Some articles on the shameful situation in Kosovo-Metohija:
1. Dateline: Kosovo in perspective - an anti-communist crusade
(by Richard Ziegler)
2. Peacekeepers return from Kosovo
(By Eva Munk for The Prague Post)
3. Inter-ethnic hostility remains in Kosovo almost four years after
the war
(by Jean-Eudes Barbier for AFP)
4. Lies and Consequences
(by William Norman Grigg)
MORE LINKS:
*** KOSOVO AND METOHIJA: PROPAGANDA AND TRUTH
by Rade Drobac
http://www.artel.co.yu/en/reakcije_citalaca/2003-04-22_1.html ***
Serbs build, others destroy (by Piotr Bein)
http://www.apisgroup.org/article.html?id=1263
Suicide Rate Up in Kosovo Since War (by Natan Dotan)
http://www.balkantimes.com/default3.asp?lang=english&page=process_print&article_id=19044
Baghdad, Belgrade, and borders (by John Zavales)
http://www.kosovo.com/erpkim23may03b.html
Children Bought and Sold (by Altin Raxhimi)
http://www.tol.cz/look/BRR/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=9&NrIssue=1&NrSection=1&NrArticle=9290
Occupation by Bad Example (by Christopher Deliso)
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/deliso75.html
SNC KIM: Kosovo Parliament legalizes crimes committed by Albanian
extremists
http://www.kosovo.com/erpkim16may03.html#9
German interior ministers demand speedy deportations. Refugees from
Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo targetted (By Elisabeth Zimmermann)
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jun2003/germ-j03_prn.shtml
TWO IMPORTANT SITES:
*** UNMIK Police: Daily News Updates, Crime statistics, 24-hour Daily
Incident Report
http://www.unmikonline.org/civpol/
*** KOSOVO.COM
http://www.kosovo.com/
=== 1 ===
http://www.artel.co.yu/en/izbor/jugoslavija/2003-05-28_4.html
Kosovo in perspective - an anti-communist crusade
NATO intervened in Kosovo not because one side was
losing but because the wrong side was losing
Dateline: Monday, May 26, 2003
by Richard Ziegler
It is almost four years since the NATO attack on Yugoslavia ended and
we now have a better understanding of what was not the cause of the
war. The justification by NATO leaders and supporters was that the
Belgrade authorities were committing genocide against the ethnic
Albanians in Kosovo and that NATO intervened in order to stop massive
human rights violations. However, the tales of missing thousands,
mass graves replete with Albanians, etc., have shown to be little
more than tales. There has been no evidence to support the
oft-repeated claims that the Serbs had committed genocide before the
bombing began, were committing genocide during the bombings, or had
plans to commit genocide that were supposedly thwarted by the
bombings. The amount of people killed in the conflict in the year
before the NATO attack commenced was comparable to or less than the
fatalities that occurred in other civil wars that were raging in the
late 1990s. NATO did not intervene because it had an alleged moral
imperative to interfere in a conflict where one side was clearly
losing; NATO was indifferent when the Croat offensive overwhelmed the
Serbs in the Krajina region of Croatia in August 1995 producing many
civilian deaths and a massive exodus of Serbs into Bosnia. NATO
intervened in Kosovo not because one side was losing but because the
wrong side was losing.
Yet if the ethnic conflict in Kosovo was at best, a partial
explanation for intervention, and at worst, an outright pretext, then
what were the other motives for NATO's actions? The NATO intervention
was indeed on behalf of human rights, but not the ones claimed by
NATO. Ever since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the
West had been using the allegations of human rights violations in the
Soviet Union and Eastern European countries as a means to undermine
communism. The West was very selective about which human rights it
wanted to see implemented in the Eastern bloc countries, and these
rights were almost invariably civil and political rights, not social
and economic rights. The West called for the implementation of the
right to vote in multiparty elections, freedom of religion, freedom
of association, not the right to employment, to shelter, or to a
minimal standard of living. The West also advocated, by extension,
the type of society that favors civil and political rights over social
and economic rights, i.e. capitalism, and the two
most cherished rights of capitalist societies, the unqualified rights
to wealth and property.
The pressure of the West on the Soviet Union and its allies to
convert to capitalist democracies that favored civil and political
rights from communist societies which gave precedence to social and
economic rights was combined with Western support for the internal
forces in these countries that were the heirs of those who never
accepted the 1917 revolution and those governments imposed or
supported by the Soviet Union following the end of World War II. By
the early 1990s only one Eastern European country remained that had
not overthrown socialism and restored capitalism, Yugoslavia, and for
this the country would pay dearly. Historically, the Balkans have
been segmented and dominated by the great powers. But the dominant
Western view holds that the breakup of Yugoslavia was different from
that historical pattern in that the genesis for the collapse
originated from within. The main Western explanation for the
disintegration of Yugoslavia was the rise of Serb nationalism and a
desire for Serb dominance in the constituent republics and autonomous
provinces of Yugoslavia; this ascent is alleged to have begun with
the speech made by Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo in 1989. The
resultant interventions by the West are widely interpreted in the
West as reactions to Serb aggression. There was certainly a rise in
Serb nationalism, but there was also an accompanying rise in the
nationalism of other ethnic groups in Yugoslavia, particularly in
Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo where Serbs had valid historical reasons
to dread being reduced to minority status if these regions became
independent. The nationalism of the Croats, Bosnian Muslims and
Albanians was combined with their desire to get rid of the vestiges
of socialism and establish a market economy. The breakup of
Yugoslavia did not deviate from the pattern of great power
involvement. Those primarily responsible for the Balkanization of
Yugoslavia were the Western governments that encouraged the
secessionist movements, provided them with financial and military
assistance, afforded them premature diplomatic recognition, and
finally intervened militarily with the attacks on the Serbs in Bosnia
and later throughout Yugoslavia during the NATO attack.
The Western attempt to foster capitalism in Yugoslavia was already
occurring in the 1980s through the Western-dominated IMF which loaned
funds to the indebted nation on condition that privatizations were to
be undertaken and whose effect was to exacerbate ethnic tensions. The
NATO ultimatum rejected by Yugoslavia at Rambouillet, France,
contained two revealing articles attesting to NATO's self-serving
motives: "The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with
free-market principles," and "There shall be no impediments to the
free movement of persons, goods, services and capital to and from
Kosovo."
It would be erroneous to assert that anticommunism was the only
driving force behind Western intervention in the former Yugoslavia.
There were other motives. The Germans had their own historical
reasons and the NATO ultimatum to Yugoslavia was the third one by
Germany to the Serbs in the last century. The support given by the
USA for the Bosnian Muslims, and to a lesser extent, the Albanians in
Kosovo, was partially motivated by the wish to reap the political
rewards of demonstrating to the Muslim countries, particularly the
oil- producing ones, that the USA could be pro-Muslim. Furthermore,
NATO used the conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo as
opportunities to justify its continued existence after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union. The anticommunist motive, however,
was a main reason shared by all the interveners and also
paradoxically explains why many progressives, social democrats and
socialists in the West supported the bombing because the rightwing
drift of Western leftist parties had reached such a point that any
attempt to weaken or sweep away the remaining socialist system in
Europe was welcomed. The Western attack on Yugoslavia was a
continuation of the Cold War and its transformation into a real war
which was made possible by a weakened Russia that was unable and
unwilling to come to the defense of its Slavic ally.
Richard Ziegler Ottawa Copyright 2003
Richard Ziegler worked as a political researcher with the federal
government's Immigration and Refugee Board from 1994 to 2002. He
analyzed allegations of human rights violations of people who were
claiming refugee status in Canada and who had originated in Eastern
Europe and the countries arising from the dissolution of the Soviet
Union. He writes: "I am familiar with the history and politics of
Yugoslavia and am aware of how Western governments use selective
human rights in order to engage in overt and covert regime change. I
was also an acitivist with the Ottawa-based group C- SWAY, Coalition
to Stop the War Against Yugoslavia. My article gives a different and
insightful perspective that the mainstream media will not consider."
=== 2 ===
http://www.praguepost.com/P03/2003/Art/0501/news4.php
The Prague Post
May 4, 2003
Peacekeepers return from Kosovo
By Eva Munk
For The Prague Post
PODUJEVO, KOSOVO
-"You just don't know what's out there," explained
Battalion Commander Petr Prochazka. "This area was
full of partisan [KLA] supply routes, and NATO
peppered it with live rounds with no system
whatsoever. It's just not worth the risk to stray off
the paths."
-The battalion's main mission is to ensure a safe
environment for all the ethnic groups in its area of
operations -- a moot point these days, as the region
is almost "ethnically clean." Aside from pockets of
Roma, or gypsies, it consists entirely of ethnic
Albanians. Of the fairly large Serb population that
once occupied the area, only 28 old-timers remain in
the mountain hamlet of Sekirac.
-"They've been here since the battle of Kosovo Polje
in 1389," said press officer Pavel Loeffler. "Now the
locals are trying wipe out all evidence they were ever
here. The Swedish unit, which was here before us,
stopped guarding two churches near Podujevo. They were
blown up within a week."
-Many of those who did not join the recently formed
Kosovo Protection Corps -- a legitimate military force
created for the defense of Kosovo -- have joined the
ranks of the mafia instead....
-Less than a month ago, UN units discovered a mass
grave in the area, and the bodies of several dozen
victims were brought to the battalion's outpost at the
village of Gazela.
"The relatives had a chance to identify them by the
clothes, which were put in a separate tent. The smell
is not something I would like to endure again,"
Loeffler said. "We didn't have much luck. Two busloads
of Serbians came in, but only a few were able to
identify some family members."
He said he thought there were many more such graves in
the territory, but the chances of finding them are
slim.
"The locals aren't going to lead us to them," he said.
"It would hurt their image as the only victims."
For 180 days, the 300 soldiers of the 43rd Airborne
Battalion from Chrudim, east Bohemia and the First
Motorized Company from Martin, central Slovakia,
cloistered in stark barracks on a hilltop. They were
stationed in a dusty burg called Podujevo, 30
kilometers (19 miles) from the nearest town.
Except for patrolling the 120 kilometers of ABL
(administrative boundary line -- the Serbs do not
accept the use of the term border) and the
885-square-kilometer (354-square-mile) area northwest
of Pristina, the troops were not allowed to leave the
base.
Worse, they had no beer. Since arriving in Kosovo last
Sept. 28, the soldiers did not taste alcohol. They
even hailed the New Year with nonalcoholic champagne.
Neither could they resort to that beloved Czech
activity of picking mushrooms in the surrounding
hills.
"You just don't know what's out there," explained
Battalion Commander Petr Prochazka. "This area was
full of partisan supply routes, and NATO peppered it
with live rounds with no system whatsoever. It's just
not worth the risk to stray off the paths."
After six months of guarding the Kosovo-Serbia
boundary, the 2nd Czech-Slovak KFOR (Kosovo Force)
Battalion headed home April 23, as part of its normal
rotation schedule.
Soldiers say they have witnessed deprivation, ethnic
hatred and the frustrating aftermath of the 1998 war
in Kosovo, in which Serbian-Albanian tensions resulted
in mass graves and permanent distrust.
The troops, however, live in relative comfort, with
hot showers, Czech TV channels and HBO beamed in by
satellite, and regular communication with their
families via cell phone. The headquarters company even
had a "saloon," complete with swinging doors, a
bleached cow skull nailed to a post, a bar and a
fireplace with a grill between two narrow firing posts
punched into the 2-meter-thick (7-foot) perimeter wall
in case of a very real attack.
"We will defend our steaks to the last man," one
soldier joked.
Prefer to see action
Many brooded over the "luck" of buddies from Chrudim
who are accompanying the field hospital and
chemical-warfare unit in Iraq and Kuwait.
"I think a lot of the soldiers envy their chance to
see some action," Prochazka said. Although security
was tightened since the outbreak of the war in Iraq,
there have not been any displays of violence in the
area.
The battalion's main mission is to ensure a safe
environment for all the ethnic groups in its area of
operations -- a moot point these days, as the region
is almost "ethnically clean." Aside from pockets of
Roma, or gypsies, it consists entirely of ethnic
Albanians. Of the fairly large Serb population that
once occupied the area, only 28 old-timers remain in
the mountain hamlet of Sekirac. A Czech-Slovak
"observation post" nearby ensures their safety.
A handful of old Serb Orthodox churches, surrounded by
barbed wire and guarded by KFOR, testify that Serbs
had lived in the area for a long time.
"They've been here since the battle of Kosovo Polje in
1389," said press officer Pavel Loeffler. "Now the
locals are trying wipe out all evidence they were ever
here. The Swedish unit, which was here before us,
stopped guarding two churches near Podujevo. They were
blown up within a week."
Occasionally the soldiers are sent to disarm a
leftover pocket of KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army)
partisans who didn't turn in their arms after the 1998
war. The raids sometimes lead to hostility among the
inhabitants.
"Of course they're not friendly when we come into
their houses in the morning without warning. You've
got to keep in mind that these guys are still local
heroes," Prochazka said.
The partisans now present the biggest threat in the
area, he said. Many of those who did not join the
recently formed Kosovo Protection Corps -- a
legitimate military force created for the defense of
Kosovo -- have joined the ranks of the mafia instead,
according to Prochazka. This situation is yet another
reason for KFOR to create a secure environment as soon
as possible.
"We have to establish confidence in the legitimate
government among the local population; otherwise they
will be fair game for the mafia," Prochazka said. To
this end, KFOR soldiers try to improve the conditions
by using military technology to rebuild roads, put up
power lines and repair damaged facilities. Mostly, the
Czechs have concentrated on rebuilding schools.
"We want to target the youngsters who are going to be
running things soon. There's not much chance we'll be
able to budge the older ones," Prochazka said, not
bothering to hide his exasperation. "They've just
gotten too used to living from handouts."
Of course, he said, life is not easy for the ethnic
Albanians. Many families survive on a pension of about
60 euros (1,890 Kc/$65) per month per adult male. Most
have houses built of bright-red UN bricks, but they
have little left over for electricity or heating.
Although these houses are two or three stories high,
the families crowd into two ground-floor rooms heated
by wood-burning stoves.
"The NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] gave
refugees who lost their houses material for new ones
as incentive for them to come back, but there wasn't
enough left over for things like insulation,"
Prochazka says.
This situation indirectly leads to friction with the
Serb patrols on the boundary line.
"Wood is the main source of heating, which is why you
won't find a mature tree on this side of the border,"
he said. "So the locals just hitch a horse to a cart
and go to the Serbian side. Then we get a panic call
saying that the Serbian police have kidnapped an
Albanian and dragged him over to their side. But when
we get there and find a chain saw still hot on the
Serbian side, it's fairly obvious [what has
happened]."
Some Czech and Slovak KFOR soldiers have changed their
attitudes toward the situation in their area of Kosovo.
Finding the way out of poverty
"When you get here and see the poverty, you really
want to help. But many people here are happy to live
with less, as long as they don't have to exert
themselves to get more," said Lieutenant Pavel Mraz,
who is in charge of the battalion's civil-military
cooperation unit. "I've realized that the best way to
help is to reduce their dependence on outside help."
Occasionally, however, something does remind them that
a real tragedy happened here.
Less than a month ago, UN units discovered a mass
grave in the area, and the bodies of several dozen
victims were brought to the battalion's outpost at the
village of Gazela.
"The relatives had a chance to identify them by the
clothes, which were put in a separate tent. The smell
is not something I would like to endure again,"
Loeffler said. "We didn't have much luck. Two busloads
of Serbians came in, but only a few were able to
identify some family members."
He said he thought there were many more such graves in
the territory, but the chances of finding them are
slim.
"The locals aren't going to lead us to them," he said.
"It would hurt their image as the only victims."
Eva Munk can be reached at news@...
=== 3 ===
http://www.ptd.net/webnews/wed/bl/Qserbia-montenegro-kosovo.Rbv1_DAK.html
Inter-ethnic hostility remains in Kosovo almost four years after the
war
Jean-Eudes Barbier
-"Steiner's opinion was based on statistics that the
tension between the communities has been significantly
reduced, but he is not the one living with it every
day, as we do."
-Serbs have also given up driving or even having
private cars. There is no access for them to the
parking lot in front of their building, while their
cars in the past have often been damaged by Albanian
extremists.
-Those who have remained in Kosovo, some 80,000 living
mostly in the enclaves, wait and hope that the
international community will finally become interested
in their fate.
PRISTINA, Serbia and Montenegro, April 20 (AFP) -
Almost four years after the United Nations established
its mission in Kosovo, inter-ethnic hostility is still
widespread and the few Serbs remaining in the capital
Pristina are afraid to circulate freely in the city.
Surrounded by the ethnic Albanian majority, many of
whom would like to see them thrown out of Kosovo, the
Serbs in Pristina are pessimistic about their future.
Some 45,000 Serbs lived in the Kosovo capital, which
was home to some 125, 000 people before the 1998-99
war in the southern Serbian province. The war ended
with the withdrawal of Belgrade forces under pressure
of a NATO bombing campaign.
Since 1999, the population of Pristina has increased
to more than 500,000, but only around 200 of them are
Serbs.
The Pristina Serbs, grouped for security reasons in
one building in the city's Ulpiana district, have been
exposed to numerous insults, while often pelted with
stones from windows of neighboring buildings.
"The psychological pressure is enormous. Our life is
worse than in a prison, " one of them, Jelena, told
AFP.
Jelena, who refused to give her last name, said daily
life has gotten worse since members of the NATO-led
peacekeeping force (KFOR), deployed throughout the
province since 1999, left the neighbourhood last
October.
The removal of many checkpoints was ordered by UN
administrator Michael Steiner, who believed that the
security situation has improved sufficiently.
The checkpoints in the nearby Serb enclaves have
disappeared, but KFOR has also increased its patrols
in return.
However, without the permanent presence of KFOR
troops, Serbs in Ulpiana today feel almost abandoned.
"Steiner's opinion was based on statistics that the
tension between the communities has been significantly
reduced, but he is not the one living with it every
day, as we do," Milan said.
The Serb families in the neighbourhood have only one
shop, poorly supplied, without fresh vegetables and
fruit. The goods are brought to the shop by a tiny UN
van coming from the Serb enclave of Gracanica, near
Pristina.
"The UN (officials) believe we can go shopping by
public buses, but this is absurd, as we would all be
beaten up," Tanja said.
Serbs have also given up driving or even having
private cars. There is no access for them to the
parking lot in front of their building, while their
cars in the past have often been damaged by Albanian
extremists.
Around 20 Serb pupils are still escorted by KFOR
soldiers to the school in a Serb village, some 20
kilometers (12 miles) from Pristina.
The community's resources are very low. Only 15 of
them are employed. They receive financial support from
Belgrade, but consider it insufficient. Sometimes,
they can find a temporary job, but for the lowest
wages.
As there are no cafes in the neighbourhood, some of
the Serbs gather in the shop to talk and encourage or
support each other.
In the evening, they continue their discussions by
candlelight, as power cuts are common in Kosovo. The
dispensary and billiard room are then deserted, as
well as a small yard where children usually play ball.
Serbs from Pristina have refused to go to the
"collective centers" in Serbia and Montenegro where
some 200,000 other Serbs now live after fleeing their
homes in Kosovo.
Those who have remained in Kosovo, some 80,000 living
mostly in the enclaves, wait and hope that the
international community will finally become interested
in their fate.
"If Kosovo gets independence, as the Albanians have
demanded, the Serb enclaves in the province will
create their defensive units and fight. We will all
leave Pristina to join them," Milan said.
=== 4 ===
http://www.jbs.org/visitor/rotnol/030525_transcript.htm
Review of the News, Week of May 25, 2003
Lies and Consequences
MP3 Format - 2.9 meg
Low Bandwidth RealAudio
High Bandwidth RealAudio
Hello and welcome to Review of the News Online. I'm William Norman
Grigg, Senior Editor for The New American magazine -- an affiliated
publication of The John Birch Society.
David Hicks, a 27-year-old Australian expatriate, is among the
captured Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters detained at Camp X-Ray in Cuba.
Like John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban," Hicks is a
disaffected western youth who became enchanted with Islam, and was
caught in a revolutionary undertow that took him first to Pakistan and
then to Afghanistan. Hicks' case is particularly interesting because
the first stop in his revolutionary odyssey was the Balkans, where he
joined the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (or KLA).
During the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, Hicks was one of
several thousand international recruits who traveled to Kosovo to
fight on behalf of the KLA. Most of those volunteers were seduced by
the romantic image of the KLA as a hardy band of idealistic freedom
fighters seeking to save Kosovo's besieged Albanian Muslims from a
Nazi-like campaign of "ethnic cleansing."
The unappetizing truth about the KLA, as The New American reported
prior to the 1999 NATO campaign, was that the group "is a terrorist
criminal syndicate, Maoist in its ideological bent, hard-wired into
the international heroin trade, and tightly allied with Osama bin
Laden." That description was based on European press and intelligence
reports and information compiled by our own government.
During the 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia, KLA forces seized control
of key sectors in Kosovo. Today, that one-time Serbian province is now
a UN protectorate ruled by the KLA. Once Kosovo was placed in the
KLA's hands, it became a staging area for international narcotics
trafficking, the European sex slave trade, and terrorism. The illicit
profits generated by the KLA's narcotics and sex trade helped fund
the al-Qaeda network, with lethal consequences for Americans. As
demonstrated by the recent al-Qaeda attack against Americans in Saudi
Arabia, our nation is still paying a price in blood for our alliance
with the KLA.
Writing in the September 21, 2000 New York Review of Books, foreign
affairs correspondent Timothy Garton Ash expressed amazement that the
KLA, "a bunch of farmyard Albanian ex-Marxist-Leninist terrorists[,]
managed to enlist the United States to win their battles for them."
The most important weapon in the arsenal of the KLA and its allies,
Ash pointed out, was the global media, which inundated the public
with lurid atrocity tales. Thus conditioned, much of the public viewed
Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic as the reincarnation of Hitler, bent
on committing genocide against Kosovo Albanians. Accordingly, many
Americans supported NATO's terror bombing of Serbia as a justified
exercise in "humanitarian intervention."
At one point, as NATO warplanes battered civilian targets in Belgrade,
Bill Clinton claimed that as many as 600,000 ethnic Albanians were
"lying in mass graves [or] starving and too frightened to go home."
Speaking to NATO combat pilots in Aviano, Italy on April 8, 1999,
Secretary of Defense William Cohen raised the bid, accusing Serb
forces of "engaging in rape, pillage, and mass murder on a scale that
we have not seen since the end of World War II.... They have pushed
over a million people onto a highway of hell that is littered with
depravation and suffering that is almost unimaginable."
On another occasion, State Department spokesman James Rubin declared
that 100,000 Albanians were being held at the municipal stadium in
Pristina, Kosovo's provincial capital. As American media outlets
breathlessly reported this claim as a fact, France's AFP wire service
sent a reporter to Pristina to verify the story. That reporter found
that the stadium was "deserted and showing no signs of recent
occupation." The story about a makeshift concentration camp, it turns
out, was fed to Rubin by KLA leader Hashim Thaci, and retailed to an
uncritical media without being confirmed.
Following the so-called Kosovo War, as the KLA consolidated its
control over the province, the Wall Street Journal ran an expose
headlined: "War in Kosovo Was Cruel, Bitter, Savage; Genocide it
Wasn't: Tales of Mass Atrocity Arose and Were Passed Along, Often with
Little Proof." One co-author of that December 31, 1999 story was
Danny Pearl, who was later the victim of a hideous, videotaped murder
by al-Qaeda terrorists. Pearl's supposed offense, in the eyes of the
subhuman wretches who killed him, was to be an American and a Jew. But
the murder may also have been, at least in part, payback for Pearl's
efforts to expose the KLA's campaign of deception during the Kosovo
conflict.
In the Journal expose, Pearl and co-author Robert Block described the
propaganda efforts of KLA functionary Halit Barani, "a former actor
with a Karl Marx beard who summarizes Serb war crimes by showing a
photo of a baby with a smashed skull. [He] spent the war moving from
village to village with his manual typewriter, calling in reports to
foreign radio services and diplomats with his daily allotment of
three minutes on a KLA satellite phone."
Barani's fertile mind and antique typewriter were the primary source
for many of the lurid atrocity accounts cited by official sources
during NATO's assault on Yugoslavia. When Pearl and Block asked about
the reliability of his stories, Barani replied: "I told everybody it
was supposition, it was not confirmed information.... For the Serbs,
anything is possible." Significantly, Barani has been tapped to serve
as an "expert" witness for the prosecution in the UN's war crimes
trial of former Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic.
After the Serbs surrendered and allowed NATO and UN forces to occupy
Kosovo, forensic investigators from the UN and the FBI were
dispatched to collect evidence of genocide. Curiously, however, the
mass graves that figured so prominently in NATO's war propaganda
failed to materialize.
The U.S. and British governments insisted that "ethnic cleansing" had
claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Kosovo
Albanians. However, Spanish forensic surgeon Emilio Perez Pujol, who
was sent by the UN's war crimes Tribunal to unearth evidence of
genocide, found that the identifiable remains of civilian victims in
Kosovo are numbered in the hundreds. This is what one would expect in
a brutal civil war - rather than thousands or tens of thousands of
casualties resulting from a campaign of genocide. In an interview
published by The Times of London on October 31, 1999, Pujol described
the notion that "mass graves" exist in Kosovo as "a semantic pirouette
by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one - not one
- mass grave."
Kosovo's vanishing "mass graves" in 1999 eerily prefigured Iraq's
disappearing "weapons of mass destruction" (or WMDs) in 2003. The
Washington Post reported on May 11th that U.S. arms inspectors
combing Iraq for WMDs "[are] winding down operations without finding
proof that ... Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed
arms...."
The May 17th edition of The Spectator of London reports: "All but a
handful of the list of sites drawn up by U.S. and British intelligence
[have] been thoroughly searched, and nothing [of consequence] ....
[has] been found." Comments Colonel Richard McPhee, a member of the
U.S. military's WMD task force in Iraq: "We came to bear country, we
came loaded for bear and we found out the bear wasn't there."
Just as forensic investigators in Kosovo found traces of a brutal and
bloody civil war, rather than genocide, U.S. weapons inspectors in
Iraq have found evidence that Saddam's regime had pursued WMDs, but
had not developed them. "We've found a lot of little pieces,"
commented U.S. arms inspector Lt.-Col. Brian Clark. "We need to put
it all together to make up the whole jigsaw."
This contrasts sharply with the apocalyptic statements of President
Bush and his subordinates regarding the supposed threat posed by Iraq
to the United States.
"The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein now,"
insisted the president two days before the U.S.-led attack. In a March
6th press conference, Mr. Bush declared: "I will not leave the
American people at the mercy of the Iraqi dictator and his weapons."
But there were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction -- a fact now
admitted by Bush administration spokesmen. "The Bush administration
has admitted that Saddam Hussein probably had no weapons of mass
destruction," reported the London Sunday Herald on May 4th. "Senior
administration officials have admitted that they would be `amazed' if
weapons of mass destruction ... were found in Iraq."
In other words, the Bush administration lied us into war in Iraq, just
as the Clinton administration lied us into war in Kosovo.
Our most recent enemy was a one-time ally who built his war machine
with the material and political support of Washington. The perfect
symbol of that relationship is the notorious photograph of
then-presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam
Hussein during a December 1983 visit to Baghdad. David Hicks, who
faces indefinite detention in Camp X-Ray as an "unlawful combatant,"
is a living symbol of a similar relationship between Washington and
al-Qaeda -- a much deadlier menace to Americans than Saddam ever was.
How much longer will Americans permit our rulers to create foreign
enemies -- and then passively swallow the lies our rulers tell us to
manipulate us into useless, senseless, destructive foreign wars?
Thank you for listening. Please join us again next time.
This has been Review of the News Online from The John Birch Society.
For more information about what you can do to preserve our freedoms,
call: 1-800-JBS-USA1.
1. Dateline: Kosovo in perspective - an anti-communist crusade
(by Richard Ziegler)
2. Peacekeepers return from Kosovo
(By Eva Munk for The Prague Post)
3. Inter-ethnic hostility remains in Kosovo almost four years after
the war
(by Jean-Eudes Barbier for AFP)
4. Lies and Consequences
(by William Norman Grigg)
MORE LINKS:
*** KOSOVO AND METOHIJA: PROPAGANDA AND TRUTH
by Rade Drobac
http://www.artel.co.yu/en/reakcije_citalaca/2003-04-22_1.html ***
Serbs build, others destroy (by Piotr Bein)
http://www.apisgroup.org/article.html?id=1263
Suicide Rate Up in Kosovo Since War (by Natan Dotan)
http://www.balkantimes.com/default3.asp?lang=english&page=process_print&article_id=19044
Baghdad, Belgrade, and borders (by John Zavales)
http://www.kosovo.com/erpkim23may03b.html
Children Bought and Sold (by Altin Raxhimi)
http://www.tol.cz/look/BRR/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=9&NrIssue=1&NrSection=1&NrArticle=9290
Occupation by Bad Example (by Christopher Deliso)
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/deliso75.html
SNC KIM: Kosovo Parliament legalizes crimes committed by Albanian
extremists
http://www.kosovo.com/erpkim16may03.html#9
German interior ministers demand speedy deportations. Refugees from
Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo targetted (By Elisabeth Zimmermann)
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jun2003/germ-j03_prn.shtml
TWO IMPORTANT SITES:
*** UNMIK Police: Daily News Updates, Crime statistics, 24-hour Daily
Incident Report
http://www.unmikonline.org/civpol/
*** KOSOVO.COM
http://www.kosovo.com/
=== 1 ===
http://www.artel.co.yu/en/izbor/jugoslavija/2003-05-28_4.html
Kosovo in perspective - an anti-communist crusade
NATO intervened in Kosovo not because one side was
losing but because the wrong side was losing
Dateline: Monday, May 26, 2003
by Richard Ziegler
It is almost four years since the NATO attack on Yugoslavia ended and
we now have a better understanding of what was not the cause of the
war. The justification by NATO leaders and supporters was that the
Belgrade authorities were committing genocide against the ethnic
Albanians in Kosovo and that NATO intervened in order to stop massive
human rights violations. However, the tales of missing thousands,
mass graves replete with Albanians, etc., have shown to be little
more than tales. There has been no evidence to support the
oft-repeated claims that the Serbs had committed genocide before the
bombing began, were committing genocide during the bombings, or had
plans to commit genocide that were supposedly thwarted by the
bombings. The amount of people killed in the conflict in the year
before the NATO attack commenced was comparable to or less than the
fatalities that occurred in other civil wars that were raging in the
late 1990s. NATO did not intervene because it had an alleged moral
imperative to interfere in a conflict where one side was clearly
losing; NATO was indifferent when the Croat offensive overwhelmed the
Serbs in the Krajina region of Croatia in August 1995 producing many
civilian deaths and a massive exodus of Serbs into Bosnia. NATO
intervened in Kosovo not because one side was losing but because the
wrong side was losing.
Yet if the ethnic conflict in Kosovo was at best, a partial
explanation for intervention, and at worst, an outright pretext, then
what were the other motives for NATO's actions? The NATO intervention
was indeed on behalf of human rights, but not the ones claimed by
NATO. Ever since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the
West had been using the allegations of human rights violations in the
Soviet Union and Eastern European countries as a means to undermine
communism. The West was very selective about which human rights it
wanted to see implemented in the Eastern bloc countries, and these
rights were almost invariably civil and political rights, not social
and economic rights. The West called for the implementation of the
right to vote in multiparty elections, freedom of religion, freedom
of association, not the right to employment, to shelter, or to a
minimal standard of living. The West also advocated, by extension,
the type of society that favors civil and political rights over social
and economic rights, i.e. capitalism, and the two
most cherished rights of capitalist societies, the unqualified rights
to wealth and property.
The pressure of the West on the Soviet Union and its allies to
convert to capitalist democracies that favored civil and political
rights from communist societies which gave precedence to social and
economic rights was combined with Western support for the internal
forces in these countries that were the heirs of those who never
accepted the 1917 revolution and those governments imposed or
supported by the Soviet Union following the end of World War II. By
the early 1990s only one Eastern European country remained that had
not overthrown socialism and restored capitalism, Yugoslavia, and for
this the country would pay dearly. Historically, the Balkans have
been segmented and dominated by the great powers. But the dominant
Western view holds that the breakup of Yugoslavia was different from
that historical pattern in that the genesis for the collapse
originated from within. The main Western explanation for the
disintegration of Yugoslavia was the rise of Serb nationalism and a
desire for Serb dominance in the constituent republics and autonomous
provinces of Yugoslavia; this ascent is alleged to have begun with
the speech made by Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo in 1989. The
resultant interventions by the West are widely interpreted in the
West as reactions to Serb aggression. There was certainly a rise in
Serb nationalism, but there was also an accompanying rise in the
nationalism of other ethnic groups in Yugoslavia, particularly in
Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo where Serbs had valid historical reasons
to dread being reduced to minority status if these regions became
independent. The nationalism of the Croats, Bosnian Muslims and
Albanians was combined with their desire to get rid of the vestiges
of socialism and establish a market economy. The breakup of
Yugoslavia did not deviate from the pattern of great power
involvement. Those primarily responsible for the Balkanization of
Yugoslavia were the Western governments that encouraged the
secessionist movements, provided them with financial and military
assistance, afforded them premature diplomatic recognition, and
finally intervened militarily with the attacks on the Serbs in Bosnia
and later throughout Yugoslavia during the NATO attack.
The Western attempt to foster capitalism in Yugoslavia was already
occurring in the 1980s through the Western-dominated IMF which loaned
funds to the indebted nation on condition that privatizations were to
be undertaken and whose effect was to exacerbate ethnic tensions. The
NATO ultimatum rejected by Yugoslavia at Rambouillet, France,
contained two revealing articles attesting to NATO's self-serving
motives: "The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with
free-market principles," and "There shall be no impediments to the
free movement of persons, goods, services and capital to and from
Kosovo."
It would be erroneous to assert that anticommunism was the only
driving force behind Western intervention in the former Yugoslavia.
There were other motives. The Germans had their own historical
reasons and the NATO ultimatum to Yugoslavia was the third one by
Germany to the Serbs in the last century. The support given by the
USA for the Bosnian Muslims, and to a lesser extent, the Albanians in
Kosovo, was partially motivated by the wish to reap the political
rewards of demonstrating to the Muslim countries, particularly the
oil- producing ones, that the USA could be pro-Muslim. Furthermore,
NATO used the conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo as
opportunities to justify its continued existence after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union. The anticommunist motive, however,
was a main reason shared by all the interveners and also
paradoxically explains why many progressives, social democrats and
socialists in the West supported the bombing because the rightwing
drift of Western leftist parties had reached such a point that any
attempt to weaken or sweep away the remaining socialist system in
Europe was welcomed. The Western attack on Yugoslavia was a
continuation of the Cold War and its transformation into a real war
which was made possible by a weakened Russia that was unable and
unwilling to come to the defense of its Slavic ally.
Richard Ziegler Ottawa Copyright 2003
Richard Ziegler worked as a political researcher with the federal
government's Immigration and Refugee Board from 1994 to 2002. He
analyzed allegations of human rights violations of people who were
claiming refugee status in Canada and who had originated in Eastern
Europe and the countries arising from the dissolution of the Soviet
Union. He writes: "I am familiar with the history and politics of
Yugoslavia and am aware of how Western governments use selective
human rights in order to engage in overt and covert regime change. I
was also an acitivist with the Ottawa-based group C- SWAY, Coalition
to Stop the War Against Yugoslavia. My article gives a different and
insightful perspective that the mainstream media will not consider."
=== 2 ===
http://www.praguepost.com/P03/2003/Art/0501/news4.php
The Prague Post
May 4, 2003
Peacekeepers return from Kosovo
By Eva Munk
For The Prague Post
PODUJEVO, KOSOVO
-"You just don't know what's out there," explained
Battalion Commander Petr Prochazka. "This area was
full of partisan [KLA] supply routes, and NATO
peppered it with live rounds with no system
whatsoever. It's just not worth the risk to stray off
the paths."
-The battalion's main mission is to ensure a safe
environment for all the ethnic groups in its area of
operations -- a moot point these days, as the region
is almost "ethnically clean." Aside from pockets of
Roma, or gypsies, it consists entirely of ethnic
Albanians. Of the fairly large Serb population that
once occupied the area, only 28 old-timers remain in
the mountain hamlet of Sekirac.
-"They've been here since the battle of Kosovo Polje
in 1389," said press officer Pavel Loeffler. "Now the
locals are trying wipe out all evidence they were ever
here. The Swedish unit, which was here before us,
stopped guarding two churches near Podujevo. They were
blown up within a week."
-Many of those who did not join the recently formed
Kosovo Protection Corps -- a legitimate military force
created for the defense of Kosovo -- have joined the
ranks of the mafia instead....
-Less than a month ago, UN units discovered a mass
grave in the area, and the bodies of several dozen
victims were brought to the battalion's outpost at the
village of Gazela.
"The relatives had a chance to identify them by the
clothes, which were put in a separate tent. The smell
is not something I would like to endure again,"
Loeffler said. "We didn't have much luck. Two busloads
of Serbians came in, but only a few were able to
identify some family members."
He said he thought there were many more such graves in
the territory, but the chances of finding them are
slim.
"The locals aren't going to lead us to them," he said.
"It would hurt their image as the only victims."
For 180 days, the 300 soldiers of the 43rd Airborne
Battalion from Chrudim, east Bohemia and the First
Motorized Company from Martin, central Slovakia,
cloistered in stark barracks on a hilltop. They were
stationed in a dusty burg called Podujevo, 30
kilometers (19 miles) from the nearest town.
Except for patrolling the 120 kilometers of ABL
(administrative boundary line -- the Serbs do not
accept the use of the term border) and the
885-square-kilometer (354-square-mile) area northwest
of Pristina, the troops were not allowed to leave the
base.
Worse, they had no beer. Since arriving in Kosovo last
Sept. 28, the soldiers did not taste alcohol. They
even hailed the New Year with nonalcoholic champagne.
Neither could they resort to that beloved Czech
activity of picking mushrooms in the surrounding
hills.
"You just don't know what's out there," explained
Battalion Commander Petr Prochazka. "This area was
full of partisan supply routes, and NATO peppered it
with live rounds with no system whatsoever. It's just
not worth the risk to stray off the paths."
After six months of guarding the Kosovo-Serbia
boundary, the 2nd Czech-Slovak KFOR (Kosovo Force)
Battalion headed home April 23, as part of its normal
rotation schedule.
Soldiers say they have witnessed deprivation, ethnic
hatred and the frustrating aftermath of the 1998 war
in Kosovo, in which Serbian-Albanian tensions resulted
in mass graves and permanent distrust.
The troops, however, live in relative comfort, with
hot showers, Czech TV channels and HBO beamed in by
satellite, and regular communication with their
families via cell phone. The headquarters company even
had a "saloon," complete with swinging doors, a
bleached cow skull nailed to a post, a bar and a
fireplace with a grill between two narrow firing posts
punched into the 2-meter-thick (7-foot) perimeter wall
in case of a very real attack.
"We will defend our steaks to the last man," one
soldier joked.
Prefer to see action
Many brooded over the "luck" of buddies from Chrudim
who are accompanying the field hospital and
chemical-warfare unit in Iraq and Kuwait.
"I think a lot of the soldiers envy their chance to
see some action," Prochazka said. Although security
was tightened since the outbreak of the war in Iraq,
there have not been any displays of violence in the
area.
The battalion's main mission is to ensure a safe
environment for all the ethnic groups in its area of
operations -- a moot point these days, as the region
is almost "ethnically clean." Aside from pockets of
Roma, or gypsies, it consists entirely of ethnic
Albanians. Of the fairly large Serb population that
once occupied the area, only 28 old-timers remain in
the mountain hamlet of Sekirac. A Czech-Slovak
"observation post" nearby ensures their safety.
A handful of old Serb Orthodox churches, surrounded by
barbed wire and guarded by KFOR, testify that Serbs
had lived in the area for a long time.
"They've been here since the battle of Kosovo Polje in
1389," said press officer Pavel Loeffler. "Now the
locals are trying wipe out all evidence they were ever
here. The Swedish unit, which was here before us,
stopped guarding two churches near Podujevo. They were
blown up within a week."
Occasionally the soldiers are sent to disarm a
leftover pocket of KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army)
partisans who didn't turn in their arms after the 1998
war. The raids sometimes lead to hostility among the
inhabitants.
"Of course they're not friendly when we come into
their houses in the morning without warning. You've
got to keep in mind that these guys are still local
heroes," Prochazka said.
The partisans now present the biggest threat in the
area, he said. Many of those who did not join the
recently formed Kosovo Protection Corps -- a
legitimate military force created for the defense of
Kosovo -- have joined the ranks of the mafia instead,
according to Prochazka. This situation is yet another
reason for KFOR to create a secure environment as soon
as possible.
"We have to establish confidence in the legitimate
government among the local population; otherwise they
will be fair game for the mafia," Prochazka said. To
this end, KFOR soldiers try to improve the conditions
by using military technology to rebuild roads, put up
power lines and repair damaged facilities. Mostly, the
Czechs have concentrated on rebuilding schools.
"We want to target the youngsters who are going to be
running things soon. There's not much chance we'll be
able to budge the older ones," Prochazka said, not
bothering to hide his exasperation. "They've just
gotten too used to living from handouts."
Of course, he said, life is not easy for the ethnic
Albanians. Many families survive on a pension of about
60 euros (1,890 Kc/$65) per month per adult male. Most
have houses built of bright-red UN bricks, but they
have little left over for electricity or heating.
Although these houses are two or three stories high,
the families crowd into two ground-floor rooms heated
by wood-burning stoves.
"The NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] gave
refugees who lost their houses material for new ones
as incentive for them to come back, but there wasn't
enough left over for things like insulation,"
Prochazka says.
This situation indirectly leads to friction with the
Serb patrols on the boundary line.
"Wood is the main source of heating, which is why you
won't find a mature tree on this side of the border,"
he said. "So the locals just hitch a horse to a cart
and go to the Serbian side. Then we get a panic call
saying that the Serbian police have kidnapped an
Albanian and dragged him over to their side. But when
we get there and find a chain saw still hot on the
Serbian side, it's fairly obvious [what has
happened]."
Some Czech and Slovak KFOR soldiers have changed their
attitudes toward the situation in their area of Kosovo.
Finding the way out of poverty
"When you get here and see the poverty, you really
want to help. But many people here are happy to live
with less, as long as they don't have to exert
themselves to get more," said Lieutenant Pavel Mraz,
who is in charge of the battalion's civil-military
cooperation unit. "I've realized that the best way to
help is to reduce their dependence on outside help."
Occasionally, however, something does remind them that
a real tragedy happened here.
Less than a month ago, UN units discovered a mass
grave in the area, and the bodies of several dozen
victims were brought to the battalion's outpost at the
village of Gazela.
"The relatives had a chance to identify them by the
clothes, which were put in a separate tent. The smell
is not something I would like to endure again,"
Loeffler said. "We didn't have much luck. Two busloads
of Serbians came in, but only a few were able to
identify some family members."
He said he thought there were many more such graves in
the territory, but the chances of finding them are
slim.
"The locals aren't going to lead us to them," he said.
"It would hurt their image as the only victims."
Eva Munk can be reached at news@...
=== 3 ===
http://www.ptd.net/webnews/wed/bl/Qserbia-montenegro-kosovo.Rbv1_DAK.html
Inter-ethnic hostility remains in Kosovo almost four years after the
war
Jean-Eudes Barbier
-"Steiner's opinion was based on statistics that the
tension between the communities has been significantly
reduced, but he is not the one living with it every
day, as we do."
-Serbs have also given up driving or even having
private cars. There is no access for them to the
parking lot in front of their building, while their
cars in the past have often been damaged by Albanian
extremists.
-Those who have remained in Kosovo, some 80,000 living
mostly in the enclaves, wait and hope that the
international community will finally become interested
in their fate.
PRISTINA, Serbia and Montenegro, April 20 (AFP) -
Almost four years after the United Nations established
its mission in Kosovo, inter-ethnic hostility is still
widespread and the few Serbs remaining in the capital
Pristina are afraid to circulate freely in the city.
Surrounded by the ethnic Albanian majority, many of
whom would like to see them thrown out of Kosovo, the
Serbs in Pristina are pessimistic about their future.
Some 45,000 Serbs lived in the Kosovo capital, which
was home to some 125, 000 people before the 1998-99
war in the southern Serbian province. The war ended
with the withdrawal of Belgrade forces under pressure
of a NATO bombing campaign.
Since 1999, the population of Pristina has increased
to more than 500,000, but only around 200 of them are
Serbs.
The Pristina Serbs, grouped for security reasons in
one building in the city's Ulpiana district, have been
exposed to numerous insults, while often pelted with
stones from windows of neighboring buildings.
"The psychological pressure is enormous. Our life is
worse than in a prison, " one of them, Jelena, told
AFP.
Jelena, who refused to give her last name, said daily
life has gotten worse since members of the NATO-led
peacekeeping force (KFOR), deployed throughout the
province since 1999, left the neighbourhood last
October.
The removal of many checkpoints was ordered by UN
administrator Michael Steiner, who believed that the
security situation has improved sufficiently.
The checkpoints in the nearby Serb enclaves have
disappeared, but KFOR has also increased its patrols
in return.
However, without the permanent presence of KFOR
troops, Serbs in Ulpiana today feel almost abandoned.
"Steiner's opinion was based on statistics that the
tension between the communities has been significantly
reduced, but he is not the one living with it every
day, as we do," Milan said.
The Serb families in the neighbourhood have only one
shop, poorly supplied, without fresh vegetables and
fruit. The goods are brought to the shop by a tiny UN
van coming from the Serb enclave of Gracanica, near
Pristina.
"The UN (officials) believe we can go shopping by
public buses, but this is absurd, as we would all be
beaten up," Tanja said.
Serbs have also given up driving or even having
private cars. There is no access for them to the
parking lot in front of their building, while their
cars in the past have often been damaged by Albanian
extremists.
Around 20 Serb pupils are still escorted by KFOR
soldiers to the school in a Serb village, some 20
kilometers (12 miles) from Pristina.
The community's resources are very low. Only 15 of
them are employed. They receive financial support from
Belgrade, but consider it insufficient. Sometimes,
they can find a temporary job, but for the lowest
wages.
As there are no cafes in the neighbourhood, some of
the Serbs gather in the shop to talk and encourage or
support each other.
In the evening, they continue their discussions by
candlelight, as power cuts are common in Kosovo. The
dispensary and billiard room are then deserted, as
well as a small yard where children usually play ball.
Serbs from Pristina have refused to go to the
"collective centers" in Serbia and Montenegro where
some 200,000 other Serbs now live after fleeing their
homes in Kosovo.
Those who have remained in Kosovo, some 80,000 living
mostly in the enclaves, wait and hope that the
international community will finally become interested
in their fate.
"If Kosovo gets independence, as the Albanians have
demanded, the Serb enclaves in the province will
create their defensive units and fight. We will all
leave Pristina to join them," Milan said.
=== 4 ===
http://www.jbs.org/visitor/rotnol/030525_transcript.htm
Review of the News, Week of May 25, 2003
Lies and Consequences
MP3 Format - 2.9 meg
Low Bandwidth RealAudio
High Bandwidth RealAudio
Hello and welcome to Review of the News Online. I'm William Norman
Grigg, Senior Editor for The New American magazine -- an affiliated
publication of The John Birch Society.
David Hicks, a 27-year-old Australian expatriate, is among the
captured Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters detained at Camp X-Ray in Cuba.
Like John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban," Hicks is a
disaffected western youth who became enchanted with Islam, and was
caught in a revolutionary undertow that took him first to Pakistan and
then to Afghanistan. Hicks' case is particularly interesting because
the first stop in his revolutionary odyssey was the Balkans, where he
joined the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (or KLA).
During the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, Hicks was one of
several thousand international recruits who traveled to Kosovo to
fight on behalf of the KLA. Most of those volunteers were seduced by
the romantic image of the KLA as a hardy band of idealistic freedom
fighters seeking to save Kosovo's besieged Albanian Muslims from a
Nazi-like campaign of "ethnic cleansing."
The unappetizing truth about the KLA, as The New American reported
prior to the 1999 NATO campaign, was that the group "is a terrorist
criminal syndicate, Maoist in its ideological bent, hard-wired into
the international heroin trade, and tightly allied with Osama bin
Laden." That description was based on European press and intelligence
reports and information compiled by our own government.
During the 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia, KLA forces seized control
of key sectors in Kosovo. Today, that one-time Serbian province is now
a UN protectorate ruled by the KLA. Once Kosovo was placed in the
KLA's hands, it became a staging area for international narcotics
trafficking, the European sex slave trade, and terrorism. The illicit
profits generated by the KLA's narcotics and sex trade helped fund
the al-Qaeda network, with lethal consequences for Americans. As
demonstrated by the recent al-Qaeda attack against Americans in Saudi
Arabia, our nation is still paying a price in blood for our alliance
with the KLA.
Writing in the September 21, 2000 New York Review of Books, foreign
affairs correspondent Timothy Garton Ash expressed amazement that the
KLA, "a bunch of farmyard Albanian ex-Marxist-Leninist terrorists[,]
managed to enlist the United States to win their battles for them."
The most important weapon in the arsenal of the KLA and its allies,
Ash pointed out, was the global media, which inundated the public
with lurid atrocity tales. Thus conditioned, much of the public viewed
Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic as the reincarnation of Hitler, bent
on committing genocide against Kosovo Albanians. Accordingly, many
Americans supported NATO's terror bombing of Serbia as a justified
exercise in "humanitarian intervention."
At one point, as NATO warplanes battered civilian targets in Belgrade,
Bill Clinton claimed that as many as 600,000 ethnic Albanians were
"lying in mass graves [or] starving and too frightened to go home."
Speaking to NATO combat pilots in Aviano, Italy on April 8, 1999,
Secretary of Defense William Cohen raised the bid, accusing Serb
forces of "engaging in rape, pillage, and mass murder on a scale that
we have not seen since the end of World War II.... They have pushed
over a million people onto a highway of hell that is littered with
depravation and suffering that is almost unimaginable."
On another occasion, State Department spokesman James Rubin declared
that 100,000 Albanians were being held at the municipal stadium in
Pristina, Kosovo's provincial capital. As American media outlets
breathlessly reported this claim as a fact, France's AFP wire service
sent a reporter to Pristina to verify the story. That reporter found
that the stadium was "deserted and showing no signs of recent
occupation." The story about a makeshift concentration camp, it turns
out, was fed to Rubin by KLA leader Hashim Thaci, and retailed to an
uncritical media without being confirmed.
Following the so-called Kosovo War, as the KLA consolidated its
control over the province, the Wall Street Journal ran an expose
headlined: "War in Kosovo Was Cruel, Bitter, Savage; Genocide it
Wasn't: Tales of Mass Atrocity Arose and Were Passed Along, Often with
Little Proof." One co-author of that December 31, 1999 story was
Danny Pearl, who was later the victim of a hideous, videotaped murder
by al-Qaeda terrorists. Pearl's supposed offense, in the eyes of the
subhuman wretches who killed him, was to be an American and a Jew. But
the murder may also have been, at least in part, payback for Pearl's
efforts to expose the KLA's campaign of deception during the Kosovo
conflict.
In the Journal expose, Pearl and co-author Robert Block described the
propaganda efforts of KLA functionary Halit Barani, "a former actor
with a Karl Marx beard who summarizes Serb war crimes by showing a
photo of a baby with a smashed skull. [He] spent the war moving from
village to village with his manual typewriter, calling in reports to
foreign radio services and diplomats with his daily allotment of
three minutes on a KLA satellite phone."
Barani's fertile mind and antique typewriter were the primary source
for many of the lurid atrocity accounts cited by official sources
during NATO's assault on Yugoslavia. When Pearl and Block asked about
the reliability of his stories, Barani replied: "I told everybody it
was supposition, it was not confirmed information.... For the Serbs,
anything is possible." Significantly, Barani has been tapped to serve
as an "expert" witness for the prosecution in the UN's war crimes
trial of former Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic.
After the Serbs surrendered and allowed NATO and UN forces to occupy
Kosovo, forensic investigators from the UN and the FBI were
dispatched to collect evidence of genocide. Curiously, however, the
mass graves that figured so prominently in NATO's war propaganda
failed to materialize.
The U.S. and British governments insisted that "ethnic cleansing" had
claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Kosovo
Albanians. However, Spanish forensic surgeon Emilio Perez Pujol, who
was sent by the UN's war crimes Tribunal to unearth evidence of
genocide, found that the identifiable remains of civilian victims in
Kosovo are numbered in the hundreds. This is what one would expect in
a brutal civil war - rather than thousands or tens of thousands of
casualties resulting from a campaign of genocide. In an interview
published by The Times of London on October 31, 1999, Pujol described
the notion that "mass graves" exist in Kosovo as "a semantic pirouette
by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one - not one
- mass grave."
Kosovo's vanishing "mass graves" in 1999 eerily prefigured Iraq's
disappearing "weapons of mass destruction" (or WMDs) in 2003. The
Washington Post reported on May 11th that U.S. arms inspectors
combing Iraq for WMDs "[are] winding down operations without finding
proof that ... Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed
arms...."
The May 17th edition of The Spectator of London reports: "All but a
handful of the list of sites drawn up by U.S. and British intelligence
[have] been thoroughly searched, and nothing [of consequence] ....
[has] been found." Comments Colonel Richard McPhee, a member of the
U.S. military's WMD task force in Iraq: "We came to bear country, we
came loaded for bear and we found out the bear wasn't there."
Just as forensic investigators in Kosovo found traces of a brutal and
bloody civil war, rather than genocide, U.S. weapons inspectors in
Iraq have found evidence that Saddam's regime had pursued WMDs, but
had not developed them. "We've found a lot of little pieces,"
commented U.S. arms inspector Lt.-Col. Brian Clark. "We need to put
it all together to make up the whole jigsaw."
This contrasts sharply with the apocalyptic statements of President
Bush and his subordinates regarding the supposed threat posed by Iraq
to the United States.
"The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein now,"
insisted the president two days before the U.S.-led attack. In a March
6th press conference, Mr. Bush declared: "I will not leave the
American people at the mercy of the Iraqi dictator and his weapons."
But there were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction -- a fact now
admitted by Bush administration spokesmen. "The Bush administration
has admitted that Saddam Hussein probably had no weapons of mass
destruction," reported the London Sunday Herald on May 4th. "Senior
administration officials have admitted that they would be `amazed' if
weapons of mass destruction ... were found in Iraq."
In other words, the Bush administration lied us into war in Iraq, just
as the Clinton administration lied us into war in Kosovo.
Our most recent enemy was a one-time ally who built his war machine
with the material and political support of Washington. The perfect
symbol of that relationship is the notorious photograph of
then-presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam
Hussein during a December 1983 visit to Baghdad. David Hicks, who
faces indefinite detention in Camp X-Ray as an "unlawful combatant,"
is a living symbol of a similar relationship between Washington and
al-Qaeda -- a much deadlier menace to Americans than Saddam ever was.
How much longer will Americans permit our rulers to create foreign
enemies -- and then passively swallow the lies our rulers tell us to
manipulate us into useless, senseless, destructive foreign wars?
Thank you for listening. Please join us again next time.
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