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With four of the republics—Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina—having broken away, all that remained of a truncated reconstituted Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was Serbia and Montenegro. Within Serbia itself were the two autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina. Kosovo was the next target.
Let us begin with some history. During World War II, the Albanian fascist militia in western Kosovo expelled seventy thousand Serbs and brought in about an equal number of Albanians from Albania. In northeastern Kosovo, the Nazi 21st SS division, manned by Kosovo Albanian volunteers, massacred thousands of Serbs and forced many others to flee the province. Though never much of a fighting force, the division did contribute to the Holocaust by participating in the roundup and deportation of Jews from Kosovo and Macedonia.
Hoping to placate Albanian nationalist sentiment after the war, Yugoslav Communist leader Josip Broz Tito made KosovoMetohija an autonomous region and, in 1963, an autonomous province but still part of Serbia. The hundred thousand or so Serbs who had been forced out of Kosovo-Metohija during the war were not allowed to return. And in 1969, the historically Serbian name of Metohija was dropped and the province was designated the "Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo," with only nominal ties to the rest of Serbia. The 1974 constitution gave additional powers not only to the Kosovars but to the various republics, "crippling the institutional and material power of the federal government. Tito's authority substituted for this weakness until his death in 1980," after which the centrifugal forces began to gain momentum, writes Peter Gowan.
Tito did little to discourage the Albanian campaign to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of non-Albanians. Between 1945 and 1998, Kosovo's population of Serbs, Roma, Turks, Gorani (Muslim Slays), Montenegrins, and several other ethnic groups shrank from some 60 per cent to about 15 per cent. Meanwhile, ethnic Albanians grew from 40 to 85 per cent, benefiting from a high birth rate and much more from the heavy influx of immigrants from Albania and the continuing expulsion of Serbs. In sum, the first ethnic cleansings of Kosovo, both during and after World War II, saw the Serbs as victims not victimizers. The dramatic shift in population balance fueled the Albanian claim to exclusive ownership of the province. In 1987, in an early untutored moment of truth, the New York Times ran David Binder's report on Kosovo:
Ethnic Albanians in the [provincial] government have manipulated public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs...Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, and flags have been torn down. Wells have been poisoned and crops burned. Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls...As the Slays flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years...an 'ethnically pure' Albanian region.
Other observers offered similar accounts: "Kosovo Albanian [separatists] persecuted the Serbs. They desecrated their churches, stole or destroyed their property, employed duress to get them to sell their holdings, and engaged in other acts designed to force them to leave Kosovo. Even Serbian professionals...were told, as a condition of their continued employment, that they must learn Albanian."
As an autonomous province of the Serb republic, Kosovo enjoyed far more extensive rights and powers within the FRY than were allowed to national minorities in any West European state or the United States. Kosovo was allowed to have its own supreme court and its own Albanian flag. University education was in Albanian, with Albanian textbooks and teachers. There were also Albanian newspapers, magazines, television, radio, movies, and sporting and cultural events. All education below the university level was exclusively in Albanian, a language radically different from Serbo-Croat. With only 8 per cent of Yugoslavia's population, Kosovo was allocated up to 30 per cent of the federal development budget, including 24 per cent of World Bank development credits. "The Kosovo authorities, it was discovered later, used large sums from these funds to buy up land from Serbs and give it to Albanians." Because of corruption and poor planning, Kosovo persistently lagged far behind other segments of the FRY, despite the largesse bestowed upon it.
Repeated appeals from besieged Serbs in Kosovo went unheeded in Belgrade—until 1987, when the new president of the Serbian Communist party, Slobodan Milošević, used the issue to strengthen the party faction that supported a firmer line against Albanian secessionists. Two years later, at Milošević's initiative, the federal government repealed the 1974 federal constitution that had allowed Kosovo to exercise a de facto veto over federal policies. Large numbers of Albanians who refused to accept Belgrade's reassertion of authority were fired from state employment. Albanians began organizing alternative institutions and boycotting federal ones, including elections. Kosovo Albanian separatists refused to pay their federal customs duties. Tensions ran high but remained well short of open warfare.
Political confrontation escalated into military conflict through the efforts of the violently separatist "Kosovo Liberation Army." The KLA's origins remain murky. Some place its beginnings in 1996, when a letter announcing its formation was sent to the press. The letter also claimed credit for a February 1996 massacre of Krajina Serb refugees who had resettled in Kosovo after fleeing Croatia. At first the KLA was an odd assortment of grouplets, including gangsters, mercenaries, brothel owners, fascists, and even some who claimed to be followers of Albania's former Marxist leader Enver Hoxha.8As late as 1998, US officials—at least publicly—were denouncing the KLA as a terrorist organization. Listen to US special envoy to Bosnia, Robert Gelbard: "We condemn very strongly terrorist actions in Kosovo. The UCK [KLA] is without any question a terrorist group.
The KLA directed its terror campaign against a variety of Serbian targets in Kosovo, including dozens of police stations, police vehicles, a local headquarters of the Socialist party, and Serbian villagers, farmers, officials, and professionals—in an effort to provoke reprisals, radicalize other Kosovo Albanians, and raise the level of conflict.
The KLA also targeted Albanians who opposed the violent secessionist movement, or were members of the Socialist Party of Serbia or who in other ways professed a loyalty to Yugoslavia or loyalty to the Republic of Serbia. The KLA assassinated Albanians who were employed in Serbian or FRY public services, including police inspectors, forest service workers, postal employees, and public utility workers.'° In 1996-98, more than half the victims of KLA terrorist attacks in Kosovo-Metohija were ethnic Albanian "collaborators." Many Kosovo Albanians fearfully adopted a passive attitude or grudgingly went along." According to reports from the US Observer Mission (State Department), KLA representatives had kidnapped persons, including Albanians, who went to the police. They killed Albanian villagers and burnt their homes if they did not join the organization—a campaign of terror that boldly escalated during the NATO bombings of 1999.
A dozen current or former KLA officials, a former Albanian diplomat, a former Albanian police official who worked with the KLA, and a number of Western diplomats have all testified that KLA leaders purged and assassinated potential rivals including other leaders within the KLA itself. By May 2000, twentythree KLA commanders were shot dead by other elements within the KLA. At least a dozen of these hits reportedly were ordered by KLA chief Hashim Thaci (friend of Bernard Kouchner of Doctors Without Borders and NATO general Wesley Clark), aided by the secret police of Albania itself.
Meanwhile, Western leaders shoved aside the civilian Kosovo Democratic League (a somewhat less extreme organization than the KLA), and nonseparatist representatives of the Kosovo Albanian community who sought a peaceful diplomatic solution to the conflict with Belgrade. "KLA leaders have been accused of assassinating moderate Kosovo Albanians .....notes Wayne Madsen. "In fact, according to Albanian State Television, the KLA had sentenced to death in absentia Irahim Rugova, the democratically elected president of the Republic of Kosovo. (The KLA boycotted the election he won in 1998.)" In early 1999 it was reported that Rugova had been murdered by the Serbs. In fact, he was alive and surfaced in Belgrade, where he remained in seclusion, out of fear of the KLA.
KLA fighters saluted with a clenched fist to the forehead, uncomfortably reminiscent of the 21st SS division and fascist militia of World War II. To sanitize its image, the organization eventually changed to the more traditional open-palm salute. The KLA's military commander, Agim Ceku, was a former brigadier general in the Croatian army. An "ethnic cleanser" in his own right, Ceku had commanded the Croatian offensive against Krajina that killed hundreds and destroyed more than ten thousand Serbian homes. Another KLA leader, Xhavit Haliti, was not even from Kosovo, but from Albania proper, and a former officer of the dreaded Albanian secret police, the Sigurimi, an organization that has committed numerous human rights violations within Albania.
In addition, the KLA was a longtime and big-time player in the multibillion-dollar international drug trafficking that reached throughout Europe and into the United States, according to Europol (the European Police Organization), Germany's Federal Criminal Agency, France's Geopolitical Observatory of Drugs, and Jane's Intelligence Review. Even Christopher Hill, US chief negotiator and architect of the Rambouillet agreement, felt compelled to criticize the KLA for its dealings in drugs. A 1995 advisory from the US Drug Enforcement Administration stated that "certain members of the ethnic Albanian community in the Serbian region of Kosovo have turned to drug trafficking in order to finance their separatist activities."
At the same time, KLA leaders offered no stated social program designed to help the common population. Their agenda in its totality seemed to be a Kosovo completely independent from Yugoslavia, cleansed of all non-Albanians, and joined to a "Greater Albania." This Greater Albania is to include additional portions of southern Serbia, and parts of Macedonia, Montenegro, and Greece.
Developments in Kosovo resembled CIA covert operations in Indochina, Central America, Haiti, and Afghanistan, where rightist assassins and mercenaries were financed in part by the drug trade. Within a year KLA rebels were magically transmuted by Western officials from terrorists and drug dealers into "freedom fighters" who supposedly represented the broad interests of all Kosovo Albanians. In 1998, the KLA experienced what the New York Times called a "rapid and startling growth," which included considerable numbers of mercenaries from Germany and the United States, who sometimes assumed leadership positions. The KLA was given training sites and generous supplements of aid and arms by Germany, the United States, Albania, and Islamic fundamentalist organizations— enough to transform it from a rag-tag assortment into a wellfinanced force equipped with some of the most advanced arms. In 2000, CIA intelligence agents admitted to the London Sunday Times to having been training, equipping, and supporting KLA fighters as early as 1998—well before the NATO air strikes began—at the very time when the White House was pretending to be a mediator striving to resolve the conflict in Kosovo.
The KLA attacks continued for more than a year before triggering a concerted response from Yugoslav police and paramilitary. "In the summer of 1998," Edward Herman writes, "Serbian security forces finally took the bait and went into the Kosovo countryside to root out the KLA." This conflict took about two thousand lives altogether from both sides, according to Kosovo Albanian sources. Yugoslavian sources put the figure at eight hundred, about the same number of killings as in Atlanta, Georgia, during the same period. Casualties occurred mostly in areas where the KLA was operating or suspected of operating. As is often the case, civilians took the brunt of the punishment, with the Yugoslav security forces inflicting the better part of such casualties, since theirs was the unenviable job of rooting out armed insurgents from unarmed sympathizers.
This was also the period when the mass expulsions and ethnic cleansing of Kosovo were supposed to have begun. But Rollie Keith, who served as one of 1,380 monitors for an OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission [KVM], reports that there were no international refugees during the last five months of peace (November 1998 to March 1999), and the internally displaced persons driven into the hills or other villages by the fighting numbered only a few thousand in the weeks before the bombing commenced. According to Keith, KVM monitors observed that "the ceasefire situation was deteriorating with an increasing incidence of Kosovo Liberation Army provocative attacks on the Yugoslavian security forces." These were "clear violations of the previous October's (Hoibrooke-Milošević) agreement" and brought about "a significant increase in Yugoslav retaliations." But he insists, "I did not witness, nor did I have knowledge of any incidents of so-called 'ethnic cleansing' and there certainly were no occurrences of 'genocidal policies' while I was with the KVM in Kosovo."
KLA tactics were perfectly evident. It was very much in Yugoslavia's interest to observe a cease-fire, de-escalate the conflict, maintain the status quo, and avoid the destruction that NATO military action would bring. But it was in the KLA's interest to pursue the very opposite course: escalate the political conflict into a military one by acts of violence and terrorism that would eventually incite retaliation from Serb forces; avoid a negotiated settlement; keep the conflict brewing; make no mention of the assassinations and kidnappings perpetrated by its own fighters, but with the assistance of a willing Western press condemn the Yugoslav retaliations as the most horrific mass atrocity Europe has witnessed since the Nazis; and give NATO the needed pretext to wage its "humanitarian" assaults upon Yugoslavia. It was for this reason that the KLA repeatedly violated the cease-fire and sought to engage Yugoslav forces. This was its real goal rather than any realistic expectation of victory on the battlefield. In every respect, the strategy proved successful—in large part because the Western interventionists readily went along with it.
The White House's claim that NATO resorted to force in Kosovo only after diplomacy failed was a gross falsehood, much like the ones used to justify intervention in Croatia and Bosnia. The NATO plan for military intervention was largely in place by the summer of 1998. By late 1998, as the KLA's military position went from bad to worse, US leaders declared a "humanitarian crisis" and ordered Belgrade to withdraw FRY troops from Kosovo.
Upgrading the KLA was a task accomplished in part by Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), a private company run by retired Pentagon brass. MPRI employs hundreds of former US military specialists, from Green Berets to helicopter pilots. It received a $400 million US State Department contract to train and equip the Bosnian Croat-Muslim Federation Army. MPRI also helped set up arms factories and military training schools in Bosnia staffed by Muslims and Croats.
The Reagan administration's secret Iran-Contra support of mercenaries in the war against Nicaragua caused quite a scandal when it was uncovered. This would not be the case with the Clinton administration's secret campaign to arm the Bosnian Muslims and then the KLA. The Freedom of Information Act does not apply to operations by private mercenary firms like MPRI. These companies can argue that such information is proprietary, hence, not open to public review. By privatizing government military involvement, these operations are put beyond the scope of public scrutiny and democratic accountability.
Then came another well-timed well-engineered story about Serbian atrocities, this time from William Walker, the US diplomat who first acquired notoriety in El Salvador as an apologist for US-sponsored assassins. Walker led a troupe of journalists to view the bodies of forty-four men and one woman allegedly executed by Yugoslav police in the deserted Kosovo village of Racak in late January 1999. The story made worldwide headlines and was used to justify the NATO bombings that began two months later. But an Associated Press TV crew had actually filmed the battle that took place in Racak the previous day in which the Serbian police killed a number of KLA fighters. The police did not seem to have anything to hide, having invited the press to witness the attack. After the battle, they were seen carting away the automatic weapons and heavy machine gun they had captured. By the next morning, with the police gone, the KLA were back in the village.
Several major European papers such as Le Figaro and Le Monde challenged the story that Walker fed the press. They noted that it was sharply contradicted by the AP footage. The television crew saw no evidence of a mass execution, nor did the French journalist from Le Monde who came through later in the afternoon. Nor did Walker's own KVM monitors report any to him or anyone else. Other questions loomed: Why did journalists find so few cartridges and almost no blood around the ditch where the executions were supposed to have taken place? The village was known to have been a KLA bastion, most of its denizens having fled long before the day of the fighting. How then could these forty-four men and one woman have been innocent Racak civilian residents? (The KLA had a small number of female fighters in their ranks.)
The Yugoslav government reacted with outrage to Walker's charges, and demanded that autopsies be performed on all the bodies in the face of efforts to bury them immediately "in conformity with Muslim practice." Some time later, independent autopsy reports by Byelorussian and Finnish forensic experts were released. These unanimously concluded that all wounds had been inflicted from a distance, contradicting Walker's assertion that he saw "bodies with their faces blown away at close range in execution fashion." There was no evidence of mutilation, and thirty-seven of the corpses had gunpowder residue on their hands, strongly suggesting that they were KLA combatants killed in action. Most likely they were then placed in the ditch that night or early morning by the returning KLA unit to create the impression of a massacre. Walker then conveniently appeared on the scene with a small army of journalists to help turn a military defeat into a propaganda victory.
None of these facts ever registered with the US media. A year later, in February 2000, PBS's Frontline reported Racak just the way Walker would have wanted, raising none of the questions proffered by more critical eyewitnesses. Frontline falsely reported that children were found among the "massacred" although the footage showed only adult bodies. "Within days," the narrator said, "the political landscape did change. Racak was decisive." On that same program, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced that drastic action had to be taken when "something as terrible as Racak can happen." Indeed, three days after Walker's accusations, Albright issued a new demand: NATO military occupation of all of Yugoslavia, and autonomy for Kosovo. If Belgrade balked, then it would be bombed. The stage was set for the diplomatic aggression launched at Rambouillet a few weeks later.