Aside from engaging in blatant guilt-by-association in this post, I am curious how Yoshie and others would analyze the fact that the racist rightwing in this country has almost the same anti-KLA, anti-NATO, anti-bombing analysis that the anti-bombing left has been promoting? On rightwing sites like freerepublic.com they substitute "New World Order elitists" for "imperialists" in the appropriate places, but the sentences are remarkably the same.
---Nathan Newman
Kosovo: The Real Story
Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture March 24, 1999 (last update) editors of Chronicles and The Rockford Institute
Kosovo Crisis
In conducting negotiations over the future of Kosovo, the Clinton administration has deliberately kept both the Congress and the American people in the dark. What follows is a detailed analysis of information that is available in the foreign press but has so far received little if any attention in the US. Although the details are complicated, the basic situation is very clear:
1) The Clinton administration is calling for a NATO/US solution to the Kosovo crisis because of a massacre of civilians which allegedly took place in the village of Racak in Kosovo.
2) A French TV crew was present when Yugoslav police took the village and say it was a fire-fight between Yugoslav forces and heavily-armed KLA fighters. Yugoslav forensic authorities have declared the massacre a hoax: dead KLA soldiers, they way, were redressed in civilian clothes and piled into a ditch they had dug.
3) The forensic case has been settled by a Finnish team of physicians brought in by the international community. However, the Finnish team’s report has not been made public, even though it is now more than three weeks since the dead have been buried. What is in that report is almost certainly a confirmation of the Yugoslav position: a) because in leaving Yugoslavia the Finns made a statement praising the high professional standards of the Yugoslav forensic pathologists, and b) according to the respected German newspaper Die Welt, the report is "a hot potato" that will undermine the US position, and c) an independent forensics team from Belarus came to the same conclusion as the Yugoslav doctors.
The Kosovo crisis is one of the most complex that an American government has ever faced. On one side are the claims (somewhat exaggerated) of majority rule; on the other side are the undisputed facts that Kosovo is, legally, only a region of Serbia and, historically, the very core of the Serbian heartland. Whatever the US decides to do about Kosovo, the Congress and the people have a right to get the full story from the administration, before even considering the use of intimidation and force.
Kosovo: The Real Story Prepared by the editors of Chronicles and The Rockford Institute
Self-inflicted atrocities and stage-managed "massacres" have paid rich dividends to the Muslim side in Bosnia. In May 1992 the Sarajevo "Breadline Massacre"-–with TV crews mysteriously in attendance to film the blood and guts-– facilitated the imposition of punitive sanctions against Serbia, some of which are still in force. Indian General Satish Nambiar, UN commander at the time, stated to me (March 6, 1999) that "no UN officer in the field at the time had any doubt that the Muslims did it to themselves in order to get political support and sympathy."
In February 1994 the show was repeated at Sarajevo’s Markale market, with similar results: the Serbs were forced to withdraw heavy weapons around Sarajevo, and were bombed. for the first time by NATO soon thereafter. Subsequent UN investigation concluded that the Muslims did it to themselves (as confirmed by Lord Owen, General Sir Michael Rose and others), but the report was suppressed on US insistence.
In August 1995 the "Trznica Massacre" in Sarajevo was the opener for some three weeks of massive American-led air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs, facilitating a Croat-Muslim offensive that ethnically cleansed western Bosnia of its Serb inhabitants. No independent investigation of the incident – as demanded by the Serbs – was even allowed this time.
Right now the Administration is pressuring the Serbs to accept a NATO force of 28,000 on their territory, including 4,000 US servicemen, as a result of yet another stage-managed "massacre"-–in the village of Racak in Kosovo--last January. That "massacre" resulted in Albright’s and Clinton’s claim that no solution is acceptable in Kosovo unless it included a NATO force. By now the demand for Serbia to open its borders to some tens of thousands of foreign soldiers, or face NATO bombing, has become an immutable tenet in Washington’s approach to the region. The fact that the event which enabled the interventionists within the Administration to formulate such policy was entirely bogus, while largely known in Europe, is being actively suppressed by the US.
The facts of the case are as follows:
On January 16, 1999, from coast to coast US media went into a state of righteous rage over the "discovery" of 45 dead Albanians at Racak, allegedly "civilians butchered in cold blood."
The head of the OSCE observer mission in Kosovo, American diplomat William Walker, immediately and categorically asserted that the Serbs were to blame. Belgrade's claim that the forty five bodies were in fact KLA guerrillas fallen during the fight in the surrounding areas was scornfully rejected in Washington as "Serbian propaganda." Not a hint of doubt about the affair was printed in any of the "mainstream" media in the United States.
In Europe, however, doubts were immediately raised about the Albanian-American version of events. According to Le Monde ("Were the dead in Racak really massacred in cold blood?" by Christophe Chatelot in Pristina, January 21, 1999), "two journalists of the Associated Press TV (APTV), which filmed the police operation in Racak, contradict Walker. When around 10 hours, they enter the locality behind an armored vehicle in the front, the village is almost deserted. They progress along the streets under the fire of the gunners of the Kosovo Liberation Army which took position in the woods which dominate the village. These exchanges of shootings will last all the time of the intervention, with more or less intensity. It is in the woods that the main combat took place."
At 3.30 p.m., the report went on, the police completed their operation and left the village under the sporadic KLA fire "who still resist thanks to the steep, difficult ground." The Serbs estimated that there were 15-20 combatants dead on the KLA side. The Albanians come out from their shelters and go down towards the village. Three vehicles of the OSCE Verification Mission arrive.
Le Monde points out that the Serb operation "was neither a surprise, nor a secret": journalists and OSCE observers were invited, and encouraged by the Serb side to witness the proceedings before the fighting started, and allowed into the village afterwards, to find but four lightly injured civilians. The night falls. With the police and verifiers gone, Le Monde report continues, the events started taking an unexpected turn:
"The next morning, press and verifiers arrive and, guided by armed KLA fighters who regained the village, they discover the ditch with twenty bodies, mostly men. During the day William Walker arrives and expresses horror at 'the crime committed by the Serbian police and the Yugoslav army.' But many questions remain unclarified. How the Serb police could gather a group of men, and quietly direct them towards the place of the execution, while they were constantly under the fire of the KLA? How the ditch at the edge of Racak could escape the glance of the inhabitants, familiar of the places, present before the night?
And how come the observers, who were present for more than two hours in this very small village, failed to see the ditch too? Why are there only a few cartridge cases around the corpses, and little blood in this sunken lane where 23 people were supposedly shot several times in the head? Weren't the bodies of the Albanians killed in the combat by the Serb police rather joined together in the ditch to create a scene of horror in order to initiate the wrath of the public opinion?"
In the same vein, Le Figaro reported ("Massacre under a cloud" by Renaud Girard in Racak, 20 January 1999) that "in view of a whole series of confusing facts related to this event, this matter deserves undivided attention":
"Taking into consideration that an AP television crew was invited as early as 8.30 a.m. to film the operation, it seems that the police had nothing to conceal. The OSCE was also notified about the operation, and they sent two cars to the site. Verifiers spent the entire day on a hill, which offered a full-length view of the village At 3:30 p.m. the police left the village, taking along a 12.7 mm heavy machine-gun, two automatic rifles, two snipers and some thirty Kalashnyikovs, of Chinese manufacture. Subsequently searching for wounded civilians, international verifiers were seen talking at ease with young Albanians in civil suits."
Le Figaro also pointed out that the "massacre" was unveiled only the following morning, with the KLA in full control of the village. They claimed that the previous day police separated women from men, whom they took to the ditch, and killed on the spot:
"The AP TV journalists' testimonies, as well the material they have filmed, give an entirely opposite interpretation of this event. The police surrounded an empty village that morning, sneaking up along the walls. Then KLA members opened fire on them from the ditches on a hill. Subsequently, surrounded KLA members were desperately trying to break through A confusing fact is that at the place of an alleged massacre on Saturday morning there were just a few shells. Maybe the KLA has thus wisely turned its military defeat into a political victory?"
Essentially identical account was published in Die Welt (January 22), and reported on the BBC World Service and Radio France International, among others.
The Serbs immediately demanded an inquest by an international, independent team of pathologists. The OSCE sent in a team of Finnish pathologists who were, on their own admission, granted unlimited facilities in examining the bodies of the "victims."
There was another team of pathologists, from Belarus, who came as guests of the Serbs. Both teams have categorically confirmed what the Serbs had claimed all along: that the fatal wounds to the victims were inflicted from bullets fired from considerable distance, that additional bullets were fired at them at point blank range, and knife wounds inflicted, only AFTER they had been dead for some hours, and that at least some bodies had had their clothes changed (presumably to remove KLA uniforms), which was evidenced by the discrepancy between the wounds and the damage to clothing.
This report the Finns have submitted to OSCE, which had commissioned it in the first place, but OSCE has refused to make it public. The line now is that "nobody wants the report to get in the way of the peace process!" Cf. Die Welt, 8/3/1999 ("Whether or not it was a massacre, nobody wants to know any more" by Karin Kneissl):
"Finnish legal doctors were supposed to clear up whether in fact 45 ethnic Albanian civilians were executed by Serbian units -- or whether defeated UCK/KLA fighters who were killed in battle were arranged to deceive Western observers. Now the dead have been buried for three weeks-- but the report is still not in. No wonder: "This report is a hot potato", said an OSCE diplomat in Vienna to Die Welt, "no one really wants to touch it." ["Eine heisse Kartoffel ist dieser Bericht", sagt ein OSCE-Diplomat in Wien gegenüber der WELT, "Keiner will in so richtig".] At first the report of the Finnish doctors' team was held back out of consideration for the Kosovo peace talks in Rambouillet, although it was ready from a legal medical viewpoint."
There can be no doubt that, had the report confirmed Walker’s claim, its findings would have been spread all over the nation’s front pages.
It is on this basis that the proliferation of open-ended American commitments involving the deployment of US forces continues. Since traditional concepts of the national interest and US security can't justify deployment, the ultimate justification is the laudable of "easing human suffering"-and if the reality of Racak does not fit the story, too bad for the facts. Creating a permanent hotbed of instability in the Balkans cannot conceivably be in America’s interest, but the Administration proudly retorts that its policy is not guided by such selfish, narrow-minded considerations. But what is on offer instead? It is "humanitarian" foreign policy – epitomized in Clinton’s exhortation "that we can make a difference" and that "America symbolizes hope and resolve."
This is, in fact, a recipe for open-ended commitment in each and every ethnic, religious, or racial conflict, anywhere in the world, whenever the ruling establishment decides, with NATO transformed from a defensive alliance into the enforcer of the will of Washington. Such policy has no relation to U.S. national interests - and no limits other than the public backlash against body bags, if and when a Mogadishu-like disaster strikes.