Remember Kosovo?
By Cliff Kincaid | December 28, 2004 Clinton's policy was not to bomb those terrorists but to support them and bomb the Christian Serbs.
AIM put together a list of the most underreported or buried stories of 2004, and one of them was the resurgence of anti-Serb, anti-Christian violence in Kosovo. Dozens were killed and more Christian churches were destroyed there. Kosovo got some attention near the end of the year when newspapers covered the fact that a former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the KLA, became prime minister in a new Kosovo-based government. A story in the Washington Post, back on page 18, noted that he has been accused of "war atrocities" and may be indicted. Here's the rest of the story.
Clinton's 1999 NATO war in Kosovo was illegal under U.S. and international law. The U.S. Congress never voted for it and the U.N. never endorsed it. There was no claim that Yugoslavia had weapons of mass destruction or had ties to terrorist groups. Instead, Clinton had the U.S. intervene on behalf of the terrorists, operating in Kosovo under the banner of the KLA. They had links to Osama bin Laden. In fact, it is reported that the KLA's head of elite forces, Muhammed al-Zawahiri, was the brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the military commander for bin Laden's Al Qaeda. After the war, the KLA was transformed into the police force for Kosovo.
Clinton's policy was not to bomb those terrorists but to support them and bomb the Christian Serbs. It should be no surprise that the anti-Serb and anti-Christian violence has continued. If this is the first time that you have heard the Clinton policy described in these terms, it is because you believed all of the propaganda about how the Serbs were supposedly engaging in the mass slaughter of the "ethnic Albanians" in Kosovo, and how NATO and the U.S. intervened to stop it.
In fact, this was a civil war in Yugoslavia that cost a couple thousand lives. It was a bloody conflict but nothing of such a magnitude that it affected U.S. national security. What was depicted as ethnic cleansing by the Serbs was a reaction to the infiltration of Kosovo by Albanians who are mostly Muslims and want to make the province into an independent state.
There was violence on both sides. Europe, which would rather appease than confront the Muslim grab for political power, had a problem. Their "solution" was to have Clinton accommodate the Europeans by using U.S. and NATO military power to intervene on behalf of the Muslims in Kosovo. It was done. Clinton complied with the European demands. Now we are on the verge of helping create a Muslim state in the heart of Europe.
This new Kosovo Prime Minister has been indicted in Serbia on 108 counts of war crimes committed by his troops against Serb civilians, as well as other offenses. Columnist Nebojsa Malic said those additional offenses include child rape, torture, multiple murders, abduction and terrorism. But he is also facing a possible indictment from the U.N. itself. The U.N.'s war crime tribunal, created in the aftermath of the Kosovo war, has already questioned him as part of an investigation into war crimes. What a mess. But don't expect the media to blame Clinton for it, even though in this case in the war against global Islamic terrorism, Clinton had the U.S. intervene on the wrong side.
Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report |
