By Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources (www.originalsources.com)
March 22, 2000
Those of you who have read my analyses for some time are aware that, before and during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia I was reporting that the KLA, headed by Hashim Thaci, was more of a drug cartel than a group of "Freedom Fighters," the new name given the group by Madeleine Albright's State Department, after eliminating its listing as one of the world's major terrorist groups.
This was not exactly secret information. It was easy for me to track, through Interpol reports in Europe, that most European police forces considered the KLA a drug running group which used its illegally gotten profits in drugs and prostitution to purchase guns. The Clinton Administration, which supposedly opposes guns, set out to disarm the Serbs while training and arming the drug dealers. Why?
David Binder, who has reported on the Balkans for about thirty-seven years, for the N.Y. Times and other publications, was not published during the bombing in the so-called "free" American press, but he wrote for the Monitor in Bulgaria after the bombing on September 1, 1999, six and a half months ago, that ethnic cleansing of Kosovo was being conducted with KFOR's approval. Serbia-Info.com reported:
Sofia, September 1, 1999 (Tanjug) - Ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and Metohija carried out by the Albanians by committing murders and violence over the remaining Serbs and other non-Albanian population, has been being done with the tacit approval of the international peace forces in Kosmet, David Binder, a notable American journalist and publicist warns in his special article published by the Bulgarian daily Monitor.
He has been reporting for the New York Times from the Balkans for a long time, and in his article titled "Results of the NATO bombarding in the Balkans" warns that so-called "KFOR" failed to protect the Serbs and other non-Albanian population in Kosmet. Two months after NATO bombarding of the Yugoslav cities and villages ended, and after Yugoslav army and Serbian police units pulled out from the province, municipalities, communications and schools are under the control of the terrorist-separatist organization KLA and its members, and the Albanians who are compelled to cooperate, writes the American journalist, estimating that the idea of the multi-ethnic Kosovo, which has been persistently advocated by the Clinton's men, is now a definite failure and looks like a poor joke.
In his long article for the Monitor, Binder also reveals the background of the aggression on Yugoslavia, saying that its planning and establishing of targets, started last summer, (1998) and a definite decision was made in February. Then, the allies agreed upon the fundamental strategy on the basis of the NATO's planned aggression, motivated by the need for doing something "important" for the 50th anniversary, in order to recover and provide further financial backup, asserts Binder. Planning of the targets was mostly done under the influence of the Americans. Their allies only occasionally managed to remove some of the targets from the list or to put them at the bottom due to "humanitarian" or other reasons.
The American journalist now reveals to the public an unknown information that a monument dedicated to the Serbs who had died in the Battle of Kosovo at Gazimestan was on the top of the list but does not explain why it was not bombed during the aggression. The American publicist thinks that the aggression was an improvised operation and estimates that the NATO war in Kosmet was the first and the last of this type. British, French and other are already planning to create the true European defence system.
Irrelevant of these plans, it is hard to believe that NATO will decide to get involved again in such a fruitless destruction, when the Yugoslav army remained intact, thousands of Albanians and Serbs killed, and multi-ethnic character of Kosovo and Metohija deadly wounded, says Binder. Bills are starting to arrive, while the NATO goals, one of them being toppling of the Yugoslav leadership, did not come true, stresses the American publicist in the Bulgarian daily.
In spite of the easy availability of this information by a long respected American journalist, the TV networks and the media in general simply refused to report it.
Finally, over the week-end, a major US news outlet, MSNBC, featured an article by David Binder entitled "The Ironic Justice of Kosovo" (http://www.msnbc.com/news/382058.asp?0m=O11M) in which Binder makes an analysis of the situation we now find ourselves in. Strangely, this situation has so far been totally undiscussed in the Presidential debates:
In 1991, Yugoslavia had only been free of German and Italian domination for scarcely 40 years. When the communist state of Josip Broz Tito plunged into dissolution and fierce ethnic fighting, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said: "I am personally of the view that the only thing that may bring it to an end is when all of the participants are exhausted." This view was derided as cold-blooded, and the Croatian, Bosnian and Kosovo wars were horribly savage. But the way things turned out, Eagleburger's prescription might well have saved lives, property and untold future years of instability in the region.'THE EVIL SERB'
The error of the approach taken by the United States and its European allies to the problem of Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s lies in their belief that they could succeed where others failed. Then they chose sides narrowly in what inevitably became a series of civil wars: Here uniformly innocent victims; there uniformly genocidal aggressors. Here ethnic cleansers, there the ethnically cleansed. At the root lies a simplistic dogma that blames one nation, the Serbs, as the origin of evil in the Balkans.Portraying the Serbs as such is an unwritten doctrine adopted by the State Department at the beginning of the Yugoslav conflicts and continued today, a doctrine endorsed and spread by the mainstream media, human rights groups and even some religious communities. It is a doctrine also embraced by Dr. Bernard Kouchner, the head of the U.N. Mission in Kosovo. Kouchner declared unabashedly before Albanians in Gnjilane last December that "Kosovo does not belong to anyone except the Kosovars," meaning ethnic Albanians. "I feel very close to the Albanian people," he said, adding later, "I love all peoples but some more than others and that is the case with you."
NO ONE IS BLAMELESS
Yet the indisputable reality of the Balkans is that none of its peoples has been an innocent victim of vicious neighbors. Except possibly the Roma. All were complicit at one time or another in killing, rape, plunder and burning. That was true in the first and second Balkan war, true in both World Wars and true in all of the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s.Yes, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians fled Kosovo in the spring of 1999. Yet, there is a curiosity documented by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) from the 78-day bombing campaign in terms of "cleansing" - the OSCE found that 863,000 Albanians left Kosovo, or 46 percent of the total. But it also reported that 100,000 Serbs and Montenegrins fled Kosovo in the same period, or about 60 percent of the total. That is, to repeat, proportionately more Serbs were displaced during the bombing, and they did not return to Kosovo.
IMPERIAL OVERREACH
A year ago, after a difficult start, the American-inspired Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission of more than 1,000 was beginning to get traction, separating the Serbian military and police forces from the Kosovo Liberation Army and enabling thousands of displaced Albanians to return to their homes. The final report to OSCE by a German general who was part of KDOM confirms this.But in its hubris, the Clinton administration sought more dramatic results - amounting to abject submission of the Serbs to NATO rule. This was the message of the failed "peace conference" in the French town of Rambouillet, the collapse of which led directly to war. Had the observer mission been allowed to continue, Kosovo would have been a much gentler, happier place today. Possibly even the seemingly endless cycle of ethnic revenge could have been halted.
There are few easy explanations in the Balkans. Even so, the State Department is hard pressed to describe how it could list the Kosovo Liberation Army among the world's terrorist organizations in 1997, denounce it as a "terrorist group" in February 1998, then turn around 180 degrees overnight and embrace it as a formation of freedom fighters who would ultimately be installed by NATO as a legitimate political force in the summer of 1999.
Through the war, some correspondents and policymakers continued to ask these questions. They also pointed to disclosures of links between the KLA and Albanian heroin trafficking rings in Italy, Switzerland, Germany and other European countries, and the connection of the KLA leader Hashim Thaci to assassinations of Albanian rivals.
Even without light being shed on those behind-the-scene developments, a strong case can be made that $11 billion military campaign against the Serbs and for the Albanians was largely a failure:
We know it greatly accelerated the flight of Albanians from Kosovo.
It did not substantially hurt the Serb military.
It did billions in pointless damage to civilian infrastructure throughout Serbia and Kosovo province (for which NATO countries will end up paying some of the repairs).
It left Slobodan Milosevic, the named and targeted enemy, firmly in power.
It sucked the United States and NATO into an open-ended commitment with no exit strategy.Military and political planners themselves acknowledged that the strategy was deeply flawed, that they were shocked when the Serbs did not capitulate after three days of bombs.
In the wake of the Cold War, some view the United States as the last great imperial power. The Balkan adventure of the United States in the last decade shows that if it is imperialism then it is essentially haphazard and makeshift in execution.
So, it has now been said. US bombing of NATO was no humanitarian operation. It was, pure and simple, American imperialism which has created a very dangerous military situation and a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. And what has the U.S. Congress done about it? It has made matters much worse by imposing sanctions (and almost by declaring Serbia a "terrorist state") in support of Clinton's blatant imperialism.
And, why has Congress supported Clinton's imperialism? Why did John McCain introduce S.J. Res 20 early in the bombing campaign to urge his colleagues in the Senate to authorize President Clinton "to use all necessary force and other means, in concert with United States allies, to accomplish United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization objectives in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro)." It was known, and discussed, in the Senate that the goals against the sovereign state of Yugoslavia were actually imperialistic in nature. Kosovo is STILL legally, part of Yugoslavia, just like Los Angeles County, which is about the same size as Kosovo, is still legally part of the United States, even through some reports indicate it has a very large group of illegal aliens living there. We would object, as Yugoslavia objected, if some outside group decided to start bombing Los Angeles county.
On April 20th, in pushing for adoption of S.J. Res. 20, Senator McCain said: "As my colleagues know, I am concerned that the force the United States and our NATO allies have employed against Serbia, gradually escalating airstrikes, is insufficient to achieve our political objectives there, which are the removal of the Serb military and security forces from Kosovo, the return of the refugees to their homes, and the establishment of a NATO-led peacekeeping force."
The Serb military and security forces had every right to be in Kosovo to stop the KLA killing of policemen and citizens that was going on there. At no point did McCain question whether or not the Albanian refugees he was referring to were even legally IN Kosovo. An estimated one third of the Albanians living in Kosovo in March 1999 were living there illegally, having fled Albania when its economy collapsed after its communist government disintegrated. We were, and McCain knew it, interfering in an internal problem of a foreign country, in favor of a group of largely illegal aliens whose military wing consisted of crime bosses of the KLA. S.J. Res. 20 was tabled, with 22 senators voting to support McCain's clearly unconstitutional transfer of authority to go to war from the Congress to the President of the United States - the very same president they had voted 50-50 to remove from office a few weeks before.
On May 4, 1999, McCain's bill was tabled with 22 Senators, including McCain, voting against tabling it. There has not yet been in the year 2000 election campaign any discussion on what Clinton has done in Kosovo or of the reasons why twenty-two U.S. Senators voted to hand over Congress' constitutional authority to determine whether or not the United States goes to war. That twenty-two Senators were:
Evan Bayh (D-IN) - Indianapolis - 317-554-0750
Joseph Biden (D-DE) - District - 302-573-6345
Richard Bryan (D-NV) -District - 702-784-5007
Joseph Cleland (D-GA) - District - 404-331-4811
Thad Cochran (R-MS) -District - 601-965-4459
Mike DeWine (R-OH) - District - 614-469-6774
Chris Dodd (R-CT) -District - 203-240-3470
Bob Graham (D-FL) -District - 305-536-7293
Chuck Hagel (R-NE) -District - 402-758-8981
Orrin Hatch (R-UT) - District - 801-524-4380
Daniel Inouye (D-HI) - District - 808-541-2542
John Kerry (D-MA) - District - 617-565-3170
Mary Landrieu D-LA) - District - 504-589-2427
Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) -District -201-639-2860
Pat Leahy (D-VT) - District - 802-863-2525
Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) - District - 203-240-3566
Richard Lugar (R-IN) - District - 317-226-5555
Connie Mack (R-FL) - District - 305-530-7100
John McCain (R-AZ) - District - 602-952-2410
Mitch McConnell (R-KY) -District - 502-582-6304
Charles Robb (D-VA)-District - 804-771-2221
Gordon H. Smith (R-OR) District - 503-326-3386
Some of these senators are considered conservatives. Why would they vote to abandon their constitutional right to vote on involving America in a war? Perhaps during the election campaigns is a good time to ask them.
To comment: mmostert@originalsources.com
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