For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
Just last week, the International Court made a decision that, if I understand it correctly, individual Serbian commanders were acquitted of genocide, and yet the nation state of Serbia itself was found guilty collectively, or some such confusing thing, I'm not sure.
But lucky for me, I have Chris D'Alessio on the phone from Balkanalysis.com and Antiwar.com, and he's in Skopje, Macedonia.
Welcome to the show, Chris.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be here.
Good to talk with you again, sir.
And I probably characterized the results of this tribunal all wrong, so why don't you set me straight here?
What's going on?
Well, what it actually was was separate, there's something called the Hague Tribunal for war crimes in Serbia, and that was for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, and also in some cases in Africa.
And that was what was trying the late Sobedon Milosevic and other individuals.
But the Hague doesn't do countries.
So what happened was Bosnia and Herzegovina took Serbia as a country to court in the World Court for the crime of genocide.
But first of all – and they were making a big deal about this as the first time that one country has sued another country for alleged genocide.
But in fact, it was not the entire Bosnian state, which is a tri-ethnic, tripartite federation of Bosnian Muslims, Croat Catholics, and Bosnian Serb Orthodox Christians.
The Serb entity naturally had nothing to do with this.
And when it came down to it, the case was pushed largely by the Bosnian Muslim Party, which had been under Izet Begović, the late leader who, you know, they were working together with bin Laden and bringing in Mujahideen from Iran and Sudan during the war.
So just to give it a little bit of background in that way, it wasn't a case brought completely by one country against another country.
It was a case brought together by political elements from a half of a country against another country.
I see.
So what actually ended up happening was that the World Court decided there was not enough evidence that Serbia, as a state, had deliberately tried to commit genocide against Bosnian Muslims.
Although they did make a little caveat, they said genocide did take place, which is also hotly contested still, and that Serbia had not taken enough measures to stop it.
But that pissed off the Bosnian Muslims because they didn't get their cash payout and they didn't get the recognition that they had expected from this.
And it probably made a lot of people sigh of it easier because a precedent hadn't been set.
Right.
And then, but at the same time, a different court was in the middle of acquitting specific Serbs of engineering these massacres and such, right?
I'm not sure I follow.
Let's see.
I thought you said that there was kind of one suit going on in the World Court and then there was a trial going on in The Hague that was against individuals, right?
The Hague is against individuals.
There's many of those cases and what happened with, there's so many, there's something like two thirds of the defendants have been Serbian and some have been, that's all at different times.
When Milosevic, the former president of Serbia, was the biggest fish, but he died while still in Hague custody, they hadn't finished his trial and it was speculation that he would have been acquitted because the point is if Serbia as a nation has just been found not guilty of trying to commit genocide, then how is it possible that Milosevic would have been, as president of that country, how is it possible that he would have been found guilty of, as leader of that country, how would he have possibly been found guilty of trying to commit genocide if his country hadn't been, you know, he died in a rather mysterious way while still in his cell and it would have been a huge embarrassment for The Hague, which has been built upon this solid reputation as Slobodan Milosevic as the evil doer, the one person in the Balkans who committed everything wrong and everything was because of him and if he wasn't found guilty, then it would have been a lot of egg on their face and people would have questioned what they were doing for so long with this case that dragged on four, five, six years.
Well, now, was Milosevic anything less than the monster he's portrayed as?
Well, he was certainly not wonderful, he was organized crime flourished under him, he was cynical and manipulative politician like all the others, but I mean there was a big war and there was people from all sides who committed atrocities, but the thing is where they have really won, the system has really won of international justice, is they have succeeded in keeping the people, the participants and the viewers of this obsessed with the details rather than the big picture.
So when this recent world court ruling came out, all the media stories essentially have been focusing on the details, the reactions of the people, they say the Muslims reacted angrily saying that nobody has respected our suffering or the Serbs reacted happily saying thank you, thank you for exonerating us, when the real questions are not asked, the question of under what right is an international body of random judges have the moral authority to judge such cases and if you say okay, we won, if you're a Serb and you say okay, they didn't find us guilty, isn't that great, it's still showing no self-respect because if you're going to deny the validity of the court, you have to deny it in all cases, you can't play their game and their game is to be acknowledged as an authority when it's really just a completely arbitrary group of individuals and they're basically legislating history, they're educating on what happened in a certain place that was very complicated, just a handful of individuals who were probably fine judges and intelligent people but the question of why a small group of judges will be able to adjudicate on a historical matter, especially a war which is very complicated, it's not like when you have other world arbitration disputes like about like I said, fishing rights or something like that or environmental issues or when country A's cyanide spills down the river into country B, it's nothing clear cut like that.
It has to do with deeply emotional issues and highly contested incidents, the recounting of highly contested incidents and it's not something that a handful of people can agree upon and make a ruling and that's it.
Well sure and when you're talking about disputes between states, I think I agree with you, fishing rights is one thing and exactly who's guilty for what in wartime is probably something too complicated for any court system to be in charge of deciding, that's one thing I guess but separate from that is the issue of the International Criminal Court and the Hague Tribunal taking jurisdiction over individual citizens and I think many Americans probably think well you know these are bad guys and they got to be put on court somewhere and I'm glad somebody's doing something about it and that kind of thing except I guess we have to put the shoe on the other foot and ask ourselves how would we like for Americans to be taken to Europe and put in front of a court where they have no jury, no American Bill of Rights, but instead have...
Mostly the American public just is not aware that such things go on but I remember in the last few years when we were building up this coalition of the wilting, of the willing, the wilting now, the US was asking from all these countries like Macedonia who were donating troops to sign an exemption so that no American citizens would be sent to an International Criminal Court and that's perfectly fine and it would be wonderful for our principals if we just were not so hypocritical about it saying that you know such things don't apply to us but they have to apply to other people and that other people should be judged if you're going to believe that you know you have state sovereignty and that random international courts cannot judge your people then you should do it for other people otherwise you're classifying them as subhuman.
Right, and of course Bush didn't, all the hype was that it was such a terrible thing that Bush had unsigned the treaty which he had not done, what he did was as you correctly note he negotiated a temporary exemption for American government employees for him and his military and his civilian advisors but it doesn't cover us.
For the individual countries that are party to those courts, right, so if you happen to be in a certain country to guarantee that that country won't extradite you to that criminal court which is in you know Northern Europe, but it could be anywhere, right, it could be anywhere.
The whole point of having these unaccountable international bodies, I mean that was a good thing if you're an American, if you're a believer in state and individual sovereignty then you have to cheer that but at the same time we have the American government putting a lot of pressure on countries, especially Serbia, to comply with the Hague, to comply with these courts or else they don't get funding, they don't get aid, they don't get political support, it's a little bit hypocritical, you know.
Sure, it's the same thing on the larger scale, it's the cop running the red light just because he can.
The enforcers of the law don't have to obey it which is something that's becoming more and more common here in America.
Well, you know, it's so ironic because the Hague Tribunal is based in the town of the Hague in the Netherlands and they're judging Yugoslav war crimes, especially the super case is Srebrenica, the UN safe haven that fell then the classic media line is where up to 8,000 men and boys were slaughtered by Serb forces and you know who the peacekeepers were who left were Dutch so you have the international court set up in Holland, you know, they didn't say that in this world court ruling, they didn't say that the Dutch were at fault for abetting the genocide, Serbia was at fault for not doing anything to stop it but you have these heavily armed western peacekeepers who didn't do anything and they were the ones who were literally in front of it, you know.
Even those numbers, this 8,000 dead is often challenged but when you repeat something enough in the media it sort of institutionalizes it and it becomes very hard to dislodge it so now you don't need to cite any proof to say that which is also, you know, it's a very conspiratorial role between the media and the governments in these cases.
When you build a story according to what the governments want that story to be it becomes too difficult to disagree with it because then you're called a holocaust denier, you know.
Right, yeah, one holocaust or another, I've noticed this more and more in America that genocide doesn't even have a definition anymore, genocide just means something bad that I don't like now.
It used to mean a determined effort to exterminate a race of people and ethnicity off the face of the earth, that's what it used to mean, right?
Now it means a bad massacre that happened somewhere maybe.
Yeah, and even in the case of Srebrenica which I said is very controversial, it always seemed funny to me how they say there's 8,000 men and boys, well where were the women, you know?
Is it possible to commit genocide against only males or if you're really trying to wipe out a people wouldn't you wipe out the women too, you know?
And they say why, this is because the place was evacuated and these people were hardline fighters who had been killing on the other side and so therefore some revenge was coming and that, you know, you don't need to be Nostradamus to see that and to wonder were these innocent civilians, etc.
But the fact of this being called a genocide, now with the legislation proposed by the Germans which has caused a real firestorm of outcry in Europe, especially from academics, is that it would be a criminal offense to deny a genocide, again rather arbitrarily, according to what who considers to be a genocide, a genocide is decided by one of these international courts which is funded by the Western governments to define things as genocide when they wish it to be.
Wow, I mean there's a concept right there, just American tax dollars going to fund a system that is trying to criminalize speech.
Free thought.
And now, you know, I hate to reach into my trusty bag of Jefferson quotes but I might as well when we're talking about free speech, Thomas Jefferson said error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
And is, I mean, is that not simple enough?
Should that not be just the end of the argument, Chris?
If I'm so wrong, you ought to be able to make a fool out of me in front of everybody and that ought to be the end of it, right?
Yeah, it's a question of what are they so afraid of that they have to heatedly codify something and institutionalize it, that they, they're just, what are they so afraid of?
If it's the truth, then the truth speaks for itself.
Of course, and you know, I read this article in the Telegraph where this academic, I forget her name, but she was someone who I guess had spent her life documenting the, the real truth of the Holocaust and yet was opposed to this law and was saying that this law gives the impression to the average guy on the street that I can't make my case, that I need cops to shut up people who try to argue with me.
Well, forget you, I can make my case just fine.
Yep, exactly.
And I, I think I have that article in front of me and you're speaking about Deborah Lipset, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies in Emory University, New Atlanta.
Right, and the other part of her quote is that the Holocaust is the most documented genocide in the history of anything and the idea that some David Irving lunatic could win an argument against her in a public forum or something, it's just laughable.
So why would she need cops for?
That's what she's saying.
Yeah, of course.
Of course.
So it's only when they're afraid of any kind of, let's say, being proven wrong that, that they want to, to codify, it makes it much easier, doesn't it?
I mean, if you don't have to think anymore, you can just sort of follow what the leaders tell you and by criminalizing this, by creating things that are genocide by definition instead of something to think about, then, you know, you can go back to your iPods or American Idol or whatever it is and just forget about it because that's thought for you and, you know, can move on from one intervention to the next.
Yeah.
And now let me ask you, while I can get an answer out of you without an arrest warrant being issued, when Bill Clinton bombed Serbia and Kosovo in 1999 to prevent genocide, was there, in fact, a genocide taking place in Kosovo for Bill Clinton to prevent?
Of course not.
They, they had a large refugee crisis, but that began only after NATO started bombing.
And in fact, what they never say is that, I think, you know, you never say with these numbers because it's all, it's very, very complicated, but there was, Macedonia got something like 400,000 ethnic Albanian refugees and the total number, I mean, some went to Albania, some went to Montenegro, and even some went to Serbia, which people don't say very often.
Of the refugees, some of them had been forced out by the ethnic Albania rebels, the KLA, Kosovo Liberation Army, you know, they told them leave because, you know, by leaving and making a big show of it, then it gets a lot more Western sympathy.
And the journalists were there on the Macedonian border to get these heart-rending photos of refugees in bonnets and shawls and, you know, babies and things.
And it came up during the Milosevic trial when they, nobody covered it, of course, when they interviewed some of the frontline medics and they had talked about how CNN was there, they would take a baby away from one family and put it with an old man, so of course the baby starts crying if he puts with some unfamiliar person or they would have some refugees walking and tell them to, you know, look down and out or, you know, take your mobile phone away, you know, your leather jacket, come across the hill again so we can get a good shot of you.
And it was completely, completely cynical.
I'm not saying that they didn't have a lot of suffering and attacks from Serb power militaries or whatever, of course they did, but to call it a genocide is really stretching it.
At that time when they started they were saying things like maybe 100,000 are dead and out of a population of around 2 million to have 100,000 dead would be shocking, wouldn't it?
But in the end, the number of total dead, and this includes the people who were killed by NATO, they dropped bombs on refugee columns, you know, and they killed civilians in Serbia and elsewhere, it was under 10,000, it was maybe more like 4,000 and, you know, alleged mass graves that were said during the war before anyone was there to document it didn't turn out to be there, but it didn't stop them from speculating.
And as always, whatever you say first is what is remembered.
So the fact that they said these things first means you just have to write a sentence in a media article and use this kind of emotive language and soon you're equating certain individuals, leaders, countries in the popular perception with evil itself.
Right.
And it sure worked in 1999.
Now, geez, I guess, you know, as long as I got you saying things that someday you might get arrested for saying, is it the case, and listen, I'm in Texas, I've never even been to Europe, much less the Balkans, I know, you know, basically what little I remember from the 1990s and the little bits that I see in the news here and there, but obviously the Middle East is front and center.
Is it right that, is it the case that the Serbs have basically all been ethnically cleansed out of Kosovo now?
More or less, yeah.
There may be maybe 100,000 or so left, I think about 200,000 were forced to flee since 1999 when NATO rolled in to protect the people.
So about two-thirds of them have been forced out?
Mm-hmm.
Actually, Serbia has the largest refugee population of any country in the Balkans, which includes people from the different, many of the different Yugoslav republics.
Right.
And there's this big fight over the status of Kosovo, whether it will be an independent state or not.
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
And so what, I mean, basically give us the rough outline.
Let me start you with the Serbs don't want Kosovo to be independent and the Albanians do, right?
Well, this is really a no-win situation for everybody involved.
And this is why, I mean, it is a classic quagmire, which is why anyone with sense could have predicted it was better not to get involved in the beginning, because you have these two principles of international relations, one state sovereignty and the other, what, national self-determination.
And therefore, Kosovo has always been a province of Serbia and has historical churches and so on of Serbian origin, going back to the 13th century.
And in the Middle Ages was the heart of the Serbian state until the Ottoman Turks came and made it part of their empire, which lasted until the early 20th century.
But the Albanians in the meantime became the majority of the population.
So you have something that has never existed as an independent state, right?
That's what the Serbs say is part of the sovereignty argument, whereas the Albanians say, we got the numbers, we deserve the place as well.
And it's always been, at least in the last century, it's always been poor.
There's a lot of mineral riches, some water riches, but the way it is now, there's not good infrastructure and a lot of corruption, a lot of organized crime, and it's not going to be an economic miracle anytime soon.
And so there's a lot of dissatisfaction, a very young population, an Islamic movement, different things like this.
So there's really no happy future, no matter what it becomes.
If it stays with Serbia, then it won't, but if it did stay with Serbia, it would just be a huge drag on the economy.
It's always caused a lot of ill will, and Yugoslavia broke up in the early 90s.
Part of it was because wealthier republics like Slovenia were sick and tired of subsidizing poor places like Kosovo.
So the Adesari plan, named after Marty Adesari, who's the UN's lead negotiator, he was also a negotiator after the 1999 bombing.
He negotiated the peace agreement with Milosevic at that time, but he has come up with a plan which would basically, it would give Kosovo independence in everything but name.
And the Serbs, of course, don't like that, and they fear that if Kosovo becomes independent then their minorities will be wiped out pretty soon, as would be expected.
I've talked to top migration officials and the people who are on the ground and directly involved with this, and they all see that within 10 years there will be no Serbs left in Kosovo.
And I don't think, I mean, the UN administration that's been there since 99 has been pretty pitiful at doing anything to stop that or to make it a better, happier, multiethnic society, and there's no reason to think that things are going to improve in the future.
At the same time, there's a lot of discontent, there's sort of a youth group, extremist group called Self-Determination, which is advocating no negotiations at all with Serbia, just independence, we take it, drive the UN out, whatever.
And they've been causing a lot of problems, they've agitated, had protests defaced UN property, and recently mysterious groups have set up checkpoints and started bombing UN and OSCE vehicles.
So for over maybe two years there's been a lot of pressure by shadowy nationalist forces in Kosovo against the UN, so they're living on borrowed time as well.
But the whole thing is a tinderbox because of this, let's say, this impasse between the two principles of state sovereignty and national self-determination, the Russian president Vladimir Putin has warned that Kosovo independence could have ominous results for other parts of the world where you have an angry minority, right?
And you have that everywhere from the Basques country to China with the URs.
But he was speaking especially about the Caucasus, which is important for the West as an oil and gas corridor, where countries like Georgia have two angry secessionist areas, Abkhazia, Althussetia, and neighboring Armenia, which has a disputed Azerbaijani province, Nagorno-Karabakh, which is an Armenian majority and supposedly under the control of Azerbaijan.
And so you have a bunch of potential hotspots that could all take Kosovo as a precedent if it becomes independent, and it already more or less is independent.
And all of these places could reignite either on their own or through, you know, greater political manipulation, like the Georgians always accused Russia of being behind the separatists in Abkhazia and Althussetia, and there's certainly some validation for that.
But the point is it's because of this small and pretty dismal place in the center of the Balkans, the whole world order is being challenged now.
And I don't think Americans probably, you know, can't find it on the map even, and yet even after eight years from this botched international intervention, it still has a lot of danger in it.
And the point is you can't avoid it.
Something is going to happen, but it can't go back to the old way, and the new ways are all dangerous, whatever way you look at it.
We're talking about international forces of one kind or the other being there for at least the next 10 or 20 years, but nobody has any real solution to make the people live together happily.
Right.
And, you know, face it, there's not one.
I mean, the fact of the matter is we're talking about ethnic and religious and historical differences that go back hundreds and hundreds of years.
And at least for the domestic audience here, the lesson as far as America is concerned is that, you know what, Central Europe's a hellhole.
It's been a hellhole in a lot of ways for a long time, and it's none of our business.
We can't fix it.
You would think that they would say that, but this is not about common sense.
It's about making money, you know.
Yeah.
The people on these U.N. missions just make so much money.
Well, yeah, let's talk about that.
First of all, about who these U.N. peacekeepers are.
I guess I think I read something that you wrote that said that a lot of this U.N. peacekeeping is actually private contractors at this point carrying it out now.
And also, what do you think would happen if they up and left?
Would the war just break out again?
Right.
OK.
Well, first of all, I guess it might differ from place to place, but in somewhere like Kosovo, I believe the State Department of each country or foreign ministry gets a mandate from the U.N.
We need 200 guys for this place, for this position.
And then usually, at least in the American case, I've heard they subcontract that to other departments and to private companies like, say, Dyncor, the famous private contracting company.
It's pretty well represented in the Balkans.
So the applicant would usually go through one of those private contracting companies.
They might have military experience.
They might not.
There's a lot of civilian positions.
Actually, most of it is civilian.
And then they would put on the U.N. blue helmet or work in the international organization.
So it's not just the U.N., it's groups like the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and of course, these organizations all have huge budgets and money is not an object.
So you get those people and it's a little bit deceptive because you think that because of the stature and the way the media represents it is everyone who works for the U.N. is sort of an altruist.
It's almost like a...
You can tell by the baby blue helmet.
That's how you know that they mean well.
It's such a soft color.
It's almost like a charity, right?
You're doing charity work.
The reality is different.
You have, let's say, there was one case I remember, a guy from Africa who had AIDS from one poor country in Africa and he went on a sort of death tourism.
It's really macabre, but they knew he was dying and so he volunteered to work for the U.N. in Kosovo and he didn't tell anybody there that he was dying and they didn't check.
And if you die on the job, then there's some large cash payout.
So he sort of wanted to look after his family in the future and by joining the U.N. in Kosovo, he was able to get the payment when he did eventually die.
I mean, is that screwed up or what?
That's the warfare welfare state, I guess that's what they call it, right?
But the second part of your question was, I forget.
It was what would happen if they all up and left?
All right.
Okay.
Well, you would have two stages, I think.
First of all would be to eliminate the minorities and the second stage would be, once that had been happening, and it will happen eventually, is that the powerful clans who run Kosovo, the ethnic Albanian clans would turn on each other because they are very unified so long as there is a perceived external oppressor.
First of all, it was the Serbs and now it's the U.N., that is the perceived outside party who is holding them back from the great myth of national unity, which they never really had anyway.
So once that starts, once the internationals are gone, the Serbs are gone, and once it's just them, then the infighting begins for who will have control of the place within their own community.
I don't think the internationals are going to just up and leave like that and anyway would be a phased withdrawal and it will take time.
So what you're saying is really that the Serbs would not have any real claim on Kosovo anymore.
It would be de facto independent immediately, basically.
Well, it is that way anyway.
And I think the important thing is that when the average media consumer reads about Kosovo, they say, okay, there's these, thank God we have whatever, 18,000 NATO troops and peacekeepers on the ground.
The situation is peaceful, looked after.
The fact of the matter is that these people are not much of a deterrent because they're looking to save their own hides first.
They stopped in, I think, 2005.
They stopped patrolling or going around in areas that were perceived as dangerous.
So they say there's less bad news to report, but that's because they see less bad news.
Now that they recently attacked with some grenades, I think, or some form of explosives, the UN parking lot, now you have to park for the UN vehicles all in certain secured locations.
And if you think about it, even if you're just a secretary or whether you're a negotiator or a diplomat, if you are living in Kosovo, you're going to the restaurants that are owned by the mafia.
You're living in an apartment that's maybe owned by the mafia.
The hotels are owned by the mafia.
So everywhere they are, they're basically living at the pleasure of their hosts, which is the mafia, essentially.
So they're not going to do anything that is going to make them unpopular with the real people behind the scenes.
They're just custodians and they're there for the position and they're there for the money.
But when the media reports that they're making some great difference, it's just deceptive because they're not reporting about how the day-to-day reality is and the fact is that nobody is planning to die for the UN flag or helmet or whatever.
They're certainly just looking after themselves first and you can see in various news reports come out about stabbings, killings, stonings of buses, things.
And it's not just against minorities, it's Albanian-Albanian violence against other groups of people.
It goes on and on.
And the UN just says that it doesn't exist rather than they just are masters of passing the buck.
And the point you mentioned at first about how they come from private contracting companies, it makes it even better because the people are there privately.
There is no real cohesion or unity.
There's nothing like patriotism.
There is no incentive to really do the job as mandated, although I have met some very good people who are very hardworking and very ethical and they care a lot about what's going on.
There is no real incentive in the traditional way, which is patriotism and love of country and love of your work to do better.
So they're just trying to collect the money and move on.
I'm Scott Horton.
You're listening to Anti-War Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm talking with Chris D'Alessio from bulkanalysis.com and antiwar.com.
Now you mentioned toward the beginning of the show that back during the war in Kosovo, you mentioned an alliance between some of these Muslim factions and Osama bin Laden and the Mujahideen.
And I know that the Kosovo Liberation Army has long been tied with heroin running and that kind of thing.
And I just wonder how old is my information?
Is there still that kind of alliance going on between the terrorists and the drug dealers and the, as you say, the Albanian mafia in Kosovo?
Well, you know, wherever you have large amounts of money, you have the organizations that are involved with desiring large amounts of money, which involves everyone from secret services to terrorists to just ordinary organized criminals, right?
So this is the hardest thing to report because it's the most dangerous thing.
And the reason you don't hear more about it is because journalists do not have any kind of incentive to investigate things like that.
And even though, especially the local journalists.
Here in Macedonia, we have many good journalists, you have many people who know what's really going on, but for the kind of salary they get in a small country, their family is known, they're known, there's really no incentive to talk about these things.
So when you do, it's at a great risk and you can never really get the whole story.
But certainly from the accounts that have come out now, and then you can see that there's still a lot of cooperation.
I think there was a good example in the Houston Chronicle about a year and three months ago, I think December 2005, where they discussed with the Serbian authorities about human trafficking, which is one of the biggest, maybe the biggest forms of organized crime in the world, whether it be to bring in migrant laborers or kidnapped people or prostitutes or whatever, organ trafficking.
It's probably the biggest form of organized crime.
And in that case, the police authority who was interviewed was talking about a Bangladeshi native who was bringing in across Romania and Serbia and Bosnia, lots of mostly illegal workers who wanted a better life in the West.
But among them also were some bad dudes, some Islamic terrorist types who he had negotiated with as well because they will pay and they have brothers in the West who will take them in.
So that's one example.
But with the drugs, of course, I mean, you've read all and you've heard all of Sibel Edmonds' testimony on this, the former FBI translator, and if the drugs are coming from Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda, Taliban has so long resided, then you're going to have to have some form of dealing between them.
Where this could be interesting in the future is, is it possible that the Kosovo Albanians are fairly secular-minded, even if they're predominantly Muslim, for now they're fairly secular nationalists.
But there is a small foreign-funded Islamic movement growing there, especially in rural areas that have been overlooked by Western donors, where all the money is coming in is Saudi and the banks are Saudi and they're giving the loans and the spiritual advice and everything.
So what if, in the future, the people in Afghanistan start to say, look, if you want us to keep the drugs coming in or at this price, then you have to start tolerating our brothers over there.
That's where you could have a more serious problem.
Well, so pardon my ignorance, and maybe you can help me out, Christopher D'Alesso.
Why did America take the side of Osama bin Laden's friends and the Muslims in this war in central Europe, rather than the Christian Serbs?
In Bosnia, you mean?
Yeah, overall, throughout the whole 1990s, right?
It was always siding against the Christians.
It wasn't always, because they were also heavily supporting Croatia, which is Catholic, and also fighting against the Serbs.
Okay.
Well, wasn't there even a policy that made any sense at all?
Was Bill Clinton just over there using any excuse he could to intervene one way or another, without any rhyme or reason, or what?
Well, I think if you go back to 1991, when he's campaigning, 92, he did have an interventionist mindset already and was eager to use the Balkans as a way to show his skill at that.
And if you go back, you can see that one of the main organizers of this arming the Bosnian Muslims policy was Anthony Lake, who was then the national security advisor.
I think they probably made the same mistake that they made in 1979, 1980, when they decided to support the Afghan Mujahideen against Soviet Union, which was that it'll be quick and easy, we won't have to get our hands dirty, and then they will just go home and be good Mujahideen afterwards and we won't have to worry about them.
You know, basically classic short-term thinking, which ignores the possibility of blowback.
This according to Seymour Hersh, we're doing in Lebanon again right now.
Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.
I think they can have these sort of proxy fighters and it'll be good and you can buy everyone.
I think maybe that is the problem, is that whereas these real hardcore Islamists, and I'm not making any kind of denunciation of Islam or Muslims in general, but the really hardcore guys, you can pay them and they will take the money, but that won't make them change their mind.
They'll still hate you and they'll find a way to use it against you in the end.
So it's a total bonus for them if the U.S. wants to give the money to kill their enemies wherever they happen to be, and then they can use that money to kill Americans later.
So in Bosnia, the U.S. didn't want to get involved because there was a U.N. arms embargo on all the sides in that three-sided war, which incidentally made a huge bonus for arms traffickers.
And they didn't want to get involved directly, so they had Saudi Arabia fund arms shipments and Iran fund arms shipments and shipments of fighters through Sudan, which was where bin Laden was living at the time.
And they would come into Germany or Austria, go through there, through Slovenia, through Croatia into Bosnia with the complete help of the German secret services, et cetera.
And the charity networks that were set up to cover for all this, a lot of the Islamic charity networks, allowed these battle-hardened Afghan fighters to set up a European network, which led indirectly to September 11th attacks.
And so it is a pretty good example of blowback, but that's one that is just now starting to be brought to public attention.
The danger now in Bosnia, they're always saying, okay, Bosnia is fine.
Most of those foreign fighters have left and gone on to greener pastures like Iraq.
There are some of them about, I guess, 300, they want to revoke their passports that they were given during the wartime Muslim government, and they don't want to go and they're not happy about that at all, because now the U.S. is saying, well, we shouldn't have let you come, but you have to leave now.
And they're saying, no, we live here, we got passports from the government, we're not going to go.
And so some of them are going underground through these sort of escape routes throughout Europe and showing up in different places.
And it has a radicalizing effect.
Even in Bosnia, most Bosnians are not really, even the religious, the ones who are Muslim, they're not all that religious.
You can see them drinking beer, going out on the town.
But there is a small and pesky minority of foreign-funded radicals who are something to watch.
And this is what different intelligence agencies say, as well as occasional news reports and books that are coming up.
Well that's why Antiwar.com has you, our man in Europe, to keep us updated on all this stuff.
Listen, I want to get back to Germany and France and these people trying to outlaw speech, the natural right of a man to express his opinion, and the idea that somehow if we have this same conversation in a year or two, that an extradition order for your arrest could be issued, and you could go to jail because somehow all this could be construed as denying a genocide?
Well, I don't know if you can make an extradition order or anything, it has to do within the EU, wherever you happen to be.
Oh, okay.
Macedonia is not in the EU.
Thank God, no.
Oh, that's good.
Okay.
You can still smoke freely and think freely.
All right.
Well, okay.
So if you went to Amsterdam for the weekend or something to have fun with your friends, you could go to jail for telling me that Bill Clinton's masquerades never showed up any better than George Bush's weapons of mass destruction.
In a way, I don't think this will ever pass as an EU-wide thing, although different individual countries have passed these tough laws.
So the prospects for it are looking dim now.
It's supposed to be against inciting racist or ethnic hatred, things like that, but also that is a very wide remit, and it would be very hard to judge about these incredibly vague concepts.
Yeah.
Well, I wonder about the state of liberty overall.
I guess you say it doesn't look like it's going to make it through the EU parliament to apply to everyone, and so that's good, but I don't know.
I would like to think that if somebody proposed something like that here, they'd just be laughed right out of town.
Don't people in Europe care about being free?
That is one good thing.
In America, you have a different dynamic, though, with that same thing, if you would like to speak about that a little.
Sure.
Well, I know that some of these Democrats have hate crime legislation that they're trying to pass.
I don't know if it's anything as severe as this.
The way I look at it is more like the same things, like the same alleged genocides or historical matters, whatever.
In the U.S., it works a little bit different than the European attack on free speech, as far as I can see, which is that foreign lobbyists try to get American legislators to pick their side in complex historical matters.
This has happened, a perfect example, in France, they're making legislation to outlaw denial of the Armenian genocide, which is another hotly disputed, was it genocide, was it not thing, which from the years of 1905 to 1915, when Armenia was part of Ottoman Turkey and many Armenians were killed by the Turks.
The Armenian lobby, and Armenia is always pushing for recognition of this as a genocide or as a holocaust, and Turkey is equally saying it wasn't, and it's more complicated than that.
France made this law, and it really made Turkey angry.
Of course, there's other political things there, which is that Turkey's trying to join the EU, and the EU is trying to hold Turkey off, and they don't really want a large Muslim country to be in it, and they're trying to find all kinds of ways to provoke them, but that's just a detail compared to the main point.
In America, you couldn't do that, but you could get a recognition law, which is not going to criminalize anybody, but which would be a politically significant thing.
The Armenian lobby in America has been pushing for the US Congress to make a resolution saying that there was such a thing as an Armenian genocide, and Turkey as the successor state to the Ottoman Empire should have some kind of contrition or responsibility to admit this as well.
This is just amazing, because you have a bunch of legislators in the US who, they're certainly all intelligent men and women, but I don't think many of them have a PhD in Ottoman history.
The question is, first of all, under what authority would they have to decide about such a thing, and even more importantly, what amount of time do they have to even think about such things?
With the way the world is going now, with Iraq, with possibly Iran, many other dangerous things happening, you would think they would need every waking minute to pay attention to the kind of things that are happening of a potentially genocidal nature, or at least more like nature, or even just to help their own constituents.
I don't think that thinking about making resolutions about historical issues in other countries has any amount of precedent.
It doesn't have any kind of importance.
Foreign lobbyists have voters in areas, so if you're from a constituency with a certain number of ethnic voters, they will vote for you if you vote for their symbolic legislation.
This is what is broken about the American political system.
If I may add to that, the whole basis is completely irrational.
Never mind the historical legitimacy of how many people died, how many Armenians at the hands of the Turks, what we're talking about here is all an exercise in collective guilt on the part of people who couldn't possibly have genocided the Armenians in the 19-teens.
Yeah, yeah, I don't think that they made a genocided mission about the American Indians.
I might be wrong, but I don't think that...
Well, even if they did, that's just as stupid.
It would be just as stupid, but you can see that it's just not productive.
If you return to the Balkans for a second, with the world courts and the criminal courts and the Hague Tribunal, that costs a lot of money.
The statistic I have in front of me, when the Hague started in 1994, at the suggestion of a German foreign minister at the time, I believe, it had a budget of under $300,000, which increased largely to $96 million by 2001, and now $300 million a year, basically.
So that's a lot of money.
And if you thought that perhaps when they were deliberating about whether they should even have such a thing, if they could have had the foresight to know how much money they would spend on it, which is in the billions, if they said we had X billion number of dollars that we're going to spend, we can either spend it on this controversial court, which will make everybody hate each other even more and bring nothing good to anybody's life, or we can spend it in some kind of productive way that will make everybody's life better.
I think if you put it that way, then there would be no question about which one you should do.
I'm not saying that you necessarily need to spend all this money on foreign countries anyway, but even if you compare it like that, there's really no justification for such courts and for such kind of application of energy.
It's counterproductive, and it doesn't improve anybody's life at all.
It improves reputations of judges and governments, and it preserves people's legacies.
So in that case, it's completely political, but it doesn't help anybody that it's supposed to help.
Yeah.
And we see what happens.
The American Supreme Court already in, I believe, two or three cases have cited the world court and basically kind of referred to themselves as an inferior court, as though they're not the highest, or the arbiters, I guess, of the highest law in the land anymore.
There's somebody higher than them, and they acquiesce to it.
Yeah, I don't know.
I'm not familiar with those cases, but I can...
Yeah, I can't cite them off the top of my head, but I remember reading that there were at least two or three where they said, well, you know how the world court ruled in this case or that case.
And so we ought to conform to, I think that was the phrase, we ought to conform to the larger world court scheme here.
Right.
The fact that they're even citing it as a precedent for the American legal system.
Yeah.
I can do what you're saying.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't think any of these opinions were entirely decided on that particular issue necessarily, but still that is a frightening development from this point of view.
And particularly, as you say, when America attempts to, or actually oftentimes succeeds in foisting this on the rest of the world while claiming complete immunity for ourselves, that situation can't last.
And I'm afraid that the backlash is going to be pretty severe.
Yeah.
I look at all this stuff and all this hypocrisy and it just, it can't end in any good way.
It just, it really can't.
I mean, if you look at the Hague tribunal website right now, you will see a photograph, which is doctored, it's not doctored, but it didn't, it's a very famous photograph, which shows a Bosnian Muslim group of people who are supposed to be in some kind of concentration camp behind barbed wire.
And this was very emotive picture in 1992 and the public relations companies used it to the hilt and they said, we must intervene, et cetera.
But actually the photographers, it was a refugee camp and the photographers were inside the barbed wire.
The barbed wire was protecting the people from, you know, electrical generator, which could kill you if you, if you touched it.
And they found the guy who looked the most emaciated in the crowd and that's because he had some medical conditions and they had to tell him not to smile because they were not under some kind of, you know, severe mistreatment, but they got the image and the, you know, the image, if you supply the image, I'll supply the war, right?
That's the old phrase.
For more than a hundred years now.
And the point is that this picture has been thoroughly discredited and it's still there right now, today, right now, as I'm looking on the website of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and under, ironically enough, under the little button that says latest development.
So that's sort of where it ended in 1992.
That's the latest development in the popular mind about who's right and who's wrong and all these things.
And I even wrote to them and I asked, what are you doing with this?
And they didn't reply.
Christopher De Liso, everybody from bulkanalysis.com and antiwar.com.
Thanks, Chris.
Thanks a lot, Chris.
Thank you.
