TALK SUBSCRIBE HOME
May 21st was a Friday, a day for deeds that wouldn't make Sunday's papers.
It was also the day U.S./NATO war planes bombed a key base of the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA). "[We acted] on the assumption that it was still in the hands of the Yugoslav Army," claimed NATO spokesman Jamie Shea.
But the base "was seized by the rebel [KLA] six weeks ago ...[and] has often been featured in reports by the international press, including television broadcasts and still photographs," as the 23 May New York Times carefully described the fact that even couch potatoes knew the base was KLA.
But then the KLA has suffered far worse than bombing at the hands of Washington and its NATO vassal allies. After all, it was the U.S. ambassador's pointed public description of the KLA as "terrorists" which green-lighted Milosevic's first ethnic cleansing campaign last fall, a vicious campaign aimed at destroying the KLA's popular base, a war which left hundreds dead and some 200,000 Kosovars homeless in the brutal mountain winter.
Then there was the full force of Washington's power -- blackmail, threats of mass violence, pay-offs, and psychological operations --brought against the KLA during the Rambouillet "peace" negotiations to surrender their arms and their aims ... and accept occupation by 28,000 NATO soldiers.
And the fearsome result -- the removal of the pioneer independence fighter Adem Demaqi who (as Australian journalist Michael Karadjis put it) "led the KLA politically until its leaders signed the Rambouillet agreement ... who had long proposed that an independent Kosova could, on the basis of self-determination, join with Serbia and Montenegro in a new, equal federation ...ideas [which] gained wide support from Serbian opposition elements in a wide-ranging "Serbian-Albanian" dialogue held in 1997...."
Here was someone--a popular leader advocating a new society of tolerance, equality and socialism--who stood as the key obstacle to U.S. plans for ethnic cleansing, war, and Western military occupation.
On his way out Demaqi warned that the new KLA leadership imposed by Washington would try to "convince Albanians to accept capitulation by launching illusions and empty promises." In other words the fantasy that Washington was an ally here to help ... and probably make some people very, very rich. Illusions which pave the way for Washington's intentions: national catastrophe for the Kosovars.
Whether the U.S. can succeed iu subverting the entire KLA to becoming a tool is still up in the air, although reports from the region regarding KLA cheerleading for NATO bombing--and Demaqi's utter disappearance--are not promising.
In any case, analyzing this process has nothing to do with the repulsive slanders currently being circulated (especially on the Internet) by Stalinists bent on portraying the armed popular movement as nothing but "a herion mafia ...organized and armed by the CIA."
The veracity of these claims--long on historical examples on CIA/drug dealing/contra operations elsewhere, but entirely lacking any current evidence against the KLA (except the guilt-by-association smear that drug smuggling occurs in the region)--should be judged by the attendant claim that there are no hordes of refugees from Kosova, just some people hired to live and camps and pretend. --S. Eckardt