AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Pacific Radio’s Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.

The United States stepped up pressure today for a Kosovo peace deal by sending 51 extra military aircraft to Europe to prepare for possible NATO strikes on Yugoslav targets. Secretary of Defense William Cohen ordered the deployment of the stealth fighters and other aircraft to assure that NATO has the capability to conduct operations, should that prove necessary, that according to the Pentagon in a statement yesterday. A Saturday deadline has been set for a peace deal. NATO Secretary General Javier Solana warned today that NATO would act swiftly if Serbs and ethnic Albanians fail to reach a peace agreement at talks in France. Asked at a news conference in Macedonia how fast NATO would act if the talks failed, Solana said it would be very soon.

And Russian President Boris Yeltsin said today he’s told President Bill Clinton that Russia will not allow NATO to launch airstrikes against Yugoslavia over the Kosovo crisis. His comments toughened Russia’s resistance to the use of force against its fellow Slavs in Yugoslavia. But Moscow’s ability to prevent airstrikes is strictly limited.

Joining us to talk about the situation of Serbia today are two guests. We’re joined by Bogdan Denitch, honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. He also works at the Institute for the Transition to Democracy, that operates in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia. Michel Collon is also with us. He’s a journalist and writer for Solidaire, a weekly paper in Brussels. He’s author of the book Beware of the Media, about Western media lies during the Gulf War, and Liar’s Poker: The Great Powers, Yugoslavia and the Next War.

Bogdan Denitch, let’s begin with you. Your assessment of where we are right now in Kosovo?

BOGDAN DENITCH: I think we’re very close to a blockage of paths of any development in Kosovo, and I’m afraid that bombing is a likely option. I happen to think it’s a bad option, although I do think that the presence of troops is absolutely essential if any kind of treaty is to be worth the paper it’s written on. I don’t think the Albanians would accept any agreement which does not include a very substantial presence of troops. And I, frankly, think that the Belgrade regime’s refusal of troops is fatal for the continued existence of the Serb minority in Kosovo. There’s nothing except troops that can preserve their safety. I think there are beginning to be breaks within the Serbian community over that.

And finally, I think that we make two basic mistakes — “we” meaning the United States and Western Europe and even Russia. One is we try to have the two negotiating groups be homogenous, instead of encouraging differences within them. If they’re going to be two homogenous communities, Albanians and Serbs facing off with each other, there’s not going to be any peace in Kosovo. There is no way that that can continue. On the contrary, I think we should be backing the democratic opposition in Serbia. We have spent less on them than one rocket would cost, certainly less than one plane would cost, over the past 10 years. And we’ve really refused to back any except the kind of opposition made in Washington, namely, nice people who speak English, who are liberal, who are pro-market, and who use deodorant. Those people are not, in my opinion, any alternative to Milošević. The same thing with the Albanians. There have been social democratic parties there. There have been human rights organizations there. The various nongovernment NGOs are there. We tend to say, if they’re weak, we don’t back them, and, of course, they’re weak because we don’t back them. We need plurality within both communities if they’re going to live together, and geography dooms them.

Lastly, no one has paid any attention to the fact that there are very strong voices within the Albanian community, whose lives are now in danger from KLA. KLA is not just killing Serbs. Serbs are not just killing off Albanians. They’re killing off their own dissidents. And major figures like Mahmut Bakalli, the former head of the communist organization in Kosovo, and Shkëlzen Maliqi have been warning that independence could only create a squalid bantustan, which would be a disaster for the Albanian majority. They are looking for other kinds of solutions, like perhaps a federalization of Yugoslavia.

One also note of correction: There are not going to be airstrikes against Yugoslavia. If there are airstrikes, they’re going to be against Serbia. No one proposes airstrikes against the other republic, which is Montenegro. And I think they’re surely not stupid enough to hit Kosovo. So, my question is: What can the airstrikes achieve? My scenario is something like Iraq right now. There’ll be flights. There’ll be strikes and so on. It will strengthen the Milošević regime, and probably destroy the opposition.

AMY GOODMAN: Michel Collon, your take on this?

MICHEL COLLON: I think the problem is not like that. The problem is not to see what the great powers can do to bring peace in this area, because they are not there to bring peace or to protect any population. If you have a doubt, you must look at what the United States is doing in Turkey, backing a fascist general to massacre Kurdish people. You must see what the Western populations — Western governments, sorry, have been doing in Africa, doing nothing to prevent the genocide in Rwanda; on the contrary, assisting, informing and arming those fascists in Rwanda, and now the same game in Congo. So, they are never, never for any humanitarian purpose in any country in the world.

So, the question is: What are they doing there? My view, and what I demonstrate in this book, is that they are in Yugoslavia to break a resistance of an independent country, to force that country to open the doors completely for multinationals and NATO. Just one important thing is that Yugoslavia is exactly the country that refuses to be part of the NATO, and that’s why they are punished.

So, I think the great powers are not the solution to a problem; they are the problem themselves. And it’s — I believe, for progressive people, it’s very naive to think that those great powers might be — might do some good job in Kosovo, while they are attacking Iraqi people, while they are attacking Kurdish people, while they are supporting UNITA, who is a group of bandits in Africa. They have killed 700,000 people, following the United Nations. And that’s what United States is now supporting them. Germany, France, Belgium is not doing better. So, it’s completely naive to wait for a solution for them. They are the problem. They are attacking every people who wants to resist — Iraq, Yugoslavia, Congo, Cuba, Korea, any.

And so, my idea is that what they want now is that they want to have military bases in the Balkans. It’s obvious. I exposed that in my book. Since the '90s, the United States has got — have got many and many military bases there. It's not only for the problem of Kosovo — it’s not at all for the problem of Kosovo. You should remind, in '97, there was a social upstanding from the people in Albania. They were fed up with this capitalism, everybody getting poor. And they were fed up, and there was an upstanding. What have they done? The great Western powers have sent their troops, led by Italy. And who was Italy? Italy was the investor number one in Albania. So they are there to protect the investments of their multinationals. They are there to break a country who resists to their system. And I think the problem is, every progressive in every country should unite against those attacks. And I think that's the only solution.

AMY GOODMAN: Michel Collon, journalist and writer for Solidaire, a weekly paper in Brussels. His book is called Liar’s Poker: The Great Powers, Yugoslavia and the Next War. Bogdan Denitch, you’re the honorary chair of Democratic Socialists of America. Do you see that the Western powers could do anything productive in Kosovo? Do you agree or disagree with Michel Collon?

BOGDAN DENITCH: I disagree. I think that Western powers are analogous to racist cops in the United States. They’re corrupt, they’re racist, and they’re wicked. But yet I don’t hesitate to call them when I see murder done. I think it would be a disaster if the Western powers plus Russia — remember, plus Russia — pulled out of Bosnia today. We would get right back to a war. They imposed a terrible peace, which was only slightly better, but was better, than a terrible war. And I think that at the present time to talk about the resistance to globalization and world capitalism is a bad mistake, because it assumes that the enemy of my enemy is my ally. I speak as a leftist. No, the enemy of my enemy could be a totalitarian tyrant who is worse for his people than even the enemy that I mainly oppose. I am absolutely taken aback that anybody on the left would defend the right of the North Korean regime to continue starving its population in the name of resistance to globalization.

MICHEL COLLON: This is false. This is false.

BOGDAN DENITCH: Excuse me.

MICHEL COLLON: This is not true.

BOGDAN DENITCH: I didn’t interrupt you.

MICHEL COLLON: This is not true.

BOGDAN DENITCH: Or, the right of Milošević’s regime to keep massacring Albanians. There’s been a 10-year repression of the Albanian population there. It has to be stopped. Now, I don’t see how it can be stopped, when the Milošević regime, like the Tudjman regime in Croatia, rests on national chauvinist mobilization and rests on a constant pointing at the threat of the West. The bulk of the Serbian population right now is desperate to get to be in Europe. Desperate. Their living standard is now a quarter of what it was before Yugoslavia broke up, and it was broken up by Milošević’s nationalists insisting on having a slight plurality of the population impose their will on the rest of the population. It began in Kosovo; it has to end in Kosovo. Kosovo has a 90% Albanian majority. There is no justification for Kosovo to continue being ruled from Belgrade. The sovereignty of Serbs does not justify tyranny over the Albanians.

And the fact that the West is not doing anything on the Kurds is absolutely true. That does not mean it should not do something in Kosovo. Also, it’s simply not true that UNITA is now backed by the West. That’s just no longer true. That’s five years out of date. And it is no longer true, by the way, that the question of the massacres in Africa is all that clear. It is true that they stood by. It is true that America was criminally negligent. But I was for intervention in Rwanda when the massacre started. And I thought, and I think that the nonintervention, that was a criminal act. There are half a million people dead because there was no intervention. I’m sorry, that argument is, to me, no more justified than to have treated Hitler’s massacre of the Jews in Europe as an internal question for Germany. I don’t believe sovereignty justifies massacres. I don’t believe sovereignty justifies a repression of minorities in a given country. I believe that rights are human. They’re individual. And they are not — I’m not a legalistic lawyer. I don’t think Yugoslavia has sovereignty over Kosovo on any legitimate basis, certainly not on the basis of the will of the population.

AMY GOODMAN: Michel Collon?

MICHEL COLLON: I think this is based on a lot of disinformation in the Western media. And I proved in my book that our information before and during the Gulf War was completely false and completely a campaign of propaganda. I proved the same about the information concerning Bosnia and the Yugoslavian war. I think it’s the same. You should not accept what the West is saying about those regimes who resisted them. Now, they are — and I studied in my book what I’m calling the demonization, the making of the devil of an enemy. And there are some methods, always the same, based on lies and deforming the things. And I think progressive people should be very cautious about that official information.

Second, I don’t think that Western powers are bringing peace anywhere. Let’s look. They are very busy with Palestina since 40 years. What have they brought? Just massacre. And — yes?

AMY GOODMAN: I just want to stick with Bosnia for a minute here, because we only have a few minutes, and rather than going to world examples. What about the 45 ethnic Albanians that were found massacred in Kosovo? Do you think that’s just Western media disinformation?

MICHEL COLLON: I will just stress this point. The truth, the Western truth, was proclaimed by William Walker. Who is he? He’s the guy who made plots against the Salvadorian — 

BOGDAN DENITCH: But was it true?

MICHEL COLLON: Please let me continue. He is a guy used to lie. His past has proved it. And the thing — the thing —

AMY GOODMAN: He was the U.S. ambassador?

MICHEL COLLON: The thing — the thing of — well, he has been accused of many — of participating in many crimes of death squads and so on — excuse me for my English. And I think this question of Racak, there was an investigation, but the official truth was proclaimed. And they were accused. I have studied, in my book, the massacres of Sarajevo, '92, in the bakery; ’94 in Markale; in ’95 again in the market. And it was the same scenario. All Western medias directly said, “Those are the Serbs.” It was never presented, massacres in Mostar, for example, between nationalists, Croatian nationalists and Muslim nationalists, only they. There, where you had the CIA and the Secret Service of Izetbegović present, and any elements against these places was put on the side. And afterwards, you had David Owen, the European mediator, who said, “We knew that this bombing was made by the Muslim forces of Izetbegović, and we have done everything so that the public opinion would not know.” He recognized it, but after the war, of course, when it's too late. So, be very careful. You know that —

AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re not saying — Michel Collon, you’re not saying that this latest massacre of the 45 ethnic Albanians didn’t happen, but you’re just saying that other massacres should also be emphasized to make it not —

MICHEL COLLON: No, I’m not saying that. It’s not proved. Have you proved that they were civilians? They were not recognized by the people of the village. It is said now that they had gunpowder on their fingers. And it was a battle. It was a fighting. It was just said now that there is a real fighting between two armies there. I mean, such a battle brings dead on both sides. I have a few questions. Why they were never presenting the Serbian dead, the Serbian casualties? Why they do not accuse the KLA with murdering a lot of people? You don’t see the bodies. You don’t see this emotion. You don’t see this campaign of propaganda. So, be very cautious.

AMY GOODMAN: Bogdan Denitch? And then we have to wrap up.

BOGDAN DENITCH: Just two points. One — 

AMY GOODMAN: Very quick.

BOGDAN DENITCH: I don’t base my information on official Western news. I base it on years of work in the field, and my field workers are in Kosovo and in Bosnia, and we have participated in the digging up of mass graves and mass killings. There’s no question but that there were mass killings on all sides in Bosnia, and most were on the part of the Serbs. I don’t justify the Croats and Bosnians. I don’t. I think they’re all engaged — all nationalists there engage in mass killings.

The fact is absolutely stubborn. Kosovo is 90% Albanian. The only way Serbs can maintain their presence there is by terror, and by continual terror. There has been no proposal to let the population there make their own decision. And the only differences that I know among the Albanians are: Do they want to be a republic within Yugoslavia, like Montenegro, or do they want to be independent?

AMY GOODMAN: On that note, we have to wrap up, and I want to thank you both very much for being with us, Bogdan Denitch, honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, and Michel Collon, journalist with Solidaire in Brussels. His book is called Liar’s Poker: The Great Powers, Yugoslavia and the Next War. You are listening to Pacific Radio’s Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.