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Take Warnings from the Failures: By Dr. Erika Laubacher-Kubat* In this century alone 160 million people have been killed through wars, genocide and torture; since 1945 almost 200 wars have been fought. Laws on non-intervention, the blocking veto in the UN security council, and the immunity of government leaders have, in almost all cases, protected the perpetrators rather than the victims. The majority of today’s wars are intra-state conflicts between rivaling political groups within a state or conflicts arising between groups and the respective state. Key to identifying the conflict groups is the politicization of ethnic traits via their political leaders. Almost two-thirds of all wars have ethnopolitical roots and occur much more often than wars of an anti-regime nature or between countries. While inter-state wars tend to result in the strengthening of state power, intra-state wars often lead to the collapse of law and order and to the breakdown...

Perspective on the Balkans: The Next War Has Begun By Christopher Layne* 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 the looming disaster in Kosovo is...

Benign Imperialism Versus United Nations By Ken Coates The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation* July 28, 1999 “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...

Information Battlespace – Kosovo Points Way To Future Combat Arena By William Church From Defense News June 14, 1999 Category: 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...

On Iraq and Sanctions 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 population of Iraq...

By Ken Coates The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation* July 9, 1999 It has become clear that, after the Yugoslav war, Europe will not be the same again. Quite evidently, the strategic position is now transformed by the establishment of what may well become a permanent NATO base in the Balkans. This registers a significant shift in the relations between the United States and Europe, and between both of these and the Russians. In turn these convulsions will affect relations within Europe, and between Russia and its allies. For NATO to hold the gateway to the East, the Americans have been brought into a new state of hegemony in Europe. The new base symbolises these vast power changes, not simply the occupation of the province of Kosovo. Whether or not this occupation will result in the pacification of internecine Balkan quarrels is rather uncertain, since new tensions appear to be emerging,...

"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...

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...

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...

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...

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...