Asklemmy

Michael Parenti in To Kill a Nation:

Ethnic cleansing, KLA-NATO style

What is still not widely understood in the West is that most of the ethnic cleansing throughout the former Yugoslavia was perpetrated not by the Serbs but against them. More than one million Serbs were driven from their ancestral homes in the breakaway republics. Some were triply displaced, uprooted from Croatia into Bosnia, then fleeing to Kosovo, and finally ending up in what remained of unoccupied Serbia. As of the year 2000, the rump nation of Yugoslavia hosted more displaced persons per capita than just about any other nation, including some 300,000 who had always lived in Serbia and were internally displaced by the NATO bombing and related hardships.

Three well-constructed refugee settlements built by the Yugoslav Republic of Serbia, intended as permanent homes, were destroyed by NATO air attacks, as was the headquarters of the Serbian Socialist party agency that dealt with the daunting refugee problem. The NATO attacks not only greatly increased the number of refugees but also destroyed many of the resources needed to cope with them, further exacerbating the FRY's housing and unemployment problems and adding to its deepening poverty.

Soon after NATO troops rolled into Kosovo, it was widely reported that the KLA itself had disarmed and disbanded. In fact, by early 2000, it was generally understood that KLA gunmen had not disarmed in any appreciable numbers. KLA personnel became the core of a civilian police force and administrative staff, the Kosovo Protection Corps, that did even less than the KFOR troops (NATO's Kosovo Force) to protect the non-Albanian minorities from violence. Indeed, former KLA members were soon involved in the misdeeds, including torturing and killing local citizens and illegally detaining others. The rule of law in Kosovo was visibly inverted, as criminals and terrorists became the law officers. John Pilger writes:

[We have witnessed] the installation of a paramilitary regime with links to organized crime. Indeed, Kosovo may become the world's first Mafia state...with war criminals, common murderers and drug traders forming an 'interim administration' that will implement the 'free-market reforms' required by the US and Europe. Their supervisors are the World Bank and the European Development Bank, whose aim is to ensure that Western mining, petroleum and construction companies share the booty of Kosovo's extensive natural resources: a fitting finale to the new moral crusade.

In the first few months that Kosovo was under KFOR occupation, 200,000 Serbs were driven from the province and hundreds were killed by KLA gunmen in what were described in the Western press as acts of revenge and retaliation, as if Serb civilians were not themselves war victims but war criminals deserving of retribution. Certainly that seemed to be the impression Cheryl Atkinson strove for when she began a CBS evening news report on the KLA attacks against minorities by saying, "Payback in Kosovo!"

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), "A wave of arson and looting of Serb and Roma homes throughout Kosovo has ensued. Serbs and Roma remaining in Kosovo have been subject to repeated incidents of harassment and intimidation, including severe beatings. Most seriously, there has been a spate of murders and abductions of Serbs since mid-June, including the late-July massacre of Serb farmers."

A joint report by the OSCE and UNHCR describes "a climate of violence and impunity" with attacks being directed against the dwindling Serb, Roma, Turkish, Egyptian, Jewish, and Gorani (Muslim Slav) populations. Within months of the NATO occupation of Kosovo, reported the Philadelphia Inquirer, "a sinister pattern of violence and intimidation is emerging. Serb houses are bombed and set ablaze" and Serbs are beaten and murdered in what amounts to "systematic ethnic cleansing." (Most mainstream publications avoided the term "ethnic cleansing" as applied to the forced expulsion of Serbs and other minorities from Kosovo.)

Cedda Prlincevic, the leader of Pristina's small Jewish community, told how Jews—who had lived securely when Kosovo was under Serbian rule—were driven from their homes, which were then pillaged and vandalized. KFOR saw it all, and allowed it to happen, he claimed. Before the war, Prlincevic insisted, he had never encountered anti-Semitism, from either Serbs or Albanians. Most of the Jews in Pristina had already intermarried or were the products of intermarriage, being Serbian-Jewish, Roma-Jewish, Albanian-Jewish, and the like. "We [Jews] were not driven out from Kosovo by Albanians from Pristina but by Albanians from Albania...they are in Kosovo now."

Representatives of the Historical Archive in Kosovska Mitrovica report that, since the arrival of KFOR, Albanian terrorists have destroyed more than two million books in the Serbian language...Important archival material has also been destroyed. Nothing has been done by KFOR to protect the books in libraries and other cultural institutions. Thus the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, and other famous writers are burned in front of soldiers from their countries. Hardest hit are communal libraries in the cities of Prizren, Djakovica, Istok, Glogovac, Srbica, Podujevo, all of them under control of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) members. [Had Milošević taken to burning non-Serbian books, we would still be hearing about it.]

UN officials admit "there was growing evidence that the Kosovo Albanian leadership was behind some of the harassment and was encouraging the formation of an intolerant monoethnic state."' Certain Albanian newspapers, especially Bota Sot, "are full of hate speech directed at Serbs, Roma, and even moderate Albanians, with even some incitement to violence."

One of the hardest hit groups in the KLA cleansing of Kosovo was the Romany people. Driven out of homes they had lived in for generations, many Roma fled to Macedonia—only to find the refugee camps there being run by the KLA. In order to gain entry, they had to pay 500 German marks and declare Albanian nationality, according to refugees interviewed by Sani Rifati, president of Voice of Roma, an educational and humanitarian aid organization based in California. Rifati traveled to Italy to deliver aid and interview Romany refugees arriving in Brindisi. They told of being surrounded by police upon arrival, then approached by Albanian interpreters who informed them that in order to procure food they would have to present themselves as Albanians fleeing from Serbs—instead of what they really were: Roma fleeing from KLA militia and other toughs. Other Romany refugees testified that KFOR collaborated with the KLA in the expulsion of Roma.

A survey in late 1999 by independent researcher Paul Polansky placed the number of Roma remaining in Kosovo at approximately 30,000. He reported that since the KFOR occupation began, more than 14,000 Roma homes had been burnt. Aid agencies also discriminated against the Roma. "In many districts," Polansky writes, "I found the Mother Teresa Society openly refusing to deliver food to Gypsies. Islamic Relief also seems to have a policy of not providing aid to Gypsies although the Roma are Muslim." Albanian officials accused the Roma of being allied with the Serbs—because of their loyalty to Yugoslavia and lack of support for Albanian supremacy in Kosovo.