A FORTUNATE COINCIDENCE
But before
we get into that, let's briefly reiterate the background to
this case: the Bytyqi brothers – Mehmet, Ylli, and Agron
– were members of the "Atlantic
Brigade," a band of some 400 Albanian-Americans (and others)
who were recruited from abroad to fight in the Kosovo war
on the side of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In spite
of US laws forbidding such activities, the Atlantic Brigadeers
were allowed to recruit, raise money, and even train in the
United States, and then travel to the battlefields of Kosovo,
where they fought at the KLA's side. The three New York-based
brothers, who previously ran a Long Island pizzeria, arrived
in Kosovo just as the war was beginning to wind down. (Although
at least one, Agron Bytyqi, made
a stopover in Ireland.) They promptly disappeared without
a trace – until police in the former Yugoslavia disinterred
their bodies from a mass grave outside a Serbian special forces
training camp. The bodies were found not only with their New
York drivers licenses in their pockets, but also with Serbian
court papers indicating that they had been arrested on June
27 and jailed for trying to infiltrate the country. Gee, what
a fortunate coincidence!
IN HIGH DUDGEON
Now, incredibly,
these KLA soldiers are being touted as helpless victims of
Milosevic's "war crimes." The discovery of these bodies has
the US chief of mission in Yugoslavia, William Montgomery,
in high dudgeon: he
told the Washington Post that the Americans are
really really peeved that the Yugoslavs didn't welcome
the Bytyqi terrorist tag-team into the country with open arms:
"Believe me, this is going to be a very important case
for us," Montgomery gloated. "We need to get real information
from the Yugoslav authorities. We are going to insist they
do a full investigation."
A VISIT TO
MOTHER
Oh, but
surely Mr. Montgomery doesn't want a full investigation,
since that would have to mean an investigation of the true
nature and sponsorship of the "Atlantic Brigade," and a determined
inquiry into just what the brothers Bytyqi were doing in Yugoslavia,
anyway, 17 days after the Kosovo war officially ended. But
he needn't worry: the "mainstream" media is not about to ask
any uncomfortable questions about this murky affair. They
are quite content to broadcast the official story: that the
three brothers, instead of being on a mission to penetrate
Yugoslav territory and wreak havoc, had instead gone
to visit their long-lost mother, and, in the midst of
another act of charity – escorting 3 male Gypsies from
their mother's neighborhood to safety in Serbia – were
detained and killed by those awful Serbian racists.
THOSE WONDERFUL
BOYS
This fanciful
tale is sprouting all over the newswires, and is the leitmotif
of the major newspaper accounts. The
New York Times piece is purest agitprop, depicting
the Bytyqis as noble idealists who gave up a comfortable life
in a beach town in the posh Long Island Hamptons for a cause
greater than themselves. These were "wonderful" boys, we are
told, and their father extols their vaunted heroism, saying
"they gave up the couch" and an easy life to liberate their
people. Their friends are cited as saying that they were all
fearless warriors precisely because they were Americans and
therefore were unused to being bullied by those bad old Serbs.
Embedded in the midst all these extravagant panegyrics is
a key nugget of information – or disinformation, depending
on your perspective:
INTO THE MURK
"They were,"
the Times informs us, "apparently not engaged in combat
when they were captured, witnesses and investigators said."
Witnesses? Who are these witnesses? The Times doesn't
elaborate, and so we have to turn to the International
Herald Tribune's version of the story, which has a
bit more hard information, in addition to the usual dose
of propaganda. We hear of another Bytyqi brother, Fatos, still
alive and in Kosovo, confessing that "he initially lied about
his brothers' war activities, but later explained that he
had been 'advised' not to discuss their membership in the
Atlantic Brigade." We also have young Fatos blurting out that,
as far as he knew, his brothers were on their way to
meet up with some buddies from the Atlantic Brigade in Pristina:
as for the mission of mercy on behalf of the Gypsies, he could
not confirm the story. At any rate, we know that the last
anyone saw of them they were heading north in a Volkswagon.
At this point, a witness – Miroslav Mitrovic, one of
the Gypsies supposedly along for the ride – enters the
picture, proffered by the Belgrade-based "Humanitarian Law
Center," and here is where the picture really begins
to get murky.
THE 'HUMANITARIAN'
WITH A GUILLOTINE
Of course,
anything that the "Humanitarian Law Center" has to say is
immediately suspect, since the HLC is the creature of Nastasa
Kandic, a Serbian version of Jane Fonda, the leading
theorist of collective Serbian guilt for alleged "war
crimes," who has made a career out of accusing her own
people of being incorrigible murderers. Kandic – the
perfect incarnation of what Isabel
Paterson, the Old Right author
of the 1940s, called "the
humanitarian with a guillotine" – advocates a "re-education"
program for Serbia similar to the one undergone by postwar
Germany, and calls
for the suppression of politically-incorrect speech and organizations.
She is now suing the Serbian Socialist Party for "hate speech"
and demanding that they be banned. It was Kandic who, as the
organizer of an OSCE media conference held in Montenegro,
told Serbian journalists who walked out in protest at the
NATO-crats' high-handedness: "They pay you and have the right
to question your conduct during the war." Heavily subsidized
by interventionist sugar-daddy George Soros, Kandic is a weird,
isolated figure in Serbian politics, one of the few who openly
sided with NATO during the bombing.
SABOTEUR WITH
A PASSPORT?
In any case,
her "witness" isn't proving all that helpful, for we are told
by the Tribune that "there is a dispute between Fatos
and Mr. Mitrovic over why the brothers did not have their
U.S. passports with them on the journey." Although we are
not told the nature of this dispute, it isn't hard to fathom
the truth: for since when does a covert agent on an important
military mission carry his passport with him? According
the family lawyer, the brothers were stopped by Serbian police
in the village of Merdare,
well over the border with Kosovo. Now, what would 3 members
of the Atlantic Brigade be doing on the wrong side of the
border, even if there was some truth to the story that they
were merely acting as a military escort for the poor oppressed
Gypsies? You tell me. It doesn't require any
great mental effort to draw the obvious conclusion: this incursion
was a precursor of the wave of KLA terrorism that erupted
in the border zone last year, as yet another "liberation army"
sprang up in the war's aftermath, this time in southern Serbia.
BRIBERY AS
TRUTH SERUM
The Gypsies
were allowed to pass, but the brothers Bytyqi were sentenced
to 15 days in prison for illegal entry into Yugoslavia, and
on June 27 they were imprisoned at Prokuplie, in southern
Serbia. Now the HLC has gotten a former police inspector,
Zoran Stankovic, to testify that the three brothers were to
be released into his custody and that he showed up at the
prison to collect them four days before what was to be their
release date, but they were nowhere to be found. According
to Fatos, however, a big bribe to a prison official reveals
the truth: that the three were "driven away in a white car
and never seen again." Will the ICTFY admit evidence from
admittedly bribed witnesses? Believe me, they aren't choosy:
anonymous witnesses are not only allowed but positively encouraged,
and they can submit their bought-and-paid-for "testimony"
in absentia.
A HATE CRIME?
The International
Herald Tribune's spin on this story is basically an echo
of the Bytyqi family lawyer's argument: "They were killed
because they were American citizens," Bajram Krasniqi, a lawyer
in Pristina, told the Tribune. "There were people in
that prison who were in the rebel army and they were eventually
released. This is the only case where someone was arrested,
taken to court, tried, released out of the prison and then
executed. This crime was planned, ordered and conducted without
any judicial act, and it was done by Serbian officials in
cooperation with officials at the prison. Hopefully, the Serb
authorities will now arrest these people and they will be
brought to justice."
LEGALITY IN
WARTIME
Arrest them
– for what? For executing three foreign nationals
who were clearly members of a hostile military force, sent
into Yugoslavia on a mission to that could've included anything
from sabotage to assassination? Fatos tells us that they wore
KLA medallions around their necks, and no one denies that
they were found on Serbian soil. A truce had been declared,
but Yugoslavia was still on a wartime footing, and the military
was alert for any new attack: are Yugoslav police to be arrested
and tried for summarily dispatching these three invaders to
Paradise?
Krasniqui claims that a "judicial process" was lacking in
the sequence of events that led to their deaths, but by this
standard every act of resistance to invasion must be adjudicated
before a single shot is fired in self-defense. And it has
got to be a joke of a particularly grotesque sort that has
a top official of the KLA standing on the principle of "legality"!
LOOK WHO'S
TALKING!
Krasniqi
is head of the Kosovo Albanian "commission for war crimes
and missing people," and a former member of KLA leader Hashem
Thaci's "provisional government." Under this government, the
ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, carried out by KLA stormtroopers,
was similarly lacking in the proper judicial procedures. Indeed,
the entire judicial process in the conquered province is so
corrupt and biased against the Serbs that even the United
Nations has had to acknowledge the problem and pledge to solve
it. So now we have Mr. Krasniqui standing before us, pontificating
that the demise of the brothers Bytyqi was a hate crime against
Americans – this from the most fanatic and relentless
practitioners of hate in the Balkans! Good lord, is there
no limit to the gall of these American sock puppets and their
Western handlers? Are we to be spared nothing?
ONLY IN MANHATTAN
Apparently
not. Incredibly, it looks like the ICTFY, in cooperation with
Ms. Kandic, is going to highlight the "murder" of the Bytyqi
brothers as emblematic of Slobodan Milosevic's "crimes against
humanity." The Times piece dutifully echoes the Tribunal
by lamely averring that the three were not "in combat" when
they were apprehended, but this Clintonian hairsplitting (are
soldiers penetrating enemy territory "in combat"?) is what
we have come to expect of the Great Gray Lady. Everywhere
but for the isle of Manhattan, soldiers caught trying to infiltrate
enemy territory are indeed engaged in an act of war. One can
hardly imagine that their fate took them by surprise.
INQUIRING MINDS
WANT TO KNOW
It's damn
lucky for the ICTFY that poor deluded old Slobo has, bizarrely,
decided not to retain legal counsel, and instead chosen
to stand on the "principle" of not answering any of the charges
against him – on the grounds that the ICTFY has no legal
standing or authority. He's right about ICTFY's illegitimacy,
but it does not follow that a lawyer is "unnecessary," as
the former Serbian strongman put it. For surely this particular
charge – the alleged "murder" of the Bytyqi brothers
– would be easy enough to refute, and you wouldn't need
Johnnie Cochran to do it (although I still think he would
be the best). Things would surely get interesting if Slobo's
defense lawyers could call to the stand the organizers and
financiers of this mysterious "Atlantic Brigade," so we could
get, first hand, the real lowdown. I'd settle for an answer
to the question of why the Bytyqi brothers showed up in Kosovo
in order to fight a war that was largely over once
they got there.
EARTH CALLING
RAMSEY CLARK
Yes, the
trial of Slobodan Milosevic could be a great boon for anti-interventionists,
instead of a propaganda coup for the War Party – if the
defense would get its act together, that is. There are all
sorts of interesting questions that are raised by this particular
accusation against Milosevic, and a good lawyer – are
you listening Ramsey Clark? Can you hear me, Christopher Black?
– would take full advantage of it. For all we know, the
Brigadeers have not returned home, but are still fighting,
this time in Macedonia. In order to pursue the Bytyqi case,
UN prosecutors could run smack up against US and European
intelligence agencies eager to protect their sources and shield
their methods – not that they're fooling much of anybody,
anyway.
TRUMP CARD
The great
difficulty of the proceedings in The Hague, from the prosecution's
point of view, is the problem of directly linking Milosevic
to a particular execution. It is one thing to hold him up
as the symbol of Serbia's alleged war guilt, and quite another
to establish his personal responsibility for specific acts.
They seem to have solved that by choosing a case where Milosevic
may indeed have issued a direct order of execution, or at
least an order that can be indirectly linked to his subordinates.
In going this route, however, the ICTFY could also be opening
themselves up to a different and far more serious problem,
and that is acute political embarrassment. In this case, the
defense has a trump card to play: they could conceivably prove
that the Bytyqi brothers, far from being innocent American
tourists on a Balkan jaunt, were American mercenaries on a
deadly mission. Just as it is Carla Del Ponte's job to personally
link Milosevic to the decision to execute noncombatants, so
the task of the defense – if one is forthcoming –
would be to uncover the true nature and origins of the Atlantic
Brigade and a give a full account of its activities. What
an interesting trial that would turn out to be!
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