the Establishment of the Narco-Jihad Republic of Kosovo
sheikyermami
As the 10th Anniversary of America’s Greatest Crime Approaches, its Architects, the KLA, Con the Washington Times
Brandnew Wahabi mosque in Christian Kosovo
Julia Gorin: My unpublished letter to the Washington Times:
The Washington Times recently gave print space to William Walker, described as a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer and former ambassador. But Walker is much more than that. In Kosovo, he remains a hands-on operative who has trained, and implemented the demands of, our terrorist ally the KLA — which as predicted now controls the Serbian province as its “legitimate” rulers. The piece (“A Separate Take from Serbia”, Feb. 24) was presented as a response to an op-ed by Serbian President Boris Tadic, when in fact it was an attempt by essentially a KLA apparatchik to recycle and reinforce the long disproved propaganda that conned us into becoming the KLA’s air force in the first place. Walker, like so many D.C. bureaucrats and lawmakers, is desperately trying to bury our blunder and seal our deal with the devil.
In 1999, the Washington Times understood better what we’d wrought in Kosovo than it does today after 10 years of Clinton’s war being exposed as a farce. On May 3rd, 1999 it ran the headline, “KLA finances fight with heroin sales – terror group linked to crime network.” The following day the even more disturbing headline appeared: “KLA rebels train in terrorist camps - Bin Laden offers financing, too.”
It’s certainly interesting that Walker is sweating as he is for our adopted demon child, Kosovo, at a time that his forensic investigator, Helena Ranta, is finally revealing the truth about his having coerced her report on the January 1999 Racak “massacre” that was used as a trigger for Clinton’s NATO bombing. A biography about Ranta, released in October, reveals that as head of the Kosovo Verification Mission, Walker “broke a pencil in two and threw the pieces at her when she was not willing to use sufficiently strong language about the Serbs,” the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported. Quoting Ranta herself now: “[Walker] says to this day that it was a massacre and that the Serbs were to blame. But I never said that. I never made any reference to the perpetrators.” She added that Walker has been “putting words into my mouth…What angered him most was that I refused to use the word massacre and say who stood behind what happened in Racak.”
News organizations including the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, Die Welt, BBC and Le Figaro raised doubts about the alleged massacre early in 1999, after forensic investigators concluded the bodies weren’t civilians but armed KLA guerrillas who started shooting at Serb police when the latter came to make arrests for ambushes of Yugoslav police. An AP TV crew filmed the entire day of fighting as it followed the Serbian police around, and witnessed no massacres. The conclusions of the above-cited newspapers, like those of Belorussian, Yugoslavian and ultimately Finnish forensic experts, were that the bodies had been disarmed, re-dressed in civilian clothes, then shot additional times and cut with knives several hours after death.
Milosevic trial observer Andy Wilcoxson noted in April 2005 that Walker “was given access to the village by the KLA while forensic investigators were kept out [initially]. Walker, instead of taking steps to secure the alleged crime scene, brought journalists to that gully and let them trample all over the place. One of the journalists was Franz Josef Hutsch, a German newspaper reporter. According Mr. Hutsch, who testified at the trial on October 12, 2004, Walker just stood there while journalists moved the bodies around to take their pictures.”
Walker’s propaganda job is repeating itself as the tenth anniversary of America’s greatest historical crime approaches this month — on March 24, the day America bombed Europe on the cusp of a new century. The Washington Times’ desire for balance is understandable, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of the truth. Walker is still trying to portray the KLA as “a tiny band attempting to stem the tide of violence inflicted by the government,” when the late Daniel Pearl and the NY Times’ Chris Hedges demonstrated as early as 1998 and 1999 what the supremacist KKKLA is all about. The KLA itself has been clarifying it over the course of the past 10 years that it’s had the run of Kosovo and 250,000 non-Albanians have fled the province. Ask the Albanians who sit with their mouths shut in Pristina in fear for their lives — as the author of the book Hiding Genocide in Kosovo can attest — whether Walker’s KLA resembles the one they know and had to cheer on February 17, 2008 along with the in-denial Albanian Diaspora in Times Square and everywhere else.
To reinforce his house of cards, Walker writes, “In the mid-1990s a tiny group of Albanians — tired of seeing their villages attacked, looted, burned to the ground; their men and boys jailed, tortured and executed; their access to education, health care and other public services cut off by Belgrade — took up arms and attempted to defend their villages, their families.”
As any student of the Balkans would know, it was the brutish Kosovo-Albanian policy that threatened death for any Albanian “collaborators” who acknowledged Belgrade’s legal rule — even by working for the postal service or police. Albanians had to “voluntarily” alienate themselves from the host society by refusing the above-mentioned “access to education, health care and other public services.” It was not “cut off by Belgrade,” as Walker lies, knowing that American readers won’t know any better. The Albanians of Kosovo set up a parallel system, in which there were Albanian schools, hospitals and administrative offices which shut out non-Albanians, such that pregnant Serbian women had to cross to Serbia proper to give birth.
As Cedomir Prlincevic, former leader of Kosovo’s banished Serbian-speaking Jewish community, told interviewer Jared Israel, of the Emperor’s New Clothes website in 2000: the Albanians of Kosovo pretended they had been locked out of the schools when actually it was an organized boycott:
In Kosovo, a foreign Superpower supported the secessionists for well over a decade. Because of this support, the Albanians were psychologically prepared to achieve — no, not to achieve, to be given — secession. As a gift. The secessionist leaders, starting with Rugova, had promised them, “Do this, do that and the US will intervene and we will get Kosovo.” They had been promising this for years. “Sacrifice your children by boycotting the schools; sacrifice your health by boycotting the hospitals; use your suffering to show foreign public opinion how we suffer under the Serbs, and the U.S. will come to our rescue.”
Serbs were once the majority in Kosovo, but today Kosovo is 97% Albanian. Who, then, was being “ethnically cleansed”? Within months of Albanians getting their NATO assistance against Serbia, they were on to Macedonia, where they now use the same arguments: that they’re being discriminated against and frozen out of jobs even though they hold government office and occupy the western half of the country as Greater Albania marches on, with U.S. blessing.
The “policy of repression, of ethnic cleansing, of systemic rape, pillage and murder” that Walker cites about Belgrade far better describes how the Albanian hyper-nationalists whom we side with were running the province for three decades leading up to Milosevic’s crackdown. But that’s been the trick all along: invert what was done to Serbs with what was done “by” Serbs, as Daniel Greenfield wrote for the website “Israel e-News” upon Kosovo’s independence: “Kosovo and the Palestinian Authority are both triumphs of terrorism, victories by racist nationalists whose aim has always been religious and ethnic cleansing, who have nevertheless managed to portray the countries they have torn to shreds as racist nationalists practicing ethnic cleansing.”
But Walker, who has been bestowed with honorary citizenship by Albania — ostensibly a separate country from Kosovo — shows his Albanian creds by calling all the subsequent discoveries and exposures of his ruse the ranting of “conspiracy theorists and Belgrade” so that the Albanian conspiracy that launched all of this to begin with, and that we signed on to, can avoid unraveling. Obviously, if you’re part of a conspiracy, you’re going to label your whistleblowers as the conspiracy theorists.
Even Kosovo “prime minister” Hashim Thaci has admitted to the Racak ploy, but Walker desperately tries to keep up the disintegrating charade when he writes, “While conspiracy theorists and Belgrade continue to deny that the Serb army and special police units were doing anything other than policing up a ‘separatist terrorist’ movement, one only has to read the OSCE’s human-rights report, the trial record from the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.”
What trial record is he referring to? It doesn’t sound like the same one that saw the Racak “massacre”, among other “atrocities”, removed from the indictment against Milosevic after they fell apart. And people wonder why the trial took 3.5 years and counting until Milosevic was finally denied healthcare and conveniently died.
Walker repeats some oft-used words when he writes, “We were determined to be neutral. That turned out to be impossible.” You can find virtually the same sentence in reporting from Bosnia by the NY Times’ John Burns and others among the “pack reporters” who covered Bosnia by dutifully reporting the information coming directly from Bosnian and Croatian information ministries — information that made these “journalists” likewise “unable to stay neutral” and turned them into co-architects of, and co-belligerents in, a war.
Tom Gambill was security chief for Walker’s selfsame OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe). Gambill was the man who in 2005 exposed the entire Kosovo mission as a fraud.
As if the already existing Kosovo myths of the 1990s weren’t enough, Walker adds some new ones when he writes, “One million Kosovar Albanians were routed from their homes, from their villages, transported in cattle cars or forced to walk into exile. On the way they were beaten, robbed, raped and degraded in every possible way.” As Bishop Artemije wrote in his Washington Times letter last week, there were hardly even any lies about cattle cars in the 1990s, much less actual cattle cars. Meanwhile, Albanians themselves have attested to it being NATO’s falling bombs that they were fleeing, as Wilcoxson wrote last year in an article for WorldNetDaily.com:
Eve-Ann Prentice, a British journalist who covered the Kosovo war for the Guardian and the London Times, testified…that rather than being driven out by the Serbs, “The KLA told ethnic Albanian civilians that it was their patriotic duty to leave because the world was watching. This was their one big opportunity to make Kosovo part of Albania eventually, that NATO was there, ready to come in, and that anybody who failed to join the exodus was not supporting the Albanian cause.”
Alice Mahon, a British MP and a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Brussels, also testified during Milosevic’s trial. She said, “The KLA definitely encouraged the exodus.”
Muharem Ibraj and Saban Fazliu, two ethnic Albanian witnesses from Kosovo who testified in Milosevic’s trial, said Serbian security forces encouraged civilians to remain in their homes, and that it was the KLA who made the civilian population leave the province.
Fazliu testified that the KLA would kill anybody who disobeyed its orders. He said, “The order was to leave Kosovo in later stages, to go to Albania, Macedonia, so that the world could see for themselves that the Albanians are leaving because of the harm caused by the Serbs. This was the aim. This was the KLA order.”
During the war, the London Times reported how “KLA ‘minders’ ensured that all refugees peddled the same line when speaking to Western journalists” by threatening the refugee’s loved ones. Unfortunately, that report was one of the few honest pieces of journalism to come out of Kosovo.
Sadly, it took something called the World Socialist Web Site to report on a sensational 2001 German documentary in which: “Heinz Loquai, a former general attached to the OSCE who has already published a book refuting some of the German Ministry of Defence’s lies…states: ‘the kind of humanitarian catastrophe that, as a category of international law, would have justified going to war did not exist in Kosovo prior to the war’. And Norma Brown, a US diplomat in Kosovo, says: “There was no humanitarian crisis up to the beginning of the NATO bombing raids.”
As for the Albanians being “beaten, robbed, raped and degraded in every possible way” and the “systematic rape, pillage and murder” of which Walker speaks, in September of 1998 the Yugoslav foreign minister was on TV in Budapest (certainly not in the U.S., whose media made the unusual step in this war of not giving us the “enemy” side), and he desperately tried to relate the now known fact that the KLA were massacring whole villages of their own people and blaming the Serbs in order to provoke the West into entering the conflict. The degradation, meanwhile, really kicked in for those refugees who fled to Albania. As Professor Mark Almond wrote for National Review in 1999: “The local Albanian mafia battened on them, demanding protection money or trying to recruit destitute girls for their prostitution rackets in Italy.”
Based on his self-spun myths and circular argument, Walker asks, “Is it any wonder that [Kosovo Albanians] want nothing further to do with Belgrade?” But wanting nothing to do with Belgrade was the cause, not the effect. Albanians did what they did to Serbia because they wanted nothing to do with Belgrade in the first place; they just wanted its land. Almond again: “The KLA’s propaganda presents the group as emerging in response to Serb repression in the mid 1990s. In fact, its roots lie in an anti-Yugoslav movement created in the early 1980s by the Stalinist-nationalist regime of Enver Hoxha in neighboring Albania. Thaci’s uncle was an activist in this self-declared Marxist-Leninist liberation movement.”
In recent years the covert operative that the Times unfortunately gave a podium to has been meeting with his old KLA contacts to make a plan for taking Kosovo’s more ornery Serb parts by force. Walker’s return to the region in March 2007 alarmed French intelligence, the newspaper Novosti reported at the time:
The information of French intelligence officers is that Walker met with many former KLA members that he had personally trained for special operations against the Serbian forces. The goal of his arrival is the preparation of a scenario and ordering of guidelines to Albanian terrorists for taking measures to seize northern Kosovo [if it’s not surrendered by Serbia]…In Pec in the hotel “Metohija” he met with ex-members of [Ramush] Haradinaj’s special unit which in 1999 conducted the [harshest] crimes against the Serbs and other non-Albanians…He also met with all of his old spies which he recruited during his Kosovo stay as leader of the UN Verification mission prior to the NATO bombardment.
Even Walker’s title “A Separate Take from Serbia” was farcical, given that Walker’s take is not the dissenting view, but the mass produced “consensus” view, while voices of dissent are far and few between. Indeed, Serbia’s is the “separate” take, the one you hardly ever hear in mainstream or even alternative media—much less on Capitol Hill.
The icing on Walker’s hackneyed cake that the Washington Times let him have was calling the liberal, Euro-facing, overly compliant Tadic “not moderate or reasonable,” accusing him of “the same inflammatory nationalistic claims” as Milosevic — a favorite pastime of editorial pages from the Wall St. Journal to the NY Times. The West’s eager cooperator before Tadic was Vojislav Kostunica — only to be promptly labeled a nationalist also, once he figured out we weren’t playing fairly. So along came Tadic as a counterweight to Kostunica — only to find and expose that our policy toward Serbia is one of perpetual trickery, as Canadian former ambassador James Bissett has lamented, and as former Italian foreign minister Gianni de Mikelis admitted in August with a welcome understatement of the century: “A lot of mistakes have been done to Serbia.” Indeed, to Walker and the West that buys his story, there is no such thing as a Serb, only a ubiquitous creature known as the ‘Serbianationalist’.
Every Serbian politician who agrees to play ball and lay his country even more prostrate under Western bidding than his predecessor did in order to deliver Serbia from its manufactured pariah status only finds himself the next pariah when he discovers that complying is met with the next punishment and demand. Going on the guiding principle that we keep our end of bargains and our signature on international agreements — such as Resolution 1244 on Kosovo, for example — actually means something, each subsequent Serbian leader finds an unrecognizable America, cooperation with whom reaps no justice or quid pro quo.
Like Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Eliot Engel, George W. Bush, and Wesley Clark, for his dutifulness Walker has a street named in his honor in Kosovo — as do so many other KLA members to whom monuments have gone up all over the Serbian province. But he’d better deliver Kosovo all the way. For despite what he lets on, Walker knows full well what his KLA “friends” are capable of when they don’t get their way — and that is what has been driving our Kosovo policy since our intervention. Washington Times readers should keep in mind that just because a supremacist, narco-terrorist, mafia-clan, jihad-harboring Greater Albania is being promoted under the Red, White and Blue banner, doesn’t make it patriotic to support this policy. Just look at its original architects.
Unfinished Business in the Balkans?
Greg Davis here. Recent conferences in Washington, DC and Berkeley, CA sponsored by the Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies and the American Council for Kosovo addressed rumblings that the current US administration may be hatching something in the Balkans. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has ominously referred to “the unfinished business in the Balkans,” and articles written by Richard Holbrooke and others indicate that Washington continues to see the Serbs – whether in Serbia or Republika Srpska – as an ongoing problem that needs to be conclusively dealt with.
US policy in the Balkans since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991 has amounted to an effort to make the region safe for jihad. As I pointed out in my conference paper,
To that end, during the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s, the US-led West a) encouraged the violent, as opposed to pacific, breakup of Yugoslavia; b) supported a hard-core Islamic supremacist, Alija Izetbegovic, president of Bosnia, in his efforts to build the first Islamic state in Europe; and c) supported diplomatically and militarily Muslim terrorists in Bosnia and Kosovo in their efforts to kill and ethnically cleanse Serb civilians. US-led Western policy continued in a similar vein during the Bush administration with the recognition of Kosovo, and, sadly, shows few signs of changing under the Obama administration.
The nettling question of course is why? Why is the US-led West so intent on persecuting the Serbs in order to further Islamic designs in Europe? It is this question that I address in my paper below. As the Obama administration tries the good-cop approach with Dar al Islam, a question is whether it will seem expedient to throw the Serbs under the bus once again. The 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian civil war did little to resolve the underlying issues that caused the war in the first place. Bosnia, roughly half of which is composed by Republika Srpska, wobbles along as a compromise pseudo-state that satisfies neither the orthodox Muslims, who want a proper Islamic state, nor the Serbs, who, while doing better than the rest of the country, would probably just as soon leave and unite with Serbia. The place is tentatively held together under the aegis of the Office of the High Representative, the effective Western viceroy.
What fifteen years of US-led policy in the region has achieved is two failed states, Bosnia and Kosovo, both riddled with corruption, drug-running, and jihadist activity. As John Schindler has pointed out in his excellent book, Unholy Terror, the jihadist attacks on the West since 1992 – including 9/11 – are directly traceable to the Bosnian civil war and Western connivance with the international Muslim forces who poured into the region to fight the infidel Serbs.
A hope is that the Obama administration will have its hands too full with Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran, the economy, etc., etc. to undertake any serious new mischief in the Balkans. But with Clinton, Holbrooke, et al. back in the saddle, we may be looking at another round of Western persecution of the Serbs, one of the few peoples to have actively resisted Islamic expansion in our time. This fact, I argue, is telling – and alarming. It indicates that there is a good deal of common cause between the West today and Islam – not because, a la Obama, Islam is “tolerant” or that Western national interests actually lie in appeasing Islamic expansion, but because the West has taken on the sorts of quasi-religious, expansionary attributes that have marked Islam and other imperialistic enterprises for centuries. This is not a comfortable fact, and I will be interested to read what Jihad Watchers have to say.
Imperial Democracy by Gregory M. Davis
The breakup of Yugoslavia and the de facto secession of Kosovo-Metohija from Serbia mark significant episodes in the post-Cold War struggle between three major world-historical forces: US-led globalization, jihad, and the old nation-state system. These three forces are the current expressions of the three civilizations that have competed for pre-eminence in the Balkan peninsula for a thousand years: the West, Islam, and the Orthodox East. The Orthodox nations of Eastern Europe, which still retain characteristics of “whole” societies based in common language, ethnicity, territory, and religion, remain one of the few genuinely conservative forces on the world stage. In simplified but meaningful terms, the Orthodox East has once again found itself squeezed in a vice between two imperialistic, violent ideologies, happy to wreck Balkan civilization for their own misguided self-interests.
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