KK-Forum,
noe interessant fra BBC reportasjen søndag 12. mars (og som forhåpentligvis
kommer på NRK) mm. Fra
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/mar2000/koso-m16.shtml
Knut Rognes
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British documentary substantiates US-KLA collusion in provoking war with
Serbia
Related Sunday Times article alleges CIA role
By Chris Marsden
16 March 2000
Back to screen version
On Sunday, March 12, Britain's BBC2 television channel ran a documentary by
Alan Little entitled "Moral Combat: NATO At War". The program contained
damning evidence of how the Clinton administration set out to create a
pretext for declaring war against the Milosevic regime in Serbia by
sponsoring the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), then pressed this
decision on its European allies. The revelations in the documentary were
reinforced by an accompanying article in the Sunday Times.
Little conducted frank interviews with leading players in the Kosovo
conflict, the most pertinent being those with US Secretary of State
Madeline Albright, Assistant Secretary of State James Rubin, US Envoy
Richard Holbrooke, William Walker, head of the UN Verification Mission, and
KLA leader Hashim Thaci. These were supplemented by many others.
The documentary set out to explain how "a shared enmity towards Milosevic"
made "allies of a shadowy band of guerrillas and the most powerful nations
on earth”.
Ever since the Bosnian war of 1995, the KLA, seeking to capitalise on
popular resentment among Kosovan Albanians against the regime in Belgrade,
had pursued a strategy of destabilising the Serbian province of Kosovo by
acts of terrorism, in the hope that the US and NATO would intervene. They
ambushed Serb patrols and killed policemen.
"Any armed action we undertook would bring retaliation against civilians,"
KLA leader Thaci explained. "We knew we were endangering a great number of
civilian lives." The benefits of this strategy were made plain by Dug
Gorani, a Kosovo Albanian negotiator not tied to the KLA: "The more
civilians were killed, the chances of international intervention became
bigger, and the KLA of course realised that. There was this foreign
diplomat who once told me, 'Look, unless you pass the quota of five
thousand deaths you'll never have anybody permanently present in Kosovo
from foreign diplomacy.'"
Albright was receptive to the KLA's strategy because the US was anxious to
stage a military conflict with Serbia. Her series of interviews began
chillingly with the words: "I believed in the ultimate power, the goodness
of the power of the allies and led by the United States." The KLA's
campaign of provocations was seized upon as the vehicle through which the
use of this power could be sanctioned.
A March 5, 1998 attack by the Serbian army on the home in Prekaz of a
leading KLA commander, Adem Jashari, in which 53 people died, became the
occasion for a meeting of the Contact group of NATO powers four days later.
Albright pushed for a tough anti-Serbian response. "I thought it behoved me
to say to my colleagues that we could not repeat the kinds of mistakes that
had happened over Bosnia, where there was a lot of talk and no action," she
told Little.
NATO threatened Belgrade with a military response for the first time. "The
ambitions of the KLA, and the intentions of the NATO allies, were
converging," Little commented. He then showed how a subsequent public
meeting between US Envoy Richard Holbrooke and KLA personnel at Junik
angered Belgrade and gave encouragement to the Albanian separatists.
General Nebojsa Pavkovic, the commander of the Yugoslav army in Kosovo,
states, "When the official ambassador of another country arrives here,
ignores state officials, but holds a meeting with the Albanian terrorists,
then it's quite clear they are getting support."
Lirak Cejal, a KLA soldier, went further, "I knew that since then, that the
USA, NATO, will put us in their hands. They were looking for the head of
the KLA, and when they found it they will have it in their hand, and then
they will control the KLA."
By October 1998 NATO had succeeded in imposing a cease-fire agreement,
partly by threat of force and partly because of Serbia's success in routing
the KLA. A cease-fire monitoring force [the Kosovo Verification Mission]
was sent into the province under the auspices of the Organisation for
Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and headed by William Walker.
The interview with Cejal is the only reference to US control of the KLA in
Little's documentary, and then it is only anecdotal. It seems that the BBC
for its own reasons chose to back-pedal on this issue, given the article in
the Sunday Times that ran the same day Little's documentary was aired.
Times journalists Tom Walker and Aidan Laverty wrote: "Several Americans
who were directly involved in CIA activities or close to them have spoken
to the makers of Moral Combat, a documentary to be broadcast on BBC2
tonight, and to The Sunday Times about their clandestine roles ‘in giving
covert assistance to the KLA' before NATO began its bombing campaign in
Kosovo."
The Sunday Times explained that the anonymous sources "admitted they helped
to train the Kosovo Liberation Army". They add that CIA officers were
"cease-fire monitors in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, developing ties with the
KLA and giving American military training manuals and field advice on
fighting the Yugoslav army and Serbian police.”
The Times article continued: "When the Organisation for Security and
Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which co-ordinated the monitoring, left
Kosovo a week before airstrikes began a year ago, many of its satellite
telephones and global positioning systems were secretly handed to the KLA,
ensuring that guerrilla commanders could stay in touch with NATO and
Washington. Several KLA leaders had the mobile phone number of General
Wesley Clark, the NATO commander."
The article goes on to cite unnamed "European diplomats then working for
the OSCE" who "claim it was betrayed by an American policy that made air
strikes inevitable." They cite a European envoy accusing OSCE head of
mission Walker of running a CIA operation: "The American agenda consisted
of their diplomatic observers, aka the CIA, operating on completely
different terms to the rest of Europe and the OSCE."
Walker was the American ambassador to El Salvador when the US was helping
to suppress leftist rebels there and is widely suspected of being a CIA
operative. He denies this, but admitted to the Sunday Times that the CIA
was almost certainly involved in the countdown to air strikes: "Overnight
we went from having a handful of people to 130 or more. Could the agency
have put them in at that point? Sure they could. It's their job."
The newspaper cites the more candid comments of its CIA sources: "It was a
CIA front, gathering intelligence on the KLA's arms and leadership," one
says. "I'd tell them [the KLA] which hill to avoid, which wood to go
behind, that sort of thing," said another.
To back up these claims, the Sunday Times notes that Shaban Shala, a KLA
commander now active in the campaign to destabilise ethnic Albanian areas
in Serbia, claims to have met British, American and Swiss agents in
northern Albania in 1996.
Little's BBC documentary makes no such explicit suggestion of CIA backing
for the KLA, but it does put flesh on the bones of how the cease-fire
became the occasion for strengthening the separatists' grip on Kosovo. He
explains that wherever the Serbs withdrew their forces in compliance with
the agreement, the KLA moved in. KLA military leader Agim Ceku says, "The
cease-fire was very useful for us, it helped us to get organised, to
consolidate and grow." Nothing was done to prevent this, despite Serbian
protests.
Little explains that the BBC has obtained confidential minutes of the North
Atlantic Council or NAC, NATO's governing body, which state that the KLA
was "the main initiator of the violence" and that privately Walker called
its actions a "deliberate campaign of provocation". It was this covert
backing for the KLA by the US which provoked Serbia into ending its
cease-fire and sending the army back into Kosovo.
The next major turn of events leading up to NATO's war against Serbia was
the alleged massacre of ethnic Albanians at Racek on January 15, 1999. To
this day, the issue of whether Serbian forces killed civilians in revenge
attacks at Racek is hotly contested by Belgrade, which claims that the KLA
staged the alleged massacre, using corpses from earlier fighting.
It is certainly the case that when the Serb forces pulled out after
announcing the killing of 15 KLA personnel, international monitors who
entered the village reported nothing unusual. It was not until the
following morning, after the KLA had retaken control of the village, that
Walker made a visit and announced that a massacre by the Serbian police and
the Yugoslav army had occurred. Little confirms that Walker had contacted
both Holbrooke and General Clarke before making his announcement.
Racek was to prove the final pretext for a declaration of war, but first
Washington had to make sure that the European powers, which, aside from
Britain, were still pushing for a diplomatic solution, would come on board.
Talks were convened at Rambouillet, France backed by the threat of war.
Little explains: "The Europeans, some reluctant converts to the threat of
force, earnestly pressed for an agreement both the Serbs and the Albanians
could accept. But the Americans were more sceptical. They had come to
Rambouillet with an alternative outcome in mind."
Both Albright and Rubin are extraordinarily candid about what they set out
to accomplish at Rambouillet. They presented an ultimatum that the Serbian
government could not possibly accept, because it demanded a NATO occupation
of not just Kosovo, but unrestricted access to the whole of Serbia. As
Serbian General Pavcovic comments: "They would have unlimited rights of
movement and deployment, little short of occupation. Nobody could accept it."
This was the US's intention. Albright told the BBC: "If the Serbs would not
agree [to the Rambouillet ultimatum], and the Albanians would agree, then
there was a very clear cause for using force." Rubin added, "Obviously,
publicly, we had to make clear we were seeking an agreement, but privately
we knew the chances of the Serbs agreeing were quite small."
KLA leader Thaci was the only problem, because he was demanding the
inclusion of a referendum on independence. So Albright was despatched on
St. Valentines Day to take charge of winning him over. Veton Suroi, a
political rival of the KLA involved in the talks, gives a candid
description of Albright's message to Thaci: "She was saying, you sign, the
Serbs don't sign, we bomb. You sign, the Serbs sign, you have NATO in. So
it's up to you."
After three weeks of discussions, Thaci finally agreed to sign the
Rambouillet Accord. The path was cleared for the US to begin an open war
against Serbia, a war that had been prepared with the aid of CIA dirty
tricks and political manoeuvring with terrorist forces.
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