NATO Ignored Risks
Bombing campaign drove out Albanians in
a way and to an extent that must be morally condemned.
By Dr. Jan Oberg

     WASHINGTON - The alternative to partition in the Balkans is the presence of a large outside force - indefinitely.
     In the run-up to the Nato intervention in the Kosovo conflict, I was told by several Nato advisers: "The only question is whether Milosevic will give in just before or just after the start of air strikes." It is easy to be wise after the event, but this phrase illuminates the multiple errors which led Nato into war. To begin with, in the whole lexicon of international relations, there is no such thing as "air strikes." Even a limited armed attack on another country constitutes an act of war. And in war, the enemy can be expected to hit back with every means at his disposal. Furthermore, a war over Kosovo was never going to be with "Milosevic." This war is with the Yugoslav state and the Serbian nation; like so many wars, it began between the Serbs and the Kosovo Albanians over control of a particular territory, and Nato has now ended up on the side of the Albanians. As in any war, a Nato victory will require a partial or even complete Serbian defeat.
      The question now facing Nato leaders is the extent of the defeat they can or wish to inflict on the Serbs; what this comes down to, in the end, is how Kosovo is going to be divided or whether Nato means to give the whole province to the Albanians, leading to a voluntary or forced exodus of the Serb minority.
      In other words, this means the terms of an ethnic partition. No significant number of Albanians will be able to live safely under Serbian rule in the future--and the much smaller, but deeply-rooted, Serbian population will also not be able to live under Albanian rule. This has become obvious in recent weeks, but the breakdown of ethnic relations in the province was evident in the 1980s; it has roots in territorial conflict going back 1,300 years, exacerbated by the Albanian role in the crushing of Serb revolts against the Ottomans and the atrocities committed by both sides in the wars since the Ottoman empire's collapse.
      War is a school of realism, a solvent of established beliefs and an impetus to harsh, but clear decisions. The fact that, in going to war, Nato has stepped outside the usual bounds of international legality (such as it is), should help us to take a hard look at some of the shibboleths on which western policy towards ethnic conflicts have been founded. Having gone to war to prevent the violent suppression of an ethnic rebellion, and having--as will surely be the case--gone on to divide up a state, it would be strange now to return to a rigid adherence to the principles of territorial integrity. The fact that our servicemen are risking their lives in a conflict in which Britain's interests are hardly at stake, should make us focus on what history can tell us about achieving lasting ethnic settlements.
      In a recent essay on Kosovo in the New York Review of Books, Timothy Garton Ash argued that "good fences make good neighbours"; contrary to current western beliefs in "integration" and "multiculturalism," the best chance for the Yugoslav peoples to progress would be as separate nation-states with clear ethnic majorities. This has, after all, been the pattern across much of western Europe over the past few centuries, and the process is not finished yet.
      This argument goes back to liberal nationalists such as Giuseppe Mazzini, ideologist of the Italian risorgimento. He and his contemporaries argued that real cooperation between European nations could only come after those nations had separated themselves into free and democratic, but also independent, national states. The whole project of European integration can be said to be founded on this argument.
      The main objection to this argument is that ethnic nations are often mixed up together and cannot be separated without bloodshed (witness the conflicts over the Italians in South Slav and German lands). And given the disasters which have befallen Europe in the 20th century, many historians mourn Mazzini's great enemy: the multi-ethnic Habsburg empire.
      But the Habsburg or Austro-Hungarian empire--like the Soviet Union in our own time--did not in the end survive. Moreover, the Habsburg empire possessed virtues denied to most multi-ethnic states: the state was founded neither on nationality, nor on popular sovereignty, but on supra-national principles: dynastic legitimacy; the rule of law; and the Catholic Church. Further, the Austrian half of the empire contained a number of large nationalities, none of which was in a position completely to dominate the others--unlike the Kingdom of Hungary (where the Hungarians dominated absolutely) or other "multi-ethnic" states, where one dominant majority faces a single large, restive minority. Finally, the empire possessed a state language, German, which in those pre-1914 days was a cosmopolitan language of European civilisation capable of assimilating people of many ethnic origins--as witnessed by the flowering of Jewish thought and culture in Habsburg Vienna.
      Elsewhere, by contrast, states which began as multi-ethnic were able to assimilate minority peoples into the dominant nationality by means of the power and prestige of the dominant language and culture--at least if they began the process long ago in pre-modern times. Thus France achieved its 20th century ethno-linguistic homogeneity (until the arrival of the new immigrants) by means of a mainly peaceful, but culturally ruthless, process of destroying the traditions of minorities such as the Bretons, above all through the national school system. Russia would have done the same to Ukrainians and others if it had been able to start a bit sooner. It is hopeless, however, to expect that linguistic cultures such as Serbian or Albanian, the reflection of one small ethnos on the periphery of European civilisation, will ever be able to play this role in assimilating large ethnic minorities--especially where these have access to the culture and the mass media of neighbouring ethnic homelands.
      Tito was called "the last Habsburg," and Yugoslav communism (like Soviet communism) was an attempt to overcome national divisions by a supranational ideology focused on the worship of a quasi-emperor. But although Yugoslavia was not (until today) threatened from outside in the manner of the Habsburgs, its internal cultural resources as a multi-ethnic state were weaker. With the waning of communism, some sort of Serb-Albanian war over Kosovo was likely. Several such wars have occurred over the past 100 years, and the struggle in fact resumed with the Kosovo Albanian protests of 1981.
      The way in which Nato and its political masters misunderstood the real dynamic of events in Kosovo reflects a characteristic failure of the liberal mind (including most of the western left and the great majority of Americans), which clings to a basically optimistic view of human nature. Such a habit of mind finds it hard to grasp that certain nations really are implacably at odds over the control of ethnically-mixed territory. Instead, the automatic belief is that the innocent masses have been led astray by evil individuals (Milosevic)--or, for the left, by evil ruling classes. These in turn are not motivated by emotions of nationalism, pride or hate, but by "rational" ones of the defence of their political or economic privileges.
      This illusion was of little practical moment during the cold war; but thanks to the decision to turn Nato from a defensive alliance into a force for democracy, stability and even market economics in Europe, it has become quite dangerous. Nato has been trapped into becoming the instrument for the policing of ethnic conflicts and the administration of ethnically-mixed societies through protectorates. This is what the Dayton accords have created in Bosnia; it was what the Rambouillet accords laid down for Kosovo; and such a protectorate is also taking shape in Macedonia.
      The precedent for this development is the League of Nations "mandate" system, introduced at the Congress of Versailles for territories in the middle east and Africa. This was usually a barely-veiled formula for indirect imperial rule by one of the victorious allies, which is how most of the world sees Nato's aggression ("US imperialism") in Serbia. And, to play the mandate role effectively, we will need something akin to imperial qualities, albeit of a civilised kind.
      When divided nations cannot be ruled, mandate-style, by a moderately impartial force, the only "solutions" will be very illiberal ones: either victory by one side, leading to the subjugation or flight of the other's population; or partition and population exchange; or some combination of the two. Although it is natural to recoil from such outcomes, the unwillingness of western diplomats even to admit their possibility in several parts of the world is strange. Not merely has the "international community" accepted several such partitions and population moves in the course of this century, this is exactly what we have ended up with in Bosnia. Between 1992 and 1995, an unwillingness to accept partition helped to prolong the war. Today, it has committed us to the hopeless task of trying to turn Bosnia back into a working multi-ethnic state (assuming that it ever was such a state). An international role in policing Bosnia is essential--but those who pretend that this is leading to re-integration are deceiving themselves and everybody else.
      The only realistic choice for Macedonia may also soon be a Bosnia-type partition or a Nato protectorate. Discussions of a possible division between the Albanian, Serb and Macedonian Slav areas are reportedly already taking place in private between Albanian representatives and pro-Bulgarian Macedonian Slav "nationalists"--the idea being that most of Macedonia would join Bulgaria. Even an agreed partition of Macedonia would be a dangerous development, but it may be even more dangerous to keep an African-style artificial legacy of empire in the middle of the Balkans. Macedonia might be able to form a stable multi- ethnic state if its national proportions were stable--but they are not. In fact, the Albanians, who a generation ago were about 20 per cent of the population, may now be as much as 35 per cent thanks to their higher birth rate. By 2020, they could become a majority. It is doubtful, however, whether the Slavs will simply go along with becoming an increasingly small minority in what would ultimately become a de facto part of a Greater Albanian confederation.
      Partition and population exchanges are certainly not a universal solution. But when everything else has failed, we need to have the courage to take responsibility for the solution. The alternative is to summon up the ruthlessness to support one side in the conflict--as in Croatia--or be prepared to commit ourselves to the long-term, heavy and sustained policing role necessary to prevent two hostile and mingled populations from tearing each other apart.
      In the end, policing and security are what these conflicts are about--the actual physical security of individuals at risk. This raises an important point about the nature of modern nationalism. We must distinguish between classical nationalism and ethnic (or one might say skinhead) hooliganism, and the role of such hooliganism in ethnically-mixed societies. In other words, it is often not a question of protecting a whole population from assault by state-backed ethnic forces, but of protecting families and individuals from being attacked by members of other ethnic groups with the acquiescence of the police--a problem with which we are not wholly unfamiliar in Britain.
      A Russian who had moved to Russia in 1992 from a village in southern Kazakhstan once explained to me how this kind of thing occurs: "There were only four Russian families in our village, and many of the Kazakhs wanted us out. People started jeering at me on the street, saying--'we're going to fuck your daughter,' that kind of thing. Nothing happened, and perhaps nothing would have happened. I'd lived there for years, and I had good friends among the Kazakhs. But we knew that the police would never have done anything if we were attacked. So we got out."
      Recent decades have indeed seen a decline in certain aspects of classical nationalism, both in the west, and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere. This has been associated with the demilitarisation of society and the spread of modernisation. As a result, there has been a reduction in the willingness to fight for disputed national territories. But this has been paralleled in western Europe and elsewhere by the persistence--or even growth of--ethnic hooliganism. I was in Germany in 1992 at the height of the attacks on immigrants by skinhead and neo-Nazi groups. Headlines outside Germany raised the spectre of the return of aggressive nationalism in Germany, but such fears were almost totally misplaced. These skinheads were up to slouching a block or two in order to terrorise a helpless Turkish family or kick to death an African asylum-seeker; they were not about to join the army, risk death and spend years in trenches to reconquer Danzig for a new German Reich. Their motivations were local: a desire to defend working class jobs, maintain pure neighbourhoods and support local football teams. They did not flow into wider national conflicts because the minorities being targeted have no territorial conflict with Germany and are too small in number to have a significant political presence.
      But as we know from Northern Ireland, it is quite different in an ethnically-mixed society where conflicting national-territorial claims exist. There, "skinhead" nationalism and classical nationalism run into each other. Arson, robbery, beatings, rape or murder against members of the other community may be communally encouraged, excused and sheltered. These will contribute in turn to mobilisation along defensive ethnic lines, and to the reliance of ordinary people on any force--however hateful--which will protect them, their families and homes. Such violence does not even need to be condoned by the national leadership of the country or the community concerned. In Chechnya, for example, neither under President Dudayev nor under President Maskhadov has there been any official policy of driving out the local Russians. Dudayev's wife is Russian; and Maskhadov--like Dudayev, a former Soviet officer--always seemed sincere in saying that he felt no hostility to the Russians as a people. None the less, the position of those Russians in Chechnya who enjoyed no protection from a powerful Chechen individual became increasingly desperate; as a result, most had left even before the Russian invasion of December 1994. Chechen traditions of banditry and armed violence are constrained when it comes to attacks on other Chechens, but are unconstrained when it comes to non-Chechens, infidels and especially Russians. A sharp contrast may be drawn with Latvia and Estonia, which have limited the rights of the Russian immigrants, but by peaceful and legal means--with the result that there has been no violence in return.
      Where a tradition of socially-sanctioned violence and banditry is present in both parts of an ethnically-mixed society, the only way of containing this in a reasonably equitable way is sustained policing by an outside power--something of which the British empire had immense experience. But for this to work, a whole series of factors have to be present, which Nato can barely begin thinking about in the Balkans. First, the outside power has to be in control of local law and order, and capable of handing out real rewards and punishments. It needs to have a sufficient number of its own men in command of forces on the ground, speaking a local language and understanding local society. In this context, the unarmed EU policemen in Bosnia look quite fatuous.
      Second, the presence of the outside power has to appear pretty much eternal. As the British experienced in India in 1945-47 (and on other occasions elsewhere), when the population at large, and locally recruited officials, have a strong sense that the outside power's rule is provisional, then no order will be implemented which risks compromising the official concerned with his own community. No police officer who values his future career or perhaps even his life is going to pursue a charge of ethnically-based theft or murder against a member of his own group. I saw this process at work among Lithuanian and Georgian KGB officers in the Soviet Union in 1990 and 1991. They were still afraid of Moscow, and they would have gone on obeying Moscow if they had been sure that the Soviet Union would last. But because its survival was questionable, it was safer for them to pretend to obey, while in fact doing discreet deals with the nationalists. This contributed significantly to the crumbling of Soviet control over those republics.
      Third, the outside policing force will have to adopt an approach very different to that common in modern western societies. In circumstances where criminality is ethnicised and enjoys communal protection, it may be more effective and less provocative to resort to a system of collective punishment; not, of course, mass executions, burning of villages or deportations, but fines, confiscations and restrictions on movement. All of these were employed by the British in India.
      Policing a violent, ethnically-mixed area is difficult enough even before atrocities have occurred. Afterwards, it is impossible. This is what makes so many peace plans seem like so much waste paper. In the southern Caucasus at present, western diplomats are giving their sympathetic consideration to Georgian suggestions of a peace settlement for the rebel territory of Abkhazia which involves Abkhaz acceptance of Georgian sovereignty, including the disbandment of the Abkhaz army, in return for various constitutional guarantees, including chairmanship of the upper house of the Georgian parliament. The Abkhaz war, parts of which I witnessed, was small-scale, but very brutal. Georgian commanders threatened to kill or expel every single Abkhaz; the Abkhaz ended the war by winning and expelling almost every single Georgian and killing a large number of them. Many of the atrocities on both sides were committed by neighbours who knew each other (also true of Bosnia). Do western diplomats expect that in these circumstances the two populations will agree to live together again? Is it rational to think that any Abkhaz leader will resign the safety of his people into the hands of the Georgians--or that a Georgian would do so if the case were reversed? For my own part, if I knew that someone in my town had killed my parents, and there were no other way of getting justice, sooner or later I would kill him--that is the human response. It is different, of course, if, as in South Africa or the Soviet Union, the atrocities have been committed not by neighbours but by the servants of an anonymous state, with whom the relatives of the victims are not required to live in close proximity.
      The Abkhaz case also illustrates how changing demography can affect such disputes. In some cases, like Abkhazia, the Baltic States, Fiji or Malaysia, this has been because of immigration, but elsewhere because of the tendency of certain ethnic groups to have more babies--sometimes as part of a conscious strategy of outnumbering the ethnic enemy. Thus the Albanian proportion of the population of Kosovo rose from 68.5 per cent in 1948 to 77.4 per cent in 1981 and more than 90 per cent before the ethnic cleansing. In Bosnia, the Muslim proportion rose from 31 per cent in 1948 to 43.7 per cent in 1991, while the Serbs fell from 44 per cent to 31 per cent. In both cases, the nations concerned resorted to arguments about which community had been there first and had originally been the largest. In these circumstances, trying to solve ethnic disputes by majoritarian democracy at a given moment is inadequate.
      Americans find such dilemmas hard to understand, because they live in an immigrant society, where they have been accustomed to seeing the ethnic composition of whole regions transformed in a single generation. But, in America's case, the immigrants presented no threat of ethnically-based territorial secession. "Native Americans" could have presented a threat, but they were few in number and were soon disposed of, by Serbian methods.
      In Britain, however, we have a more persistent and bitter experience. In 1926, catholics in Ulster made up 33.5 per cent of the population (down from 40 per cent 65 years before), and protestants 62.2 per cent--with the catholics basing their national claim on the principle that up to the late 16th century the native Gaels made up 100 per cent of the population. Thanks to their higher birth rate, by 1991, catholics were 38.4 per cent of the population and protestants only 50.6 per cent (the remainder of the population refused to state any religious allegiance). But if the catholic birth rate in Ulster had been a bit higher, or catholic emigration a bit lower, it is possible to imagine a situation in which by 1975, say, the catholics would have been a majority, and could have voted democratically for union with the Republic, which the British government would presumably have felt bound to accept. But does anyone imagine that the main protestant groups would have accepted "the will of the democratic majority"?
      In these circumstances--as in Ulster now--the only solution appears to be some form of guaranteed power-sharing with permanently fixed ethnic proportions. This is now very popular in political science; it is called "consociational democracy." But such systems are inimical to many aspects of democracy, because they limit the ability of the electorate to bring about any real change in government--they are more like a medieval estates system. Moreover, they are almost always held in place by an outside force: in Ulster, by the British and Irish governments and the British army; or, in the first modern example of this kind, Moravia, by the Austrian army. The Soviet Union operated a similar system in the ethnically-mixed republics of the north Caucasus--now dissolving in the absence of the Soviet army.
      Where such systems have broken down, atrocities have often resulted; if no new imperial rule is on hand, the least worst solution is partition. But one official of a UN agency dealing with ethnic conflict told me: "Officially, we're not even allowed to think about partition." Western diplomats intone "territorial integrity" like a prayer. In Africa, the notion that colonial borders are inviolable has been elevated to a sacred principle. But almost every Africa expert would agree that it is unlikely that in the long run--say, in 200 years' time--the borders established by colonialism, will remain. To point out that the "long run" begins today, that several states have already split along ethnic and historic faultlines, and that it would be better to recognise the fact and work with the results, is taboo.
      In the course of this century, the west has accepted or even promoted partition and population exchange on a number of occasions. In 1923, Greece and Turkey negotiated a bilateral agreement whereby some 1.2m Greeks left Turkey for Greece and about 500,000 Turks moved in the opposite direction. In 1948-49 in Palestine, the UN brokered a partition agreement, which was rejected by the Palestinians. During and after the ensuing war, some 750,000 Palestinians were driven out. The west has in effect accepted this, on the grounds that their return would destabilise the Israeli state. UN resolutions on the subject have therefore remained a dead letter.
      The deportation of Germans from central Europe (and of Poles from Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania) in 1945-46 was a ghastly affair (to say nothing of the Holocaust); yet the resulting ethnic homogeneity has allowed the states concerned to become more politically stable than they were between 1919 and 1939, and than their surviving multi-ethnic equivalents have been in the 1990s. A Poland with the ethnic proportions of 1939 would be racked with violent Polish chauvinism and ethnic secessionist movements.
      The most infamous case of partition and population exchange is India and Pakistan in 1947, in the course of which at least 300,000 people died. Many of these deaths could have been avoided if the exchange had been properly supervised. Congress and the Muslim League promised that the rights of minorities would be respected after partition. But the violence was largely an upsurge of hatred and fear from below, by populations maddened by years of propaganda.
      The division of India and Pakistan has proved an enduring wound for the subcontinent, burdening it with hatreds, wars and grotesque levels of military spending. All the same, it is hard to imagine that a united India would have been a better prospect. Would a constitutional compromise have lasted? The minimum demand of even moderate Muslims was for a loose federation and for some form of permanent guaranteed power-sharing at the centre. This would have led to a desperately weak and unstable state. Under the pressure of Islamist radicalism, Muslim population growth and Hindu nationalism, such a state would very probably have disintegrated. Such a disintegration would have been more chaotic, and perhaps even bloodier than the events of 1947. It might have led to the separation of still more states from India, and the descent of the region to west African levels of disorder and poverty. As it is, India has remained a rather successful constitutional federation, while its Muslim minority, although distrusted and sometimes attacked, is too small to provoke an overwhelming wave of Hindu fear and anger.
      To mention India in 1947 is to underline how partition and population exchange should be the last resort in any ethnic dispute. But it also underlines how those outsiders who oppose such a solution by force or diplomatic pressure have a responsibility to prevent future conflict. The British by 1947 were no longer capable of keeping the peace in India, and so were right to get out. Nato must be prepared to police parts of the Balkans permanently, or it must bring about settlements which, however harsh, will prevent future instability. From this point of view, the Rambouillet accords were deficient in one key respect. They set up an elaborate system of "consociational democracy," full of checks and balances, and they provided a Nato force to guarantee these. But they did not guarantee that the Nato force would stay.
      The partition of Kosovo--let alone Macedonia--and the acceptance of solutions involving partition for the Caucasus will take courage on the part of western leaders, both because it would expose them to howls of protest from different sides and because it would require deals (especially with Russia) which will be unpopular with the US Congress. But at a time when western servicemen are being required to show physical courage in the field, it seems not inappropriate to ask their leaders to show both moral courage and historical awareness.
     [Editor's Note: Anatol Lieven's book, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (Yale University Press) will be published in June.]

Archive Search:

      LITTLE ROCK (AP) - FBI agents investigating Democratic Party fund-raiser Yah Lin ``Charlie'' Trie sought evidence that Commerce Secretary Ronald Brown met with a Chinese arms dealer the same day that the dealer attended a White House coffee with President Clinton, according to court documents unsealed today.
     Trie faces federal charges in the campaign fund-raising probe. Agents searched his Little Rock home in October 1997 after obtaining a search warrant that alluded to a Feb. 6, 1996, meeting attended by Brown and Wang Jun just weeks before Brown's death.
     Trie, a central figure in the controversy over foreign-linked campaign donations to Democrats, arranged for Wang to attend a White House coffee with President Clinton the same day.
     Wang's company, Poly Technologies, has been implicated in smuggling of arms into the United States. He is identified as an adviser to the Chinese government in the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee's report on its investigation into illegal campaign fund raising in the 1996 election.
     Wang's visit to the White House was previously reported and Clinton has said it was inappropriate. Previous reports, however, did not mention a meeting the same day between Brown and Wang.
     Brown was a major player in Democratic politics. He was killed in April 1996 when the military transport he was aboard crashed into a mountainside in Croatia. Thirty-four others aboard the plane as part of a government trade mission also died.
     The reference to a meeting between Brown and Wang adds a new twist to the investigation into fund-raising irregularities.
      Trie, a longtime friend of Clinton and a former Little Rock restaurateur, is scheduled to go on trial May 17 on charges he made and arranged illegal contributions to the Democratic National Committee to buy access to Clinton and other top officials.
     The indictment also claims Trie obstructed justice by ordering an employee to destroy documents subpoenaed in 1997 by a federal grand jury and by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
     Trie asked a judge to unseal the court file Thursday, claiming that an FBI agent mislead the court in an affidavit that prompted a judge to issue a warrant for a search of Trie's local residence.
     Trie's lawyers said he had learned in late March or early this month that, contrary to FBI Agent Daniel J. Wehr's affidavit, Wehr did not participate in an interview of Dia Maria Mapili.
     The longtime employee of Trie told agents she was instructed by Trie in 1996 to get rid of fund-raising-related documents stored at his home and garage office.
     Agents seized computers and accessories, records, books, business papers, photographs, mail and other documents in the search of Trie's home, according to court papers that U.S. District Judge George Howard Jr. unsealed Friday.

Archive Search:

     BELGRADE, Yugolsavia -- Bombing strikes by NATO planes made direct hits on Serbia's state television station, Friday. D. Mijatovich told The Daily Republican, "This is is something I never expected from the democratic West...a brutal preventing of freedom of speech and free press."
     The NATO strick knocked Serbia Television off the air and killed one person wounding 18 others, according to sources on the ground there.
     The attack came hours after a Russian envoy said Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic had accepted the idea of a United Nations controlled "international presence" in Kosovo.
      President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair later said the proposal fell short of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's demands for an armed force in the southern Serbian province, a Blair spokesman said Friday after a phone call between the two leaders.
     Radio Television Serbia, the major source of news and entertainment for most Yugoslavs, had been broadcasting a taped interview with Mr. Milosevic by a Houston television station when its downtown Belgrade headquarters was hit by a missile.
     "For the first time in world history, the media war is fought with bombs," said Belgrade Mayor Vojislav Mihajlovic, according to the Beta news agency.
     NATO has long said Serbian television was a legitimate military target because it was spreading "propaganda" about the air campaign.
      The attack knocked down the network's transmission tower and collapsed its top two floors, according to reporters on the scene. Thick smoke filled the street, and terrified staff milled about calling the names of colleagues they feared were trapped inside.
     "We were sitting in the editing room and all of a sudden we heard tremendous blast," videotape editor Sava Andjelkovic told reporters. "A wall behind me virtually vanished, and then the entire wing of the building. We heard screams of wounded people."
     Slobodan Ivanovic, a rescue official, told the Belgrade TV station, Studio B, there were "several dead and many injured." He also said an undetermined number of people were still trapped in the rubble.
     When it resumed broadcasting from what it said was a "reserve system," RTS reported that one staff member had been killed and 18 others wounded in the attack.
     Officials said the missile also destroyed the satellite link with Eurovision, used by foreign TV crews to transmit material abroad.
     Meanwhile, a Russian peace proposal is languishing. In a diplomatic bid to end the conflict, former Russian Premier Viktor Chernomyrdin held daylong talks with Mr. Milosevic on Thursday. It was unclear whether the proposed international force would be armed, what guidelines it would operate under, and whether the offer represented a real peace gesture.
     Moscow's plan calls for the withdrawal of NATO forces amassed at Yugoslavia's borders, a U.N.-led "international presence" in Kosovo with Russia's participation, Yugoslav's "curtailing" of its army and police forces in Kosovo and the return of refugees, according to Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency.
     Mr. Chernomyrdin said talks with NATO concerning the plan would continue Friday by telephone.
     NATO has insisted it must lead any armed presence in Kosovo to enforce a peace agreement. Mr. Milosevic has so far rejected NATO demands to withdraw his troops from the province and accept a Western-dictated autonomy plan for the ethnic Albanian majority there.
      Soon after Mr. Chernomyrdin left for Moscow, alliance jets were back in action Thursday night and early Friday, attacking a railway bridge on the Ibar River in central Serbia, three Serbian television relays, a major rail bridge west of Belgrade and the southern City of Nis.
      Pentagon officials gave one of their most-detailed briefings yet on the damage done by the airstrikes Thursday, saying more than 9,000 air missions over Yugoslavia. Rear Adm. Thomas Wilson, director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff told reporters that "Milosevic's army had been made more vulnerable to a NATO ground campaign, should the alliance undertake that step."

Archive Search:

AGANA, Guam - On Saturday President Clinton authorized the Justice Department to arrest and detain a group of Chinese dissidents fleeing from Communist mainland who were discover hiding on the U.S. Island Territory of Guam.
     The refugees have been classified by Attorney General Janet Reno as "illegal aliens." They were discovered Monday hiding in local jungle areas at Apra Harbor, and are being held on the beach at Agat, and in the jungle at Retidian Point.
     It is anticipated by local officials that the group will seek asylum in Guam.
     Given the new humanitarian policy of the federal government, these refugees from Communist Chin'as oppression would no doubt see their "American Dream" come true long before the Clinton administration recognizes the rights of the local people of Guam. The put-upon people of Guam have waited for justice from America for more than 50 years. It now seems in vain as the native people of Guam see their way of life being eroded by a big goverment bureaucracy in Washington D.C.
     Officials on Guam believe the Chinese arrived in boats from China with Ntionals who paid organized crime lords in an effort to gain American citizenship. Several such vessels have grounded off Guam in recent months.
     Close to five hundred illegal aliens from China have already been apprehended and are being detained at the Department of Correction. Their sudden immmigration to Guam is drawing a complaint on the cost for food, lodging, medical care, and other cost associated in their care.
     But the President's directive would allow captured illegal aliens to be held in the Northern Marianas, which is outside the U.S. immigration area and where asylum would not be available, according to Leland Bettis, an aide to Guam Gov. Carl Gutierrez who is facing a runoff as ruled by the 9th Circuit Court as a result of the corrupted general election in 1998.
     The President's memo specifically mentioned a ``stateless vessel'' located west of the Northern Marianas and identified by U.S. authorities on or about April 12. That vessel apparently has since moved to Tinian, a Northern Mariana island near Saipan, oficials said.
     The President's action was prompted by a letter sent Tuesday by Gutierrez, outlining ``a crisis triggered by an escalating mass influx of aliens from the People's Republic of China.''
     The governor asked for federal assistance in dealing with the problem. Since January, 480 illegal Chinese immigrants have been apprehended in waters off Guam and on Guam he said.
     Last week, a vessel grounded on a reef off Guam and authorities arrested about 70 Chinese nationals on shore. On Friday, 105 Chinese aliens arrived on a boat, Bettis said.
     At present, more than 350 illegal aliens are housed in Guam's already overcrowded prison, comprising nearly 50 percent of the prison population, Gutierrez said.
     Gutierrez said he won't release the illegal aliens into the community because they are of unknown character and no information is known about their background.
     He said he was also worried that the aliens would be manipulated by organized crime, and that tuberculosis and hepatitis B cases have been found among them.
     Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands are U.S. territories located about 3,700 miles southwest of Honolulu.
     If the floodgate for immigrants is left unchecked, it won't be long before two million from China and another three million or more from India will be on Guam USA. Would we wait until the situation reached the intensity level of Yugoslavia before we start bombing them at sea before they reach Guam under humanitarian reason?

Archive Search:

How a President
Distracted by Scandal
Entered Balkan War
The Administration was becoming increasingly marginalized.
By Elaine Sciolino and Ethan Bronner

     BELGRADE - Today NATO is massively and brutally destroying everything existing on Serbian soil. Who is actually the victim of this most horrendous war crime?
     By their overall identity the Serbs belong to the European Christian civilization. They settled in South-East Europe, including Kosovo and Metohia, in the 6th century, during the period of massive population resettlement in Europe and Asia called the Great Migration. Social development in Serbia was influenced by different environing cultures and as of the 18th century predominantly under that of Central and Western Europe.
     The Serbs had their kingdom already in the 11th century and at the beginning of the 13th century they had a developed legal system as a frame work for the civic and church life within, at that time, a developed medieval civilization. The most outstanding document in this regard is Nomocanon by Saint Sava from the beginning of the 13th century, in its time a very modern set of rules governing the civic and religious life. The Serbian Orthodox Church became independent in 1219. The Codex of Emperor Dusan from 1349. ranks very high in European legislature of that time and reflects a high level of legal and social awareness. As such it is one of the most outstanding cultural assets of the Serbian Middle-Ages.
     In the 13th, 14th and the 15th century the Serbs had a many developed medieval society with results in cultural and economic field equal to the achievements of the developed European environing countries. Serbian aristocrats possessed numerous medieval palaces, castles and fortresses, most of which were built on the territory of today’s Raska, Kosovo, and Metohia (Svrcin, Pauni, Nerodimlja, Stimlje, Petric, Novo Brdo, Zvecan, Ribnik). Serbian mediveal aristocy had family relaton with many European imperial and royal dynasties, as Byzantin, Bulgarian, French, Italian, German, Russian, Hungarian, Turkish and others.
     Only in Kosovo and Metohia as a center of Serbian medieval state and society there are over 1.500 Serbian monasteries, churches and other cultural monuments. At that time the Serbs have a developed literature. Their economy is also prosperous (Novo Brdo is the main mining center of the Balkans in the 15th century). Painting was particularly fostered in monasteries, from the 12th to the 14th century.
     It is in the monasteries of Studenica, Zica, Sopocani, Mileseva, Gracanica, Decani, Patriarchy of Pec, and many others that we have outstanding examples of wall paintings called frescoes. Most of the above mentioned monasteries are under UNESCO`s protection as a part of the world cultural heritage.
     Turkish invasion of the South-Eastern Europe had destroyed the Serbian society and its civilization. The same applies to the surrounding Christian societies. The Battle of Kosovo in 1389 means a decisive organized resistance of the Serbian elite to the Turkish invasion. Both the Turkish Sultan Murat and the Serbian Prince Lazar were killed in that battle. In the collective conscience of the Serbs the battle of Kosovo had acquired mythical dimensions as a sacrifice of all Serbs for the freedom of their native country.
     This aspect has reinforced the Kosovo tradition in Serbian culture as a whole. Since the Turks had destroyed their state during several forthcoming centuries, the Serbs were forced to live under the rule of several Empires: the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy and the Republic of Venice. During the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century the Serbs organized two state and political centers: Serbia and Montenegro. During the 19th and 20th century, the Serbian social thought and Serbian parliamentarism were developing under a decisive influence of the West European liberal democracy.
     After two and a half centuries of interruption in the first place due to the Turkish invasion, during the three subsequent centuries the Serbian society was in all respects open to the European influence in the political, cultural and social spheres, providing its own contribution to the overall European civilization. The first Serbian magazine Slaveno-serbski magazin was published in 1768 in Venice and following the example of the European cultural institution Matica Srpska one of the oldest Serbian cultural institutions was founded in 1825. In 1839 the foundation was laid for the University of Belgrade, and in 1842 for Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. The Constitution of Kingdom of Serbia from 1888 guaranteeing equal civic rights to the Jews, was one of the most democratic constitutions in Europe, based on the Belgium constitution.
     In all creative spheres the Serbs have outstanding representatives: the great reformer of Serbian culture Vuk St. Karadzic, the famous botanist Josif Pancic, the well-known physicists Mihajlo Pupin, Nikola Tesla, Milutin Milankovic, the famous professor in the USA Paja Radosavljevic, eminent writers Petar Petrovic Njegos, Ivo Andric, Milorad Pavic, the philosopher Brana Petronijevic, geographer and anthropo-geographer Jovan Cvijic, painters Paja Jovanovic, Nadezda Petrovic, Ljuba Popovic, Vladimir Velickovic, film directors Aleksandar Petrovic, Dusan Makavejev, Emir Kusturica, composers, singers and musicians Stevan Mokranjac, Biserka Cvejic, Radmila Bakocevic, Goran Bregovic, Stefan Milenkovic, sport champions Vlade Divac, Aleksandar Djordjevic, Sinisa Mihailovic, Predrag Pedja Mijatovic, Jasna Sekaric.
     Along with gradual liberation from the Turks, the Serbian territories became increasingly attractive for the appetites of the European powers, Austria-Hungary in the first place. The efforts of the Serbs to create a modern national state, following the example of the national movements of the Italians and Germans was against the interests and political plans of the Great Powers regarding the Balkans.
     In order to more easily jeopardize it the Serbian movement was labeled “Great Serbian”. Obstinate efforts of Austria-Hungary and Nazi Germany in the first place to completely govern South-Eastern Europe resulted in a horrendous genocide against Serbian people in the First and the Second World War. The balance of Serbian sufferings in both World wars, when they opposed the aggression of the Central Powers in World War I and the Fascist Powers in World War II amount to 2.5 million assassinated Serbs. For a small people it is an enormous disaster from which the Serbs had not recovered to date. In 1991 he Serbs were for the third time victims of massive crimes. The most intensive ethnic cleansing after World War II was the ethnic cleansing of the Serbs in Croatia in 1995, accompanying the destruction of Republika Srpska Krajina.
     To blame the Serbs of today to be the aggressors on the territory which from the early Middle Ages has been the very heart of their political, cultural and spiritual life is more than cynical. The Serbian environment has always been, as is the case today, an example of a multi-cultural and multi-ethnical society, the proof being and exceptionally high development of the political and cultural elite of the Albanian ethnic minority in Serbia and Yugoslavia, which is in all respects above its co-nationals in Albania.
      [Editor's Note: Professor Slavenko Terzic with the Historical Institute at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.]

Archive Search:

---

Saturday April 17, 1999

NATO bombing takes more lives
Daily deaths exceed averages for region in WWII.
By Dr. Jan Oberg

     LUND, Sweden - According to the Yugoslav Ministry of Foreign Affairs, around 300 civilians have been killed between March 24 when NATO's bombing campaign started and April 13. These civilian casualties are related to places such as Aleksinac, Pristina, Kursumlija and Grdelica Gorge. Two days ago a refugee convoy was hit, killing some 60 Albanians. Thus, due to NATO's mistakes about 350 civilians have been killed in 24 days. That is an average of 15 per day.
     The war between various Yugoslav/Serb forces on the one hand and the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK or KLA) broke out in February 1998. Thus there were 13 months of warfare in Kosovo, or 395 days. The international community estimates that 2.000 - soldiers and civilians - were killed. That is an average of 5 per day.
     About 250.000 people were estimated to have fled their homes during the 13 months of war, but remained predominantly within Kosovo and Montenegro. That is an average of 632 per day.
     Since NATO began bombing, the figure has risen to perhaps as many as 750.000 outside and an unknown number inside Kosovo. Thus if 500.000 refugees have been added in 24 days, that makes an average of 20.833 per day.
     These refugees run away because of Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanians (as a reprisal of NATO's bombing in support of Albanian interests) because of NATO's bombs and because of the regular warfare between Yugoslav military and paramilitary units and UCK.
     Even if the figures above are estimates, there must be something fundamentally wrong with a peace policy that seems to kill 3 times more civilian people and produce 33 times more refugees per day than did the war it aims to stop.
     It happens to be April 16. On this day in 1944, Easter Sunday, Allied forces - American and British - carried out a blanket bombing of Belgrade with a devastation and despair no smaller than that caused by the German attack on April 6, 1941.
     Milovan Djilas, the first and perhaps greatest 'dissident' in Europe, describes the emotions at the time in his "Wartime" (1977), "...This is how it lies buried in the memories of the people of Belgrade to this day. That bombing aroused a double bitterness in us: emotional, because we pitied a city of legendary suffering which Hitler had turned into ruin and a place of torment; political, for we suspected - and at times believed - that the Allies were carrying out bombings in order to make postwar rehabilitation and administration harder for us Communists."
     Perhaps history repeats itself. Undoubtedly, rehabilitation will be hard after this combined civil war and international aggression. And few think of the past or of the future at this moment.
      [Editor's Note: Dr. Jan Oberg is a regular contributor to DR foreign corresponsence. He is the Director of the TFF Conflict-Mitigation team to the Balkans and Georgia.]

Copyright © 1999 The Daily Republican Newspaper Co. All rights reserved.

Comment

Archive Search:

---

NATO's Humanitarian Victims
Entire nation in chaos and ruin.
Slavenko Terzic, Ph.D.

     LUND, Sweden - According to the Yugoslav Ministry of Foreign Affairs, around 300 civilians have been killed between March 24 when NATO's bombing campaign started and April 13. These civilian casualties are related to places such as Aleksinac, Pristina, Kursumlija and Grdelica Gorge. Two days ago a refugee convoy was hit, killing some 60 Albanians. Thus, due to NATO's mistakes about 350 civilians have been killed in 24 days. That is an average of 15 per day.
     The war between various Yugoslav/Serb forces on the one hand and the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK or KLA) broke out in February 1998. Thus there were 13 months of warfare in Kosovo, or 395 days. The international community estimates that 2.000 - soldiers and civilians - were killed. That is an average of 5 per day.
     About 250.000 people were estimated to have fled their homes during the 13 months of war, but remained predominantly within Kosovo and Montenegro. That is an average of 632 per day.
     Since NATO began bombing, the figure has risen to perhaps as many as 750.000 outside and an unknown number inside Kosovo. Thus if 500.000 refugees have been added in 24 days, that makes an average of 20.833 per day.
     These refugees run away because of Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanians (as a reprisal of NATO's bombing in support of Albanian interests) because of NATO's bombs and because of the regular warfare between Yugoslav military and paramilitary units and UCK.
     Even if the figures above are estimates, there must be something fundamentally wrong with a peace policy that seems to kill 3 times more civilian people and produce 33 times more refugees per day than did the war it aims to stop.
     It happens to be April 16. On this day in 1944, Easter Sunday, Allied forces - American and British - carried out a blanket bombing of Belgrade with a devastation and despair no smaller than that caused by the German attack on April 6, 1941.
     Milovan Djilas, the first and perhaps greatest 'dissident' in Europe, describes the emotions at the time in his "Wartime" (1977), "...This is how it lies buried in the memories of the people of Belgrade to this day. That bombing aroused a double bitterness in us: emotional, because we pitied a city of legendary suffering which Hitler had turned into ruin and a place of torment; political, for we suspected - and at times believed - that the Allies were carrying out bombings in order to make postwar rehabilitation and administration harder for us Communists."
     Perhaps history repeats itself. Undoubtedly, rehabilitation will be hard after this combined civil war and international aggression. And few think of the past or of the future at this moment.
      [Editor's Note: Dr. Jan Oberg is a regular contributor to DR foreign corresponsence. He is the Director of the TFF Conflict-Mitigation team to the Balkans and Georgia.]

Archive Search: