1999 - NATO's Terror Campaign Against Yugoslavia (Kosovo War)

[FrankRep]

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)



1999 - NATO's Terror Campaign


William Norman Grigg | The New American
August 16, 1999

My patriotism is of the kind which is outraged by the notion that the United States was never a great nation until it knocked to pieces a poor, decrepit, bankrupt old state like Spain.
-- William Graham Sumner​

Sumner, a noted free market economist, offered the foregoing response to accusations that his public opposition to the Spanish-American War betokened a lack of patriotism on his part.

NATO’s "victory" over what remains of Yugoslavia offers even less cause for patriotic celebration than the Spanish-American War. The U.S.-led terror campaign against Yugoslavia pitted the massed assets of the world’s largest and wealthiest nations against a country the size of Vermont, whose gross domestic product is smaller than that of Idaho. Compounding this indecency is the fact that the NATO leadership collective chose not to engage the military assets of our "enemy," but instead focused on Yugoslavia’s civilian population in what has to be considered an act of international terrorism.

According to Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK), who was a bomber pilot in World War II, it is perverse even to refer to the campaign against Yugoslavia as a war. "They never came to war with us," Senator Stevens told reporters at a Washington, DC breakfast meeting in early July. "We just bombed the hell out of them until they signed an agreement. We had 780 million people [in the NATO alliance] attacking 20 million people, and they finally came to their knees.... [After] defeating 20 million people the way we defeated them, I don’t think that’s something we should go around holding our head high in the air [about] and saying we’re superior...."

"They Needed Some Bombing"

The chief author of the Yugoslav terror campaign was Bill Clinton, and the effort displayed his distinctive combination of arrogance, mendacity, cowardice, and bullying. In a videotaped speech broadcast into Serbia the day after the war began, the impeached President insisted: "I cannot emphasize too strongly that the United States and our European allies have no quarrel with the Serbian people.... The NATO nations have tried to avert this conflict through every means we knew to be available. Each of us has ties to Serbia. Each respects the dignity and courage of the Serb people.... I call on all Serbs and all people of good will to join with us in seeking an end to this needless and avoidable conflict."

Given that the source of these statements was Bill Clinton, it is not surprising that they are mostly penetrable lies — all except for the description of the war as "needless and avoidable." As has been previously noted in these pages ("Why the Bombing?" July 19th issue), "Appendix B" of the Rambouillet "peace" agreement amounted to an ultimatum, demanding that the Serbian government submit to the occupation of its country by an international "peacekeeping" force. During the Rambouillet conference, one Clinton Administration official explained to reporters: "We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They needed some bombing, and that’s what they’re going to get."

After the 78-day bombing campaign, with much of Serbia’s infrastructure — including bridges, hospitals, schools, and power plants — in ruins, Mr. Clinton announced that Serbia would be excluded from a proposed Balkan reconstruction program. "What the Serbian people decide to do, of course, is their own affair," stated the President in a June 25th press conference. "But they’re going to have to come to grips with what Mr. Milosevic ordered in Kosovo. They’re just going to have to come to grips with it. And they’re going to have to get out of denial.... And then they’re going to have to decide whether they support his leadership or not."

False Images

Invoking the image of "all those tens of thousands of people … killed, and all those hundreds of thousands of people [who] were run out of their homes … all those little girls [who] were raped, and all those little boys [who] were murdered" by Serb forces in Kosovo, Mr. Clinton concluded: "If [the Serb people] think it’s okay, they can make that decision. But I wouldn’t give them one red cent for reconstruction if they think it’s okay, because I don’t think it’s okay, and I don’t think that’s the world we’re trying to build for our children."

In other words, it appears that Mr. Clinton does have a "quarrel" with the Serb people, whom he insists on holding accountable for the actions of Slobodan Milosevic’s regime. Mr. Clinton’s statements presuppose that the calculated destruction of Serbia’s civilian economy and infrastructure is justified by atrocities allegedly committed by that nation’s government against Albanians in Kosovo. Nothing in U.S. law or in Western just war tradition supports the notion that it is right to "punish" an evil ruler by terrorizing and slaughtering his subjects. Furthermore, the parade of atrocities cited by Mr. Clinton has proven to be largely a work of embellishment, if not outright propaganda.

This is not to say that the Serbian paramilitary and regular Army units deployed in Kosovo are blameless. Ben Works, head of the Strategic Research Institute of the United States (a private intelligence consulting firm), who has analyzed Balkan affairs for more than a decade, told The New American: "It’s pretty clear that there is a pattern of war crimes by Serb forces in Kosovo. It’s by no means of the magnitude that NATO officials have suggested, and there have been plenty of outrages committed by all sides — including NATO. But it would be dishonest to say that the Serb forces in Kosovo are completely innocent."

Canadian photojournalist Paul Watson was one of the few Western reporters who covered the Kosovo tragedy on-site. In an interview with CBC radio’s As It Happens program, Watson testified: "I have spoken personally to people who have been ordered to leave their homes by police in black. I’ve also spoken to people who are simply terrified.... I don’t think that NATO member countries can, with a straight face, sit back and say they don’t share some of the blame for the wholesale depopulation of this country." While Serb forces were doing some terrible things, Watson explained, there was no evidence of systematic, genocidal "cleansing." "It is very hard to hide an anarchic wholesale slaughter of people," he pointed out. "There is no evidence that such a thing happened" in Kosovo.

Watson’s account was corroborated by a July 2nd USA Today front-page story documenting that the casualty and refugee figures — as well as the lurid atrocity accounts — peddled by NATO and Clinton Administration mouthpieces during the 78-day war "now appear greatly exaggerated as allied forces take control of the provinces.... Instead of 100,000 ethnic Albanian men feared murdered by rampaging Serbs, officials now estimate that about 10,000 were killed." How many of those victims perished as a result of the NATO bombing campaign, we may never know.

In a May speech before a veterans group, Mr. Clinton asserted that 600,000 ethnic Albanians were "trapped within Kosovo itself lacking shelter, short of food, afraid to go home, or buried in mass graves dug by their executioners." In fact, reported USA Today, "Though thousands [of Albanian men] hid in Kosovo, they are healthy." Additionally, "Kosovo’s livestock, wheat, and other crops are growing, not slaughtered wholesale or torched as widely reported." "Yes, there were atrocities," commented House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss (R-FL). "But no, they don’t measure up to the advance billing."

Bill Clinton’s allusion to accounts of "little girls" being raped — a singularly audacious charge, coming as it did from a plausibly accused rapist — also embroiders the facts that are becoming available. In the Kosovo conflict, as in nearly every other military struggle, the tragedy of rape was a tangible reality. However, as Lori Montgomery of the Sydney Morning Herald reported in a July 3rd dispatch from Prizren, there is no evidence of "systematic" rape conducted by Serb forces. Such rape as did occur was "a vicious aberration among Serb forces, an opportunistic act perpetrated by the mean and the drunken who tried to hide it from their superiors."

Further complicating efforts for Bill Clinton and others who wish to depict the Serbs as genocidalists is the fact that no threat was made to evict or exterminate Belgrade’s population of 100,000 ethnic Albanians; the only threat they faced came from NATO’s bombing runs. Furthermore, the Yugoslav government actually provided weapons to loyalist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

KLA "Cleansing"

By way of contrast, NATO’s leadership collective has shown little concern over the "ethnic cleansing" campaign being waged against Serbs in Kosovo under the leadership of the Marxist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). While many Kosovo Albanians are exacting revenge against specific Serbs who burned and looted Albanian homes, the Serb victims include many people who tried to intervene on behalf of their Albanian neighbors.

When, shortly after the NATO bombing campaign began, troops from Serbia’s Interior Ministry went on a rampage through the village of Sekiraca, 80-year-old Srbislav Dukic "implored the troops not to burn the ethnic Albanian houses and a flour mill owned by 28-year-old Mustafa Ejupi," reported the July 3rd Sydney Morning Herald. Standing with his arm around his elderly benefactor, Ejupi recalled how Dukic intervened with the soldiers and pointed out that the younger Albanian had no connections to the KLA. "Srbislav saved my mill," testified Ejupi. Now the elderly Good Samaritan and his family face "revenge" attacks mounted by the KLA.

"I don’t know how Serbs and ethnic Albanians can live together in the future, but our leadership is guilty," declares Dukic. "The leadership has created this environment. And we poor people, workers who have been working all our lives, we’ve never had problems." Now that the KLA, largely unmolested by NATO "peacekeepers," is conducting depredations against Kosovo Serbs, the relative tranquility described by Dukic will probably never return.

The monks of Decani monastery also acted to protect their Albanian neighbors from Serb paramilitaries. According to a June 17th BBC report, ethnic Albanians in Decani "say they owe their lives to the humanity and courage of the local Orthodox monks." When paramilitary gangs stormed nearby villages demanding money — and killing Albanians who wouldn’t or couldn’t buy them off — the monks offered sanctuary to as many refugees as they could take in. "We helped them in the best way we could," recalled the monastery’s abbot. Agim Morani, one of the Albanians saved by the monks, told the BBC that the abbot "took us to the church and then came back for the others. If he hadn’t come it is one hundred percent certain we would be dead." The KLA has repaid the Christian solicitude of the Decani monks by vandalizing the monastery and destroying its icons.

Mother Maharija, the abbess of Zvecan’s Holy Mother Orthodox Convent in Kosovo, also provided shelter for ethnic Albanians during the war. "Our dearest neighbors are Albanians," Maharija told the Chicago Tribune. "During the war, we protected them, brought them medicine and took them to the hospital in Kosovska Mitrovica." Since the end of the war, notes the Tribune, "Nuns have been raped, churches vandalized, and members of religious orders robbed by the Kosovo Liberation Army"; the Holy Mother Orthodox Convent has been spared thus far, and Maharija intends to continue ministering to the needs of her neighbors.

Elsewhere in "liberated" Kosovo, KLA terrorists have vented their hatred on Orthodox Christian monks and nuns. The Times of London reported on June 21st that KLA marauders "attacked and possibly raped nuns" and began "a vicious series of revenge killings of Gypsies in the southern Prizren area." One British officer assigned to the area described as "sickening" the three-day ordeal of nine nuns who were trapped in a nearby convent. "I know [KLA guerillas] fired guns right next to the sisters’ heads and I believe very possibly the youngest sister was raped," he told the Times.

Bill Clinton’s legendary empathy flags when the subject is the plight of Kosovo’s Serbs, who are being "cleansed" from their homes under the largely indifferent gaze of UN/NATO "peacekeepers." During his June 25th press conference, Mr. Clinton was asked by a reporter about "Serb homes that are being burned, Serb stores that are being looted, and Serb civilians that are being terrorized" by KLA-led mobs. The impeached President actually defended the perpetrators: "I’m not particularly surprised after what they’ve been through."

The Clinton Administration and the UN’s so-called International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia have actually made it plain that the KLA can ravage Kosovo Serbs with impunity. "The U.S. government and the United Nations said … they have no plans to investigate the Kosovo Liberation Army for possible war crimes, arguing that a wave of revenge against Serbs in the province does not appear to be coordinated by the KLA leadership," reported the June 29th Washington Times. "Our mandate is to investigate crimes that occur during the war, during armed conflict that involve members of armed entities," declared Tribunal spokesman Paul Riley. Of the KLA’s post-war rampage, Riley opined, "I don’t think it’s an organized KLA attempt. I think it’s just guys doing what they think is right — burning houses."

While Serb civilians, as Bill Clinton has made clear, must pay the price for acts of terror committed by Milosevic’s minions, the KLA will not be held accountable for supposedly unorganized acts of terror they are committing against Serb civilians.

NATO "Success"

NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign inflicted little damage on the Serbian military and interior ministry forces responsible for terrorizing Kosovo’s Albanian population. "Within Kosovo, NATO’s KFOR troops have found few examples of bombing damage," Britain’s Sky News service reported in early July. "Strategic sites in the capital, Pristina, had been destroyed, as had some key bridges. But large columns of retreating Serb forces showed little sign of attack at the end of the conflict." "We all saw the Serbs leaving Kosovo with their tails and their flags flying," observed Lieutenant General Sir Roderick Cordy-Simpson, a British official who has commanded UN "peacekeepers" in Bosnia. "Certainly we did not do anything like [the damage] we pretended we had done...."

During the air campaign, reported military analyst Colonel David Hackworth, NATO’s "smart bombs and missiles costing from 50 grand to 2 million bucks repeatedly blew up decoy ‘tanks,’ ‘artillery pieces,’ and other ‘targets’ made of sticks and plastic...." Yugoslav Army units would rig dummy mobile-air-defense units, many of which were placed next to dummy bridges and "mock roads — strips of black plastic sheeting laid across open fields with ‘tanks’ and other ‘military vehicles’ painted on them," Hackworth continued. "U.S. aircraft flying at 15,000 feet had a field day blowing up these ‘Serb air defense units’ and other dummy targets, while their spinners back at NATO headquarters daily chanted to the world, ‘We are significantly degrading their air defense and combat ability.’"

NATO’s air campaign against civilian targets was significantly more "successful." At least 74 Kosovo Albanian refugees were slaughtered during a NATO air strike on the road between Prizren and Djakovica; the refugees were killed while attempting to return to their homes in Kosovo. Robert Fisk of London’s Independent newspaper described the "torn and mangled bodies" of NATO’s victims — "a young and beautiful girl, her eyes gently staring at me between half-closed lids, the bottom half of her head bathed in blood.... [T]he old man ripped in half and blasted into a tree … the smoldering skeleton with one bloody still flesh-adhering foot over the back of a trailer … the dead, naked man slouched over the steering wheel of a burnt tractor...."

Reporting from Surdulica, Fisk described the casualties of a NATO bomb that destroyed a sanitarium for lung and tuberculosis patients. At least 18 patients died in the attack on the hospital, which is clearly identified, according to Fisk, "on every map," and nowhere near a military installation. Fisk described teen-age Milena Malobabic, whose body was found near "that of her mother — both feet torn off but placed beside her legs, and Milena’s two brothers, one of them with an arm bent over his face as if still cowering from the bombs." As Fisk recounted the attack, "About 40 patients at the Special Hospital for Lung and Tuberculosis were seriously wounded when the NATO bombs fell on them just after midnight. Part of the two-story, 75-year-old hospital simply caved in on the men and women in their beds, which is where most of them died, although one old man whose body I saw was still dressed in a pair of old blue trousers and a torn striped shirt."

"Geneva Conventions — assiduously produced by NATO in response to war crimes against Albanians in Kosovo — state that civilians must be protected even if in the vicinity of military personnel," Fisk pointed out. "But the patients at Surdulica were not given that protection." Branislav Ristic, commander of the local civil defense unit, pointed out to Fisk that during World War II, resistance fighters were stationed near the sanitarium "and the Germans knew they were here but never touched them."

"The Germans never did anything like this," agreed Jokvana Ilic, a Belgrade schoolteacher reacting to a late April bombing of the Vracar residential district. "I cannot believe it. I simply cannot believe it." According to the Associated Press, "The heat from the explosions was so great, residents said, it burned the hair of those who ran out into the streets to see what had happened." "They are destroying us, one by one, piece by piece," wept 30-year-old Jasminka Radovanovic. "What do they want from us?"

Price of "Peace"

NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia, observed Professor Robert Hayden of the University of Pittsburgh, was "the first unprovoked, opposed military aggression in Europe since Soviet troops invaded Hungary in 1956." In this war of aggression, continued Hayden, "NATO’s attacks [were] aimed against civilian targets since literally the first night of the bombing, when a tractor factory in the Belgrade suburb of Rakovica was destroyed by cruise missiles. Since then, NATO targets have included roads, railroad tracks and bridges hundreds of miles from Kosovo, power plants, factories of many kinds, food processing and sugar processing plants, water pumping stations, cigarette factories, central heating plants for civilian apartment blocks, television studios, post offices, non-military government administrative buildings, ski resorts, government official residences, oil refineries, civilian airports, gas stations, and chemical plants."

Said Hayden: "That NATO planned from the start to hit civilian targets was made clear to me a few days before the attacks began by an employee of a U.S. intelligence organization who said that the CIA had been charged with preparing lists of Yugoslav economic assets and that, ‘basically, everything in the country is a target unless it’s taken off the list.’ NATO’s strategy is not to attack Yugoslavia’s army directly, but rather to destroy Yugoslavia itself.... With this strategy it is military losses that are ‘collateral damage,’ because most of the attacks are aimed at civilian targets."

During a March 31st interview, Dan Rather asked Bill Clinton if he had given the order to (in military parlance) "go downtown" — that is, to bomb non-military targets in Belgrade. Seeking refuge in circumlocution, the impeached President drawled out an answer worthy of a Soviet commissar: "We are attacking targets that we believe will … raise the price of aggression to an unacceptably high level so that we can get back to talking peace and security."

The world neither needs nor can afford the Soviet-style "peace and security" represented in NATO’s "victory" over Serbia.

 

[FrankRep]

1999 - Our Illegal War

Con. Helen Chenoweth | The New American
April 26, 1999


Congress must reclaim its authority

When the order was given for American military personnel to attack Yugoslavia, it was not issued following a declaration of war from Congress. Nor was the order given by the President as a means of repelling a sudden attack on America by a foreign aggressor, or as a measure intended to rescue Americans abroad from unexpected peril. In fact, the order to attack Yugoslavia didn’t even follow the pattern set in Korea and Vietnam, in which our nation was committed to protracted foreign wars through unilateral presidential action. On March 23rd, the order to commence hostilities was given to an American general by a Spanish Marxist — NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana.

"I have just directed the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, General [Wesley] Clark, to initiate air operations in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia," announced Solana, who insisted that the attack "is intended to support the political aims of the international community." Congress played no role in defining those political aims, which means that the American people — in whose name Congress is empowered to act — were not permitted to play any role in the decision to commit our nation to war.

In the run-up to our war with Yugoslavia, Congress was permitted by its leaders to carry out an impotent charade of debate. On March 11th, the House approved a non-binding resolution endorsing the use of American troops to enforce a peace agreement between the Yugoslav regime of Slobodan Milosevic and secessionist leaders in Yugoslavia’s Kosovo province. On March 23rd, just hours before Solana issued the order to begin the bombing, the Senate approved a resolution supporting the military campaign. But Clinton Administration officials, including the President, had by that time made it clear that while they sought approval of the military action from Congress, they did not consider it necessary for Congress to authorize the military strike on Yugoslavia.

A few senators seemed to understand the constitutional implications of these actions. Senator Don Nickles (R-OK) pointed out, "If we start a massive bombing campaign, we’re going to war." Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) described the prospect of waging an undeclared aggressive war upon Yugoslavia as "a precedent I don’t want to be involved in." Even more pointed were the comments of Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM). "I say shame on the President," declared Domenici, momentarily forgetting that Bill Clinton has repeatedly demonstrated that he is incapable of shame. "If this is such an important matter, why couldn’t [the President] trust the United States Senate and United States House and ask us whether we concur?"

In order to appreciate the depth of the Administration’s deception regarding the war over Kosovo, it is necessary to understand that the war was "authorized" by NATO long before the bombing began on March 24th. The day after the war began, the London Telegraph reported that General Clark, NATO’s supreme military commander, "received his activation order for hostilities last October. The order was the official moment when authority over the forces to be used was transferred to him from the top brass of the member countries supplying them. The supreme commander does not need new permission from politicians or diplomats whenever he wishes to change tactics, or increase or scale back operations." (Emphasis added.)

At 1:43 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on March 24th, with American bombers en route to Yugoslavia and just minutes before the first explosions were reported on the ground in Kosovo, White House spokesman Joe Lockhart explicitly admitted that the power to take our nation into war had been surrendered to a foreign official — namely, the NATO Secretary-General. Lockhart was asked by correspondent Helen Thomas, "Who gives the green light on this now? Is it the President himself, or the Supreme Commander of NATO...?" Lockhart replied, "The Supreme Commander of NATO acts on the authority of the political leaders of the NATO countries, and he has that authority."

In brief, the power to declare war in Kosovo was exercised by NATO Secretary-General Solana; the power to make war was given to NATO’s Supreme Commander; the President of the United States played the role of "selling" the war to the public, and Congress was tacitly told that its duty was to rubber-stamp the decision to take our nation into war, and to authorize payment of the resulting expenses.

"No power but Congress can declare war," observed Daniel Webster in 1846, "but what is the value of this constitutional provision, if the President of his own authority may make such military movements as must bring on war?" The Administration’s actions in committing our country to enforce, through military action, diplomatic initiatives in Kosovo presented Congress with a fait accompli. The only recourse left to Congress was to defund military deployments to which the Administration had previously committed our country — but the political will for that is not evident. Unfortunately, the majority in both houses of Congress have abdicated their responsibility and have acquiesced in the usurpation of their powers. The passivity of the House in allowing Bill Clinton to carry out an illegal war is particularly galling in light of the fact that the same body impeached him last December for much less serious crimes.

Under the Constitution, explained Alexander Hamilton, "It is the province and duty of the Executive to preserve to the Nation the blessings of peace. The Legislature alone can interrupt those blessings, by placing the Nation in a state of War." By surrendering to a series of executive usurpations (those of Bill Clinton being the most brazen), Congress has abandoned the separation of powers and embraced in its place a version of fuhrerprinzip — the "leader principle" — in which Congress meekly endorses the decisions of an imperial "commander-in-chief."

"Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object," wrote Abraham Lincoln in 1848. The royal war-making prerogative, which permitted one man to commit his country to war, was regarded by our Founding Fathers "to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions," Lincoln explained. For this reason, the statesmen who gathered at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 "resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us."

James Madison’s notes on the Convention record the care with which the Founders assigned the power to declare war to the legislative branch. This was done, as George Mason of Virginia noted, for the purpose of "clogging rather than facilitating war." At the initiative of Madison and Elbridge Gerry, the original language authorizing Congress to "make" war was changed to the power to "declare" war, thereby (in Madison’s words) "leaving to the Executive the power to repel sudden attacks."

In an April 2, 1798 letter to Thomas Jefferson, Madison further elucidated the reasoning behind this careful assignment of powers. "The constitution supposes, what the History of all [governments] demonstrates, that the [executive] is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly, with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature."

Alexander Hamilton, who favored a strong Executive branch, observed in The Federalist, No. 69: "The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect, his authority would nominally be the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it." (Emphasis added.) Where the power of the English king "extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies," Hamilton explained, the authority of the U.S. President "amounts to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the land and naval forces, as first general and admiral" after the declaration of war has been issued by Congress.

The text of the Constitution itself (Article II, Section 2) specifies, "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States...." In other words, "Commander in Chief" describes a specific and limited role played by the President. Rather than Congress having a Commander in Chief before which it must prostrate itself, it has in the President an executive it may entrust with delegated war-making authority.

It bears repeating that in the Kosovo war, the role of commander in chief, by the Administration’s own admission, has been assigned to NATO’s Supreme Commander, who exercises (in Hamilton’s words) "the supreme command and direction of the land and naval forces" called into service by Secretary-General Solana. Perhaps, given Mr. Clinton’s own history of "loathing" for the military, personal cowardice, and bottomless corruption, it is of benefit to the morale of American servicemen fighting in Yugoslavia to know that it is General Clark who serves as their commander in chief. Nevertheless, this arrangement gravely undermines the constitutional mechanisms designed to protect our liberties and national sovereignty.

In my remarks to the House of Representatives during the March 11th debate, I reminded my colleagues that nothing in the laws or the Constitution suggests that a determination by the United Nations Security Council or by the North Atlantic Council (NATO’s governing political body) is a substitute for a congressional declaration of war. Furthermore, by making war on a sovereign nation, NATO acted in violation of both its own charter and that of the United Nations.

The North Atlantic Treaty states that NATO will "refrain in [its] international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations." The document specifies that NATO was created to defend "the territorial integrity, political independence or security" of its members in exercising the right of "collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations." Whatever one thinks of the actions of the Milosevic regime in suppressing a secessionist movement within its own borders, it must be admitted that the Yugoslav regime did nothing to threaten the "integrity, political independence or security" of NATO members. Thus NATO’s attack on that regime violated the alliance’s founding treaty.

Furthermore, NATO’s commitment to act in harmony with "the purposes of the United Nations" requires that the alliance be bound by the UN Charter. Article 2, section 7 of the UN Charter states, "Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state"; the suppression of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian secessionist movement is clearly within Yugoslavia’s domestic jurisdiction.

Under the precedent set in the Kosovo war, America may find itself committed to military intervention in ethnic conflicts around the world. Should we attack Turkey to protect the Kurds, who chafe under Turkish rule? Should we go to war with China in support of independence-minded Tibet? Will U.S. planes attack Sri Lanka in defense of Tamil separatists, or bomb targets in India on behalf of Muslims in Kashmir? The logic of the Kosovo precedent dictates that U.S. troops can be committed to war, without congressional sanction, anywhere in the world where atrocities are captured by the camera lens.

The war on Yugoslavia, we must remember, was brought about by NATO’s demand that Milosevic consent to the foreign occupation of his country by an international army, which would enforce the terms of an agreement intended to grant "autonomy" to ethnic Albanian rebels. When Milosevic refused to permit the occupation, NATO threatened to bomb his country, and ultimately carried out that threat. Once again, the Clinton Administration has been devastatingly candid about key facts. On February 10th, in testimony before the Committee on International Relations, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Pickering confirmed that Kosovo is part of Yugoslavia’s sovereign territory, and that an attack upon Yugoslavia waged because of Milosevic’s refusal to allow foreign intervention would be nothing less than an act of war.

It is a remarkable spectacle to see the Clinton Administration and NATO taking over from the Soviet Union the role of sponsoring "wars of national liberation." More remarkable still, and even more unsettling, is the fact that the beneficiary in the case of Kosovo — the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) — is a collection of Maoist drug-peddlers and terrorists who have been armed by Iran and provided with training and support by Saudi terrorist financier Osama bin Ladin, who is the world’s most notorious sponsor of international terrorism.

When Bill Clinton, in an earlier crime against the Constitution, unilaterally launched missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan, he claimed that his target was the terrorist network operated by bin Ladin. However, in Kosovo, Bill Clinton has committed America’s military might to the support of bin Ladin’s Balkan allies, and the policy of the Clinton Administration seeks the creation of a Balkan outpost for bin Ladin’s terrorist network.

THE NEW AMERICAN was the first national publication in this country to document the KLA’s narco-terrorist background ("Diving into the Kosovo Quagmire," March 15th issue), and I made this magazine’s findings available to many of my colleagues on Capitol Hill. Although few U.S. publications have looked into the KLA’s role in international narco-terrorism, the Times of London for March 24th, in a story published just before NATO commenced airstrikes upon Yugoslavia, reported that the KLA, in "the judgment of senior police officers across Europe," is "a Marxist-led force funded by dubious sources, including drug money." Police forces in three Western European countries, together with Europol, "are separately investigating growing evidence that drug money is funding the KLA’s leap from obscurity to power," continued the report.

A report filed on the same day by Steve Rodan of the World Tribune described how an "autonomous" Kosovo under KLA control could serve as a springboard for Iranian sponsored terrorism throughout Europe and beyond. According to Western European security experts, wrote Rodan, "Iran, Saudi Arabia and some of their terrorist beneficiaries have exploited the fighting to establish a sphere of influence that spans from Greece to the Austrian border." NATO’s willingness to go to war on behalf of Muslim ethnic Albanians in Kosovo could ignite insurrections across Europe, to which the KLA’s terrorist sponsors would eagerly lend support. "The concern of European strategists is that an Iranian sphere of influence would do greater damage to such Western countries as Britain, France and Germany," reported Rodan. "France has about two million Muslims, most of them poor and alienated. Britain has about 1.5 million." A European diplomat told Rodan, "Once these minorities feel that they can obtain the support of NATO, we could see flare-ups everywhere."

We could see "flare-ups" within our own nation as well — and the Kosovo precedent would justify military intervention by the "international community" to settle such conflicts within our own borders. Consider the case of the southwestern United States, a region referred to as "Aztlan," the mythical homeland of the Aztecs, by such militant groups as the "Brown Berets." Aztlan radicals have announced their intention to conduct la reconquista — the re-conquest — of that region through unrestrained illegal immigration, as well as subversion and violence. It is not difficult to foresee a future scenario in which the "international community" authorizes the use of military force in support of "autonomy" for Aztlan, in the same way that the war in Yugoslavia was launched in support of "autonomy" for an Albanian Muslim-dominated Kosovo.

Had Congress performed its constitutional duty, all of these facts would have been rigorously examined before our nation found itself committed to an illegal war in Yugoslavia. We would have demanded that the President make his best case to the people’s representatives in a formal request for a declaration of war. This would have given us the opportunity to require that he defend an alliance with drug-dealing Marxists bent upon promoting terrorism throughout Europe. Had Congress been willing to exercise a check on presidential ambitions by withholding funds for the envisioned military deployment, we would have learned, in a timely fashion, about the unconstitutional arrangement through which the power to declare war was delegated to a Spanish Marxist, and the power to make war was assigned to NATO’s military commander. Had we acted with statesman-like deliberation, we would have soberly discussed and contemplated the implications of the Kosovo precedent for our nation’s future.

It was our duty to do all of this before deciding whether or not to interrupt "the blessings of peace … by placing the Nation in a State of War." Instead, Congress submitted to the usurpations of a corrupt, impeached President, and made itself complicit in his crimes against our Constitution and our national sovereignty.

Congress can reclaim the powers it has surrendered. Indeed it must, if our descent into tyranny and the erosion of our sovereignty are to be arrested. But this will not happen until a critical mass of public understanding is reached, and informed pressure is brought to bear. The actions of an imperial President can, as Lincoln warned, "bring this oppression upon us" — but only if, through our indifference, we allow those malign designs to flourish.

 

[FrankRep]

1999 - Why Kosovo?


William Norman Grigg | The New American
May 10, 1999


It was a spectacle at once pathetic and horrifying: Hundreds of thousands — perhaps a half-million or more — terrified civilians driven from a land their people had lived in for centuries. Those not fortunate enough to flee fell prey to the depredations of merciless paramilitary death squads, who committed hideous acts of plunder, rape, and mass murder. Thousands of civilians perished, and the human tidal wave generated by this triumph of "ethnic cleansing" was described by some observers as the largest human population displacement Europe had seen since World War II.

Are these snapshots of Kosovo, April 1999? No — these are scenes from Krajina, August 1995. The victims were not ethnic Albanians driven from Kosovo by the security forces of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, but rather ethnic Serbs driven from Croatia by troops under the command of Croatian dictator Franjo Tudjman. Although no decent person can help but be moved by the plight of Kosovo’s Albanians, their suffering is not unique. As will be illustrated below, that suffering is a product — perhaps a premeditated one — of decisions taken by the same foreign policy elite that now describes the forced exodus from Kosovo as a humanitarian disaster of global proportions. That same elite was behind the slaughter and forced exodus of the Krajina Serbs.

Reward for "Peace"

No threats of military retaliation were issued by the Clinton Administration and NATO following Croatia’s rout of the Krajina Serbs. In fact, the massacre could not have occurred without timely and generous assistance from the Clinton Administration. According to Croatian diplomat Stipe Mesic, the Croatian assault on Krajina was Tudjman’s reward "for having accepted, under Washington’s pressure, the federation between Croats and Muslims in Bosnia" that was written into the Dayton "peace" accords. Croatian assembly deputy Mate Mestrovic explained that the Clinton Administration "gave us the green light to do whatever had to be done." The invasion plan, code-named "Operation Storm," received specific prior approval from Peter Galbraith, the U.S. ambassador to Croatia.

Additionally, the Croatian military campaign received tactical support from NATO. As Croat forces began their attack, U.S. aircraft under NATO command destroyed Serbian radar and anti-aircraft defenses in the region. American EA-6B electronic warfare aircraft patrolled the skies in support of the unfolding offensive, jamming communications between Serb units. But there was also a covert American presence on the ground in support of the Croats. Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI), a private military and intelligence consulting firm based in Virginia, had been hired by Tudjman in early 1995 to upgrade his Soviet-created Ministry of Defense into a modern fighting force. According to MPRI information officer Joseph Allred, the firm exists so that "the U.S. can have influence as part of its national strategy on other nations without employing its own army."

Thanks in large measure to training it received from MPRI, the "ex"-Communist Croatian military, which had previously been dismissed as bumbling and inept, performed its grisly mission in Krajina with unexpected efficiency and professionalism. By focusing primarily on civilian targets, the Croats minimized their casualties: Croatia admitted to suffering only 118 dead or wounded, as compared to an estimated 14,000 civilian casualties among the Serbs. An AP dispatch filed during the offensive reported that Croat forces shelled and strafed columns of Serb refugees.

Canadian General Alain Forand, who was assigned to UN "peacekeeping" duty in Krajina during Operation Storm, has testified, "There is no doubt in my mind that the Croats knew they were shelling civilian targets" in the city of Knin, which was where the Krajina Serb parliament was located. Colonel Andrew Leslie, another Canadian "peacekeeper," estimated that of the more than 3,000 shells fired at the city, no more than 250 hit military targets; accordingly, he concluded, "the fire was deliberately directed against civilian buildings." Leslie has also described seeing bodies of the dead at Knin Hospital "stacked in the corridors … in piles."

Milwaukee attorney Nikola Kostich, who has served as counsel for Bosnian Serbs at the UN’s war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia, told THE NEW AMERICAN in late 1997 about his visit to a mass grave in Mrkonjic Grad, a small town in southwestern Bosnia near Krajina where Croats and Bosnian Muslims liquidated Serb civilians during the period of Operation Storm. "I was present when the site was exhumed," Kostich recalled. "The bodies were not those of military personnel. They were civilians, including people as much as 80 years old."

"Highway of Hell"

As is the case with Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, the Krajina Serbs were secessionists seeking to create an independent polity in what they considered an ancestral ethnic homeland. However, just prior to the beginning of the Croat offensive on August 4, 1995, the leaders of the Krajina Serbs, fearing the consequences to continued resistance, were willing "to discuss terms for reintegrating territory they hold into Croatia’s domain," reported the AP. This contrasts sharply with the position of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the Maoist insurrectionary group that seeks to wrest Kosovo from Serbia and integrate it into a "Greater Albania" which would include parts of Montenegro, Macedonia, and Greece.

In the months leading up to the beginning of the Kosovo War on March 24th, the KLA escalated its guerilla campaign, while urging NATO to bomb the Serbs — even if this meant that hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians would perish or be driven from their homes once the war began in earnest. According to a diplomatic insider quoted by the April 1st Chicago Tribune, when KLA officials were warned that NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia would trigger retaliatory violence by Serb forces in Kosovo, one KLA leader replied: "We don’t care. 400,000 Kosovars can be sacrificed for our independence."

Addressing an audience of NATO combat pilots at the air base in Aviano, Italy on April 8th, Secretary of Defense William Cohen descended into rank melodrama: "Mr. Milosevic, as you have all seen, has carried us into the heart of darkness. It’s a place where power grinds its heel and boot over the rule of law, and where justice amounts to nothing more than a bullet in the back of the head." Milosevic and his minions, Cohen continued, "are engaging in rape, pillage, and mass murder on a scale that we have not seen since the end of World War II.... They have pushed over a million people onto a highway of hell that is littered with depravation and suffering that is almost unimaginable."

Milosevic is an "ex"-Communist thug who commands a Soviet-style military and security apparatus, and there is ample evidence that his treatment of the Kosovo Albanians has been appallingly brutal. However, he can’t claim all the credit for the humanitarian disaster described (in grossly exaggerated terms) by Cohen. The "highway of hell" is a joint production of Milosevic, the KLA, and NATO.

"We act to protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo from a mounting military offensive," declared Bill Clinton a few hours after U.S. military personnel had been ordered into battle by Javier Solana, the Spanish Marxist who serves as NATO’s secretary-general. As is the case with many of Mr. Clinton’s public pronouncements, this was a demonstrable lie, given that he had been offered ample prior warning that air strikes against Yugoslavia would provoke bloody reprisals against Kosovo’s Albanian residents.

"The warnings were there for President Clinton," reported the April 1st Washington Post. "For weeks before the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia … CIA Director George J. Tenet had been forecasting that Serb-led Yugoslav forces might respond by accelerating their campaign of ethnic cleansing in the province of Kosovo — precisely the outcome that has unfolded over the past week." Top-ranking military officials corroborated Tenet’s assessment, warning Mr. Clinton that if Serb security and military forces carried out such an assault, "air power alone would not be sufficient to stop it...." Indeed, on March 30th, NATO supreme military commander Wesley Clark admitted that from the very beginning, "we never thought that through air power we could stop these killings on the ground."

Despite receiving such detailed advice from top military advisers, "Clinton and his senior White House advisers pressed on with their planning for an air campaign," continued the Post account. An earlier report in the Post described a meeting between Mr. Clinton and Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema shortly before the war began, in which D’Alema asked the President what would be done if Milosevic responded to an air strike by escalating his own military campaign in Kosovo. Not knowing how to respond, Mr. Clinton looked helplessly at his National Security Adviser, Samuel Berger, who blithely replied, "We will continue the bombing."

In other words, if the air strikes exacerbated the suffering, the Clinton Administration’s chosen strategy was to reinforce failure — at whatever cost to both the Serbs and the ethnic Albanians in Yugoslavia. Incredibly, when White House spokesman Joe Lockhart was asked about Serb retaliation against Albanians in Kosovo, he replied: "We knew he was going to do this." This admission prompted liberal columnist Michael Kelly to conclude, "the President and his advisers are guilty of criminal irresponsibility. For the United States made no serious efforts to prepare for what Lockhart says we knew was coming, a wave of killing and ‘cleansing’ U.S. officials now compare to genocide."

NATO-Prompted Terror

An even more shocking fact was reported by Detroit News columnist Tony Snow on March 29th. Relaying an account of a confidential national security briefing provided by a senator who was in attendance, Snow wrote: "After the foreign-policy wise men asserted that the United states has a moral imperative to stop the murderous Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, one senator asked: How many Albanians have Milosevic’s troops massacred this year? The President’s emissaries turned ashen. They glanced at each other. They rifled through their papers. One hazarded a guess: ‘Two thousand?’ No, the senator replied, that was the number for all of last year."

"The senator pressed on," continued Snow. "How often have … slaughters occurred [in Kosovo]? Nobody knew. As it turns out, Kosovo has been about as bloody this year as, say, Atlanta." Before the war began, deaths in Kosovo could be measured "not in the hundreds, but dozens.... More people died last week in Borneo than expired this year in Kosovar bloodshed — more died in a single Russian bomb blast; in a single outburst of violence in East Timor; in a single day in Rwanda. China has been bloodier this year."

In other words, it was not until NATO began its war that Kosovo graduated to the status of an epic "humanitarian crisis" — just as it is true that the tragedy of Kosovo was contained until multinational intervention turned it into a conflict of potentially global scope.

It is also important to recognize that the dimensions of the "humanitarian crisis" are not known, and will not be known until normalcy — or what passes for it in the Balkans — is restored to the region. The most lurid accounts of slaughter and mayhem on the part of Serb paramilitary forces originate with the KLA, which, as a Marxist terrorist group, is not hampered by a fastidious regard for the truth. On March 31st, Agence France-Presse (AFP) commented that without independent sources on the ground in Kosovo, U.S. and NATO officials are providing "little more than regurgitation of unconfirmed information from the Kosovo Liberation Army."

State Department spokesman James Rubin acknowledged that the atrocity accounts he provided to reporters were relayed from KLA commander Hashim Thaci and were "not necessarily facts."

One spurious atrocity story retailed by Rubin described the detention of 100,000 ethnic Albanians in a sports stadium in Pristina, Kosovo’s provincial capitol. But when an AFP reporter visited the site to confirm the story, he "found the stadium to be deserted and showing no signs of recent occupation."

Scoring for Milosevic

Once it became clear that the NATO air strikes would not prevent Milosevic from attacking Kosovo’s Albanians, NATO and Administration spokesman modulated their rhetoric by insisting that the air campaign was "degrading" or "grinding down" the Serb dictator’s ability to carry out his attacks. But such statements were strangers to the truth. "With every NATO missile that hits Yugoslav targets, Slobodan Milosevic stands to gain more power at home," wrote Associated Press reporter Dusan Stojanovic in a March 27th news analysis. "The opposition can’t support the West in its air strikes, the independent media have been silenced and foreign journalists expelled." Furthermore, "the ragtag Yugoslav Army — the main target of NATO strikes — has always been sidelined under Milosevic, with far fewer resources than his real power base: the Serbian police." It is the "police" — that is, the Interior Ministry and its affiliated paramilitaries — that conducted the atrocities in Kosovo, beyond the range of NATO’s air campaign.

In much the same way that UN-supervised military campaigns against Iraq have eliminated Saddam Hussein’s domestic opposition while leaving the dictator’s power base intact, NATO’s Kosovo War has actually fortified Milosevic’s position. Obrad Kesic, a senior adviser to former Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Panic, is an outspoken opponent of Milosevic. Kesic told THE NEW AMERICAN that in late 1998 "Milosevic was purging the upper echelons of the Yugoslav Army" in order to forestall a coup. "The Army has always been a big problem for Milosevic, both as an obstacle to his designs and as a potential rival for power."

Since 1991, Milosevic has built a 40,000-60,000-man paramilitary force independent of the Army, and that paramilitary force serves as Milosevic’s personal Praetorian Guard. He has also, in time-honored Communist fashion, seeded the ranks of the Army with paramilitary gangs skimmed from the scum of Serbian jails. These are the forces that have been tasked to conduct most of the dirty work, and NATO’s military campaign has left them relatively unmolested. A NATO missile attack on Belgrade did destroy the Interior Ministry headquarters — long after it had been evacuated. New York Times pundit William Safire, a supporter of the war, pointed out that the Interior Ministry attack served a propaganda purpose: It produced dramatic pictures that looked good on television.

But the bombing of Belgrade also served Milosevic’s propaganda purposes as well. "Milosevic is a product of the Communist Party who has posed as a Serb nationalist, and the war has given him a chance to recite all of the nationalist propaganda themes," Kesic informed THE NEW AMERICAN. "The truth of the matter is that he cares for nothing but preserving his own power, and he’s willing to play ‘Tito’ over whatever part of Yugoslavia he manages to keep. Time after time he has been willing to cut a deal that has sold out Serbs, whether it’s those living in Bosnia or the Krajina Serbs who were driven out of Croatia in 1995." For this reason, Milosevic’s relationship with the military "was deteriorating rapidly" as negotiations over Kosovo proceeded earlier this year.

However, noted Kesic, "things have changed dramatically since the war began. The Army feels that it’s giving as good as it’s getting, the Serb population is united behind Milosevic in a war with a foreign aggressor, and the regime is benefiting from a wave of patriotism that is suffocating all internal dissent against Milosevic’s rule."

The Real Reason

NATO’s war, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon admitted on March 30th, hasn’t prevented as much as "one act of brutality"; in fact, as we have seen, quite the contrary is the case. It has not dislodged Milosevic; to the contrary, it has enhanced his position. Thus the question remains unanswered: Why did we go to war?

The most likely answer is suggested by the cover of the April 12th edition of Time magazine, which displays a column of forlorn Albanian refugees. In the foreground is a young Albanian mother struggling to breast-feed her infant as she wearily plods toward an uncertain destiny. Beside this heart-rending photo, a headline poses a question intended to answer itself: "Are Ground Troops the Answer?"

The public has been inundated with similar photos and footage: Kosovo Albanians driven from their homes, packed into boxcars, and consigned to wretched refugee camps; throngs of desperately hungry refugees reaching plaintively for bread; elderly women and young children racked with sobs. This barrage has been the most effective weapon of the war, since it has been calibrated to break down the American public’s resistance to a protracted involvement in a ground war in the Balkans on behalf of NATO, the United Nations, and the cause of global government.

Why was the public spared similar footage of the August 1995 exodus of the Krajina Serbs? The short and cynical answer is that an event qualifies as a "humanitarian catastrophe" only when it is recognized as such by the foreign policy elite. As the following article will show (see page 13), that elite has now decided, on the basis of Kosovo’s "humanitarian catastrophe," that a "consensus" exists in favor of American involvement in a ground war in Kosovo. The purpose of that war, as is explained in the article beginning on page 17, is to advance the cause of world government, particularly the creation of a UN-run International Criminal Court.

This is why Serbs and Albanians are dying in Yugoslavia, and why American ground troops may soon be fighting and dying in the Balkans. There is a certain sinister symmetry in the fact that the modern drive for world government began with America’s involvement in World War I. The same criminal elite responsible for that debacle has decided to reprise the Balkan bloodshed as a coda to the 20th century.

 

[FrankRep]

1999 - Diving Into the Kosovo Quagmire


William Norman Grigg | The New American
March 15, 1999


According to the Clinton Administration, U.S. military intervention in Kosovo is necessary to bring an end to a yearlong civil war, prevent a monumental “humanitarian crisis,” and prevent the conflict from spreading to Albania, Greece, Macedonia, and perhaps even Turkey. As we shall show, the Administration’s public pronouncements are at odds with the truth.

The chief beneficiary of U.S. military intervention, the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), is a terrorist criminal syndicate, Maoist in its ideological bent, hard-wired into the international heroin trade, and tightly allied with Osama bin Laden. Additionally, American servicemen deployed in Kosovo would serve under the operational command of foreign military officers. In brief, the mission would advance the cause of international narco-terrorism, help entrench the European network of the world’s most notorious Islamic terrorist, and accelerate the erosion of U.S. sovereignty.

As representatives of Kosovo’s Albanian population — including delegates from the KLA — and Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic met in Rambouillet, France to discuss "autonomy" for the province, Clinton Administration officials made it known that the President was prepared to deploy 4,000 U.S. servicemen to Kosovo as part of NATO’s "Operation Joint Guardian." They also made it clear that they did not consider it necessary to obtain congressional authorization for the deployment.

In testimony offered on February 10th before the House International Affairs Committee, Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering defended Bill Clinton’s unilateral decision to commit troops to Kosovo, claiming that "there is ample constitutional precedent for this type of action." While it is true that Congress on many occasions has abdicated its constitutional responsibilities in the face of presidential usurpation, such delinquencies do not constitute "constitutional precedent." Congressman Tom Campbell (R-CA) underscored that fact, pointedly informing Pickering that "previous constitutional violations do not justify subsequent ones."

Congressman Pat Danner (D-MO) also found Pickering’s presentation unconvincing, predicting, "We are indeed going into a second Bosnia" — and few congressmen on either side of the aisle are eager to deploy U.S. troops into another Balkan morass. "Three years ago, the President sent troops into Bosnia, promising they would be home in six months," observed Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) in his February 15th newsletter. "The years have passed, more than $20 billion has been spent, and our soldiers are still there. Very few seriously ask anymore when these troops are coming home — or even what it is they are supposed to be accomplishing."

In November 1995, as a means of compelling congressional acquiescence in his Bosnia deployment, Bill Clinton inserted a small advance contingent before unilaterally dispatching a force of 20,000 GIs as "peacekeepers." By doing this, Mr. Clinton was essentially using U.S. servicemen as hostages: Congress was unwilling to de-fund the Administration’s unconstitutional venture lest it be accused of abandoning our soldiers in the field. A report in the February 12th Washington Post indicated that the Administration was prepared to pursue that strategy once again by kidnaping a 2,200-man Marine expeditionary unit deployed in the Adriatic and deploying them in Kosovo in advance of the main body of NATO "peacekeepers."

Using such time-honored tactics, Bill Clinton is recreating the circumstances that led to the Somalia debacle in 1993: U.S. troops assigned to a UN-supervised "peacekeeping" mission, under foreign command, deployed to a region in which no "peace" exists to be kept.

Maoist Movement

If there is a tract of land anywhere on the earth’s surface less relevant to America’s national interest than Kosovo, its name does not readily come to mind. Possessing an area roughly the same as that of Connecticut, the Serbian province displays, on a miniaturized scale, all of the characteristics of Bosnia. Serbs regard the province to be the spiritual home of Serbian nationalism, and many sites deemed sacred by the Serbian Orthodox Church are found in Kosovo. Of the province’s two million inhabitants, roughly 90 percent are ethnic Albanians, of whom approximately 90 percent are Muslim.

As in Bosnia, ancestral grudges and grievances are a palpable reality in Kosovo, and have been inflamed by generations of social engineering by various ruling elites — Ottoman, Nazi, and Communist. Many within the ethnic Albanian majority favor independence from Serbia, with some seeking unification into a "greater Albania."

The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) did not exist before November 1997, when KLA guerillas disguised with ski masks appeared at the funeral of a teacher killed by Kosovo Serbs in the village of Drenica. The movement that coalesced into the KLA "was made up of militants who were fascinated by the unadulterated Marxism of [late Albanian dictator] Enver Hoxha," reported the French journal Liberation on January 21st. The KLA is "opaque in its structures [and] totalitarian in its methods," explained the French publication, and its commanders have "remained largely true to the Maoist origins of its founders." KLA frontman Adem Demaci is an unabashed disciple of Mao, and KLA cadres greet one another with an upraised fist — the universal Marxist salute.

However, as military affairs analyst Ben Works, director of the Strategic Research Institute of the United States (SIRIUS), observed, the KLA is not rigidly ideological. "The Maoist ideology is an important element, but the selling point for recruits is the group’s militant Albanian nationalism," Works informed The New American. "Its chief appeal is to the ethnic Albanian Muslim population, and so its nationalism is couched in Islamic terms." The KLA’s Islamic veneer helps explain the group’s alliance with renegade Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, the notorious financier of anti-American terrorism.

"There’s no doubt that bin Laden’s people have been in Kosovo helping to arm, equip, and train the KLA," Works declared. "Bin Laden’s the monster du jour, and here we are coming to the aid of his allies in the Balkans. There is a monster being created here, but in important ways it’s a monster of our own making. Hardly a day goes by without a terrorism alert at some U.S. embassy that has been targeted by bin Laden’s people, and the Administration’s policy in Kosovo is to help bin Laden, through the KLA, extend his reach in Europe. It almost seems as if the Clinton Administration’s policy is to guarantee more terrorism."

In his syndicated column for August 12, 1998, retired U.S. Army Colonel Harry G. Summers wrote that in Bosnia and Kosovo "we find ourselves championing the very Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups who are our mortal enemies elsewhere." The Washington Post noted that the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania might be connected to Albania’s deportation of several members of an Islamic terrorist cell run by bin Laden. Several respected European journals, including London’s Defense and Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, have reported that Iran is actively arming and supporting the KLA, and Iran’s terrorist network has extended its reach into Italy by way of KLA-aligned ethnic Albanians residing there.

KLA Narco-Mafia

The KLA’s baneful impact has already been felt in Italy, particularly with regard to narco-terrorism. "In just the first two weeks of January, there were nine murders carried out by KLA assets in Milan," Works informed The New American. "This is nothing new, by any means. The KLA is tightly connected to the Albanian mafia, which is one of the major sources of heroin in Europe, and is also heavily involved in all aspects of the vice industry."

As Ben Works pointed out in a February 4th analysis, the Clinton Administration-crafted plan to grant "partial autonomy" to a KLA-dominated Kosovo all but guarantees that the province "will find itself controlled by the gunmen of an international drug-dealing mafia masquerading as an idealistic liberation army." The narco-mafia from which the KLA was spawned has been deeply involved in drug trafficking since the early 1980s as a means of fueling political insurrection.

A 1994 report compiled by France’s Observatire Geopolitique Des Drogues, which carries out counter-narcotics investigations on behalf of the European Commission, found that "heroin shipment and marketing networks are taking root among ethnic Albanian communities in Albania, Macedonia, and the Kosovo province of Serbia, in order to finance large purchases of weapons destined not only for the current conflict in Bosnia but also for the brewing war in Kosovo." The Kosovo headquarters of the Albanian drug network was identified in that report as Tropaja — a village on the Serbian-Albanian border that is a KLA stronghold. Large quantities of heroin from the embryonic KLA’s narco-network were seized in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Greece, and profits reaped from drug dealing were used to buy weapons. The report noted that "Russian army barracks constitute an almost inexhaustible source of hardware for these networks."

Until his recent arrest, 35-year-old Agim Gashi, an ethnic Albanian from the Kosovo city of Pristina, was Milan’s ruling drug lord. The Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera reported on January 19th that Gashi "supplied his brothers in Kosovo with Kalashnikov rifles, bazookas, and hand grenades. He controlled the heroin market, and at least part of the billions he made from it was used to buy weapons for the ‘resistance’ movement of the Albanian Kosovo community."

In one telephone conversation intercepted by Italian police, Gashi was overheard admonishing his Turkish heroin suppliers to continue shipments during Ramadan — "a violation of religious rules for the sake of a more important cause: ‘To submerge Christian infidels in drugs.’" Despite Gashi’s recent arrest, the KLA’s narco-allies remain atop Milan’s underworld, and are accepting the homage of the older, established syndicates: "The old ’Ndrangheta families, the Mafia … and the old Egyptian ‘lords’ depend on the new masters of the drug market, acknowledging their authority."

U.S. soldiers called upon to enforce a "peace" accord that turns Kosovo over to the KLA might be interested to know that they are risking their lives on behalf of a criminal syndicate that for years has pumped heroin into the U.S. and threatened the lives of American law enforcement officials. The international Albanian drug syndicate that spawned the KLA played a prominent role in the "Balkan connection" heroin network. According to the Wall Street Journal for September 9, 1985, ethnic Albanian Mafiosi residing in New York City, the terminus of a heroin pipeline reaching back through Belgrade to Istanbul, were responsible for moving "25% to 40% of the U.S. heroin supply." Law enforcement officials also believed that the Albanian expatriates were "involved in everything from gun-running to counterfeiting."

Unlike other ethnic criminal syndicates — such as the Italian-American La Cosa Nostra — the Albanian narco-mafia was willing to make war directly on U.S. law enforcement officials. One U.S. Attorney active in prosecuting "Balkan connection" gangsters learned that a contract had been taken out on his life by an ethnic Albanian defendant, as well as upon Assistant U.S. Attorney Alan M. Cohen and Drug Enforcement Administration agent Jack Delmore. This was in harmony with the "Kanun of Lek Dukamejin," the 15th-century social and ethical code that defines Albania’s culture. In the Albanian blood feud, "honor is cleansed by killing any male member of the family of the original offender, and the spirit of that victim cries out to its own family for purification," explains British historian Noel Malcolm in his 1998 study Kosovo: A Short History. Thus the contract applied not only to the law enforcement officials, but to the male members of their extended families as well.

Even after the Albanian mobster was convicted and sent to prison, an attempt was made to fulfill the contract, much to the puzzlement of the targeted U.S. Attorney. "After you have been convicted," he observed, "there is no rational reason to kill a prosecutor, except revenge." So spoke future New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose experience with the Albanian mob may influence his view of the wisdom of handing Kosovo to the KLA.

Waiting for an Alibi

The developments leading up to the Administration’s announcement of a U.S. mission to Kosovo were projected with uncanny prescience in an August 12, 1998 analysis by the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee (RPC). The report noted that "planning for a U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo is now largely in place.... The only missing element seems to be an event — with suitably vivid media coverage — that would make the intervention politically salable, in the same way that a dithering Administration finally decided on intervention in Bosnia in 1995 after a series of ‘Serb mortar attacks’ took the lives of dozens of civilians — attacks which, upon closer examination, may in fact have been the work of the Muslim regime in Sarajevo, the main beneficiary of the intervention."

"That the Administration is waiting for a similar ‘trigger’ in Kosovo is increasingly obvious," observed the RPC report. Last July, the Administration had already described the "trigger" event it was seeking as a pretext for intervention. The August 4th Washington Post quoted "a senior U.S. Defense Department official" who told reporters on July 15th that "we’re not anywhere near making a decision for any kind of armed intervention in Kosovo right now." The Post observed that the official "listed only one thing that might trigger a policy change: ‘I think if some levels of atrocities were reached that would be intolerable, that would probably be a trigger.’"

The "trigger" was pulled on January 16th, when William Walker, the Administration official assigned to Kosovo with a team of observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), announced that a "massacre" of more than 40 ethnic Albanian peasants by Serbian security personnel had taken place in the village of Racak. The January 20th New York Times observed that the Racak "massacre" followed "a well-established pattern: Albanian guerillas in the Kosovo Liberation Army kill a Serb policeman or two. Serb forces retaliate by flattening a village. This time they took the lives of more than 40 ethnic Albanians, including many elderly and one child."

However, as the French newspaper Le Figaro reported on the same day, there was ample reason to believe that Walker’s assessment of the situation was made in "undue haste." Walker, the U.S. official who headed a 700-man OSCE "verification" team monitoring a cease-fire in Kosovo, accused Serbian police of conducting a massacre "in cold blood." According to Le Figaro’s account, Serb policemen, after notifying both the media and OSCE officials, conducted a raid on a KLA stronghold. After several hours of combat, Serbian police announced that they had killed ten KLA personnel and seized a large cache of weapons. Journalists observed several OSCE officials talking with ethnic Albanian villagers in an attempt to determine the casualty count.

"The scene of Albanian corpses in civilian clothes lined up in a ditch which would shock the whole world was not discovered until the next morning, around 9:00 a.m.," reported the French newspaper. "At that time, the village was once again taken over by armed [KLA] soldiers who led the foreign visitors, as soon as they arrived, toward the supposed massacre site. Around noon, William Walker in person arrived and expressed his indignation." All of the Albanian witnesses interviewed by the media and OSCE observers on January 16th related the same version of events — namely, that Serbian police had forced their way into homes, separated the women from the men, and dragged the men to the hilltops to be unceremoniously executed.

The chief difficulty with this account, according to Le Figaro, is that television footage taken during the January 15th battle in Racak "radically contradict that version. It was in fact an empty village that the police entered in the morning.... The shooting was intense, as they were fired on from [KLA] trenches dug into the hillside. The fighting intensified sharply on the hilltops above the village." Rather than a pitiless attack on helpless villagers, the unedited film depicts a firefight between police and encircled KLA guerillas, with the latter group getting by far the worst of the engagement. Further complicating things for the "official" account is the fact that "journalists found only very few cartridges around the ditch where the massacre supposedly took place."

"What really happened?" asks Le Figaro. "During the night, could the [KLA] have gathered the bodies, in fact killed by Serb bullets, to set up a scene of cold-blooded massacre?" Similar skepticism was expressed by Le Monde, a publication whose editorial slant is decidedly antagonistic to the Serbian side in any Balkan conflict.

"Isn’t the Racak massacre just too perfect?" wondered Le Monde correspondent Christophe Chatelot in a January 21st dispatch from Kosovo. Eyewitness accounts collected by Chatelot contradicted the now official version of the "massacre," describing instead a pitched battle between police and well-entrenched KLA fighters in a nearly abandoned village. "How could the Serb police have gathered a group of men and led them calmly toward the execution site while they were constantly under fire from [KLA] fighters?" wrote Chatelot. "How could the ditch located on the edge of Racak [where the massacre victims were later found] have escaped notice by local inhabitants familiar with the surroundings who were present before nightfall? Or by the observers who were present for over two hours in this tiny village? Why so few cartridges around the corpses, so little blood in the hollow road where twenty-three people are supposed to have been shot at close range with several bullets in the head? Rather, weren’t the bodies of the Albanians killed in combat by the Serb police gathered into the ditch to create a horror scene which was sure to have an appalling effect on public opinion?"

None of this is intended to minimize the capacity for brutality on the part of Serbian police, who are, after all, the internal security force of a Soviet-style Communist regime. However, the KLA is a Maoist insurgency well versed in classic urban warfare strategy. As urban warfare theorist Carlos Marighella explained in his Mini-Manual for the Urban Guerilla, the purpose of terrorism is "to intensify repression," resulting in draconian measures that "make life unbearable" for the subject population. When crackdowns come, wrote Marighella, terrorists must "become more aggressive, and violent … heightening the disastrous situation in which the government must act...." The French newspaper Liberation described the KLA’s tactics in nearly identical terms, pointing out that "for several months, the [KLA] guerillas have been pushing the Serbs across the fault line by multiplying their attacks against individual police officers. Thus, it tries to provoke a massive reaction by the forces of [Serb dictator Slobodan] Milosevic." Noted Liberation, "This strategy is classical" — and the staging of a phony "massacre" is a logical extension of that classic strategy.

None of this mattered once Walker had decreed that Serb police were guilty of "the most horrendous" massacre he had ever witnessed, and NATO warplanes were revving up for retaliatory strikes against targets in Serbia. The desired trigger incident was seized upon as a pretext for intervention. On January 30th, the NATO Council authorized NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana to use armed force to compel Serbian and ethnic Albanian delegates to "peace" negotiations in France to discuss a framework for Kosovo "autonomy."

Good for Business

Although public declarations by both the Clinton Administration and NATO officials have bristled with condemnations of, and threats directed at, the Serbian dictator Milosevic, he actually stands to benefit from U.S. intervention on behalf of the KLA. "Milosevic pretends to be a Serbian nationalist when it suits his interests, and he was actually propelled to power by exploiting the grievances of the Serb minority in Kosovo," a Senate analyst told The New American. "But he has been willing to sell out Serbs in Bosnia and in Krajina [in Croatia] when it has been necessary to cut a deal with the West. In fact, it has been to his advantage to do so, since it has helped him consolidate power by eliminating potential rivals."

In every Clinton Administration initiative in the Balkans, observed the August 12th RPC paper, "the key figure upon whose word the United States relies is none other than … Slobodan Milosevic." In fact, some observers of the Balkan region describe Milosevic as both an "arsonist" and a "fireman" — giddily igniting fires that he volunteers to subdue. At least one moderate ethnic Albanian leader has referred to the Maoist, dope-running KLA as "a creation of Milosevic’s security forces." The RPC paper asserted that "Milosevic has created a political symbiosis with the Kosovo Albanians"; they provide him with a convenient foil when he needs to posture as a Serb nationalist, just as intermittent threats of NATO air strikes give the dictator an ominous external enemy whose menace can rally his subject population and justify internal repression. Bill Clinton, after all, is not the only corrupt demagogue who knows how to "Wag the Dog."

The submerged entente between the KLA and the Milosevic regime is illustrated by the former’s role in helping to elude NATO-imposed sanctions on Serbia. Noted the RPC paper: "Milosevic, as the distributor of scarcity, for years has relied heavily on Albanian organized crime operations based in Kosovo, which has long been a center of sanctions-busting. The fact that some of these same syndicates are no doubt funding the KLA has given Milosevic no reason to disrupt their mutually lucrative business interests." There is also no reason to doubt that deploying U.S. servicemen in Kosovo, however injurious to American interests, would, from the perspective of the KLA/Milosevic axis, be very good for business.

The Aztlan Factor

No assessment of the potential damage of the Kosovo mission would be complete without examining the precedent it would set. NATO — which is a military and political component of the UN — is preparing to intervene in a sovereign nation in order to carve out what will almost certainly become a new nation-state. The justification for this intervention is a particularly lurid specimen of alleged police brutality. Over the next few decades, as unchecked immigration from Mexico changes America’s demographic realities, and as Mexican insurgents — many of whom are aligned with Mexican narco-traffickers — assume a militant posture akin to that of the Albanian KLA, the precedent set by U.S. intervention in Kosovo may become increasingly relevant to America. An independent "Kosova" (the preferred spelling for ethnic Albanian separatists) will almost certainly embolden Mexican radicals seeking to create an independent "Aztlan" in the U.S. Southwest.

"In 2020, Southern California will be predominantly Hispanic," noted retired U.S. Army Colonel David Hackworth in his January 29th syndicated column. "Imagine if California-born Hispanic leaders following the Kosovar rebel scenario convinced their followers that the home of the Rose Bowl Parade was theirs. They could argue, ‘This land belonged to our forefathers long before the English settled in Jamestown. They came with guns and took it from us. We’re taking it back.’" A governor of California, or a U.S. President, who chose to deal forcefully with Hispanic radicals, would run squarely into the Kosovo precedent. Complicating things further would be the fact that America’s military assets, if present trends continue, will be badly depleted from ongoing garrison duty in the Balkans, and wherever else our servicemen have been deployed on "peacekeeping" missions — thus leaving America at the mercy of the UN or its successor organization to keep the peace, on its terms, within the borders of our once sovereign republic.

 

[Jovan Galtic]

NATO opens fire on Serbs in Kosovo, six civilians badly injured. Not a single word in the media...

 

[Jovan Galtic]

 

[HOLLYWOOD]

http://www.militarytimes.com/news/2...11/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

NATO: Troops fired on Serb protesters in Kosovo


The Associated Press
Posted : Tuesday Sep 27, 2011 10:01:03 EDT

MITROVICA, Kosovo — A NATO spokesman says its troops shot at Serb protesters after the military alliance’s troops were attacked near Kosovo’s border with Serbia.
A hospital official in northern Kosovo says seven Serb protesters were wounded after gunfire erupted following a standoff between local Serbs and NATO troops.
Local Serb leaders blame the alliance’s troops — that include U.S. and German troops — for the shooting.


NATO spokesman, Lt. Col. Kai Gudenoge says its troops wounded only one of the protesters. He could not say how the other protesters were wounded.

Serbs in northern Kosovo, who do not recognize Kosovo’s 2008 secession, are protesting a move by Kosovo authorities to set up customs with Serbia.

 

[HOLLYWOOD]

SERBS Strike Back

 

[Jovan Galtic]

http://www.militarytimes.com/news/2...11/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

NATO: Troops fired on Serb protesters in Kosovo
...
A NATO spokesman says its troops shot at Serb protesters after the military alliance’s troops were attacked near Kosovo’s border with Serbia.

Liar. They were not attacked. NATO troops tried to forcefully remove roadblocks which Serbs setup to prevent Albanians from taking over roads which connect them to Serbia (and are critical to their bare survival). People started throwing stones at them as reaction to the use of force.