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Reno warned: By Lee Hancock / The Dallas Morning News
Waco evidence possibly withheld
File on FBI use of pyrotechnics hidden!
DALLAS, Texas - A Waco federal prosecutor wrote Attorney General Janet Reno on Monday to warn that "individuals or components within the Department of Justice" may have long withheld evidence from her and the public about the FBI's use of pyrotechnic grenades on the day the Branch Davidian compound burned.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Johnston said he felt compelled to warn Ms. Reno after he was given a 5-year-old document that discusses the use of "military gas" by the FBI on April 19, 1993. He said he was concerned because the document, a three-page set of notes detailing an interview with members of the FBI's hostage rescue team, included handwritten notations suggesting that it be kept from anyone outside the department's legal staff.
"There are handwritten notes on the documents discussing whether or not they should be disclosed, and, obviously, they have not been," said Mr. Johnston, the federal prosecutor involved longest in the Branch Davidian investigation.
"There was discussion about whether they should be turned over," he said. "Obviously, the decision was made somewhere in Washington that they were not to be."
Asked about the matter late Monday, Justice Department spokesman Myron Marlin said: "I wouldn't comment except to say that the attorney general received assurances that pyrotechnic tear-gas devices would not be used and were not used. And she has pledged to get to the bottom of this."
Mr. Johnston said he was presented with a copy of the document last week after officials divulged that the FBI had, in fact, used pyrotechnic tear gas on April 19.
A former senior FBI official told The Dallas Morning News that he had learned that two M651 CS tear-gas grenades had been fired at an area adjacent to the compound by members of the FBI's hostage rescue team. The official has maintained that use of the grenades had nothing to do with the fire that consumed the compound.
The issue has sparked a House committee investigation and also prompted angry congressional demands for an independent investigation of the FBI because Ms. Reno and other senior FBI and Justice Department officials have long maintained that nothing capable of sparking a fire was used by the government on April 19.
The compound burned that day with Branch Davidian leader David Koresh and more than 80 followers inside. The fire erupted about six hours after the FBI began using tanks and tear gas to try to force an end to a 51-day standoff.
On Monday, the House Government Reform Committee issued subpoenas records concerning the use of pyrotechnic tear gas by the FBI.
The subpoenas ordered the prosecutor and the Rangers to appear on Sept. 7 in Washington.
Mr. Johnston has been assisting the Rangers since late June in an ongoing inquiry to identify questioned evidence that has been in the possession of the Texas Department of Public Safety since the Branch Davidian standoff.
The use of pyrotechnic devices on April 19 is a key issue in a pending wrongful-death lawsuit filed by surviving Branch Davidians and families of those who died.
The lawsuit contends that the government's negligence or deliberate actions caused the 1993 tragedy.
"One of the key issues in this case is who started the fire," said Joe Phillips of Houston, one of the lead lawyers for the Branch Davidians.
"Here the government is sitting on a piece of evidence that would guarantee that we could get the issue heard by a jury.
"If the lawyers in this case knew about that information and, in the face of our evidence showing pyrotechnics were used, just sat on this and on the court," Mr. Phillips said. "That's something that we were entitled to and should have been given access to long ago."
Tim Evans, a Fort Worth attorney who defended one of the Branch Davidians in the 1994 criminal trial arising from the Waco standoff, expressed outrage Monday that the document seen by Mr. Johnston was never disclosed by federal prosecutors.
"The credibility of the federal agents was extremely important to the government's case in many issues, not just this. This succession of lies would have destroyed their credibility," Mr. Evans said. "Their lies have infected this case like maggots. Yet incredibly they still want us to pick out the maggots and swallow the rest of their story. I think America is about to choke."
Mr. Johnston said he has been ordered not to discuss the specific wording of the document or the handwritten notes. The notes apparently were added after the document was prepared.
The document was written by a paralegal working for the U.S. attorney's office in preparation for the 1994 federal prosecution of surviving Branch Davidians.
The paralegal was interviewing members of the FBI's hostage rescue team, which was involved in the final assault on the Branch Davidian compound.
Mr. Johnston said the document indicates that he may have been present during the interviews. He said he did not recall the interviews and said the
"If that document says I was there, then I was there. While I don't recall it, I can say the term 'military gas round' meant little or nothing to me, because I am unfamiliar with military ordnance," he said.
"I'll bet that the attorney general would like to have known about these documents long before now, and my letter is an attempt to bring these and other facts to her attention."
Federal officials in Washington who spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed Monday that the 1993 notes surfaced last week along with a 1996 FBI legal memo.
The officials said the memo was written by the FBI's general counsel's office after civil Justice Department lawyers notified them about the 1993 notes and also asked about allegations being raised.
FBI officials questioned members of the hostage rescue team and then prepared a memo stating that two military gas grenades had been launched about 6 a.m on April 19, six hours before the compound burned, one federal official said.
The officials said that no one involved in preparing the memo realized that the term "military gas" appeared to be shorthand for pyrotechnic tear-gas grenades. Ordnance experts say all CS tear-gas grenades used by the U.S. military are pyrotechnic devices.
The federal officials said that the notes referring to the use of military gas were among thousands of Justice Department documents subpoenaed for1995 House hearings on the Branch Davidian standoff. One federal official noted that the military jargon used in the note was probably unfamiliar to and overlooked by congressional investigators.
Another federal official familiar with the document said it may have been marked with nondisclosure warnings because of an agreement made with Congress prior to the 1995 hearing.
"Its release would violate the privacy act, because it included the names of specific individuals," the federal officials said.
A spokesman for the House Government Reform Committee said Monday that the panel, which held the 1995 hearing, knew nothing about the documents in question.
"We intend to get them, and we will get to the bottom of this," said committee spokesman Mark Corallo.
Mr. Johnston acknowledged that his letter to Ms. Reno may open him to criticism but said he felt he needed to ensurethat the attorney general was personally aware of the documents.
"There's been significance given to these documents in the last few years because of the civil suit.Whether or not thesedocuments have been or should have been given to plaintiffs and criminal defense attorneys is an issue that the department is going to have to answer," he said.
"I am very concerned," Mr. Johnston said. "I would rather not discuss the details of my letter to the AG, but I can certainly tell you that I'm very concerned that information which should've been made known to her and to the public has not been."
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Kremlin Tied to $15 Bln Mob Fraud By Brian Whitmore, Staff Writer
The $10 billion scandal just keeps growing and growing!
MOSCOW - In what is quickly turning into a public-relations nightmare for President Boris Yeltsin, a U.S. newspaper added another report of alleged involvement by Russian government figures in laundering of billions of dollars through U.S. banks - this time naming names of current and former officials.
USA Today reported Thursday that Russian organized crime figures laundered at least $15 billion though four accounts at the Bank of New York and one at New York-based Republic National Bank. Law enforcement officials are probing five current or former officials to determine their roles in laundering the money, the report said. Russian Prosecutor General's Office, the paper named the five as: Yeltsin's daughter Tatyana Dyachenko, former deputy prime ministers Anatoly Chubais and Oleg Soskovets, former finance minister Alexander Livshits and Interros President Vladimir Potanin.
USA Today did not say what role any of the five played in laundering the money. It said that law enforcement officials said the money might have included money loaned to Russia by the International Monetary Fund.
Attempts to independently verify the USA Today report met with denials from U.S. and British law enforcement officials. In a telephone interview from London, Mark Steels, a spokesman for the National Criminal Intelligence Service, denied that anybody from that organization had provided any information on the matter to either USA Today or any other news organization.
"Nobody from NCIS ever said any such things to any individual or any news organization," Steels said. "Moreover, nobody at this organization has spoken to anybody at USA Today. We have written a formal complaint to USA Today and are asking for a correction."
Steels declined to comment on the details of the USA Today report, other than to say that the NCIS was "exceptionally unhappy about it."
Joseph Valiquette, a spokesman for the FBI's New York field office, wouldn't comment on the USA Today report, saying: "The FBI has not even acknowledged that an investigation exists."
Russia's acting Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov on Thursday called for the Federal Security Service to "check the facts cited in the Russian and foreign press reports on the scandal around the Bank of New York."
The USA Today report came hot on the heels of a story in the Italian newspaper Corriera della Sera on Wednesday claiming that the Swiss company Mabetex - which won lucrative contracts from the Kremlin to renovate government buildings - had provided Yeltsin and his two daughters with $1 million in so-called "pocket money." And that bombshell came right after a Wall Street Journal report Tuesday, claiming that $200 million from IMF loans to Russia may have been laundered through the Bank of New York.
The Kremlin press service released a statement through Interfax on Thursday saying that "Yeltsin, his wife and children have never opened accounts in foreign banks." Likewise, Chubais, in a statement released to the media Thursday, said: "Never have I had bank accounts abroad. Not during my years in government or the presidential administration and not now."
Allegations of corruption and money laundering among Russian government officials are potentially damaging for Yeltsin and Russia because they could undermine confidence in Russia among foreign governments, lending institutions and aid agencies - on which the cash-strapped government depends for loans and other assistance.
The media blitz has gained the attention of the U.S. House of Representatives Banking Committee, which has scheduled congressional hearings on the matter for mid-September.
"We are still in the information gathering stage but the committee is interested in how involved," said Andrew Parmentier, a spokesman for Congressman Jim Leach, the committee's chairman.
The money laundering scandal broke last week when the New York Times ran a story claiming that Russian organized crime groups had spirited as much as $10 billion through accounts in the Bank of New York. The report claimed that the laundered funds were used for activities ranging from contract murders to the narcotics business.
Banking committee chair Leach used strong language in connection with the scandal, saying, "With regard to the Bank of New York, the question is whether they were unwittingly duped or were willing facilitators in what may be the greatest example of kleptocratic governance in modern history."
The New York Times reported that some $4.2 billion passed through the bank in more than 10,000 transactions between October 1998 and March 1999 alone. The bank has suspended two employees who handled the accounts, Natasha Gurfinkel Kagalovsky of New York and Lucy Edwards of London, both of whom are married to Russian businessmen.
Gurfinkel Kagalovsky is the wife of Konstantin Kagalovsky, who from 1992 until 1995 was an adviser to the Russian government and its representative to the IMF. Kagalovsky also worked at the now defunct Bank-Menatep and is currently vice president of the giant oil company Yukos. Edwards is married to Peter Berlin, described as the owner of Benex, a company which had accounts at the bank. None of the four has been charged with a crime.
New York Times reports, like those in USA Today, linked the accounts to Semyon Mogilevich, whom U.S. law-enforcement officials have tied to a wide range of activities ranging from arms trafficking to extortion to prostitution.
The report said Mogilevich used an American firm called YBM Magnex, which produced industrial magnets, as a money-laundering vehicle, and that investigators had found evidence linking Magnex to Benex.
[Editor's Note: The St. Petersburg Times is published by the independent Moscow Times.]
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Lawmaker Wants Bank Investigated By Marcy Gordon, Business Writer
$10 billion laundered for Russian mob between October and March!
WASHINGTON (AP) - Congress will investigate a huge money-laundering scheme allegedly involving the Russian mob and will try to determine whether the Bank of New York was duped or willingly aided the fraud.
Rep. Jim Leach, R-Iowa, chairman of the House Banking Committee, said Wednesday the panel will hold hearings next month on the alleged illegal activities at the Bank of New York that are under investigation by federal authorities.
In Moscow, Russia's finance minister denied his government was linked to the multibillion-dollar scheme at the 15th-largest U.S. bank, which has been described as potentially one of the biggest money-laundering operations ever uncovered in the United States.
``I have no information indicating that Russia has anything to do with this problem, so there is no need for the government to interfere in this situation,'' Finance Minister Mikhail Kasyanov told a news conference.
Law enforcement authorities in the United States, Britain and Russia reportedly are investigating the activities of Konstantin Kagalovsky, who was Russia's representative to the International Monetary Fund from 1992 to 1995 and later worked as a senior executive at Russia's Menatep bank. He now is vice president of Russia's oil giant Yukos.
Kagalovsky is married to Natasha Gurfinkel Kagalovsky, a senior vice president of Bank of New York who supervised its East European division out of New York City. She is one of two Russian-born senior officers suspended by the bank last week as news of the federal investigation surfaced.
Federal investigators believe as much as $10 billion was laundered through the bank in an operation run by Russian organized crime. Some $4.2 billion passed through a single account in more than 10,000 transactions between October and March, The New York Times reported last week, citing unidentified investigators.
In money laundering, illicit profits from drug trafficking and other criminal activities often are moved through a series of bank accounts to make them appear to be legitimate business proceeds.
``With regard to the Bank of New York, the question is whether they were unwittingly duped or were willing facilitators in what may be the greatest example of kleptocratic governance in modern history,'' Leach said in a statement from Iowa.
The bank said last week that it has been cooperating with the office of the U.S. attorney in Manhattan ``in the confidential investigation of the use of bank facilities to transfer funds from Russia to other countries.''
Neither the bank, Mrs. Kagalovsky nor Lucy Edwards, a bank vice president in London who also was suspended, have been charged with wrongdoing.
Ms. Edwards' husband, Peter Berlin, who like Konstantin Kagalovsky is a Russian businessman, reportedly had authority over one of the accounts in question.
USA Today, quoting officials in Russia's prosecutor general's office and Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service in today's editions, said four former aides to Russian President Boris Yeltsin and one of his daughters were being investigated for possible roles in the scheme.
The newspaper identified them as Tatyana Dyachenko, Yeltsin's daughter and adviser; Anatoly Chubais, former chief of staff and finance minister; former Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets, former Finance Minister Alexander Livshits; and Vladimir Potanin, former deputy chairman of the Russian Federation.
The Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra reported Wednesday that Swiss and Russian prosecutors investigating the Russian mob uncovered payments of more than $1 million to Yeltsin and his daughters.
A Kremlin spokesman, who declined to give his name, denied the report.
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What The World Needs Now By Jan Oberg
Make forgiveness and reconciliation a central
objective!
LUND, Sweden - How can we talk about restoring peace after wars hurt and harm without paying attention to the human aspects of conflicts in general and that of forgiveness and reconciliation in particular? I think we need to make forgiveness and reconciliation a central objective: in research and studies, in training and education and, above all, we should empower every civilian and military - and every international organisation engaged in war-torn societies to work for it with the locals.
There are many definitions of it, but forgiveness is an individual moral act of freeing oneself from the burden of hate and the right to revenge. Reconciliation takes at least two and aims at achieving something constructive out of a dark, hurtful past. It does NOT mean forgetting, it means remembering the past in order to live normally, or more fully, in the future. None of it can be achieved by money, by weapons or by legal measures - and it goes far deeper than human rights training.
Take a look at Bosnia and Croatia since 1995, look at Kosovo now, or Somalia, or...Have people really held out their arms or said 'I forgive you'? Come together in trust? Have they learnt how to deal with the past, not in order to forget it or to blame each other, but to acknowledge what happened and find ways to avoid it ever happening again? Can that even be said about South Africa? It is easy to repair houses and infrastructure, it's easy to throw money around and talk about human rights? But what if people deep down keep on hating each other and won't even dream about doing what Kim and John did? Will they themselves ever be happy and at peace with themselves? Will their children? What kind of society will it be if we cannot also, so to speak, repair souls and help create tolerance, co-existence, even cooperation and love?
One of the most moving experiences in my life was when, together with TFF team members, we helped a few Croats and Serbs in Eastern Slavonia, Croatia, come together: young boys and girls as well as the parent generation who were permitted for the first time to talk face-to-face about what had happened and avoid blaming. Many cried, successively many laughed together - some now are friends and some do projects together - and, yes, some have left or lost hope again. TFF keeps working there today.
It made me understand how neglected the whole issue of 'soul reconstruction' is - and how vain everything else will be without it. You can pour any amount of dollars into Kosovo - it will not create peace unless we also, in deep respect and cooperation with the locals on all sides, do something that can not be measured in money terms.
Perhaps the West has something to learn about reconciliation? Recently I was in Burundi, where much worse violence has hit many more people. In two weeks I heard more sensible and genuine peace talk among NGOs and ministers than I have heard during TFF's 8-year mission in ex-Yugoslavia. I have no answer, but I wonder whether we Westerners are more oriented toward a peace that builds on the sword, legality, mechanics and external implanting of economic, political and human rights conditions for peace - whereas others may see peace more in the direction of trying to be at peace with oneself, come to terms with the evil that has been, find your own ways and use your local cultural rituals and traditions to facilitate forgiveness and reconciliation? In short, that the rich West goes for more or less interventionist quick-fix peace packages where people come last, while other cultures put people and non-material dimensions first and know that real peace has to come from within the individual and the social fabric. If so, we Westerners may have something important to learn about peace-making in other cultures!
Learn the lessons: do research and training in foregiveness and reconciliation To be more concrete - it is time to learn from all these terrible wars and draw constructive conclusions from moral and intellectual catastrophes such as the international 'community's present one in Kosovo. Let's imagine that we establish regional institutes (or "centres" or "academies") for reconciliation in regions where conflicts have historically occurred frequently and risk is high that they will also in the future. Reconciliation could be understood here as an umbrella concept covering basically what happens from the moment a cease fire agreement is signed up to peaceful life, normalisation and socioeconomic development once again takes place - but with special emphasis on the human dimensions of post-war reconstruction.
For instance, we need more research on successful peace agreements and conflict-resolution processes, taking stock of the human experience, field studies of countries that have successfully learned to live with a painful past - lessons learned from old and contemporary history. We need systematic studies of the noble art of saying "I am sorry" - e.g. repentance, forgiveness, respect, healing, a collective acting out of sorrow and traumas and how to simultaneously move towards a vision of peaceful existence, either together or as good neighbours; and we need to "target" children and youth for long term violence-prevention - which in many cases means different schools, teaching materials and history books.
We need to think of memorials for all victims and all sides (as in Okinawa), books, religious places, theatre performances, exhibitions. We must build relations with those who have gone through war elsewhere. We need truth and reconciliation committees, for sure but also future workshops. And we need to expand facilities and improve methods for therapy such as empowerment of survivors; reinstating self control; rejection of relations of dominance and submission; spiritual regeneration; mourning and remembrance; developing a broad attachment to others, and work for the reconstruction of a narrative of history and the trauma and and constructive integration of it into memory. The list is endless!
The centres or institutes should be located in regions in which conflicts have been frequent historically and where they are likely to remain also for the future such as the Balkans, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, South East Asia, Central America, the Horn of Africa, southern Africa etc. In each region a site should be found that is itself expressive of a peace and reconciliation sentiment, for historical or other reason, or where peace has successfully been concluded. (If in Europe one could imagine Åland, Trento/Alto Adige/South Tirol, Schleswig-Holstein).
The institutes should do research, consultancy with formerly conflicting parties, including mediation and peace implementation planning, public outreach and, where feasible, set up pilot projects in post-war communities with the parties; and they should do courses, seminars and training for adversaries as well as locals who want to have an education in peace and reconciliation. Thus, theory and practise mixed and continuously inspiring each other.
The boards of these centres should be drawn from local professionals but could have experienced international advisers. Their members should be drawn from 1) social and human sciences including peace research and peace education, 2) governments, including local government, 3) civil society organisations, 4) humanitarian organisations and 5) area experts.
The centres would have a liaison committee in permanent contact with all relevant international organisations being present in the area such as the UN, OSCE, UNHCR, humanitarian organisations, regional associations such as the OAU, ASEAN, EU etc. It would discuss opportunities for co-operation and coordination, including joint training seminars of local and international staff on the spot.
The multi-ethnic/cultural/competent staff (research, consultants, information, (pilot) project managers and staff, area experts etc. would be drawn from the same five groups of the board. The whole point is to bring together - reconciliate - those five groups, too, and thereby promote integrated, effective reconciliation on the ground. Thus, the institutes would, by their organisation and human skills be expressive of the values it would teach others.
The institutes should be financed by the same constituencies and by anybody else who sympathises with the idea. In the beginning some institutes might need a special care from a government such as that of Sweden and other Nordic governments. No single donor, however, should exercise any particular influence on these institutes.
In order to market the idea internationally, enlightened governments and selected NGOs might take the initiative to set up an international preparatory committee that would dissolve itself when the first boards have been established.
We should not see forgiveness and reconciliation only in a postwar perspective. Before wars break out there is a lot of humiliation, human rights violations, propaganda against certain groups, or similar indicators of something much worse to come. As part of violence preventive diplomacy, pre-war forgiveness and reconciliation should be introduced - like we could study cases (from everyday lives and politics) where such processes helped people turn away from the road to war.
The Year 2000 is proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations as The International Year for the Culture of Peace and the years 2001-2010 as the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World. What more appropriate idea then to set up centres for the study and practise of forgiveness, reconciliation and, consequently, of nonviolent handling of human conflicts?"
[Editor's Note: Dr. Jan Oberg is the Director of the Transnational Foundation For Peace and Future Research. He heads the Conflict-Mitigation team to the Balkans and Georgia. He may be reached at: Vegagatan 25, S - 224 57 Lund, Sweden. Phone +46-46-145909 (0900-1100) Fax +46-46-144512. E-mail tff@transnational.org (http://www.transnational.org)]
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Defending Taiwan
How Far Would Washington Go?
By Helene Cooper, Staff Reporter
WASHINGTON - The latest flare-up of tensions between China and Taiwan has raised a pivotal question around the world: Is the U.S. still willing to go to the mat to defend Taiwan if Beijing launches a military attack?
U.S. officials say the answer to the question is yes. "Use of force across the Taiwan Strait by [China] -- that would be a matter of grave concern to us," one senior administration official says.
But the question arises because many people believe the U.S. is obligated by law to defend Taiwan in the case of a military attack, much as America is obligated to defend, say,Germany or another North Atlantic Treaty Organization member from attack. With Taiwan, however, that is not the case.
The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which stipulates that an attack by China on Taiwan would be a matter of "grave concern" to America, is deliberately ambiguous about what the U.S. response would be. The act authorizes the U.S. to sell defensive weapons to Taiwan, but doesn't commit the U.S. to deploying troops to defend the island.
Adding to the confusion is that for the past six weeks, the Clinton administration has been demonstrating its ire with Taiwan -- not China -- for igniting the latest flap over Taiwan's relationship with China.
Some critics warn that the administration could be sending mixed signals to Beijing about the strength of U.S. resolve. "It's far easier to deter than to undo," says Robert Kagan, a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Reagan administration official.
President Clinton, Mr. Kagan says, should be warning Beijing explicitly that the U.S. will back Taiwan to the hilt if China launches an attack. "We should be saying, 'Don't even try it,' " he says. "You make it clear in words, and in positioning of military assets, that you will not tolerate it."
Publicly, however, U.S. efforts to cool the situation have largely been aimed at Taiwan after statements by its president, Lee Teng-hui, that relations between Beijing and Taipei should be treated as "state to state." President Clinton has repeatedly reiterated U.S. support for a one-China policy. The Pentagon canceled a military visit and arms sale to Taiwan. A succession of top Clinton administration officials warned Taiwan not to further roil the waters and provoke China into military conflict.
The trouble is, the U.S. was already in the doghouse with China when tensions kicked up -- following trade clashes and the errant NATO bombing in May of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade -- and officials don't want to further inflame Beijing.
In 1996, the U.S. came the closest to a military confrontation with China since the 1950s after China fired missiles into the waters near Taiwan. President Clinton's response then was to move two aircraft carrier groups into the region. But at that time, the administration saw Taiwan's provocation of Beijing as more benign: The island was holding its first free presidential elections.
"When the president ordered two aircraft carrier battle groups into the region, that happened at a time when you had a substantial portion of the Taiwan Strait closed," one administration official says. China, he says, "had splashed several missiles and declared a war footing. This was intimidation on a very large scale."
his time, things are different. U.S. officials maintain that they haven't seen any signs of massive mobilization of Chinese troops. They say all the military exercises they've observed in China so far have been normal.
The only above-normal military activity, Pentagon officials say, has been the military flights -- by both sides -- over the Taiwan Strait between China and Taiwan. Incidentally, however, Taiwan last week grounded its fleet of F-16 fighter jets, following the fourth crash in 18 months.
Many U.S. officials have taken heart from Beijing's low-key response to the crisis so far, despite warnings by some low-level Chinese government officials that China may be compelled to take military action to punish Taiwan for its moves toward independence. To try to keep that response low-key the U.S. has, thus far, rushed to reassure Beijing that America isn't supporting Taiwanese moves toward independence.
Added to that, Clintonites really have been annoyed with what many of them see as Mr. Lee's unnecessarily provocative statements. Indeed, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright a few weeks ago pointedly admonished Taiwan's president for not satisfactorily clarifying his statements.
"U.S. policy is aimed overwhelmingly at trying to reduce to zero the chances that the situation will ever get to that point," of military action, according to one senior White House official. That policy, he says, is simple: First, reassure the Chinese that America supports a one-China
But there is an inherent contradiction in that policy, critics say. "The logic of strategic ambiguity is, if you say you're going to come to their defense no matter what, aren't you encouraging Taiwan to declare independence?" questions Mr. Kagan of Carnegie. "For Republican presidential candidates, this is the kind of thing that exposes inherent contradictions."
Indeed, one week ago Republican frontrunner George W. Bush entered the China fray, saying in a television interview that Mr. Clinton has handled China all wrong. Asked whether protecting Taiwan might require the use of U.S. troops if China attacked, Mr. Bush said: "It could. We need to honor our commitments in the Far East."
Among many administration officials, the hope is that China won't make any military moves against Taiwan or its islands, and that President Clinton's military resolve towards Taiwan won't be put to the test. On that matter, Mr. Clinton has one thing going for him: China's desire to enter the World Trade Organization by the end of this year.
After almost four months of stalling, Chinese officials are now indicating they will soon be ready to restart talks on China's entry into the WTO, the global capitalists' club. Chinese and U.S. officials say that talks should hopefully restart, at the latest, when President Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin meet in New Zealand Sept. 12 for an Asian-Pacific leaders meeting.
To complete a China-WTO deal, the U.S. Congress would have to vote to permanently normalize China's trade status, a vote bound to stir up lots of controversy in Washington. Chinese officials are aware there's no way
"The U.S. federal system would be completely outraged at China," says Greg Mastel, director of international trade studies at the Center for
But, Mr. Mastel warns, that doesn't mean China may not decide that clamping down on Taiwan isn't more important than getting into the trade club. Indeed, there are many in China who care far more about Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province, than about making the economic reforms necessary to get into the WTO.
"If they seize a Taiwanese island," Mr. Mastel says, "that means they've decided they don't care about getting into the WTO. And that could well happen."
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PARIS - World newspapers clatter at the Clinton administration's mis-shapen foreign policy gaff in Yugoslavia. For example, a front-page summary of an editorial by Guido Rampoldi in Italy's influential La Repubblica published this on its front page on Friday, "Since the United States became the world's superpower, all its presidents have aimed at handing down a sign to the world. This desire has often taken the form of a foreign policy project, that is, of a doctrine. We had a Truman doctrine, a Nixon doctrine, a Carter doctrine."
It went on, "In June, the Clinton policy...that a military intervention (can take place) wherever an oppressive, deadly violent policy meets with three unmentioned conditions, the existence of an American strategic interest, the assurance of being able to win exclusively by employing an overwhelmingly powerful air force, [with] such dramatic television shots that public opinion will be prepared for the risk of a short and yet successful war....merging the 'good' with 'profit'..."
"However, the White House alchemist must now demonstrate that merging 'good' and 'profitable' is not like making a philosopher's stone, a theoretical exercise, or, even worse, a trick. What is happening in Kosovo is what President Clinton promised two months ago to stop. Some are persecuting innocent civilians and are trying to kill them...and when even the New York Times calls for clarity about the situation, it is legitimate to suppose that the Clinton administration does not stick to what has been stated.... Clinton cannot afford to lose the war he has won.... The Americans thought of defeating Milosevic at the table, and, by underestimating his viciousness, entangled themselves in a conflict in which NATO's survival was at stake."
Chen wrote in the English-language China Daily on Thursday, "The continuous and outrageous violence against Serbs makes people think of 'ethnic cleaning'; the excuse the United States and NATO used to bomb Belgrade, is actually taking place in Kosovo.... Having paved the way for the enemy of their enemy (KLA) to dominate the political arena, short sighted Americans will soon find out that the KLA is the major source of instability in Kosovo."
Zhang Zhuji headlined in the Communist Party People's Daily on Thursday, "American hegemonism and power politics are virulently escalating....The Kosovo crisis indicates that in order to realize its global strategic goals, the United States is not only trying to cripple the UN using NATO, but also intending to make the G-8 group overstep the UN."
Most international analysts are doubtful after yesterday's protest rally. Most journalists seem to agree that crowds of tens of thousands of Serbians are only going through he motions of protesting against the the well entrenched Milosevic government.
However, Madrid's El Pais op-ed expressed cautious opitimism, "Now it is clear that there are hundreds of thousands of Serb patriots ready to take up the struggle against those who have ruined their country."
Acknowledging that the protest was impressive in terms of sheer numbers, the vast majority of editorialists, however, reiterated their concern that the "fragmented opposition" would be unable to mobilize sufficient popular anti-Milosevic sentiment to bring down that government.
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- Government agents posing as ship repair subcontractors have uncovered major fraud by several employees of a management company charged with overseeing repairs of Navy ships, officials say.
Bribes and kickbacks allegedly accepted by some employees of Bayship Management Inc. of Englewood Cliffs, N.J., included dinners, golf outings, country club memberships and trips from subcontractors that were later billed to the government as part of the contract price, officials said Thursday. Bayship had been awarded a $200 million government contract to maintain the ships.
Four former Bayship employees were charged in criminal bills of information last week in Texas. Charges include fraud and kickbacks. Two other Bayship employees were charged earlier.
To date, the four-year investigation has netted charges against 21 people, from Jacksonville, Fla., to Boston and San Francisco, and two companies working as subcontractors. Federal authorities say the investigation continues and more charges are likely.
``This case is an egregious example of corruption within a Department of Defense program that has undermined the procurement process, cost the American taxpayers a significant amount of money and eroded the trust and confidence of the public in the operation of the government,'' said John F. Keenan, director of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, the investigative arm of the Defense Department's inspector general.
The focus of the investigation was alleged fraud in a $200 million contract Bayship had with the Military Sealift Command for maintenance and repairs of eight Navy ships. Bayship was responsible for soliciting subcontractors to do the work.
After receiving reports of the allegations in 1994, federal agents set up an undercover subcontracting business known as Coastal Marine Engineering Group that eventually operated in Houston, Jacksonville, New Orleans, Norfolk, Va., and San Francisco.
During the probe, more than 27 agents had undercover roles and made more than 3,000 telephone and body recordings, officials said. Dozens of meetings between the undercover agents and subjects were videotaped,
Officials said the investigation revealed that Bayship employees directed the undercover agents to fraudulently inflate the dollar amounts of contracts to cover gratuities provided to them by Coastal Marine Engineering Group. On some occasions, fraudulent contracts were allegedly issued to reimburse the undercover business for cash given to Bayship employees.
The investigation also uncovered the use of ``complementary'' bids in the awarding of repair contracts. In this practice, certain subcontractors were allegedly instructed to submit bids higher than a favored vendor so it would appear that the competitive bid process was followed. Authorities said that on many occasions the Bayship employees recorded the undercover company as a bidder on a job when, in fact, no bid was ever submitted.
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WASHINGTON - In 1997, the Department of Justice made allegations of False Claims Act violations in four jurisdictions against nearly 200 hospitals or clinics, even though it did not have sufficient evidence to back up those claims. According to the General Accounting Office this week, it's investigation found that DOJ probes in many cases in Texas and other areas were ultimately dropped because of insufficient evidence.
The shocking facts are contained in a GAO Report ordered by Congress after hearings on complaints numerous last year by the health care industry after questions were raised about the lack of thhroughness of the Clinton administration's investigation of health care fraud.
Over a hundred of the cases looked into involved alleged Medicare billing fraud for patient lab tests,still have not been resolved. About 45 cases resolved, or dropped when DOJ prosecutors concluded that the hospitals had not violated the False Claims Act the GAO reported.
The only positive outcome of DOJ's investigation of the complaints, by the DOJ was a flurry of hastily drafted guidelines in June 1998, requiring all 93 U.S. attorneys to have sufficient proof before alleging a violation of the civil False Claims Act in the future.. The guidelines focus on the government's four "national initiatives" that target overbilling by hospitals. The government claims that it loses billions every year to Medicare fraud.
When the GAO was asked to determine whether the Justice Department was complying with its new guidelines, Leslie Aronovitz, a Clinton administration official at the GAO told reporters she was "...pleased overall with DOJ's progress."
The GAO report covered its investigation of several U.S. attorney's offices which currently have ongoing False Claim involving hospitals accused of overcharging Medicare for possible fraudulent lab tests billing claims.
In investigations of over twenty hospitals by one U.S. attorney, the report found "...officials told us in March 1999 that these hospitals had actually been selected primarily because they were the largest billers of Medicare in the state, not because the office had evidence" of billing fraud.
At another U.S. attorney's office, the GAO was told that False Claims Act allegations had been made against 75 hospitals in 1997 had to be dropped because the DOJ failed to obtain "...sufficient evidence to support the allegations."
John Bentivoglio, DOJ's special counsel for health care fraud, told reporters,"....delays in resolving pending cases were a result of...a cautious approach."
In the meanwhile. the Report is being carefully looked into by Congress this week.
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WASHINGTON - In 1997, the Department of Justice made allegations of False Claims Act violations in four jurisdictions against roughly 145 hospitals, even though it did not have sufficient evidence to back up those claims. This revelation comes now in the General Accounting Office new report.
The GAO report, was ordered by Congress after hearinghs on complaints last year by the health care industry after questions were raised about the lack of throughness of the Clinton administration's investigation of health care fraud.
Over a hundred of the cases looked into involved alleged Medicare billing fraud for patient lab tests,still have not been resolved. Aboit 45 cases resolved, or dropped when DOJ prosecutors concluded that the hospitals had not violated the False Claims Act the GAO reported.
The only positive outcome of DOJ's investigation of the complaints, by the DOJ was a flurry of hastily drafted guidelines in June 1998, requiring all 93 U.S. attorneys to have sufficient proof before alleging a violation of the civil False Claims Act in the future.. The guidelines focus on the government's four "national initiatives" that target overbilling by hospitals. The government claims that it loses billions every year to Medicare fraud.
When the GAO was asked to determine whether the Justice Department was complying with its new guidelines, Leslie Aronovitz, a Clinton administration official at the GAO told reporters she was "...pleased overall with DOJ's progress."
The GAO report covered its investigation of several U.S. attorney's offices which currently have ongoing False Claim involving hospitals accused of overcharging Medicare for possible fraudulent lab tests billing claims.
In investigations of over twenty hospitals by one U.S. attorney, the report founf "...officials told us in March 1999 that these hospitals had actually been selected primarily because they were the largest billers of Medicare in the state, not because the office had evidence" of billing fraud.
At another U.S. attorney's office, the GAO was told that False Claims Act allegations had been made against 75 hospitals in 1997 had to be dropped because the DOJ fasiled to obtain "...sufficient evidence to support the allegations."
John Bentivoglio, DOJ's special counsel for health care fraud, told repoirters,"....delays in resolving pending cases were a result of...a cautious approach."
In the meanwhile. the Report is being carefully looked into by Congress thois week.
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Gore project to improve government overstated savings Associated Press
Auditors say he cooked the books by double counting!
WASHINGTON (AP) - Vice President Al Gore's project to improve government overstated some claims of cost savings and can't substantiate others, according to auditors who looked at reforms in three agencies.
Gore's ``reinventing government'' project claimed $21.8 billion in savings it lacked evidence to support, inflated savings by double-counting cost cuts, and took credit for savings that may have been the result of other efforts to streamline government, the General Accounting Office said in a report.
Project officials also neglected to take into account expenses that offset some of the savings, said GAO, the auditing and investigative arm of Congress.
White House officials disputed the GAO's findings and said that while some numbers may be off slightly, the reinventing project is on track to save an estimated $137 billion and improved the way the federal government works.
``What really matters is that government is smaller than its been since the Kennedy administration and it operates better, more efficiently and is saving taxpayers money,'' said Linda Ricci, spokeswoman at the White House Office of Management and Budget, which calculated the savings estimates for Gore's project.
A House Republican who requested the report seized on its findings to criticize Gore, the front-running Democratic presidential candidate.
Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, said the report released Monday shows that Gore ``greatly exaggerated the success of his National Partnership for Reinventing Government.''
``It looks like they were reinventing accounting rules,'' Burton said.
Gore launched the reinventing project in 1993, promising to make government ``work better and cost less'' by reducing bureaucracy, cutting contracting costs and relying more on technology. Project officials claim to have achieved $107 billion in savings and say they have ``locked into place'' another $29.6 billion in savings.
GAO looked at nearly $30 billion in claimed savings from reinvention initiatives at the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy and NASA and found several problems. For example, OMB did not keep records supporting $21.8 billion in claimed savings. Ricci said OMB did not save worksheets from the calculations, some of which were done six years ago. But she said that OMB budget specialistscould reconstruct how they calculated the savings.
Making matters worse, OMB double-counted estimated savings in at least two instances, thereby inflating cost cuts. Ricci said OMB analysts inadvertently double-counted in one case, leading to an overstatement of about $770 million in savings. She said that was more than offset by another counting error in which OMB underestimated about $2 billion in savings.
Detracting further from Gore's credibility, the project claimed savings that ``could not be fully attributed to its efforts'' and were actually the result of separate efforts, said GAO.
For example, Gore's project should not have taken credit for savings at Energy Department weapons laboratories that would have occurred anyway because of the end of the Cold War, GAO noted.
[Editor's Note: Howard Hobbs contributed to this story.]
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Tide turning for whistle-blower By William Heartstone, Staff Writer
$1.7 million to Richard Caruso in California prison guard case.
Related story in American Law Review!
WASHINGTON - Alarmed at substantial losses of public money each year through theft and fraud against the state, two legislators have drafted a proposal to tighten penalties for such scams and reward whistle-blowers who report wrongdoing. The False Claims Act, sponsored by Sen. Cheryl A. Jacques and Rep. Daniel E. Bosley, is modeled after similar federal legislation. Between 1987 and 1995 the federal program recovered $3.3 billion and distributed $195 million to whistle-blowers.
The tide is coming in for the heroic whistle-blower. Take Corcoran State Prison whistle-blower Richard Caruso. His case is on point. Caruso was the prison guard who sounded the alarm on brutality at the troubled penitentiary near Fresno California, In his case, he received a $1.7 million settlement on June 11, 1999, with the California Department of Corrections. Without admitting any wrongdoing, the department settled Caruso's stress claim and forced retirement, while erasing a pending discipline charge from his record.
In Florida, the Chief State's Attorney John M. Bailey should be deeply embarrassed by the $1.5 million settlement the state made earlier this month with Supervisory Inspector Gregory Dillon. The state's offer to settle implicitly condemns Mr. Bailey's policy of silencing his employees and punishing whistle-blowers. In view of the settlement, a prior jury verdict and federal judge's ruling against him, Mr. Bailey should obviously change his policy.
Whistleblowers are protected from retaliation by employers. According to the decisions in Fort Worth v. Zimlich, Green v. Ralee-Engineering Co., and Darghous v. Johnson Controls, employers must ensure that whistleblowers are not retaliated against.
In the UK, Abbey National recently announced that it would reward an employee $40,000 for exposing a $1.6 mil fraud. This move could encourage other employers to offer incentives to their staff to expose malpractice.
The media coverage of a whistle-blower has been of someone who leaks sensitive information. But there has recently been a shift in attitude, in part due to the Nolan Committee, towards the view that whistle-blowers who expose serious fraud should not be victimized. Public Concern at Work has been lobbying for such legislation since 1993.
Whistle-blower claims reportedly trigger U.S. probe in Texas Department of Justice to investigate Texas oil and gas royalty fund following whistle-blower auditor's successful lawsuit against University of Texas)
The Dept. of Justice has launched an investigation into a Texas oil and gas royalty fund after whistle-blower auditor Jose Luna was awarded $1 mil in damages on August 20, 1996 in a lawsuit against the University of Texas.
Many whistle-blower claims have been silenced by the wide-spread use of judicial "gag-orders" where evidence of fraud and theft was introduced at time of trial, but the presiding judge ordered the record "sealed" to prevent public disclosures.
A perfect example of such a mis-carriage of justice is a breaking story that the Daily Republican Newspaper uncovered in Forth Worth, Texas, this week. The DR extensive investigation of that matter turned up a massive collection of documentation in G.S. Robertson v. Bell Helicopter. Robertson, a senior contract officer, was singled-out for corporate retaliation after Robertson discoverd what he thought was evicence of a massive "false claim" scam in which the government and American taxpayers were systematically bilked of over $1 mil in overtime phony charges routinely submitted to the USArmy by Bell Helicopter for work never performed by the firm. Robertson was terminated.
In the resulting wrongful termination lawsuit, sworn testimony, work and employee time-card records convinced the jury. The jury came in with a rare unanimous verdict in favor of whistleblower Roberrtson for his lost wages and costs. However, the judge quickly overturned the Fort Worth jury's unanimous finding in favor of Robertson.
Then, in summary fashion, the judge "sealed" the court files, effectively pre-empting Robertson from receiving the benefit of his day in court. Robertson relied on the system. Did that system shortchange him and the American taxpayers? The current trend in favorable whistleblower verdicts and monetary settlements is tipping the scales his way. Lets keep that trend going.
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Bell Helicopter overcharges revealed By Howard Hobbs, Editor & Publisher
Conspiracy of silence plagues whistleblowers
deep in the heart of Texas!
WASHINGTON - In January 1986 George S. Robertson was hired by Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth as the Senior Contract Administrator on the US Army Helicopter Improvement Program.
He dedicated himself to his work, to his family and to his community in Forth Worth, Texas. One of his duties was to oversee accounting audits and practices for his division at Bell.
He believed the work he was assigned was instrumental to the nation's defense. He had faith in the "system" and championed the American Way.
Then, 18 months later, something happened to him that would change the way he felt about that system, forever.
Robertson discovered Bell Helicopter was cheating the government & U.S. taxpayers by overcharging the government for its work. He said on Wednesday "...Bell was showing the costs for the reimburseable contract line item inordinately high." Within months of the discovery, Robertson says his supervisor "...asked me to go along with the change in the time charge system on the program."
The pressure was building on Robertson to write letters to USArmy for additional funding of the helicopter program. He said "When I refused to write and sign the letters, my boss wrote and signed them."
He says he then informed the USArmy contracting officer not to pay the Bell invoice because the charges had not been substantiated."
Bell Helicopter then quietly began a process of removing Robertson and his boss from supervisory duties on the US Army Helicopter project.
Mr.Robertson said he was told he was being laid off due to "cutbacks" at Bell Helicopter.
After that Robertson filed a federal law suit against Bell Helicopter. At trial he proved that he was wrongfully terminated. The 1993 federal jury trial with Judge Eldon Mahon presiding resulted in a unanimous jury verdict for Robertson.
Judge Mahon, however, quickly overturned the jury verdict stating in his ruling, the "...jury used its own interpretation of the evidence."
An appeal in the 5th Circuit failed to convince the Circuit Court. Following the rejection of the appeal, Robertson told the DR that "One major lawyer in Atlanta provided a sad commentary on today's society when he told me 'sometimes the bad guys are allowed to win, and there is nothing you can do about it.'"
Making matters worse, Mr. Robertson then filed a complaint in the US Government Court of claims case against Bell Helicopter which was assigned to federal judge John McBryde. That action stalled after Judge Mahon informed Bell Helicopter and judge McBryde that the matter had been placed under "seal".
This, after the government filed sworn affadavits from three government agencies requesting more time to investigate the case,. Then judge McBryde dismissed the case and stifled the investigation of Bell Helicopter by the Department of Justice.
Ironically, the USArmy had leveled its own charges that Bell Helicopter had submitted unsubstantiated claims for reimbursement of $769,006.00.
Making matters worse, on March 17,1997 Bell Helicopter settled the USArmy claim by returning $125,000.00 and dropping ostensible claims Bell Helicopter said it had against the USArmy. Then, Bell Helicopter and the USArmy reverted back to the original time charging system and started all over with a new set of Bell Helicopter supervisors.
After Mr. Robertson was then laid-off by Bell Helicopter as the Senior Contracts Administrator, he told the DR the only work he has been able to land are in the blue-collar sector.He said, "It appears being honest in today's society does one no good."
Adding to this public spectacle of whistleblower bashing,this week, Texas Gov. George W. Bush(R), is fighting a subpoena in a highly publicized suit filed by former Funeral Service Commission executive director Eliza May. Mr. Bush may be called to give testimony in another whistleblower suit recently revived by Austin Texas 3rd Court of Appeals.
The appeals court on July 29th reversed Travis County Judge Mary Pearl Williams dismissal of the case and remanded it for trial.
Williams, of the 53rd District Appellate Division, last year threw out the suit filed by Valerie Curbo and Carol Funderburgh, finding that the former employees of the governors Criminal Justice Division failed to exhaust grievance procedures before filing suit.
Curbo and Funderburgh, who helped process federal grants to assist crime victims, claim they resigned under duress after complaining about division director Nancy Hugon.
Their suit alleges Hugon made disparaging remarks about grant applicants, calling gay rights crime victims organizations "homo projects." The suit also alleges Hugon made illegal unilateral cuts in the salaries of grant recipients cuts the governors office eventually restored.
Hugon resigned after giving deposition testimony in the case. And Patricia McDaniel, a lawyer who had been the director of the governors Crime Stoppers program since 1996, was terminated about one month after giving deposition testimony herself. McDaniel also has a whistleblower case pending against the governors office; that case is set for trial Nov. 2nd.
The Austin Chronicle news reports this week that Derek Howard who represents McDaniel, Funderburgh and Curbo, as well as May, alleges that the governor had McDaniel fired in February because of her agencys investigation into Service Corporation International, which owns and operates funeral homes. The governors office has denied any involvement in Mays firing.
The Sugar Land Republican news reported this week that the women say they were present at an employee appreciation party in June 1995 when Bush told Curbo he would pardon her for a past criminal conviction. Curbo says her application for a pardon was denied after she left the governors office.
[Editor's Note: The Daily Republican Newspaper has obtained court documents including a true copy of correspondence signed by Rep. Joe Barton(R) a member of the Republican Steering Committee and then chairman of the Oversight and Investigation Sub-Committee who looked into Mr. Robertson's claim. He describes how he referred this matter to the Inspector General of the Dept. of Defense for investigation. Mr. Barton, then suddenly declined further involvement in the matter. Barton responded to Mr. Robertson's request for assistance on US Congressional letterhead, dated Sept 27, 1995. Barton wrote, "My staff has carefully looked into the ramifications....I must at this time decline your request to intervene in this matter....Thank you for bringing the matter to my attention."]
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Return our land and leave us alone By Tony Artero, Pacific Bureau Chief
Its going to take a lot more than a float in the "Liberation Day" parade!
GUAM - Local news headlines in recent days read "Laws threaten land transfer." A subtitle said, "Return of excess federal land mired in legislative struggle." It was August 6, 1999. An unemployment rate is 14%, the economic condition is alarming, and the government of Guam is in a financial disaster.
Yet, GovGuam's "leaders" are still singing, "Damned the deficit, grow the government." 14,000 workers on the payroll and hiring. My longtime friend Joe Murphy who is a former editor for the PDN and still writes his Pipe Dreams column daily, said, "There's a lot the U.S. could do to help Guam." What's wrong with that picture?
World War II was a tragedy indeed for those who fought and gave their lives and for the people of Guam in general. But a bigger tragedy is the wrong doing, after the war, which is sanctioned to this day. More laws? - for a wrong that was committed by violating the law of the land in the first place? Hello?
New laws are just excuses to continue the cover up and to condone the wrong to remain. Must we resume singing, "Uncle Sam, please come back to Guam" as my friend inferred? But Uncle has returned since 1944 and placed toxic waste everywhere. Thanks to Mr. Ben Santos for uncovering the lid on 16 canisters of the poison gas known as Mustard Gas that were buried in his property.
The Guam Landowners United, Inc., a nonprofit organization, entered a float in the "Liberation Day" parade last month and took First Place. Their message said, "We are the people who are united in the plight for the return of lands to the original owners and not to the Chamorro Land Trust. We Celebrate 55 Years of Pride in Keeping Our Dreams of Freedom Alive as We Move into the New Millennium.
It's time for politicians to take a stand and not hide under the guise of the Ancestral Lands Commission." On the bumper of the tractor pulling their float were 12 inch fonts that said, "RIGHT THE WRONGS."
It is WRONG for GovGuam to occupy Tiyan even during the so-called, "interim period" - no progress there, but plenty of self-representation through fraud, waste, and abuse and arrogance, selfishness, and greed. We want none of the above.
There were at least two money making proposals for Tiyan that were ignored by this administration.
It is WRONG that people are paying tax to GovGuam on the Urunao Beach property for four generations, yet, denied its economic use all these years because there are three open dump sites created by the military five decades ago.
It is WRONG to ignore peoples' testimony in public hearings. As a result, the so-called, "I Tano'-Ta Land Use Plan" was dead on arrival despite the $2.1M paid to the "expert." That so-called "plan" was preposterous and fraudulent from its incision starting with its name. It was not a plan, but a zoning code and it should have been named "I Tano'- Nia."
It is WRONG to be negligent, which created "Mount Trashmore" and contaminated the water.
It is WRONG not to implement a comprehensive land use plan, one that addresses safety, conservation, and development in harmony with the environment. The conditions speak for themselves.
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The Real Kosovo Mission By Jan Oberg
Like the Nazi regime, NATO claims to have
a higher mandate, one above the common law!
LUND, Sweden - I believe there were overlooked or suppressed dimensions such as collective psychology, deep cultural codes and domain Western expansionist/missionary values at work in the West's handling of Kosovo, and I think we are wise to discuss them. For instance, does the US-led West in fact hide a latent, deep-seated authoritarian ideology that seeks world dominance while pretending to create global democracy, partnership and multiculturalism? And does it in its own manner - like Milosevic and Hitler in their different manners - thrive on somebody else's crisis while pretending to help them?
It is fascinating to see how quickly the public, the politico-diplomatic discourse and the media have managed to relegate the crisis, this turning point in contemporary history, to the past. But what has happened in, and to, the West itself during the Balkan wars and during Kosovo in particular deserves a bit of introspection - and perhaps we won't like what we see if we try. "Norwegian Swedish philosopher Harald Ofstad 30 years ago analysed the ideology of Nazism. He maintains that Nazism builds on and is an extreme version of Western values, of its 'Weltanschauung.' Its main feature is 'our contempt for weakness' and a celebration of strength, power and heroism. The Strong SHALL rule over the Weaker. The good/stronger has a right, or God-given authority, to control or eradicate the evil/weaker who only deserves our contempt. The stronger takes upon him a burden of civilisation, sacrifices and acts heroically in the name of a higher principle or 'law', of Good. Thus he is never made responsible for his deeds; he has a higher mandate and is above common law. Those carrying out the leader's orders are conveniently also relieved from responsibility, no matter how criminal they may be - since they too aim to drive out Evil and (re)install Good. Anti-semitism is not essential to the authoritarianism of the Nazi worldview, rather just a flawed, perverted element in it. We admire the winner and the strong-willed and despise the deviating, the hesitating, the loser. An integral part of the Nazi ideology is to PRETEND to fight idealistically for high moral goals and against evil while promoting one's own petty cause and meanness. The world is black and white.
Discipline and obedience is rewarded; asking too many questions punished. Nationalism and symbols such as uniforms, medals and flags are important. The Leader and Leading Nation see themselves as exceptional, as chosen people by God to (re)create Paradise on earth. Personal responsibility does not mean questioning what is right and wrong, but being responsible for meticulously carrying out the mission. Language must be use to seduce, it has to be full of analogies, cliches, euphemisms, - and Nazism is fundamentally anti-intellectual, simplifying, pseudo-scientific. Particularly important is that aggression and idealism melt into one: 'we do what we do for the good of humankind, don't judge US the way you judge THEM, our motives are noble, theirs are evil - which permits the criminal to be seen as a hero.'
Conflicts often hold elements of projection. Projection means ascribing to others the 'dark sides' we find inside ourselves and abhor. Could it be that Western leaders and media, when calling Milosevic Hitler, signalled their fear or unpleasant awareness that their own project could be seen as 'Hitlerist,' i.e. that they knew that at least some of the elements of authoritarianism were at work in their own policies? Could it be that they needed the analogy to the Jews by casting all Albanians in the role of innocent victims and not as participants in a politico-military conflict - in President Clinton's repeated words they were 'objects of ethnic cleansing not because of anything they have done but exclusively because of who they are'?
NATO invaded another country, committed aggression and violated international law. It used indiscriminate weapons. It wanted to bring an 'evil' nation down on its knees. The West accused Yugoslavia for doing what it did itself, e.g. killing innocent civilians, committing aggression, creating ethnically clean(er) units, sidelining democracy, using disproportionate and overwhelming military power, having 'evil' plans (CIA getting rid of disobedient leaders), having a firm grip on media, etc.
A minimum of historical consciousness tells us that ethnic cleansing is not something invented in the Balkans, but an integral part of Western behaviour in other cultures throughout history, not the least against the Indian indigenous people in the United States. Isn't it quite clear also that the US, for instance, is a nationalist actor, having 'national interests' all over the world? When did you see a State Department press briefing or President Clinton without the Stars and Stripes, how often did American leaders not praise their own country, democracy, freedom, peace, strength and honour the way they interpret it: as exceptional, as Chosen People? What shall we make of false historical analogies about Serbia being Hitler's Germany?
Dr. Johan Galtung of TRANSCEND wrote recently about the West's handling of Kosovo "...the parallel that comes to mind, mentioned by Solzhenitsyn, is Hitler's use of the national conflict between Sudeten/Germans and Czechs, the pressure on Czechoslovakia (with the support of England)."
"Japan's attack on Manchuria," he wrote,"...between 1931-45 and Italy's attack on Ethiopia 1935-41 were also against the Kellogg-Briand Pact (Briand got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926, Kellogg in 1929) 62 states, among them all major powers, agreed to renounce war as political instrument and to settle all international disputes by peaceful means. The exceptions were wars of self-defence or military obligations from the League Covenant, the Monroe doctrine or alliance obligations - very similar to the UN Charter Article 2(4), with exceptions."
The three dictatorships were above the law and the League, brushing all resolutions aside, lifted by their visions of a New Order. Their propaganda was as massive as the NATO propaganda with its insulting 'apologies' for 'collateral damage' that so obviously was intended by those on top from the very beginning. Well, the world did not have Internet at the time, that helps.
But the power was on the side of those 'above the law' because of a criterion of their own choice (there was probably more popular will behind what those dictatorships did than for the sneaky action by the 'democracies'). The dictatorships followed up what they started: the Second World War. The USA, using NATO-AMPO-TIAP is probably tempted to do the same, starting with North Korea and Colombia (?), to implement the New World Order. Time to prevent the Third World War: Now. Place? Everywhere.
Projection, of course applies to Serbia/Yugoslavia itself, too. I remember how in 1991 Serbs of all walks of life told TFF's conflict-mitigation team members how they were victim of Ustasha/Fascism, that they had always suffered and now fought for the Good - democracy, peace, multiethnicity, minority rights, and - survival. They saw and see themselves as victims of a Greater US/Western/EU/NATO imperialist conspiracy (another famous, secret Plan functioning like 'Operation Horseshoe' to the West).
Like Croats would tell you the same about Serb Fascism/Greater Serbia and the equally secret Science Academy Plan for Greater Serbia. Serbs and Albanians have projected on to each other a series of features, stereotypes, prejudice and historical dark traits. My team members and I myself have met pure racism on both sides - and people who have tried to convince us about the truthfulness of their noble cause and historical destiny (and suffering) - and told us again and again that something much worse would happen if they didn't take matters in their own hands or got some help from abroad.
When NATO committed aggression, Serbs felt that they were right in believing that there was a Plan against them. And when the Serbs committed atrocities this spring they greatly helped the West - politics and media - in justifying its law- and human rights violating, disproportionate violence. Thus, they locked each other into a vicious circle - resulting in tremendous human suffering down there, of course, not in technologically superior NATO.
Nazi ideology advocates struggle against those who are, or threaten to be, equally strong and subduing or eradicating those weaker than us. Kosovo was not only a struggle against Serbia, the infinitely weaker. It was also about fighting potentially strong actors: a) humiliating Russia a little more with yet another NATO expansion; b) antagonising China (add to the embassy bombing the spy 'scandals', exclusion from the WTO, human rights and democracy lessons, Taiwan, Tibet, nuclearism, etc. and you have more than enough conflict material); c) undermining the UN as world organization and peacekeeper, and d) eradicating socioeconomic systems that threaten to not succumb under the pressures of 'globalisation' or otherwise refuse to obey the power of the stronger. After the collapse of the Eastern bloc there are not supposed to appear any viable competing system to world order à la West and global capitalist integration.
NATO overwhelmingly held all the cards: military power, money, unlimited access to world/global media which are all Western-controlled and cultural power: selling the message of democracy, human rights, humanitarianism. NATO could hit anywhere in Yugoslavia, which had no capacity to hit the West and had not committed aggression against any other state.
This tendential world dominance is much more global, sophisticated and multifaceted than Nazism, but it is sold in ways that make many Western citizens endorse or even embrace it - as did many ordinary citizens Hitler's Messianic vision of a world without Evil and led by an enlightened, all-powerful, culturally superior Germany.
So, projection? Most likely, yes!" says Oberg. "Nations seem to fight the dark sides of themselves that they have projected onto others - who then becomes the terrible 'Other' that must be stopped. It happened between the two main contenders in the Cold War, and it repeats itself now in new conflict formations: Serbia/FRY has been cast in the role of the 'evil' Soviet Union, the other republics and peoples playing the role as Western-oriented, peace-loving, democratic, morally right - according to the long-outdated Cold War paradigm, the only one that existed in 1991.
Without projection - and authoritarianism, stereotyping etc - things like Kosovo and NATO in Kosovo would be impossible. The West is so upset about Serbia because they have so much in common - among other things a wildly exaggerated perception of their own mission and importance in the world and their global sense of being Chosen Nations for great projects, whether regional or global. Only someone who has never studied conflicts and violence in the field can be surprised that there are MORE similarities than differences between Americans/Britons/NATO on the one hand and Serbs and Russians on the other - deeply Western as they all are, expansive and fearful of revenge from all those they have hurt.
Some of us have been around in ex-Yugoslavia for too long a time to believe that democracies are inherently peaceful or moral. Look at this century and how it ends! We have more education, more information, more military power, more violence - and more democracy and shrinking wisdom. Politics and ethics, as well as technology and culture HAVE divorced. I am convinced that Kosovo was not a minor event in contemporary history, that it is quite likely to be a turning point for worse things to come - an evidence that we have learnt absolutely nothing from this century.
Until we challenge the legitimacy of violence and the institution of war itself, world order, civilised state power, humanism, decent manners, fair play and democratic governance will - I fear - decay further. NATO and KFOR are huge steps in the wrong direction and bode ill.
A project worthy of humanity in the next century is to promise ourselves to learn from the 20th century and stop this madness, stop this violence, stop this arrogance and human folly, stop NATO/KFOR-type fraud 'peace'keeping and to use all our human and cultural skills, our economic and technological resources - in short, our humanity - to learn to do better and handle and solve our conflicts with the least possible violence. And let's not celebrate before we know how to 'cleanse' violence from our thoughts, words and deeds - and thus become able to imagine a more peaceful world.
[Editor's Note: Dr. Jan Oberg is the Director of the Transnational Foundation For Peace and Future Research. He heads the Conflict-Mitigation team to the Balkans and Georgia. He may be reached at: Vegagatan 25, S - 224 57 Lund, Sweden. Phone +46-46-145909 (0900-1100) Fax +46-46-144512. E-mail tff@transnational.org (http://www.transnational.org)]
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HIROSHIMA -- The city of Hiroshima on Sunday marked the 54th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb by calling on the leaders of the world's nuclear states to exercise strong will in abolishing nuclear weapons.
Before a crowd estimated at 50,000, Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba stressed that strong will is born from the truth that nuclear weapons "are the absolute evil and will be the cause of humankind's extinction."
Akiba praised the victims of radiation exposure.
"We must possess the strong will to abolish nuclear weapons following the examples set by the hibaksha. If all the world shares this commitment -- indeed, even if only the leaders of the nuclear weapons states do so -- nuclear weapons can be eliminated tomorrow," Akiba said.
Continuing an annual tradition, participants at the Peace Memorial Ceremony, held to remember the victims of the 1945 bombing and offer a prayer for lasting peace, observed a minute of silence at 8:15 a.m., the time the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima 54 years ago.
This year, the names of 5,071 survivors of the bombing who perished over the past year were added to the register of officially recognized atomic bomb victims who have died since the blast, bringing the total to 212,116.
Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, Health and Welfare Minister Sohei Miyashita, Hiroshima prefectural and municipal officials and Pakistani Ambassador to Japan Toquir Hussain were also on hand for the annual ceremony.
Akiba called on the Japanese government to fully understand the crucial role atomic bomb survivors have played in presenting their wishes for peace, enhance support policies for them and place the highest priority on forging the will to abolish nuclear weapons.
He singled out young people and called on them to remember the struggle of the hibaksha against nuclear weapons.
"If we lack the will to take the first step, we can never reach our goal no matter how easy the way. I especially hope our young people share this will," said Akiba, a former Lower House member from the Social Democratic Party.
The mayor, who was elected in February, said the hibaksha have made important contributions, such as effectively preventing a third use of nuclear weapons, by telling the world that to use nuclear weapons "is to doom the human race."
Another achievement, he said, is that they have rejected the path of revenge and animosity that could lead to the extinction of all humankind and put their trust in justice and the faith of all people to create a future full of hope.
He showed concern over fading memories of wartime experiences, and the difficulty in passing messages from atomic bomb survivors on to the next generation.
Obuchi also addressed the audience at the ceremony, pledging that the government will play an active role in creating a nuclear-free world as "it is the responsibility of the nation that suffered from the world's first nuclear attack."
However, Obuchi admitted that it would be difficult to attain that goal, in light of rising regional conflicts and continuing arms buildups in some countries.
He also said the government would attempt to carry out recent recommendations made in an unofficial report on regional disarmament issues presented by a group of experts.
The report, issued by the Tokyo Forum late last month, calls on the five declared nuclear states to reduce nuclear weapons through a step-by-step approach.
"We would like to move toward a nuclear-free world by strengthening the nuclear non proliferation system recommended in the report," Obuchi said.
The annual ceremony began at 8 a.m., but many people arrived earlier at Peace Memorial Park to lay flowers in front of the cenotaph honoring the victims and to pray.
A 69-year-old atomic bomb survivor got up at 4 a.m. to catch a bus to the park from the town of Sera in eastern Hiroshima Prefecture. She lost a sister who was working as a nurse in the city to the nuclear attack.
"She was 20 years old at that time. My father and I searched in vain for her remains," Tsuya Sunatani said. "My father mourned so much, and I come here every year to pray for her. Even after so many years, I still remember vividly the day of the bombing."
Sunatani was in the city of Kure at that time, also working as a nurse.
[Editor's Note: At exactly fifteen minutes past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, Japanese time, an Atomic bomb exploded above Hiroshima.The Atom bombing of Nagasaki followed the next day. Dr. Howard Hobbs, attached to the 1st. Marine Division in Japan in 1955, obtained official military estimates that as many as 80,000 Japanese non-combatants were instantly incenerated, 37,000 were seriously injured and 90 percent of the buildings in the area were destroyed. He personally visited Hiroshima on the 10th anniversary of the bombing. By that time survivors of the nuclear holocaust unleashed on Hiroshima were calling themselves hibaksha. For all those who were within 3,000 meters of the hypocenter at the time of the detonation the Japanese government was paying all medical expenses for radiation burns, tumors, and all any other illnesses suffered by hibaksha. According to local estimates, one out of every three persons was killed outright or died of radiation sickness. By 1965, on the Twentieth Anniversary there were five separate sets of memorial services being conducted at Peace Park in Hiroshima with estimates of 30,000 hibaksha's in attendance. At exactly 8:15 that morning, the giant Peace Temple bell began to sound, and as all traffic, busses, trains and work came to a halt, a sudden typhoon swept over Hiroshima and its Peace Park with such force that the Temple's eternal flame was extinguished.]
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PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) -- Ethnic Albanians appear intent on expelling Serbs and Gypsies in a campaign of intimidation and murder that seriously jeopardizes the West's goal of a peaceful, multi-ethnic Kosovo, two human rights groups said today.
An 18-page report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch included killings, abductions and abuse it says cannot be fully explained by the desire of returning ethnic Albanians to exact revenge for past atrocities.
The allegations were echoed in excerpts of testimony from Gypsies, or Roma, made available to The Associated Press by the European Roma Rights Center.
Both groups implicated the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army in most of the abuses. And they said NATO and the United Nations seem ill equipped to stop the violence in the seven weeks since they moved into Kosovo.
The reports have ominous implications for the West, which said the goal of its 78-day NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia wasto assure a peaceful, ethnically diverse Kosovo. Such visitors as British Prime Minister Tony Blair, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright have pleaded with ethnic Albanians to end the violence.
NATO officials acknowledged the need for an international police force -- the U.N. plans call for 3,000 to be in place soon -- but defended their work in Kosovo.
``We have implemented basic law and order,'' KFOR spokesman Roland Lavoie said Tuesday, noting that more than 700,000 refugees have returned, the murder rate is halved and people are going back to work. ``But we cannot be complacent.''
``Without the presence of KFOR, the situation would have been worse,'' he said.
KLA leaders again denied involvement in abuses and pledged to work with NATO.
``I categorically say that they are not our solders,'' said Lirak Celaj, a spokesman for the KLA. ``And don't forget that you can buy KLA uniforms almost anywhere in Albania and other places for just 30 German marks ($16).''
Human Rights Watch stopped short of accusing the KLA of specific atrocities, but said ``the frequency and severity of such abuses makes it incumbent upon the KLA leadership to take swift and decisive action to prevent them.''
In its report, Human Rights Watch cited the gunning down of 14 Serb farmers in a wheat field July 23 to threats against three elderly Serb women, sometimes at gunpoint, as examples of Serbs targeted for no other apparent reason than their decision to stay in Kosovo.
``The intent behind many of the killings and abductions that have occurred in the province since early June appears to be the expulsion of Kosovo's Serb and Roma population rather than a desire for revenge alone,'' the report said.
The report said that ``well over 164,000 Serbs have fled Kosovo,'' along with a significant number of Gypsies. Many Kosovo Albanians accuse Gypsies of siding with the Serbs during the NATO bombing campaign.
Human Rights Watch also said KFOR, the NATO peacekeeping force, seems unsuited for police work.
``KFOR's concern about protecting its own forces, differing interpretations of the mandate ... and lack of experience in civil policing result in an uneven response to attacks and threats against minorities,'' it said.
One victim quoted by the European Roma Rights Center based in Budapest, Hungary, told of being taken into a room in the village of Drenovce, near the Albanian border, to see a fellow Gypsy who had been severely beaten.
``He lifted up his shirt and showed me his ribs,'' said the man, identified only by his initials. ``His chest was all black.''
Then the men, some in KLA uniforms, turned their attention to him.
``They kicked me all over my body, including my genitals,'' he said. ``I couldn't see, because my eyes were full of blood.''
Other men quoted by the Roma Rights Center related similar tales of beatings, threats and intimidation by people in KLA uniforms, who accused them of spying for the Serbs or helping persecute ethnic Albanians.
Underscoring the problem were reports of more killings, including Monday's death of a 90-year-old woman in Pristina. Yugoslavia's state-run Tanjug news agency said she was found strangled to death in the bathtub of her apartment.
KFOR said two ethnic Albanians were detained in the case.
On Sunday night, two British soldiers rescued a terrified Serb couple and their daughter who had been held hostage in their Pristina apartment by two ethnic Albanians, the British army said Tuesday.
An ethnic Albanian armed with a loaded AK-47 rifle opened the apartment door when the soldiers knocked. He dropped his weapon and surrendered. Another ethnic Albanian jumped from a window and escaped.
A neighbor had alerted NATO peacekeeping forces, the British statement said.
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WASHINGTON - Foreign Policy needs a big "over-haul." Our Armed Services are in place to protect America from attacks, not wage attacks against other countries, that is unless "aggressions" are asserted against our democracy and threaten our very being.
Bill Clinton seems to be obsessed with countries abroad. What is in it for him? Maybe he's hoping to be the "leader" of the upcoming "New World Order." Perish that thought! The president talks in the "future" tense as if he's going to play a large role in the near future.
The "spin" making the political rounds these days, have the Republicans at "blame" for the country's problems! What problems? We've heard day in and day out how "wonderful" everything is...especially during the "Impeachment" fiasco. In fact President Clinton told the American people in 1995...that all was right with the world!
For the first time in history, there were no missiles pointed at America. In fact he told Americans, they could go to "lullaby" land knowing that they and their children were safe. We now know, in fact, missiles "were" and "are" pointed directly at the central core of America. And the ones in "strategic" areas will be the "first" to see the "bombs" bursting in the air!
Never in the history of the world have there been so many "immenient" dangers, and so much "whitewash" dumped on the American public. Saddam Hussein is "biting at the bit" to try out his "massive" weapons of destruction on the U.S. He wants his place in "history" and a "legacy" to end all legacies.
Some guys just want to be loved! Reports have been circulating that Hussein and Milosevic have become "allies" during the attack on Kosovo. Now there's two to be reckoned with! All they need now to round out the "good old boys" group is Boris Yeltsin.
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LUND, Sweeden - Now is the time to begin to reflect on what actually happened this spring in Kosovo and, thus, to the world. I believe that historians will agree that from March 24, 1999 international politics and relations as well as the global system has changed in a deep sense. Many consider NATO's intervention a moral success, a just war, a victory for democratic values.
But I believe we need to look at it from a variety of angles to a) understand it more deeply and b) to work out ideas, concepts and policies so that anything similar will never happen again elsewhere. It is indeed peculiar that this war - conducted from a moral high ground and with the aim to promote the finest ideals of Western culture - has hardly been evaluated in just such terms. I am not a philosopher of ethics, but here are some points you may use in your own thinking about contemporary history and - if it exists - 'moral foreign policy.'
A high-ideals, low-risk war. The West has many and noble ideals. But when it comes to risking Western lives for them, they crumble. Both Albanians and Serbs have proved themselves willing to pay a price for what they believe in.
David and Goliath World history's most powerful alliance attacks a small state, devastates it with 1100 planes during 79 days. NATO could do anything in Yugoslavia, but Yugoslavia had no capacity to hurt any NATO country. Whatever propensity to feel sympathy for David there may be in Christian values, it didn't surface.
Explanation? Ten years of demonization. In addition, cruise missiles are low-cost and promise destruction on the enemy's territory without human or material costs on our side. Behind NATO's boasting of success and determination hides a high-tech-based cowardice second to none.
Perhaps the biggest lie in all this was the statement that 'we are not at war with the Yugoslav people.' But NATO destroyed 300 factories and refineries, 190 educational establishments, 20 hospitals, 30 clinics, 60 bridges, 5 airports; it killed at least 2,000 civilians and wounded 6,000 and many will die and suffer because of the health infrastructure destruction. To this you may add the sanctions since 1991 and the burden of more than 700.000 refugees from other republics and now from Kosovo. Only 12-15 tanks of 300 main battle tanks and some planes were destroyed, the rest seem to have been dummies!
Selective justice - much worse conflicts and humanitarian problems are ignored. In terms of human rights violations, war-caused deaths and degree of "dictatorship," Kosovo is a minor conflict. Between November 1998 and March 1999 no evidence of systematic ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, OSCE monitors have confirmed this. Germany sent back 11,000 Kosovar refugees. No humanitarian organization present in Kosovo reported a grand plan, or signs of it, to cleanse Kosovo of its 1,5 million Albanians. Look at the 30+ conflicts and much more serious human rights violations around the world and ask: why this gigantic Western commitment here?
Collective punishment is generally accepted. The magnitude of NATO's destruction of the economy and infrastructure of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with 11 million citizens - most of whom innocent - did not cause a proportionate, widespread or intensive debate in the West in general or in NATO countries in particular. There were mass protests (few shown on television) but no momentum that could have stopped the 'campaign'.
One side in a civil war was demonized, isolated, presented with a fait accompli, threatened with destruction, forced out of its sovereign territory, its people leaving the province and, apart from some humanitarian aid, the West does not intend to contribute to its reconstruction. These gross human rights violations are tacitly accepted even by many 'correct' human rights organizations and media.
Militarized rather than civilian conflict-management. After the Kosovo crisis nobody can doubt that there is ALWAYS unlimited supply of funds and personnel for military affairs, whereas the much cheaper early violence-preventive diplomacy, peaceful humanitarian intervention and postwar civilian peacekeeping consistently lack resources.
The UN, OSCE and NGOs are marginalized in the process - a rapid slide toward militarized conflict management and interventionism. This is a deliberate, moral choice made by the international 'community'.
Humanitarian concerns hardly credible. NATO's action released a humanitarian catastrophe. The international 'community' let Macedonia and Albania carry 98% of the burden, and relieved itself of the frightening perspective of having the refugees flood EU Europe. The US - generously - suggested that it could take 20.000 and store them on its military base...in Cuba! Today the world is struggling with finding the resources for aid and reconstruction - and will be very tempted to take it from funds earmarked for humanitarian relief where there are fewer cameras. The average Albanian refugee in Macedonia and Albania already got about 10 times more relief aid than the African - or Serb - refugee.
It could be argued that NATO or the US would be morally required to pay some compensation - if not for the overall military destruction, then for the "collateral damage": to the families of those innocent civilians who were killed and wounded, to civil facilities hit by mistake etc.
Moral foreign policy without moral responsibility. Quite a few of us were brought up with the norm that 'I am responsible for what I do.' Scores of NATO's violations of international law, the laws of war, of human rights etc. during its bombing campaign have been justified with reference to there being a grand plan of ethnic cleansing, to stopping the atrocities, to fighting a cruel dictator, and with arguments that 'if we do not counter and stop this now, it will be much worse later.'
The general discussion has not focussed on the crimes committed by NATO, neither on the political legitimacy of ignoring this predictable civil war for years and wait to do something until this something 'has to be' NATO intervention.
A norm has thus been used which in effect says that 'I am not responsible for my own deeds because I am fighting someone who is worse.' Paradoxically the same norm is used by all warlords and architects of ethnic cleansing, in ex-Yugoslavia and elsewhere!
Nonviolence punished, violence rewarded. This has broad meaning. Dr. Rugova's pragmatic nonviolent line was never given any political support, legitimacy or concrete economic or other support comparable with what KLA was given by the West. The UN principle of 'peace by peaceful means' was completely ignored as was violence preventive diplomacy - for years by every single NATO country; the UN played and will play a marginal role. All NGOs and non-violent missions to the region, including OSCE, had to leave because of NATOs all dominating policies in general and the bombings in particular. The West fought Yugoslav/Serb violence in Kosovo - for good reason. It actively supported Albanian hardliners' violence, atrocities and violations of international laws, and continues to do so now as 'peace'-keeper. In politics as well as mainstream media, Serb/Yugoslav violence is the worst, then KLA, then NATO - although NATO's has killed far more people. Violence as such is never challenged.
The West supports illegal arms exports. The arming of KLA can only have taken place by violating the arms embargo against all parts of former Yugoslavia decided by the UN Security Council in 1991. Which murky organizations and intelligence agencies, which private and semi-private arms dealers made it possible - and do you think we will ever see them in the Hague?
The West supports 'terrorists'. The US and the West has no qualms by being allied with what the US envoy, Robert Gelbard, in early 1998 called a terrorist organisation, namely the KLA or UCK. It has built its military capacity on weapons, ammunition and training supplied by various Western sources; it has been given political legitimacy in Rambouillet through the embrace of the US and UK; it has served as NATO's ally on the ground during the bombardments. At the same time, the West has refused to deal with the Yugoslav government as a legitimate one which came to power through open elections - and with moderate Albanian leader Dr. Ibrahim Rugova who was the only politically legitimate representative and who dares not return to Kosovo today.
The West cooperates with war criminals. The West also happily works with a war criminal - until it doesn't need him anymore. President Milosevic is now indicted as a war criminal. But read the indictment (available on TFF's website): it mentions only what he may be responsible for since January 1 this year. I guess the US/CIA and others have the files and documentation for crimes he may be directly or indirectly responsible for since 1991. But mentioning that would mean that he was a criminal also when a partner with the West, such as in Dayton in 1995. Also, indicting him for crimes committed between 1991 and 1998 would make people ask: so why not also indict presidents Izetbegovic and Tudjman?
In passing, it is interesting how much more the media has dealt with this indictment than with the indictment of NATO's leaders.
No equal recognition of the rights and sufferings of human beings. A simple ethical principle in conflict resolution - and other spheres of life - is this: recognise ALL parties' human suffering and ALL parties' human rights. This has not been practised by any of those who took the leadership in what they themselves called a humanitarian intervention.
Telling the truth, well...It is often stated that the West cannot rely on Milosevic/the Serbs/Belgrade regime. True - but remember! The West supports democracy but openly and tacitly supported authoritarian regimes in Zagreb, Sarajevo and Albania (including the KLA leadership). Before Yugoslavia broke down, US foreign secretary James Baker stated that Tito's Yugoslavia was a sovereign state - a few months later the West recognized Croatia and Slovenia out of it. The West supports multiethnic states but has, since 1991, helped the following units to appear with less multiethnicity than before the crisis: Croatia, the two parts of Bosnia and now Kosovo. Ambassador Gelbard stated in early spring 1998 that KLA/UCK was a terrorist organization - after which the US supported it. Remember when ambassador Holbrooke negotiated a deal in October with Milosevic about a civilian OSCE mission ? 70% of them had military background, consistent rumours indicate that several were intelligence people - and NATO established itself in Macedonia. So, while the West may not have much reason to trust Milosevic - does he, or Yugoslavia, have more reason to trust the West?
Lack of proportion President Clinton, in his speech of March 19, mentioned the event in Racak where some forty bodies were found and said about NATO's future airstrikes that "hesitance is a licence to kill." It did not bother him that NATO later killed 50 times more innocent people in Serbia in what was called 'collateral damage' - neither did it seem to bother the media much.
I don't think everything is morally OK with NATO. But we did stop unspeakable atrocities? Well, today between 60.000 and 80.000 people die unnecessarily around the world because the international community has still not provided clean water, houses, medicare, and other basic means for basic need satisfaction for all to just live. Study the annual UNDP Human Development Report, just out these days...It's rapidly becoming a more and more inhuman world. When shall Western leaders devote themselves as energetically to real humanitarian problems as they do to NATO-constructed crisis?
Ask yourself whether NATO's bombing and subsequent occupation could have been done against any other nation in today's Europe. Whether any other country than Yugoslavia and any other people but Serbs is so despised?
The plight of the Albanian refugees is in focus, but how well and how extensive did media cover that of the Serbs, Goranis, Montenegrin, Turks and Gypsies in Kosovo? The refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania entered our living rooms - but did the human suffering of people living in and fleeing to bombed-out Yugoslavia?
Recent Albanian extremist violence against Serbs is reported with 'understanding,' presented as (justifiable) revenge for what Serb police, military and paramilitary units did. But the media which told the story this way, never 'explained' that Serb ethnic cleansing after NATO started bombing could be 'understood' as (justifiable) anger at what THEY saw as the destruction of their entire country commissioned or demanded - as it was - by moderate as well as extremist Kosovo-Albanians.
Everybody knows that humanitarian aid should be based on needs only. But people living in Yugoslavia shall not receive any assistance 'as long as Milosevic is at the helmet.' One wonders whether the international human rights community is on collective holiday? Since the early 1990s, Serb human and minority rights were never cared for to the extent e.g. Croatian, Bosniak and Albanian rights were.
In social science, stereotyping can be defined as 'a one-sided, exaggerated and normally prejudicial view of a group, tribe or class of people, and is usually associated with racism and sexism.' Stereotypes are often resistant to change or correction from countervailing evidence, because they create a sense of social solidarity. Is it so unlikely that the United States and NATO did just a bit of stereotyping to maintain alliance credibility and solidarity?
Authoritarian politics undermining international democracy. NATO now has a near-monopoly on conflict-management. The UN, the EU, singlegovernments in the region, OSCE and NGOs went out of the region when NATO went in. No NATO government declared war, no parliaments voted about participation in the campaign. (In contrast, the 'dictatorship's parliament in Belgrade debated both the Rambouillet and the G8 plan). None of the democracies in NATO dared challenge the near-total US military and political dominance in this operation or that of the "Quint" - the five biggest NATO leaders. President Clinton violated the War Powers Act; no non-NATO country was consulted when NATO chopped up Kosovo in 'peacekeeping' zones; numerous national and international laws and human rights were violated by NATO decision-makers - impunity now established as a norm for them. Why is this important? Because all these facts are outcomes of moral choices.
From the perspective of world democracy it is a huge setback that the United Nations is now an organisation that is invited to 'endorse' NATO action rather than serve as the body that expresses the will of the international community - all of it. Decisions are increasingly debated and made in less transparent forums such as G7, the Contact group, Davos and, who knows - Bilderberg - and crisis management conducted on cellular phones. The G7 in effect wrote UN SC Resolution 1244.
The term 'international community' was part of the propaganda. In fact, it signifies some ten state leaders and foreign ministers, not even all 19 NATO members. IF the international community were truly the actor here, why was the United Nations - with ten times more members than NATO - not the central discussion forum, the central actor, the central negotiator, why is the present mission not established and run by the UN?
Rhetorics only compounded this slide towards authoritarianism: Suddenly, when the West had no need for Milosevic, he was called a dictator, a serial ethnic cleanser etc. and there is now a draft in the US to designate Yugoslavia status as a terrorist state. Repeatedly, phrases were used like: 'The US has stated...' or 'We have made it abundantly clear that...' - meaning that everybody else has to agree. 'Milosevic knows what he has to do, and he knows which number to call if he wants bombs to stop.' 'These conditions must be met before we will even consider stopping the bombing.' The stronger sets the rule of the game, to humiliate.
Lack of transparency - why the Rambouillet texts are not published Thus, NATO early defined itself as an organisation that does not negotiate. Rambouillet - being a cheap media-diplomatic manipulation - was a dictate (as everybody who cared to read it knows). The Rambouillet texts - the original, the expanded and the Yugoslav government's - are undoubtedly the single most important historical documents explaining why NATO went to war, why it is in the Balkans and what is supposed to happen in the future there. But did any NATO government translate and publish it, perhaps with an introduction on how the 'negotiations' were conducted? Would it not be reasonable to make it available to citizens - as ministries make so many other treaty texts available as part of their public information policy? Why not give citizens a chance to judge the issues: What's in the texts? Was there a peace treaty? Was it fair play? Was it fair to start bombing because Belgrade said no?
NATO's own premises violated. What indisputably started out as bombing 'because they won't sign the Rambouillet Accord' was rapidly turned into 'we bomb because Mr. Milosevic had a plan of ethnic cleansing.' Gone was any mention of the indisputable fact that a civil war had raged in the province for 13 months, a war that broke out only when KLA surfaced.
Conspicuously, virtually all mass graves now found in the Kosovo province are products of atrocities committed AFTER March 24 when NATO started bombing. Contrary to what Western leaders tell us, eager as they are to justify their Balkan bombing blunder, this does not prove that NATO stopped an already ongoing mass expulsion or genocide.
Contrary to what NATO told the world, few today believe that the bombing of Yugoslavia was not a violation of the NATO charter and not an aggression. (Many seem to think that that is OK given the monstrous policies of the Belgrade regime). Few believe that there is more stability in Europe today than before March 24. Few believe that it is right to kill so many innocent civilians and that NATO was not at war. Hard evidence also tell that we were fooled by NATO when its spin doctors presented fantastic military successes stories. Funnily enough, many still cling to the belief that NATO did not release a humanitarian catastrophe but, rather, stopped one.
An increasingly 'politically correct' human rights activism It is a simple ethical principle in both conflict-resolution and human rights work to recognise ALL parties' human suffering and rights, recognise ALL violations no matter the perpetrator and speak up against them! However, MORE people died and were wounded in Yugoslavia under NATO's bombs than during the 13-month war between Yugoslav/Serb units and KLA. The destruction of future possibilities for 11 million in FRY achieved - and will achieve - much less attention than that of 800.000 Albanians who are rapidly returning to the Kosovo province. The 650.00+ refugees in Serbia and Montenegro - victims of ethnic cleansing elsewhere since 1995 - have attracted disproportionately little media attention.
The international human rights community has been rightfully attentive to the human rights violations against the Kosovo-Albanians and woefully ignorant (with exceptions such as Amnesty International and the British Helsinki Human Rights Group) about the human rights of Serbs everywhere, including Kosovo. Furthermore, it is particularly deplorable that the human rights community, particularly in the United States and other NATO countries, has had no more to say about NATO's flagrant, systematic - and much larger - human rights violations. Throughout the Balkan crisis, we have seen human rights organisations and advocates moving dangerously near to 'political correctness' either by a) speaking about politics and advocating bombing and political measures outside their field of expertise, b) keeping silent about certain groups' human rights that did not fit into the conflict-management of the West, or c) keeping equally silent about thehuman rights violations of NATO.
The intellectual's moral imperative is to challenge power. I am sure that some will say, 'pro-Serb arguments!' and believe they have said something significant. But this is to reduce complex matters to the equally moralising as irrelevant question (for conflict-resolution), Which side are you on? It SHOULD be intellectually possible to imagine that there can be different diagnoses, different prognoses and different types of treatment in conflict-management and peacekeeping. It should be part of liberal democracy to have them presented also when the powers that be do not consider them politically correct. So you may wonder why those who shaped, promoted and legitimated the West's unethical conflict (mis)management in the Balkans since 1990 were never accused of being 'pro-Croat' or 'pro-Muslim' or 'pro-Albanian.
In a violent world and a violence-prone time like ours, I do not think that politically correct peace research is peace research. Perhaps, in this case, it was particularly difficult to strive for analytical objectivity because NATO's project was spearheaded by statesmen and ministers who once upon a time were socialists, peace and anti-NATO activists, liberals and social democrats - some still professing to be. In short, from traditions rather critical to militarist policies.
The relevant question remains how we can learn to approach conflicts as complex matters encompassing elements of history, structures, culture and psychology that must be applied specifically to each case. The intellectual and moral challenge remains how to handle conflicts with the least violence possible.
[Editor's Note: Dr. Jan Oberg is the Director of the Transnational Foundation For Peace and Future Research. He heads the Conflict-Mitigation team to the Balkans and Georgia. He may be reached at: Vegagatan 25, S - 224 57 Lund, Sweden. Phone +46-46-145909 (0900-1100) Fax +46-46-144512. E-mail tff@transnational.org (http://www.transnational.org)]
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PRISTINA, Yugoslavia - Two paintings are gone. A desk is missing. And many books have been taken, although, to Kadri Metai's surprise, some volumes are still on their shelves, almost as he left them. As the philosophy professor sits in his old office at the University of Pristina, eight years after he and all other ethnic Albanians on the faculty were summarily fired by Serbian authorities, he finds taking stock of the room's contents not a difficult task. Taking stock of his emotions, however, is another matter.
"We are glad to be back," he says. "But we have all suffered so much, I am not sure I know how to be happy."
With the United Nations now in charge in Kosovo, ethnic-Albanian academics are reclaiming their offices at the university. The institution had been an Albanian-language university until 1991, when Serbian authorities, as part of a drive to tighten control of Kosovo, fired all ethnic Albanians on the faculty, banned the use of the Albanian language at the university, and turned it into a Serbian institution.
In the years that followed, two parallel universities operated here: the University of Pristina and a shadow institution, an underground Albanian-language university, for which professors lectured in makeshift classrooms scattered across the city. Some 16,000 students were enrolled in classes offered by the underground university.
For Mr. Metai and his colleagues, the prospect of teaching in an actual classroom again is exciting. And their students are anxious to attend lectures at the university after years of classes in storefronts, garages, and basements.
"We are going to feel like students, real students," says Erlind Kadriu, who is studying medicine. "It will be great."
While the ethnic Albanians eagerly await the start of the new academic year, Serbian professors and students here are filled with anxiety. They have no idea what will become of the university as they have known it for the past eight years.
Serbs have been fleeing Kosovo en masse since early June, when Yugoslav military and security forces were ordered to leave as part of a deal to end the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The bombing was undertaken to halt the brutal repression by Serb forces of ethnic-Albanian civilians in Kosovo, but it triggered an escalation of Serbia's ethnic-cleansing campaign, leaving thousands dead and hundreds of villages destroyed. A half million ethnic Albanians fled Kosovo for refugee camps in Albania, Macedonia, and other countries.
As the refugees flooded back into Kosovo, there were some violent reprisals against Serbs. Two weeks ago, 14 Serbian farmers were killed in what appeared to be a mass execution. Earlier, three Serbs at the University of Pristina -- a professor and two staff members -- were found murdered in a basement washroom on the campus.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 71,000 of Kosovo's 194,000 Serbian residents have left in the past two months. One Serbian professor says that only 10 per cent of the university's 300 Serbian professors and 5,400 Serbian students are still in Kosovo.
"Will there be any Serbs left in September?" asks Zoran Andelkovic, who is the Yugoslav government's top representative here. He questions whether there will be a need for a Serbian-language university.
Most of the Serbian professors and students who remain in Kosovo hope that two of the University of Pristina's six main buildings will be designated for their use.
Ultimately, decisions about who controls the university and how its facilities are used will be made by the United Nations Civil Administration in Kosovo, which has not yet announced any plans for the institution. However, a source within the United Nations mission here who requested anonymity said the prevailing view was that there should be just one university, and that it should be bilingual.
An Austrian academic working to assist the University of Pristina agrees. "It would seem that if the U.N. allowed two universities, it would go against the principle of having people live together," says Wolfgang Benedek, a professor of international law at Graz University and an official of the World University Service, a relief organization. Mr. Benedek recently was in Kosovo as part of a fact-finding mission for the service, which has offered to help the United Nations find a rector for the university.
The Austrian government is providing half a million dollars in aid to help the university open the new year on schedule, and Graz is helping to administer the funds.
Ahmet Geca, who served as vice-rector of the shadow university, favors the one-institution approach, although his reasons for doing so are not quite in sync with the United Nations' belief that the university should serve as a unifying force. "If the Serbs get their own buildings," he says, "they will just use them for propaganda against us."
But Mr. Geca worries about how difficult it will now be for ethnic-Albanian professors and students to share facilities with their Serbian counterparts. He says resentment of the Serbian academics runs deep. "The Serbian professors didn't raise their voices in concern for our intellectuals," he says.
An agreement reached in 1997 to return some of the university's buildings to the ethnic Albanians was never fully carried out. Only two of the four buildings that were slated to be turned over ever changed hands. Mr. Andelkovic, the Yugoslav official, says he believes the terms of that agreement are still valid. Mr. Geca says ethnic Albanians should have the use of all of the university's buildings.
It is not clear how many ethnic-Albanian academics were killed by Serbian police and paramilitary forces. Five ethnic-Albanian professors are confirmed dead, but Mr. Geca says that, since the bombing ended, he has been able to account for only about 500 of the underground university's 1,500 full and part-time faculty members.
One of the dead professors is Haidiu Berisha, of the Technical Faculty, who was killed in March along with 24 members of his family. His death was doubly hard for Fevzi Berisha, who lost both a colleague and a cousin. But he says he is willing to try to work with Serbs.
With some of his colleagues, Mr. Berisha, a mathematics professor, is conducting an equipment inventory in the Technical Faculty building, which was returned to the ethnic Albanians last year but subsequently looted. All the computers are gone. Doors, desks, and chairs are broken. Evidence suggests that Serb forces used the building as a headquarters: Empty liquor bottles, dirty coffee cups, and half-eaten tins of meat litter the floor.
"We used to work with them," he says of the Serbian academics. "They were welcome here last year, but they never came because they feel guilty about the last 10 years. I just don't know how I will react when I see them."
Likewise, Hamdi Daci, an English professor, says Serbs are welcome in the Faculty of Philology building -- although it doesn't look that way. In June, a statue of Vuk Karadic, a Serbian writer, that stood in front of the building was torn down. It now lies on the ground.
Mr. Daci doesn't miss the statue, which he says Serbs erected several years ago just to irritate ethnic Albanians. "It was so ugly, so huge, so stupid," he says.
But he does think he may someday regret not reaching out to his Serbian colleagues, because he knows what it feels like when your co-workers do nothing as you are pushed out the door.
"Somewhere down the line, I think I will think that I -- we -- should have done something so they would have stayed," says Mr. Daci. "But after all that has happened, you can't now expect from us anything other than silence, at least for a while."
The ethnic-Albanian students seem much less inclined to compromise. "I would build them a university with my own hands so I don't have to go to school with them," says Learta Gunga, a law student, whose home here was looted by Serbs. "I don't ever want to have to hear Serbian again."
The Serbian symbol, a cross with a Cyrillic "S" in each quadrant, was spray-painted on the wall of the apartment Ms. Gunga shares with her mother, Drita, a history professor. The Serbs, says the mother, "destroyed my daughter's childhood, and filled her with such hate. That is what I resent most."
Many ethnic-Albanian students want nothing to do with their Serbian counterparts, and while they disapprove of the revenge killings, they say the Serbs should have a taste of their own medicine.
"Let them go to school in basements like we did; let them suffer like we did," says Baton Kelmendi. "Why should they have special buildings?"
During the ethnic-cleansing campaign, Mr. Kelmendi, his father, and an uncle were taken off a refugee-filled bus by Serbian troops. They were forced to lie on the ground, guns to their necks, for two hours, while money was collected from the other passengers to secure their release.
"So, when I see these Serbian students," says Mr. Kelmendi, "how am I supposed to know it wasn't their father, uncle, or brother who held that gun to my neck?"
Serbian students seem no more anxious to share the university's facilities than do their ethnic-Albanian counterparts.
"After all that has happened, it just does not seem possible," says Milan Dopudja. "Separate universities are the best solution.
"If we are mixed," he adds, the Serbs "will be swallowed."
Mr. Dopudja says he is angry with Serbs who have fled Kosovo, even though he understands their fear. He, too, is contemplating leaving for Serbia and starting his education over.
"The Serbs' leaving is like dominoes," he says. "You can't reverse it."
The Serbian professors who remain here hope that some of their Serbian colleagues will return so that they might offer some sort of program for Serbian students.
"I am sad that my colleagues left, but I am also angry -- it puts so much pressure on the rest of us," says Gojko Savic, a biology professor. He says he stayed because he has worked hard to earn the comfortable home where he and his wife live. Tensions in Kosovo led them to send their three children to stay with relatives in Serbia.
The Serbian professors reside in a development of semidetached homes with small balconies. The complex was built for them by the Yugoslav government, but it is now guarded by NATO soldiers. The professors rarely venture out.
Vojislav Trajvovic, a professor of medicine, was going to his post at the university hospital daily until mid-July, when his ethnic-Albanian colleagues told him they feared for his safety. He says he was never threatened at the hospital, but the situation was uncomfortable.
"We are afraid to speak Serbian," he says. "I speak Albanian out on the street, but they know I'm a Serb. I'm worried about the extremists."
The Serbian professors now spend their days reading, watching television, and chatting with one another.
"We are like hostages in a ghetto," says Bozo Radovic, a professor of agriculture. "We are afraid to leave. They will kill us."
Mr. Radovic says he isn't surprised that the ethnic-Albanian academics are not concerned about his plight, given the animosity between the two groups.
"I don't want to work with them, and they don't want to work with me," he says. "I don't think well of them, and they don't think well of me. What would be the point of working together?"
Mr. Radovic says higher education for Serbs in Kosovo is doomed, because there will not be enough students or professors.
"This," he says, "is an embarrassing time to be a Serb."
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MANCHESTER, New Hampshire - General Wesley Clark, the U.S./NATO commander who led NATO troops in the destruction of Kosovo and agressively-moving civilian refugees, has been fired as NATO's chief representative from the U.S. by President Clinton.
While much talk about his admirable service record is coming from the White House, many in the defense community are saying publicly that he was let go as pay-back for his opposition to Clinton's "gradualist" approach during the war. Clark was often quoted as being critical of the administration's handling of the war, urging more intense bombing of the obstensively military targets inside Serbia.
General Joseph Ralston is to be promoted from his No. 2 position at the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the NATO position. He was in line to succeed Gen. John Shalikashvili as chairman of the Joint Chiefs when he admitted in June 1997 that he had had an affair 13 years earlier.
This effectively disqualified him for the job, since many believed that a double standard was being used to measure high-ranking, male military officers. Lt. Kelly Flinn, a female Air Force bomber pilot, was charged with adultery, lying and disobedience for having an affair while in the service. She avoided a court-martial by taking a general discharge.
Ralston is strongly supported by Defense Secretary William Cohen, who stood by Ralston during the previous controversy.
[Editor's Note: Stephen Abbott is Coordinator, The Kosovo Facts Project, Manchester, NH.]
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WASHINGTON - Amidst the burning "ruins" of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, there may be a "silver lining" after all. Somebody keeps pulling the "rabbit" out of the hat for China. On Friday, for example, the Clinton White House offered and the Communist Chinese government in Beijing agreed to accept payment of $4.5 million from U.S. taxpayers to compensate the victims of NATO's May 7th bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia.
For the Communist Chinese, these days, everything seems to be "coming up roses" for them. Never mind that Beijing carries out the same inhumane "atrocities" as Slobodan Milosevic is now famous for, but the ChiComs still wear the "crown" and "robe" for the "Most Favored Nation", while Milosevic has to settle for "free bombing" everyday. Of course there may not be enough "ammunition" to take care of China. Some guys have all the luck!
Now that a (supposedly) wayward missile has found its way to the Chinese Embassy, blasting it apart, killing some unsuspecting people inside, the United States owes the Chinese an "apology" and "anything" else they may want or expect. And to think this opportunity just "fell" out of the sky...well it did "literally" fall out of the sky, in the form of a nasty old bomb!
The timing couldn't have been more perfect had it been planned! Not only are the Chinese expecting a free ride...they want the whole "amusement" park! And oh yeah, they don't want just a free "pass" they want a "lifelong" membership!
Not only do they want their thievery overlooked, but they want the thief exonerated as well. Boy the Chinese drive a hard bargain! They are ordering a tall "order" off of the menu, and the entree is the big "daddy rabbit!"
In 1995 during the campaigning for re-election, Bill Clinton left a trail of "rhetoric" more than a mile long, telling the American citizens that for the first time in history there was not "one" missile pointed at the United States, not "one" missile" pointed at a child in America, (well he may have been a little truthful there...considering there is not just "one" missile pointed our way..but hundreds!) and everyone could go to sleep at night feeling safe. Jim Jones could talk up a good "sell" as well.
High tech missiles have been "down sized" from about 10 feet long to 2 and a half feet long making them easier to load onto a large missile. And weighing far less. In fact about 10 can be launched at one time to invade 10 cities, causing great casualties!
The "Hiroshima" bomb wiped out about 75,000 people at one time where the latest technology affords the ability to wipe out about 750,000 people at one launching! Besides missiles won't have far to travel...since the Long Beach Naval base was handed over for a ChiCom shipyard.
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