BEOGRAD 23/3
NEW YORK 24/3


===*===

BEOGRAD 23/3


Subject: Meeting in Belgrade

Dear friends,

Please find below details of the meeting in Belgrade this
weekend and my presentation to the gathering.

Paul Davidson



INTERNATIONAL ROUND TABLE
NATO AGGRESSION - THREE YEARS AFTER
DEFENSE OF PRESIDENT MILOSEVIC - DEFENSE OF YUGOSLAVIA

· NATO tribunal as a weapon of
aggression and terrorism
· NATO in alliance with Al Qaida and
narco-mafia in Kosovo and Metohia
· Overcoming consequences of the
NATO activities in the Balkans

BELGRADE, MARCH 23, 2002

Organizers: SPS Council for International Relations,
Patriotic Alliance of Yugoslavia, Freedom Association,
Belgrade Forum, Center for Peace and Tolerance, Women Forum,
"Smisao" Theoretical Journal

Venue: Studentski Trg 15, Belgrade;
Beginning: 10:00 a.m.



PRESENTATION BY PAUL DAVIDSON

Dear friends,

My name is Paul Davidson. I am a co-ordinator of the
Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic in Britain. On behalf
of that committee I thank
the organisers of this conference for inviting me here, as a
representative, and for making me welcome.

This is an intense moment for me. I have come here to meet
with you, to listen and to learn. And we know that while we are
deliberating here,
President Milosevic remains behind those grey prison walls in
The Hague. Surely it must be understood that this is an
injustice. For those
conditions are not conducive to his health, nor to his ability to
conduct his defence. That is why we have called for his
immediate release

They say that my own country, Britain, is governed according
to civilised laws and procedures. But can they deny that were
those same laws
and procedures to be applied in this ?tribunal? in Holland, then
the defendant would be immediately released from prison
pending the outcome
of his trial. Dare I say it that were the norms of international
justice to have been applied in that court, the judge would have
found already that
there was no case to answer and would have dismissed the
trial.

And those who prop up this sham court with political and
military pressure and with grants of money are the same ones
who lecture us on the
virtues of justice and accuse the Serb people of being in denial
of its own history. While the very fortress in which they hold
President
Milosevic is itself a testimony to their own past. Can civilised
Europe be in denial of its own barbaric past?

How can this trial bring peace and reconciliation to The
Balkans?

It is clear that there is a cross-section of our population that
has deep suspicions about what our government and our media
tell us with regard
to the region of the Balkans. But I bring you greetings from a
much smaller circle that makes up our committee. Our
committee seeks to
educate to the doubters and to organise them in defence of
human rights to peace, progress and justice, which are
universal rights. The
preservation and enforcement of these universal rights is not
based upon the unilateral intervention of the big powers but
upon respect for
national sovereignty and international law.

And therefore our target audience is rather large. For issues of
national sovereignty and international law cut across the
political spectrum of
left and right. And additionally the conditions in which your
President remains imprisoned, even in illness, make this case
one of human rights.

It gives me no pleasure to say that my country is one that has
had much to do with the suffering of your people. It has been a
prominent member of the NATO alliance that has used brute force to deny
the Balkan peoples their rights to self-determination. Before it
lectures others,
my country has to face up to its own past and its present role,
so that it will cease to be in denial of it. That is the process we
have to engage in.

I want to express three thoughts to you. The first concerns our
group. It concerns the question of why we set it up and what is
our purpose.

We set up our defence committee in September 2001 shortly
after the abduction (or what the CIA euphemistically calls
"rendition") of
President Milosevic. We organised ourselves in response to
the fact that committees were being set up all over Europe and
beyond Europe
with the aim of defending President Milosevic. We founded our
committee with four clear aims:

1.To support the stand that President Milosevic continues to
take against the dismemberment of his nation.
2.To defend President Milosevic and all Serbia against the
attack of the unjust tribunal at The Hague
3.To expose the illegitimacy of that tribunal and fight for its
closure
4.To expose the context of NATO?s colonial strategy in your
region

We determined to work closely with the International Defence
Committee.

For let us be clear, NATO is the alliance of which my country
is part. We the citizens of Britain fund this NATO monster
with the taxes we pay
with every wage cheque we receive and with every purchase
we make. Can we be in denial of this?

With those four simple yet noble aims in mind we seek to
educate and organise that section of the public which deeply
questions our
government and our corporate media and hence which refuses
to be in denial.

Secondly, what can we offer you? What do we bring to the
table? We are not historians. We cannot feign to give an
account of your complex
history, even the contemporary history. We cannot assume the
posture of the historian who is able to say with apparent
certainty, that this and
this happened but that this did not happen and to say who is
responsible for what within the region. We are citizens of
Britain and cannot write
your history.

If a lie is told in our press we will attempt to expose it. If
confusion is sewn we will try to cut through it. But it is not for
us to define nor defend
any one version of your history. That is your job, not ours. Our
focus, which we share with you, is on universal values, justice,
freedom and
human rights, as they apply to the unjust, unfree and inhuman
treatment of Slobodan Milosevic.

It is our own history we have to write. We have to give an
account of our role in this injustice. For it was the British
government in slavish
obedience to our trans-Atlantic friends that has intervened
time and time again in your region. Intervened not to bring
peace and reconciliation
but to promote war and injustice. We in the committee will not
play that interventionist game, for any end.

And the so-called tribunal in little civilised and democratic
Holland is nothing more than the extension of this policy of war
by other means. As
for the British judge who sits there and listens to the British
prosecutor, the provocatively names Mr. Nice, these people are
nothing but vigilantes in wigs. Can we be in denial of this?

Thirdly, where has all this policy of war and hatred taken us?
We, the ordinary citizens of Britain have to ask ourselves in all
honesty, what have we got out of it?

After ten years of intervention do we live in a more secure
world? Three years after the bombing, where are the economic
fruits for the
ordinary people? Do we enjoy more trade? After fifteen years of
unremitting propaganda, are we more educated or more ignorent? Have we
learned anything knew, or have we merely unlearned that which
we once knew? Have we forgotten that the Serb people were
our allies during
six years of intense war against the Nazi tyranny. Can we be in
denial of that?

I tell you that the ordinary people of my land have gained
nothing from the destruction of yours. We come away the
poorer, the more illiterate,
the less cultured, the more barbaric, the less secure, the more
controlled and the less law-bound . . . than WE previously
were before this
interventionism of the New World Order swept away whatever
good sense we had.

And the court case at The Hague will bring us nothing. One can
only imagine that its true purpose is not to bring peace and
reconciliation to
the peoples of the region but to further the cause of animosity
and enflamed hatred. So, they keep stirring the pot.

Only where division rules can Empire rule.

Our mission can be therefore summed up in one simple phrase
- to rescue foreign policy from a treasonous government and
get OUR
government off YOUR backs. And this for our own interests as
it is for yours.

We in this committee have issued thousands of leaflets to our
fellow citizens, during anti-war marches and civil protest. In
the short space of
six months we have issued press statements, given TV and
radio interviews, published articles and letters in the media and
established our
own email list. We have held a public meeting of almost 100
people and raised money for the defence fund. We have made
tentative
progress to put questions in the arena of parliamentary politics.
We have come here to join with you now, today.

But I can honestly tell you that we have not done enough.

This will be a long fight and there are those of us who are
committed to it with our whole hearts It is in the name of those
that I speak when I
say, without hesitation

Freedom for President Milosevic!

Long live peace, justice and progress and true reconciliation
between the peoples!

Thank you

===*===

NEW YORK 24/3

Subject: [IAC]NYC-3/24: 3rd Anniversary US War Against
Yugoslavia
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 13:13:02 -0500
From: "Action Center" <actioncenter@...>
To: <ActionCenter.balkan@...>




CONTINUING WARS: 3 YEARS AFTER US/NATO BOMBING OF
YUGOSLAVIA

You are invited to a March 24 meeting to launch the new
IAC book:

HIDDEN AGENDA: U.S. NATO Takeover of Yugoslavia

Dear friends

As the U.S. vice president scours the world trying to gain
support for new U.S. military aggression against Iraq.

As U.S. planes rain thousands of tons upon the people and
the mountains of Afghanistan and the generals plan
incursions into Pakistan.

As the Empire run from Washington plants new military
bases from Kosovo and Bosnia to Usbekistan and
Tadjikistan.

As the Pentagon plans military tribunals to sentence those
they designate enemies from the Middle East and South
Asia, and as the Justice Department arrests young men of
the same background without reason or probable cause.

Ramsey Clark and the staff of the International Action
Center (IAC) invite you to a meeting to commemorate the
third anniversary of the beginning of the 78-day U.S./NATO
war against Yugoslavia and to show the relationship
between this war and the new eternal "crusade" of the
Pentagon.

Scheduled for 3-5 p.m. on March 24 at Ramsey Clark's law
office at 36 East 12th Street, 6th Floor, Manhattan, the
meeting will launch the new book published by the IAC,
HIDDEN AGENDA: U.S./NATO Takeover of Yugoslavia.

The meeting will include a discussion of the trial of
former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for alleged
war crimes, with a report from The Hague, where Milosevic
has turned the tables on his captors and put U.S./NATO
policies on trial.

The Pentagon generals and their public-relations
specialists presented the 1999 war as one to protect human
rights. They claimed that they would rebuild the damaged
Yugoslavia and help it enter the world of the "free
market." They even claimed they were helping Muslims.

Walter Rockler, the prosecutor at the post World War II
Nuremberg trial of Nazis, who died this March 8, had a
more accurate analysis of the 1999 war: "The attack on
Yugoslavia," he wrote, "constitutes the most brazen
international aggression since the Nazis attacked Poland
to prevent `Polish atrocities' against Germans."

Indeed, one can see from the unemployment and poverty
ravaging what is left of Yugoslavia, from U.S./NATO
military penetration of the Balkans and from U.S./European
Union domination of the Balkans economies today that all
the U.S./NATO excuses were lies.

Come join us to meet the editors of and contributors to,
HIDDEN AGENDA and discuss with Ramsey Clark and others
these important questions.

For those who cannot come, but would like to buy the new
book, more information is included below.

Sara Flounders and John Catalinotto, editors, HIDDEN
AGENDA
***********************************************

HIDDEN AGENDA U.S./NATO TAKEOVER OF YUGOSLAVIA

This book presents evidence gathered by dozens of
nongovernmental hearings in 1999 and 2000 that the NATO
countries engaged in a decade-long conspiracy to foment
war in Yugoslavia in order to split it up.

In the 40+ essays presented here, leading anti-war
activists and analysts from many countries take up The
Hague Tribunal, the occupation of Kosovo, media lies, war
crimes and the blatant illegality of NATO aggression.
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark writes on
"Blaming the victim." Former Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic, demonized in the Western press, stands up to
the NATO tribunal based in The Hague.

ALSO AVAILABLE:

LIAR'S POKER: THE GREAT POWERS, YUGOSLAVIA, AND THE WARS
OF THE FUTURE By Michel Collon. (Translated from the
French and just published by the IAC)

NATO in the Balkans: Voices of Opposition Selections from
Ramsey Clark, Sara Flounders, Sean Gervasi, Nadja Tesich
and others.

War, Lies & Videotape: How Media Monopoly Stifles Truth
Exposes the links between the government, the media and
the military. War propaganda and NATO's expanding role.

SPECIAL OFFER

Hidden Agenda, 408 pages, maps, photographs, index,
$19.95.

Liar's Poker, 208 pages (8.5x11 in.), maps, photographs,
index, $19.95.

When ordering both Hidden Agenda and Liar's Poker, pay
$29.90, plus postage and handling (25% discount!).

NATO in the Balkans: Voices of Opposition, 1998, 236
pages, indexed, $15.95, plus postage and handling.

War, Lies & Videotape: How Media Monopoly Stifles Truth,
2000, 288 pages, indexed, $15.95, plus postage and
handling.

Special rate on all four books covering the U.S./NATO war
on Yugoslavia: $49.90 (a $71.80 value) plus postage and
handling.

In all cases, add postage and handling--$5 for the first
book and $1 for each additional book.

For booksellers or associations interested in ordering 10
copies or more, please contact orders@... for
special discounts and shipping arrangements.

Buy online through http://www.leftbooks.com

Otherwise send pre-paid orders to :
International Action Center 39 West 14th Street, Suite 206
New York, NY 10011


http://www.iacenter.org
iacenter@...

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