SIT-REP 3-8; March 8, 1999

In this Bulletin: Kosovo, Bosnia

NOTE: Not surprisingly, a second account regarding the circumstances surrounding the killing of Mr. Krsto Micic Friday night has emerged and we await a fair investigation of the matter.

Constitutionally, Rambouillet is not a bad deal, though its implementation is problematical. The fact is that Kosovo is "dysfunctional," or "bankrupt" and in need of a receivership process -a political form of what an American businessman would refer to as a "Chapter XI reorganization in bankruptcy." It is this or a violent Balkan War of Reckoning, which the Albanians will only lose and in which we will all suffer.

Americans may safely start to forget the propaganda excesses encouraged by the Clinton Administration, which now stand in the way of revealing the true state of matters on the ground. It is sufficient that the Administration has punished itself by making a difficult problem more intractable by steering an easy, politically-correct propaganda course while inflating Albanian expectations these last six years. The Clinton-Albright team is starting to reposition our awareness through articles seeded around in the Media --more on this new neo-Orwellian rewrite a little further below.

That propaganda course, by the way, was entirely built on a "Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc" argument; in Clinton-Dogpatch speech, this "false cause" fallacy in logic is "the rooster taking credit for the dawn," as SIRIUS director Dan Mahony first put it. The false cause argument is that Milosevic is the cause of all misery in former-Yugoslavia, rather than the political consequence of a long-running conspiracy against the old Yugoslav nation-state by the Croat neo-fascists and their many allies in Bosnia, Kosovo and in the expatriate communities here and around Europe.

I have included May 1998 testimony by Joseph DioGuardi in the "Dole-KLA-Kosovo" archive, as it outlines the Albanian case. It represents not lies, so much as cherry-picking facts convenient to a partisan argument --convenient truths. The Albanian case could not stand without some factual basis and Albanians did die at the hands of the police as early as the 1981 Pristina demonstrations. But as I have explored herein in recent issues, the whole other side of the story remains the more compelling case.

These misrepresentations justifying policy, coupled with excessive sanctions, have only strengthened corruption in general and the hand of the Kosovo Mafia in particular, while gutting Yugoslavia's economy and increasing Serb paranoia. Worse, since Richard Holbrooke's bullying cease-fire arrangement in October and despite the presence of OSCE monitors, the KLA killing rampage against civilians escalated, while the police were hampered from any but emergency responses. Finally, Carlos Westerdorp's recent actions in Bosnia regarding the Serb president and the status of Brcko, create credibility problems for the Rambouillet agreement and for US credibility at a still-delicate moment when Mme. Albright is attempting to reposition for the longer term diplomatic resolution.

Corruption and fiscal bankruptcy, toxic whether or not there are inter-ethnic complications, have reached the point where a Bosnian Serb Army unit was shut down about a week ago, apparently (a Serb neighbor tells me) when its officers were caught selling guns to the anti-Serb guerrillas of the KLA. This has happened before. Last night, Zbigniew Brezinski, in A CNN "The Cold War" episode on the Soviet Union's Afghanistan war, confirmed that Red Army officers were selling weapons to the CIA, shopping for arms to equip the Afghan Mujaheddin. Further, the Balkan Mafias, Muslim and Christian alike, are having a field day, while politicians complete the fiscal draining of the core economy to perpetuate their regimes and core supporters..

Another impact as the West's diplomatic "volto face" (about-face) will demonstrate, is that at the core of the KLA rampage is a wider Islamic fundamentalist jihad which will have further reason to prosecute its world-wide terror campaign against the US and other prominent non-Muslim targets (see archive file "KLA-Ideology" at the website).

Rambouillet's terms, the Independence Issue and Diplomatic Repositioning:

About independence for Kosovo, though many fret about some vague phrasing regarding an international meeting on Kosovo three years after the Rambouillet Agreement's initiation, independence can only come if all of Serbia agrees to it. The language, found in the final chapter of that agreement, is included verbatim from the full text, which is widely available on the internet:

Mme. Albright was alluding to the fact that if the Serbs throw up their hands in despair and if they chose to rid themselves of the troublesome province, they do have the option, while the Kosovo Albanians do not have a unilateral right to vote their secession.

To assert that any a local majority within political-geographical sub-unit has an intrinsic right to secede from the greater whole is a form of "reductio ad absurdam" argument. It is an assertion convenient to the micro-politics of local advantage and gains traction among policy amateurs more impressed by rhetoric than logic. But in the political world governed by traditional international law, further ratified within the Helsinki-OSCE charter, it is clear that only all the voters of the greater political unit(s) can make such a decision. On the practical side, the Albanisns flunked miserably in their first attempt at self-rule, hence the need for a stern nanny.

Stalin and Tito created an exception within their Constitutions, Stalin for propaganda purposes: the "republics" of the Soviet Union did have an explicit right of secession, Stalin's way of demonstrating that his workers' paradise was a voluntary association. Tito granted the right of secession to the republics of Serbia, Macedonia, Slovenia and Croatia, and later to Bosnia. He also promoted the self-government of the province of Kosovo & Metohija, with its bizarre constitutional implications on Serbia, ended by Mr. Milosevic's termination of that autonomous charter.

Tito's measures, in my estimation, were deliberate means of promoting ethnocentric selfishness (upon which socialism rests), while deliberately obstructing Serbia's natural dominance of the Yugoslav Federal Republic, of which Serbia was the physical core ("center of gravity") and the Serbs the largest, most independent-minded and self-reliant population. Then Tito set about seducing the Serbs and everybody with the politics of dependency --that socialist safety net. Having encouraged ethnic state politics, Tito in a self-contradiction, tried to socially homogenize his populations through the armed forces and university system. There are further implications but that's enough for today's purpose.

But this argument that only Kosovo's remaining residents have the legitimacy to declare the independence of their province from Yugoslavia and Serbia is the argument that French Canadians swarm into New Hampshire and vote to secede from the United States, or that Westchester County may secede from both New York and from the United States without consent of the rest of New York and the nation. .

The key to understanding Rambouillet's obstruction of secessionism lies in the reactions of informed parties to its terms. We already see the Clinton Administration repositioning itself in the Press. Here is a Serb reaction, asking for improvements ("enhancement" is the Clinton-speak phrase), and one from Adem Demaci, the chief ideologue of the KLA, demanding rejection:

Now for Adem Demaci's reaction:

Given a form of Rambouillet is accepted by both sides, can the rule of law and "free markets" be established in a corner of Yugoslavia without reform in the rest of the country? I await further developments, wondering at how we got to this sad point in the first place and aghast that it is so bad, that whether or not I support some outside occupation force and its costs to the armed forces and taxpayers of the US, a negotiated occupation-as-nanny is the price we shall have to pay for our all our leaders' mistakes. This is a reparation to pay all the much-abused people(s) of Yugoslavia.

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