By Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources, (http://www.originalsources.com)
March 24, 2000
Exactly one year ago, American bombers began to destroy Yugoslavia's infrastructure. On March 24, 1999 I wrote the analysis below which was titled: "We Go to War - WHY, Mr. President?" The question, of course, was not answered. However, today, a year later, journalists all over the world are finally beginning to ask: "WHY did Clinton destroy Yugoslavia?" The charges he made, which are reported in the March 24, 1999 analysis have been proven false. There was no genocide. The so-called peace proposal at Rambouillet required that Yugoslavia allow NATO troops to commandeer and control ALL of Yugoslavia. At the end of 79 days of bombing, an intact Yugoslavian army and the Kosovo police force withdrew, as demanded, but the sovereignty of the remaining portions of Yugoslavia were preserved by UN Resolution 1244.
A tiny nation of 10 million people, a nation with one third the population of California, withstood the combined force of 750 million people and their advanced weaponry and it is now generally agreed that the situation in Kosovo is not only worse, but dangerously worse. Der Speigel, a German publication, ended a damning analysis of the US insistence on bombing Yugoslavia with the charge warning that, because of Clinton's actions " In a few years, Kosovo might become an independent state 'cleansed of Serbs', and led by the unreliable fanatics, who, with their dreams of 'Greater Albania', could endanger the entire region."
The German weekly recently challenged Clinton's premise for the bombing - his claim that NATO "stopped the genocide" in the Balkans. Thousands of forensic experts investigating hundreds of sites which were supposed to contain "mass graves" of "up to 100,000" Albanians supposedly killed by the Serbs turned out to contain less than 2000 bodies and many of those bodies were people killed by NATO bombs.
Strangely, this major foreign policy debacle has been almost glossed over by presidential candidates, except for Alan Keyes. On the first day of the bombing, March 24, 1999, I asked "WHY, Mr. President:"
Without a declaration of War, without the support of the majority of the American people, without a clear objective or exit strategy, President Bill Clinton has announced that the first bombing raids on a European Country, the Republic of Yugoslavia have begun.
Clinton said in the announcement of the raids: "We and our allies have taken this action only after extensive and repeated efforts to obtain a peaceful solution to the crisis in Kosovo." He then blamed Milosevic for the "terrible wars" in Bosnia, and Croatia. "He has rejected the balanced and fair peace accords."
Was this a plausible response to "WHY, Mr. President?" Another European commentary answered: "Far fewer people had died as a result of fighting in Kosovo before the bombing started than had been killed in civil strife in Sierra Leone, Sudan, or Rwanda - African countries in which NATO showed no interest in intervening. Thus NATO s war did nothing to establish a viable standard for deciding when humanitarian intervention may be undertaken." Europe had had very similar excuses for aggression before:
The Serb position on this, of course, is that this is comparable to what happened to Yugoslavia in 1941 after Italy invaded Greece from bases in Albania. The Greeks drove the Italians out and then invaded Albania. To help a fellow members of the Axis powers, Germany wanted to send troops through Yugoslavia so they could attack the Greeks. Pro-German Croatians, Albanians and Bosnians who supported the Nazis and Adolph Hitler, demanded that the King allow the German army into Yugoslavia. On March 25, 1941 Yugoslavia joined Germany and Italy as one of the Axis powers and on March 27th, the Serb led army, ousted the pro-fascist government and King Peter II, at age 17, was declared king.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said that March 27 was "the turning point in Hitler's fate." Hitler had planned to invade the Soviet Union on May 15, which would have given him time to reach and occupy Moscow before winter. With the Serb action, he had to use his army to invade and occupy Yugoslavia, which gave the Russians time to mount a defense and wait for winter which bogged down Hitler's army.
During the war, over 500 American pilots, who were shot down over Yugoslavia, were found and kept alive by the Serb underground led by Draza Mihailovich, a colonel in the Yugoslav army, who represented King Paul II's government in exile in London. Winston Churchill put his support behind the Croatian Communist leader, Tito, and at the end of the war the Mihailovich, who had been a major factor in the Allied victor with his underground resistance, was executed by Tito.
The Serbs are reacting to the Clinton bombing very much as they reacted to the bombing by Adolph Hitler - although Bill Clinton is trying to convince the American people, and the world, that he is bombing Belgrade and Pristina in the quest for peace in the region.
So, did Clinton's and Madeleine Albright's determination to bomb Yugoslavia bring peace? The Japan Times in Toyko observed March 11th, quoting Doug Bandow of Cato Institute that the bombing
"emphasizes a series of disastrous decisions by the American administration, among other things, the U.S. State Secretary Madeleine Albright was more interested in bombardment of Serbia, than in peaceful solution of the Kosovo problem. The bombardment was a political failure, claims Bandow, backing up his words with the latest request that more NATO troops should be deployed in Kosovo. Serbs are forced to flee Kosovo in great numbers, while those who have remained there, including Croats, Romanies, Jews and other non-Albanians, are being killed, kidnapped, robbed...Orthodox churches and monasteries have been destroyed, says the American analyst. According to Bandow, the situation is deteriorating, and the example for this is Kosovska Mitrovica. "KLA" is only formally disarmed, while armed gangs are active during night and organized criminal is spreading. Police and courts are not operating. Violation of human rights of Serbs is continuing under the patronage of the West, the text warns.
A year ago, the haphazard and uninformed nature of the decision made by Clinton to bomb Yugoslavia was illustrated by Joe Lockhart at a White House Briefing:
In a White House briefing today, Joe Lockhart used the phrase "short of appeasement" of Milosevic and was challenged in his use of the word by a Reporter who appeared to know what a fighting word that would be to the Serbs. One in seven of the Serbs, 1.5 million people, died in the Nazi holocaust, according the Holocaust Museum as a result of their support for the American side in World War II. The fury this air attack on the Serbs is having among Serbs worldwide can hardly be over-emphasized.Yugoslavia is a very different terrain that that of Iraq. Almost 80% of Yugoslavia is rough hill and mountain areas. Their up-to-date air defenses include mobile systems which can be easily hidden in the hills which the Serbs know well. That is where many Serbs fled to in World War II and, in the end, weakened Hitler by pinning down several divisions of the German Army which he had planned to use elsewhere. In Desert Storm the targets were out in the open on flat desert, treeless land and still Saddam Hussein survived two weeks of heavy pounding missiles and bombers, and soon rebuilt his weapons capability. We also deployed a fighting force to Desert Storm of nearly 500,000 to re-take Kuwait on the ground from the invading Iraq army. The goal was to re-take Kuwait, which we did.
What's our real goal in Kosovo, Mr. President?
On March 23, 1999 I had written an analysis in which I observed:
Today, without a vote in the Congress or the UN, President Clinton has in effect declared war on Yugoslavia, which is approximately the size of the State of Kentucky. He is providing the Air Support the KLA lacks. Kosovo, which is demanding independent status, is about 4,000 square miles which is about one tenth of Yugoslavia. The KLA is composed largely of non-Albanian mercenaries who are financed with the Kosovo-Albanian heroin trade in Scandinavia, Italy, and the Czech Republic.
Did the President Clinton and the members of the U.S. Senate, including at least one Republican Presidential candidate, John McCain, know that the KLA was, and is, involved in heroin trade? They did. As early as 1985 the New York Times reported that the Albanian Mafia’s drug and arms traffic. In June 1999 Jerry Seper in a front page report in the Washington Times reported:
"Could Clinton and the Congressmen who advocate arming the KLA possibly be ignorant of the group's drug trafficking? In a word, no. "In 1998," Seper recalls, "the U.S. State Department listed the KLA . . . as an international terrorist organization, saying it had bankrolled its operations with proceeds from the international heroin trade and from loans from terrorists like Osama bin Laden." He notes that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has also documented the KLA connection."…What right does an American President have to intervene in a sovereign nation's civil war? What is Clinton trying to accomplish with the protracted bombing of Serbia? Why is he depleting an American arsenal that may be needed elsewhere in the not too distant future? And why is he offering support to a gang of drug-trafficking terrorists? If the objective of the Gulf War was to protect oil supplies, could the aim of the war in Kosovo be to protect heroin supplies? That's a horrid thought, but there doesn't seem to be any other explanation, and old stories about strange goings-on at an airstrip in Mena, Arkansas now resound.
None of these questions have been answered. None have even been brought up in the presidential debates. And, how many Americans, considering the coverage given, the demonization of the Serbs by not only the media but by key American politicians and the blanket of lies issued daily by the Clinton White House and NATO spokesman Jamie Shea during the bombing even know what the questions really are?
It’s not likely we can get answers to the questions when the American people are simply not told the facts.
To comment: mmostert@originalsources.com
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