Kosovo: New War in the Balkans?

 

STRATFOR (USA)

Kosovo: New War in the Balkans?

November 22, 2005 17 40 GMT

Summary

The current stalemate over Kosovo's status is a perfect example of the palsied international system. One would think that a province that has been a de facto international protectorate for more than six years, by now, would have its status decided; yet the concerned parties in Kosovo ostensibly cannot perform the necessary tasks. The responsibility for this impasse rests first on the shoulders of the Kosovar Serbs and Albanians, who cannot agree, and second on the shoulders of the Contact Group members -- including the United States -- who dare not impose a solution.

Analysis

U.N. status envoy Martti Ahtisaari and his deputy Albert Rohan on Nov. 21 began their Balkan trip in the Kosovar capital of Pristina, with the clear intent of ensuring that status negotiations scheduled for December in Vienna, Austria, do not fail. However, their visit probably will have the opposite effect. At this stage it appears Ahtisaari merely wants to take notice of the contradictory positions at play in the negotiations rather than come up with a clear plan. A further sign of the chaos reigning in and around Kosovo is that disagreement exists both between and among the Albanians and the Serbs.

Two major views have emerged in the Serbian ranks. Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica and Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Draskovic maintain that "Kosovo-Metohija" must remain part of Serbia. It can receive more than autonomy but less than independence, and the inhabitants' minority and property rights must be respected to the utmost. Hence, the Serbian government prepared a resolution Nov. 15 that was adopted by the Serbian Parliament on Nov. 21.

Also on Nov. 15, Serbian head of state Boris Tadic expounded his own views during talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Tadic said Kosovo should be decentralized to create separate Serbian and Albanian entities within the region and allow Serbs to have a relationship with Serbia that would be close but regulated by Kosovar institutions. Earlier, Serbian Vice President Miroslav Labus came forth with a similar proposal, maintaining that a Serbian enclave should be created in northern Kosovo and along the Kosovar part of the River Morava.

What the Serb positions have in common is a simple fact: Kosovo must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to achieve independence.

Here, it must be noted that the international community -- the majority of U.S. and European politicians involved in this process -- are striving to extinguish the independent Serbian enclave in Bosnia-Herzegovina and create a unified state. Hence, it is possible that Tadic and Labus' proposals are designed to safeguard the existence of Serbian entities not only in Kosovo but also in Bosnia.

Events during the last few months testify to the uncertainties among Albanians, too. Though all the Albanians agree that Kosovo must be independent, in October some radical groups attempted to pressure the Kosovar Parliament to declare independence immediately. However, as a result of international pressure -- primarily from Jesen Petersen, leader of the U.N. Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo -- on Nov. 17 a public proclamation was issued stating that Kosovar Albanians want an independent and sovereign Kosovo, and that this position will be represented during negotiations with Belgrade.

The international community could resolve this predicament -- especially if the major powers represented in the Contact Group (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Russia) legally sanctioned the de facto protectorate. That would translate into at least five years of conditional independence for Kosovo, supervised by the Contact Group and protected by international forces, which would give the Serbs in Northern Kosovo not only minority rights (a term they consider an affront in itself) but also the ability to organize themselves -- inside Kosovo -- as a separate entity.

If the Contact Group members are not ready to impose the solution of conditional independence as soon as possible, a new war in the Balkans is almost a certainty. Historical patterns simply are not working: Neither the Ottoman Empire nor Tito's Yugoslavia can be resurrected. But a sort of Bismarckian realpolitik -- a protectorate imposed and supervised by a concert of major powers -- might be worth trying.

Regardless of what path is approached, any removal of international forces will lead to Albanian-Serb bloodshed. Consequently, the international community only has two options. First, the Contact Group could adopt a position of de facto support of Albanian independence. Such a stance would anger Belgrade, but Belgrade currently lacks the tools to retaliate effectively (although the Bosnian Serbs would certainly feel forced to act to protect their own interests). Second, the Contact Group could simply attempt to extend the existing legal limbo.

Unfortunately, another bit of Serbia and Montenegro -- namely, Montenegro -- is champing at the bit to vote on independence itself. And should Montenegro go, the Kosovar Albanians are certain to not wait around for the international community to make up its mind. This leaves just one question in Stratfor's mind: Do the Kosovar Albanians possess the military fortitude to seize their independence should they not receive a blank check from the Contact Group?

Guardian newspaper forced to retract Noam Chomsky interview

Using Emotion to Silence Analysis

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/nov2005/chom-n29_prn.shtml

World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org



WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : Britain

Guardian newspaper forced to retract Noam Chomsky interview

By Robert Stevens
29 November 2005

On November 17, Britain's Guardian newspaper ran a statement in its
Corrections and Clarifications column announcing the removal from its
website of an interview with Noam Chomsky.

The interview, conducted by Emma Brockes, was published in the
Guardian's October 31 edition after Chomsky, a professor of
linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was voted
the world's top intellectual in a poll conducted by Britain's Prospect
magazine. Of 20,000 participants in the Prospect poll, 4,800 voted for
Chomsky.

In the published interview, Brockes attacked Chomsky, claiming he had
implied that a massacre of Muslims had not been carried out by Serbian
forces at Srebrenica in July 1995, during the Bosnian war. Her
diatribe marked a new low in the ever more pronounced rightward shift
of a newspaper that still advertises itself as the mouthpiece of
Britain's liberal intelligentsia.

The Guardian dropped the interview only following an open letter to
the newspaper from Chomsky, a complaint from the media organisation
Media Lens, and numerous letters of protest from readers.

The Guardian had initially defended its interview. On November 1, it
published two letters supporting criticisms of Chomsky, supposedly to
balance the "debate". As Chomsky later pointed out in an email copied
to the Media Lens organisation, "Both writers assume that there is a
'debate', as the editors falsely claimed, in which I question the
massacre (or as they pretend, 'massacre') in Srebrenica. That is all
fabrication, as the editors know well. They labored mightily to create
the impression of a debate in which I take the position they assigned
to me, and have succeeded. Now I'm stuck with that, even though it is
a deceitful invention of theirs."

The newspaper also failed to publish Chomsky's entire open letter of
complaint, dated November 13. Instead, they ran a truncated version in
which they insisted, before agreeing to publish, that Chomsky remove
the word "fabrication" from his condemnation of the Brockes article.

Chomsky agreed to do this and later stated that he was mistaken in
doing so. Even then, Chomsky's letter was published alongside one from
a victim of the war in the Balkans under the spurious heading "Fallout
Over Srebrenica". In reality, this "fallout" had been entirely
concocted by the Guardian, which had attributed to Chomsky a statement
he never made.

The newspaper's November 14 retraction admitted as much. It was issued
in the form of an acknowledgement by the "readers' editor" that found
in favour of Chomsky on three significant complaints.

"Principal among these was a statement by Ms. Brockes that in
referring to atrocities committed at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war
he had placed the word 'massacre' in quotation marks. This suggested,
particularly when taken with other comments by Ms. Brockes, that Prof.
Chomsky considered the word inappropriate or that he had denied that
there had been a massacre. Prof. Chomsky has been obliged to point out
that he has never said or believed any such thing. The Guardian has no
evidence whatsoever to the contrary and retracts the statement with an
unreserved apology to Prof. Chomsky."

Brockes' piece was clearly a hatchet job in which she demonstrated a
complete disdain for basic journalistic standards. But why was she
given the task and what was the brief given to her by the Guardian's
editorial staff?

There is no doubt that Chomsky's nomination by the readers of Prospect
will have angered and appalled the Guardian. Both publications
function as liberal apologists for the Labour government of Prime
Minister Tony Blair and both he and his leading adviser, Peter
Mandelson, have written for Prospect. Last year the Guardian published
an article by the editor of Prospect, David Goodhart, in which he
questioned whether an ethnically diverse society and a welfare state
are any longer compatible.

The vote for Chomsky by Prospect's readers on the basis of his left
politics and generally anti-imperialist stance was clearly seen as a
slap in the face. There remains a section of readers who have not got
the message being doled out by both organs.

Why were Brockes and, presumably, the Guardian's editors so determined
to raise the issue of Srebrenica? Because the civil war in Bosnia
represented a political watershed. It was the occasion for a slew of
liberals and radicals to ditch their oppositional stance and make
their peace with imperialismâ€â€a phenomenon that was analysed by the
International Committee of the Fourth International in its December
14, 1995 statement, " Imperialist War in the Balkans and the Decay of
the Petty-Bourgeois Left"

The ICFI noted how representatives of this tendency, in which the
Guardian and many of its leading columnists were to be found, cited
revulsion over Serbian atrocities as the justification for their swing
into the imperialist campâ€â€ignoring similar atrocities by Croat and
Muslim forces. The moral hand-wringing over Bosnia served a definite
political purposeâ€â€to legitimise support for Western military
intervention aimed at the break-up of Yugoslavia and the installation
of various pro-Western regimes that would ensure imperialist control
of this strategic region. The Bosnian war provided an opportunity for
these layers of ex-radicals to realign their politics with those of
imperialism.

This analysis has been amply borne out in the past decade. The
Guardian's role in justifying Britain's military intervention in
Bosnia by citing atrocities such as Srebrenica was only a practice run
for its subsequent abandonment of opposition to the Iraq war and shift
to support for regime-change in Iraq, once again citing the crimes
committed by Saddam Hussein.

An essential function of the pro-war propaganda of the Guardian has
been to intimidate and silence all those who refuse to accept the lie
that the imperialist powers are undertaking a great civilising mission
by organising regime change in the Balkans, the Caucasus and the
Middle East: Hence Brockes' choice of ideological weapon against
Chomsky.

The interview was published under the headline "The Greatest
Intellectual?" Its subhead was designed to be read as an excerpt from
the interview. It stated, "Q: Do you regret supporting those who say
the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated? A: My only regret is that I
didn't do it strongly enough."

Below, Brockes writes of Chomsky's career as an intellectual: "This
is, of course, what Chomsky has been doing for the last 35 years, and
his conclusions remain controversial: that practically every US
president since the Second World War has been guilty of war crimes;
that in the overall context of Cambodian history, the Khmer Rouge
weren't as bad as everyone makes out; that during the Bosnian war the
'massacre' at Srebrenica was probably overstated."

Chomsky has never put quotation marks around "massacre" in relation to
Srebrenica as Brockes implies. Indeed, he has referred to the massacre
at Srebrenica several times in his writing. More important still, the
question and answer that was used by the Guardian as a subhead was
made up either by Brockes or whoever edited her article for
publication.

The Guardian acknowledged in its retraction:

"No question in that form was put to Prof. Chomsky. This part of the
interview related to his support for Diana Johnstone (not Diane as it
appeared in the published interview) over the withdrawal of a book in
which she discussed the reporting of casualty figures in the war in
former Yugoslavia. Both Prof. Chomsky and Ms. Johnstone, who has also
written to the Guardian, have made it clear that Prof. Chomsky's
support for Ms. Johnstone, made in the form of an open letter with
other signatories, related entirely to her right to freedom of speech.
The Guardian also accepts that and acknowledges that the headline was
wrong and unjustified by the text."

The book by Diana Johnstone is entitled Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia,
NATO and Western Delusions, and was published in 2002. It is a
critique of the Western coverage of the war and seeks to shed light on
what lay behind the propaganda campaign of the imperialist
governments, which sought to demonize Serbia and lay sole
responsibility for the war at its door.

In 2003, Chomsky was one of a number of prominent signatories to an
open letter opposing the withdrawal of the book by its Swedish
publisher. That decision followed a press campaign in which both
Johnstone and her book were vilified, led by the daily newspaper,
Dagens Nyeter.

Chomsky was simply defending the author's right to free speech and,
while describing Johnstone's book as a "serious" work, has never said
that he fully agrees or disagrees with her analysis.

In his open letter to the Guardian, Chomsky states, "The reporter
obviously had a definite agenda: to focus the defamation exercise on
my denial of the Srebrenica massacre. From the character of what
appeared, it is not easy to doubt that she was assigned this task.
When I wouldn't go along, she simply invented the denial, repeatedly,
along with others."

An indication of just how importantâ€â€personally as well as
politicallyâ€â€it was for the Guardian to discredit Chomsky is Brockes'
description of "my colleague, Ed Vulliamy" as a "serious, trustworthy"
person. This is written in the context of an attack on Chomsky for
daring to question Vulliamy's reporting of the war.

Vulliamy wrote regularly on the war in the Balkans. His essential
theme was that the Serbian regime was responsible for the war, that
the Bosnian people were being systematically wiped out, and that
failure to support Western intervention was tantamount to supporting
Serbian atrocities.

As Diana Johnstone points out in her November 14 article on the
Brockes-Chomsky episode, entitled "Kulturkrieg in Journalism: Using
Emotion to Silence Analysis," it is entirely conceivable that Brockes
based her conversation with Chomsky on a few culled paragraphs from
Vulliamy, even down to his spelling mistakes. Vulliamy had previously
spelled Johnstone's first name incorrectly in printâ€â€a mistake repeated
by Brockes in her article.

Guardian Apologizes to Chomsky

November 17, 2005

Guardian Apologizes to Chomsky

Total Retraction of Emma Brockes's "No Massacre at
Srebrenica" Slurs

By CounterPunch News Service


The following unusually detailed and categorical apology to
Noam Chomsky appears in The Guardian for November 17. The
Guardian's "readers' editor", Ian Mayes, issues this
virtually unprecedented climb-down--in effect a savage
rebuke to its reporter Emma Brockes--after complaints by
Chomsky himself and others, and by detailed exposes, first
by Alexander Cockburn and then by Diana Johnstone on this site.


The headline and text of The Guardian's retractions follow.


Corrections and clarifications
The Guardian and Noam Chomsky
Thursday November 17, 2005
The Guardian


The readers' editor has considered a number of complaints
from Noam Chomsky concerning an interview with him by Emma
Brockes published in G2, the second section of the Guardian,
on October 31. He has found in favour of Professor Chomsky
on three significant complaints.


Principal among these was a statement by Ms Brockes that in
referring to atrocities committed at Srebrenica during the
Bosnian war he had placed the word "massacre" in quotation
marks. This suggested, particularly when taken with other
comments by Ms Brockes, that Prof Chomsky considered the
word inappropriate or that he had denied that there had been
a massacre. Prof Chomsky has been obliged to point out that
he has never said or believed any such thing. The Guardian
has no evidence whatsoever to the contrary and retracts the
statement with an unreserved apology to Prof Chomsky.


The headline used on the interview, about which Prof Chomsky
also complained, added to the misleading impression given by
the treatment of the word massacre. It read: Q: Do you
regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was
exaggerated? A: My only regret is that I didn't do it
strongly enough.


No question in that form was put to Prof Chomsky. This part
of the interview related to his support for Diana Johnstone
(not Diane as it appeared in the published interview) over
the withdrawal of a book in which she discussed the
reporting of casualty figures in the war in former
Yugoslavia. Both Prof Chomsky and Ms Johnstone, who has also
written to the Guardian, have made it clear that Prof
Chomsky's support for Ms Johnstone, made in the form of an
open letter with other signatories, related entirely to her
right to freedom of speech. The Guardian also accepts that
and acknowledges that the headline was wrong and unjustified
by the text.


Ms Brockes's misrepresentation of Prof Chomsky's views on
Srebrenica stemmed from her misunderstanding of his support
for Ms Johnstone. Neither Prof Chomsky nor Ms Johnstone have
ever denied the fact of the massacre.


Prof Chomsky has also objected to the juxtaposition of a
letter from him, published two days after the interview
appeared, with a letter from a survivor of Omarska. While he
has every sympathy with the writer, Prof Chomsky believes
that publication was designed to undermine his position, and
addressed a part of the interview which was false. Both
letters were published under the heading Falling out over
Srebrenica. At the time these letters were published,
following two in support of Prof Chomsky published the
previous day, no formal complaint had been received from
him. The letters were published by the letters editor in
good faith to reflect readers' views. With hindsight it is
acknowledged that the juxtaposition has exacerbated Prof
Chomsky's complaint and that is regretted. The Guardian has
now withdrawn the interview from the website.


[No need to worry--the article will live forever on the
innumerable right-wing sites that copied it, and no doubt
its admittedly false allegations will forever remain part of
the Chomsky lore endlessly repeated by his detractors.--DC]


--
Dan Clore