Michael Pugliese
Benjamin C. Works, Executive Director --Speak the Truth and Shame the Devil--
December 8, 1999
In This Issue: Choke-points: Kosovo, Serbia, and Chechnya
This will have to be short as I am just recovered from eight days of the flu and am off tonight for seven days in Panama, where, as an escort-expert to a group sponsored by the Washington Times, I will observer the return of the Panama Canal next Tuesday. I hope to visit that subject in a bulletin "from the road" if I can surmount the petty details of using the internet from Panama.
Watching the riotous street-fest that was Seattle during the WTO meeting last week, I again thought it odd how our current crises overlay key commercial through-routes in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Even the Indonesian convulsions are adjacent to key world waterways. Hmm.
The WTO, with those now-infamous "closed door meetings" is supposed to work to removing protectionist national political deal-making from a role in disrupting fair international trade; it gives local politicians a "plausible" scapegoat when their protectionist deals are overturned. But the WTO is designed to liberate commerce from unneccessary politics. To politicians and those activists who manipulate the political process to advance their special-interest agendas, this is a threat. Thus it must be attacked by labor and environmental activists, farmers' groups, etc. Their agendas --not at all well hidden-- were entirely protectionist seeking to leverage US politics to impose "punitive" standards on other economies when reasonable standards have already been set by other UN treaties covering hazardous child labor, the environment, etc..
The WTO is a "constitutional" process joined by treaty, not a "forum" for speechifying; but it was meant to reduce political influence, and now politicians have been able to re-define the WTO as "undemocratic." Hmmm.
Chechnya: "Carthago Delenda Est."
"Carthage must be destroyed," Cato kept reminding the Roman Senate, until it was accomplished. The Chechen rebels have presented Russia with a "set-piece" battle for control of the capital city of Grozny --a hub of the old Caucasus oil pipeline route-- and Russia has decided to accept that battle on its terms. The city will be bombarded to splinters and dust, and Russia will do all it can to keep its infantry out of a wasteful house-to-house battle.
Obviously the Chechen rebels don't like the set-up and international human rights groups do not like it either. But what Russia has set up is not illegal and President Clinton affirmed that today in a press conference. It's just that Mr. Clinton and progressive-minded people think sledge-hammer tactics don't work. Their only alternative though, turns out to be awarding secession, an option the Russians cannot consider without triggering a further breakup of their nation state.
Under the law of land warfare, when an army besieges a city, it is expected to allow civilians to flee, but if they remain in the city, law views these residents as hostages of the defending army and their fate is the responsibility of the defender. With regard to Grozny, Russia has given the remaining civilian populace five days to evacuate before a "final" bombardment attack is launched.
Under the UN Treaty on Genocide it is plausible to charge that a form of genocide (ethnic depopulation) is being practiced against the Chechens, but the Russian treatment of refugees contradicts such arguments. Here, again, the Russians could have served their cause better by being prepared in advance for that flood which left the rebel-controlled zone.
Any sanctions or criticism of Russia --specifically threats to restrict international loans--during this campaign will not deter Russia, and will only reinforce the hardliners who face parliamentary elections this month. Here is the conundrum: are Russia's critics standing for principles, for morals? For strategy? Is anybody standing against terrorism, gangsterism and anarchy?
The Russian preparations are nearly complete and we shall see more when the attacks begin on Saturday. Stay tuned.
Serbia and Kosovo:
Interesting; on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, John McLaughlin's "McLaughlin Group" talk show --a big deal here in the US-- initiated the broadcast with Mr. McLaughlin launching scathingly critical reviews of NATO's performance in Kosovo and the nasty impact of post-air war sanctions on Serbia's civilian population. Questionable if not outright criminal, he found. Further, McLaughlin (and others) openly affirm that the sanctions are counter-productive.
This continues the fallout after Stratfor's report on the non-existent "mass graves" and the lack of evidence that a genocide was being perpetrated in Kosovo by the Belgrade government.
This public debate has continued, particularly among the Republican Presidential Candidates: Alan Keyes has attacked the alleged genocide twice during debates in New Hampshire and Iowa. In the second case, he responded to a challenge from the Press to his remarks in New Hampshire the week before: Judy Woodruff of CNN was trying to cover for the administration's argument that there was a concerted conspiracy to eliminate all Albanians from Kosovo prior to and during the spring air campaign.
WOODRUFF:...Mr. Keyes, another Kosovo question, you have said that you thought the scale of Serb atrocities there was grossly overstated and that what the U.S. did through NATO in intervening was more dangerous than what happened inside the province itself. My question is there's this new report just out that -- by a neutral organization -- than confirms an overwhelming brutal Serb campaign to drive out a million Albanians from Kosovo. Are you still -- do you still stand by your view that the U.S., through NATO, should have stood by and done nothing?
KEYES. If I understand the report, it confirms an intention, ma'am. And -- and it's not entirely clear to me we react in foreign policy to intentions. We've got to react to facts. And the facts as they have been established on the ground do not support all the reports that came out in the course of that war, and you and I know it. The Pentagon has said so, others have said so.
We have got to be very careful not to lower the threshold of intervention. It was the pretext of the abuse of minorities in Poland and elsewhere that Hitler used for his aggressions, that other conquerors have used for their aggressions.
If we're to maintain the principle of non-aggression that has been the bedrock principle for which Americans have died, then we've got to be very careful not to set an example ourselves that allows and easy pretext to be out there in the world for would-be aggressors. It's going to cause far more trouble than the trouble we resolve, as we are discovering, I believe, right now in Kosovo.
So Pat Buchanan now has good company in raising the issues of national sovereignty and multilateral interventionism. The debate verges on erupting into the political mainstream here in the US. This is good for all concerned.
The Genocide Convention of 1948:
Why is the term "genocide" so easy to throw around when debating Kosovo and Chechnya, vs. real terrors such as the Armenian and Jewish Holocausts, the Cambodian killing fields and the post-colonial cycle of Rwanda-Barundi machete massacres. It is because, under law, wholesale massacre is not the only condition defined as ethno-murder; it is suffcient to try to dismantle a distinct population or to evict a native population from their ancestral lands. This is why the Hague Court may be able to make some charges of war crimes against Yugoslavia's leaders stick; though it is also clear that the court is letting slide the preponderance of crimes of similar or greater gravity, as committed by Bosnian and Croat leaders,
The following is reproduced from the UN's website archives. It describes the very generous definition of genocide as adopted by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was approved and proposed for signature and accession by General Assembly resolution 260 (III) A of 9 December 1948. The Convention entered into force on 12 January 1951. As of October 1998, the Convention had been ratified and acceded to by 127 States.
The 19-article Convention states that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law. It defines genocide as any of the acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, including by killing its members; causing them serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
In Kosovo:
Meanwhile those KLA attacks into Serbia near villages with Albanian populations have continued since my Nov. 24th report, and Europeans are becoming more convinced that the intervention has been a big mistake.
NATO's commander, observing the ongoing violence in Kosovo has determined that the Albanians utterly lack any sense of humanity --that's almost a direct quote. We'll be looking at that in greater detail upon return from Panama; as the Kosovo occupation continues its melt-down into chaos.
© Copyright 1999 by Benjamin C. Works -- SIRIUS WWW.SIRI-US.COM Readers may re-post this report in part or in whole, with this copyright notice, "for fair use only."