issue

Benjamin C. Works, Executive Director

--Speak the Truth and Shame the Devil--

SIT-REP 6-30; Wednesday, June 30, 1999 (July 1^st Revision in Bold Type)

KOSOVO: Who is Cleansing Whom?

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

- Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 23 April 1770.

Sometimes, when outnumbered, it is best to sit back and let fools pursue their follies for a while, while keeping track but keeping relatively quiet. Sometimes you just get a bit of the "writer's block." Sometimes other projects come up, including a recent lobbying trip to Washington on behalf of providing humanitarian relief into Yugoslavia. Suffice it to say that when I get around to writing a history of this tragic crime, I have ample information for the gaps in these newsletters.

I did manage to write a guest essay for David Hackworth's newsletter, which should circulate this week; it is about those Albanian-American Political Action Committee ("PAC") contributions. "Hack" has also taken his cut on the wildly exaggerated NATO claims in their "body count" estimates of destroyed Yugoslav equipment and dead Yugoslav Army troops. NATO propagandists, led by Jamie Shea, were more ludicrous in their inflated assertions, it appears, than the old Vietnam War body counts presented at the daily "Five O'clock Follies" in Saigon. For example, NATO claimed 110 destroyed tanks; on the ground about 12 were counted, supporting Yugoslavia's Third Army's report of losing 13 tanks. Less than 500 soldiers died in bombardment and battles with the KLA, vs. a NATO report of 5-10,000 dead. The discrepancies go on. Our media are served up "spin" by a corps of liars "of magnitude."

Mass Graves and The Post Hoc Argument:

Before I get started, a number of people persist in misinterpreting my writing as anti-Albanian screed, when in fact, I am focused on the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and the ultra-nationalist xenophobes of the "Greater Albania" movement. Some one-third of Kosovo's Albanians were "loyalists" before the bombing began; they are now being found murdered, raped, or tortured in new KLA torture chambers (as in Prizren, first reported on June 18^th, with a second confirmed incident in the NY Times of June 28th). Another half of Kosovo's Albanians were pacifistic supporters of Ibrahim Rugova, before bombing and forcible expulsions radicalized more. --I suspect that Mr. Rugova and other more moderate leaders suspect that Kosovo is not a safe venue for them so long as Mr. Hashim Thaci and the KLA remain prominent.

The many politicians who have conspired this tragedy over the many years it has taken to accomplish the destruction of Yugoslavia are to blame and Serb politicians are also equally guilty to the extent that they failed abysmally to find alternative solutions to contest the conspirators' stratagems. Politicians took the low road of stimulating greed, envy and hatred among their followers, and after years of pressure and under fire, some Serbs broke under pressure; thousands are dead who would have been alive had NATO not launched its ill-advised and illegal bombing campaign. Under the curious "might makes right" interpretation of NATO's collective aggression, its crimes and violations of international law are swept under the rug while Serb crimes will be prosecuted.

Yes, there are mass graves in Kosovo and may have held several thousand bodies. Britain has estimated 10,000 victims of slaughter, to justify NATO's campaign --but NATO's British and American propaganda mouthpieces also claimed NATO had killed some 5-10,000 Serb soldiers. The victims will prove to be those from local massacres, NATO bombs, battles and skirmishes between Yugoslav forces and KLA guerrillas, plus the victims of local vendetta score-settlings. There were some 1200 to 2000 dead from the KLA guerrilla war before NATO's bombs dropped and many of those victims have been incorporated into the body counts for the war crimes indictment of Mr. Milosevic.

The numbers have been made impossible to reconcile by a combination of NATO assertions and Yugoslav measures, including alleged attempts to destroy corpses through disinterment and cremation. This recalls the way Nazi "Einsatzcommando" groups went around cleaning up mass graves of Jews in the middle of World War 2. Cremation, it seems to me, is also a way to encourage many who continue to hope that images of mass graves were concocted by NATO using doctored photos and such. But NATO has also manipulated its numbers, images and evidence. Izbica is the particular focus of manipulation by both sides.

Many Serbs will continue to deny the extent of these massacres and killings, but any massacre is one too many, and the simple act of ejecting "illegal immigrants" from Kosovo, in response to NATO aggression, was a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Whether or not Mr. Milosevic ordered massacres, he is responsible for them as head of state. It is time for him to find other career interests.

But since the Albanian nationalists, in their boycott years of 1989-1998, abandoned their Serbian and Yugoslav Parliamentary seats to Serb radical supporters of Milosevic, Vojslav Seselj and "Arkan," the pro-reform parties have a problem unseating Mr. Milosevic without some other intercession, such as the Army and Church. It is not yet clear whether the NATO-UN peacekeeping effort will provide for elections to those seats, where Albanian delegates would provide a block of votes aimed against Milosevic's coalition.

That said, the cleansing and alleged massacres happened only after NATO bombs began to fall in a punitive campaign allegedly mounted to prevent genocide and an ethnic cleansing of Albanians that had never taken place to begin with. The campaign, we know, was deliberately prepared by Mme Albright and others, to force an unpalatable surrender of sovereignty on an unpopular, but legitimate sovereign government. Thus the bombing is the prior and precipitating crime. Further, we have explored for the "original sin," and find it squarely on the hands of the KLA and its predecessor Albanian nationalist organizations and movements. Mme Albright cannot explain away the demonstrated ethnic cleansing of Serbs and other minorities in the autonomous years of 1974-1989. She cannot explain away the fact that the KLA cleansed over 100 villages of Serb and minority populations between October 1998and March 1999. She cannot explain away the "Greater Albania" conspiracy, which suborned Congress and the Clintn government over the years. --More below on this.

Mr. Clinton explained that the war was "just," and that NATO bombed because the Serbs were intolerant and were attacking --killing-- people based on how they worshipped God and who their forbears were -he never bothered to document these assertions with facts or allegations. But that was not the case prior to the bombing. The Yugoslav government forces were attacking rebels and terrorists --albeit creating a greater problem for themselves through crude tactics used in the March 1998-March 1999 civil war.

I maintain that the whole basis for the NATO Air War was a "Post Hoc" or False Cause argument --the bombing came before the cleansing. At the time of the bombing it was the Albanian nationalists who were cleansing other populations, and with the NATO occupation, that racist work has resumed under the noses of the NATO forces. That's right; under current American parlance, the KLA-Greater Albanian behavior is "racist." War is organized theft of property; excuses for theft never work in court, but work wonderfully in the war for public opinion.

NATO has admitted (NY Times and Time Magazine -June 28 pp.28-29, etc.) that they knew before the bombing began that Belgrade had prepared "Operation Horseshoe" as a means of depopulating Kosovo. But NATO failed to provide for the refugees, having failed to prevent that operation's inception through preventive diplomacy. One can only conclude that NATO wanted that ethnic cleansing and wanted it to be messy as part of their propaganda strategy.

I am not alone in arguing that the US should never have gotten involved and that what we have accomplished is in any way either "right," or justified by the events that transpired on the ground after NATO's illegal aggression began. Pat Buchanan and Henry Kissinger are among the distinguished minority who object to the post hoc premise for NATO aggression. A lot more out there worry about America's leadership of this unjust bullying which has only served to benefit racists, in league with fascists, Marxists and Islamic fundamentalists, and who freely deal in heroin, prostitution and every other form of corruption and vice (as my website archives clearly prove).

In likening this post-Cold War crusade for "our values and morals," George Kenney, writing in the June 14^th The Nation, compared Kosovo to Vietnam in 1968 ("Rolling Thunder: the Rerun"). He dropped this bombshell, un-refuted by the Administration:

Could it be the same with Yugoslavia? An unimpeachable press source who regularly travels with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told this reviewer that, swearing reporters to deep-background confidentiality at the Rambouillet talks, a senior State Department official had bragged that the United States "deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept." The Serbs needed, according to the official, a little bombing to see reason. Many critics already assumed the United States was creating a pretext for bombing --it seemed abundantly evident from the sham Rambouillet plan, which in its military appendix B demanded what would have been an unconditional surrender of Yugoslavia-- but it is still astonishing to find out that a senior official would crow about a premeditated US plan to justify attack. Does the Gulf of Tonkin ring a bell?

Henry Kissinger remains adamant against this crusade, supported by "Neo-Conservative" crusaders, as well as the establishment Liberal combine represented by Clinton's "Third Way." His critique appeared in an interview with Boris Johnson, "Cold War warrior scorns 'new morality'" which appeared in Monday's The Telegraph:

"I object to statesmen who pretend that there is a new concept that they have invented, and that the previous centuries have been run by people of lesser illumination," he says in his Claridges suite and his magnificently studied German-American drawl·.

But he thought the whole business was misconceived. The Rambouillet text, which called on Serbia to admit Nato troops throughout Yugoslavia, was a "provocation", "an excuse to start bombing". "Rambouillet is not a document that an angelic Serb could have accepted. It was a terrible diplomatic document that should never have been presented in that form."

The Serbs may have behaved barbarously in suppressing KLA terror. But 80 per cent of the ceasefire violations, between October and February, were committed by the KLA. "It was not a war about ethnic cleansing at that point. If we had analysed it correctly we would have tried to strengthen the ceasefire and not put the entire blame on the Serbs.

"If Milosevic had engaged in massive ethnic cleansing without the bombing, I would probably have gone along with it. But if you add up all the suffering and ethnic strife that has followed, and all the consequences yet to happen, I am not persuaded that another course would not have been better."

Readers with the luxury of time and resources might check out Mr. Kissinger's critique of neo-conservative crusading instincts in the May/June Foreign Affairs Magazine, an interesting companion to the Hedges article on the KLA.

Thaci, Gypsies and Other Victims:

Less than two months ago Chris Hedges of the New York Times wrote a "cutting edge" policy essay for the May/June issue of "Foreign Affairs" decreeing that the KLA was a factor NATO would have to contend with for a long time. Indeed; those with the guns control the revolution and NATO handed Kosovo over to the KLA on a platter.

Last Friday, in the New York Times, Hedges explored Hashim Thaci's track record using homicide to control his followers in the KLA. Hedges indicated that at least 6 KLA leaders have been liquidated by Thaci, and further indicated Thaci's direct ties to the Albanian government, military and secret police establishments. Since that article's publication, though, Mr. Thaci has been all sweetness and light, a voice of moderation, and has been subjected to intense charm-school training by Robin Cook of Britain, Jamie Rubin and others. Such photo opportunities. Thaci now power-lunches.

Just since Friday, Jamie Rubin has denied a connection between the KLA and the Heroin Mafia, then denied that his lunch-buddy, Hashim Thaci is homicidal, but we know better. Dress him up any way you want, though, and the 30-year old "Snake" is a brutal totalitarian; they may wean him from Marxist-Stalinist theory to "Third Way" boardroom plutocracy, but he is still an extremist, wedded to the law of the jungle. In a suit though, he and Jamie Rubin almost make for a pair of "twins separated at birth." So photogenic. Our Millenialist "cabaret socialists" and "limousine liberals" now have a homicidal maniac as an official pet "liberationist" leader. Let network anchors and editorial boards explain this, please!

An even more interesting twist, as the KLA rampaged through Kosovo's security vacuum is that NATO and the media found that the KLA's ethnic cleansing vendetta extended to Kosovo's large gypsy community and to Albanian loyalists and other ethnic communities within Kosovo --it wasn't just about Serb tyranny. It was, indeed, always about a chauvinist-xenophobic Greater Albania.

But the media have accepted the KLA line that the gypsies are just "collaborators." It is noteworthy that there were an estimated 150,000 gypsies in Kosovo when this dreadful business began, most of whom had been bullied into enumerating themselves as Albanians in older census counts. This was possible because many gypsies --former slaves and serfs under the Ottomans-- took their masters' surnames --I read about Bajrami Berisha, a gypsy from Kacanik in a wire story which will be included in a forthcoming archive on KLA depradations against Gypsies, Croats, Turks and others.

A pro-Tudjman Zagreb newspaper, Vecernji List, reported on June 22 a story remarkable enough to be picked up by Belgrade's news agency, (Tanjug) "We are afraid that Albanians will return our good with evil, transfers the from Zagreb the words of a resident of the Kosovo town of Janjevo, which is inhabited by another four hundred Croats. " It appears that this mountain village's minority population is being actively harassed by the KLA. At one point the men were lined up against the wall in a mock firing squad.

As to the gypsies, they are being tortured, raped, dispossessed and Belgrade wants to block these refugees fleeing north into Serbia. There were some 150,000 Roma in Kosovo. Compare these two conflicting statements about the Kosovo Roma made by relief community professionals from current wire stories:

``Basically, they've always been accused as allies of the Serbs. In the old pecking order, they were higher than the Albanians, and as a result, they're coming under a lot of pressure now,'' said Judith Kumin, a spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commission for Refugees in Geneva. (AP-NY-06-29-99 1503EDT)

Vs.

But international relief officials caution against making snap judgments about the Gypsies' alleged role in the Serb campaign to purge Kosovo of its Albanian majority. ``During times of ethnic strife, people look for a scapegoat,'' said Paula Ghedini, a spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency. ``The Roma have a long history of being outcast, marginalised and victimised in this part of the world.'' (Reuter; 03:07 06-25-99)

The Clinton-NATO position is to explain away this anti-minority, anti-dissenter violence in terms couched in situational ethics and moral relativism. The Albanians have a right to violence after their trauma, the argument goes --they can rape nuns, policemen's daughters, mentally ill Serbian girls, kill priests, sack churches and monasteries, chase out unwanted populations, etc., ad nauseum. On Monday, the US State Department's plenipotentiary for War Crimes, Mr. David Scheffer, explained: to A Craig Copetas of the sympathetic Wall Street Journal; "We must understand that [the ethnic Albanians] want revenge, and it would be foolish to argue that they should not have these feelings." Okay, but what about the Croats, Gypsies, Turks et al? Do two wrongs make a right? Is rape by the KLA justified? Who began the atrocities, anyway?

In order to make the NATO-UN intervention marketable as a "just war," it appears to be necessary to demonize an orphan people --the most oppressed everywhere else in Europe-- as active criminals, rather than as innocent bystanders. The Czech Republic -a new NATO member- is busy walling its gypsies into ghettoes, for instance, while there were no ghettoes in Yugoslavia. Perhaps this is a part of the reason why the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney are not on board with the Administration policy.

US Readiness:

What have we done to Kosovo's people; what have we done to the Constitution and to the international rule of law? And what have we done to our armed forces, particularly our air forces? We have not only demystified the mystique of conventional air power --again-- and emptied the munitions lockers. We have worn our people and equipment down even more.

It seems the US was too quick in claiming its air war victory, while also doing further damage to long-term readiness of our air forces. Per reporter Otto Kreisel, writing in the July issue of "Air Force" magazine, the official journal of the US Air Force Association, Air Combat Command's leader, Gen. Richard E. Hawley made the following admission:

"We are going to be in desperate need in my command for a significant retrenchment in commitments for a significant period of time," after the war, he told reporters April 29^th. This stand-down would be needed "to restore the health of the units, allow them to get back to basic training, get their basic skills upgraded, [and] upgrade all the new people who have come out of the training pipeline during the course of this operation."

He said, "We have a real problem facing us three, four, five months down the road in the readiness of the stateside units."

At the end of Operation Allied Force, the USS Theodore Roosevelt (not damaged by a Yugoslav "kamikaze" as some on the internet theorized) was off to the Persian Gulf, so that the USS Kitty Hawk task force could hasten back to the Pacific, where a Korean naval dispute was generating casualties over some crab fishing grounds. Add to that dispute fresh reports that North Korea has deployed 10 medium range Rodong missiles, which are capable of hitting much of Japan. Atop that, intelligence reports indicate North Korea is preparing to test a new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile capable of hitting the United States.

The strains continue all around the US military.

In Serbia and Kosovo - "Milosevic Must Go"

Yugoslav reserve units demonstrated for back pay for about four days, then yesterday, elements of the political opposition --ex Vuk Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Movement-- began demonstrations at Cacak, which they expect to spread across Serbia in coming days. And the Orthodox Church, though still under immediate threat from Albanian extremists in Kosovo, renewed its attack on the Milosevic government. The Church, throughout the crisis of the last year and a half, has been a voice for tolerance and community, not a parochial voice for an ethnic group.

"If the only way to create a greater Serbia is by crime," said Patriarch Pavle on Vidovdan (Monday), at a news conference at Gracanica Monastery, "then I don not accept that, and let that Serbia disappear. And also if a lesser Serbia can only survive by crime, let it also disappear. And if all the Serbs had to die and only I remained and I could live only by crime, then I would not accept that, it would be better to die."

Bishop Artimije, at the same conference expanded: "We are both aware, as God knows, how much evil has been done in the course of the last year and especially in the last three months. The greater part of the guilt lies with Milosevic· What is not understandable is the suffering caused by the undemocratic regime of Milosevic. The Orthodox Church has called for the resignation of Milosevic, not because we lost the war in Kosovo, but because we think the problem could have been resolved peacefully." (NY Times June 29, 1999, p. A9).

It is early, but Yugoslavs wonder why they suffered through 78 days of bombing only to see an intact army withdrawn, churches and monasteries burned, Serbs, Gypsies and other minorities put on the run, and the misery of sanctions continue. It is time for Mr Milosevic to go; rumors circulate -- exile in Beijing? Will the Church call on Prince Alexander to ascend the Serbian Throne? It does seem that competing egos in Belgrade, among the opposition, continue to be the greater obstacle to reform and an apolitical "regency" might give the people a holiday from dueling egotisms.

At the same time, some radical Serb nationalists are inclined to prepare for attempts at launching a guerrilla campaign against the NATO occupation. So far we have only seen a few hard drinkers, faced with the immediate prospect of losing everything, take shots at NATO troops from the Serb side --Slivovitz Rangers. This is a tragic form of self-destruction by people much afflicted. But there is a prospect of a more serious infiltration, if NATO continues to condone the ethnic cleansing of all 19 minority ethnic communities and some Albanian loyalists by the KLA's xenophobic extremists. Getting policy back to the facts would help reduce this evolving danger.

The UN is attempting to respond by rounding up 3000 people to form an international police force. The Russian Brigade became another important element --Sir Michael Jackson seems to be more favorably disposed to the Russian presence after a few days of the KLA running amok against gypsies and Albanian loyalists, as well as against Serb civilians and clergy.

Western Civilization is not distinguishing itself this year.