Congressman blasts US role in Kosovo

The 78-day US bombing war on Yugoslavia ended months ago but 
Representative Dennis Kucinich (a Democrat from Ohio) is warning that the 
danger of renewed violence in the Balkans is very real.

Kucinich writes in the August edition of The Progressive that his 
office has received an Executive Order that hands the CIA a black bag in 
the Balkans to engineer a military coup in Serbia, to interrupt 
communications, tamper with bank accounts, freeze Yugoslav assets abroad, 
and train the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in terrorist tactics such as how 
to blow up buildings.

Kucinich asks, "How this is intended to help establish a democracy in 
Serbia or Kosovo hasn't yet been explained.

Nor has the failure to substantially disarm and demilitarise the KLA been 
explained. Nor has the reverse ethnic cleansing taking place in Kosovo by 
the KLA while NATO rules the province been explained."

Kucinich, a former mayor of Cleveland who is of Croatian background grew 
more and more uneasy as the war escalated. He writes: "NATO was out of 
control ... NATO was moving into that fuzzy circumstance of high violence 
where the possibility of nuclear war, on purpose or by accident, was 
beginning to be real."

Kucinich worked with several members of Congress mobilising opposition to 
the war. He recalls that "The White House and Democratic leaders held a 
series of meetings to lobby for the war. They were stunned when the vote 
ended in a tie, defeating the measure and forcing the administration to 
look toward diplomatic channels to end the conflict".

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People's Weekly World