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http://russia-insider.com/en/kosovo-evil-little-war-almost-all-us-candidates-liked/ri13583
America's illegal wars: Kosovo & Iraq
http://russia-insider.com/en/kosovo-evil-little-war-almost-all-us-candidates-liked/ri13583
Kosovo: An Evil Little War (Almost) All US Candidates Liked
Nebojsa Malic
Originally appeared at RT
Although the 2016 presidential election is still in the primaries phase, contenders have already brought up America’s failed foreign wars. Hillary Clinton is taking flak over Libya, and Donald Trump has irked the GOP by bringing up Iraq. But what of Kosovo?
The US-led NATO operation that began on March 24, 1999 was launched under the “responsibility to protect” doctrine asserted by President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. For 78 days, NATO targeted what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – which later split into Serbia and Montenegro – over alleged atrocities against ethnic Albanians in the southern province of Kosovo. Yugoslavia was accused of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” as bombs rained on bridges, trains, hospitals, homes, the power grid and even refugee convoys.
NATO’s actions directly violated the UN Charter (articles 53 and 103), its own charter, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and the 1980 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The war was a crime against peace, pure and simple.
Though overwhelmed, Yugoslavia did not surrender; the June 1999 armistice only allowed NATO to occupy Kosovo under UN peacekeeping authority, granted by Resolution 1244 – which the Alliance has been violating ever since.
US Secretary of State at the time, Madeleine Albright, was considered the most outspoken champion of the “Kosovo War.” She is now a vocal supporter of candidate Clinton, condemning women who don’t vote for her to a “special place in Hell.”
Clinton visited the renegade province in October 2012, as the outgoing Secretary of State. She stood with the ‘Kosovan’ government leaders – once considered terrorists, before receiving US backing – and proclaimed unequivocal US support for Kosovo’s independence, proclaimed four years prior.
One Sanders aide, Jeremy Brecher, resigned in May 1999 arguing against the intervention as it unfolded, since the “goal of US policy is not to save the Kosovars from ongoing destruction.”
Trouble is there was no “destruction.” Contrary to NATO claims of 100,000 or more Albanians purportedly massacred by the Serbs, postwar investigators found fewer than 5,000 deaths – 1,500 of which happened after NATO occupied the province and the Albanian pogroms began.
Western media, eager to preserve the narrative of noble NATO defeating the evil Serbs, dismissed the terror as “revenge killings.” NATO troops thus looked on as their Albanian protégés terrorized, torched, bombed and pillaged across the province for years, forcing some 250,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma, and other groups into exile.
After George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, his administration adopted the Clinton-era agenda for the Balkans, including backing an independent Albanian state in Kosovo. None of the Republicans, save 2012 contender Ron Paul, have criticized the Kosovo War since.
Billionaire businessman Donald Trump actually has been critical – though back in 1999, long before he became the Republican front-runner and the bane of the GOP establishment. In October that year, Trump was a guest on Larry King’s CNN show, criticizing the Clintons’ handling of the Kosovo War after a fashion.
“But look at what we’ve done to that land and to those people and the deaths that we’ve caused,” Trump told King. “They bombed the hell out of a country, out of a whole area, everyone is fleeing in every different way, and nobody knows what’s happening, and the deaths are going on by the thousands.”
The problem with Trump, then as now, is that he is maddeningly vague. So, these remarks could be interpreted as referring to the terror going on at that very moment – the persecution of non-Albanians under NATO’s approving eye – or the exodus of Albanians earlier that year, during the NATO bombing. Only Trump would know which, and he hasn’t offered a clarification.
Though he has the most delegates and leads in the national polls for the Republican nomination, the GOP establishment is furious with Trump because he dared call George W. Bush a liar and describe the invasion of Iraq as a “big fat mistake.” According to the British historian Kate Hudson, however, the 2003 invasion was just a continuation of the “pattern of aggression,” following the precedent set with Kosovo.
Last week Secretary of State John Kerry reluctantly branded the actions of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in Iraq and Syria “genocidal” towards the Christians, Yazidis, Shiites and other groups. He cited examples of how IS destroyed churches, cemeteries and monuments, and murdered people simply because of who they were.
It was March 17, eight years to the day since 50,000 Albanians began a three-day pogrom in Kosovo, doing the very same things – while their activists in the US were raising funds for the very same John Kerry, as he ran for president as the Democratic candidate.
“For me, my family and my fellow Americans this is more than a foreign policy issue, it is personal,” [Hillary] Clinton said. Given the Kosovo Albanians had renamed a major street in their capital ‘Bill Clinton Avenue’ and erected a massive gilded monument to Hillary’s husband, her comments were hardly a surprise.
She is unlikely to be condemned for those remarks by her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. While arguing that Congress should have a say in authorizing the intervention, Sanders entirely bought into the mainstream narrative about the conflict, seeing it as a case of the evil Serbian “dictator” Slobodan Milosevic oppressing the unarmed ethnic Albanians. He saw “supporting the NATO airstrikes on Serbia as justified on humanitarian grounds.”
http://russia-insider.com/en/kosovo-evil-little-war-almost-all-us-candidates-liked/ri13583
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Kate Hudson,
Historian:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/14/usa.kosovo
A pattern of aggression
Kate Hudson
Iraq was not the first illegal US-led attack on a sovereign state in recent times. The precedent was set in 1999 in Yugoslavia writes Kate Hudson
Thursday 14 August 2003 11.42 AEST
The legality of the war against Iraq remains the focus of intense debate - as is the challenge it poses to the post-second-world-war order, based on the inviolability of sovereign states. That challenge, however, is not a new one. The precursor is without doubt Nato's 1999 attack on Yugoslavia, also carried out without UN support. Look again at how the US and its allies behaved then, and the pattern is unmistakable.
Yugoslavia was a sovereign state with internationally recognised borders; an unsolicited intervention in its internal affairs was excluded by international law. The US-led onslaught was therefore justified as a humanitarian war - a concept that most international lawyers regarded as having no legal standing (the Commons foreign affairs select committee described it as of "dubious legality"). The attack was also outside Nato's own remit as a defensive organisation - its mission statement was later rewritten to allow for such actions.
In Yugoslavia, as in Iraq, the ultimate goal of the aggressor nations was regime change. In Iraq, the justification for aggression was the possession of weapons of mass destruction; in Yugoslavia, it was the prevention of a humanitarian crisis and genocide in Kosovo. In both cases, the evidence for such accusations has been lacking: but while this is now widely accepted in relation to Iraq, the same is not true of Yugoslavia.
In retrospect, it has become ever clearer that the justification for war was the result of a calculated provocation - and manipulation of the legitimate grievances of the Kosovan Albanians - in an already tense situation within the Yugoslav republic of Serbia. The constitutional status of Kosovo had been long contested and the case for greater Kosovan Albanian self-government had been peacefully championed by the Kosovan politician, Ibrahim Rugova.
In 1996, however, the marginal secessionist group, the Kosovo Liberation Army, stepped up its violent campaign for Kosovan independence and launched a series of assassinations of policemen and civilians in Kosovo, targeting not only Serbs, but also Albanians who did not support the KLA. The Yugoslav government branded the KLA a terrorist organisation - a description also used by US officials. As late as the beginning of 1998, Robert Gelbard, US special envoy to Bosnia, declared: "The UCK (KLA) is without any question a terrorist group."
KLA attacks drew an increasingly heavy military response from Yugoslav government forces and in the summer of 1998 a concerted offensive against KLA strongholds began. In contrast to its earlier position, the US administration now threatened to bomb Yugoslavia unless the government withdrew its forces from the province, verified by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The US was now clearly determined to remove Milosevic, who was obstructing Yugoslavia's integration into the western institutional and economic framework.
Agreement was reached in October 1998 and 1,000 OSCE observers went to Kosovo to oversee the withdrawal of government troops. But the KLA used the pullback to renew armed attacks. In January 1999 an alleged massacre of 45 Kosovan Albanians by Yugoslav government forces took place at Racak. Both at the time and subsequently, evidence has been contradictory and fiercely contested as to whether the Racak victims were civilians or KLA fighters and whether they died in a firefight or close-range shootings.
Nevertheless, Racak was seized on by the US to justify acceleration towards war. In early 1999, the OSCE reported that "the current security environment in Kosovo is characterised by the disproportionate use of force by the Yugoslav authorities in response to persistent attacks and provocations by the Kosovan Albanian paramilitaries." But when the Rambouillet talks convened in February 1999, the KLA was accorded the status of national leader. The Rambouillet text, proposed by the then US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, included a wide range of freedoms and immunities for Nato forces within Yugoslavia that amounted to an effective occupation. Even the former US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, described it as "a provocation, an excuse to start bombing". The Yugoslavs refused to sign, so bombing began on March 24 1999.
Despite claims by western leaders that Yugoslav forces were conducting "genocide" against the Kosovan Albanians, reports of mass killings and atrocities - such as the supposed concealment of 700 murdered Kosovan Albanians in the Trepca mines - were often later admitted to be wrong. Atrocities certainly were carried out by both Serb and KLA forces. But investigative teams did not find evidence of the scale of dead or missing claimed at the time, responsibility for which was attributed to the Yugoslavs. The damage inflicted by US and British bombing, meanwhile, was considerable, including civilian casualties estimated at between 1,000 and 5,000 deaths. Nato forces also used depleted uranium weapons - linked to cancers and birth defects - while Nato bombers destroyed swathes of Serbia's economic and social infrastructure.
Far from solving a humanitarian crisis, the 79-day bombardment triggered the flight of hundreds of thousands of Kosovans. Half a million Kosovan Albanians who had supposedly been internally displaced turned out not to have been, and of the 800,000 who had sought refuge or been forced into neighbouring countries, the UNHCR estimated that 765,000 had already returned to Kosovo by August of the same year. A more long-lasting result, however, was that half the Kosovan Serb population - approximately 100,000 - left Kosovo or was driven out.
So was the war worth it? Notwithstanding the Nato-UN protectorate established in Kosovo, the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia was no longer under threat - the Kosovans did not achieve their independence. Nor has western support for the KLA been mirrored in Kosovan voting patterns: the party of Rugova, who never backed the violent path, received a convincing majority in the elections in 2001.
Meanwhile, violence dogs the surviving minority communities, and in spite of the presence of 40,000 K-For troops and a UN police force, the Serb and other minorities (such as Roma) have continued to be forced out. More than 200,000 are now estimated to have left. In the short term, support for Milosevic actually increased as a result of the war, and the regime was only changed through a combination of economic sanctions, elections and heavy western intervention. Such interference in a country's internal politics does not generally lead to a stable and peaceful society, as evidenced by the recent assassination of Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic, the most pro-western politician in the country.
As in Yugoslavia, so in Iraq: illegal aggression justified by spin and fabrication enables might to prevail and deals a terrible blow to the framework of international law. As in Yugoslavia, so in Iraq, people's wellbeing comes a poor second-best to the interests of the world's self-appointed moral and economic arbiters.
·Kate Hudson is principal lecturer in Russian and East European politics at South Bank University, London and author of Breaking the South Slav Dream: the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/14/usa.kosovo
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COMMENT
The American-Anglo NATO criminal alliance consistently uses the pretext of 'hoomanitarian' grounds to lawlessly invade or bomb one unlucky nation after another.
In the instance of Yugoslovia, they violated the following:
- UN Charter (articles 53 and 103) (USA's own charter)
- 1975 Helsinki Final Act
- 1980 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties
and their aggressive incursions set a precedent for Iraq.
The American-Anglo politicians are liars and war criminals.
Notice how NATO re-wrote its mission in the aftermath of violating international law?
It's the same legal redefinition game they played to commit atrocities and war crimes with impunity, against German prisoners of war during their post WWII massacre and occupation of vanquished Germany (which they still occupy today).
It's the same shifting of the goal posts and betrayals they've been adept at, consistently violating treaties with native Americans.
It's the same dishonesty being played out on the international stage, with the Americans ' unsigning' themselves from the Rome Statute, so they can avoid being held accountable for their war crimes by the International Criminal Court ('ICC') at The Hague.
In the lead-up to the establishment of the ICC, USA signed up to the ICC just before the December 2000 deadline:
-- to ensure that it would be a State party to the agreement
-- that could participate in DECISION-MAKING on how the Court works
To make certain it would remain immune to prosecution:
In addition:
US threatens military force if personnel held at The Hague:
-- U.S. President George Bush
-- 3 August, 2002, signs:
-- Servicemembers Protection Act (ASPA) (2002)
-- dubbed the 'Hague Invasion Act'
-- because the law:
-- law authorises the use of US military force
-- to liberate any American or citizen of a US-allied country
-- being held by ICC in The Hague
-- USA punishing those that ratify ICC treaty
-- Servicemembers Protection Act
-- provides for withdrawal of US military assistance
-- from countries ratifying the ICC treaty
-- reconstructs US participation in UN peacekeeping, unless US obtains immunity from prosecution
-- but provisions may be waived on 'national interests' grounds
-- however, the US has written into law, the provision that the US may:
-- assist internationally to 'bring to justice' those accused of:
-- genocide;
-- war crimes;
-- crimes against humanity;
-- including assistance with efforts of ICC.
*USA makes an exception of itself and its partners in crime.
http://www.globalissues.org/article/490/united-states-and-the-icc
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EU-NATO IMPERIALISM ❌ 
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