Archive 1986 – 2017

From ‘Terrorists’ to ‘Partners’ U.S. Senate Republican Policy CommitteeLarry E. Craig, Chairman – Jade West, Staff Director March 31, 1999 Publications Issue List Vote Analysis Main Page On March 24, 1999, NATO initiated air attacks on Yugoslavia (a federation of two republics, Serbia and Montenegro) in order to impose a peace agreement in the Serbian province of Kosovo, which has an ethnic Albanian majority. The Clinton Administration has not formally withdrawn its standing insistence that Belgrade sign the peace agreement, which would entail the deployment in Kosovo of some 28,000 NATO ground troops — including 4,000 Americans — to police the settlement. But in recent days the Clinton public line has shifted to a demand that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic halt the offensive he has launched in Kosovo, which has led to a growing humanitarian crisis in the region, before there can be a stop to the bombing campaign. One...

July 2, 1999 In Pristina, the UN Secretary-General’s acting Special Representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, called together leaders of the Albanian and Serbian communities to focus exclusively on the pressing issue of security for all people in Kosovo. This is the first time that Albanian and Serb leaders of Kosovo have sat down to discuss concrete issues. They issued a joint statement calling for restraint and respect for human life, which was broadcast on radio and television by the United Nations mission in Kosovo.  The text of the statement is as follows: “Today, we have met at the headquarters of the UN Mission in Kosovo to urgently address a problem that affects all the people of Kosovo: people who want to return to their homes here, people who want to stay here, people who have returned in the past few weeks, people who have remained here throughout recent tragic months....

For 27 år siden skrev den norsk-svenske filosof Harald Ofstad en banebrydende bog om “Vor foragt for svaghed. Nazismens normer og vurderinger – og vore egne.” Nu, efter den foreløbige kulmination i Kosovo af Vestens Balkanpolitik, tyer jeg atter til den for jeg har endnu ikke kunnet begripe hvordan Vesten kunne begå hvad jeg mener er et upåagtet eller fortrængt civilisationsbarbari. For det følgende kan det være værd at lytte til statsminister Nyrup Rasmussen, der med disse ord på grundlovsdag mente at Kosovo-krisen ville vise at demokratiet er stærkest: “Vi ser den danske befolknings ansvarsfølelse og fællesskabsfølelse og demokratiske grundholdning, fordi vi er klar over, at vores demokrati er så dyrebart og over, at det at hjælpe andre i virkeligheden også er at hjælpe os selv.” Mit ærinde er IKKE at påstå at USA eller NATO eller Danmark er nazistisk eller på vej at blive det. Det er at rejse...

LONDON- A nuclear war creeps up on the world by an unmarked path. As India and Pakistan confront each other daily over “the line of control” that marks the temporary division over their rival claims for the state of Kashmir the chance of their conflict spiralling out of control can no longer be dismissed. And if that happens the nuclear weapons that both sides exhibited to the world for the first time last year are within a hairtrigger of being used. “The first false alert could be last”, said one seasoned observer not very long ago. We should think of Kashmir as a permanent Cuban missile crisis, when in nose to nose nuclear brinkmanship the risk of inadvertent nuclear war is unacceptably high. With only 4 or 5 minutes warning time before a nuclear weapon fired from one country would detonate in the other there is no time for second thoughts...

By Phillip Knightley who places the Kosovo atrocity stories in their historical context The Indepedent June 27, 1999 If history is any guide, then many of the atrocity stories from Kosovo that have dominated the media since the end of the war will turn out to be false. Written and filmed by some of the self-styled “mass-grave correspondents”, they may at the moment appear to have the chilling ring of truth: after all, mass graves have unquestionably been found. Some of the stories may indeed be genuine, but many will vanish under investigation, or the scrutiny of time. When passions have cooled – as one hopes that they will even in the hate-strewn Balkans – we may even hear the confessions of those who invented them. Invented? In the case of Kosovo the inventions will have been the work not of British journalists but of those feeding them with information. In...

Similar Crises Get Divergent Treatment in the New York Times From Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. Media analysis, critiques and news reports New York, June 25, 1999 An article in the June 24 New York Times reported on the trial in Turkey of captured Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan. The Times provided background on the war between Kurdish separatist guerrillas and Turkish security forces:“The war that Ocalan has waged has cost more than 30,000 lives and made him the object of intense hatred. It has also made him a heroic figure to many Kurds who live in Turkey’s southeast.”Contrast this description with the way the New York Times presents the background of another, very similar, separatist war (3/27/99):“The Serbian campaign against the ethnic Albanians has seen more than 2,000 killed in the last year, with hundreds of thousands of Kosovars driven from their homes, according to the United Nations.” The...

A Proposal on an International Non-Military Force for Peace ByMel Duncanand 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...

LONDON- If the war with Slobodan Milosevic is now in abeyance it is, perhaps, to remind us that only temporarily were we allowed to forget that the one with Saddam Hussein continues. The bombing never stopped; neither do the sanctions. The one important thing always to recall when discussing what next to do about Saddam Hussein is what President Bill Clinton has said more than once: that the UN arms inspectors found and destroyed more Iraqi weapons of mass destruction than were destroyed during all the days of intensive bombardment during the days of the Gulf War. Briefly put, most of the work of disarming Iraq has now been done. The UN inspectorate may not have been a perfect fool-proof system but it was pretty good. Nothing that existed before, in the annals of warfare, short of total military occupation, had such a record of success in disarming a nation. If...

“Did you read UN Security Council Resolution 1244 about peace in Kosovo? Well, it is not exactly coherent. If your computer manual was this much of a mishmash and contradictions and if dozens of pages were missing, you would probably have operative system failures and bombs – and I think this is what will happen with NATO in Kosovo. But the resolution IS clear enough on essentials for us to ask after one week of NATO ‘peace’-keeping in Kosovo what on earth is going on,” says TFF director Jan Oberg. Here and in PressInfo 72 follow some of the already manifest problems. It condemns all acts of violence by the local parties, but has not even a mild statement about the uniquely brutal NATO-caused killings and devastation of a country of 12 million people. It expresses a determination to resolve the humanitarian crisis – well and good – but does...

Jeste li procitali Rezoluciju 1244 Saveta bezbednosti UN-a o miru na Kosovu? Pa, ne moze se bas reci da je koherentna. Kad bi uputstvo za rukovanje vaseg kompjutera imalo tako brojne nejasnoce i protivrecnosti, pa jos kad bi mu i nekoliko desetaka stranica bilo istrgnuto, izvesno je da bi vam se operativni sitem neprestano rusio i zapinjao a mislim da je upravo to ono sto ce se dogoditi NATO-u na Kosovu. Medjutim, ova Rezolucija je IPAK dovoljno jasna u svojim osnovnim crtama pa ce nam dozvoliti da se posle evo, prve nedelje NATO-ovog kosovskog mirotvorstva zapitamo sta se to uopste tamo dogadja? kaze direktor TFF-a, Jan Oberg. U ovoj i u sledecoj informaciji (Pres Info # 72) mozete pratiti analizu nekih od vec uocenih ociglednih problema. Rezolucijom se osudjuje svako nasilje lokalnih strana umesanih u sukob dok ona istovremeno ne sadrzi ni najblazi oblik spomena izuzetno brutalnog ubijanja koje je...

LONDON- Logjams that busy, but unthinking, beavers have been building up for decades are now to be broken up. The distance between inaction and action on dismantling the dams that impede social progress in Third World countries has been narrowed and the rivers of opportunity should be able to run a little faster. On Friday, President Bill Clinton makes [made] an historic visit to the Geneva headquarters of the International Labour Organisation, one of the oldest UN bodies, established to bring unions, employers and government into a closer working relationship. His speech in favour of a convention aimed at eliminating the most intolerable forms of child labour is, by any measure, an important milestone. On Saturday, the Group of 8, the world’s leading industrial nations together with Russia, open their heads of government meeting in Cologne and debt relief for the poorest nations is, after Kosovo, the most significant item on...

When There is Little Left for a Radical to Say By Robin Hahnel ZNet Commentary June 16, 1999 Paul A. Volcker is best known as the conservative, inflation fighting Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1979 through 1987. Prior to that he served Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in a variety of capacities. After retiring from the Fed he became Chairman of James D. Wolfenson & Co. Inc. and is the Henry Kaufman Visiting Professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Paul Volcker is exactly the kind of person I would expect to be invited to make the luncheon address to the Overseas Development Council Conference on Making Globalization Work (March 18, 1999). But I did not expected him to have this to say: “Everybody talks about globalism these days to the point we are all sick of the term. But what...