Features

John LloydJuly 5th 1999 Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, believes that the liberation of Kosovo is the equal of the fall of the Berlin Wall in importance to the future of Europe – indeed of the world. He believes, too, that the Dayton accords negotiated with Slobodan Milosevic appeased and encouraged Milosevic when he should have been confronted and beaten; that Milosevic’s comprehensive defeat now was necessary to release south-east Europe from his thrall and speed the coming together of all of Europe; that the defence of humanitarian values that Nato has made will echo round the globe – but that we’ve had enough of just wars. “We’re not looking for another conflict, thank you very much.” When I talked to him in the VIP suite of Gatwick airport before he flew to the EU-Latin American summit, Cook expressed the belief that this had not only been a just war,...

The guns are silent but the international press corpscan’t stop sniping at each other By Henry PorterSunday July 4, 1999The Observer More than 2,500 journalists entered Kosovo with allied troops three weeks ago, according to the New York Times. Even by modern standards, that’s an enormous press pack. If size were anything to go by, you might conclude that the effort paid off in terms of the information and detail that began to flow from Kosovo as the first reporters found a cellphone beacon which enabled them to file their stories. But the war, or at least this stage of it, has ended with the media feeling far from satisfied with its own behaviour. A distinctly rancorous dispute has broken out between those journalists who feel that the media rolled over to become Nato’s gullible plaything, and those who allege that some of the reporters based in Belgrade were dangerously...

By Regine Mehl* Very much concerned with the war (and still no peace) in Kosovo and following the discussions running on all our international email lists I (more or less suddenly) recognised that we usually have a very selective perception of wars in general and of atrocities towards civil societies in particular – at least on the discussion lists. While we were so much concerned in the war in Kosovo, 26 other wars were running and still do, and amongst them a war of almost undescribable atrocities in West African Sierra Leone. Only very, very few NGO’s and international partners take care of it at all. What they and Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and now UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, report about the situation there “is even worse than everything we saw in Kosovo,” as Mary Robinson expressed it. The generel public, and I suppose most of...

Returning OSCE human rights monitoroffers a view from the ground in Kosovo By Rollie Keith From “The Democrat” – May 1999 ROLAND KEITH is a 32-year career military officer in the Canadian military. He’s a former director of the Kosovo Polje Field Office of the Kosovo Verification Mission, from which position he returned in April. He has spoken out against the war from the very beginning, and has been part of the press conferences and public meetings organized by the Ad Hoc Committee to Stop Canada’s Participation in the War on Yugoslavia.Rollie Keith lives in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada. Canada is currently participating in the NATO coalition air bombardment of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, ostensibly to force compliance with the terms of the Rambouillet and subsequent Paris “Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo”. The justification for this aggressive action was to force Yugoslavian compliance and acceptance to...

From ‘Terrorists’ to ‘Partners’ U.S. Senate Republican Policy CommitteeLarry E. Craig, Chairman – Jade West, Staff Director March 31, 1999 Publications Issue List Vote Analysis Main Page On March 24, 1999, NATO initiated air attacks on Yugoslavia (a federation of two republics, Serbia and Montenegro) in order to impose a peace agreement in the Serbian province of Kosovo, which has an ethnic Albanian majority. The Clinton Administration has not formally withdrawn its standing insistence that Belgrade sign the peace agreement, which would entail the deployment in Kosovo of some 28,000 NATO ground troops — including 4,000 Americans — to police the settlement. But in recent days the Clinton public line has shifted to a demand that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic halt the offensive he has launched in Kosovo, which has led to a growing humanitarian crisis in the region, before there can be a stop to the bombing campaign. One...

From London Review of Books, Volume 21, Number 11, Cover date 27 May 1999 Ferteze Nimari had lost two of her brothers and her husband was forced to bury all the dead in one grave. Later, packed into a stiflingbus with sixty fellow Kosovars, the couple held onto each other as he clutched a strap suspended from the ceiling. The bus stopped in the Stankovac I refugee camp in Macedonia and they told their story. ‘The tank came to our village of Sllovi. The Serb neighbours said not to worry – it was just there to observe us. But by lunchtime the next day a teenage girl lay dead in the street. Then another 15 people were killed. They told us to run into the woods and they started shooting us.’ I asked them so many questions about what they had seen. ‘What happened when your brothers were shot?’ ‘How...

By Shkelzen Maliqi, AIM correspondent from Pristina AIM Podgorica, 21 May, 1999 Internationalization of the war in Kosovo had an unexpected consequence: the Kosovo Albanian political scene has experienced total collapse. On the one hand, this collapse was caused by brutal reaction of Serbian military troops. Total repression, liquidation of prominent intellectuals and political activists, as well as mass deportation of ethnic Albanians into neighbouring countries destroyed communication among people and prevented operation of all “parallel” institutions and organizations. On the other hand, it became evident that Kosovar “parallel institutions” were not at all prepared for war. The self-organized society of Kosovo Albanians fell apart as a house built on sand under the vindicive aggression of the Serbian state force. The ten-year civil, non-violent resistance movement in Kosovo had not prepared any paramilitary structures, any committees for the case of war. The split in the ethnic Albanian movement that occurred...

This is the full text of the accord on the demilitarisation of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA, known in Kosovo by its initials UCK) signed by KLA chief Hashim Thaqi and KFOR commander Lieutenant-General Mike Jackson in Pristina on June 21, 1999: 1. This Undertaking provides for a ceasefire by the UCK, their disengagement from the zones of conflict, subsequent demilitarisation and reintegration into civil society, in accordance with the terms of UNSCR 1244 and taking account of the obligations agreed to at Rambouillet and the public commitments made by the Kosovar Albanian Rambouillet delegation. 2. The UCK undertake to renounce the use of force, to comply with the directions of the Commander of the international security force in Kosovo (COMKFOR), and where applicable the head of the interim civil administration for Kosovo, and to resolve peacefully any questions relating to the implementation of this undertaking. 3. The UCK agree...

By Simon Jenkins The Times, London So how do you feel, asks an unkindly correspondent, now that you see the torture chambers and killing fields of Kosovo? How now this Hitler of the Balkans? How now the “appeasers”? Was Tony Blair not right to bomb the bastard to pieces? The answer is that I feel exactly as I did at the start. It takes a warped brain not to be sickened by war, especially “civil” war. But it takes a dangerous one to refuse to think. The present horror will run its course. The media are still revelling in atrocity pornography. Next will come the memoirs, the novels and the movies. Then the worm will turn. We shall hear of the horrors of the Albanian revenge. Then we shall remark that vendetta is the culture of the Balkans, and wander away from this landscape of violence. How do I feel?...

This is not victors’ justice in the former Yugoslavia – in fact, it is no justice at all’ By John Laughland The Times, London, June 18, 1999 Emotion may be a spur to justice, but it is rarely its guarantor. The allegations of war crimes eagerly funnelled out of Kosovo by the thousands of journalists in the province have provoked a demand for retribution. That cry for justice is natural. But the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the body charged with pursuing those accused of war crimes in Kosovo, is a rogue court with rigged rules. The tribunal was established to override the key principle of the international order – the belief written into the UN charter that states were sovereign within their own borders. State sovereignty, it was claimed, merely provided a cover for dictators to wield unfettered power and therefore international authority must override it. It...

Reuters BEIJING (Reuters) – China compared the United States to Nazi Germany Tuesday and said NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia reflected Washington’s ambition to become “Lord of the Earth.” “If you ask which country wants to become ‘the Lord of the Earth’ as the then Nazi Germany had tried to, there is only one answer,” said a commentary in the People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of China’s ruling Communist Party. “It is the hegemonism-pursuing United States.” In likening the United States to Nazi Germany, the newspaper cited its massive defense budget, the bombing of Yugoslavia without U.N. sanction and the killing of civilians during the air campaign in Yugoslavia. NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia “has let more and more people see more clearly the ferocious appearance of the U.S. hegemonism and its ambition to dominate the world,” it said. China’s embassy was bombed by NATO planes during the U.S.-led alliance’s air campaign against...

July 2, 1999 In Pristina, the UN Secretary-General’s acting Special Representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, called together leaders of the Albanian and Serbian communities to focus exclusively on the pressing issue of security for all people in Kosovo. This is the first time that Albanian and Serb leaders of Kosovo have sat down to discuss concrete issues. They issued a joint statement calling for restraint and respect for human life, which was broadcast on radio and television by the United Nations mission in Kosovo.  The text of the statement is as follows: “Today, we have met at the headquarters of the UN Mission in Kosovo to urgently address a problem that affects all the people of Kosovo: people who want to return to their homes here, people who want to stay here, people who have returned in the past few weeks, people who have remained here throughout recent tragic months....