The West and the Balkans

The mass grave and the very ordinary cemetery

A.B. On 20th July there is news that a mass grave has been discovered close to Suva Reka near Prizren. According to Monika Finnberg of UNMIK (the UN mission in Kosovo) a number of Kosovo-Serbs might be among the dead as well as members of minorities. The very same day the news is ‘strongly denied’. The mass grave becomes just an ordinary cemetery. ‘It’s a cemetery, very clear and simple,’ says Guido Van Rillaer, president of the UN Office for Missing Persons in Kosovo: ‘It’s a storage place ... a cemetery kept for unidentified bodies.’

What is this place that is called ‘a cemetery, very clear and simple’ in Kosovo? What really happened after NATO marched in? What kind of peace did the victors bring the tormented region? No doubt everybody remembers the way Hashim Thaci suddenly appeared as the ‘political leader of the Kosovo-Albanians’ in Rambouillet – Madeleine Albright’s protégé. In the meantime it has also become widely known that it was the CIA who trained him in Switzerland after he had been granted asylum there, and that it was his crew providing NATO with the bombing co-ordinates for the bombardments which took place every evening. And what sort of role NATO has played in the region after ‘victory’ was declared?

Werner van Gent, in his book ‘Der Geruch des Grauens’ (The Smell of Horror), outlines the invasion of the vanquishers: ‘After eleven weeks NATO finally managed to triumph, although a lot of people ask themselves what kind of victory this is supposed to be when the opposing army has in no way been defeated, but instead the infrastructure and industry of the whole country has been razed to the ground.’ In the flush of victory though such questions are pushed aside. ‘If a war is just, then of course the result of this war, peace, cannot be anything but just, too.’ That’s logical, isn’t it?

However, bitter reality has caught up with Europe. The members of the German Bundestag only realised afterwards that the war had violated international law. And the fact that they violated their own constitution in their eagerness to please Nato has not yet been talked through. After the disaster of World War II the Germans promised the international community that they would never again wage war in another country. Is today everything justified simply because America is the one giving the orders? If that is the case the German population should be told the truth: Their country is no longer a democracy but a vassal state of the USA, and therefore it is both their right and duty to do everything they deem necessary to safeguard and re-establish a true democracy.

And what about neutral Switzerland? And neutral Austria? In the past twenty years both countries have been host to large communities of workers from Serbia and Albania. And as the Swiss and the Austrians knew very well, members of those communities worked peacefully side by side in the same firms. Until the Nato war and the bombings began. That changed everything.

In a quarterly for security and peace the authors Karadi and Lutz wrote that victory in the Kosovo war had a high price and that it would be contemptible when looking back at the war to concentrate on the fact that the end could have been a lot worse or to even to try to add a moral dimension to the victory. Too great a discrepancy existed between international law and the obligation to render assistance, between the protection of human life and at the same time endangerment of those lives, between the appropriateness and the choice of the means. One thing, they are sure, has become clear to those responsible in the alliance: The real tasks still lie ahead of them because even if NATO ‘won’ the aerial war, a new war has already started. This is the fight for political power in Kosovo. The enemy of NATO’s Kfor troops is now none other than the partners they had formerly courted: the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) who are striving for the independence of Kosovo under their political leadership, and before the eyes of the Kfor they continue to wage war against the Serbs in the form of ethnic expulsion. Another minority, they point out, in need of protection are the ca. 90,000 Sinti and Roma who the Albanians indiscriminately suspect of ‘collaborating’ with the Serbs. Ever since the international peace keeping force first arrived about 30 murders have taken place every week. These victims have been mainly Serbs. In front of the whole world expulsion is taking place which is organised or at least approved of by the KLA. This is also ethnic cleansing. And just like in Croatia, the West is again running the risk of operating a double standard. (Matthias Z. Karadi / Dieter S. Lutz, Der Preis des Krieges ist seine Legitimität. Zu den Kosten und Folgekosten des Kosovo-Krieges, in: Vierteljahresschrift für Sicherheit und Frieden, 3/99, Nomos Verlag, Baden-Baden)

Switzerland and Austria, snagged on the hook of ‘Partnership for peace’, both sided with the belligerent power. Although the mission was made out to be humanitarian does nothing to alter the facts. Both countries should have broken with the agreement and provided humanitarian aid via the Red Cross.

The next war, which is due to take place in Macedonia, is ready to be launched: carefully prepared, so to speak ‘nurtured’ by the KLA and the Americans. Will the Europeans be again enticed into becoming limelighters, persist in wading through the quagmire of war? ‘They promised us peace and security, but instead all hell was let loose and they brought us suffering and heartache,’ said Aleksandar Jovanovic, the Serb representative in a Kosovo village, to the British military post. ‘I entreat you, leave your posts! Go! Then, at least, you won’t have to witness the extermination of the Serbian people.’

Why was the mass grave so quickly and strongly denied? The UN spokeswoman was not so wrong, except that the corpses had already been checked over and counted. And the question concerning the whereabouts of the 1,300 missing Serbs still remains unanswered. This, together with the apparently 30 murders a week of mostly Serbians, is all going on in a protectorate that was obviously created for different purposes: American military bases, transport corridors, pipelines, a deployment zone or air base that is located closer than Aviano to the planned ‘front line’ further to the east.

What about Serbia? For Milosevic’s extradition $1.3 billion of ‘Western aid was promised. The slice that they immediately receive must to be paid straight back to the European Investment Bank. The reason for this are the debts accumulated during the Tito era.

‘330,000 families live on an income of 40 German marks per month, the 600,000 refugees are a heavy burden on our budget, and 100,000 people are going to lose their jobs as a result of the transformations to the economy demanded by Western creditors,’ says Serb Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic bitterly. Is all this paving the way for the next move on Brezinski’s chessboard? Where is all this leading? Is the West doing all it can to spread the fire that is already raging in the region? Is the idea to create the next thousand-year Reich – this time by America’s grace? Germany meanwhile continues to march ahead, and do Switzerland and Austria again want to be limelighters?