The Albanian Front
Carnegie, Marc
The Albanian Front MARC CARNEGIE I t's hard to know what to say about the war on Yugoslavia that NATO hasn't already said itself. In any given press conference from allied spokesman...
...diplomat, has coincidentally spent much of his career in the vicinity of clandestine rebel operations much like the KLA's...
...The move weakened Berisha by damaging the economy, drying up crucial revenues for the well-organized fuel smugglers in Albania's nascent free market...
...And this despite the OSCE's own declaration that "the lawfulness of the newly elected Albanian Parliament cannot be questioned...
...It has been consistently ignored, but the Kosovar Albanians themselves began the terrorism long before Milosevic came to power...
...And then there is Albania...
...The American Spectator • Jun e 1999 But much of the effect of that aid was counteracted by Clinton's decision, as part of the appeasement of Milosevic, to lift sanctions against Serbia...
...That left him in a jam, and when some real fraud did come around (in the form of a massive pyramid scheme that wiped out thousands of eager new capitalists), Albania erupted...
...It reported that Walker, a former U.S...
...The transition to a free market was not easier than elsewhere, but Albania was a kind of limited success...
...International observers at the elections testified that they had taken place in peaceful and mostly acceptable circumstances...
...The Clinton administration's U.S...
...Those killings, one now needs to be reminded, were taking place wholly within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, to which Kosovo belongs...
...There are differing accounts of just when the KLA was formed—some put it in 1981 or 1982, others as late as 1996 —but none disputes that even two years ago it was nothing more than a loose band of several hundred guerrilla misfits, financed by Albanian control over the flow of heroin into Hungary, Italy, and elsewhere...
...The Tosks in general do not like them...
...When Salvadoran police slaughtered a half-dozen Jesuit priests, Walker said: "Management control problems can exist in these kinds of situations...
...No one doubts Milosevic was cracking down, but what the West has repeatedly ignored is that he had something to crack down on...
...It doesn't look very good, and, thank you Jamie Shea, it doesn't look like it has much to do with human rights, either...
...The terrorists from the Kosovo Liberation Army will be armed to the teeth and perhaps a bit anxious for revenge...
...effort to help Marxist rebels backed by a socialist government the Clinton administration helped to put in power...
...And who was the OSCE official who "validated" the KLA's claim of a massacre...
...representative to the OSCE's human-rights monitoring operation on the scene declared it a massacre despite arriving in Racak some 12 hours after the "Serbian security forces" had departed...
...After the fall of the Iron Curtain, however, he became a committed pro-Westerner and Albania's first post-Soviet president...
...The OSCE's claims further heightened the instability and unrest...
...More than 1,000 people were killed in the ensuing anarchy, and the nation's weapons depots and arsenals were looted...
...Serbia will be even more impoverished and unstable, not least by having lost Kosovo—home to much of its precious mineral reserves...
...Kosovo has already been implanted with thousands of land mines that will make the "return" of the Albanians nearly as nightmarish as their departure, not to mention that if they get through the minefields there won't be much left to return to...
...Nevertheless, the OSCE declared the elections valid...
...In the ensuing 18 months, 3,000 people were killed in Kosovo, some Soo to boo of them Serb and Albanian politicians...
...Of course there's one thing that Jamie Shea isn't so keen to talk about, and that's what happens to Kosovo and Albania after NATO finally finishes winning...
...The two do not much like each other, and at the extreme ends of their different dialects cannot even understand each other...
...Business was good, and human-rights abuses were virtually non-existent...
...The standard explanation of their transformation into a highly-organized force of some 30,000 troops —with AK-47's, grenade launchers, and more —is that "volunteers" swelled the ranks in reaction to Milosevic's abominations...
...Now there are open calls on Capitol Hill from both sides of the aisle for the U.S...
...was effectively taking it away...
...More than a million Kosovars are now refugees...
...to arm the KLA directly...
...Berisha was not allowed to campaign in the south, international observers had to be escorted by tanks and armored personnel carriers, and gun-toting goons manned the polling stations...
...Several major newspapers, including Le Monde and the Los Angeles Times, have reported that the KLA may have faked the massacre in order to get NATO to act against Milosevic, noting that there were no bullet casings or blood in the trench where the bodies were "discovered...
...Dissident Albanians encouraged violence against the Serbs, including the damaging of their factories...
...He also served as U.S...
...The OSCE charges helped reinforce the geographical, political, and ethnic divide that Albania has in common with many nations—in this case between the pro-Berisha Ghegs in the north and the socialist-leaning southern Tosks...
...soldiers and that we're very glad Jesse Jackson has succeeded in releasing the soldiers, that the point of continuing the bombardment is to stop Albanians from being forced out of Kosovo and that more Albanians have been forced out of Kosovo...
...But by mid-April, Defense Secretary William Cohen was making the astonishing announcement that the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia "will shift the military balance decisively in favor of the KLA...
...42 June 1999 The American Spectator ment of then-President Sali Berisha fall, the KLA wouldn't have been able to arm itself enough to commit the atrocities that Milosevic was trying to punish it for...
...They halted the direct flow of arms to the KLA, whom they actively disliked...
...Already one of the poorest nations in the world, the influx of refugees that even Jamie Shea admits was the result of the NATO bombing has left the nation teetering on the verge of collapse...
...Of course no one could think that Walker is involved in an undercover U.S...
...MARC CARNEGIE is TAS's correspondent at large...
...If the Clinton administration had not bowed to European pressure to let the pro-Western governHow the U.S...
...New elections were held in 1997, amid an atmosphere of total chaos...
...The remarkable thing is that much of the crisis in Kosovo is a direct result of the West's intentional meddling in Albania three years ago...
...He was named (but not charged) in Lawrence Walsh's Iran-contra indictments...
...William Walker, not perhaps everyone's first choice as "human-rights monitor...
...As the quirky but excellent Moscow magazine (published by U.S...
...Berisha had been a Marxist when the country was ruled by Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha...
...But by then the genie was long gone from the bottle...
...the U.S...
...But what was a man with William Walker's record doing there as a human-rights monitor...
...Just been blown up by an errant cruise missile...
...There is a U.S...
...In fact they began escalating the bloodshed in Kosovo in 1997 after beginning to acquire those weapons from Albania, where Berisha had been ousted with the tacit agreement of the Clinton administration and the active participation of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE...
...There were "no reports of politically motivated disappearances," the report said, noting that there had been but one killing in police custody...
...Berisha was fond of boasting that his nation had "more Mercedes per capita" than other countries behind the old Iron Curtain, and while everyone got the joke—Albania is an international bazaar for stolen cars —the European Union was sufficiently impressed with Tirana's progress to give it more financial aid than any other nation in Eastern Europe...
...Even in its current bombing campaign, NATO still acknowledges that Kosovo is a part of Yugoslavia...
...It's just like in those sensitive unisex modern school games when the teacher refuses to "privilege" any boy/girl by calling him/her the "winner": we're all winners...
...At the outset of the bombing in late March, spokesman Jamie Shea regularly said that NATO would not "condone" the KLA's rebel actions in Kosovo and denied suggestions that the alliance was effectively going to war on their side...
...Then on Januaryi5 this year —just before the doomed Rambouillet agreement that the Clinton administration tried to foist on Milosevic which effectively would have guaranteed Kosovo's independence from Belgrade—the U.S.-led NATO forces got a perfectly timed excuse to take military action: More than 40 Albanians were allegedly massacred by Serbian security forces in the Kosovar village of Racak...
...The Koso43 var Albanians are close to the Ghegs, but until very recently even Berisha did not publicly support the KLA...
...To cope with the problem, Berisha made the regrettable decision to begin distributing arms to the populace, many of which quickly enough found their way to the KLA either directly or via the black market...
...For once, you can see his point...
...It's okay—NATO's determined to keep your death to a minimum...
...Not surprisingly, claims of human-rights abuses then started to become widespread...
...The EU was giving money...
...In any given press conference from allied spokesman Jamie Shea, he'll say that we're winning the war and that Slobodan Milosevic has more troops than ever in Kosovo, that we're making every effort to minimize civilian deaths and that NATO missiles have just increased the number of civilian deaths, that we don't support Jesse Jackson's efforts to release the U.S...
...Even so, there were but a handful of political killings in Kosovo every year...
...More than loo innocent civilians have now been killed by NATO...
...human-rights monitor with a whiff of CIA about him waiting in the wings...
...set the stage for an alliance with a country and liberation movement straight out of Somalia...
...44 June 1999 • The American Spectator...
...Despite just getting a clean bill of health in the State Department report, Albania came to be seen in Washington as a failing project...
...He was deputy chief of mission in Honduras in the early 198o's when the contra rebels were being formed...
...expatriates) the Exile put it, "If William Walker is not a CIA agent, he's done a very bad job of not looking like one...
...troops who fought clandestinely in El Salvador...
...According to Branka Magas in The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-Up 1980-92, Albanian resistance began as early as April 1981, just after the death of Tito...
...But when Berisha was re-elected in May 1996, the OSCE, which monitored the elections, said the polling had been fraudulent and backed calls from the socialist opposition for the vote to be nullified...
...One thing is certain: NATO and the Clinton administration have changed their tune about the KLA...
...A similar fake appears to have been used to seduce NATO in Bosnia...
...The Washington Post even reported in May 1996 that Walker hosted a Washington dinner for the 5,000 U.S...
...U ntil two years ago political violence in Kosovo was minimal, despite the Clinton administration's cynical decision to strike any mention of Kosovo from the Dayton peace agreement on Bosnia in its rush to cut a deal with Milosevic—whom Clinton now calls a latter-day Hitler (but whom Dayton negotiator Richard Holbrooke described just last year as "a man we can do business with...
...Serbs were being gunned down in the streets, while KLA thugs assassinated those unwilling to join their murderous ranks...
...For reasons that are not entirely clear, the Clinton administration refused to fight the OSCE claims and withdrew its support for Berisha...
...Even so, in its 1996 Albania report, Clinton's State Department hailed the success of its economy and democracy...
...atrocious, but far from a slaughterhouse...
...He established the now-infamous operation at El Salvador's Ilopango air base, which funneled supplies to the contras in Nicaragua...
...ambassador to El Salvador, where "human rights" were not exactly his burning passion...
...Several major papers report that the KLA may have faked the massacre to get NATO to act against Milosevic...
...Berisha was toppled, and the socialists came to power...
Vol. 32 • June 1999 • No. 6
