Byzantine Blog

A Lynch Mob

On March 23, 1999, then NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana addressed the world with the following announcement:

“I have just directed the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Clark, to initiate the air operations in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). [...] All efforts to achieve a negotiated political solution to the Kosovo crisis have failed, and no alternative is open but to take military action.”

What NATO Chief referred to as negotiations took place from February 6 to March 19, 1999, in Rambouillet near Paris and, in reality, boiled down to an ultimatum Clinton administration issued to the Serbs. Represented by Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke, United States requested that Yugoslavia allows Albanian minority in Serbian Kosovo-Metohija to hold a referendum for secession of the Serbian province in three years, but also to submit to military occupation of Yugoslavia’s entire territory: Serbia (with Kosovo province) and Montenegro.

Among the key clauses of an agreement Yugoslavia was pressured to sign under the threats of bombardment are paragraphs 6, 8 and 15 of Appendix B to Chapter 7: paragraph 8 gave NATO forces the right to travel anywhere, by any means and carry out any NATO assignments, throughout Yugoslavia; paragraph 15 gave NATO unrestricted access to all telecommunications channels throughout Yugoslavia; and paragraph 6 gave NATO and its forces complete immunity from prosecution, criminal or otherwise, throughout Yugoslavia. Also included were arbitrary arrest and detention powers for NATO personnel.

“The [Clinton] administration went to Rambouillet basically to arrange a trap for Milosevic. It was a no-win situation for him and frankly, Albright was basically trying to find a pretext for bombing,” said Dan Goure, deputy director of political and military studies at the conservative Center for Strategic and International Studies, in an IPA release. “They told the Kosovo Albanians that if they signed and Milosevic didn’t, they’d bomb Serbia. Rambouillet was not a negotiation, it was a setup, a lynch party.”

Goure’s assesment was confirmed in the June 14, 1999 issue of the Nation, when George Kenney, a former State Department Yugoslavia desk officer, reported:

An unimpeachable press source who regularly travels with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told this [writer] that, swearing reporters to deep-background confidentiality at the Rambouillet talks, a senior State Department official had bragged that the United States “deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept.” The Serbs needed, according to the official, a little bombing to see reason.

Providing further confirmation of Kenney’s account, Jim Jatras, a foreign policy aide to Senate Republicans, reported in a May 18 speech at the Cato Institute in Washington that a “senior Administration official told media at Rambouillet, under embargo” the following:

“We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.”

Nuremberg Tribunal: War of Aggression, the Supreme International Crime

The aggression conducted without United Nations authority and in violation of the UN Charter and international law began on March 24, 1999, little before 8 p.m. local time and lasted until June 10, 1999.

Walter J. Rockler, one of the prosecutors in the Nuremberg trial of German Nazi leaders wrote on May 23, 1999:

We have engaged in flagrant military aggression, ceaselessly attacking a small country primarily to demonstrate that we run the world. [...] As a primary source of international law, the judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal in the case of the major Nazi war criminals is plain and clear [...] “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime deferring only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

During the first night of bombardment, more than 50 military objects were hit on the whole territory of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), including cities of Pristina, Kursumlija, Uzice, Danilovgrad, Novi Sad, Pancevo, Podgorica, Kraljevo, Kragujevac... According to the statement issued by the Yugoslav Army Headquarters, during the first night of bombardment 10 conscripts were killed and 38 wounded. As the bombing progressed, the attacks became more indiscriminate, with NATO quickly moving to include civilian targets and objects along with the military ones.

The 78 days of areal bombardment caused an estimated 10,000 civilian casualties. The material damage has been estimated between 29,6—100 billion dollars. NATO aggression lasted continuously throughout 11 weeks, destroying or damaging the entire infrastructure of the Serbian state, schools, factories, business objects, hotels, hospitals, media centers, cultural monuments...

Media Pogrom

Meanwhile, led by the U.S. State Department and U.K's Number 10 Downing Street, Western mainstream media orchestrated ferocious demonization of the Serbs in order to sustain broad public support for the massive aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia.

A renowned Balkan expert, Diana Johnstone, wrote about the first shots fired in this war, citing the political editor of the New York Times, Thomas Friedman, who “celebrated the start of the bombing of Yugoslavia with a notorious article announcing frankly that ‘the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist’ and that ‘for globalism to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is’.”

CNN kept borrowing from the Hollywood bag of tricks throughout the aggression to affect the widest public by instantaneously effective visual messages, among other means. Static pictures of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, along with all the other NATO representatives were retouched in graphic programs to perfection, beautifully lit, with soft sfumato smiles and glowing halos on vibrant blue backgrounds of the liberators and “Merciful Angels.” Images of Milosevic and other Serbs were crude and sharpened, often shown while grimacing and inevitably pasted over flaming red or dirty orange smoky backgrounds invoking the immediate associations of mayhem and hell.

Quasi-experts and military spokesmen were brought to studios throughout West, presenting exclusively NATO’s views, justifications and version of events. No Serbs were invited or allowed to take part in any of the hundreds and thousands of “Kosovo war specials”, townhall meetings, round tables or other programs covering various aspects of the war.

Among an army of dedicated supporters of the aggression, CNN’s Larry King also invited Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel who publicly endorsed the carnage, repeating U.S. allegations and giving the intervention a moral justification by making comparisons to the Holocaust. He condemned the West’s failure to take action against the Nazi death camps during World War II, and expressed his satisfaction that unlike in the case of the Jews in the 1930s and 40s, the West was responding to the “plight of the Kosovars” with military intervention.

Another Larry King’s guest at the time, Dalai Lama, who was touring the West in order to garner support for separating Tibet from China, also voiced his support for the military intervention. Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader was saying that, even though Buddhists generally abhor violence, he perfectly understands NATO’s actions, since the bombardment was “the only available option.”

Larry King’s special was a soapbox from which U.S. Senator Joseph Biden labeled Serbian nation as “...a bunch of illiterates, degenerates, baby killers, butchers and rapists.” Richard Holbrooke, a “US Special Envoy” at the time, has demonstrated an equal measure of impartiality and level-headedness, saying that Serbs are “murderous assholes.”

Big Lie and Many Smaller Ones

In the first week of bombardment State Department took mass hysteria to a new level, claiming that 100,000 Albanian men were being rounded up on a football stadium in Pristina, executed by the Serbs and dumped in a mass grave there. AFP reporter who was on the ground went straight to the stadium the very next day. “A football stadium in the Kosovo capital Pristina stood empty Wednesday, one day after reports that Serbian forces were herding ethnic Albanians there in an apparent prelude to a massacre. An AFP reporter who visited the site said the stadium, whose galleries can host some 25,000 spectators, was completely empty and there were no signs of any mass groupings,” Agence France-Presse reported on March 31.

NATO/State Department daily briefings included a number of similar grainy satellite photos and doctored images used as “evidence” that Serbs are conducting a “genocide” in Kosovo province. During the conflict, the NATO powers asserted that somewhere between 100,000 (according to US Defence Secretary William Cohen) and 500,000 (according to an April 1999 statement of the US State Department) Kosovo Albanians had been killed by Serb forces. Labeling the Serbs as “mass killers,” Cohen argued that Serb complaints about NATO’s civilian bombing casualties were comparable to Holocaust architect Adolph Eichmann complaining about the crematoriums being bombed.

The Trepca mining complex, supposedly the hub of Serbian ethnic cleansing operations, was compared in the British press with the Nazi death camps. NATO and the KLA claimed that as many as 1,000 bodies a day had been dropped down the shafts, incinerated or dissolved in hydrochloric acid. In the aftermath of the war, however, investigators surveying the mine complex have found no evidence of executions.

Around the same time, Guardian columnist Frances Wheen coined the term “Kosovo revisionists”, equating those who dispute NATO claims of genocide with right-wing historians who deny the Nazi holocaust against the Jews.

David North commented: “For the public to accept the destruction wrought by US/NATO bombs, it had to be convinced that the war was undertaken to prevent another Holocaust. The fabrication of the death toll was an essential component of a propaganda campaign which sought to disorient public opinion, distort the background of the war, and conceal the real political aims and material interests underlying the decision to go to war against Yugoslavia.”

Still, according to Richard Holbrooke, one of the masterminds of US policy in the Balkans, “The kind of coverage we’re seeing from The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and the newsmagazines lately in Kosovo has been extraordinary and exemplary" (as quoted by Znet, 27 May).

No Genocide, No Mass Murder, No Mass Graves

In October 1999, the Texas-based publication Stratfor noted that “evidence of mass murder has not yet materialized on the scale used to justify the war,” despite the fact that teams from 15 nations conducted investigations.

In two trips to Kosovo since the war’s end, the American FBI has found a total of 30 sites containing some 200 bodies. A Spanish team investigating one zone in Kosovo found no mass graves and only 187 bodies, all buried in individual graves. One team member, Emilio Perez Pujol, said, “There never was a genocide in Kosovo. It was dishonest and wrong for Western leaders to adopt the term in the beginning to give moral authority to the operation.”

Of the civilian dead, these Western investigative teams established that a number died as a result of fighting between Serb forces and the NATO-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), while some were killed by NATO bombs. According to Reuters report on November 10, 1999, ICTY chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte said that UN investigators have exhumed 2,108 corpses in Kosovo, of both Serbian and Albanian ethnicity.

Staging the “Humanitarian Catastrophe”

Three days after bombardment begun, on March 27, 1999, tens of thousands of Kosovo Albanians surged towards borders with FYR of Macedonia and Albania, with Western mainstream reporters eager and ready to report about “Serbian atrocities” and “humanitarian catastrophe”. Serbian government and army were blamed for another bout of “ethnic cleansing” and the reports went along the lines: Thank God We Started Bombing Them in Time!

Contrary to the mainstream spins, political magazine Panorama of the German state television station ARD first program has presented documents from the German Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Defense, shedding an entirely different light on the situation in Kosovo and Metohija just a couple of days before the bombardment started.

The report by the Ministry of Defense dated March 1999, only a day before the aggression started said that Serbs “are only performing local and time-limited actions against the KLA.” A document by the Foreign Ministry dated March 19 the same year, contained this assessment: “Serbs warn civilian ethnic Albanian population before their military actions. After the retreat of the Serb security forces the population in refuge returns to their homes. There is no mass flight to the woods, no supply catastrophe.”

After reading these documents, professor Duter Luc from the Institute for Research of Peace and Security says: “One must be worried when reading these reports, particularly the parts saying the KLA commanders forced their people to the places which were the targets of the NATO attacks.”

Non-Albanian Kosovo-Metohija residents, like Cedomir Prlincevic, President of the Jewish Community in Pristina, also contradicted the NATO officials’ reports, claiming that it was not the Serbian army, but KLA forcing other Albanians to leave Kosovo, in order to help justify NATO’s aggression in the eyes of public and allow themselves to be “rescued” by the U.S.-led NATO “liberators.”

In addition, few of the journalists who were stationed in Kosovo-Metohija province at the time, have reported seeing “the leaflet by which Ibrahim Rugova and KLA called on the Albanians to evacuate Kosovo in order to stage the phony ‘humanitarian catastrophe,’ and then return under the wings of NATO.”

General Obrad Stevanovic testified at the ICTY, during the “trial” of former Serbian President Milosevic of seeing the same leaflet Milosevic has shown during his “trial” at the Hague. Distributed by the KLA to Kosovo-Albanians during the war, the leaflet instructed the Albanian population to leave Kosovo and travel in large groups towards FYR of Macedonia and Albania.

Apart from this sort of evidence Western mainstream media and officials collectively chose to ignore, some of the Albanian refugees openly denied Western claims that they are the victims of Serbian campaign of “ethnic cleansing.” According to the Parenti’s “The Media and their Atrocities,” the San Francisco Guardian reported during the bombing that “an Albanian woman crossing into Macedonia was eagerly asked by a news crew if she had been forced out by Serb police. She responded: ‘There were no Serbs. We were frightened of the [NATO] bombs.’” Besides the surprisingly well-dressed and provisioned Albanians, Serbs also fled during the bombing. Parenti asks in jocular fashion, “were the Serbs ethnically cleansing themselves?”

Subsequent ethnic cleansing of over 250,000 Serbs and other non-Albanians from the Serbian province, and destruction of more than 150 churches and monasteries since NATO marched in has been greeted with eight years of deafening silence by the Western mainstream.

KLA: From Terrorists, to Freedom Fighters, to NATO’s Ground Troops

A May 4, 1999 Washington Times article by Jerry Seper described the narco-terrorist characteristics of the KLA:

Some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has financed its war effort through the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by international fugitive Osama bin Laden — who is wanted in the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 persons, including 12 Americans.

Brendan Stone explains:

Led by Agim Ceku, the KLA imported into Kosovo “mujahadeen” from throughout Eastern Europe. Seper referred to official U.S. State Department reports labeling the KLA as an “insurgency” organization, while State Department officials themselves labeled the KLA as a “terrorist” organization for attacking both Serbian and ethnic Albanian civilians in its war for Kosovo’s independence. Seper also quoted the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s statement that gangs of Kosovar Albanians were “second only to Turkish gangs as the predominant heroin smugglers along the Balkan Route.”

Mainstream media was fairly ambiguous on the question of the NATO-KLA ties. For example, Slate magazine claimed, “The Department of Defense acknowledges that the KLA reports to NATO on the situation inside Kosovo, but the extent of KLA/NATO cooperation is not known.” After the NATO Operation, however, the truth began to seep out. The Times reported that U.S. intelligence admitted its linkages to the KLA. The CIA had provided the KLA with arms and training. Co-operation between the U.S. state and the KLA was so close that some KLA soldiers were given OSCE telephones and GPS equipment, and had NATO commander General Wesley Clark’s personal phone number. During the NATO bombardment, according to pro-U.S. historian David Fromkin, the KLA acted as a ground force for NATO, drawing out Serbian forces so that NATO air command could target them.

[...] These actions by the KLA served to trigger conflicts in Kosovo that were painted in the Western media as ethnic repression by the Serbs (...). In 2001, the British newspaper The Observer conducted a series of interviews in its investigation of the KLA. The Observer revealed,

The CIA encouraged former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters to launch a rebellion in southern Serbia in an effort to undermine the then Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, according to senior European officers who served with the international peace-keeping force in Kosovo (K-For), as well as leading Macedonian and US sources.

NATO War Crimes

Despite constant reassurances that NATO is conducting “surgical bombardment” aimed at “the military infrastructure that President Milosevic and his forces are using to repress and kill innocent people” (March 25, 1999, CNN appearance of William Cohen, U.S. Secretary of Defense), and despite mainstream media chorus hailing NATO for its “altruism” rained on Serbia (Max Boot wrote in the Wall Street Journal on April 1, 1999, that “Though it may seem odd to link foreign policy to altruism, it seems clear that NATO’s purposes in Kosovo are primarily humanitarian”), it turned out that Serbian army was largely unscathed: while NATO armada was very effective in destroying immovable targets, bridges, water plants, power plants, schools and hospitals and has committed a number of atrocious war crimes against civilian population, it has been almost entirely ineffective against its professed target, Serbian army.

Although NATO was “exonerated” by the ICTY for its killing of civilians in Yugoslavia, Amnesty International on June 7, 2000, published “a blistering attack on the Alliance, accusing it of committing serious violations of the rules of war, unlawful killings and — in the case of the bombing of Serbia’s television headquarters — a war crime.“ (Robert Fisk)

The 65-page Amnesty report details a number of mass killings of civilians in NATO raids and states that “civilian deaths could have been significantly reduced if NATO forces had fully adhered to the rules of war.”

Among the most obvious war crimes was the attack on Grdelica Bridge, bombardment of the column of Albanian refugees, destruction of Serbian Radio Television building, attack on Chinese Embassy and the attacks on hospitals.

Grdelica Bridge was bombed on April 12 at the very moment a passenger train was crossing the bridge: 14 passengers were killed and more than 20 sustained serious injuries. Amnesty International assessed that “NATO forces failed to suspend their attack after it was evident that they had struck civilians.” The truth of the matter is that the pilot not only failed to suspend the attack on civilians, but kept coming back to rain more death, including the last round, when the clearly marked emergency vehicles and staff arrived to offer help to the injured.

On April 14 NATO planes bombed two columns of Albanian refugees on the road from Djakovica to Prizren, killing 75 and wounding more than 100 civilians. American pilot who conducted the attack said that he was “confused” and thought he was attacking a military column. Part of the problem was that he ended up being “confused” for no less than 35 minutes, as long as the attack lasted. NATO’s — by then already customary — first reaction was to blame the Serbs, suggesting it was the Serbian aircraft that attacked Albanian refugee column. Only when U.S. military markings were found amidst the debris and clearly shown on Serbian television was NATO forced to admit it was their aircrafts that committed the carnage after all.

William Cohen called it simply an “error” and used the opportunity to lash out on President Milosevic once again: “For him to talk in terms of atrocities when in fact he has caused the displacement and the refugee status of in excess of a million people, where he has sent in 40,000 of his military, paramilitary, police, hooded thugs to savagely kill and slaughter at random and on a wholesale basis these innocent people, for him to talk about atrocities when an error occurred on the part of someone trying to carry out a mission to save their lives, I think is one of the most grotesque statements that I could conceive of.”

On April 23 at 2:00 a.m. the Radio Television Serbia building in Aberdareva Street in Belgrade was hit. On that occasion 16 workers died and four were seriously wounded. Apparently unaware of their own morbid hypocrisy, NATO propagandists didn’t skip a beat in claiming Serbian television was a “legitimate target” because it was “spreading propaganda.” Foreign journalists who were in Belgrade at the time, like Independent’s Robert Fisk, were no less outraged than Serbs. On the same day, Fisk expressed his shock by admitting “We had not believed NATO capable of such ferocity,” and wrote: “Once you kill people because you don’t like what they say, you change the rules of war.”

Reporting from the scene, Fisk described some of devastation:

Hanging upside-down from the wreckage was a dead man, in his fifties perhaps, although a benevolent grey dust had covered his face. Not far away, also upside-down — his legs trapped between tons of concrete and steel — was a younger man in a pullover, face grey, blood dribbling from his head on to the rubble beneath.

Deep inside the tangle of cement and plastic and iron, in what had once been the make-up room next to the broadcasting studio of Serb Television, was all that was left of a young woman, burnt alive when Nato’s missile exploded in the radio control room. Within six hours, the Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short, declared the place a “legitimate target.”

It wasn’t an argument worth debating with the wounded — one of them a young technician who could only be extracted from the hundreds of tons of concrete in which he was encased by amputating both his legs. Nor with the silent hundreds who gathered in front of the still-smoking ruin at dawn yesterday, lost for words as they stood in the little glade of trees beside St Marko’s Cathedral, where Belgrade’s red and cream trams turn round.

A Belgrade fireman pulled at one of the bodies for all of 30 seconds before he realised that the man, swinging back and forth amid the wreckage, was dead. By dusk last night, 10 crushed bodies — two of them women — had been tugged from beneath the concrete, another man had died in hospital and 15 other technicians and secretaries still lay buried. A fireman reported hearing a voice from the depths as the heavens opened, turning into mud the muck and dust of a building that Ms. Short had declared to be a “propaganda machine.”

[...] Serbia’s “propaganda machine” had been prolonging the war.

I wonder. I seem to recall Croatian television spreading hatred a-plenty when it was ethnically cleansing 170,000 Serbs from Croatia in 1995. But we didn’t bomb Zagreb. And when President Franjo Tudjman’s lads were massacring Serbs and Muslims alike in Bosnia, we didn’t bomb his residence.

Was Serbian television’s real sin its broadcast of film of the Nato massacre of Kosovo Albanian refugees last week, killings that Nato was forced to admit had been a mistake?

On May 7 NATO bombed the embassy of the People’s Republic of China in New Belgrade “by mistake”, it later explained. Three Chinese citizens were killed and seven seriously wounded. Clearly marked, the Embassy where over 30 people were sleeping at the time believing they are safe on the Embassy grounds, was hit during night, with three Tomahawk missiles flown straight from the U.S. Texas base. NATO officials blamed CIA for giving them “old maps.” No one was forced to resign over the dreadful “mistake” since.

Another column of Albanian refugees was bombed on May 15 near the village of Koris near Prizren. Eighty-one people were killed and more than 70 wounded in this attack on Albanians. On May 20 Belgrade hospital — the Clinical Medical Center Dr. Dragisa Misovic in Dedinje was hit: three patients and a guard were killed, and a large number of patients and personnel were wounded. Surdulica was bombed again on May 31 and on that occasion the Health Center for Lung Diseases and the Home for the Elderly were hit.

Surprisingly, Amnesty International accepted an unconfirmed information by the Western mainstream media, quoting articles from The Independent in several investigations of civilian deaths, including an investigation into the bombing of a hospital at Surdulica on 31 May. The Independent alleged in November that “Serb soldiers were sheltering on the ground floor of the hospital when it was bombed,” even though all the casualties of the attack were civilian refugees and hospital patients.

Amnesty says: “If NATO intentionally bombed the hospital complex because it believed it was housing soldiers, it may well have violated the laws of war. According to Article 50(3) of Protocol 1, [of the Geneva Conventions] ‘the presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character’. The hospital complex was clearly a civilian object with a large civilian population, the presence of soldiers would not have deprived the civilians or the hospital compound of their protected status.”

On May 24, while NATO aggression was still in full swing, as a peak and the sum of preceeding concerted efforts to take all the blame off NATO and Western powers and pin it on the Serbian political and military leadership, and the nation, NATO’s own rogue court with rigged rules — ICTY — issued indictments against Yugoslavia’s acting President Slobodan Milosevic, Serbian President Milan Milutinovic, deputy Yugoslav Prime minister Nikola Sainovic, Yugoslav military Chief of Staff Dragoljub Ojdanic and Serbian Internal Affairs Minister Vlajko Stojiljkovic. ICTY’s chief prosecutor at the time, (Del Ponte’s predecessor) Louise Arbour said she “did not want to discuss the specific offenses alleged in the indictment until the accused are in custody. We haven’t had access to Kosovo for a long time,” she said. “We have a lot of information about what we will discover if and when we go, but I don’t know what will be there. So I think to substantiate charges of genocide, it is prudent to have a fuller picture.”

Back to the Original Plan

The bombing of Yugoslavia ended on June 10 with the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which specifies that Kosovo-Metohija is to remain an integral part of Serbia. The previous day representatives of the Yugoslav Army and NATO signed the Military-Technical Agreement in Kosovo province detailing the withdrawal of Yugoslav Army forces from Kosovo and Metohija and the deployment of international military troops in the province.

We are now back at square one, facing another U.S.-led NATO offensive to hijack Serbian Kosovo province from Serbia, that is equally ferocious and equally blindly advertised in prominent political circles and throughout incredibly obedient, sheepish and propagandistic Western mainstream media.

Javier Solana who was NATO Secretary-General during the aggression on Serbia is today the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the Secretary-General of both the Council of the European Union (EU) and the Western European Union (WEU).

Martti Ahtisaari, who was a president of Finland at the time and, together with Russian Envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin, persuaded Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to accept the agreement under the UN auspices to end the bombardment, is today a UN Special Envoy for Kosovo-Metohija and has drafted a proposal — unsurprisingly hailed by the U.S. State Department, Solana and NATO in general — to amputate Kosovo-Metohija from Serbia, after all.

Bill Clinton hopes to have his wife, Hilary Clinton, a U.S. Senator, elected to the White House in 2008. Richard Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright are nothing, save for being loyal followers of Morton Abramowitz, a former US ambassador to Thailand who has specialized in intelligence matters, and who went on to be a champion of the UCK/KLA and an advisor to the Kosovo Albanian delegation at Rambouillet.

According to Diana Johnstone, Abramowitz has since become president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations. Together with Martti Ahtisaari, he is also on the board of the International Crisis Group, the Brussels-based think-tank that formulates policy options for the “international community” in Bosnia and Kosovo, and is financed by both Western governments and private foundations, notably the Soros foundation. “Abramowitz may be considered the eminence grise behind the US policy of support to the Albanian secessionists in Kosovo,” says Diana Johnstone.

Both Holbrooke and Albright are lined up and waiting for the Democratic win, in hopes of getting back the highest positions in the new United States administration. Wesley Clark is also preparing to be a Democratic nominee in the upcoming elections. All of them, along with the current State Department officials still firmly support further destruction of Serbia and secession of Kosovo-Metohija province, and are very much responsible for the devastation caused in the Balkans during the last 15 years.

Additional information about NATO aggression.