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>From http://www.iwpr.net/
Vojvodina: A Second Kosovo?
A NATO land attack via Hungary could be as disastrous for Vojvodina's
national minorities as the bombing has been for Kosovo's Albanians.
By a journalist in Novi Sad
(Published on May 4, 1999)
Since NATO launched its bombing campaign against Yugoslavia and Serb forces
set out ethnically cleansing Kosovo of its Albanian population, rumour and
speculation have been rife in Vojvodina, Serbia's northern province.
Its residents wonder whether Vojvodina is about to share the fate as
Kosovo.
Much depends on factors over which people in the province have no control,
in particular on actions by the NATO alliance and Belgrade's response.
However, most agree that if NATO decides to launch a land offensive against
Yugoslavia via the north through Hungary, now a member of the alliance, the
consequences for Vojvodina's national minorities may be as catastrophic as
for Kosovo's Albanians.
NATO guarantees for the territorial security of countries bordering
Yugoslavia--which have been reinforced by US President Bill Clinton--are of
little practical value for the national minorities within Vojvodina, in
particular the Hungarians who are the most numerous, who might yet find
themselves at the mercy of Serb nationalists.
Hungarians in the provincial capital, Novi Sad, have already begun to
experience growing Serb hostility. Some have been thrown out of the bunkers
where they sought shelter during the bombing. They have been told bluntly,
"There is no place for you in the shelters, since the bombs are coming from
your country." Others have been cursed in the street and ostracised by
their
neighbours.
Thus far such incidents have been isolated. And in what is Yugoslavia's
most
ethnically mixed territory, there have also been signs of cross-community
solidarity, with some people, for example, speaking out against the
expulsions from the shelters.
But pessimists fear that such abuse is a sign of what is to come, not only
for Hungarians but also for Croats, Slovaks, Romanians and Czechs. This is
especially the case since, after the destruction of the bridges on the
Danube, many Serbs believe that NATO is attempting to sever Vojvodina from
Serbia.
In the shelters, in the streets and in the coffee shops, people speculate
about a possible carve-up of the province. According to one popular theory,
NATO will reward its allies in the region by giving Hungary the Backa
region, Croatia the Srem, and Romania the Banat area - each one a different
region each bordering the respective country.
Josef Kasa, mayor of Subotica and leader of the Alliance of Vojvodina
Hungarians, warned Budapest before the bombing campaign got under way that
the Hungarian minority in Vojvodina may suffer if Hungary, as a NATO
member,
played an active role in the military campaign against Yugoslavia.
In mid-March, when it became clear that NATO planned to launch its
campaign,
Kasa travelled to Budapest to seek assurances from Hungarian Foreign
Minister Janos Martonyi that, in the event of war, Hungary would stay out.
On his return to Yugoslavia, Kasa stated that he had gone to Hungary on his
own initiative, not at Belgrade's behest, and that his only motivation was
a
desire to contribute to peace in the region. Moreover, since the NATO
offensive got under way, he has on several occasions condemned the bombing
campaign and appealed to NATO to halt its attacks on Serbia.
Officially, Belgrade has not responded to Kasa's initiatives. The
opposition
Democratic Party of Serbia has, by contrast, assessed Kasa's conduct as
"worthy of respect". It has also urged the Serbian parliament to look
positively at proposals made by the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians for
reform in Vojvodina to improve the status of both the Hungarians and the
other national minorities.
Like Kosovo, Vojvodina was stripped of its autonomous status at the end of
the 1980s. In late 1998, the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians published a
discussion paper called "Agreement on the Political Framework of Self-Rule
in Vojvodina". The proposal was ignored by Belgrade, but endorsed by the
Reformist Democratic Party and other democratic parties in Vojvodina. It
has
also received support from the Coalition Sumadija and Coalition Sandzak,
two
regional groupings that work together closely with parties in Vojvodina.
Since the beginning of NATO's campaign, several thousand non-Serbs are
believed to have left Vojvodina rather than risk bombing, conscription, or
the possibility of ethnic cleansing.
There are no precise figures, although most are presumed to be Hungarians.
But Slovaks, Romanians, Croats and others have also been leaving. (The
Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians estimates that some 40,000 Vojvodina
Hungarians moved out earlier in the decade during the wars in Croatia and
Bosnia. Croats were forcibly expelled during these earlier wars.)
According to the 1991 census, Vojvodina's 2 million inhabitants included
some 16 different communities. Of these, some 340,000, or 17 per cent of
the
province's population, were Hungarians. There were also some 75,000 Croats,
64,000 Slovaks, 38,000 Romanians, 24,000 Roma and 18,000 Ruthenians. Hence
the importance of inter-ethnic tolerance, for which the province has
historically been known. And the extreme risks.
The author is an independent journalist in Novi Sad.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>From wsws.org
WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : The Balkan Crisis
Clinton, NATO generals discuss expansion of Yugoslavia war
By Martin McLaughlin
6 May 1999
US President Bill Clinton flew to Belgium Wednesday for talks with top NATO
officials, including General Wesley Clark, the commander of the air war
against Yugoslavia, amid press reports that the US and NATO are planning
intervention with ground troops in Kosovo no later than July.
Few details were made public about the substance of the talks at NATO
headquarters in Brussels, but the clear purpose of the trip is to reaffirm
and expand the US-NATO war in the Balkans. Clinton followed up the Brussels
meeting with a speech to US soldiers at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany,
where he reiterated the goal of expelling all Serbian and Yugoslav military
forces from the province of Kosovo and declared, "We will continue to
pursue this campaign in which we are now engaged. We will intensify it in
an unrelenting way until these objectives are met.''
General Clark said that NATO warplanes had stepped up their air strikes in
the 48 hours since the release of three American soldiers captured by the
Yugoslav Army. The heaviest bombing was in Kosovo province, but the city of
Novi Sad, the country's third largest and the capital of Vojvodina
province, was also hard hit. Bombs and missiles hit the city's television
station, power plants, oil refinery and factories.
American media coverage of the war is so one-sided that it fails to convey
the vast scale of the destruction inflicted by the air war on the people of
Yugoslavia. According to General Klaus Naumann, military adviser to NATO
Secretary-General Javier Solana, US and NATO warplanes have dropped 15,000
bombs and missiles in the 42 days since the attacks began, on a country
with the size and population of the state of Ohio.
With the size of a bomb or missile warhead ranging from 500 to 2,000
pounds, this means that between 4,000 and 15,000 tons of explosive have
already been expended--an amount equivalent to the atomic bomb which the
United States dropped on Hiroshima.
Opposition in Europe
The catastrophic impact of the bombing campaign has fueled a growing
hostility towards the United States in Europe. The widespread opposition to
the war, especially in Germany, is virtually unknown to the American
public. Two significant events took place during the demonstrations and
ceremonies over May Day.
Oscar Lafontaine, the former chairman of the ruling Social Democratic
Party, spoke out publicly against the war in front of a working class
audience, and was widely supported. Lafontaine resigned his post as Finance
Minister of Germany only a week before the launching of the war, virtually
without explanation.
At another workers' rally, Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping, another
leading Social Democrat, was shouted down and called a murderer. Scharping
has been the most strident defender of the bombing campaign, in which
German warplanes are participating, in their first military action since
World War II.
Clinton's trip was motivated in large part by the need to counter the deep
disquiet, nervousness and even outright opposition to the war which is
emerging in Europe, where it is widely believed that the decision by NATO
to go to war in the Balkans is a mistake of catastrophic proportions.
Or worse, so disastrous has been the outcome of the air war and so crude
the supposed "miscalculations"--i.e., about the consequences of bombing for
the Kosovar Albanians--that in some circles the conviction is growing that
the United States deliberately engineered the collapse of the Rambouillet
talks and the showdown with Yugoslavia in order to draw the European
countries into a war which they had long resisted, and which serves the
long term interests of America, not Europe.
One German newspaper commentator observed that the broader American design
appeared to be to transform NATO into a "deputy for the American sheriff,"
so that the alliance would become active in any part of the world where its
interests--as defined by the United States--were at stake.
The response of the United States and Britain to such concerns has been to
escalate both the rhetorical onslaught against the government of President
Slobodan Milosevic and the scale of military operations. Ominously, three
separate press reports Wednesday suggested that the US was now moving
towards the launching of a ground war against Yugoslavia.
Wednesday's issue of the Wall Street Journal carried an article describing
in some detail the methods by which 60,000 NATO troops, 20,000 of them
American, would enter Kosovo once bombing was deemed to have sufficiently
worn down the resistance of the Yugoslav Army, creating what was described
as a "semi-permissive" environment--i.e., without any negotiated agreement
with the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
The "concept of operations," a general outline of the plan, was said to be
the subject of discussion in the Clark-Clinton talks in Brussels. Combat
troops would be flown into Kosovo by helicopter to bypass roads and bridges
either destroyed by bombing or mined by the Yugoslav military. Bases in
both Albania and Macedonia would be utilized for the forced entry, while
other NATO troops would be positioned in Hungary, Bulgaria and aboard ship
in the Adriatic Sea, to keep Belgrade guessing about the direction of the
coming attack.
Occupation of Kosovo would be followed by weeks of military operations
against the Yugoslav Army and any Serb civilians who resisted the NATO
force. The Journal said that the invasion would have to begin by late July
so that the province could be completely "pacified" before weather
conditions became too difficult.
CNN carried a similar report on its broadcasts and website Wednesday,
describing the 60,000 troops as double the size of the 28,000 soldiers
proposed as a NATO occupation force under the Rambouillet accords signed by
NATO and the KLA but rejected by Yugoslavia. This report attributed the
much greater number of troops, not to expected resistance by Yugoslavia,
but to the requirements for engineering and road and bridge repair to make
troop movements in the province possible.
The third report came in the annual review of the London-based Institute
for International Strategic Studies, a hawkish study group which was highly
critical of the Clinton administration for ruling out ground troops in the
initial stages of the war. The IISS said that at least 60,000 troops would
be required in the initial stages of an invasion of Kosovo, a military
operation which would have to get underway by late July in order to be
completed before the onset of winter weather.
These accounts are strikingly similar, both in the number of troops
anticipated and in the late July deadline given as the last possible time
to begin the ground war. There is no doubt that, while perhaps containing a
considerable amount of disinformation about specific details, especially
the timing, these reports suggest the direction which US and NATO policy is
now heading.
A ground war could begin much earlier than these reports suggest--as early
as the second week of June, according to Jane's Defence Weekly. The British
publication quoted retired US military officers who said that it would
require only 30 days to move additional troops, vehicles and helicopters to
the region from bases in Germany and the United States. There are already
nearly 30,000 US and European troops in Albania and Macedonia, and another
15,000 deployed as a peacekeeping force in Bosnia, on Yugoslavia's western
border.
The number of troops could also be much higher than 60,000. Earlier US
scenarios for a ground war in the Balkans called for 100,000 troops to
seize Kosovo--against the anticipated opposition of 40,000 Yugoslav
soldiers in the province--and 200,000 or more to go all the way to
Belgrade.
The US-NATO bombing raids triggered the unprecedented exodus of refugees
from Kosovo and spread political instability and crisis throughout the
Balkans--precisely the outcome which Clinton claimed the bombing would
prevent. There is no reason to believe that the war planners in Washington
and Brussels can foresee the outcome of a ground war with any greater
foresight than they exhibited in launching the air war.
The reckless escalation of military violence by American imperialism,
backed by its European allies, presages a conflagration on a far wider
scale than that which is already underway, threatening even a confrontation
between the US and Russia, the two principal nuclear powers. A ground war
in the Balkans would have incalculable but surely devastating consequences,
for the people of Yugoslavia, of the Balkans, of Europe and the world.
See Also:
The fraud of NATO humanitarianism
What are the reasons for the war in Yugoslavia?
[5 May 1999]
Wall Street celebrates stepped-up bombing of Serbia
[5 May 1999]
Blair outlines his vision of the new military world order
[29 April 1999]
The Munich Agreement and the US-NATO war against Yugoslavia: The real
lessons of appeasement in the 1930s
[23 April 1999]
War in the Balkans
[WSWS Full Coverage]
Top of page
Readers: The WSWS invites your comments. Please send e-mail.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1998-99
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
www.sfgate.com Return to regular view
KLA Linked To Enormous Heroin Trade
Police suspect drugs helped finance revolt
Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 5, 1999
�1999 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: http://www.commondreams.org/kosovo/kosovo.htm
Officers of the Kosovo Liberation Army and their backers, according to law
enforcement authorities in Western Europe and the United
States, are a major force in international organized crime, moving
staggering amounts of narcotics through an underworld network that reaches
into the heart of Europe.
In the words of a November 1997 statement issued by Interpol, the
international police agency, ``Kosovo Albanians hold the largest share of
the heroin market in Switzerland, in Austria, in Belgium, in Germany, in
Hungary, in the Czech Republic, in Norway and in Sweden.''
That the Albanians of Kosovo are victims of a conscious, ethnic- cleansing
campaign set in motion by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is clear.
But the credentials of some who claim to represent them are profoundly
disturbing, say highly placed sources on both sides of the Atlantic.
On March 25 -- the day after NATO's bombardment of Serb forces began --
drug
enforcement experts from the Hague-based European Office of Police
(EUROPOL), met in an emergency closed session devoted to ``Kosovar
Narcotics
Trafficking Networks.''
EUROPOL is preparing an extensive report for European justice and interior
ministers on the KLA's role in heroin smuggling. Independent investigations
of the charges are also under way in Sweden, Germany and Switzerland.
``We have intelligence leading us to believe that there could be a
connection between drug money and the Kosovo Liberation Army,'' Walter
Kege,
head of the drug enforcement unit in the Swedish police intelligence
service, told the London Times in late March.
As long as four years ago, U.S. officials were concerned about alleged ties
between narcotics syndicates and the People's Movement of Kosovo, a
dissident political organization founded in 1982 that is now the KLA's
political wing.
A 1995 advisory by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration warned of
the
possibility ``that certain members of the ethnic Albanian community in the
Serbian region of Kosovo have turned to drug trafficking in order to
finance
their separatist activities.''
If the drug-running allegations against the KLA are accurate, the group
could join a rogues' gallery of former U.S. allies whose interests outside
the battlefield brought deep embarrassment and domestic political turmoil
to
Washington.
In 1944, the invading U.S. Army handed the reins of power in Sicily to
local
``anti-fascists'' who were in fact Mafia leaders. During the next half
century, American governments also turned a blind eye to, or collaborated
with, the narcotics operations of Southeast Asian drug lords and Nicaraguan
Contras who were allied with the United States in Indochina and Central
America.
In each case, the legacy of these partnerships ranged from global expansion
of the power wielded by criminal syndicates, to divisive congressional
inquiries at home and lasting suspicion of American intentions overseas.
The involvement of ethnic Albanians in the drug trade is not exclusively
Kosovar. It includes members of Albanian communities in Europe's three
poorest countries or regions -- Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania -- where the
appeal of narcotics trafficking is self-explanatory, even without a
separatist war to fund.
The average 1997 monthly salary in all three communities was less than
$200.
In Albania, it was less than $50.
According to the Paris-based Geopolitical Drug Watch, which advises the
governments of Britain and France on illegal narcotics operations, one
kilogram (2.2 pounds) of heroin costs $8,300 in Albania, which lies at the
western terminus of a ``Balkan Route'' that today accounts for up to 90
percent of the drug's exports to Europe from Southeast Asia and Turkey.
Across the border from Albania in Greece, the same kilo of heroin can be
sold for $30,000, yielding an instant profit equal to nine years' normal
income in Macedonia and more than a third of a century in Albania or
prebombardment Kosovo.
The Balkan Route is a principal thoroughfare for an illicit drug traffic
worth $400 billion annually, according to Interpol.
Although only a small number of ethnic Albanian clans profit directly from
the trade, their activities have cast a dark shadow on the entire Albanian
world.
There is a growing tendency among foreign observers, says former Albanian
President Sali Berisha, ``to identify the criminal with the honest, the
vandal with the civilized, the mafiosi with the nation.''
Those ethnic Albanians who have embraced the narcotics trade are
extraordinarily aggressive.
Albanian speakers comprise roughly 1 percent of Europe's 510 million
people.
In 1997, according to Interpol, they made up 14 percent of all European
arrests for heroin trafficking.
The average quantity of heroin confiscated per arrest, among all offenders,
was less than two grams. Among Albanian-speakers, the figure was 120 grams
(4.2 ounces).
Until the war intervened, Kosovars were the acknowledged masters of the
trade, credited with shoving aside the Turkish gangs that had long
dominated
narcotics trafficking along the Balkan Route, and effectively directing the
ethnic Albanian network.
Kosovar bosses ``orchestrated the traffic, regulated the rate and set the
prices,'' according to journalist Leonardo Coen, who covers racketeering
and
organized crime in the Balkans for the Italian daily La Repubblica.
``The Kosovars had a 10-year head start on their cousins across the border,
simply because their Yugoslav passports allowed them to travel earlier and
much more widely than someone from communist Albania,'' said Michel
Koutouzis, a senior researcher at Geopolitical Drug Watch who is regarded
as
Europe's leading expert on the Balkan Route.
``That allowed them to establish very efficient overseas networks through
the worldwide Albanian diaspora -- and in the process, to forge ties with
other underworld groups involved in the heroin trade, such as Chinese
triads
in Vancouver and Vietnamese in Australia,'' Koutouzis told The Chronicle.
On assignments in Kosovo and Macedonia between 1992 and 1996, a Chronicle
reporter frequently encountered groups of ethnic Albanian men --
ostentatiously dressed in designer clothing and driving luxury cars far
beyond the normal means of their community -- at restaurants in the
Macedonian capital of Skopje and near the Kosovo frontier.
The men were quite willing to speak about politics, confirming that they
were Kosovar, and asserting their determination to bring down Milosevic.
But
when asked how they earned their livings, they uniformly answered ``in
business,'' declining to provide any details.
The rise of Kosovar bosses to the pinnacle of the drug trade -- and the
sudden, simultaneous appearance of the KLA -- dates from 1997, when the
Berisha government fell in Albania amid nationwide rioting over a collapsed
financial pyramid scheme that destroyed the savings of millions and wrecked
the economy. In the unchecked looting that followed, the nation's armories
were emptied of weapons, explosives and ammunition.
In June 1997, Berisha was succeeded as president by Rexhep Mejdani, who
unlike Berisha was openly sympathetic to a separatist rebellion in Kosovo.
Last year, a NATO official in Brussels quoted by Radio Free Europe cited
intelligence findings of ``the wholesale transfer of weapons to Kosovo'' in
1997, destabilizing the precarious balance between ethnic Albanians and
Serbs in the province and undercutting the position of pacifist Kosovo
leader Ibrahim Rugova in autonomy negotiations with Belgrade.
A U.N. study found that at least 200,000 Kalashnikov automatic assault
weapons stolen from Albanian military armories wound up in the KLA arsenal.
So many, according to reliable sources, that KLA operatives were themselves
exporting guns to overseas black markets at the start of 1999.
In effect, the KLA's armed insurgency, escalating at a time when U.S. and
Western European diplomats were seeking a peaceful solution to the crisis,
provided a pretext for Milosevic to press for a nationalist solution to the
Kosovo problem.
Then came the failed Rambouillet talks, the NATO bombing decision, and with
it what Koutouzis calls ``the militarization'' of the Kosovar drug trade.
``Narcotics trafficking has been a permanent part of the Kosovo picture for
a long time. The question is where the profits go,'' Koutouzis said.
``When Rugova held sway and the object was a peaceful settlement, the drug
proceeds of Kosovo clans were at least invested in growth, in things like
better housing and health care. It was a form of social taxation in a
sense,
and the more illegal the activities, the more that their `businessmen' were
expected to pay.''
But with the outbreak of war, Koutouzis adds, ``the investment is only in
destruction -- and the KLA's first effort was to destroy the influence of
Rugova, and no one in the West did much to help him.''
Nonetheless, NATO military officers and diplomats have always been troubled
by the murky origins and financing of the KLA, which materialized for the
first time in Kosovo on Nov. 28, 1997, outfitted in expensive
Swiss-manufactured uniforms and equipped with the purloined Albanian
Kalashnikovs.
The mistrust is reciprocated. According to Veton Surroi, the widely
respected editor of Kosovo's Albanian-language daily newspaper Koha Ditore,
U.S. negotiator Richard Holbrooke had a Kalashnikov held to his head when
he
arrived for a meeting with KLA officers during one of his shuttle missions
to Kosovo.
As recently as February 25, U.S. Ambassador Chris Hill, another of the
negotiators, said, ``The KLA must understand that its members have a future
as members of political parties or local police forces, but not in the
continuation of armed struggle.''
The eruption of war changed almost everything. Since the bombing campaign
opened, NATO has had little alternative but to rely on the KLA for
intelligence. Its guerrilla units inside Kosovo are the only eyewitness
sources of information on Serb troop movements.
Solid intelligence about the KLA itself is nearly impossible to nail down.
NATO estimates put its forces at 15,000. Avdija Ramadom, the organization's
official spokesman, claims that the KLA has more than 50,000 men.
In addition to alleged drug receipts, the group is said to be funded by a
war tax of 3 percent imposed by the People's Movement of Kosovo on the
earnings of 500,000 ethnic Albanian emigrants in Western Europe, a
population that is soaring with the immense exodus of refugees. Half of the
prewar immigrants have settled in Germany, according to the International
Migration Organization, and a third in Switzerland.
A single fund-raising evening in Switzerland earlier this year is believed
to have raised $7 million from ethnic Albanian immigrants, much of it
earmarked for the KLA struggle against Serbia.
�1999 San Francisco Chronicle Page A1
A<>E<>R
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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A<>E<>R
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
German Writer (1759-1805)
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Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
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In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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