Invisible Kosovo Under the Bombs
Three days after the air strikes began, the United
Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) reported
that 4,000 refugees had fled from Kosovo province into
Albania and Macedonia. As the days passed, tens of
thousands more began to stream across the borders into
Macedonia, Albania, and other parts of Yugoslavia, both
Montenegro and central Serbia. Since outside observers
had been pulled out of Kosovo itself prior to the bombing
(over protests from the Serbian government which
wanted them to stay), explaining the causes of this
exodus to the NATO public was left entirely up to NATO
spokesmen and to whichever Albanian refugees western
reporters and TV crews chose to interview. Neither
could be described as unbiased sources. For NATO
spokesmen, Serbian "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide"
justified the bombing. As for the ethnic Albanians fleeing
Kosovo, matters are more complex. Some, but certainly
not all, had been forcibly expelled. Some families of KLA
members had reportedly been instructed by the KLA to
leave the war zone for the safety of neighboring
Albania. Others fled in fear of Serb security forces or
paramilitaries. Others fled from both the Serbs and the
KLA, to avoid being forcibly recruited into the KLA. Very
many sought safety from the bombs and the fighting.
However, there is no doubt that "Serbian ethnic
cleansing" was the version most in demand among
western media conducting the interviews, and that
ethnic Albanians who told this story, whether because it
was true or for other reasons, were the most likely to
end up on western television screens. And it was the
only version sought by the U.S.-financed investigators
sent to collect testimony to back the indictment of
Slobodan Milosevic.
The official NATO version was that Milosevic was
ethnically cleansing Kosovo of its entire Albanian
population. After ten days of bombing, President Clinton
announced that the "cold clear goal" of Milosevic was to
"keep Kosovo�s land while ridding it of its people." In
mid-April, Clinton told the American Society of
Newspaper Editors that Milosevic was "determined to
crush all resistance to his rule even if it means turning
Kosovo into a lifeless wasteland." As a matter of fact,
by this time, the United States was determined to crush
all resistance to NATO�s edict even if it meant turning
Yugoslavia into a lifeless wasteland.
On May 10, the U.S. State Department issued a report
entitled "Erasing History: Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo,"
which, based on refugee accounts and aerial photos,
estimated that 90 percent of Kosovo Albanians had been
driven from their homes. This was not accurate, as it
later turned out, but in unveiling the report Madeleine
Albright said it "makes clear beyond any doubt" the
existence of "horrific patterns of war crimes and crimes
against humanity" including "systematic executions" and
"organized rape" and that the "evil" could turn out to be
even greater.
These allegations bring to mind others drawn from the
copious annals of war propaganda, and notably the
Bryce report whose wild tales of German atrocities did
so much to help the British hate the "Huns" and
therefore enthusiastically support the ongoing butchery
of World War I. The horror stories in the report by Lord
Bryce were also drawn from refugee accounts, a
notoriously unreliable source for many more or less
obvious reasons. The report concluded that German
soldiers in Belgium had engaged in "murder, lust, and
pillage" on a scale "unparalleled in any war between
civilized nations during the last three centuries." (16)
The Bryce report, a classic in its genre, included an
exciting piece of fiction about how German officers and
men had raped 20 Belgian girls in the market square at
Liege.
The "town square mass rape" story was recycled during
the Kosovo bombing and ended up in the Philadelphia
Inquirer under the headline "Serbs� system of rape,"
which gave this vivid description of life in Kosovo under
NATO bombing: "In other cases, mass rapes are
organized in town squares. Townspeople are assembled
to observe these horrific events; the fear and revulsion
sometimes spur residents to flee voluntarily." (17) A
general accusation which does not have to be proved
can never be disproved, and can be safely repeated
forever. (18)
As word began to filter out that large numbers of
Albanians were still living in Kosovo, even getting in the
way of NATO bombs, they were described as "human
shields" or hostages. NATO bravely announced that the
risk of killing them could not be allowed to deter its
humanitarian mission. In May, Clinton claimed that
600,000 ethnic Albanians were "trapped within Kosovo
itself, lacking shelter, short of food, afraid to go home or
buried in mass graves." Whether they left or stayed,
Kosovo Albanians were counted as victims of Serbian
genocide.
On June 11, just after the bombing was halted, Clinton
declared that the Serbs had been engaged in "an
attempt to erase the very presence of a people from
their land, and to get rid of them dead or alive."
The next day, NATO troops began to move into Kosovo.
As they took over Prizren, Pristina, and other Kosovo
towns, they were surrounded by large cheering crowds
of healthy-looking Albanians. Quite obviously, Kosovo
had not been "rid of its people" or "turned into a lifeless
wasteland" by the Serbs.
Visible Kosovo
Various accounts speak of a "five-day orgy of rage" that
was unleashed by the NATO bombing. Serbian forces
attacked KLA and beat them back, but also struck
civilians, especially in the rebel strongholds in the
western part of Kosovo, near the Albanian border.
Paramilitary groups were unleashed. Thousands of
people were killed, including innocent civilians. From the
Yugoslav military viewpoint, this was a defensive war
against a triple aggression: a foreign invasion from
Albania, which provided bases and infiltrated KLA
soldiers and weapons; a local fifth column of KLA rebels
and their supporters; and NATO flying air strikes in
support of the KLA and perhaps to prepare a ground
invasion of its own.
In the weeks preceding the bombing, U.S. and British
military intelligence agents operating under cover of the
"Kosovo Verification Mission" headed by William Walker,
former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador and a key
member of the Oliver North team that armed the
Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s, had been reportedly
making contact with local KLA agents and training them
in how to help guide in NATO bombs and missiles to "kill
the Yugoslav army." It is perfectly obvious that once
NATO launched air strikes, the first thing Yugoslav
forces would be called upon to do would be to root out
all those suspected agents. And insofar as they
considered the KLA to blame for getting NATO to bomb,
they were unlikely to go about it gently.
In early May, a KLA political officer named Pleurat Sejdiu
boasted that KLA reports passed to NATO headquarters
in Brussels were still helping NATO pilots target Serbian
tanks and artillery: "The support the KLA is giving NATO
is still very important. Our intelligence alone is causing
lots of damage and taking quite a big toll." (19)
Effective or not, the KLA certainly intended to be a
damaging "fifth column" inside Kosovo.
Just after the bombing began, Veton Surroi, the editor
of the Soros-financed daily Koha Ditore and a favorite
ethnic Albanian leader among western policy-makers,
told the New York Times that in accepting the
Rambouillet "agreement" designed by the U.S. he had
"also accepted that there would be consequences for
the people of Kosovo, that if the Serbian side did not
agree to the pact, it would have to be imposed by
force�even at risk to the civilian population," because,
he explained, "these kinds of political arrangements
require war." (20) In short, the Albanian nationalists
consciously accepted the "risk to the civilian population"
in order to attain their political goal of independence
from Serbia. They were not surprised by the Serb
reprisals against Albanian civilians, and there is no
reason why their American advisers should have been
any more surprised than they were. The effect on
Albanian civilians was a foreseen consequence that
could be�and was�turned into a political asset for
NATO.
What had actually been going on in Kosovo during the
bombing was reported by the few western journalists
who were there on the spot. Steven Erlanger reported in
the New York Times in early May that the province was
far from empty, and that contrary to NATO reports,
there were plenty of military-age ethnic Albanian men at
liberty. He also reported from Prizren that panic would
sometimes inexplicably seize a neighborhood, and
everybody would start to leave, without being forcibly
expelled. Contradicting the statement of a UNHCR
spokesman in Albania interpreting the latest influx of
refugees as "the final cleansing of Prizren," Erlanger
reported that: "The city is hardly empty and many
Albanians, however fearful, remain here but rarely go
outside." (21)
Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times, who stayed in
Kosovo all through the bombing, wrote later of NATO
spokesman Jamie Shea: "Even in Kosovo, I couldn�t
escape the sound of Mr. Shea�s voice on satellite TV. It
haunted me at the strangest times, denying things I
knew to be true, insisting on others that I had seen
were false." This makes an important point: For all the
justified complaints of media distortion, the usual source
of the distortions is not the journalist on the spot�who,
if left alone to write freely, might well prefer to tell the
true story�but the editors who dictate what the "story"
must be, the big-name commentators who twist things
to fit their agenda, and above all the official spokesmen,
infamous like Shea or "unidentified," who manipulate
mainstream journalists dependent on good relations with
such "sources" to please their editors and keep their
coveted jobs.
Watson described the helpless feeling of people being
bombed. "Bombing can create rage, and when you
cannot reach the people doing it from 15,000 feet, you
must find other ways to deal with it. My way was to
bury myself in my work.... But others, perhaps with hate
already in their hearts, chose the revenge of setting
fires, raping, or murdering. Once NATO added its air war
to Kosovo�s civil war, the Serbs retaliated against the
closest, and most defenseless, target: the ethnic
Albanians NATO had come to save." (22)
By late June, the editor of an independent NATO military
journal acknowledged that: "Increasingly, however,
evidence is accumulating that it was the NATO action
that unleashed the major ejection of the refugees and
most of the massacres." (23)
In reality, there was never anything so surprising or
even unusual about the massive exodus of civilians from
what had suddenly become a very dangerous war zone.
(24) Especially during a civil war, when danger is coming
from all sides, families may decide the prudent course is
to pack up and leave. The incentive was all the greater
for ethnic Albanians in that they knew they could find
shelter among fellow ethnic Albanians, some of them
relatives, only a short distance away in Albania or in
Macedonia (where local authorities and aid agencies
kept them in camps instead of allowing them to swell
the local Albanian population, as they no doubt would
have preferred to do). The terrifying noise of missiles,
the explosions nearby, add to the impulse.
During the bombing, NATO put the figure of Albanians
killed at around 100,000. Afterwards, the NATO figure
dropped to 10,000. Certainly, many died. But this was
no "holocaust."
President Clinton, however, did not revise his rhetoric
downward. On the contrary, he began to add "raping
little girls" to the liturgy of alleged Serbian crimes,
despite the absence of any evidence for this
accusation. Speaking to KFOR troops in Macedonia on
June 22, Clinton claimed that Serbs had raped little girls
"en masse." At a particularly virulent White House press
conference on June 25, Clinton escalated his rhetoric to
justify a new phase of the war: opposition to any aid to
enable Serbia to rebuild its infrastructure destroyed by
NATO bombing. He implied that if the Serbs didn�t get rid
of Milosevic, then they didn�t deserve to have their
country rebuilt. The Serbs "are going to have to decide
whether they support his leadership or not, whether
they think it�s okay that all those tens of thousands of
people were killed and all those hundreds of thousands
of people were run out of their homes and all those little
girls were raped and all those little boys murdered," he
raved, adding that, if they think so, then they won�t get
any aid, "because I don�t think that�s okay."
Thus the official presidential seal was set on the notion
that failure to overthrow, by goodness knows what
means, the legally elected President of Yugoslavia in
mid-term will signify that the Serbian people approve of
mass murder and the "rape of little girls." And thus they
will deserve to go into winter without heating, without
electricity, without running water, without factories to
work in or bridges to cross their rivers. At the G-8
summit in Cologne, British Prime Minister Tony Blair ruled
out even humanitarian aid to the Serbian people, saying
that "people simply wouldn�t understand" spending
money on people who had committed such horrendous
crimes against Kosovars. Since then, the European
Union has been adopting legislation to ban exports of a
long list of just about everything imaginable that Serbia
would need to repair its bombed power plants, bridges
and heating installations. After spectacular destruction,
the West is proceeding to kill a country softly.
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