By John Catalinotto

Spokespeople for the NATO governments have presented the alliance’s bombing attack on Yugoslavia as a "humanitarian intervention" in defense of the rights of the people of Kosovo, especially of the Albanians. They claimed their goal was to make it possible for people of all nationalities of the region to live in peace in Kosovo.

A look at the facts as they unfold, however, shows that every step taken by the NATO powers and especially by the military and intelligence forces of the United States and Germany aimed at exacerbating tensions among the different nationalities in Kosovo and provoking a war against Yugoslavia. That providing military and political support for the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA or UCK, using the initials in Albanian) made regular clashes with the Yugoslav security forces inevitable. That starting to bomb Yugoslavia indeed brought these tensions to a boiling point and made it all but impossible for these populations to live together peacefully. That the intense bombing inside Kosovo itself made great parts of the province difficult if not impossible to live in and created a new level of suffering for the whole population, including hundreds of thousands of Albanians who fled to neighboring countries or to Montenegro or Serbia. And that NATO troops occupying Kosovo with no presence of Yugoslav troops has created a climate where Serb, Roma and other nationalities live in fear or flee the province.

Thus there is a great disconnection between NATO’s stated goal and the result of its actions. The reason for this disconnection is that the stated goal is a lie. NATO’s real goal regarding Kosovo was to continue the dismembering of Yugoslavia by removing Kosovo from Serbia. It aimed to put Kosovo under the direct control of NATO, with a local reactionary puppet government that would remain a NATO client. This is a continuation of NATO’s and especially German and U.S. policy toward Yugoslavia since 1990, which has been to dismember Yugoslavia and privatize all the means of production in the Balkans

For over a year before the bombing began, NATO was planning military action in Kosovo. U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen had traveled to Skopje, Macedonia in late December 1997 for discussions with the government and military there to try to secure the stationing of armed combat troops on that country’s border with Kosovo. A few months later, Macedonia’s Defense Minister L. Kitanoski went to Washington for meetings at the Pentagon. On the agenda: the establishment of a NATO base in Macedonia. [Michel Chossudovsky—NATO’s War Against Yugoslavia, An Overview, June 1999]

Just a year earlier, U.S. officials had denounced the KLA as a "terrorist" organization. But by 1998, the KLA was seen as a convenient tool to use against the Yugoslav government and provide NATO with a pretext to build up its ground forces in Macedonia. NATO set up direct links with the KLA. According to a U.S. Department of Defense briefing, "… the realization has come to people [in NATO] that we [NATO] have to have the UCK involved in this process …." By then, several reports stated that both the CIA and the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) had been covertly training and supplying the KLA since the mid-1990s. [Chossudovsky]

On Sept. 24, 1998, a UN Security Council Resolution called on Yugoslavia to withdraw its troops from Kosovo. In mid-October, the North Atlantic Council authorized NATO’s Supreme Commander for Europe Gen. Wesley Clark to start "limited air strikes" and a "phased air campaign" against Yugoslavia if they didn’t withdraw troops. But when Belgrade withdrew some troops, the KLA—with backing from the U.S. and Germany—stepped up terrorist activity in Kosovo, making clashes inevitable. [Chossudovsky]

Meanwhile, under the threat of NATO bombing, Yugoslavia had to allow the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission into the province. The KVM’s role was to assure that the Yugoslav military was pulling out. Heading the KVM was William Walker, a former aide to Oliver North and Elliott Abrams in running aid to Nicaraguan Contras in Central America in the 1980. He was U.S. ambassador to El Salvador during the time right-wing death squads were there, working with the military, carried out assassinations.

While NATO was able since November 1998 to carry out aerial observation of Kosovo as well as ground observation by the KVM, it needed a pretext for more direct intervention. This arrived with the alleged massacre in the village of Racak on Jan. 15. While the French daily newspapers Le Monde, Le Figaro and Liberation ran articles that the 40 bodies were probably KLA fighters killed in a shoot out with Serbian police—and then gathered in a mass grave by the KLA with the intent of discrediting Belgrade—Walker claimed the Serbian police carried out a massacre of civilians. NATO powers used this alleged massacre to prepare military action against Yugoslavia.

Brandishing the threat of bombing Yugoslavia, NATO leaders brought both Yugoslav and KLA leaders to Rambouillet, France, supposedly to negotiate over a U.S.-drafted peace and autonomy plan. After the KLA frustrated NATO’s first effort by rejecting the plan first presented, the U.S. came up a month later with a new peace plan containing several provisions that no sovereign nation could accept. The plan allotted Kosovo a status transcending either of Yugoslavia’s republics and provided for direct NATO involvement. Yugoslavia would have to "invite" occupation by hostile NATO troops. [Greg Elich—Carving Another Slice from Yugoslavia]

A provision stated that "the economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles" to ensure Western corporate interests. And, as revealed by a German intelligence official, "The [German] chancellor and foreign minister knew from the outset that no Yugoslav government could ever sign" the Rambouillet plan. "Both understood clearly that this would mean the end of Yugoslavia as a sovereign state. War was therefore inevitable." [Elich]

The bombing began March 24. In the year before the bombing began, some 2,000 people had been killed in fighting in Kosovo, and some tens of thousands became refugees. The bombing, which was concentrated in Kosovo even more than in the rest of Yugoslavia, exacerbated the fighting between the Yugoslav and Serbian security forces on one side and the KLA on the other, with the KLA operating under NATO air cover. It sharpened the conflict between the Albanian and Serb nationalities in the Kosovo population. It and fear of being caught between the two combatant sides on the ground drove hundreds of thousands of people from Kosovo’s cities

As even some within NATO had to admit, the relentless bombing of Kosovo, while it did nothing to protect Albanian civilians, made normal life horrible for everyone within the province. NATO bombing raids even struck lines of mostly Albanian refugees, once killing over 80 people.

As part of the final settlement, five NATO powers—the U.S., Germany, Britain, France and Italy—divided up the province of Kosovo into five slices much as the 19^th Century colonial powers divided up Africa. And they entered Kosovo along with armed KLA units, who proceeded to terrorize people of Serb and Roma origin as well as Albanians suspected of cooperating with the Serbs. The result was the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and turning Kosovo into a NATO protectorate.

Commission of Inquiry
c/o International Action Center
39 West 14^th Street, Room 206
New York, NY 10011
email: iacenter@iacenter.org
http://www.iacenter.org
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war crimes

Table of Contents: Selected Research Findings