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by John Laughland 12 January 2004, Sanders Research
Brecon Political and Theological Discussion
Group There can be no doubt that the change of regime in Tbilisi is the result of US secret service operations. The allegations that the elections on 2nd November were flawed was based exclusively on exit polls conducted by an American "polling agency"; the students activists from the "Kmara!" organisation are modelled on, and trained by, their US-backed opposite numbers in Serbia, Otpor. The two groups even have the same logo, presumably so as to give their sponsors some economies of scale when it comes to printing costs.[1] Everything down to the storming of the parliament (Tbilisi, 22nd November 2002; Belgrade 5th October 2000) and the visit of the Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, to ensure the hand-over of power, followed exactly the same carefully choreographed plan. Moreover, the identity of the choreographer is not difficult to establish: Richard Miles, the current US ambassador in Tbilisi, was charge d'affaires in Belgrade during the later years of the Milosevic regime. While in Serbia, I came across unexpected confirmation of the extent of secret service involvement in the politics of that country. Tim Marshall, a reporter for Sky TV, has published a book in Serbia on the period 1998 2000, i.e. the Kosovo war and the overthrow of Milosevic. Marshall is evidently very proud of his connections with the secret services, especially the British ones, because his book, entitled "Shadowplay", is a detailed account of their activities, which are presented as the key factors in the political events he describes. The value of his account is all the greater because Marshall, like all other TV reporters, supports the New World Order view that Slobodan Milosevic was evil and that Nato was right to attack Yugoslavia in 1999. At every turn, Marshall seems to know who
the main intelligence players are. His account is thick
with references to "an MI6 officer in Pristina", "sources
in Yugoslav military intelligence", "a CIA man who
was helping to put together the coup", an "officer
in US naval intelligence", and so on. He quotes secret
surveillance reports from the Serbian secret police; he knows
who the Ministry of Defence desk officer is in London who draws
up the strategy for getting rid of Milosevic; he knows that the
Foreign Secretary's telephone conversations are being listened
to; he knows who are the Russian intelligence officers who accompany
Yevgeni Primakov, the Russian prime minister, to Belgrade during
the Nato bombing; he knows which rooms are bugged in the British
embassy, and where the Yugoslav spies are who listen in to the
diplomats' conversations; he knows that a staffer on the US House
of Representatives International Relations Committee is, in fact,
an officer in US naval intelligence; he seems to know that secret
service decisions are often taken with the very minimal ministerial
approval; he describes how the CIA physically escorted the KLA
delegation from Kosovo to Paris for the pre-war talks at Rambouillet,
where Nato issued Yugoslavia with an ultimatum it knew it could
only reject; and he refers to "a British journalist"
acting as a go-between between London and Belgrade for hugely
important high-level secret negotiations, as people sought to
betray one another as Milosevic's power collapsed. The war went ahead, of course, and Yugoslavia was ferociously bombed. But Milosevic stayed in power. So London and Washington started what Marshall happily calls "political warfare" to remove him. This involved giving very large sums of money, as well as technical, logistical and strategic support, and including arms, to various "democratic opposition" groups and "non-governmental organisations" in Serbia. The Americans were by then operating principally through the International Republican Institute, yet another CIA front, which had opened offices in neighbouring Hungary for the purpose of getting rid of Slobodan Milosevic. "It was agreed" at one of their meetings, Marshall explains, "that the ideological arguments of pro democracy, civil rights and a humanitarian approach would be far more forceful if accompanied, if necessary, by large bags full of money." These, and much else besides, were duly shipped into Serbia through the diplomatic bags in many cases of apparently neutral countries like Sweden who, by not participating formally in the NATO war, were able to maintain full embassies in Belgrade. As Marshall helpfully adds, "Bags of money had been brought in for years." Indeed they had. As he earlier explains, "independent" media outlets like the Radio Station B92 (who is Marshall's own publisher) were, in fact, very largely funded by the USA. Organisations controlled by George Soros also played a crucial role, as they were later to do, in 2003-4, in Georgia. The so-called "democrats" were, in reality, nothing but foreign agents just as the Yugoslav government stolidly maintained at the time. Marshall explains that it was also the Americans who conceived the strategy of pushing forward one candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, to unite the opposition. Kostunica had the main advantage of being largely unknown by the general public. Marshall then describes how the strategy also involved a carefully planned coup d'état, which duly took place after the first round of the presidential elections. He shows in minute detail how the principal actors in what was presented on Western TV screens as a spontaneous uprising of "the people" were, in fact, a bunch of extremely violent and very heavily armed thugs under the command of the Mayor of the town of Cacak, Velimir Ilic. It was Ilic's 22 kilometre-long convoy carrying "weapons, paratroopers and a team of kickboxers" to the federal parliament building in Belgrade. As Marshall admits, the events of 5th October 2000 "looked more like a coup d'état" than the people's revolution of which the world's media so naively gushed at the time. Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of his account is that Marshall often uses Serb nationalist arguments to attack Milosevic. The former Yugoslav president is habitually accused in the Western media of pursuing a racist policy of creating an ethnically pure Greater Serbia. Marshall does nothing to dispel this nonsense and claims that, under Milosevic, the state TV company was stuffed with "rabid dogs of nationalism". Such myths persist even in spite of the failure of the West ever to produce one single quotation in which Milosevic ever said anything racist. But on several occasions, Marshall accuses Milosevic of callously ignoring the fate of Serbs outside Serbia, such as the 200,000 or so Serbs who were ethnically cleansed from the Krajina region of Croatia in the US-backed "Operation Storm" in 1995, or the 100,000 or so Serbs who were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo by the KLA at the end of the Nato bombing. It is indeed true that there are many nationalists in Serbia who attack Milosevic for this very reason, and for not fighting enough to keep Yugoslavia together. Such extreme nationalists have been easily co-opted into the pro-Western anti-Milosevic cause. Marshall reminds us that the leader of the Serbian Radical Party, Vojislav Seselj, the extreme right winger whose party won the parliamentary elections on 28th December, played a key role in getting rid of Milosevic in October 2000: as deputy prime minister, Seselj stated publicly that he thought the presidential election had been rigged and that the West's man, Vojislav Kostunica, was the legitimate federal president of Yugoslavia. It may be because of a deep complicity with the West that Seselj inexplicably handed himself voluntarily over to the International Criminal Trubunal in The Hague in February 2003 an institution which, as Marshall once again makes clear, is straightforwardly controlled by the Americans. It is in keeping with this strange alliance that, as Marshall once again reminds us, the Bosnian Serbs sided with Nato in the attack on Yugoslavia and in the overthrow of Milosevic. The Bosnian Serbs, it will be recalled, are the ones whom the West formally accuses of having carried out atrocities on a huge scale in the Bosnian war. Marshall explains that Milosevic called on the Bosnian Serbs to attack a US barracks in Bosnia during the NATO bombing, but that they refused because they thought Milosevic had betrayed them at Dayton in 1995. Later, he explains how MI6 used their major base near Banja Luka (in the Serbian part of Bosnia) to organise key parts of the coup which overthrew Milosevic on 5th October 2000. Again, such complicity could explain why the two Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, both of whom are accused of genocide, have managed to escape capture despite seven years of military occupation by the West of Bosnia-Herzegovina. If the US needed only eight months to capture Saddam Hussein in a huge country like Iraq, how come they can fail to find these two men in a small place like Bosnia, especially when the population of that country must be even easier to bribe for information than the Iraqis? Perhaps one day, in due course, the same revelations will reach us about the recent events in Georgia. Although some of the key covert operations have already been discussed in the mainstream media,[3] for the most part Western newspapers and TV prefer to stick to the fairytale version of events a fairytale which has been punctured neither by the fact that the new Georgian president won the heroic Soviet score of 96% in the election on 4th January, nor that he started his revolution against Shevardnadze with a rally at Stalin's statue in Gori. But, after Marshall's exposé of the reality behind the almost identical events in Serbia, there can be no doubt that the US takeover of Georgia is a textbook case of covert operations at work. http://www.sandersresearch.com/Sanders/NewsManager/ShowNewsGen.aspx?NewsID=522
[3] See, for instance, "Georgia revolt carried mark of Soros" by Mark MacKinnon, Globe and Mail (Canada) 26th November 2003
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