Rick Rozoff: Kosovo: Marking Ten Years Of Worldwide Wars
[Rick Rozoff has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. Is the manager of the Stop NATO international email list.]
It has been said that proverbs are the wisdom of nations and one of the most common is that a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.
Former U.S. President William Jefferson Clinton is to arrive in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, on Sunday, November 1 according to the erstwhile head of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and self-styled prime minister of Kosovo Hashim Thaci.
The occasion of Clinton's visit, his first since Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence in February of 2008 - a violation of international law and United Nations Resolution 1244 directly resulting from Clinton's acts of a decade ago - is to attend the official unveiling of a statue dedicated to himself.
"The almost ten feet statue of the former U.S. President Bill Clinton has been erected in the same square that bears his name in Pristina. [The unveiling] of the statue was delayed due to the busy agenda of the former American President. The statue erected to President Clinton is being sponsored by and [is] under the auspices of Prime Minister Thaci." [1]
Another adage, this time a peculiarly American one, is that partisan politics end at the water's edge. Not that it matters to anyone in the world except for U.S. voters every four years, but differences between the nation's two ruling parties, such as they are, rarely manifest themselves beyond the nation's Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The main street in Pristina is named after George W. Bush, who presided over and in fact engineered Kosovo's formal secession from Serbia.
There are also major streets named after Tony Blair, Madeleine Albright and William Walker, the last the Deputy Chief of Mission in Honduras and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central America in the 1980s during the Reagan administration's Contra war against Nicaragua and death squad terror in El Salvador. Walker is held in high esteem by KLA veterans like Hashim Thaci for his role in blaming the government of Yugoslavia for what he represented as a massacre in the Kosovo village of Racak in January of 1999, arguably the main incident used to justify the 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia three months later.
Western journalists at the time and forensic experts afterward reported a different story, but Walker blustered:
"From what I saw, I do not hesitate to describe the crime as a massacre, a crime against humanity. Nor do I hesitate to accuse the government security forces of responsibility."
Not that anyone would question Walker's familiarity with massacres, he certainly oversaw enough genuine ones in Central America in the 1980s, but his motives in this case were suspect to say the least.
No report has yet surfaced that the separatists in Kosovo, armed during their own contra war ten years ago and now again as a proto-army, the Kosovo Security Force, by the U.S. and its NATO allies, plan to erect a monument to Walker, but if so that would give the new governments of Nicaragua and El Salvador an additional reason to eschew recognizing the illegal entity that is spurned by 130 of the world's 192 nations.
Regarding Clinton's arrival on Sunday (the scent of a handsome "honorarium" wafts through the air), KLA chieftain Thaci, endearingly known to his former KLA colleagues by the nom de guerre of The Snake, promises that the Bomber of Belgrade will be met with a "magnificent welcome" and that locals will "appear en masse at the Bill Clinton Square". [2]...
Read entire article at OpEdNews.com
It has been said that proverbs are the wisdom of nations and one of the most common is that a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.
Former U.S. President William Jefferson Clinton is to arrive in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, on Sunday, November 1 according to the erstwhile head of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and self-styled prime minister of Kosovo Hashim Thaci.
The occasion of Clinton's visit, his first since Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence in February of 2008 - a violation of international law and United Nations Resolution 1244 directly resulting from Clinton's acts of a decade ago - is to attend the official unveiling of a statue dedicated to himself.
"The almost ten feet statue of the former U.S. President Bill Clinton has been erected in the same square that bears his name in Pristina. [The unveiling] of the statue was delayed due to the busy agenda of the former American President. The statue erected to President Clinton is being sponsored by and [is] under the auspices of Prime Minister Thaci." [1]
Another adage, this time a peculiarly American one, is that partisan politics end at the water's edge. Not that it matters to anyone in the world except for U.S. voters every four years, but differences between the nation's two ruling parties, such as they are, rarely manifest themselves beyond the nation's Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The main street in Pristina is named after George W. Bush, who presided over and in fact engineered Kosovo's formal secession from Serbia.
There are also major streets named after Tony Blair, Madeleine Albright and William Walker, the last the Deputy Chief of Mission in Honduras and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central America in the 1980s during the Reagan administration's Contra war against Nicaragua and death squad terror in El Salvador. Walker is held in high esteem by KLA veterans like Hashim Thaci for his role in blaming the government of Yugoslavia for what he represented as a massacre in the Kosovo village of Racak in January of 1999, arguably the main incident used to justify the 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia three months later.
Western journalists at the time and forensic experts afterward reported a different story, but Walker blustered:
"From what I saw, I do not hesitate to describe the crime as a massacre, a crime against humanity. Nor do I hesitate to accuse the government security forces of responsibility."
Not that anyone would question Walker's familiarity with massacres, he certainly oversaw enough genuine ones in Central America in the 1980s, but his motives in this case were suspect to say the least.
No report has yet surfaced that the separatists in Kosovo, armed during their own contra war ten years ago and now again as a proto-army, the Kosovo Security Force, by the U.S. and its NATO allies, plan to erect a monument to Walker, but if so that would give the new governments of Nicaragua and El Salvador an additional reason to eschew recognizing the illegal entity that is spurned by 130 of the world's 192 nations.
Regarding Clinton's arrival on Sunday (the scent of a handsome "honorarium" wafts through the air), KLA chieftain Thaci, endearingly known to his former KLA colleagues by the nom de guerre of The Snake, promises that the Bomber of Belgrade will be met with a "magnificent welcome" and that locals will "appear en masse at the Bill Clinton Square". [2]...