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To see where Israel is headed, visit Kosovo
Historical and Investigative Research - 8 July 2006
by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/kosovo_junger.htm[Research assistance: Peter Robert North]
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Table of Contents
( hyperlinked < )
< Introduction
< Why the NATO bombing of Serbia?
< The Kosovo trade in female slaves
< Sebastian Junger
< Law and order in Kosovo today, according to
Sebastian Junger
< APPENDIX: Sebastian Junger's Slaves of the Brothel
[ Full Text ]
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Introduction
Do you remember Kosovo? It’s the place we had to go save because the Serbs, NATO officials told us, were committing genocide against the Kosovo Albanians, and so what NATO needed to do, according to NATO officials, was help the ethnic Albanian KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) defeat the Serbs. So NATO bombed Serbia in 1999.
According to Sebastian Junger’s piece Slaves of the Brothel (Vanity Fair, July 2002), since the NATO bombing Kosovo has become a gangster state, where a criminal organization that is a cross between an ordinary mafia and a full-fledged terrorist army represses everybody, directs the lion’s share of the European heroin trade, and also much of the traffic in European female slaves. Did NATO intervene in Kosovo on behalf of the ethnic Albanians? This is easily answered: 1) NATO has failed to produce a single body from the genocide it supposedly went to stop;[1] 2) NATO installed the current Kosovo gangsters in power; and 3) we are no longer being exhorted by NATO officials to feel compassion for Kosovo Albanians.
In the Middle East as in Kosovo, there are terrorists who wish to exterminate their neighbors and who daily oppress their own people with physical violence for dissenters, and with hate indoctrination for the rest. In the Middle East as in Kosovo, the enemies of such terrorists are falsely demonized as oppressors in the Western media. In the Middle East as in Kosovo, the United States and the European powers are all supporting the idea of a pseudo-state carved out of another state, and run by such terrorists. And in the Middle East as in Kosovo, the NATO powers claim that they do this out of concern for an oppressed Muslim people.
Kosovo has become a gangster state where ordinary Albanians suffer extreme and widespread oppression; Kosovo’s ethnic Serbs have been murdered or thrown out in a campaign of extermination. Substitute ‘Arabs’ for ‘Albanians’ and ‘Jews’ for ‘Serbs’ and you’ve predicted the future of the Middle East. Those who would defend Israel must understand Kosovo.
Why the NATO bombing of Serbia?
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In the late 1990s, NATO governments threw their support behind an ethnic Albanian terrorist movement calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) that, among other things, was seeking to separate the province of Kosovo from Serbia. (Partly as a consequence of twentieth century violence, the ethnic Albanians had become the majority in Kosovo). NATO citizens were told that the KLA was fighting to liberate ethnic Albanians in Kosovo from what NATO officials insisted was Serbian right-wing repression. When NATO began dropping bombs on Serbia, NATO officials forcefully and repeatedly explained, this was to stop a genocide against the ethnic Albanians. Turning a phrase that Orwell himself might have coined, NATO officials called this “humanitarian bombing.”[2]
NATO’s humanitarian bombs killed quite a few civilians, but killing Serbian civilians was necessary to stop an anti-Albanian genocide from getting worse, NATO officials insisted. Embarrassingly, however, these humanitarian, pro-Albanian bombs were killing so many Albanian civilians that the same NATO officials were forced to make a public apology.[3] By contrast, as HIR has demonstrated, even with total NATO/KLA military control over post-bombing Kosovo, NATO’s own forensics were unable to produce even one body of an Albanian civilian murdered by the Serbs.[4]
Did the US ruling elite really back the terrorist KLA to protect ethnic Albanians from genocide?
There is a way to test this. We can take a look at the situation of the Kosovo Albanians before the NATO bombing and compare this to what life for Kosovo Albanians has become since the NATO bombing. If the Kosovo Albanians are infinitely worse off today, and if the US and the rest of the NATO governments do not seem to care, then we may conclude that helping the Kosovo Albanians was never the point of the NATO bombing of Serbia.
HIR has already provided the before picture. As we have shown, according to a study done by the US military in the 1980s (the decade right before the civil wars that tore Yugoslavia apart), the Albanians in the Kosovo province of Serbia were the most carefully protected, economically subsidized, and politically enfranchised national minority anywhere in the world.[5] That’s right. What this piece will show is that the Kosovo Albanians are now -- thanks, precisely, to the NATO bombing -- some of the most brutally oppressed people in the world.
The Kosovo trade in female slaves
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Vanity Fair’s July 2002 piece by Sebastian Junger begins by explaining what the topic is:
“A virulent Mafia business is thriving in postwar Kosovo: the $7 to $12 billion traffic in Eastern European women lured by promises of work, then forced into prostitution. Despite international efforts, sex slave traders have been nearly impossible to prosecute, thanks to corruption, local laws, and the victims’ fear of testifying.
…By the time they realize what is going on, it is too late. Deprived of their passports, gang-raped, often forced to take drugs, and disoriented by lack of food and sleep, these women find themselves virtual prisoners of whatever brothel they wind up in.
...the women know that -- since they were recruited back home -- the Mafia network extends into the smallest villages of their home country. When a pimp promises to harm a prostitute or her family, it is not an idle threat.”[6]
Junger’s desire to report on the mushrooming, multi-billion-dollar traffic in European female slaves brought him to Kosovo because this is now the epicenter of a business that grinds young women and destroys them. Writes Junger:
“The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (O.S.C.E.) -- part of the temporary governing body in Kosovo -- estimates that around 200,000 women each year are trafficked from Eastern Europe and Central Asia, most of them as prostitutes. The value of their services has been estimated at between $7 and $12 billion. ...There are now as many as 100 brothels in Kosovo, each employing up to 20 women. Thousands more women are trafficked through Kosovo and on into Western Europe.”
How much “temporary governing” can the OSCE be doing if Kosovo has become the capital of the modern trade in European female slaves? Is this the meaning of “Security and Cooperation in Europe”? Who is cooperating with whom? Here is one clue: according to Junger, “prostitution became a mainstay of the criminal economy within months of the NATO intervention in Kosovo.” Here is another clue: Junger says that “U.N. police officers are training local Albanians -- many of them taken from the ranks of the disarmed Kosovo Liberation Army -- ...in basic police procedure.” So the KLA terrorist thugs are being turned by the UN into the official -- UN sanctioned -- monopoly of power, which is convenient for the many UN personnel whom Junger says regularly patronize the KLA's Kosovo brothels. Junger explains that these “Kosovo Police Service…officers, who are paid only $230 a month, are also highly vulnerable to corruption, making security breaches almost unavoidable.” In other words, the “disarmed Kosovo Liberation Army” is the armed and KLA-corrupted “Kosovo Police Service.” And the old Kosovo Liberation Army continues: it was never disarmed.[7] So the slave-trafficking KLA/Albanian Mafia is everywhere in power.
This includes a KLA-friendly court system, because, as Junger explains,
“Major criminal trials in Kosovo have two international judges sit on a panel with three local, or ‘lay,’ judges. This panel hears all evidence and then comes to a verdict. The lay judges, however, occasionally display the prejudices of the highly patriarchal [Albanian Muslim] culture. They tend to blame the woman for her troubles, in other words. ‘The majority of rape cases are fabricated by the alleged victims, seeking revenge, or trying to pressure the defendant to force a marriage proposal,’ one judge, according to an O.S.C.E. report, declared before a rape trial.”
Life for sex slaves, even when they are not being beaten or gang-raped, is unbelievably tough. According to a former sex slave whom Junger interviewed,
“[In the brothels,] the schedule was brutal. They had to stripdance from eight P.M. until six A.M., taking time to go in back with clients if called upon, and they had to be up at eight A.M. in case there were clients during the day. ...The prostitutes made around $30 per client and $1 for each drink the client bought, which was all put toward their debt. Natalia owed $1,500, but the owner deducted for food, lodging, clothes, and, of course, drugs, particularly cocaine, which the girls freebased in back. The new girls lived at the bar, and the ones who had repaid more than half their debt lived in an apartment, because the owner didn’t want the experienced ones warning the new ones about what was going to happen to them. If a particular girl got close to repaying her debt, the owner sold her off to someone else, and she had to start all over again.”
Junger says that he interviewed one “Lilia Gorceag, an American trained psychologist who treats women at the I.O.M. safe house in Chisinau.” Chisinau is the capital of the former Soviet Republic of Moldova, where slave traffickers find much with which to commerce (because Moldova is desperately poor and its women beautiful); the I.O.M. is the International Organization for Migration, which shelters ‘migrants’ and helps them return home. Writes Junger:
“Gorceag says that women who are trafficked to Turkey, Greece, and Italy generally survive their experiences psychologically intact, but the ones who wind up in the Balkans [meaning, in Kosovo] are utterly destroyed as people. They exhibit classic symptoms of severe post-traumatic stress disorder: they can’t focus; they can’t follow schedules; they’re apathetic to the point of appearing somnambulistic; they fly into violent rages or plunge into hopeless depression; some even live in terror that someone will come and take them away. Their condition keeps them from functioning normally in a family or a job, and that puts them at even greater risk of being trafficked again. “One of my patients ate napkins,” says Gorceag. “When I took away the napkins, she started eating newspaper. She wasn’t even aware of what she was doing. There is another patient who counts. She counts everything. When she can’t find anything to count, she turns her sleeve and counts the stitching. These are people with completely destroyed psyches. It’s a form of genocide. I know that’s a very strong word, but I live with 22 of these women, and I see their suffering every day.”
The extreme psychological breakdown that Gorceag reports for slaves trafficked to Kosovo may have something to do with the special ferocity and regularity of the violence there. Given post-NATO Kosovo’s centrality to the modern reappearance of a Muslim traffic in European slaves, Junger is naturally forced to tell us something about what law and order have become in Kosovo since the NATO bombing, beyond reporting on the slave trade itself. This focus is what makes Junger’s portrait of Kosovo so valuable to us. But, naturally, when interpreting a portrait it is good to have a sense for the painter’s biases, so allow me a few words about this Sebastian Junger, because he is not a stranger to Yugoslavia, and in particular he is not a stranger to Kosovo.
Topic: the vital and crucial lesson of kosovo for israel... part one... (Read 2621 times)