On TFF from May 21, 2001
http://www.transnational.org
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T F F P r e s s I n f o 1 2 1
May 21, 2001
M A C E D O N I A A N D T H E W E S T E R N P R E S S
By Jan Oberg, TFF director
PressInfo 118 offers an independent analysis of 11 reasons why
Macedonia is at the brink of war. Number 119 deals with the way the
United Nations was forced out of Macedonia and not employed in Kosovo
at the time when it could have made a difference. In short, there was
a hidden agenda. PressInfo 120 deals with how Macedonia is also
responsible, and not only a victim, in the process towards its fatal
crisis now.
This one deals with insufficient, or deceptive, media coverage, and
with Western democracies.
Where is the free press?
********************
We have explained that the 43,000 NATO/KFOR "peace"-keepers can not
control or seal off the border around the territory it has occupied
and is tasked with stabilising and controlling. Has it turned the
blind eye to Albanian military activity all the time? This mission is
much larger than the UN ever was in former Yugoslav territories and
much more heavily armed.
If a UN mission had failed to the same extent, hundreds of
journalists, experts and commentators would have renewed the anti-UN
chorus of the 1990s: the UN is incompetent, bureaucratic, too
expensive and inefficient, it's too weak. There is no peace to keep!
We need more muscle!
Now it is NATO, private American mercenaries, CIA in bed with more or
less criminal, hardline elements in the Balkans and no chorus is
heard. One may wonder: who controls the free press?
Will future historians reveal to us that journalists, NGOs, clergy
and Peace Corps volunteers have functioned as cover for CIA and
possibly other intelligence agencies and their cloak-and-dagger
covert operations, that citizens around the world are targets of
psychological warfare?
If you think this is to carry it too far, this is what a former CIA
analyst, Melvin Goodman, says in a recent study from the Center for
International Policy in Washington:
"The report of the (US) Council of Foreign Relations in 1996 took a
step backward with its implicit endorsement of expanded use of CIA
cover to include journalists, clergy, and Peace Corps volunteers.
This suggested misuse of the Peace Corps would destroy its integrity
as a "non political" humanitarian organization, and would greatly
increase the danger to its volunteers. The House Intelligence
Committee, in its 1996 report, also recommended that the clandestine
services apply journalistic cover to their operators abroad.
There is no justification for the use of spies posing as reporters or
the employment of bona fide reporters for intelligence missions,
practices that developed during the Cold War. Both practices should
be banned. The press has constitutional protection because it is the
chronicler of and check on the government, not its instrument.
Unfortunately, recent CIA directors have insisted that the Agency
have the option of using journalists in sensitive clandestine
operations."
Ed. Craig Eisendrath, National Insecurity. U.S. Intelligence After
the Cold War, Temple University Press, Philadelphia 2000, p36.
Given their history and purposes, there is no reason to be surprised
at the presence of CIA and similar agencies in a place like the
Balkans. You may have wondered why your media does not cover their
role or other darker aspects such as those you find in some TFF
PressInfos (and the critical, dissident press). One reason may be
that there is a politico-military-media-intelligence complex that
does not see it fit to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing
but the truth.
Media manipulation and psychological warfare is nothing new as we
know from the writings of intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky,
Chalmers Johnson, William Blum, and John Pilger to mention a few. It
does not prevent the United States and other Western nations from
teaching the virtues of the free press wherever they can.
Peace-prevention is linked to debate-prevention
***************************************
The same governments and leaders who now condemn the Albanian
extremist activities have armed these forces and supported them, and
do so today. One of the closest allies of UNMIK and KFOR in Kosovo is
(former KLA) commander Agim Ceku. He had a leading position at the
time in the Croatian Army when it drove out some 200.000 legitimate
citizens from Croatia of Serb origin, in Operation Storm and Flash in
1995. Allegedly, he is under investigation by the War Crimes Tribunal
in the Hague; but it would be an utter embarrassment to NATO/KFOR and
the UN - - whose partner he is - - should he (and some of his
colleagues) be brought to the Tribunal. That would shed light on
Western-supported ethnic cleansing in Croatia and on the question as
to why at least 200.000 non-Albanians have left Kosovo since NATO and
the UN arrived.
If a major war breaks out in Macedonia, some of the weapons the
parties will use to fight each other come from the same supplier; and
the parties will be assisted by the same "advisers" and mercenaries
(see PressInfo 118).
The same politicians who now rush to Skopje are those who were
absolutely central in creating the havoc in the first place: then
NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana who is now the "Foreign
Minister" of the EU, Lord Robertson who was then British Secretary of
Defence, now NATO Secretary-General. The new Head of Mission of UNMIK
is former Danish defence minister Hans Haekkerup who was responsible
for Danish F16 participation in the actual bombing of Yugoslavia.
Their moral capital and legitimacy in this situation and their
competence in conflict-management in general should not be beyond
scrutiny, debate and critical evaluation in a free press.
One highly relevant word for Western policies outlined here is
peace-prevention. (See TFF report by that title). Either there is a
hidden agenda for the destruction of Macedonia too or the official
plan to provide stability and peace in Yugoslavia and Macedonia is
yet another conflict-management failure of Himalayan proportions.
Those who want to look into the matter might find that the policies
of EU and NATO countries, particularly as they relate to Kosovo and
the policies of the missions there, make up the most important factor
of instability in today's Balkans.
Macedonia's ability to survive the consequences of ten years of
conflict-mismanagement in the Balkans has been impressive, but it is
coming to an end. There has been no lack of early warnings from
experts such as Misha Glenny, international government mission heads
in the region and independent expert teams such as that of TFF.
Unfortunately, top politicians in the US and Europe lack every
willingness to listen. They do not learn lessons, they teach them.
They have too little humility and too much missionary zeal. They see
others as standing on the lower rungs of the civilisational ladder,
themselves (on its top) as chosen to civilise the savages. Or to make
others their disciples. It's the classical colonial mind-set: the
noble white man's shouldering his burden while regretting that now
and then he needs to use the sword to make them understand his
altruism and fundamental goodness.
The importance of independent research and media work grows by the day.
This is what TFF wrote about preventing war in Macedonia about two years
ago:
Your ideas for peace in Macedonia wanted (1999)
http://www.transnational.org/pressinf/pf79.html
A Bouquet of peace ideas to Macedonia...and Kosovo (1999)
http://www.transnational.org/pressinf/pf80.html
� TFF 2001
Please reprint, copy, archive, quote or re-post this item, but please
retain the source.
---
THE DANGEROUS GAP
A legacy of the Clinton Era
R. K Kent
Emeritus Professor of History
University of California at
Berkeley.
(17 May 2001)
When ballots cast in secret eliminated the United States from
U.N.�s Commission
on Human Rights reactions ranged from disbelief to outrage. It was
immediately
pointed out that �rogue� states and gross violators of Human Rights
had, as such,
no moral right to block the United States, sustained champion of
Human Rights
everywhere �Cut-off all U.S. funds to the U.N.,� said some. Others
suggested that the
time has come to �pull out of the U.N. altogether,� as the U.S. did with
the League of
Nations. For the more cynical observers, this act of �expulsion� was
the price of
being the sole remaining super-Power, a target for the small fry to
�bite� the Tall
Uncle Sam. Yet, hardly anyone argued seriously that this was a
symbolic and
actually well-intended message to the American People that something
had gone wrong
with those who govern them, that something had, in fact, tarnished the
United States,
and that the gap between self-perception in Washington and the way the
U.S. is widely
perceived today has grown too wide. It did not just happen to �come
with the
territory.�
It is actually an attempt to ring alarm bells and virtually impose
the
understanding of an acute and very real gap between the outer-world
realities and the
self-perception in Washington, New York and Los Angeles. This is a
problem that the
ruling American elite refuses to acknowledge. It is consumed by
America�s own
unquestioned primacy and might. It has discovered the heady brew of
�re-arranging�
matters in the �old countries� without being really accountable to
anyone. It is
becoming addicted to foreign petitioners, fund-raising ethnic lobbies
at home, and
�ethnic� nationalists seeking U.S. help to hurt their own local
adversaries. All of
this has served to enhance both venality and �American
Exceptionalism,� the id�e
maitresse of the home-grown Nationalist ethos. The basic rule is
that �we� cannot,
by definition, be wrong. When �we� do happen to be proven wrong by
events these are
disregarded or passed over in silence as the basic rule reminds everyone
that Might
alone makes Right. To this must be added the irritating tendency from
the Clinton Era to
�iron-out� all foreign-policy contradictions with arrogance and the
lofty
�Humanitarian� rhetoric which hardly jibes with actual applications of
the U.S. military
and economic might abroad.
During the intense Human Rights drive of the Nineties, its leaders
in the U.S.
Government and the American corporate media endowed themselves
with moral purity
and made it a practice to depict various interventions abroad as a
humanitarian
duty. A widely noted example of this self-inflicted malady was
Madeleine
Albright�s TV retort to Leslie Stohl that the U.S. sanctions on Iraq
were �worth� the
deaths of 500,000 local children, with a subsequent explanation that
�we care more
about the Iraqi people than Saddam.� But. such arrogance and
contradiction in logic
were hardly confined to Madeleine Albright. She simply displayed
and articulated
them in a way calculated to get a craved public attention. There
is a far more
consequential legacy of the Clinton-era foreign policy, inherited by
the Bush
Administration. Its most revealing segment is the unprecedented U.S.
entry into the
Balkans and, more specifically, into ex-Yugoslavia. It began in
1992-1993 to be
capped some seven years later with the so-called �Victory at Kosovo.�
One key contradiction is to be found in the simultaneous support for
multi-ethnic
national arrangements and the right of self-determination. As a true
reflection of a
pluralist America, Washington�s foreign policy should have preserved
the Yugoslav
federal arrangement, by refusing a priori to recognize any seceding
component.
Instead, the Clinton foreign policy team actively supported the
break-up of
Yugoslavia, a major European achievement as a multi-ethnic and
multi-religious nation.
It accorded, at the same time, the right of self-determination to all
of the
ethnicities within the Federal structure except the Serbs. Equally, as
the official
propaganda castigated the � Great Sin � of Nationalism, especially its
narrower
manifestations, U.S. support went to the extreme nationalists in
Croatia, Muslim Bosnia
and Kosovo. It was a performance abroad all tied-up in knots. It did
not even deserve
to be called a �policy.� A brief look at the results should be enough
to convince.
In Bosnia, which was a mini-Yugoslavia in composition, reflected in
large numbers of
inter-marriages, the U.S. diplomatic intervention served to force
all the diverse
elements to submit to an illegal Muslim government required to step
down from
Bosnia�s presidency. . This was done despite the European Union�s
success in
arranging, at Lisbon in February 1992, for an acceptable peace treaty
in Bosnia. Two
months later and two days apart, both Germany and the U.S. recognized
Bosnia as an
independent state under a Muslim government .The civil war became
inevitable at this
point. The reality today is that Bosnia is effectively sub-divided into
three parts,
despite the official fiction of progress and �emerging� �federative
unity.� Bosnuan
Muslims continue to be favored despite widespread corruption and theft
of funds for
reconstruction. . The why of this favoritism of the Muslim �side� in
Bosnia is not
difficult to decipher. Two factors went into play. A number of
influential
foreign-policy persons, including Anthony Lake, Sanford Berger and
Madeleine Albright,
convinced themselves that this would somehow aid U.S. efforts at
attaining peace in
the Middle East. It did not matter again that the logic here was
again faulty and
working in total disregard of Israeli-Arab relations during more than
half of the
Twentieth Century. The second factor reflected what the astute
French journalist
Louis Dalmas has called the �Cult of Minorities.� (1)
While Washington supported Croatia�s right to self-determination
as a � budding
Democracy� with a free market economy, in opposition to the �
Communist Serbia,� the
attempt of the Yugoslav Federal Army to prevent the unilateral and
violent exit of
Croatia served conveniently to transform Serbia into an �enemy� of the
West. In the
process, as the Serbs came do be deformed by propaganda beyond
recognition, the
�International Community� overlooked the first massive �ethnic
cleansing� in the
Yugoslav space. It was carried out by the New Croatia�s Army and
para-military in
Western Slavonia between August 1991 and February 1992. About 40,000
ethnic Serbs fled
in panic. Their properties were looted and taken away, their
Orthodox churches were
systematically destroyed and their elderly, who could not or would not
run, were simply
executed. Nor did the �International Community� manage to lift a finger
to counter the
mistreatment and myriad human-rights abuses against the Serb minority
in Croatia. It
used to be at 14 percent of the total population. In August 1995, an
even larger
�ethnic cleansing� of Krajina�s 250,000 Serb civilians established
Croatia as an
ethno-religiously �pure� mini-state .In this action it had full U.S.
support. U.S. jets
within NATO even strafed the Serb radar positions around Knin, the
Capital of Krajina as
the Croat Army carried out its blitzkrieg.
Finally, the U.S./NATO intervention at Kosovo has produced yet another
case of �ethnic
cleansing,� right under the eyes of 40,000 NATO troops. Altogether some
300,000 Serbs,
Romas, Turks, Greeks, pro-Yugoslav Albanians, and a number of
numerically smaller
minorities have fled from Kosovo since June 1999. Except for a handful
of Serb ghettos
guarded by NATO troops in central and southern Kosovo, the last
concentration of some
120,000 Serbs is holding out at Kosovska Mitrovica. There is an almost
ethnically pure
Kosovo now, courtesy of the U.S. clandestine (CIA) and open(Pentagon
and State
Department) support of the so-called �Kosovo Liberation Army� (KLA).
What is happening
inside Kosovo may no longer be mentioned in polite company and,
whatever happens, it
is clear that Kosovo has been taken de facto away from Serbia by
Washington�s diktat.
It is no longer possible to hope for any real reconciliation at
Kosovo. The U.S./NATO
�humanitarian intervention� has poisoned for a long time to come the
soil and the
water. It has virtually made sure that an already moribund human soul at
Kosovo cannot
recover any deeper sense of humanity. A sub-rosa control of Kosovo by
the �ex-KLA�
translates also into illegal commercial enterprise as 80 percent of the
heroin for
Western Europe goes through the hands and minions of Kosovo�s Caids
and Albanian
Mafiosi. Looking the other way at �justifiable retribution?� But, what
the Serbs were
being accused of doing at Kosovo, before NATO�s � Humanitarian�
intervention as well
as during the eleven weeks of the so-called �air war,� has proven to
have been at
considerable odds with local realities. The claims of endless mass
graves and 100,000
executions were dead on arrival of NATO�s occupying force. The
accusation that the
Serb Army and Police targeted the Kosovo Albanians as a �Race�
subjected to �Genocide�
became subsequently exposed as untenable. Between 1998 and the
beginning of 1999 some
300 Serb policemen were killed, almost exclusively from ambush. In
acting against
the KLA ambushers and assassins.( transformed by propaganda into
�freedom fighters�)
the Serb authorities did nothing more sinister than to exercise another
basic right,
the right of self-defense and its legitimate internal application
against a guerrilla
mounted and financed from outside. All of this is dismissed with such a
quip as �the
first victim of war is Truth.� Since lies dominate in all wars
�deforming� truth at
Kosovo is nothing to get excited about. Or, as a U.S. Army Generl
countered the
emerging contradictions within Kosovo, �the claims made represent the
best information
available at the time.� How could anyone be unfair and disagree with
�our men in
uniform,� �risking their lives to defend freedom.� Few could recall that
not a single
American life was lost in the eleven weeks of bombing Serbia and
Kosovo. But, when
disinformation is enveloped in rather transparent �Patriotism� and the
managerial
�explanations� to questioin it is always an uphill struggle.
The U.S. entry into the Balkans began first in secret and amid denials
from the
Pentagon. Only the European and primarily British press exposed the
clandestine
engagement. At the time. American Public opinion did not favor a U.S.
entry into
another conflict that was not generally understood and for which no
time-frame was
in sight. .Therein lies the source of a most ruthless campaign by
official propaganda
and its sometimes sycophantic and at other times even more aggressive
corporate-media. Only, almost all of it was not directed at a
foreign �enemy� but
at an American People that partly did not care and partly distrusted
the government
anyway. It probably was not a coincidence that the bombings by �NATO�
(mainly USAF) in
Yugoslavia ended one day before mass demonstrations against the �air
war� were scheduled
to take place in most major American cities.
So far, the U.S. Treasury is short by over 25 billion dollars,
squandered in the
would-be mirific enterprises in the Balkans. Lasting �Victories� have
been proclaimed
in Bosnia and in Kosovo and William Jefferson . Clinton left the White
House. On his
last visit to Europe before stepping down he promised to �de-Balkanize
the Balkans.�
He forgot or never really knew that what he had done was to Balkanize
Yugoslavia a
classic world-power �engagement� in the region. Italian Fascists and
German Nazis
�worked hard� (a Clinton phrase) to Balkanize Yugoslavia too and the
legacies of both
have not entirely played themselves out Neither has the Clintonian
variant. Strap on
the seat belts. The game is hardly over. Amid the seeming �victories�
and successes The
Clinton Legacy , with its economic and military arrogance, is an
increasing disgust
with U.S. leadership in the world. The new Administration is preparing
all kinds of
defenses against unseen but �developed� foreign enemies. Despite all
the talk about the
need for �humility� and �respect� in foreign- affairs dealings, the
same Nationalist
Hawks are sucking the American People into their web of �
geo-political strategies�
discredited long ago as appendages of Nazi Germany�s intended Global
Hegemony. Only the
overt arrogance is missing.
---
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Please forward this to someone you think would like to receive the
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T F F P r e s s I n f o 1 2 1
May 21, 2001
M A C E D O N I A A N D T H E W E S T E R N P R E S S
By Jan Oberg, TFF director
PressInfo 118 offers an independent analysis of 11 reasons why
Macedonia is at the brink of war. Number 119 deals with the way the
United Nations was forced out of Macedonia and not employed in Kosovo
at the time when it could have made a difference. In short, there was
a hidden agenda. PressInfo 120 deals with how Macedonia is also
responsible, and not only a victim, in the process towards its fatal
crisis now.
This one deals with insufficient, or deceptive, media coverage, and
with Western democracies.
Where is the free press?
********************
We have explained that the 43,000 NATO/KFOR "peace"-keepers can not
control or seal off the border around the territory it has occupied
and is tasked with stabilising and controlling. Has it turned the
blind eye to Albanian military activity all the time? This mission is
much larger than the UN ever was in former Yugoslav territories and
much more heavily armed.
If a UN mission had failed to the same extent, hundreds of
journalists, experts and commentators would have renewed the anti-UN
chorus of the 1990s: the UN is incompetent, bureaucratic, too
expensive and inefficient, it's too weak. There is no peace to keep!
We need more muscle!
Now it is NATO, private American mercenaries, CIA in bed with more or
less criminal, hardline elements in the Balkans and no chorus is
heard. One may wonder: who controls the free press?
Will future historians reveal to us that journalists, NGOs, clergy
and Peace Corps volunteers have functioned as cover for CIA and
possibly other intelligence agencies and their cloak-and-dagger
covert operations, that citizens around the world are targets of
psychological warfare?
If you think this is to carry it too far, this is what a former CIA
analyst, Melvin Goodman, says in a recent study from the Center for
International Policy in Washington:
"The report of the (US) Council of Foreign Relations in 1996 took a
step backward with its implicit endorsement of expanded use of CIA
cover to include journalists, clergy, and Peace Corps volunteers.
This suggested misuse of the Peace Corps would destroy its integrity
as a "non political" humanitarian organization, and would greatly
increase the danger to its volunteers. The House Intelligence
Committee, in its 1996 report, also recommended that the clandestine
services apply journalistic cover to their operators abroad.
There is no justification for the use of spies posing as reporters or
the employment of bona fide reporters for intelligence missions,
practices that developed during the Cold War. Both practices should
be banned. The press has constitutional protection because it is the
chronicler of and check on the government, not its instrument.
Unfortunately, recent CIA directors have insisted that the Agency
have the option of using journalists in sensitive clandestine
operations."
Ed. Craig Eisendrath, National Insecurity. U.S. Intelligence After
the Cold War, Temple University Press, Philadelphia 2000, p36.
Given their history and purposes, there is no reason to be surprised
at the presence of CIA and similar agencies in a place like the
Balkans. You may have wondered why your media does not cover their
role or other darker aspects such as those you find in some TFF
PressInfos (and the critical, dissident press). One reason may be
that there is a politico-military-media-intelligence complex that
does not see it fit to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing
but the truth.
Media manipulation and psychological warfare is nothing new as we
know from the writings of intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky,
Chalmers Johnson, William Blum, and John Pilger to mention a few. It
does not prevent the United States and other Western nations from
teaching the virtues of the free press wherever they can.
Peace-prevention is linked to debate-prevention
***************************************
The same governments and leaders who now condemn the Albanian
extremist activities have armed these forces and supported them, and
do so today. One of the closest allies of UNMIK and KFOR in Kosovo is
(former KLA) commander Agim Ceku. He had a leading position at the
time in the Croatian Army when it drove out some 200.000 legitimate
citizens from Croatia of Serb origin, in Operation Storm and Flash in
1995. Allegedly, he is under investigation by the War Crimes Tribunal
in the Hague; but it would be an utter embarrassment to NATO/KFOR and
the UN - - whose partner he is - - should he (and some of his
colleagues) be brought to the Tribunal. That would shed light on
Western-supported ethnic cleansing in Croatia and on the question as
to why at least 200.000 non-Albanians have left Kosovo since NATO and
the UN arrived.
If a major war breaks out in Macedonia, some of the weapons the
parties will use to fight each other come from the same supplier; and
the parties will be assisted by the same "advisers" and mercenaries
(see PressInfo 118).
The same politicians who now rush to Skopje are those who were
absolutely central in creating the havoc in the first place: then
NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana who is now the "Foreign
Minister" of the EU, Lord Robertson who was then British Secretary of
Defence, now NATO Secretary-General. The new Head of Mission of UNMIK
is former Danish defence minister Hans Haekkerup who was responsible
for Danish F16 participation in the actual bombing of Yugoslavia.
Their moral capital and legitimacy in this situation and their
competence in conflict-management in general should not be beyond
scrutiny, debate and critical evaluation in a free press.
One highly relevant word for Western policies outlined here is
peace-prevention. (See TFF report by that title). Either there is a
hidden agenda for the destruction of Macedonia too or the official
plan to provide stability and peace in Yugoslavia and Macedonia is
yet another conflict-management failure of Himalayan proportions.
Those who want to look into the matter might find that the policies
of EU and NATO countries, particularly as they relate to Kosovo and
the policies of the missions there, make up the most important factor
of instability in today's Balkans.
Macedonia's ability to survive the consequences of ten years of
conflict-mismanagement in the Balkans has been impressive, but it is
coming to an end. There has been no lack of early warnings from
experts such as Misha Glenny, international government mission heads
in the region and independent expert teams such as that of TFF.
Unfortunately, top politicians in the US and Europe lack every
willingness to listen. They do not learn lessons, they teach them.
They have too little humility and too much missionary zeal. They see
others as standing on the lower rungs of the civilisational ladder,
themselves (on its top) as chosen to civilise the savages. Or to make
others their disciples. It's the classical colonial mind-set: the
noble white man's shouldering his burden while regretting that now
and then he needs to use the sword to make them understand his
altruism and fundamental goodness.
The importance of independent research and media work grows by the day.
This is what TFF wrote about preventing war in Macedonia about two years
ago:
Your ideas for peace in Macedonia wanted (1999)
http://www.transnational.org/pressinf/pf79.html
A Bouquet of peace ideas to Macedonia...and Kosovo (1999)
http://www.transnational.org/pressinf/pf80.html
� TFF 2001
Please reprint, copy, archive, quote or re-post this item, but please
retain the source.
---
THE DANGEROUS GAP
A legacy of the Clinton Era
R. K Kent
Emeritus Professor of History
University of California at
Berkeley.
(17 May 2001)
When ballots cast in secret eliminated the United States from
U.N.�s Commission
on Human Rights reactions ranged from disbelief to outrage. It was
immediately
pointed out that �rogue� states and gross violators of Human Rights
had, as such,
no moral right to block the United States, sustained champion of
Human Rights
everywhere �Cut-off all U.S. funds to the U.N.,� said some. Others
suggested that the
time has come to �pull out of the U.N. altogether,� as the U.S. did with
the League of
Nations. For the more cynical observers, this act of �expulsion� was
the price of
being the sole remaining super-Power, a target for the small fry to
�bite� the Tall
Uncle Sam. Yet, hardly anyone argued seriously that this was a
symbolic and
actually well-intended message to the American People that something
had gone wrong
with those who govern them, that something had, in fact, tarnished the
United States,
and that the gap between self-perception in Washington and the way the
U.S. is widely
perceived today has grown too wide. It did not just happen to �come
with the
territory.�
It is actually an attempt to ring alarm bells and virtually impose
the
understanding of an acute and very real gap between the outer-world
realities and the
self-perception in Washington, New York and Los Angeles. This is a
problem that the
ruling American elite refuses to acknowledge. It is consumed by
America�s own
unquestioned primacy and might. It has discovered the heady brew of
�re-arranging�
matters in the �old countries� without being really accountable to
anyone. It is
becoming addicted to foreign petitioners, fund-raising ethnic lobbies
at home, and
�ethnic� nationalists seeking U.S. help to hurt their own local
adversaries. All of
this has served to enhance both venality and �American
Exceptionalism,� the id�e
maitresse of the home-grown Nationalist ethos. The basic rule is
that �we� cannot,
by definition, be wrong. When �we� do happen to be proven wrong by
events these are
disregarded or passed over in silence as the basic rule reminds everyone
that Might
alone makes Right. To this must be added the irritating tendency from
the Clinton Era to
�iron-out� all foreign-policy contradictions with arrogance and the
lofty
�Humanitarian� rhetoric which hardly jibes with actual applications of
the U.S. military
and economic might abroad.
During the intense Human Rights drive of the Nineties, its leaders
in the U.S.
Government and the American corporate media endowed themselves
with moral purity
and made it a practice to depict various interventions abroad as a
humanitarian
duty. A widely noted example of this self-inflicted malady was
Madeleine
Albright�s TV retort to Leslie Stohl that the U.S. sanctions on Iraq
were �worth� the
deaths of 500,000 local children, with a subsequent explanation that
�we care more
about the Iraqi people than Saddam.� But. such arrogance and
contradiction in logic
were hardly confined to Madeleine Albright. She simply displayed
and articulated
them in a way calculated to get a craved public attention. There
is a far more
consequential legacy of the Clinton-era foreign policy, inherited by
the Bush
Administration. Its most revealing segment is the unprecedented U.S.
entry into the
Balkans and, more specifically, into ex-Yugoslavia. It began in
1992-1993 to be
capped some seven years later with the so-called �Victory at Kosovo.�
One key contradiction is to be found in the simultaneous support for
multi-ethnic
national arrangements and the right of self-determination. As a true
reflection of a
pluralist America, Washington�s foreign policy should have preserved
the Yugoslav
federal arrangement, by refusing a priori to recognize any seceding
component.
Instead, the Clinton foreign policy team actively supported the
break-up of
Yugoslavia, a major European achievement as a multi-ethnic and
multi-religious nation.
It accorded, at the same time, the right of self-determination to all
of the
ethnicities within the Federal structure except the Serbs. Equally, as
the official
propaganda castigated the � Great Sin � of Nationalism, especially its
narrower
manifestations, U.S. support went to the extreme nationalists in
Croatia, Muslim Bosnia
and Kosovo. It was a performance abroad all tied-up in knots. It did
not even deserve
to be called a �policy.� A brief look at the results should be enough
to convince.
In Bosnia, which was a mini-Yugoslavia in composition, reflected in
large numbers of
inter-marriages, the U.S. diplomatic intervention served to force
all the diverse
elements to submit to an illegal Muslim government required to step
down from
Bosnia�s presidency. . This was done despite the European Union�s
success in
arranging, at Lisbon in February 1992, for an acceptable peace treaty
in Bosnia. Two
months later and two days apart, both Germany and the U.S. recognized
Bosnia as an
independent state under a Muslim government .The civil war became
inevitable at this
point. The reality today is that Bosnia is effectively sub-divided into
three parts,
despite the official fiction of progress and �emerging� �federative
unity.� Bosnuan
Muslims continue to be favored despite widespread corruption and theft
of funds for
reconstruction. . The why of this favoritism of the Muslim �side� in
Bosnia is not
difficult to decipher. Two factors went into play. A number of
influential
foreign-policy persons, including Anthony Lake, Sanford Berger and
Madeleine Albright,
convinced themselves that this would somehow aid U.S. efforts at
attaining peace in
the Middle East. It did not matter again that the logic here was
again faulty and
working in total disregard of Israeli-Arab relations during more than
half of the
Twentieth Century. The second factor reflected what the astute
French journalist
Louis Dalmas has called the �Cult of Minorities.� (1)
While Washington supported Croatia�s right to self-determination
as a � budding
Democracy� with a free market economy, in opposition to the �
Communist Serbia,� the
attempt of the Yugoslav Federal Army to prevent the unilateral and
violent exit of
Croatia served conveniently to transform Serbia into an �enemy� of the
West. In the
process, as the Serbs came do be deformed by propaganda beyond
recognition, the
�International Community� overlooked the first massive �ethnic
cleansing� in the
Yugoslav space. It was carried out by the New Croatia�s Army and
para-military in
Western Slavonia between August 1991 and February 1992. About 40,000
ethnic Serbs fled
in panic. Their properties were looted and taken away, their
Orthodox churches were
systematically destroyed and their elderly, who could not or would not
run, were simply
executed. Nor did the �International Community� manage to lift a finger
to counter the
mistreatment and myriad human-rights abuses against the Serb minority
in Croatia. It
used to be at 14 percent of the total population. In August 1995, an
even larger
�ethnic cleansing� of Krajina�s 250,000 Serb civilians established
Croatia as an
ethno-religiously �pure� mini-state .In this action it had full U.S.
support. U.S. jets
within NATO even strafed the Serb radar positions around Knin, the
Capital of Krajina as
the Croat Army carried out its blitzkrieg.
Finally, the U.S./NATO intervention at Kosovo has produced yet another
case of �ethnic
cleansing,� right under the eyes of 40,000 NATO troops. Altogether some
300,000 Serbs,
Romas, Turks, Greeks, pro-Yugoslav Albanians, and a number of
numerically smaller
minorities have fled from Kosovo since June 1999. Except for a handful
of Serb ghettos
guarded by NATO troops in central and southern Kosovo, the last
concentration of some
120,000 Serbs is holding out at Kosovska Mitrovica. There is an almost
ethnically pure
Kosovo now, courtesy of the U.S. clandestine (CIA) and open(Pentagon
and State
Department) support of the so-called �Kosovo Liberation Army� (KLA).
What is happening
inside Kosovo may no longer be mentioned in polite company and,
whatever happens, it
is clear that Kosovo has been taken de facto away from Serbia by
Washington�s diktat.
It is no longer possible to hope for any real reconciliation at
Kosovo. The U.S./NATO
�humanitarian intervention� has poisoned for a long time to come the
soil and the
water. It has virtually made sure that an already moribund human soul at
Kosovo cannot
recover any deeper sense of humanity. A sub-rosa control of Kosovo by
the �ex-KLA�
translates also into illegal commercial enterprise as 80 percent of the
heroin for
Western Europe goes through the hands and minions of Kosovo�s Caids
and Albanian
Mafiosi. Looking the other way at �justifiable retribution?� But, what
the Serbs were
being accused of doing at Kosovo, before NATO�s � Humanitarian�
intervention as well
as during the eleven weeks of the so-called �air war,� has proven to
have been at
considerable odds with local realities. The claims of endless mass
graves and 100,000
executions were dead on arrival of NATO�s occupying force. The
accusation that the
Serb Army and Police targeted the Kosovo Albanians as a �Race�
subjected to �Genocide�
became subsequently exposed as untenable. Between 1998 and the
beginning of 1999 some
300 Serb policemen were killed, almost exclusively from ambush. In
acting against
the KLA ambushers and assassins.( transformed by propaganda into
�freedom fighters�)
the Serb authorities did nothing more sinister than to exercise another
basic right,
the right of self-defense and its legitimate internal application
against a guerrilla
mounted and financed from outside. All of this is dismissed with such a
quip as �the
first victim of war is Truth.� Since lies dominate in all wars
�deforming� truth at
Kosovo is nothing to get excited about. Or, as a U.S. Army Generl
countered the
emerging contradictions within Kosovo, �the claims made represent the
best information
available at the time.� How could anyone be unfair and disagree with
�our men in
uniform,� �risking their lives to defend freedom.� Few could recall that
not a single
American life was lost in the eleven weeks of bombing Serbia and
Kosovo. But, when
disinformation is enveloped in rather transparent �Patriotism� and the
managerial
�explanations� to questioin it is always an uphill struggle.
The U.S. entry into the Balkans began first in secret and amid denials
from the
Pentagon. Only the European and primarily British press exposed the
clandestine
engagement. At the time. American Public opinion did not favor a U.S.
entry into
another conflict that was not generally understood and for which no
time-frame was
in sight. .Therein lies the source of a most ruthless campaign by
official propaganda
and its sometimes sycophantic and at other times even more aggressive
corporate-media. Only, almost all of it was not directed at a
foreign �enemy� but
at an American People that partly did not care and partly distrusted
the government
anyway. It probably was not a coincidence that the bombings by �NATO�
(mainly USAF) in
Yugoslavia ended one day before mass demonstrations against the �air
war� were scheduled
to take place in most major American cities.
So far, the U.S. Treasury is short by over 25 billion dollars,
squandered in the
would-be mirific enterprises in the Balkans. Lasting �Victories� have
been proclaimed
in Bosnia and in Kosovo and William Jefferson . Clinton left the White
House. On his
last visit to Europe before stepping down he promised to �de-Balkanize
the Balkans.�
He forgot or never really knew that what he had done was to Balkanize
Yugoslavia a
classic world-power �engagement� in the region. Italian Fascists and
German Nazis
�worked hard� (a Clinton phrase) to Balkanize Yugoslavia too and the
legacies of both
have not entirely played themselves out Neither has the Clintonian
variant. Strap on
the seat belts. The game is hardly over. Amid the seeming �victories�
and successes The
Clinton Legacy , with its economic and military arrogance, is an
increasing disgust
with U.S. leadership in the world. The new Administration is preparing
all kinds of
defenses against unseen but �developed� foreign enemies. Despite all
the talk about the
need for �humility� and �respect� in foreign- affairs dealings, the
same Nationalist
Hawks are sucking the American People into their web of �
geo-political strategies�
discredited long ago as appendages of Nazi Germany�s intended Global
Hegemony. Only the
overt arrogance is missing.
---
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