By Matthew Robinson
PRISTINA, Serbia and Montenegro (Reuters) - The United States warned on Thursday against the use of violence as negotiations on the future of Serbia's disputed province of Kosovo near, saying its people had a unique opportunity to define their own future.
"We implore the parties to these negotiations not to use intimidation or the threat of violence, or violence itself as a tactic in the negotiations," U.S. Undersecretary for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns said in the Kosovo capital Pristina.
He said the end of 2005 and the first months of 2006 would be a period of "great chance" for the province, where the ethnic Albanian majority wants independence after six years as a de facto United Nations protectorate.
"There is a historic opportunity for the people of Kosovo now to define their own future," Burns told reporters.
His comments are certain to cause concern in Belgrade, which hopes to retain Kosovo within Serbia's borders despite the will of 1.9 million ethnic Albanians -- 90 percent of the population -- to secede.
Legally part of Serbia, Kosovo has been run by the United Nations since 1999, when NATO bombing drove out Serb forces accused of brutal atrocities against civilians in a war with separatist guerrillas.
Frozen in international limbo since, Kosovo was thrust back on to the international agenda when riots erupted in March 2004, killing 19 people.
Ethnic Albanian mobs torched Serb homes and churches in a two-day orgy of violence that exposed 17,000 NATO-led peacekeepers as slow and ineffective.
"We remember what happened in March 2004," Burns said. "There is no place for that in U.N.-sponsored negotiations."
Serbia opposes independence for its southern province, its religious heartland, and believes the West is rushing to resolve its fate for fear of a new explosion of violence.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has recommended talks begin once the Security Council gives the green light at a session on October 24.
Diplomats in Pristina say Western powers will steer the negotiations toward a form of "conditional independence" under continued international supervision and with major concessions to 100,000 minority Serbs.
Annan is expected to appoint a special envoy for status talks at the end of October, with former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari reportedly favorite for the job.
Diplomats predict negotiations will run up to spring next year, when the envoy will draft an imposed solution if the two sides cannot agree.
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In other words, keep a leash on mad dog Albin Kurti.
US and British officials told us that at least 100,000 were murdered in Kosovo. A year later, fewer than 3,000 bodies have been found - False figues from the Kosovo Liberation Army promulgated as fact - Brief Article
New Statesman, Sept 4, 2000 by JOHN Pilger
After more than a year, the silence of those who wrote and broadcast the propaganda for Nato's "humanitarian war" over Kosovo remains unbroken: they who answered the Prime Minister's call to join "a great moral crusade" against a regime that was "set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews during World War Two".
Something had to be done, they insisted. After all, by March last year, 500,000 Kosovar Albanians were missing, feared dead, according to the US State Department. In mid-May, the US defence secretary, William Cohen, said: "We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing... They may have been murdered." Two weeks later, David Scheffer, the US ambassador at large for war crimes, increased the 100,000 figure to as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59". The British press took their cue. "Flight from genocide," said the Daily Mail. "Echoes of the Holocaust," chorused the Sun and the Mirror.
As the bombing dragged on, the facade began to crack; British television viewers were shown the ruins of trains and refugee convoys attacked by Nato aircraft, and their victims. "We have a public relations meltdown," said someone at Downing Street. On cue, the then Foreign Office minister, Geoffrey Hoon, announced that, "in more than 100 massacres", about 10,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed, adding that "the final toll may be much worse". Although inexplicably reduced from the original claims of 500,000 and 100,000, this was a substantial and utterly unsubstantiated figure.
By mid-June, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams began subjecting the province to minute examination. The American FBI arrived to investigate what was called the "largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history". Several weeks later, having found bodies but not a single mass grave, the FBI went home. The Spanish forensic team also returned home, its leader complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one -- not one -- mass grave".
At grave site after grave site, the story was similar. Reports in the western media, sourced to local people but often traced back to the Kosovo Liberation Army (as with the figures quoted above), became unbelievable. One explanation was that the Serbs had come in the night and taken the bodies away. "Where," wrote Michael Parenti in his review of the investigation, "was the evidence of mass grave sites having been disinterred? Where were the new grave sites now presumably chock-full of bodies?"
Perhaps the most significant disclosure, confirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal last October, was that the Trepca lead and zinc mines contained no bodies. Trepca was central to the drama of the "genocide" investigation: the corpses of more than 1,000 murdered Albanians were presumed hidden there, many of them disposed of in vats of hydrochloric acid, according to Nato and American officials. According to the Mirror, there was evidence of the "mass dumping of executed corpses" and "Auschwitz-style furnaces". Not a single body was found: no teeth, no remains.
Last November, the Wall Street Journal published the results of its own investigation and dismissed "the mass-grave obsession". Instead of "the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect ... the pattern is of scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had been active". The Journal concluded that "Nato stepped up its claims about Serb 'killing fields"' when it "saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by Nato's bombs". This propaganda, said the newspaper, could be traced back to the KLA; many of the most lurid and prominently published atrocity reports attributed to refugees and other sources were untrue. "The war in Kosovo was cruel, bitter, savage," said the paper. "Genocide it wasn't." Such honesty was rare.
Nato bombed, according to George Robertson, the then defence secretary, "to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe" of mass expulsion and killing. In December, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, whose monitors were in Kosovo until just before the bombing, released its report on the war. This received almost no publicity in Britain. It confirmed that most of the crimes against the Albanian population had taken place after the bombing began: that is, they were not a cause but a consequence of the Nato campaign.
Western gravediggers have found a total of 2,788 bodies, and not all of them war crimes victims. On 7 June this year, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) published a list of 3,368 missing persons whose names had been given to it by families from all communities in Kosovo, spanning January 1998 to mid-May this year. The ICRC says that a substantial number could be alive, among refugees scattered throughout Europe.
What is now beyond doubt is that the figures used by London and Washington, and by much of the media, were ludicrous inventions. The killings in Kosovo were despicable and tragic, but to equate them with genocide and the Holocaust is to mock the truth with profanity. With the exception of the Guardian, almost none of this has been reported in Britain. The Red Cross report was virtually ignored in this country. This is understandable; among the journalists who swallowed Nato's and their government's lies were the truly committed and triumphant, who wrote that "when the mass graves are opened, the opponents of this humanitarian war should apologise".
The defenceless population upon whom Nato's bombs rained down night after night, the 400 to 600 who died, blown up in crowded passenger trains and buses, in factories, television stations, libraries, old people's homes, schools and 18 hospitals, many cut to pieces by the RAF's thousands of "unaccounted for" cluster bombs which fragment into shrapnel, require an apology from the propagandists; because, as Nato's planners never tired of saying at their post-bombing seminars, without journalists "on board", they could never have pulled it off.
Robert Fisk, Britain's greatest war reporter, has called them sheep, gulled by professional manipulators. Take the bombing of the Belgrade TV headquarters and the murder of staff such as make-up ladies. Amnesty International, in a rare departure, called this "a deliberate attack on a civilian object, and as such constitutes a war crime". Shortly before the bombing, the Nato mouthpiece Jamie Shea had given a written assurance that the TV building would not be attacked.
With the media on board, Nato could go forth. At one "private preliminary review by Nato experts" of the bombing (reported in the Daily Telegraph), it was agreed that "any future operation by Nato is likelier to involve heavier, more ruthless attacks on civilian targets ..."
Having taken sides in what was a bitter but low-level civil war on the scale of Ireland in the 1970s, and having deliberately blocked a peaceful solution at the phoney Rambouillet "talks", Nato was able to finish off the west's "strategic concept" of destroying Yugoslavia - without recourse to the United Nations or international law. It was all based on a marriage of lies, thanks largely to those journalists who acted as the handmaidens of great and murderous power.
Kosovo is today, more than ever, a terror state, run by Mafia-style criminals with links to the KLA: the people who last year could call Robin Cook directly on their mobile phones.
More than 200,000 Serbs and Roma have since been driven out, with few headlines here. The Americans have built one of their biggest military bases in the world, Camp Bondsteel, which achieves a long-held strategic aim of Washington to straddle the Balkan transit routes. Stand by for their next humanitarian adventure.
COPYRIGHT 2000 New Statesman, Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
If you had a penny for all the times you've spammed this blog...
After finding 1,000 bodies of Kosovar murdered men, women and children buried on military bases in Serbia and with allmost 3,000 still missing to go with the 5,000 Kosovar dead in Kosovo itself; we still have the Serb version of Holocaust deniers coming on this blog and posting lies.
"New Statesman, Sept 4, 2000 by JOHN Pilger"
John Pilger is a left-winger who never met a dictator he didn't like as long as they were sufficiently anti-American and left-wing. He has written sympathetically about the 9-11 aterrorists, on behalf of Milosevic, Castro, Saddam Hussein, Arafat, and Chavez; and against Blair & Bush--not to mention his antipathy to Kosova, the USA, and NATO. The fact that Serbs use Pilger's columns to support their side shows how out of touch they are.
Holocoust deniers!!!! my god who fucking tought u albaniacs thes words u are too primitive to understand???? SERB HOLOCOUST???????????? DUDE U FUCKING KILLED OVER 2000 SERBS IN KOSOVO THE PAST 8 YEARS, KICKED OUT 300,000 WHO WILL NEVER GO BACK, DURING THE LAST 100 YEARS U TURNED A PROVIENCE TAHT WAS MAJORITY SERB IN THE START OF TEH 20th cen TO AN ETHNICALLY CLEANSED REGION WITH NO SERBS AT ALL!!!!!!!!!!! NOW U TELL ME WHO COMMITEED A GENOCIDE OR A HOLOCOUST IN KOSOVO U SCUMBAG!!!!! FACT IS THAT 2,100 ALBOS DIED WHO WERE MOSTLY KLA SCUM WHO DESERVED WHAT THEY GOT, WHAT DID U THINK TEH SERB POLICE WAS GONNA SIT TEHRE AS UR 10th or 11th brother planted bombs and shot at serb soildlers and police????? r u kidding me?
is this SERB propaganda as well???? this is from ur BBC LOVING SCUMBAG BROTHERS (bbc moslty owned by ur filthy arab brotehrs who bombed trade center and trained with the KLA and BinLaden) look at the pictures of thes faces, u look like u are from another planet:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1530781.stm
Kosovo assault 'was not genocide'
The court ruled there was no attempt to destroy the Albanian ethnic group
A United Nations court has ruled that Serbian troops did not carry out genocide against ethnic Albanians during Slobodan Milosevic's campaign of aggression in Kosovo from 1998 to 1999.
The controversial ruling by the UN-supervised Supreme Court in the Kosovan capital, Pristina, has angered Albanians, and some UN officials are reported to be preparing to challenge it.
The decision comes as authorities in Serbia begin the excavation of another mass grave believed to contain the bodies of around 50 Kosovar Albanians.
Four graves have already been investigated, revealing the remains of 340 victims.
UN 'unhappy'
The court, Kosovo's highest legal body, said there had been a "systematic campaign of terror, including murders, rapes, arsons and severe maltreatments".
Slobodan Milosevic has not yet been charged with genocide in Kosovo
Crimes against humanity and war crimes did take place, it said, but "the exactions committed by Milosevic's regime cannot be qualified as criminal acts of genocide, since their purpose was not the destruction of the Albanian ethnic group... but its forceful departure from Kosovo".
However the BBC's Paul Wood in Belgrade says that some UN legal officials are deeply unhappy and have begun a campaign to have the ruling overturned.
The decision was based on the 1948 Geneva convention which defines genocide as the intent "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such".
Milosevic debate
The court, which is comprised of two international judges and one Albanian, was ruling on the case of a Serb, Miroslav Vuckovic, convicted of genocide by a district court in Mitrovica.
Excavations of mass graves have changed public opinion
International officials have raised concerns about the treatment of Serbs by Kosovo's Albanian dominated judiciary.
Mr Vuckovic's conviction has now been overturned and he will face a retrial in Mitrovica.
The decision is likely to reopen the debate on whether Slobodan Milosevic should face genocide charges at The Hague, where he already stands accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The tribunal is currently preparing indictments of genocide against Mr Milosevic in connection with atrocities carried out in Bosnia and Croatia.
Mass grave
Serbian authorities in the western Serbian town of Bajina Basta began on Thursday to excavate a mass grave thought to contain the bodies of Kosovo Albanians.
They are believed to have been transported out of the province in an attempt by Mr Milosevic to cover up atrocities and possible war crimes carried out during his campaign of terror.
Serbian police believe around 800 victims of the conflict in Kosovo have been buried around Serbian territory.
The gruesome revelations of the bodies are credited with changing public opinion in Serbia and increasing acceptance that war crimes were carried out under the Milosevic regime.
Dude, you have so exhausted (often posting the same thing over and over) articles and blog commentaries from 1999 to prove your point that you have began supporting the Albanian side.
Go ahead, show it to the whole world how dumb you are and how proud you can be about it, having nothing better with which to show off.
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