'Reverse Balkan blowback': good guys become bad then good

But let us go back in time so that we can understand this bizarre Reverse Balkan Blowback involving Ali Ahmed Ali Hamad.

From 1945 to 1991, Yugoslavia was a communist federation consisting of six republics: Serbia (Srbija), Croatia (Hrvatska), Slovenia (Slovenija), Macedonia (Makedonija), Montenegro (Crna Gora) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Bosna-Hercegovina). In 1974, two autonomous regions, Vojvodina and Kosovo-Metohija, were created within Serbia. Up until his death in 1980 Marshal Josip Broz Tito, a half Croat, half Slovene, managed an incredible balancing act by a ruthless crackdown on any form of ethnic separatism and as well as keeping Yugoslavia free from Soviet Russian domination.

In 1989 the President of the Republic of Serbia, a communist banker by the name of Slobodan Milosevic, riding on a wave of nationalism, revoked the special status of Vojvodina, which had a large ethnic Hungarian population, and Kosovo, with its 90 per cent ethnic Albanian majority. Milosevic’s ambition was to keep Yugoslavia intact but under Serbian hegemony.

In an article titled, “Yugoslavia supplying arms to Iraq, published in the Croatian Herald, Melbourne, on January 25, 1991, I wrote, as it turned out five months in advance that war in Yugoslavia would break out:

It is believed that the US may have given tacit approval for JNA [Yugoslav People’s Army-Jugoslovenska Narodna Army] to intervene in Slovenia, Croatia … In return the Yugoslav government pledged to stop supplying Iraq with weapons [first gulf war 1990-91].

Eleven years later British journalists, Nicholas Wood and Ian Traynor, wrote in the Guardian newspaper, "Yugoslavia the hub of arms sales to Saddam," November 26, 2002.

On June 25, 1991, tanks from the Serbian dominated JNA rolled into Slovenia after it seceded from Yugoslavia. War broke out that was to tear apart the Balkans region for a decade.

Maud Beelman, an Associated Press foreign correspondent, wrote in Hear No Evil, See No Evil: Early U.S. Policy in Yugoslavia, for the Alicia Patterson Foundation:

Preoccupied with the Gulf War and concern over the future of the Soviet Union, the United States did not deploy its diplomatic big guns until June 1991, just days before the long-announced secession of Slovenia and Croatia and the outbreak of war.

Secretary of State James Baker flew to Belgrade for a one-day marathon of meetings with the leaders of federal Yugoslavia and the various republics. Baker declined to be interviewed, but in his autobiography, "The Politics of Diplomacy," he said his message was clear.

“While we supported the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia and existing republic borders and would not accept unilateral changes, the international community, of course, recognized that if the republics wanted to change borders by peaceful, consensual means, that was an altogether different matter,“ he wrote.

A U.S. diplomat with Baker said the Serbs took his comments as a green light for sending in the federal army, while all the Croats and Slovenes heard was democratize. War erupted in less than a week.

Pointedly, Baker did not threaten any U.S. intervention should the Serbs use the army to quell secessionist attempts, only "ostracism" for the Serbs and a refusal by the West to recognize breakaway republics.

Slovenia won its independence after 10 days, and the JNA withdrew to attack Croatia and later Bosnia.

In October 1992, I was an Australian journalist hired by the MILS news agency, specialising in Macedonian and Balkan affairs, to train young Macedonian reporters and to fine tune its daily news wire service, which was being supplied to subscribers: foreign embassies and international media agencies. MILS Managing Director, was Dr Ljupco Naumovski, a former diplomat in the Federal Yugoslav and later the Macedonian Foreign Affairs Offices.

MILS's headquarters was in Brussels, Belgium, and had a branch in Skopje, the Macedonian capital. Skopje was manned by respected local journalist Saso Ordanoski, who is on a first name basis with ex-Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans from Evan’s time as the President of the International Crisis Group (ICG), a strategic think tank dedicated to ending world conflict and based in Brussels.