SIGHTINGS


 
Kosovo - NATO - Trepca -
Gold Silver Coal Lead Zinc &
Cadmium Mines
From: ralph@TeamInfinity.com
4-18-99


 
First a few points to entice you to read it all.
 
Serbia's State of Kosovo is home to:
 
"The RICHEST MINES in ALL of EUROPE"
 
RICHER than we first thought, more in future article.
 
The FULL TEXT of RAMBOUILLET, NOT KNOWN to even MOST experts, contained provisions allowing NATO COMPLETE USE of ALL of YUGOSLAVIAN AIR SPACE, ROADS, RESOURCES etc. When you read the article below these excerpts you will see the plan for stealing that vast mineral resources.
 
OFFICAL AGREEMENT see:
 
http://www.alb-net.com/kcc/interim.htm
 
EXCERPTS:
 
The text of Article 8 of this Appendix reads: "NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] including associated airspace and territorial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, maneuver, billet, and utilization of any areas or facilities as required for support, training, and operations."
 
Article 6 guarantees the occupying forces absolute immunity: "NATO personnel, under all circumstances and at all times, shall be immune from the Parties' jurisdiction in respect of any civil, administrative, criminal, or disciplinary offenses which may be committed by them in the FRY."
 
Article 10 secures NATO the cost-free use of all Yugoslavian streets, airports and ports.
 
 
RAMBOUILLET
 
A 'peace' agreement designed to start a war
 
By Richard Becker
 
The official line in the big-business media is that the Pentagon had no choice but to rain bombs and missiles down on Yugoslavia because the Milosevic government refused to negotiate over the issue of Kosovo, a region of that country where ethnic Albanians make up the majority.
 
The reality is that there never were any negotiations. Instead, there was the "Rambouillet Agreement." This was an ultimatum presented in France to the Yugoslav government that gave it two choices: Sign or die.
 
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other top U.S. officials made the point over and over again that there was no room for discussion of the terms of this document, which was drawn up by "international mediators."
 
In February, to the surprise of the United States, its allied Kosovo Liberation Army refused to sign the agreement. This put the planned bombing war off for a few weeks--but only until the deal was even further sweetened for the KLA.
 
On March 15, the KLA signed on to the amended agreement. Yugoslavia was given a new deadline. The Yugoslav government refused to sign and the U.S./NATO war was launched.
 
Washington deliberately crafted the Rambouillet accord in such a way as to make it impossible for the Yugoslavian government to sign.
 
A brief look at the accord reveals why no independent government would have willingly accepted its remarkably onerous and intrusive terms.
 
Features of the Rambouillet accord
 
Kosovo is today a province of the republic of Serbia, which along with Montenegro makes up the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
 
The agreement provided for a type of "autonomy" never before seen. Kosovo would have its own constitution, president, prime minister, legislature and supreme court and be able to make virtually all of its laws. The new "provincial" government, as envisioned, would be able to overrule any federal laws it wished, unlike U.S. states whose laws are subordinate to federal legislation. The Supreme Court of the federal republic would be required to enforce legislation passed by the Kosovo parliament.
 
Kosovo would also be allowed to conduct its own foreign policy under the accord--something not granted to any other autonomous region or state anywhere in the world.
 
All Yugoslav federal army and police forces would have to be withdrawn, except for a three-mile-wide area along the borders of the province. A new Kosovar police force would be trained to take over internal security responsibilities. Members of the KLA, which is supposed to disarm under the agreement, could join the police units.
 
In reality, however, neither the Kosovo police, the KLA nor the Yugoslav federal forces would be the basic state apparatus under Rambouillet. That function would be reserved for NATO.
 
A 28,000-strong NATO occupation army, known as the KFOR, would be author ized to "use necessary force to ensure compliance with the Accords," according to a U.S. State Department fact sheet issued on March 1.
 
Nor would the new Kosovo executive, legislative and judicial organs be the real government.
 
"The international community will play a role in ensuring that these provisions are carried out, through a civilian Implementation Mission, an ombudsman and constitutional court judges selected under international auspices, OSCE/EU [Organization for Security and Cooperation of the European Union] supervision of elections, and an international military presence," said the State Department.
 
The Chief of the OSCE/EU Implementation Mission (CIM) is given the authority to issue binding directives to all parties on all matters, including the right to appoint and remove officials. This is similar to the dictatorial powers given to the CIM in Bosnia under the Dayton accords that Yugoslavia signed under duress in December 1995.
 
The Implementation Mission would also have its own TV and radio stations, and be able to shut down and/or censor other media, as it does in Bosnia.
 
Kosovo would be required to have a "free market" economy. Kosovo has vast mineral resources, including the richest mines for lead, molybdenum, mercury and other metals in all of Europe. The capital to exploit these resources, which are now mainly state-owned, would undoubtedly come from the United States and Western European imperialists.
 
After three years of this arrangement, the "final status" of Kosovo would be settled. But in reality, Yugoslav sovereignty over the region would end the day the agreement was signed.
 
The Rambouillet accord would turn Kosovo into a colony in every respect--a colony of the United States, the dominant power in NATO.
 
Clinton, Albright and the rest of the international predators who make up the U.S. national security apparatus knew very well that there was no way the Yugoslav government could have or would have signed on to such an agreement. Yugoslavia has a proud history of resisting foreign colonization and domination.
 
Yugoslav Partisans tied down 55 Nazi divisions during World War II and ended up liberating their country through untold blood and sacrifice, suffering a death toll in the war seven times that of the much-larger United States.
 
Rambouillet was never meant to bring peace. It was, instead, a declaration of war.
 
- END - BEGIN SECOND and LAST SEGMENT
 
 
[YOU ARE ENCOURAGED TO WIDELY RE-POST THIS ITEM TO INTERNET CONFERENCES, MAILING LISTS, AND DISCUSSION GROUPS]
 
How the Balkan war was prepared
 
Rambouillet Accord foresaw the occupation of all Yugoslavia
 
By Peter Schwarz 14 April 1999
 
The refusal of the Milosevic government to sign the Rambouillet Accord provided NATO with official justification for its war against Yugoslavia. For a long time, however, the precise contents of this accord were unknown. The Contact Group, responsible for the talks at Rambouillet and Paris, had agreed to remain silent. The complete text was only recently published on the Internet site of the Albanian Kosova Crisis Center.
 
As can now be seen, the accord contains provisions that would have subjected the whole of Yugoslavia to NATO occupation. The official presentation repeatedly stated that it was a matter of autonomy for Kosovo, which would be secured by the stationing of a "peace force" in Kosovo. However, Appendix B, "Status of Multi-National Military Implementation Force", grants NATO freedom of movement "throughout all Yugoslavia", i.e., Serbia and Montenegro as well as Kosovo.
 
The text of Article 8 of this Appendix reads: "NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] including associated airspace and territorial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, maneuver, billet, and utilization of any areas or facilities as required for support, training, and operations."
 
Article 6 guarantees the occupying forces absolute immunity: "NATO personnel, under all circumstances and at all times, shall be immune from the Parties' jurisdiction in respect of any civil, administrative, criminal, or disciplinary offenses which may be committed by them in the FRY."
 
Article 10 secures NATO the cost-free use of all Yugoslavian streets, airports and ports.
 
If the Yugoslav government had signed the accord, they would have been relinquishing all claims to sovereignty over their own territory. The Berliner Zeitung noted, "This passage sounds like a surrender treaty following a war that was lost ... The fact that Yugoslavian President Milosevic did not want to sign such a paper is understandable."
 
The way in which the Yugoslav government was called upon to sign this diktat--delivered as an ultimatum--and the secretiveness regarding its content, suggest that the Rambouillet and Paris conferences were aimed at providing a pretext for war, not a political solution to the Kosovo conflict.
 
"An accord such as this could not be signed by any head of a sovereign state," commented the radical newspaper Taz, the first German paper to publish passages from the Accord itself.
 
"If the talks had really had the aim of producing agreement, and not merely trying to convince skeptics of the unavoidability of NATO's attacks, then the text of the Accord is incomprehensible."
 
The original proposal of the Contact Group, which served as the basis for the Rambouillet Conference, did not contain these passages. The negotiations were first supposed to deal with the question of Kosovar autonomy, and only then take up the question of the military measures to be implemented to carry this out. This was the basis for the Yugoslav government participating in the conference.
 
In the course of negotiations, which lasted from February 6 to 23, the five Western members of the Contact Group--the US, Britain, Germany, France and Italy--moved openly to embrace the standpoint of the Kosovar Albanians, who insisted on the stationing of NATO troops inside Kosovo.
 
On the final day of the conference, the final draft of the Accord was presented containing the Appendix B quoted above.
 
From then on, the draft statutes covering Kosovar autonomy--to which the Yugoslavian government had largely agreed--and the proposals for stationing NATO troops inside Kosovo were characterised as an "indissoluble packet". The Yugoslav delegation was given the bald choice of either swallowing the ultimatum or rejecting the Accord as a whole, which they then did.
 
To the surprise of NATO, the Kosovar Albanians also refused to sign up. The conference was consequently adjourned again, until the Kosovars signed the same text on March 18. NATO had obtained the pretext it wanted to launch its attack. On March 24, the first bombs were dropped.
 
It would appear that not a few politicians who bear responsibility for launching the war were uninformed about this sequence of events. They agreed to the attack on Yugoslavia without even having read the text that was used to justify it. NATO's campaign of disinformation, which has accompanied the war from its inception, is not only directed at the general public, but at parliamentarians and senior state officials.
 
According to the Taz newspaper, which made inquiries at the German Foreign Ministry, two of the three most senior officials--State Minister Gunther Verheugen (a Social Democrat) and Ludger Volmer (a Green)--were completely surprised. They claimed that the Articles in Appendix B were "completely new" to them. The third official--Permanent Secretary Wolfgang Ischinger--claimed that the passages came from an earlier, no longer current, version of the Accord, which is clearly refuted by the facts.
 
The Taz article asks, how much did Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer know? They raise another possibility: "Did the Federal Government deliberately pull the wool over the eyes of parliament and the public"
 
Many parliamentary deputies have expressed anger regarding the Government's game of hide-and-seek. The text of the Accord was only officially presented to the German parliament last Thursday, more than two weeks after the war had started.
 
Angelika Beer wrote a letter to her Green Party colleague, Joschka Fischer, saying she would have spoken out against the air attacks if she had known about the content of the Accord.
 
Social Democratic Party deputy Hermann Scheer said, "If we had been able to read this paper as soon as it was ready, then the argument that all political and diplomatic manoeuvres had been exhausted and all that remains is the threat of bombardment would not have been tenable."
 
Scheer accuses the Government of accepting the fact that the USA exerts too strong an influence over NATO decision-making. _______________________
 
[the URL for the source document cited in this story is:
 
http://www.alb-net.com/kcc/interim.htm
 
Grab it, and send a copy to every one of your Congressional and Parliamentary representatives, before it disappears!] ________________________________________
 
SEE http://204.107.208.2/~ralph/ramboolay.html
 
Your thoughts, pro or con are invited, we only want the truth... Thanks, ralph@TeamInfinity.com






SIGHTINGS HOMEPAGE