Phil, Daniela,

I guess I'm just dense, or maybe over worked lately. I have no idea what you're talking about re: Stratfor.

Anyway, I won't lose sleep over it, I guess.

Daniela, thanks for your many recent posts. I've been very busy at work this last two weeks, but I do find time to keep up with my reading. You've posted some really good stuff. Thanks again.

tommygunns, T'gunns, Suitboy (your choice)

T'gunns, I`ve never made any bad coments about you and never will.
I have sent you some private email though, recently. If it is ok with you, I can continue.

Daniela,

I was just confused about Phil's Stratfor post. I just re-read it and I still don't know what he's talking about.

I've been really busy lately. With Y2K approaching the investment industry is cranking-up their hysteria, so I've had to work a lot of overtime.

I'm sorry but I didn't get your email. Please re-send it. I think a bunch of email from that mailbox got dumped.

BTW - there's not much activity on this board lately. I guess our NATO groupie wannabees are in mourning for the collapse of the whole structure of lies that are unraveling day by day in Kosovo.

Suitboy

BTW - there's not much activity on this board lately. I guess our NATO groupie wannabees are in mourning for the collapse of the whole structure of lies that are unraveling day by day in Kosovo.

Suitboy
**** To be honest this is the first time im looking at this board at all. Like you im working a lot. And then i just set my priorities so no mourning, cause i have nothing to mourn about. Lucky me. BTW NATO WHO's NATO????????

October 22, 1999

Genocide in
Kosovo?

So, is there serious evidence of a
Serbian campaign of genocide in
Kosovo? It's an important issue, since
the NATO powers, fortified by a chorus
from the liberal intelligentsia, flourished
the charge of genocide as justification
for bombing that destroyed much of
Serbia's economy and killed around
2,000 civilians, with elevated death
levels predicted for years to come.

Whatever horrors they may have been
planning, the Serbs were not engaged in
genocidal activities in Kosovo before the
bombing began. They were fighting a
separatist movement, led by the KLA,
and behaving with the brutality typical
of security forces, though to a degree
infinitely more restrained than those
backed by the United States in Central
America. One common estimate of the
number of Kosovar Albanians killed in
the year before the bombing is 2,500.
With NATO's bombing came the flights
and expulsions and charges that the
Serbs were accelerating a genocidal
plan; on some accounts, as many as
100,000 were already dead. An
alternative assessment was that NATO's
bombing was largely to blame for the
expulsions and killings.

After the war was over, on June 25, Bill
Clinton told a White House press
conference that on Slobodan Milosevic's
orders "tens of thousands of people"
had been killed in Kosovo. A week
before, from the British Foreign Office
came the statement from Geoff Hoon
that "according to the reports we had
gathered, mostly from the refugees, it
appeared that around 10,000 people
[that is, Kosovar Albanians] had been
killed in more than 100 massacres." Of
course, the US and British governments
had an obvious motive in painting as
horrifying a picture as possible of what
the Serbs had been up to, since the
bombing had come under increasingly
fierce attack, with rifts in the NATO
alliance.

The NATO powers had plenty of
reasons to rush charges of genocide into
the headlines. For one thing, it was
becoming embarrassingly clear that the
bombing had inflicted no significant
damage on the Serbian Army. All the
more reason, therefore, to propose that
the Serbs were collectively guilty of
genocide and thus deserved everything
they got.

Throughout the end of June and July
there were plenty of press accounts
running along lines similar to a July 4
dispatch in the New York Times from
John Kifner with this sentence in its lead
paragraph: "The bodies keep turning up,
day after day, and are expected now to
number 10,000 or more." On August 2
Bernard Kouchner, the UN's chief
administrator in Kosovo, said that
11,000 bodies had already been
discovered in mass graves in the
province.

According to a useful and interesting
analysis put out on October 17 by
Stratfor.com (an independent operation
based in Austin, Texas, that offers
intelligence briefings gratis on the
Internet), Kouchner cited the
International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Republic of Yugoslavia as his
authority, but the tribunal has said it
hadn't provided any such information.
Nonetheless, the 10,000 figure became
the baseline, with some estimates
soaring far higher. Teams of forensic
investigators from fifteen nations,
including a detachment from the FBI,
have been at work since June. To date
they've examined about 150 of 400 sites
of alleged mass murder.

There's still immense uncertainty, but at
this point it's plain there are not enough
bodies to warrant the claim that the
Serbs had a program of extermination.
The FBI team has made two trips to
Kosovo and investigated thirty sites,
containing nearly 200 bodies. In early
October, the Spanish newspaper El País
reported what the Spanish forensic team
had found in its appointed zone in
northern Kosovo. "The UN figures,"
said Perez Pujol, director of the
Instituto Anatómico Forense de
Cartagena, "began with 44,000 dead,
dropped to 22,000 and now stand at
11,000." He and his fellows were
prepared to perform at least 2,000
autopsies in their zone. To date they've
found 187 corpses.

A colleague of Pujol, Juan Lopez
Palafox, told El País, "In the former
Yugoslavia there have been horrible
crimes, but they stemmed from the war.
In Rwanda we saw 450 bodies of
women and children in church, all with
their heads split open." Palafox said he
had the impression that the Serbs had
given families the option of leaving. If
they refused, or came back, they were
killed. Like any murder of civilians,
these were war crimes, just as any mass
grave, whatever the number of bodies,
indicates a massacre. But genocide?

One persistent story held that 700
Kosovars had been dumped in the
Trepca lead and zinc mines. On October
12 Kelly Moore, a spokeswoman for the
international tribunal, announced that
the investigators had "found absolutely
nothing." The Stratfor analysis cites
another claim of a mass grave
containing 350 bodies in Ljubenic that
turned out to hold seven. In Pusto Selo,
villagers said 106 had been killed by the
Serbs, and NATO rushed out satellite
photos of "mass graves." Nothing to
buttress that charge has yet been found.
Another eighty-two were allegedly killed
in Kraljan. No bodies have as yet been
turned up.

There's an estimate that of the people
living in Kosovo before the war, 17,000
are unaccounted for. But as Stratfor's
analyst points out, it's unclear how this
figure popped up. There's been no
census in Kosovo since the war ended,
and no one knows how many Kosovars
are still in exile or in Serbian prisons.
Roy Gutman of Newsday conjectures
that 20,000 were killed and believes
there was a Serbian program of
genocide. He offers no hard evidence to
back up this claim, and one has to note
that Gutman has co-edited a book,
Crimes of War: What the Public Should
Know, with David Rieff, a man
fanatically parti pris on the question of
Serbian monstrosity.

Although surely by now investigators
would have been pointed to all probable
sites, it's conceivable that thousands of
Kosovar corpses await discovery. But
as matters stand, the number of bodies
turned up by the tribunal's teams is in
the hundreds, not thousands, which
tends to confirm the view of those who
hold that NATO bombing provoked a
wave of Serbian killings and expulsions,
but that there was and is no hard
evidence of a genocidal program. Count
another victory for the Big Lie. CP

http://www.counterpunch.org/

if you find yourself any 'nato groupie wannabes' you be sure and let us all know, hear?

a german might say 'fick dich'

bugs bunny would definitely say 'wotta maroon'

ps> big bopper aint comin for you either. ^_~

and if'n i failed made it clear just now:
ATTN:POSEURSUITGUNNTOMMYBOY

T'gunn, the following may help clarify. You posted this article:

By suitboy on Monday, October 18, 1999 - 04:02 am:
STRATFOR KOSOVO UPDATE
October 17, 1999
WHERE ARE KOSOVO'S KILLING FIELDS?

---

I noted that the Stratfor site used the following in their 'about us' section which i found fascinating:

By PhilTR on Tuesday, October 19, 1999 - 09:27 am:
" What began as a slow ramp-up to the Internet quickly took off when Stratfor.com launched the Kosovo Crisis Center on March 24, 1999, the same day that NATO forces began air strikes against Yugoslavia. "
Simply fascinating! phil

---

I thought you posted this in response to my bemused observation above:

By suitboy on Tuesday, October 19, 1999 - 10:53 pm:
oh! Guess the jokes on me. :o( suitboy

---

I wanted to reassure you that I too was fooled by the Startfor 'about us' section too with the following reply:

By PhilTR on Wednesday, October 20, 1999-10:32 am:
Not to fear T'gunn. Stratfor took the name from the "Kosova Cricis Center" sometimes referred to as the "Kosovo Crisis Center". Altavista and other search engines place the word 'stratfor' in front of all references to Stratfor's site to istinguish it form "alb-net's site" I was caught by surprise at first too. phil

---

This post to Daniela was ment to further calarify what I was talking about:

By PhilTR on Wednesday, October 20, 1999-10:54 am:
" Just to distract from the real subjects. "
Daniela, i'ts only a distraction for some. I did find Stratfo's use of the words "Kosovo Cricis Center" to be mildly interesting. I don't fault their marketing manager. I didn't catch the fact that Stratfor's site was created one year and a couple of months after alb.net's site even tho
the Stratfor people indirectly tells everyone so. Only someone very familiar with both sites would likely catch it. phil

phil

Well, well. I see our resident psych has developed selective amnesia while her #1 patient has turned himself inside out. The unraveling of the Kosovo myths must be a terrible blow to ones mental stability! Perhaps a good rest at an NWO reorientation camp is called for?

Be assured that I feel your pain.

Meantime, here's some hard core geopolitical material for your therapy sessions.

Suitboy

===============================================

PART 1


COUNTERPUNCH

edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

THE TWILIGHT OF THE EUROPEAN PROJECT

BY PETER GOWAN

In the midsts of the bombing campaign it is impossible for us to grasp the full significance of the NATO war against Yugoslavia. This is particularly true for those of us living in NATOland since the war, for us, is purely synthetic experience, television images as part of our daily, normal routine and images which are themselves increasingly routinised and thus normal. Indeed for us the whole war is part of our everyday routine: yesterday it was Iraq, some newsflashes about Sudan and somebody with an exotic name in Afghanistan, today Kosovo, tomorrow Taiwan -- all far away places which we naturally care deeply about but about which we know little and need to know less.

But one of the significant consequences of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia is almost certainly that it marks the end of the European project as a political project for Western and Central Europe. That political project could only have succeed if the member states of the European Union had been prepared to stick to their words and reconstruct the European political order as a norm-based rather than a power-politics based system, becoming democratic and embracing the Eastern part of the continent. This war seems certain to bring that effort to an end. A gathering of intellectuals at the Marc-Bloc Foundation in Paris on 29th May, entitled 'After the Emotion the Political Reflection began to tackle this question seriously. Claude Lanzmann, the producer of Shoah, the documentary account of the Holocaust spoke. He said that the NATO attack on Yugoslavia was a new Dreyfus Affair. It is, but this time with a whole European nation, the Serbs, cast in the role of Dreyfus. A handful of French intellectuals sensed quickly that the whole case against Dreyfus was constructed out of lies. Millions upon millions of people across Europe now see the Serb nation for what it is: a victim of the power plays of Western powers which have constructed this war on a foundation of lies, shattering the entire normative scaffolding upon which the new Europe was supposed to be built. Powerful States can and so wage wars rooted in fictions and falsehoods, and get away with it. But attempts to build transnational, post-nation state structures like the European Union, the Council of Europe or the OSCE on a power politics that displays contempt for the supposedly founding principles of such bodies are unlikely to be sustainable.

The continuation of the European project as a form of political development for Europe will be possible only if one of two conditions are met: either the NATO Dreyfus affair in the Western Balkans can be quickly forgotten in a rapid move to prosperity, peace and hope in a reconstructed Western Balkans; or the political and intellectual resources of Europe are mobilised to decisively repudiate the entire aggressive war against Serbia and against a tolerable future for all the peoples in that region. Neither of these two conditions seems a remote possibility. As a result, the European project is likely to become a Single Market project, harmonised with the requirements of American business plus a currency under American tutelage. And the tendency will be for the main West European powers to be constantly involved in power politics manoeuvres on an American led agenda, manoeuvres focused largely on mounting chaos in the Eastern and South Eastern part of the continent.

The NATO attack on Yugoslavia was the result of American diplomacy, just as the war itself is essentially an American war legitimated by the fact that it is run as a NATO war. For many months during 1998, the West European powers did try to resist the American drive for a NATO war. Their resistance was partly based upon the fact that there strategic interests differed from those of the Americans but the form of their resistance was that of attempting to resolve the conflict in Yugoslavia by mediation and by peaceful means. But in late January,1999 the British and the French governments broke ranks and lined up behind the Clinton Administration for war.

Thus to understand the current war we have to understand the character of American aims. There are broadly speaking two approaches to this question. One approach says that the Clinton Administration was reacting to events in the Western Balkans in deciding to go for war. Its aims were governed by the plight of the Kosovar Albanians. This line of argument then leads to the conclusion that there was an extraordinary mismatch between US aims and US methods, a mismatch which the European pundits supporting the war explain by reference to supposed American stupidity. We will survey the diplomatic background and the launch of the war to explore the validity of this theory which we will call the Theory of American Stupidity. In doing so we will show how the approaches of the US and the West Europeans to the Kosovo issue in the run-up to war were not complementary: they were directly contradictory. The US approach undermined European efforts at mediation and peaceful resolution of the conflict. The West European approaches constantly undermined the US drive for war, until the Franco-British turn in January 1999. Those who support the war need to address this conflict of approaches in order to provide themselves with a consistent position. They can say that the European approach was complicit with the Serbian government; or they can say that the US approach was responsible for much of the terrible sufferings of the Kosovo Albanians both before the NATO attack and especially after it had begun. But they should not evade these issues.

But there is a second way of understanding US aims in launching this war. This says that the Clinton Administration's drive for war was dictated by US strategic political aims in Europe and in the international arena and thus that a war against Yugoslavia over Kosovo was simply an instrument in US geopolitical strategy: the Kosovo Albanians' plight was a pretext and the Kosovar Albanian political groups were simply pawns. This view is, of course, anathema to the media pundits in NATOland, but it is overwhelmingly popular in the foreign offices and state executives of the states of Europe and of the entire world. On this view, the war demonstrates one central lesson: the inability of the main West European powers to sustain a collective political will in the face of unremitting US pressure. Thus, despite the very strong political and economic interests of the main West European capitalist states in maintaining a collective stance in the face of US manoeuvres over European affairs, their rivalries and vanities can always ultimately be exploited by the US to divide them. In essence this gives us a theory of the current war in terms of the West European states' stupidities. We will examine that theory, which we will call the Theory of European Stupidity.

Of course, the word 'stupidity' is a polite one, it is a neutral, problem-solving word, without significant ethical connotations. It is necessary, perhaps to add that the word is used here in an ironical sense. The moral and political consequences of this war for Europe are terrible to contemplate. The hopes of a better future for the continent 10 years ago are over. Never glad confident morning in Europe again, at least not for decades. The next phase of European history will be marked by the efforts of the United States to push further its drive for global hegemony in Europe and elsewhere. As soon as it has finished its bombing campaign in the Western Balkans it will switch its pitiless gaze East towards the coming truly awesome confrontation with China. Back and forth between Asia and Europe the US will move, attempting to beat the world into shape for the next millennium. The really strong arguments for the NATO war are actually the general arguments for US global hegemony. These take two forms. First, those who actually believe that US hegemony will produce a new world of global citizens rights, global prosperity and global justice. Secondly, the pragmatists argue that we cannot buck the trend, we must bandwagon with the hegemon in order to subvert it later from within its secure security zone. That subversion will take the form of transforming hegemonic dominance into a cosmopolitan set of institutions of global governance and justice. We will survey those arguments at the end of this article.

PART 2 OF POST:

=======================================

THE TWILIGHT OF THE EUROPEAN PROJECT

BY PETER GOWAN

PART 1: THE THEORY OF AMERICAN STUPIDITY

The notion of American stupidity is really a British idea. It has been a double-sided notion throughout the post-war period in Britain: on one side it is a variety of Anti-Americanism much beloved in the British upper classes (especially those on the Right); on the other side it is a message of hope -- perhaps we can be cleverer than the Americans and manipulate them to our advantage. Thus have the British upper classes reconciled themselves to being constantly managed -- often for the benefit of the world's populations, as in the case of Suez -- by successive American administrations in an uninterrupted progress of British decline. The notion of American Stupidity is now becoming a European idea during the course of the present war. It has become the absolutely central conceptual mechanism for overcoming the contradictions in the efforts to justify the NATO air war against Yugoslavia.

These contradictions derive from one single source: the attempt to explain the origins of the NATO attack as lying in a reactive effort to respond to the plight of the Kosovar Albanians. The contradictions disappear if we explain the attack as an attempt involve the European NATO members in a war to destroy the existing Serbian state. But that latter explanation raises a great many new questions about this war which NATO governments are seeking, so far very successfully, to evade.

The distinction between seeking to help the Kosovar Albanians and seeking to destroy the existing Serbian state may seem a fine one. Common sense may suggest that the two goals are simply two sides of a single coin: supporting one side in a local conflict against the other side. But the NATO attack on Yugoslavia has involved much more than support for one side against another. It has entailed a decision by NATO to overthrow the normative cornerstones of the post-war international order: the principle of state sovereignty and the outlawing of aggression against a state without UN Security Council mandate. To take that step, the NATO powers could not simply claim that they were opposed to the domestic policies of the Yugoslav state. They had to claim that they were taking drastic action to save the Kosovo Albanians from a genocidal catastrophe. More, they had to claim that nothing other than military aggression against Serbia could prevent the catastrophe because all other methods had been tried and had failed.

From this stance come all the contradictions in the NATO position. For during the 14 months up to the launch of the NATO war, the West European and Russian governments were in continuous conflict with the USA over Kosovo, the USA systematically tried to sabotage a peaceful settlement of the conflict in Yugoslavia and the way in which the Clinton Administration launched the war invited a genocidal slaughter of the Kosovo Albanians.

The European variant says that for 14 months the 'International Community' tried every possible means of resolving the conflict peacefully. All efforts were thwarted by the Yugoslav authorities. So there was no choice but to turn to US air power. The US variant claims that for 14 months the US was struggling to gain agreement to a war against Yugoslavia, but the Europeans and Russians were blocking war. But finally, the US managed to push the Russians out of the picture (along with the UN) and bounce the West Europeans into a just war that they had been resisting.

These two variants may not appear incompatible, but a glance at that 14 month history shows that they were, because the failure of the European-Russian efforts to gain a negotiated solution was the direct result of the activities of the US State Department. Only for a brief moment at the very start of the current phase of the Kosovo crisis did the USA appear to be on the same line as the Europeans, in viewing the KLA as a terrorist group. To search for the real origins of the war we need to survey this history.

1. The US both encouraged the Serbian government to launch the counter-insurgency and wanted war against the Serbian government because of its counter-insurgency.

2. From early March 1998, Albright wanted war against Serbia on the grounds that the Serbian government was genocidal. On March 7th,1998, just after and in response to the Serbian security force operation in the Benitsar region of Kosovo, she declared: "We are not going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer get away with doing in Bosnia." Two days later she reserved the right for the US to take unilateral action against the Serbian government, saying, 'We know what we need to know to believe we are seeing ethnic cleansing all over again.' This remained the US line right the way through from that first Serbian counter-insurgency drive against the KLA in Benitsar: Albright demanded war against Serbia. But the signal for the Serbian government to launch its counter-insurgency in Benistar also, intriguingly, came from Albright's own State Department. This signal was given by the United States special envoy to the region, Ambassador Gelbard. The BBC correspondent in Belgrade reported that Gelbard flew into Belgrade to brand the KLA as a terrorist group.

' "I know a terrorist when I see one and these men are terrorists," he said...At the time, the KLA was believed to number just a several hundred armed men. Mr. Gelbard's words were interpreted in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, as a green light for a security forces operation against the KLA and the special police conducted two raids in the Benitsar region in March.'

So the Clinton administration encouraged the Serbian counter-insurgency in order to liberate the Kosovo Albanians from it through a NATO war. The Europeans on the other hand, wanted the Serbian counter-offensive against the KLA to result in an internationally brokered compromise peace granting Kosovo Autonomy within Serbia.

3. The ''international community' tried for 14 months to broker a peaceful solution, but the Clinton Administration did not.

4. The UN (in its resolution 1199), the West European powers and the Russians sought, during 1998, to bring about a cease fire and a negotiated solution in Kosovo, granting autonomy to the Albanians within Serbia. The Serbian government, from March 1998 declared its support for this, and there was support for this approach, as an interim solution, from the Rugova shadow government in Pristina. Only two major actors opposed this: Madeleine Albright and the KLA. Albright and the whole Clinton administration gave massive political support to the KLA, undermining the line of the other members of the Contact Group and the line of UN resolution 1199.

Support for the KLA did not involve support for its aims: the Clinton administration has always opposed the aims of both the KLA and the Rugova leadership, both of whom demand independence for Kosovo. The Clinton administration did, however, support the KLA's means -- guerrilla warfare against the Serbian state -- by repeatedly and vigorously making demands upon the Serbian government which strengthened and encouraged the KLA war.

This US support for the KLA became unequivocal by June 1998, by which time NATO military planning for an attack on Yugoslavia was completed. In that month, White House spokesperson Mike McCurry asserted that Serbia 'must immediately withdraw security units involved in civilian repression, without linkage to...the 'stopping of terrorist activity.' In parallel, Pentagon spokesperson Kenneth Bacon said: 'We don't think that there should be any linkage between an immediate withdrawal of forces by the Yugoslavs on the one hand, and stopping terrorist activities, on the other. There ought to be complete withdrawal of military forces so that negotiations can begin.' In other words, Washington was insisting that before any cease-fire or negotiations on a Kosovo peace settlement, the Serbian authorities must withdraw all their forces for Kosovo, handing over the territory to the KLA's military forces despite the fact that the urban Albanian population of Kosovo was far more pro-Rugova than the KLA. As Gary Dempsey explains, the US was demanding that the Serbian government 'effectively hand over one of its territories to an insurgency movement.....This...led many ethnic Albanians to further conclude that the Clinton administration-- despite its official statements to the contrary -- backed their goal of independence....Although US policy was officially opposed to independence for Kosovo, Washington would not allow Belgrade to forcibly resist it.'

Air War supporters thus have a choice of interpretations on these matters: either the US was right to back the KLA and sharpen the internal conflict in preparation for a NATO attack, in which case the Europeans are the Russians were presumably covert supporters of the dictatorial, genocidal Milosevic regime. Alternatively, they can argue that the European-Russians-UN were right to seek an internal cease-fire and negotiated solution and the US was wrong to try to sabotage this. But Air War supporters cannot embrace both variants.

5. Sabotaging the October 13th Cease-Fire:

6. On 13th October, Albright's rival in the Clinton administration, Richard Holbrooke, negotiated a cease-fire agreement with Yugoslav President Milosevic. The cease-fire would be monitored in Kosovo by OSCE observers. Milosevic agreed on the basis that the US administration would ensure that the KLA did observe the cease-Fire.

But the Clinton administration sabotaged the whole operation. The OSCE monitors did not enter Kosovo for a whole month after the agreement. During that time, the KLA did not respect the cease-fire, continued its operations and extended its reach in Kosovo. During the delay, the Clinton administration took control of the OSCE, placed William Walker, a key organiser of the Contra operation in Nicaragua and the blood-bath in El Salvador, in charge of the OSCE monitoring force. Some 2,000 trained monitors waiting in Bosnia to be sent into Kosovo were blocked by the US, who put US ex-military personnel in as the monitoring force and from mid-November they surveyed every bridge, cross-roads, official building, security force billet and barracks -- every item that could be relevant to a future NATO-KLA joint offensive.

At the same time the European-Russian-UN line continued to be to seek an internal solution and blamed the KLA for the failure to achieve it. Thus, for example, at their General Affairs Council on 8th December, 1998, Cook and the other foreign ministers of the EU assessed the situation in Kosovo. The report of the meeting in the Agence Europe Bulletin of the following day stated: 'At the close of its debate on the situation in the Western Balkans, the General Affairs Council mainly expressed concern for the recent 'intensification of military action' in Kosovo, noting that 'increased activity by the KLA has prompted an increased presence of Serbian security forces in the region.' ' Thus, the EU saw the KLA as the driving force undermining the possibility of a cease fire and a compromise solution. They were simply on a different line from Albright. And they continued to be right through January.

7. Turning the Rambouillet Negotiations into an Ultimatum, while overthrowing the Rugova Leadership:

8. The two variants continue into the Rambouillet process. The idea of bringing the two sides together into face to face negotiations under international auspices came from the French government. The Clinton administration had been against such an idea, favouring a straight move towards bombing. But on this occasion, the differences were overcome in favour of the French getting their way on the form while the US would get its way on the substance. This was a turning point. The French and British switched over to the US position at a meeting of the contact group in London on 29th January,1999, exactly a week before the opening on 6th February of the Rambouillet 'negotiations'. From that moment on the NATO attack on Yugoslavia was a virtual certainty. We can see why when we appreciate that the Rambouillet 'negotiations' were not negotiations at all: they were an ultimatum to the Serbian government which was drafted in such a way as to ensure that it would be rejected.

The Serbian government wanted face to face negotiations at Rambouillet with the Kosovo representatives. This the Americans absolutely refused, presumably with British and French support since they were formally supposed to be in charge of the process. It is also fairly clear that there were some on the Kosovo side who were interested in discussing with the Serbian authorities. Why else would be Clinton administration have decided to overthrow the elected Rugova government of Kosovo and replace it with a KLA-led government, there and then, at Rambouillet?

The Serbian side was then required to agree to the 'Agreement' without changing it, or face NATO attack on Yugoslavia. If the Serbian government had signed the 'Agreement' the agreement would have had no status in international law, since treaties signed under threat of aggression have no force in international law. But the Serbian authorities, probably wisely, did not have any confidence in their ability to rely upon international law, so they refused to sign.

Most people assume that the Serbian government refused to sign, because the 'Agreement' would lead to the independence of Kosovo. The 'Agreement' did involve a de facto NATO Protectorate (not, by the way, a democratic entity. The Chief of the Implementation Force could dictate to the Kosovo government on any aspect of policy he considered relevant to NATO (ie US) concerns.)

But the real sticking point for the Serbian government seems to have been the threat that the 'Agreement' posed to the rest of Yugoslavia. The NATO compliance force would have complete control of Kosovo deploying there whatever types of forces it wished: ' NATO will establish and deploy a force (hereinafter KFOR) which may be composed of ground, air, and maritime units from NATO and non-NATO nations, operating under the authority and subject to the direction and the political control of the North Atlantic Council (NAC) through the NATO chain of command. The Parties agree to facilitate the deployment and operations of this force.' Thus, if the US wished to use Kosovo as a base for the invasion and occupation of the rest of Yugoslavia it could do so.

This was threat enough. But the so-called 'Appendix B' added to the document at Rambouillet itself and kept secret until it was leaked and eventually published in the French press, insisted that NATO forces could move at will across the whole of Yugoslavia. Thus: 'NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY including associated airspace and territorial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, manoeuvre, billet, and utilisation of any areas or facilities as required for support, training, and operations.' NATO could also alter the infrastructure of Yugoslavia at will: 'NATO may.... have need to make improvements or modifications to certain infrastructures in the FRY, such as roads, bridges, tunnels, buildings, and utility systems.' It could thus move around investigating all Yugoslav infrastructures with a view to destroying them (in an attack) later. And the Yugoslav authorities 'shall provide, free of cost, such public facilities as NATO shall require.' The Yugoslav authorities 'shall, upon simple request, grant all telecommunications services, including broadcast services, needed for the Operation, as determined by NATO. This shall include the right to utilise such means and services as required to assure full ability to communicate....free of cost.' 'NATO is granted the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tolls, or charges occasioned by mere use.' The Yugoslav authorities must not merely tolerate this: they must facilitate it:' The authorities in the FRY shall facilitate, on a priority basis and with all appropriate means, all movement of personnel, vehicles, vessels, aircraft, equipment, or supplies, through or in the airspace, ports, airports, or roads used. No charges may be assessed against NATO for air navigation, landing, or takeoff of aircraft, whether government-owned or chartered. Similarly, no duties, dues, tolls or charges may be assessed against NATO ships, whether government-owned or chartered, for the mere entry and exit of ports.'

And in all such activities in the whole of Yugoslavia, NATO shall be completely above the law: 'NATO shall be immune from all legal process, whether civil, administrative, or criminal.' And again: 'NATO personnel, under all circumstances and at all times, shall be immune from the Parties' jurisdiction in respect of any civil, administrative, criminal, or disciplinary offences which may be committed by them in the FRY. ' And again: ' NATO and NATO personnel shall be immune from claims of any sort which arise out of activities in pursuance of the operation'.

This threat to move from Kosovo to the overthrow of the entire Serbian and Yugoslav regime was underlined by the fact that NATO claimed the right to dictate the fundamentals of socio-economic policy within Kosovo, with the Yugoslav and Kosovo governments completely under the diktat of US policies. Thus:' The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles.' And: 'There shall be no impediments to the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to and from Kosovo.' And again: 'Federal and other authorities shall within their respective powers and responsibilities ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources. There must also be complete compliance with the IMF and World Bank. Thus: 'International assistance, with the exception of humanitarian aid, will be subject to full compliance with....conditionalities defined in advance by the donors and the absorptive capacity of Kosovo.' The Yugoslav government must also agree to handing over economic assets to foreign interests. Thus: 'If expressly required by an international donor or lender, international contracts for reconstruction projects shall be concluded by the authorities of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.'

These statements made it perfectly clear that NATO was out to destroy the existing character of the Serbian economy. The ultimatum also demonstrated that NATO was determined to wage war against the Serbian media. It demanded 'Free media, effectively accessible to registered political parties and candidates, and available to voters throughout Kosovo.' And it said that 'The IM shall have its own broadcast frequencies for radio and television programming in Kosovo. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia shall provide all necessary facilities.....'

Rambouillet was thus an ultimatum for a war against Serbia and the terms of the ultimatum demonstrated that if the Serbian government accepted Rambouillet they would very likely face a crushing attack in the future from NATO forces on Yugoslav soil.

9. The Launch of the War and the Need for Stupidity With the 'failure' of Rambouillet, the Clinton Administration took open charge of the preparations for war. And it is at this point that the analysis of those who support the NATO Air War faces absolutely irreconcilable contradictions. For the way in which the war was launched is, on the face of it, absolutely inexplicable.
10. The bombing campaign was launched in 24th March. But President Clinton announced on the 19th of March that the bombing campaign would be launched and nothing now could block it. The US administration thus gave the Serbian government 5 days in which they could do as their pleased in Kosovo. And when the bombing started, it was organised so that the Serbian authorities could continue to have a free hand in Kosovo for more than a week. The air war's first phase was directed largely at targets outside the Kosovo theatre itself for a full week.

And this military side of the attack was combined with an absolutely contradictory set of explanations for NATO's aggression. On one side, the attack was justified as an attempt to prevent the genocidal threat to the Kosovar Albanians from the Milosevic regime. But on the other side, the attack was simultaneously justified by the claim that the Milosevic regime had no such genocidal intentions and indeed wanted the bombing campaign in order to use it to sell Rambouillet to the Serbian people.

These contradictions cannot be explained away by haste, improvisation and confusion on the part of the Clinton administration. We know that the US National Security Council and the State Department had been planning this war in detail for 14 months before it started. We know also from the Washington Post that the experts in the US administration spent those 14 months running over, day after day, all the variants of the course of such a war, all the scenarios of possible Yugoslav government responses to the air attack. We know that they foresaw the possibilities of mass refugee exits from Kosovo. The Pentagon foresaw a long air war: the notion that Milosevic wanted the bombing attack was political spin put about by General Wesley Clark: it was nonsense. So why did they plan the start of the war in this particular way?

There is only one serious explanation: the Clinton administration was giving the Serbian authorities the opportunity to provide the NATO attack with an ex post facto legitimation. The US was hoping that the five days before the launch of the bombing and the first week of the war would give various forces in Serbia the opportunity for atrocities that could then be used to legitimate the air war.

This was a rational calculation on the part of the US planners. They knew that the main political opponents in Serbia of Milosevic's Socialist Party -- the Radical Party of Seselj and various Serbian fascist groups -- supported the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, though the Socialist Party did not. They knew also that Yugoslav military forces would pour into positions in Kosovo as the OSCE personnel left, clearing strategic villages, driving forward against KLA-US supporters. They could predict also that there would be a refugee flow across the borders into Macedonia and Albania.

And the US planners were proved right. Extremist Serbian groups did, it seems, go on the rampage in Pristina for three days after the start of the war. Refugees did start to flood across the borders. And the resulting news pictures did indeed swing European public opinion behind the war. As for the Serbian government organising a genocidal mass slaughter, this did not happen: the Clinton administration organised the launch of the war to invited the Serbian authorities to launch a genocide, but the Milosevic government declined the invitation.

It is simply impossible to argue that the US military campaign was designed to stop the brutalities against the Kosovo Albanians. It would be far easier to demonstrate that this thoroughly planned and prepared war was designed to increase the chances of such brutalities being escalated to qualitatively higher levels. The way that the war was launched was designed to increase the sufferings of the Kosovar Albanians in order to justify an open-ended US bombing campaign against the Serbian state. The technique worked. But this success cannot be acknowledged. Instead it must be hidden by the notion of Clinton administration stupidity.

And to this stupidity the European pundits of NATO can add many other supposed American stupidities. The stupidity of trying to save the Kosovar Albanians with an air war instead of a ground war. The stupidity of killing so many Albanian and Serbian civilians. The stupidity of not swiftly admitting such killings when they occur.

And then there is the most fascinating stupidity of all: the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. This particular stupidity must have been a defining moment for the European powers, a moment for hard, focused thinking, for one very simple reason: stupid or not, the governments of Western Europe know that it was not a mistake. They know that the US military attaches in Belgrade had dined more than once at the Chinese Embassy compound in the city before the war started. They know very well how prominent the compound is and how professional the US intelligence operation for targeting is. They know that the Embassy was hit on a special mission by a plane from the United States. And they noted Clinton's casual response: no press conference to make a formal public apology. Just an aside about an unfortunate mistake in a speech about something else. They know too that China is by far the most important issue in the entire current US foreign policy agenda.

And the West European states have learned more about the stupidity of the bombing of the Chinese Embassy since it has occurred: it resulted in the collapse of weeks of German-Russian diplomacy which had gone into producing the G8 declaration agreed just before the Embassy was bombed. That G8 declaration threatened to undermine the US's 5 conditions for ending the war and threatened to rebuild the central authority of the UN over NATO: the Embassy bombing put a stop to all that. More, it completely sabotaged Schoder's planned business visit to China: West European efforts to steal contracts with China by taking a softer line than the Clinton administration were brought to a standstill and the West Europeans are being brigaded into line behind Washington's policy in a new confrontation with China.

All this, for the West Europeans is surely the height of stupidity. But pennies have been dropping in the Chancelleries of Western Europe. They are realising that even if there has been plenty of stupidity in the NATO war against Yugoslavia, the stupidity may not lie in Washington. It may lie in quite a different quarter, namely in the state executives of Western Europe itself. To see why, we need an entirely different take on the origins of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia.

PART 3 OF POST:

THE TWILIGHT OF THE EUROPEAN PROJECT

BY PETER GOWAN

PART 2: THE THEORY OF EUROPEAN STUPIDITY

The alternative take on the origins of the NATO war against Yugoslavia starts from the fact that the war did not derive from big power reactions to local events in the Balkans at all. Instead, this theory starts from the premise that the Clinton administration was seeking a war against Yugoslavia as a means for achieving political goals outside the Balkans altogether. The conflict between the Serbian state and the Kosovar Albanians was to be exploited as a means to achieve US strategic goals outside the Balkans on the international plane.

This conception turns the cognitive map used by the proponents of American stupidity on its head. Thus, for example, instead of thinking that the US was read y to overthrow the norms of the international order for the sake of the Kosovar Albanians, we assume exactly the opposite: the US was wanting to overthrow the principles of state sovereignty and the authority of the UN Security Council and used the Kosovo crisis as an instrument for doing so. Instead of imagining that the US was ready to shut Russia out of European politics for the sake of the Kosovar Albanians, we assume that the Clinton administration used the NATO attack on Yugoslavia precisely as an instrument for consolidating Russia's exclusion. Instead of assuming that the US was ready to abandon its policy of engagement with China for the sake of the Kosovo Albanians, we assume that the Clinton administration used the war against Yugoslavia to inaugurate a new phase of its policy towards China. And last but not least, instead of assuming that the US firmly subordinated the West European states to its military and political leadership in order create a new dawn in the Western Balkans, it used a number of ingenious devices -- especially the dilettantish vanity of messieurs Chirac and Jospin -- to drag the West European states into a Balkan war that would consolidate US hegemony over them, the EU and the Euro's development.

This is where the European stupidity enters the theory. The one strategic interest of the main West European states (Germany and France) in the Balkans lies in maintaining stable and strong enough states in the region to keep their impoverished populations firmly in place. West European military intervention in the Balkans has essentially been concerned with preventing mass migrations Westwards when states collapse. Anglo-French military involvement in Yugoslavia through UNPROFOR was essentially about that: 'humanitarian aid' in the war zone to ensure that the civilian population did not leave the war theatre. Italian military intervention in Albania in 1997 was about the same thing: stanching the flood of humanity out of Albania Westwards, by rebuilding an Albanian state while blocking emigration and asylum rights. Anglo-French efforts in Macedonia and Albania in the current war are similarly about caging the Kosovar Albanians within the Western Balkans. Yet now the American air force has, with European support, turned the Western Balkans into twenty years (minimum) of chaos from which all the energetic younger generations of all ethnic groups will rightly wish to flee West for decades to come. This is the first European stupidity.

The second strategic interest of the West European states (especially Germany) in Eastern Europe is to maintain stable, friendly governments in Russia and Ukraine. That too can be ruled out as a result of this war as far as Russia is concerned; Ukraine will have to choose between Russia and the USA (the EU is not a serious alternative. And both Russia and Ukraine could spiral out of control with disastrous consequences for Central Europe Western Europe. This is the second European stupidity.

The third strategic interest of the main West European states has been to combine an effort to bandwagon with US power with preserving an effective check on US efforts to impose its will on their foreign policies, whether in Europe or other parts of the world. That too seems finished now. The basic West European check on US power was the French veto at the UN Security Council, restraining the US with its 2 votes (including that of the UK). Now that Chirac has chosen to discredit the UN Security Council, he has undermined his own ability to speak for Europe at the UNSC and to be a useful partner for other states seeking to gain European help to restrain the US. That is a third stupidity.

A fourth West European priority was to be able to claim that the EU is an independent, West European political entity with a dominant say at least over European affairs. Yet the current war demonstrates that this is a piece of pretentious bluff: the EU has played absolutely no role whatever in the launching or the management of this war. It will play no role whatever in the ending of the war. It is simply a subordinate policy instrument in the hands of a transatlantic organisation, the North Atlantic Council, handling the economic statecraft side of NATO's policy implementation. And within the North Atlantic Council the United States rules: the way the war ends will shape the future of Europe for at least a decade, yet that decision will be taken in the White House: the West European states (not to speak of the EU institutions) are political voyeurs with their noses pressed against the windows of the Oval Office trying to read the lips of the people in there deciding Europe's fate. This is a fourth stupidity.

To explain the background to these stupidities we must examine US strategy since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc.

US GLOBAL STRATEGY IN THE 1990s

In some conditions the cognitive framework -- local actions, big power reactions -- is useful. Such conditions exist when the superpower is satisfied and secure that the structures which it has established to ensure its dominance are safely in place. It is sitting astride the oceans comfortably and it reacts now and again to little local blow-outs and break downs.

Some might regard that as being the situation of the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. If we look at the power of the United States in the 1990s in resource terms, it has had no rival or even potential group of rivals in the military field, it dominates the international political economy, there is no power on earth remotely able for the foreseeable future to challenge the United States for world leadership.

Yet curiously enough, the United States has been far from satisfied with its situation in the 1990s. It has felt itself to be facing a number of important challenges in the two key traditional regions of the world where it must exercise leadership -- Europe and the Pacific Rim -- and the challenges there are linked to another big challenge: the battle to ensure the preponderant weight of US capitalism in the so-called 'emerging markets'. Leadership of Europe and of the Pacific in turn ensure that the United States can channel the activities of these states to ensure that US interests predominate in designing regimes to open up and dominate the 'emerging markets'.

These problems were all connected to another, deeper issue: concerns about the basic strength and dynamism of the American economy and American capitalism. When the Clinton administration came into office it was determined to rejuvenate the dynamism of American capitalism through an activist foreign drive to build a new global set of political economy regimes accented to the strengths and interests of American capitalist expansion. Getting leverage over the Europeans and Japanese to achieve that was key.

To understand US policy in the 1990s, we must appreciate the double-sided situation that it found itself in: on one side, its old way of dominating its capitalist 'allies' had been shattered by the Soviet Bloc collapse, giving lots of scope for these 'allies' to threaten important US interests in their particular regional spheres. But on the other side, the US had gigantic resources, especially in the military-political field and if it could develop an effective political strategy it could convert these military power resources into a global imperial project of historically unprecedented scope and solidity. We must grasp both the challenges and the great opportunities after the Soviet Bloc collapse to understand the strategy and tactics of the Bush and Clinton administrations.

a) The Post-Cold War Problems

The challenge to the US in Europe created by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc has too often been ignored. That collapse not only made the USA the sole global super-power. It also simultaneously destroyed the political structures through which the USA had exercised its direct leadership over West European capitalism. And it simultaneously opened the whole of Eastern Europe for business with the West, a business and political expansion opportunity which the West European states, especially Germany, would spontaneously tend to control. What if West European capitalist states threw off US leadership, forged their own collective military-political identity, joined their capitals with Russian resources and Russian nuclear capacity? Where would that leave the USA in Western Eurasia outside of Turkey?

The central political pillar of US leadership over Western Europe during the Cold War was NATO. The US-Soviet confrontation positioned Western Europe on the front line in the event of a US-Soviet war. This situation enable the USA to gain political leadership over Western Europe by supplying the military services -- the strategic nuclear arsenal -- to protect Western Europe. In return for these military services, the West European states agreed to the US politically brigading them under US leadership. The US could exercise control over their foreign policy apparatuses, integrating the bulk of their military forces under US command, imposing discipline of the dealings of West European capitalism with the East and so on. And the US could also exercise this political leadership for economic purposes, especially to assure the free entry of US capitals into Europe, to ensure that Europe worked with the US over the management of the global economy etc. So NATO was a key military- political structure. The hierarchy was: US military services give political leadership which gives leadership on the big economic issues, those to do with the direction of accumulation strategies.

But the Soviet collapse led to the redundancy of the US strategic arsenal which led to the redundancy of NATO, the collapse of the political leadership structure for the US in Europe and the undermining of the US's ability to impose its core political economy goals for Europe and for the world on the West Europeans. This is one of the key things that has made the United States a paradoxically dissatisfied power in the 1990s. It has had to combat all kinds of European schemes for building political structures that deny the US hegemonic leadership in Europe. And in combating such schemes it has had to develop a new European programme and strategy for rebuilding US European leadership. In short, the USA has been an activist and pro-active power in Europe during the 1990s, not a satisfied and reactive power. The 1990s have been a period of political manoeuvres amongst the Atlantic capitalist powers as the key players have sought to advance their often competitive schemes for reorganising the political structures of the continent.

And in these manoeuvres, the territory and peoples of the former Yugoslavia have played a very special role. The states bearing competing programmes for a new European political order have all sought to demonstrate the value of their political project for Europe by showing how it can handle an important European problem: the long Yugoslav crises. Yugoslavia has been the anvil on which the competing great powers have sought to forge the instruments for their new European orders. No power has been more active in these endeavours than the United States.

And this means that a cognitive framework for understanding the Balkan wars cannot take the form of: local actions, great power reactions. We need an entirely different framework: great power European strategies, and the tactical uses of Yugoslavia's crisis for advancing them.

b) The New Opportunities.

Yet the United States was not just a power dissatisfied with the international arrangements it confronted at the end of the Cold War. It was also aware that it had a gigantic relative lead over all other powers in the world in terms of the resources for entirely reshaping arrangements on the planet. It had not only unrivalled military capacity but command of new military technologies that could enable it to strike safely and fairly accurately at will anywhere on the planet. It could, for example, out of a clear blue sky, destroy the great dam on the Yangtse river and drown 100 million Chinese at the heart of the Chinese economy without the Chinese government being able to stop it: that kind of power. It could take on China and Russia together and win. It could militarily seal of Japan and Western Europe from their sources of vital inputs for their economies and from the export markets vital for their economic stability.

The United States also have supreme command over the international political economy through the dominance of the Dollar-Wall Street Regime over international monetary and financial affairs and through US control over the key multilateral organisations in this field, especially the IMF and the World Bank.

With resources like these, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc opened up the possibility of a new global Empire of a new type. An empire made up of the patchwork of the states of the entire planet. The legal sovereignty of all these states would be preserved but the political significance of that legal sovereignty would be turned on its head. It would mean that the state concerned would bear entire juridical and political responsibility for all the problems on its territory but would lose effective control over the central actual economic and political processes flowing in and out of its territories. The empire would be centred in Washington with Western Europe and Japan as brigaded client powers and would extend across the rest of the world, beating against the borders of an enfeebled Russia and a potentially beleaguered China.

And it would be an Empire in which the capitalist classes of every state within it would be guaranteed security against any social challenge, through the protection of the new Behemoth, provided only that they respected the will and authority of the Behemoth on all questions which it considered important. It the US played its new strategy for empire building effectively, it could thus earn the support and even adulation of all the capitalist classes of the world.

Thus the decade from 1989 to 1999 has been marked above all by one central process: the drive by the US to get from (a) to (b): from political structures left over from the Cold War which disadvantaged and even threatened the US in the new situation, to entirely new global political and economic structures which would produce an historically new, global political order: New Democrats, New Labour, New NATO, new state system, new world economy, new world order. This is the context in which we can understand the various Yugoslav wars, including the current one. CP

Peter Gowan is a correspondent for the New Left Review.

© Copyright: CounterPunch 1998-1999. All rights reserved.

o dear tommy in the suit:
great stuff, that three parter. seriously.
BWAAA-HA-HAAAAAA
the annoying part of all this being that you'd
think of it as some kinda infliction upon me.
and =this= is where your asinine presumptions and
conjectures have set me off and essentially driven
me out of here.
like, um, what, do i have to 'defend my cool' for
your benefit?
i think not.
where were you in '95 when i was writing in my
fanzine column about the "psychotic rerun of WW1"
down yugoslavia way? for just one example.
where were you this summer when i made it clear
that i wasnt pro-NATO, i was anti-war? kissie,
you've just gotta remember that part.
and our viewers at home dont realize i've written
you off-group several times, trying to defuse this
silliness.
but no, for you it's more fun to posture in front
of daniela, she who hates albanians. BTW daniela,
assuming that invective involved the two sisters,
i dont even know their ethnicity.
i DO know, however, that it's the equivalent of a
playground taunt to ask them, more than once, w/a
straight face, if they're in the CIA. not to
mention just plain stupid.
so really, i've already put too much effort in
replying. hate to disturb my =koff= esteemed
=koff= former peers here.
knock yo damn selves out.

Tommy, here is something for your appetite.

---

Insigh Magazine, Published Date October 1, 1999, in Washington, D.C.

http://www.insightmag.com


War Tribunal Cleans Up Its Act

---

By Jerry Zeifman

---

Charges of covering up U.S. war crimes and conflicts of interest have led to the resignations of key members of the International
Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia.

As first reported in Insight (see "Just What Is a War Criminal," Aug. 2), on July 8 the International Ethical Alliance, or IEA, submitted
legal pleadings to the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, or ICTY, calling for evenhanded justice in the prosecution of war
crimes. The IEA supported the prosecution of President Slobodan Milosevic, but it also charged the ICTY's prosecutor, Louise Arbour,
with covering up war crimes committed by President Clinton and Secretary of Defense William Cohen. Drawing upon facts first
detailed by former president Jimmy Carter in the New York Times relating to the use of cluster bombs and the illegal targeting of
civilians, the IEA pointed out that ICTY was receiving substantial contributions, including compensation for members of the panel,
directly from the United States and other countries involved in the alleged crime -- resulting in a substantial conflict of interest.

Despite the fact that IEA's filings seemingly were ignored by the conflicted panel, three of the five justices cited by the IEA for
conflicts have resigned before the end of their terms, including Arbour. Transmitted by fax and priority air mail, the pleadings included
a request for a preliminary hearing by Aug. 10. But IEA received no response until Aug. 25. A cursory note from a deputy registrar
sent by ordinary mail said, "Your letter has subsequently not been filed, but has been forwarded to the Office of the Prosecutor."

The term "Office of the Prosecutor," of course, referred to Arbour's own office. The IEA had petitioned the tribunal to disqualify her
(as well as four other justices) for "receiving compensation from funds contributed to the Tribunal in whole or in part by NATO
countries; and biases in favor of NATO countries."

Christopher Black, a Canadian lawyer with more than 20 years experience in criminal-defense practice, has investigated the tribunal's
funding. He advised the IEA that the ICTY is not financed solely from the U.N. budget, as required by its authorizing statute.

According to Black, in the last year for which public figures are available (1994-95) the United States provided $700,000 in cash and
$2.3 million worth of equipment. In the same year, the court received substantial tax-deductible private financing from such groups
as the Open Society Institute (a foundation established by billionaire George Soros), the Rockefeller Foundation and the Central and
East European Law Institute (created by the American Bar Association and lawyers close to the United States).

In more recent years, the ICTY's chief justice, Gabrielle Kirk McDonald (an American) and prosecutor Arbour (a Canadian) both have
been engaged in soliciting tax-deductible donations for the tribunal from private sources, Black reports. However, since 1995 the
ICTY has published the amounts of private contributions and the names of donors.

In alleging that Arbour was ignoring war crimes by Clinton, IEA's pleadings included verbatim quotes from an article by Carter in the
New York Times May 27, calling "the destruction of civilian life ... senseless and brutal." Carter also attacked the use of antipersonnel
cluster bombs that caused damage to hospitals, offices and residences of ambassadors.

The IEA's unfiled pleadings charged that the acts described by Carter were being ignored intentionally by Arbour even though they
indisputably were violations of U.N. treaties.

On June 10, shortly after the Carter article appeared, more charges of NATO war crimes were published in Spain's Articulo 20. It was
reported that Capt. Adolfo Luis Martin de la Hoz of the Spanish air force had participated in NATO bombings but now denounces them
as "one of the biggest savageries of history.... NATO's repeated bombings of civilian victims and nonmilitary targets were not 'errors.'"


According to de la Hoz, NATO chiefs were selecting such targets intentionally and also were using bombs containing uranium. De la
Hoz and other Spanish pilots learned that "there was a coded order of the North American military that we should drop antipersonnel
bombs over the [civilian] localities of Pristina and Nish." The Spanish group refused to carry out the order. The Spanish pilots thus
provided eyewitness corroboration of Carter's prior charges. Although the de la Hoz article received much attention abroad, it went
unreported in mainstream U.S. media. With the exception of Insight and the New York Times, Carter's denunciation of the bombings
also has been all but ignored by the U.S. media.

Also first reported in Insight was the endorsement of the IEA's pleadings by Tom Hutson, who has served for 32 years as a State
Department official. After spending the last four years as a top career diplomat in Yugoslavia, Hutson protested the bombings of
Belgrade and left State. He also corroborates -- and denounces -- U.S. use of uranium-containing weapons.

Even before the IEA prepared its pleadings, the group had little hope that Arbour would investigate the basis for Carter's charges or
those of such eyewitnesses as de la Hoz and Hutson. By then other war-crimes charges against NATO leaders previously had been
submitted by the Movement for the Advancement of International Criminal Law, founded by British lawyers from Cambridge University.
In early June, one of these lawyers, Glen Rangwala, met personally with Arbour, stating, "This is a historic opportunity to
demonstrate the evenhandedness of international justice. A failure to indict NATO leaders would be a severe blow to international
law."

Similar charges also were submitted by organizations formed in Norway, Canada and Greece. Although ignored by most American
journalists, the claims drew the attention of the British Broadcasting Corp., the British press and English Nobel laureate Harold Pinter
-- and generated numerous antiwar demonstrations in Germany, Italy and other NATO countries. However, Arbour refused to act or
even comment on the extensive evidence formally submitted to her by any of the prior organizations.

On June 18 (the week after the de la Hoz story had broken) the Times of London journalist John Laughlin wrote: "The International
Criminal Tribunal shows little sign of caring that NATO has itself broken nearly every rule of war.... It displays considerable contempt
for the very thing which distinguishes the rule of law from retributive justice, namely due process."

Of the five tribunal members for whose disqualification the IEA had petitioned, three have resigned prematurely:

* On Sept. 6, Justice Antonio Cassese of Italy (whose term was not due to expire until November 2001) announced his retirement
and plans to resume an academic career at the University of Florence.

* On Sept. 15, Arbour resigned. She has been appointed to the Canadian supreme court. Many Canadian critics of Prime Minister Jean
Chretien have opposed her appointment, considering it a reward for suppressing evidence of Chretien and Clinton's war crimes in the
bombing of Serbian civilians. As Arbour's replacement, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has appointed Carla Del Ponte, a former
attorney general of Switzerland. Del Ponte appears to be highly qualified, given her record for professional integrity and traditional
Swiss neutrality in military affairs.

* After Nov. 17, ICTY's Chief Justice McDonald also will be stepping down. As her replacement, Annan has appointed Patricia Wald,
currently a judge of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

As president of the IEA, this reporter is particularly pleased by the appointment of Wald since he has some personal knowledge of her
prior career. She served as assistant attorney general during the Carter administration, and Carter eventually appointed her to a
federal judgeship.

In 1993, after pledging "the most ethical administration in history," Clinton publicly announced that he wished to appoint Wald as U.S.
attorney general. To the astonishment of the media and other observers, Wald publicly declined. Her refusal to accept the
appointment led to a scramble for alternatives and the upheaval of "nannygate," in which the next two successive nominees
proposed by Clinton to head the Justice Department were of questionable ethics. Why did Wald decline? Even before her name
surfaced, the president and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton had chosen the now criminally discredited Webster Hubbell to be
associate attorney general. They also already had appointed the now ethically tarnished Bernie Nussbaum to be the White House
counsel.

The plan was evident: The first lady had plotted to run the Justice Department from the White House through her cronies with a
figurehead woman as attorney general. Wald would have none of it; she long has demonstrated an integrity and nonpartisanship that
sadly is lacking in Clinton's ultimate choice, Janet Reno.

As soon as Wald officially becomes the tribunal's new chief justice in November, IEA will resubmit even more extensive pleadings --
and also call for an official investigation and public disclosure of the tribunal's past questionable financing.

- Jerry Zeifman, who was counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for 13 years, is the author of Without Honor: The Impeachment
of President Nixon and the Crimes of Camelot (www.iethical.org/book.htm).


Copyright © 1999 News World Communications, Inc.


Related link: http://www.iethical.org/iea/writing9.htm

Friday October 22 12:27 PM ET

NATO Bombing Critics Want Lawsuit

By BART JANSEN Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Congressional critics of U.S. participation in NATO military strikes against Yugoslavia asked a federal
appeals court today to revive a lawsuit challenging President Clinton's authority to order the bombing.

The 31 lawmakers participating in the case argued that Clinton violated the 1973 War Powers Act when he authorized U.S.
involvement in NATO airstrikes. The Vietnam War-era legislation, which has been ignored by presidents of both parties, requires
congressional approval for ``introduction into hostilities'' of U.S. forces lasting more than 60 days.

But a judge threw out the case in June without addressing the merits of the case. U.S. District Court Judge Paul Friedman said the
lawmakers lacked the standing to sue because they failed to show a genuine impasse between the president and Congress in the
matter.

Lawmakers led by Rep. Tom Campbell, R-Calif., asked a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
to reverse Friedman's decision. The military example in Yugoslavia is considered the best case of several since the War Powers
Act because the bombing lasted 21/2 months and followed two congressional votes that opposed the action.

``Here, they flagrantly ignored it,'' Jules Lobe, a lawyer representing the lawmakers, said of the administration. ``The question here
is since Congress stepped up to the plate and performed its duty, will the courts do so.''

But the judges appeared skeptical that courts could rule over whether military actions fit the definition of a war, citing military
actions in Korea and Iraq.

``You're putting a lot of pressure on the judiciary,'' Judge Laurence Silberman told the lawmakers.

Justice Department lawyers led by William Schultz argued that the courts have no business ruling in disputes between Congress
and the president, except in procedural conflicts like whether a bill was properly vetoed.

The case filed April 30 argues that a 213-213 vote two days earlier killed a request to authorize U.S. participation in NATO
bombing of Yugoslavia. Another vote rejected a declaration of war. The bombing had begun March 24.

But Friedman said Congress sent ``distinctly mixed messages'' by also defeating a bill that would have removed U.S. troops from
Yugoslavia.

Several lawmakers who attended the hearing said the case offers the clearest example of whether Congress can rein in a president
over military actions.

``I would say you will never have a clearer case,'' Campbell said after the hearing.

Others complained that options such as impeachment or withholding funds are impractical in opposing a military action, especially
if troops are already deployed.

``That is a terrifying prospect to consider,'' said Rep. Bob Schaffer, R-Colo.

Article speaks for itself. And you know what. No "so called" nato cr*p.Oh and BTW its not a newspaperclipping out of Elsevier etc

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THE ASSOCIATION OF JUDGES OF SERBIA

The Association of Judges of Serbia was established as a reaction to the
manipulations performed by the Serbian courts after the local elections in
November 1996. It is estimated that nowadays almost a quarter of the total
number of judges in Serbia belongs to this association. However, most of
its members are reluctant to admit their membership for the fear of possible
consequences from the authorities personified in presidents of courts,
appointed by the government and persons of significant powers.

Although the Association is of a professional kind, comprised of judges
committed to the promotion of the rule of law, it has been exposed to
incessant attacks by the authorities ever since it had been founded.
The latest one presents the denial by the administration of its registration
as a legal entity, a dubious decision according to the very constitutions
of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Republic of Serbia, which
guarantee the freedom of political, trade union and other kind of
association
without preliminary permission, by simple registration with the competent
authority. Regrettably, instead of ordering the Ministry of Interior to
register the Association, the Supreme Court of Serbia upheld this
unconstitutional
administrative decision.

The Association of Judges at present functions as part of the Association
of Jurists of Serbia, an organization which enjoys the status of registered
legal entity and hosts sixteen different societies, also not registered as
separate legal entities. Apparently, this situation does not satisfy the
presidentof the Supreme Court of Serbia, Mr. Balsa Govedarica, who recently
openly
threatened the members of the Association of Judges with removal from their
functions as judges only if their membership in this association would be
detected. It is not known what legal grounds could the Serbian Parliament
find dismiss the judges, since this is the body with the authority in law to
initiate the procedure for a judge's removal. The only personal restriction
of the freedom of association applicable to judges, according to the
Serbian Courts Act, relates to their exercise of political functions, as
well as the commission of deeds incompatible with their role of judges.
As the Association of Judges is by no means a political party, it remains
yet to be seen how the authorities would interpret the membership in
a non-governmental organization promoting the rule of law as being
unbecoming of a judge. Unfortunately, the Serbian Parliament is a
rubber stamp body originating in the 1997 elections, boycotted by most
parties of the democratic opposition.

Following the orders of Mr. Govedarica, the presidents of courts have r
ecently started to summon judges to a peculiar inquisition-kind-of-meetings
in order to investigate their membership in the Association of Judges.
Judges were ordered to admit to their membership and were openly
threatened with removal from their office if the suspicion was to be proved.
The Belgrade Centre for Human Rights issued a protest reminding those
responsible that such activities amounted to serious violations of the right
to freedom of association and the right to privacy according inter alia to
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which FR
Yugoslavia is a party.