The War NATO Wanted
BY DIANA JOHNSTONE
Paris, May 1999
To justify their assault on Serbia, the United States and its obedient
NATO allies claimed they had no choice. As the official story goes,
Slobodan Milosevic (suddenly the reincarnation of Hitler who has
the power to make all other citizens of Yugoslavia invisible to the
Clinton administration) refused to negotiate and rejected the
Rambouillet peace agreement. Therefore, there was nothing else
to do but bomb Yugoslavia.
This preposterous lie is only one among countless others. In reality,
Belgrade never refused to negotiate. Rambouillet was never about
negotiations. It was about presenting the Serbs with an ultimatum
precisely designed to provide the pretext for NATO bombing.
Rambouillet was a tragic farce, a low point in the history of
diplomacy, in which the United States had to coax and cajole a
band of well-armed criminals into signing the death warrant of their
adversary, the legitimate government of Yugoslavia.
The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) is scarcely the sort of outfit one
might expect to see invited to a famous French chateau to decide
on the future of war and peace in Europe. The connection between
KLA gunmen and the ethnic Albanians who dominate the heroin traffic
through the Balkans from Turkey to Switzerland and Germany has
been widely reported.
As for ideology, violent ethnic Albanian irredentism has switched
opportunistically from fascism during World War II, to
“Marxism-Leninism” in the days of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha,
to today’s enthusiasm for NATO. The constant
factor is hatred of Serbs in particular and Slavs in general.
The rise of the KLA was a challenge to the leadership of the ethnic
Albanian nationalists’ nonviolent leadership, headed by Ibrahim
Rugova. The killing of Serbs in Kosovo began in April 1996, thanks
to the arms glut caused by the total collapse of law and order in
Albania. Not only Yugoslav police but also ethnic Albanians
branded as “traitors” were targeted.
Last summer, by posing for news photographers with a KLA
officer, Richard Holbrooke publicly signaled that the United States
was dropping Rugova in favor of the KLA. The process was
completed at Rambouillet with the Feb. 6 arrival of the official
ethnic Albanian delegation of 16 members, five of them from the
KLA.
Rugova and the older generation of leaders were suddenly
shoved onto the sidelines, as an unknown, 29-year-old KLA
chieftain named Hashim “The Snake” Thaqi was introduced to
the world as the leader of the delegation.
The KLA’s irresistible rise was nurtured notably by Morton
Abramowitz, a prominent member of the U.S. foreign policy elite.
Abramowitz served as ambassador to Thailand when the CIA’s
Bangkok bureau was perpetrating the “yellow rain” hoax that
accused Vietnamese victims of U.S. chemical warfare of using
chemical agents in Laos.
In 1986, as assistant secretary of state in charge of intelligence
and research in the Reagan administration, Abramowitz and top
CIA officials accompanied Sen. Orrin Hatch to Beijing to work
out a deal with China and Pakistan for providing Stinger missiles
to Islamic Afghan rebels.
He then passed, quite naturally, to the presidency of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. Under the Clinton
administration, he hasparticipated in a blue-ribbon panel on CIA
reform–selected by the Council on Foreign Relations–which
recommended easing restrictions on covert actions.
More recently, Abramowitz has been a leading figure in the
high-level International Crisis Group, a leading designer of policy
toward Kosovo. There, he became an advocate of arming the KLA.
At Rambouillet, Abramowitz and another U.S. official, Paul Williams,
led a team coaching the KLA delegation.
Even so, at Rambouillet, ‘The Snake” bit the hand that fed him and
refused to sign the document. To the fury and dismay of Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright, it was not the Serbs but the Albanian
KLA that balked, depriving the United States of its pretext to launch a
NATO war against the Serbs.
Rambouillet was adjourned. Former Sen. Bob Dole, recipient of
generous campaign contributions from the Albanian-American lobby
during his political career, was dispatched to the Balkans to urge the
Albanians to sign the treaty–not to make peace, but to
“maintain pressure” on the Serbs. KLA leaders were bribed with a
promise of a “visit to Washington to discuss matters of interest,”
notably the future of the KLA–veiled language meaning that the
United States would not insist on disarming the KLA, but would find
some formula for transforming what U.S. envoy Robert Gelbard had
described as a “terrorist” group into “liberated” Kosovo’s
police force.
So it was that the Serbs and the Kosovar Albanians were summoned
back to Paris to sign, as is, an agreement that in effect would detach
Kosovo from Serbia and put it under the joint control of NATO and
whichever ethnic Albanians NATO chose–apparently, the KLA. There
were no negotiations. Instead, Serbia’s Milan Milutinovic and his
(multi-ethnic) delegation were presented with an ultimatum: Either
accept the “peace agreement” concocted by Christopher Hill
(Holbrooke’s second at Dayton who is now posted as U.S.
ambassador to Macedonia) allowing NATO to take over Kosovo, or
else be bombed. This ultimatum in itself was a violation of international law,
which invalidates agreements obtained by the threat or use of force,
according to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.
And the terms were totally unacceptable. Kosovo’s “self-government” was
to be run by a NATO official, with the title of Chief of the Implementation
Mission, or CIM. The CIM would have the final say over virtually everything
and everybody. Kosovo would be occupied by a NATO force called KFOR.
No ceiling was placed on the size of KFOR forces, which would have full
control of airspace over Kosovo, be immune to prosecution or liability
under local law, and have free access to the rest of Yugoslavia–a
license to invade the rest of the country on one pretext or another. The
agreement called for withdrawal of Serbian police and armed forces, but
the fate of “other forces” (no mention of the KLA, which thus escaped any
commitment or obligations) would be decided later by the KFOR commander.
Not only Milosevic, but any Serbian opposition party, was bound to
reject such terms. And yet compromise was not impossible. The Yugoslavs
were ready to make huge concessions, but not to welcome NATO. NATO
was the sticking point. A U.N. peacekeeping force might well have been
acceptable. However, the Clinton administration insisted on NATO or nothing.
The rise of the KLA, backed by the United States and Germany (German
intelligence reportedly played an important role in equipping the
rebels), made it extremely dangerous for any more moderate ethnic
Albanian leaders to negotiate with the Serbs. The KLA repeatedly
announced what would happen to such “traitors.” By backing the KLA,
the United States weakened the more moderate forces on both sides.
On December 21, 1998, the State Department released information from the
Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission that “the KLA harass or kidnap anyone
who comes to the police,” and that “representatives threatened to kill
villagers and burn their homes if they did not join the KLA.” It added
that KLA harassment has reached such intensity that residents of six
villages in the Stimlje region are “ready to flee.”
Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian civilians have been trapped between devastating
NATO bombing raids, KLA thugs and Serbian police. That refugees would
flee from Kosovo in all directions (including northward into central Serbia,
a fact ignored by Western media) is scarcely surprising. Yet NATO
exploited the resulting misery and confusion on the borders to justify the very
bombing that triggered the exodus.
The suffering of the refugees is genuine and poignant. The interpretations by
Western officials and media are not to be trusted. (After Japan bombed Pearl
Harbor, the United States “ethnically cleansed” the West Coast of Japanese
Americans, although Japan did not announce that it was bombing the U.S.
on behalf of armed Japanese-American secessionists.)
Various compromise proposals have been made from the Serb side over the
years. They have been totally ignored by Western governments and media,
which have claimed to be in favor of “restoring Kosovo’s autonomy” and
opposed to secession. This double language has been interpreted by both
sides as veiled support for the Albanian irredentism.
Confident of Western backing, Albanian nationalist leaders have held out
for independence rather than any form of living together with the Serbs in
Serbia. Partition has been dogmatically ruled out by the United States on
the “domino-theory” grounds that it would destabilize Macedonia. NATO
bombing has done that already.
U.S. and NATO meddling so far have produced all of the disasters
they promised to prevent, and a few more. NATO is not waging peace. It
is waging war and must be stopped.
Diana Johnstone is a contributing editor of In These Times.