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The Protectorate. A Way to Dominate 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...

What I Learned in the War 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...

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...

Autoritære demokratiers drift mod verdensherredømme 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...

The Unfinished Business Of the Century By John Kenneth Galbraith Page A11 of the Boston Globe on 07/12/99. The following remarks are from a speech John Kenneth Galbraith delivered last week on receiving an honorary degree from the London School of Economics. Much in this last century has, indeed, been accomplished. In what we choose to call the advanced countries there has been an enormous change in the basic substance of life, particularly in the production of food, shelter, clothing, other manufactured artifacts, provision of health care and in the means of transportation. I began my life in economics with the study of agriculture. At that time just under half of all those gainfully employed in the United States were engaged in producing food, tobacco, and cotton, as for centuries before most had been so occupied. Now fewer than 5 percent are thus engaged. In this last century men and...

Democracy Against Hegemony By Samir Amin Al-Ahram Weekly 22 – 28 April 1999 Issue No. 426 Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 The 28 March issue of the New York Times contains an informative article on US political strategy. Its content is summed up by an eloquent image that takes up one page of the publication: a boxing glove in the colours of the American flag, accompanied by the following caption: “What the world needs now — for globalisation to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is”. The reason for the announced punches is elucidated in these terms: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the US Army, Air...

Forced to Accept False Logic By Edward Said Al-Ahram Weekly 29 April – 5 May 1999 As I write these lines, the NATO campaign is a month old, with none of the alliance’s announced objectives anywhere near being accomplished. The tyrannical and xenophobic regime of Slobodan Milosevic is still in power, gathering more Serbian adherents, even from among his former enemies in the country. Dissidents, democratic opposition figures, anti-government radio stations and papers have either been silenced or now support him against NATO, an unsurprising thing given that the increasingly damaging air campaign is correctly perceived as a war against all of Serbia. The atrocities in Kosovo have also increased, with more refugees, more destroyed villages, and more (rather than less) Serbian troops creating havoc in a place that is supposedly being protected from further ravages. This is by far the worst of NATO’s miscalculations, for which the starkest proof...

Nothing in My 30 Years of Reporting Wars Compares with the Present Propaganda Dressed as Journalism By John Pilger New Statesman, London 12th July 1999 On 17 June, the Guardian published a letter by Ben Bradshaw MP, a new Labour bomber. “In one radio discussion I did with [Pilger],” he wrote, “he even suggested the refugees were inventing stories of massacres.” He demanded my apology. I took the trouble to get a tape of Scott Chisholm’s programme on Talk Radio, on which Bradshaw and I appeared. What I actually said was that refugees “often tell the truth, but this is sometimes difficult to verify” – the opposite of what Bradshaw wrote. Bradshaw’s smooth transition from an incomplete career at the BBC to obedient Blairite MP was reflected not only in his distortion of what I said, but in his indignation. "Why," he said to me, "are you criticising America and...

Jugoslavien under bomberna Bristen på medkänsla och solidaritet med de elva miljonerna medborgare i dagens Jugoslavien, vars samhälle dag för dag förstörs, är lika förvånande som beklagansvärd. Jag minns hur humanister inom kultur, vetenskap, politik och medier flockades till Sarajevo när den staden förstördes. Journalister vallfärdar nu i hundratal till Makedonien och Albanien ˆ på goda grunder ˆ och till NATO:s presskonferenser. Men få tycks vara motiverade nog att själva vilja uppleva och rapportera hur det känns att vara objekt för den värsta militära, ekonomiska och sociala förstörelsen i Europa sedan 1945. Var är de som tycker Jugoslavien är en diktatur? De tvärsäkra håller sig hemma. Var är förkämparna för mänskliga rättigheter när NATO på det grövsta bryter mot dem? Var är humanisterna när en europeisk huvudstad och en kulturnation går under i urskillningslöst västligt våld? Var är de intellektuella när en handfull megalomaniska ledare åtar sig att köra en...

Auktoritära demokratiers drift mot världsherravälde För 27 år sedan skrev den norsk-svenska filosofen Harald Ofstad en banbrytande bok, “Vårt förakt för svaghet. Nazismens normer och värderingar – och våra egna” (Prisma, Stockholm). Nu, efter den tillfälliga kulmineringen i Kosovo av Västs Balkanpolitik, tar jag åter fram den eftersom jag inte har begripit hur Väst kunde begå vad jag menar är ett förträngt civilisationsbarbari. Mitt syfte här är INTE att påstå att USA eller NATO eller Sverige är nazistiskt eller på väg att bli det, utan att resa frågan om det auktoritära i vår egen kulturkrets, just utifrån det sätt som Ofstad gör det i förordet till boken: "Om vi håller upp nazismen som en spegel för oss, ser vi våra egna drag förstorade, men just därför så avslöjande. Antisemitismen är inte det väsentliga i nazismen. Det väsentliga är läran om att den starka ska härska över den svage, och att...

A War-Torn Reporter Reflects By Michael Dobbs The Washington Post July 11, 1999, Sunday On my way out of Kosovo last month, I stopped off in the southern Serbian city of Nis. I wanted to find out what Serbs thought about the war that had been waged in their name, and how they felt about the atrocities committed by Serbian forces against ethnic Albanian civilians. My first call was on the mayor, Zoran Zivkovic, a leader of Yugoslavia’s Democratic party and a longtime opponent of President Slobodan Milosevic. While Zivkovic certainly did not condone the killings of ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovo, he was more interested in talking about killings he had witnessed within sight of his own office. On two occasions during the war–on May 7 and May 12–NATO warplanes dropped cluster bombs on the center of Nis, killing a total of 15 civilians. (NATO maintains that both times...

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...