During Bill
Clinton’s first term of office as President of the United
States, Madeleine Albright was the U.S. Ambassador to the
United Nations and the U.S.
representative on the UN Security Council. An independent report commissioned
by the Organization of African Unity states that in 1994 the U.S., France, Belgium
and the Catholic and Anglican churches used their influence within the UN to
actively block any use of peacekeeping forces to prevent the genocide in Rwanda.
Furthermore, the report specifically accuses Albright of using her position on
the Security Council to block any form of military rescue mission. The Clinton administration
then hypocritically proceeded to blame the United Nations for the Rwandan
disaster.
As U.S.
Ambassador to the UN, Albright was also responsible for defending and
aggressively pursuing sanctions against Iraq. According to figures released
by the UN and various aid organizations, by the mid-1990s those sanctions were
directly responsible for the deaths of at least 500,000 Iraqis, most of them
children. When asked by reporter Leslie Stahl in a 1996 interview if this was a
price worth paying, Albright replied that “the price is worth it.” As a result
of the outcry over her remarks, the Clinton
administration changed its tactics and began blaming Saddam Hussein for those
deaths because he was supposedly diverting humanitarian aid into building up
his military. Whatever crimes Saddam Hussein may have committed against the
Iraqi people, the fact remains that almost all shipments of medical supplies to
Iraq were blocked by the U.S.
under the hoax that they could be used to produce weapons of mass destruction.
Meanwhile, under the pretext of defending the illegal “no-fly zone” imposed by
the U.S. and Britain without the consent of the UN, U.S. and British bombers
destroyed Iraqi pharmaceutical factories, hospitals and water treatment plants.
During the early
years of the first Clinton administration,
Madeleine Albright also played a key role in shaping U.S. policy towards the Balkans. U.S.
imperialism had just emerged as the world’s sole military superpower and was
anxious to use that position to stop its economic downslide and block the
emergence of any challengers to its imperial rule. German imperialism was eager
to use its influence over Croatia
to consolidate its control over the Danube
transportation route and access to Middle Eastern oil. For its part, the U.S.
was desperate to block the German expansion southward, but it had no
traditional allies in the Balkans. Following Albright’s advice, the Clinton administration championed the Bosnian cause and
interfered in the negotiations between the Bosnians, Croatians and Serbs in
such a way as to block any peaceful settlement to the dispute over Bosnia’s secession from Yugoslavia. At the same time, U.S. emissaries were assuring Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic that the U.S. considered Bosnia
to be an internal affair of Yugoslavia,
encouraging the Serbs to pursue an expansionist policy towards Bosnia.
Of course, when civil war inevitably broke out, the U.S. promptly declared its
“humanitarian duty” to protect the Bosnians from the Serbs.
Albright was
U.S. Secretary of State during Clinton’s second
term and oversaw the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan which was
producing crucial vaccines for the Sudanese people. Once again the excuse given
by the Clinton
administration was that the facility was being used to produce weapons of mass
destruction, although subsequent investigations proved these claims to be
totally false. In fact, the U.S.
pharmaceutical giants have had a long-standing dispute with African
pharmaceutical manufacturers because they have been providing cheap vaccines
and medicines to the African people, cutting into the profits of the U.S.
drug cartels. It has become clear that this act by Clinton and Albright had
nothing to do with combating terrorism or the production of “weapons of mass
destruction” and everything to do with eliminating competition to the U.S.
pharmaceutical monopolies.
During
Albright’s final years as Clinton’s
Secretary of State she once again interfered in the Balkans. The Kosovar Albanians have been struggling for independence
from Yugoslavia and
reunification with Albania
ever since Britain divided
the country at the end of the Balkan Wars and gave half of Albania to the newly-established Kingdom of Yugoslavia. This struggle re-emerged
after the death of Yugoslav leader Tito when his successors decided to
consolidate their power in Serbia
by extinguishing Kosovo’s autonomous status. The Serb campaign against the
Albanians reached a peak in the early 1980s with Yugoslav tanks rolling into Prishtina and the closing of all Albanian-language schools
and universities. In the late 1980s Slobodan Milosevic once again played the
Kosovo card in order to consolidate his position as leader of the Yugoslavian
state. He addressed a Prishtina rally of over one
million Serbs (over 90 percent of whom were brought in from Serbia) and pledged to them that
Kosovo would never again be granted autonomy, but would remain a Serbian
province. Milosevic was swept to power on the resulting wave of Serbian
chauvinism and the Kosovar Albanians began an armed
struggle for self-determination. Milosevic’s speech in Prishtina
so alarmed the Croatian and Slovenian sections of the League of Yugoslav
Communists that they withdrew from the party, setting in motion the events that
led to the eventual secession of Croatia,
Slovenia and Bosnia
from the Yugoslav Federation. It should be noted that during this period the U.S.
government refused to condemn the Yugoslav attacks against the national rights
of the Kosovar Albanians.
With the fall of
socialism in Albania,
the U.S. State Department took over de
facto control of the Albanian government. However, the 1997 armed uprising
in Albania forced the U.S.
administrators to flee Tirana for a period of time and weakened American
control over the Balkans. However, Albright and the Clinton administration saw an opportunity to
regain their control by taking over Kosovo. During the late 1990s the armed
struggle of the Kosovar Albanians was escalating
under the leadership of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Initially the U.S. opposed the KLA as a terrorist organization
and the KLA leadership rejected any alliance with U.S. imperialism. However,
following their ouster from Albania
in 1997 the Americans changed their position. They began to woo some of the
military leaders of the KLA with promises of weapons and training and by 1999
the Americans had, for all intents and purposes, taken over that organization.
At the Rambouillet talks in early 1999, the
Americans, led by Albright, drafted an agreement that they knew Yugoslavia
could not sign since it would mean the end of Yugoslavian sovereignty.
Milosevic responded to the collapse of the Rambouillet
talks by escalating the Yugoslav military offensive against the KLA. This was
the excuse needed by the Americans to intervene. Claiming that the Serbs were
committing genocide, the U.S.
imperialists, led by Clinton and Albright, declared that it was their
“humanitarian duty” to intervene militarily to “protect” the Kosovar Albanians. As a result, NATO forces bombed Yugoslavia
for 78 days, eventually forcing the Milosevic regime to concede defeat and
agree to the de facto secession of
Kosovo. The war against Yugoslavia
was also used by the Americans to re-establish their military control over Albania.
Despite their claims of “humanitarian duty”, since establishing their control
over Kosovo the U.S.
imperialists have shown little regard for the wellbeing of the Kosovar Albanians, abandoning them to the mercies of
various criminal gangs and drug lords.
This is the
legacy of Madeleine Albright and the Clinton Democrats, whom Lloyd Axworthy would have us believe were a humanitarian and
peace-loving lot, to be much preferred to the warmongering Bush regime.