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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...

Quietly Preventing Conflict 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...

Differentiation and Analysis of ‘Clean War’ By Zhang Dezhen From International Forum of Renmin Ribao, Beijing 24 August 1999 Some people in US-led NATO military circles are immensely proud to claim that the Kosovo war which has just ended was a”clean war.” The reason they give is that in this war, fought by means of strategic air strikes, NATO achieved a record of combat without a single casualty. In fact, as far as NATO is concerned, the war it launched against the Yugoslav Federation [FRY] was indeed very “clean” and “neat.” As one of the belligerents, the cities of NATO countries were not destroyed, their inhabitants were not killed, and they lost not one military casualty. This must be the first time this has happened in the history of war. Without mentioning the Korean and Vietnam wars, from which tens of thousands of US soldiers never returned, up to 100...

Reporting Kosovo: Journalism vs. Propaganda By Philip Hammond* From Transitions Online http://www.transitions-online.org Throughout Nato’s war against Yugoslavia, no opportunity was missed to contrast the propaganda emanating from Yugoslavia’s state-controlled media with the truthful, reliable free press of the West. The contrast was used by Nato as a reason to kill civilians, when it bombed the Belgrade RTS television building in April; and by journalists as a way to brush aside criticism of British media coverage and Nato news-management. As a demonstration of the vibrant diversity of Britain’s unshackled media, take the stories written as reporters entered Kosovo alongside British paratroopers on 12 June, carried in the following day’s Sunday editions. This is what James Dalrymple wrote in the Independent on Sunday, describing the town of Kacanik: ‘It looked peaceful and intact – except for the silence .There were no curtains, no ornaments, no door handles, no light fittings. Every item...

United States leads charge to discredit U.N. 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 authority) as the fall guy for the not-so-peaceful conclusion of the...

Godt nytår! Nåh, hvad skal DU egentlig lave nytårsaften? Det ER jo ikke noget der sker sådan lige med det samme igen, vel! Vé den der ikke har svar på rede hånd. Som jeg. Overalt hører man at "nu hvor vi er på vej mod et nyt århundrede, så må vi lige have ordnet…" eller at "her ved indgangen til et nyt årtusind" bør vi sætte os for at..og "af begivenhederne i det her århundrede bør vi lære…". På vej ind i "den nye tid" hvad tror man så at vore efterkommere vil sige, når de ser tilbage om et årti, århundrede, årtusind på 1900-tallet? Vil de fremhæve det som teknikens, krigenes, vækstens, den kolde krigs, eller globaliseringens århundrede? Kendetegnes "vor tid" af liberalismens sejr over fascismen og kommunismen? Eller lidt af hvert? Fascinerende, ikke! Nogle planlægger at befinde sig på bestemte, mere eller mindre mærkelige, steder, nytårsaften, f.eks. på en...

Gott nytt år! 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...

By Ibrahim Fathi In 1994, the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) estimated that 59 million people in Latin America are victims of chronic hunger. In its 1998 Human Development Report, the UNDP says that 840 million people in the Third World suffer from malnutrition, and that the average household in Africa consumes 25 per cent less than it did in the early ’70s. The industrialised nations cannot be exonerated from the plight of the Third World. Prices of primary materials, which account for the bulk of the Third World’s exports, are steadily dropping against the rising costs of exports from the industrialised nations, including primary material exports. These discrepancies are not the product of the “free market forces of supply and demand”, but of the dynamics of unequal power relationships. There is a steady and permanent drain of wealth from the Third World into the first. According to the...

The New York Review of Books Volume XLVI, Number 13 By Richard Ullman* August 12, 1999 The following interview with George Kennan took place in Princeton in June, during the days following the end of the war in Kosovo. Richard Ullman: Are you surprised at the role that Russia has played in the bargaining over Kosovo? George Kennan: Not really. It is, for them, largely a matter of prestige. Precisely because they now have no great military power they fear that the rest of the world will forget that they are a great people, which of course they are in many respects, and by no means only the military ones. To be able to play a useful part in the resolution of the Kosovo crisis is, for many of them, a much-needed source of reassurance about themselves; and I see no reason why we should not, on principle, welcome it....

The Rich Get Richer By Ibrahim Fathi Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt, 3 – 9 June 1999 In 1994, the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) estimated that 59 million people in Latin America are victims of chronic hunger. In its 1998 Human Development Report, the UNDP says that 840 million people in the Third World suffer from malnutrition, and that the average household in Africa consumes 25 per cent less than it did in the early ’70s. The industrialised nations cannot be exonerated from the plight of the Third World. Prices of primary materials, which account for the bulk of the Third World’s exports, are steadily dropping against the rising costs of exports from the industrialised nations, including primary material exports. These discrepancies are not the product of the "free market forces of supply and demand", but of the dynamics of unequal power relationships. There is a steady and permanent drain...

Welcome to the New World Order 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...

AN APPEAL FROM FATHER SAVA, DECANI, KOSOVO Dear Friends, After the month and a half of the NATO and UN sponsored peace in Kosovo we have the following results: 130.000 – Serbian refugees from Kosovo (2/3 of the population) 150 – killed Serbs 200 – kidnapped Serbs 40 – damaged or destroyed churches Serbs are persecuted, killed in flats, expelled from their homes, women are raped, farmers are slaughtered, Serbian and all Non-Albanian homes are systematically torched, AND all this in the presence of the most powerful force in the World. We have just prepared an extensive photo material on destruction of the Serbian Orthodox Churches in Kosovo. These destructions are systematically effected by the Kosovo Albanian Extremists who have launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing and the cultural genocide against everything Christian in the province. All these churches are destroyed NOT IN WAR but during the peace established by...