NATO Ignored Risks
Bombing campaign drove out Albanians in
a way and to an extent that must be morally condemned.
By Dr. Jan Oberg

     WASHINGTON - The alternative to partition in the Balkans is the presence of a large outside force - indefinitely.
     In the run-up to the Nato intervention in the Kosovo conflict, I was told by several Nato advisers: "The only question is whether Milosevic will give in just before or just after the start of air strikes." It is easy to be wise after the event, but this phrase illuminates the multiple errors which led Nato into war. To begin with, in the whole lexicon of international relations, there is no such thing as "air strikes." Even a limited armed attack on another country constitutes an act of war. And in war, the enemy can be expected to hit back with every means at his disposal. Furthermore, a war over Kosovo was never going to be with "Milosevic." This war is with the Yugoslav state and the Serbian nation; like so many wars, it began between the Serbs and the Kosovo Albanians over control of a particular territory, and Nato has now ended up on the side of the Albanians. As in any war, a Nato victory will require a partial or even complete Serbian defeat.
      The question now facing Nato leaders is the extent of the defeat they can or wish to inflict on the Serbs; what this comes down to, in the end, is how Kosovo is going to be divided or whether Nato means to give the whole province to the Albanians, leading to a voluntary or forced exodus of the Serb minority.
      In other words, this means the terms of an ethnic partition. No significant number of Albanians will be able to live safely under Serbian rule in the future--and the much smaller, but deeply-rooted, Serbian population will also not be able to live under Albanian rule. This has become obvious in recent weeks, but the breakdown of ethnic relations in the province was evident in the 1980s; it has roots in territorial conflict going back 1,300 years, exacerbated by the Albanian role in the crushing of Serb revolts against the Ottomans and the atrocities committed by both sides in the wars since the Ottoman empire's collapse.
      War is a school of realism, a solvent of established beliefs and an impetus to harsh, but clear decisions. The fact that, in going to war, Nato has stepped outside the usual bounds of international legality (such as it is), should help us to take a hard look at some of the shibboleths on which western policy towards ethnic conflicts have been founded. Having gone to war to prevent the violent suppression of an ethnic rebellion, and having--as will surely be the case--gone on to divide up a state, it would be strange now to return to a rigid adherence to the principles of territorial integrity. The fact that our servicemen are risking their lives in a conflict in which Britain's interests are hardly at stake, should make us focus on what history can tell us about achieving lasting ethnic settlements.
      In a recent essay on Kosovo in the New York Review of Books, Timothy Garton Ash argued that "good fences make good neighbours"; contrary to current western beliefs in "integration" and "multiculturalism," the best chance for the Yugoslav peoples to progress would be as separate nation-states with clear ethnic majorities. This has, after all, been the pattern across much of western Europe over the past few centuries, and the process is not finished yet.
      This argument goes back to liberal nationalists such as Giuseppe Mazzini, ideologist of the Italian risorgimento. He and his contemporaries argued that real cooperation between European nations could only come after those nations had separated themselves into free and democratic, but also independent, national states. The whole project of European integration can be said to be founded on this argument.
      The main objection to this argument is that ethnic nations are often mixed up together and cannot be separated without bloodshed (witness the conflicts over the Italians in South Slav and German lands). And given the disasters which have befallen Europe in the 20th century, many historians mourn Mazzini's great enemy: the multi-ethnic Habsburg empire.
      But the Habsburg or Austro-Hungarian empire--like the Soviet Union in our own time--did not in the end survive. Moreover, the Habsburg empire possessed virtues denied to most multi-ethnic states: the state was founded neither on nationality, nor on popular sovereignty, but on supra-national principles: dynastic legitimacy; the rule of law; and the Catholic Church. Further, the Austrian half of the empire contained a number of large nationalities, none of which was in a position completely to dominate the others--unlike the Kingdom of Hungary (where the Hungarians dominated absolutely) or other "multi-ethnic" states, where one dominant majority faces a single large, restive minority. Finally, the empire possessed a state language, German, which in those pre-1914 days was a cosmopolitan language of European civilisation capable of assimilating people of many ethnic origins--as witnessed by the flowering of Jewish thought and culture in Habsburg Vienna.
      Elsewhere, by contrast, states which began as multi-ethnic were able to assimilate minority peoples into the dominant nationality by means of the power and prestige of the dominant language and culture--at least if they began the process long ago in pre-modern times. Thus France achieved its 20th century ethno-linguistic homogeneity (until the arrival of the new immigrants) by means of a mainly peaceful, but culturally ruthless, process of destroying the traditions of minorities such as the Bretons, above all through the national school system. Russia would have done the same to Ukrainians and others if it had been able to start a bit sooner. It is hopeless, however, to expect that linguistic cultures such as Serbian or Albanian, the reflection of one small ethnos on the periphery of European civilisation, will ever be able to play this role in assimilating large ethnic minorities--especially where these have access to the culture and the mass media of neighbouring ethnic homelands.
      Tito was called "the last Habsburg," and Yugoslav communism (like Soviet communism) was an attempt to overcome national divisions by a supranational ideology focused on the worship of a quasi-emperor. But although Yugoslavia was not (until today) threatened from outside in the manner of the Habsburgs, its internal cultural resources as a multi-ethnic state were weaker. With the waning of communism, some sort of Serb-Albanian war over Kosovo was likely. Several such wars have occurred over the past 100 years, and the struggle in fact resumed with the Kosovo Albanian protests of 1981.
      The way in which Nato and its political masters misunderstood the real dynamic of events in Kosovo reflects a characteristic failure of the liberal mind (including most of the western left and the great majority of Americans), which clings to a basically optimistic view of human nature. Such a habit of mind finds it hard to grasp that certain nations really are implacably at odds over the control of ethnically-mixed territory. Instead, the automatic belief is that the innocent masses have been led astray by evil individuals (Milosevic)--or, for the left, by evil ruling classes. These in turn are not motivated by emotions of nationalism, pride or hate, but by "rational" ones of the defence of their political or economic privileges.
      This illusion was of little practical moment during the cold war; but thanks to the decision to turn Nato from a defensive alliance into a force for democracy, stability and even market economics in Europe, it has become quite dangerous. Nato has been trapped into becoming the instrument for the policing of ethnic conflicts and the administration of ethnically-mixed societies through protectorates. This is what the Dayton accords have created in Bosnia; it was what the Rambouillet accords laid down for Kosovo; and such a protectorate is also taking shape in Macedonia.
      The precedent for this development is the League of Nations "mandate" system, introduced at the Congress of Versailles for territories in the middle east and Africa. This was usually a barely-veiled formula for indirect imperial rule by one of the victorious allies, which is how most of the world sees Nato's aggression ("US imperialism") in Serbia. And, to play the mandate role effectively, we will need something akin to imperial qualities, albeit of a civilised kind.
      When divided nations cannot be ruled, mandate-style, by a moderately impartial force, the only "solutions" will be very illiberal ones: either victory by one side, leading to the subjugation or flight of the other's population; or partition and population exchange; or some combination of the two. Although it is natural to recoil from such outcomes, the unwillingness of western diplomats even to admit their possibility in several parts of the world is strange. Not merely has the "international community" accepted several such partitions and population moves in the course of this century, this is exactly what we have ended up with in Bosnia. Between 1992 and 1995, an unwillingness to accept partition helped to prolong the war. Today, it has committed us to the hopeless task of trying to turn Bosnia back into a working multi-ethnic state (assuming that it ever was such a state). An international role in policing Bosnia is essential--but those who pretend that this is leading to re-integration are deceiving themselves and everybody else.
      The only realistic choice for Macedonia may also soon be a Bosnia-type partition or a Nato protectorate. Discussions of a possible division between the Albanian, Serb and Macedonian Slav areas are reportedly already taking place in private between Albanian representatives and pro-Bulgarian Macedonian Slav "nationalists"--the idea being that most of Macedonia would join Bulgaria. Even an agreed partition of Macedonia would be a dangerous development, but it may be even more dangerous to keep an African-style artificial legacy of empire in the middle of the Balkans. Macedonia might be able to form a stable multi- ethnic state if its national proportions were stable--but they are not. In fact, the Albanians, who a generation ago were about 20 per cent of the population, may now be as much as 35 per cent thanks to their higher birth rate. By 2020, they could become a majority. It is doubtful, however, whether the Slavs will simply go along with becoming an increasingly small minority in what would ultimately become a de facto part of a Greater Albanian confederation.
      Partition and population exchanges are certainly not a universal solution. But when everything else has failed, we need to have the courage to take responsibility for the solution. The alternative is to summon up the ruthlessness to support one side in the conflict--as in Croatia--or be prepared to commit ourselves to the long-term, heavy and sustained policing role necessary to prevent two hostile and mingled populations from tearing each other apart.
      In the end, policing and security are what these conflicts are about--the actual physical security of individuals at risk. This raises an important point about the nature of modern nationalism. We must distinguish between classical nationalism and ethnic (or one might say skinhead) hooliganism, and the role of such hooliganism in ethnically-mixed societies. In other words, it is often not a question of protecting a whole population from assault by state-backed ethnic forces, but of protecting families and individuals from being attacked by members of other ethnic groups with the acquiescence of the police--a problem with which we are not wholly unfamiliar in Britain.
      A Russian who had moved to Russia in 1992 from a village in southern Kazakhstan once explained to me how this kind of thing occurs: "There were only four Russian families in our village, and many of the Kazakhs wanted us out. People started jeering at me on the street, saying--'we're going to fuck your daughter,' that kind of thing. Nothing happened, and perhaps nothing would have happened. I'd lived there for years, and I had good friends among the Kazakhs. But we knew that the police would never have done anything if we were attacked. So we got out."
      Recent decades have indeed seen a decline in certain aspects of classical nationalism, both in the west, and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere. This has been associated with the demilitarisation of society and the spread of modernisation. As a result, there has been a reduction in the willingness to fight for disputed national territories. But this has been paralleled in western Europe and elsewhere by the persistence--or even growth of--ethnic hooliganism. I was in Germany in 1992 at the height of the attacks on immigrants by skinhead and neo-Nazi groups. Headlines outside Germany raised the spectre of the return of aggressive nationalism in Germany, but such fears were almost totally misplaced. These skinheads were up to slouching a block or two in order to terrorise a helpless Turkish family or kick to death an African asylum-seeker; they were not about to join the army, risk death and spend years in trenches to reconquer Danzig for a new German Reich. Their motivations were local: a desire to defend working class jobs, maintain pure neighbourhoods and support local football teams. They did not flow into wider national conflicts because the minorities being targeted have no territorial conflict with Germany and are too small in number to have a significant political presence.
      But as we know from Northern Ireland, it is quite different in an ethnically-mixed society where conflicting national-territorial claims exist. There, "skinhead" nationalism and classical nationalism run into each other. Arson, robbery, beatings, rape or murder against members of the other community may be communally encouraged, excused and sheltered. These will contribute in turn to mobilisation along defensive ethnic lines, and to the reliance of ordinary people on any force--however hateful--which will protect them, their families and homes. Such violence does not even need to be condoned by the national leadership of the country or the community concerned. In Chechnya, for example, neither under President Dudayev nor under President Maskhadov has there been any official policy of driving out the local Russians. Dudayev's wife is Russian; and Maskhadov--like Dudayev, a former Soviet officer--always seemed sincere in saying that he felt no hostility to the Russians as a people. None the less, the position of those Russians in Chechnya who enjoyed no protection from a powerful Chechen individual became increasingly desperate; as a result, most had left even before the Russian invasion of December 1994. Chechen traditions of banditry and armed violence are constrained when it comes to attacks on other Chechens, but are unconstrained when it comes to non-Chechens, infidels and especially Russians. A sharp contrast may be drawn with Latvia and Estonia, which have limited the rights of the Russian immigrants, but by peaceful and legal means--with the result that there has been no violence in return.
      Where a tradition of socially-sanctioned violence and banditry is present in both parts of an ethnically-mixed society, the only way of containing this in a reasonably equitable way is sustained policing by an outside power--something of which the British empire had immense experience. But for this to work, a whole series of factors have to be present, which Nato can barely begin thinking about in the Balkans. First, the outside power has to be in control of local law and order, and capable of handing out real rewards and punishments. It needs to have a sufficient number of its own men in command of forces on the ground, speaking a local language and understanding local society. In this context, the unarmed EU policemen in Bosnia look quite fatuous.
      Second, the presence of the outside power has to appear pretty much eternal. As the British experienced in India in 1945-47 (and on other occasions elsewhere), when the population at large, and locally recruited officials, have a strong sense that the outside power's rule is provisional, then no order will be implemented which risks compromising the official concerned with his own community. No police officer who values his future career or perhaps even his life is going to pursue a charge of ethnically-based theft or murder against a member of his own group. I saw this process at work among Lithuanian and Georgian KGB officers in the Soviet Union in 1990 and 1991. They were still afraid of Moscow, and they would have gone on obeying Moscow if they had been sure that the Soviet Union would last. But because its survival was questionable, it was safer for them to pretend to obey, while in fact doing discreet deals with the nationalists. This contributed significantly to the crumbling of Soviet control over those republics.
      Third, the outside policing force will have to adopt an approach very different to that common in modern western societies. In circumstances where criminality is ethnicised and enjoys communal protection, it may be more effective and less provocative to resort to a system of collective punishment; not, of course, mass executions, burning of villages or deportations, but fines, confiscations and restrictions on movement. All of these were employed by the British in India.
      Policing a violent, ethnically-mixed area is difficult enough even before atrocities have occurred. Afterwards, it is impossible. This is what makes so many peace plans seem like so much waste paper. In the southern Caucasus at present, western diplomats are giving their sympathetic consideration to Georgian suggestions of a peace settlement for the rebel territory of Abkhazia which involves Abkhaz acceptance of Georgian sovereignty, including the disbandment of the Abkhaz army, in return for various constitutional guarantees, including chairmanship of the upper house of the Georgian parliament. The Abkhaz war, parts of which I witnessed, was small-scale, but very brutal. Georgian commanders threatened to kill or expel every single Abkhaz; the Abkhaz ended the war by winning and expelling almost every single Georgian and killing a large number of them. Many of the atrocities on both sides were committed by neighbours who knew each other (also true of Bosnia). Do western diplomats expect that in these circumstances the two populations will agree to live together again? Is it rational to think that any Abkhaz leader will resign the safety of his people into the hands of the Georgians--or that a Georgian would do so if the case were reversed? For my own part, if I knew that someone in my town had killed my parents, and there were no other way of getting justice, sooner or later I would kill him--that is the human response. It is different, of course, if, as in South Africa or the Soviet Union, the atrocities have been committed not by neighbours but by the servants of an anonymous state, with whom the relatives of the victims are not required to live in close proximity.
      The Abkhaz case also illustrates how changing demography can affect such disputes. In some cases, like Abkhazia, the Baltic States, Fiji or Malaysia, this has been because of immigration, but elsewhere because of the tendency of certain ethnic groups to have more babies--sometimes as part of a conscious strategy of outnumbering the ethnic enemy. Thus the Albanian proportion of the population of Kosovo rose from 68.5 per cent in 1948 to 77.4 per cent in 1981 and more than 90 per cent before the ethnic cleansing. In Bosnia, the Muslim proportion rose from 31 per cent in 1948 to 43.7 per cent in 1991, while the Serbs fell from 44 per cent to 31 per cent. In both cases, the nations concerned resorted to arguments about which community had been there first and had originally been the largest. In these circumstances, trying to solve ethnic disputes by majoritarian democracy at a given moment is inadequate.
      Americans find such dilemmas hard to understand, because they live in an immigrant society, where they have been accustomed to seeing the ethnic composition of whole regions transformed in a single generation. But, in America's case, the immigrants presented no threat of ethnically-based territorial secession. "Native Americans" could have presented a threat, but they were few in number and were soon disposed of, by Serbian methods.
      In Britain, however, we have a more persistent and bitter experience. In 1926, catholics in Ulster made up 33.5 per cent of the population (down from 40 per cent 65 years before), and protestants 62.2 per cent--with the catholics basing their national claim on the principle that up to the late 16th century the native Gaels made up 100 per cent of the population. Thanks to their higher birth rate, by 1991, catholics were 38.4 per cent of the population and protestants only 50.6 per cent (the remainder of the population refused to state any religious allegiance). But if the catholic birth rate in Ulster had been a bit higher, or catholic emigration a bit lower, it is possible to imagine a situation in which by 1975, say, the catholics would have been a majority, and could have voted democratically for union with the Republic, which the British government would presumably have felt bound to accept. But does anyone imagine that the main protestant groups would have accepted "the will of the democratic majority"?
      In these circumstances--as in Ulster now--the only solution appears to be some form of guaranteed power-sharing with permanently fixed ethnic proportions. This is now very popular in political science; it is called "consociational democracy." But such systems are inimical to many aspects of democracy, because they limit the ability of the electorate to bring about any real change in government--they are more like a medieval estates system. Moreover, they are almost always held in place by an outside force: in Ulster, by the British and Irish governments and the British army; or, in the first modern example of this kind, Moravia, by the Austrian army. The Soviet Union operated a similar system in the ethnically-mixed republics of the north Caucasus--now dissolving in the absence of the Soviet army.
      Where such systems have broken down, atrocities have often resulted; if no new imperial rule is on hand, the least worst solution is partition. But one official of a UN agency dealing with ethnic conflict told me: "Officially, we're not even allowed to think about partition." Western diplomats intone "territorial integrity" like a prayer. In Africa, the notion that colonial borders are inviolable has been elevated to a sacred principle. But almost every Africa expert would agree that it is unlikely that in the long run--say, in 200 years' time--the borders established by colonialism, will remain. To point out that the "long run" begins today, that several states have already split along ethnic and historic faultlines, and that it would be better to recognise the fact and work with the results, is taboo.
      In the course of this century, the west has accepted or even promoted partition and population exchange on a number of occasions. In 1923, Greece and Turkey negotiated a bilateral agreement whereby some 1.2m Greeks left Turkey for Greece and about 500,000 Turks moved in the opposite direction. In 1948-49 in Palestine, the UN brokered a partition agreement, which was rejected by the Palestinians. During and after the ensuing war, some 750,000 Palestinians were driven out. The west has in effect accepted this, on the grounds that their return would destabilise the Israeli state. UN resolutions on the subject have therefore remained a dead letter.
      The deportation of Germans from central Europe (and of Poles from Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania) in 1945-46 was a ghastly affair (to say nothing of the Holocaust); yet the resulting ethnic homogeneity has allowed the states concerned to become more politically stable than they were between 1919 and 1939, and than their surviving multi-ethnic equivalents have been in the 1990s. A Poland with the ethnic proportions of 1939 would be racked with violent Polish chauvinism and ethnic secessionist movements.
      The most infamous case of partition and population exchange is India and Pakistan in 1947, in the course of which at least 300,000 people died. Many of these deaths could have been avoided if the exchange had been properly supervised. Congress and the Muslim League promised that the rights of minorities would be respected after partition. But the violence was largely an upsurge of hatred and fear from below, by populations maddened by years of propaganda.
      The division of India and Pakistan has proved an enduring wound for the subcontinent, burdening it with hatreds, wars and grotesque levels of military spending. All the same, it is hard to imagine that a united India would have been a better prospect. Would a constitutional compromise have lasted? The minimum demand of even moderate Muslims was for a loose federation and for some form of permanent guaranteed power-sharing at the centre. This would have led to a desperately weak and unstable state. Under the pressure of Islamist radicalism, Muslim population growth and Hindu nationalism, such a state would very probably have disintegrated. Such a disintegration would have been more chaotic, and perhaps even bloodier than the events of 1947. It might have led to the separation of still more states from India, and the descent of the region to west African levels of disorder and poverty. As it is, India has remained a rather successful constitutional federation, while its Muslim minority, although distrusted and sometimes attacked, is too small to provoke an overwhelming wave of Hindu fear and anger.
      To mention India in 1947 is to underline how partition and population exchange should be the last resort in any ethnic dispute. But it also underlines how those outsiders who oppose such a solution by force or diplomatic pressure have a responsibility to prevent future conflict. The British by 1947 were no longer capable of keeping the peace in India, and so were right to get out. Nato must be prepared to police parts of the Balkans permanently, or it must bring about settlements which, however harsh, will prevent future instability. From this point of view, the Rambouillet accords were deficient in one key respect. They set up an elaborate system of "consociational democracy," full of checks and balances, and they provided a Nato force to guarantee these. But they did not guarantee that the Nato force would stay.
      The partition of Kosovo--let alone Macedonia--and the acceptance of solutions involving partition for the Caucasus will take courage on the part of western leaders, both because it would expose them to howls of protest from different sides and because it would require deals (especially with Russia) which will be unpopular with the US Congress. But at a time when western servicemen are being required to show physical courage in the field, it seems not inappropriate to ask their leaders to show both moral courage and historical awareness.
     [Editor's Note: Anatol Lieven's book, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (Yale University Press) will be published in June.]

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      LITTLE ROCK (AP) - FBI agents investigating Democratic Party fund-raiser Yah Lin ``Charlie'' Trie sought evidence that Commerce Secretary Ronald Brown met with a Chinese arms dealer the same day that the dealer attended a White House coffee with President Clinton, according to court documents unsealed today.
     Trie faces federal charges in the campaign fund-raising probe. Agents searched his Little Rock home in October 1997 after obtaining a search warrant that alluded to a Feb. 6, 1996, meeting attended by Brown and Wang Jun just weeks before Brown's death.
     Trie, a central figure in the controversy over foreign-linked campaign donations to Democrats, arranged for Wang to attend a White House coffee with President Clinton the same day.
     Wang's company, Poly Technologies, has been implicated in smuggling of arms into the United States. He is identified as an adviser to the Chinese government in the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee's report on its investigation into illegal campaign fund raising in the 1996 election.
     Wang's visit to the White House was previously reported and Clinton has said it was inappropriate. Previous reports, however, did not mention a meeting the same day between Brown and Wang.
     Brown was a major player in Democratic politics. He was killed in April 1996 when the military transport he was aboard crashed into a mountainside in Croatia. Thirty-four others aboard the plane as part of a government trade mission also died.
     The reference to a meeting between Brown and Wang adds a new twist to the investigation into fund-raising irregularities.
      Trie, a longtime friend of Clinton and a former Little Rock restaurateur, is scheduled to go on trial May 17 on charges he made and arranged illegal contributions to the Democratic National Committee to buy access to Clinton and other top officials.
     The indictment also claims Trie obstructed justice by ordering an employee to destroy documents subpoenaed in 1997 by a federal grand jury and by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
     Trie asked a judge to unseal the court file Thursday, claiming that an FBI agent mislead the court in an affidavit that prompted a judge to issue a warrant for a search of Trie's local residence.
     Trie's lawyers said he had learned in late March or early this month that, contrary to FBI Agent Daniel J. Wehr's affidavit, Wehr did not participate in an interview of Dia Maria Mapili.
     The longtime employee of Trie told agents she was instructed by Trie in 1996 to get rid of fund-raising-related documents stored at his home and garage office.
     Agents seized computers and accessories, records, books, business papers, photographs, mail and other documents in the search of Trie's home, according to court papers that U.S. District Judge George Howard Jr. unsealed Friday.

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     BELGRADE, Yugolsavia -- Bombing strikes by NATO planes made direct hits on Serbia's state television station, Friday. D. Mijatovich told The Daily Republican, "This is is something I never expected from the democratic West...a brutal preventing of freedom of speech and free press."
     The NATO strick knocked Serbia Television off the air and killed one person wounding 18 others, according to sources on the ground there.
     The attack came hours after a Russian envoy said Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic had accepted the idea of a United Nations controlled "international presence" in Kosovo.
      President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair later said the proposal fell short of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's demands for an armed force in the southern Serbian province, a Blair spokesman said Friday after a phone call between the two leaders.
     Radio Television Serbia, the major source of news and entertainment for most Yugoslavs, had been broadcasting a taped interview with Mr. Milosevic by a Houston television station when its downtown Belgrade headquarters was hit by a missile.
     "For the first time in world history, the media war is fought with bombs," said Belgrade Mayor Vojislav Mihajlovic, according to the Beta news agency.
     NATO has long said Serbian television was a legitimate military target because it was spreading "propaganda" about the air campaign.
      The attack knocked down the network's transmission tower and collapsed its top two floors, according to reporters on the scene. Thick smoke filled the street, and terrified staff milled about calling the names of colleagues they feared were trapped inside.
     "We were sitting in the editing room and all of a sudden we heard tremendous blast," videotape editor Sava Andjelkovic told reporters. "A wall behind me virtually vanished, and then the entire wing of the building. We heard screams of wounded people."
     Slobodan Ivanovic, a rescue official, told the Belgrade TV station, Studio B, there were "several dead and many injured." He also said an undetermined number of people were still trapped in the rubble.
     When it resumed broadcasting from what it said was a "reserve system," RTS reported that one staff member had been killed and 18 others wounded in the attack.
     Officials said the missile also destroyed the satellite link with Eurovision, used by foreign TV crews to transmit material abroad.
     Meanwhile, a Russian peace proposal is languishing. In a diplomatic bid to end the conflict, former Russian Premier Viktor Chernomyrdin held daylong talks with Mr. Milosevic on Thursday. It was unclear whether the proposed international force would be armed, what guidelines it would operate under, and whether the offer represented a real peace gesture.
     Moscow's plan calls for the withdrawal of NATO forces amassed at Yugoslavia's borders, a U.N.-led "international presence" in Kosovo with Russia's participation, Yugoslav's "curtailing" of its army and police forces in Kosovo and the return of refugees, according to Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency.
     Mr. Chernomyrdin said talks with NATO concerning the plan would continue Friday by telephone.
     NATO has insisted it must lead any armed presence in Kosovo to enforce a peace agreement. Mr. Milosevic has so far rejected NATO demands to withdraw his troops from the province and accept a Western-dictated autonomy plan for the ethnic Albanian majority there.
      Soon after Mr. Chernomyrdin left for Moscow, alliance jets were back in action Thursday night and early Friday, attacking a railway bridge on the Ibar River in central Serbia, three Serbian television relays, a major rail bridge west of Belgrade and the southern City of Nis.
      Pentagon officials gave one of their most-detailed briefings yet on the damage done by the airstrikes Thursday, saying more than 9,000 air missions over Yugoslavia. Rear Adm. Thomas Wilson, director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff told reporters that "Milosevic's army had been made more vulnerable to a NATO ground campaign, should the alliance undertake that step."

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AGANA, Guam - On Saturday President Clinton authorized the Justice Department to arrest and detain a group of Chinese dissidents fleeing from Communist mainland who were discover hiding on the U.S. Island Territory of Guam.
     The refugees have been classified by Attorney General Janet Reno as "illegal aliens." They were discovered Monday hiding in local jungle areas at Apra Harbor, and are being held on the beach at Agat, and in the jungle at Retidian Point.
     It is anticipated by local officials that the group will seek asylum in Guam.
     Given the new humanitarian policy of the federal government, these refugees from Communist Chin'as oppression would no doubt see their "American Dream" come true long before the Clinton administration recognizes the rights of the local people of Guam. The put-upon people of Guam have waited for justice from America for more than 50 years. It now seems in vain as the native people of Guam see their way of life being eroded by a big goverment bureaucracy in Washington D.C.
     Officials on Guam believe the Chinese arrived in boats from China with Ntionals who paid organized crime lords in an effort to gain American citizenship. Several such vessels have grounded off Guam in recent months.
     Close to five hundred illegal aliens from China have already been apprehended and are being detained at the Department of Correction. Their sudden immmigration to Guam is drawing a complaint on the cost for food, lodging, medical care, and other cost associated in their care.
     But the President's directive would allow captured illegal aliens to be held in the Northern Marianas, which is outside the U.S. immigration area and where asylum would not be available, according to Leland Bettis, an aide to Guam Gov. Carl Gutierrez who is facing a runoff as ruled by the 9th Circuit Court as a result of the corrupted general election in 1998.
     The President's memo specifically mentioned a ``stateless vessel'' located west of the Northern Marianas and identified by U.S. authorities on or about April 12. That vessel apparently has since moved to Tinian, a Northern Mariana island near Saipan, oficials said.
     The President's action was prompted by a letter sent Tuesday by Gutierrez, outlining ``a crisis triggered by an escalating mass influx of aliens from the People's Republic of China.''
     The governor asked for federal assistance in dealing with the problem. Since January, 480 illegal Chinese immigrants have been apprehended in waters off Guam and on Guam he said.
     Last week, a vessel grounded on a reef off Guam and authorities arrested about 70 Chinese nationals on shore. On Friday, 105 Chinese aliens arrived on a boat, Bettis said.
     At present, more than 350 illegal aliens are housed in Guam's already overcrowded prison, comprising nearly 50 percent of the prison population, Gutierrez said.
     Gutierrez said he won't release the illegal aliens into the community because they are of unknown character and no information is known about their background.
     He said he was also worried that the aliens would be manipulated by organized crime, and that tuberculosis and hepatitis B cases have been found among them.
     Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands are U.S. territories located about 3,700 miles southwest of Honolulu.
     If the floodgate for immigrants is left unchecked, it won't be long before two million from China and another three million or more from India will be on Guam USA. Would we wait until the situation reached the intensity level of Yugoslavia before we start bombing them at sea before they reach Guam under humanitarian reason?

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How a President
Distracted by Scandal
Entered Balkan War
The Administration was becoming increasingly marginalized.
By Elaine Sciolino and Ethan Bronner

     BELGRADE - Today NATO is massively and brutally destroying everything existing on Serbian soil. Who is actually the victim of this most horrendous war crime?
     By their overall identity the Serbs belong to the European Christian civilization. They settled in South-East Europe, including Kosovo and Metohia, in the 6th century, during the period of massive population resettlement in Europe and Asia called the Great Migration. Social development in Serbia was influenced by different environing cultures and as of the 18th century predominantly under that of Central and Western Europe.
     The Serbs had their kingdom already in the 11th century and at the beginning of the 13th century they had a developed legal system as a frame work for the civic and church life within, at that time, a developed medieval civilization. The most outstanding document in this regard is Nomocanon by Saint Sava from the beginning of the 13th century, in its time a very modern set of rules governing the civic and religious life. The Serbian Orthodox Church became independent in 1219. The Codex of Emperor Dusan from 1349. ranks very high in European legislature of that time and reflects a high level of legal and social awareness. As such it is one of the most outstanding cultural assets of the Serbian Middle-Ages.
     In the 13th, 14th and the 15th century the Serbs had a many developed medieval society with results in cultural and economic field equal to the achievements of the developed European environing countries. Serbian aristocrats possessed numerous medieval palaces, castles and fortresses, most of which were built on the territory of today’s Raska, Kosovo, and Metohia (Svrcin, Pauni, Nerodimlja, Stimlje, Petric, Novo Brdo, Zvecan, Ribnik). Serbian mediveal aristocy had family relaton with many European imperial and royal dynasties, as Byzantin, Bulgarian, French, Italian, German, Russian, Hungarian, Turkish and others.
     Only in Kosovo and Metohia as a center of Serbian medieval state and society there are over 1.500 Serbian monasteries, churches and other cultural monuments. At that time the Serbs have a developed literature. Their economy is also prosperous (Novo Brdo is the main mining center of the Balkans in the 15th century). Painting was particularly fostered in monasteries, from the 12th to the 14th century.
     It is in the monasteries of Studenica, Zica, Sopocani, Mileseva, Gracanica, Decani, Patriarchy of Pec, and many others that we have outstanding examples of wall paintings called frescoes. Most of the above mentioned monasteries are under UNESCO`s protection as a part of the world cultural heritage.
     Turkish invasion of the South-Eastern Europe had destroyed the Serbian society and its civilization. The same applies to the surrounding Christian societies. The Battle of Kosovo in 1389 means a decisive organized resistance of the Serbian elite to the Turkish invasion. Both the Turkish Sultan Murat and the Serbian Prince Lazar were killed in that battle. In the collective conscience of the Serbs the battle of Kosovo had acquired mythical dimensions as a sacrifice of all Serbs for the freedom of their native country.
     This aspect has reinforced the Kosovo tradition in Serbian culture as a whole. Since the Turks had destroyed their state during several forthcoming centuries, the Serbs were forced to live under the rule of several Empires: the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy and the Republic of Venice. During the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century the Serbs organized two state and political centers: Serbia and Montenegro. During the 19th and 20th century, the Serbian social thought and Serbian parliamentarism were developing under a decisive influence of the West European liberal democracy.
     After two and a half centuries of interruption in the first place due to the Turkish invasion, during the three subsequent centuries the Serbian society was in all respects open to the European influence in the political, cultural and social spheres, providing its own contribution to the overall European civilization. The first Serbian magazine Slaveno-serbski magazin was published in 1768 in Venice and following the example of the European cultural institution Matica Srpska one of the oldest Serbian cultural institutions was founded in 1825. In 1839 the foundation was laid for the University of Belgrade, and in 1842 for Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. The Constitution of Kingdom of Serbia from 1888 guaranteeing equal civic rights to the Jews, was one of the most democratic constitutions in Europe, based on the Belgium constitution.
     In all creative spheres the Serbs have outstanding representatives: the great reformer of Serbian culture Vuk St. Karadzic, the famous botanist Josif Pancic, the well-known physicists Mihajlo Pupin, Nikola Tesla, Milutin Milankovic, the famous professor in the USA Paja Radosavljevic, eminent writers Petar Petrovic Njegos, Ivo Andric, Milorad Pavic, the philosopher Brana Petronijevic, geographer and anthropo-geographer Jovan Cvijic, painters Paja Jovanovic, Nadezda Petrovic, Ljuba Popovic, Vladimir Velickovic, film directors Aleksandar Petrovic, Dusan Makavejev, Emir Kusturica, composers, singers and musicians Stevan Mokranjac, Biserka Cvejic, Radmila Bakocevic, Goran Bregovic, Stefan Milenkovic, sport champions Vlade Divac, Aleksandar Djordjevic, Sinisa Mihailovic, Predrag Pedja Mijatovic, Jasna Sekaric.
     Along with gradual liberation from the Turks, the Serbian territories became increasingly attractive for the appetites of the European powers, Austria-Hungary in the first place. The efforts of the Serbs to create a modern national state, following the example of the national movements of the Italians and Germans was against the interests and political plans of the Great Powers regarding the Balkans.
     In order to more easily jeopardize it the Serbian movement was labeled “Great Serbian”. Obstinate efforts of Austria-Hungary and Nazi Germany in the first place to completely govern South-Eastern Europe resulted in a horrendous genocide against Serbian people in the First and the Second World War. The balance of Serbian sufferings in both World wars, when they opposed the aggression of the Central Powers in World War I and the Fascist Powers in World War II amount to 2.5 million assassinated Serbs. For a small people it is an enormous disaster from which the Serbs had not recovered to date. In 1991 he Serbs were for the third time victims of massive crimes. The most intensive ethnic cleansing after World War II was the ethnic cleansing of the Serbs in Croatia in 1995, accompanying the destruction of Republika Srpska Krajina.
     To blame the Serbs of today to be the aggressors on the territory which from the early Middle Ages has been the very heart of their political, cultural and spiritual life is more than cynical. The Serbian environment has always been, as is the case today, an example of a multi-cultural and multi-ethnical society, the proof being and exceptionally high development of the political and cultural elite of the Albanian ethnic minority in Serbia and Yugoslavia, which is in all respects above its co-nationals in Albania.
      [Editor's Note: Professor Slavenko Terzic with the Historical Institute at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.]

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Saturday April 17, 1999

NATO bombing takes more lives
Daily deaths exceed averages for region in WWII.
By Dr. Jan Oberg

     LUND, Sweden - According to the Yugoslav Ministry of Foreign Affairs, around 300 civilians have been killed between March 24 when NATO's bombing campaign started and April 13. These civilian casualties are related to places such as Aleksinac, Pristina, Kursumlija and Grdelica Gorge. Two days ago a refugee convoy was hit, killing some 60 Albanians. Thus, due to NATO's mistakes about 350 civilians have been killed in 24 days. That is an average of 15 per day.
     The war between various Yugoslav/Serb forces on the one hand and the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK or KLA) broke out in February 1998. Thus there were 13 months of warfare in Kosovo, or 395 days. The international community estimates that 2.000 - soldiers and civilians - were killed. That is an average of 5 per day.
     About 250.000 people were estimated to have fled their homes during the 13 months of war, but remained predominantly within Kosovo and Montenegro. That is an average of 632 per day.
     Since NATO began bombing, the figure has risen to perhaps as many as 750.000 outside and an unknown number inside Kosovo. Thus if 500.000 refugees have been added in 24 days, that makes an average of 20.833 per day.
     These refugees run away because of Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanians (as a reprisal of NATO's bombing in support of Albanian interests) because of NATO's bombs and because of the regular warfare between Yugoslav military and paramilitary units and UCK.
     Even if the figures above are estimates, there must be something fundamentally wrong with a peace policy that seems to kill 3 times more civilian people and produce 33 times more refugees per day than did the war it aims to stop.
     It happens to be April 16. On this day in 1944, Easter Sunday, Allied forces - American and British - carried out a blanket bombing of Belgrade with a devastation and despair no smaller than that caused by the German attack on April 6, 1941.
     Milovan Djilas, the first and perhaps greatest 'dissident' in Europe, describes the emotions at the time in his "Wartime" (1977), "...This is how it lies buried in the memories of the people of Belgrade to this day. That bombing aroused a double bitterness in us: emotional, because we pitied a city of legendary suffering which Hitler had turned into ruin and a place of torment; political, for we suspected - and at times believed - that the Allies were carrying out bombings in order to make postwar rehabilitation and administration harder for us Communists."
     Perhaps history repeats itself. Undoubtedly, rehabilitation will be hard after this combined civil war and international aggression. And few think of the past or of the future at this moment.
      [Editor's Note: Dr. Jan Oberg is a regular contributor to DR foreign corresponsence. He is the Director of the TFF Conflict-Mitigation team to the Balkans and Georgia.]

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NATO's Humanitarian Victims
Entire nation in chaos and ruin.
Slavenko Terzic, Ph.D.

     LUND, Sweden - According to the Yugoslav Ministry of Foreign Affairs, around 300 civilians have been killed between March 24 when NATO's bombing campaign started and April 13. These civilian casualties are related to places such as Aleksinac, Pristina, Kursumlija and Grdelica Gorge. Two days ago a refugee convoy was hit, killing some 60 Albanians. Thus, due to NATO's mistakes about 350 civilians have been killed in 24 days. That is an average of 15 per day.
     The war between various Yugoslav/Serb forces on the one hand and the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK or KLA) broke out in February 1998. Thus there were 13 months of warfare in Kosovo, or 395 days. The international community estimates that 2.000 - soldiers and civilians - were killed. That is an average of 5 per day.
     About 250.000 people were estimated to have fled their homes during the 13 months of war, but remained predominantly within Kosovo and Montenegro. That is an average of 632 per day.
     Since NATO began bombing, the figure has risen to perhaps as many as 750.000 outside and an unknown number inside Kosovo. Thus if 500.000 refugees have been added in 24 days, that makes an average of 20.833 per day.
     These refugees run away because of Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanians (as a reprisal of NATO's bombing in support of Albanian interests) because of NATO's bombs and because of the regular warfare between Yugoslav military and paramilitary units and UCK.
     Even if the figures above are estimates, there must be something fundamentally wrong with a peace policy that seems to kill 3 times more civilian people and produce 33 times more refugees per day than did the war it aims to stop.
     It happens to be April 16. On this day in 1944, Easter Sunday, Allied forces - American and British - carried out a blanket bombing of Belgrade with a devastation and despair no smaller than that caused by the German attack on April 6, 1941.
     Milovan Djilas, the first and perhaps greatest 'dissident' in Europe, describes the emotions at the time in his "Wartime" (1977), "...This is how it lies buried in the memories of the people of Belgrade to this day. That bombing aroused a double bitterness in us: emotional, because we pitied a city of legendary suffering which Hitler had turned into ruin and a place of torment; political, for we suspected - and at times believed - that the Allies were carrying out bombings in order to make postwar rehabilitation and administration harder for us Communists."
     Perhaps history repeats itself. Undoubtedly, rehabilitation will be hard after this combined civil war and international aggression. And few think of the past or of the future at this moment.
      [Editor's Note: Dr. Jan Oberg is a regular contributor to DR foreign corresponsence. He is the Director of the TFF Conflict-Mitigation team to the Balkans and Georgia.]

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Friday April 16, 1999

Kosovo Info Wars
The essence of US-NATO strategy.
By Dr. Jan Oberg

     LUND, Sweden - Most people around the world probably think that war and media are separate. When there is a war, the media tell us about it as objectively as they can under the often difficult circumstances. But in today's information society, every war is two wars: that on the ground and that in the media. Weapons communicate and communication is a weapon.
     We must ask what interests determine what we are told and what we are not told? The history of warfare makes one thing abundantly clear. We can safely assume that we are not told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In NATO's war with Yugoslavia, there is reason to paraphrase Hamlet - 'there is something rotten in the state of the media.'
     This is what you can read about the use by the United States of information in times of war: "Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations planned to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behaviour of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. PSYOP are a vital part of the broad range of US political, military, economic, and informational activities.
     When properly employed, PSYOP can lower the morale and reduce the efficiency of enemy forces and could create dissidence and disaffection within their ranks. There are four categories of military PSYOP; strategic, operational, tactical, and consolidation. PSYOP, which are used to establish and reinforce foreign perceptions of US military, political, and economic power and resolve.
     Other countries work with PSYOP, too. Let's remember that when we watch television. Balkan conflicts not only have a Balkan but also a world order dimension.For instance, did you ever hear about the National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 133 entitled United States Policy towards Yugoslavia labelled "SECRET SENSITIVE"? A censored version was declassified in 1990 and largely confirmed NSDD 54 from 1982 the objective of which included "expanded efforts to promote 'quiet revolution' to overthrow Communist governments and parties" while integrating the countries of Eastern Europe into a market economy.
     Media tend to focus on today's 'story.' But there is a larger frame in which the events take place. To facilitate a broader understanding - in contrast to simply justifying what happens - we need a frame of reference in time and space, analyses of the root causes behind the events.
     Any conflict holds an incompatibility, some attitudes and some behaviour. What you see on the screen is mainly behaviour. What the conflict in Kosovo is about has been forgotten by the media.
      Conspicuously lacking from the media coverage is the suffering of Serbs, Gorans, Turks, Montenegrins, Yugoslavs and gypsies, the roughly 15% of Kosovo's citizens who are not Albanians. Likewise, we are given few opportunities to empathize with the 8-9 million people whose country is being devastated under NATO's 6000 bombing sorties (as of April 14). We hear that the West is not at war with the people of Yugoslavia and if civilian targets are hit, it's a deplorable mistake. It should be journalistically interesting to learn how those at the receiving end see it.
     This distinction is made repeatedly, but it's a myth that the two can be distinguished. Sure, when you bomb oil depots, bridges or telecommunication facilities these are objects that the military needs. But civilians need them too. How far can we go in undermining a military machine without actually destroying, slowly but surely, an entire society?
     Given the use of very advanced intelligence technologies and various types of human presence in the conflict area, there is hardly any doubt that SOME people know much more than we media consumers are told. What appears on the screen is only the top of the information iceberg. For instance, there have been constant rumours about NATO use of depleted uranium bombs against tanks. If so, what are the effects on human beings and the environment?
     Could it be that there is a pattern to media events such as these: the day after Albania declares that it is willing to place all of the country at the disposal of NATO, news reach us that Yugoslav troops have gone over the border. Was that really the first time? If there was a serious loss of lives on NATO's side, would we be told immediately, given the sensitivity surrounding the loss of Western lives?
     Some Western leaders and NATO's spokesman, Jamie Shea, repeatedly refers to 'information on the ground' and tell us that some of it comes from KLA leaders. Robin Cook just repeats the number of refugees in Kosovo that he has been told by KLA's Jakub Krasniqi.
     At the same time, Western media consistently do NOT publish information coming from the Yugoslav government - for instance the very detailed lists of civilian destruction - presumably because it is considered non-reliable or controlled by Milosevic, or serving particular political purposes. But can we really exclude the possibility that the same applies to KLA-based information and NATO's public relation in this situation?
     Journalists now make extensive use of non-confirmed news and even though they tell us that this or that is not confirmed, their audiences are manipulated to think 'there is no smoke without a fire' and they may not notice if, much later, the 'story' or 'the report' are proved to have been false.
      Predominantly military expertise, statesmen, ministers and diplomats - from NATO countries. Fewer political experts, Balkan experts, and virtually no psychologists, peace and conflict researchers, professional mediators and never independent intellectuals. American think tank scholars are invited to comment on American foreign policy. No media has provided Yugoslav think tanks or scholars an opportunity to participate in a dialogue.
      The typical press conference or briefing goes like this: a spokesman runs the show, selects the questions, give them a ready-made answer - they are NEVER taken by surprise and have eloquent formulations about everything - and says: Next! Since March 24 the general representatives of the free press have NOT questioned the content of the Rambouillet Dictate, they have NOT challenged the morality of NATO's policy, they have NOT highlighted its destabilizing effects, they have NOT highlighted the discrepancies between the stated goals and the consequences of NATO's policies. They are shown photos and videos of targets bombed and told that this is a tank or this is an ammunition storage - and NONE of them asks: I can't see that it is, how can we be sure? Others raise directly helpful questions such as: how can the West prevent Yugoslavia from importing oil?
     Military authorities have a virtual monopoly over virtual reality. Pictures from Aviano base and interviews with brave pilots are more frequent than coverage of the civil destruction. Beyond CNN, there are surprisingly few independent journalists in the region. The uniformity of their 'stories' is staggering to come from a press that should be free to have many angles and many different stories.
     When a black-and-white image of the parties has been established, media promote the view that there is a 'good' violence combating an 'evil' violence. The West's moral justification was that, over one year, 2000 people had been killed, 250.000 people displaced and that 45 people were killed in Racak. After three weeks of bombing, at least 350 civilians have been killed, an additional 500.000 have fled and NATO remains 'determined' to reduce the welfare of 8-10 million Yugoslavia citizens for years.
     Judge for yourself: Was Rambouillet 'negotiations'? Was the document a 'peace' plan? When civilians are killed it is called 'collateral damage.' To 'neutralize' or 'take out' an object means to destroy it. Belgrade's media are 'censored' or 'controlled,'ours are not.
      The economic costs and who will pay Remember how you heard again and again that the United Nations was so expensive and could not make peace in Croatia and Bosnia? American investment bank, Lehman Brothers, calculates one month of bombing to 3 US bn $, Financial Times quotes sources that estimate 20 bn US $ to be closer to reality. That is, the sheer military costs. Add to that the price of the destruction in human and material terms - and what it will cost to reconstruct the region later - and care for refugees, compensate neighbouring states etc. Probably we are talking about 1-2 bn $ per day - not to speak of 'opportunity' costs: what welfare could have been purchased for that sum instead?
     The interests of the military-industrial complex Huge economic interests are at stake. War is another way of doing research and testing weapons and strategies. Capitalism's productive overcapacity is absorbed through the destruction-reconstruction cycles that wars go through.
     The role of intelligence services and their infiltration in various 'civilian' missions and NGOs. Wether there could be more NATO casualties and more NATO planes shot down than we have been told up till now (6000 sorties implies a certain risk).
     The independent peace proposals They proliferate from experienced peace and other civil society organizations such as the International Peace Bureau, from peace and conflict research networks such as Transcend or TFF. You will see few and short reports from the hundreds of demonstrations for peace and Stop the Bombing around the Western world. But you will hear about it when EU/Germany presents a 'peace' plan (April 14) which is cobbled together of what NATO can accept does not address the roots causes, is unacceptable to Belgrade and otherwise devoid of creativity. So why is it highlighted?
     Because it comes from governments, from the same circles that simultaneously need to legitimate the air campaign: "We actually hate to bomb, but we do it for peace. The Soviet leadership consistently deceived its own people and allies about the dangers of nuclearism, about 'real' socialism and its consequences and about its activities in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Somalia, Afghanistan and Chechenya. And only later were KGB's murky activities confirmed.
     The American leadership consistently deceives its own people and allies about nuclearism, 'real' capitalism and its consequences for the poor of the world and about its activities in Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, the Filippines, Iran, Haiti, Panama, and Iraq. And only later are CIA's activities confirmed. I don't think for a moment that NATO's war against Yugoslavia will be any different. What is at stake now for the West in the Balkans is MUCH bigger than what was at stake in the above-mentioned conflicts. Thus, the media warfare, the perception management and the PSYOPs, will be much more massive.
      [Editor's Note: Dr. Jan Oberg is a regular contributor to DR foreign corresponsence. He is the Director of the TFF Conflict-Mitigation team to the Balkans and Georgia.]

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Thursday April 15, 1999

Mistakes and Outright Lies
The Clinton-Gore propaganda team.
By Andrew Ping, Staff Writer

     BERKELEY - I would be willing to believe that President Clinton intended to keep all of his Campaign promises, made almost eight years ago. Most have long since been broken, of course, but I understand that the realities of office can have a sobering effect on a newly elected official. Since then, he's lied about everything from spending (didn't he say every penny of budget surplus was going to shore up social security?) to his sex life.
     Unfortunately, Presidential candidate Al Gore has learned a lot from his mentor. It is fortunate for the public, however, that he's much more inept at it than Mr. Clinton was.
     Take for example, his claim to have created the Internet. It's now been widely publicized that the Alphanet was created by the Pentagon in 1969, years before Gore had anything to do with Congress. Al Gore certainly did not invent the HTML formatting standard, which has given rise to the popularity and easy access to the Internet, now known by most people as "the Web." Next, he claimed to have grown up on a farm doing chores in the hot sun and learning responsibility. If that were true, he probably would not lie so blatantly. Though his family does own a farm, Gore himself evidently grew up in a hotel suite in Washington.
      The point of these glaring examples is that Gore has learned something terrible from Mr. Clinton. Somehow, Al Gore has picked up the idea that the American people are easy to lie to, and that any buffoon can make us believe whatever he likes. Maybe that's true, but the buffoon must be good at it, as demonstrated by President Clinton, who has proved more slippery than the proverbial greased pig.
     Now I'm trying to decide who is less intelligent: Mr. Gore or the American Public. So far, I'm convinced that the American Public has the edge. If you'd like more of an edge, visit the site: http://www.realchange.org/gore.htm which details shady activities of our Vice President, and provides sources for that information.
     Personally, I'm sick of the lies, and I hope other citizens are, too. We can do a lot better than Al Gore in 2000, and that should be as blatantly obvious as his lies for both Republicans and Democrats. Honesty in office, and respect for the American Public should be issues that unite us all.
      [Editor's Note: Andrew Ping is a Staff Writer for the Daily Republican Newspaper Co. and is a Senior enrolled ay U.C. Berkeley and will be graduating in June.]

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Wednesday April 14, 1999

COVERING UP NATO'S
BALKAN BLUNDER
By Dr. Jan Oberg

     LUND, Sweden - Western leaders are busy re-writing history to justify their Balkan bombing blunder. The change in information, rhetoric and explanations since the bombings started on March 24 is literally mind-boggling. Most likely they fear they have opened a very dark chapter in history and may be losing the plot. One way to make failure look like success is to construct a powerful media reality and de-construct real reality. That's the essence of media warfare and that's what happens now.
     For instance, you must have noticed that the The Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA or UCK, which existed some weeks ago and allegedly participated in Rambouillet now suddenly never existed. The 13-months war in Kosovo/a also conveniently has been expurgated.
     The last few days President Clinton, prime minister Blair, NATO General Wesley Clark, foreign secretary Cook, foreign minister Fischer, secretary Albright, defence minister Robertson and other Western leaders have explained to the world why NATO bombs Yugoslavia. They made NO MENTION of KLA or the war. Their speeches are surprisingly uniform.
     The main points are, that we have evidence that Yugoslavia, i.e.President Milosevic had a plan to ethnically cleanse Kosovo/a of all Albanians. One proof of this plan is that some 700.000 have been driven over the borders; it would have been many more, if not all 2 million Albanians, had NATO not taken action. Milosevic deployed 40.000 troops and 300 tanks in the region even while his delegation was in Paris. 'We have reports' and 'there are stories' about mass graves, rapes, and endless atrocities. We have no hard evidence, but that's what refugees consistently tell. He is now 'a cruel dictator' and 'a serial ethnic cleanser.' Innocent civilians are driven away 'only because of who they are and not because of anything they have done,' as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair express it. Milosevic has not been in compliance with the agreement he signed with ambassador Holbrooke in October last year.
     Why is this not credible, why is this probably a 'narrative' made to influence emotions, perceptions, enemy images, and ultimately the behaviour of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals?
     Let me give you a few facts from my own visits and repeated meetings over the years with the civilian Kosovar Albanian leadership, the opposition and independent intellectuals in Pristina. Dr. Ibrahim Rugova repeatedly told me, as he did everyone from the West who cared to listen, that he feared he could not keep the Albanian people behind his pragmatic nonviolent strategy if the West did not 'do something' such as persuade Belgrade to participate in talks mediated by the international community.
     Years ago I met Kosovar Albanians who were very critical of Dr. Rugova's 'passive' leadership and advocated guerrilla struggle as the only way out, sooner or later. In 1996 I was told by well-informed Albanian intellectuals that they would not rule out that there existed an armed fraction. Last year advisers to Dr. Rugova told me that they had heard about the liberation army as early as 1993.
     For years, I would say, Kosovo has been a police state. The only response Belgrade had to the legitimate Albanian grievances was to step up police repression. I have no doubts about the fact that there were gross, systematic violations of political, economic, cultural and other human rights. The Albanians feared Belgrade - which insisted that it was an internal problem but never took steps to find a solution.
     At the same time, the Albanian leaders 'needed' the repression to mobilize international support for their project of an independent Kosova. Thus, they refused to deal with moderate, dialogue-inclined leaders such as prime minister Milan Panic and his excellent ministers in 1993.
     Be this as it may, the truth is that there was no war, no mass killings, no systematic ethnic cleansing, no genocide. Many Albanians left because of the repression but also because of the misery, the utter poverty and lack of future opportunities for themselves and their children. Serbs, too, left for such reasons and not - as they sometimes claim - because they were victims of an Albanian genocide plan.
     The conflict that was said to have started in 1989 erupted into war in February 1998 when KLA surfaced. It can NOT be denied that KLA activity changed the situation from repression to war. The most surprising is a) that the West turned a blind eye to Albania's role as a training ground and base for KLA, b) that, in its consequences, Albanian policies amounted to de facto aggression against Yugoslavia, c) that KLA was armed by predominantly Western sources in contravention of the United Nation Security Council's embargo on any arms imports into the territories of former Yugoslavia, d) that nobody thought of closing the border to prevent spilling-in of soldiers, weapons and ammunition and the spilling-over of Yugoslav reprisals and e) that Yugoslav armed forces, by and large, let these incursions happen for months without taking action against them.
     US envoy Robert Gelbard said on February 23, 1998 that he was "deeply disturbed by the UCK" and that it was "undoubtedly a terrorist organization." One week later the Yugoslav offensive against it began. So much for the present Western cover-up which seek to make us forget the pivotal role of KLA in this crisis.
     Next, what about the argument that Milosevic did not keep his promise to Holbrooke of October last year? It would be a good point if that was not a one-sided agreement. While there were two forces fighting fiercely in Kosovo - various Yugoslav/Serb police and military forces on the one side and KLA on the other - the agreement was signed only by Milosevic. KLA declared a cease fire on their side, but never signed any document. One-party cease fires are as unique as they are untenable.
     We were told and saw pictures of a war that had raged in the province for 13 months. Albanians intellectuals and editors I talked with during visits to Pristina in autumn 1998 told me proudly when asked who the KLA was that 'that's everyone of us, we are a people in arms.' Sheltered by the Holbrooke-Milosevic deal, KLA seized 30% of the province's territory. Radical Albanians gave visitors the crystal clear impression that victory was around the corner. That is, until Belgrade had had enough.
     During those 13 months, around 2000 people were killed and 250.000 people displaced - about 10% of the province's Albanians and 10% of its Serbian citizens - but few of them, fortunately, fled outside Kosovo. Two weeks after NATO action began, suddenly 750.000 had run over the borders. Now we are told that there were only innocent civilian Albanians in Kosovo who, as President Clinton stated it on April 12, are driven away ONLY because of who they are and not because of anything they have done.
     It seems more probable to me that people run away for three reasons, not one: a) because of ethnic cleansing by Serb/Yugoslavs who feel that the ongoing destruction of Yugoslavia is the result of Albanian policy, b) because of the war between Yugoslav and KLA forces, and c) because of NATO's bombs which repeatedly also happens to hit civilian targets.
     Was there a plan to cleanse the area? No one who maintains it has shown any hard evidence. Before March 24 this year no politician had told us about Milosevic' alleged plan. No humanitarian organizations had warned about a major, systematic campaign to drive out 1-2 million people. If OSCE with 1500 verifiers knew about such a plan - and they listened in on Yugoslav communication - why did it not alert the world? If Belgrade wanted to get rid of all Kosovo-Albanians, it could have done so at any time since 1991.
     It never touched any Albanian leader or tried to prevent the building of their parallel state. Why did NATO threaten to bomb Yugoslavia if it would not sign the Rambouillet document but said nothing about bombing it because of the existence of such a plan?
     Are 40.000 troops and 300 tanks indicative of such a plan? Hardly. Troops and tanks are not the prime tools to make people run away. They were deployed in the province when NATO deceived Yugoslavia. You see, Holbrooke probably forgot to tell Milosevic that NATO would deploy an 'extraction force' in Macedonia. Its task was to protect the 'extraction' from Kosovo of the unarmed OSCE verifiers in the event of NATO bombings - an activity that could lead to them being taken hostage by the Serbs. So, NATO's bomb threat was real from October. Would your country do nothing if threatened for months with bombings by history's most powerful military alliance?
     With the OSCE verifiers peacefully out, NATO did not withdraw the force but had already begun to increase it from 3.000 to 12.000 (and forgot to consult the Macedonian parliament). Yugoslavia had very legitimate reasons to see this as an extremely unfriendly "signal" and moved troops down to the Macedonian border to "signal" its determination to fight that force, should it cross the border into Kosovo. KLA was sucked in by the presence of the Yugoslav units and fighting intensified in an area where no fighting had taken place before. All this BECAUSE of NATO's policies. What is now called evidence of a grand design for ethnic cleansing by Western leaders was nothing but the response to NATO's remarkably unwise, clumsy and adventurous attempt to force Macedonia into the role of an ally and major NATO base. It was a perfectly natural response to NATO's repeated threat of a massive air campaign. It - predictably - resulted in an almost complete political destabilization of the Macedonian government and a socio-economic destabilization because of the NATO-provoked refugee flows.
     Finally, Milosevic is a 'cruel dictator'? Well, if so why has the West helped him be central, relied on his signature in Dayton and never extended any help to the opposition in Belgrade - not even when 1,5 million people demonstrated against him a couple of years ago? Why has ambassador Holbrooke and scores of Western diplomats had 'interesting' talks with him? Why did the West hope for a last-minute concession from him to avoid the bombing it threatened? What do we do with 'cruel dictators' who are elected by citizens many of whom would certainly call him authoritarian or see his policies a catastrophic but who never saw him as a cruel dictator?
     Why does NATO repeat the mistake from Iraq - to bomb a country only to see its people unite completely behind their leader?
     None of NATO's present arguments are valid. They contradict facts, they contradict what Western leaders themselves told us yesterday. What we witness is a pitiful attempt at "perception management" and media war against public opinion.
     Our suspicious are warranted when Western civilian and military top leaders within days seek to rewrite and falsify history, omit well-documented facts and central actors, change the sequence of events and forget what they stated and did only a couple of weeks ago. It's particularly disturbing if you see a systematic bias or tendency in those changes. And it bodes ill, indeed, when the majority of journalists ask only politically correct questions to State Department and NATO spin doctors and spokespersons at a time that could well turn out to be a defining moment of history.
      [Editor's Note: Dr. Jan Oberg is the Director of the TFF Conflict-Mitigation team to the Balkans and Georgia.]

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Tuesday April 13, 1999

Kosovo and NATO Military Action
By Frederic L. Kirgis

     WASHINGTON - When the Yugoslav government refused to sign the American-drafted peace accord for Kosovo, and after repeated warnings to Yugoslavia, NATO forces have begun an aerial bombing campaign against Yugoslav military targets. The question arises whether international law permits the use of armed force against Yugoslavia under these circumstances.
     Kosovo is a province of Yugoslavia, not an independent state. Even though about 90 percent of its population is ethnic Albanian, the international community has not supported a right of secession for Kosovo. Since Kosovo remains a part of Yugoslavia in fact and in law, the current military action raises questions of external intervention in civil strife. In this case, though, the civil strife is likely to endanger peace and security in neighboring states and has already created large refugee flows into those states.
     Until the advent of the United Nations, international law had little to say about what a government did regarding its own citizens in its own territory. In the U.N. era, it has become well established that governments do not have a free rein to mistreat their own citizens, and a wide range of international human rights standards has been established to prevent or rectify such mistreatment.
     The right of self-determination is one of the currently-recognized human rights, but it has not normally been regarded as a right of an ethnic or other minority to secede. It does, however, protect certain civil and political rights of ethnic groups as well as of individuals. The international community has treated it as applicable to the Kosovo situation, in the form of a right to increased autonomy within the Yugoslav state. But even if a central government, such as the government in Belgrade, is depriving a group of its right of self-determination, that alone does not permit intervention by external armed forces.
     The United Nations Charter provides a mechanism for legitimating NATO armed intervention. Regional arrangements, such as NATO, are expressly permitted under Chapter VIII of the Charter. But Chapter VIII, Article 53, prohibits enforcement action (as distinguished from action in self-defense) by regional agencies without the authorization of the U.N. Security Council.
     In 1962 the International Court of Justice said that enforcement action is coercive action in the context of Chapter VII, which deals with threats to the peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression. If the NATO action is designed to coerce the Yugoslav government to accept the allied peace plan for Kosovo, it would require Security Council authorization under Article 53. On the other hand, if the NATO action is designed to ensure humanitarian relief for the people of Kosovo or merely to help them to repel armed aggression, one could argue that Security Council authorization may not be necessary.
     In 1998, Security Council resolution 1199 expressed deep concern for the deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Kosovo, including reports of violations of human rights and of international humanitarian law, and emphasized the need to ensure that the rights of all inhabitants of Kosovo were respected. By invoking Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, the Council implicitly found that there was a threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression of an international character.
     It demanded (among other things) that Yugoslavia withdraw its security units used for civilian repression, enable effective international monitoring to be done in Kosovo, facilitate the safe return of refugees and displaced persons, and make rapid progress toward a political situation in Kosovo. The Council also called upon U.N. member states to provide adequate resources for humanitarian assistance in the region.
     Resolution 1199 thus expressly acknowledged that there is a situation in Kosovo of the nature covered by Chapter VII and recognized the role Yugoslav forces have played in creating the humanitarian crisis in the province, but it did not expressly authorize forceful intervention. The U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan, has said that in his view only the Security Council has the authority to decide that the internal situation in any state is so grave as to justify forceful intervention. The clear implication is that if any state or alliance, such as NATO, could intervene on its own, the U.N. system of collective security could be endangered or destroyed.
     There are two possible arguments for intervention without Security Council authorization, but they both require an extension of recognized principles beyond the limits heretofore applied to them. The first is based on a limited right of humanitarian intervention to aid groups held captive or subjected to grave physical danger. The justification for humanitarian intervention is strongest when the intervening states are acting to protect their own nationals, as in the case of Israel’s 1976 raid to release its nationals being held hostage at the airport in Entebbe, Uganda.
     The extended argument would be that in exceptional cases where peaceful means of alleviating a humanitarian crisis inflicted by a state on its own nationals have failed, and where the Security Council has recognized a threat to international peace, forceful intervention would be lawful so long as it is proportional to the situation.
     The second argument is based on an extension of the right of collective self-defense. That right is recognized by Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, if the Security Council has not acted to deal with an armed attack. The right of self-defense, though, has traditionally been regarded as legitimate only in the case of an armed attack on a state.
     Even if the Kosovo authorities have requested self-defense help from NATO, since Kosovo is not a state under international law, the right of collective self-defense would have to be stretched to apply here. The argument for stretching it would stress the international community’s recognition of the Kosovars as an entity entitled to a substantial measure of autonomy (and thus entitled not only to defend itself, but also to request others to help, so long as the help is proportional to the situation).
     [Frederic L. Kirgis is Law School Association Alumni Professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law. He has written extensuely on international law.]

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Monday April 12, 1999

International Law and Kosovo
By Thomas D. Grant, Contributor

      CAMBRIDGE, UK - The action of states in international affairs is a prime shaper of international law. When powerful states or alliances of states undertake an action, the influence of that action on the law may well be substantial and pervasive. The NATO operation against Yugoslavia which began on Wednesday, March 24—Operation Allied Force—will certainly not leave international law unchanged. That much seems clear.
        How exactly the Kosovo intervention will change international law is less clear. It is critical that Americans think about the legal aspect of the operation and its aftermath, for, if we do not, some of the ramifications of Operation Allied Force will indeed come as a possibly unpleasant surprise.
      Opponents of the NATO strikes on Yugoslavia have argued that the strikes will upset the United Nations security system. Under the United Nations Charter, the use of force is outlawed, except in special cases. The most basic exception—under Article 51 of the Charter—is that of self-defense. The UN Charter also permits the use of force when the Security Council has determined that there exists a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression. According to some, the present action in Yugoslavia does not fall under any UN Charter exception to the ban on use of force. The present action, as such, while ‘degrading’ the armed forces of Yugoslavia, also degrades the international security order enshrined in the UN Charter. Or so the argument goes.
      This must be put in context however. The UN security system which opponents of the NATO action against Yugoslavia argue is being degraded has rarely in over a half century of its existence been as robust as its framers had hoped. In a number of cases where minorities within a state have sought independence through unilateral secession, the UN has provided little guidance.
      Bangladesh, Chechnya, and Biafra made their claims for independence and either succeeded (Bangladesh) or failed (Chechnya and Biafra) essentially outside the UN Charter framework. Military actions where the UN system has come into play—Korea, the Falklands, Kuwait—required a confluence of political opinion among the five permanent members of the Security Counsel. Where no such confluence existed, states have nonetheless employed force in pursuit of foreign policy aims. The United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan, Indonesia in East Timor—putting aside whether any of these instances was a justifiable use of force, none took place within the UN Charter framework.
      To argue that the UN security system will fall victim to the present action in Yugoslavia implies that that system was more robust before the action than it really was. Operation Allied Force, at least as regards the core of the UN security system, probably will not result in very much change at all.
       Yet, at the same time, the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia may well prove one of the formative incidents of early twenty first century world order. At least four areas may see substantial legal change as a result of Operation Allied Force.
      First, though the core of the UN security system is unlikely to be ‘degraded’ in any meaningful way by the action, in at least one aspect it may well change. Article 52 of the UN Charter recognizes the right of states to form regional collective security organizations. The most successful of these organizations has been NATO. It was for self- defense that NATO was originally established in April 1949.
      If any one member state of the Alliance were attacked, all other members were bound by the NATO treaty to use force to repel the attack. The UN Charter permits this. However, Article 53 of the Charter makes clear that regional collective security organizations are not permitted to use force without Security Council authorization, at least where members of the organization are not under attack. A noteworthy aspect of Operation Allied Force is that its mandate comes essentially from the North Atlantic Counsel—political arm of NATO. This bypasses UN Charter Article 53. If the rule of Article 53 is overtaken by Operation Allied Force, then interesting results could follow.
      NATO, though the most successful collective security organization, is not the only one. The states of West Africa have organized themselves in a collective security arrangement. Similar arrangements have existed in the Americas, the Far East, and Eastern Europe. The Arab states form an organization known as the Arab League, which exists to promote their mutual interests and common defense. What if there were a resurgence of violence on the West Bank, and Israeli security forces killed a number of Palestinians and damaged Palestinian property? Would the Arab League, by a unanimous resolution of its member states, have legal authority to engage in an armed action against Israel?
       Under the precedent being set by Operation Allied Force, it would seem that it might. In favor of Israel it would in all likelihood be argued that the human rights violations committed by Israel on the West Bank, if any, are far less egregious than those committed by Yugoslavia in Kosovo. This, however, simply begs a further question—how serious do violations have to be in order to justify attack by a regional collective security organization? Not to resort to trivial examples in such a serious context, but it is clear that, were the Brazilian national airline suddenly to revoke all of its frequent flier miles, that would not justify an attack on Brazil by the Organization of American States. But few real cases will be so easy.
       The trouble will arise when the facts are more ambiguous—worse than breaches of minor commercial contracts, not as bad as the Holocaust. Even if an objective standard were set in law, there is still the question of who decides the facts. After all, the Warsaw Pact countries all ‘agreed’ in 1967 that something had to be done about Czechoslovakia—a reading of the law and of the facts that could never have been obtained at United Nations level. Letting NATO decide that the violations of human rights in Kosovo in 1999 justify armed intervention furnishes persuasive legal precedent for intervention by regional security organizations elsewhere in the future.
      This in turn leads to a second aspect of international law that may change under influence of Operation Allied Force. International lawyers long said that what states did within their own borders was not a matter which international law could address. Acts by one state against another might be actionable, but if the impact of the acts of a state were limited to its own citizens, then other states had no business intervening. This rule has been under reconstruction for some time. Events in the 1990s in particular have changed it.
      The United States led an intervention in Haiti, not because Haiti was under attack or was attacking another state, but because the government of Haiti refused to respect the results of a democratic election in Haiti. A similar action was undertaken by the West African states in 1998 in Sierre Leone. The no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq have the purpose of protecting from their own government minorities in Iraq (Kurds in the north, Shi’ite Arabs in the south).
       In none of these cases was armed intervention justified on traditional grounds—defense of a state from attack by another state. Instead, a new rule was being applied. States may intervene to protect the people of one state against their fellow citizens and rulers. NATO intervention against Yugoslavia is a new—and by far the most decisive application to date—of this new rule. Though some Kosovar Albanians have declared their province a state, nobody had recognized Kosovo as a state at the time Operation Allied Force commenced. NATO intervention is for the purpose of changing the internal order of Yugoslavia—not for the traditional purpose of defending one state from another.
      This change in international law is momentous. In effect, it erodes the state as an independent unit in international affairs. Some international lawyers once described the state as a social order dependent on no other social order. That description, under the Kosovo precedent, can no longer be entirely accurate. And, again, problems may arise when this new conception of the relationship between states and international society is applied in the future. Consider for example the domestic situation in Indonesia.
      In that large developing country, a small minority of Indonesian citizens of Chinese ethnic background control as much as eighty per cent of the economy. ‘Native’ Indonesians are openly hostile to the Chinese minority. At times, they have subjected their Chinese fellow citizens to attacks which observers have compared to the pogroms earlier this century against European Jews. Under the traditional view, no state could take action against Indonesia for conduct that had no direct impact on persons outside the borders of Indonesia. But under the Kosovo precedent, the rule is different.
      If Indonesians began a new round of terror against their Chinese co-nationals, an outside state would have an arguable case for intervention. Would a People’s Republic of China, keen on geopolitical expansion, use the opportunity to take over Indonesia? Would Russia try to revive the Soviet Union, if persons of Russian ethnic background came under attack in the Baltic Republics or, more plausibly, one of the five Central Asian states? Such questions are much more serious now than before Operation Allied Force. Closer to home for Americans, the erosion of the once-impermeable state may expose to new international criticism United States laws not widely approved in the developed world. Western Europeans, for example, by substantial majorities oppose capital punishment. There is, of course, no realistic question of foreign armed intervention in the domestic affairs of the United States. But the legal bases for foreign pressure in the domestic affairs of all countries are arguably reinforced by the intervention in Yugoslavia.
      By the same token, states may find after Operation Allied Force that the way they manage their own provinces or federal regions is no longer strictly a domestic matter. A third legal result of Operation Allied Force may well be to increase the profile of the subunits of states in international affairs. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, which in turn is a constituent republic of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The traditional view under international law was that subunits of a state—even subunits with substantial powers of their own, such as possessed by the fifty states of the United States—were not subjects of international law. Any profile that such subunits might have enjoyed outside the borders of their own country existed at the sufferance of the central government.
       The relations between the central government and its territorial subunits or provinces was of no legal interest to other countries. Operation Allied Force, while at one level about the rights of individual human beings, is also about the federal structure of Yugoslavia. The Rambouillet agreement, rejection of which by Yugoslavia triggered the present NATO action, required Yugoslavia to restore to Kosovo autonomy stripped from it in 1989. Under the traditional view, Yugoslavia’s internal federal relations would have been a matter for Yugoslavia alone to govern. In the 1970s, the central government of Ethiopia terminated the autonomy of Eritrea—a province which had joined Ethiopia after World War II on the promise that it remain largely independent from the central government. No international action was taken against Ethiopia when it went back on the promise. The change was a change in the federal structure of Ethiopia and was not believed to have repercussions under international law. The rule after Operation Allied Force, however, is different.
      A subunit of a federation, such as Kosovo, may become the object of international legal interest. Again, for Americans, the implication is not that foreign coalitions might use force against the United States, but, rather, that the change in international law might by increments erode the freedom of action of the United States federal government. Some United States states have, on their own, already mounted interesting challenges to the long-assumed monopoly of the federal government over foreign affairs.
       Massachusetts, for example, has a law forbidding government purchases from Burma (Myanmar). If this is a trend on the part of U.S. states, then it may be strengthened, indirectly at any rate, by action which conceives of a subunit of a country as a proper subject of international legal concern. Operation Allied Force may change the status of federal units and provinces in relation to international law and in relation to the central governments of their own countries.
      In Yugoslavia, a province may well be on its way to becoming a nominally independent state. But a Kosovar state will in all likelihood be dependent on armed international support, both for protection against outside foes (namely, Serbia) and for domestic stability. A fourth result of Operation Allied Force may well be to contribute to a resurgence of a form of statehood that was quite common in the nineteenth century but rejected in the twentieth—the protectorate. The premise behind a protectorate was that a given state lacked the internal cohesion to govern its own affairs or to defend itself against outside forces.
      Foreign countries, usually European, established protectorates over many states in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. British India was not a unitary entity but, in essence, a series of protected states. Protectorates such as Nigeria, Malaysia, and Morocco in fact were scattered throughout the colonial empires. The protectorate by the end of World War II was rejected as a model of governance, however, on the grounds that it was a façade for western conquest. The post-Cold War era, remarkably, may be witnessing creation of a new version of the old form.
      Not a tool for conquest but a response to humanitarian crisis, the latter day protectorate would appear to be largely divorced from the material interests of the protecting powers. Nonetheless, it would also appear to involve some of the essential elements of its precursor—on-going armed intervention, substantial external influence on constitution-making, foreign involvement in courts and other government bodies. The idea of a modern protectorate is arguably much in evidence in Bosnia. There, the constitution of the state was drafted overseas, in a language foreign to the state, and guaranteed by a ‘contact group’ of outside states. Foreign troops with powers similar to those of an occupying army police domestic dividing lines between hostile ethnic groups and guard Bosnia against its outside foe, Serbia.
      Foreign legal experts sit on key Bosnian judicial panels. The Bosnian government depends on external financial aid. It is difficult to imagine how an independent Kosovo could survive without a similar arrangement. And instability caused by the mass exodus of Kosovar Albanians into neighboring states might well result in the need for still further international protectorates in the region. Macedonia and Albania in particular could find themselves dependent states in much the same way Bosnia has been since the Dayton- Paris Accords.
       If Montenegro, the other federal unit of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, increases its protest and breaks with Serbia to make its own state, the hostility of the Yugoslav federal army and the Kosovar refugee crisis would probably result there too in an international protectorate, in fact if not in name. The United States, as it is in Bosnia, would in all likelihood be the chief guaranteeing power in all of these potential new protectorates. If Operation Allied Force completely degrades Yugoslavia, it is not totally inconceivable that Serbia itself might require outside support to preserve domestic order.
      By then, the international legal system may well have adapted itself to accommodate the new protected state. Whether powers such as the United States will wish to continue for a long duration to play the role of guarantor to the new protectorates will depend on domestic political opinion. The costs of such a role could be high. Preparing the ground for new protectorates is a further change in international law that the Kosovo intervention may well effect. The United States and its allies in Operation Allied Force should themselves prepare for this along with other potential changes to international law.
      [Thomas Grant is an attorney in Massachusetts, New York, and Washington, DC. He is completing a Ph.D. in international law at Cambridge University, in England and is a Fulbright scholar.]

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Friday, April 9, 1999

Flawed Peace Strategy
White House has now shifted Ms. Albright's responsibilites.
By Edward Anderson, Staff Writer

      WASHINGTON - Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State, is a good example of the Clinton administration's modern diplomacy that is drawing fire from international and domestic sources. On Thursdsay, even James Rubin was telling reporters, "There is a certain degree of finger-pointing going on..."
     As late as Wednesday, Albright was making public statements like, "I'm convinced this is a good thing....I think destroying Milosevic is a worthy objective. But whether we can accomplish this is up in the air."
     The embattled spokesperson for the State Department appeared on NBC's nationally televised Face The Nation on Sunday where she told Tim Russert, "We are, I believe, very much on target literally with what we are trying to do to make sure that Milosevic does not have the military power in order to control the Kosovo region in a tight grip."
     That strategy is about as viable as the failed one-sided peace accords being promoted by Albright in Rambouillet, France ten days ago. In a public statement on Friday, Ivo Daalder, of the Brookings Institution said, "Albright was off the mark. And then Clinton, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Wesley K. Clark, the commander of NATO and Javier Solana, the secretary general of NATO were wrong. The only thing Milosevic understands is maintaining power."
     Reliable sources say Albright makes hourly telephone calls to NATO foreign ministers, pleading for them to hang tough and not to back-down.
     Making matters worse, the Clinton White House shifted responsibilites at the White House so that Ms. Albright will no longer be responsibile for the ethnic Albanian refugees.
     Albright claims that the failed peace agreement at Rambouillet, still remains the center-piece of a future political settlement in Kosovo.
     However, Hubert Vedrine, the French foreign minister, has openly challenged Albright's public claims that the so called agreement is still viable.
     The proposed Rambouillet Interim Agreement, Kosovo would have granted autonomy within Serbia and permitted NATO forces to occupy Serbia.
     To show just how far off the mark Ms. Albright is, the Clinton administration is now referring to independence for Kosovo, dashing Albright's hopes for restoring her failed Rambouillet peace mission.

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Archive Search: Thursday, April 8, 1999 U.S. GROUND TROOPS SENT IN "Belgrade's sustained and accelerating repression is creating a humanitarian disaster of staggering dimensions..." By Howard Hobbs, Editor      WASHINGTON - President William Jefferson Clinton reported to the Congress on March 26, 1999, on the participation of U.S. military forces in the series of air strikes conducted by NATO in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Since Mr. Clinton's report on March 26, Belgrade has reportedly launched what the White House is depicting as, "...sustained and accelerating repression, creating a humanitarian disaster of staggering dimensions....Estimates now are that well over one million Kosovars have been displaced from their homes and villages. At this time, more than 400,000 Kosovars are in Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro."      Today, Mr. Clinton has sent a letter to Congress explaining his efforts in continuing to intensify U.S. actions in support of international relief efforts being conducted in the region. Mr. Clinton also said he has directed U.S. military forces to deploy on the ground in Albania and Macedonia, "...to support humanitarian disaster relief operations for the Kosovar refugees...efforts will include delivering food and supplies, constructing shelters, providing coordination and assisting in logistics movement of displaced persons and relief supplies, and when necessary, providing protection for displaced persons and relief supplies." He wrote, "As a force protection measure, the U.S. military forces will be equipped for combat...I have also ordered additional U.S. forces to Albania. These forces consist of rotary wing aircraft, artillery, and tactical missile systems and will be stationed in Albania to provide a deep strike task force to enhance NATO's ability to conduct effective air operations in the FRY. Approximately 2,500 soldiers and aviators will deploy as part of this task force."      Not defining the time duration nor an exit strategy Mr. Clinton conditioned the duration of U.S. ground deployments, as depending, "...upon the course of events in Kosovo, and in particular, on Belgrade's conduct with respect to its campaign of ethnic cleansing and the duration of the threat posed to peace and security in the region."      Mr, Clinton cited presidential war powers, as the authority for his actions. He wrote, "I have taken these actions pursuant to my constitutional authority to conduct U.S. foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive. In doing so, I have taken into account the views and support expressed by the Congress in S. Con. Res. 21 and H. Con. Res. 42."      [Editor's Note: Mr. Clinton's letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Speaker Pro Tem of the Senate dated April 7, 1999 is available from the White House Press Office.] Copyright © 1999 The Daily Republican Newspaper Co. All rights reserved. Comment Archive Search: Thursday, April 8, 1999 China got U.S. nuclear secrets in 1995 Data led to improvements in China's neutron bomb New York Times      WASHINGTON - In early 1996, the United States received a startling report from one of its Chinese spies. Officials inside China's intelligence service, the spy said, were boasting that they had just stolen secrets from the United States and had used them to improve Beijing's neutron bomb, according to American officials.      China first built and tested a neutron warhead in the 1980s, using what American officials have said was secret data stolen from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Berkeley, one of America's key nuclear weapons labs.      But the design did not work properly. American officials say that China's 1988 test of the neutron bomb, which kills people with enhanced radiation while leaving buildings intact, was not successful.      Now, the spy was suggesting, Chinese agents had solved the problem by coming back to the United States in 1995 to steal more secrets. The spy even provided details of how the information was transferred to China, officials said.      The report prompted a federal criminal investigation, but U.S. officials say they have found no evidence that China has produced an improved neutron bomb.      President Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel ``Sandy'' Berger, was first told of a possible new theft of neutron-bomb data in 1996, according to officials who took part in the meeting or read the highly classified materials used to prepare for it. The briefing came weeks after the FBI gave the Energy Department a report on the spy's information.      David Leavy of the National Security Council said Berger and another NSC official who attended the 1996 briefing do not believe the neutron-bomb issue was mentioned. Leavy said that Berger did not learn of the suspicions until a more detailed briefing in July 1997.      The disclosure of the report about the neutron bomb is significant for several reasons.      Until now, Clinton administration officials have portrayed reports of China's nuclear spying as an old story, emphasizing that the loss of the W-88 warhead design occurred in the 1980s, while Republicans held the White House. They have suggested that there is no evidence Chinese nuclear spying continued into the Clinton administration.      They have also said that Clinton responded quickly to concerns about security breaches at the nuclear weapons laboratories.      Accounts by government officials about the neutron bomb case call both assertions into question.      According to the officials, the April 1996 briefing of Berger included evidence of the theft of the W-88 design, the need to increase security at the weapons laboratories and the report about the loss of neutron-bomb data.      The White House said Berger did not tell the president or take any further action until more than a year later, in July 1997. Soon after, Leavy said, Berger told the president about the security weaknesses at the laboratories and China's spying.      The Energy Department completed an analysis of the neutron bomb case in July 1996, and unearthed some intriguing connections. The study, officials said, raised the possibility that the chief suspect in the W-88 case, a computer scientist in Los Alamos, had also been involved in the transfer to China of neutron-bomb secrets.      The suspect, Wen Ho Lee, was dismissed from his job last month after the Energy Department said he violated security regulations. No criminal charges have been filed. Officials said the FBI has investigated the Energy Department's theory but has not been able to establish that Lee has any connection to the neutron-bomb case.      As they investigated further, Energy Department officials discovered that Lee had attended a classified meeting in 1992 in which solutions to the neutron bomb's design flaw were discussed, officials said.      The FBI, officials said, had also found that Lee had made at least one telephone call to the scientist at Lawrence Livermore who was suspected of having provided the Chinese with the original neutron-bomb data in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Copyright © 1999 The Daily Republican Newspaper Co. All rights reserved. Comment Archive Search: Thursday, April 8, 1999 Yugoslavia seals off Kosovo's borders People headed for Albanian border disappeared Wednesday. By Tatsudo Akayama, Foreign Correspondent       BRUSSLES - At a NATO briefing in Brussels, spokesman Jamie Shea said, "Reports that Yugoslavia had closed off exits from Kosovo were cause for alarm...912,000 ethnic Albanians have been forced to flee their homes in the past year." But the stream of people at the Albanian border had completely disappeared by Wednesday, morning. Unconfirmed reports that they may hev been forced to turn back into Kosovo are ominous.      Following on the heels of the disappearance, Yugoslav authorities sealed off major border crossings from Kosovo into Macedonia and Albania. Macedonia came under criticism for clearing out thousands of refugees camped by its border on Tuesday night. Both recent developments have left thousands of refugees unaccounted for. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department Wednesday announced the names of nine Serb military officers who risk being tried by a war crimes tribunal for their troops in Kosovo.      Making matters worse, Macedonia's actions spread panic among Kosovo Albanian refugees and extreme concern among relief agencies and others helping them. Tens of thousands of Kosovars were stranded for days in the no-man's land along the border. But over Wednesday night the fields where they had been camped out were empty. While it was later learned that Macedonia had sent thousands of people to Albania and to Turkey, the location of thousands more remained uncertain.      The United States Wednesday afternoon warned Macedonia that it must adhere to international standards in dealing with Albanian refugees from Kosovo. State Department Spokesman James Rubin cited reports that Macedonia had bussed thousands of refugees out of its territory to Albania. He said "we have sent a strong message to the government of Macedonia that we will hold it to the highest standard of humanitarian law and expect it to uphold internationally-accepted laws in the treatment of refugees and evacuation procedures."      Albania and Macedonia, both of which share borders with Yugoslavia, are struggling to provide food and shelter to the refugees from Kosovo. Their efforts are being aided by this week's NATO airlift. The air operation will bring up to 100,000 ethnic Albanians from the Balkans to alliance nations that have promised temporary asylum. The first flights Tuesday carried 3,500 refugees to Turkey and Norway. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said its top priority is ensuring that families remain together and that refugees who leave the region do so voluntarily. NATO has emphasized that it plans to repatriate the Kosovar Albanians once the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo has ended and it is safe to return to the province.      The United States announced Tuesday that it will temporarily house 20,000 people on its naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Pentagon said refugees will likely begin arriving there in the next few days. Preparations are under way to receive the ethnic Albanians.       The alliance is continuing to give humanitarian assistance to Macedonia and Albania, which have taken in hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians. The Albanian government wants the refugees to stay until the crisis is over, and has protested NATO efforts to send refugees abroad. Tirana, Albania's capital, is the site of the Kosovo Liberation Army's government-in-exile.      NATO officials have reported that Serb forces ousted ethnic Albanian families from their homes at gunpoint, sometimes robbing and beating them before herding them away from Serb territory. The reports suggest that Serb authorities may be intent on expelling the province's entire ethnic Albanian population. There have also been repeated claims of mass killings of civilians at the hands of Yugoslav forces.      In a Wednesday statement, Clinton administration's spokesman Rubin named nine Serb commanders in connection with atrocities in Kosovo, and said the nine could face prosecution before the war crimes tribunal at The Hague. Copyright © 1999 The Daily Republican Newspaper Co. All rights reserved. Comment Archive Search: Thursday, April 8, 1999 What Exactly Is America Prepared For? Sometimes picking up NATO's pieces is not so easy. By Kaye Grogan, Contributor.      WASHINGTON - Thanks to President Clinton's military cutbacks, the armed services are in disarray. Air Force officials are saying that they are about 10,000 soldiers short and that's just the tip of the iceberg! The moment Bill Clinton took office his main objective has seemed to be: Cut the defense "funding" and close "military" bases. A Mistake? It certainly was! Former "military loather" Bill Clinton has used the military many times. Whether the actions were truly needed or used politically as a pawn...the jury is still out on that one. Credibility is crucial and no matter how one attempts to reject this idea...when all is said and done...there still stands the reprecussions from bad leadership.      Sometimes picking up the pieces is not easy. And the pieces of many lives in Kosovo will be torn to shreds...and the aftermath of a senseless...not completely thought out bombing will prove to have a "costly" price tag.       Hundreds of thousands are stranded in a modern day "wilderness" and Moses is no where in sight! Sicknesses, fear of the unknown, is etched deeply within the nameless faces of those driven from their homes. Panic has set in and the situation has become a dog-eat-dog situation. Diseases are now prevalent and the elderly seem to have given up from the weaknesses gripping their frail bodies. Women in labor feel deep pain, but more importantly they must feel deep despair, knowing their babies will be born into a situation where death will be almost certain.      Can one secure, warm, and well fed, imagine what it would be like to be one of those displaced, homeless people? Many Americans have enjoyed the lap-of-luxury. America is now called the "super power" but what good is power when it becomes misplaced or abused? What would happen if a knock came on the doors of the American people and they were told to flee or be killed? Something to meditate on. Before one makes a decision to drop bombs on another country, small or large, the U.S. better have a tested exit strategy in reserve. Otherwise, Mr. Clinton can kiss his end-game "goodbye"! Copyright © 1992-1999 The Daily Republican Newspaper Co. All rights reserved. Comment Archive Search: Monday, April 5, 1999 Thinking the unthinkable? NATO's use of a ground force in Kosovo may be inevitable. By Mitch Mitchell, CBS News Military Affairs Consultant.      NEW YORK - With the arrival of the aircraft carrier, Theodore Roosevelt, and the introduction of US Army Apache helicopters into the NATO arsenal, the United States has continued to increase its participation in the conflict to the point that it has more forces involved than the other 18 NATO countries combined. If significant force increases are required, other NATO countries must contribute more, or run the risk of making the conflict a US only show. Granted, we are the leader among equals in the NATO structure, but the real strength of that coalition comes from political consensus and active involvement of all member nations. Without such involvement, support for a protracted campaign could wane, and the United States and a small handful of NATO allies would be left "holding the bag," mired in an unpopular struggle that could well be open ended.      There is an option that could stop the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo before the remaining million Kosovar Albanians are driven out. It involves the immediate introduction of ground forces in the province. The lowest estimates of force requirements to protect Kosovo call for 200,000 ground troops. Organizing, transporting, and employing such a force would take months. If the force requirements then grew to 500,000, which I think is more reasonable, given the size of the province and the number of populated areas to protect, it would take six months to get them in place. That was the case in the Gulf War against Iraq (Desert Shield), and it would certainly be the same for Operation Allied Force in Kosovo.      With some risk, however, NATO could begin the introduction of such a force almost immediately by deploying its rapid reaction corps and the rapid reaction forces of the member nations. At the same time, the heavier follow-on forces could be made ready and transported to the region as rapidly as transportation assets allowed. Apache helicopters are a start, but soldiers on the ground are the only sure way to stop the genocide.      With the support of Allied air power, the rapid reaction forces could turn back the Serbian military and paramilitary forces and stop the destruction of property and the uprooting and killing of the population. All of this would not be without casualties. War is war, and some NATO troops would be killed and wounded in the process of bringing stability to Kosovo. In the Gulf War, we used rapid reaction forces to contain Saddam Hussein's forces in Kuwait until we could build up coalition forces for Desert Storm. The same could be done in Kosovo if the political will were there to make it happen.      If ground forces go into Kosovo, there will have to be clear objectives that can be accomplished with the means at hand. Therein lies the problem. If Milosevic remains in power and engages NATO in a waiting game, our troops could become a permanent police force, something no one wants. A change of strategy, therefore, would have to include a change of regimes in Belgrade as well. Milosevic would have to go, and whoever or whatever replaced him would have to accept an autonomous Kosovo as a condition for cessation of hostilities and peace in the region. How could this be achieved?      The strategic bombing campaign, currently doing little to stop the tragedy in Kosovo, is beginning to have effect elsewhere in Serbia. As military infrastructure targets such as bridges and industrial plants are being struck with great effect, the civilian populace will be affected as well. Defiance and hatred against the attackers will give way to desperation and dissatisfaction with Milosevic and his regime. As essential human services such as power, water, sewer and phone utilities are cut off, they will look for someone who can reverse the situation.       All this may take more time than NATO is willing to spend. If that is the case, the only other alternative short of Milosevic giving in to the pressure of the air strikes, will be a NATO ground offensive to defeat Serbia in detail and dictate peace. Such a campaign would require ground forces of more than a million people and would be very difficult to execute in the forbidding and restrictive terrain of the area. More than 50 years ago, Hitler discovered how difficult any war in the Balkans can be, and we will have no easier time if we decide to do what at the moment all NATO ministers think is unthinkable.

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Sunday, April 4, 1999

Macedonia's Tightrope
Violence in streets, bombings from the skies sets off refugee backlash.
By Iso Rusi, Foreign Correspondent

      SKOPJE - After three days of rioting by local Serbs on the streets of Skopje, the Macedonian parliament met in emergency session over the weekend amid rumours that a contingent of Zeljko ("Arkan") Razmatovic's Tigers, the notorious Serb para-militaries, were coming to destabilise the country.
     Though the riots may have given the impression that Macedonia sympathised with the Serbian position in Kosovo and was hostile to the on-going air offensive, the Macedonian government has been quick to reassure the West that NATO troops are welcome in the country. Fearful that the conflict in Kosovo may spill over into Macedonia, Skopje continues to walk a political tight-rope carefully juggling seemingly irreconcilable interests.
     In an address to the nation, Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski warned that the two greatest dangers for Macedonia at the moment are the possible arrival of thousands of refugees and the creation of anti-NATO atmosphere in the country.
     Although the Democratic Party of Serbs, the political party of Macedonia's ethnic Serbs, claimed that the riots were spontaneous, the organised manner in which demonstrators arrived from Kumanovo, Tetovo and Gostivar suggest that they were staged. As a result, Skopje has criticised Yugoslavia's meddling in its affairs saying that it "was unacceptable that a foreign country was encouraging demonstrations and violence in another".
     While support for Serbia among ethnic Macedonians may have been exaggerated, the demonstrations in Skopje and Kumanovo have not been isolated incidents. Truck drivers from the town of Negotino, angry that they were unable to work because of the bombing, handed in a petition of protest to NATO. And over the weekend professional footballers held up placards at the beginning of matches with the words "Stop the bombing so that we can play in peace".
     In an emergency session, the Macedonian parliament concluded that the crisis represents a serious danger for Macedonia as well as the entire region and reaffirmed that Macedonian territory would not be used as a staging post to attack any of its neighbours. The parliament also welcomed a written guarantee from NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana in which he promised to protect Macedonia in the event that fighting should spill over from Kosovo. That said, the Commander of the NATO forces in Macedonia, British Gen. Mike Jackson, has been more equivocal, saying that the defence of Macedonia is a matter for Macedonia's Ministry of Defence, and not the NATO troops stationed on its territory. The Macedonian media have, nevertheless, chosen to portray NATO troops as the second line of defence on Macedonia's northern border.
     To date some 22,000 Kosovo Albanians have sought refuge in Macedonia, most of whom have been taken in by their ethnic kin. This is already 2,000 more than the Macedonian government said it was prepared to admit before the influx began. By comparison, Macedonia took in some 50,000 refugees during the Bosnian war, most of whom were accommodated in public buildings.
     Macedonia temporarily closed three border crossings with Yugoslavia on Wednesday 24 March, the day on which the NATO offensive began, turning back several hundred Kosovo refugees. The border crossings were reopened at about 5 P.M., around the time NATO launched its first attacks against Serbia. This followed concerted pressure by foreign diplomats as well as the Democratic Party of Albanians, the ethnic Albanian political party which forms part of the coalition government.
     In the panic at the beginning of NATO's offensive, many Macedonians rushed to stock up on essentials, thus creating queues at petrol stations and emptying the shops of basic necessities. Private bureaux de change stopped selling foreign currency. However, the panic only lasted a few days and things are now more or less back to normal.
     With war being waged just 10 miles away from Skopje, the situation is tense. Many Macedonians have relatives and friends over the border whom they cannot contact because the telephone lines have been cut. They hear reports of villages being burned down, of massacres, arrests and the executions of prominent Albanians. But they lack reliable information about what is really taking place.
     [Editor's Note: Iso Rusi is a journalist with Fokus News in Skopje.]

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Friday, April 2, 1999

Clinton rhetoric "No ground troops in Kosovo!"
Distracts public about thousands of U.S. ground troops he presently has in region.
By William Heartstone, Staff Writer

      WASHINGTON - Have the American people forgotten that the three members of the 1st Infantry Division were attached to the U.S. peacekeeping force in Macedonia? Apparently, Mr. Clinton thinks so.
     The three were seized by Serbian forces late Wednesday while on patrol in Macedonia. They were a contingent of two U.S. forces in the Balkans including 7000 in Bosnia and Macedonia.
     The U.S. military mission to Macedonia was the first American intervention into the region in 1993. This was Mr. Clinton's token gesture to the United Nations peacekeeping operation dubbed Unpredep, intended to head off hostilities in Macedonia. The Clinton administration's decision to send ground troops was really intended, the State Depatment has admitted, to send a threatening message to Mr. Milosevic, "Keep your hands off Macedonia."
     Although, the U.N. arrangement officially ended in February, Mr. Clinton has kept the ground troops in Bosnia and Macedonia waiting for orders to move on Kosovo. In the meantime, an additional detachment of U.S. Marines was inserted on the ground there in the past seven days to beef up the U.S. embassy in Skopje which came under attack by Serbians protesting U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia.
     The U.S. 1st Armored Division entered Northern Bosnia as ground troops in December 1995 with heavy tanks and attack helicopters, expecting to engage in ground combat. In fact, the Clinton administration's Joint Chiefs of Staff predicted that U.S. ground forces would sustain hundreds of combat deaths, from sniper fire and mortar attacks. However, Mr.Clinton misleads the Congress by stating that American troops "...will only be used for peacekeeping, and would be there for one year."
     Now, more than three years later, Mr. Clinton still repeats in nationally televised broadcats that he has "...no intention of deploying ground troops in the region." In mute silence, the American people act as though Mr. Clinton still has some shred of credibility and ignore that he is maintaining a sizable presence of U.S. Army and Marine combat troops in Bosnia and Macedonia.
     America is beginning to wake up to the news of Yogoslavia has U.S. ground troops on trial in Pristina as prisoners of war. If that doesn't get our attention, maybe the report out this week as toPentagon costs for deploying 7000 ground troops in the Yugoslavia region is costing U.S. taxpayers more than $10 billion, in addition to the mounting $billions being spent on the air war unleashed in Mr. Clinton's attempt to de-stabilize Mr. Milosevic's regime in the past seven days.

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Thursday, April 1, 1999

War Crimes
Serbian military may execute Americans.
By Andrew Ping, Staff Writer

      BERKELEY - Risking American lives over an ethnic situation we can't solve was bad enough. Now, our President has involved our military forces in a reckless NATO attack on a sovereign nation that appears to be a nightmarish reprise of the Vietnam War debacle of the Johnson administration. And now, three of our men are prisoners of war in Kosovo. Worse yet, Americans were put on the ground in hostile territory, by our draft dodging president who is, himself, a complete stranger to the mortal danger these young men face. Mr. Clinton told the American public on a Wednesday evening ABC television interview that there would not be any U.S. ground troops deployed anywhere near Kosovo.
     What can be done? Three American soldiers, in the hands of Slobodan Milosevic's mercenaries now face a military courts martial trial in Kosovo tomorrow morning. This story is just breaking as this column hits the streets. The trial itself is illegal, and will no doubt be a show trial that will convict the men for "crimes" committed by NATO against Serbs, and probably end in their execution, though we may pray that that won't occur. Milosevic will use our men to boost the moral of his hopelessly outgunned army.
     Given that the heads of state make international law, and Milosevic is willing to break it by trying our men, I believe he forfeits the protection normally afforded the heads of state. We should take a simple step, and assassinate him. There's no doubt that we have the special forces teams with the ability and equipment. We've faced nastier operations and come out as winners. The only thing that stops us is international law which Milocevic happily breaks at his convenience.
     Does the United States lose moral ground if we assassinate Milocevic? Certainly not. What is more moral, slaughtering thousands of Serbs who don't care about where Albanians live, or taking out the man who ordered the atrocities committed? When the heads of state unlawfully ignore the will of the majority of their people, and commit humanitarian atrocities as well as flout international law, they are no longer heads of state. Milosevic doesn't have the support of his people, and he doesn't represent them.
     It's time for a new tactic. Instead of sending hundreds of our loyal military personnel into danger, and risking more of our patrols being abducted, let's send a small team with the right stuff in and take out the source of the problem. For their imprisoned comrades in arms they'd most likely be happy to do it.
     [Editor's Note. Andrew Ping writes View from the Terrace a weekly column published in The Bulldog Newspaper and The Fresno Republican Newspaper. He is a Senior at the University of California, Berkeley.]

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Tuesday, March 30, 1999

- In Focus -

RAMBOUILLET ACCORDS
U.S. State Department Summary

Read the complete Kosovo Peace Agreement

      WASHINGTON - The Rambouillet Accords that the United States and European allies are seeking to negotiate between the Yugoslav Serbian government and Kosovo's ethnic Albanians will provide self-government, peace, and security in the embattled province, the State Department says.
      Following is the text of a summary of the accords, issued by the department March 1.
     The Rambouillet Accords are a three year interim agreement that will provide democratic self-government, peace, and security for everyone living in Kosovo.
     1. Democratic self government will include all matters of daily importance to people in Kosovo, including education, health care, and
economic development. Kosovo will have a president, an assembly, its own courts, strong local government, and national community institutions with the authority needed to protect each community's identity.
     2. Security will be guaranteed by international troops deployed on the
ground throughout Kosovo. Local police representative of all national communities in Kosovo will provide routine law enforcement. Federal and Republic security forces will leave Kosovo, except for a limited border protection presence.
     3. An international meeting will be convened after three years to
determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo. The will of the people will be an important factor at the international meeting.
     Democratic Self-Government.During the interim period, citizens in Kosovo will govern themselves
democratically through Kosovo institutions.
     4. Kosovo will have a constitution. The constitution calls for the democratic selection of a president, a prime minister and government,
an assembly, and strong communal authorities. Kosovo will have its own supreme court, constitutional court, other courts, and prosecutors.
     5. Free and fair elections will be held within nine months of entry
Security and Cooperation in Europe.)
     6. Kosovo will have the authority to make laws not subject to revision by Serbia or the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, including levying taxes, instituting programs of economic, scientific, technological, regional, and social development, conducting foreign relations within its areas of responsibility in the same manner as a republic, and all matters of local government.
     7. Kosovo and its national communities will perform most functions presently handled by the Republic of Serbia. Citizens in Kosovo will
be able to call upon republic institutions for assistance if they wish. The federal republic will not be permitted to act in ways
injurious to Kosovo.
     8. National communities in Kosovo will be able to control their own
identities, including preserving their languages and operating schools and hospitals. All other authorities are forbidden from interfering.
     9. Human rights and the rights of the members of all national
communities will be guaranteed.
     10. The international community will play a role in ensuring that these provisions are carried out, through a civilian implementation mission, an ombudsman and constitutional court judges selected under international auspices, OSCE supervision of elections, and an international military presence.
     Peace and Security. The parties invite NATO to deploy a military force (KFOR), which will be authorized to use necessary force to ensure compliance with the accords, protect international agencies involved with implementation, and provide a secure environment for everyone in Kosovo. All other security forces will withdraw or be phased out under the supervision of KFOR, according to a balanced schedule of reciprocal steps by all sides specified in the accords.
      11. The Kosovo Liberation Army will hand over security in Kosovo to NATO troops, and will be demilitarized.
     12. Yugoslav army forces will withdraw completely from Kosovo, except for a limited border guard force (active only within a 5 kilometer border zone) and associated personnel.
     13. Serb security forces will withdraw completely except for a limited number of border police and, for a transitional period, a limited international implementation mission until local police are trained to replace them.
     14. Local police will take over all policing duties in Kosovo within one year, extendable for a limited period only by the chief of the mplementation mission.
      A Mechanism for Determining a Final Settlement. Three years after entry into force of the accords, an international meeting will be convened to determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo, on the basis of the will of the people, opinions of relevant authorities, each party's efforts regarding the implementation of the accords, and the Helsinki Final Act.

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Tuesday, March 30, 1999

- In Focus -

Clinton's polls in nose-dive
By Kaye Grogan, Contributor

      WASHINGTON - Slobodan Milosevic has accomplished the impossible in two weeks. He has sent the President's "poll ratings" on a serious decline. Something no one else has been afforded the luxury of doing thus far. The President of Yugoslavia is refusing to lie down and cry "wolf" as this administration had hoped he would. In fact reports are indicating that the tyrant type leader is becoming stronger than ever... since the onslaught of bombs hitting his small country have occured.
     The Clinton administration is accusing the Serbs of engaging in genocide against ethnic Albanians, and is warning Milosevic that he can be tried as a war criminal. Most of the news media have been barred from the scenes, so it's difficult to know what is really going on in the war torn vicinity. Although 19 nations are behind the NATO intervention, it is unclear where and how all of this will play-out.
     ke Saddam Hussein, Milosevic seems to be in for the long haul, and this spells out trouble. This dog's tail may just wag off! The President may have bitten off more than he can chew. His poll ratings may hit zero if ground troops are sent in and soldiers start to come home in body bags! Pentagon spokeman Kenneth Bacon estimated that at the very least 200,000 ground soldiers would be needed to take over Kosovo. As of today, the administration says it is not comtemplating sending ground troops into the conflict.
      While the Viet Nam war was going on and American soldiers were being blown to "Kingdom Come", Bill Clinton was in Russia demonstrating, burning and stomping the American Flag on foreign soil. It's one thing to wage a protest against war, but to do it against one's own country on foreign soil... speaks volumes. Although one is cautioned to look to the future ahead...can the past be far behind?
     it seems this president has been bomb and trigger happy ever since he has been in office. He tells the American people how important it is to get and keep rulers like Milosevic in tow, but yet countries like China who practice inhumane atrocities against their people daily are ignored and let off of the hook and have gained the rank of "Most favored Nation." This acceptance of China speaks in volumes, too.
     While bombs were falling in Yugoslavia the president took out time to play a round of golf! He has gotten some flack from this seemingly unconcerned approach, and it is much deserved. News of prominent Kosovar Albanian leaders being executed by the Serbs, leaves a foul taste in the mouth along with a sobering affect.
     Reports of women and children being held in refugee concentration camps to be used as hostages and human shields, sounds a lot like a replay of the atrocities during the Viet Nam period, when the vietnamese sent their own small children carrying hand grenades to the Americans...to be blown up along with the enemy. This is not war, this is beyond all humanity... beyond all comprehension.
      America has a bad record of trying to baby-sit the world. It doesn't take a village to raise the world! This country has been fighting amongst themselves for at least 600 years. Slobodan Milosevic is responsible for the events that led to the war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia, and now Kosovo. This man sounds like a modern day Hitler.
     With so much unrest in the world, will America ever be at peace again? Who will emerge next? The Chinese? Now that they have our weapons' formulas and the technology to cause massive power outages, can we ever have an effective national security in place again?
     Most would agree...absolutely not!

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Monday, March 29, 1999

Many Cities Crowds Call for Bombing Halt
Attack sets off angry protests, flag burning and U.S. embassies raids.
By Agence France-Presse

     PARIS - Thousands of protesters took to the streets Sunday in several cities in Europe, Australia and the United States to demand an end to NATO bombings in Yugoslavia.
      One of the biggest demonstrations was in Vienna, where some 9,000 Serbs rallied on St. Stephen's Square, according to the local police. In Paris, clashes broke out as the police fired tear gas at some 300 pro-Serbian demonstrators who threw bottles and rocks at the United States Embassy.
      In Australia, the police said some 6,000 Serbs rallied in Melbourne, 7,000 in Sydney and 400 in Canberra, burning American flags and pelting the police with eggs. Some 300,000 people from the former Yugoslavia, most of them Serbs, live in Australia.
      In Los Angeles, around 1,000 people, mostly Serbian-Americans, held a peaceful protest outside a Federal building.
      In Sweden, around 1,000 people -- mostly Serb immigrants, but also Russians, Greeks and Syrians -- protested in Stockholm and Malmo. There were also anti-American and anti-NATO demonstrations in Milan and Rotterdam.
     In Moscow, the United States Embassy was hit by gunfire during a shootout between masked gunman and the police that took place as several hundred protesters were picketing, but no injuries were reported. Protests also occurred in other east European capitals.
      In Hungary, which joined NATO two weeks ago, but declined to actively take part in the strikes and only put at NATO's disposal its airspace and airfields, some 250 protesters gathered in Budapest, waving banners and shouting slogans against the air strikes.
     On Saturday, some 200 demonstrated in front of the American Embassy there, calling President Clinton a "war criminal" and a "murderer," in a demonstration organized by the communist Labor Party.
      In Romania, hundreds of demonstrators, many of them Orthodox priests, marched through central Bucharest today pledging solidarity with Serbs.
      Marchers carried candles and signs, including "The Romanian and Serbian peoples are brothers," down the city's widest boulevard.
      In Madrid, Serbian soccer players with Spanish clubs protested the NATO raids outside the American embassy. Some of the protesters said they were opposed to the policies of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav President, but that the NATO air strikes were "just going to make him stronger."
      In Greece, some 1,000 people protested outside an air base at Aktion, where American Awacs radar planes are normally stationed, the police said.
      They chanted slogans against the United States and NATO, burned a European Union flag, and daubed the walls of the base with anti-American slogans.
      In Podgorica, capital of Montenegro, about 1,000 people gathered outside the United States Information Center calling on the United States to "get out of here."
      The protesters, mostly supporters of the Serbian Radical Party of ultra-nationalist Deputy Premier Vojislav Seselj, burned a photo of President Clinton and NATO Secretary General Javier Solana.
      In Banja Luka, capital of the Bosnian Serb republic, a procession of motorists, mostly students, filed past the British base of NATO peacekeeping forces in Bosnia waving flags and shouting slogans.
     Meanwhile, on the Fifth day into the bombing, Americans remained closely divided on the wisdom of the military action against Yugoslavia, new polls have found. Narrow majorities backed the effort but opinion was unsettled, with the prospect of American casualties a worry.
     President Clinton's handling of the crisis has not won him the support from Americamns he had hoped for. In a variety of polls, he appears to be losing groubd at home. Support for U.S. involvement in the air campaign, according to a Time-CNN poll was only about 44% after three days of agressive air attacks against Yugoslavia.

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Sunday, March 27, 1999

Clinton misleads
public in Kosovo speech
By Milosh Milenkovich, Contributor

     WASHINGTON - President Bill Clinton's address to the nation about the Kosovo crisis on Friday was filled with inaccuracies and falsehoods.
     Sadly, the President's address contained so many serious errors of fact that any truth he may have intended, was lost. Truth must not be the first casualty of this war. As a direct consequence, our nation faces disaster.
     Take Kosovo autonomy, for example. The decision to change Kosovo's autonomous status in 1989 was not taken by Slobodan Milosevic alone. It was a consensual act signed by all the constituent republics of then Yugoslavia, including Kosovo. Its purpose was to amend the 1974 Yugoslav constitution and to avoid paralysis of federal business caused by the veto of a single province.
      The use of Albanian Language is another example. Kosovo's Albanian population has never been denied use of their own language or access to Albanian language schools. The Albanian-language university in Pristina and the many Albanian language newspapers published in Kosovo attest to this fact.
      Take the dissolution of Yugoslavia, for another. Serbia did not start the wars with Croatia and Bosnia. These were precipitated by the actions these republics and by Slovenia in declaring illegal and unilateral independence in violation of the then federal Yugoslav constitution. Premature recognition of these illegal acts by the European Union and the wider international including the United States, negated the negotiation process and made war inevitable.
     Then, there is that "Moral Imperative". The claim to a "moral imperative" is false. The U.S. took no action in 1995 when over 250,000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed from Croatia. In the present situation no such moral authority has been conferred upon the NATO action. Pope John Paul has described this as a "defeat for humanity." NATO is acting without UN authority and in direct violation of international law as framed in the UN Charter, the NATO Treaty, and the Helsinki Accords.
      Mr. Clinton's reference to a "peace agreement" at Rambouillet is disingenuous. It is a cardinal principle of international law embodied in the Vienna Convention on Treaties adopted on May 26, 1963 and which entered into force on January 27, 1980 that agreements negotiated under threat of force are null and void. Section 2, Articles 51 and 52 make clear that coercion in impermissible as a negotiating instrument. Coercion was, however, the central theme of the Rambouillet talks. There was no "peace agreement" only a choice between signature and bombing.
      Saving lives is only pretext. The claim that the U.S. is acting "because we care about saving innocent lives" has already been shown to be false. NATO actions have caused civilian casualties
     The "wider war" claim that the U.S. is acting to prevent is misleading. Already instability in Macedonia and new concerns about renewed disturbances in Albania show that the NATO action will likely increase the risks to regional stability. The encouragement of separatism and irredentism, for example in the form of a greater Albania, will have dangerous Europe-die consequences.
      Much of the history and geography cited by Mr. Clinton in the address was faulty. Turkey lies East not South of Kosovo; World War 1 started not because Europe was slow to realize the dangers of war but for the opposite reason, namely that Europe mobilized prematurely.
      The Serbian Unity Congress has been in the forefront of efforts to build a negotiated and durable peace in Kosovo and to bring about democratic reform in Serbia. These efforts will be severely compromised by the illegal bombing campaign. We call upon the President to call an immediate halt to this immoral, illegal and counterproductive action.
     The US is violating a number of international laws in attacking Serbia over Kosovo, which is part of a sovereign independent state.(1) It is a violation of Article 2 of the UN Charter that prohibits the use of force against a sovereign state where it has not committed aggression on other states. Serbia did not attack any neighboring states outside its sovereign borders. The Security Council did not sanction the use of force here. If the issue had been submitted to the Security Council, it would certainly have been vetoed by Russia and China. NATO knows it and therefore bypassed it.(2) It is a violation of NATO's own charter which claims it is a defensive organizations and is only committed to force if one of its members is attacked. No member of NATO was attacked.(3) The so-called Rambouillet "Agreement" (there was no "agreement" by Serbia) is a violation of the 1980 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties which forbids coercion and force to compel any state to sign a treaty or agreement. Serbia is being asked to sign this "Agreement" through NATO bombs and missiles.(4) It is a violation of the Helsinki Accords Final Act of 1975 which guarantees the territorial frontiers of the states of Europe. What this so-called peace plan offers is (a) the severance of Kosovo through NATO bombing with immediate effect; or (b) the severance of Kosovo through NATO occupation three years later.(5) If the sequel to the bombing is recogntion of Kosovo as an independent state, this will violate international law that prohibits recognition of provinces that unilaterally declare independence against the wishes of the federal authorities.
     These unlawful actions will set precedents that will undermine stability elsewhere in the world.
     [Editor's Note: Milosh Milenkovich, is the President of the Serbian Unity Congress.]

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Thursday, March 25, 1999

Our Objective
By William Jefferson Clinton

     OVAL OFFICE - I'm about to receive a briefing from the national security team. I'm very grateful that our crews returned home safely after their work last night. And I'm very grateful that the United States Congress has expressed its support for them.
     I want to say again that our purpose here is to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe or a wider war. Our objective is to make it clear that Serbia must either choose peace or we will limit its ability to make war. And we're going to get a briefing and lay further plans today.
     He [Mr. Milosevic] has to choose peace or we have to try to limit his ability to make war. That's what we're trying to do. And I think that's been very clear. If you look at what happened at the Rambouillet talks, the arrangement was basically supported by all of Europe, the United States, the Kosovars. The Russians agreed that it was a fair agreement -- they did not agree to the military involvement of NATO, but they agreed that it was a fair agreement. Only Mr. Milosevic and the Serbs declined to deal with the evident responsibility they have to choose the path of peace instead of the path of aggression and war.
     So I think that it is clear -- I don't know how to make it any clearer -- that we either have to have a choice for peace by Serbia, not just stopping the killing for an hour or two, but a choice for peace, or we will do our best to limit their ability to make war on those people.
     The exit strategy is what it always is in a military operation -- it's when the mission is completed.
     I believe we can create a situation in which we have limited their ability to make war and thereby increase the prospects that they can protect themselves better. I do believe that.
     Well, you know, they [Russians] have quite a lot of arms on their own. They made a lot of arms in the Former Yugoslavia. I told the American people they had a very impressive air defense system and they had lots of other arms and weapons. I have no intention of supporting any lifting of the arms embargo on Serbia. I think that would be a terrible mistake. We would be far better off if they didn't have as many arms as they do; then they would be out there making peace and accommodating these ethnic differences and figuring out ways they can live together.
     I believe that many Americans really had not thought a lot about this until the last two days. I hope that a lot of them heard my presentation last night. I did my very best to explain what we were doing and why, and I believe that a majority of them will support what we're trying to do here. I also believe very strongly that it is my responsibility to make this judgment based on what I think is in the long-term interests of the American people.
      I think he knows what needs to be done.
     [Editor's Note: This text was adapted from the televised Press Conference in the Oval Office held at 12:10 PM EST on 3/25/99.]

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