SIT-3-5; Friday, March 5, 1999

In this Issue: Kosovo-- Marketing Rambouillet, A Killing Rampage!!

REQUEST For Information: I have asked Father Sava of Decani Monastery for an estimate of the size of the Albanian Catholic community and for any information on Albanian Orthodox communities in Kosovo, but he is a busy man. If someone would like to call the Catholic Diocese(s) for their estimate of parishes and parishoners, I would appreciate receiving the information.

NOTE TO READERS: For those with an interest in further research-documentation, www.siri-us.com, in the "Background Issues" folder, you will find that the KLA archives are periodically updated with further articles shedding further insight to each topic of interest. . Alex. V. (or AV, identity protected at personal request) has also contributed an archive to that section, "Uckmar1.html," detailing the murders of some 82 Albanians by the KLA since Richard Holbrooke's mid-October's ceasefire agreement. Summary information on these murders may also be found in KLA-Terror-Cleansing.html. This is an exercise in "forensic history" and appears to be proving the concept.

Marketing Rambouillet While Stopping the Murderers

Kosovo is chaos pretending at a civil community under duress. Restoring civic order and re-creating a civil polity will be difficult and time-consuming. Those powers who eventually intervene on the ground in a proposed occupation force should understand they will be playing nanny to some very bratty children who have no respect for the rule of law or for their neighbors.

In reality, whoever polices Kosovo in the next few years will not only be "Policeman of the World" but will also be "Nanny of the World." The real mission is a similar form of "nation building" previously attempted in Somalia. Readers know how well that mission worked out. It has not worked very well in Bosnia, either, but as I have discussed with SIRIUS associate AV, at least the Bosnian Serbs --and others-- are protected from Alija Izetbegovic's scheme to perfect his neo-Nazi Islamic fascist state in their districts.

In Kosovo diplomacy seeking to finalize the Rambouillet agreement continues. The Albanian Muslim leaders seek to market the political agreement, which provides the majority plenty of political largesse and pork, while America seeks to market the occupation force, necessary for confidence building, to a very chary Mr. Milosevic.

Bob Dole, Madame Albright's newest Plenipotentiary of Peace, has gone to Macedonia's capital, Skopje, to explain to Albanian leaders the reasons why they must settle for cooperative home rule and controlled autonomy, rather than their independence. Dole was originally intending to meet Rugova and others in Pristina, but Yugoslavia decided to give Mr. Dole a little grief for his longstanding involvement in assisting the country's breakup; he was refused a visa and not allowed to cross the border into Kosovo.

There is a bit of fighting going on around the border crossing where the main road from Belgrade-Pristina-Skopje, so travel security for Dole is slightly problematical. But as we will see, the leaders of this insurrection will have little problem traveling to Skopje, though they may also be hassled a bit when they return to Pristina.

This is important to note. In the middle of an armed insurrection, those advocating it, political leaders, political representatives of the KLA, and a very free Albanian Press continue to operate unmolested. Imagine if during the Vietnam war, the US allowed a free Vietcong Press, Media Center and Vietcong politicians to operate openly in Saigon. The West's pressure has imposed some absurd conditions upon the Yugoslav government.

It is little wonder, then, that there is a need for Mr. Dole to clean up his own mess by moderating the expectations of those politicians whom Dole's financial contributors sought to assist and abet. Can they then calm down the xenophobic gunmen of the KLA? Apparently that can only be done by paramilitary force, or by outsiders in a post-agreement "confidence-building" "presence."

In reserve is the revived idea of possibly sending the very blunt Mr. Holbrooke back to Belgrade to convince Mr. Milosevic to accept a NATO-sponsored occupation force to keep the KLA in line, but I think Mr. Milosevic should rightly hold out for an OSCE-sponsored force, since the Helsinki-OSCE Treaty is precisely tailored to situations such as Kosovo. A gracious acquiescence to a Russia-China-France-sponsored OSCE alternative by Mr. Milosevic would be strategically sound and further demonstrate that though he may not be a sweetheart, he is also not the "Butcher of the Balkans," as alleged by his enemies' foreign propaganda mills.

On Terror & Cleansing (see website archives "KLA-Terror-Cleansing" and "Uckmar1")

Altogether, the KLA had killed 135 local and Paramilitary police (some cops are also Albanians), 124 Albanian civilians and 115 Serb and other minorities up to February 7^th and the body counts continue to grow. Since Richard Holbrooke "imposed" a ceasefire last October, KLA murders of Albanians and Serbs has continued unabated and AV has documented 82 murdered Albanians between Oct. 26 and Feb. 22 in his archive. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees' (UNHCR) office may not wish to confirm it as a "humanitarian catastrophe" but some one hundred villages have been cleansed of Serbs since mid-October and some 25-30,000 Serbs and other minorities have been driven out of their homes out of sheer terror. In Belgrade the other day, "There is no humanitarian disaster," confirmed Pola Gedini, UNHCR spokeswoman. Some 60,000 have been temporarily displaced by these local fights, but most Albanians get to go right home, while the Serbs, Albanian Catholics and other minorities are truly displaced or choose permanent exile.

Now Albania is the only country in Europe where vendetta murder is considered a legal common law right and the country Albanians of Kosovo also assert their right to settle affairs of honor by murder. In an independent Kosovo, the murderers would rule and would continue to build their international heroin mafia. But if Kosovo is forced back into a sullen state of civil order, less homicidal elements of the population will be able to play at self-government while their non-Muslim neighbors may be able to get a peaceful night's sleep again. Let us maintain the most moderate of expectations, though. There is little reason to be hopeful that the new Millennium will usher in fraternal love and cultural enlightenment in Kosovo.

Frustrated Serb paramilitaries and border officials have been rather rough on OSCE observer personnel in several incidents a few days ago and I would point out to them that the OSCE has demonstrated a clear record of helping prevent KLA ambushes of police convoys and documented many justified operations by police, as well as verifying the homicidal mania of KLA terrorists. Mr. William Walker's highly biased behavior at Racak aside, the OSCE observers on the ground are professionals and highly experienced at differentiating between propaganda assertions and the true nature of facts. It was a British monitor and his Serb driver who were wounded on January 15 by the KLA while escorting a police convoy. But the observers should also make every effort to check with Serb villagers, as well as Albanians and other minorities, as much as possible.

The observers have had an impact on our diplomatic admissions. In a March 3 briefing, Ambassador Christopher Hill responded to a question about the wave of individual killings. He said "there is absolutely no room" for continued violence by the Kosovo Liberation Army, "and anyone engaged in hostage-taking and killing should be apprehended and prosecuted.... This has no place, and it's particularly a concern when some of these activities are clearly designed to derail the peace process, and I think we do have a peace process right now."

From that moment there has been a perceptible shift in reportage by some writers in Kosovo, and they are now attempting to address the very real issue of wanton lawlessness by KLA and other Muslim gunmen seeking to cleanse villages of Serb families, while also continuing to intimidate Albanians and other ethnic minorities who continue to oppose the KLA.

Writing for The New York Times on Thursday, Carlotta Gall reported the wider impact from the killing of one Serb civilian:

Ms Gall fails to reflect that this sinister trend dates back to the beginning of the KLA's campaign in 1997 and has always been an element of Albanian-Muslim intimidation of their neighbors, going back to the mid-1970s. An associate of SIRIUS has compiled a file of press reports just about KLA attacks on Albanians since Richard Holbrooke's ceasefire of mid-October.

The worst KLA regional chieftain is "Commander Remi" in the north and whose area of operations includes the provincial capital of Pristina. It is Remi's gunmen who have been popping grenades into cafes and killing older men in their homes for the last several months. Currently the OSCE has chosen to watch quietly as the Army and Police attempt to shut down Remi, with quiet assent, even, from other Albanian leaders. "Just play by the rules," the observers remind. So, in the area around Vucitern, counter-insurgency operations continue.

PS: Tomorrow is the first anniversary of the police assaults on the Drenica district KLA strongholds of Prekaz and Srbica, originally characterized as "massacres" by the press, despite substantial video and documentary evidence to the contrary. I got a laugh at this characterization of Prekaz KLA warlord Adem Jashari as a "local sheriff:"

Kosovo Monitors Tail Yugoslav Army

By Anne Thompson Associated Press Writer

Saturday, February 27, 1999; 7:44 p.m. EST

In Arabic, a "sharif" is very different than our western understanding of "sheriff" (based on the Anglo-Saxon "shire-reeve"). Adem Jashari (whose clan vigorously supported the Nazis in World War II, cleansing 30,000 Serbs from the district during that war) was no Wyatt Earp.

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