Former U.S. President William Jefferson Clinton is to arrive in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, on Sunday, November 1 according to the erstwhile head of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and self-styled prime minister of Kosovo Hashim Thaci.
The occasion of Clinton's visit, his first since Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence in February of 2008 - a violation of international law and United Nations Resolution 1244 directly resulting from Clinton's acts of a decade ago - is to attend the official unveiling of a statue dedicated to himself.
"The almost ten feet statue of the former U.S. President Bill Clinton has been erected in the same square that bears his name in Pristina. [The unveiling] of the statue was delayed due to the busy agenda of the former American President. The statue erected to President Clinton is being sponsored by and [is] under the auspices of Prime Minister Thaci." [1]
Another adage, this time a peculiarly American one, is that partisan politics end at the water's edge. Not that it matters to anyone in the world except for U.S. voters every four years, but differences between the nation's two ruling parties, such as they are, rarely manifest themselves beyond the nation's Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The main street in Pristina is named after George W. Bush, who presided over and in fact engineered Kosovo's formal secession from Serbia.
There are also major streets named after Tony Blair, Madeleine Albright and William Walker, the last the Deputy Chief of Mission in Honduras and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central America in the 1980s during the Reagan administration's Contra war against Nicaragua and death squad terror in El Salvador. Walker is held in high esteem by KLA veterans like Hashim Thaci for his role in blaming the government of Yugoslavia for what he represented as a massacre in the Kosovo village of Racak in January of 1999, arguably the main incident used to justify the 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia three months later.
Western journalists at the time and forensic experts afterward reported a different story, but Walker blustered:
"From what I saw, I do not hesitate to describe the crime as a massacre, a crime against humanity. Nor do I hesitate to accuse the government security forces of responsibility."
Not that anyone would question Walker's familiarity with massacres, he certainly oversaw enough genuine ones in Central America in the 1980s, but his motives in this case were suspect to say the least.
No report has yet surfaced that the separatists in Kosovo, armed during their own contra war ten years ago and now again as a proto-army, the Kosovo Security Force, by the U.S. and its NATO allies, plan to erect a monument to Walker, but if so that would give the new governments of Nicaragua and El Salvador an additional reason to eschew recognizing the illegal entity that is spurned by 130 of the world's 192 nations.
Regarding Clinton's arrival on Sunday (the scent of a handsome "honorarium" wafts through the air), KLA chieftain Thaci, endearingly known to his former KLA colleagues by the nom de guerre of The Snake, promises that the Bomber of Belgrade will be met with a "magnificent welcome" and that locals will "appear en masse at the Bill Clinton Square". [2]
Criminals don't leave the scene of a crime, a war crime, when they have never left left it. Most of the 50,000 U.S. and other NATO troops that entered Kosovo in June of 1999 with their KLA allies have since departed to "bring peace" to and "stabilize" other parts of the world, Afghanistan and Iraq most notably, but over 14,000 remain more than ten years afterward.
What also remains in Kosovo is Camp Bondsteel, a nearly 1,000-acre U.S. Army base used as headquarters for the NATO Kosovo Force (KFOR) Multinational Task Force East. The installation is so extensive that it contains "the best hospital in Kosovo; a movie theater; three gyms; two recreation buildings that have phones, computers with internet connection, pool tables, video games and more; two chapels with various religious services and other activities; two large dining facilities; a fire station; a military police station; the Laura Bush education center where classes are offered through the University of Maryland University College and Central Texas College; two cappuccino bars, a Burger King, Taco Bell, and an Anthony's Pizza pizzeria; two barber shops; two laundry facilities employing local nationals who do the laundry for those living on base; two press shops; a sewing shop; two massage shops employing mostly Thai women who conduct various
massages...softball and football fields; and more." [3]
In short, a small city. Camp Bondsteel, the largest overseas American military facility constructed since the Vietnam War, was reported to be a CIA "black site" in a report by a major British newspaper in January of this year. The base can well be used for whatever purposes the CIA and the Pentagon intend it to with the pseudo-government of Kosovo, many of its leaders linked for decades to Europe's narcotics, arms and sex slave trades, manifestly unwilling to raise any objections knowing full well to whom they are indebted for their current fiefdom.
A month after the U.S.- and NATO-backed secession of Kosovo from Serbia, the latter's then prime minister Vojislav Kostunica stated, "The illegal construction of a huge American military base, Bondsteel, and Annex 11 of the Ahtisaari plan, which establishes NATO as the supreme organ of government in Kosovo, reveal the reason why Serbia was mindlessly destroyed, and why a NATO state was declared illegally on February 17." [4]
During its fiftieth anniversary jubilee summit in Washington, D.C. in April of 1999 NATO was in the midst of an almost three-month air war against Yugoslavia, the first unprovoked military attack against a European nation since Hitler's Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and subsequently other nations, plunging the continent into the deadliest and most destructive war in its history.
The end result of 1999's Operation Allied Force, NATO's first war, fought without UN authorization and against the opposition of Russia, China and most of the world's nations, was to transform the entire Balkans region into what are little more than NATO military colonies: Recruitment grounds for troop deployments to new war zones further to the east and south and sites for the building and acquisition of new U.S. military bases - infantry, air and naval - for the same purpose, as with not only Kosovo but Bulgaria and Romania as well.
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