A Decent Discussion of the Kosovo Question and Clark

Can it be had?

A recent thread which was deemed inflammatory in its title was locked for that infraction.

I would like for the subject to be discussed, if possible, without inflammation or without it being flamebait. I therefore propose that we discuss the merits of the claims made in an intelligent way.

I assume that this may be impossible, but it is a really critical question to me, because my views on Clark are in the balance.

I confess that I know almost nothing about Kosovo. I also know almost nothing about Milosevic or what happened there.

So I want to be educated by those who know more than me.

I know a hell of a lot on a lot of subjects. But this is not one of them. So I have no way of sorting out the facts about Kosovo.

The last thread locked on this subject referred to a website which was denigrated and deemed insidious and practically evil. Again, I have no idea what the truth on these matters is, so I want factual and evidentiary input on the subject.

I did a littrle research to see what I could find and I remember reading about this when the wars in eastern Europe began.

It is a place to start, I think: did NATO and the IMF CREATE the wars for neocolonialist purposes? Was Clark their main operative under Clinton to consolidate western corporate hegemony there?

I really feel like DU could help me figure it out.

Thanks.

start here and help me:


http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/62/022.html

It was pretty civil.

I could suggest a number of books on the topic if you are sincerely interested and not simply looking to perform a sideways attack on Clark. There are also a host of online sources which some quick googling should reveal.

Why ask us do your research for you?

There was no name spewing no nothing. It was great. No Clark is a "war criminal" and you are a Milosevic apologist. It was pretty good stuff.

It is a subject we need to be educated about whatever we feel about Dean or Clark: we need the facts on the allegations re: the war criminal stuff and not just the hype.

We also need to be able to discuss it without it getting locked.

That serves no one.

I really want to get some perspective (with details) on the article I posted and its author.

He seems to be admiored by some here and I suppose reviled by others.

Is he a reliable source? Is he a Larouchian? What?

I had heard that a lot of what happened in Kosovo etc was really the nwo global grip of the corporations.

But I honestly want more unbiased info. That is all.

It's called "Kosovo: War and Revenge" by Tim Judah. He explains the background and history of Kosovo very clearly, as well as an excellent accounting of what went down there.

I mean, is there any explanation related to the various economic powers operating and whether a perspective like Chossudovsky's is valid or not?

Everyone is inserting their own bias into that analysis, for good or ill reasons.

Misha Glenny's books try to see the situation through the eyes of a journalist, that might be the closest to an objective account. But if you're looking for a denuciation of U.S. imperialism, you're not going to find it there.

He is professor of economics, University of Ottawa.
http://www.socialsciences.uottawa.ca/eco/eng/profdetails.asp?login=mchossudovsky

I did read his book "the globalization of poverty" first and it seems to me one of the best books about the policies of the Worldbank and the IMF. He origines from Chile and was a young student for economics during the CIA-supported revolt against Allende and the take-over by the fashist Pinochet-regime in Chile. Might explain a lot about his views.
What has surprised me about his book is that it is nearly free of theory, he just painfully adds facts and facts about one country after the other.
On Human Rights Day, 10 December 2003, Michel Chossudovsky was awarded The 2003 Human's Rights Prize of the Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and Human Dignity (GBM) in Berlin, Germany.
The things, he writes about Yuguslavia, esp. the years before the war, seem to be well-founded.

Another interesting link about the Kosovo-war:
http://www.counterpunch.org/gowan.html

Some people and organisations, who raised critical questions and doubt the offical-US-version:

Sean Gervassi, Diana Johnstone, Gregory Elich, Nicholas Stavrous, Michel Collon, Raju Thomas, and Michel Chossudovsky.

The European Community's Commission on Women's Rights, the OSCE and its Kosovo Verification Mission, the UN War Crimes Commission, and various other UN commissions, various State Department reports, the German Foreign Office and German Defense Ministry reports, and the International Red Cross.

Members of the U.S. Congress who visited the Balkans, a former State Department official under the Bush administration, a former deputy commander of the U.S. European command, several UN and NATO generals and international negotiators, Spanish air force pilots, forensic teams from various countries, and UN monitors who offer revelations that contradict the picture drawn by the U.S. officialdom.

Hello from Germany,
Dirk

Seattle and beyond: disarming the NWO (Professor Chossudovsky):
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/jan2000/chos-j15.shtml

A reply to Professor Chossudovsky's critique of globalization:

Part 1: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/feb2000/cho1-f21.shtml
Part 2: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/feb2000/chos2-f23.shtml
Part 3: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/feb2000/chos-f25.shtml

But apart from this question, his book "the globalisation of poverty" is very very good. And he doesn't seem to feel obliged to offer a solution like many other leftists do.

"To reverse the tide of war, military bases must be closed down, the war machine (namely the production of advanced weapons systems like WMDs) must be stopped and the burgeoning police state must be dismantled. More generally we must reverse the "free market" reforms, dismantle the institutions of global capitalism and disarm financial markets.

The struggle must be broad-based and democratic encompassing all sectors of society at all levels, in all countries, uniting in a major thrust: workers, farmers, independent producers, small businesses, professionals, artists, civil servants, members of the clergy, students and intellectuals.

The antiwar and anti-globalisation movements must be integrated into a single worldwide movement. People must be united across sectors, "single issue" groups must join hands in a common and collective understanding on how the New World Order destroys and impoverishes.

The globalization of this struggle is fundamental, requiring a degree of solidarity and internationalism unprecedented in world history. This global economic system feeds on social divisiveness between and within countries. Unity of purpose and worldwide coordination among diverse groups and social movements is crucial. A major thrust is required which brings together social movements in all major regions of the world in a common pursuit and commitment to the elimination of poverty and a lasting world peace."
This was the last part of his speech in Berlin, Germany, on the 10th of december.
Dirk

The struggle must be broad-based and democratic encompassing all sectors of society at all levels, in all countries, uniting in a major thrust: workers, farmers, independent producers, small businesses, professionals, artists, civil servants, members of the clergy, students and intellectuals.

A grand sweeping vision that won't, in my opinion, ever come to fruition. The binding of people on socio-economic commonality is interesting in theory but has never proven to be successful. Religion, history, and race play as big a part in why we remain as we do today.

This list is not a good medium for giving anything but a cursory background on the Balkans. You are going to have to take a look at some of the literature out there. Not only do you have to look at a number of sources, you need to read those sources with a critical eye.

Anyone have thoughts on him and his website?

so I'm not much help there. I know that smarter people than me on Doug Henwood's Left Business Observer list and other places have raised eyebrows concerning the fact that C has not really had a bad thing to say about Milosevic and the that C has been willing to hang with some far right elements.

I'm not saying that to slam him, I'm just saying that my opinion of the guy has been formed largely by what others have said.

Dirk

Perhaps I read it too fast but it seems to me to be a critique of the ways in which the Titoist Yugoslavian economy and state was brought to its economic knees.

Not exactly a new story, or an uncommon one.

The events that involve Clark, however, seem to have taken place somewhat later than the era referenced in the piece. At the time of the intervention the disintegration of the Balkans was well under way and the critique of the intervention here in the US, and especially among many Republicans well known to those on the board, was largely based on a reluctance to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations and engage in "nation building" where our national interests were not directly challenged.

Clark fought a war. He was not necessarily reponsbible for the events that made that war necessary.

for the conflict and the role the US monetary powers played in making it happen.

If the war was manufactured for imperialist purposes and was NOT really based on ethnic conflicts, then the assertion that the genocide was purely just an age old ethnic conflict is bullshit and the justifications for Clark's actions is diminished or actually fraudulent. But that is the question I am curious about.

If the genocide was NOT purely just an age old ethnic conflict, does that mean it wasn't genocide? If everything up to the intervention to stop the genocide was a secret plot by the Carlyle Group, does that mean that Clinton's intervention to stop it was wrong?

It seems to me that stepping up and trying to stop the death of a million or so Albanian Kosovars is a pretty good deal, even if the situation had its roots in something malignant by international bankers.

And if you don't mind, in yet another "objective" thread you came back pretty strong with the "if", "then" construction, painting Clark's involvement as possibly "diminished or actually fraudulent"

I assume you will accept the proposition that the men, women and children on the ground were not privy to the high level conspiracy you refer to.

Question: Did you ever hear of the Iron Curtain? the cold war? the USSR? ballistic missles with nuclear warheads? the KGB? the Kremlin?

Reason I ask is you seem to ignore that small geo-political backdrop in the way you phrase your comments. (similar to other posts I have seen in the last day or so)

If... the policies of our government helped hasten the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and effectively removed the threat of a First strike against the US or NATO by the East...and resulted in economic upheaveal which was evident in Yugoslavia... then do you feel that we (US) acted immorally or illegally?

what do you mean by manufactured?

Do you beleive that ethnicity played no part in the atrocities in the Balkans?

I'm not even going to ask what you think of Clark, your innuendo reveals all.

which is supposed to be a somewhat factual (but probably embellished) story about the discovery of the ethnic cleansing. You could always rent that as part of your reasearch, if for nothing else than it's a really good movie.

I found it for you. The testimony is plentiful, although it looks to be a couple of weeks behind. Anyhow, you should be able to get a much clearer and more impartial view by reading the testimony. Here ya go:

http://www.un.org/icty/milosevic/

Click on the testimony link to pull up over 2 years worth of stuff.

The Current Bombings: Behind the Rhetoric By Noam Chomsky

(("keeping to facts that are not seriously contested". ))

<reluctant snip>

I will skip other examples of (I) and (II), which abound, and also much more serious contemporary atrocities, such as the huge slaughter of Iraqi civilians by means of a particularly vicious form of biological warfare -- "a very hard choice," Madeleine Albright commented on national TV in 1996 when asked for her reaction to the killing of half a million Iraqi children in 5 years, but "we think the price is worth it." Current estimates remain about 5000 children killed a month, and the price is still "worth it." These and other examples might also be kept in mind when we read awed rhetoric about how the "moral compass" of the Clinton Administration is at last functioning properly, as the Kosovo example illustrates.
Just what does the example illustrate? The threat of NATO bombing, predictably, led to a sharp escalation of atrocities by the Serbian Army and paramilitaries, and to the departure of international observers, which of course had the same effect. Commanding General Wesley Clark declared that it was "entirely predictable" that Serbian terror and violence would intensify after the NATO bombing, exactly as happened. The terror for the first time reached the capital city of Pristina, and there are credible reports of large-scale destruction of villages, assassinations, generation of an enormous refugee flow, perhaps an effort to expel a good part of the Albanian population -- all an "entirely predictable" consequence of the threat and then the use of force, as General Clark rightly observes.
Kosovo is therefore another illustration of (I): try to escalate the violence, with exactly that expectation.
To find examples illustrating (III) is all too easy, at least if we keep to official rhetoric. The major recent academic study of "humanitarian intervention," by Sean Murphy, reviews the record after the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928 which outlawed war, and then since the UN Charter, which strengthened and articulated these provisions. In the first phase, he writes, the most prominent examples of "humanitarian intervention" were Japan's attack on Manchuria, Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, and Hitler's occupation of parts of Czechoslovakia. All were accompanied by highly uplifting humanitarian rhetoric, and factual justifications as well. <snip>

<snip>

Despite the desperate efforts of ideologues to prove that circles are square, there is no serious doubt that the NATO bombings further undermine what remains of the fragile structure of international law. The US made that entirely clear in the discussions leading to the NATO decision. Apart from the UK (by now, about as much of an independent actor as the Ukraine was in the pre-Gorbachev years), NATO countries were skeptical of US policy, and were particularly annoyed by Secretary of State Albright's "saber-rattling" (Kevin Cullen, Boston Globe, Feb. 22). Today, the more closely one approaches the conflicted region, the greater the opposition to Washington's insistence on force, even within NATO (Greece and Italy). France had called for a UN Security Council resolution to authorize deployment of NATO peacekeepers. The US flatly refused, insisting on "its stand that NATO should be able to act independently of the United Nations," State Department officials explained. The US refused to permit the "neuralgic word `authorize'" to appear in the final NATO statement, unwilling to concede any authority to the UN Charter and international law; only the word "endorse" was permitted (Jane Perlez, NYT, Feb. 11). <snip>

<snip>

While the Reaganites broke new ground, under Clinton the defiance of world order has become so extreme as to be of concern even to hawkish policy analysts. In the current issue of the leading establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington warns that Washington is treading a dangerous course. In the eyes of much of the world -- probably most of the world, he suggests -- the US is "becoming the rogue superpower," considered "the single greatest external threat to their societies." <snip>

<snip>

http://www.cin.org/archives/cinjustann/199904/0008.html

Michael Parenti

To Kill A Nation:
The Attack on Yugoslavia
http://free.freespeech.org/americanstateterrorism/yugoslavia/ToKillANation.html

The Demonization of Slobodan Milosevic
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Milosevic.html

Yugoslav Sojourn: Notes from the Other Side, January 2000
http://www.michaelparenti.org/YugoslavSojourn.html

The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia, November 1999
http://www.michaelparenti.org/yugoslavia.html

---

Howard Zinn

Their Atrocities--and Ours, by Howard Zinn in the July '99 issue ...
http://www.progressive.org/zinn9907.htm

The Deadly Semantics of NATO Bombings
http://free.freespeech.org/evolution/koso2.html

see also...

CommonDreams Articles
http://www.commondreams.org/kosovo/kosovo.htm

:hi:

peace

I did just dare to post an article of this guy on DU.
Now I found myself exactly in the middle of the axis of evil, with Hitler to my right and Saddam to my left.


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=103&topic_id=26391#26415

Now choose, if you're with me or one of them. No, please don't choose:-)
Hi from Germany,
Dirk

and that gets plenty of folks nervous ;->

:hi:

peace

and present things in highly inflammatory ways. They, especially Parenti, are not good sources, simply because they will distort and slant to fit a political agenda, just like Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity.

is very distorted versions of history and world events. He sounds real smart but is deliberatly deceptive. i wrote examples in a different post.

Here are some truly humanist Marxist progressives who know what they're talking about with Parenti, whose willingness to turn a blind eye to genocide in order to make his theories on Western imperialism line up a little better is little short of disgusting. The saddest part is that Milosevic isn't even the defender of socialism against Western capital that his ridiculous defenders make him out to be. He privatized the former Yugoslavia's state-run industries as soon as he took over and very willingly dealt with the IMF and the WTO:

Michael Parenti, apologist for Stalinism

Divorcing Marxism from freedom all too easily leads to lending support to tyrants who claim the label "socialist." In a letter to the SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN (3/21/01), Michael Parenti claims a nostalgia for "the guaranteed income, free education, medical care and affordable housing" of the Milosevic era, and dismisses allegations of ethnic cleansing, rape camps and mass atrocities. He contends that only 70 bodies have been recovered from the supposed massacre of Srebrenica. This last contention openly conflicts with the report by the UN Commission on Human Rights on Srebrenica, issued 11/15/99, which provided pages and pages of evidence on the massacre, including an account by one Croat member of the Bosnian Serb Army, Drazen Erdemovic, whose unit by itself executed over 1,000 Muslim men and boys on the Pilica state farm. It is available on the Internet from the Commission's website:
www.unhchr.ch/

Milosevic started out as a major bank official. As Serbia's leader, he was the architect of savage austerity measures imposed upon working people, a policy which implemented the demands of the IMF and international capital. This led to violent protests by workers, including an attack on the Yugoslav parliament building in July 1988, and mass rioting in the streets of Belgrade in March 1991, as well as widespread strikes in which people from all ethnic backgrounds cooperated on the basis of class interests. The response of Milosevic, and other bureaucrats such as the leaders of Croatia and Bosnia, was to fan the flames of ethnic strife. The U.S. government initially supported Milosevic, on the basis of his willingness to enforce IMF policies, and only turned on him when his regime was deemed unstable.

Milosevic's rule led to mass protests within Yugoslavia in late '96-early '97, after he tried to overturn by force the results of opposition victories in local elections. He retreated, briefly, then resorted to escalating repression in Kosovo. In May 2000, his government suppressed what was left of independent media, including radio station B-92, the first station outside the U.S. to send a message of support to the KPFA staff during the July 1999 Pacifica occupation. Meanwhile, Parenti was on "Flashpoints," describing the Yugoslav opposition as a creature of the CIA. He likewise ignored the murder of several publishers of opposition newspapers.

Parenti consistently downplays the extent of Joseph Stalin's crimes. He recently claimed on KPFA that the number in the Gulags may have been as low as in the thousands. And he dismisses counts of victims in the millions, presented by the likes of Russian Marxist Roy Medvedev, as exaggerations and propaganda.

happens ALL the time.

i take it with a huge grain of salt.

peace

You cannot possibly get an accurate look at history or politics coming from extremists like Chomsky and Zinn and outright liars like Michael parenti. Chomsky's works are so biased, slanted and the facts are so distorted that I cannot even read him. I tried to read Zinn once, but his version of the Civil war seemed to be written by someone on another planet.

Michael parenti is utterly vile. his works are disgusting communist apologia and so full of lies and factual errors that they are worthless for any purpose. At least chomsky can make some good points about power, money, media and society. Parenti is a just Bolshevik. People who wrote for Pravda or Ivestiya never made the kind of nonsense he puts out.

If you question Iraq... then you're a saddam supporter and unamerican.

If you question kosovo... then you're a Slobo supporter and unamerican.


If it was wrong for Bush to murder civilians to stop Saddam from killig his own people... then it was wrong for Clark to kill civilians to stop Slobo from killing his own people.

And the fact is the air campaign did not stop a damn thing.

Slobo was kicked out after the russians pulled their support, but if Clark had gotten his way, we'd have pissed off the russians and backed them into a defensive combative position that would have made that impossible.

There is no question of the fact that Clark gave an order that was refused, and his own damn government backed up the british officer's refusal of the order. When your own government supports another government's officer's refusal of your orders, you're time as a commader is over.

One, as I have shown, you don't know squat about the Pristina Airport incident.

"When your own government supports another government's officer's refusal of your orders, you're time as a commader is over."

Second, the practice of "red carding" an order that involves your own troops has been a long standing one within NATO. And for the alliance to hold together, someone has to back down when such a disagreement occurs.

"If it was wrong for Bush to murder civilians to stop Saddam from killig his own people... then it was wrong for Clark to kill civilians to stop Slobo from killing his own people."

Do the words "imminent threat" mean anything to you? If it could be reaonably shown that Saddam was on the brink of murdering or expelling 1.5 million of his own people, THEN IT WOULD HAVE BEEN RIGHT FOR BUSH TO HAVE INTERVENED AND INFLICTED CIVILIAN CASUALTIES TO KEEP HIM FROM MURDERING THOSE PEOPLE. I would have supported such an intervention, as would, I think, most right thinking people. People who think otherwise do not, I think, have a morally defensible view of international justice.

"And the fact is the air campaign did not stop a damn thing."

Not according to Human Rights Watch, the joint independent studies by the associations of American and European international lawyers, and Physicians for Human Rights, all of whom found that Milosevic had been plannning and started the expulsions and killings well before the beginning of the NATO intervention.

and also by falsely depicting Milosevic as a valiant socialist anti-capitalist when he's actually just a power-hungry authoritarian, as well as denying both Slobo's massacres and trying to minimize Stalin's massacres, then, yeah, that person's probably a Stalinist.

and also by falsely depicting Milosevic as a valiant socialist anti-capitalist when he's actually just a power-hungry authoritarian, as well as denying both Slobo's massacres and trying to minimize Stalin's massacres, then, yeah, that person's probably a Stalinist.

and pointing out that trying to distort to minimize Stalin's atrocities is bad. Then, yeah, I guess that happens.

it is utterly unbelievable how far he will go to defend the Soviets. He even asserts that 'Lenin overthrew the tsar' which is pure fiction as Lenin was in Switzerland when the Tsar voluntarily abdicated in March 1917.

his writings are so full of factual errors that they should be dismissed out of hand. Against Empire, which i unfortunately own, is laughable.

"Administration is at last functioning properly, as the Kosovo example illustrates.
Just what does the example illustrate? The threat of NATO bombing, predictably, led to a sharp escalation of atrocities by the Serbian Army and paramilitaries, and to the departure of international observers, which of course had the same effect."

Okay so the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OCSE) launches the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) with NATO backing(1). Then in a mid-January Offensive launched by the Serbs the OCSE realized that the continued negotiations of the KVM led to nothing and deemed the mission a failure. So violence erupted long before the international observers (KVM) had left.

"the most prominent examples of "humanitarian intervention" were Japan's attack on Manchuria, Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, and Hitler's occupation of parts of Czechoslovakia. All were accompanied by highly uplifting humanitarian rhetoric, and factual justifications as well. "

Anybody that still thinks that Chomsky is being objective after that paragraph must wear blinders.
NATO had Security Council resolutions 1199 and 1203 to fall back on to justify the air campaign.
Even so former State Department Official James Hooper expressed his fear that NATO had lost its bargaining power by lacking determination. "“What happened here is when NATO threatens force, it has to be prepared to use force, if it's called on that. This is the third time that Mr. Milosevic has called NATO's bluff, beginning with the attack on February 28th of this year."
These bluffs, i.e. threatening force and not following through with it should be interpreted as an obvious attempt by NATO to keep military force as a last resort. Comparing NATO to a invading army is ridiculous to say the least.

NATO in Oct 1998 noted that already 400,000 refugees had fled Kosovo
the OCSE said it was a minimum of 300,000.

The UN, NATO, the OCSE, the EU etc. had a moral responsibility to stop the ethnic cleansing and forced deportation of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

If you want to hear testimony on the facts just go ahead and mosey over to Cspan and watch Clarks press conference yesterday and listen to the two speakers that open for him...

(1) as endorsed by The Security Council. Security Council Resolution. "peaceful Resolution of the Problem of Kosovo, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia," RESOLUTION 1203. S/RES/1203 (1998). New York: United Nations, 24 October 1998. 3937th meeting.

In the article I linked (once again I plead, unusually, almost total ignorance of the facts on the ground, except that Clark's assertion that depleted uranium is "safe" is an abhorrent crime in my opinion)

Excerpt from article cited in original post:



"...Following a pattern set early on, Western public opinion has been misled. The conventional wisdom holds that the plight of the Balkans is the outcome of an "aggressive nationalism," the inevitable result of deep-seated ethnic and religious tensions rooted in history (1). Likewise, commentators cite "Balkans power-plays" and the clash of political personalities to explain the conflicts.(2)

"Lost in the barrage of images and self-serving analyses are the economic and social causes of the conflict. The deep- seated economic crisis which preceded the civil war is long forgotten. The strategic interests of Germany and the US in laying the groundwork for the disintegration of Yugoslavia go unmentioned, as does the role of external creditors and international financial institutions. In the eyes of the global media, Western powers bear no responsibility for the impoverishment and destruction of a nation of 24 million people.

"But through their domination of the global financial system, the Western powers, in pursuit of national and collective strategic interests, helped bring the Yugoslav economy to its knees and stirred its simmering ethnic and social conflicts. Now it is the turn of Yugoslavia's war-ravaged successor states to feel the tender mercies of the international financial community.

"As the world focuses on troop movements and cease-fires, the international financial institutions are busily collecting former Yugoslavia's external debt from its remnant states, while transforming the Balkans into a safehaven for free enterprise. With a Bosnian peace settlement holding under NATO guns, the West has unveiled a "reconstruction" program that strips that brutalized country of sovereignty to a degree not seen in Europe since the end of World War II. It consists largely of making Bosnia a divided territory under NATO military occupation and Western administration."

Is there any validity to this position? Is there therefore any validity to the claim that Clark was a "pawn" of the west which actually created the severity of the conflict for economic and strategic purposes?

This is the crux of the issue I raise about Clark: is he a tool of a corrupt policy and have we been misled about the roots of this conflict by wall street and the architects of the NWO as asserted at the website I linked to?

...to this one. There would never have been the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Rwanda had it not been the intentional policy of European colonial powers to set up their colonies in a manner that totally disregarded natural ethnic population groupings and nations. They wanted to play one group off against the next to make it easier for them to dominate and exploit. The current national borders of Rwanda were a manipulated monstrocity with Hutu and Tutsi peoples artificailly thrown together. That is history.

The world community essentially stood by and did nothing when Hutu extremists eventually massacred hundreds of thousands of Tutsi. I don't care who did what to set up the conditions for that violence, simply standing by and allowing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians to be murdered comes damn close to complicity in genoicide in my book. You know the proverb, two wrongs don't make a right.

like any good soilder, no?

i think he can kick bush's a$$ though if he gets the vote which is priority number 1 for me right now - as far as my political 'life' goes

:hi:

peace

Another Way For Kosovo?
by Noam Chomsky

Editor's Introduction: On the night of 24-25 March 1999 NATO unleashed an air attack on Yugoslavia that lasted for 78 days. How should the operation be viewed one year on? The suffering of the Kosovar Albanians has ended and the refugees have returned to their homes - more often than not destroyed - but Kosovo's Serbs and Gypsies have in turn been forced to leave. Mitrovica, the last great multiethnic city, is the scene of fearsome clashes. And Slobodan Milosevic is still in power in Belgrade. Such a failure means the real nature of this war needs to be examined. The "genocide" of the Kosovar Albanians had to be stopped. But was it not a question of the United States using NATO to imposing its grip on the Balkans? Which would explain why the allies stubbornly refused any diplomatic solution.


Noam Chomsky:

Kosovo was an extremely ugly place last year. About 2000 people were killed according to NATO, mostly Albanians, in the course of a bitter struggle that began in February with Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) actions that the United States denounced as "terrorism" and a brutal Serb response. By summer the KLA had taken over about 40% of the province, eliciting a vicious reaction by Serb security forces and paramilitaries, targeting the civilian population. According to Albanian Kosovar legal adviser Marc Weller, "within a few days the number of displaced had again risen to over 200,000," figures that conform roughly to US intelligence reports (1). Suppose the monitors had not been withdrawn in preparation for the bombing and diplomatic efforts had been pursued. Were such options feasible? Would they have led to an even worse outcome, or perhaps a better one? Since NATO refused to entertain this possibility, we cannot know. But we can at least consider the known facts, and ask what they suggest.

Could the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) monitors of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have been left in place, preferably strengthened? That seems possible, particularly in the light of the immediate condemnation of the withdrawal by the Serb National Assembly. No argument has been advanced to suggest that the reported increase in atrocities after their withdrawal would have taken place even had they remained, let alone the vast escalation that was the predicted consequence of the bombing signalled by the withdrawal. NATO also made little effort to pursue other peaceful means; even an oil embargo, the core of any serious sanctions regime, was not considered until after the bombing.

The most important question, however, has to do with the diplomatic options. Two proposals were on the table on the eve of the bombing. One was the Rambouillet accord, presented to Serbia as an ultimatum. The second was Serbia's position, formulated in its 15 March 1999 "Revised Draft Agreement" and the Serb National Assembly Resolution of 23 March 1999 (2). A serious concern for protecting Kosovars might well have brought into consideration other options as well, including, perhaps, something like the 1992-93 proposal of the Serbian president of Yugoslavia, Dobrica Cosic, that Kosovo be partitioned, separating itself from Serbia apart from "a number of Serbian enclaves" (3). At the time the proposal was rejected by Ibrahim Rugova's Republic of Kosovo, which had declared independence and set up a parallel government; but it might have served as a basis for negotiation in the different circumstances of early 1999. Let us, however, keep to the two official positions of late March: the Rambouillet ultimatum and the Serb Resolution.

<snip about these two options that were pointedly ignored by the US/UK>

<snip about the media's complicity of total silence>

Despite official efforts to prevent public awareness of what was happening, the documents were available to any news media that chose to pursue the matter. In the US the extreme (and plainly irrelevant) demand for virtual NATO occupation of the FRY received its first mention at a NATO briefing of 26 April, when a question was raised about it but was quickly dismissed and not pursued. The facts were reported as soon as the demands had been formally withdrawn and had become irrelevant to democratic choice. Immediately after the announcement of the peace accords of 3 June the press quoted the crucial passages of the "take it or leave it" Rambouillet ultimatum, noting that they required that "a purely NATO force was to be given full permission to go anywhere it wanted in Yugoslavia, immune from any legal process," and that "NATO-led troops would have had virtually free access across Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo" (7).

<snip about the 78 days of bombing negotiations aka "capitulation under the bombs">

Scraps of paper

NATO had no intention of living up to the scraps of paper it had signed, and moved at once to violate them, implementing a military occupation of Kosovo under NATO command. When Serbia and Russia insisted on the terms of the formal agreements, they were castigated for their deceit, and bombing was renewed to bring them to heel. On 7 June NATO planes again bombed the oil refineries in Novi Sad and Pancevo, both centres of opposition to Milosevic. The Pancevo refinery burst into flames, releasing a huge cloud of toxic fumes, shown in a photo accompanying a New York Times story of 14 July that discussed the severe economic and health effects. The bombing itself was not reported, though it was covered by wire services (8).

<snip>

http://www.commondreams.org/views/031400-107.htm

I love the man and own many of his books but relying on him as your main, if not only source, is a bad way to argue something.

The guy is brilliant, but he has some serious biases.

Glad you like him. He was a personal friend of my father's and I hold him in the highest esteem. Chomsky sees things in a manner that most people never can because it's too mind-boggling to put it together. I'm very curious what personal biases you're referring to because I've never noticed any.

There is a point you get too when you've tracked so much that you lose people who aren't looking at the whole and I know that happens with a lot of people. Not saying you're one of them, just wondering why you think that.

I personally think that he has a preconcieved idea about America's role in foreign affairs, then tries to prove that notion.

I do not consider him to be anti-American or anything along those lines, but I always get the feeling that he seems to look at every major foreign policy event/issue with the idea that America's role in the event or our policy on the issue is flawed and is directly influenced by corporate needs or the Military-Industrial Complex.

While I feel that many of the last 30 years worth of events/wars/conflicts can be included in his criticisms, I believe that he refuses to, or is not able to, see that our role in the world is frequently positive.

I like him and think he is a very important source of information. He just needs to be balanced with other, and opposing, viewpoints.

----

Have you read "Hegemony or Survival" yet?

I have heard some very good things about it.

I haven't read "Hegemony or Survival" yet; the name alone attracts me. Your critique of Chomsky is understandable, even justifiable in many ways. I used to think the same thing about both him and my father until I lived overseas and started voraciously reading and asking very pointed questions. I gained a totally different perspective from living in Germany (Berlin) for over a decade and then in Central America. In both places I read/watched the US media, the European media and the local media (in C.A.); I was shocked at the difference between what my own eyes were seeing and the stark difference in the accounts of the French & German media vs the US media. Already the format is different. Over here it's pure entertainment- especially on TV. I would kill right now to have a good solid 30 minute German-syle News session. I was in France for a while at the beginning of this Iraq war. What they were getting on TV in half an hour was what it took me hours, despite my speed-reading skills, to get at DU or on my other "concentrated" news sites. Now I have CNN on for 6 hour stretches as I post/read DU and still am not aware of half the things my European friends are getting from their media. The news barely matches except with our good friends the British who are basically on the same imperialistic adventure as us (my opinion).

All the good I see that America does throughout the world is done by a few independent organizations and mostly by independent individuals.

When I lived in Haiti, I couldn't believe the spin in our news about all the good the American government was doing. It literally made me sick because on the ground what I saw were the exploited Haitians (90% of the population) toiling away in American sweat-shops and the US government, under both Dem and Rep administrations, pulling every trick in the book to ensure those sweat-shops were protected and forced upon a population that didn't want them. One day, when you want to cry, I'll tell you about the US-demanded/forced slaughter of the indigenous swine that ensured the lively-hood of so many peasants who were needed to man the sweat-shops or work in the sugar fields (have you read the book Bitter Sugar? Excellent book- you will never ever throw sugar away again!). The things that went on were down-right criminal but all excused & explained under the pretext of improving their way of life. Very transparent but most of all very heart-breaking. Our way of life is so selfish that we don't even realize all the pain and suffering it takes to keep us in this this style.

I'm a Dem because I live under a two-party system and believe that the Dems are marginally better than the Republicans (in the grand scheme of things, I find the differences marginal) but both parties demand this type of exploitation of other people's resources because otherwise our way of life (for the average man) would be a wee bit less cushy and the wealthy elite, always wanting, needing more, would have to live like normal people and, gasp, work. Sorry this isn't more complete; it's past 2AM, I have to work in the morning and I'm very tired tonight. Thanks

I read many left wing writers (and from the right as well) and balance it with pure history to gain a sense of balance.
Chomsky is very, very useful for some ways. He makes an excellent devils advocate.

Not good at all. An clear sign of tunnel vision and a deficit of humanity that is the result of a totalizing critique.

I've heard the same rumors, but I believe they were taken out of context or asre false.

Chomsky at least acknowledges that the KR are bad NOW, but he can't deny that he glossed over their atrocities previously, because it was useful for illustrating a point.

Check out this very fair and detailed analysis from a site devoted to studying Cambodia--as a bonus, its also a meditation on the nature of propadanda/counterpropaganda, a necessary read for people who cite polemicists like Chomsky and Zinn and nuts like Parenti.

You have made my insomnia worthwhile tonight.

This piece presents an excellent dissection of both particular and persistent flaws in Prof. Chomsky's ouvre. Understanding the fellow is himself a propagandist of no mean caliber is essential to comprehending both his work and his influence.

Some people quote Chomsky and Zinn like the bible. I think they are so biased and dogmatic that they come off like Ann Coulter to me.

in the same Ann Coulter is biased to the right.

If I read Chomsky's accounts of events that i know about, they do not even resemble the facts. If an event features an attempted Communist revolution, organized by Stalin, in greece in 1947-1948, Chomsky would say that 'progressive democrats' (stalinists) tried to bring justice and reform to Greece but were stopped by the US and Greek 'fascists' (meaning everyone from Royalists to Democrats).
\
His accounts of the elections of 1948 in italy are even worse. He refers to the christian Democrats as 'Fascists' even though their leadership had been anti-Mussolini and the Communists as 'progressive reformers dedicated to democracy' (Hard line Stalinists funded by the comintern). He even refers to the Italian regular police as the 'Fascist police' as if they were hard core brownshirt militias.

His take on many other events is truly awful and biased. It always follows the same line.

When he was talking about Korea between WWII and 1950, he makes incredible errors. He asserts that the US went around massacring progressives (stalinists) and does not even mention the circumstances (a usual Chomsky ploy). The fact is that North korea did not have proper food or supplies so they sent military raids into South korea. they also set up a network of both NK communists and SK agents to conduct guerilla war against the South korean government and it's supporters. Chomsky mentions none of this, and seems to forget that the US pulled the military outh of Korea, did not send large amounts of military aid to SK, and that the UN ran SK on a day to day basis. South Korea's military barely could be called a military because the US did not wish to provoke the communists. It was the communists that started the military build up on the peninsula and it was not until the NK invasion that the US reciprocated


as you can see, there is a pattern where he only tells part of the story, uses loaded labels to create an impression, and slants history till it says what he wants it to say.

That is bias, and that is why i do not trust 'politically motivated' histories.

but rather they attack the source.

on Kosovo. But I have read other stuff, and especially parenti is in no way reliable and one can never be sure if he is even telling the truth.
His book 'Against Empire' is full of outright lies, inexcusable mistakes and a general all pervasive bias.
I do not have it with me, but I can remember several major factual errors from the book:
1. That Lenin overthrew the Tsar and was dedicated to progressive socialism (utter tripe)
2. That the US invaded Grenada to overthrow the elected leadership. (In fact the elected leadership was overthrown in a Cuban backed military coup, and the whole island was on 24 hour curfew, with 1000 American citizens held there)
3. The Marxist-leninist Sandanistas were 'christian democrats'. I guess Parenti did not read of their persecution of the churches.

We all consider the source as well as the substance.

The quoted sources are not credible - thus the substance they provide is not credible.

shows that Parenti gets facts about Yugoslavia and its relationship to Western capitalism completely wrong, THEN adds the motivational speculations.

Also, note that the person who initially brought up Chomsky and Parenti were citing them as authorities, and not for any empricial evidence they provided. Chomsky and Parenti don't have any strong evidence for their claims: the original writer was trading on their reputation. Therefore it is entirely legitimate to attack their reliability as authorities.

For outright counterevidence of their claims, see the substantial histories Magistrate and I have provided below, which have gone gone completely unrefuted by the anti-intervention folks on this thread. Chomsky and Parenti make some poorly sourced insinuations about Western great power interests; we provide significant evidence of ethnic conflict and Milosevic's active and long-standing aggression AND NATO footdragging precisely because there wasn't much a Western material interest to get involved. You have no response; therefore your arguments are empty.

did NATO and the IMF CREATE the wars for neocolonialist purposes?

Undoubtedly. The destabilization of & war against Yugoslavia were step one of the PNAC plan. Troops all over the place... an undeclared Third World War. We're all over the map, involved on every economic, political, social and military front in yet another was on a noun. This time the noun is terrorism. Al-Queda, Wahabi heretics, Hizbollah, Abu Nidal, Asbat al-Ansar, the Communist Party of Philippines, Columbia's National Liberation Army, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, etc, etc are all elusive components of that noun which justifies our entire Military Industrial Complex which has us overtly deployed in Bosnia, Kosovo, Columbia, The Philippines, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

The war against Yugoslavia was American corporate globalization imposed and maintained by American military, economic, and media domination. It was protested ALL over the world! From Europe people watched aghast at the talking points and the spin because Yugoslavia was no great unknown over there as in the US. There were brave groups in the US that protested it and Veterans for Peace with its heros like S Brian Wilson were front and center of those protests.

The only place it wasn't protested was here. For shame that we allowed the media to lull us into buying the spun myth that this was a "humanitarian intervention" which is nothing more than newspeak for what we once termed double containment.

and how it benefited Clinton or Clark? I'm also curious how American media is making bank on that market?

I think the before mentioned text of Michel Chossudovsky is about the best so far.
I did just found another text, I started to read, but I can't give you any information about it's value, seems to be from serbian people.

http://members.tripod.com/kosovo99/lastfree.htm

I go to bed now, just tired of being called a friend of massmurders and Saddam Hussein, 'cause I don't wanna marry General Clark. What kind of choice...
Good Night,
Dirk

Not at you in particular.

And yes I've actually seen someone defend Milosevic in the name of self-determination. On the other hand the UN needs to get it's act together and get the place self-governing again.

Rambouillet, which required the complete military occupation of Yugoslavia by NATO military forces and their immunity from prosecution for crimes also specified that "the economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles." It allowed "no impediments to the free flow of persons and capital to and from Kosovo."

John Caruso highlights the Economic Provisions of Rambouillet here: http://www.iacenter.org/warcrime/17_econ2.htm

=======

<snip>

In 1999, NATO said it was attacking Yugoslavia to force it to sign the Rambouillet "peace agreement" (even though the Vienna Convention states that any treaty obtained by force or the threat of force is void).

<snip>

During the war, Clinton elaborated: "If we're going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world Europe has got to be the key; that's what this Kosovo thing is all about... It's globalism versus tribalism." ((Quote here:http://usembassy-australia.state.gov/hyper/WF990323/epf203.htm))

<snip>

Yugoslavia had a domestically controlled economy, a strong publicly owned sector, a good (and free) health care system and its own defence industry. It had many employee owned factories -- its population was resisting wholesale privatization. It produced its own pharmaceuticals, aircraft and Yugo automobile. It refused to allow U.S. military bases on its soil. According to the speaker of the Russian Duma: "Yugoslavia annoys NATO because it conducts an independent policy, does not want to join NATO and has an attractive geographic position."

<snip>

In a March 28 New York Times article, Thomas Friedman wrote: "For globalization to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is... The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist " McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

As NATO troops entered Kosovo, the same newspaper announced Kosovo's new currency will be the U.S. dollar or German mark, currencies of the two countries most responsible for Yugoslavia's break-up. And after months of being told that Slobodan Milosevic was the problem, we heard Washington Balkans expert, Daniel Serwer, explain: "It's not a single person that's at issue, there's a regime in place in Belgrade that is incompatible with the kind of economy that the World Bank... has to insist on..."

http://www.davidorchard.com/online/articles-1999/globalism-first.html


You have to wonder why the US and NATO were attempting to mandate a free market economy for Kosovo, if the purpose of Rambouillet was to stop the fighting and protect the civilian population :shrug:

You have to wonder also why behind every country being "democratized" in Eastern Europe and Latin America we see George Soros appropriating those countries resrources. In the case of Kosovo it was the fabulous Trepca mines. Soros' think tank, The International Crisis Group (Yes Clark is on their Board though he's currently listed as being "on leave".)


======
Taking over the Trepca mines: Plans and Propaganda

The International Crisis Group is a high-level think tank supported by financier George Soros. It was set up in 1995, primarily to provide policy guidance to governments involved in the NATO-led reshaping of the Balkans. Its leading figures include top U.S. policy maker Morton Abramowitz, the eminence grise of NATO's new "humanitarian intervention" policy and sponsor of Kosovo Albanian separatists. ((Other illustrious members are former national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinki, Richard Allen (Vice-Chairman) & ex congressman Stephen Solarz who signed the 1998 PNAC letter to Clinton calling for a "comprehensive political and military strategy for brining down Saddam and his regime"))

<snip>

Trepca is a conglomerate of some 40 mines and factories, mostly but not all in Kosovo, notably including Stari Trg, "one of the richest mines in Europe" and the richest in the Balkans, currently shut down, and the Zvecan smelter, located northwest of Mitrovica and still being operated by Serb management. The ICG calls on UNMIK, headed by Bernard Kouchner, to cut through legal disputes over the industry's ownership and take over management of Trepca itself.

http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/Johnstone/howitis.htm

--
You can read the ICG's 1999 paper on the Trepca Mines which ended up in Soros' hands: Trepca: Making Sense of the Labyrinth

================

Voice of America Report:

Wearing surgical face masks, hundreds of NATO
troops seized a smelting factory at the vast Trepca
mines in Kosovo, while outraged workers tried in vain
to stop them. Bernard Kouchner, chief UN
administrator of Kosovo, explained the plant's
pollution could no longer be tolerated. He said it
was endangering everyone, especially pregnant women
and children.

Former NATO Commander General Wesley Clark says
cleaning up Trepca is vital for Kosovo:

/// CLARK ACT ///

Kosovo needs a lot of investment. To get that
investment in there, it needs the right kind of
governance. In the meantime, we do not want to
destroy the environment any more by continuing
activities that are so clearly destructive as
that smelter was. ((Now THAT is funny. Depleted uranium anyone?))

/// END ACT ///

<snip>

It was quite ironic that NATO justified taking
over the factory on the grounds of air
pollution. The amount of water and ground
pollution and even air pollution that was
created by the bombing makes the Trepca mine
pale in comparison.

/// END ACT ///

Susan Blaustein is a senior consultant to the
International Crisis Group, or I-C-G, <blah blah blah snip>

The I-C-G report notes that forceful action by the
international community, rather than protracted
negotiations, usually leads to progress. Cato's Gary
Dempsey sees this calculation behind the Trepca
takeover:

/// DEMPSEY ACT ///

Really what they are doing now with the takeover
of the Trepca mines is laying the economic
groundwork for eventual independence, and over
the past year or so, we have seen them lay the
political groundwork. I think they are just
moving this process along.

/// END ACT ///

Who will eventually own the mines remains unclear
since there is a formidable tangle of claims. Some
critics suspect that international financier George
Soros, who has supported I-C-G, will end up in control
of the complex. Susan Blaustein scoffs at this as one
of many conspiracy theories swirling around the
takeover.

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/2000/kosovo-000829a.htm

It's kind of funny they scoffed at conspiracy theories when you consider that Soros had invested $150 million in an effort to gain control of Trepca's gold, silver, lead, zinc and cadmium, which make the property worth $5 billion. He is now the majority owner of the entire shabang. This is no surprise when you consider that Soros is Carlyle along with the Bush family, Frank Carlucci, James Baker, John Majors...

===

He ((Soros)) raised $US115,000 for Democratic candidate Howard Dean, and backs John Kerry, Wesley Clark and Dick Gephardt.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/11/12/1068329596318.html

"We are the evil empire. Our war in Kosovo is the latest chapter in a century of American imperialism that includes Vietnam, the Gulf War and our shameful, secret wars in Central America."
—Thomas Fleming, editor of the Chronicles


What's in it for Clinton or Clark? The same thing that's in it for all of them. Power.

Your Quote:

During the war, Clinton elaborated: "If we're going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world Europe has got to be the key; that's what this Kosovo thing is all about... It's globalism versus tribalism." ((Quote here: http://usembassy-australia.state.gov/hyper/WF990323/epf203.htm))

Real Quote:

"And I supported the idea that the United States, Canada and our European allies had to take on the new security challenges of Europe of the 21st century, including all these ethnic upheavals on their border. Why? Because if this domestic policy is going to work, we have to be free to pursue it. And if we're going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key. And if we want people to share our burdens of leadership with all the problems that will inevitably crop up, Europe needs to be our partner.

Now, that's what this Kosovo thing is all about. And so I want to talk to you about Kosovo today, but just remember this -- it's about our values. What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolph Hitler earlier? How many people's lives might have been saved? And how many American lives might have been saved?"

1. I quoted the article as it was written

2. I had the courtesy of researching that and posting the link for people so that they could see the thing in its entirety. Did you think I just threw that link in there for fun? Not a very common thing to do is it? Don't worry, this is no surprise.

So no, I don't think so but nice try. If you have the intellectual curiosity you might even go find the speech and listen to it live so you can hear it all.

You see, some people, are not interested in all the fluff. They go straight for the relevant information because important information is usually surrounded by crap fluff so that people won't realize what's going on. David Orchard was one of those people. You did notice though that in this case, the additional words didn't change anything. It still boils down to that's what this Kosovo thing is all about.

IACenter - Ramsey Clark, the war criminal's best friend:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/06/21/clark/

How Ramsey Clark Labored to Protect Nazi Émigrés:
http://emperors-clothes.com/ramsey/ramsey4.htm

If you want to hear the other side read the post below.

Is no defense agains that charge. But we are very grateful that you provided the link to the article, Tinoire, becuase the extra word do change everything. So let's see again what this Kosovo thing is all about:

In foreign policy, what I wanted to do is to say, look, okay the Cold War is over, but we're more interconnected with all parts of the world than ever before -- how are going to create a world that is more peaceful, prosperous, and free?

Now, one of the things that we've had to do was to look at Europe. Why? Because the whole 20th century is, in large measure, the story of slaughter that started in Europe. World War I started in the Balkans -- in Bosnia, next door to Kosovo. World War II engulfed the Balkans. The Cold War saw the Balkans where Kosovo is, at the edge of the communist empire, and the clash of Slavic civilization with European Muslims and others. Now, if we have learned anything after the Cold War, and our memories of World War II, it is that if our country is going to be prosperous and secure, we need a Europe that is safe, secure, free, united, a good partner with us for trading; they're wealthy enough to buy our products; and someone who will share the burdens of taking care of the problems of the world.

We're working hard to have that kind of Europe. I supported the union of the European countries, economically; the union of Germany. I supported very strongly the expansion of NATO. Next month we're going to have all these countries come here. We'll have the largest number of world leaders ever assembled in Washington, D.C., next month for the 50th anniversary of the NATO Summit. And we're bringing in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

And I supported the idea that the United States, Canada and our European allies had to take on the new security challenges of Europe of the 21st century, including all these ethnic upheavals on their border. Why? Because if this domestic policy is going to work, we have to be free to pursue it. And if we're going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key. And if we want people to share our burdens of leadership with all the problems that will inevitably crop up, Europe needs to be our partner.

Now, that's what this Kosovo thing is all about. And so I want to talk to you about Kosovo today, but just remember this -- it's about our values. What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolph Hitler earlier? How many people's lives might have been saved? And how many American lives might have been saved?

What Kosovo is about is about cooperation with Europe and the liberal democratic international community, on issues of security, but also issues related to democratic values, communication, culture, and, yes, commerce. Clinton believes that the spread of peace, democracy, liberal culture, and globalization are connected. So did Kant, Montesquieu, and (more recently) Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Not exactly an inhumane conspiracy.

And, oh, I noticed that seventhson hasn't commented on the histories on the Kosovo conflict posted by myself and Magister. Any thoughts?

because the dogmatists cannot argue facts, only their ideals.

Frankly, I'd rather go four-wheeling or beat my head against the wall than spend my time going round and round with people whose only resort is to either attack the source or rely on specious arguments.

It's been quite humorous to see how credible Liberal sources started being attacked with the advent of one particular candidate on the scene, so I'd rather just post the information and let inquiring DUers and lurkers form their own judgement.

We know which historians and political commentators we trust. We also know what we've witnessed. It will take a lot more than Soros' desire to see Clark as President to discredit men as great as Chomsky and Parenti. Another thing people remember are the discussions we had here before Clark came on the scene, when there was no candidate partisanship involved, and not only was he not esteemed but the entire operation in Yugoslavia was discussed and deemed to be an obscenity. Those discussions and conclusions can't be undone or re-written in a few months.

It's just time management on my part.

to me his histories are deeply flawed and deliberatly deceptive. I have seen this when he reports on things i know well.
Parenti's book 'Against empire' is so full of absolutely, totally inaccurate claims to make it utterly worthless as a political or historical argument.
Parenti is also a hardcore Soviet apologist, and as a person whose family suffered for decades because of that monstrosity, i deeply resent any efforts to cover up the massive, inexcusable war on human rights and civil liberty that occured in that country.

I've already noticed that in LBN and other GD posts and don't hold it against you. You are much more conservative than I am- much more willing to believe that our system is good without really spending too much time on the misery beneath (from other countries) that allows us to live so well.

I was a Sovietologist for 20 years for the government with access to information I am better off forgetting I ever saw. I did, at one time, buy into the US hysteria about the Soviets. With 20/20 hindsight I am now ashamed because I had better mentors who in the end were proven correct and should have known better. I swallowed a very bitter pill there.

You take care and just keep travelling and reading. The travelling is the better option and living abroad is the best one. We live in a little media-controlled vaccuum in the US.

Those of us who were against this war cheered on the French little realizing that the French are almost as bad as we are. If we have to cheer on the French, the butchers of Algeria, simply because they are more level-headed and humane about their exploitation it kind of shows you how low we've fallen.

If this isn't too personal, just how did your family suffer for decades? I spent 10 years in & out of government training, 1:1 with Russians and Ukrainians who came here looking for a better truth, a better life and returned to the Soviet Union, disgusted at the lie that we were and the lies we were pushing. It usually took them about 3 years to discover the utter hypocrisy of our position. They weren't the only ones with whom I saw this. It was the same thing with all sorts of other immigres who came here searching for the great American Dream. It takes about a year or two to realize that it's all Hollywood propaganda and that unless you have money, there is no American Dream because the American Dream IS money- shallow, shallow "let me sell my soul to Mammon" money.

You take care.

then guilty as charged.

"We know which historians and political commentators we trust."

If you are going to rely ENTIRELY on arguments from authority as you do here, then the ONLY way to argue with you is to attack the sources, since you are trading ENTIRELY on their trustworthiness and character and not on the quality of their arguments.

Also, Chomsky and Parenti aren't liberals. Chomsky is a utopian anarchist (he said so at a speech--he actually wasn't bad, although he didn't exactly have the facts on Indonesia right, and he seemed to not be completely "with it" regarding the Internet) and Parenti is a Marxist/Leninist (if I were speaking less charitably, I'd say neo-Stalinist).

Also, Tinoire is a "she."

Besides Tamezsu, nice as you are, you know perfectly well that we have always been at odds. You showed up on this forum at the same time the Draft Clark movement started. We had several decent conversations but you spent most of our conversations spinning for Clark. You are one of the most adept at it, which is why I once greeted you with "So they called in the big guns this time".

From the very beginning of Clark's campaign, you could see the rat tails sticking out all over the place and I called you and other supporters on it each time. I am glad to see that some of the things I called you out on are now have been confirmed by the press and even by some (ex) Clark supporters such as the fact that there was never any real Draft Clark movement or the fact that from the very beginning Soros' money was only intended to benefit one person and that was Clark. Now, thanks to some of Soros' comments, people are beginning to catch on to the poisonous strings attached to that money because he's beginning to get a little frightened that Dean will beat Clark and that the neoliberal capitalist machine may not get quite the right person to sell a war against Putin or the necessity of "surgical strikes" against 'terorists' to the American people.

The quality of Chomsky and Parenti's arguments are fine with me. It is the quality of the arguments of Clark supporters that I am concerned about because for months it hasn't been very good- it's all boiled down to "attack the source".

Clark is a neo-liberal, the worst sort, the sort that will sell you Gay Rights, Abortion, Civil justice and whatever it takes to keep we American people happy but at the same time ensure the imperialist machine can march on raping and plundering the rest of the world with military force. You will never ever convince me that a candidate who wrings his hands saying "Bush was only wrong in his technique" is a real Progressive- especially when he didn't even register as a Democrat until late September 2003 and had, as recently as March 2003, been praising the entire PNAC directory. You will also never ever convince me that a candidate who believes in 'pre-emptively and surgically' striking at terrorist threats no matter where they are found is anything other than a more refined version of Bush (which is exactly what people like Soros & the rest of his Carlyle friends need). I've already seen how much support Clark is getting from Conservatives who are all for crushing the Palestinians and putting countries like Syria back in its place. I also saw all the jubilation and celebrating that Clark supporters here were doing the day Saddaam was "captured" (if you'd like- I'll even share some of the hate mail I got for not being a patriot and not celebrating). I've been thoroughly disgusted that a man many of us protested for that obscene war against Yugoslavia has suddenly metamorphosed into a Democrat simply because "Karl Rove didn't return my call". You are, apparently a pleasant and intelligent person, but we are miles apart in our reasoning and miles apart in how far the US is allowed to go to ensure our cushy way of life.

The US Empire is dying. Not even Wesley Clark can save it. The only thing to do now is to courageously go on to the next step and the sooner the better for us little people. Kucinich brings this message and hope to people who have understood that. Dean brings the message that he will work his damnest to get us back to the Clinton days (but, IMO, it's way too late for that). And what is Clark promising? He's just promising that he will continue with Bush's doctrine but in a much more intelligent and discreet way. And people like you KNOW that. I read your posts absolutely amused at the lengths you'll go to to justify all of Clark's statements and spin them into something resembling a facsimile of liberal thought. It's interesting to see how other Clark supporters are spinning these SAME statements on Conservative boards because it totally contradicts the spin we get here.

I am tired of Clark. Clark, true to his shallow roots in the Democratic Party, will probably go Independent if/when he doesn’t win the Democratic Primary. I'll never forget the C-Span segment when the Draft Clark founders were bragging that their supporters were 1/3 Dem, 1/3 Democrat and 1/3 Independent. There's NO way Clark can beat the Dean machine in the Dem Party and all the dirty tricks of Clinton's former Campaign Communications Director (the Osama/Dean ad) or the nasty e-mails/faxes being sent out by groups like "Jews for Clark" will ever change that.

You can, right here, right now, bet me that Clark won't run as an Independent if he loses the Dem Primary. I will bet you $500 that he will. All that hemming and hawing during the months that he was being so coy were to see which party would give him the best chances. As we all know, the Dauphin at 1600 Penn Ave wants no competition so Clark opted on the Dem Party but despite months of trying to create the illusion that he has strong support, it's still not working and Dean is beating him in every unfreeped poll. What will Clark do when he loses the Dem Primary? Forgive me if I don't think he's going to kindly endorse Dean. IMO, Clark is going to pack up all his toy soldiers and run as an Independent because he has all of Soros' money & all of Soros' think tanks behind him. They'll probably come up with soe really clever spin but Progressives will contine to see past it and so will the American people.

Wes Clark belongs to certain lobbies and they are not mine; they're the ones I've been fighting for decades.

but I could do without the insults.

I have found this a very informative and, until now, a flame free, dialogue and correspondence.

Thanks all.

that is not a legitimate source. Ramsey Clark is not reliable, he is an apologist for mass killing and tyranny. His organizations are the most vile form the left takes. To blame this on NATO is an insult to the scores of thousands murdered in cold blood by the serbs, who started the war in the first place. I know it is not fashionable on DU to say 'America was right. NATO was correct' but in Yugoslavia they were.

There are many books on the history of Yugoslavia, the Balkan wars (started by the serbs, not NATO) or Kosovo war that present facts in a non biased, non agenda based manner unlike Counterpunch! or the IACenter.

But more info is always helpful to dispel the darkness of ignorance.


Thanks for the insights, as always, Tinoire!


PAX

Let me be very frank about this. The main reason for my support of General Clark is directly related to Kosovo and what that conflict represents. An accurate and appropriate response to Kosovo is for me the big lesson that the left--my left, as I am as deep a progressive as you can get--has not yet learned. Indeed, it pretty much failed this test in a spectacularly disorganized manner, and this is what has set up its inability to present a unified and plausible critique of the Iraq intervention.

So this is my one shot at educating DU. I was going to start with Pulitzer Prize winning Samantha Powers, from her book A Problem from Hell, which investigates the U.S. successes but mostly failures in dealing with the problem of genocide. But I got tired with typing up the long passage--you should look it up on Amazon yourself. Instead, I direct you to an article on the very dovish and progressive pro-Palestine/pro-Israel Jewish-American site Tikkun for an article entitled The Left and Kosovo.

It has an excellent essay. The bottom line is that the U.S. and the West did not want to intervene in Kosovo if it could help it and dragged their feet for as long as they could while people were getting massacred precisely because there was no money and no oil in the Balkans. As Bismarck had put it, there ain't squat there that's even worth "the bones of one Pommeranian grenadier." Lefties are right in assuming that the U.S. is not a big fan of doing humanitarian interventions for pure motives. But in the case of Kosovo, a quarter of a million dead in Bosnia in Europe's backyard was drawing media attention and Milosevic was beginning to become more than just a regional threat. In other words, the Clinton Administration, the Europe, and the UN had to be embarassed into getting involved, with the possibility of Eastern European destabilization as a creeping fear for more negative incentive.

An excerpt of this well-researched history from a distinctly progressive point of view:

The NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia has unleashed a torrent of criticism from the American left, who argue that NATO's stated humanitarian objectives merely represent a cover for power politics and the assertion of American hegemony. While some of these voices articulate understandable anguish at facing the prospect of using military force to achieve a human rights objective, and some of the objections are understandable in light of the way that U.S. military power has far too frequently been used to advance the interests of American corporations and the military rather than the highest ideals of American democracy, this time the Left has drawn the wrong conclusions and ended up on the wrong side. The Nation and Pacifica radio have lost their moral compass, portraying this struggle as though their writers had no knowledge of who has been victim and who has been victimizer for the past decade. Left-inspired "teach-ins" disseminating information from Ramsey Clark or from the International Action Center often present an uncritical apologia for Serbian policy (or, at best, a passing acknowledgment of Serbian crimes) and insist that the current intervention is just another instance of America's imperial arrogance.

These voices could not be more wrong on the substance of the issues. Rather than a knee-jerk rejection of Western military action, critics on the Left should be finding common cause with the victims whose suffering demands action. Here, finally, is a case in which U.S. and NATO foreign policy is shaped not only by self-interest but by moral considerations—which is precisely why it took NATO so long to get involved, why it tried negotiations rather than confrontation for so many years. Because the moral/humanitarian purposes of this intervention are so great, we on the Left must support forces which we are uncomfortable and unused to supporting. But by encouraging Milosevic to believe that NATO might eventually be paralyzed by a lack of will and unity, the international left contributed to Milosevic's fantasy that he could outlast the bombings and continue the worst atrocities in Europe since the end of the Second World War.

The most commonly heard arguments against the NATO war have been steeped in misinformation. First, decriers of the intervention often have suggested or assumed that the conflict between Milosevic and the Kosovars began on March 24, 1999, and that it was the NATO air strikes that caused the depopulation of Kosovo. In fact, the war against the Kosovar Albanians began ten years ago, and the air strikes only gave Milosevic the cover of war in which to complete his program of Serbianizing Kosovo.

Second, critics of the NATO intervention have argued that this is a civil war unworthy of international involvement. This argument rejects the notion that the violence in Kosovo constitutes genocide....

Kosovo: A History

In the opening days of the NATO strikes, there was talk on the Left that the killings in Kosovo and the mass exodus were as much a result of the bombings as they were a result of Serb forces. Why had we rushed to use force—why not negotiate?

The fact is that Serb forces, in the year prior to the NATO action, had been steadily escalating the magnitude of their atrocities against Kosovar Albanian civilians. Far from rushing to intervene against Serbian aggressions, NATO and the United States have spent eight years in negotiations, appeasing Milosevic in the hope of avoiding a military confrontation.

Serbian nationalists have long sought a "final solution" to the problem of Muslims in the Balkans. An outline for a "final solution" of the Kosovo Albanians had been discussed as early as 1937, in a paper titled "The Expulsion of the Albanians" by Serbian nationalist V. Cubrilovic. This "solution" was given intellectual benediction by a memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences in the late 1980s, which called for the ethnic purification of Serbia. Milosevic rose to power in 1989 by promising to restore the Serbian hold over Kosovo.

In 1989, following through on his campaign promises, Milosevic revoked Kosovo's autonomy. A lengthy period of brutal oppression against ethnic Albanian civilians followed. Albanians were dismissed from their jobs, had their cultural institutions banned and destroyed, had their leaders imprisoned, and were effectively cut off from all civic institutions, professions, and university life. In other circumstances, this would have been enough to mobilize the worldwide Left into action against oppression.

Government security forces began to organize attacks on Albanian civilians, particularly those with any political or professional status. Human Rights Watch (HRW), in a report in 1993, documented massive human rights violations in Kosovo and included, on its cover, a picture of a Kosovar Albanian man who had had a Serb cross carved into his chest by police forces in Kosovo. More recently, the Serbs have also used food as a weapon in ejecting Albanians from Kosovo. In an October 1998 report, HRW documented that Serb forces in Kosovo had systematically destroyed food stocks, burned down silos and haystacks, and killed livestock, so that by the end of that year Kosovo was dependent on food assistance from international aid organizations.

Since 1991, in reaction to Milosevic's predations, the West has brokered eleven cease-fires with him, all of which he has violated....

In 1995, when NATO finally did intervene in Bosnia, it was three years into the war, after almost a quarter million people were killed, and after the Serbs had wiped out two of the UN "safe havens" established to protect fleeing Muslim civilians. The Clinton administration, unwilling to commit ground troops to intervene against Milosevic, had consistently quieted attempts to indict him as a war criminal in order to pursue negotiated settlements to his wars in the Balkans. This inconsistency on the part of the United States was motivated by a sense that the U.S. had no economic or military interests in the region (as one member of the governing elite put it, "We have no dog in that fight"); the major pressure to intervene was ethical, and most NATO leaders felt that they could ignore more pressure. So what if a few Jews, remembering our own Holocaust, sounded off about all this—most people seemed not to care that much, and for that reason the Clinton administration could see that the easiest way out was to try to make accommodations with Milosevic, unwilling to acknowledge quite how determined he has been to achieve full "ethnic purity" for a "Greater Serbia."

By the early months of 1998, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), reacting to the increase of attacks on ethnic Albanian civilians, began sporadic guerrilla actions against Yugoslav security forces. In response, Milosevic used the growth of the KLA as a rationale for increasing the brutality of his attacks on Kosovar Albanian civilians. The defenders of the Muslims were termed "terrorists" and Milosevic expected that the West would remain passive if he could convince them he was merely involved in a war against terrorists. As early as February 1998, more than a year before the NATO bombing, Yugoslav government forces massacred civilians in the Drenica region of central Kosovo (a stronghold of the KLA), as HRW documented in its October 1998 report. In the attack, Yugoslav Special Forces reportedly used artillery, helicopters, and armored vehicles to kill at least eighty-three people, twenty-four of whom were women and children....

Slowly, the outside world began to shake off its paralysis. In June 1998, the Contact Group on the former Yugoslavia (consisting of America, Russia, Italy, France, Britain, and Germany) warned Milosevic that he could not count on the West being as indecisive as it had been in Bosnia. Milosevic promised that the advance had stopped. Yet, it was clear on the ground that government forces had actually intensified their offensive from July through September 1998. By mid-August, the government had recaptured most of the territory held by the KLA. According to Physicians for Human Rights, the Serb summer offensive left hundreds dead; Western aid groups estimated it also produced a quarter-million Albanian refugees within Kosovo, fifty thousand of whom, they warned, were hiding in the woods and in danger of freezing to death from the snows of the coming Balkan winter.

In what was by now a familiar pattern, NATO drew up plans for military action, Milosevic promised concessions, and NATO threats soon languished. As the massacres of Kosovar Albanian civilians continued through the fall, however, the UN Security Council was outraged enough in September 1998 to pass a resolution demanding an immediate end to attacks on civilians by the Yugoslav army. Milosevic simply ignored it. Three days later, two separate massacres of civilians in the Drenica region by Serb forces shocked the world community. The killing of eighteen women, children, and elderly members of the Deliaj family, in the village Obrinje, was particularly horrific. Included among the victims were a ten-year-old boy, his throat slit from his jugular to his lip, a baby girl, and a young woman whose belly was gouged out.

The October Accord

The pattern of Serb atrocities, initial international outrage, swift and fleeting calls for action, followed by a gradual accommodation to Milosevic's continued defiance, is well illustrated by the failure of the October accord.

In the fall of 1998, international pressure to stop the Serbian atrocities was growing. With the UN Security Council, the six-nation Contact Group, and renewed threats of NATO action behind him, U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke met the Serb leader and pushed him to meet some of the concessions laid down by the Security Council. Milosevic agreed to halt his crackdown against the Albanian population and to allow the presence of some two thousand observers from the OSCE to monitor the cease-fire in Kosovo. In return, Milosevic was able to win a concession from the West that he would reduce his forces only to levels prior to the campaign of the summer.

There was little expectation in the West that the accord would last. Milosevic was betting on the fleeting attention of the Clinton administration, embroiled as it was in trying to contain the Lewinsky scandal. After only token reductions of Serb forces, Milosevic stopped his withdrawal. NATO, with no will to carry through on its threat of air strikes, first extended its deadline for withdrawal ten days, and then, predictably, let the deadline slip quietly without consequence.

For the besieged White House, Kosovo was quickly forgotten as President Clinton moved closer to an impeachment trial. Milosevic, meanwhile, taking advantage of Washington's distraction, gradually began to build up his forces in Kosovo. By the late fall, Western intelligence officials, particularly the Germans, began to warn of a Serb troop build-up that could be the backbone of a military operation to push hundreds of thousands of Albanians out of Kosovo. Its code name was Potkova—in Serbian, "Horseshoe"—and it alluded to the amassing Serb troops who were positioning themselves to encircle the central Kosovo region of Djakovica, the stronghold of the KLA. According to the International Crisis Group, Operation Horseshoe was devised to leave open escape routes between Serb forces for fleeing deportees who survived the assault. In this way, Milosevic predicted he would direct the flood of refugees into neighboring Macedonia and Albania.

As Milosevic grew bolder, NATO increasingly sought to accommodate his campaign in Kosovo. By the end of 1998, the fighting that had caused the deaths of two thousand people continued unabated. Serbs, meanwhile, were routinely blocking the passage of the unarmed monitors to villages where Serbs were carrying out offenses, and the number of incidents of violence against OSCE monitors by Serb security forces escalated. The tenuous October cease-fire had collapsed.

Meanwhile, as NATO civilian leaders agonized over what steps to take, if any, the massacres of ethnic Albanian civilians mounted. The most dramatic was a killing spree by Serbian forces on January 16 of forty-five Albanians in the village of Racak. Some of the victims, later discovered by OSCE verifiers, were found with their eyes gouged out and their heads caved in—one man was even decapitated. The victims, all dressed in civilian clothes, included a twelve-year-old boy, a young woman, and many elderly men.

Rambouillet

The world community was finally galvanized by the barbarity of the massacre at Racak. Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, was quoted by the New York Times as saying that the threat of force was justified to get the Serbs to the bargaining table. This was the impetus NATO civilian leaders needed—united and determined more than ever to end Kosovo's killings—to back a new accord with a genuine threat of force.

The nations of the Contact Group (which included Russia) drafted a new set of five principles for both sides. They included: the withdrawal of all Serbian forces; the effective return of an autonomous self-government in Kosovo; a referendum in three years to decide final status for the province; the presence of armed NATO troops to verify the accord and protect the Albanians; and the gradual disarming of the KLA.

But Rambouillet proposals were not accepted by the Serbs. By the time the Paris talks fell apart, Serb tanks and troops had already begun to move well into the Drenica region. Serb forces destroyed homes and set villages ablaze.

In the week of Rambouillet's conclusion, six days prior to the NATO strike, the office of the UN high commissioner on refugees estimated that forty thousand people had fled their homes in Kosovo—twenty thousand of whom had fled in the two days after Rambouillet's collapse. The Serb spring offensive had begun.

As NATO's deadline drew near, OSCE quickly evacuated its monitors and Serb military leaders gave the order to prevent journalists from reaching the Drenica region. In the vacuum left by the absence of the verification team and Western reporters, Serb forces let loose a bloodbath. Serb police attacked the ethnic Albanian suburbs on the southern edge of Pristina. They raided houses, beat people, and smashed cars and windows. The suburbs' five hundred houses were emptied in minutes. By March 21, the village of Prekaz was emptied and burning. Scbica was torched. In the four days leading up to the NATO deadline, the UN high commissioner for refugees estimated a further twenty-five thousand people were forced to flee their homes.

On March 24, after a year of delays and appeasement, the nineteen nations of NATO were finally pushed to launch air strikes in the hope of halting the Serb killing machine in Kosovo.

Thank you for mentioning Samantha Power's book. It won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction last yearr.

I agree 100%. I was for intervention in Kosovo myself, and I also respect Samantha Power's version more than Ramsey Clark's.

but maybe you should do a research about Susan Sontag's first reaction.
She wrote that article "Why Are We in Kosovo?" (The New York Times Magazine, May 2, 1999). There was an ongoing "dirty" debate between her and the austrian author Peter Handke, who was stongly attacked for his position. He visited Yuguslavia more than once during the conflict. I just give you a quote from an article of Salman Rushdie (1999):

"Never mind that Handke is co-writer of that great movie "Wings of Desire.'' Condemned as a "monster'' by Alain Finkielkraut and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek and the Serbian novelist Bora Cosic, he deserves to be, as Susan Sontag pithily puts it, "finished.''"

"There are intellectuals who, after hearing his utterances about the war in Yugoslavia, have sworn never to pick up another of his books"

Here is the whole story about Handke and the reactions in Germany.
http://handke.scriptmania.com/custom3.html
It's long but an interesting reading.

As far as I know, Sontag later corrected her position and admitted that she was mislead by the propaganda against the serbs in the USA.

I try to ad more information about her reasons to reconsider her position later. Thanx for posting this article.

Hello from Germany,
Dirk

than their US counter part.
At least that has been my experience in the 16 years I lived in Berlin. Germans are quick to condem any military action these days (and I am talking about the public not the state.) But as usual its a very vocal minority that is responsible for the reputation.

the Serbs started the wars when several parts of the former Yugoslavia tried to secede and then it became an all out ethnic cleansing campaign.
Europe's governments did favor military confrontation, because they knew the long term dangers that were represented by the destabilizing influence of ethic cleansing in a place as unsteady as eastern Europe.

Here is some background on the subject, that was prepared about a year and a half ago, and which may be of use to some in assessing the situation. It is unwise to proceed on the belief people are not their own actors, and do nothing of their own volition: the continual search for what is "really" behind things is more likely than not to lead inquiry astray down blind alleys of preconception and ideological assumption.


The Unhappy History of Kossovo

One: Origin of the Quarrel

The clash in Kossovo of Arnaut and Vascian, as the peoples known to we moderns as Albanian and Serb were oft known in Ottoman days, differs from the usual run of Balkan bloodletting; it describes a real ethnic difference. Serb, Croat, Slovene, Montenegrin; all are Slavs, divided due to institutions only. Albanians remain in some proportion survivals of the old Dalmatian and Illyric peoples of Roman days, taken to craggy peaks for refuge from a tide of Slavic invasion commencing with the sixth century.

Medieval Albanian Catholicism offered further differentiation from Orthodox Serbs. The northeastern extension of the Albanian remnant, and the southern marches of the Serb, coincided roughly in modern Kossovo. Here the Serb Czar and Orthodox Patriarchite were able to exert authority the more atomized Albanian polity could not. After the death of the Albanian chieftain Skanderberg, and the Ottoman routing of Venice from the latter’s Adriatic lodgments, late in the fifteenth century, Albanians generally converted to Islam.

In Kossovo, this established local Albanians’ dominance over the Orthodox Serb peasantry, as the Ottoman gave landlord’s tenure only to Moslems. More enterprising or desperate Serbs migrated north; Albanians of similar motivation replaced them from the west. The locale remained poorly ordered, and a frequent theater for rebellion and consequent Ottoman suppression.

The catastrophe suffered by the Ottoman besieging Vienna in 1683 led to the swift seizure of Bosnia, Albania, and Serbia by Austrian and Bavarian Catholic armies. An Austrian force ventured into Kossovo in 1689, setting Albanian and Serb alike both to rebellion against the Ottoman and to battle against one another. The Austrians soon were routed at Nish. In Kossovo, the Ottoman killed every inhabitant they could lay hands on for days. Serbs fled north in great number, Albanians fled west.
With Ottoman authority reasserted, it was mostly Albanians who returned. These soon outnumbered the Serb survivors and progeny. Erection of an autonomous Serbia early in the nineteenth century enticed Kossovo Serbs to migrate north and acquire a freehold farm there. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877, which saw near collapse for the tottering Ottoman, was preceded and followed by Serb attacks.

These fell on Ottoman garrisons and Moslem inhabitants in the south of modern Serbia, culminating in the 1878 sack and firing of the Albanian quarter in Nish. Islamic refugees fled into Kossovo; Christians fled into Serbia for shelter from ensuing pogrom, and advancing Ottoman soldiery. The peace imposed by the Treaty of Berlin left Kossovo under unrestricted Ottoman rule.

Two: To the Yugoslav Monarchy

Albanian agitation for autonomy on modern terms within the declining Ottoman imperium began at Prizren in Kossovo, and at Istanbul. The Serb remnant in Kossovo were subjected to a wretched existence, without recourse from predation by landlord or hostile brigand. Early in 1912, declaration of an Albanian state ignited a successful rebellion in Kossovo against the Ottoman. In the Balkan War, pitting Slav and Greek against the Ottoman that autumn, Serbian armies struck south through Kossovo with great massacre against the Albanian populace. The Treaty of Bucharest in 1913 confirmed Serbia in possession of Kossovo.

During World War One, Austria-Hungary put Serbia’s army to flight in 1915. Albanians in Kossovo rose against the retreating Serbs with utmost savagery. The Serb soldiers replied in kind to fight their way through to the Adriatic, there embarking on French ships to tremendous Allied acclaim. Serb armies re-entered Kossovo from the south by the 1918 Armistice, and were bitterly resisted by Albanian rebels. The new Yugoslav monarchy with its Serb king did not succeed in breaking organized resistance till 1924 in Kossovo. Brigandage, and brutal reprisal, remained endemic to the locale.

The Serb monarchy of Yugoslavia superintended a determined effort to secure its rule in Kossovo. Land was stolen from Albanians as “undocumented,” and made available for Serbs who would venture south to settle on it. Schools teaching in Albanian, originally encouraged in the hope they would keep Albanians backward, proved hotbeds of secessionist agitation, and were suppressed. In 1937, the monarchy entertained proposals by a leading Serb intellectual, the assassin turned historian Vaso Cubrilovic of Belgrade University, that all Albanians be forcibly expelled from Kossovo.

Near the start of World War Two, Fascist Italy seized Albania. Nazi Germany seized Yugoslavia in 1941. The mines in northern Kossovo, and most Kossovo Serbs therefore, were retained under Nazi occupation; the remainder of Kossovo was awarded to Italian Albania. Serbs in Italian Kossovo, mostly recent settlers, were pitilessly persecuted by Albanians, even against occasional Italian opposition. The S. S. security division “Skanderberg” was largely recruited among Kossovo Albanians.

Three: The Tito Era

After Italy capitulated in 1943, Tito, the Communist partisan leader, declared Kossovo would be allowed self-determination if Communists won. In 1944, his partisans succeeded in fighting their way into the place, with some local Albanian support at last. Royalist Chetnik partisans violently opposed any idea of Kossovo secession, winning Tito even more support in that locale.

Tito, however, reneged on that promised self-determination, annexing Kossovo anew to Serbia as an “Autonomous district” within his new Yugoslavia. The Albanian Communist leader, Enver Hoxha, was in no position to contest the matter, amid talk under Stalin of a Balkan Federation to include Albania itself. Tito’s break in 1948 with Stalin ended any real hope for Hoxha he could fold Kossovo into his hoped for Greater Albania.
Kossovo’s populace was then about three-fifths Albanian and one-quarter Serb, with the remainder including Moslem Slavs, Catholic Montenegrins, Turks, and Gypsies. Tito saw that Communist party and police supervisors in Kossovo were Serbs. These energetically hunted up the least hint of Albanian secessionists, harvesting batches of them for show trials in 1956 (coincident with the Hungarian revolt), and again in 1964.

Tito purged his Serb Interior Minister in 1966, for opposition to economic decentralization. Albanian Communists replaced Serbs in Party and police supervisory posts in Kossovo. In the “Prague Spring” of ’68, Kossovo Albanian students demonstrated for national status in Yugoslavia, and an Albanian language university. After many arrests, Tito granted the university in 1970. Albanian language textbooks could only be got in Enver Hoxha’s Albania, which opened a connection to the new Kossovo school in Pristina for his enterprising “special service” agents.

A new Yugoslav constitution in 1974 gave autonomous Serbian Kossovo effective national status, with a representative on the Yugoslav collective presidency. Albanian Kossovo police and party personnel suppressed radical cliques, inspired to “Enverism” (as secession became called) by Hoxha’s agents. Some of these cliques, formed about 1978, included young men who would later become leading lights of the present-day Kossovo Liberation Army.

Tito died in 1980. In spring of 1981, Kossovo Albanian students at Pristina University began demonstrations demanding independence, even fusion with Hoxha’s Albania, to applause from spectators. Yugoslav Interior Ministry troops arrived, and broke the demonstrations, shooting and beating scores to death. Kossovo Albanian party and police officials sustained the crack-down, loyally denouncing “Enverist” radicals, and arresting and beating hundreds suspected of such leanings.

Radical secessionist leaders fled to sanctuaries in Western Europe. Several, meeting near Stuttgart in 1982 to form a popular front, were ambushed and shot dead by unknown assailants. Surviving radicals concluded the bullets came from Serbs in the Yugoslav Interior Ministry, and swore blood vengeance. Under the name of Popular Movement for the Kossovo Republic, a handful of such trained in Albania, and attempted a campaign of gun-battles and bombs against Kossovo and Yugoslav police.

Four: Rise of Milosevic

These largely would-be assassins had no material effect, but a profound moral one. Any crime against serbs in Kossovo was in serbia reported as secessionist terror, and crimes against Serbs in Kossovo, particularly against property of isolated farms and Orthodox sites, occurred with increasing frequency. The Serb Orthodox Patriarchite was ranged alongside the Serb Academy of Sciebces in protest of this, with the latter, in 1985, calling the current situation genocide against against Serbs in Kossovo.

At the start of 1986, the banker Slobodan Milosevic ascended to leadership of the Serb Communist Party. Belligerence in favor of Serbs dwelling outside Serbia’s boundaries, or in the autonomous districts of Vojvodina and Kossovo, offered a ready lever for political power. Kossovo Serbs were organizing militias with assistance from Serb Interior Ministry police; Hoxha’s death had not altered Albania’s support of “Enverism” in Kossovo.

Early in 1987, Milosevic arrived in Pristina’s suburbs for a meeting with Kossovo Serb leaders. A large crowd of Kossovo Serbs rioted before him against the largely Albanian Kossovo police. It was not chance; four days before, Milosevic had met with the riot’s instigators, and a schedule had been fixed for the outbreak.

Widely broadcast film of the incident established Milosevic as champion of distressed Serbs. Later that year, Milosevic used this popularity to force Serbia’s president from office. In the summer of 1988, Milosevic’s Serb Communist Party organized a campaign of Kossovo Remembrance rallies throughout Serbia proper, claiming an average attendance of half a million at each. In November, Milosevic as Party chief dismissed the Albanians in Communist Party leadership in Kossovo, and promulgated constitutional changes effectively stripping Kossovo of its autonomous status.

Albanian Communist leadership in Kossovo mobilized sizable demonstrations and hunger strikes in protest early in 1989. These were broken with loss of life by Yugoslav Interior Ministry troops, who seized the arms of both Kossovo’s national guard and police. Closely surrounded by tanks, the Kossovo Assembly voted itself out of effective existence on March 23.

Milosevic now accepted the Presidency of Serbia. Continuing Albanian demonstrations in Kossovo were broken by Serb and Yugoslav soldiers and police; hundreds of arrests were accompanied by torture. At the end of the year, Albanian intellectuals and some Communist leaders collected to form the Democratic League for Kossovo. The police terror stilled the demonstrations early in 1990.

Milosevic ratified Serb Parliament decrees forbidding Albanians to buy land from Serbs in Kossovo, and removing Albanians from civil service, including hospitals, schools, and the police. The latter quickly became overwhelmingly Serb. The Albanian membership of the Communist Party in Kossovo took up membership in the League for Democratic Kossovo.

Five: The Kossovo Resistance

This L. D. K. was led by the writer Ibrahim Rugova. He inspired Kossovo Albanians to a program of passive resistance to Serb authority. A “shadow state” emerged, quartered in private dwellings, and with a government in exile operating in Germany. Rugova’s “shadow state” held elections, administered Albanian language schooling, even collected taxes. These applied equally to Kossovo Albanians dwelling abroad; most were guest-worker laborers in Europe, but some were prosperous businessmen, or smugglers of stolen cars and narcotics and prostitutes.

The handful of violent radicals constituting the Popular Movement for the Kossovo Republic (P. M. K. R.) were denounced by Rugova as stooges of the Serb police, and he was widely believed by Kossovo Albanians when he did. The radicals’ sporadic gunshots and arsons each served to signal a fresh campaign of interrogations and beatings by Serb police, directed against the nonviolent “shadow state” organizers.

With Yugoslav and Serb armed forces devoted to war in Croatia and Bosnia, Milosevic was content to leave Kossovo at this status quo. On Serb victory in Croatia, one of the leading Serb killers, an Interior Ministry employee known as Arkan, moved to Pristina with scores of armed followers. “Enverist” radicals of the P. M. K. R. secretly convened in Drenica (where resistance to the old Yugoslav monarchy had persisted into 1924), and there voted themselves the armed force of the Kossovo Republic. Albania’s newly elected government maintained cordial relations both with these radicals, and Rugova’s pacific Kossovo government in exile, now established near Bonn.

Kossovo Albanian boycott of official Serb elections in December 1993 gave Milosevic a resounding victory over his rival for the presidency, the Serb-American businessman Panic, and allowed the killer Arkan to win election to a parliament seat. The “Enverist” radicals were split into a Marxist faction, the National Movement for the Liberation of Kossovo, and a Nationalist faction, the Kossovo Liberation Army. The latter had a better footing abroad, where the pacific Rugova’s government in exile at Bonn was beginning to explore establishing its own armed force. Albania continued to assist by giving military training to dozens of radicals, and allowing transit through its borders.

The bloody summer of 1995 saw Serb massacre of Bosnian Moslems, Croat expulsion of Serbs, and NATO bombing of Serb forces in Bosnia. The Dayton Accords confirmed Serb gains in Bosnia, and recognized the rump Yugoslav Federation Milosevic dominated, from his seat for Serbia in its collective presidency. The pacific Rugova used his control of Albanian language media in Kossovo to maintain popular commitment to passive resistance, while the fledgling KLA demanded Serb departure from Kossovo, and launched a new campaign of sporadic shootings and bombings.

Serbia was greatly unsettled by the influx of refugees from Krajina and Slavonia. In Yugoslav elections on May 31, 1996, the Montenegrin presidency went to an opponent of Milosevic, and in Serbia, opposition parties won local posts in many cities. Milosevic refused to allow victorious opponents to take office in Serbia. He allowed three months of demonstrations, then bought off his principal Serb opponent by offering him a cabinet post. The demonstrations were mopped up by brutal police attack, and opposition figures allowed to take local office found their function superseded by various national agencies. The Vatican brokered an agreement Milosevic signed to allow Albanian language schools official existence in Kossovo, but he took no steps to implement it.

Six: Taking Up the Gun

In Bonn, the leading functionary of Rugova’s government in exile, Bujar Bukoshi, rejected passive resistance, and turned the radio transmitter he controlled to broadcasts supporting the KLA. Early in 1997, Albania’s banks were revealed as Ponzi swindles. Mobs looted government facilities, including military arsenals, and swiftly reduced the land to anarchic chaos, in which a Kalshnikov rifle could be had for a five dollar bill.

Bukoshi’s embryonic forces, consisting of a few hundred exiled policemen and soldiers, established themselves in Albania as the Armed Forces of the Kossovo Republic (F. A. R. K.), in competition with the KLA. Albanian students organized demonstrations against Milosevic’s refusal to implement the Vatican agreement on schooling, ignoring orders to desist from Rugova. Serb police crushed the demonstrations with extraordinary brutality.

KLA attacks, which by the Serb government’s claims had been occurring roughly once a week, and claimed ten Serb lives since 1995, began to take place almost daily at the start of 1998. In the old rebel district of Drenica, near the village of Likosane just before noon on February 28, a gunfight broke out between KLA men and a Serb police patrol. Once it was over, Serb police massacred the men of a wealthy Albanian clan considered leaders of the hamlet. Five days later, Serb police surrounded the family compound of a KLA leader and shelled it for hours, then went into the ruins and murdered women, children, and wounded, to a total of 58, including the KLA man, Adem Jashari.

These murders turned Albanian village elders throughout Kossovo against Rugova’s passive resistance. They put hundreds of their young men at the disposal of the KLA. In Drenica, and near the Albanian border, armed partisan bands appeared in such strength the Serb police retired to establish encircling roadblocks. Western diplomats threatened Milosevic with dire consequences if the murders by his police were repeated. Milosevic agreed to begin implementing the Vatican schools agreement, and to meet with Ibrahim Rugova. Simultaneously, Milosevic admitted the ultra-nationalist Chetnik party into a coalition government with his Serbian Socialist Party, and loosed his Serb police once again into Drenica.

This campaign was conducted with the same degree of atrocity that characterized previous operations by Serb police. In one typical incident near Gorjne Obrinje, after fourteen Serb police were shot in a fire-fight, a group of fourteen Albanian women, children, and old men found hiding nearby were shot point-blank by Serb police. Some 200,000 Albanians fled their homes to avoid the fighting, some to southern Kossovo and some to Albania. President Clinton ordered a show of force by U. S. warplanes over Yugoslavia, and in October, his pressure secured an agreement by which Serb Interior Ministry troops were to vacate Kossovo, negotiations with Kossovo Albanian leaders were to begin in earnest, and a body of diplomatic observers would enter Kossovo to monitor events. During the course of negotiating this agreement, Milosevic told a U. S. general that the way to bring peace to Drenica was to “kill them all.”

The monitored cease-fire brought many Kossovo Albanian refugees back to their homes. In Albania, the Kossovo government in exile’s small armed force was violently absorbed by the KLA; in Kossovo, KLA men began arresting and executing functionaries of Rugova’s “shadow state” as collaborators with Serbia. They also murdered about a dozen Serb civilians, and a Serb village mayor. By the start of 1999, fire-fights of company and even battalion scale between KLA guerrillas and Serb police were once more occurring.

Near dawn on January 15, battle broke out between KLA guerrillas and Serb police near the town of Racak. After nine KLA men were killed the rest fled. During the afternoon Serb police entered the town, raped and murdered two women, and murdered forty-three unarmed men and boys. Serb Information Ministry spokesmen in Pristina next morning invited Western journalists to visit the scene of a “successful” fight against the KLA; when they reported what they saw, Milosevic declared the KLA had fabricated the incident, and demanded the diplomatic observers quit Kossovo. The chief judge of the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia was denied entry to the country.

Seven: The NATO Intervention

NATO demanded the talks agreed to the previous October begin in February, and threatened military action to force compliance. The meeting at Rambouillet Chateau featured a severely fractured Albanian delegation; its principal factions (all of which hated one another) were Rugova’s adherents in the old LDK, old line Communist functionaries from that same umbrella group, and the KLA led by Hashim Thaci. After days of negotiation, Milosevic struck out about half the already settled agreement, substituting his initial demands, which the Albanians and NATO had already rejected, and forced collapse of the talks on March 18. Two days later, 40,000 Serb police and soldiers with 300 armored vehicles launched a fresh offensive into Drenica.

NATO air strikes commenced against Serbia on March 24. While these aimed at destroying Serb anti-aircraft defenses, Serb police and soldiers in Kossovo commenced a wholesale assault on the Albanians of Kossovo, aimed at driving them from the country by exemplary massacre. During the course of this campaign, roughly 10,000 persons, mostly young men, were murdered by Serb police and soldiers. Almost a million Albanians took to flight, either west to Albania, south into Macedonia, or into the mountains of Kossovo itself. Lightly armed KLA guerrillas could accomplish nothing against the Serb forces.

When Serb air defenses were disabled, NATO warplanes began attacks demolishing bridges, power stations, and the like in Serbia proper. With Serb police and soldiers forced to retire their heavy equipment to shelter in bunkers by NATO air bombardment in Kossovo, their murder squads became vulnerable to attack by Albanian partisans, many of whom were not, properly speaking, KLA, but village militia deployed by their clan elders. When Serb police and soldiers attempted to group together to overpower these guerrilla bands, the Serbs were savaged by NATO warplanes.

On June 3, Milosevic capitulated. Serb police and soldiers retired northward; NATO troops moved in. Kossovo Albanian refugees streamed back to their homes. Many set upon Serbs still remaining in Kossovo. NATO troops intervened to protect lives, but not property; even so, several dozen Serbs, many elderly, were killed. The overwhelming majority of Serbs resident in Kossovo fled north into Serbia, or into that small portion of northern Kossovo around the mines where they had long constituted the principal element of the populace.

A government for Kossovo, formed under NATO auspices, blended elements of the LDK and KLA, with the KLA’s Hashim Thaci emerging as Prime Minister, while Ibrahim Rugova, the nonviolent leader, found himself without power, or much prestige. The KLA has kept its word to disarm only poorly, and remains a police problem for NATO occupation troops. It has attempted to provoke guerrilla war in the adjoining areas of Macedonia which are largely populated by Albanians, but has had scant success there, either in baiting the Macedonian government into atrocious reaction to their activities, or in gaining wide support among Albanian people in those districts.

Seems like a good source of information if anyone else is interested. I admit I needed a history refresher. According to this study Yugoslavia was an economic mess dating back to the 60's. With extreme inflation and foreign debt in the 70's and 80's. And a reliance on Soviet oil into the 90's.

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/yutoc.html

... you post (very authoritatively - stating rumor, innuendo, and your own personal opinions as fact) crap about Wesley Clark on a very consistant basis and now you're acting as though you really want the real truth.

I don't buy it.

You're looking - as someone else in this thread pointed out - for others to provide factual confimation of your opinions because you can't find it yourself.

Your conspiracy theories are well know here...

..from repeatedly claiming that Clark worked for Henry Kissinger, to saying that John Kerry is a BFEE collaborator and that there are 1000+ post DU'ers who are really republicans only here to bash Howard Dean.

Example:



As one DU'er termed it:

No war crimes were commited by NATO forces in preventing Butcher Slobo's designs in Kossovo. The continued assertion there were is based on two things: an a priori view that use of military force by the U.S. is illegitimate by definition, and a lack of appreciation of how the laws of war apply to its actual practice. It is not possible to prove anything to persons who hold that view, as they have not arrived at by its having been proved to them, but only have adopted it because it fits their accustomed ideological parameters.

More important is to understand that such charges have no resonance with any but a tiny band of left extremists, most of whom have opted out of the electoral process for various splinter-group actions, and a similarly tiny band of right extremists, who will never vote for a Democratic Party candidate in any case. The general public will be rather inclined to view the NATO campaign in Kossovo as a favorable contrast to the current botch-up in Iraq: it was quickly successful, with a minimum of casualties, and the criminal who was its object is now on trial at The Hague. (Magistrate)

It is nice to have an "objective" thread about Kosovo (and by extension Clark) actually include information, facts and opinion by Clark supporters as opposed to only those who have repeatedly, regularly (and in my view unfairly) slammed Clark in the past.

If Europe was so opposed to the NATO action, why then was Clark honored and decorated by so many countries, including European countries.

And if Europe was so opposed to the NATO action, why then is Clark described as being the democratic candidate favored by Europe?

And if NATO's actions were so wrong, why is Clark a hero to hundreds of thousands of people - who honor his name and photos of him?

But you must expect the radical propagandists to be more diligent in such matters. There is a species of auto-hypnosis involved: the chant must be continuous as a monk's mantra, and so it is liable to be frequently typed, being always on the mind. It is hard work being certain of things ordinary mortals cannot apprehend....

We, esp. Germany, were involved in this neocolonial war.

"And if Europe was so opposed to the NATO action, why then is Clark described as being the democratic candidate favored by Europe?"

Excuse me, but this is just complete nonsense. At least in Germany, I guess about 99% of the people don't know that guy or might even not remember him from the war. The only candidate mentioned so far is Howard Dean. I wouldn't know anything about him, if not for DU.

A democratic candidate in uniform labeling himself as "heroic and patriotic" might hopefully make many Europeans ust puke, at least me.
Even if he is willing to share the profits from his neocolonial cold and hot wars with our corporations and banks.
Hello from Germany,
Dirk

If you read Tinore's posts on this thread, they contain the statements about Europeans opposing the NATO action.

Thanks for one opinion from a German - unless you are speaking for the entire country. And your view of Clark is not from reading DU - it appears to be from reading the posts of about 5 DU posters - cuz its not a very balanced view - its fairly unbalanced.

I have a voice of my own. It's just me and 5 unknown DUers. And if "we" - majestis plural or just the ordinary one? - would be allowed to call Tinoire one of "us", that's more than we deserve!

Taking off the uniform, I did never wear,
Dirk

How can anyone ever forget how ol' Wesley gave those Haitian men hooters? :hi:

surreal when people began posting that tripe.

so back off.

I am not claiming it was proven (the source was a little overzealous but his facts were not completely wrong or false -- just some were inaccurate or exaggerated)

Just because a claim is bizarre and funny to some does not make it false or fiction. There is SOME truth to the fact that Clark had some authority over the Haitian situation and troops at Guantanamo as well as the fact that there is a legal claim that chemicals used against Haitian men there caused hormonal imbalances which resulted in breast enlargement.

The real question of fact is whether Clark was responsible for troops or personnel or policies at Guantanamo when the chemical exposure happened. THAT remains an open question.

It is like the Waco issue: we KNOW Clark was in the milkitary vicinity and was likley in the theater: but did he play a ROLE in the events? I do not yet know for sure either way. Maybe he called in sick that year.

I tried to act like you were somebody interested in finding out what was really going on.

This post convinces me that you already "know" what's going on and that what you "know" is bullshit.

Farewell, 7th, I can't say I'll miss you as I press the ignore key.

What a loser.

It would be more productive to simply argue the facts instead of calling me names and casting aspersions.

Frankly my concerns about Clark do NOT get allayed when his supporters use name calling and erroneous assumptions instead of arguing actual evidence on the issues addressed in this thread.

?

Bush = Skull = Kerry = BFEE

that is my opinion.

same with Clark.

His comments that dropping Depleted Uranium on civilians is just poeachy rules him out with me.

But on the issue of the roots of the Kosovo conflict, I AM looking for more info from anyone who has it AND, you are right in your quote to some degree: the use of force by Clark against civilians may very well have been completely unnecessary from my perspective, and Nothing anyone says will change my mind about that.

Clark is complicit in war crimes IMHO

because you never intended to have a "decent discussion about Kosovo and Clark," if "Nothing anyone says will change mind."

Your statement at the beginning this thread that "your views on Clark hang in the balance" could not therefore have been sincere.

deliberate targeting of civilians (in the sense that they were "acceptable" collateral damage) -- all of these are facts which make my mind firm that Clark is IMHO a war criminal.

However, that is a very different question from whether the war he conducted was a just war in both its reasons, its cause, and is outcome.

I have to hold Clinton as well as Congress accountable for that war. Clark was merely a cog in that wheel.

So if the cause was just my opinion of his role DOES hang in the balance as far as whether he was merely a tool of the IMF and World Bank and Wall Street and whether it was a justifiabe war.

The methods he used are indefensible in this war. But was the war justifiable at all in its PURPOSES.

In other words - I am still somewhat open on the question of whether the war itself was justifiable and whether Clark's "Mission" was noble or just another wall street manipulation. I tend to believe the latter but I want more info from both sides to make a more informed conclusion.

Nothing will make me believe that the use and defense of Depleted Uramium and the massive bombings of civilians was fully justified or noble.

Clark MAT have been engaged in a noble war while using immoral methods to fight it.

"War crimes" is an exact phrase with an exact legal meaning. Clark has not been accused nor convicted by any entity who decides such cases.

And this is one of my issues here:

If the policies were immoral and were war crimes (as I and many others believe) then putting a man who may have committed crimes as a general into the White House is a VERY BAD idea.

How could someone like Clark EVER muster the balls to go after a Bush or Cheney or Ashcroft or Kissinger if he himself is arguably complicitous in similar crimes against humanity in, FOR EXAMPLE, Kosovo and Colombia?

... or, then, ANYBODY could accuse ANYONE of war crimes no matter how stupid the charge is.

Look! DEAN is war criminal! He dodged the draft! BAD! WITCH!

If the policies were immoral

"immoral" is subjective. Do we know judge on what some consider immoral?

and were war crimes (as I and many others believe)

You are not qualified to make the charge.

then putting a man who may have committed crimes as a general into the White House is a VERY BAD idea.

No war crimes have been charge by anyone with any qualifications to do so.

How could someone like Clark EVER muster the balls to go after a Bush or Cheney or Ashcroft or Kissinger if he himself is arguably complicitous in similar crimes against humanity in, FOR EXAMPLE, Kosovo and Colombia?

No war crimes have been charged to Clark.

Sorry.

You interpretation of what a "war crime" is isn't shared by those who actually charge, try, and convict such cases.

If Clark had been accused of war crimes (which does have a specific definition, legally) , he would not be allowed to testify at the Hague against Milosevic.

Especially for war crimes allegedly committed during the same war.

Not only was the air war a failure that did not stop the serbs. Clark's bad judgment almost caused a confrontation with Russian forces. Luckily Clark's boneheaded order was refused.

He had the UN saying that his bombing of civilians was unacceptable.

THE LONDON INDEPENDENT, Monday, November 22, 1999
US 'lost count of uranium shells fired in Kosovo'

By Robert Fisk in Pristina

American aircraft used so much depleted uranium ammunition during the Nato bombardment of Serbia that US officials are now claiming - to the disbelief of European bomb disposal officers - that they have no idea how many locations may be contaminated by the radioactive dust left behind by their weapons.

....

A growing number of doctors and scientists suspect that an explosion of cancers in southern Iraq is caused by the US use of depleted uranium tank and aircraft munition warheads during the 1991 Gulf War. British and American doctors have suggested that it may also be a cause of the "Gulf War syndrome", which has caused the death of up to 400 veterans. Despite these fears, Nato this summer refused to assist a UN team investigating the use of depleted uranium munitions in Kosovo.

But information given to The Independent by European military sources in Kosovo demonstrates just why Nato should be so reluctant to tell the truth about the anti-armour ammunition - a waste product of the nuclear industry which burns on impact and releases toxic and radioactive material when it explodes. For it transpires that DU was used by A-10 "tankbuster" aircraft for more than a month in at least 40 locations in Kosovo, many of them "fake" military targets set up by the Serbs to lure pilots away from their tanks and artillery positions.

More tragically, A-10 aircraft used DU ammunition in two attacks against Kosovo Albanian refugees, the first on 14 April on the main road between Djakovica and Prizren. Hundreds of civilians were wounded in these attacks, carried out when Nato pilots - flying at more than 15,000 feet to avoid any injury to themselves - bombed refugee columns in the belief that they were military convoys.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,2763,208056,00.html

A month later, with Nato getting increasingly frustrated about Milosevic's refusal to buckle, Mary Robinson, the UN human rights commissioner, said Nato's bombing campaign had lost its "moral purpose". Referring to the cluster bomb attack on residential areas and market in the Serbian town of Nis, she described Nato's range of targets as "very broad" and "almost unfocused". There were too many mistakes; the bombing of the Serbian television station in Belgrade - which killed a make-up woman, among others - was "not acceptable".

Nato, which soon stopped apologising for mistakes which by its own estimates killed 1,500 civilians and injured 10,000, said that "collateral damage" was inevitable, and the small number of "mistakes" remarkable, given the unprecedented onslaught of more than 20,000 bombs.

Yet once Nato - for political reasons, dictated largely by the US - insisted on sticking to high-altitude bombing, with no evidence that it was succeeding in destroying Serb forces committing atrocities against ethnic Albanians, the risk of civilian casualties increased, in Kosovo and throughout Serbia. Faced with an increasingly uncertain public opinion at home, Nato governments chose more and more targets in urban areas, and experimented with new types of bombs directed at Serbia's civilian economy, partly to save face. By Nato's own figures, of the 10,000 Kosovans massacred by Serb forces, 8,000 were killed after the bombing campaign started.

Nato does not dispute the Serb claim that just 13 of its tanks were destroyed in Kosovo - a figure which gives an altogether different meaning to the concept of proportionality. Nato fought a military campaign from the air which failed to achieve its stated objectives.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Prior to the bombing only 2000 people had been killed, and that was a genocide so horrific it demanded NATO action, and yet the bombing killed 1500 (NATO's numbers) civilians. That's only 500 less than the genocidal mad man had killed. Murder 2000 and you are a genocidal villain... murder 1500 civilians and you're a hero.

How does that work?




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.fair.org/extra/9907/kosovo-crimes.html



Extra! July/August 1999 Legitimate Targets? How U.S. Media Supported War Crimes in Yugoslavia - By Jim Naureckas

NATO justified the bombing of the Belgrade TV station, saying it was a legitimate military target. "We've struck at his TV stations and transmitters because they're as much a part of his military machine prolonging and promoting this conflict as his army and security forces," U.S. General Wesley Clark explained--"his," of course, referring to Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic. It wasn't Milosevic, however, who was killed when the Belgrade studios were bombed on April 23, but rather 20 journalists, technicians and other civilians.

http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/Kosovo/Kosovo-Ethnic_Cleansing15.htm

Refugee reports of Serbian mass executions claim over 6,000 ethnic Albanian deaths; the number would be far higher if we added the countless tales of individual murder. The organized and individual rape of ethnic Albanian women by Serb security forces is continuing to be reported by Kosovar refugees. According to refugees, Serb forces have conducted systematic rapes in Dakovica and at the Karagac and Metohia hotels in Pec.
<snip>

We also have clear indications of the magnitude and intensity of the Serbian effort to displace the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo. At least one million Kosovar Albanians have left the province since the Serbs launched their first security crackdown in March 1998, with most having fled since March 1999. Based on the scope and intensity of Serb activities throughout the province, some 480,000 additional Kosovars appear to be internally displaced persons (IDPs). In sum, over 1.5 million ethnic Albanians -- at least 90 percent of the estimated 1998 Kosovo population of the province -- have been forcibly expelled from their homes.

<snip>
Refugees have reported that over 500 villages have been burned since late March, and we have confirmed that the following villages have been mostly burned or entirely destroyed.

That all happened before NATO's bombing campaign.

It shows that NATO was entirely correct in intervening. If one is to prevent genocide, on must stop it at the critical stage.

except that some people are desperate to paint General Clark as a wildman who wants to start WWIII.

This isn't a discussion intended to exchange information, it is a platform from which to launch and re-launch all the old crap that's been used against Clark from the beginning.

What I take from the Kosovo situation is what a million and a half Albanian Kosovars apparently do. Wesley Clark helped save their lives from a coldly calculated program of genocide.

From my point of view, the fact that the Kosovans were Muslims is yet another reason why we can look to Clark to bring the War against Terror under control. It'll be hard to paint him as a Christian Crusader, even in the Muslim press.

Final estimates on civilian deaths due to NATO were less than 500 according to Human Rights Watch; NATO's own estimate is slightly lower.

Another incorrect fact. What a surprise.

With regard to Pristina Airfield, you are badly informed.

As for whether TV stations can be part of a genocidal machine--it is uncontested fact that they were in Rwanda and they contributed significantly in Serbia.

As far depleted uranium goes, EVERY NATO country uses it and it is currently an accepted weapon according to the UN. Is Dean going to ban it? Who has opened up the possibility of cutting military spending, dean or Clark?

Of this reasoned discussion of Kosovo.

First---how could the Serbs be responsible for only 2000 when they murdered 7,000 in Srebenica in Bosnia alone? Milosevic was involved in that through mladic.
Second---2000 is not a known figure. More likely it was many times higher.
Third---The NATO action probably killed less than 500 civilians
Fourth--- How many civilians would have died in kosovo if the ethnic cleansing went unchallenged? How about in bosnia, where it got really savage?


Also, the evidence claming that Depleted Uranium is the sole or main cause of gulf war syndrome is not very powerful. More likely is mustard gas stored in southern iraq or even used during the Iran Iraq war, which contaminated waters, soils and towns like basra.

This taken off another thread:

"Great press confeerence with an excellent introduction from both Samantha Power and the woman who headed the non-violent resistance movement in Kosovo (whose name escapes me).


http://www.c-span.org/search/basic.asp?ResultStart=1&ResultCount=10&BasicQueryText=wesley+clark"

The women in question was the foreign minister for the major Kosovo non violent autonomy/independence movement for a number of years.
It is powerful testimony.

I could not post it here directly, but here is what the subject appropriate link looks like. If you go to the above site the link from there is active.

Gen. Wesley Clark (Ret.) Speech
Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark briefs the press on the testimony he gave at the Milosevic trial in the Hague & on other current events.
12/17/2003: CONCORD: 30 min.

http://robbedvoter.forclark.com/story/2003/12/18/91558/110

For anyone to defend Milosevic over Clark...But then again, these are the same people who took Saddam's word over Clinton's re: aspirin factory. I hate to break it to some of you (Ramsek Clatk & fans) but not everyone on the opposite side of the US is a good because of it

Most of the opponents of the US, from The USSR to Saddam Hussein, have been among the worst tyrannies ever seen on earth.

Hello Robbedvoter,
here's a part of Milosovics reply the next day:
(http://www.un.org/icty/transe54/031216ED.htm)

17 MR. MILOSEVIC:

18 Q. All right, General. Since this has to do with your statement,

19 among other things -- I mean, you are really mocking the truth and logic

20 here. You say in paragraph 28: "We know how to handle these Albanians,

21 these murderers, these rapists, these killers of their own kind. We have

22 taken care of them before." And you talk about 1946.

23 General, obviously you do not know history, the history of the

24 Second World War. Do you know that in this context I did not speak to you

25 about this at all? I'm going to remind you. I was saying that many

Page 30504

1 members of Hitler's army who were Albanians and who had been crushed spent

2 all of two years after the war in the mountains of Kosovo, notably in

3 Drenica, and they were killing people, and that the Yugoslav army spent

4 all of two years with them in Kosovo finishing off the Second World War.

5 They were members of Hitler's units that remained in the hills up there,

6 and the war went on for two more years over there in Kosovo. Truth to

7 tell, it was a low-intensity conflict.

8 So it is completely false that we surrounded them in 1946 and

9 killed all of them. This went on for two years.

10 JUDGE MAY: One thing at a time. What is it you're suggesting you

11 said to the general, so that we can understand it?

12 THE ACCUSED: I said to the general that

13 particularly in Drenica, the former members of Hitler's units were focused

14 there and that the war went on for another two years with these ballists.

15 They were even part of the SS units, Hitler's SS units. And these

16 bandits --
17 JUDGE MAY: Just a moment. Let's deal with this. General,

18 perhaps you could deal with that, if you would. The accused is suggesting

19 that what he said was that the war went on for another two years

20 apparently with these units, members of Hitler's units, part of the SS, in

21 Drenica, I understand. Perhaps you could help us. Did he say anything

22 like that?

23 THE WITNESS: Well, let me put this in context and then go to the

24 specifics, if I might, Your Honour. (...)"

Dirk





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Dirk39 (1000+ posts) Sun Dec-21-03 03:59 AM
Response to Reply #20
46. Just a bit more of Milosovic's answer:



16 Q. That, General, is simply not true. And secondly, when you made
17 that comparison with reference to what was done before, in 1946 I was five
18 years old. I couldn't have spoken in the first person plural.
19 And secondly, General, you certainly must know that it was the
20 German intelligence service, in fact, that worked on the formation of
21 terrorist groups and the equipping of the KLA. As NATO commander, you
22 must have had such intelligence information.
23 JUDGE MAY: This is totally irrelevant. Whether you were five
24 years old or not is not the point. The point is that this is exactly what
25 is alleged that you said. Now, what we make of it will be a matter for
Page 30509

1 the Trial Chamber, and whether we accept the evidence is a matter for the
2 Trial Chamber, but you must confine your examination to that conversation.
3 THE ACCUSED: I was talking about the traditional
4 commitment of certain groups over there in that area in favour of
5 terrorism, looting --

6 JUDGE MAY: No, we're not going to go into this. You know that
7 your examination is limited. Now, have you any other questions? You've
8 got 20 minutes on the current count, or less. Have you got any more,
9 anything else you want to ask the general about?
10 THE ACCUSED: You told me you would give me some
11 extra time, Mr. May. You said you would give me some additional time so
12 please don't say I've only got another 20 minutes.


http://www.un.org/icty/transe54/031216ED.htm

Dirk

'Blood and Guts' sometimes cared little for the consequences to those under him- this Clark thing really was disconcerting.

I like Clark, but at the time I thought he was an idiot to antagonizee the russians.

at the time. Criticising Clark on that one is like criticising a mugging victim because he put up a fight.

If Clark had American troops available they would have invested the airport, the Russians would have looked at them, they would have looked at the Russians, they probably would have ended up having vodka together and the story would never have made the papers.

Instead, he had to depend on British troops and their commander balked at the idea of moving onto the airfield so as to prevent Russian reinforcements from being ferried into the area. If he had commanded the British troops at Bunker Hill and Concord we probably never would have heard of either of them.

As it was, after all was over, the British government awarded Clark some sort of knighthood. Guess nothing succeeds like success, right?

Clark was a great General and good guy- but the Kosovo thing was a bonehead manuever- it could have gone hinkey nine ways to hell.

The Brit general was right to tell Wes NO- he kept his head. Clark was stuck in cold war mode- one of the only times I've ever heard of him making a mistake, but let's try to be honest about it.

Yep WWIII we were damn close there /sarcasm. Clark's superiors supported his decision until Britain freeked. And in my opinion it was the British officer who over-reacted.


For anyone interested in the story, there is Clark's new book Winning Modern Wars,

also articles at
MSNBC-Slate "Defending the General"
http://slate.msn.com/id/2091194/


From the American Prospect
http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/11/yglesias-m-11-14.html

both articles defend Clark from this smear.

Thank God that Brit General had the sense to diffuse the Situation. I know a lot of these aging 'cold warriors' and they view everything with the Russians through the lens of confrontation.

Instead of the 'ugly American' it was the 'ugly American general'.

Everyone is allowed one fuck-up and this was Wesley's. That's my view.

We know that NO such crazy thing would have happened had the British general OK'd sending the troops, precisely because a couple of days after Clark and the Brit General had their confrontation, the British General gave in and THEY DID PRECISELY THAT.

And guess what happened? British and French troops zipped up to the airport and told the Russians "we're taking the place over and you should leave because you're not supposed to be here, OK?"

And the Russians said "Nope, we're staying."

And the French and British troops glared at the Russians a bit, and the Russians glared back. The French and British troops radioed back to Clark and HQ, who told them to just leave and not to escalate things. And so they left

Hey look, World War III didn't start.

Oh, I forgot to add that at some point, because the Russians couldn't fly in supplies, the troops at the airport started running out of food and water, so Clark had the British and French troops bring some to them. Some hard on to get the Russkies.

The Brit's statement was hyperbolic, but his meaning was clear: 'I'm not going to escalate a tense situation because you need rub the Russinas nosed in the dirt'.

I was in the Army in at that time- most of the guys I talked with thought Clark over reacted- let's face it, it wasn't CLark who was going to get his ass shot off, it was us G.I's.

Like I said, I like Clark, but this was a bad day for him. Let's forget it; But let's not pretend like it didn't happen.

I'm asking because I'm curious as to how widespread any information about this pretty obscure issue spread at the time. Did Jackson issue a press release or something?

Would it have even made the backpages if Jackson had just informed Clark that "I decline to proceed according to your orders without prior consultation with my government."?

I submit that the hyperbole was used to justify Jackson's refusal of a direct, authorised command from a superior officer. If Whitehall Street hadn't backed Jackson up, what would we be calling Jackson right now?

In the Army it's called being 'Posted'- the Navy has 'Stations'.

how widespread was the discussion about Pristina among the troops?

I don't recall coming across references to it in the press (though I didn't follow the Nation or National Review or anything like that so I stand to be corrected if it was on the tip of everyone else's tongue) or on TV and it struck me as curious that a bunch of G.I.'s would be familiar with it at the time, and, of course, Jackson's famous quote.

I notice, in passing, that General Shelton's famous quote has surfaced again, this time in Milosovic's cross examination of Clark at the Hague. I wonder if that made General Shelton feel proud, being used to shore up the case of a mass murderer. Words have such a tendency to come back and bite one.

The three guys who were nabbged by Milosovic and held captive were Cavalry Scouts like us- perhaps we were paying a bit more attention than most.

I don't think I can legimately say how widespread people were talking about it.

This is about the PR-company behind the Kosovo-war:

"James Harff, director of Ruder & Finn Global Public Affairs, in an interview with French journalist Jacques Merlino which was published in his book, Les Verites Yougoslaves ne sont pas toutes bonnes en dire (Albin Michel, Paris, 1994), talked about his new clients and his (i.e., Harff's) strategy for success. According to Harff: 'Between August 2nd and 5th, 1992, the New York Newsday came out with a lead story on (Serbian death) camps. We jumped at the opportunity and immediately distributed it to three major Jewish organizations - the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress ... The engagement of Jewish organizations on the side of the Bosnians was a superb poker play. Immediately thereafter, we were able to associate the Serbs and the Nazis in the public's mind ... It is not our job to verify information ... Our job is to accelerate the circulation of news items which are favourable to us ... We are not paid to moralize ...'"

"At the beginning of July 1992, New York Newsday came out with the article on Serb camps. We jumped at the opportunity immediately. We outwitted three big Jewish organizations.... That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the Bosnians we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind. Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia ... By a single move, we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself. We won by targeting the Jewish audience. Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with the use of words with high emotional content such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, etc, which evoke images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz."

"The PR firm was piling hoax upon hoax. The famous story of Serb concentration camps was built on a photo of a gaunt man surrounded by others, staring at the viewer from behind barbed wire; surely an image to chill one to the bones. It took years before a German journalist Thomas Deichman, in an article titled 'The picture that fooled the world', described how the famous photo was staged by its takers, British journalists, who were photographing the inhabitants from inside barbed wire which was protecting agricultural products and machinery from theft in a refugee and transit camp; the men stood outside of it; and at no time was there a barbed-wire fence surrounding the camp. But by that time the image had done its deed, terminally slamming the Serbs as genocidal mass murderers.

"There are countless other stories, all deliberately maligning the Serbs to further the ends of military intervention. These stories and photos of 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' (a la Hitler) in a civil war, in which Serbs are guilty as sin and others are their innocent victims, are repeated ad nauseam by western reporters without the slightest evidence, and have provided the ground for the public's (hopefully only temporary) acceptance of the illegal and brutal war against the sovereign nation of Yugoslavia. They continue after NATO's bombing began, unabated, with new absurdities such as the suggestion that the Serbs are really bombing themselves! Perhaps in the war crimes court there will soon be a place for journalists and PR firms who with their inflammatory reporting and fraudulent actions cause wars to begin." <7>


http://www.endtimesnetwork.com/oldnews/vol8no6.html

Goebbels seems to wear red, white and blue these days, not to mention black, yellow and red...


We are not paid to moralize
We are not paid to moralize
We are not paid to moralize
Hello from Germany,
Dirk