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The Oslo War Process
Norwegian diplomats are the 'advance guard' of the US-European empire. They helped destroy Yugoslavia. They set Israel on the path to destruction. Now they will finish destroying Sri Lanka. Next: India. And Spain.

Historical and Investigative Research, 29 Oct 2005
by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/oslo2.htm

intro  |  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6
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2. NATO’s gunboat diplomacy on behalf of Knut Vollebaek's OSCE (which was really the CIA)
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In late 1998, Knut Vollebaek, the Norwegian Foreign Minister and therefore Norway's highest diplomat, became the OSCE Chairman in Office. He rushed to make his priorities clear:

“The OSCE's incoming chairman, the Norwegian foreign minister Knut Vollebaek, said yesterday that Kosovo was the organisation's greatest challenge.”[3]

What was he talking about? NATO had just forced Slobodan Milosevic’s government, at the point of a gun, to accept the presence of OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) "peace verification" teams in Kosovo.

Why was NATO behaving like this, using the threat of force to coerce another state into compliance with its wishes? NATO had never yet gone to war against anybody, and its charter was explicitly and famously defensive, not offensive. Given this, one might expect that only a tremendous emergency would cause NATO to completely contradict its founding charter by shifting to an unprecedented posture of offensive ultimatums against a sovereign nation-state that was not threatening the security of any NATO member. Alas!, evidence for such a momentous emergency is entirely lacking.

As David Ramsay Steele, writing in Liberty, explained:

"In 1998, the newly organized and freshly armed KLA launched an offensive against the Yugoslav government, rapidly gaining control of many villages. Yugoslav forces struck back and largely defeated the KLA."[4]

It was after the Yugoslav army "largely defeated the KLA" that NATO forced the army to withdraw and allow the KLA back in. Why? According to NATO, because it wanted to ameliorate an urgent crisis. But a war that has ended is the exact opposite of an urgent crisis.

Of course, the outcome of a war may be unacceptable on moral grounds. But this was not the case, for the Yugoslav army had just defeated a collection of brutal terrorists who preyed on the same people they claimed to represent. As Ramsay Steele explains:

"The homicide toll rose to around 2,000 for that year. About three quarters of these deaths were of Albanians. Many of the Albanian deaths, however, were directly due to the KLA, which, like any new insurgent group lacking broad popular support, had to persuade a largely reluctant Albanian population to accept it as effectively a new government…The KLA especially targeted Albanians who co-operated with the Yugoslav local authorities."

If, as was blared in the mainstream Western press, the Yugoslav army had really meant to cleanse the Albanians out of Kosovo, or meant to systematically deprive them of their rights, then Albanians would have all been driven straight into the arms of the KLA. Instead, we find:

1) that the Albanians were so uncooperative with the KLA’s aims that much KLA violence was in fact directed against Albanians; and

2) that Albanian collaboration with the Yugoslav government was significant enough to invite special KLA violence against Albanians loyal to Yugoslavia.

All of this is consistent with the Yugoslav army’s claims to have been defending all innocent civilians -- Albanian and Serb -- from the KLA terrorists. It is also consistent with the Yugoslav government's claims that Albanians in Kosovo were never oppressed (quite the opposite), something that I can document with materials from the US military itself! [4a]

Why did the KLA get any international support?

It was well known that they were terrorists, and earlier that same year (1998), US special envoy to the Balkans Robert Gelbard had

"condemned the actions of an ethnic Albanian underground group Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) which has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks on Serb targets. ‘We condemn very strongly terrorist actions in Kosovo. The UCK is, without any questions, a terrorist group,’ Gelbard said."[5] [my emphasis]

It is now publicly known that the KLA finances itself by trafficking in heroin,[6] and that it got both funds and personnel assistance from Al Qaeda.[7]

The responsibility for the death toll in Kosovo can be laid at the KLA’s feet. They were and are terrorists, behaving in the manner of unpopular separatists everywhere by victimizing even the people they claimed to represent. And this is who the Yugoslav army roundly defeated in 1998, pushing them out of the province of Kosovo.

So how did NATO react before the Yugoslav victory over brutal terrorists who victimized even the people they claimed to represent? They threatened the Yugoslavs with bombs, as Ramsay Steele explained in Liberty:

"…In October 1998, responding to NATO's threat to bomb Yugoslavia, the Yugoslavs pulled back their troops and allowed OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) observers into Kosovo. At that point, most of the 2,000 deaths had already been sustained, Yugoslavia's war against the KLA was mostly over, and the death toll would have steeply declined the following year."[4]

NATO presented itself as doing a bit of necessary bullying for a good cause: to get the international OSCE observers to monitor that Albanian civilians not be attacked in Kosovo. But what NATO in fact did was help terrorists who preyed on both innocent Albanians and Serbs to take back lost territory.

As Liberty says,

“Because of the Yugoslav withdrawal of troops, the KLA quickly took or retook many villages, and by March 24th, militarily controlled 40 percent of Kosovo's territory.”

This is how the minority Serbs in Kosovo saw it:

“'As soon as the Serb forces withdrew, the KLA regained all of the positions they used to hold,' said an official Serb source in Pristina. 'And now the Serb population in Kosovo think that the OSCE mission would like to have the KLA returning to their positions in order to make them an equal partner in negotiations,' he said.”[7a]

NATO was empowering the KLA. So what was NATO thinking?

It was no mistake. Although talk of international "OSCE observers" will suggest to everybody 'neutral' observers, let’s not forget that the Chairman-In-Office of the OSCE was the Norwegian Foreign Minister Knut Vollebaek. And Norwegian diplomats, we recall, work on behalf of the NATO foreign policy elite. Thus, NATO was putting its own people on the ground.

For what?

Well, the attack on Yugoslavia had nothing to do with events in Kosovo, real or imagined.[7b] And so the OSCE 'observers' that Washington placed in Kosovo had two main objectives:

1) to unify and prepare the terrorist KLA in order to make it a competent adversary to the Yugoslav army, acting as a ground force complementing the NATO air attack; and

2) to engineer the Racak massacre hoax, which would become the excuse to attack Yugoslavia.

The Racak "massacre" hoax
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In January 1999 NATO leaders launched a media campaign, blasting Yugoslav security forces for excessive use of force and supposed atrocities in the Kosovo town of Racak. But it was a hoax. As reported much later in Toronto Sun piece entitled "The Hoax That Started A War":

"On Jan. 16 [1999]…William Walker, the veteran American diplomat who headed [the American] peace verifiers for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), was taken by Kosovo Liberation Army members to Racak to see the bodies in the ditch. He declared that the dead 'obviously were executed where they lay.'

His OSCE report spoke of 'arbitrary arrests, killings and mutilations of unarmed civilians' at Racak."[8]

This alleged massacre of 45 ethnic Albanian civilians in the Kosovo town of Racak was the cassus belli -- the pretext -- for dropping bombs on Serbia. As the Toronto Sun article's title blares, it is no longer exactly a secret that this was a hoax (see here for a full analysis of this fabrication).[8a]

But it was not merely a hoax: it was one that succeeded because William Walker, head of the American OSCE mission, was there to proclaim it a genuine "massacre" (and because the Western media then obligingly plastered this "opinion" all over its front-pages). 

Knut Vollebaek's OSCE mission in Kosovo, which NATO had forced the Yugoslavs to accept, was therefore a Trojan Horse -- an offensive action that initially appears like something else entirely, and which requires advance planning.

So the decision to attack Yugoslavia had been taken long before.

It was in fact the Yugoslav government that demanded an investigation into the Racak allegations. Belorussian and Yugoslav forensic teams looked at the evidence and concluded there had been no massacre. A third team, Finnish, was chosen by Knut Vollebaek's OSCE to investigate because NATO claimed the other two could not be trusted (notice again the one-two step between NATO and the Vollebaek's OSCE). The Finnish team's report was withheld from publication.

Why?

Well, apparently so that Helena Ranta, the leader of the Finnish team, could claim in public that Racak had supposedly been "a crime against humanity." For, you see, this was a lie that her own report contradicted. The Finnish team’s report has finally become public and it agrees with the findings of the Belorussian and Yugoslav teams (see here).[8b] Other investigations since have reached the same conclusion: there was no massacre:

"It has since turned out, through subsequent investigations by German, French and American correspondents and by human rights and peace groups...that the Racak massacre seems an enormous, albeit effective, hoax perpetrated by the Kosovo Liberation Army to persuade the U.S. and NATO to attack the Serbs. The goal was independence for Kosovo, possibly leading to the dream of a Greater Albania."[8]

The Yugoslav government was accused of using excessive force and of targeting civilians in Kosovo. Later, it was accused of genocide. But if the Yugoslav army was really behaving in such a reprehensible manner, why was a hoax necessary to make the argument?

That is the question.

If the KLA, which controlled 40% of the territory in Kosovo, needed a hoax in order to tarnish the Yugoslav army with accusations of abuses against civilians, then it needed this hoax. The disciplined and humane Yugoslav army (whose rules of engagement require them to take losses rather than kill civilians[8c]) had not obliged the KLA with a real massacre that they could use for propaganda purposes.

But who was the KLA fooling with this hoax? The Toronto Sun says in its headline that, because of the Racak hoax, "The U.S., Nato And The Western Media Were Conned In Kosovo." Is that plausible?

First, consider that NATO had forced Yugoslavia to accept Norwegian foreign minister Knut Vollebaek's OSCE verification mission at gunpoint, and this allowed the already defeated KLA terrorists to regain territory.

[NOTE: This can and should be compared to how the US threatened Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir with all loss of economic aid in order to force him to go to the Madrid "peace" talks, the platform for the Norwegian-brokered Oslo process that revived an already defeated and exiled terrorist PLO, giving it territory within the Jewish state.[8d] ]

Second, it turns out that the American component of Knut Vollebaek's OSCE mission was full of CIA operatives (see below) who cooperated in faking the Racak hoax, which US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer rushed to use as NATO's excuse to start bombing Serbia.[8e]

[NOTE: this can and should be compared to the fact that the CIA was training the PLO already in the year 1994 (at the start of the Norwegian-brokered Oslo 'peace' process), if not earlier, despite the fact that PLO officials were explaining to the Western press that they would use this training to murder Israelis.[9] ]

Third, the reason the Western powers were able to use the Racak CIA hoax as an excuse to start bombing is that Helena Ranta, the head of the Finnish forensic team, who was sent by Knut Vollebaek's OSCE to investigate Racak, didn't publish her own report and falsely claimed that Racak had been a "crime against humanity." The media then plastered this disinformation all over its headlines, convincing everybody that the Serbs had supposedly committed atrocities against Albanian civilians.[8a]

[NOTE: This can and should be compared to how the same Helena Ranta was chosen by the UN to investigate the UN's accusations against Israel that the Israeli Defense Forces had supposedly committed a massacre (which they hadn't) in the West Bank town of Jenin.[9a] ]

So was anybody conned with Racak? Sure. You and I were. But not NATO, and not the Western media.

Who micromanaged the Racak hoax?
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There is every indication that William Walker, who headed the American OSCE mission in Kosovo, colluded with the KLA in staging the Racak hoax, because William Walker immediately rushed to judgment, even though he was supposed to be a diplomat, rather than a forensic pathologist. And Walker's OSCE mission was crawling with CIA operatives, as explained in a piece entitled "CIA Aided Kosovo Guerilla Army" that appeared in the Sunday Times of London:

"AMERICAN intelligence agents have admitted [that]…Central Intelligence Agency officers were cease-fire monitors in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, developing ties with the KLA and giving American military training manuals and field advice on fighting the Yugoslav army and Serbian police.

When the…OSCE, which co-ordinated the monitoring, left Kosovo a week before airstrikes began a year ago, many of its satellite telephones and global positioning systems were secretly handed to the KLA…[so it could] stay in touch with Nato and Washington. Several KLA leaders had the mobile phone number of General Wesley Clark, the Nato commander."[10]

This reveals an intimate level of covert cooperation between the Walker OSCE mission (that is to say, the CIA) and the KLA. It also shows that, contrary to their puritanical denials, NATO was planning from the very beginning to become the KLA’s air force.[11]

Walker was perfect for this mission. He had earlier been a key player in bringing US assistance to the Salvadoran government’s massive terror campaign which included collusion with right-wing paramilitary terrorists. He was a key apologist for all sorts of atrocities committed by the Salvadoran government and its proxies, including the infamous massacre of several prominent Jesuit priests.[11a] And he was a link in the illegal support given to the Contra terrorists. Later he was sent to Croatia, where the dismemberment of Yugoslavia began under the aegis of Franjo Tudjman’s revived Ustasha (Croatian Nazis), whose military were trained and supplied by American paramilitary companies with close ties to the CIA. These same companies placed their people in Walker's OSCE Kosovo mission:

"Agim Ceku, the KLA commander in the latter stages of the conflict, had established American contacts through his work in the Croatian army, which had been modernized with the help of Military Professional Resources Inc, an American company specializing in military training and procurement. This company's personnel were [working as peace verifiers] in Kosovo, along with others from a similar company, Dyncorps, that helped in the American-backed program for the Bosnian army."[10]

So it is obvious that Walker was in Kosovo to cooperate with the KLA and the CIA in conning others.

Madeleine Albright kept a close watch over all this. She was so eager to make war that in Washington and in the media NATO’s bombing campaign got called "Albright’s War."[12] Albright immediately seized upon the Racak allegations as her excuse to start bombing, so it is not exactly a surprise to find that she had handpicked William Walker for the job herself: "Walker... was nominated by Madeleine Albright, the American secretary of state."[12a] 

Albright was the executive of this operation.

Knut Vollebaek was also heavily involved in the details. He was very active in defending the behavior of the American OSCE mission and in insisting that the Yugoslavs allow this mission to operate unimpeded. His performance, as we shall see next, demonstrates that he understood perfectly that the Walker OSCE mission -- for which he was ultimately responsible -- was the "Trojan Horse" NATO needed in order to destroy Yugoslavia with lies.

Continue to part 3:
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/oslo3.htm
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Footnotes and Further Reading
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