[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Grubacic / Eisenhower's Mistake: A Tale of an
Astonishing Letter to the Former German Chancellor / Feb 18
Morton K. Brussel
brussel at uiuc.edu
Sun Feb 18 21:22:29 CST 2007
Looking backward; a note about the war in Yugoslavia/Kosovo.---mkb
Begin forwarded message:
> From: ZNet Commentaries <sysop at zmag.org>
> Date: February 18, 2007 5:29:44 PM CST
> To: brussel at uiuc.edu
> Subject: Grubacic / Eisenhower's Mistake: A Tale of an Astonishing
> Letter to the Former German Chancellor / Feb 18
>
>
> Today's commentary:
> http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-02/18grubacic.cfm
>
> ==================================
>
> ZNet Commentary
> Eisenhower's Mistake: A Tale of an Astonishing Letter to the
> Former German Chancellor February 18, 2007
> By Andrej Grubacic
>
> The first time I heard of Willy Wimmer was during the NATO "freedom
> through bombs" campaign in Serbia in 1999. "Never before so few
> lied so thoroughly to so many, as in connection with the Kosovo
> war", he famously observed. "People died for this". Wimmer, then a
> member of the Christian Democratic Union party in the German
> Bundestag, was referring to the organized media's attempt to
> convince the population of Germany that there was indeed a
> humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo, one that would necessitate a
> humanitarian intervention. The attempt was, as we know, all too
> successful.
>
> NATO spokesman, Jamie Shea, said at the time that, "The political
> leaders played the decisive role with regard to public opinion". He
> was referring to German politicians, those " democratically elected
> representatives", who "knew which news was important for public
> opinion in their country. Rudolf Scharping did a really good job.
> It's not easy, particularly in Germany, whose population for 50
> years had known only military defense, meaning the protection of
> their own country, to send German soldiers hundreds of miles away."
>
> Explaining the difficulties that the new definition of security
> policy entailed, Shea commended "not only Minister Scharping, but
> also Chancellor Schröder and Minister Fischer" who all provided "an
> outstanding example of political leaders who don't just run behind
> public opinion, but know how to shape it."
>
> Shea was probably at his cynical best when he described the reasons
> behind his optimism: "It makes me optimistic to see that the
> Germans have understood that. And despite the very unpleasant side
> effects, the collateral damage, and the long duration of the air
> raids, they stayed on course. If we had lost public support in
> Germany, we would have lost it throughout the alliance."
>
> Among the many news items, which "were important for public
> opinion" in Germany, as readers of ZNet probably remember, was
> information, provided by Minister Sharping in April of 1999, that
> the Serbs have installed a Nazi-style concentration camp for few
> thousand Kosovo Albanians in the football stadium of Pristina, the
> capital of Kosovo. In his efforts to persuade the nation to "stay
> on course", comrade Minister Joschka Fischer, the ex radical German
> Foreign Minister, compared the Serbs to the Nazis, calling for
> military intervention with a crusader fervor: 'There must never be
> another Auschwitz!' I remember how we were, sitting in shelters and
> trying to ignore the buzz of humanitarian tomahawks around us,
> joking that in order for Germans to prevent the return of "Nazism"
> in a region that built it's identity on the fight against German
> Nazis in World War II, Fisher and Schroder had resort to a Nazi
> propaganda, not seen since 1945.
>
> A few days ago I was reminded of Willy Wimmer, one of the few
> conservative German politicians arguing against the war in Kosovo
> (and criticized, by Frankfurter Alemagne Zeitung, predictably
> enough, as a "conspiracy theorist"). A well informed Serbian
> conservative weekly published a translation of the letter from
> Wimmer to the German Chancelor Schroder. The letter is a report
> from a conference held in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava,
> organized by the State Department and the American Enterprise
> Institute. The subject of this conference, attended by numerous
> prime ministers "from Baltic to Macedonia", was the Balkans and
> expansion of NATO.
>
> Wimmer had heard many interesting things in Bratislava. For
> instance, that "Operation Horseshoe" - the plan allegedly conceived
> by the Serbs to drive the Albanian population out of Kosovo in 1999
> - was a propaganda invention; that the purpose behind the Kosovo
> war was to enable the USA to correct an oversight of General
> Eisenhower's in the Second World War and to establish a US military
> presence in the Balkans with a view to controlling the
> strategically important peninsula. He heard a high ranking American
> official saying that the American aim was to draw a geo-political
> line from the Baltic Sea to Anatolia and to control this area as
> the Romans had once controlled it (one would suppose that American
> "mare nostrum", or "our sea", is not the Mediterranean, but the
> Atlantic). Wimmer had a distinct impression that everyone agreed
> (and could have cared less) about the fact that NATO humanitarian
> attacks are illegal under international law, and were done very
> deliberately, in order to establish the precedent for future
> "humanitarian" actions without a UN mandate.
>
> One of the many interesting things about this letter is that Wimmer
> is by no means a leftist activist. Not even a left-leaning critic
> of "American imperialism". He was, at the time of writing the
> document, not only a defense policy spokesman of the conservative
> Christian Democratic Union (CDU), but also a Vice-President of the
> Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Co-operation in
> Europe. After reading the published translation of the letter in
> the Yugoslav language, I have tried, not without some difficulties,
> to dig out the original. I have discovered that the document was
> published in the government journal Blätter fur deutsche und
> internationale Politik (2001 9, page 1059, 1060). The translation
> below, however, is of the text that I have found on the University
> of Kassel website (http://www.uni-kassel.de/fb5 /frieden/themen/
> NATO-Krieg/wimmer-rupp.html)
>
> I thought that the readers of Znet interested in the nature of US
> politics in the Balkans, especially in the light of the recent
> Ahtisaari plan for independent- but- not-autonomous Kosovo, as well
> as those interested, more generally, in the nature of US foreign
> politics, could benefit from this rough translation, the quality
> for which I duly apologize.
>
> -----
>
> Berlin, 02. 05. 2000
>
> Highly Esteemed Mister Chancelor,
>
> Last week I had the opportunity to attend a conference in
> Bratislava, the Capitol of Slovakia, organized by the American
> State Department and American Enterprise Institute (Foreign Policy
> Institute of the Republican Party). The main subject of the meeting
> was the Balkans and the process of NATO enlargement.
>
> The conference was attended by high political officials, as
> indicated by the presence of numerous regional prime ministers, as
> well as ministers of foreign politics and defense. Among the many
> important topics discussed, a few deserve special emphasis:
>
> 1. The organizers of the Conference (US State Department and
> American Enterprise Institute) demanded a speedy recognition of
> Kosovo, according to international law.
>
> 2. It was explained by the organizers that the Federal Republic of
> Yugoslavia must be kept out of every rule - of - law organ, and
> especially out of the Helsinki accords.
>
> 3. European rule of law is a hindrance to NATO. The American system
> of law is therefore more suitable for Europe.
>
> 4. The war against Yugoslavia was fought to rectify an incorrect
> decision of General Eisenhower during World War II. In this manner,
> because of the strategic reasons demanding the stationing of US
> soldiers in this region, the faulty determination has been corrected,
>
> 5. The European allies took part in the war against Yugoslavia in
> order to, de facto, overcome the dilemma which presented itself
> after the acceptance of the "new strategic concept" of the Alliance
> in the April of 1999, and to overcome the inclination of the
> Europeans to secure a previous mandate of the UN or the
> Organization for European Security and Cooperation.
>
> 6. Europeans allies may legalistically reason that this war
> against Yugoslavia, which was outside the treaty's domain, was an
> exception. However, it is clear that this is a precedent, which
> they can and will call upon at any moment.
>
> 7. NATO should now fill the area between the Baltic and Anatolia,
> as it was filled by Roman forces during the height of the Roman
> Empire.
>
> 8. In addition, Poland must be surrounded from the north and the
> south by democratic neighbor states; Bulgaria and Romania should
> provide the territorial connection to Turkey; in the long run,
> Serbia must be kept out of European development (probably to
> further the safety of the American military presence).
>
> 9. North of Poland it is important to establish complete control
> of all access routes from St Petersburg to the Baltic Sea.
>
> 10. In each process, the right for people's self determination
> should be given priority before all other regulations or rules of
> the international law.
>
> 11. The statement that NATO's war against Yugoslavia was a
> violation of all relevant regulations and rules of international
> law did not encounter any opposition.
>
> After this conference, where the discussion was very open and
> candid, we cannot avoid the long lasting importance of the
> conference conclusions, especially taking into account the
> professional rank and competence of its participants and organizers.
>
> The American side seems to be conscious, that in order to pursue
> its interests, it needs to undermine the rule of law developed as a
> result of the two World Wars. Power must be above justice. Where
> international law stands in the way, it must be removed. When a
> similar development was embraced by the League of Nations, the
> Second World War was not far away. A way of thinking that puts self-
> interest in such an absolute position can not be called anything
> but totalitarian.
>
> With friendly regards,
>
> Willy Wimmer
>
>
> ----
>
> * Andrej Grubacic is an anarchist historian from the mountains of
> South Eastern Europe. He can be reached at zapata at mutualaid.org
>
> * To learn more about the recent development in the Balkans, see my
> ZNet commentaries at : http://www.zmag.org/bios/homepage.cfm?
> authorID=181
>
> * The information on the conference Bratislava seems to have
> disappeared from the world wide web. Try googling "Regional Round
> table: "Is Euro-Atlantic Integration Still on Track? Opportunities
> and Obstacles".
>
> * For those of you who read German, check out the Frankfurter
> Allgemeine Zeitung criticism of Wimmer's "simplistic
> views" [Christoph Albrecht, FAZ, 27th August 2001]
>
>
>
>
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