Jugoinfo
Lettera inviata al "Manifesto" il 19/6/2000:
Osservo con molte perplessita' lo schierarsi di associazioni di
volontariato per un impegno, di per se nobile, in favore dello sviluppo
democratico in Jugoslavia, chiedendomi quanto tale impegno non abbia a
che fare, in realta', con l'ossimoro "Guerra Umanitaria". Quanto, cioe',
la guerra non sia frutto di un albero nato dal seme dell'ingerenza
umanitaria, fatta apparentemente in buona fede e per solidarieta' ma, in
realta', pericolosa perche' va ad innescare un processo incontrollabile
di effetti e reazioni a catena. Se la guerra e' stato il suo frutto
velenoso, non bastera' potarlo, quell'albero!
Vedere poi come, in modo parallelo ed ufficiale, l'Italia sposi il
progetto UNHOPS, organismo delle Nazioni Unite per aiuti allo sviluppo
delle citta' jugoslave rette dall'opposizione, cioe' quasi tutte (altro
"ossimoro", perche' e' difficile capire come in un paese governato da un
novello "Hitler" possano esistere giunte di opposizione...), fa un po'
pensare.
Perche' quando ci si muove in quel senso, ci sono miliardi da gestire e
da spendere ma dietro suggerimento di chi, in realta', la guerra l'ha
fatta e ha causato il dramma che si tenta di arginare. E allora, dove
sta la contro-informazione, la denuncia, la ferma opposizione alla
guerra e alle politiche espansioniste se poi, di contro, si sta al gioco
della perdizione-distruzione con relativa redenzione-ricostruzione? E
perche', allora, non si fa la stessa cosa in Iraq? Forse, in Iraq, non
ci sono citta' rette dall'opposizione? Forse, laggiu', il novello Hitler
e' un po' piu' Hitler dell'altro? E in Kosovo, terra UCK, e' stato
raggiunto un livello accettabile di democrazia e di convivenza
multietnica? Li' televisioni e radio e giornali sono esempi di
obbiettivita'?
Credo che un'associazione che lavori nel campo della solidarieta'
internazionale debba chiedersi se il proprio impegno non serva, qualche
volta, a celebrare l'opportunismo di chi andrebbe, in realta',
processato per crimini contro l'umanita'. Le scelte sono anche politiche
e sono fondamentali.
Fra i partecipanti UNHOPS c'e' il governo italiano e con le associazioni
tratta un certo Umberto Ranieri, ex sottosegretario agli Esteri durante
la guerra NATO e suo energico sostenitore. Vagliera' i progetti da
finanziare... Qualcuno se lo ricorda ancora, o e' meglio per tutti
dimenticare?
Alessandro Di Meo, Roma
-
Lettera inviata al "Manifesto" il 23/7/2000:
FARE DEL BENE A CHI?
Lo spunto di questa lettera è l'intervento di Marcello Cini pubblicato
in
ultima sul manifesto di giovedì 20 luglio dal titolo "Perché no?
Facciamoci
del bene", in cui l'eminente teorico della scienza discetta sulla
opportunità che un gruppo di suoi amici tornino a rappresentare
l'alleanza
di centrosinistra nella malaugurata previsione di una vittoria
elettorale
della destra.
Sarebbe oltremodo opportuno che qualcuno (magari un giornalista
vero)
voglia oggi ricordare ai lettori che tra i poveri "orfani dell'alleanza
di
centro sinistra" figurano nomi che hanno sostenuto a pieno titolo, come
partecipanti al governo D'Alema, ovvero come silenti spettatori
dell'evento, l'aggressione bellica alla Jugoslavia dello scorso anno,
che
nelle colonne di questo giornale è stata compiutamente descritta e
condannata. Perciò non sto qui a ricordare le conseguenze ecologiche,
sanitarie ed economiche di questa guerra, visto che molti partecipanti
al
"salotto" si considerano ecologisti formati. E' tuttavia spiacevole e
deludente che tali "protagonisti" cerchino ancora credibilità nella
confusione della disinformazione o nel segreto dell'urna, ma è
soprattutto
offensivo per chi è stato e sarà ancora colpito da questa e da altre
guerre, senza neppure il barlume di un riscatto di umana giustizia.
Un consiglio, invece, per molti di coloro che sono passati al
centro o che
non riescono più a rifarsi una verginità politica a sinistra: sarebbe
più
opportuno che, perduti dietro ai compromessi, se non riescono più a fare
il
lavoro per cui si sono un dì qualificati, si dirigessero direttamente
all'indirizzo di Berlusconi, come altri hanno già fatto in un recente
passato; oggi, infatti, se ci sono cose di cui ha bisogno la sinistra,
queste sono ancora la chiarezza e completezza dell'informazione e la
reale
solidarietà, che ci permettono di collaborare tra "diversi"; il resto
predicato da Cini lo si può considerare "un furbetto giochetto di
Ermete"...
Mauro Cristaldi, Roma
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
Osservo con molte perplessita' lo schierarsi di associazioni di
volontariato per un impegno, di per se nobile, in favore dello sviluppo
democratico in Jugoslavia, chiedendomi quanto tale impegno non abbia a
che fare, in realta', con l'ossimoro "Guerra Umanitaria". Quanto, cioe',
la guerra non sia frutto di un albero nato dal seme dell'ingerenza
umanitaria, fatta apparentemente in buona fede e per solidarieta' ma, in
realta', pericolosa perche' va ad innescare un processo incontrollabile
di effetti e reazioni a catena. Se la guerra e' stato il suo frutto
velenoso, non bastera' potarlo, quell'albero!
Vedere poi come, in modo parallelo ed ufficiale, l'Italia sposi il
progetto UNHOPS, organismo delle Nazioni Unite per aiuti allo sviluppo
delle citta' jugoslave rette dall'opposizione, cioe' quasi tutte (altro
"ossimoro", perche' e' difficile capire come in un paese governato da un
novello "Hitler" possano esistere giunte di opposizione...), fa un po'
pensare.
Perche' quando ci si muove in quel senso, ci sono miliardi da gestire e
da spendere ma dietro suggerimento di chi, in realta', la guerra l'ha
fatta e ha causato il dramma che si tenta di arginare. E allora, dove
sta la contro-informazione, la denuncia, la ferma opposizione alla
guerra e alle politiche espansioniste se poi, di contro, si sta al gioco
della perdizione-distruzione con relativa redenzione-ricostruzione? E
perche', allora, non si fa la stessa cosa in Iraq? Forse, in Iraq, non
ci sono citta' rette dall'opposizione? Forse, laggiu', il novello Hitler
e' un po' piu' Hitler dell'altro? E in Kosovo, terra UCK, e' stato
raggiunto un livello accettabile di democrazia e di convivenza
multietnica? Li' televisioni e radio e giornali sono esempi di
obbiettivita'?
Credo che un'associazione che lavori nel campo della solidarieta'
internazionale debba chiedersi se il proprio impegno non serva, qualche
volta, a celebrare l'opportunismo di chi andrebbe, in realta',
processato per crimini contro l'umanita'. Le scelte sono anche politiche
e sono fondamentali.
Fra i partecipanti UNHOPS c'e' il governo italiano e con le associazioni
tratta un certo Umberto Ranieri, ex sottosegretario agli Esteri durante
la guerra NATO e suo energico sostenitore. Vagliera' i progetti da
finanziare... Qualcuno se lo ricorda ancora, o e' meglio per tutti
dimenticare?
Alessandro Di Meo, Roma
-
Lettera inviata al "Manifesto" il 23/7/2000:
FARE DEL BENE A CHI?
Lo spunto di questa lettera è l'intervento di Marcello Cini pubblicato
in
ultima sul manifesto di giovedì 20 luglio dal titolo "Perché no?
Facciamoci
del bene", in cui l'eminente teorico della scienza discetta sulla
opportunità che un gruppo di suoi amici tornino a rappresentare
l'alleanza
di centrosinistra nella malaugurata previsione di una vittoria
elettorale
della destra.
Sarebbe oltremodo opportuno che qualcuno (magari un giornalista
vero)
voglia oggi ricordare ai lettori che tra i poveri "orfani dell'alleanza
di
centro sinistra" figurano nomi che hanno sostenuto a pieno titolo, come
partecipanti al governo D'Alema, ovvero come silenti spettatori
dell'evento, l'aggressione bellica alla Jugoslavia dello scorso anno,
che
nelle colonne di questo giornale è stata compiutamente descritta e
condannata. Perciò non sto qui a ricordare le conseguenze ecologiche,
sanitarie ed economiche di questa guerra, visto che molti partecipanti
al
"salotto" si considerano ecologisti formati. E' tuttavia spiacevole e
deludente che tali "protagonisti" cerchino ancora credibilità nella
confusione della disinformazione o nel segreto dell'urna, ma è
soprattutto
offensivo per chi è stato e sarà ancora colpito da questa e da altre
guerre, senza neppure il barlume di un riscatto di umana giustizia.
Un consiglio, invece, per molti di coloro che sono passati al
centro o che
non riescono più a rifarsi una verginità politica a sinistra: sarebbe
più
opportuno che, perduti dietro ai compromessi, se non riescono più a fare
il
lavoro per cui si sono un dì qualificati, si dirigessero direttamente
all'indirizzo di Berlusconi, come altri hanno già fatto in un recente
passato; oggi, infatti, se ci sono cose di cui ha bisogno la sinistra,
queste sono ancora la chiarezza e completezza dell'informazione e la
reale
solidarietà, che ci permettono di collaborare tra "diversi"; il resto
predicato da Cini lo si può considerare "un furbetto giochetto di
Ermete"...
Mauro Cristaldi, Roma
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
IN THE INFORMATION WAR, A VICTORY FOR PEACE
Reflections on the one year anniversary of the US/NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia
Text of a speech given to Dayton Peace Action, Dayton, Ohio, 3/21/00
By Geoff Berne
It's a privilege to have been asked by Dayton Peace Action to speak
regarding this past year of war in Yugoslavia.
An organization like yours that's dedicated to peace is a rare one in
the landscape of today's geopolitics in which stronger countries like
ours are said to have "national interests" that justify going to war. A
person who is for peace signals that he most likely does not have a
multinational investment portfolio and probably doesn't care whether the
bulk of Americans who invest in foreign enterprises and ventures prosper
or not. If you reject the notion that nations such as ours have the
right to send troops to protect the investment of capital in a foreign
country like Kuwait or Yugoslavia, you'll be looked on as a clueless
individual who somehow hasn't gotten the message that investment in the
economies of foreign countries is the life's blood of our American
system, a thing that Americans who own stocks are ready to die for, or
kill for, even if you are not. May you, notwithstanding, continue to
carry the peace banner.
I have spent the past year being one of a chorus of people that has
raised an outcry about the Balkan war on the internet, and has refused
to let the matter die as the media and our national leadership try to
move on to other things. What anybody who has followed the war on the
web has quickly realized is that it has caused a crisis of consistency
for people of every political inclination: from so-called Democratic
Socialists (many of whom vigorously supported the bombing of a socialist
country) to conservative libertarians (who supposedly believe in a free
market economy but defended Yugoslavia - a country bombed for its
refusal to adopt a free market economy).
Somehow through the confusion of seeing right and left trade their
traditional positions on the justness of war an antiwar computer
consensus emerged that demanded to be heard and became a factor that had
to be reckoned with. Within mere months, the war opposition that had
taken root among the public bubbled to the surface in the House of
Representatives last May in a tie vote registering no-confidence in the
administration's war policy, 213-213, a vote followed just a few weeks
later by an abrupt halt in the bombing. Can one recall a more dramatic
triumph of democracy than in this affirmation of the goal of peace by
the representatives of the people?
The Pentagon fought the information war in the Balkans using the old
media: newspapers and TV. They failed to stir the traditional pro-war,
patriotic fervor, however, because, increasingly, public opinion is
being shaped today not by TV but by computer.
As compared with their support for action against the Ayatollah Khomeini
in Iran and against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the public's reaction to
this war was to sit on its hands and turn away from the kiddie cartoon
version of a war in Yugoslavia that the video media crafted with the
help of military and CIA psychological operations specialists who
literally occupied CNN newsrooms and production facilities. Even in
spite of all that effort, like a big budget Hollywood movie that nobody
went to see, "Operation Allied Force" was a disaster at the box office.
Does anybody even remember that corny name?
As we approach the one year anniversary of the start of NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia three days from now, let's take satisfaction that the war has
been such an embarrassing subject that not a single presidential
candidate from the two major parties has so much as mentioned it! Given
the fact that the war was undeclared and indeed that the word "war" was
not even used to describe an operation that involved 40,000 Western
bombing sorties, the uprooting of a million people, ten thousand
civilian deaths, and the destruction of 1,500 towns and 40 per cent of
the buildings in Kosovo alone by the NATO bombing - to the point that
1.2 billion dollars would now be needed to rebuild housing in Kosovo
alone - given the fact that even with all that bloodshed and destruction
NATO was able to destroy only 13 Yugoslavian tanks, and is it any wonder
"Kosovo" is a war regarding which no major political candidate has dared
speak its name?
Odds are, however, that this issue will not stay quiet very much longer
because, for one thing, the war is still going on and in fact heating up
with every passing day, and furthermore those who originally set it in
motion had grandiose goals that are still far from being achieved, goals
that can only be achieved by a confrontation with Yugoslavia's
unyielding regime.
As far as the war still going on is concerned, indications are that
another call by the United States for a resumption of bombing and
perhaps ground operations will be made in the very near future. A
blockade of the Republic of Montenegro set up early this month by the
Milosevic government seems to set the stage for yet another U.S./NATO
rescue mission. This time it would be on behalf of the government of
Montenegro President Milo Djukanovic, the king of European cigarette
smuggling, who is expected to follow in the footsteps of Slovenia,
Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and (soon to be added to this
list, Kosovo), and stage a secession from the Yugoslav federation.
Also indicative that the war is recharging is the renewal of Albanian
aggressive acts, not only against Serb civilians but this time even
against NATO/UN peacekeeping personnel. Persecution, bombings, and
killings of Serbs by revenge-minded Albanians have taken place under the
nose of and with the apparent protection of the greatly overmatched UN
international peacekeepers. In a sign of the underwhelming international
support that there is for the Balkan mission, the UN countries who
supposedly pledged to provide a total of 5,000 troops to police the
streets of Kosovo instead only provided 2500. In the past few weeks,
everyone in a position of authority in relation to Kosovo, from UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan on down, has proclaimed the area to be out
of control. Either a mono-racial Albanian state entirely "cleansed" of
Serbs will emerge in Kosovo, a republic that NATO at war's end had
agreed would remain as a territorial part of the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, or Kosovo will be partitioned as in Bosnia and Cold War
Berlin.
Incredible as it may seem, NATO had gone to war without first having in
place a game plan for postwar occupation of a country that it invaded
and occupied. Now that it has total authority, it's making up a new
script each day as it goes along. Ten years is the minimum forecast I
have read for how long this travesty of an occupation will last, and
some have said fifty. Its mission compromised to the core, its authority
mocked by their having served as protectors to the gangland violence of
its Kosovo Albanian dependents, the UN occupation and security force has
reduced retiring NATO commander Clark to putting out desperate calls for
more troops - and caused NATO's own field officers and monitors to warn
that troops may now be needed to quell these same Albanians that we
embraced and set up as a fighting force in the first place.
On February 13th, in the city of Mitrovica where 50,000 of the remaining
100,000 Serbs who have not yet been driven out of Kosovo still live, UN
personnel were overmatched by sniper fire and crowds throwing rocks and
grenades in a march on the city that's known for its prized Trepca
mineral mines. Wresting control of the mines and their 17 billion tons
of coal reserves, plus lead, zinc, cadmium, silver, and gold treasures
from the government in Belgrade has been seen as a goal not just of the
Albanian insurgents of Kosovo but also of the international industrial
and investment interests who stand poised to reap major benefits from
NATO dominion over the area.
The mines have been called "the most valuable piece of real estate in
the Balkans." Many of Kosovo's pro-secession Albanians who had worked in
the mines were weeded out and replaced with Poles, Czechs, and Serbs by
the Milosevic administration in the 1980's after having committed a
spate of strikes, sabotage incidents, and violence against
fellow-Albanian miners who remained loyal to the government in Belgrade.
The guns of insurgents who fought for the KLA and for secession of
Kosovo from Yugoslavia are still targeted on these fellow -Albanians
"traitors" who remain pro-Belgrade and whom they would like to oust from
the mines. The 70,000 Albanians who rallied in Mitrovica have plainly
lost patience with the UN occupation which they had expected would
re-establish employment in the mines for Albanians who are pro-KLA.
Obviously the mines are not just a flashpoint, they are the flashpoint
for any future hostilities in Kosovo.
The Trepca mines first attracted notice in the early days of the war
when NATO spokesmen alleged that they held one thousand bodies of
Albanian victims of Serb ethnic murders. The Mirror of London wrote
that the name Trepca would "live alongside those of Belsen, Auschwitz
and Treblinka, etched in the memories of those whose loved ones met a
bestial end in true Nazi Final Solution fashion." But in the aftermath
of the bombing ceasefire investigators for the International Criminal
Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found no human remains there at
all!
If the name Trepca continues to live in infamy it will be as a symbol
not of genocide but of the official invention of a fake genocide to
justify war against a nation that had committed no offense other than a
refusal to allow the major Western nations to plunder it.
Along with Trepca all other evidence of Serb genocide has collapsed, the
100,000 ethnic murders of which "Mr." Milosevic was accused by Defense
Secretary Cohen were pure invention as admitted even by hardliner Adem
Demaci of the KLA who put the figure at closer to seven thousand.
However, the ICTY forensic teams who were sent to look for bodies wound
up actually finding remains of only a few hundred persons and even these
bodies were conceded to have been likely insurgent combat troops rather
than innocent civilians. At the very most, the ICTY teams estimated
that the total count of bodies found would be something like 2,000. No
less an authority than KLA "minister" Hashim Thaci has himself now
admitted that the notorious so-called "massacre" at Racak, the incident
that outraged the world and gained world support for NATO action, was
the result of a bald-faced provocation by KLA terrorists who used the
photographed bodies of their own snipers as "proof" of a Serbian ethnic
bloodbath.
While this is not news on the television media, which refuse to report
these revelations, it's big news on the internet where official lies and
disinformation are routinely deflated in a matter of hours after being
proclaimed. Indeed, in spite of NATO's seeming media advantage, the
winners of the information age's first internet war have been the forces
of peace! A determined information-gathering resistance movement on the
internet has grown in influence over this past year to such a point that
it has succeeded in stripping away the humanitarian fig leaf that NATO
wore when the war first started and with it all credibility of the
governments of nineteen of the most powerful countries in the world.
That is a big, big accomplishment.
Hence while a new war, even an expanded war, has perhaps never been so
close, the power of those who seek peace has never seemed greater,
either.
The next time this country goes to war, whether in the Balkans or
against some small, defenseless country elsewhere on the planet, how can
our pretense of humanitarian motive be believed now that internet
researchers have exposed our hidden intentions in Yugoslavia and forced
revisions of the official spin on that war to be made in the historical
record?
The entrance of the U.S. into the Balkans was shocking when it happened
because of our trampling of international war codes, treaties, and rules
of conduct taken for granted for decades, and even centuries. The UN
Security Council - out of business. The Geneva Convention prohibiting
aggression against civilian populations - null and void. The War Powers
Act forbidding foreign military intervention without Congressional
authorization - never heard of it. I even read that we had violated the
Treaty of Westphalia of 1648! The internet revolution broke down the
mystique of foreign affairs expertise, allowing citizens like ourselves
to have technical information such as this. Now we have an opportunity
to sort through the sheer mountain of data, and, if we stay the course,
to find out exactly what goes on inside the Leviathan of the war
machine, and exactly how a nightmarish war such as we have seen in
Yugoslavia is made from drawing board through fait accompli.
It's exactly appropriate that among the most influential sources of
truth about this war have been two websites, the absolutely essential
antiwar.com and one entitled The Emperor's New Clothes - www.tenc.com.
Here are just some of the revelations with which that latter website and
others have succeeded in tearing away the aura of righteous purpose in
which the makers of the NATO war on Yugoslavia have vainly struggled to
clothe themselves.
By the time the bombing was two weeks old it was clear to anybody
following it on the internet that restoring ethnic harmony in Kosovo was
not the reason we were in Yugoslavia. Now a year later a consensus has
grown that what the U.S. had sought for Kosovo is for it to be a
permanent colonial protectorate, a launching pad for America to move
into the former Soviet bloc countries. Prior to the war, America had
military bases in 100 countries around the world but not Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was the very the last country in Europe without an American
base. Now, thanks to the war the largest American base in Europe is in
Kosovo.
Emperor's Clothes has published many entries by writer Diana Johnstone.
She characterizes Yugoslavia as "a testing ground and a metaphor for the
Soviet Union." In other words, American orchestration of the downfall of
Yugoslavia (by abetting the breakaway of its member republics) is only a
dress rehearsal for future usage of the same dismemberment strategy
against Russia. Supporting the idea that America is positioning itself
to revive the Cold War struggle against Russia are several articles on
Emperor's Clothes including a 1996 paper by Sean Gervasi which asserts
that America wants to have the status of a "European power," and to
expand eastward, eventually taking over the running and economic
exploitation of former east bloc countries such as the Ukraine, Georgia,
and Azerbaijan.
As long as four years ago Gervasi was proclaiming that far from being a
tightly knit partnership, the western alliance is falling apart. In his
analysis, fearing that the emergence of the European Union, of which the
U.S. is not a member, would make Germany rather than ourselves the
supreme power in Europe, the U.S. sought war in the Balkans to carve out
a post-Cold War domain for NATO, of which we are a member, and a way to
make NATO be the supreme power in Europe.
Gervasi's theory is as follows: worried that our fellow NATO countries
had only weakly supported American action in the Gulf War (with our
so-called allies relying almost wholly on American manpower and
firepower), the U.S. cooked up a Balkan crisis in order to lift NATO out
of its doldrums and establish American supremacy by dazzling our allies
with American high tech firepower. Implicit in this theory is that
America had acted in the hope that Europe would see that this country
sets the standard for military manufacture and would have to buy
American military goods.
As early as the 1980's American strategists were plotting ways that NATO
intervention against "rogue nations" would give the U.S. and its fellow
members of NATO a new cause. Just as the old empires of Europe
conquered whole continents in the name of a "civilizing mission," NATO
would roam the planet as protectors of human rights and as humanitarian
rescuers.
Another contributor to Emperor's Clothes (and other antiwar websites),
Michael
Chossudowsky, documents the way the U.S. used the American-controlled
International Monetary Fund, with its power of foreclosure as financial
lender, to smash the Yugoslavian economy, render that country helpless
against foreign takeover, and create such outrageous social and economic
conditions that military intervention by outside countries would seem
like the only solution.
Finally, once again from Emperor's Clothes, on March 12th we were
privileged to get the first American posting of investigations by the
major London newspapers and BBC television that show how America's CIA
created the pro-Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army to spread terror against
Serbia and the government in Belgrade. When Belgrade acted to stop the
shootings, burnings, and kidnappings by the KLA Western media portrayed
Belgrade's law & order measures as racial genocide against Albanians.
In such way the impression was created of a humanitarian crisis that
NATO used as cover for a military aggression.
Now one year after the initial bombing of Yugoslavia, America has
installed itself as an occupying power in Kosovo. Like Korea, like
Berlin and the two Germanies during the Cold War, Yugoslavia is now a
divided country with two republics (Bosnia and Kosovo) that are
protectorates run by outside international bodies mainly staffed by
Americans.
Is the United States simply getting carried away with its own
self-righteous sense of a mission to save mankind, as many anti-war
conservatives who hate the idea of governments acting on the basis of
paternalistic compassion, such as Pat Buchanan, charge, or is the U.S.
committing itself to interventionism because of some more practical and
self-interested motive?
We do not read much about it or hear about it in the major media, but
the internet has carried dozens of articles about the economic benefits
that the U.S. stands to reap from its presence in Kosovo: first of all
the U.S. seeks to build an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan in the former
Soviet Central Asia right across Kosovo and Croatia. With its domination
of Kosovo the U.S. would have control over the future main supply of oil
to the European continent.
And in Kosovo as in many other countries before it, America has sided
with factions that reap huge profits from the drug trade thus
implicitly suggesting that our government has a stake in that trade that
has become a vital form of military financing. First Afghanistan, then
the Nicaraguan contras, then Panama, and now it's our latest client,
Albania. 80 percent of Europe's heroin supply comes from Albania, which
has used drug sales to fund KLA expansion into Kosovo and made Kosovo an
indispensable link in the Albanian drug trade. Our armed forces are
being readied for an expedition to stop the drug trade in Colombia. Has
one word been said to suggest that the military in Kosovo might want to
stop the drug trade in Kosovo as well?
It's been hard for anyone who knows the truth about the KLA and drugs to
watch TV personalities such as Geraldo Rivera go to Albania and stand
side by side in solidarity with these anti-Serb rebels whom they
characterize as freedom fighters. Only on the internet do we discover
that these brave patriots are funded almost entirely by profits from
heroin and other major-scale organized crime activity including
prostitution.
Give credit to the internet resistance, then, for exposing truths such
as these about the war in Yugoslavia. In today's information wars,
computer truth forces are the modern day successors of the war
resistance of Yugoslavian partisans and chetniks who stood up to Hitler
during World War II.
In just three days we will mark the one year anniversary of NATO's air
invasion of Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999. It so happens that that date
coincides with another anniversary, the birth of Yugoslavian resistance
to Adolf Hitler on March 26-27, 1941. On that date after Hitler had
struck a deal with Yugoslavia's Prince Regent, Yugoslavia's armed forces
rose up and overthrew his government, as crowds spat on the German
minister's car. Allow me to quote from William L. Shirer's classic
account of the years of the Third Reich:
"The coup in Belgrade threw Adolf Hitler into one of the wildest rages
of his entire life. He took it as a personal affront and in his fury
made sudden decisions which would prove utterly disastrous to the
fortunes of the Third Reich. Yugoslavia (he said) would be crushed with
'unmerciful harshness.' He ordered Goering to 'destroy Belgrade in
attacks by waves' with bombers operating from Hungarian air bases." He
then postponed his invasion of Russia by four weeks thus guaranteeing
that it would end in failure and the snows of the Russian winter.
The bombing of Belgrade by the Luftwaffe began on April 6, 1941, razing
the city to the ground and killing 17,000 civilians. In an eerie
forshadowing of today's tradition of giving each war its own
action-movie title such as "Operation Desert Storm" in Iraq and
"Operation Allied Force" in Kosovo, Hitler's air attack on Yugoslavia
was called "Operation Punishment." On April 13, 1941, Yugoslavia was
overwhelmed by the German blitz, and the army surrendered at Sarajevo.
Under the occupation industrialist Alfried von Krupp and Reichsmarshall
Hermann Goering personally divided up the spoils of Yugoslavia's
precious mines. However the Yugoslavian partisans, consisting primarily
of Serbs, fought on, resisting all foreign domination including, after
the war, that of the Soviet Union.
Of all the countries that were overrun by Hitler's armies, Yugoslavia
set a unique example in fighting back and offering armed resistance.
The heroic resistance to military aggression demonstrated by the Serbs
of Yugoslavia, which started with Serbia's declaration of independence
after World War I and has now withstood three invasions including
NATO's, should not only not be forgotten, but should inspire us today.
Yugoslavia is once again being eyed as an outpost for the west in
Central Europe, a fortified American emplacement in readiness for war
with Russia. The stubborn Serbs of that country have shown that they
will endure any suffering to prevent their land from being used for such
a scenario. We must find the strength to match the Serbs in their
heritage of resistance to war, and it looks as though we will be called
upon to do so if, as appears likely, NATO's war against Yugoslavia
intensifies in the very near future.
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
Reflections on the one year anniversary of the US/NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia
Text of a speech given to Dayton Peace Action, Dayton, Ohio, 3/21/00
By Geoff Berne
It's a privilege to have been asked by Dayton Peace Action to speak
regarding this past year of war in Yugoslavia.
An organization like yours that's dedicated to peace is a rare one in
the landscape of today's geopolitics in which stronger countries like
ours are said to have "national interests" that justify going to war. A
person who is for peace signals that he most likely does not have a
multinational investment portfolio and probably doesn't care whether the
bulk of Americans who invest in foreign enterprises and ventures prosper
or not. If you reject the notion that nations such as ours have the
right to send troops to protect the investment of capital in a foreign
country like Kuwait or Yugoslavia, you'll be looked on as a clueless
individual who somehow hasn't gotten the message that investment in the
economies of foreign countries is the life's blood of our American
system, a thing that Americans who own stocks are ready to die for, or
kill for, even if you are not. May you, notwithstanding, continue to
carry the peace banner.
I have spent the past year being one of a chorus of people that has
raised an outcry about the Balkan war on the internet, and has refused
to let the matter die as the media and our national leadership try to
move on to other things. What anybody who has followed the war on the
web has quickly realized is that it has caused a crisis of consistency
for people of every political inclination: from so-called Democratic
Socialists (many of whom vigorously supported the bombing of a socialist
country) to conservative libertarians (who supposedly believe in a free
market economy but defended Yugoslavia - a country bombed for its
refusal to adopt a free market economy).
Somehow through the confusion of seeing right and left trade their
traditional positions on the justness of war an antiwar computer
consensus emerged that demanded to be heard and became a factor that had
to be reckoned with. Within mere months, the war opposition that had
taken root among the public bubbled to the surface in the House of
Representatives last May in a tie vote registering no-confidence in the
administration's war policy, 213-213, a vote followed just a few weeks
later by an abrupt halt in the bombing. Can one recall a more dramatic
triumph of democracy than in this affirmation of the goal of peace by
the representatives of the people?
The Pentagon fought the information war in the Balkans using the old
media: newspapers and TV. They failed to stir the traditional pro-war,
patriotic fervor, however, because, increasingly, public opinion is
being shaped today not by TV but by computer.
As compared with their support for action against the Ayatollah Khomeini
in Iran and against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the public's reaction to
this war was to sit on its hands and turn away from the kiddie cartoon
version of a war in Yugoslavia that the video media crafted with the
help of military and CIA psychological operations specialists who
literally occupied CNN newsrooms and production facilities. Even in
spite of all that effort, like a big budget Hollywood movie that nobody
went to see, "Operation Allied Force" was a disaster at the box office.
Does anybody even remember that corny name?
As we approach the one year anniversary of the start of NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia three days from now, let's take satisfaction that the war has
been such an embarrassing subject that not a single presidential
candidate from the two major parties has so much as mentioned it! Given
the fact that the war was undeclared and indeed that the word "war" was
not even used to describe an operation that involved 40,000 Western
bombing sorties, the uprooting of a million people, ten thousand
civilian deaths, and the destruction of 1,500 towns and 40 per cent of
the buildings in Kosovo alone by the NATO bombing - to the point that
1.2 billion dollars would now be needed to rebuild housing in Kosovo
alone - given the fact that even with all that bloodshed and destruction
NATO was able to destroy only 13 Yugoslavian tanks, and is it any wonder
"Kosovo" is a war regarding which no major political candidate has dared
speak its name?
Odds are, however, that this issue will not stay quiet very much longer
because, for one thing, the war is still going on and in fact heating up
with every passing day, and furthermore those who originally set it in
motion had grandiose goals that are still far from being achieved, goals
that can only be achieved by a confrontation with Yugoslavia's
unyielding regime.
As far as the war still going on is concerned, indications are that
another call by the United States for a resumption of bombing and
perhaps ground operations will be made in the very near future. A
blockade of the Republic of Montenegro set up early this month by the
Milosevic government seems to set the stage for yet another U.S./NATO
rescue mission. This time it would be on behalf of the government of
Montenegro President Milo Djukanovic, the king of European cigarette
smuggling, who is expected to follow in the footsteps of Slovenia,
Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and (soon to be added to this
list, Kosovo), and stage a secession from the Yugoslav federation.
Also indicative that the war is recharging is the renewal of Albanian
aggressive acts, not only against Serb civilians but this time even
against NATO/UN peacekeeping personnel. Persecution, bombings, and
killings of Serbs by revenge-minded Albanians have taken place under the
nose of and with the apparent protection of the greatly overmatched UN
international peacekeepers. In a sign of the underwhelming international
support that there is for the Balkan mission, the UN countries who
supposedly pledged to provide a total of 5,000 troops to police the
streets of Kosovo instead only provided 2500. In the past few weeks,
everyone in a position of authority in relation to Kosovo, from UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan on down, has proclaimed the area to be out
of control. Either a mono-racial Albanian state entirely "cleansed" of
Serbs will emerge in Kosovo, a republic that NATO at war's end had
agreed would remain as a territorial part of the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, or Kosovo will be partitioned as in Bosnia and Cold War
Berlin.
Incredible as it may seem, NATO had gone to war without first having in
place a game plan for postwar occupation of a country that it invaded
and occupied. Now that it has total authority, it's making up a new
script each day as it goes along. Ten years is the minimum forecast I
have read for how long this travesty of an occupation will last, and
some have said fifty. Its mission compromised to the core, its authority
mocked by their having served as protectors to the gangland violence of
its Kosovo Albanian dependents, the UN occupation and security force has
reduced retiring NATO commander Clark to putting out desperate calls for
more troops - and caused NATO's own field officers and monitors to warn
that troops may now be needed to quell these same Albanians that we
embraced and set up as a fighting force in the first place.
On February 13th, in the city of Mitrovica where 50,000 of the remaining
100,000 Serbs who have not yet been driven out of Kosovo still live, UN
personnel were overmatched by sniper fire and crowds throwing rocks and
grenades in a march on the city that's known for its prized Trepca
mineral mines. Wresting control of the mines and their 17 billion tons
of coal reserves, plus lead, zinc, cadmium, silver, and gold treasures
from the government in Belgrade has been seen as a goal not just of the
Albanian insurgents of Kosovo but also of the international industrial
and investment interests who stand poised to reap major benefits from
NATO dominion over the area.
The mines have been called "the most valuable piece of real estate in
the Balkans." Many of Kosovo's pro-secession Albanians who had worked in
the mines were weeded out and replaced with Poles, Czechs, and Serbs by
the Milosevic administration in the 1980's after having committed a
spate of strikes, sabotage incidents, and violence against
fellow-Albanian miners who remained loyal to the government in Belgrade.
The guns of insurgents who fought for the KLA and for secession of
Kosovo from Yugoslavia are still targeted on these fellow -Albanians
"traitors" who remain pro-Belgrade and whom they would like to oust from
the mines. The 70,000 Albanians who rallied in Mitrovica have plainly
lost patience with the UN occupation which they had expected would
re-establish employment in the mines for Albanians who are pro-KLA.
Obviously the mines are not just a flashpoint, they are the flashpoint
for any future hostilities in Kosovo.
The Trepca mines first attracted notice in the early days of the war
when NATO spokesmen alleged that they held one thousand bodies of
Albanian victims of Serb ethnic murders. The Mirror of London wrote
that the name Trepca would "live alongside those of Belsen, Auschwitz
and Treblinka, etched in the memories of those whose loved ones met a
bestial end in true Nazi Final Solution fashion." But in the aftermath
of the bombing ceasefire investigators for the International Criminal
Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found no human remains there at
all!
If the name Trepca continues to live in infamy it will be as a symbol
not of genocide but of the official invention of a fake genocide to
justify war against a nation that had committed no offense other than a
refusal to allow the major Western nations to plunder it.
Along with Trepca all other evidence of Serb genocide has collapsed, the
100,000 ethnic murders of which "Mr." Milosevic was accused by Defense
Secretary Cohen were pure invention as admitted even by hardliner Adem
Demaci of the KLA who put the figure at closer to seven thousand.
However, the ICTY forensic teams who were sent to look for bodies wound
up actually finding remains of only a few hundred persons and even these
bodies were conceded to have been likely insurgent combat troops rather
than innocent civilians. At the very most, the ICTY teams estimated
that the total count of bodies found would be something like 2,000. No
less an authority than KLA "minister" Hashim Thaci has himself now
admitted that the notorious so-called "massacre" at Racak, the incident
that outraged the world and gained world support for NATO action, was
the result of a bald-faced provocation by KLA terrorists who used the
photographed bodies of their own snipers as "proof" of a Serbian ethnic
bloodbath.
While this is not news on the television media, which refuse to report
these revelations, it's big news on the internet where official lies and
disinformation are routinely deflated in a matter of hours after being
proclaimed. Indeed, in spite of NATO's seeming media advantage, the
winners of the information age's first internet war have been the forces
of peace! A determined information-gathering resistance movement on the
internet has grown in influence over this past year to such a point that
it has succeeded in stripping away the humanitarian fig leaf that NATO
wore when the war first started and with it all credibility of the
governments of nineteen of the most powerful countries in the world.
That is a big, big accomplishment.
Hence while a new war, even an expanded war, has perhaps never been so
close, the power of those who seek peace has never seemed greater,
either.
The next time this country goes to war, whether in the Balkans or
against some small, defenseless country elsewhere on the planet, how can
our pretense of humanitarian motive be believed now that internet
researchers have exposed our hidden intentions in Yugoslavia and forced
revisions of the official spin on that war to be made in the historical
record?
The entrance of the U.S. into the Balkans was shocking when it happened
because of our trampling of international war codes, treaties, and rules
of conduct taken for granted for decades, and even centuries. The UN
Security Council - out of business. The Geneva Convention prohibiting
aggression against civilian populations - null and void. The War Powers
Act forbidding foreign military intervention without Congressional
authorization - never heard of it. I even read that we had violated the
Treaty of Westphalia of 1648! The internet revolution broke down the
mystique of foreign affairs expertise, allowing citizens like ourselves
to have technical information such as this. Now we have an opportunity
to sort through the sheer mountain of data, and, if we stay the course,
to find out exactly what goes on inside the Leviathan of the war
machine, and exactly how a nightmarish war such as we have seen in
Yugoslavia is made from drawing board through fait accompli.
It's exactly appropriate that among the most influential sources of
truth about this war have been two websites, the absolutely essential
antiwar.com and one entitled The Emperor's New Clothes - www.tenc.com.
Here are just some of the revelations with which that latter website and
others have succeeded in tearing away the aura of righteous purpose in
which the makers of the NATO war on Yugoslavia have vainly struggled to
clothe themselves.
By the time the bombing was two weeks old it was clear to anybody
following it on the internet that restoring ethnic harmony in Kosovo was
not the reason we were in Yugoslavia. Now a year later a consensus has
grown that what the U.S. had sought for Kosovo is for it to be a
permanent colonial protectorate, a launching pad for America to move
into the former Soviet bloc countries. Prior to the war, America had
military bases in 100 countries around the world but not Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was the very the last country in Europe without an American
base. Now, thanks to the war the largest American base in Europe is in
Kosovo.
Emperor's Clothes has published many entries by writer Diana Johnstone.
She characterizes Yugoslavia as "a testing ground and a metaphor for the
Soviet Union." In other words, American orchestration of the downfall of
Yugoslavia (by abetting the breakaway of its member republics) is only a
dress rehearsal for future usage of the same dismemberment strategy
against Russia. Supporting the idea that America is positioning itself
to revive the Cold War struggle against Russia are several articles on
Emperor's Clothes including a 1996 paper by Sean Gervasi which asserts
that America wants to have the status of a "European power," and to
expand eastward, eventually taking over the running and economic
exploitation of former east bloc countries such as the Ukraine, Georgia,
and Azerbaijan.
As long as four years ago Gervasi was proclaiming that far from being a
tightly knit partnership, the western alliance is falling apart. In his
analysis, fearing that the emergence of the European Union, of which the
U.S. is not a member, would make Germany rather than ourselves the
supreme power in Europe, the U.S. sought war in the Balkans to carve out
a post-Cold War domain for NATO, of which we are a member, and a way to
make NATO be the supreme power in Europe.
Gervasi's theory is as follows: worried that our fellow NATO countries
had only weakly supported American action in the Gulf War (with our
so-called allies relying almost wholly on American manpower and
firepower), the U.S. cooked up a Balkan crisis in order to lift NATO out
of its doldrums and establish American supremacy by dazzling our allies
with American high tech firepower. Implicit in this theory is that
America had acted in the hope that Europe would see that this country
sets the standard for military manufacture and would have to buy
American military goods.
As early as the 1980's American strategists were plotting ways that NATO
intervention against "rogue nations" would give the U.S. and its fellow
members of NATO a new cause. Just as the old empires of Europe
conquered whole continents in the name of a "civilizing mission," NATO
would roam the planet as protectors of human rights and as humanitarian
rescuers.
Another contributor to Emperor's Clothes (and other antiwar websites),
Michael
Chossudowsky, documents the way the U.S. used the American-controlled
International Monetary Fund, with its power of foreclosure as financial
lender, to smash the Yugoslavian economy, render that country helpless
against foreign takeover, and create such outrageous social and economic
conditions that military intervention by outside countries would seem
like the only solution.
Finally, once again from Emperor's Clothes, on March 12th we were
privileged to get the first American posting of investigations by the
major London newspapers and BBC television that show how America's CIA
created the pro-Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army to spread terror against
Serbia and the government in Belgrade. When Belgrade acted to stop the
shootings, burnings, and kidnappings by the KLA Western media portrayed
Belgrade's law & order measures as racial genocide against Albanians.
In such way the impression was created of a humanitarian crisis that
NATO used as cover for a military aggression.
Now one year after the initial bombing of Yugoslavia, America has
installed itself as an occupying power in Kosovo. Like Korea, like
Berlin and the two Germanies during the Cold War, Yugoslavia is now a
divided country with two republics (Bosnia and Kosovo) that are
protectorates run by outside international bodies mainly staffed by
Americans.
Is the United States simply getting carried away with its own
self-righteous sense of a mission to save mankind, as many anti-war
conservatives who hate the idea of governments acting on the basis of
paternalistic compassion, such as Pat Buchanan, charge, or is the U.S.
committing itself to interventionism because of some more practical and
self-interested motive?
We do not read much about it or hear about it in the major media, but
the internet has carried dozens of articles about the economic benefits
that the U.S. stands to reap from its presence in Kosovo: first of all
the U.S. seeks to build an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan in the former
Soviet Central Asia right across Kosovo and Croatia. With its domination
of Kosovo the U.S. would have control over the future main supply of oil
to the European continent.
And in Kosovo as in many other countries before it, America has sided
with factions that reap huge profits from the drug trade thus
implicitly suggesting that our government has a stake in that trade that
has become a vital form of military financing. First Afghanistan, then
the Nicaraguan contras, then Panama, and now it's our latest client,
Albania. 80 percent of Europe's heroin supply comes from Albania, which
has used drug sales to fund KLA expansion into Kosovo and made Kosovo an
indispensable link in the Albanian drug trade. Our armed forces are
being readied for an expedition to stop the drug trade in Colombia. Has
one word been said to suggest that the military in Kosovo might want to
stop the drug trade in Kosovo as well?
It's been hard for anyone who knows the truth about the KLA and drugs to
watch TV personalities such as Geraldo Rivera go to Albania and stand
side by side in solidarity with these anti-Serb rebels whom they
characterize as freedom fighters. Only on the internet do we discover
that these brave patriots are funded almost entirely by profits from
heroin and other major-scale organized crime activity including
prostitution.
Give credit to the internet resistance, then, for exposing truths such
as these about the war in Yugoslavia. In today's information wars,
computer truth forces are the modern day successors of the war
resistance of Yugoslavian partisans and chetniks who stood up to Hitler
during World War II.
In just three days we will mark the one year anniversary of NATO's air
invasion of Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999. It so happens that that date
coincides with another anniversary, the birth of Yugoslavian resistance
to Adolf Hitler on March 26-27, 1941. On that date after Hitler had
struck a deal with Yugoslavia's Prince Regent, Yugoslavia's armed forces
rose up and overthrew his government, as crowds spat on the German
minister's car. Allow me to quote from William L. Shirer's classic
account of the years of the Third Reich:
"The coup in Belgrade threw Adolf Hitler into one of the wildest rages
of his entire life. He took it as a personal affront and in his fury
made sudden decisions which would prove utterly disastrous to the
fortunes of the Third Reich. Yugoslavia (he said) would be crushed with
'unmerciful harshness.' He ordered Goering to 'destroy Belgrade in
attacks by waves' with bombers operating from Hungarian air bases." He
then postponed his invasion of Russia by four weeks thus guaranteeing
that it would end in failure and the snows of the Russian winter.
The bombing of Belgrade by the Luftwaffe began on April 6, 1941, razing
the city to the ground and killing 17,000 civilians. In an eerie
forshadowing of today's tradition of giving each war its own
action-movie title such as "Operation Desert Storm" in Iraq and
"Operation Allied Force" in Kosovo, Hitler's air attack on Yugoslavia
was called "Operation Punishment." On April 13, 1941, Yugoslavia was
overwhelmed by the German blitz, and the army surrendered at Sarajevo.
Under the occupation industrialist Alfried von Krupp and Reichsmarshall
Hermann Goering personally divided up the spoils of Yugoslavia's
precious mines. However the Yugoslavian partisans, consisting primarily
of Serbs, fought on, resisting all foreign domination including, after
the war, that of the Soviet Union.
Of all the countries that were overrun by Hitler's armies, Yugoslavia
set a unique example in fighting back and offering armed resistance.
The heroic resistance to military aggression demonstrated by the Serbs
of Yugoslavia, which started with Serbia's declaration of independence
after World War I and has now withstood three invasions including
NATO's, should not only not be forgotten, but should inspire us today.
Yugoslavia is once again being eyed as an outpost for the west in
Central Europe, a fortified American emplacement in readiness for war
with Russia. The stubborn Serbs of that country have shown that they
will endure any suffering to prevent their land from being used for such
a scenario. We must find the strength to match the Serbs in their
heritage of resistance to war, and it looks as though we will be called
upon to do so if, as appears likely, NATO's war against Yugoslavia
intensifies in the very near future.
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
THE FATAL FLAWS UNDERLYING NATO'S INTERVENTION IN YUGOSLAVIA
By Lt Gen Satish Nambiar (Retd.)
(First Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations Forces
deployed in the former Yugoslavia 03 Mar92 to 02 Mar 93. Former Deputy
Chief of Staff, Indian Army. Currently, Director of the United Services
Insitution of India.)
My year long experience as the Force Commander and Head of Mission of
the
United Nations Forces deployed in the former Yugoslavia has given me an
understanding of the fatal flaws of US/NATO policies in the troubled
region.
It was obvious to most people following events in the Balkans since the
beginning of the decade, and particularly after the fighting that
resulted
in the emergence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, that Kosovo was a 'powder keg' waiting
to
explode. The West appears to have learnt all the wrong lessons from the
previous wars and applied it to Kosovo.
(1) Portraying the Serbs as evil and everybody else as good was not only
counterproductive but also dishonest. According to my experience all
sides were guilty but only the Serbs would admit that they were no
angels
while the others would insist that they were. With 28, 000 forces under
me and with constant contacts with UNHCR and the International Red Cross
officials, we did not witness any genocide beyond killings and massacres
on all sides that are typical of such conflict conditions. I believe
none
of my successors and their forces saw anything on the scale claimed by
the
media.
(2) It was obvious to me that if Slovenians, Croatians and Bosniaks had
the right to secede from Yugoslavia, then the Serbs of Croatia and
Bosnia
had an equal right to secede. The experience of partitions in Ireland
and
India has not be pleasant but in the Yugoslavia case, the state had
already been taken apart anyway. It made little sense to me that if
multiethnic Yugoslavia was not tenable that multiethnic Bosnia could be
made tenable. The former internal boundaries of Yugoslavia which had no
validity under international law should have been redrawn when it was
taken apart by the West, just as it was in the case of Ireland in 1921
and
Punjab and Bengal in India in 1947. Failure to acknowledge this has led
to the problem of Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia.
(3) It is ironic that the Dayton Agreement on Bosnia was not
fundamentally
different from the Lisbon Plan drawn up by Portuguese Foreign Minister
Cuteliero and British representative Lord Carrington to which all three
sides had agreed before any killings had taken place, or even the
Vance-Owen Plan which Karadzic was willing to sign. One of the main
problems was that there was an unwillingness on the part of the American
administration to concede that Serbs had legitimate grievances and
rights.
I recall State Department official George Kenny turning up like all
other
American officials, spewing condemnations of the Serbs for aggression
and
genocide. I offered to give him an escort and to go see for himself
that
none of what he proclaimed was true. He accepted my offer and
thereafter
he made a radical turnaround.. Other Americans continued to see and
hear
what they wanted to see and hear from one side, while ignoring the other
side. Such behaviour does not produce peace but more conflict.
(4) I felt that Yugoslavia was a media-generated tragedy. The Western
media sees international crises in black and white, sensationalizing
incidents for public consumption. From what I can see now, all Serbs
have
been driven out of Croatia and the Muslim-Croat Federation, I believe
almost 850,000 of them. And yet the focus is on 500,000 Albanians (at
last count) who have been driven out of Kosovo. Western policies have
led
to an ethnically pure Greater Croatia, and an ethnically pure Muslim
statelet in Bosnia. Therefore, why not an ethnically pure Serbia?
Failure to address these double standards has led to the current one.
As I watched the ugly tragedy unfold in the case of Kosovo while
visiting
the US in early to mid March 1999, I could see the same pattern
emerging.
In my experience with similar situations in India in such places as
Kashmir, Punjab, Assam, Nagaland, and elsewhere, it is the essential
strategy of those ethnic groups who wish to secede to provoke the state
authorities. Killings of policemen is usually a standard operating
procedure by terrorists since that usually invites overwhelming state
retaliation, just as I am sure it does in the United States.
I do not believe the Belgrade government had prior intention of driving
out all Albanians from Kosovo. It may have decided to implement
Washington's own "Krajina Plan" only if NATO bombed, or these expulsions
could be spontaneous acts of revenge and retaliation by Serb forces in
the
field because of the bombing. The OSCE Monitors were not doing too
badly,
and the Yugoslav Government had, after all, indicated its willings to
abide by nearly all the provisions of the Rambouillet "Agreement" on
aspects like cease-fire, greater autonomy to the Albanians, and so on.
But they insisted that the status of Kosovo as part of Serbia was not
negotiable, and they would not agree to stationing NATO forces on the
soil
of Yugoslavia. This is precisely what India would have done under the
same circumstances. It was the West that proceeded to escalate the
situation into the current senseless bombing campaign that smacks more
of
hurt egos, and revenge and retaliation. NATO's massive bombing intended
to terrorize Serbia into submission appears no different from the
morality
of actions of Serb forces in Kosovo.
Ultimatums were issued to Yugoslavia that unless the terms of an
agreement
drawn up at Rambouillet were signed, NATO would undertake bombing.
Ultimatums do not constitute diplomacy. They are acts of war. The
Albanians of Kosovo who want independence, were coaxed and cajoled into
putting their signatures to a document motivated with the hope of NATO
bombing of Serbs and independence later. With this signature, NATO
assumed all the legal and moral authority to undertake military
operations
against a country that had, at worst, been harsh on its own people. On
24th March 1999, NATO launched attacks with cruise missiles and bombs,
on
Yugoslavia, a sovereign state, a founding member of the United Nations
and
the Non Aligned Movement; and against a people who were at the forefront
of the fight against Nazi Germany and other fascist forces during World
War Two. I consider these current actions unbecoming of great powers.
It is appropriate to touch on the humanitarian dimension for it is the
innocent who are being subjected to displacement, pain and misery.
Unfortunately, this is the tragic and inevitable outcome of all such
situations of civil war, insurgencies, rebel movements, and terrorist
activity. History is replete with examples of such suffering; whether
it
be the American Civil War, Northern Ireland, the Basque movement in
Spain,
Chechnya, Angola, Cambodia, and so many other cases; the indiscriminate
bombing of civilian centres during World War Two; Hiroshima and
Nagasaki;
Vietnam. The list is endless. I feel that this tragedy could have been
prevented if NATO's ego and credibility had not been given the highest
priority instead of the genuine grievances of Serbs in addition to
Albanians.
Notwithstanding all that one hears and sees on CNN and BBC, and other
Western agencies, and in the daily briefings of the NATO authorities,
the
blame for the humanitarian crisis that has arisen cannot be placed at
the
door of the Yugoslav authorities alone. The responsibility rests mainly
at NATO's doors. In fact, if I am to go by my own experience as the
First
Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations forces in the
former Yugoslavia, from March 1992 to March 1993, handling operations in
Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia, I would say that reports put
out in the electronic media are largely responsible for provoking this
tragedy.
Where does all this leave the international community which for the
record
does not comprise of the US, the West and its newfound Muslim allies?
The
portents for the future, at least in the short term, are bleak indeed.
The United Nations has been made totally redundant, ineffective, and
impotent. The Western world, led by the USA, will lay down the moral
values that the rest of the world must adhere to; it does not matter
that
they themselves do not adhere to the same values when it does not suit
them. National sovereignty and territorial integrity have no sanctity.
And finally, secessionist movements, which often start with terrorist
activity, will get greater encouragement. One can only hope that good
sense will prevail, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Lt General Satish Nambiar Director, USI, New Delhi
6 April 1999
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
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------------------------------------------------------------
By Lt Gen Satish Nambiar (Retd.)
(First Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations Forces
deployed in the former Yugoslavia 03 Mar92 to 02 Mar 93. Former Deputy
Chief of Staff, Indian Army. Currently, Director of the United Services
Insitution of India.)
My year long experience as the Force Commander and Head of Mission of
the
United Nations Forces deployed in the former Yugoslavia has given me an
understanding of the fatal flaws of US/NATO policies in the troubled
region.
It was obvious to most people following events in the Balkans since the
beginning of the decade, and particularly after the fighting that
resulted
in the emergence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, that Kosovo was a 'powder keg' waiting
to
explode. The West appears to have learnt all the wrong lessons from the
previous wars and applied it to Kosovo.
(1) Portraying the Serbs as evil and everybody else as good was not only
counterproductive but also dishonest. According to my experience all
sides were guilty but only the Serbs would admit that they were no
angels
while the others would insist that they were. With 28, 000 forces under
me and with constant contacts with UNHCR and the International Red Cross
officials, we did not witness any genocide beyond killings and massacres
on all sides that are typical of such conflict conditions. I believe
none
of my successors and their forces saw anything on the scale claimed by
the
media.
(2) It was obvious to me that if Slovenians, Croatians and Bosniaks had
the right to secede from Yugoslavia, then the Serbs of Croatia and
Bosnia
had an equal right to secede. The experience of partitions in Ireland
and
India has not be pleasant but in the Yugoslavia case, the state had
already been taken apart anyway. It made little sense to me that if
multiethnic Yugoslavia was not tenable that multiethnic Bosnia could be
made tenable. The former internal boundaries of Yugoslavia which had no
validity under international law should have been redrawn when it was
taken apart by the West, just as it was in the case of Ireland in 1921
and
Punjab and Bengal in India in 1947. Failure to acknowledge this has led
to the problem of Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia.
(3) It is ironic that the Dayton Agreement on Bosnia was not
fundamentally
different from the Lisbon Plan drawn up by Portuguese Foreign Minister
Cuteliero and British representative Lord Carrington to which all three
sides had agreed before any killings had taken place, or even the
Vance-Owen Plan which Karadzic was willing to sign. One of the main
problems was that there was an unwillingness on the part of the American
administration to concede that Serbs had legitimate grievances and
rights.
I recall State Department official George Kenny turning up like all
other
American officials, spewing condemnations of the Serbs for aggression
and
genocide. I offered to give him an escort and to go see for himself
that
none of what he proclaimed was true. He accepted my offer and
thereafter
he made a radical turnaround.. Other Americans continued to see and
hear
what they wanted to see and hear from one side, while ignoring the other
side. Such behaviour does not produce peace but more conflict.
(4) I felt that Yugoslavia was a media-generated tragedy. The Western
media sees international crises in black and white, sensationalizing
incidents for public consumption. From what I can see now, all Serbs
have
been driven out of Croatia and the Muslim-Croat Federation, I believe
almost 850,000 of them. And yet the focus is on 500,000 Albanians (at
last count) who have been driven out of Kosovo. Western policies have
led
to an ethnically pure Greater Croatia, and an ethnically pure Muslim
statelet in Bosnia. Therefore, why not an ethnically pure Serbia?
Failure to address these double standards has led to the current one.
As I watched the ugly tragedy unfold in the case of Kosovo while
visiting
the US in early to mid March 1999, I could see the same pattern
emerging.
In my experience with similar situations in India in such places as
Kashmir, Punjab, Assam, Nagaland, and elsewhere, it is the essential
strategy of those ethnic groups who wish to secede to provoke the state
authorities. Killings of policemen is usually a standard operating
procedure by terrorists since that usually invites overwhelming state
retaliation, just as I am sure it does in the United States.
I do not believe the Belgrade government had prior intention of driving
out all Albanians from Kosovo. It may have decided to implement
Washington's own "Krajina Plan" only if NATO bombed, or these expulsions
could be spontaneous acts of revenge and retaliation by Serb forces in
the
field because of the bombing. The OSCE Monitors were not doing too
badly,
and the Yugoslav Government had, after all, indicated its willings to
abide by nearly all the provisions of the Rambouillet "Agreement" on
aspects like cease-fire, greater autonomy to the Albanians, and so on.
But they insisted that the status of Kosovo as part of Serbia was not
negotiable, and they would not agree to stationing NATO forces on the
soil
of Yugoslavia. This is precisely what India would have done under the
same circumstances. It was the West that proceeded to escalate the
situation into the current senseless bombing campaign that smacks more
of
hurt egos, and revenge and retaliation. NATO's massive bombing intended
to terrorize Serbia into submission appears no different from the
morality
of actions of Serb forces in Kosovo.
Ultimatums were issued to Yugoslavia that unless the terms of an
agreement
drawn up at Rambouillet were signed, NATO would undertake bombing.
Ultimatums do not constitute diplomacy. They are acts of war. The
Albanians of Kosovo who want independence, were coaxed and cajoled into
putting their signatures to a document motivated with the hope of NATO
bombing of Serbs and independence later. With this signature, NATO
assumed all the legal and moral authority to undertake military
operations
against a country that had, at worst, been harsh on its own people. On
24th March 1999, NATO launched attacks with cruise missiles and bombs,
on
Yugoslavia, a sovereign state, a founding member of the United Nations
and
the Non Aligned Movement; and against a people who were at the forefront
of the fight against Nazi Germany and other fascist forces during World
War Two. I consider these current actions unbecoming of great powers.
It is appropriate to touch on the humanitarian dimension for it is the
innocent who are being subjected to displacement, pain and misery.
Unfortunately, this is the tragic and inevitable outcome of all such
situations of civil war, insurgencies, rebel movements, and terrorist
activity. History is replete with examples of such suffering; whether
it
be the American Civil War, Northern Ireland, the Basque movement in
Spain,
Chechnya, Angola, Cambodia, and so many other cases; the indiscriminate
bombing of civilian centres during World War Two; Hiroshima and
Nagasaki;
Vietnam. The list is endless. I feel that this tragedy could have been
prevented if NATO's ego and credibility had not been given the highest
priority instead of the genuine grievances of Serbs in addition to
Albanians.
Notwithstanding all that one hears and sees on CNN and BBC, and other
Western agencies, and in the daily briefings of the NATO authorities,
the
blame for the humanitarian crisis that has arisen cannot be placed at
the
door of the Yugoslav authorities alone. The responsibility rests mainly
at NATO's doors. In fact, if I am to go by my own experience as the
First
Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations forces in the
former Yugoslavia, from March 1992 to March 1993, handling operations in
Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia, I would say that reports put
out in the electronic media are largely responsible for provoking this
tragedy.
Where does all this leave the international community which for the
record
does not comprise of the US, the West and its newfound Muslim allies?
The
portents for the future, at least in the short term, are bleak indeed.
The United Nations has been made totally redundant, ineffective, and
impotent. The Western world, led by the USA, will lay down the moral
values that the rest of the world must adhere to; it does not matter
that
they themselves do not adhere to the same values when it does not suit
them. National sovereignty and territorial integrity have no sanctity.
And finally, secessionist movements, which often start with terrorist
activity, will get greater encouragement. One can only hope that good
sense will prevail, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Lt General Satish Nambiar Director, USI, New Delhi
6 April 1999
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
George Kenney
HOW MEDIA MISINFORMATION LED TO BOSNIAN INTERVENTION
in "Living Marxism" (London), April, 1997
Was it inevitable that the West
intervened militarily in Bosnia's civil war, taking sides against the
Serbs, and then occupying the country? I doubt it. Was it right? No,
not insofar as careful, objective, after-the-fact investigation of key
media events was lacking.
The first turning point, that led straightaway to the introduction of
Western troops,coincided with ITN's broadcast of images of what was
widely
assumed to be a concentration camp, at the Bosnian Serb-run Trnopolje
refugee collection centre in August 1992. Now, in a stunning
development,
Thomas Deichmann has discovered that those ITN images 'fooled the
world'.
To understand the impact that those misleading ITN pictures had, one
must
look at the atmosphere of July/August in Washington. Beginning with his
19 July articles on the Serb-run detention centres at Manjaca and
Omarska,
Roy Gutman of Newsday began filing a series of storiesbased, he
minimally
acknowledged at that time, only on second and third-hand accountsthat
culminated in his charge in several stories filed from 2-5 August that
the
Bosnian Serbs were operating 'Nazi-style' (his words) death camps for
non-Serb prisoners of war.
As the Yugoslav desk officer at the State Department, I knew about these
stories before they were printed, because Gutman had contacted the then
US
Consulate General in Zagreb to tell officials of his suspicions and ask
for help in corroborating his findings.
Specifically, he wanted US spy satellites to determine whether a 'death
camp' was in operation. Nobody took this request seriously, but I knew
such reports could create a public relations firestorm, so I made a
special effort to keep the highest levels of the State Department's
management, including Deputy Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger's office,
informed of his work. I did not, however, think management paid much or
enough attention before Gutman's story broke.
Among other tasks, I was responsible for drafting press materials, which
mainly involved preparing State Department Spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler
for her daily noon press briefing. Tutwiler, who was Secretary James
Baker's closest confidant and unofficially the second most influential
person at State, felt that the USA should have been doing considerably
more to stop, or at least suppress, the civil war in Bosnia. Alone
among
senior officials in her surreptitious dissent, she drew constant
attention
to the war's worst aspects, hoping to spur the administration to greater
action if for no other reason than Baker's fear of bad press. At my
initiative, she had already used the term 'ethnic cleansing' in mid-May
to
describe Bosnian Serb actions, introducing this previously unknown
revilement into the vernacular. Frequent use of this sort of lurid
language conditioned the press into a Pavlovian yearning for ever more
shocking news of atrocities.
On Tuesday, 4 August Assistant Secretary for European Affairs Tom Niles
was scheduled to give routine testimony to the House International
Relations European Subcommittee, and in carrying out this obligation he
badly erred, compounding public outcry about Gutman's 'death camps'
report. Inexplicably, Niles decided to stonewall instead of earnestly
declaring that we knew little, but took the matter seriously and were
looking into it. The subcommittee responded poorly, with Niles
particularly enraging its presiding member, Tom Lantos, a survivor of
pro-Nazi Hungarian concentration camps. Adding to public frustrations,
Niles' comments appeared to differ from what Tutwiler's assistant
Richard
Boucher told the press pool at the State Department the day beforethat
the
USA knew about the Gutman stories. Boucher had meant only that US
officials read newspapers, but the leading papers unanimously (and
mistakenly) reported that he said State had independent confirmation
from
its intelligence sources. Reporters, smelling a cover-up, launched into
full-throated choruses of 'what did they know, and when did they know
it?'
More importantly, they asked, 'what is the USA going to do?'.
The truth was, the State Department knew very little. The real scandal
was that it did not want to know more, because whatever could have been
learned might also have brought new obligations to do something
(anything). But by early 1992 the White House had decided not to incur
the least substantive responsibility for the Yugoslav crisis, in order
to
avoid a Vietnam-like slippery slope and messy foreign entanglements
during
an election. We did not know whether minor measures might have brought
results, but had no will to experiment. Yugoslavia, in the US
government's view, was Europe's problem; the State Department was
determined it should stay that way. In any case, by mid-week the State
Department's public affairs officials were in a nuclear panic. The
Yugoslav desk was asked, twice, to review its files about what we knew
on
'death camps', and I gave Boucher a thick folder to photocopy of
telegrams
from my unofficial, personal file on Bosnia. There was not much
information therenothing confirming Gutman's storyand the State
Department
struggled to find words to get out of the hole it had dug for itself.
We
had to explain our limited knowledge and say something more than 'we do
not like concentration camps', but less than 'we intend to invade Bosnia
and shut them down'.
Sensing an opportunity to attack President George Bush, on 5 August
then-candidate Bill Clinton renewed his call for the USA, through the
United Nations, to bomb Bosnian Serb positions. The US Senate began
consideration of a symbolic vote (eventually approved) to permit the use
of force to ensure aid deliveries and access to the camps. Even high
Vatican officials, speaking unofficially for the Pope, noted parallels
between Nazi atrocities and Bosnian camps, and called for military
intervention 'to hold back the hand of the aggressor'.
A kind of hysteria swept through the Washington press corps. Few
outsiders believed State was trying to tell the truth. After I resigned
over policy in late August, senior Clinton campaign officials speedily
approached me regarding the camps issue, seeking advice on whether they
should pursue spy satellite records which the administration allegedly
ignored. I told them not to waste their time. And for years afterwards
journalists continued to ask me about 'the cover-up'.
On Wednesday 5 August, in an effort to quell the burgeoning
Boucher/Niles
'cover-up' story and regain control of the press, Deputy Secretary
Eagleburger's office issued a clarification of the State Department's
position, including an appeal for 'war crimes investigations' into
reports
of atrocities in Bosnian detention centres. Immune to his efforts,
extremely harsh press criticism continued to mount from every quarter.
On
Thursday, President George Bush issued an ill-prepared statement urging
the United Nations Security Council to authorise the use of 'all
necessary
measures' to ensure relief deliveries, but stopped short of calling for
the use of force to release prisoners. British and French officials
responded that his statement was a reaction to political concerns in the
USA. Meanwhile, further inflaming the public outcry, Serb forces
stepped
up their attacks on Sarajevo.
At almost exactly the moment of President Bush's call to arms, ITN's
pictures first aired. I do not know whether senior State Department
officials saw or learned of them that day, but I viewed them, to the
best
of my recollection, with a handful of colleagues on Friday morning or
possibly early afternoon, in the office of European Bureau's chief of
public affairs. We were unanimous, from our respective
mid-to-mid-senior
level vantage points, that the tape was ruinous for the Bush
administration's hands-off policy and could not but result in
significant
US actions. The notion that 'we have got to do something' echoed down
State's corridors.
At the start of the week possible critical policy shifts were dimly
perceived and highly tentative, but by week's end ITN's graphic
portrayal
of what was interpreted as a 'Balkan Holocaust' probably ensured that
those shifts became irreversible. Those shifts remain fundamental to
policy to this day. On 13 August the UN Security Council passed
Resolutions 770 and
771, which for the first time authorised the international use of force
in
Bosnia and promised to punish war criminals, the precursors of the
current
international occupation of Bosnia and the International War Crimes
Tribunal at the Hague. On the 14th, the United Nations Human Rights
Commission appointed former Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a
highly pious Catholic, as Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the
Former Yugoslavia, a position from which he tended to target only
Bosnian
Serbs. And, on the
18th, Britain reversed itself and pledged to send 1800 soldiers to
Bosnia
for humanitarian aid operations, the first step towards what became by
mid-September a UNSC approved, enlarged UN Protection Force mission in
Bosnia the seed that sprouted into IFOR and now SFOR.
Lost in the shuffle was any understanding of what was actually going on
in
the camps, who ran them, and why. Official Washington and the US press
almost completely ignored an International Committee of the Red Cross
report issued on 4 August, describing ICRC visits to 10 camps and their
finding of blatant human rights violations by all sides. And though the
Serbs did indeed, as the ICRC said, run more camps, it was not
disproportionately more. In the rush to convict the Serbs in the court
of
public opinion, the press paid no more attention to other, later reports
throughout the war, up to and after the Dayton agreement, of hellish
Croat
and Muslim run camps. Nor did the press understand that each side had
strong incentives to hold at least some prisoners for exchanges.
Medieval xenophobes reincarnated as high-tech cowboys, Western opinion
leaders fixated their fear and anger against the unknown. Defying
reason
and logic, a myth of a Serb perpetrated Holocaust, coupled with the
refusal to even acknowledge atrocities against Serbs, became
conventional
wisdom. This was the first instance and future model for post-modern
imperialistic intervention to determine the winner in a bloody civil
war.
Washington loves to go to war in August. The florid atmosphere of
August
1992, though not (yet) exactly a shooting match, comprised a more than
satisfactory propaganda war, vaguely reassuring those who lost their
bearings with the end of the Cold War, together with a new generation of
journalists who needed a fraught, dirty conflict on which to cut their
teeth. Bosnia made excellent sport.
It is no surprise, after all, that the temptation for news organisations
to try to change policy, when they knew how easily they could, was
overwhelming.
George Kenney resigned from the US State Department in August 1992, in
protest at the Bush Administration's policy towards the former
Yugoslavia.
This is his personal account of how the bogus interpretation which the
world placed upon ITN's pictures of Trnopolje camp helped to put
Washington on a war footing.
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
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------------------------------------------------------------
HOW MEDIA MISINFORMATION LED TO BOSNIAN INTERVENTION
in "Living Marxism" (London), April, 1997
Was it inevitable that the West
intervened militarily in Bosnia's civil war, taking sides against the
Serbs, and then occupying the country? I doubt it. Was it right? No,
not insofar as careful, objective, after-the-fact investigation of key
media events was lacking.
The first turning point, that led straightaway to the introduction of
Western troops,coincided with ITN's broadcast of images of what was
widely
assumed to be a concentration camp, at the Bosnian Serb-run Trnopolje
refugee collection centre in August 1992. Now, in a stunning
development,
Thomas Deichmann has discovered that those ITN images 'fooled the
world'.
To understand the impact that those misleading ITN pictures had, one
must
look at the atmosphere of July/August in Washington. Beginning with his
19 July articles on the Serb-run detention centres at Manjaca and
Omarska,
Roy Gutman of Newsday began filing a series of storiesbased, he
minimally
acknowledged at that time, only on second and third-hand accountsthat
culminated in his charge in several stories filed from 2-5 August that
the
Bosnian Serbs were operating 'Nazi-style' (his words) death camps for
non-Serb prisoners of war.
As the Yugoslav desk officer at the State Department, I knew about these
stories before they were printed, because Gutman had contacted the then
US
Consulate General in Zagreb to tell officials of his suspicions and ask
for help in corroborating his findings.
Specifically, he wanted US spy satellites to determine whether a 'death
camp' was in operation. Nobody took this request seriously, but I knew
such reports could create a public relations firestorm, so I made a
special effort to keep the highest levels of the State Department's
management, including Deputy Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger's office,
informed of his work. I did not, however, think management paid much or
enough attention before Gutman's story broke.
Among other tasks, I was responsible for drafting press materials, which
mainly involved preparing State Department Spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler
for her daily noon press briefing. Tutwiler, who was Secretary James
Baker's closest confidant and unofficially the second most influential
person at State, felt that the USA should have been doing considerably
more to stop, or at least suppress, the civil war in Bosnia. Alone
among
senior officials in her surreptitious dissent, she drew constant
attention
to the war's worst aspects, hoping to spur the administration to greater
action if for no other reason than Baker's fear of bad press. At my
initiative, she had already used the term 'ethnic cleansing' in mid-May
to
describe Bosnian Serb actions, introducing this previously unknown
revilement into the vernacular. Frequent use of this sort of lurid
language conditioned the press into a Pavlovian yearning for ever more
shocking news of atrocities.
On Tuesday, 4 August Assistant Secretary for European Affairs Tom Niles
was scheduled to give routine testimony to the House International
Relations European Subcommittee, and in carrying out this obligation he
badly erred, compounding public outcry about Gutman's 'death camps'
report. Inexplicably, Niles decided to stonewall instead of earnestly
declaring that we knew little, but took the matter seriously and were
looking into it. The subcommittee responded poorly, with Niles
particularly enraging its presiding member, Tom Lantos, a survivor of
pro-Nazi Hungarian concentration camps. Adding to public frustrations,
Niles' comments appeared to differ from what Tutwiler's assistant
Richard
Boucher told the press pool at the State Department the day beforethat
the
USA knew about the Gutman stories. Boucher had meant only that US
officials read newspapers, but the leading papers unanimously (and
mistakenly) reported that he said State had independent confirmation
from
its intelligence sources. Reporters, smelling a cover-up, launched into
full-throated choruses of 'what did they know, and when did they know
it?'
More importantly, they asked, 'what is the USA going to do?'.
The truth was, the State Department knew very little. The real scandal
was that it did not want to know more, because whatever could have been
learned might also have brought new obligations to do something
(anything). But by early 1992 the White House had decided not to incur
the least substantive responsibility for the Yugoslav crisis, in order
to
avoid a Vietnam-like slippery slope and messy foreign entanglements
during
an election. We did not know whether minor measures might have brought
results, but had no will to experiment. Yugoslavia, in the US
government's view, was Europe's problem; the State Department was
determined it should stay that way. In any case, by mid-week the State
Department's public affairs officials were in a nuclear panic. The
Yugoslav desk was asked, twice, to review its files about what we knew
on
'death camps', and I gave Boucher a thick folder to photocopy of
telegrams
from my unofficial, personal file on Bosnia. There was not much
information therenothing confirming Gutman's storyand the State
Department
struggled to find words to get out of the hole it had dug for itself.
We
had to explain our limited knowledge and say something more than 'we do
not like concentration camps', but less than 'we intend to invade Bosnia
and shut them down'.
Sensing an opportunity to attack President George Bush, on 5 August
then-candidate Bill Clinton renewed his call for the USA, through the
United Nations, to bomb Bosnian Serb positions. The US Senate began
consideration of a symbolic vote (eventually approved) to permit the use
of force to ensure aid deliveries and access to the camps. Even high
Vatican officials, speaking unofficially for the Pope, noted parallels
between Nazi atrocities and Bosnian camps, and called for military
intervention 'to hold back the hand of the aggressor'.
A kind of hysteria swept through the Washington press corps. Few
outsiders believed State was trying to tell the truth. After I resigned
over policy in late August, senior Clinton campaign officials speedily
approached me regarding the camps issue, seeking advice on whether they
should pursue spy satellite records which the administration allegedly
ignored. I told them not to waste their time. And for years afterwards
journalists continued to ask me about 'the cover-up'.
On Wednesday 5 August, in an effort to quell the burgeoning
Boucher/Niles
'cover-up' story and regain control of the press, Deputy Secretary
Eagleburger's office issued a clarification of the State Department's
position, including an appeal for 'war crimes investigations' into
reports
of atrocities in Bosnian detention centres. Immune to his efforts,
extremely harsh press criticism continued to mount from every quarter.
On
Thursday, President George Bush issued an ill-prepared statement urging
the United Nations Security Council to authorise the use of 'all
necessary
measures' to ensure relief deliveries, but stopped short of calling for
the use of force to release prisoners. British and French officials
responded that his statement was a reaction to political concerns in the
USA. Meanwhile, further inflaming the public outcry, Serb forces
stepped
up their attacks on Sarajevo.
At almost exactly the moment of President Bush's call to arms, ITN's
pictures first aired. I do not know whether senior State Department
officials saw or learned of them that day, but I viewed them, to the
best
of my recollection, with a handful of colleagues on Friday morning or
possibly early afternoon, in the office of European Bureau's chief of
public affairs. We were unanimous, from our respective
mid-to-mid-senior
level vantage points, that the tape was ruinous for the Bush
administration's hands-off policy and could not but result in
significant
US actions. The notion that 'we have got to do something' echoed down
State's corridors.
At the start of the week possible critical policy shifts were dimly
perceived and highly tentative, but by week's end ITN's graphic
portrayal
of what was interpreted as a 'Balkan Holocaust' probably ensured that
those shifts became irreversible. Those shifts remain fundamental to
policy to this day. On 13 August the UN Security Council passed
Resolutions 770 and
771, which for the first time authorised the international use of force
in
Bosnia and promised to punish war criminals, the precursors of the
current
international occupation of Bosnia and the International War Crimes
Tribunal at the Hague. On the 14th, the United Nations Human Rights
Commission appointed former Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a
highly pious Catholic, as Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the
Former Yugoslavia, a position from which he tended to target only
Bosnian
Serbs. And, on the
18th, Britain reversed itself and pledged to send 1800 soldiers to
Bosnia
for humanitarian aid operations, the first step towards what became by
mid-September a UNSC approved, enlarged UN Protection Force mission in
Bosnia the seed that sprouted into IFOR and now SFOR.
Lost in the shuffle was any understanding of what was actually going on
in
the camps, who ran them, and why. Official Washington and the US press
almost completely ignored an International Committee of the Red Cross
report issued on 4 August, describing ICRC visits to 10 camps and their
finding of blatant human rights violations by all sides. And though the
Serbs did indeed, as the ICRC said, run more camps, it was not
disproportionately more. In the rush to convict the Serbs in the court
of
public opinion, the press paid no more attention to other, later reports
throughout the war, up to and after the Dayton agreement, of hellish
Croat
and Muslim run camps. Nor did the press understand that each side had
strong incentives to hold at least some prisoners for exchanges.
Medieval xenophobes reincarnated as high-tech cowboys, Western opinion
leaders fixated their fear and anger against the unknown. Defying
reason
and logic, a myth of a Serb perpetrated Holocaust, coupled with the
refusal to even acknowledge atrocities against Serbs, became
conventional
wisdom. This was the first instance and future model for post-modern
imperialistic intervention to determine the winner in a bloody civil
war.
Washington loves to go to war in August. The florid atmosphere of
August
1992, though not (yet) exactly a shooting match, comprised a more than
satisfactory propaganda war, vaguely reassuring those who lost their
bearings with the end of the Cold War, together with a new generation of
journalists who needed a fraught, dirty conflict on which to cut their
teeth. Bosnia made excellent sport.
It is no surprise, after all, that the temptation for news organisations
to try to change policy, when they knew how easily they could, was
overwhelming.
George Kenney resigned from the US State Department in August 1992, in
protest at the Bush Administration's policy towards the former
Yugoslavia.
This is his personal account of how the bogus interpretation which the
world placed upon ITN's pictures of Trnopolje camp helped to put
Washington on a war footing.
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
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