Kosovo's Dirty Secrets

Serbs and Dissident Albanians Kidnapped and Murdered

Kosovo's Dirty Secrets

By JEAN-ARNAULT DÉRENS

On October 27, 1999 Budimir Baljosevic, a teacher aged 50, and four friends tried to escape from the ghetto to which the Serbs of the Kosovan town of Orahovac/Rahovec had been confined. Kosovo had been placed under interim United Nations administration in June that year, and a Nato-led peacekeeping force, KFOR, had moved in.

A Roma resident of the town, Agron N, had offered to guide them to Rozaje in Montenegro, for a fee of $840 each. His credentials justified the high price: he worked with the TMK (Kosovo Protection Corps), an organization supervised by Nato; its mission was the social reintegration of former guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA); he had already completed four successful "exfiltrations" of Serbs from Orahovac; a bricklayer by trade, he was involved in the construction of a new TMK base in the neighbouring town of Djakovica/Gjakove – where the five Serbs were last seen.

Agron N explained: "I stopped to look for my brother-in-law, who was supposed to come with us, driving in convoy. I left the Serbs in the car. When I came out of my brother-in-law's house, someone shouted to me to hide and strangers took the Serbs. No one's heard from them since." He decided it was better for his own safety to spend a few months in Novi Pazar, in Serbia. Baljosevic's brother tried many times to get news of the five Serbs, without success: "Some Italian soldiers from KFOR came to see me, and the UN police, too, but I never heard anything."

Their fate is commonplace. Negovan Mavric keeps a small café at Velika Hoca, a Serb enclave a few kilometers from Orahovac/Rahovec, and runs the local branch of the Association of Families of Kidnapped and Missing Persons in Kosovo and Metohija. He showed me a list of the village's dead and missing: the remains of 19 Serbs kidnapped in 1998 and 1999 have been found, but 55 Serbs and nine Roma are still missing. The first murder of a Serb civilian was recorded on May 12, 1998, when the Serbian police and the KLA began to fight for control of the district, where many Serbs then lived. The last kidnapping was on July 28, 2000, more than a year after the UN protectorate was established.

The hills around Velika Hoca are covered with vineyards; the mountains high above them mark the border between Kosovo and Albania. In the past, Albanians and Serbs coexisted peacefully in the Orahovac/Rahovec district. Since June 1999 the Serb population has fallen from nearly 10,000 to 700 in Velika Hoca, and 300 in the upper part of the town of Orahovac. The Serbs have been driven out of mixed villages such as Zociste, Opterusa and Retimlije.

The majority of the missing Serbs were kidnapped as early as July 1998, when the KLA briefly besieged Orahovac. Then a large number of Serb civilians from Retimlije were taken to a KLA base in the nearby village of Semetiste. The women were freed four days later, after the Red Cross intervened; none of the men (one just 16 years old) were seen alive again. In April 2005 some were identified among the remains of 21 people buried in a mass grave some distance away, in the village of Volujak/Valljake, near Klina.

Held on suspicion

Olgica Bozanic, a Serb from Orahovac who has taken refuge in Belgrade, is a member of the Association of Families of Kidnapped and Missing Persons. She may have lost as many as 10 relatives, including her two brothers, uncles and cousins. She heard news of one from Albanian former neighbors, who were held for several months by the guerrillas on suspicion of collaboration with the Serbian regime. They said that some Serbs from the Orahovac area were initially held near the main KLA base in the area, in the village of Drenovac/Drenovce. After the fighting stopped, they were transferred to Deva, a village in the Has mountains, near the Albanian border. It seems the KLA had occupied a base abandoned by the Yugoslav army when it withdrew in June 1999, and converted it into a detention centre. The Orahovac Serbs were then taken to Kukes, in Albania, and later to Durres, on the Albanian coast, where Bozanic's former neighbours claimed to have seen them alive, in a KLA prison, in 2001.

Most Serbs kidnapped before the end of the war were probably killed inside Kosovo. The idea that those kidnapped after KFOR drove in were taken to Albania was put forward some time ago, but there has been no trace of them. In autumn 1999 Sefko Alomerovic, president of the district of Novi Pazar's Helsinki Committee (a local organization, independent of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia), conducted a long inquiry, but the report has been lost and Alomerovic died in 2003. In interviews in 2000, he claimed to have visited five detention centers in Kosovo. These were small facilities – often converted garages or industrial buildings on the outskirts of towns – housing 10-50 detainees. The centers were under the authority of a Commandant "Mala" (real name Alush Agushi), a close associate of Ramush Haradinaj. Some families had tried to ransom detainees, but although large sums of money had been paid to intermediaries, none had ever been freed.

Some Serbs had been kept with a view to exchanging them for Albanian prisoners in Serbia, whose numbers were estimated at around 800 in 2000. There is no evidence that any exchanges ever took place. Some sources claim that many Serb detainees were executed in 2001, when Serbia passed an amnesty law and freed Albanians suspected of having belonged to the KLA. Some detention centers in Kosovo were used as staging camps for both Serb and Albanian prisoners awaiting transfer to Albania. Alomerovic was the first to mention human organ trafficking, suspecting that international criminal networks were buying organs supplied by members of the KLA.

Wall of silence

His revelations were not followed up and were in fact rejected by international organizations in Kosovo, including the UN interim administration mission, then led by Bernard Kouchner. Alomerovic, well known as a human rights militant and a long-term opponent of the Milosevic regime, talked of a "wall of silence"; KFOR denied the existence of any detention centers in Kosovo, in spite of evidence. Carla Del Ponte, former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, has also described this wall of silence, which she encountered when attempting to investigate the disappearance of Serb civilians and rumours of human organ trafficking.

As Dick Marty has emphasised in many interviews since the publication of his report to the Council of Europe "everybody in Kosovo" knew of the disappearance of Serb civilians, and of the detention during the war of many Albanians suspected of collaborating with the Serbian regime. Since 1999 the Pristina daily Bota Sot has never stopped denouncing the elimination of sympathizers of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK, founded by the late Ibrahim Rugova), during and since the war. The paper's editor Bajrush Morina summed it up: "Three thousand people have been murdered in Kosovo since 1999, and only 600 of those murders have been solved. There's been a lot of talk of revenge killings by families, but most are political murders." Two of the paper's reporters have been killed and Morina had to hire private bodyguards for a time. Yet the stories Bota Sot publishes have always been regarded with suspicion, given its relationship with the LDK.

Bota Sot has regularly reported the existence of detention centers in Kosovo and Albania, where Albanians accused of collaboration were held. In February this year the trial of former KLA commanders Sabit Geci and Riza Alijaj began in Mitrovica. They are accused of committing serious crimes against detainees in a camp at Cahan, in the mountains of northern As from the Kosovo border.
During the war, the secluded village of Cahan was used by the KLA as a logistics centre and a rear base for volunteers going to fight in Kosovo. Local strongman Bedri Cahani admitted that the inhabitants of Cahan smuggled cigarettes into Kosovo and that he was recruited by the KLA in autumn 1997, mainly to smuggle fighters over the mountains at night. The KLA was using an Albanian army barracks, abandoned in 1992, which still stands at the entrance to the village: this also housed a detention centre, mentioned by Marty. Cahan is a secluded spot, nearly 10km by rough mountain tracks from the town of Kruma.

ZZ spent two and a half months in "hell" at Cahan, and will be a key protected witness at the trial of Geci and Alijaj. He remembers systematic abuse and serious torture. Some detainees were forced to have sexual relations with each other; others were subjected to simulated executions. But, he told me, "I was probably the longest-serving prisoner at Cahan, and I only saw Albanians." He had also seen some of the KLA's most important commanders in Cahan, especially Hashim Thaci, Kosovo's current prime minister.

All the detainees there in 1999 were, like ZZ, senior figures in the LDK. Most were arrested in the towns of Kukes and Kruma, which were full of refugees driven out of Kosovo by the Serbian forces. Some were members of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Kosovo (Fark), a guerrilla movement rival to the KLA, started, without much success on the ground, by supporters of Ibrahim Rugova.

The Drenica Group

Marty's report singles out as responsible an internal faction of the KLA, which it refers to as the "Drenica Group", listing as members Hashim Thaci, Azem Syla, Xhavit Haliti, Kadri Veseli, Fatmir Limaj, Sabit Geci and Riza Alijaj. These former guerrilla commanders are all from the Drenica area; they were also members of the Popular Movement of Kosovo (LPK), a secret Marxist-Leninist organization favorable to the Albanian Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha. The movement emerged among the Albanian diaspora in Switzerland, and had an extensive network of clandestine militants in Kosovo. It was the LPK that created the KLA in 1996, bringing together a number of groups of independent militants already operating in Kosovo, mainly in the Drenica area. The best known, Adem Jashari, a great hero who is virtually worshipped in Kosovo, was killed by the Serbian police on March 6, 1998. His cousin, Gani Geci, survived and narrowly escaped an attempt on his life in 2001. Geci has never joined the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), the direct successor to the LPK. He is from the family of the bajraktar (hereditary village chieftain) of the village of Llausha, in the Drenica area. He remained a member of the LDK and later of a small splinter group, whom he represented during the last Kosovo parliament.
Geci told me: "We were faithful to Ibrahim Rugova, and we had never heard of the LPK, nor of Fark: as far as we were concerned, the KLA badge united all the fighters. When the LPK people arrived from Switzerland, we made them welcome. They had money and promised us weapons, but we quickly realized they were only interested in power. In any case, they never fought the Serbs. They relied on Nato to do that. They only fought other Albanians, to gain absolute power, and, since the end of the war they have systematically bled Kosovo dry."

His claims are largely confirmed by a recently declassified Nato report from 2003, which identifies Haliti as the "godfather" of Kosovo, controlling most illegal activities, including smuggling, drug trafficking and prostitution. As well as being a senior figure in the LPK, Haliti was notorious as an agent of the Sigurimi, the secret service of Stalinist Albania. He is a top leader of the Drenica Group, which is synonymous with the leadership of the LPK and today's PDK.

The PDK had a powerful tool in the Sherbimi Informativ i Kosoves (Shik), an intelligence service headed by Veseli and Syla. In 2009 Kosovo was shaken by the revelations of a former Shik agent, Nazim Bllaca, who admitted having murdered an Albanian who had collaborated with the Serbian police. Under house arrest while awaiting trial, Bllaca is once more free to speak to the press. In an interview in Koha Ditore this January, he claimed that Shik had killed "600 people in the first few months after the establishment of the UN protectorate and 1,000 over 12 months".

People are beginning to talk in Kosovo about the violence by the KLA against Albanians accused of collaboration, or those whose political persuasion differed from the guerrillas. However, nobody yet wants to talk about the fate of the missing Serbs. ZZ explained that, at the end of the war, he was transferred from the camp at Cahan to the town of Prizren, in Kosovo: "For several days, they kept me in the cellar of a house, with seven elderly Serbs and one Roma. There were two of us Albanian prisoners from the camp at Cahan, and our gaolers forced us to hit the old Serbs. In the end, some German soldiers from KFOR freed me, but the Serbs had already been taken away, I don't know where."

I was unable to find any evidence that, after the war was over, the camp at Cahan had also housed Serbs intended to supply the trade in human organs. However, when Cahan housed a torture centre for "dissident" members of the KLA, in spring 1999, it was visited regularly by members of US special forces.

Translated by Charles Goulden

Jean-Arnault Dérens is editor of Le Courrier des Balkan (balkans.courriers.info); his latest book, co-authored with Laurent Geslin, is Voyage au pays des Gorani: Balkans, début du XXIe siècle (Journey to the Land of the Gorani: the Balkans at the Start of the 21st Century), Cartouche, Paris, 2010.

This article appears in the Apriledition of the excellent monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com. This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features two or three articles from LMD every month.

http://www.counterpunch.org/derens04062011.html

Russia to rescue Serbia from NATO's claws

05.04.2011

 

Serbia may become one of the largest buyers of Russian arms. This can become possible after Vladimir Putin's recent visit to the country. Belgrade may receive a ten-billion-dollar loan soon. Three billion dollars of the amount will be spent to modernize outdated Soviet arms and purchase state-of-the-art Russian arms.

What exactly do the Serbs want to buy from Russia? No official statement on the matter has been made during Putin's visit. However, both Russian and Serbian experts discuss the subject very actively.

The Blic, a Serbian newspaper, wrote that the security of the country was in danger because of the deplorable situation in the Air Force of the country. Prior to the war of 1999, up to 80 percent of the Serbian Air Force consisted of outdated aircraft, such as MiG-21 fighters. Most of MiG-29 planes were either downed or could not be used because of the shortage of spare parts.

In the beginning of 2010, the Serbian Defense Ministry supposedly sent inquiries to world's leading manufacturers of fourth-generation fighter jets. Pursuant to that information, the Serbs were going to conduct a tender to replace outdated aircraft.

They were presumably interested in American F-16 and F-18 fighter jets, Swedish Gripens, French Rafales and Eurofighters, as well as Russian MiG-29M and Su-30. Apparently, the Russian fighters are the priority from the point of view of price-quality ratio.

The Serbian missile defense system was practically destroyed during the war in 1999. Moreover, the results of the war showed that it was impossible to repulse the aggression of such an enemy as NATO with the use of missile complexes developed during the 1960s and the 1970s. Serbia may purchase two divisions of Russia's renowned S-300 systems or an export variant of S-400.

Practically all radar stations in the country were also destroyed during the war. The country was deprived of the opportunity to control its own air space. This gives every reason to believe that Belgrade may purchase Russian radar stations as well.

However, thee billion dollars is not enough to modernize the air force, to rebuild the missile defense system and reequip radar troops. Two divisions of S-300 systems will not improve the situation. What can these two divisions do if the alliance can use hundreds of its fighter jets?

Will NATO let Serbia rearm the army at all? The administration of the alliance previously announced the intention to cut the Serbian armed forces to 21,000 men.

Viktor Litovkin, an observer with Independent Military Survey newspaper said in an interview with Pravda.Ru that NATO would not impede Serbia's initiative to rearm its armed forces with the use of Russian arms. Belgrade wants to join the alliance, but the possession of Russian hardware did not become an obstacle for other countries of Europe in obtaining NATO membership. Take a look at Greece, for example. This country is a member of NATO, but it still buys S-300 systems from Russia," the experts said.

Elena Guskova, an expert for Balkans, does not share the same point of view.

"It is quite doubtful that the EU and the USA would welcome such a deal. They do not conceal their plans to separate Serbia from Russia as much as possible. Many Serbs believe that their problems have not been solved. Many conflict areas remained in Serbia after the collapse of Yugoslavia. There's every reason to believe that NATO will not be able to defend Serbia in case a serious conflict occurs in the north or in the south of the country. It happened so in Macedonia in 2001. The alliance simply took the side of the Albanians as it happened two years earlier with Kosovo," the expert said.

Sergei Balmasov

Pravda.Ru

http://english.pravda.ru/russia/economics/05-04-2011/117464-russia_serbia-0/

Will the US stop digging its Kosovo hole?

Will the US stop digging its Kosovo hole?

The current talks between Belgrade and Pristina may provide the US with an opportunity to shift away from a policy that has become dependent on one leader and upon giving full backing to all of Pristina's political claims.

By Gerard Gallucci

Since December, news from Kosovo has been increasingly about the involvement of its political leaders in corruption, organ trafficking and organized crime, extending back to acts committed by the KLA during the war. EULEX is currently investigating the alleged involvement of senior officials who are former KLA members. These investigations may be, in part, an effort to make-up for EULEX's failure to pursue allegations in a report, by Swiss Senator Dick Marty, on Prime Minister Thaci's involvement in KLA organ trafficking. EULEX tried to deflect calls for it to investigate Thaci by blaming Marty for not passing on the names of witnesses. But some witnesses are dead and those living seem reluctant to entrust themselves into Kosovo's witness protection scheme. So, EULEX apparently dug through its files and came up with the current investigation. But in the Balkans, it is hard to please everyone and former-KLA have been quite active in criticizing and demonstrating against EULEX.

All this has led some to suggest that perhaps the creation of an Albanian-majority, independent Kosovo was a mistake. Some have charged too that none of the information on corruption and criminal involvement is really new but was previously covered up and ignored for political reasons. This is almost certainly true. Anyone working in the Balkans since the collapse of Yugoslavia will be quite familiar with the near ubiquitous links between political and criminal circles. Of course, traditional brigandage has characterized certain areas of Kosovo since time immemorial. And stories of human rights abuses and criminal activity by KLA figures were common in Kosovo. Some of these may not stand up to the demands for evidence, but the general picture has been known for some time.

It seems certain that someone was protecting the Kosovo leadership from being investigated. Some cite reports that the US pressured UNMIK not to investigate charges into Thaci's leadership. The US may also have played a role in ensuring that former KLA leader and prime minister, Ramush Haradinaj, was pulled in front of the Hague to get him out of Thaci's way. Indeed, the US may have sought to punish a high-ranking UNMIK official for seeking to help Haradinaj as it had helped Thaci.

It is no secret that the US judged Thaci to be key to maintaining control over the Kosovo Albanians. Keeping him as a trusted and cooperative prime minister became in itself an important element of US policy. In return for him keeping the lid on Albanian irredentism and for accepting the form – if not the substance – of the Ahtisaari Plan, Thaci received complete US backing both for him and for Pristina's claim of independence and "territorial integrity" (meaning control of the north). Thus the US followed the path it has often used in backing the likes of the Shah of Iran, Mobutu, Pinochet, Saddam (before 9/11), Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gaddafi – swallow any reservations about the behavior of "your man" as long as he remains "your man." Typically, the US was unable to extricate itself from these relationships until it was too late for a happy ending.

This is not to say that Thaci is in the same category as these others. He is not a mass murderer and he continues to operate within the context of a constitutional democracy. The real problem is the stance the US has taken to avoid having to deal with the mess it – and its Quint partners – helped create in Kosovo by picking a favorite, overlooking the problems and digging in to keep things "stable." One result has been the reckless US effort to distract attention from the problems in Pristina by focusing on alleged threats to security and legality from the northern Kosovo Serbs. US policy for Kosovo can be boiled down into two parts: help Thaci, blame Serbs. If this continues to take the form of seeking to bully the north into accepting Pristina, it will lead to further conflict. Unfortunately, it is a trait of many who have dug themselves into a hole to dig further. Somebody should instead help the US get out of its hole. The current discussions between Belgrade and Pristina could be the ladder.

Gerard M. Gallucci is a retired US diplomat and UN peacekeeper. He worked as part of US efforts to resolve the conflicts in Angola, South Africa and Sudan and as Director for Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council. He served as UN Regional Representative in Mitrovica, Kosovo from July 2005 until October 2008. Gerard is also a member ofTransCconflict's advisory board. The views expressed in this piece are his own and do not represent the position of any organization.

You can read more of Mr. Gallucci's analysis of current developments in Kosovo and elsewhere by clicking here. To read other articles by Gerard for TransConflict, please click here.

http://www.transconflict.com/2011/04/will-the-us-stop-digging-its-kosovo-hole-054/

LIBYA: FORCE DOES NOT BRING DEMOCRACY, SERBIAN AMBASSADOR

 

 LIBYA: FORCE DOES NOT BRING DEMOCRACY, SERBIAN AMBASSADOR

29 March , 15:51

(ANSAmed) - ROME, MARCH 29 - "The Western powers should have exhausted all diplomatic avenues before deciding to intervene with force in Libya. Bombs do not bring democracy," said the Serbian Ambassador to Italy, Sanda Raskovic-Ivic, regarding military operations in Libya recently transferred to NATO command, which began 12 years after the NATO mission against Serbia under the rule of Milosevic. "It certainly wasn't NATO's bombs that brought democracy to Serbia," said the diplomat. Rather, that use of force at the time only reinforced Slobodan Milosevic's power." Those air strikes, said Raskovic-Ivic, "delayed the fall by at least a year". Democracy in Serbia, she continued, "arrived when the time was right". The time will be right for the people in the Arab world too. "Whosoever," she underlined, "says that Islam is incompatible with democracy is wrong. Rather, the two are strongly related." History, she said, "will show us that what inspired countries like France are pure economic interests, not their conscience". Proof of this," she concluded, "is the fact that the French authorities continue to refuse entry to Tunisia immigrants at the border between Ventimiglia and Menton".

http://www.ansamed.info/en/news/ME.XEF67923.html

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USA must stop resisting dollar decline, global currency and NWO - Soros

04.01.2011

 

In the video you are about to see, George Soros talks about "the creation of a New World Order", he discusses the need for a "managed decline" of the U.S. dollar and he talks at length of the global need for a true world currency. So just who is George Soros? Well, he is a billionaire "philanthropist" who came to be known as "the Man Who Broke the Bank of England" when he raked in a staggering one billion dollars during the 1992 "Black Wednesday" currency crisis. These days Soros is most famous for being perhaps the most "politically active" (at least openly) billionaire in the world. His Open Society Institute is in more than 60 countries and it spends approximately $600 million a year promoting the ideals that Soros wants promoted. Soros and his pet organizations have played a key role in quite a few "revolutions" around the globe over the last several decades, but these days the main goal of George Soros is to bring political change to the United States.

So exactly what is it that George Soros is trying to accomplish? Well, in a nutshell, what he wants is a Big Brother-style one world government based on extreme European-style socialism, strict population control and the radical green agenda. It would be a world where the state tightly regulates everything that we do for the greater benefit of the environment and of society as a whole.

However, Soros is not the "mastermind of the New World Order" that some have tried to make him out to be. The truth is that to those in the international banking elite, Soros is considered to be something of a "black sheep" and an "outsider". Much of what Soros is trying to accomplish lines up with the goals of the international banking elite, but what they don't like is that Soros won't stop publicly talking about a global currency and a "New World Order". Of course the international banking elite very much want a global currency and a "New World Order", but what they don't need is a "squeaky wheel" like Soros running around drawing unneeded attention to those goals.

Also, Soros does not seem to understand that both sides of the political spectrum in the United States are deeply influenced by the international banking elite. Sadly, the truth is that the same handful of elitist organizations has dominated the cabinets of every single president that we have had since World War II. If you doubt this, just check out how many members of each presidential administration over the last 40 years have belonged to either the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderberg Group. If you have never looked into this before, you will be absolutely shocked. No matter what president we elect, it is always the exact same organizations that always dominate their cabinets.

But Soros still seems very much trapped within the left/right paradigm and he seems absolutely obsessed with destroying the Republican Party. For example, Soros spent an insane amount of money attempting to defeat George W. Bush back in 2004. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, George Soros donated $23,581,000 during that election cycle to political organizations that were trying to keep Bush from being reelected.

Soros has also been a tremendous backer of Barack Obama, although lately Soros seems a bit disenchanted with him. Through organizations such as the Center for American Progress and MoveOn.org, Soros is constantly trying to influence the state of American politics.

So what is George Soros thinking about these days? Well, in the video posted below you will see Soros discussing "an orderly decline" of the U.S. dollar, the coming global currency and the importance of the New World Order....

George Soros openly discusses the coming New World Order - video

Did you notice how uncomfortable Soros was when he was saying the term "New World Order"?

The truth is that he knows exactly what that phrase means. He knows that it is a phrase that he probably shouldn't say and that will get a lot of attention.

But he said it anyway.

Soros also seemed a bit uncomfortable as he discussed "an orderly decline" of the U.S. dollar.

Soros has been saying the the U.S. dollar needs to go down for quite a while now, and he speaks of the coming fall of the dollar as if it is inevitable.

The only thing that Soros seems to fear is that the "managed decline" of the dollar could "get out of hand" and could lead to global financial chaos.

Soros even had the gall to say that having the dollar be the reserve currency of the world is not in our national interest and that a move to a global currency is "a healthy, if painful, adjustment" that we are just going to have to endure for the greater good of the world economy.

But shouldn't the American people have something to say about all of this?

Perhaps the American people do not want a "managed decline" of the U.S. dollar.

Perhaps the American people do not want any part of a new "global currency".

Perhaps the American people do not want any part of a "New World Order".

But to men like George Soros, it doesn't really matter what "the little people" think. In the world that Soros lives in, those with overwhelming amounts of money and power know what is best for the rest of us, and if "the little people" don't seem to want to go along initially then public opinion can be bought if you just spend enough money.

The sad truth is that we already live in a global economy. Just go into just about any store across the United States and start picking up products to see where they were made. Very few of the things we buy are still made in the United States.

Today, labor is a global commodity. American workers must now directly compete for jobs with those making slave labor wages in China and India. The fact that millions of U.S. jobs are being offshored and outsourced does not bother advocates of globalism at all because it is supposedly a beneficial thing for the overall global economy.

And most Americans have little to no idea just how much influence international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO have over our daily lives.

The truth is that we already live in a world that has been deeply, deeply integrated. As this continues, at some point it will only seem "natural" for America to agree to a true global currency and full global political integration.

Let us hope that day never arrives. Or at least let us hope that the American people wake up enough to not just go passively into a "New World Order".

A global economy is bad for America and a global government would be really bad for America.

But perhaps you disagree. Perhaps you believe that integrating our economy, our currency and our government with the rest of the world would be a wonderful thing. If that is the case, please feel free to leave a comment explaining exactly why globalism is such a wonderful thing for all of us....

Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse Blog

http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/04-01-2011/116427-soros_new_world_order-0/

Libya’s Blood For Oil: The Vampire War

Libya's Blood For Oil: The Vampire War

By wmw_admin on March 30, 2011

By Susan Lindauer – via The People's Voice March 28, 2011

Who are we kidding? The United States, Britain and NATO don't care about bombing civilians to contain rebellion. Their militaries bomb civilians every day without mercy. They have destroyed most of the community infrastructure of Iraq and Afghanistan before turning their sights on Libya. So what's really going on here?

According to the CIA, the following never happened…

Last October, US oil giants— Chevron and Occidental Petroleum— made a surprising decision to pull out of Libya, while China, Germany and Italy stayed on, signing major contracts with Gadhaffi's government. As the U.S. Asset who started negotiations for the Lockerbie Trial with Libyan diplomats, I had close ties to Libya's U.N. Mission from 1995 to 2003. Given my long involvement in the Lockerbie saga, I have continued to enjoy special access to high level intelligence gossip on Libya.

Last summer that gossip got juicy!

About July, I started hearing that Gadhaffi was exerting heavy pressure on U.S. and British oil companies to cough up special fees and kick backs to cover the costs of Libya's reimbursement to the families of Pan Am 103. Payment of damages for the Lockerbie bombing had been one of the chief conditions for ending U.N. sanctions on Libya that ran from 1992 until 2003. And of course the United Nations forced Gadhaffi to hand over two Libyan men for a special trial at The Hague, though everybody credible was fully conscious of Libya's innocence in the Lockerbie affair. (Only ignorant politicians trying to score publicity points say otherwise.)

Knowing Gadhaffi as well as I do, I was convinced that he'd done it. He'd bided his time until he could extort compensation from U.S. oil companies. He's a crafty bastard, extremely intelligent and canny. That's exactly how he operates. And now he was taking his revenge. As expected, the U.S. was hopping mad about it. Gadhaffi wasn't playing the game the way the Oil Bloodsuckers wanted. The Vampire of our age—the Oil Industry—roams the earth, sucking the life out of every nation to feed its thirst for profits. Only when they got to Libya, Gadhaffi took on the role of a modern-day Robin Hood, who insisted on replenishing his people for the costs they'd suffered under U.N. sanctions.

Backing up a year earlier, in August 2009 the lone Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people, Abdelbasset Megrahi, won a compassionate release from Scottish prison. Ostensibly, the British government and Scottish Courts granted Megrahi's request to die at home with dignity from advance stage cancer—in exchange for dropping a legal appeal packed with embarrassments for the European Courts. The decision to free Megrahi followed shocking revelations of corruption at the special Court of The Hague that handled the Lockerbie Trial. Prosecution witnesses confessed to receiving payments of $4 million each from the United States, in exchange for testimony against Megrahi, a mind-blowing allegation of judicial corruption.

The Lockerbie conviction was full of holes to begin with. Anybody who knows anything about terrorism in the 1980s knows the CIA got mixed up in heroin trafficking out of the Bekaa Valley during the hostage crisis in Lebanon. The Lockerbie conspiracy had been a false flag operation to kill off a joint CIA and Defense Intelligence investigation into kick backs from Islamic Jihad, in exchange for protecting the heroin transit network.

According to my own CIA handler, Dr. Richard Fuisz, who'd been stationed in Lebanon and Syria at the time, the CIA had established a protected drug route from Lebanon to Europe and on to the United States. His statements support other sources that "Operation Corea" allowed Syrian drug dealers led by Monzer al-Kassar (also linked to Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal) to ship heroin to the U.S. ON Pan Am flights, in exchange for intelligence on the hostages' whereabouts in Lebanon. The CIA allegedly made sure that suitcases carrying heroin were not searched at customs. Nicknamed the "Godfather of Terror," Al Kassar is now serving a prison sentence for conspiring with Colombian drug cartels to assassinate U.S. nationals.

Building up to Lockerbie, the Defense Intelligence team in Beirut, led by Maj. Charles Dennis McKee and Matthew Gannon, suspected that CIA infiltration of the heroin network might be prolonging the hostage crisis. If so, the consequence was severe. AP Reporter Terry Anderson got chained in a basement for 7 years, while 96 other high profile western hostages suffered beatings, mock executions and overall trauma. McKee's team raised the alarms in Washington that a CIA double agent profiting from the narco-dollars might be warning the hostage takers whenever their dragnet closed in. Washington sent a fact-finding team to Lebanon to gather evidence.

On the day it was blown out of the sky, Pan Am 103 was carrying that team of CIA and FBI investigators, the CIA's Deputy Chief assigned to Beirut, and three Defense Intelligence officers, including McKee and Gannon, on their way to Washington to deliver a report on the CIA's role in heroin trafficking, and the impact on terrorist financing and the hostage crisis. In short, everyone with direct knowledge of CIA kickbacks from heroin trafficking died on Pan Am 103. A suitcase packed with $500,000 worth of heroin was found in the wreckage. It belonged to investigators, as proof of the corruption.

The punch line was that the U.S. State Department issued an internal travel advisory, warning that government officials should get off that specific flight on that specific day, because Pan Am 103 was expected to get bombed. That's right, folks! The U.S. had prior knowledge of the attack.

Unforgivably, nobody told Charles McKee or Matthew Gannon. But other military officials and diplomats got pulled off the flight—making room for a group of students from Syracuse University traveling stand by for the Christmas holidays.

It was a monstrous act! But condemning Megrahi to cover up the CIA's role in heroin trafficking has struck many Lockerbie afficiandos as grossly unjust. Add the corruption of purchased testimony– $4 million a pop— and Megrahi's life sentence struck a nerve of obscenity.

It struck Gadhaffi as grievously offensive, as well—The United Nations had forced Libya to fork over $2.7 billion in damages to the Lockerbie families, a rate of $10 million for every death. Once it became clear the U.S. paid two key witnesses $4 million each to commit perjury, spook gossip throughout the summer was rife that Gadhaffi had taken bold action to demand compensation from U.S. (and probably British) oil corporations operating in Libya. More than likely, Libya's demands for kick backs and compensation extended to other European oil conglomerates as well—particularly France and Italy—who are now spearheading attacks on Libya.

I knew last summer there would be trouble. Payback would be a b—tch on both sides. You don't lock an innocent man in prison for 10 years on bogus charges of terrorism, and expect forgiveness. The United States and Britain had behaved with remarkable selfishness. You've got to admit that Gadhaffi's attempt to balance the scales of justice demonstrated a flair of righteous nationalism.

Alas, Gadhaffi was playing with fire, no matter how justified his complaint. You don't strike a tyrant without expecting a tyrant to strike back.

And that's exactly what's happening today.

Don't kid yourself. This is an oil war, and it smacks of imperialist double standards. Two articles by Prof. Chossudovsky at the Global Research Centre are must reading: "Operation Libya and the Battle for Oil: Redrawing the Map of Africa" and "Insurrection and Military Intervention: The US-NATO Attempted Coup d'Etat in Libya?"

There is simply no justification for U.S. or NATO action against Libya. The U.N. charter acknowledges the rights of sovereign nations to put down rebellions against their own governments. Moreover, many observers have commented that plans for military intervention appear to have been much more advanced than U.S. and European leaders want to admit.

For myself, I know in my gut that war planning started months before the democratization movement kicked off throughout the Arab world—a lucky cover for U.S. and European oil policy. Perhaps too lucky.

As Chossudovsky writes, "Hundreds of US, British and French military advisers arrived in Cyrenaica, Libya's eastern breakaway province" on February 23 and 24— seven (7) days after the start of Gadhaffi's domestic rebellion. "The advisers, including intelligence officers, were dropped from warships and missile boats at the coastal towns of Benghazi and Tobruk." (DEBKAfile, US military advisers in Cyrenaica, Feb. 25, 2011) Special forces on the ground in Eastern Libya provided covert support to the rebels." Eight British Special Forces commandos were arrested in the Benghazi region, while acting as military advisers to opposition forces, according to the Times of London.

We're supposed to believe the United States, Britain and Europe planned, coordinated and executed a full military intervention in 7 short days— from the start of the Libyan rebellion in mid-February until military advisers appeared on the ground in Libya on February 23-24!

That's strategically impossible.

Nothing can persuade me that Gadhaffi's fate wasn't decided months ago, when Chevron and Occidental Petroleum took their whining to Capitol Hill, complaining that Gadhaffi's nationalism interfered with their oil profiteering. From that moment, military intervention was on the drawing board as surely as the Patriot Act got stuck in a drawer waiting for 9/11.

The message is simple: Challenge the oil corporations and your government and your people will pay the ultimate price: Give us your oil as cheaply as possible. Or die.

Don't kid yourself. Nobody gives a damn about suffering in Libya or Iraq. You don't bomb a village to save it. The U.S., Britain and NATO are the bullies of the neighborhood. The enforcers for Big Oil.

Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan have something in common. They have vast and extraordinary oil and mineral riches. As such, they are all victims of what I call the Vampire Wars. The Arab Princes get paid off, while the bloodsuckers pull the life blood out of the people. They're scarcely able to survive in their own wealthy societies. The people and the domestic economy are kept alive to uphold the social order, but they are depleted of the nourishment of their own national wealth.

The democratization movements are sending a warning that I don't think Big Oil, or their protectors in the U.S. and British governments understand or have figured out how to control. The Arab people are finished with this cycle of victimization. They've got their stakes out, and they're starting to figure out how to strike into the heart of these Vampires, sucking the life blood out of their nations.

And woe to the wicked when they do!

-###-

This article may be reprinted in full or part with attribution to the author.

Former U.S. Intelligence Asset, Susan Lindauer covered Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria/Hezbollah from 1993 to 2003. She is the author of Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq

 

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=23184

 

Humanitarian Intervention - Again?

Humanitarian Intervention - Again?

Written by James Bissett Wednesday, 30 March 2011

As in the case of Serbia twelve years ago, Canada's air force is once again bombing a country presenting no threat to the safety or security of our country. In fact, we are at war. There has been no declaration of war. There has been no serious attempt to intervene peacefully to help resolve the conflict. There has been no debate in our Parliament. There was no suggestion of sending a mission to Libya to assess the situation on the ground.

More seriously, there has been no satisfactory explanation of what the bombing is designed to do and little idea of who it is we are fighting for.

The United Nations Security Council has authorized a no-fly zone to be enforced over Libyan skies but it is not clear what exactly this means. In the meantime some Western nations – including Canada – have interpreted it to mean they are authorized to attack and destroy Qaddafi's forces fighting against an armed rebellion to overthrow the dictator. Other countries do not agree. Among them are: Germany, Russia, China, India, Brazil and, more importantly, the Arab League.

Some have argued the aim is to prevent the Libyan despot, Muammar Qaddafi, from slaughtering thousands of his people, but there has been no evidence that this was his intention before the bombing took place.

President Sarkozy of France has made it clear that, as far as the French are concerned, the intervention is to change the regime and replace Qaddafi. France has already recognized the rebels in Benghazi as the legitimate representatives of the Libyan people. This extraordinary step seems to rule out any possibility of negotiating with Qaddafi for a peaceful solution to the armed struggle. It also implies what amounts to a demand for his unconditional surrender – a demand that almost always leaves your opponent no choice but to fight to the bitter end.

As for the United States we are not sure what President Obama has in mind. Initially, he was hesitant to lead his country into yet another war against a Muslim nation. However, a hyped-up media and a number of his close advisors urged him to intervene militarily. Having done so, he was anxious to at least pretend that the lead in the continuing conflict would be taken by others, and the "others" now seem to have been designated as some of the NATIO countries – minus Germany and Turkey.

The waves of unrest and upheavals in the Arab world have created great hope but at the same time potential danger. Who or what might replace the deposed despots is not known, One thing seems clear, none of the Muslim countries involved is ready for, or even desires to have, western style democracy.

For the most part the values of these Muslim countries are not western values, and lurking in the background is the menacing threat of religious extremism. This may be especially true in Libya, which has produced a high proportion of suicide bombers and mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As a general rule it is unwise to take sides in a civil war unless our own vital interests are at stake. What is taking place in Libya today is a civil war and we find ourselves playing the role of air force for the rebels. Unfortunately, we really have no idea of who they are or what they represent. Moreover, we do not know where the conflict will lead, how long it might last or the broader implications for the region after the fighting ends.

All of this fiasco has turned out to be a colossal mess and is unlikely to end well. This is not unusual when the excuse for intervention is based primarily on so-called humanitarian reasons.

Military intervention for humanitarian reasons is not a new phenomenon. Even Hitler justified his invasion of Czechoslovakia on the grounds that the ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland were being mistreated and abused by their fellow Czechoslovaks.

The concept has, however, found renewed popularity following the failure to prevent the Rwanda genocide. It gained momentum during the civil war in Bosnia and later in Kosovo, when charges of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity were levelled against the Serbs. The NATO intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo - despite strong evidence to the contrary - continues to be hailed as highly successful operations.

The Balkan experience led directly to the new doctrine of the "responsibility to protect" or R2P – the right to intervene in a sovereign state to protect populations there who are at risk. R2P has become the new term for humanitarian intervention and has laid out the conditions to be met for such intervention. The key provision of this doctrine is that if a state is failing to protect its citizens from mass atrocities, and peaceful measures to do so are not working, the international community has the responsibility to intervene at first diplomatically, and then more coercively, and at last resort, with military force.

It is worth noting that the United Nations Charter does not permit the use of military force for humanitarian intervention. However, in 2005 the General Assembly did adopt the principle of R2P, provided that the parties to the dispute "first of all seek a solution through negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice."

If such peaceful means have been tried but have failed then and only then can the United Nations Security Council authorize the use of force. Clearly none of these peaceful methods were tried before the decision was taken to bomb Qaddafi's forces.

R2P has many loyal advocates both in Canada and the United States. In Canada, our former foreign minister, Lloyd Axworthy, and retired General Romeo Dallaire are leading proponents of the doctrine. In the United States, one of its foremost advocates is Samantha Powers, author, foreign policy analyst, and now member of the US National Security Council. Powers was appointed to the NSC by President Obama and is said to have strongly influenced the President to intervene in Libya.

Powers exemplifies the potential dangers of having a doctrine that invites the violation of national sovereignty on the basis of alleged human rights abuse. For human rights proponents like her there are few conflict situations that do not deserve military intervention. In 2002, during the second Palestinian Intifada, she pushed hard for US military intervention against Israel with the aim of establishing and protecting a Palestinian state.

It is fortunate that R2P is not a mandatory obligation for the international community. It provides a framework for intervention and guidelines to be followed but it remains the responsibility of the United Nations Security Council to authorize military intervention in a sovereign state. The veto power remains a last resort to prevent the violation of sovereignty for whatever reason.

There is great danger in assuming that the western democratic nations can exercise wise judgment about when they should intervene in a conflict taking place in developing countries. There is even more danger in assuming that the intervention is motivated by real humanitarian concerns and not for selfish political or foreign policy objectives as was clearly the case in Bosnia and Kosovo.

The R2P concept is too easily high-jacked by leaders who see an opportunity to gain political mileage at home by playing the role of protecting the rights of suffering victims in far away places. If the country to be punished is headed by a dictator and is not too powerful to take on, then the risk is worth taking.

If the intervention can be in concert with other allied nations so much the better. For Canada, acting as part of NATO becomes particularly important as it was in the bombing of Serbia, and is now in the case of Libya. Quite apart from the substance of the issues involved Canada feels it must go along with our NATO partners whether the military action is justified or not. Our political leaders do not need to consult Parliament because NATO has decided the matter for us.

This is not a satisfactory situation for a democratic country. Other NATO member countries do not always feel obliged to follow the NATO lead if they do not agree with a military solution to the problem. Greece refused to take part in the bombing of Serbia in 1999 and Germany has refused to join its NATO partners in the Libya intervention.

Going to war is a serious business and it should be only done with the full agreement of the Parliament of Canada after a vote in the House of Commons. It is well to remember that at the outbreak of the Second World War it was only after debate in the House of Commons and a vote that Canada declared war on Germany.

Decisions about war and peace that affect the safety and security of our armed services and citizenry are the paramount expression of a nation's sovereignty. Canada should not abdicate that responsibility in any circumstances.

http://policystudies.ca/library-mainmenu-76/96-international-affairs/411-humanitarian-intervention-again

Association of journalists of Kosovo and Metohija

Posstovani, 

U prlogu imate saopsstenje za javnost Drusstva novinara Kosova i Metohije. 

Srdaccan pozdrav, 

Tijana Arsich - Sekretar DNKiM.

 

The Association of Journalists of Kosovo and Metohija and Association of Journalists of Serbia are warning on appearance of censorship, political partiality and unprofessional behavior of Radio and Television of Kosovo (RTK).

Editors of RTK interrupted with no explanation in regular broadcasting time on 23 March 2011 in 18' the show "Slobodno srpski", of the author Budimir Nicic. This kind of "technical intervention" in the programme of the media institution that intends to become a public service do not happen often in the world and proves power of individuals or individual to use the principle "I don't like this" and edit the programme of public service broadcaster.

The show „Slobodno srpski" in which guest was Momcilo Trajkovic, politician and witness of 17 March riots in 2004, was delivered three days in advance and addition was full transcript of the show. This fact leads to the point that some of politicians or powerful people did not like the show and gave the order to interrupt it and "give the viewership something that suits them". After interruption of the show, programme was continued with classic music and soon after patriotic songs.

In explanation sent to the author Budimir Nicic with reasons why the show was stopped was said „that if someone speaks about the crimes against the Serbs, than it should be spoken about crimes of Serb over the Albanians." Association of journalists is of the opinion that good analyses of RTK programme is more than welcomed and will result with unilateralism in portraying the past on public service TV.  Balance and search for analogy in the past based on the principle "Look what they did to us" or "what happened to you is because of our victims" is dangerous and initiates hate and evil. The management of RTK is looking for justification of 17 March riots in 2004 and is asking from the author to emphasize that reason for riots are actually crimes that Serbs did over Albanians?

In the part of explanation of the Management that refers to the views of the politician Momcilo Trajkovic, was said "we all knew his accusations" and "we all know his interest". The Association is warning the public service, that should be the mirror of pluralism and different opinions, cannot use this kind of totalitarian statements.  Who intends to become in one society a person that will say and decide that we "know everything"? It seems that RTK knows what we all know! By presenting the interest of the viewers, author of the show and already mentioned pluralism we are asking for „Slobodno srpski" to be back on RTK.

Key question in this issue is accusation that journalist didn't respect the other side. What is the other side of 17 March 2004, who is the other side, where shall we look for it, why there is no other side of the terrible crime that happened in peace? These questions do not have answers, no trial processes for organizers of riots and what is the most important, for us professionals, there is no investigative journalism that RTK could enforce/initiate. Maybe this is a good chance that someone dare and search for the answers on these questions because exactly the report on drowning of the children broadcasted on RTK was the trigger for 17 March riots.

The Association thinks that journalist Budimir Nicic did not violate professional standards and is warning expert and even wider public on a dangerous censorship, influence of politics and interruptions on RTK. This problem, among many others, clearly leads to the fact that relations of RTK with new TV channel in Serbian language (guaranteed by International documents on Kosovo) should be reconsider.

 

President of the Association of  journalists of Kosovo and Metohija

 

Zeljko Tvrdisic

 

Responsibility to protect or right to meddle

  

Responsibility to protect or right to meddle?

The Libya no-fly zone is either a humanitarian mission or an excuse to meddle, depending on who you ask. Gregg Carlstrom Last Modified: 24 Mar 2011 14:47

The "responsibility to protect" concept, a justification for the no-fly zone in Libya, remains a controversial idea [EPA] While the Western-led military coalition in Libya continues to debate the exact goals of its offensive there, a broader discussion is playing out in some foreign capitals: did the United Nations even have the authority to authorise the action? The week-old bombing campaign in Libya has prompted a debate over what's known as "responsibility to protect," or R2P, the convention that the world has a responsibility to prevent war crimes and protect vulnerable populations. Supporters of the no-fly zone over Libya like to call it a humanitarian operation, and argue that days of sorties - mostly by American, British and French planes - have prevented wider civilian casualties. Refugees International, for example, praised the no-fly zone as "international intervention to protect the people of Libya." Critics have reached exactly the opposite conclusion: The Chinese government said on Tuesday that the no-fly zone would lead to a "humanitarian disaster," and warned against "causing even more civilian casualties through the use of armed force." (China was one of five UN Security Council members to abstain from voting on resolution 1973, which authorised the no-fly zone and bombing campaign.) A 'historic breakthrough'... The R2P concept rose to prominence largely because of the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur. It became something of an official UN position in 2005, when hundreds of heads of state publicly endorsed the idea at a meeting of the General Assembly in New York. And it was explicitly invoked in resolution 1973, which declared a core goal of "protect[ing] civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack." The resolution is based on chapter VII of the United Nations charter, which gives the Security Council wide-ranging authority to identify and stop "threats to the peace" and "acts of aggression." Chapter VII has been used to justify a variety of UN actions in the past, including those in Somalia, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. But experts say this is the first time it has been explicitly used in the context of protecting civilians. "The explicit invocation of R2P within a chapter VII resolution is a significant, perhaps even historic breakthrough in our stated commitment to end mass atrocities," said Jonas Claes, a scholar at the Washington-based US Institute of Peace. One of the most prominent advocates for R2P, US academic Samantha Power, is also a senior member of Barack Obama's national security council. "Every human being's rights now have claim on international responsibility and protection," Power wrote in a 2006 book, Realizing Human Rights. "No country can now say that the human rights of any human being subject to its jurisdiction is no one else's business." The R2P concept considers military intervention a last resort, something to be used only after diplomatic measures fail. Advocates of the no-fly zone in Libya say it has met that requirement: international condemnation did not stop Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, nor did economic sanctions on high-level government officials. … or a dangerous precedent? But are Libya's internal problems an international issue to begin with? Critics say no: Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for example, said earlier this week that "we want Libya to resolve its internal matters without foreign intervention." Gaddafi's offensive against the rebels in eastern Libya has undoubtedly killed civilians - and he has vowed to go "house to house," killing protesters - but critics say Libya's civil war is ultimately a Libyan issue, and that the "responsibility to protect" goes too far in giving powerful countries a mandate to intervene in the affairs of others. They are quick to point out that the R2P concept is applied selectively. Gaddafi's crimes against his own people were apparently enough to justify international intervention, but the leaders of Yemen and Bahrain - both of whom have ordered brutal crackdowns on peaceful protesters - face no such threat. The R2P concept is also abstract enough to cover, and legitimise, a range of military interventions. Consider Saddam Hussein, whose ghastly human rights record includes the use of chemical weapons against his own people. Proponents of the American war in Iraq could have argued that toppling Hussein was an effort to "protect civilians." It has done no such thing, of course; more than 100,000 civilians have been killed since the invasion, according to classified US military records. But R2P could nonetheless be used as a justification for "regime change"; indeed, the British foreign office said yesterday, the ultimate goal in Libya is a country "not run by Gaddafi," an objective that seemingly goes beyond the mandate of simply protecting civilian life. Those criticisms aside, though, some of the harshest critics of the Libya campaign could also be accused of acting out of self-interest. Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin both condemned the airstrikes, the former calling it a bid to seize Libya's oil reserves, the latter likening it to the Crusades. It's unclear, one week in, whether the campaign in Libya will oust Gaddafi or simply enforce a stalemate. Equally unclear is whether it will set a precedent for future interventions.

Source: Al Jazeera

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http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/03/2011324121253913547.html

Libya: Protecting "civilians" or helping "rebels"?

22.03.2011 | 13:08

 

Libya: Protecting "civilians" or helping "rebels"?

 

 

In Libya, have certain members of the international community have once again fallen into the trap of the Balkans Syndrome, when guilt at not having acted earlier provoked a knee-jerk reaction with disastrous consequences: the travesty of international law called Kosovo? In Libya, are they protecting "civilians" or are they helping "rebels"?

 

 

Praiseworthy though it is to have preoccupations about the safety of fellow human beings, it is also the duty of the leaders of the international community to think carefully before they act and not fall into the trap of the Balkans Syndrome, when guilt at not having acted earlier provoked a knee-jerk reaction with disastrous consequences: the travesty of international law called Kosovo. And since when can a heavily armed group of bearded Islamist fanatics be  described as "unarmed civilians"?2878.jpeg

 

However, does anyone in the international community these days act or react through the goodness of their hearts, or through self-interest and the obligation to protect the groups that put them in power? How democratic are the "democratic" societies, when the real power is held by dark groups of grey barons who pull the corporate vested interest strings behind the scenes, and when Governments are elected depending upon how good the leader of the party looks on TV?

 

How democratic and free is the media when information is controlled and presented in a nice tidy package in which the truth is often suppressed or ignored and lies and misinformation manipulated?

 

Praiseworthy though it is to have preoccupations about the well-being of people, let us look beneath the surface of the issues surrounding the attack against Libya, led by the USA, UK and France.

 

Firstly, was the internal situation in Libya a question of a popular uprising against oppressive standards of living while a clique of elitists bled the country dry? No, because Libya's wealth was distributed and will be, so long as Muammar Al-Qathafi retains an influence. Or was the situation in Libya fuelled by "rebels" aided and abetted and supplied from the borders to the West (Tunisia) and East (Egypt) whose governments had conveniently "fallen"? Let us take a look at where the "rebellion" started.

 

It did not start in Tripoli, the capital - where Muammar Al-Qathafi is so obviously still massively popular, it started in the traditionally separatist province of Cyrenaica (Benghazi) and on the western frontier.

 

Secondly, where are these "unarmed civilians"? It is difficult to imagine which TV set David Cameron, Barack Obama or Nicolas Sarkozy have been watching, because the "unarmed civilians" I have seen on the bank of TV sets in my editing center, linked in to a number of different stations, show heavily armed bearded marauding gangs of thugs yelling "Allahu Akhbar". Now where have I heard that before?2880.jpeg

 

Thirdly, have they got it wrong again? Have they jumped the gun and been taken in by those whose intentions are neither democratic, nor that clear, and probably eventually anti-western? Remember the Mujaheddin, those "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan who destroyed women's rights in that country and then went on to morph into the Taleban? The thank you note was to be 9/11.

 

Fourthly, UN Resolution 1973 is sufficiently vague to have catered for a massive headache among the members of the international community. One can only imagine the shenanigans behind the scenes before its hasty adoption - it was obvious from the words of the French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé that it was to be passed even before it was voted for.

 

The wording of its Paragraph 4, on the Protection of Civilians, quotes Paragraph 9 of Resolution 1970 (2011), which expressly forbids the export of weapons to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Whoever, then, is supplying the "rebels", is breaking international law; the wording of Paragraph 4 of Resolution 1973 (2011) mentions the authority "to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya".

 

Does this not go against the precepts under international law that member states are free to protect themselves in cases of armed insurrection? And where does one draw the line between "protecting civilians" and attacking the Government forces, allowing the "civilians" to advance to Tripoli, as has been suggested in numerous media outlets?

 

Fifthly, how can a group of people in uniforms, armed with heavy weaponry, be considered "civilians" and therefore how can any substantial military attack on the forces of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya be anything except a breach of international law, occasioning interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state?

 

Sixthly, has President Obama gone to Congress for permission to wage war, as he is supposed to do? Has David Cameron informed those of his citizens whose maternity ward has just been closed, whose local school has been shut down, whose relative have been taunted by gangs of drunken thugs and drug addicts because the police force has been savagely reduced, quite how much money he is spending?

 

For those in Britain waiting for an operation, unable to get a hospital bed and whose social security benefits have been cut, sending them into misery, I am happy to inform them that the cost of a mission per aircraft per hour is between 35.000 and 50.000 pounds, or 200,000 per plane, per day. The cost of a back-seat role in a prolonged no-fly operation is in the region of 300 million pounds per year.

 

To do what? Help a marauding bunch of bearded fanatics seize power on Europe's doorstep?

 

Finally, how many of the governments involved in this manic campaign have actually bothered to research the tremendous amount Colonel Al-Qathafi has done not only for his people, but also for Africa? How many of them have stated that he was one of the first voices to ring out against Al Qaeda and international terrorism? How many have explained that he took the poorest country in the world and turned it into the one with the highest human development indices in Africa?2882.jpeg

 

Why was a session arranged at the UNO later this month to praise Muammar Al-Qathafi  for his human rights record? On his policy of religious tolerance... a report which praised him for protecting "not only political rights but also economic, social and cultural rights", praising him for his treatment of minorities and for the human rights training of the security forces...

 

Once again, the international community has been hasty, has fallen into the trap of the Balkans Syndrome, when Clinton wanted to take attention away from his midriff after what he did in the Oval Office, turning the White House into a whore house. This time around, who are the three leaders with most popularity problems at home? Barack Obama, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, whose approval ratings are beneath those of Muammar Al-Qathafi's.

 

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

 

Pravda.Ru

http://www.moscowtopnews.com/

Libya: Is This Kosovo All Over Again?

Another NATO Intervention?

Libya: Is This Kosovo All Over Again?

By DIANA JOHNSTONE

 

L ess than a dozen years after NATO bombed Yugoslavia into pieces, detaching the province of Kosovo from Serbia, there are signs that the military alliance is gearing up for another victorious little "humanitarian war", this time against Libya.  The differences are, of course, enormous.  But let's look at some of the disturbing similarities.

A demonized leader. 

As "the new Hitler", the man you love to hate and need to destroy, Slobodan Milosevic was a neophyte in 1999 compared to Muammar Qaddafi today.  The media had less than a decade to turn Milosevic into a monster, whereas with Qaddafi, they've been at it for several decades.  And Qaddafi is more exotic, speaking less English and coming before the public in outfits that could have been created by John Galliano (another recently outed monster).  This exotic aspect arouses the ancestral mockery and contempt for lesser cultures with which the West was won, Africa was colonized and the Summer Palace in Beijing was ravaged by Western soldiers fighting to make the world safe for opium addiction. 

The "we must do something" chorus. 

As with Kosovo, the crisis in Libya is perceived by the hawks as an opportunity to assert power.  The unspeakable John Yoo, the legal advisor who coached the Bush II administration in the advantages of torturing prisoners, has used the Wall Street Journal to advise the Obama administration to ignore the U.N Charter and leap into the Libyan fray. "By putting aside the U.N.'s antiquated rules, the United States can save lives, improve global welfare, and serve its own national interests at the same time," Yoo proclaimed.  And another leading theorist of humanitarian imperialism, Geoffrey Robertson, has told The Independent that, despite appearances, violating international law is lawful. 

The specter of "crimes against humanity" and "genocide" is evoked to justify war.

As with Kosovo, an internal conflict between a government and armed rebels is being cast as a "humanitarian crisis" in which one side only, the government, is assumed to be "criminal".  This a priori criminalization is expressed by calling on an international judicial body to examine crimes which are assumed to have been committed, or to be about to be committed.  In his Op Ed piece, Geoffrey Robertson made it crystal clear how the International Criminal Court is being used to set the stage for eventual military intervention.  The ICC can be used by the West to get around the risk of a Security Council veto for military action, he explained.

"In the case of Libya , the council has at least set an important precedent by unanimously endorsing a reference to the International Criminal Court. […]  So what happens if the unarrested Libyan indictees aggravate their crimes - eg by stringing up or shooting in cold blood their opponents, potential witnesses, civilians, journalists or prisoners of war?"  [Note that so far there are no "indictees" and no proof of "crimes" that they supposedly may "aggravate" in various imaginary ways.)  But Robertson is eager to find a way for NATO "to pick up the gauntlet" if the Security Council decides to do nothing.]
  
"The defects in the Security Council require the acknowledgement of a limited right, without its mandate, for an alliance like NATO to use force to stop the commission of crimes against humanity. That right arises once the council has identified a situation as a threat to world peace (and it has so identified Libya, by referring it unanimously to the ICC prosecutor)."

Thus referring a country to the ICC prosecutor can be a pretext for waging war against that country!  By the way, the ICC jurisdiction is supposed to apply to States that have ratified the treaty establishing it, which, as I understand, is not the case of Libya – or of the United States.  A big difference, however, is that the United States has been able to persuade, bully or bribe countless signatory States to accept agreements that they will never under any circumstances try to refer any American offenders to the ICC.  That is a privilege denied Qaddafi.

Robertson, a member of the UN justice council, concludes that: "The duty to stop the mass murder of innocents, as best we can if they request our help, has crystallized to make the use of force by Nato not merely 'legitimate' but lawful."

Leftist idiocy. 

Twelve years ago, most of the European left supported "the Kosovo war" that set NATO on the endless path it now pursues in Afghanistan. Having learned nothing, many seem ready for a repeat performance.  A coalition of parties calling itself the European Left has issued a statement "strongly condemning the repression perpetrated by the criminal regime of Colonel Qaddafi" and urging the European Union "to condemn the use of force and to act promptly to protect the people that are peacefully demonstrating and struggling for their freedom."  Inasmuch as the opposition to Qaddafi is not merely "peacefully demonstrating", but in part has taken up arms, this comes down to condemning the use of force by some and not by others – but it is unlikely that the politicians who drafted this statement even realize what they are saying.

The narrow vision of the left is illustrated by the statement in a Trotskyist paper that: "Of all the crimes of Qaddafi, the one that is without doubt the most grave and least known is his complicity with the EU migration policy…"   For the far left, Qaddafi's biggest sin is cooperating with the West, just as the West is to be condemned for cooperating with Qaddafi.  This is a left that ends up, out of sheer confusion, as cheerleader for war.

Refugees.

The mass of refugees fleeing Kosovo as NATO began its bombing campaign was used to justify that bombing, without independent investigation into the varied causes of that temporary exodus – a main cause probably being the bombing itself. Today, from the way media report on the large number of refugees leaving Libya since the troubles began, the public could get the impression that they are fleeing persecution by Qaddafi.  As is frequently the case, media focuses on the superficial image without seeking explanations.  A bit of reflection may fill the information gap.  It is hardly likely that Qaddafi is chasing away the foreign workers that his regime brought to Libya to carry out important infrastructure projects.  Rather it is fairly clear that some of the "democratic" rebels have attacked the foreign workers out of pure xenophobia.  Qaddafi's openness to Africans in particular is resented by a certain number of Arabs.  But not too much should be said about this, since they are now our "good guys".  This is a bit the way Albanian attacks on Roma in Kosovo were overlooked or excused by NATO occupiers on the grounds that "the Roma had collaborated with the Serbs".

Osama bin Laden. 

Another resemblance between former Yugoslavia and Libya is that the United States (and its NATO allies) once again end up on the same side as their old friend from Afghan Mujahidin days, Osama bin Laden.  Osama bin Laden was a discreet ally of the Islamist party of Alija Izetbegovic during the Bosnia civil war, a fact that has been studiously overlooked by the NATO powers.  Of course, Western media have largely dismissed Qaddafi's current claim that he is fighting against bin Laden as the ravings of a madman.  However, the combat between Qaddafi and bin Laden is very real and predates the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.  Indeed, Qaddafi was the first to try to alert Interpol to bin Laden, but got no cooperation from the United States.  In November 2007, the French news agency AFP reported that the leaders of the "Fighting Islamic Group" in Libya announced they were joining Al Qaeda.  Like the Mujahidin who fought in Bosnia, that Libyan Islamist Group was formed in 1995 by veterans of the U.S.-sponsored fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.  Their declared aim was to overthrow Qaddafi in order to establish a radical Islamist state.  The base of radical Islam has always been in the Eastern part of Libya where the current revolt broke out.  Since that revolt does not at all resemble the peaceful mass demonstrations that overthrew dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, but has a visible component of armed militants, it can reasonably be assumed that the Islamists are taking part in the rebellion.

Refusal of negotiations. 

In 1999, the United States was eager to use the Kosovo crisis to give NATO's new "out of area" mission its baptism of fire.  The charade of peace talks at Rambouillet was scuttled by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who sidelined more moderate Kosovo Albanian leaders in favor of Hashim Thaci, the young leader of the "Kosovo Liberation Army", a network notoriously linked to criminal activities.  The Albanian rebels in Kosovo were a mixed bag, but as frequently happens, the US reached in and drew the worst out of that bag.

In Libya, the situation could be even worse. 

My own impression, partly as a result of visiting Tripoli four years ago, is that the current rebellion is a much more mixed bag, with serious potential internal contradictions. Unlike Egypt, Libya is not a populous historic state with thousands of years of history, a strong sense of national identity and a long political culture.  Half a century ago, it was one of the poorest countries in the world, and still has not fully emerged from its clan structure. Qaddafi, in his own eccentric way, has been a modernizing factor, using oil revenues to raise the standard of living to one of the highest on the African continent.  The opposition to him comes, paradoxically, both from reactionary traditional Islamists on the one hand, who consider him a heretic for his relatively progressive views, and Westernized beneficiaries of modernization on the other hand, who are embarrassed by the Qaddafi image and want still more modernization.  And there are other tensions that may lead to civil war and even a breakup of the country along geographic lines.

So far, the dogs of war are sniffing around for more bloodshed than has actually occurred.  Indeed, the US escalated the Kosovo conflict in order to "have to intervene", and the same risks happening now with regard to Libya, where Western ignorance of what they would be doing is even greater.

The Chavez proposal for neutral mediation to avert catastrophe is the way of wisdom.  But in NATOland, the very notion of solving problems by peaceful mediation rather than by force seems to have evaporated.

 

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. She can be reached at  diana.josto@yahoo.fr