OSINFO - Open Sources Information

From: MASHABLE

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by Daniel Pipes
The Australian
April 15, 2008

The future of Europe is in play. Will it turn into "Eurabia," a part of the Muslim world? Will it remain the distinct cultural unit it has been over the last millennium? Or might there be some creative synthesis of the two civilizations?

The answer has vast importance. Europe may constitute a mere 7 percent of the world's landmass but for five hundred years, 1450-1950, for good and ill, it was the global engine of change. How it develops in the future will affect all humanity, and especially daughter countries such as Australia which still retain close and important ties to the old continent.

I foresee potentially one of three paths for Europe: Muslims dominating, Muslims rejected, or harmonious integration.

(1) Muslim domination strikes some analysts as inevitable. Oriana Fallaci found that "Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam." Mark Steyn argues that much of the Western world "will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries." Such authors point to three factors leading to Europe's Islamization: faith, demography, and a sense of heritage.

The secularism that predominates in Europe, especially among its elites, leads to alienation about the Judeo-Christian tradition, empty church pews, and a fascination with Islam. In complete contrast, Muslims display a religious fervor that translates into jihadi sensibility, a supremacism toward non-Muslims, and an expectation that Europe is waiting for conversion to Islam.

The contrast in faith also has demographic implications, with Christians having on average 1.4 children per woman, or about one third less than the number needed to maintain their population, and Muslims enjoying a dramatically higher, if falling, fertility rate. Amsterdam and Rotterdam are expected to be in about 2015 the first large majority-Muslim cities. Russia could become a Muslim-majority country in 2050. To employ enough workers to fund existing pension plans, Europe needs millions of immigrants and these tend to be disproportionately Muslim due to reasons of proximity, colonial ties, and the turmoil in majority-Muslim countries.

In addition, many Europeans no longer cherish their history, mores, and customs. Guilt about fascism, racism, and imperialism leave many with a sense that their own culture has less value than that of immigrants. Such self-disdain has direct implications for Muslim immigrants, for if Europeans shun their own ways, why should immigrants adopt them? When added to the already-existing Muslim hesitations over much that is Western, and especially what concerns sexuality, the result are Muslim populations that strongly resist assimilation.

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From: With a Grain of Salt

Posted: 18 Feb 2008 12:19 AM CST

While the European Union and the US, have acknowledged that they would be "opposed" to a " unilateral" declaration of independence of Kosovo, the secession of Kosovo from Serbia is already de facto. It is part of  a US-NATO military agenda. It is the culmination of the 1999 NATO led invasion. It responds to US-NATO strategic objectives. 

Moreover, the "compromise" Ahtisaari Proposal under the helm of the former Finnish Prime Minister to establish a "multi-ethnic" Kosovar State has little to do with "national sovereignty" or "independence". It is a copy and paste replicate of the structures imposed on Bosnia-Herzegovina under the 1995 Dayton agreements. It essentially sustains the authority of the military occupation. Under proposed blueprint, all the major decisions pertaining to public spending, social programs, monetary and trading arrangements would remain in the hands of the NATO-UN occupation administration. 

The re-election of a "pro-Western" president Boris Tadic in the Serbian elections is likely to "legitimize" Kosovo's de facto secession. Boris Tadic's Democratic Party takes its orders from Washington. In 2000, it actively participated in the ousting of Slobodan Milosevic from the Serbian presidency. Moreover, Boris Tadic as Serbian president, is also the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. He is unlikely to act without consulting Washington and Brussels in the event of a unilateral declaration of independence. 

Since the 1999 NATO invasion, Kosovo has become a territory under foreign military rule. Kosovo remains under UN administration, In practice, however, it is under NATO military jurisdiction. Secession from Serbia would reinforce the control of the NATO-UN occupation authority.  

The civilian government of the province is headed by Prime Minister, Hashim Thaci, former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) (Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës or UÇK in Albanian). Known for its extensive links to Albanian and European crime syndicates, the KLA was supported from the outset in the mid-1990s by the CIA and Germany's intelligence agency, the Bundes Nachrichten Dienst (BND). In the course of the 1999 war, the KLA was supported directly by NATO.  

Prime Minister of Kosovo Hashim Thaci, who now heads the Democratic Party of Kosovo  was known in the 1990s to be part of a crime syndicate, involved in drug trafficking and prostitution. During the Clinton administration, he was a protégé of Madeleine Albright. In the 1990s, Thaci founded the so-called "Drenica-Group", a criminal syndicate based in Kosovo, with links to the Albanian, Macedonian and Italian mafias. These links to criminal syndicates have been acknowledged both by Interpol and the US Congress. 

In 1997, the KLA was recognized by the U.S. as a terrorist organization linked to the drug trade. President Clinton's special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, described the KLA as, "without any questions, a terrorist group".

The Democratic Party of Kosovo is integrated by former members of a terrorist organization. It has maintained its links to organized crime. In fact, a large part of the political spectrum in Kosovo is dominated by former KLA members. Kosovo's previous prime minister Ramush Haradinaj and head of the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, elected in 2004, is also a former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army. In addition  to his links to organized crime, Hadadinaj was also indicted in 2005 for war crimes by the The Hague ICTY Tribunal. 

The NATO occupation of Kosovo responds to US foreign policy objectives. It secures a heavily militarized US zone of influence in Southern Europe. It ensures the militarization of strategic pipeline routes and transport corridors which link Western Europe to the Black Sea. It also protects the multibillion dollar heroin trade, which uses Kosovo and Albania as transit locations for the transshipment of Afghan produced heroin into Western Europe. 

Camp Bondsteel

Kosovo is home to one of America's largest military bases, Camp Bondsteel.  

Bondsteel was built on contract to the Pentagon by Halliburton, through its engineering subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR). Camp Bondsteel is considered to be "the largest and most expensive army base since Vietnam." with more than 6000 US troops.  

"Camp Bondsteel, the biggest “from scratch” foreign US military base since the Vietnam War  (...) 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.

In June 1999, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Yugoslavia, US forces seized 1,000 acres of farmland in southeast Kosovo at Uresevic, near the Macedonian border, and began the construction of a camp.

Camp Bondsteel is known as the “grand dame” in a network of US bases running both sides of the border between Kosovo and Macedonia. In less than three years it has been transformed from an encampment of tents to a self sufficient, high tech base-camp housing nearly 7,000 troops—three quarters of all the US troops stationed in Kosovo.

There are 25 kilometres of roads and over 300 buildings at Camp Bondsteel, surrounded by 14 kilometres of earth and concrete barriers, 84 kilometres of concertina wire and 11 watch towers. It is so big that it has downtown, midtown and uptown districts, retail outlets, 24-hour sports halls, a chapel, library and the best-equipped hospital anywhere in Europe. At present there are 55 Black Hawk and Apache helicopters based at Bondsteel and although it has no aircraft landing strip the location was chosen for its capacity to expand. There are suggestions that it could replace the US airforce base at Aviano in Italy. 

(See Paul Stuart, Camp Bondsteel and America’s plans to control Caspian oil, WSWS.org, April 2002, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/apr2002/oil-a29.shtml) 

Camp Bondsteel was not the outgrowth of a humanitarian or "Just War" on behalf of Kosovar Albanians. The construction of Camp Bondsteel had been envisaged well in advance of the bombings and invasion of Kosovo in 1999. 

The plans to build Camp Bondsteel under a lucrative multibillion dollar DoD contract with Halliburton's Texas based subsidiary KBR  were formulated while Dick Cheney was Halliburton's CEO. 

Construction of Camp Bondsteel was initiated shortly after the 1999 invasion under the Clinton administration. Construction was completed during the Bush administration, after Dick Cheney had resigned his position as Halliburton's CEO: 

 The US and NATO had advanced plans to bomb Yugoslavia before 1999, and many European political leaders now believe that the US deliberately used the bombing of Yugoslavia to establish camp Bondsteel in Kosovo.. According to Colonel Robert L. McCure, “Engineering planning for operations in Kosovo began months before the first bomb was dropped.” (See Lenora Foerstel, Global Research, January 2008)

One of the objectives underlying Camp Bondsteel was to protect the Albanian-Macedonian-Bulgarian Oil pipeline project (AMBO), which was to channel Caspian sea oil from the Bulgarian Black Sea port of Burgas to the Adriatic. 

Coincidentally, two years prior to the invasion, in 1997, a senior executive of `Brown & Root Energy, a subsidiary of Halliburton,  Edward L. (Ted) Ferguson had been appointed to head AMBO. The feasibility plans for the AMBO pipeline were also undertaken by Halliburton's engineering company, Kellog, Brown & Root Ltd.

The AMBO agreement for the 917-km long oil pipeline from Burgas to Valona, Albania, was signed in 2004. 

Criminalization of the State

The KLA was set up as a paramilitary group in the mid 1990s. It was a US-NATO sponsored insurgency. The objective was to destabilize and ultimately break up Yugoslavia. The KLA had extensive links to Al Qaeda, which was also involved in military training. Mujahideen mercenaries from a number of countries integrated the ranks of the KLA, which was involved in terrorist activities as well as political assassinations. 

In this context, what are the implications of the "Ahtisaari Plan." which envisages the formation of a separate multi-ethnic Kosovar State? 

The proposed Kosovar political setup is integrated by criminal elements. Western politicians are fully aware of the nature of the Kosovar political project, of which they are the architects. . 

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ST. PETERSBURG, Russia | If I were an engine driver on a freight train, I would certainly like to know the nature of the cargo I was responsible for. And I would have thought that this kind of information was by no means considered classified in Russia, if I had not spoken to members of an environmental pressure group at a street protest in St. Petersburg a few days ago.

Local environmentalists took to the streets to inform locals that St. Petersburg is becoming a frequent point of arrival for foreign ships with radioactive material on board.

Cargo containing radioactive material passes through the city's port at least 10 times a month. Having arrived by sea, the nuclear loads are then loaded on trains for shipment to treatment facilities in the Urals and Siberia.

City authorities remain tight-lipped about the practice, while the number of these loads looks set to grow at a fast pace. St. Petersburg is currently the only Russian port used for handling radioactive material, according to the Bellona environmental group and local Greenpeace activists. As this column was being written on 30 January, four people, including two Bellona activists, were briefly detained by police near the city during a protest against the import of uranium tailings from Germany.

Russia recently signed contracts with India, Pakistan and China to receive spent nuclear fuel and highly toxic uranium hexafluoride in addition to the regular shipments of radioactive cargoes from Western Europe.

Russian environmental organizations complain they are not officially informed about the nuclear traffic and typically hear of new shipments of radioactive waste only from their foreign counterparts. And when volunteers find out about a particular load and check the containers for radiation levels, they often find the containers unattended.

Train engine drivers do not receive any extra training in carrying hazardous loads and are even denied access to information about the cargo they are pulling because the Russian authorities would rather keep such information under wraps. Officials believe it would be safer not to inform the public, ostensibly to avoid widespread panic.

"Ordinary people have to be prepared to deal with this subject," said Maria Rozhdestvina, an aide to the Leningrad region prosecutor responsible for investigating environmental crimes. "Pouring out information to the general public who know nothing about the subject would simply stir groundless mass hysteria."

Germany stopped shipments of nuclear waste on the country’s rails in 1998 because of safety fears. Although the shipments resumed three years later, anti-nuclear campaigners still sometimes try to stop them. But public awareness remains in an embryonic state in Russia as even environmental groups can get precious little information related to the safety level of the nuclear industry in Russia.

NO NEED TO KNOW

Olga Tsepilova, deputy head of the environmental faction of the liberal party Yabloko and an environmental scientist with the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said the independent safety monitoring of Russia's nuclear facilities is being complicated by the country's security services.

In 2004 the scientist herself faced espionage charges as she tried to collect materials for a dissertation on Russia's nuclear cities.

Although Tsepilova was a scientist working legally on her dissertation, she was denied access to a nuclear facility at Ozersk, a town in the Urals.

"The nuclear industry in Russia is highly corrupt, but tracing the misappropriation of money is very complicated bearing in mind that external control is restricted,” Tsepilova said. "Outsiders can merely compare the slow tempo of construction of new nuclear facilities with the record speed with which nuclear bosses are building luxurious mansions for themselves and their families."

Tsepilova's attempts to investigate and track down the cash flows resulted in a criminal case against her.

Some at the protest in St. Petersburg said they would have moved house had they known they were living next to the transport arteries that see frequent movement of radioactive materials. And the soothing speeches by the authorities about the safety of such traffic are the last thing they need to make a decision. The public needs facts rather than highly subjective opinions. But access to the facts is restricted.

More importantly, the rosy picture of nuclear safety in Russia drawn by the authorities clashes dramatically with reports by environmentalists.

In July 2006, members of the local branch of Greenpeace said they measured unsafe levels of radioactivity originating from six containers loaded on trains at Kapitolovo station on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. Radioactive shipments always transit through this station, but the wagons were unguarded.

"This kind of transport would make a perfect gift for terrorists, both in the sense of accessibility of radioactive material and as a very vulnerable potential object for attack," Dmitry Artamonov, head of the local Greenpeace branch, said at the time. Two months earlier, members of the group found 37 rail containers marked "radioactive material" sitting on the tracks at Kapitolovo.

In February 2001, a container was impounded by customs officials at the main airport in Yekaterinburg because it was emitting radiation well over the accepted safety level.

That container had arrived from the United States on a San Francisco-to-Yekaterinburg cargo flight. The airport’s spokesperson said the empty container was bound for the Energotechnical Research and Construction Institute in the town of Zarechny, near Yekaterinburg and close to the Beloyarsk nuclear power station.

The institute regularly exports various radioactive materials and had sent some to a U.S. organization that had ordered them, which in turn had sent the container back without cleansing it of radiation.

Vladimir Slivyak of the Russian environmental organization Ecodefense said a recent investigation by his group turned up several instances where trains carrying radioactive material did not display the mandatory warning signs.

"Besides, Russian railways aren't immune to traffic accidents," Slivyak said. "On a recent occasion, a bridge under construction fell on a passing train. Luckily, the train wasn't carrying uranium."

In the meantime, Russia's mishandling of its own nuclear waste is inexcusable. One of the most notorious examples is Karachai Lake in the Chelyabinsk area, which although situated only 4 kilometers from the nearest village, is full of nuclear waste. The cancer rate in the region is at least 2.5 times higher than the national average.

Russian storage facilities currently hold about 700,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, 100,000 tons of it imported.

The time has come for international organizations to call for independent monitoring and introduce greater international responsibility in this sphere. Lax safety procedures and St. Petersburg's location on the Baltic coast make for a dangerous combination.

If a leak or any other accident occurs, it won't be just Russians who suffer.

From: With A Grain of Salt!

Posted: 12 Jan 2008 03:29 AM CST

I am always curious about one historical anomaly. Why is the Bangladeshi Genocide never considered in the same light as that of Rwanda, Darfur, Southern Sudan, Congo, Cambodia or other genocides? Why does it not even get a fraction of the attention paid to the Palestinian Question, the Kosovo Question, the Lebanese Question or a host of other minority based problems? I can only point to four reasons why this never hit the headlines. First is that the genocide was carried out by an American Ally. Second, the country never was part of the American Interest. Third, it was carried out by Muslims on other fellow Muslims. Fourth, both Bangladesh and Pakistan did not really show much interest in pushing for this to be resolved. Between these four issues, nobody cared or even still cares about the Bangladeshi genocide.

But then, I am biased and I have to admit that right off the bat. I am a Hindu, and my roots are from Bangladesh (my father was a refugee from erstwhile East Pakistan many moons ago). So while Hindus were targeted solely for being Hindus, Muslims were targeted for being intellectuals or just wanting their rights, so I am connected to Bangladesh by virtue of language, cuisine, family, history, culture, geography, religion and a whole lot more. I know fully well that Hindus have been significantly and seriously ethnically cleansed from Bangladesh (and from Pakistan and from Kashmir) but they do not matter in the greater scheme of things of the international and the national grand Poo-Bahs. Nobody cares much for them. One of my childhood memories is about the 1971 Bangladeshi refugees fighting over left over food thrown into garbage bins but let us not go there for now. So this is a topic which is dear to my heart and I might be a bit more emotional than normal and I really don’t want to do an Alex Haley of Roots fame here.

Having said that, the history of the 1971 war and genocide is pretty well known and I do not want to reiterate it here. I quote from the report by the International Commission of Jurists here: “a campaign of genocide involved. . . the indiscriminate killing of civilians, including women and children and the poorest and weakest members of the community; the attempt to exterminate or drive out of the country a large part of the Hindu population; the arrest, torture and killing of Awami League activists and students, professionals, business men and other potential leaders among the Bengalis; the raping of women; the destruction of villages and towns.”

According to an excellent and thought provoking recent paper by Donald Beacher ('The politics of genocide scholarship : the case of Bangladesh', Patterns of Prejudice, 2007, 41:5, 467 – 492)many scholars bluntly even denied that any genocide took place. He says that compared to the Cambodian Genocide where a similar number of people were killed, "no ideological or partisan faction in the United States has stood to gain much from the study of the Bangladesh genocide." Think about it, Pakistan, that rogue country responsible for this genocide is an ally of USA!
It is still ruled by the same Pakistani Army, which is very much supporting the so-called “War on Terror”. Pakistan is still the primary base of most of the terrorists, they were either trained, educated, born in or have links to Pakistan. This “land of the pure” (an ironical name for Pakistan) was responsible. It has lost effective control over large swathes over its public and real life space to the fundamentalists. It has carried out massacres (some say it's also genocide, but that’s a bit debatable) in Baluchistan and Karachi. And this is a USA ally! So why on earth would American politicians, media or academics be interested in investigating it any further (specially compared to the Cambodian Genocide)?

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