Jared Kushner back at it, making deals with despots
For a political leader obsessed with flags, national greatness rhetoric, and other expressions of patriotism in the abstract, Donald Trump has never seemed super duper concerned about United States national security (or the people who protect it) in the particular.
Examples of this abound, from his insulting 2016 comments about a family whose son died in Iraq to his indifference about the detention and apparent torture of Ohio native Otto Warmbier in North Korea.
(A year after Warmbier’s death, Trump appeared with Kim Jong-un at a summit in Singapore and spoke excitedly about the possibility of turning North Korean beaches into resorts.)
He’s also often suggested that the United States should abandon its commitments to protect NATO countries from Russia, which, in addition to arguably being an unconscionable betrayal of the European allies who helped prevent America from being overrun by communists with names like Ivan and Yevgeny, could conceivably result in a World War III–type land war in Europe, which would probably be bad for the U.S. overall as well. Vladimir Putin, too, has won Trump’s favor by engaging him about potential real estate development.
A new story by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff in the SpyTalk newsletter suggests that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, may be a chip off the old block. The government of Serbia recently agreed to let Kushner’s investment company, Affinity Partners, build a $500 million luxury hotel complex in Belgrade. Isikoff highlights one particular condition of that deal, which is that Affinity will be building a memorial to the victims of NATO’s 1999 bombing attacks against the government of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who would later be charged in The Hague for leading so-called ethnic cleansing campaigns against other Balkan populations. (Milosevic died of a heart attack in 2006, before a verdict was reached.)
The NATO operation, as Isikoff notes, was specifically triggered by the Milosevic government’s imposition of what the U.N. later called “a systematic campaign of terror” in Kosovo:
But the fine print of the deal includes a commitment that seems destined to stir up even more international controversy: a pledge by Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, to construct a “memorial dedicated to all the victims of NATO aggression”— an allusion to the U.S.backed bombing campaign that brought the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic to its knees a quarter century ago in response to its relentless campaign of repression and savage massacres of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
(Bloomberg and BalkanInsight.com reported on the provision requiring the construction of the memorial in May 16 articles about the Affinity deal.)
U.S. forces played a major role in the NATO air campaign, which suggests that Kushner’s memorial would pay tribute to individuals who attempted (albeit with little success) to use lethal force against American troops. No NATO fatalities were reported during combat operations, although two U.S. soldiers died when an Army helicopter malfunctioned, and three soldiers were captured and beaten near the Yugoslavia-Macedonia border but were later released.
Is the memorial possibly commemorating civilian deaths caused by American and NATO strikes? (Human Rights Watch estimated that some 500 noncombatants were killed during the bombings.) It wouldn’t appear so, given that development is slated for the former site of the Yugoslav army headquarters building, which was damaged heavily by NATO in 1999 and subsequently left abandoned as its own sort of unofficial memorial. It was Yugoslav army forces that beat, mocked, and detained the U.S. soldiers (who were, according to the American account at the time, lawfully on patrol in Macedonia).
According to Human Rights Watch, the Yugoslav army was responsible for “torture, killings, rapes, forced expulsions, and other war crimes” in Kosovo. (Affinity did not respond to a request for comment.)
This is in some ways business as usual for Kushner, given that Affinity is itself backed by a Saudi fund controlled by Mohammad bin Salman, who ordered the 2018 kidnapping and murder of Virginia resident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
For his part, Trump has been claiming on the campaign trail this year that he could easily secure the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been held prisoner in Russia for more than a year on spurious espionage charges, but will only do so if Americans vote for him in November. It’s too bad for Gershkovich and Khashoggi, really, that their families weren’t in the hotel investment business.
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