Re: Open Letter to the British Helsinki Human Rights Group
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Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 11:27:50 +0300 (EET DST)
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Subject: Re: Open Letter to the British Helsinki Human Rights Group
From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
Original sender: Cecil Ballantine <[email protected]>
Re: Open Letter to the British Helsinki Human Rights Group
With reference to Monika Horikova's Open Letter to the British
Helsinki HR Group, many readers of minelres will have seen the article
by Jeremy Druker in Transitions 6/2 February 1999. It is avaiable on
www.ijt.cz and was entitled War of the Monitors and it dealt with the
Group's position on Roma in the Czech Republic and on relations
between the Group and OSCE as well as being quite critical of the
BHHRG's political stance in other areas. The BHHRG has a web site at
www.bhhrg.org.
The chairman of the Group is Mark Almond whose article below was
published in the British right-wing weekly magazine The Spectator in
its issue of 3 April 1999. It may be further evidence of the current
political position being taken up by the BHHRG.
WHAT THE KLA REALLY IS
Just being against Milosevic does not make people decent, warns Mark
Almond.
'Know thy enemy' is the best advice for any general. Nato's military
leaders have been extensively briefed about the crimes of Slobodan
Milosevic over the last eight years, but if the Serbs are our enemies,
should we embrace the Serbs' foes on the ground in Kosovo as our
natural allies?
Little has been published about the shadowy Kosovo Liberation Army
(KLA) which is now widely seen as Nato's natural ally. Yet US
senators and retired generals have queued up to urge President Clinton
to arm them and on Tuesday Robin Cook demonstrated his support by
staging a press conference with a KLA representative.
Anyone familiar with the murky history of the KLA and its methods
should have serious qualms about putting weapons into its hands.
Ordinary Albanians in Kosovo may be suffering a terrible wave of
reprisals from the Serb forces since the start of Nato's bombing
campaign, but this was exactly what the so-called Kosovo Liberation
Army hoped for.
Before the current crisis exploded, one of the KLA's leaders admitted
that its strategy was to provoke the Serbs into reprisals and then
gather support among ordinary Albanians and from the West. These are
classic partisan tactics. Tito used them during the war against the
Germans after 1941. The KLA guerillas were well aware that the Serbs
were likely to react brutally to attacks on their policemen. That's
what they wanted. Now they have got all the brutality they could ask
for.
The media love to glamorise guerrillas. Now the Nato establishment is
reinforcing the radical chic. Because swaggering Serb policemen are
embodiments of gormless viciousness, it is naive to conclude that
being against Milosevic automatically makes someone decent.
Public appearances of the KLA regularly conform to the requirements of
terrorist style. Like the IRA or ETA at their 'military' funerals,
KLA fighters wear reversed black balaclava helmets with eye-slits cut
into them. On the first anniversary of the fighting in Kosovo a few
weeks ago, CNN broadcast slips of the 'revolutionary opera' staged by
the KLA to mark the event. Madame Mao would have been proud. The
Internet sites sympathetic to the KLA link with, for instance, those
of the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso. Not since the Sandinistas appeared
in Nicarague have the armchair partisans in North America or Islington
had such heroes out of central casting.
President Clinton and his civilian advisers belong to the Sixties
generation which idolised the Vietcong and utterly failed to foresee
that their victory would lead to the exodus of the Boat People.
Richard Miles, the US ambassador to Belgrade, told student
demonstrators in Pristina in September 1997 about his experiences
outside the Pentagon in the 1960s. Shouldn't the Vietnam vets at Shape
have their doubts about supporting the Vietcong of the Balkans?
Contrary to its current propaganda, the KLA was not set up in response
to intensified Serb repression in Kosovo over the last few months. In
fact, it was established as far back as 1982. After Tito's death in
1980, his great regional rival, Albania's obdurate Stalinist Enver
Hoxha, saw an opportunity to cause problems for his Yugoslav neighbour
by taking advantage of Kosovo's large Albanian majority. It was on
Tirana's initiative that the KLA came into being. It soon came a
cropper at the hands of the Yugoslav secret police.
The survivors fled abroad. Some took refuge in Hoxha's Albania.
Others became refugees in Germany and Switzerland. There they bided
their time. Operating under various Marxist-Leninist party names, the
emigres seemed as completely out of the political picture as Lenin's
quarelling emigres in Zurich in 1914, especially when communist
Albania collapsed in 1992.
The implosion of post-communist Albania in 1997 threw a lifeline to
the shadowy KLA. Overnight, weapons flooded out of arsenals and a
route back to Kosovo was opened up. It also revealed the nexus
between the KLA's Maoist-style liberation ideology and the Albanian
mafia. In January this year, the outgoing Albanian interior minister,
Perikli Teta, admitted that 'smugglers and mafia have ruled this
country for the last 16 months'. He added that the Albanian
ex-communists came back to power 'through the barrel of a gun'.
Far from reducing corruption or the smuggling of people and drugs
across the Adriatic, the comeback of the Albanian ex-communists has
made matters worse. I have seen the nightly exodus of hundreds of
illegal immigrants heading for Italy in speedboats from the mafia-run
port of Vlore on the Adriatic coast. The evidence is that the KLA
takes its cut from the 1500 US dollars that many of these people pay
to get to Italy. Both the Italian and HM Customs warn that heroin and
other drugs are brought into Europe by couriers posing as refugees.
Italy has suffered from an exponential growth of an Albanian mafia as
its homegrown variety has been cut back byu the so-called 'clean
hands' investigations. The Albanian gangs - whether Kosovar or from
Albania proper - have amazed the Italian 'cosa nostra' by their
brutality. Italian opposition to the use of Aviano and other bases by
Nato aircraft is not therefore just a kneejerk response to the
unreconstructed communists.
Millions of Italians read every day in their newspapers about the
activities of Albanian mafia gangs. Every night television shows
grisly scenes of murder and pimping. A post-modern schizophrenia
fills the airwaves: first the reports of Serb atrocities and Allied
air-strikes to save Kosovo, then the local news about Kosovar gang
strikes against Italian pensioners. Italians may be forgiven for
linking the two phenomena and asking why they should fight for the
KLA's cause when its foot-soldiers and enforcers seem to be more
active in Milan than in Pristina.
Now on Italy's Adriatic coast her armed forces are involved in two
contradictory operations. Anti-aircraft missiles are being set in
place to repel Serbian counter-attacks, and at sea the Italian navy is
trying to thwart the invasion of illegal immigrants organised by the
Albanian mafia. So far the seaborne threat is the only one to have
materialised and the Italians are being swamped.
In this country, the Kosovar refugees are organised by the KLA. Most
of them seem to be fit young men - very different from the women and
children from Bosnia a few years ago. The risk must be that some of
them are acting as the advance guard for the drugs couriers and
money-launderers of the KLA instead of taking the speedboat back to
Albania to fight in the mountains against the Serbs. Already in
Germany and Switzerland as well as Italy the police complain of their
uphill struggle against the tight-knit Albanian-speaking gangs.
While these gangs get better organised in Western Europe, Nato is
expected to back the KLA's demand for its own statelet in the Balkans.
Since all the moderate Albanian leaders have been marginalised by the
fighting, or even murdered by the Serbs, there is no hope that an
independent Kosovo will emerge multi-party and tolerant from the
ruins.
The KLA despised the moderate non-violent Albanian leader, Ibrahim
Rugova. Their cruel ridiculing of him as a naive Gandhi of the
Balkans has been confirmed by events. The West did nothing to back
his peaceful separatism and the Serbs may well have murdered him by
now in order to create a clear killing field between their extremism
and the KLA.
In response to the upsurge of fighting, no doubt many ordinary
Albanians in Kosovo have joined the ranks of the KLA. They are not
racketeers or pimps but, just as the bulk of Tito's partisans were not
serious communists in 1944, what matters is who will be in charge when
the fighting stops. Then the peasants will go home to try to patch up
their lives, while the hard-core activists will stay in charge of a
new perverse political hybrid - the Maoist-mafia statelet. It will be
the first of its kind, but the Kurdish PKK, for one, will be hoping it
isn't the last.
President Clinton was negligent in neglecting the Kosovo issue at the
Dayton Conference in 1995. He was frivolous in launching an air war
which could only turn a bad situation in Kosovo into a nightmare for
ordinary Albanians there. But he will be criminal if he follows the
siren voices urging him to arm the KLA.
(The author is lecturer in modern history at Oriel College, Oxford)
------------------------
Cecil Ballantine
24 Albany Rd
Cheltenham,
Glos GL50 2UL
UK
Phone/fax : +44 1242 255518
Mobile: 08311 76602
e-mail : [email protected]
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