NATO Fraud - There Was No Genocide In Kosovo
Press Reports On False Claims
Of Genocide By Serbs In Kosovo
www.nlpwessex.org/docs/kosovofalsehoods.htm

"The question of legality arises both in respect of Kosovo and Iraq. Like Lord Goldsmith, Mr Blair regards the lawfulness of the Iraq action as turning on the absence of a second UN resolution, and the reliance on Resolution 1441. Broad questions of international law are also involved. They concern the monopoly of the use of force given to the United Nations in the UN Charter. Since 1945, the conventions on torture and genocide have opened a wider right to use force; there is a general right to arrest those responsible for torture or to intervene to prevent genocide. That was the justification for the Nato intervention in Kosovo."
Lord Rees-Mogg - Blair the dictator bulldozed us into war
London Times, 1 Feburary 2010

"My boss told me that I had seen every single piece of paper on Kosovo that he had. I am not at all sure that was the case. I am not accusing him of falsifying events, his memory may have been faulty, he may not have known what I saw and what he saw, but still he assured me of that. I did also see the reports, for example, on all the conversations between the Prime Minister and President Clinton and Mr Chirac and Mr Schroder—bar only one weekend when things got a little rocky between Downing Street and the White House and there were telephone calls which, of course, were not circulated.... I think certain people were spoiling for a fight in NATO at that time..... If you ask my personal view, I think the terms put to Milosevic at Rambouillet were absolutely intolerable; how could he possibly accept them; it was quite deliberate. That does not excuse an awful lot of other things, but we were at a point when some people felt that something had to be done, so you just provoked a fight....The use of the word 'genocide', which came up very often, I thought was quite misplaced because I do not think Mr Milosevic, whatever else he was doing, was engaged in genocide...."
THE RT HON LORD GILBERT, British Junior Defence Minister During The Kosovo Conflict
Evidence To House of Commons Select Committee On Defense, 20 June 2000

"The second point is about the KLA. Various things have come to us in this evidence we have taken so far. My impression is that a relatively well armed uniformed force came from virtually nowhere and all the questions we have asked about that in the past people have put a block on, it is as though 'we do not talk about that'...."
Mr Mike Gapes MP, Defence Select Committee Member
Minutes Of Evidence To House of Commons Select Committee On Defense, 20 June 2000

"....a growing weight of evidence indicates that the 1999 war had little to do with Milosevic, and everything to do with the US’s economic and military hegemonic ambitions in the Balkans..... Lord Gilbert, the UK’s defence minister in 1999, has admitted that 'the terms put to Milosevic at Rambouillet [the international conference preceding the war] were absolutely intolerable . . . it was quite deliberate'. In an affidavit to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Colonel John Crosland, the UK’s military attaché in Belgrade from 1996-99, stated that the US had decided on regime change in Serbia and had decided to use the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army to achieve that end."
Don't mention the war
New Statesman, 2 April 2009

"A report purporting to show that Belgrade planned the systematic ethnic cleansing of Kosovo's entire Albanian population was faked, a German general has claimed. The plan, known as Operation Horseshoe, was revealed by Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, on April 6 last year, almost two weeks after Nato started bombing Serbia. German public opinion about the Luftwaffe's participation in the airstrikes was divided at the time. Horseshoe - or 'Potkova', as the Germans said it was known in Belgrade - became a staple of Nato briefings. It was presented as proof that President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia had long planned the expulsion of Albanians. James Rubin, the American state department spokesman, cited it only last week to justify Nato's bombardment. Heinz Loquai, a retired brigadier general, has claimed in a new book on the war that the plan was fabricated from run-of-the-mill Bulgarian intelligence reports. Loquai, who now works for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), has accused Rudolf Scharping, the German defence minister, of obscuring the origins of Operation Horseshoe.... Loquai has claimed that the German defence ministry turned a vague report from Sofia into a 'plan', and even coined the name Horseshoe. Die Woche has reported that maps broadcast around the world as proof of Nato's information were drawn up at the German defence headquarters in Hardthöhe.... The Bulgarian report concluded that the goal of the Serbian military was to destroy the Kosovo Liberation Army, and not to expel the entire Albanian population, as was later argued by Scharping and the Nato leadership."
Serbian ethnic cleansing scare was a fake
Sunday Times, 2 April 2000

"Like the war in Iraq, the neocon-inspired war against Yugoslavia in 1999 - which Hari still defends - had nothing to do with 'humanitarian concerns' or 'spreading democracy' (Yugoslavia under Milosevic was a multi-party democracy, with a well-financed opposition media) but was purely and simply about extending Pax Americana and, to use Hari's own words the imposition of mass privatisations. In order to achieve their goal, the empire builders in Washington had to resort to deceit: in 2003, the Big Lie was that Iraq possessed WMDs, four years earlier, it was that Yugoslav forces were committing genocide in Kosovo. Sadly, large sections of the liberal left believed the official version, and in 1999 backed the illegal war. Messrs Perle, Wolfitowitz and Rumsfeld - all members of the executive of the the Balkan Action Committee (which lobbied for US involvement on the side of the separatist leader Izetbegovic in Bosnia, and then for full scale war against Milosevic's rump Yugoslavia in 1999) would never have got the level of public support they did for their wars without the propagandising done for their cause by liberal-left writers like Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Johann Hari - and of course, Christopher Hitchens. Once the liberal-left wakes up to the fact that in Yugoslavia, as in Iraq, they were sold a pack of lies, it really is game over for the serial warmongers."
Seeing the light?
Guardian, Comment Is Free, 25 July 2007

".... everyone knows that those claims of genocide bore as much relation to reality as did the claim made in 2002-2003 that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Indeed, the charge of genocide turned out to be so unsustainable that it was never even included in the indictment against Miloševic."
Kosovo’s Independence Will Stir Up Trouble. Who Will Benefit?
The Brussels Journal, 12 December 2007

An Illegal War In Which NATO Bombed Civilian Targets

"Perhaps the most important, though largely forgotten, recent failure of air power to win a war on its own was in Yugoslavia in 1999, when the Anglo-Americans led by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair illegally intervened (ie, without UN sanction) in a domestic conflict between the Yugoslav Government and the insurgents of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army. Mr Clinton and Mr Blair believed that three days of massive airstrikes against the Yugoslav army in Kosovo would break the nerve of Slobodan Milosevic and his colleagues. In fact, the air onslaught went on for 78 days, and yet was still barren of decisive result - even though extended to targets throughout Yugoslavia, many of them purely civilian, such as bridges, power stations, and even the main TV studios in Belgrade. Why did the Anglo-Americans resort to such extreme means? It was because of the total failure of the initial tactical bombing in Kosovo itself, and the consequent allied desperation. But even the 'total war' bombing of Belgrade and other cities failed to break the nerve of the Yugoslav (really the Serb) people....In the case of Kosovo in 1999, the Anglo-Americans had no land forces available in the Balkans capable of evicting the Yugoslav army. Clinton's and Blair's adventure was on the verge of catastrophic failure. It was only the Russians, by telling Milosevic that they would not back him in an all-out war, that compelled him to order the Yugoslav army to evacuate Kosovo. And it was only this Russian intervention that got Clinton and Blair off the hook - and saved Blair's premiership."
Correlli Barnett, Fellow Churchill College, Cambridge
London Times, 8 January 2009

"An international human rights group demanded Thursday that NATO be held accountable for civilian casualties in the bombing of Serbia's state television headquarters a decade ago, calling the attack a 'war crime.' Sixteen civilians were killed and 16 others injured during the attack on April 23, 1999, on the headquarters and studios of Radio Television Serbia in central Belgrade. Amnesty International called on NATO and its member states to ensure independent investigations, full accountability and redress for victims and their families.....The bombing was a part of a 78-day air-raid campaign against then-President Slobodan Milosevic to halt his onslaught against Kosovo Albanian separatists in the former Serbian province. 'The bombing of the headquarters of Serbian state radio and television was a deliberate attack on a civilian object and as such constitutes a war crime,' Sian Jones, Amnesty International's Balkans expert, said in a statement....Amnesty International said in the statement that NATO officials confirmed that no specific warning of the attack was given, even though they knew many civilians would be in the RTS building."
Amnesty: NATO bombing of Serbian TV 'war crime'
Associated Press, 23 April 2009

The Extent Of The Conflict In Kosovo
War Crimes On Both Sides But No Genocide

“Some media reports have quoted a senior Belgrade official as stating that there are 198 mass graves in Kosovo. The Office on Missing Persons and Forensics (OMPF) would like to categorically state that no evidence has been provided to OMPF regarding existence of any mass graves in Kosovo. Such unfounded statements reflect a lack of sensitivity to an issue that is extremely emotive and causes considerable anguish for all affected families.”
UNMIK Disputes Belgrade Report on Mass Graves
United Nations Mission In Kosovo (UNMIK) Press Release, 23 January 2004

No Mass Graves Were Discovered In Kosovo Until 2005
The Graves Discovered Were Of Serbian Dead
Whilst Albanian Bodies Had Been Disposed Of In Serbia

"...About 3,000 people are still missing from the 1998-99 conflict. Most are ethnic Albanians but some 500 Serbs are also missing, believed to have been killed by the rebels. Two mass graves with the bodies of Serb civilians were unearthed in Kosovo earlier this month."
Serbia to return Kosovo corpses found in mass grave
Reuters, 26 May 2005

"The recent discovery [in 2005] of a second mass grave containing bodies of Serb civilians in Kosovo has stoked tensions in the run-up to expected final status talks this autumn. UNMIK investigators discovered the bodies of 13 Serbs in a mass grave in Malisheva/Malisevo, in central Kosovo in mid-May. Forensic experts said all were dressed in civilian clothes and had their hands tied behind their backs. The year of their execution is believed to have been 1998, during the height of the armed conflict between the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, and Serb government forces.  The finding in Malisheva follows the discovery of the first mass grave containing Serb bodies in Kosovo at Volljaka, some 60 kilometres west of Pristina, in April 2005. Nine of the 24 bodies in Volljaka have been identified as missing Serbs, but UNMIK forensic experts said they suspected all were local Serbs who went missing in 1998. The discovery has boosted fears this highly emotional issue may add to the tension between Pristina and Belgrade during the run-up to final status talks. Outside observers point out that the issue of missing persons has been manipulated, or used as a bargaining point, before. At the core of the dispute is the unresolved fate of thousands of Albanians, Serbs and others who disappeared at the height of the Kosovo conflict in the late Nineties. Nothing is known of around 2,900. According to the Red Cross, ICRC, some 2,400 of these are Albanians and 700 non-Albanians, including 500 Serbs... More recently, the Serbian media revealed that large numbers of Albanian bodies were also incinerated at the Mackatica aluminium factory, in southern Serbia. Without faster progress on the return all of these bodies, Albanian missing persons groups say the Kosovo government should slow down the return of Serb bodies.... Kosovo Serb leaders, on the other hand, say the discovery of Serb mass graves in Volljaka and Malisheva alters the whole dynamic of the discussion about atrocities. Serb representative Rada Trajkovic told IWPR the discoveries showed the West had been wrong to intervene in Kosovo in the first place. 'The international community made a mistake with its intervention in Kosovo in 1999, bringing us to where we are now,' she said. 'The KLA killed Serb civilians in the territory it controlled.'"
Kosovo: Tussle Over Mass Graves
Balkans Crisis Report, 2 June 2005

"Where are the bodies? Was the other big war of the last decade, Kosovo in 1999, triggered by bogus allegations as well? Another case of mass deception?  In Iraq, it's the missing mass weapons of destruction. In Kosovo, it's the missing mass graves. In alleged ethnic cleansing exercises by Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, as many as 100,000 to 200,000 civilians were said to have gone missing or been killed in Kosovo, many of them buried in mass graves. Members of a Canadian forensic team to the Serbian province have come forward to label the numbers nonsense. No mass graves, they say, and, on both the Albanian and Serb sides, only a few thousand dead. A mockery of the numbers used to justify the war..... The Kosovo story has etchings of Iraq all over it. The United States (the Democrats this time) and Britain (Tony Blair again) demonize an enemy with fraudulent accusations. They play the gullible media, Canada's included, like a violin.  The latest person to debunk the genocide numbers is retired Vancouver homicide detective Brian Honeybourn, a member of the forensic team. He told The Ottawa Citizen this week that his nine-member group found mainly single graves, with a couple of exceptions being one of 20 bodies and another 11. He wonders how genocide charges against Mr. Milosevic can stand up. 'It seems as though The Hague is beginning to panic.' But having everybody in the wagon doesn't excuse what happened. If the forensic teams' stories are correct, the missing dead in Kosovo is indeed a scandal comparable to the absence of WMD in Iraq. In a five-year period, political leaders twice duped their populations into going to war."
Another Case of Mass Deception?
Globe and Mail (Canada), 2 September 2004

"Pre-intervention portrayals of the conflict in Kosovo were not, however, a failure of intelligence, but an act of willing deceit; designed to reduce the conflict to terms that betrayed the complexity of a situation involving a previously designated terrorist organisation, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), and a heavy-handed state security infrastructure which had been for decades contending with ethnically-motivated crimes in Kosovo. Detailed reports by Amnesty International suggesting that the death toll was in the hundreds did little to deter talk of an on-going genocide. The media and NGOs, meanwhile, did little to challenge Tony Blair's portrayal of the war as 'a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity; between democracy and dictatorship'....In bypassing the United Nations, engaging in disingenuous negotiations that precluded diplomatic solutions and manipulating the public case for war, Nato's intervention over Kosovo in 1999 was an important precursor to the invasion of Iraq in 2003."
Serbia's anniversary is a timely reminder
Guardian, Comment Is Free, 24 March 2009

"The War on Terror suffered a major blow three years before it was ever announced. It happened when the people of this democracy [in America] were misled into attacking the sovereign, emerging post-Communist democracy of Yugoslavia - over rumors of genocide and ethnic cleansing that proved false.  In so doing, we put the final touch on delivering the Balkans to al Qaeda. Today we are being asked to seal that historical blunder, whose repercussions seven years later are only escalating as those we 'rescued' turn their weapons against UN and NATO forces. While NATO spends most of its time rooting out terror cells in Kosovo and Bosnia—which served as the logistics bases for the London and Madrid bombings--the 2006 deadline to complete our eagerly forgotten debacle and determine the province’s final status is fast approaching.... [Deputy commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army Niam Behljulji, known as Hulji], according to the December issue of the Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy journal, is the man who supplied the Semtex-like explosives used in the London and Madrid attacks.  But to perpetuate the version of events we were sold from the beginning, all these connections have gone purposefully unmade by our nation’s 'journalists,' who were gung-ho supporters of our 1999 offensive against a historical ally and the culmination of our pro-terror policies in 1990s Yugoslavia.... Only Britain's Sky News has caught on, in December airing a segment entitled 'The Hidden Army of Radical Islam,' about Bosnia, where there is 'growing radicalization' and a base for Al Qaeda:  'In the heart of Europe, thousands of Arab fighters. Zenica [Bosnia], 1995. They come to wage holy war in support of the Bosnian Army. [Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic shown welcoming the mujahadeen.] ...They committed many atrocities; the tapes Sky News has obtained include beheadings and signs of torture. …This isn’t just about history; it's about now. Western intelligence agencies are now pressing the Bosnians to look into exactly where these people are and what they are doing, and asking have any of these men been in contact with the three young Bosnian Muslims arrested last month on terrorism charges. ...In Sarajevo now the influence of Saudi ideas can be found all over the city. ...Radical Islam is attempting to plant deep roots in the community. …The seeds for change were planted back in 1995.'... The narration continues: 'There were some serious players sent to Bosnia, among them the man who planned 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed...'  A similar picture began to emerge in Kosovo, where the late Wall St. Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was uncovering that 'Ethnic-Albanian militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each other to give genocide rumors credibility.' The anti-Serb propaganda which misled Americans throughout  the 90s and which Daniel Pearl was debunking continues to guide our perceptions and foreign policy in the Balkans today. But despite the media’s blackout on the subject of Balkans terror--including by Pearl's own Wall St. Journal--more and more Americans have been scratching their heads, wondering why we forcibly precluded the Serbs from doing in their own backyard what we’ve gone halfway around the globe to do.... For the past four years, the Hague's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has been finding what multiple international forensic teams have found--that claims of Serb 'atrocities' were exaggerated and often invented. It turns out we confused an attempt to create an Islamic 'Greater Albania' with one to create a 'Greater Serbia.' Surely if the latter were Slobodan Milosevic’s goal, he would have started by ethnically cleansing the nearly 300,000 Muslims of Serbia. Though he built his career in whatever dirty ways Tito's Yugoslavia allowed, he was the least of the Balkans' villains. For most Serbs, he was not a hero until he was called upon to defend an entire nation at the Hague. Now that Milosevic is dead, we are spared the worldwide riots that would have ensued had the tribunal mustered the courage to issue a verdict based on the evidence. And we can all sleep comfortably as the disproved charges are accepted as history.... In early 2001, German TV broadcast a report titled 'It Began with a Lie,' which publicized the findings of the observer force Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)  that no genocide had taken place in Kosovo. The revelations set off a huge public debate in Germany, a member of the NATO coalition, after the public realized their country had been party to a hoax, and they held the responsible politicians’ feet to the fire. It’s long past time that we also set the record straight on what we 'achieved' in the Balkans -- and change course. As the world closes in on the Serbs again this year, we must stop bin Laden from establishing a terror state in Europe. We know from Madrid and London that we’ll pay for it with our own blood. In fact, we already have."
A Balkan Base For Al Qaeda?
FrontPageMagazine, 20 March 2006

"On its part, the Kosovo Liberation Army has committed more breaches of the ceasefire, and until this weekend was responsible for more deaths than the [Yugoslav] security forces."
Robin Cook, British Foreign Secretary
House Of Commons, 18 January 1999, c 567

"In a report published to mark the tenth anniversary of the end of the war in Kosovo, Amnesty International highlights the continued failure of the authorities in Serbia and Kosovo to investigate and prosecute enforced disappearances and abductions and bring the perpetrators to justice. A decade after the war ended, around 1,900 families across Kosovo and Serbia still have no details about the fate or whereabouts of their missing relatives. Amnesty International interviewed relatives of the missing on both sides of the conflict, in the aftermath of the war and again in 2009 when researchers returned to gather further testimony. The report is based on many first-hand accounts from those affected and describes a history of undocumented exhumations, lost documentation, political interference in the justice system, aborted investigations and a massive duplication of effort by different agencies, all of which have combined to deny access to justice for the relatives of the missing. Sian Jones, Amnesty International's Balkans expert, said: 'Over the past 10 years there has been a consistent failure by the authorities in Serbia and in Kosovo to address the legacy of war crimes which took place in Kosovo in 1999. 'Their failure to initiate prompt, thorough and impartial investigations in either Serbia or Kosovo has created a culture of impunity, and has failed to deliver justice to the relatives of ethnic Albanians 'disappeared' by Serb forces and relatives of Serbs abducted by the KLA'. More than 3,000 ethnic Albanians were the victims of enforced disappearances by Serbian police, paramilitary and military forces during the war in Kosovo. An estimated 800 Serbs, Roma and members of other minority groups were also abducted, reportedly by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, mostly under the eyes of the NATO-led peacekeeping Kosovo force after the international armed conflict ended in June 1999. ... Amnesty International believes that there are serious institutional barriers to ending impunity for enforced disappearances and abductions. In the absence of effective witness protection programmes, many people are reluctant to come forward to provide investigators with evidence for prosecution. In Serbia for example, investigations into allegations that in May 1999 the bodies of ethnic Albanian civilians were incinerated in a smelter at the Maèkatica aluminium complex near Surdulica in Serbia, were abandoned after witnesses were intimidated by local and state security police. The alleged incinerations had been part of a massive cover-up operation, in which the bodies of more than 900 ethnic Albanian were transferred and buried in mass graves in Serbia proper in April and May 1999. Sian Jones said: 'The influence of individuals who were powerful during the war, including some former KLA leaders and Serbian police officials, still extends throughout the Serbian and Kosovo Albanian government and society, and in the case of Kosovo, even into UNMIK.'  In Kosovo, there have been few prosecutions of ethnic Albanians responsible for the abduction of Serbs. UNMIK investigators failed to promptly conduct a thorough and impartial investigations into allegations, subsequently published by Carla del Ponte, former Chief Prosecutor to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, that up to 300 Serbs had been abducted by members of the KLA in 1999, and taken across the border to the 'Yellow House' near the village of Burrel in Albania."
Serbia/Kosovo: New report reveals impunity for abuses 10 years after end of Kosovo
Amnesty International, 8 June 2009

"Far more Yugoslav civilians died from NATO bombing than did Kosovar Albanian civilians from Serb forces prior to the onset of the bombing. A number of human rights groups that condemned Serbian actions in Kosovo also criticized NATO attacks that, in addition to the more immediate civilian casualties, endangered the health and safety of millions of people by disrupting water supplies, sewage treatment, and medical services.... There are serious questions regarding what actually prompted the United States and NATO to make war on Yugoslavia. While the Serbian nationalism espoused by Milosevic had fascistic elements, and his government and allied militias certainly engaged in serious war crimes throughout the Balkans that decade, comparisons to Hitler were hyperbolic, certainly in terms of the ability to threaten any nation beyond the borders of the old Yugoslavia. As today, there was civil strife in a number of African countries during this period, resulting in far more deaths and refugees than Serbia's repression in Kosovo. As a result, some have questioned U.S. double standards towards intervention such as why the United States didn't intervene in far more serious humanitarian crises, particularly in Rwanda in 1994, where there clearly was an actual genocide in progress. But a more salient question is why the United States has never been held accountable for when it has intervened - in support of the oppressors. In recent decades, the U.S. government provided military, economic, and diplomatic support of Indonesia's slaughter of hundreds of thousands of East Timorese, and of Guatemala's slaughter of many tens of thousands of its indigenous people. While Clinton tried to justify the war by declaring that repression and ethnic cleansing must not be allowed to happen 'on NATO's doorstep,' he was not only quite willing to allow for comparable repression to take place within NATO itself, but actively supported it: During the 1990s, Turkey's denial of the Kurds' linguistic and cultural rights, rejection of their demands of autonomy, destruction of thousands of villages, killing of thousands of civilians and forced removal of hundreds of thousands bore striking resemblance to Serbia's repression in Kosovo. Yet the Clinton administration, with bipartisan congressional support, continued to arm the Turkish military and defended its repression....the U.S.-led NATO war on Yugoslavia helped undermine the United Nations Charter and thereby paved the way for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, perhaps the most flagrant violation of the international legal order by a major power since World War II. The occupation by NATO troops of Serbia's autonomous Kosovo region, and the subsequent recognition of Kosovar independence by the United States and a number of Western European powers, helped provide Russia with an excuse to maintain its large military presence in Georgia's autonomous South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions, and to recognize their unilateral declarations of independence. This, in turn, led to last summer's war between Russia and Georgia. Indeed, much of the tense relations between the United States and Russia over the past decade can be traced to the 1999 war on Yugoslavia. Russia was quite critical of Serbian actions in Kosovo and supported the non-military aspects of the Rambouillet proposals, yet was deeply disturbed by this first military action waged by NATO. Indeed, the war resulted in unprecedented Russian anger towards the United States, less out of some vague sense of pan-Slavic solidarity, but more because it was seen as an act of aggression against a sovereign nation. The Russians had assumed NATO would dissolve at the end of the Cold War. Instead, not only has NATO expanded, it went to war over an internal dispute in a Slavic Eastern European country....This tragic conflict should further prove that, moral and legal arguments aside, military force is a very blunt and not very effective instrument to promote human rights, and that bloated military budgets and archaic military alliances aren't the way to bring peace and security."
Professor Stephen Zunes - The War on Yugoslavia, 10 Years Later
Foreign Policy In Focus, 6 April 2009

Rambouillet
How The War Against Serbia Over Kosovo Was Contrived By The West

"Nato's intervention over Kosovo in 1999 represented a collective failure of both diplomatic will and conception. The terms of the Rambouillet Accords demonstrated a reluctance to achieve a negotiated peace settlement acceptable to all sides. As ex-secretary of state Henry Kissinger insisted, 'the Rambouillet text, which called on Serbia to admit Nato troops throughout Yugoslavia, was a provocation, an excuse to start bombing'."
Serbia's anniversary is a timely reminder
Guardian (Comment Is Free), 24 March 2009

"I think the terms put to Milosevic at Rambouillet were absolutely intolerable; how could he possibly accept them; it was quite deliberate."
THE RT HON LORD GILBERT, British Junior Defence Minister During The Kosovo Conflict
Evidence To House of Commons Select Committee On Defense, 20 June 2000

"....it was impossible for Milosevic to accept the Rambouillet agreement because what it asked him to do was allow Nato to use Serbia as a part of the Nato organisation. Sovereignty would have been lost over it. He couldn’t accept that.  I think what Nato did by bombing Serbia actually precipitated the exodus of the Kosovo Albanians into Macedonia and Montenegro. I think the bombing did cause the ethnic cleansing.  I’m not sticking up for the Serbs because I think they behaved badly and extremely stupidly by removing the autonomy of Kosovo, given them by Tito, in the first place. But I think what we did made things very much worse and what we are now faced with is a sort of ethnic cleansing in reverse. The Serbs are now being cleared out. I think it’s a great mistake to intervene in a civil war. I don’t think [Milosevic] is any more a war criminal than President Tudjman of Croatia who ethnically cleansed 200,000 Serbs out of Kyrenia [Krajina]. Nobody kicked up a fuss about that. I think we are a little bit selective about our condemnation of ethnic cleansing, in Africa as well as in Europe"
Interview with Lord Carrington, Former British Foreign Secretary
Saga Magazine, September 1999

"For amid the present furore over the no-show of Iraqi WMDs, let us remember that in Kosovo our humanitarian Prime Minister dragged this country into an illegal, US-sponsored war on grounds which later proved to be fraudulent. In 2003 Tony's Big Whopper was that Saddam's WMDs 'could be activated within 45 minutes'. In 1999 it was that Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia was 'set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews during World War Two'..... In fact, the Yugoslavs had by February 1999 already agreed to most of the autonomy proposals and had assented to a UN (but not Nato) peacekeeping team entering Kosovo..... It was the unwelcome prospect of Milosevic signing up to a peace deal and thereby depriving the US of its casus belli that caused Secretary of State Albright, with the connivance of Cook, to insert new terms into the Rambouillet accord purposely designed to be rejected by Belgrade. Appendix B to chapter seven of the document provided not only for the Nato occupation of Kosovo, but also for 'ounrestricted access' for Nato aircraft, tanks and troops throughout Yugoslavia. The full text of the Rambouillet document was kept secret from the public and came to light only when published in Le Monde Diplomatique on 17 April. By this time, the war was almost a month old...The Kosovan war was, we were repeatedly told, fought 'to stop a humanitarian catastrophe'. 'It is no exaggeration to say that what is happening is racial genocide' - claimed the British Prime Minister - 'something we had hoped we would never again experience in Europe. Thousands have been murdered, 100,000 men are missing and hundreds forced to flee their homes and the country.' The Serbs were, according to the US State Department, 'conducting a campaign of forced population movement not seen in Europe since WW2'....With public support for war faltering, and a Downing Street spokesman talking of a 'public-relations meltdown', it was time for the Lie Machine to go into overdrive.... To date, the total body count of civilians killed in Kosovo in the period 1997-99 is still fewer than 3,000, a figure that includes not only those killed in open fighting and during Nato air strikes, but also an unidentified number of Serbs. Clearly it was an exaggeration - of Munchausenian proportions - for the Prime Minister to describe what happened in Kosovo as 'racial genocide'. In both Kosovo and Iraq, the government's war strategy seems to have been threefold:
1. In order to whip up public support for war, tell lies so outrageous that most people will believe that no one would have dared to make them up.
2. When the conflict is over, dismiss questions about the continued lack of evidence as 'irrelevant' and stress alternative 'benefits' from the military action, e.g., 'liberation' of the people.
3. Much later on, when the truth is finally revealed, rely on the fact that most people have lost interest and are now concentrating on the threat posed by the next new Hitler.
An admission of the government's culpability for the Kosovan war only slipped out in July 2000, when Lord Gilbert, the ex-defence minister, told the House of Commons that the Rambouillet terms offered to the Yugoslav delegation had been 'absolutely intolerable' and expressly designed to provoke war. Gilbert's bombshell warranted scarcely a line in the mainstream British media, which had been so keen to label the Yugoslavs the guilty party a year before."
How the battle lies were drawn
Spectator, 14 June 2003

"The trigger for the US-led bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was, according to the standard western version of history, the failure of the Serbian delegation to sign up to the Rambouillet peace agreement. But that holds little more water than the tale that has Iraq responsible for last year's invasion by not cooperating with weapons inspectors. The secret annexe B of the Rambouillet accord - which provided for the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia - was, as the Foreign Office minister Lord Gilbert later conceded to the defence select committee, deliberately inserted to provoke rejection by Belgrade. But equally revealing about the west's wider motives is chapter four, which dealt exclusively with the Kosovan economy. Article I (1) called for a 'free-market economy', and article II (1) for privatisation of all government-owned assets. At the time, the rump Yugoslavia - then not a member of the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO or European Bank for Reconstruction and Development - was the last economy in central-southern Europe to be uncolonised by western capital. 'Socially owned enterprises', the form of worker self-management pioneered under Tito, still predominated. Yugoslavia had publicly owned petroleum, mining, car and tobacco industries, and 75% of industry was state or socially owned. In 1997, a privatisation law had stipulated that in sell-offs, at least 60% of shares had to be allocated to a company's workers. The high priests of neo-liberalism were not happy. At the Davos summit early in 1999, Tony Blair berated Belgrade, not for its handling of Kosovo, but for its failure to embark on a programme of 'economic reform' - new-world-order speak for selling state assets and running the economy in the interests of multinationals. In the 1999 Nato bombing campaign, it was state-owned companies - rather than military sites - that were specifically targeted by the world's richest nations. Nato only destroyed 14 tanks, but 372 industrial facilities were hit - including the Zastava car plant at Kragujevac, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed. After the removal of Slobodan Milosevic, the west got the 'fast-track' reforming government in Belgrade it had long desired. One of the first steps of the new administration was to repeal the 1997 privatisation law and allow 70% of a company to be sold to foreign investors - with just 15% reserved for workers. The government then signed up to the World Bank's programmes - effectively ending the country's financial independence."
The Spoils of Another War
Guardian, 21 September 2004

"Just as we are escaping the last and bloodiest of Tony Blair's wars, so the consequences of the first of his wars may be coming back to haunt us. I mean Kosovo. On March 24, 1999, Nato started dropping bombs on Serbia, which it blamed for a series of atrocities in Kosovo in which thousands of Albanians had supposedly died.... After 11 weeks and 23,614 bombs and the deaths of about 500 of its civilians, Serbia withdrew. Tony Blair was triumphant. Much more than Iraq three years later, this had been his war, not the Americans'. He had made the running, and now he received the plaudits....For nine years Nato forces in Kosovo have managed to keep the lid on the ethnic cleansing of Serbs by Kosovar Albanians, though there have been nasty periodic outbreaks. Much worse is likely to follow as a result of the emergence in last month's elections of Hashim Thaci as the leader of Kosovo's largest political party. Thaci, a former Kosovar Albanian guerrilla leader who is lucky not to be on trial for war crimes, has declared that Kosovo will unilaterally declare independence from Serbia. America backs him; the EU and Britain are in a flap; Russia and, of course, Serbia, are adamantly opposed. Diplomatic efforts to persuade him to stay his hand failed last week. We are on the verge of an independent Kosovo. Nearly nine years later, Mr Blair's victory is looking distinctly tarnished. In fact, things began to go wrong in Kosovo immediately after the end of the war....This was a war that could have probably been avoided. In February 1999, western diplomats nearly agreed a settlement with Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia at Rambouillet near Paris that would have led to a semi-autonomous Kosovo. Only an unreasonable insistence by the West that Nato troops should be allowed to roam about Serbia at will, and that there should be a referendum on independence for Kosovo within three years, scuppered a deal. It was almost as though Nato, and Britain and America in particular, were spoiling for a fight. Tony Blair was building up a head of righteous anger. In an article written for an American magazine shortly after the beginning of the bombing, he called for a 'new internationalism' which would not tolerate dictators who 'visit horrific punishments on their own people to stay in power'. He was thinking of Slobodan Milosevic, whom he implicitly - and ridiculously - compared to Hitler. Three years later it would be Saddam Hussein's turn. Milosevic was undoubtedly a nasty dictator but largely of the tinpot variety and far less lethal than Saddam. Nor did he present any conceivable threat to the West. Mr Blair claimed Milosevic was guilty of killing at least 10,000 Kosovar Albanians before the war, but human rights groups have never been able to justify a number anywhere close to this.... If Mr Blair's division of Kosovar Albanians and Serbs into goodies and baddies was simplistic before the war, it has turned out to be wildly wrong since hostilities ended, with the Serb minority often being the victims of ethnic cleansing by the Kosovar Albanians..... the outcome of the war seems certain to lead to the Greater Albania which western policy makers always said they did not want. Even now they insist that an independent Kosovo must not join forces with their ethnic brothers in Albania to create one large state that might destabilise the Balkans. How on earth can it be stopped? It does not seem very intelligent statecraft to end up with the very thing - a Greater Albania - which the West has opposed. For Tony Blair Kosovo was a dry run for Iraq. There was the same messianic conviction, and the same slipperiness with facts, so that the Serbs were portrayed as being more heinous then they were, and the Kosovar Albanians as being more virtuous. There was also the same disregard for practicalities. As Mr Blair gave very little thought to the consequences of invading Iraq in terms of social disorder, so he evidently did not foresee that the Serbs would become victims of ethnic cleansing, nor that western victory in the war would inevitably lead to an independent Kosovo that would in turn probably form a Muslim Greater Albania at odds with Christian Serbia. The apparent success of the war against Serbia redoubled his absurdly inflated belief that he was a visionary leader of world stature who could, and should, intervene with America at his side, to right every wrong, regardless of the niceties of international law. And yet whereas he was opposed at every stage over Iraq and was ultimately driven out of office because of it, the outcry over Kosovo was always much less. Mr Blair was still in his halcyon days when he bombed Serbia, and many on the Left and Right were inclined to trust him.....Kosovo is a mess, Iraq is a bigger mess, and, I fear, Afghanistan will become a mess. Surely Gordon Brown and the Government have learned the lesson that it is a dangerous business going around invading other people's countries."
Just as we try to escape from Blair's last and bloodiest war, so his first one is coming back to haunt us
Daily Mail, 11 December 2007

"The terms of the Rambouillet Accords demonstrated a reluctance to achieve a negotiated peace settlement acceptable to all sides. As ex-secretary of state Henry Kissinger insisted, 'the Rambouillet text, which called on Serbia to admit Nato troops throughout Yugoslavia, was a provocation, an excuse to start bombing'....Though justified by apparently humanitarian considerations, Nato's bombing of Serbia succeeded only in escalating the Kosovo crisis into a full-scale humanitarian catastrophe. It is now widely acknowledged that the bulk of the ethnic cleansing and war crimes occurred after the start of Nato's campaign, with an OSCE inquiry highlighting 'the patterns of the expulsions and the vast increase in lootings, killings, rape, kidnappings and pillage once the Nato air war began on March 24'.....though these much-vaunted humanitarian objectives were used to build widespread public support for Nato's intervention, Strobe Talbott, the former US deputy secretary of state, has written how 'it was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform – not the plight of the Kosovar Albanians – that best explains Nato's war'. Placing outwardly humanitarian or security-related motives at the service of political and economic objectives has done much to undermine the emerging notion of the 'responsibility to protect' by breeding scepticism about the ultimate goal of such intervention...."
Serbia's anniversary is a timely reminder
Guardian, Comment Is Free, 24 March 2009

What Really Happened In Kosovo
Press Reports

"The Kosovo Liberation Army killed two Serb hostages yesterday morning after an American initiative to forge a cease-fire around the guerrillas' former headquarters of Malisevo had been blown apart in a KLA rocket and grenade assault on the town's police station. The hostages, both police reservists, were apparently forced to kneel at the side of the road 200 yards from their besieged colleagues in the station, before being raked with at least 24 bullets fired from a machine pistol. Their bodies showed signs of torture as well as gunshot wounds. Yesterday Serbian police said that they would step up patrols in the restive province within 48 hours unless international observers guaranteed safety on its roads. The hostages's deaths represented a crushing reversal for the American's go-it-alone policy in Kosovo; only last Friday, Christopher Hill, Washington's negotiator in the peace process, had visited villages around Malisevo and pleaded with guerrillas to stop their often unprovoked attacks on Serb security units. The hostages, who were attempting to deliver food to the police station, were captured hours after he left, and the KLA has subsequently shown its determination to push the Serbs out of Malisevo.... The incident provided the Serbs with a graphic opportunity to reveal KLA brutality, and the media centre in Pristina took a convoy of journalists to Malisevo to survey the scene..... A bizarre sideshow then developed in which a Day-Glo orange American Humvee pulled up from the opposite direction, only for its driver, a Contact Group observer, to be harangued by police officials who accused him of removing a key witness from the scene. 'He won't come back now, whatever I tell him to do,' protested the American. 'We were doing all we could.' Realising he was within earshot of journalists, he changed tack and insisted he was in Malisevo because of engine problems with his vehicle, and then beat a hasty retreat.... Another American vehicle, a Chevrolet Suburban in a similar shade of orange and containing David Scheffer, the State Department war crimes envoy, then passed on the other side of the crossroads without stopping....."
Kosovo rebels deal blow to peace hopes
London Times, 10 November 1998

"Something strange is going on in this Kosovo Albanian village in what was once a hard-line guerrilla stronghold, where NATO accuses Serbs of committing genocide. An estimated 15,000 displaced ethnic Albanians live in and around Svetlje, in northern Kosovo, and hundreds of young men are everywhere, strolling along the dirt roads or lying on the grass on a spring day. So many fighting-age men in a region where the Kosovo Liberation Army fought some of its fiercest battles against Serbian forces are a challenge to the black-and-white versions of what is happening here. By their own accounts, the men are not living in a concentration camp, nor being forced to labor for the police or army, nor serving as human shields for Serbs. Instead, they are waiting with their families for permission to follow thousands who have risked going back home to nearby villages because they do not want to give up and leave Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic.... A foreign journalist spent two hours in Svetlje over the weekend, his second visit in less than a week, without a police or military escort or a Serbian official to monitor what was seen or said. The closest Serbian security forces were two policemen sitting at a checkpoint half a mile up the dirt road, who weren't pleased to see so many refugees moving back into the Podujevo area. Just as NATO accuses Yugoslav forces of using ethnic Albanian refugees as 'human shields,' the Serbs say KLA fighters hide among ethnic Albanian civilians to carry out 'terrorist attacks.' But Velia and other ethnic Albanians interviewed in Svetlje said they haven't had any problems with Serbian police since the police allowed them to come back. 'For the month that we've been here, the police have come only to sell cigarettes, but there hasn't been any harassment,' Velia said.  That isn't what North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary-General Javier Solana believes is happening in Kosovo. Solana told BBC television Sunday that he expected much more evidence of 'ethnic cleansing' in the province to emerge once the war is over. 'You don't see males in their 30s to 60s,' he said. And on CBS-TV's 'Face the Nation' on Sunday, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said that as many as 100,000 ethnic Albanian men of fighting age have vanished in Kosovo and may have been killed by Serbian forces.....The Kosovo Democratic Initiative, an ethnic Albanian political party opposed to the KLA's fight for independence, is distributing relief aid, offering membership cards and gathering the names of Serbs accused of committing atrocities. ' As an Albanian, I am convinced that the Serbian government and security forces are not committing any kind of genocide,' Fatmir Seholi, the party's spokesman, said in an interview Sunday. 'But in a war, even innocent people die,' Seholi said. 'In every war, there are those who want to profit. Here there is a minority of people who wanted to steal, but that's not genocide. These are only crimes.' As an Albanian, Seholi also knows the risks of questioning claims that Yugoslavia's leaders, police and military are committing crimes against humanity in Kosovo. His father, Malic Seholi, was killed Jan. 9, 1997, apparently for being too cooperative with Serbian authorities. The KLA later claimed responsibility for the slaying in a statement published in Bujku, a local Albanian-language newspaper, his son said."
In One Village, Albanian Men Are Everywhere
Los Angeles Times, 17 May 1999

"What, however, was the situation within Kosovo before March 20, and are we now being misled with biased media information? Is this aggressive war really justified to counter alleged humanitarian violations, or are there problematical premises being applied to justify the hostilities?... As an OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) monitor during February and March of this year, I was assigned as the Director of the Kosovo Polje Field Office, just west of the provincial capital of Pristina.... By the time I arrived, vehicles and other resources along with the majority of international monitors were arriving, but the cease-fire situation was deteriorating with an increasing incidence of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) provocative attacks on the Yugoslavian security forces. In response the security forces of the Ministry of Internal Security police supported by the army were establishing random roadblocks that resulted in some harassment of movement of the majority Albanian Kosovars. The general situation was, though, that the bulk of the population had settled down after the previous year's hostilities, but the KLA was building its strength and was attempting to reorganize in preparation for a military solution, hopeful of NATO or western military support.....Consequently the October Holbrooke-Milosevic agreement restraining the Internal Security police and army was not strictly adhered to, as unauthorized forces were deployed to maintain security within the major communities and internal lines of communication. In my estimation, however, the KLA was left in control of much of the hinterland unchallenged, comprising at least some fifty per cent of the province. In addition the parallel Albanian government of the Kosovo Democratic League (KDL) continued to provide some leadership to the majority of the Albanian Kosovars.   This low intensity war since the end of 1998 had resulted in a series of incidents against the security forces, which in turn led to some heavy-handed security operations, one being the alleged 'massacre' at Racak of some 45 Albanian Kosovars in mid-January...Upon my arrival the war increasingly evolved into a mid intensity conflict as ambushes, the encroachment of critical lines of communication and the kidnapping of security forces resulted in a significant increase in government casualties which in turn led to major Yugoslavian reprisal security operations that included armour, mechanized forces and artillery to secure there same lines of communication. By the beginning of March these terror and counter-terror operations led to the inhabitants of numerous villages fleeing, or being dispersed to either other villages, cities or the hills to seek refuge.... The situation was clearly that KLA provocations, as personally witnessed in ambushes of security patrols which inflicted fatal and other casualties, were clear violations of the previous October's agreement. The security forces responded and the consequent security harassment and counter-operations led to an intensified insurrectionary war, but as I have stated elsewhere, 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. What has transpired since the OSCE monitors were evacuated on March 20, in order to deliver the penultimate warning to force Yugoslavian compliance with the Rambouillet and subsequent Paris documents and the commencement of the NATO air bombardment of March 24, obviously has resulted in human rights abuses and a very significant humanitarian disaster as some 600,000 Albanian Kosovars have fled or been expelled from the province. This did not occur, though, before March 20, so I would attribute the humanitarian disaster directly or indirectly to the NATO air bombardment and resulting anti-terrorist campaign. "
Returning OSCE human rights monitor offers a view from the ground in Kosovo
The Democrat, May 1999

"Back in March, Milosevic agreed to grant autonomy -- but not independence -- to Kosovo and to allow a partly Russian UN peacekeeping force to patrol the province. But NATO wanted more.  An appendix of the Rambouillet agreement required that NATO troops be granted 'free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout FRY (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia).' NATO forces would be free to use any Yugoslav street, airport or port without charge, and would have the right to commandeer any land or facilities 'as required for support, training and operations.' In short, NATO was demanding a military occupation of Yugoslavia. Milosevic rejected this, along with NATO’s demand for international deliberations on Kosovar independence. So Clinton started bombing. The peace agreement struck June 3 yields both points to Milosevic: No Kosovar independence, no NATO troops in Serbia. 'Well, so what?' defenders of the war will counter. Milosevic was committing genocide. We had to do something. Even if the war ended in a stalemate, our decision to fight was still morally sound. But was it? German government investigators have found no evidence of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo before the onset of NATO bombing. 'Even in Kosovo an explicit political persecution linked to Albanian ethnicity is not verifiable...' said one report, quoted in the April 24, 1999 issue of the German newspaper Junge Welt. The report concluded that Serb security forces were targeting KLA guerrillas and collaborators but apparently not innocent civilians. What about the 100,000 - 500,000 Kosovar men allegedly missing and feared killed? USA Today reported on July 1 that U.S. officials have now lowered that figure to 10,000. Further reductions seem likely. Then there are the mass graves. It was the discovery of one such grave in January that triggered NATO intervention. When 45 bodies were found near the town of Racak, a U.S. media blitz accused the Serbs of slaughtering innocent civilians. NATO commander Wesley Clark personally confronted Milosevic with photos of the victims. 'This was not a massacre,' Milosevic cried. 'This was staged.' The New York Times reported this exchange on April 18, 1999, three months after it occurred, but unfortunately failed to explain to readers that Milosevic was probably telling the truth. By the time that article was written, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, Die Welt, the BBC, and others had already raised doubts about the alleged massacre. Forensic investigators had concluded that the bodies were probably those of KLA guerrillas killed in action. The bodies appear to have been dressed in civilian clothes, then shot additional times and cut with knives several hours after death, in order to simulate a brutal massacre. In view of the Racak hoax, it would seem wise to reserve judgment about the flood of reports now pouring out of Kosovo concerning mass graves. Many atrocities have undoubtedly occurred, on both sides. But there is little evidence that Serbia has behaved more villainously than its adversary, the KLA. Since 1993, Clinton has presided over the systematic dismemberment of Yugoslavia, piece by piece. He has armed and supported one rebel leader after another, including Franjo Tudjman, the accused war criminal whose Croatian forces 'ethnically cleansed' 300,000 Serbs from Krajina in 1995. Clearly, there is a purpose behind Clinton’s policy, and just as clearly it has nothing to do with defending human rights. But what that purpose is we are not being told. Until we learn to question our leaders and probe their motivations, we can only look forward to more and deadlier foreign adventures in the future."
More Kosovo Lies
NewsMax, 9 July 2009

"Nato strikes on Serbia caused, rather than prevented, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, says Nato's former Secretary-General and former UK Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington.... in the Saga interview, published on Friday, Lord Carrington openly accuses Nato governments of creating the mass exodus of Kosovo Albanians.... Lord Carrington also criticised Britain for being 'a little bit selective' about its condemnation of ethnic cleansing ... "
Ex-Nato chief criticises Kosovo Campaign
BBC Online, 26 August 1999

"....it was impossible for Milosevic to accept the Rambouillet agreement because what it asked him to do was allow Nato to use Serbia as a part of the Nato organisation. Sovereignty would have been lost over it. He couldn’t accept that.  I think what Nato did by bombing Serbia actually precipitated the exodus of the Kosovo Albanians into Macedonia and Montenegro. I think the bombing did cause the ethnic cleansing.  I’m not sticking up for the Serbs because I think they behaved badly and extremely stupidly by removing the autonomy of Kosovo, given them by Tito, in the first place. But I think what we did made things very much worse and what we are now faced with is a sort of ethnic cleansing in reverse. The Serbs are now being cleared out. I think it’s a great mistake to intervene in a civil war. I don’t think [Milosevic] is any more a war criminal than President Tudjman of Croatia who ethnically cleansed 200,000 Serbs out of Kyrenia [Krajina]. Nobody kicked up a fuss about that. I think we are a little bit selective about our condemnation of ethnic cleansing, in Africa as well as in Europe"
Interview with Lord Carrington, Former British Foreign Secretary
Saga Magazine, September 1999

"...the estimate of a Spanish forensic surgeon, Emilio Perez Pujol, who has just returned home, disillusioned after investigating war crimes in Kosovo, is that as few as 2,500 civilians were killed. In an outspoken interview, Pujol complained he had been sent to head a large investigation team attached to the ICTY, consisting of pathologists and police specialists, to work in the north of the country.  But he found that what was publicised as a search for mass graves was 'a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one -- not one -- mass grave'.... The gap between the hyperbole of the western propaganda machine and the realities of Kosovo were wide throughout the air campaign and led to the publication of wild, misleading and just plain untrue stories. Above all, there was a tendency to claim there was a systematic campaign of genocide in Kosovo... The war in Kosovo was Nato's first intervention in a sovereign country, so building a case to sway public opinion was crucial for it and member governments.... War reporting is now experiencing extraordinary changes. In the case of Kosovo, western military officers, officials and ministers all conspired to push out the party line. There was spin-doctoring on an unprecedented scale, which has damaged Nato's reputation for fairness and truth.... All this has left a dedicated forensic scientist such as Pujol, who had come to Kosovo to help establish the truth, deeply irritated. In an interview with El Pais, he says: 'We had been working with two parallel problems. One was the propaganda war. This allowed them to lie, to fake photographs for the press, to publish pictures of mass graves, or whatever they had to influence world opinion in favour or against Milosevic or in favour of the Nato bombings....There never was a genocide in Kosovo. It was dishonest and wrong for western leaders to adopt the term in the beginning to give moral authority to the operation.'"
Lost in the Kosovo numbers game
Sunday Times, 31 October 1999

"When you consider that 1,500 civilians or more were killed during Nato bombing, you have to ask whether the intervention was justified".
Alice Mahon, MP
Cook accused of misleading public on Kosovo massacres
Sunday Times, 31 October 1999

"As the war dragged on... NATO saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by NATO's bombs. NATO stepped up its claims about Serb 'killing fields.'"
Despite Tales, the War in Kosovo Was Savage, but Wasn't Genocide
Wall St Journal, 31 December 1999

"... indiscriminate mass murder, rape camps, crematoriums, mutilation of the dead -- haven't been borne out in the six months since NATO troops entered Kosovo. Ethnic-Albanian militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each other to give genocide rumors credibility. Now, a different picture is emerging.... British and American officials still maintain that 10,000 or more ethnic-Albanian civilians died at Serb hands during the fighting in Kosovo. The U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has accused Serbs of covering up war crimes by moving bodies. It has begun its own military analysis of the Serb offensive. But the number of bodies discovered so far is much lower -- 2,108 as of November, and not all of them necessarily war-crimes victims. While more than 300 reported grave sites remain to be investigated, the tribunal has checked the largest reported sites first, and found most to contain no more than five bodies, suggesting intimate acts of barbarity rather than mass murder. The KLA helped form the West's wartime image of Kosovo.... Even more closely connected to the KLA was Radio Free Kosova, set up in January as outsiders were cut off from Kosovo hot spots. A former correspondent for the radio, Qemail Aliu, says he and five other journalists holed up with the KLA in the central Kosovo mountains, using satellite phones to take reports from KLA regional commanders. The radio broadcasts were just strong enough to reach the provincial capital, Pristina, where a correspondent translated the reports into English for the KLA's Kosova Press Internet site.... Kosovo would be easier to investigate if it had the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect. Instead, the pattern is of scattered killings."
Daniel Pearl - Despite Tales, the War in Kosovo Was Savage, but Wasn't Genocide
Wall St Journal, 31 December 1999

"Walker, in collaboration with the KLA, may have had a part to play in staging this incident [at Racak]."
James Bisset, former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia
Speech to the Canadian Hellenic Federation of Ontario, May 2000

"The scene of Albanian corpses in civilian clothes lined up in a ditch which would shock the whole world was not discovered until the next morning, around 9 a.m., by journalists soon followed by OSCE observers. At that time, the village was once again taken over by armed UCK soldiers who led the foreign visitors, as soon as they arrived, toward the supposed massacre site. Around noon, William Walker in person arrived and expressed his indignation. All the Albanian witnesses gave the same version: at midday, the policemen forced their way into homes and separated the women from the men, whom they led to the hilltops to execute them without more ado. The most disturbing fact is that the pictures filmed by the AP TV journalists -- which Le Figaro was shown yesterday -- radically contradict that version. It was in fact an empty village that the police entered in the morning, sticking close to the walls. The shooting was intense, as they were fired on from UCK trenches dug into the hillside. The fighting intensified sharply on the hilltops above the village. Watching from below, next to the mosque, the AP journalists understood that the UCK guerrillas, encircled, were trying desperately to break out. A score of them in fact succeeded, as the police themselves admitted. What really happened? During the night, could the UCK have gathered the bodies, in fact killed by Serb bullets, to set up a scene of cold-blooded massacre? A disturbing fact: Saturday morning the journalists found only very few cartridges around the ditch where the massacre supposedly took place."
Kosovo: Obscure Areas Of A Massacre
Le Figaro, 20 January 1999

"Even if they don't remember the village's name, most Canadians will remember the pictures. The images of bodies piled in a ravine in the tiny Kosovo village of Racak in January 1999. That massacre of Albanian civilians by Serbian forces provoked immediate anger and international condemnation against Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic. It became the galvanizing event that led to NATO's armed intervention against Yugoslavia. In the year that has passed since NATO's bombing campaign, there is mounting evidence the Racak massacre was not as gruesomely simple as it first appeared. There are suggestions the massacre was allowed to happen to fuel sympathy for Kosovo's Albanians, while strengthening demands for NATO's bombs. Over the past three months, CBC Radio has sought to unravel the mystery of the Racak massacre: was it a massacre or an act of manipulation by those interested in bringing NATO to war?... If the Serbs had been planning a bloody massacre that day, why had they issued a press release in Pristina that morning, inviting journalists to come to Racak to cover the police operation? They said they would be carrying out an operation aimed at capturing Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers in the area responsible for killing three Serb policemen in ambushes the week before... Had the KLA manipulated the massacre scene to provoke condemnation against the Serbs? Were the dead men in the ditch really innocent civilians, or possibly dead KLA soldiers who'd been taken out of uniform?...The quest to determine what was going on in the days before the massacre has unearthed disturbing new information about the conduct of both the Kosovo Liberation Army and William Walker's observer mission. Much of that new information comes from the people of Racak themselves. People like Sadije Ramadani say the first hints of what was to come appeared on the weekend prior to the Friday massacre. The Yugoslav Army had always maintained a small presence on the large hill overlooking Racak. But suddenly a significant number of reinforcements arrived. They showed up a day after the KLA ambushed and killed three Serb police officers. Canadian General Michel Maisonneuve admits the KLA had to know how the Serbs were likely to react to that ambush... Dugi Gorani, a prominent Kosovar Albanian, suggests the KLA was very aware of the consequences of their actions.'The more civilians were killed,' he said, 'the chances of international intervention became bigger, and the KLA of course realized that.'... Some KLA supporters have conceded that a key unit was based in the hills above and around Racak. But, when the Serbs finally attacked on January 15, eyewitnesses say the KLA fought back from high in the hills and made no real attempt to defend or protect the village. By the next morning, however, KLA soldiers were all over Racak to lead journalists into the ravine where the bodies were piled. Le Figaro's Renaud Girard remembers asking the KLA where they'd been the day before. But the actions of KLA commanders aren't the only actions that are now coming under scrutiny. For every question being asked about their whereabouts on the day of the massacre, an equal number of questions are being aimed at William Walker's observer mission. OSCE monitors knew about the KLA's ambush on police and the arrival of Serb reinforcements near Racak the very next day. Burim Osmani says his father Sadik had always been in frequent touch with the OSCE monitors responsible for Racak. He says that two or three weeks before the massacre, his father pleaded with the monitors to establish a permanent presence in the village. The OSCE refused... The world may no longer care to remember the massacre that sparked NATO's bombing campaign and the subsequent occupation of Kosovo by tens of thousands of NATO soldiers. But the people of Racak have found a way to thank and remember the man they believe made it all possible. They've renamed the Road to Racak, William Walker Road."
The Road to Racak
CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Radio News, 2000

"European diplomats then working for the OSCE claim it was betrayed by an American policy that made airstrikes inevitable. Some have questioned the motives and loyalties of William Walker, the American OSCE head of mission. 'The American agenda consisted of their diplomatic observers, aka the CIA, operating on completely different terms to the rest of Europe and the OSCE,' said a European envoy... Several Americans who were directly involved in CIA activities or close to them have spoken to the makers of Moral Combat, a documentary to be broadcast on BBC2 tonight, and to The Sunday Times about their clandestine roles. Walker dismissed suggestions that he had wanted war in Kosovo, but admitted the CIA was almost certainly involved in the countdown to airstrikes.... Ten years earlier he [Walker] was the American ambassador to El Salvador when Washington was helping the government there to suppress leftist rebels while supporting the contra guerrillas against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Some European diplomats in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, concluded from Walker's background that he was inextricably linked with the CIA. The picture was muddied by the continued separation of American 'diplomatic observers' from the mission. The CIA sources who have now broken their silence say the diplomatic observers were more closely connected to the agency.... The KLA has admitted its long-standing links with American and European intelligence organisations. Shaban Shala, a KLA commander now involved in attempts to destabilise majority Albanian villages beyond Kosovo's border in Serbia proper, claimed he had met British, American and Swiss agents in northern Albania in 1996.""
CIA aided Kosovo guerrilla army
Sunday Times, 12 March 2000

"Ambassador Walker was not just working for the OSCE. He was part of the American diplomatic policy that was occurring which had vilified Slobodan Milosevic, demonised the Serbian Administration and generally was providing diplomatic support to the UCK or the KLA leadership."
Moral Combat - NATO at War
BBC 2, 12 March 2000

"A report purporting to show that Belgrade planned the systematic ethnic cleansing of Kosovo's entire Albanian population was faked, a German general has claimed. The plan, known as Operation Horseshoe, was revealed by Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, on April 6 last year, almost two weeks after Nato started bombing Serbia. German public opinion about the Luftwaffe's participation in the airstrikes was divided at the time. Horseshoe - or 'Potkova', as the Germans said it was known in Belgrade - became a staple of Nato briefings. It was presented as proof that President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia had long planned the expulsion of Albanians. James Rubin, the American state department spokesman, cited it only last week to justify Nato's bombardment. Heinz Loquai, a retired brigadier general, has claimed in a new book on the war that the plan was fabricated from run-of-the-mill Bulgarian intelligence reports. Loquai, who now works for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), has accused Rudolf Scharping, the German defence minister, of obscuring the origins of Operation Horseshoe.... Loquai has claimed that the German defence ministry turned a vague report from Sofia into a 'plan', and even coined the name Horseshoe. Die Woche has reported that maps broadcast around the world as proof of Nato's information were drawn up at the German defence headquarters in Hardthöhe.... The Bulgarian report concluded that the goal of the Serbian military was to destroy the Kosovo Liberation Army, and not to expel the entire Albanian population, as was later argued by Scharping and the Nato leadership."
Serbian ethnic cleansing scare was a fake
Sunday Times, 2 April 2000

"I didn't consult with anyone before [reporting the fact that I was holding a press conference on the deaths at Racak]. I knew that it takes forever to get permission to do something like that."
William Walker Interview
Public Broadcasting Service, USA, 2000

"The final toll of civilians confirmed massacred by Yugoslav forces in Kosovo is likely to be under 3,000, far short of the numbers claimed by Nato governments during last year's controversial air strikes on Yugoslavia. When Yugoslav forces withdrew from Kosovo in June last year, Nato spokesmen estimated that the Serbs had killed at least 10,000 civilians. While the bombing was under way William Cohen, the US defence secretary, announced that 100,000 Kosovo Albanian men of military age were missing after being taken from columns of families being deported to Albania and Macedonia. 'They may have been murdered,' he said....The exhumation of less than 3,000 bodies is sure to add fuel to those who say Nato's intervention against Yugoslavia was not 'humanitarian' and that it had other motives ..."
Serb killings 'exaggerated' by west
Guardian, 18 August 2000

"In 1999, the discovery of bodies in the Kosovo village of Racak helped push NATO into war. New evidence casting doubt on claims that the bodies were civilian victims of a massacre has stirred debate in the European media-- but there has been a virtual blackout on the news in the U.S. press. In January of 1999, the American head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission in Kosovo announced that 45 Kosovar Albanians from the village of Racak had been massacred by Serb soldiers. U.S. diplomat William Walker condemned the killings as a 'horrendous' massacre, stating that the dead were all civilians who had been brutally executed, many of them mutilated after death.  Once the massacre story was reported in heart-wrenching detail by media across the globe, pressure for war intensified and previously reluctant European allies took a major step toward authorizing airstrikes. A Washington Post article (4/18/99) reconstructing the Kosovo decision-making process found that 'Racak transformed the West's Balkan policy as singular events seldom do.' Troubling questions soon emerged, however, about whether or not there had actually been a massacre at Racak, or whether the incident had been manipulated to push NATO into war-- questions almost completely ignored by the U.S. media at the time. Front-page news articles by veteran Yugoslavia correspondents questioning William Walker's account were published in French newspapers like Le Figaro ('Dark Clouds Over a Massacre,' 1/20/99) and Le Monde ('Were the Dead in Racak Really Massacred in Cold Blood?,' 1/21/99). The German daily Berliner Zeitung reported in March (3/13/99) that several European governments, including Germany and Italy, were pressing the OSCE to fire William Walker based on information from OSCE monitors in Kosovo that the Racak bodies 'were not-- as Walker declared-- victims of a Serbian massacre of civilians,' but were mostly KLA fighters killed in battle. The Sunday Times of London (3/12/00) reported that Walker's team of American observers was covertly working with the CIA, pursuing a policy intended to push NATO into war. 'European diplomats then working for the OSCE claim it was betrayed by an American policy that made airstrikes inevitable,' the Sunday Times reported. After the massacre, the European Union hired a Finnish team of forensic pathologists to investigate the deaths. Their report was kept secret until now, two years later. The U.S. media is ignoring the story, despite the report's finding that although people did indeed die at Racak, there is no evidence of a massacre. According to the Berliner Zeitung (1/16/01), the Finnish investigators could not establish that the victims were civilians, whether they were from Racak, or even exactly where they had been killed. Furthermore, the investigators found only one body that showed traces of an execution-style killing, and no evidence at all that the bodies had been mutilated. The Berliner Zeitung also reports that these findings were completed as early as June 2000, but that their publication had been blocked by the UN and the EU. Except for one brief wire story from United Press International (1/18/01), not a single U.S. media outlet has run a story on the Finnish team's findings. News outlets continue to refer to the Racak massacre without qualification, despite the cloud of uncertainty hanging over the story."
Media Ignore Questions About Incident That Sparked Kosovo War
Update on Racak
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 1 February 2001

"The tribunal might also hear the observations of the French journalists who were among the first to arrive at the scene of the killings. According to the Canadian Broadcasting Company documentary 'The Road to Racak,' (The World at Six, 5/29/00), when reporter Renaud Girard of the French daily Le Figaro arrived in the village, he was surprised to find that William Walker, the American head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe observer mission in Kosovo, had not sealed off the crime scene for war crimes investigators. Girard was equally puzzled to find almost no bullet casings on the ground. 'It was weird,' he told the CBC. 'Maybe somebody had picked them up.' Back in Pristina that day, he told his colleague Christophe Chatelot of Le Monde about the apparent absence of bullet casings. Chatelot asked one of Walker's observers, an American army captain, why there were none on the ground. The captain replied, 'That's because I took them, I collected them.' The captain 'confided to Chatelot that he'd picked up all the bullet casings once he'd arrived at the scene.' Intrigued, Chatelot went to Racak the next day to investigate. When he tried to find the American army captain again, he was 'suddenly nowhere to be found.' 'We don't know him. He's never been here,' Chatelot says he was told by the OSCE mission. When he asked to talk to the four monitors who had been in and around Racak the day of the killings, he was told that their names had suddenly been made 'a classified secret.' 'It's very strange,' Chatelot told the CBC. Later, it emerged that Walker's team of American observers had been largely composed of undercover CIA operatives who, European diplomats asserted, were carrying out 'an American policy that made [NATO] airstrikes inevitable' (London Sunday Times, 3/12/00). International outrage over the Racak killings was instrumental in pushing NATO to threaten Yugoslavia with airstrikes. The German magazine Der Spiegel (3/19/01) recently obtained a secret dossier of evidence on the Racak killings compiled by prosecutors at the war crimes tribunal in the Hague. According to Spiegel's report, tribunal investigators found that the victims in Racak were probably unarmed at the time they were killed; but the dossier 'also reveals manipulations, deceptions and cover-ups-- on all sides.' 'U.N. investigators concede that perhaps half the victims were aides to or sympathizers with the KLA,' the report says. Though 'defenseless civilians at the time of their deaths,' these victims had also 'carried out attacks and assassinations of Serbian officials and establishments or had approved of them.' Just 'a few days before the massacre,' the report says, some of these victims 'fought against the advancing Serbs' near Racak. (According to the Geneva conventions, it is a crime to deliberately kill unarmed enemy sympathizers or prisoners of war.) The Spiegel report adds that the French intelligence services in Kosovo monitored all KLA radio traffic and possess detailed logs of these communications. According to Spiegel, these radio logs 'compromise' the KLA with regard to its role in Racak. (According to Albanian witnesses, KLA fighters were present in the hills surrounding Racak at the time of the killings.) But the French (who were more sympathetic to the Serbian side in the Kosovo war than the United States) have released only a fraction of these logs to anxious war crimes prosecutors trying to build a criminal case. 'Now,' the Spiegel report concludes, 'the controversy over the radio logs begins: Washington, Berlin and above all Belgrade are trying to gain possession of the explosive material.'...In President Bill Clinton's March 19, 1999 address to the nation announcing NATO's determination to launch airstrikes against Yugoslavia, he said: As we prepare to act we need to remember the lessons we have learned in the Balkans.... We should remember what happened in the village of Racak back in January -- innocent men, women and children taken from their homes to a gully, forced to kneel in the dirt, sprayed with gunfire -- not because of anything they had done, but because of who they were. It is the responsibility of U.S. journalists to try to find out whether or not this official account is true."
Update on Racak
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 18 July 2001

“Dick, you can kiss your Nobel Peace Prize goodbye.”
William Walker to US special diplomatic envoy to Bosnia and Kosovo, Richard Holbrooke, after Walker's visit to Racak
as reported by Walker's deputy, General Karol Drewienkiewicz
The Milosevic Trial: William Walker’s role as provocateur
World Socialist Web Site report, 20 July 2002

"The head of Belgrade’s Kosovo Coordination Centre, Nebojsa Covic, said today that the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was prompted by the 'deception' of US diplomat William Walker. The state and its citizens were bombed because of Walker and his trickery,' said Covic, in a reference to the killings in the village of Racak, which Walker described as a massacre by Serb security forces, a description which international investigators have since described as rash.   'If Milosevic must answer for all the things he did, then so should Walker answer for his deception, instead of showing off in Kosovo,' he said."
Kosovo bombing prompted by US diplomat’s 'deception'
B92, (Serbia) 25 January 2004

"In Milosevic's trial, German reporter Franz Josef Hutsch testified that ethnic Albanian rebels in Kosovo had been harassing Serb troops to provoke an 'excessive reaction' against Kosovo civilians and hasten international intervention. Milosevic is accused of unleashing Serb troops who committed atrocities while quashing a rebellion in Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia dominated by ethnic Albanians. Eventually NATO launched a 78-day bombing campaign to force the Serbs to end the crackdown. Milosevic has described the Kosovo war as a defensive action against terrorists. Hutsch said he spent months with the Kosovo Liberation Army, the KLA, beginning in September 1998. He described it as a well-organized force, assisted by officers from Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Morocco who had trained somewhere in Turkey. To finance the purchase of increasingly sophisticated weapons, he said, the KLA ran smuggling operations of drugs and women who were being forced into prostitution in Europe. Hutsch testified that the KLA's tactics during the cease-fire in late 1998 included staging hit-and-run attacks on Serb patrols designed to 'force them into a trap and try to provoke an excessive reaction.' He said they also tried to lure the Serbs into attacking civilians in early 1999 so the images would be shown during peace negotiations taking place in Rambouillet, France."
Milosevic returns to court, again seeking right to represent himself
Associated Press, 12 October 2004

"Veterans of Kosovo’s 1998-99 guerrilla war said they were prepared to take up arms again if deadlock between the West and Russia continued to block the province’s independence from Serbia. The ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army veterans warned the international bodies running the territory, primarily the United Nations, not to block the process. A statement said that if their demand for independence was not met they would be 'forced to act as KLA soldiers to fulfill the oath of our national heroes'. Talks between Serbs and Albanians ended in stalemate in March."
KLA threaten fresh fighting in Kosovo
London Times, 9 July 2007

"....starting in 1992 with the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina I witnessed the beginning of international anti-Serb bias based in no small part due to the efforts of professional North American based public relations firms hired by two sides in a three sided civil war. The Bosnian Serbs were slow off the mark, hired no one and have paid the price. This anti-Serb bias and sympathy for their 'victims' was exploited by the Kosovo Liberation Army, (KLA), an internationally recognized terrorist organization at the time when it commenced killing Serbian security personnel in the late 90s. The KLA hired the same North American PR firms employed by the Bosnian government and successfully won the PR war in spite of the fact their organization initiated the armed conflict. No one could ever accuse the Serbs of treating the Kosovar's with kid gloves; however, discrimination in civil service and university hiring procedures is hardly justification for armed resistance with independence and the creation of Greater Albania as a goal. Canadians should be concerned regarding Kosovo's current leadership. The current Prime Minister Hashim Thaci was the leader of the KLA. He has admitted that the KLA orchestrated the infamous Racak 'massacre' dressing their KLA dead in civilian clothes, machine gunning them and dumping them in a ditch and claiming it was a Serbian slaughter of civilians. NATO bought into the ruse and on its 50th birthday looking for a role in the post cold war world the alliance became the KLA's air force and bombed a sovereign nation from the safety of 10,000 ft. No one in NATO was hurt. His predecessor as Prime Minister was Agim Cheku. He was in command of Croatian Forces in the Medak Pocket where Serb families were burnt alive in their cellars necessitating intervention by Canadian soldiers and he was also in charge in 1995 during Operation Storm when the Croatian Army cowardly shelled and over- ran Canadian peacekeeping positions. For both of those actions Canada called for the indictment of Cheku for war crimes. Canada should remain united with the approximately 157 member countries of the United Nations and with the leaders of the vast majority of the world's population, India, China, the world's most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia, Russia, Argentina, Greece, Cyprus and 149 others in not recognizing Kosovo's illegal unilateral declaration of independence. Independence has to be earned by a group meeting specific criteria and in accordance with legal protocol. Kosovo does not even come close to qualifying for such recognition."
Major General (ret'd) Lewis MacKenzie, Canada
Statement to   The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies, The Rockford Institute Center for International Affairs and the Montreal Rally against the Recognition of Kosovo 'Independence', 30 March 2008

"Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence [February 2008] should not be recognized by Canada. It has not been authorized by the United Nations and is therefore in violation of international law, the United Nations Charter and the Helsinki Final Accords. In addition, UN resolution 1244, which ended the bombing of Serbia, reaffirms Serbia's sovereignty over Kosovo. The basic principles of territorial integrity and state sovereignty have governed the relations between states since the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. While they have been violated many times in the intervening years, usually by acts of aggression by dictators, they remain the essential components of international law.... The Helsinki Final Act of 1975 reinforced these principles by adding to them the principle of the inviolability of borders. These are fundamental principles and they have universal application. They cannot be set aside because of special cases or because they present an obstacle to the policy objectives of a powerful nation. Their message is simple and clear --borders cannot be changed without the consent of the state involved..... In the spring of 1999 the U.S.-led NATO countries intervened militarily in Kosovo and, in violation of the UN Charter, bombed Serbia. The bombing was justified on allegations that genocide and ethnic cleansing were taking place in Kosovo. We now know these allegations were completely unfounded. In the three years of armed conflict in Kosovo leading up to the bombing by NATO the UN estimates there were a total of 4,600 people killed during the fighting and this figure includes both Serbs and Albanians. In fact, so far there have been only a little over 2,000 bodies discovered. This in itself is a tragic figure, but it is not genocide. As for ethnic cleansing it is now generally acknowledged that the mass expulsion of the Albanians took place after the bombing started. While there were thousands of Albanians displaced within Kosovo as a result of two years of armed conflict there was not a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing taking place. Although the western media continue to justify the independence of Kosovo on the grounds of ethnic cleansing and atrocities committed by Slobodan Milosevic's security forces the facts do not support these allegations. They do stand, however, as testimony to the success of NATO's propaganda machine. The intervention in Kosovo had nothing to do with humanitarian reasons but was deliberately designed to justify the continued existence of NATO and to fundamentally change its role from a purely defensive organization acting in accordance with the UN Charter into one that could intervene wherever or whenever it decided to do so, and with or without UN approval. There have been numerous reports that western security agencies trained, equipped and armed members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and sent them back into Kosovo to assassinate Serbian mayors, police officials and Albanians who did not support their cause. It was a highly successful operation and it fuelled the armed rebellion by the KLA. In August 1998 - seven months before the NATO bombing - the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee reported that, 'planning for a U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo is largely in place. ... The only missing element seems to be an event with suitably vivid media coverage that could make the intervention politically saleable. ... That the administration is waiting for a 'trigger' is increasingly obvious.' That trigger was soon to be pulled. It was the highly suspicious 'Racak' massacre that, as Madeleine Albright said, was the galvanizing incident that led to the bombing. The bombing of Serbia by NATO without UN approval was a historical turning point. The precedent had been set. The UN Charter could be subverted if the military intervention could be cloaked and justified in terms of humanitarianism. The intervention in Iraq was to follow but this time not all of the NATO countries went along with the American initiative."
James Bissett (former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia) - Canada And Kosovo
The Ottawa Citizen, 19 February 2008

"Today is a decade since the armed conflict in the village of Racak in Kosmet, which was the immediate reason for the NATO bombing of FR Yugoslavia, reminds the POLITIKA daily. On January 15, 1999, the Serbian security forces took the action against the members of the terrorist KLA organization and killed 40 of them, and then OSCE Head in Kosmet William Walker described that as a 'massacre of civilians', which was the beginning of the media preparation for the NATO intervention. Investigative judge in Pristina at the time, Danica Maksimovic, has once again confirmed for the POLITIKA that at issue was an armed conflict, of which there has been much evidence, and certainly not a civilian massacre. She was accompanied during the entire time by three OSCE members, who had a clear understanding of the situation. Last year, head of the international forensic team in the Racak case, Helena Renta from Finland, wrote in her autobiography that the report was made under the pressure of William Walker and the Fin Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and she was required to define the incident as the Serb crime. In a documentary film of Russian authors, she has also admitted that terrorist bodies were found in Racak. At the trial of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague, the event in Racak was also described as a massacre, but such qualification was later excluded from the indictment."
Ten years since the Racak case
Radio Srbija, 15 January 2009

"Forensic dentist Helena Ranta says that officials of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs had tried to influence the content of her reports in 2000, when Ranta was commissioned by the European Union to investigate the events of Racak in Kosovo. Ranta put forward her allegations on Wednesday at the publication of her biography in Helsinki. The book was written by Kaius Niemi, a managing editor at Helsingin Sanomat. 'Three civil servants of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs expressed wishes by e-mail for more far-reaching conclusions', Ranta said. 'I still have the e-mails.' More than 40 Albanians were killed in the village of Racak in January 1999. The investigation by Ranta’s working group was very charged from the beginning. It was commonly assumed that Serb forces had perpetrated a massacre, which helped persuade NATO to launch bombings of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999. In her investigations, Ranta focussed on forensic medicine; she did not want to take a stand, at that stage, on politically and legally loaded terminology. In the summer of 2000 she submitted her report to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, and a summary of the report to the EU member states. Ranta says that the head of the Foreign Ministry’s political section at the time, Pertti Torstila, who now holds the position of Secretary of State, asked her to remove a comment from the report, that was 'very mildly critical' of the foreign affairs administration.   Officials at the Foreign Ministry had also hoped that Ranta would have drawn conclusions on how many people fired shots and if any of the shots amounted to a coup de grace. 'I feel that it was more a task for the war crimes tribunal', Ranta says in the book... pressure was high, specifically in the investigation over Racak. That pressure also came from the media. According to Ranta, in the winter of 1999 William Walker, the head of the OSCE Kosovo monitoring mission, broke a pencil in two and threw the pieces at her when she was not willing to use sufficiently strong language about the Serbs."
Helena Ranta: Foreign Ministry tried to influence Kosovo reports
Helsingin Sanomat (Finland), 16 October 2008

"The Tuesday Op-Ed, 'A separate take from Serbia' by William Walker, deeply shocked me due to its lack of impartiality and its maliciousness and/or ignorance. Claiming that basically nothing has changed in Serbia regarding Kosovo since the era of the late Slobodan Milosevic is not only simply false, but also represents an outrageous fabrication....In the negotiations over the status of Kosovo, Serbia had offered Kosovo autonomy over and above any similar arrangements that exist in multiethnic states throughout the world. That these negotiations ended with a unilateral declaration of independence by Albanian leaders in Kosovo, bypassing the U.N. Security Council in spite of the standing U.N. Resolution 1244, is a travesty of international law and a dangerous precedent that will inflame secessionist movements throughout the world....The impartiality of Mr. Walker has been questioned over the years, not least because of what has been perceived as his rush to judgement in the Racak case that led to the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. His op-ed can only add support to doubts concerning his impartiality."
IVAN VUJACIC - Ambassador of Serbia to the United States
LETTER TO EDITOR: Truth about Serbia
Washington Times, 2 March 2009

'The Hoax That Started A War'

Who Is William Walker? - 'Meet Mr Massacre'

"Five years ago our television screens were dominated by pictures of Kosovo-Albanian refugees escaping across Kosovo's borders to the sanctuaries of Macedonia and Albania. Shrill reports indicated that Slobodan Milosevic's security forces were conducting a campaign of genocide and that at least 100,000 Kosovo-Albanians had been exterminated and buried in mass graves throughout the Serbian province. NATO sprung into action and, in spite of the fact no member nation of the alliance was threatened, commenced bombing not only Kosovo, but the infrastructure and population of Serbia itself -- without the authorizing United Nations resolution so revered by Canadian leadership, past and present. Those of us who warned that the West was being sucked in on the side of an extremist, militant, Kosovo-Albanian independence movement were dismissed as appeasers. The fact that the lead organization spearheading the fight for independence, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), was universally designated a terrorist organization and known to be receiving support from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda was conveniently ignored. The recent dearth of news in the North American media regarding the increase in violence in Kosovo compared to the comprehensive coverage in the European press strongly suggests that we Canadians don't like to admit it when we are wrong. On the contrary, selected news clips on this side of the ocean continue to reinforce the popular spin that those dastardly Serbs are at it again... Since the NATO/UN intervention in 1999, Kosovo has become the crime capital of Europe. The sex slave trade is flourishing. The province has become an invaluable transit point for drugs en route to Europe and North America. Ironically, the majority of the drugs come from another state 'liberated' by the West, Afghanistan. Members of the demobilized, but not eliminated, KLA are intimately involved in organized crime and the government. The UN police arrest a small percentage of those involved in criminal activities and turn them over to a judiciary with a revolving door that responds to bribes and coercion. The objective of the Albanians is to purge all non-Albanians, including the international community's representatives, from Kosovo and ultimately link up with mother Albania thereby achieving the goal of "Greater Albania." The campaign started with their attacks on Serbian security forces in the early 1990s and they were successful in turning Milosevic's heavy-handed response into worldwide sympathy for their cause. There was no genocide as claimed by the West -- the 100,000 allegedly buried in mass graves turned out to be around 2,000, of all ethnic origins, including those killed in combat during the war itself. The Kosovo-Albanians have played us like a Stradivarius. We have subsidized and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically pure and independent Kosovo.We have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of the violence in the early '90s and we continue to portray them as the designated victim today in spite of evidence to the contrary. When they achieve independence with the help of our tax dollars combined with those of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, just consider the message of encouragement this sends to other terrorist-supported independence movements around the world."
Maj-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie (now retired, commanded UN troops during the Bosnian civil war of 1992)
National Post (Canada), 7 April 2004

The Role Of Journalists
In Spreading NATO Falsehoods About Kosovo And Serbia

"In times of war, there is always intense pressure for media outlets to serve as propagandists rather than journalists. While the role of the journalist is to present the world in all its complexity, giving the public as much information as possible so as to facilitate a democratic debate, the propagandist simplifies the world in order to mobilize the populace behind a common goal. One of propaganda's most basic simplifications is to divide participants in a conflict into neat categories of victim and villain, with no qualification allowed for either role. In the real world, of course, responsibility cannot always be assigned so neatly. Both sides often have legitimate grievances and plausible claims, and too often genuine atrocities are used to justify a new round of abuses against the other side. In presenting the background to the Kosovo conflict, U.S. news outlets have focused overwhelmingly on the very real crimes committed by Yugoslavian and Serbian forces against ethnic Albanians. In the process, they have downplayed or ignored the ways that Albanian nationalists have contributed to ethnic tensions in the region. These one-sided accounts have reduced a complex dynamic that calls for careful mediation to a cartoon battle of good vs. evil, with bombing the bad guys as the obvious solution....The revocation of [Kosovo's] autonomy [by Serbia] was a crucial decision, one which greatly destabilized the multi-ethnic Yugoslavian system and contributed to the country's breakup. The loss of autonomy was a grievance that helped pave the way for the rise of an armed separatist movement, in the form of the Kosovo Liberation Army. But the decision to end Kosovo's autonomous status did not come out of nowhere, or out of a simple Serbian desire to oppress Albanians. To get a more complicated picture of the situation in Kosovo in the '80s, Kaufman would only have had to look up his own paper's coverage from the era. New York Times correspondent David Binder filed a report in 1982 (11/28/82): 'In violence growing out of the Pristina University riots of March 1981, a score of people have been killed and hundreds injured. There have been almost weekly incidents of rape, arson, pillage and industrial sabotage, most seemingly designed to drive Kosovo's remaining indigenous Slavs--Serbs and Montenegrins--out of the province.' Describing an attempt to set fire to a 12-year-old Serbian boy, Binder reported (11/9/82): 'Such incidents have prompted many of Kosovo's Slavic inhabitants to flee the province, thereby helping to fulfill a nationalist demand for an ethnically 'pure' Albanian Kosovo. The latest Belgrade estimate is that 20,000 Serbs and Montenegrins have left Kosovo for good since the 1981 riots.' 'Ethnically pure,' of course, is another way to translate the phrase 'ethnically clean'--as in 'ethnic cleansing.' The first use of this concept to appear in Nexis was in relation to the Albanian nationalists' program for Kosovo: 'The nationalists have a two-point platform,' the Times' Marvine Howe quotes a Communist (and ethnically Albanian) official in Kosovo (7/12/82), 'first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania.' All of the half-dozen references in Nexis to 'ethnically clean' or 'ethnic cleansing' over the next seven years attribute the phrase to Albanian nationalists...By 1987, the Times was portraying a dire situation in Kosovo. David Binder reported (11/1/87):    'Ethnic Albanians in the 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 Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years, and especially strongly since the bloody rioting by ethnic Albanians in Pristina in 1981--an 'ethnically pure' Albanian region, a 'Republic of Kosovo in all but name.' This is the situation--at least as perceived by Serbs--that led to Milosevic's infamous 1987 speech promising protection of Serbs, and later resulted in the revocation of Kosovo's autonomy. Despite being easily available on Nexis, virtually none of this material has found its way into contemporary coverage of Kosovo, in the New York Times or anywhere else. It may be, of course, that some of the charges levied against Albanian nationalists during the '80s were exaggerated or even fabricated by politically motivated Serbs. Those who are tempted to dismiss these accounts based on this possibility, however, should be careful to apply the same critical standards to media coverage of anti-Albanian atrocities in the '90s. The current coverage of Serbian crimes, if anything, should be viewed with even greater skepticism, since Yugoslavia has now become an official enemy of the U.S., and establishment reporting generally shows a strong bias against such countries. (See Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky.) And if one suggests that the New York Times had a peculiar anti-Albanian bias in the '80s, one still has to explain why similar reports of proto-ethnic cleansing appeared in the Washington Post (11/29/86) and the Financial Times (7/20/82, 7/22/86)....The question of historical responsibility is one that must be answered through careful research and reporting. Overwhelmingly, the U.S. media have failed to do that research, instead relying on a simplified, truncated official history that serves NATO's propaganda purposes more than it serves the citizenry's need for a complete and accurate context."
The Forgotten Background of the Serb/Albanian Conflict
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, May/June 1999

"Jamie Shea, NATO spokesman during the Kosovo war, recently gave a talk to business leaders, titled: 'Selling a Conflict - the Ultimate PR Challenge'. With unusual bluntness, Shea talked about the 78 days of his media success. One has to win the public opinion, said Shea, and this isn't a simple task while violating the sovereignity of a state. The 'collateral damages' endangered the public opinion in favor of NATO, but the pictures of refugees on all TV channels restored the public opinion, according to Shea. Shea said that the public loves daily soap operas with good characters, and that's what he gave to the public. How well he did this job, is shown by the fact that people still recognize him today wherever he goes. The media star Shea also boasted that he was recently nominated as one of the '10 sexiest men in the world' by a magazine. The media had Jamie Shea, NATO had the media. On the other side was Milosevic, with no media briefings and ever-changing spokespersons - giving a bad image in the media."
Selling a Conflict - the Ultimate PR Challenge
Neue Zurcher Zeitung (Switzerland), 31 March 2000

"Castigating the press for 'journalistic crimes' committed during its reporting on the Balkans wars of the 1990s, retired New York Times reporter David Binder claims the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting awarded to both the Times and New York's Newsday 'should, in all fairness and honesty, be revoked.'  Binder was speaking at a press conference for the release of a new book criticizing the war reporting. Binder wrote the foreword to the book by Peter Brock, titled 'Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting, Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia.' 'What we're looking at here is a series catalogued by Peter Brock of journalistic crimes,' said Binder..... During his recent appearance at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Binder said it would take 'at least a decade' before historians 'clear out that wretched underbrush of lies and concoctions' from 'despicable' politicians 'like Richard Holbrooke,' an international negotiator during the administration of former President Bill Clinton and 'certainly the journalists' criticized in Brock's book. The rise of blogs and media watchdog groups offers a 'corrective' for the public now, Binder contended."
Former NY Times Reporter: '93 Pulitzer Should Be Revoked
CNSNews, 22 March 2006

"Peter Brock's devastating portrayal of the role played by western journalists in distorting the truth about what was really happening during the break up of Yugoslavia is a major accomplishment. The book underlines the terrible power of the media in influencing governments to make unwise policy decisions affecting the very course of history. It also exposes the close affinity that exists between media and government. Both are capable of telling lies and both are unwilling to admit mistakes. This is a 'must read' book. It is a sad and shameful story but one that should be mandatory reading by every politician and by every practicing and aspiring journalist."
James Bissett, former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia (1990-1992)
On Peter Brock's Book 'Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting - Journalism and Tragedy In Yugoslavia'

"Peter Brock has done a masterful job - through patient and unbiased documentation and cool, logical reporting - of highlighting the great failure of the media in fairly and accurately covering the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars in its constituent parts. As someone intimately involved in covering the wars of the 1990s in the Balkans, I can attest that Brock's writing is restrained and, if anything, understated, and the indictment of the media for its bias and the resultant contribution to the start and ongoing conduct of the war is valid. That there were genuine initial misunderstandings on the part of the world's media with regard to the Balkan situation is clear. But the fact that the media - on whose judgments governments made policies - allowed itself to be duped by propagandists, and that editors then refused to recant when their errors became obvious: there lies the essence of Brock's indictment. The free press of the world fought to be recognized as the guardian of truth and as a pillar of good governance. It cannot now deny culpability and reject criticism, or avoid the growing sentiment that it - as with all aspects of public life - requires constant review, and reform. It is evident from Brock's vital and eminently readable book that for freedom to perish, all it takes is for the media to exempt itself from its ethical responsibility toward impartiality. If Watergate was the modern starting point for agenda-based reporting, then the Balkan wars showed that, unchecked, the media could, without accountability, bring about the downfall of nations. The resultant emergence of terrorist coordinating centers in the Balkans, intimately involved in the 9/11, Madrid, and London attacks, can be laid directly at the door of the editors who allowed bias to rule their coverage of the Balkan wars. We have yet to see the full consequences of the media's shameful unprofessionalism in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. But to start to remedy the problem it is essential that Brock's Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting be widely read, and its message taken to heart. Peter Brock's book should be the basis for both Congressional and independent media enquiries."
Gregory R. Copley, President of the International Strategic Studies Association, and Editor of Defense & Foreign Affairs publications
On Peter Brock's Book 'Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting - Journalism and Tragedy In Yugoslavia'

"America's most widely-read newspaper today revealed painful details of a seven-month probe into its star war reporter that led to his resignation for lying to his editors. The USA Today journalist Jack Kelley, who enjoyed a stellar career in which he hopped from war zone to war zone, came under suspicion after a fellow member of staff accused him in an anonymous letter of inventing reports.... The paper said they could not have confidence in any of his work after discovering that he had tried to fool their probe into one of his stories, a 1999 front-page story on Serbian war crimes in Kosovo.The investigators telephoned his supposed translator in Serbia as a witness to prove that he had not invented the story. But when they analysed recordings of their conversations they discovered the translator was not who she claimed. The investigation found Mr Kelley had allowed another woman to impersonate the witness and gave him two days to resign. Karen Jurgensen, USA Today Editor, accused her former employee of engaging in an 'elaborate deception' during the investigation.... His editors caught him out by calling the impersonator back and hiring private investigators to conduct expert voice analysis of the conversation that proved she was not the original translator. A fellow reporter, Mark Memmott, was despatched to Belgrade in a vain attempt to track down the translator. Mr Kelley was therefore unable to prove that he had seen a Yugoslav army notebook containing a direct order to 'cleanse' a village of its ethnic Albanian residents during an encounter with a human rights activist. An evangelical Christian who has said that he chose his profession 'because God has called me to proclaim truth,' Mr Kelley is now suspected by his former bosses of a more serious deception."
USA Today says star reporter deceived paper
London Times, 13 January 2004

"A Serbian human rights activist on Monday questioned whether USA Today reporter Jack Kelley, who resigned under scrutiny for his reporting of the Kosovo conflict, actually saw a key document he cited as a source. Kelley stepped down earlier this month amid questions over his claims that he was shown an order by the army of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for a killing spree in a Kosovo village. Kelley, according to news reports in the United States, claimed he saw a typed order from army headquarters in Belgrade to 'cleanse' the village, printed on official stationery as part of a black-bound notebook belonging to a Yugoslav officer. The order, according to Kelley, was crucial evidence linking Milosevic to Kosovo atrocities. Kelley alleged he saw the document during an interview with Natasa Kandic, of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, after the fighting ended. The notebook was retrieved by U.N. tribunal investigators in Kosovo. Kandic, however, said the notebook was only seen by herself, U.N. investigators and ethnic Albanian rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army who fought Milosevic's troops and initially discovered the notebook. It was a handwritten notebook, bound in red, not black, and contained no printed documents, Kandic said."
Serb soldier's notebook on horrific killings at center of controversy surrounding U.S. reporter
Associated Press, 26 January 2004

"While the U.S. fights Muslim terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. and the United Nations are helping allies of Muslim terrorists come to power in Kosovo, a province of Serbia. This is a foreign policy disaster in the making that you should hope and pray gets some immediate attention from the media. To illustrate the dimensions of the problem, Father Keith Roderick of Christian Solidarity International has testified that Albanian Muslims in Kosovo have been systematically destroying Christian churches and other sites in Kosovo and the Serbian Christian population in the province is being 'squeezed down to oblivion.' The evidence is on display in a new DVD, 'Days Made Of Fear,' directed, produced and distributed by Ninoslav Randjelovic. At the same time, Father Roderick also says that hundreds of new Mosques have been built in Kosovo over the last several years, financed mostly by Gulf Arab money. The excellent DVD consists of 8 different films, but the most explosive is 'Notes About the Rock,' on the destroyed and vandalized churches and monasteries in Kosovo. Many of the scenes captured on film are considered the only video documentation on this subject available. There is no question about the reason for the destruction. The churches were targeted by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), also known by the acronym UCK. These initials are visible on the ruins, like a calling card. They openly advertise their anti-Christian Jihad, but our media pay no attention. Writing for the Byzantine Cultural Project and reviewing the DVD, Theodoros Georgiou Karakostas comments, 'The footage of ravaged and destroyed Serbian Churches and Monasteries is appalling. The DVD is a shocking affirmation that the American television Networks such as CNN, FOX, ABC, CBS, NBC, and the others are all lined up with the foreign policy establishment and are active practitioners of official censorship. I cannot recall seeing any of the horrifying footage on this DVD on American television.' He adds, 'The same U.S. media which continues to attack the Bush administration for lying about the Iraq war, continues to give Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke, Wesley Clark, and Samuel Berger a pass for their destructive war on Yugoslavia. We should remember also that at the last Democratic National Convention in Boston two years ago, one of the top KLA men was an honored guest of John Kerry. 'The same U.S. media which was appalled by the Taliban's destruction of the 2,000-year-old Buddhist statues has nothing to say about the remarkable Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries which have stood since the period preceding the Ottoman conquests, and which are being systematically destroyed.' Why are the media ignoring what is happening in Kosovo? One reason, as explained in the book, Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting, is that the media reported the war wrong and now refuse to report who has really been victimized by it. Another factor is that the much-vilified neoconservatives got Kosovo wrong, too. As I noted in a Media Monitor, 'In 1999 the neocons supported the NATO war on Yugoslavia launched by President Clinton. That benefited a Muslim terrorist group, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), with links to Osama bin Laden.' The neocons thought they were supporting a tougher and a new NATO. To compound this tragedy, the Bush Administration has continued the misguided Clinton policy on Kosovo. Let's remember that Clinton ordered U.S. military intervention in the Balkans against the Christian Serbs on the grounds that 'ethnic cleansing' and even 'genocide' were being waged against Serbia's neighbors. Most of that was hokum. Serbia, a U.S. ally in World War II, was being ruled by the communist Slobodan Milosevic, who was desperate to hold on to power in the former Yugoslavia, which included Serbia. While Milosevic was a problem, the Clinton 'solution' made the problem worse. Clinton gave the green light to military aggression against the Serbs and even ordered the CIA to provide support to the Kosovo Liberation Army, which was allied with Osama bin Laden and radical Islamists. The U.S. bombed Serbia and forced Milosevic, who was later turned over to a U.N. court, to capitulate. Milosevic recently died in a U.N. prison."
Christians Under Siege in Kosovo
Media Monitor, 1 June 2006

"If 'The wages of sin is death', the returns must seem altogether less bleak to Tony Blair. In November, Blair was reported to have received £237,000 for a 20-minute speech before an audience of Chinese entrepreneurs. While his salary as prime minister was £186,429 a year, it now takes him two high-profile speeches to earn the same amount. Analysts estimate that he could earn £3m simply by speaking 50 nights a year. Blair will also supplement his income as an adviser to international investment bank JP Morgan - a job that could net him £500,000 a year. This is all in addition to the £4.5m he is being paid for his memoirs. Blair also finds himself in a position to reward the journalists who loyally supported him as he deceived the public and waged his wars. A notable example is Times columnist David Aaronovitch who, last November, published an article in the Times based on a three-part BBC TV interview with Blair, The Blair Years, shown later that month. Last July, Peter Oborne commented in the Daily Mail on the news that Aaronovitch had been chosen to interview Blair: 'This is troubling, for over the past ten years Aaronovitch has never... ceased to extend a helping hand to Tony Blair... Whatever his merits as a journalist, Aaronovitch cannot be regarded as an independent figure who could be trusted to interrogate a former prime minister on behalf of the British public.' (Oborne, ‘Forget the Queen fiasco, it's the BBC's love affair with the Blairs that's so disquieting,’ Daily Mail, July 14, 2007) Evidence of Aaronovitch’s 'helping hand' is readily available. Writing for the Independent in 1999, he described Serbian actions in Kosovo as 'the worst crime against humanity committed in Europe since the Second World War'. Speculating on whether the Kosovar Albanian cause was one for which he would be prepared to fight, he answered his own question: 'I think so.' (Aaronovitch, 'My country needs me,' The Independent, April 6, 1999) Compassion was the key: 'I could weep for these poor academics [opposing the war], if the plight of the Kosovars weren't already occupying all available tear-ducts.' (Aaronovitch, 'The reality is that war, tragedy and incompetence go together,' The Independent, May 11, 1999)  In fact NATO sources later reported that 2,000 people had been killed in Kosovo on all sides in the year prior to the start of NATO bombing. There had been no 'genocide', as was so often claimed at the time (a claim that has since been quietly dropped). Blair and Clinton’s intervention to save the people of Kosovo turned out to be the standard moral camouflage obscuring standard corporate priorities. John Norris, director of communications for US deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott during the Kosovo war, has written of how 'it was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform - not the plight of Kosovar Albanians - that best explains NATO's war'. (Norris, Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo, Praeger, 2005, p.xiii) .... The horrific reality is that writers like Aaronovitch use compassionate arguments to support the policies of powerful interests seeking to subordinate human welfare to power and profit. This is not to suggest that Aaronovitch is a liar or a government stooge (we have no evidence to that effect), but it does accurately describe the results of his actions."
David Aaronovitch - A Different Kind Of Comparison
Media Lens, 10 January 2008

....Pre-intervention portrayals of the conflict in Kosovo were not, however, a failure of intelligence, but an act of willing deceit; designed to reduce the conflict to terms that betrayed the complexity of a situation involving a previously designated terrorist organisation, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), and a heavy-handed state security infrastructure which had been for decades contending with ethnically-motivated crimes in Kosovo. Detailed reports by Amnesty International suggesting that the death toll was in the hundreds did little to deter talk of an on-going genocide. The media and NGOs, meanwhile, did little to challenge Tony Blair's portrayal of the war as 'a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity; between democracy and dictatorship'....In bypassing the United Nations, engaging in disingenuous negotiations that precluded diplomatic solutions and manipulating the public case for war, Nato's intervention over Kosovo in 1999 was an important precursor to the invasion of Iraq in 2003."
Serbia's anniversary is a timely reminder
Guardian (Comment Is Free), 24 March 2009

Bombing Serbia's Version Of The News

"An international human rights group demanded Thursday that NATO be held accountable for civilian casualties in the bombing of Serbia's state television headquarters a decade ago, calling the attack a 'war crime.' Sixteen civilians were killed and 16 others injured during the attack on April 23, 1999, on the headquarters and studios of Radio Television Serbia in central Belgrade. Amnesty International called on NATO and its member states to ensure independent investigations, full accountability and redress for victims and their families.....The bombing was a part of a 78-day air-raid campaign against then-President Slobodan Milosevic to halt his onslaught against Kosovo Albanian separatists in the former Serbian province. 'The bombing of the headquarters of Serbian state radio and television was a deliberate attack on a civilian object and as such constitutes a war crime,' Sian Jones, Amnesty International's Balkans expert, said in a statement....Amnesty International said in the statement that NATO officials confirmed that no specific warning of the attack was given, even though they knew many civilians would be in the RTS building."
Amnesty: NATO bombing of Serbian TV 'war crime'
Associated Press, 23 April 2009

"NATO's explanations for the bombing [of the RTS TV building] have shifted over time, however, and the Tribunal simply discounted the more incriminating rationales. Early NATO statements focused on the need to 'degrade' the Milosevic regime’s 'ability to transmit their version of the news' (NATO press briefing, 4/23/00)."
Propaganda or Patriotism? - The media, the military and the ICTY
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, September/October 2000

NATO's Spin Machine

"A chilling insight into the military mindset -- as explained by Nato’s leading media strategist Jamie Shea -- provided an unexpected but revealing talking point at UNESCO’s annual world press freedom day debate on the international media’s role at times of war.  Shea spoke in support of a motion that 'governments at war are winning the battle of controlling the international media' -- a motion that carried the day by a majority of more than two to one.... what dominated the opening of the debate (at the Frontline Club, London) was Shea’s brutally frank exposition of how Nato governments were becoming increasingly successful in managing the flow of information from the military to the public. Shea, who was Nato’s spokesman during the Kosovo conflict and is now director of policy planning for the Nato secretary general, said that governments had proved 'quick learners' after the damage inflicted on Nato partners during the war against Serbia. Developing and maintaining a media strategy was now taken as seriously as fighting the conflict itself.  The objective was to create a story line designed to keep journalists 'as busy as possible'. 'Keeping journalists occupied is the priority; feeding them constant briefings so they don’t have much time to go off and find out information for themselves'.  Media handlers realised that embedded journalist liked to put on battle fatigues suggesting they were 'part of the action'.  Regular press tours to theatre were another priority, coupled with access to privileged interviews but the military had to make sure the journalists were 'flown home before they have time to look around' for themselves in operations such as Iraq or Afghanistan. Academic experts were also invited on tours and encouraged to write 'influential op-ed features and columns which are often sympathetic to our case'. Shea was equally forthright in defending the media network which Nato was developing which included Nato television, a Nato radio station and Nato newspapers.  Nato tv, established two months ago, was a feed providing video material from locations to which the media did not have not access themselves and which was free of charge.....Andrew Gilligan, the former BBC defence correspondent, supported Shea’s thesis that the military had the upper hand. Wars had created a sellers’ market in news.   Reporters sent out at huge cost to combat zones and embedded with the military had to produce stories to justify their existence, giving governments extraordinary scope to manipulate the story lines."
Nato strategist Jamie Shea gives chilling insight into military’s media control at times of war
Spin Watch, 1 May 2009

"On the morning of 9 February 2004, The New York Times carried an exclusive and alarming story. The paper's Baghdad correspondent, Dexter Filkins, reported that US officials had obtained a 17-page letter, believed to have been written by the notorious terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the 'inner circle' of al-Qa'ida's leadership, urging them to accept that the best way to beat US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war....The letter argued that al-Qa'ida, which is a Sunni network, should attack the Shia population of Iraq: 'It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis.' Later that day, at a regular US press briefing in Baghdad, US General Mark Kimmitt dealt with a string of questions about The New York Times report: 'We believe the report and the document is credible, and we take the report seriously... It is clearly a plan on the part of outsiders to come in to this country and spark civil war, create sectarian violence, try to expose fissures in this society.' The story went on to news agency wires and, within 24 hours, it was running around the world. There is very good reason to believe that that letter was a fake – and a significant one because there is equally good reason to believe that it was one product among many from a new machinery of propaganda which has been created by the United States and its allies since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.  For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it. The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news....The 'Zarqawi letter' which made it on to the front page of The New York Times in February 2004 was one of a sequence of highly suspect documents which were said to have been written either by or to Zarqawi and which were fed into news media. This material is being generated, in part, by intelligence agencies who continue to work without effective oversight; and also by a new and essentially benign structure of 'strategic communications' which was originally designed by doves in the Pentagon and Nato who wanted to use subtle and non-violent tactics to deal with Islamist terrorism but whose efforts are poorly regulated and badly supervised with the result that some of its practitioners are breaking loose and engaging in the black arts of propaganda. So, who exactly is producing fiction for the media? Who wrote the Zarqawi letters? Who created the fantasy story about Osama bin Laden using a network of subterranean bases in Afghanistan, complete with offices, dormitories, arms depots, electricity and ventilation systems? Who fed the media with tales of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, suffering brain seizures and sitting in stationery cars turning the wheel and making a noise like an engine? Who came up with the idea that Iranian ayatollahs have been encouraging sex with animals and girls of only nine? Some of this comes from freelance political agitators. It was an Iranian opposition group, for example, which was behind the story that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was jailing people for texting each other jokes about him. And notoriously it was Iraqi exiles who supplied the global media with a dirty stream of disinformation about Saddam Hussein. But clearly a great deal of this carries the fingerprints of officialdom. The Pentagon has now designated 'information operations' as its fifth 'core competency' alongside land, sea, air and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US military has had its own 'psyop' element producing output for local media. This military activity is linked to the State Department's campaign of 'public diplomacy' which includes funding radio stations and news websites. In Britain, the Directorate of Targeting and Information Operations in the Ministry of Defence works with specialists from 15 UK psyops, based at the Defence Intelligence and Security School at Chicksands in Bedfordshire. In the case of British intelligence, you can see this combination of reckless propaganda and failure of oversight at work in the case of Operation Mass Appeal. This was exposed by the former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, who describes in his book, Iraq Confidential, how, in London in June 1998, he was introduced to two 'black propaganda specialists' from MI6 who wanted him to give them material which they could spread through 'editors and writers who work with us from time to time'. In interviews for Flat Earth News, Ritter described how, between December 1997 and June 1998, he had three meetings with MI6 officers who wanted him to give them raw intelligence reports on Iraqi arms procurement. The significance of these reports was that they were all unconfirmed and so none was being used in assessing Iraqi activity. Yet MI6 was happy to use them to plant stories in the media. Beyond that, there is worrying evidence that, when Lord Butler asked MI6 about this during his inquiry into intelligence around the invasion of Iraq, MI6 lied to him."
How the spooks took over the news
Independent, 11 February 2008

"While it might be difficult to identify precisely the impact of the spooks (variously represented in the press as 'intelligence', 'security', 'Whitehall' or 'Home Office' sources) on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous. As Roy Greenslade, media blogger at the Guardian, and editor of the Mirror at the time of the Gulf crisis in 1991, commented: 'Most tabloid newspapers – or even newspapers in general – are playthings of MI5'. Spy novelist John le Carré, who worked for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has even claimed that the British secret service then controlled large parts of the press – just as they may do today. Investigative journalist David Leigh records a series of instances in which the secret services manipulated prominent journalists. He says reporters are routinely approached by intelligence agents: 'I think the cause of honest journalism is best served by candour. We all ought to come clean about these approaches and devise some ethics to deal with them. In our vanity, we imagine that we control these sources. But the truth is that they are very deliberately seeking to control us.' John Simpson, BBC world affairs editor, describes in his autobiography how he was once approached by a 'man from MI5'. He said: 'At some point they might make me broadcast something favourable to them. Or they might just ask me to carry a message to someone. You never knew,' he said. But Simpson adds: 'It doesn’t do journalists any good to play footsie with MI5 or the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS); they get a bad reputation.' Observer foreign correspondent Mark Frankland talks in his autobiography of his time in SIS in the late 1950s and comments: 'Journalists working abroad were natural candidates for agents and particularly useful in places such as Africa where British intelligence was hurrying to establish itself.' Jonathan Bloch and Patrick Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of 'one of Britain’s most distinguished journals' as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists....According to Richard Norton-Taylor, Guardian security specialist, there is a category of people who are particularly attractive to intelligence agencies: 'They may be informers, arms dealers, businessmen, even journalists. Their common value is their special access to groups or targets which the agencies have in their sights but cannot reach on their own. And if anything goes wrong, the agencies can always resort to the well-worn defence of ‘plausible deniability’....Guardian journalist Seumas Milne claimed that three quarters of Fleet Street’s industrial correspondents were at that time agents for MI5 or for Scotland Yard’s Special Branch....Since September 11 2001, all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats. The former UN arms inspector, Scott Ritter, revealed in his book, Iraq Confidential, the existence of an MI6-run psychological warfare effort, known as Operation Mass Appeal. According to Ritter: 'Mass Appeal served as a focal point for passing MI6 intelligence on Iraq to the media, both in the UK and around the world. The goal was to help shape public opinion about Iraq and the threat posed by WMD.' MI6 propaganda specialists, at the time, claimed they could spread the misinformation through 'editors and writers who work with us from time to time'. Thus from this evidence alone it is clear there has been a long history of links between hacks and spooks. But as the secret state grows in power, through massive resourcing, through a whole raft of legislation – such as the Official Secrets Act, the anti-terrorism legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and so on – and as intelligence moves into the heart of ex-British leader Tony Blair and prime minister Gordon Brown’s ruling clique so these links are even more significant."
Richard Lance Keeble, Professor of journalism at the University of Lincoln
Uncovered: British journalists who are spooks
NowPublic, 2 July 2008

Why Milosevic
Wanted To Speak For Himself At The Hague

"Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic says he will call ex-US leader Bill Clinton and other Western politicians to testify at his trial for war crimes at The Hague.... Mr Milosevic, who is conducting his own defence, said he also wanted to question UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, Germany's former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright among others."
Milosevic wants Clinton to testify
BBC Online, 15 February 2003

The Aborted Milosevic Trial
Where Most Of The Charges Against Him Were Not Standing Up To Scrutiny

"For the past four years, the Hague's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has been finding what multiple international forensic teams have found--that claims of Serb 'atrocities' were exaggerated and often invented. It turns out we confused an attempt to create an Islamic 'Greater Albania' with one to create a 'Greater Serbia.' Surely if the latter were Slobodan Milosevic’s goal, he would have started by ethnically cleansing the nearly 300,000 Muslims of Serbia. Though he built his career in whatever dirty ways Tito's Yugoslavia allowed, he was the least of the Balkans' villains. For most Serbs, he was not a hero until he was called upon to defend an entire nation at the Hague. Now that Milosevic is dead, we are spared the worldwide riots that would have ensued had the tribunal mustered the courage to issue a verdict based on the evidence. And we can all sleep comfortably as the disproved charges are accepted as history.... In early 2001, German TV broadcast a report titled 'It Began with a Lie,' which publicized the findings of the observer force Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)  that no genocide had taken place in Kosovo. The revelations set off a huge public debate in Germany, a member of the NATO coalition, after the public realized their country had been party to a hoax, and they held the responsible politicians’ feet to the fire. It’s long past time that we also set the record straight on what we 'achieved' in the Balkans -- and change course. As the world closes in on the Serbs again this year, we must stop bin Laden from establishing a terror state in Europe. We know from Madrid and London that we’ll pay for it with our own blood. In fact, we already have."
A Balkan Base For Al Qaeda?
FrontPageMagazine, 20 March 2006

Milosevic's Timely Death Was A Boon To NATO
As It Would No Longer Be Faced With The Increasing Prospect Of An Unfavourable Verdict At The End Of The Trial

"The chief prosecutor for war crimes in former Yugoslavia yesterday voiced admiration for and fascination with her most formidable opponent, Slobodan Milosevic. Carla Del Ponte, whose mission is to bring the worst criminals from the Yugoslav wars to justice and who spent more than four years trying Milosevic, paid tribute to the late Serbian leader, declaring him superior to the dozens of other suspects who have been in the dock at the tribunal in The Hague. 'The way he questioned certain witnesses was fascinating,' she told Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 'He really knew how to deal with people. I admired that. He was the only accused who mounted his own defence alone ... Milosevic always spoke out. He had been the president of Yugoslavia. He was head and shoulders above the rest'. Milosevic died in custody in his cell outside The Hague earlier this year, almost five years after being flown there following his overthrow in Belgrade. The death was a major blow to the tribunal, as it deprived the former Yugoslavia of a verdict in the biggest and longest trial before the court. The death spawned multiple conspiracy theories and also triggered strong criticism of the manner in which the tribunal operates."
Del Ponte tells of admiration for Milosevic
Guardian, 29 July 2006

"The presence in his [Milosovic's] blood of a tuberculosis medicine known to counteract other drugs that he had been taking for heart problems created suspicions on all sides that somehow his death was deliberate."
Q&A: arrest of Radovan Karadzic
London Times, 23 July 2008

US (And UK) Backed Islamic Terrorism in the Balkans
Press Reports

Not for the people in the Middle East, the Caucasus or the Balkans
Not for freedom and democracy
 
Why They Are Really Doing It
GLOBAL ENERGY CRISIS LOOMING