This month marked the fifth an anniversary of NATO's 1999 bombing
campaign against
In March 1999,
NATO intervened in a bloody and brutal local conflict on the side of the
so-called "Kosovo Liberation Army" (KLA), a shadowy group that the U.S. State
Department's top Balkans envoy at the time labeled a "terrorist organization."
(British historian Timothy Garton Ash would more colorfully describe the KLA as
a "bunch of farmyard ex-Marxist-Leninist-terrorists.")
Instead of
stopping ethnic cleansing, however, when the conflict was over the KLA was given
free reign to begin a campaign of forced expulsion, driving more than 200,000
Serbs, Slavic Muslims and Roma from the province. Part and parcel of this
strategy was the destruction of more than 100 Christian churches in Kosovo,
including many masterpieces of medieval Balkan Christian civilization. In recent
weeks, more than 30 additional Christian churches were destroyed and 3,000
people were driven from their homes.
NATO claimed in
1999 that it was acting to ensure stability in the Balkans and to prevent a
wider war from breaking out. In fact, after turning over de facto power in
Kosovo to the KLA (after the war refashioned into a so-called "Kosovo Protection
Corps") these extremists went on in subsequent years to launch new violence in
southern
In 2003, an
offshoot of the KLA, the Albanian National Army, largely composed of former KLA
members, was declared a terrorist organization by the United Nations after
numerous acts of violence in Kosovo and
This violence, it
should be noted, is paid for largely by drug trafficking and the smuggling of
human beings. The former U.N. Special Representative in Kosovo, Michael Steiner,
has pointed out that the Albanian mafia controls 70 percent of the prostitution
trade in
NATO's promises
to create a functioning, multiethnic society in Kosovo have fallen short in
countless ways. Human rights groups decry the "culture of impunity" with which
non-Albanian ethnic minorities can be killed and their property destroyed. In
the first year after NATO took control of Kosovo, more than 500 members of
non-Albanian ethnic minorities were killed, yet not a single person has ever
been convicted of these crimes. No one involved in atrocities such as the
massacre of more than a dozen farmers working their fields in Kosovo in July
1999, or the February 2001 bus bombing that killed 11 people, or the machine gun
massacre of children swimming in a river in August 2003 has ever been brought to
justice. Murders that occur in public in broad daylight produce no witnesses;
local police refuse to investigate murders of non- Albanian ethnic minorities.
On the rare occasion when someone is arrested, local judicial officials refuse
to prosecute them. Not a single leading Kosovo Albanian politician would
publicly condemn attacks on non-Albanians during the March
pogroms.
The impunity with
which non-Albanian ethnic minorities in Kosovo can be murdered is compounded by
the systematic persecution directed against them in every sphere of public life.
In 2002, the head of the United Nations' education department in Kosovo
announced that he was quitting his post because it was proving impossible to
stop discrimination against Serbs and other minorities. In Kosovo's mental
institutions, Mental Disability Rights International reported in 2002 that there
"is a pervasive pattern of serious abuses. The rule of law simply does not apply
within these psychiatric facilities. We found extreme, inhuman and degrading
treatment, arbitrary detention and the physical and sexual assault of women, and
we received a blanket denial from the authorities." Most of the patients in
these facilities were Serbs. In 2003, Amnesty International reported that
non-Albanian ethnic minorities "find themselves subjected to both direct and
indirect discrimination when seeking access to basic civil, political, social,
conomic and cultural rights."
On the fifth anniversary of NATO's
"war to save Kosovo," what has happened in what British Prime Minister Tony
Blair once called "the heart of