That's not the case. He's in total agreement with you because he THINKS Obama wants to do this, and he THINKS this is the way to do damage to him.
The Diaries of Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair's Press Secretary, detail exactly the same dialogue and thinking on Kosovo (which, again, Obama and Clinton WILL have discussed in detail - unlike Clinton himself at the time, Obama (like Kennedy) speaks frequently and at length with his predecessors to get advice and poll their opinion before acting on major issues of war and peace and avoid their mistakes, which is why he hasn't been impeached (yet) and October Surprise 2012 was successfully thwarted by James Clapper, making him now subject to a vendetta from the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainmenr Complex, who have since tried to destroy him.
Kosovo and Syria today are practically identical scenarios, only without the Mossad Cell inside the Cabinet this time (Madeline Albright and William Cohen, with an honourable mention going out to Ambassador Barbara Bodine, over in Yemen at that point).
As Secretary of State, Albright was an absolute blood-drenched War Hawk, architect of the criminal Rambouillet Talks, which made the Munich Agreement look like a love-in; the fact that she PERSONALLY took the side of, advised and actively intervened on the side of the KLA (who don't even qualify as terrorists, since they have no ideology, they were just bandits and muggers, armed by the Germans, supplied by the CIA and trained by the SAS), a nominally Muslim group of armed separatists to illegally annex the spiritual homeland of the Serbian nation ("Kosovo is our Jerusalem") was bad enough - when she (according to multiple accounts) advised them that it would require reports of a major Serb atrocity or obvious War Crime in the province (there weren't any) before international opinion could be swung in favour of intervention on the side of the KLA, they just went right out and faked one.
The "Massacre" at Račak was an almost carbon copy template for this Syrian gas attack; what had actually happened was that the guerrillas had scared away the local population of the village of Raçak with their constant violence and intimidation and so got themselves an empty village; at the time, armed Serb Security Police had been deployed to restore order and deal with the heavily armed Special Forces-trained Albanian bandits running around kidnapping and ransoming people and burning villages, raping and pillaging.
The exact ordering of events is unclear, but the overall picture is absolutely indisputable - the KLA had an empty village, Serb Security forces in the area to provoke and an international audience - a team of UN Observers had just arrived on the ground the day before, and set up base around 5 miles away from Račak; the team was led by a former State Dept diplomat assigned to Central America and Nicaragua during the mid-80s - a gentlemen, therefore, well acquainted with massacres and US-sponsored Death Squads.
All they needed now were the bodies.
The exact details for this are EXTREMELY sketchy for obvious reasons - suffice it to say, by the time the UN team heard "there's been a massacre by the Serbs over the the hill in Račak", the dead people they found lying all over the place were not lying where they originally fell, but more crucially, they were not wearing the same clothes they had on when they were shot dead.
What APPEARS to have happened is that the KLA bandits arranged a massive ambush by luring the Serb Police into the village before launching an all-out frontal assault. The guerrillas were armed and equipped with (Brand new, German) tactical gear, the Serb Police had in many cases World War II vintage equipment and gear - either they killed everyone or forced the Serbs to withdraw - the KLA then hauled all of their own dead (and probably many of the Serb dead, too) back into the centre of town from where they had died, taking cover..... And redressed the corpses to remove their military fatigues and dress them in civilian clothes.
They then just left them strewn all over the street in plain site.
When the UN Observation team, with journalists in tow arrived in the village square, they found thirty or forty dead bodies in civilian clothes lying all over the street (and possibly the odd wailing old woman for added verisimilitude).
A few of the reporters at the time (not many) noted with puzzlement that:
A) All the dead appeared to be males of fighting age, which was rather odd,
B) It seemed in many cases that even when the people had bullet holes in them, their clothes didn't,
C) By no means all of them appeared to be ethnically Albanian
D) The one thing almost instantly associated in most people's minds with massacres and War Crimes in general tends inevitably to be mass graves; to carry out the massacre of an entire (all male) community whist there were UN Observers just 5 miles away is, to say the least, ballsy.... To imagine that the Serb Police might be so caviller as to not even bother to BURY them is, to say the least, a bit of a stretch....
After the 77 day long war (NATO's First), 3 international commissions re-examined the "Massacre" at Račak - two of them concluded that the KLA had staged this tableau, and the EU report has never been made public.
The reason NATO went to war with Serbia was because as a non-state actor, it's not bound by the UN or by Security Council resolutions; military action against a sovereign nation and member state in response to internal violence and unrest is a violation of the UN Charter and of the Nuremberg Protocols; it is, according to the Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg,
"not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
And thus Russia and China veto these things in the Security Council. Knowing that they could be next. But also, because its absolutely and totally illegal. And they're right.
But you saw this same talk coming from the Europeans, specifically the Anglo-French axis, the old Suez, Sykes-Picot Lobby - the primary, dispicable war hawk from my country is Mr William Hague, who had openly been calling someone ELSE, other that Bashar Assad "President" (someone who NO ONE in Syria has EVER elected to ANYTHING....) and if he was any tighter with NATO Command, he'd be internal.
He's the one, now, who's been talking again about NATO action against Syria to circumvents the UN, as was the case in Kosovo; NATO intervention over Libya was authorised on a strictly limited basis by the Security Council, in Kosovo it wasn't and the current attempt to pass a clone of Resolution 1973 to authorise actions over Syria "to protect civilians" will not work - after all, the Free Syrian Army are civilians, al-Nusra are civilians, Hezzbolah are civilians.... And the Syrian Army are all conscripts, not professional soldiers.
But the votes will never be there on the NATO North Atlantic Council for this (they need 15 counties to sign on, they don't have them) and Russia and China will block everything in the UN that breaches the UN Charter. Fortunately.
But the point is, don't fall for the US Media's double lie that
A) America is the main player, here, or
B) Obama wants to do this.
Because neither of those things are true, they are not anywhere close to being true and are prima face nonsense.
Clinton eventually caved into pressure to act over Kosovo in the immediate aftermath of Račak, not realising what Albright had done; but it was the constant shuttle diplomacy and lobbying from Tony Blair that made the difference, playing Clinton like a harp from Hell - one line he kept hammering Clinton on (2 months after his impeachment trial) was "This is a moral crisis, and a moral issue", and working on convincing Sandy Berger (who, like Clinton, was far more sensible and more of an honest broker, and therefore more of a dove)
Clinton remarked that the Republicans in Congress would probably support military action, even ground troops in Kosovo "because it might destroy me".
He was right then, and it's right now, applied to Obama and the Syrian situation - he will NOT allow them to box him in...
Current UN Ambassador Samantha Power, by the way, considers Kosovo to have been an extremely successful "humanitarian" intervention....
Yeah. Except for bringing the world to the brink of World War III....
She obviously has never heard of the Incident at Prestina Airport...
President Obama is set to nominate former White House aide Samantha Power to replace Susan Rice as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Power has long been a staunch advocate for U.S. intervention on moral grounds. In 2008, she appeared on Democracy Now! to debate journalist Jeremy Scahill about Kosovo, Iraq sanctions and Bill Clinton’s foreign policy record. Power wrote extensively about Bosnia and Kosovo in her book, "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," which won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize. Scahill covered the NATO bombings of Kosovo and Yugoslavia for Democracy Now! in 1999. Scahill is the author of the new book "Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield." The fim of the same names opens in theaters on Friday.
TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: You’re an adviser to Barack Obama, in addition to having just published another book, but I wanted to play for you Hillary Clinton’s comments last night in the debate, at the Democratic presidential debate in Austin, when she brought up the issue of Kosovo. This is what she had to say.
SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: I’ve supported the independence of Kosovo, because I think it is imperative that in the heart of Europe we continue to promote independence and democracy, and I would be moving very aggressively to hold the Serbian government responsible with their security forces to protect our embassy. Under international law, they should be doing that.
AMY GOODMAN: Samantha Power, your response?
SAMANTHA POWER: Well, I just think it’s one thing — I mean, on some level, I agree. I think that if there wasn’t violence in Serbia today because of the declaration of independence, there would be violence in Kosovo today because the Albanians were literally just recoiling under international occupation, I mean, ultimately. So we were sort of in a lose-lose situation once it got to this point. And the tragedy is that the nine years weren’t used to do more to actually sort of deepen the economic ties and deepen the minority rights protections and so forth in Kosovo and that it has come to this. But I think that one has to be very careful not to think about Kosovo a la carte, and, to some degree, this sort of “I’m going to stampede ahead” and “We’re going to recognize this” and, you know, “The Serbs are responsible yet again” — I mean, that kind of implication probably isn’t going to do the people of Serbia any favors in the long term. We’ve really got to start to think about integration and not simply denunciation.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Jeremy, I’d like to ask you, you covered the original US-led NATO bombings in that region years ago, and it was raised then as sort of an example of humanitarian intervention that worked. And here we are a decade later, and we still have major, major divisions and problems in the region. Your perspective, as you look at this new upsurge of problems?
JEREMY SCAHILL: I find it very interesting that the Bush administration is talking about international law and how international law needs to be upheld for the protection of the US embassy. That certainly is true, but notice the selectivity of when the Bush administration chooses to recognize that there actually is international law. I mean, this is an administration that refuses to support any kind of an effective and independent international criminal court, preferring to support these sort of ad hoctribunals, which have been used against Yugoslavia and certainly with Rwanda.
In the case of Hillary Clinton, what’s particularly interesting is that she and her advisers, which include many of the key figures involved with the original bombing of Yugoslavia and, in fact, the architects of much of US policy in the 1990s toward Yugoslavia, people like Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke, that Clinton holds this up as a sort of successful US foreign policy or international action.
And I think it’s important to remember that this declaration of independence from Kosovo was immediately supported by the Bush administration and many powerful countries in the world. I was recalling during the 2000 elections in the United States, being in Serbia and people joking that the worst thing that could happen to us is that Al Gore would be president, because then we’ll have the Democrats continuing to focus on us, and if Bush is president, he’ll ignore us. And, well, of course, Bush immediately recognized Kosovo, and that sort of seals the deal, in a sense.
But it’s important to remember how we got to this point. I mean, Samantha was talking a little bit about the broader context here. The fact is that this was sort of Clinton’s Iraq, in a way. He bombed Yugoslavia for seventy-eight days with no United Nations mandate. I was at the UN the night that it began, and Kofi Annan was sort of beside himself that the action had been taken so swiftly, this military action, seventy-eight days of bombing of Yugoslavia under the auspices of NATO.
Wesley Clark was the commander of those operations, the Supreme Allied Commander. They bombed a Serbian television station, killing sixteen media workers; some of them were media workers, some of them were makeup artists, others were engineers. They directly targeted passenger trains and then fabricated a video afterwards to make it seem as though it was a split-second decision. They killed thousands of civilians.
And the fact was that the exaggerations of what was happening in Kosovo by William Cohen, the Defense Secretary at the time, who talked about a million missing people — then it was scaled back to 100,000, then 50,000, then 10,000, and now the official number is that there were 2,700 people that were killed, and there’s been no determination of their ethnicity. Now, I can tell you from being on the ground in Kosovo that some of the worst violence that occurred, slaughtering of Albanians, happened after the NATO bombing began. And the fact was that the US sabotaged the work of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in the weeks leading up to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
And I think that what we have to understand here is that this is where the sort of liberals, like Hillary Clinton, come together with the neocons, because there are a lot of similarities between what happened in Yugoslavia and what happened in Iraq, with the lead-up to the war, the disregard for international law or international consensus, and then the outright killing of civilians under the auspices of a humanitarian intervention.
AMY GOODMAN: Samantha Power, your response? And you’re saying Barack Obama isn’t that different on this issue than Hillary Clinton in his attitude to what has happened.
SAMANTHA POWER: Well, I think he feels like it has come to this point, and, as I said, there was going to be major violence in Kosovo if the status of the province was left untended to.
I do have a different perspective from Jeremy from that period, as one who spent time in Kosovo in advance of the NATO bombing and wondered what on earth was going to be the fate of those people if the Serbian regime remained in power, and disagree with some of the specific facts of what he said about what actually happened during the bombing.
But I think the important fact is that we reveal, over time — in academia, one talks about revealed preferences, revealed agendas. If we could put the people of Kosovo finally at the centerpiece of our thinking about what to do about the region, or the people of Serbia, for that matter, I mean, whatever the motives are for getting involved, whatever happened back in 1999 — and I’m not saying we should brush it under the rug, by any means — but what is revealed again and again is when we pay attention to these kind of places, it’s a spasm, and it’s usually for some combination of national — something to do with national interest. At that time, it was probably NATO credibility. But I have to say, if it weren’t for the atrocities against the Kosovo Albanians, there would not have been an intervention. It wasn’t merely about NATO credibility. You don’t just go bomb gratuitously — and I recognize that I’m probably in the minority at this table in believing this to be true.
But having gone in, you had a responsibility to the province, you had a responsibility to the Serbian minority. And what happened is we got involved and then turned our attention elsewhere. And Bush, in coming into office, pulled US troops out of Kosovo, basically said, “This isn’t my problem,” and then started to pay attention at the moment we recognized Kosovo’s independence. That’s not the way you go. You don’t sort of spasm here, spasm there. It’s going to produce this kind of turbulence and this kind of violence.
JEREMY SCAHILL: What the United States did, though, right after NATO forces entered Yugoslavia is they brought in some high-profile thugs and criminals, people like Agim Ceku, who became the commander, the military commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army. This was a man who was a war criminal from the war in Bosnia when he served in the Croatian military. He was trained by a US mercenary company called Military Professional Resources Incorporated. He was the guy that the United States was basically bolstering to become the new head of the Kosovo army, and it’s quite interesting that that man is a war criminal.
And the fact is that Camp Bondsteel is of tremendous, significant importance, significance, to the United States for geopolitical reasons, and I think that’s one of the reasons why Bush moved so swiftly to support the independence of Kosovo, is that the government in Pristina is very easy to manipulate. The government in Belgrade, that’s a tougher story. Vojislav Kostunica, who’s one of the main political figures, the prime minister of the country, is a fairly rightwing isolationist and I don’t think would be too happy about a US military base operating on Serbian soil.
But, you know, in response to some of what Samantha was saying, in the 1990s, the worst humanitarian crises in the world, certainly Rwanda and other African nations, certainly in Europe, but Iraq — I mean, where is the label of genocide for the US policy toward Iraq? It was Bill Clinton who initiated the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam against Iraq under the guise of humanitarian intervention in the north and south of that country, the sanctions killing hundreds of thousands of people. I mean, we have had one of the greatest mass slaughters in history, in modern history, in Iraq, going from 1990 to the present, and yet everyone talks about this as though it’s not genocide, as though it’s not part of that bigger picture. Clinton selling weapons to the Turks to slaughter the Kurds — I mean, there were all sorts of horrific things happening in the world. And it’s the selectivity of US foreign policy that I think is really outrageous. It’s not that no one should do anything about it; it’s that the Iraqis — it’s sort of, you know, good victims, bad victims.
AMY GOODMAN: Samantha Power?
SAMANTHA POWER: Where does one start? I mean, I would just like to know — I guess Jeremy just asked — the question is, since you’ve spent so much time there, at the moment that we’re at now, what do we do, in fact? I mean, are you suggesting that then basically the Serbian — the Kosovars should become part of Serbia? I mean, I felt like we hit a stalemate, and something had to budge. There was going to be violence in Kosovo. And I, again, don’t mean to brush all the crimes of American foreign policy under the rug, and I’ve written extensively also about sanctions and the toll of sanctions and so forth in Iraq. But just to stick to this moment —-
JEREMY SCAHILL: But is that genocide, according to you?
SAMANTHA POWER: No, but we can talk about that. I don’t think the Clinton administration set out to deliberately destroy the Iraqi people as such.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Oh, I totally disagree. But what Madeleine Albright said, it was worth the price, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi victims of US policy.
SAMANTHA POWER: So can I just ask: so what exactly do we do now in terms of Kosovo, as one who has spent a lot of time there?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, now, I think we have a very serious problem, because I think, and as Professor Robert Hayden from the University of Pittsburgh pointed out last night, who of course is fluent in Serbian, spent a lot of time there and is a specialist in international law, there could have been some kind of a negotiated border agreement, I think, where the Serbs would have been guaranteed protection. I mean, I was talking to sources in Serbia last night who said that now the Serbian military is actually engaging in incursions into the northern part of Kosovo. This could potentially be a very serious issue.
And I think that even if we look at it from the most mainstream political perspective, it was unwise for the US to come in so swiftly without giving the Serbian government an opportunity to deal with the safety of the Serbs in Mitrovica and in some of those border areas. And I think, internally in Serbia now, one of the reasons we’re seeing so much protest is that the Milosevic government had a despicable policy toward refugees from all of the various former Yugoslav republics who found themselves in Serbia. And you have literally hundreds of thousands of Serbs who are sort of left without a place to go and don’t have full rights in Serbia. I just think it was very poor diplomacy on the part of the Bush administration to do this so swiftly, and I think it raises serious questions about what the US agenda there is. So we have a very serious international crisis there right now.
SAMANTHA POWER: I just think to call it “swift,” when for nine years Kosovo’s status has been hanging in limbo, is not right. And part of the issue is what -— even stipulating everything you said about NATO bombing, what exactly do you do then about a province that is hanging by a thread where you have a Serbian minority? I mean, one of the things that I think we don’t talk near enough about is that there are no takers for the demand that monitors be put into Kosovo. You don’t see European governments, you don’t see other international governments around, you don’t see people stepping up to say, you know, “I prefer to do more than simply denounce George Bush; I’d actually like to help the Serbian minority in Kosovo.” Those minority rights protections have been in play for two years. The Serbian government wasn’t interested in negotiating and being a part of anything that would constitute a compromise in terms of Kosovo’s future.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Is your sense that the rush or the quick movement of the Bush administration to support this independence is in some way effected also by the continuing tensions between the United States and the rest of the Muslim world, that this is a — because I would assume that in other parts of the Muslim world, there’s support for this — for Kosovo independence?
SAMANTHA POWER: Can we just push back a little on this idea of swiftness, again, as I wasn’t very articulate just now? But there has been a process overseen by the United Nations by Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish prime minister [president], for I think now going on three years, as basically an effort to do this peaceably. I don’t see how there was ever going to be a way to get out of this bind without offending either Serbia or the ethnic Albanians and either stemming violence in Serbia or stemming violence in Kosovo. But whether there could have been a compromise or not, it was an international diplomat, who has the respect — allegedly, anyway — of both sides, who tried try to come up with a solution which would have protected the Serbian minority and would have protected hopefully ethnic Albanians, as well. That was rejected. There were no negotiations that were accepted by Serbia. Then, at a certain point, the Albanians said, OK, after three years, we’re going to declare independence, or we’re going — this is going to explode. Now, they don’t care about the Serbian minority at all. They’d just assume the Serbs be cleansed, I couldn’t agree with Jeremy more.
But the idea that this is swift, what it is is a swift response to the declaration of independence in the hopes, almost, that it will just go away, that if you could just get enough countries within the UN to recognize this independence, then maybe that will — cooler heads will prevail. And the irony of what happened yesterday in Belgrade is there’s some chance that perhaps the perverse counter-effect to the violence is that maybe in Serbia this will actually — because of the fear of thuggery and so forth, that tempers will abate. But I’m just trying to think about how to go forward in an impossible situation where Kosovo is also now sadly the playground for great powers, as it has been arguably for a very long time, rather than a place where people are actually focusing on the welfare of the people in peril.
JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, but what I do think is of particular concern to people in this country is when Hillary Clinton holds this up as a success. I mean, did you support, you know, the total sabotage of diplomacy at Rambouillet, when the United States put forward an occupation agreement that said that NATO ships and vessels and troops would enjoy free and unrestricted access throughout all of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo, and then said, “Oh, Milosevic rejected peace”? The reality was that Albright and Holbrooke delivered basically a document that no sovereign country on earth would have signed, and it was a setup. It was an occupation agreement that said immunity for US troops traveling around. I mean, this is how the Democrats and Republicans come together in their foreign policy. I mean, this is the Hillary Clinton-George Bush alliance. This is how international diplomacy is waged: through bombs.
SAMANTHA POWER: So Kofi Annan, who you invoked earlier, gave a very good speech in the middle of the NATO war, which was: I don’t want to live in a world where countries like the United States can just trample over the UN Security Council, as you alluded to earlier in terms of both Kosovo and Iraq. I also don’t want to live in a world where a government can commit massacres with impunity. Kofi Annan was much more torn —-
JEREMY SCAHILL: As Clinton did in Iraq -—
SAMANTHA POWER: If I may —-
JEREMY SCAHILL: —- and Bush is doing in Iraq.
SAMANTHA POWER: If I may — Kofi Annan was hugely torn about the Kosovo intervention. He didn’t want to see the UN Security Council trampled, you’re right. There wasn’t adequate international legal authorization for that, by any means. But he also didn’t want to live in a situation where the Serbs could massacre the ethnic Albanians at will.
Sergio Vieria de Mello, who at some point we will maybe talk about, was also somebody totally loyal to the UN Charter, totally loyal to the idea of civilian protection. He also supported the war in Kosovo. So, yes, in fact, I did support the Rambouillet negotiations. I don’t see it at all the way that you did. And, again, I haven’t heard a scenario by which ethnic Albanians would actually have been free of massacres and free of fear in the scenario which would have left the province alone in a way that you suggest.
GUESTS
Jeremy Scahill, National Security correspondent for The Nation and author of the new book "Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield." The film of the same name opens in theaters on Friday.
Samantha Power, President Obama’s nominee to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
FILED UNDER Web Exclusive, United Nations, Jeremy Scahill, Samantha Power
TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: You’re an adviser to Barack Obama, in addition to having just published another book, but I wanted to play for you Hillary Clinton’s comments last night in the debate, at the Democratic presidential debate in Austin, when she brought up the issue of Kosovo. This is what she had to say.
SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: I’ve supported the independence of Kosovo, because I think it is imperative that in the heart of Europe we continue to promote independence and democracy, and I would be moving very aggressively to hold the Serbian government responsible with their security forces to protect our embassy. Under international law, they should be doing that.
AMY GOODMAN: Samantha Power, your response?
SAMANTHA POWER: Well, I just think it’s one thing — I mean, on some level, I agree. I think that if there wasn’t violence in Serbia today because of the declaration of independence, there would be violence in Kosovo today because the Albanians were literally just recoiling under international occupation, I mean, ultimately. So we were sort of in a lose-lose situation once it got to this point. And the tragedy is that the nine years weren’t used to do more to actually sort of deepen the economic ties and deepen the minority rights protections and so forth in Kosovo and that it has come to this. But I think that one has to be very careful not to think about Kosovo a la carte, and, to some degree, this sort of “I’m going to stampede ahead” and “We’re going to recognize this” and, you know, “The Serbs are responsible yet again” — I mean, that kind of implication probably isn’t going to do the people of Serbia any favors in the long term. We’ve really got to start to think about integration and not simply denunciation.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Jeremy, I’d like to ask you, you covered the original US-led NATO bombings in that region years ago, and it was raised then as sort of an example of humanitarian intervention that worked. And here we are a decade later, and we still have major, major divisions and problems in the region. Your perspective, as you look at this new upsurge of problems?
JEREMY SCAHILL: I find it very interesting that the Bush administration is talking about international law and how international law needs to be upheld for the protection of the US embassy. That certainly is true, but notice the selectivity of when the Bush administration chooses to recognize that there actually is international law. I mean, this is an administration that refuses to support any kind of an effective and independent international criminal court, preferring to support these sort of ad hoctribunals, which have been used against Yugoslavia and certainly with Rwanda.
In the case of Hillary Clinton, what’s particularly interesting is that she and her advisers, which include many of the key figures involved with the original bombing of Yugoslavia and, in fact, the architects of much of US policy in the 1990s toward Yugoslavia, people like Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke, that Clinton holds this up as a sort of successful US foreign policy or international action.
And I think it’s important to remember that this declaration of independence from Kosovo was immediately supported by the Bush administration and many powerful countries in the world. I was recalling during the 2000 elections in the United States, being in Serbia and people joking that the worst thing that could happen to us is that Al Gore would be president, because then we’ll have the Democrats continuing to focus on us, and if Bush is president, he’ll ignore us. And, well, of course, Bush immediately recognized Kosovo, and that sort of seals the deal, in a sense.
But it’s important to remember how we got to this point. I mean, Samantha was talking a little bit about the broader context here. The fact is that this was sort of Clinton’s Iraq, in a way. He bombed Yugoslavia for seventy-eight days with no United Nations mandate. I was at the UN the night that it began, and Kofi Annan was sort of beside himself that the action had been taken so swiftly, this military action, seventy-eight days of bombing of Yugoslavia under the auspices of NATO.
Wesley Clark was the commander of those operations, the Supreme Allied Commander. They bombed a Serbian television station, killing sixteen media workers; some of them were media workers, some of them were makeup artists, others were engineers. They directly targeted passenger trains and then fabricated a video afterwards to make it seem as though it was a split-second decision. They killed thousands of civilians.
And the fact was that the exaggerations of what was happening in Kosovo by William Cohen, the Defense Secretary at the time, who talked about a million missing people — then it was scaled back to 100,000, then 50,000, then 10,000, and now the official number is that there were 2,700 people that were killed, and there’s been no determination of their ethnicity. Now, I can tell you from being on the ground in Kosovo that some of the worst violence that occurred, slaughtering of Albanians, happened after the NATO bombing began. And the fact was that the US sabotaged the work of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in the weeks leading up to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
And I think that what we have to understand here is that this is where the sort of liberals, like Hillary Clinton, come together with the neocons, because there are a lot of similarities between what happened in Yugoslavia and what happened in Iraq, with the lead-up to the war, the disregard for international law or international consensus, and then the outright killing of civilians under the auspices of a humanitarian intervention.
AMY GOODMAN: Samantha Power, your response? And you’re saying Barack Obama isn’t that different on this issue than Hillary Clinton in his attitude to what has happened.
SAMANTHA POWER: Well, I think he feels like it has come to this point, and, as I said, there was going to be major violence in Kosovo if the status of the province was left untended to.
I do have a different perspective from Jeremy from that period, as one who spent time in Kosovo in advance of the NATO bombing and wondered what on earth was going to be the fate of those people if the Serbian regime remained in power, and disagree with some of the specific facts of what he said about what actually happened during the bombing.
But I think the important fact is that we reveal, over time — in academia, one talks about revealed preferences, revealed agendas. If we could put the people of Kosovo finally at the centerpiece of our thinking about what to do about the region, or the people of Serbia, for that matter, I mean, whatever the motives are for getting involved, whatever happened back in 1999 — and I’m not saying we should brush it under the rug, by any means — but what is revealed again and again is when we pay attention to these kind of places, it’s a spasm, and it’s usually for some combination of national — something to do with national interest. At that time, it was probably NATO credibility. But I have to say, if it weren’t for the atrocities against the Kosovo Albanians, there would not have been an intervention. It wasn’t merely about NATO credibility. You don’t just go bomb gratuitously — and I recognize that I’m probably in the minority at this table in believing this to be true.
But having gone in, you had a responsibility to the province, you had a responsibility to the Serbian minority. And what happened is we got involved and then turned our attention elsewhere. And Bush, in coming into office, pulled US troops out of Kosovo, basically said, “This isn’t my problem,” and then started to pay attention at the moment we recognized Kosovo’s independence. That’s not the way you go. You don’t sort of spasm here, spasm there. It’s going to produce this kind of turbulence and this kind of violence.
JEREMY SCAHILL: What the United States did, though, right after NATO forces entered Yugoslavia is they brought in some high-profile thugs and criminals, people like Agim Ceku, who became the commander, the military commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army. This was a man who was a war criminal from the war in Bosnia when he served in the Croatian military. He was trained by a US mercenary company called Military Professional Resources Incorporated. He was the guy that the United States was basically bolstering to become the new head of the Kosovo army, and it’s quite interesting that that man is a war criminal.
And the fact is that Camp Bondsteel is of tremendous, significant importance, significance, to the United States for geopolitical reasons, and I think that’s one of the reasons why Bush moved so swiftly to support the independence of Kosovo, is that the government in Pristina is very easy to manipulate. The government in Belgrade, that’s a tougher story. Vojislav Kostunica, who’s one of the main political figures, the prime minister of the country, is a fairly rightwing isolationist and I don’t think would be too happy about a US military base operating on Serbian soil.
But, you know, in response to some of what Samantha was saying, in the 1990s, the worst humanitarian crises in the world, certainly Rwanda and other African nations, certainly in Europe, but Iraq — I mean, where is the label of genocide for the US policy toward Iraq? It was Bill Clinton who initiated the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam against Iraq under the guise of humanitarian intervention in the north and south of that country, the sanctions killing hundreds of thousands of people. I mean, we have had one of the greatest mass slaughters in history, in modern history, in Iraq, going from 1990 to the present, and yet everyone talks about this as though it’s not genocide, as though it’s not part of that bigger picture. Clinton selling weapons to the Turks to slaughter the Kurds — I mean, there were all sorts of horrific things happening in the world. And it’s the selectivity of US foreign policy that I think is really outrageous. It’s not that no one should do anything about it; it’s that the Iraqis — it’s sort of, you know, good victims, bad victims.
AMY GOODMAN: Samantha Power?
SAMANTHA POWER: Where does one start? I mean, I would just like to know — I guess Jeremy just asked — the question is, since you’ve spent so much time there, at the moment that we’re at now, what do we do, in fact? I mean, are you suggesting that then basically the Serbian — the Kosovars should become part of Serbia? I mean, I felt like we hit a stalemate, and something had to budge. There was going to be violence in Kosovo. And I, again, don’t mean to brush all the crimes of American foreign policy under the rug, and I’ve written extensively also about sanctions and the toll of sanctions and so forth in Iraq. But just to stick to this moment —-
JEREMY SCAHILL: But is that genocide, according to you?
SAMANTHA POWER: No, but we can talk about that. I don’t think the Clinton administration set out to deliberately destroy the Iraqi people as such.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Oh, I totally disagree. But what Madeleine Albright said, it was worth the price, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi victims of US policy.
SAMANTHA POWER: So can I just ask: so what exactly do we do now in terms of Kosovo, as one who has spent a lot of time there?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, now, I think we have a very serious problem, because I think, and as Professor Robert Hayden from the University of Pittsburgh pointed out last night, who of course is fluent in Serbian, spent a lot of time there and is a specialist in international law, there could have been some kind of a negotiated border agreement, I think, where the Serbs would have been guaranteed protection. I mean, I was talking to sources in Serbia last night who said that now the Serbian military is actually engaging in incursions into the northern part of Kosovo. This could potentially be a very serious issue.
And I think that even if we look at it from the most mainstream political perspective, it was unwise for the US to come in so swiftly without giving the Serbian government an opportunity to deal with the safety of the Serbs in Mitrovica and in some of those border areas. And I think, internally in Serbia now, one of the reasons we’re seeing so much protest is that the Milosevic government had a despicable policy toward refugees from all of the various former Yugoslav republics who found themselves in Serbia. And you have literally hundreds of thousands of Serbs who are sort of left without a place to go and don’t have full rights in Serbia. I just think it was very poor diplomacy on the part of the Bush administration to do this so swiftly, and I think it raises serious questions about what the US agenda there is. So we have a very serious international crisis there right now.
SAMANTHA POWER: I just think to call it “swift,” when for nine years Kosovo’s status has been hanging in limbo, is not right. And part of the issue is what -— even stipulating everything you said about NATO bombing, what exactly do you do then about a province that is hanging by a thread where you have a Serbian minority? I mean, one of the things that I think we don’t talk near enough about is that there are no takers for the demand that monitors be put into Kosovo. You don’t see European governments, you don’t see other international governments around, you don’t see people stepping up to say, you know, “I prefer to do more than simply denounce George Bush; I’d actually like to help the Serbian minority in Kosovo.” Those minority rights protections have been in play for two years. The Serbian government wasn’t interested in negotiating and being a part of anything that would constitute a compromise in terms of Kosovo’s future.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Is your sense that the rush or the quick movement of the Bush administration to support this independence is in some way effected also by the continuing tensions between the United States and the rest of the Muslim world, that this is a — because I would assume that in other parts of the Muslim world, there’s support for this — for Kosovo independence?
SAMANTHA POWER: Can we just push back a little on this idea of swiftness, again, as I wasn’t very articulate just now? But there has been a process overseen by the United Nations by Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish prime minister [president], for I think now going on three years, as basically an effort to do this peaceably. I don’t see how there was ever going to be a way to get out of this bind without offending either Serbia or the ethnic Albanians and either stemming violence in Serbia or stemming violence in Kosovo. But whether there could have been a compromise or not, it was an international diplomat, who has the respect — allegedly, anyway — of both sides, who tried try to come up with a solution which would have protected the Serbian minority and would have protected hopefully ethnic Albanians, as well. That was rejected. There were no negotiations that were accepted by Serbia. Then, at a certain point, the Albanians said, OK, after three years, we’re going to declare independence, or we’re going — this is going to explode. Now, they don’t care about the Serbian minority at all. They’d just assume the Serbs be cleansed, I couldn’t agree with Jeremy more.
But the idea that this is swift, what it is is a swift response to the declaration of independence in the hopes, almost, that it will just go away, that if you could just get enough countries within the UN to recognize this independence, then maybe that will — cooler heads will prevail. And the irony of what happened yesterday in Belgrade is there’s some chance that perhaps the perverse counter-effect to the violence is that maybe in Serbia this will actually — because of the fear of thuggery and so forth, that tempers will abate. But I’m just trying to think about how to go forward in an impossible situation where Kosovo is also now sadly the playground for great powers, as it has been arguably for a very long time, rather than a place where people are actually focusing on the welfare of the people in peril.
JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, but what I do think is of particular concern to people in this country is when Hillary Clinton holds this up as a success. I mean, did you support, you know, the total sabotage of diplomacy at Rambouillet, when the United States put forward an occupation agreement that said that NATO ships and vessels and troops would enjoy free and unrestricted access throughout all of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo, and then said, “Oh, Milosevic rejected peace”? The reality was that Albright and Holbrooke delivered basically a document that no sovereign country on earth would have signed, and it was a setup. It was an occupation agreement that said immunity for US troops traveling around. I mean, this is how the Democrats and Republicans come together in their foreign policy. I mean, this is the Hillary Clinton-George Bush alliance. This is how international diplomacy is waged: through bombs.
SAMANTHA POWER: So Kofi Annan, who you invoked earlier, gave a very good speech in the middle of the NATO war, which was: I don’t want to live in a world where countries like the United States can just trample over the UN Security Council, as you alluded to earlier in terms of both Kosovo and Iraq. I also don’t want to live in a world where a government can commit massacres with impunity. Kofi Annan was much more torn —-
JEREMY SCAHILL: As Clinton did in Iraq -—
SAMANTHA POWER: If I may —-
JEREMY SCAHILL: —- and Bush is doing in Iraq.
SAMANTHA POWER: If I may — Kofi Annan was hugely torn about the Kosovo intervention. He didn’t want to see the UN Security Council trampled, you’re right. There wasn’t adequate international legal authorization for that, by any means. But he also didn’t want to live in a situation where the Serbs could massacre the ethnic Albanians at will.
Sergio Vieria de Mello, who at some point we will maybe talk about, was also somebody totally loyal to the UN Charter, totally loyal to the idea of civilian protection. He also supported the war in Kosovo. So, yes, in fact, I did support the Rambouillet negotiations. I don’t see it at all the way that you did. And, again, I haven’t heard a scenario by which ethnic Albanians would actually have been free of massacres and free of fear in the scenario which would have left the province alone in a way that you suggest.
GUESTS
Jeremy Scahill, National Security correspondent for The Nation and author of the new book "Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield." The film of the same name opens in theaters on Friday.
Samantha Power, President Obama’s nominee to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
FILED UNDER Web Exclusive, United Nations, Jeremy Scahill, Samantha Power
