NATO Socks It To The Serbs, For a Change
By Nebojsa Malic

MORE THAN A DOZEN civilians were injured when NATO troops opened fire on Serb protesters in northern Kosovo on Tuesday. The Serbs had been peacefully protesting NATO’s seizure of checkpoints on the roads to the rest of Serbia, seeking to enforce the writ of the self-proclaimed Albanian government “in the entire country” (Kosovo’s Albanians declared an independent state with NATO support in 2008; Serbia, along with most of the world, refuses to recognize it). Western media reported this as “clashes.” NATO spokespeople argued they’d used only rubber bullets, in “self-defense.” Video and eyewitness reports prove them wrong.

NATO occupied Kosovo in 1999, after an illegal war in support of the separatist Albanian “Liberation Army.” Evidence of alleged Serb atrocities – used to justify the war – never materialized. Albanian persecution of ethnic Serbs and other communities, meanwhile, has unfolded for 12 years now, under the very noses of the “peacekeepers” and often with their tacit approval. When Serbia acted to establish law and order in Kosovo in 1998, it was condemned by NATO as “aggressor” and its actions deemed “genocide.” But when NATO initiates violence on behalf of a criminal regime of ethnic cleansers, slavers, drug-runners and organ harvesters, they call it “law and order” and anyone who opposes it, no matter how peacefully, a “criminal element.”

Why should any of this matter? Because it shows the world’s dominant military power (for now) as dangerously and deliberately disconnected from logic, and hence justice.

In the early 1990s, a media image of the Balkans wars was created in the West, wherein the Serbs were these mass-murdering aggressors against their peaceful neighbors, and the virtuous West had to step in and stop them. The Serbs were accused of the most vicious atrocities and compared to the Nazis.

None of that makes any sense. The Serbs are accused of breaking up Yugoslavia – yet they wanted to preserve it (and even then, not at all costs). The West decided that Yugoslavia had ceased to exist (just like that) and that the borders of its federal units were inviolable – except for Serbia, which could be carved up further (Kosovo). Serbs in Croatia were denied autonomy and expelled en masse, but Albanians in Serbia were given independence. Serbs in Bosnia were told they had to submit to a centralized, Muslim-dominated state, while Serbia itself was ordered to de-centralize to the point of separatism. No matter which way one turns, the only consistent “principle” in the Orwellian Balkans is that the Serbs always lose.

The Nazi comparison is especially vile, considering that 1) the Serbs were the principal targets of Nazis and their allies during WW2, and had also fought German and Austrian aggression in WW1; 2) Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Albanians were allied with the Nazis in WW2, and the first two fought for Austria-Hungary in WW1, and 3) both Croats and Albanians had designs for eliminating the Serbs from the territories they claimed, and put those plans into effect under Western patronage, while the Serbs were accused of genocide without any evidence of intent!

One PR executive even bragged, as early as 1993, that the biggest coup of his agency was convincing the Jewish public opinion in the West that the Serbs were Nazis reborn, even though Croats and Bosnian Muslims had a history of “real and cruel anti-Semitism”!

In the course of the Balkans interventions, the West has repeatedly violated its own laws and charters (NATO), making a mockery of the UN and international law, while claiming to be guided by some sort of higher morality. The result of these interventions was that the US, Britain and France betrayed an ally from two world wars and demonized them as Nazis reborn, while supporting Germany and aiding German allies from WW2 to finish what they started in 1941. If this sort of stunning reversal can happen in the Balkans, it can happen anywhere else. To anyone else.

First come the smears. Then the bombs. Then the boots on the ground, and the desert called peace.

You have been warned.

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Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. This editorial is exclusive to Barely A Blog.

UPDATE: BAB contributor Nebojsa Malic on Russia Today, TODAY. The neocon is always and everywhere the most uncivilized:

Benjamin Netanyahu speaks on a level incomprehensible to his audience. One doesn’t have to agree with everything Israel’s prime minister says to respect his patriotism, the incisive points he drove home, and his command of history and reasoned argument. I’ve often argued that American leaders—Republican, Democrat and other, wannabe effetes—are unpatriotic. At bottom, they dislike the historic people and work against their interests. Not so Netanyahu. The Arabists on CNN are agreed: Both James Rubin (correspondent Christian Amanpour’s beau) and Hussein Ibish claimed Netanyahu lost. They’re probably right. As usual, the text of the address is not yet out there. The UN feed doesn’t enable a rewind. I’ve replaced it with this C-SPAN hyperlink. I hope an embed of Netanyahu’s speech becomes available shortly.

UPDATED I (Sept. 26):

UPDATE II: My father, whom I have just called in South Africa to wish Shanah Tova, said this about Netanyahu’s “lost cause”: If you were to propose a resolution in the UN that the world is flat, you’d get a majority vote.

The PA may well come to regret invoking the Kosovo precedent, says Nebojsa Malic:

THE EFFORTS OF THE Palestine Authority (PA) to declare independence and get UN recognition have been compared to those of the “Republic of Kosovo,” a province of Serbia occupied by NATO in 1999 on behalf of the ethnic Albanian “Kosovo Liberation Army.” The KLA, a terrorist organization dabbling in drug-running, slavery and other unsavory practices on the side, orchestrated NATO’s aerial campaign and subsequent invasion (much like the current “rebels” in Libya), and after almost nine years of ethnically cleansing the province and laying the groundwork, declared it an independent state in 2008. While “Kosovo” is recognized by around 80 governments (most notably the US and major Western European powers), it has yet to claim a seat at the UN, faced with a certain Russian and probable Chinese veto.

Last year, the International Court of Justice (ICJ, not to be confused with faux tribunals such as the ICTY and ICTR) turned in a stunning verdict, refusing to recognize that the KLA government’s declaration directly violated the UN resolution regulating the status of Kosovo and accepted international law. Torturing language and logic, the majority of judges said that the declaration had been made not by the UN-regulated provisional government, but the “direct representatives of the Kosovo people,” and as such not bound by UN resolutions or international law (!). Following this sort of logic, any group, anywhere, could declare statehood – and the only thing that mattered would be whether it has sufficiently powerful patrons to enforce that statehood by force.

Upon recognizing “Kosovo,” its U.S. and EU sponsors insisted it would not establish any sort of precedent, as fervently as they had once insisted that the occupation of the province in no way conflicted with Serbia’s sovereignty over it. And now the PA is about to exploit the very Kosovo precedent. Critics of the American Empire often deride Washington’s belief in American exceptionalism, but it does actually apply in one, albeit unintended, respect: the U.S. may well be the first country in history to destroy the very international order its global dominance was built upon. Flouting the law with impunity is one thing; declaring that behavior to be the law, quite another.

However, there are drawbacks to PA’s invocation of the Kosovo precedent. For one, it would undermine “Kosovo” itself, obliterating a major argument of the separatists’ sponsors and putting the rest of the world on notice regarding their own separatist issues (and many countries have them). With many already uneasy about the professional revolutionaries (a method of unconventional takeover first tested in Serbia) in their midst, now another legacy of the Euro-American Balkans interventions – death by recognition – threatens to go global. While few seem to be aware of these potential problems down the road – there appears to be near-universal support in the UN for a state of Palestine – they will most certainly read their heads sooner or later.

Arabs themselves may be ill-served by the declaration. The PA is not self-sustaining, while the economic activity in the territories in question leans heavily on Israel. However much of a nuisance navigating the security checkpoints may be now, becoming an international border won’t make them any better – quite the contrary. Statehood would also mean taking ownership and responsibility for one’s actions and behavior, including terrorist attacks; until now, everything that happened could be blamed – and usually is – on Israel and the occupation. With statehood, that excuse disappears.

Claiming a Palestinian state in the territories of West Bank and Gaza would also go against the charters of both Fatah (current PA leadership) and Hamas. Both deny Israel’s right to exist and claim the entire territory of the old Palestine Mandate as their own. Settling for territories annexed by Egypt and Jordan in 1948, and occupied by Israel in 1967, is not just a matter of quantity, but of principle: it is an indirect recognition of Israel’s legitimacy. Last, but not least, the existence of a Palestinian state would shift the dynamic of the Arab-Israeli conflict from the current field of 4th-generation warfare (where weakness is strength) that has benefited the Arabs to a more conventional model, where Israel has proven its superiority repeatedly (as the Egyptians who remember 1967 and even 1973 can attest).

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Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. This editorial is exclusive to Barely A Blog.

Liberals are denying that New York City’s 9th Congressional District is “a bellwether district.” Their perpetual propaganda cannot repeal reality. Uncontroversially (for a change), I contend, in my new WND.COM column, that “New Yorkers are onto the Leech-in-Chief”:

“Running against Barack Obama’s reckless fiscal policies (the building blocks for which were laid by Bush), a Republican, Catholic businessman has just beaten a Democratic, Jewish, pro-Israel, career politician in New York City’s 9th Congressional District, by 54 to 46 percent.

Bob Turner’s historic win over David Weprin, a first for Republicans since 1923, is reminiscent of Scott Brown’s victory over Martha Coakley in Massachusetts. Given the ethnic composition of the district—almost 40 percent Jewish—the media, however, is spinning the win as a referendum on Obama’s policies on Israel, not the economy.

Had the Democrat not outspent the Republican and outgunned him with the assistance of former president Bill Clinton and Gov. Andrew Cuomo; and had the Jewish voters under scrutiny not been primarily Orthodox, working class, and in opposition to gay marriage—CNN’s Errol Louis might have alluded to Jewish money and influence. Instead, the commentator confined himself to describing the votes cast for a fiscally and socially more conservative representative as ‘tribally’ motivated.”…

Read the rest of “New Yorkers are onto the Leech-in-Chief,” on WND.COM.

My new book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon.

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