Kosovo: toward the end of the experiment?
By Umberto Pascali
Global Research, September 25, 2007
What is going to happen in Kosovo?
The official spokesmen, the experts have been wrong so many times in
the last many months that they have achieved, paradoxically, a positive
result: normal people have lost any remaining confidence in their
credibility.
The once omnipotent Marti Ahtisaari had put his hand on the fire
proclaiming the unstoppable ?independence? of the province. He lost
that hand. Washington political and diplomatic leaders from George Bush
on down had spoken in the curt language characteristic of the ?sole
superpower? that the Olympus had taken a decision and minor gods (such
as those lingering around the UN Palace) had to accept the fait
accompli or else.
The European gnomes from London to Berlin to Paris, like the cat in
Pinocchio kept repeating the last words of the US fox explaining to the
na?f Balkan natives the unchangeable and unchallengeable nature of the
decision taken by the supreme powers: ?It?s a done deal, see? Nobody
can change the decision.?
Instead, it was all but a done deal! Ahtisaari has been forced to
abandon the stage where he tried to play the part of the hero in an
historic drama. On the contrary, rotten eggs, tomatoes, and cat calls
have put an end to a pathetic farce of corruption and shame.
Still, no ?done deal?.
It was the moment, then, to deploy the local messengers of Olympus. The
?experts? dutifully obliged writing in newspapers and enjoying the
sound of their voice on TV: there is nothing anybody can do., Kosovo
will be ?independent.? Is there the risk that this will become a
precedent that destroys some basic tenets of international law? So
what? The antiquated discussion on what is right and what is wrong has
been abandoned long ago. It is a new world now. For our own good, the
rule now is Might Makes Right.
Still, no ?done deal?.
Then the threat arrived: If you people do not accept what has been
decided for you then there will be an explosion of violence. The UCK ?
remember the UCK ? could reemerge bigger and bloodier than ever. The
Albanians could start mass violence if they do not get what they want.
And you Macedonians, do you remember how things started in Tanusevci
after the Kosovo war of ?99? Things can start again, and who will
defend you then? Better you push for an immediate and unconditional
implementation of the decisions. This threat was accompanied by the
sub-threat of the partition of Macedonia if the ?independence? of
Kosovo was not realized according to the decisions. If, for example, an
area of Kosovo was to be administered by the Serbian population.
And still, no ?done deal?.
On the contrary, Serbia, that had been democratized and westernized,
now seems not be even interested in the offer of membership in NATO and
European Union that once were the idols in front of which all the
former so-called eastern European countries would genuflect and pray.
Now, the Serbian leaders are challenging the decision taken in
Washington. They are closing ranks with Russia and are openly accusing
Washington of establishing, not an independent and democratic regime in
Kosovo, but ? a NATO puppet state. The revelation of the secret
everybody knew but no official leader dared to say began with
Aleksandar Simic, an adviser to Serbia?s Prime Minister Kostunica: ?it
can be concluded that the implementation of Ahtisaari?s plan would call
for Bondsteel to practically be the capital city of an independent
Kosovo.? Of course, Camp Bondsteel, is the enormous US military basis
whose construction started when Kosovo and Serbia were still smoking
from the 1999 bombing (i.e., the blueprint must have been ready before
the Kosovo war).
The Macedonian public knows very well how strategic is the position of
Bondsteel in the context of the transportation corridors and pipelines
running north-south and east-west in the Balkans. Few can believe that
such a gigantic base would be built only for a temporary operation and
then, the sovereignty would be given to the independent Kosovo
government. Before going to Moscow to discuss the Kosovo issue, the
Serbian Minister for Kosovo Slobodan Samardzic urged Washington to give
up "the project of creating a satellite, army barrack, state on foreign
territory.? The "creation of the NATO state" was the real goal of
NATO's 1999 air war against Serbia over Kosovo." And the spokesman of
Kostunica, Branislav Ristivojevic insisted in his nationalist rhetoric:
"We won't give up Kosovo, nor one inch of Serbian territory, for any
kind of international integration process, whether it's NATO, the
European Union or anything else? Kosovo's real capital would be Camp
Bondsteel.?
Behind Serbia, the Russia of Vladimir Putin stands firm with its
warning of using its veto power in the UN if the issue of independence
is put to vote. China, one of the five permanent members of the UN
Security Council is reportedly ready to do the same. The US, that
fought its most ferocious war (1861-65) to stop the secession of the
southern states, tried to threaten a unilateral recognition of Kosovo?s
?independence.? It soon had to back down and deny it ever did so.
Meanwhile, Russia is stating every day in more clear terms its
opposition to any unilateral declaration of independence, and the more
the US and the Euro-bureaucrats call for respect of the decision, the
more a subtle but increasing split is becoming visible in Europe.
Officials in several European capitals are expressing their opposition
to the hard line on independence while in publish the dissent is taking
the form of the research of a not-better-defined compromise.
Why is the Sole Superpower not able to impose a ?done deal?? Why does
the normalized Serbia talk back to Washington and say publicly what was
supposed to be discussed only in private? And more in general: how come
that until now the Anglo American strategy ended up winning all the
games and now it is shooting more and more blanks?
End of the Hegemony
The answer to this question is the solution to the present Kosovo
paradox. The Kosovo situation is not the consequence of local factors,
just as it was not local factors that produced the main wars and
strategic cataclysms in the Balkans since before WWI. The main cause
was the clash of several empires fighting for supremacy in that
geo-strategically crucial area, often manipulating local population to
fight each other, and always determined to keep the area divided,
?balkanized?.
After the fall of the end of the Soviet Union, there was only one
cowboy left with a big gun in the global saloon: the Anglo-American
pistolero. No matter how short sighted, wild, and brainless, the lone
gunman started and won all the fights he felt like provoking. The
international institutions set up as compensation chambers among the
international powers (read U.N.) came to resemble more and more the
impotent drunk sheriff of old western movies. The Anglo-American gunman
created new justification for his undisputed hegemony. A vast and
unbridled propaganda machine could transform overnight an old tool
(e.g. Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden) into the personified evil,
perfect to justify a war with any means and no legalistic restrictions.
All the other unarmed cowboys would fall on each other in the attempt
to propitiate the gunman.
All over the globe, and in Europe and in the Balkans in particular,
several semi-demential experiments were set up with the declared
purpose to reshape the map of the world. Countries were to be
dismembered, ethnic and religious groups incited to fight each other,
powerful imperial bases placed as control centers in the most strategic
areas (such as Camp Bondsteel), no obstacle, even a potential one could
have been allowed to survive. Every too strong a country was to be cut
into pieces, defanged and boxed into a ?defensive alliance? (NATO)
dominated by Washington and London.
In the crucial area of the Balkans it was not difficult to find ethnic,
religious, cultural differences to be manipulated. After the first
moment of euphoria in which the victorious US forces brought democracy
and freedom to the oppressed people taking over the historical mission
from the impotent Europeans, the ?oppressed peoples? began to realize
that they had been given neither freedom, nor democracy. Rather, they
had been boxed in to an unstable situation in which the future was
always more dangerous and scary than the present.
The Kosovo war, for example, was followed by the surfacing of the UCK
Mafioso-terrorist structure that had acted as a paramilitary force in
the army of Wesley Clark and Madeleine Albright. The post-war became
more dangerous that the pre-war. The UCK took over Kosovo and pushed
away any moderate force. At this point Kosovo is a mixture of military
power mostly emanating from Bondsteel and a mafia-like economy that
includes every sort of criminal and illegal activity one could find in
a penal code. As always, a mafia structure is contagious, the
corruptive power of huge sums of money rapidly accumulated in the hands
of the top criminals is infecting broader and broader areas. The
booming opium production in the liberated Afghanistan is distributed in
the form of heroin by the Albania or Kosovo mafia. Misery, instability,
oppression presented as freedom, pending threats of future violence and
wars is the daily reality.
This has been the result of the great experiment organized by
Washington and London. Like in the old horror movies when the mad
scientist conducts his atrocious experiments, Kosovo ?independence? was
just a necessary step toward a greater horror. However, something
strange happened. The guinea pigs refused to follow the script and
begin to rebel. No independence. The power of the mad scientist is
called into question. The experiment is stopped.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization
The reason that the independence scenario has been blocked for the
moment at least, is not due to a moral rebellion -- to the fact that
what has been imposed is repulsive and criminal. The very large
majority in Macedonia and many other countries knew how wrong and
immoral the scenario was. Various unharmed prophets repeated things
that were well known. This, however, did not stop the criminality. What
stopped it was the creation of a counter power, the arrival in the
global saloon of another armed cowboy.
This new counter power, this bizarre Machiavellian prince, took the
form a of an alliance between Russia and China, the two final victims
of the worldwide balkanization plans. China and Russia started a series
of meetings seven years ago creating a progressively more
institutionalized organization that includes also four other Asian
countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The last
meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) took place in
the middle of August in Kyrgyz Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The official
observer countries included India, Pakistan, Iran and Mongolia.
A total of ten presidents of member and candidate countries were
present. Many others sent observers and asked to be considered for
membership. The novelty this year was that the SCO also became a
military alliance -- Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) --
and Vladimir Putin and the Chinese President Hu Jintao presided over
substantial military maneuvers, ?Peace Mission 2007,? with mostly
Russian and Chinese troops that intended to demonstrate that local
countries are going to defend and patrol? their strategic space,
without need of US or NATO. Reportedly, the US asked to participate as
observers. But their request was rejected. At the end of the first ever
military maneuver of this kind, Putin announced: ?I have decided that
Russia's strategic aviation will resume patrols on a permanent basis.
At midnight today, August 17, 14 strategic missile carriers, support
and refueling aircraft took off from seven air force bases in different
parts of the Russian Federation and began a patrol involving a total of
20 aircraft. As from today, such patrols will be carried out on a
regular basis. These patrols are strategic in nature."
The US and European media were not able to come out with a clear line
on the Shanghai group. Political and military spokesmen were at a loss
to quantify what had just happened. Someone called it, the NATO of the
East. Others called it a new Warsaw Pact. But such definitions are,
both at the same time limitative, and overblown. The new alliance is
just making the first steps and it is not comparable to either NATO or
the defunct Warsaw Pact. At the same time, the implication of such an
alliance (with many countries formally allied with the US knocking
insistently at the door of the new organization to be accepted.
First of all, it is remarkable that China and Russia concluded such a
substantial alliance. The traditional mistrust between the two
countries is well known. Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon were able in
the 70?s to play the China Card against the Soviet Union playing on
that mistrust. It was the beginning of the end for the Soviet empire.
Recently an insider observed that the Shanghai Group was exactly what
Kissinger and Nixon did everything to prevent. And yet, the crazy
Anglo-American cow boy succeeded in forcing Moscow and Beijing to
overcome any disagreement and conclude a solid alliance. More solid
than the wild mixture known as NATO.
The new alliance is not an ideological entity. Its raison d?etre is,
first and foremost, the necessity to defend oneself from the unchained
and irrational hubris of the present Anglo-American elites. The Russian
elite indeed tried to become ?capitalist.? To accept privatizations and
rock& roll, free market and McDonald?s. We know how the Yeltsin
adventure ended up: a bankrupt country, taken over by corruption and
organized crime and ready, in the opinion of geopolitico supremo,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, to be partitioned into several chunks and used as
a producer of raw materials controlled by Western companies. China was
to end up in the same way. The Russian elite does not have any doubt,
at this point, that the Anglo-American elite does not hate communism,
it hates Russia. A similar way of thinking dominates in Beijing. This
is why no matter which threats will be unchained against the new
alliance, Russia and China will not surrender. They have already done
that and they know that they would be smashed. No diplomatic magic can
change that.
A superficial observer could conclude that the China-Russia alliance
corresponds to a simplistic East versus West scenario. Accustomed to
the reductionist formulas of the dominating propaganda, a geographic
location becomes an ideology and a philosophy. In fact, there are
plenty of leaders, factions, institutions in the West that are looking
with great hope to the new counter-power. Anything but the destructive
irrationality of the crazy cowboy. The more, for example, Putin
confronts his strategic rivals, and the more the so-called Atlantic
solidarity shows cracks and breaks.
The question of Kosovo made the point clear. Just few weeks ago Europe
was aligned and obedient. Now, after Moscow repeated that unconditional
independence is not going to be accepted, we see different opinions and
dissent, both in private and publicly. What can Washington do? The fait
accompli of unilateral recognition? It would lose even more allies.
Military means? A campaign of boycott and propaganda against Putin the
?dictator?? Already tried; and it doesn?t really work. It doesn?t work
because now, contrary to 1999, there is a real force capable of
defending itself on several fronts: diplomatic, political,
propagandistic, and military. This is going to decide what will happen
in Kosovo. Even the option of unchaining violence through UCK and other
mercenary forces is not a totally practicable option. Special
operations such as non-orthodox warfare can only work if there are none
capable or willing to react. by denouncing. When there is an
institutional entity with intelligence and media capabilities, a
special operation could easily become a liability because it can be
publicly revealed and its controllers unmasked. This is the objective
limit in the use of terrorist cut out. It could lead to its
controllers.
Even if some form of independence is accorded to Pristina, it will not
be the end of a process; it will be the beginning of a new
confrontation because there is an independent power able and willing to
challenge the fait accompli.
To be noted that the only Asian country totally aligned with the
Anglo-American elites, Japan, has recently dropped its anti-China line
and called publicly through its new Prime Minister for closer relations
with Beijing.
China?s Nuclear Option
Indeed the clash between the former Sole Superpower and the new
emerging Russian-Chinese alliance does not concern only the political
and military aspect. Actually the most important front is the economic
and financial one. The Anglo-American elite took a decision long ago to
de-industrialize their countries, use cheap (or slave) labor from Third
World countries, mostly China, and thus stop paying normal wages to
their countrymen. In the immediate term this meant gigantic profits.
China was producing goods for almost nothing. But in so doing, the
genial economists achieved two things; first, they all but destroyed
their qualified labor, and second, they gave to China the goose that
that lays the golden eggs, i.e. their productive apparatus.
The masochistic geniality of these financial experts contemplated also
the idea of issuing an infinite number of US Treasury Bonds that could
finance an increasing mountain of debts. Who would buy it? Well, mostly
the Chinese. So, in a sort of vicious circle, the Chinese labor would
do most of the work from which US companies would extract a large
profit. The money accumulated by the Chinese would then go to finance
further US debt.
This system, presented here in a simplified form, could work while the
dollar system could impose itself with the political and military
strength controlled by Washington. There is only one Achilles heel in
all of this. If China, or all the other countries that have huge
reserves in US treasury bonds and dollars (Russia, Saudi Arabia,
European Countries, and every rich producer of oil and raw materials
including Venezuela and Iran) decide one day to dump them, then the
whole genial scheme that allowed them to become rich without working,
would collapse.
This, however, was not even considered a possibility. The military
power of the US was without comparison and anybody who could even
remotely challenge it would be smashed. Besides, there was a grand
strategic design that would put the whole world under their direct
control. Once the Soviet Union had been dismantled, it was time to
smash the most populous and doggedly cohesive developing countries, the
Muslim countries. It was called the Clash of Civilizations. Then, once
the last vestige of independence in those countries was canceled and
there was no obstacle to full looting of oil and other materials, it
was the moment to start the long march to take over Russian and China.
The countries would have been partitioned, balkanized and then used as
a reserve of raw material and semi-slave labor.
The Balkan strategy with the enlargement of NATO was only part of a new
Operation Barbarossa to encircle, isolate and then take over Russia. No
raw materials were to be exported from Russia independently, without
the mediation of an Anglo-American company. This made Kosovo and
Macedonia, -- points of transit for transportation corridors and
pipelines -- crucial locations.
Even if the continental European countries do not know it or try not to
see it, they were the last stage in this deranged grand design.
All of this depended on the ability to prevent the establishment of
even a limited form of independent power. But the clumsy strategists
relied mostly on computer and formal logic, forgetting history and
culture. In 1999, it was the NATO/US victory in Kosovo that triggered
deep changes inside the Russian leadership that had concluded that
Washington could not be trusted. The result was the rapid eclipse of
Yeltsin and the emerging of the unknown Putin who took over Russia with
the mission of re establishing its independent power with every means.
But already during the last phase of the Kosovo war, the Russian
military had taken over the Pristina airport. Their determination, even
at that low point gave a healthy scare to the British General Michael
Jackson who refused the order given by the American general in charge,
Wesley Clark, to stop the Russians with the words: "I'm not going to
start the third world war for you,"
Eight years later, the danger highlighted by the British general, is
possibly more real than it has even been during the whole cold war.
China and Russia (and possibly silent partners in high places in Europe
and elsewhere) have put together an unrefined but effective military
power and are expanding it as fast as they can. It is a desperate race
in which they think they cannot surrender. The military dimension,
again, is only a part of the game. The financial side of this war is
even more important.
China gave a demonstration of it. After having been pressured by US to
continue its role of playing sewer system for US debts and after having
been asked to sacrifice its economy and risk financial destabilization
by buying the worthless sub-prime mortgage, the Chinese went for the
?nuclear option?. If the US insists in destabilizing our financial
system, the academician He Fang stated, Beijing ?could be forced to
sell the dollar... which may lead to a mass depreciation of the dollar.
Another official, Xia Bin, declared that the huge Chinese reserves in
dollars and treasury bonds could be used as ?bargaining chips.?
The pressures on China stopped for a while, while a campaign on the
danger of Chinese produced toys was launched in the US media. However,
in the US stock market the Dow Jones index went down after the
statements. The US monetary authorities were forced to go for a policy
of low interest rates that will provoke a growing inflation. When the
worthless sub prime mortgage collapsed, Beijing announced proudly that
they had disinvested from that sector. The threat this time had not
worked. An immense self created weak flank, the growing mountain of
treasury bonds and dollars that can be dumped at time, has become a
reality of the ongoing war.
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