August 1999

Ramsay Clark’s Letter to the Security Council On August 27, 1999, the following letter was sent from former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark to the ambassador and foreign minister of each member of the UN Security Council, and to the UN General Assembly Dear Ambassador, The United Nations, as it now functions, cannot continue to exist as an institution of honor and hope if it fails to act immediately to lift all economic sanctions from Iraq and prohibit the United States from nearly daily murderous aerial assaults on its defenseless people. The Security Council through nine years of economic sanctions forced on it by the United States, has caused the greatest human disaster in this last decade of a century of self inflicted human disasters. More than 1,500,000 people have been killed; overwhelmingly infants, children, elderly persons, pregnant and nursing women, the chronically ill and emergency medical cases. The whole...

Quietly Preventing Conflict By Steven R. Ratner From The Christian Science Monitor August 18, 1999, Wednesday The war in Kosovo seems to confirm our worst fears about the dangers to peace that lurk in ethnic conflict. As with Bosnia before it, attempts to stop “ethnic cleansing” through diplomacy proved fruitless, leading to outside military intervention. Western troops and hordes of international personnel now occupy both Bosnia and Kosovo. The result is, effectively, an international protectorate unlikely to solve long-term problems. But Europe and the rest of the world are not full of Kosovos – yet. In fact, the term "ethnic dispute" simplifies a wide variety of situations. Some governments, like Serbia’s or Croatia’s, clearly have yet to accept people of varying backgrounds on equal footing; and some ethnic organizations, like the Kosovo Liberation Army, favor a separation hardly conducive to building cohesive states. But most governments in eastern Europe and...

Kosovo Fascism, Albanian’s Shame The systematic intimidation of Kosovo’s Serbs brings shame on the province’s Albanians and will have far-reaching and long-term consequences By Veton Surroi in Pristina In the past month an old woman has been beaten to death in her bath; a two-year-old boy has been wounded and his mother shot dead; two youths have been killed with a grenade launcher; and a woman dares not speak her name in public for fear that those who attempted to rape her will return. All these victims were Serbs. Sadly, these are not isolated incidents. Many more of Kosovo’s remaining Serbs have locked themselves in their homes, terrified by an atmosphere in which every sound seems threatening and every vehicle that stops might take you away to your death. Then there is the case of the elderly couple with nothing to eat who are afraid to venture out to buy...

Why the West Can’t Sleep Easy By Gary Younge From The Guardian August 25th 1999 I wonder if President Clinton is getting his sleep, and if he is, does he ever have nightmares about Jelica Cemburovic? In June he said that if Nato had not intervened in Kosovo: “We wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night.” A few months earlier he had explained the rationale behind the bombing thus: “I want us to live in a world where we all get along with each other, with all of our differences.” Jelica, 87, a Serb, is under virtual house arrest in the northern Kosovan town of Podujevo, left at the mercy of ethnic Albanians eager to wreak revenge on the Serb community because of the persecutions once inflicted on them by the Serb security forces. Jelica wants to stay put so that when she dies she can be laid to...

Collected by International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms, IALANA 1. Opinion of the Upper Administrative Court at Mnster, March 11, 1999 (Az: 13A 3894/94.A): “Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have neither been nor are now exposed to regional or countrywide group persecution in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” 2. Opinion of the Bavarian Administrative Court, October 29, 1998 (Az: 22 BA 94.34252): “The Foreign Office’s status reports of May 6, June 8 and July 13, 1998, given to the plaintiffs in the summons to a verbal deliberation, do not allow the conclusion that there is group persecution of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. Not even regional group persecution, applied to all ethnic Albanians from a specific part of Kosovo, can be observed with sufficient certainty. The violent actions of the Yugoslav military and police since February 1998 were aimed at separatist activities and are no proof of a persecution of the...

Everything Is Both Legal and Illegal By Stephan Israel From Frankfurter Rundschau 23 August 1999 During the day the shiny new vehicles clog the streets in the seasonably hot Pristina. Some are driving with tags from neighboring Albania, where as others have no license plate. One can see the latest models that just recently came off the assembly lines. On board are often young men with dark sun glasses and not much to say. The change of scene could not be more radical. Three months ago, when the NATO peacekeeping force arrived, Pristina was a ghost town. Today primarily the young people use their freedom in the evening to meet in one of the bars. Business seems to be flourishing. From the loudspeakers boom the previously forbidden songs about the Albanian fight for freedom and the people in front of the bars crowd far out onto the terraces in the...

Differentiation and Analysis of ‘Clean War’ By Zhang Dezhen From International Forum of Renmin Ribao, Beijing 24 August 1999 Some people in US-led NATO military circles are immensely proud to claim that the Kosovo war which has just ended was a”clean war.” The reason they give is that in this war, fought by means of strategic air strikes, NATO achieved a record of combat without a single casualty. In fact, as far as NATO is concerned, the war it launched against the Yugoslav Federation [FRY] was indeed very “clean” and “neat.” As one of the belligerents, the cities of NATO countries were not destroyed, their inhabitants were not killed, and they lost not one military casualty. This must be the first time this has happened in the history of war. Without mentioning the Korean and Vietnam wars, from which tens of thousands of US soldiers never returned, up to 100...

The Position of Yugoslavia on NATO in Kosovo By The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Belgrade, 16 August 1999 Implementation of Security Council resolution 1244 (1999) and the Military Technical Agreement, the current situation and positions of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia The Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, recalling its communications to the Security Council and the United Nations Secretary-General, as well as to the Heads of UNMIK and KFOR and in particular, the positions expressed in its Memorandum of 27 July 1999 relating to the current situation in the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija (hereinafter: the Province), has the honour to draw attention to the following facts and views: 1. Security Council resolution 1244 (1999) has unequivocally reaffirmed the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and, accordingly, defined the mandates and the terms of reference...

"Serbia Counts Cost" By Larry Elliott From The Guardian, London August 23, 1999 Yugoslavia faces the threat of a humanitarian disaster this winter in the aftermath of Nato’s 11-week war earlier this year which caused £38bn worth of damage and transformed the country into the poorest in Europe, a new report discloses. The Economist Intelligence Unit says today that the air campaign inflicted "enormous damage on the Yugoslav economy and infrastructure", with gross domestic product poised to shrink by 40% this year. Real GDP this year is expected to be just 30% of the level a decade ago, the sharpest decline of any of the 27 countries making the transition from communism to a market economy. Income per head will be below even that of Albania, which has until now been the poorest in Europe. The EIU added that the west’s policy of denying reconstruction aid to Serbia while president...

By Steven R. Ratner From The Christian Science Monitor August 18, 1999, Wednesday The war in Kosovo seems to confirm our worst fears about the dangers to peace that lurk in ethnic conflict. As with Bosnia before it, attempts to stop “ethnic cleansing” through diplomacy proved fruitless, leading to outside military intervention.Western troops and hordes of international personnel now occupy both Bosnia and Kosovo. The result is, effectively, an international protectorate unlikely to solve long-term problems. But Europe and the rest of the world are not full of Kosovos – yet. In fact, the term “ethnic dispute” simplifies a wide variety of situations. Some governments, like Serbia’s or Croatia’s, clearly have yet to accept people of varying backgrounds on equal footing; and some ethnic organizations, like the Kosovo Liberation Army, favor a separation hardly conducive to building cohesive states. But most governments in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union...

Collected by International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms, IALANA 1. Opinion of the Upper Administrative Court at Mnster, March 11, 1999 (Az: 13A 3894/94.A):“Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have neither been nor are now exposed to regional or countrywide group persecution in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” 2. Opinion of the Bavarian Administrative Court, October 29, 1998 (Az: 22 BA 94.34252):“The Foreign Office’s status reports of May 6, June 8 and July 13, 1998, given to the plaintiffs in the summons to a verbal deliberation, do not allow the conclusion that there is group persecution of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. Not even regional group persecution, applied to all ethnic Albanians from a specific part of Kosovo, can be observed with sufficient certainty. The violent actions of the Yugoslav military and police since February 1998 were aimed at separatist activities and are no proof of a persecution of the whole Albanian...

By The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Belgrade, 16 August 1999 Implementation of Security Council resolution 1244 (1999) and the Military Technical Agreement, the current situation and positions of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia The Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, recalling its communications to the Security Council and the United Nations Secretary-General, as well as to the Heads of UNMIK and KFOR and in particular, the positions expressed in its Memorandum of 27 July 1999 relating to the current situation in the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija (hereinafter: the Province), has the honour to draw attention to the following facts and views: 1. Security Council resolution 1244 (1999) has unequivocally reaffirmed the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and, accordingly, defined the mandates and the terms of reference of UNMIK and KFOR. By accepting the Ahtisaari-Chernomyrdin...