We will never give up asking for
JUSTICE FOR YUGOSLAVIA !
1. How the battle lies were drawn (Neil Clark)
The current furor in Britain over Iraq's missing WMD has a precedent in
the Blair administration's justifications for war against Yugoslavia...
2. Kosovo Déjà Vu (James Bovard)
As the world looks on at the growing mess in postwar Iraq, it is time
to recall the U.S. government’s bombing campaign against Serbia.
There are many similarities to the recent campaign in Iraq...
MORE LINKS:
March 24, 1999: NATO's Humanitarian Trigger
(by Diana Johnstone)
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/Kosovo/Kosovo-controversies16.html
The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia
(by Michael Parenti)
http://www.michaelparenti.org/yugoslavia.html
VERY IMPORTANT WEB PAGES
ABOUT THE 1999 NATO DESTRUCTION OF YUGOSLAVIA:
http://otan99.chiffonrouge.org
les deux volumes du livre blanc des crimes de l’OTAN en Yougoslavie
1999
http://www.justiceyugoslavia.org
http://www.sramota.com/nato
two summaries of NATO destructions, with many photos
=== 1 ===
http://www.infowar-monitor.net/
modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=356&mode=thread&order=
0&thold=0
The current furor in Britain over Iraq's missing WMD has a precedent in
the Blair administration's justifications for war against Yugoslavia,
argues Neil Clark in The Spectator.
From The Spectator
http://www.spectator.co.uk/
article.php3?table=old§ion=current&issue=2003-
06-14&id=3195
The Spectator
June 14, 2003
How the battle lies were drawn
Neil Clark
The WMDs haven’t turned up. In 1999 there was no genocide in Kosovo.
But, says Neil Clark, Tony Blair has never allowed the facts to get in
the way of a good war.
If you ever get to Belgrade Zoo, don’t miss the snake house. There, in
nicely heated tanks, you will see two rather fearsome-looking pythons,
one named Warren and the
other Madeleine. The names of Bill Clinton’s secretaries of state —
Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright — will not be forgotten
quickly in the capital of the former Yugoslavia. Seeing the two pythons
slithering in their tanks reminded me
of the murderous foreign policy of the Clinton administration and the
enthusiastic support it received from New Labour.
For amid the present furore over the no-show of Iraqi WMDs, let us
remember that in Kosovo our humanitarian Prime Minister dragged this
country into an illegal, US- sponsored war on grounds which later
proved to be fraudulent. In 2003 Tony’s Big Whopper was that Saddam’s
WMDs ‘could be activated within 45 minutes’.
In 1999 it was that Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia was ‘set on a
Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews
during World War Two’.
Clare Short now complains that the Prime Minister ‘duped’ the public
over the non-existent Iraqi threat.
But four years ago, Short and her fellow Cabinet resigner Robin Cook
were enthusiastic collaborators in Blair’s equally squalid campaign to
‘dupe’ the British public over Kosovo. Cook’s role in the war on
Yugoslavia was described by the late
Auberon Waugh as a ‘national disgrace’.
A closer examination of the part played by the former foreign secretary
in the military conflict makes you wonder why he too did not end up
commemorated in a Belgrade snake house.
Consider his role in the farcical ‘peace negotiations’ at Rambouillet —
the successful conclusion of which Washington and London desired as
much as they wanted Hans Blix’s weapons inspectors to be able to
complete their mission in Iraq.
Cook claimed that ‘the reason they [the Serbs] refused to agree to the
peace process was that they were not willing to agree to the autonomy
of Kosovo, or for that autonomy to be guaranteed by an international
military presence at all’.
In fact, the Yugoslavs had by February 1999 already agreed to most of
the autonomy proposals and had assented to a UN (but not Nato)
peacekeeping team entering Kosovo.
It was the unwelcome prospect of Milosevic signing up to a peace deal
and thereby depriving the US of its casus belli that caused Secretary
of State Albright, with the connivance of Cook, to insert new terms
into the Rambouillet accord purposely designed to be rejected by
Belgrade.
Appendix B to chapter seven of the document provided not only for the
Nato occupation of Kosovo, but also for ‘unrestricted access’ for Nato
aircraft, tanks and troops throughout Yugoslavia. The full text of the
Rambouillet document was kept secret from the public and came to light
only when published in Le Monde Diplomatique on 17 April. By this
time, the war was almost a month old and the asting of Milosevic as
the ‘aggressor’ had lready successfully been achieved.
The Kosovan war was, we were repeatedly old, fought ‘to stop a
humanitarian catastrophe’. ‘It is no exaggeration to say that what is
happening is racial genocide’ — claimed the British Prime Minister
‘something we had hoped we would never again experience in Europe.
Thousands have been murdered, 100,000 men are missing and hundreds
forced to flee their homes and the country.’
The Serbs were, according to the US State Department, ‘conducting a
campaign of forced population movement not seen in Europe since WW2’.
One US Information Agency ‘fact’ sheet claimed that the number of
Albanians massacred could be as high as 400,000. Undeterred by the
complete lack of evidence to back up the claims of Washington and
London, political pundits, from Lady Thatcher to Ken Livingstone,
weighed in with op-ed pieces comparing Slobodan Milosevic to Adolf
Hitler.
But despite its overwhelming military superiority, Nato’s assault on
Yugoslavia did not go according to plan. The second week of April was
a particularly bad news week for the humanitarian interventionists. On
12 April Nato bombers hit a passenger train in southern Serbia,
killing 10 civilians and injuring 16 others.
It was also revealed that the alliance was, despite earlier denials,
using depleted uranium. And, worst of all for the hawks in the US and
Britain, EU leaders were due to meet to discuss a German peace plan
which would involve a 24-hour suspension of bombing and UN
peacekeepers entering Kosovo.
With public support for war faltering, and a Downing Street spokesman
talking of a ‘public-relations meltdown’, it was time for the Lie
Machine to go into overdrive. Dr. Johnson believed patriotism to be
the last refuge of the scoundrel. He clearly hadn’t considered the
invention of enemy rape camps. On 13 April an ashen-faced Robin Cook
told journalists of ‘fresh evidence’ that ‘young women are being
separated from the refugee columns and forced to undergo systematic
rape in an army camp at Djakovica near the Albanian border’.
In fact, Cook’s ‘evidence’ (which was founded solely on uncorroborated
claims by Albanian refugees) was not ‘fresh’ at all, but had first been
presented by US defense spokesman Kenneth Bacon at a press conference
the week before. Not to be outdone by her Cabinet colleague, Clare
Short also joined in enthusiastically to add breaches of women’s rights
to the long litany of Serb sins.
‘The actual rape reports are still in the hundreds‚’ claimed the
International Development Secretary, ‘but they’re deliberate and
organised and designed to humiliate, often in front of fathers and
husbands and children, you know, just to give
anguish and humiliation to the whole family.’ For the record, the UNHCR
found no evidence of a rape camp at Djakovica and even Human Rights
Watch, the George Soros-financed NGO hardly known for its pro-Yugoslav
stance, announced that it was ‘concerned that Nato’s use of rape camps
to bolster support for the war relied on unconfirmed accounts’. The
hysteria over Serb rape camps rallied support for the war,
even though the next day an attack by a Nato plane on a convoy of
Albanians killed 64 and wounded 20.
Apologists for the government now claim that we should not jump to
hasty conclusions over the failure of coalition forces to find any
Iraqi WMD. But as far as Kosovo is concerned, we have already had
plenty of time to discover the truth. When
John Laughland, writing in The Spectator in November 1999, claimed that
the mass graves in Kosovo were a ‘myth’, he was loudly denounced by
Francis Wheen, Noel Malcolm and a whole host of Nato apologists and
lap-top bombardiers.
Four years on, it is Wheen and the supporters of intervention in Kosovo
who have the explaining to do.
At the Trepca mine, where Nato told us that up to 700 bodies had been
dumped in acid and whose name the Daily Mirror predicted would ‘live
alongside those of Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka’, UN investigators
found absolutely nothing, a pattern
repeated at one Nato mass-grave site after another. To date, the total
body count of civilians killed in Kosovo in the period 1997–99 is
still fewer than 3,000, a figure that includes not only those killed
in open fighting and during Nato air strikes, but also an unidentified
number of Serbs. Clearly it was an exaggeration — of Munchausenian
proportions — for the Prime Minister to describe what happened in
Kosovo as ‘racial
genocide’.
In both Kosovo and Iraq, the government’s war strategy seems to have
been threefold:
1. In order to whip up public support for war, tell lies so outrageous
that most people will believe that no one would have dared to make
them up.
2. When the conflict is over, dismiss questions about the continued
lack of evidence as ‘irrelevant’ and stress alternative ‘benefits’
from the military action, e.g., ‘liberation’ of the people.
3. Much later on, when the truth is finally revealed, rely on the fact
that most people have lost interest and are now concentrating on the
threat posed by the next new Hitler.
An admission of the government’s culpability for the Kosovan war only
slipped out in July 2000, when Lord Gilbert, the ex-defence minister,
told the House of Commons that the Rambouillet terms offered to the
Yugoslav delegation had been ‘absolutely intolerable’ and expressly
designed to rovoke war. Gilbert’s bombshell warranted scarcely line
in the mainstream British media, which ad been so keen to label the
Yugoslavs the uilty party a year before.
Last week, to the party’s eternal shame, only 1 Labour MPs voted for an
independent judicial investigation into the way the British rime
Minister led us into war against Iraq.
But, important as such an inquiry would be, it will not be enough. What
is also needed is a similar, concurrent investigation into how the
Blair government also deceived the
nation over Kosovo. New Labour, of course, would rather we all forgot
about non-existent mass graves, mythical rape camps and phantom WMDs.
The interests of democracy and accountable government — to say nothing
of those killed in two
shameful conflicts — mean that we must never do so.
=== 2 ===
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0307d.asp
Freedom Daily
Kosovo Déjà Vu
by James Bovard, May 16, 2003
As the world looks on at the growing mess in postwar Iraq, it is time
to recall the U.S. government’s bombing campaign against Serbia.
There are many similarities to the recent campaign in Iraq. President
Bill Clinton’s war against Serbia epitomized his moralism, his
arrogance, his refusal to respect law, and his fixation on proving his
virtue by using deadly force, regardless of how many innocent people
died in the
process.
Ethnic conflicts exploded throughout the former Yugoslavia in the
early 1990s. The casualty toll was highest in Bosnia. In 1995, the
Clinton administration backed a sweep by the U.S.-trained Croatian
army to recapture Serb-held territory in Croatia.
More than a quarter-million Serb civilians were turned into refugees
by this attack; much of Croatia was ethnically cleansed in the
process, as journalist Doug Bandow
reported at the time. The U.S. government made no protest and refused
to recognize the plight of Serb refugees.
By 1998, full-scale civil war was raging in Kosovo, a province of
Serbia the size of Connecticut. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)
controlled about 40 percent of the territory of the province. Both
sides used brutal tactics. For instance, at the State Department daily
press briefing for March 4, 1998, department spokesman James Rubin
announced that the U.S. government “called on the leaders of the
Kosovar-Albanians to condemn terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo
Liberation Army.”
The KLA was known to be heavily involved in drug trafficking and had
close ties to Osama bin Laden, allegedly the worst terrorist
mastermind in the world.
A cease-fire was negotiated between the Serbian government and the KLA
in late 1998, but it did not stop the fighting. According to former
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 80 percent of the cease-fire
violations in the months before the NATO bombing campaign began were
committed by the KLA.
The United States and its NATO partners pressured the Serbian
government to agree to a set of demands that purported to end the
ethnic violence in Kosovo. When
Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic refused, NATO bombed. In a speech
on March 24, 1999, the day the bombing began, Clinton denounced
Milosevic for rejecting “the balanced and fair peace accords that our
allies and partners, including Russia, proposed last month, a peace
agreement that Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians courageously accepted.”
However, at negotiations in Rambouillet, France, NATO effectively
demanded the equivalent of unconditional surrender from the
Yugoslavian government. As John Pilger reported in the British New
Statesman,
Anyone scrutinizing the Rambouillet document is left in little doubt
that the excuses given for the subsequent bombing were fabricated.
The peace negotiations were stage-managed, and the Serbs were told:
Surrender and be occupied, or don’t surrender and be destroyed. The
impossible terms, published in full in Le Monde Diplomatique, but not
in Britain, show that NATO’s aim was the occupation not only of
Kosovo, but effectively all of Yugoslavia.
A moral imperative to kill
Launching the bombing of Serbia was a family affair in the Clinton
White House.
Hillary Clinton revealed to an interviewer in the summer of 1999, “I
urged him to bomb. You cannot let this go on at the end of a century
that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO
for if not to defend our way of life?”
There was no fact that could not be brushed aside or twisted to
sanctify the bombing. In a March 27, 1999, radio address, Clinton
announced,
Through two world wars and a long cold war we saw that it was a short
step from a small brush fire to an inferno, especially in the
tinderbox of the Balkans. The time to put out a fire is before it
spreads and burns down the neighborhood.
The implication that World War II started in the Balkans would
surprise Poles who recalled the Nazi invasion of September 1, 1939.
In a special videotape address to the Serbian people on March 25,
1999, Clinton declared that the Serbian attack “was not simply a war
against armed Kosovar forces but also a campaign of violence in which
tanks and artillery were unleashed against unarmed civilians.” But a
campaign against unarmed civilians from planes far overhead was
different because NATO had a “moral imperative.”
The longer the bombing went on, the more brazenly NATO ignored the
limits it had initially imposed on its targets. The Los Angeles Times
detailed many of the “mistakes” made by U.S. and British war planes:
April 5 — An attack on a residential area in the mining town of
Aleksinac kills 17 people.
April 12 — NATO missiles striking a railroad bridge near the Serbian
town of Grdelica hit a passenger train, killing 17.
April 14 — 75 ethnic Albanian refugees die in an attack on a convoy
near Djakovica.
April 27 — A missile strike in the Serbian town of Surdulica kills at
least 20 civilians.
May 1 — A missile hits a bus crossing a bridge north of Pristina,
killing 47.
May 7 — A cluster bomb attack damages a marketplace and the grounds of
a hospital in Nis, killing at least 15.
May 8 — Fighter pilots using outdated maps attack the Chinese embassy
in Belgrade, killing 3 journalists and injuring 20 other people.
May 13 — 87 ethnic Albanian refugees are killed and more than 100
injured in a late-night NATO bombing of a Kosovo village, Korisa.
May 20 — At least 3 people are killed when NATO missiles hit a
hospital in Belgrade.
May 21 — NATO bombs a Kosovo jail, killing at least 19 people and
injuring scores.
May 31 — NATO missiles slam into a bridge crowded with market-goers
and cars in central Serbia, killing at least 9 people and wounding 28.
NATO spokesmen responded to each new fiasco by bragging even louder
about how smart the bombs were that they were dropping — like
defending some mass murderer by talking about his high SAT scores. If
Serbian terrorists had blown up
hospitals, bridges, neighborhoods, and old folks’ homes in the United
States at the same rate that NATO hit such targets in Serbia,
Americans would have viewed the war differently.
NATO repeatedly dropped cluster bombs into marketplaces, hospitals,
and other civilian areas. Cluster bombs are anti-personnel devices
designed to be scattered across enemy troop formations. NATO dropped
more than 1,300 cluster bombs on Serbia and Kosovo and each bomb
contained 208 separate bomblets that floated to earth by parachute.
Bomb experts estimated that more than 10,000 unexploded
bomblets were scattered around the landscape when the bombing ended.
NATO worked overtime to explain away its “mistakes.” On April 12, a
NATO pilot sent a missile into a passenger train on a railway bridge,
killing 14 people. Gen. Wesley Clark, supreme commander of NATO, took
to the press podium to show the video from the nose of the missile,
stressing that the pilot was focused on the bridge “when all of a
sudden, at the very last instant, with less than a second to go, he
caught a flash of movement that came into a screen and it was the
train coming in. Unfortunately, he couldn’t dump the bomb at that
point. It was locked, it was going into the target and it was an
unfortunate incident which he and the crew and all of us very much
regret.”
The video was endlessly replayed on Western television stations,
driving home the point that, with the speed of modern missiles, there
was sometimes nothing pilots could do to avoid catastrophe.
However, in January 2000, the Frankfurter Rundschau revealed that the
video was shown at the NATO press conference at triple the actual
speed, thus making the
attack on civilians look far more inevitable than it actually was.
NATO officials had become aware of the deceptive nature of the video
several months earlier but saw “no reason” to publicly admit the
error, according to a U.S. Air Force spokesman.
On April 14, 1999, NATO bombs repeatedly hit a column of ethnic
Albanian refugees a few miles from the Albanian border, killing 75
people. NATO spokesmen initially claimed that Serb planes carried out
the attack and used the incident to further inflame anti-Serbian
opinion. Five days later, NATO spokesmen admitted that the deaths had
been caused by NATO forces. NATO then released the audio tape from the
debriefing of a pilot identified as involved in the attack.
As Newsday reported,
According to officials, the American pilot was selected because he
gave a graphic account of Milosevic’s forces torching a series of
ethnic Albanian villages near the Kosovo town of Dakojvica Wednesday.
The pilot told how he selected a three-truck military convoy for a
laser-guided bomb strike when he saw it pulling away from a village
where fires were just starting.
However, this gambit backfired when high-ranking military officers
protested that NATO, at General Clark’s urging, had released the tape
of a pilot who had nothing to do with bombing the refugee column. The
pilot’s words were a red herring to distract attention from the
carnage inflicted on the refugees.
The main achievement of the war was that, instead of Serbs terrorizing
ethnic Albanians, ethnic Albanians terrorized Serbs; instead of
refugees fleeing south and west, refugees headed north. This result
may not have been entirely unwelcome to
NATO. British Defense Minister George Robertson declared in March 1999
that the goal of the operation was “Serbs out, NATO in, refugees
back.”
Unfortunately, few Americans paid close enough attention to the Kosovo
war to recognize the danger of permitting the U.S. government to go
crusading with bombs dropped from 15,000 feet.
President George W. Bush used similar rhetoric to justify the war
against Iraq. As White House senior advisor Karl Rove told Washington
Post editor Bob Woodward last year regarding the war on terrorism:
“Everything will be measured by results.
The victor is always right. History ascribes to the victor qualities
that may or may not actually have been there. And similarly to the
defeated.”
At some point, “history” is going to catch up with the U.S. government.
James Bovard is author of Lost Rights (1994) and the forthcoming
Terrorism and Tyranny: How Bush's Crusade is Sabotaging Peace, Justice,
and Freedom (St. Martin's Press, September 2003) and serves as a policy
advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation.
JUSTICE FOR YUGOSLAVIA !
1. How the battle lies were drawn (Neil Clark)
The current furor in Britain over Iraq's missing WMD has a precedent in
the Blair administration's justifications for war against Yugoslavia...
2. Kosovo Déjà Vu (James Bovard)
As the world looks on at the growing mess in postwar Iraq, it is time
to recall the U.S. government’s bombing campaign against Serbia.
There are many similarities to the recent campaign in Iraq...
MORE LINKS:
March 24, 1999: NATO's Humanitarian Trigger
(by Diana Johnstone)
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/Kosovo/Kosovo-controversies16.html
The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia
(by Michael Parenti)
http://www.michaelparenti.org/yugoslavia.html
VERY IMPORTANT WEB PAGES
ABOUT THE 1999 NATO DESTRUCTION OF YUGOSLAVIA:
http://otan99.chiffonrouge.org
les deux volumes du livre blanc des crimes de l’OTAN en Yougoslavie
1999
http://www.justiceyugoslavia.org
http://www.sramota.com/nato
two summaries of NATO destructions, with many photos
=== 1 ===
http://www.infowar-monitor.net/
modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=356&mode=thread&order=
0&thold=0
The current furor in Britain over Iraq's missing WMD has a precedent in
the Blair administration's justifications for war against Yugoslavia,
argues Neil Clark in The Spectator.
From The Spectator
http://www.spectator.co.uk/
article.php3?table=old§ion=current&issue=2003-
06-14&id=3195
The Spectator
June 14, 2003
How the battle lies were drawn
Neil Clark
The WMDs haven’t turned up. In 1999 there was no genocide in Kosovo.
But, says Neil Clark, Tony Blair has never allowed the facts to get in
the way of a good war.
If you ever get to Belgrade Zoo, don’t miss the snake house. There, in
nicely heated tanks, you will see two rather fearsome-looking pythons,
one named Warren and the
other Madeleine. The names of Bill Clinton’s secretaries of state —
Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright — will not be forgotten
quickly in the capital of the former Yugoslavia. Seeing the two pythons
slithering in their tanks reminded me
of the murderous foreign policy of the Clinton administration and the
enthusiastic support it received from New Labour.
For amid the present furore over the no-show of Iraqi WMDs, let us
remember that in Kosovo our humanitarian Prime Minister dragged this
country into an illegal, US- sponsored war on grounds which later
proved to be fraudulent. In 2003 Tony’s Big Whopper was that Saddam’s
WMDs ‘could be activated within 45 minutes’.
In 1999 it was that Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia was ‘set on a
Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews
during World War Two’.
Clare Short now complains that the Prime Minister ‘duped’ the public
over the non-existent Iraqi threat.
But four years ago, Short and her fellow Cabinet resigner Robin Cook
were enthusiastic collaborators in Blair’s equally squalid campaign to
‘dupe’ the British public over Kosovo. Cook’s role in the war on
Yugoslavia was described by the late
Auberon Waugh as a ‘national disgrace’.
A closer examination of the part played by the former foreign secretary
in the military conflict makes you wonder why he too did not end up
commemorated in a Belgrade snake house.
Consider his role in the farcical ‘peace negotiations’ at Rambouillet —
the successful conclusion of which Washington and London desired as
much as they wanted Hans Blix’s weapons inspectors to be able to
complete their mission in Iraq.
Cook claimed that ‘the reason they [the Serbs] refused to agree to the
peace process was that they were not willing to agree to the autonomy
of Kosovo, or for that autonomy to be guaranteed by an international
military presence at all’.
In fact, the Yugoslavs had by February 1999 already agreed to most of
the autonomy proposals and had assented to a UN (but not Nato)
peacekeeping team entering Kosovo.
It was the unwelcome prospect of Milosevic signing up to a peace deal
and thereby depriving the US of its casus belli that caused Secretary
of State Albright, with the connivance of Cook, to insert new terms
into the Rambouillet accord purposely designed to be rejected by
Belgrade.
Appendix B to chapter seven of the document provided not only for the
Nato occupation of Kosovo, but also for ‘unrestricted access’ for Nato
aircraft, tanks and troops throughout Yugoslavia. The full text of the
Rambouillet document was kept secret from the public and came to light
only when published in Le Monde Diplomatique on 17 April. By this
time, the war was almost a month old and the asting of Milosevic as
the ‘aggressor’ had lready successfully been achieved.
The Kosovan war was, we were repeatedly old, fought ‘to stop a
humanitarian catastrophe’. ‘It is no exaggeration to say that what is
happening is racial genocide’ — claimed the British Prime Minister
‘something we had hoped we would never again experience in Europe.
Thousands have been murdered, 100,000 men are missing and hundreds
forced to flee their homes and the country.’
The Serbs were, according to the US State Department, ‘conducting a
campaign of forced population movement not seen in Europe since WW2’.
One US Information Agency ‘fact’ sheet claimed that the number of
Albanians massacred could be as high as 400,000. Undeterred by the
complete lack of evidence to back up the claims of Washington and
London, political pundits, from Lady Thatcher to Ken Livingstone,
weighed in with op-ed pieces comparing Slobodan Milosevic to Adolf
Hitler.
But despite its overwhelming military superiority, Nato’s assault on
Yugoslavia did not go according to plan. The second week of April was
a particularly bad news week for the humanitarian interventionists. On
12 April Nato bombers hit a passenger train in southern Serbia,
killing 10 civilians and injuring 16 others.
It was also revealed that the alliance was, despite earlier denials,
using depleted uranium. And, worst of all for the hawks in the US and
Britain, EU leaders were due to meet to discuss a German peace plan
which would involve a 24-hour suspension of bombing and UN
peacekeepers entering Kosovo.
With public support for war faltering, and a Downing Street spokesman
talking of a ‘public-relations meltdown’, it was time for the Lie
Machine to go into overdrive. Dr. Johnson believed patriotism to be
the last refuge of the scoundrel. He clearly hadn’t considered the
invention of enemy rape camps. On 13 April an ashen-faced Robin Cook
told journalists of ‘fresh evidence’ that ‘young women are being
separated from the refugee columns and forced to undergo systematic
rape in an army camp at Djakovica near the Albanian border’.
In fact, Cook’s ‘evidence’ (which was founded solely on uncorroborated
claims by Albanian refugees) was not ‘fresh’ at all, but had first been
presented by US defense spokesman Kenneth Bacon at a press conference
the week before. Not to be outdone by her Cabinet colleague, Clare
Short also joined in enthusiastically to add breaches of women’s rights
to the long litany of Serb sins.
‘The actual rape reports are still in the hundreds‚’ claimed the
International Development Secretary, ‘but they’re deliberate and
organised and designed to humiliate, often in front of fathers and
husbands and children, you know, just to give
anguish and humiliation to the whole family.’ For the record, the UNHCR
found no evidence of a rape camp at Djakovica and even Human Rights
Watch, the George Soros-financed NGO hardly known for its pro-Yugoslav
stance, announced that it was ‘concerned that Nato’s use of rape camps
to bolster support for the war relied on unconfirmed accounts’. The
hysteria over Serb rape camps rallied support for the war,
even though the next day an attack by a Nato plane on a convoy of
Albanians killed 64 and wounded 20.
Apologists for the government now claim that we should not jump to
hasty conclusions over the failure of coalition forces to find any
Iraqi WMD. But as far as Kosovo is concerned, we have already had
plenty of time to discover the truth. When
John Laughland, writing in The Spectator in November 1999, claimed that
the mass graves in Kosovo were a ‘myth’, he was loudly denounced by
Francis Wheen, Noel Malcolm and a whole host of Nato apologists and
lap-top bombardiers.
Four years on, it is Wheen and the supporters of intervention in Kosovo
who have the explaining to do.
At the Trepca mine, where Nato told us that up to 700 bodies had been
dumped in acid and whose name the Daily Mirror predicted would ‘live
alongside those of Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka’, UN investigators
found absolutely nothing, a pattern
repeated at one Nato mass-grave site after another. To date, the total
body count of civilians killed in Kosovo in the period 1997–99 is
still fewer than 3,000, a figure that includes not only those killed
in open fighting and during Nato air strikes, but also an unidentified
number of Serbs. Clearly it was an exaggeration — of Munchausenian
proportions — for the Prime Minister to describe what happened in
Kosovo as ‘racial
genocide’.
In both Kosovo and Iraq, the government’s war strategy seems to have
been threefold:
1. In order to whip up public support for war, tell lies so outrageous
that most people will believe that no one would have dared to make
them up.
2. When the conflict is over, dismiss questions about the continued
lack of evidence as ‘irrelevant’ and stress alternative ‘benefits’
from the military action, e.g., ‘liberation’ of the people.
3. Much later on, when the truth is finally revealed, rely on the fact
that most people have lost interest and are now concentrating on the
threat posed by the next new Hitler.
An admission of the government’s culpability for the Kosovan war only
slipped out in July 2000, when Lord Gilbert, the ex-defence minister,
told the House of Commons that the Rambouillet terms offered to the
Yugoslav delegation had been ‘absolutely intolerable’ and expressly
designed to rovoke war. Gilbert’s bombshell warranted scarcely line
in the mainstream British media, which ad been so keen to label the
Yugoslavs the uilty party a year before.
Last week, to the party’s eternal shame, only 1 Labour MPs voted for an
independent judicial investigation into the way the British rime
Minister led us into war against Iraq.
But, important as such an inquiry would be, it will not be enough. What
is also needed is a similar, concurrent investigation into how the
Blair government also deceived the
nation over Kosovo. New Labour, of course, would rather we all forgot
about non-existent mass graves, mythical rape camps and phantom WMDs.
The interests of democracy and accountable government — to say nothing
of those killed in two
shameful conflicts — mean that we must never do so.
=== 2 ===
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0307d.asp
Freedom Daily
Kosovo Déjà Vu
by James Bovard, May 16, 2003
As the world looks on at the growing mess in postwar Iraq, it is time
to recall the U.S. government’s bombing campaign against Serbia.
There are many similarities to the recent campaign in Iraq. President
Bill Clinton’s war against Serbia epitomized his moralism, his
arrogance, his refusal to respect law, and his fixation on proving his
virtue by using deadly force, regardless of how many innocent people
died in the
process.
Ethnic conflicts exploded throughout the former Yugoslavia in the
early 1990s. The casualty toll was highest in Bosnia. In 1995, the
Clinton administration backed a sweep by the U.S.-trained Croatian
army to recapture Serb-held territory in Croatia.
More than a quarter-million Serb civilians were turned into refugees
by this attack; much of Croatia was ethnically cleansed in the
process, as journalist Doug Bandow
reported at the time. The U.S. government made no protest and refused
to recognize the plight of Serb refugees.
By 1998, full-scale civil war was raging in Kosovo, a province of
Serbia the size of Connecticut. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)
controlled about 40 percent of the territory of the province. Both
sides used brutal tactics. For instance, at the State Department daily
press briefing for March 4, 1998, department spokesman James Rubin
announced that the U.S. government “called on the leaders of the
Kosovar-Albanians to condemn terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo
Liberation Army.”
The KLA was known to be heavily involved in drug trafficking and had
close ties to Osama bin Laden, allegedly the worst terrorist
mastermind in the world.
A cease-fire was negotiated between the Serbian government and the KLA
in late 1998, but it did not stop the fighting. According to former
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 80 percent of the cease-fire
violations in the months before the NATO bombing campaign began were
committed by the KLA.
The United States and its NATO partners pressured the Serbian
government to agree to a set of demands that purported to end the
ethnic violence in Kosovo. When
Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic refused, NATO bombed. In a speech
on March 24, 1999, the day the bombing began, Clinton denounced
Milosevic for rejecting “the balanced and fair peace accords that our
allies and partners, including Russia, proposed last month, a peace
agreement that Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians courageously accepted.”
However, at negotiations in Rambouillet, France, NATO effectively
demanded the equivalent of unconditional surrender from the
Yugoslavian government. As John Pilger reported in the British New
Statesman,
Anyone scrutinizing the Rambouillet document is left in little doubt
that the excuses given for the subsequent bombing were fabricated.
The peace negotiations were stage-managed, and the Serbs were told:
Surrender and be occupied, or don’t surrender and be destroyed. The
impossible terms, published in full in Le Monde Diplomatique, but not
in Britain, show that NATO’s aim was the occupation not only of
Kosovo, but effectively all of Yugoslavia.
A moral imperative to kill
Launching the bombing of Serbia was a family affair in the Clinton
White House.
Hillary Clinton revealed to an interviewer in the summer of 1999, “I
urged him to bomb. You cannot let this go on at the end of a century
that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO
for if not to defend our way of life?”
There was no fact that could not be brushed aside or twisted to
sanctify the bombing. In a March 27, 1999, radio address, Clinton
announced,
Through two world wars and a long cold war we saw that it was a short
step from a small brush fire to an inferno, especially in the
tinderbox of the Balkans. The time to put out a fire is before it
spreads and burns down the neighborhood.
The implication that World War II started in the Balkans would
surprise Poles who recalled the Nazi invasion of September 1, 1939.
In a special videotape address to the Serbian people on March 25,
1999, Clinton declared that the Serbian attack “was not simply a war
against armed Kosovar forces but also a campaign of violence in which
tanks and artillery were unleashed against unarmed civilians.” But a
campaign against unarmed civilians from planes far overhead was
different because NATO had a “moral imperative.”
The longer the bombing went on, the more brazenly NATO ignored the
limits it had initially imposed on its targets. The Los Angeles Times
detailed many of the “mistakes” made by U.S. and British war planes:
April 5 — An attack on a residential area in the mining town of
Aleksinac kills 17 people.
April 12 — NATO missiles striking a railroad bridge near the Serbian
town of Grdelica hit a passenger train, killing 17.
April 14 — 75 ethnic Albanian refugees die in an attack on a convoy
near Djakovica.
April 27 — A missile strike in the Serbian town of Surdulica kills at
least 20 civilians.
May 1 — A missile hits a bus crossing a bridge north of Pristina,
killing 47.
May 7 — A cluster bomb attack damages a marketplace and the grounds of
a hospital in Nis, killing at least 15.
May 8 — Fighter pilots using outdated maps attack the Chinese embassy
in Belgrade, killing 3 journalists and injuring 20 other people.
May 13 — 87 ethnic Albanian refugees are killed and more than 100
injured in a late-night NATO bombing of a Kosovo village, Korisa.
May 20 — At least 3 people are killed when NATO missiles hit a
hospital in Belgrade.
May 21 — NATO bombs a Kosovo jail, killing at least 19 people and
injuring scores.
May 31 — NATO missiles slam into a bridge crowded with market-goers
and cars in central Serbia, killing at least 9 people and wounding 28.
NATO spokesmen responded to each new fiasco by bragging even louder
about how smart the bombs were that they were dropping — like
defending some mass murderer by talking about his high SAT scores. If
Serbian terrorists had blown up
hospitals, bridges, neighborhoods, and old folks’ homes in the United
States at the same rate that NATO hit such targets in Serbia,
Americans would have viewed the war differently.
NATO repeatedly dropped cluster bombs into marketplaces, hospitals,
and other civilian areas. Cluster bombs are anti-personnel devices
designed to be scattered across enemy troop formations. NATO dropped
more than 1,300 cluster bombs on Serbia and Kosovo and each bomb
contained 208 separate bomblets that floated to earth by parachute.
Bomb experts estimated that more than 10,000 unexploded
bomblets were scattered around the landscape when the bombing ended.
NATO worked overtime to explain away its “mistakes.” On April 12, a
NATO pilot sent a missile into a passenger train on a railway bridge,
killing 14 people. Gen. Wesley Clark, supreme commander of NATO, took
to the press podium to show the video from the nose of the missile,
stressing that the pilot was focused on the bridge “when all of a
sudden, at the very last instant, with less than a second to go, he
caught a flash of movement that came into a screen and it was the
train coming in. Unfortunately, he couldn’t dump the bomb at that
point. It was locked, it was going into the target and it was an
unfortunate incident which he and the crew and all of us very much
regret.”
The video was endlessly replayed on Western television stations,
driving home the point that, with the speed of modern missiles, there
was sometimes nothing pilots could do to avoid catastrophe.
However, in January 2000, the Frankfurter Rundschau revealed that the
video was shown at the NATO press conference at triple the actual
speed, thus making the
attack on civilians look far more inevitable than it actually was.
NATO officials had become aware of the deceptive nature of the video
several months earlier but saw “no reason” to publicly admit the
error, according to a U.S. Air Force spokesman.
On April 14, 1999, NATO bombs repeatedly hit a column of ethnic
Albanian refugees a few miles from the Albanian border, killing 75
people. NATO spokesmen initially claimed that Serb planes carried out
the attack and used the incident to further inflame anti-Serbian
opinion. Five days later, NATO spokesmen admitted that the deaths had
been caused by NATO forces. NATO then released the audio tape from the
debriefing of a pilot identified as involved in the attack.
As Newsday reported,
According to officials, the American pilot was selected because he
gave a graphic account of Milosevic’s forces torching a series of
ethnic Albanian villages near the Kosovo town of Dakojvica Wednesday.
The pilot told how he selected a three-truck military convoy for a
laser-guided bomb strike when he saw it pulling away from a village
where fires were just starting.
However, this gambit backfired when high-ranking military officers
protested that NATO, at General Clark’s urging, had released the tape
of a pilot who had nothing to do with bombing the refugee column. The
pilot’s words were a red herring to distract attention from the
carnage inflicted on the refugees.
The main achievement of the war was that, instead of Serbs terrorizing
ethnic Albanians, ethnic Albanians terrorized Serbs; instead of
refugees fleeing south and west, refugees headed north. This result
may not have been entirely unwelcome to
NATO. British Defense Minister George Robertson declared in March 1999
that the goal of the operation was “Serbs out, NATO in, refugees
back.”
Unfortunately, few Americans paid close enough attention to the Kosovo
war to recognize the danger of permitting the U.S. government to go
crusading with bombs dropped from 15,000 feet.
President George W. Bush used similar rhetoric to justify the war
against Iraq. As White House senior advisor Karl Rove told Washington
Post editor Bob Woodward last year regarding the war on terrorism:
“Everything will be measured by results.
The victor is always right. History ascribes to the victor qualities
that may or may not actually have been there. And similarly to the
defeated.”
At some point, “history” is going to catch up with the U.S. government.
James Bovard is author of Lost Rights (1994) and the forthcoming
Terrorism and Tyranny: How Bush's Crusade is Sabotaging Peace, Justice,
and Freedom (St. Martin's Press, September 2003) and serves as a policy
advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation.