Yugoslavia and the great game

On the eve of the second anniversary of the beginning of NATO's criminal 
war against Yugoslavia, and one week before the quislings now working for 
NATO in Belgrade used thousands of troops and brought the country to the 
brink of civil war to arrest ex-President Milosevic, Brian Denny of the 
British left daily Morning Star reviewed the course of events in 
this country that has become a symbol of resistance to the US "New World 
Order". Denny points to oil as the key to understanding the events in the 
Balkans.

Two years ago, March 24, the bombing of Yugoslavia by NATO powers began, a 
campaign that would leave over 1,000 civilians dead and hundreds of 
schools, hospitals, factories, TV stations, trains, buses and even refugee 
columns destroyed.

To justify this genocide the Western media unleashed a demonisation 
campaign against the Serbs unparalleled in modern history.

It is difficult today to describe the relentless stream of lies and 
distortions dreamt up by the pundits. One of the media tricks was to claim 
that the war was against one man, the "dictator" Slobodan Milosevic — the 
three times elected President in the minority multi-ethnic coalition 
government — and not the Yugoslav people.

A smokescreen to cover the actions of NATO in the Balkans, crimes far 
greater than any perpetrated by Belgrade.

Western politicians joined in the hysteria with equal levels of bile and 
misinformation, denouncing the expansionist "Hitlerite" government in 
Belgrade, thereby sealing the fate of thousands during the West's multi-
billion dollar reign of terror.

The West declared that "something must be done" to crush Yugoslavia, a 
country that was not threatening any other country in the region but 
fighting an internal civil war against Western-backed ethnic Albanian 
rebels.

So, without any mandate from the United Nations, the "humanitarian" 
destruction of Yugoslavia began while sections of the left grimly repeated 
claim upon claim by the United States intelligence services that over 
100,000 Albanians had been killed, without a shred of evidence to prove it.

The NATO attacks were illegal in every sense, in fact it was a showcase to 
tell the world that international law no longer applied to the Western 
military alliance.

In the eyes of NATO, the UN Charter protecting the right of nations to 
self-determination and sovereignty was to be subsumed by the political and 
economic needs of the West.

As US Senator Richard Lugar famously put it, once the Cold War had been 
won, NATO must be "either out of area or out of business".

That was the reason Yugoslavia, which had not violated international law, 
was criminalised by an uneasy military alliance between the European Union 
and the United States which chose to ignore international law.

The decision to dismantle the multi-national, multi-ethnic Balkan state had 
been decided by the West ten years before and the intervening years saw the 
relentless carve-up of the Balkans between Washington and the German-led 
EU.

To destroy what was left of Yugoslavia, which by the mid '90s was made up 
of just Serbia (of which Kosovo was a province) and Montenegro, internal 
conflict had to be fomented and encouraged by the West.

So the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was born and by 1997 the KLA had 
launched dozens of attacks and assassinations against Serbs and against 
Albanians in the Serb province loyal to Yugoslavia.

In less than a year, the KLA had gone from obscurity to a force in 
possession of ground-to-air missiles and anti-tank weapons such as the 
Amburst, which can be only obtained through official German channels.

During NATO attacks on Kosovo the KLA guided US bombs to their targets with 
sophisticated NATO equipment on the ground.

The KLA umbrella, which included a number of warlords, demanded 
"independence" for an ethnically cleansed Kosovo before its final 
annexation to neighbouring Albania.

To this end, the KLA played the Western pawn at the farcical Rambouillet 
negotiations in February 1999, where the West drew up a document so 
outrageous that no government could have signed.

These accords were really a collective agreement between the big Western 
powers, Germany and the US, in a fight for strategic military positions in 
the Balkans.

Belgrade's refusal to sign the document, which included the NATO occupation 
of the whole of Yugoslavia, delighted the West and NATO stepped in as the 
"KLA's air force".

Three months later Yugoslavia was driven out of Kosovo by Western forces 
along with over 350,000 Serbs, Gypsies, Jews and others, ethnically 
cleansed by the KLA while NATO turned a blind eye.

It was here that Western claims to be the "defender of human rights" was at 
its most sickeningly hypocritical.

The Western strategy of feigning concern for "human rights" was drawn up by 
US advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who dreamt up US support in Afghanistan for 
groups like the extreme Muslim fundamentalist Taliban in the 1970s.

In his book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski lays out the need to 
use the emotive issue of human rights to justify anything the West does in 
order to defend and extend US strategic political and economic interests.

"It was the best way to destabilise the Soviet Union and it worked", he 
says.

The same alleged concern for the plight of certain groups in the Balkans 
was the pretext to implement Western plans for military domination and 
spark war in the region.

Western-backing for a Greater Albania, as well as for Muslim and Croatian 
forces in neighbouring Bosnia, has seen the military colonisation of the 
Balkans by NATO successfully implemented.

Western colonial occupation forces in Bosnia and Kosovo now hold supreme 
power on the basis that the "protectorates must be protected".

Today, the reasons why the West is so interested in occupying and subduing 
the Balkans are all too apparent.

The mineral assets of Kosovo have been privatised, including the lucrative 
Trepca mine complex, taken over by NATO troops despite protests from local 
workers.

And news that an oil pipeline is being constructed through Bulgaria, 
Macedonia, and on to Albania, tells us everything we need to know about the 
real origins of the Kosovo war.

The new Trans-Balkan pipeline will run from the Bulgarian port of Burgas, 
bisect Macedonia, and go on through to Vlore, Albania's Adriatic port, in 
anticipation of the flow of oil and natural gas expected to come out of the 
Caspian region.

It is here that the uses of a "Greater Albania" come into focus as the 
"Great Game" for Caspian oil riches is fought out by the huge oil 
corporations such as Texaco, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, BP Amoco, Agip, and 
TotalElFina.

It will come as no surprise that Mr Brzezinski, advisor to US Secretary of 
State Madeleine Albright during the war, is a consultant for Amoco.

This brings us to Macedonia.

Even before the bombing of Yugoslavia the German newspaper "Frankfurter 
Allgemeine Zeitung" applauded the "Kosovo-isation" of Macedonia where over 
30 percent of the population are Albanians.

It claimed that the "fight for political rights of ethnic Albanians in 
Macedonia is no longer possible within the institutions of Macedonia".

Today, a heavily-armed KLA offshoot in the Macedonian Albanian-dominated 
town of Tetovo are demanding the partition of the country into ethnically 
pure statelets.

National Liberation Army commander Sadri Ameti warned that the KLA was 
capable of "setting all of Macedonia on fire" and the conflicts in Tetovo 
were only a "warning" to Skopje unless "Slav" forces withdraw.

The KLA genie, like many other reactionary forces armed and trained by the 
West, is well and truly out of the bottle.

Even UN Special Envoy for Human Rights Jiri Dienstbier blamed the growing 
crisis in Macedonia on NATO for refusing to disarm the KLA and prevent the 
ethnic cleansing of the non-Albanian population.

"I hope that international forces will now understand what has always been 
the aim of Albanian extremists", he said.

However, the current situation only helps NATO to justify intervening in 
its usual way to impose Western rule indefinitely with the help of the 
corporate media as a smokescreen.

Another massive "humanitarian" intervention would complete the 
militarisation of the southeastern Balkans — and pave the way for NATO 
troops to act as the gendarmes of the big oil corporations.

All the more reason to remove and silence a talented, outspoken opponent 
like Slobodan Milosevic.