November 19, 1999

In This Issue: Kosovo, Serbia, Croatia and Chechnya

It has been interesting to note the after-effects of the October 17^th report by Stratfor.com on the question of the mass graves in Kosovo. Having missed the chance to write that report myself (a good number of us had access to the same reports Stratfor used) it made sense to me to hold back and report on the US-NATO-ICTY response as well as other reactions. That will be the basis for the next SIT-Rep. Suffice it for now that the reaction at the US-NATO propaganda mills is weak, but the globalist gang of establishment liberals surrounding Mr. Clinton are having fun contemplating the carve-off of Chechnya and a number of other fools are falling for that repetition of the Kosovo game, including the perennial Democratic party guru, Zbignev Brzezinski (in the Nov. 19 NY Times -"Russia Would Gain by Losing Chechnya", and my good friends at the Wall Street Journal.

In this report I have been asked to look at the immediate situation in Kosovo, Serbia and Bosnia. I'll throw in Croatia and Chechnya as a bonus.

It is an "official" truth that under Mr. Kofi Annan, the UN has established itself as a neo-colonial power: Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor are the first colonies --"international protectorates" is the euphemism In the wake of Thursday's OSCE conference, it seems clear that our Mr. Clinton and friends would like to make Chechnya the fourth colony, while Indonesia's President Wahid is taking interesting measures to head off the possibility that the oil-rich and secession-minded Aceh province may provide an opportunity for a fifth colony.

As to Mr. Clinton, he's simply pushed his luck too far, in terms of international relations: his all-important "legacy" now includes vigorous anti-Clinton demonstrations in Turkey and Greece. In Turkey, the crowd was tiny, 50 or so in Istanbul and 100 in Ankara; but in Athens, thousands marched on Wednesday and again on Friday. Further demonstrations are expected as he visits Macedonia and Bulgaria in coming days --though sycophantic governments are trying to contain or suppress these natural expressions of popular outrage at "Emperor Bill's" machinations. In Bulgaria, Ms Blagovista Doncheva, who wrote an Op-Ed in the Nov. 11 NY Times "In Bulgaria, 10 Years of Misery" was arrested for protesting the proposed Clinton visit. Worse, Bulgar officials tried to stick in a mental ward --one must be insane to protest Mr. Clinton, seems to be the logic. For more on Ms Doncheva's story, readers are referred to www.emperors-cloths.com.

Kosovo Update:

What is the security situation in Kosovo now that Kfor and the UN have been in charge for over 5 months? Well, that depends on where we look and upon which ethnic group we study. No official will admit it for the record, because to many reputations and "legacies" are at stake, but Kosovo is worse than Mogadishu and the troops on the ground understand better why Serbia had to deploy so many police and troops into Kosovo last year, when the KLA disregarded Richard Holbrooke's Oct. 1998 ceasefire arrangement and kept on killing civilians of all ethnic groups, especially loyalist Albanians. This is why NATO and the UN have been progressively increasing the number of soldiers an international police to the "protectorate" mission.

First, there appear to be some strains between the UN and K-for over security; the UN is not getting enough volunteers to properly man its international police force. Originally commissioned with a strength of 3000, only about 1600-1700 have arrived. The UN, in reaction to the ongoing terror campaign waged by Albanian xenophobe terrorists, has authorized an increase to 4,000, but funding remains a problem. On Nov. 12, Kofi Annan proposed a budget of $456 mil including a further increase of police strength. He wants to deploy 38 military liaison officers, 4,718 civilian police, 1,269 international staff, 3,566 local staff, 18 national officers and 203 U.N. volunteers.

At the same time, Kfor quietly raised its military strength from 40,000 to 50,000 but still cannot provide adequate protection for minority communities except where the local commanders seriously want to. The French appear to be protecting the large Serb-Roma community in northern Mitrovica and the Turks are trying to protect the Muslim-Slav Gorani district in the southernmost district.

On the other hand, the Dutch battalion (scheduled to be relieved by a fresh Dutch force next month) appears, by many accounts, to be running the forlorn Serb enclave in the wine-making town of Orahovac as a "ghetto" where the water, food and electricity supplies are down at punitive levels. The Dutch, believing what the local KLA activists allege, think many local Serbss are suspected war criminals, though anybody with sense would understand that the real criminals would have fled to Serbia at the war's end in June. The real game appears to be an Albanian attempt to steal control of some very profitable wineries and vineyards in the district --you can imagine what kind of shape a vineyard must be in after so many months of neglect.

Murders and kidnappings continue at an outrageous pace, though the UN viceroy, Bernard Kouchner, asserts that the rate of new crimes is decreasing as a result of the Kfor strategy of positioning troops closer to minority enclaves. There is a nasty dispute as to how many murders have been committed, partly a result of the reaction to Stratfor's exposé of NATO's mass grave-genocide propaganda lies.

A dispute erupted on Nov. 11^th as to the numbers of murders since the inception of Kfor's occupation. On Nov. 10^th, in reaction to the Stratfor report, International War Crimes

NATO released figures Wednesday saying 379 people have been killed in Kosovo since June, including 135 Serbs. The other 244 victims not identified by NATO include Gypsies, Gorani, Albanian opponents of the KLA and others.

But the Serb National Council (Bishop Artimije, Father Sava and other reliable citizens) said 357 Serbs have been killed and 450 kidnapped (murdered? Or in illegal KLA jails?) from the time the peacekeepers were deployed in June just up to Sept. 1. Data for September, October and November are still being collected, the council said. Having met and measured Father Sava, the bishop and some of their associates, and having seen their earlier reports, I know their figures are more accurate than NATO's. As the reader can see, their number of Serb victims alone exceeds the NATO estimate by more than 100%. Alas, they did not report their numbers for other non-Serb victims of extremist Albanian violence. If we go through a scrupulous accounting, we may yet find that from Nov. 1997 through Nov. 1999, the KLA and its allies (Mafiosi and NATO pilots) have killed more Serbs, Albanians, Gypsies and others than can be attributed by the ICTY to Serb police and paramilitaries.

As to punishment for any of this, it will be all but impossible for the UN to establish a credible justice system as Albanians routinely declare blood feuds against any judge foolish enough to rule against them.

Kidnappings occur for several reasons: the KLA's terrorists continue a campaign of murder-kidnappings against their Albanian opponents as well as against Serbs, Gypsies and other "collaborator" minorities. Second, there are kidnappings for ransom. Then there is the matter of gangsters kidnapping girls to force them into prostitution. To date, unlike Chechnya, there have been no kidnappings of foreigners, though members of UN teams and reporters were routinely robbed in Albania.

Then there is a warning by an Albanian leader to Kosovo fathers: `your daughters are at risk!' Mafiosi, associated with the Heroin Mafia and the KLA are kidnapping teenage Kosovo girls and forcing them into prostitution in Europe. Now this has been an ongoing problem in Albania itself, but continues in NATO-occupied Kosovo, where the Albanian gangsters have had unrestricted access to the occupied province for the last five months. Still, Albanian politician Redzep Chosja, member of the Kosovo Interim Council established by Kouchner, issued a public warning on the subject this week, as Reuters reported on Nov. 17^th from Brussels ("Belgium faces rising tide of prostitutes"), that the Albanian-run prostitution ring is getting worse. The mafiosi are kidnapping Chechen girls as well as Albanians and even unwary Belgian girls.

The Canadians: The liberal sycophantic government of PM Jean Chretien has overstretched Canada's small armed forces in attempting to support Mr. Clinton and Mr. Annan's adventures in neo-colonialism. Canada now has 4400 troops (mostly Army) assigned to 22 different missions, out of a total strength of 60,000 in all its armed services. Presently Ottawa has 1450 troops in Kosovo, 1350 in Bosnia and 650 in East Timor. By April, NATO intends to cut SFOR's strength in Bosnia from 30,000 to 20,000. Britain will cut from 3300 to 2200 there, but Canada intends to strengthen its force there by about 300 troops --two infantry companies worth, I expect. To do that, while reducing its world-wide commitments, it will withdraw its battalion task force in Kosovo, leaving only about 100 support personnel there. Further, the battalion in East Timor will return in the Spring and will not be replaced with another. Since 1993-94, Canada has reduced its defense outlays from $12 Bil to $9.4 Bil, about 22%. Personnel have been cut by about that aount and the country's equipment is aging, to the point where NATO partners wonder about its ability to meet its NATO obligations. Hence, the retrenchment.

It couldn't come at a better time as the Canadian Press is responding aggressively to doubts about the whole US-NATO propaganda campaign waged during the Kosovo Air War.

Sovereignty and multi-culturalism:

Time is Serbia's ally and NATO's enemy. Can Mr. Milosevic outlast the Y2K Presidential Election, while the KLA continues to foul up everything in Kosovo? In the US, the Presidential Primaries will all but decide the election by April; can Serb-Americans and their Orthodox friends assemble a bloc vote in the "rust-belt states" that can swing this election for a sensible-minded next President? There are more than enough such votes to swing Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, the swing states that can decide the election.

With calculated regularity, Mr. Milosevic's government underscores the sovereignty issue and brings attention to NATO hypocrisy in interesting ways. Some is tailored to Serb nationalists (preaching to the choir) while some is tailored to the diplomatic realities of the G-8 cessation of hostilities agreement. At the same time, Belgrade has to duck attempts to cause Montenegro's secession, while delaying initiatives aimed at clearing the Danube River shipping channel. Most interesting, and the European Union has been seeking to sweeten the offer of reconstruction aid to Yugoslavia once free and fair elections are held.

Belgrade, in conjunction with the restless government of Macedonia, pulled an interesting trick a few weeks back, as a means of asserting its rightful sovereignty over Kosovo: it issued a "Notice to Pilots" banning commercial flights into Kosovo. For several days Macedonia cooperated with Yugoslavia to make that restriction stick, while NATO fumed. At the time, an Albanian airline had just initiated round-trip service to Pristina from Albania.

Yugoslavia continues to raise the question of when limited numbers of its military, police and border guards will be allowed to return to Kosovo, as provided for in the June cessation of hostilities agreement NATO's commander admits he cannot guarantee their safety from snipers. Yugoslavia has also raised the sovereignty issue in objecting to Mr. Clinton's anticipated visit to US troops next Tuesday and also lodges objections to other compromises of sovereignty not explicitly called for in the G-8 Ceasefire. They are right to do so and have the noise-level just about right. As the Kosovo occupation continues to thrash in its traces over the Winter and Spring, if Belgrade does not fall into another trap, there may be new opportunities as America goes through its Presidential Election process and as the political coalition behind the occupation reacts to its own exhaustion.

Last week, the independent Kosovo Albanian publisher Veton Surroi --no friend of the KLA-- told NATO legislators at the weekend that the alliance should drop its insistence on a ``multi-ethnic'' Kosovo, saying his people equated that phase with forced cohabitation. The UN and NATO picked up on the nomenclatural chang, as officialdom scrambles to avoid "cantonization" or partition of this already-failing social-engineering experiment: ``We have to look hard at how we can ensure some degree of cohabitation if not integration. It's going to be a challenge,'' a NATO official conceded on Wednesday.

The average Kosovo Albanian now knows what he or she can expect from the KLA (murder, rape, plunder and terror), from NATO (nothing), from "Greater Albania" (a Bedlam of crime and chaos) and from Serbia (law and order, but with the obligation to speak two languages and to pay taxes).

In Croatia:

Croatia faces parliamentary elections in the next month or two, but they are hampered by the fact that President Franjo Tudjman almost died from surgery on his stomach cancer. Officially, the Clinton team holds President Tudjman up as a sterling democrat, but his HDZ party is really a fascist-nationalist crowd, incorporating the aging survivors of the World War II "Ustasha" Fascist Party of Croatia, their families and other like-minded lunatics.

So, the US has been providing "democracy" consulting to opposition parties which show the promise of possibly ending the neo-Nazi HDZ grip on parliamentary control. Friday's New York Times (Nov. 19^th) reports that some of these US government employee consultants have been badly harassed by mysterious break-ins at their homes and openly suspects Tudjman's supporters are the perpetrators. This scandal has promise.

The ICTY is well on its way to thoroughly discrediting itself by its lop-sided indictments covering Krajina, Bosnia and Kosovo. Serb leaders are set up with indictments for what will be Stalinist-style show trials, but the other skunks are getting a free ride. Nobody has been indicted for the gross human rights violations in the "Operation Storm" cleansing of 200,000 Serbs from Krajina, committed by Croat forces, supported we find by US aircraft and retired US officer-consultants of MPRI. The Albright-Berger-Holbrooke foreign policy team justifies that gross violation as necessary force the Bosnian deal --the 1995 Dayton Accords.

On Chechnya:

Who invaded whom? How can Russia "invade" a province that is an integral part of its sovereign territory. Why is the US and the West again backing gangsters and lunatic cutthroats?

I don't think Russia is deliberately "bombing women and children," as a host of people are alleging, this week. In the past four years clan-based gangs and Islamist guerrillas have chased more than half of Chechnya's population out, ethnically cleansing Jews, Armenians, Russians and others, including a substantial number of fellow Chechens who want a little law and order in their lives. In this wave of fighting, which began with a guerrilla attack on the neighboring province of Dagestan, some 211,000-plus --more than half the remaining population-- have fled into Russian lines --not away from the Russians as oppressed people would flee.

Refugees tend to vote with their feet. Most refugees from the current Chechen fighting have fled into Russian controlled territory in Chechnya and on into the neighboring province of Ingushetia; a small number has fled into independent Georgia. Now the government of Chechnya tells us that some 4,000 or more civilians have been killed by Russian "aggression" and the human rights community is aroar with pleas for intervention, but there is little to corroborate those estimates, and from the refugee numbers we see that though not well provided for, most civilians are safe and away from the fighting and bombing.

Mr. Yeltsin in underscoring US and Western hypocrisy, at Thursday's meeting in Istanbul reminded the world of the anarchic situation in Grozny: "The pain of the tragedy," he said, "has been felt by thousands of families in every corner of Russia. In the last three years, terrorists have kidnapped 935 hostages, and these were not only Russians. They included also Britons, United States nationals, French nationals. About 200 prisoners are still being held by the bandits, and they are suffering atrocious torment at the hands of the bandits, upon which we cannot look with indifference." Torment, disfigurement and too often, brutal murder, are common features of these kidnappings.

Russia's own corruption and other problems are real matters for our concern but they are legitimately fighting a terrorist threat that falls mostly on other Chechens, themselves.

Yet, Mr. Clinton and others --including George W. Bush-- loudly criticize Moscow for openly attacking "women and children" in rhetoric identical to rhetoric used in the Kosovo propaganda campaign. Still, those women and children --and many men-- flee the Chechen "freedom fighters" into Russian controlled zones. In fact, there are innocent civilian casualties for the same reasons NATO generated innocent civilian casualties in Kosovo and Serbia -- pilots at 15,000 feet often mistake civilian vehicles and often pick the wrong targets among buildings near the battle line. Civilian casualties are "the fortunes of war" which is the polite way of saying "shit happens." Worse, guerrilla armies always position themselves near civilians in hopes of tricking the other side into generating "atrocities." The Vietcong and NVA did it, Aidid's militia in Mogadishu did it, and both the KLA and Chechen guerrillas --already linked as allies in the drug and prostitution trade andboth associated with Osama bin Laden's "Islamist" crowd-- are trying it. Why? Because it works so well with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other meddling ninnies of the Liberal Establishment.

At the same time, Russians must understand that this campaign does not have an end game --no "exit strategy," no "closure." Russia could occupy all of Chechnya but the guerrillas can pop up anywhere, any night and slaughter isolated guards and patrols. It is unrealistic for Moscow to think it can destroy all the guerrillas with a conventional army in a "set piece battle," what the French tried repeatedly in their Vietnam War. And this is where some greater kindness to the refugees would have played well: we called it "winning hearts and minds," in Vietnam.

Russia has gained control of the best parts of Chechnya by now, including most of its oil and gas fields, plus the second largest city. It has avoided a repetition of the street-fighting of 1994-96 which the Muslim guerrillas turned into a mini-Stalingrad for the Russian Army. But how will they finally smash the guerrillas and the gangs?

I believe that even the Russian generals understand there will have to be some political settlement, at some point, once they have delivered the maximum damage to the Chechen rebels. But negotiations with a government that couldn't establish order, or with an outlaw guerrilla army is impossible; Moscow will have to find and assemble credible leaders among the refugees. And once again, the international community, driven by a propaganda-shaped misrepresentation of events, is loudly supporting a vicious gang of Muslim murderers and gangsters, further encouraging a "no-fault" right of rebellion. Obviously the OSCE and UN want to install themselves as the middle men in this eventual settlement, but clearly they are not acting as honest brokers, but re-acting based on lies and half-truths, as partisans and empire builders.

I think Russia's biggest mistake here is not making better refugee relief provisions as this campaign unfolded. They could have done themselves a big favor by allowing the relief NGO's to build up in neighboring Ingushetia. Since so many of these relief personnel had been kidnapped --even killed-- by Chechen gangs in the last 4 years, the NGOs were operating out of Ingushetia anyway.

Many in Europe were eager to support Southern secessionism during our US Civil War, and today, too many "enlightened" people are over-eager to support secessionist movements without any critical review of those movements' behavior. As to the criticism of Russia's military campaign, they haven't even come close to doing to Chechnya what Sherman did to Georgia or the Nazis did to Russia. Nor did the Serbs in Kosovo.

© Copyright 1999 by Benjamin C. Works -- SIRIUS?WWW.SIRI-US.COM

Readers may repost this report in part or in whole, with this copyright notice, "for fair use only."