AntiWar.com
| May 13, 2006 |
| Tactics for More Balkan Mischief The West's media machine swings into high gear over Kosovo |
| by Christopher Deliso |
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| When it comes to the Balkans, there are some interventionist truths that will never die. Take the 1999 war in Kosovo. In starting it, former President Bill Clinton failed to seek congressional approval in bombing Yugoslavia. The bombing also went on without UN approval. And NATO violated its own self-defensive charter in attacking a country that threatened none of its members. In short, the war was illegal in every respect. Operationally, NATO enlisted a group (the Kosovo Liberation Army) that had until very recently before been classified a terrorist organization, its funding derived partially from organized crime, its numbers bolstered by Islamist fanatics. The war effort also meant turning a blind eye to the machinations of people like Florin Krasniqi, an Albanian who snuck into the U.S. illegally and then proceeded to make illegal shipments of arms to Kosovo. (In 2004, this double felon chipped in at a fundraiser for John Kerry.) Tactically, the U.S. also enlisted groups like the OSCE to fabricate stories of an alleged Serbian massacre of Albanians at Racak, something subsequently discredited in an official forensics report. German intelligence pitched in with a bogus report of an alleged "Operation Horseshoe," Milosevic's supposed diabolical plan to ethnically cleanse Kosovo's almost 2 million Albanians. The lies spouted by the Clinton administration included such canards as 100,000 Albanian dead (postwar tallies put the numbers killed on both sides at around 4,000). The propaganda was assisted by the military's working relationship with CNN and the network's Christiane Amanpour, the wife of then-State Department spokesman James Rubin. Media-government complicity does not get any more intimate than that. Most unforgivably, NATO won its war not through military valor but through bombing civilian targets in Serbia, including hospitals, schools, bridges, and refineries – thus creating toxic, cancerous clouds that in effect made America guilty of using weapons of mass destruction. Vicious cluster bombs that maimed and killed civilians were also used, and, worst of all, copious amounts of depleted uranium were dropped over Kosovo – thus providing the Kosovar Albanians NATO had allegedly been there to protect with a generation of cancer and birth defects. Indeed, NATO's own soldiers have already suffered this fate, one the U.S. knew about full well in light of the "Gulf War Syndrome" of the first Gulf War less than a decade earlier. And so, NATO's war was illegal and immoral in every way. The subsequent UN occupation of Kosovo has proved to be a colossal failure. Over 200,000 minority members were expelled by Albanians, and those that remain often do not enjoy basic human rights. The UN has not stopped but actually encouraged ethnic cleansing. The remaining Serbs in Kosovo live in constant fear and still come under regular attacks and intimidation from Albanians, whose militant leadership has been coddled and promoted to positions of high political power by the UN – regardless of their indictments for war crimes – even as the West continues its hypocritical demands for Serbia to export war crimes suspects to the Hague. Meanwhile, the UN continues to allow Islamic terrorist groups to set up shop in Kosovo, and has promoted a one-sided clash of civilizations in which over 150 churches have been destroyed or damaged and over 200 Arab-funded mosques have risen in their place. UN staffers, from the lowest to highest levels, have also been implicated in everything from white-collar corruption to human trafficking and murder while at the same time contributing – after seven years of administration – shoddy infrastructure and sporadic electricity and water. Ladies and gentlemen, it does not get much more disgusting than this. The Final Drama These irrefutable truths constitute the tip of the iceberg. But this overwhelming mass of evidence, this enormity of collective karma, if you will, needs to be mentioned so that the reader can understand just why the West is being forced to such hysterics in the media to defend its own indefensible policies and the disastrous fruits of its intervention in Kosovo. The best offense is a strong defense, and so the West attempts to divert attention from its own failures by sending the public down false trails. This could be called the Serbian smokescreen. Now that endgame is near and Kosovo's final status is being negotiated in Vienna by a bevy of foreign diplomats and lobbyists, the West is employing a tried and tested policy of distracting the world from the very real illegalities, failures, and hypocrisies of its actions in Kosovo, by shifting the blame for everything that ever went wrong to Serbia, and especially to the late Slobodan Milosevic, who after all can no longer defend himself. A Fortuitous Pattern of Events The great lengths the interventionists have been going to – through the usual diplomatic broadsides, media bombardments, and damning think-tank pronouncements – attest to the scope of the effort necessary to conceal the facts of their complete failure in Kosovo. Perhaps through a brief recap of media focus on the region since January it will become clear how the stage is being set for both further violence and the self-exoneration of those who caused it. As the year began and Kosovo's final status talks loomed, several wonderful coincidences occurred that served to marginalize Serbia's position and enhance that of the militant Albanian wing in the Kosovar leadership. All this suited the Western powers just fine, and was in fact driven by them. The remarkably rapid succession of events guaranteed that mass media coverage of Kosovo would be focused, not on the West's many failures, but on satisfying Albanian wishes at the expense of the still-demonized Serbs. Rugova's Demise to the Mladic Media Frenzy First, on Jan. 22, came the long-anticipated death of Kosovo President Ibrahim Rugova. Rugova was the veteran, relatively pacifist Albanian politician who had long represented a stabilizing presence in comparison to the militant wing, people like Ramush Haradinaj, Agim Ceku, and Hashim Thaci. For this orientation he was allegedly supported by the British and opposed by the Americans in the first elections following the UN occupation, in October 2000. When Rugova died of lung cancer, an American plan that had been decided "long in advance" (according to UN sources) was realized. It involved replacing the weak prime minister, Bajram Kosumi, with war hero Agim Ceku – though it was necessary to have this alleged war criminal's name removed first from the Interpol list. In the interests of Albanian "unity," Rugova the peacenik was given the burial of a "martyr," in a ceremony reserved for the "war heroes" of the KLA – ironically, a group which he had often opposed at his own risk. Such is the grip of militant Albanian nationalism, which their leaders cannot escape even in death. Media coverage in January and February was thus devoted to the past greatness of Rugova and the future promise of Ceku, with little attention given to the latter's murderous record. Then, the last week of February saw a dramatic development that kept the media from addressing this topic: an inexplicable, rumor-fed media feeding frenzy allegedly begun in Sarajevo, which saw the pundits breathlessly speculating that war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic was on the verge of capture. The effect of this "bombshell" (in the end, it turned out to be another dead end) was to proliferate the number of news articles and editorials demanding the fugitive's capture, and in general denigrating the Serbs, taking the reader back to the Bosnian war of the 1990s and the alleged genocide at Srebrenica of 1995. And then, just a few days later – wouldn't you know it? – the encore arrived with massive coverage of the Bosnian government's genocide lawsuit against Serbia in the World Court, first announced in 1993. However, as Nebojsa Malic pointed out, this is not correct: "[T]his isn't a 'Bosnian' lawsuit, but a private undertaking of the Bosnian Muslim ruling party (SDA), from a time when it claimed itself to be the only legitimate government of the country. Bosnia's Serbs and Croats are adamantly against it and have denied it government approval and funding." Nevertheless, the bogus suit resulted in an outpouring of editorials worldwide condemning the Serbs, and thus requisitioning scarce newspaper column space that might have been used on the current sordid reality. At the same time, Kosovo status negotiations that had been postponed by the death of Rugova began. With the negative press already snowballing, Serbia entered the process in a decidedly bad light; as usual, issues pertinent to Kosovo and what has resulted there after seven years of disastrous UN occupation were ignored. It was clear that Serbia was, through a complicit media, being tried in the court of moral opinion over matters that had nothing to do with the real events on the ground. This trend would be dramatically increased in the days to come with two high-profile deaths. The Death of Milosevic Milan Babic, one-time president of the short-lived Republic of Serbian Krajina in Croatia, was the first to go. He died in his cell at the Hague on March 5, allegedly having committed suicide. However, the fact that he had been described beforehand as being in good spirits and eager to provide further testimony against Serb war crimes suspects made the death somewhat suspicious. A source with close ties to the Hague told me that there was "much more" to the story than suicide, and that it would "dangerous for one's health to dig too deep into the affair." Six days later, the Hague's highest-value prisoner, Slobodan Milosevic, also died suddenly in his jail cell. The effect of his passing was like a seismic shift that could have toppled the Hague's entire flimsy edifice – thus necessitating a massive media campaign to uphold the sanctity of this illegal and now potentially homicidal institution. Despite the testimony of many people close to Milosevic, who all stated that he was in good spirits and determined to see his trial through to the end, top prosecutor Carla Del Ponte and the tribunal's many media backers started floating rumors that Milosevic had been playing with his medication in order to get the treatment in Russia he had been demanding. Del Ponte even went so far as to speculate that Milosevic committed suicide. Of course, no one took too seriously Milosevic's own alarm at finding he had been given strange drugs for months, and no one cared that he was demonstrably very ill. His death at that precise moment was without a doubt the greatest gift the Tribunal could have received; for it meant that they would never have to issue an official verdict – one that probably would have fallen far, far short of their vicious expectations. It also meant that Milosevic never got the opportunity to call certain high-ranking Western officials to the witness stand. This would have been a lose-lose proposition for the Hague: an appearance by Western officials involved with the Bosnia and Kosovo wars would have potentially disastrous and embarrassing consequences for the prosecution as well as the Official Truth of the wars; but were they to refuse to appear, the trial would be robbed of any shred of legitimacy it might have had. Milosevic's death was thus played up to the hilt in the media to cement his public image as a Class-A dictator, regardless of the facts. A flood of editorials damning the "Butcher of the Balkans" appeared in newspapers worldwide, digging up disproved statistics and interventionist blowhards such as Richard Holbrooke to make the case that Milosevic – and Milosevic alone – was responsible for everything that has gone wrong in the Balkans over the past 15 years. And so in the space of a week, with one untimely death, the entire history of the modern Balkans was carved in stone, never to be challenged again. Finally, the fact that over 100,000 people turned out to mourn his death in Serbia, at a protest rally where crowds cheered for the Radical and Socialist parties, was just icing on the cake; it was the final damning proof that the Serbs were little more than a nation of bloodthirsty supporters of war criminals. Needless to say, the media obsession with Milosevic succeeded in keeping developments in Kosovo out of the headlines yet again at a very crucial moment. And so the question of whether the UN had acted wisely in promoting Ceku, a suspected Albanian war criminal, to the top job there would not be brought up. Ongoing attacks against the Serbian minority in Kosovo, or the plight of their refugees were also to be ignored, as they had always been, in one way or another. The important trend of Albanian rioters targeting the UN administration violently in Kosovo was also glossed over. In short, never was there a more useful and fortunate death for the West than that of Slobodan Milosevic. Of course, foul play cannot be proved – primarily because the powers-that-be were never interested in proving it, and because when Milosevic's supporters and the Russian government raised the issue they were dismissed in the media as biased propagandists. Yet considering the many benefits that his death has had for the Hague, the diplomats, the media, and their cumulative legacy, as well as the opportunities it provided for covering up the UN's failure in Kosovo and paving the way for it to become an independent, ethnically clean Albanian country, one has to admit that the motive was there. These suspicions were not allayed by an eyebrow-raising recent comment from ICG President Gareth Evans, a former Australian foreign minister whose ambitions of succeeding then-UN Secretary General Boutros-Boutros Ghali led his countrymen to lampoon him by the name Gareth-Gareth Evans. In another oration/fundraising speech for a lobby group whose moral credit is very heavily deposited in the bank of Collective Serbian Guilt, Evans came out of nowhere with a completely unprovoked disclaimer regarding Milosevic: "[N]o one can be blamed for his death in custody before it [the trial] was complete." Well that settles that! April: On to Montenegro, and More Looming Catastrophe on the Horizon In April, media attention turned to the referendum for independence in Montenegro that will come on May 21. Yet having been contextualized in advance by the lobbyists, nobody asked the right questions about the referendum and its aftermath. The reasons why the tiny republic of 690,000 would benefit from independence were not really given; the media chose to echo the views of smuggler-in-chief Milo Djukanovic, the only Balkan leader still empowered after 15 years, an autocratic part-time cigarette salesman who really just seeks to expand his personal fiefdom through independence. The president in Podgorica has continually made the disingenuous argument that Serbia is a heavy weight around the neck of Montenegrins yearning to breath free, and that the Serbian legacy of alleged war crimes and Belgrade's failure to catch war criminals is holding the republic back from its "European" course. Ironically, however, if Mladic and Karadzic are anywhere to be found, the mountains of Montenegro are a much more likely place to look than the Serbian plain. Indeed, in a BBC report of Feb. 21 the allegation is repeated again: "[M]ost recent intelligence reports put Mr. Karadzic living in the remote mountains of northwest Montenegro, not far from his home town of Niksic." So why is all the international pressure to catch him levied against Belgrade, and not Podgorica? Why, if Mr. Djukanovic wants to enjoy all the rights and privileges of a sovereign state, is he not obliged to take international responsibilities? It is simply because by not catching the fugitives, he can continue to blame Serbia for holding Montenegro back. Indeed, now that EU accession talks have been stalled by the failure to catch the fugitives, the cynical truth becomes obvious: "[S]lowing down EU partnership talks would be strengthening the cause of Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic." Harsh Realities The Balkans is full of ethnic stereotypes. Sometimes they are supported by events. I recall a few years ago when a farm owner put an ad in the paper asking for 500 grape-pickers. He only got one call – and the caller had dialed the wrong number. It would be harsh to say that Montenegrins are naturally lazy, but it is a fact that there are little economic opportunities for the country save tourism, which is not going to be enough. Montenegro depends on Serbia for trade and benefits from Serbian health care and (until recently) military power. This last is the major reason why an independent Montenegro will not be long for this life. After having led the push for Montenegrin independence, the EU, in another schizophrenic and hapless act of opaque interventionism, has demanded a voter turnout rate – 50 percent – for the May referendum to be valid, a number even higher than is required in EU states. A 55 percent majority of this number will be required for the EU to give its bureaucratic blessings to the winner. With voters divided fairly evenly, it is still possible the referendum will fail. And so Djukanovic is courting, at his own peril, the ethnic vote of Bosniak Muslims and Albanians, who comprise roughly 20 percent of the population. 19th Century Scenarios for a 21st Century World There are several scenarios arising from this morass. Should the referendum succeed, the Muslim bloc will seek to cash in its political capital by bringing up all sorts of old bellyaches and demands. The Montenegrin side will not be eager to appease them. Muted charges of racism and ethnic oppression will become a roar, with the eager assistance of the Albanian-American lobby, and a boiling point will be reached for separatists already keen to break away. Without the help of the Serbian army, it will be Macedonian redux – another war against a helpless state begun by an Albanian paramilitary force commanded from Kosovo and the diaspora. And Montenegro will be partitioned. Should the referendum be defeated outright, simmering resentment will bubble along until it is either held again or independence is gained through violence. At which point the aforementioned Muslim bloc will make the same claims, war will follow, and Montenegro will be partitioned. Finally, should the referendum be narrowly defeated, some interventionists conjecture, the EU will call for a "union of independent states" as some sort of consolation. Although the article doesn't say so, such an unwieldy grouping would elevate the Sanjak Muslim area straddling the Serb-Montenegrin border to autonomous status and could even include Kosovo, or at least the Serbian part in the north. It could even include all of Kosovo as well. Otherwise, to avoid a war Kosovo will be given to Albania. If this seems just so 19th century, that is because it is. The secessionist genie has been deliberately let out of the bottle by Western powers in order to accelerate their economic colonization of the region. So much money has been made, so many intellectually fraudulent careers have been enabled, and so much potential economic competition to the West has been eliminated by the breakup of Yugoslavia. Of course, the West can't be blamed for all of the causes that led up to this disintegration, but they also could have stopped it, had they really been interested to do so. But that would have been self-defeating. It is obvious to the point of boredom: failed intervention has the Balkans headed ineluctably for further war, which is good news for German bankers and the American arms industry, among others. As a friend of mine with long experience of American administrations and secret services recently quipped, "This [Western political interference] has nothing to do with the people in Serbia, Kosovo, Albania. This has everything to do with the industry that supplies to wars." The only hope the world has when its masters are so bent on evil is an independent and fearless media, willing to get to the heart of the matter and to bring the hypocrisies, lies, and hidden motives of the powers-that-be to light. Sadly, this is still not the case today. The last few months in the Balkans have shown, yet again, that an obsequious media devoted to its powerful political patrons in the West has continued to disgrace itself by asking all the wrong questions, setting out from all the wrong precedents, thus arriving at all the wrong conclusions. In its wake it has left a sound and fury signifying nothing – nothing positive, anyway. |
