Global Research

Transcript for Diana Johnstone, March 19, 2024

Global Research: Now the immediate pretext that was delivered to people in the US, Canada, and NATO nations generally was the presumption that the Yugoslavian government was threatening Kosovo Albanians with genocide. It comes on the heels of maybe a decade of media coverage within the country talking about the racist factors motivating the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic. For the first time ever, NATO mobilized outside its traditional territory, the North Atlantic area, as a humanitarian intervention. So, first of all, could you give just a brief explanation to dismantle the proposition that humanitarianism was not the real reason why NATO united to attack this country?

Diana Johnstone: Well, it certainly was not. I mean, the whole  humanitarian crisis was very prepared and financed by Western organizations. They financed a Kosovo humanitarian organization where they were giving money to the Kosovo Albanian separatists, thousands of them, to report on human rights violations which they could simply make up because there was nobody there to check their word. And these things were largely simply invented and the press swallowed them all.

I will say this: because I was in Kosovo shortly before that. I had been a student in Yugoslavia, I knew people in the country. I spoke somewhat of the language. And I know very well that they sent down journalists who didn’t know anything about anything. Who simply picked up the stories from the people who were paid by the West to – about Serbian atrocities. I mean, the journalists were sent down there to get a story on Serbian atrocities and they would look around for them and didn’t find them, but somebody would make them up and tell them that. I mean, it was totally invented, that humanitarian crisis.

There were, of course, the Kosovo Albanian terrorists who started murdering people and that naturally, inevitably caused government repression. I mean, they attacked the director of a university. They were attacking sort of anybody who was friendly to the government and then naturally there was a repression. And then, of course the repression was the excuse to – that was called a “humanitarian crisis.”

But it was not on a racial basis because of the Kosovo nationalists were even murdering members of their own ethnic group if they were cooperating with the government. And there was not a – there was not a racial or ethnic oppression against Albanians who also lived in other parts of Serbia and had all their rights. So, that was just invented because NATO needed a new mission.

The whole point of this was that the Soviet Union had collapsed and there was no reason for NATO, which was supposed to be a defence organization against the Soviet Union. There was no Soviet Union. NATO needed a new mission and Kosovo was the excuse for that. It was to transfer NATO from a defence organization into a human rights intervention organization. Give it a new mission – gave it a new mission. There was a meeting of NATO at that time. The whole purpose of that was to save NATO and expand it, which they’re still doing. So, it was to transfer NATO from a defensive into an offensive, aggressive organization that could operate all over the world.

GR: NATO nations that bill themselves as helping to spread freedom and so on. But it seems that NATO’s actions are not building up democracy, so much as literally tearing them apart. I mean, Yugoslavia is really just a set of independent countries now. Do you think the aim in the current NATO manipulating war in Ukraine is serving the same set of purposes? I mean, to split Russia apart the same way they split Yugoslavia apart?

DJ: Absolutely. Absolutely. Kosovo – the way NATO treated Yugoslavia was precisely a laboratory experiment in how they would later attack Russia.

And you see, this thing about democracy: one thing is, you always know that they – they have a set script for this that they use all over the place. I mean, you have a wicked dictator who wants to act like Hitler, ‘Whoa whoa whoa, here comes Hitler again.’ And then, ‘There’s bad dictator who wants to kill people. We must stop him.’

Well, first of all, Milosevic was not a dictator. He was a perfectly democratically elected leader who always had a coalition government, he never ruled by himself. He did not control the press at all, which was mostly critical. He had a coalition government. He was more democratically elected probably than others in that same region. But we’re against him, so he’s a dictator. That’s one thing: you’re always – the enemy is always a dictator and that’s why we’re for democracy, because he’s a dictator.

Well, I can tell you that is absolutely not true. And then, you use – you exploit minority differences, you exploit ethnic differences in order to cause huge trouble. I mean, there were – it was possible to solve the problems in Yugoslavia, all of them could have been solved. But the United States did not want negotiations.

And you have to see that they – there were these false negotiations in Rambouillet, France with NATO and the Serb government. And it started out with Professor Rugova who was a Kosovo Albanian who should have been elected by them and they shoved him out of the way and brought in a gangster, Hashim Thaci, who Madeleine Albright decided was the real leader. And he was the head of this armed group that was assassinating people. And in the Kosovo delegation they replaced the peaceful person, the head of the armed band. And then, Madeleine Albright, while they were working towards some kind of compromise, put down conditions that the Serbs would have to allow NATO free run of their whole country. And that means they – Madeleine Albright was demanding that Serbia agree to let NATO troops to go wherever they want all over the country and exempt from law. That is, they could kill people or commit all kinds of crimes and they could not be prosecuted. Well, no Serb government, no government at all could accept those conditions.

And so, they didn’t accept them. And then, they told them ‘Oh, he refuses to negotiate, so we have to bomb.’ That’s the way it went, it’s unbelievable. But people believed it.

GR: The Yugoslavian War was essentially a prototype, a blueprint for wars to follow, wasn’t it? I mean, the wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, now Haiti and anywhere else that the elite countries decide must be attacked to fight for ‘human rights.’ It used to be about, as you say, you know, stopping fascism, communism, threats of invasion, dictators. I mean, how did this humanitarian and intervention become the chosen method by which the need for war is articulated? I mean, can you place it on any set of individuals or circumstances?

DJ: Well, you see, in a way it’s always been the Western thing. And when they went into Africa or something, it was also – I mean, it was to fight savages who bring – they didn’t use the term ‘human rights’ but they would use similar terms like that. I mean, they always push virtue ahead of them as their excuse for going there. The terms may change. ‘Human rights’ became the word after the US failure in Vietnam. They had to become very virtuous. So there was a whole series of conferences of human rights in the Helsinki Agreements in Europe. The conclusion of those agreements was supposed to make peace by saying that they couldn’t change the borders. But then, the United States went right in to change the borders on the excuse of ‘human rights.’

And by ‘human rights’ we especially mean minority rights. If you notice, the whole tendency in the last decades for the West is no longer to define democracy by the majority, but by the rights of minorities. And you could almost always find a discontented minority anywhere. And then, that discontented minority becomes the victim that you have to support.

Of course, but it happens that, in fact, the real victim minority is not on your side as in Ukraine. Well, that’s different.

GR: Yeah.

DJ: At that point, the minority cannot succeed. When we like the minority, the minority has the perfect right to succeed and we’ll go in and help it. But if it’s a minority that we don’t like, why it just better stay put. And that’s what you see in Ukraine where the Russian-speaking minority of Eastern Ukraine, which did not appreciate having the elected government of – for someone they voted for being overthrown with the help of Victoria Nuland of the State Department.

We will then – we then armed the Ukrainians that we put in power in Kyiv to attack those people. So, it’s a total double standard.

GR: Just talking about again, I mean, you mentioned like all of the major political leaders. I mean, comparing Ukraine to Yugoslavia, could you talk about like the way the money was – how money was made by the NATO side, you know, and how that has, you know – maybe there are signs that they are trying to attack that same dynamic in, you know, Ukraine or what’s left of it when the war ends.

DJ: I don’t quite see – I mean, war is always making money, you know, that’s its – it’s definitely making money for the arms manufacturers. But I don’t think – you see, you always have to have some moralistic excuse. You don’t – you can’t tell people, ‘We’re going to go to war because it’s good for the arms industry.’ So, of course it’s good for the arms industry.

What comes politically is always the cover-up story. And the cover-up story has to be, you know, ‘We’re overthrowing a wicked dictator,’ or – especially the Hitler model since most of – especially Americans don’t know anything about world history, except they’ve heard about Hitler. So, you model it on that. You’re – you model whoever is the leader of the country that you want to overthrow, you model him on Hitler and make up your story around that.

I mean, the extent of lies is unbelievable. I was there, so I saw it. I couldn’thave believed it. Now I realize that they just go on lying and lying and lying. But that’s the first time I had witnessed close-up just the extent to which they make things up and staged events to look like – they stage events – there’s some – there was an incident in Kosovo where the government attacked a base of what they call terrorists, you can call them whatever you want. But they had been assassinating policemen. And they had a fight and they won. And they had announced it to the press, this was no secret. And the American in charge of things went in there and said, ‘Oh, this is horrible,’ and he put on a whole show. That was the Racak Massacre which wasn’t. And it was a police action which the Americans turned into an ethnic cleansing thing. I mean, they just staged these sort of things all the time. And people fall for it.

And the left wing fell for it. They thought, ‘Oh, well this is a good war because we’re saving people from something.’ And it’s not true. What they did is they – Yugoslavia was a functioning country. It had its difficulties, but actually, it was quite well off and it was – it had remnants of socialism and also it was attached to the Non-Aligned Movement. The United States had just thought it had won the Cold War, it had defeated the Soviet Union which it hadn’t. The Soviet Union collapsed from within.

But they wanted to get rid of the last trace of socialism in Europe and a country which had been very important in the international Non-Aligned Movement. It was very friendly with independent countries, with Arab countries.

And so, the whole idea was to break that country up and into non-functional little pieces. I mean, Bosnia to this day is just as divided as ever. It has no – it’s supposedly independent, but in fact, it’s ruled by what they call the ‘High Representative’ which is chosen by NATO and it happens to be a German. So, this is a victory for the German revanchisme against their enemies in two world wars. They got Bosnia, because in fact, they have a boss there and the country is totally divided, non-functional. The population is leaving by droves, so it’s de-populating. The same thing is happening in Macedonia.

So, you don’t have a group of independent countries, you have two members of the EU who are not better – the people are not better off than they were in Yugoslavia because those were – Slovenia and Croatia were very prosperous in Yugoslavia. And they were lured to get out and, ‘Oh, you can be a part of Europe, you can be part of a great, big, Western club.’ So, that lured them out of Yugoslavia. And that began the whole thing of falling apart. And the Germans were much behind that, because undoing part of World War I. And the Serbs who had been the allies of the West were totally abandoned by the West who turned around and branded them as the bad guys.

GR: Yeah.

DJ: To their great surprise by the way. One parallel – you see, the US went into Kosovo and the moment they got there, they started building a huge military base. Now that was not in the program, right? That was – it was going in there for human rights. And what does the United States do? It immediately starts building this huge base, Bondsteel, in Kosovo.

And what is the parallel is that the motive of the United States in Ukraine was blatantly, obviously wanting to capture the Russian base of Sevastopol in Crimea. And so, naturally, inevitably, the Russians took back Crimea which had only been given to Ukraine very recently, with a referendum showing that the people there wanted to be in Russia because they could not sit there and have the United States take over Russia’s main naval base and make it a NATO base. That’s so obvious.

GR: Mm-hmm.

DJ: And people are acting as if they don’t notice that. Unbelievable. They say the Russians had no motive. They just – just feeling bad, they went in and attacked poor little Ukraine. Whereas, Ukraine was being armed to the teeth to be an enemy of Russia. There’s a whole history to that, but I can’t go into that.

Global Research: The KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army, considered freedom fighters in Kosovo, they’ve actually been gangsters and thugs who commit insurgencies against the Yugoslavs, affecting, you know, police, a professor, and so on. And then, the Yugoslavian government sends forces or police to, you know, in response. But it’s only that latter portion that gets captured in media and it gives the impression that they’re ethnically cleansing the area. Of course, you write that they also, the Kosovo Liberation Army, also happens to be Al-Qaeda offshoots and they get their funding and training from the CIA. That’s not public news. So, I mean, what exactly is the basis of this information?

Kit Klarenberg: Yeah, sure. So, I mean, at the risk of (inaudible). In fact, Kosovo was a portion of Yugoslavia. It was a province within the wider federal republic. Historically, it had – had always had significant Albanian population, but it is regarded – I mean, was, but still is – regarded as the cradle of Serb civilization or Serbia’s Jerusalem. It culturally, historically, spiritually, it’s a very important place where, in 1389, the Serbs fought back the advancing Ottomans, the Turks. And this led to a flourishing of Serb Orthodox culture in the area for many people. Serb Orthodox churches, it used to be home to more but many have been destroyed over the past few decades.

Now within Yugoslavia, it was always an extremely poor backwater. Unkind language, but it was a place of high unemployment and high poverty within a wider socialist republic that sits – that was economically successful for the most part. And it received significant sums from the central government that would uplift its population over the years.

Now in the 1980s, Albanian nationalist separatists started trying to cleanse the area of Slavic inhabitants, and this was especially brutal. Village elders gave young Albanians instructions to start raping Serb women and girls and all sorts of other rather illustrious activities. And so, its Serb population started to dwindle by design. Now with the coming to power of Slobodan Milosevic in, towards the end of the 1980s, he sort of reversed this by first occupying Kosovo with a heavy Yugoslav military presence and moving back – or moving Serb inhabitants to the province. This led to the creation of an exile group in Switzerland of embittered Kosovo Albanians who were seeking to achieve independence for the province/reunification with Albania which is to the South.

In the mid-90s, this translated into the murder of police officers and local officials and politicians by the Kosovo Liberation Army who, as you say, they were tied to Al-Qaeda and they were funded and trained by the CIA and MI6. And this effectively became an all-out guerrilla war in 1998. The Yugoslav army was sent in in a sizable fashion to try and fight back this insurgency.

The international community, or the US as it’s known parenthetically decided that this was a major issue, a cause-celebre of human rights of the day. And via the UN, brokered a peace agreement under which the Yugoslav army was to rule in Kosovo and this is towards the end of 1998.

Now, there were no obligations placed on the KLA as a result of this. So, they just used the absence of the army to carry on rampaging, killing civilians. And they had an explicit objective of maximizing civilian casualties because then any Kosovo Albanians killed can be spun as, ‘Oh, well this is not an attack, a kind of counterattack on a jihadist insurgency, it is a wider assault on the civilian population.’

And so, heading into the start of 1999, the KLA was engaged in a variety of highly provocative acts in an attempt to row Yugoslav’s forces back into the fray, as it were. The UN set up a Kosovo verification which is called the OSCE, that’s the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Their job was to monitor Yugoslav authorities’ compliance with the ceasefire. It wasn’t charged with ensuring the KLA didn’t engage in incendiary acts.

Now in January of 1999, there is an incident in Racak which is a strategically vital village overlooking a major transport hub within Kosovo where the KLA had set up – it’s a mountain town overlooking motorways below that led from Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, to other significant parts of the province. Now the KLA set up expansive shooting nests and trenches and other sorts of stations in the area in order to attack passing Yugoslav government vehicles which went through the area frequently and draw them in to direct combat. This happened in January and there was a very, very brutal shootout, a counter-terror operation led by local security forces at least, which resulted in a large number of dead on both sides.

Now the head of the OSCE, Kosovo verification which was an individual named William Walker who was a veteran of Ronald Reagan’s Dirty Wars in Latin America throughout the 1980s where the subject of interest was the Iran-Contra scandal. I mean, this is where money generated from the illicit sales of arms to Iran and Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War throughout the —

GR: Was he not a former – was he not a former US ambassador to El Salvador?

KK: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, this was a time when El Salvador was being used for the illicit trade of cocaine in order to finance those same Dirty Wars in Nicaragua. And he had personally whitewashed the massacre of Jesuit priests in El Salvador saying, “In times of great emotions, things like this happen.” Now suddenly, he’s had this devastating conversion by the time he’s leading this OSCE group monitoring the situation in Kosovo, he’s a committed humanitarian.

Now following the shootout in January 1999, Walker led a procession of Western journalists to Racak where there was a number of hardly Kosovo Albanian civilians, they were Kosovo Albanians dressed in civilian clothes. Serbs who had apparently been torn apart in cold blood by Yugoslav police and army gunfire. He subsequently gave a press conference at which he stated unequivocally that this was a massacre of civilians because they were civilians and demanded the Yugoslav authorities hand over the names of police and the officials involved in this massacre, or else, promising grave consequences if they didn’t comply.

Now the reality was that, yes, that these were KLA fighters who had likely died in – almost certainly died in combat with Yugoslav forces. But by framing it as an attack on the wider population, it served as the foundation for NATO’s illegal intervention in Yugoslavia called Operation: Allied Force which was a 78 day-long completely illegal bombing campaign against the wider Yugoslavia as it was at the time.

In years subsequently, other European members of that OSCE delegation were left to ponder whether this was a deliberate setup and indeed, whether William Walker was working for the CIA was deliberately pushing the wider organization into a position where they effectively supported NATO airstrikes on Yugoslavia.

GR: Okay. Well, could you talk about the role of an independent Kosovo, separate from Serbia and what role it plays for US and NATO figures, you know, generally. I mean, was there a way that the US and its partners could take advantage of it? I mean, you know, politically or financially or otherwise?

KK: Yeah, sure. It was in the words of the New York Times, like a glittering prize. It’s a very resource rich area that is home to what’s known as the Trepca Mines where there’s an enormous amount of zinc, and gold, and silver, and lead, and aluminum in Kosovo. And US officials had their eye on it. I might add that Strobe Talbott, who was a senior Clinton administration advisor, helped oversee the bombing of Yugoslavia admitted in 2005 that the reason that the US bombed Yugoslavia was because of Belgrade’s resistance to the broader trend of political and economic reform in the region, which is to say, neoliberal rape and pillage. I mean, we see this in the form of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union where a large number of countries have fallen victim to US shock therapy. It has been a disaster for the populations and countries involved. And they wanted to impose this on Yugoslavia which, towards the end of the 20th century was still putatively a socialist system with 75 percent of the economy (inaudible).

And the bombing campaign itself – and this is an interesting feature that’s often forgotten – it primarily focused on Yugoslavia’s industry. It destroyed all manner of manufacturers and chemical plants making hundreds of thousands of people jobless. In terms of trying to stop the Yugoslav army, purge the province of the KLA, they officially destroyed just 14 tanks versus over 300-400 industrial sites. So, you know, that’s where their objectives truly lay.

I think it’s interesting though, because Kosovo is kind of a bell weather for US imperial to fight. So, that the hope was with Kosovo wrenched out of Belgrade’s grasp at last, that it would be completely defenceless and easily exploitable and it could be asset stripped and its resources just sapped out of it in a manner of a Global South pull in the 1800s. In domestic political issues and also the fact that the US never invests, it takes it never gives, how it creates lots of problems. And also, the burning issue is the fact that they remain the site of multiple pogroms by the Kosovo Albanian majority. There remains a significant Serb population. It is a political problem that is not easily resolvable, let alone reprehensible and backed by Western power.

So, they don’t really know what to do. I mean, Kosovo still has the highest unemployment and poverty rate in Europe. Recently, they were recognized as an independent political state and its passports were recognized as legitimate travel documents by the European Union. And almost immediately, 200,000 Kosovo Albanians left. It’s already got a tiny population as it is overall. This is precipitating a major demographic collapse in a region where demographics are already terrible. So, it’s almost like they are the masks of their own destruction.

—intermission—-

Part two

GR: If you just joined us, you’re listening to the Global Research News Hour and our guest is Kit Klarenberg, investigative journalist. Kit, could you talk a bit about Otpor, that’s the – it’s a group that’s – it’s an NGO that’s working to subvert the sitting president Milosevic both within the party and abroad and it seems to have taken shape as a sort of an instigator for other coloured revolutions around the world. Do you want to explain what they’re all about?

KK: Yeah, sure. So, I mean Otpor which is Serbian for “Resist,” it was a dissident youth group that was created by the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, which its own founders admit was set up to do overtly what the CIA did covertly, how they funnelled money to opposition groups to undermine enemy governments. They were given an enormous amount of money in training by US government agencies and, it seems, the CIA in order to get rid of Milosevic. It became a huge movement that gave the appearance of it being fully grassroots and they were at the forefront of anti-Milosevic organizing and at the forefront of the October, 2000 bulldozer revolution which got rid of Milosevic once and for all. I mean, this followed an election which allegedly had fraudulent results and Milosevic’s failure. The US pumped tens of millions into this, which in reverse, it would be like Belgrade’s spending billions trying to influence the result of a US election which would be completely illegal.

It was so successful and it got so much attention. There’s even a documentary narrated by Martin Sheen called “Bringing Down a Dictator,” it’s all very hokey. They became an international sensation and subsequently started exporting their model of regime change to other countries, particularly within the Soviet sphere like Georgia and Kazakhstan and Ukraine. And they tried it in Belarus, but it failed. But in each case, there was an almost identical youth group in – I forget the name, but this was a group in Georgia and Ukraine which was highly modelled on Otpor and indeed trained by then. Otpor evolved into CANVAS, the Center for Applied NonViolent Actions and Strategies or something similar and they have since gone on to train hundreds of groups around the world onto all manner of campaigns which are concerned with regime change. They’re of the Stratfor emails, Stratfor being the shadow CIA released by Wikileaks which showed that they are in receipt of US funding and target governments the US doesn’t like. One Stratfor staffer states that when applied directly they are as devastating as an aircraft carrier in terms of taking down governments the US doesn’t like. And this was a wider attempt to weaponize – part of a wider attempt to weaponize civil society which still thrived under the alleged Stalin-esque dictator Milosevic during the final years of Yugoslavia. There was funding for media groups, charities, or NGOs, et cetera. And they were all ultimately arraigned against the government. And the kind of boomerang effect of this is that in Serbia today, there is widespread distrust of Western-funded NGOs and perceived foreign meddling in Serbia’s eyes.

GR: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean I’m going to get to that in a minute. But I wanted to ask you about how – I mean, it’s been said that the war in Yugoslavia has become a blueprint for future wars, the wars that have followed. Could you talk about any of the significant similarities that you’ve seen between the war in Yugoslavia 25 years ago and the war in Ukraine this last two years?

KK: Yeah, sure. So, I mean it’s very much the same playbook that’s been applied over and over again. Often by the same individuals, same intelligence officials, same, you know, government figures in the years since.

The war, the destruction of Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s is kinda of ground zero for a global Pax Americana which seems to be becoming rather spectacularly unstuck from the fields of Eastern Ukraine as we speak. I mean, in the parallels to draw are, number 1: secret financing of the extremely brutal paramilitary groups. The West is doing this in Eastern Ukraine from 2014 onwards. You have groups like Azov, Right Sector, Centuria. These are all neo-Nazi, neo-fascist paramilitaries that were ruling civilian areas of Donbas with an iron fist and engaged in all sorts of perverse levels of violence towards innocent civilians. I strongly suspect as with Yugoslavia that the purpose was to try and drag Russia into the conflict somehow, because there is a widespread belief in Russia that the Russian speakers of Ukraine are parts of Ryski Mir, Russian World, and therefore they are our people and it’s our duty to protect them.

And there’s also, I think, this relentless atrocity propaganda without context as to the very interesting parallel and that’s played out in numerous proxy conflicts. So, in Syria we heard a lot about the courageous moderate rebels and freedom fighters and didn’t hear so much about the fact that they were in bed with Al-Qaeda and they were engaged in criminal acts like organ harvesting and the sale of drugs to finance their activities.

I mean, another parallel to draw is the moralizing effect where, in Yugoslavia when the bombing happened, the line was that this is humanitarian, this is for liberation. We are rescuing the poor Kosovo Albanian civilians from certain death and this kind of Holocaust 2.0 that’s being cooked up by Milosevic’s cronies. It’s the same in Ukraine where all manner of rhetoric about Kyiv staging a heroic defence of European values. It’s a very good way of getting Western citizens, particularly liberal, onside. I mean, you look at the rhetoric of the time in 1999, there were figures such as Vaclav Havel who is a post-communist leader in Czechoslavakia who called the NATO assault the “most moral war of his time” and that this is rewriting the rules of war around good and justice.

Yeah, I mean, in reality if you say that was a gangbeating of a largely defenceless country from the skies. And there are declassified British documents – Ministry of Defence documents – where they talk about how, utterly ineffective and pointless of there’s a lot of stuff they were doing. They’d be doing, what, Serbia’s Interior Ministry and this was hailed as this courageous act behind closed doors. They admitted that they achieved nothing, that was actually counterproductive in terms of turning people against the government.

If I could use another example from the Yugoslav wars which I think are very, very apropos: in Bosnia, the US was backing the Bosniaks and the Bosnian War raged from 1992 to 1995 and it pitted Bosnian Muslims, Bosniaks, Bosnian Croats, and Bosnian Serbs against one another. It was a hellish cycle of medieval violence. They were backing the – first, the Bosniaks, and then the Bosniaks and Croats when they united in anti-Serb efforts. And they were just encouraged to reject peaceful settlements and negotiations and just keep fighting with the promise that, well, you have our unconditional financial and military support.

Now when the US got bored of this war at the end of 1995, they forced the Bosniaks into peace negotiations and imposed terms on them that were far worse than any prior Yugoslav or UN or EU-brokered deal and then told them, ‘Well, you have to sign this or you’re on your own and we’re going to abandon you.’ And there was a lot of bitterness amongst Bosniak nationalists that feel they have to sign this peace deal with a “gun to their heads.” And I think it’s going to be the same in Ukraine where a large number of Ukrainians genuinely believe promises from the Biden administration that, you know, we’re in this until the bitter end and you have as much support as you need, we will provide, and everything. And then now, when that’s increasingly becoming – it’s increasingly becoming clear that that’s not the case and they’re going to get thrown under the bus. They are extremely anxious and upset and rather revolted by it. But you know, ultimately the US is contemplating it as an investment opportunity and with a planned post-war asset stripping and privatization of Ukraine. They need enough of the population alive to work a subsistence wage for Western corporations and investors. So, the time is probably right now for it to end.

That’s an interesting historical parallel which people have had enough of…

GR: Yeah.

KK: It’s highly apropos.

GR: Yeah. I’ve just got one minute left in this interview. Could you maybe comment on what you’ve heard from people in the country about how the war affected life and politics in Serbia, you know, 25 years later?

KK: Oh, well, I mean the scars remain today, like there are bombed-out buildings in the centre and the fear that the West has inflicted upon them is ever present on their lives. I mean, largely people walk around in perpetual – well, I wouldn’t say “fear” but there is a perpetual concern and acknowledge that it could happen all over again, you know, based on lies. I mean, they’ve done it before, they could very easily do it again.

GR: It’s been a fascinating conversation. I know you’ll have much more fascinating situations to address in the future. And then you had a couple of – more comments on your Substack coming up soon. So, thank you very much for agreeing to be a guest on my program.

KK: My pleasure. Cheers, Michael. Take care.

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