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The 78-day U.S. bombing war on Yugoslavia ended months ago but Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) is warning that the danger of renewed violence in the Balkans is very real.
Kucinich laid out his reasons for strongly opposing the NATO adventure in an article titled "What I learned in the War" published in the August edition of The Progressive. Kucinich reports that since the bombing ended, his office received a recent "Executive Order that hands the CIA a black bag in the Balkans for engineering a military coup in Serbia, for interrupting communications, for tampering with bank accounts, freezing assets abroad, and training the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in terrorist tactics such as how to blow up buildings."
Adds Kucinich, "How this is intended to help establish a democracy in Serbia or Kosovo hasn't yet been explained. Nor has the failure to substantially disarm and demilitarize the KLA been explained. Nor has the reverse ethnic cleansing taking place in Kosovo by the KLA while NATO rules the province been explained."
Kucinich, former mayor of Cleveland, is of Croatian background and last January spoke to President Clinton as he entered the House Chamber to deliver his State of the Union Message about his concerns on the issue of ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia. Clinton told Kucinich he would address the issue in the speech.
But as the war escalated, Kucinich grew more and more uneasy. Many were concluding that "NATO was out of control ... NATO was moving into that fuzzy circumstance of high violence where the possibility of nuclear war, on purpose or by accident, was beginning to be real."
Kucinich worked with several members of Congress mobilizing opposition to the war. The decisive moment was April 28, the day the House of Representatives voted not to give the Administration full authority in the war, including use of ground troops. "The White House and Democratic leaders held a series of meetings to lobby for the war. They were stunned when the vote ended in a tie, defeating the measure and forcing the administration to look toward diplomatic channels to end the conflict," Kucinich writes.