After being criticized for relying on a gusher of Saudi money, Jared Kushner’s investment fund made its first big splash last month when it announced it had signed a$ 500 million deal with the Serbian government to build a high-end real estate project in downtown Belgrade on the site of a bombed-down army building that was destroyed during the Kosovo War in 1999.
However, the fine print of the agreement includes a promise that appears to be going to stoke even more international outcry: a promise made by Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, to create 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 in response to its , relentless campaign of repression and
Among those exercised , over the Kushner deal , is retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander during the battle.
While he has no objection to a U. S. firm investing in Serbia, the planned revisionist memorial—officially proclaiming America’s adversary in the war to have been a victim of , “aggression” — “is worse than a reversal” of U. S. policies in the region, said Clark in an interview with Spy Talk. It betrays the United States, its laws, and the brave ambassadors and airmen who, according to Wikipedia, did everything possible to quit Serb ethnic cleansing.
The just-released agreement between Kushner’s organization and the Serbian government of Aleksander Vui, a pro-Russian hardliner who previously served as Milosevic’s government’s minister of information, is equally alarming, Clark said. In a time when NATO is attempting to halt Russian aggression in Ukraine, the monument job serves the Kremlin’s main objectives.
According to Clark,” This is a part of a larger Russian intelligence movement to cut, discredit, and undermine NATO.” ” It’s Russian royal pushback…Should Kushner join in this? Of course, he should n’t.
Kushner and members of his Miami-based business did not respond to requests for opinion. However, Clark’s notes are likely to attract attention to a job that has drawn strong criticism from Serbian opposition leaders and concerns about potential conflicts of interest if Donald Trump, Kushner’s father-in-law, is elected chairman in November.
Given Richard Grenell’s reported part in the Belgrade offer, which was Trump’s former U.S. ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence, has forged close ties to Bosnian officers and kept his hope of becoming secretary of state in a second Trump administration in a heated debate.
The proposed$ 500 million project, which includes plans to construct a luxury hotel, retail space, and 1,500 residential units on the bombed-out site of the former Serbian Army headquarters, was recently reported by The New York Times.  ,
He was quoted by the Times as saying he saw the project—an earlier variant of which he pushed during a time he also served as Trump’s special envoy to the region—as promoting “healing” between the U. S. and Serbia. ( Efforts to reach Grenell for comment for this story were unsuccessful. )
Kushner’s post-White House dealings have drawn a lot of scrutiny since it was revealed that his newly established overseas investment firm had received the majority of its funding,$ 2 billion, from the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, a wealthy financial institution that some claimed was a payoff for his efforts to protect Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Salman ( MBS ) in the wake of the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The administration of President Biden, who previously vowed to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state, has cultivated MBS in hopes of forging a security deal that includes a peace deal with Israel, has somewhat cooled that cost.  ,
Clark’s outrage stems from the Kushner firm’s consent to create the memorial and its language about NATO aggression. NATO’s attack of Serbia, which commenced in March, 1999, he said, was the culmination of a “years long work” by the U. S. Western alliance to prevent continuous attacks on Kosovo villages and towns by the next- Serbian authorities of Milosevic, once known as” the Butcher of the Balkans”, who died in a United Nations confinement body in The Hague in 2006 while on trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.  ,
” There was no NATO aggression”, said Clark. The battle was a reaction to Milosevic’s “ethnic cleansing plan” that was started in the late 1980s. Determined to mark out Kosovo separatists rebelling against Bosnian persecution, Serb forces do” surround a town, then mail in the , military, taking women and raping them, shooting families. Clark once said that he had a memory of meeting Milosevic with him in 1998 during an all-night meeting in Belgrade where he quoted the Serbian leader as saying,” We know how to deal with these people. ”  ,
The United States has already begun to heal the wounds from the NATO war with Serbia, according to Edward P. Joseph, a Balkans scholar at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who served in the region during the conflict. In 2016, he noted, then Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Belgrade and expressed his” condolences , to the families of those whose lives were lost in the wars of the 1990s, including those killed as a consequence of the NATO airstrikes. ”  ,
But the Kushner- Serbia agreement goes considerably beyond that by framing NATO’s bombing of Serbia as a case of western” aggression. ”  ,
According to Joseph, who conducted on-the-ground deconfliction efforts during the war,” And that’s the main obstacle to moving Serbia past the wars of the 1990s.”
” To achieve reconciliation, the memorial at the reconstructed building would have to honor the memory of the victims—as Biden did in 2016—and confront the’ Greater Serbia ‘ policy of the 1990’s, “added Joseph”. Vui, who served in the Milosevic regime as information minister in 1999, is undoubtedly unwilling to do this. They are still pushing the grievance narrative. ”  ,
