KK-Forum,
George Szamueli fra antiwar.com
http://128.121.216.19/szamuely/sz-col.html
Knut Rognes
*******************
March
17, 2001
Replaying NATO's Greatest Hits
Let
us stipulate the following: If NATO – the greatest military
force in the world – wished to stop the ethnic Albanian
insurgency
in Southern Serbia and Macedonia it would do so. If the KLA
believed
for one moment that its insurgencies were likely to push NATO
into
abandoning Kosovo it would wind them up. The conclusion is
inevitable:
The KLA launched the two insurgencies in the full certainty
that
they would enjoy tacit, if not explicit, NATO – and that, of
course, means United States – support. Let us further stipulate
the following: The objective of the KLA is to detach chunks
of Serbia
and Macedonia and to attach them to a future state of Greater
Albania.
NATO leaders furthermore know this to be the case. Another
conclusion
is inevitable. Greater Albania is very much in conformity
with US
plans for the Balkans.
Therefore
we must assume that the KLA will not call off its
insurgencies,
and that agreements promising "ceasefires" are not be
worth the paper they are written on. From what we
have stipulated above, we deduce that NATO knows full
well that these "agreements" are not be worth the paper
they are written on. Therefore the "ceasefire"
earlier this week between the Belgrade regime and the
Albanian guerrillas, brokered by NATO, which would allow the Yugoslav
armed forces into the 3-mile wide buffer zone between
Kosovo
and Serbia proper, is clearly a fraud. And NATO knows
it
to be a fraud. The KLA has not the slightest
intention of
permitting Belgrade to re-establish its authority in
Southern Serbia.
Indeed,
the Albanian guerrillas are not even pretending to take
it seriously. Having signed a "ceasefire" agreement,
they immediately announced that they could not guarantee
the safety of any Serb soldier entering the buffer
zone. Presevo Valley terrorist "chief of staff," Shefket
Musliu, declared: "I and my commanders cannot accept
responsibility for spontaneous actions of local
Albanian
elements in Sector C of the Ground Safety Zone." NATO
furthermore imposed all manner of restrictions on the Yugoslav
armed forces entering the zone, thereby condemning them
to almost certain failure. Tanks and armored cars
were out.
Helicopters were out. All air support for ground troops
were out. Villages were out of bounds. Mines were
out. Rocket
launchers were out. There was to be no shelling without
NATO’s consent. "We have demanded that they do not
occupy houses, do not enter villages, do not receive backing
from armored cars or use rocket launchers and
antitank weapons,"
declared a smug Lieutenant General Carlo Cabigiosu,
commander
of KFOR.
The
ostensible purpose of the deployment of the Yugoslav
troops
is to block off "escape routes" of Albanian guerrillas
into Kosovo. This is a strange task. The KLA terrorists
are coming across the border from NATO-occupied Kosovo.
One would have thought responsibility for preventing
their
entry into Macedonia or the Presevo Valley was NATO’s
and
NATO’s alone. According to UN Security Council
Resolution
1244, which had authorized NATO’s seizure of Kosovo,
the "responsibilities of the international security presence
to be deployed and acting in Kosovo will include:
(a)
Deterring renewed hostilities, maintaining and where
necessary enforcing a ceasefire...(b) Demilitarizing the Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA) and other armed Kosovo Albanian groups...(d)
Ensuring public safety and order until the
international
civil presence can take responsibility for this
task...(g)
Conducting border monitoring duties as required." In
other words, NATO has massively failed to live up to
almost
every single one of its obligations. Yet this does
not stop
the United States from endlessly demanding that
Belgrade
live up to its obligations to cooperate with the
Hague Tribunal.
NATO’s
strategy, as always, is to shift responsibility for its
failures on to Belgrade. Before last October’s coup,
NATO
blamed every calamity on Slobodan Milosevic. Now that
Milosevic is no longer there, the new Yugoslav regime is to be set
up for a fall. All too eagerly Belgrade is marching
into NATO’s trap. The Yugoslav military deployment is bound to
fail. There are two scenarios and only one
conclusion. First
scenario: NATO will impose so many constraints on the
Yugoslav
armed forces that they will be unable to get to grips
with
the KLA insurgency. After a couple of months, NATO will
declare that Yugoslavia had "failed" and that only
solution was possible. Reluctantly, KFOR must itself
take over Southern Serbia and Macedonia. Second
scenario: The Yugoslav forces begin to get on top of the situation.
Immediately the cry of "humanitarian abuses" goes
up. The KLA will stage massive flights of Albanian
refugees
across the border into Kosovo, and "anguished"
Albanians will stage riots in Kosovska-Mitrovica.
Again NATO will declare that Yugoslavia had "failed"
and that KFOR has to take over.
This,
of course, is precisely the KLA strategy. Concern about
Albanians shooting at NATO soldiers is ludicrous. KLA
and
NATO march in lockstep. The KLA wants to run Greater
Albania. NATO is there to facilitate its creation. The media will
cheer on NATO’s expanded mission in the Balkans. We
must
bear any burden, we will be told, to make the world
safe
for "peace" and "stability." According
to Robert Curis, a senior analyst with the
International Crisis Group, the George Soros-funded outfit always on hand
to advocate military intervention on behalf noble
goals,
the current fighting is "a threat to the stability
of the Balkans and therefore to all of Europe." Once
the stakes are this high – nothing less than the
"stability"
of "all of Europe" – only NATO can be trusted to
get the job done.
NATO
began preparing to expand its mission in the Balkans
quite
some time ago. In early 1999, at Rambouillet, the
United
States had demanded that NATO be given free access to
all
of Serbia. Milosevic said no and thereby precipitated
the
NATO onslaught. UN Security Council Resolution 1244
also failed to deliver what the US wanted. As soon as the Americans
arrived in Kosovo, however, they began to arm and train
KLA fighters to take over Southern Serbia. According to
a
recent article in the Observer, the "CIA
encouraged former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters to
launch
a rebellion in southern Serbia in an effort to
undermine
the then Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic." A
European KFOR commander told the Observer reporter:
"The CIA has been allowed to run riot in Kosovo with
a private army designed to overthrow Slobodan
Milosevic.
Now he’s gone the US State Department seems incapable
of
reining in its bastard army." This, of course, is an
absurd misreading of what really took place. The
purpose was not primarily to "overthrow" Milosevic, but
to take over Serbia. This was to happen either by the
reduction
of Serbia to US satellite-status or by gradual US
military
takeover. The notion that the US State Department is
unable
to rein in "its bastard army" is laughable.
Interestingly,
the Observer story echoes a recent BBC report: "The
BBC’s Nik Gowing in Davos has been shown evidence by
foreign
diplomatic sources that the guerrillas now have
several hundred fighters in the 5km-deep military exclusion zone
on the boundary between Kosovo and the rest of
Serbia. The
sources said that: Certain NATO-led KFOR forces were
not
preventing the guerrillas taking mortars and other
weapons
into the exclusion zone. The guerrilla units had been
able
to hold exercises there, including live-firing of
weapons,
despite the fact that KFOR patrols the zone. Western
special
forces were still training the guerrillas, as a
result of
decisions taken before the change of government in
Yugoslavia." Again, the European sources cited are being disingenuous.
The United States could bring the KLA to heel any
time it wanted. One has to assume that Washington policymakers read
newspapers and would therefore be aware of the fact that
Milosevic was no longer in power in Belgrade. Perhaps
they
just simply did not know what the telephone code for
Kosovo
was.
What
we are seeing now is an eerie replay of the sinister
events
of 1998. It was then that the United States began
training
and arming the KLA even as officials were condemning it
in public as a "terrorist" organization. It was
then that the United States was forcing Serbia, under
threat
of bombs, to sign one "ceasefire" agreement after
another, each one of which would then be exploited by
the
KLA to strengthen its position in Kosovo. US support
for
the KLA, incidentally, was in flagrant violation of
UN Security
Council Resolution 1160, passed on March 31, 1998,
which
had condemned "all acts of terrorism by the Kosovo
Liberation Army or any other group or individual and
all
external support for terrorist activity in Kosovo,
including
finance, arms and training."
In
October 1998, facing imminent US air strikes, President
Slobodan Milosevic signed an agreement with US envoy
Richard
Holbrooke, promising to withdraw Yugoslav security
forces
from Kosovo. This deal imposed obligations
exclusively on
Yugoslavia. The Albanians had not had to sign
anything, and were therefore free to continue to provoke the Serbs,
confident that any act of Serb retaliation would be
reported
in the US media as typical Serb barbarity. It was a
fatal
surrender of sovereignty. Yugoslavia had been forced to
agree not to suppress an armed insurrection within
its own
borders. It would be a matter of time before the
Serbs would
be confronted by even more humiliating demands.
As
soon as Yugoslavia began withdrawing its forces from
Kosovo,
the KLA moved swiftly to take over positions previously
held by the Serbs. The most sinister feature of the
Holbrooke-Milosevic
agreement was the establishment of the Kosovo
Verification Mission (KVM) under the auspices of the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The
ostensible
purpose of the KVM was to monitor Yugoslavia’s
compliance
with the agreement. Its real purpose was to lay the
groundwork
for the subsequent NATO attack. The KVM was largely a
CIA
operation. Its chief was former US Ambassador to El
Salvador,
William G. Walker, a specialist in covert warfare and
propaganda.
Walker maintained close links to the KLA. He elicited
from
them critical information about Yugoslav defenses. As
for
the KLA, here is how Roland Keith, a former field
office director of KVM, described their methods: "Upon my
arrival the war increasingly evolved into a
mid-intensity conflict as ambushes, the encroachment of critical lines
of communication and the [KLA] kidnapping of security
forces resulted in a significant increase in government casualties
which in turn led to major Yugoslavian reprisal
security operations…. The situation was clearly that KLA provocations…were
clear violations of the previous October’s agreement."
KLA
provocations, on the one hand, and CIA manipulation
of US
public opinion, on the other hand, culminated in the
notorious
deceit of Racak in January 1999. Walker had declared to
the media of the world, on the basis of no evidence
whatsoever,
that KLA fighters killed in a firefight with Yugoslav
police
had been Albanian civilians murdered in cold blood.
Subsequent
forensic investigations confirmed the Yugoslav
version of
events: No one had been shot at close range. The dead
had
lost their lives in battle. Yet this alleged "massacre"
served to fuel the media hysteria leading up to
NATO’s March 1999 murderous onslaught.
The
US media, needless to say, maintained their usual
discreet
silence when questions about the US Government’s
deceitful
conduct came up. A year ago, the Sunday Times of
London reported: "American intelligence agents have
admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation
Army
before NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia…. Central
Intelligence
Agency officers were ceasefire monitors in Kosovo in
1998 and 1999, developing ties with the KLA and giving American
military training manuals and field advice on
fighting the Yugoslav army and Serbian police. When the Organization
for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which
coordinated
the monitoring, left Kosovo a week before airstrikes
began…many
of its satellite telephones and global positioning
systems
were secretly handed to the KLA, ensuring that
guerrilla commanders could stay in touch with NATO and Washington.
Several KLA leaders had the mobile phone number of
General
Wesley Clark, the NATO commander." Amazing stuff.
Nothing about any of this found its way into the US media. That
the United States was behind what is taking place
currently
in the Presevo Valley was obvious to the Sunday Times
reporters a year ago: "The KLA has admitted its long-standing
links with American and European intelligence
organizations.
Shaban Shala, a KLA commander now involved in
attempts to destabilize majority Albanian villages beyond Kosovo’s border
in Serbia proper, claimed he had met British,
American and
Swiss agents in northern Albania in 1996."
By
now, United States involvement with the KLA is so
flagrant
and outrageous that even that master of the
inconsequential
turn of phrase, Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica
has now taken to accusing NATO
of "direct collaboration" with the KLA in Southern
Serbia. KFOR, Kostunica says, had "enabled and
in some way supported or was helping the terrorists."
"Flights of KFOR helicopters," he went on, "have been
traced that gave he impression of being used as a sort
of logistics support to the terrorists rather than
surveilling [sic] them." Given these facts then, why would Kostunica
want to cooperate with NATO? Would it not make more
sense for him to publicize NATO’s mendacity? And to challenge
NATO to live up to its obligations and seal the
Kosovo border? But then the Belgrade regime is bought and paid for. Its
orders now are that it should be the fall guy, the
one to
blame for the continued turmoil in the Balkans.
------------------------
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