but see nothing amiss in Turks attacking Kurds. We cannot
even agree to abandon the use of land mines.
In reality when we, the self-anointed rulers
of the planet, issue an ultimatum to another country, it is "surrender
or die." To maintain our "credibility," we must
crush any semblance of resistance to our dictates to that country.
JUST A GAME
Under the headline "War Gaming,"
Newsweek listed an agenda for getting ready for an invasion of
Yugoslavia in time for winter. Troops would have to start assembling
in June and war would have to be won no later than the middle
of October "to spare Kosovo's refugees the worst rigors
of a Balkan winter." Newsweek didn't indicate the game plan
if the war refused to end on schedule.
THE REVIEW LIST
Percentage of Yugoslav military equipment
wiped out by NATO so far. As calculated
by Counterpunch using NATO's actual damage
reports and comparing them with Jane's
1997 survey of Yugoslavian forces
Tanks: 6.83%
Armored combat vehicles: 15.29%
Artillery pieces: 3.5%
Combat aircraft: 51.61%
-- Number of cruise missiles launched per
piece of Yugoslavian equipment destroyed: 18
-- Number of tons of explosive required to destroy one piece
of Yugoslavian military equipment: 50
COUNTERPUNCH: http://www.counterpunch.com
LAWSUIT TO STOP THE
BOMBING OF YUGOSLAVIA http://www.mratner.com/main_frameset_sf.htm
LEGAL GUIDE TO THE
KOSOVO CONFLICT http://www.jurist.law.pitt.edu/kosovo.htm
It is impossible to talk peace with
bombs falling. This is clear now.
So I deem it necessary to say that, unless the raids stop soon,
I shall advise Russia's president to suspend Russian participation
in the negotiating process, put an end to all military-technological
cooperation with the United States and Western Europe, put off
the ratification of START II and use Russia's veto as the United
Nations debates a resolution on Yugoslavia. On this, we shall
find understanding from great powers such as China and India.
Of this, I am sure. -- Viktor Chernomyrdin in the Washington
Post
THE REVIEW LIST
The Pentagon's order this week
for Purple Heart medals
from the Graco Company in Tomball TX
1,400 for November
1,400 for December
1,600 for January
1,600 for February
1,600 for March
1,400 for April
[Steve Dunleavy in the New York Post]
SOUTH CHINA POST: Beijing's
strategists are studying the possibility that Washington and
its allies may target North Korea if NATO succeeds in its war
against Yugoslavia. Generals also have warned that the "NATO
military machine" might intervene in China, using Taiwan,
Tibet or Xinjiang as a pretext. Diplomatic sources said yesterday
Pyongyang had related its fear to Beijing that North Korea might
become an "Asian Serbia". ~~ The diplomat said since
the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, PLA officers
and strategists had had more influence in foreign policy. ~~
The People's Daily yesterday also quoted the Chief of Staff,
General Fu Quanyou, as urging more "large-scale army training
using science and technology".
REUTERS: NATO's
two-month-old bombing campaign against Yugoslavia has caused
acid rains in Romania and its authorities are concerned over
the possible long-term impact of pollution on the Danube and
the Black Sea. ~~ A ministry study of Danube water pollution
showed copper, lead, chromium and cadmium concentrations rose
to double the admissible levels during three consecutive days
in April. The study also showed zinc concentrations between 20
and 55 times permissible levels during that interval.
The Pentagon is claiming that its first order of Purple Heart medals in eight
years -- 9,000 of them -- is just to refill its inventory, rather
than being a sign of anticipated heroic injuries in the Balkan
War. Only problem is, the factory says it had never gotten such
an order before.
Pollster and toe sucker Dick Morris thinks the president is being too
timid in his handling of the Balkan war. Says Morris, "Polls
and past experience suggest the American people would accept
25 to 50 deaths .... There's nothing wrong with conducting wars
by polls. You just have to ask the right questions."
One of the secrets the American media is keeping from its audience
is the willingness of Yugoslavia to have a peacekeeping operation
in Kosovo; it has just steadfastly and logically refused to have
command and control in the hands of the war's aggressor, NATO.
The failure of the media to clearly make this distinction is
one of the more serious forms of journoprop impeding a resolution
of the conflict. Instead the press quotes faux tough guys like
unindicted war capo Strobe Talbott. Talbott, who is not known
to have faced anything more deadly in his life than a skeptical
professor, says, "We are not talking to Milosevic except
in one language and this is bombing."
FIRST THE MEDALS, THEN THE VICTORY
We recently learned that the government
had ordered 9,000 copies of the Purple Heart. Now comes word
that 200,000 copies of an expeditionary medal has been ordered,
despite that fact that only about 33,000 American troops are
currently involved in the war against Yugoslavia. We may run
out of cruise missiles but apparently we won't be short on medals.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Reuters reports that animals at the Belgrade
zoo provide early warning of bomb attacks, starting around a
half hour before the planes arrive.
Zoo director Vuk Bojovic: "It's one
of the strangest and most disturbing concerts you can hear anywhere.
It builds up in intensity as the planes approach - only they
can hear them, we can't - and when the bombs start falling it's
like a choir of the insane. Peacocks screaming, wolves howling,
dogs barking, chimpanzees rattling their cages. . . .
"I had 1,000 eggs of rare and endangered
species incubating, some of them ready to hatch in a couple of
days. They were all ruined. That's 1,000 lives lost. . .
Many animals aborted their young in late stages of pregnancy
including a snake that aborted 40 fetuses. On a night when NATO
hit an army headquarters 600 years way, "The next day we
found that some of the animals had killed their young. A female
tiger killed two of her four three-day-old cubs, and the other
two were so badly injured we couldn't save them.''
Armed guards now patrol the zoo to shoot
any escaping dangerous animals should the zoo itself be bombed.
PRESIDENT WENT TO WAR WITHOUT CONSULTING
JOINT CHIEFS
Rowan Scarborugh and Valerie Richardson
in the Washington Times report that today will mark W.J. Clinton's
first meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff since the war against
Yugoslavia began. "In fact, the president has not met with
the full Joint Chiefs in nine months. For the war in Kosovo,
Mr. Clinton has relied on advice from his civilian national security
team --none of whom has military experience -- and Gen. Henry
Shelton, the Joint Chiefs chairman."
One of the hallmarks of the bumbling boomer
barons running America these days is a sense of superiority so
well honed that they don't see much need to go beyond their own
ilk for advice. The result can be a compounding of ignorance
of the sort that led to the Yugoslavian disaster.
IF ONLY RON BROWN WERE HERE
If you want to get in on the $30 billion
that Congress has voted to restore the damage NATO has done to
Yugoslavia, you might be interested in a conference that will
be held this month by something called the Center for Reconstruction
& Development.
The agenda includes "an assessment
of assistance needed by each country in the region." Speakers
include various ambassadors from nations with an eye on some
of that money. Registration fee is $495 for corporations, $245
for non-profits, and $125 for relief agencies and diplomats.
The center is already involved in the reconstruction
bonanza in Central America as a result of Hurricanes Mitch and
Georges, pointing out to potential customers that "numerous
business opportunities exist for companies involved in roads
and bridges, housing, potable water, power, telecommunications,
agriculture, food, health and medicine, and many other fields."
It offers a $125 briefing book that includes
the latest damage assessments and information on "the programs
and private sector contracts of numerous U.S. and multilateral
agencies ~~ Especially valuable is hard-to-obtain contact information
in each of the U.S. and multilateral agencies involved in reconstruction."
The center's parent firm, Equity International,
has already hosted a conference on hurricane reconstruction,
complete with a keynote address by the Under Secretary of Commerce
for International Trade. "The program also featured representatives
of U. S. agencies involved in reconstruction, including high-level
representatives of US AID, State Department, Treasury, Export-Import
Bank, OPIC, Agriculture, and the Inter-American Foundation, as
well as high-level representatives of multilateral agencies involved
in reconstruction, including the Inter-American Development Bank,
The World Bank, OAS, and the European Union. Numerous companies
participated, including Caterpillar, Bechtel, Mitsubishi, COMSAT,
Citibank, Riggs Bank, AGCO, Black & Veatch, and McDermott/Babcock
& Wilcox. Conference sponsors included Brown & Root,
Space Imaging, and Latin Trade Magazine."
CENTER FOR RECONSTRUCTION & DEVELOPMENT
http://www.rec-dev.com
While even the President seems confused as to what just has been agreed
to in the Yugoslavian war talks, it appears that we have just
fought our first war over a bunch of paragraphs. Given that the
Clinton administration is run by those more comfortable with
leveraged buyouts than with war strategy, this is not surprising,
but the known differences between what Yugoslavia was willing
to accept before the bombing began and what has now been agreed
in no way justifies the destruction of a whole country to get
there. Rather it merely accentuates the criminality of US behavior
in the matter.
For example, the media watchdog FAIR reported
some time ago:
"By the close of the first round of
the Rambouillet talks in late February, Serb President Milan
Milosevic had already declared Serbia's willingness to discuss
'an international presence in Kosovo' to monitor the implementation
of the accords. On February 21, Madeleine Albright responded
by insisting that 'We accept nothing less than a complete agreement,
including a NATO-led force'
"On March 23, the day before the NATO bombing began, the
Serbian parliament adopted a resolution again rejecting the military
portion of the accords, but expressing willingness to review
the 'range and character of an international presence' in Kosovo.
According to the Toronto Star's correspondent in Belgrade on
March 24, 'There have been hints Serbia might ultimately accept
a UN force.'
But the U.S. appears to have been unwilling to consider any option
other than NATO troops."
In other words, an agreement probably could
have been struck at that time if NATO had given up its illegal
insistence on command and control over Kosovo, eventual independence
for Kosovo, and an egregious demand that it be allowed access
throughout Yugoslavia much as the Nazis had in Vichy France.
We went to war over goals that never should have been sought
in the first place.
It now appears that NATO has relented (to
an uncertain degree) on the matter of control of the peacekeeping
force, has agreed to a more ambiguous status for Kosovo ('substantial
autonomy')with UN Security Council oversight, and has withdrawn
of its demand for the de facto occupation of the rest of Yugoslavia.
This is quite contrary to the spin already
coming out of the White House and State Department, but we shouldn't
be too choosy. Mere lies, after all, are quite an improvement
over unconstitutional international aggression and war crimes.
Meanwhile George Kenney, a former State
Department Yugoslavia desk officer, writes in the Nation that
there is evidence the U.S. deliberately set out to thwart the
Rambouillet peace talks in order to provide a "trigger"
for NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia. Furthermore, correspondents
from major American news organizations reportedly knew about
this plan to stymie the Kosovo peace talks, but did not inform
their readers or viewers.
Writes Kenney: "An unimpeachable press
source who regularly travels with Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright told this [writer] that, swearing reporters to deep-background
confidentiality at the Rambouillet talks, a senior State Department
official had bragged that the United States 'deliberately set
the bar higher than the Serbs could accept.' The Serbs needed,
according to the official, a little bombing to see reason.
Kenney compares this plan to the Gulf of
Tonkin incident. FAIR adds that Jim Jatras, a foreign policy
aide to Senate Republicans, reported in a May 18 speech at the
Cato Institute in Washington that he had it "on good authority"
that a "senior Administration official told media at Rambouillet,
under embargo" the following: "We intentionally set
the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing,
and that's what they are going to get."
NATION ARTICLE
http://www.thenation.com/issue/990614/0614kenney.shtml
[Last week, TPR pointed out that the
recent Balkan agreement was not as the White House and media
have alleged and that, on paper at least, Yugoslavia seems to
have come out better than it would have signing the Rambouillet
edict. The media watchdog, FAIR, in its latest advisory, supports
this view]
FAIR: A New York Times editorial (6/4/99)
claimed the plan, if genuine, shows that NATO's "sustained
bombing has been more effective than many critics allowed"
and represents a "victory for the principles of democracy
and human rights." The Washington Post's Stephen Rosenfeld
wrote (6/3/99): "They said Bill Clinton was wrong to rely
on air power alone to win the war, and -- assuming the details
are mastered -- they were wrong.... This time around, anyway,
he showed he was right. His weighing of means and ends finally
clicked." USA Today's Walter Shapiro stated (6/4/99): "The
record must show that Bill Clinton did the morally right thing.
And if his efforts are crowned with a lasting peace in the Balkans,
the president deserves the gratitude of all of us who doubted
his resolve and courage." CNN's Christiane Amanpour (6/3/99)
said that the "plan amounts to [Milosevic] accepting less
than he would have come away with had he agreed several months
ago at the Rambouillet talks."
These interpretations are seriously misleading.
Seventy days of bombing in the Balkans have brought an agreement
from Yugoslavia whose terms, in many important respects, diverge
little from those Yugoslavia accepted before the first shot was
fired. To a great extent, an end to the war seems possible now
not because massive bombing forced Yugoslavia to capitulate,
but because the U.S. seems to be willing to drop conditions that
it had previously insisted Belgrade must meet before bombing
could be halted.
Indeed, the media notion of Serb capitulation
seemed to rely on a cue from NATO powers, as evidenced by this
CNN report from correspondent Walter Rodgers (6/3/99): "It's
difficult to say whether it's a capitulation. It really isn't
even up for me to say that, that is something that has to be
decided by someone like the president of the United States, Britain's
prime minister, Mr. Blair."
At Rambouillet, before the bombing began,
Yugoslavia had agreed to almost all the points that are contained
in the June 3 Serbian Assembly resolution, including autonomy
for Kosovo. A major point insisted on by the U.S. at Rambouillet
-- a referendum on Kosovo's independence after three years --
is now absent from the Serb Assembly decision, without audible
complaint from U.S. officials. What Yugoslavia rejected at Rambouillet
was the idea of a NATO-led force in Kosovo, proposing instead
a UN command. It also objected to a last-minute addition to the
agreement known as Appendix B, which would have given NATO sweeping
powers throughout all of Yugoslavia.
There is strong evidence that the U.S.
intentionally crafted this document to provoke a rejection from
the Serbs. A State Department official reportedly told journalists
at Rambouillet: "We intentionally set the bar too high for
the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that's what
they are going to get."
After two and a half months of that bombing,
the Serb parliament agreed to a peacekeeping force "under
UN auspices" in which there would be "essential NATO
participation." This language is only slightly different
from the Yugoslavian position at Rambouillet, and there are suggestions
that Belgrade was willing to accept such a compromise peacefully
What was the price of the failure to reach
an agreement at Rambouillet? 800,000 Kosovars have fled the province
since the start of the bombing; many will never return to homes
that are now destroyed. According to the Pentagon, the bombing
killed 5,000 Yugoslavian soldiers, while Belgrade reports that
NATO killed 1,200 civilians. The U.S. State Department claims
that upwards of 4,600 Albanians have been killed by Yugoslavia
since NATO announced bombing plans.
FAIR YUGOSLAVIA SITE
http://www.fair.org/international/yugoslavia.html
JOURNOPROP
From an article
by John F. Harris
of the Washington Post
One friend who has spoken to Clinton several
times in recent months believes Kosovo -- and what Clinton believes
were the unambiguously moral motives for NATO's intervention
-- represented a chance to soothe regrets harbored in Clinton's
own conscience. One of those regrets concerned Vietnam, a war
Clinton believes was a mistake and took steps to avoid serving
in. The friend said Clinton has at times lamented that the generation
before him was able to serve in a war with a plainly noble purpose,
and he feels "almost cheated" that "when it was
his turn he didn't have the chance to be part of a moral cause."
.... Once, after the Middle East peace
accord at Wye River last fall, Clinton publicly said he was rededicating
himself to doing good things as president. .... Compared with
what Clinton viewed as the low-minded nature of the Lewinsky
scandal, this confidant said, in Kosovo the president believed,
"This is something big; this is something important ....
There was a sense that if this costs him points, at least it
was in the service of something moral." Another friend said
the regular "spiritual counseling" that Clinton is
receiving in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal has helped him
curb a tendency to vent anger and lose focus on the larger picture
when things aren't going well.
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER
On June 5, the New York Times finally took
notice of the of the appendix of the Rambouillet edict that would
have let NATO forces move at will through Yugoslavia almost like
the Nazis through Vichy France. In the article Steven Erlanger
wrote:
"The key part of the proposal that
made it acceptable for Belgrade, the officials said, was the
limitation on the movement of the international forces, mostly
NATO and Russian troops under a United Nations flag, to Kosovo
itself. Under an annex of the Rambouillet accord, a purely NATO
force was to be given full permission to go anywhere it wanted
in Yugoslavia, immune from any legal process. 'NATO personnel
shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft
and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access
throughout the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia including associated
airspace and territorial waters,' the annex read."
MISSING IN ACTION
Not only are ethnic Albanians (save the
Kosovo Contras)curiously absent from discussions of their future,
but the United Nations is still being treated by the media as
only slight better than an anti-war protestor. For example, NPR's
Julie McCarthy manages to regurgitate every burp emitted by NATO
flacks but the network, like much of the reset of the media,
passed over the marvelously wise and sardonic comments of UN
Secretary General Kofi Amman when he pointed out that sooner
or later one had to come to the United Nations about matters
such as the Balkans and that it was probably better to do it
sooner than later.
MAY 1999
NOW CELEBRATING FOUR WEEKS
OF BOMBING BELGRADE
We do know that we must do more
to reach out to our children and teach them to express their
anger and to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons
-- W.J. Clinton
BALKANIZING THE BEEF BUSINESS
Despite all the hoopla over 20,000 Balkan
refugees coming to the US, Carl Limbacher of Newsmax says that
since the mid-1990s, America has already resettled over 80,000
displaced persons from the region. Most of them are Bosnian Muslims
who have ended up in the middle west. Writes Limbacher: "America's
largest meat processing company ~~ has done very well by the
deluge of hardworking Balkan refugees willing to take their dangerous
non-union jobs. A case in point: The small town of Waterloo,
Iowa, population 65,000, has been overwhelmed since 1995 with
resettled Bosnians, many of whom find their first work at the
local meat processing plant. Until recently Bosnian immigrants
made up nearly a third of the 2,000 strong workforce at Iowa
Beef Processors, Inc.'s Waterloo plant. Over the last few years
Waterloo has taken in about 6,000 Bosnians, nearly 10% of the
town's entire population. The new immigrants are recruited by
IBP for rough and tumble meatpacking jobs at below union wages.
The influx of Bosnians to Iowa has made the state the only one
in the nation with its own refugee bureau." NEWSMAX http://newsmax.com
BROTHERS IN ARMS?
I believe in killing people who try to
hurt you. And I can't believe we're being pushed around by these
two-bit pricks. -- Bill Clinton speaking of the Somalis, quoted
by George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education
Kill Em AALLLL!!!! --Eric Harris
WAR OF THE KILLER LITIGATORS
The war on Yugoslavia shows what happens
when you give a bunch of boomer corporate lawyers their own air
force. If one looks at pre-bombing positions of the disputants
one finds not a single grand principle worth destroying a country
for, but rather the routine headaches of international diplomacy.
In fact, one finds, among other things, a modest crew of unarmed
international observers doing a far better job of protecting
the lives and property of the Kosovars than their NATO liberators
would later.
This fact is daily obscured by the spin
of the Clinton machine and its media backers. The former is now
desperately crediting anything good that happens - from the release
of our POWs to Jesse Jackson's latest allegory - to its patently
disastrous bombing strategy. The latter have consistently distributed
false and misleading information such as the declaration by the
New York Times a few weeks back that Milosevic "has absolutely
refused to entertain an outside force in Kosovo, arguing that
the province is sovereign territory of Serbia and Yugoslavia."
Here is what really happened.
On February 21, the Yugoslavs rejected
the Rambouillet edict - not an agreement at all, but a declaration
of surrender. Under this edict, 28,000 NATO troops would take
over Kosovo. This provision was inserted without the knowledge
of the Russians who opposed it.
In Appendix B of the edict, NATO was given
the right to do pretty much whatever it wanted in the rest of
Yugoslavia. This was not reported to the American people who
thus do not know that they had signed on to the sort of document
that invading countries use to give a modicum of dignity to their
aggression.
For example the provision said:
"7. NATO personnel shall be immune
from any form of arrest, investigation, or detention by the authorities
in the [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]. 8. NATO personnel shall
enjoy... free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout
the FRY including associated airspace and territorial waters.
11. NATO is granted the use of airports, roads, rails and ports
without payment... "
This is not unlike the arrangement that
the Nazis had with Vichy France. The moral: before you go to
war at WJ Clinton's urging, read the fine print carefully.
The true situation was well described by
FAIR (and previously reported by TPR)
>>>>>>>>>>>
By the close of the first round of the
Rambouillet talks in late February, Serb President Milan Milosevic
had already declared Serbia's willingness to discuss 'an international
presence in Kosovo' to monitor the implementation of the accords.
On February 21, Madeleine Albright responded by insisting that
'We accept nothing less than a complete agreement, including
a NATO-led force'
"On March 23, the day before the NATO
bombing began, the Serbian parliament adopted a resolution again
rejecting the military portion of the accords, but expressing
willingness to review the 'range and character of an international
presence' in Kosovo. According to the Toronto Star's correspondent
in Belgrade on March 24, 'There have been hints Serbia might
ultimately accept a UN force.'
But the U.S. appears to have been unwilling
to consider any option other than NATO troops. At a March 24
State Department press briefing, spokesman James Rubin was asked
about this development:
QUESTION: Was there any follow-up to the
Serbian Assembly's yesterday? They had a two-pronged decision.
One was to not allow NATO troops to come in; but the second part
was to say they would consider an international force if all
of the Kosovo ethnic groups agreed to some kind of a peace plan.
It was an ambiguous collection of resolutions. Did anybody try
to pursue that and find out what was the meaning of that?
MR. RUBIN: Ambassador Holbrooke was in
Belgrade, discussed these matters extensively with President
Milosevic, left with the conclusion that he was not prepared
to engage seriously on the two relevant subjects. I think the
decision of the Serb Parliament opposing military-led implementation
was the message that most people received from the parliamentary
debate. I'm not aware that people saw any silver linings.
QUESTION: But there was a second message,
as well; there was a second resolution.
MR. RUBIN: I am aware that there was work
done, but I'm not aware that anybody in this building regarded
it as a silver lining.
In other words, the State Department was
aware that the Serbian parliament expressed openness to an "international
presence," but this was not seen as a "silver lining,"
apparently because only a NATO force was acceptable to the U.S.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
As late as January even Madeleine Albright
was still saw the matter in non-military terms:
"The Kosovo situ