All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on the Liberty Radio Network.
Now, Nubosha Malik has been writing for Antiwar.com for 10 years.
His latest article is called Boss Snake's Mafia State.
That's at original.antiwar.com/malik.
His column is called Moments of Transition.
Welcome back to the show.
Nubosha, how's it going?
Not too bad.
Not too bad.
Good to be back.
Yeah, yeah.
It's been far too long since we've spoken.
I'm very happy to have you here on the show.
So I want to talk all about Richard Holbrook, or I want you to talk all about Richard Holbrook to me.
But first, I was hoping maybe we can spend this first segment on the prime minister, as they call him, of Kosovo, Hashim Feisi.
And I suppose this is the guy that America put in power with the war for Kosovo independence in 1999, right?
That is correct, yes.
And so now there's this report that's been put out by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
What the hell is that?
It's sort of a trans-parliamentary...
Imagine a whole bunch of congresses from European states getting together and sort of creating a super parliament, but it's not an actual government institution.
It's more like a debating club.
It's not a part of the EU.
It's outside of the EU and involves a lot of countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
So it's actually...
I suppose for a libertarian, it would be one of those, oh my god, more government, and sort of is.
But it doesn't actually have any coercive power per se.
But they do apparently have some kind of investigatory power here.
Do they have subpoena power and that kind of thing?
I don't think they have subpoena power, no.
From what I've been able to discern, this investigation was actually launched at the behest of former ICQI prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, whom I have had very few good words for over the years.
But I guess after she was...
I don't know if she retired voluntarily or if they nudged her out, but any which way, after her mandate at the Hague position ended, she finally publicized that she had some evidence of this organ trade business, which is pretty macabre, and wanted to see that investigated.
And the tribunal had actually bungled the investigation horribly, destroyed and lost evidence, tried to cover it up, essentially.
So she tried to shine a spotlight on this, and it was apparently her insistence that Mr. Marty had set up this whole inquest.
And two years later, we finally have results.
All right.
I'm talking with Namosh Simalek.
He writes Moments of Transition for Antiwar.com, and he's got a blog of his own, greyfalcon.blogspot.com.
And now we're talking about this report about the prime minister, basically about the government of Kosovo, after Bill Clinton's war in 1999 to guarantee their independence from Serbia.
And now, so what was it detailed in this report?
You said something about the illegal organ trade?
Well, the report is actually established that Tachi, who was known back in 1999 among the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army as Snake, is basically a mafia boss in charge of a mafia organization that runs Kosovo's own private fiefdom, and he's involved in drug smuggling, weapon smuggling, slave trade, and organ trade, illegal organ trade from either voluntary or involuntary donors.
And involuntary donors are sort of a euphemism.
These are basically people that have been captured by the KLA.
The large number of them were Serbs, but there were Albanians as well.
And they were pretty much dismembered, and their organs were sold on the black market.
So the thing about this report is that most of the things detailed in it have already been rumored and sort of known, but not corroborated over the past few years, and in some cases even longer.
But it's been routinely dismissed as, oh, this is just propaganda, it's just propaganda, there's nothing to it.
Well, there is something to it, and it couldn't have happened without the knowledge and approval and support of a lot of Western European capitals and Washington, D.C., and that's the biggest embarrassment in this whole schedule.
I mean, Tachi doesn't really care, you know, if they accuse him, he's been harvesting organs for people, he's like, oh, that's just Serbian propaganda, I never did that.
Oh, you just want to make me look bad.
Well, I would imagine that, you know, if you harvested organs for people, you already do look pretty bad.
In addition to being a terrorist and a mass murderer.
Well, is it too much, you think, to assume that the State Department must have known all along that this was going on, if it's just now in this European report?
Well, look at it this way.
Back in 1998, the U.S. envoy for the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, was asked if the KLA is a terrorist organization, and he said, well, you know, I know my terrorists and these guys are terrorists.
And for that, he got rewarded, quote unquote, with a post in, I believe, Indonesia.
He had basically been shoved off to the side.
And very shortly thereafter, Richard Holbrook goes over there, takes his shoes off, sits down on the floor with, you know, the KLA, who had been until that moment considered terrorists, and promotes them to freedom fighters.
And, you know, people claim that he took his shoes off out of a sign of respect, because you're supposed to take your shoes off when you enter a Muslim house.
The guy next to him wore boots.
It wasn't an issue of, it wasn't respect.
It was submission.
It was submission, pure and simple.
So, I mean, they've known about these guys from the very start.
They've known about the Atlantic Brigade, which was, you know, American-Albanians going to fight there.
There was a book a few years back about the guy in New York who smuggled weapons over to the Albanians in Kosovo.
You think the FBI has investigated him?
Hell no.
Do you think he ever saw a visit by any sort of inspector of the federal government?
No.
He's basically been allowed to do that completely unhindered.
So, there's a great level of collusion.
Basically, the KLA could get away with just about anything, because there was absolutely no will to do anything to hinder its criminal operation.
So, even if we don't have WikiLeaks yet about the State Department talking about how they knew this all along, although those may be coming, we do have, as you say, the apparent firing of this Carla Del Ponte for trying to investigate this.
At least from what I've read, it seems like this was the final thing that she tried to do where they shut her down and kicked her out.
I guess she was investigating the wrong people this time.
Right.
Well, what happened to Del Ponte is very instructive.
She actually published this delegation in her memoirs in 2008.
The book was actually spiked by a lot of people.
It hasn't been published here in the States.
It hasn't been translated into English.
Its original was in Italian, I believe.
The Swiss government, which was her boss at the time, and still is, I believe, actually decided to shut her up by issuing a gag order and sending her to a mess or somewhere in Latin America.
I don't recall exactly where.
So, everybody's been trying to keep this under wraps, and now that it's the cat's out of the bag, I'm not really sure how they're going to react.
The official reactions from most of Europe have been, well, these are really horrible and serious allegations.
We hope Mr. Markey has evidence, and of course he has evidence.
You don't present all of your evidence in a preliminary report.
You save it for the trial.
Well, you know, I think it's worth recalling that this was basically Bill Clinton's victory lap after being acquitted by the Senate in the beginning of 1999, and they just outright lied.
They created this, I mean, and I even remember this, and I'm not that good on these issues, not like you, but I remember playing his day on TV that the Rambouillet Peace Accord was simply an ultimatum that Milosevic couldn't possibly accept, that said he had to allow NATO to occupy the entire country, up to and including his palace and the parliamentary mansion and whatever the hell, and then they also said that there was a genocide going on, not just ethnic cleansing, which apparently that wasn't necessarily even going on, but they claimed that there were at least 100,000 murdered Kosovars at the hands of the Serbs, and then, so basically, I mean, this was no different, really, than the George Bush administration and what they did with Iraq.
A bogus peace ultimatum, you know, give up your entire country, move to Egypt, whatever, you know, an ultimatum he couldn't possibly live up to.
Prove the negative, on the one hand, and then all the lies about what we're going to find when we get there, too.
Genocide or weapons of mass destruction, same thing, and people just forget.
I even forget the Kosovo War.
I'll be listing wars and lies that led America to war, and I'll even leave Kosovo off the list sometimes myself, but it's important to remember that a lot of people really did die in the name of people who hadn't really died.
Hang tight, everybody.
It's Nebojsa Malik on Anti-War Radio.
We'll be right back.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Nebojsa Malik from grayfalcon.blogspot.com and original.antiwar.com/Malik, M-A-L-I-C, and we're talking about Bill Clinton and Richard Holbrook's Kosovo War for apparently the worst heroin dealers on Earth and people who like to kidnap other people and cut their organs out.
I guess it goes right to the heart of what Rothbard said about governments just being nothing but gangsters, only bigger.
In this case, you've got outright gangsters who became the government.
But there's no distinction between government and organized crime.
In this instance, the government is the organized crime.
It's almost a textbook example of what libertarian analysis of politics is all about, really.
I'd like to say that just about everything about the Kosovo War that the public has been told has pretty much been a lie, including and the everything, everything.
I mean, back in 99, they were claiming that NATO had to intervene to stop a humanitarian disaster.
I mean, in actuality, it created one.
That there was a genocide.
There wasn't one.
That there was this plan to destroy Albanians in Kosovo.
Well, there wasn't one.
It was fabricated.
What happened afterwards was that the non-Albanians were pretty much obliterated in the province.
There's been systematic destruction of non-Albanian heritage, specifically Serbian heritage.
And back in 99, Clinton and other NATO leaders swore up and down that this was not about creating an independent Kosovo state, that according to UN Resolution 1244, it still belonged to Serbia on paper and everything.
And then, you know, 10 years later, they said, well, we lied.
You know, we really wanted it to become independent from what they want.
There was no return to status quo anyway.
And, you know, it's just not realistic.
We've got to go with reality underground.
You know, the reality underground is what they created with their guns and bombs.
I mean, if we're going to set up reality like that, then what's the point of law at all?
Why don't we just go back to the Hobbesian state of nature?
So everything the American public has been told about this has been a lie.
And worse yet, it hasn't been told anything for almost a decade because we've been talking about Iraq and we've been talking about Afghanistan.
But Kosovo is what made Iraq possible.
It happened four years earlier.
That's what nobody's talking about.
Yeah, well, every president's got to have a war somewhere.
And I guess Bill Clinton's genocide against Iraq through the blockade and no-fly zone bombings just wasn't really exciting enough.
Of course, you had the Waco massacre.
He got to use the Delta Force there.
But that's not really a war like Desert Storm like George Bush got to have.
So, you know, 1999, he's running out of time.
He's in a hurry.
He's got to have a real war somewhere, right?
Right.
And I mean, it would be funny if it weren't tragic.
But there was a movie back at the time called Wag the Dog, in which a fictitious president goes to war against Albania of all things.
And it's a fictitious war.
It's completely done in the studio.
Nothing actually takes place in the field.
And it's all done with, you know, through the help of a Hollywood producer and this psy-operative and a PR person.
And they have all sorts of wacky misadventures, obviously.
And there are people who die in the end.
And the entire nation is sold on this myth that there was a war with Albania that mercifully ended.
And it had its own, you know, tragic hero that ended up being somebody that some lunatic rapist that they, you know, got out of the military stockade, who was basically spun into this, you know, heroic special operative.
And the whole thing is just so cynical because it's true.
I mean, it's basically people whose people's names have been changed and some places have been changed.
But it's precisely what happened.
It's funny, too, because the way it should be right would be have a sex scandal to distract from the evils of the foreign policy.
But no, nobody cares about mass murder for lies.
They get really upset about a sex scandal, though.
So it really is better in the mathematics of political capital and all that.
Go ahead and distract from a sex scandal with a war instead of the other way around.
Right.
Well, I mean, in these days, Washington's become so jaded that, you know, the saying used to be don't get caught with a with a live girl.
Now it's don't get caught with a dead girl or a live boy.
And yet even that is, you know, no longer the case.
Man, those Republicans, I'll tell you.
All right.
Well, now, wait a minute.
Rewind a little bit to the early 90s and tell me about the breakup of Yugoslavia and the intervention.
I guess I remember that Bill Clinton sent troops in 95, said they'd be home by Christmas.
Not sure if that ever happened.
But, you know, the Kosovo war, I remember much better than the previous intervention there in Bosnia.
Did they pick the side of the gangsters there, too?
Well, in Bosnia, they picked the side of the jihadists.
That's a whole different story.
I mean, you know, it's a much closer to home experience.
I've actually I actually lived through the Bosnian war.
I left Bosnia right after the war ended while the peace treaty was still in the process of being set up.
And so I remember things pretty vividly.
And I've been there a couple of times since.
The problem is that the regime in Bosnia that labeled itself progressive and multiculturalist and tolerant and, you know, favoring a citizen state was actually run by a radical Islamist ideology and who were actually won all sorts of merit awards throughout the Islamic world for his contribution to Islamic politics.
And well, I think you told me before years ago, I'm sorry, because we are running out of time here.
I think you told me before that as Yugoslavia was breaking up after the fall of communism, that Richard Holbrook came in and took what had sort of been soft, unofficial borders as people were moving.
And there was violence and ethnic cleansing or whatever going on.
Then you said Holbrook came in, took a magic marker and said, these are now international borders and which just left, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people on the wrong side of the various lines and precipitated much worse violence.
Is that really his legacy in the Balkans?
It wasn't Holbrook who did that.
But what he ended up doing in Dayton and what was being celebrated as his greatest achievement actually took place in spite of him.
He was the one who orchestrated the whole thing to get the Serbian president, who wasn't necessarily involved, but he made it so that he had to become involved, the president of Croatia and the Bosnian Muslim leader.
And they all sat down in Dayton and drew the maps of Bosnia and then the Bosnian constitution and so on and so forth.
And that's all.
I mean, if they had stuck to that, that would have been fine and good.
But, you know, Dayton came in, it ended the war, the shooting stopped, the conflict moved to the political sphere, obviously, because it wasn't resolved.
And then Holbrook spent the next 10 years trying to destroy his creation, because he's been campaigning incessantly for a centralized Bosnian state, which would be completely against the peace agreement.
So when people celebrate him for his success at Dayton, they kind of neglected to mention that, yes, it was a great success for Dayton, and then he renounced it and spent most of his latter career trying to destroy it, as well as the U.S. government.
So it just goes to show that, you know, any piece of paper that you sign with most governments is completely worthless, especially if the government gets to interpret what it says.
Well, so did I have it right that it was the Americans or the so-called international community that made those borders hard borders?
And you're saying then what, that Holbrook came later?
Right.
Well, I believe it was the EU who declared the borders of the Yugoslav Republics, which were arbitrarily drawn by communists, to be international borders.
I'm not going to say it would have been fine if they stuck to that principle, but once the principle was established and once, you know, tens of thousands of people have been killed for it, they turned around and said, well, except in the case of Serbia, in which case the borders of Kosovo are sovereign and borders of Serbia can be modified at will.
So really, there's just this complete absence of principle or standard or any sort of coherent philosophy that's internally contained.
It's basically whatever we want goes.
It's the arrogance of power that's involved here.
The Balkans is not subject to any sort of general principle.
Basically, it's all sui generis.
It's all an exception to the rule.
And of course, that cannot exist.
And that cannot carry on for very long.
Well, now, listen.
And all that is just crumbling down.
Now, I might be ignorant, but I'm not so naïve to think that the Democrats care about anybody.
So what were their ulterior motives in all this intervention?
Is it just about building bases, securing some pipeline routes or preventing some?
Or what's the dang deal here?
It was power.
Holbrooke himself had acknowledged back in 1998 in his memoirs that the Bosnian intervention was all about getting America back into Europe and reasserting its dominance, because you had this whole post-Cold War notion of, OK, well, Cold War's over.
The Soviet empire's gone.
Let's just have a unified Europe.
Let's have a stronger role for the European Union.
We no longer have to be directed from Washington.
We no longer have to be told what to do.
Why should we listen to the Pentagon all the time?
Well, and they even talked about the creation of a European standing army.
Correct.
And that all got pretty much wrecked through the Balkans intervention.
Ironically, it was the Europeans who were left to clean up the mess that the Americans created.
But that was the whole point.
You create the mess, you make the Europeans deal with it, and you carry on and you maintain this whole, OK, we give the orders and you clean up our mess.
I'm not saying that a European super state would have been a better solution.
Far from it.
I'm just saying that part of the motivation here was strictly power.
It was reasserting power.
And he wrote about it openly in his book.
I said in the obituary I wrote about him that just about the only thing worth of respect in him is that he was sufficiently arrogant to actually say what he meant.
Well, and, you know, that's really out of the defense planning guidance of Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby from 1991.
It's all about Germany.
What's going to become of reunited Germany?
And will they be, you know, like like America's run by the British imperialists of the World War One era or something?
What are we going to do about German power on the continent?
And then this is a big part of the NATO expansion eastward to surround, quote, old Europe with new European powers, all armed by America and Lockheed, and so that they're kind of surrounded by the NATO alliance that they may never break free of it.
Well, what's really ironic is that the general American foreign policy seems to be a carbon copy of the British one from the 19th century, specifically in the Balkans.
However, it seems to have been carbon copied from Austria-Hungary from 100 years ago.
And in the case of relations with Russia, it was copied from, well, Hitler, pretty much.
Yeah, well, we all know how well the British Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Soviet Empire worked out for everybody involved with them, right?
Exactly, exactly.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We got to go.
I got to interview Patrick Coburn here.
We're over time, but thank you very much for your time, Norbert.
I really do appreciate it.
And let's do this again more often.
Absolutely.
All right, everybody.
That is Namocha Malik from antiwar.com, original.antiwar.com/Malik, M-A-L-I-C.
And his website is greyfalcon.blogspot.com.
