"TERRORISM AGAINST SERBIA IS NO CRIME"
by Jared Israel and Rick Rozoff [25 May 2001] Below is a news dispatch from yesterday's edition of the daily report issued by KFOR, that is, by NATO in Kosovo: "KFOR News Update Pristina, 24 May 2001 By Maj. Axel-Bernd Jandesek, KFOR Spokesman "More Than 450 UCBMP Members Surrendered "By the end of ...KFOR's soft policy towards UCBMP extremists, more than 450 former extremists had taken advantage of this policy. These people voluntarily laid down their arms and turned themselves in at several KFOR checkpoints. KFOR screened and released all UCBMP members who are not suspected of having committed serious crimes." Did you notice that the headline talks about UCBMP terrorists 'surrendering' but the actual news concerns their being released? Now, by way of contrast, consider the following excerpts from the famous U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, which is NATO's legal justification for occupying Kosovo: "The KLA and other armed Kosovo Albanian groups [must] end immediately all offensive actions and comply with the requirements for demilitarization... "[The United Nations Security Council] condemns all terrorist acts by any party [and reaffirms] the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the other States of the region, as set out in the Helsinki Final Act... "[The UN and the security forces operating under its jurisdiction in Kosovo will see to the] demilitarizing the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and other armed Kosovo Albanian groups." (http://www.kforonline.com/resources/documents/unscr1244.htm) The KFOR dispatch reports that KFOR released 450 terrorists, only detaining an unknown number who were "not suspected of committing serious crimes." Keep in mind, we are not talking about shoplifters here. We are talking about armed terrorists (if they weren't armed how could they have "voluntarily laid down their arms"?) who invaded southern Serbia. What crimes could they have committed that were not serious? Wasn't being involved in an armed invasion of Serbia itself a "serious crime"? The contrast between the language of UN Resolution 1244 - "respect for Yugoslav sovereignty", "disarm the KLA", "armed Kosovo Albanian groups [must] end immediately all offensive actions" - and the reality of UN/NATO practice is striking. What message has KFOR delivered to Albanians by arresting and then releasing approximately 450 terrorists? TERRORIST INVASION OF SERBIA = REBELLION Some things to consider: 1) The article makes no mention of the basis on which KFOR decided whether a captured terrorist should be "suspected of having committed a serious crime." One assumes KFOR did not allow Serbian forces to interrogate the detainees, that they did not stage "lineups" so that villagers from southern Serbia who had witnessed terrorist crimes could identify the criminals, and so on. Failing that, the only way KFOR would know that a terrorist had committed a "serious crime": would be if the terrorist confessed, which seems unlikely. 2) Any soldier in any army who "commits serious crimes" could be subject to trial and punishment. Thus, by stating that it was allowing all the captured terrorists to go free except those "suspected of committing serious crimes," KFOR was defining the UCPMB terrorists as constituting a normal army engaged in legitimate military action. 3) But what was this normal army doing? It was invading southern Serbia - that is, a sovereign country - moreover, a sovereign country that, as Resolution 1244 clearly states, KFOR is legally required to protect! And what were the members of this army doing in southern Serbia? They were laying mines, killing policemen, sniping at civilians. By letting these men go free KFOR was declaring that none of these acts of violence against Serbs (and by extension, against Slavic Macedonians) constitutes a "serious crime." 4) This is an unusual amnesty. Normally, amnesties are granted as an act of forgiveness by the party who has been attacked. But KFOR was not attacked. In fact, KFOR controls Kosovo following an act of war - the 1999 aggression against Yugoslavia. Moreover, the people who are attacking southern Serbia have been trained by elements of - KFOR! So what do we have: KFOR occupies part of Serbia and then trains terrorists who attack the rest of Serbia and then detains some of those terrorists and - then out of the kindness of its military heart, declares an amnesty and forgives - who? The terrorists it trained... The people attacking southern Serbia call themselves the UCPMB, but they are in fact members of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Another part of the KLA is attacking Macedonia with the goal, at this time, of intimidating, coercing and cajoling the powerful Albanian clan leaders into supporting their cause. (1) A key part of the KLA's message to local Albanian clan leaders is: resisting us is pointless because the West is on our side. To make this argument convincing, they need evidence of Western support. The problem is that, for political reasons, NATO cannot openly endorse the KLA. Indeed, since NATO always said Macedonia was a 'good' country, and that it opposes Albanian expansionism, NATO must adopt a public stance of opposing the secessionists. By arresting 450 terrorists and then releasing all who are not "suspect of committing serious crimes", NATO has cleverly resolved the paradox of its duplicity: the arrest says, "We officially oppose secessionism;" the release says "But secessionist terrorism is perfectly legitimate." LIAR'S ADVANTAGE The Serbs have a problem dealing with the West. Their political culture affirms the value of honesty, which tends to leave them unprepared for the current world. They naively believe that if someone signs an agreement he can be expected to carry it out. How quaint. The so-called International Community did of course swear (in Resolution 1244) to defend Yugoslav sovereignty and prevent Albanian terrorism, but no matter: the West has discovered that the oppression of Albanians in Kosovo - the original justification for the 'humanitarian bombing' of Yugoslavia - has now spread to southern Serbia and Macedonia as well. Soon they will discover that it extends to Northern Greece, and perhaps other countries as well. The existence of anti-Albanian discrimination is accepted by the mass media as being true without evidence. It is a sort of axiom of Balkans' life: wherever Albanians exist they are oppressed. And once accepted, any crime committed against Serbian or Macedonian sovereignty becomes 'understandable" as an act of rebellion by an oppressed group. And so the various terrorist forces who are killing uncooperative Macedonian Albanian clan members and Macedonian policemen are described in the mass media as rebels, the same as when they were killing uncooperative clan members and Serbian policemen in Kosovo. ARM? DISARM? WHAT'S THE BIG DIFFERENCE? According to Resolution 1244, KFOR and UNMIK (the United Nations in Kosovo) were supposed to disarm the KLA terrorists two years ago. Instead, the KLA handed over a few obsolete weapons and then KFOR and UNMIK announced that the KLA had been disarmed. Commented a Russian Writer: "The head of the U.N. mission in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, has announced that KLA representatives had turned in 10,000 units of various types of weapons which allows the mission to speak about the completion of the disarmament process. 'We are satisfied that the OAK [KLA] handed in 10,000 firearms, even if we know that they still have another 100,000 guns,' joked one of the members of the U.N. mission in Kosovo." (Russian Press Digest September 21, 1999) This duplicity made UNMIK and KFOR accomplices in every crime the KLA has committed with those weapons ever since, including murders in Kosovo, southern Serbia and Macedonia. Next, KFOR and UNMIK declared that the KLA had been dissolved (another lie) and set up the so-called Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC), comprised of KLA members. To head the KPC. the UN appointed KLA chief Adam Ceku. Ceku is a notorious war criminal. (2) Then the KPC members - who were the same old members of the KLA - were recruited into something called the UCPMB and dispatched to attack Southern Serbia. The BBC (that's the British public TV/Radio station, not another terrorist group) recently admitted that NATO has been training these terrorists since they first attacked southern Serbia. (3) And now, KFOR gives 450 of these terrorists a blanket amnesty. Let's put KFOR's behavior in perspective. Imagine that a narco-terrorist secessionist group was organized, trained and armed by the Canadian government. The Canadians, who have seized and occupied Buffalo, New York (in order to prevent human rights abuses) unleash said terrorists, whom the Canadian media of course calls 'rebels', on the northern New York. The 'rebels' ambush American police, plant land mines and murder civilians. When they capture American security forces they kill them, mutilate the bodies (before or after death) and return the pieces; this shows how angry they are at the human rights abuses they have suffered at American hands! The 'rebels' go into battle under a blanket of Canadian air force protection, and U.S. forces are banned from pursuing them into Buffalo since this would constitute armed aggression and invite swift Canadian retaliation, such as flattening Manhattan. To demonstrate that it does not tolerate lawlessness, the Canadian government occasionally arrests some terrorists, but these are invariably released unless "suspected of having committed serious crimes" - which in practice never occurs. (The Canadian method of determining if a terrorist has committed serious crimes consists of asking him or her: "Hey, have you committed serious crimes," to which said terrorist if not brain dead answers, "No way, dude," and is released so that he or she resume the not-seriously-criminal act of murdering people in New York. If Canada did that there would be mushroom clouds over Ottawa, better believe it. But for NATO, which in the first place organized the KLA and has been fighting shoulder to shoulder with its KLA clients for several years, this is simply by way of human rights. Or should we say, might makes right. Further Reading: (1) 'WHAT'S BEHIND KLA STRATEGY IN THE BALKANS?' by Jared Israel at http://emperors-clothes.com/interviews/strategy.htm (2) 'The UN appoints an alleged war criminal in Kosovo' at http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/chuss/unandthe.htm (3) The following articles talk about the attack on southern Serbia: On the evidence that KLA (that is, Kosovo Protection Corps) members were behind last year's attacks on southern Serbia, see : * 'Who is Behind Terrorist Attacks on 'Serbia Proper'? by Jared Israel at http://emperors-clothes.com/news/fighting.htm On the more recent attacks on southern Serbia, see: * 'Pentagon Dogs' by Tika Yankovich at http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/tika/dogs.htm On evidence that the West is training the KLA forces involved, see: 'Diplomats Admit NATO Backs KLA Invasion of Inner Serbia' at http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/admi.htm And related, on the participation of Islamist terrorists from around the world in the attacks on Macedonia, see 'CHECHEN SEPARATISTS ARE FIGHTING IN MACEDONIA', by Yevgeni Kryshkin, at http://emperors-clothes.com/cos/chechen.htm *** Send this article to a friend! We're free, but we definitely need help from our friends... Emperor's Clothes does not charge a subscription fee because we want everyone to read these articles. Instead we rely on help from our readers. We have many expenses. For example, the cost of Lexis, our news media search engine, has doubled. Apparently Lexis figured out that we needed it to rapidly locating news stories from among thousands of sources over the past twenty years. So they doubled the price. At the moment we are almost $1500 (U.S.) behind on Lexis payments. We are also way behind on our long distance phone bill. We use the phone to do interviews, including overseas, consult on editing, on translations, and so on. Any help you can send will be greatly appreciated. You can mail a check to Emperor's Clothes, P.O. Box 610-321, Newton, MA 02461-0321. (USA) You can make a credit card donation by going to our secure server at http://emperors-clothes.com/howyour.html#donate Or call us and make a donation over the phone. Call (U.S.A.) 617 916-1705 between 9:30 AM and 5:30 PM, Eastern Time (USA) Ask for Bob. Thanks for reading Emperor's Clothes! www.tenc.net [Emperor's Clothes] |