From Krajina to Kosovo by Nebojsa Malic <http://original.antiwar.com/author/malic/> , August 07, 2010
The Cold War ended in 1989, when the USSR basically gave up. Two years later, the USSR itself was gone, replaced by a patchwork of "independent states." The jihad in Afghanistan, engineered as a weapon <http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html> against the Soviets in the 1970s, was coming to an end. Francis Fukuyama famously wrote about the coming "end of history <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man> ." But the imperialist establishment saw this as an opportunity. The world was theirs for the taking. Step by step, the U.S. dismantled the old world order, suborning the UN, brushing aside international law, asserting phantom rights under the guise of greater, "humanitarian" necessity. The test bed for this was the Balkans <http://original.antiwar.com/malic/2006/04/19/birth-of-an-empire/> , where the U.S. got deeply involved in an ethnic war following the destruction of Yugoslavia. By intervening in Bosnia, Richard Holbrooke <http://original.antiwar.com/malic/2003/05/29/bosnias-founding-stepfather/> admitted, the U.S. re-asserted power in Europe. It also sidelined the UN and empowered NATO. Just three years after the gunpoint-diplomacy of Dayton came the farce of Rambouillet, and the war of aggression <http://original.antiwar.com/malic/2005/03/24/an-evil-little-war/> NATO billed as "humanitarian intervention." There was nothing humanitarian about the Kosovo war. If anything, it was an attempted re-run of Operation Storm from August 1995 <http://original.antiwar.com/malic/2005/08/04/remembering-the-storm/> , in which the Empire lent air support to the local proxy forces. Back then, the "junkyard dogs" (a term used by Holbrooke’s colleague Robert Frasure) were the U.S.-trained Croatian Army; in 1999, it was the terrorist KLA. Not coincidentally, many of the KLA – Agim Ceku <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agim_%C3%87eku> , for example — used to fight in the Croatian Army. The consequences were chillingly similar as well: mass expulsion of Serbs (along with other non-Albanians, in Kosovo), murder and intimidation of those who stayed, and widespread destruction of property. Though Croatia recently launched a major advertising campaign to attract tourists from Serbia, those that do visit are routinely met with verbal and physical abuse. In Kosovo, Serb-supplied electricity and bread <http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/main/news/29561/> are welcome, but Serbs themselves are not; in one infamous incident, a Bulgarian UN employee was murdered on the street <http://www.bulgaria-italia.com/fry/krumov.htm> for speaking in what sounded like Serbian. The Empire, however, presented both "Storm" and the occupation of Kosovo as great victories for human rights <http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/sep/01/00028/> . The Kosovo campaign was spun as "illegal but legitimate," and the road was clear all the way to Baghdad <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/aug/14/usa.kosovo> … http://original.antiwar.com/malic/2010/08/06/the-sorrow-of-empire/ _______________________________________________ News mailing list [email protected] http://lists.antic.org/mailman/listinfo/news
