[This article on the importance of WikiLeaks revelations related to Serbia and Kosovo comes as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is facing extradition to the U.S. where the U.S. government is seeking to try him under the Espionage Act. If Assange is extradited and convicted in what would amount to a show trial, it would represent a major blow to freedom of the press and to attempts to hold powerful actors accountable for secret political manipulations like those described in this article, and war crimes.—Editors]

Fears about a revival of the 1990s’ Balkans conflict have resulted from the flaring of renewed tensions between Serbia and Kosovo. Time magazine reported that, in May, Kosovo police raided Serb-dominated areas in the region’s north and seized local municipal buildings. Further, Kosovo’s police and NATO-led peacekeepers engaged local Serbs in clashes that led to dozens of people being injured on both sides.

Traditionally, Kosovo was a province of Serbia but declared its illegal, unconstitutional, unilateral, pseudo independence in 2008 with U.S.-NATO backing—nine years after a U.S.-NATO bombing campaign targeted the Serbs that helped establish ethnic Albanian rule in Kosovo.

New reports prepared by U.S. diplomats which were released by WikiLeaks and the British Guardian in 2010 uncovered the details of how the Western powers used all diplomatic ways and means to try to engineer the independence of Kosovo and get support for that from Russia. Certain cables by Western diplomats reveal how France and the U.S. had tried to maneuver so that Serbia could get the Agreement for Stabilization and EU Accession (SAA) as well as NATO membership in the Partnership for Peace.

The diplomatic correspondence cables by the U.S. Ambassador to France, Craig Stapleton, written on December 12, 2006, detail a conversation between Daniel Freed, the Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia with Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, foreign policy adviser to then-French President Jacques Chirac, held on December 7, 2006, in Paris, France.

The French president’s adviser talked then about the plans by France to convince the EU to offer Serbia membership in SAA designed to get it into the EU, regardless of the unfinished obligation of full cooperation with The Hague Tribunal. They were worried about the explicit threats by then-Russian President Vladimir Putin that he would veto the UN Security Council resolution on the Kosovo issue.

In the cable, which was marked as secret, it is relayed that Freed said that the West should prepare themselves to act without the Russians, and that the U.S. decided to offer Serbia Partnership for Peace (prelude to NATO membership) as well as the support for democratic forces within the country on the eve of the elections and that President Boris Tadić created a good foundation for a Euro-Atlantic future for Serbia.

According to the WikiLeaks cables, the U.S. decided for the same reasons to support the postponement of Ahtisaari recommendations on the status of Kosovo (recommendations by President of Finland Martti Ahtisaari for Kosovo’s independence with supervision by the international community), after January 21, 2007, when extraordinary parliamentary elections were held in Serbia.

What was certain was that the Russians were not to be allowed to believe that the veto threat would work because they would make use of it. The West thus should send a signal that they were ready to move without them if necessary, because the non-existence of a signal would be interpreted as a tacit agreement for Russia to raise their stake. “That would be a horrible possibility, but the paralysis would be worse,” Freed said.

Maurice Gourdault-Montagne said that President Chirac recommended to German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the EU offer to Serbia becoming part of the SAA even in the case of insufficient cooperation of Belgrade with The Hague.

Merkel first gave a negative response, stating Tadić’s failure to fulfill it, but France still considered that the offer of SSP could make a difference in the January elections. Gourdault-Montagne added that France would then offer SSP on its own.

However, in the WikiLeaks cables of other U.S. diplomats who discuss the issue of Kosovo, it is mentioned that the U.S. Ambassador to Italy communicated to the State Department in Washington that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said, in November 2008, that the recognition of the independence of Kosovo represents a U.S. provocation against Russia.

The Kosovo issue is mentioned in the WikiLeaks cables related to Georgia as well. In June 2007, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili expressed his concern that the independence of Kosovo could create a precedent and encourage the position of Russia in the breakaway Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The State Department documents published by WikiLeaks emphasize that Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs (and future CIA Director) William J. Burns met with Saakashvili in June 2007 in order to confirm the intention of the U.S. to support the independence of Kosovo.

However, Saakashvili warned the U.S. on that occasion that Russia would use that precedent to recognize the independence of Abkhazia. This conclusion could be drawn from a confidential cable sent to the U.S. Embassy in Paris.

Burns responded that the recognition of Abkhazia would isolate Russia on the international stage and would call upon Georgia to refrain from opposing it. According to this cable, the U.S. diplomat told Mikheil Saakashvili that then-U.S. President George W. Bush, at the G8 summit, told Putin clearly that Kosovo would be independent.

Russian threats that they would recognize Abkhazia were evaluated by Burns as vacuous, adding that then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice clearly told Putin and Sergey Lavrov that the recognition of Abkhazia would be a great mistake.

When asked by Saakashvili if there were anything else besides Abkhazia which Russia would accept in return for the independence of Kosovo, Burns responded that the U.S. was searching for a solution as to how to encourage the Russians to refrain from the Albanian negotiations for three to five months more.

In the cables which were published by WikiLeaks, separate meetings were mentioned with the then outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Russia, William Burns, in which opposition to Kosovo’s independence was voiced by Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Patriarch Cyril.

Solzhenitsyn repeated his criticism to the Ambassador about the independence of Kosovo. Why would the Serbs, he asked, be responsible for the sins committed by Milosevic?

As was detailed in the cables, Solzhenitsyn was also critical of that decision and plans about Ukraine getting closer to joining NATO.

---

Below is an interview carried out by Serbian TV on the talk show Govornica with Nikola Vrzić, who is author of the book WikiLeaks Serbia, which provides further details on the significance of the WikiLeaks Serbia documents.

TV host: The exposure of the network of U.S. influence in Serbia, for which it seems to me that before you published your first book was merely guessed at by many locals, and that it may have been somewhat incidental, there have been mere suspicions of what may have been happening. And then we have the situation that in the year 2011 you obtain full access to….

NV: Not only me. All the reporters in the world. When WikiLeaks were released…

TV host: In the autumn of 2010, WikiLeaks published diplomatic correspondence and I am interested to know who remembered to use the somewhat antiquated term depeša (cables). Yet, it is in fact diplomatic correspondence and cables sent by a telegraph. You selected 1,000 out of 250,000 diplomatic cables sent from Belgrade [Serbia] and several hundred sent by others which were related to Serbia.

NV: Yes, that is true.

TV host: You come to a conclusion, with which we shall wrap up this talk, that a very powerful and incredibly strong network of U.S. influencers in Serbia has been established, which penetrates almost all pores of a society, given that the U.S. has their own insiders not only in the government ministers, who duly report to them, and not only in the military where they “assign” generals, and not only within the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Serbian judicial system or the Public Prosecution and political parties but also they weigh in in the creation of the political coalitions. What we have today can be viewed as the result of the U.S. influence which anybody [can see] who takes a look at the book you wrote in 2011, published by PECAT in as few as a hundred pages, the title of which is…

NV: WIKILEAKS: The Secrets of the Belgrade Political Correspondence

TV host: And I think there is an alternative title which you did not assign to it eventually. It sounded something like “The chronicles of the occupation” or something along those lines.

NV: Well, yes. In fact you have described it all fine. It seems that these cables are the reports which the U.S. diplomats sent off; these were the conversations with our politicians though retold.

TV host: The reports by ambassadors and diplomatic civil servants/officials from Belgrade sent to Washington, D.C.?

NV: Yes. That is true. Then there are reports about a set of “counsel” sessions of the U.S. diplomats with their allies related to Serbia. I used everything that would give me a broader picture of Serbia in that context.

TV host: So the time span it covered was from 2005 to 2010. Is that so? The U.S. ambassador at the time was…

NV: There was Michael Polt, then Cameron Munter, then Jennifer Brush afterwards…I am not sure if I may have forgotten somebody…So, it was not only one U.S. ambassador [but a number of them in succession]. We also have the cables from Hillary Clinton who signed and sent them in her position as Secretary of State back then. Anyways…the point of all this is, at the end of the day, the Americans at least in that period, the crux of the matter was/is Kosovo and Metohija and how to force Serbia into formally renouncing Kosovo and Metohija and how to find appropriately cooperative “allies” to help them with that. I asked Vojislav Kostunica to give a talk at my book promotion because he was our Prime Minister at the time. He has proven to be a man who can truly look us in the eyes because he never resorted to any falsehoods or lies and he never reneged on what he would pledge in public.

TV host: I am now chuckling because I remember your statement and I would like to ask you now to explain it to our TV viewers. It refers to Vojislav Kostunica. According to the secret reports from the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, only two Serbian politicians were considered to be truly consistent: Vojislav Kostunica and Cedomir Jovanovic.

NV: Yes, that is true.

TV host: Could you possibly explain?

NV: Vojislav Kostunica is consistent in his advocating for…

TV host: How is it possible that all the others are believed to be dishonest, lying and conniving, yet only Cedomir Jovanović and Kostunica are consistent in your opinion?

NV: Of course. I told this tongue-in-cheek. Kostunica has been consistent in his protecting or at least in his efforts to protect and defend [our sovereignty and Constitution, etc.]. He was consistent in that he never retreated an inch “from the red lines drawn” which were stipulated by our Constitution and Resolution 1244. Cedomir Jovanovic, on the other hand, of course, he has been “consistent” in a completely different way. We do not have to dwell on “his personality” for too long in vain.

TV host: Is that also consistency when we talk about Cedomir Jovanovic?

NV: If high treason were a matter of honesty, yes. Yes, it can be called consistency. There was an issue with Boris Tadić, Vuk Jeremić and Zdravko Ponos and “their cronies” all the time, according to the reports by U.S. diplomats…What I am doing in my book is making a cross-section of the information stated in public after a number of meetings in certain situations with what we found out from what was written in the U.S. WikiLeaks. So what we have here is Vuk Jeremić and Boris Tadić saying that Serbia is militarily neutral but they had just come out of the NATO meeting where, according to the U.S. diplomatic reports, both said: “Our no. 1 priority is for Serbia to join NATO.” Then in the WikiLeaks we can further follow their joint synchronized “work” on the proclamation of the quasi “independence” of Kosovo, i.e., you mean how can Kosovo proclaim independence unilaterally because it was not possible otherwise but to avert the political demise of Boris Tadić, though for that “incident” not to impede the ongoing election campaign?

NV: Yes, exactly that. For that reason, Vuk Jeremić facilitated the introduction of Hashim Thaçi into the UN Security Council which had not been possible before.

Print

The source...