I thought Klintoon put us on the Muslim's side in that little war. ???
It wasn't as much for the sake of the Muslims as the problem it was posing Europe as a whole. But who expects rationality out of the Balkans?
"I thought Klintoon put us on the Muslim's side in that little war. ???"
And you are right.
Here's something from "The Transatlantic Intelligencer" blog -- http://trans-int.blogspot.com/2005/03/return-of-ruder-finn-background-on-pro.html After the interview from the last link with James Harff (Ruder Finn PR agent who represented the Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians during the Balkan wars), there is this:
"An article published in Wednesday’s New York Sun under the title “Advisor to Annan Triggers Concern” now reveals that David Finn, the chairman of Ruder Finn, has served as a “pro bono” advisor to Kofi Annan since he became UN Secretary General in 1997. Furthermore, the article reveals that Kofi Annan’s nephew Kobina was employed as a paid intern at Ruder Finn – “Kofi Annan asked David Finn if he would give some guidance to his nephew, Kobina Annan,” a Ruder Finn spokesperson is quoted as saying – and that “Ruder Finn's publishing arm is selling Mr. Annan's 2001 Nobel Peace Prize lecture as a hardcover book”. “At the same time that Ruder Finn employed Mr. Annan's nephew,” the article notes,
Two senior Ruder Finn officials, Anne Glauber and Dena Merriam, who is Mr. Finn's daughter, were hired as outside contractors by the U.N. Development Program to revamp its communications office. They were paid $30,000 for two months' work, according to a UNDP spokesman, William Orme.
I do not want here to discuss James Harff’s assessment of the relative responsibility of the warring parties for the ravages of the Bosnian Civil War. But I will recall that it was in Bosnia that the UN essentially lost its innocence and, for better or for worse, abandoned the impartiality among warring parties that had hitherto been the sine qua non for UN peace-keeping operations. The most spectacular event in this process of transformation was the 1995 bombing of Bosnian Serb positions by NATO forces in connection with – though in fact not quite under – a UN mandate. The go ahead for the operation on the part of the UN bureaucracy – which was supposed to hold one of the two “keys” that had to be “turned” to initiate NATO air strikes in Bosnia – was given by none other than Kofi Annan in his capacity as then Under-Secretary General. Richard Holbrooke, in his notably self-aggrandizing account of the Bosnian conflict To End A War (New York: Random House, 1998), goes so far as to claim that it was thanks to this act of indulgence toward NATO that Annan would later become Secretary General: “in a sense Annan won the job on that day” (p. 103).
In his book Dubious Mandate: A Memoir of the UN in Bosnia, Summer 1995 (Durham and London: Duke, 1999), Phillip Corwin has written on the developments in question as follows:
If NATO wanted to declare war against one of the parties to the conflict in Bosnia, then it should have done so under a NATO flag, not under a UN flag. It was disingenuous to enter a country as a peacekeeping force and then to wage war against one of the parties.
Corwin was the UN’s chief political officer in Bosnia. In his book, he also recounts, incidentally, how a Bosnian government official “threatened his life” when he proposed to visit Srebrenica following its fall to Serb forces in July 1995. Shortly after the meeting in question, Corwin would be the target of sniper fire that, he claims, came from Bosnian government positions."