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http://www.balkanreport.com/strana.asp?id=460 [A brief background piece on Ali Ahmeti follows] Balkan Report 3/25/2002 Ali Ahmeti Elected President Of Coordinative Council All Kosovo dailies today report on the appointment of Ali Ahmeti, the former political leader of the NLA, as the president of the Co-ordination Council of the Albanians in Macedonia, in a meeting held yesterday in Tetova. A communiqué issued by the Council said that Ahmeti’s unanimous election “proved the unity of the Macedonian Albanians to develop and promote democratic values as a factor of stability and integration of Macedonia into the Euro-Atlantic structures”. In other news, Koha Ditore reports that despite NATO calls for Macedonian Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski to disband the special ‘Lions’ police unit created during the crisis, Boskovski announced on Saturday that this unit is a regular police unit. The minister was speaking at a ceremony marking the completion of a three-month training course in Manastir for members of this unit. His announcement follows international criticism that Lions are an illegitimate police unit. -------------------------------------------------------Human Rights Watch: Dear Mr. Ahmeti by Rick Rozoff August 1, 2001 Human Rights Watch, whose interests and positions so closely (suspiciously if you like) parallel those of the United States State Department, politely requests that the political leader of the self-styled National Liberation Army in Macedonia, the lifelong separatist extremist Ali Ahmeti, abide by "international humanitarian law." (The Human Rights Watch appeal is appended below.) Though, contrary to the title of the missive, the letter in fact requests that both sides in the conflict - the legitimate, legally-elected government, and the armed insurgency launched from Kosovo and Albania - respect Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions pertaining to what Human Rights Watch characterizes as "internal armed conflicts." In keeping with HRW's stated policy of 'deferring judgment' on the legitimacy of said internal armed conflicts, its spokeperson, Holly Cartner, fully equates the aggressor and the victim; the legally-constituted authority, which is not accused of either provoking or even creating any pretext for the armed uprising, and the crime syndicate-linked and -funded racial terrorists. In the interim between the deferential letter from Ms. Carter to Mr. Ahmeti almost three months ago and now, Ahmeti and his pan-Albanian mercenaries have unleashed a full-scale insurrection throughout the nation, ethnically cleansing dozens of villages and contributing to the displacement of - by some estimates - over 120,000 civilians, a sizeable percentage of Macedonia's two million people. Human Rights Watch has kept a low profile since on this issue, except for reports on alleged mistreatment of ethnic Albanians and Western press personnel. When an organization like HRW advances its concerns from those affecting non-combatants in "internal armed conflicts" to the mistreatment, real or fancied, of insurgents - which is certainly impending - then it crosses the threshold of supposed impartiality into treating the belligerents as equal parties to the conflict, and thus "internationalizes" what in truth is a matter of internal criminal law enforcement. That HRW has at least left the door open for such a prospect is evident by Cartner's following up her reference to the Geneva Conventions by her revealing invocation of the "fundamental principle[s] of the laws of war." Who is Dear Mr. Ahmeti? Holly Cartner, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch's Europe and Central Asia Division, has kept a close enough eye on the Balkans over the past years to know who she was so respectfully writing to. For anyone not familiar with Mr. Ahmeti, whose history suggests someone anything but dear, he possesses, to employ an expression familiar to the American if not the Albanian underworld, a rap sheet as long as his arm. Regarding his recent activties, in addition to waging war against the sovereign nation of Macedonia and its civilian population from his base in Prizren in Kosovo, Ahmeti reportedly found time to appear on an Australian radio broadcast and announce the launching of a Liberation Army of Chameria in Northern Greece, claiming he already had fighters and weapons in place there. When questioned about this, the latest plan for his decades' old project for a Greater Albania, he denied it - but then Ahmeti has denied a number of things in his lifetime. Had he been asked about his clandestine meeting with American OSCE representative Robert Frowick in mid-May of this year - a meeting held in Ahmeti's headquarters in Kosovo with Macedonian ethnic Albanian political leaders, and cabinet ministers, Arben Xhaferi and Imer Imeri - he might well have denied that also, except that Frowick himself didn't deny that it occurred. In a feature in the London Times on March 19, 2001, "Albanians Insist Their Victory Is Inevitable," writer Anthony Loyd, commenting on the NLA in Macedonia, had this to say about Mr. Ahmeti's antecedents: "Intelligence reports name four main figures, including Ali Ahmeti and Emrush Xhemajii, as leaders. Both men owe their political allegiance to the Popular Movement for Kosovo, the LPK, which set up the KLA in 1993 and created the Homeland Calling funding scheme among Albanians abroad. The scheme still exists and funding for the NLA has been launched, say diplomats." But his record as an ethnic separatist goes back farther than 1993. Though born in what is now the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, he attended the University of Pristina in the Serbian province of Kosovo in 1981, where he was active in pan-Albanian agitation and was arrested by federal authorities there. He subsequently left for Switzerland, where he joined up with his uncle, Fazli Veliu, to set up an international operation to raise funds and recruit fighters for insurrections in Kosovo and elsewhere; an operation that several investigations establish was funded by narcotics trafficking and the European sex slave trade. On this score the German newspaper Die Welt reported in March, in an article about the Albanian mafia, that the NLA in Macedonia was indeed funded by the drug trade and by a "war tax" levied on ethnic Albanians living abroad. Ali Ahmeti and Fazli Veliu (the second arrested on terrorism charges in Germany last year, but released shortly thereafter) are identified as key ringleaders in the crime syndicate/armed insurgency collaboration. Ahmeti, after leaving Switzerland for the first time, returned to Yugoslavia to help found the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army, as noted above, and appears to be the key liaison between the fighters on the ground and the Transatlantic ethnic Albanian gun-running and recruitment operation feeding the first with personnel, funds and weapons. In the past twenty six months since NATO-led KFOR forces occupied Kosovo, with their KLA adjuncts in tow, Ahmeti - who during the fighting had been a commander for the infamous war criminal Ramush Haradinaj - returned to Kosovo where he set up operation in Prizren. It was there, and recall that Ahmeti claims to be a citizen of Macedonia concerned about alleged "civil rights" in that nation, that he met with the heads of Macedonia's two largest ethnic political parties, the Democratic Party of Albanians and the Party for Democratic Progress, under the auspices of U.S. OSCE operative Robert Frowick. It may also have been in Prizren, if not in Skopje itself, that, according to the Skopje newspaper Makedonija Denes, Ahmeti met with former NATO head and current European Union foreign affairs chief Javier Solana, with Kosovo Protection Corps commander and war criminal Agim Ceku, and with KLA commander Haradinaj. According to a Yugoslav Tanjug account of the Macedonian paper's story, "It was agreed that Solana, currently visiting Macedonia, bring pressure to bear on the Macedonian government to halt the government forces' operations for liberating Aracinovo village near the capital Skopje" - the site of the U.S.-led rescue of a hundred or more NLA fighters shortly thereafter. [http://www.tanjug.co.yu/Arhiva/2001/Jun%20-%2000/26-06e10.html] Although Ahmeti recently made it on to the U.S. black list and is also persona non grata in Switzerland of late, his movements in and out of Kosovo, surely known to if not coordinated by NATO's KFOR contingent, seem blissfully unimpeded. Lastly, to reflect on both Human Rights Watch and on its dear Mr. Ahmeti, five days before Holly Cartner's ever so reverential letter was issued, Ahmeti's terrorists ambushed and killed eight Macedonian security personnel. Ahmeti told a Reuters reporter after the incident that, "Our soldiers acted in self-defense." And no doubt, in his mind and in Ms. Cartner's, according to Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions relating to "internal armed conflicts" and to "humanitarian law." For the above crime was not mentioned in the exchange between Dear Mr. Ahmeti and Holly Cartner, respectfully. ______________________________________________ http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/05/macedonia_ltr3.htm. Letter to NLA Political Spokesman Ali Ahmeti May 4, 2001 Mr. Ali Ahmeti Political Spokesman for the National Liberation Army (NLA) Dear Mr. Ahmeti, Human Rights Watch is a privately funded international non-governmental organization dedicated to documenting human rights abuses throughout the world. In the past ten years, we have committed substantial time and effort to investigating violations of human rights and humanitarian law in the former Yugoslavia. We have documented violations of international humanitarian law by all sides of the armed conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and the NATO war with the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Reports of the renewed conflict in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia between security forces and armed groups of ethnic Albanians raise concerns relating to adherence to international humanitarian law. As in all other conflicts in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, our principal concern is that all parties involved respect civilian immunity and ensure the protection of civilians. Human Rights Watch wants to express its concern that the groups organized under the name of National Liberation Army (NLA) take all measures to comply with basic principles of international humanitarian law applicable to situations of internal armed conflict, and enshrined in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. This provision protects those who do not take an active part in hostilities from the most serious violations, including acts of murder, torture and cruel treatment, the taking of hostages, outrages upon personal dignity, and the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgement pronounced by a regularly constituted court. With regard to the renewed fighting, the NLA leadership should refrain from any attacks against civilians, attacks and reprisals against civilian objects, as well as threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population. We also call on the NLA leadership to ensure that the civilian population of the affected areas enjoys as much protection as possible against dangers of harm resulting from the fighting. The most fundamental principle of the laws of war requires that combatants be distinguished from noncombatants, and that military objectives be distinguished from protected property or protected places. Parties to a conflict must direct their operations only against military objectives (including combatants). Also, the use of civilians as shields for defensive positions, to hide military objectives or to screen attacks, violates the principles of the international humanitarian law. We also note that the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) applies to serious violations of international humanitarian law committed after 1991 on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, including the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Human Rights Watch also recognizes the obligations of the Macedonian security forces to uphold the standards of international humanitarian law and urges their adherence to these norms. Letters expressing Human Rights Watch's concerns to this effect are being sent to the president and the prime minister of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. We hope, Mr. Ahmeti, that you will give serious thought to the points addressed in this letter and, guided by consideration for human life and well-being, do everything in your power to ensure that the NLA respects obligations under international humanitarian law. Respectfully, /s/ Holly Cartner Executive Director Europe and Central Asia Division cc: Mrs. Carla Del Ponte, Chief Prosecutor, ICTY __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! 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