Robert Fisk har en interessant artikkel om Rambouillet-forhandlingene i
siste utgave av Independent (full tekst nederst). Her får vi et innblikk i
de såkalte "forhandlingene" som foregikk. Utdrag:
----------
"Milan Komnenic, who was the Yugoslav Federal Information minister and a
member of Vuk Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Movement (then in government but
soon to be in opposition), was in Paris during the talks and has become
preoccupied with the military annexe. He is writing a book about the
negotiations, The Trap of Rambouillet. A tall, bespectacled figure with a
reputation for intelligence and integrity he admits atrocities were
carried out by Serbs he says he still does not understand why the war
started.
"We don't know when the Russians found out about paragraphs six, seven and
eight of the annexe," he said. "Igor Ivanov [the Foreign Minister of
Russia] claimed the Russian side didn't know about the annexe at all. The
surprise is that besides the Americans, no one knew about the annexe. We
were given it one day before the end of the Paris talks at 'a minute
before midnight'. Before that, we heard only rumours about the
implementation of the political agreement."
According to Mr Komnenic, the American negotiator Christopher Hill and the
Austrian diplomat at the talks, Boris Petritsch, insisted on the annexe
while the Russian negotiator, Boris Mayorski who later refused to attend
the Kosovo Albanian signing of the "peace" agreement abstained. "Hill and
Petritsch were 'for' the annexe and [Robin] Cook and Védrine apparently
agreed with a version not identical to the final annexe which was called
an 'explanation' of the political agreement and which said there could be
no implementation with a Nato presence only in Kosovo," Mr Komnenic said. "
----------
Som de fleste allerede vet gikk NATO til "aksjon" i vår med den offisielle
begrunnelse at Jugoslavia ikke godtok det militære tillegget i
Rambouillet-avtalen. Dette tillegget ble lagt til Rambouillet-avtalen i
siste liten under Rambouillet-forhandlingene (etter at Jugoslavia
overraskende hadde godtatt den politiske avtalen).
Da krigen startet ble Rambouillet-avtalen fort glemt av bombetilhengerne,
krigen skapte som forventet raskt en forverret situasjon i Kosovo, som så
igjen ble brukt for å legitimere krigen. Da avtaleteksten fra Rambouillet
etterhvert ble gjort kjent av krigsmotstanderne, viste det seg den militære
avtaleteksten krevde full kapitulasjon (okkupasjon av hele Jugoslavia,
kontroll over kringkastingen, osv.), og etter all sannsynlighet var laget
slik at den umulig kunne godtas av noen som helst stat. Dette ble ignorert
av bombetilhengerne og tiet hjel i media. Informasjon om
Rambouillet-avtalens faktiske innhold var så å si umulig å oppdrive i
massemediene i løpet av krigen.
Ved avslutningen av krigen var NATO plutselig helt uinteressert i å få
gjennomslag for kravene de hadde stilt i sitt eget militære tillegg, og
"fredsavtalene" som ble inngått i juni var uten krav om okkupasjon,
kontroll over kringkasting osv. Før krigen stilte NATO altså en rekke
ufravikelige krav til Jugoslavia, som Jugoslavia ikke kunne godta, og NATO
gikk til krig på grunn av dette. Etter krigen var NATO totalt uinteressert
i disse kravene de selv hadde stilt.
Etter at krigen var over, ble avtaleteksten for Rambouillet gjort
tilgjengelig via offisielle websiter, blant annet i USA. Innholdet i den
militære avtalen kunne ikke lenger bestrides. Den ble da isteden delvis
forsøkt omfortolket, slik at det kom til en debatt om avtalens faktiske
innhold i noen aviser (f.eks. Guardian, Aftenposten), men for det meste ble
den ignorert. Fokuset i media var nå på grusomhetene som skjedde under
krigen, og den nye "freden", og bombetilhengerne kunne derfor uten videre
hevde at Rambouillet-avtalen, som i begynnelsen var begrunnelsen for å gå
til krig, var fullstendig irrelevant for å forstå konflikten. I
Verdikommisjonens høring om krigen den 19.august f.eks. kom
Rambouillet-avtalens kontroversielle sider opp til debatt - OSSE-formann
Vollebæk innrømmet da at han ikke hadde lest hele avtalen, Blankenborg
hevdet at det det var "bortkastet tid" å lese avtalen, Solheim hevdet at
den var "irrelevant". Sjokkerende uttalelser, men det ble fort glemt.
http://www.stavanger-aftenblad.no/nyheter/nytt/1999/0820/084823.html
Øistein Holen
----------
Fra Independent 26/11-99:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Europe/kosovo261199.shtml
The Trojan horse that 'started' a 79-day war
By Robert Fisk in Belgrade
26 November 1999
In the last days of the Paris peace talks on Yugoslavia last March,
something extraordinary happened. The Serb delegation after agreeing to a
political revolution in Kosovo was presented with a military appendix to
the treaty which demanded the virtual Nato occupation of all Yugoslavia.
The Serbs turned it down and Nato went to war. Yet 79 days later, Nato
which had refused to contemplate a change in the military document lost
all interest in the annexe and at the final dramatic meetings on the
Macedonian border was content with a Nato force inside only Kosovo.
Official obfuscation and confusion has ever since surrounded this
all-important, last-minute addition to the Paris "peace" agreement. Was it
presented by the Americans to force President Slobodan Milosevic to reject
the whole peace package and permit Nato to bomb Serbia? Nato sources claim
the Serbs would anyway never have abided by the Kosovo political accords:
in which case, why did the West negotiate with Belgrade in the first place?
Even the text of the military appendix was not known to journalists
reporting the two sets of "peace" talks in Rambouillet and Paris. The Serbs
say they denounced it at their last Paris press conference an ill-attended
gathering at the Yugoslav Embassy at 11pm on 18 March. Although a summary
of an early draft of the peace treaty was placed in the House of Commons
library on 1 March, the full treaty and the military annexes together were
not put in the library until 1 April the first day of the parliamentary
recess and a week after Nato's bombing campaign began.
The full annexes demanded Nato rights of road, rail and air passage across
all of Yugoslavia, the use of radio stations, even the waiving of any
claims of damages against Nato. For any state even one as grotesque as
Serbia this would have amounted to occupation. The Foreign Minister of
France, Hubert Védrine, said the military appendix was similar to that used
by Nato when it moved troops into Bosnia and that Nato forces needed access
to Kosovo through Belgrade. But he has never explained why this supposedly
essential part of the treaty was abandoned once Nato troops moved into the
province.
Milan Komnenic, who was the Yugoslav Federal Information minister and a
member of Vuk Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Movement (then in government but
soon to be in opposition), was in Paris during the talks and has become
preoccupied with the military annexe. He is writing a book about the
negotiations, The Trap of Rambouillet. A tall, bespectacled figure with a
reputation for intelligence and integrity he admits atrocities were
carried out by Serbs he says he still does not understand why the war
started.
"We don't know when the Russians found out about paragraphs six, seven and
eight of the annexe," he said. "Igor Ivanov [the Foreign Minister of
Russia] claimed the Russian side didn't know about the annexe at all. The
surprise is that besides the Americans, no one knew about the annexe. We
were given it one day before the end of the Paris talks at 'a minute
before midnight'. Before that, we heard only rumours about the
implementation of the political agreement."
According to Mr Komnenic, the American negotiator Christopher Hill and the
Austrian diplomat at the talks, Boris Petritsch, insisted on the annexe
while the Russian negotiator, Boris Mayorski who later refused to attend
the Kosovo Albanian signing of the "peace" agreement abstained. "Hill and
Petritsch were 'for' the annexe and [Robin] Cook and Védrine apparently
agreed with a version not identical to the final annexe which was called
an 'explanation' of the political agreement and which said there could be
no implementation with a Nato presence only in Kosovo," Mr Komnenic said.
In January, the Hill plan was published without annexe B in the Kosovo
Albanian newspaper Koha Ditore, Mr Komnenic says. "And Hill gave Mr
Draskovic and myself a copy of the plan in February calling for a military
presence in Kosovo but not in all of Yugoslavia. Then in Paris, Hill put
annexe B on the table one day before the collapse. I don't even know if
our side knew till then about the annexe... But when we realised the danger
of war was threatening, we de facto accepted the political agreement. It's
clear the Americans were surprised by our acceptance of the agreement. So
they were preparing their trap."
Since the military annexe became widely known, Western leaders have either
tried to explain it away as a routine addendum to any peace implementation
or an essential mechanism to get Nato into Kosovo. Mr Cook has adopted both
tactics. Replying to Sir Peter Emery in the Foreign Affairs Select
Committee on 28 April when the Nato bombardment had been going on for more
than a month while half the Albanian population of Kosovo was being
"ethnically cleansed" by the Serbs Mr Cook said: "The proposal for a
military presence in Kosovo was one confined to Kosovo." This, he said,
would require a "force agreement" with the Yugoslav government "that may
[sic] be the text which has appeared". The issue, he said, had never been
raised by the Serb delegation "which suggests to me that there is something
deeply false about the idea that this is now the basis on which talks broke
down". The idea that the military annexe was the "casus belli" was a "canard".
Goran Matic, a minister in Mr Milosevic's government and a close friend of
the President, says that the European Contact Group designed the political
framework for the Rambouillet talks and that at one meeting the Russians
refused to discuss the political and military annexe. "Around the end of
the second week of March, our delegation received the paper which contained
the military annexe," Mr Matic said. "The Contact Group had managed to
present the paper without the Russians. Our delegation, together with
Mayorski, decided to withdraw acceptance of the paper because it wasn't
produced by all the Contact Group. For this reason, we said the paper was
only 'informal'. But the Americans were trying to 'legalise' the paper,
which wasn't acceptable to the Russians. Mayorski put in a written
objection. We were ready to accept the political solution of the Kosovo
problem and UN troops to regulate the implementation but not Nato troops
in occupation. United Nations Security Council resolution 1244 [which ended
the conflict] could have been accepted before the bombing."
In any event, when Nato commanders met the Serbs for the
"military-technical agreement" at the end of the war after thousands of
Kosovo Albanians had been murdered by Serb forces and as many as 1,500
civilians killed by Nato bombs the supposedly crucial military annexe was
never mentioned. Miraculously, Nato with 40,000 troops to move into the
province (10,000 more than originally envisaged) no longer needed appendix
B. Not a single Nato soldier moved north of Kosovo into the rest of Serbia.
What was the real purpose of Nato's last minute demand? Was it a Trojan
horse? To save the peace? Or to sabotage it?
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