CIRCLING VULTURES
HRW has
recently issued a report
– trumpeted far and wide by the NATO-crats – claiming that
Boskovski personally directed a "massacre" of unarmed civilians
in the village of Ljuboten. Carla Del Ponte and her Kangaroo
Court immediately announced that they would conduct an "investigation,"
albeit a preliminary one. However, word is out that a full-fledged
all-out effort to get Boskovski is already well along, and
the "humanitarian" vultures are circling. The Macedonian drama
is playing out exactly as scripted in Kosovo: create a "massacre,"
rationalize a NATO presence – and move in for the kill.
A VIGNETTE
The utter
phoniness of HRW's accusations is at least hinted at in the
opening lines of their account of the incident, which they
characterize as a "revenge" killing in response to the assassination
of 9 Macedonian soldiers by the rebels. We are given a novelistic
vignette of a mother, Saifa Fetahu, hugging her children,
who are frightened to death:
"Friday morning at eight in the morning we were having
breakfast. I heard automatic rifle fire, the shooting started
and we knew nothing about it. When they started shelling,
the house was shaking and the kids started yelling. We went
to the basement and were afraid to get out, even to get water.
They [Macedonian forces] were shooting all day and all night
at the houses. The kids of my son, aged eight, six, and two,
were very afraid. The youngest one just grabbed hold of me
and refused to let go."
Touching,
isn't it? Perhaps just a little too touching, one might
even say pat or even hokey, like a scene out of a grade-C
made-for-TV movie. To Mrs. Fetahu, I say this: if you, and
all the other Albanian women, would prevail on Mr. Fetahu
to quit the "National Liberation Army," lay down their arms,
and do something a bit more productive than shooting up the
country – say, earning an honest living – you and your children
will never again cower under the kitchen table.
REBEL TERRITORY
What virtually
every news account of this incident fails to point out is
that Ljuboten, a mere 10 kilometers from the capital city
of Skopje, has long been considered a no-man's-land, if not
rebel-held, and certainly not under government control. Foreign
reporters have frequently met NLA officers in Ljuboten, and,
from there, were escorted deeper into rebel territory where
they conducted adoring interviews with various NLA commanders.
Would NLA cadre go into territory with such regularity if
it wasn't militarily secured? Ljuboten is on the front lines
of the government's war against the guerrilla insurgency.
DISINFORMATION
On August
10, eight Macedonians were blown to bits on the road to the
village by a landmine, a murderous act that occurred just
as KLA commanders were bloviating the loudest about their
commitment to "peace," and the West was insisting on the Macedonians'
immediate capitulation to virtually all Albanian demands.
Responsibility for these acts was taken, not by the peace-loving
NLA, but by a new player, the "Albanian National Army" (ANA),
which is kind of like the Real IRA, the only difference being
that the Irish are not valorized by the leftist cognoscenti.
One guerrilla army supposedly disarms, while yet another springs
out of the earth and takes up where the other left off: it
is a ruse so transparent that no one believes it, least of
all the Macedonian majority. Just a few months ago, Radio
Free Europe – i.e. the US government – was echoing Jane's
Intelligence Review [February 6] in reporting that "the
alleged Albanian National Army (AKSh) is the creation of Belgrade's
disinformation experts."
BULGING BICEPS
I think
it was Simon Jenkins, in a recent piece, who pinpointed the
Western media's seduction by the rebels on account of their
"bulging biceps." So like the biceps of the Sandinistas, those
radical chic icons of yesteryear. The sexual exploits of Sandinista
groupie Bianca Jagger, a prominent member and contributor
to Human Rights Watch, are amusingly recounted in Ronald Radosh's
excellent new book, Commies
– and no doubt the carnal appeal of the dashing NLA commanders
and their hunky troops is the source of at least some of the
good press they've been getting. But their real appeal, it
seems to me, is more or less ideological: like the Vietcong
and the Nicaraguan commies, the NLA and the ANA have announced
that they are fighting a war of "national liberation." They
accuse the Macedonians of "racism" and their Western apologists
and international publicists characterize them in much the
same terms as the American left situates blacks: as a super-oppressed
minority, perpetually victimized by "the system."
AM I CHE GUEVARA?
To characterize
Human Rights Watch as an organization of the Left, is, I think,
not unfair. Although they pose as unbiased observers of human
folly, both the timing and the content of their pronouncements
are indicative of their real agenda. They have now announced that
they will henceforth devote themselves to defending "economic
rights" as well as the right to be free of coercion, and this
involves the whole laundry list of "rights" enumerated in
the platform of any European social democratic party, or in
the fulminations of Jesse Jackson and the far left fringe
of the Democratic party in the US: the "right" to healthcare,
the "right" to an education, as well as a plethora of "cultural
rights" that HRW goes to great pains to illuminate. Yet this
"left" face is really a façade, one that hides the broad coalition
of groups and donors that cooperate in the operation of HRW.
Without going into too much detail, except to link to today's
excellent "spotlight"
piece on this site, suffice to say that if Morton Abramowitz,
a mainstay of the American foreign policy establishment, and
former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research,
is a man of the left, then I am Che
Guevara.
THE
DEATH OF ERXHAN ALIU
The ring
of untruth permeates the HRW report. Their account of the
death of a young boy, although appealingly cinematic, is decidedly
peculiar:
"When
the shelling resumed on Friday afternoon, six-year-old Erxhan
Aliu was playing in the street. 'Basqim', (not his real name),
a twenty-five-year-old farmer from the village, watched as
Erxhan was hit by a shell: 'On Friday, at about 5 or 6 p.m.
when the shelling started again, there were people standing
in the road and I was watching them. There were some kids
also. I saw the kids running towards [the adults] and at the
same moment a grenade hit the kid. The boy flew into the air
and there was lots of smoke....'"
So, all
these kids are playing in the street at every lull
in the fighting? Either the parenting skills of Albanian mothers
are not quite up to snuff, or else somebody is telling a little
fib. Indeed, the dishonesty of this dubious account is all
too apparent, not only in its lack of coherence, but also
in the anonymity of the witness. Such testimony would not
stand up in an American court of law, but Carla Del Ponte
is far less fastidious.
IT'S ALL IN
THE DETAILS
Other details
give the game away. Here is part an account of an alleged
Macedonian attack on a private home in Ljuboten, supposedly
inhabited by civilian noncombatants:
"First
they were on the side of the house, and they couldn't shoot
through the walls. So they went a bit further and were directly
in front of the house, and started shooting again. They were
firing on the second and third floor from the APC; they broke
all the windows. Then they came to the gate of the yard, the
gate was closed. They shot out the lock to break it, but they
couldn't do it. Afterwards, I don't know how, but they blew
away the whole door...."
ONE LITTLE
PROBLEM
But surely
the Macedonian police would have enough firepower to blast
through the door of an ordinary "civilian" home – so why
does the witness seem so surprised that they succeeded? The
answer is that traditional Albanian homes are not ordinary
houses but more like small castles, or forts, built to withstand
just such an assault as was launched at Ljuboten. The description
of the events that took place in the village has all the hallmarks
of a pitched battle – minus one side, of course. The Albanians,
naturally, were completely disarmed, and did not fire a shot
– at least this is the story HRW is peddling. There's only
one problem: it's a lie.
IS THAT A GUN
IN YOUR POCKET?
Paraffin
tests conducted by Macedonian police on the terrorists confirms
that they had recently fired weapons: HRW, however, taking
the stance of the Oswald-didn't-do-it Kennedy assassination
conspiracy theorists, derides the test as "unreliable"
– although such tests are routinely treated as valid evidence
in American and European courts. Perhaps the entire West,
then, is guilty of violating "human rights" and bears watching.
So far, however, HRW seems to be applying this standard only
to Macedonia.
RACAK II
In his own
defense, Boskovski
has said that what is being created here is yet "another Racak,"
and in that he is surely right. The Racak massacre, you'll
recall, was the incident cited by the War Party – and Clinton
himself – to target Yugoslavia and conquer Kosovo. It was
only after the fact, however, long after the last bombs
fell on Belgrade, that the truth came out about the battle
of Racak.
Oh, a few French newspapers had articles exposing the hoax
early on, but in this country the real story wasn't widely
known until long after Bill Clinton had declared "victory"
and put the KLA on the American payroll as the "Kosovo
Protection Corps."
BURYING THE
TRUTH
At least
at Racak they tried to give some credence to the idea that
targets of a Serbian military operation were just hapless
peaceful villagers; in Ljuboten, however, the HRW expects
us to believe that because the combatants weren't wearing
uniforms they couldn't have been NLA (or ANA) fighters. We
are also told that the Macedonians didn't find any weapons
– but how does HRW know that? If I were them, I wouldn't
bet the ranch on it – especially in a country where the right
to bear arms is so often exercised by so many. And so what
if they didn't find the weapons: according to reports from
the Macedonian media, the police couldn't even get into the
village due to interference from the OSCE
monitors and the villagers. The bodies of all the alleged
victims were quickly buried – although probably not in the
same spot as their Kalishnikovs.
A PROVOCATION
HRW describes
all the Albanian inhabitants of Ljuboten as "civilians" by
definition, and rules out any NLA presence in the village
on the grounds that it is surrounded on three sides by Macedonian
towns. But if the rebels were trying to create a provocation
– in order to gain some advantage in the "peace" talks –
then surely this is where they would do it, in an area a few
minutes from Skopje, so as to underscore their own power and
the military weakness of the government. Weak logic, dubious
and self-contradictory testimony, and the suspicious timing
– the report was issued just as cries for extending the NATO
presence beyond the September 26 exit date – all point to
yet another slipshod effort by the War Party to pass off propaganda
as fact.
IT'S A CRIME
Yet the
"massacre" that supposed took place at Ljuboten is indeed
being reported as fact in most major media. Even more significant
is what is not being reported: the Albanian campaign
of ethnic cleansing that has created over a hundred thousand
refugees, the burning of Macedonian homes, the rape and pillage
of a country once considered a model of mult-cultural democracy.
If you want a lesson in "how to demonize an enemy," then watch
the concerted campaign against Georgievski,
against Boskovski, against any Macedonian who dares
to resist the conquest and partition of his country. Their
only crime is to stand up for Macedonia, its sovereignty and
its dignity – and that is a crime in the world NATO
and Human Rights Watch are busily building for us.
BUSH'S COMPLICITY
What is
most shameful about this whole sordid affair – the mugging
of Macedonia – is the active participation of a Republican
administration in a project begun by its debauched and corrupt
predecessor: the destruction of the Balkan Slavic states and
the creation of a Greater Albania. I would argue that, of
all Bill Clinton's crimes – the depravity, the lying, the
brazen tackiness and greed – his war against the people of
Yugoslavia was the worst. But even among those conservatives
less emphatic in their foreign policy views, surely Kosovo
was way up there on the list of Clintonian evils that
make up his legacy. Why oh why, then, is an ostensibly Republican
administration replicating his sin in Macedonia? The US is
hip-deep into this one, and where are the Republican members
of congress who demanded that we get out of the Balkans when
Clinton was in the White House? Are they deaf, dumb, and blind?
What is needed is a thorough congressional investigation of
our role in the ongoing destruction of Macedonia – and of
our Balkan policy in general. The much-vaunted "policy review"
undertaken by the Bush administration has yet to be completed:
what needs reviewing, first of all, is our ongoing complicity
in the rape of Macedonia.
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