Archive 1986 – 2017

Arrogance: Like other empires, America believes it can write its own rules for its dealings with other nations By Phyllis Bennis* IT WAS EMINENTLY predictable. Just weeks after the end of NATO’s bombing campaign, U.S. officials are blaming the United Nations for NATO’s failure to restore peace in Kosovo and the rest of Yugoslavia. It wasn’t until the bombing failed to stop the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo that Washington and its NATO allies grudgingly allowed a role for the once-excluded U.N. The bombing devastated Yugoslavia and shored up support for Slobodan Milosevic. So, it turned out that the United States and its allies needed the U.N. to orchestrate the deal for ending the air war, withdrawing Yugoslav troops and creating an international protectorate in Kosovo. But it was clear from the beginning that part of the U.S. strategy was to set up the U.N. (already denied adequate resources, personnel and...

Can We Learn to Do Better Than We Did in Kosovo? This article was commissioned by the editors of  World Bank Institute Journal “Development Outreach” and written in August 1999. I was asked to write a thought-provoking piece. Whether it is, only the readers can judge. But the editors of Development Outreach seem to have thought it reached a bit too far …It would read so much better if “edited” down to two text bits boxed inside articles by other authors; they also threw in another full article so that, unfortunately, there was no space available for all my contribution. Below find the full article. The blue sections are those printed by the World Bank Institute Journal. Judge for yourself why this “editing” was done and what they didn’t want to print. And remember they said it wasn’t censorship. Deficient diagnosis, failed conflict-resolution A conflict is a problem that arises out of incompatible...

LONDON- Although you would not know it from Madeleine Albright, the North Korean rocket you can see coming towards you could be a light at the end of the tunnel! The North Koreans are at it again but, each time, fearing the worst, the U.S. and Japan get into a serious panic. They have convinced themselves of a mighty calamity. The U.S. , Japan and South Korea have now threatened a total embargo of the renegade outlaw country if it dare test-fire its new inter-continental ballistic missile. But it should not be a cause for fear, rather the excuse for some highly creative diplomacy. First, there was the row in 1994 over the plutonium-rich cooling rods unloaded from North Korea’s main nuclear reactor. Washington convinced itself that North Korea was on a fast-track to building an armoury of nuclear weapons. President Bill Clinton was heavily leaned on to threaten war with...

“Now is the time to begin to reflect on what actually happened this spring in Kosovo and, thus, to the world. I believe that historians will agree that from March 24, 1999 international politics and relations as well as the global system has changed in a deep sense,” says TFF director Jan Oberg. “Many consider NATO’s intervention a moral success, a just war, a victory for democratic values. But I believe we need to look at it from a variety of angles to a) understand it more deeply and b) to work out ideas, concepts and policies so that anything similar will never happen again elsewhere. It is indeed peculiar that this war – conducted from a moral high ground and with the aim to promote the finest ideals of Western culture – has hardly been evaluated in just such terms. I am not a philosopher of ethics, but here...

“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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Nå, hur ska DU egentligen fira nyårsafton? Det ÄR ju inget som händer med det första igen! Gud nåde den som inte har svar på den frågan. Som jag. Överallt hör man att “nu när vi är på väg mot ett nytt sekel, så måste vi..” eller att “här vid ingången till ett nytt milennium bör vi sträva efter” och “av det 20:e seklet bör vi lära att…” På väg in i “den nya tiden” – vad tror man just nu att framtidens människor kommer att tänka om 1900-talet när de om ett decennium, ett sekel eller milennium ser tillbaka? Kommer de att beteckna det som teknikens, krigens, tillväxtens, det kalla krigets, demokratins eller globaliseringens sekel? Handlar “vår tid” om liberalismens seger över fascism och kommunism? Eller lite av varje? Fascinerande, eller hur?! Många planerar att befinna sig på bestämda, mer eller mindre märkvärdiga, platser den 31 december – t.ex....

RABAT, MOROCCO – Unlike the late King Hussein of Jordan, the late King Hassan of Morocco who died on Friday has seemingly bequeathed his son, King Mohammed VI, a weak hand. A weak hand that is, if you judge power by autocratic reach. Hussein had dabbled with democracy, but his prime ministers and their governments came and went with alacrity and no one doubted who called the shots. With Hassan it was, until fairly recently, a similar, “l’etat, c’est moi”, even if he didn’t change his prime ministers so regularly. But a little over a year ago in a remarkable development, Hassan voluntarily handed over a good slice of power to a former political prisoner, once sentenced to death, the socialist parliamentarian Abderrahman Youssoufi, ending 40 years of conservative rule. Most royal functionaries were sidelined, apart from the king’s powerful, but much reviled, minister of the interior, Driss Basri. Democracy not...