(english / italiano)
La eliminazione dei serbi dalla Croazia
1: Il ruolo attivo degli USA
A. Coverup at The Hague Tribunal - Mercenary Outfit on Contract to the
Pentagon behind 1995 Ethnic Massacres in the Krajina region of Croatia
(M. Chossudovski / Centre for Research on Globalisation / CBC Canada)
SULLO SPORCO LAVORO DELLA AGENZIA DI MERCENARI MPRI, AL SOLDO DEL
PENTAGONO, E SULLO SPORCHISSIMO LAVORO DI COPERTURA DA PARTE DEL
"TRIBUNALE" DELL'AIA
B. Was the US behind the single greatest act of ethnic cleansing in
Yugoslavia? (By Stephen Gowans)
ANALISI DEL RUOLO DEGLI USA NELLA EPURAZIONE ETNICA DELLA CROAZIA
C. U.S., Clinton accused of war atrocities (J.T. Kuhner, The Washington
Times 4/22/2002)
IL GENERALE GOTOVINA CHIAMA IN CORREITA' CLINTON PER LA EPURAZIONE
ETNICA DELLA CROAZIA
=== A ===
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO307D.html
www.globalresearch.ca
Centre for Research on Globalisation
Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation
Coverup at The Hague Tribunal
Mercenary Outfit on Contract to the Pentagon behind 1995 Ethnic
Massacres in the Krajina region of Croatia
www.globalresearch.ca July 2003
The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO307D.html
The Hague Tribunal (ICTY) has asked:
"to interview retired [Croatian] general Mirko Norac as a suspect over
two military operations during the 1991-95 war, a government statement
said.
Norac, 34, was sentenced in March by a Croatian court to a 12 years in
jail for organizing the executions of at least 50 ethnic Serbs
civilians in October 1991 near the central town of Gospic.
He is the highest ranking Croatian officer to be sentenced by a local
court for war crimes committed during the 1991-95 war with
Belgrade-backed rebel Serbs, who opposed Croatia's independence from
the former Yugoslavia.
The International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) wants
to interview Norac about a 1993 operation in the so-called Medak
pocket, in central Croatia, and a 1995 operation -- dubbed Storm --
which practically ended the conflict." AFP, 19 July, 2003).
On 21 July, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) acknowledged
the role of MPRI, a US mercenary Outfit on contract to the Pentagon in
Operation Storm, the 1995 ethnic massacres in the Krajina region of
Serbia. Since the 1990s, both the ICTY and the media have been involved
in a coverup of the role of the US military in the 1993 Medak pocket
and 1995 Operation Storm ethnic massacres.
Below you will find the following texts:
1. Transcript of CBS New Story: Croatian Atrocities being forgotten:
http://www.cbc.ca/MRL/clips/ram-audio/dyer1_wr030721.ram
2. Part of a text by Michel Chossudovsky on the role of MPRI, in
Krajina first published in 1999 as part of a larger study entitled NATO
has Installed a Reign of Terror in Kosovo, (
http://www.iacenter.org/warcrime/chossu.htm or
http://www.softmakers.com/fry/docs/chossudovsky.htm )
--- Croatian Atrocities being forgotten ---
CBC Report
21 Jul 2003 9:32:11 OTTAWA
Canadian officers say they are frustrated by inaction over a 1995
ethnic cleansing operation by Croatians against Serbs – one in which
the Croats may have had western help.
They documented numerous atrocities during Operation Storm, which was a
four-day campaign by the Croats to recover land held in central and
southern Croatia for four years by Serbian militias.
However, not one person has been arrested and brought before the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
More than 200,000 Serbs were expelled, and thousands were killed.
"Just amazing. You can see the holes in the back of the head," said
Capt. Gerry Carron, showing pictures he took to document the killings.
"We found people in wells," he said. "There was an old lady we found
head-first in a well. Why did they do that?"
Some top military officers said the expertise required to plan and
execute Operation Storm meant it couldn't have been done by the Croats
alone.
Croatia's American consultant
Fingers have been pointed at Military Professional Resources Inc.
(MPRI), a U.S. consulting company based in Alexandria, Virginia.
The company's Web site points to an article in which the Croatian
government praised the job MPRI has done for it – although MPRI has
denied involvement in Operation Storm.
"I don't think it was the Croats themselves that did that," said
Maj.-Gen. Alain Fourand, who commanded UN forces in the area of
Operation Storm, adding he suspected it was MPRI.
Maj.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, who will be going to Afghanistan to command
Canadian troops, also said he doubts the Croats themselves pulled off
Operation Storm.
"That was done by people who really knew what they were doing," he
said, adding he didn't think the Croats had the expertise.
Croatia was getting assistance in other ways. Argentina supplied
artillery used in Operation Storm – despite a UN ban and even though
their own soldiers were working there as peacekeepers.
Looking back, Carron said peacekeepers may have made things worse by
disarming the Serbs while the Croats re-armed.
Canadian officers say the involvement of the West could explain the
foot-dragging on prosecution, although the tribunal said the case is
largely circumstantial.
The Canadians also believe the Croatian commander of Operation Storm is
being protected by supporters in Croatia's government, and that not
enough diplomatic pressure is being exerted.
Written by CBC News Online staff
--- The Role of the MPRI in the Krajina Massacres ---
by Michel Chossudovsky
31 July 1999
This following excerpt was part of a text presented to the Independent
Commission of Inquiry to Investigate U.S./NATO War Crimes Against The
People of Yugoslavia, International Action Center, New York, July 31,
1999. The full text entitled: NATO has installed a Reign of Terror in
Kosovo, can be consulted at
http://www.iacenter.org/warcrime/chossu.htm or
http://www.softmakers.com/fry/docs/chossudovsky.htm
According to the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights,
Operation Storm resulted in the massacre of at least 410 civilians in
the course of a three day operation (4 to 7 August 1995).22 An internal
report of The Hague War Crimes Tribunal (leaked to the New York Times),
confirmed that the Croatian Army had been responsible for carrying out:
"summary executions, indiscriminate shelling of civilian populations
and "ethnic cleansing" in the Krajina region of Croatia...."23
In a section of the report entitled "The Indictment. Operation Storm, A
Prima Facie Case.", the ICTY report confirms that:
"During the course of the military offensive, the Croatian armed forces
and special police committed numerous violations of international
humanitarian law, including but not limited to, shelling of Knin and
other cities... During, and in the 100 days following the military
offensive, at least 150 Serb civilians were summarily executed, and
many hundreds disappeared. ...In a widespread and systematic manner,
Croatian troops committed murder and other inhumane acts upon and
against Croatian Serbs." 24
US `GENERALS FOR HIRE'
The internal 150 page report concluded that it has "sufficient material
to establish that the three [Croatian] generals who commanded the
military operation" could be held accountable under international
law.25 The individuals named had been directly involved in the military
operation "in theatre". Those involved in "the planning of Operation
Storm" were not mentioned:
"The identity of the "American general" referred to by Fenrick [a
Tribunal staff member] is not known. The tribunal would not allow
Williamson or Fenrick to be interviewed. But Ms. Arbour, the tribunal's
chief prosecutor, suggested in a telephone interview last week that
Fenrick's comment had been `a joking observation'. Ms. Arbour had not
been present during the meeting, and that is not how it was viewed by
some who were there. Several people who were at the meeting assumed
that Fenrick was referring to one of the retired U.S. generals who
worked for Military Professional Resources Inc. ... Questions remain
about the full extent of U.S. involvement. In the course of the three
yearinvestigation into the assault, the United States has failed to
provide critical evidence requested by the tribunal, according to
tribunal documents and officials, adding to suspicion among some there
that Washington is uneasy about the investigation...
The Pentagon, however, has argued through U.S. lawyers at the tribunal
that the shelling was a legitimate military activity, according to
tribunal documents and officials".26
The Tribunal was attempting to hide what had already been revealed in
several press reports published in the wake of Operation Storm.
According to a US State Department spokesman, MPRI had been helping the
Croatians "avoid excesses or atrocities in military operations."27
Fifteen senior US military advisers headed by retired two star General
Richard Griffitts had been dispatched to Croatia barely seven months
before Operation Storm. 28 According to one report, MPRI executive
director General Carl E. Vuono: "held a secret top-level meeting at
Brioni Island, off the coast of Croatia, with Gen. Varimar Cervenko,
the architect of the Krajina campaign. In the five days preceding the
attack, at least ten meetings were held between General Vuono and
officers involved in the campaign..."29
According to Ed Soyster, a senior MPRI executive and former head of the
Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA):
"MPRI's role in Croatia is limited to classroom instruction on
military-civil relations and doesn't involve training in tactics or
weapons. Other U.S. military men say whatever MPRI did for the Croats
and many suspect more than classroom instruction was involved it was
worth every penny." Carl Vuono and Butch [Crosbie] Saint are hired guns
and in it for the money," says Charles Boyd, a recently retired four
star Air Force general who was the Pentagon's No. 2 man in Europe until
July [1995]. "They did a very good job for the Croats, and I have no
doubt they'll do a good job in Bosnia."30
THE HAGUE TRIBUNAL'S COVER UP
The untimely leaking of the ICTY's internal report on the Krajina
massacres barely a few days before the onslaught of NATO's air raids on
Yugoslavia was the source of some embarrassment to the Tribunal's Chief
Prosecutor Louise Arbour. The Tribunal (ICTY) attempted to cover up the
matter and trivialise the report's findings (including the alleged role
of the US military officers on contract with the Croatian Armed
Forces). Several Tribunal officials including American Lawyer Clint
Williamson sought to discredit the Canadian Peacekeeping officers'
testimony who witnessed the Krajina massacres in 1995.31
Williamson, who described the shelling of Knin as a "minor incident,"
said that the Pentagon had told him that Knin was a legitimate military
target... The [Tribunal's] review concluded by voting not to include
the shelling of Knin in any indictment, a conclusion that stunned and
angered many at the tribunal"...32
The findings of the Tribunal contained in the leaked ICTY documents
were downplayed, their relevance was casually dismissed as
"expressions of opinion, arguments and hypotheses from various staff
members of the OTP during the investigative process".33
According to the Tribunal's spokesperson "the documents do not
represent in any way the concluded decisions of the Prosecutor." 34
The internal 150 page report has not been released. The staff member
who had leaked the documents is (according to a Croatian TV report) no
longer working for the Tribunal. During the press Conference, the
Tribunal's spokesman was asked: "about the consequences for the person
who leaked the information", Blewitt [the ICTY spokesman] replied that
he did not want to go into that.
He said that the OTP would strengthen the existing procedures to
prevent this from happening again, however he added that you could not
stop people from talking".35
THE USE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS IN CROATIA
The massacres conducted under Operation Storm "set the stage" for the
"ethnic cleansing" of at least 180,000 Krajina Serbs (according to
estimates of the Croatian Helsinki Committee and Amnesty
International). According to other sources, the number of victims of
ethnic cleansing in Krajina was much larger.
Moreover, there are indications that chemical weapons may have been
used in the Yugoslav civil war (1991-95).36 Although there is no firm
evidence of the use of chemical weapons against Croatian Serbs, an
ongoing enquiry by the Canadian Minister of Defence (launched in July
1999) points to the possibility of toxic poisoning of Canadian
Peacekeepers while on service in Croatia between 1993 and 1995:
"There was a smell of blood in the air during the past week as the
media sensed they had a major scandal unfolding within the Department
of National Defense over the medical files of those Canadians who
served in Croatia in 1993. Allegations of destroyed documents, a
coverup, and a defensive minister and senior officers..."37
The official release of the Department of National Defence (DND) refers
to possibility of toxic "soil contamination" in Medak Pocket in 1993
(see below). Was it "soil contamination" or something far more serious?
The criminal investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)
refers to the shredding of medical files of former Canadian
peacekeepers by the DND. In other words did the DND have something to
hide? The issue remains as to what types of shells and ammunitions were
used by the Croatian Armed Forces ie. were chemical weapons used
against Serb civilians?
OPERATION STORM: THE ACCOUNT OF THE ROYAL CANADIAN REGIMENT
Prior to the onslaught, Croatian radio had previously broadcasted a
message by president Franjo Tudjman, calling upon "Croatian citizens of
Serbian ethnicity... to remain in their homes and not to fear the
Croatian authorities, which will respect their minority rights."38
Canadian peacekeepers of the Second Battalion of the Royal 22nd
Regiment witnessed the atrocities committed by Croatian troops in the
Krajina offensive in September 1995:
"Any Serb who had failed to evacuate their property were systematically
"cleansed" by roving death squads. Every abandoned animal was
slaughtered and any Serb household was ransacked and torched".39
Also confirmed by Canadian peacekeepers was the participation of German
mercenaries in Operation Storm:
"Immediately behind the frontline Croatian combat troops and German
mercenaries, a large number of hardline extremists had pushed into the
Krajina. ...Many of these atrocities were carried out within the
Canadian Sector, but as the peacekeepers were soon informed by the
Croat authorities, the UN no longer had any formal authority in the
region."40
How the Germans mercenaries were recruited was never officially
revealed. An investigation by the United Nations Human Rights
Commission (UNHRC) confirmed the that foreign mercenaries in Croatia
had in some cases "been paid [and presumably recruited] outside Croatia
and by third parties."41
THE 1993 MEDAK POCKET MASSACRE
According to Jane Defence Weekly (10 June 1999), Brigadier General Agim
Ceku (now in charge of the KLA) also "masterminded the successful HV
[Croatian Army] offensive at Medak" in September 1993. In Medak, the
combat operation was entitled "Scorched Earth" resulting in the total
destruction of the Serbian villages of Divoselo, Pocitelj and Citluk,
and the massacre of over 100 civilians.42
These massacres were also witnessed by Canadian peacekeepers under UN
mandate:
"As the sun rose over the horizon, it revealed a Medak Valley engulfed
in smoke and flames. As the frustrated soldiers of 2PPCLI waited for
the order to move forward into the pocket, shots and screams still rang
out as the ethnic cleansing continued. ...About 20 members of the
international press had tagged along, anxious to see the Medak
battleground. Calvin [a Canadian officer] called an informal press
conference at the head of the column and loudly accused the Croats of
trying to hide war crimes against the Serb inhabitants. The Croats
started withdrawing back to their old lines, taking with them whatever
loot they hadn't destroyed. All livestock had been killed and houses
torched. French reconnaissance troops and the Canadian command element
pushed up the valley and soon began to find bodies of Serb civilians,
some already decomposing, others freshly slaughtered. ...Finally, on
the drizzly morning of Sept. 17, teams of UN civilian police arrived to
probe the smouldering ruins for murder victims. Rotting corpses lying
out in the open were catalogued, then turned over to the peacekeepers
for burial."43
The massacres were reported to the Canadian Minister of Defence and to
the United Nations:
"Senior defence bureaucrats back in Ottawa had no way of predicting the
outcome of the engagement in terms of political fallout. To them, there
was no point in calling media attention to a situation that might
easily backfire. ...So Medak was relegated to the memory hole no
publicity, no recriminations, no official record. Except for those
soldiers involved, Canada's most lively military action since the
Korean War simply never happened."44
Notes
23. Quoted in Raymond Bonner, War Crimes Panel Finds Croat Troops
Cleansed the Serbs, New York Times, 21 March 1999).
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Raymond Bonner, op cit.
27. Ken Silverstein, "Privatizing War", The Nation, New York, 27 July
1997.
28. See Mark Thompson et al, "Generals for Hire", Time Magazine, 15
January 1996, p. 34.
29. Quoted in Silverstein, op cit.
30. Mark Thompson et al, op cit.
31. Raymond Bonner, op cit.
32. Ibid.
33. ICTY Weekly Press Briefing, 24 March 1999).
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. See inter alia Reuters dispatch, 21 October 1993 on the use of
chemical grenades, a New York Times report on 31 October 1992 on the
use of poisoned gas).
37. Lewis MacKenzie, "Giving our soldiers the benefit of the doubt",
National Post, 2 August 1999.
38. Slobodna Dalmacija, Split, Croatia, August 5 1996.
39. Scott Taylor and Brian Nolan, The Sunday Sun, Toronto, 2 November
1998.
40. Ibid.
41. United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Fifty-first session,
Item 9 of the provisional agenda, Geneva, 21 December 1994).
42. (See Memorandum on the Violation of the Human and Civil Rights of
the Serbian People in the Republic of Croatia,
http://serbianlinks.freehosting.net/memorandum.htm
43. Excerpts from the book of Scott Taylor and Brian Nolan published in
the Toronto Sun, 1 November 1998.
44. Ibid.
© Copyright CBC 2003 For fair use only/ pour usage équitable seulement
.
=== B ===
What's Left
July 21, 2003
Was the US behind the single greatest act of ethnic cleansing in
Yugoslavia?
By Stephen Gowans
It was one of those peeks into what really happened that are
occasionally glimpsed long after anyone cares, like finding out after
the invasion of Iraq that the US and Britain had already begun aerial
operations to pick apart Iraq's defenses long before the invasion had
begun, at a time both countries were denying they had already made a
decision to go to war ("U.S.
Moved Early for Air Supremacy: Airstrips on Iraqi Defenses Began Long
Before Invasion, General Says," The Washington Post, July 20, 2003).
Those who saw the news reports may have raised their eyebrows, but the
reports were too obscure to have flitted, even briefly, across the
consciousness of most (even ardent) newspaper readers. The secret,
though technically out, remained a secret, lost in the deluge of other
news, bereft of any urgency for being about an event that had happened
months before.
So who's going to care about something that happened almost eight years
ago?
"In early August 1995," writes researcher Gregory Elich, "the Croatian
invasion of Serbian Krajina precipitated the worst refugee crisis of
the Yugoslav civil war. Within days, more than two hundred thousand
Serbs, virtually the entire population of Krajina, fled their homes,
and 14,000 Serbian civilians lost their lives." ("The invasion of
Serbian Krajina," NATO in the Balkans: Voices of Opposition,
International Action Center, New York, 1998.)
This was Operation Storm, "the largest single act of ethnic cleansing
of the Yugoslav civil war," according to Even Dyer, a journalist with
CBC Radio. "And yet not one person has been arrested and brought before
the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia"
("Croatian atrocities being forgotten: Cdn. Officers," CBC News, July
21, 2003.)
The popular mythology about the Yugoslav civil war is that it was the
Serbs, led by Slobodan Milosevic, who embarked on a program of ethnic
cleansing to create a greater Serbia. Milosevic is on trial at the
Hague Tribunal, facing genocide charges.
So it should strike a dissonant chord that:
the single greatest act of ethnic cleansing does not have the Serb's
signature on it (they were the victims); and the Hague Tribunal, which
professes to be impartial, has done nothing to
bring the authors of the atrocity to book.
The Tribunal says the evidence is circumstantial, but senior Canadian
soldiers, including a general who commanded peacekeeping forces in the
area of Operation Storm, say they suspect the real reason for the
Tribunal's inaction is that Western governments were in the background
pulling the strings.
For example, Argentina provided artillery to the Croats, despite a UN
embargo on supplying materiel and even though their own troops were in
Croatia as peacekeepers.
And a private US military contractor, Military Professional Resources
Inc (MPRI), headed by a former US Army Chief of Staff, likely planned
the operation.
Canada's Major-General Andrew Leslie says he doubts the Croats could
have pulled off Operation Storm themselves. "That was done by people
who really knew what they were doing."
Leslie's colleague, Major-General Alain Fourand, agrees. He says he
suspects it was MPRI that was behind the operation.
The MPRI Web site, according to CBC news, "points to an article in
which the Croatian government praised the job MPRI has done for it."
There is much that is misunderstood about the Yugoslav civil war, and
the Hague Tribunal.
For one, the Croats were a lot closer to the image of Nazis than the
Serbs were, though it was Serbs who were portrayed, for propaganda
reasons, as successors of Hitler's fascists. After the breakaway Croat
republic violently seceded from Yugoslavia in 1991, Franjo Tudjman, the
country's president, began to resurrect symbols of Croatia's Nazi
puppet state past.
According to Elich, "the Croatian fascist(s) murdered as many as one
million Serbs, Jews and Romani" during WWII.
And the Tribunal is funded in part by billionaire financier George
Soros, who has a long history of underwriting programs to destabilize
countries whose markets are closed, or partly closed, to Western
investment. Once a renitent government is ousted, and a Western
friendly regime is installed, Soros swoops in to buy up state assets at
fire sale prices. Soros is said to have his eyes on the massive Trepca
mining complex in Kosovo, worth an estimated $5 billion. The Hungarian
émigré spent $100 million to oust Milosevic, who presided over a
largely socially owned economy ("The billionaire trader has become
Eastern Europe's uncrowned king and the prophet of an 'open society."
But open to what?" New Statesman, June 2, 2003.)
The US and Germany began supporting secessionist forces in Yugoslavia
after the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union, when the
Yugoslav federation refused to be brought wholly into the Western
orbit. Former Communist countries were undergoing a spate of
privatization. But, according to Neil Clark, "Over 700,000 Yugoslav
enterprises remained in social ownership and most were still controlled
by employee-management committees, with only 5% of capital privately
owned." ("The quisling of Belgrade," The Guardian (UK), March 14,
2003.) The West aligned itself with Alija
Izetbegovic in Bosnia, who wanted to makeover the multi-ethnic republic
as an Islamic religious state, though Bosnia had a large non-Muslim,
including Serb, population. And Tudjman, the West's favorite in
Croatia, reeked to heaven of fascism and anti-Serb fanaticism. But both
were useful as instruments to tear apart the federation and deliver it,
piece by piece, into the hands of the West, and its corporate sector.
Later, secessionist in Kosovo would be encouraged, trained, and
bankrolled by the West, sparking a civil war that furnished NATO with a
pretext to launch a "humanitarian" war, and ultimately, the ouster of
Milosevic, working through its proxy, the Democratic Opposition of
Serbia.
The atrocities of August 1995 are now largely forgotten in the West,
and while they seem to be old news, they do shed light of recurrent
patterns that can be glimpsed today. The West's penchant for
precipitating crises that can be used as pretexts for intervention in
countries that seek to pursue an independent course hasn't abated. And
it's all too common for victims of Western-backed aggressions to be
portrayed as the aggressors themselves. North Korea, for example, is
now widely understood to be a hostile nation, even though it is the US
that shows every indication of being hell-bent on resuming a war with
the impoverished country it has never entirely renounced. Cuba,
Belarus, Zimbabwe, part of a complement of nations George W. Bush has
designated "captive nations," along with North Korea ("Bush blacklists
Zimbabwe, Cuba," news24.com, July 19, 2003) are portrayed as brutal,
repressive, regimes, though the reason they're demonized has
everything to do with their inhospitable orientation to the global
capitalist economy dominated by the United States.
That too was the Serb's offense, in the eyes of the West, which is why
there ever was an Operation Storm, why there's a Star Chamber at the
Hague, and why MPRI won't soon be facing war crimes charges.
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What's Left
http://www3.sympatico.ca/sr.gowans/ethnic.html
=== C ===
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:pTYCXOMXiDoC:www.washtimes.com/
world/20020422-7801660.htm+operation+storm+croatia+us&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
U.S., Clinton accused of war atrocities
Jeffrey T. Kuhner
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published 4/22/2002
The lawyer for a Croatian general indicted by the
war crimes tribunal in The Hague says his client's
case opens the possibility that former President
Clinton will be charged with crimes against humanity
for authorizing a Croatian military offensive in 1995
that recaptured territory from rebel Serbs.
"According to the unjust indictment brought
against my client, there is a basis for an
investigation and indictment of high-ranking Clinton
administration officials who oversaw Operation Storm,"
said Luka Misetic, the defense attorney for Gen. Ante
Gotovina.
The high-ranking Croatian general was indicted in
June 2001 by the prosecutor's office at the U.N. War
Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague
on charges that he exercised "command responsibility"
over the military campaign in which 150 Serbian
civilians were killed.
Secretly supported by the Clinton
administration, Croatian forces launched a three-day
massive military offensive — known as "Operation
Storm" — on Aug. 5, 1995 in which Croatia recovered
territories occupied by rebel Serbs following
Croatia's bloody drive for independence from
Yugoslavia in 1991.
Gen. Gotovina was the military commander of
Sector South of the operation, which was responsible
for the capture of the rebel-held city of Knin. He is
also accused of overseeing the ethnic cleansing of
150,000 Serbs who fled from Croatia during the
military offensive.
The United States provided military and technical
assistance to Operation Storm in order to block
then-Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's goal of
forging an ethnically pure "Greater Serbia."
The Clinton administration viewed Croatia's
military campaign as pivotal to tilting the strategic
balance of power in the region against Serbian forces,
paving the way for the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that
ended the war in neighboring Bosnia.
However, Mr. Misetic said U.S. support and
approval for the military offensive means the
indictment against Gen. Gotovina could lead to the
prosecution by The Hague tribunal of Mr. Clinton and
other high-ranking U.S. officials on charges of having
command responsibility for war crimes that were
committed during the operation.
"The theory against Gotovina can now be brought
against Clinton, [Assistant Secretary of State
Richard] Holbrooke and all the way down the U.S. chain
of command. On the prosecution's logic, they should be
indicted as well. They knew the attack was coming and
gave it the green light," Mr. Misetic said.
"The prosecutor's office is punting on an issue
that is clearly there. They are claiming that ethnic
cleansing took place during this operation. They are
claiming that by virtue of his position, Gotovina had
knowledge of war crimes. His knowledge was shared and
given to him by the Pentagon," he said.
Florence Hartmann, spokeswoman for chief
prosecutor Carla del Ponte, said the tribunal is not
challenging the legitimacy of Croatia's military
offensive but individual atrocities carried out by
Croatian soldiers whose actions fell under the
responsibility of Gen. Gotovina.
"It is not Operation Storm that is being
indicted, but the crimes that were committed during
and afterward," Mrs. Hartmann said.
U.S. support for the operation "has to be
established," she said. "I don't know that the
[Clinton] administration was involved."
Asked whether the prosecutor's office was
planning to issue indictments against either Mr.
Clinton or other administation officials, Mrs.
Hartmann said: "We have no comment because there is no
evidence to substantiate the charges of Gen.
Gotovina's lawyers. They can make their case with
evidence to the court."
Mr. Misetic dismissed Mrs. Hartmann's comments as
"blatant hypocrisy."
La eliminazione dei serbi dalla Croazia
1: Il ruolo attivo degli USA
A. Coverup at The Hague Tribunal - Mercenary Outfit on Contract to the
Pentagon behind 1995 Ethnic Massacres in the Krajina region of Croatia
(M. Chossudovski / Centre for Research on Globalisation / CBC Canada)
SULLO SPORCO LAVORO DELLA AGENZIA DI MERCENARI MPRI, AL SOLDO DEL
PENTAGONO, E SULLO SPORCHISSIMO LAVORO DI COPERTURA DA PARTE DEL
"TRIBUNALE" DELL'AIA
B. Was the US behind the single greatest act of ethnic cleansing in
Yugoslavia? (By Stephen Gowans)
ANALISI DEL RUOLO DEGLI USA NELLA EPURAZIONE ETNICA DELLA CROAZIA
C. U.S., Clinton accused of war atrocities (J.T. Kuhner, The Washington
Times 4/22/2002)
IL GENERALE GOTOVINA CHIAMA IN CORREITA' CLINTON PER LA EPURAZIONE
ETNICA DELLA CROAZIA
=== A ===
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO307D.html
www.globalresearch.ca
Centre for Research on Globalisation
Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation
Coverup at The Hague Tribunal
Mercenary Outfit on Contract to the Pentagon behind 1995 Ethnic
Massacres in the Krajina region of Croatia
www.globalresearch.ca July 2003
The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO307D.html
The Hague Tribunal (ICTY) has asked:
"to interview retired [Croatian] general Mirko Norac as a suspect over
two military operations during the 1991-95 war, a government statement
said.
Norac, 34, was sentenced in March by a Croatian court to a 12 years in
jail for organizing the executions of at least 50 ethnic Serbs
civilians in October 1991 near the central town of Gospic.
He is the highest ranking Croatian officer to be sentenced by a local
court for war crimes committed during the 1991-95 war with
Belgrade-backed rebel Serbs, who opposed Croatia's independence from
the former Yugoslavia.
The International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) wants
to interview Norac about a 1993 operation in the so-called Medak
pocket, in central Croatia, and a 1995 operation -- dubbed Storm --
which practically ended the conflict." AFP, 19 July, 2003).
On 21 July, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) acknowledged
the role of MPRI, a US mercenary Outfit on contract to the Pentagon in
Operation Storm, the 1995 ethnic massacres in the Krajina region of
Serbia. Since the 1990s, both the ICTY and the media have been involved
in a coverup of the role of the US military in the 1993 Medak pocket
and 1995 Operation Storm ethnic massacres.
Below you will find the following texts:
1. Transcript of CBS New Story: Croatian Atrocities being forgotten:
http://www.cbc.ca/MRL/clips/ram-audio/dyer1_wr030721.ram
2. Part of a text by Michel Chossudovsky on the role of MPRI, in
Krajina first published in 1999 as part of a larger study entitled NATO
has Installed a Reign of Terror in Kosovo, (
http://www.iacenter.org/warcrime/chossu.htm or
http://www.softmakers.com/fry/docs/chossudovsky.htm )
--- Croatian Atrocities being forgotten ---
CBC Report
21 Jul 2003 9:32:11 OTTAWA
Canadian officers say they are frustrated by inaction over a 1995
ethnic cleansing operation by Croatians against Serbs – one in which
the Croats may have had western help.
They documented numerous atrocities during Operation Storm, which was a
four-day campaign by the Croats to recover land held in central and
southern Croatia for four years by Serbian militias.
However, not one person has been arrested and brought before the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
More than 200,000 Serbs were expelled, and thousands were killed.
"Just amazing. You can see the holes in the back of the head," said
Capt. Gerry Carron, showing pictures he took to document the killings.
"We found people in wells," he said. "There was an old lady we found
head-first in a well. Why did they do that?"
Some top military officers said the expertise required to plan and
execute Operation Storm meant it couldn't have been done by the Croats
alone.
Croatia's American consultant
Fingers have been pointed at Military Professional Resources Inc.
(MPRI), a U.S. consulting company based in Alexandria, Virginia.
The company's Web site points to an article in which the Croatian
government praised the job MPRI has done for it – although MPRI has
denied involvement in Operation Storm.
"I don't think it was the Croats themselves that did that," said
Maj.-Gen. Alain Fourand, who commanded UN forces in the area of
Operation Storm, adding he suspected it was MPRI.
Maj.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, who will be going to Afghanistan to command
Canadian troops, also said he doubts the Croats themselves pulled off
Operation Storm.
"That was done by people who really knew what they were doing," he
said, adding he didn't think the Croats had the expertise.
Croatia was getting assistance in other ways. Argentina supplied
artillery used in Operation Storm – despite a UN ban and even though
their own soldiers were working there as peacekeepers.
Looking back, Carron said peacekeepers may have made things worse by
disarming the Serbs while the Croats re-armed.
Canadian officers say the involvement of the West could explain the
foot-dragging on prosecution, although the tribunal said the case is
largely circumstantial.
The Canadians also believe the Croatian commander of Operation Storm is
being protected by supporters in Croatia's government, and that not
enough diplomatic pressure is being exerted.
Written by CBC News Online staff
--- The Role of the MPRI in the Krajina Massacres ---
by Michel Chossudovsky
31 July 1999
This following excerpt was part of a text presented to the Independent
Commission of Inquiry to Investigate U.S./NATO War Crimes Against The
People of Yugoslavia, International Action Center, New York, July 31,
1999. The full text entitled: NATO has installed a Reign of Terror in
Kosovo, can be consulted at
http://www.iacenter.org/warcrime/chossu.htm or
http://www.softmakers.com/fry/docs/chossudovsky.htm
According to the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights,
Operation Storm resulted in the massacre of at least 410 civilians in
the course of a three day operation (4 to 7 August 1995).22 An internal
report of The Hague War Crimes Tribunal (leaked to the New York Times),
confirmed that the Croatian Army had been responsible for carrying out:
"summary executions, indiscriminate shelling of civilian populations
and "ethnic cleansing" in the Krajina region of Croatia...."23
In a section of the report entitled "The Indictment. Operation Storm, A
Prima Facie Case.", the ICTY report confirms that:
"During the course of the military offensive, the Croatian armed forces
and special police committed numerous violations of international
humanitarian law, including but not limited to, shelling of Knin and
other cities... During, and in the 100 days following the military
offensive, at least 150 Serb civilians were summarily executed, and
many hundreds disappeared. ...In a widespread and systematic manner,
Croatian troops committed murder and other inhumane acts upon and
against Croatian Serbs." 24
US `GENERALS FOR HIRE'
The internal 150 page report concluded that it has "sufficient material
to establish that the three [Croatian] generals who commanded the
military operation" could be held accountable under international
law.25 The individuals named had been directly involved in the military
operation "in theatre". Those involved in "the planning of Operation
Storm" were not mentioned:
"The identity of the "American general" referred to by Fenrick [a
Tribunal staff member] is not known. The tribunal would not allow
Williamson or Fenrick to be interviewed. But Ms. Arbour, the tribunal's
chief prosecutor, suggested in a telephone interview last week that
Fenrick's comment had been `a joking observation'. Ms. Arbour had not
been present during the meeting, and that is not how it was viewed by
some who were there. Several people who were at the meeting assumed
that Fenrick was referring to one of the retired U.S. generals who
worked for Military Professional Resources Inc. ... Questions remain
about the full extent of U.S. involvement. In the course of the three
yearinvestigation into the assault, the United States has failed to
provide critical evidence requested by the tribunal, according to
tribunal documents and officials, adding to suspicion among some there
that Washington is uneasy about the investigation...
The Pentagon, however, has argued through U.S. lawyers at the tribunal
that the shelling was a legitimate military activity, according to
tribunal documents and officials".26
The Tribunal was attempting to hide what had already been revealed in
several press reports published in the wake of Operation Storm.
According to a US State Department spokesman, MPRI had been helping the
Croatians "avoid excesses or atrocities in military operations."27
Fifteen senior US military advisers headed by retired two star General
Richard Griffitts had been dispatched to Croatia barely seven months
before Operation Storm. 28 According to one report, MPRI executive
director General Carl E. Vuono: "held a secret top-level meeting at
Brioni Island, off the coast of Croatia, with Gen. Varimar Cervenko,
the architect of the Krajina campaign. In the five days preceding the
attack, at least ten meetings were held between General Vuono and
officers involved in the campaign..."29
According to Ed Soyster, a senior MPRI executive and former head of the
Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA):
"MPRI's role in Croatia is limited to classroom instruction on
military-civil relations and doesn't involve training in tactics or
weapons. Other U.S. military men say whatever MPRI did for the Croats
and many suspect more than classroom instruction was involved it was
worth every penny." Carl Vuono and Butch [Crosbie] Saint are hired guns
and in it for the money," says Charles Boyd, a recently retired four
star Air Force general who was the Pentagon's No. 2 man in Europe until
July [1995]. "They did a very good job for the Croats, and I have no
doubt they'll do a good job in Bosnia."30
THE HAGUE TRIBUNAL'S COVER UP
The untimely leaking of the ICTY's internal report on the Krajina
massacres barely a few days before the onslaught of NATO's air raids on
Yugoslavia was the source of some embarrassment to the Tribunal's Chief
Prosecutor Louise Arbour. The Tribunal (ICTY) attempted to cover up the
matter and trivialise the report's findings (including the alleged role
of the US military officers on contract with the Croatian Armed
Forces). Several Tribunal officials including American Lawyer Clint
Williamson sought to discredit the Canadian Peacekeeping officers'
testimony who witnessed the Krajina massacres in 1995.31
Williamson, who described the shelling of Knin as a "minor incident,"
said that the Pentagon had told him that Knin was a legitimate military
target... The [Tribunal's] review concluded by voting not to include
the shelling of Knin in any indictment, a conclusion that stunned and
angered many at the tribunal"...32
The findings of the Tribunal contained in the leaked ICTY documents
were downplayed, their relevance was casually dismissed as
"expressions of opinion, arguments and hypotheses from various staff
members of the OTP during the investigative process".33
According to the Tribunal's spokesperson "the documents do not
represent in any way the concluded decisions of the Prosecutor." 34
The internal 150 page report has not been released. The staff member
who had leaked the documents is (according to a Croatian TV report) no
longer working for the Tribunal. During the press Conference, the
Tribunal's spokesman was asked: "about the consequences for the person
who leaked the information", Blewitt [the ICTY spokesman] replied that
he did not want to go into that.
He said that the OTP would strengthen the existing procedures to
prevent this from happening again, however he added that you could not
stop people from talking".35
THE USE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS IN CROATIA
The massacres conducted under Operation Storm "set the stage" for the
"ethnic cleansing" of at least 180,000 Krajina Serbs (according to
estimates of the Croatian Helsinki Committee and Amnesty
International). According to other sources, the number of victims of
ethnic cleansing in Krajina was much larger.
Moreover, there are indications that chemical weapons may have been
used in the Yugoslav civil war (1991-95).36 Although there is no firm
evidence of the use of chemical weapons against Croatian Serbs, an
ongoing enquiry by the Canadian Minister of Defence (launched in July
1999) points to the possibility of toxic poisoning of Canadian
Peacekeepers while on service in Croatia between 1993 and 1995:
"There was a smell of blood in the air during the past week as the
media sensed they had a major scandal unfolding within the Department
of National Defense over the medical files of those Canadians who
served in Croatia in 1993. Allegations of destroyed documents, a
coverup, and a defensive minister and senior officers..."37
The official release of the Department of National Defence (DND) refers
to possibility of toxic "soil contamination" in Medak Pocket in 1993
(see below). Was it "soil contamination" or something far more serious?
The criminal investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)
refers to the shredding of medical files of former Canadian
peacekeepers by the DND. In other words did the DND have something to
hide? The issue remains as to what types of shells and ammunitions were
used by the Croatian Armed Forces ie. were chemical weapons used
against Serb civilians?
OPERATION STORM: THE ACCOUNT OF THE ROYAL CANADIAN REGIMENT
Prior to the onslaught, Croatian radio had previously broadcasted a
message by president Franjo Tudjman, calling upon "Croatian citizens of
Serbian ethnicity... to remain in their homes and not to fear the
Croatian authorities, which will respect their minority rights."38
Canadian peacekeepers of the Second Battalion of the Royal 22nd
Regiment witnessed the atrocities committed by Croatian troops in the
Krajina offensive in September 1995:
"Any Serb who had failed to evacuate their property were systematically
"cleansed" by roving death squads. Every abandoned animal was
slaughtered and any Serb household was ransacked and torched".39
Also confirmed by Canadian peacekeepers was the participation of German
mercenaries in Operation Storm:
"Immediately behind the frontline Croatian combat troops and German
mercenaries, a large number of hardline extremists had pushed into the
Krajina. ...Many of these atrocities were carried out within the
Canadian Sector, but as the peacekeepers were soon informed by the
Croat authorities, the UN no longer had any formal authority in the
region."40
How the Germans mercenaries were recruited was never officially
revealed. An investigation by the United Nations Human Rights
Commission (UNHRC) confirmed the that foreign mercenaries in Croatia
had in some cases "been paid [and presumably recruited] outside Croatia
and by third parties."41
THE 1993 MEDAK POCKET MASSACRE
According to Jane Defence Weekly (10 June 1999), Brigadier General Agim
Ceku (now in charge of the KLA) also "masterminded the successful HV
[Croatian Army] offensive at Medak" in September 1993. In Medak, the
combat operation was entitled "Scorched Earth" resulting in the total
destruction of the Serbian villages of Divoselo, Pocitelj and Citluk,
and the massacre of over 100 civilians.42
These massacres were also witnessed by Canadian peacekeepers under UN
mandate:
"As the sun rose over the horizon, it revealed a Medak Valley engulfed
in smoke and flames. As the frustrated soldiers of 2PPCLI waited for
the order to move forward into the pocket, shots and screams still rang
out as the ethnic cleansing continued. ...About 20 members of the
international press had tagged along, anxious to see the Medak
battleground. Calvin [a Canadian officer] called an informal press
conference at the head of the column and loudly accused the Croats of
trying to hide war crimes against the Serb inhabitants. The Croats
started withdrawing back to their old lines, taking with them whatever
loot they hadn't destroyed. All livestock had been killed and houses
torched. French reconnaissance troops and the Canadian command element
pushed up the valley and soon began to find bodies of Serb civilians,
some already decomposing, others freshly slaughtered. ...Finally, on
the drizzly morning of Sept. 17, teams of UN civilian police arrived to
probe the smouldering ruins for murder victims. Rotting corpses lying
out in the open were catalogued, then turned over to the peacekeepers
for burial."43
The massacres were reported to the Canadian Minister of Defence and to
the United Nations:
"Senior defence bureaucrats back in Ottawa had no way of predicting the
outcome of the engagement in terms of political fallout. To them, there
was no point in calling media attention to a situation that might
easily backfire. ...So Medak was relegated to the memory hole no
publicity, no recriminations, no official record. Except for those
soldiers involved, Canada's most lively military action since the
Korean War simply never happened."44
Notes
23. Quoted in Raymond Bonner, War Crimes Panel Finds Croat Troops
Cleansed the Serbs, New York Times, 21 March 1999).
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Raymond Bonner, op cit.
27. Ken Silverstein, "Privatizing War", The Nation, New York, 27 July
1997.
28. See Mark Thompson et al, "Generals for Hire", Time Magazine, 15
January 1996, p. 34.
29. Quoted in Silverstein, op cit.
30. Mark Thompson et al, op cit.
31. Raymond Bonner, op cit.
32. Ibid.
33. ICTY Weekly Press Briefing, 24 March 1999).
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. See inter alia Reuters dispatch, 21 October 1993 on the use of
chemical grenades, a New York Times report on 31 October 1992 on the
use of poisoned gas).
37. Lewis MacKenzie, "Giving our soldiers the benefit of the doubt",
National Post, 2 August 1999.
38. Slobodna Dalmacija, Split, Croatia, August 5 1996.
39. Scott Taylor and Brian Nolan, The Sunday Sun, Toronto, 2 November
1998.
40. Ibid.
41. United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Fifty-first session,
Item 9 of the provisional agenda, Geneva, 21 December 1994).
42. (See Memorandum on the Violation of the Human and Civil Rights of
the Serbian People in the Republic of Croatia,
http://serbianlinks.freehosting.net/memorandum.htm
43. Excerpts from the book of Scott Taylor and Brian Nolan published in
the Toronto Sun, 1 November 1998.
44. Ibid.
© Copyright CBC 2003 For fair use only/ pour usage équitable seulement
.
=== B ===
What's Left
July 21, 2003
Was the US behind the single greatest act of ethnic cleansing in
Yugoslavia?
By Stephen Gowans
It was one of those peeks into what really happened that are
occasionally glimpsed long after anyone cares, like finding out after
the invasion of Iraq that the US and Britain had already begun aerial
operations to pick apart Iraq's defenses long before the invasion had
begun, at a time both countries were denying they had already made a
decision to go to war ("U.S.
Moved Early for Air Supremacy: Airstrips on Iraqi Defenses Began Long
Before Invasion, General Says," The Washington Post, July 20, 2003).
Those who saw the news reports may have raised their eyebrows, but the
reports were too obscure to have flitted, even briefly, across the
consciousness of most (even ardent) newspaper readers. The secret,
though technically out, remained a secret, lost in the deluge of other
news, bereft of any urgency for being about an event that had happened
months before.
So who's going to care about something that happened almost eight years
ago?
"In early August 1995," writes researcher Gregory Elich, "the Croatian
invasion of Serbian Krajina precipitated the worst refugee crisis of
the Yugoslav civil war. Within days, more than two hundred thousand
Serbs, virtually the entire population of Krajina, fled their homes,
and 14,000 Serbian civilians lost their lives." ("The invasion of
Serbian Krajina," NATO in the Balkans: Voices of Opposition,
International Action Center, New York, 1998.)
This was Operation Storm, "the largest single act of ethnic cleansing
of the Yugoslav civil war," according to Even Dyer, a journalist with
CBC Radio. "And yet not one person has been arrested and brought before
the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia"
("Croatian atrocities being forgotten: Cdn. Officers," CBC News, July
21, 2003.)
The popular mythology about the Yugoslav civil war is that it was the
Serbs, led by Slobodan Milosevic, who embarked on a program of ethnic
cleansing to create a greater Serbia. Milosevic is on trial at the
Hague Tribunal, facing genocide charges.
So it should strike a dissonant chord that:
the single greatest act of ethnic cleansing does not have the Serb's
signature on it (they were the victims); and the Hague Tribunal, which
professes to be impartial, has done nothing to
bring the authors of the atrocity to book.
The Tribunal says the evidence is circumstantial, but senior Canadian
soldiers, including a general who commanded peacekeeping forces in the
area of Operation Storm, say they suspect the real reason for the
Tribunal's inaction is that Western governments were in the background
pulling the strings.
For example, Argentina provided artillery to the Croats, despite a UN
embargo on supplying materiel and even though their own troops were in
Croatia as peacekeepers.
And a private US military contractor, Military Professional Resources
Inc (MPRI), headed by a former US Army Chief of Staff, likely planned
the operation.
Canada's Major-General Andrew Leslie says he doubts the Croats could
have pulled off Operation Storm themselves. "That was done by people
who really knew what they were doing."
Leslie's colleague, Major-General Alain Fourand, agrees. He says he
suspects it was MPRI that was behind the operation.
The MPRI Web site, according to CBC news, "points to an article in
which the Croatian government praised the job MPRI has done for it."
There is much that is misunderstood about the Yugoslav civil war, and
the Hague Tribunal.
For one, the Croats were a lot closer to the image of Nazis than the
Serbs were, though it was Serbs who were portrayed, for propaganda
reasons, as successors of Hitler's fascists. After the breakaway Croat
republic violently seceded from Yugoslavia in 1991, Franjo Tudjman, the
country's president, began to resurrect symbols of Croatia's Nazi
puppet state past.
According to Elich, "the Croatian fascist(s) murdered as many as one
million Serbs, Jews and Romani" during WWII.
And the Tribunal is funded in part by billionaire financier George
Soros, who has a long history of underwriting programs to destabilize
countries whose markets are closed, or partly closed, to Western
investment. Once a renitent government is ousted, and a Western
friendly regime is installed, Soros swoops in to buy up state assets at
fire sale prices. Soros is said to have his eyes on the massive Trepca
mining complex in Kosovo, worth an estimated $5 billion. The Hungarian
émigré spent $100 million to oust Milosevic, who presided over a
largely socially owned economy ("The billionaire trader has become
Eastern Europe's uncrowned king and the prophet of an 'open society."
But open to what?" New Statesman, June 2, 2003.)
The US and Germany began supporting secessionist forces in Yugoslavia
after the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union, when the
Yugoslav federation refused to be brought wholly into the Western
orbit. Former Communist countries were undergoing a spate of
privatization. But, according to Neil Clark, "Over 700,000 Yugoslav
enterprises remained in social ownership and most were still controlled
by employee-management committees, with only 5% of capital privately
owned." ("The quisling of Belgrade," The Guardian (UK), March 14,
2003.) The West aligned itself with Alija
Izetbegovic in Bosnia, who wanted to makeover the multi-ethnic republic
as an Islamic religious state, though Bosnia had a large non-Muslim,
including Serb, population. And Tudjman, the West's favorite in
Croatia, reeked to heaven of fascism and anti-Serb fanaticism. But both
were useful as instruments to tear apart the federation and deliver it,
piece by piece, into the hands of the West, and its corporate sector.
Later, secessionist in Kosovo would be encouraged, trained, and
bankrolled by the West, sparking a civil war that furnished NATO with a
pretext to launch a "humanitarian" war, and ultimately, the ouster of
Milosevic, working through its proxy, the Democratic Opposition of
Serbia.
The atrocities of August 1995 are now largely forgotten in the West,
and while they seem to be old news, they do shed light of recurrent
patterns that can be glimpsed today. The West's penchant for
precipitating crises that can be used as pretexts for intervention in
countries that seek to pursue an independent course hasn't abated. And
it's all too common for victims of Western-backed aggressions to be
portrayed as the aggressors themselves. North Korea, for example, is
now widely understood to be a hostile nation, even though it is the US
that shows every indication of being hell-bent on resuming a war with
the impoverished country it has never entirely renounced. Cuba,
Belarus, Zimbabwe, part of a complement of nations George W. Bush has
designated "captive nations," along with North Korea ("Bush blacklists
Zimbabwe, Cuba," news24.com, July 19, 2003) are portrayed as brutal,
repressive, regimes, though the reason they're demonized has
everything to do with their inhospitable orientation to the global
capitalist economy dominated by the United States.
That too was the Serb's offense, in the eyes of the West, which is why
there ever was an Operation Storm, why there's a Star Chamber at the
Hague, and why MPRI won't soon be facing war crimes charges.
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What's Left
http://www3.sympatico.ca/sr.gowans/ethnic.html
=== C ===
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:pTYCXOMXiDoC:www.washtimes.com/
world/20020422-7801660.htm+operation+storm+croatia+us&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
U.S., Clinton accused of war atrocities
Jeffrey T. Kuhner
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published 4/22/2002
The lawyer for a Croatian general indicted by the
war crimes tribunal in The Hague says his client's
case opens the possibility that former President
Clinton will be charged with crimes against humanity
for authorizing a Croatian military offensive in 1995
that recaptured territory from rebel Serbs.
"According to the unjust indictment brought
against my client, there is a basis for an
investigation and indictment of high-ranking Clinton
administration officials who oversaw Operation Storm,"
said Luka Misetic, the defense attorney for Gen. Ante
Gotovina.
The high-ranking Croatian general was indicted in
June 2001 by the prosecutor's office at the U.N. War
Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague
on charges that he exercised "command responsibility"
over the military campaign in which 150 Serbian
civilians were killed.
Secretly supported by the Clinton
administration, Croatian forces launched a three-day
massive military offensive — known as "Operation
Storm" — on Aug. 5, 1995 in which Croatia recovered
territories occupied by rebel Serbs following
Croatia's bloody drive for independence from
Yugoslavia in 1991.
Gen. Gotovina was the military commander of
Sector South of the operation, which was responsible
for the capture of the rebel-held city of Knin. He is
also accused of overseeing the ethnic cleansing of
150,000 Serbs who fled from Croatia during the
military offensive.
The United States provided military and technical
assistance to Operation Storm in order to block
then-Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's goal of
forging an ethnically pure "Greater Serbia."
The Clinton administration viewed Croatia's
military campaign as pivotal to tilting the strategic
balance of power in the region against Serbian forces,
paving the way for the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that
ended the war in neighboring Bosnia.
However, Mr. Misetic said U.S. support and
approval for the military offensive means the
indictment against Gen. Gotovina could lead to the
prosecution by The Hague tribunal of Mr. Clinton and
other high-ranking U.S. officials on charges of having
command responsibility for war crimes that were
committed during the operation.
"The theory against Gotovina can now be brought
against Clinton, [Assistant Secretary of State
Richard] Holbrooke and all the way down the U.S. chain
of command. On the prosecution's logic, they should be
indicted as well. They knew the attack was coming and
gave it the green light," Mr. Misetic said.
"The prosecutor's office is punting on an issue
that is clearly there. They are claiming that ethnic
cleansing took place during this operation. They are
claiming that by virtue of his position, Gotovina had
knowledge of war crimes. His knowledge was shared and
given to him by the Pentagon," he said.
Florence Hartmann, spokeswoman for chief
prosecutor Carla del Ponte, said the tribunal is not
challenging the legitimacy of Croatia's military
offensive but individual atrocities carried out by
Croatian soldiers whose actions fell under the
responsibility of Gen. Gotovina.
"It is not Operation Storm that is being
indicted, but the crimes that were committed during
and afterward," Mrs. Hartmann said.
U.S. support for the operation "has to be
established," she said. "I don't know that the
[Clinton] administration was involved."
Asked whether the prosecutor's office was
planning to issue indictments against either Mr.
Clinton or other administation officials, Mrs.
Hartmann said: "We have no comment because there is no
evidence to substantiate the charges of Gen.
Gotovina's lawyers. They can make their case with
evidence to the court."
Mr. Misetic dismissed Mrs. Hartmann's comments as
"blatant hypocrisy."