Kosovo May Explode - Here

  Kosovo May Explode -- Here

By Julia Gorin

CNSNews.com Commentary

March 16, 2006

The War on Terror suffered a major blow three years before it was ever announced. It happened when the people of this democracy were misled into attacking the sovereign, emerging post-Communist democracy of Yugoslavia, over rumors of genocide and ethnic cleansing that proved false. In so doing, we delivered the Balkans to al Qaeda.

Today we are being asked to seal that historical blunder, the repercussions of which are still escalating seven years later. The people we "rescued" have turned their weapons against United Nations and NATO forces.

While NATO spends most of its time rooting out terror cells in Kosovo and Bosnia, which served as the planning bases for the London and Madrid bombings, the 2006 deadline to complete our eagerly forgotten debacle and determine the province's final status is fast approaching.

To persuade the international community that only one final status will be acceptable, our Albanian "rescuees" have been stepping up the violence. This is a message to the West that it has only one possible exit strategy: grant unconditional independence -- without border compromises with Serbia and without protection guarantees for what's left of the non-Albanian minorities.

If we allow this to happen, the peacekeepers will have to leave, and with them so will our eyes and ears in this terror haven and thruway. Still, congressional, U.S. State Department and U.N. sentiment seem to be tilting toward self-determination and the logic that if you've dug yourself into a hole, keep digging.

Here is the size of that hole so far: In November, 2001, what should have been an explosive article appeared in the European edition of the Wall St. Journal. Headlined "Al Qaeda's Balkan Links," it read: "For the past 10 years ... Ayman al-Zawahiri (bin Laden's second in command) has operated terrorist training camps [and] weapons of mass destruction factories throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia ... Though the Clinton administration had been briefed extensively by the State Department in 1993 on the growing Islamist threat in former Yugoslavia, little was done to follow through ..."

A December 2003 article in Britain's Sunday Mirror also registered barely a blip: "Posing as members of the Real IRA, we ... made our deal in Kosovo, a breeding ground for fanatics with al-Qaeda links. Our contact was the deputy commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army Niam Behljulji ... [who allegedly supplied] terrorists across Europe and has been accused of massacring Serbian women and children during the war. He even posed grinning for a photograph, holding the severed head of one of his victims."

Even the high-minded among us may soon become nostalgic for the days when ethnic profiling was even possible. Because while the world wept for Bosnia, bin Laden and Iran were recruiting thousands of blonde, blue-eyed Bosnian Muslims for suicide missions -- "White al Qaeda," according to Yossef Bodansky, security expert and author of "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America."

But to perpetuate the version of events we were sold from the beginning, all these connections have gone purposefully unmade by our nation's "journalists," who were gung-ho supporters of our 1999 offensive against a historical ally.

How many Americans know that the terrorists who carried out a spate of suicide attacks in Iraq in August 2004 were trained in Bosnia, or that al Qaeda's top Balkans operative -- al-Zawahiri's brother Mohammed -- had a high position with our terrorist KLA "allies"?

And who wants to bring up what former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia James Bissett has, that in Bosnia we fought alongside at least two of the 9/11 hijackers. We won't learn the details of how Bosnia has become the European "one-stop shop" for all the terrorism needs -- weapons, money, shelter, documents -- of Chechen and Afghan fighters passing through Europe before heading to Iraq.

We will lack information about an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, where U.S. forces recovered one Albanian Kosovar's application, reading: "I have Kosovo Liberation Army combat experience against Serb and American forces. ... I recommend operations against parks like Disney."

Despite the media's blackout on the subject of Balkans terror, more and more Americans have been scratching their heads, wondering why we forcibly precluded what the Serbs were doing in their own backyard, and continue to mischaracterize it, even as we've gone halfway around the globe to do the same thing.

For the past four years The Hague's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has been finding what multiple international forensics teams have found, that claims of Serb "atrocities" were exaggerated and often invented. It turns out we confused an attempt to create an Islamic "Greater Albania" with one to create a "Greater Serbia." But Milosevic's sudden death this week spares us from the worldwide riots that would have ensued had the tribunal mustered the courage to issue a verdict based on the evidence.

"If you break it, you fix it." We've heard much of that refrain throughout our Iraq debates, including from the self-same architects of the Kosovo offensive, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton and Wesley Clark.

Their prescription for fixing what they broke? Bury it. Clark warned that "a violent collision may occur by year-end" if we don't do what the Albanians want, and this four-star general advocated doing just that. After all, "unrest" in the region shines an unwelcome spotlight on his "successful war." Clark even suggested pummeling the Serbs again if Belgrade got in the way; it's easier than fighting his terrorist Albanian campaign donors.

As U.N. human rights observer Jiri Dienstbier notes, "If NATO and the U.N. can't defeat terrorism in an area the size of one-eighth of the Czech Republic, how do they expect to confront global terrorism?"

Balkans author Vojin Joksimovich seconds the question: "Although the intelligence community is fully aware of the threat, political leaders are denying it and the media are silent. Given this cover-up, it's fair to ask whether we are able to prevent yet another major terrorist act."

Indeed, can you fight terror with one hand while abetting it with the other?

It's long past time to set the record straight on what we "achieved" in the Balkans, and change course. If a commission was set up to determine whether a presidential administration did all it could to prevent kamikaze attacks on 9/11, good God, what of an administration that committed the might of the U.S. Air Force to bomb Europe for a legacy beyond sexual harassment, and lied about genocide to achieve it?

Testifying at the Milosevic trial in September 2004, former Senate Republican Policy Committee analyst James Jatras quoted the 9/11 Commission's finding that it was in 1990s Bosnia that the "groundwork for a true terrorist network was being laid." That network is known as al Qaeda.

The Balkans were the early, key prize that Iran and Osama bin Laden sought as a terror corridor into the West. We delivered it to them. Why?

As the world closes in on the Serbs again this year, handing bin Laden an unequivocal victory by severing Kosovo -- Serbia's version of Jerusalem -- and officially establishing a terror state in Europe, we can know from Madrid and London that we'll pay for it with our own blood.

Indeed, we already have.

(Julia Gorin blogs at JuliaGorin.com and is a contributing editor to JewishWorldReview.com, where she has been chronicling the enduring fallout from the Balkan wars.)

       
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