Hawks and
Eagles: 'Greater NATO' Flies to the Aid of
'Greater Albania'
by
Diana Johnstone
On
March 24, NATO launched its first full-scale
aggressive war
against a sovereign state. It was certainly not
meant to be the last. NATO, it was repeatedly
stated, had to prove its “resolve.” The
action was meant to be exemplary, a model for
future NATO actions elsewhere and a warning to
the world.
Yugoslavia had neither attacked
nor threatened any other country. NATO acted
illegally, without any mandate from the United
Nations Security Council. By flouting the basic
principles that underlie the fragile structure of
international legality, the Clinton
administration and NATO chose “might is
right” as the law of the new millennium.
This
appalling adventure, presented by servile media
and ignorant politicians as a
“humanitarian” necessity, set off
precisely the “humanitarian
catastrophe” its apologists claimed it was
meant to prevent. Countless thousands of
frightened ethnic Albanian civilians fled over
rough terrain into neighboring countries. They
were fleeing from the NATO bombing and Serb
reprisals, in proportions it was not possible to
measure. Both NATO and its armed Albanian allies
in the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK or KLA) needed
to persuade the world that “Milosevic”
(the semi-fictional personification of evil on
the one hand, and Serbia on the other) was
carrying out “genocide” in Kosovo. The
“genocide” story was necessary to
justify both the bombing and the next phase of
the NATO-KLA scenario, the invasion of Serbia to
“liberate” Kosovo.
After
a week of bombing, this much could be said with
certainty: NATO leaders had lied so blatantly
about things that could be checked, that there
was no reason to believe anything they say about
things that could not.
Among
the many lies in the current torrent, one lie
played a key role in the justifying of the NATO
bombing, the “no alternative” lie:
Since Milosevic refused peace negotiations, we
had no choice but to bomb.(1)
The
“no alternative” lie incorporated
several falsehoods in one.
Milosevic
had not refused peace negotiations. For months,
the Serbian government had been offering to
negotiate, while the ethnic Albanian leaders
refused. The Serb side had presented quite
comprehensive and reasonable proposals for
extensive self-government in Kosovo.
For
years, but especially during recent months, both
the Serbian government and non-governmental
groups have made compromise proposals for Kosovo,
all including autonomy, democracy and extensive
cultural rights, while the nationalist leaders
have insisted on only one demand: secession.
The
“Rambouillet peace agreement” was in
reality an ultimatum to Yugoslavia to accept a
NATO protectorate on its soil. It was designed by
State Department official Christopher Hill to
satisfy KLA leaders, and was “agreed”
upon only by those two parties and the European
Union representative, not by the entire Contact
Group (including Russia) which was theoretically
sponsoring it. No sovereign state in the world
could accept such an ultimatum.
Top
U.S. officials openly coaxed reluctant Albanians
into signing the agreement by telling them that
their signatures were needed in order to justify
NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia. The
“peace agreement” was thus in reality a
war agreement.
The
War Agreement of Rambouillet
The
conflict between ethnic Albanians and Serbs is a
very old one, which can be traced back over three
centuries. It is older than the
Israeli-Palestinian or Northern Ireland
conflicts, not to mention countless other ethnic
conflicts in the world. The “peace
process” in such cases is expected to be
long and delicate. Only in Kosovo, governments
and media suddenly decided that the conflict had
to be settled in two weeks, at Rambouillet, on
terms laid down by the United States.
Why
the hurry? Because the United States was keen to
lock in NATO’s new mission as global
intervention machine with a show of force prior
to the 50th anniversary of NATO summit in April.(2) NATO had carefully
planned the operations six months in advance.
Peace negotiations “broke down” just
when NATO was all set to go.
For
many months, the Serbian government had offered
to negotiate. High-level government teams went
repeatedly to the provincial capital, Pristina,
to hold talks with Ibrahim Rugova and other
non-violent ethnic Albanian leaders. On one
pretext or another, the Albanians refused to
negotiate. It is probable that two factors
weighed heavily in their refusal: fear of going
against the rising armed rebel movement, the
“Kosovo Liberation Army,” (UCK/KLA),
hostile to any compromise and ready to
assassinate “traitors” who dealt with
the Serbs; and expectations that strong U.S.
pressure on Yugoslavia would bring them more than
negotiations with Belgrade.
At
Rambouillet, the older generation of nationalist
leaders such as Rugova never had the slightest
opportunity to enter negotiations with the
multi-ethnic official Serbian delegation, which
included members of the various ethnic
communities in Kosovo. They were flanked and
overshadowed in the ethnic Albanian delegation by
KLA outlaws, who by then were assured of United
States support. Rambouillet was a charade staged
by the United States in order to provide a
pretext for a NATO demonstration of force on the
eve of the Alliance’s fiftieth anniversary.
A
genuine negotiation would have at least paid
attention to the extensive 10-page proposal of
the Serbian government side, calling for,
notably:
·
Equality of all citizens and guaranteed human
rights.
·
Facilitated return of all citizens to their
homes.
·
Safe unhindered access of all international and
national or non-governmental humanitarian
organizations to the population for purposes of
aid.
·
General amnesty for all political crimes related
to conflict in Kosovo except for persons properly
convicted of crimes against humanity and
international law.
·
Widest possible media freedoms.
·
Preservation and promotion of the national,
cultural, and linguistic identity of each
national community.
·
The commune (county) as basic unit of local
self-government.
·
An Assembly of 130 members, 95 elected directly
by citizens through proportional representation
and 35 elected by national communities of
Albanians, Serbs, Turks, Romani (Gypsies),
Egyptians, and Gorani (mountain Serbs of
southwestern Kosovo, converted to Islam), five
members each.
·
Election by the Assembly of a President and 6
vice presidents, at least one from each national
community, for a four-year term.
·
Responsibility of the Assembly for: budget and
taxes; educational arrangements, with respect for
the authorities of national communities and
communes; electing judges; establishing a
framework for local self-government; protecting
the environment where intercommunal issues are
involved; adopting regulations governing medical
institutions, urban planning, agriculture,
elections, property ownership, as well as
economic, scientific, technological and social
development, among other things.
·
The right of citizens to choose whether to be
tried in a Kosovo court or in a court of the
Republic of Serbia, and the right to request that
members of the panel hearing their case be chosen
from their own national community.
·
Voluntary establishment of courts of national
communities to settle disputes among members of a
national community who accept separate national
community rules.
This
last point is clearly designed for the Albanian
community which, particularly in rural areas of
Kosovo as in neighboring northern Albania, has
never fully accepted any governmental law and
prefers to be guided by the archaic traditional
“Qanun” based on family honor and clan
loyalty. Other measures, such as the provision
for election to the Assembly, reflect fear of
oppression by the Albanian majority of
non-Albanians in Kosovo.
No
doubt this proposal is inadequate. But in any
normal negotiation, it would have at least been
acknowledged as a basis for discussion. This did
not occur. As for the Albanian side, it was
interested in only one thing: secession from
Serbia and total independence, if not today, then
certainly in three years’ time.
The
stubbornness of the Albanian delegation surprised
Madeleine Albright. Perhaps the U.S. sponsors of
the KLA hadn’t realized that the purpose of
the armed rebellion was to seize power in any
future “independent Kosovo,” and did
not fully trust the United States to give it to
them under the ambiguous terms of Rambouillet.
For that purpose, war is a better method than any
peace agreement, even one specially designed to
detach Kosovo from Serbia. The KLA finally agreed
to sign the Christopher Hill document once it was
clear that Belgrade could not possibly agree to
it, and that the KLA would thus get the war it
wanted, complete with air cover.
It
was evident that Belgrade could not accept the
U.S.-drafted two-part Rambouillet ultimatum, not
only because it was a thinly veiled plan to
detach Kosovo from Serbia, but also because it
contained provisions even worse than loss of that
historic province, provisions no country in the
world could possibly accept. This has been
clearly analyzed by Jan Oberg, director of the
Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future
Research in Lund, Sweden.(3) The Rambouillet
ultimatum came in two parts, civilian and
military. In the civilian part, three aspects
stand out as obviously unacceptable.
·
Kosovo would in effect be independent of Serbia,
but Serbia would not be independent of Kosovo.
Kosovo would be able to influence Yugoslavia as a
whole by sending its representatives to both
Yugoslav and Serbian parliaments, governments,
and courts, whereas Yugoslavia would be barred
from influencing Kosovo’s internal affairs.
This is precisely the aspect of the 1974 version
of the Constitution of the Socialist Republic of
Yugoslavia that made major economic reforms
impossible in Serbia in the 1980s and led to
virtually unanimous Serbian demands for a return
to pre-1974 terms of Kosovo’s autonomy.(4) The Albanian veto made
Serbia ungovernable.
·
“Self-governing” Kosovo would actually
be run by a NATO imperial proconsul, with the
title of Chief of the OSCE/EU Implementation
Mission, or CIM. The CIM, who would effectively
be chosen by the United States, would have the
authority to issue binding directives on all
important matters, hire and fire officials and
security personnel, and overrule election
results. During the three-week period between
Rambouillet I and Rambouillet II, while the
Clinton administration and ex-Senator Robert Dole
were scrambling to cajole the Albanians into
signing up for NATO bombing, the “High
Representative” in Bosnia, model for the
CIM, demonstrated his powers by dismissing the
democratically elected President of the Serbian
entity.(5)
·
Economically, the Rambouillet ultimatum would
continue to drain economic resources from Serbia
to Kosovo. In Tito’s Yugoslavia, Kosovo was
the main recipient of development aid from the
Federation. Nevertheless, due in part to
population growth (by far the highest birthrate
in Europe,(6) as well as clandestine
immigration from Albania), per capita income in
Kosovo remained the lowest in Yugoslavia. The
Rambouillet ultimatum demanded that Yugoslavia
give Kosovo an “equitable” share of
benefits from international transactions, without
indicating what might be Serbia’s share of
state or social property there. Since Kosovo
would have its own “constitution,”
overruling the Yugoslav and Serbian
constitutions, making it a “free market
economy,” it is to be expected that formerly
Serbian resources would flow rapidly into the
hands of the rich Albanian mafia as well as any
interested buyers from the NATO countries. The
agreement did not even mention suspending
economic sanctions against Serbia, much less any
economic aid or help to the 650,000 refugees in
Serbia. But substantial economic aid was promised
to Kosovo.
The
only operational remnant of the formal Yugoslav
“sovereignty” supposedly retained by
this proposal would be the obligation for Serbia
to keep paying for Kosovo.
Dr.
Oberg points out that the civilian side of the
“agreement” lacked any reference to
confidence building, reconciliation, peace or
human rights education–measures vitally
needed to enable the ethnic communities to live
together. In short, there was nothing to suggest
any serious effort to prevent “ethnic
cleansing” of the Serb minority by the
triumphant Albanian majority.
Still,
the Serbian negotiating team at Rambouillet was
ready to consider seriously this extremely unjust
arrangement. The real sticking point was the
military side of the ultimatum. This amounted to
nothing less than unconditional surrender of
Kosovo to NATO.
·
Kosovo would be occupied by a NATO force called
“KFOR” headed by a Commander, COMKFOR,
who would “have the authority, without
interference or permission of any Party, to do
all he judges necessary and proper, including the
use of military force, to protect KFOR” or
to order cessation of any activity he judges to
be a “potential threat.” Judging from
experience in Bosnia, that could include forcibly
shutting down media that differ with NATO
doctrine.
·
No ceiling is set on COMKFOR forces.
·
The government had to disarm, but disarmament of
the armed rebels, considered dangerous terrorists
by the Serbs, was left up in the air. Yugoslav
defenses within Kosovo would be withdrawn except
for 1,500 border guards supported by up to 1,000
logistics personnel placed in predetermined
barracks. On the other hand, the “Other
Forces,” apparently meaning the KLA (never
mentioned by name), would be called on to
“publicly commit themselves to demilitarize
on terms to be determined by COMKFOR.” This
meant that the Yugoslavs had no way of knowing to
what extent or how the KLA might ever be
disarmed.
·
COMKFOR would have full control of airspace over
Kosovo as well as 25 kilometers into Serbia and
Montenegro along the borders with Kosovo.
·
NATO would not be liable for any damages to local
property, would be immune from all local
jurisdiction or legal process, and would be
ensured free and unrestricted access through all
of Yugoslavia. This amounts to a license to
invade other parts of Yugoslavia.
“The
military provisions,” said Dr. Oberg,
“have nothing to do with peacekeeping.”
The more appropriate term, he suggested on March
18, the day the Albanians signed, would be
“peace-prevention.”
Dr.
Oberg observed that among all the leading media,
commentators, scholars, and diplomats condemning
the Yugoslav side for refusing to sign, none was
examining what the accords contained. Having
studied earlier versions of Christopher
Hill’s text and the final February 23
version, Dr. Oberg came to the conclusion that
“this document has been adapted to be
acceptable to the Albanian delegates to such an
extent that the Yugoslav side– ready to
accept the political parts at an earlier
stage–now find the changed document
unacceptable both in terms of political and
military aspects.”
Why
this change? “Because the worst case for the
international community would be Yugoslavia
saying yes and the Albanians saying no,”
concluded Oberg.
So
the Serbs were given an offer they could not
accept.
Although
KLA leaders were not enthusiastic about this
agreement either, the United States apparently
obtained their consent by promising a privileged
role for the rebel gunmen as military partners of
the United States.
Eliminating
the Alternative
It
is preposterous to suggest that there was no
alternative to unconditional surrender of
Yugoslavia to CIM and COMKFOR. It would have
taken time to work them out, and bringing the
intransigent KLA into the negotiations made
matters vastly more difficult. But that
intransigence was largely the result of their
certitude that they ultimately commanded full
United States and NATO support.
During
the time needed for a peace process, the presence
of truly neutral peacemakers could have played a
constructive and indispensable role.
Last
October 12, Richard Holbrooke got Belgrade to
allow 2,000 “verifiers” to enter Kosovo
to monitor compliance of the Yugoslav side only
with a cease-fire the KLA had never been obliged
to keep. This was already an extreme oddity: a
one-sided cease-fire, in which the legal police
of a country agrees not to pursue armed groups
which, whether called “liberation army”
or “terrorists,” had been murdering
citizens for well over a year and showed no
inclination to stop.
The
Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSCE) was chosen to organize this Kosovo
Verification Mission (KVM). In Western Europe,
since the demise of the 1980s peace movement,
objections to the qualitative and geographical
expansion of NATO have tended to take refuge in
proposals to strengthen the OSCE which, unlike
NATO, involves Russia and indeed all European
countries except, since 1992, Yugoslavia.
Early
suspicions in some pro-OSCE circles, confirmed by
later events, suggested that this assignment was
used largely to discredit the OSCE as a viable
“alternative” to NATO. Although the
champions of OSCE had seen it as less
U.S.-dominated, the U.S. put one of its own
“dirty war” specialists, William
Walker, in charge of the KVM. The
“verifier” force never approached
2,000, and it was widely assumed that many of the
verifiers were agents of various NATO
intelligence services, in particular U.S.
military or civilian intelligence. Walker’s
“diplomatic” experience in assisting
the Contra guerrillas to mount a spoiling war
against Sandinista Nicaragua was good background
for cooperation with the KLA, the only
“liberation” movement in the world (so
far) which enthusiastically calls for NATO
bombing of the territory it is out to conquer. In
mid-January, Walker himself broke the fragile
peace his force had been sent to solidify by
endorsing the KLA version of the extremely
controversial events in the village of Racak.
Walker’s hasty and unquestioning
condemnation of a “Serbian massacre”
which many believe (and on the basis of solid
evidence) was a propaganda set-up, arranging
battlefield dead to give the appearance of an
execution, discredited the KVM as a neutral
observer.
Some
of the resulting dissension within the OSCE has
come into public view. In particular, the German
vice-president of the OSCE, Christian Democratic
Bundestag member Willy Wimmer, called the KVM a
“fairly hopeless mission” because some
people “apparently did not at all want it to
succeed.” Who? “For instance the UCK.
For instance those who are behind the UCK and
pull the strings.” Wimmer said that the
international OSCE observers had unambiguously
agreed that the Yugoslav side had kept to the
October cease-fire agreement, while the UCK had
“systematically evaded it” and engaged
in provocations.(7)
Asked
by Deutschlandradio Berlin whether he considered
the NATO military assault a mistake, Wimmer
answered: “I personally consider it a very
big mistake. And I am in agreement with the OSCE
parliamentary assembly, which with a majority of
nearly 90% has repeatedly stated that military
engagements can be undertaken only with a mandate
from the United Nations Security Council.”
However, the interests of the United States and
Britain were “diametrically opposed to
us.”
From
“Greater Albania” to Greater NATO
The
war against Yugoslavia has been sold to the
public as a humanitarian necessity, when in
reality it is a political project. For the
Albanian leaders, the purpose was always clear:
Albanian rule over Kosovo, not “human
rights” and certainly not “peace.”
Veton
Surroi, publisher of the leading Kosovo Albanian
newspaper Koha Ditore, financially supported by
the Soros Foundation and the National Endowment
for Democracy, is often mentioned as the
West’s dark horse to be President of
“independent” ethnic Albanian Kosovo.
He was a member of the Albanian delegation that
signed the Rambouillet war agreement with the
U.S. and the EU. He told the New York Times a
week later that when he signed, he “also
accepted that there would be consequences for the
people of Kosovo, that if the Serbian side did
not agree to the pact, it would have to be
imposed by force–even at risk to the
civilian population.” He continued:
“...these kinds of political arrangements
require war, both as the driving force and as the
action that seals them.”
Surroi
also recognized the political interest of NATO:
“The inhabitants of southeastern Europe will
have to face the fact that NATO has created a
security umbrella over them....”
In
reality, the whole thrust of U.S. policy has been
toward a violent conflict in Yugoslavia that
would shatter Serbia, the last bastion of
old-fashioned independence in the Balkans, and
bring NATO in as occupier and arbiter. The United
States did not want to bring Yugoslavia into
NATO, but NATO into Yugoslavia.
To
most people, it seems incredible that the
apparently blundering Clinton administration
could have hatched and carried out such a
Machiavellian plot. And no doubt it didn’t.
The monstrous policy seems, from what one can
discern, to have grown more or less by chance out
of a strange encounter between two very different
interest groups: Balkan revanchist lobbies, both
Croatian and Albanian, on the one hand, and a
circle of strategic policy planners looking for
the means to transform NATO from a West European
defense alliance focused on containing the Soviet
Union into the military arm of U.S. global
hegemony, able to act anywhere in the world
without regard to national sovereignty, the
United Nations or international law.
The
Albanian Lobby
First
came the lobbies. Already in the 1980s, when
Albanians were actually running Kosovo, and the
mainstream press was reporting that Albanians
were harassing Serbs in order to establish
“an ethnically clean Albanian republic”
before merging with Albania to form “a
greater Albania,”(8) the Albanian lobby in
the United States was working to reverse the
image. The center of this lobby was New York
Republican Congressman Joseph DioGuardi, of
Italian-Albanian background.
On
June 18, 1986, Representative DioGuardi and
Senator Bob Dole introduced Concurrent Resolution
150, “Expressing Concern over the Condition
of Ethnic Albanians Living in Yugoslavia.”
This was an early significant victory for the
Albanian lobby. Of course, neither Dole nor,
probably, any other congressman had the slightest
idea of conditions in Kosovo, if they could tell
where it was, but it’s a rare politician who
isn’t ready to “express concern”
over the condition of an ethnic minority that has
an active lobby operating in Washington. This
sort of resolution can then be used as
documentary proof of whatever it alleges.
The
reward was not long in coming. In May 1987, Dole
and DioGuardi attended an Albanian-American
fund-raiser in New York City that raised $1.2
million for Dole’s campaign and $50,000 for
DioGuardi’s. (9) Even so, DioGuardi lost
his seat, whereupon he formed the
Albanian-American Civic League to pursue lobbying
for the Albanian cause.
Cuba
has long been the most striking illustration of
how a relatively small ethnic lobby–that of
the counter-revolutionary Cuban exiles in
Florida–could have a long-term negative
influence on U.S. foreign policy. The Balkans
provide a second, even more surprising, example.
Ethnic
lobbies offer mediocre politicians two precious
assets. The most obvious is money in the form of
campaign contributions. The other is the
semblance of an idealistic cause: Championing
some obscure “oppressed people” seeking
American support for its “righteous
cause” can provide a glow of international
vision to mediocre provincial politicians with
not a glimmer of understanding of the outside
world.
The
ethnic lobbies are not partisan. Republicans and
Democrats are eligible to support their causes.
For the 1996 elections, the Democrats
“established nine steering committees to
concentrate on Albanians, Arabs, Croatians,
Greeks, Irish, Hungarians, Italians, Lithuanians
and Poles.... An energetic 31-year-old Albanian
American, Ilir Zherka, was put in charge of the
drive, which was called Ethnic Outreach,”
The European reported.(10)
Once
upon a time ethnic lobbies were concerned with
the social welfare and advancement of their
constituents. To some extent, that may still be
the case, but since America became top
superpower, the focus has shifted to bringing
that power in on the side of exile groups with an
agenda. The Clinton administration, Zherka told
The European, “has concentrated on trying to
solve age-old problems in Ireland, Bosnia, and
the Middle East. In addition, Clinton has worked
on expanding NATO, and the Poles, Hungarian, and
Baltic citizens appreciate his efforts. He has
also supported Ukrainian independence.”
Here
is where the agendas of exile groups and the
post-Cold War problem of finding a new
“mission” for NATO have dovetailed
dangerously. With the collapse of the communist
“enemy,” a small number of very special
interests have rushed in to fill the foreign
policy void.
“Minority
groups have leverage because their support can
mean the difference between a candidate winning
or losing an entire state,” according to
William Kimberling of the Federal Election
Commission.(11) Smaller ethnic groups
can be more effective than big ones because they
are more compact. “One of the problems of
American politics is that the two biggest groups,
Blacks and Hispanics, are the least organized and
don’t vote.” The lesson he drew is that
“if you vote together, candidates will pay
attention.”
The
leading role of the Albanian lobby in the Clinton
campaign’s “Ethnic Outreach”
program is striking, as is the absence of any
Serbian lobby. One can assume that this is not
because there are no Americans of Serbian origin
in the United States, but because
Serbian-Americans have not, in recent decades,
been united by an activist revanchist agenda.
Serbs identified totally with the victorious
Allied side in both world wars; many considered
themselves Yugoslavs first and foremost, and if
they opposed Tito, the changes they hoped to see
in Yugoslavia were political and democratic, not
a reshaping of the Balkans with help from the
U.S. Superpower.
In
contrast, right-wing Croatian exile groups in
particular nursed dreams of restoring the fascist
Ustashe “Independent Croatian State,”
which had existed only during World War II thanks
to the occupation and dismantling of Yugoslavia
by Germany and Italy. In 1993, it was reported
that “Croatia has built up the most
effective lobbying and public relations network
on Capitol Hill since the days when the Israeli
and Greek lobbies were at their peak.” (12) Croatian lobbying
efforts, congressional investigators were quoted
as saying, “could well exceed $50
million.”
Culturally,
there is little in common between Croats and
Albanians. But extreme Croatian and Albanian
exiles nursing the hope of restoring the Greater
Croatia and the Greater Albania that had existed
only thanks to the Axis Powers during World War
II shared something very important: a common
enemy. That common enemy was multi-national
Yugoslavia, which deprived them of their
ethnically defined independent states.
Politically, it was more effective to define that
enemy as the Serbs, the people who had played the
leading historic role in creating multi-cultural
Yugoslavia. Denouncing the Serbs as communist
oppressors was the formula for winning support
from American politicians. Serbian-Americans were
without a well-funded revanchist agenda, and
politically divided: no clout.
A
key role in the joining of the anti-Serb forces
was reportedly played by a young aide of Senator
Dole, Mira Radievolic Baratta. Within the
“small circle of those who monitor U.S.
policy toward the Balkans,” The Weekly
Standard reported in 1995, “her influence
and her expertise are widely recognized.”
Richard Perle, an informal Dole adviser who
worked on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims at the
Dayton peace talks, says that “other than
Richard Holbrooke, Baratta has been the most
influential individual in shaping U.S.
policy.” (13) Baratta began working
for Dole in June 1989 and in May 1995 received
the “Award for Excellence in Politics”
from the National Federation of Croatian
Americans. In a bastion of ignorance, Baratta
easily became the congressional expert on the
Balkans. Baratta has “as good an
understanding of the Balkans as anyone on Capitol
Hill,” The Weekly Standard reported
admiringly, adding that “she is probably the
only congressional staffer monitoring
ex-Yugoslavia who speaks and reads both Croatian
and Serbian”–a statement which itself
indicates the prevailing ignorance, since
Croatian and Serbian are the same language.
Baratta
clearly understood the importance of
concentrating on the villain–the
Serbs–as a better way to influence policy
than to try to sell Congress on the Croats. She
also advocated the Albanian cause and was
publicly credited with getting the Senate to
adopt a resolution calling for lifting the arms
embargo against the Bosnian Muslims.
Even
after leaving politics, Dole continues his
support of the Albanian cause. “In articles
and TV appearances, Dole has glorified the KLA
and vilified the Serbs,” Investor’s
Business Daily reported. (14)
Matthew
Rees predicted that Baratta would succeed in
“climbing the foreign-policy
establishment’s greasy pole. Dole advisers
such as Perle, Wolfowitz, and Jeane Kirkpatrick
are among Baratta’s biggest boosters.” (15)
By
a not so strange coincidence, Baratta’s fans
include the most hawkish veterans of the Reagan
administration. “Many former Reagan
officials–U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick,
Assistant Secretary of State Richard Perle, and
Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger–have
publicly endorsed sending NATO ground troops to
Kosovo.” (16) Caspar Weinberger, whose
name is synonymous with the big California-based
transnational infrastructure-construction
company, Bechtel, is described as “the most
hawkish on the Balkans.” Bechtel,
incidentally, has already been selected to build
Croatia’s new coastal highway. The ravaged
Balkans should supply plenty of infrastructure
construction opportunities– not least the
future oil pipeline to bring Caspian Sea oil from
the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, in line with
the Clinton administration’s great concern
to divert the oil away from Russia or Iran.
The
Eagles and the Hawks
Albania–in
the Albanian language, Shqipëria, the land of
the eagles–is by far the poorest, least
developed country in Europe. After the fall of
its uniquely repressive communist regime,
Albanians came into world view trying desperately
to flee their poor country toward Italy. During
Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship, that exit had
been closed tight from within. The easiest exit
route for Albanians in that period had been
across the mountains of northern Albania into
Kosovo, where local authorities–often ethnic
Albanian kinfolk–let them settle. Compared
to Albania, Kosovo was the land of milk and
honey, even if it was the poorest part of
Yugoslavia. With a Yugoslav passport, travel was
easy. From Kosovo, enterprising Albanians went
out to make their fortunes in Germany or
Switzerland. Thanks in part to their very tight
clan structure, Kosovo Albanians have notoriously
taken control of the heroin smuggling routes
through the Balkans from Turkey to Switzerland
and Germany. After the fall of communism, rich
Kosovo Albanians have tended to treat Albania
itself as a colony for exploitation and a base
for various illegal operations. Considering the
potential dominance by Kosovo Albanians in a
“Greater Albania,” the prospect does
not delight all people in Albania itself, in
particular in the south, where the Tosk dialect
is spoken, in contrast to northern Albania and
Kosovo where the Gheg dialect prevails.
If,
as has been widely reported, the KLA is the armed
branch of the ethnic Albanian mafia, it would not
be the first time that the CIA has ended up
working hand in hand with drug dealers.
The
alliance of the Hawks and the Eagles solidified
around the dangerous project of “Greater
Albania,” sold by lobbies and public
relations campaigns to American politicians and
public opinion as a “human rights”
rather than a nationalist cause. This project
filled a foreign policy vacuum. Veterans of the
Cold War policy elite were groping around for new
“threats” and a new mission for NATO
and the U.S. military-industrial complex. As for
the American left, or what remained of it after
the end of the Cold War, it largely stopped
thinking seriously about international problems
of war and peace. The “single issue”
approach made paradoxical connections invisible.
Reduced to sentimental humanitarianism, the
liberal left has become easily manipulated by
public relations campaigns framed in terms of
human rights and victims. A contemporary version
of the old “white man’s burden” or
mission civilisatrice has emerged to be exploited
by the designers of NATO’s new global
mission.
Thus
by championing a supposedly “oppressed
people,” NATO could prove in the Balkans its
ability to act as a “humanitarian”
police force anywhere in the world. Bombing Iraq
and Serbia simultaneously, it could prove its
“two wars at once” capacity (and use up
its stock of cruise missiles before Y2K renders
them obsolete). If it worked, NATO would have a
formula that could be put into operation in other
trouble spots, notably what Zbigniew Brzezinski
calls the “Eurasian Balkans,” a vast
area of mixed ethnic composition interestingly
located around the Caspian Sea and all those oil
reserves.(17) The idea is to find an
“oppressed minority,” promise support
to its fiercest warriors, preferably drug dealers
who can afford to buy their own weapons, and when
all hell breaks loose, one moves in to
“avoid humanitarian catastrophe.”
Yugoslavia is a test case.
Supposing
U.S. mastery of airspace and television time,
this mixed propaganda-missile mechanism should
meet the needs of those who perceive that eternal
U.S. economic supremacy needs a military arm.
“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,” is how Thomas L.
Friedman summed it up. (18) This is the imperative
behind the rush to assert NATO’s “right
to intervene” all over the world.
Thus,
observed columnist Jim Hoagland, “the Kosovo
war is about the global future, not the European
past.” (19)
The
American people not being considered mature
enough for such Realpolitik, it has been
necessary to feed them children’s fairy
tales about the Big Bad Milosevic eating babies
for breakfast, with Slick Willy and Slick Tony
reincarnating FDR and Churchill to stop “the
new Hitler.” The future of the Albanians and
the Serbs is only one of the stakes in the Kosovo
war of 1999. Another is the capacity of the
American people to tell reality from fiction.
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