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Japan Times
July 2, 2007

Serbia owed justice in Kosovo

By GREGORY CLARK*


No commentator likes to sound like a conspiracy nut.

But if that is the fate of anyone who tries to
challenge the distortions involved in painting Serbia
as criminally guilty over Kosovo and the breakup of
the former Yugoslavia, then so be it.

Let's go back to the beginning. When Nazi Germany
tried to occupy Yugoslavia during World War II, the
Croat and Muslim minorities there backed the Nazis in
their campaign against the mainly Serbian resistance.

Even the Nazis are said to have been impressed by the
brutality with which the Croatian forces — the dreaded
Ustashi — set out to massacre and cleanse whole
villages and even towns of their Serbian populations.
Some 1 million Serbs died as a result, many of them in
the Croatian death camp at Jasenovac, said to rival
some Nazi Holocaust operations in scale and atrocity.

With the war over, Serb revenge seemed inevitable. But
the Yugoslav resistance leader, Tito, managed to
restrain passions by allowing Serbian domination of
the central government while dividing the nation into
semi-autonomous regions with mixed ethnic populations.

But it was an uneasy compromise, as I saw on the
ground in the former Yugoslavia of the '60s and as
even we in distant Australia probably realized better
than most.

There we saw frequent attacks by recalcitrant Ustashi
elements on Yugoslav diplomatic missions and the large
Serbian immigrant community.

We took it for granted that in any breakup of
post-communist Yugoslavia it would be insanity to ask
the large Serbian minorities in Croatia and Bosnia to
accept rule by their former pro-Nazi Croatian and
Muslim oppressors. But insanity prevailed, thanks
largely to pressure from Germany, Britain and the
United States, all seeking to expand influence into
yet another Eastern Europe ex-communist nation.

In short, the subsequent fighting was inevitable, as
were the atrocities, by all sides. But the Serbs could
at least claim they were seeking mainly to recover
some of the towns and villages they had lost under the
Nazis.

Much is made of Serbian revenge killings in the
Bosnian district of Srebrenica in 1995. But we see no
mention of the wartime and postwar killings of Serbs
in that area, which had reduced the Serbian population
from a prewar level of over half to less than one
third. Nor do we find much mention of the atrocities
involved in expelling hundreds of thousands of Serbs
from Croatia.

Enter the Kosovo problem.

To assist the Muslim side during the 1992-1995 Bosnian
fighting, British and U.S. intelligence organs
resorted to the extraordinary recruitment and training
of Islamic extremists from Afghanistan's anti-Soviet
wars of the 1980s.

Help and training was also given to Albanian Muslim
extremists setting up their Kosovo Liberation Army to
launch guerrilla attacks against isolated Serbian
communities. (These long-suspected facts were
confirmed by Britain's former environment minister
Michael Meacher writing in The Guardian newspaper
recently).

Even more extraordinary was the way Serbian attempts
to prevent or retaliate against those KLA attacks were
denounced as the "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo's
Albanians (ironically it was the KLA that invented the
term, to describe its plan to drive out the Serbian
minority).

The U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
move to bomb Serbia into submission followed soon
after, even though it was the KLA, not Belgrade, that
violated a 1998 ceasefire organized by the U.S.

The propaganda war used to justify Western policies
over Kosovo was unrelenting.

We were told that 500,000 ethnic Albanians had been
killed there by the Serbs (miraculously we are now
given a figure of around 10,000).

Much was made of a 1989 speech by former Yugoslav
leader Slobodan Milosevic said to call for "ethnic
cleansing" in Kosovo. But one has only to read the
speech to realize it said the exact opposite — that it
was a call for moderation in handling ethnic Albanian
hostility to a justifiably stronger Serbian political
presence there; the idea that the 10 percent Serbian
minority there would set out deliberately to expel the
large ethnic Albanian majority was patently absurd
from the start.

Yet that absurdity has regularly been trundled out by
allegedly objective Western commentators relying
heavily on the 1999 flight of ethnic Albanians to
neighboring Macedonia as proof. But that flight was
temporary, and came after the U.S./NATO bombing
attacks, not before. Some of it was also staged.

Almost nowhere do we see any mention of the hundreds
of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies [Roma] and
moderate ethnic Albanians since expelled permanently
from Kosovo by the now dominant extremists. Meanwhile
we are supposed to be annoyed by Belgrade's and
Moscow's resistance to a Kosovo independence that
would almost certainly see the remaining ethnic
minorities even further victimized.

The implications for the future are frightening. The
propaganda victory over Kosovo seems to have convinced
our Western policymakers that they can say anything
they like on any issue and rely on spin, black
information and a lazy or compliant media to get away
with it.

The 1999 ultimatum given Belgrade over Kosovo was pure
blackmail: Either you agree to our demands, no matter
how unreasonable (including the demand to put not only
Kosovo but also Serbia under NATO military
occupation), or we use our dominant air power to wreck
your economic and social infrastructure. The
subsequent destruction of Serbia's industries,
including its only car factory, was pure vandalism.

Even Belgrade's willingness to accept a Kosovo under
the control of moderate ethnic Albanians was rejected,
in favor of the KLA Muslim extremists the U.S. had
long supported. Ironically some of those extremists
have now joined al-Qaida's anti-U.S. jihad.

On the 50th anniversary of their original unification,
the EU powers congratulated themselves on the way they
had kept Europe free of war ever since 1945.

They did not seem even to notice how they had just
gone to war with a European nation called Serbia.

Serbia was the one European nation to resist Nazi
German domination (the others either surrendered or
collaborated). Its capital, Belgrade, was viciously
bombed as a result. The next time it was bombed was by
a NATO that included Germany and many of the other
former collaborator nations, this time to force it to
submit over Kosovo. Little wonder the Serbs remain
angry.

*Gregory Clark is a former Australian government
official and currently vice president of Akita
International University. A translation of this
article will appear at www.gregoryclark.net 

(Source: R. Rozoff via http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/yugoslaviainfo )