[ Questo articolo in lingua italiana:
http://www.resistenze.org/sito/te/po/se/pose4n17.htm
oppure
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/4108 ]
http://pilger.carlton.com/print/133403
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger revisits an
earlier 'humanitarian' invasion - in Kosovo. He describes the parallels
with the invasion of Iraq, especially the fraudulent justifications for
intervening in a 'genocide' that never was. : Pilger : 08 Dec 2004
HOW SILENT ARE THE 'HUMANITARIAN' INVADERS OF KOSOVO?
Muted by the evidence of the Anglo-American catastrophe in Iraq, the
international "humanitarian" war party ought to be called to account
for its largely forgotten crusade in Kosovo, the model for Tony Blair's
"onward march of liberation". Just as Iraq is being torn apart by the
forces of empire, so was Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic state that
uniquely rejected both sides in the cold war.
Lies as great as those of Bush and Blair were deployed by Clinton and
Blair in their grooming of public opinion for an illegal, unprovoked
attack on a European country. Like the build-up to the invasion of
Iraq, the media coverage in the spring of 1999 was a series of
fraudulent justifications, beginning with US Defence Secretary William
Cohen's claim that "we've now seen about 100,000 military-aged
[Albanian] men missing... they may have been murdered." David Scheffer,
the US ambassador at large for war crimes, announced that as many as
"225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" may have been
killed. Blair invoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World
War". The British press took its cue. "Flight from genocide," said the
Daily Mail. "Echoes of the Holocaust," chorused the Sun and the Mirror.
By June 1999, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams
began subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The American FBI arrived
to investigate what was called "the largest crime scene in the FBI's
forensic history". Several weeks later, having not found a single mass
grave, the FBI went home. The Spanish forensic team also returned home,
its leader complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become
part of "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because
we did not find one - not one - mass grave."
In November 1999, the Wall Street Journal published the results of its
own investigation, dismissing "the mass grave obsession". Instead of
"the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect ... the
pattern is of scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist
Kosovo Liberation Army had been active." The Journal concluded that
Nato stepped up its claims about Serb killing fields when it "saw a
fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians
killed by Nato's bombs ... The war in Kosovo was "cruel, bitter,
savage; genocide it wasn't."
One year later, the International War Crimes Tribunal, a body
effectively set up by Nato, announced that the final count of bodies
found in Kosovo's "mass graves" was 2,788. This included combatants on
both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the Albanian Kosovo
Liberation Army. Like Iraq's fabled weapons of mass destruction, the
figures used by the US and British governments and echoed by
journalists were inventions - along with Serb "rape camps" and
Clinton's and Blair's claims that Nato never deliberately bombed
civilians.
Code-named 'Stage Three', Nato's civilian targets included public
transport, hospitals, schools, museums, churches. "It was common
knowledge that Nato went to Stage Three [after a couple of weeks],"
said James Bissell, the Canadian ambassador in Belgrade during the
attack. "Otherwise, they would not have been bombing bridges on Sunday
afternoons and market places."
Nato's clients were the Kosovo Liberation Army. Seven years earlier,
the KLA had been designated by the State Department as a terrorist
organisation in league with Al Qaida. KLA thugs were feted; Foreign
Secretary Robin Cook allowed them to call him on his mobile phone. "The
Kosovo-Albanians played us like a Stradivarius," wrote the UN Balkans
commander, Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, last April. "We have
subsidised and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an
ethnically pure Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the
perpetrators of the violence in the early 1990s and we continue to
portray them as the designated victim today in spite of evidence to the
contrary."
The trigger for the bombing of Yugoslavia was, according to Nato, the
failure of the Serbian delegation to sign up to the Rambouillet peace
conference. What went mostly unreported was that the Rambouillet accord
had a secret Annexe B, which Madeline Albright's delegation had
inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the
whole of Yugoslavia, a country with bitter memories of the Nazi
occupation. As the Foreign Office minister Lord Gilbert later conceded
to a Commons' defence select committee, Annexe B was planted
deliberately to provoke rejection by the government in Belgrade. As the
first bombs fell, the elected parliament in Belgrade, which included
some of Milosevic's fiercest opponents, voted overwhelmingly to reject
it.
Equally revealing was a chapter dealing exclusively with the Kosovo
economy. This called for a "free-market economy" and the privatisation
of all government assets. As the Balkans writer Neil Clark has pointed
out, "the rump of Yugoslavia... was the last economy in
central-southern Europe to be uncolonised by western capital. 'Socially
owned enterprises', the form of worker self-management pioneered under
Tito, still predominated. Yugoslavia had publicly owned petroleum,
mining, car and tobacco industries, and 75 per cent of industry was
state or socially owned."
At the Davos summit of neo-liberal chieftains in 1999, Blair berated
Belgrade, not for its handling of Kosovo, but for its failure to fully
embrace "economic reform". In the bombing campaign that followed, it
was state owned companies, rather than military sites, that were
targeted. Nato's destruction of only 14 Yugoslav army tanks compares
with its bombing of 372 centres of industry, including the Zastava car
factory, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. "Not one foreign or
privately owned factory was bombed," wrote Clark.
Erected on the foundation of this massive lie, Kosovo today is a
violent, criminalised UN-administered "free market" in drugs and
prostitution. More than 200,000 Serbs, Roma, Bosniacs, Turks, Croats
and Jews have been ethnically cleansed by the KLA with Nato forces
standing by. KLA hit squads have burned, looted or demolished 85
Orthodox churches and monasteries, according to the UN. The courts are
venal. "You shot an 89-year-old Serb grandmother?" mocked a UN
narcotics officer. "Good for you. Get out of jail."
Although Security Council Resolution 1244 recognises Kosovo as an
integral part of Yugoslavia, and does not authorise the UN
administration to sell off anything, multinational companies are being
offered 10 and 15 year leases of the province's local industries and
resources, including the vast Trepca mines, some of the richest mineral
deposits in the world. After Hitler captured them in 1940, the mines
supplied German munition factories with 40 per cent of their lead.
Overseeing this plundered, murderous, now almost ethnically pure
"future democracy" (Blair), are 4,000 American troops in Camp
Bondsteel, a 775-acre permanent base.
Meanwhile, the trial of Milosevic proceeds as farce, not unlike an
earlier show trial in The Hague: that of the Libyans blamed for the
Lockerbie bomb. Milosevic was a brute; he was also a banker once
regarded as the west's man who was prepared to implement "economic
reforms" in keeping with IMF, World Bank and European Community
demands; to his cost, he refused to surrender sovereignty. The empire
expects nothing less.
First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk
http://www.resistenze.org/sito/te/po/se/pose4n17.htm
oppure
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/4108 ]
http://pilger.carlton.com/print/133403
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger revisits an
earlier 'humanitarian' invasion - in Kosovo. He describes the parallels
with the invasion of Iraq, especially the fraudulent justifications for
intervening in a 'genocide' that never was. : Pilger : 08 Dec 2004
HOW SILENT ARE THE 'HUMANITARIAN' INVADERS OF KOSOVO?
Muted by the evidence of the Anglo-American catastrophe in Iraq, the
international "humanitarian" war party ought to be called to account
for its largely forgotten crusade in Kosovo, the model for Tony Blair's
"onward march of liberation". Just as Iraq is being torn apart by the
forces of empire, so was Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic state that
uniquely rejected both sides in the cold war.
Lies as great as those of Bush and Blair were deployed by Clinton and
Blair in their grooming of public opinion for an illegal, unprovoked
attack on a European country. Like the build-up to the invasion of
Iraq, the media coverage in the spring of 1999 was a series of
fraudulent justifications, beginning with US Defence Secretary William
Cohen's claim that "we've now seen about 100,000 military-aged
[Albanian] men missing... they may have been murdered." David Scheffer,
the US ambassador at large for war crimes, announced that as many as
"225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" may have been
killed. Blair invoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World
War". The British press took its cue. "Flight from genocide," said the
Daily Mail. "Echoes of the Holocaust," chorused the Sun and the Mirror.
By June 1999, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams
began subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The American FBI arrived
to investigate what was called "the largest crime scene in the FBI's
forensic history". Several weeks later, having not found a single mass
grave, the FBI went home. The Spanish forensic team also returned home,
its leader complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become
part of "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because
we did not find one - not one - mass grave."
In November 1999, the Wall Street Journal published the results of its
own investigation, dismissing "the mass grave obsession". Instead of
"the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect ... the
pattern is of scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist
Kosovo Liberation Army had been active." The Journal concluded that
Nato stepped up its claims about Serb killing fields when it "saw a
fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians
killed by Nato's bombs ... The war in Kosovo was "cruel, bitter,
savage; genocide it wasn't."
One year later, the International War Crimes Tribunal, a body
effectively set up by Nato, announced that the final count of bodies
found in Kosovo's "mass graves" was 2,788. This included combatants on
both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the Albanian Kosovo
Liberation Army. Like Iraq's fabled weapons of mass destruction, the
figures used by the US and British governments and echoed by
journalists were inventions - along with Serb "rape camps" and
Clinton's and Blair's claims that Nato never deliberately bombed
civilians.
Code-named 'Stage Three', Nato's civilian targets included public
transport, hospitals, schools, museums, churches. "It was common
knowledge that Nato went to Stage Three [after a couple of weeks],"
said James Bissell, the Canadian ambassador in Belgrade during the
attack. "Otherwise, they would not have been bombing bridges on Sunday
afternoons and market places."
Nato's clients were the Kosovo Liberation Army. Seven years earlier,
the KLA had been designated by the State Department as a terrorist
organisation in league with Al Qaida. KLA thugs were feted; Foreign
Secretary Robin Cook allowed them to call him on his mobile phone. "The
Kosovo-Albanians played us like a Stradivarius," wrote the UN Balkans
commander, Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, last April. "We have
subsidised and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an
ethnically pure Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the
perpetrators of the violence in the early 1990s and we continue to
portray them as the designated victim today in spite of evidence to the
contrary."
The trigger for the bombing of Yugoslavia was, according to Nato, the
failure of the Serbian delegation to sign up to the Rambouillet peace
conference. What went mostly unreported was that the Rambouillet accord
had a secret Annexe B, which Madeline Albright's delegation had
inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the
whole of Yugoslavia, a country with bitter memories of the Nazi
occupation. As the Foreign Office minister Lord Gilbert later conceded
to a Commons' defence select committee, Annexe B was planted
deliberately to provoke rejection by the government in Belgrade. As the
first bombs fell, the elected parliament in Belgrade, which included
some of Milosevic's fiercest opponents, voted overwhelmingly to reject
it.
Equally revealing was a chapter dealing exclusively with the Kosovo
economy. This called for a "free-market economy" and the privatisation
of all government assets. As the Balkans writer Neil Clark has pointed
out, "the rump of Yugoslavia... was the last economy in
central-southern Europe to be uncolonised by western capital. 'Socially
owned enterprises', the form of worker self-management pioneered under
Tito, still predominated. Yugoslavia had publicly owned petroleum,
mining, car and tobacco industries, and 75 per cent of industry was
state or socially owned."
At the Davos summit of neo-liberal chieftains in 1999, Blair berated
Belgrade, not for its handling of Kosovo, but for its failure to fully
embrace "economic reform". In the bombing campaign that followed, it
was state owned companies, rather than military sites, that were
targeted. Nato's destruction of only 14 Yugoslav army tanks compares
with its bombing of 372 centres of industry, including the Zastava car
factory, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. "Not one foreign or
privately owned factory was bombed," wrote Clark.
Erected on the foundation of this massive lie, Kosovo today is a
violent, criminalised UN-administered "free market" in drugs and
prostitution. More than 200,000 Serbs, Roma, Bosniacs, Turks, Croats
and Jews have been ethnically cleansed by the KLA with Nato forces
standing by. KLA hit squads have burned, looted or demolished 85
Orthodox churches and monasteries, according to the UN. The courts are
venal. "You shot an 89-year-old Serb grandmother?" mocked a UN
narcotics officer. "Good for you. Get out of jail."
Although Security Council Resolution 1244 recognises Kosovo as an
integral part of Yugoslavia, and does not authorise the UN
administration to sell off anything, multinational companies are being
offered 10 and 15 year leases of the province's local industries and
resources, including the vast Trepca mines, some of the richest mineral
deposits in the world. After Hitler captured them in 1940, the mines
supplied German munition factories with 40 per cent of their lead.
Overseeing this plundered, murderous, now almost ethnically pure
"future democracy" (Blair), are 4,000 American troops in Camp
Bondsteel, a 775-acre permanent base.
Meanwhile, the trial of Milosevic proceeds as farce, not unlike an
earlier show trial in The Hague: that of the Libyans blamed for the
Lockerbie bomb. Milosevic was a brute; he was also a banker once
regarded as the west's man who was prepared to implement "economic
reforms" in keeping with IMF, World Bank and European Community
demands; to his cost, he refused to surrender sovereignty. The empire
expects nothing less.
First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk