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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 Serbs200 – kidnapped Serbs40 – 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 NATO and UN in the province. In fact Albanian extremists...

Building peace in the Balkans 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...

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 were accompanied by misleading propaganda, including...

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 civilian population. It was hard to keep...

By John Kenneth Galbraith Page A11 of the Boston Globe 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 women have escaped the repetitive and often dismal...

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 Force, Navy and...

Juli är en het månad på Cypern. Samtidigt som meteorologerna varnar för nya värmerekord pågår på var sida om den buffertzon som skär igenom ön förberedelserna inför den 20 juli. I år tilldrar sig detta datum särskild uppmärksamhet. Det är nämligen tjugofem år sedan som Turkiet genomförde den militära intervention som ledde till att ön delades och en gräns drogs mellan grekcyprioter i söder och turkcyprioter i norr. Alla ansträngningar att återförena ön har hittills misslyckats. Interventionen skedde den 20 juli 1974. I en andra våg tre veckor senare avancerade de turkiska styrkorna tills dess att de kontrollerade en tredjedel av ön. För grekcyprioterna var interventionen och den efterföljande ockupationen av norra Cypern en katastrof. Hundratusentals grekcyprioter tvingades lämna sina hem och egendomar i norr. Turkcyprioterna däremot välkomnade de turkiska soldater som seglade ner i sina fallskärmar som räddande änglar. För dem var det turkiska ingripandet en räddning undan enosis;...

Al-Ahram Weekly29 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 is the clear unreadiness of the attacking countries to...

By John PilgerNew Statesman, London12th 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 Britain . . . your own countries [sic] . . . as the baddies?” Not having the nationality...

By Michael DobbsThe Washington Post 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 it was trying to hit the airport, several miles away.)...

By Barbara EhrenreichLos Angeles Times WeeklyJune 25 – July 1, 1999 It’s an ugly peace, to say the least, when the victors keep chortling over each mass grave they uncover. “See, we were right to pulverize Serbia!,” they crow – not noticing that the mass graves are material evidence of NATO’s own ineptness and, it must be said, savagery. For 78 days of war, that proud alliance refused to let the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo deter it for one moment from the urgent business of bombing Serbia back into the era of candlelight and campfires. It would have been too risky for our airplanes to take on the Serbs in Kosovo, so NATO contented itself with terrorizing their wives and children back in Belgrade. What was the conflict all about then, other than providing an unplanned excursion to Macedonia and Kukes for a million ethnic Albanian Kosovars lucky enough not...

After the War in Yugoslavia: What Next For Europe´s Left? The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation* 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...