Freenations

KOSOVO AND THE DISMEMBERMENT OF YUGOSLAVIA

Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen.

As has already been pointed out, I did address you almost exactly a year ago on a similar topic - then we called it 'Germany in the Balkans'.

During this presentation I shall remind you from time to time of some of the things that I stated then. It is quite interesting to see some of the developments that have taken place. But today Kosovo and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia are very much the continuous focus for all the world's media, and of course they are very much NATO's focus.

NATO is the largest military organisation in the world, financed by 850 million of the richest taxpayers, and it has taken on a small nation in the Balkans, approximately 10 million in size, in order to carry out it's activities, based as I understand it, on trying to prevent some kind of humanitarian catastrophe. Though that is not what they actually stated before the conflict - by 'conflict' I mean this latest bombing that they actually started. (NATO stated the purpose was to 'pursued' Serbia to sign the Rambouillet Agreement - which is illegal under the Vienna Convention of the Law of Treaties - Ed.)

I think that what is happening in Kosovo and what has happened in the Balkans has huge implications for developments elsewhere in eastern Europe, elsewhere in Central Europe, elsewhere in the Middle east and the Mediterranean. That is one of the reasons why the Balkans has been chosen as a focus for a projection of power.

Relating to the actual bombing, and the various targeting that has taken place, there is one event that I think that needs to be pointed out particularly. It is something that has never occurred during my lifetime and it's absolutely key that we remind ourselves of it. Eight days ago on Friday morning, I should tell you that I was actually in Belgrade at the time, the TV Centre of Belgrade was deliberately targeted by NATO missiles. Something like twenty media workers have been killed right in the middle of a European capital.

The Radio Television Serbia centre, a bit like a very much smaller version of Broadcasting house in London, is actually also a European Union Broadcasting Centre. Note! Many of the journalists who have been reporting from Yugoslavia actually go there in order to file their reports. What is more horrifying than the actual bombing itself, and of course, the inevitable killing of the media workers, is the explanation that almost instantly followed. Clearly it had been prepared. Here the British government, Tony Blair and Clare Short had a simple explanation: 'They are propagating propaganda therefore they were a legitimate target. The issue is closed.'

Once you do that what you are effectively saying is that if you have a different viewpoint from us, then we have the right to kill you - it is fantastically simple (applause).

That is of course the basis on which the media campaign is being conducted, in other words those who are conducting it don't want you to know the other side, don't want you to know the truth or any other alternative view. Just to give you an idea of some of the items that they may have found offensive - even today you can still get pretty well twenty four hour coverage of some of the events from the Serbian side from satellite TV. There is a satellite that sits above the equator - I think it's the Cypriot satellite, but you can get coverage of what is actually happening.

Of course you do see the effects of NATO bombing, they are the effects of all bombing, you know bombs have been created for a particular purpose, they have a particular design, they are all there to kill, to maim, to murder, to destroy, whether they are NATO bombs, Serbian bombs, German bombs, British bombs, you know bombs do behave according to their design, and what Serbian Television shows is the effect of such bombing.

I have seen some of it. In the case of the targeting of the refugee convoy, you might remember, this happened to be an ethnic Albanian refugee convoy and 75 people were killed. There was also the train which was targeted, meanwhile 55 bodies or parts of bodies have been recovered, many of them literally fried, you know to charcoal. These things have been shown on Serb TV - they have not been shown on the western media. It is in fact a real education to see what is being transmitted via Serbian TV and to see the one or two percent that is subsequently shown on the western media, all the rest is edited out.

All this is freely available, you can view it. It is of course something very frightening - in the way that anyone can conduct a campaign if you have only your own approved information, that comes out of MOD briefings or NATO briefings out of Brussels. Then what actually happens does not matter, what you are saying is essentially 'we come from an industrially developed part of the world, we have superior technology, we have the right to do whatever we like to do'.

Pretty much, by the way, what some 58 years ago another power, at that time the foremost power in Europe, Nazi Germany, did - trampled over much of Europe. But it did it, of course, in rather different conditions. It did have to use, as we now identify the key words, ground troops. It did have to expose it's own population to bombings. We are now entering an era where you can safely pick off targets and bomb people essentially to rubble. Such terminology has been used, I've read carefully an interview with NATO's General Klaus Nauman in the Washington Post where he freely says, 'maybe we have made the wrong calculations, that by bombing somebody into rubble, somebody would actually surrender, and obviously they are not doing it therefore we will simply have to continue doing what we are doing'.

You can make up your own mind on that, but I am simply telling you that there is obviously a huge wall going up, at least on one half of the story.

I shall at least in part tell you some of the other side of the story, and I'll remind you of some of the things, which I said when I spoke to you a year ago. At that time NATO was not visibly present, and certainly not by it's aerial bombardments, but there was fighting caused by a group of people known as the KLA - the Kosovo Liberation Army, which we can now freely call NATO's ground troops, I mean they are not even bothering to conceal that. But at that time the fighting was going on and in April of last year, I think it was early April when I spoke, there were under 100 deaths that had resulted from the fighting at that stage.

I remind you that there is in terms of Kosovo, which is an unruly region similar, incidentally, in size and population to Northern Ireland, a usual way of evaluating the 'repression', if you like, and the killing, by looking at the police records. This is what the record was at this time last year and this is what I told you: 'the number of killings in incidents by terrorist and counter-terrorist operations was less than 10 per annum'. This was over the previous 10 years. To give you an idea compared to Northern Ireland, if you take the time since the troubles 1969, you can easily look it up on the website, it is in fact over 100 per annum on average in Ulster. Still a very very low level conflict in world terms by the way. Pretty every American Senator visiting Northern Ireland gets embarrassed when the actual killing figures from any North American city are pointed out to them and it turns out to be several times greater than Ulster, and in peacetime.

So however bad Kosovo was, you know, without NATO, it was a hell of a site better than it has been with NATO and with international presence. The introduction of the KLA alone and the fighting which resulted from that resulted in approximately 2,000 deaths prior to NATO actually intervening in it's bombing campaign.

No one can identify the actual number of deaths since, I should think it's probably well over 2,000. I follow carefully the state information that comes out of Serbia. It's quite interesting; they are playing down that information. They are too afraid to let the population know what the actual losses that have been sustained in terms of civilian life have been. A good example was the bombing of the TV centre, where it was instantly apparent that at least two people had died. You know, from a close up camera you could see that two people were dead and there were more hanging from the balconies, but the state media subsequently spoke only of casualties and 18 people injured. They essentially wanted the population to go back to work, not to discontinue working, and to pretend that such things have not happened.

The official figures therefore stand at present at about 500 deaths, but I should think that there are many times more. The destruction, of course, is considerable, bridges have been destroyed, schools have been destroyed, hospitals, of course military installations as well, but 90% of the targets hit have been civilian targets. (By June 1999 Yugoslav civilian deaths were recorded at 1,800 to 2,000. NATO claimed 5,000 Yugoslav armed forces dead - probably an exaggeration - Ed.)

How did we get into this situation? What is going to be the end play and what has been the importance of the region? I'll go back therefore and look at some of the historical basis for all this.

When I spoke to you a year ago I defined the Balkans as one of the weakest areas in Europe. I defined weakness in the sense as being an area, which over the last 2,000 years had actually never spawned an empire, or a mini empire, one that was ever capable of expanding outside the Balkans.

You are going to look in vein for some imperial capital in the Balkans from which areas outside the Balkans were ever administered. But you are going to find numerous other capitals like Vienna and Istanbul from which the Balkans themselves have been administered. And you are going to find numerous such, let's call them imperial capitals, in Europe on the Iberian peninsular alone in Spain we have Madrid, and in Portugal Lisbon which administered substantial empires, so this whole idea that we have some kind of aggressive power in the Balkans that somehow is threatening Europe is one of the biggest nonsense that I have ever heard. What is most frightening is that such nonsense can actually be believed and used as a basis for important decision making policy. I mean this is the biggest concern really.

Secondly the Balkans have been very much a powder keg at various times that did lead to the first world war after all, but the powder keg was only a powder keg when other big powers were present.

At present it is very much a powder keg because we have the United States presence, we have Britain having a key role in leading the NATO activity, certainly in propaganda terms, we have Germany again present, we have the Russians not militarily present but of course they have to take into account what is happening there. So it is a very serious situation, people have been speaking of a third world war starting, because inevitably people have to react to a change in any power structures that may result from the events currently taking place in the Balkans.

Let me say something, though, about the concern about humanitarian and other issues in the Balkans. It is very very unusual that the most concern for the Balkans is shown by a country, or a state that is actually located on another continent - the United States of America, and the next most concerned is an island offshore from the continent of Europe, the United Kingdom. The NATO 'story' sells reasonably well in the United States, by the way, where most people don't actually know where the Balkans are. It's more difficult to sell it here, much more difficult, which is why there is such a huge media propaganda campaign against you and against the populations involved. If you look at the initial opinion polls they were about 80% against any kind of intervention and any bombing, but now this saturation media coverage (plus Government commissioned polls!) seems almost to be reversing that.

The story, however, even with media saturation won't sell in Italy, a Nato country immediately opposite the Balkans, which usually takes the largest number of refugees, especially from Kosovo and Albania. They have done that in previous situations and have experience to draw on. There are huge demonstrations against NATO involvement and essentially the population does not want Italian territory to be used for what is in effect the first aggression in Europe since Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939.

If we move from Italy to another NATO country, - Greece. Greece is actually on the Balkans and also usually takes a substantial number of refugees; there is an Albanian community close to 1 million there already. In Greece 95% of the population are totally against the bombing - they call NATO and it's present exercise by it's proper name - they call NATO a fascist organisation. You may want to question me on that terminology, but that is the position. (No one questioned this description - Ed.)

Having somebody from 'outside' projecting power in the Balkans for purposes that we need to understand is the issue.

Before we address that however, back to the Balkans as an historical area. I said an area of historical weakness, an area which had been permeated by other powers who then, effectively by clashing with each other, have provoked a world war, provoked a regional crisis and other crises which caused a lot of problems for themselves as well as for the local people.

A few things about Kosovo, simply because they are hardly ever stated and before it goes entirely off the screens and off the media, this is an opportunity to say a few things that we may not be allowed to say in due course, if 'they' kill people who think otherwise.

In the Balkans, by the way, this weak area of Europe, there was a medieval empire between the 11th and the 14th centuries which centred very much on Kosovo, which pretty much covered the Balkans - it's extent was almost all the Balkans. That state was called Serbia. Kosovo is the heartland of medieval Serbia.

It's capital was near to Kosovo, in the area of Metoijhe. Near to Kosovo and Kosovo itself is covered in Serbian history and art. To give you an idea it's full name was Kosovo and Metoijhe, I'll take the second word, 'Metoijhe' means 'monastery land'. Various landscapes in Europe are identified by castles, you know, feudal lordships and so on, either had to build castles or fortresses in order to defend their realm, and in fact areas like Bastille in Spain get their name from the nature of their landscape.

But given the social development that had been reached in Serbia was associated with the Byzantine empire, where the rulers actually were not building castles because everyone had to build a monastery. So the land was actually covered with monasteries, there are some 1300 recorded, 300 of them are still around today, most of them date from the period that I have just covered.

So to deny Serbian presence in Kosovo is one of the most perverse thing that I can think about. The monasteries bear testament, the very word Kosovo is a Serbian word, the word 'Kos' is the name of a bird, a blackbird, and you will have heard the word Kosovo….. - the field of the blackbird - where probably the biggest historic battle in the Balkans took place when the Ottoman Turks actually defeated the Kingdom of Serbia in 1389. They essentially occupied the region and later co-occupied it with Austria, Austria-Hungary from the north (which is why Albanians are Muslim).

For much of the time the region was therefore partitioned between those two powers. What I am simply mentioning is that Kosovo and Metoijhe are part of the Serbian heartland. The area is very important to the people there, understandably. Kosovo, Pristina and the 'field of the blackbird' is to Serbia as Kent, Canterbury and the Battle of Hastings is to England, and it should be so.

Kosovo came back to the Kingdom of Serbia, following the Balkan wars in the early part of this century, when the Ottoman Empire was defeated by four Christian nations, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece. The Ottomans had to retreat out of the Balkan peninsular altogether. It was partially saved by the big powers including the British empire at the time. It was then also that the state of Albania was created. Albania was created essentially at the behest of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they didn't want Serbia to have access to the sea and the Austro-Hungarians were worried about the Russians, indirectly via Serbia (you know we are talking of a Christian Orthodox state here) having some access to the Mediterranean. Anyway that is the reason for the formation of Albania, and as you know Kosovo itself has a considerable Albanian population.

That population at the time of Kosovo becoming part of Serbia again in the early part of this century, was about 50-50, in fact there was a slight Serbian majority in the early stages, but the population numbers changed partially due to a higher birth rate in the Moslem Albanian population, but primarily because during the second world war, during the German and mostly the Italian occupation of the region Kosovo became part of a greater Albanian state, and it was during that period that a very large number of Serbs were simply exiled from the region.

Subsequently when Yugoslavia was re-formed in 1945 Kosovo became an autonomous province, subsequently in 1974 it got a very special autonomous status which made it an almost completely Albanian area, at that stage the population numbers would have been about 60-30, and we must not forget the many non-Serb non-Albanian in the region, by the way. And the Albanian pressure on the rest of the population, especially the Serbs caused yet further immigrations to take place, so that by the mid-1980s to early 1990s approximately 15 to 20% of the population that was left was non Albanian. This is why people speak of the 90 to 10% ratio of the population being Albanian, I think it would be more correct to speak of 20 - 80%.

I am just putting this to you as a background - in some kind of historical context, so now coming back to what is happening. That false historical perception is being used as a reason for the military intervention.

One of the key accusations that have been thrown at the state of Yugoslavia and at the Serbs was that it was mistreating it's Albanian population. There are various ways in which you can look at this question of mistreatment, but I would suggest that there is one, above all others, which is instructive. That is: has the minority, because the Albanians are a minority in Yugoslavia and Serbia, managed to physically preserve itself in the area?

I should think that there should be no doubt that a population that actually increases in numbers has more than managed to preserve itself. In Kosovo more newspapers are published than in Albania proper - and that was before NATO's present bombing. An yet with the sort of obscene media coverage that we have had, the situation in peoples perceptions has been turned entirely around. You know you get the impression that there is no opportunity for the Albanian minority within Serbia to use its own language, and I should tell you that there are some 10,000 people of ethnic Albanian origin that live in the Belgrade area alone. I'd like to know how many non-Albanians there are in Tirana!

At present within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia there are 26 ethnic minorities, there is a problem with only one of them and that is the ethnic Albanians, the only reason for that is that they want independence and they want it through violent means. There is only one way that any country can respond, this country should know that better than any other bearing Ulster in mind, but those in the Basque country in Spain, in Corsica and in numerous other places in the world will know that you don't really have many options in dealing with such an issue.

However I have told you what the degree of repression, at least in terms of the number of deaths, has been minimal. That is something that we should not forget because it is continuing to be used to justify the present intervention.

Personally I don't think that there is anything that justifies the US presence in the region. The idea that the US should be concerned about an Albanian minority in Kosovo candidly boggles the mind. Even if you think of the third Reich, even Adolf Hitler did show at a certain level an understandable concern about the Zudeten Germans - at least they spoke the same language and were just across the border, but the idea that the United States is concerned about the Kosovo Albanians is something that I simply cannot 'buy'. That has been used, from my point of view, as an excuse for a projection of power for purposes of creating another NATO protectorate in the area, we already have one in Bosnia, another one already exists in Albania by the way, Albania has virtually no sovereignty over it's own territory, and Kosovo is next.

If it is defeated, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia will become yet another NATO protectorate run by the expansionist 'German Europe'. That is something of which we have to be aware.

From the Yugoslav and Serbian side, you have to ask yourself why they did not sign up to this wonderful Rambouillet agreement which has been so magnanimously offered to them? If that is such a solution is that not preferable to being bombed to rubble? Are people so stupid that a huge majority would not accept the agreement? I read a very interesting article by a French writer and philosopher, who is presently in Belgrade, who describes the mood there. He said 'there are 8 million Serbs, if only one of them remained alive he would not sign the Rambouillet agreement.' Why? Well because the Rambouillet agreement effectively says, if you sign it you commit national suicide, you agree to an occupation of your country, of Kosovo and the rest of the Serbia (read the annex) and not only are you supposed to agree to that occupation, you are suppose to participate in the occupation make all available resources available to the occupiers.

And if you look as such bodies as the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, you are, in the process, to co-operate with them so at the same time you proclaim yourself to be criminals for having resisted this. That is what the agreement proposes, of course if you so not sign up you are going to be bombed.

I read, in my view, a good response from a Serbian gentleman to that, he said, "if they have to cut us up then we prefer it not to be vivisection". They have to kill us first - then they can cut us any way that they want! That is the position that we have reached, I believe now on the 37th day of NATO bombing, they have bombed continuously, they have bombed around the clock, they haven't just bombed Kosovo area, where incidentally they have created the largest refugee crisis that the area has ever known. We are supposed to believe, by the way that the Yugoslavs prepared their ethnic cleansing operation and then full synchronised it with the 23rd May of 1999 in order to expel the Albanian population. Not all of them have been expelled anyway, you'll find that the figures have been substantially exaggerated. You are still speaking of about 75% of the population being in Kosovo. This is quite unlike the Krajina Serb population where they made up a majority in Croatia who were expelled pretty well 100% within a period of about 10 days. That also involved a Nato operation, it was carried out by US trained and equipped Croatian armed forces and subsequently US trained and equipped Bosnian Moslem forces and it involved NATO bombing of the Republika Serpska. The total numbers of refugees then created, something like half a million, are still refugees four years later. Hardly any of them have been able to return to their homes.

That is the position that seldom gets mentioned, but obviously the concern for refugees in one case and the total ignoring them in the other tells it's own story. If you have somebody directly participating in a war you don't expect them to be objective. The point, which I continuously make to the media who interview me, is to stop pretending that they can be judges, that they can be neutral or that they can be independent. If you are part of a military operation against a country then you cannot be independent and you cannot be neutral.

That's all that I have time to say on this issue. You can ask some questions that I will try to answer, perhaps you would like to know why NATO is doing all this?

Thank you for your attention.