CLINTON'S HUMANITARIAN WAR
End of an era? 

Hague trials rock Kosovo's rebel-led politics

Issued on: 12/12/2020 - 

Former President Hashim Thaci (C) and other rebel chiefs were once feted for liberating Kosovo from Serbia in a 1990s war STRINGER AFP

Pristina (AFP)

After more than a decade at the helm, Kosovo's former guerillas may have finally met their match -- not at home but in The Hague, where they are on trial for war crimes.

It has been a long and hard fall from grace for former president Hashim Thaci and other ex-rebels who were once feted as heroes for liberating Kosovo from Serbia in a late 1990s war, with the help of NATO.

Yet if they were once associated with the joy of that victory, in recent years they have become the face of a political elite accused of corruption and clientelism that has clouded Kosovo's first decade of independence.

"They became so strong and accumulated so much wealth that it was impossible to overthrow them," said Ismet Sojeva, 66, a retired English teacher.

"Only The Hague could help bring them from the sky back down to earth".

Thaci, 52, and four others were summoned last month to the EU-backed court in the Netherlands on charges of murder, torture, persecution and other war crimes allegedly committed during the 1998-99 conflict with Serbia.

For many Kosovars, it's a complicated moment.

Most strongly defend the uprising that paved Kosovo's path to independence in 2008.

Yet the guerilla leaders themselves have long ago lost their shine among a public frustrated with enduring poverty and dysfunction.

"There is nothing they have not done to us people," said the owner of a tea shop in Pristina who declined to give his name.

"They almost destroyed the state."

- An opportunity -

With trials that could last up to eight years, political science professor Belul Beqaj believes the absence of Thaci and his cadres could open a new chapter for Kosovo politics.

Thaci's PDK party came to power in 2007 and stayed there until losing an election late last year.

"It is the beginning of the end of the era of the powerful military-political group that brought Kosovo to this state," Beqaj said.

There is a rare opportunity for a "new generation of politicians" to fill the void, adds Arben Hajrullahu, a professor of political sciences at the University of Pristina.

Yet the ex-rebels won't "leave soon and easily," he noted, with some key figures still in politics and many others holding sway in powerful state institutions.

The fragmented opposition would need to unite around a common cause, said the professor, a goal that has so far proved difficult in Kosovo's tumultuous political scene.

- War heroes -

Known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the ethnic Albanian rebels are deeply embedded in the national narrative, with scores of streets and monuments bearing their names and stories.

They first emerged as a separatist movement in the 1990s in response to growing oppression of the ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo, then a Serbian province.

Thaci, a founding member, served as the group's political head, using a satellite phone to communicate with peace-brokering diplomats and foreign reporters.

Other prominent leaders on trial include the KLA's former spy chief Kadri Veseli, spokesman Jakup Krasniqi and chief of operations Rexhep Selimi.

After the KLA's clashes with Serbian troops intensified in 1998, the rag-tag army swelled from a few hundred members to thousands of recruits.

Victory arrived with NATO's intervention the following year, after 13,000 lives had been lost, mostly Kosovo Albanians.

The KLA was officially disbanded but its members continued to hold sway, consolidating their power through a series of attacks on political rivals.

- 'Corrupt payouts' -

Many top commanders like Thaci swapped their fatigues for politics and have circled the halls of power ever since.

Their levers of control were unveiled in 2011, when wiretapped phone conversations between then-PM Thaci and his associates showed a system of settling political appointments based on cronyism.

Thaci's clan is also accused of using their clout to scupper local investigations of KLA war crimes -- as well as attempts to obstruct the work of the tribunal in The Hague, which was set up in 2015.

"The suspects wield enormous influence over former KLA members and Kosovo in general," Hague prosecutors said in their request for arrest warrants this year.

Officials loyal to Thaci have "presided over corrupt government pay-outs" and job offers to silence potential witnesses, they alleged.

The trials may signal the end of crucial support from the West, which has long propped up Thaci and his allies.

The US has been a particularly robust ally, embracing Thaci at every turn, including when then-Vice President Joe Biden welcomed him to the White House as the "George Washington of Kosovo".

Critics say the West has backed the former rebels to prioritise stability in the region -- at the cost of rotting democratic institutions and a loss of public faith in politics.

Thaci and his men "looked only after settling and feeding themselves," said 22-year-old economy student Albulen Obrazhda, summing up the widespread disillusionment among youth, many of whom are eager to go abroad for better opportunities.

"They left us at the bottom."

© 2020 AFP

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=KOSOVO

Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Thesis on The Kosovo Crisis and the Crisis of Global Capitalism
(originally written May 1999, Bill Clinton set the stage for George W. to invade Afghanistan and Iraq for humanitarian purposes.)
http://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2005/01/war-whats-it-good-for-profit.html

Kosovo's indicted president withdraws from White House talks

© Provided by The Canadian Press

PRISTINA, Kosovo — Kosovo's president pulled out of a White House meeting with Serbian officials set for Saturday following his indictment on crimes against humanity and war crimes charges.

U.S. presidential envoy Richard Grenell, who invited Kosovar and Serbian officials to meet in Washington to jump start their stalled peace talks, tweeted that Kosovo President Hashim Thaci decided to postpone his trip to Washington.

Grenell wrote: "I respect his decision not to attend the discussions until the legal issues of those allegations are settle.”

The discussions will proceed and be led by Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Kosovo Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti, the U.S. envoy said. Grenell said.

Thaci and nine other former separatist fighters were indicted on a range of crimes against humanity and war crimes charges by a court investigating crimes against ethnic Serbs, Albanians and Roma during and after Kosovo’s 1998-99 independence war with Serbia.

The Kosovo Specialist Chambers said the indictment accuses them of being “criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders” of political opponents and Kosovar Albanian, Serb and Roma victims.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

Kosovo’s president and nine other former separatist fighters were indicted on a range of crimes against humanity and war crimes charges, including murder, by a court investigating crimes against ethnic Serbs, Albanians and Roma during and after Kosovo’s 1998-99 independence war with Serbia.

A statement from a prosecutor of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers issued Wednesday said President Hashim Thaci and the others suspects “are criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders” of political opponents and Kosovar Albanian, Serb and Roma victims.

Other charges include enforced disappearance, persecution, and torture. Thaci commanded fighters in the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, during the war.

The president's advisers did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press. Before the indictment, Thaci planned to attend a White House meeting with Serbia’s leaders on Saturday aimed at securing a peace agreement between Serbia and Kosovo.

He already has left Kosovo, but it wasn't clear what the charges may mean for his trip to Washington.

Thaci, 52, was elected president in February 2016 and his term ends next year. He previously served as prime minister, deputy prime minister and foreign minister.

The indicted individuals also include Kadri Veseli, former parliament speaker and leader of the opposition Democratic Party of Kosovo. Thaci resigned as the party's leader when he became president, leaving the post to Veseli.

The indictment issued Wednesday was the first by the special tribunal based in The Hague. The court has been operating since 2015 and has questioned hundreds of witnesses. Kosovo’s prime minister resigned last year before he was questioned. Veseli also has been questioned, but not Thaci.

The indictment is being reviewed by a pretrial judge who will decide whether to confirm the charges, according to the statement.

The prosecutor filed the indictment following a lengthy investigation and it reflects his “determination that it can prove all of the charges beyond a reasonable doubt," the statement said.

The prosecutor also accused Thaci and Veseli of repeated efforts “to obstruct and undermine the work" of the tribunal.

“Thaci and Veseli are believed to have carried out a secret campaign to overturn the law creating the Court and otherwise obstruct the work of the Court in an attempt to ensure that they do not face justice,” the statement said.

“By taking these actions, Mr. Thaci and Mr. Veseli have put their personal interests ahead of the victims of their crimes, the rule of law, and all people of Kosovo,” it added.

Kosovo politicians resisted and resented the scrutiny of the war crimes court, repeatedly noting that Serb troops committed massacres and other atrocities during the war that went unpunished.

The 1998-1999 war left more than 10,000 dead and 1,641 are still unaccounted for. It ended after a 78-day NATO air campaign.

Kosovo is a former Serbian province that declared independence in 2008, a move Serbia does not recognize. Tensions between the two countries remain high. European Union-facilitated negotiations to normalize their relations started in March 2011 and has produced some 30 agreements, most of which were not observed.

The White House meeting was set to be the first talks between the two sides in 19 months.

——-
Semini reported from Tirana, Albania. Dusan Stojanovic contributed from Belgrade.
Zenel Zhinipotoku And Llazar Semini, The Associated Press

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=KOSOVO

Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Thesis on The Kosovo Crisis and the Crisis of Global Capitalism
(originally written May 1999, Bill Clinton set the stage for George W. to invade Afghanistan and Iraq for humanitarian purposes.)
http://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2005/01/war-whats-it-good-for-profit.html

Key U.S. Ally Indicted for

Organ Trade Murder Scheme

by NICOLAS J S DAVIES JULY 7,2020

Photograph Source: Andrew Milligan sumo – CC BY 2.0

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 be starting to look over their shoulders?

More articles by:NICOLAS J S DAVIES

Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq and of the chapter on “Obama At War” in Grading the 44th President: A Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.

CLINTON/NATO'HUMANITARIAN'WAR

Joe Biden's letters show new approach in Kosovo, Serbia

President Donald Trump participates in a signing ceremony and meeting with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic (L) and the Kovovo Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti, in the Oval Office of the White House on September 4. 

Pool Photo by Anna Moneymaker/UPI | License Photo

WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 (UPI) -- With left-wing politician Albin Kurti elected prime minister of Kosovo last weekend, U.S. President Joe Biden has congratulated the heads of state of both Kosovo and Serbia for their independence days in letters revealing how his approach to the region will be different from that of his predecessor.

The letters, sent to honor Serbia's independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1804 and Kosovo's independence from Serbia in 2008, urged the normalization of relations between the two countries, which have struggled to move past animosities from the bloody war in the region in the 1990s. Although most Western countries recognize Kosovo, Serbia and its allies Russia and China have yet to recognize the new country -- a point of contention in the Balkans.

"We remain steadfast in our support for Serbia's goal of European integration and encourage you to continue taking the hard steps forward to reach that aim -- including instituting necessary reforms and reaching a comprehensive normalization agreement with Kosovo centered on mutual recognition," Biden wrote to Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić earlier this month.

Biden also encouraged Kosovo to move toward normalization with Serbia based on mutual recognition -- the crux of the problem between the two countries -- in a letter with a markedly different tone.

RELATED Kosovo, Serbia normalize economic relations

"On a personal note," Biden wrote to acting President Vjosa Osmani this week, "Kosovo continues to hold a special place for the Biden family, in honor of the time our late son Beau Biden spent working to ensure peace, justice and the rule of law for all the people of Kosovo."

The president's son spent time in Kosovo as a legal adviser for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe after the war ended in 1999, leaving such an impact that the country named a main highway after him following his death in 2015.

Joe Biden also spent time in the Balkans as a senator and vice president. He last visited the region as vice president in 2016 in a final push for normalization between Kosovo and Serbia. During the trip, he attended the naming ceremony of the Joseph R. "Beau" Biden III Highway in Kosovo, where he told the country, "I believe in you" and "we love you."

RELATED Kosovo President Hashim Thaci says he will resign to face war crimes trial

In contrast, Biden's meeting with Serbian leaders in Belgrade the day before the highway ceremony was marred by the presence of hundreds of ultranationalist protesters who marched throughout the city shouting "Donald Trump." Biden's visit came about a month after Trump had been nominated as the Republican presidential candidate, garnering support from pro-Russia populists in the country.

The Trump administration showed more willingness to work with Serbia than most previous administrations, said Engjellushe Morina, a Balkans expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Trump officials asked what can the United States get out of the region, rather than the past U.S. position of asking what is it that the United States can do to help the region, she said.

Trump organized a much anticipated peace summit with Vučić and then Kosovo Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti in the White House to move forward peace negotiations in September, overseen by Trump's special presidential envoy for peace negotiations between the countries, Ambassador Richard Grenell.

RELATED COVID-19: Serbia arrests 71 in protest over handling of pandemic

But the meeting resulted in the signing of two documents that included no legally binding agreements, Morina said, largely focusing on economic issues and extraneously normalizing relations with Israel instead of establishing mutual recognition between the two countries.

"That agreement is very dubious in terms of the substance," said Florian Bieber, professor of Southeast European history and politics at the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz. "Without really putting details on paper, it's not going to matter much."

Bieber said it seems Trump sent Grenell to the region to score an easy foreign policy win before he was up for re-election.

After the summit, Trump sent letters to Vučić and Hoti urging them to take more concrete steps toward normalization. Trump's letters showed less sympathy than Biden's to the Kosovo cause.

"I appreciate and share your steadfast commitment to ensuring the stability and peace of the Balkans and the world," Trump wrote to Hoti. "I look forward to continuing to strengthen the partnership between our nations and send my best wishes to you and the people of Kosovo."

Trump's note to Vučić read more warmly: "I am heartened by your tremendous courage in beginning to normalize economic relations with Kosovo," Trump wrote, "and look forward to continuing to create a safer, stronger and more prosperous region. Best wishes to you and the great people of Serbia."

Despite Kurti's belief that Grenell played a role in the demise of his first coalition, Kurti has said that he does not hold a grudge against the United States and immediately tweeted congratulations to Biden after his inauguration.

Although Vucic has not made a public statement responding to Biden's most recent letter, Serbia's Minister of Foreign Affairs Nikola Selaković said this week that if the United States and other countries expect Belgrade to recognize Kosovo, they will not find the answer they are hoping for in Serbia.

upi.com/7076788

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=KOSOVO

Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Thesis on The Kosovo Crisis and the Crisis of Global Capitalism
(originally written May 1999, Bill Clinton set the stage for George W. to invade Afghanistan and Iraq for humanitarian purposes.)
http://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2005/01/war-whats-it-good-for-profit.html

Canada Out Of NATO

Another Progressive For War (PFW) the Galloping Beaver blogs on the background to the Canadian Forces operations in Afghanistan. He is cheered on by Cerberus, and cross posted it to the Torch. So now all the bases are covered.

Galloping Beaver compares the differences between Iraq and Afghanistan. Quite right too. Both operations are different. And as a progressive he is opposed to the war in Iraq but then he continues to try and justify the war in Afghanistan as different, more noble. Because it is sanctioned by the UN and NATO.

But then again when he says it is sanctioned by the UN and NATO let us not forget that so was the war on Serbia over Kosovo. And that mess is still going on. With no resoloution. So far neither the UN nor NATO sanctioned wars have had much success.

See my Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Thesis on The Kosovo Crisis and the Crisis of Global Capitalism
originally written May 1999, Bill Clinton set the stage for George W. to invade Afganistan and Iraq for humanitarian purposes.

And the comparison could be made that initially we were involved in peace keeping in the Balkans and then we were part of the War in the Balkans declared by that other Progressive For War, Bill Clinton.

At that time those who opposed imperialism and war, and the two go togther like peanutbutter and jam, also objected to that war. And that war was fought on so called humanitarian grounds, which many on the left even, mistakenly, supported. Christopher Hitchens opposed the war but now he supports the War in Iraq. Consistency is the hobgobllen of opportunists.

The Galloping Beaver says; If Canada were to suddenly withdraw because Canadians at home are getting squeamish, those who would have us do that should be aware that Canada would be forever viewed as an unreliable ally; not by the US, but by NATO. Canada relies on collective defence treaties to keep defence affordable. Withdrawl would result in no treaties, no collective defence and a huge price to pay in going it alone.

Exactly why we should withdraw from NATO. Something the NDP called for over many decades until Jack Layton decided to arbitrarily change the party platform. Thus leaving him in the Hobbesian dilemma he is in now over whether our Troops should stay or go. NATO is a cold war relic, whose purpose was to prepare for a European theatre of war with the USSR. Without the USSR, NATO has no purpose.That was until it was utilized to end the Balkan war it's member states had encouraged in the first place (with their recognition of Slovenia and Croatia).

Then the Beaver concludes; "No matter how comfortable people are inside our borders at the moment, they should realize that the world has become a much more dangerous place, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union."

Yep thats when the world changed. No longer did we fear the nuclear meltdown due to the Cold War. Nor could the Soviet Union do its job as an Imperialist power in moderating its client states and holding them accountable. Thus a vacuum was created. One into which marched the USA as it declared under the Elder Bush the coming of the New World Order. And the new mask of Imperialism was adopted, that of humanitarian wars.

Military interventions on supposedly humanitarian grounds have become an established feature of the post–Cold War global order. Since September 11, this form of militarism has taken on new and unpredictable proportions. Diana Johnstone’s well-documented study demonstrates that a crucial moment in establishing in the public mind—and above all, within the political context of liberalism and the left—the legitimacy of such interventions was the “humanitarian” bombing of the former Yugoslavia in 1999.

For those of us on the Left we are opposed to Capitalism, Imperialism and War we are not pacifists, we recgonize that all wars are the bosses war which is why we say No War But Class War.

This adventure in Afghanistan clearly exposes those who are the liberals and so called progressives, the new age social democrats who will go to war for humanitarian reasons; which is the new excuse for Capitalism and Imperialism. Like they once used nationalism and honor.



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Kosovo in Retrospect: Rise and Fall of the ‘Rules-Based Order’

Philip Hammond reflects on the significance of the Kosovo war, which began 25 years ago this week

By Philip Hammond

March 25, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Soldiers representing NATO partner and allied nations. Image via GetArchive



NATO expansion, Western leaders vaunting wars for values, international judges ruling on accusations of genocide, calls to defend civilisation against barbarism — it sometimes feels as if we are still in the 1990s. Yet looking back to the 1999 Kosovo conflict reveals how much has changed in the past quarter century. Then, the West’s post-Cold War ‘rules-based order’ was at its height. Today, it is slowly, violently collapsing as a new, multipolar world emerges.

Dawn of the rules-based order

The Kosovo conflict was the key event in establishing the ‘rules-based order’. The term sounds like it might just be a synonym for ‘international law’, but is in fact its antithesis — as legal scholars have belatedly begun to notice. Specifically, the ‘rules-based order’ entails a break from the post-1945 UN system, which was premised on the principles of sovereign equality and non-interference in the internal affairs of other states.

In 1999 the UN was bypassed, to avoid a Security Council veto by Russia, and the bombing of Yugoslavia was instead carried out by NATO. Even its supporters admitted this was illegal under international law, but argued it was nevertheless ‘justified on moral grounds’. This was the era of what in Britain was called ‘ethical foreign policy’, when conscience was said to compel military action in defence of universal moral values.

In a famous April 1999 speech, Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed NATO was waging a ‘just war’ which laid the basis for a ‘new doctrine of international community’. The doctrine essentially consisted of a globalist perspective on the economy, the environment and ‘international security’: Blair said the ‘most pressing foreign policy problem’ was to ‘identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts’.

This was a vision of a ‘community’ that would be policed by the dominant military states since, as Blair explained, ‘nations which have the power, have the responsibility’. This is the essence of the rules-based order: in line with their own self-proclaimed ‘values’, the powerful decide where and how to ‘get actively involved’ in the affairs of the less powerful.

A ‘right to intervene’

Less than a fortnight before it started bombing Yugoslavia, NATO completed its first wave of eastward enlargement, admitting Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Already it appeared that, as Secretary of State Anthony Blinken put it recently, ‘if you’re not at the table in the international system, you’re going to be on the menu’.

The same month as Blair was preaching his ‘doctrine’, Czech president Vaclav Havel similarly envisaged a future world governed by ‘cooperation between larger, mostly supranational, entities’, in which ‘the notion that it is none of our business what happens in another country’ would ‘vanish down the trapdoor of history’. Conceding that Yugoslavia was being ‘attacked … without a direct mandate from the UN’, Havel maintained that this was because of NATO’s ‘respect … for a law that ranks higher than the law which protects the sovereignty of states’ — the ‘higher value’ of universal human rights.

The logic was drawn out by Bernard Kouchner, the first governor of post-war Kosovo. He claimed it was time for a ‘decisive evolution in international consciousness’, whereby a ‘new morality’ would be ‘codified in the “right to intervention” against abuses of national sovereignty’. Mere humanitarianism was not enough: ‘we need to establish a forward-looking right of the world community to actively interfere in the affairs of sovereign nations’.

After 9/11, ethical justifications for war were incorporated into the ‘war on terror’, despite occasional incongruities of tone. Washington reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring public relations consultants to ‘humanise the war’ in Afghanistan, where US planes dropped aid as well as cluster bombs (both in yellow packaging) in an effort to save some Afghans while killing others. According to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, the bombing was ‘a triumph for human rights’. Similarly, in Iraq president George Bush Jr. promised ‘liberation’ while Blair emphasised the ‘moral case for removing Saddam’.

‘Benign’ dictatorship

Many observers criticised what they saw as the cynical, instrumental use of humanitarianism in the war on terror, yet the problem is not simply that interventions are selective, poorly implemented or undermined by ulterior motives. Rather, the core problem is that the best one can hope for under such a system is a benign global dictatorship. The rules-based order returns us to a neo-colonial world where the powerful decide which people need to be ‘helped’ and abrogate to themselves the right to do so.

It is the polar opposite of sovereign equality, a world of international protectorates (in Bosnia and Kosovo) and regime-change wars (in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya). The latter have produced nothing but bloody chaos; the former have merely frozen conflicts rather than resolving them. In Kosovo, a quarter century of Western state-building has produced a ‘failed state’ where the Serbian minority still endures daily harassment and violence.

None of this is to idealise the UN, where real power has always resided in the Security Council. Before Kosovo, interventions under the UN banner were launched against Iraq, Somalia and Haiti, and Western powers took it upon themselves to decide where to draw the borders of new states in the former Yugoslavia, knowingly exacerbating conflict as they did so. For much of the 1990s it looked like a retooled UN might provide the framework for the ‘new world order’ proclaimed by George Bush Snr. at the start of the decade, but the logic of a unipolar world pointed in the opposite direction.

During the Cold War, although the post-1945 conventions of sovereign equality and non-interference were often infringed, they were nevertheless important in delegitimising aggressive foreign policy, and represented an historic gain for states which were previously mere colonial possessions. The ‘Illegal yet legitimate’ formula used for Kosovo showed how far this had unravelled in the 1990s.

The propaganda war

Critics of Western policy in the 1990s tended to argue that it was not forceful enough; that terrible things were allowed to happen while the Western powers were constrained by the unwieldy UN system. In 1999, NATO leaders were largely successful in presenting themselves as the solution to this problem, thanks to the extreme subservience (with a few honourable exceptions) of Western journalists.

The claim that NATO bombing was morally justified, even if illegal, meant the media presentation of the war was crucial. Yet virtually everything NATO said about Kosovo was either misleading or outright false. NATO supposedly went to war reluctantly, after diplomatic efforts had been exhausted, but the so-called ‘peace agreement’ was designed to be rejected. A US official explicitly told reporters at the time that ‘We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.’ To keep this information from the public, journalists were simply told not to report it, and they complied.

The other key claim in the build-up to war was that Yugoslav forces were massacring ethnic-Albanian civilians, notably at the village of Račak on 15 January 1999. William Walker, the American head of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission in Kosovo, visited the scene and immediately declared it an ‘unspeakable atrocity’ and a ‘crime against humanity’. The New York Times ran a front-page story about ‘mutilated bodies’ with ‘eyes gouged out’ and ‘heads smashed in’. President Bill Clinton described ‘innocent men, women and children taken from their homes to a gully, forced to kneel in the dirt, sprayed with gunfire’.

These accounts bore little relation to what actually happened at Račak — a firefight between Yugoslav security services and Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas — but most Western journalists just repeated them. One of the few who did contest the official version of events, French reporter Renaud Girard, said he was rounded on by British and American colleagues who complained ‘You’re killing our story’. As one study of this and other episodes in the propaganda war notes, the media created an ‘illusion of multiple sources’ as different outlets reproduced the same distorted accounts, and an ‘illusion of independent confirmation’ as officials cited news reports as corroboration of stories they had fed to journalists in the first place.

NATO also repeatedly claimed it had to start bombing to prevent a refugee crisis. State Department spokesman James Rubin, for example, said on 25 March 1999 that if NATO had not acted, ‘you would have had hundreds of thousands of people crossing the border’. Privately, however, they knew they were about to cause just such a crisis. A US diplomat with the OSCE, Norma Brown, later said that ‘everyone knew there would be a humanitarian crisis of massive proportions if NATO bombed. It was discussed in NATO; it was discussed in the OSCE’. Yet as the crisis unfolded, journalists treated it as confirmation that the airstrikes were necessary and right, ‘forgetting’ that preventing it had ever been a justification for bombing. One British TV journalist claimed afterwards: ‘This is why NATO went to war: so the refugees could come back to Kosovo’.

NATO of course denied any responsibility, insisting the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Kosovo Albanians was the result of a premeditated policy and would have happened anyway. On cue, secret documents outlining just such a Serbian plan – ‘Operation Horseshoe’ – were revealed by the German government. This supposed ‘blueprint for genocide’ was exposed as a fake concocted by the German intelligence services – but only months after the war ended.

Germany was also among the first Western states to start arming and training the KLA from the mid-1990s. In addition to building a guerrilla army, NATO powers also undermined what remained of the Yugoslav state by funding political opponents of the regime, leading to the overthrow of President Slobodan Milošević in 2000 — a blueprint for subsequent ‘colour revolutions’.

The fall

The propaganda surrounding the current wars in Ukraine and Israel can sometimes make it seem as if little has changed politically in the West, but of course much has. We are long past the messianic zeal of liberal interventionism or the hubris of war-on-terror attempts to remake reality. The West is even more risk-averse than in 1999, when NATO did its own high-altitude bombing. Now it sends weapons and celebrates what a ‘good deal’ this is for arms manufacturers.

Blair’s description of the Kosovo war as ‘a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity; between democracy and dictatorship’ was an attempt to sell NATO bombing as an epic struggle for values. Now, just beneath the surface of the values-talk, commentators promote the West’s proxy war against Russia on the grounds that it is ‘cheap’ and that it is somebody else’s sons who are being killed.

Some have taken up Israel’s claim to be waging an ‘existential struggle between civilisation and barbarism’ in Gaza, but Israeli actions — killing more than 30,000, injuring twice as many again, and displacing most of the population — present an even less attractive advertisement for ‘civilisation’ than NATO’s 78-day bombing of Serbia. As one assessment puts it, whatever the outcome of current conflicts, ‘the West seems to have already lost on the normative and narrative front’.

In part, this is due to the affordances of social media and the increasing irrelevance of the ‘legacy’ gatekeepers, though of course governments are seeking new means of control. But there are two more fundamental changes. The first is the underlying shift in geopolitical power and a growing willingness to challenge Western hegemony. The second is the rise of populism and the rejection of globalist elites within Western countries. When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, one of the elite’s greatest worries was that this would be a setback for globalism. The influential writer (and husband of Victoria Nuland) Robert Kagan, for example, said he feared that ‘America may once again start behaving like a normal nation’, pursuing its own interests but not taking ‘responsibility for global order’.

There is no room for complacency. As a new, multipolar order begins to take shape, it sometimes seems that we are entering a period of heightened danger with little to look forward to but a choice between different kinds of authoritarianism. And populist leaders have mostly so far failed to live up to their promises — in Britain, for example, the post-Brexit political class has done everything possible to reinforce the UK’s involvement in trans-national institutions, particularly NATO.

Yet the decline of Western dominance and the rise of multipolarity are inherently positive insofar as they represent a challenge to globalism and offer new possibilities for smaller states to reassert their sovereign independence. Today there is new hope that Kagan’s nightmare — that the US and its allies will get ‘out of the world order business’ — may yet come true.


Philip Hammond is Emeritus Professor of Media & Communications at London South Bank University. He is the editor, with Edward S. Herman, of Degraded Capability: The Media & the Kosovo Crisis (Pluto Press, 2000).

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=KOSOVO

Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Thesis on The Kosovo Crisis and the Crisis of Global Capitalism
(originally written May 1999, Bill Clinton set the stage for George W. to invade Afghanistan and Iraq for humanitarian purposes.)
http://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2005/01/war-whats-it-good-for-profit.html

WHEN TONY BLAIR BOMBED MONTENEGRO

Britain’s direct involvement in NATO raid that killed a Montenegrin civilian revealed for the first time.

PHIL MILLER
29 APRIL 2024

Blair welcomed Montenegro’s president Milo Djukanovic to Downing Street, a year after bombing his country. (Photo: PA via Alamy)

Montenegro opposed Serbia’s conduct in the Kosovo war of 1999 but was not spared from NATO bombing of Yugoslavia

Future head of MI6 gave clearance for “precision guided munitions” to be dropped on Montenegro’s capital

Royal Air Force has bombed eight different countries or territories since 1999

Twenty five years ago today NATO bombed Montenegro’s main airport.

It came amid airstrikes on Yugoslav forces in Kosovo, where Bill Clinton and Tony Blair waged a “humanitarian intervention” ostensibly to save ethnic Albanians from Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Yet a 61-year-old woman, Paska Juncaj, was killed in the strikes on Montenegro’s capital Podgorica, which lasted for 24 hours.

“Shrapnel hit her in the head while she was on the way to an air raid shelter with her son,” a hospital official told Reuters.

Three others were injured – one seriously – and two houses destroyed after a cluster bomb missed its target.

Bombing Montenegro at all was controversial, because the country was friendly to NATO.

And although it remained in Yugoslavia with Serbia, its president Milo Djukanovic was anti-Milosevic and took a neutral stance on Kosovo.

The country would eventually join NATO as a member in 2017.
Approving air strikes

The Atlantic alliance did not specify which of its members had taken part in the air strikes on Montenegro at the time.

Such secrecy would become a common feature of future NATO air wars, making it hard for victims to hold individual states responsible.

But a formerly classified document reveals that Britain was heavily involved in the attack on Montenegro.

Blair’s defence secretary, George Robertson, believed an attack on Podgorica’s airport was justified because “it was being used as a base for operations in and over Kosovo” by Yugoslav jets and helicopters.

John Sawers, Blair’s foreign affairs adviser and future head of MI6, gave clearance for “precision guided munitions” to be dropped at 4 points of the airfield, which had both civilian and military functions.

“The risk of casualties was low, for both civilian and military, and of collateral damage, medium”, Robertson’s private secretary Christopher Deverell noted in a memo to Downing Street marked, “Secret – Personal” and “Limited distribution”.

On the same day, a Cabinet Office meeting of legal advisors recorded “some concern about the acceptability of explanations that have been given by NATO and national spokesmen for attacks by non-UK NATO forces on certain targets which were on the face of it civilian in character.”

Sawers concluded: “I think it would be right to continue to plan on the assumption that the Prime Minister is almost certain to agree to targets where collateral damage is assessed as high but civilian casualties remain low.”

The file has since been declassified and was passed to the National Archives in London this December.

The MoD, NATO and Lord Robertson did not respond to requests for comment.
Culture of impunity

Dr Iain Overton from campaign group Action on Armed Violence told Declassified: “The lack of transparency displayed by the Ministry of Defence over its air strikes is long and concerning. They repeatedly deny civilian harm even in the face of detailed evidence. This revelation just adds to the proof that this culture of opacity and impunity prevails at the highest level.”

It is unclear whether Britain had any involvement in another NATO attack on Montenegro the following day – 30 April 1999 – when a bridge in the village of Murino was struck by ten missiles.

Six civilians died in that airstrike, including three children, sparking a long running campaign for justice.

British aircraft did participate in the wider bombing of Serbia and Kosovo. The 78-day campaign by NATO left around 500 civilians dead, according to Human Rights Watch.

Milosovic was later overthrown and died while on trial at The Hague. Blair’s ally in the conflict, Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) leader Hashem Thaci, is currently on trial for war crimes.

Over the next 25 years, Britain conducted airstrikes in eight countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

The list does not include military interventions like in Sierra Leone, as they did not feature aerial bombardments.

This month the RAF flew missions to protect Israel from Iranian drones.
‘My enemy’s enemy’

Britain’s military intervention in Kosovo produced mixed results. Although it allowed the return of ethnic Albanian refugees, it sparked reprisals against ethnic Serbs and empowered the KLA.

During the air war, Sawers pushed for Britain to deepen ties with the KLA, who were fighting Serb forces on the ground.

Sawers said Britain risked being “too sniffy” towards the KLA and that: “Our starting point in a conflict like this should be that your enemy’s enemy is your friend. We can sort out our differences later.”

Sawers also suggested a “minimalist interpretation” of the UN arms embargo. Blair replied: “I agree”. The KLA had easy access to small arms from their bases in Albania, where the collapse of pyramid schemes had left the state in tatters.

The file gives an important insight into the mindset of Sawers, who went on to run MI6 a decade on from the Kosovo war. In 2011 he oversaw a similar strategy in Libya where British intelligence sided with banned terrorist groups to topple Muammar Gaddafi.





Narco-state

In both cases, the Machiavellian policies have left a troubled legacy. Kosovo became virtually a narco-state on the edge of Europe, while Al Qaeda spin off groups like ISIS flourished in Libya’s power vacuum and spread terrorism to the UK.

A memo on the KLA written by a Whitehall staffer in 1999 noted it “does contain unsavoury elements…Links to drugs/crime.”

It added that the UK “do not support their goal (independence) or methods,” although Britain would be the first country to recognise Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008.

The MoD and Foreign Office warned: “Not all the Kosovo Albanians support the KLA. And the KLA is prone to feuding, and not incapable of atrocities itself. NATO cannot be seen to be in alliance with them…KLA rule might not be a liberal experience.”

Another document warned they were “not much better than the Serbs”.

Two months after Milosevic agreed to pull his forces out of Kosovo, leaving Thaci in control, the Independent reported “around 30 people a week are being killed in Kosovo as organised gangs take advantage of the UN’s failure to police the province.”

A NATO spokesman admitted there was a “law and order vacuum” with Western diplomats saying “gangs, some of which are suspected of having links to the Kosovo Liberation Army, are taking apartments, real estate, businesses, fuel supplies and cars from Kosovo Albanians and Serbs, who have little recourse to justice.”

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ON TRIAL FOR WAR CRIMES – TONY BLAIR’S FORMER ALLIES

A declassified British government file written shortly after the war said a senior KLA veteran was “up to his neck in smuggling and organised crime”. Kosovo was described in the media as a “smugglers’ paradise” and “the Colombia of Europe”, supplying up to 40% of heroin on the continent.

Sex trafficking and forced prostitution also rose in post-war Kosovo as gangs supplied NATO peacekeepers with “hundreds of women, many of them under-age girls”, Amnesty International warned in 2004.
Organised crime

Thaci became Kosovo’s first prime minister, despite NATO believing he was among the country’s “biggest fish” in organised crime.

An investigation by the Council of Europe accused Thaci of organ harvesting, with his inner circle allegedly murdering Serb captives to sell their kidneys on the black market.

It also cited reports from anti-narcotic agencies who identified Thaci as having “violent control over the trade in heroin”.

Kosovar gangs often have close familial links with the wider Albanian mafia. The National Crime Agency said in 2017 that “Albanian crime groups have established a high profile influence within UK organised crime, and have considerable control across the UK drug trafficking market, particularly cocaine.”

Drug deaths in Britain have now reached a 30-year high, with almost 5,000 fatalities in 2022.

After decades of impunity, Thaci is now on trial for 10 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity relating to the KLA.

The degree of corruption and intimidation is so high in Kosovo that his trial has to be held at a special court in The Hague.

Tougher rules on prison visits had to be implemented in December after prosecutors complained that visitors tried to compel “witnesses to withdraw or modify their testimony in a manner favorable” to the defendants.

Thaci denies all the charges against him.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phil Miller is Declassified UK's chief reporter. He is the author of Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes. Follow him on Twitter at @pmillerinfo