SIT-REP 3-22; March 22, 1999

In This Issue: Kosovo Showdown

NEW ARCHIVE: Partly in order to dispel propagandistic misrepresentations by Bob Dole and Joseph DioGuardi, the SIRIUS "Background Issues" archives now includes a file "Kosovo-1980s," containing 14 articles from the New York Times and Washington Post between 1982-89. These add further insight into how the old provincial government, dominated by Muslim Albanians, systematically encouraged the ethnic cleansing of Serbs, beginning in the mid-1970s. Other archives have been updated as well.

Matters have come to a head in the Balkans; Mr. Milosevic continues his not entirely unreasonable objections to a NATO occupation force in the violence-torn province of Kosovo & Metohija, his troops continue to pursue Commander Remi's KLA renegades in the Drenica District (I say renegades because Remi called on the KLA to reject the Rambouillet Accord and went on the offensive three weeks ago), and elsewhere there are continued acts of violence, possibly from both Serb and Albanian extremists.

In America, the people are lukewarm, at best, to Mr. Clinton's reasons for any US involvement. At the weekend a poll showed 62% objected to bombing and 49% even objected to a peaceful occupation of Kosovo by another US-NATO peacekeeping force. In Serbia, many are weary of the whole mess, but nationalists are so angry with Rambouillet and Bosnia that they threaten to depose and kill Milosevic and his wife the way the Romanians removed Ceausescu in December 1989. Those same fed-up nationalists vow that when NATO bombs fall, the real ethnic cleansing of Albanians from Kosovo will begin -- with several hundred thousands chased into Albania or Macedonia.

Then what, Mr. Clinton?

This is a civil war stirred up by ambitious ethnic-political leaders where some not-very-nice people on both sides are ruining the lives of many good people in the several groups living in Bosnia. It has never been a good idea to intervene in a civil war either as a partisan ally or as a neutral interventionist. The West has been wrong, for many years, to encourage any Albanian hopes of independence, and now, not having sounded like an "honest broker," it is unsurprising that the Serbian people feel they remain as the target of an international neo-fascist conspiracy against their nation.

After three months of bombing Iraq, there appears to be a pause in the ongoing air-ground skirmishes during the Haj pilgrimage season, but Saddam has not conceded to the US and Britain over the legality of the no fly zones or the UN-mandated weapons inspection regime. Air power is very useful in paving the way for ground force attacks, but the Iraqi strikes have largely dispelled the myth that conventional airstrikes alone can command obedience or cooperation.

CBS Radio has invited me to their studios tomorrow, Tuesday, in anticipation that the current impasse between Belgrade and NATO remains unresolved. People in America, Moscow, Beijing and Belgrade who have studied air attacks on Iraq already know how the US plans and executes its punitive strikes and CBS will get my best analysis. Some of my CBS colleagues read this newsletter and know I personally oppose what may happen, but will confine me to the technical and objective aspects of what may happen.

I will observe that it is very easy for Yugoslavia's intelligence apparatus to monitor NATO bases from outside the wire, and our ships, which launch "surprise" first strikes, will have a lot of small vessels observing their operations as well, achieving tactical surprise is more difficult with Yugoslavia than with Iraq. We shall, perhaps, see how Moscow has progressed in developing defenses against Tomahawks and GPS satellite guidance systems.Many in Congress wonder where this is heading; Majority Leader Trent Lott had called for the Senate to address the question of a Kosovo intervention this week, so it appears that Mr. Clinton may have accelerated the crisis, by ordering out embassy staff and the OSCE observer force on Friday, to create the appearance that there was an immediate danger to those people and an immediate threat of a general rampage by Yugoslav forces.

Instead, the Yugoslav forces have continued a blunt and cold-hearted counter-offensive aimed at Commander Remi and his hard-core forces in the Mitrovica-Drenica region northwest of Pristina --this group contains many of the most ruthless foreign-born mujaheddin and Croat mercenaries. Over the weekend the government reached the area around Prekaz and Srbica, where in World War II, local Albanian warlords cleansed 30,000 Serbs out of these and other district villages, refugees whom Tito prevented by law from returning to their homes at war's end. Fifty four years later, an old score is being settled.

Elsewhere in the province violence continues at lower levels, some random, some from the KLA, some from the government or non-Albanian extremists.

Mr. Clinton's policy team has stuck to the NATO option for coercion and stuck too close in public rhetoric to the ad hominem propaganda vilifying Milosevic as "the butcher of the Balkans" and the Serb people as "Nazis." Why did diplomatists not look at the OSCE-Helsinki option? Why must Mr. Clinton use the NATO Ministers' agreements as justification for this intervention? Why skirt Congress by citing as his justification the consensus of foreign and defense ministers, none of whom were elected or selected by the American people?

Mr. Clinton was able to use this NATO means once before, in bombing Bosnia in 1995. Congress, its thinking occluded by Bob Dole and other partisans, went along that time, thinking that there had been real atrocities in that crisis. Turns out most of those were grossly exaggerated.

Further, just yesterday, the New York Times printed an article confirming that the August 1995 Croatian "Operation Storm" is likely to be found a criminal ethnic cleansing of some 200,000-plus Serbs in Krajina; a people chased out of homes they had lived in since 1578 and who had not been aggressive towards Croatia --merely a minority seeking to protect itself from neo-Ustasha bullies.

Congress has been manipulated into accepting a Presidential intervention once, but should ask serious questions with Clinton pulling the same trick a second time: "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me."

Let us hope tonight, that someone is poised to pull a rabbit out of a hat in the next 24 hours or so. Russian Prime Minister Yevgenny Primakov is due in Washington tomorrow, but Clinton is using a needed IMF loan to coerce Russian assent to the Rambouillet process. We shall soon know how much of this is theater and how much of this is genuine stupidity.

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