Who Gets Justice From ICTY?

Finnish leading daily newspaper – Helsingin Sanomat – published today (14/04/2013) an investigative feature story Winners Justice related to recent release of Croatian war criminal Ante Gotovina. Gotovina was responsible about biggest ethnic cleansing during Balkan wars. The article clearly proves the political and biased nature of International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Bosniacs have got most justice from Hague, Albanians and Serbs least
Lines from top to bottom: Croats, Bosniacs, Serbs, Albanians, Other
Column 1: Civilian deaths, Column 2: Refugees, Column 3: ICTY sentences (years) about crimes against nations on line, Column 4: ICTY sentences against nations on line/days/civilian death
Column 5: ICTY sentences against nations on line/ratio of deaths + 50% of refugee amount
Free translation AR///Source: Helsingin Sanomat

Ante Gotovina was leading sc Operation Storm against Serb populated Krajina region. Krajina had been under UN protection from 1992, however some 10,000 UN peacekeepers could not stop the attack against civilians – three peacekeepers was murdered and over 200,000 Serbs escaped to Serbia. Croatian army looted homes of Serbs and burned most of them (about 17,000) down. Few thousands old or handicapped Serbs could not flee and hundreds of them were found later decapitated, burned or executed. More about operation Storm and ethnic cleansing in Krajina in my articles Krajina – Victory with Ethnic Cleansing and Operation Storm – forgotten pogrom.

The operation “Storm” successfully finalized the ethnic cleansing of the Republic of Serbian Krajina. Croat president Franjo Tudjman cynically described the pogrom of Croatia Serbs at the opening of the Military school Ban Josip Jelacic in Zagreb, on December 14 1998: “We have, therefore, resolved the Serbian question! There will no longer be 12 percent of Serbs, nor 9 percent of Yugoslavs, as before. One may find some equivalence between terms of Serbian question and Jewish question and not by coincidence as Mr.Tjudman is a widely acclaimed Holocaust denier and international hero to Neo-Nazis.

Serb populated areas in Croatia/Krajina before the Operation Storm

ICTY started to investigate war crimes and ethnic Krajina’s cleansing immediately 1995. U.S. – who was the main financier of ICTY – tried at daily basis to stop investigations and when they however continued U.S. refused to submit satelite photos and other evidencies in their possession to prosecutor. Despite all this sabotage ICTY anyway had enough evidence against Gotovina; after years of hiding he was arrested on 2005 – maybe because his arrest was one preconditition for Croatia’s EU membership. Gotovina got sentence of 24 years in Hague. However ICTY Appeals Chamber released him on Nov. 2012.

The obvious reason for outcome Ante Gotovina’s trial from my perspective is that operation Storm was implemented by help of U.S. All the procedure manifests that ICTY is a political construction to implement U.S. will, to whitewash actions and war crimes implemented by U.S. and their allies and to demonize Serbs to get justification for U.S. intervention to Balkan wars. The dominating political aspect casts shadows also the earlier court decisions – whether accused were acquit or not as well throws suspicion on ongoing trials in Hague.

P.S:

I have tried to tell the other side of Balkan war story in my previous articles such as

• Why It Happened InYugoslavia?
• Srebrenica: A Town Betrayed” – Finally a Critical Documentary about Srebrenica Tragedy
• Media War of Yugoslav Secession continues
• NIOD Report on Srebrenica
• Srebrenica again – Hoax or Massacre?
• High pressure to fabricate Racak reports
• 10th anniversary of Nato’s attack on Serbia
• Kosovo: Two years of Pseudo-state and
• Captured Pseudo-State Kosovo

Devaluation of Nobel Peace Prize Continues But EU Could Show Way For Better Crisis Management

“The stabilizing part played by the E.U. has helped to transform most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace,” (Thorbjorn Jagland, chair of awarding committee)

“The leader of the E.U. is Germany, which is in an economic war with southern Europe, I consider this war equal to a real war. (Comment of Mr. Polychronopoulos, Greece)

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its 2012 peace prize to the European Union, lauding its role over six decades in building peace and reconciliation among enemies who fought Europe’s bloodiest wars. So far I have noticed this selection described as scandalous, parody, joke, sarcastic and bizarre act and late April fool. Also timing has been seen wrong as Europe is facing “increasing violence and division, the EU now appears to critics impotent amid a debt crisis that has widened north-south divisions.

I can agree that the origins of peace in Europe lie in the alliance made between France and Germany it gave birth to the European Coal and Steel Community, a forerunner of the EU. However in my opinion it is questioned whether the EU’s track record in the Balkan wars of the 1990s justified a Prize for spreading peace. However I hope that Peace Prize will give some self-confidence to EU to develop this content so that the block could increase its role in relation of conflict prevention and crisis management.

There are hundreds of worthwhile grass roots organisations and individuals for whom the award of the Nobel Peace Prize would have made a huge difference. For EU the Prize probably will be only one lucky event and photo-opportunity. Interesting but trivial alltough describing detail will be which EU president should collect the prize – Mr Barroso, Mr Van Rompuy or Martin Schulz as none of them or their institutions during their time has done nothing to solve conflicts or build peace. In my opinion the right address of this years Nobel award in EU would be ”spiritual father” of EU, Mr. Robert Schuman, for creating peace by making former Nazi Germany a “member of the family,” in the European Community.

Nobel’s Will questioned

There probably never was a finer gift donated to ‘the greatest benefit of mankind’ than the prize that the Swedish inventor and tycoon Alfred Nobel (1833-96) established for ‘the champions of peace’. When, on November 27th, 1895, Nobel signed his last will he had concluded that his desire for global peace required global disarmament founded on global law. He intended his prize to promote a systemic change in international relations.

Many years there has been debate are peace laureates reflecting Nobel’s last will. Norwegian lawyer and Nobel historian Fredrik S. Heffermehl claims the Norwegian Nobel Committee isn’t following Alfred Nobel’s wishes. His interview in The Local (Swedish news in English) highlights the orginal idea of Alfred Nobel.

Nobel’s will states that the prize should be given to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”. According Heffermehl the reason might be that ”the military sector in Norway is a strong sector and the reality today is that a majority politicians favoring a strong military defense are in control of a prize, which was initially meant for their opponents.”

There is justified doubt that the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision does not comply with Alfred Nobel’s mission statement, which sets out to reward peace activists’ efforts throughout the preceding year. Nobel did not meant the prize to be a reward or recognition of civil right movements, social reforms and taming of ethnic conflict, but precisely and exclusively for substantial achievements on behalf of demilitarization in the world. This and nothing else was – and is – the exclusive intention of the prize.

EU has sadly done little for the demilitarization of Europe. Whilst the EU imposes severe austerity measures upon many EU countries, it simultaneously supports the growing militarization of Europe through support for US/NATO (guilty of war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.). It continues to support the policies of American nuclear weapons deployed to six EU States.

Degradation of Nobel Peace Prize

“Ahtisaari does not solve conflicts but drives through a short-term solutions that please western countries”. (Johan Galtung)

The best example of Nobel peace prize degradation during last decade could be President Obama who has ordered hundreds assassinations with drones, has accepted serious war crimes and human right violations e.g. in Guantamo, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen … and who has continued promoting interests of Military-Industrial-Complex.

Because Obama is too obvious choice in ”worst selections category” I would take other example which is No 119 peace laureate Mr. Ahtisaari. Personally I lost my respect to Nobel Peace Prize after his selection as laureate. No doubt that formally he has worked with many conflicts – Namibia, Yugoslavia(Bosnia and Kosovo), Indonesia – as ”peace broker”.

My critique is based first to his record and second to his methods and values behind them.

• Ahtisaari, after consulting South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, agreed to a South African Defence Force “hunt and destroy” mission, which led to the deaths of some 300 SWAPO fighters. SWAPO leader Sam Nujoma condemned the massacre saying, “At this crucial and critical hour for Namibia’s freedom, [Ahtisaari’s] action betrayed our cause and resulted in the deaths of many civilians.” Despite calling Ahtisaari “very much a collaborator with the US and pro-British [and] more concerned with his career at the United Nations than with his responsibilities to the oppressed people of Namibia”. Now Namibia keeps white landownership and black misery.

• The role of Ahtisaari in Bosnia was insignificant; anyway after him the bloodiest war since WWII started. The compromise solution in Dayton can be described as temporary one as it never respected the Croat wish to join Croatia and the Serb wish for independence (also of Beograd).

• In 1999 he was the envoy who persuaded the Serb state to give in after NATO’s 78 days of bombing, the most brutal event in Europe since 1945, which also lacked a UN Security Council mandate. .He then was appointed as the “architect” of the plan behind the separation of now “quasi-independent” Kosovo which, following this bombing, broke off from Serbia. Kosovo bypassed the Security Council and set a dangerous precedent.

• Aceh was one lucky strike due to a tsunami washing the arms into the ocean. Ahtisaari himself recalled how the 2004 tsunami in South Asia was one factor that came to help open talks he facilitated between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and Indonesia resulting in the August 2005 deal.

About peace broking methods of Mr. Ahtisaari the following quote gives good idea from2nd June 1999 when it was the task of Ahtisaari and Chernomyrdin visited President Milosevic to deliver NATO’s final terms to end bombings against Yugoslavia:

“Ahtisaari opened the meeting by declaring, “We are not here to discuss or negotiate,” after which Chernomyrdin read aloud the text of the plan. Ahtisaari says that Milosevic asked about the possibility of modifying the plan, to which he replied, “No.” Milosevic took the papers and asked, “What will happen if I do not sign?” In answer, “Ahtisaari made a gesture on the table,” and then moved aside the flower centerpiece. Then Ahtisaari said, “Belgrade will be like this table. We will immediately begin carpet-bombing Belgrade.” Repeating the gesture of sweeping the table, Ahtisaari threatened, “This is what we will do to Belgrade.” A moment of silence passed, and then he added, “There will be half a million dead within a week. (Source “How the Nobel Peace Prize Was Won” by Gregory Elich at CounterPunch)

The result with Kosovo I have summarized following: “Kosovo … a Serbian province, occupied and international protectorate, as quasi-independent pseudo-state has good change to become next “failed” or “captured” state; today’s Kosovo is already safe-heaven for war criminals, drug traffickers and international money laundry”. When Kosovo unilatarally declared intependence only less than half UN memberstates recognized it many of them after some pressure from U.S. Ahtisaari was not worried, describing to his values is following comment: “It really doesn’t matter if Paraguay hasn’t recognized,” Ahtisaari said. “Well over 65 percent of the wealth of the world has recognized. That matters.” This is in line with Ahtisaari’s role as messenger boy of U.S., if one doesn’t have money that opinion doesn’t matter.

I agree with Johan Galtung, who noted that “Ahtisaari does not solve conflicts but drives through a short-term solutions that please western countries”. My conclusion: Mr. Ahtisaari – an unofficial spokesperson of U.S. State Department and Nato who repeatedly functioned as “peace fixer” for Western power elites – good example of degradation of Nobel Peace Prize.

EU’s role with crisis management now and hopefully in the future

Putting Mr. Nobel and his Will aside, taking creative interpretation of peace award criteria of Nobel Committee as such I like to put focus on EU’s role with crisis management. The arguments given by the Norwegian Nobel Committee are not entirely false. I agree that “The stabilizing part played by the E.U. has helped to transform most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace,” The EU has played the historical role that it describes. Degradation of Peace Prize described above might have a positive follow-up; to avoid total devaluation of Prize the further selections should have more original content. I hope that Peace Prize will give some self-confidence to EU to develop this content so that the block could increase its role in relation of conflict prevention and crisis management.

Earlier The League of Nations and then The United Nations were created to prevent one nation-state from invading another nation-state and going to war with that other nation-state. Today most wars are intrastate ethnic conflicts. Current peacemaking, peace-building or crisis management structures are not designed to cope with this type of conflict.

U.S. itself has experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, that old military strategy is not effective. The integrated counterinsurgency, or COIN, strategy was strategic development from military alone approach. COIN has been applied last years in Afghanistan and it has many components: protecting Afghan civilians, rapidly expanding the Afghan army and police, reforming government, providing economic development assistance, weaning Taliban fighters and leaders away from Mullah Omar and al-Qaeda, reconciling them into the new government, and targeting those who refuse. This makes it a demanding strategy, maybe too demanding for U.S. However the good idea of COIN is that it emphasises a “population-centric” over an “enemy-centric” approach.

The events on Arab Street are reflecting also another problem with U.S. Strategies for dominating the rest of world. For similar reasons as the failure of COIN strategy in Afghanistan in Arab Street the strategy might be good in Theory but the Americans can not implement them. It seems that the Americans don’t understand deeply the operational theatre, they are unfamiliar in another cultural environment, in this case with Muslim world.

Hard vs. Soft Power
	Hard Power	Soft Power
Spectrum of behaviors	Command, coercion and inducement	Agenda-setting, attraction and co-opt
Most likely resources	Force, sanctions and payments	Institutions, values, culture and policies

EU has applied a bit similar approach. At theoretical level the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), launched in 1999, exemplifies the EU’s commitment to the so-called “comprehensive approach” – a strategy that emphasises the importance of combining civilian and military tools when dealing with external security challenges.

Crisis management in the future -by EU hopefully

I think that the conflict resolution by peacemakers is an ad hock fire department activity, important but secondary question. The primary issue from my viewpoint is prevention of problems and their causes, or at least awareness of them. Also important is to put single conflicts in wider context such as game between great powers, struggle over global energy resources and their supply routes, economic profits of military-industrial-complex etc. So in my view peace mediation is one part of handling conflicts.

The new approach should in my opinion cover the whole crisis cycle, from prevention to crisis management to post-crisis stabilization and capacity-building measures. The European Union prides itself on being able to deal with fragile and failing states outside its borders, from Kosovo to Kabul, through what it believes to be its distinctive combination of “hard” power – coercion by military or other means – and “soft” power – persuasion through trade, diplomacy, aid and the spread of values.

The key question is how to replace U.S. hard power with EU soft power. In Eastern Europe U.S. controls crucial foreign and/or domestic policies of another nation through ties with its military and intelligence institutions. EU’s military, political, and corporate elites have already increasingly become dependents or confederates of the US military-industrial complex. To take step forward EU must work to establish its own security structure in order to free itself from tactics which are now used under the current US-dominated Alliance. EU should stop outsourcing its strategical planning to U.S. The key question is focusing on EU civilian capabilities.

EU already has remarkable financial resources for capacity building measures. The EU accounts for half of all global aid. Last year, it donated €53.1bn (£42.8bn). The European commission by itself is the world’s second largest bilateral donor after the US, providing €12.3bn of external aid in 2011. Aid constitutes about 9% of the EU budget. EU is a formidable player in global development.

Replacing U.S. Cowboy policy by EU’s soft power in conflicts and crisis management is possible, if EU can find a common vision, strategy and position with its external relations. Even better would be if the OSCE could make this. It can be argued that the OSCE has a much better claim to represent all the states of Europe, (and possibly a better candidate for Peace Prize) since it has 56 States from Europe, Central Asia and North America – compared to the EU’s 27 — a “Europe with the windows open” rather than the “Fortress Europe” image associated with the EU. Ihope that Nobel Peace Prize can help with this even in EU.

More e.g. in my related articles:

Civil Crisis Management: Filling the Gaps Between the Aims and on the Ground Effectiveness of a Mission

Nobel: “Do you hear Mr. Nobel rolling in his grave” – and more specific about Ahtisaari’s mediator tactics in my article “500.000 bodies or sign” -headlines are describing quite well the content and my shock after his selection

Interventions in general: R2P vs Facades of Interventions, Multifaceted Intervention Practices , Is Peace more than absence of the War? , Could EU lead the 3rd Way out from Confrontation? , Quality Peace? and Peacemaking – How about solving Conflicts too?

About U.S. strategy in Afghanistan: Will COIN work in Afghanistan? andAfghanistan – to be or not?

U.S. practising intervention first in the Bosnian War 1992-95 and selecting terrorist/OC-groups to U.S. alliese.g. Srebrenica again – Hoax or Massacre? and Krajina – Victory with Ethnic Cleansing and the outcome Bosnia on the road to the EU, sorry to Dissolution

Racak fabrication and “humanitarian intervention” aka since WWII first ever full scale bombing operation in center of Europe 1999 High pressure to fabricate Racak reports and 10th anniversary of Nato’s attack on Serbia

Other related articles: Libya Intervention is creating problems instead of solving them and Some framework to Syrian crisis

Article (short version) first published as Devaluation of Nobel Peace Prize to be Continued on Technorati.

EU in Turmoil and not only in Financial One

The two dominating trends among EU leaders are to cut losses of players in virtual economy at the expense of taxpayers and to guide EU towards strict federation at the expense of democracy.

(Ari Rusila)

The financial crisis has been in headlines already few years. Despite continuous emergency meetings between EU and especially Eurozone countries no light can be seen for better future. Despite more and more ”effective” measures the markets are not satisfied more than few hours or days. In my opinion it is time finally admit that selected strategy to save euro has been disaster – not maybe to banks and speculators but to ordinary citizens at least. It is time to make alternative visions not only for Euro but for whole EU too, time to whistle game out, collect losses and start new game in Day after Euro/EU context.

Today strategic decisions are hard to agree due 27 different circumstances in 27 member-states (and more to come with enlargement). Also “European Monetary Union” is dead as economies inside Eurozone differ too much. It would seem nowadays that the Eurozone leaders have decided to place the region under Martial law. Old principles about democracy, subsidiarity etc are forgotten.

From my viewpoint intervene again and again into something that is not going to work in the long run is the wrong medicine. The two dominating trends among EU leaders are to cut losses of players in virtual economy at the expense of taxpayers and to guide EU towards strict federation at the expense of democracy. Change to this is needed for saving 99 % of people instead saving profits of the rest one per cent.

Grexit best for all

Eurozone countries have tried solve financial crisis in Greece with different measures – such as bailout packets – already few years with about € 320 billion. However this amazing solidarity of Eurozone has not helped average Greek. Instead foreign banks and financial speculators have been beneficiaries of the aid money. The still ruling government in Greece has also decided to invest aid money to new submarines and other military equipments instead the needs of their citizens. Btw as Nato country why Greece does not apply same strategy like Iceland who has outsourced e.g their military air-control to other member-states. Anyway on the bottom line Greece had public debts on 2009 some €300 bn and after aid packets it now has €420 bn . GNP is decreasing so debt problem is coming more difficult to solve every day. Same time the living conditions of average citizens has dropped dramatically and extra loans have not made ground for new entrepreneurship or new export business or helped still existing companies. When unemployment is rising the share of debt compared to GNP doing the same. (See e.g. ”Common Appeal for the Rescue of the Peoples of Europe”  )

Euro-zone, European Central Bank and IMF seem to have only one ultra-liberalist strategy to solve problem – cutting salary, public services and social benefits from ordinary citizens and saving some financial institutions, funds and speculators from bigger losses. But the problem will not be solved with this strategy and the reason is that these financial institutions and speculators have created a virtual financial world ( derivative markets, futures, hedge-funds …) which value is about ten times more than the real economy. I am not an economist but anyway how could this equation be solved with selected strategy.

Grexit now would be best for all. The new currency should be introduced at a one-for-one rate with the euro. But it will soon depreciate by something like 30-50% giving a boost to Greece’s international competitiveness. The government should renominate its debt in the new national currency and make clear its intention to renegotiate the terms of this debt.

Different analysts estimate that the overall debt load continues to grow faster than the economy, then large-scale debt restructuring becomes inevitable. Greece has been in a state of slow motion economic collapse on the scale of past economic collapses such as that of Argentina but so far without the ability to default, devalue and inflate.  It is to be noted that the case of Argentina shows one successful example how to copy in a similar situation.

Strategic miscalculation

“The euro should now be recognized as an experiment that failed”

(Martin Feldstein, an American economist in 2012)

Many economists, mostly from outside Europe, condemned the design of the Euro currency system from the beginning and have since been advocating that Greece (and the other debtor nations) unilaterally leave the Eurozone, which would allow Greece to withdraw simultaneously from the Eurozone and reintroduce its national currency the drachma at a debased rate. However the political will, or fear, has kept Eurozone leaders in their expired visions – current political leaders might be affraid to apply Modern Monetary Theory or post-Keynesian views. The European bailouts are largely about shifting exposure from banks and others, who otherwise are lined up for losses on the sovereign debt they recklessly bought, onto European taxpayers. However I believe that many of them will be either be replaced or finally they have courage to take new appraoach.

There are clear advantages to ridding Europe of the euro. Countries now suffering with debt could return to their national currencies, devalue, and regain competitiveness more easily. They wouldn’t have the same financial safety-net – at Eurozone level – but their freedom would also allow them to chart their own course. The poor outsiders could negotiate debt restructurings and a more fair division of losses would result and same time the rich outsiders could probably put their economies on a stronger growth path by using their money for supporting investments in real economy of their country instead supporting saving efforts of speculator money in virtual economy.

One viewpoint is that the debt should be characterized as odious debt. This definition is famous earlier from cases in South America and Africa uder military dictatorship. For example the Greek documentary Debtocracy examines whether the recent Siemens scandal and uncommercial ECB loans which were conditional on the purchase of military aircraft and submarines are evidence that the loans amount to odious debt and that an audit would result in invalidation of a large amount of the debt. (See more e.g. Liège based NGO Committee for the Abolition of the Third World Debt /CADTM)

EU Scenario: Dissolution, Federation, Confederation, EU Lite …

”A lot of English people like the economic advantages, but are happy to keep the frogs and krauts and spics and eye-ties at a healthy distance.”

(One view from U.K. in web)

Now Eurozone as well EU as construction is on the verge of tumbling down. EU bureaucracy is implementing their only truth by trying to guide EU towards federation. Earlier agreements in Maastricht, Barcelona and Lisbon were only soft exercises. Now financial crisis has enabled stronger methods. In March 2011 a new reform of the Stability and Growth Pact was initiated, which provides for automatic penalties and obligations for states in case of breaches of either the deficit or the debt rules. By the end of the year, Germany, France and some other smaller EU countries went a step further and vowed to create a fiscal union across the Eurozone with strict and enforceable fiscal rules and automatic penalties embedded in the EU treaties. (More e.g. Wikipedia).

With the “golden rule” the Stability and Growth Pact, the political choices of national parliaments are limited. Besides killing the democracy the Pact will kill growth too so putting people in misery and dismay. The Pact is new tool for the plundering of the public services and the destruction of social rights in all EU countries.

The best scenario from my point of view could be some kind of EU Lite version. A bit of similar ”privileged partnership” agreement than planed with Turkey. EU Lite should be build simply to EU’s early basics as economical cooperation area including a customs union, the EU tariff band, competition etc linked to idea of the Common Market. EU Lite could also apply a structure of Confederation. Also some kind of fiscal confederation can be shaped. EU Lite could be described also as a political union and there could be some forum for national parliamentarians and party leaders. Federalist intentions, the EU puppet parliament and the most of EU bureaucracy should from my point of view put in litter basket together with high-flown statements and other nonsense.

The investors face normally e.g Interest rate risk, credit (i.e default) risk, volatility risk, structure risk, counter-party credit risk, prepayment risk, general market risk, liquidity risk, extension risk, transparency risk, political risk, and currency risk and now also with Euro a dissolution risk. As said this is normal and because of those risks also the profits are huge. But the basic principle in is that with investments and not to speak even speculations there is two sides – wins and losses. In my opinion the loss should no more be paid by taxpayers.

Many – still non-member – Balkan countries, Turkey and one disputed region (Kosovo) have some vision about EU association. While considering this in my opinion three aspects should be highlighted:

Why to join? Due the needs of people or due the needs of Brussels or elite?

When related to time-line? Association process is long and circumstances are changing, after EU/Eurozone crisis who know what kind of EU if any still exists, same time other regional and global power-centers are rising and options should be open.

Where? Now it is open question if country is joining in future to strict federation with martial law, to some sub-category of loose federation, confederation, open discussion forum or free trade zone only.

After this the forth question – how – is the easy one. (More this with example of Serbia in Serbia’s EU association is not a Must )

My bottom line

With today’s strategy there is a risk that the combination of economic insecurity and political paralysis has been recipe for an increase in extremism and xenophobia. It is slow motion death spiral of economic collapse. That is the base to my view that people should be the first priority and not virtual economy, fiscal system, euro or even EU.

I would like to see following principles – related to current Eurozone crisis – to came again to agenda:

• People first system after

• Real economy instead of virtual economy

• Investor risk instead of taxpayers risk

As interests even inside Eurozone differ these new principles in my opinion have best change if implemented at national level. So e.g each country could nationalize their bankrupting banks, each country could start implement Toby’n (or transaction) tax by national decisions. And when different countries find common interests so new formations, forums and cooperation can be established.

Kosovo Referendum Prepares the Ground for Tripartite Approach

Ethnic Serbs living in northern Kosovo – municipalities of Zubin Potok, Zvecan, northern Mitrovica and Leposavic – have been voting in a two-day referendum on February 14.-15. The question was simple: Voters were asked simply ”Do you accept the institutions of the so-called ‘Republic of Kosovo’ established in Pristina?”. Turnout was at 75.28%. Final results will be made known on February 19th – just after the fourth anniversary of Kosovo’s independence declaration – but early estimate is that 99.74 % were against Pristina’s sovereignty. In Kosovo case the figure probably reflects good the opinion of local Serb population. The result shows that the barricades against EULEX were not just the work of “criminals” and “radicals” but instead have real popular support.

One should note that question about northern municipalities of Kosovo is only one – even if a core one – aspect in Kosovo framework. During NATO-bombing and after ethnic cleansing implemented by Kosovo Albanians, nearly 200.000 Serbs and Romas escaped to Serbia where they are living like internal refugees many of them in temporary conditions. Despite naïve multiethnic ideas in Brussels they have not any intentions to risk their lives by returning hostile environment and their destroyed homes. In my opinion international community – which allowed this problem to happen – should finance a housing program in Serbia for these refugees (or officially IDPs). Second core question is the fate of some half of remaining Kosovo Serbs namely those who are living in isolated enclaves outside northern municipalities in Kosovo. These enclaves are protected by KFOR troops and should be so long as Pristina administrated part of Kosovo is so hostile as it still is.

High Tension in Kosovo North

Tension has been high in northern Kosovo since last July. The situation escalated when Kosovo Serbs put up roadblocks and barricades to stop the deployment of Kosovo customs officers to border points between north Kosovo municipalities and Serbia. Several rounds of violence has occurred; a Kosovo policeman was killed and several NATO troops injured. The north was the scene of unrest in November, when some 50 soldiers from the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force were hurt in a dispute between the two sides over control of border crossings. This Pristina’s failed attempt to seize the northern boundary with support by EULEX and KFOR have demonstrated that using force does not solve dispute.

The governing coalition in Belgrade has called on the Serbs to end the blockade, refrain from violence and abandon the referendum and same time several EU nations, especially Germany, want Serbia’s government to make deals with Pristina so that Serbia could get EU candidate status this Spring.

In Brussels, the EU said it was preparing for a new round of talks between Belgrade and Pristina aimed at easing tensions in northern Kosovo. “There is a particular situation in the north that needs a solution, but neither violence nor barricades, or a referendum contributes to it,” EU spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic said. “Only a dialogue can achieve that.” (Source AP ) Earlier the EU pressured Serbia intensely in November and December, demanding that it force the northern Kosovo Serbs to remove their barricades in the name of “freedom of movement”. KFOR fought several actions against barricades, inflicting – and taking – casualties.

The burned down border crossing Jarinje on Kosovo's northern frontier with Serbia in the early hours on July 28, 2011. (SASA DJORDJEVIC/AFP/Getty Images)

Time to Exit-strategy?

However the western powers have on the drawing board also an other strategy of fostering change to avoid reinforcing the status quo in the north. The press in Pristina has reported about secret meetings between the Kosovo government, the US ambassador and chief of the International Civilian Office (ICO), Pieter Feith,on a new plan to push the UN out of the north. An “EU House” will be established in the north to promote the “European perspective” and to cooperate with “progressive forces” willing to work with Pristina, “parallel” municipalities in the north would remain unrecognized and “Advisory Councils led by moderate Kosovo Serbs” chosen by Pristina taking place from democratically elected bodies in Leposavic, Zubin Potok and Zvecan. To make space for these innovations the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) Administration in Mitrovica (UAM), that administers north Mitrovica under UN Security Council Resolution 1244, will be closed.

Also the International Steering Group (ISG) had meeting on January 24^th in Vienna to deside its 2012 program for Kosovo. Despite its name ISG represents only countries which have advocated Kosovo Albanian separatism, cover costs of Kosovo Albanian state-building efforts.cover costs of Kosovo Albanian state-building efforts and try to underestimate UN Security Council Resolution 1244 – which btw represents in Kosovo highest international law. Anyway ISG issued a communique calling upon the government of Kosovo to continue to implement the Ahtisaari Plan, aiming to complete outstanding elements so that the period of “supervised independence” could terminate by the end of this year. While the outcome both politically and on operation theatre has been modest as best and the results related to investments almost non-visible, ISG probably his hurry to implement fast exit-strategy.

Marko Prelec from International Crisis Group concludes well the situation now since last summer tensions started in his post Update on Northern Kosovo Barricades. A quote:

The situation shows with crystal clarity the folly of the “freedom of movement” campaign, which cost tens of millions of Euros (flying Kosovo officials to, and from, the border day after day runs into serious money), dozens of injuries, made travel more difficult for real people and achieved nothing. All this started because of the basic disputes between Kosovo and Serbia, over Kosovo’s independence and territorial integrity. Trying to use issues like freedom of movement – or the rule of law – as tools to change locals’ minds about sovereignty issues, rather than as ends in themselves, just damages the tool. The dispute isn’t a technicality and cannot be resolved as though it were.

… or back to Dialogue?

Dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina has poor history. Serbs and Albanians have been in negotiations and talks frequently over the past two decades – from the tentative efforts of the 1990s to the doomed talks in Rambouillet, France, in 1999 and the later “status” talks between 2005 (Ahtisaari’s pseudo-talks) and 2007 (“Troika” led talks). None of these has led to tangible results and left outsiders imposing an outcome, be it NATO intervention or proposing the Ahtisaari plan.

The original or better to say official aim of international community was to build “standards before status”, on 2005 the task was seen impossible so the slogan changed to “standards and status”. Even this was unrealistic so Feb. 2008 “European”standards were thrown away to garbage and “status without standards” precipitately accepted by western powers. For international community I don’t see any success story with this backward progress. Thus the multiethnic idea is far away despite EU’s billions. The remaining Serbs in Kosovo are barricaded into enclaves keeping their lives mainly with help of international KFOR troops or in de facto separated Serb majority region in North Kosovo. This has changed former multiethnic province more mono-ethnic one.

Rewrite History: The Map of Destroyed Shrines in Post-war Kosovo

(To see picture above in full size click here!)

The new situation has forced also International Crisis Group (ICG) to admit the defeat of its Kosovo policy recommendations during last decade. ICG has acted as informal extension of U.S. State Department however pretending to be neutral mediator and think tank. During earlier “status” negotiations 2005 it endorsed preconditions before talks and afterwards supported sc Ahtisaari plan. Now in their new analysis ”Kosovo and Serbia after the ICJ Opinion”  ICG sees Kosovo’s partition with land swap one of possible solutions during coming talks between Belgrad and Pristina.

The fact on the ground is that northern part of Kosovo is integrated to Serbia like it always has been, as well those parts south of Ibar river, which are not ethnically cleansed by Kosovo Albanians. Serbia still runs municipalities, courts, police, customs and public services, and the EU Rule of Law Mission (EULEX) has been unable to deploy more than a token presence there.

During the course of events, the Ahtisaari Plan was implemented in south Kosovo, the north, however, remained outside Kosovo institutions and the ICO, and the Ahtisaari Plan was not implemented there. The Ahtisaari Plan derived a formula that would allow Kosovo Serbs to have their own local institutions and communal life with continued linkages to Serbia, but within the framework of a multi-ethnic Kosovo. If partition option – which in my opinion is pragmatic, the best and even realistical way to solve Kosovo conflict – is not yet possible so then the Ahtisaari Plan might be temporary base for compromise. The Plan however needs some modification. A new follow-up – entitled ‘The Ahtisaari Plan and North Kosovo’ - is presented by TransConflict and it might be achievable as the policy paper is authored by Gerard Gallucci, the former UN Regional Representative in Mitrovica.

My Scenario

“Kosovo … a Serbian province, occupied and now international protectorate administrated by UN Kosovo mission; as quasi-independent pseudo-state has good change to become next “failed” or “captured” state; today’s Kosovo is already safe-heaven for war criminals, drug traffickers, international money laundry and radical Wahhabists – unfortunately all are also allies of western powers”.

(Ari Rusila)

US based Freedom House gave in their last report (2012) rank partly free to Kosovo related to political rights and civil liberties (5,4 points respectively), while Serbia got rank free (2,2) and e.g also Croatia (1,2), Bulgaria (2,2) and Romania (2,2) got rank free, while Bosnia-Herzegovina (4,3) and Albania (3,3) fell to category partly free. (Note: Each country is assigned a numerical rating from 1 to 7 for both political rights and civil liberties, with 1 representing the most free and 7 the least free.) So even western powers must addmit that despite billions of dollars for Kosovo state-building efforts during last 12 years the outcome is that the protectorate still is among the worst in region related to political rights and civil liberties. One could ask why then Kosovo Serbs should go backwards by integrating to that society when better the alternative could be integrate also officially to more developed Serbia.

In my opinion Kosovo will remain a frozen conflict probably whole this decade. The western powers can not addmit – yet – that their intervention was a mistake, international community can not addmit its failure with capasity-/state-building efforts after squandering billions of Euros, noor that instead of multiethnic democracy the out outcome mono-ethnic tribe-society.  EULEX etc will continue to build some facades and pseudo-activities like it used to do, Pristina pretends that north is integral part of their quasi-independent pseudo-state which the North never has been, the Kosovo institutions do not exist in the north, and it is very unlikely that they will be established there soon. Hard-line Serbs keep claim about Kosovo as Serbian province, which it indeed has been but after 1999 situation on the ground changed; instead the today’s government in Belgrade might change in next elections. What is clear after referendum is that population in Kosovo’s northern municipalities does not want to integrate Pristina lead institutions, they want to continue their living as part of Serbia like they always have been, in short they want reunify northern municipalities with Serbia again.

After this quite pessimistic view one can ask if there is any other way forward. From my point of view there is the negotiation option. But this time negotiations should base facts on the ground instead of high-flown ideas in Washington and Brussels, around negotiation table in addition to Belgrade and Pristina representatives should be also local stakeholders from northern Kosovo and selected by local population. The referendum made positions clear for tripartite approach.

More eg in Kosovo: Two years of Pseudo-state

Serbia: Kosovo vs EU?

FW: Common Appeal for the Rescue of the Peoples of Europe

Attached below please find an appeal related to ongoing financial, social and political crisis. Appeal is created by Mikis Theodorakis and Manolis Glezos in order to addressed to personalities and intellectuals in your countries.

Common Appeal for the Rescue of the Peoples of Europe

65 years after the defeat of nazism and fascism, European people are today confronting a dramatic threat, this time not military, but a financial, social and political one.

A new “Empire of Money” has been systematically attacking one European country after another in the last 18 months, without facing any substancial resistance.

European governments not only fail to organize a collective defense of European people against the markets, but, instead, try to “calm” the markets by imposing policies that remind us of the way governments tried to confront nazism in the ’30s. They organize “debt wars” between the peoples of Europe, just like when they were driven from the belle époque to World War 1.

The offensive of the markets initiated a war against Greece, an EU member-state, whose people have played a decisive role in the resistance against barbarity and the liberation of Europe in World War 2. In the beginning, this war was a communicative war, which reminded us of the campaigns against hostile, outcast countries, like Iraq or Yugoslavia. This campaign presented Greece as a country of lazy and corrupted citizens, while attempting to blame the “PIIGS” of Europe and not the international banks for the debt crisis.

Shortly, this offensive evolved into a financial one, which caused the submission of Greece under a status of limited sovereignty and the intervention of the IMF to the internal affairs of the Eurozone.

When they got what they wanted from Greece, the markets targeted the other, smaller or larger countries of the European periphery. The aim is one and common in all cases: The full guarantee of the interests of the banks against the states, the demolition of the European welfare state, which has been a cornerstone of European democracy and culture, the demolition of European states and the submission of the remaining state structures to the new “International of Money”.

The EU, which was presented to its peoples as a means for collective progress and democracy, tends to become the means for terminating prosperity and democracy. It was introduced as a means of resistance to globalization, but the markets wish it to be an instrument of this globalization.

It was introduced to German and other European peoples as a means of peaceful increase of their power and prosperity, but the way that all peoples are abandoned to be the pray of financial markets, destroys the image of Europe and turns the markets into actors of a new financial totalitarianism, into the new bosses of Europe.

We are facing the danger of repeating the financial equivalent of World War 1 and World War 2 in our continent and be dissolved into chaos and decomposition, in favor of an international Empire of Money and Weapons, in the economic epicentre of which lies the power of the markets.

The peoples of Europe and the world are facing a historically unprecedented concentration of financial but also political and media power by the international financial capital, ie by a handful of financial institutes, rating agencies and a political and media class redeemed by them, with more centers outside, than inside Europe. These are the markets that attack today in one European country after another, using the leverage of debt to demolish the European welfare state and democracy.

The “Empire of Money” now requires a fast, violent, brutal transformation of a Eurozone country, Greece, into a country of the third world, with a so-called program of “rescue“, in fact the “rescue” of banks who lent the country. In Greece, the alliance of banks and the political leaderships imposed -through the EU, the ECB and the IMF- a program that equals to to “economic and social murder” of the country and its democracy, and organizes the looting of the country before the bankruptcy to which it leads, wishing to make it the scapegoat of the global financial crisis and use it as a “paradigm” to terrorize all European peoples.

The policy that is currently conducted in Greece and attempts to spread, is the same applied in Pinochet’s Chile, Yeltsin’s Russia or Argentina and will have the same results, if not discontinued immediately. As a result of a program that supposedly intended to help the country, Greece isnow on the verge of economic and social disaster; it is used as a guinea pig to study people’s reactions to social Darwinism and terrify the entire European Union, with what can happen to one of its members.

The markets may also be pushing and using the leadership of Germany in actions of destruction of the European Union. But it constitutes an act of extreme political and historical blindness for the dominant forces of the EU and first of all, for Germany, to think that there can be any project of European integration or even simple cooperation, on the ruins of one or more members of the Eurozone.

The planned demolition of major, globally significant political and social achievements of the European peoples, can not establish any kind of European Union. It will lead to chaos and disintegration and it will promote the emergence of fascist solutions in our continent.

In 2008 private banking giants of Wall Street forced the states and state banks to bail them out of the crisis they themselves created, by paying with the taxpayers’ money the cost of their enormous fraud, such as mortgages, but also the operational cost of an unregulated casino-capitalism, imposed in the last twenty years. They turned their own crisis into a public debt crisis.

Now they are using the crisis and debt, which they themselves created, to deprive the states and the citizens of the few powers they still hold.

This is one part of the debt crisis. The other is that financial capital, together with the political forces supporting it globally, imposed an agenda of neoliberal globalization, which inevitably leads to the relocation of production outside Europe and the downward convergence of social and ecological standards of Europe with those of the Third World. For many years they hid this process behind loans, but now they use the loans to completeit.

The “International of Money”, thatwishes to eliminate any notion of state in Europe, threatens Greece today, Italy or Portugal tomorrow; it encourages the confrontation among European peoples and puts the European Union before the dilemma whether to transform into a dictatorship of the markets or to dissolve. It aims at making Europe and the world to regress in a state like the one before 1945, or even before the French Revolution and the Enlightenment.

In ancient times, the abolition, by Solon, of the debts which forced the poor to be slaves of the rich, the so-called Seisachtheia reform, laid the foundations for the birth, in ancient Greece, of the ideas of democracy, citizenship, politcs and Europe, the foundations of European and world culture.

Struggling against the class of wealth, the citizens of Athens led the way in the constitution of Pericles and the political philosophy of Protagoras, who declared that “Man is the measure above all money”.

Today, the wealthy classes are attempting to avenge ths spirit of man: “The markets are the measure above all men”is the motto that our political leaderships willingly embrace, in alliance with the devil of money, as Faust did.

A handful of international banks, rating agencies, investment funds, a global concentration of financial capital without historical precedent, claims power in Europe and the world and prepares to abolish the states and our democracy, using the weapon of debt to enslave the peoples of Europe, putting in place of the incomplete democracy we have, the dictatorship of Money and Banks; the power of a totalitarian empire of globalization, the political center of which is outside continental Europe, despite the presence of powerful European banks at the heart of the empire.

They started from Greece, using it as a guinea pig, to move then to the other countries of the European periphery, and gradually to the center. The hope of some European countries to eventually escape, just proves that today’s European leaders face the threat of a new “financial fascism”, not better than the way they faced the threat of Hitler during the inter-war period.

It is not by accident that a big part of the media controlled by bankers chose to attack against the European periphery, by naming these countries as “pigs”, and also turned to a contemptuous, sadistic, racist campaign of the media they own, not only against the Greeks, but against the ancient Greek heritage and the ancient Greek civilization. This choice shows the deeper, underlying goals of the ideology and the values of financial capital, which promotes capitalism of destruction.

The attemptof a part of the German media to humiliate symbols such as the Acropolis or the Venus de Milo, monuments which were respected even by Hitler’s officers, is nothing but an expression of the deep disdain of bankers, who control these media, not so much against the Greeks, but mainlyagainst the ideas of freedom and democracy, which were born in this country.

The financial monster produced four decades of tax exemption for the capital, all kinds of “market liberalization”, widespread deregulation, abolition ofall barriers to the flows of capital and commodities, constant attacks against the state, massive acquisition of political parties and media, ownership of the global surplus from a handful of vampire-banks of Wall Street. Now, this monster, a true “state behind the States”, is revealed claiming the completion of the financial and political “permanent coup d’ etat“, carried out for over than four decades.

Facing this attack, the political forces of the European right-wing and social democracy seem compromised after decades of “entryism” by financial capital, the most important centersof which are non-European. On the other hand, trade-unions and social movements are still not strong enough to block this attack decisively, like they repeatedly did in the past. The new financial totalitarianism seeks to take advantage of this situation, in order to impose finite, irreversible conditions across Europe.

There is an urgent need for an immediate, cross-border coordination of action by intellectuals, people of the arts and literature, spontaneous movements, social forces and personalities who comprehend the importance of the stakes; we need to create a powerful front of resistance against the advancing “totalitarian empire of globalization”, before it is too late.

Europe can survive only if wepromote a united response against the markets, a challenge bigger than theirs, a new European «New Deal».

- We must immediately stop the attack against Greece and other countries of the EU periphery; we must stop the irresponsible and criminal policy of austerity and privatization, which leads directly to a crisis deeper than the one of 1929.

- Public debts must be radically restructured across the Eurozone, particularly on the expense of the private banking giants. Banks must be recontrolled and the financing of European economy must be under national and European social control. It is not possible to let the financial keys of Europe in the hands of banks like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, UBS, the Deutsche Bank etc. We must ban the uncontrolled financial derivatives, which are the spearhead of the destructive financial capitalism, and create real economic development, instead of speculative profits.

- The present architecture, based on the Maastricht Treaty and the WTO rules,has established a debt production machine in Europe. We need a radical change of all Treaties, the submission of the ECB under political control by the European peoples, a “goldenrule” for minimum social, fiscal, environmental standards in Europe. We urgently need a change of paradigm; a return to the stimulation of growth through the stimulation of demand, via new European investment programs, a new regulation, taxation and control of international capital and commodities flows; a new form of smart and reasonable protectionism in an independent Europe, which will be the protagonist in the fight for a multipolar, democratic, ecological, social planet.

We appeal to the forces and individuals who share these ideas, to converge into a broad, European front of action as soon as possible; to produce a European transitional program, to coordinate our international action, so as to mobilize the forces of the popular movement, to reverse the current balance of power and overthrow the current historically irresponsible leaderships of our countries, in order to save our people and our societies before it is too late for Europe.

Athens, October 2011

Mikis Theodorakis

Manolis Glezos

Captured Pseudo-State Kosovo

“We Bombed The Wrong Side” (General Lewis Mackenzie)

In my previous articles I have portrayed Kosovo with quite dark colours. I have summarized Kosovo

“as Serbian province, occupied and now international protectorate administrated by UN Kosovo mission; as quasi-independent pseudo-state has good change to become next “failed” or “captured” state; today’s Kosovo is already safe-heaven for war criminals, drug traffickers, international money laundry and radical Wahhabists – unfortunately all are also allies of western powers”.

This description can naturally be seen as individual biased view without any connection to reality. However the process which began before Xmas may lead similar outcome in western mainstream media too. Investigations conducted by the Swiss diplomat, Dick Marty on behalf of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) have revealed the true picture of Kosovo’s prime minister Hashim Thaci. In his report to the PACE’s Commission, Thaci is presented as the leader of a criminal gang engaged in the smuggling of weapons, the distribution of illegal drugs throughout Europe and the selling of human organs for unlawful transplantation. The Swiss senator conducted a two-year inquiry into organised crime in Kosovo after the Council of Europe mandated him to investigate claims of organ harvesting by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) after the war with Serbia ended in 1999.

Western intelligence agencies warned that Hashim Thaci ran an organised crime network in the late 1990s, they knew the KLA were criminals running the drug, slave, and weapons rackets throughout Europe, they knew the KLA was supported by Osama bin Laden (with whom Thaci met personally in Tirana in 1998 to plan the jihad in Kosovo. Despite this Western political leaders backed his Kosovo Liberation Army and its members were transformed as “freedom fighters”.

The case related to organ trafficking is now in Pristina court, according Swiss sources PM Thaçi has been prohibited from entering Switzerland “for a certain period of time”, investigations are called for allegations that sums originating from organ trafficking in Kosovo and Albania had been deposited in Swiss bank accounts. Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey has reportedly decided not to receive an award given by the Kosovo Embassy and members of the Kosovo diaspora, for her contribution to the recognition of Kosovo’s independence. The award ceremony was planned to be held on 21. December, 2010 for her contribution to the recognition of Kosovo’s independence. (Source: Euractiv )

Organ trafficking case

In April 2008 Madam Carla Del Ponte, the former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), published a book “La caccia – Io e i criminali di guerra”. In the book, almost ten years after the end of the war in Kosovo, there appeared revelations of trafficking in human organs taken from Serb prisoners, reportedly carried out by leading commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Now the report, “Inhuman treatment of people and illicit trafficking in human organs in Kosovo” , for Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), prepared by Swiss prosecutor-turned-politician Dick Marty, expands on allegations made by Mrs. Del Ponte.

The PACE report claims that civilians – Serbian and non-KLA-supporting Kosovan Albanians detained by the KLA in the 1999 hostilities – were shot in northern Albania and their kidneys extracted and sold on the black market. It names Hashim Thaçi, the former leader of the KLA and Kosovo’s prime minister, as the boss of a “mafia-like” group engaged in criminal activity – including heroin trading – since before the 1999 war.

A Council of Europe report into organ trafficking in Kosovo linked the Medicus case to a wider criminal network in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which began trading in organs in 1999. A faction within the rebel guerilla army loyal to Thaci has been accused of overseeing a racket involving Serb captives. A “handful” were said, in the report, to have been shot in the head, then had their kidneys extracted. It is believed the kidneys were flown to Istanbul in ischemia bags. Thaci has strongly denied the claims. I also touched on a matter in my article New Cannibalism in Europe too? a couple of years ago.

In November 2008 police raided the property of Medicus clinic in a deprived suburb near the Kosovan capital Pristina. Patients from Canada, Germany, Poland and Israel had received organ transplants at the clinic. Victims were promised up to $20,000, while recipients were required to pay between €80,000 and €100,000 euros. But despite promises of payment the donors had left empty-handed; up to 30 victims lost their kidneys in the clinic in just eight months in 2008. The key player of is Dr. Yusuf Ercin Sonmez from Medicus clinic has been a key player in the unscrupulous organ market for more than 10 years.

A Washington-based intelligence source said the kidneys were sold to Dr. Sonmez, a 53-year-old medic. It was then that the Turkish doctor was said to have struck up a relationship with Kosovan Albanians, who, investigators believe, are implicated in the Medicus clinic case which unfolded in the confirmation hearing case on December in Pristina district court. (Source: The Guardian: The doctor at the heart of Kosovo’s organ scandal )

However the present case is limited to Medicus clinic and its links to a wider network of Albanian organised criminals and events a decade ago will hopefully take place in wider trial. EU’s EULEX-operation in Kosovo will from its side examine allegations that the country’s prime minister is the head of a “mafia-like” criminal network linked to organ trafficking. if there is sufficient evidence against Thaçi or the other senior government figures implicated in the report, they could face prosecution even though most crimes are alleged to have taken place in Albanian territory. (Source e.g: The Guardian: The doctor at the heart of Kosovo’s organ scandal )

Whitewashing Organized Crime

War crimes related to organ scandal are only minor by-plot in context of organized crime in Kosovo during last decade. KLA’s transformation from OC-/terrorist group to freedom fighters was an amazing media victory which guaranteed the occupation and later capturing of Kosovo.

Neil Clark in his column Kosovo and the myth of liberal intervention - in the Guardian describes very well this hoax:

It was the KLA’s campaign of violence against Yugoslav state officials, Serbian and Kosovan civilians in 1998, which led to an escalation of the conflict with the government in Belgrade, with atrocities committed on both sides. The report is a damning indictment not only of the KLA but also of western policy. And it also gives lie to the fiction that Nato’s war with Yugoslavia was, in Tony Blair’s words, “a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity; between democracy and dictatorship”.

On 1999 the Western media was full of stories of mass graves and brutal rapes. U.S. officials claimed that from 100,000 up to 500,000 Albanians had been massacred. In 78 days the Pentagon dropped 35,000 cluster bombs, used thousands of rounds of radioactive depleted-uranium rounds, along with bunker busters and cruise missiles. Expecting to find bodies everywhere, forensic teams from 17 NATO countries organized by the Hague Tribunal on War Crimes searched occupied Kosovo all summer of 1999 but found a total of only 2,108 bodies, of all nationalities. Some had been killed by NATO bombing and some in the war between the UCK and the Serbian police and military.

Number game as cause of Nato’s attack on Serbia  According the Kosovo “Book of the Dead”, the equivalent of the Bosnia “Book of the Dead” by London based Bosnian Institute which finally counted the slain, has since the Kosovo war been able to establish a total about 10,000 dead or “permanently missing” (i.e. dead), of which just under 5000 are Albanians, and the rest Serbian, other minorities, or ethnicity not known. So as Albanians made up around 50% off the dead despite making up 85% of the population, they suffered proportionately much less in terms of deaths than any other group. (Bosnian Institute: Establishing the number of victims in the Yugoslav wars of succession)

I would draw following time axis about some core events with this campaign:

• U.S. practising intervention first in the Bosnian War 1992-95 and selecting terrorist/OC-groups to U.S. allies (More e.g. Srebrenica again – Hoax or Massacre? and Krajina – Victory with Ethnic Cleansing )

• Racak fabrication and “humanitarian intervention” aka since WWII first ever full scale bombing operation in center of Europe 1999 ( High pressure to fabricate Racak reports and 10th anniversary of Nato’s attack on Serbia )

• Guaranteeing results with pogroms 1999-2004 creating one of the biggest refugee problem in Europe by complete ethnic cleansing Serbs out of Kosovo ( Forgotten Refugees – WestBalkans and Kosovo March/February 17th: Pogrom with Prize )

• Creating a quasi-independent puppet state for safe haven for terrorists and OC ( e.g. Quadruple Helix – Capturing Kosovo and Balkan Route – Business as usual )

• Today’s outcome a frozen conflict and captured pseudo-state (more e.g. Kosovo: Two years of Pseudo-state );

• As side result U.S. created Bondsteel, one of the biggest U.S. military base in center of Europe – completely outside European/international jurisdiction – to serve also as secret torture/detention/investigation center of CIA.

In the bottom line – so far at least temporary – U.S. State Department and their British lapdogs were responsible for orchestrating or facilitating events mentioned above. For background information I recommend a video “General Lewis Mackenzie: We Bombed The Wrong Side”, anyway the headline of video is not so far from my point of view.

OC-connection well known

Thaçi and other members of his inner circle, Marty avers, were “commonly identified, and cited in secret intelligence reports,” published by the German secret state agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND “as the most dangerous of the KLA’s ‘criminal bosses’.” Trading on American protection to consolidate political power, thus maintaining control over key narcotics smuggling corridors, the special rapporteur writes that “having succeeded in eliminating, or intimidating into silence, the majority of the potential and actual witnesses against them (both enemies and erstwhile allies), using violence, threats, blackmail, and protection rackets,” Thaçi’s Drenica Group have “exploit[ed] their position in order to accrue personal wealth totally out of proportion with their declared activities.” Indeed, multiple reports prepared by the U.S. DEA, FBI, the BND, Italy’s SISMI, Britain’s MI6 and the Greek EYP intelligence service have stated that Drenica Group members “are consistently named as ‘key players’ in intelligence reports on Kosovo’s mafia-like structures of organised crime.”

Mafia Clans/KFOR sectors -map made by Laura Canali

Reliable and highly informed sources at the Institute for European Policy based in Germany, in a 2007 report commissioned for the German Armed Forces, indicated that the three leading Kosovo politicians, Ramush Haradinaj, Hashim Thaci and Xhavit Haliti, are “persons protected by the international community although they are deeply involved in all of these affairs.”Already in 2000, according to Interpol Kosovo criminals, illicit profits of 2 billion euros were laundered through more than 200 banks. The current data show much higher earnings, and this without considering the investments in the building sector, the purchase of shares and other activities. In relation to the drugs issue, according to the Italian journalist Roberto Saviano, in an interview in 2009, the Albanian mafia in Kosovo chiefs “dream” about turning the province into “a European Colombia.”

“In order to achieve this, they wish to genetically engineer a type of coca plant that would grow in Kosovo’s climate. In this way, the Albanian mafia would have a monopoly over the cocaine trade. They need 20 years to achieve this,” he said, and added that “then, Kosovo will without a doubt become the new Colombia.”

More about link between organized crime and Kosovo political leaders one can find e.g. from “Albanian Terrorism and Oraganized Crime in Kosovo and Metohija (K&M)” , which also can be found from my document library. Related background information can be found also from “leaked” German Intelligence reports BND report 2005 and BND-IEP report Kosovo 2007 which can be found from my document library under Kosovo headline.

Note: An extract from Correspondence between BND and Wikileaks  As of up today you still provide the option of downloading a classified report of the BND under the following address: http://www.wikileaks.com/wiki/BND_Kosovo_intelligence-report,_22_Feb_2005. We kindly ask you again to remove the file immediately and all other files or reports related to the BND as well. Otherwise we will press for immediate criminal prosecution. AR: As links are whole time cracked I have saved report to my computer and downloaded it to document library of my blog for public use.

International community unwilling to rock of the boat

“Two years ago a joke was being circulated on the Runet that a heroin producer has recognized its distributor’s independence. It was about Afghanistan, which was to the first to recognize the independence of the Serbian province of Kosovo which had illegally separated from Yugoslavia.” (GRTV)

International community has worked over ten years with capacity building of Kosovo administration; EU launched few years ago its huge EULEX operation for rule and law in protectorate. Still it was needed outside institutions to bring both individual case – organ trafficking/war crime – and a system error – OC/political link – to public knowledge. Why so?

An other report gives one answer. Extract from recent the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) Rapporteur Jean-Charles Gardetto’s report entitled The protection of witnesses as a cornerstone for justice and reconciliation in the Balkans (The document should be adopted by the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) on coming January 26.)

Moreover, when a witness does come forward, there is a real threat of retaliation. This may not necessarily put them in direct danger, losing their job for example, but there are also examples of key witnesses being murdered. The trial of Ramush Haradinaj, the former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, well illustrates this. Mr. Haradinaj was indicted by the ICTY for crimes committed during the war in Kosovo but was subsequently acquitted. In its judgment, the Tribunal highlighted the difficulties that it had had in obtaining evidence from the 100 prosecution witnesses. Thirty-four of them were granted protection measures and 18 had to be issued with summonses. A number of witnesses who were going to give evidence at the trial were murdered. These included Sadik and Vesel Muriqi, both of whom had been placed under a protection program by the ICTY.

The five countries – U.S., Britain, Germany, France and Italy – had access to information, resources and a long history of work with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), former U.S. diplomat and UN Regional Representative in northern Kosovo Gerard Gallucci told Belgrade’s Politika newspaper in an interview. “Regardless of the claims about organ trafficking, everyone knows about the involvement of some of the top Kosovo leaders in transnational crime and corruption. International officials ignored these problems so as not to provoke the ethnic Albanians and prevent them from creating even bigger problems,” Gallucci stated, according to the newspaper.

Conclusion/Possible reflections?

“I am very proud of my past and the past of my people who, along with NATO, arrived at the goal” (Hashim Thaci, Crime Minister of Kosovo)

New talks between Belgrade and Pristina are planned to start soon for resolving frozen Kosovo conflict. Serbs and Albanians have been in negotiations and talks half a dozen times over the past two decades – from the tentative efforts of the 1990s to the doomed talks in Rambouillet, France, in 1999 and the later “status” talks between 2005 (Ahtisaari’s pseudo-talks) and 2007 (“Troika” led talks). None of these has led to tangible results and left outsiders imposing an outcome, be it NATO intervention or proposing the Ahtisaari plan.

Few month ago it looked like now it would be possible to have real talks first time between local relevant authorities; the events on December have put this optimism in question. The PACE report gives new (for western powers, mainstream media and public) view to justification of the Nato’s attack on Serbia, it products evidence and argumentation for suspected joint venture of organized crime and political elite in Kosovo before “humanitarian intervention, after that and now: the report casts a shadow to western political leadership as their own intelligence services had all relevant information at their disposal.

In my earlier article Will Negotiation Slot for Kosovo be used? I remarked, that

“EU in my opinion should start to distance itself from U.S. cowboy policy. Now many Europeans realize they were hoodwinked into recognizing Kosovo’s independence on the pretence it would resolve problems and bring peace – it didn’t happen; a new approach is needed.”

I would like to point out that now after PACE report the West can not any more escape reality, facts can not be ignored any longer. The report could be start for reassessment of Kosovo status and operations/presence of international community there.

Will Negotiation Slot for Kosovo be used?

When UN made new Kosovo related decision on September 2010 it was believed that resolution would enable a dialogue for resolving this frozen conflict. With minimal preconditions new direct talks between Belgrad and Pristina and a possible deal between local stakeholders could open the way for sustainable solution. However resent events have have resulted in stalemate: President of separatist Kosovo government resigned and dissolution of the government itself have put the focus in Kosovo on next elections which will be held in December 2010. Meanwhile also Serbia starts soon preparations for its next next elections, due by spring 2012.

Thus there is a narrow negotiation slot between the time when a new Kosovo government takes office and to end successfully before the Serbian election campaign makes any compromise impossible. The core question is if there is political will to start talks with the aim of reaching as comprehensive a compromise settlement as possible.

Serbs and Albanians have been in negotiations and talks half a dozen times over the past two decades – from the tentative efforts of the 1990s to the doomed talks in Rambouillet, France, in 1999 and the later “status” talks between 2005 (Ahtisaari’s pseudo-talks) and 2007 (“Troika” led talks). None of these has led to tangible results and left outsiders imposing an outcome, be it NATO intervention or proposing the Ahtisaari plan.

The original or better to say official aim of international community was to build “standards before status”, on 2005 the task was seen impossible so the slogan changed to “standards and status”. Even this was unrealistic so Feb. 2008 “European”standards were thrown away to garbage and “status without standards” precipitately accepted by western powers. For international community I don’t see any success story with this backward progress. Thus the multi-ethnic idea is far away despite EU’s billions. The remaining Serbs in Kosovo are barricaded into enclaves keeping their lives mainly with help of international KFOR troops or in de facto separated Serb majority region in North Kosovo. This has changed former multi-ethnic province more mono-ethnic one.

New elements in new talks

The new situation has forced also International Crisis Group (ICG) to admit the defeat of its Kosovo policy recommendations during last decade. ICG has acted as informal extension of U.S. State Department however pretending to be neutral mediator and think tank. During earlier “status” negotiations 2005 it endorsed preconditions before talks and afterwards supported sc Ahtisaari plan. Now in their new analysis ”Kosovo and Serbia after the ICJ Opinion” ICG sees Kosovo’s partition with land swap one of possible solutions during coming talks between Belgrad and Pristina. ICG notes that Pristina will not accept partition but gives some hints it might consider trading the heavily Serb North for the largely Albanian-populated parts of the Preševo Valley in southern Serbia. The (dead) Ahtisaari plan and expanded autonomy for North Kosovo are the other two conceivable solutions according ICG.

The fact on the ground is that northern part of Kosovo is integrated to Serbia like it always has been, as well those parts south of Ibar river, which are not ethnically cleansed by Kosovo Albanians. Serbia still runs municipalities, courts, police, customs and public services, and the EU Rule of Law Mission (EULEX) has been unable to deploy more than a token presence there.

Besides the status, autonomy degree of Northern Kosovo (or its also formal integration with Serbia) the third key question during planned talks is the security of the Serbian Orthodox Church’s most venerable monasteries and churches. The Church, fearful of a repeat of the March 2004 mob violence that left many religious sites in smoking ruins, wants more than extensive protection promised in the Ahtisaari plan; extra-territoriality, treaty guarantees and protection by an international force after NATO-led peacekeepers (KFOR) leave could be solution.

However question of returns seems not be in priority list any more. During Nato bombings some 200.000 Serbs and some thousands of Roma were expelled from there to northern Serb-dominated part of province or to Serbia and due the security problems or economical reasons they have not returned or are not even planing to come back to their (destroyed) homes.

Kosovo or EU

European Union must be united in its demands that Serbia must first recognize Kosovo as an independent country if it is to be granted membership, suggest Martti Ahtisaari, Wolfgang Ischinger and Albert Rohan. “Only a united position of the European Union, combined with the statement that Serbia’s membership in the European Union is impossible until this problem is solved in its entirety, could result in a change of positions, both among ordinary Serbs and within their government,” write the three diplomats. The three also warn that the current calm in Kosovo is not sustainable until Serbia is forced to recognize Kosovo. “No one should be deceived by the current relative calmness in Kosovo. The last tragedies in the Balkans have shown that unresolved problems sooner or later turn into open conflicts,” write the diplomats. (Source Serbianna)

I have my – not so well-disposed – opinion about Mr. Ahtisaari and his negotiation skills related to Kosovo. Instead repairing his earlier mistakes EU in my opinion should start to distance itself from U.S. cowboy policy. Now many Europeans realize they were hoodwinked into recognizing Kosovo’s independence on the pretence it would resolve problems and bring peace – it didn’t happen; a new approach is needed.

Would Serbia be prepared to trade sovereignty over Kosovo for membership of the EU? Not according to a Gallup poll in which 70% opposed the suggestion that Serbia relinquish its claim over its southern province in return for joining the EU. About the same proportion felt that Kosovo ‘has to remain a part of Serbia’ and said that Serbia would never recognise Kosovo. At the same time, a relative majority of 43% seemed resigned to accept that Kosovo would be independent one day, regardless of what Serbia did to prevent it. In other poll a total of 74.5 percent Kosovo Albanians supported the idea of forming a single state which would be inhabited by ethnic Albanians, and 47.3 percent believe this ambition would be realized soon. Albanians today also live in north-western Greece , western Macedonia , southern Serbia and southern Montenegro.

From other side Kosovo cannot even begin the EU accession process because five EU member states do not recognise its independence.

What’s the local opinion

A Gallup survey revealed growing disillusion with the new status among those who had been so hopeful. When Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia in February 2008 there was great optimism among the territory’s ethnic Albanians, if not among ethnic Serbs. Although three-quarters of Kosovo Albanians said they felt independence had been a good thing, this was considerably fewer than the 93% who had greeted the unilateral declaration of independence in 2008. Ethnic Serbs, meanwhile, became yet more convinced that independence had been a mistake: 80% said it was a ‘bad thing’ in 2009, compared to 74% a year earlier.

Despite being less positive in 2009 that Kosovo’s independence was a good thing, almost half (48%) of Kosovo Albanians said things in the country were going in a good direction. Hardly any Kosovo Serbs agreed that the country was going in a good direction (2% vs. 86% who disagreed).

Doubts also grew within both communities about the possibility of peaceful coexistence. In 2008, over seven out of ten Kosovo Albanians had said that they could live peacefully with ethnic Serbs. This fell to six out of ten in 2009. Kosovo Serbs, always sceptical on the question, became even more so: in 2008, 17% thought peaceful coexistence was possible, but by 2009 this had shrunk to 12%. (Source: Focus On Kosovo Independence)

In Kosovo, meanwhile, the International Civilian Representative and EU Special Representative has a thankless task: neither of the territory’s two largest ethnic groups is convinced of the benefits of an international presence. In the 2009 Gallup poll more ethnic Serbs and ethnic Albanians saw no need for an International Civilian Representative/EU Special Representative, rather than thought it necessary. A considerable number of ethnic Albanians nevertheless expressed support for the work being done by the EULEX mission for maintaining stability and security in the disputed territory. Kosovo Serbs, by contrast, were dismissive of its role.

The bottom line

The international community should facilitate as complete a settlement as is possible, leaving it up to the parties themselves to decide how far and in what direction they can go to achieve sustainable compromise. According ICG “The most controversial outcome that might emerge from negotiations would be a Northern Kosovo-Preševo Valley swap in the context of mutual recognition and settlement of all other major issues”. As I have propagated this outcome as pragmatic solution for years I have nothing against to this result, at least it with nearly all aspects is better than situation today and prospects for future. On the other hand stagnation with Kosovo case paralyses regional progress too.

A slight risk – according some international observers – may be that border changes could provoke mass migration by Kosovo Serbs now living south of the Ibar, as well as destabilizing separatism in neighboring Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. However from my viewpoint migration from enclaves is already ongoing, Macedonia has developed practice to copy with separatism and Bosnia is destabilising due internal reasons without outside help.

Officially (UNSC resolution1244) Kosovo is international protectorate administrated by UN Kosovo mission, practically it is today a pseudo-state with good change to become next “failed” or “captured” state. This time (hopefully and finally) real talks between local stakeholders with unpredicted but possible compromise can end this frozen conflict, but “negotiation slot” is time-wise narrow and should be started to use this winter. Failure to negotiate in the next months would probably freeze the conflict for several years, as the parties entered electoral cycles, during which the dispute would likely be used to mobilize nationalist opinion and deflect criticism of domestic corruption and government failures.

Some of my related articles:
Kosovo after ICJ ruling
Peacemaking – How about solving Conflicts too?My critics due Mr.Ahtisaari’s Nobelprize: Do you hear Mr. Nobel rolling in his grave? and his peace mediation methods: 500.000 bodies or sign! and outcome in Kosovo: Kosovo: Two years of Pseudo-state



Krajina – Victory with Ethnic Cleansing

Thousands of people across several Balkan countries have held services last week to commemorate those who died in Operation Storm 15-years ago. Like normal in Balkans the views what happened are almost opposite to each other. One side is celebrating victory, the other side has remembrance of those who died during the largest refugee crisis since Holocaust before Kosovo. The focal point was Republic of Serbian Krajina, a country or separatist region on the borderline of today’s Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which existence came to an end August 1995.

In Croatia, August 4 is celebrated as a Victory Day and Homeland Thanksgiving Day, as well as Veterans Day. Croatia’s Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor headed a delegation of high-ranking officials at Zagreb central cemetery to mark the military operation carried out by forces from her country and Bosnia and Herzegovina to retake areas of Croatia claimed by ethnic Serbs. She said on Wednesday the operation had been “a victory” over the policies of former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Masses were held at the same time in main churches in Belgrade and Banja Luka for about 2,000 Serbs who were believed to have been killed during the operation, according to Serbian non-governmental organisations. A day earlier, Boris Tadic met in Belgrade with family members of those who went missing during the operation, saying that “the crime must not be forgotten”

Croat member of the Bosnian three-partite Presidency, Zeljko Komsic, sent greetings to his Croatian counterpart, calling the day a day of biggest victory for Croatia, the day when your army in the best possible way showed what does it meant to protect homeland and democracy.

Krajina

Before the war, 12% of Croatian citizens were of Serbian nationality. Half of them lived in the region called Krajina. Krajina was created by Austrians in 16th century as a military zone to protect the Christian West from the advance of Muslim Ottoman Empire. Serbian peasants that escaped Ottoman rule were given free land there in exchange for their military service. After the collapse of both empires Serbs remained living in there throughout both the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the late Yugoslav communist state.

The Republic of Croatia declared its independence on June 25, 1991. By the end of the year, the Yugoslav People’s Army and different Serb forces took control of more than one third of the country, proclaiming their own independent state: Republika Srpska Krajina (RSK) with a capital in Knin.

After the peace agreement brokered by the European Community and the UN, implementation of the so-called Vance Plan started. It envisioned four “protected areas,” with a Serb majority, whose eventual status was planned be resolved through negotiations. In 1992 UN peacekeepers were deployed along the conflict lines surrounding the Krajina. Serbian residents inside Krajina conducted a referendum to declare their independence, printed their own currency, established their own militia (Vojska Krajina) and created a centre of government in the city of Knin. The Croatian military – aided by U.S. and German advisors – continued to build up its forces along the Krajina border.

In January 1993, Croatian forces – between 17,000 and 20,000 troops – launched a surprise attack against the Serb-held Krajina. The Serbs fought back and as part of a ceasefire agreement the area became a so-called “Pink Zone” placed under UNPROFOR protection, and within which the warring factions pledged there would be no fighting. UN Security Council Resolution 802 censured Croatia for the attack and ordered the immediate withdrawal of Croatian troops. At the Geneva Peace Conference on March 2, 1993, the RSK agreed to the Vance-Owen proposal that as the Croatian forces withdrew, only UNPROFOR, would occupy the territory formerly held by the Serbs prior to the Croatian attack. No final agreement was concluded until July 16. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman ordered all United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) units to leave Croatian territory by March 31, 1995. The move, supported by U.S., gave the Croatian Government a green light to start their ethnic cleansing.

On August 2, negotiations took place in Geneva for Krajina to enter a political settlement with Zagreb. The basis for negotiations in Geneva was a modified version of the Z-4 (Zagreb 4 was mini-contact group including U.S., Russia, France, Germany) plan. The plan was meant to allow for the reintegration of the Republic of Serbian Krajina into Croatia by offering wide-ranging autonomy through most of Serbian Krajina. On August 2, Krajina Prime Minister Milan Babic publicly declared his acceptance the Z-4 Plan through negotiations with U.S. Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith. Croatia refused to acknowledge the plan’s acceptance by Krajina authorities.

Note (AR):

Later after 1995 events The Republic of Serbian Krajina Government-in-exile (“RSK”), a self proclaimed government in exile for the Republic of Serbian Krajina, called for the re-creation of the RSK on the basis of the 1994 Z-4 plan, which had called for Krajina to have a status of “more than autonomy, less than independence” within Croatia (btw Serbia made same offer to Kosovo Albanians during sc “troika” talks). However this government in exile has only marginal support among mainly nationalist politics in Serbia, Russia and Greece.

Storm

“Krajina is the reward for having accepted, under Washington’s pressure, the federation between Croats and Muslims in Bosnia.”( Stipe Mesic, former President of Croatia)

From 1992 Croatia’s government feverishly prepared for war, training its troops on the battlefields of Bosnia and staging quick, limited offensives at the strategic edges of UN-protected areas like the Medak Pocket attack in 1993. On May 1, 1995, Croatian troops tested both their readiness and the UN’s will by staging a strike at an exposed Serb enclave of Western Slavonia. The operation was code-named Bljesak – “flash,” or perhaps more appropriately, “Blitz” describing better Croatia’s old Nazi sympathies. The clear violation of the armistice went unpunished. The stage was set for Storm (Oluja).

On the 04.of August 1995, Croatian armed forces, with NATO’s approval and support, in the joint forces of Croatian defense council (Hrvatsko Vijece odbrane- HVO) and Bosnian (BiH) Army, launched an attack – Operation Storm (Oluja) in Croatia and part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This aggression was executed despite the facts that this area was under UN protection (Sectors South and North) and that RSK delegates, only one day earlier in Geneva with Croatian delegation, before UN delegates and in Belgrade before USA representative, as a leading NATO member, had accepted proposal of international community. The proposal was that negotiation regarding final political agreement about Krajina status is conducted plans.

During this operation, 2,650 Serbs (mainly civilians) were killed and some 250,000 were “ethnically cleansed” from their ancestral homes. Several thousand have disappeared, and their fate is not known to this day. This was the largest refugee crisis since the Holocaust, since World War II and until Kosovo war 1999. Most of the refugees ended in Serbia, Bosnia and eastern Slavonia. Some of those who remained were murdered, tortured and forcibly expelled by the Croatian Army and police. Of those expelled, just a handful have returned, in many instances their return being greeted with abuse and humiliation. For the vast majority, return to their homes and property is but a dream. (More about issue e.g. in my article “Operation Storm – forgotten pogrom” )

Some historical background

Croatian side has claimed that most Serbs leaved voluntary from Krajina during attack. That’s true and some historical background – especially the memories of Jasenovac – can explain this. Upon the occupation of Yugoslavia, the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists formed an “independent” state in Croatia, which was basically a Nazi puppet state. Immediately the fascist Ustashe government set up concentration camps, most notably at Jasenovac – a 3^rd biggest extermination camp after Auschwitz and Treblinka. Nazi Croatian Ustashi forces slaughtered 300.000-700.000 Serbs, 30.000-60,000 Jews and 40.000-80,000 Gypsies (the exact amount varies depending from source) 65 years ago. Many Croats fled after the war through the “Vatican “Ratline” for Argentina and Juan Peron issued 34,000 Visas to Croatian war criminals. (more in “Jasenovac – Holocaust promoted by Vatican”)

The Nazi past still alive

Croatia was pro-Nazi during World War II, became independent in 1991 and sympathetic to that historical era in the 1990s – prompting Israel to hold off recognizing it until 1997. Since 2000, Croatia’s governments have denounced fascism. In spite of official public statements one alarming trend is (over)emphasizing Croatia’s Nazi past. From time to time some symptoms of this past are occurring also today e.g. in rock concerts and soccer matches and even with support of government (More e.g. in my article “Nazi’s funeral shadows Croatians past”). This said one must state that naturally there is extremists also in Serbia as well jihadists in Bosnia which makes reintegration quite challenging.

My point of view

As I noted in the beginning viewpoints about near history in western Balkans differ drastically and this aspect has great effect also today’s policy and possibilities to create cooperation tomorrow. For reintegration/reconciliation in my opinion is needed go into issues such as following:

• Missing persons: NGO VERITAS (Center For Collecting Document And Information) was established in late 1993 by citizens of the then Republic of Serbian Krajina – RSK. On the VERITAS evidences, there are names of 1,934 dead and missing Serbs from this action and later on. Among them are 1,196 civilian people, and half of them are older then 60 years. There are 524 women and 14 children among them. Association families of missing persons from Krajina, has still 2.627 missing persons in their data. Now after 15 years of uncertainty about the fait accompli of missing persons should be clarified.
• Property rights: The property laws allegedly favor Croatians refugees who took residence in houses that were left unoccupied and unguarded by Serbs after Operation Storm. Amnesty International’s 2005 report considers one of the greatest obstacles to the return of thousands of Croatian Serbs has been the failure of the Croatian authorities to provide adequate housing solutions to Croatian Serbs who were stripped of their occupancy rights, including where possible by reinstating occupancy rights to those who had been affected by their discriminatory termination. There is estimation that the value of Serb property in Croatia is worth 30 billion euros. and that this should be paid to the Serbs who lived in Croatia as a part of war reparations.
• Returns: According census on 1991 there were 581,663 Serbs out of 4,784,265 People in Croatia (12.16%) and on 2001 201,631 Serbs out of 4,437,460 People in Croatia ( 4.54%); these figures clearly show that refugees from Krajina are returning slowly if at all. As part of the settlement of the status of the expelled Serb people there has been initiatives that Croatia should pay war damage compensation for Serb people if their return is not possible. However war damage compensation for Serb people are probably possible only if Croatia or Bosnia did the same towards Serbia so prospects are not very promising. A housing programme in Serbia with possible international aid could be a realistic alternative for returns.
• History: In my opinion all sides – Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks as well jihadists, mercenaries and Nato – committed war crimes, ethnic cleansing or massacres during Balkan Wars. Today or maybe never there is no common truth about events. Some regional committee should anyway study this near history and find some common description for explaining it e.g. forwarding it in new schoolbooks so that ethnic tensions could decrease by avoiding most exaggerated tales.
• Justice: The trial of commanders of the Croatian Army, generals Ante Gotovina, Mladen Markac and Ivan Cermak, is underway in the Hague Tribunal, on charges of conspiracy to commit crime, aimed to permanently eliminate the Serbs from that part of Croatia and other war crimes. However, since the “Storm” no Croats have been tried before local courts for the crimes in that operation. I don’t put very much weight to ICTY rulings but however from my point of view the procedure itself brings more facts about events on the table, especially when both the prosecutor and defence have made their case. At best this can make easier to bring justice also to lower level.

Sources of this story e.g:

• BalkanInsight
  
• KrajinaForce
  
• VERITAS (Center For Collecting Document And Information)

Balkan Route – Business as usual

Transnational organized crime is considered as one of the major threats to human security, impeding the social, economic, political and cultural development of societies worldwide. It is a multi-faceted phenomenon and has manifested itself in different activities, among others, drug trafficking, trafficking in human beings; trafficking in firearms; smuggling of migrants; money laundering; etc. In particular drug trafficking is one of the main activities of organized crime groups, generating enormous profits. (UNODC)

The World Drug Report 2010, issued on June 2010 by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), shows that even drug cultivation is declining in Afghanistan (for opium) and the Andean countries (coca), and drug use has stabilized in the developed world, the famous Balkan route still facilitates a lucrative business. Some 85 mt (metric tn) goes vie Balkan route to western Europe markets. What is significant for Balkan route that other transit regions – Iran and Turkey – are seizing 6-11 times more drugs that Balkan countries. Even in northern route – via Central Asia and Russia – seizures are 5 % of heroin flow while in some countries of South-Eastern Europe, including EU member states, are intercepting less than two per cent of the heroin crossing their territory. It is clear that these figures are reflecting one of then fundamental problems in the Balkans – the big role of transnational organized crime in Balkan societies.

The 2010 World Drug Report states that 37% of all Afghan heroin is annually trafficked via the “Balkan route” towards the European market. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the region has become a key link in the chain in the transport of heroin, from Afghanistan to the West.

The illicit opiate industry also has a detrimental effect on stability and security in a number of places, including through the funding it provides for insurgents in production areas, particularly in Afghanistan. Links between illicit drug production, trafficking and involvement of terrorist groups, criminals and transnational organized crime are clear. In some regions, the nexus of illicit drugs, organized crime and instability has taken the form of growing infiltration of state institutions by drug trafficking groups.

In this article I try to highlight some aspects of drug trade via Balkan route and their links to society. My main source is The World Drug Report 2010 of UNDOC, which I refer if nothing else is mentioned.

Source and demand

If we are already bombing Taliban positions, why won’t we spray their fields with a harmless herbicide and cut off their money? ( counterterrorism expert David Kilcullen)

After the drought during Taliban rule, opium production surged to over 4,000 mt in 2000. In 2001, the Taliban, caving into international pressure declared opium production illegal. This campaign was very effective, and in 2001, only 200 mt of opium was produced. But, in 2002, when the new, weak Karzai regime took control over Afghanistan, opium production increased and reached record levels, with an unprecedented yield of 8,200 mt, or 193,000 hectares in 2007. The rise in the opium economy has created many opportunities for insurgent groups, militia, and warlords to finance their operations against one another. Other opium producing countries have stopped production. Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey have clamped down on opium production and are now poppy‐free. Combined with a growth in demand, opium prices have increased, and Afghan farmers have more of an incentive to grow opium (World Bank 2005). (Source: “Vicious Circle: An Analysis of the Role of Narcotics in Insurgent Violence in Afghanistan From 2001 to 2008” thesis by Jared Stancombe)

The Karzai government that has prevented efforts to engage in aerial eradication of poppy crops, which is one very important tool in any counter-narcotics toolbox. However UNODC officials interviewed by the authors in April 2007 believe that the “Taliban are completely dependent on the narco-economy for their financing.” Where the Taliban are able to enforce it—mostly in the south and some eastern districts—they are said to levy a 40% tax on opium cultivation and trafficking. A low estimate of the amount that the Taliban earn from the opium economy is $10 million, but considering the tradition of imposing tithes on cultivation and activities further up the value chain, the total is likely to be at least $20 million. One should also make a difference between Taliban and Al Qaeda. The Taliban are mainly local Afghans who do not want to be occupied by any invading army, local Afghan nationalists resisting occupation, ISI pakistani agents fighting a proxy war against the US, drug smugglers and opium growers protecting their drug territories, foreign jihadists working with the pakistani ISI and the angry relatives of Afghans killed by coalition forces getting revenge. As much as one-third of Afghanistan’s GDP comes from growing poppy and illicit drugs including opium and its two derivatives, morphine and heroin, as well as hashish production.

It is estimated that 37 per cent of all Afghan heroin, or 140 mt, departs Afghanistan along the Balkan route, to meet demand of around 85 mt. Most of the heroin interdicted in the world is seized along this route:  the Islamic Republic of Iran and Turkey were responsible for more than half of all heroin seized globally in 2008. The world’s largest heroin market is West Europe, and about half of this market is contained in just three countries: the United Kingdom, Italy and France.

The fight against the illegal use of drugs has almost 100 years long history. In February 1909, the Shanghai Opium Commission, which comprised 13 states including Russia, tried to find the ways to restrict drug import from the Asian countries. At present there are about 30 million drug addicts in the world. In particular the number of marihuana users is between 143 million – 190 million people, about 20 million people consume opium and cocaine, from 16 million to 50 million take non-natural drugs and about 17 million people take ecstasy. The Afghan drugs hit Russia, Europe, the US and the main attack is aimed at the young generation. Over the last 8 years almost one million of people younger than 35 died of the Afghan heroin.

The Balkan route

The Balkan route to West and Central Europe runs from Afghanistan via the Islamic Republic of Iran, Turkey and south-east European countries. This route and its various branches form the artery that carries high purity Afghan heroin into every important market in Europe. UNODC estimates that 37% of all Afghan heroin or 140 mt is annually trafficked into the Islamic Republic of Iran, from Afghanistan and Pakistan, towards the European market. The bulk of the supply (at least 80%, or 85 mt) travels the traditional overland Balkan route. An additional 10 mt reach Europe by air or sea from various points of departure. The so-called ‘northern Balkan route’ is a relatively recent variant on the Balkan route which transits the Caucasus rather than Turkey. Every year, approximately 9 mt of heroin are estimated to be trafficked from the Islamic Republic of Iran along this route. Joining this flow is a smaller volume of about 2 mt from Central Asia (not shown on map). In all, 11 mt of heroin are estimated to enter the Caucasus. After consumed or seized amounts around 7 mt, is thought to be trafficked to Europe.

The US State Department International Strategy for Narcotics Control report, released on March 2010, says that the Balkan countries remain major transit points for Afghan heroin, while the war against traffickers is hampered by corruption and weak state institutions. According to the report, Albania, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina are used by narcotics traffickers to move Afghan heroin from Central Asia to destinations around Western Europe. To a lesser extent Macedonia, Romania and Montenegro are also considered as staging posts for traffickers. Apart from being an important transit country for heroin and cocaine, Bulgaria is also a producer of illicit narcotics, the report says. With its geographic position on Balkan transit routes, Bulgaria is vulnerable to illegal flows of drugs, people, contraband, and money.

Balkans – the worst link of seizures

“There’s nobody to stop them.” (heroin middleman on the Kosovo route)

Interception rates vary widely between regions; however, estimated global interception rates are approximately 20% of the total heroin flow worldwide in 2008. Once heroin leaves Turkish territory, interception efficiency drops significantly. “In 2008, the countries and territories that comprise South- East Europe (a total of 11 countries, including Greece and Cyprus) seized 2.8 mt of heroin in 2008 – only 3% of flow. This is in sharp contrast to what is seized upstream in Turkey (15.5 mt in 2008) and the Islamic Republic of Iran (32 mt in 2008) every year. In other words, for every kg seized in the South East Europe, nearly 6 are seized in Turkey and 11 in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In the Balkans, relatively little heroin is seized, suggesting that the route is exceedingly well organized and lubricated with corruption. Across Europe, many countries directly straddling the main heroin trafficking routes report rather low levels of heroin seizures, such as Montenegro (18 kg in 2008), Bosnia and Herzegovina (24 kg), the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (26 kg), Hungary (28 kg), Albania (75 kg), Austria (104 kg), Slovenia (136 kg), Croatia (153 kg) and Serbia (207 kg).

However, some cross-border efforts have seen success – not exactly with heroin but coce. The so-called ‘Balkan Warrior’ anti-narcotics operation involved officers from Serbia, Argentina, the U.S., and Uruguay, and in October last year the joint effort resulted in the seizure of over 2.1 tons of high quality cocaine intended for the European market.

Heroin – the core of lucrative business for organized crime

Getting opiates from producer to consumers worldwide is a well-organized and, most importantly, profitable activity. The most lucrative of illicit opiates, heroin, presently commands an estimated annual market value of US$55 billion. When all opiates are considered, the number may reach up to US$65 billion. Traffickers, essential to the transportation of drugs from production areas to lucrative end-user markets, pocket most of the profits of this trade. One kg of heroin is worth around US$2,000-2,500 in Afghanistan, but rises to US$3,000 on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and to US$5,000 on the Iran-Afghanistan border. It increases yet again by around 60%, to approximately US$8,000, at the Iran-Turkey border. An average of US$44,300 per kg in West and Central Europe.

Corruption and insufficient regional cooperation in transit countries, including in the Balkans, are noted as significant challenges facing the effort to clamp down on drug trafficking. Drugs seized in Southeast Europe is considered to be quite low, with corruption, strong organised crime groups, and a lack of regional cooperation pointed to as contributing factors. Networks of local diaspora in Western Europe are described as part of the heavily used Balkan route, while inter-ethnic cooperation is also found to be flourishing in the trafficking world.

Organized crime in the Balkans involves a large variety of criminal activities and as such, heroin is but one, albeit among the most lucrative, commodities illicitly trafficked through this region. The profits accrued as the opiates move downstream are substantial. Organized crime groups managing heroin trafficking between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Turkey and on to the Balkans are estimated to earn around US$8,000 per kg of heroin or a total of US$600-700 million per year. The routes through this region also operate in the reverse direction with cocaine, precursor chemicals and amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) moving eastward into Turkey and beyond. Organized crime groups controlling these corridors thus have comparatively better access to more numerous and diversified crime markets than their Northern route counterparts. Thus, many tend to be poly-drug (heroin, cannabis et cetera) and poly-crime (trafficking in human beings, weapons and stolen vehicles, to name but a few).

Estimated annual value of some global criminal markets in the 2000s is following: Firearms 1 bnUS$, Trafficking in persons 32 bnUS$, Opiates (retail) 65 bn US$, Cocaine (retail) 88 bn US$. For example the 2010 report, published by the U.S. Department of State, points that Kosovo is a source, transit side, and destination of women and children, victims of human trafficking. Criminal groups in Europe are making around €2.5 billion per year through sexual exploitation and forced labour. In Europe over half of the victims come from the Balkans (32 per cent) and the former Soviet Union (19 per cent), with 13 per cent originating in South America, seven per cent in Central Europe, five per cent in Africa and three per cent in East Asia. (UNODC presented its report Trafficking in persons to Europe for sexual exploitation on 29 June 2010)

Click a related picture from The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIN), BiH P19_Overview_ENG

Clan society as success factor

Organized crime in the Balkans has its roots in the traditional clan structures. In these largely rural countries, people organized into clans with large familial ties for protection and mutual assistance. Starting in the 15th century, clan relationships operated under the kanun, or code, which values loyalty and besa, or secrecy. Each clan established itself in specific territories and controlled all activities in that territory. Protection of activities and interests often led to violence between the clans. The elements inherent in the structure of the clans provided the perfect backbone for what is considered modern-day Balkan organized crime.

Many years of communist rule led to black market activities in the Balkans, but the impact of these activities was limited to the region. When communism collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it led to the expansion of Balkan organized crime activities. Criminal markets once closed to Balkan groups suddenly opened, and this led to the creation of an international network. Within the Balkans, organized crime groups infiltrated the new democratic institutions, further expanding their profit opportunities. Albanian organized crime activities for example in the U.S. include gambling, money laundering, drug trafficking, human smuggling, extortion, violent witness intimidation, robbery, attempted murder, and murder. Balkan organized crime groups have recently expanded into more sophisticated crimes including real estate fraud. (More e.g. in FBI sites )

Another notable feature of the Balkan route is that some important networks have clan-based and hierarchically organized structures. Albanian groups in particular have such structures, making them particularly hard to infiltrate. This partially explains their continued involvement in several European heroin markets. Albanian networks continue to be particularly visible in Greece, Italy and Switzerland. Italy is one of the most important heroin markets in Europe, and frequently identified as a base of operation for Balkan groups who exploit the local diaspora. According to WCO seizure statistics, Albanians made up the single largest group (32%) of all arrestees for heroin trafficking in Italy between 2000 and 2008. The next identified group was Turks followed by Italians and citizens of Balkan countries (Bulgaria, Kosovo/Serbia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and to some extent Greece).The combined GDP of Kosovo/Serbia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Albania at US$20 billion is equivalent to the value of West-Europe’s heroin market. A number of unresolved conflicts and/or remaining inter-ethnic tensions along sections of this route continue to prevent the emergence of effective regional counterdrug cooperation and to facilitate trafficking.

New business opportunities?

Though recent years have seen a proliferation of entry points, including some in the Balkan region, most of the cocaine entering Europe does so through one of two hubs: Spain and Portugal in the south, or Netherlands and Belgium in the north. A few groups from the Balkan region have also emerged as players in the international cocaine trade in recent years.

Some 500 kilos of cocaine were seized Nov 25 in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Núñez. Investigators said the drugs belonged to a Serbian criminal organization –the same one that shipped more than two tons of narcotics on a yacht bound from Buenos Aires only to be busted by the Uruguayan navy on October 15 when the boat was at anchor at a fishing pier in Santiago Vasquez, near Montevideo.

Over the past several years the Serb mafia has established vital business relationships with the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) in Colombia and in Mexico with Sinaloa/Guzman and Zetas/La Compania, which in turn interfaces with another partner of the Serbs– the Ndrangheta in Calabria, Italy. According to Serb police sources jointly organized criminal groups from Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina take in 200 million Euros per year off the cocaine trade. (Source Narcoguerratimes)

Political aspect

The US got involved in massive drug operations, importation, processing and distribution during the Reagan years, supposedly to finance covert CIA operations involving death squads tasked with murdering Sandinista “infrastructure” in Nicaragua. The deal involved Israel, Iran and the Colombian cartel. Saddam was even involved. In the end, President Reagan was put on the stand only to remember little or nothing of his tenure in office. Lt. Col. Oliver North was convicted as was Secretary of Defense Weinberger and many others. Pardons and “other methods” were used to keep the guilty out of jail. (Source: ”Did Bush/Cheney rebuild Reagan’s “Iran Contra” drug gang?” article by Gordon Duff, in Salem-News)

Radical Islam has enforced and widened their activities in Balkans last 15 years. During Bosnian war many foreign Islamists came to fight in mujahedeen brigade also many Al Quida figures – including Osama bin Laden – were supporting Bosnian Muslims 1990’s. US took the side with these “freedom fighters” in Bosnia and later in Kosovo. Links between drug trafficking and the supply of arms to the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) were established mid-90s. This made the base to successful (Kosovo) Albanian traffickers who now control some 70 % of heroin entering EU markets. Kosovo is serving as a junction for heroin trafficking from Afghanistan to West Europe through famous Balkan route. Ethnic Albanian traffickers have been described as a “threat to the EU” by the Council of Europe at least as recently as 2005. In fact, ethnic Albanian heroin trafficking is arguably the single most prominent organized crime problem in Europe today.

So from my point of view US foreign policy tactics helped to create logistics between markets via Balkan route and producers of heroin. This creature has been further developed by itself more strong by financial connection between Wahhabi organizations e.g. in Kosovo and international terrorism and Wahhabis as potential pool for operations. Same time there is historical and social link between organized crime groups and Kosovo’s political leaders. All this has also its international dimensions. Today Kosovo is a pseudo-state with good change to become next “failed” or “captured” state if international community does not firm its grip in province. Today’s Kosovo is already safe-heaven for war criminals, drug traffickers, international money laundry and radical Wahhabists – unfortunately all are also allies of western powers. I have earlier described circumstances in Kosovo with Fourfold or “Quadruple Helix Model” where government, underworld, Wahhabbi schools and international terrorism have win-win symbiosis. (More in “Quadruple Helix – Capturing Kosovo”)

Kosovo – Captured state?

“It is the Colombia of Europe” (Marko Nikovic)

Links between drug trafficking and the supply of arms to the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) were established mid-90s. In West KLA was described as terrorist organization but when US selected them as their ally it transformed organization officially to “freedom” fighters. After bombing Serbia 1999 KLA leaders again changed their crime clans officially to political parties. This public image however can not hide the origins of money and power, old channels and connections are still in place in conservative tribe society. In some other important drug transit zones trafficking is reflected in high levels of violence but not in Balkans. UN report explains this that good links between crime organizations and commercial/political elites have ensured that Balkan organized crime groups have traditionally encountered little resistance from the state or rival groups.

A relatively universal model of terrorist operations in the world – which is, as a rule, usually funded from criminal sources (trafficking in drugs, arms and people, as well as in excise goods) – was applied, at one time, by the leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), and was taken over, and is applied now, by the leaders of the Albanian National Army (ANA). Drenica group, loyal to Hashim Thaqi (PM of Kosovo, under UNSCR 1244) is mainly involved in arms trafficking, dealing in stolen vehicles, in human beings, excise goods and, above all, cigarettes and fuel. Through his family connections, Thaqi has direct control over the local institutions through which he provides and secures an unhindered performance of the said criminal activity. The Thaqi family has ties with the Albanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian and Check mafia. The so-called Metohija group, led by Ramush Haradinaj (ex-PM of Kosovo), is active in Dukadjin zone in cooperation with Lab region,. The Haradinaj family is mainly oriented toward the illegal trade of weapons, drugs, excise goods and stolen cars, but also toward the racketeering of the Albanian population in K&M. there are also some ten other families whose operations are oriented toward illegal trade and smuggling and who conduct the described activities in cooperation with, or under the supervision of, one of the listed chiefs.

More about link between organized crime and Kosovo political leaders one can find e.g. from “Albanian Terrorism and Oraganized Crime in Kosovo and Metohija (K&M)”, White paper published by the Serbian government, September 2003. Related background information can be found also from “leaked” German Intelligence reports BND report 2005 and BND-IEP report Kosovo 2007 which can be found from my document library under Kosovo headline.

Peace Rank: Balkans and Eastwards

The Global Peace Index (GPI) is implemented by organization called Vision of Humanity, which groups together a number of interrelated initiatives focused on global peace. As its mission Visions of Humanity brings a strategic approach to raising the world’s attention and awareness around the importance of peacefulness to humanity’s survival in the 21st century. Now on May Vision of Humanity published its fourth edition of the Global Peace Index (GPI). It has been expanded to rank 149 independent states and updated with the latest-available figures and information for 2008-09.

Indicators

The index is composed of 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators from respected sources, which combine internal and external factors, such as violent crime, political stability and military expenditure, correlated against a number of social development indicators such as corruption, freedom of the press, respect for human rights and school enrolment rates and relations with neighbouring countries. These indicators were selected by an international panel of academics, business people, philanthropists and members of peace institutions.

Some reservations:

• Vision of humanity, its expert panel and GPI are representing mainly western methodology, approach and values
• GPI is based to data available of different indicators and as such a compromise
• The 2010 scores are based information collected mainly information for 2008-2009 so there is some delay

With these reservations I however find GPI both interesting and useful and anyway I haven’t seen any better global survey.

The Rank

To the table below I have collected the GPI rankings from the Balkans and Eastwards on countries analysed in 2010 report. In addition I have included to table also top-3 and worst-3 countries, the BRIC countries and USA. Besides 2010 ranking I show also rankings in 2009, 2008 and 2007 reports to see trend during last years as this may help to track when and how some countries become more or less peaceful. Countries most at peace are ranked first. A lower score indicates a more peaceful country. My source – Vision of Humanity Org, GPI results, full list of 149 countries, methodology and other explanations and scores per country/indicator can be found from here!

Country	2010		2009		2008		2007
	Rank	Score	Rank	Score	Rank	Score	Rank	Score
New Zealand	1	1.188	1	1.202	4	1.350	2	1.363
Iceland	2	1.212	4	1.225	1	1.176
Japan	3	1.247	7	1.272	5	1.358	5	1.413
Slovenia	11	1.358	9	1.322	16	1.491	15	1.539
Croatia	41	1.707	49	1.741	60	1.926	67	2.030
Romania	45	1.749	31	1.591	24	1.611	26	1.682
Bulgaria	50	1.785	56	1.775	57	1.903	54	1.936
Bosnia and Herzegovina	60	1.873	50	1.755	66	1.974	75	2.089
Albania	65	1.925	75	1.925	79	2.044
Moldova	66	1.938	75	1.925	83	2.091	72	2.059
China	80	2.034	74	1.921	67	1.981	60	1.980
Brazil	83	2.048	85	2.022	90	2.168	83	2.173
Macedonia (FYR)	83	2.048	88	2.039	87	2.119	82	2.170
USA	85	2.056	83	2.015	97	2.227	96	2.317
Montenegro	88	2.060
Serbia	90	2.071	78	1.951	85	2.110	84	2.181
Ukraine	97	2.115	82	2.010	84	2.096	80	2.150
Armenia	113	2.266
Azerbaijan	119	2.367	114	2.327	101	2.287	101	2.448
Turkey	126	2.420	121	2.389	115	2.403	92	2.272
India	128	2.516	122	2.433	107	2.355	109	2.530
Georgia	142	2.970
Russia	143	3.013	136	2.750	131	2.777	118	2.903
Afghanistan	147	3.252	143	3.285	137	3.126
Somalia	148	3.390	142	3.257	139	3.293
Iraq	149	3.406	144	3.341	140	3.514	121	3.437

Some developments

Central and Eastern Europe remains, on average, the third most peaceful region, after North America. The recent members of the European Union are ranked highest, with Slovenia leading the way in 11th place. Non-EU countries in the Balkans are ranked between 60th and 90th in the 2010 GPI and nations in the Caucasus and Central Asia occupy the lower reaches of the index, as before. Croatia also fared well, with a robust score increase and a rise of eight places to 41st position, amid growing political stability and improved relations with neighbouring countries as it closed in on accession to the EU. Romania’s score also deteriorated sharply and it dropped 14 places in the overall ranking. Particularly large score rises for Russia and Georgia, which were embroiled in conflict in 2008. Serbia and Montenegro were covered earlier as the state and the scores of Serbia does not include Kosovo province as figures from there were not available.

Findings

One of the more remarkable findings from the 2010 Global Peace Index is that societies that are highly peaceful also perform exceptionally well in many other ways. The most peaceful societies share the following social structures and attitudes peaceful also perform exceptionally well in many other ways. The most peaceful societies share the following social structures and attitudes

Photo: dreamstime.com

• Well functioning government

• Sound business environment

• Respectful of human rights and tolerance

• Good relations with neighbouring states

• High levels of freedom of information

• Acceptance of others

• High participation rates in primary and secondary education

• Low levels of corruption

• Equitable sharing of resources.

These qualities act as a facilitator making it easier for people to produce, businesses to sell, entrepreneurs and scientists to innovate and governments to regulate. A detailed review of these qualities is contained in discussion paper.

Monetary value of peace

Peace has also its monetary value in terms of business growth and economic development. The index authors estimate that the total economic impact of an end to violence could have been US$28.2tr between 2006 and 2009. A 25% reduction in global violence would add an annual $1.85tr to the global economy. If an improvement of 25% in global peacefulness could have been achieved in 2009 then this would have unleashed $1.2 trillion in additional economic activity. (Source: Peace, Wealth and Human Potential)

However also war has its monetary value and in short term business – especially inside military-industrial-complex – world the profits from war can be more attracting than those from peace. In my previous article “Peacemaking – How about solving Conflicts too?”. I described situation as follows:

Global military industrial consumption per year is 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars, representing a few percent of GDP and still rising. U.S. share of the cake is about 40% to the current year, 664 billion dollars. This is a good comparison of the UN budget (27 billion), which is a sum of nearly three per cent of its Member States on military expenditure. UN’s “Millennium Development Goals” are dreaming 135 billion per year, this one only a fraction of military spending.

An other comparison (dollars / year): the world’s military spending 1.2 trillion, the OECD Development 106 billion, Peace work 6 billion and 0.6 billion of conflict prevention. The international community is now willing to invest 200 times more to the war than peace. Peace Research, could help prevent conflicts, but development of tools for killing is much more lucrative. Against one peace researcher, is estimated to be more than 1100 researcher for weapon (and their use) developers.

Peace and global challenge

Global challenges, such as climate change, decreasing biodiversity, lack of fresh water and overpopulation, call for global solutions and these solutions will require co-operation on a global scale unparalleled in history. Peace is the essential prerequisite because without it the level of needed co-operation, inclusiveness and social equity necessary to solve these challenges will not be achieved. The big challenge at global, regional and state level is to strengthen factors – or “drivers” of peace in social structures and attitudes.

ari rusila