When the United Nations refused to sanction the 1999 Kosovo War, it became a NATO campaign although critics pointed out that the NATO charter specifies that NATO was created for defence of its members, and the bombing of Serbia was an attack on a non-NATO country which was not directly threatening any NATO member.
With the KLA painted as the good guys and the Serb forces as the baddies when in reality they were both as bad as each other when it came to killing civilians, NATO stepped into a civil war regardless of the lack of legitimacy and three months of bombing later, the Serbian Army was in retreat and Kosovo became an interim civilian administration under the authority of the United Nations.
Ten years on an a report from the Council of Europe tells us that it is now ruled by gangster thugs involved in murder and selling body parts.
The report alleges that the newly re-elected Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, was the head of an organised crime ring involved in organ trafficking, assassinations and other crimes.
It seems that all NATO achieved was to foist a gang of gangsters into power who have been exerting what the EC called 'violent control over the trade in heroin and other narcotics.'
Part of the report suggests that after the 1999 war the KLA took revenge on the
Serb civilians who stayed behind by dragging them off to a network of KLA run detention centres in northern Albania where they were 'subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, before ultimately disappearing, murdered for their kidneys.'
It concludes 'Thaçi’s Drenica Group 'bear the greatest responsibility'.
The first commander of U.N. troops in Bosnia, Canadian Gen. Lewis MacKenzie said 'We bombed the wrong side. The Kosovo-Albanians have played us like a Stradivarius.'
They certainly did and once again Western intervention has made a horrific situation a whole lot worse.
2 comments:
I won't take issue with the undesirable results of this intervention, but my impression is that (unlike the invasion of Iraq, which was undertaken for nakedly political and economic reasons) the motivation behind the intervention in Kosovo was comparatively pure and virtuous.
It is reminiscent of the Georgia Russia conflict in 2008 in such that the KLA tugged on the tail of its more powerful neighbour and then acted the victim when it retaliated. In comes NATO and the KLA take over Kosovo. It then tried the same trick with Montenegro but NATO warned it off and the realisation that we were duped. Or 'played like a Stradivarius' as the man put it.
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