By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources (http://www.originalsources.com
August 10, 1999
In a small community in Northeastern England, Bethany Megan Robinson sent a letter to the editor of her local paper, the "Northern Echo." It was very short, and very British:
"If Britain had stood on the side of Adolf Hitler when he used the feeble excuse that it was for the sake of the ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia that he made his incursion, this would have been an identical parallel to the stance taken recently by NATO in Kosovo.
"Why else would NATO now stand idly by and allow the terrorist thug outfit KLA to murder and ethnically cleanse Kosovo Serbs and non-Albanians?. This whole stinking situation has more to do with the takeover of sovereign nations by a force which, to draw another interesting parallel to the last Nazi beast, calls itself a 'New World Order."
Is this a bit harsh? Is NATO REALLY standing idly by and allowing "the terrorist thug outfit KLA murder and ethnically cleanse Kosovo Serbs and non-Albanians? Is NATO the 1990s parallel to the Third Reich? Could the same thing REALLY happen the same way twice in 50 years?
Let me draw your attention to a couple of other facts. Before March 24, 1999, the United Nations and NATO said there were 2,000,000 people in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, which had been the cradle of the Serbian Orthodox Church going back to the time of the First Archbishop of the Serbs, Sava, who was born in 1175 AD. Of those 2 million people, 90% were Albanians - many of whom had fled into Kosovo since the collapse of the Albanian Communist government, and the nation's economic collapse resulting from fraudulent investment schemes in 1997, which led to a 70% unemployment rate in Albania.
World Almanac population figures show that as of 1997 Yugoslavia had experienced an increase in the percentage of Albanians living in the country from 8% in 1984 to 14% in 1997. Whereas there was something like 800,000 ethnic Albanians living in Kosovo in the late 1980s, by the time NATO started bombing on March 24th, they claimed there were 1,800,000 Albanians - to about 200,000 Serbs, Montenegrins and Gypsies.
On May 26th, two months into NATO's bombing, the United Nations claimed there were 600,000 Albanian refugees who had fled Kosovo. That would be one third of the Ethnic Albanian population. On August 10, approximately two months into NATO's peacekeeping in Kosovo, more than three-fourths of the non-Albanian minority population have fled Kosovo. It appears that NATO's peacekeeping is a more effective method of ethnic cleansing than NATO's bombing.
In case you have forgotten what the purpose of Clinton's and NATO's bombing was, let's take a look at a press statement I plucked off the US State Department Website, issued by James P. Rubin, husband of CNN's Christiane Amanpour and spokesman for Madeleine Albright, issued on April 3, 1999:
"Secretary Albright has been consulting regularly with the Foreign Ministers of France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom regarding the situation in Kosovo and the surrounding region. She and the other Ministers agreed, on April 2, that their governments' objective is a peaceful multi-ethnic democratic Kosovo in which all its people live in security. This objective can be achieved by the return of all refugees and therefore the deployment of an international security force, the withdrawal of Serb military, police and paramilitary forces, and putting in place of a political framework for Kosovo on the basis of the Rambouillet accords."
So, the bombing raged, a peace agreement was signed, there's now something like 30,000 NATO troops and about 3,000 Russian troops in Kosovo, and how are we doing towards establishing "a peaceful multi-ethnic democratic Kosovo in which all its people live in security?"
I found this interesting little analysis at: http://www.unfoundation.org/unwire/unwire.cfm#1, on the United Nations website entitled: US Undermines UN Authority in Conflict Resolution, Author Says:
"US strategy for the conclusion of the war in Kosovo 'was to set up the UN as the fall guy,' writes author Phyllis Bennis in an editorial in the Baltimore Sun. Bennis, who wrote Calling The Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's UN, says the United States violated the UN charter by using NATO to authorize its air war against Yugoslavia instead of placing the issue before the UN.
" 'The United States rejected any UN role in decision-making about military action. But now Washington holds the UN accountable for the messy aftermath of the US-NATO war,' she writes. As ethnic tensions in Kosovo continue to escalate, 'the UN's task will become more daunting, and Washington's position is likely to make the mission's failure much more likely.'
The UN, which was totally ignored back in March when Clinton announced he was bombing Yugoslavia, now is being blamed for the incredible mess in Kosovo. Meanwhile, CNN reported yesterday, with pictures of the raging mob of KLA instigated Albanians in Kosovska Mitrovica: "Albanian demonstrators hurled two big stones at the soldier and hit him with a stick, according to the French contingent's chief information officer, Philip Tanguy. The injured soldier was rushed by ambulance to the French military hospital in serious condition with a cracked skull, he said." These "Albanian demonstrators," according to a Serb report of the same incident: "...attempted again today to pass the bridge on Ibar forcibly and enter the northern part of town, provoke incidents and force Serbs from that part of the town to move away.
"Strong forces of the French KFOR aided with armored personnel carriers and guns in hands prevented today, just as they did yesterday, the attempt of the Albanian extremists from entering the northern part of town. "Infuriated by the efforts of French KFOR to keep peace and order, the Albanians insulted the KFOR troops, threw stones and cans at them, while singing all the time nationalist songs. "One member of the French KFOR told Tanjug that there was no doubt that the so-called "KLA" stood behind the violent behavior. "Groups of Albanian terrorists opened mortar and automatic gunfire last evening, for the third straight night, from the southern part of Kosovska Mitrovica, from where all Serbian families have been expelled, on the northern part of town inhabited mostly by Serbs."
How come CNN calls people who have fired, and are firing, mortar shells at unarmed civilians "demonstrators?" Is this all part of Christiane Amanpour's spin in favor of her fellow Muslims? It's no longer possible for CNN to pretend that there is nothing going on over in Kosovo in the way of ethnic cleansing. In fact, the ethnic cleansing actually started when NATO forces GOT there. Even if all the Albanians who fled Kosovo, to avoid either the bombing or the ground war being waged between the Yugoslav Army and the KLA, had stayed away, Kosovo would still be an ethnically mixed state. A million Albanians remained throughout the NATO bombing.
Today, as the Serbs, the Gypsies, the Montenegrins and many ethnic Albanians who are not supporters of the KLA are either killed or driven out of Kosovo, it would seem that Bethany Megan Robinson has an excellent point in saying: "If Britain had stood on the side of Adolf Hitler when he used the feeble excuse that it was for the sake of the ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia that he made his incursion, this would have been an identical parallel to the stance taken recently by NATO in Kosovo."
What we have done in the Balkans in the 1990s, under Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, is to stand on the side of the children and grandchildren of those Croatian, Bosnian Muslim and Albanian supporters of Adolf Hitler who slaughtered the Jews in the Balkans and over one million Serbs. What is really incredible about this is that the propaganda has been so effective that even many American Jews have stood at the side of those who have rekindled Hitler's hatreds and adopted his propaganda techniques against the Serbs.
To comment: mmostert@originalsources.com
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