Paul,
I agree that this is disquieting information. I must
admit that I really do not know what Zimmerman's
motives were in 1992. I know that you are convinced
of this effort to break up Yugoslavia for economic
imperialism motives. But by 1992, that had already
happened. Triggering a war in B-H served no purpose
whatsoever to such an end, near as I can tell anyway.
BTW, one of the reasons that I have been so focused
on old Milosevic is that the minute I first heard of his June
28, 1989 speech at Kosovo Polje I had a terrible premonition
that it meant war in both Kosovo-Metohija and more widely
throughout Yugoslavia. Ugh. I would note that at that time the
USSR was still intact as was the CMEA and the Warsaw Pact.
Communist governments still ruled throughout this zone,
although negotiations were on in Poland that would remove
the one there. The Berlin Wall still stood and Yugoslavia
was stilled viewed broadly in the US as a crypto-ally against
all of the above as it was not in either of those broad groupings.
The IMF was imposing stuff on Yugoslavia, but it was running
a hyperinflation and had high foreign debts.
BTW, I am going to be withdrawing from pen-l for awhile.
This is not in protest of anything but because I am facing
heightened personal responsibilities right now as well as
professional pressures. I have already pulled off lbo-talk
for the same reasons. I might note that the professional
pressures are related to getting the first volume of the second
edition of my _From Catastrophe to Chaos: A General Theory
of Economic Discontinuities_ out. I bring this up to thank
Michael Perelman. He had a hand in its initial publication in
1991 after having been rejected by 13 publishers.
One can see the crucial math chapter ("The Mathematics
of Discontinuity") up on my website, listed again below.
I'll be back. Behave yourselves in the meantime.
Barkley Rosser
tel: 540-568-3212
fax: 540-568-3010
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
website: http://cob.jmu.edu/rosserjb
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Monday, May 31, 1999 4:07 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:7478] Some Disquieting Info
At the public meeting I spoke at on Saturday against the war on
Yugoslavia, the speakers (other than myself) included Michael
Bliss, the Canadian historian who is usually associated with the
political right but is opposed to Canada's "ready, eye ready"
response to US international policy directives. One point that he
made was that a strong opponent of NATO bombing is former
Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
But the two speakers who had the most impact were the former
Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia during the tumultuous 1991-
92 period, James Bissett; and Rollie Kieth, a retired Army officer
with 32 years experience, much of it in peace keeping in several
theatres including the Sinai where he worked alongside of Yugoslav
army representatives. Most recently, he was head of the observer
force in the Kosovo Polje region of Kosovo prior to the bombing.
Some of the disquieting things said:
The ambassador is totally convinced that the indictment of
Milosevic was arranged between NATO and the Tribunal to be
announced the day before Chermonyrden's (sp?) visit to Belgrade
to discredit the Russian effort and sabotage an agreement that
would be acceptable to the European partners. If this is the case,
then the tribunal itself is guilty of a war crime.
He also confirmed (he was there as ambassador at the time) that
when the Lisbon agreement was reached in '92 to a cantonization
of Bosnia, all the diplomatic personnel cheered that they had
successfully headed off the Bosnian war -- all except one, the
American ambassador Warren Zimmerman who immediately
boarded a plane for Sarajevo to convince Izabegovic not to sign the
agreement and saying that if he refused to sign, Izabegovic would
be backed by the US with recognition and he could be the head of
the first Islamic state in Europe . Karadzic pleaded with Izabegovic
to sign to save 50,000 lives but American influence prevailed and
Izabegovic refused the peace agreement plunging Bosnia into civil
war.
Kieth's comments were also disturbing. As head of the observer
force, he said that he had never observed nor had he heard about
any attempts at ethnic cleansing or atrocities prior to the bombing
by NATO. What was worse, he said after the Holbrook deal, the
Yugoslav army and police pulled back but, contrary to the Holbrook
agreement, the KLA did not hold their lines but immediately took
over the area the army vacated. And the American observers did
nothing to stop it. Furthermore, the KLA repeatedly tried to
provoke the Yugoslav army and police. In fact he said two police
were gunned down during this period "right before [his] eyes."
When the army or police retaliated, which he claimed they had the
right to do, they often did with 'excessive force' which he did not
condone but "as a military man, I understood."
He also implied, but did not explicitly say in public, that the
Racak "massacre" was not a massacre but the result of Serb
retaliation to KLA provocations and the appearance of "massacre
was engineered (or validated) by American observers. In all cases
that he knew of, any violations of the Holbrook agreement were the
result of KLA provocations. The Serbs, including Milosevic, abided
by the agreement until provoked. He also said, speaking as a
military man, when it became apparent that there were to be no
meaningful negotiations in Paris and that NATO was going to
attempt to impose the Rambouille ultimatum by force, the Yugoslav
army did as he would expect them to do, as he would have done,
and "cleared the area of potential 5th columnists or enemy
collaborators and terrorists."
This is disquieting because it gives more and more substance to
the allegation that NATO's objectives in this whole exercise are to
destroy Yugoslavia to "extend the new economic order" (or
American imperialism) at whatever it costs in human lives for the
people who don't want to be members of the "new economic order."
Is there really no sense of humanity or shame in Washington,
London or Ottawa? At least in all the other NATO countries, as
Bliss pointed out, the politicians are beginning to question the
humanity of 'bombing for peace (sic)' which Kieth labelled the
greates oxymoron of all time.
Paul Phillips,
Economics,
University of Manitoba
