How to Make a Bad Situation Impossible
Great Power Meddling in Kosovo
By DIANA JOHNSTONE
After nearly eight years of uneasy occupation of the province of Kosovo that NATO wrested from Serbian control by 78 days of bombing in 1999, the U.S.-led "International Community" is eager to shift responsibility for the intractable situation to someone else. This may be done by imposing a false "solution" that provokes either Serbs or Albanians, or both, into reacting in ways that can be blamed for the impending disaster.
The "International Community", the contemporary equivalent of the nineteenth century Great Powers that carved up the Balkans in ways that led to World War I, appointed former Finnish president Marrti Ahtisaari to be "special envoy of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for the future status process for Kosovo". Ahtisaari's task was to come up with something that would sound good to Western media and human rights NGOs. Neither international law nor mere reality on the ground were serious considerations.
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Creating Rights Violations
The post-Cold War capitalist West, needed to drape itself in a noble cause. "Human rights" did the trick. To preserve and expand the U.S.-led Cold War military machine after the dismantling of its official adversary, the Warsaw Pact, NATO was endowed with the new mission of "humanitarian intervention". The 1999 "Kosovo war" was the trial run for this new mission.
The background of the centuries-old Kosovo conflict was dismissed as irrelevant by U.S. policy makers in their search for "new Hitlers" on one side and "victims" on the other -- the cast of characters required for staging "humanitarian intervention".
Encouraged by the prospect of getting to play the "rescued victim" role, the armed separatist group calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) provoked reprisals by shooting policemen and other persons loyal to the existing government. Violent repression predictably ensued. NATO then chose to interpret the reprisals as part of a deliberate plan of "ethnic cleansing" and perhaps even genocide.
Thanks to ignorant and biased media coverage, NATO enjoyed overwhelming popular support for its bombing campaign and subsequent occupation of Kosovo.Henceforth, NATO has had to maintain its Manichean interpretation in order to justify its intervention. The main instrument for this purpose is the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, which, although formally a "United Nations tribunal", is essentially staffed, funded and provided with "evidence" by NATO governments.
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It is generally forgotten, because largely ignored at the time, that in 1998, Belgrade attempted to start negotiations with Kosovo Albanians.
Kosovo Albanian leaders rejected talks in favor of the implicit promise of NATO intervention on their behalf if the situation deteriorated. Then to save diplomatic appearances before launching NATO's assault, the U.S. stage-managed last minute "negotiations" in Rambouillet chateau in France during which Serbian and Kosovo Albanian delegations were kept apart, as both were presented with "take it or leave it" proposals drafted by U.S. diplomats. These proposals were crafted to obtain Albanian acceptance and Serbian rejection, in order to justify bombing with the claim that "the Serbs refuse to negotiate" -- which was not true. Official Serbian compromise proposals were simply ignored.
Adding insult to injury, the Americans at Rambouillet abruptly promoted Hashim Thaqi, a young rebel leaders with alleged criminal connections, as head of the Albanian delegation, shoving aside the better-known respected Albanian intellectuals who had also come to Rambouillet.
This illustrates a typical feature of U.S. imperial behavior abroad: select, listen to and promote only the worst elements in the foreign society you want to influence. Yes, there are, in any society, better and worse elements.
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