The Real Story Behind Kosovo's Independence

February 23 / 4, 2008

Lessons in the
Bi-Partisanship of Empire

The Real Story Behind Kosovo's
Independence

By JEREMY SCAHILL

News
Flash: The Bush administration acknowledges there is a such thing as
international law.

But, predictably, it is not being
invoked to address the US prison camps at Guantanamo, the wide use of torture,
the invasion and occupation of sovereign countries, the extraordinary rendition
program. No, it is being thrown out forcefully as a condemnation of the Serbian
government in the wake of Thursday's attack by protesters on the US embassy in
Belgrade following the Bush administration's swift recognition of the
declaration of independence by the southern Serbian province of Kosovo. Some
1,000 protesters broke away from a largely non-violent mass demonstration in
downtown Belgrade and targeted the embassy. Some protesters actually made it
into the compound, setting a fire and tearing down the American flag.

"I'm outraged by the mob attack
against the U.S. embassy in Belgrade," fumed Zalmay Khalilzad,the US
Ambassador to the United Nations. "The embassy is sovereign US territory.
The government of Serbia has a responsibility under international law to
protect diplomatic facilities, particularly embassies." His comments were
echoed by a virtual who's who of the Bill Clinton administration. People like
Jamie Rubin, then-Secretary of State Madeiline Albright's deputy, one of the
main architects of US policy toward Serbia. "It is sovereign territory of
the United States under international law," Rubin declared. "For
Serbia to allow these protesters to break windows, break into the American
Embassy, is a pretty dramatic sign." Hillary Clinton, whose husband
orchestrated and ran the 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, said, "I
would be moving very aggressively to hold the Serbian government responsible
with their security forces to protect our embassy. Under international law they
should be doing that."

There are two major issues here. One is
the situation in Kosovo itself (which we'll get to in a moment), but the other
is the attack on the US embassy. Yes, the Serbian government had an obligation
to prevent the embassy from being torched and ransacked. If there was
complicity by the Serbian police or authorities in allowing it to be attacked,
that is a serious issue. But the US has little moral authority not just in
invoking international law (which it only does when it benefits Washington's
agenda) but in invoking international law when speaking about attacks on
embassies in Belgrade.

Perhaps the greatest crime against any embassy in the history of
Yugoslavia was committed not by evil Serb protesters, but by the United States
military.

On May 7, 1999, at the height of the
78 day US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the US bombed the Chinese embassy in
Belgrade, killing three Chinese citizens, two of them journalists, and wounding
20 others. The Clinton administration later said
that the bombing was the result of faulty maps provided by the CIA (Sound
familiar?). Beijing rejected that explanation and alleged it was deliberate.
Eventually, under strong pressure from China, the US apologized and paid $28
million in compensation to the victims' families. If the US was serious about
international law and the protection of embassies, those responsible for that
bombing would have been tried at the Hague along with other alleged war
criminals. But "war criminal" is a designation for the losers of
US-fueled wars, not bombers sent by Washington to drop humanitarian munitions
on "sovereign territory."

Beyond the obvious hypocrisy of the US
condemnations of Serbia and the sudden admission that international law exists,
the Kosovo story is an important one in the context of the current election
campaign in the United States. Perhaps more than any other international
conflict, Yugoslavia was the defining foreign policy of President Bill
Clinton's time in power. Under his rule, the nation of Yugoslavia was
destroyed, dismantled and chopped into ethnically pure para-states. President
Bush's immediate recognition of Kosovo as an independent nation was the icing
on the cake of destruction of Yugoslavia and one which was enthusiastically
embraced by Hillary Clinton. "I've supported the independence of Kosovo
because I think it is imperative that in the heart of Europe we continue to
promote independence and democracy," Clinton said at the recent Democratic
debate in Austin, Texas.

A few days before the attack on the US
embassy in Belgrade, Clinton released a Molotov cocktail statement praising the
declaration of independence. In it, she referred to Kosovo by the Albanian
"Kosova" and said independence "will allow the people of Kosova
to finally live in their own democratic state. It will allow
Kosova and Serbia to finally put a difficult chapter in their history behind
them and to move forward." She added, "I want to underscore the need
to avoid any violence or provocations in the days and weeks ahead." As
seasoned observers of Serbian politics know, there were few things the US could
have done to add fuel to the rage in Serbia over the declaration of
independence -- "provocations" if you will -- than to have a
political leader named Clinton issue a statement praising independence and
using the Albanian name for Kosovo.

On the campaign trail, the Clinton camp
has held up Kosovo as a successful model for how to conduct US foreign policy
and Clinton criticized Bush for taking "so long for us to reach this
historic juncture."

Perhaps a little of that history is in
order. If Kosovo is her idea of solid US foreign policy, it speaks volumes to
what kind of president she would be. The reality is that there are striking
similarities between the Clinton approach to Kosovo and the Bush approach to
Iraq.

On March 24, 1999, President Bill
Clinton began an 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. Like Bush with
Iraq, Clinton had no UN mandate (he used NATO) and his so-called
"diplomacy" to avert the possibility of bombing leading up to the
attacks was insincere and a set-up from the jump. Just like Bush with Iraq.

A month before the bombing began, the
Clinton administration issued an ultimatum to President Slobodan Milosevic,
which he had to either accept unconditionally or face bombing. Known as the
Rambouillet accord, it was a document that no sovereign country would have
accepted. It contained a provision that would have guaranteed US and NATO
forces "free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access
throughout" all of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo. It also sought to immunize
those occupation forces "from any form of arrest, investigation, or
detention by the authorities in [Yugoslavia]," as well as grant the
occupiers "the use of airports, roads, rails and ports without
payment." Additionally, Milosevic was told he would have to "grant
all telecommunications services, including broadcast services, needed for the
Operation, as determined by NATO." Similar to Bush's Iraq plan years
later, Rambouillet mandated that the economy of Kosovo "shall function in
accordance with free market principles."

What Milosevic was actually asked to
sign is never discussed. That it would have effectively meant the end of the
sovereignty of the nation was a non-story. The dominant narrative for the past
nine years, repeated this week by William Cohen, Clinton's defense secretary at
the time of the bombing, is this: "We tried to achieve a peaceful
resolution of what was taking place in Kosovo. And Slobodan Milosevic
refused." Refused peace? More like he unwisely refused one of Don
Corleone's famous offers. Washington knew he would reject it, but had to give
the appearance of diplomacy for international "legitimacy."

So the humanitarian bombs rained down
on Serbia. Among the missions: the bombing of the studios of Radio Television
Serbia where an airstrike killed 16 media workers; the cluster bombing of a Nis
marketplace, shredding human beings into meat; the deliberate targeting of a
civilian passenger train; the use of depleted uranium munitions; and the
targeting of petrochemical plants, causing toxic chemical waste to pour into
the Danube River. Also, the bombing of Albanian refugees, ostensibly the people
being protected by the U.S.

Similar to Bush's allegations about
Iraqi WMDs in the lead up to the US invasion, in 1999 Clinton administration
officials also delivered stunning allegations about the level of brutality
present in Kosovo as part of the propaganda campaign. "We've now
seen about 100,000
military-aged men missing ....They may have been murdered," Cohen said five weeks into the
bombing. He said that up to 4,600 Kosovo men had been executed, adding, "I
suspect it's far higher than that." Those numbers were flat out false.
Eventually the estimates were scaled back dramatically, as Justin Raimondo
pointed out recently in his column on Antiwar.com, from 100,000 to 50,000 to
10,000 and "at that point the War Party stopped talking numbers altogether
and just celebrated the glorious victory of 'humanitarian intervention.'"
As it turned out "there was no 'genocide' -- the International Tribunal
itself reported that just over 2,000 bodies were recovered from postwar Kosovo,
including Serbs, Roma, and Kosovars, all victims of the vicious civil war in
which we intervened on the side of the latter. The whole fantastic story of
another 'holocaust' in the middle of Europe was a fraud," according to
Raimondo.

Following the NATO invasion of Kosovo
in June of 1999, the US and its allies stood by as the Albanian mafia and gangs
of criminals and paramilitaries spread out across the province and
systematically cleansed Kosovo of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Romas and
other ethnic minorities. They burned down houses, businesses and churches and
implemented a shocking campaign to forcibly expel non-Albanians from the
province. Meanwhile, the US worked closely with the Kosovo Liberation Army and
backed the rise of war criminals to the highest levels of power in Kosovo.
Today, Kosovo has become a hub for human trafficking, organized crime and
narcosmuggling. In short, it is a mafia state. Is this the
"democracy" Hillary Clinton speaks of "promoting" in
"the heart" of Europe?

It didn't take long for the US to begin
construction of a massive US military base, Camp Bondsteel, which conveniently
is located in an area of tremendous geopolitical interest to Washington. (Among
its most bizarre facilities, Bondsteel now offers classes at the Laura Bush
education center, as well as massages from Thai women and all the multinational
junk food you could (n)ever wish for). In November 2005, Alvaro Gil-Robles, the
human rights envoy of the Council of Europe, described Bondsteel as a
"smaller version of Guantanamo." Oh, and Bondsteel was constructed by
former Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

Herein lies an interesting point. The
Serbian government is largely oriented toward Europe, not the US. The country's
prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, is a conservative isolationist who is not
enthusiastic about a US military base on Serbian soil any more than Cuba is
about Gitmo. He charged that, in recognizing Kosovo, Washington was "ready
to unscrupulously and violently jeopardize international order for the sake of
its own military interests." To the would-be independent Kosovo
government, however, Bondsteel is no problem.

Russia and a few other nations are
fighting the recognition of Kosovo as an independent nation, but that is
unlikely to succeed. Still, this action will undoubtedly reverberate for years
to come. "We have in Serbia a situation in which the U.S. has forced an
action --the proclamation of independence by the Kosovo Albanians -- that is in
clear violation of the most fundamental principles of international law after
World War II," argues Robert Hayden, Director of the Center for Russian
and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. "Borders cannot
be changed by force and without consent -- that principle was actually the main
stated reason for the 1991 U.S. attack on Iraq."

And this brings us full circle.
International law matters only when it is convenient for the US. So too are the
cries for "humanitarian interventions." And despite the extremism of
the Bush administration, this is hardly a uniquely Republican phenomenon. In a
just world, there would be a humanitarian intervention against the US
occupation of Iraq -- with its indiscriminate killings of civilians, torture
chambers and widespread human rights violations. There certainly would have
been such an intervention during the bipartisan slaughter, through bombs and
sanctions, of Iraq's people over the past 18 years. But that's what you get
when the cops and judges and prosecutors are the criminals. US policy has
always operated on a worthy victim, unworthy victim system that is almost never
primarily about saving the victims. Humanitarianism is the publicly offered
justification for the action, seldom, if ever, the primary motivation. With
Iraq, Bush wheeled out the humanitarian justification for the
occupation--Saddam's brutality -- only after the WMD lies were thoroughly
debunked. In Yugoslavia, Clinton used it right out of the gates. In both cases,
it rang insincere.

If you are a victim who happens to
share a common geography with US interests, international law is on your side
as long as it is convenient. If not, well, tough. The UN is just a debate club
anyway. Just ask the tens of thousands of Kurds who were slaughtered by Turkey
with weapons sold to them by the Clinton administration during the 1990s. Or
the Palestinians who live under the brutality of Israel's occupation.

[They're really in danger if they go
to Sbarro's Pizzeria:jpm.]

In some cases, the "victims"
allegedly being protected by the US actually get bombed themselves, as was the
case with President Clinton's "humanitarian" bombings of the north
and south of Iraq once every three days in the late 1990s.

In the bigger picture, the Bush
administration's quick recognition of an independent Kosovo has given us a
powerful reminder of a fact that is too often overlooked these days: empire is
bipartisan, as are the tactics and rhetoric and bombs used to defend and expand
it.

Jeremy Scahill is author of The New York Times-bestseller "Blackwater:
The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.". He can be
reached at jeremy(AT)democracynow.org

This article was originally published
by Alternet.

Jeremy Scahill: The
Real Story Behind Kosovo's Independence