03/25/09 – Nebojsa Malic – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm here to talk about America's and NATO's war against Serbia ten years ago.
It is Navoisa Malik.
He writes Moments of Transition, formerly Balkan Express, at Antiwar.com.
You can find it at Antiwar.com and he also writes the blog, greyfalcon.blogspot.com.
Welcome to the show, Navoisa.
How are you doing?
Thank you.
I'm doing well.
Thank you for having me.
Well, thank you for holding on through that terrible Bill Clinton speech.
And forgive me, please, for having gone so long since I've invited you on the show.
It's been years and years.
And I guess my problem is I don't know too much about the Balkans in general.
And I have no real way of keeping track of who's who or any kind of thing.
And there hasn't been too much big news in these intervening years to cover.
And I've sort of just let it slip under my radar.
Not that the issue has been resolved at all.
So my apologies to you and my sincere welcome to the show.
It's really good to talk to you again and to have you here.
Let's start with the Rambo-Yea Accord.
That's what Bill Clinton was just talking about there.
The peace agreement.
The Kosovars have already agreed to it.
The Serbs won't agree to it.
And yet I seem to remember there was something funny about calling that thing a peace agreement at the time.
Do you have any comment about that?
Well, you remember correct.
And I was going to say, commenting on the whole speech by Clinton, that surprise, surprise, just about everything in that speech was a lie, including the end and the.
And among other things, so was the notion that together with the Western allies and Russia, there was a peace proposal in Rambo-Yea.
The thing that was proposed in Rambo-Yea was not talked over with Russians.
Or it was not talked over with anybody, really.
It was an ultimatum.
It was an ultimatum that distilled to two sentences, basically said, OK, you will surrender Kosovo to NATO occupation, allow NATO to roam freely through Serbia, and give Albanians independence within three years.
Or else.
That was it.
So it was an offer they couldn't possibly accept, basically.
It was designed not to be accepted.
As a matter of fact, the 1300-page document issued by the Hague Tribunal last month, as part of their justification for the ridiculous verdict against the Serbian political and military leadership over the Kosovo War, included a quote from Clinton himself, who said that he wouldn't have signed the agreement had he had that choice.
So to say that Serbs rejected peace is just downright facetious.
But then again, what else could we expect from Clinton?
Right, yeah, well, and that's the whole thing.
He was a master at words.
I remember being in awe sometimes of the detailed nuances and kind of side-escape hatches built into the excuses he would give.
It was really something to behold, watching him edit his phony answer as he gives it, in such a masterful way.
He always was great at that.
And no wonder a lot of people thought of him the Antichrist at the time.
Yeah, well, I don't think I ever went that far, but I sure thought he was a felon and should be convicted as one, as far as that goes.
Well, I didn't think of him the Antichrist myself either, but a lot of people did.
Yeah, well, everybody thinks everybody's the Antichrist nowadays.
But anyway, so the other thing is, too, here, well, I want to try to wrap my head around it.
The way I remember this was the U.S. had made a giant precedent, basically, when the Soviet Union fell, as George Carlin said, couldn't wait to go and play with our toys in the sand.
We went over there to intervene in a war between two neighboring states, neither of which was an ally of ours.
Actually, I guess one of them was the aggressor, where Iraq invaded Kuwait, and we went and intervened in that border dispute war that had nothing to do with our country at all.
And then the Serbian war, and I guess to a lesser extent, at least as far as my understanding, the previous interventions in the Balkans, but particularly the war against Serbia for Kosovo, the precedent set there was, if America doesn't like what you're doing inside your own country, and it wasn't even really a civil war, as my understanding, they weren't even really trying to break free completely.
They just wanted autonomy, the Albanian-Kosovar state.
So it wasn't even really a civil war going on.
And it was just basically, you know, if we don't like your policy inside your country, America reserves the right to, you know, I guess get England and France and whoever to gang up on you, use NATO if necessary, to bomb the hell out of your country until you do what we say.
That's more or less technically correct.
I mean, I wrote a couple of essays yesterday in a variety of languages, and one of my theses was that the Gulf War wasn't exactly the first battle of the future, but the last battle of the past.
It was sort of a bookend to the Cold War.
Massive confrontation of armies in the open field, UN security authorization and all that.
But it was the first step on the road that the US followed in the 1990s, which was to craft, sort of like putting Legos together, build a power of precedence, so to speak, so that at the end of this, the end result would be the ability of Washington to bomb, invade, occupy, or blockade anybody, anywhere, for any reason.
When the Bosnian and the Croatian wars started in 1991 and 1992 respectively, NATO was minimally involved.
It was charged with enforcing the blockade of Yugoslavia, and then it was charged with enforcing the no-fly zone, and then to support the safe areas, and there was the dual key for airstrikes, and in the end, in Bosnia in 1995, it was airstrikes without any UN authorization.
And then in 1999, it was basically one of those, okay, well, we know it's illegal, we know there's no legal cover for this at all, we're not even going to bother to invent one, we're just going to say this is a horrible genocide and we have to stop it, and who cares what the Constitution or charters or anything else says.
Except, of course, it wasn't a genocide.
There were no widespread atrocities that Clinton was speaking of.
The offense that he was talking about, people lined up and shot.
At that particular point in time, that was absolutely not the truth.
He was lying through his teeth, as usual.
Well, on that point, let me stop you there for a second.
Forgive me, but the point about the mass graves is all important here.
Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and himself included in that clip, referred basically to either outright genocide or at least massive ethnic cleansing going on.
Thousands of people killed.
In some cases, they claimed as many as 100,000 people who are missing and presumed murdered.
And yet, the fact really is, as you just alluded to, they never found the mass graves that supposedly existed.
They had released satellite photos and all these things.
And yet, as John Pilger reported, the FBI Special Forensic Teams left after two weeks, and the UN doctor groups or whatever that were sent in to examine the mass graves were quoted angrily saying, we've been used and conned and this whole thing never even happened.
It was like Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program.
Right, that's correct.
The final body count that they found in individual graves, individual, not mass graves, was just north of 2,000 people.
And I think the research that's been done since, but not publicized at all, added up all the civilian and military casualties, including the KLA fighters, who cannot justly be counted as innocent civilians in any way, shape, or form.
And they amounted to less than 8,000 people total.
And that's Serbs and Albanians, victims of bombing as well as fighting.
And no mass graves at all.
In fact, the only two mass graves that I recall seeing stories about were mass graves of Serbs butchered by the KLA.
So, yeah, to say the least, disingenuous.
And the number of 10,000 that's routinely paraded as the number of Albanian civilians killed in the conflict is absolutely wrong.
Yeah, it's really no different than the Gulf of Tonkin or the weapons of mass destruction or any of these excuses.
They needed an excuse.
I mean, when the war started, Clinton was talking about people getting shot in the streets and whatnot, but the official line from NATO was, well, we are attacking to impose the Rambouillet Agreement, which wasn't an agreement.
And then, within a couple of weeks, when the Serbs didn't surrender as planned, they changed the story and started talking about genocide and atrocities and all this other stuff.
So, even the official excuse...
You know when people try to make up an excuse for something and it doesn't make up a beautiful lie and it collapses right away because it doesn't fit with the rest of their story?
I mean, this was a schoolbook example of it.
Yeah, well, just like they changed the operation in Iraq from finding weapons to creating democracy for the people there and all that kind of thing.
I also thought it was interesting the way they took a page right out of Ronald Reagan in that Clinton clip where he talked about the distance between Italy and Kosovo and it sounded just like when Ronald Reagan says, yeah, well, you know, Nicaragua is closer to Harlingen, Texas than Washington, D.C. is.
As though, you know, what was going on in Nicaragua was somehow a threat to the people of Texas.
And Bill Clinton just basically copied and pasted that exact same kind of fear-mongering thing as though Italy is a state in the Union anyway.
Right, and to be perfectly honest, there's a far bigger threat from Washington, D.C. to Texas than from Nicaragua.
No doubt about that.
Yeah, well, and in fact, in the person of Bill Clinton himself, who at least on one occasion used the Army's Combat Applications Group to slaughter a bunch of men, women, and children a hundred miles from where I used to live.
Right, exactly.
And the military commander in Fort Hood at that time, I believe, was none other than Wesley Clark.
Aha.
Now, here's my favorite tidbit about Wesley Clark, other than bombing ambulances and TV stations, is that he almost started World War III.
And there's an article in the BBC about the unfortunately named General Michael Jackson of the United Kingdom, who basically refused to follow Wesley Clark's orders that he thought very well could have led to a war with the Russians over the Pristina Airport.
Exactly, yes.
When the bombing ended in June, there was a compromise agreement, a compromise treaty giving Serbia sovereignty on paper.
It was a step back from the Rambouillet demands, and people today mock the insistence of the Serbs that they had won, but in essence they managed to hold off NATO for over three months, and in the end settled for some sort of a compromise agreement as opposed to outright capitulation.
Well, as the first part of that, the Russians deployed a paratrooper unit at the Pristina Airport, which came as a total surprise to NATO, including their clients in Moscow.
And Clark ordered the British troops, under Jackson's command, to dislodge the Russians by force, and Jackson refused.
And that's how that situation got diffused, and there was no conflict between NATO and the Russians at that particular point.
I remember that too, live on CNN at the time, and they said, the Russians have gone and moved into the Pristina Airport before we could get there, oh no!
And they were really not prepared for what they were getting into there.
They certainly hadn't prepared the American people with the understanding that the Russians view the Serbs as their little cousins that they have to protect.
Well, no, and that's actually been stressed in propaganda over the last 80 years, that Serbs are nothing but surrogate Russians anyway, which is not necessarily the case.
I mean, these are two distinct people with two distinct histories.
They do have a lot in common, but Serbia is by no way, shape or form, a client state of Russia.
In fact, the relationship between Serbia and Russia is, they're much more independent partners than, for example, the UK and the US.
I mean, Britain's relationship to the United States can be described as vassal, and Serbia is much more different in that respect than Russia.
Well, even in the days of the Cold War, Yugoslavia stayed separate from the Soviet Union.
Very correct.
And I guess, see, this is the problem here too, is when that ended, everybody, and I don't know in what order and who started what, and which all are the guilty parties, but basically when the Soviet Union fell apart, everybody started dividing up upon ethnic lines, and the country didn't just divide, it tore itself apart.
Yes, and actually Yugoslavia preceded the Soviet Union in that.
In 1991, the only three republics that had declared independence from the Soviet Union were the Baltic Republics, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, because they had been independent states in the 1940s and they were incorporated into the Soviet Union against their will.
But the Soviet Union itself did not fall apart until late 1991, and by that time the war in Yugoslavia was already raging, and the precedent in Yugoslavia was the decision by the EU, completely out of the blue, that it was the republics, which were these administratively created entities by the communists, not states, but somebody drew lines on a map and said, okay, this is Slovenia, this is Croatia, this is Montenegro, this is Macedonia, this is Serbia, this is Bosnia, and the EU said, well, these are states and they have the right to secede, and they simply copied that approach to the Soviet Union and they found a very favorable actor in that respect in Boris Yeltsin who said, oh yeah, fine, let all these other republics secede and I've got Russia, who cares?
Well, and isn't part of this, too, that when the Americans came in, was it the very same lines that the communists had drawn, that the Americans said, okay, these are the borders now?
Absolutely.
My understanding, I guess, and I think I remember this from talking with you years ago, is that the Soviet Union decides these people from those and that kind of thing, but then Richard Holbrook, I guess it was, came in and said, no, no, no, the river is a dark black magic marker line on my map, it's an international border now, for real, and then that made it where all these people who were already kind of going through all this ethnic cleansing anyway, it all got turned to fast forward and what was the case is that the communists drew lines on the map according to a program from the 1920s when they had decided that Yugoslavia was a very bad thing and it had to be broken apart and all these people that had just recently joined Yugoslavia following World War I were horribly mistaken and were actually enslaved.
Well, in 1941, when the Germans attacked, the Germans had a resistance movement that wasn't really a resistance movement so much as let's wait until the Russians get here, not the Soviets really, and the royalists who were trying to preserve Yugoslavia adopted the approach of well, let's wait until the British get here and of course the British never came and the Russians did.
So the communists got installed into power in 1945 and they were thinking, okay, well, like they planned, they broke it up internally and kept overall control but in order to do that they had to partition Serbia and so they created these provinces in the north and in the south, created Kosovo so it would be an ethnic Albanian majority province, it was also the heartland of Serbian culture with the wealth of monasteries and churches and chapels and monuments and castles and all this, I mean this is the historical heartland of Serbia and they gave it to the Albanians to administer and at this point Albanians were the most radical communists in Europe, they had broken with Stalin, they had broken with the Soviets as well as with everybody else, they declared themselves the only true communists and allied themselves with Mao's China.
So Yugoslavia was getting a lot of refugees from under Hoxha's Albania and these people, they contributed to the ethnic imbalance in the province and so I'm not going to go so far as to say they ethnically cleansed the Serbs but they certainly allowed it to happen because it didn't really bother their designs.
The weaker the Serbs were the easier it was to run the country because Serbs as a nation were about half of Yugoslavia's population but they were broken up into 4 or 5 entities and that's the way they administered the country.
The Serbs didn't really object too much until the late 80s when the whole division became too much and Serbia couldn't function as a country at all because the provinces had veto power over anything that the parliament decided.
Can you imagine, for example, Vermont being able to veto every single law in the senate?
Oh, that would be awesome.
Well, yes.
From a libertarian perspective that would be fantastic but the provinces could legislate on their own but could veto every decision in the Serbian parliament.
Well, I can certainly see how this could have been part of leading up to the crisis there.
Only Vermont could veto everything in the senate and every other state did not have that right.
That could obviously be a problem for interstate relations and that's when Milosevic stepped in.
This sense of injustice and oppression and an unworkable setup is what propelled him to power in the late 80s and he rose within the communist apparatus to become the chairman of the communist party and then president of Serbia but in the other republics there were nationalists who the communists had previously jailed rising to power and preaching ideas of independence, secession, we've gotten everything out of Yugoslavia that we could have possibly wanted let's just back up and go.
That situation was inflamed by 1990 and then the Soviet Union collapsed communism collapsed and all of a sudden there was no sense of balance between East and West that kept Yugoslavia together and that's when everything started up.
It's a complete lie that Milosevic started a war in Slovenia he had nothing to do with that and the Slovenians some of whom are alive and in power to the present day emphatically brag about starting the war and killing the federal army troops and customs agents and the Croatians the late Croatian president publicly admitted that there wouldn't have been a war had I not wanted one for independence all these people who are saying the Serbs started the war have also at a different time admitted that they had in fact started the war so again we're going back to Clinton's speech and the fact that it's a complete reversal of reality.
What's the significance of the news that this one guy whose name I can't remember who was I guess an aide or worked under Milosevic turns out that he was a CIA agent he was actually a Serbian equivalent of the head of the CIA he was the head of the Serbian security service and this is a guy who's being tried for war crimes in The Hague right now that's how this came out not just any war crimes the charges against him is that he organized special execution squads to go into Bosnia and Croatia and kill people so he's being framed as a Serbian equivalent and what we've seen over the past 20 years is that the Serbs are the new Nazis Milosevic was Hitler his generals were Keitel and Jodl and this fellow Stanisic was Himmler who planned and executed the genocide I mean there's no evidence for genocide and they don't care about that they never attack the issue head on because they have no proof but what they do is they say ok well he organized these groups and one of these groups that may have been connected may have video tape of this so therefore he's guilty of genocide and so Stanisic knowing that he's being framed tried to save his skin by appealing to the CIA and saying look I helped you guys out you're going to throw me a bone here and they did after a fashion and they leaked that piece to the Los Angeles Times a couple weeks ago and it sort of dovetailed into the verdict the previous week to the generals of the Serbian army of some grand conspiracy to expel the Albanians from Kosovo despite the fact that no evidence whatsoever was presented for this so but what happened last week or a couple weeks ago what you're saying is that it was the CIA that leaked it as a favor to this guy rather than he leaked it to say hey CIA is stabbing me in the back I was their guy well I don't know who leaked it it's a bit of a mystery the letter that the CIA is not yet on trial because he's very ill he's got liver issues I believe and he's under medical care but the piece appeared in the LA Times and it was very well researched and obviously the fellow who researched it had spent some time on it so the timing of the publication of the article was very interesting well and you know Raimondo was talking today at antiwar.com about the news in the New York Times that Richard Holbrook he could be free and would be left alone as long as he stayed out of politics and then Holbrook got mad because the guy got involved in something I'm not sure what because then when they found him he'd been hiding for 10 years so what's going on there?well I think there should be a phrase in the English language in colloquial English language something along the lines of Holbrook's agreement to denote a bargain that the other party is interested in honoring that's a Holbrook agreement I like that I'm going to try to use that so first of all yes there was a deal between Holbrook and Carthage there's documentary evidence for this and Holbrook can't keep on denying it but so what if there was the tribunals already said well we Holbrook we don't take orders from Holbrook yes they take orders from the guy that Holbrook took orders from but that's beside the point how is that any of our business?which is exactly what they're doing yes Carthage had a deal to withdraw from politics he stepped down and stepped away and basically disappeared after 1996 and Holbrook is now salvaging his case because for the previous year well eight months since Carthage's capture last July in Belgrade he was saying there was no deal this is complete nonsense these are filthy lies intended to smear my reputation for years I don't think and his reputation can be sullied any further yes well Holbrook and his reputation I wasn't sure there was one I think that's part of the deal to be in the imperial court you have to have no shame and you have to have no ability to recognize that people already hate your guts because of the terrible things you've done none whatsoever and Holbrook actually goes the extra mile and they start apologizing and well we didn't really mean it that way and it was this but not that Holbrook is completely unapologetic he said yeah sure I hate the Serbs I'm proud of it well what was this about because I know Bill Clinton doesn't care about a make believe 100,000 dead people and I do know that there is a massive base called Camp Bonsteel in Kosovo and is that what straddling a pipeline is that what this whole thing is about the whole project for a pipeline that's pretty much DOA that pipeline is fiction there's been a lot of theories surrounding that yes but a couple of years back Chris DeLiso wrote a review on anti-war of a book called Collision Course by a fellow named John Norris who's advisor for the International Crisis Group which has been a bunch of retired US diplomats trying to steer foreign policy using plausible deniability as a non-governmental organization none other than Clinton's point man on foreign policy Strobe Talbot the Russia expert in the Clinton administration and according to Talbot and Norris this was all part of the great game aimed against Russia it was never about Kosovo it was never about the Serbs it was about control of Europe and domination of Russia so basically just putting the base there for putting the base there's sake right but it was part of the whole project of okay we need to stretch it into Central Asia and we need Central Asia to control Asia as a whole which means we can use them against the Russians the Chinese and the Indians and that's how we're going to perpetuate our global hegemony into the 21st century from big Chizhensky grand chess board to several Kissinger's ideas there's a lot of baggage here but it boils down to okay we want to control Europe so we can control Asia and if we control Asia we have to have a risk player as opposed to a statement but that's what they did so it was never really about the Serbs or the Albanians they were just the big players in the whole thing which makes it all the more disgusting right and see that's the thing too any of these foreign policy discussions I think about how much time was spent explaining how invading Iraq and killing a bunch of people is not a good way to spread democracy or whatever but that's just the clean break for the Likudniks and expanding the footprint into Eurasia as you're talking about right but I mean the pieces are really coming together when you take a look at all the statements from people like Joseph Biden or who was it late representative from California Lantosha I believe and people like that there's just a whole wealth of resources online that people attract all these US policy makers saying well you know we're friends with the Muslims look what we did in Bosnia and Kosovo look how we saved the Kuwaitis it seems to me almost as if there is a push on part of one faction within the US foreign policy establishment to create an alliance with the Muslim world and use them as a weapon against potential rivals which is to any casual observer with a grain of common sense the most idiotic notion ever of a terminal horrible enemy of the United States and their destruction is necessary no I'm not saying that but to play with this kind of fire that's exactly what it is it's the Cold War policy continued against Russia and China and you know Robert Dreyfuss wrote that book Devil's Game how the United States helped to unleash fundamentalist Islam and it's about how Britain first and then both and then America basically and of course Israel created Hamas as a religious alternative to the PLO and on and on you see right wing factions Khomeini and his group were supported because they helped to overthrow Mossadegh in 1953 and then came back 26 years later to do the overthrow of their own never mind Al Qaeda and the Afghan war certainly it's playing with fire and I guess nobody figures that any of the consequences matter because they don't come due before their particular job in whichever bureaucracy is up and they move to a different position exactly, nobody cares about blowback and blowback is what this is all about I'm going to break Godwin's law here and I'm going to invoke Hitler because inevitably one must but the last person who actually had this whole wacky notion of befriending the Muslim people and using them as a weapon against the rest of the world and the Serbs fought him too at the same time that was going on the Serbs fought him because they really had no choice when somebody comes to your house with a gun and demands that you give up at gunpoint you either submit or you fight and the Serbs have a tradition of fighting back well I guess it doesn't pay to be allies with America you see what you get that's the only thing more dangerous than being an American enemy and one of the real world consequences of what's happened since this war the Kosovo Liberation Army are they the de facto government of Kosovo now?not just the de facto but officially the prime minister I believe is the leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army I don't know whether the president is from his ranks or from the ranks of Rugova's former party it really doesn't matter they're all on the same page how big is the Serbian government in Europe?by about a five or seven orders of magnitude there's reports documenting the graft and the corruption and the trafficking of people and narcotics and weapons and just about anything you can imagine there's no law and order in that place there are no property rights there's no concept of anything except who has the bigger gun and who has more of it and these are not these are not disputes over who was loyal to Serbia or who's more pro-independence this is one of those two clans fight over smuggling rights for heroin and whichever clan wins gets to shoot the other one I was reading last month following the anniversary of the whole declaration of independence thing the German central reporter who actually talked to the Serbian government repeatedly about freedom and independence and blah blah blah and the German sent somebody on the ground and he actually sat down with all these young Albanians who had no jobs no electricity hardly ever drinking water they spent all the money they managed to scrounge up working odd jobs to pay for food for lodging for working nonwithstanding obviously so the Albanians who are supposed to have been saved are actually living a pretty miserable existence right now and that's not to count the Serbs, the Gypsies, the Turks the Slavic Muslims all the other so-called minorities in Kosovo people who had all the human rights and civil rights before the wars and under protection of armed NATO troops and just waiting for another Albanian mob to come down and burn them out how many of these different ethnic groups have been forced out at least the Serbs have Serbia to go to what about all those other Gypsies and would you say Slavic Muslims and which other groups where did they go?well a lot of them went to Serbia some of them went to Bosnia obviously because there were Slavic Muslims who were perceived better there a lot of them went to Serbia there are some heartbreaking refugee camps in the south of Serbia because Serbia itself is dirt poor from the bombing and the horrible mismanagement of the American client government for the past 8 years and a lot of these people simply have been forgotten there's almost a million refugees from the Yugoslav wars in Serbia alone and they've been completely ignored how many refugees?well the Serbian government operates for the figure north of 200,000 I think the numbers were even up to 250 the Albanians simply flat out deny that any of them have left they say those who left must have been war criminals or those who left must have left on their own volition they flat out deny that they've expelled anybody we know that at least 4,000 people were driven from their homes in 2004 and we know that at antiwar.com it's the blood dimmed tide the Kosovo pogrom of 2004 tell us about that well the most revolting thing about it is that it was a pogrom it was a rerun of the 1938 pogrom of the Jews in Hitler's Germany it was compared to that by a UN official on the ground the American officers five years before were saying this is ethnic cleansing this is a humanitarian disaster this is an organized systematic deliberate destruction of an entire people and did any of the Albanians involved in it get arrested?prosecuted?
tried?no, none of them in fact the European so called law and order mission that just came into Kosovo a few months ago to implement the independence plan in 2001 the UN finally caught him after years and years they tried him they convicted him they sentenced him to either 15 or 40 years it doesn't really matter and the Europeans said too bad, release him he did nothing there is not a single shred of justice for what happened in 2004 in fact what makes it worse is that the Albanians got independence as a result of this they started the propaganda and the people who were justifying these these weren't riots these were not people just randomly destroying stuff this was 40,000 people deliberately going after Serbian villages, Serbian churches, chapels old people in their homes and just deliberately killing them burning their homes, beating them up destroying everything in their path it was very targeted very systematic and immediately the press here after years started saying these people are desperate because they're frustrated and because they're poor and because there's no independence if you give them independence things will be better and that's what started the ball rolling on the whole independence process that started in 2005 and now it's been what one year or two years since they declared independence it's been a year and it's been through Palau Federated States of Micronesia and so on and did everything get better?
I've got to tell you I know that you're a libertarian as well and my perspective is that no state has the right to claim any territory at all so if the people of Kosovo want to declare their independence from Belgrade all this other criminality and what have you notwithstanding I know that's fine with me but what's at issue here is the consequences for the human beings well not just that and you're right I agree with the session in general this particular case is complicated by the fact that the property in Kosovo the land over 70% of it is owned by the Serbs outright and the Serb pockets that are in the province the rest of Serbia I should say because the U.S. is now insisting that Kosovo's borders cannot be violated but Serbia's could so it's an issue of no standards at all here we're not talking double standards we're talking well the right thing to do is whatever we say because we've got the guns the Albanians as I mentioned earlier the Albanians are really really badly off if the system in Kosovo but if it was some sort of tribal system that the Albanians have somehow made work over the centuries that wouldn't be a problem really not for me or for them I would have no grounds to object to it at all but it isn't it's not even they're not even following tribal laws of Albania it's simply a complete not an anarchy even it's a dictatorship of the KLA it's a mafia state distilled I mean every state is organized crime by definition but this is the apotheosis of organized crime in which the mafia is the government and you can you are not allowed to say anything against the government or you will quite literally disappear well and when we're talking about I'm trying to picture as detailed the geography as I can here and unfortunately it isn't all that detailed but I guess my understanding is that all the heroin grown in Afghanistan through this pipeline through the so-called Turkic countries through Turkey itself and then through Albania and Kosovo into Europe and now the point here isn't drug abuse the point here is how many tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in criminal profits and bribe money for NATO officials and who knows what else and who knows who all is in on it the drug trade is part of the issue there's really this whole smuggling route from Central Asia that runs through yes Turkey and then Bulgaria especially southern Bulgaria and then it crosses into Macedonia which is also destabilized by the Albanian insurrection from 2001 so its law enforcement is in shambles and then it crosses into Kosovo and then it crosses into Albania and from Albania it goes to Italy and then from Italy on to Western Europe and this is not just a conduit for drugs this is a conduit for weapons this is a conduit for money laundering and drugs, weapons, money laundering none of these are necessarily crimes against the libertarian beliefs but the worst part about this is it's a conduit for slavery for slavery?slaves, yes sex slavery or trafficking as the politicians like to call it to give it sort of an irrespectability and change it from what it really is but it's slavery you know it's an interesting thing about that because it's very rarely covered but I think everybody knows that there is such a thing as international markets and this kind of thing and yet it seems like the lack of high profile busts might indicate that it's all the politicians who are the ones running these things in the first place or what?well the politicians are I would say probably primary customers given the politicians predilection for engaging prostitutes of all kinds obviously this is a sweeping judgment and I don't have any particular examples to prove it apart from all these senators and congressmen here caught with prostitutes of various kinds but it's publicly known there's figures available from police sources that for example the Albanians control 90% of the illegal prostitution in the United Kingdom and yet we get movies like Eastern Promises which show that the Russians are in fact doing this and one that I've seen in the last probably decade was the recent Luc Besson film with Lime Neeson taken if you've heard of it oh yeah I saw the commercial for it right I mean it's the story of the people who kidnap his daughter are Albanian slave traders and there are Europeans involved and there's Arabs involved and there's all sorts of unsavory characters involved it's not just the Albanians but the Albanians are the muscle behind the initial sales and this is the first time that anybody's actually mentioned it in the western mainstream and so far I mean until now it's been a complete taboo but we do have a giant awesome base there right indeed biggest base in Europe I'm sorry for being so facetious but the point there is that's the only other thing on the other side of the scale right pretty much I'm not convinced of Madeline Albright oh good Bill Clinton Boulevard huh yeah but I mean when George Bush went to Albania what is it 2007 and he lost his watch lost right you know people here were commenting well if you have to go to Albania to be loved then what are we talking about here but the truth is Albanians are very enthusiastic in their support of the U.S. and it certainly appeals to Americans when they read about how you know you've got people around the world burning American flags and chanting death to America and then you come to Albania or Kosovo and everybody's like oh America we love America but you know you turn to history books and you dig up the photographs from the 1940s well with all these Albanians you realize that it's nothing personal yeah right and it's not a love for America it's a love for what America's government did to separate them from Serbia simple as that because they couldn't have ever done it on their own I mean it was one of those the Albanian movement has been around since 1878 and it's been obsessed with creating the so called ethnic Albania which would encompass parts of Serbia and Montenegro and northern Greece and Macedonia and so on so when you said earlier and I didn't correct you that the Kosovo Albanians didn't want independence but autonomy no no they really did want independence and in fact independence would just be a stepping stone towards merging with Albania and onward there's sites out there there's maps there's official Albanian organizations endorsing this so it's not some sort of grand conspiracy theory it's a fact it's a possibility and I talked with Eric Garris a little bit about this and he said this is obviously way overblown by the right wing and I'm not saying he was believing in this or something he was just using it as an example but all the right wing conspiracy theories about how all the Mexicans want to take back Azatlan and have some kind of autonomous thing in Southern California or some kind of thing like that he basically made the analogy of what was actually happening that basically this would be like if George Bush or Obama sent the National Guard there to kind of keep them within the country or whatever it wasn't even really like South Carolina declaring secession from the Union it was more like a that's very true and personally when I'm asked about these parallels I refrain from making them because in my view I don't think the immigrants from Mexico would really want to have an exit to Mexico oh clearly not they wouldn't want an exit to Mexico obviously people that come here come here because they want to live here not because they want to take here with them back where they came from I don't know how that's supposed to work anyway and obviously we all understand that's a world net daily fantasy but the point was to try to come up with a metaphor for this was less than a civil war going on here kind of an internal subversion sort of a thing much less than a real civil war or an outright secession what Clinton said about the Albanians not being able to use their language and so forth that was just complete BS the Serbs, the Communists the Republic of Serbia had built universities for Albanians had built schools and hospitals the Albanians also had more rights than Albanians in Albania proper and in 1945 he pretty much executed all the literate people in Albania so that he would have a clean slate and start afresh as a communist whereas all the literate Albanians for years and the Albanian anti-communists ironically found refuge in communist Yugoslavia there was I remember it was incongruity the fact that there's this I think he's related to the Republic of Kosovo they share the same last name which is not uncommon he writes from Boston and a couple of years back I translated a piece of his in which he's saying this is not a fight for independence this is a fight for reunification with Albania which is what we really want and then in his biographical information it's good that he worked for the Yugoslav foreign ministry until 1999 so this fellow who claims he actually had a job in the Serbian government well that sounds about right at least they admitted it in the byline right?well it wasn't in the byline to that particular article it was in the biographical information on a different site because they were introducing him a few years earlier somewhere in New England and he was giving a speech so the internet is a wonderful thing you really can't hide anything anymore from a public relations firm on Madison Avenue very true he knew something about what he was spinning that's true we'll have to call that victory that might have been total crap but at least he passionately believed it and it wasn't just paid to start it that's something I guess alright well listen we need to do this more often I really appreciate your time on the show today as I'm sure many in the audience do as well thank you for having me thank you for having me on the show ok great everybody that's Nebojsa Malik it's moments of transition is the name of his column at antiwar.com slash Malik and also he keeps a blog at greyfalcon.blogspot.com this is antiwar radio from LA in Austin Texas we'll be right back