Insurrection is usually the last resort, taken when oppression is so severe that life does not seem worth living. Alternatively, insurrection is the road taken when you want to be king and you have good reason to believe that help will come from powerful neighbors. At the end of December 1992 President Bush was reported, in The New York Times of December 28, 1992, as saying that "in the event of conflict in Kosovo caused by Serb action, the United States will be prepared to employ military force against the Serbs in Kosovo and in Serbia proper." Open threats do not have the purpose of instilling moderation. If that were the purpose, the threat would be made very quietly, through diplomatic channels. The purpose of open threat is to clear any doubts amongst your own ranks, to cause excitement, patriotic fervor, action, and reaction from your opponents. In 1859, when the King of Sardinia was to give a patriotic crown speech at the opening of parliament, the speech was submitted for approval to the Emperor of France, who suggested stronger language. The speech as delivered said: "We are not insensitive to the cry of pain and sorrow that is raised unto us from so many parts of Italy." The British Foreign Secretary then asked the British ambassador in Turin to "make present to the Count of Cavour [the Prime Minister] the responsibility... which he inevitably encounters by provoking war, as he... puts in the mouth of his sovereign, words of comfort to other powers' subjects, who may be unhappy with their own governments." Within four months the Count of Cavour had the war he had wanted. Within five months of President George Bush's warning, his successor had his war, which began with the killing of Serb policemen in Glogovac.
The oppression suffered by the Albanians in Kosovo in 1992 was comparable to the conditions of the Catholics in Northern Ireland in the 1960's. Certainly nasty things were done by the government, but there was not the level of oppression that you would find in many countries allied to the United States. It was not as bad in Kosovo for the Albanians as it is in the United States of America for some Native American nations. Albanians in Kosovo could vote and had more speech, press, cultural, and economic freedom than most minorities in the world. The Albanians wanted that right which very few minorities in the world and no minority in the U.S. enjoys, the right of secession. Had they been willing to remain in Yugoslavia and vote, they would have turned the balance of power against President Milosevic and would have been able to join a coalition government in Belgrade. Then they could have obtained autonomy once again. The only condition would have been ending the reign of terror which elements of the Albanian majority were imposing upon minorities like Serbs ,Gorani, and Romany. The Serbs in Pristina did not object to being ruled by Albanians, as long as security was provided. Some Albanians, however, seconded by western politicians, insisted that beating up Serbs and torching their homes is an appropriate form of nationalist expression. The 1981 demonstrations are normally glorified in western publications as the start of Kosovo's modern nationalist struggle. In the west, no mention is made of the fact that on March 26, 1981, at a time when Albanians were in full control of the government , including the legislative, the police, and the judiciary, a pogrom against Serbs and Montenegrins took place in Pristina. Serb homes in Podujevo were marked with a cross in advance of the attacks.
Kosovo's Albanian leadership could have entered an anti-Milosevic coalition and could have obtained autonomy. Then, once they were in power, they could have followed the Quebec model and worked toward secession. Some influential people in Serbia were already open to Kosovo Albanian secession, if coupled with partition. Such options are closed to Turkey's Kurds, Burma's Karens, or China's Tibetans, just to mention three out of the hundreds of oppressed minorities in the world. The Albanian leadership instead chose insurrection, death, and destruction. Because they are naturally violent? Not at all. Like all other nations, Kosovo's Albanians have their own quota of crazies. Usually crazies do not receive foreign support and grow to a ripe old age, grumbling and complaining to their poor wives. Kosovo's crazies, however, just like Croatia's and Bosnia's, had the misfortune to have foreign cash thrown at them. So they achieved a leadership position and led their nation to catastrophe, not because there were no alternatives, but because insurrection had been encouraged by the President of the United States of America. Albania, the channel for arms and supplies was financed by NATO countries. Cash for arms, explosives, and mercenaries freely flowed from NATO and Arab countries. Could NATO countries have done more to create the insurrection? Could NATO have expected anything else to happen in Kosovo, as a result of their actions?
In the 1990's intimidation, terror and ethnic cleansing by Albanians against all minorities in Kosovo worsened and in 1998 were answered by the Yugoslavs with search and destroy operations in which, oddly enough, instead of melting into the hills, the Albanians fought from their fortified houses. The Yugoslavs brought in artillery and everyone in those houses got wiped out. The Yugoslavs suffered very low casualties, and the KLA lost their bases. NATO military advisors wrung their hands over the unwillingness of the Albanians to learn basic guerrilla warfare tactics. As Albanians fled the shelled villages, they became refugees and provided the media with excellent photo opportunities. Pressure increased on NATO's do-gooders to do something good. They did the only thing they could think of--threaten Serbia. Every threat creates pressure to make more threats, and as the "media boys" snickered that Mr. Clinton's threats were nothing to worry about, pressure for war increased. Now it was a matter of face for the Boss. When 46 Albanians died in Racak, even though it was apparent that this had been a battle, the decision was made to carry the battle casualties into a central location and call it a massacre. The staged event was used as a pretext to deliver an offer which the Yugoslavs could not fail to refuse, at the Rambouillet Peace Conference. The leaders of the the terrorized minorities of Kosovo went to Rambouillet. The leaders of the Albanians who wanted to remain in Yugoslavia went to Rambouillet. None of them were heard, not at the conference table, nor on the media of the Free World. There was no peace conference taking place in Rambouillet. It was an imperial audience, granted to Yugoslavia's leaders, at which they were ordered to accept an independence referendum for Kosovo in 3 years and NATO occupation of any part of Yugoslavia which NATO might choose to occupy. The Yugoslav government was willing to accept foreign troops under UN auspices in Kosovo but not in the rest of Serbia or in Montenegro. Could NATO have expected anything else?
NATO started bombing and the refugees poured out of the country. The KLA attacked and Serbian self-defense units engaged in your normal torture, rape, murder , pillage, and arson. They should have been nicer, they should not have killed anybody in jail, and should not have burned down any houses. Certainly rapists, killers, arsonists and looters amongst the Serbs' self defense forces ought to have been shot on the spot. A few well-publicized executions would have brought the practice to a stop. It was not done. However, it is the highest degree of hypocrisy for Americans and Europeans to rend their clothes in indignation over crimes committed by the peasants of Kosovo, be they Albanians or Serbs, Romany or Gorani, in a war that the vicious do-gooders of the west imposed on Yugoslavia. Bombed from the air and terrorized on the ground, hundreds of thousands of refugees poured out of Kosovo into Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Could NATO have expected anything else?
For months the Yugoslavs held out, under a very destructive bombing campaign directed at the country's infrastructure. When they were finally offered the conditions they had been willing to accept at Rambouillet, they signed. The conditions involved NATO--and Russian--troops in Kosovo under U.N. auspices, no foreign troops in the rest of the country, and no referendum for the independence of Kosovo in 3 years. The Yugoslav armed forces withdrew and NATO marched in. Now, while NATO thugs smirk and NATO do-gooders wring their hands, Albanian extremists are engaging in your normal torture, rape, murder, pillage, and arson. Could NATO have expected anything else?
NATO's Leader issues "Hate" orders, as described in George Orwell's Nineteen-eighty-four. Like the FBI's "ten most wanted list", the Hate List bears the pictures of the foreign leaders we are supposed to hate. Once we see some foreign leader's photograph on the list, all normal inhibitions evaporate, and we feel morally licensed to bomb him, provided we first face the west and recite aloud, "Cross my heart and hope he don't die." That is because the U.S. Congress, in a fit of guilt, trying to scrub the blood of a few "terminated" foreign leaders off its hands, passed a law outlawing foreign leader assassination. So now first we must cross our hearts, then we can bomb the leader, his friends and relations, his children--like Quaddafi's baby daughter--, his house, his city, and his country. All it takes is for us to see that president's face on the Hate List. If he is on it, we feel morally and politically correct, ready to do what needs to be done .
Editors and journalists are normal humans, normally subject to the influence of power. They are allowed to be very critical of individual politicians, they may even express contempt for a sitting President, but cannot challenge the basic premises of US foreign policy. If they were to do so, their access to background information at the Pentagon and State Department would be cut off , they would not be invited to the White house, and would not be picked to ask questions at press conferences, should they be able to enter the room at all. When the President chooses a foreign leader for the Hate List, the media must accept it, because the President has spoken ex cathedra. A good Catholic may be highly critical of the Pope, but when the Pope speaks ex cathedra, "from the throne", he is infallible. And that's that. The same holds for U.S. foreign policy decisions. Chairman Mao was generally considered the Devil Incarnate, he ruled "Red China", and lived in "Peiping". Overnight things changed, even the names were changed: President Nixon went to Peking, Red China became China, our new ally against the Soviet Union. The decision of President Nixon to remove Mao from the Hate List was at once internalized by the media. Similarly, when media editors and politicians see someone's face on the Hate List, they quickly internalize it, and are ready to go into an Orwellian "Two Minute Hate" frenzy. They demand action. If the foreign leader is not promptly deposed, they feel personally affronted. They might normally be sober intellectuals, but their thinking pattern quickly changes, and it begins to approach that of an educationally deprived teenager with a gun in his pocket. If you care for your life, don't diss an intellectual, especially a pacifist. NATO's avowed pacifist and socialist leaders like Blair, Cook, Schroder, and Solanas felt dissed by Serbia. What else could they do? They reached for their revolver.
NATO did not choose to fight for Croats, Moslem Bosnians, and Albanians out of revulsion against ethnic cleansing. Actually NATO did not mind ethnic cleansing at all, as long as the targets of it were the Serbs. When the cleansing policy was initiated against the Serbs of Croatia in 1991, before the war started, no squeals of indignation were heard in the moral centers of western civilization. European and American intellectuals and politicians noticed the problem only after the tide of war had turned against their boys. Then they threw in their war machine and righted the situation. When the whole Serb nation of Krajna, was expelled from its ancestral lands in 1995, NATO smirked: they had organized Operation Storm, and it was a grand success. As the Serbs were cleansed out of Kosovo by individual acts of terror, NATO looked the other way. Yet, when the Serbs went on the offensive and attacked the fortified villages from which the KLA raiding parties took off, NATO went to war. Against ethnic cleansing? Hardly. An assault upon a fortified village does not constitute ethnic cleansing, and until the start of the NATO campaign, Albanians lived in peace in areas where there was no KLA activity and no terror against KLA opponents. In the rest of Yugoslavia, various nationalities, including hundreds of thousand Albanians, Moslems, Croats, Hungarians, Romanians, and Romany--and 700,000 NATO-cleansed Serbs-- lived in peace, and still live in peace, enjoying cultural and religious liberties unthinkable in quite a few nations allied to NATO.
Roland Keith, field office director of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) until March 20th reported as follows:
"Upon my arrival the war increasingly evolved into a mid intensity conflict as ambushes, the encroachment of critical lines of communication and the [KLA] kidnapping of security forces resulted in a significant increase in government casualties which in turn led to major Yugoslavian reprisal security operations... By the beginning of March these terror and counter-terror operations led to the inhabitants of numerous villages fleeing, or being dispersed to either other villages, cities or the hills to seek refuge... The situation was clearly that KLA provocations, as personally witnessed in ambushes of security patrols which inflicted fatal and other casualties, were clear violations of the previous October's agreement. The security forces responded and the consequent security harassment and counter-operations led to an intensified insurrectionary war, but as I have stated elsewhere, I did not witness, nor did I have knowledge of any incidents of so-called "ethnic cleansing"... there certainly were no occurrences of "genocidal policies" while I was with the KVM in Kosovo.
On the other hand, the expulsion of all Serbs from many Albanian villages and the killing of the old folks who refused to run was ethnic cleansing, but NATO didn't mind that. NATO went to war against the Serbs because, out of arrogance and ignorance, some bets had been placed. In 1991 we first heard, from Secretary of State Baker, a good line about Yugoslavia: "We have no dog in this fight". In 1992 things changed, and President Bush decided to take the side of the Germans, who had been working hard to destroy Yugoslavia. A small bet was placed on the small Albanian dog, in the form of threats against the big Serb dog. As time went by, the bets were ever increased. Now the whole issue became one of credibility, a matter of face. By the beginning of 1999 the NATO Boss saw that his little dog was losing . He pulled out his gun. The crowd gasped. The Boss smirked, and shot the big dog in the foot. The little dog was declared the winner. Unfair? Who ever said that the Boss must play fair? His dog always wins, that's all.
The NATO leaders have saved face and have conquered Kosovo. A very expensive temporary success, formalized in an armistice, which will last until the next war. Actually, hostilities have already resumed, in the form of ethnic cleansing directed against Serbs, Romany, Gorani, Montenegrins, Croats, and Jews. Their ancient churches and cultural institutions are sacked and destroyed under the watchful eye of NATO's peacekeepers. The barber-surgeons of Washington went to the Balkans. They came, they saw, they wrecked.
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