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Sending Cluster Bombs to Ukraine Indicts the US’ Moral Posturing
The Biden administration overrode the warnings of rights advocates and transferred the weapons, which are sure to pose a threat to life well into the future, as they have in other countries.
Aug 23, 2023
President Joe Biden’s administration has taken a cruel weapon—the cluster bomb—off the shelf and sent it to Ukraine to be used in the war against Russia. Prior to being transferred to Ukraine, cluster bombs made in the United States were used by Saudi Arabia as recently as last year to devastating effect in its war in Yemen. The weapons pose such an extraordinary danger to civilians that—although the U.S. is among a minority of countries that refuses to sign the Convention on Cluster Munitions banning them, and retains such weapons in its arsenal—they have largely been gathering dust because their use and sale are so controversial on the world stage. The White House’s decision to transfer the bombs to Ukraine both escalates the already horrific war and legitimizes a weapon that has no place in our world.
Cluster bombs are large bombs that contain dozens or even hundreds of smaller bombs, or “bomblets.” Cluster bombs are designed to scatter the bomblets over a wide area upon detonation. At a time when the United States and its allies often claim—inaccurately—to carry out precision killing with “surgical strikes,” cluster bombs are imprecise by nature.
But what makes cluster bombs even worse is the fact that, inevitably, not all of the smaller, scattered bombs explode on impact. The bomblets lie on or below the surface of the ground, potentially for years or even decades, waiting to be detonated when touched. They are, in effect, land mines. As Amnesty International’s Brian Castner concludes, “There’s just not a responsible way to use cluster munitions.”
Well after ceasefires and treaties formally end armed conflicts, cluster bombs continue to threaten civilians in the places where they have been used.
In Laos, where the U.S. dropped cluster bombs extensively as part of its war in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and ’70s, unexploded bomblets continue to litter the land even today. As veteran foreign correspondent Lewis M. Simons—who covered the war in Southeast Asia—wrote in a piece responding to the news of the weapons transfer to Ukraine, “Less than 1% of the dormant bombs have been cleared since the war ended in Laos. About 20,000 civilians been killed during the same period. Even as the numbers gradually decline, thousands continue to be killed, crippled, and disfigured.” He added, “Half the victims are children.”
Well after ceasefires and treaties formally end armed conflicts, cluster bombs continue to threaten civilians in the places where they have been used. In response to the dangers remaining bomblets present to civilians, more than 120 countries have signed the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions.
This means that by transferring cluster bombs to Ukraine, the Biden administration is violating an international law that the majority of U.N. member states are party to.
This is ironic given the attention that the White House has rightfully called to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s violations of international law in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. move to send cluster bombs to Ukraine indicts the moral position that it has claimed in the war.
How We Got Here
Biden’s decision fits into a long, dark history of the U.S. manufacture, use, and sale of this destructive weapon. The U.S. has used cluster bombs in large-scale military operations since World War II, including its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq two decades ago. The bomblets that the U.S. used in those invasions were the same size and color as the packaged meals—humanitarian daily rations, or HDRs—that the U.S. also air-dropped for civilians. Human rights groups warned at the time against using cluster bombs, pointing to a similar problem that occurred when the U.S. used them in the Balkan Wars in the 1990s and children mistook the bomblets for toys—but the Pentagon used them anyway. Between the misleading, friendly appearance of the unexploded bomblets and their widespread scatter upon being dropped, cluster bombs killed, maimed, and threatened the lives of many civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, provoking condemnation by human rights groups.
Then in 2006, Israel used U.S.-made cluster bombs in its 2006 invasion of Lebanon. In a move that the U.N. described as “immoral,” Israel dropped the overwhelming majority of its bombs—90%—in the last three days of the war as it was retreating, leaving Southern Lebanon littered with mines that have continued to pose a threat to civilians in the years since. This further fueled public sentiment against cluster bombs.
In 2008, the year that the Convention on Cluster Munitions was drafted and opened to signatories, President George W. Bush’s administration issued guidance regarding the Pentagon’s use of the weapon. While the U.S. would maintain cluster bombs in its arsenal, the new directive required that the “dud rate” of the bomblets had to be under 1%.
The notion that it is possible to develop a cluster bomb—an essentially blunt instrument of warfare—that spares civilians is a total fantasy.
The directive, on the one hand, was a response to international pressure and domestic unease over the threat that such weapons posed to civilians. On the other hand, it gave cover to cluster bombs by suggesting that the destruction they caused could remain limited to the time and place of battle and target only combatants. But the U.S.’s so-called “precision weapons”—such as “smart bombs” and attack drones—have been shown to cause enormous civilian casualties. The notion that it is possible to develop a cluster bomb—an essentially blunt instrument of warfare—that spares civilians is a total fantasy.
In 2017, however, the U.S. abandoned even this effort that at least hinted at a concern for the problem of civilian harm and a commitment to human rights when Donald Trump’s administration reversed Bush’s 2008 directive. This allowed the use of cluster bombs that had already been made—and were in the U.S. stockpile—that had a dud rate exceeding 1%. The new guidance also removed a deadline for replacing older cluster bombs that had higher dud rates.
Ironically, this coincided with the greatest blow to cluster bombs’ credibility in recent memory, when the U.S. provided them to Saudi Arabia for use in its scorched-earth bombardment of Yemen. Riyadh bombed weddings, destroyed bridges and roads used by Yemeni civilians, and slaughtered dozens of children when it blew up a school bus—using U.S.-made cluster bombs. The atrocities rendered the war unpopular in the U.S., leading to a congressional vote to end U.S. involvement—which President Trump then vetoed.
The U.S. remains in the minority of countries that refuses to sign the Convention on Cluster Munitions, along with Ukraine and Russia.
Still, the cluster weapons transfer to Ukraine remains controversial. In addition to condemnation by human rights groups like Amnesty International, The New York Times—which has enthusiastically supported sending weapons to Ukraine—editorialized against sending the cluster bombs.
Nevertheless, the Biden administration overrode the warnings of rights advocates and transferred the weapons, which are sure to pose a threat to life well into the future, as they have in other countries.
Thankfully though, that is not where the story ends.
During the widespread condemnation of U.S. support of Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen at its height in the mid-2010s, anti-war activists in New England organized against Textron, a Rhode Island-based weapons manufacturer that made cluster bombs. The campaign was ultimately successful, and Textron announced in 2016 that it would stop manufacturing the weapon. The many controversies and regulations regarding cluster bombs have led U.S. companies to stop producing them, and Textron was the nation’s last domestic manufacturer. There are currently no cluster bombs being manufactured in the U.S., and, if anti-war activism is strong enough, perhaps there never will be.
Just weeks ago, the U.S. disposed of the last chemical weapons in what had once been an enormous arsenal. Though militarism is on the rise around the world—with Washington being a key driver—the elimination of U.S. chemical weapons is a great milestone in the history of disarmament. The challenge is to build on the success of the chemical weapons moratorium and on the campaign against Textron, and toward the day when we can also assure the elimination of U.S. cluster bombs.
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Kosovo Closes Main Border With Serbia Amid Protests, Rising Tensions
"It is paramount that all involved avoid any rhetoric or actions that can cause tensions and escalate the situation," said the leader of NATO's mission in Kosovo. "Solutions should be sought through dialogue."
Dec 28, 2022
Kosovo shut down its largest border crossing with Serbia on Wednesday, underscoring the extent to which tensions between the two Balkan countries are rising.
Albanian-majority Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 with Western support, roughly a decade after North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces intervened and carried out a bombing campaign on behalf of ethnic Albanians during a 1998-1999 civil war in the former Yugoslavia.
Serbia, which had been one of the six constituent republics of Yugoslavia prior to its dissolution, has refused to recognize the statehood of Kosovo, which had been a Yugoslav province within Serbia. Instead, according to Agence France-Presse, Belgrade has encouraged 120,000 ethnic Serbs living in Kosovo to defy Pristina's authority—especially in northern Kosovo where Serbs constitute the majority.
According to Al Jazeera: "About 50,000 Serbs living in ethnically divided northern Kosovo refuse to recognize the government in Pristina or the status of Kosovo as a country separate from Serbia. They have the support of many Serbs in Serbia and its government."
As AFP reported:
The latest trouble erupted on December 10, when ethnic Serbs put up barricades to protest the arrest of an ex-policeman suspected of being involved in attacks against ethnic Albanian police officers—effectively sealing off traffic on two border crossings.
After the roadblocks were erected, Kosovar police and international peacekeepers were attacked in several shooting incidents, while the Serbian armed forces were put on heightened alert this week.
Late Tuesday, dozens of demonstrators on the Serbian side of the border used trucks and tractors to halt traffic leading to Merdare, the biggest crossing between the neighbors—a move which forced Kosovo police to close the entry point on Wednesday.
Due to recent border blockades and closures, just three entry points between the two countries remain open. The obstructions are "preventing thousands of Kosovars who work elsewhere in Europe from returning home for holidays," Al Jazeera noted.
"Kosovo's government has asked NATO's peacekeeping force for the country, the approximately 4,000-strong KFOR, to clear the barricades" erected on its side of the border, the news outlet reported. "KFOR has no authority to act on Serbian soil."
KFOR commander Major General Angelo Michele Ristuccia said Wednesday in a statement that "it is paramount that all involved avoid any rhetoric or actions that can cause tensions and escalate the situation."
"Solutions should be sought through dialogue," he added.
On Tuesday, Kosovo Interior Minister Xhelal Sveçla accused Serbia, under the influence of Russia, of trying to destabilize its neighbor by supporting ethnic Serbs who have been demonstrating for weeks in northern Kosovo.
According to Al Jazeera:
Serbia denies it is trying to destabilize its neighbor and says it only wants to protect the Serbian minority living in what is now Kosovan territory... not recognized by Belgrade.
Moscow said on Wednesday that it supported Serbia's attempts to protect ethnic Serbs in northern Kosovo but denied Pristina's accusation that Russia was somehow stoking tensions in an attempt to sow chaos across the Balkans.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov called it "wrong" to blame Moscow for escalating tensions between Kosovo and Serbia.
"Serbia is a sovereign country, and naturally, it protects the rights of Serbs who live nearby in such difficult conditions, and naturally reacts harshly when these rights are violated," said Peskov.
"Having very close allied relations, historical and spiritual relations with Serbia, Russia is very closely monitoring what is happening, how the rights of Serbs are respected and ensured," he added. "And, of course, we support Belgrade in the actions that are being taken."
In a joint statement released Wednesday, the European Union and the United Statescalled on all parties "to exercise maximum restraint, to take immediate action to unconditionally de-escalate the situation, and to refrain from provocations, threats, or intimidation."
Serbian Defense Minister Miloš Vučević on Wednesday described the barricades as a "democratic and peaceful" means of protest and said that Belgrade has "an open line of communication" with Western diplomats on resolving the issue.
"We are all worried about the situation and where all this is going," said Vučević. "Serbia is ready for a deal."
As AFP reported, "Northern Kosovo has been on edge since November when hundreds of ethnic Serb workers in the Kosovo police as well as the judicial branch, including judges and prosecutors, walked off the job."
"They were protesting a controversial decision to ban Serbs living in Kosovo from using Belgrade-issued vehicle license plates—a policy that was eventually scrapped by Pristina," the news agency noted. "The mass walkouts created a security vacuum in Kosovo, which Pristina tried to fill by deploying ethnic Albanian police officers in the region."
This article has been updated to better reflect the relationship between the former Yugoslavia, Serbia, and Kosovo.
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How Biden Flubbed Town Hall Foreign Policy Question
Most of our leaders are still hell-bent on preserving America's imperial power at any cost: endless wars, climate catastrophe, mass extinctions, and the terrifying risk of a final, apocalyptic mass-casualty war—most likely a nuclear war.
Oct 19, 2020
Toward the end of Joe Biden's October 15 town hall session, a Trump supporter asked Biden the only foreign policy question of the night. "So peace is breaking out all over the world," the questioner claimed. "Our troops are coming home. Serbia is talking to Kosovo. And the Arabs and Israelis are talking peace, which I believe is a modern-day miracle, what's going on. Does President Trump's foreign policy deserve some credit?"
Instead (Biden) endorsed some of the most deceptive elements of Trump's propaganda, dropped some clangers of his own and, in a classic Freudian slip, laid bare his own enduring commitment to American imperialism.
This question encapsulated all the smoke and mirrors that Trump has used to confuse the public and obscure his broken promises to end America's wars, bring our troops home and build a more peaceful world. This was a fantastic opportunity for Biden to clarify the reality of Trump's abysmal record and explain what he would do instead. But he didn't. Instead he endorsed some of the most deceptive elements of Trump's propaganda, dropped some clangers of his own and, in a classic Freudian slip, laid bare his own enduring commitment to American imperialism.
In response to the questioner's designation of Israel's deal with the UAE and Bahrain as a "modern-day miracle," Biden simply rolled over and said, "I complement the president on the deal with Israel." What he should have said was something like this:
"The UAE and Bahrain are ruled by dictators with absolute, despotic power who represent neither their own people nor the Arab world, let alone the people of Palestine--who gained nothing from these deals. Since these countries were not at war with Israel to begin with, these accords have nothing to do with peace. They are more about flooding the Middle East with even more U.S. weapons and forming new military alliances against Iran. Yes, we need peace deals between Israel and its Arab neighbors, but they must be deals that truly bring peace, end Israel's illegal military occupations and advance the equal rights of Palestinians and Israelis."
Biden didn't respond to the mention of the White House meeting between Serbia and Kosovo, but he could have explained that it had to be postponed when President Hashim Thaci of Kosovo was indicted for war crimes by an international court at The Hague. Thaci is charged with organizing the killing of hundreds of Serbian prisoners of war to sell their internal organs on the international transplant market under cover of NATO bombing in 1999. When the indictment was unveiled in June 2020, Thaci was literally in his plane on the way to meet Serbian leaders at the White House, and had to make a U-turn over the Atlantic to return to Kosovo.
Twenty-one years after NATO dropped 23,000 bombs on Serbia and illegally annexed Kosovo, neither Serbia nor nearly half the countries in the world have recognized Kosovo's independence from Serbia. Biden could have pointed to this as a case study in why the U.S. must stop waging regime change wars, organizing coups in other countries, and installing CIA-backed gangsters and war criminals like Thaci to rule them.
As for the critically important statement by the town hall questioner that "Our troops are coming home," Biden claimed that there are more troops in Afghanistan now than when he and Obama left office. That appears to be incorrect, since there were 11,000 troops there in December 2016 and 8,600 U.S. troops as of September 22nd, despite the lack of confirmation from the Pentagon on further reductions that Trump had promised.
However, Biden could have simply compared the number of troops brought home by Obama and Trump, which would have been an impressive comparison. Obama reduced U.S. troop levels abroad from 483,670 in December 2008, just before he took office, to 275,850 by December 2016. If the latest figures from the Trump administration are correct, there are still over 238,000 U.S. military personnel overseas.
So Obama reduced the U.S.'s overseas military presence by 43%, while Trump has reduced it by no more than another 14%. With Trump claiming he is "bringing our troops home" in every stump speech, why on Earth is Biden not trumpeting the fact that he and Obama brought home five times more troops than Trump has? Why is Biden running from that record? Is he planning to reverse that trend if elected? Millions of American voters would like to know.
A disappointing aspect of Biden's response was his habitual readiness to take the low road, smearing China's President Xi Jinping, criticizing Trump for even trying to make peace with North Korea, and repeating an unsubstantiated story about Russia paying "bounties" to the Taliban for killing U.S. troops. A better response from Biden would have been to fault Trump for not following through on the peace initiative with North Korea and for stirring up new Cold Wars with Russia and China, when the American people want their leaders to focus on existing threats like the pandemic, our devastated economy and the climate crisis.
The U.S. did indeed rule an empire in the twentieth century, albeit a neocolonial empire in an anti-colonial and post-colonial world that had to be sustained by a whole web of myths and lies.
But perhaps the most revealing moment of the evening was Biden's Freudian slip about the imperial character of America's relations with its allies and the rest of the world:
"You know, we've always ruled - (corrects himself) we've been most effective as a world leader, in my humble opinion - not just by the exercise of our power - we're the most powerful nation in the world - but the power of our example. That's what's led the rest of the world to follow us, on almost anything."
The U.S. did indeed rule an empire in the twentieth century, albeit a neocolonial empire in an anti-colonial and post-colonial world that had to be sustained by a whole web of myths and lies. But now we are standing at a crossroads in American and world history. America's history of war, militarism and international coercion has reached its final stage in the terminal decline of an increasingly corrupt and decadent American empire. Yet most of our leaders are still hell-bent on preserving America's imperial power at any cost: endless wars, climate catastrophe, mass extinctions, and the terrifying risk of a final, apocalyptic mass-casualty war--most likely a nuclear war.
But there is another path leading away from this crossroads, one that Joe Biden should embrace, which involves redirecting our country's resources and energies away from unsustainable imperial power through a peaceful transition to a sustainable, prosperous post-imperial future.
It would have been inspiring to hear Biden say that his goals would be to put an end to U.S. efforts at regime change; to significantly reduce the threat of nuclear war and join the UN Treaty on the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons; to free up hundreds of billions of dollars per year for domestic needs by right-sizing the Pentagon budget; and to put peaceful diplomacy front and center.
That would have been a paradigm-changing answer that would have motivated millions of Americans across the political spectrum--from leftists to anti-imperialist Republicans and libertarians--who long to live in a peaceful, just and sustainable world.
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Key US Ally Indicted for Organ Trade Murder Scheme
As the web of lies spun by Clinton and Albright has unraveled, and the truth behind their lies has spilled out piece by bloody piece, the war on Yugoslavia has emerged as a case study in how U.S. leaders mislead us into war.
Jul 06, 2020
When President Clinton dropped 23,000 bombs on what was left of Yugoslavia in 1999 and NATO invaded and occupied the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, U.S. officials presented the war to the American public as a "humanitarian intervention" to protect Kosovo's majority ethnic Albanian population from genocide at the hands of Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. That narrative has been unraveling piece by piece ever since.
In 2008 an international prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, accused U.S.-backed Prime Minister Hashim Thaci of Kosovo of using the U.S. bombing campaign as cover to murder hundreds of people to sell their internal organs on the international transplant market. Del Ponte's charges seemed almost too ghoulish to be true. But on June 24th, Thaci, now President of Kosovo, and nine other former leaders of the CIA-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA,) were finally indicted for these 20-year-old crimes by a special war crimes court at The Hague.
From 1996 on, the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies covertly worked with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to instigate and fuel violence and chaos in Kosovo. The CIA spurned mainstream Kosovar nationalist leaders in favor of gangsters and heroin smugglers like Thaci and his cronies, recruiting them as terrorists and death squads to assassinate Yugoslav police and anyone who opposed them, ethnic Serbs and Albanians alike.
As it has done in country after country since the 1950s, the CIA unleashed a dirty civil war that Western politicians and media dutifully blamed on Yugoslav authorities. But by early 1998, even U.S. envoy Robert Gelbard called the KLA a "terrorist group" and the UN Security Council condemned "acts of terrorism" by the KLA and "all external support for terrorist activity in Kosovo, including finance, arms and training." Once the war was over and Kosovo was successfully occupied by U.S. and NATO forces, CIA sources openly touted the agency's role in manufacturing the civil war to set the stage for NATO intervention.
By September 1998, the UN reported that 230,000 civilians had fled the civil war, mostly across the border to Albania, and the UN Security Council passed resolution 1199, calling for a ceasefire, an international monitoring mission, the return of refugees and a political resolution. A new U.S. envoy, Richard Holbrooke, convinced Yugoslav President Milosevic to agree to a unilateral ceasefire and the introduction of a 2,000 member "verification" mission from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). But the U.S. and NATO immediately started drawing up plans for a bombing campaign to "enforce" the UN resolution and Yugoslavia's unilateral ceasefire
Holbrooke persuaded the chair of the OSCE, Polish foreign minister Bronislaw Geremek, to appoint William Walker, the former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador during its civil war, to lead the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM). The U.S. quickly hired 150 Dyncorp mercenaries to form the nucleus of Walker's team, whose 1,380 members used GPS equipment to map Yugoslav military and civilian infrastructure for the planned NATO bombing campaign. Walker's deputy, Gabriel Keller, France's former Ambassador to Yugoslavia, accused Walker of sabotaging the KVM, and CIA sources later admitted that the KVM was a "CIA front" to coordinate with the KLA and spy on Yugoslavia.
The climactic incident of CIA-provoked violence that set the political stage for the NATO bombing and invasion was a firefight at a village called Racak, which the KLA had fortified as a base from which to ambush police patrols and dispatch death squads to kill local "collaborators." In January 1999, Yugoslav police attacked the KLA base in Racak, leaving 43 men, a woman and a teenage boy dead.
After the firefight, Yugoslav police withdrew from the village, and the KLA reoccupied it and staged the scene to make the firefight look like a massacre of civilians. When William Walker and a KVM team visited Racak the next day, they accepted the KLA's massacre story and broadcast it to the world, and it became a standard part of the narrative to justify the bombing of Yugoslavia and military occupation of Kosovo.
Autopsies by an international team of medical examiners found traces of gunpowder on the hands of nearly all the bodies, showing that they had fired weapons. They were nearly all killed by multiple gunshots as in a firefight, not by precise shots as in a summary execution, and only one victim was shot at close range. But the full autopsy results were only published much later, and the Finnish chief medical examiner accused Walker of pressuring her to alter them.
Two experienced French journalists and an AP camera crew at the scene challenged the KLA and Walker's version of what happened in Racak. Christophe Chatelet's article in Le Monde was headlined, "Were the dead in Racak really massacred in cold blood?" and veteran Yugoslavia correspondent Renaud Girard concluded his story in Le Figaro with another critical question, "Did the KLA seek to transform a military defeat into a political victory?"
NATO immediately threatened to bomb Yugoslavia, and France agreed to host high-level talks. But instead of inviting Kosovo's mainstream nationalist leaders to the talks in Rambouillet, Secretary Albright flew in a delegation led by KLA commander Hashim Thaci, until then known to Yugoslav authorities only as a gangster and a terrorist.
Albright presented both sides with a draft agreement in two parts, civilian and military. The civilian part granted Kosovo unprecedented autonomy from Yugoslavia, and the Yugoslav delegation accepted that. But the military agreement would have forced Yugoslavia to accept a NATO military occupation, not just of Kosovo but with no geographical limits, in effect placing all of Yugoslavia under NATO occupation.
When Milosevich refused Albright's terms for unconditional surrender, the U.S. and NATO claimed he had rejected peace, and war was the only answer, the "last resort." They did not return to the UN Security Council to try to legitimize their plan, knowing full well that Russia, China and other countries would reject it. When UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told Albright the British government was "having trouble with our lawyers" over NATO's plan for an illegal war of aggression against Yugoslavia, she told him to "get new lawyers."
In March 1999, the KVM teams were withdrawn and the bombing began. Pascal Neuffer, a Swiss KVM observer reported, "The situation on the ground on the eve of the bombing did not justify a military intervention. We could certainly have continued our work. And the explanations given in the press, saying the mission was compromised by Serb threats, did not correspond to what I saw. Let's say rather that we were evacuated because NATO had decided to bomb."
NATO killed thousands of civilians in Kosovo and the rest of Yugoslavia, as it bombed 19 hospitals, 20 health centers, 69 schools, 25,000 homes, power stations, a national TV station, the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and other diplomatic missions. After it invaded Kosovo, the U.S. military set up the 955-acre Camp Bondsteel, one of its largest bases in Europe, on its newest occupied territory. Europe's Human Rights Commissioner, Alvaro Gil-Robles, visited Camp Bondsteel in 2002 and called it "a smaller version of Guantanamo," exposing it as a secret CIA black site for illegal, unaccountable detention and torture.
But for the people of Kosovo, the ordeal was not over when the bombing stopped. Far more people had fled the bombing than the so-called "ethnic cleansing" the CIA had provoked to set the stage for it. A reported 900,000 refugees, nearly half the population, returned to a shattered, occupied province, now ruled by gangsters and foreign overlords.
Serbs and other minorities became second-class citizens, clinging precariously to homes and communities where many of their families had lived for centuries. More than 200,000 Serbs, Roma and other minorities fled, as the NATO occupation and KLA rule replaced the CIA's manufactured illusion of ethnic cleansing with the real thing. Camp Bondsteel was the province's largest employer, and U.S. military contractors also sent Kosovars to work in occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2019, Kosovo's per capita GDP was only $4,458, less than any country in Europe except Moldova and war-torn, post-coup Ukraine.
In 2007, a German military intelligence report described Kosovo as a "Mafia society," based on the "capture of the state" by criminals. The report named Hashim Thaci, then the leader of the Democratic Party, as an example of "the closest ties between leading political decision makers and the dominant criminal class." In 2000, 80% of the heroin trade in Europe was controlled by Kosovar gangs, and the presence of thousands of U.S. and NATO troops fueled an explosion of prostitution and sex trafficking, also controlled by Kosovo's new criminal ruling class.
In 2008, Thaci was elected Prime Minister, and Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia. (The final dissolution of Yugoslavia in 2006 had left Serbia and Montenegro as separate countries.) The U.S. and 14 allies immediately recognized Kosovo's independence, and ninety-seven countries, about half the countries in the world, have now done so. But neither Serbia nor the UN have recognized it, leaving Kosovo in long-term diplomatic limbo.
When the court in the Hague unveiled the charges against Thaci on June 24th, he was on his way to Washington for a White House meeting with Trump and President Vucic of Serbia to try to resolve Kosovo's diplomatic impasse. But when the charges were announced, Thaci's plane made a U-turn over the Atlantic, he returned to Kosovo and the meeting was canceled.
The accusation of murder and organ trafficking against Thaci was first made in 2008 by Carla Del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY), in a book she wrote after stepping down from that position. Del Ponte later explained that the ICTFY was prevented from charging Thaci and his co-defendants by the non-cooperation of NATO and the UN Mission in Kosovo. In an interview for the 2014 documentary, The Weight of Chains 2, she explained, "NATO and the KLA, as allies in the war, couldn't act against each other."
Human Rights Watch and the BBC followed up on Del Ponte's allegations, and found evidence that Thaci and his cronies murdered up to 400 mostly Sebian prisoners during the NATO bombing in 1999. Survivors described prison camps in Albania where prisoners were tortured and killed, a yellow house where people's organs were removed and an unmarked mass grave nearby.
Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty interviewed witnesses, gathered evidence and published a report, which the Council of Europe endorsed in January 2011, but the Kosovo parliament did not approve the plan for a special court in the Hague until 2015. The Kosovo Specialist Chambers and independent prosecutor's office finally began work in 2017. Now the judges have six months to review the prosecutor's charges and decide whether the trial should proceed.
A central part of the Western narrative on Yugoslavia was the demonization of President Milosevich of Yugoslavia, who resisted his country's Western-backed dismemberment throughout the 1990s. Western leaders smeared Milosevich as a "New Hitler" and the "Butcher of the Balkans," but he was still arguing his innocence when he died in a cell at The Hague in 2006.
Ten years later, at the trial of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, the judges accepted the prosecution's evidence that Milosevich strongly opposed Karadzic's plan to carve out a Serb Republic in Bosnia. They convicted Karadzic of being fully responsible for the resulting civil war, in effect posthumously exonerating Milosevich of responsibility for the actions of the Bosnian Serbs, the most serious of the charges against him.
But the U.S.'s endless campaign to paint all its enemies as "violent dictators" and "New Hitlers" rolls on like a demonization machine on autopilot, against Putin, Xi, Maduro, Khamenei, the late Fidel Castro and any foreign leader who stands up to the imperial dictates of the U.S. government. These smear campaigns serve as pretexts for brutal sanctions and catastrophic wars against our international neighbors, but also as political weapons to attack and diminish any U.S. politician who stands up for peace, diplomacy and disarmament.
As the web of lies spun by Clinton and Albright has unraveled, and the truth behind their lies has spilled out piece by bloody piece, the war on Yugoslavia has emerged as a case study in how U.S. leaders mislead us into war. In many ways, Kosovo established the template that U.S. leaders have used to plunge our country and the world into endless war ever since. What U.S. leaders took away from their "success" in Kosovo was that legality, humanity and truth are no match for CIA-manufactured chaos and lies, and they doubled down on that strategy to plunge the U.S. and the world into endless war.
As it did in Kosovo, the CIA is still running wild, fabricating pretexts for new wars and unlimited military spending, based on sourceless accusations, covert operations and flawed, politicized intelligence. We have allowed American politicians to pat themselves on the back for being tough on "dictators" and "thugs," letting them settle for the cheap shot instead of tackling the much harder job of reining in the real instigators of war and chaos: the U.S. military and the CIA.
But if the people of Kosovo can hold the CIA-backed gangsters who murdered their people, sold their body parts and hijacked their country accountable for their crimes, is it too much to hope that Americans can do the same and hold our leaders accountable for their far more widespread and systematic war crimes?
Iran recently indicted Donald Trump for the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, and asked Interpol to issue an international arrest warrant for him. Trump is probably not losing sleep over that, but the indictment of such a key U.S. ally as Thaci is a sign that the U.S. "accountabilty-free zone" of impunity for war crimes is finally starting to shrink, at least in the protection it provides to U.S. allies. Should Netanyahu, Bin Salman and Tony Blair start looking over their shoulders?
Killing for Credibility: A Look Back at the 1999 NATO Air War on Serbia
Twenty years later, Operation Allied force has been all but forgotten in the United States. It should not be.
Mar 24, 2019
This month marks the 20th anniversary of Operation Allied Force, NATO's 78-day air war against Yugoslavia. It was a war waged as much against Serbian civilians--hundreds of whom perished--as it was against Slobodan Milosevic's forces, and it was a campaign of breathtaking hypocrisy and selective outrage. More than anything, it was a war that by President Bill Clinton's own admission was fought for the sake of NATO's credibility.
One Man's Terrorist...
Our story begins not in the war-torn Balkans of the 1990s but rather in the howling wilderness of Afghanistan at the end of the 1980s as defeated Soviet invaders withdrew from a decade of guerrilla warfare into the twilight of a once-mighty empire. The United States, which had provided arms, funding and training for the mujahideen fighters who had so bravely resisted the Soviet occupation, stopped supporting the jihadis as soon as the last Red Army units rolled across the Hairatan Bridge and back into the USSR. Afghanistan descended deeper into civil war.
The popular narrative posits that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, Washington's former mujahideen allies, turned on the West after the US stationed hundreds of thousands of infidel troops in Saudi Arabia--home to two out of three of Sunni Islam's holiest sites--during Operation Desert Shield in 1990. Since then, the story goes, the relationship between the jihadists and their former benefactors has been one of enmity, characterized by sporadic terror attacks and fierce US retribution. The real story, however, is something altogether different.
From 1992 to 1995, the Pentagon flew thousands of al-Qaeda mujahideen, often accompanied by US Special Forces, from Central Asia to Europe to reinforce Bosnian Muslims as they fought Serbs to gain their independence from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The Clinton administration armed and trained these fighters in flagrant violation of United Nations accords; weapons purchased by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran were secretly shipped to the jihadists via Croatia, which netted a hefty profit from each transaction. The official Dutch inquiry into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which thousands of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were slaughtered by Bosnian Serb and Serbian paramilitary forces, concluded that the United States was "very closely involved" in these arms transfers.
When the Bosnian war ended in 1995 the United States was faced with the problem of thousands of Islamist warriors on European soil. Many of them joined the burgeoning Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which mainly consisted of ethnic Albanian Kosovars from what was still southwestern Yugoslavia. Emboldened by the success of the Slovenes, Croats, Macedonians and Bosnians who had won their independence from Belgrade as Yugoslavia literally balkanized, KLA fighters began to violently expel as many non-Albanians from Kosovo as they could. Roma, Jews, Turks and, above all, Serbs were all victims of Albanian ethnic cleansing.
The United States was initially very honest in its assessment of the KLA. Robert Gelbard, the US special envoy to Bosnia, called it "without any question a terrorist group." KLA backers allegedly included Osama bin Laden and other Islamic radicals; the group largely bankrolled its activities by trafficking heroin and sex slaves. The State Department accordingly added the KLA to its list of terrorist organizations in 1998.
However, despite all its nastiness the KLA endeared itself to Washington by fighting the defiant Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic. By this time Yugoslavia, once composed of eight nominally autonomous republics, had been reduced by years of bloody civil war to a rump of Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. To Serbs, the dominant ethnic group in what remained of the country, Kosovo is regarded as the very birthplace of their nation. Belgrade wasn't about to let it go without a fight and everyone knew it, especially the Clinton administration. Clinton's hypocrisy was immediately evident; when Chechnya fought for its independence from Moscow and Russian forces committed horrific atrocities in response, the American president called the war an internal Russian affair and barely criticized Russian President Boris Yeltsin. But when Milosevic resorted to brute force in an attempt to prevent Yugoslavia from further fracturing, he soon found himself a marked man.
Although NATO called the KLA "the main initiator of the violence" in Kosovo and blasted "what appears to be a deliberate campaign of provocation" against the Serbs, the Clinton administration was nevertheless determined to attack the Milosevic regime. US intelligence confirmed that the KLA was indeed provoking harsh retaliatory strikes by Serb forces in a bid to draw the United States and NATO into the conflict. President Clinton, however, apparently wasn't listening. The NATO powers, led by the United States, issued Milosevic an ultimatum they knew he could never accept: allow NATO to occupy all of Kosovo and have free reign in Serbia as well. Assistant US Secretary of State James Rubin later admitted that "publicly we had to make clear we were seeking an agreement but privately we knew the chances of the Serbs agreeing were quite small."
Wagging the Dog?
In 1997 the film "Wag the Dog" debuted to rave reviews. The dark comedy concerns a Washington, DC spin doctor and a Hollywood producer who fabricate a fictional war in Albania to distract American voters from a presidential sex scandal. Many observers couldn't help but draw parallels between the film and the real-life events of 1998-99, which included the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton's impeachment and a very real war brewing in the Balkans. As in "Wag the Dog," there were exaggerated or completely fabricated tales of atrocities, and as in the film the US and NATO powers tried to sell their war as a humanitarian intervention. An attack on Yugoslavia, we were told, was needed to avert Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanians.
There were two main problems with this. First, there was no Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars until after NATO began mercilessly bombing Yugoslavia. The German government issued several reports confirming this. One, from October 1998, reads, in part:
The violent actions of the Yugoslav military and police since February 1998 were aimed at separatist activities and are no proof of a persecution of the whole Albanian ethnic group in Kosovo or a part of it. What was involved in the Yugoslav violent actions and excesses since February 1998 was a selective forcible action against the military underground movement (especially the KLA)... A state program or persecution aimed at the whole ethnic group of Albanians exists neither now nor earlier.
Subsequent German government reports issued through the winter of 1999 tell a similar story. "Events since February and March 1998 do not evidence a persecution program based on Albanian ethnicity," stated one report released exactly one month before the NATO bombing started. "The measures taken by the armed Serbian forces are in the first instance directed toward combatting the KLA and its supposed adherents and supporters."
While Serbs certainly did commit atrocities (especially after the ferocious NATO air campaign began), these were often greatly exaggerated by the Clinton administration and the US corporate mainstream media. Clinton claimed--and the media dutifully parroted--that 600,000 Albanians were "trapped within Kosovo... lacking shelter, short of food, afraid to go home or buried in mass graves." This was completely false. US diplomat David Scheffer claimed that "225,000 ethnic Albanian men... are missing, presumed dead." Again, a total fabrication. The FBI, International War Crimes Tribunal and global forensics experts flocked to Kosovo in droves after the NATO bombs stopped falling; the total number of victims they found was around 1 percent of the figure claimed by the United States.
However, once NATO attacked, the Serb response was predictably furious. Shockingly, NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark declared that the ensuing Serbian atrocities against the Albanian Kosovar population had been "fully anticipated" and were apparently of little concern to Washington. Not only did NATO and the KLA provoke a war with Yugoslavia, they did so knowing that many innocent civilians would be killed, maimed or displaced by the certain and severe reprisals carried out by enraged Serb forces. Michael McGwire, a former top NATO planner, acknowledged that "to describe the bombing as a humanitarian intervention is really grotesque."
Bloody Hypocrites
The other big problem with the US claiming it was attacking Yugoslavia on humanitarian grounds was that the Clinton administration had recently allowed--and was at the time allowing--far worse humanitarian catastrophes to rage without American intervention. More than 800,000 men, women and children were slaughtered while Clinton and other world leaders stood idly by during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The US also courted the medievally brutal Taliban regime in hopes of achieving stability in Afghanistan and with an eye toward building a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. Clinton also did nothing to stop Russian forces from viciously crushing nationalist uprisings in the Caucuses, where Chechen rebels were fighting for their independence much the same as Albanian Kosovars were fighting the Serbs.
Colombia, the Western Hemisphere's leading recipient of US military and economic aid, was waging a fierce, decades-long campaign of terror against leftist insurgents and long-suffering indigenous peoples. Despite horrific brutality and pervasive human rights violations, US aid to Bogota increased year after year. In Turkey, not only did Clinton do nothing to prevent government forces from committing widespread atrocities against Kurdish separatists, the administration positively encouraged its NATO ally with billions of dollars in loans and arms sales. Saudi Arabia, home to the most repressive fundamentalist regime this side of Afghanistan, was--and remains--a favored US ally despite having one of the world's worst human rights records. The list goes on and on.
Much closer to the conflict at hand, the United States tacitly approved the largest ethnic cleansing campaign in Europe since the Holocaust when as many as 200,000 Serbs were forcibly expelled from the Krajina region of Croatia by that country's US-trained military during Operation Storm in August 1995. Krajina Serbs had purged the region of its Croat minority four years earlier in their own ethnic cleansing campaign; now it was the Serbs' turn to be on the receiving end of the horror. Croatian forces stormed through Krajina, shelling towns and slaughtering innocent civilians. The sick and the elderly who couldn't escape were executed or burned alive in their homes as Croatian soldiers machine-gunned convoys of fleeing refugees.
"Painful for the Serbs"
Washington's selective indignation at Serb crimes both real and imagined is utterly inexcusable when held up to the horrific and seemingly indiscriminate atrocities committed during the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia. The prominent Australian journalist John Pilger noted that "in the attack on Serbia, 2 percent of NATO's missiles hit military targets, the rest hit hospitals, schools, factories, churches and broadcast studios." There is little doubt that US and allied warplanes and missiles were targeting the Serbian people as much as, or even more than, Serb forces. The bombing knocked out electricity in 70 percent of the country as well as much of its water supply.
NATO warplanes also deliberately bombed a building containing the headquarters of Serbian state television and radio in the middle of densely populated central Belgrade. The April 23, 1999 attack occurred without warning while 200 employees were at work in the building. Among the 16 people killed were a makeup artist, a cameraman, a program director, an editor and three security guards. There is no doubt that the attack was meant to demoralize the Serbian people. There is also no doubt that those who ordered the bombing knew exactly what outcome to expect: a NATO planning document viewed by Bill Clinton, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac forecast as many as 350 deaths in the event of such an attack, with as many as 250 of the victims expected to be innocent civilians living in nearby apartments.
Allied commanders wanted to fight a "zero casualty war" in Yugoslavia. As in zero casualties for NATO forces, not the people they were bombing. "This will be painful for the Serbs," Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon sadistically predicted. It sure was. NATO warplanes flew sorties at 15,000 feet (4,500 meters), a safe height for the pilots. But this decreased accuracy and increased civilian casualties on the ground. One attack on central Belgrade mistakenly hit Dragisa Misovic hospital with a laser-guided "precision" bomb, obliterating an intensive care unit and destroying a children's ward while wounding several pregnant women who had the misfortune of being in labor at the time of the attack. Dragana Krstic, age 23, was recovering from cancer surgery--she just had a 10-pound (4.5 kg) tumor removed from her stomach--when the bombs blew jagged shards of glass into her neck and shoulders. "I don't know which hurts more," she lamented, "my stomach, my shoulder or my heart."
Dragisa Misovic wasn't the only hospital bombed by NATO. Cluster bombs dropped by fighter jets of the Royal Netherlands Air Force struck a hospital and a market in the city of Nis on May 7, killing 15 people and wounding 60 more. An emergency clinic and medical dispensary were also bombed in the mining town of Aleksinac on April 6, killing at least five people and wounding dozens more.
Bridges were favorite targets of NATO bombing. An international passenger train traveling from Belgrade to Thessaloniki, Greece was blown apart by two missiles as it crossed over Grdelica gorge on April 12. Children and a pregnant woman were among the 15 people killed in the attack; 16 other passengers were wounded. Allied commander Gen. Wesley Clark claimed the train, which had been damaged by the first missile, had been traveling too rapidly for the pilot to abort the second strike on the bridge. He then offered up a doctored video that was sped up more than three times so that the pilot's behavior would appear acceptable.
On May 1, at least 24 civilians, many of them children, were killed when NATO warplanes bombed a bridge in Luzane just as a bus was crossing. An ambulance rushing to the scene of the carnage was struck by a second bomb. On the sunny spring afternoon of May 30, a bridge over the Velika Morava River in the small town of Vavarin was bombed by low-flying German Air Force F-16 fighters while hundreds of local residents gathered nearby to celebrate an Orthodox Christian holiday. Eleven people died, most of them when the warplanes returned and bombed the people who rushed to the bridge to help those wounded in the first strike.
No One Is Safe
The horrors suffered by the villagers of Surdulica shows that no one in Serbia was safe from NATO's fury. They endured some 175 bombardments during one three-week period alone, with 50 houses destroyed and 600 others damaged in a town with only around 10,000 residents. On April 27, 20 civilians, including 12 children, died when bombs meant to destroy an army barracks slammed into a residential neighborhood. As many as 100 others were wounded in the incident. Tragedy befell the tiny town again on May 31 when NATO warplanes returned to bomb an ammunition depot but instead hit an old people's home; 23 civilians, most of them helpless elderly men and women, were blown to pieces. Dozens more were wounded. The US military initially said "there were no errant weapons" in the attack. However, Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre later testified before Congress that it "was a case of the pilot getting confused."
The CIA was also apparently confused when it relied on what it claimed was an outdated map to approve a Stealth Bomber strike on what turned out to be the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Three Chinese journalists were killed and 27 other people were wounded. Some people aren't so sure the attack was an accident--Britain's Observer later reported that the US deliberately bombed the embassy after discovering it was being used to transmit Yugoslav army communications.
There were plenty of other accidents, some of them horrifically tragic and others just downright bizarre. Two separate attacks on the very Albanians NATO was claiming to help killed 160 people, many of them women and children. On April 14, NATO warplanes bombed refugees along a 12-mile (19-km) stretch of road between the towns of Gjakova and Decan in western Kosovo, killing 73 people including 16 children and wounding 36 more. Journalists reported a grisly scene of "bodies charred or blown to pieces, tractors reduced to twisted wreckage and houses in ruins." Exactly one month later, another column of refugees was bombed near Korisa, killing 87--mostly women, children and the elderly--and wounding 60 others. In the downright bizarre category, a wildly errant NATO missile struck a residential neighborhood in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, some 40 miles (64 km) outside of Serbia. The American AGM-88 HARM missile blew the roof off of a man's house while he was shaving in his bathroom.
NATO's "Murderous Thugs"
As the people of Yugoslavia were being terrorized by NATO's air war, the terrorists of the Kosovo Liberation Army stepped up their atrocities against Serbs and Roma in Kosovo. NATO troops deployed there to keep the peace often failed to protect these people from the KLA's brutal campaign. More than 164,000 Serbs fled or were forcibly driven from the Albanian-dominated province and by the summer of 2001 KLA ethnic cleansing had rendered Kosovo almost entirely Albanian, with just a few die-hard Serb holdouts living in fear and surrounded by barbed wire.
The KLA soon expanded its war into neighboring Macedonia. Although NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson called the terror group "murderous thugs," the United States--now with George W. Bush as president--continued to offer its invaluable support. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice personally intervened in an attempt to persuade Ukraine to halt arms sales to the Macedonian army and when a group of 400 KLA fighters were surrounded at Aracinovo in June 2001, NATO ordered Macedonian forces to hold off their attack while a convoy of US Army vehicles rescued the besieged militants. It later emerged that 17 American military advisers were embedded with the KLA at Aracinovo.
Credibility Conundrum
The bombing of Yugoslavia was really about preserving the credibility of the United States and NATO. The alliance's saber rattling toward Belgrade had painted it into a corner from which the only way out was with guns blazing. Failure to follow threats with deadly action, said President Clinton, "would discredit NATO." Clinton added that "our mission is clear, to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO's purpose." The president seemed willfully ignorant of NATO's real purpose, which is to defend member states from outside attack. British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed with Clinton, declaring on the eve of the war that "to walk away now would... destroy NATO's credibility." Gary Dempsey, a foreign policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote that the Clinton administration "transformed a conflict that posed no threat to the territorial integrity, national sovereignty or general welfare of the United States into a major test of American resolve."
Waging or prolonging war for credibility's sake is always dangerous and seems always to yield disastrous results. Tens of thousands of US troops and many times as many Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian soldiers and civilians died while Richard Nixon sought an "honorable" way out of Vietnam. Ronald Reagan's dogged defense of US credibility cost the lives of 299 American and French troops killed in Hezbollah's 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. This time, ensuring American credibility meant backing the vicious KLA--some of whose fighters had trained at Osama bin Laden's terror camps in Afghanistan. This, despite the fact that al-Qaeda had already been responsible for deadly attacks against the United States, including the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
It is highly questionable whether bombing Yugoslavia affirmed NATO's credibility in the short term. In the long term, it certainly did not. The war marked the first and only time NATO had ever attacked a sovereign state. It did so unilaterally, absent any threat to any member nation, and without the approval of the United Nations Security Council. "If NATO can go for military action without international blessing, it calls into question the reliability of NATO as a security partner," Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, then Moscow's ambassador to NATO, told me at a San Francisco reception.
Twenty years later, Operation Allied force has been all but forgotten in the United States. In a country that has been waging nonstop war on terrorism for almost the entire 21st century, the 1999 NATO air war is but a footnote in modern American history. Serbs, however, still seethe at the injustice and hypocrisy of it all. The bombed-out ruins of the old Yugoslav Ministry of Defense, Radio Television of Serbia headquarters and other buildings serve as constant, painful reminders of the horrors endured by the Serbian people in service of NATO's credibility.
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The Music That's In All of Us
"Music is a healing force that can and must be used to move humanity past the damage it has been doing to itself ever since war and conquest became the global norm."
Feb 15, 2019
And suddenly the music burst through the borders.
This was in May of 1999, in a city in the Netherlands called Alkmaar. Laura Hassler, an American woman who had been living in the Netherlands for many years by then -- who was a choir director and, in essence, the "town musician," the organizer of public music events -- had put together a concert for the town's annual honoring of the dead of World War II.
But the bloody war in Kosovo was then raging: Thousands had died; nearly a million refugees were streaming across Europe. Its horror dominated the daily news and Laura couldn't ignore it. She couldn't simply focus on the war dead of half a century ago, not when the hell of war was alive in the present moment, pulling at her soul.
She decided, "We'll perform music from the people suffering from war now -- folk songs from Eastern Europe," she told me. Her impulse was to reach out, to connect, somehow, with those suffering right now, on the other side of Europe. And something happened the night of the concert. When it ended, there was a moment of profound silence . . . and then, as the audience stood, applause so thunderous that the rafters shook. It went on for 20 minutes.
One of the musicians, a political refugee from Turkey, said to her afterwards: "This concert was special. We should put it on a train, send it to Kosovo and stop the war!"
And so it began, a Zen moment, a crazy idea. Within a few weeks, a peace group had donated office space and Musicians Without Borders -- an international organization with the stated mission "to use the power of music to bridge divides, connect communities, and heal the wounds of war" -- was born.
"Within a few months, we had enough money to rent buses and go to camps in the Netherlands for refugees from Kosovo," Laura told me recently. Something profoundly necessary had manifested. "It had to happen."
At the refugee camps, the musicians made music with children and performed again the beautiful folk songs from the region. They also brought donated violins, accordions, guitars. Refugees who were musicians were likely to have fled without their instruments. These donated instruments gave them their music back.
"This was run by passion," Laura said. "We didn't know exactly where we were going, but we knew what we were doing." Within a few months the new organization was traveling to Sarajevo, in Bosnia, bringing instruments, connecting with local musicians, and making music with children in refugee camps. Building on these experiences, Musicians Without Borders worked toward a long-term project in Srebrenica, with children from both sides of a cruel divide, which had separated Serbs (in the city) and Muslims (in refugee camps). This was a divide created by war and enforced by politics and bureaucracy. But music was a way to start to bridge it.
"This is what we believed," Laura said. "that musicians don't identify primarily by nationality or religion, but as musicians. We'll find musicians in all war -torn regions who feel this way, as we do."
In Srebrenica, scene of a 1995 massacre in which thousands were killed, MWB's Music Bus became the organization's first long-term project and an example of how music could help to rebuild a society shattered by war. With the Music Bus, Musicians Without Borders had established itself internationally. A short while later the organization was invited to Palestine to present its work. It also came to the attention of UNICEF and currently it works with local musicians in six countries -- Kosovo, Palestine, Rwanda, Uganda, Northern Ireland and El Salvador -- all of them torn apart by war and cultural division and suffering long-term consequences.
"In the beginning, people laughed at us," she said. "We had no basis, no funding. But we had a vision. We struggled to make it for years. But every time we were about to go under, we survived.
"Every person has music in them!"
And the core and heart of Musicians Without Borders lays itself bare. This is the passion that drives it, that drives Laura, who grew up as a child of activist parents in a cooperative community, where "we were always making music. It was part of my life. I was always setting up singing groups and leading them."
Every person has music in them, crying to be released. And, Laura believes, music is a healing force that can and must be used to move humanity past the damage it has been doing to itself ever since war and conquest became the global norm.
"There are different ways of experiencing music, as we all know," she has written, "but also very different ideas about what music is. In European related cultures the dominant idea of music has, over history, become 'something' outside the person, to be taught and learned, practiced, perfected, held to a standard of quality and achievement.
". . . a relatively few people are 'artists,' of whom a very few are 'top artists'; but most of us are not -- we're listeners. And many listeners would tell you that they cannot make music.
"There is another way of perceiving music which many cultures, including earlier European cultures, share: that music is in the middle of all life, a basic element of being human, one that plays a continuous role in the life of the community and of every person in it. Inherent in this understanding of music is that, just like the capacity for language, music is part of our DNA and 'doing' music is part of human existence. It is what we do as we work, play, love, celebrate, suffer, mourn. You might say that we are music: from the rhythm of our heartbeat, our breath or our walking or dancing step, to the perception of tone everywhere in our lives, to the melody of our voices: music is in our bodies and in our spirits. . . . Music is a universally shared human trait, and all people have it in them."
This is the future -- a part of the enormous change pushing humanity beyond itself, beyond what it thinks it knows. Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest, described this enormous becoming in a TED Talk: "It's so new we can't recognize it. We're so familiar with armies and governments, wars, churches and religions. There's no precedent for what we're doing. . . .
"In the 20th Century: big ideologies stalked the earth, clad in armor. They fought for the control of our minds, of our land, and it wasn't pretty.
"This movement is humanity's immune response, to resist and heal political disease, economic infection and ecological corruption caused by ideologies. It is about possibilities and solutions. Humankind knows what to do."
This movement . . . maybe it has a million pieces. We're putting humanity back together in a new way, in a way that values Planet Earth and the soul of humanity. When Musicians Without Borders started becoming known, Laura said, she began receiving emails from musicians from all over the world, saying in essence: "Can I work with you? This is why I became a musician."
Somehow I'm not surprised. The music's in all of us. So is the desire to connect, to create peace, to save the world.
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Kosovo Chaos Undercuts Clinton 'Success'
President Bill Clinton’s Kosovo war of 1999 was loved by neocons and liberal hawks—the forerunner for Iraq, Libya, Syria and other conflicts this century—but Kosovo’s political violence and lawlessness today underscore the grim consequences of those strategies even when they “succeed,” writes Jonathan Marshall.
Feb 21, 2016
The insatiable appetite of America's bipartisan foreign policy elites for military intervention -- despite its record of creating failing states in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen -- traces back to the marriage of liberal and neoconservative interventionists during the Clinton administration's 78-day bombing of Serbia to create the break-away state of Kosovo in 1999.
One scholar-advocate has called NATO's campaign "The most important precedent supporting the legitimacy of unilateral humanitarian intervention." Even Sen. Bernie Sanders was proud to support that use of American power, ostensibly "to prevent further genocide."
But Kosovo, which is still not recognized as an independent state by nearly half of all UN members, and which still relies on 4,600 NATO troops to maintain order, is hardly a showcase for the benefits of military intervention. With an unemployment rate of 35 percent, Kosovo is wracked by persistent outbreaks of terrorism, crime, and political violence.
Following a series of violent street protests and wild disruptions of parliament, the leader of the radical nationalist party, Vetevendosje, announced on Feb. 19, "This regime is now is in its final days. They will not last long."
That day, members of Vetevendosje set off tear gas cannisters in parliament and tussled with police in the latest of their many protests against an agreement reached by the government last summer to grant limited powers to the country's Serbian minority, in return for Serbia's recognition of Kosovo. Opposition lawmakers also rail against endemic corruption and the country's under-performing economy.
Two days earlier, at least 15,000 Kosovars gathered in the central square of Pristina, the country's capital, to demand the government's resignation. In January, thousands of protesters clashed with police, hurling Molotov cocktails, setting a major government building and armored police cars on fire, and wounding 24 police officers.
"The aim of this protest was to overthrow the government with violence," the government said in a statement. The U.S. ambassador chimed in, "Political violence threatens democracy and all that Kosovo has achieved since independence."
This violence gets little attention from the American media in part because, unlike the Ukrainian demonstrators who overthrew their democratically elected government in 2014, Kosovo's protesters are targeting a pro-Western government that eagerly seeks membership in the European Union.
But it's no wonder that Kosovo's political fabric is so rent by violent confrontations. The rump state was created by a violent secessionist movement led by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). That guerrilla band of Albanian nationalists was covertly backed by the German secret service to weaken Serbia. Its terrorist attacks on Serbian villages and government personnel in the mid-1990s prompted a brutal military crackdown by Serbia, followed by NATO's decisive intervention in 1999.
During the fighting the KLA drove tens of thousands of ethnic Serbs from Kosovo as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign to promote independence for the majority Albanian population. It recruited Islamist militants -- including followers of Osama Bin Laden -- from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan and other countries.
President Bill Clinton's special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, called the KLA "without any question, a terrorist group," and a Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder added, "most of its activities were funded by drug running."
None of that, however, stopped Washington from embracing the KLA's cause against Serbia, a policy spearheaded by the liberal interventionist First Lady Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Without authorization from the United Nations, NATO began bombing Serbia in March 1999, killing some 500 civilians, demolishing billions of dollars' worth of industrial plants, bridges, schools, libraries and hospitals, and even hitting the Chinese embassy. ("It should be lights out in Belgrade," demanded New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. "Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted. Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation.")
Following Serbia's capitulation, according to Human Rights Watch, "elements of the KLA" engaged in "widespread and systematic burning and looting of homes belonging to Serbs, Roma, and other minorities and the destruction of Orthodox churches and monasteries. This destruction was combined with harassment and intimidation designed to force people from their homes and communities. By late-2000 more than 210,000 Serbs had fled the province . . . The desire for revenge provides a partial explanation, but there is also a clear political goal in many of these attacks: the removal from Kosovo of non-ethnic Albanians in order to better justify an independent state."
Former KLA leaders, including its political head Hashim Thaci, went on to dominate the new Kosovo state. A 2010 report by the Council of Europe declared that Thaci, who was then Kosovo's prime minister, headed a "mafia-like" group that smuggled drugs, guns and human organs on a grand scale through Eastern Europe. The report's author accused the international community of turning a blind eye while Thaci's group of KLA veterans engaged in "assassinations, detentions, beatings and interrogations" to maintain power and profit from their criminal activities.
Prime Minister Thaci and the Kosovo government strenuously denied the allegations and succeeded for years in resisting accountability. Their American friends were eager to put the past behind as well. In 2012, Madeleine Albright and a former Clinton special envoy to the Balkans bid to take control of the country's state-owned telecommunications company despite widespread allegations of corruption, the attempted assassination of the telecommunications regulatory chief, and the murder of the state privatization agency's chief.
No one seemed immune from corruption. A study of the European Union's own legal mission to Kosovo suggested that its members may have taken bribes to drop investigations of senior Kosovo politicians for rampant criminal activity.
In 2014, a three-year E.U. investigation concluded that "senior officials of the former Kosovo Liberation Army" should be indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including "unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, other forms of inhumane treatment, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites."
Under tough pressure from the United States and E.U., Kosovo's parliament finally agreed last summer to permit a special court to prosecute former KLA leaders for war crimes. The court will begin operating this year in The Hague.
"The sad thing is that the United States and European countries knew 10 years ago that Thaci and his men were engaged in drug smuggling and creating a mafia state," said one European ambassador last year. "The attitude was, 'He's a bastard, but he's our bastard.'"
Whether delayed justice will clean up Kosovo's "mafia state," and whether belated granting of rights to the Serbian minority will ease or aggravate Kosovo's explosive ethnic tensions, remain to be seen. One thing's for sure: a great many people have died in the name of this great "humanitarian intervention," and many more are still suffering for it. Kosovo is no Libya or Syria, but neither is it any kind of showcase for the benefits of U.S. armed intervention.
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Another US "Success Story": The Creation and Abandonment of Kosovo
Kosovo is falling apart at the seams, with it thousands of its citizens seeking desperately to escape life there by any means possible.
Haven't heard about that one?
Perhaps that's because the US is almost wholly responsible for creating an independent Kosovo, and from there, the brutal and corrupt power structure that lords cruelly over the life of its people.
The creation of an independent Kosovo in the name of democracy and humanitarianism is considered by the Clinton crowd to be one of the US's first post-Cold War foreign policy successes.
Mar 01, 2015
Kosovo is falling apart at the seams, with it thousands of its citizens seeking desperately to escape life there by any means possible.
Haven't heard about that one?
Perhaps that's because the US is almost wholly responsible for creating an independent Kosovo, and from there, the brutal and corrupt power structure that lords cruelly over the life of its people.
The creation of an independent Kosovo in the name of democracy and humanitarianism is considered by the Clinton crowd to be one of the US's first post-Cold War foreign policy successes.
Under the direction of the late egotist Richard Holbrooke, intellectual--if we can use that word--godfather of today's Susan Rices and Samantha Powers, a new US protectorate was created in the heart of the Balkans, one of the more historically unstable regions of the Western world.
Of course, it had nothing to do with democracy and humanitarianism and everything to do, as has been the case with most major moves the US has undertaken in the world since 1989, with the need to give the US the ability to:
- project power into every corner of the globe
- disrupt the possibility of any country or bloc of countries impeding its economic and military designs.
More concretely, it was part of the US plan to make sure that the then newly unshackled countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe would essentially be beholden to it, and not their EU neighbors.
Once this dependence was established, as it was in Kosovo, Bulgaria, Poland (which did not need much coaxing) and the Baltic Republics, the US could, as Rumsfeld famously let slip in 2003, play the new Europe off against the old Europe and, in this way, neuter any ability the Old Continent might have to act as a check upon US prerogatives.
The program has worked like a charm. How do we know? Just look at the way, the more important European countries (to call them "powers" today would be to strain credibility) like Germany and France have, until quite recently, completely acquiesced to a foreign policy on Ukraine that was wholly designed in Washington, and that is completely inimical to their economic and strategic interests.
Russia needs Europe and Europe needs Russia.
But the strategic players in Washington, those sons and daughters of Brzezinski, Holbrooke and Albright, have other ideas.
And up until last week's meeting in Minsk with Putin, it seems that neither Merkel, nor Hollande truly understood role of useful idiots they were playing within the US game.
But back to Kosovo. After promoting the independence of a completely unviable state to get what it really wanted, that is, "the largest U.S. military base built outside of the U.S. since the Vietnam War", the US has, in its inimitably egotistical, callous and heedless fashion, left Kosovo and the Kosovans to rot in hell.
After whipping up the worst kind of cheap nationalism there to enable its plan, the US now has left them on their own to live in grinding poverty among the mafias that grew up around the flow of cash generated by base construction and CIA black funds. With all this, of course, come the adjunct "industries" of prostitution and drugs which always proliferate in poor societies that receive grotesquely large and shadily administered injections of foreign capital.
Things are so bad that people are fleeing en masse through the mountains and snow to get to the well-known democratic paradise known as Serbia.
And what makes it worse, is that we could describe several other equal, or much worse, instances around the world where the same plan of "creative destruction" has played out under direct US tutelage.
This is who we are. This is what we borrow trillions from the Chinese to do.
When, if ever, will the American people begin to face theses facts?
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Time For Peace
May 26, 1999
Now is the time to make peace in the Balkans.
People everywhere are becoming increasingly outraged by the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovar Albanians by the Serbian army. It's the Cold War revisited, with China calling the bombing the greatest human catastrophe since World War ll and Mikhail Gorbachev calling it "disastrous" and saying that NATO has lost-"politically and morally." The International Herald Tribune, an American paper published in Europe, reports that opposition to the bombing has surfaced in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East in official statements, newspaper editorials and public protests. Feelings against the bombing were strong enough in Italy and Greece to inspire acts of urban guerrilla violence. Meanwhile, Sergio Vieira de Mello, leader of a UN humanitarian team visiting Kosovo, called the "ethnic cleansing" of Albanians in Kosovo "shocking" and "revolting" and Hillary Clinton likened the Albanian refugee situation to the Jewish holocaust depicted in Spielberg's Schindler's List.
NATO claims that the 14,000 bombs and missiles used in two months of airstrikes have destroyed a third of Serbia's heavy military equipment. They have also purposefully destroyed much of the infrastructure-- including bridges, oil refineries, electric power plants, water supplies, and media and communication systems while "accidentally" or "collaterally," in military-speak, destroying hospitals, embassies and a few thousand Serbian and Albanian people. Steven Erlanger of the New York Times reports from Belgrade that the Serbian people are "deeply weary" and reduced to a "caveman" life but are "still defiant" and don't blame Milosevic. He reports that the Serbs "feel they are right to be fighting for Kosovo" and "are proud of their brave if inevitably futile defense against all the might of NATO."
A former employee of the American Embassy said that the bombing "will not make people revolt against their government.... Making people's lives miserable is not solving any problems." The people of Serbia want a peace agreement and they are resigned to the fact that foreign troops will come into Kosovo, but fear that people are dying for the reputations of politicians on both sides. Yet, with dark humor they still joke about it, asking, "Why will Bill Clinton become the next President of Yugoslavia?" The answer: "He's succeeded in uniting the Serbs and destroying the Albanians."
There is a growing consensus of public opinion in the USA, Yugoslavia and throughout the world for a peace agreement that will ensure the safe return of ethnic Albanians to their former places of residence in Kosovo with the help of a UN-led and NATO-supplemented peacekeeping force. It's time for the President of the United States and members of the Senate and Congress and everyday people to engage in personal diplomacy and activism at every level to stop the senseless killing.
Last Sunday here in Columbia, South Carolina, we held an interfaith peace vigil at our State House to protest the war and received positive media coverage. Everyone wore black ribbons to symbolize our call for an end to the war. David Edwards of Lexington, SC, said, "War does not bring peace," and called for an immediate end to the bombing and a UN-brokered peace accord. Janet Swigler of Columbia heard about the vigil at her church and decided to come because she's worried about the worsening plight of the Kosovo refugees. "You see their pictures and you know it's hard," she said. "I know how comfortable it is to go back home every night." For the first time in my life, I wrote every member of the US Senate and Congress on Friday and asked them to work for peace.
Jesus Christ said, "Blessed are the peacemakers," and the Pope and the Prelate of the Orthodox Church have called for an end to the bombing and "ethnic cleansing" and a peaceful, diplomatic settlement. The religious and ethnic differences between Albanian and Serbian people are not worth killing one more human being over. I hope and pray that peace will come before our knights in shining armor start coming back home in body bags because that will bring the killing home and end the conflict.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his life for the cause of peace and justice and spoke to the present crisis when he said: "Returning violence for violence only multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that."
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Make Love, Not War
May 14, 1999
Bill Clinton is much better at making love than war. I campaigned and voted for Bill Clinton twice and spoke up for him during the impeachment process, so I've paid enough dues to tell him the world was a better place when he was making out with Monica in the oval office rather than ordering bombing strikes in the Balkans. Just consider a cost-benefit analysis: we are probably spending more in one day of military action than Kenneth Starr has spent in three years of legal action. It will cost us at least double that amount to build back the bridges, hospitals, and infrastructure we are destroying every day until "July or August"---or however long it takes to "win' as Clinton and his fellow NATO warriors like to say.
A comparison of the moral costs of love versus war vis a vis Clinton's performance is interesting. Certainly, truth suffered in the USA when the Prez looked us in the eye, wagged his finger and said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," but it's been said that the greatest casualty of war is the truth, and if Clinton really thinks the bombing of Yugoslavia is stopping the killing, he is either suffering from a clinical case of self-delusion or actually believes the intelligence reports of the "bomb-the-Chinese-Embassy-by-mistake" CIA. He might even pick up The NY Times and read one of Steven Erlanger's reports from Kosovo, quoting ethnic Albanians from different areas who say that most of the real violence and "ethnic cleansing" started when the NATO bombing began in their town or village.
Marital infidelity is not the moral equivalent of bombing and killing hundreds of innocent people and destroying the quality of life of millions more. I don't know if the policies of Milosevic have resulted in as much genocide as those of Ho Chi Minh, but I do know that in Bill Clinton's "make love, not war" days he opposed the "unjust" war in Southeast Asia and found a way to keep from putting his own life on the line to fight it. I'm not certain there is such a thing as a just war but I know for sure that Bill Clinton has not engaged in the kind of personal diplomacy necessary to bring about a conclusion to the war, and instead is sending more and more young Americans into a conflict that appears to be spinning out of control.
The German government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroder is teetering on collapse after its congress voted that NATO should declare a limited halt to the bombing. Russia, whose diplomatic efforts are crucial for a peace agreement with Yugoslavia, is verging on political chaos, with the possibility of a coalition of communists and ultra-nationalists taking over the government and its thermonuclear ICBM arsenal. The Russian Parliament recently voted by a 6-1 margin to join with Yugoslavia as a nation. Militarists who long for a resumption of the Cold War must be ecstatic with growing numbers of Russians and Chinese hating us about as much now as in the days of the Cuban missile crisis or the Korean War.
I wish Ron Brown were still alive to counsel the President about the real strength of the United States in the global community. Ron, who believed in the strength and diversity of all God's children in the USA and everywhere else, died in a tragic plane crash in the Balkans while peacefully pursuing a policy of economic stimulation and trade that could have bridged across the age-old ethnic and religious animosities of that region for everyone's mutual benefit.
Since 1949, there have been 19 ethnic and civil wars around the world with more than 6 million people killed. If the Clinton doctrine is to now randomly project our awesomely expensive, hi-tech, military power around the world by bombing the Balkans, or even Iraq, while genocide is practiced and tolerated in Turkey and Rwanda we will be perceived as the world's bully and worse. There's an old American folk adage that war is good for the economy, and if President Eisenhower were alive he would probably update his apprehension of the military-industrial complex by adding in the media-entertainment industry who cash in on war and violent conflict with elevated ratings and readership.
The only thing that rivals war and violence in interest to those viewers, listeners, readers, and voters is sex, so please, Mr. President, make love, not war. Your poll numbers were much higher when you were being impeached for messing around with Monica and the world was a much safer place.
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