NO REPRESSION LIKE IT IN THE WORLD

"Across this last weekend, the Western propaganda machine was working overtime, celebrating the latest NATO miracle: the transformation of Serbian Kosovo into Albanian Kosova. A shameless land grab by the United States, which used the Kosovo problem to install an enormous military base (Camp Bondsteel) on other people's strategically located land, is transformed by the power of the media into an edifying legend of "national liberation"."
~ Diana Johnstone, "Independence in the Brave New World Order".

State Department hack defends US recognition of Kosovo independence to the Chinese:

Kosovo's situation is "unique", a senior U.S. diplomat told China on Tuesday, trying to assuage Beijing's opposition to independence for the region from Serbia.

"As I emphasized to our Chinese interlocutors today, it is quite a unique situation in Kosovo, really very unique, and there's nothing like it in the world," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill told reporters in Beijing.

Really?? "There's nothing like it in the world"? Not quite:

. . . [I]f bad treatment of the local population were to disqualify a state from exercising sovereignty over part of its territory, then an awful lot of countries would be eligible for enforced amputation: Turkey would have to be stripped of Turkish Kurdistan . . .

At the same link, check the numbers:

The Foundation for Humanitarian Law led by Nata_a Kandi_, much beloved and much bankrolled by Western governments and non-governmental organizations, runs a project seeking to establish the number of dead and missing in Kosovo. According to an article in the Croatian magazine, Globus, "The project has documented 9,702 people dead or missing during the war in Kosovo from 1998 to 2000. Of this number, as things stand now, 4,903 killed and missing are Albanians and 2,322 are Serbs, with the rest either belonging to other nationalities or their ethnic identity remaining uncertain."

At least 40,000 Kurds were murdered by the Turkish state during the 1990s, the same time that Serbia was allegedly trying "to annihilate over one million Kosovar Albanian Muslims," according to another State Department hack, Daniel Fried.

Compare Turkey's program of "ethnic cleansing", from Hill and Fried's employer:

The exact number of persons forcibly displaced from villages in the southeast since 1984 is unknown. Most estimates agree that 2,600 to 3,000 villages and hamlets have been depopulated. A few NGO's put the number of people forcibly displaced as high as 2 million. Official census figures for 1990--before large-scale forced evacuations began--indicate that the total population for the 10 southeastern provinces then under emergency rule was 4 to 4.5 million people, half of them in rural areas. Since all rural areas in the southeast have not been depopulated, the estimate of 2 million evacuees is probably too high. On the low end, the Government reports that through 1997 the total number of evacuees was 336,717. Rapidly growing demands for social services in the cities indicate that migration from the countryside has been higher than this figure. Although this urbanization is also accounted for in part by voluntary migration for economic or educational reasons also related to the conflict, the figure given by a former M.P. from the region--560,000--appears to be the most credible estimate of those forcibly evacuated.

Compare against figures released in December 2006:

The long-awaited results of the government-commissioned national IDP survey were released in December 2006, confirming that the number of IDPs in Turkey is significantly higher than the previous government estimate of 355,807. According to the survey between 953,680 and 1,201,200 people were displaced for security-related reasons from the east and south-east of the country between 1986 and 2005.

How many ethnic Albanians were "ethnically cleansed" from Kosovo? After crunching the numbers, Kosovo looks less and less like "a really very unique" situation and more and more like much ado about nothing. Or I should say "much ado about oil":

Camp Bondsteel, the biggest “from scratch” foreign US military base since the Vietnam War is near completion in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. It is located close to vital oil pipelines and energy corridors presently under construction, such as the US sponsored Trans-Balkan oil pipeline. As a result defence contractors—in particular Halliburton Oil subsidiary Brown & Root Services—are making a fortune.

[ . . . ]

The contract to service Camp Bondsteel is the latest in a string of military contracts awarded to Brown & Root Services. Its fortunes have grown as US militarism has escalated. The company is part of the Halliburton Corporation, the largest supplier of products and services to the oil industry.

In 1992 Dick Cheney, as Secretary of Defence in the senior Bush administration, awarded the company a contract providing support for the US army’s global operations. Cheney left politics and joined Halliburton as CEO between 1995 and 2000. He is now US vice president in the junior Bush administration. In 1992 Brown & Root built and maintained US army bases in Somalia earning $62 million. In 1994 Brown & Root built bases and support systems for 18,000 troops in Haiti doubling its earnings to $133 million. The company received a five-year support contract in 1999 worth $180 million per-year to build military facilities in Hungary, Croatia and Bosnia. It was Camp Bondsteel, however, that was dubbed “the mother of all contracts” by the Washington based Contract Services Association of America.

[ . . . ]

According to leaked comments to the press, European politicians now believe that the US used the bombing of Yugoslavia specifically in order to establish Camp Bondsteel. Before the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the Washington Post insisted, “With the Middle-East increasingly fragile, we will need bases and fly over rights in the Balkans to protect Caspian Sea oil.”

The scale of US oil corporations investment in the exploitation of Caspian oil fields and the US government demand for the economy to be less dependent on imported oil, particularly from the Middle-East, demands a long term solution to the transportation of oil to European and US markets. The US Trade & Development Agency (TDA) has financed initial feasibility studies, with large grants, and more recently advanced technical studies for the New York based AMBO (Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria Oil) Trans-Balkan pipeline.

[ . . . ]

The $1.3 billion trans-Balkan AMBO pipeline is one of the most important of these multiple pipelines. It will pump oil from the tankers that bring it across the Black Sea to the Bulgarian oil terminus at Burgas, through Macedonia to the Albanian Adriatic port of Vlore. From there it will be pumped on to huge 300,000 ton tankers and sent on to Europe and the US, bypassing the Bosphorus Straits—the congested and only route out of the Black Sea where tankers are restricted to 150,000 tons.

US support for Kosovo is all about the oil. And that may help explain why the new NATO protege is a criminal society.

For the moment, it appears that Russia will bide its time. China, with its own ethnic "problem" in Xinjiang, is standing with Russia.

What might Russia and China do? It might be appropriate for them to gather a consensus within the SCO to restrict Western access to Central Asian energy resources. Russia recently struck a couple of blows against the Western-backed Nabucco pipeline, which may explain Turkish foreign minister Babacan's current visit to Russia. Babacan may be trying to save an agreement between Russian Gazprom and Turkish Botaş.

Maybe, too, Putin can whisper something in Babacan's ear about possible Russian support for the "unique" situation of the Kurds under Turkish repression.