- 30/06/2025
Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? (2024)
Old conflicts in the Kosovo region are rekindled, and NATO intervenes, but at what cost?
Old conflicts in the Kosovo region are rekindled, and NATO intervenes, but at what cost?
Categoria
😹
DiversãoTranscrição
00:00I went to Russia in 1998, I talked to General Kalashnin, he said you're taking
00:29our countries in Eastern Europe.
00:31These are our countries, meaning the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania.
00:38I said, they're not your countries, they're independent countries.
00:43He said, we Russians, we know what you're doing, you're using this to come into our part
00:50of Europe.
00:53You see, there was an education process underway in the Soviet Union, it was taught at all
01:02levels of the chain of command, that the world was like a chessboard.
01:08There's my squares, and there's your squares.
01:13And what's in the middle, I want them, and I'm going to take them.
01:18And if you take those, you're going to make me feel very unsafe in my square.
01:24And that's the way the Russians think.
01:31After two years of relative calm, the Balkans are once again on the brink of war.
01:37Violent clashes in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
01:39A huge demonstration of ethnic Albanian Muslims demanding independence.
01:44Now to escape Serbian domination, it is Kosovo that wants to break away, but Serb leader Slobodan
01:49Milošević pledges to keep Kosovo under Serb control.
01:53I went down to see Milošević, and Milošević showed up about 10 o'clock in the morning, had
02:02his glass of pair of brandy with him, and he says, you know General Clark, he said, we know
02:07how to handle these Albanians.
02:11We have done this before.
02:13I said, well, how did you handle them?
02:16He said, we killed them.
02:18We killed them all.
02:19The Western world has been freed of the evil forces.
02:27We are the nation that liberated continents, concentration camps, and the death camps still
02:34bear witness that evil is real and must be opposed.
02:38Decent people must never remain silent and inactive in times of moral crisis.
02:43The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans unwilling to witness or permit
02:51the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.
02:58It is easy to say never again, but much harder to make it so.
03:04The northern nation has made the advancement of human rights and dignity so central to its
03:08foreign policy because it's central to who we are as Americans.
03:12America truly is the world's indispensable nation.
03:17The one indispensable nation in world affairs.
03:20A shining city on a hill where all things are possible.
03:24We can make a difference and we will do it.
03:28We are Americans.
03:31Never forget, never again.
03:35Never forget, never forget, never forget.
03:48This is Adem Yashari, the father of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA.
03:55Beginning in the mid-1990s, Yashari and his large family became symbols of the Kosovar Muslim
04:01struggle for freedom and independence from Serbia.
04:06Serbs had actually been engaged in a graduated ethnic cleansing program against the Albanian
04:12inhabitants of Serbia.
04:14And that consisted of forbidding the instruction in the schools in the Albanian language,
04:20running Albanian speaking people out of the government posts, harassing doctors and lawyers,
04:29making life difficult for people like the Yashari family who were proud of their Albanian heritage.
04:37And they were made to feel like second-class citizens in their own country.
04:44The Dayton Agreement, signed in November 1995, finally ended the Serbs' genocidal war on Bosnia's Muslims.
04:54But the agreement did not address Kosovo, which the international community considered a part of Serbia.
05:00For Kosovo's Muslims, the problem now became how to gain international attention
05:08and persuade the West to support their claim for independence.
05:12Many Muslims came to believe that violence was the most effective means.
05:21During the next two years, the KLA began attacking Serb police stations at government buildings in Kosovo.
05:28Men flocked to the KLA, and money began to pour in.
05:37As dawn broke on March 5th, 1998, Yashari and the KLA launched an attack on a police patrol near their village.
05:52This time, the Serbs were ready.
05:54Heavily armed police surrounded the Yashari compound and gave the family an ultimatum.
06:01They had two hours to surrender.
06:07Adem Yashari decided Kosovo needed a martyr.
06:11The family patriarch opened fire.
06:14The Serbs responded with bullets and artillery shells.
06:21The siege lasted three days.
06:25At the end, Adem Yashari lay dead.
06:30Beside him lay his wife, his brother, and his son.
06:34In all, 57 members of the Yashari family, fighters, women, and children died in the siege.
06:43Adem's ten-year-old niece was the only Yashari that survived.
06:48I got a call from the U.S. ambassador in Macedonia.
06:55He said, President Kligorov wants to see you right away.
06:59So I went to see Kligorov.
07:01And he told me, this Yashari family has been murdered, and these Albanians are not like Bosnians.
07:11They will fight.
07:15And he explained to me this.
07:16He said, General Clark, there have been many guerrilla movements in the Soviet Union, and they've all been crushed.
07:22He said, the tactics are extreme, and they've worked.
07:31He said, in one case, the Laplanders, they rebelled against the Soviets.
07:38The Soviets, they took a man's children, and they smeared them with what the sled dogs eat,
07:47and tied them up, and turned the sled dogs loose on the children.
07:53That was the method that Milosevic learned.
07:56If you negotiate, you look weak.
07:59So, best thing to do with these people is kill them.
08:02And now, you're having these Albanians under attack.
08:10And it will be Soviet methods.
08:14There will be war.
08:17Only a few years before, NATO bombing and American diplomacy had finally ended the Serbs' war in Bosnia.
08:27It had taken three and a half years while the Serbs massacred Muslims, and the United States stood by.
08:37Finally, after the Serbs murdered 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica, President Clinton had acted,
08:44sending his war planes to bomb the Serbs.
08:50The Serbs, at last, had been stopped.
08:53But they had not been cowed.
08:56Unleashing the utmost fidelity while the West watched,
09:00they had accomplished in Bosnia much of what they desired,
09:03cleansing huge swaths of Bosnian territory of Muslims.
09:07Now, in Kosovo, the Serbs seemed on the verge of doing it all over again.
09:16Keep in mind that, again, for the context of this situation,
09:19this administration had been through the Srebrenica massacre on their watch.
09:26This was a searing experience for some of those who were in office at that time.
09:32So, as they saw this looming, again, humanitarian catastrophe,
09:38there was a sense that we can't let this get out of control the way Bosnia did.
09:43I'm Madeleine Korvel Albright.
09:45Do solemnly swear.
09:47Do solemnly swear.
09:49I was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
09:51And I don't want to overdo my status as a refugee during World War II, but we were.
09:57And I know, even as a child, what it felt like to have to leave your country.
10:04And I think that every decision-maker bring their own history and background to looking at decisions.
10:12The Munich Agreement of September 1938 was a quintessential moment for me.
10:19The agreement gave a peace of Czechoslovakia to Germany, to Hitler.
10:27When Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, said something like,
10:32why should we care about people in faraway places with unpronounceable names?
10:36There was not a recognition that what was being done to dismantle this small country actually did not achieve peace.
10:43That you have to stand up to evil.
10:47And there's no way that I can fully explain what it was like to be a child of World War II,
10:54and having survived, and then sitting behind the sign that said the United States,
11:01and realizing that we could do something.
11:03And so the question for me always was, if you take action earlier, will you be able to prevent terrible things happening later?
11:14I thought to myself, last time I was UN ambassador, now I'm Secretary of State,
11:20and we are not going to just sit around and wait for this.
11:22We are not going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer get away with doing in Bosnia.
11:34The Secretary of State is in London today for meetings with the same group of countries that helped broker an end to the war in Bosnia,
11:41hoping to find a solution in Kosovo.
11:44The time to stop the killing is now.
11:46The way to do that is to take immediate action against the regime in Belgrade to ensure that it pays a price for the damage it has already done.
11:55American policymakers read the lessons of Bosnia and believed that this victory, such as it was, could be replicated in Kosovo.
12:07The Russians saw things differently.
12:10They thought that the most important thing in international affairs is the national sovereignty.
12:17And what goes on inside borders is the business of the country that is in government there.
12:23And unless they call for assistance, then it's not the business of the international community.
12:27I was at a meeting with President Clinton.
12:46And the President said, one of the most important things that is going to be a part of our legacy is if we can bring Russia into a globalized world and with good relations with the West.
13:04And the most important person in that is going to be Yeltsin, and I'm going to spend a lot of time with him.
13:12This was our eighth visit. It was a good and productive one, which emphasized the stability and the strength of the partnership between the United States and Russia.
13:25If you looked at the press reports, one could see that what you were writing was that today's meeting with President Bill Clinton was going to be a disaster.
13:36So this is the first time I tell you, that you were a disaster.
13:39This is the first time I tell you, that you were a disaster.
13:45Well, now for the first time I can tell you, that you were a disaster.
13:49The political pressure on Yeltsin was intense.
14:10After the end of communism, the Russian economy was collapsing.
14:15And for many Russians, the West's aggressiveness against their Slavic brothers fit a pattern of stab-in-the-back betrayal.
14:22A few years before, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker had promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that the Western Alliance would move not one inch eastward.
14:36Baker vowed that NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which for four decades had bound the United States military to those of its European allies, would not take advantage of Russia's current weakness.
14:49Now, under Clinton, the United States was doing exactly that, bringing Russia's former allies into NATO in order, the Russians believed, to keep Russia humiliated, isolated, and exposed.
15:05They were convinced that the United States was tricking Russia, boasting about the strong American-Russian relationship, even as they ignored Russia's legitimate interests in Eastern Europe.
15:20Many Russians began to despise Yeltsin for his close relations with Clinton and the United States.
15:26There was a sense in Russia in the mid-90s that being a great power, and Russia sees itself as a great power, that great powers like Russia are entitled to spheres of influence.
15:39And this is a proud people, you know, Russians who have a very exceptionalist view of their history and their role in the world.
15:44And I think there was a sense that was encroached upon, that the West took advantage of that moment.
15:51When I was serving in Russia in the mid-90s, I remember Andrei Kozirev, who was then the Russian foreign minister, saying,
15:58you Americans like to tell us what to do, but don't think that we, you know, like to be put in that position.
16:11Serbian forces are going all out to drive ethnic Muslim Albanians out of Kosovo.
16:17Serbs came, destroyed homes and schools, but then left.
16:19At least nine people have been killed in the last two days, including a child.
16:22...for some 200,000 villagers to flee their homes into the surrounding woods and hills.
16:29The Serbs were patrolling, movement through the villages arresting people who might be so-called troublemakers.
16:37Minimum, they'd be robbed, the women might be raped, the kids might be taken captive, they might be shot, and then people would flee.
16:47The Albanians came to me and they said, look, we're looking across these mountains,
16:54and of course we can see the mortar bombs going off.
16:57Boom, boom, boom.
16:59We know who's living in those villages.
17:01Some of them are our cousins.
17:03They're attacking these villages.
17:05What is NATO going to do?
17:08Well, that's a pretty strong condemnation of NATO, just after you've been beating your breast and saying how great we were,
17:15because we brought peace into the Balkans.
17:18We hadn't finished the job.
17:22There was not a shadow of doubt that we were going to intervene in Kosovo.
17:27There were not long debates.
17:29And the president articulated, time again, we're not going to permit ethnic cleansing,
17:33pure ethnic cleansing to take place in the last year of the 20th century.
17:38So then the question was, could we get NATO to sign on?
17:43Some of the NATO members said, we have to get the permission of the Security Council.
17:47We knew that was impossible.
17:49Russia going to veto it.
17:51To avoid creating more problems for Yeltsin, President Clinton tries to deter Milosevic.
18:00In June 1998, he sends 85 NATO warplanes on a demonstration flight above Albanian Macedonia.
18:06The president means to send a clear message.
18:11If Milosevic does not halt his ethnic cleansing in Kosovo,
18:15the Western powers are willing to use their military might to stop him.
18:19And if Milosevic is counting on Russia to protect him by casting its veto in the UN Security Council,
18:26Clinton sends a message about that too.
18:28The leader of the nation that proclaims a new world order, built around the United Nations,
18:36is quite willing to ignore the UN and order NATO forces into combat without Security Council approval.
18:43We have a lot of concern about the UN Security Council on the UN Security Council on the UN Security Council on the UN Security Council on the UN Security Council on the UN Security Council.
18:57In mid-June, President Clinton calls Yeltsin to discuss the Kosovo crisis.
19:03We must avoid the mistake we made in Bosnia, Clinton tells him, by waiting too long to act.
19:11Yeltsin is alarmed.
19:14Military action in Kosovo, he tells Clinton flatly, is unacceptable.
19:18Yeltsin was just bellowing at him, saying, you know, the United States must not, will not, cannot use force again in the Balkans the way you did in Bosnia.
19:34This is unacceptable.
19:36He ranted at Clinton, who often in these phone calls, by the way, would just sit there and kind of listen, take it.
19:44And then he hung up.
19:45The United States government at every level knew that the Russians were dug in on Kosovo.
19:56But there was a sense that genocide was around the corner if you, if you did not act.
20:03We had a hard choice to make between seeing this worst case scenario unfold,
20:09seeing Molosevic get away with murder and with ethnic cleansing.
20:14Seeing NATO's credibility kind of be shattered or to try to keep the Russians on board.
20:21Play on the strong personal connection between Clinton and Yeltsin.
20:25What Javier Solano, the NATO Secretary General said at the time, Molosevic has a new tactic.
20:37He calls it, a village a day keeps NATO away.
20:40That is to say, they had found the level of pain that NATO could tolerate.
20:47If they only did a village a day, NATO would say, well, it's not that serious right now.
20:52And yes, we should definitely take this under advisement.
20:56If they did two or three villages, NATO might act.
20:58So therefore, a village a day, that's what you got.
21:02That was 400,000 people who had evacuated their villages and were living up in the forests on these 10,000 foot mountains.
21:11They were winding up in tent encampments in neighboring countries and winter was coming.
21:17So there was initially a race to simply put in place the means to receive them, feed them, keep them warm and so on.
21:29Because the numbers were so extraordinarily high.
21:36Some of them would sneak in at night, they'd try to get the last loaf of bread out of their house,
21:41but they'd be gone again as soon as possible because they knew that Serbs caught them there.
21:48Anything could happen.
21:51And it was all starting over again. It was like a nightmare.
21:55And the dilemma was, okay, what now?
22:07We discussed our common foreign policy agenda.
22:11We agreed that the Serbian government must stop all repressive actions against civilian populations,
22:17allow relief organizations immediate and full access to those in need,
22:21and pursue an interim settlement.
22:23Here our approaches have not always completely coincided.
22:30Russia rejects the use of power methods as a matter of principle.
22:34Conflicts of today have no military solutions, be it in Kosovo or others.
22:42Also, we do not accept the NATO-centrism idea for the new European security.
22:48Are we Russia and US partners right now?
22:53And today, bidding farewell, Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton, are they still friends?
22:59You ask if we're still friends, the answer to that is yes.
23:05You ask if we are, if Russia and the United States have a partnership,
23:09I think the plain answer to that is yes, even though we don't always agree on every issue.
23:14Behind his calming words, Clinton is worried about Yeltsin's precarious political position.
23:25We are headed to a collision in Kosovo, he tells British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
23:30I'm quite concerned about the stability of Yeltsin's government.
23:35His economic problems are horrible, and his internal political problems are awful.
23:41Clinton and Blair agree not to bring the Kosovo issue to a UN Security Council vote,
23:47to avoid putting more pressure on Yeltsin.
23:51We tried to bring up the situation to Milosevic.
23:55He said, his internal problem, I'm not going to discuss it.
23:58It was clear that Milosevic had no intention of changing his plans.
24:05He was the worst sort of leader.
24:08Milosevic, for his own purposes, used the nationalist sense that the Serbs had
24:15in order to keep going after Kosovo.
24:17That was something that he talked about all the time, and it was a matter of Serbian honor.
24:22He was living up to the dreams that Serbia had, and a revenge for what happened in the 14th century.
24:31The Battle of Kosovo in 1389, where the Serbs got defeated by the Muslims.
24:36The Serbs went through this little village of Raychock, and rounded up 53 guys, and moved them into a ditch, and mowed them down.
24:51Some asked her, these guys are farmers. None of us understood why. Who were they?
24:58Why? Who were they?
25:11Oh, my goodness. Oh, sir.
25:14Mr. Milosevic has crossed the threshold, and the NATO countries I believe now are as one, that he must comply, or face the distinct possibility of military action.
25:32There was a way in which, and this applies to a lot of American policy in the 1990s, that our success made us overconfident.
25:42So, number one, we thought we had figured out how to solve some of the key problems, security problems that we faced.
25:55There was a kind of renewed confidence that the United States had the answers, that the right formula was, this was one the Clinton administration used all the time, diplomacy backed by force.
26:20You know, if you could find the right way to use those two tools, we could make the world work better.
26:30We're not in the business anymore of making appeals to him. He knows what he has to do.
26:33If he does it, that's his decision. Of course, I hope that he does do it.
26:36But we're not acting on the basis that he will. We're acting now on the basis that we're going to have to take military action.
26:41Before he orders the attack on Serbia, Clinton calls Jeltsin.
26:46I want you to know, said Clinton, that I am determined to do whatever I can to keep our disagreement on this from ruining everything else we have done and can do together in the coming years.
27:00Jeltsin is horrified. He begs Clinton to reconsider.
27:06At stake is not just Kosovo, Jeltsin declares, but the future of Russia.
27:12I remember how hard it was for me to try to turn the heads of our people towards the West, towards the United States, says Jeltsin.
27:20And now, we would lose all that.
27:26Jeltsin said, no, no, no.
27:29Nyet, nyet, nyet.
27:31Don't do this.
27:33He was furious, apoplectic.
27:37It was, he says, you just cannot do that.
27:40We have a good relationship going, but I have a lot of problems at home.
27:46I have tried to bend for things that you felt were important, including the future of NATO.
27:55But, uh, he did not say, please don't do this.
27:59He said, you can't do this.
28:01The Russian president tried to explain to Clinton that the issue is much bigger than Kosovo.
28:10That acting to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo would carry a huge cost.
28:15In the name of our future, in the name of you and me, in the name of the security in Europe, Jeltsin pleads,
28:23I ask you to renounce that strike.
28:26That should be done for the sake of peace in Europe.
28:29It is not known who will come after us.
28:35I can't, says Clinton.
28:41Taking account of what Russia thought, or Russian interests, or Russian reactions, was not a big deal, frankly.
28:50The policy establishment here was not actually thinking,
28:55Oh, we need to think carefully about how we've approached this because Russia may react X, Y, or Z.
29:01Russia was seen as basically having to take it.
29:04This was a NATO operation now.
29:06There is a humanitarian reason why I believe we need to take a stand there.
29:10There is a practical reason.
29:13If we don't do it now, we'll have to do it later.
29:16And there is a long-term strategic region for the United States.
29:19Our children need a stable, free Europe.
29:22It was a Tuesday night on the 23rd of March, and General Shelton called me and said,
29:32The military authority.
29:3524 hours from now, it's going.
29:39Velozovich knows the phone number of NATO, and he knows where to call when he wants the strikes to stop.
29:50Perhaps 20 targets hit in the first hour alone.
29:53Airports, communication towers, command posts, military factories and warehouses.
30:00Pristina, only two weeks ago, a bustling city of mostly Kosovar Albanians.
30:04Today, a virtual ghost town.
30:06Well, короче говоря, грубейшая ошибка американцев и американской дипломатии и Клинтона.
30:15Грубейшая ошибка.
30:17Кто следующий?
30:19Кто из вас уверен, что они завтра не объявят, что в результате гуманитарной катастрофы в Чечне
30:24надо бомбить предместье Москвы или по Волочке?
30:29Ну, кто из вас теперь уверен?
30:36КОНЕЦ!
30:37КОНЕЦ!
30:38КОНЕЦ!
30:39КОНЕЦ!
30:40КОНЕЦ!
30:41КОНЕЦ!
30:42КОНЕЦ!
30:43КОНЕЦ!
30:44КОНЕЦ!
30:45КОНЕЦ!
30:46КОНЕЦ!
30:47plan that they instituted immediately when the bonds started falling, and that is to
30:54push the Kosovars out of Kosovo into Macedonia.
31:01In the vast sea of mud and despair, new arrivals huddle in groups, women and children traumatized
31:07by the loss of their men.
31:09The refugee camps in Macedonia are packed to bursting.
31:12More than 100,000 ethnic Albanians are here already.
31:17There was a tremendous pressure in the Clinton administration, and then a sense that winter
31:22was coming, which meant there would be a crisis at humanitarian levels, and a sense that Milosevic
31:29was playing a pressure game with us, and the question was, what would be the response to
31:36that?
31:39Soon after the mission began, we, I think, realized that bombing only Serb forces in Kosovo,
31:49you know, the actual perpetrators of the ethnic cleansing, was only having limited effect.
31:55And that's why as the conflict went on, we had to push for Allied agreement to raise the
32:00stakes by beginning to bomb military targets in Serbia proper.
32:05And even sort of strategic assets like bridges and TV towers, and in Belgrade itself.
32:15Should we or should we not strike the Serbian White House?
32:18Should we strike the Serbian version of the Pentagon?
32:22Because some of the very sensitive targets the chairman insisted on taking to the White House.
32:27He wanted President Clinton to understand that a very politically sensitive target was
32:33going to be struck.
32:35And they approved every single one that he took over.
32:38There would be many more massacres.
32:40The bombing of Belgrade was a bit of a shock for some of us at the State Department.
32:45And I remember saying to Strobe in a kind of moment of agitation, you know, this is really
32:54un-American, bombing cities.
32:57You'd have to be a moron or a devil to go into a war and not be afraid.
33:12Those are humanity's darkest chaos.
33:23We actually bombed refugees who were trying to get out of the country.
33:30We bombed bridges when we thought there was nobody on them and there were people on them.
33:36War is hell.
33:40So everything was going wrong.
33:42At some point I walk into my office very early on and my executive assistant says, sit down.
33:48I said, what?
33:49He said, just sit down.
33:50I said, what's the matter with you?
33:52And he said, we have just bombed the Chinese embassy by mistake.
33:55Suddenly CNN is saying that the Chinese embassy was hit.
34:01So I laid out all the targets and all the maps and looked at them and nothing was anywhere
34:05near the Chinese embassy.
34:09And my wife came in and she said, they sure look like Chinese people standing there.
34:15And so we had to acknowledge that somehow we had struck the Chinese embassy.
34:24I said, I said, my regrets and my profound condolences to the leaders and the people of China and to
34:35the innocent people in Serbia who have perished.
34:37Perished.
34:38I hate it.
34:39It wasn't.
34:40It's tragic.
34:41It's awful.
34:43But it's a tragedy.
34:44And it was an accident.
34:46Let's just go back to the US embassy and angry Russians today.
35:03The building is scarred by three straight days of demonstrations.
35:07In today's emergency debate in parliament, ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky showed up
35:11in uniform ready for war.
35:13No surprise there.
35:16What is significant, though, is what's being said by Russians who are normally pro-Western.
35:20Russia was not starting the war.
35:22The bombing came from NATO.
35:24You have no right to start the things that you don't know how to finish.
35:28We had the most uncontrollable anti-American rhetoric that we'd seen since the, not just
35:38since the Cold War, but in many, many years.
35:43You'd have to go back decades to find anything as hysterical and anti-American as what you
35:49heard during the Kosovo War.
35:51A lot of this, I always thought, had very little to do with Kosovars and Serbians.
36:02It had to do with domestic politics.
36:05What suddenly emerged was an opportunity for Yeltsin's critics, opponents, all those people
36:15whom he had managed to keep at bay.
36:20It became an opportunity because he is seen as not standing up to the Americans.
36:26Mr. Yeltsin is under attack from communists and nationalists who are pushing him to do
36:32more for Yugoslavia.
36:34From opposition lawmakers who are preparing for a major debate on impeaching him.
36:38The single biggest political organized force in the Russian Federation was still what was
36:51left over of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
36:55And that much of the nationalist opposition came out either of a certain set of especially
37:01vitriolic politicians who were appealing to raw Russian nationalism and to the Communist Party.
37:11Yeltsin was increasingly pushed by harder line advisers including Primakov and some of the
37:17former KGB people that were gaining more influence.
37:20more liberal figures in Yeltsin's administration had been replaced.
37:26So Russia was kind of becoming a little more Soviet in its approach and was determined not
37:33to be led by the nose by NATO or the United States anymore.
37:37In fact, America is going on the way to fascist Germany.
37:40They were in the 1936-1937 in Spain and they decided to try new technologies in Iraq and Yugoslavia.
37:49The cold war is constantly returning.
37:52The commandment of the North-Western Army is saying that they are willing to
37:55personally appoint a group of Russian soldiers if they are going to Yugoslavia.
38:00NATO is an instrument of war, not an instrument of the world.
38:04NATO is a criminal organization, and it does not have a right to exist.
38:09This is not looking back and saying, oh my god, that is going to be really tough on Yeltsin
38:16and the reformers in Russia.
38:18We knew that it was going to be very, very tough on them when we were doing it.
38:26We were doing the right thing, but sometimes the right thing can be very, very dangerous.
38:33The tragedy, on my opinion, is in a different way.
38:37It is more massive.
38:38Today, a group of states is taking an active attempt to change the
38:43after the Second World War, the international world order.
38:48The United Nations Organization is removed from the decision of one of the most harsh conflicts
38:53in the last few days.
38:55I told NATO and the Americans and the Germans, don't push us towards military actions,
39:05otherwise the whole Europe will plunge into a war.
39:09Mr. Yeltsin, according to the Speaker of the Lower House of Parliament, went even further,
39:13saying he might order Russia to retarget its nuclear weapons at NATO countries
39:17taking part in the bombing of Yugoslavia.
39:19The threats by President Yeltsin of Russia were taken very seriously and parsed and analyzed
39:25and the intelligence community did various analyses of this.
39:29But there just was not a conviction that Russia was going to use nuclear weapons over Kosovo.
39:43We thought five, six days, Milosevic would surrender.
39:47You know, two months, he had not surrendered.
39:49And there was one particular moment when, you know,
39:52we had to make a decision of whether we were going to use ground forces.
39:55But that was when the debate emerged.
39:58The military did not want to put ground forces in
40:02because they said it was a non-permissive environment.
40:05And I said, but excuse me, I don't understand.
40:08We've been bombing for over 70 days.
40:10So is there something between permissive and non-permissive?
40:15Is there semi-permissive?
40:17And then the military, who know how to do this, said, you're not semi-dead.
40:23Well, nobody was in favor of ground.
40:25When you put ground troops in, you start taking casualties.
40:28You're writing letters home.
40:30But from the commander's perspective,
40:32it had to be an option that was on the table.
40:35The credible threat of a ground invasion dramatically increases the stakes.
40:42For the arrival of American troops in Kosovo would send Russians into the streets
40:47and make Yeltsin's position untenable.
40:51Yeltsin acts.
40:53He brings back to power the former Russian Prime Minister Viktor Tchernomirdin.
40:58He orders him to fly to Belgrade to restrain Milosevic and broker a peace deal with the West.
41:05After a couple of weeks in which he had not been able to get a handle on this,
41:11Yeltsin turned the tables on his critics,
41:14injects himself into this picture as the man who is going to stop the fighting
41:22and ensure that not more Serbs get killed
41:26and is going to keep Russia from having any involvement in a war.
41:47When Tchernomirdin arrives in Belgrade,
41:49NATO makes clear that the preparations for an invasion are advancing.
41:55Tchernomirdin tells Milosevic flatly that if NATO invades,
41:59Russia will not support him.
42:05I remember sitting in my office at 2 o'clock in the morning,
42:08writing a memo to the president,
42:11saying, if we want to have the ground option,
42:14you have to say yes in three days.
42:19And here are the consequences of that.
42:238 o'clock, the phone rang.
42:25It was Strobe Talbot.
42:27And Strobe said he surrendered.
42:31You don't think there was an absolute exhale of relief at that point.
42:36I went to Brussels, went to NATO headquarters,
42:40went to the office of Javier Solana,
42:44and we basically just had one big abrazo.
42:49We just hugged,
42:52and there were a few cheers of kind of relief shed.
42:58But that's the only time I would confess in public.
43:04It was late at night, 8 or 9 o'clock in Brussels,
43:08and Solana called me, and he said,
43:10this is over.
43:11You can stop right now.
43:13It's over.
43:14Stop the campaign.
43:15You've done it.
43:16You've won.
43:17He said, you'll be my friend for life.
43:19I thought that was a nice expression,
43:22and I've always treasured what he said to me that night.
43:26I got a good night's sleep for the first time in about three months.
43:29This is CNN breaking news.
43:38Despite assurances by the Russian government
43:40that its troops would not enter Kosovo,
43:42Russian soldiers entered the battered capital early Saturday
43:45and were greeted by...
43:46They came down the main street of Pristina,
43:49Russian flags overhead,
43:51shots fired repeatedly.
43:53Tim, they are simply stunned here at the White House tonight.
43:56I cannot overstate the shock of White House officials.
43:59At first, they denied it could be true,
44:01but then rushed into meetings here at the White House.
44:06It was a nice day in Washington,
44:09and I got a call from my deputy,
44:11who was with Strobe in Moscow between meetings,
44:16and she said to me,
44:17you're not going to believe what has been going on here.
44:23There was a sense that they had witnessed
44:27the kind of Russian national security establishment
44:30coming unglued.
44:33In Russia, it was chaos.
44:36It was chaos.
44:38Yeltsin was out of business.
44:40He was at the dacha.
44:42And then some Russians,
44:45high up in the military,
44:47went rogue.
44:48I would say it was almost a mutiny.
44:51It was a mutiny.
44:53It was a Russian special op.
44:56They got their battalion in.
44:57They took the airfield.
44:58They continued to prepare to outload their troops
45:02and land more troops.
45:03But in the meantime,
45:05I had called the Hungarians
45:08and the Ukrainians and the Romanians.
45:11The Russians had come to them
45:13and asked for overflight permission.
45:15So they did it the typical way.
45:17You know, they went to the Ukrainians and said,
45:19the Hungarians have already agreed to overflight.
45:21You may as well give us permission.
45:22So the Ukrainians said,
45:23okay, you're going to have it.
45:25They went to the Hungarians and said,
45:26the Ukrainians have given us permission.
45:27The Hungarians said, no.
45:29They went to the Romanians.
45:31The Romanians said, no.
45:32They went to the Bulgarians.
45:33The Bulgarians said, no.
45:34So they backed down
45:36and the additional troops never came in.
45:43I arrived in Pristina once the war was over
45:46and there were signs all over saying,
45:50thank you, USA.
45:51Thank you, USA.
45:52And now there is a whole generation of little girls
45:56whose first name is Madeline.
45:58Well, I obviously was deeply moved
46:01and we did do the right thing.
46:05We're working with both parties
46:07to try to get them together.
46:08Because the Russian presence
46:09will help to reassure the service
46:11and close figures who are working
46:12toward democratic change.
46:14There was an argument in the United States
46:18which is the Americans won the Cold War.
46:21And that idea was not about ideology
46:25but rather it became focused
46:27on the Russians lost.
46:38Then the issue becomes, in a sense,
46:40well, who's in charge of designing the future
46:44of this big Euro-Atlantic world?
46:48Whose values, whose systems, whose institutions
46:53and so on?
46:54And the answer from Washington is pretty obvious.
46:56Well, you know, we're in charge.
46:58So it's NATO.
47:03It is Western financial and trading institutions.
47:07It's all of the things that the United States
47:11and the West had stood for.
47:14Our message is clear.
47:19Peace and humanity will prevail in Kosovo.
47:25The last European dictatorship
47:27of the 20th century
47:29will not destroy Europe's long-awaited chance
47:32to live at last together
47:35in peace and freedom.
47:38We didn't listen much.
47:48We're not good listeners, Americans, you know.
47:50We think if there's a problem, let's get on and fix it.
47:54And we never have been,
47:56were willing to accept the premise
47:58that in a different world
48:01you better sit down with everybody
48:04and figure out what the new rules are going to be.
48:08Clearly the mood in Russia after the war
48:23was increasingly anti-Western
48:25and Kosovo was a key part of the narrative.
48:28So it may have been one of the factors
48:31that led the forces around Putin
48:35to be the choice that Yeltsin had to make
48:40in choosing his successor.
48:45Yeltsin was leaving office.
48:48In his final call as president with Clinton
48:51just three hours before the new millennium,
48:54Yeltsin thanks Clinton for his friendship.
48:57Then he invites him to meet his successor,
49:00a former KGB officer
49:02who was largely unknown to the West.
49:05He is strong and intelligent,
49:07Yeltsin assures Clinton.
49:09I'm sure he is a Democrat.
49:12The United States missed a terrific opportunity
49:18to help Russia transform itself.
49:22Instead, we just let Russia be.
49:26And the power structure
49:28that was left after the collapse
49:30of the Soviet Union was still in place.
49:33The same KGB officers,
49:34like Major or Colonel Putin.
49:38They made their way up.
49:39They carried the same ideas and prejudices
49:42that they'd been schooled to.
49:43President of the Russian Federation
49:46I'm sure that Putin's time
50:05being kind of on the fringes
50:07of the breakup of the Soviet Empire
50:09when he was serving in the KGB
50:11in East Germany influenced his view of the West.
50:15And I think a lot of his hostility to the West
50:17goes back to his sense
50:19that Russia had been ignored.
50:21It was not so much that
50:22we did anything harmful to Russia,
50:24but that we ignored Russia's point of view
50:26in taking our final decision
50:28to use the air power.
50:31I think that contributed to a lot of the rhetoric
50:34we've heard from Putin in more recent years.
50:37I don't think you can understand Putin's Russia
50:40unless you have a sense of that feeling
50:43of collapse and humiliation
50:46that was very much a part of Yeltsin's Russia.
50:49From Putin's perspective,
50:50when he was looking at the independence of Kosovo,
50:54he was looking at American plans
50:55to establish missile defense installations
50:58in Poland and the Czech Republic,
50:59and he was looking at a NATO summit
51:01in which the United States pushed very hard
51:03to open the door to NATO membership
51:05for Ukraine and Georgia.
51:07He saw all this as part of a kind of concerted,
51:10American-led conspiracy to undermine Russia.
51:14And so, yeah, I mean, their sense was
51:17that the United States was the more powerful player
51:19along with our NATO allies,
51:21and so we were making the rules.
51:22And when the moment arose years later,
51:25you know, when they had relatively more leverage,
51:28that was still very much on their minds.
51:30I have over and over and again tried
51:38with Gimlet eyes to say,
51:41Strobe, you and we made a big mistake
51:47with two things,
51:49NATO expansion
51:52and the war against Milosevic over Kosovo
51:56because they were crippling to Yeltsin.
52:05But that's not the end of my monologue
52:10with my dialogue with myself.
52:13You have to say to yourself,
52:16what's the other side?
52:19What would have happened
52:22if we had shut down
52:25all of the countries
52:26that wanted to be part of the West?
52:28If we had sacrificed them,
52:32we would have been ashamed of ourselves.
52:35And as for the genocidal war
52:39that Milosevic was waging
52:42against his own people,
52:44if we had let that thing go to the end,
52:49history would have been
52:51at least as mad at us
52:54as our Russian friends are now.
52:57How many would have died in Kosovo
53:01had the West not finally acted
53:03to stop ethnic cleansing?
53:06It is impossible to know.
53:09But during the month
53:10after the bombings ended,
53:12nearly a million Muslim refugees
53:14protected by NATO troops
53:16were able to return to their homes.
53:19Today, Kosovo is an independent country
53:22created by the West after the war.
53:29After the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda,
53:32the United Nations embraced
53:34the responsibility to protect.
53:38Under this principle known as R2P,
53:41the sovereignty of each regime
53:42over its territory and people
53:44carries the responsibility
53:46to protect those people
53:47from genocide, ethnic cleansing
53:49and crimes against humanity.
53:51Should the national government
53:54fail to fulfill that responsibility,
53:56then the international community
53:58through the Security Council
53:59must assume it.
54:01in effect,
54:05this is what the United States
54:07and NATO did in Kosovo.
54:09They intervened in a sovereign country
54:12and acted to save lives.
54:14But the intervention had its cost.
54:17The nations of the region
54:18have faced enormous...
54:19For a time,
54:20the United States
54:21as sole superpower
54:22had been strong enough
54:24to impose its vision.
54:25But as in any tragedy,
54:27unchecked power brings hubris
54:30in its train
54:31and hubris leads
54:32to the downfall of the powerful.
54:34Hurrah!
54:35Hurrah!
54:36Hurrah!
54:42Vladimir Putin took power
54:44vowing to return
54:46a humiliated Russia
54:47to its glory days.
54:49And he acted to do just that.
54:51Putin ruthlessly crushed
54:54the rebellion in Chechnya,
54:56intervened in Georgia,
54:58eastern Ukraine and Syria
55:00and seized the Crimea.
55:03Putin curbed democratic freedoms
55:05in Russia,
55:06assassinated his critics
55:08and made himself in effect
55:10president for life.
55:14He became Russia's new strongman
55:16and he did so with the approval
55:18of vast numbers of Russians
55:20who had been humiliated
55:22by what they saw
55:23as the abject retreat
55:24of the Yeltsin years
55:25and welcomed
55:26their country's
55:27newfound power.
55:32It is not known
55:33who will come after us,
55:35Yeltsin had warned Clinton.
55:38The Americans,
55:39by imposing their will
55:41on a weakened Russia,
55:43had helped create
55:44their own nemesis.
55:45In Vladimir Putin,
55:47the Americans found a tough
55:50and cunning rival
55:52who played Russia's hand
55:53aggressively
55:54in the Middle East
55:55and in Europe.
55:58In February 2022,
56:00Putin sent his soldiers
56:01and tanks into Ukraine,
56:03vowing to dismantle
56:05a sovereign country
56:06and set off the gravest crisis
56:08in Europe
56:09since the Second World War.
56:11No doubt,
56:12he had been encouraged
56:13that when he earlier
56:14attacked and invaded
56:15his neighbors,
56:16he had found
56:17little real opposition.
56:19But the seeds
56:20of his resentment,
56:21his obsession
56:22to recreate
56:23the glory of Soviet power
56:25had been sown
56:26during the
56:27New World Order
56:28of the 90s
56:29in the United States'
56:30decisions
56:31to expand NATO
56:32and to intervene
56:33in Kosovo.
56:37Putin's brutal invasion
56:38of Ukraine
56:39brought Russia
56:40and the United States
56:42as close
56:43as they have ever been
56:44to the nightmare
56:45of nuclear confrontation.
57:08He's got aятся
57:23and he's gonna get
57:24on his own.
57:25He was a very
57:26devil's Iranian
57:27and he was a great
57:28expert in Russia.
57:29He was a great
57:30hero,
57:31of course,
57:32and he was a devil's
57:33who was a little
57:36who was a great
Recomendado
59:28
|
A Seguir
59:30
0:52
1:34:42
1:27:53