Dennis Kucinich on Yugoslavia, and NO Wes Clark is not a War Criminal.

[Quixote1818]

Lately their has been a lot of crap brought up hear about Ramsey Clark calling Wesley Clark and Clinton war criminals. I would like to put this to rest with a voice I think most DU people will agree is neutral and honest. The words of Dennis Kucinich. I think it's up to debate if Kucinich was right or not about whether we should not have gone to war but even as a Wesley Clark supporter I am willing to admit that things could have been done differently and perhaps we went to War before we absolutely had to but that was Clinton's ultimate call, not Wesley Clark's. At this point we will never know if Dennis was right but to compare what happened in Yugoslavia to what Bush did in Iraq is not fair at all. First of all their were mass graves found and ethnic cleansing was the primary reason we were told we should go to war. Perhaps Clinton and NATO were not telling us the "real" reason we went to war but they sold it to us based on humanitarian reasons and these things were happing. Bush sold Iraq to us based on WMD's which was a lie. Second, we went in with a coalition of many country's unlike what happened in Iraq. Third, no American lives were lost and we had a good plan and exit strategy even though I believe too many civilians were killed because we bombed from so high up. Wesley Clark was dead set against this and wanted to use ground troops to lower civilian casualties but was over ruled by Clinton and Cohen. Bush on the other had has been horrible handling the occupation. One mistake after another!

So based on the words of Dennis Kucinich:

Are Bill Clinton, Madelyn Albright and Wesley Clark war criminals? NO!

Was their ethnic cleansing going on in Yugoslavia? YES!

Should we have gone to war? According to Kucinich, probably not.

Was Dennis Kucinich right? In my opinion yes and no. It's difficult to say and I am open to hearing more reasons as to how war could have been avoided when Melosivich was so defiant. I am no expert on the complexities of everything that lead up to the bombings and could be convinced otherwise. I do believe Dennis Kucinich has the right tone and if people thought more creatively most wars could be prevented but the macho jousting often end's up with two sides having to save face. When you box a country in and hope they will give in it becomes extremely difficult to not attack if they don't. If you don't do what you say you will do then you have lost all credibility. So diplomacy should be more creative than macho jousting to prevent boxing yourself into having to use force. What I am interested in is what creative things could we have done to prevent the war in Kosovo? Any ideas?


So even if Clinton was wrong about taking us to war in Kosovo which I really don't know at this point. But even if he was wrong and moved to quickly he at least tried diplomacy and I believe truly hoped we would not have to go to war. Bush I believe truly wanted war and would do anything to get it. Perhaps more diplomacy could have been done before we bombed Yugoslavia and that is really what we should be debating here on DU. But calling Clinton, Clark, Albright and everyone else war criminals is basically complete Bull Shit! Now read what Kucinich had to say and I hope we can debate what more creative things could have been done to prevent that war. Lets try to fix our mistakes and find solutions for future situations like we saw in Yugoslavia and not call people war criminals based on bogus websites from nut case Ramsey Clark. I think we can all agree something needed to be done about the ethnic cleansing, but what was the best way to stop it if you don't use force? Also, who knows what is happeing their now? Did the war cause more death or did it save lives? I would like anyone who has personal experience give an account as the number of bogus websites and opinions from the media has got my head spinning. I trust people on DU who have actually seen the results and I would like to hear what you have to say.
http://www.muhajabah.com/muslims4kucinich/archives/006280.php

[eridani]

1. Kucinich certainly has a nuanced position here

However, these are the facts of US policy in the Balkans
1. In 1991, there was a deliberate decision to cram 'free' trade down Yugoslavia by hook or by crook, despite CIA warnings that this could precipitate serious ethnic conflict. FIRST MISSED OPPORTUNITY for avoiding war and ethnic conflict--DON'T DO THAT SHIT!
2. The US openly supported the Nazis Iztbecovic in Bosnia and Tudjman in Croatia. When negotiators had worked out a plan for ethnic spheres of influence in Bosnia before major conflicts had begun, the US urged Iztbecovic to reject it. SECOND MISSED OPPORTUNITY--the postwar areas of ethnic dominance in Bosnia are not too different from what the prewar agreement recommended in the first place.
3. US mercenary forces helped Croatia drive 350,000 Serbians out of the Krajina, killing 14,000. THIRD WRONG TURN. That sucked--don't do that shit, try negotiation instead.
4. The KLA was and is an Al Qaeda-linked, drug running terrorist organization. Don't support them. FOURTH MISSED OPPORTUNITY. There were certainly plenty of Albanians not in the KLA that could have been supported instead.
5. The Milosevic response to terrorism was exactly like the Sharon response to Hamas--brutal, stupid, and making the situation much worse. The 2/3 of members of Parliament who were in opposition realized this, and had an alternative plan to put Kosovo under UN (not NATO, note) management. Granted, the UN may have also found the problems intractable, but it wasn't necessary to bomb the shit out of the place in order to have a neutral outside force try to mediate the situation. FIFTH MISSED OPPORTUNITY.



What Kosovo is like now--the KLA has mostly driven out the other ethnic minorities, so it's a huge 'success' from their standpoint. http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGEUR700182004 , http://www.balkanpeace.org/hed/archive/jul04/hed6567.shtml

[eridani]

54. Quixote asked, I answered. No comment?

People keep saying, "OK smartypants, what would you have done instead?" I tell them and the conversation comes promtly to an end.

[eridani]

2. What the war was really about--

Ramsey Clark had nothing whatsoever to do with the following article. Neil Clark is no relation. I'd like to hear your explanation of why refusing to privatize state-owned assets should be a cause for war, and what that particular clause had to do with ethnic cleansing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1309037,00.html

'Wars, conflict - it's all business," sighs Monsieur Verdoux in Charlie Chaplin's 1947 film of the same name. Many will not need to be convinced of the link between US corporations now busily helping themselves to Iraqi state assets and the military machine that prised Iraq open for global business. But what is less widely known is that a similar process is already well under way in a part of the world where B52s were not so long ago dropping bombs in another "liberation" mission.

The trigger for the US-led bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was, according to the standard western version of history, the failure of the Serbian delegation to sign up to the Rambouillet peace agreement. But that holds little more water than the tale that has Iraq responsible for last year's invasion by not cooperating with weapons inspectors.

The secret annexe B of the Rambouillet accord - which provided for the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia - was, as the Foreign Office minister Lord Gilbert later conceded to the defence select committee, deliberately inserted to provoke rejection by Belgrade. But equally revealing about the west's wider motives is chapter four, which dealt exclusively with the Kosovan economy. Article I (1) called for a "free-market economy", and article II (1) for privatisation of all government-owned assets. At the time, the rump Yugoslavia - then not a member of the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO or European Bank for Reconstruction and Development - was the last economy in central-southern Europe to be uncolonised by western capital. "Socially owned enterprises", the form of worker self-management pioneered under Tito, still predominated.

Five years on from the Nato attack, the Kosovo Trust Agency (KTA), the body that operates under the jurisdiction of the UN Mission in Kosovo (Unmik) - is "pleased to announce" the programme to privatise the first 500 or so socially owned enterprises (SOEs) under its control. The closing date for bids passed last week: 10 businesses went under the hammer, including printing houses, a shopping mall, an agrobusiness and a soft-drinks factory.

But there is little talk of the rights of the moral owners of the enterprises - the workers, managers and citizens of the former Yugoslavia, whose property was effectively seized in the name of the "international community" and "economic reform".

[AP]

7. I suspected the OP would bet more attention.

This seems to be dying.

[genius]

18. The problem was the use of depleted uranium.

Clark's best hope is to admit he was wrong and never should have used it.

[Lone_Wolf]

55. And cluster bombs and the targeting of civilians

Gen. Wesley Clark, being questioned by Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill.

TRANSCRIPT:
JEREMY SCAHILL: In Yugoslavia, you used cluster bombs and depleted uranium...

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Sure did.

JEREMY SCAHILL: I want to know if you are president, will you vow not to use them.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I will use whatever it takes that's legal to protect the men and women against force.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Even against civilians in the Nis marketplace? Why bomb Radio Television Serbia? Why did you bomb Radio Television Serbia? You killed 16 media workers, sir.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: They were-

Here's the rest of the transcript:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/26/1632224#transcript

[eridani]

3. John Pilger's analysis--

He has a book out with more detailed references. He does cite the Wall Street Journal, not a 'fringe' blog. That KLA was designated as a terrorist organization is a matter of public record.

http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/2004-12/09pilger.cfm

By June 1999, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams began subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The American FBI arrived to investigate what was called "the largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history". Several weeks later, having not found a single mass grave, the FBI went home. The Spanish forensic team also returned home, its leader complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one - not one - mass grave."

In November 1999, the Wall Street Journal published the results of its own investigation, dismissing "the mass grave obsession". Instead of "the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect ... the pattern is of scattered killings in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had been active." The Journal concluded that Nato stepped up its claims about Serb killing fields when it "saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by Nato's bombs ... The war in Kosovo was "cruel, bitter, savage; genocide it wasn't."

Equally revealing was a chapter dealing exclusively with the Kosovo economy. This called for a "free-market economy" and the privatization of all government assets. As the Balkans writer Neil Clark has pointed out, "the rump of Yugoslavia... was the last economy in central-southern Europe to be uncolonised by western capital. 'Socially owned enterprises', the form of worker self-management pioneered under Tito, still predominated. Yugoslavia had publicly owned petroleum, mining, car and tobacco industries, and 75 per cent of industry was state or socially owned."

Nato's clients were the Kosovo Liberation Army. Seven years earlier, the KLA had been designated by the State Department as a terrorist organisation in league with Al Qaida.

At the Davos summit of neo-liberal chieftains in 1999, Blair berated Belgrade, not for its handling of Kosovo, but for its failure to fully embrace "economic reform". In the bombing campaign that followed, it was state owned companies, rather than military sites, that were targeted. Nato's destruction of only 14 Yugoslav army tanks compares with its bombing of 372 centres of industry, including the Zastava car factory, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. "Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed," wrote Clark.

Erected on the foundation of this massive lie, Kosovo today is a violent, criminalised UN-administered "free market" in drugs and prostitution. More than 200,000 Serbs, Roma, Bosniacs, Turks, Croats and Jews have been ethnically cleansed by the KLA with Nato forces standing by. KLA hit squads have burned, looted or demolished 85 Orthodox churches and monasteries, according to the UN. The courts are venal.

"You shot an 89-year-old Serb grandmother?" mocked a UN narcotics officer. "Good for you. Get out of jail."

[Tinoire]

4. Kucinich - in his own words not some partisan Albanian's/sued Clinton

DENNIS J. KUCINICH

IN MY CONGRESSIONAL OFFICE, I read the latest reports concerning a recent Executive Order that hands the CIA a black bag in the Balkans for engineering a military coup in Serbia, for interrupting communications, for tampering with bank accounts, freezing assets abroad, and training the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in terrorist tactics, such as how to blow up buildings.

How this is intended to help establish a democracy in Serbia or Kosovo hasn't yet been explained. Nor has the failure to substantially disarm and demilitarize the KLA been explained. Nor has the reverse ethnic cleansing taking place in Kosovo by the KLA while NATO rules the provinces been explained.

But the extracurricular activity is consistent with NATO's policy of the ends justifying the means, of might makes right, of collective guilt, of retribution upon a civilian population.

It was hard to keep up with the war in the Balkans. The sheer velocity of events made analysis or commentary difficult. What was most objectionable one moment was quickly submerged into something else even more objectionable. Headlines became Haiku: Massacres. Ethnic Cleansing. Masses Missing. Peace Agreements. Bombs Dropping. Missiles Flying. Masses of Refugees.

(snip)

Once a war begins, individual members of Congress are ill-equipped to manage the pace of events. Congress, like the public, is vulnerable to manipulation by war managers. Part of the story of this war is how the Administration and NATO used events and sentiment to suppress criticism of the war and shroud the multitude of violations of international law.

(smip)

On February 6, talks began in Rambouillet, France. The Administration billed the talks as a promise to arrive at a peaceful resolution. Details that emerged weeks later about Appendix "B" to the agreement--which gave NATO the right to go anywhere in Yugoslavia--mark Rambouillet as the start of the war, not the beginning of a peace. Madeleine Albright issued a series of nonnegotiable demands to ensure that the only solution was to be bombing.

I did not anticipate that the U.S. and NATO, in the name of a humanitarian cause, would undertake the bombing of Serbia and thereby violate the U.N. Charter, the NATO Charter, the Congressional intent in approving the North Atlantic Treaty, the U.S. Constitution, and the War Powers Act. The U.N. Security Council was the proper forum for debating such offensive action. In the 1949 Senate debate on the founding of NATO, Senator Forrest C. Donnell, Republican of Missouri, worried that such an organization could supersede the War Power of the U.S. Congress. Now, U.S. planes were dropping U.S. bombs on Serbia in the name of my country, in the name of NATO, but without the approval of the U.S. Congress.

Suddenly, the United States had a clever new spokesperson, Jamie Shea, from England, who talked cheerfully of damage done, of punishment being meted out, of NATO power and NATO air superiority. When a few members of Congress observed that such action was a violation of the Constitution, Article I, Section 8, we were told our objection was academic, pedantic, and, worse, insensitive to the plight of the Kosovar Albanians.

On my first weekend home after NATO began bombing Serbia, I received a 5:30 a.m. call from an old friend who warned that the bombing could precipitate a wider war. He reminded me that World War I began in the Balkans.

"You've got to listen to me," he insisted. "You've got to understand what we are getting into here."

Yes, I knew, I sleepily replied.

Last year, I stood at the site in Sarajevo where Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated. I rode with SFOR (the International Stabilization Force in Bosnia) through Sarajevo's infamous sniper alley, its shattered bullet-riddled residential areas. I met with Muslim clerical leaders who told me the Dayton Accords were a farce and that future war was inevitable as long as people could not go home and war criminals roamed the region.

(snip)

I strongly objected to the attacks on the Kosovar Albanians. But I believed it was possible to be opposed to Milosevic and also opposed to the bombing. Yet all around me, I could feel the dense illogic of war beginning to grip Washington. It was becoming the Capital of Dichotomized Thinking, split consciousness. Republicans versus Democrats, left versus right thinking, which is the stuff of which wars are made. Of U.S. versus Them: Serbia; of NATO versus Yugoslavia, of NATO interests versus Russian interests. This type of thinking is what makes it possible to defend the human rights of some while depriving others of theirs.

(snip)

As the death toll began to mount, I thought of times when I rode trains in Europe and wondered what it would be like to be traveling to work or to visit relatives while, 15,000 feet above, a sophisticated targeting system was locking into the approaching bridge, and suddenly it is as if dozens of people never even existed. And who was taking responsibility for all of this? What was the purpose of any of it? Why did civilians in Serbia and Kosovo have to die in air attacks? Who made that decision?

I thought NATO was a defensive organization. At least that's what its charter said. But NATO's war moved along like a giant unconscious force. Soon NATO was prepared to blockade Russian ships in Montenegro's harbor, prompting Vladimir Lukin of the Yabloko party to warn that such an action was "a direct path to nuclear escalation."He didn't have to say it. There were numerous quiet discussions taking place around Washington and across the country of people who were beginning to sense that NATO was out of control. They understood that NATO was moving into that fuzzy circumference of high violence where the possibility of nuclear war, on purpose or by accident, was beginning to be real.


(snip)

The war ended almost as quickly and crazily as it began. How close we were to the brink of nuclear disaster we'll never know. But I believed then and I still believe that everything was hanging in the balance.

Several factors contributed to the cease-fire: 1) After a heated fight, my colleagues in the House of Representatives voted not to authorize a wider war; 2) the instability of the European Alliance made the governments of several nations politically vulnerable; 3) Milosevic decided it was in his interest to negotiate an end to the war, while his troops still had the capacity to fight. In fact, the solution on the ground in Kosovo was not much different from what Milosevic was willing to give voluntarily in March--autonomy for Kosovo, the withdrawal of all troops (who kept their guns), and the occupation of Kosovo by an international force including Russian troops; 4) the approaching Presidential campaign season meant the war would have been an unwelcome factor in party primaries.

I WORKED WITH several members of Congress, building opposition to giving the President war powers authority. The decisive moment was April 28. On that day, the House of Representatives voted, in a test of the War Powers Act, not to give the Administration full authority in the war, including the ability to use ground troops. This single vote may well have been the turning point of the war. The White House and Democratic leaders held a relentless series of meetings to lobby for the war, including small focus groups with members of Congress, caucus meetings, and whip meetings to organize floor counts and check and recheck the vote. They were stunned when the vote ended in a tie, defeating the measure and forcing the Administration to look toward diplomatic channels to end the conflict.

NATO's unbridled escalation of the air war, with its risk of World War III, caused an unlikely coalition of eleven Congressional Representatives, six Republicans, four Democrats (including myself), and one Independent to travel to Vienna, Austria, to meet with leaders of the Russian Duma to try to create a framework for a peace agreement. That Russia was essentially dealt out of a Balkan resolution was made obvious by the U.S. refusal to submit the Kosovo crisis to the U.N. Security Council. As NATO strove to keep its distance from Russia, it became clear that Russia, through its Slavic cultural ties, its Orthodox religious traditions, and its economic relationship, presented a possible opening toward peace.

In Vienna, with State Department representatives in attendance, we met with Vladimir Ryzkov, a leader of the "Nas Dom" party, Vladimir Lukin of Yabloko, and Alexander Shabanov of the Communist Party. While most of the discussions had a respectful tone, we had an exchange about the possibilities of a nuclear confrontation between Russia and the United States.

Lukin, a former Russian ambassador to the United States, was quite direct: "First you spit on us, now you want our help. NATO says it is not at war. But it is bombing Serbia. What if your country brought on a nuclear attack? Your country would disappear. But you would not be at war."

Over two days, we fashioned articles for peace that included stopping the bombing, the withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo, the cessation of the military activities of the KLA, the return of all refugees, and an international armed force to administer Kosovo. A business associate of Milosevic was an observer at the talks. He communicated what was going on to Milosevic in a series of phone calls and said that Milosevic was ready to deal. In the report of the meeting, the Russians agreed that ethnic cleansing was, in fact, occurring, despite denials by Milosevic. While the State Department and some Democratic members of Congress condemned the trip as being meddlesome or traitorous, the principles of the Vienna talks found their way into the final peace plan.

(snip)

One of the myths of this war is that it was won by air power. Peace activists ought to demand that Congress appropriate money for a strategic bombing survey. This survey, conducted by an independent, non-defense-related organization, should examine where the bombs fell, as distinct from their intended targets. It would analyze the purpose of the specific bombing campaigns and whether the purpose was accomplished. For instance, NATO bombing was supposed to cripple the Serbian military. A strategic bombing survey would show that nothing of the sort happened.

A classic maneuver for politicians caught in a foreign policy morass is to declare victory and get out. In Kosovo, the President and Secretary of State have declared a NATO victory and are staying. Troops will be there to ensure the KLA has a shot at independence--circumstances that will only bring the people of Kosovo more violence. What did we win? We won more war.

NATO's victory talk only sets the stage for the next war, creates a false sense of security about its power, puts faith in arms instead of negotiation, and covers up the endless series of blunders in the execution of the war.

(snip)

It is said that all Milosevic understands is force. But what we ought to ask is whether force is all we understand. The question is not so much whether or not we intervene to help relieve the suffering of others. The question is whether we can visualize a just and lasting peace through a bomb sight.

http://www.progressive.org/kuc899.htm

===

President Clinton Sued Over War Against Yugoslavia

The Illegal War Against Yugoslavia

Paul, Kucinich and others Sue President over Kosovo
Members say President has violated Constitution, War Powers Resolution

WASHINGTON, DC -- A bipartisan group of 17 Members of Congress, including US Rep. Ron Paul (R-Surfside, Texas), filed a lawsuit on Friday, April 30, 1999, in federal court against President Bill Clinton for violating both the US Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Resolution with regard to Yugoslavia.
Rep. Paul has led Congress in the opposing the unconstitutional military action, introducing the first legislation to stop the measure early in this Congress, and speaking against it last year.

"This president has violated the law and he must be taken to task," said Rep. Paul. "It is a shame that Congress has not done more to stop the president from this destructive course. So it is therefore incumbent upon us to resort to the courts to force Mr. Clinton to follow his Oath of Office to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States."

The lawsuit specifically states that the president violated Section 1, Article 8, Clause 11, of the US Constitution by engaging in war without the declaration of such from Congress. The suit also notes that the president violated the 1973 War Powers Resolution for failing to officially report to Congress on his aggressive actions against Yugoslavia within the mandated forty-eight hours.

(snip)

"For more than 50 years, presidents have engaged in foreign adventurism at the cost of American lives without regard for the Constitution. But for the first time we have a president who not only refuses to acknowledge the Constitution, but also the War Powers Resolution which -- in my opinion -- improperly transferred constitutionally non-delegable powers from the legislative to executive branch," said Rep. Paul. "Apparently this president thinks he is king, for in our representative democracy no man is given the power to unilaterally commit troops to battle without the express authorization of the people's representatives in Congress."

(snip)

"This president is putting American soldiers, and indeed all Americans, in danger by engaging in this reckless action," said Rep. Paul. "We must not allow this or any president to declare themselves above the law." Congress voted this week 427 to 2 against a declaration of war with Yugoslavia, voted to prohibit funding for ground elements, and finally, denied support for the ongoing air campaign.

----------------------------------

This news item emanated from Congressman Paul's office.

http://www.progress.org/archive/yugo04.htm

[FrenchieCat]

10. What about these sentiments from Kucinich in the same article....

you decided not to copy and paste in your very own rendition. Why cut out those parts, Tinoire?

It appears that Dennis Kucinich was conflicted about the Kosovo War....and although he did believe that Genocide was occurring and that the Serbs were committing violence and atrocities, as a man of peace, he felt that other measures should always be priority over bombing from high altitudes. Dennis Kucinich did want Clinton to do something about Kosovo...and urged him to do so....but at the same time, he wanted to avoid war.

This is very different from saying that the Kosovo War was started for reasons having nothing to do with the humanitarian disaster that was occurring there. It is also very different from saying that there was no Genocide going on in Kosovo by the Serbs and that no mass graves existed. You also maintain that it was the Albanians who were attacking the Serbs (but this was after the war, and not in the same degree at all).

Below are Kucinich's own words about the torment that he faced. Kucinich is a pacifist.....to a great degree, which is why he didn't want a war to be the problem solver.
---------------------
As the undeclared war moved forward, I wanted to slow things down, like a film editor inspecting the dailies frame by frame, to find where the shoot was going awry, and to do something to make it right. But the time sequences kept changing, a three day war became a seventy-eight day war.

Each new report of Serb attacks on Kosovo tugged at my heart and caused an anger to rise within me. I imagined how I'd feel if it was my family being attacked, my children routed from their homes, my brothers and sisters led to slaughter.

I sent letters and made a series of late night calls from my Washington office and from my home in Cleveland to the State Department and to the White House to ask for action to head off a wider catastrophe.
snip
Last year, I stood at the site in Sarajevo where Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated. I rode with SFOR (the International Stabilization Force in Bosnia) through Sarajevo's infamous sniper alley, its shattered bullet-riddled residential areas. I met with Muslim clerical leaders who told me the Dayton Accords were a farce and that future war was inevitable as long as people could not go home and war criminals roamed the region.

In a helicopter ride from Tuzla to Brcko, I saw village after village that had been burned down and blown up by Serb forces. I met with survivors who told stories of disinformation, misinformation, and terror tactics that turned neighbor against neighbor. I listened to the widows, the sisters of the missing and dead of Srebrenica, whose plight I had discussed in debate in the House.

I knew about the region, I said. Last Christmas, I visited Croatia and hoped to see the home in which my grandfather, John Kucinic, was born, in the eastern Slavonian village of Botnoga, not too far from Vukovar, where in 1991 Krajina Serbs herded several hundred wounded soldiers out of a hospital, executed them, and put them in a mass grave. "Gone," said my would-be tour guide. "There is nothing to see. The Serbs destroyed everything in the war. You've got to be careful where you go. There are still a lot of mines."

In Cleveland, I knew Croatian Americans who mortgaged their homes to support the war effort. Some of their family members had been killed.
http://www.progressive.org/kuc899.htm

[eridani]

15. I see you didn't mention the subsequent ethnic cleansing of the Krajina

The majority Serbs in Croatian Krajina were doing to minority Croats living there what the majority Albanians in Serbian Kosovo were doing to minority Serbs, Jews and Rom. Therefore, in response the Nazi Tudjman eliminated the entire Serbian population from the Krajina--all 350,000 of them, killing 14,000 of them in the process. This was with financial aid from the US, with the strategic planning done by US mercenaries. This is fine by you, apparently, though Milosevic wanting to do exactly the same to Kosovo was bad for some reason.

There was one major difference between Tudjman and Milosevic. Tudjman had no opposition, and successfully carried out mass murder with the approval of the Croatian population and the US. Milosevic was opposed by 2/3 of his Serbian parliament (which unfortunately had not been able to put up a united front and prevent him from getting elected in the first place), which was willing to accept more autonomy in Kosovo and help from the UN. So it's Serbia that gets the bombs. Why?

[eridani]

47. Again. Why?

<crickets>

[FrenchieCat]

52. Because that was the part that Tinoire and yourself chose to

highlight. The parts cut out, were the parts that I chose to post....since Tinoire was painting a one sided view of Dennis story....

Tinoire cut out parts of Dennis' essay ...

I just came after her and added them back in.

She selectively edited to use only what she wanted to convey using Dennis' words.....

I just brought those "cut and left on the editing room floor" pieces back.

The Albanians atrocities against the Serbs were clear retaliation....as they gained power.... Previously, it was the other way around....as the Serbs ran the government at the time of the Nato War.
-------------------
If I were you, I'd get checked for that Cricket Chirping thing you're hearing.

[eridani]

53. Wrong. The Serbs were retaliating.

The Albanians are the MAJORITY in Kosovo, capeesh? They were and are ethnically cleansing the minority Serbs, Jews and Rom. They are a majority there in the first place only because of their enthusiastic cooperation with the Nazis in WW II in the successful project of exterminating 500,000 Serbs in concentration camps. The Serbs retaliated Ariel Sharon-style. Then NATO intervened to get the KLA ethnic cleansing project back on track.

And I asked a question about the Krajina, where exactly the same situation occurred, which you refuse to answer. In the Krajina, the majority Serbs of the province wanted separation from Croatia, and attacked the Croatian minority (unfortunately including Kucinich relatives), just as in Kosovo the Albanians wanted separation from Serbia and attacked the Serbian minority. In the Krajina, the Nazi Tudjman retaliated by expelling the entire 350,000 population of Serbs, killing 14,000 of them WITH PLANNING BY US STRATEGISTS AND ASSISTANCE BY US MILITARY FORCES.

In Kosovo, Milosevic wanted to do the same thing, although the opposition in parliament objected. The US refused to help him with ethnic cleansing as they helped Tudjman, instead threatening to bomb Serbia into oblivion. The lion's share of Serbian atrocities were committed AFTER THE BOMBING CAMPAIGN BEGAN, as retaliation against the Albanians that they blamed for instigating it.

And just to rephrase the question, if Clark or anyone in the Clinton administration actually gave a damn about ethnic cleansing, why did they aid and abet one instance of it and try to block the other instance? Why is it bad for the Serbs of the Krajina to want independence from Croatia and good for the Albanians of Kosovo to want independence from Serbia?

And another question. How does bombing a worker-owned car factory (not a tank or a bullet factory) in Serbia (not in Kosovo) while leaving neighboring foreign-owned factories alone stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo? Can you explain the relationship? I just don't see it.

[BootinUp]

56. You might be interested in this post here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1525658&mesg_id=1540112&page=

Amnesty international's take on the situation.

[Cocoa]

5. this passage sums up what's great about Dennis

I knew I had to think peace, speak peace, and act peacefully in my statements about the war. In my desire for the truth, I had to let go of self-righteous judgment and blame-casting. I knew I had to avoid creating war-like debates about the war. This meant avoiding war-like language, avoiding being deliberately provocative so as to defeat dialogue about the war. I also knew I could not look to my left or to my right to see if anyone else was speaking out.


This is what I think a truly peaceful person sounds like. I can't imagine Dennis calling Wes Clark a war criminal, that's not his style in any way. If I need help understanding Yugoslavia or any conflict, people like Dennis are worth listening to, people that use hysterical rhetoric are nearly useless.

[AP]

6. I agree with that.

That passage is brilliant on a lot of levels.

[Dhalgren]

8. I agree with you, too.

And from my own experience, I know how hard it is to toe the peace-line the way Dennis does. He is a very strong person.

[eridani]

9. No, he doesn't do namecalling

But that does not stop him from criticizing policies vigorously. I remember one interview where the interviewer was trying to get him to call Bush a liar. He wouldn't do it. However, he did have quite a lot to say about the lies that the war was based on.

[Cocoa]

16. I remember that too

it might have been on "Hardball."

[FrenchieCat]

11. If you want to know why this thread was started .....

Go here to find posters (found in this same thread here) who do not agree with Kucinich in reference to whether genocide was actually happening and that NATO went to war because it wanted to. Posters who needed 100,000 dead before genocide should be recognized as such.

Kucinich does believe that the mission was of a humanitarian nature.....but that war can only compound and not necessarily solve the real issues at hand.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1522940&mesg_id=1522940

Kucinich is a pacifist and therefore took a principled stance....but by no means did he believe that humanitarian assistance was not needed in Kosovo....nor did Kucinich believe that Molosovic was somehow a reasonable person who's only crime was that of refusing to allow Western capitalism to enter his country.

That was the point of the PRO Milosovic/Rasmey Clark/Schomsky crowd were making initially. And actually, if you look at top of the thread, that is still what they maintain. I believe that Dennis Kucinich believed that Kosovar were being terrorized and driven out of Kosovo...and killed....and raped....and their homes burned down, because if he didn't believe that....he would have just called the Kosovo war "a war fought under false pretenses" if that's what was truly happening. He didn't....but instead felt that the war was not the way to solve the problem that he did believe existed.

Here's another passage in where he urges Clinton to do something about Kosovo....
ON JANUARY 19, I arrived in the chamber of the House of Representatives, hours before the State of the Union address, to get an aisle seat, hoping to have a chance to say a few words to the President about Kosovo before his speech. In the split second he passed by I urged him not to forget Kosovo. "I won't," he replied, "I am going to say something tonight." In a single sentence he did speak of ending repression, bringing responsible parties to justice, and establishing self-government for the province. On January 30, the North Atlantic Council permitted NATO Secretary General Javier Solana to authorize air strikes against Yugoslavia.
http://www.progressive.org/kuc899.htm

[eridani]

14. Kucinich is not a pacifist at all

He just doesn't think that war should be the first option.

Yes, Albanians were being attacked and killed by Serb forces, but this was in retaliation for the ethnic cleansing being perpetrated on the minority Serbs, Jews and Rom by Albanians. It's like when the Israelis bulldoze a bunch of houses and date palms every time a suicide bomber attacks Israel. Neither Serbs nor Israelis are justified in doing that, but the problems they are responding to are nonetheless real. Do you even give a damn that Kosovo was majority Serb in 1940, and that the only reason it was not after WW II was the enthusiastic help that Croats and Albanian Muslims gave to the German Nazis in exterminating 500,000 Serbs? Nothing quite like economic stress from IMF and WTO approved of by Clinton et al. to stir up old resentments.

The Milosevic policies toward Kosovo were strongly opposed by 2/3 of the Serbian parliament, and that ought to have provided a basis for figuring out some kind of settlement not involving war. Kucinich understood that, but apparently you don't. However, that same parliament was damned well not going to tolerate being forced to sell off all its public resources as a condition of not being bombed, or having the entire country (not just Kosovo) occupied by NATO. They were perfectly willing to have UN help with Kosovo, even if Milosevic wasn't.

[PatrioticOhioLiberal]

12. I have a question

Why the continual re-hash of the Kosova war on DU?

Yes, I understand that "those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it", but I also know that the past can't be changed one iota no matter the number of words dedicated to it.

The only way we can change the future for good or ill is by our actions in the present moment. Our immediate future is not Kosova, Panama, the Grenada's et al. Our immediate future (and that of our children and grandchildren at the very least) lies in the ME, the corridors of Washington DC and the board rooms of corporate America.

We can charge and counter charge on the wisdom of/reason for Kosova till hell freezes over but not one instant of what took place there will alter.

Only by focusing our energies on the now of our existence can we offer hope of a better tomorrow to those who come after us.

The now of our existence is that America is becoming a fascist state, ruled by the money changers who will do ANYTHING to increase their power and influence.

Do we stop them by expending our mental prowess on Kosova? Do we even slow them down for a nano-second? Or do we leave a free and clear path for their storm trooper mentality and twisted vision of the future by our dawdling along the abandoned road of what was?

If General Clark had not run for the Democratic nomination would this be the subject of numerous threads or would we be concentrating on the current debacle in Iraq instead?

Are these threads (and comments on unrelated threads) here to attack/defend one man while the future of all humankind plays out on the world stage?

Are we to remain "in the audience" waxing eloquent about the "play" that unfolded on the stage last week, debating the merits of the lead players...who was the villain, who was the hero...to the point that we miss the current action on the boards?

Like the lead players or not...label them "good", label them "evil" depending on your point of view...they are the act-ers from which the action moves forward.

We have the power to influence those forward moves...we have the power to "write the script". But first we have to stop trying to make revisions to last year's manuscript...they're not going to produce that movie again.

[eridani]

13. I'm not doing namecalling on Clark

I just know something about the Balkans and refuse to put up with the fluffy pink bunny crap on the subject whenever people post it. It is the same damn crap from the media that was responsible for the far more disastrous war of choice in Iraq. My focus is on the policies and the media crap, not solely one individual candidate. The reasons for becoming a fascist state can be found in Kosovo as well as Iraq.

I get your point about the future, but recall that we were just supposed to move on in 2000, and focus on the elections in 2002 and 2004. Yet not one damned thing was done about unauditable Republican owned machines.

[PatrioticOhioLiberal]

17. And the re-hash

of Kosova has done "one damned thing" in regards to unauditable Republican owned machines?

This is my dilemma regarding these threads...what do they accomplish?

A great deal of sound and fury that accomplishes nothing, IMHO.

[JohnOneillsMemory]

20. Yes, BBV is now the only issue. But WClark is being promoted relentlessly

by Clarkies at this site. Relentlessly. And many of us, not just because of the complex situation in Kosovo, but because WClark was a lobbyist to Poindexter's Total Information Awareness program at DARPA see him as the opposite of a 'savior from the neo-cons.'

http://www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/search/web/acxiom%2Bwesley%2Bclark%2Bdarpa

I, for one, find him scary as hell. We've learned alot about the illusion of a two party system and better apply what we've learned to figuring out Friend-or-Foe.

Wesley Clark is a horribly well-disguised foe to democracy.

[Sparkly]

21. A quote from your links, and some questions

...Clark worked for Acxiom, which recently which won a contract to work on Capps II, the federal government’s airline passenger screening system. He did lobby for Acxiom as it worked to help in security screening of Americans after the 9/11 attack. Officials said he lobbied a range of government officials including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Vice President Cheney, and John Poindexter, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency head who resigned under fire. He also met with the FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Insiders say that while working with Acxiom, Clark pushed for privacy restrictions on the data that could be mined on Americans and U.S. visitors. In fact, he is credited with urging Poindexter to meet with privacy experts, one of whom allegedly leaked DARPA’s plan to mine private databases for info on alleged terrorists.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/whispers/archive/january2004.htm

As I recall, the 1996 Gore Commission also recommended passenger screening, which could well have prevented 9/11 if the Republicans hadn't laughed it off without letting it out of committee. After the attacks, screening became inevitable (witness "no-fly lists" and passenger "flags"). Given that, it seems to me the choice is between a less-intrusive way to go about it and a more-intrusive way. And it seems to me that's more a question of government policy than available technology.

What privacy did the Acxiom technology Clark promoted violate, that isn't already known, or wouldn't be known in another way? Was there a way to prevent that breach of privacy; or did Acxiom cause it? There's already spyware; our SS#'s are all over the place; just for being a teacher, I've been fingerprinted; there's video surveillance in everything from banks to 7-11's; I'm not sure why Acxiom's version of screening is such anathema. Serious questions, not rhetorical.

[JohnOneillsMemory]

23. Acxiom hacked, 20 million IDs lost to criminals. Nice Things Said.

I'm not sure who is doing the assuring when 'insider' is mentioned.

In another thread, FrenchieCat posted an excerpt from 'The Myth of Privacy' (source unknown to me) wherein these assurances were written. I paste in my response to that post here now:
-----------------
"According to an Acxiom executive and government officials who attended the meetings, Clark was vigilant about insisting that privacy rights be balanced with security needs."

Oh,an Acxiom executive. That's reassuring. And Wes sure SAYS nice stuff.

Acxiom was HACKED by a subcontractor who downloaded the identity info (names, birthdate, credit cards, SSN, more) on 20,000,000 people and took them home on 30 compact discs. He was busted but not before the info was disseminated to other criminals.

This was one of the Three Mile Island-type leaks in the data industry.

That's Wesley's client. A..fucking..criminal..joke.

[Sparkly]

26. We're sort of overlapping threads

I'm not sure who the insider is, either; most of the info at these links aren't sourced. I saw your post on the other thread and responded:

*****
I'm not familiar with the hacking incident. Is there a specific link in that search-list you could refer me to?

I'm also curious to what extent, or in what ways, you consider Clark responsible for hacking by a subcontractor. Should he have known it would happen and if so, could he have prevented it? What info was on the discs and what was done with them (or what potentially could be done with them)?

Serious questions; I'm not being sarcastic.

[FrenchieCat]

34. It appears that an employee working for Acxiom

was doing some "thievin'"....

Why and how Wes Clark gets the blamed for this, I don't know?

Guess since I worked for Macy's via contract in San Francisco many moons ago, and an employee at the New Jersey store stole some clothes....that must make me guilty.

That's why it's hard to buy anything from the likes of poster John O'neill....cause conspiracy and association by 6th degrees of separation appears to be his calling card.

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/7697
A Cincinnati man who plead guilty Thursday to cracking and cloning giant consumer databases was only caught because he helped out a friend in the hacker community.

Daniel Baas, 25, plead guilty Thursday to a single federal felony count of "exceeding authorized access" to a protected computer for using a cracked password to penetrate the systems of Arkansas-based Acxiom Corporation -- a company known among privacy advocates for its massive collection and sale of consumer data. The company also analyzes in-house consumer databases for a variety of companies.

[Sparkly]

35. Ohhhh!

Now I get it -- thank you! I truly wasn't familiar with this at all.

(Btw, I worked for Macy's in Manhattan in my youth -- I was even in their parade once! Shhh, don't tell anybody, that New Jersey guy could get us all arrested...)

Edited to add: The article you linked refers to Acxiom as a company in "consumer data." As in, Radio Shack asking for your address and phone number?! The link within the link shows it to be nothing more -- basically, marketing tools. Good God, to read about it here I could have imagined it was something evil about reading our irises or DNA or something!

[JohnOneillsMemory]

42. It indicts the whole damn industry that is feeding DARPA and NSA.

"...the likes of poster...conspiracy...6 degrees of separation...calling card..."

Hmmm. Attacking the Messenger. Interesting tactic. Well, I am not thin-skinned so I'll take my criticism with humility and try to be a better animal, FrenchieCat.

You are the #1 promoter of Clark's virtues, it seems, in every single thread where he is mentioned. Congratulations on your conviction and industry. You do offer information, as well, and thanks for that.

Admittedly, I don't always offer a legal case against Wes with columns of cut-and-paste.

But since you have taken the 'Attack The Messenger'-route now, I find it curious that you can divorce Wes from ANY responsibilty for the actions in Kosovo (please don't argue body counts) AND the integrity of the Acxiom firm or even the entire industry he was hawking for.

You have suggested the US military, Southern Command, and US-led NATO actions involving depleted uranium and destruction of infrastructure were all-
1)someone else's gameplan OR
2)Wes wanted to do it right but couldn't OR
3)was better than it used to be OR
4)were even virtuous AND
5)the corporate Big Brother industry is harmless AND
6)'Privacy is a Myth.'

All so good old Wes is blameless for his ACTIONS with them.

That's a bit of a stretch to keep your boy's halo clean, isn't it?

Particularly interesting, since Dennis Kucinich is being used by some as a yard-stick for integrity in the ongoing debate over Wes, it was Dennis Kucinich who pointed out on live TV during one of the Dem primary debates that Wesley Clark was on the advisory panel assembled by the neo-cons to sell the Iraq occupation cost to Congress as being a 5 year-long committment costing a quarter of a trillion dollars.

I remember because I found it in the transcript and posted a WTF? thread about this sicne DU-ers have been long divided over the trustworthiness of Clark as a johnny-come-lately to politics after carrying out orders for the American Empire all his life.

Speaking of the American Empire-

I have offered links to information indicating the US govenment, military, and CIA have continuously been carrying out the most murderous policies for decades with nary a sign of altruistic actions for other than propaganda purposes in an opportunistic way to enable the policies of fascist devastation.

You respond, "what has that got to do with Wes?" Do you see an inability to connect Wesley Clark with his entire life here, FrenchieCat?

[JohnOneillsMemory]

44. WesClark outted by Kucinich for selling a 5 year occupation to Congress

September 23, 2003 Dem candidate transcript, Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A433-2003Sep25¬Found=true

SEIB: Turning on Iraq to Congressman Kucinich and Reverend Sharpton, you've both been outspoken critics of the war and have said, in fact, you'd bring the troops home. But the fact is that as of now the troops are there, the United States is committed.

Would you vote--will you vote yes or no on the $87 billion? And if the answer is no, what's the message you would send to the troops who are there today?

KUCINICH: The message is now I will not vote for the $87 billion. I think we should support the troops and I think we best support them by bringing them home.

Our troops are at peril there, because of this administration's policy. And I think that the American people deserve to know where every candidate on this stage stands on this issue, because we were each provided with a document--a security document that more or less advised us to stay the course, don't cut and run, commit up to 150,000 troops for five years at a cost of up to $245 billion.

A matter of fact, General Clark was one of the authors of that document that was released in July.

So I think the American people deserve to know that a candidate--and I'm the candidate who led the effort in the House of Representatives challenging the Bush administration's march toward war, I say bring the troops home unequivocally. Bring them home and stop this commitment for $87 billion, which is only going to get us in deeper.

After a while, we're going to be sacrificing our education, our health care, our housing and the future of this nation.

SEIB: Congressman?

KUCINICH: Bring them home.

[FrenchieCat]

51. Can you clearify what "the document" in July is....

I realize that Kucinich is a wonderful man....and that everything out of his mouth is supreme (I'm black so I know some of his failings...but that's OK, as I don't want to bring anything up about that).....

But what document is this put out in July?

Link? Title? Anything more than a sentence within a debate? A hit and run? Any other information about "the" document which is being used to indict Wes Clark of "I'm not sure what" right here and now?

First, I've been googling since Thursday to find out what this "security document" is Kucinich is talking about, and I can't find it anywhere. Kucinich supporters have grasped at this alleged report as proof that Wesley Clark wants to spend $245 billion dollars for more warfare in Iraq, which is certainly at odds with the General's public statements.

General Clark wasn't given a chance to rebut Kucinich's claim. In the absense of context, it isn't unreasonable to assume that this "security document," if it exists at all, was an estimate of what the war will cost if it continues as it has.
http://www.mahablog.com/id15.html

[Sparkly]

50. If I may...

If I may...

There's a point at which one side of an argument dares the other to prove a negative. At that point, the argument is really over. Unless you can prove something happened, you've lost. There's no "score" in challenging someone to prove they've stopped beating their wife.

Your "prove it isn't so" argument is:
1)someone else's gameplan OR
2)Wes wanted to do it right but couldn't OR
3)was better than it used to be OR
4)were even virtuous AND
5)the corporate Big Brother industry is harmless AND
6)'Privacy is a Myth.'

But the fact that you pose these "prove it isn't so's" shows you have no support for your own assertions. Accusations are easy.

You're citing a set of circumstances and leaping to conclusions about General Clark and his motives -- as far as I can tell, those are motives that he was a) greedy, b) bloodthirsty, or c) politically ambitious. Let's look at those.

a) The notion that he was greedy. In that case it makes no sense that he stayed in the military and turned down opportunities to make a fortune in the private sector for decades, and makes no sense that he's become an activist against this administration and its policies rather than going along and cashing in as he could easily have done.

b) The notion that he's bloodthirsty. In that case, as somebody who enjoys killing and maiming for the sake of killing and maiming,it makes no sense that he'd testify against the invasion of Iraq as he did, it makes no sense that he'd have advocated for action against one tyrant like Milosevic rather than a broad state like North Korea or Iran or Syran or Saudi Arabia -- THERE you'd get some real bloodshed. Kosovo was quick and didn't even cause any American combat deaths.

c) The notion that he's politically ambitious. In that case, he could easily have run as a Republican or played the game and been appointed to the BushCo cabinet. It makes no sense that he'd go out on a limb to oppose this administraion, run as a Democrat against their policies, support John Kerry with tireless commitment, and even after the electino continue to espouse Democratic principles in foreign policy in direct opposition to the current political winds.

But I submit that it's really on YOU to prove your accusations, rather than us to prove the negatives.

[dogman]

28. Now Clark is responsibnle for a clients security?

He's good, but I don't think that's his job. You don't like Clark, so what? Don't vote for him or support him. Vote for Chomsky, write it in. I'm sure that will solve our problems. I want a Dem candidate who represents me and I can trust to lead this country for the future, my grandchildren. I don't want some theoretician who will sell them into slavery to prove he's pure.

[BootinUp]

32. Chomsky/Dean '08

I might have to start that thread. :evilgrin:

[Adelante]

22. Promoted is not the word

Defended is. Truly.

"Wesley Clark is a horribly well-disguised foe to democracy."

This is an outlandish statement, simply outlandish. I don't even know what to say.

[JohnOneillsMemory]

24. Your right, that's a bit strong, isn't it? OK, he isn't what he seems or

what we need to demilitarize this nation's culture or policies.
Is this a more reasonable assertion, even if you disagree?

[Adelante]

29. Yes, thank you

The second part is a fair assertion coming from you and I might agree depending on context. As a general good wish for a better future, absolutely. In fact, Gen. Clark would agree. On the first part, I know you don't think so, and you have every right to your own judgment, but he is very much what he seems, so we would never agree here. In any case, I appreciate the adjustment in tone.

[JohnOneillsMemory]

40. I've learned things recently that disturbed me and I let it get to me.

Some things have even affected my employment. Interesting times.

1) I read 'No Place to Hide' by Washington Post investigative reporter Robert O'Harrow Jr. A most disturbing read about surveillance and data-mining integration.

2) A cousin of mine who is my age works for the National Security Agency, the ultimate omniscient Big Brother intel organization. This is a cause of some friction in the family, as you may or may not imagine. This is closer to me than I'd like. Way too close.

Combined with Rumsferatu's extra-judicial Gestapo recently revealed, I am so disgusted by this regime and its minions I can hardly keep from spitting.

There is more continuity of policy leading up to the neo-con wars then many of us who used to see Dems as 'the good guys' would like to believe.

I sincerely wish I could see Wesley Clark as a 'good guy' but I cannot carry his baggage of actions as far as others carry his words.

And there you have it, WesDem. I do hope, if Wes is propelled to another candidacy, that his actions might match his words.

Thank you for your protest vote here propelling me to my own clarification.

[PatrioticOhioLiberal]

33. Is this not

DU...a place meant for promotion of Democrats?

As those who support Wes Clark promote him "relentlessly" as you put it, are those who don't support him equally as "relentless" in digging for information to discredit him?

I would say the scales are balanced in regard to the promotion and the "demotion" as it were.

As we "eat our own" it seems to me the rupugnicans are enjoying us turning up the oven and basting our own goose.

It keeps our attention off their sorry a$$es don'tcha know.

As Nero fiddled while Rome burned, Democrats fight over a thimble full of water when Niagra Falls is needed to douse the conflageration the neocons have ignited.

Oh well...guess we're so used to drowning at the polls it would be a shame to stick a finger in the dyke at this late date.

[Clark2008]

39. And you're horribly over-reacting

and mislead.

But - you're entitled to your opinion. I just know he has a better shot at winning - and has fought for real democracy - than most of the candidates I see you supporting.

We have to turn the ship. PERIOD.

Then, maybe - just MAYBE - you can get a Kucinich in there. (and you can search my name. I love Denny and have never said a bad word about him, but he cannot and will not win a national election. Sorry).

[JohnOneillsMemory]

46. see my post #45. Clark sold the occupation to Congress. 5 yrs/$245 billion

(On 9/23/03 Wesley Clark was outted on live TV by Dennis Kucinich for being one of the authors of the 5 year-long occupation costing a quarter trillion dollars that was used to brief Congress after the invasion. This qualifies, to me, as working for the neo-cons and leaving the American public completely out of the loop on a PNAC project.-JOM)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A433-2003Sep25¬Found=true

SEIB: Turning on Iraq to Congressman Kucinich and Reverend Sharpton, you've both been outspoken critics of the war and have said, in fact, you'd bring the troops home. But the fact is that as of now the troops are there, the United States is committed.

Would you vote--will you vote yes or no on the $87 billion? And if the answer is no, what's the message you would send to the troops who are there today?

KUCINICH: The message is now I will not vote for the $87 billion. I think we should support the troops and I think we best support them by bringing them home.

Our troops are at peril there, because of this administration's policy. And I think that the American people deserve to know where every candidate on this stage stands on this issue, because we were each provided with a document--a security document that more or less advised us to stay the course, don't cut and run, commit up to 150,000 troops for five years at a cost of up to $245 billion.

A matter of fact, General Clark was one of the authors of that document that was released in July.

So I think the American people deserve to know that a candidate--and I'm the candidate who led the effort in the House of Representatives challenging the Bush administration's march toward war, I say bring the troops home unequivocally. Bring them home and stop this commitment for $87 billion, which is only going to get us in deeper.

After a while, we're going to be sacrificing our education, our health care, our housing and the future of this nation.

SEIB: Congressman?

KUCINICH: Bring them home.

[faithfulcitizen]

43. "Wesley Clark is a horribly well-disguised foe to democracy"?

duuuude, get a grip...

your conspiracy theories are being promoted relentlessly, relentlessly...

find a new target would ya? you've beaten a dead horse here.

[JohnOneillsMemory]

45. mea culpa. see my subsequent moderations. BUT read this. It damns Wes.

(On 9/23/03 Wesley Clark was outted on live TV by Dennis Kucinich for being one of the authors of the 5 year-long occupation costing a quarter trillion dollars that was used to brief Congress after the invasion. This qualifies, to me, as working for the neo-cons and leaving the American public completely out of the loop on a PNAC project.-JOM)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A433-2003Sep25¬Found=true

SEIB: Turning on Iraq to Congressman Kucinich and Reverend Sharpton, you've both been outspoken critics of the war and have said, in fact, you'd bring the troops home. But the fact is that as of now the troops are there, the United States is committed.

Would you vote--will you vote yes or no on the $87 billion? And if the answer is no, what's the message you would send to the troops who are there today?

KUCINICH: The message is now I will not vote for the $87 billion. I think we should support the troops and I think we best support them by bringing them home.

Our troops are at peril there, because of this administration's policy. And I think that the American people deserve to know where every candidate on this stage stands on this issue, because we were each provided with a document--a security document that more or less advised us to stay the course, don't cut and run, commit up to 150,000 troops for five years at a cost of up to $245 billion.

A matter of fact, General Clark was one of the authors of that document that was released in July.

So I think the American people deserve to know that a candidate--and I'm the candidate who led the effort in the House of Representatives challenging the Bush administration's march toward war, I say bring the troops home unequivocally. Bring them home and stop this commitment for $87 billion, which is only going to get us in deeper.

After a while, we're going to be sacrificing our education, our health care, our housing and the future of this nation.

SEIB: Congressman?

KUCINICH: Bring them home.

[BootinUp]

48. You sure are a busy bee.

I grow weary of addressing the ridiculous posts you have put up tonight.

Clarks position on Iraq has never been a mystery that you need to dig up in old primary debate threads. Just go to his old website if you want the facts. http://www.clark04.com

[faithfulcitizen]

49. oh great... I mean bad...seriously, move on!

[Zhade]

19. We must have read different articles.

Kucinich never even mentions Clark, and it's quite clear that in his view (and he is correct) the war was illegal. By definition, an illegal war is a criminal action, and those who prosecute an illegal war are, in effect, war criminals.

Nasty thing, reality. But there it is.

[Tinoire]

25. Nasty thing indeed. n/t

[Clarkie1]

27. So Bill Clinton is a war criminal? n/t

[dogman]

30. The World Court is wrong.

The Honorable Dennis Kucinich has ruled. Hey I love Dennis but I don't think he determines the legality of a war. Reality, there it is.

[PatrioticOhioLiberal]

31. I repeat

A great deal of sound and fury that accomplishes nothing.

[durutti]

36. Amnesty says Clark is a war criminal. I trust their opinion. n/t

[Sparkly]

37. Well, wasn't that easy?

:eyes:

[BootinUp]

41. Check your facts

What follows in these two volumes provides a detailed picture of the decade of torture and ill-treatment, ''disappearance'' and death in Kosovo which preceded events beginning in March 1999. Amnesty International takes no position on the political issues concerning the status of Kosovo within the FRY or on the military intervention of NATO which began in March. It is clear however that NATO's intervention is primarily a response to the security situation in the region. So far the intervention has failed to prevent or stop the human suffering. For more than a decade AI has been warning of the growing human rights crisis in Kosovo. To no avail. For the most part the international community did not want to know, did not want to act. It failed to prevent the outbreak of armed conflict in Kosovo which provided the context for further violations of human rights. At the start of the bombing campaign by NATO, Amnesty International emphasized the need for the most rigorous respect for international humanitarian law in Kosovo and the rest of the FRY in a letter sent to NATO, President Slobodan Miloševiƒ and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In applying international humanitarian law in the context of Kosovo, Amnesty International has previously reported on a number of breaches of the Geneva Conventions by the KLA in its 1998 publications, and will continue to monitor closely the organization's activities in relation to its obligations to uphold those principles binding on all parties to a conflict

http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGEUR700451999

[eridani]

59. The summary unfortunately neglects the terrorist connections of the KLA

They've been on the terrorist organization list since 1991, and have perpetrated terror against non-Albanian minorities. Which does not excuse Serbian brutality in retaliation, anymore than Ariel Sharon is off the hook for what he does to Palestinians.

And again, you are totally ignoring the Krajina ethnic cleansing.

[Clark2008]

38. Thank you, Quixote.

My blood has been in a simmering boil for about two days with all the Clark bashing going on in here.

It's like people don't want to win or make inroads into the red states or something.

Clark has this magnificent talent of being a liberal with the ability to sound like a moderate. He can win some red states and, election fraud aside, we have to start uniting the country in some way if we're ever to get back on the correct (not "right") path again.

I know Clark cannot be all to everyone - he is near-perfect to this blue voter in a red state - but it's time we backed someone who can appeal to more than the anti-Bush (or whatever Republican comes along). Clark has a vision - a 100-year vision - and he has answers. He's not the anti-fill in the blank.

[ClarkUSA]

57. Wes Clark is "The General Who Did Too Good a Job"

http://tinyurl.com/sjp6

The Washington Post
The Unappreciated General
International Herald Tribune The General Who Did Too Good a Job

By Patrick B. Pexton
Tuesday, May 2, 2000; Page A23

Nine years ago, Washington put on a lavish victory parade for the conquering troops of Desert Storm. The nation cheered the men and women who, in a
six-week air campaign and 100-hour ground war, with only 148 combat deaths, defeated a ruthless dictator who had seized and pillaged a neighboring land. The generals who led an unwieldy multinational coalition to triumph were feted, toasted and mentioned as presidential material.

Not so for the general who won Kosovo, although he too ousted a
murderous tyrant who burned and occupied a neighboring land. This general also led a cumbersome multinational coalition to victory in a short war--this time with zero combat deaths. But Gen. Wesley Clark, supreme allied commander Europe, will come home to no special welcome, no TV or book deals and no talk of the presidency. Clark's reward for victory is early retirement. Tomorrow, several months before his tour of duty would normally end, Clark will turn over the European command to an officer more to the liking of the ever-cautious White House and defense secretary.


Clark's problem was that he was a great general but not always a perfect
soldier--at least when it came to saluting and saying, "Yes, sir." In fact, when he got orders he didn't like, he said so and pushed to change them.

Clark disapproved the gradualism of the initial bombing campaign against
Belgrade. He wanted to hit hard and massively. But NATO governments and
diplomats in Washington felt Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic would
yield after only a few bombs and cruise missiles, as he had in Bosnia. They were wrong. Clark, who was part of the delegation that negotiated the Dayton accords with Milosevic, knew Kosovo was integral to Serb identity and to Milosevic's rise to power. He would not give it up easily.

When it became clear the initial NATO bombing wasn't working, Clark
pushed for every airplane he could get, much to the dismay of the U.S. Air Force. Indeed, one of the unsung accomplishments of Kosovo is how quickly Clark built up air power--far faster than was done in Desert Storm. Clark prodded and cajoled the Europeans and the White House into accepting expanded, and riskier, target lists. He ordered 50 Apache attack helicopters to take the battle to the Serb ground troops, only to see the force reduced in size and then left to sit in Albania while the White House and Pentagon fretted about casualties. Clark also was right about readying troops for an invasion. The preparations for a ground war helped persuade Milosevic to surrender.

More presciently, Clark was right about the Russians. When fewer than
200 lightly armed Russian peacekeepers barnstormed from Bosnia to the
Pristina airport in Kosovo to upstage the arrival of NATO peacekeepers,
Clark was rightly outraged. Russians did not win the war, and he did not
want them to win the peace.

Clark asked NATO helicopters and ground troops to seize the airport before the Russians could arrive. But a British general, absurdly saying he feared World War III (in truth the Russians had no cards to play), appealed to London and Washington to delay the order.

The result was a humiliation for NATO, a tonic for the Russian military and an important lesson for the then-obscure head of the Russian national security council, Vladimir Putin. As later Russian press reports showed, Putin knew far more about the Pristina operation than did the Russian defense or foreign ministers. It was no coincidence that a few weeks afterward, Russian bombers buzzed NATO member Iceland for the first time in a decade. A few weeks after that, with Putin as prime minister, Russian troops invaded Chechnya. Putin learned the value of boldness in the face of Western hesitation. Clark learned that he had no backup in Washington.

Recent events in Kosovo show that Clark's bosses in the Pentagon and
White House still don't get it. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Henry Shelton, rebuked Clark in February for using 350 American soldiers to reinforce French troops who were unable to quell violence between Albanians and Serbs. After the American reinforcements were pelted with
rocks and bottles, Shelton and the White House, panicky about potential
casualties, told Clark not to volunteer U.S. troops again.

But Clark was right to act. He understood the value of using force quickly and early to show who was in control, and to demonstrate to the European allies that the United States is willing to put lives at risk too.

Both Desert Storm and Kosovo were imperfect victories because the despots who caused them were left in power. But the military fought them well. The thousands of Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps pilots and support troops who quietly rejoined their squadrons when the Kosovo war ended deserve more than a historical footnote. And Clark deserves more than a pink slip.

The writer is a managing editor at National Journal.

[The Magistrate]

58. Some Further Facts On The Matter, Mr. Quixote

The Unhappy History of Kossovo


One: Origin of the Quarrel

The clash in Kossovo of Arnaut and Vascian, as the peoples known to we moderns as Albanian and Serb were oft known in Ottoman days, differs from the usual run of Balkan bloodletting; it describes a real ethnic difference. Serb, Croat, Slovene, Montenegrin; all are Slavs, divided due to institutions only. Albanians remain in some proportion survivals of the old Dalmatian and Illyric peoples of Roman days, taken to craggy peaks for refuge from a tide of Slavic invasion commencing with the sixth century.

Medieval Albanian Catholicism offered further differentiation from Orthodox Serbs. The northeastern extension of the Albanian remnant, and the southern marches of the Serb, coincided roughly in modern Kossovo. Here the Serb Czar and Orthodox Patriarchite were able to exert authority the more atomized Albanian polity could not. After the death of the Albanian chieftain Skanderberg, and the Ottoman routing of Venice from the latter’s Adriatic lodgments, late in the fifteenth century, Albanians generally converted to Islam.

In Kossovo, this established local Albanians’ dominance over the Orthodox Serb peasantry, as the Ottoman gave landlord’s tenure only to Moslems. More enterprising or desperate Serbs migrated north; Albanians of similar motivation replaced them from the west. The locale remained poorly ordered, and a frequent theater for rebellion and consequent Ottoman suppression.

The catastrophe suffered by the Ottoman besieging Vienna in 1683 led to the swift seizure of Bosnia, Albania, and Serbia by Austrian and Bavarian Catholic armies. An Austrian force ventured into Kossovo in 1689, setting Albanian and Serb alike both to rebellion against the Ottoman and to battle against one another. The Austrians soon were routed at Nish. In Kossovo, the Ottoman killed every inhabitant they could lay hands on for days. Serbs fled north in great number, Albanians fled west.

With Ottoman authority reasserted, it was mostly Albanians who returned. These soon outnumbered the Serb survivors and progeny. Erection of an autonomous Serbia early in the nineteenth century enticed Kossovo Serbs to migrate north and acquire a freehold farm there. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877, which saw near collapse for the tottering Ottoman, was preceded and followed by Serb attacks.

These fell on Ottoman garrisons and Moslem inhabitants in the south of modern Serbia, culminating in the 1878 sack and firing of the Albanian quarter in Nish. Islamic refugees fled into Kossovo; Christians fled into Serbia for shelter from ensuing pogrom, and advancing Ottoman soldiery. The peace imposed by the Treaty of Berlin left Kossovo under unrestricted Ottoman rule.


Two: To the Yugoslav Monarchy

Albanian agitation for autonomy on modern terms within the declining Ottoman imperium began at Prizren in Kossovo, and at Istanbul. The Serb remnant in Kossovo were subjected to a wretched existence, without recourse from predation by landlord or hostile brigand. Early in 1912, declaration of an Albanian state ignited a successful rebellion in Kossovo against the Ottoman. In the Balkan War, pitting Slav and Greek against the Ottoman that autumn, Serbian armies struck south through Kossovo with great massacre against the Albanian populace. The Treaty of Bucharest in 1913 confirmed Serbia in possession of Kossovo.

During World War One, Austria-Hungary put Serbia’s army to flight in 1915. Albanians in Kossovo rose against the retreating Serbs with utmost savagery. The Serb soldiers replied in kind to fight their way through to the Adriatic, there embarking on French ships to tremendous Allied acclaim. Serb armies re-entered Kossovo from the south by the 1918 Armistice, and were bitterly resisted by Albanian rebels. The new Yugoslav monarchy with its Serb king did not succeed in breaking organized resistance till 1924 in Kossovo. Brigandage, and brutal reprisal, remained endemic to the locale.

The Serb monarchy of Yugoslavia superintended a determined effort to secure its rule in Kossovo. Land was stolen from Albanians as “undocumented,” and made available for Serbs who would venture south to settle on it. Schools teaching in Albanian, originally encouraged in the hope they would keep Albanians backward, proved hotbeds of secessionist agitation, and were suppressed. In 1937, the monarchy entertained proposals by a leading Serb intellectual, the assassin turned historian Vaso Cubrilovic of Belgrade University, that all Albanians be forcibly expelled from Kossovo.

Near the start of World War Two, Fascist Italy seized Albania. Nazi Germany seized Yugoslavia in 1941. The mines in northern Kossovo, and most Kossovo Serbs therefore, were retained under Nazi occupation; the remainder of Kossovo was awarded to Italian Albania. Serbs in Italian Kossovo, mostly recent settlers, were pitilessly persecuted by Albanians, even against occasional Italian opposition. The S. S. security division “Skanderberg” was largely recruited among Kossovo Albanians.


Three: The Tito Era

After Italy capitulated in 1943, Tito, the Communist partisan leader, declared Kossovo would be allowed self-determination if Communists won. In 1944, his partisans succeeded in fighting their way into the place, with some local Albanian support at last. Royalist Chetnik partisans violently opposed any idea of Kossovo secession, winning Tito even more support in that locale.

Tito, however, reneged on that promised self-determination, annexing Kossovo anew to Serbia as an “Autonomous district” within his new Yugoslavia. The Albanian Communist leader, Enver Hoxha, was in no position to contest the matter, amid talk under Stalin of a Balkan Federation to include Albania itself. Tito’s break in 1948 with Stalin ended any real hope for Hoxha he could fold Kossovo into his hoped for Greater Albania.

Kossovo’s populace was then about three-fifths Albanian and one-quarter Serb, with the remainder including Moslem Slavs, Catholic Montenegrins, Turks, and Gypsies. Tito saw that Communist party and police supervisors in Kossovo were Serbs. These energetically hunted up the least hint of Albanian secessionists, harvesting batches of them for show trials in 1956 (coincident with the Hungarian revolt), and again in 1964.

Tito purged his Serb Interior Minister in 1966, for opposition to economic decentralization. Albanian Communists replaced Serbs in Party and police supervisory posts in Kossovo. In the “Prague Spring” of ’68, Kossovo Albanian students demonstrated for national status in Yugoslavia, and an Albanian language university. After many arrests, Tito granted the university in 1970. Albanian language textbooks could only be got in Enver Hoxha’s Albania, which opened a connection to the new Kossovo school in Pristina for his enterprising “special service” agents.

A new Yugoslav constitution in 1974 gave autonomous Serbian Kossovo effective national status, with a representative on the Yugoslav collective presidency. Albanian Kossovo police and party personnel suppressed radical cliques, inspired to “Enverism” (as secession became called) by Hoxha’s agents. Some of these cliques, formed about 1978, included young men who would later become leading lights of the present-day Kossovo Liberation Army.

Tito died in 1980. In spring of 1981, Kossovo Albanian students at Pristina University began demonstrations demanding independence, even fusion with Hoxha’s Albania, to applause from spectators. Yugoslav Interior Ministry troops arrived, and broke the demonstrations, shooting and beating scores to death. Kossovo Albanian party and police officials sustained the crack-down, loyally denouncing “Enverist” radicals, and arresting and beating hundreds suspected of such leanings.

Radical secessionist leaders fled to sanctuaries in Western Europe. Several, meeting near Stuttgart in 1982 to form a popular front, were ambushed and shot dead by unknown assailants. Surviving radicals concluded the bullets came from Serbs in the Yugoslav Interior Ministry, and swore blood vengeance. Under the name of Popular Movement for the Kossovo Republic, a handful of such trained in Albania, and attempted a campaign of gun-battles and bombs against Kossovo and Yugoslav police.


Four: Rise of Milosevic

These largely would-be assassins had no material effect, but a profound moral one. Any crime against serbs in Kossovo was in serbia reported as secessionist terror, and crimes against Serbs in Kossovo, particularly against property of isolated farms and Orthodox sites, occurred with increasing frequency. The Serb Orthodox Patriarchite was ranged alongside the Serb Academy of Sciebces in protest of this, with the latter, in 1985, calling the current situation genocide against against Serbs in Kossovo.

At the start of 1986, the banker Slobodan Milosevic ascended to leadership of the Serb Communist Party. Belligerence in favor of Serbs dwelling outside Serbia’s boundaries, or in the autonomous districts of Vojvodina and Kossovo, offered a ready lever for political power. Kossovo Serbs were organizing militias with assistance from Serb Interior Ministry police; Hoxha’s death had not altered Albania’s support of “Enverism” in Kossovo.

Early in 1987, Milosevic arrived in Pristina’s suburbs for a meeting with Kossovo Serb leaders. A large crowd of Kossovo Serbs rioted before him against the largely Albanian Kossovo police. It was not chance; four days before, Milosevic had met with the riot’s instigators, and a schedule had been fixed for the outbreak.

Widely broadcast film of the incident established Milosevic as champion of distressed Serbs. Later that year, Milosevic used this popularity to force Serbia’s president from office. In the summer of 1988, Milosevic’s Serb Communist Party organized a campaign of Kossovo Remembrance rallies throughout Serbia proper, claiming an average attendance of half a million at each. In November, Milosevic as Party chief dismissed the Albanians in Communist Party leadership in Kossovo, and promulgated constitutional changes effectively stripping Kossovo of its autonomous status.

Albanian Communist leadership in Kossovo mobilized sizable demonstrations and hunger strikes in protest early in 1989. These were broken with loss of life by Yugoslav Interior Ministry troops, who seized the arms of both Kossovo’s national guard and police. Closely surrounded by tanks, the Kossovo Assembly voted itself out of effective existence on March 23.

Milosevic now accepted the Presidency of Serbia. Continuing Albanian demonstrations in Kossovo were broken by Serb and Yugoslav soldiers and police; hundreds of arrests were accompanied by torture. At the end of the year, Albanian intellectuals and some Communist leaders collected to form the Democratic League for Kossovo. The police terror stilled the demonstrations early in 1990.

Milosevic ratified Serb Parliament decrees forbidding Albanians to buy land from Serbs in Kossovo, and removing Albanians from civil service, including hospitals, schools, and the police. The latter quickly became overwhelmingly Serb. The Albanian membership of the Communist Party in Kossovo took up membership in the League for Democratic Kossovo.


Five: The Kossovo Resistance

This L. D. K. was led by the writer Ibrahim Rugova. He inspired Kossovo Albanians to a program of passive resistance to Serb authority. A “shadow state” emerged, quartered in private dwellings, and with a government in exile operating in Germany. Rugova’s “shadow state” held elections, administered Albanian language schooling, even collected taxes. These applied equally to Kossovo Albanians dwelling abroad; most were guest-worker laborers in Europe, but some were prosperous businessmen, or smugglers of stolen cars and narcotics and prostitutes.

The handful of violent radicals constituting the Popular Movement for the Kossovo Republic (P. M. K. R.) were denounced by Rugova as stooges of the Serb police, and he was widely believed by Kossovo Albanians when he did. The radicals’ sporadic gunshots and arsons each served to signal a fresh campaign of interrogations and beatings by Serb police, directed against the nonviolent “shadow state” organizers.

With Yugoslav and Serb armed forces devoted to war in Croatia and Bosnia, Milosevic was content to leave Kossovo at this status quo. On Serb victory in Croatia, one of the leading Serb killers, an Interior Ministry employee known as Arkan, moved to Pristina with scores of armed followers. “Enverist” radicals of the P. M. K. R. secretly convened in Drenica (where resistance to the old Yugoslav monarchy had persisted into 1924), and there voted themselves the armed force of the Kossovo Republic. Albania’s newly elected government maintained cordial relations both with these radicals, and Rugova’s pacific Kossovo government in exile, now established near Bonn.

Kossovo Albanian boycott of official Serb elections in December 1993 gave Milosevic a resounding victory over his rival for the presidency, the Serb-American businessman Panic, and allowed the killer Arkan to win election to a parliament seat. The “Enverist” radicals were split into a Marxist faction, the National Movement for the Liberation of Kossovo, and a Nationalist faction, the Kossovo Liberation Army. The latter had a better footing abroad, where the pacific Rugova’s government in exile at Bonn was beginning to explore establishing its own armed force. Albania continued to assist by giving military training to dozens of radicals, and allowing transit through its borders.

The bloody summer of 1995 saw Serb massacre of Bosnian Moslems, Croat expulsion of Serbs, and NATO bombing of Serb forces in Bosnia. The Dayton Accords confirmed Serb gains in Bosnia, and recognized the rump Yugoslav Federation Milosevic dominated, from his seat for Serbia in its collective presidency. The pacific Rugova used his control of Albanian language media in Kossovo to maintain popular commitment to passive resistance, while the fledgling KLA demanded Serb departure from Kossovo, and launched a new campaign of sporadic shootings and bombings.

Serbia was greatly unsettled by the influx of refugees from Krajina and Slavonia. In Yugoslav elections on May 31, 1996, the Montenegrin presidency went to an opponent of Milosevic, and in Serbia, opposition parties won local posts in many cities. Milosevic refused to allow victorious opponents to take office in Serbia. He allowed three months of demonstrations, then bought off his principal Serb opponent by offering him a cabinet post. The demonstrations were mopped up by brutal police attack, and opposition figures allowed to take local office found their function superseded by various national agencies. The Vatican brokered an agreement Milosevic signed to allow Albanian language schools official existence in Kossovo, but he took no steps to implement it.


Six: Taking Up the Gun

In Bonn, the leading functionary of Rugova’s government in exile, Bujar Bukoshi, rejected passive resistance, and turned the radio transmitter he controlled to broadcasts supporting the KLA. Early in 1997, Albania’s banks were revealed as Ponzi swindles. Mobs looted government facilities, including military arsenals, and swiftly reduced the land to anarchic chaos, in which a Kalshnikov rifle could be had for a five dollar bill.

Bukoshi’s embryonic forces, consisting of a few hundred exiled policemen and soldiers, established themselves in Albania as the Armed Forces of the Kossovo Republic (F. A. R. K.), in competition with the KLA. Albanian students organized demonstrations against Milosevic’s refusal to implement the Vatican agreement on schooling, ignoring orders to desist from Rugova. Serb police crushed the demonstrations with extraordinary brutality.

KLA attacks, which by the Serb government’s claims had been occurring roughly once a week, and claimed ten Serb lives since 1995, began to take place almost daily at the start of 1998. In the old rebel district of Drenica, near the village of Likosane just before noon on February 28, a gunfight broke out between KLA men and a Serb police patrol. Once it was over, Serb police massacred the men of a wealthy Albanian clan considered leaders of the hamlet. Five days later, Serb police surrounded the family compound of a KLA leader and shelled it for hours, then went into the ruins and murdered women, children, and wounded, to a total of 58, including the KLA man, Adem Jashari.

These murders turned Albanian village elders throughout Kossovo against Rugova’s passive resistance. They put hundreds of their young men at the disposal of the KLA. In Drenica, and near the Albanian border, armed partisan bands appeared in such strength the Serb police retired to establish encircling roadblocks. Western diplomats threatened Milosevic with dire consequences if the murders by his police were repeated. Milosevic agreed to begin implementing the Vatican schools agreement, and to meet with Ibrahim Rugova. Simultaneously, Milosevic admitted the ultra-nationalist Chetnik party into a coalition government with his Serbian Socialist Party, and loosed his Serb police once again into Drenica.

This campaign was conducted with the same degree of atrocity that characterized previous operations by Serb police. In one typical incident near Gorjne Obrinje, after fourteen Serb police were shot in a fire-fight, a group of fourteen Albanian women, children, and old men found hiding nearby were shot point-blank by Serb police. Some 200,000 Albanians fled their homes to avoid the fighting, some to southern Kossovo and some to Albania. President Clinton ordered a show of force by U. S. warplanes over Yugoslavia, and in October, his pressure secured an agreement by which Serb Interior Ministry troops were to vacate Kossovo, negotiations with Kossovo Albanian leaders were to begin in earnest, and a body of diplomatic observers would enter Kossovo to monitor events. During the course of negotiating this agreement, Milosevic told a U. S. general that the way to bring peace to Drenica was to “kill them all.”

The monitored cease-fire brought many Kossovo Albanian refugees back to their homes. In Albania, the Kossovo government in exile’s small armed force was violently absorbed by the KLA; in Kossovo, KLA men began arresting and executing functionaries of Rugova’s “shadow state” as collaborators with Serbia. They also murdered about a dozen Serb civilians, and a Serb village mayor. By the start of 1999, fire-fights of company and even battalion scale between KLA guerrillas and Serb police were once more occurring.

Near dawn on January 15, battle broke out between KLA guerrillas and Serb police near the town of Racak. After nine KLA men were killed the rest fled. During the afternoon Serb police entered the town, raped and murdered two women, and murdered forty-three unarmed men and boys. Serb Information Ministry spokesmen in Pristina next morning invited Western journalists to visit the scene of a “successful” fight against the KLA; when they reported what they saw, Milosevic declared the KLA had fabricated the incident, and demanded the diplomatic observers quit Kossovo. The chief judge of the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia was denied entry to the country.

Seven: The NATO Intervention

NATO demanded the talks agreed to the previous October begin in February, and threatened military action to force compliance. The meeting at Rambouillet Chateau featured a severely fractured Albanian delegation; its principal factions (all of which hated one another) were Rugova’s adherents in the old LDK, old line Communist functionaries from that same umbrella group, and the KLA led by Hashim Thaci. After days of negotiation, Milosevic struck out about half the already settled agreement, substituting his initial demands, which the Albanians and NATO had already rejected, and forced collapse of the talks on March 18. Two days later, 40,000 Serb police and soldiers with 300 armored vehicles launched a fresh offensive into Drenica.

NATO air strikes commenced against Serbia on March 24. While these aimed at destroying Serb anti-aircraft defenses, Serb police and soldiers in Kossovo commenced a wholesale assault on the Albanians of Kossovo, aimed at driving them from the country by exemplary massacre. During the course of this campaign, roughly 10,000 persons, mostly young men, were murdered by Serb police and soldiers. Almost a million Albanians took to flight, either west to Albania, south into Macedonia, or into the mountains of Kossovo itself. Lightly armed KLA guerrillas could accomplish nothing against the Serb forces.

When Serb air defenses were disabled, NATO warplanes began attacks demolishing bridges, power stations, and the like in Serbia proper. With Serb police and soldiers forced to retire their heavy equipment to shelter in bunkers by NATO air bombardment in Kossovo, their murder squads became vulnerable to attack by Albanian partisans, many of whom were not, properly speaking, KLA, but village militia deployed by their clan elders. When Serb police and soldiers attempted to group together to overpower these guerrilla bands, the Serbs were savaged by NATO warplanes.

On June 3, Milosevic capitulated. Serb police and soldiers retired northward; NATO troops moved in. Kossovo Albanian refugees streamed back to their homes. Many set upon Serbs still remaining in Kossovo. NATO troops intervened to protect lives, but not property; even so, several dozen Serbs, many elderly, were killed. The overwhelming majority of Serbs resident in Kossovo fled north into Serbia, or into that small portion of northern Kossovo around the mines where they had long constituted the principal element of the populace.

A government for Kossovo, formed under NATO auspices, blended elements of the LDK and KLA, with the KLA’s Hashim Thaci emerging as Prime Minister, while Ibrahim Rugova, the nonviolent leader, found himself without power, or much prestige. The KLA has kept its word to disarm only poorly, and remains a police problem for NATO occupation troops. It has attempted to provoke guerrilla war in the adjoining areas of Macedonia which are largely populated by Albanians, but has had scant success there, either in baiting the Macedonian government into atrocious reaction to their activities, or in gaining wide support among Albanian people in those districts.

[tishaLA]

60. I'd already saved this post, sir!

Thank you for reposting it.