The Guardian - Peter Beaumont, Ed Vulliamy and Paul Beaver
The United States secretly supported the ethnic Albanian extremists now behind insurgencies in Macedonia and southern Serbia.
The CIA encouraged former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters to launch a rebellion in southern Serbia in an effort to undermine the then Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, according to senior European officers who served with the international peace-keeping force in Kosovo (K-For), as well as leading Macedonian and US sources.
They accuse American forces with K-For of deliberately ignoring the massive smuggling of men and arms across Kosovo's borders.
The accusations were made in a series of interviews by The Observer . They emerge as America has been forced into a rapid U-turn over its support for Albanian extremists in Kosovo seeking a 'Greater Kosovo' that would include Albanian communities in Serbia and Macedonia.
In the past week ethnic Albanian guerrillas have intensified their campaign of attacks in the two areas, threatening a new war in the region which last week put US troops in the firing line in the Balkans for the first time.
The accusations have led to tension in K-For between the European and US military missions. European officers are furious that the Ameri cans have allowed guerrilla armies in its sector to train, smuggle arms and launch attacks across two international borders.
One European K-For battalion commander told The Observer yesterday: 'The CIA has been allowed to run riot in Kosovo with a private army designed to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic. Now he's gone the US State Department seems incapable of reining in its bastard army.'
He added: 'Most of last year, there was a growing frustration with US support for the radical Albanians. US policy was and still is out of step with the other Nato allies.'
The claim was backed by senior Macedonian officials in the capital, Skopje. 'What has been happening with the National Liberation Army [which has been responsible for a series of attacks on Macedonia's borders in recent weeks] and the UCPMB [its sister organisation in southern Serbia] is very similar to what happened when the KLA was launched in 1995-96,' said one.
'I will say only this: the US intelligence agencies have not been honest here.'
The claims were given extra credence from an unexpected source - Arben Xhafari, leader of Macedonia's main Albanian party who tried to prevent the crisis on the border igniting an ethnic civil war inside Macedonia itself.
A US State Department official blamed the last administration. There had now been 'a shift of emphasis'.
Wikipedia
Later that year, the British weekly The European carried an article by a French expert stating that "German civil and military intelligence services have been involved in training and equipping the rebels with the aim of cementing German influence in the Balkan area. (...) The birth of the KLA in 1996 coincided with the appointment of Hansjoerg Geiger as the new head of the BND (German secret Service). (...) The BND men were in charge of selecting recruits for the KLA command structure from the 500,000 Kosovars in Albania."[23] Matthias Küntzel tried to prove later on that German secret diplomacy had been instrumental in helping the KLA since its creation.[24]
Interesting... I did a "Nicholas Dujmovic" query in MNE and got no matching posts.
ReplyDeleteKaivey,
ReplyDeleteBack in the nineties, I think, the Dutch government started to investigate the jihadi war in the Balkans. The subsequent report brought down the government. There was overwhelming evidence to show, or rather prove, that there had been a systematic mainly US but also European decision to import jihadis to the Balkans. They were also financed, trained, armed and used as a proxy army to bring about the kind of Yugoslavia that Washington wanted (mini states beholden to the empire). It was Afghanistan circa the eighties, or even Indonesia circa the sixties. We see it again in Syria today.
See for example https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/22/warcrimes.comment
It's all out in the open and undeniable, yet referring to any of this makes you at best an embarrassing oik for not knowing which fork to use, and at worst a "conspiracy theorist", "anti-West propagandist", "useful idiot" and all the rest of the move-along-nothing-to-see-here apologists who work and run the media and the academy, and are therefore the gatekeepers of respectable thought.