issue

Benjamin C. Works, Executive Director

--Speak the Truth and Shame the Devil--

SIT-REP 2-23; February 23, 1999

Inside this Issue: Rambouillet - "A Failure to Communicate"

"What we have here, is a `failure to communicate.'"

- Strother Martin; 1967 film, "Cool Hand Luke."

There is a major international diplomatic communications failure making itself increasingly evident in Rambouillet, Washington, Belgrade, Pristina and at the UN Headquarters in New York. After two deadlines came and went, both Albanian and Serbian delegations were sent home for two weeks (or so) to consult with their leaderships and supporters, after the Albanians "conditionally accepted" the deal, based on the prospect for an independence referendum in three years. They are expected to reconvene in London. Meanwhile, Kosovo Liberation Army terrorists and guerrillas have provoked daily fights in the beleaguered province, precipitating police reactions by murdering Serb civilians in small villages, then reinforcing the hit teams with combat squads. The KLA team was never negotiating in good faith, they were hoping to trick Serbia into a fatal blunder, which did not quite happen. Meanwhile, the Serb delegation agreed to accept "an international presence" but not necessarily the NATO occupyin force currently proposed.

When negotiations resume in two weeks, the KLA and political factions may well find they have not heard much sympathetic noise from the diplomatic community and further find that the deal on the table in London is less generous than the one just rejected. Further, they may find governments beginning to correct the record on who has been oppressing whom in Kosovo these last twenty-five years. Lastly, I understand China assumes the Presidency of the UN Security Council on March 1, and they will be very firmly opposed to unilateral action by NATO and to the compromise of sovereign rights of governments..

At Rambouillet there was a failure to communicate in what is an increasingly apparent diplomatic mess for at least three important reasons: the US-British policy, based on the assumption that Serbs are committing or may commit atrocities is diametrically opposed to the facts on the ground --the KLA is initiating every fight and for 25 years has been committing ethnic cleansing against Serbs, Gypsies and non-KLA supporters among the Albanians and other ethnic communities. Second, having based our intervention on misrepresented "facts" about which side is responsible for a possible "human rights disaster" the US tried to use the threat of aerial bombardment against a legitimate and sovereign government which is facing a ruthless rebel onslaught. Third, the US, in attempting to assert a "pro-active" role for NATO outside its treaty area, and NATO remains a military mutual-defense pact, the US has chosen the wrong treaty organization to sponsor any proposed "stand-still" tothe fighting, an organization which also has no treaty bearing on international diplomacy or civil rights within non-member sovereign states.

Who is Oppressing Whom?

In the years of Bill Clinton's "Third Way," I have never seen a wider gap between "facts" reported in the Media and the realities on the ground. You know, everybody gets along just fine in Belgrade, though in a near-equally shared deprivation, but folks do not do so well in the boondocks. In particular, the local Albanian majority in Kosovo has been harassing other populations since the 1970s, as much as 15 years before Mr. Milosevic surfaced as the champion of Kosovo's Serbs in June 1987. By July 12, 1982, The New York Times reported that the Albanian autonomous government and Albanian villagers were openly harassing and discriminating against Serbs, with 57,000 Orthodox Christian Slavs forced to emigrate in 10 years. "The [Albanian] nationalists have a two-point platform, ...first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania, " The Times reported. "Some 57,000 Serbs have left Kosovo in the last decade... The exodus of Serbs is admittedly one of the main problems... in Kosovo..." The ethnic cleansing of Serbs, accomplished by burning barns, killing livestock, sabotaging equipment, raping girls, beating priests and bishops, etc. continued and escalated while the Albanians cried to the world that their rights were being violated. This violence precipitated the rise of Slobodan Milosevic who curtailed this misrule.

On March 2, 1998, Chris Hedges of The New York Times, reporting from the KLA-controlled Drenica region, wrote that the KLA began a little terror campaign in 1993, began attacking police stations in November 1987 and near Srbica, assassinated a Serb official, Desimir Vasic, on Jan. 23, 1998. On February 28 last year, the Serb police began mounting weapons raids against KLA targets, leading to the first "battles." Hedges' report, which featured a front page color photo of three KLA fighters in uniforms and black ski masks, fondling Kalashnikov assault rifles, but failed to report that the men of those villages cleansed 30,000 Serbs out of Drenica district during 1941-45 and served in the SS Skanderbeg Division. After that report, the police attacked warlord-stronghold villages of Prekaz and Srbica, leading to the first howls of "massacres," when, in fact, these have been fierce house-to-house fights in fortified villages that resemble Stalingrad crossed with Vietnam.

I vividly recall Jim Lehrer of the Public Broadcasting System's Lehrer News Hour solemnly intoning a report of a mass grave in a voice-over while video footage clearly showed polished wood coffins and individually dug graves. In Prekaz, seeking to reinforce the propaganda spin of a massacre, the local Muslim Imam did not cooperate with the burial, so the authorities deliberately placed the coffins "backwards" relative to Mecca in the graves. The locals had to exhume the coffins, turn them around and rebury them. In nearby Srbica, as Mr. Hedges reported in a later dispatch, the Imam did cooperate and the coffins were interred in a decent Muslim burial. He then found out that just down the road the KLA had been harassing the poor nuns of Devic Monastery for years.

Last night CBS News learned something peculiar about the breakdown at Rambouillet; herewith the revelation:

CBS EVENING NEWS (6:30 PM ET), February 22, 1999

DAN RATHER, anchor:

The breakdown in and confusion surrounding the Kosovo peace talks have raised questions about the Clinton administration's foreign policy decision-making process, American intelligence gathering and what's really going on in these talks. CBS News White House correspondent Scott Pelley puts us in perspective. Scott.

SCOTT PELLEY reporting:

Dan, the very people that the United States is trying to save essentially doubled-crossed the president. A senior adviser here at the White House told CBS News that the Kosovar Albanian delegation indicated they might be inclined to accept the peace plan, which led Mr. Clinton on Friday to declare that air strikes against the Serbians could be imminent.

[replay film from last Friday] President BILL CLINTON: I think it would be a mistake to extend the deadline. The Kosovo Albanians have shown courage in moving forward the peace accord that we, our NATO allies and Russia have proposed.

PELLEY: The Kosovo Albanians then, of course, rejected the peace plan. One adviser here calls the Kosovo Albanian delegation eclectic and he says they have trouble figuring out what it is that they want to do. If they do not take the peace plan tomorrow, then another deadline will come and go. There is clearly a sense of exasperation at the White House, a feeling that the United States jumped in to stop a genocide, and the Kosovar Albanians are so far refusing to be saved. --End Clip--

Of course it was Albanians practicing ethnic cleansing and "genocide" by terror all along but the American Media, following the Clinton diplomatic message, failed to understand the history or report accurately. The Albanians rejected a political solution at this time; the rebellion continues. Two weeks from now, when talks reconvene, the KLA may find less generous terms and little official sympathy for their continued attempts to provoke an excessive reaction, so long as Yugoslavia's security forces do not perpetrate outright atrocities and make use of the OSCE observer missions properly. Yugoslavia need not fear bombing by NATO if it follows --as it generally does-- reasonable rules of conduct. Remember that the majority of Albanians, too, do not support the KLA and have not been subjected to evacuating their villages in the middle of the winter cold.

The Impasse Disguised as Progress -- Helsinki's Importance

The Helsinki Accord of 1975 is a trophy of US progressive diplomacy, but it is the US that is threatening its integrity over the matter of group right affirmative action, over individual civil rights. Today at the end of the Rambouillet talks, the Albanians of the hard core KLA and soft core Rugova "pacifist" factions both simply refuse to abandon their demand for independence, so they will not accept a lesser "home rule" or autonomy within Yugoslavia. In not accepting the 10 principles of the political agreement, the KLA has taken the heat off Belgrade's government, which has accepted those principles, but quibbles over the military agreement, which calls on NATO, not the OSCE or UN, to execute a military occupation on non-member soil. Moscow has sensibly suggested that the mission be given to the OSCE as that treaty does guarantee Serb and Albanian rights within a guaranteed border, the reason why it sponsors the observer missions there.

This Albanian intransigence over the issue of independence is also a primary reason why the Clinton team cannot demonstrate clear rules of engagement, an exit strategy or endgame, or any clear vision of why it should be involved in the first place. The Clinton-Blair police is hostage to having built itself on the erroneous propaganda which Clinton's team, seeking to mollify the international humanitarian establishment, embraced. Other reasons are that the KLA relies on the Kosovo Heroin Mafia for funding and is in alliance with Osama bin Laden, who is also now in league with Saddam Hussein.

This is why, with two "drop-dead" deadlines passing on Saturday and Tuesday, CNN has no bombing strikes to report. The international diplomatic community, though it has encouraged and abetted the demonization of Mr. Slobodan Milosevic, of the Serb people as individuals and as a race, and of the Yugoslav government, army and special police, will not gladly conspire to give sovereign power to the Kosovo Heroin Mafia and its collaborators in the KLA. The diplomatic community does not want to set aside the rigorous limits charted in the 1975 Helsinki Treaty which established what is now the 54-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe --the OSCE, under which the Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission (KDOM) and Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) monitors operate in that shattered province, a mountainous region smaller than Connecticut.

The Clinton foreign policy team is demonstrating that it is not as competent as its ardent admirers and spin doctors would have us believe. As Tuesday's deadline neared, Mme. Albright apparently tried to slip in an independence referendum to mollify the Albanians. Reuters reported that Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic (a former opposition leader) said on Tuesday international mediators had altered the draft peace plan to include a formula for an eventual referendum on independence for Kosovo.

``Until last night, the text was such that our delegation could have signed it. Since last night there were some games behind the scenes and under a different name, the idea of a referendum has been inserted in this new proposal.''

The fact is that it is the Albanian Muslims of Kosovo who continue to cavil about the core details of a political deal who are the bigger obstacle to a peace deal in Kosovo, while the Yugoslav government only quibbles about the details of the military-police occupation force. Albright's insertion of the suggestion of a mechanism for eventual independence at the last minute was not helpful.

The Helsinki accord and its OSCE mechanism does seek to ensure the rights of ethnic minority groups within its 54 member states, while also enshrining individual civil and human rights, and guaranteeing that borders of its sovereign members may not be changed except through peaceful negotiations. The KLA and its supporters demand an exemption, but that swiftly sets dangerous precedents none of the signatory nations want, for it legitimizes both secessionism and irredentist (an Italian word and political-nationalist concept originally) claims by State A to reclaim stranded minority populations' districts in neighboring states. Hungary would reclaim Transylvania from Romania, and Vojvodina from Yugoslavia, while Italy would demand the Tyrol, and on, and on, ad nauseum.

The international humanitarian community, needing a crisis to justify its growing importance and increasing budgets, has in hyping this propaganda distorted tragedy into a dangerous threat to the very Helsinki Accords which the humanitarians created themselves to serve. This is because they accept the group rights argument over the principles of individual rights and inviolable borders. The humanitarians of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, relief distribution groups and other interest groups are only encouraging violent rebellions and irredentist ambitions.

The humanitarians think nationalism is obsolete --it does stand in the way of their power in a universal government formed around the UN. Some Clintonians believe in this diminution of national sovereignty as well. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Paul Gogle reported yesterday in "Yugoslavia: Analysis From Washington -- Nations, States, And The International System:"

"·the Kosovo crisis has further reduced the scope for independent action by the leaders of countries. As Christopher Hill, the American diplomat charged with dealing directly with this crisis, put it during the weekend, his task is to convince both sides that a fixation on national governments "is a bit antiquated."

Dr. Henry Kissinger, in a syndicated column published over the weekend noted, a fourth disparity in US policy regarding the contradiction in goals for Bosnia vs. Kosovo:

"What confuses the situation even more is that the American missions in Bosnia and in Kosovo are justified by different, perhaps incompatible, objectives. In Bosnia, American deployment is being promoted as a means to unite Croats, Muslims and Serbs into a single state. Serbs and Croats prefer to practice self-determination but are being asked to subordinate their preference to the geopolitical argument that a small Muslim Bosnian state would be too precarious and irredentist. But in Kosovo, national self-determination is invoked to produce a tiny state nearly certain to be irredentist."

Air Strikes and "the CNN Factor"

Mr. Clinton sought to send a message to Saddam in the mid-December four-day punitive "Desert Fox" campaign in which the US and Britain managed to kill perhaps 1300 of Saddam's military. I note that as of Tuesday's end of the Rambouillet talks, the allies have had to strike at more than 80 different Iraqi air defense targets since December 26^th, and that Saddam forced three days of incidents even as the Rambouillet talks were continuing under threat of immediate NATO airstrikes. What sort of cooperation can we expect from Yugoslavia after airstrikes if they cannot coerce Iraq into compliance?

The KLA has as many as 10,000 armed supporters and is supported by perhaps 15% of Kosovo's population, but its hard core is likely around 2000 guerrillas, including followers of Osama and other foreign-born volunteers. That qualifies this as an insurrection, or rebellion, but not as a full-bore civil war, since the majority of Muslims does not actively support it and fear the Mafia more than they fear the police.

A reporter asked me today how many were killed in "Desert Fox," how many Serbs might be killed in this comparable punitive campaign, then wanted to compare that with the 2000 alleged dead in this Kosovo rebellion. I pointed out that 2000 is an inflated Albanian estimate and that the internationally verified body count is closer to 1200.

The threatened airstrikes would be resisted by Yugoslavia's armed forces and once they began, Serbians might chase the majority of the Albanians back into Albania in a reverse ethnic cleansing --the ultimate act of defiance.

Further, Reuters reported something interesting on February 14^th in an article entitled "Analysis-West Has Little Leverage Over Kosovo Guerrillas:"

"Asked how Western leaders could sustain such a position in the face of television pictures of slaughtered civilians, one senior American official said last month: "We'll just ignore them (the pictures). The 'CNN factor' is over-rated. It's only when we respond to the pictures that there's a consequence to them. We create the CNN factor, not CNN or the public or the warring parties."" ---End clip-

Simply put, the diplomats want the KLA out of business to put an end to "Greater Albania," while Interpol would dearly love to get the Kosovo Mafia under control; that, and the integrity of the Helsinki Charter of the OSCE are the only legitimate interests the international community has in this mess.

Let us stop demonizing the Serbs, who are the victims in this long-running mess (now more than 25 years in the making), and let both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Milosevic curb their propensity for playing what appear to be "wag the dog" games. Let the newly empowered international "humanitarian" community stop exaggerating and misrepresenting crises. Let's respect the Helsinki Charter instead of undermining it. Let Mr. Rugova's political wing demonstrate that an Albanian majority can govern responsibly this time, and that the rights of all Kosovo's ethnic groups will be equally respected.