I tip my hat to Julia Gorin's patience in the face of such denial, dhimmitude and plain stupidity. Is it me or has the Times been moving more to the left? ........... Will the appointment of Richard Miniter as editor of the editorial pages and vice president of opinion stop the slide? We live in hope.
My unpublished letter to the Washington Times:
The Washington Times recently gave print space to William Walker, described as a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer and former ambassador. But Walker is much more than that. In Kosovo, he remains a hands-on operative who has trained, and implemented the demands of, our terrorist ally the KLA — which as predicted now controls the Serbian province as its “legitimate” rulers. The piece (“A Separate Take from Serbia”, Feb. 24) was presented as a response to an op-ed by Serbian President Boris Tadic, when in fact it was an attempt by essentially a KLA apparatchik to recycle and reinforce the long disproved propaganda that conned us into becoming the KLA’s air force in the first place. Walker, like so many D.C. bureaucrats and lawmakers, is desperately trying to bury our blunder and seal our deal with the devil.
In 1999, the Washington Times understood better what we’d wrought in Kosovo than it does today after 10 years of Clinton’s war being exposed as a farce. On May 3rd, 1999 it ran the headline, “KLA finances fight with heroin sales – terror group linked to crime network.” The following day the even more disturbing headline appeared: “KLA rebels train in terrorist camps - Bin Laden offers financing, too.”
It’s certainly interesting that Walker is sweating as he is for our adopted demon child, Kosovo, at a time that his forensic investigator, Helena Ranta, is finally revealing the truth about his having coerced her report on the January 1999 Racak “massacre” that was used as a trigger for Clinton’s NATO bombing. A biography about Ranta, released in October, reveals that as head of the Kosovo Verification Mission, Walker “broke a pencil in two and threw the pieces at her when she was not willing to use sufficiently strong language about the Serbs,” the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported. Quoting Ranta herself now: “[Walker] says to this day that it was a massacre and that the Serbs were to blame. But I never said that. I never made any reference to the perpetrators.” She added that Walker has been “putting words into my mouth…What angered him most was that I refused to use the word massacre and say who stood behind what happened in Racak.”
News organizations including the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, Die Welt, BBC and Le Figaro raised doubts about the alleged massacre early in 1999, after forensic investigators concluded the bodies weren’t civilians but armed KLA guerrillas who started shooting at Serb police when the latter came to make arrests for ambushes of Yugoslav police. An AP TV crew filmed the entire day of fighting as it followed the Serbian police around, and witnessed no massacres. The conclusions of the above-cited newspapers, like those of Belorussian, Yugoslavian and ultimately Finnish forensic experts, were that the bodies had been disarmed, re-dressed in civilian clothes, then shot additional times and cut with knives several hours after death.
Milosevic trial observer Andy Wilcoxson noted in April 2005 that Walker “was given access to the village by the KLA while forensic investigators were kept out [initially]. Walker, instead of taking steps to secure the alleged crime scene, brought journalists to that gully and let them trample all over the place. One of the journalists was Franz Josef Hutsch, a German newspaper reporter. According Mr. Hutsch, who testified at the trial on October 12, 2004, Walker just stood there while journalists moved the bodies around to take their pictures.”
Walker’s propaganda job is repeating itself as the tenth anniversary of America’s greatest historical crime approaches this month — on March 24, the day America bombed Europe on the cusp of a new century. The Washington Times’ desire for balance is understandable, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of the truth. Walker is still trying to portray the KLA as “a tiny band attempting to stem the tide of violence inflicted by the government,” when the late Daniel Pearl and the NY Times’ Chris Hedges demonstrated as early as 1998 and 1999 what the supremacist KKKLA is all about. The KLA itself has been clarifying it over the course of the past 10 years that it’s had the run of Kosovo and 250,000 non-Albanians have fled the province. Ask the Albanians who sit with their mouths shut in Pristina in fear for their lives — as the author of the book Hiding Genocide in Kosovo can attest — whether Walker’s KLA resembles the one they know and had to cheer on February 17, 2008 along with the in-denial Albanian Diaspora in Times Square and everywhere else.
To reinforce his house of cards, Walker writes, “In the mid-1990s a tiny group of Albanians — tired of seeing their villages attacked, looted, burned to the ground; their men and boys jailed, tortured and executed; their access to education, health care and other public services cut off by Belgrade — took up arms and attempted to defend their villages, their families.”
As any student of the Balkans would know, it was the brutish Kosovo-Albanian policy that threatened death for any Albanian “collaborators” who acknowledged Belgrade’s legal rule — even by working for the postal service or police. Albanians had to “voluntarily” alienate themselves from the host society by refusing the above-mentioned “access to education, health care and other public services.” It was not “cut off by Belgrade,” as Walker lies, knowing that American readers won’t know any better. The Albanians of Kosovo set up a parallel system, in which there were Albanian schools, hospitals and administrative offices which shut out non-Albanians, such that pregnant Serbian women had to cross to Serbia proper to give birth.
As Cedomir Prlincevic, former leader of Kosovo’s banished Serbian-speaking Jewish community, told interviewer Jared Israel, of the Emperor’s New Clothes website in 2000: the Albanians of Kosovo pretended they had been locked out of the schools when actually it was an organized boycott:
In Kosovo, a foreign Superpower supported the secessionists for well over a decade. Because of this support, the Albanians were psychologically prepared to achieve — no, not to achieve, to be given — secession. As a gift. The secessionist leaders, starting with Rugova, had promised them, “Do this, do that and the US will intervene and we will get Kosovo.” They had been promising this for years. “Sacrifice your children by boycotting the schools; sacrifice your health by boycotting the hospitals; use your suffering to show foreign public opinion how we suffer under the Serbs, and the U.S. will come to our rescue.”
Serbs were once the majority in Kosovo, but today Kosovo is 97% Albanian. Who, then, was being “ethnically cleansed”? Within months of Albanians getting their NATO assistance against Serbia, they were on to Macedonia, where they now use the same arguments: that they’re being discriminated against and frozen out of jobs even though they hold government office and occupy the western half of the country as Greater Albania marches on, with U.S. blessing.
The “policy of repression, of ethnic cleansing, of systemic rape, pillage and murder” that Walker cites about Belgrade far better describes how the Albanian hyper-nationalists whom we side with were running the province for three decades leading up to Milosevic’s crackdown. But that’s been the trick all along: invert what was done to Serbs with what was done “by” Serbs, as Daniel Greenfield wrote for the website “Israel e-News” upon Kosovo’s independence: “Kosovo and the Palestinian Authority are both triumphs of terrorism, victories by racist nationalists whose aim has always been religious and ethnic cleansing, who have nevertheless managed to portray the countries they have torn to shreds as racist nationalists practicing ethnic cleansing.”
