KK-Forum,
(glemte å sende denne for noen dager siden):
hva sier humanitærintervensjonistene i dag (Vollebæk, Jagland,
Haaland-Matlary - hun med soft-power - m m fl )?
" .... Nato is now playing with fire. These Albanians know from experience
how to win friends in the West. They terrorise the ruling power and provoke
it into retaliatory suppression and atrocity. They raise the tempo of this
atrocity until it is noticed by the Western media, which is the catalyst to
panicking politicians into “something must be done”. Then they sit tight
and await the bombs and aid. Already the Albanian publicity machine in
Macedonia’s Tetovo is depicting the local Albanians as victims of a Fascist
Slav regime. Albanian class sizes are 50, they cry, as against 30 for
native Macedonians. Give us arms. We must kill them.
...."
Simon Jenkins i The Times, London, 21. mars 2001.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,248-102268,00.html
Knut Rognes
******************
WEDNESDAY MARCH 21 2001
Nato prepares to reap the Balkan whirlwind
SIMON JENKINS
A strange transformation is overtaking Tony Blair’s great Balkan crusade.
The opportunistic Anglo-Albanian alliance of 1999 is crumbling fast, to be
replaced by its bizarre successor, a new Anglo-Serbian alliance. This bond
promises to be longer-lasting, but if I were a Balkan politician I would
not hold my breath. Put not your faith in Nato princes. Their whim is as
chaff in a storm.
Take our erstwhile friend, Shefket Musliu, a freedom fighter for the army
for the liberation of the Albanian population of Presevo, Medvedja and
Bujanovac (the UCPMB). His territory had been designated by Nato the
Charlie East buffer zone of southern Serbia and thus a no-go area for
Serbs. A year ago Mr Musliu would have counted Mr Blair a buddy and been
toasted by every hostess across Manhattan. Nato’s Secretary-General, Lord
Robertson of Port Ellen, would have called him a Byronic hero and offered
to lend him an Apache gunship or two. Bombers and troop carriers would have
been at his disposal to crush the hated Serb, as they were for his KLA
compatriot, Hashim Thaci, inside Kosovo.
So why, Mr Musliu is asking, has Nato suddenly allowed the Serb Army to
return to Presevo, under the triumphant banner of General Nebojsa Pavkovic,
the notorious ethnic cleanser of Pristina? Why have Serb forces been
allowed back into the three-mile-wide northern buffer zone? Why has his
war-lordship suddenly turned against the KLA’s surrogates, the National
Liberation Army, in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia? Whose side
is he on? It would be idle these days to seek consistency in Nato’s policy
in the Balkans. It lurches from photo opportunity to photo opportunity,
depending on who is in town. Mr Blair and the former US President, Bill
Clinton, could at least argue that they had other things on their minds.
Lord Robertson has less excuse. He is in charge. During the 1999 war, he
was the most fanatical supporter of Mr Thaci in ousting the Serbs from
Kosovo and letting him seize the initiative from the moderate leaders in
the Kosovan capital of Pristina.
Since then the Nato powers have poured money, which means weapons, into the
KLA’s ever deeper and more corrupt pockets, enabling it to carry the
struggle for Greater Albania into neighbouring Serbia and Macedonia. Nato’s
cackhanded aim, declared privately, was to counterbalance any possibility
of Serb revanchism.
Nato must now reap this whirlwind. On Monday Lord Robertson called the
National Liberation Army that is stirring pro-Albanian civil war in
Macedonia a bunch of “localised extremists”. Nato would take any military
measures necessary to curb them. A unit of British troops, outside the UN
or Nato mandate, is even proposed to “advise the Macedonian Government” on
countering the Albanian threat. The unit will be just 20- strong but, like
all British deployments of this sort, it will go weighed down with
ministerial mission creep.
Lord Robertson is clearly serious. Every student of the Blairite lexicon
knows that its two most contemptuous words are local and extremist.
Yesterday’s Albanian freedom fighters are today’s localised
mischief-makers. Yesterday’s bulwarks against Hitlerian aggression are
today’s bloody nuisance. Last year Nato backing for Greater Albania was
“crucial to Balkan stability on Europe’s doorstep”. This year it is no
longer crucial, indeed it is possibly catastrophic.
To Nato, civil war meddling is foreign policy for slow learners. Lord
Robertson was Britain’s gung-ho Defence Secretary during the Kosovan
adventure. His objective in bombing Serbia, he said, was to halt ethnic
cleansing, install multi-ethnic democracy in Kosovo and restore stability
to the region. He did not halt ethnic cleansing. He did not install
multi-ethnic democracy. Now his third objective has also failed. The region
faces unprecedented instability, possibly sucking in Greece and Bulgaria as
well as Macedonia. This is precisely what Britain’s interventions in Bosnia
and then Kosovo were supposed to forestall.
In Montenegro, a Serbia weakened by Nato may yet be unable to resist local
separatism. A bloodbath here would be truly awful. Will Nato, which has
done so much to encourage Montenegran separatism from Belgrade, now
intervene to stop it? In western Bosnia, the Croats are cutting loose from
Sarajevo and running to join Greater Croatia. This will leave Bosnia as a
mostly Muslim statelet, under an army of occupation of thousands of UN
personnel. Will Lord Robertson regard these Croats as “localised
extremists”? Will he threaten to bomb Zagreb if it continues to encourage
territorial expansionism? Most serious of all is the looming civil war in
Macedonia, hard not to regard as a direct consequence of Nato support for
Albanian nationalism in Kosovo. Despite reverses in recent elections, the
KLA has been allowed to become an arrogant regional bully-boy, bloated with
Western aid and from trafficking in drugs and asylum-seekers. The
organisation, with its roots in separatist terrorism, has long been the
vanguard of Greater Albania. This land is intended to embrace not just
Albania and Kosovo but bordering areas of Serbia, such as the Presevo
Valley, and of Macedonia. A third of the Macedonian population claims
Albanian descent. If regional stability was truly Nato’s concern, backing
these Albanians against their Slav neighbours was always stupid.
Of course Macedonia is not like Kosovo. Lord Robertson will protest that in
Kosovo Nato sought to re-establish the rights of the local Albanian
majority, which were being monstrously abused by the central Government of
Yugoslavia. In Macedonia, the Albanian majority is not being abused, at
least not in Lord Robertson’s view. So it was OK to bomb Belgrade in 1999,
but not the Macedonian capital of Skopje in 2001. Kosovo has good
Albanians, Macedonia has bad ones. That is the joy of dabbling in other
people’s conflicts. You can treat right and wrong as black and white. One
gets a million dollars, the other gets cluster bombs.
Nato is now playing with fire. These Albanians know from experience how to
win friends in the West. They terrorise the ruling power and provoke it
into retaliatory suppression and atrocity. They raise the tempo of this
atrocity until it is noticed by the Western media, which is the catalyst to
panicking politicians into “something must be done”. Then they sit tight
and await the bombs and aid. Already the Albanian publicity machine in
Macedonia’s Tetovo is depicting the local Albanians as victims of a Fascist
Slav regime. Albanian class sizes are 50, they cry, as against 30 for
native Macedonians. Give us arms. We must kill them.
This has proved too crude even for Lord Robertson. He is finally doing what
was inevitable from the moment he first went to the Balkans. He has had to
acknowledge the reality of Serb power. He has allowed the Yugoslav Army
back into the border regions round Kosovo and Macedonia. He will eventually
have to permit Yugoslav troops to do what he has failed to do, which is
defend Serb enclaves and historic sites within Kosovo. Meanwhile, having
supported the KLA to the hilt, he now feels he must support the (pro-Serb)
Skopje Government against the KLA’s proxies in northern Macedonia.
This madcap adventure thus approaches its denouement. Nato’s intervention
will have partitioned the whole of former Yugoslavia on ethnic lines. It
will have left a patchwork of insecure statelets as mafia fiefdoms or UN
colonies (or both). Not content with this, the most powerful military force
in the world will find itself having supported every side in a series of
petty civil wars, which seem destined to roll everlastingly round the
Balkans. Slobodan Milosevic was not the destabiliser of this region. That
title belongs to Nato.
Rather than leave local civil conflicts to burn themselves out, Nato and
its cheerleaders on the British Left are still pouring guns, money and
threats of “decisive action” into this theatre. I sometimes think that Lord
Robertson will not stop until the Balkans are ablaze from the Adriatic to
Istanbul. The only hope is that President Bush has more sense. His
Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said last week: “We went in together and
we will come out together.”
Tomorrow, please.
simon.jenkins@thetimes.co.uk
Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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