Workers World Oct. 5, 2000: In their own words

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------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Oct. 5, 2000 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------

In their own words

Following are excerpts from news reports in the New York Times and Washington Post detailing Washing ton's illegal intervention in the Yugoslav elections.
The New York Times, Sept. 20, 2000

Milosevic, Trailing in
Polls, Rails Against NATO

By Steven Erlanger

BELGRADE, Serbia, Sept. 19--In his race for re-election, President Slobo dan Milosevic of Yugoslavia is running against NATO and the United States, not against his democratic opposition.
He is not entirely mistaken to do so. The United States and its European allies have made it clear that they want Mr. Milosevic ousted, and they have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to get it done.
Portraying himself as the defender of Yugoslavia's sovereignty against a hostile, hegemonic West led by Washington, Mr. Milosevic and his government argue that opposition leaders are merely the paid, traitorous tools of enemies who are continuing their war against him by other means. In March 1999, NATO began a 78-day bombing campaign to drive Serbian forces out of Kosovo.
The Yugoslav elections are on Sunday, but there has hardly been a day since the bombing began that state television news has not railed against "NATO aggressors."
The money from the West is going to most of the institutions that the government attacks for receiving it--sometimes in direct aid, sometimes in indirect aid like computers and broadcasting equipment, and sometimes in suitcases of cash carried across the border between Yugoslavia and Hungary or Serbia and Montenegro.
Even before the Kosovo war, the United States was spending up to $10 million a year to back opposition parties, independent news media and other institutions opposed to Mr. Milo sevic. The war itself cost billions of dollars. This fiscal year, through Septem ber, the administration is spending $25 million to support Serbian "democratization," with an unknown amount of money spent covertly to help the failed rallies of last year, which did not bring down Mr. Milosevic, or to influence the current election. For next year, the administration is requesting $41.5 million in open aid to Serbian democratization, though Congress is likely to cut that request.
Independent journalists and broadcasters here have been told by Amer ican aid officials "not to worry about how much they're spending now," that plenty more is in the pipeline, said one knowledgeable aid worker. Others in the opposition complain that the Ameri cans are clumsy, sending e-mails from "state.gov"--the State Department's address--summoning people to impolitic meetings with American officials in Budapest, Montenegro or Dubrovnik, Croatia.
But there is little effort to disguise the fact that Western money pays for much of the polling, advertising, printing and other costs of the opposition political campaign.
The Washington Post, Sept. 19, 2000
(Final Edition)

U.S. Funds Help Milosevic's Foes in Election Fight

By John Lancaster,
Washington Post Staff Writer
Charges of Chinese influence-buying in the 1996 U.S. presidential campaign caused a political storm in Washington that has yet to fully abate. By some measures, however, that episode pales by comparison to American political interference in Serbia, locus of a $77 million U.S. effort to do with ballots what NATO bombs could not--get rid of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
In the run-up to national elections on Sept. 24, U.S. aid officials and contractors are working to strengthen Serbia's famously fractured democratic opposition. They have helped train its organizers, equipped their offices with computers and fax machines and provided opposition parties with sophisticated voter surveys compiled by the same New York firm that conducts polls for President Clinton.
More generally, they have sought to foster what one aid consultant calls "democracy with a small 'd'," funneling support to student groups, labor unions, independent media outlets, even Serbian heavy metal bands that stage street concerts as part of a voter registration drive called "Rock the Vote."
Underscoring worries about Serbia and Montenegro, the Pentagon yesterday began a global shift of forces to bolster the U.S. military presence in the Balkans. A carrier battle group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln left Thai waters ahead of schedule and headed toward the Persian Gulf, which will free up another carrier group, led by the USS George Washington, for movement to the Adriatic Sea, Defense Department officials said.
It's not the first time
The New York Times, March 31, 1997 (Late Edition - Final)
Political Meddling by
Outsiders: Not New for U.S.
By John M. Broder
Members of both political parties express horror at accusations that the Chinese may have tried to use covert campaign donations to influence American policy, but the United States has long meddled in other nations' internal affairs.
Congress routinely appropriates tens of millions of dollars in covert and overt money to use in influencing domestic politics abroad.
The National Endowment for Democracy, created 15 years ago to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades, spends $30 million a year to support things like political parties, labor unions, dissident movements and the news media in dozens of countries, including China.
The endowment has financed unions in France, Paraguay, the Philippines and Panama. In the mid-1980s, it provided $5 million to Polish émigrés to keep the Solidarity movement alive. It has underwritten moderate political parties in Portugal, Costa Rica, Bolivia and Northern Ireland. It provided a $400,000 grant for political groups in Czechoslovakia that backed the election of Vaclav Havel as president in 1990. For the Nicaraguan election of 1990, it provided more than $3 million in "technical" assistance, some of which was used to bolster Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the presidential candidate favored by the United States.

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