Features

Today on Sep 22 on the session of the Kosovo Transitional Council the representatives of the Serbian national commuity, Bishop Artemije and Mr. Trajkovic officially resigned from their positions within the KTC. They explained their leaving of the Council with the fact that after three months of KFOR andUNMIK presence in Kosovo the multiethnic concept in Kosovo has failed. This failure was crowned by the transformation of the KLA into a monoethnic and armed Kosovo Protection Corps which is directly violating the UN Security Council Resolution 1244. After three months of peace the results are catastrophic for the Serbs in the province: about 200.000 expelled, more than 350 killed, 450 abducted, thousands of burned and looted Serb houses as well as 70 destroyed churches and monasteries in the presence of almost 50.000 international peace forces. In Kosovo there is not a single multiethnic institution. Serbs have been practically expelled from...

By Tyler Marshall,Times Staff writerLos Angeles Times,September 27, 1999 U.S. foreign affairs specialists are monitoring the potential for increased cooperation between Russia, China and India, amid a growing conviction in all three countries, especially after NATO’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, that U.S. power must somehow be checked. Although agreeing that the three nations are far from coalescing into a pan-Eurasian, anti-NATO axis, the analysts remain concerned about what they call a nightmare scenario: an alliance that would bring together about 2.5 billion people, formidable military might and a vast stockpile of nuclear weapons, all held together by the common goal of countering America’s global dominance. “Right now, you have flirting,” said Charles Williams Maynes, president of the Eurasia Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. “I don’t know where this is going to go. If we play our cards right, it’s going to go nowhere.” But if the relationships progress, Maynes said,...

democratic model in Kosovo. (Susan Biddle ˜ The Washington Post) By R. Jeffrey Smith Washington Post Foreign Service PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Sept. 23 ˆ Senior U.S. officials have privately dropped their opposition to Kosovo’s independence from Yugoslavia and say the Clinton administration increasingly sees the province’s secession as inevitable.Officials say the emerging consensus, which amounts to a major shift for the United States, is already having a significant impact on the international peacekeeping operation in Kosovo. The United States has become a leading advocate for the creation of independent institutions and legal structures that tend to isolate the fledgling United Nations protectorate from Yugoslavia’s manifold economic problems and political troubles. U.S. officials deny that the administration’s approach is meant to engineer the further breakup of Yugoslavia, as the Belgrade government claims. They say it is meant only to ensure that Kosovo becomes a viable, self-governing democracy with a successful economy. But...

Press Conference, KFOR Press Centre on 21 Sept. 1999 September 24, 1999 Introduction by Dr Kouchner, Special Representative of the Secretary General: Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you for coming and let me tell you first that we, Mike Jackson and I, are very happy to be facing you to answer to you questions after 2 little very light statements. It is a good day for us. But, this is not an end, but a beginning. Demilitarisation is not necessarily accomplished by simply dismantling military structures and collecting soldiers’ arms. The concept of complementing demilitarisation through the transformation of former fighting forces, is well established in peacekeeping practice. It became an integral part of the Kosovo peace process. As a result of the KLA undertaking on demilitarisation and transformation presented to KFOR Commander, Mike Jackson in June. In close consultation with UNMIK, KFOR subsequently developed a concept for a civilian, disciplined,...

New Statesman, September 13 1999 It had been a long night of waiting for the Indonesian troop convoy to pass. Two of us then crossed the border into East Timor clandestinely, through a forest of dead, petrified trees that appeared as silhouetted needles around which skeins of fine white sand drifted, like mist. As the sun rose, there stood the surreal crosses. They were almost everywhere; great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides, crosses beside the road, overlooking white slabs. They littered the earth and crowded the eye. As we trudged through dense scrub, we came upon them: on a riverbank, an escarpment, commanding all before them. The inscriptions on some were normal: those of generations departed in proper time and sequence. However, the dates of these were all prior to 1975, when proper time and sequence ended. The majority revealed...

Major statement from Noam Chomsky, Sept 10, on East Timor There are many topics of major long-term significance that should be addressed at the APEC conference, but one is of consuming importance and overwhelming urgency. We all know exactly what it is, and why it must be placed at the forefront of concern — and more important, instant action. This conference provides an opportunity — there may not be many more — to terminate the tragedy that is once again reaching shocking proportions in East Timor. The Indonesian military forces who invaded East Timor 24 years ago, and have been slaughtering and terrorizing its inhabitants ever since, are right now, as I write, in the process of sadistically destroying what remains: the population, the cities and villages. What they are planning, we cannot be sure: a Carthaginian solution is not out of the question. The tragedy of East Timor has...

From BBC London, Newsnight Friday, August 20, 1999 Published at 03:34 GMT 04:34 UK General Clark: “didn’t always defer to those who wanted targets withheld” In a special Newsnight programme Mark Urban investigates Nato’s handling of the Kosovo crisis. Interviewing the key players he finds that the Allies were far from united. (Newsnight – BBC Two – 10.30pm – Friday 20 August). Talk to the people running Nato’s war against Slobodan Milosevic and many will tell you it was a “near run thing”.  Strobe Talbott: “A good thing that the conflict ended when it did” Strobe Talbott, the American Deputy Secretary of State, told BBC’s Newsnight Kosovo Special “there would have been increasing difficulty within the alliance in preserving the solidarity and the resolve of the alliance” had the Serbian leader not given in on 3 June. Mr Talbott, regarded as the man closest to President Clinton in the Washington...

It is grotesque hypocrisy for Tony Blair to weep for the children of Dunblane By John Pilger From The Guardian September 7, 1999 Having finally discovered East Timor, most of the media have now left, blaming a “descent into violence”. The long, silent years mock these words. The descent began almost a quarter of a century ago when Indonesian special forces invaded the defenceless Portuguese colony. On December 7, 1975, a lone radio voice rose and fell in the static: “The soldiers are killing indiscriminately. Women and children are being shot in the streets. This is an appeal for international help. This is an SOS – please help us.” No help came, because the western democracies were secret partners in a crime as great and enduring as any this century; proportionally, not even Pol Pot matched Suharto’s spree. Air Force One, carrying President Ford and his secretary of state Henry...

“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 new role for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation: “benign or ethical imperialism”. NATO at 50 must “switch...

Universitetslektor Kjell Magnusson, Centrum för multietnisk forskning, Uppsala Universitet analyserar i “Rambouilletavtalet. Texten, förhandlingarna, bakgrunden” myterna om dessa “fredsförhandlingar” och konkluderar att deras syfte med all sannolikhet var att legitimera NATO:s bombningar av Jugoslavien. Man kan inte låta bli att fråga sig hur så många människor, inklusive politiker och journalister, kunde låta sig luras av NATO:s, EU:s och USA:s propaganda. Visste svenska politiker och UD:s ämbetsmän om det verkliga innehållet – och processens verkliga syften? Boken bekräftar i långa stycken den analys TFF presenterade redan den 17 och 18 mars – före bombningnarna – i PressInfo 57 och 58. Boken beställes på http://www.multietn.uu.se/nybok.html

By William Church From Defense NewsJune 14, 1999Category: 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 and the role of multilateral organizations are prime concerns, but it is also...

Ramsay Clark’s Letter to the Security Council 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...