Benjamin C. Works, Executive Director

--Celebrating Chaos Theory Since 1987--

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SIT 9-30: Sept. 30^th 1998

"Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues."

- Thomas Hobbes; Leviathon; 1651

Today at 2:30 EDT I went out on a limb regarding massacres allegedly perpetrated by "Serbian" police and army troops against innocent villagers in the Drenica region over the weekend. There are at least two alleged massacres, one of which we have ample evidence of outrageous brutality against elderly, women, a pregnant woman, and children. In the other though, we only have 14 pools of blood and a bloody pitchfork, plus a body passing by on the way to a graveyard. We do not even know if the blood is human.

In a dispatch from AP this morning, local UN-OSCE observers involved with western reporters in documenting the massacres called for more outside forensic experts and not for immediate punitive bombing.

Here are important open questions:

Witnesses allege the attackers wore both police and army uniforms and wore Balaclava helmets (knitted face-mask caps) to mask their identities. The police and army do not wear those, the KLA does, as do many guerrilla and terrorist forces, which also makes it possible that a local Serb gang wanted some revenge. Further, police and army infantry do not operate in commingled groups. Further, Yugoslav authorities have kept their forces under very tight discipline all year to prevent groups going off and randomly terrorizing, and those methods have worked.

We also have had a couple of reports of KLA attempts to cobble up atrocities to blame, with pliant reporters involved, on the Yugoslav forces. The dead Albanians women and children are described by surviving relatives as "neutrals" in the struggle, but the district is home to the most ruthless of KLA terrorists, including those who are sons and grandsons of WWII Albanian veterans of the notorious Nazi-SS Skanderbeg Division, which mostly chased Serbs out of their villages and skirmished with Serb Chetnik guerillas. In such desperate guerilla operations, where the insurgents are clearly losing, nobody handy-by is a neutral, and if the last resort is to stage an atrocity, the KLA is most likely to perpetrate such a fraud --if force won't work, try fraud.

Remember that Hitler started WW II by dressing up some prisoners in Polish Army uniforms, then massacred them near a radio station just inside Germany's border.

Oddly, the New York Times reporter on the beat, Jane Perlez, though highly experienced in other stories, is new to this one. Chris Hedges, who was candid in debunking some earlier allegations of Yugoslav atrocities, was relieved from the story, then replaced by Mike O'Conner, who started off buying everything an Albanian could tell him. In today's Internet wires no Serb sources are quoted on site, all the alleged witnesses are Albanian. That is not balanced journalism protecting itself from propaganda tricks.

The reaction from the White House, the highly-partisan Bob Dole (long a beneficiary of Croat-fascist funds and Albanian activist money), and from the UN establishment has been very inflated and reeks of more "wag the dog." Herr Schroeder of Germany is mighty truculent as he seeks to consolidate his government. Meanwhile those international field observers want to check the facts fairly --but that part of the AP story disappeared from later editions on the Internet.

Notwithstanding rhetoric from Kofi Annan, the White House and elsewhere, NATO is still planning and won't meet until next week; neither will Mr. Annan get to a decisive meeting at the UN Security Council much before troops are ready to act, and they haven't been mobilized to Italian bases yet. But this afternoon everybody is declaring emergency meetings or issuing stern warnings; NATO is designating air force units. So there is to be a lot more posturing, even action, before this crisis is passed.

Important to me is that the US and NATO have 30,000 ground troops at some risk in Bosnia which might become targets for snipers if NATO does something precipitous. Their security has to be considered and bolstered before a prudent leader would take action.

Also important is the ongoing governmental crisis and insurrection by KLA allies in Albania.

I remain skeptical and that is why I went out on a limb on KNX news radio in Los Angeles today. I do not wish to see any massacres perpetrated by either side, but it simply does not make sense for Yugoslav police and army troops to commit a massacre at the moment of victory. But it makes all the sense in the world for the KLA to perpetrate a phony atrocity to pin on Yugoslavian government forces in order to trick us all into a wider Balkan war. It makes sense for Mr. Clinton to seize on this "crisis" to cover over his increasingly obvious failure to keep Saddam in line. It makes sense for Herr Schroeder to play at being tougher than Chancellor Kohl, as he takes over leadership of the EU's most important member.

This is not good for national sovereignty and not good for America's troops. Even if this were a random massacre by out of control Yugoslav forces, we had our My Lai and precedents for outside interference in a domestic insurrection in Kosovo set precedents for interference in America's moments of inner city domestic unrest and other odd situations, such as Waco. Under UN treaty law, Yugoslavia has the first obligation to try its alleged war criminals; I would keep the pressure there, while assuring neutral forensic experts assist in the gathering of evidence. But then, I am not President of the United States or Secretary General of the UN, nor do I aspire to be "emperor of the world."

© Copyright 1998 Benjamin C. Works-SIRIUS