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THE WAR NATO WANTED
- Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 19:01:25 -0400 (EDT)
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May 16, 1999
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THE WAR NATOR WANTED
BY DIANA JOHNSTONE
Paris
To justify their assault on Serbia, the United States and its
obedient NATO allies claimed they had no choice. As the
official story goes, Slobodan Milosevic (suddenly the
reincarnation of Hitler who has the power tomake all other
citizens of Yugoslavia invisible to the Clinton
administration) refused to negotiate and rejected the
Rambouillet peace agreement. Therefore, therewas nothing
else to do but bomb Yugoslavia.
This preposterous lie is only
one among countless others.
In reality, Belgrade never
refused to negotiate.
Rambouillet was never about
negotiations. It was about
presenting the Serbs with an
ultimatum precisely designed
to provide the pretext for
NATO bombing. Rambouillet
was a tragic farce, a low point
in the history of diplomacy, in which the United
States had to coax and cajole a band of well-armed
criminals into signing the death warrant of their adversary,
the legitimate government of Yugoslavia.
The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) is scarcely the sort of
outfit one might expect to see invited to a famous French
chateau to decide on the future of war and peace in
Europe. The connection between KLA gunmen and the
ethnic Albanians who dominate the heroin traffic through
the Balkans from Turkey to Switzerland and Germany has
been widely reported. As for ideology, violent ethnic
Albanian irredentism has switched opportunistically from
fascism during World War II, to "Marxism-Leninism" in the
days of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, to today's
enthusiasm for NATO. The constant factor is hatred of
Serbs in particular and Slavs in general.
The rise of the KLA was a challenge to the
leadership of
the ethnic Albanian nationalists' nonviolent
leadership,
headed by Ibrahim Rugova. The killing of Serbs
in Kosovo
began in April 1996, thanks to the arms glut
caused by the
total collapse of law and order in Albania. Not
only
Yugoslav police but also ethnic Albanians
branded as
"traitors" were targeted. Last summer, by posing
for news
photographers with a KLA officer, Richard
Holbrooke
publicly signaled that the United States was
dropping
Rugova in favor of the KLA. The process was
completed
at Rambouillet with the Feb. 6 arrival of the
official ethnic
Albanian delegation of 16 members, five of them
from the
KLA. Rugova and the older generation of leaders
were
suddenly shoved onto the sidelines, as an
unknown,
29-year-old KLA chieftain named Hashim "The
Snake"
Thaqi was introduced to the world as the leader
of the
delegation.
The KLA's irresistible rise was nurtured notably
by Morton
Abramowitz, a prominent member of the U.S.
foreign
policy elite. Abramowitz served as ambassador to
Thailand
when the CIA's Bangkok bureau was perpetrating
the
"yellow rain" hoax that accused Vietnamese
victims of U.S.
chemical warfare of using chemical agents in
Laos. In
1986, as assistant secretary of state in charge
of intelligence
and research in the Reagan administration,
Abramowitz and
top CIA officials accompanied Sen. Orrin Hatch
to Beijing
to work out a deal with China and Pakistan for
providing
Stinger missiles to Islamic Afghan rebels.
He then passed, quite naturally, to the
presidency of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Under the
Clinton administration, he has participated in a
blue-ribbon
panel on CIA reform--selected by the Council on
Foreign
Relations--which recommended easing restrictions
on
covert actions. More recently, Abramowitz has
been a
leading figure in the high-level International
Crisis Group, a
leading designer of policy toward Kosovo. There,
he
became an advocate of arming the KLA. At
Rambouillet,
Abramowitz and another U.S. official, Paul
Williams, led a
team coaching the KLA delegation.
Even so, at Rambouillet, 'The Snake" bit the
hand that fed
him and refused to sign the document. To the
fury and
dismay of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright,
it was not
the Serbs but the Albanian KLA that balked,
depriving the
United States of its pretext to launch a NATO
war against
the Serbs. Rambouillet was adjourned. Former
Sen. Bob
Dole, recipient of generous campaign
contributions from
the Albanian-American lobby during his political
career,
was dispatched to the Balkans to urge the
Albanians to sign
the treaty--not to make peace, but to "maintain
pressure"
on the Serbs. KLA leaders were bribed with a
promise of a
"visit to Washington to discuss matters of
interest," notably
the future of the KLA--veiled language meaning
that the
United States would not insist on disarming the
KLA, but
would find some formula for transforming what
U.S. envoy
Robert Gelbard had described as a "terrorist"
group into
"liberated" Kosovo's police force.
So it was that the Serbs and the Kosovar
Albanians were
summoned back to Paris to sign, as is, an
agreement that in
effect would detach Kosovo from Serbia and put
it under
the joint control of NATO and whichever ethnic
Albanians
NATO chose--apparently, the KLA. There were no
negotiations. Instead, Serbia's Milan
Milutinovic and his
(multi-ethnic) delegation were presented with an
ultimatum:
Either accept the "peace agreement" concocted by
Christopher Hill (Holbrooke's second at Dayton
who is
now posted as U.S. ambassador to Macedonia)
allowing
NATO to take over Kosovo, or else be bombed.
This
ultimatum in itself was a violation of
international law,
which invalidates agreements obtained by the
threat or use
of force, according to the Vienna Convention on
the Law
of Treaties.
And the terms were totally unacceptable.
Kosovo's
"self-government" was to be run by a NATO
official, with
the title of Chief of the Implementation
Mission, or CIM.
The CIM would have the final say over virtually
everything
and everybody. Kosovo would be occupied by a
NATO
force called KFOR. No ceiling was placed on the
size of
KFOR forces, which would have full control of
airspace
over Kosovo, be immune to prosecution or
liability under
local law, and have free access to the rest of
Yugoslavia--a
license to invade the rest of the country on one
pretext or
another. The agreement called for withdrawal of
Serbian
police and armed forces, but the fate of "other
forces" (no
mention of the KLA, which thus escaped any
commitment
or obligations) would be decided later by the
KFOR
commander.
Not only Milosevic, but any Serbian opposition
party, was
bound to reject such terms. And yet compromise
was not
impossible. The Yugoslavs were ready to make
huge
concessions, but not to welcome NATO. NATO was
the
sticking point. A U.N. peacekeeping force might
well have
been acceptable. However, the Clinton
administration
insisted on NATO or nothing.
The rise of the KLA, backed by the United States
and
Germany (German intelligence reportedly played
an
important role in equipping the rebels), made it
extremely
dangerous for any more moderate ethnic Albanian
leaders
to negotiate with the Serbs. The KLA repeatedly
announced what would happen to such "traitors."
By
backing the KLA, the United States weakened the
more
moderate forces on both sides.
On December 21, 1998, the State Department
released
information from the Kosovo Diplomatic Observer
Mission
that "the KLA harass or kidnap anyone who comes
to the
police," and that "representatives threatened to
kill villagers
and burn their homes if they did not join the
KLA." It
added that KLA harassment has reached such
intensity that
residents of six villages in the Stimlje region
are "ready to
flee."
Kosovo's ethnic Albanian civilians have been
trapped
between devastating NATO bombing raids, KLA
thugs and
Serbian police. That refugees would flee from
Kosovo in all
directions (including northward into central
Serbia, a fact
ignored by Western media) is scarcely
surprising. Yet
NATO exploited the resulting misery and
confusion on the
borders to justify the very bombing that
triggered the
exodus. The suffering of the refugees is genuine
and
poignant. The interpretations by Western
officials and
media are not to be trusted. (After Japan bombed
Pearl
Harbor, the United States "ethnically cleansed"
the West
Coast of Japanese Americans, although Japan did
not
announce that it was bombing the U.S. on behalf
of armed
Japanese-American secessionists.)
Various compromise proposals have been made from
the
Serb side over the years. They have been totally
ignored by
Western governments and media, which have
claimed to be
in favor of "restoring Kosovo's autonomy" and
opposed to
secession. This double language has been
interpreted by
both sides as veiled support for the Albanian
irredentism.
Confident of Western backing, Albanian
nationalist leaders
have held out for independence rather than any
form of
living together with the Serbs in Serbia.
Partition has been
dogmatically ruled out by the United States on
the
"domino-theory" grounds that it would
destabilize
Macedonia. NATO bombing has done that already.
U.S.
and NATO meddling so far have produced all of
the
disasters they promised to prevent, and a few
more. NATO
is not waging peace. It is waging war and must
be stopped.
Diana Johnstone is a contributing editor of In
These Times.
For more Kosovo coverage from Diana Johnstone,
check
out MoJo wire's Kosovo forum at
http://www.motherjones.com/total_coverage/kosovo/forum/.
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