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Libya overshadowed by “Kosovo model”

23 May

Scene of the bombing of Libya, 2011

Scene of the bombing of Belgrade, 1999

BEIJING, May 23 (Xinhua) — The latest moves by Western allies against Libya have shown marked similarities to “strategies” they adopted in Kosovo in the 1990s.

Catherine Ashton, EU’s foreign policy chief, opened the bloc’s office on Sunday in Benghazi,the Libyan opposition’s base camp when he visited the city on Sunday.

Earlier last Monday, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) requested arrest warrants for Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, his son Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi and his brother-in-law Abdullah Al-Sanousi who is Libya’s head of intelligence.

In retrospective, NATO adopted a three-step strategy in Kosovo War back in 1999.

NATO first supported the Kosovo authority and launched 78-day bombings against former Yugoslavia, forcing the late Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his forces.

The West then stirred up the political unrest in Serbia, leading to the downfall of Milosevic.

The last step was to send Milosevic to The Hague to face trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia. Later on, Milosevic died in custody.

Twelve years later, the Western allies again resorted to a similar three-step strategy in Libya.

NATO is launching continuous air strikes against Gaddafi’s forces, while the Western allies are heaping political and psychological pressures on Gaddafi and openly supporting the opposition, in a bid to force Gaddafi to give up power. This was followed by ICC’s issuance of arrest warrant to bring Gaddafi to The Hague.

Yet, there are some differences between the two scenarios.

Depleted uranium left in the province of Kosova by NATO bombs

In 1999, the West unleashed the bombings without bothering to ask for UN Security Council mandate, while 12 years later, the West launched airstrikes on Libya by overstepping the authorization of UN Resolution 1973 to impose “non-fly” zone supposedly to protect the civilians in Libya.

In addition, NATO has expanded its military actions from Europe, the defense area defined by the North Atlantic Treaty, to Africa, which is far beyond NATO’s traditional legitimate defense area.

Ironically, the West has claimed to seek “political solution” while continuing its airstrikes in Libya, but what it really means by “political solution” is something quite different from what is understood by the international community.

Since March 19 when several Western nations started air raids, the West has organized so-called “Contact Group” on Libya and held several meetings to coordinate actions, claiming to “seek political solution to resolving Libya crisis.”

However, the “Contact Group” has openly urged support for the Libya opposition on several occasions.

In short, what happened in Kosovo and Libya may well serve as perfect examples of the so-call “neo-interventionism” pursued by some Western powers.

Under the pretext of “human rights above sovereignty,” they try to interfere in the domestic affairs of sovereign states, even resort to military means to split them.

The strategies of these neo-interventionists are, more often than not, deceptive.

On the Libya issue, for instance, the Western powers seemed to have complied with international procedures and norms: they first tried to push pass a UN Security Council resolutions and then seek an ICC arrest warrant to bring Libyan leader Gaddafi to justice.

These strategies, however, are merely employed on a selective basis to get rid of political figures the West dislike, including Gaddafi and Milosevic. The West would turn a blind eye to similar cases in countries which are considered its own allies.

To put it clearly, some forces in the West are using just procedures of the international laws to serve their own political purposes.

In the 21st century, some Western countries take “neo-interventionism” as their standard practice and even try to apply the so-called “Kosovo model” elsewhere in the world. This should ring an alarm bell to the international community.

Special Report: Foreign Military Intervention in Libya

 

Source

Serbia-Kosovo Talks Must Not Forget the Roma

5 Apr

Officials from Serbia and Kosovo met in Brussels last week for a second round of negotiations aimed at establishing a formal relationship. Because of the potential for the talks to be politically fraught, negotiators have agreed to limit themselves to three seemingly less controversial topics: the rule of law, regional cooperation, and freedom of movement.

But while Serbia and Kosovo negotiate these subjects, they should spend some time discussing one of Kosovo’s most intractable human rights issues: the plight of displaced Roma families trapped in lead- contaminated camps in the divided city of Mitrovica.

The Roma families were displaced during and after the war, and their mahalla (neighbourhood) in the southern part of Mitrovica was destroyed. They were resettled in an area heavily contaminated with lead and told they would only be there for a few months. Some have been stuck there for more than a decade.

As a 2009 Human Rights Watch report documented, people living in the camps, especially children, have suffered severe health consequences from persistent lead exposure. The situation was described by the United Nations mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, in 2006 as “one of the worst health crises that we have in this part of Europe.”

Following extensive pressure from human rights, Roma rights and civil society organizations and growing international condemnation, major progress toward closing the camps was made in 2010.


The most heavily contaminated camp, Cesmin Lug, was closed and demolished in late 2010 and the majority of the inhabitants of that camp and a second lead-contaminated camp at Osterode were relocated to reconstructed homes in a mahalla, through an EU- and USAID-funded project.

While there is still much to be done to ensure medical testing and treatment for all residents and to help with reintegration and livelihoods, moving them away from the worst lead contamination was an important first step.

But there are still about 20 families in Osterode. They are unwilling to return to the mahalla in Albanian-controlled south Mitrovica, fearing for their security, their livelihoods, or both. So they are trapped in a camp that is literally poisoning them, and without a solution for these families, it will be impossible to close the camp.

Roma are a vulnerable minority across the Western Balkans, where they face persistent discrimination in many areas of life. This includes forced evictions in Serbia, segregated education in Croatia, exclusion from political office in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and lack of access to basic services in Kosovo.

The long-held prejudices against Roma will not evaporate with a few negotiations in Brussels. But there is an answer for the displaced Roma families in the lead-contaminated Osterode camp, if Serbia and Kosovo can agree on it.


The remaining Roma families at Osterode could be permanently relocated to Serb-controlled north Mitrovica or to municipalities in northern Kosovo. Funding is not an impediment (through the EU and USAID projects) and the families have said they would move to north Mitrovica. All that is needed is land on which to build them homes.

To date, however, the EU, the US and the authorities in Pristina have been reluctant to pursue such a solution. Western officials fear that negotiating with the de facto Serbian local authorities in north Mitrovica and the three other northern municipalities might confer legitimacy on them, undermining Kosovo’s territorial integrity.

Kosovo and Serbian negotiators have an opportunity at the talks to overcome this problem. Kosovo authorities can agree to stand behind efforts by international officials to negotiate with the Serbian authorities in northern Kosovo to provide land for these trapped families.

The government of Serbia can encourage these Kosovo Serb authorities to respond favorably to those requests. It should assure Kosovo that it will not seek to use such requests from international officials for the purpose of political advantage or to undermine Kosovo’s autonomy.

If the negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo are about solving problems with straightforward solutions, there is no excuse to not take on this issue. If Serbia and Kosovo do so, they will demonstrate that their cooperation can bring tangible benefits to the most vulnerable people within their borders.

Source

Operation Odyssey Dawn: Libya to get the “Kosovo Treatment”

19 Mar

Another “Humanitarian Bombing” – First Yugoslavia, Now Libya

President Barack Obama has now made the exact same speech Bill Clinton made on network news back in 1999 – promising “no ground forces” in the next American-led war of aggression. U.N. and U.S. actions against Moammar Gaddafi’s Libya are signs of imperialist designs for Libya, including its enormous oil wealth. Gaddafi has rightfully called these attacks “colonial” and “crusader.”

The United States and its allies have committed an act of aggression by bombing Libya in the so-called “Operation Odyssey Dawn.” A coalition of European countries and the United States bombed Libyan targets by air and sea on Saturday, March 19th, 2011. These acts constitute an open act of war against the Libyan people. Chillingly, this is widely being referred to as “the largest international effort since the Iraq War,” as though that were a desirable model!

Comparisons are already being made to the previous “military intervention” and “humanitarian bombing” of this type – the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

Back during the 1990′s, NATO began bombing the Balkan country, causing much destruction – the NATO air forces “[bombed] fifteen cities in hundreds of around-the-clock raids for over two months, spewing hundreds of thousands of tons of highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals into the water, air, and soil, killing thousands of Serbs, Albanians, Roma, Turks, and others, and destroying bridges, residential areas, and over two hundred hospitals, clinics, schools, and churches, along with the productive capital of an entire nation” (1).

Why did the Western powers do this? Why did they bomb a sovereign country? Dr. Michael Parenti’s work “The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia” recalls the events of the Kosovo War, the predecessor of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars as well as the current Libya bombing:

In 1999, the U.S. national security state — which has been involved throughout the world in subversion, sabotage, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, and death squads — launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia for 78 days, dropping 20,000 tons of bombs and killing thousands of women, children, and men. All this was done out of humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo. Or so we were asked to believe. In the span of a few months, President Clinton bombed four countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq repeatedly, and Yugoslavia massively. At the same time, the U.S. was involved in proxy wars in Angola, Mexico (Chiapas), Colombia, East Timor, and various other places. And U.S. forces are deployed on every continent and ocean, with some 300 major overseas support bases — all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, and humanitarianism. (1)

The United States, European and United Nations cries for military intervention in Libya are not being done out of concern for the Libyan people or any sort of “humanitarian” desires – they are being done with imperialism’s global economic interests in mind. Like Yugoslavia, an imperialist attack in Libya will reduce it to a destroyed, defenseless right-wing “Third World-ized” state.

French warplanes, followed closely by U.S. airplanes, have launched a murderous assault on Libyan targets. President Obama’s use of “left unchecked” paralleled Bill Clinton and George W. Bush’s speeches, notably Bush justifying Iraq.

As of now, U.S. and British forces have launched 110 Tomahawk missiles at targets along the coast, including around the capital of Tripoli and other major cities. The attacks are part of a U.N. policy of establishing a “no-fly-zone” over Libya in violation of its national sovereignty. The Pentagon has loudly proclaimed that the U.S. is “leading” the air strikes and the widespread jamming of communications in the country. France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, Canada and other Arab powers are responsible for a war of aggression against Libya.

It is also fitting that today, March 19th, marks the 8th anniversary of the Iraq War, the day on which thousands of American workers will be protesting throughout the country against the continuation of U.S. imperialist wars.

Remember that U.N. sanctions and a “no-fly zone” killed over a million Iraqis. Remember that another war of aggression, the Iraq War, has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

Remember that “humanitarian bombing” killed thousands of civilians in Yugoslavia.

CLICK HERE FOR A LIST OF PROTESTS

Join Anti-War Protests!

NO to Imperialist Attack on Libya!

Sources:

1)
http://www.michaelparenti.org/yugoslavia.html

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