PressInfo

  This is the first in a series of TFF PressInfos about Kosovo. It follows PressInfo 208 about the United Nations praising the potential war criminal, former Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj. Relevant background links for this series is found here.   EXECUTIVE SUMMARY As Kosovo these very days marks the anniversary of the massive anti-Serb violence of March 2004, the path towards talks on its final status appears set. The mainly Albanian populated province of southern Serbia has extradited its Prime minister Ramush Haradinaj, indicted for war crimes during the Kosovo conflict, to the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. Belgrade is doing the same with its own former generals indicted for war crimes during the conflict, thus paving the way for a positive stance by Brussels on its EU Feasibility Study. The roadblocks towards a true, negotiated and long-lasting agreement on Kosovo remain numerous, but should by no...

“This is the founders’end-of-the-year statement and a few highlights of our activities this year. It suggests that TFF will promote reconciliation and forgiveness in the year 2000 and beyond. We suggest this theme because it has been singularly missing in the century and the very decade we are now leaving behind. We agree with Desmond Tutu that there can be no future without forgiveness. Hope for change and reconciliation are now the lenses through which the future must be imagined. Why? Because, if we let the present global system of violence – against other humans, other cultures and Nature – continue unabated, it is unlikely that there will be anybody around to celebrate New Year 2100. The wonderful thing about forgiveness, reconciliation and hope is that we have to take the initiative ourselves; they can not be demanded of somebody else. You can’t force another human being to forgive you;...

“We are seeing it for the umteenth time in international conflict-management: when intellectual analysis and politics fall apart, cover it up with military potency and give it all a human face! One would like to believe that the West’s moral, legal and political conflict ‘management’ disaster in the Balkans and in Kosovo 1989-1999 would be debated throughout the West – democracies with freedom of speech. The silence about that failure, however, is roaring. It’s just the locals who won’t understand how well-meaning we were and are! But something else is happening: the disaster is turning into a recipe! Read the statements from leading ministers, top generals, EU, and NATO during the last six months. They invariably state ‘that we have learnt in Kosovo’ that we need more military capacity, more force. NATO’s Secretary- General, Lord Robertson, tells the world that “the time for a peace dividend is over because there...

“Given that democratic countries have free and independent media, President Clinton’s visit to Kosovo on November 23, would be a golden opportunity to take stock of the US-lead Western policies to bring peace to the region. Here is a selection of questions with some media advisory. In other words, if I imagine I had been granted an interview as a journalist, this is what I would focus on,” says TFF director Jan Oberg.   (1) Mr. President, US warplanes bombed Yugoslavia and the Kosovo province with you as the Chief Commander of US forces. Does it worry you that the whole campaign was justified and conducted on the basis of what has turned out to be grossly mistaken or falsified information about a genocide planned by Belgrade? [During the campaign, President Clinton, Secretary Cohen, and Secretary Albright are on record with figures of between 10.000 and 100.000 missing and probably...

”With e-mail and Internet it has become so much more easy to generate and share ideas instantly. Below you find 53 different ideas about peace in Macedonia from people around the world who responded to our call in the preceding PressInfo. It’s a free gift to anyone who cares to listen and take inspiration – many could also be implemented in Kosovo,” says TFF director Jan Oberg. “Our respondents are not a representative sample but, among other things, this exciting experiment shows that: 1) there are so many ideas out there and an amazing willingness to contribute constructively; 2) people who have not been to Macedonia can share ideas and initiatives that have worked in other conflicts, a general body of knowledge and experiences are developing; 3) they focus much more on the human dimensions of conflict-resolution than governments do; 4) they by and large reject military means in peacebuilding,...

“Read the farewell interview with Macedonian President Kirov Gligorov and the analysis by TFF’s Macedonian adviser Dr. Biljana Vankovska on our site and you will understand how fragile Macedonia’s stability and peace is. Why not try a citizens’ ‘early warning’? We invite you to send us your ideas on how we can help Macedonia avoid violence and move towards peace in spite of all the obstacles,” says director Jan Oberg. “After the Kosovo war, all citizens of Macedonia go through very difficult times; presidential elections take on October 31. If there is one lesson from Kosovo, it is this: the earlier we deal with the problems, the more options there are, and the easier it is to solve conflicts without resorting to violence. It is a safe prediction that, unless various types of violence-preventive measures are taken and taken in time, Macedonia is likely to slide into chaos. If citizens...

“Those who wrote the Report of the UN Secretary-General on the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) must have had other aims than accurate reporting. The report is biased, embellished, slanted. It omits important aspects which point toward the fact that this mission ignores Security Council Resolution 1244 on which it is based and is a failure in-the-making on its own criteria,” says TFF director Jan Oberg upon his return from TFF’s 37th mission to the region and his visit to Pristina, Skopje and Belgrade. “The report (S/1999/987 of September 16) covers the period in which at least 150.000 legitimate non-Albanian (Serbs, Roma,etc) citizens were driven out of the province. Normally this would be called ethnic cleansing. It has happened under the very eyes of 45.000 NATO soldiers, 1.100 UN civilian police and thousands of other internationals, including the OSCE and EU. The report does NOT state that this is a fatal blow...

“The UN and NATO missions in Kosovo violate Security Council Resolution 1244 which clearly guarantees the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). The Security Council has just reaffirmed that Kosovo is a part of FRY. 1244 also demands the full cooperation of FRY in implementing the missions tasks. All this is pure pretence, as any visitor to Kosovo will learn – and mission members will tell you privately. The Report of the Secretary-General (S/1999/987 of September 16) does not even bother to mention whether KFOR/UNMIK cooperates with Belgrade! It seems pretty clear, rather, that the international community has fooled Belgrade and considers it so weak that it doesn’t even have to be polite or give the world the impression that it respects the country’s sovereignty. This coincides with credible press analyses that the U.S. decision makers think Kosovo must become independent. The international presence...

“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’d 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 conflicts in general...

  “Da li se jos secate Kim, 9-togodisnje vijetnamske devojcice koju su 1972. godine pogodili napalmom americki ratni avioni? Ta slika je 24 godine proganjala Dzona Plamera; on je pilotirao helikopterom koji je omogucio taj napad napalmom. Njegov brak je propao, on se izolovao od prijatelja i rodbine i propio; posle svega postao je metodisticki pastor u Virdziniji. Kim i Dzon su se sreli 1996. godine i on kaze: “Kim je videla moj bol, moju tugu, moje sazaljenjeÖ Ispruzila je ruke i zagrlila me. Jedine reci koje sam uspevao da prozborim bile su: ” Zalim, zao mi je ñ i to sam ponavljao i ponavljao. Ona je tada govorila: ” U redu je, u redu, oprastam ti.” Njih dvoje su sad dobri prijatelji koji se cesto se cuju i razgovaraju. * Mozda je ovo jeste jedinstvena prica, no kako uopste mozemo govoriti o obnavljanju mira posle ratom nanesenih ozleda, stete...

  • Stereotyping and discrimination Ask yourself whether NATO’s bombing and subsequent occupation could have been done against any other nation in today’s Europe. Whether any other country than Yugoslavia and any other people but Serbs is so despised? The plight of the Albanian refugees is in focus, but how well and how extensive did media cover that of the Serbs, Goranis, Montenegrin, Turks and Gypsies in Kosovo? The refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania entered our living rooms – but did the human suffering of people living in and fleeing to bombed-out Yugoslavia? Recent Albanian extremist violence against Serbs is reported with ‘understanding,’ presented as (justifiable) revenge for what Serb police, military and paramilitary units did. But the media which told the story this way, never ‘explained’ that Serb ethnic cleansing after NATO started bombing could be ‘understood’ as (justifiable) anger at what THEY saw as the destruction of their...

* Sterotipi i diskriminacijaZapitajte se da li bi NATO-ovo bombardovanje iokupacija koja mu je sledila uopste bilo moguce u bilo kojojdrugoj zemlji danasnje Evrope. Postoji li ijedna drugazemlja sem Jugoslavije i ijedna nacija osim Srba koja bibila dovoljno prezrena? U zizi interesovanja medija bile supatnje i stradanja albanskih izbeglica, ali da li su ikoliko mediji pokrili patnje srpskih, goranskih,crnogorskih, turskih i romskih izbeglica s Kosova?Izbeglicki logori u Makedoniji i Albaniji su se prostopreselili u nase dnevne sobe – no da li se isto dogodilo isa patnjama ljudi koji su ziveli pod bombama ili su od njihbezali sirom bombama ratvaljene Jugoslavije? O nedavnom nasilju albanskih ekstremista protiv Srbaizvestava se s “razumevanjem”, ono se predstavlja kao(opravdana) osveta za sve sto su srpska policija, vojska iparavojne jedinice uradile. Medjutim, nijednom mediju kojiovu pricu prica na ovakav nacin nije ni kraj pameti bilo daeventualno “objasni” kako bi i srpsko etnicko ciscenje kojeje nastupilo posle...