by: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources, (www.originalsources.com)
March 29, 2000
On February 24th my analysis was subtitled: "The Battle of Mitrovica is Not About Visiting Cousins - its About the Trepca Mine." (See: http://www.originalsources.com/OS2-00MQC/2-24-2000.1.html) Somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 ethnic Albanians had marched for miles through the snow to attempt to get across the bridge in to Mitrovica, which was being guarded by French peacekeepers. The marchers told gullible Western journalists that "all they wanted" was to "be able to visit their cousins on the other side of the river."
Over the weekend the real issue of Kosovo finally emerged in a press release from KFOR headquarters in Pristina, Kosovo which was entitled: Mining Industry - A Great Asset For Kosovo, written by Maj. Kristian Kahrs.
The e-mail to me and other members of the media said:
"Dear friends of KFOR Online We can now offer an article from the Stari Trg Mine just east of Mitrovica. KFOR Polish soldiers gave 500 uniforms and safety equipment to the mine, and the mine has a great potential. According to mine director Mr. Burhan Kavaja, they can exploit 16 million metric tons of zinc, lead and silver, and there are enough metals to have work for 20 years. Read more on KFOR Online, http://kforonline.com."
Only one month ago I asked in my analysis of the conflict at the Mitrovica bridge "How come none of these reports are mentioning another minor little fact concerning Mitrovica - the Trepca Mine? The mine is owned by the Serbs and a Greek mining firm, Mytilinaios SA who signed a contract with Serbian agency of foreign trade in 1998 to invest $519 Billion in the mine."
Now, all the sudden, KFOR is claiming some kind of "humanitarian" giveaway program to "help" the mine? What's going on? In February I quoted from an article written by Chris Hedges in the New York Times in July 1998 entitled: "Kosovo War's Glittering Prize Rests Underground" in which he pointed out that the real issue in Kosovo was control of the mine. In that article Hedges quotes "Burhan Kavaja, an Albanian, who was the former director of the Stari Tng mine, who was dismissed and imprisoned after the first strike. ...This conflict will only end now with our independence."
And just who is it that KFOR is giving the free miner's helmets to? Is it the director put in place by the owner of both the mine, the Belgrade government, Novak Bjelic, who Hedges interviewed? It wasn't. It was no other than the Albanian, Burhan Kavaja, the former director of the Stari Tng Mine who led the illegal efforts to seize control of the mine by force.
Hedges wrote, "The ethnic Albanian miners, who made up 75 percent of the 23,000 employees, shut down the mines and organized a 30-mile-long protest march to Pristina. They carried photos of the late communist leader, Josip Broz Tito, and Yugoslav flags adorned with the communist red star." What the miners wanted was not only independence, but control of the most valuable piece of real estate in Kosovo - the Trepca Mines - the only thing in the area that Adolf Hitler wanted.
"When the Nazis seized this corner of the Balkans in 1941, they handed over the hovels in Pristina, the provincial capital, to the Italian fascists," Hedges observed. "But they kept the British-built Trepca mines for the Reich, shipping out wagonloads of minerals for weapons and producing the batteries that powered the U-boats. Submarine batteries, along with ammunition, are still produced in the Trepca mines. The mining history reaches back to the Romans, who hacked out silver from the quarries."
Before their destruction under KFOR "protection" Kosovo was covered with ancient Serbia Orthodox Church monasteries and religious sites. Some of those now destroyed Churches were built in the 13th and 14th centuries. Kosovo is the cradle of the Serb culture. Even throughout 500 years of Ottoman Turk occupation, the Serbs were a majority in Kosovo.
The "real worth of Kosovo", Hedges said, are the mines - especially the which contains the minerals needed to wage war - even back in the time of the Romans. "The fighting between the rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army, with their intoxicating visions of an independent state, and the 50,000 Serbian soldiers and special policemen. ...There is over 30 percent lead and zinc in the ore," said Novak Bjelic, the mine's beefy director. "The war in Kosovo is about the mines, nothing else. This is Serbia's Kuwait -- the heart of Kosovo. We export to France, Switzerland, Greece, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Russia and Belgium. "We export to a firm in New York, but I would prefer not to name it. And in addition to all this Kosovo has 17 billion tons of coal reserves. Naturally, the Albanians want all this for themselves."
The Trepca mining complex "the most valuable piece of real estate in the Balkans," is worth billions of dollars. "The Stari Tng mine, with its warehouses, is ringed with smelting plants, 17 metal treatment sites, freight yards, railroad lines, a power plant and the country's largest battery plant.
"In the last three years we have mined 2,538,124 tons of lead and zinc crude ore," Novak Bjelic, 58, the Serb director of the mine in July 1998 told Hedges, "and produced 286,502 tons of concentrated lead and zinc and 139,789 tons of pure lead, zinc, cadmium, silver and gold."
The battle for control of that silver and gold, lead, zinc, and cadminum, began in the late 1980s with a series of hunger strikes in which the Albanian miners occupied the mines. The mine protests led to general strikes throughout Kosovo, making Trepca the nerve center of the resistance movement. Serbian special policemen eventually seized the mine, carrying weakened miners out on stretchers. The Albanians' drive to seize the mines, declare independence to create a "greater Albania" of course would switch the proceeds of the mines from the government of Yugoslavia to the Albanians under the KLA, which controls much of the heroin trade in Europe. Milosevic declared a state of emergency and the ethnic Albanian miners were replaced with Poles, Czechs and Serbs. In 1998 there were 15,000 mine workers, about 15% of whom were of Albanian origin.
Less than a year after Hedges wrote that, US Bombers began to wreak havoc on both Kosovo and Belgrade, supposedly to "stop" a "genocide" of Albanians. The bombing raids, under the direction of Bill Clinton, drove out half the Albanian population and sixty percent of the Serb population of Kosovo.
After the bombing stopped, thousands of forensic experts from several countries searched for the "mass graves" the KLA kept telling the world contained "up to 100,000" Albanians slaughtered by the Serbs. Only about 2108 bodies were found, some of them Serbs, others prisoners in a prison bombed by NATO and NO proof of ANY genocide.
Throughout the world the word is getting out. We were lied to. The KLA, which was listed as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department in 1998 and known to Interpol as the major supplier of illegal drugs and prostitutes in Europe, is now in control of Kosovo, anarchy reigns, just as it does in Northern Albanian under the clan warlords, and KFOR has reinstalled the Albanian manager of the Stari Tng mine who tried to deliver the mine to the KLA in 1998.
Contacts in Yugoslavia told me, via e-mail, when Clinton ordered the bombing, that the bombing was really all about control of Kosovo mineral assets. I didn't print that in 1999. I couldn't believe at that time that America would be a party to such a thing. The KFOR e-mail and their report on the Stari Tng mine on the Internet is irrefutable proof that the Serbs were right.
Will Belgrade stand by and do nothing as the Serbs of Mitrovica are driven out so the Albanians can have total control over mineral resources the Serbs need to survive? Thirty-four percent of the coal used to heat Belgrade comes from the same region of Kosovo. Will they stand by, with their intact army, and do nothing as a seizure of assets comparable, in the words of the Serb director of the mine, to Iraq's seizure of Kuwait's life blood - their oil wells, takes place? Will the Russians and the Chinese, who are friends of the Serbs, allow those assets to be controlled by the KLA drug dealers as the region deteriorates into anarchy?
And, will the candidates for the U.S. Presidency continue to pretend that nothing is happening as America implements such a glaring piece of imperialism? Will the next U.S. leader and the American people really continue to be content with spending billions of American dollars to shore up the KLA and its drive to create a Greater Albania and secure its near monopoly of heroin sales in Europe?
Time will tell.
To comment: mmostert@originalsources.com
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