THE KLA: HOW THE US SET THE STAGE FOR AN ALLIANCE STRAIGHT OUT OF SOMALIA
Dr. Jai Maharaj
http://www.flex.com/~jai/posts.html
HOW THE U.S. SET THE STAGE FOR AN ALLIANCE WITH A
COUNTRY AND LIBERATION MOVEMENT STRAIGHT OUT OF SOMALIA
By Marc Carnegie
American Spectator
June 1999
It's hard to know what to say about the war on
Yugoslavia that NATO hasn't already said itself. In any
given press conference from allied spokesman Jamie
Shea, he'll say that we're winning the war and that
Slobodan Milosevic has more troops than ever in Kosovo,
that we're making every effort to minimize civilian
deaths and that NATO missiles have just increased the
number of civilian deaths, that we don't support Jesse
Jackson's efforts to release the U.S. soldiers and that
we're very glad Jesse Jackson has succeeded in
releasing the soldiers, that the point of continuing
the bombardment is to stop Albanians from being forced
out of Kosovo and that more Albanians have been forced
out of Kosovo. It's just like in those sensitive unisex
modern school games when the teacher refuses to
"privilege" any boy/girl by calling him/her the
"winner": we're all winners. Just been blown up by an
errant cruise missile? It's okay--NATO's determined to
keep your death to a minimum.
Of course there's one thing that Jamie Shea isn't so
keen to talk about, and that's what happens to Kosovo
and Albania after NATO finally finishes winning. For
once, you can see his point. Kosovo has already been
implanted with thousands of land mines that will make
the "return" of the Albanians nearly as nightmarish as
their departure, not to mention that if they get
through the minefields there won't be much left to
return to. The terrorists from the Kosovo Liberation
Army will be armed to the teeth and perhaps a bit
anxious for revenge. Serbia will be even more
impoverished and unstable, not least by having lost
Kosovo--home to much of its precious mineral reserves.
And then there is Albania. Already one of the poorest
nations in the world, the influx of refugees that even
Jamie Shea admits was the result of the NATO bombing
has left the nation teetering on the verge of collapse.
The remarkable thing is that much of the crisis in
Kosovo is a direct result of the West's intentional
meddling in Albania three years ago. If the Clinton
administration had not bowed to European pressure to
let the pro-Western government of then-President Sali
Berisha fall, the KLA wouldn't have been able to arm
itself enough to commit the atrocities that Milosevic
was trying to punish it for.
Until two years ago political violence in Kosovo was
minimal, despite the Clinton administration's cynical
decision to strike any mention of Kosovo from the
Dayton peace agreement on Bosnia in its rush to cut a
deal with Milosevic--whom Clinton now calls a latter-
day Hitler (but whom Dayton negotiator Richard
Holbrooke described just last year as "a man we can do
business with"). It has been consistently ignored, but
the Kosovar Albanians themselves began the terrorism
long before Milosevic came to power. According to
Branka Magas in The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking
the Break-Up 1980-92, Albanian resistance began as
early as April 1981, just after the death of Tito.
Dissident Albanians encouraged violence against the
Serbs, including the damaging of their factories. Even
so, there were but a handful of political killings in
Kosovo every year; atrocious, but far from a
slaughterhouse.
There are differing accounts of just when the KLA was
formed--some put it in 1981 or 1982, others as late as
1996--but none disputes that even two years ago it was
nothing more than a loose band of several hundred
guerrilla misfits, financed by Albanian control over
the flow of heroin into Hungary, Italy, and elsewhere.
The standard explanation of their transformation into a
highly-organized force of some 30,000 troops--with AK-
47's, grenade launchers, and more--is that "volunteers"
swelled the ranks in reaction to Milosevic's
abominations.
In fact they began escalating the bloodshed in Kosovo
in 1997 after beginning to acquire those weapons from
Albania, where Berisha had been ousted with the tacit
agreement of the Clinton administration and the active
participation of the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Berisha had been a Marxist when the country was ruled
by Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha. After the fall of
the Iron Curtain, however, he became a committed pro-
Westerner and Albania's first post-Soviet president.
The transition to a free market was not easier than
elsewhere, but Albania was a kind of limited success.
Berisha was fond of boasting that his nation had "more
Mercedes per capita" than other countries behind the
old Iron Curtain, and while everyone got the joke--
Albania is an international bazaar for stolen cars--the
European Union was sufficiently impressed with Tirana's
progress to give it more financial aid than any other
nation in Eastern Europe.
But much of the effect of that aid was counteracted by
Clinton's decision, as part of the appeasement of
Milosevic, to lift sanctions against Serbia. The move
weakened Berisha by damaging the economy, drying up
crucial revenues for the well-organized fuel smugglers
in Albania's nascent free market. The EU was giving
money; the U.S. was effectively taking it away.
Even so, in its 1996 Albania report, Clinton's State
Department hailed the success of its economy and
democracy. Business was good, and human-rights abuses
were virtually non-existent. There were "no reports of
politically motivated disappearances," the report said,
noting that there had been but one killing in police
custody.
But when Berisha was re-elected in May 1996, the OSCE,
which monitored the elections, said the polling had
been fraudulent and backed calls from the socialist
opposition for the vote to be nullified. (And this
despite the OSCE's own declaration that "the lawfulness
of the newly elected Albanian Parliament cannot be
questioned.") International observers at the elections
testified that they had taken place in peaceful and
mostly acceptable circumstances.
The OSCE charges helped reinforce the geographical,
political, and ethnic divide that Albania has in common
with many nations--in this case between the pro-Berisha
Ghegs in the north and the socialist-leaning southern
Tosks. The two do not much like each other, and at the
extreme ends of their different dialects cannot even
understand each other. The Kosovar Albanians are close
to the Ghegs, but until very recently even Berisha did
not publicly support the KLA. The Tosks in general do
not like them.
The OSCE's claims further heightened the instability
and unrest. To cope with the problem, Berisha made the
regrettable decision to begin distributing arms to the
populace, many of which quickly enough found their way
to the KLA either directly or via the black market.
Not surprisingly, claims of human-rights abuses then
started to become widespread. Despite just getting a
clean bill of health in the State Department report,
Albania came to be seen in Washington as a failing
project. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the
Clinton administration refused to fight the OSCE claims
and withdrew its support for Berisha.
That left him in a jam, and when some real fraud did
come around (in the form of a massive pyramid scheme
that wiped out thousands of eager new capitalists),
Albania erupted. More than 1,000 people were killed in
the ensuing anarchy, and the nation's weapons depots
and arsenals were looted. New elections were held in
1997, amid an atmosphere of total chaos. Berisha was
not allowed to campaign in the south, international
observers had to be escorted by tanks and armored
personnel carriers, and gun-toting goons manned the
polling stations. Nevertheless, the OSCE declared the
elections valid. Berisha was toppled, and the
socialists came to power.
They halted the direct flow of arms to the KLA, whom
they actively disliked. But by then the genie was long
gone from the bottle. In the ensuing 18 months, 3,000
people were killed in Kosovo, some 500 to 600 of them
Serb and Albanian politicians. No one doubts Milosevic
was cracking down, but what the West has repeatedly
ignored is that he had something to crack down on.
Serbs were being gunned down in the streets, while KLA
thugs assassinated those unwilling to join their
murderous ranks.
Those killings, one now needs to be reminded, were
taking place wholly within the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, to which Kosovo belongs. (Even in its
current bombing campaign, NATO still acknowledges that
Kosovo is a part of Yugoslavia.)
Then on January 15 this year --just before the doomed
Rambouillet agreement that the Clinton administration
tried to foist on Milosevic which effectively would
have guaranteed Kosovo's independence from Belgrade--
the U.S.-led NATO forces got a perfectly timed excuse
to take military action: More than 40 Albanians were
allegedly massacred by Serbian security forces in the
Kosovar village of Racak. The Clinton administration's
U.S. representative to the OSCE's human-rights
monitoring operation on the scene declared it a
massacre despite arriving in Racak some 12 hours after
the "Serbian security forces" had departed.
Several major newspapers, including Le Monde and the
Los Angeles Times, have reported that the KLA may have
faked the massacre in order to get NATO to act against
Milosevic, noting that there were no bullet casings or
blood in the trench where the bodies were "discovered."
(A similar fake appears to have been used to seduce
NATO in Bosnia.)
And who was the OSCE official who "validated" the KLA's
claim of a massacre? William Walker, not perhaps
everyone's first choice as "human-rights monitor." As
the quirky but excellent Moscow magazine (published by
U.S. expatriates) the Exile put it, "If William Walker
is not a CIA agent, he's done a very bad job of not
looking like one."
It reported that Walker, a former U.S. diplomat, has
coincidentally spent much of his career in the vicinity
of clandestine rebel operations much like the KLA's. He
was deputy chief of mission in Honduras in the early
1980's when the contra rebels were being formed. He
established the now-infamous operation at El Salvador's
Ilopango air base, which funneled supplies to the
contras in Nicaragua. He was named (but not charged) in
Lawrence Walsh's Iran-contra indictments. He also
served as U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, where "human
rights" were not exactly his burning passion. (When
Salvadoran police slaughtered a half-dozen Jesuit
priests, Walker said: "Management control problems can
exist in these kinds of situations.") The Washington
Post even reported in May 1996 that Walker hosted a
Washington dinner for the 5,000 U.S. troops who fought
clandestinely in El Salvador.
Of course no one could think that Walker is involved in
an undercover U.S. effort to help Marxist rebels backed
by a socialist government the Clinton administration
helped to put in power. But what was a man with William
Walker's record doing there as a human-rights monitor?
One thing is certain: NATO and the Clinton
administration have changed their tune about the KLA.
At the outset of the bombing in late March, spokesman
Jamie Shea regularly said that NATO would not "condone"
the KLA's rebel actions in Kosovo and denied
suggestions that the alliance was effectively going to
war on their side. But by mid-April, Defense Secretary
William Cohen was making the astonishing announcement
that the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia "will shift the
military balance decisively in favor of the KLA."
Now there are open calls on Capitol Hill from both
sides of the aisle for the U.S. to arm the KLA
directly. There is a U.S. human-rights monitor with a
whiff of CIA about him waiting in the wings. More than
a million Kosovars are now refugees. More than 100
innocent civilians have now been killed by NATO. It
doesn't look very good, and, thank you Jamie Shea, it
doesn't look like it has much to do with human rights,
either.
This article also appears in the June 1999 issue of The
American Spectator.
Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used for
the educational purposes of research and open
discussion.
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Posted by: Ditto 6/04/1999 17:12:26 PDT
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Jai Maharaj
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Om Shanti