Jeremy Scahill on Kosovo/Serbia: Empire is bipartisan...

[JackRiddler]

http://www.counterpunch.org/scahill02232008.html

Perhaps the greatest crime against any embassy in the history of Yugoslavia was committed not by evil Serb protesters, but by the United States military.

On May 7, 1999, at the height of the 78 day US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese citizens, two of them journalists, and wounding 20 others. The Clinton administration later said that the bombing was the result of faulty maps provided by the CIA (Sound familiar?). Beijing rejected that explanation and alleged it was deliberate. Eventually, under strong pressure from China, the US apologized and paid $28 million in compensation to the victims' families. If the US was serious about international law and the protection of embassies, those responsible for that bombing would have been tried at the Hague along with other alleged war criminals. But "war criminal" is a designation for the losers of US-fueled wars, not bombers sent by Washington to drop humanitarian munitions on "sovereign territory."

Beyond the obvious hypocrisy of the US condemnations of Serbia and the sudden admission that international law exists, the Kosovo story is an important one in the context of the current election campaign in the United States. Perhaps more than any other international conflict, Yugoslavia was the defining foreign policy of President Bill Clinton's time in power. Under his rule, the nation of Yugoslavia was destroyed, dismantled and chopped into ethnically pure para-states. President Bush's immediate recognition of Kosovo as an independent nation was the icing on the cake of destruction of Yugoslavia and one which was enthusiastically embraced by Hillary Clinton. "I've supported the independence of Kosovo because I think it is imperative that in the heart of Europe we continue to promote independence and democracy," Clinton said at the recent Democratic debate in Austin, Texas.

(...)

On March 24, 1999, President Bill Clinton began an 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. Like Bush with Iraq, Clinton had no UN mandate (he used NATO) and his so-called "diplomacy" to avert the possibility of bombing leading up to the attacks was insincere and a set-up from the jump. Just like Bush with Iraq.

A month before the bombing began, the Clinton administration issued an ultimatum to President Slobodan Milosevic, which he had to either accept unconditionally or face bombing. Known as the Rambouillet accord, it was a document that no sovereign country would have accepted. It contained a provision that would have guaranteed US and NATO forces "free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout" all of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo. It also sought to immunize those occupation forces "from any form of arrest, investigation, or detention by the authorities in ," as well as grant the occupiers "the use of airports, roads, rails and ports without payment." Additionally, Milosevic was told he would have to "grant all telecommunications services, including broadcast services, needed for the Operation, as determined by NATO." Similar to Bush's Iraq plan years later, Rambouillet mandated that the economy of Kosovo "shall function in accordance with free market principles."

(MORE AT LINK)
http://www.counterpunch.org/scahill02232008.html

[Fredda Weinberg]

1. Powers says Cahill has his facts wrong. I concur n/t

[JackRiddler]

2. Such a weighty comment - are you referring to Samantha Powers?

The apologist for the new humanitarian imperialism? If this is to be a name vs. name contest with no further facts or arguments brought by you, I'll take Scahill.

[JackRiddler]

3. kick

[mmonk]

4. Absolutely.

I have information I plan to post at some time in the future. There was even a sort of agreement with Al Queda in that they would help in this fight but were allowed to hit other targets of "American influence" but not strike our forces in this operation.

[JackRiddler]

5. Looking forward to that...

The KLA-UCK was listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department as late as 1998! What a reversal followed. A mafioso group of ethnic supremacists dealing heroin, with ties to the radical Islamist mujahedeen (and backing from the German intelligence BND) overnight became America's heroic proxy (with even bigger backing from the CIA). The Yugoslav attempt to put down an insurgency was styled into genocide. When Milosevic agreed to stand down during the 1998 crisis, this proxy violated the terms by moving into the province vacated by Serb forces under General Clark's cover. So the Serb forces moved back in.

The next year at the Rambouillet talks, Milosevic was given an ultimatum to allow NATO occupation not just of Kosovo but of all of Yugoslavia, with a clause freeing the prospective foreign occupiers from any liability for their actions. It boiled down to, Let us occupy you or we will bomb you. Those unwilling within NATO were railroaded into the action by U.S./Germany/UK, fearing the alternative of a NATO break-up. NATO violated its own treaty terms with an out-of-area offensive action.

The multiethnic refugees from the subsequent NATO bombing of Kosovo (1/3 of whom fled into Serbia) and of all Serbia were "disappeared" by the Western media, who falsely claimed hundreds of thousands of Albanian males had been killed, on the basis of zero evidence. (Ultimately 2,000 dead civilians and fighters of all ethnic groups were found in the province due to the fighting and bombing. Several refugee trains and many residences were hit by NATO bombs.) CNN headquarters accepted a team of CIA "interns" who "helped" with the reportage during the bombing. Scahill neglects to mention that the deadly "oops" bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade came two days after China launched an initiative for an immediate ceasefire and peace negotiations. If that looks like a U.S. answer to the unwanted meddling of the Chinese, then I guess it's just bad luck in the timing for the bombers, eh?

At the end of hostilities, Gen. Clark almost ordered an attack on a unit of Russian paratroopers who had moved into the Pristina airport, in the words of UK Gen. Michael Jackson (who successfully resisted the order) almost starting World War Three.

Here's the commanders' victory photo:


Left to Right: Hashim Thaci, UCK (KLA) leader; Bernard Kouchner, UN Administrator of Kosovo; Gen. Sir Michael Jackson, KFOR Commander; Agim Ceku, Commander of KPC; Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO Commander.

http://www.zpub.com/un/clark.html

For those in the audience who did not have a flier, I began to explain the picture which showed General Clark in a congratulatory handshake with Hashim Thaci, leader of the KLA, which under the noses of KFOR had murdered or ethnically cleansed thousands of Kosovo Serbs and had destroyed more Orthodox Christian churches and monasteries than were destroyed in 500 years under the Ottoman Empire. Next to Thaci was Bernard Kouchner, Chief U.N. administrator in Kosovo, British General Sir Michael Jackson, and Agim Ceku, who commanded the Croatian Army in "Operation Storm" that ethnically cleansed 250,000 Serbs from Krajina and murdered thousands and who now commands the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC), the thinly disguised successor to the KLA. It should be noted that the KLA, with whom we allied ourselves, at one time was designated by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization. Of course, this is the same KLA about whom Senator Joe Lieberman said: "The United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same values and principles . . . Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values." (Washington Post, Apr.28, 1999). Clark at Borders bookstore, Pentagon Center Mall, 17 Jul 2001 by Colonel George Jatras, USAF (Ret.)

(NOTE: The 1995 "Operation Storm" by Croation forces to expel the Serbian population of the Krajina, the largest single ethnic cleansing action of the Yugoslavian wars, came after several years in which the U.S. armed and trained the Croatian forces in preparation. At that point, the fighting in Croatia had largely died down, and this was a new offensive. It played as a minor event by the U.S. media.)

The ethnic cleansing of Kosovo occurred after the attack of 1999. Under the NATO occupation the Albanian separatists chased out Serbs, Gypsies and Gorani who had lived in Kosovo all along. The awakened dreams of Greater Albania were extended to a separatist movement in Macedonia.

All this is supposed to be international law and a shining example of humanitarian intervention, as dictated by bombs. To pro-Clinton ideologues, the proof that the rape of Serbia was a good thing lies in the fact that all the killing was done from the air, with no danger to U.S. ground troops, whose lives are apparently the only ones that count.

Are these the facts that Samantha Powers can refute?

[mmonk]

6. Your link has quite a bit of Clark links.

My piece I have decided to put on hold until it looks as if we have a candidate so it can't be miss-read by Clinton supporters as an attack on her. I get tired of that sort of thing if I'm trying to share information I think is important.

[JackRiddler]

8. That's too bad...

Facts are facts regardless of whether they look bad for Clinton, or Clark. The consequences of their actions are a lot bigger than their teeny little reputations.

[Akimbo2112]

7. It was a bad idea....

prima facie to recognize Kosovo's independence. You don't need an expert to know it's going to be destabilizing. This is reminiscent of the West's abrupt decision to recognize independent Croatia in the early 1990's.

[JackRiddler]

9. kick and thanks for recs

[eridani]

10. Both Clinton and Obama are foursquare in favor of empire

I wonder when supporters of US military action as basically social work done with depleted uranium and cluster bombs will drop their assumption that even though the MSM lied to us in the run-up to the Iraq war, they were telling the truth about the Balkans. Google John Pilger and Naomi Klein on this subject also. When you find out all the facts, the conclusion that Camp Bondsteel is to the Baghdad embassy palace as Isengard was to Mordor is inescapable. Disagree? Then explain what a demand to privatize state-owned assets has to do with stopping ethnic cleansing.

http://www.counterpunch.org/pilger12112004.html

The trigger for the bombing of Yugoslavia was, according to NATO, the failure of the Serbian delegation to sign up to the Rambouillet peace conference. What went mostly unreported was that the Rambouillet accord had a secret Annex B, which Madeleine Albright's delegation had inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia, a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation. As the Foreign Office minister Lord Gilbert later conceded to a Commons' defense select committee, Annex B was planted deliberately to provoke rejection by the government in Belgrade. As the first bombs fell, the elected parliament in Belgrade, which included some of Milosevic's fiercest opponents, voted overwhelmingly to reject it.

Equally revealing was a chapter dealing exclusively with the Kosovo economy. This called for a "free-market economy" and the privatization of all government assets. As the Balkans writer Neil Clark has pointed out, "the rump of Yugoslavia ... was the last economy in central-southern Europe to be uncolonized by western capital. 'Socially owned enterprises,' the form of worker self-management pioneered under Tito, still predominated. Yugoslavia had publicly owned petroleum, mining, car, and tobacco industries, and 75 percent of industry was state- or socially owned."

At the Davos summit of neo-liberal chieftains in 1999, Blair berated Belgrade, not for its handling of Kosovo, but for its failure to fully embrace "economic reform." In the bombing campaign that followed, it was state-owned companies, rather than military sites, that were targeted. NATO's destruction of only 14 Yugoslav army tanks compares with its bombing of 372 centers of industry, including the Zastava car factory, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. "Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed," wrote Clark.

[JackRiddler]

11. Yes, thanks for adding the economic dimension ....

People think there couldn't be any big economic gain for the imperial powers from a poor place without big resource reserves like Kosovo, yet there was Blair in his rhetoric emphasizing above all the need to return Yugoslavia to the "free market" system.

The name of the present-day ideology is globalization - ultimately every place must be fit in, no place is irrelevant, the growth machine needs new frontiers even if they are barren. Every place in the world can be made more profitable and more amenable to having profits repatriated to the global multis. Any place that tries to stay on a true third path of public ownership, as Yugoslavia did, poses a challenge that cannot be tolerated. (The Kosovo war did not just "free" Kosovo for exploitation but punish Serbia.)

Opportunities for profit present themselves for the covert operators who engage in the advance preparation and destabilization - it's no big coincidence that Afghanistan is the source of the world's opium and that the pipeline for heroin to Europe goes through the Kosovar mafia.

Finally, unavoidably, the MIC needs real wars. It can't justify the way it sucks up the nation's wealth in the long term or stay battle-ready or test the next generation of weapons without them. Preparing for war is great, but ultimately real wars must happen and in '99 that was Kosovo.

And isn't Camp Bondsteel quite a trophy?

[JackRiddler]

12. and another kick for readers

[eridani]

13. And of course they keep selling advanced weaponry to potential enemies

It's like cornering the market on a poison and its antidote both. Nice work if you can get it.

[JackRiddler]

14. Next day arrogant this merits more attention than Starbucks kick (nt)

[JackRiddler]

15. New article today by Gary Leupp...

Reviews the history dating back to the beginnings of WWI at Sarajevo and the later birth of Yugoslavia...

http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp02262008.html

Flash forward to March 1999, when Condoleezza Rice's predecessor, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, offered Serbia another ultimatum. She ordered the Yugoslav army out of the Yugoslav "breakaway" province of Kosovo. The "Rambouillet Agreement" signed by U.S., British, and Kosovar Albanian separatists that month further demanded that NATO forces receive "free and unrestricted access throughout including the right of bivouac, maneuver, billet, and utilization of any areas or facilities as required for support, training and operations."

Agree to that, Belgrade was told, or we will bomb you.

(...)

Belgrade was willing to restore the autonomy, the de facto republic status Kosovo had enjoyed until 1989. It was willing to accept UN peacekeeping forces in Kosovo. It had the year before accepted unarmed Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) forces. But it was not willing to give NATO unbridled access to the roads and airspace of all that remained of Yugoslavia. The "scope of the demand" (to again cite the 1914 Serbian reply to Vienna) was such that no sovereign state could accept.

But the spin in the U.S. corporate press was well expressed by CNN's Christiane Amanpour: "Milosevic continues to thump his nose at the international community." The U.S.-dictated "agreement," rejected by Russia and Yugoslavia, was depicted as a reasonable international consensus. Belgrade, which had maintained neutrality between NATO and the Warsaw Pact for decades, naturally resisted an unlimited alliance presence in its territory. But the logic of this stance was obscured by the anti-Serbian propaganda relentlessly unleashed by the U.S. press and the statements of U.S. officials charging the Serbian state with responsibility for mass murder in Kosovo. It later became clear that the charges were wildly overblown, while attacks upon Serbs, their property and holy places were generally ignored by those demanding U.S. military action.

That action killed about 500 civilians, according to Human Rights Watch. Since the bombing ended and NATO occupied Kosovo, thousands more have died in anti-Serbian pogroms. Between June 1999 and March 2004, by one estimate, over 3000 perished in ethnic-based violence in Kosovo. Over 200,000 Serb have fled their Kosovo homeland since 1999.

Continues to the present situation and the confrontation with Russia.