>
> Thanks to Johannes & Hinrich for posting articles on the alleged
> "Racak Massacre." I think that this type of "questioning" of the
> Kosovo War is going on now because the Empire has already succeeded
> in replacing the Socialist Party of Serbia/the Yugoslav United Left
> by Kostunica-led "Democraic Opposition of Serbia" whose
> constituencies are more amenable to further restructuring of the
> economy along the neoliberal line, and in this new context, the
> grievances of Albanians in Kosovo are _no longer useful pretexts for
> military assaults by NATO that they once were_ but now merely useful
> (if annoying) "problems" (in that while it is hard to manage
> Albanians who have their own aspirations, the difficulty of
> management is in itself still useful because it's an excuse for
> maintaining the imperial military presence in the area, _perhaps for
> ever_):
>
While I agree with Yoshie about using the Albanian aspirations as a pretext for imperial military presence in Kosovo, I think from a German perspective the purpose of the bombing of Yugoslavia was to a lesser degree the wish to force the re-introduction of market relations in Yugoslavia, but to cretae a consensus for German miltary intervention outside the area of NATO member states.
Such an assumption is backed by the commentary from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung I am appending below. It clearly shows the usefullness of the 'Racak massacre' for imperialist and clearly proves that the issues is not 'Were there any massacres at all', but how instrumental Racak was in the given situation.
What I noted when looking at the timeline of privatisation in Yugoslavia Yoshie posted was the following rough pattern: 89-94 privatisation, 94 stopped, 97 new attempts for privatisation, 99 stopped again. This means the privatisation attempts were mostly influenced by the improvement or deteriation of Yugoslavia'a realtions to the imperialist powers: At any time when there was some sort of raproachment privatisation steps were taken up again. Seems to be a sort of chicken-egg problem.
On the Albanian aspirations: An article similiar to the one quoted by Yoshie appeared in the January 23 edition of the Chicago Tribune, more or less painting the Albanians as evil troublemakers.
There is an account on NATO-UCPMB clashes on the Jane's website dated January 8. http://www.janes.com/regional_news/europe/news/jir/jir010108_1_n.shtml
There is also a general assesment of the situation in Yugoslavia on the same site: http://www.janes.com/regional_news/europe/sentinel/balkans/yugoslavia.shtml
Johannes
ANOTHER SPARK IN BALKAN TINDER ETHNIC ALBANIANS MAKE BID FOR SERB TERRITORY
By Tom Hundley Tribune Foreign Correspondent January 23, 2001
"... Commander Xhemajli. He is a hard, muscular man of 40 years with a thick black beard and fists covered with tattoos. As a member of the KLA, he fought the Serbs in Kosovo. In that war, NATO was his ally. In this war they are not his enemy, not yet, but they have become a hindrance.
(...) What bothers Xhemajli more is the way the Americans have been arresting members of his army in Kosovo. In recent months, U.S. soldiers have picked up about 110 suspected members of the guerrilla group. They are holding about 60, including Xhemajli's brother, in the stockade at Camp Bondsteel, the main U.S. base in Kosovo. "We can arrest, too, you know," Xhemajli said. "It's not hard to capture an American or a Russian, but we don't do that." The UCPMB's overall political goal is to detach their little piece of territory from Serbia and attach it to Kosovo. There appears to be very limited support for this among Kosovo Albanians. There is no support at all within the international community. The Kosovo Albanian leadership "understands that this is hurting them with us," said a senior Western diplomat in Kosovo. Xhemajli is not worried. He knows that Western diplomats said the same about the KLA when it began attacking Serb police in 1998. A year later NATO found itself in its first shooting war, with the KLA calling in targets for NATO warplanes. Even with no international backing, Xhemajli believes the UCPMB can achieve its objective. How? "With guns," he said. (...) For the Bush administration, a worst-case scenario would be that the Serbs revert to form and respond to an Albanian provocation with a Racak-style retaliation. "If the Serbs go in and burn villages, the pressure for KFOR to go in and do something would grow," said a Western diplomat. If NATO did respond, it would prove that the hard-liners like Xhemajli and Plaku were right all along when they gambled that NATO could again be maneuvered into taking the Albanians' side. If NATO did nothing, most Kosovo Albanians probably would see this as siding with the Serbs. NATO peacekeepers could no longer be assured of their welcome in Kosovo. Last month, UCPMB guerrillas opened fire on a joint U.S.-Russian patrol that was blowing up one of their supply trails into the Presevo valley. The Americans and Russians returned fire. There were no casualties. A few days later, the Americans were back to finish the job of sealing the supply route. This time they brought Apache helicopters with them. The guerrillas stood aside. U.S. officials--military and civilian--have warned of the "heavy hammer" that would come down on anyone foolish enough to mess with American troops. But Xhemajli and Plaku have listened carefully to America's internal debate over the last few months. They know the Bush administration is unhappy with the hand it has inherited in the Balkans. They also understand the political uproar that would ensue if American soldiers started dying in the Balkans. Men like Xhemajli and Plaku might be given to believe that if Americans start taking casualties here, they would pack up and go home."
Full text at: http://chicagotribune.com/news/printedition/article/0,2669,SAV-0101230196,FF .html
>From the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
To What Extent Should the Past Shape Reunited Germany? By Berthold Kohler
FRANKFURT. The war is over, but the fighting about it goes on. It would have been highly out of character for this country if we had not questioned whether it was right to follow the just sworn-in coalition to the Balkans and to fight for the human rights of foreign nationals. With surprising composure, the vast majority of the population did support the action. Surprising because the country had only recently gotten over the surprise of its return to the world stage after reunification and also because generations of believers had observed the 11th commandment of postwar Germany: Thou shalt never again wage war of any kind.
Of course, there were those who were concerned, those who believed that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's intervention in Kosovo was imperialist, the justification spurious and Germany's participation unconstitutional. Thanks to their pangs of conscience, the village of Recak is making headlines again -- but not as the place where Serbs killed dozens of Albanians. Now, Recak is to help us weigh the meaning, or meaninglessness, of the war in Kosovo.
After the reports of a massacre in Recak became public in January 1999, many politicians, including the German foreign minister, spoke of a "turning point." Opponents of the war, then and now, hinge their argument on that expression: If this bloodbath was the key event that put the Western powers on the path to war, the one they used to win over public opinion for the conflict, then NATO's military intervention lacks all justification if it turns out that it was not innocent civilians who were shot in Recak but fighters from the Kosovo Liberation Army. Some already speak of another "Gleiwitz" (the former German-Polish border town where the Germans staged an attack to justify the invasion of Poland in 1939). If Recak is another Gleiwitz, then there was no need for NATO to intervene -- let alone with depleted uranium munitions.
The governments of the Western alliance were at the time under pressure to justify their action. They had for so long refrained from doing anything while Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was waging his campaigns of expulsion in Croatia and Bosnia that people had to wonder why action was necessary in a "civil war" after a few Albanian insurgents had been killed. Why die for Pristina? Democrats, like their armed forces, prefer to keep away from war if they can. One of their strengths, which is simultaneously one of their weaknesses in dealing with despots, is that democrats refuse to believe that the despots live by a different set of values. Long before Recak made headlines, tens of thousands of Albanians, Bosnians, Croats and Serbs lost their lives, and hundreds of thousands their homes in the territory of the former Yugoslavia because the West allowed Mr. Milosevic and his thugs to indulge their delusion of a Greater Serbia.
However, after the massacre in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, this was no longer possible. The Bosnian debacle was the real turning point in the West's Balkans policy. From then on, the Western powers had no choice but to accept that Mr. Milosevic's campaigns to ethnically cleanse a future Greater Serbia jeopardized the security and stability of all southeastern Europe and that only military force would stop him. But even after he had crossed the line and unleashed murder and expulsion on Kosovo, nobody in NATO was eager to take up arms. Throughout the Western diplomatic efforts and military action, from the Rambouillet conference to the start of the bombing campaign, one could hear the earnest appeals to Mr. Milosevic not to force NATO to go to extremes. The supposedly bellicose members of the Western alliance were only prepared to do the minimum; thus, this military action and the alliance came within a hair's breadth of failing.
None of the governments involved believed that their voters would accept casualties. The need for justification was nowhere as desperate as in Berlin. Would the first national coalition of Social Democrats and Greens, of all governments, with its virulently anti-military and anti-American junior partner, take Germany to war at America's side? In those days, the issue was not reduced to the question of whether the foreign minister's U-turns and quarrels pointed to a less than staunch adherence to principles. In the spring of 1999, the political debate centered on the extent to which the self-doubts and modesty that had marked the postwar Federal Republic, should remain state ideology of the post-unification Berlin Republic. In other words, should the mythological founding principles of the postwar Bonn Republic, principles that grew out of the Nazi trauma, also be a part of reunited Germany's defining culture? This was the heart of the debate then, and it is at the center of debate again today.
Leading figures in the governing coalition believed that German participation in the Kosovo intervention could only be justified under the rallying cry of "never again." Foreign Minister Joseph Fischer discovered that Auschwitz had not only wrung from Germans the oath "never again war" but also the obligation "never again genocide." He and the minister of defense, who kept his own war diary, and other politicians believed that only by overstating the evil, could they achieve consensus in our media-driven democracy.
This was not necessary. People did not have to see Mr. Milosevic as a new Hitler and the planned Operation Horseshoe as a second Wannsee conference (where the Holocaust was coordinated) to grasp the danger that allowing the Serbs to continue their decade-old policy of expulsion posed for the whole of Europe -- particularly if Europe simply stood idly by. But they are as self-absorbed in Berlin as they used to be in Bonn, smugly confident that nobody could be more evil yet nobody more ethical than the Germans. Jan. 22, 2001