| To: Yaacov who wrote (17732) | 8/25/2001 9:29:06 AM | | From: Tom Clarke | | | | Milosevic threatened with loss of privileges after giving U.S. television interview
By Anthony Deutsch, Associated Press, 8/24/2001 15:20
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was warned Friday that he could lose jail privileges after he gave an unauthorized interview to Fox television.
Fox said Milosevic initiated the interview by phoning the station from a telephone just outside his cell at the U.N. detention unit at The Hague, where he is awaiting trial for alleged war crimes against Kosovo Albanians in 1999.
''We found out that he had spoken with a journalist in violation with the rules of detention and he has been warned that if there was to be a repetition that it could result in a withdrawal of all privileges,'' said Jim Landale, spokesman for the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. ''The situation is crystal clear to him.''
Fox said in an e-mail that Milosevic was surrounded by guards during the phone call, but they did not intervene.
Landale said he could not confirm the circumstances of the call. He called the incident ''regrettable'' and said Milosevic had claimed he was unaware he had broken rules by giving the interview.
Landale said Milosevic could forfeit his communications privileges, except with an attorney present. Detainees are normally free to buy prepaid telephone cards at the prison store.
Milosevic is known to frequently telephone family, supporters and leaders of his political party in Belgrade.
According to a transcript of the interview, Milosevic again charged that the tribunal is illegitimate and denied Serb forces had systematically committed war crimes.
''There are individual crimes, but there was clear order that any crime has to be punished immediately and whoever did it have to be arrested,'' he said.
As proof, ''more than 500 different individuals were arrested by the police or the army,'' he said. Crimes ''were consequences of chaotic situation created by massive bombing of NATO.''
Milosevic was transferred to the tribunal June 28 from Belgrade, where he had been arrested in April on charges of abuse of power and corruption during his 13-year rule. The former leader declined to enter a plea or appoint lawyers to defend him against the war crimes accusations, and the judges entered innocent pleas to all the charges.
Asked in the interview if he regretted the tens of thousands of people killed during the Balkan wars, Milosevic said: ''All of us are sorry for the death of any person all around the world.''
Milosevic said he had always acted in the interest of a united Yugoslavia, and expressed confidence in his public support back home.
''I have very, very wide and very strong support within my people,'' he said. ''So, they understand how they have brought that puppet regime now in Belgrade with those stolen elections and they understand that that is the way to occupy Yugoslavia, and everything is now worse than it was before.''
Milosevic, who was ousted from power in October, was succeeded by President Vojislav Kostunica.
boston.com |
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| To: Patrick E.McDaniel who started this subject | 8/29/2001 9:33:19 AM | | From: Tom Clarke | | | | BOSNIA, THE GLOBAL TAMMANY HALL
by Srdja Trifkovic
Bosnia is the Imperium’s first major experiment in nation-building. It is the harbinger of great and glorious things to come in the new millennium, and the experiences of this multiethnic, multiconfessional, multicultural polity based on democracy and human rights will be closely watched by other aspiring clients of the international community. It is therefore disheartening that in Bosnia we encounter evidence that the officials of the “international community” are perhaps no more virtuous or high-minded than the old rogues who governed the nation-states of yore.
Take the case of Thomas Miller, the United States ambassador in Sarajevo, who is rumored to have conspired a year ago with Milorad Dodik, then prime minister of the Bosnian-Serb Republic, to divert $500,000 of an American aid package to the Gore/Lieberman campaign. This claim, made privately by a former minister in Dodik’s government, has been confirmed by another highly placed source in Banja Luka, the capital of the Republika Srpska (RS).
The alleged deal was simple: Last July, Ambassador Miller is said to have arranged a multimillion-dollar USAID grant for the RS budget. Once the money arrived in Banja Luka, half a million was allocated to the prime minister’s “discretionary fund”—over which he had exclusive control—and promptly sent back to the United States as his contribution to the Gore/Lieberman campaign. This was not the only payment to a Western political figure from the fund (the existence of which Dodik admitted in a television interview last November), but it was the largest single disbursement ever made from it.
Our source insists that Miller was behind the scheme but does not know whether the administration or “Gore’s people in Washington” were aware of what was going on:
It is possible that Ambassador Miller arranged it all on his own initiative, because he is a committed Democrat--just like all other key U.S. officials in Bosnia: Jacques Klein, U.N. mission chief in Sarajevo, Ralph Johnson, first deputy high representative, and Robert Berry, OSCE mission chief. They all rooted for Gore, and Miller is known to have expressed his concern for ‘the future of Bosnia’ if Bush won. And he could not conceal his fury at the outcome of the election dispute in Florida.
When some revelations of Dodik’s corrupt practices--including the first partial disclosure of the Gore deal--were published by the Banja Luka magazine Extra last February, it looked like the cat was out of the bag. Interestingly, however, there has been no follow-up. It was widely expected that the new government of Prime Minister Mladen Ivanic, publicly committed to fighting corruption, would make public the results of an investigation into his predecessor’s practices. This has not happened so far, and our sources indicate that Dr. Ivanic is under heavy pressure from Ambassador Miller and other American political heavyweights in Bosnia not to rock the boat. He has agreed to comply, thus betraying his own electoral promise to eradicate corruption and hold former officials responsible.
Their motives are easy to understand. Dodik was persona gratissima in Bill Clinton’s Washington—Madeleine Albright once described him as “a breath of fresh air”—and the proponents of “continuity” of the U.S. policy in Bosnia want to keep him in reserve as a tried and true quisling. He could come in handy if they are allowed to play the next act in their arcane Balkan game: the scrapping of the Dayton Accord in favor of a centralized Bosnian state.
Even after Dodik’s crushing defeat at last fall’s RS general election, Ambassador Miller was promoting him for a ministerial position at the federal level in Sarajevo. Because Dodik’s reputation for greed and graft has made him odious even to the Muslim politicians who had found him useful in the past, he was unsuccessful in his bid. In addition, Mr. Miller, a protégé of Richard Holbrooke, may have strong personal reasons for wanting the new RS government to keep quiet about some of Dodik’s shenanigans. If the allegations are corroborated, it could mark not only the end of his diplomatic career but the beginning of a criminal investigation back in Washington. “I am honored to appear before you today as President Clinton’s nominee to receive the rank of ambassador… I am grateful to the President and to Secretary Albright for the confidence they have shown in appointing me to this position,” Thomas Miller declared at his Senate confirmation hearing in October 1997. His gratitude to the Democratic White House seems to have acquired a tangible form three years later.
In the meantime Miller had stepped on many Bosnian toes. During his tenure he has openly campaigned for the “non-nationalist” parties in Bosnia’s elections and earned the lasting wrath of both Serbs and Croats, who resented his support for the Muslims’ preferred model of a centralized Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serb member of the tripartite Bosnian presidency, Zivko Radisic, last fall even asked for Miller’s recall because “his activities in support of his preferred political parties and personalities in Bosnia are incompatible with the proper role of a diplomat.” The Croats’ leader Ante Jelavic agreed. The Croats were even more resentful of Miller’s imperious posture in the aftermath of the clampdown by the “international community” on their stronghold in Mostar, which included a raid on the vault of the bank used by their main political party.
Even if the Bosnian Serb government is bullied into silence, our source says that it should be possible to learn the truth about any misuse of USAID funds from Deloitte Touche Tohmantsu (DTT) and KPMG, as those two companies manage the consulting and lending program that makes USAID the largest lender in the RS and Bosnia. Right now, the source claims, DTT is covering up malfeasance in its Bosnian projects:
An effort is under way, sometimes desperate, by DTT to prevent an independent investigation of what is behind observed suspicious behavior in its project. They probably know if the alleged contribution to the Gore campaign has been made, but there is reason to suspect a corrupt connection between the DTT project and Dodik, and to expect that Ambassador Miller will go out of his way to thwart an independent investigation.
If there is a scandal involving foreign aid, it won’t be the first since the “international community” started its involvement in post-Dayton Bosnia. During 1996-99, the United States and its allies committed more than $5 billion to finance civil aspects of the Dayton Agreement; and as of March 2000, U.S. military costs to support the agreement totaled about $10 billion. In the summer of 1999, the office of the high representative—the U.N. Gauleiter in Sarajevo who wields the real power in the hybrid “country”—confirmed that more than one billion dollars had been lost in postwar Bosnia through tax evasion, customs fraud, or embezzlement of public funds. Much of that money was simply stolen from international aid projects. For instance, more than $20 million deposited by ten foreign embassies and international aid agencies in a Bosnian bank has disappeared. Over $500 million was missing from the Muslim city of Tuzla’s budget alone. The town of Sanski Most used municipal funds to build a horseracing track, while its Mayor, Mehmed Alagic, is accused of stealing $450,000 in aid from Saudi Arabia. A year later the Netherlands Ambassador to the UN, Peter Van Walsum, declared that B&H looses $500 million a year because of corruption involving high governmental officials. Without these losses, he said, there would be no budget deficit. At the same time the representatives of the International Monetary Fund cited that around $230 million are lost annually merely to the black-marketing of cigarettes and that the B&H government shows little interest in regulating the marketplace. In July of last year the Clinton Administration was forced to agree with the “basic thrust” of a report from the General Accounting Office (GAO) that crime and corruption are “endemic problems” in Bosnia which “seriously inhibit” both economic and political development and implementation of the Dayton peace agreement.
But as Ambassador James Pardew tried to explain to the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations July 19 of last year, there are “reform-minded Bosnians” who are willing to work hard to change the situation, and the “entire thrust” of U.S. assistance for Bosnia is designed “to help these people establish a peaceful, transparent and democratic society.”
Dodik was an example of “reform-mindedness” to Pardew and his bosses, and Miller is their man in situ. Another form of institutionalized corruption involves international bureaucrats who lobby local politicians on behalf of companies from their countries. According to our source in Banja Luka,
The British dominate the so-called Independent Commission for Media, and they swiftly tailored the privatization of the Bosnian television system so that British companies appear as best qualified potential buyers. The Bosnian tsar himself, High Representative Wolfgang Petritsch, tirelessly demands that Austria Telecom be granted the license as the second mobile-phone provider for Bosnia-Herzegovina. His deputy, Ralph Johnson of the United States, is involved in setting up consolidated public utilities for gas and electricity so that they can be sold off more easily to foreign investors who fit his bill.
Lower down the scale, foreign bureaucrats—especially those from Eastern Europe and the Third World—are involved in large-scale smuggling of American cigarettes that arrive from Montenegro and are then shipped via Bosnia to the European Union.
Bosnia, of course, is no exception to the rule that there is no correlation between foreign assistance and economic growth, but the “international community” is by now aiding and abetting the open-ended burgeoning of the culture of corruption. Foreigners have absolute power in Bosnia. The results were to be expected. The future will only bring more of the same, corrupting not only Bosnia--the victim of international largesse--but all those who enter the dark villayet to distribute it.
Endemic and institutionalized corruption at all levels and by all participants is an apt symbol of “Bosnia” because it is an edifice is based on a lie. The lie was supposed to replace the bonds of loyalty, authority, and legitimacy that link Bosnian Croats and Croatia and Bosnian Serbs and Serbia. These bonds are rooted in centuries of political, ethnic, and cultural identity and are sure to prove stronger than bonds to a hastily fabricated central government. The way the whole Dayton package has been put together reflects the short-termism of Western policy, and its ultimate preference for form over substance. It will not survive in the long term: the inherent dynamics of Bosnia’s disintegration are still there. Those same centrifugal forces which had doomed Yugoslavia as a whole are still present in Bosnia, probably even more than before the U.S. got involved.
As for Ambassador Miller, his apparently well-deserved demise will have to wait: the Bush administration, either oblivious of his alleged transgressions or indifferent to them, has rewarded him for his efforts with the ambassadorial appointment to Greece.
Copyright 2001, www.ChroniclesMagazine.org
928 N. Main St., Rockford, IL 61103
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| To: Patrick E.McDaniel who started this subject | 8/31/2001 10:33:36 AM | | From: Tom Clarke | | | | 3 Ways to Handle the KLA
Thursday, August 30, 2001
Options on Macedonia
By Srdja Trifkovic
On the eve of the War in Kosovo, I wrote in the Times of London that NATO support of ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo would unleash a chain reaction whose first victim would be Macedonia, because "once KLA veterans acting as policemen start to patrol Kosovo, the rising expectations of Macedonia's Albanians will be impossible to contain."
"Nonsense," a U.S. State Department official snapped at a conference in Washington a few days later. "The problem in Kosovo is Milosevic. In Macedonia the Albanians don't need to make trouble because their rights are respected." The issue was that of "human rights," he said, not nationalism: the notion of Greater Albania was a Serb paranoid invention.
Two and a half years, one bombing, and $100 billion later we know the score. The same pattern of NATO blunders is continuing. To correct it, we need to recognize that no institutional arrangements short of ethnic partition will assuage Albanian separatism.
There is nothing remarkable, or inherently reprehensible, about such behavior: Premodern nations and tribes have been at it since time immemorial. The Albanians differ only in that they have perfected the art of using foreigners - sultans, kaisers, duces, führers, and most recently the Clinton administration - to get the job done for them. Indeed, the mess in the Balkans is likely to be Clinton's most enduring legacy.
The Bush administration now faces three alternatives. All of them are unpleasant, although not equally so.
Becoming a truly honest broker and acting robustly to disarm the KLA (or whatever label it chooses to use in Macedonia today, or Montenegro or Greece tomorrow) is a nonstarter. Truly disarming the KLA, not merely collecting an arbitrarily determined and suspiciously low number of easily replaceable weapons, would mean American casualties, leading to a hasty withdrawal of the U.S. contingent - with or without prior agreement with our European allies - and the loss of credibility that this administration would never allow. It knows that the only reason that ethnic Albanians still tolerate NATO's presence in Kosovo, now that it is no longer needed to defeat the Serbs, is that it has not seriously attempted to declaw the KLA.
The present course - pretending to restrain the KLA while effectively appeasing it - is the worst of all options. The deployment of 3,500 NATO troops, supposedly for 30 days so the KLA may hand in its weapons to them, is a stopgap measure divorced from any meaningful strategy. It will also bring an all-around loss of American credibility (with the Macedonians this has already happened) and no gain. Ethnic Albanians will continue to use Kosovo as their safe haven for hit-and-run attacks against Macedonians, with NATO either reduced to passive observers or forced into an open-ended mission creep, and with American diplomacy permanently stuck in a deadend not of this administration's making.
The third option, least odious by far, is to disengage. During last year's campaign, candidate Bush and his aides - notably Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney and others - claimed that it was time to turn over the task of policing the Balkans to the Europeans. Since the United States has intervened needlessly and harmfully in the Balkans for the last decade, the task of sorting out the mess should be left to our NATO allies, if they are keen to stay. Bush should call Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder and give them the glad tidings: The hour of Europe has come. If your Eurocorps is to have any meaning, gentlemen, it is now - in the hills around Tetovo, on the road from Skopje to Kumanovo, and inside Kosovo - that its worth may be proven.
Perhaps the Europeans will have the sense to decline this gift. Ultimately the Albanians may even have to face their long-abused neighbors without foreign cover. That will present them with an unexpected problem, but its resolution is unworthy of the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier or Texas Ranger.
Srdja Trifkovic (STrif@compuserve.com) is director of the Center for International Studies at the Rockford Institute (www.rockfordinstitute.org) in Rockford, Ill.
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| To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (16909) | 10/25/2001 1:36:25 AM | | From: Thomas M. | | | | Dang it if this isn't one of the best rants I've heard in a while!
<<< .. I mean, there you have an all-American boy who's basically spent all his life in his native boonies, who's been brainwashed with the idiot-box all the while, who's been a dutiful churchgoer, who really believed that Uncle Sam was that great sugar-daddy-turned-Santa-Claus who'd never send his "beloved boys" on a sleazy mission.... who suddenly finds himself thrown down in the spotlight! Face-to-face with those ugly, barbaric coons who molested, raped, and ransacked the brave Kuwaiti --good heavens!
However, as days, weeks, and months pass, GI Tim's worldview evolves, changes and, somehow, gets subversively altered by his first-hand experience in the field.... Officer Timothy McVeigh might have come back alive from the Gulf War, yet, his ideological loyalty's been killed. His"third-kind" encounter with Middle-East aliens irremediably shattered him. He felt betrayed by the politicos, by the mainstream media's phoney reports, by his fellow countrymen's cretinous political awareness, and even by the reverend's bugaboo preaching.... ``I went over there hyped up, just like everyone else.... What I experienced, though, was an entirely different ballgame."
An entirely different ballgame indeed! Henceforth, McVeigh realized that everything he's been told back in his cloud-cuckoo land was actually a whole'nother ballgame. Eventually, the anticlimax was too much for McVeigh to stick it. The rest is history.... >>>
Tom |
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| To: Yaacov who wrote (17739) | 10/28/2001 3:32:45 PM | | From: George Papadopoulos | | | | I am still around, just too busy to post... I used to post some stuff in the Foreign Affairs Discussion thread but it got way too busy for me there to keep up so I left.
Isn't it ironic how Kosovo and other conflicts around don't seem as important anymore after Sept. 11?
Milo and Kosovo looks like peanuts compared to bin Laden and Afghanistan;)
I almost arranged a super cheap short vacation deal to Bangkok with wife and son but my mother in law in Malaysia shot it down, talk about oppression man!<g>
Hope all is going well with you, we sure live in interesting times...
Personally I can't wait for the World Cup next year<g>
George |
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