Jugoinfo
>
> La ragione dei serbi
>
> Sabato 29 Gennaio 2000 - ore 15,00
> CASA DEL POPOLO (CANDILEJAS)
> Via Bentini, 29 - Bologna
> BUS 27/A
> 4 chiacchere e 1 videotape
> su una guerra dal vago sapore di crociata che forse si poteva evitare:
> "...sempre ci stupisce l'inaudita scoperta che qualcuno ha pensato
> non già più lontano di noi, ma diverso da noi..."
>
> Interverrano:
> - Prof. Aldo Bernardini, Docente di Diritto Internazionale
> Università di Teramo
> - Sig.ra Gordana Glisic, Pres. Assoc. d'Amicizia Italia - Jugoslavia
> - Dott Fulvio Grimaldi, Giornalista
> - Prof. Dragos Kalajic, Direttore Istituto Geopolitico di Belgrado
> - Prof. Claudio Moffa, Docente di Storia e Istituzioni Paesi Afro-Asiatici
> Università di Teramo
>
> lnfo: Cristina 0338.2576525 E-mail: zannaecris@...
>
> "LA RAGIONE DEI SERBI": PERCHE'?
> Tante cose sono state dette e scritte dai mass-media occidentali su quanto è
> accaduto e accade nei paesi balcanici in questi ultimi anni; eppure
> basterebbe un veloce passaggio, anche solo un week-end, nella capitale serba
> per avere la sensazione che molto è stato distorto e/o manipolato, non si sa
> quanto arbitrariamente, da tutte le fonti di informazione di influenza Nato.
> Già poche settimane dopo la fine della guerra sono comparsi diversi articoli
> (anche canadesi ed americani) che hanno messo in dubbio la veridicità delle
> informazioni relative ai presunti genocidi attuati dalle milizie jugoslave
> ai danni della popolazione kossovara, informazioni che da sole
> giustificavano il violento intervento delle forze Nato.
> L'entrata in guerra delle forze alleate era veramente necessaria oppure si è
> voluto rispondere ad una necessità di carattere economico imposta dal
> neo-liberismo imperante? Forse potrebbe essere utile sentire le ragioni di
> chi, in questi anni, è stato dall'altra parte della barricata: le ragioni
> dei serbi.
>
> ASSOCIAZIONE D'AMICIZIA ITALO-JUGOSLAVA
>
> Costituitasi nello scorso mese di settembre al fine di riallacciare i
> rapporti tra i due paesi interrotti bruscamente a causa della guerra,
> l'associazione si pone come obiettivo prioritario la realizzazione di
> progetti a scopo umanitario
> e socio-culturale quali, ad esempio, l'invio di medicinali e beni di prima
> necessità, la collaborazione con il centro culturale italiano di Belgrado,
> l'organizzazione di concerti, mostre, avvenimenti sportivi e quant'altro
> possa contribuire al ripristino dell'equilibrio sociale tra le due nazioni.
> Qui è rappresentata dalla Sig.ra GORDANA GLISIC Presidente dell'Associazione.
>
> PROF. ALDO BERNARDINI
> Docente di diritto internazionale presso l'Università di Teramo, è stato
> Direttore dello Istituto Giuridico della Facoltà di Scienze Politiche,
> quindi Preside della stessa dal 1972 al 1979, Rettore dell'Università di
> Chieti daI 1979 al 1985.
> Autore di libri, saggi, articoli di diritto e politica tra i quali
> "Questione Iraq-Kuwait" ha ultimamente pubblicato un saggio sul rapporto con
> la Costituzione italiana del
> Patto di stabilità dell'Unione Europea. Ha partecipato a diverse relazioni e
> convegni in tutto il mondo, Parigi, Berlino Est, Baghdad, Pyongyang, Mosca.
> Ha tenuto alcune lezioni all'Università di Baghdad. E stato collaboratore
> della Società Italiana per l'organizzazione Internazionale, e redattore di
> periodici quali "La Comunità Internazionale".
>
> DR. FULVIO GRIMALDI
> Giornalista dal 1962, redattore presso la BBC a Londra e corrispondente da
> Londra per Panorama e Paese Sera. Inviato di Paese Sera e poi di Giorni -
> Vie Nuove, settimanale del PCI.
> Direttore di Lotta Continua, giornalista di varie testate straniere e
> inviato RAI dal 1986 al 1989.
> Si è occupato eminentemente di questioni internazionali, delle lotte
> antimperialiste e di ambiente.
> Ha seguito tutte le guerre mediorientali e la lotta irlandese fin dall'inizio.
> Ha visitato molti paesi del terzo mondo per scrivere di neocolonialismo,
> neoliberismo e lotte di liberazione. Autore di diversi libri, ha realizzato
> video sul Chiapas, sul Vietnam, sull'Iraq, sui profughi palestinesi in
> Libano, su Cuba, sul sud-est asiatico e sulla Jugoslavia "Il popolo
> invisibile" e "Serbi da morire" che verrà presentato nel corso del l'incontro.
> Attualmente scrive una rubrica quotidiana su Liberazione e una settimanale
> su "Ultime Notizie".
> Negli ultimi mesi ha dedicato particolare attenzione alla
> contro-informazione sulla Jugoslavia.
>
> PROF. DRAGOS KALAJIC
> Nato a Belgrado nel 1943. Diplomato presso l'Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma
> in Storia dell'Arte, dagli anni sessanta è
> presente sulla scena culturale e politica jugoslava con una serie di saggi
> ed analisi regolarmente recensiti dalla stampa russa. Ha ottenuto diversi
> riconoscimenti tra cui, nel 1994, il premio annuale della rivista
> dell'associazione degli scrittori russi.
> Nel 1997 ha fondato a Belgrado, con alti ufficiali dell'esercito jugoslavo,
> l'istituto di Studi Geopolitici.
> Negli anni dal 1992 al 1995 è stato corrispondente di guerra della stampa
> jugoslava, in Republika Srpska Krajina e Republika Srpska, rispettivamente
> in Croazia e in Bosnia-Herzegovina
> E' senatore della Republika Srpska in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
> E' membro onorario dell'Associazione degli Scrittori Russi.
>
> PROF. CLAUDIO MOFFA
> Docente di Storia ed Istituzioni dei Paesi Afro-Asiatici all'Università di
> Teramo. Politologo, esperto delle questioni "nazionali" nell'età
> contemporanea ed autore de "La questione nazionale dopo la decolonizzazione.
> Per una rilettura del principio di autodecisione nazionale" (Quaderni
> Internazionali, 1989).
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
** NO COPYRIGHT ! **
------------------------------------------------------------
> La ragione dei serbi
>
> Sabato 29 Gennaio 2000 - ore 15,00
> CASA DEL POPOLO (CANDILEJAS)
> Via Bentini, 29 - Bologna
> BUS 27/A
> 4 chiacchere e 1 videotape
> su una guerra dal vago sapore di crociata che forse si poteva evitare:
> "...sempre ci stupisce l'inaudita scoperta che qualcuno ha pensato
> non già più lontano di noi, ma diverso da noi..."
>
> Interverrano:
> - Prof. Aldo Bernardini, Docente di Diritto Internazionale
> Università di Teramo
> - Sig.ra Gordana Glisic, Pres. Assoc. d'Amicizia Italia - Jugoslavia
> - Dott Fulvio Grimaldi, Giornalista
> - Prof. Dragos Kalajic, Direttore Istituto Geopolitico di Belgrado
> - Prof. Claudio Moffa, Docente di Storia e Istituzioni Paesi Afro-Asiatici
> Università di Teramo
>
> lnfo: Cristina 0338.2576525 E-mail: zannaecris@...
>
> "LA RAGIONE DEI SERBI": PERCHE'?
> Tante cose sono state dette e scritte dai mass-media occidentali su quanto è
> accaduto e accade nei paesi balcanici in questi ultimi anni; eppure
> basterebbe un veloce passaggio, anche solo un week-end, nella capitale serba
> per avere la sensazione che molto è stato distorto e/o manipolato, non si sa
> quanto arbitrariamente, da tutte le fonti di informazione di influenza Nato.
> Già poche settimane dopo la fine della guerra sono comparsi diversi articoli
> (anche canadesi ed americani) che hanno messo in dubbio la veridicità delle
> informazioni relative ai presunti genocidi attuati dalle milizie jugoslave
> ai danni della popolazione kossovara, informazioni che da sole
> giustificavano il violento intervento delle forze Nato.
> L'entrata in guerra delle forze alleate era veramente necessaria oppure si è
> voluto rispondere ad una necessità di carattere economico imposta dal
> neo-liberismo imperante? Forse potrebbe essere utile sentire le ragioni di
> chi, in questi anni, è stato dall'altra parte della barricata: le ragioni
> dei serbi.
>
> ASSOCIAZIONE D'AMICIZIA ITALO-JUGOSLAVA
>
> Costituitasi nello scorso mese di settembre al fine di riallacciare i
> rapporti tra i due paesi interrotti bruscamente a causa della guerra,
> l'associazione si pone come obiettivo prioritario la realizzazione di
> progetti a scopo umanitario
> e socio-culturale quali, ad esempio, l'invio di medicinali e beni di prima
> necessità, la collaborazione con il centro culturale italiano di Belgrado,
> l'organizzazione di concerti, mostre, avvenimenti sportivi e quant'altro
> possa contribuire al ripristino dell'equilibrio sociale tra le due nazioni.
> Qui è rappresentata dalla Sig.ra GORDANA GLISIC Presidente dell'Associazione.
>
> PROF. ALDO BERNARDINI
> Docente di diritto internazionale presso l'Università di Teramo, è stato
> Direttore dello Istituto Giuridico della Facoltà di Scienze Politiche,
> quindi Preside della stessa dal 1972 al 1979, Rettore dell'Università di
> Chieti daI 1979 al 1985.
> Autore di libri, saggi, articoli di diritto e politica tra i quali
> "Questione Iraq-Kuwait" ha ultimamente pubblicato un saggio sul rapporto con
> la Costituzione italiana del
> Patto di stabilità dell'Unione Europea. Ha partecipato a diverse relazioni e
> convegni in tutto il mondo, Parigi, Berlino Est, Baghdad, Pyongyang, Mosca.
> Ha tenuto alcune lezioni all'Università di Baghdad. E stato collaboratore
> della Società Italiana per l'organizzazione Internazionale, e redattore di
> periodici quali "La Comunità Internazionale".
>
> DR. FULVIO GRIMALDI
> Giornalista dal 1962, redattore presso la BBC a Londra e corrispondente da
> Londra per Panorama e Paese Sera. Inviato di Paese Sera e poi di Giorni -
> Vie Nuove, settimanale del PCI.
> Direttore di Lotta Continua, giornalista di varie testate straniere e
> inviato RAI dal 1986 al 1989.
> Si è occupato eminentemente di questioni internazionali, delle lotte
> antimperialiste e di ambiente.
> Ha seguito tutte le guerre mediorientali e la lotta irlandese fin dall'inizio.
> Ha visitato molti paesi del terzo mondo per scrivere di neocolonialismo,
> neoliberismo e lotte di liberazione. Autore di diversi libri, ha realizzato
> video sul Chiapas, sul Vietnam, sull'Iraq, sui profughi palestinesi in
> Libano, su Cuba, sul sud-est asiatico e sulla Jugoslavia "Il popolo
> invisibile" e "Serbi da morire" che verrà presentato nel corso del l'incontro.
> Attualmente scrive una rubrica quotidiana su Liberazione e una settimanale
> su "Ultime Notizie".
> Negli ultimi mesi ha dedicato particolare attenzione alla
> contro-informazione sulla Jugoslavia.
>
> PROF. DRAGOS KALAJIC
> Nato a Belgrado nel 1943. Diplomato presso l'Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma
> in Storia dell'Arte, dagli anni sessanta è
> presente sulla scena culturale e politica jugoslava con una serie di saggi
> ed analisi regolarmente recensiti dalla stampa russa. Ha ottenuto diversi
> riconoscimenti tra cui, nel 1994, il premio annuale della rivista
> dell'associazione degli scrittori russi.
> Nel 1997 ha fondato a Belgrado, con alti ufficiali dell'esercito jugoslavo,
> l'istituto di Studi Geopolitici.
> Negli anni dal 1992 al 1995 è stato corrispondente di guerra della stampa
> jugoslava, in Republika Srpska Krajina e Republika Srpska, rispettivamente
> in Croazia e in Bosnia-Herzegovina
> E' senatore della Republika Srpska in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
> E' membro onorario dell'Associazione degli Scrittori Russi.
>
> PROF. CLAUDIO MOFFA
> Docente di Storia ed Istituzioni dei Paesi Afro-Asiatici all'Università di
> Teramo. Politologo, esperto delle questioni "nazionali" nell'età
> contemporanea ed autore de "La questione nazionale dopo la decolonizzazione.
> Per una rilettura del principio di autodecisione nazionale" (Quaderni
> Internazionali, 1989).
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
** NO COPYRIGHT ! **
------------------------------------------------------------
"IL CONVERTITO E' PEGGIO DEL TURCO" (PROVERBIO SLAVO)
Jack Straw, un tempo tra i piu' attivi capelloni del movimento "hippy"
britannico, e' diventato uno dei ministri degli Interni piu' odiosi e
reazionari che la storia della Gran Bretagna ricordi. Straw si sta
costruendo una immagine da fautore della "tolleranza zero", ad esempio
in fatto di droghe leggere, e contemporaneamente impedisce che la
giustizia faccia il suo corso nel caso di criminali conclamati. Dopo i
tentennamenti relativi all'estradizione dell'anziano criminale nazista
lituano Konrad Kalejs, Straw sta dando il peggio di se per impedire la
consegna del ben noto dittatore cileno Pinochet. Eppure Straw - che a
difesa di Pinochet adduce "ragioni umanitarie" in perfetto spregio della
Convenzione Europea sulla Estradizione del 1957 ed in base ad un referto
medico tenuto segreto - 34 anni fa fece persino un viaggio di
solidarieta' internazionalista nel Cile di Allende.
(Fonti: Reuters 14/01/2000; Dichiarazione della Associazione Americana
dei Giuristi - http://www.presos.org/italia )
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
** NO COPYRIGHT ! **
------------------------------------------------------------
Jack Straw, un tempo tra i piu' attivi capelloni del movimento "hippy"
britannico, e' diventato uno dei ministri degli Interni piu' odiosi e
reazionari che la storia della Gran Bretagna ricordi. Straw si sta
costruendo una immagine da fautore della "tolleranza zero", ad esempio
in fatto di droghe leggere, e contemporaneamente impedisce che la
giustizia faccia il suo corso nel caso di criminali conclamati. Dopo i
tentennamenti relativi all'estradizione dell'anziano criminale nazista
lituano Konrad Kalejs, Straw sta dando il peggio di se per impedire la
consegna del ben noto dittatore cileno Pinochet. Eppure Straw - che a
difesa di Pinochet adduce "ragioni umanitarie" in perfetto spregio della
Convenzione Europea sulla Estradizione del 1957 ed in base ad un referto
medico tenuto segreto - 34 anni fa fece persino un viaggio di
solidarieta' internazionalista nel Cile di Allende.
(Fonti: Reuters 14/01/2000; Dichiarazione della Associazione Americana
dei Giuristi - http://www.presos.org/italia )
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
** NO COPYRIGHT ! **
------------------------------------------------------------
HUMANITARIAN WAR:
MAKING THE CRIME FIT THE PUNISHMENT
by Diana Johnstone
www.emperors-clothes.com
The order of events is strange. On March 24, 1999, the
NATO forces led by the United States began an
eleven-week-long punishment of Yugoslavia's President,
Slobodan Milosevic, which amounted to capital punishment
for an undetermined number of citizens of that
unfortunate country. Two months later, on May 27, the
U.S.-backed International Criminal Tribunal for former
Yugoslavia issued an indictment of Milosevic for "crimes
against humanity" having occurred after the punishment
began. Then, in late June, the Clinton administration
dispatched 56 forensic experts from the Federal Bureau of
Investigation to Kosovo to gather material evidence of
the crimes for which Milosevic and five of his colleagues
had already been indicted and for which his country had
already been severely and durably punished.
The FBI had no instructions to search for evidence of
crimes as such, including those that might have been
committed by, say, armed rebels fighting against the
established government of Yugoslavia. The only crimes of
interest were those for which Milosevic had previously
been accused, and all evidence was assumed in advance to
point to his guilt.
Thus the world entered the new age of humanitarian
vigilante power.
At the end of World War II, a world political system was
put in place to outlaw war. In its triumph as sole
superpower destined to govern the world, the United
States is currently striving to replace the system that
outlaws war by a system that uses war to punish outlaws.
Who the outlaws are is decided by the United States.
Alongside economic globalization, this vigilante system
corresponds to a dominant American world view of a
capitalist system inherently capable of meeting all human
needs, marred only by the wrongdoings of evil outcasts.
At home and abroad, the social effort to bring everybody
into a community of equal rights and obligations is
abandoned in favour of universal competition in which the
rich winners exclude the losers from society itself. On
the domestic scene, as the rich get richer, the
well-to-do escape from the very sight of the poor by
moving into gated communities, social programs are cut,
while prisons and execution chambers fill up. Punishment,
even vengeance, are popular values.
Twenty years ago, the United Nations and its agencies
provided a political forum for discussions of such
matters as a "new economic order" or a "new information
order" that might seek to narrow the enormous gap between
the rich Atlantic world and most of the rest of the
planet. All that is past, and today, the United Nations
is instrumentalized by the United States to pursue
dissident States which it has chosen to brand as rogues,
terrorists or criminals. Capitalist competition is being
forced onto the entire world as the supreme law by new
bodies such as the World Trade Organization. NATO-land is
a gated community whose armed forces are being prepared
to intervene worldwide, at the bidding of Washington, to
defend members' interests, in the name of the war against
crimes against humanity.
The Clinton Doctrine
The NATO war against Yugoslavia marks a great leap
forward toward the depoliticization and criminalization
of international relations. In the case of the similar
war against Iraq, the regime of Saddam Hussein was in
fact a military dictatorship, which did in fact violate
international law by invading Kuwait (leaving aside
eventual extenuating circumstances), and the United
States did obtain a mandate from the United Nations
Security Council for at least some (but not all) of its
military operations. In the case of Yugoslavia, the
military operations were carried out without U.N. mandate
against a state with an elected civilian government,
which had not violated international law.
NATO's war, directed from Washington, was intended as a
pure demonstration that the United States could make or
break the law. For it was Yugoslavia, which had not
violated international law, that was branded a criminal
State. Already on November 5, 1998, the American
presiding judge at the International Criminal Tribunal
for former Yugoslavia, Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, described
Yugoslavia as "a rogue state, one that holds the
international rule of law in contempt". During the
bombing, U.S. and British leaders regularly compared
Milosevic to Hitler. And afterwards, the U.S. Senate on
June 30 adopted a bill describing Yugoslavia as "a
terrorist State", in the total absence of any of the
usual criteria for such a designation. The United States
is free both to commit crimes, and to criminalize its
adversaries. Might is sure of being right.
"A Clinton Doctrine of humanitarian warfare is taking
place", rejoiced (1) columnist Jim Hoagland, a leading
voice in the chorus of syndicated columnists who have
nagged away at the President to get up the gumption to
lead NATO through the Balkans into a brave new
millennium. This "doctrine" is not quite as spontaneous
as it is made to seem by the media chorus which portrays
Uncle Sam as a reluctant Hamlet generously stumbling into
greatness.
Since the end of the Cold War, United States leaders have
been searching for a grand new design to replace the
containment doctrine developed after World War II. To
this end, the oligarchy that formulates American foreign
policy has been hard at work in its various exclusive
venues such as the Council on Foreign Relations, private
clubs, larger assemblages such as the Trilateral
Commission (which specializes in the great American
ruling class art of selective co-optation and conversion
of potential critics), and a myriad of institutes,
foundations and "think tanks", overlapping with a half
dozen of the most prestigious universities and, of
course, the boards of directors of major corporations and
financial institutions. All are united by an unshakable
conviction that what is good for the United States (and
the business of the United States is business) is good
for the world. American policy-makers may be more or less
generous or cynical, crafty or forthright, but all
necessarily share the conviction that the system which
has made America great and powerful should be bestowed on
the rest of an often undeserving and recalcitrant world.
There is no conflict between this conviction and ruthless
pursuit of economic self-interest; they are part of the
same mindset.
None better epitomizes the combined power and good
conscience of American capitalism than the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, founded in 1910 by the
Scottish-American steel king Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)
who recycled part of his vast rags-to-riches fortune into
philanthropic enterprises. It is fitting that in
formulating the Doctrine of Humanitarian Warfare now
attributed to Clinton, a major ideological role appears
to have been played by the Carnegie Endowment under the
presidency of Morton I. Abramowitz (2).
The Importance of War Crimes
In May 1997, three months after taking office as U.S.
Secretary of State, Madeleine Korbel Albright created a
new post, ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues. The
creation of the post indicated the crucial importance of
"war crimes" in Albright's foreign policy. Two days
later, crime was linked to punishment as she delivered
her first policy speech on Bosnia to senior military
officers aboard an aircraft carrier in the Hudson River.
These gestures showed that the first woman Secretary of
State was out to demonstrate the serious meaning of her
famous remark, "What's the use of having the world's
greatest military force if you don't use it?"
Albright and the man named to the new "war crimes" post,
David Scheffer, were putting into practice new policy
concepts they had helped develop before Clinton was
elected President, and before the war in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, when they had been part of what a
privileged observer (3) recently described as "a small
foreign policy elite convened by the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace to change U.S. foreign policy
after the Cold War."
During the last years of the Bush administration, the
Carnegie Endowment for Peace was confronting the major
question raised by the collapse of the Soviet bloc: what
new mission could save NATO, the necessary instrument for
U.S. leadership in Europe? And it found an answer:
humanitarian intervention. Reports by group members
Albright, Richard Holbrooke and Leon Fuerth "recommended
a dramatic escalation of the use of military force to
settle other countries' domestic conflicts." (4)
The Carnegie Endowment's 1992 report entitled "Changing
Our Ways: America's Role in the New World" called for "a
new principle of international relations: the destruction
or displacement of groups of people within states can
justify international intervention". The U.S. was advised
to "realign" NATO and the OSCE to deal with these new
security problems in Europe.
Release of this report, accompanied by policy briefings
of key Democrats and media big shots, was timed to
influence the Democratic presidential campaign. Candidate
Bill Clinton quickly took up the rhetoric, calling for
Milosevic to be tried for "crimes against humanity" and
advocating military intervention against the Serbs.
However, it took several years to put this into practice.
At the Carnegie Endowment, as member of a study group
including Al Gore's foreign policy advisor Leon Fuerth,
David Scheffer had co-authored (with Morton Halperin) a
book-length report on "Self-Determination in the New
World Order" which proposed military intervention as one
of the ways of "responding to international hot spots". A
major question raised was when and to what end the United
States should become involved in a conflict between an
established state and a "self-determination" -- i.e. a
secessionist -- movement. Clearly, the question was not
to be submitted to the United Nations. "The United States
should seek to build a consensus within regional and
international organizations for its position, but should
not sacrifice its own judgment and principles if such a
consensus fails to materialize"(5).
In general, the authors concluded, "the world community
needs to act more quickly and with more determination to
employ military force when it proves necessary and
feasible"(6). But when is this?
When a self-determination claim triggers an armed
conflict that becomes a humanitarian crisis, getting
food, medicine, and shelter to thousands or millions of
civilians becomes an inescapable imperative. A new
intolerance for such human tragedies is becoming evident
in the post-Cold War world and is redefining the
principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of
states (7).
Now, in theory, this sounds almost indisputable. However,
in practice the question becomes one not of theory but of
facts. When does a crisis in fact correspond to this
description, and when, on the contrary, can it simply be
made to seem to correspond to this description?
In the official NATO version, vigorously endorsed by
mainstream media, the Kosovo war was precisely an
instance when "a self-determination claim triggers an
armed conflict that becomes a humanitarian crisis..."
However, there is considerable, indeed overwhelming
evidence that the "self-determination claim" quite
deliberately provoked both the "armed conflict" and the
"humanitarian crisis" precisely in order to bring in, not
humanitarian aid, but military intervention from NATO on
the pretext of humanitarian aid. For there was never any
need of NATO intervention in order to provide food,
medicine and shelter to civilians within Kosovo or before
the NATO bombing. The "humanitarian crisis" was a mirage
until NATO triggered it by the bombing.
But in the culture of images, temporal relationships are
easily obscured. What came before or after what is
forgotten. And with temporal relationship, cause and
effect are lost, along with responsibility.
Can Kosovo be detached from Serbia? "The use of military
force to create a new state would require conduct by the
parent government so egregious that it has forfeited any
right to govern the minority claiming
self-determination"(8). But who decides that conduct is
sufficiently "egregious"?
Clearly, Madeleine Albright was so eager to put these
bold new theories into practice that she worked mightily
to make the crime fit the punishment.
Morton Abramowitz himself, who as Carnegie Endowment
President nurtured Albright, Holbrooke, Fuerth, Scheffer
and the others as they jointly developed Clinton's future
doctrine of "humanitarian warfare", has also played an
active role. In 1997, he passed through the elite
revolving door from the Carnegie Endowment to the Council
on Foreign Relations. He has contributed his wisdom to a
new, high-level think tank, the International Crisis
Group, whose sponsors include governments and omnipresent
financier George Soros. The ICG has been a leading
designer of policy toward Kosovo.
Putting into practice the hypothesis of "a
self-determination claim triggering an armed conflict",
Abramowitz became an early advocate of arming the "Kosovo
Liberation Army"(U?K). At Rambouillet, Abramowitz
discreetly coached the ethnic Albanian delegation headed
by U?K leader Hashim Thaqi (9).
Back in February 1992, before civil war broke out in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, television producer John B. Roberts
II was asked to design a publicity campaign to gain
public support for the soon-to-be-published Carnegie
Endowment recommendations. When he saw that "Changing Our
Ways" proposed "the revolutionary idea that a U.S.-led
military first strike was justified, not to defend the
United States, but to impose highly subjective political
settlements on other countries", that it "discarded
national sovereignty in favour of international
intervention", Roberts "began to regret [his] efforts to
build publicity for the report" (10).
One way or another, the "revolutionary idea" has been
widely propagated during the 1990s. Humanitarian
intervention was an idea whose time had come because it
met a certain number of perceived needs. It provided a
solution to the problem formulated by Senator Richard
Lugar, that once the Cold War ended, NATO must be "either
out of area or out of business". A new missionary mission
not only kept NATO alive, thereby nourishing a vast array
of vested industrial and financial interests, primarily
but not solely in the United States, it also could be
seen as a potential instrument to defend less broadly
perceived geostrategic interests without submitting them
to public controversy.
Humanitarian Realpolitik
When Madeleine Albright took over the State Department
from Warren Christopher in early 1997, her promotion was
presented to the public more as a personal success for a
woman than as a corporate success for a policy design. At
its most informative, The New York Times (11), mentioned
influential policy-makers as if they were benevolent
uncles ready to give encouragement to a lady. Three
months after she took office, it was reported: "Ms.
Albright has reached out for advice. She has talked with
Zbigniew Brzezinski; the departing president of the
Carnegie Endowment, Morton Abramowitz; the philanthropist
George Soros; and Leslie Gelb, president of the Council
on Foreign Relations."
If Abramowitz may be considered the ?minence grise behind
the whole "humanitarian intervention" policy, Brzezinski
provided a geostrategic rationale. Brzezinski has no
inhibitions about using high principles in the power
game. In Paris in January 1998 to promote the French
edition of his book, The Grand Chessboard, he was asked
about an apparent "paradox" between the fact that his
book was steeped in Realpolitik, whereas, in his days as
National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter,
Brzezinski had been the "defender of human rights".
Brzezinski waved the paradox aside. There is none, he
replied. "I elaborated that doctrine in agreement with
President Carter, as it was the best way to destabilize
the Soviet Union. And it worked"(12).
Of course, it took more than nice words about human
rights to destabilize the Soviet Union. It took war. And
Brzezinski was very active on that front. As he told a
second French weekly (13) during his book promotion tour,
the CIA had begun bank-rolling counter- revolutionary
Afghan forces in mid-1979, half a year before the Soviet
Union moved into Afghanistan on a "stabilizing" mission
around New Year's Day 1980. "We did not push the Russians
into intervening, but we knowingly increased the
possibility that they would. That secret operation was an
excellent idea. The effect was to draw the Russians into
the Afghan trap."
Brzezinski rightly felt he could be forthright about such
matters as humanitarian entrapment in Paris, where the
policy elite admires nothing so much in American leaders
as unabashed cynical power politics. This admiration is
most acute when the French are offered a share in it, as
was the case with Brzezinski and his book. France, wrote
Brzezinski, "is an essential partner in the important
task of permanently locking a democratic Germany into
Europe", which means preventing Germany from building its
own separate sphere of influence to the East, possibly
including Russia -- a connection that Brzezinski's policy
recommendations are designed to forestall at all costs.
"This is the historic role of the Franco-German
relationship, and the expansion of both the EU and NATO
eastward should enhance the importance of that
relationship as Europe's inner core. Finally, France is
not strong enough either to obstruct America on the
geostrategic fundamentals of America's European policy or
to become by itself a leader of Europe as such. Hence,
its peculiarities and even its tantrums can be
tolerated"(14).
These assurances may contribute to explaining the mystery
-- as it was widely perceived in other countries -- of
France's strong support to NATO's Kosovo war, second only
to Britain and in disharmony with reactions in Germany
and Italy. That is, the French elite had been given to
understand this war as part of the Brzezinski design for
a transatlantic Europe giving France a politico-military
leadership role offsetting Germany's economic
predominance.
Brzezinski frankly sets the goal for U.S. policy: "to
perpetuate America's own dominant position for at least a
generation and preferably longer still". This involves
creating a "geopolitical framework" around NATO that will
initially include Ukraine and exclude Russia. This will
establish the geostrategic basis for controlling conflict
in what Brzezinski calls "the Eurasian Balkans", the huge
area between the Eastern shore of the Black Sea to China,
which includes the Caspian Sea and its petroleum
resources, a top priority for U.S. foreign policy. In the
policy elites of both Britain and France, perpetuation of
Trans-Atlantic domination could be understood as a way of
preventing a Russo-German rapprochement able to dominate
the continent.
Along with Jeane Kirkpatrick, Frank Carlucci, William
Odom and Stephan Solarz, Brzezinski has joined the
anti-Serb crusade in yet another new Washington policy
shop, the "Balkan Action Council", calling for all-out
war against Yugoslavia over Kosovo.
In the Brzezinski scheme of things, Yugoslavia is a
testing ground and a metaphor for the Soviet Union. In
this metaphor, "Serbia" is Russia, and Croatia, Bosnia,
Kosovo, etc., are Ukraine, the Baltic States, Georgia and
the former Soviet Republics of "the Eurasian Balkans".
This being the case, the successful secession of Croatia
and company from Yugoslavia sets a positive precedent for
maintaining the independence of Ukraine and its
progressive inclusion in the European Union and NATO,
which he sets for the decade 2005-2015 as a "reasonable
time frame".
The little Balkan "Balkans" appear on a map on page 22 of
The Grand Chessboard interestingly shaded in three
gradations representing U.S. geopolitical preponderance
(dark), U.S. political influence (medium) and the
apparent absence of either (white). Darkly shaded (like
the U.S., Canada and Western Europe) are Hungary,
Rumania, Bulgaria and Turkey. Medium shading covers
Slovakia, Moldavia and Ukraine as well as Georgia and
most of the "Eurasian Balkans". Glaringly white, like
Russia, are Yugoslavia and Greece. For Brzezinski,
Belgrade was a potential relay for Moscow. Serbs might be
unaware of this, but in the geostrategic view, they were
only so many surrogate Russians.
Cultural Divides and Caspian Oil
Samuel Huntington's notion of "conflict of
civilizations", by identifying Orthodox Christianity as a
civilization in conflict with the West and its famous
"values", has offered an ideological cover for the
"divide and conquer" strategy, which has less appeal, but
is not incompatible with, the "humanitarian"
justification. It has been taken up by influential (15)
writer Robert D. Kaplan, who sees a "real battle" that is
"drawn along historical-civilizational lines. On the one
side are the Turks, their fellow Azeri Turks in
Azerbaijan, the Israelis and the Jordanians [...]. On the
other side are those who suffered the most historically
from Turkish rule: the Syrian and Iraqi Arabs, the
Armenians, the Greeks and the Kurds"(16). It is not hard
to see whose side the United States must be on in this
battle, or which must be the winning side.
Kaplan places Kosovo "smack in the middle of a very
unstable and important region where Europe joins the
Middle East" while "Europe is redividing along historic
and cultural lines"(17).
"There is a Western, Catholic, Protestant Europe and an
Eastern Orthodox Europe, which is poorer, more
politically unsettled and more ridden with organized
crime. That Orthodox realm has been shut out of NATO and
is angrier by the day, and it is fiercely anti-Moslem",
Kaplan declares.
An oddity of these "cultural divide" projections is that
they find the abyss between Eastern and Western
Christianity far deeper and more unbridgeable than the
difference between Christianity and Islam. The obvious
short, three-letter explanation is "oil". But there is a
complementary explanation that is more truly cultural,
relating to the transnational nature of Islam and to the
importance of its charitable organizations. Steve Niva
(18) has noted a split within the US foreign policy
establishment between conservatives (clearly absent from
the Clinton administration) who see Islam as a threat,
and "neo-liberals" for whom the primary enemy is "any
barrier to free trade and unfettered markets". These
include European leaders, oil companies and Zbigniew
Brzezinski. "Incorporating Islamists into existing
political systems would disperse responsibility for the
state's difficulties while defusing popular opposition to
severe economic `reforms' mandated by the IMF. Islamist
organizations could also help fill the gap caused by the
rollback of welfare states and social services...", Niva
observed.
In any case, all roads lead to the Caspian, and through
Kosovo. Kaplan publicly advises the nation's leaders that
an "amoral reason of self-interest" is needed to persuade
the country to keep troops in the Balkans for years to
come. The reason is clear. "With the Middle East
increasingly fragile, we will need bases and fly-over
rights in the Balkans to protect Caspian Sea oil. But we
will not have those bases in the future if the Russians
reconquer southeast Europe by criminal stealth. Finally,
if we tell our European allies to go it alone in Kosovo,
we can kiss the Western Alliance goodbye"(19).
Looking at a map, one may wonder why it is necessary to
go through Kosovo to obtain Caspian oil. This is a good
question. However, U.S. strategists don't simply want to
obtain oil, which is a simple matter if one has money.
They want to control its flow to the big European market.
The simple way to get Caspian oil is via pipeline
southward through Iran. But that would evade U.S.
control. Or through Russia; just as bad. The preferred
U.S. route, a pipeline from Azerbaijan to the Turkish
Mediterranean port of Ceyhan has been rejected as too
costly. Turkey has vetoed massive oil tanker traffic
through the Bosporus on ecological grounds. That leaves
the Balkans. It seems the U.S. would like to build a
pipeline across the Balkans, no doubt with Bechtel
getting the building contract -- former Bechtel executive
and Reagan administration Defense Secretary Caspar
Weinberger is a leading Kosovo warhawk. Bechtel has
already obtained major contracts in Tudjman's Croatia. It
is interesting that the Danube, likely to fall under
German control, has been blocked for serious transport by
NATO's bombing of Serbia's bridges.
On the way to the Caspian, the next stop after Yugoslavia
could be the big prize: Ukraine, which like the other
former Soviet Republics is already under U.S. influence
through NATO's "Partnership For Peace". Early this year,
asked by a German magazine whether NATO should be the
world policeman, NATO commander Wesley Clark observed
that the "countries on the Caspian Sea are members of the
`Partnership for Peace'. They have the right to consult
NATO in case of threat." Clark "didn't want to speculate
on what NATO might then do..."(20).
Scenarios Reach the TV Screen
As television producer Roberts recalls, it was a
Ukrainian friend who, seeing the implications for his own
country of the Abramowitz humanitarian war plans, set him
to worrying. "If the U.S. endorsed this new foreign
policy principle the potential for international chaos
was immense. Real or trumped up incidents of destruction
or displacement would be grounds for Russian or American
military intervention in dozens of countries where
nothing like a melting pot has ever existed."
"Real or trumped up" -- that is the question. For once so
much is at stake -- nothing less than the future of the
greatest power the world has ever seen -- events are all
too likely to follow the imaginary scenario laid out by
the policy planners.
This can happen in at least three ways.
1 - Reality imitates fiction. It is a common human
psychological phenomenon that people see what they are
looking for, or have been led to expect to see, often
when it is not there. This happens in countless ways. It
may account for desert mirages, or apparitions of the
Virgin, or simple errors of recognition that occur all
the time.
When reporters unfamiliar with the country are sent into
Bosnia or Kosovo to look for evidence of "Serbian war
crimes", and only evidence of Serbian war crimes, that is
what they will find. And if Croats, Muslims and Albanians
who are fighting against the Serbs know that that is what
they are looking for, it will be even easier.
If they are expecting, say, Serbs to be criminals,
everything Serbs say or do will be interpreted in that
light, with greater or less sincerity. Every ambiguous
detail will find its meaning.
2 - Evidence will be trumped up. This is an age-old
practice in war.
3 - Circumstances can be arranged to incite the very
crimes that the power wants to be able to punish. In
police language, this is called entrapment, or a "sting"
operation, and is illegal in many countries, although not
in the United States.
The Kosovo scenario has been advanced in all three ways.
(1. continua)
MAKING THE CRIME FIT THE PUNISHMENT
by Diana Johnstone
www.emperors-clothes.com
The order of events is strange. On March 24, 1999, the
NATO forces led by the United States began an
eleven-week-long punishment of Yugoslavia's President,
Slobodan Milosevic, which amounted to capital punishment
for an undetermined number of citizens of that
unfortunate country. Two months later, on May 27, the
U.S.-backed International Criminal Tribunal for former
Yugoslavia issued an indictment of Milosevic for "crimes
against humanity" having occurred after the punishment
began. Then, in late June, the Clinton administration
dispatched 56 forensic experts from the Federal Bureau of
Investigation to Kosovo to gather material evidence of
the crimes for which Milosevic and five of his colleagues
had already been indicted and for which his country had
already been severely and durably punished.
The FBI had no instructions to search for evidence of
crimes as such, including those that might have been
committed by, say, armed rebels fighting against the
established government of Yugoslavia. The only crimes of
interest were those for which Milosevic had previously
been accused, and all evidence was assumed in advance to
point to his guilt.
Thus the world entered the new age of humanitarian
vigilante power.
At the end of World War II, a world political system was
put in place to outlaw war. In its triumph as sole
superpower destined to govern the world, the United
States is currently striving to replace the system that
outlaws war by a system that uses war to punish outlaws.
Who the outlaws are is decided by the United States.
Alongside economic globalization, this vigilante system
corresponds to a dominant American world view of a
capitalist system inherently capable of meeting all human
needs, marred only by the wrongdoings of evil outcasts.
At home and abroad, the social effort to bring everybody
into a community of equal rights and obligations is
abandoned in favour of universal competition in which the
rich winners exclude the losers from society itself. On
the domestic scene, as the rich get richer, the
well-to-do escape from the very sight of the poor by
moving into gated communities, social programs are cut,
while prisons and execution chambers fill up. Punishment,
even vengeance, are popular values.
Twenty years ago, the United Nations and its agencies
provided a political forum for discussions of such
matters as a "new economic order" or a "new information
order" that might seek to narrow the enormous gap between
the rich Atlantic world and most of the rest of the
planet. All that is past, and today, the United Nations
is instrumentalized by the United States to pursue
dissident States which it has chosen to brand as rogues,
terrorists or criminals. Capitalist competition is being
forced onto the entire world as the supreme law by new
bodies such as the World Trade Organization. NATO-land is
a gated community whose armed forces are being prepared
to intervene worldwide, at the bidding of Washington, to
defend members' interests, in the name of the war against
crimes against humanity.
The Clinton Doctrine
The NATO war against Yugoslavia marks a great leap
forward toward the depoliticization and criminalization
of international relations. In the case of the similar
war against Iraq, the regime of Saddam Hussein was in
fact a military dictatorship, which did in fact violate
international law by invading Kuwait (leaving aside
eventual extenuating circumstances), and the United
States did obtain a mandate from the United Nations
Security Council for at least some (but not all) of its
military operations. In the case of Yugoslavia, the
military operations were carried out without U.N. mandate
against a state with an elected civilian government,
which had not violated international law.
NATO's war, directed from Washington, was intended as a
pure demonstration that the United States could make or
break the law. For it was Yugoslavia, which had not
violated international law, that was branded a criminal
State. Already on November 5, 1998, the American
presiding judge at the International Criminal Tribunal
for former Yugoslavia, Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, described
Yugoslavia as "a rogue state, one that holds the
international rule of law in contempt". During the
bombing, U.S. and British leaders regularly compared
Milosevic to Hitler. And afterwards, the U.S. Senate on
June 30 adopted a bill describing Yugoslavia as "a
terrorist State", in the total absence of any of the
usual criteria for such a designation. The United States
is free both to commit crimes, and to criminalize its
adversaries. Might is sure of being right.
"A Clinton Doctrine of humanitarian warfare is taking
place", rejoiced (1) columnist Jim Hoagland, a leading
voice in the chorus of syndicated columnists who have
nagged away at the President to get up the gumption to
lead NATO through the Balkans into a brave new
millennium. This "doctrine" is not quite as spontaneous
as it is made to seem by the media chorus which portrays
Uncle Sam as a reluctant Hamlet generously stumbling into
greatness.
Since the end of the Cold War, United States leaders have
been searching for a grand new design to replace the
containment doctrine developed after World War II. To
this end, the oligarchy that formulates American foreign
policy has been hard at work in its various exclusive
venues such as the Council on Foreign Relations, private
clubs, larger assemblages such as the Trilateral
Commission (which specializes in the great American
ruling class art of selective co-optation and conversion
of potential critics), and a myriad of institutes,
foundations and "think tanks", overlapping with a half
dozen of the most prestigious universities and, of
course, the boards of directors of major corporations and
financial institutions. All are united by an unshakable
conviction that what is good for the United States (and
the business of the United States is business) is good
for the world. American policy-makers may be more or less
generous or cynical, crafty or forthright, but all
necessarily share the conviction that the system which
has made America great and powerful should be bestowed on
the rest of an often undeserving and recalcitrant world.
There is no conflict between this conviction and ruthless
pursuit of economic self-interest; they are part of the
same mindset.
None better epitomizes the combined power and good
conscience of American capitalism than the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, founded in 1910 by the
Scottish-American steel king Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)
who recycled part of his vast rags-to-riches fortune into
philanthropic enterprises. It is fitting that in
formulating the Doctrine of Humanitarian Warfare now
attributed to Clinton, a major ideological role appears
to have been played by the Carnegie Endowment under the
presidency of Morton I. Abramowitz (2).
The Importance of War Crimes
In May 1997, three months after taking office as U.S.
Secretary of State, Madeleine Korbel Albright created a
new post, ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues. The
creation of the post indicated the crucial importance of
"war crimes" in Albright's foreign policy. Two days
later, crime was linked to punishment as she delivered
her first policy speech on Bosnia to senior military
officers aboard an aircraft carrier in the Hudson River.
These gestures showed that the first woman Secretary of
State was out to demonstrate the serious meaning of her
famous remark, "What's the use of having the world's
greatest military force if you don't use it?"
Albright and the man named to the new "war crimes" post,
David Scheffer, were putting into practice new policy
concepts they had helped develop before Clinton was
elected President, and before the war in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, when they had been part of what a
privileged observer (3) recently described as "a small
foreign policy elite convened by the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace to change U.S. foreign policy
after the Cold War."
During the last years of the Bush administration, the
Carnegie Endowment for Peace was confronting the major
question raised by the collapse of the Soviet bloc: what
new mission could save NATO, the necessary instrument for
U.S. leadership in Europe? And it found an answer:
humanitarian intervention. Reports by group members
Albright, Richard Holbrooke and Leon Fuerth "recommended
a dramatic escalation of the use of military force to
settle other countries' domestic conflicts." (4)
The Carnegie Endowment's 1992 report entitled "Changing
Our Ways: America's Role in the New World" called for "a
new principle of international relations: the destruction
or displacement of groups of people within states can
justify international intervention". The U.S. was advised
to "realign" NATO and the OSCE to deal with these new
security problems in Europe.
Release of this report, accompanied by policy briefings
of key Democrats and media big shots, was timed to
influence the Democratic presidential campaign. Candidate
Bill Clinton quickly took up the rhetoric, calling for
Milosevic to be tried for "crimes against humanity" and
advocating military intervention against the Serbs.
However, it took several years to put this into practice.
At the Carnegie Endowment, as member of a study group
including Al Gore's foreign policy advisor Leon Fuerth,
David Scheffer had co-authored (with Morton Halperin) a
book-length report on "Self-Determination in the New
World Order" which proposed military intervention as one
of the ways of "responding to international hot spots". A
major question raised was when and to what end the United
States should become involved in a conflict between an
established state and a "self-determination" -- i.e. a
secessionist -- movement. Clearly, the question was not
to be submitted to the United Nations. "The United States
should seek to build a consensus within regional and
international organizations for its position, but should
not sacrifice its own judgment and principles if such a
consensus fails to materialize"(5).
In general, the authors concluded, "the world community
needs to act more quickly and with more determination to
employ military force when it proves necessary and
feasible"(6). But when is this?
When a self-determination claim triggers an armed
conflict that becomes a humanitarian crisis, getting
food, medicine, and shelter to thousands or millions of
civilians becomes an inescapable imperative. A new
intolerance for such human tragedies is becoming evident
in the post-Cold War world and is redefining the
principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of
states (7).
Now, in theory, this sounds almost indisputable. However,
in practice the question becomes one not of theory but of
facts. When does a crisis in fact correspond to this
description, and when, on the contrary, can it simply be
made to seem to correspond to this description?
In the official NATO version, vigorously endorsed by
mainstream media, the Kosovo war was precisely an
instance when "a self-determination claim triggers an
armed conflict that becomes a humanitarian crisis..."
However, there is considerable, indeed overwhelming
evidence that the "self-determination claim" quite
deliberately provoked both the "armed conflict" and the
"humanitarian crisis" precisely in order to bring in, not
humanitarian aid, but military intervention from NATO on
the pretext of humanitarian aid. For there was never any
need of NATO intervention in order to provide food,
medicine and shelter to civilians within Kosovo or before
the NATO bombing. The "humanitarian crisis" was a mirage
until NATO triggered it by the bombing.
But in the culture of images, temporal relationships are
easily obscured. What came before or after what is
forgotten. And with temporal relationship, cause and
effect are lost, along with responsibility.
Can Kosovo be detached from Serbia? "The use of military
force to create a new state would require conduct by the
parent government so egregious that it has forfeited any
right to govern the minority claiming
self-determination"(8). But who decides that conduct is
sufficiently "egregious"?
Clearly, Madeleine Albright was so eager to put these
bold new theories into practice that she worked mightily
to make the crime fit the punishment.
Morton Abramowitz himself, who as Carnegie Endowment
President nurtured Albright, Holbrooke, Fuerth, Scheffer
and the others as they jointly developed Clinton's future
doctrine of "humanitarian warfare", has also played an
active role. In 1997, he passed through the elite
revolving door from the Carnegie Endowment to the Council
on Foreign Relations. He has contributed his wisdom to a
new, high-level think tank, the International Crisis
Group, whose sponsors include governments and omnipresent
financier George Soros. The ICG has been a leading
designer of policy toward Kosovo.
Putting into practice the hypothesis of "a
self-determination claim triggering an armed conflict",
Abramowitz became an early advocate of arming the "Kosovo
Liberation Army"(U?K). At Rambouillet, Abramowitz
discreetly coached the ethnic Albanian delegation headed
by U?K leader Hashim Thaqi (9).
Back in February 1992, before civil war broke out in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, television producer John B. Roberts
II was asked to design a publicity campaign to gain
public support for the soon-to-be-published Carnegie
Endowment recommendations. When he saw that "Changing Our
Ways" proposed "the revolutionary idea that a U.S.-led
military first strike was justified, not to defend the
United States, but to impose highly subjective political
settlements on other countries", that it "discarded
national sovereignty in favour of international
intervention", Roberts "began to regret [his] efforts to
build publicity for the report" (10).
One way or another, the "revolutionary idea" has been
widely propagated during the 1990s. Humanitarian
intervention was an idea whose time had come because it
met a certain number of perceived needs. It provided a
solution to the problem formulated by Senator Richard
Lugar, that once the Cold War ended, NATO must be "either
out of area or out of business". A new missionary mission
not only kept NATO alive, thereby nourishing a vast array
of vested industrial and financial interests, primarily
but not solely in the United States, it also could be
seen as a potential instrument to defend less broadly
perceived geostrategic interests without submitting them
to public controversy.
Humanitarian Realpolitik
When Madeleine Albright took over the State Department
from Warren Christopher in early 1997, her promotion was
presented to the public more as a personal success for a
woman than as a corporate success for a policy design. At
its most informative, The New York Times (11), mentioned
influential policy-makers as if they were benevolent
uncles ready to give encouragement to a lady. Three
months after she took office, it was reported: "Ms.
Albright has reached out for advice. She has talked with
Zbigniew Brzezinski; the departing president of the
Carnegie Endowment, Morton Abramowitz; the philanthropist
George Soros; and Leslie Gelb, president of the Council
on Foreign Relations."
If Abramowitz may be considered the ?minence grise behind
the whole "humanitarian intervention" policy, Brzezinski
provided a geostrategic rationale. Brzezinski has no
inhibitions about using high principles in the power
game. In Paris in January 1998 to promote the French
edition of his book, The Grand Chessboard, he was asked
about an apparent "paradox" between the fact that his
book was steeped in Realpolitik, whereas, in his days as
National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter,
Brzezinski had been the "defender of human rights".
Brzezinski waved the paradox aside. There is none, he
replied. "I elaborated that doctrine in agreement with
President Carter, as it was the best way to destabilize
the Soviet Union. And it worked"(12).
Of course, it took more than nice words about human
rights to destabilize the Soviet Union. It took war. And
Brzezinski was very active on that front. As he told a
second French weekly (13) during his book promotion tour,
the CIA had begun bank-rolling counter- revolutionary
Afghan forces in mid-1979, half a year before the Soviet
Union moved into Afghanistan on a "stabilizing" mission
around New Year's Day 1980. "We did not push the Russians
into intervening, but we knowingly increased the
possibility that they would. That secret operation was an
excellent idea. The effect was to draw the Russians into
the Afghan trap."
Brzezinski rightly felt he could be forthright about such
matters as humanitarian entrapment in Paris, where the
policy elite admires nothing so much in American leaders
as unabashed cynical power politics. This admiration is
most acute when the French are offered a share in it, as
was the case with Brzezinski and his book. France, wrote
Brzezinski, "is an essential partner in the important
task of permanently locking a democratic Germany into
Europe", which means preventing Germany from building its
own separate sphere of influence to the East, possibly
including Russia -- a connection that Brzezinski's policy
recommendations are designed to forestall at all costs.
"This is the historic role of the Franco-German
relationship, and the expansion of both the EU and NATO
eastward should enhance the importance of that
relationship as Europe's inner core. Finally, France is
not strong enough either to obstruct America on the
geostrategic fundamentals of America's European policy or
to become by itself a leader of Europe as such. Hence,
its peculiarities and even its tantrums can be
tolerated"(14).
These assurances may contribute to explaining the mystery
-- as it was widely perceived in other countries -- of
France's strong support to NATO's Kosovo war, second only
to Britain and in disharmony with reactions in Germany
and Italy. That is, the French elite had been given to
understand this war as part of the Brzezinski design for
a transatlantic Europe giving France a politico-military
leadership role offsetting Germany's economic
predominance.
Brzezinski frankly sets the goal for U.S. policy: "to
perpetuate America's own dominant position for at least a
generation and preferably longer still". This involves
creating a "geopolitical framework" around NATO that will
initially include Ukraine and exclude Russia. This will
establish the geostrategic basis for controlling conflict
in what Brzezinski calls "the Eurasian Balkans", the huge
area between the Eastern shore of the Black Sea to China,
which includes the Caspian Sea and its petroleum
resources, a top priority for U.S. foreign policy. In the
policy elites of both Britain and France, perpetuation of
Trans-Atlantic domination could be understood as a way of
preventing a Russo-German rapprochement able to dominate
the continent.
Along with Jeane Kirkpatrick, Frank Carlucci, William
Odom and Stephan Solarz, Brzezinski has joined the
anti-Serb crusade in yet another new Washington policy
shop, the "Balkan Action Council", calling for all-out
war against Yugoslavia over Kosovo.
In the Brzezinski scheme of things, Yugoslavia is a
testing ground and a metaphor for the Soviet Union. In
this metaphor, "Serbia" is Russia, and Croatia, Bosnia,
Kosovo, etc., are Ukraine, the Baltic States, Georgia and
the former Soviet Republics of "the Eurasian Balkans".
This being the case, the successful secession of Croatia
and company from Yugoslavia sets a positive precedent for
maintaining the independence of Ukraine and its
progressive inclusion in the European Union and NATO,
which he sets for the decade 2005-2015 as a "reasonable
time frame".
The little Balkan "Balkans" appear on a map on page 22 of
The Grand Chessboard interestingly shaded in three
gradations representing U.S. geopolitical preponderance
(dark), U.S. political influence (medium) and the
apparent absence of either (white). Darkly shaded (like
the U.S., Canada and Western Europe) are Hungary,
Rumania, Bulgaria and Turkey. Medium shading covers
Slovakia, Moldavia and Ukraine as well as Georgia and
most of the "Eurasian Balkans". Glaringly white, like
Russia, are Yugoslavia and Greece. For Brzezinski,
Belgrade was a potential relay for Moscow. Serbs might be
unaware of this, but in the geostrategic view, they were
only so many surrogate Russians.
Cultural Divides and Caspian Oil
Samuel Huntington's notion of "conflict of
civilizations", by identifying Orthodox Christianity as a
civilization in conflict with the West and its famous
"values", has offered an ideological cover for the
"divide and conquer" strategy, which has less appeal, but
is not incompatible with, the "humanitarian"
justification. It has been taken up by influential (15)
writer Robert D. Kaplan, who sees a "real battle" that is
"drawn along historical-civilizational lines. On the one
side are the Turks, their fellow Azeri Turks in
Azerbaijan, the Israelis and the Jordanians [...]. On the
other side are those who suffered the most historically
from Turkish rule: the Syrian and Iraqi Arabs, the
Armenians, the Greeks and the Kurds"(16). It is not hard
to see whose side the United States must be on in this
battle, or which must be the winning side.
Kaplan places Kosovo "smack in the middle of a very
unstable and important region where Europe joins the
Middle East" while "Europe is redividing along historic
and cultural lines"(17).
"There is a Western, Catholic, Protestant Europe and an
Eastern Orthodox Europe, which is poorer, more
politically unsettled and more ridden with organized
crime. That Orthodox realm has been shut out of NATO and
is angrier by the day, and it is fiercely anti-Moslem",
Kaplan declares.
An oddity of these "cultural divide" projections is that
they find the abyss between Eastern and Western
Christianity far deeper and more unbridgeable than the
difference between Christianity and Islam. The obvious
short, three-letter explanation is "oil". But there is a
complementary explanation that is more truly cultural,
relating to the transnational nature of Islam and to the
importance of its charitable organizations. Steve Niva
(18) has noted a split within the US foreign policy
establishment between conservatives (clearly absent from
the Clinton administration) who see Islam as a threat,
and "neo-liberals" for whom the primary enemy is "any
barrier to free trade and unfettered markets". These
include European leaders, oil companies and Zbigniew
Brzezinski. "Incorporating Islamists into existing
political systems would disperse responsibility for the
state's difficulties while defusing popular opposition to
severe economic `reforms' mandated by the IMF. Islamist
organizations could also help fill the gap caused by the
rollback of welfare states and social services...", Niva
observed.
In any case, all roads lead to the Caspian, and through
Kosovo. Kaplan publicly advises the nation's leaders that
an "amoral reason of self-interest" is needed to persuade
the country to keep troops in the Balkans for years to
come. The reason is clear. "With the Middle East
increasingly fragile, we will need bases and fly-over
rights in the Balkans to protect Caspian Sea oil. But we
will not have those bases in the future if the Russians
reconquer southeast Europe by criminal stealth. Finally,
if we tell our European allies to go it alone in Kosovo,
we can kiss the Western Alliance goodbye"(19).
Looking at a map, one may wonder why it is necessary to
go through Kosovo to obtain Caspian oil. This is a good
question. However, U.S. strategists don't simply want to
obtain oil, which is a simple matter if one has money.
They want to control its flow to the big European market.
The simple way to get Caspian oil is via pipeline
southward through Iran. But that would evade U.S.
control. Or through Russia; just as bad. The preferred
U.S. route, a pipeline from Azerbaijan to the Turkish
Mediterranean port of Ceyhan has been rejected as too
costly. Turkey has vetoed massive oil tanker traffic
through the Bosporus on ecological grounds. That leaves
the Balkans. It seems the U.S. would like to build a
pipeline across the Balkans, no doubt with Bechtel
getting the building contract -- former Bechtel executive
and Reagan administration Defense Secretary Caspar
Weinberger is a leading Kosovo warhawk. Bechtel has
already obtained major contracts in Tudjman's Croatia. It
is interesting that the Danube, likely to fall under
German control, has been blocked for serious transport by
NATO's bombing of Serbia's bridges.
On the way to the Caspian, the next stop after Yugoslavia
could be the big prize: Ukraine, which like the other
former Soviet Republics is already under U.S. influence
through NATO's "Partnership For Peace". Early this year,
asked by a German magazine whether NATO should be the
world policeman, NATO commander Wesley Clark observed
that the "countries on the Caspian Sea are members of the
`Partnership for Peace'. They have the right to consult
NATO in case of threat." Clark "didn't want to speculate
on what NATO might then do..."(20).
Scenarios Reach the TV Screen
As television producer Roberts recalls, it was a
Ukrainian friend who, seeing the implications for his own
country of the Abramowitz humanitarian war plans, set him
to worrying. "If the U.S. endorsed this new foreign
policy principle the potential for international chaos
was immense. Real or trumped up incidents of destruction
or displacement would be grounds for Russian or American
military intervention in dozens of countries where
nothing like a melting pot has ever existed."
"Real or trumped up" -- that is the question. For once so
much is at stake -- nothing less than the future of the
greatest power the world has ever seen -- events are all
too likely to follow the imaginary scenario laid out by
the policy planners.
This can happen in at least three ways.
1 - Reality imitates fiction. It is a common human
psychological phenomenon that people see what they are
looking for, or have been led to expect to see, often
when it is not there. This happens in countless ways. It
may account for desert mirages, or apparitions of the
Virgin, or simple errors of recognition that occur all
the time.
When reporters unfamiliar with the country are sent into
Bosnia or Kosovo to look for evidence of "Serbian war
crimes", and only evidence of Serbian war crimes, that is
what they will find. And if Croats, Muslims and Albanians
who are fighting against the Serbs know that that is what
they are looking for, it will be even easier.
If they are expecting, say, Serbs to be criminals,
everything Serbs say or do will be interpreted in that
light, with greater or less sincerity. Every ambiguous
detail will find its meaning.
2 - Evidence will be trumped up. This is an age-old
practice in war.
3 - Circumstances can be arranged to incite the very
crimes that the power wants to be able to punish. In
police language, this is called entrapment, or a "sting"
operation, and is illegal in many countries, although not
in the United States.
The Kosovo scenario has been advanced in all three ways.
(1. continua)
(seconda parte)
Military intervention may be justified "when a
self-determination claim triggers an armed conflict that
becomes a humanitarian crisis", wrote Scheffer and
Halperin.
The much-praised non-violent movement of Ibrahim Rugova
could not meet this criterion. It failed precisely
because it was not a movement for political equality but
a movement for secession. A non-violent movement for
political equality can find many active ways to
illustrate its exclusion and press its demands for
inclusion. But the goals of the Albanian movement were
not inclusion but complete independence from the existing
State. To show their rejection of Serbia, Kosovo
Albanians in the Rugova period refused to use the
democratic rights they had, boycotted elections, refused
to pay taxes, and even set up their own parallel schools
and public health service. The odd thing is that this
movement of passive resistance was met for the most part
by passive resistance on the part of the Serbian State,
which allowed Dr Rugova to go about his business
(obviously in defiance of Serbian laws) as "President of
the Republic of Kosova", let people get away with not
paying taxes and did not force children to attend Serbian
schools. Certainly, there were numerous instances of
police brutality, although their extent is hard to judge,
inasmuch as Kosovar Albanian Human Rights Groups
notoriously exaggerated such incidents in order to claim
that their people were being brutally oppressed -- a
claim which was not accepted by the German government
(21), incidentally, despite its support to the separatist
movement. But in reality, internal separatism was too
easy. The two communities grew ever farther apart, but
peacefully. There was an impasse.
That impasse was broken by the U?K/KLA, acting with the
backing of the United States. The strategy was summed up
by Richard Cohen (22):
The KLA had a simple but effective plan. It would kill
Serbian policemen. The Serbs would retaliate, Balkan
style, with widespread reprisals and the occasional
massacre. The West would get more and more appalled,
until finally it would, as it did in Bosnia, take action.
In effect, the United States and much of Europe would go
to war on the side of the KLA.
It worked.
This version perhaps gives the KLA/U?K a little too much
credit. The United States has been watching Kosovo
closely for years, and there are strong indications that
it both passively and actively assisted the armed rebels
in their humanitarian sting operation. The KLA did indeed
kill Serbian policemen, as well as a number of civilians,
including ethnic Albanians who failed to boycott the
Serbian state. But in between these killings and the Serb
retaliation, "Balkan style", there was a very significant
encouragement from Richard Gelbard, acting as U.S.
proconsul for former Yugoslavia. Normally, Gelbard's
visits to Belgrade were marked by utterances berating
Serbian authorities for not doing Washington's bidding in
one respect or another. But on February 23, 1998, Gelbard
visited Pristina and declared publicly that the KLA/U?K
was indeed "unquestionably a terrorist organization".
To the Serbs, this simply seemed to be recognition of
what to them was an obvious fact. Naively believing that
the United States was, as it continued to declare,
sincerely opposed to "international terrorism", Serbian
authorities took this remark as a green light to do what
any government normally does in such circumstances: send
in armed police to repress the terrorists. After all,
they were not hard to find. Unlike guerrillas in most
conflicts, they made no effort to conceal their
whereabouts but openly proclaimed that they were hanging
out in a number of villages in the Drenica hill region.
Far from heading for the hills when the police
approached, the U?K let civilians who didn't want to get
shot head for the hills while they themselves hunkered
down at home, sometimes with a few remaining family
members, and shot it out with police. This suicidal
tactic may have stemmed from the fact that Albanian homes
often double as fortresses in the traditional blood
feuds, but could not withstand Serbian government fire
power. In any case, the results were enough dead
Albanians in their villages to enable Madeleine Albright
and her chorus of media commentators to cry "ethnic
cleansing". It was not "ethnic cleansing", it was a
classic anti-insurgency operation. But that was enough
for the trap to start closing.
It is easy to imagine how the same scenario could enfold
again in some remote area of the "Eurasian Balkans",
where folk customs are not frightfully different from
those of the Albanians.
How to Get the Job of U.N. Secretary General
The Abramowitz-Albright policy for Yugoslavia has been
used as the event, the fait accompli, to complete a major
institutional shift of power. Institutions based on the
principle of decision-making equality between nations
(the United Nations, its agencies, and the OSCE) have
been drastically weakened. Others, effectively under U.S.
control (NATO, the International Criminal Tribunal), have
enlarged their scope, under the heading of a vague new
entity, the "international community".
The first target of this shift has of course been the
United Nations. Already weakened by the successful U.S.
undermining of U.N. agencies such as UNESCO and UNCTAD
which threatened to promote alternative and more
egalitarian concepts of "globalization", the United
Nations has been reduced by the conflict in Yugoslavia to
a rubber stamp to be used or ignored by the United States
as it chooses.
Certainly, responsibility for weakening the United
Nations is widely shared among world powers, but the
United States' role in this demolition enterprise has
nevertheless been outstanding. Far from trying to help
the United Nations seek an even-handed solution to the
Yugoslav crisis, the Clinton administration used its
influence to secure decisions of benefit to its own
chosen clients, the Bosnian Muslims and the Albanian
secessionists. In Bosnia, United Nations forces were
given impossible missions: hanging around deceptively
declared -- deceptively because never demilitarized --
"safe areas", as fighting continued. Their inevitable,
not to say programmed, failure could be, and has been,
trumpeted as "proof" that only NATO can carry out a
proper peace-keeping mission.
A significant high point in the United States' reduction
of the United Nations to a pliant tool came on August 30,
1995, when the United Nations momentarily relinquished
its control over Bosnian peace-keeping to NATO, aka the
Pentagon, in order to let the United States bomb the
Bosnian Serbs.
For Washington, the primary significance of this bombing
had less to do with the people of Bosnia than with U.S.
power. According to Richard Holbrooke, this was correctly
grasped by columnist William Pfaff who wrote the next
day: "The United States today is again Europe's leader;
there is no other."
In his memoir To End a War, Richard Holbrooke recounted
this proud achievement and lavishly praised the United
Nations official who made it possible: the Ghanaian
diplomat Kofi Annan, then in charge of peacekeeping
operations.
Madeleine Albright, at the time the U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations, was carrying on a "vigorous campaign"
in favour of bombing the Serbs. Luck smiled:
"fortunately, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali was
unreachable [...], so she dealt instead with his best
deputy, Kofi Annan, who was in charge of peacekeeping
operations. At 11:45 a.m., New York time, came a big
break: Annan informed Talbott and Albright that he had
instructed the U.N.'s civilian officials and military
commanders to relinquish for a limited period of time
their authority to veto air strikes in Bosnia. For the
first time in the war, the decision on the air strikes
was solely in the hands of NATO -- primarily two American
officers [...]"
"Annan's gutsy performance in those twenty-four hours was
to play a central role in Washington's strong support for
him a year later as the successor to Boutros
Boutros-Ghali as Secretary General of the United Nations.
Indeed, in a sense Annan won the job on that day"(23).
Bosnia was the main reason for getting rid of
Boutros-Ghali. "More than any other issue, it was his
performance on Bosnia that made us feel he did not
deserve a second term -- just as Kofi Annan's strength on
the bombing in August had already made him the private
favorite of many American officials", Holbrooke
explained. "Although the American campaign against
Boutros-Ghali, in which all our key allies opposed us,
was long and difficult [...] the decision was correct,
and may well have saved America's role in the United
Nations."
How to Sabotage the OSCE
With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was widely
favoured to succeed both the dismantled Warsaw Pact and
NATO as an all-inclusive institution to ensure security,
resolve conflicts and defend human rights in Europe. This
naturally encountered opposition from all those who
wanted to preserve and expand NATO, and with it, the
leading U.S. role in Europe -- that is, from many
important officials in many NATO countries, especially
Britain and the Netherlands, as well as the United States
itself.
On the eve of the Kosovo war, the tandem of Richard
Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright once again moved to
cripple a rival to NATO and clear the way for NATO
bombing.
On October 13, 1998, under threat of NATO bombing, U.S.
envoy Richard Holbrooke got Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic to sign a unilateral deal to end security
operations against armed rebels. The agreement was to be
monitored by 2,000 foreign "verifiers" provided under the
auspices of the OSCE. From the start, opinions in Europe
were divided as to whether this Kosovo Verification
Mission (KVM) marked an advance for the OSCE or a kiss of
death, designed to prove the organization's impotence and
leave NATO as the uncontested arbiter of conflicts in
Europe.
The mission's fate was sealed in favour of the second
alternative when the European majority in the OSCE was
somehow persuaded to accept U.S. diplomat William Walker
to head the KVM. Walker was a veteran of Central American
"banana republic" management, who had collaborated with
Oliver North in illegally arming the "Contras" and had
covered up murderous state security operations in El
Salvador as U.S. ambassador there during the Reagan
administration.
Walker brought in 150 professional mercenaries from the
Arlington, Virginia-based DynCorp which had already
worked in Bosnia, drove around in a vehicle flying the
American flag, and did everything to confirm what his
French deputy, Ambassador Gabriel Keller, described as
the "wide-spread conviction in Serbian public opinion
that the OSCE was working under cover for NATO, [...]
that we acted with a hidden agenda" (24).
That impression was shared by many members of the KVM. A
number of Italians, whose comments were published
anonymously in the geostrategic review LiMes, accused the
Americans of "sabotaging the OSCE mission". Said one:
"The mission in my view had two primary aims. One was to
infiltrate personnel into the theatre with intelligence
tasks and for special forces activities (preparatory work
for a predetermined war). The other was to give the world
the impression that everything had been tried and thus
create grounds for public consent to the aggression we
perpetrated"(25).
According to Swiss verifier Pascal Neuffer: "We
understood from the start that the information gathered
by OSCE patrols during our mission were destined to
complete the information that NATO had gathered by
satellite. We had the very sharp impression of doing
espionage work for the Atlantic Alliance"(26).
KVM members have criticized Walker and his British chief
of operations, Karol (John) Drewienkiewicz, for rejecting
any cooperation with Serb authorities, for blocking
diplomatic means to ensure human rights, for controlling
the mission's information flow, and most serious of all,
for using the mission to make contact with U?K rebels and
train them to guide NATO to targets in the subsequent
bombing (27). Since the Serbs were quite aware of this
activity, as soon as the bombing began on March 24, Serb
security forces set out to root out all suspected U?K
indicators. These operations are very probably at the
heart of what NATO has described as ethnic cleansing.
However, prior to the bombing, KVM members testify to a
low level of violence, as well as a pattern of U?K
provocations. According to Keller, "every pullback by the
Yugoslav army or the Serbian police was followed by a
movement forward by [U?K] forces [...] OSCE's presence
compelled Serbian government forces to a certain
restraint [...] and U?K took advantage of this to
consolidate its positions everywhere, continuing to
smuggle arms from Albania, abducting and killing both
civilians and military personnel, Albanians and Serbs
alike."
By the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999, an
increasingly audible split was taking place within the
KVM between Walker and most of the Europeans. Every
incident was an occasion for Walker and the U.S. State
Department to denounce the Serbs for breaking the truce,
and to accuse Milosevic of violating his commitment. The
Europeans saw things differently: the Albanian rebels,
with U.S. encouragement, were systematically provoking
Serb attacks in order to justify NATO coming in on their
side of the conflict.
In mid-January, Walker settled the score with his
European critics by bringing the world media over to his
side. This was the political significance of the famous
"Racak massacre". On January 15, Serb police had carried
out a pre-announced operation, accompanied by observers
and television cameras, against U?K killers believed to
be hiding out in the village of Racak. As the Serbs swept
into the village, the U?K gunmen took refuge on
surrounding high ground and began to fire on the police,
as TV footage showed. But the Serbs had sent forces
around behind them, and many U?K fighters were trapped
and shot. After the Serb forces withdrew that afternoon,
the U?K again took control of the village, and it was
they who led Walker into the village the next day to see
what they described as victims of a massacre. It may be,
as Serb authorities claimed and many Europeans tended to
believe, that the victims were in fact killed in the
shootout reported by the police, and then aligned to give
the appearance of a mass execution, or "massacre".
In any case, the extremely emotional public reaction by
the high-profile head of the KVM, condemning the Serbs
for "a crime against humanity", "an unspeakable atrocity"
committed by Serbs "with no value for human life", ended
any possible pretense of neutrality of the OSCE mission.
Walker's accusations were quickly taken up by NATO
politicians and editorialists. A complex conflict was
reduced to a simple opposition between Serbian
perpetrators of massacres and innocent Albanian civilian
victims. The U?K and its provocative murders of policemen
and civilians were to all intents and purposes invisible.
Presented as a gratuitous atrocity, "Racak" became the
immediate justification for NATO war against Yugoslavia.
In Kosovo itself, KVM members have testified, after Racak
the Serbs were totally convinced that the OSCE was
working for NATO and began to prepare for war, while the
U?K became still more aggressive. KVM members have also
complained of the fact that Walker evacuated the mission
to Macedonia on March 20, five days before the bombing
began. This way, no outside observers were there to see
exactly what did happen when the bombing began, much less
try to prevent it. Walker's leadership had effectively
removed all pressure or incentive for either side to show
restraint.
"In the history of international missions it would be
hard to find such a chaotic and tragically ambiguous
enterprise", concluded an Italian participant.
How to Obtain Justice
The importance of crimes in this new world order was
highlighted by the establishment in May 1993 of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY). This tribunal was established by Security Council
resolution 827 under its Article 29 which allows it to
set up "subsidiary bodies" necessary to fulfill its
peacekeeping tasks. It is more than doubtful that the
framers of the United Nations statutes had a criminal
tribunal in mind, and many jurists consider resolution
827 to be an usurpation of legislative and judicial
powers by the Security Council. In fact, this act went
contrary to over forty years of study, within the
framework of the United Nations, of the possibilities for
setting up an international penal tribunal, whose
jurisdiction would be established by international treaty
allowing States to transfer part of their sovereign
rights to the tribunal. The Security Council's ICTY went
over the heads of the States concerned and simply imposed
its authority on them, without their consent.
Last April 5, as NATO was bombing Yugoslavia, the ICTY's
presiding judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald (a former U.S.
federal judge in Texas) told the Supreme Court that the
Tribunal "benefited from the strong support of concerned
governments and dedicated individuals such as Secretary
Albright. As the permanent representative to the United
Nations, she had worked with unceasing resolve to
establish the Tribunal. Indeed, we often refer to her as
the `mother of the Tribunal'".
Because it is also located in The Hague, very many
well-informed people confuse the Tribunal with the
International Court of Justice, or at least believe that,
like the ICJ, the ICT is a truly independent and
impartial judicial body. Its many supporters in the media
say so, and so do its statutes. Article 32 of its
governing statute says the Tribunal's expenses shall be
borne by the regular budget of the United Nations, but
this has been persistently violated. As Toronto lawyer
Christopher Black points out, "the tribunal has received
substantial funds from individual States, private
foundations and corporations". The United States has
provided personnel (23 officials lent by the Departments
of State, Defense and Justice as of May 1996), equipment
and cash contributions. More money has been granted the
Tribunal by financier George Soros' Open Society
Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the United
States Institute for Peace, set up in 1984 under the
Reagan administration and funded by Congressional
appropriations, with its board of directors appointed by
the U.S. President.
The Tribunal is vigorously supported by the Coalition for
International Justice (CIJ), based in Washington and The
Hague, founded and funded by George Soros' Open Society
Foundation and a semi-official U.S. lawyers' group called
CEELI, the Central and East European Law Institute, set
up to promote the replacement of socialist legal systems
with free market ones, according to Christopher Black.
Last May 12, ICTY president Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, in a
speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, said that:
"The U.S. government has very generously agreed to
provide $500,000 and to help to encourage other States to
contribute. However, the moral imperative to end the
violence in the region is shared by all, including the
corporate sector. I am pleased, therefore, that a major
corporation has recently donated computer equipment worth
three million dollars, which will substantially enhance
our operating capacity."
Moreover, during the bombing, Clinton obtained a special
$27 million appropriation to help the Tribunal,
especially in collecting anti-Serb testimony from
Albanian refugees along the borders of Kosovo. Finally,
Clinton has offered a bounty of $5 million for the arrest
of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
Ethnic Divisions, Unified Empires
An extremely significant feature of the humanitarian
intervention policy is its emphasis on collective in
contrast to individual rights.
"In the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet empire,"
runs the summary of Self-Determination in the New World
Order, "new nations are emerging rapidly, and more and
more ethnic groups are pushing for independence or
autonomy." So the question is "how the United States
should respond". The authors "propose criteria for
decision makers who are weighing whether to support
groups seeking self-determination, to offer political
recognition, or to intervene with force."
This approach has practically nothing to do with
democracy, and everything to do with empire construction.
Although the words "democracy" and "democratic" are still
used, they tend increasingly to be without meaning other
than to designate favoured client leaders or groups in
countries of interest to the United States. Certainly,
Hashim Thaqi, the U?K leader who counts Madeleine
Albright's spokesman James Rubin (husband of CNN's
Christiane Amanpour) among his fans (28), is scarcely
more "democratic" than Milan Milutinovic, elected
President of Serbia, indicted with Milosevic by
Albright's "International War Crimes Tribunal". In fact,
the selection of particular groups, ethnic or social, as
clients, is the traditional way in which a conquering
empire can reshape social structures and replace former
elites with its own.
The imperial project is becoming increasingly open.
Protectorates are being established in Bosnia and Kosovo,
President Clinton is vigorously calling for the illegal
overthrow of the legally elected Yugoslav president.
Totally disregarding the feelings and wishes of the real,
live people who live there, Robert Kaplan announced (29)
that "there are two choices in the Balkans -- imperialism
or anarchy. To stop the violence, we essentially have to
act in the way the great powers in the region have always
acted: as pacifying conquerors." Like the Romans and the
Austrian Habsburgs, "motivated by territorial
aggrandizement for their own economic enrichment,
strategic positions and glory."
Merely to suggest that the United States might "intervene
with force" on behalf of an ethnic group seeking
self-determination is to cause trouble. There are
potentially hundreds of such groups not only in the
former Soviet Republics but throughout Africa and Asia.
The prospect of U.S. military intervention will, on the
one hand, encourage potential secessionist leaders to
push their claims to the point of "humanitarian crisis",
in order to bring in the Superpower on their side. By the
same token, it will encourage existing states to suppress
such movements brutally and decisively in order to
prevent precisely that intervention. A vicious cycle will
be created, enabling the single Superpower to fish
selectively in troubled waters.
The concept of "ethnic group" rests on the notion of
"identity". If individual identity is problematic, group
identity is even more so. That is, just as individuals
may have multiple or changing "identities", groups may
have changing compositions as people come and go from one
"identity" group to another. Especially in the modern
mobile world, ethnic identity is therefore a highly
questionable basis for claim to political recognition in
the form of an independent State. The forceful
affirmation of "ethnic identity" tends to strengthen
traditional patriarchal structures in places such as
Kosovo, at the expense of individual liberation. Stress
on ethnic identity enforces stereotypes, mafioso
structures and leadership by "godfathers".
Foreign policy based on ethnic identity has notorious
antecedents: it was precisely the policy employed by
Adolf Hitler to justify his conquest of the same Eastern
European territories that Brzezinski now watches so
attentively. Both the takeover of Czechoslovakia and the
invasion of Poland were officially justified by the need
to protect allegedly oppressed German minorities from the
cruel Czechs and Poles. The British government's
understanding for Herr Hitler's concern about Germans in
Czechoslovakia is the real "Munich". Before invading
Poland, Hitler had the SS manufacture an "incident" in
which wicked Poles stormed an innocent German-language
radio station in order to desecrate it with their
barbarous Slav language. The dead body left on the scene
to authenticate the incident was in fact a prison convict
in costume.
In Yugoslavia, Hitler "liberated" not only Germans but
also and especially Croats and (in conjunction with
fascist Italy) Albanians, long selected as the proper
Randv?lker to receive German protection, the better to
crush the main historic adversary, the Serbs, the people
who more than any other had fought for independence from
Empires. (The Serbs themselves as they became "Yugoslavs"
were less and less unified around Serbian identity, even
if they have continued to pay for it.)
Making policy by distinguishing between "friend" and
"enemy" peoples is pure Hitlerism, and this is what the
Anglo-American NATO leaders are now doing, while
ironically pretending to reject "Munich".
History As Melodrama
The media that recount Balkan ghost stories to the
"children" (30) back in NATOland rarely go into detail
about the peculiarities of these various customs and
situations. Popular culture has prepared audiences for a
simpler version. The pattern is the same as in disaster
movies, outer space movies, etc: there is always the trio
of classic melodrama: wicked villain, helpless victim
(maiden in distress) and heroic rescuer. Same plot. Over
and over. Only in the Abramowitz humanitarian war plan,
the trio is composed of ethnic entities or nationalities.
There is the "good" ethnic group, all victims, like the
Kosovar Albanians. Then there is the "bad" ethnic group,
all racist hatred, ethnic cleansing and even "genocide".
And finally, of course, there is Globocop to the rescue:
NATO with its stealth bombers, cruise missiles and
cluster blade bombs, its depleted uranium and graphite
power-plan busters. A bit of fireworks, like the car
chase at the end of the movie.
The whole concept of ethnic war as pretext for U.S.
military intervention implies this division of humanity
between "good" and "bad" nationalities, between
"oppressor" and "victim" peoples. Since this is rarely
the case, the story is told by analogy with the famous
exceptional cases where the categories fit: Hitler and
the Jews being the obvious favourite. Every new villain
is a "Hitler", every new ethnic secessionist group to be
used as pretext for new NATO bases is the victim of a
potential "Holocaust". At this rate, the two terms will
cease to be proper nouns and become general terms for the
new global Guignol.
Starting with the pretense of militant anti-racism,
"humanitarian intervention" finishes with a new racism.
To merit all those bombs, the "bad" people must be
tarnished with collective guilt. At the G8 summit in
Cologne in June, Tony Blair clearly adopted the doctrine
of collective guilt when he declared that there could be
no humanitarian aid for the Serbs because of the dreadful
way they had treated the Kosovar Albanians. With their
incomparable self-righteousness, the Anglo-American
commanders are leading this new humanitarian crusade to
extremes of inhumanity.
Footnotes
(1) Jim Hoagland, "Developing a Doctrine of Humanitarian
Warfare", International Herald Tribune, June 28, 1999.
(2) A former U.S. Ambassador to Thailand, Abramowitz
served as Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence
and Research in the Reagan administration. In January
1986, he took part in an interesting mission to Beijing
alongside top CIA officials with the purpose of
persuading China to support supplying Stinger missiles to
Islamic Afghan rebels in order to keep up pressure on the
Soviet Union, even as Gorbachev was trying to end the
Cold War. In the mid-1990s, he was part of a blue ribbon
panel sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations which
advised the Clinton Administration to loosen restrictions
on CIA covert operations such as dealing with criminals,
disguising agents as journalists, and targeting
unfriendly heads of State.
(3) John B. Roberts, "Roots of Allied Farce", The
American Spectator, June 1999.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Morton H. Halperin & David J. Scheffer with Patricia
L. Small, Self-Determination In the New World Order,
Carnegie Endowment, Washington,D.C., 1992; page 80.
(6) Ibid, p.105.
(7) Ibid, p.107.
(8) Ibid, p.110.
(9) Charles Trueheart, "Serbs and Kosovars Get Nudge From
Their Hosts To Speed Up Peace Talks", International
Herald Tribune/Washington Post, February 9, 1999: "On
Monday, the Kosovo Albanians won a small tactical victory
when their American advisers, initially barred by
conference hosts, were allowed to visit them at the
chateau. They included two former U.S. diplomats, Morton
Abramowitz and Paul Williams."
(10) John B.Roberts, op.cit.
(11) Steven Erlanger, "Winning Friends for Foreign
Policy: Albright's First 100 Days", The New York Times,
14 May 1997.
(12) "Il n'y a pas de paradoxe. J'ai mis au point cette
doctrine en accord avec le pr?sident Carter, car c'?tait
la meilleure fa?on de d?stabiliser l'Urss. ?a a march?."
L'Ev?nement du jeudi, 14 January 1998.
(13) Le Nouvel observateur, 14 January 1998, reported by
AFP.
(14) Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard,
BasicBooks, New York, 1997, p.78.
(15) Kaplan's 1993 book Balkan Ghosts was notoriously
read by President Clinton, who, however, had to be chided
later by the author for having drawn the wrong
conclusion. That is, Clinton's initial conclusion was to
stay out of the Balkans, whereas Kaplan has, he
explained, always been an interventionist.
(16) New York Times/International Herald Tribune, 23
February 1999.
(17) Robert D.Kaplan, "Why the Balkans Demand Amorality",
The Washington Post, 28 February 1999.
(18) Steve Niva, "Between Clash and Co-Optation: US
Foreign Policy and the Specter of Islam", Middle East
Report, Fall 1998.
(19) The Washington Post, 28 February 1999.
(20) Stern, 4 March 1999.
(21) In mid-April, 1999, the International Association of
Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA) obtained and
distributed to news media official documents from the
German foreign office showing that in the months leading
up to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the foreign office
had repeatedly informed administrative courts of the
various German L?nder that there was no persecution of
ethnic Albanians in Kosovo or the rest of Serbia.
Example: Intelligence report from the Foreign Office,
January 12, 1999, to the administrative Court of Trier,
"Even in Kosovo an explicit political persecution linked
to Albanian ethnicity is not verifiable. The East of
Kosovo is still not involved in armed conflict. Public
life in cities like Pristina, Urosevac, Gnjilan, etc.
has, in the entire conflict period, continued on a
relatively normal basis." The "actions of the security
forces [were] not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians
as an ethnically defined group, but against the military
opponent and its actual or alleged supporters." These
reports were published in the German daily junge welt on
24 April 1999.
(22) Richard Cohen, "The Winner in the Balkans Is the
KLA", Washington Post/International Herald Tribune, 18
June 1999.
(23) Richard Holbrooke, To End a War, Random House, New
York, 1998, p.103.
(24) "The OSCE KVM: autopsy of a mission", statement
delivered by Ambassador Gabriel Keller, principal deputy
head of mission, to the watch group on May 25, 1999.
(25) Italian military participant "Romanus", in LiMes
2/99, cited by il manifesto, 19 June 1999.
(26) La Libert?, Gen?ve, 22 April 1999, and Balkan-Infos
No.33, Paris, May 1999.
(27) Ulisse, "Come gli Americani hanno sabotato la
missione dell'Osce", LiMes, supplemento al n.1/99, p.113,
L'Espresso, Rome, 1999.
(28) "Throughout the Kosovo crisis, Mr.Rubin personally
wooed Hashim Thaci, the ambitious leader of the Kosovo
Liberation Army", the Wall Street Journal reported on
June 29, 1999, even going so far as to "jokingly promise
that he would speak to Hollywood friends about getting
Mr.Thaci a movie role."
(29) Robert D.Kaplan, "Why the Balkans Demand Amorality",
The Washington Post, 28 February 1999.
(30) Peter Gowan, in "The Twisted Road to Kosovo", Labour
Focus on Eastern Europe, Number 62, Spring 1999, explains
(p.76) that the foreign policy elite discuss the sordid
realities of power politics in a closed arena, and "not
in front of the children", that is, the citizenry of the
NATOland countries, who are regaled with versions that
appeal to their values and ideals.
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(2. fine)
Military intervention may be justified "when a
self-determination claim triggers an armed conflict that
becomes a humanitarian crisis", wrote Scheffer and
Halperin.
The much-praised non-violent movement of Ibrahim Rugova
could not meet this criterion. It failed precisely
because it was not a movement for political equality but
a movement for secession. A non-violent movement for
political equality can find many active ways to
illustrate its exclusion and press its demands for
inclusion. But the goals of the Albanian movement were
not inclusion but complete independence from the existing
State. To show their rejection of Serbia, Kosovo
Albanians in the Rugova period refused to use the
democratic rights they had, boycotted elections, refused
to pay taxes, and even set up their own parallel schools
and public health service. The odd thing is that this
movement of passive resistance was met for the most part
by passive resistance on the part of the Serbian State,
which allowed Dr Rugova to go about his business
(obviously in defiance of Serbian laws) as "President of
the Republic of Kosova", let people get away with not
paying taxes and did not force children to attend Serbian
schools. Certainly, there were numerous instances of
police brutality, although their extent is hard to judge,
inasmuch as Kosovar Albanian Human Rights Groups
notoriously exaggerated such incidents in order to claim
that their people were being brutally oppressed -- a
claim which was not accepted by the German government
(21), incidentally, despite its support to the separatist
movement. But in reality, internal separatism was too
easy. The two communities grew ever farther apart, but
peacefully. There was an impasse.
That impasse was broken by the U?K/KLA, acting with the
backing of the United States. The strategy was summed up
by Richard Cohen (22):
The KLA had a simple but effective plan. It would kill
Serbian policemen. The Serbs would retaliate, Balkan
style, with widespread reprisals and the occasional
massacre. The West would get more and more appalled,
until finally it would, as it did in Bosnia, take action.
In effect, the United States and much of Europe would go
to war on the side of the KLA.
It worked.
This version perhaps gives the KLA/U?K a little too much
credit. The United States has been watching Kosovo
closely for years, and there are strong indications that
it both passively and actively assisted the armed rebels
in their humanitarian sting operation. The KLA did indeed
kill Serbian policemen, as well as a number of civilians,
including ethnic Albanians who failed to boycott the
Serbian state. But in between these killings and the Serb
retaliation, "Balkan style", there was a very significant
encouragement from Richard Gelbard, acting as U.S.
proconsul for former Yugoslavia. Normally, Gelbard's
visits to Belgrade were marked by utterances berating
Serbian authorities for not doing Washington's bidding in
one respect or another. But on February 23, 1998, Gelbard
visited Pristina and declared publicly that the KLA/U?K
was indeed "unquestionably a terrorist organization".
To the Serbs, this simply seemed to be recognition of
what to them was an obvious fact. Naively believing that
the United States was, as it continued to declare,
sincerely opposed to "international terrorism", Serbian
authorities took this remark as a green light to do what
any government normally does in such circumstances: send
in armed police to repress the terrorists. After all,
they were not hard to find. Unlike guerrillas in most
conflicts, they made no effort to conceal their
whereabouts but openly proclaimed that they were hanging
out in a number of villages in the Drenica hill region.
Far from heading for the hills when the police
approached, the U?K let civilians who didn't want to get
shot head for the hills while they themselves hunkered
down at home, sometimes with a few remaining family
members, and shot it out with police. This suicidal
tactic may have stemmed from the fact that Albanian homes
often double as fortresses in the traditional blood
feuds, but could not withstand Serbian government fire
power. In any case, the results were enough dead
Albanians in their villages to enable Madeleine Albright
and her chorus of media commentators to cry "ethnic
cleansing". It was not "ethnic cleansing", it was a
classic anti-insurgency operation. But that was enough
for the trap to start closing.
It is easy to imagine how the same scenario could enfold
again in some remote area of the "Eurasian Balkans",
where folk customs are not frightfully different from
those of the Albanians.
How to Get the Job of U.N. Secretary General
The Abramowitz-Albright policy for Yugoslavia has been
used as the event, the fait accompli, to complete a major
institutional shift of power. Institutions based on the
principle of decision-making equality between nations
(the United Nations, its agencies, and the OSCE) have
been drastically weakened. Others, effectively under U.S.
control (NATO, the International Criminal Tribunal), have
enlarged their scope, under the heading of a vague new
entity, the "international community".
The first target of this shift has of course been the
United Nations. Already weakened by the successful U.S.
undermining of U.N. agencies such as UNESCO and UNCTAD
which threatened to promote alternative and more
egalitarian concepts of "globalization", the United
Nations has been reduced by the conflict in Yugoslavia to
a rubber stamp to be used or ignored by the United States
as it chooses.
Certainly, responsibility for weakening the United
Nations is widely shared among world powers, but the
United States' role in this demolition enterprise has
nevertheless been outstanding. Far from trying to help
the United Nations seek an even-handed solution to the
Yugoslav crisis, the Clinton administration used its
influence to secure decisions of benefit to its own
chosen clients, the Bosnian Muslims and the Albanian
secessionists. In Bosnia, United Nations forces were
given impossible missions: hanging around deceptively
declared -- deceptively because never demilitarized --
"safe areas", as fighting continued. Their inevitable,
not to say programmed, failure could be, and has been,
trumpeted as "proof" that only NATO can carry out a
proper peace-keeping mission.
A significant high point in the United States' reduction
of the United Nations to a pliant tool came on August 30,
1995, when the United Nations momentarily relinquished
its control over Bosnian peace-keeping to NATO, aka the
Pentagon, in order to let the United States bomb the
Bosnian Serbs.
For Washington, the primary significance of this bombing
had less to do with the people of Bosnia than with U.S.
power. According to Richard Holbrooke, this was correctly
grasped by columnist William Pfaff who wrote the next
day: "The United States today is again Europe's leader;
there is no other."
In his memoir To End a War, Richard Holbrooke recounted
this proud achievement and lavishly praised the United
Nations official who made it possible: the Ghanaian
diplomat Kofi Annan, then in charge of peacekeeping
operations.
Madeleine Albright, at the time the U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations, was carrying on a "vigorous campaign"
in favour of bombing the Serbs. Luck smiled:
"fortunately, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali was
unreachable [...], so she dealt instead with his best
deputy, Kofi Annan, who was in charge of peacekeeping
operations. At 11:45 a.m., New York time, came a big
break: Annan informed Talbott and Albright that he had
instructed the U.N.'s civilian officials and military
commanders to relinquish for a limited period of time
their authority to veto air strikes in Bosnia. For the
first time in the war, the decision on the air strikes
was solely in the hands of NATO -- primarily two American
officers [...]"
"Annan's gutsy performance in those twenty-four hours was
to play a central role in Washington's strong support for
him a year later as the successor to Boutros
Boutros-Ghali as Secretary General of the United Nations.
Indeed, in a sense Annan won the job on that day"(23).
Bosnia was the main reason for getting rid of
Boutros-Ghali. "More than any other issue, it was his
performance on Bosnia that made us feel he did not
deserve a second term -- just as Kofi Annan's strength on
the bombing in August had already made him the private
favorite of many American officials", Holbrooke
explained. "Although the American campaign against
Boutros-Ghali, in which all our key allies opposed us,
was long and difficult [...] the decision was correct,
and may well have saved America's role in the United
Nations."
How to Sabotage the OSCE
With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was widely
favoured to succeed both the dismantled Warsaw Pact and
NATO as an all-inclusive institution to ensure security,
resolve conflicts and defend human rights in Europe. This
naturally encountered opposition from all those who
wanted to preserve and expand NATO, and with it, the
leading U.S. role in Europe -- that is, from many
important officials in many NATO countries, especially
Britain and the Netherlands, as well as the United States
itself.
On the eve of the Kosovo war, the tandem of Richard
Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright once again moved to
cripple a rival to NATO and clear the way for NATO
bombing.
On October 13, 1998, under threat of NATO bombing, U.S.
envoy Richard Holbrooke got Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic to sign a unilateral deal to end security
operations against armed rebels. The agreement was to be
monitored by 2,000 foreign "verifiers" provided under the
auspices of the OSCE. From the start, opinions in Europe
were divided as to whether this Kosovo Verification
Mission (KVM) marked an advance for the OSCE or a kiss of
death, designed to prove the organization's impotence and
leave NATO as the uncontested arbiter of conflicts in
Europe.
The mission's fate was sealed in favour of the second
alternative when the European majority in the OSCE was
somehow persuaded to accept U.S. diplomat William Walker
to head the KVM. Walker was a veteran of Central American
"banana republic" management, who had collaborated with
Oliver North in illegally arming the "Contras" and had
covered up murderous state security operations in El
Salvador as U.S. ambassador there during the Reagan
administration.
Walker brought in 150 professional mercenaries from the
Arlington, Virginia-based DynCorp which had already
worked in Bosnia, drove around in a vehicle flying the
American flag, and did everything to confirm what his
French deputy, Ambassador Gabriel Keller, described as
the "wide-spread conviction in Serbian public opinion
that the OSCE was working under cover for NATO, [...]
that we acted with a hidden agenda" (24).
That impression was shared by many members of the KVM. A
number of Italians, whose comments were published
anonymously in the geostrategic review LiMes, accused the
Americans of "sabotaging the OSCE mission". Said one:
"The mission in my view had two primary aims. One was to
infiltrate personnel into the theatre with intelligence
tasks and for special forces activities (preparatory work
for a predetermined war). The other was to give the world
the impression that everything had been tried and thus
create grounds for public consent to the aggression we
perpetrated"(25).
According to Swiss verifier Pascal Neuffer: "We
understood from the start that the information gathered
by OSCE patrols during our mission were destined to
complete the information that NATO had gathered by
satellite. We had the very sharp impression of doing
espionage work for the Atlantic Alliance"(26).
KVM members have criticized Walker and his British chief
of operations, Karol (John) Drewienkiewicz, for rejecting
any cooperation with Serb authorities, for blocking
diplomatic means to ensure human rights, for controlling
the mission's information flow, and most serious of all,
for using the mission to make contact with U?K rebels and
train them to guide NATO to targets in the subsequent
bombing (27). Since the Serbs were quite aware of this
activity, as soon as the bombing began on March 24, Serb
security forces set out to root out all suspected U?K
indicators. These operations are very probably at the
heart of what NATO has described as ethnic cleansing.
However, prior to the bombing, KVM members testify to a
low level of violence, as well as a pattern of U?K
provocations. According to Keller, "every pullback by the
Yugoslav army or the Serbian police was followed by a
movement forward by [U?K] forces [...] OSCE's presence
compelled Serbian government forces to a certain
restraint [...] and U?K took advantage of this to
consolidate its positions everywhere, continuing to
smuggle arms from Albania, abducting and killing both
civilians and military personnel, Albanians and Serbs
alike."
By the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999, an
increasingly audible split was taking place within the
KVM between Walker and most of the Europeans. Every
incident was an occasion for Walker and the U.S. State
Department to denounce the Serbs for breaking the truce,
and to accuse Milosevic of violating his commitment. The
Europeans saw things differently: the Albanian rebels,
with U.S. encouragement, were systematically provoking
Serb attacks in order to justify NATO coming in on their
side of the conflict.
In mid-January, Walker settled the score with his
European critics by bringing the world media over to his
side. This was the political significance of the famous
"Racak massacre". On January 15, Serb police had carried
out a pre-announced operation, accompanied by observers
and television cameras, against U?K killers believed to
be hiding out in the village of Racak. As the Serbs swept
into the village, the U?K gunmen took refuge on
surrounding high ground and began to fire on the police,
as TV footage showed. But the Serbs had sent forces
around behind them, and many U?K fighters were trapped
and shot. After the Serb forces withdrew that afternoon,
the U?K again took control of the village, and it was
they who led Walker into the village the next day to see
what they described as victims of a massacre. It may be,
as Serb authorities claimed and many Europeans tended to
believe, that the victims were in fact killed in the
shootout reported by the police, and then aligned to give
the appearance of a mass execution, or "massacre".
In any case, the extremely emotional public reaction by
the high-profile head of the KVM, condemning the Serbs
for "a crime against humanity", "an unspeakable atrocity"
committed by Serbs "with no value for human life", ended
any possible pretense of neutrality of the OSCE mission.
Walker's accusations were quickly taken up by NATO
politicians and editorialists. A complex conflict was
reduced to a simple opposition between Serbian
perpetrators of massacres and innocent Albanian civilian
victims. The U?K and its provocative murders of policemen
and civilians were to all intents and purposes invisible.
Presented as a gratuitous atrocity, "Racak" became the
immediate justification for NATO war against Yugoslavia.
In Kosovo itself, KVM members have testified, after Racak
the Serbs were totally convinced that the OSCE was
working for NATO and began to prepare for war, while the
U?K became still more aggressive. KVM members have also
complained of the fact that Walker evacuated the mission
to Macedonia on March 20, five days before the bombing
began. This way, no outside observers were there to see
exactly what did happen when the bombing began, much less
try to prevent it. Walker's leadership had effectively
removed all pressure or incentive for either side to show
restraint.
"In the history of international missions it would be
hard to find such a chaotic and tragically ambiguous
enterprise", concluded an Italian participant.
How to Obtain Justice
The importance of crimes in this new world order was
highlighted by the establishment in May 1993 of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY). This tribunal was established by Security Council
resolution 827 under its Article 29 which allows it to
set up "subsidiary bodies" necessary to fulfill its
peacekeeping tasks. It is more than doubtful that the
framers of the United Nations statutes had a criminal
tribunal in mind, and many jurists consider resolution
827 to be an usurpation of legislative and judicial
powers by the Security Council. In fact, this act went
contrary to over forty years of study, within the
framework of the United Nations, of the possibilities for
setting up an international penal tribunal, whose
jurisdiction would be established by international treaty
allowing States to transfer part of their sovereign
rights to the tribunal. The Security Council's ICTY went
over the heads of the States concerned and simply imposed
its authority on them, without their consent.
Last April 5, as NATO was bombing Yugoslavia, the ICTY's
presiding judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald (a former U.S.
federal judge in Texas) told the Supreme Court that the
Tribunal "benefited from the strong support of concerned
governments and dedicated individuals such as Secretary
Albright. As the permanent representative to the United
Nations, she had worked with unceasing resolve to
establish the Tribunal. Indeed, we often refer to her as
the `mother of the Tribunal'".
Because it is also located in The Hague, very many
well-informed people confuse the Tribunal with the
International Court of Justice, or at least believe that,
like the ICJ, the ICT is a truly independent and
impartial judicial body. Its many supporters in the media
say so, and so do its statutes. Article 32 of its
governing statute says the Tribunal's expenses shall be
borne by the regular budget of the United Nations, but
this has been persistently violated. As Toronto lawyer
Christopher Black points out, "the tribunal has received
substantial funds from individual States, private
foundations and corporations". The United States has
provided personnel (23 officials lent by the Departments
of State, Defense and Justice as of May 1996), equipment
and cash contributions. More money has been granted the
Tribunal by financier George Soros' Open Society
Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the United
States Institute for Peace, set up in 1984 under the
Reagan administration and funded by Congressional
appropriations, with its board of directors appointed by
the U.S. President.
The Tribunal is vigorously supported by the Coalition for
International Justice (CIJ), based in Washington and The
Hague, founded and funded by George Soros' Open Society
Foundation and a semi-official U.S. lawyers' group called
CEELI, the Central and East European Law Institute, set
up to promote the replacement of socialist legal systems
with free market ones, according to Christopher Black.
Last May 12, ICTY president Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, in a
speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, said that:
"The U.S. government has very generously agreed to
provide $500,000 and to help to encourage other States to
contribute. However, the moral imperative to end the
violence in the region is shared by all, including the
corporate sector. I am pleased, therefore, that a major
corporation has recently donated computer equipment worth
three million dollars, which will substantially enhance
our operating capacity."
Moreover, during the bombing, Clinton obtained a special
$27 million appropriation to help the Tribunal,
especially in collecting anti-Serb testimony from
Albanian refugees along the borders of Kosovo. Finally,
Clinton has offered a bounty of $5 million for the arrest
of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
Ethnic Divisions, Unified Empires
An extremely significant feature of the humanitarian
intervention policy is its emphasis on collective in
contrast to individual rights.
"In the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet empire,"
runs the summary of Self-Determination in the New World
Order, "new nations are emerging rapidly, and more and
more ethnic groups are pushing for independence or
autonomy." So the question is "how the United States
should respond". The authors "propose criteria for
decision makers who are weighing whether to support
groups seeking self-determination, to offer political
recognition, or to intervene with force."
This approach has practically nothing to do with
democracy, and everything to do with empire construction.
Although the words "democracy" and "democratic" are still
used, they tend increasingly to be without meaning other
than to designate favoured client leaders or groups in
countries of interest to the United States. Certainly,
Hashim Thaqi, the U?K leader who counts Madeleine
Albright's spokesman James Rubin (husband of CNN's
Christiane Amanpour) among his fans (28), is scarcely
more "democratic" than Milan Milutinovic, elected
President of Serbia, indicted with Milosevic by
Albright's "International War Crimes Tribunal". In fact,
the selection of particular groups, ethnic or social, as
clients, is the traditional way in which a conquering
empire can reshape social structures and replace former
elites with its own.
The imperial project is becoming increasingly open.
Protectorates are being established in Bosnia and Kosovo,
President Clinton is vigorously calling for the illegal
overthrow of the legally elected Yugoslav president.
Totally disregarding the feelings and wishes of the real,
live people who live there, Robert Kaplan announced (29)
that "there are two choices in the Balkans -- imperialism
or anarchy. To stop the violence, we essentially have to
act in the way the great powers in the region have always
acted: as pacifying conquerors." Like the Romans and the
Austrian Habsburgs, "motivated by territorial
aggrandizement for their own economic enrichment,
strategic positions and glory."
Merely to suggest that the United States might "intervene
with force" on behalf of an ethnic group seeking
self-determination is to cause trouble. There are
potentially hundreds of such groups not only in the
former Soviet Republics but throughout Africa and Asia.
The prospect of U.S. military intervention will, on the
one hand, encourage potential secessionist leaders to
push their claims to the point of "humanitarian crisis",
in order to bring in the Superpower on their side. By the
same token, it will encourage existing states to suppress
such movements brutally and decisively in order to
prevent precisely that intervention. A vicious cycle will
be created, enabling the single Superpower to fish
selectively in troubled waters.
The concept of "ethnic group" rests on the notion of
"identity". If individual identity is problematic, group
identity is even more so. That is, just as individuals
may have multiple or changing "identities", groups may
have changing compositions as people come and go from one
"identity" group to another. Especially in the modern
mobile world, ethnic identity is therefore a highly
questionable basis for claim to political recognition in
the form of an independent State. The forceful
affirmation of "ethnic identity" tends to strengthen
traditional patriarchal structures in places such as
Kosovo, at the expense of individual liberation. Stress
on ethnic identity enforces stereotypes, mafioso
structures and leadership by "godfathers".
Foreign policy based on ethnic identity has notorious
antecedents: it was precisely the policy employed by
Adolf Hitler to justify his conquest of the same Eastern
European territories that Brzezinski now watches so
attentively. Both the takeover of Czechoslovakia and the
invasion of Poland were officially justified by the need
to protect allegedly oppressed German minorities from the
cruel Czechs and Poles. The British government's
understanding for Herr Hitler's concern about Germans in
Czechoslovakia is the real "Munich". Before invading
Poland, Hitler had the SS manufacture an "incident" in
which wicked Poles stormed an innocent German-language
radio station in order to desecrate it with their
barbarous Slav language. The dead body left on the scene
to authenticate the incident was in fact a prison convict
in costume.
In Yugoslavia, Hitler "liberated" not only Germans but
also and especially Croats and (in conjunction with
fascist Italy) Albanians, long selected as the proper
Randv?lker to receive German protection, the better to
crush the main historic adversary, the Serbs, the people
who more than any other had fought for independence from
Empires. (The Serbs themselves as they became "Yugoslavs"
were less and less unified around Serbian identity, even
if they have continued to pay for it.)
Making policy by distinguishing between "friend" and
"enemy" peoples is pure Hitlerism, and this is what the
Anglo-American NATO leaders are now doing, while
ironically pretending to reject "Munich".
History As Melodrama
The media that recount Balkan ghost stories to the
"children" (30) back in NATOland rarely go into detail
about the peculiarities of these various customs and
situations. Popular culture has prepared audiences for a
simpler version. The pattern is the same as in disaster
movies, outer space movies, etc: there is always the trio
of classic melodrama: wicked villain, helpless victim
(maiden in distress) and heroic rescuer. Same plot. Over
and over. Only in the Abramowitz humanitarian war plan,
the trio is composed of ethnic entities or nationalities.
There is the "good" ethnic group, all victims, like the
Kosovar Albanians. Then there is the "bad" ethnic group,
all racist hatred, ethnic cleansing and even "genocide".
And finally, of course, there is Globocop to the rescue:
NATO with its stealth bombers, cruise missiles and
cluster blade bombs, its depleted uranium and graphite
power-plan busters. A bit of fireworks, like the car
chase at the end of the movie.
The whole concept of ethnic war as pretext for U.S.
military intervention implies this division of humanity
between "good" and "bad" nationalities, between
"oppressor" and "victim" peoples. Since this is rarely
the case, the story is told by analogy with the famous
exceptional cases where the categories fit: Hitler and
the Jews being the obvious favourite. Every new villain
is a "Hitler", every new ethnic secessionist group to be
used as pretext for new NATO bases is the victim of a
potential "Holocaust". At this rate, the two terms will
cease to be proper nouns and become general terms for the
new global Guignol.
Starting with the pretense of militant anti-racism,
"humanitarian intervention" finishes with a new racism.
To merit all those bombs, the "bad" people must be
tarnished with collective guilt. At the G8 summit in
Cologne in June, Tony Blair clearly adopted the doctrine
of collective guilt when he declared that there could be
no humanitarian aid for the Serbs because of the dreadful
way they had treated the Kosovar Albanians. With their
incomparable self-righteousness, the Anglo-American
commanders are leading this new humanitarian crusade to
extremes of inhumanity.
Footnotes
(1) Jim Hoagland, "Developing a Doctrine of Humanitarian
Warfare", International Herald Tribune, June 28, 1999.
(2) A former U.S. Ambassador to Thailand, Abramowitz
served as Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence
and Research in the Reagan administration. In January
1986, he took part in an interesting mission to Beijing
alongside top CIA officials with the purpose of
persuading China to support supplying Stinger missiles to
Islamic Afghan rebels in order to keep up pressure on the
Soviet Union, even as Gorbachev was trying to end the
Cold War. In the mid-1990s, he was part of a blue ribbon
panel sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations which
advised the Clinton Administration to loosen restrictions
on CIA covert operations such as dealing with criminals,
disguising agents as journalists, and targeting
unfriendly heads of State.
(3) John B. Roberts, "Roots of Allied Farce", The
American Spectator, June 1999.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Morton H. Halperin & David J. Scheffer with Patricia
L. Small, Self-Determination In the New World Order,
Carnegie Endowment, Washington,D.C., 1992; page 80.
(6) Ibid, p.105.
(7) Ibid, p.107.
(8) Ibid, p.110.
(9) Charles Trueheart, "Serbs and Kosovars Get Nudge From
Their Hosts To Speed Up Peace Talks", International
Herald Tribune/Washington Post, February 9, 1999: "On
Monday, the Kosovo Albanians won a small tactical victory
when their American advisers, initially barred by
conference hosts, were allowed to visit them at the
chateau. They included two former U.S. diplomats, Morton
Abramowitz and Paul Williams."
(10) John B.Roberts, op.cit.
(11) Steven Erlanger, "Winning Friends for Foreign
Policy: Albright's First 100 Days", The New York Times,
14 May 1997.
(12) "Il n'y a pas de paradoxe. J'ai mis au point cette
doctrine en accord avec le pr?sident Carter, car c'?tait
la meilleure fa?on de d?stabiliser l'Urss. ?a a march?."
L'Ev?nement du jeudi, 14 January 1998.
(13) Le Nouvel observateur, 14 January 1998, reported by
AFP.
(14) Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard,
BasicBooks, New York, 1997, p.78.
(15) Kaplan's 1993 book Balkan Ghosts was notoriously
read by President Clinton, who, however, had to be chided
later by the author for having drawn the wrong
conclusion. That is, Clinton's initial conclusion was to
stay out of the Balkans, whereas Kaplan has, he
explained, always been an interventionist.
(16) New York Times/International Herald Tribune, 23
February 1999.
(17) Robert D.Kaplan, "Why the Balkans Demand Amorality",
The Washington Post, 28 February 1999.
(18) Steve Niva, "Between Clash and Co-Optation: US
Foreign Policy and the Specter of Islam", Middle East
Report, Fall 1998.
(19) The Washington Post, 28 February 1999.
(20) Stern, 4 March 1999.
(21) In mid-April, 1999, the International Association of
Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA) obtained and
distributed to news media official documents from the
German foreign office showing that in the months leading
up to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the foreign office
had repeatedly informed administrative courts of the
various German L?nder that there was no persecution of
ethnic Albanians in Kosovo or the rest of Serbia.
Example: Intelligence report from the Foreign Office,
January 12, 1999, to the administrative Court of Trier,
"Even in Kosovo an explicit political persecution linked
to Albanian ethnicity is not verifiable. The East of
Kosovo is still not involved in armed conflict. Public
life in cities like Pristina, Urosevac, Gnjilan, etc.
has, in the entire conflict period, continued on a
relatively normal basis." The "actions of the security
forces [were] not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians
as an ethnically defined group, but against the military
opponent and its actual or alleged supporters." These
reports were published in the German daily junge welt on
24 April 1999.
(22) Richard Cohen, "The Winner in the Balkans Is the
KLA", Washington Post/International Herald Tribune, 18
June 1999.
(23) Richard Holbrooke, To End a War, Random House, New
York, 1998, p.103.
(24) "The OSCE KVM: autopsy of a mission", statement
delivered by Ambassador Gabriel Keller, principal deputy
head of mission, to the watch group on May 25, 1999.
(25) Italian military participant "Romanus", in LiMes
2/99, cited by il manifesto, 19 June 1999.
(26) La Libert?, Gen?ve, 22 April 1999, and Balkan-Infos
No.33, Paris, May 1999.
(27) Ulisse, "Come gli Americani hanno sabotato la
missione dell'Osce", LiMes, supplemento al n.1/99, p.113,
L'Espresso, Rome, 1999.
(28) "Throughout the Kosovo crisis, Mr.Rubin personally
wooed Hashim Thaci, the ambitious leader of the Kosovo
Liberation Army", the Wall Street Journal reported on
June 29, 1999, even going so far as to "jokingly promise
that he would speak to Hollywood friends about getting
Mr.Thaci a movie role."
(29) Robert D.Kaplan, "Why the Balkans Demand Amorality",
The Washington Post, 28 February 1999.
(30) Peter Gowan, in "The Twisted Road to Kosovo", Labour
Focus on Eastern Europe, Number 62, Spring 1999, explains
(p.76) that the foreign policy elite discuss the sordid
realities of power politics in a closed arena, and "not
in front of the children", that is, the citizenry of the
NATOland countries, who are regaled with versions that
appeal to their values and ideals.
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