Ur artikel av John Laughland i The Express, England:
"Within a month of the
end of the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, Nato governments
and Belgrade have struck up a curious alliance. They are united
in a conspiracy of silence about the tens of thousands of Serb
and gipsy refugees from Kosovo, driven from their homes by Albanians.
I realised the scale of this new humanitarian catastrophe on a
recent visit to Kosovo as I toured camps of terrified people.
On Friday, the spokesman for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees confirmed this when he said revenge attacks were far worse than had been expected. If action was not taken, he said, Kosovo would soon be completely ethnically cleansed of Serbs and gipsies. But his words are likely to go unheeded, for these poor terrified people are an ideological threat to Tony Blair as much as they are to Slobodan Milosevic.
Officially there are no refugees at all in Serbia. Their existence proves that Yugoslavia has lost control of Kosovo. Whatever concessions Nato made on paper (the most important being recognition that Kosovo is an integral part of Yugoslavia), the reality is that Nato and the Kosovo Liberation Army are now in charge.
But, for Nato, the flood of refugees destroys the fiction that the war was fought for moral principles. Time and again during the war Mr Blair said: "This is not a war for territory but for values."
Ethnic cleansing was unacceptable and had to be stopped. However, if this were the real reason for the war, Nato should logically be now bombing the Albanian capital, Tirana, or attacking the KLA headquarters all over the province.
Instead, Nato is turning a blind eye to Albanian atrocities. Far from exerting pressure on the KLA, Mr Blair was photographed recently enjoying a convivial joke with its leader, Hashim Thaci. And while the International Criminal Tribunal prosecutor, Louise Arbour, is travelling in Kosovo to draw attention to Serb atrocities against Albanians months ago, she is ignoring atrocities now being committed by Albanians under her very nose.
The West even looks the other way, despite its huge military presence in the province, as the Albanian Mafia charges Albanian refugees ransom money before allowing them to leave the camps and return home.
Serb and gipsy refugees, pouring across the border in their hundreds every day, told me how they were chased from homes which were then burned before their eyes; how women had been raped; how neighbours had been shot or had their throats slit. They also said Albanians were killing "loyal Albanians" - Kosovars who had worked for the Yugoslav state, for instance as postmen or in factories.
The refugees also all complained that Nato troops were doing nothing to protect them. One 30-year-old mother of three tried to alert a British soldier to looting and violence by Albanians. He replied: "We have no mandate to arrest people." In the French sector, uniformed KLA soldiers walk around unmolested, in contravention of the demilitarisation agreement.
The gipsies' fate is particularly tragic. All over Eastern Europe they are a persecuted minority. Only in Serbia, it appears, did they live free from discrimination. But Albanians seem to have a particular hatred for them. I was taken to a former gipsy quarter in the town of Kosovska Mitrovica: all the houses stood empty, torched and smashed up by Albanians.
"We cannot live with the Albanians any more," cried one desperate gipsy woman waiting by the roadside with her family and a few suitcases. "They are animals."
If Nato is now declining to stand by the very principles it enunciated only a few weeks ago, what credibility can there be for the stated justification of the war in the first place?
Two elements must make us sceptical. First, there was no refugee crisis (and thus no "ethnic cleansing") until the bombing started. There were many internally displaced people within Kosovo, fleeing the civil war, but mass movement into Macedonia and Albania began only after bombing started. The more we bombed, the more came out. Many were therefore fleeing bombs, not Serbs. In any case, hundreds of thousands of Albanians remained in Kosovo during the conflict, untouched by Serbs.
Second, as a KLA leader told an American journalist two years ago in Istanbul, the KLA strategy for Kosovo independence (which was executed from January 1998 onwards) was to attack and kill Serbs in order to provoke reprisals. These were presented to the West as racially motivated ethnic cleansing; in reality they were a (doubtless brutal) reaction to a brutal terrorist insurrection..."
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