or Are you saying that one genocide deserves another? Or that it was all of our fault via history....so we shouldn't have intervened?
For quite some years before Clark was in charge of NATO, it was the Serbians doing the dirty deed (1994 to 1999). Of course there was reprisals for Serbian action by Albanians...but it was the Serbs who held the governmental power during the Kosovo campaign.
http://www9.sbs.com.au/theworldnews/region.php?id=113035®ion=3http://www.ogrish.com/archives/2005/june/ogrish-dot-com... http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=1520469Genocide By Mass Starvation;
NATO Strategy Makes Sense On One Level. But, In Humanitarian Terms, It's A Fatal Miscalculation. Los Angeles Times
April 25, 1999, Sunday, Home Edition
http://www.refugees.org/news/op_eds/042599.htmPresident Slobodan Milosevic's ability to stop and start massive refugee flows out of Kosovo is a chilling sign of his power and intent. From the Nazis to the Khmer Rouge, closed borders have been a serious sign that genocide is occurring. Genocide does not require gas chambers or even mass graves. A favored tactic is calculated mass starvation. That is what is happening in Kosovo. Serb forces used food as a weapon during the war in Bosnia. They rarely engaged in battle, preferring to surround and besiege an area, subject it to shelling and cut it off from food.
Long before the bombing began, Milosevic began a systematic campaign to deplete Kosovo of its food resources. Beginning last summer, Serb forces:
restricted importation of basic items into Kosovo, including wheat, rice, cooking oil, sugar, salt, meat, milk, livestock, heating fuel and gasoline;
looted warehouses and burned fields, haystacks, winter food stocks and firewood.
killed livestock and often dropped their carcasses into wells to contaminate the water;
shot at ethnic Albanian farmers trying to harvest or plant;
Harassed, persecuted and sometimes killed local humanitarian aid workers;
created nearly 300,000 internally displaced people, most of whom stayed with private families, eating what private stores of food they had managed to save.
In the best of times, Kosovo is not a self-sufficient food producer.
By early this year, with planting and harvesting brought to a halt and with food stocks consumed or destroyed, there were no food reserves outside Serbian government shops. Most of the population was dependent on humanitarian aid delivered through a network of U.N. agencies and local and international nongovernmental organizations. That network is gone. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Food Program are out of Kosovo. International nongovernmental groups have been expelled and are now working with refugees outside Kosovo. Local nongovernment groups have been decimated, their staff members lucky to become refugees themselves.
Before NATO's military objectives can be achieved,
Milosevic will already have accomplished his objective: Grinding down Kosovo's 1.8 million ethnic Albanians. One rule of war is this: Men with guns do not starve; civilians do. NATO is not going to beat the Yugoslav military by starving them out, and if it did, the civilians would perish long before them.
As hunger and disease loom, various interim steps have been suggested: internal safe havens, food air drops, humanitarian corridors. Each is flawed, largely because each requires cooperation from Milosevic that in all likelihood will never come to be.
Milosevic could achieve his aims simply by dragging his feet. Everyone is concerned about the lives of NATO servicemen, but the people on the executioner's block cannot wait for a risk-free, soldier-friendly environment for their rescue. They can't wait for the amassing of 200,000 troops, if that will take months of buildup and field support. They can't wait for a "permissive environment."
Mass Graves, Mass Denial (PDF)
http://www.bard.edu/bgia/journal/vol2/63-66.pdfhttp://www.religioustolerance.org/war_koso.htmDid the Serbs commit genocide?Civilian populations are increasingly being targeted during recent civil wars. However,
atrocities must match certain specific criteria before they are considered genocide. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
defines genocide as "certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such. The proscribed acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, forcibly transferring its children to another group, or deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part." Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia during the mid 1990s started as mass expulsions of civilians. It escalated to include internment in concentration camps, mass executions, rapes, etc.
There was a clear policy by the Serbs "to exterminate Muslim Bosnians as a group..." Their actions were generally considered to be genocide. There is a general consensus that widespread atrocities were also committed by the Muslims and the Croats (largely Roman Catholic). But the level of their war crimes did not reach genocidal proportions.
There have been allegations that the Serbs were engaged in genocide in Kosovo before and during the NATO bombing. Media correspondents and human rights investigators conducted large-scale interviews of Kosovar refugees. The data collected show that the Geneva Conventions concerning civilians had been ignored and that extremely serious war crimes were perpetrated by the Yugoslavian army, police and militias.
There appeared to be a consensus of human rights investigators that the quantity and type of documented atrocities proved that genocide was committed by the Yugoslavian government against the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. This belief was confirmed as the NATO forces occupied Kosovo. Mass graves were located and are being systematically examined by forensic specialists. Ethnic Albainians came out of hiding with horrendous stories to tell. In excess of 11,000 murders were reported to authorities. According to a report by the U.N.'s chief prosecutor in Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, on 1999-NOV-10, 2,108 complete corpses and an unknown but large number of incompete corpses were found. By 1999-NOV, a total of 195 grave sites in Kosovo had been analyzed; another four hundred remained to be investigated. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2147781.stmMass grave found near Srebrenica Tuesday, 23 July, 2002, 22:35 GMT 23:35 UK
Forensic experts in Bosnia have discovered a mass grave in the north-east of the country, close to the site of the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. It is thought the grave contains the bodies of Bosnian Muslims killed by Bosnian Serb forces after they captured Srebrenica. Skeletons 'incomplete' The grave site was discovered on Monday near the Serb-held village of Kamenica, some 70 kilometres (45 miles) north-east of Sarajevo.
The commission said it had "reliable proof" that the remains were transported to the grave from another location, in order to conceal the remains from war crime investigators.
He said some of the skeletons were incomplete, and that others were found with their hands bound by wire.
More than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed after the fall of Srebrenica, in the worst massacre Europe has seen since World War II.
So far 6,000 bodies have been exhumed from numerous mass graves around the town, but only 300 have been identified.
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his army chief Ratko Mladic have been implicated in the Srebrenica massacres. New mass grave found in Kosovo as Milosevic trial nearsPosted: 02/11/2002 11:10 amLast Updated: 2002-02-11 11:58:09-05
Kroni I Mbretit, Yugoslavia - Kosovo villagers have discovered a new mass grave, just two days before former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic goes on trial for engineering genocide in their province.
The remains were uncovered in western Kosovo on Sunday. The remains of up to 20 bodies were found in a shallow grave by children playing in the area.
Several villagers living near the grave will offer testimony in the upcoming trial of Milosevic, which starts tomorrow in the Hague, but their testimony will focus on other events, and not the grave uncovered Sunday.http://www.wndu.com/news/022002/news_12301.phphttp://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/09/09/serb.grave/BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Serbian forensic experts have discovered another mass grave near a lake in southwestern Serbia. The grave is believed to contain bodies of ethnic Albanians killed during the 1999 war in Kosovohttp://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/06/11/bosnia.pit/index.htmlBosnia mass grave foundJune 11, 2001 Posted: 3:58 AM EDT (0758 GMT)
MOUNT MALUSA, Bosnia -- A mass grave containing bodies of victims of the notorious Foca prison camp has been discovered in Bosnia, Reuters has reported.
Bosnian Muslim officials found the grave hidden deep in a dense forest after receiving a letter signed by "a Serb from Foca," the agency said. Rice for SOS hearings:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/19/politics/19cnd-rtex.h ...
"My last point has to do with Milosevic. You said you can't compare the two dictators. You know, you're right; no two tyrants are alike. But the fact is Milosevic started wars that killed 200,000 in Bosnia, 10,000 in Kosovo and thousands in Croatia, and he was nabbed and he's out without an American dying for it. That's the facts. Now I suppose we could have gone in there and people could have killed to get him. The fact is not one person wants either of those two to see the light of day, again. And in one case we did it without Americans dying. In the other case, we did it with Americans dying. And I think if you ask the average American, you know, was Saddam worth one life, one American life, they'd say, "No, he's the bottom of the barrel." And the fact is we've lost so many lives over it. So if we do get a little testy on the point, and I admit to be so, it's because it continues day in and day out, and 25 percent of the dead are from California.
We cannot forget. We cannot forget that.
Thank you. "
A Short History:The Bosnian-Herzegovinian declaration of sovereignty in October of 1991, was followed by a referendum for independence from Yugoslavia in February 1992 boycotted by the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Serbs. Serbia and Bosnian Serbs responded shortly thereafter with armed attacks on Bosnian-Herzegovinian Croats and Bosniaks aimed at partitioning the republic along ethnic lines and joining Serb-held areas. The UNPROFOR (UN Protection Force) was deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina in mid-1992. 1992 and 1993 saw the greatest bloodshed in Europe after 1945. In March 1994, Bosniaks and Croats reduced the number of warring factions from three to two by signing an agreement creating a joint Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Each nation reported many casualties in the three sided conflict, in which the Bosniaks reported the highest number of deaths and casualties. However, the only case officially ruled by the U.N. Hague tribunal as genocide was the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. At the end of the war more than 200,000 had been killed and more than 2 million people fled their homes (including over 1 million to neighboring nations and the west).
On November 21, 1995, in Dayton, Ohio, presidents of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Alija Izetbegoviæ), Croatia (Franjo Tuðman), and Serbia (Slobodan Miloševiæ) signed a peace agreement that brought a halt to the three years of war in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (the final agreement was signed in Paris on 14 December 1995). The Dayton Agreement succeeded in ending the bloodshed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it institutionalized the division between the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslim and Croat entity - Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (51% of the territory), and the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Serb entity - Republika Srpska (49%).
The enforcement of the implementation of the Dayton Agreement was through a UN mandate using various multinational forces: NATO-led IFOR (Implementation Force), which transitioned to the SFOR (Stabilisation Force) the next year, which in turn transitioned to the EU-led EUFOR at end of 2004. The civil administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina is headed by the High Representative of the international community.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BosniaThe Magistrate (1000+ posts) Fri Jan-28-05 12:19 AM
Response to Reply #150
153. If Anyone Is Desirous Of Facts In This Matter
The Unhappy History of Kosovo
One: Origin of the Quarrel
The clash in Kossovo of Arnaut and Vascian, as the peoples known to we moderns as Albanian and Serb were oft known in Ottoman days, differs from the usual run of Balkan bloodletting; it describes a real ethnic difference. Serb, Croat, Slovene, Montenegrin; all are Slavs, divided due to institutions only. Albanians remain in some proportion survivals of the old Dalmatian and Illyric peoples of Roman days, taken to craggy peaks for refuge from a tide of Slavic invasion commencing with the sixth century.
Medieval Albanian Catholicism offered further differentiation from Orthodox Serbs. The northeastern extension of the Albanian remnant, and the southern marches of the Serb, coincided roughly in modern Kossovo. Here the Serb Czar and Orthodox Patriarchite were able to exert authority the more atomized Albanian polity could not. After the death of the Albanian chieftain Skanderberg, and the Ottoman routing of Venice from the latter's Adriatic lodgments, late in the fifteenth century, Albanians generally converted to Islam.
In Kossovo, this established local Albanians' dominance over the Orthodox Serb peasantry, as the Ottoman gave landlord's tenure only to Moslems. More enterprising or desperate Serbs migrated north; Albanians of similar motivation replaced them from the west. The locale remained poorly ordered, and a frequent theater for rebellion and consequent Ottoman suppression.
The catastrophe suffered by the Ottoman besieging Vienna in 1683 led to the swift seizure of Bosnia, Albania, and Serbia by Austrian and Bavarian Catholic armies. An Austrian force ventured into Kossovo in 1689, setting Albanian and Serb alike both to rebellion against the Ottoman and to battle against one another. The Austrians soon were routed at Nish. In Kossovo, the Ottoman killed every inhabitant they could lay hands on for days. Serbs fled north in great number, Albanians fled west.
With Ottoman authority reasserted, it was mostly Albanians who returned. These soon outnumbered the Serb survivors and progeny. Erection of an autonomous Serbia early in the nineteenth century enticed Kossovo Serbs to migrate north and acquire a freehold farm there. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877, which saw near collapse for the tottering Ottoman, was preceded and followed by Serb attacks.
These fell on Ottoman garrisons and Moslem inhabitants in the south of modern Serbia, culminating in the 1878 sack and firing of the Albanian quarter in Nish. Islamic refugees fled into Kossovo; Christians fled into Serbia for shelter from ensuing pogrom, and advancing Ottoman soldiery. The peace imposed by the Treaty of Berlin left Kossovo under unrestricted Ottoman rule.
Two: To the Yugoslav Monarchy
Albanian agitation for autonomy on modern terms within the declining Ottoman imperium began at Prizren in Kossovo, and at Istanbul. The Serb remnant in Kossovo were subjected to a wretched existence, without recourse from predation by landlord or hostile brigand. Early in 1912, declaration of an Albanian state ignited a successful rebellion in Kossovo against the Ottoman. In the Balkan War, pitting Slav and Greek against the Ottoman that autumn, Serbian armies struck south through Kossovo with great massacre against the Albanian populace. The Treaty of Bucharest in 1913 confirmed Serbia in possession of Kossovo.
During World War One, Austria-Hungary put Serbia's army to flight in 1915. Albanians in Kossovo rose against the retreating Serbs with utmost savagery. The Serb soldiers replied in kind to fight their way through to the Adriatic, there embarking on French ships to tremendous Allied acclaim. Serb armies re-entered Kossovo from the south by the 1918 Armistice, and were bitterly resisted by Albanian rebels. The new Yugoslav monarchy with its Serb king did not succeed in breaking organized resistance till 1924 in Kossovo. Brigandage, and brutal reprisal, remained endemic to the locale.
The Serb monarchy of Yugoslavia superintended a determined effort to secure its rule in Kossovo. Land was stolen from Albanians as "undocumented," and made available for Serbs who would venture south to settle on it. Schools teaching in Albanian, originally encouraged in the hope they would keep Albanians backward, proved hotbeds of secessionist agitation, and were suppressed. In 1937, the monarchy entertained proposals by a leading Serb intellectual, the assassin turned historian Vaso Cubrilovic of Belgrade University, that all Albanians be forcibly expelled from Kossovo.
Near the start of World War Two, Fascist Italy seized Albania. Nazi Germany seized Yugoslavia in 1941. The mines in northern Kossovo, and most Kossovo Serbs therefore, were retained under Nazi occupation; the remainder of Kossovo was awarded to Italian Albania. Serbs in Italian Kossovo, mostly recent settlers, were pitilessly persecuted by Albanians, even against occasional Italian opposition. The S. S. security division "Skanderberg" was largely recruited among Kossovo Albanians.
Three: The Tito Era
After Italy capitulated in 1943, Tito, the Communist partisan leader, declared Kossovo would be allowed self-determination if Communists won. In 1944, his partisans succeeded in fighting their way into the place, with some local Albanian support at last. Royalist Chetnik partisans violently opposed any idea of Kossovo secession, winning Tito even more support in that locale.
Tito, however, reneged on that promised self-determination, annexing Kossovo anew to Serbia as an "Autonomous district" within his new Yugoslavia. The Albanian Communist leader, Enver Hoxha, was in no position to contest the matter, amid talk under Stalin of a Balkan Federation to include Albania itself. Tito's break in 1948 with Stalin ended any real hope for Hoxha he could fold Kossovo into his hoped for Greater Albania.
Kossovo's populace was then about three-fifths Albanian and one-quarter Serb, with the remainder including Moslem Slavs, Catholic Montenegrins, Turks, and Gypsies. Tito saw that Communist party and police supervisors in Kossovo were Serbs. These energetically hunted up the least hint of Albanian secessionists, harvesting batches of them for show trials in 1956 (coincident with the Hungarian revolt), and again in 1964.
Tito purged his Serb Interior Minister in 1966, for opposition to economic decentralization. Albanian Communists replaced Serbs in Party and police supervisory posts in Kossovo. In the "Prague Spring" of '68, Kossovo Albanian students demonstrated for national status in Yugoslavia, and an Albanian language university. After many arrests, Tito granted the university in 1970. Albanian language textbooks could only be got in Enver Hoxha's Albania, which opened a connection to the new Kossovo school in Pristina for his enterprising "special service" agents.
A new Yugoslav constitution in 1974 gave autonomous Serbian Kossovo effective national status, with a representative on the Yugoslav collective presidency. Albanian Kossovo police and party personnel suppressed radical cliques, inspired to "Enverism" (as secession became called) by Hoxha's agents. Some of these cliques, formed about 1978, included young men who would later become leading lights of the present-day Kossovo Liberation Army.
Tito died in 1980. In spring of 1981, Kossovo Albanian students at Pristina University began demonstrations demanding independence, even fusion with Hoxha's Albania, to applause from spectators. Yugoslav Interior Ministry troops arrived, and broke the demonstrations, shooting and beating scores to death. Kossovo Albanian party and police officials sustained the crack-down, loyally denouncing "Enverist" radicals, and arresting and beating hundreds suspected of such leanings.
Radical secessionist leaders fled to sanctuaries in Western Europe. Several, meeting near Stuttgart in 1982 to form a popular front, were ambushed and shot dead by unknown assailants. Surviving radicals concluded the bullets came from Serbs in the Yugoslav Interior Ministry, and swore blood vengeance. Under the name of Popular Movement for the Kossovo Republic, a handful of such trained in Albania, and attempted a campaign of gun-battles and bombs against Kossovo and Yugoslav police.
Four: Rise of Milosevic
These largely would-be assassins had no material effect, but a profound moral one. Any crime against serbs in Kossovo was in serbia reported as secessionist terror, and crimes against Serbs in Kossovo, particularly against property of isolated farms and Orthodox sites, occurred with increasing frequency. The Serb Orthodox Patriarchite was ranged alongside the Serb Academy of Sciebces in protest of this, with the latter, in 1985, calling the current situation genocide against against Serbs in Kossovo.
At the start of 1986, the banker Slobodan Milosevic ascended to leadership of the Serb Communist Party. Belligerence in favor of Serbs dwelling outside Serbia's boundaries, or in the autonomous districts of Vojvodina and Kossovo, offered a ready lever for political power. Kossovo Serbs were organizing militias with assistance from Serb Interior Ministry police; Hoxha's death had not altered Albania's support of "Enverism" in Kossovo.
Early in 1987, Milosevic arrived in Pristina's suburbs for a meeting with Kossovo Serb leaders. A large crowd of Kossovo Serbs rioted before him against the largely Albanian Kossovo police. It was not chance; four days before, Milosevic had met with the riot's instigators, and a schedule had been fixed for the outbreak.
Widely broadcast film of the incident established Milosevic as champion of distressed Serbs. Later that year, Milosevic used this popularity to force Serbia's president from office. In the summer of 1988, Milosevic's Serb Communist Party organized a campaign of Kossovo Remembrance rallies throughout Serbia proper, claiming an average attendance of half a million at each. In November, Milosevic as Party chief dismissed the Albanians in Communist Party leadership in Kossovo, and promulgated constitutional changes effectively stripping Kossovo of its autonomous status.
Albanian Communist leadership in Kossovo mobilized sizable demonstrations and hunger strikes in protest early in 1989. These were broken with loss of life by Yugoslav Interior Ministry troops, who seized the arms of both Kossovo's national guard and police. Closely surrounded by tanks, the Kossovo Assembly voted itself out of effective existence on March 23.
Milosevic now accepted the Presidency of Serbia. Continuing Albanian demonstrations in Kossovo were broken by Serb and Yugoslav soldiers and police; hundreds of arrests were accompanied by torture. At the end of the year, Albanian intellectuals and some Communist leaders collected to form the Democratic League for Kossovo. The police terror stilled the demonstrations early in 1990.
Milosevic ratified Serb Parliament decrees forbidding Albanians to buy land from Serbs in Kossovo, and removing Albanians from civil service, including hospitals, schools, and the police. The latter quickly became overwhelmingly Serb. The Albanian membership of the Communist Party in Kossovo took up membership in the League for Democratic Kossovo.
Five: The Kossovo Resistance
This L. D. K. was led by the writer Ibrahim Rugova. He inspired Kossovo Albanians to a program of passive resistance to Serb authority. A "shadow state" emerged, quartered in private dwellings, and with a government in exile operating in Germany. Rugova's "shadow state" held elections, administered Albanian language schooling, even collected taxes. These applied equally to Kossovo Albanians dwelling abroad; most were guest-worker laborers in Europe, but some were prosperous businessmen, or smugglers of stolen cars and narcotics and prostitutes.
The handful of violent radicals constituting the Popular Movement for the Kossovo Republic (P. M. K. R.) were denounced by Rugova as stooges of the Serb police, and he was widely believed by Kossovo Albanians when he did. The radicals' sporadic gunshots and arsons each served to signal a fresh campaign of interrogations and beatings by Serb police, directed against the nonviolent "shadow state" organizers.
With Yugoslav and Serb armed forces devoted to war in Croatia and Bosnia, Milosevic was content to leave Kossovo at this status quo. On Serb victory in Croatia, one of the leading Serb killers, an Interior Ministry employee known as Arkan, moved to Pristina with scores of armed followers. "Enverist" radicals of the P. M. K. R. secretly convened in Drenica (where resistance to the old Yugoslav monarchy had persisted into 1924), and there voted themselves the armed force of the Kossovo Republic. Albania's newly elected government maintained cordial relations both with these radicals, and
Rugova's pacific Kossovo government in exile, now established near Bonn.
Kossovo Albanian boycott of official Serb elections in December 1993 gave Milosevic a resounding victory over his rival for the presidency, the Serb-American businessman Panic, and allowed the killer Arkan to win election to a parliament seat. The "Enverist" radicals were split into a Marxist faction, the National Movement for the Liberation of Kossovo, and a Nationalist faction, the Kossovo Liberation Army. The latter had a better footing abroad, where the pacific Rugova's government in exile at Bonn was beginning to explore establishing its own armed force. Albania continued to assist by giving military training to dozens of radicals, and allowing transit through its borders.
The bloody summer of 1995 saw Serb massacre of Bosnian Moslems, Croat expulsion of Serbs, and NATO bombing of Serb forces in Bosnia. The Dayton Accords confirmed Serb gains in Bosnia, and recognized the rump Yugoslav Federation Milosevic dominated, from his seat for Serbia in its collective presidency. The pacific Rugova used his control of Albanian language media in Kossovo to maintain popular commitment to passive resistance, while the fledgling KLA demanded Serb departure from Kossovo, and launched a new campaign of sporadic shootings and bombings.
Serbia was greatly unsettled by the influx of refugees from Krajina and Slavonia. In Yugoslav elections on May 31, 1996, the Montenegrin presidency went to an opponent of Milosevic, and in Serbia, opposition parties won local posts in many cities. Milosevic refused to allow victorious opponents to take office in Serbia. He allowed three months of demonstrations, then bought off his principal Serb opponent by offering him a cabinet post. The demonstrations were mopped up by brutal police attack, and opposition figures allowed to take local office found their function superseded by various national agencies. The Vatican brokered an agreement Milosevic signed to allow Albanian language schools official existence in Kossovo, but he took no steps to implement it.
Six: Taking Up the Gun
In Bonn, the leading functionary of Rugova's government in exile, Bujar Bukoshi, rejected passive resistance, and turned the radio transmitter he controlled to broadcasts supporting the KLA. Early in 1997, Albania's banks were revealed as Ponzi swindles. Mobs looted government facilities, including military arsenals, and swiftly reduced the land to anarchic chaos, in which a Kalshnikov rifle could be had for a five dollar bill.
Bukoshi's embryonic forces, consisting of a few hundred exiled policemen and soldiers, established themselves in Albania as the Armed Forces of the Kossovo Republic (F. A. R. K.), in competition with the KLA. Albanian students organized demonstrations against Milosevic's refusal to implement the Vatican agreement on schooling, ignoring orders to desist from Rugova. Serb police crushed the demonstrations with extraordinary brutality.
KLA attacks, which by the Serb government's claims had been occurring roughly once a week, and claimed ten Serb lives since 1995, began to take place almost daily at the start of 1998. In the old rebel district of Drenica, near the village of Likosane just before noon on February 28, a gunfight broke out between KLA men and a Serb police patrol. Once it was over, Serb police massacred the men of a wealthy Albanian clan considered leaders of the hamlet. Five days later, Serb police surrounded the family compound of a KLA leader and shelled it for hours, then went into the ruins and murdered women, children, and wounded, to a total of 58, including the KLA man, Adem Jashari.
These murders turned Albanian village elders throughout Kossovo against Rugova's passive resistance. They put hundreds of their young men at the disposal of the KLA. In Drenica, and near the Albanian border, armed partisan bands appeared in such strength the Serb police retired to establish encircling roadblocks. Western diplomats threatened Milosevic with dire consequences if the murders by his police were repeated. Milosevic agreed to begin implementing the Vatican schools agreement, and to meet with Ibrahim Rugova. Simultaneously, Milosevic admitted the ultra-nationalist Chetnik party into a coalition government with his Serbian Socialist Party, and loosed his Serb police once again into Drenica.
This campaign was conducted with the same degree of atrocity that characterized previous operations by Serb police. In one typical incident near Gorjne Obrinje, after fourteen Serb police were shot in a fire-fight, a group of fourteen Albanian women, children, and old men found hiding nearby were shot point-blank by Serb police. Some 200,000 Albanians fled their homes to avoid the fighting, some to southern Kossovo and some to Albania. President Clinton ordered a show of force by U. S. warplanes over Yugoslavia, and in October, his pressure secured an agreement by which Serb Interior Ministry troops were to vacate Kossovo, negotiations with Kossovo Albanian leaders were to begin in earnest, and a body of diplomatic observers would enter Kossovo to monitor events. During the course of negotiating this agreement, Milosevic told a U. S. general that the way to bring peace to Drenica was to "kill them all."
The monitored cease-fire brought many Kossovo Albanian refugees back to their homes. In Albania, the Kossovo government in exile's small armed force was violently absorbed by the KLA; in Kossovo, KLA men began arresting and executing functionaries of Rugova's "shadow state" as collaborators with Serbia. They also murdered about a dozen Serb civilians, and a Serb village mayor. By the start of 1999, fire-fights of company and even battalion scale between KLA guerrillas and Serb police were once more occurring.
Near dawn on January 15, battle broke out between KLA guerrillas and Serb police near the town of Racak. After nine KLA men were killed the rest fled. During the afternoon Serb police entered the town, raped and murdered two women, and murdered forty-three unarmed men and boys. Serb Information Ministry spokesmen in Pristina next morning invited Western journalists to visit the scene of a "successful" fight against the KLA; when they reported what they saw, Milosevic declared the KLA had fabricated the incident, and demanded the diplomatic observers quit Kossovo. The chief judge of the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia was denied entry to the country.
Seven: The NATO Intervention
NATO demanded the talks agreed to the previous October begin in February, and threatened military action to force compliance. The meeting at Rambouillet Chateau featured a severely fractured Albanian delegation; its principal factions (all of which hated one another) were Rugova's adherents in the old LDK, old line Communist functionaries from that same umbrella group, and the KLA led by Hashim Thaci. After days of negotiation, Milosevic struck out about half the already settled agreement, substituting his initial demands, which the Albanians and NATO had already rejected, and forced collapse of the talks on March 18. Two days later, 40,000 Serb police and soldiers with 300 armored vehicles launched a fresh offensive into Drenica.
NATO air strikes commenced against Serbia on March 24. While these aimed at destroying Serb anti-aircraft defenses, Serb police and soldiers in Kossovo commenced a wholesale assault on the Albanians of Kossovo, aimed at driving them from the country by exemplary massacre. During the course of this campaign, roughly 10,000 persons, mostly young men, were murdered by Serb police and soldiers. Almost a million Albanians took to flight, either west to Albania, south into Macedonia, or into the mountains of Kossovo itself. Lightly armed KLA guerrillas could accomplish nothing against the Serb forces.
When Serb air defenses were disabled, NATO warplanes began attacks demolishing bridges, power stations, and the like in Serbia proper. With Serb police and soldiers forced to retire their heavy equipment to shelter in bunkers by NATO air bombardment in Kossovo, their murder squads became vulnerable to attack by Albanian partisans, many of whom were not, properly speaking, KLA, but village militia deployed by their clan elders. When Serb police and soldiers attempted to group together to overpower these guerrilla bands, the Serbs were savaged by NATO warplanes.
On June 3, Milosevic capitulated. Serb police and soldiers retired northward; NATO troops moved in. Kossovo Albanian refugees streamed back to their homes. Many set upon Serbs still remaining in Kossovo. NATO troops intervened to protect lives, but not property; even so, several dozen Serbs, many elderly, were killed. The overwhelming majority of Serbs resident in Kossovo fled north into Serbia, or into that small portion of northern Kossovo around the mines where they had long constituted the principal element of the populace.
A government for Kossovo, formed under NATO auspices, blended elements of the LDK and KLA, with the KLA's Hashim Thaci emerging as Prime Minister, while Ibrahim Rugova, the nonviolent leader, found himself without power, or much prestige. The KLA has kept its word to disarm only poorly, and remains a police problem for NATO occupation troops. It has attempted to provoke guerrilla war in the adjoining areas of Macedonia which are largely populated by Albanians, but has had scant success there, either in baiting the Macedonian government into atrocious reaction to their activities, or in gaining wide support among Albanian people in those districts.
Postcript
This piece was written several years ago, which does not, of course, alter the body of facts it presents. In the interim, there does not seem to have been too much change. The remnant Serbian population of the district has been squeezed north and out, and the doing, while unwholesome, is about all that could be expected under the circumstances. There has been some friction between the K.L.A. and the NATO forces, but nothing approaching the scale of even the first stages of revolt against Milosevic.
The situation is, by and large, about as good as could be expected, given the history and recent trauma of the place.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
