Kosovo Conditional independence

Kosovo: behind-the-scenes hard talk begins (ISN Security Watch)



As both formal and informal behind-the-scenes talks about Kosovos future status begin, the member countries of the powerful Contact Group seem to have reached a consensus that Kosovo should be granted conditional independence.

By Tim Judah in London and Paris for ISN Security Watch (24/12/05)


Though UN officials have recently announced that talks concerning the status of Serbias UN-administered province of Kosovo would begin in earnest in January, ISN Security Watch has learned that much of the real work is already being done behind the scenes, with intense discussions between key countries involved in the region and Serbian and Kosovo Albanian leaders.

Over the past few weeks, a series of meetings, both formal and informal, have taken place in key capitals - including the Serbian capital, Belgrade, and the Kosovo capital, Pristina - as diplomats attempt to shape a deal for Kosovo, bolstering the work being done by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, who has been chosen to head the UN-led status negotiations.

Since the end of the Kosovo war in 1999, the province of some two million people has been under the jurisdiction of the UN, though it legally remains a part of Serbia. Its population is over 90 per cent ethnic Albanian. They have made it clear they want nothing less than full independence for Kosovo.

Serbia's official position is that Kosovo can have  ' more than autonomy but less than independence.

Members of the Serbian negotiation team, Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica and President Boris Tadic, had proposed earlier this month that Kosovo be divided into Albanian and Serbian areas.

According to the Serbian plan, the Albanian areas would be self-governing and independent in all but name, while the Serbian ones would remain linked to Belgrade and the Serbian flag would fly once again on Kosovos frontiers.

In parallel to this, the Serbian leadership has also decided that it would be most advantageous to argue their Kosovo case along legal lines - that is to say that Kosovo is de jure part of Serbia and thus its international frontiers cannot be changed without Serbias consent.

However, Kosovos Albanian leaders are demanding that the province be given full independence in recognition of their right to self-determination.

Over the last few weeks, there have been several meetings - including one between the Contact Group, which was set up to coordinate policy during the Balkan wars in the early 1990s, and Ahtisaari - which have yielded significant results. While Ahtisaari is now the official Kosovo mediator, real power lies with the countries of the Contact Group.

There appears to be a considerable unity of purpose among the Contact Group members. France and the US, for example, so often at loggerheads over the past few years, have no major disagreement over Kosovo. Russia, too, has been described by diplomats as extremely cooperative over Kosovo. If Serbian leaders were hoping to find backing from the traditionally friendly Russians there is no evidence thus far that they will get it.

Representatives of the Contact Group countries have decided that the best solution for Kosovo is that it be given so called conditional independence.

This means that the sovereign link with Serbia will be broken but that restrictions on Kosovos independence will remain for a transitional period. These could include, for example, no army and awarding reserve powers to a representative of the international community. The result would be a slimmed down and more focused version of the model that exists in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is effectively governed by the international communitys High Representative, who has sweeping powers.

Diplomats who have talked to ISN Security Watch, on condition of anonymity, say the only disagreement among the Contact Group members is over speed and tactics.

We all know, more or less, where we are going but we just have to be careful of the language used in public, one source said.

At the moment, officials from Contact Group countries say publicly that what they want is an agreement made between and mutually acceptable to Serbs and Albanians. Yet, privately, everyone knows that Serbs and Albanians will never be able to agree on the status of Kosovo.

France is less willing to openly say that the Contact Group countries are in favor of conditional independence because it fears that to do so might prompt the Serbs to withdraw from talks before they have even properly started.

By contrast, the British believe that the sooner the I word (for independence) is pronounced, the more flexible the Albanians will become. The British theory, according to informed sources, is that given a guarantee that independence (conditional or otherwise) is coming, the Albanians will be more amenable to granting the Kosovo Serbs concessions such as extensive decentralization.

As to whether moving Kosovo towards independence might provoke a nationalist radicalization of Serbia, one source in favor of moving faster rather than slower, simply sums up the Serbian dilemma as one of Belarus or Brussels. That is to say that Serbia has a choice between renewed isolation or continuing along its current path towards European integration.

It is clear to Serbian leaders that US policymakers have little sympathy for the Serbian efforts to keep Kosovo. However, what is unclear is that there appears to be no compelling reason (other than realpolitik,) as to why the US should favor independence for the Kosovo Albanians but oppose it for Iraqi Kurds, for instance.

Serbs have looked for support in meetings in Moscow and with the French. The Russians, while promising Serbian leaders that they would oppose anything Belgrade does not agree with, say in private talks with their western counterparts that they will not oppose conditional independence for Kosovo.

France then was perhaps the last best hope for the Serbian leadership, but here too, in a series of meetings this month, the Serbs have been disappointed. According to ISN Security Watch sources, the Serbs were told that France would support Serbian interests but that those interests had to be realistic. Holding on to Kosovo, in any form, was not considered realistic.

In public and private, the Serbs are now pursuing different lines of attack. Predrag Simic, Serbia and Montenegros ambassador to France and a member of the Serbian Kosovo negotiating team, evokes the situation leading up to the Second World War to argue against independence for Kosovo.

In 1938, he says, the Western powers, fearful of Hitler, accepted his demand to annex the Sudetenland, the predominantly German inhabited area of Czechoslovakia. But this appeasement brought neither peace nor security to Europe.

However, in private, according to western diplomatic sources, Serbian President Tadic is exploring a more flexible agenda. He wants any settlement to secure the future of the Kosovo Serbs and wants to try and steer proponents of conditional independence into making sure that if this cannot be avoided then, at least for the foreseeable future, Kosovo will have no army or highly symbolic seat at the UN.

But Western diplomats are fearful of what they call the disaster scenario, which foresees the talks failing to gain traction and hardliners on either side opting for violence.

The disaster scenario sees either Serbian or Albanian hardliners provoking an exodus from the Serbian enclaves in Kosovo. There are some100,000 Serbs in Kosovo, of which 30,000 live in the solidly Serbian north, while the rest are scattered in enclaves in central and southern Kosovo.

Albanian hardliners could decide to attack the enclaves and provoke the flight of the Serbs there, so as to prevent the areas from becoming autonomous regions that would remain, in their view, like Serbian claws in a future independent Kosovo.

By contrast Serbian hardliners could seek to provoke a Serbian exodus from the enclaves in a bid to solidify the Serbian population of the north. Their hope would be that many years down the line the de facto partition that already exists along the Ibar river would one day be recognized as the international frontier between the part of Kosovo that Serbia managed to save and the Albanian part, which would be independent.

It is precisely because they want to avert such a disaster scenario that the diplomats are now talking intensively to the Serbs and Albanians and among themselves.

Indeed, the message diplomats are now delivering to the Kosovo Albanians might come as a surprise to some. According to one source, the Albanians have been warned not to let hardliners provoke violence, but they have also been told that since conditional independence is the aim, The talks are not about the status of Kosovo. What they are really about then, is negotiating the status of the Serbs in Kosovo, the source said.


Tim Judah is the author of Kosovo: War and Revenge and The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, both published by Yale University Press.
Source: ISN Security Watch

News Fixing

 

                                             AN APPEAL TO REASON

                                                           R.K.Kent







G.M. Books of Los Angeles has just published and released Peter Brock’s powerful  and  devastating book which   takes a very close and intimate  look at the trees and the forest. Its title is  Media  Cleansing: Dirty Reporting – Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia. While the major media in the U.S. and Western  Europe  continue to repeat endlessly that the “massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and BOYS by ‘the Serbs’ at Srebrenica” constitutes the only “case of ‘genocide’” in Europe since WWII, Brock shows that the claim is built like a house of cards. Poke SERIOUSLY at any angle and the claim collapses. The numbers are, to say the least, highly suspect. Actual   findings,  even years  after l995, do not support them.



All kinds of researchers, in teams and individually, have arrived at  a host  of major doubts about  this constantly repeated  claim even before Brock’s new book. The context of the event alone, based on factual and verified information, exposes the claim as a methodical, structured and manipulative adjunct to an end  or ends  that  have transcended an  initial propaganda phase.



It managed to hide (a) that there was a civil war ongoing in Eastern Bosnia, involving the entire district of Srebrenica;



(b)that a SYSTEMATIC extermination and ethnic cleansing of near-by Serb villagers.---men, women and children-- had been going on even before  Srebrenica became, by U.N. mandate,  a “safety zone,” inhabited only by “unarmed civilians;”



 (c)that this old silver-mining town was, in fact, used by well armed Bosnian Muslims, led by a warlord named Nasir Oric, to liquidate  all the near-by Serbs by terror and mayhem, DOCUMENTED BY ORIC HIMSELF;



(d)that Oric and up to about 5,000 of his men, forewarned from Sarajevo,  fled to the Bosnian Muslim stronghold of Tuzla, days before the Bosnian Serb Army took Srebrenica ;



(e)that  the allegation of  “genocide”  with which  General Ratko Mladic is being charged, could not stand in any real court of law because he put the Muslim elderly, women and children of Srebrenica  into buses and sent them to Tuzla, in sharp contrast to the real GENOCIDE carried out by Oric;



(f)that while Oric has been running a disco for U.S. G.I.s in Tuzla, under no indictment   by the Hague “Tribunal” until recently (for “mistreating prisoners”) Mladic is wanted by it as a major “war criminal” for having committed “genocide” at Srebrenica;.



(g)that the U.S.under a NATO cosmetic umbrella  had the command and put into action  its  preponderant personnel and weapons systems to wage  a 78-day purely punitive air war against a defenseless Serbia, without the Congressional declaration of war mandated by the Constitution and causing over 3,000 civilian death plus a damage to Serbia’s infrastructure, governmental and private properties estimated at the low of $20 and high of $40 billion;.



(h)that the  punishment  exceeded by far the non-existent SERIE  of “sins”  into  which  “the Serbs” are  being  marched, with sticks and carrots,  to accept  “collective guilt” because some  ethnic Serbs committed egregious crimes in an egregious  tripartite fratricide heavily assisted via  the classic “”Balkanization” by foreign powers of our own moment in time,  some with an attested   pedigree .in repetitive invasions,  civilized savageries and undergoing  an acute  historical amnesia.



Given all that plus the latest and decidedly  irrefutable  work by Brock it is difficult to understand the unending flow of  political venom against present-day Serbia from our powerful Solons who have inducted the  U.S. Congress into additional, this time economic, threat of punishments if Mladic and Karadzic  are not delivered by Serbia to the Hague Tribunal, by 31st May 2006. Since the  International  “Community” has constructed an international boundary between Serbia and Bosnia,  Belgrade cannot send troops  into Bosnia to “capture” Mladic. If foreign  requests  were to be  put to Syria to deliver Bin Laden to the U.S. one could only laugh at them. But, the analogy is symmetric. It is also doubtful that Karadzic is still in any ex-Yugoslav space. This  turns   the demand to Serbia into  either a  “fait accompli”  to punish since it cannot be met or, else, borders on the irrational.. 

 #######

 The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) Canada
       
News Fixing

By Dimitri Diamant

       
December 26, 2005
       


Many know that price fixing by the largest competitors in any industry is against the law.  Stories have been told of top execs meeting in hotel rooms in order to fix such industry-wide prices, nothing written down, not even on slips of paper.

Lately, there seems to be an ominous trend towards something similar that could be described as News Fixing.

Proper journalistic standards require that the most authoritative sources that are available be referred to, and there should be confirmation; but are there an increasing number of circumstances where such proper journalistic standards are not being followed?  This situation suffers from even more aggravation due to the well known concentration of major news source outlets into fewer and fewer hands, so that now, only a handful of media CEOs can make it clear to all journalists that the quality and reliability of news sources can be fudged.

One serious example of this practice would be an alleged massacre that all journalists dutifully always describe as the worst since World War II.  This would be the alleged massacre that may have taken place in Srebrenica, Bosnia in July, 1995.

What are the sources for this story?  When News Fixing takes place, we see that all journalists, for example, from television, whether presenting the news or conducting interviews with pre-selected guests, always rigidly preach from exactly the same hymn book, News Fixing, almost as though the top level CEO is always looking over their shoulder.  Is this the free press?

Whenever any noted journalist is constrained to provide a source for the Srebrenica story, they always immediately refer to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the ICRC, Geneva, Switzerland, but without any further elaboration whatsoever.  Is this their only source, as vaguely as it is presented, for a story as singularly important as this?

It is possible to delve into the statements made by the ICRC at that time with regard to Srebrenica.  The most authoritative source would be an interview granted to Junge Welt (Young World), a Berlin newspaper, www.jungewelt.de .  This newspaper was founded at the time of the DDR, continues to publish during the subsequent fifteen years of the Federal Republic, and their editorial policy would continue to be critical of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, a country that was founded in 1920 by Woodrow Wilson.  This authoritative interview was granted to Junge Welt on August 30, 1995 by an official spokesperson from the ICRC headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland.  A pertinent excerpt from this interview, granted by a Mr. Pierre Gaultier of the ICRC, would be as follows:

  "All together we arrived at the number of approximately 10,000 [missing from Srebrenica]. But there may be some double counting... Before we have finished [weeding out the double counting] we cannot give any exact information. Our work is made even more complicated by the fact that the Bosnian government has informed us that several thousand refugees have broken through enemy lines and have been reintegrated into the Bosnian Muslim army. These persons are therefore not missing, but they cannot be removed from the lists of the missing (...) because we have not received their names."

Other sources, including the original ICTY indictment issued by Richard Goldstone, accurately describe these thousands of men as armed fighters, which is why Mr. Gaultier refers to them as "refugees" reintegrated into the "army".  Some of these armed fighters, eighteen or nineteen years of age, are now described by all journalists as boys.

 Thus, from this interview, we see that thousands did reach, on foot, essentially the town of Tuzla.  The remaining thousands are said to be missing, not massacred.  However, instead of relying on this authoritative source, all journalists, if pressed, will refer instead to an idle speculation by a Red Cross field worker, with the last name of Barry, who once said that "5,000 have simply disappeared".  Now, one has to think cleverly for a moment to see that the word "disappeared" is not the same as "massacred", and the disappearances of thousands more or less took place in the direction of the town of Tuzla, and then on from there into the Muslim, Islamic army.  Today, in 2005, ten years later, six thousand such bodies have yet to be found by zealous, well funded professional gravediggers hired by the ICTY, and that would be because missing, and even disappearing, is not the same as massacred.

Returning to the subject of news source reliability, why do all journalists, at the direction of their CEO's, always refer to Barry instead of Mr. Gaultier?  The ruminations of a lone, low-level ICRC field worker are a far cry from an authoritative interview granted by an official spokesperson from the ICRC headquarters at Geneva, Switzerland.

What has been the position of the ICRC since then?  No doubt, from national contributors, they have eventually felt the need to conform with the uniform Srebrenica story.  However, on July 26, 2005, about a month before the Junge Welt interview, and some days after the alleged massacre of July, 1995, the ICRC issued the following news release, four paragraphs altogether, only the fourth and last paragraph presented in its entirety:

        26-07-1995  ICRC News 30
        Bosnia-Herzegovina: ICRC action in enclaves crisis

          "More than 1,000 civilians - most of them women and children - have fled the fighting that is now raging in the north of the Bihac enclave to seek refuge with relatives in the town of Cazin. ...

          "At the start of the crisis affecting the enclaves, the ICRC set up a special tracing service in Kladanj, on the Tuzla air base and in the various places where displaced persons have gathered, to try and locate people separated from their families or reported missing. ...

          "Emergency teams of medical personnel and water supply experts, stationed by the ICRC at the Kladanj checkpoint and in the Tuzla area, stand ready to take action in the event of a fresh influx of displaced people from Zepa and its surroundings. ...

          "Since the fall of the Srebrenica enclave, the ICRC has not succeeded in gaining access to individuals detained by the Bosnian Serb forces. It is relentlessly pursuing its approaches to the authorities in charge, which have publicly pledged, on several occasions, to respect the Geneva Conventions. So far they have not honoured their commitments, and the ICRC is deeply concerned about the plight of all those whom it is unable to protect."

  The Srebrenica enclave is mentioned last, and there is no mention of a major massacre.

Concluding, price fixing is supposed to be against the law, and News Fixing ought to be seriously frowned upon, if only this were possible.

       
       

The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=1640 <http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=1640> 

#######

Srebrenica 'killings' video
http://www.srpskapolitika.com/video/Srebrenica.html