Balkanalysis.com

What Mr. Lyon Didn’t Say

By Christopher Deliso

James Lyon’s April 10 article on political developments in Serbia, published in the Baltimore Sun, darkly predicts “serious repercussions” for the Balkan country, in terms of its “relations with the European Union and the United States, Montenegro’s independence referendum, the future status of Kosovo and cooperation with The Hague war crimes tribunal.”

What is the reason for such a portentous pronouncement? Mr. Lyon opines that Serbia’s Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica has allegedly “let the nationalist genie out of the bottle and may be unable to put it back anytime soon.”According to Mr. Lyon, the Serbian prime minister’s great act of treachery was in that he allegedly “provided” the late Slobodan Milosevic with “a state funeral in all but name,” and thus “disgraced Serbia and demonstrated his commitment to preserving Mr. Milosevic’s legacy and interpretation of history.”

This would be a damning indictment- were it actually true.

While he correctly notes that the Serbian opposition, the Radical Party and the late Mr. Milosevic’s former Social Party, hope to gain from the negative opinion of Serbs toward the Hague Tribunal, which was trying Mr. Milosevic for war crimes at the time of his death, Mr. Lyon does not say that the former president’s funeral was held literally in the back yard of his family home- about as far from a state funeral as one could get.

Mr. Lyon also fails to say much about himself, or the think-tank for which he works. This activist organization, the International Crisis Group, has a demonstrated track record of attacking Serbia in sensationalist reports, while consistently lobbied for the Kosovo Albanians, who are pushing for independence from Serbia.

Further, Mr. Lyon does not mention that the ICG board of directors includes interested parties such as former Gen. Wesley Clark, who commanded the NATO assault on Serbia in 1999; or figures such as Martti Ahtisaari, a former Finnish president employed to negotiate a settlement at that time, and called in again to help negotiate Kosovo’s final status today. Do readers not deserve to know when special interests are concealed behind seeming objectivity?

Mr. Lyon’s article is therefore much more revealing for what the author doesn’t say than for what he does.

Notably, Mr. Lyon does not say that despite the self-assured belief of Western media and politicians, there were very real doubts that Mr. Milosevic would have been convicted of most of the crimes – especially the all-important one of genocide – that had been levied against him, had he lived to see the end of his trial. Thus it is clear why Mr. Lyon also does not say that Milosevic’s death, happening when it did, was the greatest relief that the Hague and Western political interests could have hoped for.

But Mr. Lyon’s article is not really about Milosevic, or about the alleged dangers of political parties in Serbia. It is about how to use these burning issues to set up a smokescreen, in order to keep the reader from seeing the all-too-visible proof that Western intervention in Kosovo has brought about massive economic and social dislocation, and that the West is now committed to a hypocritical policy that is right now rewarding ethnic cleansing, war criminals and racism- ironically, the very values that Mr. Lyon attributes to the late Slobodan Milosevic.

Indeed, while Mr. Lyon states that Mr. Milosevic “had been on trial for war crimes,” he does not say that Kosovo’s Western-appointed Prime Minister, Agim Ceku, is himself suspected of having directly committed war crimes in both Croatia and Kosovo. And Mr. Lyon does not mention that the Western powers ordered INTERPOL to remove Ceku from its list of wanted criminals in order for him to try his hand at politics.

Further, Mr. Lyon does not state that one of Mr. Ceku’s predecessors, Ramush Haradinaj, is in fact currently on trial for war crimes at the very same Hague Tribunal where Mr. Milosevic died. However, the Kosovo Albanian former militant leader has enjoyed a leisurely and indefinite recess for a year now. And on March 10, the UN announced that Mr. Haradinaj is free to participate in Kosovo politics- despite being officially on trial for war crimes. Needless to say, Mr. Lyon doesn’t mention this blatant insult to justice.

He also does not mention that Kosovo, which he would like to see made independent, was only once before an independent state- during World War II, when the Kosovo Albanians sided with Hitler and were rewarded for their ethnic cleansing of Serbs, Jews, Romas and others by the creation of a “Greater Albania’ encompassing parts of Macedonia as well as Kosovo and Albania itself.

Tellingly, Mr. Lyon does not mention how precisely this bloody past has been repeated today. He does not say that the Albanian “Kosovo Liberation Army” which the West supported during NATO’s bombardment of Serbia in 1999 and its successor militias have driven well over 200,000 people from minority populations, for the most part Serbs, out of the province.

Mr. Lyon does not mention that the Kosovo Albanians have destroyed or damaged over 150 Serbian Christian churches, many dating back over 700 years, out of sheer ethnic hatred.

He also does not mention that during NATO’s 1999 bombing the same Albanian paramilitaries expelled the remainder of Kosovo’s centuries-old Jewish population, permanently. For the great crime of being loyal Yugoslav citizens, these Jews were forced to emigrate to Israel.

It is thus not a surprise that Mr. Lyon fails to mention that the few remaining Serbs in Kosovo live in refugee shelters or UN-protected enclaves, requiring armed escorts to travel, and still come under regular attack and intimidation from their Albanian neighbors.

Mr. Lyon never mentions that the Western powers, for their own self-interests, have long planned to make Kosovo independent, and that the current “negotiations” are just a formality to be finished with as quickly as possible.

Similarly, Mr. Lyon does not say that these same powers are hell-bent on creating an army for Kosovo’s Albanians by enlarging the KPC and TMK, the two militarized successor bodies of the demilitarized KLA. This new army is going to have helicopter gunships; as with the weapons and ordnance, these too are being provided by the West. With such an arsenal, the Kosovo Albanians will for the first time have the capability to launch air strikes on neighboring countries with restive Albanian minorities, such as Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia proper.

Last but not least, Mr. Lyon does not say that separatist groups in the Caucasus – Abkhazia and Ossetia in Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan and more – have openly stated that should Kosovo gain independence through the argument of national self-determination, they will make the same case themselves. The results could very well lead to renewed war in an unpredictable region where the West has staked billions on an oil pipeline connecting the Caspian Sea to Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.

Thus, far from building regional confidence and promoting a peaceful future in the Balkans, it seems that Western policy is laying the foundations for a new war in that eternally tormented region, as well as economic and political havoc on another major geopolitical and cultural fault line.

Just don’t expect Mr. Lyon and his kind to admit it.