Among those countries was Spain, which, maintaining and following Albanian ideas and the erroneous inertia of that country's plans and the IC deployed there. Spain offered to set up a refugee camp where necessary, at its discretion. For this purpose, they were assigned a plot of land in the vicinity of Durres[1].
As quickly as possible, what was called Operation Alpha-Romeo[2] - Aid to Refugees - was set up by Spain for the construction and initial administration (later transferable) of a camp planned for some 5,000 people. The camp was never wholly filled for several reasons: a certain real delay in getting the material to Albania, that the assigned land was swampy and had to be dried previously, was located on the coast near Barí (Italy) and because, as we had foreseen, the refugees did not want to move away from the border point with Kosovo in KuKës, one hundred and fifty kilometers away from a terrible and dangerous road.
Besides, perhaps because of well done sake, it was build a not a provisional camp, but a camp with all sorts of details and specific accommodations. It was thought that it would be necessary for a long time, so it took a long time to perfect it. That was a fact that delayed their full availability and the entry of people into them. Another error, since the camp was only in real activity a little more than a month.
When the camp was correctly assembled, most potential refugees had already returned to their homes in Kosovo (another one of our predictions not followed by anyone). Precisely, on July 13, the installation was definitively closed, and the contingent returned to the national territory. The materials used in the construction were donated to UNHCR because it was less expensive than shipping them back to Spain.
In general, the attempt to accommodate the refugees in Albania was a very costly operation. Moreover, the noble efforts of the donor countries´soldiers were not compensated due to the closure of Albania and the respective governments, due their General staffs, due to particular interests in getting their hands on the coordination of the slow and questionable management of the EU, or due to the pure and "noble" eagerness of each of them to carry out the "war on their own" without consulting those who knew the general situation (NATO).
I must emphasize and clarify that this failure could not only be attributed to Spanish efforts; the contributions of other countries, although to a lesser extent by the Italians, were similarly fortunate because they made the same mistakes[3].
The worst case of all that I know was that of two huge camps started to be built by the Americans with the intention of having all the luxury of details thinking that they would be occupied for a long time. For this reason they were devised as far as possible from Kosovo, precisely in the south of Albania, near the border with Greece. These camps, according to my information, were never finished and were never stepped on by a refugee because of their building delay and because it was so far away from the aforementioned border, with such adverse conditions and dangerous roads.
Quite a few NGOs understood, albeit badly and late, the message and directed their efforts to the aforementioned KuKës border. In reality, most of them, as it usually happens in such an environment, fought to appropriate the cash aid from donors (some countries only contributed money), to make a name for themselves in this fairly lucrative business (many people use humanitarian aid as a means of life), to survive a crisis[4], or to own the useless or second-hand materials of the fields at the end of their work. The exponential increase of NGOs of all types and backgrounds is very common; as soon as a conflict begins also the first donations and subcontracts begin.
In both countries, as we had also previously announced and with very little success, refugees tended to return home with the first movements of NATO troops over Kosovo. This reaction naturally caused severe problems for the movement of NATO forces which were intended to be rapid and purely military.
Many sought to return protected under NATO cover, but only managed to block the few passable roads with long convoys of a mixture of vehicles (cars, trucks, cars pulled by animals, tractors, motorcycles, bicycles, buses and even people walking). It was necessary to react and to create specific areas of rest and concentration and even to stop their long columns, to allow the passage of the military convoys.
During the month and a half of the intermittent bombing campaign on Kosovo (from March, 24 to June,10), the role of the J-9 in identifying NGOs, their roles and the various hidden agendas of many of them, was also crucial in many respects. Not to overextend this section, as it is not the central theme of the article, to cite one of the most curious cases discovered or solved by CIMIC staff: Based on some complaints and petitions, the NGOs that moved through Kosovo, or entered and left the territory, were offered by some "hollow-headed thinker" the possibility of moving around the area using a beacon -which was given to them in FYROM- to be identified by the pilots at night, not to be attack in their movements at such times and to avoid what was then popularized as "collateral damage"[5]. It was enough to analyze the important increase of petitions and where petitions came from, to realize that the campaign of bombardment was paralyzing; This led us to suspect that their "humanitarian convoys" were not such and what they were really hiding were Serbian forces fleeing conflict zones, redeploying or creating safe bombing zones where they could shelter and rest during the night.
All Kosovar Albanians who had taken refuge in Albania and FYROM returned to Kosovo that summer, but most Kosovar Serbs had to flee the region. More than 200,000 non-Albanian Kosovars were forced to leave the province because of pressure and revenge from their Kosovar Albanian neighbors and unethical skirmishes by the UCK. Their properties were burned; cemeteries and most of the valuable places and monasteries of worship had to be protected. A significant number of civil enclaves resisted with a few Serbs who decided to remain on their properties, convinced of the seriousness of the IC's promises to protect them, but they were cornered by Albanians. This situation made them dependent on their security and subsistence on the protection and support of KFOR Units deployed in their immediate vicinity.
These narrated situations led us to the conviction that the frightened "lamb" supported energetically by the CI and the NATO troops, as soon as they returned to their homes, became a "wolf". They managed to take possession of property that was not theirs, to harass their non-Albanian neighbors, and even to destroy friendships and quite a few family ties, originated by the rubbing and proximity of so many years of coexistence or physical closeness. It was clear that our protection mission had changed its passive subject quite suddenly and clearly.
To initiate to impede such excesses and confronting the new situation, the first step was demilitarization and to establish exhaustive control over the UCK and its bloodthirsty chiefs (UN Resolution 1244); Second step was to restrict to the maximum the use of weapons leaving them a just few for their security and small protocol acts. Also it was narrow their existence and missions to operations in support of the civilian population in situations of natural disasters or caused by the hand of man; this support had to be provided obligatorily without distinction of ethnicity or religion. This latter demand, which was very difficult to achieve, and whenever something was done in this field in favor of the Serbs, it was reluctant.
These types of situations and tensions lengthened over time. I could verify it on-site. In December 2001, shortly after finishing my AFSOUTH assignment, given the excellent knowledge of the mission and a high level of Italian, I was appointed for six months as second Chief of the Multinational Spanish-Italian West Brigade of KFOR based in Pec; I joined already as a Colonel. My General (Italian), due to my previous experience in the mission, assigned me tasks concerning the contact with the OIs/NGOs, the Serbian minorities, and the control of the UCK in our sector.
We had a cold and difficult winter, which really made it very easy for me to get the real and hard image of Kosovo conflict´s aftermath; I realized who were the real persecuted; the tremendous silent work of NATO troops for the benefit of a few civilians; the monstrosity of specific hidden agendas of some NGOs; the delay in the reaction of the OIs dependents of the UN and the EU; and the evil intentions of the mostly murderers, the heads of the UCK.
There I understood that some things worked terrible or very terrible even though the CI's written agreements were clear and explicit, even though that the troops had a well-defined mission and that we had high morale and sufficient means. Kosovo's Serb minorities lived in fear and were increasingly afraid to think about their future, while the Kosovar-Albanians, perhaps taught by someone competent and influential, were much more emboldened and reluctant to accept the precepts and limitations set out in Resolution 1244.
To make matters worse, and as I announced before, quite a few NGOs covered varied, obscure, obscene and improper objectives and agendas. These NGO got as far as recruiting people to transform them into jihadist combatants (deceitfully recruiting or not), who were later incorporated into Al Qaeda type terrorist groups. Thus, these NGO managed to constitute what is still known as "White Al-Qaeda"[6].
The way many of them badly behaved was discovered by the CIMIC men of KFOR. Today even the Kosovar Ministry of the Interior recognized it; the strategy consisted on initially using a lambskin costume with the form of diverse and disguised NGOs - mostly financed by Saudi Arabia - that sprang up with the "healthy intentions" of rebuilding homes, create social canteens, set up outpatient clinics and finance the reconstruction of mosques and other types of centres where, finally, Salafist Islam was teach.
On the subject of mosques, they initially offered the "reconstruction" of old Ottoman mosques damaged by war and mutual repression. But, by chance, their reconstruction plans were always "so expensive" that it was cheaper to build new ones in which their signs and symbols turned out to be symbols that Salafism "as it happens" employs for its predicaments (very different from the rites and beliefs of previous on-site mosques, and very close to Al Qaeda and its subsidiaries speech).
As aforementioned, on their part Albanian majorities increasingly emboldened and were confident in achieving their longings and illusions of independence. They also were confident in improving the capacities of the UCK and its leaders to jump into politics in order to lead Kosovo with sure hand towards a situation they had never encountered in all their history. They only needed the impetus and widespread support of the CI.
For years, both the UN (through the mouths of its representatives from UNHCR and UNMIK) and NATO spent their time preventing, with all kinds of means and actions, that no one in Kosovo should try to declare the independence of the country and persecute or devastate the diminishing Serb-Kosovar minorities remaining in the territory. Precept, which was nothing new; because the very UN Resolution on Kosovo (1244, Articles 10 and 11) tacitly prevented it.
The UN resolution on Kosovo availed to lead Serbia to exit from the territory. Also helped, for a while, to calm the minds of the Serbs, to force and maintain a certain peace in the Kosovar civilian population, and to be able to control the UCK adequately. Step by step after a few years and without explanation of apparent weight, the situation was cooling and changing totally of sense.
The reality is often very stubborn, and therefore it is quite easy to analyze the current situation to find clues to those "hidden motives" that led to such an ignominious change in opinion or at least in international intention.
In addition to the fact that any act to dismember Yugoslavia into as many pieces as possible was beneficial for some Western countries (fundamentally the US, because it went against the interests of Serbia-Russia) there are other quite substantial reasons to dismember Yugoslavia, such as making the area a place of transit for much of the drug that arrives in Europe, important flows of trafficking in human beings, and the arms illegal market; another important reason was to make it a strategic point through which the United States manages to have projection onto the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and to secure the trade routes linking Europe with the Middle East through Turkey and the Balkans.
As if the above were not enough, the so-called AMBO project also appears on the scene. This project is the development of a pipeline to transport oil from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean through Bulgaria, Northern Macedonia, Kosovo, and Albania.
Kosovo, as we have seen, is not only a criminal state with various criminal activities, but also threatens to become one of the main bases of Jihadist Wahhabism, close to the heart of Europe. Kosovo is capable of inferring the participation of Kosovars in all the terrible current and future jihadist conflicts; all those actions are usually sponsored by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
In order to control this whole quilombo, it may be necessary to have one of the most important American military bases deployed on the European continent; I am referring to CAMP BONDSTEEL[7]. This is an enormous base incomprehensibly located in a country of limited recognition, without total legal legitimacy and less historical or necessary for NATO's interests to host such a large American installation[8]. A base that I once knew merely as the camp where to house the forces and the CG of the North American sector of KFOR.
KOSOVO; THE GREAT INTERNATIONAL DECEPTION - PART IV
[1] A port city on the shores of the Adriatic Sea in the western part of Albania, west of the capital Tirana.
[2] http://www.ejercito.mde.es/misiones/europa/albania/98_OPERACIONALFAROMEO.html
[3] https://elpais.com/diario/1999/04/18/internacional/924386401_850215.html
[4] At that time, and I imagine it is still the same today, setting up an NGO was so simple that it was enough to give a name to the organization to be founded, that of a responsible person (real or imaginary) and an address and telephone number as the place of location and contact. Anybody could set up an NGO, and I think they can still do it because there is no specific and verifiable register at the UN (UNHCR) to prevent the appearance of intruders or ill-intentioned people in this field.
As the only UN body concerning NGOs, there is what is known as the Committee on NGOs, established in 1946, although, instead, it only deals with those organizations that opt for any consultation in search of information and/or contracts. https://research.un.org/es/ngo (page 57)
There are also only two specific and related listings that can be found at https://esango.un.org/civilsociety/login.do https://esango.un.org/civilsociety/displayDPISearch.do?method=searchessionCheck=false
[5] https://elpais.com/diario/1999/09/22/internacional/937951215_850215.html
[6] "That is to say, small cells that by their form and functioning do not arouse more considerable suspicion but are ready to act. According to police figures, more than 150 Kosovars are currently in the ranks of DESA, a reasonably high percentage for a country of just over one million nine hundred thousand citizens.
http://www.ieee.es/Galerias/fichero/docs_marco/2015/DIEEEM07-2015_Kosovo_EsmaKucukalic.pdf
[7], the largest U.S. base in the world created from scratch since the Vietnam War outside U.S. territory. Located near Uroševac, in the eastern part of Kosovo. The base currently serves as the headquarters for NATO and one of the two KAFOR Force Groups, East. The other being the West in charge of the Italians in the vicinity of Pec.
[8]https://otralectura.com/2017/09/15/la-base-estadounidense-en-kosovo/
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Muy interesante y efectivamente clarificador. Muchas gracias mi coronel por el articulo. Efectivamente, parece que desde que los españoles abandonamos la base de ISTOK, no existe Kosovo para la sociedad española, pero no cabe duda de que este punto caliente en el corazón de Europa necesita de un seguimiento y ser considerado Zona de Interés de Inteligencia para las organizaciones de seguridad europeas, que espero, sean cada vez mas serias en este sentido; maxime tras las severas y reiteradas advertencias de los EEUU de que debemos ocuparnos un poquito mas de nuestra seguridad, que ya nos toca.