A Russian puzzle

What, exactly, is Putin's game in Kosovo?

Ian Traynor

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March 29, 2007 8:30 PM | Printable version

The stand-off, in the opinion of a British general, harboured the
risk of starting a third world war between Russia and the west. It was
the summer of 1999 and General Mike Jackson, now retired, was leading a Nato ground force into Kosovo after 11 weeks of Nato bombing had driven the Serbs out.

Serbia's main ally, Russia, was fuming impotently on the sidelines.
Boris Yeltsin and his top military men had been totally against Nato's
first war, refused to supply a UN mandate for the campaign, and then
had to stand by as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton made a case for the use
of force as humanitarianism.

When the war ended and the Nato troops moved to secure Kosovo,
Yeltsin and his chief of staff pulled a fast one. Secretly, Russian
peacekeepers in nearby Bosnia were ordered to make a dash to grab
control of Kosovo's main airport at Pristina. It worked. The Russians
got there before Gen Jackson.

Wesley Clark, the American officer commanding the war, went
ballistic and ordered Jackson and his ground troops to recapture the
airport.

No way, answered the Brit insubordinately. "I'm not going to start the third world war for you."

That was then - the tail-end of the Yeltsin decade. Russia was weak
and demoralised. Eight years later, Vladimir Putin's main claim to his
position is that he has stopped the rot. Russia, he boasts, is back as
a big international player. It will no longer be ignored or pushed
around. And on Kosovo, it's payback time for the humiliation of 1999.

Nursing grudges and making mischief, Russia now stands as the main
obstacle to a peaceful settlement of the Kosovo conflict - redrawing
the borders in the southern Balkans and creating a new, independent
state of Kosovo inhabited mainly by ethnic Albanians but including a
sizeable frightened and hostile Serbian minority afforded extensive
powers of self-government and international protection.

No one knows what Russia wants, what its real aim is, or where it
identifies its genuine interests. To drive a hard bargain? Get a
pay-off somewhere else? It is threatening to veto a new UN security
council resolution needed to mandate the EU's most ambitious ever
mission as the international overseer of Kosovo independence and the
implementation of the independence blueprint drafted by the Finnish
fixer and UN envoy, Martti Ahtisaari.

Ahtisaari laid
his 58-page settlement before the security council in New York this
week and added three pages of recommendations in which he forcefully
used the i-word for the first time. Independence was the only viable
option for security, stability, and lasting peace.

No surprise there. In the crisis of 1999, it was the same Ahtisaari
who went to Belgrade on an emergency mission and persuaded Serbia's
Slobodan Milosevic to back down, creating the scenario for the
insertion of Gen Jackson's troops in Kosovo. Ever since, Ahtisaari has
privately told diplomats engaged in the Balkans, the west has blundered
by failing to move more promptly towards Kosovo independence.

The issue should have been tackled seven years ago, he believes,
rather than being left to fester during years of uninspired UN
administration. Now, much depends on the Russians.

The British, and then the Americans, chair the security council in
April and May and everyone involved thinks the Russians will stonewall
to keep London or Washington from taking the credit for any
breakthrough.

In June, the security council chair falls to Belgium, while Angela
Merkel, the German chancellor, leads two big international summits - of
the EU and of the G-8. Mrs Merkel is proving a very able international
fixer and the hope is she will charm and deliver Putin on Kosovo at the
G-8, while the EU summit rubberstamps the dispatch of some 2,000 EU
officials, policemen, judges, and administrators to Kosovo to act as
midwife to a new country.

This is the optimistic scenario. There's a reasonable prospect of it prevailing.

The alternative is grim. A Russian veto in New York will unleash
diplomatic chaos internationally and violence on the ground in the
Balkans.

The 27 countries of the EU tentatively support the Ahtisaari plan if
it can be implemented. EU and Nato leaders are daily calling for
European "unity", in the full knowledge of how fragile that consensus
is.

Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Hungary, Bulgaria all have
strong reservations about the peace and independence plan. If there is
a consensus in New York and a security council resolution, the European
unity will hold. If not, the European position will buckle, with many
of the Europeans effectively supporting the Russian position and that
of Serbia, which will never volunteer to give up Kosovo.

The Russians are adroit at sowing and exploiting European division,
whether on energy and gas pipelines or missile defence in Europe.
Kosovo offers a further opportunity.

Even if the Europeans support the Ahtisaari plan, many of them do
not support its imposition against the will of Serbia - the only way it
can be implemented.

If the Russians block and the Europeans crumble, the Kosovo
Albanians, fed up waiting, are likely to declare independence anyway
and invite international recognition. The Americans may recognise, the
British follow suit, a few more Europeans, too. EU fissures will be
laid bare. The Serbs may seize on the confusion to partition Kosovo,
grabbing the northern sliver of the province that they already control.
Ethnic cleansing and violence will be inevitable, accompanied by
international disarray.

It is not clear at all what Russia's interest may be in triggering
such mayhem, nor is it clear what interest Russia has in Kosovo at all.
It won't be the third world war, but there is a lot at stake.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ian_traynor/2007/03/ian_traynor_the_standoff_thoug.html

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Forfeiting Nothing

 Forfeiting Nothing



Main Argument for Kosovo's Secession Bogus

by Nebojsa Malic



Despite fierce opposition from Belgrade and Moscow, the UN-designated "mediator" for Kosovo, former Finnish president and ICG board member Martti Ahtisaari submitted his proposal this week to the UN Security Council. Ahtisaari told Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that "supervised independence" was the "only viable option" for the Serbian province, occupied since June 1999 by NATO and administered by a UN mission and a "provisional" ethnic Albanian government.



Washington has declared its ironclad support to Ahtisaari's proposal, rejecting out of hand any further negotiations. According to NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Alliance also fully supports Ahtisaari.



After a 78-day illegal war, followed by almost eight years of violent occupation, the Empire is finally making a move to separate Kosovo from Serbia. The decision is in line with its systematic violations of international law, NATO and UN charter, the U.S. Constitution, and even the very UN resolution that created a precarious legal cover for the occupation.



What is even worse, the reasoning invoked to justify this criminal act is cynical and duplicitous, bearing no relationship to truth or logic.



Simply Illegal



Jurist, a well-known publication of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, carried a guest column this week, in which Prof. Anthony D'Amato of Northwestern University claimed an independent Kosovo would be a "humanitarian disaster" for the remaining Serbs. D'Amato described Kosovo as having a "Serb-hating majority," and wrote that "a Kosovar-dominated (sic) independent government will lose no time in confiscating the property and rights of the Serbian minority. Some 200,000 Serbs in Kosovo could lose everything they own and maybe their lives."



Of particular interest is this observation, concerning the legality of Ahtisaari's proposal:



"If we remove the diplomatic euphemisms from Mr. Ahtisaari's report, we find that he is essentially arguing that UNMIK has conquered Kosovo! Territory-grabbing by conquest has been illegal since the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, yet somehow the United Nations has done it, according to Mr. Ahtisaari. However, there is nothing in the UN Charter that gives the UN the power to oust an existing government by force, replace it with a United Nations mission created especially for the occasion, and then dissolve the mission and hand sovereignty over the territory to someone else. Acquisition of territory by conquest is simply illegal, whether a state does it or an international organization does it."



Sounds clear enough.



However, D'Amato continues the article by claiming that partition would be a preferred solution, and explains why; to establish at least some legitimacy for the Albanian (or "Kosovar," as he erroneously puts it) cause, he turns to a "human rights argument." Since, he claims, the Albanians were victims of an "unremitting campaign of suppression" by Milosevic, and "crimes against humanity" by the Yugoslav army and police, "the brutality of the Milosevic incursions into Kosovo may be argued as disqualifying Serbia from ever again governing the Kosovars."



Argumentum Ad Atrocitas



This "victim argument" has long been used as justification for NATO's bombing, the subsequent expulsion and persecution of Serbs ("revenge attacks") and others by Albanians, and indeed for claiming the "right" to independence. Supporters of independence have repeatedly claimed that Serbia has somehow "forfeited" its sovereignty through actions in Kosovo in 1999 and before.



As NATO bombs began raining on Serbia and Montenegro in March of 1999, media in NATO countries began manufacturing atrocity stories from the mold perfected just a few years earlier in Bosnia. Refugees, ethnic cleansing, genocide, massacres, rape camps – everything was there. In addition to propaganda injected into the mainstream media by U.S. and other NATO governments, there was also KLA propaganda directly fed to gullible reporters.



Even today, veteran propagandists dutifully repeat the claim that Serb "ethnic cleansing" of Albanians led to the NATO attack. Nothing can be further from the truth. NATO launched the attack in March 1999 after failing to coerce Serbia into accepting an occupation force, during the false negotiations in France. The official justification for the bombing was to force Belgrade to sign the "agreement" presented by the U.S. envoys in Rambouillet. Alleged atrocities are all said to have happened subsequent to the start of the bombing. Indeed, the ICTY indictment against Slobodan Milosevic included only one alleged crime dated prior to March 23, and that was the faux massacre at Racak.



By late 1999, it was obvious that the death toll in Kosovo was much less than the alleged 100,000 – or even the more commonly used 10,000, often falsely qualified as Albanian civilians (That number was actually a wild claim by UK Foreign Minister Geoff Hoon, who sought to justify the bombing.) The total number of bodies exhumed by ICTY's investigators was 2,108, of all ethnicities and with varying causes of death. It is unclear whether that death toll included the numerous Albanians killed by the KLA, the KLA's own substantial casualties, or those of the Yugoslav Army. In any case, horror stories presented as facts in a State Department "report" were later proven false. For example, the "Trepca mines" story was debunked by Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl. True, several other mass graves were discovered in the province since 1999. However, the victims buried there were Serbs, so the discoveries quickly faded from memory.



Although many Kosovo Albanians suffered terribly during the KLA insurrection and the NATO bombing, their claim that "Serb atrocities" have earned them the right to independence holds very little water.



Goose and Gander



However, neither the Albanians nor their Western sponsors actually believe the "atrocity argument" on principle. For if they did, and it was universally applicable, they would have forfeited all right to Kosovo themselves!



We could start from the beginning: NATO's war itself was illegal and illegitimate. In the course of the war, NATO pilots targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure. The Alliance naturally claims those were "unfortunate mistakes" and that bombs were dropped "in good faith," yet Gen. Michael Short publicly stated that the campaign was designed to force Belgrade to surrender by terrorizing civilians.



Korisa, Grdelica, Aleksinac, Surdulica – these were just some of the NATO atrocities during the "humanitarian" war of 1999.



Once the government in Belgrade agreed to withdraw from Kosovo and allow the UN to occupy the province (in practice, it was NATO occupation), Albanian separatists began terrorizing Kosovo. Violence against Serbs has been amply documented, in photographs, in print, and on film. It is important to note that Serbs were not the sole victims of Albanian attacks; Roma and other communities in Kosovo have also been exposed to violence, intimidation, extortion and murder.



Here are just some of the more gruesome incidents of anti-Serb violence:



- July 1999: fourteen Serb farmers massacred in the fields near Staro Gracko (graphic photos);



- October 1999: Valentin Krumov, UN official from Bulgaria, slain for "speaking Serbian";



- February 2000: bus carrying Serbs to a cemetery service hit by a missile;



- February 2001: roadside bomb blows up another bus;



- June 2003: brutal slaying of a Serb family in Obilic;



- August 2003: Serb children swimming in the river near Gorazdevac machine-gunned down;



- March 2004: massive pogrom throughout the province targets Serbs; 8 dead, 4500 expelled, several villages razed.



All this was accompanied by systematic destruction of Serbian Orthodox churches, chapels, monasteries and cemeteries.



Albanian separatists and NATO leaders claim that Serbia's violent suppression of the terrorist KLA in 1998-99 merited not only an illegal aggression in response, but also forfeited Serbia's sovereignty over Kosovo. Yet the Albanians have not "forfeited" their right to Kosovo because of systematic terrorism under NATO occupation – they are being rewarded for it by independence!



The Croatian Precedent



Further proof that the "atrocity argument" was made up for the specific purpose of fabricating a reason to separate the occupied province from Serbia and make it into an Albanian state is the absolute absence of any such argument in the case of Croatia, which once had a considerable Serb population.



No "humanitarian" interventionist has ever claimed that atrocities of the Ustasha regime between 1941-1945, in which hundreds of thousands of Serbs perished (Croat and Nazi estimates were over half a million!), somehow disqualified Croatia from sovereignty over territories with majority Serb population that rebelled in 1991? Nor have any of them claimed that Croatia "forfeited" its sovereignty after the ethnic cleansing of Serbs in 1995, following a brutal Croat military incursion that ended the Serb rebellion and "reintegrated" the disputed territories. So how is Kosovo different?



When Croatia engaged in suppression of a Serb rebellion, it was an ally of the United States and NATO, enjoying their full support – military, political, intelligence and diplomatic. When Serbia tried to suppress the Albanian rebellion three years later, the U.S./NATO support was there again – on the side of the Albanians! This is why the same logic does not apply to Krajina and Kosovo, Croatia and Serbia, or even the Serbs and the Albanians. There is no logic here, no principle, no coherent concept of right or wrong – beyond the naked argument of force: whomsoever the Empire supports is a righteous victim, and its enemy an irredeemable villain.



The Final Leap



Empire's pattern of aggression has by now torn the fragile tapestry of international law to shreds. The UN has already lost so much credibility and respect in the world, unable to stop the abuses by the Washington-run "international community," the Ahtisaari Show is but a final nail in its coffin. Over the past fifteen years, many lines have been crossed. Appeasement of NATO and Albanian aggression in Kosovo might just be that last step over the edge, and into the abyss from which what remains of Western civilization may never return.



http://www.antiwar.com/malic/?articleid=10736

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