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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/oslo3.htm

intro  |  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6
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3. Knut Vollebaek helps US Intelligence prepare the ground for war
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The NATO bombing of Serbia began on March 24, 1999, shortly after the Racak ‘massacre’ hoax exploded onto the headlines. The Norwegian foreign minister Knut Vollebaek, also Chairman in Office of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), played a prominent role in this. Vollebaek assisted NATO’s gunboat diplomacy to keep William Walker -- who engineered the Racak ‘massacre’ hoax -- in Kosovo against the wishes of the Yugoslav government. He also assisted NATO’s gunboat diplomacy to compel Slobodan Milosevic to sign the Rambouillet so-called "Agreement." The next section will deal with Rambouillet. Here I examine Vollebaek's efforts to keep William Walker in Kosovo, which efforts were closely coordinated with Washington.

As reported in the Sunday Times of London,[15] the Yugoslav government, like European diplomats in Belgrade, became understandably suspicious of William Walker because of his background. These suspicions appeared confirmed when Walker rushed -- prior to any investigation -- to declare the Racak incident a ‘massacre’ against Albanian ‘civilians’ by the Serbian security forces. So the government in Belgrade ordered Walker to leave. After a flurry of gunboat diplomacy in which president Slobodan Milosevic was told to either back off or get bombed, the expulsion order against Walker was "frozen."

The following is from the Chicago Sun-Times:

[Quote From Chicago Sun Times Starts Here]

"A government statement said the expulsion order against William Walker would remain 'frozen' until 'the consequences of his behavior are fully clarified.'

…The order was issued Monday, two days after Walker visited the site of a Yugoslav military operation in Racak and said government forces were responsible for 'a massacre, a crime against humanity' there that left 45 people dead.

…In Washington, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had warned that the entire 750-person monitoring team would be pulled out of Kosovo unless Milosevic allowed Walker to remain as head of the mission.

The removal of the monitoring team would probably mean the end of the tottering cease-fire between Milosevic's forces and ethnic Albanian separatists and could pave the way for NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia."[16]

[Quote From Chicago Sun Times Ends Here]

Albright’s meaning between the lines becomes very clear: if Walker was kicked out, she said, she would pull the entire OSCE team out, she would declare a collapse of the cease-fire, and then she would start bombing, because "the end of the tottering cease-fire between Milosevic's forces and ethnic Albanian separatists" would give her the excuse she needed to begin "NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia." Translation: "Make my day."

Madeleine Albright’s threat to remove the entire 750-person OSCE monitoring team deserves close attention, because she was the US Secretary of State, not the Chairman in Office of the OSCE. That title, as we know, was held by Knut Vollebaek.

The website of the OSCE explains the role of the OSCE chairman as follows:

Chairman-in-Office -- The Minister of Foreign Affairs of an OSCE participating State, selected each year, bears overall responsibility for executive action and co-ordination of OSCE activities.[17]

So the Chairman in Office is the executive -- which is to say, the boss -- of the OSCE.

The American OSCE delegation was about 130 people (as Walker is quoted saying in the Sunday Times of London [18]). Therefore, assuming Albright had the formal authority to say anything to anybody in the OSCE, at most she could not have been giving orders to more than 130 people. What she certainly didn't have was the authority to command the entire 750-person OSCE monitoring team, composed of people from all member states and under the authority of the OSCE's boss: Knut Vollebaek. Not only that. In addition, Knut Vollebaek had a reasonable constituency for acting independently from Albright because the OSCE missions from other countries were upset with the behavior of the American mission.[19]

So what are we to make of the fact that Albright was brazenly confident that threats to remove the entire OSCE mission were hers to make? That Knut Vollebaek and Madeleine Albright were both cogs in the same machine.

But Vollebaek was much more than a mere cog. He was dispatched as an agent of Empire to the frontline, to carry out himself the bullying of Milosevic:

"While Walker sat tight, the U.S. special envoy for Kosovo, Christopher Hill, and Norwegian Foreign Minister Knut Vollebaek were meeting separately in Belgrade with Milosevic to urge him to rescind the expulsion order.

In the last week, NATO planes have gone on alert for possible strikes against Yugoslavia…"[16]

Isn't this absurd?

The Yugoslav government was complaining entirely about one person whom it considered biased and suspect, and this person was supposed to be a diplomat acting as a ‘peace-verifier.’ If the Yugoslavs objected to this ‘diplomat,’ what was the easy and diplomatic thing to do? Replace him with somebody else! It hardly makes any sense for NATO, a defensive alliance, to send the Chairman in Office of a different body, and moreover one calling itself the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, to threaten war. It makes even less sense to do all this over the visa status of one individual. Unless, of course, Norwegian diplomats are NATO puppets and NATO was just looking for an excuse to attack.

Much else that would otherwise be absurd becomes easily comprehensible under the light of that hypothesis. For example, consider Knut Vollebaek's reasoning:

"In Pristina, Mr. Vollebaek said that if Mr. Walker had been expelled, the entire monitoring force -- currently about 750 people and scheduled to grow to 2,000 -- would have been removed from Kosovo, followed by other international aid organizations.

Without the monitors to restrain the combatants, he said, 'the humanitarian catastrophe would be even worse.'"[20]

On the face of it this is perfectly absurd.

First, whatever deaths were being sustained at the time were NATO’s fault because NATO had forced the Yugoslav army to retrench so that the already defeated KLA terrorists could regain territory;

Second, what Vollebaek referred to as the ongoing "humanitarian catastrophe" was, according to Liberty,[21] a grand total of less than 70 dead since the OSCE mission had arrived. Any plane crash will easily top that.

Third, these were almost certainly all combatants, not civilians.

However, underneath the incomprehensible official story there is another story that perfectly explains NATO’s behavior. Walker had a very important covert role to play: he was in Kosovo to engineer the Racak hoax (which would provide a pretext for war), and also to fan out his CIA personnel for the purpose of training the terrorist KLA and establishing the necessary communication links in advance of the foreordained bombing of Serbia.

The flurry of desperate bullying and diplomacy to keep Walker in Kosovo makes clear that he was the critical mastermind for the entire operation. And Albright’s prominent role in the frantic efforts to keep Walker in Kosovo are consistent with her full and complete understanding of Walker’s mission’s true purpose. The same goes for Knut Vollebaek, whose behavior makes sense only if we assume that he understood perfectly the desperate importance of keeping Walker on the ground until his crucial offensive mission had been accomplished.

And Vollebaek worked hard at this. After obtaining the "freeze" on Walker’s expulsion order, he went the extra mile for NATO. The following is from The Daily Telegraph:

"Knut Vollebaek, the OSCE chairman and Norway's foreign minister, emerged from meetings with Yugoslav Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic and Milosevic to tell reporters 'we achieved this decision on the freeze of the expulsion after negotiations with the Yugoslav Government'. The agreement clinched by Vollebaek followed an apparently unsuccessful meeting between Milosevic and two US envoys who spent four hours trying to persuade him to comply with the October agreement.

The agreement calls on Serbia to sharply reduce its military presence in Kosovo, as well as let the verifiers move freely about the province."[22]

Where two US envoys had failed, the seemingly neutral Norse who appeared to represent the so-called "international community" succeeded not only in keeping Walker in Kosovo, but in getting the Yugoslav army to retreat further and allow William Walker’s personnel -- most of them CIA operatives or else employees of the CIA-linked paramilitary companies Military Professional Resources and Dyncorp, as we have seen -- the ability to "move freely about the province."

Vollebaek was preparing the ground for the bombing of Yugoslavia, which he obviously knew was foreordained.

Further evidence that Vollebaek knew long in advance that -- come what may -- NATO was resolved to bomb Yugoslavia can be gleaned from his subsequent diplomacy with regard to the Rambouillet so-called ‘peace agreement.’ I turn to this next.

Continue to part 4:
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/oslo4.htm
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Footnotes and Further Reading
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