Jugoinfo
Yugoslavia Amid the Maelstrom
By Gregory Elich
The sound was like no other. Hundreds of blackbirds were perched in trees
throughout the park in central Belgrade where our bus stopped, and their
loud and raucous cries startled me. I had never seen so many blackbirds in
one place. Our host, Nikola Moraca, and his son were there to greet us.
When asked about the blackbirds, Nikola replied, "We never had these
before. They are from Kosovo. They migrated here because the bombing in
Kosovo was too intense." The birds' piercing cries were unsettling, and
seemed a harbinger of all of the pain and suffering we would come to
witness during our stay in Yugoslavia. We were a delegation of peace
activists and concerned individuals, organized and led by Barry Lituchy, a
specialist on European history. Our mission was to bring medical aid to
the people of Yugoslavia, and we would spend the first two weeks of August
1999 gathering evidence of NATO war crimes for former U.S. Attorney
General Ramsey Clark's Independent Commission of Inquiry.
Years of hardship had taken their toll on Yugoslav society. Burdened by
sanctions, a massive influx of refugees, and NATO's destruction of
factories and workplaces, the unemployment rate had soared. All along
Revolution Boulevard, sidewalks were jammed with street vendors selling
paltry goods. It was an important means of survival for many people in
Belgrade. I saw two very elderly women sitting behind a card table, on
which the only goods were stones, hand-painted with designs and
affectionate sayings. Gasoline is strictly rationed, and stations were
usually closed. We frequently saw people standing by roadsides, plastic
bottles of gasoline for sale. Gasoline smuggled across the border from
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Hungary was another means of survival for the
destitute. Buses and streetcars were densely crowded. Windows were sealed
in some streetcars, a sign of air conditioning in better times. Now the
closed windows served to trap the oppressive summer heat as people, soaked
with sweat, crowded and pressed against each other. "The burden of imposed
sanctions is felt in nearly every situation on a daily basis," Danka
Moraca, Nikola's wife, informed us. "Sanctions have changed our lives
tremendously, if not totally. Now we are all used to shortages of everyday
necessities such as basic food, cleaning products and personal items. If
you are fortunate enough to be able to afford them, you must wait in long
lines." Sanctions, she added, have resulted in a "decline of salaries,
pensions and a general impoverishment of ordinary people." According to
the Yugoslav Red Cross, approximately 100,000 people, primarily pensioners
and welfare recipients, rely on soup kitchens, but the need outstrips the
supply of available meals. Eight years of sanctions have taken their toll,
and the war compounded the effect, nearly doubling the poverty rate.
On our first morning in Belgrade, we met with Bratislava Morina, Federal
Minister for Refugees, Displaced Persons and Humanitarian Aid. It was
Morina's ministry that was responsible for coping with Europe's largest
refugee population. Already burdened with 700,000 refugees from wars in
Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, more than 200,000 people had fled from
Kosovo by the time of our visit, a number that would soon grow to over
350,000. Morina, whose husband is Albanian, listed several prominent
political positions held by Albanians in Yugoslavia, "until they were
given orders to leave office" by secessionists "and become part of the
parallel world." - a reference to the secessionist's boycott of
institutions. Calm and dignified, Morina spoke eloquently of the
destruction wrought by NATO, but concluded that these were "not the worst
crimes committed" by President Clinton. "When we hear claims that they
want to create a multiethnic society in Kosovo, this is ironic," she said,
"because we have witnessed one of the most radical ethnic cleansing
campaigns" since the arrival of NATO troops.
We next met with officials of the Yugoslav Red Cross. We gave them several
bags of medicines that were donated by American doctors and individuals.
Dr. Miodrag Starcevic talked of the refugee crisis, pointing out that "our
needs are very urgent," and that they lacked food, shelter, clothes and
medicines for refugees. Officials there felt that the level of need for
humanitarian aid greatly exceeded what international organizations were
providing. Another serious problem for the organization is that it cannot
operate freely in Kosovo. "We cannot go there," Dr. Starcevic said. "Even
when we send humanitarian relief, we must provide in advance for some kind
of escort by KFOR [NATO's Kosovo Force], because it is impossible to go
there. It is too dangerous." Medical officer Ljubisa Dragisic told us that
local production met most of the nation's needs for drugs and medical
supplies, but that sanctions caused shortages in imported medicines. "It's
especially a problem with some services," she said. "For example, the
transfusion service, because we import the bags and blood tests, and some
drugs...oncology drugs, and some programs for example, the dialysis
program, and a part of the program for treatment of diabetics." Suture
material and anesthetic drugs were also in short supply.
Poisoning an Entire Nation and People
We were particularly interested in learning more about the environmental
aspect of NATO bombing. The systematic destruction of chemical,
petrochemical, fertilizer plants, and oil refineries seriously poisoned
the local environment. In the early morning hours of April 18, 1999, NATO
missiles rained down on the industrial town of Pancevo, just northeast of
Belgrade. A petrochemical plant was hit, sending into the atmosphere 900
tons of vinyl chloride monomer (VCM), an extremely dangerous carcinogen.
By sunrise, clouds of VCM poured through the town, at levels exceeding
10,600 times the permissible limit for human safety. Burning VCM released
phosgene gas, a substance that was used as a poison gas during the First
World War. Chlorine gas - also used as a poison gas during World War I -
was also discharged by fires at the plant, as were other dangerous
chemicals, such as naptha, ethylene dichloride and hydrochloric acid. A
poison rain spattered the region, and hundreds of tons of oil and
chemicals soaked into the soil and poured into the Danube River. Pools of
mercury formed on the grounds of the plant. After a missile narrowly
missed striking a tank of liquid ammonia, panicked workers dumped the
liquid ammonia into the Danube in order to avert a terrible tragedy. The
entire population of Pancevo was evacuated immediately, but residents had
returned to their homes by the time of our visit. Doctors there advise
women to avoid pregnancy for the next two years, and many residents are
coming down with red rashes and blisters. Although we were only in Pancevo
for a few hours, some of us, myself included, found rashes appearing on
our legs before the end of the day. My lower legs were covered with
rashes, and it was two weeks before they would finally disappear.
According to one worker we talked with, eighty percent of the
petrochemical plant was destroyed. Another worker told us that "vast
quantities of ammonia and VCM spilled into the river," and that he could
"see an immediate effect because one meter above the river the bank
appears burned. All the plants look as if they had been burned by fire."
Several people expressed fears for their health and that of their
families.
Serious environmental hazards also resulted from the destruction of power
plants in Bor and Kragujevac. Transformers there relied on transformer oil
containing polychlorinated biphenyles (PCB) pyralene, as a coolant.
According to the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern
Europe, "one liter of the PCB pyralene pollutes one billion liters of
water." We visited an oil refinery in Novi Sad. One resident of Novi Sad,
whose home was located a mere three blocks from the refinery, later told
me that the refinery was bombed on virtually a daily basis and that his
neighborhood was constantly enveloped in smoke. Outside the refinery, we
saw a struggling bird soaked in oil, near death
Perhaps the deadliest weapon in NATO's arsenal was depleted uranium (DU)
tipped missiles and bombs. Depleted uranium's high density enables
projectiles to easily penetrate armor and concrete targets. When DU
weapons impact on their target, thousands of radioactive particles are
released into the atmosphere, and may be borne for miles by the wind. When
people ingest these particles, serious bodily damage can result. Following
the use of DU weapons in the 1991 Gulf War, rates of birth defects and
leukemia rose dramatically in southern Iraq.
Barry and I talked with Dr. Radoje Lausevic, an environmental specialist
and assistant professor at the University of Belgrade. Dr. Lausevic's
appearance and manner of speech reminded me of my best friend, Jorge, so
he made an immediately favorable impression. While driving us in his car,
he commented on the ecological impact of the war, and it wasn't until we
arrived at our destination that I realized that his talk was so
interesting that I forgot to record him or take notes. We arrived at the
office of the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern
Europe, where we briefly concluded our discussion of the environmental
damage. Barry asked about depleted uranium (DU) weapons. My impression was
that use of depleted uranium weapons was limited to Kosovo, but Dr.
Lausevic told us that Russian sources determined that 30 metric tons of DU
was used outside of Kosovo. The entire territory of Yugoslavia was exposed
to these weapons. One particle of DU in the lungs, he said, is equivalent
to a daily chest x-ray for life.
The delegation also met with Dusan Vasiljevic, president of Green Table, a
Belgrade-based environmental non-governmental organization. A man with an
elegant manner of speech, he also acted as our guide and translator when
we visited Pancevo. Vasiljevic told us that 135,000 tons of toxic
chemicals spilled into the environment as a result of NATO bombing.
Speaking of Pancevo, he pointed out that VCM "is one of the most dangerous
toxic chemicals that ever existed. It's gastro organic in the first place,
and disrupts the cells inside," the consequences of which are "liver
disease, kidney disease and of course cancer itself." Vasiljevic also
confirmed Dr. Lausevic's report of widespread use of DU weapons.
Vasiljevic explained that as DU particles spread over an area, it "enters
the food chain, as well as to water, soil, even in the air. Once you get
these depleted uranium particles in your body, they stay there. You can't
get rid of them. And they move in your body...mostly they go to the
kidneys, and also to the liver." Vasiljevic's comments on Kosovo were
sobering. "Kosovo itself is a nuclear desert now. I wouldn't go there
myself...because the level of radiation in Kosovo is over any tolerable
level." Depleted uranium emits primarily alpha radiation, which is 20
times more deadly internally than gamma radiation, he said. The United
Nations Balkan Task Force, as well as other Western investigators "did not
find any increased radiation. How could they say so? Because they did not
have the proper equipment for that....They had just a Geiger counter." A
Geiger counter is worthless for measuring DU because it measures primarily
gamma radiation, not alpha.
Exhaust from NATO overflights, Vasiljevic claimed, severely damaged the
ozone layer above Yugoslavia. Immediately following NATO's bombing
campaign, Yugoslavia was ravaged by a series of floods and severe
rainstorms. By the time of our visit, the temperature was searing,
unbearable at times. People speculated that the heat, floods and rains
were a result of the thinning of the ozone. The damaged ozone layer would
soon drift over Western Europe, Vasiljevic said. It is difficult to
determine a correlation, but on December 2, 1999, the European Space
Agency reported that the lowest ever levels of ozone, "nearly as low as
those found in the Antarctic," were measured over northwest Europe during
November. Everyone was concerned about the food supply. Danka worried that
"all that we have on the green markets or in the shops nowadays has been
contaminated, either by the destroyed chemical industry or by the new
weapons dropped on our heads. I can't even think about the possible
consequences of consuming such food."
A City Crippled by Bombs
In the northern city of Novi Sad, we viewed three bridges spanning the
Danube River. All three were severed by NATO missiles. The Varadin Bridge
carried a main water pipe, and when the bridge was destroyed on April 1,
the Petrovaradin section of the city lost its water supply. Similarly,
destruction of the Zezelj Bridge on April 26 eliminated water in the
suburbs. Water had to be trucked in until service could be restored. At
the Executive Council Building in Novi Sad, we met Dr. Zivorad Smiljanic,
president of the Assembly of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, and an
interesting and knowledgeable man. Smiljanic pointed out, as did many
others during our visit, that Yugoslavia has 26 nationalities and is a
multiethnic society. "Even the smallest nationalities have education in
their own mother tongue," he said. "Now you can see for yourselves what
NATO did." NATO leaders "constantly talk about democracy, but we could see
that democracy in action here: democracy that bombed and destroyed
bridges, schools and hospitals....all these aims were actually false,
because the real truth and their real aim was to conquer everything and
put everything under one system." Smiljanic was asked to name their most
urgent need. "The thing that we would like most of all is for the
international community to leave us alone;" he exclaimed, "to lift
blockades and sanctions, and stop 'helping' us in the way that they are
doing."
Following the meeting, one official approached Barry. His eyes were moist.
"It was such a difficult time for those of us with children," he said. "We
didn't know what to do: take both children in one cellar, or put them in
separate cellars." A terrible dilemma, whether to keep the family together
and risk losing everyone in a single moment; or split the family apart,
thus increasing the chances of losing someone.
We were scheduled to tour and view bomb damage at the Executive Council
building later in the day. When we arrived, our bus pulled to a stop in
front of the building and our delegation began to disembark. A woman
walked up to our bus, and asked us through an open window, "Are you a
delegation?" Receiving an affirmative answer, she spoke in an angry and
outraged tone, "We're a delegation from Germany. We've been here one week
already. We've seen such terrible things, you can't imagine. People here
have a system like no one in the world. It's a true multiethnic society.
Back in Germany, all we hear are lies. There is no way to get the truth
out." We soon came to share her reaction and her outrage. The portrayal of
Yugoslavia in Western media is bizarre for anyone who troubles himself to
actually visit the place. A multiethnic society where peoples of many
nationalities work and live together is painted as racist. A society in
which women walk calmly and unafraid in a park at midnight, as we
regularly saw, is portrayed as crime-ridden. Knowledgeable and worldly
people are represented as ignorant and irrational. How often had I read in
the Western press of President Slobodan Milosevic's 1989 speech at Kosovo
Polje, in which it was claimed that he whipped the crowd into a
nationalist frenzy with a language of hate? Western reporters can get away
with such monstrous lies because they know no one will bother to check the
text of that speech. I couldn't believe the accusation because it ran
counter to those speeches I was familiar with. When I found a copy of the
speech, my suspicions were confirmed. There was not one phrase of hatred.
What I found instead were phrases such as, "Serbia has never had only
Serbs living in it. Today, more than in the past, members of other peoples
and nationalities also live in it. This is not a disadvantage for Serbia.
I am truly convinced that it is its advantage." Or these examples:
"Socialism in particular, being a progressive and just democratic society,
should not allow people to be divided in the national and religious
respect," and "Yugoslavia is a multiethnic community and it can survive
only under the conditions of full equality for all nations that live in
it." These are the phrases Western media would have one believe are filled
with hate and racism. When I returned to the United States, it was weeks
before I could bear to listen to the news and its spewing of lies and
obsession with trivial issues.
Whatever else would happen during our stay in Yugoslavia, it was clear
that we would be well fed. Every morning and evening, Nikola and Danka
prepared a spectacular banquet for us. We were continually delighted by a
dazzling array of delicious dishes. Their extraordinary hospitality and
kindness made me feel like part of their family, and Nikola's impish sense
of humor brought daily merriment. The importance of family and friends was
paramount in this society. Friends, family, and neighbors often visited.
On the street, we often saw family members holding hands. Displays of
affection were open. Due to sanctions, their lives are materially
impoverished compared to earlier times, but still they lead rich lives. As
one man in Novi Sad told me, "We have a different philosophy here than in
the West. We have a saying, 'The man is rich who has many friends'."
NATO did not ignore Vidovdan Skonaselje, a suburb of Novi Sad. People were
living in the ruins of their homes, simply because they had nowhere else
to go. The home of Rajko and Gordana Matic was severely damaged. Rajko and
his wife Gordana fled Zagreb in 1992 and built their new home here. Now
NATO had bombed their new house. Heavy plastic covered the windows. With
the exception of the frame and base, nothing remained of the roof. The
explosion had dented and twisted their car. They allowed us inside to view
their home. Holes in the walls, a result of the bomb blast, allowed
chickens to enter and wander about. On the second floor, one of the
interior walls, broken and cracked, was bowed to an alarming degree, like
the letter 'C'. Light streamed in through a ruptured wall, and mounds of
rubble filled the rooms. It didn't seem safe, but they had nowhere else to
go, nor money to repair the damage. Previous Western visitors had promised
them help, which never came. To the left of the Matic's house stood an
empty shell of another home. Only the brick walls still stood. Everything
else was blown away in the bombing. Farther to the left, the roof of a
demolished home angled down to the ground. Behind it stood more homes with
blasted roofs, damaged walls and seared interiors. The house to the right
was missing the second floor. Only remnants of the front and back wall
remained. Hammering sounds told us that the owners had begun the arduous
task of rebuilding. Across the street, the roof of one home was a mass of
twisted wreckage. Between these buildings, a roadside sign listed at a
drunken angle, punctured neatly by shrapnel from a NATO bomb. It was a
"welcome" sign.
NATO also left its calling card at another suburb of Novi Sad, Detelinara.
On May 6, a powerful bomb landed at the juncture of two apartment
buildings and the Svetozar Markovic elementary school. By the time of our
visit, the huge crater had been filled in, and all 20 of the demolished
automobiles removed. The buildings were severely damaged, and many
apartments were devastated. Seven people were wounded in the attack, and
the site followed a pattern that we would witness repeatedly during our
two weeks in Yugoslavia. Residential areas with no military value were
targeted on a regular basis.
Belgrade Bombarded
In New Belgrade, the more recently built section of the city, we stopped
at Hotel Yugoslavia. On May 7, just before midnight, two NATO missiles
struck the hotel near the main entrance. One person was killed, and four
wounded. It was impossible to view the extensive destruction without
contemplating the mentality that could order missiles to be fired at a
hotel. As we stood before the Chinese embassy, only a few blocks away,
NATO's excuses seemed absurd. Architecturally distinctive, the embassy's
unique beauty could not possibly be mistaken for the nearby Federal
Directorate of Supply and Procurement, nor any other building in the
vicinity. Similarly difficult to swallow was the claim that the embassy
was bombed because the CIA had relied on an old map. The embassy building
was built during 1992-93, and an old map would have shown an empty field.
One would have to believe that NATO intended to bomb an empty field.
Certainly, the CIA would have closely monitored the Chinese embassy in
Belgrade, particularly as NATO prepared to wage war on Yugoslavia. Three
satellite-guided missiles struck the embassy, just twenty minutes after
the bombing of Hotel Yugoslavia. The missile that did the most damage
penetrated through the roof, burrowing down to the basement. Three people
were killed, and 20 wounded. Fire and smoke poured through the building.
The stairways were demolished, and people trapped on the top three floors
tied bedsheets together, hanging them out of windows as a means of escape.
We saw that one rope of bedsheets still hung from a fourth story window.
Two days before my departure for Yugoslavia, I obtained a copy of an
article from the July 2 issue of Kai Fang, published in Hong Kong. The
article's author, Su Lan, wrote that embassy personnel electronically
monitored NATO's military operations, and that NATO feared that the
downing of its F-117 Stealth fighter-bomber may have been a result of
information passed along by them to Yugoslav officials. The October 17
issue of The Observer and a follow-up story a few weeks later, confirmed
that the embassy was deliberately targeted. A NATO flight controller based
in Naples told The Observer, "The Chinese embassy had an electronic
profile, which NATO located and pinpointed." "The aim," said another NATO
officer, "was to send a clear message to Milosevic that he should not use
outside help in the shape of the Chinese."
Not far away stood the ruins of another beautiful building, the 23-story
Usce Business Center, the target of four missiles on April 21. Much of the
building's exterior was blackened by fire, and many windows were a mass of
twisted metal. I remembered seeing dramatic photographs of this building
engulfed in flames. NATO planners anticipated high "collateral damage."
Their plans anticipated that up to 100 government officials and 250
civilians residing in nearby apartments in the "expected blast radius"
would be killed in the attack. Unfazed at the prospect of murdering up to
350 people, President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair gave
their approval for the building's destruction. The Usce Business Center
housed offices of a variety of businesses and political organizations. The
rationale for the building's destruction was that some of the offices
belonged to the Serbian Socialist Party and the closely allied Yugoslav
United Left. Only prior evacuation of the building averted a tragedy and
no one perished in the attack.
NATO's bland assertions seemed obscene. Bombing the Chinese embassy was an
"accident," and therefore excusable. This carried with it the unspoken
assumption that bombing another building and killing Yugoslav civilians
would be acceptable. The destruction of Hotel Yugoslavia and the Usce
Business Center was also acceptable, because these somehow fell into the
all-inclusive category of "military targets." Many people in the West were
completely indifferent to the death and destruction carried out in their
names. All of NATO's claims were accepted without examination or
questioning. The United States, it is assumed, has an inherent right to
invade or bomb another country and to trample international law underfoot.
In this context, I found it poignant when we saw a billboard in Belgrade,
which read: "They believe in bombs. We believe in God."
That night, in the Moraca's home, delegation member Ken Freeland
interviewed Nenad Gudjic, a Serbian refugee from Kosovo. Gudjic said he
felt that "Albanians suppressed me, especially when I started to date my
present wife, who is Albanian." His wife also felt strong pressure from
Albanian extremists, prompting them to leave Kosovo. "Something very
interesting is happening now," Gudjic said. "I lived in Pristina for 33
years. Now, on the streets of Belgrade, I saw a few of my Albanian friends
who escaped, as I escaped, from Pristina. They are living now in Belgrade
without any problems. These are ethnic Albanians of my generation who
escaped that chaos."
Every Federal building in downtown Belgrade bore the scars of bombing.
Almost every day we passed these buildings, and each day the sight was as
painful as the day before. Late one night during the war, kept awake by an
air raid, Nikola was on his balcony talking to his neighbor across the
street on her balcony. The sound of flying missiles interrupted their
conversation. Nikola shouted at his neighbor, "Get down. This one will hit
us." His shoulders rose as a chill travelled down the back of his neck.
Two explosions roared. Only a few short blocks away, one missile smashed a
house on Maxim Gorky Street, also damaging an adjoining apartment building
and a restaurant. The other missile struck a street nearby. Four people
were injured; one of whom, 23-year old Sofija Jovanovic, died of her
wounds two days later. On my last day in Belgrade, I walked down to view
the site. Nothing remained but a mound of concrete, bricks, broken boards,
and upturned earth. As a sort of memorial, someone had scrawled graffiti
on the remnants of an adjacent building: "Bombed April 30." With
fatalistic humor, graffiti on another house read, "Sorry. You missed us."
Danka described life during the bombing. "We were bombed constantly for 78
days and nights, without any break or pause. We were without water or
electricity for days. We had to throw away everything from the
refrigerator, including all medicaments essential for our family, because
of the high temperatures in May. The bombing was awful, cruel and savage.
We were all afraid, staying in the dark lobby for hours, listening to the
scary sounds of the low-flying warplanes, detonations, children crying,
car alarms, and people screaming who simply couldn't stand it anymore."
Later in the war, "NATO changed its tactics, and by the end they were
bombing us every two hours. That was part of their psychological war, I
suppose." The effects of the bombardment were widespread. "There was no
bread. The bakeries couldn't produce bread without electricity. The smell
of spoiled food spread from nearby supermarkets. There was no milk for
children." Her children were upset, asking, "Why are those people bombing
us? Why do they hate us so much when we didn't do anything wrong to them?"
Danka revealed that every time she kissed her children goodnight "during
the bombing campaign, deep inside me I was praying for God to see them
healthy and alive the next morning. During those long bombing nights, they
were awakened so many times by strong nearby explosions, annoyed and
panicked."
The Belgrade 5 transformer station of the Serbian Electric Company is
located at Bezanijska Kosa in New Belgrade. It was bombed, as were many
other electrical power and transformer stations. Several Tomahawk missiles
struck here, as well as a new weapon, the CBU-94, a cluster bomb which
releases a web of carbon-graphite threads, resulting in electrical
short-circuits and burnt components. At one point, seventy percent of
Yugoslavia's power supply was knocked out, which also adversely affected
water supplies that depended on electrical pumps. About 50,000 hospital
patients, including those on dialysis and babies in incubators, also
suffered from the power outages. When workers proved adept at restoring
power rapidly, NATO then targeted the plants with cruise missiles and
conventional bombs. By the end of the war, one third of the electricity
transmission systems were damaged or destroyed. During our visit to
Belgrade 5, workers were busily repairing the damage. We talked with one
of the workers, who said that most of the Belgrade suburb of Zemun was
without electricity. He worried about the onset of winter, when people
would have to rely on alternative sources of heat, such as coal and small
heaters. He pointed out that the coolant for the plant's transformers
contained PCBs, and that consequently, "when the fuel burns, it is toxic,
so [NATO] poisoned nature around here also. It went into the ground, so it
will reach our water supplies." One of our delegation members, Jeff
Goldberg, asked him if this was the most expensive damage inflicted on
Yugoslavia, and the worker immediately responded, "The most expensive
damage is that they killed a lot of people." When asked about the length
of time required for repair, the worker answered. "We need equipment. We
need spare parts...without foreign aid we are dead. We have a factory that
makes spare parts, converters, but...they can make only one switch per
month. It's a low capacity factory."
The previous day, due to bomb damage, virtually all of Serbia's steam
power plants shut down, and much of the country was left without power. On
the day of our visit, a breakdown at the power line at the Djerdap-Bor
hydroelectric plant caused a chain-reaction of breakdowns in other power
lines, resulting in more blackouts. It was expected that hundreds of
thousands of people would freeze during winter, with sanctions blocking
the import of much-needed parts, but prospects improved due to a
remarkable program of reconstruction and improvisation. Electricity is
severely rationed, with frequent power cuts. But what seemed an inevitable
humanitarian disaster has been averted through the ingenuity and heroic
efforts of workers in overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The
electrical worker we talked with summed up the war: "We were bombed
because we refuse to be slaves. We are a proud people and we don't want to
be enslaved. Rich people want slaves. They want obedient people."
Our meeting with the Belgrade-based Committee for Compiling Data on Crimes
against Humanity and International Law was of particular interest for me.
I had read several articles about the work of the committee as well as
interviews with its president, Dr. Zoran Stankovic, so I was familiar with
the meticulous and significant work they had done in Bosnia-Herzegovina
and Croatia. All nine members of the committee work on a volunteer basis,
constrained by severely limited resources, outmoded personal computers and
only one copy machine. The committee was tasked to investigate NATO war
crimes, and that was the main focus of our discussion. A point of
frustration for the committee was that they had submitted eight files of
documentation with The Hague War Crimes Tribunal, which treated their
reports with complete disinterest.
Albanian Refugees and Civil War: Behind the Media Screen
NATO officials accused the Yugoslav government of expelling its Albanian
population and committing genocide. The flood of refugees pouring into
Albania and Macedonia was trumpeted as justification for bombing
Yugoslavia. Few dwelled on the logical fallacy of NATO's claim that a
refugee crisis which occurred subsequent to bombing was itself the
motivation for that bombing. Western leaders presented a simple picture,
one easily grasped. Reality is seldom as simple as a Hollywood action
movie, though, and Western leaders intentionally distorted events for an
uncritical public.
Every nationality can be found in the membership of the Serbian Socialist
Party, including Albanian, and the party has long prided itself on a
commitment to a multiethnic society. This commitment is evident in its
program and in virtually every document and every speech. Toward the end
of 1998, during the period of the OSCE Mission in Kosovo, the Yugoslav
government set up 14 centers throughout Kosovo, where people could come
and take free lumber and building supplies for reconstruction of homes
damaged in the civil war. These supplies were open to every person of
every nationality. There were no restrictions. It was impossible for me to
believe that the Serbian Socialist Party metamorphosed overnight into a
racist organization, bent on national exclusivity. It did not fit, so I
dug into the matter, trying to ascertain the truth among a torrent of
lies. A more subtle picture emerged, still with suffering on a mass scale,
but this time with NATO as the central catalyst. According to an
intelligence report from the German Foreign Office, dated January 12,
1999, "Even in Kosovo an explicit political persecution linked to Albanian
ethnicity is not verifiable...actions of the security forces [are] not
directed against the Kosovo Albanians as an ethnically defined group, but
against the military opponent and its actual or alleged supporters." A
civil war was raging in the province of Kosovo between the Albanian
secessionist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and Yugoslav security forces.
This internal document presented a very different message than Western
leaders' public statements.
Concomitant with NATO's bombing campaign, hundreds of thousands of people
of all nationalities fled their homes. When the first bombs fell,
extremists became enraged and blamed Albanians for the bombing. Many of
these extremists formed paramilitary groups and criminal gangs, and vented
their rage on the local Albanian population. NATO's bombs created an
environment of anarchy and chaos that allowed thugs, paramilitary gangs,
and renegade police to operate freely. One Serbian official was reported
as saying, "It was a catastrophe. Podujevo was emptied in about three
hours. There were a lot of vile and angry people, maddened, who were out
of control." In Kosovo's capital city of Pristina, the first wave of
refugees departed when threatened by thugs during the week and a half
following NATO's first bombs on March 24. The second wave left when the
center of the city was bombed on April 6 and 7, and the third wave left
later, out of a panic that something may happen. Zoran Andjelkovic,
president of the then governing Provisional Executive Council for Kosovo,
pointed out that the first ten days or so of chaos included fierce clashes
among angry civilians. Criminal gangs ran wild, ordering people to leave
so that their homes could be robbed. Both Albanian and Serbian criminal
gangs roamed the region. Adrian Gillan, in an article in the London Review
of Books, talked with Ben Ward, a researcher for Human Rights Watch. Ward
told him, "There doesn't appear to be anything to support allegations of
mass killings. It is generally paramilitaries who are responsible. It
doesn't seem organized. There appear to be individual acts of sadism
rather than anything else. There seems not to be any policy or
instruction, but that isn't to say that people have not been given the
latitude to kill. However, I don't think at this stage we have anything
that adds up to the systematic killing of civilians." Restoring order was
an extremely difficult task for the Yugoslav Army and security forces
because they were under constant NATO bombardment. Yet, by the third week
of the war they had succeeded in restoring order in much of the region,
and in the latter half of April, Yugoslav police began escorting refugees
back to their homes. By the time Yugoslav troops and security forces
withdrew from Kosovo in early June, they had arrested over 800 thugs and
paramilitaries for crimes against civilians.
At the beginning of the war, Yugoslav troops evacuated villages along the
border with Albania where KLA bunkers and arms depots where found. An
invasion by NATO troops was anticipated, and as one Yugoslav soldier
explained, "You can't be waiting for the American army and at the same
time have armed Albanians behind your back." In an interview for UPI
conducted during the war, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic said, "Our
regular forces are highly disciplined. The paramilitary irregular forces
are a different story. Bad things happened, as they did with both sides
during the Vietnam war, or any other war for that matter. We have arrested
those irregular self-appointed leaders. Some have already been tried and
sentenced to 20 years in prison."
People fled for other reasons as well. There was a clear pattern of people
fleeing areas subjected to intensive bombardment. Some of the refugees Ben
Ward talked with said they had fled from NATO bombs. Other refugees fled
to escape being caught in battles between Yugoslav and KLA forces.
Thousands more fled to avoid forcible conscription into KLA ranks. Every
Albanian man KLA soldiers encountered was forced to enlist. Those who
refused were either savagely beaten or killed.
Refugee flight, though, was never as thorough as painted by NATO
propaganda, and hundreds of thousands of Albanians remained in Kosovo.
Paramilitary rage swept through portions of the western region, while much
of the remainder of the province was unscathed. Even during the period of
bombing, many thousands of Albanian refugees returned to their homes.
The web of lies spun by the NATO propaganda machine started to unravel
once KFOR entered the province. Claiming that there would be half a
million internally displaced people inside the province, KFOR instead
found only small isolated pockets of refugees. "We planned for what we
thought was a potential disaster...and we just haven't found it," admitted
Lt. General Mike McDuffie. Lurid tales of mass genocide fell apart, as
forensic specialists investigated suspected mass graves. Up to 700 bodies
were said to be hidden in the Trepca lead and zinc mines. Not one body was
found there. About 350 were buried in a mass grave in Ljubenic, the public
was told. A thorough examination of the site found only seven. The leader
of the Spanish forensic team, Emilio Perez Pujo, was told that his team
would go to the "worst zone of Kosovo," and to "prepare ourselves to
perform more than 2,000 autopsies." But, "the result is very different. We
only found 187 cadavers." "There were no mass graves" in his team's area,
he said. "For the most part the Serbs are not as bad as they have been
painted." Faced with increasingly embarrassing questions about the lack of
evidence for NATO's justification for military aggression, The Hague war
crimes tribunal scrambled to release a statement asserting that they had
indeed found 2,108 bodies. Far short of genocide, but certainly more than
individual reports of excavations would indicate. Significantly, the
tribunal neglected to categorize these deaths. We are not told how many
bodies of each nationality were found, how many died from executions, how
many were KLA or Yugoslav soldiers killed in combat, how many died from
NATO bombs, and how many died from natural causes.
NATO claimed that its intervention was necessary to quell the civil war in
Kosovo, while neglecting to reveal its role in creating and escalating the
conflict. A September 24, 1998 report on the Monitor television program on
German ARD Television Network, revealed that the German Federal
Intelligence Service [BND] was engaged in "several illegal arms supplies"
to Albania, in cooperation with the Military Counter Intelligence Service
[MAD], and that "via these channels" military equipment was supplied to
the KLA. An ex-MAD official claimed that orders for the illegal arms
shipments were issued "from the very top." Several monitors from the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) patrolling
Kosovo during 1998-99 were CIA officers, revealed The Times on March 12,
2000. Their function was to provide advice and training manuals to the
KLA. The same article reports that Shaban Shala, a KLA commander, met
British, American and Swiss intelligence agents in northern Albanian as
early as 1996. According to Belgrade's Politika Ekspres, "a leak from
well-informed circles in the [secessionist] Democratic League of Kosovo"
disclosed that during a meeting between US envoy Richard Holbrooke and KLA
officers at Junik on June 26, 1998, Holbrooke promised the KLA $10 million
for the purchase of U.S. arms. One week later, Albanian media reported
mysterious flights of U.S. C-130 cargo planes landing at Gjadar airport in
northern Albania, a region under the control of the KLA. None of the
flights were reported to Albanian air traffic controllers, causing alarm
over potential collisions. Paul Beaver, an editor at Jane's Defence Weekly
was told by a Pentagon source, "Even before the air strikes seemed
inevitable, a [Military Professional Resources - MPRI] team was there [in
Kosovo] giving basic military training in tactics to the KLA field
commanders." MPRI is an organization of ex-US military officers that is
contracted by the Pentagon to provide training to foreign armed forces
when it is politically awkward for the U.S. government to be seen as
directly involved. KLA bunkers captured by Yugoslav forces often turned up
sophisticated Western weapons and U.S. food tins and medical packs. The
Fate of the Roma (Gypsy) People in Kosovo
On August 6, we visited Zemun and met with Jovan Damjanovic, president of
the Federal Association of Roma (Gypsy) People in Yugoslavia. A passionate
man, Damjanovic described the horrors visited upon his community by the
KLA following the occupation of the province by KFOR. Once Yugoslav forces
withdrew, there was nothing to restrain the KLA from pursuing its policy
of murdering and driving out every non-Albanian ethnic group, and every
non-secessionist Albanian. Under the protective umbrella of KFOR, the KLA
went on a murderous rampage, killing or expelling virtually everyone who
opposed it and leaving in its wake a trail of burning homes.
Damjanovic told us that the European Union had issued a list of 300
Yugoslav citizens who it banned from travel outside of Yugoslavia. The
United States and several other nations also joined in imposing the travel
restrictions. Individuals whose names are on the list and who have
investments or accounts outside of Yugoslavia had those assets seized.
U.S. intelligence agents visited many of the people on the list, implying
that their names could be removed from the list if they cooperated with
Western attempts to overthrow the democratically elected government of
Yugoslavia. There were also hints that uncooperative individuals would
face trumped-up war crimes charges. Right-wing opposition leader Vuk
Draskovic is not on the list, but he also was told he would face war
crimes charges if he did not join the U.S. effort to topple the
government, an assignment he readily accepted. Almost the entire
government of Yugoslavia is on the list, as well as many prominent people
in the society. On December 6, 1999, the list was expanded to 590 names,
and more than two months later, on February 28, an additional 180 names
were added. Looking over the list of names, I recognized several people we
had met, such as Commissioner for Refugees, Displaced Persons and
Humanitarian Aid Bratislava Morina and President of the Vojvodina Assembly
Zivorad Smiljanic. In Smiljanic's case, Western officials supposedly knew
enough about him to add him to the list, but not enough to spell his name
correctly. Only a complete reading of the list can bring a full
understanding of its vindictive nature. Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic's daughter-in-law is on the list. The Minister of Sport,
apparently, also bears guilt, as do the Minister of Tourism and the
Minister of Family Care. Also punished is the owner of a fashion-clothing
store, the owner of a watch company, bankers, family members of a banker,
and the Secretary of the Red Cross. In short, anyone of prominence who has
not lent him or herself to the Western project to impose a puppet
government is treated as a criminal.
On September 17, 1999, Damjanovic issued a statement condemning the KLA's
pogrom against non-Albanians in Kosovo. "This state of affairs calls into
question the justification for the foreign presence," the statement
declared, and "the exodus of Serbs, Montenegrins, and the Romanies
continues on the lines of the Nazi scenario of fifty years ago, while the
world looks on." It was a strong statement, but also a cry from the heart.
Damjanovic's organization faced the daunting task of providing housing and
aid for the mass exodus of the Romany people from Kosovo. His plea did not
go unnoticed in the West. On December 6, he too, was added to the EU's
travel ban list. Now the president of the Roma people in Yugoslavia, too,
is a criminal.
We were driven to a Roma settlement in Zemun Polje, on the outskirts of
Zemun. Romany residents here and in Zemun itself had taken into their
homes over 5,000 refugees. Coping with this influx placed a considerable
strain on the local population. Those who had little still opened their
arms to help their fellow human beings. It said much for the people, and I
was deeply impressed. This was a poor neighborhood, and several of the
homes demonstrated an ingenuity for improvised construction with found
materials that reminded me of a similar resourcefulness found among poor
residents of Bangkok. One home in particular fascinated me, with what
appeared to be a fur-covered roof, and a fur tail waving aloft from a pole
which protruded from the roof. The moment our cars pulled to a stop, a
crowd gathered. We interviewed several Roma and Egyptian refugees; people
who had lost everything. Krasnic Tefiq brought his family here from Obilic
after KLA soldiers came to his house and threatened to kill him and his
family. For two months they had nowhere to sleep until a family here took
them in, but life was still hard. "We have no food," he told us, "We are
starving. We are begging in the streets for food." Puco Rezeza's
experience was similar. His brother was killed by the KLA, and KLA
soldiers threatened to kill him and his family if they did not leave. He
too told us he was starving. We interviewed several more people, but when
emotions flared, Damjanovic decided to cut short the interviews. As our
cars departed, children ran excitedly behind us, enveloped in the dust
kicked up by our cars. We passed two boys standing by the side of the
road, who pumped their fists in the air, and chanted, "Yugoslavia!
Yugoslavia!"
We resumed our interviews in Zemun the next day. We were surrounded and
pressed on all sides by a crowd of refugees, all anxious to tell us their
stories and to hear what others had to say. The heat was sweltering, and
sweat poured down my back. Estrep Ramadanovic, vice president of the Roma
association, told us that 120,000 out of 150,000 Romany people had been
expelled from Kosovo. Ramadanovic himself had taken 20 refugees into his
home. "The KLA soldiers don't want any other ethnic group to be in
Kosovo," he told us, "Only Albanians." Bajrosha Dulaj was angry. "My
daughter, Anesi Akmeti, was raped by KLA soldiers. At night we were
sleeping in our house, and KLA soldiers broke in and dragged my daughter
out and raped her." Her family's only remaining possessions were the
clothes they wore on the day they were driven from Kosovo. "These are the
only clothes I have. I have no food, nowhere to sleep," she said. "Should
I sleep on the street?" The psychological effects of bombing persisted.
"The children awake at night, calling 'Mama, Mama,' and I have nothing to
give to them. They are afraid of airplanes. They can't sleep well. They
can't eat."
Adan Berisha survived KLA torture. He showed us his wife, who was also
tortured by KLA soldiers. It appeared as if acid had been poured on her
face and arm. The KLA killed their 12-year-old son, Idis, as well as
Adan's father and two of his uncles. "A KLA soldier gave us only three
hours to leave our home," Adan said, "or he would kill us." His voice was
filled with anguish as he concluded, "Sorrow. A world of sorrow."
"KLA soldiers took everything, all my furniture from my home," Rakmani
Elis told us, "and then they burned down my house." Rakmani expressed
himself with a passion that swept all before it. "I'm not against the
American people," he exclaimed, "but this decision they made strikes me as
lunatic. The rights of every people, the Serb, the Montenegrin and the
Gypsy, have been annulled. People are going out to kill, but you, as an
army," - referring to KFOR - "just sit there. Did you come here to help or
to watch this circus going on? Events now are making history. It is not
acceptable what the American people are doing to us. If they came to help,
let me see them help. But if they did not come here to help, then
everyone, Serbs and Gypsies, will be stamped out."
KLA solders had dragged Aysha Shatili and her children from her home, and
started removing her furniture. "I called three British KFOR soldiers for
help. They came, but did nothing," she said. Her son was stabbed in the
back when he attempted to stop the KLA soldiers from looting their home.
Her two houses were then burned down. Like most of the refugees, she too
owned only the clothes she wore on the day she was driven from her home.
Five KLA soldiers visited Hasim Berisha, looking for his brother. "They
told me I have just five minutes to produce my brother or they will kill
my entire family." He left immediately and went to his sister's house. His
sister reported the incident to British KFOR headquarters, where they told
her to go wherever she would like to go, just so she won't be killed.
Hasim checked on his house the following day, and saw that it had been
burned down. His brother was caught by the KLA and severely beaten, and he
too was forced to flee the province.
Abdullah Shefik was fleeing from Urosevac in his van when KLA soldiers
stopped him and ordered him to leave his van with them. "American KFOR
soldiers stood nearby when my van was hijacked," he said, "but they did
nothing." All of his belongings were in the van.
Becet Kotesi told us that when British and French KFOR troops entered
Gnjilane, KLA soldiers "attacked Serbian and Roma people. KFOR did nothing
because they were on the other side of town, but the town is not very big,
so they had to know what was happening." Kotesi was in a pharmacy when the
shooting began, and promptly left to ride his bicycle home. "Three hundred
meters behind me was another man riding a bicycle, and KLA soldiers threw
a grenade at him and killed him." Kotesi fled the province because "KLA
soldiers searched for my compatriots, to beat and kill them because many
fought against them as members of the Yugoslav Army."
A Humanist Scholar, Driven from his Home
The Provisional Executive Council, which governed Kosovo up until the
entry of NATO troops, represented every ethnic group in the province. On
August 8 we interviewed Bajram Haliti, one of the Council's members.
Haliti, a Roma, also serves as Secretary for Development of Information on
the Languages of National Minorities. Always well-dressed and dignified,
he was gentle and soft-spoken, and I took an immediate liking to this
scholarly man who described himself as a humanist. Two years before, he
published a book, "The Roma: a People's Terrible Destiny," concerning the
genocide against the Roma people during the Second World War, and he
kindly gave each of us a copy of his book. In his personal library were
over 500 books in several languages from many countries on the subject of
the Roma and the genocide against them. Both of his homes were burned down
by KLA soldiers, including the library that Haliti had spent a lifetime
collecting. "I can't set a price on that library," he told us. At the
beginning of May 1999, Haliti sent an open letter to President Clinton,
protesting the bombing of his country. In the letter, he wrote, "Everyone
who cares for peace supports Yugoslavia, its leadership and people, who
are fighting for freedom, independence and territorial integrity." Calling
for an end to the bombing, his letter pointed out that "only peaceful
means can lead to a just settlement for all national communities which
live in Kosovo and Metohija." The letter made an impression. Haliti was on
the first travel ban list.
Addressing the issue of the rights of the Albanian people in Kosovo,
Haliti mentioned that a Yugoslav delegation arranged 17 meetings with
secessionists prior to NATO's bombardment. "In those negotiations," he
said, "we wanted to offer the Albanian people maximum legal, cultural and
political autonomy," but the secessionist delegation refused to meet with
them. "Every ethnic group was guaranteed all political, cultural and legal
rights," but secessionist Albanians boycotted institutions. "People
outside of Yugoslavia did not know that Albanians refused to exercise
their rights. For example, Albanians boycotted schools in their own
language, and told the world that they can't receive an education in their
own language." There were 65 newspapers in the Albanian language in
Kosovo, he added. "Many of these newspapers advocated secession, to sever
ties. Not one newspaper was forbidden. In America, if a group put out a
newspaper advocating secession and terrorism, would that newspaper be
allowed to publish?"
"Why doesn't NATO challenge [KLA leader] Hasim Thaci? Why don't they bomb
Hasim Thaci," he asked, "as he carries out massive ethnic cleansing? In
Kosmet [Kosovo-Metohija] now, few Serbs remain, few Roma remain and few
Gorans remain.... The Roma people are in a very hard situation. It is the
same situation Jewish people faced in 1939. At that time, Hitler
persecuted every Jew in his territory. And now we have Hasim Thaci. Now
Roma houses are burned down. Roma are expelled by the KLA."
"The hostility toward Roma people is because we want a normal life
together with other ethnic groups, we oppose division of our country, and
we give our political support to the government."
One of our delegation members, Ken Freeland, a pacifist and anti-war
activist from Houston, was keenly interested in a journal edited by
Haliti, Ahimsa, the title of which was taken from Gandhi's term for
non-violence. "Roma people are a peaceful people," Haliti explained. "The
Roma are a cosmopolitan people. Roma do not have a country. The exodus of
the Roma people has brought them to every country, where they are loyal
citizens who live a normal life. The Roma people have earned the right to
give this name to the journal."
Haliti told us that in a few months "we will have our own radio and
television frequencies, and a station" called Romany National Television,
and that he would be the station's chief editor. I wondered in how many
other countries Romanies held government positions. How many other
countries had a Romany radio and television station, in the Romany
language? Were there any, besides Yugoslavia? NATO propaganda had turned
reality completely on its head, painting the most multiethnic society in
the Balkans, in which every nationality was represented in the Kosovo
government, as nationalist and racist.
Haliti and I shared a passion for music, and following our interview, we
had a very interesting discussion of Roma culture, and the contribution of
the Romany people to the world of music. Haliti told us that flamenco
music originated among Roma people, and also talked of several prominent
Roma musicians, such as jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and flamenco
musician Camaron De La Isla.
Twelve days later, Haliti was again interviewed, this time by Tanjug, the
Yugoslav news agency. "It is useless to talk about the position and the
rights of Romanies, as the UN peace mission is unable to protect any
inhabitants of the province, including ethnic Albanians who do not accept
the terror of their extremist fellows," he declared. KLA leaders "reject
the fundamental democratic and humane principles on which contemporary
civilization rests and without which there can be no peace or stability in
multiethnic communities." It will be a long time before Bajram Haliti's
name is removed from the travel ban "enemies list."
War on Belgrade
One of NATO's innovations was a rather novel form of censorship. On April
23, missiles slammed into Radio Television Serbia (RTS) in downtown
Belgrade, killing 16. The studio, NATO claimed, was a "legitimate military
target" because it broadcast "propaganda," meaning, of course, that it was
reporting the effects of NATO's bombing. RTS Belgrade was passing footage
of destruction to Western media, a practice that evidently had to be
stopped. CNN had a studio there, but was warned of the attack beforehand
and pulled out its equipment and personnel. CNN invited Serbian Minister
of Information Aleksandar Vucic to the studio for a live broadcast
interview. Vucic was asked to arrive for makeup at 2:00 AM sharp on April
23, for an interview scheduled to take place half an hour later. At 2:20,
RTS was no more. Shortly after the attack, RTS employee Sava Andjelkovic
described the scene. "A wall behind me virtually vanished, and then the
entire wing of the building. We heard screams of wounded people." Several
people were trapped in the rubble, and it was some time before all of the
survivors could be rescued. Vucic was more fortunate. His tardiness spared
his life, foiling the attempted assassination.
By the time of our visit, the rubble had been cleared, but the building
still stood with one wing sheared away, the multi-floor building standing
with each floor exposed. Nearby, missing railings and smashed windows at
the Dusko Radovic Children's Theater hinted at greater damage within.
RTS Belgrade was not alone. Radio and television stations and towers
throughout Yugoslavia were targeted. Our host Nikola demonstrated what was
on his television. Only static could be found on state channels. Untouched
were opposition channels, as well as music video and fashion channels, and
always there was access to Western cable. Western media stories about the
so-called "media dictatorship" in Yugoslavia, like all Western media
stories about Yugoslavia, are less believable for those who visit there.
We stopped at the Tanjug Press Center, housed in an aged and
unprepossessing building. As we climbed the stairs, delegation member
Michael Parenti pointed to several steps that were missing chunks of
concrete and quipped, "So this is the well-oiled Milosevic propaganda
machine we hear so much about." Not far away, an opposition-owned
television station, housed in a tall gleaming modern building, towered
above its surroundings. The U.S. and European Union have funnelled
millions of dollars to opposition media in Yugoslavia. One wonders what
the reaction would be in the United States were a hostile foreign
government to fund American media advocating the overthrow of the
government. In Yugoslavia, this media, bought and paid for, operated
freely. Newsstands were everywhere, and perusal revealed that a flood of
opposition newspapers and magazines vastly outnumbered pro-government
publications such as Politika, Borba, and Vecernje Novosti. It presented
an interesting study in semantics. A media dictatorship is where state
television cannot be viewed, but opposition television can; where there
are three pro-government papers and dozens of opposition papers. In the
United States, freedom of the press is lauded. One can pick up any
newspaper in any city with the confident expectation that it will have
essentially the same content as any other newspaper in any other city.
Alternative publications, often tepid and predictable, are marginalized
and often difficult to find, virtually to the point of irrelevance.
NATO's media war against Yugoslavia continues unabated. In place of bombs,
more subtle methods are implemented, outside the perception of the
American public. As state television returns to the air, transmitters
based in neighboring countries jam it. Such stations as Voice of America,
BBC, Radio Free Europe and USA Radio broadcast on Yugoslav state radio and
television frequencies. While we were in Yugoslavia, on August 11, RTS
issued a statement condemning this "media occupation," and pointing out
that these "frequencies were awarded to our country by international
conventions" and that this "violates all international standards in the
sphere of telecommunications." Appeals to international law fell on deaf
ears.
From RTS, a long trolley ride took us to the Belgrade suburb of Rakovica.
There we viewed the 21st of May Industrial Complex, which manufactured
automobile engines, and like many factories throughout Yugoslavia, it lay
in ruins. Now it was merely a mass of twisted wreckage; steel pipes,
girders and concrete jumbled together. The deliberate targeting of
factories was an extension of sanctions, an attempt at economic
strangulation. Over 600,000 people lost their jobs during the period of
bombing, raising the number of unemployed to over two million. About $100
billion damage was inflicted on Yugoslavia, president of the Trade Union
Association Radoslav Ilic announced during the war. "This aggression has
all the characteristics of a dirty war," he said, "in which workers are
the biggest sufferers. Workers and the products of their work have become
military targets, and the international progressive public is too slow in
awakening." Much of the Western progressive public still slumbers.
While in Rakovica, we met a refugee from Bosnia-Herzegovina who had
earlier worked in Germany for seven years. He wanted to show us his
child's school, the France Presern elementary school, one of dozens of
schools targeted by NATO. Virtually every window was broken and several
window frames were damaged. The doors were locked, so we were unable to
view interior damage. He told us that the school year would begin in two
weeks, and wondered where his child would go to school.
Kosovo's Other Albanians
Later that afternoon we met with three Albanian refugees from Kosovo. All
three, Faik Jasari, Corin Ismali and Fatmir Seholi, were members of the
Kosovo Democratic Initiative, an Albanian political party that favored a
multiethnic Kosovo within Yugoslavia and opposed the KLA's policy of
secession and racial exclusion. Jasari is president of the Kosovo
Democratic Initiative, as well as a member of the Provisional Executive
Council, which governed Kosovo prior to NATO's occupation of the province.
Jasari said he was forced to flee from his home in Gnjilane on June 18th
because "members of the KLA were showing photos of my family and me to
people, trying to find us. I am now at the top of the list of people the
KLA is looking for." Jasari lost everything. "My wife and I worked for 34
years, and now we have nothing. Nothing." Barry asked him if he was afraid
for his life. "Yes. I am afraid.....If they find me, they will kill me."
He had good reason to be afraid. The KLA had already killed several
hundred pro-Yugoslav Albanians. Many more were beaten and tortured. In
all, Jasari said, the KLA had expelled over 150,000 Albanians from Kosovo,
both before and after the entry of KFOR. He could not stand idly by, and
sent a letter to UN Special Representative for Kosovo Bernard Kouchner,
asking "to visit with him and discuss the situation in Kosovo and with my
party." Predictably, his letter went unanswered. "Where is democracy and
pluralism in Kosovo? I can't go there," he told us. I can't take part in
the political process. Where is democracy?" All of NATO's pretty-sounding
phrases about democracy and human rights, aimed at the Western domestic
audience, rang hollow for him.
When asked about reports of Serbian oppression of Albanians, Jasari
responded firmly, "It is not true. It is not true. I am Albanian and I
have all the same rights as any Serbian."
Corin Ismali, Under-Secretary for National Social Questions in the
Provisional Executive Council, also attempted to meet with Kouchner, and
he too was rebuffed. Ismali was forced from his home by threats from KLA
soldiers, he explained, "because I supported Yugoslavia and I opposed
secession....We want to live with other ethnic groups in Yugoslavia. We do
not want to live in a country that has only one ethnic group."
Fatmir Seholi worked in public relations for the Kosovo Democratic
Initiative, and was chief editor at Radio Television Pristina. "I must
point out," he said, "that the Albanian people had more media than did the
Serbian people" in Kosovo. "You could find only one newspaper in the
Serbian language, but you could find about 65 newspapers in the Albanian
language." That one Serbian newspaper was closed down shortly after the
arrival of KFOR in Kosovo. Seholi studied at Pristina University, and
pointed out that Albanian people were able to study in their own language.
"I think that America did not have the right information about Albanian
people in Kosovo, or did not want to get the correct information about the
rights of Albanian people in Kosovo."
The tragedy that befell Seholi's country had disillusioned him. "Until the
NATO bombing, I loved and<br/><br/>(Message over 64 KB, truncated)
By Gregory Elich
The sound was like no other. Hundreds of blackbirds were perched in trees
throughout the park in central Belgrade where our bus stopped, and their
loud and raucous cries startled me. I had never seen so many blackbirds in
one place. Our host, Nikola Moraca, and his son were there to greet us.
When asked about the blackbirds, Nikola replied, "We never had these
before. They are from Kosovo. They migrated here because the bombing in
Kosovo was too intense." The birds' piercing cries were unsettling, and
seemed a harbinger of all of the pain and suffering we would come to
witness during our stay in Yugoslavia. We were a delegation of peace
activists and concerned individuals, organized and led by Barry Lituchy, a
specialist on European history. Our mission was to bring medical aid to
the people of Yugoslavia, and we would spend the first two weeks of August
1999 gathering evidence of NATO war crimes for former U.S. Attorney
General Ramsey Clark's Independent Commission of Inquiry.
Years of hardship had taken their toll on Yugoslav society. Burdened by
sanctions, a massive influx of refugees, and NATO's destruction of
factories and workplaces, the unemployment rate had soared. All along
Revolution Boulevard, sidewalks were jammed with street vendors selling
paltry goods. It was an important means of survival for many people in
Belgrade. I saw two very elderly women sitting behind a card table, on
which the only goods were stones, hand-painted with designs and
affectionate sayings. Gasoline is strictly rationed, and stations were
usually closed. We frequently saw people standing by roadsides, plastic
bottles of gasoline for sale. Gasoline smuggled across the border from
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Hungary was another means of survival for the
destitute. Buses and streetcars were densely crowded. Windows were sealed
in some streetcars, a sign of air conditioning in better times. Now the
closed windows served to trap the oppressive summer heat as people, soaked
with sweat, crowded and pressed against each other. "The burden of imposed
sanctions is felt in nearly every situation on a daily basis," Danka
Moraca, Nikola's wife, informed us. "Sanctions have changed our lives
tremendously, if not totally. Now we are all used to shortages of everyday
necessities such as basic food, cleaning products and personal items. If
you are fortunate enough to be able to afford them, you must wait in long
lines." Sanctions, she added, have resulted in a "decline of salaries,
pensions and a general impoverishment of ordinary people." According to
the Yugoslav Red Cross, approximately 100,000 people, primarily pensioners
and welfare recipients, rely on soup kitchens, but the need outstrips the
supply of available meals. Eight years of sanctions have taken their toll,
and the war compounded the effect, nearly doubling the poverty rate.
On our first morning in Belgrade, we met with Bratislava Morina, Federal
Minister for Refugees, Displaced Persons and Humanitarian Aid. It was
Morina's ministry that was responsible for coping with Europe's largest
refugee population. Already burdened with 700,000 refugees from wars in
Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, more than 200,000 people had fled from
Kosovo by the time of our visit, a number that would soon grow to over
350,000. Morina, whose husband is Albanian, listed several prominent
political positions held by Albanians in Yugoslavia, "until they were
given orders to leave office" by secessionists "and become part of the
parallel world." - a reference to the secessionist's boycott of
institutions. Calm and dignified, Morina spoke eloquently of the
destruction wrought by NATO, but concluded that these were "not the worst
crimes committed" by President Clinton. "When we hear claims that they
want to create a multiethnic society in Kosovo, this is ironic," she said,
"because we have witnessed one of the most radical ethnic cleansing
campaigns" since the arrival of NATO troops.
We next met with officials of the Yugoslav Red Cross. We gave them several
bags of medicines that were donated by American doctors and individuals.
Dr. Miodrag Starcevic talked of the refugee crisis, pointing out that "our
needs are very urgent," and that they lacked food, shelter, clothes and
medicines for refugees. Officials there felt that the level of need for
humanitarian aid greatly exceeded what international organizations were
providing. Another serious problem for the organization is that it cannot
operate freely in Kosovo. "We cannot go there," Dr. Starcevic said. "Even
when we send humanitarian relief, we must provide in advance for some kind
of escort by KFOR [NATO's Kosovo Force], because it is impossible to go
there. It is too dangerous." Medical officer Ljubisa Dragisic told us that
local production met most of the nation's needs for drugs and medical
supplies, but that sanctions caused shortages in imported medicines. "It's
especially a problem with some services," she said. "For example, the
transfusion service, because we import the bags and blood tests, and some
drugs...oncology drugs, and some programs for example, the dialysis
program, and a part of the program for treatment of diabetics." Suture
material and anesthetic drugs were also in short supply.
Poisoning an Entire Nation and People
We were particularly interested in learning more about the environmental
aspect of NATO bombing. The systematic destruction of chemical,
petrochemical, fertilizer plants, and oil refineries seriously poisoned
the local environment. In the early morning hours of April 18, 1999, NATO
missiles rained down on the industrial town of Pancevo, just northeast of
Belgrade. A petrochemical plant was hit, sending into the atmosphere 900
tons of vinyl chloride monomer (VCM), an extremely dangerous carcinogen.
By sunrise, clouds of VCM poured through the town, at levels exceeding
10,600 times the permissible limit for human safety. Burning VCM released
phosgene gas, a substance that was used as a poison gas during the First
World War. Chlorine gas - also used as a poison gas during World War I -
was also discharged by fires at the plant, as were other dangerous
chemicals, such as naptha, ethylene dichloride and hydrochloric acid. A
poison rain spattered the region, and hundreds of tons of oil and
chemicals soaked into the soil and poured into the Danube River. Pools of
mercury formed on the grounds of the plant. After a missile narrowly
missed striking a tank of liquid ammonia, panicked workers dumped the
liquid ammonia into the Danube in order to avert a terrible tragedy. The
entire population of Pancevo was evacuated immediately, but residents had
returned to their homes by the time of our visit. Doctors there advise
women to avoid pregnancy for the next two years, and many residents are
coming down with red rashes and blisters. Although we were only in Pancevo
for a few hours, some of us, myself included, found rashes appearing on
our legs before the end of the day. My lower legs were covered with
rashes, and it was two weeks before they would finally disappear.
According to one worker we talked with, eighty percent of the
petrochemical plant was destroyed. Another worker told us that "vast
quantities of ammonia and VCM spilled into the river," and that he could
"see an immediate effect because one meter above the river the bank
appears burned. All the plants look as if they had been burned by fire."
Several people expressed fears for their health and that of their
families.
Serious environmental hazards also resulted from the destruction of power
plants in Bor and Kragujevac. Transformers there relied on transformer oil
containing polychlorinated biphenyles (PCB) pyralene, as a coolant.
According to the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern
Europe, "one liter of the PCB pyralene pollutes one billion liters of
water." We visited an oil refinery in Novi Sad. One resident of Novi Sad,
whose home was located a mere three blocks from the refinery, later told
me that the refinery was bombed on virtually a daily basis and that his
neighborhood was constantly enveloped in smoke. Outside the refinery, we
saw a struggling bird soaked in oil, near death
Perhaps the deadliest weapon in NATO's arsenal was depleted uranium (DU)
tipped missiles and bombs. Depleted uranium's high density enables
projectiles to easily penetrate armor and concrete targets. When DU
weapons impact on their target, thousands of radioactive particles are
released into the atmosphere, and may be borne for miles by the wind. When
people ingest these particles, serious bodily damage can result. Following
the use of DU weapons in the 1991 Gulf War, rates of birth defects and
leukemia rose dramatically in southern Iraq.
Barry and I talked with Dr. Radoje Lausevic, an environmental specialist
and assistant professor at the University of Belgrade. Dr. Lausevic's
appearance and manner of speech reminded me of my best friend, Jorge, so
he made an immediately favorable impression. While driving us in his car,
he commented on the ecological impact of the war, and it wasn't until we
arrived at our destination that I realized that his talk was so
interesting that I forgot to record him or take notes. We arrived at the
office of the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern
Europe, where we briefly concluded our discussion of the environmental
damage. Barry asked about depleted uranium (DU) weapons. My impression was
that use of depleted uranium weapons was limited to Kosovo, but Dr.
Lausevic told us that Russian sources determined that 30 metric tons of DU
was used outside of Kosovo. The entire territory of Yugoslavia was exposed
to these weapons. One particle of DU in the lungs, he said, is equivalent
to a daily chest x-ray for life.
The delegation also met with Dusan Vasiljevic, president of Green Table, a
Belgrade-based environmental non-governmental organization. A man with an
elegant manner of speech, he also acted as our guide and translator when
we visited Pancevo. Vasiljevic told us that 135,000 tons of toxic
chemicals spilled into the environment as a result of NATO bombing.
Speaking of Pancevo, he pointed out that VCM "is one of the most dangerous
toxic chemicals that ever existed. It's gastro organic in the first place,
and disrupts the cells inside," the consequences of which are "liver
disease, kidney disease and of course cancer itself." Vasiljevic also
confirmed Dr. Lausevic's report of widespread use of DU weapons.
Vasiljevic explained that as DU particles spread over an area, it "enters
the food chain, as well as to water, soil, even in the air. Once you get
these depleted uranium particles in your body, they stay there. You can't
get rid of them. And they move in your body...mostly they go to the
kidneys, and also to the liver." Vasiljevic's comments on Kosovo were
sobering. "Kosovo itself is a nuclear desert now. I wouldn't go there
myself...because the level of radiation in Kosovo is over any tolerable
level." Depleted uranium emits primarily alpha radiation, which is 20
times more deadly internally than gamma radiation, he said. The United
Nations Balkan Task Force, as well as other Western investigators "did not
find any increased radiation. How could they say so? Because they did not
have the proper equipment for that....They had just a Geiger counter." A
Geiger counter is worthless for measuring DU because it measures primarily
gamma radiation, not alpha.
Exhaust from NATO overflights, Vasiljevic claimed, severely damaged the
ozone layer above Yugoslavia. Immediately following NATO's bombing
campaign, Yugoslavia was ravaged by a series of floods and severe
rainstorms. By the time of our visit, the temperature was searing,
unbearable at times. People speculated that the heat, floods and rains
were a result of the thinning of the ozone. The damaged ozone layer would
soon drift over Western Europe, Vasiljevic said. It is difficult to
determine a correlation, but on December 2, 1999, the European Space
Agency reported that the lowest ever levels of ozone, "nearly as low as
those found in the Antarctic," were measured over northwest Europe during
November. Everyone was concerned about the food supply. Danka worried that
"all that we have on the green markets or in the shops nowadays has been
contaminated, either by the destroyed chemical industry or by the new
weapons dropped on our heads. I can't even think about the possible
consequences of consuming such food."
A City Crippled by Bombs
In the northern city of Novi Sad, we viewed three bridges spanning the
Danube River. All three were severed by NATO missiles. The Varadin Bridge
carried a main water pipe, and when the bridge was destroyed on April 1,
the Petrovaradin section of the city lost its water supply. Similarly,
destruction of the Zezelj Bridge on April 26 eliminated water in the
suburbs. Water had to be trucked in until service could be restored. At
the Executive Council Building in Novi Sad, we met Dr. Zivorad Smiljanic,
president of the Assembly of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, and an
interesting and knowledgeable man. Smiljanic pointed out, as did many
others during our visit, that Yugoslavia has 26 nationalities and is a
multiethnic society. "Even the smallest nationalities have education in
their own mother tongue," he said. "Now you can see for yourselves what
NATO did." NATO leaders "constantly talk about democracy, but we could see
that democracy in action here: democracy that bombed and destroyed
bridges, schools and hospitals....all these aims were actually false,
because the real truth and their real aim was to conquer everything and
put everything under one system." Smiljanic was asked to name their most
urgent need. "The thing that we would like most of all is for the
international community to leave us alone;" he exclaimed, "to lift
blockades and sanctions, and stop 'helping' us in the way that they are
doing."
Following the meeting, one official approached Barry. His eyes were moist.
"It was such a difficult time for those of us with children," he said. "We
didn't know what to do: take both children in one cellar, or put them in
separate cellars." A terrible dilemma, whether to keep the family together
and risk losing everyone in a single moment; or split the family apart,
thus increasing the chances of losing someone.
We were scheduled to tour and view bomb damage at the Executive Council
building later in the day. When we arrived, our bus pulled to a stop in
front of the building and our delegation began to disembark. A woman
walked up to our bus, and asked us through an open window, "Are you a
delegation?" Receiving an affirmative answer, she spoke in an angry and
outraged tone, "We're a delegation from Germany. We've been here one week
already. We've seen such terrible things, you can't imagine. People here
have a system like no one in the world. It's a true multiethnic society.
Back in Germany, all we hear are lies. There is no way to get the truth
out." We soon came to share her reaction and her outrage. The portrayal of
Yugoslavia in Western media is bizarre for anyone who troubles himself to
actually visit the place. A multiethnic society where peoples of many
nationalities work and live together is painted as racist. A society in
which women walk calmly and unafraid in a park at midnight, as we
regularly saw, is portrayed as crime-ridden. Knowledgeable and worldly
people are represented as ignorant and irrational. How often had I read in
the Western press of President Slobodan Milosevic's 1989 speech at Kosovo
Polje, in which it was claimed that he whipped the crowd into a
nationalist frenzy with a language of hate? Western reporters can get away
with such monstrous lies because they know no one will bother to check the
text of that speech. I couldn't believe the accusation because it ran
counter to those speeches I was familiar with. When I found a copy of the
speech, my suspicions were confirmed. There was not one phrase of hatred.
What I found instead were phrases such as, "Serbia has never had only
Serbs living in it. Today, more than in the past, members of other peoples
and nationalities also live in it. This is not a disadvantage for Serbia.
I am truly convinced that it is its advantage." Or these examples:
"Socialism in particular, being a progressive and just democratic society,
should not allow people to be divided in the national and religious
respect," and "Yugoslavia is a multiethnic community and it can survive
only under the conditions of full equality for all nations that live in
it." These are the phrases Western media would have one believe are filled
with hate and racism. When I returned to the United States, it was weeks
before I could bear to listen to the news and its spewing of lies and
obsession with trivial issues.
Whatever else would happen during our stay in Yugoslavia, it was clear
that we would be well fed. Every morning and evening, Nikola and Danka
prepared a spectacular banquet for us. We were continually delighted by a
dazzling array of delicious dishes. Their extraordinary hospitality and
kindness made me feel like part of their family, and Nikola's impish sense
of humor brought daily merriment. The importance of family and friends was
paramount in this society. Friends, family, and neighbors often visited.
On the street, we often saw family members holding hands. Displays of
affection were open. Due to sanctions, their lives are materially
impoverished compared to earlier times, but still they lead rich lives. As
one man in Novi Sad told me, "We have a different philosophy here than in
the West. We have a saying, 'The man is rich who has many friends'."
NATO did not ignore Vidovdan Skonaselje, a suburb of Novi Sad. People were
living in the ruins of their homes, simply because they had nowhere else
to go. The home of Rajko and Gordana Matic was severely damaged. Rajko and
his wife Gordana fled Zagreb in 1992 and built their new home here. Now
NATO had bombed their new house. Heavy plastic covered the windows. With
the exception of the frame and base, nothing remained of the roof. The
explosion had dented and twisted their car. They allowed us inside to view
their home. Holes in the walls, a result of the bomb blast, allowed
chickens to enter and wander about. On the second floor, one of the
interior walls, broken and cracked, was bowed to an alarming degree, like
the letter 'C'. Light streamed in through a ruptured wall, and mounds of
rubble filled the rooms. It didn't seem safe, but they had nowhere else to
go, nor money to repair the damage. Previous Western visitors had promised
them help, which never came. To the left of the Matic's house stood an
empty shell of another home. Only the brick walls still stood. Everything
else was blown away in the bombing. Farther to the left, the roof of a
demolished home angled down to the ground. Behind it stood more homes with
blasted roofs, damaged walls and seared interiors. The house to the right
was missing the second floor. Only remnants of the front and back wall
remained. Hammering sounds told us that the owners had begun the arduous
task of rebuilding. Across the street, the roof of one home was a mass of
twisted wreckage. Between these buildings, a roadside sign listed at a
drunken angle, punctured neatly by shrapnel from a NATO bomb. It was a
"welcome" sign.
NATO also left its calling card at another suburb of Novi Sad, Detelinara.
On May 6, a powerful bomb landed at the juncture of two apartment
buildings and the Svetozar Markovic elementary school. By the time of our
visit, the huge crater had been filled in, and all 20 of the demolished
automobiles removed. The buildings were severely damaged, and many
apartments were devastated. Seven people were wounded in the attack, and
the site followed a pattern that we would witness repeatedly during our
two weeks in Yugoslavia. Residential areas with no military value were
targeted on a regular basis.
Belgrade Bombarded
In New Belgrade, the more recently built section of the city, we stopped
at Hotel Yugoslavia. On May 7, just before midnight, two NATO missiles
struck the hotel near the main entrance. One person was killed, and four
wounded. It was impossible to view the extensive destruction without
contemplating the mentality that could order missiles to be fired at a
hotel. As we stood before the Chinese embassy, only a few blocks away,
NATO's excuses seemed absurd. Architecturally distinctive, the embassy's
unique beauty could not possibly be mistaken for the nearby Federal
Directorate of Supply and Procurement, nor any other building in the
vicinity. Similarly difficult to swallow was the claim that the embassy
was bombed because the CIA had relied on an old map. The embassy building
was built during 1992-93, and an old map would have shown an empty field.
One would have to believe that NATO intended to bomb an empty field.
Certainly, the CIA would have closely monitored the Chinese embassy in
Belgrade, particularly as NATO prepared to wage war on Yugoslavia. Three
satellite-guided missiles struck the embassy, just twenty minutes after
the bombing of Hotel Yugoslavia. The missile that did the most damage
penetrated through the roof, burrowing down to the basement. Three people
were killed, and 20 wounded. Fire and smoke poured through the building.
The stairways were demolished, and people trapped on the top three floors
tied bedsheets together, hanging them out of windows as a means of escape.
We saw that one rope of bedsheets still hung from a fourth story window.
Two days before my departure for Yugoslavia, I obtained a copy of an
article from the July 2 issue of Kai Fang, published in Hong Kong. The
article's author, Su Lan, wrote that embassy personnel electronically
monitored NATO's military operations, and that NATO feared that the
downing of its F-117 Stealth fighter-bomber may have been a result of
information passed along by them to Yugoslav officials. The October 17
issue of The Observer and a follow-up story a few weeks later, confirmed
that the embassy was deliberately targeted. A NATO flight controller based
in Naples told The Observer, "The Chinese embassy had an electronic
profile, which NATO located and pinpointed." "The aim," said another NATO
officer, "was to send a clear message to Milosevic that he should not use
outside help in the shape of the Chinese."
Not far away stood the ruins of another beautiful building, the 23-story
Usce Business Center, the target of four missiles on April 21. Much of the
building's exterior was blackened by fire, and many windows were a mass of
twisted metal. I remembered seeing dramatic photographs of this building
engulfed in flames. NATO planners anticipated high "collateral damage."
Their plans anticipated that up to 100 government officials and 250
civilians residing in nearby apartments in the "expected blast radius"
would be killed in the attack. Unfazed at the prospect of murdering up to
350 people, President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair gave
their approval for the building's destruction. The Usce Business Center
housed offices of a variety of businesses and political organizations. The
rationale for the building's destruction was that some of the offices
belonged to the Serbian Socialist Party and the closely allied Yugoslav
United Left. Only prior evacuation of the building averted a tragedy and
no one perished in the attack.
NATO's bland assertions seemed obscene. Bombing the Chinese embassy was an
"accident," and therefore excusable. This carried with it the unspoken
assumption that bombing another building and killing Yugoslav civilians
would be acceptable. The destruction of Hotel Yugoslavia and the Usce
Business Center was also acceptable, because these somehow fell into the
all-inclusive category of "military targets." Many people in the West were
completely indifferent to the death and destruction carried out in their
names. All of NATO's claims were accepted without examination or
questioning. The United States, it is assumed, has an inherent right to
invade or bomb another country and to trample international law underfoot.
In this context, I found it poignant when we saw a billboard in Belgrade,
which read: "They believe in bombs. We believe in God."
That night, in the Moraca's home, delegation member Ken Freeland
interviewed Nenad Gudjic, a Serbian refugee from Kosovo. Gudjic said he
felt that "Albanians suppressed me, especially when I started to date my
present wife, who is Albanian." His wife also felt strong pressure from
Albanian extremists, prompting them to leave Kosovo. "Something very
interesting is happening now," Gudjic said. "I lived in Pristina for 33
years. Now, on the streets of Belgrade, I saw a few of my Albanian friends
who escaped, as I escaped, from Pristina. They are living now in Belgrade
without any problems. These are ethnic Albanians of my generation who
escaped that chaos."
Every Federal building in downtown Belgrade bore the scars of bombing.
Almost every day we passed these buildings, and each day the sight was as
painful as the day before. Late one night during the war, kept awake by an
air raid, Nikola was on his balcony talking to his neighbor across the
street on her balcony. The sound of flying missiles interrupted their
conversation. Nikola shouted at his neighbor, "Get down. This one will hit
us." His shoulders rose as a chill travelled down the back of his neck.
Two explosions roared. Only a few short blocks away, one missile smashed a
house on Maxim Gorky Street, also damaging an adjoining apartment building
and a restaurant. The other missile struck a street nearby. Four people
were injured; one of whom, 23-year old Sofija Jovanovic, died of her
wounds two days later. On my last day in Belgrade, I walked down to view
the site. Nothing remained but a mound of concrete, bricks, broken boards,
and upturned earth. As a sort of memorial, someone had scrawled graffiti
on the remnants of an adjacent building: "Bombed April 30." With
fatalistic humor, graffiti on another house read, "Sorry. You missed us."
Danka described life during the bombing. "We were bombed constantly for 78
days and nights, without any break or pause. We were without water or
electricity for days. We had to throw away everything from the
refrigerator, including all medicaments essential for our family, because
of the high temperatures in May. The bombing was awful, cruel and savage.
We were all afraid, staying in the dark lobby for hours, listening to the
scary sounds of the low-flying warplanes, detonations, children crying,
car alarms, and people screaming who simply couldn't stand it anymore."
Later in the war, "NATO changed its tactics, and by the end they were
bombing us every two hours. That was part of their psychological war, I
suppose." The effects of the bombardment were widespread. "There was no
bread. The bakeries couldn't produce bread without electricity. The smell
of spoiled food spread from nearby supermarkets. There was no milk for
children." Her children were upset, asking, "Why are those people bombing
us? Why do they hate us so much when we didn't do anything wrong to them?"
Danka revealed that every time she kissed her children goodnight "during
the bombing campaign, deep inside me I was praying for God to see them
healthy and alive the next morning. During those long bombing nights, they
were awakened so many times by strong nearby explosions, annoyed and
panicked."
The Belgrade 5 transformer station of the Serbian Electric Company is
located at Bezanijska Kosa in New Belgrade. It was bombed, as were many
other electrical power and transformer stations. Several Tomahawk missiles
struck here, as well as a new weapon, the CBU-94, a cluster bomb which
releases a web of carbon-graphite threads, resulting in electrical
short-circuits and burnt components. At one point, seventy percent of
Yugoslavia's power supply was knocked out, which also adversely affected
water supplies that depended on electrical pumps. About 50,000 hospital
patients, including those on dialysis and babies in incubators, also
suffered from the power outages. When workers proved adept at restoring
power rapidly, NATO then targeted the plants with cruise missiles and
conventional bombs. By the end of the war, one third of the electricity
transmission systems were damaged or destroyed. During our visit to
Belgrade 5, workers were busily repairing the damage. We talked with one
of the workers, who said that most of the Belgrade suburb of Zemun was
without electricity. He worried about the onset of winter, when people
would have to rely on alternative sources of heat, such as coal and small
heaters. He pointed out that the coolant for the plant's transformers
contained PCBs, and that consequently, "when the fuel burns, it is toxic,
so [NATO] poisoned nature around here also. It went into the ground, so it
will reach our water supplies." One of our delegation members, Jeff
Goldberg, asked him if this was the most expensive damage inflicted on
Yugoslavia, and the worker immediately responded, "The most expensive
damage is that they killed a lot of people." When asked about the length
of time required for repair, the worker answered. "We need equipment. We
need spare parts...without foreign aid we are dead. We have a factory that
makes spare parts, converters, but...they can make only one switch per
month. It's a low capacity factory."
The previous day, due to bomb damage, virtually all of Serbia's steam
power plants shut down, and much of the country was left without power. On
the day of our visit, a breakdown at the power line at the Djerdap-Bor
hydroelectric plant caused a chain-reaction of breakdowns in other power
lines, resulting in more blackouts. It was expected that hundreds of
thousands of people would freeze during winter, with sanctions blocking
the import of much-needed parts, but prospects improved due to a
remarkable program of reconstruction and improvisation. Electricity is
severely rationed, with frequent power cuts. But what seemed an inevitable
humanitarian disaster has been averted through the ingenuity and heroic
efforts of workers in overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The
electrical worker we talked with summed up the war: "We were bombed
because we refuse to be slaves. We are a proud people and we don't want to
be enslaved. Rich people want slaves. They want obedient people."
Our meeting with the Belgrade-based Committee for Compiling Data on Crimes
against Humanity and International Law was of particular interest for me.
I had read several articles about the work of the committee as well as
interviews with its president, Dr. Zoran Stankovic, so I was familiar with
the meticulous and significant work they had done in Bosnia-Herzegovina
and Croatia. All nine members of the committee work on a volunteer basis,
constrained by severely limited resources, outmoded personal computers and
only one copy machine. The committee was tasked to investigate NATO war
crimes, and that was the main focus of our discussion. A point of
frustration for the committee was that they had submitted eight files of
documentation with The Hague War Crimes Tribunal, which treated their
reports with complete disinterest.
Albanian Refugees and Civil War: Behind the Media Screen
NATO officials accused the Yugoslav government of expelling its Albanian
population and committing genocide. The flood of refugees pouring into
Albania and Macedonia was trumpeted as justification for bombing
Yugoslavia. Few dwelled on the logical fallacy of NATO's claim that a
refugee crisis which occurred subsequent to bombing was itself the
motivation for that bombing. Western leaders presented a simple picture,
one easily grasped. Reality is seldom as simple as a Hollywood action
movie, though, and Western leaders intentionally distorted events for an
uncritical public.
Every nationality can be found in the membership of the Serbian Socialist
Party, including Albanian, and the party has long prided itself on a
commitment to a multiethnic society. This commitment is evident in its
program and in virtually every document and every speech. Toward the end
of 1998, during the period of the OSCE Mission in Kosovo, the Yugoslav
government set up 14 centers throughout Kosovo, where people could come
and take free lumber and building supplies for reconstruction of homes
damaged in the civil war. These supplies were open to every person of
every nationality. There were no restrictions. It was impossible for me to
believe that the Serbian Socialist Party metamorphosed overnight into a
racist organization, bent on national exclusivity. It did not fit, so I
dug into the matter, trying to ascertain the truth among a torrent of
lies. A more subtle picture emerged, still with suffering on a mass scale,
but this time with NATO as the central catalyst. According to an
intelligence report from the German Foreign Office, dated January 12,
1999, "Even in Kosovo an explicit political persecution linked to Albanian
ethnicity is not verifiable...actions of the security forces [are] not
directed against the Kosovo Albanians as an ethnically defined group, but
against the military opponent and its actual or alleged supporters." A
civil war was raging in the province of Kosovo between the Albanian
secessionist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and Yugoslav security forces.
This internal document presented a very different message than Western
leaders' public statements.
Concomitant with NATO's bombing campaign, hundreds of thousands of people
of all nationalities fled their homes. When the first bombs fell,
extremists became enraged and blamed Albanians for the bombing. Many of
these extremists formed paramilitary groups and criminal gangs, and vented
their rage on the local Albanian population. NATO's bombs created an
environment of anarchy and chaos that allowed thugs, paramilitary gangs,
and renegade police to operate freely. One Serbian official was reported
as saying, "It was a catastrophe. Podujevo was emptied in about three
hours. There were a lot of vile and angry people, maddened, who were out
of control." In Kosovo's capital city of Pristina, the first wave of
refugees departed when threatened by thugs during the week and a half
following NATO's first bombs on March 24. The second wave left when the
center of the city was bombed on April 6 and 7, and the third wave left
later, out of a panic that something may happen. Zoran Andjelkovic,
president of the then governing Provisional Executive Council for Kosovo,
pointed out that the first ten days or so of chaos included fierce clashes
among angry civilians. Criminal gangs ran wild, ordering people to leave
so that their homes could be robbed. Both Albanian and Serbian criminal
gangs roamed the region. Adrian Gillan, in an article in the London Review
of Books, talked with Ben Ward, a researcher for Human Rights Watch. Ward
told him, "There doesn't appear to be anything to support allegations of
mass killings. It is generally paramilitaries who are responsible. It
doesn't seem organized. There appear to be individual acts of sadism
rather than anything else. There seems not to be any policy or
instruction, but that isn't to say that people have not been given the
latitude to kill. However, I don't think at this stage we have anything
that adds up to the systematic killing of civilians." Restoring order was
an extremely difficult task for the Yugoslav Army and security forces
because they were under constant NATO bombardment. Yet, by the third week
of the war they had succeeded in restoring order in much of the region,
and in the latter half of April, Yugoslav police began escorting refugees
back to their homes. By the time Yugoslav troops and security forces
withdrew from Kosovo in early June, they had arrested over 800 thugs and
paramilitaries for crimes against civilians.
At the beginning of the war, Yugoslav troops evacuated villages along the
border with Albania where KLA bunkers and arms depots where found. An
invasion by NATO troops was anticipated, and as one Yugoslav soldier
explained, "You can't be waiting for the American army and at the same
time have armed Albanians behind your back." In an interview for UPI
conducted during the war, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic said, "Our
regular forces are highly disciplined. The paramilitary irregular forces
are a different story. Bad things happened, as they did with both sides
during the Vietnam war, or any other war for that matter. We have arrested
those irregular self-appointed leaders. Some have already been tried and
sentenced to 20 years in prison."
People fled for other reasons as well. There was a clear pattern of people
fleeing areas subjected to intensive bombardment. Some of the refugees Ben
Ward talked with said they had fled from NATO bombs. Other refugees fled
to escape being caught in battles between Yugoslav and KLA forces.
Thousands more fled to avoid forcible conscription into KLA ranks. Every
Albanian man KLA soldiers encountered was forced to enlist. Those who
refused were either savagely beaten or killed.
Refugee flight, though, was never as thorough as painted by NATO
propaganda, and hundreds of thousands of Albanians remained in Kosovo.
Paramilitary rage swept through portions of the western region, while much
of the remainder of the province was unscathed. Even during the period of
bombing, many thousands of Albanian refugees returned to their homes.
The web of lies spun by the NATO propaganda machine started to unravel
once KFOR entered the province. Claiming that there would be half a
million internally displaced people inside the province, KFOR instead
found only small isolated pockets of refugees. "We planned for what we
thought was a potential disaster...and we just haven't found it," admitted
Lt. General Mike McDuffie. Lurid tales of mass genocide fell apart, as
forensic specialists investigated suspected mass graves. Up to 700 bodies
were said to be hidden in the Trepca lead and zinc mines. Not one body was
found there. About 350 were buried in a mass grave in Ljubenic, the public
was told. A thorough examination of the site found only seven. The leader
of the Spanish forensic team, Emilio Perez Pujo, was told that his team
would go to the "worst zone of Kosovo," and to "prepare ourselves to
perform more than 2,000 autopsies." But, "the result is very different. We
only found 187 cadavers." "There were no mass graves" in his team's area,
he said. "For the most part the Serbs are not as bad as they have been
painted." Faced with increasingly embarrassing questions about the lack of
evidence for NATO's justification for military aggression, The Hague war
crimes tribunal scrambled to release a statement asserting that they had
indeed found 2,108 bodies. Far short of genocide, but certainly more than
individual reports of excavations would indicate. Significantly, the
tribunal neglected to categorize these deaths. We are not told how many
bodies of each nationality were found, how many died from executions, how
many were KLA or Yugoslav soldiers killed in combat, how many died from
NATO bombs, and how many died from natural causes.
NATO claimed that its intervention was necessary to quell the civil war in
Kosovo, while neglecting to reveal its role in creating and escalating the
conflict. A September 24, 1998 report on the Monitor television program on
German ARD Television Network, revealed that the German Federal
Intelligence Service [BND] was engaged in "several illegal arms supplies"
to Albania, in cooperation with the Military Counter Intelligence Service
[MAD], and that "via these channels" military equipment was supplied to
the KLA. An ex-MAD official claimed that orders for the illegal arms
shipments were issued "from the very top." Several monitors from the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) patrolling
Kosovo during 1998-99 were CIA officers, revealed The Times on March 12,
2000. Their function was to provide advice and training manuals to the
KLA. The same article reports that Shaban Shala, a KLA commander, met
British, American and Swiss intelligence agents in northern Albanian as
early as 1996. According to Belgrade's Politika Ekspres, "a leak from
well-informed circles in the [secessionist] Democratic League of Kosovo"
disclosed that during a meeting between US envoy Richard Holbrooke and KLA
officers at Junik on June 26, 1998, Holbrooke promised the KLA $10 million
for the purchase of U.S. arms. One week later, Albanian media reported
mysterious flights of U.S. C-130 cargo planes landing at Gjadar airport in
northern Albania, a region under the control of the KLA. None of the
flights were reported to Albanian air traffic controllers, causing alarm
over potential collisions. Paul Beaver, an editor at Jane's Defence Weekly
was told by a Pentagon source, "Even before the air strikes seemed
inevitable, a [Military Professional Resources - MPRI] team was there [in
Kosovo] giving basic military training in tactics to the KLA field
commanders." MPRI is an organization of ex-US military officers that is
contracted by the Pentagon to provide training to foreign armed forces
when it is politically awkward for the U.S. government to be seen as
directly involved. KLA bunkers captured by Yugoslav forces often turned up
sophisticated Western weapons and U.S. food tins and medical packs. The
Fate of the Roma (Gypsy) People in Kosovo
On August 6, we visited Zemun and met with Jovan Damjanovic, president of
the Federal Association of Roma (Gypsy) People in Yugoslavia. A passionate
man, Damjanovic described the horrors visited upon his community by the
KLA following the occupation of the province by KFOR. Once Yugoslav forces
withdrew, there was nothing to restrain the KLA from pursuing its policy
of murdering and driving out every non-Albanian ethnic group, and every
non-secessionist Albanian. Under the protective umbrella of KFOR, the KLA
went on a murderous rampage, killing or expelling virtually everyone who
opposed it and leaving in its wake a trail of burning homes.
Damjanovic told us that the European Union had issued a list of 300
Yugoslav citizens who it banned from travel outside of Yugoslavia. The
United States and several other nations also joined in imposing the travel
restrictions. Individuals whose names are on the list and who have
investments or accounts outside of Yugoslavia had those assets seized.
U.S. intelligence agents visited many of the people on the list, implying
that their names could be removed from the list if they cooperated with
Western attempts to overthrow the democratically elected government of
Yugoslavia. There were also hints that uncooperative individuals would
face trumped-up war crimes charges. Right-wing opposition leader Vuk
Draskovic is not on the list, but he also was told he would face war
crimes charges if he did not join the U.S. effort to topple the
government, an assignment he readily accepted. Almost the entire
government of Yugoslavia is on the list, as well as many prominent people
in the society. On December 6, 1999, the list was expanded to 590 names,
and more than two months later, on February 28, an additional 180 names
were added. Looking over the list of names, I recognized several people we
had met, such as Commissioner for Refugees, Displaced Persons and
Humanitarian Aid Bratislava Morina and President of the Vojvodina Assembly
Zivorad Smiljanic. In Smiljanic's case, Western officials supposedly knew
enough about him to add him to the list, but not enough to spell his name
correctly. Only a complete reading of the list can bring a full
understanding of its vindictive nature. Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic's daughter-in-law is on the list. The Minister of Sport,
apparently, also bears guilt, as do the Minister of Tourism and the
Minister of Family Care. Also punished is the owner of a fashion-clothing
store, the owner of a watch company, bankers, family members of a banker,
and the Secretary of the Red Cross. In short, anyone of prominence who has
not lent him or herself to the Western project to impose a puppet
government is treated as a criminal.
On September 17, 1999, Damjanovic issued a statement condemning the KLA's
pogrom against non-Albanians in Kosovo. "This state of affairs calls into
question the justification for the foreign presence," the statement
declared, and "the exodus of Serbs, Montenegrins, and the Romanies
continues on the lines of the Nazi scenario of fifty years ago, while the
world looks on." It was a strong statement, but also a cry from the heart.
Damjanovic's organization faced the daunting task of providing housing and
aid for the mass exodus of the Romany people from Kosovo. His plea did not
go unnoticed in the West. On December 6, he too, was added to the EU's
travel ban list. Now the president of the Roma people in Yugoslavia, too,
is a criminal.
We were driven to a Roma settlement in Zemun Polje, on the outskirts of
Zemun. Romany residents here and in Zemun itself had taken into their
homes over 5,000 refugees. Coping with this influx placed a considerable
strain on the local population. Those who had little still opened their
arms to help their fellow human beings. It said much for the people, and I
was deeply impressed. This was a poor neighborhood, and several of the
homes demonstrated an ingenuity for improvised construction with found
materials that reminded me of a similar resourcefulness found among poor
residents of Bangkok. One home in particular fascinated me, with what
appeared to be a fur-covered roof, and a fur tail waving aloft from a pole
which protruded from the roof. The moment our cars pulled to a stop, a
crowd gathered. We interviewed several Roma and Egyptian refugees; people
who had lost everything. Krasnic Tefiq brought his family here from Obilic
after KLA soldiers came to his house and threatened to kill him and his
family. For two months they had nowhere to sleep until a family here took
them in, but life was still hard. "We have no food," he told us, "We are
starving. We are begging in the streets for food." Puco Rezeza's
experience was similar. His brother was killed by the KLA, and KLA
soldiers threatened to kill him and his family if they did not leave. He
too told us he was starving. We interviewed several more people, but when
emotions flared, Damjanovic decided to cut short the interviews. As our
cars departed, children ran excitedly behind us, enveloped in the dust
kicked up by our cars. We passed two boys standing by the side of the
road, who pumped their fists in the air, and chanted, "Yugoslavia!
Yugoslavia!"
We resumed our interviews in Zemun the next day. We were surrounded and
pressed on all sides by a crowd of refugees, all anxious to tell us their
stories and to hear what others had to say. The heat was sweltering, and
sweat poured down my back. Estrep Ramadanovic, vice president of the Roma
association, told us that 120,000 out of 150,000 Romany people had been
expelled from Kosovo. Ramadanovic himself had taken 20 refugees into his
home. "The KLA soldiers don't want any other ethnic group to be in
Kosovo," he told us, "Only Albanians." Bajrosha Dulaj was angry. "My
daughter, Anesi Akmeti, was raped by KLA soldiers. At night we were
sleeping in our house, and KLA soldiers broke in and dragged my daughter
out and raped her." Her family's only remaining possessions were the
clothes they wore on the day they were driven from Kosovo. "These are the
only clothes I have. I have no food, nowhere to sleep," she said. "Should
I sleep on the street?" The psychological effects of bombing persisted.
"The children awake at night, calling 'Mama, Mama,' and I have nothing to
give to them. They are afraid of airplanes. They can't sleep well. They
can't eat."
Adan Berisha survived KLA torture. He showed us his wife, who was also
tortured by KLA soldiers. It appeared as if acid had been poured on her
face and arm. The KLA killed their 12-year-old son, Idis, as well as
Adan's father and two of his uncles. "A KLA soldier gave us only three
hours to leave our home," Adan said, "or he would kill us." His voice was
filled with anguish as he concluded, "Sorrow. A world of sorrow."
"KLA soldiers took everything, all my furniture from my home," Rakmani
Elis told us, "and then they burned down my house." Rakmani expressed
himself with a passion that swept all before it. "I'm not against the
American people," he exclaimed, "but this decision they made strikes me as
lunatic. The rights of every people, the Serb, the Montenegrin and the
Gypsy, have been annulled. People are going out to kill, but you, as an
army," - referring to KFOR - "just sit there. Did you come here to help or
to watch this circus going on? Events now are making history. It is not
acceptable what the American people are doing to us. If they came to help,
let me see them help. But if they did not come here to help, then
everyone, Serbs and Gypsies, will be stamped out."
KLA solders had dragged Aysha Shatili and her children from her home, and
started removing her furniture. "I called three British KFOR soldiers for
help. They came, but did nothing," she said. Her son was stabbed in the
back when he attempted to stop the KLA soldiers from looting their home.
Her two houses were then burned down. Like most of the refugees, she too
owned only the clothes she wore on the day she was driven from her home.
Five KLA soldiers visited Hasim Berisha, looking for his brother. "They
told me I have just five minutes to produce my brother or they will kill
my entire family." He left immediately and went to his sister's house. His
sister reported the incident to British KFOR headquarters, where they told
her to go wherever she would like to go, just so she won't be killed.
Hasim checked on his house the following day, and saw that it had been
burned down. His brother was caught by the KLA and severely beaten, and he
too was forced to flee the province.
Abdullah Shefik was fleeing from Urosevac in his van when KLA soldiers
stopped him and ordered him to leave his van with them. "American KFOR
soldiers stood nearby when my van was hijacked," he said, "but they did
nothing." All of his belongings were in the van.
Becet Kotesi told us that when British and French KFOR troops entered
Gnjilane, KLA soldiers "attacked Serbian and Roma people. KFOR did nothing
because they were on the other side of town, but the town is not very big,
so they had to know what was happening." Kotesi was in a pharmacy when the
shooting began, and promptly left to ride his bicycle home. "Three hundred
meters behind me was another man riding a bicycle, and KLA soldiers threw
a grenade at him and killed him." Kotesi fled the province because "KLA
soldiers searched for my compatriots, to beat and kill them because many
fought against them as members of the Yugoslav Army."
A Humanist Scholar, Driven from his Home
The Provisional Executive Council, which governed Kosovo up until the
entry of NATO troops, represented every ethnic group in the province. On
August 8 we interviewed Bajram Haliti, one of the Council's members.
Haliti, a Roma, also serves as Secretary for Development of Information on
the Languages of National Minorities. Always well-dressed and dignified,
he was gentle and soft-spoken, and I took an immediate liking to this
scholarly man who described himself as a humanist. Two years before, he
published a book, "The Roma: a People's Terrible Destiny," concerning the
genocide against the Roma people during the Second World War, and he
kindly gave each of us a copy of his book. In his personal library were
over 500 books in several languages from many countries on the subject of
the Roma and the genocide against them. Both of his homes were burned down
by KLA soldiers, including the library that Haliti had spent a lifetime
collecting. "I can't set a price on that library," he told us. At the
beginning of May 1999, Haliti sent an open letter to President Clinton,
protesting the bombing of his country. In the letter, he wrote, "Everyone
who cares for peace supports Yugoslavia, its leadership and people, who
are fighting for freedom, independence and territorial integrity." Calling
for an end to the bombing, his letter pointed out that "only peaceful
means can lead to a just settlement for all national communities which
live in Kosovo and Metohija." The letter made an impression. Haliti was on
the first travel ban list.
Addressing the issue of the rights of the Albanian people in Kosovo,
Haliti mentioned that a Yugoslav delegation arranged 17 meetings with
secessionists prior to NATO's bombardment. "In those negotiations," he
said, "we wanted to offer the Albanian people maximum legal, cultural and
political autonomy," but the secessionist delegation refused to meet with
them. "Every ethnic group was guaranteed all political, cultural and legal
rights," but secessionist Albanians boycotted institutions. "People
outside of Yugoslavia did not know that Albanians refused to exercise
their rights. For example, Albanians boycotted schools in their own
language, and told the world that they can't receive an education in their
own language." There were 65 newspapers in the Albanian language in
Kosovo, he added. "Many of these newspapers advocated secession, to sever
ties. Not one newspaper was forbidden. In America, if a group put out a
newspaper advocating secession and terrorism, would that newspaper be
allowed to publish?"
"Why doesn't NATO challenge [KLA leader] Hasim Thaci? Why don't they bomb
Hasim Thaci," he asked, "as he carries out massive ethnic cleansing? In
Kosmet [Kosovo-Metohija] now, few Serbs remain, few Roma remain and few
Gorans remain.... The Roma people are in a very hard situation. It is the
same situation Jewish people faced in 1939. At that time, Hitler
persecuted every Jew in his territory. And now we have Hasim Thaci. Now
Roma houses are burned down. Roma are expelled by the KLA."
"The hostility toward Roma people is because we want a normal life
together with other ethnic groups, we oppose division of our country, and
we give our political support to the government."
One of our delegation members, Ken Freeland, a pacifist and anti-war
activist from Houston, was keenly interested in a journal edited by
Haliti, Ahimsa, the title of which was taken from Gandhi's term for
non-violence. "Roma people are a peaceful people," Haliti explained. "The
Roma are a cosmopolitan people. Roma do not have a country. The exodus of
the Roma people has brought them to every country, where they are loyal
citizens who live a normal life. The Roma people have earned the right to
give this name to the journal."
Haliti told us that in a few months "we will have our own radio and
television frequencies, and a station" called Romany National Television,
and that he would be the station's chief editor. I wondered in how many
other countries Romanies held government positions. How many other
countries had a Romany radio and television station, in the Romany
language? Were there any, besides Yugoslavia? NATO propaganda had turned
reality completely on its head, painting the most multiethnic society in
the Balkans, in which every nationality was represented in the Kosovo
government, as nationalist and racist.
Haliti and I shared a passion for music, and following our interview, we
had a very interesting discussion of Roma culture, and the contribution of
the Romany people to the world of music. Haliti told us that flamenco
music originated among Roma people, and also talked of several prominent
Roma musicians, such as jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and flamenco
musician Camaron De La Isla.
Twelve days later, Haliti was again interviewed, this time by Tanjug, the
Yugoslav news agency. "It is useless to talk about the position and the
rights of Romanies, as the UN peace mission is unable to protect any
inhabitants of the province, including ethnic Albanians who do not accept
the terror of their extremist fellows," he declared. KLA leaders "reject
the fundamental democratic and humane principles on which contemporary
civilization rests and without which there can be no peace or stability in
multiethnic communities." It will be a long time before Bajram Haliti's
name is removed from the travel ban "enemies list."
War on Belgrade
One of NATO's innovations was a rather novel form of censorship. On April
23, missiles slammed into Radio Television Serbia (RTS) in downtown
Belgrade, killing 16. The studio, NATO claimed, was a "legitimate military
target" because it broadcast "propaganda," meaning, of course, that it was
reporting the effects of NATO's bombing. RTS Belgrade was passing footage
of destruction to Western media, a practice that evidently had to be
stopped. CNN had a studio there, but was warned of the attack beforehand
and pulled out its equipment and personnel. CNN invited Serbian Minister
of Information Aleksandar Vucic to the studio for a live broadcast
interview. Vucic was asked to arrive for makeup at 2:00 AM sharp on April
23, for an interview scheduled to take place half an hour later. At 2:20,
RTS was no more. Shortly after the attack, RTS employee Sava Andjelkovic
described the scene. "A wall behind me virtually vanished, and then the
entire wing of the building. We heard screams of wounded people." Several
people were trapped in the rubble, and it was some time before all of the
survivors could be rescued. Vucic was more fortunate. His tardiness spared
his life, foiling the attempted assassination.
By the time of our visit, the rubble had been cleared, but the building
still stood with one wing sheared away, the multi-floor building standing
with each floor exposed. Nearby, missing railings and smashed windows at
the Dusko Radovic Children's Theater hinted at greater damage within.
RTS Belgrade was not alone. Radio and television stations and towers
throughout Yugoslavia were targeted. Our host Nikola demonstrated what was
on his television. Only static could be found on state channels. Untouched
were opposition channels, as well as music video and fashion channels, and
always there was access to Western cable. Western media stories about the
so-called "media dictatorship" in Yugoslavia, like all Western media
stories about Yugoslavia, are less believable for those who visit there.
We stopped at the Tanjug Press Center, housed in an aged and
unprepossessing building. As we climbed the stairs, delegation member
Michael Parenti pointed to several steps that were missing chunks of
concrete and quipped, "So this is the well-oiled Milosevic propaganda
machine we hear so much about." Not far away, an opposition-owned
television station, housed in a tall gleaming modern building, towered
above its surroundings. The U.S. and European Union have funnelled
millions of dollars to opposition media in Yugoslavia. One wonders what
the reaction would be in the United States were a hostile foreign
government to fund American media advocating the overthrow of the
government. In Yugoslavia, this media, bought and paid for, operated
freely. Newsstands were everywhere, and perusal revealed that a flood of
opposition newspapers and magazines vastly outnumbered pro-government
publications such as Politika, Borba, and Vecernje Novosti. It presented
an interesting study in semantics. A media dictatorship is where state
television cannot be viewed, but opposition television can; where there
are three pro-government papers and dozens of opposition papers. In the
United States, freedom of the press is lauded. One can pick up any
newspaper in any city with the confident expectation that it will have
essentially the same content as any other newspaper in any other city.
Alternative publications, often tepid and predictable, are marginalized
and often difficult to find, virtually to the point of irrelevance.
NATO's media war against Yugoslavia continues unabated. In place of bombs,
more subtle methods are implemented, outside the perception of the
American public. As state television returns to the air, transmitters
based in neighboring countries jam it. Such stations as Voice of America,
BBC, Radio Free Europe and USA Radio broadcast on Yugoslav state radio and
television frequencies. While we were in Yugoslavia, on August 11, RTS
issued a statement condemning this "media occupation," and pointing out
that these "frequencies were awarded to our country by international
conventions" and that this "violates all international standards in the
sphere of telecommunications." Appeals to international law fell on deaf
ears.
From RTS, a long trolley ride took us to the Belgrade suburb of Rakovica.
There we viewed the 21st of May Industrial Complex, which manufactured
automobile engines, and like many factories throughout Yugoslavia, it lay
in ruins. Now it was merely a mass of twisted wreckage; steel pipes,
girders and concrete jumbled together. The deliberate targeting of
factories was an extension of sanctions, an attempt at economic
strangulation. Over 600,000 people lost their jobs during the period of
bombing, raising the number of unemployed to over two million. About $100
billion damage was inflicted on Yugoslavia, president of the Trade Union
Association Radoslav Ilic announced during the war. "This aggression has
all the characteristics of a dirty war," he said, "in which workers are
the biggest sufferers. Workers and the products of their work have become
military targets, and the international progressive public is too slow in
awakening." Much of the Western progressive public still slumbers.
While in Rakovica, we met a refugee from Bosnia-Herzegovina who had
earlier worked in Germany for seven years. He wanted to show us his
child's school, the France Presern elementary school, one of dozens of
schools targeted by NATO. Virtually every window was broken and several
window frames were damaged. The doors were locked, so we were unable to
view interior damage. He told us that the school year would begin in two
weeks, and wondered where his child would go to school.
Kosovo's Other Albanians
Later that afternoon we met with three Albanian refugees from Kosovo. All
three, Faik Jasari, Corin Ismali and Fatmir Seholi, were members of the
Kosovo Democratic Initiative, an Albanian political party that favored a
multiethnic Kosovo within Yugoslavia and opposed the KLA's policy of
secession and racial exclusion. Jasari is president of the Kosovo
Democratic Initiative, as well as a member of the Provisional Executive
Council, which governed Kosovo prior to NATO's occupation of the province.
Jasari said he was forced to flee from his home in Gnjilane on June 18th
because "members of the KLA were showing photos of my family and me to
people, trying to find us. I am now at the top of the list of people the
KLA is looking for." Jasari lost everything. "My wife and I worked for 34
years, and now we have nothing. Nothing." Barry asked him if he was afraid
for his life. "Yes. I am afraid.....If they find me, they will kill me."
He had good reason to be afraid. The KLA had already killed several
hundred pro-Yugoslav Albanians. Many more were beaten and tortured. In
all, Jasari said, the KLA had expelled over 150,000 Albanians from Kosovo,
both before and after the entry of KFOR. He could not stand idly by, and
sent a letter to UN Special Representative for Kosovo Bernard Kouchner,
asking "to visit with him and discuss the situation in Kosovo and with my
party." Predictably, his letter went unanswered. "Where is democracy and
pluralism in Kosovo? I can't go there," he told us. I can't take part in
the political process. Where is democracy?" All of NATO's pretty-sounding
phrases about democracy and human rights, aimed at the Western domestic
audience, rang hollow for him.
When asked about reports of Serbian oppression of Albanians, Jasari
responded firmly, "It is not true. It is not true. I am Albanian and I
have all the same rights as any Serbian."
Corin Ismali, Under-Secretary for National Social Questions in the
Provisional Executive Council, also attempted to meet with Kouchner, and
he too was rebuffed. Ismali was forced from his home by threats from KLA
soldiers, he explained, "because I supported Yugoslavia and I opposed
secession....We want to live with other ethnic groups in Yugoslavia. We do
not want to live in a country that has only one ethnic group."
Fatmir Seholi worked in public relations for the Kosovo Democratic
Initiative, and was chief editor at Radio Television Pristina. "I must
point out," he said, "that the Albanian people had more media than did the
Serbian people" in Kosovo. "You could find only one newspaper in the
Serbian language, but you could find about 65 newspapers in the Albanian
language." That one Serbian newspaper was closed down shortly after the
arrival of KFOR in Kosovo. Seholi studied at Pristina University, and
pointed out that Albanian people were able to study in their own language.
"I think that America did not have the right information about Albanian
people in Kosovo, or did not want to get the correct information about the
rights of Albanian people in Kosovo."
The tragedy that befell Seholi's country had disillusioned him. "Until the
NATO bombing, I loved and<br/><br/>(Message over 64 KB, truncated)
From "International Policy" - http://www.inaffairs.org.yu
John Catalinotto
International Coordinator in
Ramsey Clark's International Action Center
NATO Must Be Abolished
In the name of the International Action Center and its president, former
US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, I would like to thank the Institute
for
International Politics and Economics for inviting us to participate in
this important symposium to discuss the roots and the consequences of
the
war of aggression the US-led NATO powers waged against the people of
Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia has always had a special place in our hearts. Why? Exactly
because the ideal of Yugoslavia is that of a multi-ethnic,
multi-national,
multi-religious state founded on social justice and equality of
nationalities, religions and languages.
The greatest military powers on earth – just a year ago– unleashed a
vicious, cold-blooded war against the people of Yugoslavia. These powers
expected the Yugoslavs to beg for mercy after two, three days at most.
Instead, the people here stood up bravely to 78 days of relentless
bombing. We are proud to be here on this anniversary among such people.
We
only regret we couldn't have done more in our own country to stop the
bombing and the war waged against you.
Long Live Yugoslavia!
Since the defeat of the Soviet Union strategists in US ruling circles
have
promoted the policy of expanding NATO and using that military pact as a
world policeman. This policy is directed against smaller and weaker
countries in Africa and the Middle East. It is also aimed at plundering
the East, up to the Caspian Sea with its oil riches.
While the major NATO powers are military allies, they are rivals for
markets, resources and areas to invest in. The US strategy of expanding
NATO is also aimed at keeping these powerful rivals in line behind
Washington.
The people of Yugoslavia were the direct targets of this policy. But
they
were only the first part of the world's peoples endangered by a strategy
that leads towards bigger, more dangerous wars – unless the people of
the
world are able to stop it.
WHO MAKES UP NATO
With the exception of Japan and Australia, NATO includes all the major
industrial and financial powers: the United States, Germany, France,
Britain, Italy and Canada. These six plus Japan make up the G-7
countries
that set economic rules for the world.
The corporate and financial rulers of these countries control the bulk
of
the world's wealth, both in these industrialized countries themselves
and
in what can be described as the oppressed countries or the Third World.
These capitalist countries were the first to industrialize, they are now
the most advanced in technology, they control the mass media, and of
course they manufacture the most powerful weapons and are the most
heavily
armed. They sell weapons to the world but keep the most powerful and
advanced weapons for themselves.
They include the big colonial powers of the 19th century – Britain and
France – that directly ruled vast parts of the earth, and others that
held
colonies like Germany (Namibia, Tanzania), the Netherlands (Indonesia)
and
Belgium (Congo). Now there are few direct colonies, but through control
of
the world market, currency exchange rates and banking, and on the basis
of
their technological advantages, they now indirectly control and oppress
most of the world. In 1878 they met in Berlin and carved up the Balkans.
In 1885 they met in Berlin and carved up Africa into spheres of
influence.
In 1999 they met in Bosnia and carved up Kosovo for the so-called
peace-keeping forces.
It should never be forgotten that, while pursuing their rivalry for
markets, colonies and raw materials in the first half of this century,
these predatory states launched two world wars that together killed 100
to
200 million people.
Of these seven countries, the United States, with the greatest single
national economy and by far the biggest military power, is now the most
dangerous to the rest of the world.
This analysis will focus on statements coming from United States
military
and diplomatic leaders and from their own media. Yet it will clearly
show
how the war against Yugoslavia was premeditated, planned in advance,
with
wide-ranging geostrategic goals, and that it contains the seeds of new
wars.
1992 PENTAGON WHITE PAPER
On March 8, 1992, the New York Times published excerpts from a 46-page
White Paper
leaked by Pentagon officials. This paper asserts the need for complete
US world domination in
both political and military terms and threatens other countries that
even aspire to a greater role.
The public threats seem to be aimed at the European powers and Japan.
Here's some part of
what it said:
"Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival...
First, the US must show the
leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the
promise of convincing
potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or
pursue a more aggressive
posture to protect their legitimate interests. We must account
sufficiently for the interests of the
advanced industrial nations to discourage them from seeking to overturn
the established political
and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanism for
deterring potential competitors
from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role".
Regarding Europe, the document continues:
"It is of fundamental importance to preserve NATO as the primary
instrument of Western defense
and security... We must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only
security arrangements
which would undermine NATO".
GEN. DUGAN'S PLAN FOR THE BALKANS
It wasn't too long before strategists began adapting this policy to the
developing crisis in the
Balkans.
Retired Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael J. Dugan and George Kenney
of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace wrote an opinion piece for the New
York Times published
November 29, 1992, entitled "Operation 'Balkan Storm': Here's a Plan".
"A win in the Balkans would establish US leadership in the post-Cold War
world in a way that
Operation Desert Storm never could". Dugan laid out a scenario of
building a coalition with
Britain, France and Italy on an ad hoc basis, if possible, because he
believed the United Nations
Security Council would not approve a NATO assault. He described arming
the pro-US Bosnian
forces to use "unconventional" operations in Bosnia to force the UN to
suspend humanitarian
programs.
Then, he said, massive air power should be used against Serbs in Bosnia
and Serbia. Dugan
suggested using aircraft carriers, F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, and F-111s,
Tomahawk missiles, and the
JSTARS surveillance system to destroy Serbia's electricity grid,
refineries, storage facilities, and
communications. "But the US costs in blood and treasure would be modest
compared with that of
Bosnian trauma".
Gen. Dugan was infamous for his interview in September 1990 where he
candidly laid out US
plans for the massive assault on and destruction of Iraq. For speaking
out so frankly, he was
relieved of his command. But the US carried out this vicious plan
against Iraq.
His scenario for Bosnia too was carried out a little over six years
later, but starting instead from
Kosovo. And by then Washington was able to push and pull all of NATO
behind it while the UN
was left powerless.
From 1993 to 1995 in Bosnia the US, through NATO, increasingly used air
power against
Bosnian and Croatian Serbs as well as against those Muslim forces that
opposed the Izetbegovic
regime.
In August and September 1995, NATO launched a massive air war against
positions of the
Bosnian Serbs. The combination of these air raids with the NATO-enforced
economic blockade
led to the Dayton Accords of 1995. As part of the agreement, 60,000 NATO
troops, 20,000 of
them US soldiers, were sent into Bosnia under US command.
Earlier, a German/French-backed European force intervened in Bosnia,
where it attempted to
broker a truce. But US officials prodded the Bosnian regime to sabotage
this agreement, leading
to more bloodshed. Finally, US officials brokered the Dayton Accords on
more or less the same
terms except with a major US role as the occupying army.
A large new NATO base was established in Hungary to facilitate troop
deployment in Bosnia.
The US also established new bases in Macedonia and northern Albania.
(San Francisco
Chronicle, September 12, 1995)
As early as 1990, the US government had put in place plans for a
military occupation of Eastern
Europe and possibly parts of the former Soviet Union. That plan included
the 100,000 strong
Allied Command Europe Rapid Reaction Corps, the NATO unit in charge of
the Bosnia
operation.
At the end of November 1995, Reuters reported that: "The Allied Command
Europe Rapid
Reaction Corps (ARRC), based at Rheindahlen in western Germany, has
worked relatively
unnoticed since 1992 to put into practice NATO's new emphasis... (It
has) NATO's full array of
firepower (and) a tailor-made fighting force of up to 100,000 soldiers
able to deploy quickly. As
ARRC commander, British Lt.-Gen. Michael Walker, is in charge of running
the multinational
ground force to be stationed in and around Bosnia for NATO's first
ground deployment outside
its own area. The corps, with headquarters in Sarajevo, is taking three
divisions into Bosnia. Two
of them, the US First Armored Division and the British Third Mechanized
Division, are
permanently assigned to it. The third division is French".
The US used the Bosnia operation as a wedge for the expansion of NATO
into Eastern Europe.
AUGUST 1998, ATTACK ON YUGOSLAVIA AT WORK
By August 4, 1998 the Clinton administration confirmed that NATO had
developed detailed plans
for an attack on Yugoslavia. Sources told the New York Times that the
focus is on "a variety of
air-power options that could punish or intimidate".
On July 29, 1998, the Albanian government had announced that 76 top NATO
officers were in
Tirana, the capital, to plan "joint Albania–NATO exercises" from August
17 to August 22, 1998
within 50 miles of the border with Kosovo. The maneuvers will prepare
NATO and Albanian
troops for a "peacekeeping mission". Similar exercises are planned for
Macedonia in September.
These maneuvers were recommended in a March 20, 1998 position paper of
the International
Crisis Group, a think-tank with White House ties, headed by former
Senate Democratic Leader
George Mitchell.
That report also recommended "an international force in Albania close to
the borders of Kosovo
to help prevent the conflict in Kosovo from spreading and... facilitate
rapid and effective action
should an intervention become necessary". On July 29, 1998, German
Foreign Minister Klaus
Kinkel recommended similar action by NATO.
An article in the November 28, 1998 New York Times, headlined "A policy
struggle stirs within
NATO", provided advance notice of US plans to expand NATO's use beyond
Europe.
Washington wanted NATO forces ready to intervene not only in the Balkans
and against
countries like Iraq or Iran in the Middle East, or Libya, Sudan or Congo
in Africa – but against
any attempt at a popular revolution anywhere, from Russia to Indonesia.
UN Security Council resolutions have often provided a cover for US
military intervention –
against Korea in 1950 and Iraq in 1991, for example. Yet the council is
not certain to ratify all US
military aggression.
Washington noted in its "mission statement" for NATO that the alliance
may act without the
Security Council's approval. US officials argue that otherwise a Russian
or Chinese veto could
stop a military action. One NATO official brazenly explained this to the
Times: "A Security
Council mandate is highly desirable but we should not tie our hands in
advance".
US – EUROPE CONFLICTS
On March 4, 1999:
– A Marine court martial in North Carolina acquitted the captain whose
jet fighter-bomber
snapped a gondola cable in the Italian Alps a year before, killing 20
European tourists. Italians
protested.
– The state of Arizona executed by lethal injection German-American
Walter LaGrand. The
German government protested.
– Media worldwide announced that the Clinton administration imposed 100
percent import duties
on selected European-produced goods. The European Union protested.
These three seemingly unrelated events expressed open economic
competition between US
business interests and those of its former Cold War "allies" in Western
Europe, a competition
carried out through the national states.
Within three weeks this competition was buried under the weight of US
air power. When
Belgrade refused to sign the Rambouillet surrender terms, Washington
used this pretext to launch
a war against Yugoslavia.
By the time the North Atlantic Treaty Organization celebrated its 50th
anniversary on April 4,
1999, it had just made its first military assault beyond its borders and
carried out the largest
bombing in Europe since World War II.
Washington used the war against Yugoslavia to impose its changes on NATO
– changing it from a
no-longer-needed anti-Soviet alliance to an intervention force ready to
strike worldwide. NATO
powers met in Washington in late April to ratify this proposal.
In addition, the US government had recently succeeded in gaining NATO
admission for Poland,
Hungary and the Czech Republic over the objection of other NATO members.
It then pulled
these three countries directly into the war.
The brutal bombing of Yugoslavia gives the first example of how the US
wants to use the new,
post-Cold War NATO to lead its European allies into battle. Washington
says the NATO
countries have an "alliance of interests". What this means is the common
need of the predatory
ruling classes in the US and Europe to suppress any popular revolt that
threatens their ability to
plunder the raw materials and labor of the rest of the world.
It also means a common interest in preventing any newer capitalist
country from being able to
challenge the G-7's domination of the world economy. Neither would-be
capitalists in Russia and
Eastern Europe nor up-and-coming entrepreneurs in south Korea or
Indonesia will be allowed to
challenge the supremacy of US, West European and Japanese capital. They
will have to consider
themselves fortunate to get crumbs off the tables of their masters.
Along with this "alliance of interests", however, there is also a bitter
rivalry between the same
powers over economic and strategic interests. This has already burst out
with the "banana war"
and the battle between the US and the European Union over
hormone-fattened meat.
Washington's first de facto expansion of NATO's role is against
Yugoslavia. To contain the
competing interests of the NATO countries and submit them all to US
strategic control,
Washington had NATO be the instrument for its conquest of Yugoslavia.
Throughout the 11-week assault on Yugoslavia by most of the world's
biggest military powers,
US and European mainstream politicians of all political shades tried to
give the impression that the
NATO forces were united, whatever trade rivalries and military
maneuvering were going on
behind the scenes.
But no sooner had Yugoslavia agreed to terms the European Union's
leaders made a remarkable
statement: the European Union, up to now a primarily economic alliance
centered around German
banks and industry, announced plans to emerge as a military power.
Leaders from 15 European countries announced the move on June 3, 1999 –
the same day that
the Yugoslav leadership announced its acceptance, on paper, of NATO's
onerous terms.
"The union must have the capacity for autonomous action", the EU
statement read, "backed up by
credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and a
readiness to do so, in order to
respond to international crises without prejudice to actions by NATO".
Make no mistake. The emergence of a new European military power does not
bode well for
ordinary working people anywhere. European workers in particular can
look forward to having
more of their labor robbed to fund the new military apparatus while
social services are cut – an
experience US workers have been forced to endure for decades.
WASHINGTON A REPEAT OFFENDER
Just since World War II, Washington has fought the Korean War;
overthrown the elected
governments of Guatemala, Iran, Chile, Indonesia; fought wars against
the people of Central
America; invaded Lebanon; carried out a genocidal war in Indochina, in
which millions of
Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and more than 50,000 US troops died;
and enforced an
economic blockade against Iraq that has taken the lives of more than a
million and a half people,
half of them children under the age of five. The real objective of the
war on Yugoslavia is to
re-balkanize the Balkans – to break up Yugoslavia into small, easily
controllable and digestible
pieces, in order to insure US/NATO, and especially US, domination of
this key strategic region.
While 10 years ago it had no bases in Eastern Europe, today the United
States has military bases
in Albania, Macedonia, Hungary, Bosnia and Croatia. Washington and its
NATO partners have
cut up Kosovo into little pieces, occupation zones. And they have
assisted in forcing out all ethnic
and national groups who were not Albanian, and even some Albanians.
Thomas Friedman, who writes for the New York Times – is a thoroughly
despicable individual
who is now held up as the highest example of US journalism. Friedman
wrote approvingly on
March 28, 1999: "For globalization to work, America can't be afraid to
act like the almighty
superpower that it is. The hidden hand of the market will never work
without a hidden fist.
McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of
the F-15, and the hidden
fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technology is called
the United States Army, Air
Force, Navy and Marine Corps".
NEW US MILITARY BUILDUP
US military superiority is the key to US global economic domination. The
United States does not
have superiority over its rivals just by virtue of its economic system
and technology. But what it
does have is this vast military apparatus to implement its will.
A new military buildup is already under way, even though the United
States today already spends
more on its military that the rest of the UN Security Council combined.
Having spent US$ 19
trillion since 1940 on the military, the US government proposes to spend
an additional US$ 1,2
trillion in the next four years.
But Washington doesn't want to be the only one spending on the military.
US Defense Secretary
William Cohen used an evaluation of the war against Yugoslavia to bully
the NATO allies into
accepting US policies at an "informal meeting" of 19 NATO defense
ministers in Toronto
September 21–22, 1999.
Cohen said NATO won the war with US "precision-guided weapons" and other
high-tech
systems. Speaking of European NATO members, he said that "in some cases
countries would
have to spend more money" to buy such weapons – by implication from US
arms makers.
Speaking earlier at the Institute of Strategic Studies in San Diego on
September 9, 1999, Defense
Secretary William Cohen boasted of the US role in this bombing. He
outlined what he would
demand from France, Britain, Germany and the other European powers
regarding the US's new
NATO proposal called the Defense Capabilities Initiative.
"We have all agreed to develop forces that are more mobile, beginning
with the reassessment of
NATO's strategic lift requirements for planning purposes. We need
forces, we've agreed, that can
sustain themselves longer; that means having a logistics system that
will ensure they have the
supplies when and where they need them".
Cohen said the NATO powers need "forces that can engage more
effectively; that means having
the new advanced technologies such as greater stocks of precision-guided
munitions and forces
that can survive better against chemical, biological or nuclear weapons,
and also information
warfare".
EUROPEAN SECURITY AND DEFENSE IDENTITY
Cohen and his European allies had different views on what the so-called
European Security and
Defense Identity (ESDI) should mean. Washington would oppose any force
that challenges its
domination even in Europe itself. Washington sees the ESDI as a way of
harnessing European
militarism back into NATO – where the Pentagon holds the reins. That's
what Cohen told
reporters in Toronto on September 22.
"There was unanimity of expression (supporting ESDI)", he said. "This is
important for the
Europeans to undertake. It is important also to make sure that it is not
seen as a separate
institution and capability, but rather that it is maintained under the
umbrella so to speak of
NATO".
On September 22, French Press Agency report noted that ESDI was supposed
to allow
European NATO members to carry out "a peacekeeping operation, for
example, using NATO
materiel and resources but not involving the US or Canada. It was
unclear, however, how the
Europeans would be able to act independently while relying on assets
under the control of an
alliance still dominated by the Pentagon".
Cohen wants a situation in which the European NATO countries take the
risks of wartime
casualties and pay the costs, but where US control of strategic weapons
and logistics gives
Washington all the trump cards.
It's clear that Cohen expects NATO to fight future wars of a Kosovo size
and bigger – and more
distant from the United States or Western Europe. Now, without a USSR,
Washington wants
NATO to be a world cop. And Cohen expects the European governments to
pick up a big share
of the costs of expansion. But he was definitely talking about "the next
war", without clarifying if
that war was against Iraq, Libya, in the Balkans, in Central Asia, in
Africa, against the Colombian
revolutionaries, against the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.
Perhaps it will be some new
target with a leader the US media demonizes.
Because NATO is such a threat to peace, Ramsey Clark has declared
publicly that he sees no
other alternative but to abolish NATO. And we in the International
Action Center have made this
demand central to our anti-war work.
WHAT IS OUR ROLE?
This conference is doing an excellent job analyzing the war against
Yugoslavia and its
consequences. But our responsibility is not simply to analyze the world,
but to change it. NATO's
armies are strong, but they too have weaknesses. The US military fears
that any significant
casualties among US troops will arouse a mass anti-war movement as
happened during the war
against Vietnam. Some of the other European powers have populations that
are also reluctant to
back a war that demands sacrifices. They are in conflict with each
other. All this raises possibilities
to fight back.
I especially address this to those of us here from the very NATO
countries that waged aggression
against Yugoslavia. Our responsibility is to use the facts and analysis
from here to mobilize our
home populations to fight the government's policies, to lift the
sanctions against Yugoslavia, to
send aid – really reparations for the crimes committed.
On June 10, the International Action Center is holding a day-long
International Tribunal on
US/NATO War Crimes Against Yugoslavia in New York. Our initial hearing
last July 31 inspired
or encouraged a dozen US cities. Those working in parallel with us held
similar hearings in Oslo,
Novi Sad, Berlin, Rome, Vienna, Moscow, Kiev, Sydney, and even Tokyo.
The most dramatic
was a mass people tribunal in Athens last fall where thousands found
Clinton guilty of war crimes.
More hearings are planned for Belgrade, Hamburg, Prague, Boston and
elsewhere.
We do not expect to make the people in power see reason and change their
minds. These
tribunals are a way to mobilize mass public opinion and build a movement
that can fight the
governments that wage these wars. In the International Action Center we
also support the
struggles of oppressed groups in the United States – or example, the
fight to free political prisoner
Mumia Abu-Jamal. Only by building bridges to others can we succeed in
turning back the US war
machine.
On June 10, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark will prosecute US and
NATO leaders for
19 charges of war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against
humanity. International expert
witnesses will present testimony. And a distinguished international
panel of judges will hear the
case. Come and be part of this historic event.
Down with NATO! Long live Yugoslavia!
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
John Catalinotto
International Coordinator in
Ramsey Clark's International Action Center
NATO Must Be Abolished
In the name of the International Action Center and its president, former
US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, I would like to thank the Institute
for
International Politics and Economics for inviting us to participate in
this important symposium to discuss the roots and the consequences of
the
war of aggression the US-led NATO powers waged against the people of
Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia has always had a special place in our hearts. Why? Exactly
because the ideal of Yugoslavia is that of a multi-ethnic,
multi-national,
multi-religious state founded on social justice and equality of
nationalities, religions and languages.
The greatest military powers on earth – just a year ago– unleashed a
vicious, cold-blooded war against the people of Yugoslavia. These powers
expected the Yugoslavs to beg for mercy after two, three days at most.
Instead, the people here stood up bravely to 78 days of relentless
bombing. We are proud to be here on this anniversary among such people.
We
only regret we couldn't have done more in our own country to stop the
bombing and the war waged against you.
Long Live Yugoslavia!
Since the defeat of the Soviet Union strategists in US ruling circles
have
promoted the policy of expanding NATO and using that military pact as a
world policeman. This policy is directed against smaller and weaker
countries in Africa and the Middle East. It is also aimed at plundering
the East, up to the Caspian Sea with its oil riches.
While the major NATO powers are military allies, they are rivals for
markets, resources and areas to invest in. The US strategy of expanding
NATO is also aimed at keeping these powerful rivals in line behind
Washington.
The people of Yugoslavia were the direct targets of this policy. But
they
were only the first part of the world's peoples endangered by a strategy
that leads towards bigger, more dangerous wars – unless the people of
the
world are able to stop it.
WHO MAKES UP NATO
With the exception of Japan and Australia, NATO includes all the major
industrial and financial powers: the United States, Germany, France,
Britain, Italy and Canada. These six plus Japan make up the G-7
countries
that set economic rules for the world.
The corporate and financial rulers of these countries control the bulk
of
the world's wealth, both in these industrialized countries themselves
and
in what can be described as the oppressed countries or the Third World.
These capitalist countries were the first to industrialize, they are now
the most advanced in technology, they control the mass media, and of
course they manufacture the most powerful weapons and are the most
heavily
armed. They sell weapons to the world but keep the most powerful and
advanced weapons for themselves.
They include the big colonial powers of the 19th century – Britain and
France – that directly ruled vast parts of the earth, and others that
held
colonies like Germany (Namibia, Tanzania), the Netherlands (Indonesia)
and
Belgium (Congo). Now there are few direct colonies, but through control
of
the world market, currency exchange rates and banking, and on the basis
of
their technological advantages, they now indirectly control and oppress
most of the world. In 1878 they met in Berlin and carved up the Balkans.
In 1885 they met in Berlin and carved up Africa into spheres of
influence.
In 1999 they met in Bosnia and carved up Kosovo for the so-called
peace-keeping forces.
It should never be forgotten that, while pursuing their rivalry for
markets, colonies and raw materials in the first half of this century,
these predatory states launched two world wars that together killed 100
to
200 million people.
Of these seven countries, the United States, with the greatest single
national economy and by far the biggest military power, is now the most
dangerous to the rest of the world.
This analysis will focus on statements coming from United States
military
and diplomatic leaders and from their own media. Yet it will clearly
show
how the war against Yugoslavia was premeditated, planned in advance,
with
wide-ranging geostrategic goals, and that it contains the seeds of new
wars.
1992 PENTAGON WHITE PAPER
On March 8, 1992, the New York Times published excerpts from a 46-page
White Paper
leaked by Pentagon officials. This paper asserts the need for complete
US world domination in
both political and military terms and threatens other countries that
even aspire to a greater role.
The public threats seem to be aimed at the European powers and Japan.
Here's some part of
what it said:
"Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival...
First, the US must show the
leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the
promise of convincing
potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or
pursue a more aggressive
posture to protect their legitimate interests. We must account
sufficiently for the interests of the
advanced industrial nations to discourage them from seeking to overturn
the established political
and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanism for
deterring potential competitors
from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role".
Regarding Europe, the document continues:
"It is of fundamental importance to preserve NATO as the primary
instrument of Western defense
and security... We must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only
security arrangements
which would undermine NATO".
GEN. DUGAN'S PLAN FOR THE BALKANS
It wasn't too long before strategists began adapting this policy to the
developing crisis in the
Balkans.
Retired Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael J. Dugan and George Kenney
of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace wrote an opinion piece for the New
York Times published
November 29, 1992, entitled "Operation 'Balkan Storm': Here's a Plan".
"A win in the Balkans would establish US leadership in the post-Cold War
world in a way that
Operation Desert Storm never could". Dugan laid out a scenario of
building a coalition with
Britain, France and Italy on an ad hoc basis, if possible, because he
believed the United Nations
Security Council would not approve a NATO assault. He described arming
the pro-US Bosnian
forces to use "unconventional" operations in Bosnia to force the UN to
suspend humanitarian
programs.
Then, he said, massive air power should be used against Serbs in Bosnia
and Serbia. Dugan
suggested using aircraft carriers, F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, and F-111s,
Tomahawk missiles, and the
JSTARS surveillance system to destroy Serbia's electricity grid,
refineries, storage facilities, and
communications. "But the US costs in blood and treasure would be modest
compared with that of
Bosnian trauma".
Gen. Dugan was infamous for his interview in September 1990 where he
candidly laid out US
plans for the massive assault on and destruction of Iraq. For speaking
out so frankly, he was
relieved of his command. But the US carried out this vicious plan
against Iraq.
His scenario for Bosnia too was carried out a little over six years
later, but starting instead from
Kosovo. And by then Washington was able to push and pull all of NATO
behind it while the UN
was left powerless.
From 1993 to 1995 in Bosnia the US, through NATO, increasingly used air
power against
Bosnian and Croatian Serbs as well as against those Muslim forces that
opposed the Izetbegovic
regime.
In August and September 1995, NATO launched a massive air war against
positions of the
Bosnian Serbs. The combination of these air raids with the NATO-enforced
economic blockade
led to the Dayton Accords of 1995. As part of the agreement, 60,000 NATO
troops, 20,000 of
them US soldiers, were sent into Bosnia under US command.
Earlier, a German/French-backed European force intervened in Bosnia,
where it attempted to
broker a truce. But US officials prodded the Bosnian regime to sabotage
this agreement, leading
to more bloodshed. Finally, US officials brokered the Dayton Accords on
more or less the same
terms except with a major US role as the occupying army.
A large new NATO base was established in Hungary to facilitate troop
deployment in Bosnia.
The US also established new bases in Macedonia and northern Albania.
(San Francisco
Chronicle, September 12, 1995)
As early as 1990, the US government had put in place plans for a
military occupation of Eastern
Europe and possibly parts of the former Soviet Union. That plan included
the 100,000 strong
Allied Command Europe Rapid Reaction Corps, the NATO unit in charge of
the Bosnia
operation.
At the end of November 1995, Reuters reported that: "The Allied Command
Europe Rapid
Reaction Corps (ARRC), based at Rheindahlen in western Germany, has
worked relatively
unnoticed since 1992 to put into practice NATO's new emphasis... (It
has) NATO's full array of
firepower (and) a tailor-made fighting force of up to 100,000 soldiers
able to deploy quickly. As
ARRC commander, British Lt.-Gen. Michael Walker, is in charge of running
the multinational
ground force to be stationed in and around Bosnia for NATO's first
ground deployment outside
its own area. The corps, with headquarters in Sarajevo, is taking three
divisions into Bosnia. Two
of them, the US First Armored Division and the British Third Mechanized
Division, are
permanently assigned to it. The third division is French".
The US used the Bosnia operation as a wedge for the expansion of NATO
into Eastern Europe.
AUGUST 1998, ATTACK ON YUGOSLAVIA AT WORK
By August 4, 1998 the Clinton administration confirmed that NATO had
developed detailed plans
for an attack on Yugoslavia. Sources told the New York Times that the
focus is on "a variety of
air-power options that could punish or intimidate".
On July 29, 1998, the Albanian government had announced that 76 top NATO
officers were in
Tirana, the capital, to plan "joint Albania–NATO exercises" from August
17 to August 22, 1998
within 50 miles of the border with Kosovo. The maneuvers will prepare
NATO and Albanian
troops for a "peacekeeping mission". Similar exercises are planned for
Macedonia in September.
These maneuvers were recommended in a March 20, 1998 position paper of
the International
Crisis Group, a think-tank with White House ties, headed by former
Senate Democratic Leader
George Mitchell.
That report also recommended "an international force in Albania close to
the borders of Kosovo
to help prevent the conflict in Kosovo from spreading and... facilitate
rapid and effective action
should an intervention become necessary". On July 29, 1998, German
Foreign Minister Klaus
Kinkel recommended similar action by NATO.
An article in the November 28, 1998 New York Times, headlined "A policy
struggle stirs within
NATO", provided advance notice of US plans to expand NATO's use beyond
Europe.
Washington wanted NATO forces ready to intervene not only in the Balkans
and against
countries like Iraq or Iran in the Middle East, or Libya, Sudan or Congo
in Africa – but against
any attempt at a popular revolution anywhere, from Russia to Indonesia.
UN Security Council resolutions have often provided a cover for US
military intervention –
against Korea in 1950 and Iraq in 1991, for example. Yet the council is
not certain to ratify all US
military aggression.
Washington noted in its "mission statement" for NATO that the alliance
may act without the
Security Council's approval. US officials argue that otherwise a Russian
or Chinese veto could
stop a military action. One NATO official brazenly explained this to the
Times: "A Security
Council mandate is highly desirable but we should not tie our hands in
advance".
US – EUROPE CONFLICTS
On March 4, 1999:
– A Marine court martial in North Carolina acquitted the captain whose
jet fighter-bomber
snapped a gondola cable in the Italian Alps a year before, killing 20
European tourists. Italians
protested.
– The state of Arizona executed by lethal injection German-American
Walter LaGrand. The
German government protested.
– Media worldwide announced that the Clinton administration imposed 100
percent import duties
on selected European-produced goods. The European Union protested.
These three seemingly unrelated events expressed open economic
competition between US
business interests and those of its former Cold War "allies" in Western
Europe, a competition
carried out through the national states.
Within three weeks this competition was buried under the weight of US
air power. When
Belgrade refused to sign the Rambouillet surrender terms, Washington
used this pretext to launch
a war against Yugoslavia.
By the time the North Atlantic Treaty Organization celebrated its 50th
anniversary on April 4,
1999, it had just made its first military assault beyond its borders and
carried out the largest
bombing in Europe since World War II.
Washington used the war against Yugoslavia to impose its changes on NATO
– changing it from a
no-longer-needed anti-Soviet alliance to an intervention force ready to
strike worldwide. NATO
powers met in Washington in late April to ratify this proposal.
In addition, the US government had recently succeeded in gaining NATO
admission for Poland,
Hungary and the Czech Republic over the objection of other NATO members.
It then pulled
these three countries directly into the war.
The brutal bombing of Yugoslavia gives the first example of how the US
wants to use the new,
post-Cold War NATO to lead its European allies into battle. Washington
says the NATO
countries have an "alliance of interests". What this means is the common
need of the predatory
ruling classes in the US and Europe to suppress any popular revolt that
threatens their ability to
plunder the raw materials and labor of the rest of the world.
It also means a common interest in preventing any newer capitalist
country from being able to
challenge the G-7's domination of the world economy. Neither would-be
capitalists in Russia and
Eastern Europe nor up-and-coming entrepreneurs in south Korea or
Indonesia will be allowed to
challenge the supremacy of US, West European and Japanese capital. They
will have to consider
themselves fortunate to get crumbs off the tables of their masters.
Along with this "alliance of interests", however, there is also a bitter
rivalry between the same
powers over economic and strategic interests. This has already burst out
with the "banana war"
and the battle between the US and the European Union over
hormone-fattened meat.
Washington's first de facto expansion of NATO's role is against
Yugoslavia. To contain the
competing interests of the NATO countries and submit them all to US
strategic control,
Washington had NATO be the instrument for its conquest of Yugoslavia.
Throughout the 11-week assault on Yugoslavia by most of the world's
biggest military powers,
US and European mainstream politicians of all political shades tried to
give the impression that the
NATO forces were united, whatever trade rivalries and military
maneuvering were going on
behind the scenes.
But no sooner had Yugoslavia agreed to terms the European Union's
leaders made a remarkable
statement: the European Union, up to now a primarily economic alliance
centered around German
banks and industry, announced plans to emerge as a military power.
Leaders from 15 European countries announced the move on June 3, 1999 –
the same day that
the Yugoslav leadership announced its acceptance, on paper, of NATO's
onerous terms.
"The union must have the capacity for autonomous action", the EU
statement read, "backed up by
credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and a
readiness to do so, in order to
respond to international crises without prejudice to actions by NATO".
Make no mistake. The emergence of a new European military power does not
bode well for
ordinary working people anywhere. European workers in particular can
look forward to having
more of their labor robbed to fund the new military apparatus while
social services are cut – an
experience US workers have been forced to endure for decades.
WASHINGTON A REPEAT OFFENDER
Just since World War II, Washington has fought the Korean War;
overthrown the elected
governments of Guatemala, Iran, Chile, Indonesia; fought wars against
the people of Central
America; invaded Lebanon; carried out a genocidal war in Indochina, in
which millions of
Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and more than 50,000 US troops died;
and enforced an
economic blockade against Iraq that has taken the lives of more than a
million and a half people,
half of them children under the age of five. The real objective of the
war on Yugoslavia is to
re-balkanize the Balkans – to break up Yugoslavia into small, easily
controllable and digestible
pieces, in order to insure US/NATO, and especially US, domination of
this key strategic region.
While 10 years ago it had no bases in Eastern Europe, today the United
States has military bases
in Albania, Macedonia, Hungary, Bosnia and Croatia. Washington and its
NATO partners have
cut up Kosovo into little pieces, occupation zones. And they have
assisted in forcing out all ethnic
and national groups who were not Albanian, and even some Albanians.
Thomas Friedman, who writes for the New York Times – is a thoroughly
despicable individual
who is now held up as the highest example of US journalism. Friedman
wrote approvingly on
March 28, 1999: "For globalization to work, America can't be afraid to
act like the almighty
superpower that it is. The hidden hand of the market will never work
without a hidden fist.
McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of
the F-15, and the hidden
fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technology is called
the United States Army, Air
Force, Navy and Marine Corps".
NEW US MILITARY BUILDUP
US military superiority is the key to US global economic domination. The
United States does not
have superiority over its rivals just by virtue of its economic system
and technology. But what it
does have is this vast military apparatus to implement its will.
A new military buildup is already under way, even though the United
States today already spends
more on its military that the rest of the UN Security Council combined.
Having spent US$ 19
trillion since 1940 on the military, the US government proposes to spend
an additional US$ 1,2
trillion in the next four years.
But Washington doesn't want to be the only one spending on the military.
US Defense Secretary
William Cohen used an evaluation of the war against Yugoslavia to bully
the NATO allies into
accepting US policies at an "informal meeting" of 19 NATO defense
ministers in Toronto
September 21–22, 1999.
Cohen said NATO won the war with US "precision-guided weapons" and other
high-tech
systems. Speaking of European NATO members, he said that "in some cases
countries would
have to spend more money" to buy such weapons – by implication from US
arms makers.
Speaking earlier at the Institute of Strategic Studies in San Diego on
September 9, 1999, Defense
Secretary William Cohen boasted of the US role in this bombing. He
outlined what he would
demand from France, Britain, Germany and the other European powers
regarding the US's new
NATO proposal called the Defense Capabilities Initiative.
"We have all agreed to develop forces that are more mobile, beginning
with the reassessment of
NATO's strategic lift requirements for planning purposes. We need
forces, we've agreed, that can
sustain themselves longer; that means having a logistics system that
will ensure they have the
supplies when and where they need them".
Cohen said the NATO powers need "forces that can engage more
effectively; that means having
the new advanced technologies such as greater stocks of precision-guided
munitions and forces
that can survive better against chemical, biological or nuclear weapons,
and also information
warfare".
EUROPEAN SECURITY AND DEFENSE IDENTITY
Cohen and his European allies had different views on what the so-called
European Security and
Defense Identity (ESDI) should mean. Washington would oppose any force
that challenges its
domination even in Europe itself. Washington sees the ESDI as a way of
harnessing European
militarism back into NATO – where the Pentagon holds the reins. That's
what Cohen told
reporters in Toronto on September 22.
"There was unanimity of expression (supporting ESDI)", he said. "This is
important for the
Europeans to undertake. It is important also to make sure that it is not
seen as a separate
institution and capability, but rather that it is maintained under the
umbrella so to speak of
NATO".
On September 22, French Press Agency report noted that ESDI was supposed
to allow
European NATO members to carry out "a peacekeeping operation, for
example, using NATO
materiel and resources but not involving the US or Canada. It was
unclear, however, how the
Europeans would be able to act independently while relying on assets
under the control of an
alliance still dominated by the Pentagon".
Cohen wants a situation in which the European NATO countries take the
risks of wartime
casualties and pay the costs, but where US control of strategic weapons
and logistics gives
Washington all the trump cards.
It's clear that Cohen expects NATO to fight future wars of a Kosovo size
and bigger – and more
distant from the United States or Western Europe. Now, without a USSR,
Washington wants
NATO to be a world cop. And Cohen expects the European governments to
pick up a big share
of the costs of expansion. But he was definitely talking about "the next
war", without clarifying if
that war was against Iraq, Libya, in the Balkans, in Central Asia, in
Africa, against the Colombian
revolutionaries, against the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.
Perhaps it will be some new
target with a leader the US media demonizes.
Because NATO is such a threat to peace, Ramsey Clark has declared
publicly that he sees no
other alternative but to abolish NATO. And we in the International
Action Center have made this
demand central to our anti-war work.
WHAT IS OUR ROLE?
This conference is doing an excellent job analyzing the war against
Yugoslavia and its
consequences. But our responsibility is not simply to analyze the world,
but to change it. NATO's
armies are strong, but they too have weaknesses. The US military fears
that any significant
casualties among US troops will arouse a mass anti-war movement as
happened during the war
against Vietnam. Some of the other European powers have populations that
are also reluctant to
back a war that demands sacrifices. They are in conflict with each
other. All this raises possibilities
to fight back.
I especially address this to those of us here from the very NATO
countries that waged aggression
against Yugoslavia. Our responsibility is to use the facts and analysis
from here to mobilize our
home populations to fight the government's policies, to lift the
sanctions against Yugoslavia, to
send aid – really reparations for the crimes committed.
On June 10, the International Action Center is holding a day-long
International Tribunal on
US/NATO War Crimes Against Yugoslavia in New York. Our initial hearing
last July 31 inspired
or encouraged a dozen US cities. Those working in parallel with us held
similar hearings in Oslo,
Novi Sad, Berlin, Rome, Vienna, Moscow, Kiev, Sydney, and even Tokyo.
The most dramatic
was a mass people tribunal in Athens last fall where thousands found
Clinton guilty of war crimes.
More hearings are planned for Belgrade, Hamburg, Prague, Boston and
elsewhere.
We do not expect to make the people in power see reason and change their
minds. These
tribunals are a way to mobilize mass public opinion and build a movement
that can fight the
governments that wage these wars. In the International Action Center we
also support the
struggles of oppressed groups in the United States – or example, the
fight to free political prisoner
Mumia Abu-Jamal. Only by building bridges to others can we succeed in
turning back the US war
machine.
On June 10, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark will prosecute US and
NATO leaders for
19 charges of war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against
humanity. International expert
witnesses will present testimony. And a distinguished international
panel of judges will hear the
case. Come and be part of this historic event.
Down with NATO! Long live Yugoslavia!
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
SULLE ELEZIONI NELLA RF DI JUGOSLAVIA
Gentile Tommaso Di Francesco,
nei giorni precedenti la tornata elettorale in Jugoslavia abbiamo notato
uno zelo particolare da parte tua e del tuo giornale nel sostegno ad uno
dei candidati della opposizione di destra, il liberista e nazionalista
Kostunica. In particolare, nel tuo articolo "I profughi dimenticati di
Belgrado"
(http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/23-Settembre-2000/art13.htm)
sostieni che "solo Kostunica non ha smesso di insistere sulla questione
Kosovo e sul rientro dei profughi", sorvolando sul fatto che proprio
Kostunica in Kosovo e' stato preso a sassate in faccia dai serbi sotto
assedio, mentre l'attuale governo jugoslavo chiede costantemente che, in
applicazione alla Risoluzione ONU 1244, non solo rientrino i profughi,
ma persino alle forze di sicurezza jugoslave sia consentito di
rientrare. Per quanto riguarda il voto ai profughi, tu biasimi Milosevic
che non li fa votare; a parte il fatto che i profughi hanno
tranquillamente diritto di voto nei loro seggi (in Kosovo), ma non
possono esercitarlo perche' - appunto - sono profughi (ma la colpa di
questo di chi e'?): se il governo jugoslavo avesse organizzato dei seggi
elettorali appositi nei campi profughi tu avresti sicuramente scritto
che sarebbe stata una "speculazione politica di Milosevic" per
garantirsi i voti dei profughi.
Comunque si voglia girare la frittata, la colpa e' di Milosevic.
D'altronde, lo dicono pure tutti gli altri giornali.
Saluti
Coordinamento Romano per la Jugoslavia
PS. non contiamo nella pubblicazione, ma una risposta diretta ci sarebbe
gradita.
PPS. perche', piuttosto, non pubblicate l'intervista di Juergen
Elsaesser a Mihailo Markovic? Se c'e' un problema di copyright crediamo
sia facilmente risolvibile... O non e' quello il motivo?
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
Gentile Tommaso Di Francesco,
nei giorni precedenti la tornata elettorale in Jugoslavia abbiamo notato
uno zelo particolare da parte tua e del tuo giornale nel sostegno ad uno
dei candidati della opposizione di destra, il liberista e nazionalista
Kostunica. In particolare, nel tuo articolo "I profughi dimenticati di
Belgrado"
(http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/23-Settembre-2000/art13.htm)
sostieni che "solo Kostunica non ha smesso di insistere sulla questione
Kosovo e sul rientro dei profughi", sorvolando sul fatto che proprio
Kostunica in Kosovo e' stato preso a sassate in faccia dai serbi sotto
assedio, mentre l'attuale governo jugoslavo chiede costantemente che, in
applicazione alla Risoluzione ONU 1244, non solo rientrino i profughi,
ma persino alle forze di sicurezza jugoslave sia consentito di
rientrare. Per quanto riguarda il voto ai profughi, tu biasimi Milosevic
che non li fa votare; a parte il fatto che i profughi hanno
tranquillamente diritto di voto nei loro seggi (in Kosovo), ma non
possono esercitarlo perche' - appunto - sono profughi (ma la colpa di
questo di chi e'?): se il governo jugoslavo avesse organizzato dei seggi
elettorali appositi nei campi profughi tu avresti sicuramente scritto
che sarebbe stata una "speculazione politica di Milosevic" per
garantirsi i voti dei profughi.
Comunque si voglia girare la frittata, la colpa e' di Milosevic.
D'altronde, lo dicono pure tutti gli altri giornali.
Saluti
Coordinamento Romano per la Jugoslavia
PS. non contiamo nella pubblicazione, ma una risposta diretta ci sarebbe
gradita.
PPS. perche', piuttosto, non pubblicate l'intervista di Juergen
Elsaesser a Mihailo Markovic? Se c'e' un problema di copyright crediamo
sia facilmente risolvibile... O non e' quello il motivo?
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
DA PEACELINK: A PROPOSITO DI LIBERTA' DI VOTO
------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date forwarded: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 04:37:12 +0200
From: "francesco iannuzzelli" <francesco@...>
Organization: peacelink
To: pck-armamenti@...
Come segnalato in home page dalla testimonianza di Zoran, gli
USA stanno compiendo parecchie operazioni militari in
concomitanza con il voto in Yugoslavia.
In Kosovo sono arrivati altri 4 battaglioni di truppe alleate portando
la K-For a 45.000 effettivi.
Nella confinante Romania forze della Nato insieme a rumeni,
svizzeri e bulgari simulano un "intervento teso a riportare la pace in
un paese sconvolto dalla guerra civile".
In Slovacchia e Repubblica Ceca si svolgono le manovre "Blue Line
2000" con piloti e jet statunitensi.
Le operazioni piu' significative pero' riguardano l'esercitazione
congiunta tra truppe USA e croate, sia di terra che di mare, che si
svolgera' dal 25 al 29 settembre, coinvolgendo 600 soldati
americani e 9.000 croati nelle citta' di Spalato e Sebenik.
Sono accompagnati da due unita' di trasporto per operazioni
anfibie, la USS Austin e la USS Saipan, che nei giorni scorsi era
nel porto di Trieste (prima ancora a La Spezia).
Inoltre la portaerei Washington, a propulsione nucleare, e' stata
trasferita all'ultimo momento dal Golfo Persico all'Adriatico, dove e'
giunta in questi giorni.
Il dipartimento della difesa statunitense ha smentito ogni legame
tra queste manovre e le concomitanti elezioni yugoslave...
ciao
francesco
Fonti:
Reuters:
http://live.altavista.com/scripts/editorial.dll?ei=2205001&ern=y
Analisidifesa:
http://www.analisidifesa.it/numero7/natobelg.htm
francesco iannuzzelli francesco@...
associazione peacelink - sez. disarmo
http://www.peacelink.it
===
DUE MESSAGGI DA MICHEL COLLON, PRESENTE IN JUGOSLAVIA
Message urgent de Michel Collon de Belgrade
L?opposition va provoquer des incidents Dimanche soir. Ils diront qu?ils
ont gagné les élections à 9 heures, les bureaux
fermant à 8 heures. Mais les résultats officiels n?étant connus qu?à
minuit. Ils diront que les sondages étaient à leur
faveur et que si Milosevic gagne ça ne peut être qu?une fraude. Ils
cherecheront des bagares avec la police et avoir de
mauvaises images. Peut-être aussi des incidents à Montenegro.
Pourtant les sondages ne sont pas fiables, reconnaît même un responsable
des observateurs dits indépendants, organisés
par l?opposition et les USA, qui reconnaît qu?on ne peut rien prédire.
La tactique de déstabilisation est bien coordonnée, les prix augmentent
chacun de ces derniers jours, on (qui?) organise des
pénuries, huile et sucre sont retirés, les gens se ruent pour stocker.
Les prix augmentent, un dinar de plus chaque jour pour
un mark. L?atmosphère devient engoissante.
La différence entre les meetings électoraux frappe. A celui de Milosevic
: « En tant que colonie, nous ne serions jamais
libres des sanctions car le statut de colonie c?est la pire forme de
sanctions ». Les gens sont fiers de ce qu?ils ont fait :
resister. Milosevic a beaucoup reconstruit. Mais bien sûr, il y a la
lassitude des sanctions et les illusions de la jeunesse qui
n?a pas vecu le fascisme. Il y a un fosse entre générations, d?autant
que l?Ouest envahit la jeunesse avec sa pub et son
modèle de consommation.
Et au meetings de Kostunica, les gens sont tristes, ils sont vite partis
apres le discours, il ne restent même pas pour le
concert. C?est normal, il se prétend un homme de principes mais il est
en train de vendre la souveraineté du pays.
L?opposition, trouvera-t-elle assez de gens pour le soutenir dans ces
incidents ? On verra?
Je ne sais pas comment ca va tourner, en tout cas ça valait la peine de
venir ici. Il faut se préparer au pire et mobiliser les
gens
> Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 17:24:19 +0200
> From: Marko Atanasievski
> To: pdevos@...
> Subject: Message de Michel Collon de Belgrade
>
> Nous sommes ici plus de 200 observateurs venus de 53 pays (Russie,
> Argentine, Chili, Jordanie, Chine, Allemagne, etc) pour contr^oler la
> legalite des elections en Yougoslavie.
> Au parlement, nous avons rencontre la commission de supervision des
> elections qui nous a explique les regles. En fait, elles ressemblent
> tout a fait a ce quon voit dans les pays occidentaux: vote secret,
> bulletins controles, dans tous les bureaux de vote, commissions de
> controle ouvertes a tous les partis.
> En fait, les methodes electorales sont celles pronees par l'OSCE,
> Organisation pour la Cooperation et la Securite en Europe, qui avait
> d'ailleurs declare parfaitement correctes les elections yougoslaves
> de 1996.
> On se demande alors pourquoi la presse occidentale repete inlassablement
> que les elections seront truquees pour permettre a Milosevic de gagner.
> Parce qu'elle pense que l'opposition va perdre? Parce que l'Otan
> cherche un pretexte pour intervenir a nouveau?
> Nous avons essaye de repondre a cette question, ce samedi matin, en
> echangeant nos observations entre observateurs d'une vingtaine de
> pays. D'abord, nous avons constate qu'a l'etranger, on racontait des
> choses assez incroyables. En Hongrie, la presse pretend que les
> observateurs etrangers viennent seulement de quatre pays (Russie,
> Libye, Irak et Hongrie), qu'ils ne peuvent rencontrer l'opposition et
> que celle ci ne pourra etre dans les bureaux de vote pour controler
> les operations. Trois mensonges grossiers, nous avons pu le
> constater. Au Canada, les medias ont pretendu que tous les
> journalistes etrangers avaient ete expulses. Archi-faux: il reste ici
> des dizaines de correspondants internationaux meme si cest vrai,
> quelques journalistes ont ete expulses.
> Cest peut etre regrettable dans certains cas, mais il faut aussi
> comprendre: les Yougoslaves ont subi une guerre, des milliers de gens
> ont perdu la vie, leurs maisons, leurs biens, l'Otan a foutu des
> dechets nucleaires un peu partout et ca provoquer des millers de
> cancers dans quelques annes, et toute cette guerre a ete prepare par
> des mediamensonges occidentaux. Aujourdhui, ils sont a nouveau
> nerveux car les Etats Unis manifestement font monter la tension...
> Il y a dix jours, un journal de l'opposition yougoslave a revele que
> Madeleine Albright, ministre US des Affaires etrangeres, avait reclame
> qu'on bombarde a nouveau la Yougoslavie. Proposition non acceptee
> pour l'instant par les autres responsables americains, mais demain
> qu'arrivera-t-il? Avant les guerres precedentes contre la
> Yougoslavie, on avait constate aussi une campagne psychologique
> preparatoire: demonisation de l'adversaire, creation d'un etat de
> tension en lui attribuant des projets agressifs (ici on pretend que
> Milosevic va attaquer le Montenegro, ce qui ne tient pas debout),
> etcetera... Dans cette campagne psychologique, les sondages doivent
> etre consideres comme une arme de propagande parmi d'autres. Selon
> beaucoup de gens a qui j'ai parle, la lutte sera serree. Voteront
> Milosevic ceux qui, en depit de critiques qu'ils lui font, mettent
> pardessus tout la defense de l'independance. Voteront pour
> l'opposition ceux qui, lasses par des annes depreuves et de
> privations, s'efforcent de croire Kostunica et les promesses des
> EtatsUnis. Mais les medias occidentaux avancent que Kostunica serait
> sur de gagner. Ca ne repose pas sur des enquetes serieuses, en fait
> il n'existe pas de sondage scientifiquement fiable. Pourquoi alors ce
> pronostic trompeur? Pour decourager les electeurs yougoslave et pour
> preparer l'opinion occidentale a cette idee: si Milosevic gagne, ce
> ne pourra etre qu'en fraudant, donc nous devrons intervenir de
> nouveau contre la Yougoslavie (par une nouvelle guerre ou de nouveaux
> bombardements? Esperons que non, et faisons tout pour qu'il n'en soit
> pas ainsi). Les Etats Unis ont fourni a l'opposition une serie de
> consultants specialistes de la communication (le genre de ceux qui
> ont assiste Jamie Shea durant la guerre); les sondages trompeurs
> font partie de leur panoplie d'armes psychologiques. Les Etats-Unis
> font aujourd'hui plein de promesses, garantissant aux Yougoslaves
> qu'ils vivront prosperes s'ils votent bien. D'abord, il faut
> remarquer que ces promesses ils les ont deja faites aux Russes, aux
> Bulgares et aux Albanais avec les resultats qu'on sait....
> En Occident, on n'en parle guere, mais ici, on est tres choques par
> les 70 millions de dollars que les Usa reconnaissent verser aux
> partis, medias dits independants et a d'autres organisations. Acheter
> la Yougoslavie? Que diraient les medias occidentaux si Belgrade ou
> Pekin versait 5 milliards de FB (somme equivalente si on compare les
> niveaux de vie) pour aider un parti d'extreme gauche en France parce
> qu'elle ne respecte pas les droits des Corses ou des Basques? Ou en
> Belgique parce qu'elle enferme les refugies dans des prisons?
>
> Redevenons serieux: les Etats-Unis sont en train de preparer
> psychologiquement l'opinion internationale a la possibilite dune
> nouvelle agression (n'oublions pas qu'ils bobardemt impunement l'Irak
> depuis neuf ans!). Ils osent presenter comme une lecon de
> <democratie> le chantage <Votez pour nous ou crevez de faim a moins
> qu'on vous bombarde a nouveau!>
>
> Au moment ou ils preparent un Plan Colombie, veritable declaration de
> guerre contre toute l'Amerique latime et ses nouvelles luttes au
> Venezuela, em Argentine et ailleurs, au moment ou ils soutiennent
> ferocement Israel responsable d'une purification ethnique
> systematique depuis plus de cinquante ans, au moment ou le monde
> entier se mobilise tres positivement contre les injustices de la
> globalisation imposee par les multinationales, il est tres important
> d'arreter cette nouvelle menace d'agression.
>
> Demain, les 200 observateurs se disperseront dans tout le pays ou ils
> pourront tout controler dans les bureaux de vote et les operations de
> comptage. Nous avons convenu d'echanger nos impressions dimache soir
> et lundi matin tres tot. Les resultats devraient etre connus dans la
> nuit. Il me parait tres important de contrer IMMEDIATEMENT la
> desinformation que certains milieux essaient d'organiser au sujet de
> ces elections. Je suggere de contacter d'avance des journalistes
> honnetes pour leur expliquer qu'une autre information est disponible.
> On peut me joindre a l'hotel Intercontinental, chambre 313.
>
> Michel Collon
> samedi 23 septembre, Belgrade
===
IMPORTANTI INFORMAZIONI DALLA BULGARIA
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/doncheva/electionday.htm
>Election Day Meddling
>A letter from Blagovesta Doncheva in Sofia, Bulgaria
>(9-24-2000)
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/doncheva/bulgmed.htm
>Bulgaria Meddles in Yugoslav Vote
>
>'Monitor,' [Bulgaria] September 22, p. 1-2-3
>
>Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marin Raikov, is behind an unprecedented
>plan for parallel Yugoslav vote counting from Sofia. Kostov threatens
>Milosevic with "categorical/decisive actions" if he 'manipulates' the vote on
>Sunday...
===
SULLE INTERFERENZE EUROPEE E STATUNITENSI
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Sept. 28, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
YUGOSLAVIA ELECTIONS: U.S., W. EUROPE USE CARROT &
STICK
By John Catalinotto
With the big vote set for Sept. 24, the European Union and
the U.S. government have stepped up their already blatant
intervention in Yugoslavia's national election. Both the
Yugoslav government and anti-war forces in NATO countries
have reacted with anti-NATO actions.
The EU offered the carrot. In a "message to the Serbian
people" from a Sept. 18 monthly foreign ministers' meeting
in Brussels, the EU said it would lift sanctions if
Yugoslavs voted out President Slobodan Milosevic in the
presidential election.
"The elections ... will give the Serbian people the
opportunity to repudiate clearly and peacefully the policy
of Milosevic." Should they do so, "we will lift the
sanctions against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, we
will support the necessary economic aid for its
reconstruction, and we will support the reintegration of the
FRY into the international community," is how the EU
presented its bribe.
Washington continued to wave the big stick. The U.S. Navy
plans maneuvers in the Adriatic Sea off the Yugoslav coast
on election weekend. Both U.S. and NATO leaders have
threatened intervention should there be conflict in
Montenegro, the smaller republic, which along with Serbia
makes up what remains of Yugoslavia.
If Yugoslavia is treated like the other former socialist
countries of the Balkans, "reintegration" means that a
handful of Yugoslavs will grow rich while the bulk of the
population is driven deeper into poverty and the people as a
whole are forced to submit to Western imperialism.
An article in the Sept. 19 New York Times makes it clear
that the only job opportunities for young Bulgarian women is
to work as prostitutes in the Czech Republic near the German
border.
The only serious candidates for president of Yugoslavia are
Milosevic and Vojislav Kostunica, who is backed by 18 small
opposition parties, some of them openly pro-NATO and all pro-
Western. Kostunica is a long-time anti-communist with
credentials as a Serbian nationalist.
Kostunica is also the only opposition figure who is not
tarnished by open association with NATO forces. He can
possibly attract voters who are weary of the assault on
Yugoslavia and who hope that removing Milosevic will end the
hostility.
The U.S. and West European imperialists, however, want
Kostunica to defeat Milosevic in order to weaken the best-
organized anti-NATO structures inside Yugoslavia. These
structures include Milosevic's Socialist Party and the party
called the Yugoslav United Left, plus the security forces
and the army.
Weakening this apparatus would leave the road open for
imperialist penetration and for turning all of Yugoslavia
back into a colony of the West, whether or not that is what
Kostunica plans.
The Western media claim Kostunica is leading in election
polls. Pro-Milosevic sources point out that the polls were
taken by pro-NATO organizations that want to try to claim
Milosevic "stole" the election should he win.
BELGRADE PUTS NATO LEADERS ON TRIAL
Meanwhile, the Milosevic forces have run their election
campaign against NATO threats, pointing to the opposition as
NATO puppets.
In addition, the Yugoslav government has gone on the
political offensive against NATO. In Belgrade Sept. 18 the
government opened a trial of NATO leaders for war crimes
committed during the 1999 aggression and 78-day bombing
assault.
Yugoslavia charged Presidents Bill Clinton of the United
States and Jacques Chirac of France, British Prime Minister
Tony Blair, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, U.S.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and nine other NATO
and Western government leaders with war crimes. Their names
were attached to 14 empty chairs in the front of a Belgrade
courtroom.
Serb authorities appointed a lawyer for each of the accused.
Yugoslav officials said it would take four days to present
the evidence.
"They are charged with inciting an aggressive war...war
crimes against civilian population...use of banned combat
means, attempted murder of the Yugoslav president...the
violation of the country's territorial integrity. ..," the
charge sheet read.
"They fired 600 cruise missiles and made 25,119 [air]
sorties during the 78-day aggression, attacking both
military and civilian targets, killing and wounding many
people, causing mass destruction of property," it added.
The charges were similar in structure to those presented at
the dozens of "People's Tribunals" held in Germany, the
United States, Italy, Austria, Greece, Russia and other
countries in the past 14 months, all of which found the NATO
leaders guilty. The Yugoslavs will be able to present more
detailed, eyewitness descriptions of the crimes.
Exposing NATO's crimes and especially the lies NATO leaders
used to justify their aggression has strengthened solidarity
with Yugoslavia in some of the NATO countries.
In Italy, a traditional annual peace march from Perugia to
Assisi will take place Sept. 24 with a more clearly anti-
NATO position than it has had in recent years. Last year
former Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema led the march--but he
also had led the war against Yugoslavia. This year march
organizers invited forces carrying a banner "Against NATO,
against the embargoes" to play a big role in the march and
promised that none of the war criminals from the Italian
regime would be present.
In Germany, a group of anti-war intellectuals have issued a
call from Berlin: "No new NATO-war on the Balkans!" The call
warns of U.S.-NATO military preparations for a possible new
assault on Yugoslavia, and asks for actions against this new
aggression. There are also vigils planned in Bonn on Sept.
22 and 29.
- END -
(Copyleft Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to
copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
ww@.... For subscription info send message to:
info@.... Web: http://www.workers.org)
YUGOSLAVIA LODGES PROTEST WITH E.U. COUNCIL
BRUSSELS, September 23 (Tanjug) Yugoslavia has filed a protest
with the European Union in Brussels over a socalled "message" that E.U.
foreign ministers have recently sent Yugoslavs in connection with
Sunday's
presidential and parliamentary elections in Yugoslavia.
Yugoslav Charge d'Affaires Dragan Zupanjevac delivered the
protest
note to E.U. Ministerial Council Director General Brian Crowe.
The note says, among others, that the E.U. ministers' "message"
constitutes gross and unacceptable interference in the internal affairs
of
a sovereign country, and is without a precedent in democratic practice.
Yugoslavia believes it is high time the European Union
abandoned
its unprincipled and antiEuropean policy, its antiYugoslav policy of
sanctions and isolation, which is achieving nothing other than
continuing
to destabilise southeast Europe, the protest note says.
===
F.R. YUGOSLAVIA ELECTIONS
YUGOSLAVIA TO ELECT PRESIDENT AND MP'S ON SUNDAY
BELGRADE, September 23 (Tanjug) Yugoslavia will be electing a
president and federal parliament deputies, while its republic of Serbia
will be voting also for local administration officials on Sunday,
September
24.
According to the Central Electoral Commission, Yugoslavia has
an
electorate of 7,861,327; of this number, 7,417,197 are in Serbia, and
444,130 in the other Yugoslav federal unit, Montenegro.
This will be the first time for the people to be electing a
president directly, and they will have the choice of five candidates:
Incumbent Slobodan Milosevic, nominated by a leftist coalition
made up of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), the Yugoslav Left (JUL),
and the Socialist People's Party (SNP) of Montenegro;
Vojislav Kostunica, nominated by 18 opposition parties rallied
into the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) bloc;
Tomislav Nikolic of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS);
Vojislav Mihailovic of the Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO);
Miroljub Vidojkovic of the Affirmative Party.
Should none of the candidates secure an outright majority of
the
votes cast in the first round, the two leading candidates will fight it
out
between them in a runoff two weeks later.
Serbs and Montenegrins will be voting in 27 electoral districts
to
elect 138 deputies to the Chamber of Citizens (lower house) of the
Yugoslav
federal parliament, from among candidates nominated by 30 parties on 30
tickets.
Of this number, Serbia will be giving 108 deputies to the
Chamber,
and Montenegro, 30.
Yugoslav citizens displaced from Serbia's U.N.administered
Kosovo
and Metohija province will be voting in Serbia's southern Prokuplje and
Vranje municipalities.
Deputies to the Chamber of Republics (Upper house) will be
elected
by direct ballot another first with Serbia and Montenegro, as two
equal
constituencies, giving 20 deputies each.
Parallel with the federal elections, polls will be held for
electing 120 deputies to the Serbian Vojvodina province's assembly
(Parliament), and local administrations in Serbia.
Also, 110 deputies to the Belgrade City Council will be elected
from among 548 candidates nominated by 21 parties.
Belgrade has an electorate of 1,351,365.
Apart from local monitors, the elections will be monitored by
more
than 200 foreign observers from 52 countries, who have already arrived
in
Yugoslavia.
YUGOSLAVIA TAKES FURTHER STEPS TO PREVENT ELECTION FRAUD
BELGRADE, September 23 (Tanjug) The Yugoslav Central Electoral
Commission on Saturday reviewed reports on a plot to illegally augment
the
number of ballots at polling stations and issued further instructions to
prevent fraud on the eve of Sunday's elections.
Yugoslavia votes for president and deputies to both chambers of
the federal parliament, while its republic of Serbia elects local
administrators on Sunday, September 24.
The Commission said in a statement it has come in possession of
information that, as part of subversive activities against Yugoslavia, a
plan has been hatched to sabotage and compromise the presidential
election.
"Foreign factors have prepared a number of ballots for the
presidential election, which their stooges among the Yugoslav people
should
drop in the ballot boxes folded inside the regular ballot papers...
"This has been done because, under election rules, in case
there
is a single ballot in a box more than there were voters at that
particular
polling station, the polling must be declared invalid", the Commission
said.
In this way, a couple of hundred unscrupulous individuals could
invalidate the will of hundreds of thousands, it added.
The Commission has therefore decreed that the invigilators at
the
polling stations must check that the ballot paper of each voter in the
presidential election is a single paper, with nothing folded in it.
"The check will be made by each voter marking the ballot,
folding
it and then handing it over to an invigilator to see that it is a single
paper, while not violating the secrecy of the voting, and then dropping
it
in the box", the statement said.
The Commission appealed to the people to respect the reasons
that
have made this kind of control necessary.
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date forwarded: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 04:37:12 +0200
From: "francesco iannuzzelli" <francesco@...>
Organization: peacelink
To: pck-armamenti@...
Come segnalato in home page dalla testimonianza di Zoran, gli
USA stanno compiendo parecchie operazioni militari in
concomitanza con il voto in Yugoslavia.
In Kosovo sono arrivati altri 4 battaglioni di truppe alleate portando
la K-For a 45.000 effettivi.
Nella confinante Romania forze della Nato insieme a rumeni,
svizzeri e bulgari simulano un "intervento teso a riportare la pace in
un paese sconvolto dalla guerra civile".
In Slovacchia e Repubblica Ceca si svolgono le manovre "Blue Line
2000" con piloti e jet statunitensi.
Le operazioni piu' significative pero' riguardano l'esercitazione
congiunta tra truppe USA e croate, sia di terra che di mare, che si
svolgera' dal 25 al 29 settembre, coinvolgendo 600 soldati
americani e 9.000 croati nelle citta' di Spalato e Sebenik.
Sono accompagnati da due unita' di trasporto per operazioni
anfibie, la USS Austin e la USS Saipan, che nei giorni scorsi era
nel porto di Trieste (prima ancora a La Spezia).
Inoltre la portaerei Washington, a propulsione nucleare, e' stata
trasferita all'ultimo momento dal Golfo Persico all'Adriatico, dove e'
giunta in questi giorni.
Il dipartimento della difesa statunitense ha smentito ogni legame
tra queste manovre e le concomitanti elezioni yugoslave...
ciao
francesco
Fonti:
Reuters:
http://live.altavista.com/scripts/editorial.dll?ei=2205001&ern=y
Analisidifesa:
http://www.analisidifesa.it/numero7/natobelg.htm
francesco iannuzzelli francesco@...
associazione peacelink - sez. disarmo
http://www.peacelink.it
===
DUE MESSAGGI DA MICHEL COLLON, PRESENTE IN JUGOSLAVIA
Message urgent de Michel Collon de Belgrade
L?opposition va provoquer des incidents Dimanche soir. Ils diront qu?ils
ont gagné les élections à 9 heures, les bureaux
fermant à 8 heures. Mais les résultats officiels n?étant connus qu?à
minuit. Ils diront que les sondages étaient à leur
faveur et que si Milosevic gagne ça ne peut être qu?une fraude. Ils
cherecheront des bagares avec la police et avoir de
mauvaises images. Peut-être aussi des incidents à Montenegro.
Pourtant les sondages ne sont pas fiables, reconnaît même un responsable
des observateurs dits indépendants, organisés
par l?opposition et les USA, qui reconnaît qu?on ne peut rien prédire.
La tactique de déstabilisation est bien coordonnée, les prix augmentent
chacun de ces derniers jours, on (qui?) organise des
pénuries, huile et sucre sont retirés, les gens se ruent pour stocker.
Les prix augmentent, un dinar de plus chaque jour pour
un mark. L?atmosphère devient engoissante.
La différence entre les meetings électoraux frappe. A celui de Milosevic
: « En tant que colonie, nous ne serions jamais
libres des sanctions car le statut de colonie c?est la pire forme de
sanctions ». Les gens sont fiers de ce qu?ils ont fait :
resister. Milosevic a beaucoup reconstruit. Mais bien sûr, il y a la
lassitude des sanctions et les illusions de la jeunesse qui
n?a pas vecu le fascisme. Il y a un fosse entre générations, d?autant
que l?Ouest envahit la jeunesse avec sa pub et son
modèle de consommation.
Et au meetings de Kostunica, les gens sont tristes, ils sont vite partis
apres le discours, il ne restent même pas pour le
concert. C?est normal, il se prétend un homme de principes mais il est
en train de vendre la souveraineté du pays.
L?opposition, trouvera-t-elle assez de gens pour le soutenir dans ces
incidents ? On verra?
Je ne sais pas comment ca va tourner, en tout cas ça valait la peine de
venir ici. Il faut se préparer au pire et mobiliser les
gens
> Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 17:24:19 +0200
> From: Marko Atanasievski
> To: pdevos@...
> Subject: Message de Michel Collon de Belgrade
>
> Nous sommes ici plus de 200 observateurs venus de 53 pays (Russie,
> Argentine, Chili, Jordanie, Chine, Allemagne, etc) pour contr^oler la
> legalite des elections en Yougoslavie.
> Au parlement, nous avons rencontre la commission de supervision des
> elections qui nous a explique les regles. En fait, elles ressemblent
> tout a fait a ce quon voit dans les pays occidentaux: vote secret,
> bulletins controles, dans tous les bureaux de vote, commissions de
> controle ouvertes a tous les partis.
> En fait, les methodes electorales sont celles pronees par l'OSCE,
> Organisation pour la Cooperation et la Securite en Europe, qui avait
> d'ailleurs declare parfaitement correctes les elections yougoslaves
> de 1996.
> On se demande alors pourquoi la presse occidentale repete inlassablement
> que les elections seront truquees pour permettre a Milosevic de gagner.
> Parce qu'elle pense que l'opposition va perdre? Parce que l'Otan
> cherche un pretexte pour intervenir a nouveau?
> Nous avons essaye de repondre a cette question, ce samedi matin, en
> echangeant nos observations entre observateurs d'une vingtaine de
> pays. D'abord, nous avons constate qu'a l'etranger, on racontait des
> choses assez incroyables. En Hongrie, la presse pretend que les
> observateurs etrangers viennent seulement de quatre pays (Russie,
> Libye, Irak et Hongrie), qu'ils ne peuvent rencontrer l'opposition et
> que celle ci ne pourra etre dans les bureaux de vote pour controler
> les operations. Trois mensonges grossiers, nous avons pu le
> constater. Au Canada, les medias ont pretendu que tous les
> journalistes etrangers avaient ete expulses. Archi-faux: il reste ici
> des dizaines de correspondants internationaux meme si cest vrai,
> quelques journalistes ont ete expulses.
> Cest peut etre regrettable dans certains cas, mais il faut aussi
> comprendre: les Yougoslaves ont subi une guerre, des milliers de gens
> ont perdu la vie, leurs maisons, leurs biens, l'Otan a foutu des
> dechets nucleaires un peu partout et ca provoquer des millers de
> cancers dans quelques annes, et toute cette guerre a ete prepare par
> des mediamensonges occidentaux. Aujourdhui, ils sont a nouveau
> nerveux car les Etats Unis manifestement font monter la tension...
> Il y a dix jours, un journal de l'opposition yougoslave a revele que
> Madeleine Albright, ministre US des Affaires etrangeres, avait reclame
> qu'on bombarde a nouveau la Yougoslavie. Proposition non acceptee
> pour l'instant par les autres responsables americains, mais demain
> qu'arrivera-t-il? Avant les guerres precedentes contre la
> Yougoslavie, on avait constate aussi une campagne psychologique
> preparatoire: demonisation de l'adversaire, creation d'un etat de
> tension en lui attribuant des projets agressifs (ici on pretend que
> Milosevic va attaquer le Montenegro, ce qui ne tient pas debout),
> etcetera... Dans cette campagne psychologique, les sondages doivent
> etre consideres comme une arme de propagande parmi d'autres. Selon
> beaucoup de gens a qui j'ai parle, la lutte sera serree. Voteront
> Milosevic ceux qui, en depit de critiques qu'ils lui font, mettent
> pardessus tout la defense de l'independance. Voteront pour
> l'opposition ceux qui, lasses par des annes depreuves et de
> privations, s'efforcent de croire Kostunica et les promesses des
> EtatsUnis. Mais les medias occidentaux avancent que Kostunica serait
> sur de gagner. Ca ne repose pas sur des enquetes serieuses, en fait
> il n'existe pas de sondage scientifiquement fiable. Pourquoi alors ce
> pronostic trompeur? Pour decourager les electeurs yougoslave et pour
> preparer l'opinion occidentale a cette idee: si Milosevic gagne, ce
> ne pourra etre qu'en fraudant, donc nous devrons intervenir de
> nouveau contre la Yougoslavie (par une nouvelle guerre ou de nouveaux
> bombardements? Esperons que non, et faisons tout pour qu'il n'en soit
> pas ainsi). Les Etats Unis ont fourni a l'opposition une serie de
> consultants specialistes de la communication (le genre de ceux qui
> ont assiste Jamie Shea durant la guerre); les sondages trompeurs
> font partie de leur panoplie d'armes psychologiques. Les Etats-Unis
> font aujourd'hui plein de promesses, garantissant aux Yougoslaves
> qu'ils vivront prosperes s'ils votent bien. D'abord, il faut
> remarquer que ces promesses ils les ont deja faites aux Russes, aux
> Bulgares et aux Albanais avec les resultats qu'on sait....
> En Occident, on n'en parle guere, mais ici, on est tres choques par
> les 70 millions de dollars que les Usa reconnaissent verser aux
> partis, medias dits independants et a d'autres organisations. Acheter
> la Yougoslavie? Que diraient les medias occidentaux si Belgrade ou
> Pekin versait 5 milliards de FB (somme equivalente si on compare les
> niveaux de vie) pour aider un parti d'extreme gauche en France parce
> qu'elle ne respecte pas les droits des Corses ou des Basques? Ou en
> Belgique parce qu'elle enferme les refugies dans des prisons?
>
> Redevenons serieux: les Etats-Unis sont en train de preparer
> psychologiquement l'opinion internationale a la possibilite dune
> nouvelle agression (n'oublions pas qu'ils bobardemt impunement l'Irak
> depuis neuf ans!). Ils osent presenter comme une lecon de
> <democratie> le chantage <Votez pour nous ou crevez de faim a moins
> qu'on vous bombarde a nouveau!>
>
> Au moment ou ils preparent un Plan Colombie, veritable declaration de
> guerre contre toute l'Amerique latime et ses nouvelles luttes au
> Venezuela, em Argentine et ailleurs, au moment ou ils soutiennent
> ferocement Israel responsable d'une purification ethnique
> systematique depuis plus de cinquante ans, au moment ou le monde
> entier se mobilise tres positivement contre les injustices de la
> globalisation imposee par les multinationales, il est tres important
> d'arreter cette nouvelle menace d'agression.
>
> Demain, les 200 observateurs se disperseront dans tout le pays ou ils
> pourront tout controler dans les bureaux de vote et les operations de
> comptage. Nous avons convenu d'echanger nos impressions dimache soir
> et lundi matin tres tot. Les resultats devraient etre connus dans la
> nuit. Il me parait tres important de contrer IMMEDIATEMENT la
> desinformation que certains milieux essaient d'organiser au sujet de
> ces elections. Je suggere de contacter d'avance des journalistes
> honnetes pour leur expliquer qu'une autre information est disponible.
> On peut me joindre a l'hotel Intercontinental, chambre 313.
>
> Michel Collon
> samedi 23 septembre, Belgrade
===
IMPORTANTI INFORMAZIONI DALLA BULGARIA
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/doncheva/electionday.htm
>Election Day Meddling
>A letter from Blagovesta Doncheva in Sofia, Bulgaria
>(9-24-2000)
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/doncheva/bulgmed.htm
>Bulgaria Meddles in Yugoslav Vote
>
>'Monitor,' [Bulgaria] September 22, p. 1-2-3
>
>Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marin Raikov, is behind an unprecedented
>plan for parallel Yugoslav vote counting from Sofia. Kostov threatens
>Milosevic with "categorical/decisive actions" if he 'manipulates' the vote on
>Sunday...
===
SULLE INTERFERENZE EUROPEE E STATUNITENSI
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Sept. 28, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
YUGOSLAVIA ELECTIONS: U.S., W. EUROPE USE CARROT &
STICK
By John Catalinotto
With the big vote set for Sept. 24, the European Union and
the U.S. government have stepped up their already blatant
intervention in Yugoslavia's national election. Both the
Yugoslav government and anti-war forces in NATO countries
have reacted with anti-NATO actions.
The EU offered the carrot. In a "message to the Serbian
people" from a Sept. 18 monthly foreign ministers' meeting
in Brussels, the EU said it would lift sanctions if
Yugoslavs voted out President Slobodan Milosevic in the
presidential election.
"The elections ... will give the Serbian people the
opportunity to repudiate clearly and peacefully the policy
of Milosevic." Should they do so, "we will lift the
sanctions against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, we
will support the necessary economic aid for its
reconstruction, and we will support the reintegration of the
FRY into the international community," is how the EU
presented its bribe.
Washington continued to wave the big stick. The U.S. Navy
plans maneuvers in the Adriatic Sea off the Yugoslav coast
on election weekend. Both U.S. and NATO leaders have
threatened intervention should there be conflict in
Montenegro, the smaller republic, which along with Serbia
makes up what remains of Yugoslavia.
If Yugoslavia is treated like the other former socialist
countries of the Balkans, "reintegration" means that a
handful of Yugoslavs will grow rich while the bulk of the
population is driven deeper into poverty and the people as a
whole are forced to submit to Western imperialism.
An article in the Sept. 19 New York Times makes it clear
that the only job opportunities for young Bulgarian women is
to work as prostitutes in the Czech Republic near the German
border.
The only serious candidates for president of Yugoslavia are
Milosevic and Vojislav Kostunica, who is backed by 18 small
opposition parties, some of them openly pro-NATO and all pro-
Western. Kostunica is a long-time anti-communist with
credentials as a Serbian nationalist.
Kostunica is also the only opposition figure who is not
tarnished by open association with NATO forces. He can
possibly attract voters who are weary of the assault on
Yugoslavia and who hope that removing Milosevic will end the
hostility.
The U.S. and West European imperialists, however, want
Kostunica to defeat Milosevic in order to weaken the best-
organized anti-NATO structures inside Yugoslavia. These
structures include Milosevic's Socialist Party and the party
called the Yugoslav United Left, plus the security forces
and the army.
Weakening this apparatus would leave the road open for
imperialist penetration and for turning all of Yugoslavia
back into a colony of the West, whether or not that is what
Kostunica plans.
The Western media claim Kostunica is leading in election
polls. Pro-Milosevic sources point out that the polls were
taken by pro-NATO organizations that want to try to claim
Milosevic "stole" the election should he win.
BELGRADE PUTS NATO LEADERS ON TRIAL
Meanwhile, the Milosevic forces have run their election
campaign against NATO threats, pointing to the opposition as
NATO puppets.
In addition, the Yugoslav government has gone on the
political offensive against NATO. In Belgrade Sept. 18 the
government opened a trial of NATO leaders for war crimes
committed during the 1999 aggression and 78-day bombing
assault.
Yugoslavia charged Presidents Bill Clinton of the United
States and Jacques Chirac of France, British Prime Minister
Tony Blair, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, U.S.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and nine other NATO
and Western government leaders with war crimes. Their names
were attached to 14 empty chairs in the front of a Belgrade
courtroom.
Serb authorities appointed a lawyer for each of the accused.
Yugoslav officials said it would take four days to present
the evidence.
"They are charged with inciting an aggressive war...war
crimes against civilian population...use of banned combat
means, attempted murder of the Yugoslav president...the
violation of the country's territorial integrity. ..," the
charge sheet read.
"They fired 600 cruise missiles and made 25,119 [air]
sorties during the 78-day aggression, attacking both
military and civilian targets, killing and wounding many
people, causing mass destruction of property," it added.
The charges were similar in structure to those presented at
the dozens of "People's Tribunals" held in Germany, the
United States, Italy, Austria, Greece, Russia and other
countries in the past 14 months, all of which found the NATO
leaders guilty. The Yugoslavs will be able to present more
detailed, eyewitness descriptions of the crimes.
Exposing NATO's crimes and especially the lies NATO leaders
used to justify their aggression has strengthened solidarity
with Yugoslavia in some of the NATO countries.
In Italy, a traditional annual peace march from Perugia to
Assisi will take place Sept. 24 with a more clearly anti-
NATO position than it has had in recent years. Last year
former Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema led the march--but he
also had led the war against Yugoslavia. This year march
organizers invited forces carrying a banner "Against NATO,
against the embargoes" to play a big role in the march and
promised that none of the war criminals from the Italian
regime would be present.
In Germany, a group of anti-war intellectuals have issued a
call from Berlin: "No new NATO-war on the Balkans!" The call
warns of U.S.-NATO military preparations for a possible new
assault on Yugoslavia, and asks for actions against this new
aggression. There are also vigils planned in Bonn on Sept.
22 and 29.
- END -
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YUGOSLAVIA LODGES PROTEST WITH E.U. COUNCIL
BRUSSELS, September 23 (Tanjug) Yugoslavia has filed a protest
with the European Union in Brussels over a socalled "message" that E.U.
foreign ministers have recently sent Yugoslavs in connection with
Sunday's
presidential and parliamentary elections in Yugoslavia.
Yugoslav Charge d'Affaires Dragan Zupanjevac delivered the
protest
note to E.U. Ministerial Council Director General Brian Crowe.
The note says, among others, that the E.U. ministers' "message"
constitutes gross and unacceptable interference in the internal affairs
of
a sovereign country, and is without a precedent in democratic practice.
Yugoslavia believes it is high time the European Union
abandoned
its unprincipled and antiEuropean policy, its antiYugoslav policy of
sanctions and isolation, which is achieving nothing other than
continuing
to destabilise southeast Europe, the protest note says.
===
F.R. YUGOSLAVIA ELECTIONS
YUGOSLAVIA TO ELECT PRESIDENT AND MP'S ON SUNDAY
BELGRADE, September 23 (Tanjug) Yugoslavia will be electing a
president and federal parliament deputies, while its republic of Serbia
will be voting also for local administration officials on Sunday,
September
24.
According to the Central Electoral Commission, Yugoslavia has
an
electorate of 7,861,327; of this number, 7,417,197 are in Serbia, and
444,130 in the other Yugoslav federal unit, Montenegro.
This will be the first time for the people to be electing a
president directly, and they will have the choice of five candidates:
Incumbent Slobodan Milosevic, nominated by a leftist coalition
made up of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), the Yugoslav Left (JUL),
and the Socialist People's Party (SNP) of Montenegro;
Vojislav Kostunica, nominated by 18 opposition parties rallied
into the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) bloc;
Tomislav Nikolic of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS);
Vojislav Mihailovic of the Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO);
Miroljub Vidojkovic of the Affirmative Party.
Should none of the candidates secure an outright majority of
the
votes cast in the first round, the two leading candidates will fight it
out
between them in a runoff two weeks later.
Serbs and Montenegrins will be voting in 27 electoral districts
to
elect 138 deputies to the Chamber of Citizens (lower house) of the
Yugoslav
federal parliament, from among candidates nominated by 30 parties on 30
tickets.
Of this number, Serbia will be giving 108 deputies to the
Chamber,
and Montenegro, 30.
Yugoslav citizens displaced from Serbia's U.N.administered
Kosovo
and Metohija province will be voting in Serbia's southern Prokuplje and
Vranje municipalities.
Deputies to the Chamber of Republics (Upper house) will be
elected
by direct ballot another first with Serbia and Montenegro, as two
equal
constituencies, giving 20 deputies each.
Parallel with the federal elections, polls will be held for
electing 120 deputies to the Serbian Vojvodina province's assembly
(Parliament), and local administrations in Serbia.
Also, 110 deputies to the Belgrade City Council will be elected
from among 548 candidates nominated by 21 parties.
Belgrade has an electorate of 1,351,365.
Apart from local monitors, the elections will be monitored by
more
than 200 foreign observers from 52 countries, who have already arrived
in
Yugoslavia.
YUGOSLAVIA TAKES FURTHER STEPS TO PREVENT ELECTION FRAUD
BELGRADE, September 23 (Tanjug) The Yugoslav Central Electoral
Commission on Saturday reviewed reports on a plot to illegally augment
the
number of ballots at polling stations and issued further instructions to
prevent fraud on the eve of Sunday's elections.
Yugoslavia votes for president and deputies to both chambers of
the federal parliament, while its republic of Serbia elects local
administrators on Sunday, September 24.
The Commission said in a statement it has come in possession of
information that, as part of subversive activities against Yugoslavia, a
plan has been hatched to sabotage and compromise the presidential
election.
"Foreign factors have prepared a number of ballots for the
presidential election, which their stooges among the Yugoslav people
should
drop in the ballot boxes folded inside the regular ballot papers...
"This has been done because, under election rules, in case
there
is a single ballot in a box more than there were voters at that
particular
polling station, the polling must be declared invalid", the Commission
said.
In this way, a couple of hundred unscrupulous individuals could
invalidate the will of hundreds of thousands, it added.
The Commission has therefore decreed that the invigilators at
the
polling stations must check that the ballot paper of each voter in the
presidential election is a single paper, with nothing folded in it.
"The check will be made by each voter marking the ballot,
folding
it and then handing it over to an invigilator to see that it is a single
paper, while not violating the secrecy of the voting, and then dropping
it
in the box", the statement said.
The Commission appealed to the people to respect the reasons
that
have made this kind of control necessary.
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
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