<< The eXile #08/63 April 22 - May 6, 1999
Meet Mister Massacre Once US diplomat William Walker Covered Them Up;
Now He Makes Them Up
by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi
Years from now, when the war in Serbia is over and the dust has settled,
historians will point to January 15, 1999 as the day the American Death
Star became fully operational.
That was the date on which an American diplomat named William Walker
brought his OSCE war crimes verification team to a tiny Kosovar village
called Racak to investigate an alleged Serb massacre of ethnic Albanian
peasants. After a brief review of the town's 40-odd bullet-ridden corpses,
Walker searched out the nearest television camera and essentially fired
the starting gun for the war.
"From what I saw, I do not hesitate to describe the crime as a massacre,
a crime against humanity," he said. "Nor do I hesitate to accuse the
government security forces of responsibility."
We all know how Washington responded to Walker's verdict; it quickly
set its military machine in motion, and started sending out menacing
invitations to its NATO friends to join the upcoming war party.
How Russia responded is less well-known. One would assume that it began
preparations for a diplomatic strategy in the event of war, which it
probably realized was inevitable. But in Russia's defense and intelligence
communities, the sight of William Walker uncovering Serb atrocities on
television almost certainly provoked a different, and more dramatic,
reaction. It probably sent a chill up the community's collective spine,
and pushed its generals into rapid preparations for a new cold war with
the United States. As connoisseurs in the art of propaganda and the use
of provacateurs, they recognized a good job when they saw one. And,
more importantly, they knew who William Walker was.
Since the outbreak of war in the Balkans, most people in the West have
already read news reports raising the possibility that Russia may commit
troops, weapons, or even its nuclear arsenal to aid Yugslavia in its
war against NATO. But few people overseas are aware yet of why Russia
is talking about going to war with us.
We've been told that it's a race thing, that Russians are only upset about
U.S. policies in Serbia because their fellow Slavs are being bombed. We've
also heard that this is just another chapter in the sore-loser syndrome,
that Russians are bitter about the NATO bombing because it has forced
them to face the stinging reality of their impotence to defend even
their former satellite states. If these reports are to be believed,
Russia's military leaders are considering war with superpower America
because their feelings have been hurt.
These stories overlook the fact that Russia has, or at least thinks it
has, a real reason to be considering military resistance to NATO, even in
its severely weakened state. And that reason is that much of the military
and political leadership in this country believes sincerely that the
Yugoslavia bombing is just the first chapter in an ambitious American
campaign for world domination. Even the soberest of Russian generals
is now inclined to consider military intervention on behalf of Serbia
on the purely pragmatic grounds that it would be cheaper and easier to
try to stop the U.S. now rather than later, when it might be too late.
"The people in the Russian military believe sincerely that they need
to try to stop the U.S. now, before it goes on a real rampage around
the world," said military/defense analyst Pavel Felgenhauer. "That the
U.S. is striving for world domination, no one has any doubt."
Most Americans laugh off the idea of themselves as burgeoning world
dictators, and would dismiss Russian fears as paranoia. But what
most Americans don't realize is that the United States, through its
prosecution of the NATO bombing and in its foreign policy in general,
has given foreigners plenty of reasons to see conspiracy and military
ambition behind everything we do.
One good example is the role of the mysterious William Walker in starting
the war. As it turns out, even the most cursory review of the background
of our chief "verifier" would inspire almost any foreign government
to regard the entire Yugoslavia campaign as a cynical, unabashed act
of imperialist aggression. For if William Walker is not a CIA agent,
he's done a very bad job of not looking like one. Judge for yourself:
Walker's Background
According to various newspaper reports, Walker began his diplomatic
career in 1961 in Peru. He then reportedly spent most of his long career
in the foreign service in Central and South America, including a highly
controversial posting as Deputy Chief of Mission in Honduras in the early
1980s, exactly the time and place where the Contra rebel force was formed.
The Contra force was the cornerstone of then-CIA Director William Casey's
hardline anti-Communist directive, and Honduras was considered, along with
El Salvador, the front line in the war with the Soviet Union. From there,
Walker was promoted, in 1985, to the post of Deputy Assistant Secretary
of State for Central America. This promotion made him a special assistant
to Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, a figure whose name would
soon be making its way into the headlines on a daily basis in connection
with a new scandal the press was calling the "Iran-Contra" affair.
Walker would soon briefly join his boss under the public microscope.
According to information contained in Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh's
lengthy indictment of Abrams and Oliver North, Walker was responsible
for setting up a phony humanitarian operation at an airbase in Ilopango,
El Salvador. This shell organization was used to funnel guns, ammunition
and supplies to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Despite having been named in Walsh's indictment (although he was never
charged himself) and outed in the international press as a gunrunner,
Walker's diplomatic career did not, as one one might have expected,
take a turn for the worse. Oddly enough, it kept on advancing. In 1988,
he was named ambassador to El Salvador, a state which at the time was
still in the grip of U.S.-sponsored state terror.
Walker's record as Ambassador to El Salvador is startling upon review
today, in light of his recent re-emergence into the world spotlight as
an outraged documenter of racist hate-crimes. His current posture of
moral disgust toward Serbian ethnic cleansing may seem convincing today,
but it is hard to square with the almost comically callous indifference
he consistently exhibited toward exactly the same kinds of hate crimes
while serving in El Salvador.
In late 1989, when Salvadoran soldiers executed six Jesuit priests,
their housekeeper, and her 15 year-old daughter, blowing their heads off
with shotguns, Walker scarecely batted an eyelid. When asked at a press
conference about evidence linking the killings to the Salvadoran High
Command, he went out of his way to apologize for chief of staff Rene
Emilio Ponce, dismissing the murders as a sort of forgiveable corporate
glitch, like running out of Xerox toner. "Management control problems
can exist in these kinds of these kinds of situations," he said.
In discussing the wider problem of state violence and repression--which
in El Salvador then was at least no less widespread than in the Serbia he
monitored from October of last year until March of this year--Walker was
remarkably circumspect. "I'm not condoning it, but in times like this
of great emotion and great anger, things like this happen," he said,
apparently having not yet decided to audition for the OSCE job.
Finally, in what may be the most amazing statement of all, given his
current occupation, Walker questioned the ability of any person or
organization to assign blame in hate crime cases Shrugging off news of
eyewitness reports that the Jesuit murders had been committed by men
in Salvadoran army uniforms, Walker told Massachusetts congressman Joe
Moakley that "anyone can get uniforms. The fact that they were dressed
in military uniforms was not proof that they were military."
Later, Walker would recommend to Secretary of State James Baker that
the United States "not jeopardize" its relationship with El Salvador by
investigating "past deaths, however heinous."
This is certainly an ironic comment, coming from a man who would later
recommend that the United States go to war over...heinous deaths.
One final intriguing biographical note: Walker in 1996 hosted a ceremony
in Washington held in honor of 5,000 American soldiers who fought secretly
in El Salvador. While Walker was Ambassador of El Salvador, the U.S.
government's official story was that there were only 50 military advisors
in the country (Washington Post, May 6, 1996).
A Spooky Choice
With a background like this, it seems implausible that Walker would be
chosen by the United States to head the Kosovar verification team on the
basis of any established commitment to the cause of human rights. What
seems more likely, given Walker's background, is that he was chosen
because of his proven willingness to say whatever his government wants
him to say, and to keep quiet when he is told to keep quiet-- about
things like a gunrunning operation, or the presence of 4,950 undercover
mercenaries (whose existence he regularly denied with a straight face)
in the banana republic where you are Ambassador.
The Iran-Contra incident isn't the only thing in Walker's background
which gives reason for pause. Another is his curious ability to remain
in Central and South America throughout virtually his entire diplomatic
career.
Not since before the fall of China has the State Department allowed its
career people to remain in one place for any significant length of time.
After the Chinese Revolution, the State Department enacted what has
come to be known as the Wriston reform, which dictated that Department
employees be rotated out of their posts every few years. With this reform,
the government was hoping to put an end to a problem which they termed
"quiet-itis"--the development of "excessive" sympathies towards the
culture of one's host countries.
With the Wriston act, the U.S. government eventually got exactly what
it wanted--a State Department characterized by fortress-like embassy
compounds, in or around which Americans live amongst themselves in
monolingual, isolationist bliss, counting the hours until they're rotated
out to their next job in Liberia, or Peru, or wherever. As a result, most
State employees see three or four different posts in different corners of
he world every ten years. It is well-known among career foreign service
people, though, that one of the few exceptions to this rule are the CIA
agents in the embassies. Our intelligence people take longer to develop
their contacts, and in order to preserve these "personal relationships"
(bribe-takers don't like to change bagmen), they tend to hang around
longer.
Walker was in Latin America virtually throughout his entire career,
until he arrived in Kosovo. He had no experience in the region which
qualified him to head the verification team in Yugoslavia. Furthermore,
he spent the entire 1980s occupying high-level State positions in Central
America, under the Reagan and Bush White Houses, when the region was the
source of more East-West tension than in any other place in the world,
and Central American embassies were the most notoriously CIA-penetrated
embassies we had. You can draw your own conclusions.
Nonetheless, one need not prove that Walker is a CIA agent to make
the case that the United States made a serious error in judgement in
appointing him. Whether or not he was sent to Kosovo to guarantee that
evidence of ethnic cleansing would be "discovered", and whether there
even exists a covert plan, of which Walker might be part, to install a
semi-permanent U.S. military force in the Balkans, it is bad enough that
other countries might identify Walker according to their own criteria and
assume the worst. And assume they will, according to political analysts
familiar with the story. "Ambassador Walker's record in El Salvador does
not a priori invalidate his testimony on the massacres in Kosovo, but
it certainly does compromise his reliability as an objective witness,"
said James Morrell, research director for the Washington-based Center
for International Policy.
"No question about it, they should have chosen someone else," said
Felgenhauer. "If this guy was working for Ollie North, then that's all
anyone in Russia is going to need to know, anyway."
There is a widespread belief not only in Russia, but in other countries,
that Walker's role in Racak was to assist the KLA in fabricating a Serb
massacre that could be used as an excuse for military action. Already,
two major mainstream French newspapers--Le Monde and Le Figaro--as well as
French national television have run exposes on the Racak incident. These
stories cited a number of inconsistencies in Walker's version of events,
including an absence of shell casings and blood in the trench where the
bodies were found, and the absence of eyewitnesses despite the presence
of journalists and observers in the town during the KLA-Serb fighting.
Eventually, even the Los Angeles Times joined in, running a story entitled
"Racak Massacre Questions: Were Atrocities Faked?" The theory behind
all these exposes was that the KLA had gathered their own dead after the
battle, removed their uniforms, put them in civilian clothes, and then
called in the observers. Walker, significantly, did not see the bodies
until 12 hours after Serb police had left the town. As Walker knows, not
only can "anybody have uniforms", but anyone can have them taken off, too.
The story of William Walker's involvement in the war is just one of a
rapidly-growing family of tales cataloguing the incompetence and arrogance
of the United States and its allies throughout the Kosovo conflict. Even
if it isn't proof of some as-yet-unreleased sinister plan to secure a
permanent military presence in the Balkans, the fact that the United
States didn't even care to avoid the appearance of impropriety in its
search for Serb atrocities says a lot about our approach to international
relations. It says, "Go ahead and think the worst about us. We don't
care. We've got more bombs than you do." If that's the sum of our entire
policy, it's only a matter of time before a place like Russia decides
to strike first. They won't wait for us to send the next Walker.