(seconda parte)

Military intervention may be justified "when a
self-determination claim triggers an armed conflict that
becomes a humanitarian crisis", wrote Scheffer and

The much-praised non-violent movement of Ibrahim Rugova
could not meet this criterion. It failed precisely
because it was not a movement for political equality but
a movement for secession. A non-violent movement for
political equality can find many active ways to
illustrate its exclusion and press its demands for
inclusion. But the goals of the Albanian movement were
not inclusion but complete independence from the existing
State. To show their rejection of Serbia, Kosovo
Albanians in the Rugova period refused to use the
democratic rights they had, boycotted elections, refused
to pay taxes, and even set up their own parallel schools
and public health service. The odd thing is that this
movement of passive resistance was met for the most part
by passive resistance on the part of the Serbian State,
which allowed Dr Rugova to go about his business
(obviously in defiance of Serbian laws) as "President of
the Republic of Kosova", let people get away with not
paying taxes and did not force children to attend Serbian
schools. Certainly, there were numerous instances of
police brutality, although their extent is hard to judge,
inasmuch as Kosovar Albanian Human Rights Groups
notoriously exaggerated such incidents in order to claim
that their people were being brutally oppressed -- a
claim which was not accepted by the German government
(21), incidentally, despite its support to the separatist
movement. But in reality, internal separatism was too
easy. The two communities grew ever farther apart, but
peacefully. There was an impasse.

That impasse was broken by the U?K/KLA, acting with the
backing of the United States. The strategy was summed up
by Richard Cohen (22):

The KLA had a simple but effective plan. It would kill
Serbian policemen. The Serbs would retaliate, Balkan
style, with widespread reprisals and the occasional
massacre. The West would get more and more appalled,
until finally it would, as it did in Bosnia, take action.
In effect, the United States and much of Europe would go
to war on the side of the KLA.

It worked.

This version perhaps gives the KLA/U?K a little too much
credit. The United States has been watching Kosovo
closely for years, and there are strong indications that
it both passively and actively assisted the armed rebels
in their humanitarian sting operation. The KLA did indeed
kill Serbian policemen, as well as a number of civilians,
including ethnic Albanians who failed to boycott the
Serbian state. But in between these killings and the Serb
retaliation, "Balkan style", there was a very significant
encouragement from Richard Gelbard, acting as U.S.
proconsul for former Yugoslavia. Normally, Gelbard's
visits to Belgrade were marked by utterances berating
Serbian authorities for not doing Washington's bidding in
one respect or another. But on February 23, 1998, Gelbard
visited Pristina and declared publicly that the KLA/U?K
was indeed "unquestionably a terrorist organization".

To the Serbs, this simply seemed to be recognition of
what to them was an obvious fact. Naively believing that
the United States was, as it continued to declare,
sincerely opposed to "international terrorism", Serbian
authorities took this remark as a green light to do what
any government normally does in such circumstances: send
in armed police to repress the terrorists. After all,
they were not hard to find. Unlike guerrillas in most
conflicts, they made no effort to conceal their
whereabouts but openly proclaimed that they were hanging
out in a number of villages in the Drenica hill region.
Far from heading for the hills when the police
approached, the U?K let civilians who didn't want to get
shot head for the hills while they themselves hunkered
down at home, sometimes with a few remaining family
members, and shot it out with police. This suicidal
tactic may have stemmed from the fact that Albanian homes
often double as fortresses in the traditional blood
feuds, but could not withstand Serbian government fire
power. In any case, the results were enough dead
Albanians in their villages to enable Madeleine Albright
and her chorus of media commentators to cry "ethnic
cleansing". It was not "ethnic cleansing", it was a
classic anti-insurgency operation. But that was enough
for the trap to start closing.

It is easy to imagine how the same scenario could enfold
again in some remote area of the "Eurasian Balkans",
where folk customs are not frightfully different from
those of the Albanians.

How to Get the Job of U.N. Secretary General

The Abramowitz-Albright policy for Yugoslavia has been
used as the event, the fait accompli, to complete a major
institutional shift of power. Institutions based on the
principle of decision-making equality between nations
(the United Nations, its agencies, and the OSCE) have
been drastically weakened. Others, effectively under U.S.
control (NATO, the International Criminal Tribunal), have
enlarged their scope, under the heading of a vague new
entity, the "international community".

The first target of this shift has of course been the
United Nations. Already weakened by the successful U.S.
undermining of U.N. agencies such as UNESCO and UNCTAD
which threatened to promote alternative and more
egalitarian concepts of "globalization", the United
Nations has been reduced by the conflict in Yugoslavia to
a rubber stamp to be used or ignored by the United States
as it chooses.

Certainly, responsibility for weakening the United
Nations is widely shared among world powers, but the
United States' role in this demolition enterprise has
nevertheless been outstanding. Far from trying to help
the United Nations seek an even-handed solution to the
Yugoslav crisis, the Clinton administration used its
influence to secure decisions of benefit to its own
chosen clients, the Bosnian Muslims and the Albanian
secessionists. In Bosnia, United Nations forces were
given impossible missions: hanging around deceptively
declared -- deceptively because never demilitarized --
"safe areas", as fighting continued. Their inevitable,
not to say programmed, failure could be, and has been,
trumpeted as "proof" that only NATO can carry out a
proper peace-keeping mission.

A significant high point in the United States' reduction
of the United Nations to a pliant tool came on August 30,
1995, when the United Nations momentarily relinquished
its control over Bosnian peace-keeping to NATO, aka the
Pentagon, in order to let the United States bomb the
Bosnian Serbs.

For Washington, the primary significance of this bombing
had less to do with the people of Bosnia than with U.S.
power. According to Richard Holbrooke, this was correctly
grasped by columnist William Pfaff who wrote the next
day: "The United States today is again Europe's leader;
there is no other."

In his memoir To End a War, Richard Holbrooke recounted
this proud achievement and lavishly praised the United
Nations official who made it possible: the Ghanaian
diplomat Kofi Annan, then in charge of peacekeeping

Madeleine Albright, at the time the U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations, was carrying on a "vigorous campaign"
in favour of bombing the Serbs. Luck smiled:
"fortunately, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali was
unreachable [...], so she dealt instead with his best
deputy, Kofi Annan, who was in charge of peacekeeping
operations. At 11:45 a.m., New York time, came a big
break: Annan informed Talbott and Albright that he had
instructed the U.N.'s civilian officials and military
commanders to relinquish for a limited period of time
their authority to veto air strikes in Bosnia. For the
first time in the war, the decision on the air strikes
was solely in the hands of NATO -- primarily two American
officers [...]"

"Annan's gutsy performance in those twenty-four hours was
to play a central role in Washington's strong support for
him a year later as the successor to Boutros
Boutros-Ghali as Secretary General of the United Nations.
Indeed, in a sense Annan won the job on that day"(23).

Bosnia was the main reason for getting rid of
Boutros-Ghali. "More than any other issue, it was his
performance on Bosnia that made us feel he did not
deserve a second term -- just as Kofi Annan's strength on
the bombing in August had already made him the private
favorite of many American officials", Holbrooke
explained. "Although the American campaign against
Boutros-Ghali, in which all our key allies opposed us,
was long and difficult [...] the decision was correct,
and may well have saved America's role in the United

How to Sabotage the OSCE

With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was widely
favoured to succeed both the dismantled Warsaw Pact and
NATO as an all-inclusive institution to ensure security,
resolve conflicts and defend human rights in Europe. This
naturally encountered opposition from all those who
wanted to preserve and expand NATO, and with it, the
leading U.S. role in Europe -- that is, from many
important officials in many NATO countries, especially
Britain and the Netherlands, as well as the United States

On the eve of the Kosovo war, the tandem of Richard
Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright once again moved to
cripple a rival to NATO and clear the way for NATO

On October 13, 1998, under threat of NATO bombing, U.S.
envoy Richard Holbrooke got Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic to sign a unilateral deal to end security
operations against armed rebels. The agreement was to be
monitored by 2,000 foreign "verifiers" provided under the
auspices of the OSCE. From the start, opinions in Europe
were divided as to whether this Kosovo Verification
Mission (KVM) marked an advance for the OSCE or a kiss of
death, designed to prove the organization's impotence and
leave NATO as the uncontested arbiter of conflicts in

The mission's fate was sealed in favour of the second
alternative when the European majority in the OSCE was
somehow persuaded to accept U.S. diplomat William Walker
to head the KVM. Walker was a veteran of Central American
"banana republic" management, who had collaborated with
Oliver North in illegally arming the "Contras" and had
covered up murderous state security operations in El
Salvador as U.S. ambassador there during the Reagan

Walker brought in 150 professional mercenaries from the
Arlington, Virginia-based DynCorp which had already
worked in Bosnia, drove around in a vehicle flying the
American flag, and did everything to confirm what his
French deputy, Ambassador Gabriel Keller, described as
the "wide-spread conviction in Serbian public opinion
that the OSCE was working under cover for NATO, [...]
that we acted with a hidden agenda" (24).

That impression was shared by many members of the KVM. A
number of Italians, whose comments were published
anonymously in the geostrategic review LiMes, accused the
Americans of "sabotaging the OSCE mission". Said one:
"The mission in my view had two primary aims. One was to
infiltrate personnel into the theatre with intelligence
tasks and for special forces activities (preparatory work
for a predetermined war). The other was to give the world
the impression that everything had been tried and thus
create grounds for public consent to the aggression we

According to Swiss verifier Pascal Neuffer: "We
understood from the start that the information gathered
by OSCE patrols during our mission were destined to
complete the information that NATO had gathered by
satellite. We had the very sharp impression of doing
espionage work for the Atlantic Alliance"(26).

KVM members have criticized Walker and his British chief
of operations, Karol (John) Drewienkiewicz, for rejecting
any cooperation with Serb authorities, for blocking
diplomatic means to ensure human rights, for controlling
the mission's information flow, and most serious of all,
for using the mission to make contact with U?K rebels and
train them to guide NATO to targets in the subsequent
bombing (27). Since the Serbs were quite aware of this
activity, as soon as the bombing began on March 24, Serb
security forces set out to root out all suspected U?K
indicators. These operations are very probably at the
heart of what NATO has described as ethnic cleansing.

However, prior to the bombing, KVM members testify to a
low level of violence, as well as a pattern of U?K
provocations. According to Keller, "every pullback by the
Yugoslav army or the Serbian police was followed by a
movement forward by [U?K] forces [...] OSCE's presence
compelled Serbian government forces to a certain
restraint [...] and U?K took advantage of this to
consolidate its positions everywhere, continuing to
smuggle arms from Albania, abducting and killing both
civilians and military personnel, Albanians and Serbs

By the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999, an
increasingly audible split was taking place within the
KVM between Walker and most of the Europeans. Every
incident was an occasion for Walker and the U.S. State
Department to denounce the Serbs for breaking the truce,
and to accuse Milosevic of violating his commitment. The
Europeans saw things differently: the Albanian rebels,
with U.S. encouragement, were systematically provoking
Serb attacks in order to justify NATO coming in on their
side of the conflict.

In mid-January, Walker settled the score with his
European critics by bringing the world media over to his
side. This was the political significance of the famous
"Racak massacre". On January 15, Serb police had carried
out a pre-announced operation, accompanied by observers
and television cameras, against U?K killers believed to
be hiding out in the village of Racak. As the Serbs swept
into the village, the U?K gunmen took refuge on
surrounding high ground and began to fire on the police,
as TV footage showed. But the Serbs had sent forces
around behind them, and many U?K fighters were trapped
and shot. After the Serb forces withdrew that afternoon,
the U?K again took control of the village, and it was
they who led Walker into the village the next day to see
what they described as victims of a massacre. It may be,
as Serb authorities claimed and many Europeans tended to
believe, that the victims were in fact killed in the
shootout reported by the police, and then aligned to give
the appearance of a mass execution, or "massacre".

In any case, the extremely emotional public reaction by
the high-profile head of the KVM, condemning the Serbs
for "a crime against humanity", "an unspeakable atrocity"
committed by Serbs "with no value for human life", ended
any possible pretense of neutrality of the OSCE mission.

Walker's accusations were quickly taken up by NATO
politicians and editorialists. A complex conflict was
reduced to a simple opposition between Serbian
perpetrators of massacres and innocent Albanian civilian
victims. The U?K and its provocative murders of policemen
and civilians were to all intents and purposes invisible.
Presented as a gratuitous atrocity, "Racak" became the
immediate justification for NATO war against Yugoslavia.

In Kosovo itself, KVM members have testified, after Racak
the Serbs were totally convinced that the OSCE was
working for NATO and began to prepare for war, while the
U?K became still more aggressive. KVM members have also
complained of the fact that Walker evacuated the mission
to Macedonia on March 20, five days before the bombing
began. This way, no outside observers were there to see
exactly what did happen when the bombing began, much less
try to prevent it. Walker's leadership had effectively
removed all pressure or incentive for either side to show

"In the history of international missions it would be
hard to find such a chaotic and tragically ambiguous
enterprise", concluded an Italian participant.

How to Obtain Justice

The importance of crimes in this new world order was
highlighted by the establishment in May 1993 of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY). This tribunal was established by Security Council
resolution 827 under its Article 29 which allows it to
set up "subsidiary bodies" necessary to fulfill its
peacekeeping tasks. It is more than doubtful that the
framers of the United Nations statutes had a criminal
tribunal in mind, and many jurists consider resolution
827 to be an usurpation of legislative and judicial
powers by the Security Council. In fact, this act went
contrary to over forty years of study, within the
framework of the United Nations, of the possibilities for
setting up an international penal tribunal, whose
jurisdiction would be established by international treaty
allowing States to transfer part of their sovereign
rights to the tribunal. The Security Council's ICTY went
over the heads of the States concerned and simply imposed
its authority on them, without their consent.

Last April 5, as NATO was bombing Yugoslavia, the ICTY's
presiding judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald (a former U.S.
federal judge in Texas) told the Supreme Court that the
Tribunal "benefited from the strong support of concerned
governments and dedicated individuals such as Secretary
Albright. As the permanent representative to the United
Nations, she had worked with unceasing resolve to
establish the Tribunal. Indeed, we often refer to her as
the `mother of the Tribunal'".

Because it is also located in The Hague, very many
well-informed people confuse the Tribunal with the
International Court of Justice, or at least believe that,
like the ICJ, the ICT is a truly independent and
impartial judicial body. Its many supporters in the media
say so, and so do its statutes. Article 32 of its
governing statute says the Tribunal's expenses shall be
borne by the regular budget of the United Nations, but
this has been persistently violated. As Toronto lawyer
Christopher Black points out, "the tribunal has received
substantial funds from individual States, private
foundations and corporations". The United States has
provided personnel (23 officials lent by the Departments
of State, Defense and Justice as of May 1996), equipment
and cash contributions. More money has been granted the
Tribunal by financier George Soros' Open Society
Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the United
States Institute for Peace, set up in 1984 under the
Reagan administration and funded by Congressional
appropriations, with its board of directors appointed by
the U.S. President.

The Tribunal is vigorously supported by the Coalition for
International Justice (CIJ), based in Washington and The
Hague, founded and funded by George Soros' Open Society
Foundation and a semi-official U.S. lawyers' group called
CEELI, the Central and East European Law Institute, set
up to promote the replacement of socialist legal systems
with free market ones, according to Christopher Black.

Last May 12, ICTY president Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, in a
speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, said that:
"The U.S. government has very generously agreed to
provide $500,000 and to help to encourage other States to
contribute. However, the moral imperative to end the
violence in the region is shared by all, including the
corporate sector. I am pleased, therefore, that a major
corporation has recently donated computer equipment worth
three million dollars, which will substantially enhance
our operating capacity."

Moreover, during the bombing, Clinton obtained a special
$27 million appropriation to help the Tribunal,
especially in collecting anti-Serb testimony from
Albanian refugees along the borders of Kosovo. Finally,
Clinton has offered a bounty of $5 million for the arrest
of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Ethnic Divisions, Unified Empires

An extremely significant feature of the humanitarian
intervention policy is its emphasis on collective in
contrast to individual rights.

"In the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet empire,"
runs the summary of Self-Determination in the New World
Order, "new nations are emerging rapidly, and more and
more ethnic groups are pushing for independence or
autonomy." So the question is "how the United States
should respond". The authors "propose criteria for
decision makers who are weighing whether to support
groups seeking self-determination, to offer political
recognition, or to intervene with force."

This approach has practically nothing to do with
democracy, and everything to do with empire construction.
Although the words "democracy" and "democratic" are still
used, they tend increasingly to be without meaning other
than to designate favoured client leaders or groups in
countries of interest to the United States. Certainly,
Hashim Thaqi, the U?K leader who counts Madeleine
Albright's spokesman James Rubin (husband of CNN's
Christiane Amanpour) among his fans (28), is scarcely
more "democratic" than Milan Milutinovic, elected
President of Serbia, indicted with Milosevic by
Albright's "International War Crimes Tribunal". In fact,
the selection of particular groups, ethnic or social, as
clients, is the traditional way in which a conquering
empire can reshape social structures and replace former
elites with its own.

The imperial project is becoming increasingly open.
Protectorates are being established in Bosnia and Kosovo,
President Clinton is vigorously calling for the illegal
overthrow of the legally elected Yugoslav president.

Totally disregarding the feelings and wishes of the real,
live people who live there, Robert Kaplan announced (29)
that "there are two choices in the Balkans -- imperialism
or anarchy. To stop the violence, we essentially have to
act in the way the great powers in the region have always
acted: as pacifying conquerors." Like the Romans and the
Austrian Habsburgs, "motivated by territorial
aggrandizement for their own economic enrichment,
strategic positions and glory."

Merely to suggest that the United States might "intervene
with force" on behalf of an ethnic group seeking
self-determination is to cause trouble. There are
potentially hundreds of such groups not only in the
former Soviet Republics but throughout Africa and Asia.
The prospect of U.S. military intervention will, on the
one hand, encourage potential secessionist leaders to
push their claims to the point of "humanitarian crisis",
in order to bring in the Superpower on their side. By the
same token, it will encourage existing states to suppress
such movements brutally and decisively in order to
prevent precisely that intervention. A vicious cycle will
be created, enabling the single Superpower to fish
selectively in troubled waters.

The concept of "ethnic group" rests on the notion of
"identity". If individual identity is problematic, group
identity is even more so. That is, just as individuals
may have multiple or changing "identities", groups may
have changing compositions as people come and go from one
"identity" group to another. Especially in the modern
mobile world, ethnic identity is therefore a highly
questionable basis for claim to political recognition in
the form of an independent State. The forceful
affirmation of "ethnic identity" tends to strengthen
traditional patriarchal structures in places such as
Kosovo, at the expense of individual liberation. Stress
on ethnic identity enforces stereotypes, mafioso
structures and leadership by "godfathers".

Foreign policy based on ethnic identity has notorious
antecedents: it was precisely the policy employed by
Adolf Hitler to justify his conquest of the same Eastern
European territories that Brzezinski now watches so
attentively. Both the takeover of Czechoslovakia and the
invasion of Poland were officially justified by the need
to protect allegedly oppressed German minorities from the
cruel Czechs and Poles. The British government's
understanding for Herr Hitler's concern about Germans in
Czechoslovakia is the real "Munich". Before invading
Poland, Hitler had the SS manufacture an "incident" in
which wicked Poles stormed an innocent German-language
radio station in order to desecrate it with their
barbarous Slav language. The dead body left on the scene
to authenticate the incident was in fact a prison convict
in costume.

In Yugoslavia, Hitler "liberated" not only Germans but
also and especially Croats and (in conjunction with
fascist Italy) Albanians, long selected as the proper
Randv?lker to receive German protection, the better to
crush the main historic adversary, the Serbs, the people
who more than any other had fought for independence from
Empires. (The Serbs themselves as they became "Yugoslavs"
were less and less unified around Serbian identity, even
if they have continued to pay for it.)

Making policy by distinguishing between "friend" and
"enemy" peoples is pure Hitlerism, and this is what the
Anglo-American NATO leaders are now doing, while
ironically pretending to reject "Munich".

History As Melodrama

The media that recount Balkan ghost stories to the
"children" (30) back in NATOland rarely go into detail
about the peculiarities of these various customs and
situations. Popular culture has prepared audiences for a
simpler version. The pattern is the same as in disaster
movies, outer space movies, etc: there is always the trio
of classic melodrama: wicked villain, helpless victim
(maiden in distress) and heroic rescuer. Same plot. Over
and over. Only in the Abramowitz humanitarian war plan,
the trio is composed of ethnic entities or nationalities.
There is the "good" ethnic group, all victims, like the
Kosovar Albanians. Then there is the "bad" ethnic group,
all racist hatred, ethnic cleansing and even "genocide".
And finally, of course, there is Globocop to the rescue:
NATO with its stealth bombers, cruise missiles and
cluster blade bombs, its depleted uranium and graphite
power-plan busters. A bit of fireworks, like the car
chase at the end of the movie.

The whole concept of ethnic war as pretext for U.S.
military intervention implies this division of humanity
between "good" and "bad" nationalities, between
"oppressor" and "victim" peoples. Since this is rarely
the case, the story is told by analogy with the famous
exceptional cases where the categories fit: Hitler and
the Jews being the obvious favourite. Every new villain
is a "Hitler", every new ethnic secessionist group to be
used as pretext for new NATO bases is the victim of a
potential "Holocaust". At this rate, the two terms will
cease to be proper nouns and become general terms for the
new global Guignol.

Starting with the pretense of militant anti-racism,
"humanitarian intervention" finishes with a new racism.
To merit all those bombs, the "bad" people must be
tarnished with collective guilt. At the G8 summit in
Cologne in June, Tony Blair clearly adopted the doctrine
of collective guilt when he declared that there could be
no humanitarian aid for the Serbs because of the dreadful
way they had treated the Kosovar Albanians. With their
incomparable self-righteousness, the Anglo-American
commanders are leading this new humanitarian crusade to
extremes of inhumanity.


(1) Jim Hoagland, "Developing a Doctrine of Humanitarian
Warfare", International Herald Tribune, June 28, 1999.

(2) A former U.S. Ambassador to Thailand, Abramowitz
served as Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence
and Research in the Reagan administration. In January
1986, he took part in an interesting mission to Beijing
alongside top CIA officials with the purpose of
persuading China to support supplying Stinger missiles to
Islamic Afghan rebels in order to keep up pressure on the
Soviet Union, even as Gorbachev was trying to end the
Cold War. In the mid-1990s, he was part of a blue ribbon
panel sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations which
advised the Clinton Administration to loosen restrictions
on CIA covert operations such as dealing with criminals,
disguising agents as journalists, and targeting
unfriendly heads of State.

(3) John B. Roberts, "Roots of Allied Farce", The
American Spectator, June 1999.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Morton H. Halperin & David J. Scheffer with Patricia
L. Small, Self-Determination In the New World Order,
Carnegie Endowment, Washington,D.C., 1992; page 80.

(6) Ibid, p.105.

(7) Ibid, p.107.

(8) Ibid, p.110.

(9) Charles Trueheart, "Serbs and Kosovars Get Nudge From
Their Hosts To Speed Up Peace Talks", International
Herald Tribune/Washington Post, February 9, 1999: "On
Monday, the Kosovo Albanians won a small tactical victory
when their American advisers, initially barred by
conference hosts, were allowed to visit them at the
chateau. They included two former U.S. diplomats, Morton
Abramowitz and Paul Williams."

(10) John B.Roberts, op.cit.

(11) Steven Erlanger, "Winning Friends for Foreign
Policy: Albright's First 100 Days", The New York Times,
14 May 1997.

(12) "Il n'y a pas de paradoxe. J'ai mis au point cette
doctrine en accord avec le pr?sident Carter, car c'?tait
la meilleure fa?on de d?stabiliser l'Urss. ?a a march?."
L'Ev?nement du jeudi, 14 January 1998.

(13) Le Nouvel observateur, 14 January 1998, reported by

(14) Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard,
BasicBooks, New York, 1997, p.78.

(15) Kaplan's 1993 book Balkan Ghosts was notoriously
read by President Clinton, who, however, had to be chided
later by the author for having drawn the wrong
conclusion. That is, Clinton's initial conclusion was to
stay out of the Balkans, whereas Kaplan has, he
explained, always been an interventionist.

(16) New York Times/International Herald Tribune, 23
February 1999.

(17) Robert D.Kaplan, "Why the Balkans Demand Amorality",
The Washington Post, 28 February 1999.

(18) Steve Niva, "Between Clash and Co-Optation: US
Foreign Policy and the Specter of Islam", Middle East
Report, Fall 1998.

(19) The Washington Post, 28 February 1999.

(20) Stern, 4 March 1999.

(21) In mid-April, 1999, the International Association of
Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA) obtained and
distributed to news media official documents from the
German foreign office showing that in the months leading
up to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the foreign office
had repeatedly informed administrative courts of the
various German L?nder that there was no persecution of
ethnic Albanians in Kosovo or the rest of Serbia.
Example: Intelligence report from the Foreign Office,
January 12, 1999, to the administrative Court of Trier,
"Even in Kosovo an explicit political persecution linked
to Albanian ethnicity is not verifiable. The East of
Kosovo is still not involved in armed conflict. Public
life in cities like Pristina, Urosevac, Gnjilan, etc.
has, in the entire conflict period, continued on a
relatively normal basis." The "actions of the security
forces [were] not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians
as an ethnically defined group, but against the military
opponent and its actual or alleged supporters." These
reports were published in the German daily junge welt on
24 April 1999.

(22) Richard Cohen, "The Winner in the Balkans Is the
KLA", Washington Post/International Herald Tribune, 18
June 1999.

(23) Richard Holbrooke, To End a War, Random House, New
York, 1998, p.103.

(24) "The OSCE KVM: autopsy of a mission", statement
delivered by Ambassador Gabriel Keller, principal deputy
head of mission, to the watch group on May 25, 1999.

(25) Italian military participant "Romanus", in LiMes
2/99, cited by il manifesto, 19 June 1999.

(26) La Libert?, Gen?ve, 22 April 1999, and Balkan-Infos
No.33, Paris, May 1999.

(27) Ulisse, "Come gli Americani hanno sabotato la
missione dell'Osce", LiMes, supplemento al n.1/99, p.113,
L'Espresso, Rome, 1999.

(28) "Throughout the Kosovo crisis, Mr.Rubin personally
wooed Hashim Thaci, the ambitious leader of the Kosovo
Liberation Army", the Wall Street Journal reported on
June 29, 1999, even going so far as to "jokingly promise
that he would speak to Hollywood friends about getting
Mr.Thaci a movie role."

(29) Robert D.Kaplan, "Why the Balkans Demand Amorality",
The Washington Post, 28 February 1999.

(30) Peter Gowan, in "The Twisted Road to Kosovo", Labour
Focus on Eastern Europe, Number 62, Spring 1999, explains
(p.76) that the foreign policy elite discuss the sordid
realities of power politics in a closed arena, and "not
in front of the children", that is, the citizenry of the
NATOland countries, who are regaled with versions that
appeal to their values and ideals.

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(2. fine)