August 1999

Ramsay Clark’s Letter to the Security Council On August 27, 1999, the following letter was sent from former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark to the ambassador and foreign minister of each member of the UN Security Council, and to the UN General Assembly Dear Ambassador, The United Nations, as it now functions, cannot continue to exist as an institution of honor and hope if it fails to act immediately to lift all economic sanctions from Iraq and prohibit the United States from nearly daily murderous aerial assaults on its defenseless people. The Security Council through nine years of economic sanctions forced on it by the United States, has caused the greatest human disaster in this last decade of a century of self inflicted human disasters. More than 1,500,000 people have been killed; overwhelmingly infants, children, elderly persons, pregnant and nursing women, the chronically ill and emergency medical cases. The whole...

The systematic intimidation of Kosovo’s Serbs brings shame on the province’s Albanians and will have far-reaching and long-term consequences By Veton Surroi in Pristina In the past month an old woman has been beaten to death in her bath; a two-year-old boy has been wounded and his mother shot dead; two youths have been killed with a grenade launcher; and a woman dares not speak her name in public for fear that those who attempted to rape her will return. All these victims were Serbs. Sadly, these are not isolated incidents. Many more of Kosovo’s remaining Serbs have locked themselves in their homes, terrified by an atmosphere in which every sound seems threatening and every vehicle that stops might take you away to your death. Then there is the case of the elderly couple with nothing to eat who are afraid to venture out to buy food because they know...

If Nato’s bombing was to create a multi-ethnic state, it has failed By Gary Younge From The Guardian I wonder if President Clinton is getting his sleep, and if he is, does he ever have nightmares about Jelica Cemburovic? In June he said that if Nato had not intervened in Kosovo: “We wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night.” A few months earlier he had explained the rationale behind the bombing thus: “I want us to live in a world where we all get along with each other, with all of our differences.” Jelica, 87, a Serb, is under virtual house arrest in the northern Kosovan town of Podujevo, left at the mercy of ethnic Albanians eager to wreak revenge on the Serb community because of the persecutions once inflicted on them by the Serb security forces. Jelica wants to stay put so that when she dies she can...

By Zhang Dezhen From International Forum of Renmin Ribao, Beijing 24 August 1999 Some people in US-led NATO military circles are immensely proud to claim that the Kosovo war which has just ended was a”clean war.” The reason they give is that in this war, fought by means of strategic air strikes, NATO achieved a record of combat without a single casualty.In fact, as far as NATO is concerned, the war it launched against the Yugoslav Federation [FRY] was indeed very “clean” and “neat.” As one of the belligerents, the cities of NATO countries were not destroyed, their inhabitants were not killed, and they lost not one military casualty. This must be the first time this has happened in the history of war. Without mentioning the Korean and Vietnam wars, from which tens of thousands of US soldiers never returned, up to 100 US servicemen lost their lives in the...

 Letter to TFF Reconciliation, NGOs and Civilian Peace Service 24 Aug 1999 Dear TFF, I have read with interest your call for world wide Reconciliation Institutes. Your proposal brings to mind a number of precedents. You undoubtedly know that is was “The Fellowship of Reconciliation” who established after World War I the first Civilian Service which brought together (mostly young) people from former enemy countries for the purpose of both reconciliation and reconstruction. The FOR policy seems sound in that it links reconciliation with reconstruction. The FOR’s Civilian Service of 1919 seems to me a forerunners of today’s Civilian Peace Service project. Are you planning to work with the FOR and NGOs such as the Mothers in Black? I have virtually no idea about the present state of those Kosovo/ Albanian and Serbian NGOs who resisted the armed conflict. Are you planning to write a post-mortem of your attempt to...

By Stephan Israel From Frankfurter Rundschau During the day the shiny new vehicles clog the streets in the seasonably hot Pristina. Some are driving with tags from neighboring Albania, where as others have no license plate. One can see the latest models that just recently came off the assembly lines. On board are often young men with dark sun glasses and not much to say. The change of scene could not be more radical. Three months ago, when the NATO peacekeeping force arrived, Pristina was a ghost town. Today primarily the young people use their freedom in the evening to meet in one of the bars. Business seems to be flourishing. From the loudspeakers boom the previously forbidden songs about the Albanian fight for freedom and the people in front of the bars crowd far out onto the terraces in the semi-darkness. At the parties in the liberated city, one...

The Economist on NATO’s Destruction of Yugoslavia By Larry Elliott From The Guardian, London August 23, 1999 Yugoslavia faces the threat of a humanitarian disaster this winter in the aftermath of Nato’s 11-week war earlier this year which caused £38bn worth of damage and transformed the country into the poorest in Europe, a new report discloses. The Economist Intelligence Unit says today that the air campaign inflicted “enormous damage on the Yugoslav economy and infrastructure”, with gross domestic product poised to shrink by 40% this year. Real GDP this year is expected to be just 30% of the level a decade ago, the sharpest decline of any of the 27 countries making the transition from communism to a market economy. Income per head will be below even that of Albania, which has until now been the poorest in Europe. The EIU added that the west’s policy of denying reconstruction aid...

From BBC London, Newsnight Friday, August 20, 1999 Published at 03:34 GMT 04:34 UK General Clark: “didn’t always defer to those who wanted targets withheld” In a special Newsnight programme Mark Urban investigates Nato’s handling of the Kosovo crisis. Interviewing the key players he finds that the Allies were far from united. (Newsnight – BBC Two – 10.30pm – Friday 20 August). Talk to the people running Nato’s war against Slobodan Milosevic and many will tell you it was a “near run thing”.  Strobe Talbott: “A good thing that the conflict ended when it did” Strobe Talbott, the American Deputy Secretary of State, told BBC’s Newsnight Kosovo Special “there would have been increasing difficulty within the alliance in preserving the solidarity and the resolve of the alliance” had the Serbian leader not given in on 3 June. Mr Talbott, regarded as the man closest to President Clinton in the Washington...

“Da li se još sećate Kim, devetogodišnje vijetnamske devojčice koju su 1972. godine pogodili napalmom američki ratni avioni? Ta slika je 24 godine proganjala Džona Plamera; on je pilotirao helikopterom koji je omogućio taj napad napalmom. Njegov brak je propao, on se izolovao od prijatelja i rodbine i propio; posle svega postao je metodistički pastor u Virdžiniji. Kim i Džon su se sreli 1996. godine i on kaže: „Kim je videla moj bol, moju tugu, moje sažaljenje… Ispružila je ruke i zagrlila me. Jedine reči koje sam uspevao da prozborim bile su: ‘Žalim, žao mi je’ – i to sam ponavljao i ponavljao. Ona je tada govorila: ‘U redu je, u redu, opraštam ti.” Njih dvoje su sada dobri prijatelji koji se često čuju i razgovaraju. Možda je ovo jedinstvena priča, no kako uopšte možemo govoriti o obnavljanju mira posle ratom nanesenih ozleda, štete i zla, a da svoju pažnju...

“Do you remember Kim, the 9-year-old Vietnamese girl, running as she was hit by napalm from U.S. warplanes in 1972? That picture haunted John Plummer for 24 years; he had been a helicopter pilot and helped organise the napalm raid. His marriage crashed, he isolated himself and took to drinking; he eventually became a Methodist pastor in Virginia. In 1996, Kim and John met and he says: ‘Kim saw my grief, my pain, my sorrow… She held out her arms to me and embraced me. All I could say was “I’m sorry; I’m sorry” – over and over again. And at the same time she was saying, “It’s all right, I forgive you.” They are now good friends and call each other regularly. This may be a unique story, but how can we talk about restoring peace after wars’ hurt and harm without paying attention to the human aspects of...

The Western Alliance Will Not Accept an Independent Nation There, and the KLA Will Not Settle for Less From Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1999 In the aftermath of NATO’s military intervention in Kosovo, some analysts presciently warned that the peacekeeping and reconstruction mission undertaken by the U.S. and its allies was fraught with peril. However, as each day brings ominous reports from Kosovo–sniper attacks on peacekeepers, “organized” ethnic cleansing of Serbs by ethnic Albanians–it is apparent that the postwar honeymoon between the Kosovo Liberation Army, on one side, and NATO troops and U.N. civil authorities, on the other, has ended much more quickly than we expected. The first shots in Kosovo’s next war–pitting the KLA against its erstwhile liberators–already have been fired. The unraveling of the post-conflict settlement in Kosovo was easily foreseeable–except, of course, by the Clinton administration. The Clinton foreign policy team bears a heavy responsibility, because...

By Steven R. Ratner From The Christian Science Monitor August 18, 1999, Wednesday The war in Kosovo seems to confirm our worst fears about the dangers to peace that lurk in ethnic conflict. As with Bosnia before it, attempts to stop “ethnic cleansing” through diplomacy proved fruitless, leading to outside military intervention.Western troops and hordes of international personnel now occupy both Bosnia and Kosovo. The result is, effectively, an international protectorate unlikely to solve long-term problems. But Europe and the rest of the world are not full of Kosovos – yet. In fact, the term “ethnic dispute” simplifies a wide variety of situations. Some governments, like Serbia’s or Croatia’s, clearly have yet to accept people of varying backgrounds on equal footing; and some ethnic organizations, like the Kosovo Liberation Army, favor a separation hardly conducive to building cohesive states. But most governments in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union...