Byzantine Blog

Kosovo: We're On The Brink Of A Balkans Bloodbath

By George Galloway, Global Research

WHILE most were asleep, we've walked to the brink of yet another war in the Balkans.

Kosovo is a part of Serbia. That's a legal and political fact. It wants to break away and appears to have secured British and American agreement, but not, alas, the agreement of either Serbia, whose land it is, or Russia, which will veto any breakaway in the UN. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) rules the roost and has said it will make a unilateral declaration of independence soon. The Serbs cannot allow Kosovo, sacred to their orthodox Christian heritage for 1000 years, to go without a fight.

Serbia, with Russian help, outguns the KLA, who can only fight with outside help. That's where we come in.

In the Nineties, we provided the air force for the breakaway KLA, branded as late as 2000 by the US as a "terrorist organisation". But this time we would have to be their infantry as well. Fancy another war, anyone?

And Serbia is not the only place where there is a substantial Albanian minority.

One quarter of the former Yugoslavian republic of Macedonia is Albanian. They want independence too.

And 50 per cent of Bosnia-Herzegovina is Serb. If Kosovo declares independence, so might the Bosnian-Serbs. Then we will be back in the bloody Balkan wars.

Moreover, the principle that a state can be dismembered against its will is pregnant with problems all over the world.

The Kurdish people are 20 million strong in Turkey and would like to break away. Would we fight for them? Of course not.

Which goes to show the hypocrisy which has accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia all along.

Lord George "Bomber" Robertson was one of the chief propagandists for the last Kosovo war. You will remember his sonorous claim that the Serbs had murdered 100,000 Albanians and we must act. In fact, 3000 people died, less than the death toll in Northern Ireland, and picture if you will the outrage in Britain if the US Air Force had started bombing us over that. No one knows how many of the 3000 were Albanians or Serbs, or who killed them and how. Kosovo is a garrison for foreign soldiers, and at the same time Europe's major hub for gun-running, drugsmuggling, people-trafficking and prostitution.

If it becomes independent on the point of our bayonets, don't say you weren't warned.

The One We Liberated Earlier...

“A Brewing Crisis” by George Galloway, Morning Star

HERE’s one we liberated earlier. The mounting crisis over Kosovo, which is set to come to a head in the new year, is a grim epitaph for the Blair years and the doctrine of liberal interventionism.

The Kosovo war in 1999 was long held up as a success story - NATO air strikes on make-up women, refugee columns and market squares notwithstanding. Scalpelled out of the complexities of this part of the world was a modern-day morality tale, absolute and Manichean.

Western military force, deployed in the promulgation of a moral order that was at once universal but strangely Anglo-Saxon at the same time, had curbed a criminal regime. The last act of the wars of succession following the tearing down of Yugoslavia had been a triumphant vindication of "humanitarian interventionism."

Blair chose the fitting venue of the Chicago business club to elucidate the new doctrine. Many, even on the left, were taken in.

Eight years on and the picture is very different from all the pomp and the sight of Blair arriving in Kosovo to scenes of adulation.

It would be a case of first-time tragedy, second-time farce, except that the tragedy has continued and could now become manifold.

It has long been established that the NATO air war in 1999 precipitated exactly the forced movement of people that it was ostensibly to prevent.

[...] Kosovo itself became a haven for trade in drugs, prostitutes and guns, all three ending up on our shores. Far from having control over their own destiny, the people of Kosovo became occupied by 16,000 NATO troops, their economy overrun by gangsterism and their state structures overseen by one or other European Union potentate.

Now, all those features are to remain while, absurdly, the group around Hashim Thaci, who was hoisted into power by NATO, is pushing for what they grandiloquently call independence. It would, of course, be no such thing. Kosovo would be what used to be called a protectorate of the Great Powers. That or it would be part of a new round of bloody redrawing of the map.

There are already forces pushing for a "greater Albania" encompassing Albania itself, Kosovo and the western part of Macedonia. This way lies madness.

Yet, given the opportunity to repudiate this drive to rip a chunk out of the sovereign and independent Serbian state, Gordon Brown has spurned it. We are in danger of sleepwalking into a renewed Balkan war.

A lot has happened since the last one in 1999. Above all, we have the "war on terror" against Afghanistan and Iraq, with threats against Iran. I very much hope that those who were caught up in the rhetoric of liberal humanitarianism eight years ago will see where it has led. As the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

Entire article (subscription required) »

A Crisis of West's Own Making

By Neil Clark, The Australian

POWERFUL Western nations make threats to Serbia. Serbia, backed by Russia, ignores the ultimatums. A war ensues. That was the scenario in the summer of 1914, when the world plunged into the war to end all wars. Nearly a century on, the situation is uncannily similar.

Despite Western threats for it to accept Kosovan independence, Belgrade is standing firm. Serbian armed forces are on standby to reclaim the province by force if necessary. Russia has promised Serbia its support.

If war does follow, then Serbia will no doubt be blamed by Western governments for not toeing the line. But it would be an unfair judgment.

The present crisis in Kosovo has been caused not so much by Serbian intransigence, but by the West's policy of intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states, which, over the past decade has caused chaos, not only in the Balkans, but across the globe.

Ten years ago, Kosovo was at relative peace. Albanian demands for independence from Belgrade were being channeled through the peaceful Democratic League party of Ibrahim Rugova, while the small groups of Albanian paramilitaries that did exist were isolated and had little public support.

According to a report by Jane's intelligence agency in 1996, the Kosovo Liberation Army, the most extreme of Albanian paramilitary groups, does not take into consideration the political or economic importance of its victims, nor does it seem at all capable of hurting its enemy.

It has not come close to challenging the region's balance of military power. As late as November 1997, the KLA, officially classified by the US as a terrorist organisation, could, it has been estimated, call on the services of only 200 men.

Then, in a policy shift whose repercussions we are witnessing today, the West started to interfere big time. The US, Germany and Britain increasingly saw the KLA as a proxy force which could help them achieve their goal of destabilising and eventually removing from power the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, which showed no inclination to join Euro-Atlantic structures.

Over the following year, the KLA underwent a drastic makeover. The group was taken off the US State Department's list of terrorist organisations and, as with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan a decade or so earlier, became fully fledged freedom fighters.

Large-scale assistance was given to the KLA by Western security forces. Britain organised secret training camps in northern Albania. The German secret service provided uniforms, weapons and instructors.

The Sunday Times in Britain published a report stating that American intelligence agents admitted they helped to train the KLA before NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, Rugova's Democratic League, which supported negotiations with Belgrade, was given the cold shoulder.

When the KLA's campaign of violence, directed not only against Yugoslav state officials, Serb civilians and Albanian collaborators who did not support their extremist agenda, led to a military response from Belgrade, the British and Americans were ready to hand out the ultimatums.

During the 79-day NATO bombing of Yugoslavia that followed, the West made promises of independence to the KLA which, eight years on, are coming back to haunt them.

Recognising an independent Kosovo will push Serbia from the Western orbit as well as creating a real chance of war. And it will set a precedent: if the rights of self-determination for Kosovan Albanians are to be acknowledged, then what about the rights of self-determination for Serbs in Bosnia, who wish to join Serbia?

Doing a U-turn, and attempting to get independence postponed, runs the risk of violence from Kosovo's Albanian majority. It's an almighty mess, but one of the West's own making.

Had it not intervened in Yugoslav internal affairs 10 years ago, it is likely a peaceful compromise to the Kosovan problem would eventually have been found between the government in Belgrade and the Democratic League. Rugova's goal was independence for Kosovo from Serbia, but only with the agreement of all parties.

What is certain is that without Western patronage the KLA would never have grown to the force it eventually became.

By championing the most hardline force in Kosovo, the West not only helped precipitate war, but made the issue of Kosovo much harder to solve.

It is ironic that for supporters of liberal intervention, Western actions in Kosovo are still seen to have been a great success. It was at the height of the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 that the then British prime minister, Tony Blair, made his famous speech at Chicago in which he outlined his doctrine of the international community.

Blair argued that the principle of non-interference in the affairs of sovereign states - long considered an important principle of international order - should be subject to revision. "I say to you: never fall again for the doctrine of isolationism," Blair pleaded.

But after surveying the global debris of a decade of Western interference, from the Balkans to Afghanistan and Iraq, is it any wonder that isolationism and observing the principle of non-interference in the affairs of sovereign states again seems so appealing?

Billboard by the California Department of Corrections—CDC—“a private correctional facility that protects the public through the secure management, discipline, and rehabilitation of California's advertising.”