Subject: FYROM: Terrorist Chief Elected Head Of 'Coordinative
Council'
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 03:41:40 -0800 (PST)
From: Rick Rozoff
> http://www.balkanreport.com/strana.asp?id=460
[A brief background piece on Ali Ahmeti follows]
Balkan Report
3/25/2002
Ali Ahmeti Elected President Of Coordinative Council
All Kosovo dailies today report on the appointment of
Ali Ahmeti, the former political leader of the NLA, as
the president of the Co-ordination Council of the
Albanians in Macedonia, in a meeting held yesterday in
Tetova. A communiqué issued by the Council said that
Ahmeti?s unanimous election ?proved the unity of the
Macedonian Albanians to develop and promote democratic
values as a factor of stability and integration of
Macedonia into the Euro-Atlantic structures?. In other
news, Koha Ditore reports that despite NATO calls for
Macedonian Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski to
disband the special ?Lions? police unit created during
the crisis, Boskovski announced on Saturday that this
unit is a regular police unit. The minister was
speaking at a ceremony marking the completion of a
three-month training course in Manastir for members of
this unit. His announcement follows international
criticism that Lions are an illegitimate police unit.
-------------------------------------------------------Human
Rights Watch: Dear Mr. Ahmeti
by Rick Rozoff
August 1, 2001
Human Rights Watch, whose interests and positions so
closely (suspiciously if you like) parallel those of
the United States State Department, politely requests
that the political leader of the self-styled National
Liberation Army in Macedonia, the lifelong separatist
extremist Ali Ahmeti, abide by "international
humanitarian law." (The Human Rights Watch appeal is
appended below.)
Though, contrary to the title of the missive, the
letter in fact requests that both sides in the
conflict - the legitimate, legally-elected government,
and the armed insurgency launched from Kosovo and
Albania - respect Common Article 3 of the Geneva
Conventions pertaining to what Human Rights Watch
characterizes as "internal armed conflicts." In
keeping with HRW's stated policy of 'deferring
judgment' on the legitimacy of said internal armed
conflicts, its spokeperson, Holly Cartner, fully
equates the aggressor and the victim; the
legally-constituted authority, which is not accused of
either provoking or even creating any pretext for the
armed uprising, and the crime syndicate-linked and
-funded racial terrorists.
In the interim between the deferential letter from Ms.
Carter to Mr. Ahmeti almost three months ago and now,
Ahmeti and his pan-Albanian mercenaries have unleashed
a full-scale insurrection throughout the nation,
ethnically cleansing dozens of villages and
contributing to the displacement of - by some
estimates - over 120,000 civilians, a sizeable
percentage of Macedonia's two million people. Human
Rights Watch has kept a low profile since on this
issue, except for reports on alleged mistreatment of
ethnic Albanians and Western press personnel. When an
organization like HRW advances its concerns from those
affecting non-combatants in "internal armed conflicts"
to the mistreatment, real or fancied, of insurgents -
which is certainly impending - then it crosses the
threshold of supposed impartiality into treating the
belligerents as equal parties to the conflict, and
thus "internationalizes" what in truth is a matter of
internal criminal law enforcement. That HRW has at
least left the door open for such a prospect is
evident by Cartner's following up her reference to the
Geneva Conventions by her revealing invocation of the
"fundamental principle[s] of the laws of war."
Who is Dear Mr. Ahmeti?
Holly Cartner, Executive Director of Human Rights
Watch's Europe and Central Asia Division, has kept a
close enough eye on the Balkans over the past years to
know who she was so respectfully writing to. For
anyone not familiar with Mr. Ahmeti, whose history
suggests someone anything but dear, he possesses, to
employ an expression familiar to the American if not
the Albanian underworld, a rap sheet as long as his
arm.
Regarding his recent activties, in addition to waging
war against the sovereign nation of Macedonia and its
civilian population from his base in Prizren in
Kosovo, Ahmeti reportedly found time to appear on an
Australian radio broadcast and announce the launching
of a Liberation Army of Chameria in Northern Greece,
claiming he already had fighters and weapons in place
there.
When questioned about this, the latest plan for his
decades' old project for a Greater Albania, he denied
it - but then Ahmeti has denied a number of things in
his lifetime.
Had he been asked about his clandestine meeting with
American OSCE representative Robert Frowick in mid-May
of this year - a meeting held in Ahmeti's headquarters
in Kosovo with Macedonian ethnic Albanian political
leaders, and cabinet ministers, Arben Xhaferi and Imer
Imeri - he might well have denied that also, except
that Frowick himself didn't deny that it occurred. In
a feature in the London Times on March 19, 2001,
"Albanians Insist Their Victory Is Inevitable," writer
Anthony Loyd, commenting on the NLA in Macedonia, had
this to say about Mr. Ahmeti's antecedents:
"Intelligence reports name four main figures,
including Ali Ahmeti and Emrush Xhemajii, as leaders.
Both men owe their political allegiance to the Popular
Movement for Kosovo, the LPK, which set up the KLA in
1993 and created the Homeland Calling funding scheme
among Albanians abroad. The scheme still exists and
funding for the NLA has been launched, say diplomats."
But his record as an ethnic separatist goes back
farther than 1993. Though born in what is now the
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, he attended the
University of Pristina in the Serbian province of
Kosovo in 1981, where he was active in pan-Albanian
agitation and was arrested by federal authorities
there.
He subsequently left for Switzerland, where he joined
up with his uncle, Fazli Veliu, to set up an
international operation to raise funds and recruit
fighters for insurrections in Kosovo and elsewhere; an
operation that several investigations establish was
funded by narcotics trafficking and the European sex
slave trade.
On this score the German newspaper Die Welt reported
in March, in an article about the Albanian mafia, that
the NLA in Macedonia was indeed funded by the drug
trade and by a "war tax" levied on ethnic Albanians
living abroad.
Ali Ahmeti and Fazli Veliu (the second arrested on
terrorism charges in Germany last year, but released
shortly thereafter) are identified as key ringleaders
in the crime syndicate/armed insurgency collaboration.
Ahmeti, after leaving Switzerland for the first time,
returned to Yugoslavia to help found the so-called
Kosovo Liberation Army, as noted above, and appears to
be the key liaison between the fighters on the ground
and the Transatlantic ethnic Albanian gun-running and
recruitment operation feeding the first with
personnel, funds and weapons.
In the past twenty six months since NATO-led KFOR
forces occupied Kosovo, with their KLA adjuncts in
tow, Ahmeti - who during the fighting had been a
commander for the infamous war criminal Ramush
Haradinaj - returned to Kosovo where he set up
operation in Prizren.
It was there, and recall that Ahmeti claims to be a
citizen of Macedonia concerned about alleged "civil
rights" in that nation, that he met with the heads of
Macedonia's two largest ethnic political parties, the
Democratic Party of Albanians and the Party for
Democratic Progress, under the auspices of U.S. OSCE
operative Robert Frowick.
It may also have been in Prizren, if not in Skopje
itself, that, according to the Skopje newspaper
Makedonija Denes, Ahmeti met with former NATO head and
current European Union foreign affairs chief Javier
Solana, with Kosovo Protection Corps commander and war
criminal Agim Ceku, and with KLA commander Haradinaj.
According to a Yugoslav Tanjug account of the
Macedonian paper's story, "It was agreed that Solana,
currently visiting Macedonia, bring pressure to bear
on the Macedonian government to halt the government
forces' operations for liberating Aracinovo village
near the capital Skopje" - the site of the U.S.-led
rescue of a hundred or more NLA fighters shortly
thereafter.
[http://www.tanjug.co.yu/Arhiva/2001/Jun%20-%2000/26-06e10.html%5d
Although Ahmeti recently made it on to the U.S. black
list and is also persona non grata in Switzerland of
late, his movements in and out of Kosovo, surely known
to if not coordinated by NATO's KFOR contingent, seem
blissfully unimpeded.
Lastly, to reflect on both Human Rights Watch and on
its dear Mr. Ahmeti, five days before Holly Cartner's
ever so reverential letter was issued, Ahmeti's
terrorists ambushed and killed eight Macedonian
security personnel.
Ahmeti told a Reuters reporter after the incident
that, "Our soldiers acted in self-defense." And no
doubt, in his mind and in Ms. Cartner's, according to
Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions relating to
"internal armed conflicts" and to "humanitarian law."
For the above crime was not mentioned in the exchange
between Dear Mr. Ahmeti and Holly Cartner,
respectfully.
______________________________________________
http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/05/macedonia_ltr3.htm.
Letter to NLA Political Spokesman Ali Ahmeti
May 4, 2001
Mr. Ali Ahmeti
Political Spokesman for the National Liberation Army
(NLA)
Dear Mr. Ahmeti,
Human Rights Watch is a privately funded international
non-governmental organization dedicated to documenting
human rights abuses throughout the world. In the past
ten years, we have committed substantial time and
effort to investigating violations of human rights and
humanitarian law in the former Yugoslavia. We have
documented violations of international humanitarian
law by all sides of the armed conflicts in Croatia,
Bosnia, Kosovo, and the NATO war with the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia.
Reports of the renewed conflict in the former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia between security forces and
armed groups of ethnic Albanians raise concerns
relating to adherence to international humanitarian
law. As in all other conflicts in the territory of the
former Yugoslavia, our principal concern is that all
parties involved respect civilian immunity and ensure
the protection of civilians.
Human Rights Watch wants to express its concern that
the groups organized under the name of National
Liberation Army (NLA) take all measures to comply with
basic principles of international humanitarian law
applicable to situations of internal armed conflict,
and enshrined in Common Article 3 of the Geneva
Conventions. This provision protects those who do not
take an active part in hostilities from the most
serious violations, including acts of murder, torture
and cruel treatment, the taking of hostages, outrages
upon personal dignity, and the passing of sentences
and the carrying out of executions without previous
judgement pronounced by a regularly constituted court.
With regard to the renewed fighting, the NLA
leadership should refrain from any attacks against
civilians, attacks and reprisals against civilian
objects, as well as threats of violence the primary
purpose of which is to spread terror among the
civilian population.
We also call on the NLA leadership to ensure that the
civilian population of the affected areas enjoys as
much protection as possible against dangers of harm
resulting from the fighting. The most fundamental
principle of the laws of war requires that combatants
be distinguished from noncombatants, and that military
objectives be distinguished from protected property or
protected places. Parties to a conflict must direct
their operations only against military objectives
(including combatants). Also, the use of civilians as
shields for defensive positions, to hide military
objectives or to screen attacks, violates the
principles of the international humanitarian law.
We also note that the jurisdiction of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) applies to serious violations of
international humanitarian law committed after 1991 on
the territory of the former Yugoslavia, including the
former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
Human Rights Watch also recognizes the obligations of
the Macedonian security forces to uphold the standards
of international humanitarian law and urges their
adherence to these norms. Letters expressing Human
Rights Watch's concerns to this effect are being sent
to the president and the prime minister of the former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
We hope, Mr. Ahmeti, that you will give serious
thought to the points addressed in this letter and,
guided by consideration for human life and well-being,
do everything in your power to ensure that the NLA
respects obligations under international humanitarian
law.
Respectfully,
/s/
Holly Cartner
Executive Director
Europe and Central Asia Division
cc: Mrs. Carla Del Ponte, Chief Prosecutor, ICTY
Council'
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 03:41:40 -0800 (PST)
From: Rick Rozoff
> http://www.balkanreport.com/strana.asp?id=460
[A brief background piece on Ali Ahmeti follows]
Balkan Report
3/25/2002
Ali Ahmeti Elected President Of Coordinative Council
All Kosovo dailies today report on the appointment of
Ali Ahmeti, the former political leader of the NLA, as
the president of the Co-ordination Council of the
Albanians in Macedonia, in a meeting held yesterday in
Tetova. A communiqué issued by the Council said that
Ahmeti?s unanimous election ?proved the unity of the
Macedonian Albanians to develop and promote democratic
values as a factor of stability and integration of
Macedonia into the Euro-Atlantic structures?. In other
news, Koha Ditore reports that despite NATO calls for
Macedonian Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski to
disband the special ?Lions? police unit created during
the crisis, Boskovski announced on Saturday that this
unit is a regular police unit. The minister was
speaking at a ceremony marking the completion of a
three-month training course in Manastir for members of
this unit. His announcement follows international
criticism that Lions are an illegitimate police unit.
-------------------------------------------------------Human
Rights Watch: Dear Mr. Ahmeti
by Rick Rozoff
August 1, 2001
Human Rights Watch, whose interests and positions so
closely (suspiciously if you like) parallel those of
the United States State Department, politely requests
that the political leader of the self-styled National
Liberation Army in Macedonia, the lifelong separatist
extremist Ali Ahmeti, abide by "international
humanitarian law." (The Human Rights Watch appeal is
appended below.)
Though, contrary to the title of the missive, the
letter in fact requests that both sides in the
conflict - the legitimate, legally-elected government,
and the armed insurgency launched from Kosovo and
Albania - respect Common Article 3 of the Geneva
Conventions pertaining to what Human Rights Watch
characterizes as "internal armed conflicts." In
keeping with HRW's stated policy of 'deferring
judgment' on the legitimacy of said internal armed
conflicts, its spokeperson, Holly Cartner, fully
equates the aggressor and the victim; the
legally-constituted authority, which is not accused of
either provoking or even creating any pretext for the
armed uprising, and the crime syndicate-linked and
-funded racial terrorists.
In the interim between the deferential letter from Ms.
Carter to Mr. Ahmeti almost three months ago and now,
Ahmeti and his pan-Albanian mercenaries have unleashed
a full-scale insurrection throughout the nation,
ethnically cleansing dozens of villages and
contributing to the displacement of - by some
estimates - over 120,000 civilians, a sizeable
percentage of Macedonia's two million people. Human
Rights Watch has kept a low profile since on this
issue, except for reports on alleged mistreatment of
ethnic Albanians and Western press personnel. When an
organization like HRW advances its concerns from those
affecting non-combatants in "internal armed conflicts"
to the mistreatment, real or fancied, of insurgents -
which is certainly impending - then it crosses the
threshold of supposed impartiality into treating the
belligerents as equal parties to the conflict, and
thus "internationalizes" what in truth is a matter of
internal criminal law enforcement. That HRW has at
least left the door open for such a prospect is
evident by Cartner's following up her reference to the
Geneva Conventions by her revealing invocation of the
"fundamental principle[s] of the laws of war."
Who is Dear Mr. Ahmeti?
Holly Cartner, Executive Director of Human Rights
Watch's Europe and Central Asia Division, has kept a
close enough eye on the Balkans over the past years to
know who she was so respectfully writing to. For
anyone not familiar with Mr. Ahmeti, whose history
suggests someone anything but dear, he possesses, to
employ an expression familiar to the American if not
the Albanian underworld, a rap sheet as long as his
arm.
Regarding his recent activties, in addition to waging
war against the sovereign nation of Macedonia and its
civilian population from his base in Prizren in
Kosovo, Ahmeti reportedly found time to appear on an
Australian radio broadcast and announce the launching
of a Liberation Army of Chameria in Northern Greece,
claiming he already had fighters and weapons in place
there.
When questioned about this, the latest plan for his
decades' old project for a Greater Albania, he denied
it - but then Ahmeti has denied a number of things in
his lifetime.
Had he been asked about his clandestine meeting with
American OSCE representative Robert Frowick in mid-May
of this year - a meeting held in Ahmeti's headquarters
in Kosovo with Macedonian ethnic Albanian political
leaders, and cabinet ministers, Arben Xhaferi and Imer
Imeri - he might well have denied that also, except
that Frowick himself didn't deny that it occurred. In
a feature in the London Times on March 19, 2001,
"Albanians Insist Their Victory Is Inevitable," writer
Anthony Loyd, commenting on the NLA in Macedonia, had
this to say about Mr. Ahmeti's antecedents:
"Intelligence reports name four main figures,
including Ali Ahmeti and Emrush Xhemajii, as leaders.
Both men owe their political allegiance to the Popular
Movement for Kosovo, the LPK, which set up the KLA in
1993 and created the Homeland Calling funding scheme
among Albanians abroad. The scheme still exists and
funding for the NLA has been launched, say diplomats."
But his record as an ethnic separatist goes back
farther than 1993. Though born in what is now the
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, he attended the
University of Pristina in the Serbian province of
Kosovo in 1981, where he was active in pan-Albanian
agitation and was arrested by federal authorities
there.
He subsequently left for Switzerland, where he joined
up with his uncle, Fazli Veliu, to set up an
international operation to raise funds and recruit
fighters for insurrections in Kosovo and elsewhere; an
operation that several investigations establish was
funded by narcotics trafficking and the European sex
slave trade.
On this score the German newspaper Die Welt reported
in March, in an article about the Albanian mafia, that
the NLA in Macedonia was indeed funded by the drug
trade and by a "war tax" levied on ethnic Albanians
living abroad.
Ali Ahmeti and Fazli Veliu (the second arrested on
terrorism charges in Germany last year, but released
shortly thereafter) are identified as key ringleaders
in the crime syndicate/armed insurgency collaboration.
Ahmeti, after leaving Switzerland for the first time,
returned to Yugoslavia to help found the so-called
Kosovo Liberation Army, as noted above, and appears to
be the key liaison between the fighters on the ground
and the Transatlantic ethnic Albanian gun-running and
recruitment operation feeding the first with
personnel, funds and weapons.
In the past twenty six months since NATO-led KFOR
forces occupied Kosovo, with their KLA adjuncts in
tow, Ahmeti - who during the fighting had been a
commander for the infamous war criminal Ramush
Haradinaj - returned to Kosovo where he set up
operation in Prizren.
It was there, and recall that Ahmeti claims to be a
citizen of Macedonia concerned about alleged "civil
rights" in that nation, that he met with the heads of
Macedonia's two largest ethnic political parties, the
Democratic Party of Albanians and the Party for
Democratic Progress, under the auspices of U.S. OSCE
operative Robert Frowick.
It may also have been in Prizren, if not in Skopje
itself, that, according to the Skopje newspaper
Makedonija Denes, Ahmeti met with former NATO head and
current European Union foreign affairs chief Javier
Solana, with Kosovo Protection Corps commander and war
criminal Agim Ceku, and with KLA commander Haradinaj.
According to a Yugoslav Tanjug account of the
Macedonian paper's story, "It was agreed that Solana,
currently visiting Macedonia, bring pressure to bear
on the Macedonian government to halt the government
forces' operations for liberating Aracinovo village
near the capital Skopje" - the site of the U.S.-led
rescue of a hundred or more NLA fighters shortly
thereafter.
[http://www.tanjug.co.yu/Arhiva/2001/Jun%20-%2000/26-06e10.html%5d
Although Ahmeti recently made it on to the U.S. black
list and is also persona non grata in Switzerland of
late, his movements in and out of Kosovo, surely known
to if not coordinated by NATO's KFOR contingent, seem
blissfully unimpeded.
Lastly, to reflect on both Human Rights Watch and on
its dear Mr. Ahmeti, five days before Holly Cartner's
ever so reverential letter was issued, Ahmeti's
terrorists ambushed and killed eight Macedonian
security personnel.
Ahmeti told a Reuters reporter after the incident
that, "Our soldiers acted in self-defense." And no
doubt, in his mind and in Ms. Cartner's, according to
Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions relating to
"internal armed conflicts" and to "humanitarian law."
For the above crime was not mentioned in the exchange
between Dear Mr. Ahmeti and Holly Cartner,
respectfully.
______________________________________________
http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/05/macedonia_ltr3.htm.
Letter to NLA Political Spokesman Ali Ahmeti
May 4, 2001
Mr. Ali Ahmeti
Political Spokesman for the National Liberation Army
(NLA)
Dear Mr. Ahmeti,
Human Rights Watch is a privately funded international
non-governmental organization dedicated to documenting
human rights abuses throughout the world. In the past
ten years, we have committed substantial time and
effort to investigating violations of human rights and
humanitarian law in the former Yugoslavia. We have
documented violations of international humanitarian
law by all sides of the armed conflicts in Croatia,
Bosnia, Kosovo, and the NATO war with the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia.
Reports of the renewed conflict in the former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia between security forces and
armed groups of ethnic Albanians raise concerns
relating to adherence to international humanitarian
law. As in all other conflicts in the territory of the
former Yugoslavia, our principal concern is that all
parties involved respect civilian immunity and ensure
the protection of civilians.
Human Rights Watch wants to express its concern that
the groups organized under the name of National
Liberation Army (NLA) take all measures to comply with
basic principles of international humanitarian law
applicable to situations of internal armed conflict,
and enshrined in Common Article 3 of the Geneva
Conventions. This provision protects those who do not
take an active part in hostilities from the most
serious violations, including acts of murder, torture
and cruel treatment, the taking of hostages, outrages
upon personal dignity, and the passing of sentences
and the carrying out of executions without previous
judgement pronounced by a regularly constituted court.
With regard to the renewed fighting, the NLA
leadership should refrain from any attacks against
civilians, attacks and reprisals against civilian
objects, as well as threats of violence the primary
purpose of which is to spread terror among the
civilian population.
We also call on the NLA leadership to ensure that the
civilian population of the affected areas enjoys as
much protection as possible against dangers of harm
resulting from the fighting. The most fundamental
principle of the laws of war requires that combatants
be distinguished from noncombatants, and that military
objectives be distinguished from protected property or
protected places. Parties to a conflict must direct
their operations only against military objectives
(including combatants). Also, the use of civilians as
shields for defensive positions, to hide military
objectives or to screen attacks, violates the
principles of the international humanitarian law.
We also note that the jurisdiction of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) applies to serious violations of
international humanitarian law committed after 1991 on
the territory of the former Yugoslavia, including the
former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
Human Rights Watch also recognizes the obligations of
the Macedonian security forces to uphold the standards
of international humanitarian law and urges their
adherence to these norms. Letters expressing Human
Rights Watch's concerns to this effect are being sent
to the president and the prime minister of the former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
We hope, Mr. Ahmeti, that you will give serious
thought to the points addressed in this letter and,
guided by consideration for human life and well-being,
do everything in your power to ensure that the NLA
respects obligations under international humanitarian
law.
Respectfully,
/s/
Holly Cartner
Executive Director
Europe and Central Asia Division
cc: Mrs. Carla Del Ponte, Chief Prosecutor, ICTY