Belgrade development, joined by former Trump envoy Ric Grenell, includes a memorial to “victims of NATO aggression"
After weathering criticism over its reliance on a gusher of Saudi cash, 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 develop a high end real estate project in downtown Belgrade on the site of a bombed down army building destroyed during the 1999 Kosovo war.
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.
Among those exercised over the Kushner deal is retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander during the war.
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 SpyTalk. “It’s a betrayal of the United States, its policies and the brave diplomats and airmen who did what they could to stop Serb ethnic cleansing.”
Just as concerning as the whitewashing of Serbian war crimes, Clark said, is the just announced deal between Kushner’s firm and the Serbian government of Aleksander Vučić, a pro-Russian hardliner who once served as minister of information in Milosevic’s government. The memorial project needs to be viewed in a wider geopolitical context: It serves the Kremlin’s core interests in undermining NATO at a time the alliance is engaged in resisting Russian aggression in Ukraine.
“This is part of a broader Russian intelligence movement to split, discredit and weaken NATO,” Clark said. “It’s Russian imperial pushback…Should Kushner participate in this? Of course he should not.”
Neither Kushner nor representatives of his Miami-based firm responded to requests for comment. But the remarks by Clark are likely to draw further attention to a project that has generated strong criticism from Serbian opposition leaders as well as questions about potential conflicts of interest if Kushner’s father in law, Donald Trump (for whom he is once again raising money) is elected president in November.
Those questions have intensified in recent weeks in light of the reported role in the Belgrade deal of Richard Grenell, Trump’s former U.S. ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence, who has forged close ties to Serbian officials and made no secret of his hopes of becoming secretary of state in a second Trump administration.
The New York Times recently reported that Grenell is a partner of Kushner’s in the proposed $500 million project, which includes plans to build a luxury hotel, retail space and 1,500 residential units on the bombed out site of the former Serbian Army headquarters pulverized by NATO forces under Clark’s command in 1999.
He was quoted by the Times as saying he saw the project—an earlier version of which he pushed during a period 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 considerable scrutiny ever since it was disclosed that his newly created overseas investment firm had gotten the bulk of its funding, $2 billion, from the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund—a lucrative money source that critics charged was a payoff for Kushner’s efforts to protect Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Salman (MBS) in the aftermath of the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. (That charge has been somewhat mitigated by more recent developments in which the administration of President Biden, who once vowed to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state, has cultivated MBS in hopes of forging a security agreement that includes a peace deal with Israel. )
But it is the Kushner firm’s agreement to construct the memorial with its language about NATO aggression that got Clark’s ire. NATO’s bombing of Serbia, which commenced in March, 1999, he said, was the culmination of a “years long effort” by the U.S.-European alliance to stop relentless attacks on Kosovo villages and towns by the then-Serbian government of Milosevic, once known as “the Butcher of the Balkans,” who died in a United Nations detention cell in The Hague in 2006 while on trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
“There was no NATO aggression,” said Clark. The war was a response “to an ethnic cleansing policy that was started in the late 1980’s by Milosevic. Determined to stamp out Kosovo separatists rebelling against Serbian repression, Serbian forces would “surround a village, then send in the paramilitary, taking women and raping them, shooting families.” At one point, Clark said, he recalled meeting with Milosevic during an all-night session in Belgrade in 1998, in which he quoted the Serbian leader as saying, “we know how to deal with these people.”
Edward P. Joseph, a Balkans scholar at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who served in the region during the conflict, said the United States has already taken steps to heal the wounds from the NATO war with Serbia. 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.”
“And that’s the main obstacle to moving Serbia past the wars of the 1990’s,” said Joseph, who engaged in on-the-ground deconfliction efforts during the war.
“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. “It is clear that Vučić, who served as Minister of Information in the Milosevic regime in 1999, is unwilling to do this. They are still pushing the grievance narrative.”
Kushner’s Deal with Pro-Russia Serbs Raises Hackles (spytalk.co)