In the following interview for Strategic Culture Foundation, Daniel Kovalik explains how the U.S.-led war against the former Yugoslavia in 1999 was a fateful and brutal assault against the international order. It opened the door for the rapid eastward expansion of the NATO military bloc in breach of assurances to Russian leaders. And it thus created the conditions for today’s war in Ukraine. Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine is the culmination of U.S. and NATO aggression that can be traced back to their blitzkrieg against Serbia 23 years ago.

Daniel Kovalik is a world-renowned American human rights lawyer, author and commentator on international politics. He teaches international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Law. He is a human and labor rights attorney who has worked on many cases in Latin America, including helping Colombian workers sue the Coca-Cola Company over alleged widespread abuses. He writes extensively for Counterpunch and Huffington Post. Kovalik is the author of several books including The Plot to Scapegoat Russia.

Interview

Question: Western governments and media have condemned Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine as the worst inter-state violence in Europe since the Second World War. But last week we just saw the 23rd anniversary of the U.S. and NATO bombing of former Yugoslavia when American warplanes attacked Serbia for 78 days, a war that has been all but scrubbed from Western public memory. Are you surprised by the blatant double standards?

Daniel Kovalik: In truth, I’m not surprised at all. We live in a world of Orwellian double-speak which functions to create consent amongst the masses for war. It is always the case that we are encouraged to condemn the actions of those we are told are our enemies while we are to ignore and even forget the crimes of our own governments. The bombing of Serbia, premised upon claims of defending human rights, was an abomination that focused on destroying civilians and civilian infrastructure though it is remembered in the collective consciousness as some type of noble pursuit.

Question: Do you see the two wars as comparable? Russia claims it acted on the principle of self-defense of Russian-speaking people; the US and NATO claim they acted in defense of Kosovo-Albanians whom they claim were being ethnically cleansed by Serbian forces?

Daniel Kovalik: There are certainly some similarities between these two military operations as both were premised, at least in large part, on the defense of people under attack. However, there are major differences. First, Russia actually borders Ukraine, and those being attacked in Ukraine by the government of Ukraine have been ethnic Russians, most of whom are also Russian citizens. And so, Russia certainly has a greater stake in what is happening in Ukraine than the U.S., as the leader of the NATO operation in Serbia, had in that far-flung country. Second, Russia is also claiming, unlike the U.S. or other NATO countries, that it is acting in its own defense in the operations in Ukraine. Russia has seen Ukraine being used as a staging group in order to destabilize if not destroy Russia, and the U.S. has been open about those aims, including in statements by American President Joe Biden himself in the last several days. The U.S. and NATO had no such self-defense concerns in Serbia and did not even claim such. Third, Russia has actually taken pains in Ukraine to avoid civilian deaths and casualties while NATO specifically targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure.

Question: The U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia and its capital Belgrade endured for 78 days; Russian forces have been striking Ukrainian locations for just over 38 days. How do the two operations differ in terms of damage inflicted, including civilian casualties?

Daniel Kovalik: Again, at least so far, Russia has tried to avoid attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure while NATO actually targeted them. Of course, that doesn’t mean that there haven’t been extensive civilian casualties in Ukraine as well as destruction to civilian buildings. And the war in Ukraine is still ongoing so we will have to see how the war progresses or devolves to know the full extent of damage to that country. That is why it is critical to find a negotiated solution to this conflict as soon as possible.

Question: Madeleine Albright, the former U.S. Secretary of State who died last week on the 23rd anniversary of NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia, was a major player in the supposed peace talks – the Rambouillet talks in February 1999 – that led up to the NATO campaign in March 1999. Why did the diplomatic effort fail to prevent the war?

Daniel Kovalik: We know very well that the peace talks in the former Yugoslavia failed precisely because the U.S. wanted them to fail. There were two separate peace agreements that could have prevented much of the bloodshed which took place there and the U.S. went out of its way to scuttle both of these agreements. The United States did so because it wanted a war in the former Yugoslavia just as it has wanted a war in Ukraine. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, the U.S. wanted the war to be able to destroy the last vestiges of socialism in Europe. It also wanted the war to show the world that it could go to war unilaterally and without UN Security Council authorization. That is, it wanted the war precisely so that it could show the world that it could invade any country it wanted and at any time. This was, indeed, a war against the international legal order.

Question: Do you think the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 was pivotal for the subsequent rapid eastwards expansion of NATO as a military organization?

Daniel Kovalik: I certainly think the bombing of Serbia facilitated the eastward expansion of NATO. It also set the precedent for NATO to serve as the United States’ air force throughout the world, including in places beyond Europe, such as Libya.

Question: Would you assess that the U.S./NATO bombing of Serbia is at the root of the present conflict in Ukraine? In other words, the ongoing war in Ukraine is but one part of a bigger global picture?

Daniel Kovalik: The bombing of Serbia continues to linger in the minds of the Russians who were horrified by a brother country in Europe being bombed by NATO. The memory of this event is certainly a motivating factor in Russia’s fears that it too could be a victim of NATO, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has said as much quite recently.  And so, certainly, that bombing played a role in leading to the conflict in Ukraine.

Question: The late Madeleine Albright, like many U.S. politicians, was a big advocate of “American exceptionalism” and America’s right to unilaterally use violence to achieve its geopolitical goals. Is that doctrine at the heart of today’s international conflict between the West and Russia and indeed China?

Daniel Kovalik: Yes, it certainly is. The idea that the U.S. is the “essential nation”, as both Albright and former President Barack Obama claimed, has been used to justify the United States’ claim to be able to act unilaterally against any nation in the world in order to protect its perceived interests. Of course, other countries have interests too, including the interest to have peace and security – these being the most fundamental rights of any nation as set forth in the United Nations Charter that was established in 1945 after the Second World War. The U.S.’ ceaseless aggression has destroyed this right of nations and the UN system itself, and countries like Russia and China are keen on restoring this right. The UN Charter, by its terms, is premised on the notion that all nations are equal under international law. The U.S. has claimed that, somehow, it is more equal than others, and it has acted on this claim to the detriment of millions around the world. The world is now pushing back against this.

When I initially read “The Politics of Genocide” [2010] by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson I was easily able to assimilate their critique of the brazen misapplication of the term “genocide” to events in Bosnia (Srebrenica) and Kosovo, since I was familiar with those issues and had worked at the Hague Tribunal, the place where the propaganda was ultimately reformatted to resemble authoritative, quasi-judicial court verdicts. But like most members of the general public, I thought that those authors’ deconstruction of the Rwandan conflict was exaggerated and tendentious because I knew practically nothing about it, aside from the steady stream of horror stories that were fed to news consumers in the 1990s (the authors fittingly called it “enduring lies” in a related volume). To paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, Rwanda was literally a “quarrel in a far-away country, between people of whom we know nothing,” and that made it quite easy to fool all of us. In retrospect, the Rwandan pattern should have raised red flags for adhering too closely to the Bosnian script. But viewed in a factual vacuum and without any particular local expertise, the torrent of Rwandan genocidal allegations appeared largely credible and indisputable. Exactly as the “Srebrenica genocide” narrative must appear to most superficially informed members of the public.

It is only with the publication of Herman and Peterson’s meticulously researched and persuasively argued book that critical questions about Rwanda began to arise. The authors argued that the label “genocide,” far from being merely descriptive or following the legal criteria set by the UN convention, was in fact highly politicised and generally used by governments, journalists, and academics to brand as evil those nations and political movements that in one way or another interfered with the imperial designs of the global West. Two sets of rules govern the application of the term “genocide.” It is seldom used when the perpetrators are U.S. allies (or even the United States itself), while it is applied almost indiscriminately when murders are committed or are alleged to have been committed by enemies of the global West and its business or political interests. After removing media blinkers to study more closely the factual background of the Rwandan affair and applying Herman and Peterson’s analytical framework, events there came into focus and the received narrative about Rwanda was no longer making sense.

A recent reminiscence by Phil Taylor and John Philpot on Global Research about the judicial lynching of Rwandan Colonel Théoneste Bagasora, who recently passed away in prison after enduring many years of incarceration for his alleged role in genocidal killings, recalled not just the sordid impact of propaganda in misshaping public perceptions of important contemporary political issues. More importantly, it highlighted the squalid part played by “gekaufte Justiz,” as Udo Ulfkotte would undoubtedly have called it if he were alive to write a book on this subject today, in seemingly confirming and reinforcing propaganda’s toxic lies.

Taylor and Philpot demonstrate that Bagasora was railroaded by the ICTR, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which sits in Arusha, Tanzania, where he and scores of other Rwandan officials were tried. ICTR is the somewhat lesser-known but equally pernicious mirror image of the more infamous ICTY, or the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Attorney Christopher Black, with hands-on experience in both the Hague and Arusha, is unequivocal: “Bagasora was framed up. Not guilty of anything, but this is true of every one of the accused at the Rwanda Tribunal. They were all framed up.”

Black describes the technology of judicial lynching: “The prosecution targeted selected people to try to paint a picture of a government, so a few officers, politicians, party people, administrators, any Hutu intellectuals, etc. were indicted. They concocted stories and charges, all in the name of propaganda to justify the war the West conducted against Rwanda to overthrow its government.

“In 2007 thirty-seven of the [Rwanda] accused sent a letter to the UN declaring that they were political prisoners of the UN. Just think of that, the UN holding political prisoners. And it is a fact that they were.”

Black continues: “At the time I tried to get some of the accused at the ICTY [the Hague Tribunal] to join this action, but received no replies from anyone. The lawyers at the ICTY were sweetheart lawyers for the most part, except in the case of Milosevic.”

Referring to the structure of the pseudo-judicial twins, ICTR and ICTY, Black says that they are “identical in the way they chose people to target, the way they concocted evidence and arranged witnesses, in the way they tried to ensure that only weak lawyers were allowed to defend the accused (a constant battle at the ICTR), and in their control by NATO personnel at every level and in every department. They had the same prosecutor in charge of both [Carla Del Ponte], judges that went back and forth between the two, the same appeal chamber, etc. etc. Hans Köchler’s book about the two tribunals, “Global Justice or Global Revenge”, describes it best. He showed how the judges were all finally approved by the U.S.” Hence, one supposes, the indicative note in the blurb to Köchler’s book, that “the author’s main intention is to reflect upon the legal and philosophical foundations of international criminal law in the context of politics.”

“The two ad hoc tribunals were (and still are in the “Mechanism”) entirely show tribunals created to run show trials to frame up scapegoats for the crimes of the NATO countries involved,” Black concludes with understandable bitterness in his private communication with this author.

Going back to the Herman and Peterson analysis, both “tribunals” have been essential tools in perpetuating crude propaganda fabrications, that otherwise would probably have remained ephemeral, about the Bosnia and Rwanda conflicts by repackaging them in deceptive judicial wrapping. These sorry excuses for “international courts” are not merely a disservice to jurisprudence, to which they have inflicted incalculable damage, whose full scope will become apparent only with the passage of time. Inexcusably, they are guilty also of an appalling distortion of the historical record, arguably an even more grievous offence that may take much longer to rectify.

Enlightened Europe has been vigorously displaying its fabled values lately.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) just recently responded in the complaint brought by the Russian Federation against Ukraine for the mistreatment of the latter’s citizens based on their ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic self-identification. To quote more directly the topics covered in the complaint: “The case concerns the Russian Government’s allegation of an administrative practice in Ukraine of, among other things, killings, abductions, forced displacement, interference with the right to vote, restrictions on the use of the Russian language and attacks on Russian embassies and consulates. They also complain about the water supply to Crimea at the Northern Crimean Canal being switched off and allege that Ukraine was responsible for the deaths of those on board Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 because it failed to close its airspace.”

By any measure, these are serious complaints. Such violations, if true, go to the very core of the European and, more broadly, Western system of values. By those enlightened standards, there is no misconduct much worse than “killings, abductions, forced displacement, interference with the right to vote, restrictions on the use of … language.” Countries are put under sanctions and threatened with the use of force under the “right to protect” doctrine contrived for the benefit of victim populations for far less than that. (Cases in point: Belarus, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, and the list could go on.) The Russian Federation, while alleging cited misbehaviour, neither imposed sanctions on the Ukraine nor threatened to march in and restore some semblance of legal order and security by unilateral, self-righteous intervention. Instead, it is seeking a judicial review of the facts and asking for a legal ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, a seemingly restrained and reasonable course of action. Pending a full consideration of the evidence in the case, it asked for an interim ruling, or what is called a restraining order in America, to caution the Ukrainian authorities from tolerating the cited misconduct should it in the meantime become aware of it. A more sensible request under the circumstances is difficult to imagine.

That is why under the circumstances ECHR’s response to the request for an interim ruling is puzzling, to put it mildly:

“The Court decided to reject the request under Rule 39 of the Rules of Court since it did not involve a serious risk of irreparable harm of a core right under the European Convention on Human Rights.”

Are we to understand that in a stable, law-based political system such as the Ukraine, no ideological extremists endangering the peace and security of citizens have been detected, and that the occurrence of killings, abductions, forced displacement, interference with the right to vote and other infractions of the European Convention, such as the burning alive of several dozen people in Odessa a few years ago, are but  wild and unsubstantiated rumours, to which no extraordinary attention should be paid and thus no urgent ameliorative action is required? It would appear so, and also that, according to the preliminary judgment of ECHR, in the Ukraine all core rights are prima facie safe and secure, and mercifully are under no threat of “irreparable harm.”

But in its July 13, 2021, ruling entitled “Russia failed to justify the lack of any opportunity for same-sex couples to have their relationship formally acknowledged,” the same European court sent an eloquent virtue signal of its actual vision of “core values”. In a ruling obligating Russia to disregard its legislation and to defer instead to the demands of the LGBT agenda, and by vivid contrast to its stance on paltry matters such as “killings, abductions, forced displacement, interference with the right to vote” and the like, ECHR ordered Russia to institutionalise same-sex marriages. It thus indicated clearly which are the issues that do trigger an immediate and energetic response of human rights watchdogs in the civilised countries.

To put these matters in a broader perspective, mention should be made of Mrs. Dragica Gašić and her ghastly predicament in the town of Djakovica, located in the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija, occupied by NATO since 1999 as a showcase of what R2P interventions can do in furtherance of the “core values” to which the European Court of Human Rights is presumably committed.

Serbian Kosovo returnee, Dragica Gašić

NATO, it should be recalled, is supposed to be the muscle behind those superior values, while ECHR’s task is to maintain the moral high ground by taking upon itself their theoretical articulation. Mrs. Gašić was one of several hundred thousand ethnically cleansed residents of Kosovo who, in 1999, judged it prudent to flee before NATO’s “liberation forces” and the local armed gangs allied with them, and to take temporary refuge in the remaining unoccupied, you might say Vichy, Serbia. After repeated assurances of “normalisation” in Kosovo (an expression rich in ironic undertones within the context of 1950s and 1960s East European history), Mrs. Gašić succumbed to the temptation of taking the Pied Pipers up on their promises. Several months ago, she decided to move back to her abandoned home in Djakovica in order to continue the life that was brusquely interrupted by the humanitarian intervention of two decades ago.

Arguably, that may have been one of the worst decisions she ever made. Although she now is the only person of her ethnicity living in the town to which she has returned, her presence apparently is an intolerable irritant to the community of her neighbours, who are rather openly favoured by NATO, NATO-friendly local authorities, as well as the majority of European chancelleries. Although this lone woman poses no visible political or security threat to anyone, she has been intimidated and in no uncertain terms made to feel unwanted and socially unintegrated (in strikingly similar fashion to the ultimately successful Russian same-sex applicants to ECHR, but with the distinction that in her case there is not the slightest recognition of her plight from any quarter). Her modest application recently to the authorities to allow her to install a steel door in her apartment for personal protection was denied since, apparently inspired by the legal teaching of the European Court of Human Rights in the Ukrainian case, they failed to see any “serious risk of irreparable harm of a core right”. On July 29, in her absence the apartment was burglarised, her personal belongings were ransacked and partially carried away, including the mourning outfit for her deceased father and her diabetes medications.

Mrs. Gašić was not so lucky as to be made a subject of international litigation initiated by any government, not even her own. Nor is she even on the radar screen of any of the numerous international “core right” watchdogs and rapporteurs swarming in Kosovo. But that is scarcely surprising.

To the less favoured races, European justice has few benefits to offer.

While March 24 passed largely unnoticed in the West, where it should have evoked enormous outpourings of shame and repentance, in Moscow it was remembered by Maria Zakharova who correctly called it “a forever stain on NATO’s reputation.” On that day in 1999, invoking as its the pretext the urgent need to protect from persecution Kosovo’s Albanian minority, the NATO alliance, under the coordinated leadership  of major Western countries, began its Blitzkrieg against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Initially modelled after Hitler’s rapid war-winning strategy, the NATO offensive was not expected to last more than three or four days before Yugoslavia folded. In the event, it lasted more than seventy days, with a military and political ending in the field that was not among the brightest moments in NATO’s annals. In the final days of the unequal struggle to subdue a brave nation which had only a fraction of the aggressor’s resources to fight with, it was practically as if Hitler had been compelled to sue for peace from one of his intended victims. Other than being mindlessly destructive of civilian infrastructure, schools, hospitals, post offices, and bridges, and after killing several thousand civilians, the NATO offensive was getting precisely nowhere. Chastened by their full spectrum failure to dent Serbian ground defences, NATO generals repeatedly postponed and finally discarded the option of a ground invasion that in their probably correct estimate would have led to a politically unacceptable carnage of their troops.

What remained was to redouble the effort to vindictively and systematically, from the safe altitude of 30,000 feet, raze the victim country’s wherewithal for any semblance of civilized life. It was a practical application in the heart of Europe (not that it would have been justified anywhere else) of the neanderthal refrain of “free world” military planners that this or that country must either obey or be “bombed back to the stone age.” The neanderthals were, of course, safely ensconced in their Pentagon and Brussels offices while their acolytes were conducting murderous raids from heights that were largely unreachable for Yugoslavia’s air defences. The steady obliteration of Yugoslavia’s assets was taking its toll while the immense popular mobilization against barbarism that was taking place on the streets of Europe and America posed a severe political challenge to vassal European governments and began to strain the very fabric the NATO alliance.

In the end, NATO was ready for almost any sort of face-saving peace. Parallel to the intensification of bombing raids, it played its last card in the person of a corrupt Finnish politician, Martti Ahtisaari, who blustered President Slobodan Milosevic into adopting a more “flexible” stance by threatening to carpet bomb Belgrade, a clear war crime even if not actually enacted and used only as a tool of perverse neanderthal diplomacy. President Milosevic made the judgment call, rightly or wrongly, and decided in return for a badly needed respite to give the wicked alliance the face saver it needed by bringing its aggression to a close on something akin to “honourable” terms.

The political price for the cease fire that Yugoslavia exacted was formidable, at least in purely theoretical terms. It was UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which stipulated that the provinces of Kosovo and Metohija were inalienably Yugoslav (and with the subsequent dissolution of Yugoslavia, successor-state Serbia’s) territory and that under UN auspices NATO troops would be allowed to enter it only for the purpose of policing the peace and ensuring the safety of all ethnic groups residing there, pending a negotiated resolution of outstanding issues. Considering the gross disproportion in strength between the parties, for the Serbs that was on its face an epic moral and political victory even though NATO had not the slightest intention of honouring the terms of the agreement it signed. To rub it in, in plain view of the entire world the Serbian army withdrew from Kosovo virtually intact and in perfect order after over two months of bombardment which had almost entirely missed its target.

What remained, however, were tons of illegal toxic uranium munitions with a half-life of several million years to contaminate the soil and ruin the health of generations to come. But that was the predictable price of NATO “liberation.”

By far the most world-historical and plainly unintended consequence of NATO’s Kosovo adventure is what happened next, something that the Alliance and the Western political leadership will rue until their dying day. As noted in the Tweet of the Russian Embassy in Washington, “For the first time since WWII an aggression was committed against a sovereign European nation, an active participant in the anti-Hitler coalition, one of the UN founders.” The implications of these sombre facts did not pass without being thoroughly grasped in Moscow. In fact, they were firmly grasped and in real time by Prime Minister Evgeny Primakov who was on his way to Washington when the aggression started and immediately ordered his aeroplane, without further ado, to make a mid-Atlantic U-turn and return home. That sobering experience inaugurated a new era in geopolitics, further elaboration of this point being entirely unnecessary.

This writer, who in 2004 was seeing Mr. Primakov on another matter, upon the specific request of his mother and on behalf of the Serbian people, had the extraordinary honour of thanking the Russian statesman for his courageous and inspiring gesture which – now in retrospect we can confidently conclude – truly changed the world.

A controversy has recently erupted in Mexico, of the type that may quite often be seen in other similarly defrauded countries. Its focus is the magnificent quetzal-plumed headdress of the last Aztec emperor Moctezuma which, contrary to the misleading impression encouraged by the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, is not displayed there at all. It is actually located, of all places, in the Ethnological Museum in Vienna, Austria.

The impression is misleading because as recalled by all visitors to the Mexican Museo de Antropologia the headdress occupies a deservedly prominent position among the museum’s numerous artefacts. Viewers are not informed, however, that what is on display there is not the genuine item but a skilfully manufactured replica. Nor are they told where the genuine article is located, or what unusual circumstances explain its transfer to a minor European country that has no visible connection to the safekeeping of Mexican people’s national heritage. Unless, of course, we take into account the brief reign of Maximillian von Habsburg as the foreign-imposed emperor of Mexico in the nineteenth century. But as it turns out, that seemingly plausible assumption is a false trail. The defeated Aztec emperor’s headdress was purloined and removed to Europe by the victorious Spanish conquistadors half a millennium ago, and it ended up in Hapsburg Vienna through labyrinthine dynastic channels. But that is a pedantic clarification of the artefact’s odyssey which in principle scarcely makes any difference.

Moctezuma’s headdress

The fate of this national treasure par excellence of the people of Mexico is vividly illustrative of the policy of cultural appropriation (or, perhaps, expropriation would be just as good a word) that has been and still is zealously practiced by shameless Western imperialists. Cultural vandalism would probably be the best terms of all.

The fabled Elgin Marbles immediately come to mind. The history of this section of the Parthenon that was brazenly looted by the Earl of Elgin, at the time the Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of His Britannic Majesty to the Sublime Porte of Selim III, Sultan of Turkey, of whose realm Greece then formed a part, is emblematic of Western looting of other nations’ cultural patrimony. Lord Elgin cast an eye on the Parthenon and saw an opportunity to acquire what he could of it by bribing the corruptible Ottoman bureaucracy. After making a sweetheart deal with the local pasha (camouflaged with a forged imperial firman the original copy of which was never found in the meticulously kept Turkish archives) he arranged for the artefacts to be shipped by sea to Britain, where they are now on display in the Duveen Gallery of the British Museum. The pattern of iniquitous deal making with third parties, while excluding the party with the direct and natural interest in the matter, henceforth became a feature of Western and in particular British policy. Greece’s attempts going back two centuries to reclaim its stolen treasure have been stonewalled and, obviously, have had no success.

One of the arguments advanced by Western opponents of restitution is that, were all similar claims to be honoured, Western museums would be emptied of the objects on display there. Their argument is breathtakingly cynical, but they also make a valid point. Yes, of course, the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin’s Neues Museum in this connection readily comes to mind, as well as thousands of other looted objects in museums throughout the continent. Goering’s robbery spree across occupied Europe was but a crude imitation of the way these artistic treasures were acquired in the first place. Though scathingly denounced for his depredations after the war, in Marxian terms in the milieu in which he operated the Reichsmarschall was not an aberration. He was merely expropriating the expropriators.

The point was brilliantly illustrated much later, at the time of the memorable liberation of Iraq by coalition armies. Specially trained units made a bee line to Iraq’s National Museum immediately upon the taking of Baghdad, and not because anyone thought that the elusive weapons of mass destruction were hidden among its treasures. The Museum was systematically pillaged, Goering-style, never mind the irksome 1954 Hague Convention on the protection of cultural property which sternly forbids it. Shortly thereafter, Iraqi artefacts began to emerge and were being offered in copious quantities to eager collectors all over Europe and North America.

Predictably, the rapacious conduct of the big hyenas is being replicated by their camp followers. Not to be outdone, Kosovo Albanians are laying claim to Serbian cultural monuments in Kosovo and Metohija.

Serbian cultural monuments in Kosovo and Metohija

As seen in the map, Serbian cultural markers thickly cover the entirety of the tiny province’s territory, with none reflecting a culturally significant historical presence by another ethnicity. Undaunted by that, a pseudo-scholarly rationale for the cultural expropriation of Serbian monuments in Kosovo and their reclassification as Albanian is currently being developed in leading Western institutions of learning, on behalf of their Kosovo Albanian clients. The work of Sir Noel Malcolm, a King’s Scholar at Eton College, “Kosovo: A Short History”, is a case in point in that regard. It is a companion volume to his earlier hit piece of similar inspiration, “Bosnia: A Short History”.

Returning to Moctezuma’s headdress, or penacho as they call it in Mexico, Vienna Ethnological Museum director Christian Schicklbruber offered some revealing views in the matter. “The Museum,” he stated, “cannot make any decisions with respect to political issues.” As to who the penacho should belong to, he indicated that he preferred to call it “shared cultural patrimony,” stressing that “legally it belongs to Austria, but ethically and morally it is a shared cultural item. I would call it ‘ours,’ not mine, it is not Austrian, all of us share it.” Anyway, according to Herr Schicklgruber, it is a matter for the Austrian parliament and Ministry of Culture to decide.

Bank robbers should take note and be inspired by the Schicklgruber Doctrine (and we will not trivialize it by speculating what famous individual the museum director might be related to). They should try arguing in court that their heist is not really the property of the bank at all, but a shared financial asset to which they are entirely entitled to lay an equal and valid claim.

Phillips embodies a neolib/neocon leaning U.S. foreign policy establishment narrative, which over the course of time has proven to be hypocritically faulty. This bias explains the negative highlighting of Armenia signing under duress, unlike 1990 Yugoslavia (then consisting of Serbia and Montenegro), relative to Kosovo. In the latter instance, Phillips spins Kosovo as having been “liberated”, as in taken away from Serbia.

In the aforementioned National Interest commentary, Phillips’ disparaging of Russian peacekeepers is hypocritically inappropriate and inaccurate; especially when considering his comparatively tame response to the post-1999 Albanian nationalist abuses against Serbs in Kosovo, under the NATO led KFOR peacekeeping operation. Then again, the Serbs were often enough typecast as the overwhelmingly heavy bad guys in the 1990s period of Balkan area fighting – never mind the facts to the contrary, which reveal a more nuanced situation.

The conflict involving Armenia and Azerbaijan is another such reality. The Armenians unjustly suffered in the past – something that modern day Turkey and Azerbaijan (as well as some others) downplay. As the Soviet Union was breaking up, the Armenian majority in Nagorno-Karabakh sought to be separate from an independent Azerbaijan. Shortly thereafter, numerous Armenians experienced violence in the Azeri capital Baku.

After the Soviet breakup, Azerbaijan was headed by a pro-Turkish/anti-Russian tilted government, when the Armenians were militarily more adept than the Azeris. During this period, the Armenians established a clear dominance in the areas of the former Azerbaijan SSR (Soviet Socialist Republic) which they controlled. Many Azeris fled these areas with harsh stories.

As the years passed, the Aliyev family (father then son), have governed Azerbaijan, with improved Russian-Azeri relations, as Russia sought to maintain good ties with Armenia. Azerbaijan’s fossil fuel wealth and larger (compared to Armenia) population didn’t bode well for the future of Armenian dominance on some former Azerbaijan SSR land.

The Azeris have never gone against the position that the boundaries of the former Azerbaijan SSR remain in place as an independent state. This posture has solid international backing. In a certain sense, Armenia has diplomatically contradicted itself by not formally recognizing Nagorno-Karabakh’s independence (unlike some individual states and towns within several countries and a few disputed former Soviet territories which do), or formally recognizing Nagorno-Karabakh as a part of Armenia.

With considerable Turkish support, the successfully recent Azeri military advance took many by surprise. It’s first and foremost the responsibility of Armenia to be best informed of any potential armed action against it. In a world where might often still makes right (whether one likes it or not), Armenia isn’t a major power.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, didn’t help Armenia’s standing with Russia, by saying and implementing some Russia unfriendly stances. The recently signed peace agreement involving Russian peacekeepers saved Armenia from a greater loss. A BBC segment included a withdrawing Armenian soldier, approving of the war’s cessation, saying that he and his comrades would’ve been annihilated. For the immediate future, the Russian peacekeeping role and increased global attention, serves to diminish the likelihood of further violence in the former Azerbaijan SSR.

Russia has good reasoning to seek positive relations with Armenia and Azerbaijan. Over the decades, the U.S. has jostled over Greek-Turkish differences, including the matter of northern Cyprus.

Pashinyan comes from a media background. Another BBC segment said that the Armenian public’s outrage over the deal stemmed from the Armenian government not initially giving an accurate portrayal of how the recent fighting was actually going. Like the former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili (now criminally wanted in Georgia) and some other Soros preferred neolib slanted individuals from the former Communist bloc, Pashinyan’s image as a democratic reformer has been challenged.

Regarding the Armenian-Azeri dispute, another Russia bashing moment is evident in the November 11 Al Jazeera Inside Story show “Will the Latest Ceasefire Bring Peace to Nagorno-Karabakh?“. This particular show highlights that Armenian officials declined an appearance. Meantime, there was no mainstream Russian representation, as that country’s role was denigrated.

One of the guests, Turkophile Matthew Bryza, belittles Russian peacekeepers, by noting their presence in the former Georgian SSR, with a questionable take on how the 2008 war in the former Georgian SSR started. It was the Georgian side under the neocon/neolib preferred Saakashvili, which brazenly went into South Ossetia killing Russian peacekeepers and some other Russian citizens.

Bryza said that Armenia has just suffered its greatest defeat since the Bolsheviks and perhaps before them. What utter BS, given the genocide of the Armenians, which isn’t recognized by Turkey, Azerbaijan and the U.S. My anti-Communism aside, the USSR provided Armenia with a republic. Prior to the Soviet Union, Armenians were slaughtered and driven from their homes en masse, largely on account of the belief that they generally favored Russia over Turkey.

A month earlier, just as the bombing had started, Scharping stated that “we never would have taken military action if there weren’t this humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo, with 250,000 refugees within Kosovo and far more than 400,000 refugees in total, and with a death toll we are not even able to count yet.”

Yet, key sources contradicted him. The OSCE reported “39 deaths in all of Kosovo—before the NATO bombers came.” Heinz Loquai, a German general attached to the OSCE, stated that “the kind of humanitarian catastrophe that, as a category of international law, would have justified going to war did not exist in Kosovo prior to the war.” And Norma Brown, a U.S. diplomat with the OSCE, confirmed: “There was no humanitarian crisis up to the beginning of the NATO bombing raids.” As the film categorically states, “Not a single report on violence in Kosovo by the OSCE was found to at least indicate an impending humanitarian catastrophe.”

Nevertheless, facts be damned, together with German Prime Minister Schroeder, Scharping and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer got what they wanted – not just the bombing and the further atomization of the former Yugoslav space, but the first post-WW II engagement of German forces in an offensive military mission. It lasted 78 days and entailed the dropping of 22,000 tons of missiles, including forbidden cluster bombs and depleted uranium ammunition, and active cooperation with a terrorist organization, the Albanian KLA, resulting in thousands of civilian and military dead and wounded, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the destruction of tens of billions of dollars in property and infrastructure.

A little over 20 years later, shortly before the beginning of another evidence-free propaganda push, this time directed at Russia, involving the alleged poisoning of Alexey Navalny, the present German Defense Minister, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, opened her cards. Speaking to the Die Zeit weekly in July, Kramp-Karrenbauer stressed that it was “high time” to discuss “how Germany must position itself in the world in the future,” adding that Germany is “expected to show leadership, not only as an economic power”, but also in terms of “collective defence… international missions… a strategic view of the world,” and “the question of whether we want to actively shape the global order.”

In another July conversation, this time with the Atlantic Council, Kramp-Karrenbauer also made sure to identify the main adversary: “We see an aggressive, assertive policy coming from the Russian leadership,” she said, referring to Crimea’s reunification with Russia in 2014. “Russia has no respect for the right of self-determination of other countries. It was the first time since the Second World War that borders have been changed with force.”

Except, as referenced above, it wasn’t. For, despite the still-existing UN SC Resolution 1244, which affirms the territorial integrity of FR Yugoslavia’s successor, Serbia, pending a final political settlement, Germany stands proudly among the states that have recognized the unilateral secession of Serbia’s historic southern province. This despite the fact that this particular change of borders had come about as a result of precisely the forceful methods that the German Defense Minister is now supposedly decrying, even as her own country used them and geopolitically benefitted from them.

Having all this in mind, it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that, in the recent words of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, “the brain trusts and political analysts with close ties to the German government have openly started working on a new Eastern policy,” which includes abrogation of the strategic partnership with Russia, which is now to be treated as an “adversary” of the EU and NATO. Obviously, the decision-makers in Berlin have concluded that the time is ripe to take the next step.

To even debate whether the Navalny affair was an understandable trigger for Germany’s seeming strategic about-face or just a convenient pretext is to engage in useless feigning of naivete. For if whatever happened to Navalny was honestly seen by the German government as something that might endanger an important strategic relationship, surely the German authorities would have done everything possible to get to the bottom of it in a maximally transparent way, shared the evidence and let the chips fall where they may. Which, of course, is the one thing they have not done nor, as it stands, plan to do, despite numerous Russian appeals.

Thus, in assessing Germany’s new Drang nach Osten, it is important to note that the German political elite’s aggressive behavior did not start yesterday and has little to do with Navalny. It was methodically developed in the 1990s, during the violent break-up of Yugoslavia and polished in the demonization campaign of the closest Yugoslav Russian ally, Serbia. And, while the lies and exaggerations of German politicians were egregious and deadly as regards the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, it is important to remind that the negative German role in the entire Yugoslav crisis could be traced backed even further, to the very beginnings of the Yugoslav tragedy.

As the New York Times reported in January 1992, it was Germany that pushed the major European states to recognize the unilaterally declared independence of the breakaway republics Slovenia and Croatia. The Serbian Foreign Minister Vladislav Jovanovic described Germany’s role as “particularly negative,” adding that it was “very serious precedent to encourage unilateral secession in one multinational state.” Even then, a commentary in Bonn’s main newspaper, the General-Anzeiger, cautioned that “the fear of German dominance and unilateralism has grown.” Carl Cavanagh Hodge called it “one of the most precipitous acts in post-Cold War Europe” by which “the Bonn government in effect renounced the legitimacy of the existing Yugoslav state and pressured other European governments to do the same.” In her book “Balkan Tragedy,” Susan Woodward criticized the “German maneuver” that pressured other EC members to recognize Slovenia and Croatia, and concluded: “The precedent set by the German maneuver was that the principle of self-determination could legitimately break up multinational states, that EC application of this principle was arbitrary, and that the surest way for politicians bent on independence to succeed was to instigate a defensive war and win international sympathy and recognition.”

It would be rather naive to think that the German political establishment was unaware of the effects of its actions. Nevertheless, the Goebbelsian barrage against the Serbs would only increase in intensity, with Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel openly demanding that “Serbia must be brought to its knees,” in the aftermath of the infamous Sarajevo “breadline massacre” in late May 1992, for which he, along with most other Western diplomats and media, immediately accused Bosnian Serb forces, sans evidence, naturally. In fact, there were serious indications, expressed in confidential UN reports, that the Bosnian Muslims had “slaughtered their own people” in order to pin the blame on the Serbs and force the Cold War victors’ interventionist hand. Conveniently, the attack came shortly before a meeting of European Community ambassadors to consider imposing sanctions on Serbia.

Surely Kinkel must have been aware of such reports and doubts. But he nevertheless plowed on. And the German media for the most part followed. It seemed even then that the newly reunified Germany’s political class was almost desperate to find “Nazis” abroad to kick around. Especially if the label could be pinned on one of the peoples that suffered the most casualties at the hands of Hitler’s armies. The more cynically minded might have seen it as a useful exercise to liberate the national psyche from the decades-long burden of collective guilt. But, in retrospect, it seems to have been more deliberate than that, which is not something that was not suspected in Serbian circles at the time.

If the goal of reunified Germany’s elites from the start was to regain great power status – under cover of the EU if at all possible – then it was necessary to not only grow in strength economically and militarily, but also in terms of soft power. And the latter entails, among other things, some real or manufactured moral high ground. For the ambitions of reunified Germany’s governing elites, that obviously meant not only dissociation from the Nazi horrors – which post-war Germany had admirably done up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to be sure – but the ability to project a similar type of guilt onto its former – and, it seems, future adversaries and past victims. First Serbia, and now, increasingly, Russia.

It has taken Germany almost three decades to feel that it has gained sufficiently high “moral ground” from which it could feel confident enough to launch its brazen, evidence-free campaign of accusing Russia of responsibility for whatever really happened to Alexey Navalny. Along the way, let us not forget, Germany not only openly supported the Euromaidan coup but joined the Western chorus of anti-Russian condemnation and sanctions-mongering in connection with Ukraine as well as with another highly suspect “the Russians did it” poisoning ploy, involving Sergey Skripal and his daughter – who seem to have been conveniently “disappeared” after the affair had served its propaganda purpose.

It is one thing for a country the size and wealth of Germany to seek its rightful place in the world. It’s quite another, however, to do it in such an aggressive and dishonest way, for that inevitably raises questions regarding the motives in play. If a country responsible for two world wars over the past century launches a deliberate campaign of falsehoods directed at its past victims, it is fair to conclude that it may be on the move again, or soon will be. Using other means, but with similar goals.

Among the possibilities:

• Protracted uncertainty about the presidential contest. Think Florida 2000 but with several states’ results unresolved for weeks or even months (“Experts held ‘war games’ on the Trump vs. Biden election. Their finding? Brace for a mess”);
• A disputed outcome, perhaps with Donald Trump and Joe Biden both claiming victory, compounded by a “blue shift,” where states are claimed by Trump on election night but flip over to Biden as additional absentee and mail-in ballots conveniently turn up days or weeks later;
• Violent civil conflict, spurred on in the streets by goon squads mobilized and funded by a Who’s Who of the corporate and foundation establishment; and
• A color revolution style regime change operation staged by groups like the Soros-linked “Transition Integrity Project” and managed by people like “legal hatchet man” Norm Eisen, perhaps culminating in a military coup to remove Trump and install Biden in the Oval Office (as detailed by former Virginia State Senator and Judge Advocate General officer Richard Black).

For those who have followed events outside the United States during the past few decades, much of this sounds familiar. We’ve seen it before – inflicted on other countries.

Now It’s Coming Home to the U.S.

As explained by Revolver News, what happens in America next to a great extent may be a form of blowback from a specific event: the U.S.-supported 2014 regime change operation in Ukraine:

‘A “Color Revolution” in this context refers to a specific type of coordinated attack that the United States government has been known to deploy against foreign regimes, particularly in Eastern Europe deemed to be “authoritarian” and hostile to American interests. Rather than using a direct military intervention to effect regime change as in Iraq, Color Revolutions attack a foreign regime by contesting its electoral legitimacy, organizing mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, and leveraging media contacts to ensure favorable coverage to their agenda in the Western press.

‘It would be disturbing enough to note a coordinated effort to use these exact same strategies and tactics domestically to undermine or overthrow President Trump. The ominous nature of what we see unfolding before us only truly hits home when one realizes that the people who specialize in these Color Revolution regime change operations overseas are, literally, the very same people attempting to overthrow Trump by using the very same playbook. Given that the most famous Color Revolution was the [2004] “Orange Revolution” in the Ukraine, and that Black Lives Matter is being used as a key component of the domestic Color Revolution against Trump, we can encapsulate our thesis at Revolver with the simple remark that “Black is the New Orange.”’

This hardly should come as a surprise. The same government agencies and their corporate, NGO, and think tank cronies that are now weaponizing Black Lives Matter, Antifa, other Wokesters, and military putsch plotters here at home to remove Trump have turned regime change abroad into an art form. Ukraine was one of their signal successes, featuring a cast of characters later key to the failed “Ukrainegate” impeachment.

Another consequence of regime change: corruption. As the old saying goes, any idiot can turn an aquarium into fish soup, but no one has yet figured out how to reverse the process. Once a country gets broken it tends to stay broken, whether the “breaking” is accomplished by military means (Serbia 1999, Iraq 2003, Libya 2011) or by a color revolution from the streets (Serbia 2000, Georgia 2003, Ukraine 2004-2005 and again in 2014, Kyrgyzstan 2005, Lebanon 2005, Armenia 2018, plus many others of varying degrees of success, and failures in Iran, Russia, Venezuela, China (Hong Kong), and Belarus). With the target nation’s institutions in shambles, the dregs take over – in Libya, for example, even to the point of reintroducing trade in sub-Saharan African slaves, whose black lives evidently don’t matter to anyone at all.

Iraq: Crush, Corrupt, Cash In

Finally, once regime change occurs and corruption is rampant, another shoe drops: foreign vultures descend on the carcass, profiteers who in many cases are the very same people that helped to create the chaos on which they are cashing in. Invariably, these carpetbaggers are well-connected individuals in the aggressor states and organizations positioned on the inside track both for the carve-up of the target country’s resources and (the word “hypocrisy” doesn’t begin to describe it) for funds to implement “reform” and “reconstruction” of the devastated target.

The showcase of this scam, pursuant to Colin Powell’s reported “Pottery Barn Rule” (You break it, you own it) was the money ostensibly spent on rebuilding Iraq, despite assurances from the war’s advocates that it would pay for itself. With the formal costs conservatively set at over $60 billion to $138 billion out of a tab for the war of over two trillion dollars, the lion’s share of it went to U.S. and other vendors, including the notorious $1.4 billion no-bid contract to Halliburton subsidiary KBR, of which then-Vice President Dick Cheney, a major proponent of the war, had been a top executive. (“Rand Paul Says Dick Cheney Pushed for the Iraq War So Halliburton Would Profit.”)

In Ukraine, Biden’s Son Also Rises

The predatory cronyism vignette most pertinent to the Black/Orange regime change op now unfolding before us with the intent of installing Joe Biden in the Oval Office is that of his son, Hunter, and a Ukrainian energy company with a sketchy reputation, Burisma Holdings. (Right at the outset, even some of Hunter’s associates though the gig with Burisma was too “toxic” and broke off ties with him.) Though ignored or dismissed as fake news and a conspiracy theory by Democrats and legacy media (or do I repeat myself?), the facts are well enough known and fit the Iraq pattern to a T: then-Vice President Joe Biden pushed for regime change in Ukraine, which succeeded in February 2014 with the ouster of the constitutionally elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. In April 2014, Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was brought onto Burisma’s board (along with a fellow named Devon Archer, later convicted of unrelated fraud) at an exorbitant level of compensation that made little sense in light of Hunter’s nonexistent expertise in the energy business – but which made plenty of sense given that his dad was not only Veep but the Obama administration’s point man on policy toward Ukraine, including foreign assistance money. [NOTE: It now has come out that in 2015 Hunter put his dad, the U.S. Vice President, in direct contact with Burisma, news the giant tech firms sought to suppress on social media.]

When a troublesome Ukrainian prosecutor named Viktor Shokin seemed to be taking too much interest in Burisma, Papa Joe came to the rescue, openly threatening the western-dependent politicians installed after Ukraine’s 2014 color revolution with withholding of a billion dollars in U.S. aid until Shokin, whom Joe unironically alleged to be “corrupt,” got the heave-ho. As Tucker Carlson nails it, Shokin’s ouster followed a direct request from Burisma’s Clinton-connected PR firm, Blue Star Strategies, to Hunter to lobby his dad to get Shokin off their back. Joe did just what was asked. He later bragged: “I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here [i.e., Kiev] in, I think it was about six hours.’ I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

But First There Was Serbia

Today many people remember Iraq, some have a clue about Ukraine. But Serbia, which preceded them, is off the radar screen of most Americans. To recap:

As a Senator in the 1990s, Joe Biden was one of the most militant advocates of U.S. military action against Serbs during the breakup of the Yugoslav federation, first in Croatia (1991-95), then in Bosnia (1992-95), and then in Serbia’s province of Kosovo (1998- 1999). (As has been said about others like Hillary Clinton and the late John McCain, Biden evidently has never met a war he didn’t like. Along with Hillary, in 2003 Biden helped to whip Senate Democrat votes for the Bush-Cheney Iraq war.) Channeling his inner John McCain, Biden continually called for the U.S. to bomb, bomb, bomb bomb the Serbs while (in a foreshadowing of the Obama-Biden administration’s support for jihad terrorists in Libya and Syria, which ultimately resulted in the appearance of ISIS) pushed successfully for sending weapons to the Islamist regime in Bosnia and then for the U.S. to arm the Islamo-narco-terrorist group known as the “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA).

Joe Biden was the primary sponsor of the March 1999 Kosovo war authorization for military action against Serbia and Montenegro, S. Con. Res. 21. (As a little remembered historical note, Biden’s resolution might be seen as the last nail in the coffin of Congress’s constitutional war power. While S. Con. Res 21 passed the Senate, it failed in the House on a 213-213 tie vote, with Republicans overwhelmingly voting Nay. It didn’t matter. Bill Clinton, reeling from the Lewinsky scandal, went ahead with the bombing campaign anyway.) The ensuing 78-day NATO air operation had little impact on Serbia’s military but devastated the country’s infrastructure and took hundreds of civilian lives. (Even now, more than 20 years later, Serbia suffers from elevated cancer levels attributed to depleted uranium munitions.) But for Jihad Joe even that wasn’t punishment enough for people he collectively demonized as “illiterate degenerates, baby killers, butchers, and rapists.” In May 1999, at the height of the NATO air assault, he called for the introduction of U.S. ground troops (“we should announce there’s going to be American casualties”) followed by “a Japanese-German style occupation.”

Eventually the bombing stopped in June 1999 when then-Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević acceded to temporary international occupation of Kosovo on the condition that the province would remain part of Serbia, as codified in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244. It was a promise the U.S. and NATO, not to mention their European Union (EU) concubine, had no intention of keeping. Under the nose of the NATO occupation, ostensibly demobilized KLA thugs were given virtually free rein to terrorize the Serbian population, two-thirds of whom were driven out along with Jews and Roma, the rest sheltering in enclaves where they remain to this day. Orthodox Christian churches and monasteries, many of them centuries old, were particular targets for destruction and desecration. KLA commanders – who were also kingpins in the Kosovo Albanian mafia dealing in sex slaves, drugs, weapons, and even human organs – were handed local administration.

In 2007 Senator Biden praised the new order as a “victory for Muslim democracy” and “a much-needed example of a successful U.S.-Muslim partnership.” A year later, the Bush administration sought to complete the job by ramming through Kosovo’s independence in barefaced violation of UNSCR 1244 and despite strong Russian objections. But instead of resolving anything the result was a frozen conflict that persists today, with about half of the United Nations’ member states recognizing Kosovo and half not. Touting itself as the most pro-American “country” [sic] in the world, the Kosovo pseudo-state became a prime recruiting ground for ISIS.

But hey, business was good! Just as in Iraq, the politically well-connected, including former officials instrumental in the attack on Serbia and occupying Kosovo, flocked to the province fueled by lavish aid subsidies from the U.S. and the EU, which for a while made Kosovo one of the biggest per capita foreign assistance recipient “countries” in the world. One such vulture – sorry, entrepreneur – was former Secretary of State Madeleine we-think-a-half-million-dead-Iraqi-children-is-worth-it Albright, a prominent driver of the Clinton administration’s hostile policy on top of her personal Serb-hatred. Albright sought to cash in to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars on sale of the mobile telephone company PTK, originally a Yugoslav state-owned firm that was “privatized” (i.e., stolen) in 2005 as a joint stock company, but who later dropped her bid when it attracted unwanted publicity. Also in the hunt for Kosovo riches was former NATO Supreme Commander and operational chief of the Kosovo war General Wesley Clark, who reportedly cornered a major share of the occupied province’s coal resources under a sweetheart deal that seems to have vanished from public scrutiny since first reported in 2016.

At the moment there seems to be no smoking gun of a direct Biden family payout, à la Ukraine, but there is a possible trail via Hunter’s Burisma-buddy Devon Archer and Archer’s fellow-defendant John “Yanni” Galanis, who in turn is connected to top Kosovo Albanian politicians. In any case, the Biden clan seems to have paid a lot of attention to Kosovo for not having skin in the game. Joe’s late son and Delaware Attorney General, Beau, worked in Kosovo following the war to train local prosecutors as part of an OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) “rule of law” mission (admittedly a big task in a mafia-run pseudo-state), for which a road was named after him near the massive U.S. base Camp Bondsteel. With Hunter on hand for the naming ceremony, Joe Biden took the opportunity to express his “condolences” to Serbian families who lost loved ones in the NATO air assault – of which he was a primary advocate.

A ‘Shokin’ Demand  

Perhaps the best parallel between Biden’s handiwork in Ukraine and his interest in Kosovo also relates to getting rid of an inconvenient individual. But in this case, the person in question wasn’t a state official like Burisma prosecutor Viktor Shokin but a hierarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

In May 2009 Vice President Biden insisted on visiting one of Kosovo’s most venerable Serbian Orthodox Christian sites, the Visoki Dečani monastery. Ruling Bishop Artemije of the Eparchy of Raška and Prizren, which includes Kosovo and Metohija, refused to give his blessing for the visit, in effect telling Biden he was not welcome. Bishop Artemije long had been a bane of Biden and others advocating detachment of Kosovo from Serbia, starting with his first mission to Washington in 1997 as war clouds gathered. In 2004 Bishop Artemije sued the NATO powers in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg following their inaction to protect his flock during an anti-Serbian rampage by Muslim Albanian militants in March of that year. Then, in March 2006, as preparations were underway for a “final solution” to the Kosovo issue, Bishop Artemije launched an intensive multinational lobbying and public relations effort (in which Yours Truly was the lead professional) to try to derail the U.S. policy to which Biden had devoted so much attention. While the Bishop’s campaign was unsuccessful in reversing U.S. policy it was instrumental in delaying it for over a year – to howls of outrage from Biden’s associates in Washington. Thus, for Biden, the monastery visit snub by Bishop Artemije was adding insult to injury.

The end for Bishop Artemije came a few months later, at the beginning of 2010 at the time of two visits to Kosovo by U.S. Admiral Mark P. Fitzgerald, then Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Africa, and Commander, Allied Joint Force Command (JFC) Naples, (who retired later that year, becoming, unsurprisingly, a consultant “with numerous defense and commercial maritime and aviation contractors”). At that time, an unconfirmed report indicated that a high NATO officer (whether Admiral Fitzgerald or someone else is not specified) stated in the course of one of his local meetings (this is verbatim or a close paraphrase): “What we need here is a more cooperative bishop.” (More details are available here. Since that posting last year the NATO command in Naples seems to have scrubbed the items about Fitzgerald’s 2010 visits from their site.)

Shortly afterwards, Biden’s troublesome priest was forcibly removed by police and exiled from his see, without ecclesiastical trial, by Church authorities in Belgrade under pressure from compliant Serbian politicians installed after the October 2000 color revolution, in turn pressured by NATO. The pretext? Transparently baseless charges of financial wrongdoing. In other words, bogus accusations of “corruption” – like against Ukraine’s Shokin.

One could almost hear Joe Biden chortle: “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

But Look at the Bright Side…

Back to the incipient coup facing the United States, there should be no illusion that what’s at stake in the unfolding scenario for the removal of Donald Trump is not just his presidency but the survival of the historic American ethnos of which he is seen as an avatar by both his supporters and detractors. Remember, we’re dealing with predators and scavengers who are happy to burn the old, evil America down as long as they can achieve total power and continue to feather their cushy nests. Short of a blowout Trump victory by a margin too big to hijack, we’re headed for a dystopian state of affairs.

If they do manage to remove Trump, “by any means necessary,” and Joe Biden takes the helm, we can anticipate a bevy of globalist warmonger appointees that make Trump’s team look like disciples of Mahatma Gandhi. Among the names floated like Nicholas Burns, Antony Blinken, Michele Flournoy, Evelyn Farkas, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, all were on board with Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Syria … [NOTE: The Atlantic Council, known as NATO’s semi-official think tank in Washington and which will be instrumental in staffing a future Joe Biden administration, also has been the beneficiary of generous donations from Hunter Biden’s paymaster, Burisma.]

It’s a recipe for wars, regime changes, and color revolutions galore.

But to finish on a positive note, the potential future business opportunities will be endless!

Namely, besides the expected infrastructure deals, commitment to a regional free trade zone dubbed as the “mini-Schengen,” and matters related to energy and telecommunications (more on that later), the agreement also covered non-economic matters such as a one-year moratorium on seeking membership in international organizations (“Kosovo”) and in lobbying for “Kosovo’s” de-recognition or blocking its recognition (Serbia), freedom of religion and protection of religious sites, missing persons and the resettling of refugees and internally displaced people. But these could still be explained as being relevant to the consequences of the Kosovo conflict of the late 1990s.

However, the parties also agreed to join the US global crusade to decriminalize homosexuality in the 69 countries that are still holding out, to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization and, sensationally, to mutual recognition with Israel (“Kosovo”) and moving their embassy to Jerusalem (Serbia in writing and “Kosovo” in a subsequent oral pledge to Benjamin Netanyahu).

Most observers of international affairs have at least a rudimentary familiarity with the Kosovo issue, one of the world’s main unresolved conflicts of the past quarter century or so, the roots of which run back hundreds of years into the past. In brief, Kosovo Field (or the Field of Blackbirds) was the site of a monumental clash between Serbian and Ottoman Turk forces on June 28, 1389, in which both the Serbian and the Turkish rulers were killed, but which was subsequently enshrined as a Serb national myth/covenant, symbolizing willingness to fight for one’s freedom in the face of overwhelming odds and choosing the heavenly over the earthly kingdom. After the Ottomans finally overran Serbia and that part of Europe some 70 years later (it took them a while to recover, while the Serbian state was fatally weakened under the usual pressure from both west and east) – eventually reaching the gates of Vienna – Albanian converts to Islam gradually settled today’s Kosovo, using their newly gained privileges to repress or push out the former Serbian Christian population. The Serbian Army liberated Kosovo 523 years later, during the First Balkan War, incorporating it into Serbia and then Yugoslavia. Fast-forwarding to the early 1990s, using the Kosovo Albanians as a tool of weakening Yugoslavia and Serbia and deposing its leader Slobodan Milosevic, the US threw its support behind the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and, under the guise of NATO, bombed Serbia in the spring of 1999. The bombing ended with the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1244 of June 10, 1999, by which Kosovo and Metohija (the official name of the Serbian autonomous province) remained a part of Serbia pending a final peace agreement. However, after multiple failed negotiations and supported by most Western and Islamic countries, Kosovo Albanian leaders unilaterally declared independence on February 17, 2008, which Serbia – along with the BRICS countries, among others – has refused to recognize to this day.

So how, exactly, did Israel and Jerusalem become one of the centerpieces of an agreement between two non-Jewish warring sides thousands of kilometers removed from the Holy Land?

That is a question that is still being hotly debated, not just in Serbia and “Kosovo.” The “known knowns” are that Vucic had already made a commitment of sorts during the annual AIPAC conference in Washington DC in March of this year, pledging to open a Serbian Chamber of Commerce office as well as Serbia’s “official state office” in Jerusalem “very soon.” But that is still short of an embassy. On the other hand, per The Times of Israel, “Kosovo” has been “publicly courting Israel since before its declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008,” but “Israel refused to recognize Kosovo because it did not want to support a unilateral declaration of statehood, which Jerusalem feared could create a dangerous precedent followed by the Palestinians.”

Contributing to the “known unknowns” is the now-viral video, seen by at least a couple of hundred million viewers globally if we include China (more on that later) showing Vucic’s apparent puzzlement at Trump’s announcement of the Serbian embassy move to Jerusalem. Vucic subsequently claimed to Serbian media that this was entirely due to an inadvertent switch of folders given to him and the Kosovo Albanian leader and that he was entirely familiar with what he had signed. But that doesn’t explain Vucic’s subsequent assertion that the embassy move to Jerusalem would be contingent on Israel “being attentive to Serbia’s interests” and his appeal to Israel to “carefully consider its decisions” regarding mutual recognition vis-à-vis “Kosovo.” Especially because the last item of the agreement he signed in the White House explicitly states: “Serbia [Belgrade] agrees to… move its Embassy to Jerusalem by July 2021.”

Vucic’s position is further complicated by the Oval Office telephone conversation between Netanyahu and Hoti immediately after the signing ceremony, in which it was affirmed that “Kosovo” would indeed open its embassy in Jerusalem, as the “first Muslim-majority nation to do so.” So much for attentiveness to Serbia’s interests. But, again, the wording in the document is clear, so it would seem that Vucic’s own interpretation is nothing more than damage control for his own domestic audience.

And there is damage to be controlled, doubtlessly. For Vucic has not only implicitly agreed to another major state’s recognition of the secession of Serbia’s historic province, he has also undermined Serbia’s own international position on the matter. Namely, by signing on to an agreement to move the Serbian embassy to Jerusalem, Vucic is violating UN SC Resolution 478, which calls upon all UN member states to withdraw their diplomatic missions from Jerusalem, as Israel’s “basic law” on the Holy City “constitutes a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.” On the other hand, for more than two decades Serbia has been invoking UN SC Resolution 1244, according to which Kosovo is an integral part of Serbia, pending a final peace agreement between the sides, and has the support of countries making up the majority of the world’s population behind it. So, in effect, Vucic might be seen as practicing the same double standard against which he has railed in the past, (rightly) accusing Western states of advocating “rule of law” while violating international law themselves when they recognized “Kosovo’s” independence.

All this leads to one of two conclusions: either the item concerning the embassy move was inserted without Vucic’s knowledge – hence his stunned expression on the above-mentioned video – or Vucic knew that he’d agreed to something he shouldn’t have agreed to and is now simply using brazen denial as a survival tactic.

In any case, it is clear that the main beneficiaries of the Serbia-“Kosovo” agreement were both Israel and Trump, who used the opportunity to promote himself as not only a peacemaker but also to show that he could succeed where Biden previously not only failed but acted as a warmonger, having been a leading advocate of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and Serbia in 1999. In addition, Trump scored a major pre-election point with the powerful and wealthy pro-Israel lobby, and will build on this further by hosting the Israel-UAE diplomatic normalization agreement on September 15.

What remains to be seen is what Vucic – and Serbia – have gained from the help extended to Trump and Netanyahu. What is certain is that Vucic’a troubles do not end with the announced Jerusalem embassy move, or with the rather humiliating seating arrangement he was afforded in the Oval Office during his individual meeting with Trump, which has made him the object of much derision in Serbia. For, among the things both parties signed on to is to “diversify their energy supplies” as well as “prohibit the use of 5G equipment supplied by untrusted vendors in their telecommunications networks.”

The part pertaining to energy is clearly aimed at Russia and the Turkish Stream/Balkan Stream gas pipeline that is slated to become fully operational by the beginning of next year. The part regarding 5G equipment is even more clearly aimed at China’s Huawei. Both countries are not only Serbia’s allies but increasingly important economic and military partners. Officially, both Moscow and Beijing have not reacted negatively to the agreement, although Russian foreign minister Lavrov did somewhat pointedly emphasize that Russia will support “all voluntarily reached agreements between Belgrade and Pristina.” However, private and scattered media reactions by various Russian political figures tell a somewhat different story, from openly wondering what exactly is going on with Vucic, to pitying him as a “rape victim.” Which is why the Serbian prime minister immediately rushed to assure both Belgrade’s important partners that “nothing was clearly defined (in the agreement), which allows Serbia to create a more strategic partnership with the US without compromising the country’s cooperation with China and the Russian Federation… The agreement opens a new door, without closing all others.”

And that is indeed another strange aspect of this strange document – no one is quite sure what to make of it, whether it’s a full-fledged international agreement, or just a glorified memorandum of understanding or intent. For his part, the main public facilitator of the deal, former US ambassador to Germany and Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, made sure to underline that the US is “not a signature” to the agreement. On the other hand, as noted above, Vucic is treating it as something open to interpretation while Netanyahu is treating it as a binding agreement, as is Grenell, who openly ridiculed a Politico reporter quoting the Serbian foreign minister’s relativization of the part of the agreement concerning the embassy move to Jerusalem as a sign that the Serbian government is “stepping back from the embassy pledge.” The plot thickened a bit further when the Israeli press carried reports claiming that Serbia wouldn’t move its embassy to Jerusalem after all if Israel were to recognize “Kosovo,” specifying that a “diplomatic relationship” between the two is acceptable but that full recognition would “destroy” Israel’s ties with Belgrade.

As for Trump himself, he’d probably already mentally moved on to the next urgent items on his agenda before the ink on the signatures had even dried. It should be noted, however, that there may be more to Trump’s interest in reaching some sort of Serbia-“Kosovo” normalization than just pure electioneering, as witnessed by his son’s Tweet from March of this year, calling for the remaining 650 US troops stationed in “Kosovo” to be brought back home.

In any case, no matter the true nature of the agreement, one can be sure that the main beneficiaries to the agreement, Israel and the US, will certainly insist on the fulfillment of what was written, while pushing for the most favorable interpretation of the parts that were supposedly “not clearly defined.” Russia will certainly have questions regarding his commitments not only regarding energy supplies and Kosovo and Metohija but Serbia’s declared military neutrality as well – especially after Serbia, citing “terrible pressure” from Brussels, suddenly decided to cancel joint military exercises with Russia and Belarus (as well as with all other partners for the next six months). China will wonder just how secure its “steel friendship” with Serbia really is and whether Serbia will be the next domino to fall in the US’s global crusade against Huawei. And Hezbollah cannot be too happy either, along with Iran and Syria, both of whom have not recognized “Kosovo.” For his part, Vucic will continue trying to balance between playing for his domestic audience and meeting the expectations of major international players from both East and West and various commitments made in the increasingly hostile global geopolitical environment. As the Belarusian president has recently learned, pursuing a “multi-vector” foreign policy without being at least a major power is an uncertain and often perilous game in today’s world.