KOSOVO'S DEATH MASK
The few pieces on Kosovo now appearing in the mass media are slowly confirming the viewpoints of those who criticized the months of death and destruction rained down by US/NATO on the civilian population of Yugoslavia and Kosovo.
The agreement finally reached to end the war differs in no substantial regard from the one Yugoslavia would have agreed to at the Rambouillet "negotiations." What is more, it is only thanks to extremely duplicitous diplomatic maneuvers regarding Russia and other European NATO partners, that the US and GB excluded a much more representative Russian peacekeeping force from its sector of Kosovo, and thus prevented it from being able to defend more effectively the lives of the remaining Serb minority in Kosovo. Lt. Gen. Michael Jackson, Commander of KFOR (essentially NATO) "peacekeeping" forces in Kosovo said on August 1st that "it was the Russian negotiations with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, not the NATO air campaign, that served as the major factor in ending the fighting in Kosovo." He also said that since he was not responsible for the alliance's operation against Yugoslavia, he could not evaluate it." (1) What is instead quite clear is that, in violation of the "peace" agreements, NATO forces are doing virtually nothing to disarm the KLA army/criminal syndicate, all the while arguing that a force they claimed was sufficient to hold the Yugoslav army at bay is insufficient for policing a much smaller "guerrilla" force and blaming the UN for the lack of policing: as if a police force of around 3,500 (only a tiny fraction of which is currently deployed) could possibly provide better protection than a force 10 times larger (around 35,000 KFOR troops) armed with much more serious weapons.
A typical example of this "contra"strategy, political unwillingness, dressed as impotence, is the statement by US State Department spokesman James Rubin on August 5th that it is impossible for KFOR peacekeepers to guarantee safety for all Serbs in Kosovo. (2) But then, of course, if the US/NATO had decided to abide by the UN, all the barbarous escalation of atrocities in Kosovo would never have taken place in the first place. Instead of disarming the KLA, US/NATO forces--and especially US and GB propaganda outlets--are relying almost exclusively on KLA sources and documentation for their reports on the extent of Serbian "atrocities." (3)
The predictable outcome has been that the KLA and its allies have engaged in daily massacres of Serb civilians, have looted, stolen and "appropriated" vast amounts of Serb civilian property, businesses, and infrastructure, and have persecuted any Albanians who did not tolerate these terrorist activities in silence. The Albanian criminal element, in symbiosis with the KLA, has become the institutionally dominant factor in Kosovo, as is admitted by no less an establishment source than the New York Times. (4 )
While the US/NATO tries to score propaganda "brownie'" points against UN over-policing of Kosovo, the reality is that US/NATO strategy was never really concerned with the humanitarian situation its propaganda blathered about. Instead of trying to reestablish some sort of viable economic and legal infrastructure in Kosovo BEFORE allowing the return of Albanian refugees, the US/NATO essentially encouraged a helter-skelter return of almost all the refugees in a very brief period of time to a country devastated by the NATO bombings and to some extent by Serbian "ethnic cleansing." Taken together with the virtual free rein given to the KLA, it is quite clear that US/NATO policy was NOT to try to establish a situation of peaceful coexistence, but to exacerbate the already horrifically tragic situation-the civil war tensions in the area. The propaganda in the mass-media has tried to justify this situation as "inevitable revenge," whereas in reality both the original "ethnic cleansing," the devastation of the economic infrastructure (which in Serbia alone is estimated at $136 billion (5 ), and the current barbarous contra style activities of the KLA are due to the NATO bombings and the preceding Rambouillet farce, which even the most vicious advocates of civilian destruction, such as Thomas L. Friedman of the NYT, now admit were conducted in bad faith. (6) When it comes to justice, not revenge, the US/NATO believes they can rely on their financial, economic and military might to buy and extort the decisions they want (as in having Milosevic declared a "war-criminal").
Robert Hayden, Director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, said: "When questioned about NATO liability for war crimes, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said that 'NATO is the friend of the Tribunal. . . . NATO countries are those that have provided the finances to set up the Tribunal, we are among the majority financiers.' Mr. Shea clearly knows that he who pays the piper calls the tune." (7 )
Many jurists from the international community are trying to have those responsible in the US/NATO coalition brought to justice for war-crimes, the latest being former chief counsel for the House Watergate committee, Jerome Zeifman, who has filed charges before the International Criminal Tribunal seeking the indictment of Clinton and Secretary of Defense William Cohen for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. These formal legal documents have been submitted to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague. Zeifman is a lifelong Democrat whose meticulous preparation of the case against Richard Nixon forced the Republican president out of the White House. (8) Notes Sam Smith, ". . . in an age of internationalism and depreciated national sovereignty, the president of the United States as well as the defense secretary could be placed in the same defendant's box as Slobodan Milosevic, the indicted Yugoslavian war criminal."
However, the political and financial realities now seem to be outweighing conscience, justice, and the rule of law. To justify US/NATO devastation in the immediate aftermath of the 'peace,' the imperial mass-media tried to report mostly on the sites of alleged massacres that were being uncovered. But as Edward Said has written: "A number of honest reporters here and there have admitted that what exactly took place so far as the ethnic cleansing of Albanians by Serbs was concerned is still mostly unknown, since the NATO bombings of Kosovo, the actions of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and the actual brutality of individual or collective Serb actions took place all at once: trying to determine the blame and responsibility in such chaos, except to score self-justifying debating points is pretty difficult, if not impossible. (9)
The following is an example of the disinformation and confusion generated. Bernard Kouchner, head of the UN mission to Kosovo, has retracted statements made on August 2nd that as many as 11,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed in Kosovo, saying the figure was an overestimation. He stated, "I had so many meetings with people and it seemed to me that this number corresponded to reality, but I was wrong." An official of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Paul Risley, said it was premature to give a solid figure, but that some international organizations had put the number at a total of 7,000. (10) All in all, the mass-media's performance has been so outrageous, that John Pilger, a renowned British journalist, recently entitled one of his articles "Nothing in My 30 Years of Reporting Wars Compares with the Present Propaganda Dressed as Journalism." (11) As is always the case in 'contra'-style operations, 'humanitarian' relief is merely dangled sadistically as an imperial carrot to exact slavish political obedience in the aftermath of the devastation used as the imperial stick.
The hundred billions of dollars in economic devastation and in military hardware can hardly compare with the trickle of millions in basic aid, while the war and "reconstruction" profiteers wait on the sidelines for their trillions in profits .
The US/NATO strategy and the current activities of the KLA, only confirm what I wrote in a previous article, namely that the most recent "humanitarian war" by the US was in reality intentionally aimed at one of its current rivals on the global scene, the EU and its emerging "euro." The devastation, the ecological catastrophes (not only because of the use of depleted uranium ammunition, but because of the bombing of chemical and petrochemical plants, laboratories with radioactive materials, and so on), and the enormous rise in tensions in the area were not part of some "accidental blunder," but are consistent with a process of destabilization and an imperial "divide and rule" policy that has been part of US strategy for decades. The major difference is that the US, no longer leading a "cold-war coalition" in the evolving 'post-cold-war' tripolar world, is now aiming its apparatus of state-terrorism at its major rivals in Europe and Asia, regardless of the cost to the rest of the world.
1. Stratfor, "Kosovo Crisis Center," 08/02/99.
2. Ibid, 08/06/99.
3. NYT, 6/27/99, "Report: Yugoslavs Linked to Crimes.
4. NYT, 7/29/99, Chris Hedges, "As U.N. Organizes, Rebels Are Taking Charge of Kosovo."
5. Edward Said, "The Treason of the Intellectuals," AL-AHRAM WEEKLY, June 24-30 .
6. NYT, 8/6/99, Editorial.
7. INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES, 5/27/99 <institute@igc.org>.
8. Sam Smith, "Undernews," 7/12/99.
9. Edward Said, op. cit.
10. Stratfor, 08/04/99. 11John Pilger, NEW STATESMAN, 7/12/99.