Archive 1986 – 2017

Today on Sep 22 on the session of the Kosovo Transitional Council the representatives of the Serbian national commuity, Bishop Artemije and Mr. Trajkovic officially resigned from their positions within the KTC. They explained their leaving of the Council with the fact that after three months of KFOR andUNMIK presence in Kosovo the multiethnic concept in Kosovo has failed. This failure was crowned by the transformation of the KLA into a monoethnic and armed Kosovo Protection Corps which is directly violating the UN Security Council Resolution 1244. After three months of peace the results are catastrophic for the Serbs in the province: about 200.000 expelled, more than 350 killed, 450 abducted, thousands of burned and looted Serb houses as well as 70 destroyed churches and monasteries in the presence of almost 50.000 international peace forces. In Kosovo there is not a single multiethnic institution. Serbs have been practically expelled from...

Sept. 29, 1999 LONDON- The western powers owe Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia nothing. They certainly don’t owe him the rewriting of history in his favour. This begs the question why on earth are Nato and Russia policing Kosovo with the avowed purpose not just of “keeping the peace”, but of maintaining the fiction that the majority Albanian-peopled territory is part of Serbia and thus part of Milosevic’s reduced empire of Yugoslavia? These questions were asked in this column back in June at the time of Nato’s bombing of Serbia. At the time Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and the other western leaders insisted on every occasion their prime purpose was simply an end of the threats to the security of the Kosovo Albanians; they were not prepared to consider a deal with Milosevic that would re-draw the Balkan map more sensibly. In fact before the war they had insisted on a future...

By Tyler Marshall,Times Staff writerLos Angeles Times,September 27, 1999 U.S. foreign affairs specialists are monitoring the potential for increased cooperation between Russia, China and India, amid a growing conviction in all three countries, especially after NATO’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, that U.S. power must somehow be checked. Although agreeing that the three nations are far from coalescing into a pan-Eurasian, anti-NATO axis, the analysts remain concerned about what they call a nightmare scenario: an alliance that would bring together about 2.5 billion people, formidable military might and a vast stockpile of nuclear weapons, all held together by the common goal of countering America’s global dominance. “Right now, you have flirting,” said Charles Williams Maynes, president of the Eurasia Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. “I don’t know where this is going to go. If we play our cards right, it’s going to go nowhere.” But if the relationships progress, Maynes said,...

democratic model in Kosovo. (Susan Biddle ˜ The Washington Post) By R. Jeffrey Smith Washington Post Foreign Service PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Sept. 23 ˆ Senior U.S. officials have privately dropped their opposition to Kosovo’s independence from Yugoslavia and say the Clinton administration increasingly sees the province’s secession as inevitable.Officials say the emerging consensus, which amounts to a major shift for the United States, is already having a significant impact on the international peacekeeping operation in Kosovo. The United States has become a leading advocate for the creation of independent institutions and legal structures that tend to isolate the fledgling United Nations protectorate from Yugoslavia’s manifold economic problems and political troubles. U.S. officials deny that the administration’s approach is meant to engineer the further breakup of Yugoslavia, as the Belgrade government claims. They say it is meant only to ensure that Kosovo becomes a viable, self-governing democracy with a successful economy. But...

Press Conference, KFOR Press Centre on 21 Sept. 1999 September 24, 1999 Introduction by Dr Kouchner, Special Representative of the Secretary General: Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you for coming and let me tell you first that we, Mike Jackson and I, are very happy to be facing you to answer to you questions after 2 little very light statements. It is a good day for us. But, this is not an end, but a beginning. Demilitarisation is not necessarily accomplished by simply dismantling military structures and collecting soldiers’ arms. The concept of complementing demilitarisation through the transformation of former fighting forces, is well established in peacekeeping practice. It became an integral part of the Kosovo peace process. As a result of the KLA undertaking on demilitarisation and transformation presented to KFOR Commander, Mike Jackson in June. In close consultation with UNMIK, KFOR subsequently developed a concept for a civilian, disciplined,...

LONDON- Quite shortly now, if he hasn’t already, Turkish prime minister Bulent Ecevit will have to make up his mind whether the state should procede with the execution of the Kurdish terrorist leader, Abdullah Ocalan. On this decision Turkey’s future as a serious contender for entry to the European Union is going to hang or fall. Well, that is what a good many commentators were saying three months ago, on the conclusion of his trial. Yet, today, following the devastating earthquake in Turkey of August 17th and the serious, but rather less severe one in Greece three weeks’ later, it looks as if Turkey has been allowed a new look at the starting line for entry into the European Union, without delivering any promises about Ocalan or indeed about any of the other large hurdles it supposedly has to cross- a new deal for the Kurds (the world’s largest ethnic group...

LONDON- In his urgent action message received yesterday by all his friends (and unsolicited recipients like myself) Professor Noam Chomsky wraps up the whole East Timor imbroglio as a dastardly American responsibility, replete with ulterior, dark, purposes that suggest the U.S. pursues even its most tangential interests with a total disregard for scruple. It simply wants to rule the world.* While it is probably true that Washington ventures on a dangerous and sometimes counterproductive ego trip every time it involves itself in foreign affairs there is yet- even after Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Central America, Afghanistan, Iraq, ex-Yugoslavia and now East Timor – no hard evidence that there is some malign grand design. Perhaps if there was it might be easier to deal with. No, the trouble with America is more complicated- it is its sense of self-evident (to itself) moral purpose, delivered into the foreign field- on both the military and...

New Statesman, September 13 1999 It had been a long night of waiting for the Indonesian troop convoy to pass. Two of us then crossed the border into East Timor clandestinely, through a forest of dead, petrified trees that appeared as silhouetted needles around which skeins of fine white sand drifted, like mist. As the sun rose, there stood the surreal crosses. They were almost everywhere; great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides, crosses beside the road, overlooking white slabs. They littered the earth and crowded the eye. As we trudged through dense scrub, we came upon them: on a riverbank, an escarpment, commanding all before them. The inscriptions on some were normal: those of generations departed in proper time and sequence. However, the dates of these were all prior to 1975, when proper time and sequence ended. The majority revealed...

Major statement from Noam Chomsky, Sept 10, on East Timor There are many topics of major long-term significance that should be addressed at the APEC conference, but one is of consuming importance and overwhelming urgency. We all know exactly what it is, and why it must be placed at the forefront of concern — and more important, instant action. This conference provides an opportunity — there may not be many more — to terminate the tragedy that is once again reaching shocking proportions in East Timor. The Indonesian military forces who invaded East Timor 24 years ago, and have been slaughtering and terrorizing its inhabitants ever since, are right now, as I write, in the process of sadistically destroying what remains: the population, the cities and villages. What they are planning, we cannot be sure: a Carthaginian solution is not out of the question. The tragedy of East Timor has...

From BBC London, Newsnight Friday, August 20, 1999 Published at 03:34 GMT 04:34 UK General Clark: “didn’t always defer to those who wanted targets withheld” In a special Newsnight programme Mark Urban investigates Nato’s handling of the Kosovo crisis. Interviewing the key players he finds that the Allies were far from united. (Newsnight – BBC Two – 10.30pm – Friday 20 August). Talk to the people running Nato’s war against Slobodan Milosevic and many will tell you it was a “near run thing”.  Strobe Talbott: “A good thing that the conflict ended when it did” Strobe Talbott, the American Deputy Secretary of State, told BBC’s Newsnight Kosovo Special “there would have been increasing difficulty within the alliance in preserving the solidarity and the resolve of the alliance” had the Serbian leader not given in on 3 June. Mr Talbott, regarded as the man closest to President Clinton in the Washington...

Kommer du ihåg den lilla vietnamesiska flickan som springer ifrån amerikanska napalmbombar? Piloten kunde inte bära vad han hade gjort och blev präst. För ett par år sedan träffades de två, hon förlät honom omedelbart och kramade om honom med ett leende. Och – inom kort – visas i USA en film om Pete Peterson, en annan bombpilot som satt i vietnamesisk fängelse i 6 år, kom hem och blev medlem av kongressen och deltog i försoningsarbete mellan de två länderna – “jag kan inte göra om det som hände, men jag kan hjälpa till att bygga framtiden.” Han blev USA:s ambassadör i Hanoi 1996 och gifte sig förra året med vietnamesiskan Vi Ly. Tillåt mig påståendet att vi aldrig kommer att lyckas med att hjälpa krigförande och krigsdrabbade till fred, med mindre vi sätter de mänskliga dimensionerna av konflikter, krig och återuppbyggnad i centrum. Förstörda hus och infrastruktur är...

LONDON- When Archbishop Helder Camara died at the end of last month the president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardosa, declared three days of national mourning. Not bad for a cleric who in his “red bishop” days, as Time magazine once dubbed him, so riled the authorities that they sent a gun squad that rained a hail of bullets into his modest apartment tacked on to the back of a church. “When I feed the poor they called me a saint”, he once said. “When I asked, ‘Why are they poor?’ they called me a communist.” I don’t know personally Bishop Carlos Belo of East Timor, the Nobel prize winner, but I see certain important similarities between the two men: a commitment to justice, an anger with those who ignore the poverty of the majority, a preparedness to seek compromise and reconciliation rather than perpetual conflict. Bishop Belo’s time of testing has...