Special Report Feb. 28, 1999 

Bob Dole and Yugoslavia – Sirius

SIRIUS: The Strategic Issues Research Institute
Benjamin C. Works, Director
Special Report Feb. 28, 1999 

Bob Dole and Yugoslavia

“Concurrent Resolution 150″ and Other Puzzle Pieces
”

“Follow the money trail,” they said during the Watergate Scandal. In June 1986, more than four years before the suspension of Kosovo’s Albanian-Muslim dominated autonomous government, Senator Robert (“Bob”) Dole of Kansas was the Republican Majority leader in the US Senate. On June 18th of that year, he submitted the inflammatory Concurrent Resolution #150, the complete text of which is reprinted below (Exhibit #1), along with Senator Dole’s introductory speech.

Joseph DioGuardi, a conservative Republican of Albanian ancestry from New York’s metropolitan area, sponsored a companion Resolution in the House of Representatives, (“concurrent” means a resolution is deliberately submitted in both houses) to be found elsewhere in the same volume of the Congressional Record for June 18, 1986. (A xerox copy on file.)

The Mafia has an old saying in America; “an honest politician is one who stays bought.” Bob Dole did not become a supporter of Albanian Rights and independence overnight, but it is uncertain to me just when he began to support the dismantling of Yugoslavia. His motives are suspect because at the time of his resolution, the Kosovo autonomous government still operated –it was “closed down” three years later, in 1989– and it was Serbs and other non-Albanian Muslims being forced out of their homes. Note that four years earlier, The New York Times had reported a wide-spread persecution of Kosovo’s Serbs by the local Albanian majority, and that this was continuing at the time of Dole’s proposed concurrent resolution:

The New York Times, Monday, July 12, 1982
Exodus of Serbians Stirs Province in Yugoslavia

“Serbs …. have… been harassed by Albanians and have packed up and left the region. 

”The [Albanian] nationalists have a two-point platform, …first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania. ” 



“Some 57,000 Serbs have left Kosovo in the last decade… The exodus of Serbs is admittedly one of the main problems… in Kosovo…”

By 1989, when Mr. Milosevic consolidated his power in Serbia, another 170,000 Serbs had been chased out of their homes and out of the province by Albanian Muslims –who are as xenophobic and chauvinistic as any people on the face of the Earth. Other minority populations; Catholic Albanians, Turks, Gypsies, Gorani, et al, were also suffering under increasing intimidation and discrimination.

Note, too, that in November of 1986, about four months after he introduced the resolution, the Republicans lost control of the Senate to the Democrats, giving up several key seats, when Dole could not find a “message” to support re-election of several of his colleagues. Even before, the Concurrent Resolution “died” right away in committee, but its repercussions have been felt in Yugoslavia ever since.

By 1986, Mr. Dole was already, I am told by sources on Capitol Hill, under “the spell” of his assistant, Ms. Mira Baratta, reputedly granddaughter of a Croat Ustashe (fascist) officer in World War II. Ms. Baratta, whom at least one Hill staffer refers to as “the Croatian Mata Hari,” was singled out by Senator John Warner for praise in framing and helping in the passage of Senate bill S-21, of July 26, 1995, which sought to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia’s Izetbegovic regime. Izetbegovic founded a fascist “Young Muslim” movement in Bosnia in 1940 and was jailed by the Tito regime in 1946 for four years for perpetrating hate crimes against Bosnia’s Serbs. In 1949, his revived “Young Muslims” staged a revolt and committed substantial anti-Serb violence, for which he and three others narrowly escaped the death penalty.

It was this 1986 document and other actions in the US and elsewhere that caused novelist Dobrica Cosic and others in the Serbian Academy of Sciences to issue their “Memorandum” positing a concerted conspiracy to dismantle Yugoslavia (discussed by Mischa Glenny in “The Fall of Yugoslavia” and other narrative histories of the wars of Former-Yugoslavia). The Dole-DioGuardi resolutions prove the Serb reaction was not mere paranoia. This Dole-sponsored resolution also predates the rise of Slobodan Milosevic by more than a year, and pre-dates the termination of autonomous government in Kosovo by about three years. In effect, Mr. Dole’s attempts to undermine Yugoslavia’s multi-national –albeit still Communist– Constitutional polity, made the rise of Mr. Milosevic possible, even a logical reaction to such devious pressures.

In the Fiscal Year 1990 Budget of the United States, which took effect Oct. 1, 1989, Senator Dole continued his personal campaign of sabotage against Yugoslavia by denying that sovereign republic international funding. William Dorich, an American journalist of Krajina-Serb ancestry, described that action in a February 16, 1999 speech to the World Affairs Council of Orange County, California:
“The Balkan quagmire began in 1990 in Foreign Appropriations Bill #101-513, in which Senator Robert Dole slipped in 23 sentences that denied financial aid to Yugoslavia when that nation was 31 billion dollars in debt. This bill was a direct violation of the Helsinki Act, which forbids “any act of economic or other coercion.”

In fact, the mischief was well afoot by 1986 (see Exhibit #2, from Russ Belant’s book Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, 1988, which takes the money trail back to at least 1981). Mr. Dole’s war against Yugoslavia, fought in conjunction with the neo-fascists of Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo and their politically astute cousins here in America continues. He has managed to bamboozle many others on both sides of the aisle in Congress, and in both political parties in the United States and elsewhere.

In this, Dole and the governments of Croatia and Bosnia were assisted by the New York-Washington public relations firm, Ruder-Finn, and a number of former Republican Senators and Congressmen turned lobbyists, including Larry Pressler. 

Mr. Dole aspired to succeed Ronald Reagan as President and the Croats and Albanians funded him generously. Marko Lopusina, New York reporter for the Yugoslav magazine Interview, described a May 1987 Dole-DioGuardi Albanian-American fund-raiser in New York City that collected some $1.25 million: “In their speeches, Dole and Dioguardi acknowledged those present for their contributions of $1.2 million for Dole and $50,000 for Dioguardi’s campaign.” (Interview, Jan. 1, 1988, p. 47).

It is safe to say, given the overwhelming preponderance of evidence, that much of that money came from heroin sales and other Albanian Mafia activities. Fortunately New Hampshire found Dole badly wanting and found George Bush to be adequate to the task of leadership. 

But in 1991 when Croatia began its war against Yugoslavia and its campaign of cleansing against the Krajina Serbs, the Bush Administration, guided by old Yugoslav hands Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft, still discouraged independence. Jim Baker made a forlorn last-minute trip to Belgrade to endorse union in June 1991, just after Desert Storm.

But Yugoslavia was not as high priority as the collapsing Soviet Empire or Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The fix was already in. When the fighting began, the Bush Administration continued to discourage it; that meant Bush had to go. 

The Administration had plenty of other enemies: it was too tough on Israel over self-rule for Palestine and other questions. It was not tough enough on China and would do nothing for exiled President Aristide of Haiti. Bill Clinton, afloat on a sea of Chinese, AIPAC and, presumably, Balkan money, won the Oval Office. Croatians poured $50 million into campaign chests of their friends, as documented below (Exhibit #3). Albanian Mafiosi, meanwhile, were dealing heroin from communities in New York’s Brooklyn and Bronx boroughs, from Boston, Detroit and Chicago. From 1991 Albanian Mafia “crews” were also robbing supermarkets, ATMs and check cashing services in New York and other cities around the nation to raise campaign money and to buy arms for what became the Kosovo Liberation Army (see Exhibit #4 below). 

The linkages between the Kosovo Heroin Mafia (see SIRIUS Archive KLA-Drugs) and these fundraisers is not perfect, contributions of cash leave no audit trail and checks launder through small businesses. But evidence is out there that improves the linkages and our major city police departments know what is going on.

William Dorich, who is also a correspondent for The American Srbobran, a Pittsburgh-based newspaper, reports:
“Caught in a 1991 bank robbery in Pasadena, California, two Albanian criminals confessed that they were robbing banks in California `to raise money for the Albanian lobby in the United States.'”

Mrs. Dole, by the way, as President of the American Red Cross, appears to have done more than her share of mischief in seeking to prevent the free flow of medical supplies to the general population of Yugoslavia, or to the Serb population in Bosnia, while supplies flood into Kosovo for Albanian relief.

In light of this, the text of the Concurrent Resolution is to me an appalling misrepresentation of events in Kosovo in the mid-1980s, but I ask the reader to judge that for yourself. 

Intereference by Mr. Dole continued in the wake of the Rambouillet talks between Serbia and the Kosovo Muslim Albanians. On Monday evening, Feb. 22, he and Mme. Albright both called Adem Demaci to discuss the failure to secure an Albanian independence referendum in the agreement (Exhibits #5-6 below).

A mere two blocks from St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Cathedral in Manhattan, there is a statue of Roscoe Conkling at the southwest corner of Madison Square Park. Conkling said something interesting in defense of his president, Ulysses Grant, whose administration was plagued by scandals involving subordinates, though the President, himself, was honest:
“He [President Grant] will hew to the line of right, let the chips fall where they may.” 

- NY Senator Roscoe Conkling; Speech, June 5, 1880
Let the chips fall where they may. It is time for honest Republicans to start reining in this fiscally-driven embrace of Fascists and their neo-Fascist offspring. The Democrats, too, have ample reason to poke around in their finances, nowadays. We can start by wondering about Eliot Engel of the Bronx, and Charles Schumer. 

When not conspiring against the remains of Yugoslavia and against the Serbs, Mr. Dole has chosen to market Viagra in a pseudo-public service advertising campaign speaking of his prostate surgery and “erectile dysfunction –`ED’.” Mr. Clinton’s phallocentrism, established by our Miss Lewinsky, is matched by Mr. Dole’s (Exhibit #7 below, by Arianna Huffington). 

Mr. Dole incessantly “waves the bloody shirt” with the wound he received under honorable conditions during his brief combat service with the 10th Mountain Division in northern Italy. But, since at least the mid-1980s (and likely back to his 1976 Presidential campaign), Mr. Dole has been in league with the fascist enemies of the US and their children in abetting the erection of a neo-fascist state in Croatia and a state headed by an identified Nazi youth leader, Alija Izetbegovic, in Bosnia. Dole has also attempted to steal Kosovo for the heirs of the Albanians who served in the SS Skanderbeg Mountain Division. In this scheming, Mr. Dole has betrayed his own military service and broken faith with all American and Allied veterans of World War II. It was not for this easy campaign money and twisted policy that my father and uncles fought the Germans and Japanese.

Benjamin Works

Exhibits:
June 18, 1986; R. Dole, Senate Concurrent Resolution #150 and speech <http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38d0137f5e6f.htm> 
Russ Belant; 1989; Book: Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party <http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38d0137f5e6f.htm> 
Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, Mar 31, 1993, “Croatian Funds to US Politicians. <http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38d014455e9a.htm> 
A Dole aide & Johnny Chung on fundraising candidates <http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38d015045f63.htm> 
Robert Novak, Column April 15, 1995; Dole, New Hamp. & Albanian Campaign Contributions <http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38d015795f63.htm> 
NY Daily News, Jan. 1996; Dole’s Got Baggage <http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38d0163a5fe1.htm> 
Excerpt on Albanian Mafia activity in US from the Journal; Transnational Organized Crime; Spring, 1996: Gus Xhudo; “Men of Purpose:” <http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38d01858615e.htm> 
Reuters, Feb. 24, 1999; ANALYSIS-Kosovo leader Demaci maintains hard line <http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38d0193861cc.htm> 
New York Times, Feb. 25, 1999, Jane Perlez; No Winners at Kosovo Peace Talks, and Albright Seems to Lose Prestige <http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38d019ae620d.htm> 
Arianna Huffington, syndicated column, Feb. 22, 1999; “Bob Dole’s Erectoral Politics” <http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38d01a92624b.htm> 
Reuters, Mar. 1, 1999; U.S. asks Dole, Soros to help on Kosovo – report <http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38d01b5162bf.htm> 
IBD, March 4, 1999; The GOP’s Tangled Foreign Policy <http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38d01d386400.htm> 
March 4, 1999; Dole Statement on Kosovo Mission <http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38d01da063f1.htm> 
The Illyrian, March 4, 1999; Albanian View of Dole Mission/Message <http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38d01e92648a.htm> 
Joseph DioGuardi, May 6, 1998; Congresional Committee Testimony on Kosovo, <http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38d02062658c.htm> 
FEC: Albanian-American PAC, Candidate Contributions, 1997-98 <http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38d022f966f2.htm>