Another article about Walker
exile.ru
Meet Mister Massacre
Years from now, when the war in Serbia is over and the dust has settled, historians will point to
January 15, 1999 as the day the American Death Star became fully operational.
That was the date on which an American diplomat named William Walker brought his OSCE war
crimes verification team to a tiny Kosovar village called Racak to investigate an alleged Serb
massacre of ethnic Albanian peasants. After a brief review of the town's 40-odd bullet-ridden
corpses, Walker searched out the nearest television camera and essentially fired the starting gun for
the war.
"From what I saw, I do not hesitate to describe the crime as a massacre, a crime against humanity,"
he said. "Nor do I hesitate to accuse the government security forces of responsibility."
We all know how Washington responded to Walker's verdict; it quickly set its military machine in
motion, and started sending out menacing invitations to its NATO friends to join the upcoming war
party.
How Russia responded is less well-known. One would assume that it began preparations for a
diplomatic strategy in the event of war, which it probably realized was inevitable. But in Russia's
defense and intelligence communities, the sight of William Walker uncovering Serb atrocities on
television almost certainly provoked a different, and more dramatic, reaction. It probably sent a chill
up the community's collective spine, and pushed its generals into rapid preparations for a new cold
war with the United States. As connoisseurs in the art of propaganda and the use of provacateurs,
they recognized a good job when they saw one. And, more importantly, they knew who William
Walker was.
Since the outbreak of war in the Balkans, most people in the West have already read news reports
raising the possibility that Russia may commit troops, weapons, or even its nuclear arsenal to aid
Yugslavia in its war against NATO. But few people overseas are aware yet of why Russia is talking
about going to war with us.
We've been told that it's a race thing, that Russians are only
upset about U.S. policies in Serbia because their fellow Slavs
are being bombed. We've also heard that this is just another
chapter in the sore-loser syndrome, that Russians are bitter
about the NATO bombing because it has forced them to face
the stinging reality of their impotence to defend even their
former satellite states. If these reports are to be believed,
Russia's military leaders are considering war with superpower
America because their feelings have been hurt.
These stories overlook the fact that Russia has, or at least
thinks it has, a real reason to be considering military resistance
to NATO, even in its severely weakened state. And that
reason is that much of the military and political leadership in
this country believes sincerely that the Yugoslavia bombing is
just the first chapter in an ambitious American campaign for
world domination. Even the soberest of Russian generals is
now inclined to consider military intervention on behalf of Serbia on the purely pragmatic grounds that
it would be cheaper and easier to try to stop the U.S. now rather than later, when it might be too late.
"The people in the Russian military believe sincerely that they need to try to stop the U.S. now, before
it goes on a real rampage around the world," said military/defense analyst Pavel Felgenhauer. "That
the U.S. is striving for world domination, no one has any doubt."
Most Americans laugh off the idea of themselves as burgeoning world dictators, and would dismiss
Russian fears as paranoia. But what most Americans don't realize is that the United States, through its
prosecution of the NATO bombing and in its foreign policy in general, has given foreigners plenty of
reasons to see conspiracy and military ambition behind everything we do.
One good example is the role of the mysterious William Walker in starting the war. As it turns out,
even the most cursory review of the background of our chief "verifier" would inspire almost any
foreign government to regard the entire Yugoslavia campaign as a cynical, unabashed act of
imperialist aggression. For if William Walker is not a CIA agent, he's done a very bad job of not
looking like one. Judge for yourself:
Walker's Background
According to various newspaper reports, Walker began his diplomatic career in 1961 in Peru. He
then reportedly spent most of his long career in the foreign service in Central and South America,
including a highly controversial posting as Deputy Chief of Mission in Honduras in the early 1980s,
exactly the time and place where the Contra rebel force was formed. The Contra force was the
cornerstone of then-CIA Director William Casey's hardline anti-Communist directive, and Honduras
was considered, along with El Salvador, the front line in the war with the Soviet Union. From there,
Walker was promoted, in 1985, to the post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central
America. This promotion made him a special assistant to Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams,
a figure whose name would soon be making its way into the headlines on a daily basis in connection
with a new scandal the press was calling the "Iran-Contra" affair.
Walker would soon briefly join his boss under the public microscope. According to information
contained in Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh's lengthy indictment of Abrams and Oliver North,
Walker was responsible for setting up a phony humanitarian operation at an airbase in Ilopango, El
Salvador. This shell organization was used to funnel guns, ammunition and supplies to the Contra
rebels in Nicaragua.
Despite having been named in Walsh's indictment (although he was never charged himself) and outed
in the international press as a gunrunner, Walker's diplomatic career did not, as one one might have
expected, take a turn for the worse. Oddly enough, it kept on advancing. In 1988, he was named
ambassador to El Salvador, a state which at the time was still in the grip of U.S.-sponsored state
terror.
Walker's record as Ambassador to El Salvador is startling upon review today, in light of his recent
re-emergence into the world spotlight as an outraged documenter of racist hate-crimes. His current
posture of moral disgust toward Serbian ethnic cleansing may seem convincing today, but it is hard to
square with the almost comically callous indifference he consistently exhibited toward exactly the
same kinds of hate crimes while serving in El Salvador.
In late 1989, when Salvadoran soldiers executed six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her 15
year-old daughter, blowing their heads off with shotguns, Walker scarecely batted an eyelid. When
asked at a press conference about evidence linking the killings to the Salvadoran High Command, he
went out of his way to apologize for chief of staff Rene Emilio Ponce, dismissing the murders as a sort
of forgiveable corporate glitch, like running out of Xerox toner. "Management control problems can
exist in these kinds of these kinds of situations," he said.
In discussing the wider problem of state violence and repression--which in El Salvador then was at
least no less widespread than in the Serbia he monitored from October of last year until March of this
year--Walker was remarkably circumspect. "I'm not condoning it, but in times like this of great
emotion and great anger, things like this happen," he said, apparently having not yet decided to
audition for the OSCE job.
Finally, in what may be the most amazing statement of all, given his current occupation, Walker
questioned the ability of any person or organization to assign blame in hate crime cases. Shrugging off
news of eyewitness reports that the Jesuit murders had been committed by men in Salvadoran army
uniforms, Walker told Massachusetts congressman Joe Moakley that "anyone can get uniforms. The
fact that they were dressed in military uniforms was not proof that they were military."
Later, Walker would recommend to Secretary of State James Baker that the United States "not
jeopardize" its relationship with El Salvador by investigating "past deaths, however heinous."
This is certainly an ironic comment, coming from a man who would later recommend that the United
States go to war over...heinous deaths.
One final intriguing biographical note: Walker in 1996 hosted a ceremony in Washington held in honor
of 5,000 American soldiers who fought secretly in El Salvador. While Walker was Ambassador of El
Salvador, the U.S. government's official story was that there were only 50 military advisors in the
country (Washington Post, May 6, 1996).
A Spooky Choice
With a background like this, it seems implausible that Walker would be chosen by the United States
to head the Kosovar verification team on the basis of any established commitment to the cause of
human rights. What seems more likely, given Walker's background, is that he was chosen because of
his proven willingness to say whatever his government wants him to say, and to keep quiet when he is
told to keep quiet-- about things like a gunrunning operation, or the presence of 4,950 undercover
mercenaries (whose existence he regularly denied with a straight face) in the banana republic where
you are Ambassador.
The Iran-Contra incident isn't the only thing in Walker's background which gives reason for pause.
Another is his curious ability to remain in Central and South America throughout virtually his entire
diplomatic career.
Not since before the fall of China has the State Department allowed its career people to remain in
one place for any significant length of time. After the Chinese Revolution, the State Department
enacted what has come to be known as the Wriston reform, which dictated that Department
employees be rotated out of their posts every few years. With this reform, the government was
hoping to put an end to a problem which they termed "quiet-itis"--the development of "excessive"
sympathies towards the culture of one's host countries.
With the Wriston act, the U.S. government eventually got exactly what it wanted--a State
Department characterized by fortress-like embassy compounds, in or around which Americans live
amongst themselves in monolingual, isolationist bliss, counting the hours until they're rotated out to
their next job in Liberia, or Peru, or wherever. As a result, most State employees see three or four
different posts in different corners of he world every ten years. It is well-known among career foreign
service people, though, that one of the few exceptions to this rule are the CIA agents in the
embassies. Our intelligence people take longer to develop their contacts, and in order to preserve
these "personal relationships" (bribe-takers don't like to change bagmen), they tend to hang around
longer.
Walker was in Latin America virtually throughout his entire career, until he arrived in Kosovo. He had
no experience in the region which qualified him to head the verification team in Yugoslavia.
Furthermore, he spent the entire 1980s occupying high-level State positions in Central America,
under the Reagan and Bush White Houses, when the region was the source of more East-West
tension than in any other place in the world, and Central American embassies were the most
notoriously CIA-penetrated embassies we had. You can draw your own conclusions.
Nonetheless, one need not prove that Walker is a CIA agent to make the case that the United States
made a serious error in judgement in appointing him. Whether or not he was sent to Kosovo to
guarantee that evidence of ethnic cleansing would be "discovered", and whether there even exists a
covert plan, of which Walker might be part, to install a semi-permanent U.S. military force in the
Balkans, it is bad enough that other countries might identify Walker according to their own criteria
and assume the worst. And assume they will, according to political analysts familiar with the story.
"Ambassador Walker's record in El Salvador does not a priori invalidate his testimony on the
massacres in Kosovo, but it certainly does compromise his reliability as an objective witness," said
James Morrell, research director for the Washington-based Center for International Policy.
"No question about it, they should have chosen someone else," said Felgenhauer. "If this guy was
working for Ollie North, then that's all anyone in Russia is going to need to know, anyway."
There is a widespread belief not only in Russia, but in other countries, that Walker's role in Racak
was to assist the KLA in fabricating a Serb massacre that could be used as an excuse for military
action. Already, two major mainstream French newspapers--Le Monde and Le Figaro--as well as
French national television have run exposes on the Racak incident. These stories cited a number of
inconsistencies in Walker's version of events, including an absence of shell casings and blood in the
trench where the bodies were found, and the absence of eyewitnesses despite the presence of
journalists and observers in the town during the KLA-Serb fighting.
Eventually, even the Los Angeles Times joined in, running a story entitled "Racak Massacre
Questions: Were Atrocities Faked?" The theory behind all these exposes was that the KLA had
gathered their own dead after the battle, removed their uniforms, put them in civilian clothes, and then
called in the observers. Walker, significantly, did not see the bodies until 12 hours after Serb police
had left the town. As Walker knows, not only can "anybody have uniforms", but anyone can have
them taken off, too.
The story of William Walker's involvement in the war is just one of a rapidly-growing family of tales
cataloguing the incompetence and arrogance of the United States and its allies throughout the Kosovo
conflict. Even if it isn't proof of some as-yet-unreleased sinister plan to secure a permanent military
presence in the Balkans, the fact that the United States didn't even care to avoid the appearance of
impropriety in its search for Serb atrocities says a lot about our approach to international relations. It
says, "Go ahead and think the worst about us. We don't care. We've got more bombs than you do."
If that's the sum of our entire policy, it's only a matter of time before a place like Russia decides to
strike first. They won't wait for us to send the next Walker.
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