Natos Balkankorstog

From: Knut Rognes (knrognes@online.no)
Date: Mon Mar 26 2001 - 19:57:37 MET DST

  • Next message: Ola Lars Andresen: "VS: Viktig melding fra Telenor - VIRUSVARSEL"

    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.
    ************************************



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Mar 26 2001 - 19:57:41 MET DST