LETTER TO EDITOR: Kosovo quagmire

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/nov/15/kosovo-quagmire/
 
LETTER TO EDITOR: Kosovo quagmire

Saturday, November 15, 2008

ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PHOTO Kosovo's president, Fatmir Sejdiu (left), joined by Kosovo's head of parliament Jakup Krasniqi, is shown signing the newly independent nation's constitution in June.
Samuel Hoskinson laments that the Serbian province of Kosovo, which poses as an independent country despite the refusal of most nations to recognize it, is a poverty-stricken backwater plagued by self-serving contenders for power. ("Kosovo again in peril?" Commentary, Nov. 2). He then tries to blame Kosovo's woes on one politician who is not in power (Veton Surroi) while exonerating "former freedom fighter Hashim Thaci," who heads the illegal separatist administration.
Despite billions of dollars in aid, Kosovo's only viable "industry" remains organized crime. Mr. Hoskinson's "freedom fighters" -- commanders of the former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) -- are also kingpins in the Albanian mafia's drug, slave and weapons rackets. The KLA destroyed more than 150 Serbian Orthodox Christian churches and eradicated two-thirds of Kosovo's Serbs. Mr. Thaci's administration is stonewalling Serbian investigators and Human Rights Watch trying to account for some 300 Serbs who, according to former Hague Tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, were kidnapped by the KLA and dissected alive for their marketable organs.
Mr. Hoskinson's vendetta against Mr. Surroi -- who never has been accused of the kind of atrocities committed by KLA "freedom fighters" -- raises another question. Mr. Hoskinson identifies himself as former president of the Alliance for New Kosovo, a pro-independence group. He omits that the Alliance for New Kosovo was a creature of Mr. Hoskinson's registered client, controversial businessman Behxhet Pacolli. Is Mr. Hoskinson still working for Mr. Pacolli? If not, whose interests is he advancing? By contrast, I am more than pleased to disclose that I work for Kosovo's Serbs under their spiritual leader, Bishop Artemije of Ras and Prizren.
However dismal the situation is in Kosovo under the misrule of Mr. Hoskinson's "freedom fighters," what should concern us as Americans is our government's misguided support for them, first under President Clinton, then under President Bush, and no doubt to continue under President-elect Barack Obama. This policy has brought no benefit to the United States but has earned us an unprecedented degree of world isolation as measured by last month's vote in the U.N. General Assembly to refer the Kosovo question to the International Court of Justice. The United States was supported by a mighty coalition of just five countries: Albania, the Marshall Islands, Palau, Nauru and Micronesia.
JAMES GEORGE
JATRAS
Director
American Council for Kosovo
Washington

Russia, Serbia and the Kosovo Problem

Russia, Serbia and the Kosovo Problem
17:27     |     28/ 10/ 2008
   

(John Laughland for RIA Novosti) - Every evening at 5pm a group of demonstrators meets on Republic Square in central Belgrade to protest "against the occupation of Kosovo" by the European Union.

 For these people, the apparently harmless transfer of power from one international administration (the United Nations, which has governed Kosovo since 1999) to another (the EU) - a transfer which is supposed to take place formally in December, but which is already being implemented as EU personnel are even now being deployed to the province - is in fact a matter of principle. The EU treats Kosovo as an independent state, whereas the UN administration is based on a Security Council Resolution which proclaims it to be part of Serbia.

The nightly demonstrations are notable for two things. First, the turnout is very low - perhaps twenty or thirty people in a city of nearly two million. The Western-backed destruction of Yugoslavia has been going on for sixteen long years now (since 1992) and most Serbs are now so exhausted and demoralised by it that they are incapable of offering any further resistance. Second, the demonstrators carry Russian flags and sing the Russian national anthem. Vladimir Putin is said to be the most popular politician in Serbia, and Russia generally is regarded now (by anti-EU Serbs at least) as their only remaining hope.

However understandable, this hope is shortly to be dashed. Ever since the violent overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic on 5 October 2000, Serbia has had an uninterrupted line of pro-Western governments and presidents. This pro-Western orientation has brought Serbia only further sales of the country's economic assets to foreigners, and the further stripping of territory from Belgrade's control. In 2006, Montenegro proclaimed its independence from democratic Serbia, only to be followed by Kosovo this February. Both acts were encouraged by the West. Serbia is therefore damned if she opposes the West (as she did from 1990 to 2000 under Milosevic) and damned if she supports it (as she has done did since 2000 under Prime Ministers Vojislav Kostunica and Zoran Djindjic and the current president, Boris Tadic). No wonder some Serbs look to Russia.

Moreover, in order for the Western (EU and US) policy on Kosovo to take effect, the existing United Nations Administration in Kosovo must be dissolved. This can happen only with a vote in the Security Council and therefore only with Moscow's consent. Moscow has said that it will not agree to anything which Belgrade opposes, and Belgrade does indeed currently oppose both the independence of Kosovo and the transfer of authority to the EU.

However, people who are in the know in Belgrade - including those who have exercised the highest offices of state - are certain that the present government's public opposition to the transfer of power from the United Nations Mission in Kosovo to EULEX (the acronym given to the EU administration), and indeed to the independence of Kosovo itself, is merely cosmetic. The present Foreign Minister of Serbia, Vuk Jeremić, said recently in a private meeting with the US State Department officials responsible for Kosovo that his government's only problem was how to find a way of sugaring the bitter bill of Kosovo independence in such a way that Serbian public opinion could be convinced to swallow it.

The Belgrade government has indeed inched towards an acceptance of EULEX and therefore of the independence of Kosovo. It has said that it will accept EULEX on three conditions - if it is approved by the United Nations Security Council; if it is neutral towards the status of Kosovo; and if it does not implement the Ahtisaari plan for (internationally supervised) Kosovo independence. Although it is difficult to see how these last two conditions can ever be met (the EU mission is inseparable from the change in status, otherwise there would be no need to install it in place of the current UN administration), it is obvious from his acts that President Boris Tadic is prepared to pay any price for Serbia's entry ticket to the EU. Serbia's appeal to the International Court of Justice for an advisory ruling on Kosovo (whose independence has been recognised by less than one third of the member states of the UN), an appeal which was successfully accepted at the beginning of this month, is likely to lead to an ambiguous judgement which is any case will be non-binding and which will probably be overtaken by events in the meantime.

Some sort of fudge - of the sort which the European Union is already a world expert at concocting-will therefore be produced between now and December to square the circle between Belgrade's declared opposition to Kosovo independence and its de facto acceptance of it. Such a fudge is certainly very dangerous for the province itself, since government and policing cannot function without very clear lines of authority - as an UNMIK policeman said to me last week, "How can you arrest someone if you do not have the clear right to do so?"  Crime and corruption, already rampant in Kosovo, will only prosper even more so. But if Moscow currently does hold the key to Kosovo in virtue of its veto in the Security Council, and if Russia therefore represents a beacon of hope for patriotic Serbs, there is little she can do with this power if Belgrade itself is determined to throw it away.

John Laughland is a British historian and political scientist, Director of Studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20081028/117995277.html

Kosovo: Lost to Serbia and to the West

Kosovo: Lost to Serbia and to the West

From the desk of John Laughland on Mon, 2008-10-27 21:12
laughland-controversies.gif
A few days spent in Belgrade feels like an age. Although I have been here more times than I can remember (albeit not for five years or so) the country remains almost insuperably foreign. There is something radically different about the Balkans, with respect to the rest of Europe, and there are few more quintessentially Balkan states than Serbia.
 
Where else, for instance, would you meet a man with the wonderful name of Slobodan Despot who smiles and hands you a copy of “The Road to Revolution” by Thomas Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber? Mr. Despot is a publisher previously worked for a conservative pro-Serb publishing house in Paris and the other titles in his own list now include a consolidated calendar of Orthodox and Western saints, and the memoirs of a woman who opened a sex shop in Paris in the early 1970s.
 
And where else would you find yourself on a sofa sipping wine and talking to a civilised young professor of medicine who was himself ethnically cleansed from his home town of Urosevac in Kosovo in June 1999, as NATO guards transported Albanian guerrillas in their Hummers across the province to commit their vicious and systematic arson, murder and rape? Where else – especially in Europe – would you meet a monk whose 25 parishioners (in one of the main towns of Kosovo) have to run the gauntlet every Sunday in order to avoid getting killed on the way to Mass?
 
All these things happened to me – and much more – in the space of a very short stay last week. Ever since the United Nations took over Kosovo in 1999, indeed, the province’s endemic corruption has exploded, as I was able to confirm by talking to two American policemen who work for the international administration there. “Every level of society is corrupt,” one of them said. “Every single aspect of the society is criminal.” This is largely because the Kosovo Liberation Army, the US-backed Contra-style guerrilla force which runs the province and which controls the government, the army and the police, is also notorious for its role as a powerful organisation running drugs, guns and sex slaves to Western Europe.
 
If organised crime is a way of life in Kosovo, so is the systematic destruction of churches: more than 150 churches and monasteries have been blown up on the UN’s watch in the last nine years, as Albanians seek not only to expel all Serbs from the province but also to eradicate any physical record of their ever having been their in the first place. Kosovo, one should never forget, is the original heartland of medieval Serbia, the Serbs having migrated North to Belgrade and the Pannonian plane beyond as a result of the Turkish invasions. Images of an angry mob pulling down crosses and stamping on them, such as were filmed on 17 March 2004, have not been seen since the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; just under a century later they are now, once again, part of Europe’s present.
 
In spite of these atrocities, which include the pogrom conducted against Serbs in March 2004 – a killing spree which went largely unreported in the West and which is now completely forgotten about – the European Union and the United States have pushed Kosovo to proclaim its own independence unilaterally, even though international law clearly forbids such a step. In 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected Quebec’s right unilaterally to secede from Canada, on the grounds that the inhabitants of Quebec had full civil and political rights within Canada. Since Kosovo has been governed by the UN since 1999, their proclamation of independence now can only mean that they did not have full political and civil rights under that administration – the very body thrust onto Serbia by the “international community” in the name of human rights and democracy.
 
In the remaining months of this year, the Western powers (the EU and the US) will try to finesse a way of transferring power from the UN administration to one run by the European Union. The main obstacle comes from Russia which has a veto in the UN Security Council, the only body which can relinquish authority over the province. For the time being, the Belgrade government says that it opposes EULEX because EULEX was created as a vehicle for the independence of Kosovo, and Russia has said it will support Serbia. In private, however, Serb ministers admit that they will do anything to get into the EU, including accepting the amputation of 15% of their state territory.
 
However the circle is squared, the likely fudge of authority between the EU and the UN will cause what little government there is in Kosovo to break down completely. As one of the American policemen said to me, “How can you arrest someone if the lines of authority are unclear?” This unclarity will of course again further benefit the gangsters, pimps and drug-runners who currently constitute the government of Kosovo, and who have been the West’s allies since 1998.
 
Kosovo is therefore now decisively lost to the Serbs, and therefore to Christian civilisation. A war waged in the name of human rights in 1999 has led to nothing less than genocide – the wholesale eradication both of the Serb population of Kosovo since then (the few remaining Serbs live in ghettos) and of the historical memory of that population.  In 1999, to justify the attack on Yugoslavia, the US State Department published a document called “Erasing History” which documented the alleged genocide against the Albanians. Now we know that the bulk of that document was war propaganda, its claims unproven despite years spent trying to prove them at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Yet “erasing history” is precisely what the Albanians have done in Kosovo since NATO occupied the province, and on its watch. They have also erased democracy, human rights, and all the basic tenets of common human decency. The history of the last ten years in Kosovo is nothing but tragedy and hypocrisy blended into one – a true death of the West and all it stands for.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3614

Kosovo blunder goes to court

GLOBE EDITORIAL

Kosovo blunder goes to court

October 12, 2008

MUCH OF THE resentment President Bush brought upon America can be traced to his contempt for international institutions and the legitimacy they may confer. International institutions have reason to feel the same way about Bush's decisions.
On Wednesday, the United Nations General Assembly agreed to Serbia's request to have the International Court of Justice in the Hague determine whether Kosovo's secession from Serbia is legal. Seventy-seven countries voted in favor of the request. The United States was among only six countries that voted against it.
But then, Bush decided to invade and occupy Iraq without authorization from the United Nations Security Council. He also dismissed the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and rejected the International Criminal Court.
When the administration asked for and received UN authorization for its prolonged occupation of Iraq, it seemed Bush had belatedly learned his lesson about the benefits of international legitimacy. But then came Bush's rash decision last February to recognize the independence of Kosovo from Serbia despite a failure to obtain UN Security Council authorization. The Kremlin pointed to that dubious precedent when it recognized independence for South Ossetia and Abkhazia after the August war with Georgia.
There is a case to be made for Kosovo's independence. But there is no less of a case for the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia - as well as Tibet, and Taiwan, and Kurdistan, and the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka. The alternative to deciding all these cases by violence is international legitimacy. We hope this is a lesson the next US president will not have to learn all over again. 
 
© Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
 
 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2008/10/12/kosovo_blunder_goes_to_court/

Kosovo and the Crisis of Ignoring International Law and Global Opinions

Letters from Tokyo

Kosovo and the Crisis of Ignoring International Law and Global Opinions
By Lee Jay Walker

Tokyo Correspondent

Kosovars celebrate their independence in Pristina and show off their new flag. Photo Courtesy of Getty Images

Kosovo obtained part independence when America and many European nations gave the go ahead for the creation of this new nation. However, it is clear that things are not plain sailing because many other nations did not support this elitist adventure, therefore, the wider international community was ignored. So today we have a situation where some nations support this new state (47 nations currently support this nation), however, the majority of nations in Africa, Asia, and South America, have not given their consent. Also, the Russian Federation, Spain, and some other European nations, refuse to accept this American led adventure. So what does the future hold for Kosovo and international law?

Firstly, the current status of limbo is a shock to America and many European nations because they believed that the majority of other nations would follow suit, however, at the moment this isn`t happening. Therefore, the influence of the Russian Federation, China, India, and other nations who are against the independence of Kosovo, is much deeper than America imagined. Also, many nations are aghast by the elitism of this new venture and of course many nations worry that the same may happen to them.

Another negative side effect is the fact that Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia have clear justifications to claim the same rights, with regards to the American model of bypassing international law and the United Nations. So if America can violate international law so easily, then America should expect other nations to follow suit. Therefore, many other would be nations in other parts of the world also claim to have the same natural rights. Of course the United States, the United Kingdom, and others, are claiming that Kosovo is unique, but this is not based on reality because you have too many conflicts all over the world. So a "can of worms" is the real cause and effect of this naive policy.

Nations which are against this American led venture have stated clearly that they are very unhappy with the blatant attitude of elitist Western nations. The Foreign Minister of Argentina, Jorge Taiana, stated "if we were to recognise Kosovo, which has declared its independence unilaterally, without an agreement with Serbia, we would set a dangerous precedent that would seriously threaten our chances of a political settlement in the case of the Falkland Islands."

The newly elected President of Cyprus, Dimitris Christofias, was even more outspoken because he stated "The one thing that Kosovo and Cyprus have in common, as far as the situation in these regions is concerned, is that in both cases, the basic principles of international law and legality, as well as UN decisions, are constantly being violated." A similar comment was made by Miguel Angel Moratinos, the Spanish Foreign Minister, because he made it clear that "the Government of Spain will not recognise the unilateral act proclaimed by the assembly of Kosovo [...] We will not recognise because we consider [...] this does not respect international law."

Therefore, this issue is very important and complex and it is not about denying either the majority Kosovo Albanians independence or supporting minorities like the Serbians, Roma, and other minorities in Kosovo. It is about a deeper issue and this applies to international law. So if America and her supporters can justify Kosovo then what about creating new independent nations for the Abkhazians and South Ossetians in Georgia, Palestinians, Karen in Myanmar, Tamils in Sri Lanka, West Papuans in Indonesia, Basques in Spain, Balochis in Pakistan, and the list can go on and on; so do these ethnic groups deserve independence?

This is the problem because you can not seriously claim that Kosovo is special or unique. After all, you have countless conflicts in the world and many ethnic groups face terrible persecution. Therefore, many other ethnic groups are aghast by events and Yasser Abed Rabbo, a Palestinian politician, stated "Kosovo is not better than us. We deserve independence even before Kosovo, and we ask for the backing of the United States and the European Union for our independence. If things are not going in the direction of continuous and serious negotiations, then we should take the step and announce our independence unilaterally."

Also, the international community, on a whole, is saying that this colonial attitude is really not warrented and of course major institutions, like the United Nations, have been violated and the same applies to international law. So we have a genuine dilemma over this issue and again if the United Nations and international law can be violated, then why have either? Sadly, nations like the United States believe that they are above the international community because they also bypassed international law when they attacked Iraq and bombed the former Yugoslavia.

You also have problems within Kosovo itself and major divisions still exist. This especially applies to northern Kosovo because the Serbian community is relatively sizeable throughout this region. Therefore, you still have major flashpoints and Serbians, the Roma, and other minorities, feel isolated or abandoned. Also, the international community must still guard and protect Serbians, the Roma, and other minorities, throughout the whole of Kosovo. This in itself is evidence that the institutions of Kosovo are weak.

Therefore, the longer this situation remains in limbo the worse it will get because we have already seen convulsions in Georgia based on the Kosovo model. Whereby nations can now clearly state that America, the United Kingdom, France, and others, violated international law, therefore, other nations can follow suit and support their own self interests. So what does the future hold for Kosovo, countless other conflicts throughout the world, the United Nations, and international law?

Lee Jay Walker Dip BA MA
http://journals.aol.com/leejaywalker/uk/

http://theseoultimes.com/ST/?url=/ST/db/read.php?idx=7364&PHPSESSID=427d3e996468f1e01b149e5641fa17e3

Arbitrariness in Power

Arbitrariness in Power

2008/10/03

BELGRADE/PRISTINA/BERLIN

(Own report) - Because of a Serbian UN initiative, Berlin's Kosovo policy is threatened with serious defeat. Belgrade is requesting that the UN General Assembly petition the International Court of Justice in The Hague (ICJ) for an advisory opinion on Kosovo's secession from Serbia. The Assembly is expected to vote on Wednesday. Germany was unsuccessful in mobilizing a majority against Serbia's initiative. For the first time, UN member states have announced the intention of reversing their recognition of Kosovo, if the ICJ should confirm its secession was illegal. While EU functionaries declare that the International Court's decision would be of no consequence to them, Berlin is continuing its aid in consolidating Kosovo's illegal sovereignty. State officials, who, with Western help, had been brought to power in Pristina, are confronted with new accusations. According to reports, new evidence has surfaced pertaining to criminal trade in human organs in Kosovo. Kosovo's "prime Minister" is suspected to be implicated in this crime. One of Pristina's designated "ambassadors" to a European country is also accused of serious crimes.
Serbia has placed a demand that the UN General Assembly petition the International Court of Justice in The Hague (ICJ) for an advisory opinion concerning the secession of its southern province. For the time being, Belgrade is therefore renouncing legal action against Pristina and those states that have recognized its secession. The UN General Assembly is expected to vote on Serbia's request on Wednesday. A simple majority will suffice. Already back in July, the Serbian Foreign Minister, Vuk Jeremić, pointed out that "never before" [1] has "the General Assembly prevented a member state from seeking an ICJ advisory opinion." But governments of several Western states are attempting just that.
Refusal of Loyalty
German and US American attempts to prevent the ICJ advisory opinion are doomed to failure. Western pressure, which already last summer were the topics of interviews in the media,[2] could not prevent the Serbian government from introducing its resolution in New York. And all attempts to tone down the formulation of the resolution have failed. Washington and Berlin plan to either vote "No" or abstain. But in a test vote, approximately two thirds of the 192 UN member states are refusing loyalty, endorsing an ICJ advisory opinion on Kosovo's secession.[3] The Serbian President reported a few days ago that Western states continue their efforts to obstruct the vote by trying to induce more states to recognize Kosovo's independence. In spite of massive pressure from large EU member countries and the United States, only 47 countries - not even a fourth of the UN member states - have recognized Kosovo as a sovereign state.
Latest Tricks
Berlin is therefore faced with a serious defeat. Since the legal questions are clear - Kosovo's secession was obviously in violation of the UN Charter - the West is uncertain about how to prevent an ICJ ruling in Serbia's favor. According to Christian Tomuschat, professor of law in Berlin, there would be possibilities when the concrete formulation of the demand is decided in the UN General Assembly's sub-commission, where controversial questions are often excluded. Then "the ICJ would not even have the possibility of formulating an opinion on the primary issue."[4] The sub-commission will be convened on Monday. If Serbia's formulations still pass, the only thing left would be massive pressure on the ICJ.
Creating Facts on the Ground
If this option is also unsuccessful, German experts are pleading for disregarding international jurisprudence. Neither the ICJ nor the UN can create facts on the ground, alleges the political advisor, Franz-Lothar Altmann. "A nation's independence can only be established through recognition by individual states."[5] The EU's special emissary to Kosovo subscribes to the demand that the arbitrariness of the mighty be lifted to the global principle of design in central questions of sovereignty. "Kosovo's independence is a fact and cannot be changed, even if Serbia's ICJ initiative should prove successful."[6] Until now the larger EU nations and the USA have been relatively isolated in this standpoint. Now nations that had already recognized Kosovo, are beginning to serve notice that in the case of a negative ICJ verdict, they would consider rescinding their recognition.[7]
Abetting
All of the dispute notwithstanding, the German government is creating facts on the ground and is pushing the establishment of an independent "Kosovo" nation. Alongside the political accompaniment, in mid-September Berlin had promised further support for the development of the infrastructure of Kosovo and earmarked a total of 40 mil. Euros from its development budget for the rest of the current year. For 2009, 60 mil. Euros more have been reserved. These measures are not limited to construction aid, but extend to the consolidation of Pristina's quasi-state structures. For example, 600,000 passports and 400,000 driver's licenses that the Interior Ministry in Pristina has begun to issue have been produced by the Giesecke and Devrient Corp. in Munich. "By issuing passports, we are establishing the legal basis for a sovereign Kosovo," declared Kosovo's "Interior Minister" - providing an indication that the criminal accusation of abetting an illegal act of secession can be raised not only against the government, but even against employees of private firms.[8]
Trade in Human Organs
Serious accusations are recurringly being raised against Kosovo's new ruler, placed and maintained in power by Berlin. Extensive press research has reinforced the suspicion that the former Kosovo terror militia, UCK, killed Serbian prisoners and sold their organs.[9] Months ago this was reported by Carla del Ponte, former head prosecutor of the International War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, citing numerous witnesses. Pristina's "Prime Minister" and former head of the UCK, Hashim Thaci, is said to be implicated in this affair.[10] There is also controversy over the "ambassadors" Pristina wants to dispatch to several European nations and to the USA. Kosovo's designated "ambassador" to Switzerland is being accused of having collected money in Switzerland to finance the UCK's war on Serbia and thereby run into conflict with the Swiss authorities. It is alleged that even blackmail was involved.[11] The Swiss Foreign Ministry denies however that these accusations have any meaningful bearings on existent reservations concerning this "ambassador." The accreditation nevertheless is still pending.
Not Isolated Cases
The accusations against members of Pristina's elite are not isolated cases. As just recently reported in an appraisal of Kosovo's human rights situation by the OSCE, it is not only a question of grave shortcomings of application in conditions of rule of law.[12] Particularly the struggle against organized criminality and the slave trade [13] are making limited progress. On the other hand, the new political elite is interfering to a growing degree in the workings of the justice, the police and even the media. The new power in Pristina is creating its realm of the arbitrary.
Please read also Imperial Consummation, A Sort of Resurrection for Yugoslavia, Self Determination, Out of Control, Political Friendships, "Thank you Germany!" and Pure Chaos.
[1], [2] "Wir sind fest entschlossen, Mitglied der EU zu werden"; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 25.07.2008
[3] Westliche Kosovo-Politik kommt auf Prüfstand; Handelsblatt 28.09.2008
[4], [5] Serbien wirbt vor der UNO für Gerichtsvotum zu Kosovo; Deutsche Welle Fokus Ost-Südost 25.09.2008
[6] "Kosovo-Teilung eine Möglichkeit"; Wiener Zeitung 30.09.2008
[7] Belgrad: Einige Staaten könnten Anerkennung des Kosovo revidieren; Der Standard 02.10.2008
[8] Giesecke und Devrient liefert Reisepässe und Führerscheine für Kosovo; www.behoerden-spiegel.de
[9] Family Denies Organ Harvesting Allegations; Spiegel Online 22.09.2008
[10] see also Organhandel
[11] Umstrittener Kosovo-Diplomat; Basler Zeitung 25.09.2008
[12] OSCE Mission in Kosovo: Background Report. Human Rights, Ethnic Relations and Democracy in Kosovo, September 2008
[13] see also Unter deutscher Aufsicht and Enorme Gewalt

http://www.german-foreign-policy.com/en/fulltext/56189?PHPSESSID=1h90nhrn0mc712u3dn5g21g534

JATRAS: Kosovo prelude to Georgia?

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/sep/07/kosovo-prelude-to-georgia/

JATRAS: Kosovo prelude to Georgia?
James George Katras
Sunday, September 7, 2008

COMMENTARY:

In anticipation of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's recognition of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, President Bush said "Georgia's territorial integrity and borders must command the same respect as every other nation's."
Critics of Russia's action include Sens. Barack Obama, Joseph Biden and Joseph Lieberman; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; former United Nations Ambassador Richard Holbrooke; and many others in the bipartisan establishment.
Among the specific criticisms are Russia's violation of the sovereign territory of Georgia, a fledgling democracy and a member of the United Nations; a disproportionate response to Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili's attempt to settle South Ossetia's status by force, including Russian military operations well outside of South Ossetia; and Moscow's tardiness in withdrawing its forces under a deal brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Evidently irony is not much appreciated in Washington. It seems critics have forgotten President Bush's recognition of the independence of Kosovo, a province of democratic, U.N. member Serbia. President Bush's reference to "every other nation" whose "territorial integrity and borders must command the same respect" apparently has at least this one exception. If he can violate the United Nations Charter and the Helsinki Final Act, which guarantee sovereign borders, what right does he have to accuse others of doing the same?
If Moscow stepped over the line in its crushing military response to Mr. Saakashvili's offensive, what do we call 78 straight days of NATO's bombing throughout Serbia, destroying most of that country's civilian infrastructure? If Russia is to be faulted for imperfect implementation of the Sarkozy agreement, what can be said about Washington's violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, which ended the 1999 Kosovo war and reaffirms Serbian sovereignty in the province?
The standard reasons cited for making Serbia an exception to the rule we demand in Georgia is that NATO intervened to stop genocide of Kosovo's Albanians and that they will never again accept being part of Serbia. But after the war actual casualties among all ethnic groups - whether by military action, atrocities committed by both Serbs and Albanians, and the toll of NATO's bombing - proved to be far fewer than those cited in justification for the war. Compared to South Ossetia's much smaller population, mutual accusations of genocide against South Ossetians and Georgians, respectively, are proportionally larger than those at issue in Kosovo. And are South Ossetians and Abkhazians less adamant that they will not submit to Tbilisi's rule than Kosovo's Albanians are with respect to Belgrade?
It also should be kept in mind that Kosovo's legal status is very different from that of entities in the former Soviet Union. Under the Yugoslav constitution - the same authority that justified the secession of Croatia, Slovenia, etc. - Kosovo, part of Serbia since before Yugoslavia was formed, has no legal claim to independence. In contrast, the 1990 Soviet law on secession - which was the legal basis of the independence of Union Republics such as Georgia - required that autonomous entities within their borders be allowed, via referenda, to remain in the Soviet Union, and by extension its successor, Russia.
Thus, while Kosovo's status as part of Serbia is unquestionable, South Ossetia and Abkhazia can make a good case they were part of Soviet Georgia but never the current independent state of Georgia. (The same would apply to Transdniestria with respect to Moldova and Nagorno-Karabakh with respect to Azerbaijan. When will they follow suit?)
By trashing the accepted international "rules of the road" on Kosovo, Washington has created what amounts to the rules of the jungle. Each power acts as it will, either to suppress restive minorities or to compromise other countries' borders: The United States tries to force Serbia to accept Kosovo's independence and pressures other countries (without much success) to recognize it; Georgia tries to subdue the Ossetians and the Abkhazians and fails; Russia moves to establish the Ossetians' and Abkhazians' independence and now also will try to secure wider recognition. In turn, the U.S.-supported separatist Kosovo Albanian administration itself threatens a miniature version of Mr. Saakashvili's South Ossetia offensive to subdue Serbian enclaves, where the remaining one-third of the province's prewar community finds refuge. Where does the logic of "big fish eat little fish" end?
In Kosovo, Washington sowed the wind, and now Georgia has reaped the whirlwind. Only a return to the negotiating table to address comprehensively Kosovo, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and similar trouble spots elsewhere can prevent this malignant precedent from spinning further out of control with incalculable consequences for global peace and security. With each step down this road it will be harder to put the genie of might-makes-right back in the bottle.

James George Jatras is a lawyer and director of the American Council for Kosovo in Washington, an activity of Squire Sanders Public Advocacy, LLC, and Global Strategic Communications Group, which are registered agents for the Serbian National Council of Kosovo and Metohija. Mr. Jatras formerly served as a foreign policy analyst of the U.S. Senate Republican leadership.

Revenge of the Balkans

Revenge of the Balkans

by Gordon N. Bardos

08.28.2008

Strategic shortsightedness—defined as mistaking problems and issues of secondary or tertiary importance for those of vital importance, and being unable to foresee the predictable consequences of specific actions—is becoming a chronic malaise in Washington. So characteristic of U.S. policy in the Balkans in the 1990s and the more recent Iraq tragedy, it is now again apparent in U.S. actions with regard to Kosovo, and their spillover effects in the Caucasus. American policy makers had repeatedly told us that Kosovo was supposed to be a “unique” case, but apparently Vladimir Putin didn’t get the memo. The ghosts of our Balkan problems, it seems, continue to haunt us.
The roots of the current crisis in U.S.-Russian relations spread far and wide, and some go back to the Balkans in the 1990s, especially the 1999 U.S. and NATO bombing of Serbia. Although little remarked upon in the West, NATO’s first war marked a watershed in Russian perceptions of the United States and Europe, and, even more importantly, in Russia’s post-Soviet evolution itself. Yegor Gaidar, one of the architects of Russia’s post-Soviet economic reforms, told U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott at the time “if only you knew what a disaster this war is for those of us in Russia who want for our country what you want.” The late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said much the same, noting that Russian views of the West,
started changing with the cruel NATO bombings of Serbia. It’s fair to say that all layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings. . . . So, the perception of the West as mostly a “knight of democracy” has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals.
The consequences of this shift in Russian attitudes and perceptions, both for Russia itself and for the United States, were profound. Although it is impossible to say exactly what impact the Kosovo crisis had on Vladimir Putin’s rise to power—less than two months after the end of the Kosovo war he was appointed prime minister, and within seven months he had become president of Russia—the section of Russian elite opinion that he embodied, and how it felt about NATO’s actions in the Balkans, is clear enough.
Thus, at an historical juncture at which the primary purpose of U.S. foreign policy should have been fostering an international environment encouraging Russia’s democratic transition, American policymakers chose instead to exploit Moscow’s temporary weaknesses and engage in dubious military adventures (e.g., the bombing of Serbia) and strategic initiatives (e.g., NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders, often in violation of previous promises made to Moscow) of questionable real value to U.S. national interests. Thomas Friedman put the matter into perspective when he recently asked “Wasn’t consolidating a democratic Russia more important than bringing the Czech Navy into NATO?”
After the 2003 U.S. attack on Iraq—importantly, without UN Security Council approval—Moscow’s concerns about U.S. unilateralism, forcefully articulated by Putin at his February 2007 address before the Munich Conference on Security Policy—were inflamed by the U.S. push to grant Kosovo independence. At the G8 summit in Germany in June 2007, then–Russian President Putin was already signaling that what he called “universal principles” had to be applied to the frozen conflicts in Kosovo and the Caucasus, and Putin would later warn that U.S. and EU support for Kosovo’s secession from Serbia was “illegal and immoral.” In the UN Security Council, Russia’s permanent representative Vitaly Churkin was trying to impress upon his colleagues the gravity with which Moscow viewed the Kosovo situation, saying that the Kosovo issue could represent the most important question the Security Council dealt with in this decade, and going to the extraordinary length of organizing a Security Council fact-finding mission to the region. The warnings from Moscow over Kosovo, however, were brushed aside by Brussels and Washington, and in both places it was widely assumed that Russia would roll over when presented with a fait accompli.
The result has been yet another questionable foreign policy initiative for the Bush administration. Six months after declaring independence, only forty-six countries have recognized Kosovo. The EU itself cannot agree on a position, with six of the twenty-seven members refusing to recognize the breakaway Serbian province. Most of the remaining countries that have recognized Kosovo include the likes of San Marino, Liechtenstein, the Marshall Islands and Burkina Faso. None of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) have recognized, nor has Indonesia (the largest Muslim country in the world), nor any of the Arab states. All told, three-fourths of the international community is following Moscow’s lead on the Kosovo issue rather than Washington’s.
In the Caucasus, meanwhile, Kosovo’s declaration of independence on February 17 led to an immediate increase in tensions. Call the Russians what you will, but you can’t say that they are not fast learners. In the current crisis, Moscow copied Washington’s Kosovo playbook in full, accusing Georgian forces of ethnic cleansing and war crimes, labeling Saakashvili a war criminal (just as Washington had done in 1999 with Slobodan Milosevic), and claiming that Georgian actions had disqualified it from ruling over South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the future. Much like NATO officials had done in 1999, Russian officials also claimed that their intervention in Georgia was based on “humanitarian” motives. In fact, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov specifically compared Russian military actions in Georgia to NATO’s actions in Serbia. According to Lavrov,
Our military acted efficiently and professionally. It was an able ground operation that quickly achieved its very clear and legitimate objectives. It was very different, for example, from the U.S./NATO operation against Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, when an air bombardment campaign ran out of military targets and degenerated into attacks on bridges, TV towers, passenger trains and other civilian sites, even hitting an embassy. In this instance, Russia used force in full conformity with international law, its right of self-defense, and its obligations under the agreements with regard to this particular conflict. Russia could not allow its peacekeepers to watch acts of genocide committed in front of their eyes, as happened in the Bosnian city of Srebrenica in 1995.
Lavrov is on strong ground here; both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have determined that many of NATO’s actions in 1999 constituted attacks against illegitimate civilian targets, if not outright war crimes.
The Russians also seem relatively unmoved by Western accusations that they are intent on “regime change” in Georgia; probably with good reason, because in the Balkans the United States and the United Kingdom have recently been involved in a bit of regime change themselves.
After Serbia’s May parliamentary elections, the American and British ambassadors in Belgrade played key roles in the formation of a coalition government that removed Vojislav Kostunica, the man who defeated Slobodan Milosevic at the polls, from the prime ministership. The parties in the coalition government these ambassadors helped bring into office—believe it or not—include Slobodan Milosevic’s former Socialist Party, and the party of the assassinated Serbian gangster-cum-warlord Zeljko Raznatovic-Arkan, whose paramilitaries were involved in numerous war crimes in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. Apart from Kostunica’s uncompromising stance on defending Serbia’s territorial integrity regarding the Kosovo issue, it is hard to see what the American and British ambassadors had against him. Perhaps they didn’t like Kostunica’s translation of the Federalist Papers. Or maybe they had some issues with his scholarly work on Rousseau and Tocqueville.
Predictably, Washington neocons are now invoking a new cold war against Russia. Russians themselves, meanwhile, are growing tired of the double standards they see Washington using against them. Former–Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, for example, summed up the feelings of many of his compatriots when he questioned the value of Russian participation in international institutions:
For some time now, Russians have been wondering: if our opinion counts for nothing in those institutions, do we really need them? Just to sit at the nicely set dinner table and listen to lectures? Indeed, Russia has long been told to simply accept the facts. Here’s the independence of Kosovo for you. Here’s the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, and the American decision to place missile defenses in neighboring countries. Here’s the unending expansion of NATO. All of these moves have been set against the backdrop of sweet talk about partnership. Why would anyone put up with such a charade?
Why indeed? You do not have to be Russian to see the weak foundations on which so much of official Washington’s criticisms of Russia are based. As David Remnick recently noted in the New Yorker,
Even ordinary Russians find it mightily trying to be lectured on questions of sovereignty and moral diplomacy by the West, particularly the United States, which, even before Iraq, had a long history of foreign intervention, overt and covert ¬politics by other means. After the exposure of the Bush Administration’s behavior prior to the invasion of Iraq and its unapologetic use of torture, why would any leader, much less Putin, respond to moral suasion from Washington? That is America’s tragedy, and the world’s.
Developing a serious policy for dealing with a more powerful and assertive Russia will of necessity be high on the agenda of the next presidential administration. In the 1990s, Washington policy makers may have been able to ignore Russia’s views, or to delude themselves into believing that Russia would never be a serious international player again. But those days are over. This makes it even more urgent for U.S. policy makers to better understand the strategic importance of preventing a renewed downturn in U.S.-Russian relations. Ideological rants, moral outrage and attempts to paint the world in black and white make good TV, but they are dangerous when applied to complex problems that, upon careful and thoughtful analysis, reveal themselves in shades of gray.
The late, great American diplomat and statesman (and lifelong Russia hand) W. Averell Harriman once said, “To base policy on ignorance and illusion is very dangerous. Policy should be based on knowledge and understanding.” Harriman would probably be mortified today at the thought that so much of US policy appears based not on ignorance and illusion, but perhaps on something far worse—contempt, be it for post-Soviet Russia, for “old Europe,” or for the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions. For some in Washington, perhaps, even contempt for our own democratic principles and traditions.

Gordon N. Bardos is assistant director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.


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The West must stop bullying Russia

The West must stop bullying Russia
JAN OBERG

29.08.2008 @ 19:03 CET

EUOBSERVER / COMMENT - I was part of a TFF fact-finding mission to Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhasia in 1993. That the 7 August war would happen was predictable, albeit not the exact time.
One can see this easily if one begins to look at the wider time frame, going back some 20 years.
Let's have another look at just how successful the West was with the dissolution of the terrible Soviet Union, overseen by the visionary leadership of a man we should still all be deeply grateful to, namely Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.
Georgia currently has the highest average growth rate of military spending in the world. (Photo: KFOR, Helmut Vogl)

In 1989, Gorbachev withdraws from Afghanistan and set Sakharov free. There is no reaction in the West. His entire philosophy of change deprives the West of its beloved enemy.
Gorbachev then suggests an entirely new security structure, a 'European House' with the OSCE and the UN as centerpieces. The triumphalist West ignores it.
Gorbachev asks for economic support in the West for his perestroika and glasnost gambits, to create what would have been an open social democratic-inspired society. The G7 decides to ignores it and gambles on Yeltsin, a populist with no similar vision or charisma.
The West, understandably, wants to unite Germany, but this represents a great threat for historical reasons in the eyes of the Russians. Russia is however promised that NATO will not expand.
The Warsaw Pact is dissolved, but despite promises, NATO remains and expands rapidly. Moreover, it maintains its right to pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons.
The Clinton administration begins a huge US military expansion programme in 1992, building bases, positioning advisers and infiltrating ministries with 'advisors' and people from mercenary firms in Eastern Europe, including Yugoslavia, and all around Russia. Russia's protests about its 'near abroad' are ignored.
Serbs are cast in the role of the perennial and sole bad guys during the Yugoslav wars of the 90s - as the Russians of Yugoslavia - expansionist and dangerous vis-à-vis smaller allegedly freedom-loving democratic actors such as Croatia's Franjo Tudjman, Bosnia's Alija Izetbegovic, and Kosovo's Agim Ceku.
NATO's bombing of Serbia and Kosovo violates all international law, takes place without UN Security Council mandate and leaves a thoroughly destroyed country behind. Russian arguments for a negotiated solution are ignored.
And now we are seeing the imposition of Ballistic Missile Defence, BMD, which is not a defensive system at all, but instead allows US territory to be protected against retaliation if the US launches a nuclear attack on another country. Russia thinks it is a bad idea - as bad as a similar system set up by the Russians across the border in Mexico would appear to the Americans.
As a show of respect for democracy, the deal has been made with Poland despite a full 90 percent of the people against BMD being situated on their territory. Russian worries about the system are repeatedly ignored. The system is supposed to protect us against rogue actors such as Tehran, but when Moscow offered to site the BMD on its territory closer to Iran, the US declined the offer, confirming Russia's fears that BMD is in fact aimed at her instead.
Then this year, the US and most EU member states decide that Kosovo shall be an independent state. All substantial Russian arguments for a negotiated compromise and predictions of that secession stimulating secession elsewhere are ignored.
Russia¬ is increasingly being seen as the great new threat from whom NATO will protect us, despite the country having military expenditure that is roughly five percent of that of NATO, seven percent of that of the United States, and 13 percent of that of the EU.
US strategy and interests
Where is Georgia in all this?
As early as 1993, while visiting US offices in Tblisi, I was told that this Caucasian state was a centerpiece of US strategy and interests in the region. Georgian officials meanwhile told me that they were just waiting for Georgia to be selected to host the huge oil and gas pipelines, and then it would become a regional power to be reckoned with.
The US has since conducted a series of comprehensive train-and-equip programmes organised by the Pentagon, US Special Forces and US Marines, with Georgia becoming a member of NATO's Partnership for Peace member in 2004. One might also mention in passing that often neglected in any discussion of Georgian defence, is Israel's considerable military support for Georgia and the fact that her defence minister, Davit Kezerashvili, is a former Israeli with close links to the country's defence industry.
Despite Georgia's deep poverty, the country's military spending is substantial. In late June, the Georgian government increased the defence ministry's budget of 513 million laris (US$315 million) by 442 million laris ($US260 million), according to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Georgia currently has the highest average growth rate of military spending in the world. Some independent experts are worried that the spending is not fully accounted for, while others say that it could undermine the peace processes with the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
The military budget of Georgia increased 50 times over the period from 2002 (US$18 million) to 2008 (US$900 million), reaching almost nine percent of Georgia's GDP.
Georgia, a very loyal partner in the US war on terror, is also the third largest occupying force in Iraq, present also in Afghanistan and has been to Kosovo. It would be naive to think that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had not obtained Washington's green light for his attack on South Ossetia.
Consideration of history
This region is as complex as the former Yugoslavia, with as much history of traumas, ethnic quarrels, minorities within minorities, economic and constitutional crises and corruption. The future is bleak for us all if wars similar to those in the Balkans in the 1990s were to break out in the Caucasus once more, dragging in Russia and Europe. Bleak¬ that is, unless somebody stops to think instead of merely reacting and justifying their own participation in this sorry game of militarism and power politics.
To diffuse this crisis, there needs first to be at least a little consideration of history. Next, some little empathy with non-US and non-EU actors. There must also be recognition that Western actions are not always innocent in their consequences. We must understand the utter counter-productivity of militarisation and its psycho-political effects.
Additionally, it would be helpful if Western mainstream media would stop re-cycling the Cold War stereotypes of an ever-aggressive Russia and disseminating, Pravda-style, only what Western militarist elites say.
The art of reading and asking good questions should re-enter international journalism and foreign policy reporting, freeing the profession from complicity in any future war in the region - a war that would certainly be much larger than what we have seen thus far.
Above all, we must remember that negotiations are far superior to threats and fear-mongering.
The Russians have now said: This far, but no longer. It would be wise of the West to listen to the warning. It is not in its own best interest to continue bullying and humiliating Russia.
Jan Oberg is Director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research in Lund, Sweden
http://euobserver.com/9/26656/?rk=1

Serbophobia Obscures the Facts

Serbophobia Obscures the Facts


"Bosnian Serbs were concerned with protecting the Serbs, not killing the Muslims or Croats", Phillip Corwin

Phillip Corwin: Serbophobia Prevents Reaching the Truth

Interview with Phillip Corwin by Cathrin Schütz, Junge Welt

American Phillip Corwin was the highest UN official in Bosnia from spring to summer of 1995, serving as Civil Affairs Coordinator and Delegate of the Special Representative for the UN Secretary General. Previously, from 1994 to the spring of 1995 he held the same office for the region of Eastern Slavonia in Croatia. Duke University Press published his memoirs: Dubious mandates - A Memoir of the UN in Bosnia, Summer 1995.
Q: Richard Holbrooke, Paddy Ashdown and many other Western representatives who were involved in the Yugoslav tragedy, unanimously assessed the arrest of Radovan Karadzic's as the capture of one of the most brutal war criminals of our time. What is your opinion?
PC: Holbrooke and Ashdown used the wars in former Yugoslavia to build their careers. Their phrases like "one of the most brutal" and "good Nazi" -- that's how Holbrooke characterized Dr. Karadzic just now in the Spiegel interview -- remind us of their terrible bias and the severe harm that they caused as so-called diplomats. They foment the Serbophobia even now, making a fair process against Dr. Karadzic in The Hague impossible.

Q: What do you expect from the trial of the former president of Republika Srpska in Bosnia before the ad hoc tribunal in The Hague?
PC: In any criminal process the question of the intent is of central importance. Based on my personal contacts with Bosnian Serbs, including with Dr. Karadzic, I can only say that I am convinced the issue with Bosnian Serbs was to protect the Serbs, not to kill Muslims or Croats. Incidentally, the Gypsies allied with the Serbs -- they probably still remember all too well the treatment they were given during the Second World War by the "good Nazis" on the Croat and Muslim side. The Serbs were never threatened by the Gypsies and vice versa, the Serbs never undertook anything against the Gypsies. As always in the Hague, Dr. Karadzic can't expect a fair trial. He will be accused of participating in a 'conspiracy' and they will blame him for the deeds of soldiers in the field, whom he didn't know and to whom he never issued any orders.
Srebrenica Takeover: 700 Muslims Killed at Worst
Q: One of the main charges is Karadzic's alleged responsibility for the genocide of 8,000 Muslim males from Srebrenica. At the time Srebrenica was taken over by the Bosnian Serb Army in July 1995 you were the highest civilian official of the UN in Bosnia. What really happened?
PC: What happened on July 11 1995 in Srebrenica is part of a greater tragedy and cannot and must not be taken out of the context. Those who do are clearly doing it with intention to twist things to the detriment of one of the warring parties. What happened in Srebrenica was not a single massacre Serbs committed against the Muslims, but a series of bloody attacks and counterattacks during three years and escalating in 1995. The number of Muslims killed most probably was not higher than the number of the Serbs killed in the region during the previous years in the assaults of the Bosnian Muslim war commander Naser Oric. The number of missing Bosnian Muslims is also exaggerated. All this shows that the official reports are of purely political nature.
In May 1995, two months before the last battle for Srebrenica, the Croat army led the Operation Lightning in which 90 percent of the Serbs who lived in western Slavonia were expelled, i.e. they conducted the ethnic cleansing. A month after Srebrenica, 200,000 Serbs were expelled from their ancestral land in Krajina region [also in Croatia]. The international community remained silent in both cases! Srebrenica must be viewed in the context of events. If there really was a massacre -- and it seems realistic to speak about 700 victims -- then this is a war crime and the perpetrators must be held accountable. But the difference between the 700 and the commonly referred to 8,000 is not numerical -- it is political.
Recommended: Don't forget what happened in Yugoslavia, by John Pilger (NewStatesman.com)
http://byzantinesacredart.com/blog/2008/08/corwin-interview.html

Krajina, Not Kosovo

Krajina, Not Kosovo

Ossetia as botched Balkans replay

by Nebojsa Malic

Six days ago, as most of the world was watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Beijing, Georgian troops attacked the self-proclaimed Republic of South Ossetia. Russia quickly intervened, ousting Georgian forces from the region and attacking Georgian military bases. Despite the training and weapons supplied by the U.S. and Israel, the Georgian military quickly collapsed. President Mikheil Saakashvili, installed in power in 2003 by a CIA-sponsored "Rose Revolution," pleaded for help from his patrons, painting himself and his country as victims of "Russian aggression." Aside from empty words of encouragement and hypocritical condemnation of Russian "excessive force," the Empire had no help to give.
Over the past week, many commentators have compared Russia's intervention to protect Ossetia with NATO's 1999 attack on Serbia. The analogy does not apply, though. If there is a Balkans comparison to be made, a far better one would be with the Republic of Serbian Krajina, destroyed by Croatia in August of 1995.
Another August
There are many similarities between Ossetia and Krajina. Both are inhabited by populations distinct from the country they nominally belonged to – Ossetians and Serbs, respectively. Both were created in the aftermath of secessions; Croatia had seceded from Yugoslavia, Georgia from the Soviet Union. Both were a response to the government's attack on their people's rights: Serbs were written out of Croatia's constitution, while Ossetia was officially abolished by the regime in Tbilisi. Both came out ahead in the resulting conflicts with government troops, and both became de facto independent after armistices in 1992.
Here is where their fates diverged, however. Krajina's armistice was guaranteed by the UN and Serbia, but with the war breaking out in Bosnia, Serbia was blamed for "aggression" and sidelined by a UN blockade. When Croatian forces struck at Krajina, in August 1995, the government in Belgrade stood by and did nothing. The UN did not resist, either.
Backing both Croatia and Georgia was the American Empire. Back in 1995, it was still in its formative stages, neither ready nor willing to get directly involved in a Balkans shooting war and seeking to use Croatians as proxies in the Bosnian War. The troops that attacked Krajina in 1995 were trained and equipped by the U.S. and provided with air cover and intelligence reports. Georgia received similar help after Saakashvili came to power in late 2003.
Among the few who made this connection is Russian analyst Boris Shmelyov. As quoted in the Belgrade daily Vecernje Novosti:
"Back then, the Croats took an incredibly brutal action and killed many civilians, but the West pretended they did not see it. Now, the Georgians have done the same…"
Noting that the same U.S. military instructors were training Croats, then Albanians, and now Georgians, Shmelyov pointed out there is a powerful structure of the retired officers in the U.S., who are involved in the training of armed forces in the countries supported by the American authorities.
Could it be that Saakashvili's orders to attack Ossetia were inspired by the August 1995 Croatian "Storm"? The parallels are uncanny. However, unlike Croatia's triumphant blitz, celebrated even today with a "Homeland Thanksgiving Day," Georgia's adventure in Ossetia backfired spectacularly. For, unlike Croatia in 1995, Saakashvili was not dealing with an intimidated and blockaded Serbia, but with an angry and powerful Russian Federation.
Enter the Russophobes
It took several days for politicians and the media in the West to work themselves up into proper self-righteous lather. Once they did, however, it became obvious that Russophobia was not a Cold War relic, but rather a fashionable creed in Washington's policymaking circles. One can understand the hysterical pronouncements coming from Georgian officials about how the fate of their country – or rather, their government – was an issue of "freedom" and "democracy." But it certainly did not take long for ex-diplomat Richard Holbrooke to compare Russia to Nazi Germany. Once again, every enemy is Hitler, and it's always Munich 1938 – except when it really is, of course.
Washington commentators displayed all the symptoms of what Richard Spencer at Takimag.com called "Putin Derangement Syndrome": a delusional belief that Vladimir Putin is "not simply a totalitarian dictator at home but a super-genius strategist in foreign affairs – if anything unusual happens in his part of the world, it's all part of one of his wicked schemes."
Granted, there was some dissent. The rabidly Russophobic Washington Post did run an article by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who condemned the Georgians for starting the war. In the Guardian, Mark Almond challenged the Cold War analogies. Charles King in the Christian Science Monitor argued the conflict wasn't entirely Russia's fault. But since when have facts stopped a good story? As Brendan O'Neill argues persuasively, both Georgians and Ossetians have been used as pawns by the West to fabricate yet another morality tale.
Familiar Stories
Despite the fact that Georgia was the clear aggressor, and that Russian intervention only followed after the razing of Ossetian capital Tskhinvali, many civilian deaths, a mass of refugees, and the killing of several Russian peacekeepers, the Western media have slowly spun the crisis as Russian "aggression." As Justin Raimondo put it:
"According to our 'free' media, the Georgians didn't invade the land of the Ossetians – they merely tried to 'retake' it, as a child would bloodlessly and even quite playfully retake a shiny red ball from a playmate. Those evil Russkies, on the other hand, invaded, plunged into, and escalated their attack on Georgia. At least, those are the words our 'reporters' are using."
That is another way in which the Caucasus war resembles the Balkans. In addition to loaded words, there are loaded images. Sharp eyes have already begun to question several photographs of Georgians mourning their dead, offering compelling evidence they were staged. There are no pictures of Ossetians mourning, of course, and only a few testimonies.
Speaking of pictures: for their "voices on Georgia" feature, the BBC somehow managed to get portrait pictures of two young Georgians, both making passionate emotional appeals. Representing the other side were an Ossetian professor and a Russian architect, both over 40. No pictures.
On Tuesday, there was even a flashback of Bosnia: several journalists were injured when a "series of sudden explosions" rocked the city of Gori, birthplace of Josef Stalin and the closest city to the Ossetian front. Once again, "it was not clear who was responsible" even though the closest Russian forces were 12 kilometers away and the fire came from "mortars firing from 1-2 km away."
Scapegoating Saakashvili?
On Aug. 12, Russian President Medvedev ordered a halt to military operations, as a peace plan proposed by French President Sarkozy was negotiated. Moscow publicly stated it had no plans to depose Saakashvili, and angrily rejected U.S. charges of plotting "regime change." However, Saakashvili's political future looks very precarious at this point.
Analysts interviewed by Reuters seem to agree that Saakashvili committed a "strategic blunder" and that Georgia is likely to lose Ossetia and Abkhazia now. The London Telegraph calls him "the man who lost it all," while the Independent painted him as a "beleaguered gambler."
The New York Times blamed "mixed messages" from Washington; supposedly, Washington urged Saakashvili privately not to attack, while publicly supporting him in full. But is that so?
At first glance, it is hard to see how Georgia's fiasco could benefit the Empire. Its strongest military and political client in the Caucasus has been neutered. The war almost endangered the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, the one source of Caspian oil under American control. Russia has asserted itself, and now looms like a shadow over the West…
Once again, keep in mind the way politics works. Saakashvili was a good client, but he failed. Now a liability, he can be written off, allowing the Empire to engage in self-righteous posturing. The very same people who invaded Iraq now thunder about "Russian aggression" and call Moscow's actions "unacceptable" with a straight face. The Empire may have suffered a defeat, but as we learned in the Balkans, it's never about what really happens – it's about managing perceptions. So a setback in the Caucasus is being spun as a proof that the West is righteous, good, and democratic, that Russia is evil and aggressive – and oh, yes, that the Kosovo war was just and right. After all, didn't Russians validate it with their actions? (No.)
Either way, the Imperial establishment has now latched on to the notion of Russian belligerence as yet another excuse for their project of global hegemony, benevolent or otherwise.
Lesson Not Learned
On the second day of the conflict, before the media received their marching orders, the New York Times carried a story about how the West misread Russia. It quoted George Friedman of analytical think-tank Stratfor:
"We've placed ourselves in a position that globally we don't have the wherewithal to do anything. … One would think under those circumstances, we'd shut up."
When told of the quote, the NYT story concludes, one senior administration official, laughed. "Well, maybe we're learning to shut up now."
It seems the lesson didn't take.
http://antiwar.com/malic/?articleid=13294

Outside View: Kosovo spark, Ossetia fire

Outside View: Kosovo spark, Ossetia fire

OBRAD KESIC

Published: August 13, 2008

It is obvious that the current conflict in Georgia has been greatly influenced by the United States' and the European Union's decision to initiate, support and recognize Kosovo's independence. Over the last few days this connection has been made in newspapers from Spain to China. Prominent European statesmen such as Lech Walesa and Jiri Dienstbier also have linked the current violence in the Caucasus to the "irresponsible" decision to recognize Serbia's breakaway province.
Even the major protagonists in the current crisis have embraced this connection. The South Ossetians and Abkhazians have cited Kosovo's independence as an argument for their own separatist ambitions; the Russians have referred to Kosovo to slash at the credibility and legitimacy of EU and American criticisms. Georgian leaders who had warned about the dangerous precedent of Kosovo's independence and had refused to recognize it are now desperately attempting to find differences between the two situations in order to deny any possible legitimacy for the case for independence of its own separatist regions.
There is now a striking similarity between the current Georgian crisis and the Kosovo issue. In 1999, arguing that a humanitarian intervention was needed to protect innocent civilians from a repressive and violent state, NATO bombed Serbia and effectively separated Kosovo from the rest of the country. Now it is Russia's turn at humanitarian intervention. The Albanians in Kosovo claimed a right to self-determination and their own state, arguing that their rights would never fully be guaranteed in Serbia. This fundamental claim is now being made by Ossetians and Abkhazians as to why they need to be independent from Georgia.
Kosovo's independence came about in large part through an arrogant and reckless attitude in Washington (primarily in the Department of State and Congress), as well as in some EU capitals, that the positions of Serbia and Russia could simply be ignored. The U.N. Security Council and international law could be bypassed simply by arguing that the Kosovo problem was "unique" and easily quarantined from other similar ethnically motivated disputes over territory. There was a mistaken belief that if American and EU diplomats, officials and leaders repeated the official mantra that "Kosovo is unique" and that "Kosovo is not a precedent" that this would suffice to contain any possible repercussions from a policy that was hastily endorsed as "the only possible" option. American and some European diplomats grew fond of saying that Serbia and Russia should accept "reality" and the "facts on the ground" in Kosovo.
Now it is Washington and Brussels who must accept the reality of their own policy blunder in Kosovo, if they are to have any chance at containing and ending the violence in Georgia. This ought to begin by acknowledging that Kosovo's case for independence is no more or less unique than that of South Ossetia, Abkhazia or numerous others. It also should be realized that wishful thinking is no substitute for policy that is based on principles anchored in international law. If the United States and the European Union are not prepared to militarily intervene in the Georgian conflict, it leaves three options open.
The first is to refuse to assume any responsibility for the current mess and to continue the motions of diplomatic activity (shuttle diplomacy, rhetorical expressions of outrage and support for Georgia and self-serving media interviews) and hope that the Russians end their military intervention as soon as possible and that afterward there will be something left of a viable Georgian state.
The second option is to accept the results of their own policies in the Balkans by acknowledging directly or indirectly the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. This could be justified in the same way as in the case of Kosovo: namely that by attempting to take back South Ossetia by military action (and the humanitarian tragedy this caused), Georgia has lost the right to govern these two regions where the overwhelming majority of the citizens will never again accept being governed by Tbilisi.
The third option is to admit the EU and U.S. policy on Kosovo was a mistake and attempt to manage the Georgian crisis in light of this. That would mean freezing Kosovo's independence by returning complete authority over the province to the United Nations and by restarting negotiations between Serbs and Kosovar Albanians under U.N. sponsorship. For Georgia this would signify the only hope that Russia would lose its moral ground for further military escalation and that it could return to the status quo prior to its own military actions on Aug. 6. This would also allow for the United Nations to regain credibility and legitimacy for new peace talks on South Ossetia and Abkhazia and for any possible peacekeeping role.
If American and EU officials continue to ignore the new international reality that they have helped create by backing Kosovo's independence, they will have chosen a road that will lead to new separatist conflicts well beyond the Balkans and the Caucasus.
With their policies they have smashed an international order that had for the most part balanced for hundreds of years the demands for self-determination with the need to maintain the territorial integrity and sovereignty of international borders. One way or another, they must now pay for it.
--
(Obrad Kesic is a senior partner with TSM Global Consultants LLC.)
--
(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)
© 2008 United Press International. All Rights Reserved.
This material may not be reproduced, redistributed, or manipulated in any form.
http://www.metimes.com/Security/2008/08/13/outside_view_kosovo_spark_ossetia_fire/f646/

Kosovo redux

Kosovo redux

George Jonas, National Post Published: Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Dimitar Dilkoff, AFP, Getty Images

On Tuesday, the European Union's Javier Solana called upon Russia to do what the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) didn't do nine years ago: Respect another country's territorial integrity. Instead of replying: "We'll respect Georgia's territorial integrity as much as the Western powers respected Serbia's territorial integrity in 1999," the Russians responded politely. According to a news agency report, President Dmitry Medvedev "in a telephone conversation confirmed to Mr. Solana he has given the order to stop military operations."
This, if true, is good news for approximately 70,000 South Ossetians who live in the region that sits like the hump of a dromedary on the northern spine of Georgia, even if it can't do much for the thousand or two (reports vary) who have already lost their lives. Unfortunately, the news may not be true. "Despite the Russian President's claims earlier this morning that military operations against Georgia have been suspended, at this moment, Russian fighter jets are bombarding two Georgian villages outside South Ossetia," reported a Georgian government communique at noon.
What the governments of Russia and Georgia have in common is that one cannot believe a thing they say. In fairness, they resemble most governments in this, including the EU's, whose rotating President, Nicolas Sarkozy, has torn himself away from his busy schedule as France's President and Carla Bruni's husband to lend a hand to the peace process in Moscow if he can, and sample some caviar if he can't.
France's current relations with Russia are friendly. France opposes Georgia and Ukraine joining the EU at the present time, for which Mr. Sarkozy has been patted on the back at various diplomatic receptions by Czar Vladimir, a. k. a. Prime Minister Putin, himself. Pleasant as this is, it doesn't guarantee much except a continuing supply of vodka and Caspian fish roe. But then, harsh word don't guarantee anything either. They may even sound faintly distasteful, as U. S. President George W. Bush's televised remark did from the White House: "Russia has invaded a sovereign neighbouring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century."
One wishes. The words lose much of their ring coming from a President who has just given despotic China the seal of good housekeeping by his benign presence at the Olympics, and whose own country has bombed and invaded sovereign countries, not only potential threats like Iraq or Afghanistan, but countries that couldn't threaten America or its allies by any stretch of the imagination -- such, for instance, as Serbia.
We're seeing a replay of Kosovo, except in a more dangerous setting. The role the late Slobodan Milosevic played nine years ago is assumed today by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, while Vladimir Putin is putting on the hat of British prime minister Tony Blair and U. S. President Bill Clinton.
Look at the parallels. The world community recognizes South Ossetia as being part of Georgia, just as it recognized Kosovo as being part of Serbia. The Ossetian majority in South Ossetia wants to secede from Georgia to become independent, or join North Ossetia (in other words, Russia) just as a majority in Kosovo wanted the break away from Serbia, as it eventually did, to become independent or join Muslim Albania. So far, the conflicts seem identical.
There's a difference between Milosevic and Saakashvili as human beings. The leader of Georgia is a democrat and a staunch ally of America, while the former Yugoslav/Serb leader was a communist-turned-chauvinist, a thug and no friend of the West. This is true and a sufficient reason to choose sides in a conflict, but not for describing identical conduct by incongruent words.
Will Saakashvili end up before an international tribunal as an accused war criminal for resisting the disintegration of his country by sending troops into rebellious South Ossetia? I doubt it. Should he? No, not if you ask me -- I'm just not sure why, if Milosevic did.
Is sending troops into South Ossetia to prevent its secession from Georgia, which is what Saakashvili did, different from sending troops into Kosovo to prevent its secession from Serbia, which is what Milosevic tried to do? Why? And how does bombing Georgia to get rid of Saakashvili's troops in South Ossetia, as Putin has been doing, differ from bombing Serbia, as NATO did between March and June in 1999, to get rid ofw Milosevic's troops in Kosovo?
To prevent the ethnic cleansings of Albanians in Kosovo, NATO presided over the ethnic cleansing of the Serbs. Is Putin to be condemned for preventing Georgia from defending its territorial integrity when Clinton and Blair escape censure for preventing Serbia's defence of its territorial integrity? Again, why? They're either both war crimes or neither is.
When Hitler dismembered Czechoslovakia in 1938, an act subsequently treated as a war crime at the Nuremberg Trials, in addition to his own ambitions, he was responding to the desire of the ethnic German inhabitants of the Sudetenland to unite their region with the German Reich. It may have been a war crime all right, but it was also an attempt to give effect to the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination. Putin seems ready to pull a Sudetenland in Georgia. I'm afraid NATO may have empowered him by pulling one in 1999 in Kosovo.
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists
/story.html?id=5a55717d-2bc9-415a-afd7-147b3e9b71b4

Superpower swoop

Superpower swoop

Misha Glenny

Published 14 August 2008

What Russia and America are really doing in Georgia and who set the trap? Vladimir Putin and his thuggish FSB pals or Dick Cheney and his equally unflappable neocon friends?
Georgia's decision to seize large parts of Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, on the evening of 7 August was a disastrous political miscalculation, even in an era that is increasingly defined by spectacularly poor judgement.
Within three days of the assault, Russian forces had responded by in effect neutralising Georgia's military capacity, which President Mikhail Saakashvili's government in Tbilisi had spent several years and considerable sums of money building up.
Clearly, Russia has been goading and provoking the Georgian government for several years into making the big mistake. The parastates of Abkhazia and, above all, South Ossetia, have been under the control of a toxic coalition of criminals and both former and serving FSB officers. Russian soldiers have been acting as their protectors under the guise of a peacekeeping mission, preventing Georgia's attempts to seek a negotiated reintegration of the two areas. The Georgian crisis has benefited the standing of hardliners in Moscow, still aggrieved at Vladimir Putin's decision to place the moderate, business-friendly Dmitry Medvedev in the Kremlin.
But under the influence of an energetic neo-con lobby in Washington, and with considerable support from Israeli weapons manufacturers and military trainers, Saakashvili and the hawks around him came to believe the farcical proposition that Georgia's armed forces could take on the military might of their northern neighbour in a conventional fight and win.
The Georgian minister for reintegration of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Temur Yakobash vili, revealed the depth of the illusion the day after the conflict broke out when he thanked Israel for its assistance in training Georgian troops. "Israel should be proud of its military, which trained Georgian soldiers," Yakobashvili said, with reference to Defensive Shield, the private company run by Gal Hirsch, a former general in the Israel Defence Forces.
Still unaware of what was really happening on the battlefield, Yakobashvili reported that a small group of Georgian soldiers had been able to wipe out an entire Russian military division, thanks to the Israeli training. "We killed 60 Russian soldiers yesterday alone," he said. "The Russians have lost more than 50 tanks, and we have shot down 11 of their planes. They have sustained enormous damage in terms of manpower."
Warned off
The Russians, of course, knew all about Defensive Shield and the tens of millions of dollars worth of Israeli military equipment that Georgia had been purchasing. Just over a week before the conflict erupted, Putin put in a call to the Israeli president, Shimon Peres. His message, according to a western intelligence source, was simple: "Pull out your trainers and weapons or we will escalate our co-operation with Syria and Iran." Peres does not suffer the same illusions as Georgian ministers and the Israeli set-up left Tbilisi within two days.
The KGB has also been tracking Georgia's clandestine arms procurement in Ukraine (where most weapons dealers work for Russian intelligence anyhow). The Russian army was also fully briefed about the joint US-Georgian manoeuvres, which took place in Georgia last month. Russia was not taking a military risk when responding to the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali - Moscow knew the precise contours of its enemy's capability. David's victory over Goliath was sensational because of its rarity - in the real world Goliath always comes out on top.
So the Russians set a trap and, prodded by Dick Cheney's people, Georgia walked right into it.
The consequences of this egregious error begin in Georgia itself. Not only is it now defenceless, it can kiss goodbye to any restoration of sovereignty over both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Even though President Sarkozy of France received tentative agreement from both Moscow and Tbilisi for the establishment of international talks to settle the status of the two areas, they are unlikely to rejoin Georgia any time soon. The loss of Abkhazia, with its considerable economic potential, is a huge blow.
The EU and the US will argue that there is no parallel to be drawn between Kosovo and the Georgian breakaway regions. But that is not how much of the world, including China, South Africa and Indonesia, see it. And it is not how Russia sees it. The first chickens of Kosovo's independence are coming home to roost.
Saakashvili is now very vulnerable. The Russian invasion has cut communications between Tbilisi and the main port in Poti. BP has closed down the pipeline running from Baku to Ceyhan in Turkey through Tbilisi, and Georgian banks are freezing all loans and blocking capital flight.
After only a week, the Georgian economy is teetering. "It doesn't look very good for Georgia," Edward Parker from the credit rating agency Fitch told the Moscow Times. "Going to war with Russia is bad for your creditworthiness, to put it mildly." And if the wheels do come off the economy, it is hard to see how Saakashvili might salvage his political position - such a combination of economic distress and military defeat is usually fatal. If he goes, Georgia is likely to fracture politically into a variety of fiefdoms familiar from the 1990s and living standards will plummet.
There is one faint consolation. The west may be impotent when it comes to responding to the situation militarily but it can rally round by offering the country a financial and commercial lifeline.
The foreign implications of the error are graver still. Russia is placing a marker on Ukraine. Do not, Moscow says, even think of allowing Ukraine into Nato, otherwise what we have seen in Georgia will be child's play. So the west will have to think hard how to play Ukraine's application to join the military alliance.
This in turn has accentuated the divisions within the European Union between those countries, including Germany, which remain cautious about a course of open confrontation with Russia, and Britain, which has echoed calls from Washington demanding that Russia's application to join the World Trade Organisation be reconsidered. Speaking from Tbilisi, one senior European diplomat told me that the split on this issue, which was openly on display at the Nato Bucharest summit in April, "is running deeper within the EU than was the case in the run-up to Iraq".
But the Georgian fiasco has implications for politics in the Middle East, the European Union and the United States.
For the Bush administration (or for its hawks at least), the Georgian mistake presents an opportunity - let us recast Russia as a threat to global stability and a potential enemy. Predictably, the toughest response to the Russian invasion came from Cheney. The outbreak of the crisis coincided with President Bush horseplaying with beach volleyball players in Beijing and the vice-president was in operational control at the time.
Cheney immediately announced that the Russian invasion cannot go "unanswered", a choice of words that the American former ambassador to Nato Robert Hunter described as "inflammatory". Cheney has been spoiling for a fight with the Russians for a couple of years, and he and his allies have seized upon Georgia's and Ukraine's stated aim to join Nato as a way of riling Moscow.
This plan came unstuck at the Bucharest summit, when some European countries, led by Germany, blocked the Nato road map for the two former Soviet republics. But the final statement did concede that the two countries' aspirations would eventually be met at some unspecified time in the future.
As a democratic country, Georgia has every right to apply for Nato membership, even though its inability to assert its sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia presents a problem to some existing Nato members. But the neocons in Washington have been pushing Georgian and Ukrainian membership as a critical goal for the maintenance of the western alliance. By cranking up the dispute with Russia over Nato, Cheney is shifting the political debate in the US away from the state of the economy and towards the issue of national security.
Global dangers
If the presidential election is fought on the former issue, Barack Obama is a shoo-in. But if the central issue is national security and who would be best at dealing with a major crisis like Georgia, then his Republican opponent, John McCain, has to be favourite. McCain's response to Georgia was almost as tough as Cheney's, explained in part by the fact that until May this year his chief foreign policy adviser was working as a lobbyist for Saakashvili.
This political dynamic is driving the west towards a rift with Russia that will polarise a number of other issues, including policy towards Iran. On this latter matter, Russia has played a relatively constructive and, perhaps more importantly, a moderating role. In the next three months, the issues of Ukraine and Iran will loom large in global politics and they may well have a decisive impact on the outcome of the US election. Who set the trap in Georgia? Vladimir Putin and his thuggish pals from the FSB, or Dick Cheney and his equally unflappable neocon friends?
Whether Georgia was defeated by the Russians or lost by the neocons, a touch of diplomatic sobriety on both sides would be a welcome development, if the Georgian conflict is not to mark a very dangerous new phase in the development of global politics - serial confrontation between the west and Russia.

http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2008/08/georgia-russia-ukraine-cheney

Don't forget what happened in Yugoslavia

Don't forget what happened in Yugoslavia

John Pilger

Published 14 August 2008

Even as Blair the war leader was on a triumphant tour of "liberated" Kosovo, the KLA was ethnically cleansing more than 200,000 Serbs and Roma from the province

The secrets of the crushing of Yugoslavia are emerging, telling us more about how the modern world is policed. The former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague, Carla Del Ponte, this year published her memoir The Hunt: Me and War Criminals. Largely ignored in Britain, the book reveals unpalatable truths about the west's intervention in Kosovo, which has echoes in the Caucasus.

The tribunal was set up and bankrolled principally by the United States. Del Ponte's role was to investigate the crimes committed as Yugoslavia was dismembered in the 1990s. She insisted that this include Nato's 78-day bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999, which killed hundreds of people in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and tele vision studios, and destroyed economic infrastructure. "If I am not willing to [prosecute Nato personnel]," said Del Ponte, "I must give up my mission." It was a sham. Under pressure from Washington and London, an investigation into Nato war crimes was scrapped.

Readers will recall that the justification for the Nato bombing was that the Serbs were committing "genocide" in the secessionist province of Kosovo against ethnic Albanians. David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes, announced that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" may have been murdered. Tony Blair invoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War". The west's heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose murderous record was set aside. The British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.

With the Nato bombing over, international teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume the "holocaust". The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines". A year later, Del Ponte's tribunal announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide in Kosovo. The "holocaust" was a lie. The Nato attack had been fraudulent.

That was not all, says Del Ponte in her book: the KLA kidnapped hundreds of Serbs and transported them to Albania, where their kidneys and other body parts were removed; these were then sold for transplant in other countries. She also says there was sufficient evidence to prosecute the Kosovar Albanians for war crimes, but the investigation "was nipped in the bud" so that the tribunal's focus would be on "crimes committed by Serbia". She says the Hague judges were terrified of the Kosovar Albanians - the very people in whose name Nato had attacked Serbia.

Indeed, even as Blair the war leader was on a triumphant tour of "liberated" Kosovo, the KLA was ethnically cleansing more than 200,000 Serbs and Roma from the province. Last February the "international community", led by the US, recognised Kosovo, which has no formal economy and is run, in effect, by criminal gangs that traffic in drugs, contraband and women. But it has one valuable asset: the US military base Camp Bondsteel, described by the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner as "a smaller version of Guantanamo". Del Ponte, a Swiss diplomat, has been told by her own government to stop promoting her book.

Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent and multi-ethnic, if imperfect, federation that stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to dominate its "natural market" in the Yugoslav pro vinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991, a secret deal had been struck; Germany recognised Croatia, and Yugoslavia was doomed. In Washington, the US ensured that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans and the defunct Nato was reinvented as an enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo "peace" conference in France, the Serbs were told to accept occupation by Nato forces and a market economy, or be bombed into submission. It was the perfect precursor to the bloodbaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2008/08/pilger-kosovo-war-nato-serbs

Socialists and Democrats Will Rule Serbia

Socialists and Democrats Will Rule Serbia
by Srdja Trifkovic

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=664#comments

The political situation in Serbia is both unprecedented and unexpected. No analyst had predicted, three or four months ago, that the election on May 11 would result in such impressive gains by the Democratic Party (Demokratska stranka, DS)—which won over 38 percent of the vote—and in a relative defeat for the Radicals (Srpska radikalna stranka, SRS), which polled 29 percent. The most surprising feature of Serbia's post-election scene in the formation of the new governing coalition, based on an alliance between the "pro-Western, reformist" Democrats and the Socialists (Socijalisticka partija Srbije, SPS), the party of the late President Slobodan Milosevic.
For the past almost eight years since the fall of Milosevic, the Democrats and their allies have been demonizing the Socialist Party as an ugly relic of the past, the party that provided the political backbone to Milosevic and his regime, the obedient mechanism for all of his misguided and possibly criminal policies in the 1990s. One of the members of the present DS-led coalition, a separatist from Vojvodina by the name of Nenad Canak, has even advocated a formal ban on the Socialist Party.
But the Democrats have made a complete U-turn since May 11, having realized that they need the Socialists—who together with their smaller allies have 20 deputies—in order to stay in power. Over the past six weeks some extensive horse-trading followed that realization. Legitimizing the Socialists, proclaiming them to be a modern, decent, pro-European center-left party, fit for membership in the Socialist International, is merely one part of the package offered by the DS. Overall, the coalition agreement is the fruit of a massive exercise in political corruption, the like of which has never been seen in Serbia's long and turbulent history.
TYCOONS AND DIPLOMATS—The ability of the Democratic Party to come on top is nevertheless difficult to explain unless we consider the impact of an important pressure group helping the DS. This group's influence was not unknown, but it had never before pulled the strings so blatantly. It is the oligarchy. Now at last we know the full extent to which Belgrade's leading tycoons—their fortunes often harking back to the days of Milosevic—control the political scene from the shadows. About a dozen men who hold all key levers of financial and economic power in the country are overwhelmingly supportive of Tadic's Democrats. They are well aware that under the Yellow-Red Coalition (DS-SPS) their lucrative practices will continue unhindered. On the other hand, they were scared stiff of the Radicals, because the SRS had made the struggle against corruption a key element of its election campaign. In addition, the Radicals have amassed a lot of compromising information about some key oligarchs and their political associates in the DS camp, and they were determined to pursue prosecutions if they came to power. Knowing this, the tycoons had an additional motive to contribute lavishly to a clandestine slush fund that the DS used to woo Ivica Dacic, the Socialists leader, and his junior partners. Tadic's emissaries have done their work on the Socialist Party Main Board so thoroughly, that even this bulwark of Milosevic's reliable cadres from the 1990s overwhelmingly voted to support the coalition of their party with the DS.
While the exact magnitude of illicit transactions is unknown for the time being, Belgrade is a relatively small place in which nothing political remains unknown for long. In Serbia's politics, where there's smoke, there's fire. It is also noteworthy that the oligarchs enjoy the support of some Western diplomats in Belgrade—specifically the U.S. and British Ambassadors—in their self-appropriated role of king-makers, which provides a vivid example of the EU-NATO support for democracy in the Balkans.

COMMIES OLD AND NEW—That so many old Milosevic loyalists, who presumably have good reasons to despise and dislike Tadic's people, have changed their minds so swiftly, is a sad testimony to the condition of a shattered nation. The SPS U-turn does not concern the legacy of Milosevic alone. Having profiled themselves for years as a patriotic force determined to defend Serbia's rights in Kosovo come what may, the Socialists are about to join forces with the party obviously reconciled to giving up on Serbia's southern province after some decent interval, while pretending all along not to be doing so.
The readiness to treat vital national interests as disposable commodities indicates that the DS-SPS tandem is less surprising than it looks. The differences between the new partners may not be so deep after all. The leading lights of both parties have their ideological roots in the old, long-defunct League of Communists of Yugoslavia. A cynic would say that we are witnessing the creation of a coalition between Serbia's "reformist" communists—such as Dragoljub Micunovic—who have morphed into Tadic's Europhile social-democrats, and some seriously hard-line doctrinaires—such as Milutin Mrkonjic—who still remain faithful to Milosevic's legacy. It has been noted that we are now witnessing the coalition of two opposite factions from the Eight Session of the Communist party of Serbia in September 1987, which propelled Milosevic to power. The reformist, social-democratic wing was defeated at that time, while Milosevic's wing was triumphant. Over the past eight years the roles have been reversed. After an estrangement lasting two decades, the two factions are coming back together again.
Some Serbian patriots console themselves with the view that this coalition cannot last for long. They are wrong: this coalition is likely to stay in power longer than its predecessors because its partners will have no motive to rock the boat. The Socialists have obtained the best deal they could hope for, and they have an incentive to maintain the new status quo as long as possible. Their leader Ivica Dacic probably realizes that the party will disappear from the political scene at the next election: SPS rank-and-file will never forgive him the deal with Tadic, and this is the one shot at power, money and influence that he will ever have.
The Democrats cannot afford to risk another election, because they have reached the zenith of their likely electoral success, with just under forty percent of the vote and over a hundred deputies. They are loath to risk their current dominant position, especially if the country's financial and economic situation starts to unravel. Serbia is effectively bankrupt. It owes over $20 billion to foreign creditors, but in spite of heavy borrowing the neoliberals who run the showt have not succeeded in quick-starting the economy. Public spending in particular is not supported by the economy. After the final round of privatization, public spending may have to be financed either by inflationary means, or else by a new round of borrowing.
OPPOSITION IN CRISIS—On the other hand, the opposition to the DS-led government has to devise a long-term strategy which it does not have at the moment. In the short term it will be hard for the leading opposition parties, the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) and the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), to come up with a program of action that could undermine the emerging coalition. The DSS of the outgoing Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica is entering a period of decline. It is having difficulty in retaining loyalty of any significant segment of the electorate. Having failed on two important occasions (after the elections of December of 2004 and January of 2007) to put together stable coalitions, it is paying the price of joining forces with the DS last year. The ensuing tensions and almost schizoid bipolarity between Tadic's Europhiles and Kostunica's moderate patriots have harmed the latter disproportionately. The latter is now paying the price of not entering a coalition with the Radical Party when he could do so from the position of strength.
The Radicals also are entering a period of crisis. For many years they have been building up their support and developing their base, in the confident expectation that the ruling parties' failures over Kosovo will work to their advantage. This is not the case, however. The Democrats have succeeded in presenting Kosovo as fait accompli to the Serbian public, and they keep pointing at some elusive "European integrations" as a substitute. The Radicals, on the other hand, have failed to articulate a message that is both correct and inspiring. The Serbs are tired of economic deprivation, and many of them are willing to be duped with Euro-talk. They are still listening to the rosy stories of the open EU path, which with the defeat of the Lisbon Treaty at the Irish referendum is in fact closed. There will be no enlargement of the EU for a many years to come.
SERBIA AND THE E.U.—Serbia's Euro-fanatics, led by President Boris Tadic, will admit no such thing, however. In an interview on June 29, Tadic stated two priorities of the new government: to ratify the Stabilization and Association Agreement with the EU as soon as possible, and to "complete" cooperation with the Hague Tribunal. But Tadic's haste makes no sense. Even if the Serbian Assembly ratifies it, that gesture will be meaningless. The EU has already decided that the Agreement is suspended until General Mladic and Dr. Karadzic are arrested and delivered to the Hague Tribunal—and that will not happen. Had the Serbian government had the wherewithal to deliver them, it would have done so log time ago. Even if the Serbian Assembly ratifies the SAA, it will remain inoperative for as long as Brussels remains unconvinced that Serbia has fully complied with its imposed obligation to cooperate with The Hague Tribunal—and yet such compliance is impossible for as long as Karadzic and Mladic are at large; it's a classic Catch 22. In addition, even if the SAA were to become operative, it would not mean that Serbia is any closer to joining the EU. With the outcome of the Irish referendum the Lisbon Treaty is effectively dead. The Treaty, had it passed, would have provided the mechanism for further enlargement. Now the EU has to fall back on the Nice Treaty, signed in December 2000, that came into force in February 2003. It specifically limits the size of the EU to 28 members, which means that Croatia may be admitted next year, and that's the end: after that, for maybe 10 to 15 years the enlargement process will be over. It is interesting, however, that in Serbia nobody seems to be willing to spell this simple fact aloud. The enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn keeps saying that the door is still open to new members, but he is not telling the truth. He is paid to say so. In reality, in Brussels the EU bureaucrats are knowingly nodding to each other that it is over: neither Serbia, nor Macedonia, nor Bosnia-Herzegovina, let alone Turkey, will be members of the EU for at least two decades.
AS FOR KOSOVO…—Commenting on possible replacement of UNMIK by EULEX in Kosovo, Tadic repeated on June 29 that no transformation of UN's mission would be acceptable based on the initiative of the UN Secretary General alone, and that a Security Council decision would be needed. His statement was apparently calculated to prepare the ground for Serbia's gradual admission that Kosovo is a lost cause. Tadic pretends to resist such outcome, but in practice he is not taking any steps that would make the position of the secessionists more difficult. Belgrade's trade with Kosovo continues unabated, Kosovo Albanians' transit through the territory of Serbia is unhindered, Serbian electricity keeps Kosovo's derelict grid functioning.
Tadic seems to be implying that Serbia will accept the EU's EULEX mission, illegal as it is, provided it gets a fig leaf of legality from the UN Security Council. At the UN SC the only barrier is the opposition of Russia. Russia is not going to continue opposing Western policies, however, if Serbia herself is reconciled to the loss of the southern province. We are already witnessing gradual distancing of the Russian diplomacy from the Kosovo issue. It is only a matter of time till the new government in Belgrade signals to Moscow that Serbia is perfectly willing to see Russia removing its objections to the transformation of the UN mission into an EU mission. If and when that happens, it will mark de facto acceptance of Kosovo's independence by Belgrade.
The chief losers, in the short term, will be the remaining Serbs of Kosovo. Their lot is fatally dependent upon the posture of the government in Belgrade, politically, financially, and morally. Their ability to resist forced integration into an independent Kosovo is dependent on what happens in the Serbian capital. With the new coalition, they can no longer count on any serious support from Belgrade and most certainly they can no longer take it for granted. The previous coalition had an important ministry, the Ministry for Kosovo and Metohija, which was ably handled by the Democratic Party of Serbia and one of its leading lights, Prof. Slobodan Samardzic, as Minister. They were able to devise a whole series of projects that helped the Serbian community in Kosovo feel that it is not abandoned and that its members can count on support from Belgrade. With the new government this will no longer be the case.
It is tempting to conclude that Serbia will have an unpatriotic government for the next few years. This conclusion depends on one's definition of "patriotism," of course, and Tadic would claim that his striving to join "Europe" at any price—Kosovo implicitly included—is somehow "patriotic." Tadic's and his cohorts' understanding of Serbdom means turning Serbia into just another post-modern European nation that has given up on the legacy of its culture, tradition, and faith, just another nation that measures its successes solely in terms of dollars or euros per capita.