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Feature
The
Real Story Behind Kosovo's Independence
By
Jeremy Scahill
All
of a sudden, DC establishment figures care about "international
law" when it suits their interests in Kosovo
News Flash: The Bush administration acknowledges there is
a such thing as international law!
But,
predictably, it is not being invoked to address the US prison
camps at Guantanamo, the wide use of torture, the invasion
and occupation of sovereign
countries, the extraordinary rendition program. No, it is being thrown out
forcefully as a condemnation of the Serbian government in the wake of Thursday's
attack by protesters on the US embassy in Belgrade following the Bush administration's
swift recognition of the declaration of independence by the southern Serbian
province of Kosovo. Some 1,000 protesters broke away from a largely non-violent
mass demonstration in downtown Belgrade and targeted the embassy. Some protesters
actually made it into the compound, setting a fire and tearing down the American
flag.
"I'm outraged by the mob attack against the U.S. embassy in Belgrade," fumed
Zalmay Khalilzad,the US Ambassador to the United Nations. "The embassy is
sovereign US territory. The government of Serbia has a responsibility under international
law to protect diplomatic facilities, particularly embassies." His comments
were echoed by a virtual who's who of the Bill Clinton administration. People
like Jamie Rubin, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's deputy, one of
the main architects of US policy toward Serbia. "It is sovereign territory
of the United States under international law," Rubin declared. "For
Serbia to allow these protesters to break windows, break into the American Embassy,
is a pretty dramatic sign." Hillary Clinton, whose husband orchestrated
and ran the 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, said, "I would be moving
very aggressively to hold the Serbian government responsible with their security
forces to protect our embassy. Under international law they should be doing that."
There are two major issues here. One is the situation in
Kosovo itself (which we'll get to in a moment), but the other
is the attack on the US embassy. Yes, the Serbian government
had an obligation to prevent the embassy from being torched
and ransacked. If there was complicity by the Serbian police
or authorities in allowing it to be attacked, that is a serious
issue. But the US has little moral authority not just in invoking
international law (which it only does when it benefits Washington's
agenda) but in invoking international law when speaking about
attacks on embassies in Belgrade.
Perhaps the greatest crime against any embassy in the history
of Yugoslavia was committed not by evil Serb protesters, but
by the United States military.
On May 7, 1999, at the height of the 78 day
US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the US bombed the Chinese
embassy in Belgrade,
killing three Chinese citizens, two of them journalists, and
wounding 20 others. The Clinton administration later said that
the bombing was the result of faulty maps provided by the CIA
(Sound familiar?). Beijing rejected that explanation and alleged
it was deliberate. Eventually, under strong pressure from China,
the US apologized and paid $28 million in compensation to the
victims' families. If the US was serious about international
law and the protection of embassies, those responsible for
that bombing would have been tried at the Hague along with
other alleged war criminals. But "war criminal" is
a designation for the losers of US-fueled wars, not bombers
sent by Washington to drop humanitarian munitions on "sovereign
territory."
Beyond the obvious hypocrisy of the US condemnations
of Serbia and the sudden admission that international law
exists, the
Kosovo story is an important one in the context of the current
election campaign in the United States. Perhaps more than any
other international conflict, Yugoslavia was the defining foreign
policy of President Bill Clinton's time in power. Under his
rule, the nation of Yugoslavia was destroyed, dismantled and
chopped into ethnically pure para-states. President Bush's
immediate recognition of Kosovo as an independent nation was
the icing on the cake of destruction of Yugoslavia and one
which was enthusiastically embraced by Hillary Clinton. "I've
supported the independence of Kosovo because I think it is
imperative that in the heart of Europe we continue to promote
independence and democracy," Clinton said at the recent
Democratic debate in Austin, Texas.
A
few days before the attack on the US embassy in Belgrade,
Clinton released a Molotov cocktail statement praising the
declaration of independence. In
it, she referred to Kosovo by the Albanian "Kosova" and said independence "will
allow the people of Kosova to finally live in their own democratic state.
It will allow Kosova and Serbia to finally put a difficult chapter in their
history behind them and to move forward." She added, "I want to
underscore the need to avoid any violence or provocations in the days and
weeks ahead." As seasoned observers of Serbian politics know, there
were few things the US could have done to add fuel to the rage in Serbia
over the declaration of independence - "provocations" if you will
- than to have a political leader named Clinton issue a statement praising
independence and using the Albanian name for Kosovo.
On
the campaign trail, the Clinton camp has held up Kosovo as
a successful model for how to conduct US foreign policy and
Clinton criticized Bush for
taking "so long for us to reach this historic juncture."
Perhaps a little of that history is in order. If Kosovo is
her idea of solid US foreign policy, it speaks volumes to what
kind of president she would be. The reality is that there are
striking similarities between the Clinton approach to Kosovo
and the Bush approach to Iraq.
On March 24, 1999, President Bill Clinton
began an 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. Like
Bush with Iraq, Clinton
had no UN mandate (he used NATO) and his so-called "diplomacy" to
avert the possibility of bombing leading up to the attacks
was insincere and a set-up from the jump. Just like Bush with
Iraq.
A month before the bombing began, the Clinton
administration issued an ultimatum to President Slobodan
Milosevic, which
he had to either accept unconditionally or face bombing. Known
as the Rambouillet accord, it was a document that no sovereign
country would have accepted. It contained a provision that
would have guaranteed US and NATO forces "free and unrestricted
passage and unimpeded access throughout" all of Yugoslavia,
not just Kosovo. It also sought to immunize those occupation
forces "from any form of arrest, investigation, or detention
by the authorities in [Yugoslavia]," as well as grant
the occupiers "the use of airports, roads, rails and ports
without payment." Additionally, Milosevic was told he
would have to "grant all telecommunications services,
including broadcast services, needed for the Operation, as
determined by NATO." Similar to Bush's Iraq plan years
later, Rambouillet mandated that the economy of Kosovo "shall
function in accordance with free market principles."
What Milosevic was actually asked to sign
is never discussed. That it would have effectively meant
the end of the sovereignty
of the nation was a non-story. The dominant narrative for the
past nine years, repeated this week by William Cohen, Clinton's
defense secretary at the time of the bombing, is this: "We
tried to achieve a peaceful resolution of what was taking place
in Kosovo. And Slobodan Milosevic refused." Refused peace?
More like he unwisely refused one of Don Corleone's famous
offers. Washington knew he would reject it, but had to give
the appearance of diplomacy for international "legitimacy."
So the humanitarian bombs rained down on Serbia. Among the
missions: the bombing of the studios of Radio Television Serbia
where an airstrike killed 16 media workers; the cluster bombing
of a Nis marketplace, shredding human beings into meat; the
deliberate targeting of a civilian passenger train; the use
of depleted uranium munitions; and the targeting of petrochemical
plants, causing toxic chemical waste to pour into the Danube
River. Also, the bombing of Albanian refugees, ostensibly the
people being protected by the U.S.
Similar to Bush's allegations about Iraqi
WMDs in the lead up to the US invasion, in 1999 Clinton administration
officials
also delivered stunning allegations about the level of brutality
present in Kosovo as part of the propaganda campaign. "We've
now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing ....They may
have been murdered," Cohen said five weeks into the bombing.
He said that up to 4,600 Kosovo men had been executed, adding, "I
suspect it's far higher than that." Those numbers were
flat out false. Eventually the estimates were scaled back dramatically,
as Justin Raimondo pointed out recently in his column on Antiwar.com,
from 100,000 to 50,000 to 10,000 and "at that point the
War Party stopped talking numbers altogether and just celebrated
the glorious victory of 'humanitarian intervention.'" As
it turned out "there was no 'genocide' - the International
Tribunal itself reported that just over 2,000 bodies were recovered
from postwar Kosovo, including Serbs, Roma, and Kosovars, all
victims of the vicious civil war in which we intervened on
the side of the latter. The whole fantastic story of another
'holocaust' in the middle of Europe was a fraud," according
to Raimondo.
Following
the NATO invasion of Kosovo in June of 1999, the US and its
allies stood by as the Albanian mafia and gangs of criminals
and paramilitaries
spread out across the province and systematically cleansed Kosovo of hundreds
of thousands of Serbs, Romas and other ethnic minorities. They burned down
houses, businesses and churches and implemented a shocking campaign to forcibly
expel non-Albanians from the province. Meanwhile, the US worked closely with
the Kosovo Liberation Army and backed the rise of war criminals to the highest
levels of power in Kosovo. Today, Kosovo has become a hub for human trafficking,
organized crime and narcosmuggling. In short, it is a mafia state. Is this
the "democracy" Hillary Clinton speaks of "promoting" in "the
heart" of Europe?
It didn't take long for the US to begin construction
of a massive US military base, Camp Bondsteel, which conveniently
is located in an area of tremendous geopolitical interest to
Washington. (Among its most bizarre facilities, Bondsteel now
offers classes at the Laura Bush education center, as well
as massages from Thai women and all the multinational junk
food you could (n)ever wish for). In November 2005, Alvaro
Gil-Robles, the human rights envoy of the Council of Europe,
described Bondsteel as a "smaller version of Guantanamo." Oh,
and Bondsteel was constructed by former Halliburton subsidiary
KBR.
Herein lies an interesting point. The Serbian
government is largely oriented toward Europe, not the US.
The country's
prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, is a conservative isolationist
who is not enthusiastic about a US military base on Serbian
soil any more than Cuba is about Gitmo. He charged that, in
recognizing Kosovo, Washington was "ready to unscrupulously
and violently jeopardize international order for the sake of
its own military interests." To the would-be independent
Kosovo government, however, Bondsteel is no problem.
Russia and a few other nations are fighting
the recognition of Kosovo as an independent nation, but that
is unlikely to
succeed. Still, this action will undoubtedly reverberate for
years to come. "We have in Serbia a situation in which
the U.S. has forced an action - the proclamation of independence
by the Kosovo Albanians - that is in clear violation of the
most fundamental principles of international law after World
War II," argues Robert Hayden, Director of the Center
for Russian and East European Studies at the University of
Pittsburgh. "Borders cannot be changed by force and without
consent - that principle was actually the main stated reason
for the 1991 U.S. attack on Iraq."
And this brings us full circle. International
law matters only when it is convenient for the US. So too
are the cries
for "humanitarian interventions." And despite the
extremism of the Bush administration, this is hardly a uniquely
Republican phenomenon. In a just world, there would be a humanitarian
intervention against the US occupation of Iraq - with its indiscriminate
killings of civilians, torture chambers and widespread human
rights violations. There certainly would have been such an
intervention during the bipartisan slaughter, through bombs
and sanctions, of Iraq's people over the past 18 years. But
that's what you get when the cops and judges and prosecutors
are the criminals. US policy has always operated on a worthy
victim, unworthy victim system that is almost never primarily
about saving the victims. Humanitarianism is the publicly offered
justification for the action, seldom, if ever, the primary
motivation. With Iraq, Bush wheeled out the humanitarian justification
for the occupation - Saddam's brutality - only after the WMD
lies were thoroughly debunked. In Yugoslavia, Clinton used
it right out of the gates. In both cases, it rang insincere.
If you are a victim who happens to share a
common geography with US interests, international law is
on your side as long
as it is convenient. If not, well, tough. The UN is just a
debate club anyway. Just ask the tens of thousands of Kurds
who were slaughtered by Turkey with weapons sold to them by
the Clinton administration during the 1990s. Or the Palestinians
who live under the brutality of Israel's occupation. In some
cases, the "victims" allegedly being protected by
the US actually get bombed themselves, as was the case with
President Clinton's "humanitarian" bombings of the
north and south of Iraq once every three days in the late 1990s.
In
the bigger picture, the Bush administration's quick recognition
of an independent Kosovo has given us a powerful reminder
of a fact that is too often overlooked
these days: empire is bipartisan, as are the tactics and rhetoric and bombs
used to defend and expand it.
Jeremy
Scahill, an independent journalist
who reports frequently for the national radio and TV
program Democracy Now!, has spent
extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is
currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute.
Scahill is
the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful
Mercenary Army.Petroleumworld does not necessarily share
these views.
Editor's
Note:This commentary was originally published by AlterNet,
on Saturday
23 February 2008. Petroleumworld reprint this article in the
interest of our readers.
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Petroleumworld
03/02/08
Copyright ©2006
Jeremy Scahill. All Rights Reserved
