To Phil and Daniela,

1. Quibbling over who was in Kosovo first, the Slavs or the Albanians, is a specious argument and irrelevant to the current situation. That line of thinking could be applied anywhere on the planet.

2. It is not an established fact that the Albanians of today are descended from the ancient Illyrians. There is considerable disagreement among historians and archeologists regarding Illyria - where it was, who they were, where did they come from.

3. Until a couple of years ago, very few of the Albanian Kosovars were supportive of an independent Kosovo, and few wanted to join Albania - until it became literally life threatening for ANY Albanian to voice otherwise. This war was, and still is, being forced upon the Kosovar Albanians by elements from within Albania proper with considerable support from the U.S.A. Also, keep in mind that there are over 100,000 Kosovar Albanians who have sought refuge in Serbia.

Question: Is Hashim Thaci a Kosovar Albanian? What is his origin? Where was he born? to whom? Does anybody know?

tommygunns

TO PHIL.

What i see here is the old pattern you ask Daniela a question which get answered by a retoric question , and in the meantime avoiding your question.
This is the exact reason why she says im lying, cause i asked to many questions and simply had and still have for a part a different few.
Its sad to see it happening again.

No you don't have to agree on everything that's why its called a discussion board, but discussion also means to try answering ones questions as much as it is in your power.

TOMMYGUNNS
You write to Zoja, but shes absent. We both have a lot to do workwise so its not disinterest

Emina

A very revealing article about the KLA. You can't get much more reputable than Janes Defense. This comes hot off Phil's link at:

http://www.siri-us.com/backgrounders/Archives_Kosovo/KLA-as-Army.html


tommygunns

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

The National Conservative Weekly
March 5, 1999, Vol.55 No.9

Jane's Says Muslim Guerrillas Wage War of Terror Against Serbs

If, like most Americans, you know absolutely nothing about the Balkan backwater of Kosovo, you will learn all of you need to know in the next few paragraphs to understand that President Clinton's policy there is violently at odds with all good sense and U.S. national interests.

Last July along the Serbian-Albanian frontier, the Yugoslavian Army encountered a group of Muslim guerrillas trying to sneak across the mountains into the Serbian province of Kosovo.

The Yugoslavians killed a guerrilla named Alija Rabie. He was a citizen of Albania, but also a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army that is fighting to wrest control of Kosovo from Serbia. Documents found on Rabie's body showed he was escorting into Serbia a 50-man contingent of foreign fighters intent on waging jihad against Kosovo's minority population of Orthodox Christians, usually referred to in the press as "Serbs."

"The group included one Yemeni and 16 Saudis, six of whom bore passports with Macedonian Albanian names," reported Jane's International Defense Review.

Jane's is no partisan pro-Serbian publisher. It is the highly reputable, pro-NATO, century-old, British-based firm that over the years has developed a remarkable reputation for scooping the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency on important news about rogue regimes and insurgencies around the world.

Ethnic Cleansing of Christians

The clash last July between Yugoslavian Army troops guarding the Serbian-Albanian border and Muslim insurgents trying to sneak weapons and foreign mujahideen into the Serbian province of Kosovo was not a unique incident. It was routine.
Indeed, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA, but known in their native tongue as the Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves, or UCK) is suffering a large portion of its casualties in exactly these sort of clashes. "This total of UCK loses incurred during frontier crossings (136 dead since January 1998)," reports Jane's, "is quite significant when compared to the 180 UCK soldiers who were killed during the fighting in mid-1998. (During this period 112 Serb police and 51 Serb army personnel were killed with 395 police officers wounded."

"The UCK's tactical mistake," says Jane's, "has been to concentrate its horse-borne arms trains on two frontier crossing areas... instead of dispersing its arms caravans the length of the frontier."

"The UCK has compounded this tactical error," adds Jane's, "by trying to push ever larger guerrilla groups along these same infiltration routes in the mistaken belief that they can smash their way through Belgrade's border defense."

"The UCK favors these extremely dangerous routes," explains Jane's, "because topographically they are the easiest and shortest conduits for the pack horse arms caravans to guerrilla-controlled areas of Kosovo. Furthermore, the UCK is in a hurry to get arms to its host of ready recruits and proceed with its third winter objective, expansion of guerrilla control in Kosovo."

"UCK expansion on the ground in Kosovo is a gradual, insidious process containing three elements," says Jane's.

What are those three elements?

1. Assassination of Muslims who don't cooperate. "First is the elimination of opposition to their authority among the Kosovo Albanians," says Jane's. "This usually means targeting those few Albanians with connections to the Serb police."

2. Assassination of Serbian police. "Secondly," says Jane's, "there are occasional attacks on the Serb police patrols and the few remaining Serb police checkpoints. In one case a single RPG was fired at a Serb police car by a group that escaped in a car via the network of country lanes which the UCK has prepared as a parallel transport system in case Serb police return to their tactics of saturating main roads with checkpoints to prevent UCK vehicle movement."

3. A reign of terror against Orthodox Christians of Kosovo. "The third and most important element this winter has so far been the harassment and assassination of Serb officials and civilians from Kosovo's Serb minority," reports Jane's. "This has included sniper attacks, Serbs dragged from their vehicles and beaten, together with pressure on them to leave their homes.... This UCK tactic has the double benefit of forcing Serbs to quit the province and provoking police into retaliation and subsequent censure by OSCE [NATO-backed Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe] observers."

When Serbian Christian forces do this to Albanian Muslims, the Western press usually - and rightly - refers to it as "ethnic cleansing."

So, what is President Clinton's policy toward this war of national secession being waged by acts of terror by Arab- backed Muslim guerrillas within the historical boundaries of a European nation? It is, first, to threaten Serbia with bombing raids if the Serbs don't agree to remove their troops from their own national territory and, second, to grant "autonomy" to a region that would then be run by the KLA, with U.S. troops standing guard on the ground, protecting the KLA guerrillas from Serbian Christian forces.

This policy hit a snag last week when the KLA itself refused to sign off on the deal when it was offered them by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. KLA forces believe they can win their independence outright from the Serbs without the aid of bombing raids delivered courtesy of Uncle Sam. They fear that American troops will needlessly yoke them to the historically Christian nation they believe they can defeat on their way to establishing an Islamic republic in what Winston Churchill once called the soft underbelly of Europe.

The Serbs for their part say they will never let go of Kosovo because it is the cradle of their indigenous Orthodox religious tradition. It is for them what Mecca is to the Muslims.

As has been much reported in the liberal press, the Serbs, too, have committed outrageous acts of terror to keep Kosovo in Christian hands.

But the United States has no business intervening in this religious civil war - on either side. It is high time the Republicans in Congress raised their voice to tell President Clinton clearly and unequivocally, No Go on Kosovo.

T'gunn, as you probably know the National Conservative Weekly did a bit of 'cherry pickin' in their use of the Jane's article downplaying the history of bloody represson at the hands of the Serbs in essence trying to 'poo poo' the reports of Serb atrocities by tarring the reference with the use of the term 'liberal press' implying the reports are somehow less than accurate.

C'mon guy, you can do better than that. phil

P.S. you might want to review my Reference, History, Kosovo" links. I'm now looking for links with the Serb point of view on Kosovo.

Phil,

So what you're telling me is the link was a plant.

Reminds me of a class I once took from S.I. Hayakawa. He was extremely good at manipulating students into asking questions that gave him the opportunity to belittle their lack of knowledge of the subject matter, thereby enhancing his own perceived superiority and self-importance. His act was really quite disgusting to watch. Naturally, I dropped the class after one week.

tommygunns

Phil,

I assume you've read and/or have access to the original Jane's "cherry picked" report on the KLA. I request that you post a copy of it here, so that we can all read it and determine for ourselves if and how it was "cherry picked".

I was unable to find it in any of the free areas of Jane's web site, so I'm guessing it is restricted to subscribers who can afford the $750 annual fee.

Your assistance would be much appreciated.

tommygunns

T'gunn, the two links I posted were not plants, but merely represented widely divergent views regarding the KLA. I didn't vouch for either or recommend one over the other. phil

Nothing in My 30 Years of Reporting
Wars Compares with the Present
Propaganda Dressed as Journalism



By John Pilger
New Statesman, London
12th July 1999



On 17 June, the Guardian published a letter by Ben Bradshaw MP, a new
Labour bomber. "In one radio discussion I did with [Pilger]," he wrote, "he even
suggested the refugees were inventing stories of massacres." He demanded my
apology. I took the trouble to get a tape of Scott Chisholm's programme on Talk
Radio, on which Bradshaw and I appeared. What I actually said was that
refugees "often tell the truth, but this is sometimes difficult to verify" - the
opposite of what Bradshaw wrote.

Bradshaw's smooth transition from an incomplete career at the BBC to obedient Blairite
MP was reflected not only in his distortion of what I said, but in his indignation. "Why,"
he said to me, "are you criticising America and Britain . . . your own countries [sic] . . . as
the baddies?" Not having the nationality of either of the countries he nominated, I am left
unsure of my assigned place in the goodies and baddies game; I should be told.

Geoffrey Hoon, the new Foreign Office minister, is another who clearly believes he can
make up anything to justify Britain's support for violence and oppression in many parts of
the world. In another letter in the Guardian, Hoon wrote that my "claim that Nato
slaughtered 10,000 innocent people is make-believe". But I made no such claim; I wrote
that Nato had killed or maimed 10,000. That is the sum of the generally accepted, if
conservative, figure of 1,200 civilian deaths and more than 8,000 wounded, most of them
seriously. Add to this an unknown number of Yugoslav army casualties, mostly young
conscripts.

Together with the ethnic Albanian dead, whose numbers are still in question, they are the
victims of two distinct campaigns of terror: that of Slobodan Milosevic's murderous
special units and that of Nato's cowboy pilots, whose cluster bombs, hi-tech versions of
nail bombs, are designed for the destruction of human beings. It requires a certain
contortion of intellect and morality to condone one set of atrocities as "blunders" while
humanising one group of victims and dehumanising another. This is Sheaism, a new word
for the OED. Hoon wrote that it was "just plain sick" to suggest that Nato provoked a
pattern of Serb atrocities. From 24 March, the escalation of both atrocities and the flood
of refugees is clear in reports to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The bombing,
reported investigators of the International Strategic Studies Association, "contributed
heavily, perhaps overwhelmingly".

Hoon's letter was in response to a column I wrote about Burma, in which I pointed out
that Labour had reneged on its pledge to impose legal sanctions on investment that
underwrote the modern-day slavers in power in Rangoon. As a result, the British
multinational Premier Oil has continued to do deals worth hundreds of millions in hard
currency with the Burmese generals, allowing them to re-equip one of the biggest armies
in the world, the tool of their oppression. Aung San Suu Kyi has described Premier Oil
as "a disgrace" and called on the Blair government to honour its pledge. In his Guardian
letter Hoon made no mention of Premier Oil, ignored Aung San Suu Kyi's plea and
misrepresented her position, suggesting that her campaign to curb tourism had been a
British government initiative. Even by the standards of what the former desk officer,
Mark Higson, called the Foreign Office's "culture of lying", this was a cracker.

It is this dissembling and hypocrisy, wedded to a born-again, deeply reactionary
world-view, that inspires the "new moral cause" announced by Blair. The spun truth of its
application in the Balkans is now unravelling for all to see, as it usually does when the
media pack departs. Few now doubt that the Rambouillet talks were a set-up, used to
"deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept", a US State Department
official has now admitted. The terms that the Serbs accepted in June were virtually the
same as those they themselves offered before the bombings began.

The whole bloody travesty was almost certainly avoidable. Thousands of men, women
and children, including those Kosovars Nato was claiming to "save", would now be alive
were it not for the post-cold-war machinations of American power, egged on by Blair,
Robertson and Cook with their few ageing Harrier aircraft and squadrons of
propagandists. Ian Black, the Guardian's man at the Foreign Office, who reported the
Rambouillet talks, admitted that he never read the Rambouillet document in full.

Now that reverse ethnic cleansing is under way in Kosovo, under Nato auspices, the
drums are silent. No one is putting out more flags as thousands of Shea's "missing"
Albanians have been "found" in their homes. Terrible events occurred, but nothing is what
it seemed, as we shall continue to find out. Those who indulged Shea's deceptions, Blair's
scripted histrionics and Clare Short's on-cue buffoonery misled the public: the antithesis
of their remit. In a memorable piece in the Independent last week, Robert Fisk described
vividly the flocks of sheep who reported Shea without a "baa". For Fisk, it was an
especially angry piece, and rightly so. Like him, I have reported numerous wars and
upheavals for more than 30 years, and I have known nothing to compare with the sheer
intensity of this propaganda dressed as journalism.

Fisk has since been subjected to an insidious McCarthyism we have grown used to, that
of personalised abuse and smear, with one sheep last Sunday plying schoolboy gossip
suggesting that our greatest war correspondent was a Serb apologist. Fisk need not
worry. Truth may be the first casualty; it is seldom the last.



© New Statesman 1999

http://www.transnational.org/features/nothingcompares.html

For another comprehensive look at Who's who in Kosovo, go to: http://www.crisisweb.org/
T'gunn there some more info on Hashim Thaqi for you. Seems like he did his post grad work in poli-sci while in Luzern and Zürich, Switzerland. phil

PS: looks like I screwed up on the 'cherry pickin' quip. Can't win them all! ;o)

Phil,

>> PS: looks like I screwed up on the 'cherry pickin' quip. Can't win them all! ;o) <<

Not that I haven't questioned the veracity of your previous posts, I'll keep this little confession in mind when reading subsequent outlandish claims.

tommygunns

Phil wrote:

>> T'gunn, the two links I posted were not plants, but merely represented widely divergent views regarding the KLA. I didn't vouch for either or recommend one over the other. phil <<

Nor did you point out that they "[...] merely represented widely divergent views [...].

By posting such links to a forum where there are ongoing oppossing views being expressed, you imply that such links provide evidence for your own previously stated positions.

When playing the role of "facilitator", it would be helpful if you prefaced such posts with a statement to the effect that you are merely providing an interesting or useful link. Otherwise, your subjective and objective roles begin to merge, leaving one to ask . . . . .

. . . . what the hell DOES this guy believe and should I even pay attention to him?

See what I mean?

...and thanks for the Mario link. That one I've definately bookmarked. Lots of great stuff there, will fill many hours of browsing.

PS - no, I'm NOT going to slip back into "pissing"!

Cheers,

tommygunns

Daniela,

Thanks for posting John Pilger's exquisite piece of writing. His, as well as Robert Fisk's reporting, ought to be read by EVERY person with the slightest interest in journalistic integrity.

The following two paragraphs especially deserve reposting, as the entire article deserves to be widely disseminated.

>> It is this dissembling and hypocrisy, wedded to a born-again, deeply reactionary world-view, that inspires the "new moral cause" announced by Blair. The spun truth of its application in the Balkans is now unravelling for all to see, as it usually does when the media pack departs. Few now doubt that the Rambouillet talks were a set-up, used to
"deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept", a US State Department official has now admitted. The terms that the Serbs accepted in June were virtually the same as those they themselves offered before the bombings began.

>> The whole bloody travesty was almost certainly avoidable. Thousands of men, women and children, including those Kosovars Nato was claiming to "save", would now be alive were it not for the post-cold-war machinations of American power, egged on by Blair, Robertson and Cook with their few ageing Harrier aircraft and squadrons of propagandists. Ian Black, the Guardian's man at the Foreign Office, who reported the Rambouillet talks, admitted that he never read the Rambouillet document in full. <<

tommygunns

"Nor did you point out that they "[...] merely represented widely divergent views [...]. "

Nor should I have to. Everyone can make up their own minds as to how to interpret each article I reference.

"By posting such links to a forum where there are ongoing oppossing views being expressed, you imply that such links provide evidence for your own previously stated positions."

I intend no such implication. Everyone is free to interpret my words as they see fit. I have no hard positions on the Kosovo conflict.

"When playing the role of "facilitator", it would be helpful if you prefaced such posts with a statement to the effect that you are merely providing an interesting or useful link."

I never asked for, wanted or was granted the job as "facilitator." I post what I believe will helpful in achieving a better understanding of the issues.

" Otherwise, your subjective and objective roles begin to merge, leaving one to ask . . . . .

. . . . what the hell DOES this guy believe and should I even pay attention to
him?

See what I mean? "

I appreciate your dilemma. But you see, my position relative to an issue changes with new information and sometimes even as the result of my own impulsive interpretation of that information. I'm human and have all the frailties that follow.

" ...and thanks for the Mario link. That one I've definately bookmarked. Lots of great stuff there, will fill many hours of browsing. "

My pleasure. And be sure to check out http://www.crisisweb.org .

"PS - no, I'm NOT going to slip back into "pissing"! "

Nice to hear.

phil

P.S. "John Pilger's exquisite piece of writing" seemed more vitriolic than informative. I'd say he had a 'hard-on' for Blair, et al. and it showed through.

>>>Of coursre we're going to interpret facts to be consistent with our own
predispositions and biases. <<<
by Phill


I`ll keep in mind what you wrote there.