SIT-4-7; April 7, 1999

In this Issue: Kosovo -- Human Rights and A Possible Way Out

NOTE To Readers: My inbox is swamped and I am not able to answer all mail as I would wish. My regular contributors are keeping me informed and I ask others to be patient for now.

To Contribute: Those who wish to contribute to humanitarian relief might call AmeriCares at 1 800 486-4357 and pledge a little money. That charity gets up-to-date medicines donated by many pharmaceutical companies and needs a minimum of cash to provide for transport and overhead expenses. Serbian-Americans and their friends might contribute and ask AmeriCares to provide a little help to Belgrade as well as to Pristina; it has ongoing flights in to Macedonia and Albania. It would be a helpful gesture for contributors and for that organization.

Let me make it perfectly clear, that though I have spent much time attacking the KLA and exploring the Serbian side of this tragic story, I am a solid believer in fundamental rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and remind Yugoslavia, that at the end of this dreadful campaign, the Albanians of Kosovo have the right, under the Geneva Conventions and UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), to return to their homes and live peaceably.

I also do not lose sight of the fact that the UDHR and other treaties do not confer on a people the right to misbehave --as NATO briefer Jamie Shea seemed to be trying to indicate on Tuesday-- and that rebels pay a price for a failed rebellion. The more utterly an insurrection is crushed --whether the cause is "good" or "bad"-- the more survivors may actually get past their leaders' misguided politics and revert to the saner politics of civility.

If NATO wants to resolve this crisis, it is time for the barrages of bombast and clouds of obfuscation to calm down. Stop exaggerating or you will only embarrass yourselves further. The US has had to admit it is delayed in deploying those Apache helicopter gunships because the Albanian infrastructure, particularly the Tirana airport, is too weak to support both relief and military buildup. The terrain is really awful and Sali Berisha (the Godfather of the KLA and former Albanian leader who presided over the pyramid scheme collapse in 1996) has turned northern Albania into a chaotic mess where highway robbers openly rob refugees, NGO staffers and reporters alike.

I have never expressed a blanket condemnation of the Albanian people or Serbs or any people. But the KLA tried to maintain a nasty civil war, and has repeatedly tried to trick NATO into a ground invasion, which they must not get if Central Europe is to progress in the 21^st Century. If we are sensible, the western powers will try to support the rational and responsible development of Albania, rather than an ongoing KLA guerrilla front, which would aim itself against Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Greece.

It appears that the clans and villages which support the KLA have been ground down and they are the principle groups of refugees now in Macedonia and Albania itself. Ultimately, even those who have been stripped of their documents will have to be afforded the choice to return and live in a civil society, or remain in Albania with the ultimate leader of this insurrection, Sali Berisha.

Readers will be interested to know that there are about 90-100,000 Albanians in Belgrade, as well as some 60,000 Croats, none of whom have been ethnically-cleansed. I understand that over the western Easter weekend just passed, many of those Belgrade Albanians protested the NATO bombing, but the remaining western media chose not to take note of that.

Yugoslavia, if I am right in sorting through the propaganda, has pushed dislocation and displacement of KLA rebel families and their neighbors to the extreme edge, and we know some tragic atrocities have, indeed happened. As deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic tried to explain last week, these are local events, not policy. We just saw an event not entirely dissimilar to Sherman's March through Georgia, with its own native and technological twists. What civilian observers (driven by very heart-rending video, but with gross propaganda distortions included) fail to realize is that in the end more lives are spared by this sort of rapid crushing of a rebellion, than by trying to mediate a no-fault rebellion where the government has to be polite and the rebels do not.

I note, regarding propaganda, that when Jamie Shea tried to revive the rumors of soccer stadium concentration camps in Pristina and Pec in Tuesday's briefing, a sharp reporter asked if he had satellite imagery to prove the allegation. Mr. Shea promptly changed the subject. Many Albanian interviewees have alleged in close-up shots that the young men had all been separated and marched off to an unknown fate, but when one looks at wide-angle footage in the camps, or at the photo on the front page of Tuesday's New York Times, military-age men are everywhere in evidence and in very large numbers. For those with the time to analyze footage carefully, more exceptions pop up. But we have been seeing this media manipulation for years and further archives will soon explore this in better detail.

It is clear that when Macedonia found thousands of KLA supporters on its border, they took the opportunity to reinforce Serbia's lesson by keeping them in a "no-man's land" for a couple of days, until NATO and the NGOs got camps and processing sorted out. That was completed today.

Yesterday, Mr. Milosevic, Mr. Rugova and others revealed their preliminary plan for a return to civil government in Kosovo, and Milosevic offered the Easter Ceasefire to go with it. The plan will turn out to be real, but since it did not include language regarding an international confidence-building presence, it is understandable that NATO and the White House opted to continue bombing. Today, Yeltsin and Primakov began adding their endorsement of the deal, with Yeltsin communicating with other leaders, while Russia confirmed that Mr. Rugova is neither imprisoned nor under duress.

Another indicator is that Acting President Spyros Kyprianou of Cyprus has undertaken to get our three American military prisoners released. Those fine men, Stone, Gonzalez and Ramirez, have no political value to Yugoslavia, and the gesture will be well received by those who increasingly do not believe what NATO, the State Department and White House are telling them. By the way, Jesse Jackson also began parallel talks on the men's release with Yugoslavia's UN Ambassador, Mr. Jovanovic.

As readers know, I have been suggesting since Rambouillet that such a confidence building force is the proper province of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) under the Helsinki Accord. I have mentioned that repeatedly on TV and Radio, and Monday evening, Dale Bumpers, a former Arkansas Senator and political godfather of President Clinton, picked up on that alternative in an MSNBC appearance. OSCE sponsored the unarmed monitors who were present in Kosovo from October until the weekend before bombs fell. Russia and other non-Nato members can participate in a confidence-building force under a revised version of Rambouillet, which basic principles were accepted by Yugoslavia, but rejected when Mme Albright tried a "bait and switch" by adding unacceptable provisions regarding legislative and judicial relationships in Kosovo which lacked adequate checks and balances at the republic and federal level. It also provided for outside powers to determine Kosovo's final status after thee years. With the KLA crushed, those elements can be substantially revised in a fairly balanced agreement.

The Art of a Deal: The artful leader in a tough confrontation always leaves the other sides some graceful means of disengaging from a showdown. Though some reputations and careers may be in jeopardy, the principals should have a chance to claim some share in the successful outcome. I think Mr. Milosevic understands that. I think Moscow and Beijing understand that as well. Prime Minister Zhu Rongi has a chance to whisper a few words of sense to Mr. Clinton during his visit to Washington. If Mr. Clinton is, indeed, sensible, he might call on some old policy hand such as Zbignev Brezinski, to help negotiate a fair and balanced way out of the NATO bombing war.

Lincoln has a similarly tough problem of "national reconciliation" at the end of our Civil War and set the standard in a speech made just about 5 weeks before he was assassinated. He meant to reconcile Americans in a better fashion than what came out from his successors, and Belgrade should consider how it can set a positive example that the KLA will find increasingly difficult to dispute via propaganda:

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

- A Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, 4 March 1865

Though he proved to be evil, Hitler did demonstrate, when he first took power, that Germany could work its way out of the Great Depression very rapidly, by starting with the basics. Mr. Milosevic, who is certainly no Hitler, can find ways of rapidly restoring Yugoslavia to productivity if he can get sanctions lifted and some modest cooperation. The West has already pledged financial support for Kosovo itself.

© Copyright 1999 by Benjamin Works - SIRIUS www.siri-us.com