EDITORIAL: U.N. APPROVED

Kosovo: Yet Another War Criminal as ”Prime Minister”

Kosovo's new prime minister has been linked to two of the nastiest episodes of brutality in the ongoing war in the former Yugoslavia. His career as a war criminal started in the summer of 1991

Imagine a "multi-ethnic" Palestine, administered by the United Nations, in which a Hamas leader notorious for terrorist attacks on Jewish civilians is certified as the Authority's "democratically" elected chief executive. Imagine Abu Musab al-Zarqawi being approved by a future UN governor as Iraq's prime minister. Imagine that in Kosovo a KLA murderer… but then in Kosovo you don't have to imagine anything.

The above paragraph came from an article we published in December 2004 on the occasion of Ramush Haradinaj's appointment as Kosovo's prime minister ("U.N. Approved Terrorist to Run Kosovo"). Well, a little over a year later it's "deja-vu, all over again": yet another prominent KLA murderer - this time his name is Agim Ceku - has been appointed to the same post.

Kosovo's new prime minister has been linked to two of the nastiest episodes of brutality in the ongoing war in the former Yugoslavia. His career as a war criminal started in the summer of 1991, when he deserted his post as a captain in the Yugoslav Army stationed in the coastal city of Zadar, and joined the newly formed Croatian National Guard. He quickly rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Croatian Army (HV), and in that capacity he helped orchestrate Operation Storm and took the leading role in the Medak offensive, which involved the cleansing of ethnic Serbs from the Krajina, the deliberate shelling of civilians, rape, and systematic arson. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs fled in face of the attack. Hundreds of civilians were murdered, most of the victims being elderly and disabled persons who were unable to flee.

The Medak offensive in 1993, which Ceku masterminded is also known as the "Medak massacre." It is remembered in Canada as that nation's largest military action since the Korean War. According to Scott Taylor's book, Tested Mettle, Canadian peacekeepers in the "Medak Pocket" engaged Croatian soldiers in a firefight to stop them from terrorizing Serbian civilians. Four Canadians were wounded in the battle, which left nearly 30 Croatian soldiers dead.

Excerpts of the book's account of the fighting at Medak were published in newspapers across Canada in November 1998. Atrocities witnessed by Canadian soldiers are described in detail. "A drunken Croat soldier emerged from a building and staggered toward [a Canadian soldier]," begins one section. "A girl could be heard screaming inside the house. Draped on the drunken soldier's head was a pair of blood-soaked panties."

But crimes committed by the Croatian military have been systematically downplayed by Western European and U.S. officials. American lawyers hired by the Pentagon argued at the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague against indicting the Croatian generals who led Operation Storm. The following assessment, printed almost a decade ago in the August 22, 1995 edition of The Washington Post, still rings true: "In the battle for international public opinion, Croatia has so far escaped serious criticism for Operation Storm… International attention has focused on rebel Serbs, who are being charged with digging mass graves near Srebrenica."

Under Ceku's command, the KLA applied his experience from the Krajina to the Serbs of Kosovo in 1999. The results are well known and well documented.

With such a man at the helm it is to be feared that Kosovo will continue to be the wildest, worst-administered corner of Europe by far, a terminally dysfunctional polity plagued by crime, violence, and degrading inhumanity. Ceku's promise to take care of the Serbs' problems has a chilling ring to it, reminiscent of Haradinaj's pledge that his government will be engaged in "the implementation of democratic standards in Kosovo." It's like Himmler and Heydrich promising to take care of the Jews' problems by sending them to a nice new location in Theresienstadt.

If the new PM and his UN mentor, Jesen-Petersen, follow the model of "democratic standards" Ceku honed at Medak in 1992, and Haradinaj perfected in his fiefdom at Glodjane in 1998, the future for the few remaining Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija is grim in the extreme. The government in Belgrade should suspend all negotiations with the Kosovo Albanian government - currently under way in Vienna - for as long as this monster remains at its helm.