July 1999

The Protectorate. A Way to Dominate Le Monde diplomatique July 1999 _________________________________________________________________ Just as they did in Bosnia after the Dayton Agreements, the Western powers are getting ready to place Kosovo under their guardianship, with the declared aim of restoring peace and democracy. Yet the protectorate, a modern form of colonialism, risks putting a seal of approval on the ethnic partitioning of the province. by ANDEJA ZIVKOVIC A spectre is now haunting the world community, one that many believed was a thing of the past: the return of the empire. Taking its legitimacy from the implosion of former Yugoslavia and the civil war in Somalia, the idea of the protectorate has invaded diplomatic thinking in the West. In the minds of Western leaders, the situation in Kosovo today has even made it a cure-all. The policy of the protectorate follows on naturally from the approach taken by international bodies in...

By Mel Duncan and David Hartsough From: Civilian Peace Service <http://www.superaje.com/~marsin/cps.htm> 24 June 1999 INTRODUCTION Tanks rumble into Kosovo. NATO proclaims victory from 15,000 feet above after eleven weeks of pounding bombs without a single Alliance casualty. The Serb army retreats from the province to the cadence of their butcher leader also proclaiming victory. The KLA marches in. Over a million Kosovar Albanians resentfully return to the rubble of home as Kosovar Serbs are cleansed northwards out of their homes. The irradiated landscape soaked in blood, strewn with land mines and pocked with mass graves flows with hate. Thousands of well armed multinational troops will attempt to keep the hatred at bay while relief organizations beg for millions to help rebuild from the carnage. While the technology has dramatically advanced, we end this century, the bloodiest century of humankind, the way we began with organized brutality seeking to resolve conflicts...

Welcome to the New World Order By Richard K Moore Cyberjournal, A public service of Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance George Bush’s comment in 1990, that the Gulf War heralded a ‘new world order’, was the trigger that got me started on the path of analyzing and writing about political power relationships. Bush was suggesting that the Gulf War was more than a special case, that it was establishing some kind of new pattern for international order. He didn’t tell us much about the details, and I found myself drawn in to figuring out what he could have meant. The starting point for the investigation was the Gulf War itself. What was unique about it? In some ways it wasn’t anything new – it looked quite a bit like yet-another case of American gunboat diplomacy, one which expanded on the tactics used earlier in Panama and Grenada. All three events...

What I Learned in the War By Dennis J. Kucinich From THE PROGRESSIVE August 1999 IN MY CONGRESSIONAL OFFICE, I read the latest reports concerning a recent Executive Order that hands the CIA a black bag in the Balkans for engineering a military coup in Serbia, for interrupting communications, for tampering with bank accounts, freezing assets abroad, and training the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in terrorist tactics, such as how to blow up buildings. How this is intended to help establish a democracy in Serbia or Kosovo hasn’t yet been explained. Nor has the failure to substantially disarm and demilitarize the KLA been explained. Nor has the reverse ethnic cleansing taking place in Kosovo by the KLA while NATO rules the provinces been explained. But the extracurricular activity is consistent with NATO’s policy of the ends justifying the means, of might makes right, of collective guilt, of retribution upon a...

AN APPEAL FROM FATHER SAVA, DECANI, KOSOVO Dear Friends, After the month and a half of the NATO and UN sponsored peace in Kosovo we have the following results: 130.000 – Serbian refugees from Kosovo (2/3 of the population) 150 – killed Serbs 200 – kidnapped Serbs 40 – damaged or destroyed churches Serbs are persecuted, killed in flats, expelled from their homes, women are raped, farmers are slaughtered, Serbian and all Non-Albanian homes are systematically torched, AND all this in the presence of the most powerful force in the World. We have just prepared an extensive photo material on destruction of the Serbian Orthodox Churches in Kosovo. These destructions are systematically effected by the Kosovo Albanian Extremists who have launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing and the cultural genocide against everything Christian in the province. All these churches are destroyed NOT IN WAR but during the peace established by...

Building peace in the Balkans Le Monde diplomatique July 1999 _________________________________________________________________ Just as they did in Bosnia after the Dayton Agreements, the Western powers are getting ready to place Kosovo under their guardianship, with the declared aim of restoring peace and democracy. Yet the protectorate, a modern form of colonialism, risks putting a seal of approval on the ethnic partitioning of the province. by ANDEJA ZIVKOVIC _________________________________________________________________ A spectre is now haunting the world community, one that many believed was a thing of the past: the return of the empire. Taking its legitimacy from the implosion of former Yugoslavia and the civil war in Somalia, the idea of the protectorate has invaded diplomatic thinking in the West. In the minds of Western leaders, the situation in Kosovo today has even made it a cure-all. The policy of the protectorate follows on naturally from the approach taken by international bodies in...

By Richard K Moore Cyberjournal, A public service of Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance George Bush’s comment in 1990, that the Gulf War heralded a ‘new world order’, was the trigger that got me started on the path of analyzing and writing about political power relationships. Bush was suggesting that the Gulf War was more than a special case, that it was establishing some kind of new pattern for international order. He didn’t tell us much about the details, and I found myself drawn in to figuring out what he could have meant. The starting point for the investigation was the Gulf War itself. What was unique about it? In some ways it wasn’t anything new – it looked quite a bit like yet-another case of American gunboat diplomacy, one which expanded on the tactics used earlier in Panama and Grenada. All three events were accompanied by misleading propaganda, including...

By Dennis J. Kucinich From THE PROGRESSIVE August 1999 IN MY CONGRESSIONAL OFFICE, I read the latest reports concerning a recent Executive Order that hands the CIA a black bag in the Balkans for engineering a military coup in Serbia, for interrupting communications, for tampering with bank accounts, freezing assets abroad, and training the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in terrorist tactics, such as how to blow up buildings.How this is intended to help establish a democracy in Serbia or Kosovo hasn’t yet been explained. Nor has the failure to substantially disarm and demilitarize the KLA been explained. Nor has the reverse ethnic cleansing taking place in Kosovo by the KLA while NATO rules the provinces been explained. But the extracurricular activity is consistent with NATO’s policy of the ends justifying the means, of might makes right, of collective guilt, of retribution upon a civilian population. It was hard to keep...

Dear Friends, After the month and a half of the NATO and UN sponsored peace in Kosovo we have the following results: 130.000 – Serbian refugees from Kosovo (2/3 of the population)150 – killed Serbs200 – kidnapped Serbs40 – damaged or destroyed churches Serbs are persecuted, killed in flats, expelled from their homes, women are raped, farmers are slaughtered, Serbian and all Non-Albanian homes are systematically torched, AND all this in the presence of the most powerful force in the World. We have just prepared an extensive photo material on destruction of the Serbian Orthodox Churches in Kosovo. These destructions are systematically effected by the Kosovo Albanian Extremists who have launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing and the cultural genocide against everything Christian in the province. All these churches are destroyed NOT IN WAR but during the peace established by NATO and UN in the province. In fact Albanian extremists...

Stereotipi i diskriminacija Zapitajte se da li bi NATO-ovo bombardovanje i okupacija koja mu je sledila uopšte bilo moguće u bilo kojoj drugoj zemlji današnje Evrope. Postoji li ijedna druga zemlja sem Jugoslavije i ijedna nacija osim Srba koja bi bila dovoljno prezrena? U žiži interesovanja medija bile su patnje i stradanja albanskih izbeglica, ali da li su i koliko mediji pokrili patnje srpskih, goranskih, crnogorskih, turskih i romskih izbeglica s Kosova? Izbeglički logori u Makedoniji i Albaniji su se prosto preselili u naše dnevne sobe – no da li se isto dogodilo i sa patnjama ljudi koji su živeli pod bombama ili su od njih bežali širom bombama razvaljene Jugoslavije? O nedavnom nasilju albanskih ekstremista protiv Srba izveštava se s „razumevanjem“, ono se predstavlja kao (opravdana) osveta za sve što su srpska policija, vojska i paravojne jedinice uradile. Međutim, nijednom mediju koji ovu priču priča na ovakav način nije...

Stereotyping and discrimination Ask yourself whether NATO’s bombing and subsequent occupation could have been done against any other nation in today’s Europe. Whether any other country than Yugoslavia and any other people but Serbs is so despised? The plight of the Albanian refugees is in focus, but how well and how extensive did media cover that of the Serbs, Goranis, Montenegrin, Turks and Gypsies in Kosovo? The refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania entered our living rooms – but did the human suffering of people living in and fleeing to bombed-out Yugoslavia? Recent Albanian extremist violence against Serbs is reported with “understanding,” presented as (justifiable) revenge for what Serb police, military and paramilitary units did. But the media which told the story this way never “explained” that Serb ethnic cleansing after NATO started bombing could be “understood” as (justifiable) anger at what THEY saw as the destruction of their entire...

“Doslo je vreme da se osvrnemo na ono sto se stvarno dogodilo ovog proleca na Kosovu a dogodilo se ne samo Kosovu vec i citavom svetu. Ubedjen sam da ce se istoricari sloziti sa mnom kako su se od 24. marta 1999. na ovamo medjunarodni odnosi i politika a i sam globalni sistem uveliko promenili,” kaze direktor TFF-a, Jan Oberg. “Veliki je broj onih koji intervenciju NATO-a smatraju pobedom moralnosti, pravednim ratom i pobedom demokratskih vrednosti. Ja medjutim verujem da na nju moramo gledati iz nekoliko razlicitih uglova zato da bi (a) mogli da je sto dublje shvatimo i razumemo i zato da bi mogli da na osnovu nje (b) razvijemo niz ideja, gledista i principa koji bi nam pomogli da sprecimo da se nesto slicno ikada vise, bilo gde drugde uopste ponovo dogodi. Zaista zacudjuje da ovaj rat – vodjen s toliko moralne nadmenosti a s navodnim zadatkom da...