[R-G] The Real Story Behind Kosovo's Independence

[Anthony Fenton]

Weekend Edition
February 23 / 4, 2008
Lessons in the Bi-Partisanship of Empire
The Real Story Behind Kosovo's Independence
http://counterpunch.org/scahill02232008.html
By JEREMY SCAHILL

News Flash: The Bush administration acknowledges there is a such  
thing as international law.

But, predictably, it is not being invoked to address the US prison  
camps at Guantanamo, the wide use of torture, the invasion and  
occupation of sovereign countries, the extraordinary rendition  
program. No, it is being thrown out forcefully as a condemnation of  
the Serbian government in the wake of Thursday's attack by protesters  
on the US embassy in Belgrade following the Bush administration's  
swift recognition of the declaration of independence by the southern  
Serbian province of Kosovo. Some 1,000 protesters broke away from a  
largely non-violent mass demonstration in downtown Belgrade and  
targeted the embassy. Some protesters actually made it into the  
compound, setting a fire and tearing down the American flag.

"I'm outraged by the mob attack against the U.S. embassy in  
Belgrade," fumed Zalmay Khalilzad,the US Ambassador to the United  
Nations. "The embassy is sovereign US territory. The government of  
Serbia has a responsibility under international law to protect  
diplomatic facilities, particularly embassies." His comments were  
echoed by a virtual who's who of the Bill Clinton administration.  
People like Jamie Rubin, then-Secretary of State Madeiline Albright's  
deputy, one of the main architects of US policy toward Serbia. "It is  
sovereign territory of the United States under international law,"  
Rubin declared. "For Serbia to allow these protesters to break  
windows, break into the American Embassy, is a pretty dramatic sign."  
Hillary Clinton, whose husband orchestrated and ran the 78-day NATO  
bombing of Serbia in 1999, said, "I would be moving very aggressively  
to hold the Serbian government responsible with their security forces  
to protect our embassy. Under international law they should be doing  
that."

There are two major issues here. One is the situation in Kosovo  
itself (which we'll get to in a moment), but the other is the attack  
on the US embassy. Yes, the Serbian government had an obligation to  
prevent the embassy from being torched and ransacked. If there was  
complicity by the Serbian police or authorities in allowing it to be  
attacked, that is a serious issue. But the US has little moral  
authority not just in invoking international law (which it only does  
when it benefits Washington's agenda) but in invoking international  
law when speaking about attacks on embassies in Belgrade.

Perhaps the greatest crime against any embassy in the history of  
Yugoslavia was committed not by evil Serb protesters, but by the  
United States military.

On May 7, 1999, at the height of the 78 day US-led NATO bombing of  
Yugoslavia, the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing  
three Chinese citizens, two of them journalists, and wounding 20  
others. The Clinton administration later said that the bombing was  
the result of faulty maps provided by the CIA (Sound familiar?).  
Beijing rejected that explanation and alleged it was deliberate.  
Eventually, under strong pressure from China, the US apologized and  
paid $28 million in compensation to the victims' families. If the US  
was serious about international law and the protection of embassies,  
those responsible for that bombing would have been tried at the Hague  
along with other alleged war criminals. But "war criminal" is a  
designation for the losers of US-fueled wars, not bombers sent by  
Washington to drop humanitarian munitions on "sovereign territory."

Beyond the obvious hypocrisy of the US condemnations of Serbia and  
the sudden admission that international law exists, the Kosovo story  
is an important one in the context of the current election campaign  
in the United States. Perhaps more than any other international  
conflict, Yugoslavia was the defining foreign policy of President  
Bill Clinton's time in power. Under his rule, the nation of  
Yugoslavia was destroyed, dismantled and chopped into ethnically pure  
para-states. President Bush's immediate recognition of Kosovo as an  
independent nation was the icing on the cake of destruction of  
Yugoslavia and one which was enthusiastically embraced by Hillary  
Clinton. "I've supported the independence of Kosovo because I think  
it is imperative that in the heart of Europe we continue to promote  
independence and democracy," Clinton said at the recent Democratic  
debate in Austin, Texas.

A few days before the attack on the US embassy in Belgrade, Clinton  
released a Molotov cocktail statement praising the declaration of  
independence. In it, she referred to Kosovo by the Albanian "Kosova"  
and said independence "will allow the people of Kosova to finally  
live in their own democratic state. It will allow Kosova and Serbia  
to finally put a difficult chapter in their history behind them and  
to move forward." She added, "I want to underscore the need to avoid  
any violence or provocations in the days and weeks ahead." As  
seasoned observers of Serbian politics know, there were few things  
the US could have done to add fuel to the rage in Serbia over the  
declaration of independence -- "provocations" if you will -- than to  
have a political leader named Clinton issue a statement praising  
independence and using the Albanian name for Kosovo.

On the campaign trail, the Clinton camp has held up Kosovo as a  
successful model for how to conduct US foreign policy and Clinton  
criticized Bush for taking "so long for us to reach this historic  
juncture."

Perhaps a little of that history is in order. If Kosovo is her idea  
of solid US foreign policy, it speaks volumes to what kind of  
president she would be. The reality is that there are striking  
similarities between the Clinton approach to Kosovo and the Bush  
approach to Iraq.

On March 24, 1999, President Bill Clinton began an 11-week bombing  
campaign against Yugoslavia. Like Bush with Iraq, Clinton had no UN  
mandate (he used NATO) and his so-called "diplomacy" to avert the  
possibility of bombing leading up to the attacks was insincere and a  
set-up from the jump. Just like Bush with Iraq.

A month before the bombing began, the Clinton administration issued  
an ultimatum to President Slobodan Milosevic, which he had to either  
accept unconditionally or face bombing. Known as the Rambouillet  
accord, it was a document that no sovereign country would have  
accepted. It contained a provision that would have guaranteed US and  
NATO forces "free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access  
throughout" all of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo. It also sought to  
immunize those occupation forces "from any form of arrest,  
investigation, or detention by the authorities in [Yugoslavia]," as  
well as grant the occupiers "the use of airports, roads, rails and  
ports without payment." Additionally, Milosevic was told he would  
have to "grant all telecommunications services, including broadcast  
services, needed for the Operation, as determined by NATO." Similar  
to Bush's Iraq plan years later, Rambouillet mandated that the  
economy of Kosovo "shall function in accordance with free market  
principles."

What Milosevic was actually asked to sign is never discussed. That it  
would have effectively meant the end of the sovereignty of the nation  
was a non-story. The dominant narrative for the past nine years,  
repeated this week by William Cohen, Clinton's defense secretary at  
the time of the bombing, is this: "We tried to achieve a peaceful  
resolution of what was taking place in Kosovo. And Slobodan Milosevic  
refused." Refused peace? More like he unwisely refused one of Don  
Corleone's famous offers. Washington knew he would reject it, but had  
to give the appearance of diplomacy for international "legitimacy."

So the humanitarian bombs rained down on Serbia. Among the missions:  
the bombing of the studios of Radio Television Serbia where an  
airstrike killed 16 media workers; the cluster bombing of a Nis  
marketplace, shredding human beings into meat; the deliberate  
targeting of a civilian passenger train; the use of depleted uranium  
munitions; and the targeting of petrochemical plants, causing toxic  
chemical waste to pour into the Danube River. Also, the bombing of  
Albanian refugees, ostensibly the people being protected by the U.S.

Similar to Bush's allegations about Iraqi WMDs in the lead up to the  
US invasion, in 1999 Clinton administration officials also delivered  
stunning allegations about the level of brutality present in Kosovo  
as part of the propaganda campaign. "We've now seen about 100,000  
military-aged men missing ....They may have been murdered," Cohen  
said five weeks into the bombing. He said that up to 4,600 Kosovo men  
had been executed, adding, "I suspect it's far higher than that."  
Those numbers were flat out false. Eventually the estimates were  
scaled back dramatically, as Justin Raimondo pointed out recently in  
his column on Antiwar.com, from 100,000 to 50,000 to 10,000 and "at  
that point the War Party stopped talking numbers altogether and just  
celebrated the glorious victory of 'humanitarian intervention.'" As  
it turned out "there was no 'genocide' -- the International Tribunal  
itself reported that just over 2,000 bodies were recovered from  
postwar Kosovo, including Serbs, Roma, and Kosovars, all victims of  
the vicious civil war in which we intervened on the side of the  
latter. The whole fantastic story of another 'holocaust' in the  
middle of Europe was a fraud," according to Raimondo.

Following the NATO invasion of Kosovo in June of 1999, the US and its  
allies stood by as the Albanian mafia and gangs of criminals and  
paramilitaries spread out across the province and systematically  
cleansed Kosovo of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Romas and other  
ethnic minorities. They burned down houses, businesses and churches  
and implemented a shocking campaign to forcibly expel non-Albanians  
from the province. Meanwhile, the US worked closely with the Kosovo  
Liberation Army and backed the rise of war criminals to the highest  
levels of power in Kosovo. Today, Kosovo has become a hub for human  
trafficking, organized crime and narcosmuggling. In short, it is a  
mafia state. Is this the "democracy" Hillary Clinton speaks of  
"promoting" in "the heart" of Europe?

It didn't take long for the US to begin construction of a massive US  
military base, Camp Bondsteel, which conveniently is located in an  
area of tremendous geopolitical interest to Washington. (Among its  
most bizarre facilities, Bondsteel now offers classes at the Laura  
Bush education center, as well as massages from Thai women and all  
the multinational junk food you could (n)ever wish for). In November  
2005, Alvaro Gil-Robles, the human rights envoy of the Council of  
Europe, described Bondsteel as a "smaller version of Guantanamo." Oh,  
and Bondsteel was constructed by former Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

Herein lies an interesting point. The Serbian government is largely  
oriented toward Europe, not the US. The country's prime minister,  
Vojislav Kostunica, is a conservative isolationist who is not  
enthusiastic about a US military base on Serbian soil any more than  
Cuba is about Gitmo. He charged that, in recognizing Kosovo,  
Washington was "ready to unscrupulously and violently jeopardize  
international order for the sake of its own military interests." To  
the would-be independent Kosovo government, however, Bondsteel is no  
problem.

Russia and a few other nations are fighting the recognition of Kosovo  
as an independent nation, but that is unlikely to succeed. Still,  
this action will undoubtedly reverberate for years to come. "We have  
in Serbia a situation in which the U.S. has forced an action --the  
proclamation of independence by the Kosovo Albanians -- that is in  
clear violation of the most fundamental principles of international  
law after World War II," argues Robert Hayden, Director of the Center  
for Russian and East European Studies at the University of  
Pittsburgh. "Borders cannot be changed by force and without consent  
-- that principle was actually the main stated reason for the 1991  
U.S. attack on Iraq."

And this brings us full circle. International law matters only when  
it is convenient for the US. So too are the cries for "humanitarian  
interventions." And despite the extremism of the Bush administration,  
this is hardly a uniquely Republican phenomenon. In a just world,  
there would be a humanitarian intervention against the US occupation  
of Iraq -- with its indiscriminate killings of civilians, torture  
chambers and widespread human rights violations. There certainly  
would have been such an intervention during the bipartisan slaughter,  
through bombs and sanctions, of Iraq's people over the past 18 years.  
But that's what you get when the cops and judges and prosecutors are  
the criminals. US policy has always operated on a worthy victim,  
unworthy victim system that is almost never primarily about saving  
the victims. Humanitarianism is the publicly offered justification  
for the action, seldom, if ever, the primary motivation. With Iraq,  
Bush wheeled out the humanitarian justification for the occupation-- 
Saddam's brutality -- only after the WMD lies were thoroughly  
debunked. In Yugoslavia, Clinton used it right out of the gates. In  
both cases, it rang insincere.

If you are a victim who happens to share a common geography with US  
interests, international law is on your side as long as it is  
convenient. If not, well, tough. The UN is just a debate club anyway.  
Just ask the tens of thousands of Kurds who were slaughtered by  
Turkey with weapons sold to them by the Clinton administration during  
the 1990s. Or the Palestinians who live under the brutality of  
Israel's occupation. In some cases, the "victims" allegedly being  
protected by the US actually get bombed themselves, as was the case  
with President Clinton's "humanitarian" bombings of the north and  
south of Iraq once every three days in the late 1990s.

In the bigger picture, the Bush administration's quick recognition of  
an independent Kosovo has given us a powerful reminder of a fact that  
is too often overlooked these days: empire is bipartisan, as are the  
tactics and rhetoric and bombs used to defend and expand it.

Jeremy Scahill is author of The New York Times-bestseller  
"Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.".  
He can be reached at jeremy(AT)democracynow.org

This article was originally published by Alternet.