Covert Action Quarterly (fwd) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit ............................................................... source - Louis Proyect Covert Action Quarterly on William Walker & Kosovo As most people know, Covert Action Quarterly (http://caq.com) has been one of the few voices on the left courageous enough to stand up to anti-Serb propaganda. The late Sean Gervasi, Diana Johnstone and Michel Chossudovsky have all published powerful critiques of imperialist propaganda which attempt to turn the Serb people and their elected government into a combination of monsters from another planet and reincarnation of Hitler's Germany. There was some concern about what would happen to the magazine after the editors were fired by the publishers Williams Schaap and Ellen Ray. The fired editors warned that the magazine would be turned into a leftist version of the X-Files with conspiracy-mongering replacing solid investigative reporting. I am pleased to report that CAQ is doing better than ever, especially in light of the latest issue (Spring-Summer 1999), which has extended coverage on Yugoslavia. Included also are 2 indispensable articles by Johnstone, and one apiece by Chossudovsky and Greg Elich. What is particularly valuable, however, is the journalism of Mark Cook, whose work I became deeply familiar with during the Central America wars. A regular contributor to WBAI, the local left-wing Pacifica station, Mark (not to be confused with the comparatively wishy-washy Mark Cooper of the Nation magazine) exposed lies about Sandinista plots to invade the USA, etc. Following item is from a longer article on "William Walker: Man with a Mission." * Sidebar: U.S. diplomat William Walker's denunciation of an alleged execution-massacre of 45 people by Yugoslav police in the Kosovo village of Racak January 15, 1999, was "a turning point" in NATO's road to war, the New York Times wrote April 18, quoting unidentified U.S. sources. But Walker's claims conflict sharply with press reports in leading European newspapers and subsequent reported findings by forensic investigators. The Yugoslavian government said that the deaths were the result of a battle with elements of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The battle had in fact been filmed by an Associated Press TV (AP TV) crew, and observed by at least two U.S. teams of international monitors, Walker's own staff. Le Monde and Le Figaro first broke the AP TV crew's story "New eyewitness accounts," Le Monde noted January 21, 1999, "throw doubt on the reality of the horrible spectacle of dozens of piled-up bodies of Albanians supposedly executed by Serb security forces last Friday." Le Figaro on January 20 summed up the version compiled for the world by Walker and the press that accompanied him. All the Albanian witnesses gave the same story: At midday the police forced their way into homes and separated the women from the men, whom they led to the hilltops to execute them without more ado. "What is disturbing is that the pictures filmed by the AP TV journalists--which Le Figaro was shown yesterday--radically contradict that version," noted the newspapers longtime Balkan war correspondent Renaud Girard. Both papers said that most of the residents had fled the village long ago. The AP TV reporters saw smoke coming from only two chimneys, Le Monde pointed out. The village is known as a bastion of KLA separatist guerrillas. The police entered the town in the morning in search of KLA members suspected of murdering a police officer, and came under intense fire from KLA elements dug into the hillside in the woods outside the town. A long firefight took place until police managed to surround most of the KLA unit. "Watching from below, next to the mosque, the AP journalists understood that the UCK [KLA] guerrillas, encircled, were trying desperately to break out," Le Figaro noted. "A score of them in fact succeeded, as the police themselves admitted." At 3:30 p.m., after reporting to the press office in Pristina that they had killed at least 15 KLA "terrorists," the police left, still accompanied by the AP TV crew, and carrying a large amount of captured weapons. The AP TV camera crew saw no evidence of any execution-massacre, nor did a French journalist from Le Monde who drove through at 4:40 p.m. and spoke with the monitors from Walker's KVM organization. Nor did the monitors report any. Nor did the French journalist see or hear of any such atrocity when he returned at 6:00 p.m. Night fell shortly after. By the next morning, Le Figaro writes, "the village was once again taken over by armed UCK soldiers who led the foreign visitors, as soon as they arrived, toward the alleged massacre site. Around noon, William Walker in person arrived and expressed his outrage." "What really happened?" asked Le Figaro. "During the night, could the UCK have gathered the bodies, in fact killed by Serb bullets, to set up a scene of cold-blooded massacre? A disturbing fact: Saturday morning the journalists found only very few cartridges around the ditch where the massacre supposedly took place." Both papers noted the efforts the Yugoslav police made to bring journalists to the town during the battle, and the notification given to the monitors which sent two cars with U.S. diplomatic license plates to the scene. "The police didn't seem to have anything to hide," remarked Le Figaro. The Yugoslav government appeared stunned and outraged by the charges from Walker, and insisted on autopsies for all victims, in the face of efforts to bury the dead immediately in conformity with normal Muslim practice. Belarussian and Finnish forensic experts, unable to investigate the scene adequately because Walker had led the media over it, nonetheless did a careful study (See: "Belarussian Forensic Experts Say Victims of Racak Shot from Distance," Agence France-Presse, February 23, 1999; "Finnish Experts Refuse to Give Opinion on Racak Killings," Agence France-Presse, March 17, 1999.) Although the two teams reportedly reached similar conclusions, the Finnish report was not released due to opposition from NATO powers. NATO had been seeking a pretext to place troops in Yugoslavia, or to punish the Yugoslavs for refusing. Three days after Walker's accusations, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had come up with a new demand: NATO military occupation of all of Yugoslavia, the only Balkan country still refusing NATO bases. Moreover, virtually all police and military had to withdraw from Kosovo, and Kosovo would be granted "autonomy" If Yugoslavia did not accept all of NATO's demands, Belgrade would be bombed. (New York Times, April 18,1999, p. 13.) Within a month, the U.S. was at the Rambouillet conference in France desperately trying to get the Albanians to sign a NATO-imposed "agreement" that had been carefully designed to make it impossible for the Yugoslav government to sign. "If this fails because both sides say 'No,' there will be no bombing of Serbia," Secretary Albright declared February 21. (New York Times, April 18, 1999, p. 13.) ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytcov-06.23.99-13:17:23-19286