Archive 1986 – 2017

Albanske ekstremister har nu afsluttet en etnisk rensning af omkring 90% af Kosovos sigøjnere, serbere og jøder, proportionelt den største hidtil på Balkan. Beograd hverken planlagde eller gennemførte at fordrive 90% af albanerne. NATO hævdede det var uacceptabelt at Beograd havde 40.000 tropper i området for blandt andet beskytte det serbiske mindretal, men ingen har givet os et svar på hvorfor lige så mange NATO-soldater med mere avanceret teknik og efterretningsfolk ikke har kunnet forhindre denne aldeles forudsigelige humanitære katastrofe. Det jugoslaviske militær fik 10 dage til at trække alt tilbage men har i strid med Sikkerhedsrådets resolution 1244 ikke fået lov til at vende tilbage med grænsevagter. Den albanske befrielseshær, UCK, fik 90 dage til at indlevere sine våben, men har nu i strid med resolutionen ikke blot overtaget lokaladministration og politivæsen, men også fået lov til at oprette en slags nationalgarde med våben og helikoptere. Vest samarbejder med...

It is grotesque hypocrisy for Tony Blair to weep for the children of Dunblane By John Pilger From The Guardian September 7, 1999 Having finally discovered East Timor, most of the media have now left, blaming a “descent into violence”. The long, silent years mock these words. The descent began almost a quarter of a century ago when Indonesian special forces invaded the defenceless Portuguese colony. On December 7, 1975, a lone radio voice rose and fell in the static: “The soldiers are killing indiscriminately. Women and children are being shot in the streets. This is an appeal for international help. This is an SOS – please help us.” No help came, because the western democracies were secret partners in a crime as great and enduring as any this century; proportionally, not even Pol Pot matched Suharto’s spree. Air Force One, carrying President Ford and his secretary of state Henry...

The Western Alliance Will Not Accept an Independent Nation There, and the KLA Will Not Settle for Less From Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1999 In the aftermath of NATO’s military intervention in Kosovo, some analysts presciently warned that the peacekeeping and reconstruction mission undertaken by the U.S. and its allies was fraught with peril. However, as each day brings ominous reports from Kosovo–sniper attacks on peacekeepers, “organized” ethnic cleansing of Serbs by ethnic Albanians–it is apparent that the postwar honeymoon between the Kosovo Liberation Army, on one side, and NATO troops and U.N. civil authorities, on the other, has ended much more quickly than we expected. The first shots in Kosovo’s next war–pitting the KLA against its erstwhile liberators–already have been fired. The unraveling of the post-conflict settlement in Kosovo was easily foreseeable–except, of course, by the Clinton administration. The Clinton foreign policy team bears a heavy responsibility, because...

“Sovereignty is less absolute than in earlier times. Just as we now consider it right to intervene in families to prevent domestic violence, so it has become normal to override State sovereignty in cases of large scale violations of human rights.”(1)This is the rationale proposed by Mary Kaldor, to justify NATO’s decision to bomb Yugoslavia. Ever since the cold war ended, she claims “the distinction between internal peace and external war, between a domestic rule of law and international anarchy that characterised the Westphalian era has broken down”.(2) Indeed, she continues, since the second world war “there has been steady progress towards a global legal regime which deals both with the laws of war and with human rights and which has been strengthened by bodies like Amnesty”. And so we arrive at a new role for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation: “benign or ethical imperialism”. NATO at 50 must “switch...

Universitetslektor Kjell Magnusson, Centrum för multietnisk forskning, Uppsala Universitet analyserar i “Rambouilletavtalet. Texten, förhandlingarna, bakgrunden” myterna om dessa “fredsförhandlingar” och konkluderar att deras syfte med all sannolikhet var att legitimera NATO:s bombningar av Jugoslavien. Man kan inte låta bli att fråga sig hur så många människor, inklusive politiker och journalister, kunde låta sig luras av NATO:s, EU:s och USA:s propaganda. Visste svenska politiker och UD:s ämbetsmän om det verkliga innehållet – och processens verkliga syften? Boken bekräftar i långa stycken den analys TFF presenterade redan den 17 och 18 mars – före bombningnarna – i PressInfo 57 och 58. Boken beställes på http://www.multietn.uu.se/nybok.html

By William Church From Defense NewsJune 14, 1999Category: Inside View, page 42 NATO’s actions in Kosovo have set the stage for an urgently needed, in-depth discussion on the use of information operations (IO). The Kosovo action allowed NATO to use a full arsenal of IO weapons. It used graphite bombs against the infrastructure to deprive the civilian population of electricity and, therefore, put political pressure on the Yugoslav government. Senior U.S. Air Force officials have described extensive covert intrusions into the Yugoslav air defense systems to degrade their response capabilities. Both sides conducted an extensive psychological campaign that ranged from traditional leaflets targeted at Yugoslav civilians warning about a bogus ground attack to hacking World Wide Web pages that had minimum strategic value. The Kosovo action has pushed significant international relations issues to the surface. Questions of sovereignty and the role of multilateral organizations are prime concerns, but it is also...

LONDON- The results of East Timor’s referendum on its future will not be available until September 7th but, given the high turn out, most observers seem to be concluding that the electorate will reject the offer of autonomy offered by Indonesian president, B.J. Habibie. President Habibie has said that in this case Indonesia will give the territory independence. Inevitably, indeed it has already started, this is going to lead to more violence within East Timor, since the militias, with their close ties to the Indonesian armed forces, oppose breaking the Indonesian link, and they are well armed and ruthless to boot. This is going to tear at the heart of Indonesia just as it is about to embark on an historic transition from a president chosen by a self-selected cabal to one picked by ballot by an elected constitutional assembly. Thus, it is strange, to say the least, to see a...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 food because they know...