-Caveat Lector-
>From www.lineone.net/express/99/07/20/features/f0700view-d.html
> VIEWPOINT
> John Laughland
>
> Within a month of the end of the bombing campaign against
> Yugoslavia, Nato governments and Belgrade have struck up a
> curious alliance. They are united in a conspiracy of silence
> about the tens of thousands of Serb and gipsy refugees from
> Kosovo, driven from their homes by Albanians. I realised the
> scale of this new humanitarian catastrophe on a recent visit to
> Kosovo as I toured camps of terrified people.
>
> On Friday, the spokesman for the United Nations High Commission
> for Refugees confirmed this when he said revenge attacks were far
> worse than had been expected. If action was not taken, he said,
> Kosovo would soon be completely ethnically cleansed of Serbs and
> gipsies. But his words are likely to go unheeded, for these poor
> terrified people are an ideological threat to Tony Blair as much
> as they are to Slobodan Milosevic.
>
> Officially there are no refugees at all in Serbia. Their
> existence proves that Yugoslavia has lost control of Kosovo.
> Whatever concessions Nato made on paper (the most important being
> recognition that Kosovo is an integral part of Yugoslavia), the
> reality is that Nato and the Kosovo Liberation Army are now in
> charge.
>
> But, for Nato, the flood of refugees destroys the fiction that
> the war was fought for moral principles. Time and again during
> the war Mr Blair said: "This is not a war for territory but for
> values."
>
> Ethnic cleansing was unacceptable and had to be stopped. However,
> if this were the real reason for the war, Nato should logically
> be now bombing the Albanian capital, Tirana, or attacking the KLA
> headquarters all over the province.
>
> Instead, Nato is turning a blind eye to Albanian atrocities. Far
> from exerting pressure on the KLA, Mr Blair was photographed
> recently enjoying a convivial joke with its leader, Hashim Thaci.
> And while the International Criminal Tribunal prosecutor, Louise
> Arbour, is travelling in Kosovo to draw attention to Serb
> atrocities against Albanians months ago, she is ignoring
> atrocities now being committed by Albanians under her very nose.
>
> The West even looks the other way, despite its huge military
> presence in the province, as the Albanian Mafia charges Albanian
> refugees ransom money before allowing them to leave the camps and
> return home.
>
> Serb and gipsy refugees, pouring across the border in their
> hundreds every day, told me how they were chased from homes which
> were then burned before their eyes; how women had been raped; how
> neighbours had been shot or had their throats slit. They also
> said Albanians were killing "loyal Albanians" - Kosovars who had
> worked for the Yugoslav state, for instance as postmen or in
> factories.
>
> The refugees also all complained that Nato troops were doing
> nothing to protect them. One 30-year-old mother of three tried to
> alert a British soldier to looting and violence by Albanians. He
> replied: "We have no mandate to arrest people." In the French
> sector, uniformed KLA soldiers walk around unmolested, in
> contravention of the demilitarisation agreement.
>
> The gipsies' fate is particularly tragic. All over Eastern Europe
> they are a persecuted minority. Only in Serbia, it appears, did
> they live free from discrimination. But Albanians seem to have a
> particular hatred for them. I was taken to a former gipsy quarter
> in the town of Kosovska Mitrovica: all the houses stood empty,
> torched and smashed up by Albanians.
>
> "We cannot live with the Albanians any more," cried one desperate
> gipsy woman waiting by the roadside with her family and a few
> suitcases. "They are animals."
>
> If Nato is now declining to stand by the very principles it
> enunciated only a few weeks ago, what credibility can there be
> for the stated justification of the war in the first place?
>
> Two elements must make us sceptical. First, there was no refugee
> crisis (and thus no "ethnic cleansing") until the bombing
> started. There were many internally displaced people within
> Kosovo, fleeing the civil war, but mass movement into Macedonia
> and Albania began only after bombing started. The more we bombed,
> the more came out. Many were therefore fleeing bombs, not Serbs.
> In any case, hundreds of thousands of Albanians remained in
> Kosovo during the conflict, untouched by Serbs.
>
> Second, as a KLA leader told an American journalist two years ago
> in Istanbul, the KLA strategy for Kosovo independence (which was
> executed from January 1998 onwards) was to attack and kill Serbs
> in order to provoke reprisals. These were presented to the West
> as racially motivated ethnic cleansing; in reality they were a
> (doubtless brutal) reaction to a brutal terrorist insurrection -
> a fact systematically obscured by Nato propaganda.
>
> A final thought. The tens of thousands of Serb refugees are a
> potent force for the destabilisation of Serbia. They are already
> voicing discontent that Belgrade is not helping them enough. It
> could even be, therefore, that they are pawns in Nato's current
> strategy to stimulate unrest within Yugoslavia in order to unseat
> Milosevic. In other words, whatever noble principles are
> pronounced from on high during war, it is always ordinary people
> who suffer most. What Nato's real purpose is remains a mystery. ©
> Express Newspapers Ltd
<<Mr. Blair has enough to worry about with the situation in No.
Ireland; to further extend his personal resources to a far-off
place like Kosovo might be a little too much. Of course the
question arises: "Why didn't he stay home in the first place?"
A<>E<>R >>
>From TheTimes (UK) Via www.lineone.net
<<Well, maybe Mr. Rubin might reassess his earlier statements as
a 'miscalculation'.>>
> KLA's mafia links alarm West
>
> BY TOM WALKER
>
>
> THE slaughter at Gracko has realised some of the international
> community's worst fears over the new order in Kosovo.
>
> Western diplomats predict the disintegration of the Kosovo
> Liberation Army into competing factions, some bent on the total
> "cleansing" of the Serb population and others with sinister links
> to the mafia gangs of northern Albania.
>
> The Kfor "liberation" of Kosovo has been portrayed as a new
> beginning, a breath of fresh air for an oppressed people denied
> their right to self-determination for too long. But over the past
> few weeks Western diplomats and observers who witnessed the
> province's ethnic struggle of the past two years have left,
> privately admitting to growing doubts over the Kfor's ability to
> rule with the confused help of a United Nations civilian
> administration.
>
> Some of them said yesterday that the KLA's denial of all links
> with the Gracko massacre, made by Hashim Thaci, the
> self-proclaimed Prime Minister, was nonsense, and merely
> illustrated that a KLA central command has always been a fallacy.
> "Was the KLA ever a coherent organisation?" asked one. "You have
> to remember it was the West that pressured the KLA to come up
> with a leadership. The reality is that it is a roots-up
> organisation. There is no command structure."
>
> Another diplomat said he believed Mr Thaci, 29, had taken on
> board the West's message that Kosovo has to remain multi-ethnic.
> He said that despite Mr Thaci's authoritarian leanings and
> Marxist background, he had realised that for Kosovo to have any
> chance of independence, the KLA had to become absorbed into a
> police force that includeed Serbs and which cared for all
> Kosovans.
>
> Kfor sources in Kosovo have said that Lieutenant-General Sir
> Michael Jackson, Kfor commander, has developed a new trust in Mr
> Thaci over the last few days in verifying KLA disarmament.
>
> But pessimists question Mr Thaci's past and his backers. They say
> Mr Thaci's family is too closely linked to the KLA's main
> financier, the shadowy Swiss-based Xhavit Haliti, who is in
> Kosovo and believed to be in talks with the new special
> representative, Bernard Kouchner.
>
> "He's a real sleazeball you don't want to get too close to," said
> one diplomat. "He knows all the dirty alleyways of Albanian
> society only too well." Even if the Thaci clique wished to bring
> the Gracko murderers to justice, few believe they are capable of
> it. If Kosovo allows itself to become consumed again by the
> blood-feud culture of northern Albania, the killings will not
> stop with revenge attacks on the few hapless Serb peasants
> remaining in the central plains. It is an anarchy even some of
> the KLA's fiercest fighters want to escape.
>
> © Times Newspapers Limited
A<>E<>R
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