[News] The Real Story Behind Kosovo's Independence

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The Real Story Behind Kosovo's Independence

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16612

February 25, 2008 By Jeremy Scahill
Source: <http://www.alternet.org/story/77546/>AlterNet


News Flash: The Bush administration acknowledges there is a such 
thing as international law.



But, predictably, it is not being invoked to address the US prison 
camps at Guantanamo, the wide use of torture, the invasion and 
occupation of sovereign countries, the extraordinary rendition 
program. No, it is being thrown out forcefully as a condemnation of 
the Serbian government in the wake of Thursday's attack by protesters 
on the US embassy in Belgrade following the Bush administration's 
swift recognition of the declaration of independence by the southern 
Serbian province of Kosovo. Some 1,000 protesters broke away from a 
largely non-violent mass demonstration in downtown Belgrade and 
targeted the embassy. Some protesters actually made it into the 
compound, setting a fire and tearing down the American flag.



"I'm outraged by the mob attack against the U.S. embassy in 
Belgrade," fumed Zalmay Khalilzad,the US Ambassador to the United 
Nations. "The embassy is sovereign US territory. The government of 
Serbia has a responsibility under international law to protect 
diplomatic facilities, particularly embassies." His comments were 
echoed by a virtual who's who of the Bill Clinton administration. 
People like Jamie Rubin, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's 
deputy, one of the main architects of US policy toward Serbia. "It is 
sovereign territory of the United States under international law," 
Rubin declared. "For Serbia to allow these protesters to break 
windows, break into the American Embassy, is a pretty dramatic sign." 
Hillary Clinton, whose husband orchestrated and ran the 78-day NATO 
bombing of Serbia in 1999, said, "I would be moving very aggressively 
to hold the Serbian government responsible with their security forces 
to protect our embassy. Under international law they should be doing that."



There are two major issues here. One is the situation in Kosovo 
itself (which we'll get to in a moment), but the other is the attack 
on the US embassy. Yes, the Serbian government had an obligation to 
prevent the embassy from being torched and ransacked. If there was 
complicity by the Serbian police or authorities in allowing it to be 
attacked, that is a serious issue. But the US has little moral 
authority not just in invoking international law (which it only does 
when it benefits Washington's agenda) but in invoking international 
law when speaking about attacks on embassies in Belgrade.



Perhaps the greatest crime against any embassy in the history of 
Yugoslavia was committed not by evil Serb protesters, but by the 
United States military.



On May 7, 1999, at the height of the 78 day US-led NATO bombing of 
Yugoslavia, the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing 
three Chinese citizens, two of them journalists, and wounding 20 
others. The Clinton administration later said that the bombing was 
the result of faulty maps provided by the CIA (Sound familiar?). 
Beijing rejected that explanation and alleged it was deliberate. 
Eventually, under strong pressure from China, the US apologized and 
paid $28 million in compensation to the victims' families. If the US 
was serious about international law and the protection of embassies, 
those responsible for that bombing would have been tried at the Hague 
along with other alleged war criminals. But "war criminal" is a 
designation for the losers of US-fueled wars, not bombers sent by 
Washington to drop humanitarian munitions on "sovereign territory."



Beyond the obvious hypocrisy of the US condemnations of Serbia and 
the sudden admission that international law exists, the Kosovo story 
is an important one in the context of the current election campaign 
in the United States. Perhaps more than any other international 
conflict, Yugoslavia was the defining foreign policy of President 
Bill Clinton's time in power. Under his rule, the nation of 
Yugoslavia was destroyed, dismantled and chopped into ethnically pure 
para-states. President Bush's immediate recognition of Kosovo as an 
independent nation was the icing on the cake of destruction of 
Yugoslavia and one which was enthusiastically embraced by Hillary 
Clinton. "I've supported the independence of Kosovo because I think 
it is imperative that in the heart of Europe we continue to promote 
independence and democracy," Clinton said at the recent Democratic 
debate in Austin, Texas.



A few days before the attack on the US embassy in Belgrade, Clinton 
released a Molotov cocktail statement praising the declaration of 
independence. In it, she referred to Kosovo by the Albanian "Kosova" 
and said independence "will allow the people of Kosova to finally 
live in their own democratic state. It will allow Kosova and Serbia 
to finally put a difficult chapter in their history behind them and 
to move forward." She added, "I want to underscore the need to avoid 
any violence or provocations in the days and weeks ahead." As 
seasoned observers of Serbian politics know, there were few things 
the US could have done to add fuel to the rage in Serbia over the 
declaration of independence -- "provocations" if you will -- than to 
have a political leader named Clinton issue a statement praising 
independence and using the Albanian name for Kosovo.



On the campaign trail, the Clinton camp has held up Kosovo as a 
successful model for how to conduct US foreign policy and Clinton 
criticized Bush for taking "so long for us to reach this historic juncture."



Perhaps a little of that history is in order. If Kosovo is her idea 
of solid US foreign policy, it speaks volumes to what kind of 
president she would be. The reality is that there are striking 
similarities between the Clinton approach to Kosovo and the Bush 
approach to Iraq.



On March 24, 1999, President Bill Clinton began an 11-week bombing 
campaign against Yugoslavia. Like Bush with Iraq, Clinton had no UN 
mandate (he used NATO) and his so-called "diplomacy" to avert the 
possibility of bombing leading up to the attacks was insincere and a 
set-up from the jump. Just like Bush with Iraq.



A month before the bombing began, the Clinton administration issued 
an ultimatum to President Slobodan Milosevic, which he had to either 
accept unconditionally or face bombing. Known as the Rambouillet 
accord, it was a document that no sovereign country would have 
accepted. It contained a provision that would have guaranteed US and 
NATO forces "free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access 
throughout" all of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo. It also sought to 
immunize those occupation forces "from any form of arrest, 
investigation, or detention by the authorities in [Yugoslavia]," as 
well as grant the occupiers "the use of airports, roads, rails and 
ports without payment." Additionally, Milosevic was told he would 
have to "grant all telecommunications services, including broadcast 
services, needed for the Operation, as determined by NATO." Similar 
to Bush's Iraq plan years later, Rambouillet mandated that the 
economy of Kosovo "shall function in accordance with free market principles."



What Milosevic was actually asked to sign is never discussed. That it 
would have effectively meant the end of the sovereignty of the nation 
was a non-story. The dominant narrative for the past nine years, 
repeated this week by William Cohen, Clinton's defense secretary at 
the time of the bombing, is this: "We tried to achieve a peaceful 
resolution of what was taking place in Kosovo. And Slobodan Milosevic 
refused." Refused peace? More like he unwisely refused one of Don 
Corleone's famous offers. Washington knew he would reject it, but had 
to give the appearance of diplomacy for international "legitimacy."



So the humanitarian bombs rained down on Serbia. Among the missions: 
the bombing of the studios of Radio Television Serbia where an 
airstrike killed 16 media workers; the cluster bombing of a Nis 
marketplace, shredding human beings into meat; the deliberate 
targeting of a civilian passenger train; the use of depleted uranium 
munitions; and the targeting of petrochemical plants, causing toxic 
chemical waste to pour into the Danube River. Also, the bombing of 
Albanian refugees, ostensibly the people being protected by the U.S.



Similar to Bush's allegations about Iraqi WMDs in the lead up to the 
US invasion, in 1999 Clinton administration officials also delivered 
stunning allegations about the level of brutality present in Kosovo 
as part of the propaganda campaign. "We've now seen about 100,000 
military-aged men missing ....They may have been murdered," Cohen 
said five weeks into the bombing. He said that up to 4,600 Kosovo men 
had been executed, adding, "I suspect it's far higher than that." 
Those numbers were flat out false. Eventually the estimates were 
scaled back dramatically, as Justin Raimondo pointed out recently in 
his column on <http://antiwar.com/>Antiwar.com, from 100,000 to 
50,000 to 10,000 and "at that point the War Party stopped talking 
numbers altogether and just celebrated the glorious victory of 
'humanitarian intervention.'" As it turned out "there was no 
'genocide' -- the International Tribunal itself reported that just 
over 2,000 bodies were recovered from postwar Kosovo, including 
Serbs, Roma, and Kosovars, all victims of the vicious civil war in 
which we intervened on the side of the latter. The whole fantastic 
story of another 'holocaust' in the middle of Europe was a fraud," 
according to Raimondo.



Following the NATO invasion of Kosovo in June of 1999, the US and its 
allies stood by as the Albanian mafia and gangs of criminals and 
paramilitaries spread out across the province and systematically 
cleansed Kosovo of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Romas and other 
ethnic minorities. They burned down houses, businesses and churches 
and implemented a shocking campaign to forcibly expel non-Albanians 
from the province. Meanwhile, the US worked closely with the Kosovo 
Liberation Army and backed the rise of war criminals to the highest 
levels of power in Kosovo. Today, Kosovo has become a hub for human 
trafficking, organized crime and narcosmuggling. In short, it is a 
mafia state. Is this the "democracy" Hillary Clinton speaks of 
"promoting" in "the heart" of Europe?



It didn't take long for the US to begin construction of a massive US 
military base, Camp Bondsteel, which conveniently is located in an 
area of tremendous geopolitical interest to Washington. (Among its 
most bizarre facilities, Bondsteel now offers classes at the Laura 
Bush education center, as well as massages from Thai women and all 
the multinational junk food you could (n)ever wish for). In November 
2005, Alvaro Gil-Robles, the human rights envoy of the Council of 
Europe, described Bondsteel as a "smaller version of Guantanamo." Oh, 
and Bondsteel was constructed by former Halliburton subsidiary KBR.



Herein lies an interesting point. The Serbian government is largely 
oriented toward Europe, not the US. The country's prime minister, 
Vojislav Kostunica, is a conservative isolationist who is not 
enthusiastic about a US military base on Serbian soil any more than 
Cuba is about Gitmo. He charged that, in recognizing Kosovo, 
Washington was "ready to unscrupulously and violently jeopardize 
international order for the sake of its own military interests." To 
the would-be independent Kosovo government, however, Bondsteel is no problem.



Russia and a few other nations are fighting the recognition of Kosovo 
as an independent nation, but that is unlikely to succeed. Still, 
this action will undoubtedly reverberate for years to come. "We have 
in Serbia a situation in which the U.S. has forced an action --the 
proclamation of independence by the Kosovo Albanians -- that is in 
clear violation of the most fundamental principles of international 
law after World War II," argues Robert Hayden, Director of the Center 
for Russian and East European Studies at the University of 
Pittsburgh. "Borders cannot be changed by force and without consent 
-- that principle was actually the main stated reason for the 1991 
U.S. attack on Iraq."



And this brings us full circle. International law matters only when 
it is convenient for the US. So too are the cries for "humanitarian 
interventions." And despite the extremism of the Bush administration, 
this is hardly a uniquely Republican phenomenon. In a just world, 
there would be a humanitarian intervention against the US occupation 
of Iraq -- with its indiscriminate killings of civilians, torture 
chambers and widespread human rights violations. There certainly 
would have been such an intervention during the bipartisan slaughter, 
through bombs and sanctions, of Iraq's people over the past 18 years. 
But that's what you get when the cops and judges and prosecutors are 
the criminals. US policy has always operated on a worthy victim, 
unworthy victim system that is almost never primarily about saving 
the victims. Humanitarianism is the publicly offered justification 
for the action, seldom, if ever, the primary motivation. With Iraq, 
Bush wheeled out the humanitarian justification for the 
occupation--Saddam's brutality -- only after the WMD lies were 
thoroughly debunked. In Yugoslavia, Clinton used it right out of the 
gates. In both cases, it rang insincere.



If you are a victim who happens to share a common geography with US 
interests, international law is on your side as long as it is 
convenient. If not, well, tough. The UN is just a debate club anyway. 
Just ask the tens of thousands of Kurds who were slaughtered by 
Turkey with weapons sold to them by the Clinton administration during 
the 1990s. Or the Palestinians who live under the brutality of 
Israel's occupation. In some cases, the "victims" allegedly being 
protected by the US actually get bombed themselves, as was the case 
with President Clinton's "humanitarian" bombings of the north and 
south of Iraq once every three days in the late 1990s.



In the bigger picture, the Bush administration's quick recognition of 
an independent Kosovo has given us a powerful reminder of a fact that 
is too often overlooked these days: empire is bipartisan, as are the 
tactics and rhetoric and bombs used to defend and expand it.



Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for 
the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive 
time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin 
Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of 
Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.




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