Informazione
Un gatto nero s’avvicina al tavolo dove stiamo mangiando.
Occhi di pantera, gli intingo molliche nell’olio della carne arrostita e gliele tiro lontano, ché non si fida e non s’avvicina troppo. Mangia affamato. Di nascosto, gli tiro anche un pezzo di carne, che qui è cosa troppo preziosa da dare a un gatto. Siamo a Osojane, piccolo villaggio non molto lontano da Pec, in Kosovo, dove vivono poche famiglie serbe che ancora resistono nel Kosovo albanese. Sreten, del vicino villaggio di Kos, racconta di come le cose, nel bene e nel male, vadano avanti da dieci anni. Il Kosovo “indipendente” è solo uno dei tanti schiaffi alla loro voglia di resistenza. Ma ci vuole altro per mandarli via, per arrenderli.
Lui e i suoi amici in questa piccola kafana ci guardano diffidenti.
Come potrebbe essere altrimenti? Chi siamo noi, che arriviamo qui in questo afoso pomeriggio di luglio a parlare con loro, a chiedere cose, a scattare foto? Tanti lo hanno fatto, tanti hanno fatto domande, scritto risposte, scattato foto, filmato video, ma nessuno è mai ritornato.
Io mi presento, presento la mia associazione, racconto quel poco o tanto che abbiamo fatto e la voglia di conoscerli per raccontare ancora. Sreten vive con poche altre famiglie nel suo villaggio, ma intorno ce ne sono circa duecento. La scuola è ben tenuta, ne vanno orgogliosi. E ti dicono che hanno bisogno di tutto e di niente. Hanno bisogno di tutto perché la loro vita è tutta lì, in quella stanca e malmessa kafana, in un campo da coltivare, in una lezione da tenere, in un ambulatorio da mandare avanti fra mille stenti, nelle serate passate nella piazza del villaggio, dove i ragazzini possono giocare. Ma hanno bisogno di niente perché sono dieci anni che vanno avanti così e non sanno che farsene della solidarietà. Termino la conversazione con un “Speriamo di vederci presto” che sa di circostanza, anche se non è così nella mia mente. Solo il tempo saprà dire se questa speranza sarà stata reale.
“Una prigione a cielo aperto” è la traduzione delle ultime parole di Sreten che fa Beba, nostra piccola e splendida occasionale interprete che si ritrova a parlare di cose più grandi di lei. Dodici anni, Beba è qui con la mamma Jordanka che ha approfittato del nostro invito per tornare in Kosovo dopo dieci anni dalla fuga. Lei viveva a Osojane e da sei mesi abitava nella nuova casa costruita col marito Lazar, dove aveva portato le sue cinque figlie. Ora, Lazar è morto, così come Sanja, la figlia più grande annegata nel fiume Morava, a Kraljevo. Desiderava rivedere questi posti, Jordanka, ma la visita al cimitero dove sono sepolti la madre e un nipote diciassettenne ammazzato da terroristi albanesi è stata straziante per lei, già al mattino. Ma qui, a poche centinaia di metri c’è la sua casa, vuole rivederla, non si può dirle di no. E’ già tardi, dobbiamo percorrere il viaggio di ritorno, ci vorranno altre cinque ore, ma convinciamo l’autista e ci fermiamo ancora per dieci minuti. Lei ci mostra gli ettari di terra della sua famiglia e una casa costruita dopo, senza permesso, su quella che era stata la sua terra. La strada che portava alla sua casa è stata cancellata dal bosco che ha invaso e seppellito tutto. Allora, aggiriamo il piccolo colle e passiamo da dietro, in mezzo al bosco, passando fra terre che erano di suoi parenti. Da lontano, si intravedono altre case distrutte e razziate, facilmente riconoscibili... le case dei serbi.
Le forze non l’abbandonano quando, fra i rovi e gli alberi, si comincia a scorgere la sua casa. Man mano che ci avviciniamo, però, il suo cammino diviene stanco, rassegnato, preda di ricordi strazianti. Come il suo pianto quando entra in quella che era la cucina, passando fra rovi e arbusti. Non ci sono mura, tutte rubate, mattone dopo mattone. Restano in piedi solo i pilastri, i solai e la scala, ormai tutto staticamente precario. Fra le macerie, una piccola scarpa di bambina, forse appartenuta a Suncica o, forse, a Beba. Piange, Jordanka, come pure Beba, costretta a scoprire, fra lo spettacolo delle sue radici violate e umiliate, la memoria di se.
Vado al piano superiore, mi giro e rigiro in quella desolazione, cercando di coglierne il senso per restituirne qualcosa a chi non sa o finge di non sapere, con la mia videocamera. Ma arriva Jordanka, che subito mi mostra un legno mezzo marcito... “Alessandro, la culla di Beba!”, mi dice scoppiando in lacrime.
Jordanka rovista ancora freneticamente, cercando non si sa cosa, fra mattoni che infami sciacalli hanno spezzato per rubarne altri, insieme alle tubazioni, ai fili elettrici, al legno del tetto, alle tegole, alle piastrelle del pavimento, ai sanitari e a tutto quello che era dentro la sua vita. Ritrova due biberon, Jordanka ed è di nuovo pianto. Beba la segue come un’ombra nei suoi movimenti, quasi sapesse ogni gesto, ogni parola, ogni sua lacrima, come fosse donna adulta. E forse davvero lo è, prima del tempo, niente a che fare con le odierne e tutte nostrane pupe da premier e lacchè.
Scendiamo le scale, Jordanka cerca ancora.
“Attenti, qui può crollare tutto!”, ma niente crolla, solo Jordanka potrebbe farlo, da un momento all’altro, sangue che ribolle ed esplode negli occhi, invasi da rabbia e dolore, tristezza e piaga dei ricordi.
I rovi e gli arbusti di rosa hanno invaso il piano terra. Mi viene da prenderne dei rami, Jordanka mi ha insegnato un modo per riprodurle, per talea, lasciando sette occhi, togliendo le sette foglie, incidendo alla base il rametto e inserendo dei chicchi di grano. Il tutto va messo per cinque giorni nell’acqua e poi in terra. Ne prende anche lei, mossa dal mio stesso pensiero. Le dico che uno dovrà essere mio. E così, in un fazzoletto di carta, le dono quella spiga di grano colta nel vicino campo a Osojane, il suo villaggio.
Torniamo al pulmino dove ci aspettano Rade, l’autista e Miso, che ci ha accompagnato, riattraversando la macchia, che ha cancellato strade e sentieri, percorsi di memorie.
Beba porta fra le braccia degli stracci, vecchi vestitini di bambina e quel legno spezzato, sbriciolato, marcito ma tanto prezioso, della sua vecchia culla.
Mi offro di aiutarla ma dice di no e mi accorgo che piange, delicata. Mi dice che è triste per tutto quello che ha visto, ma pure che ringrazia per averla portata lì con la mamma.
“Sono triste ma pure felice, perché adesso ho visto...”
Si, Beba, un albero deve conoscere dove stanno le proprie radici per capire dove andare. E tu, ora, le hai conosciute. Sono qui nel Kosovo, a Osojane, piccolo villaggio vicino Pec.
E con la tua culla fra le braccia, puoi adesso tornare alla tua vita. La vita che verrà.
Alessandro Di Meo
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visita: http://unsorrisoperognilacrima.blogspot.com/
"Deve esserci, lo sento, in terra o in cielo un posto
dove non soffriremo e tutto sarà giusto..."
(francesco guccini - cyrano)
Un ponte per... associazione di volontariato per la solidarietà internazionale
Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, 132 - 00185 - Roma
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La lezione di storia si è tenuta davanti all'edificio del Museo, chiuso da diverso tempo e non funzionante. La targa commemorativa sull'edificio è illeggibile, le lettere sono sbiadite. Nella sua relazione il presidente del Centro ha evidenziato che questa casa è unica in Europa e che molti paesi vorrebbero averne una simile. La ragione è che il 4 luglio 1941 soltanto il popolo sovietico e i britannici si scontravano contro i tedeschi in Europa. Tra il fronte sovietico e quello britannico c'era il buio. Fu allora che in Jugoslavia si accese la fiamma della insurrezione, che come un incendio si sarebbe allargata su tutto il nostro paese e poi nel resto dell'Europa.
Clanovi Centra Tito, SKJ u Srbiji i SUBNOR Beograda posetili su Muzej 4.juli, koji se nalazi u kuci porodice Ribnikar( Boticeva 5 u Beogradu)i polozili buket cveca na spomenik partizanskom borcu ispred te istorijske kuce. Predsednik CENTRA Tito je zatim upoznao prisutne mlade clanove sa tokom i znacajem sednice Politbiroa CK KPJ, koja je odrzana u toj kuci 4.jula 1941. Najznacajnija odluka te sednice je bila da se pokrene oruzna borba protiv okupatora. Pripreme za tu borbu su bile vec uveliko izvrsene. U duhu odluke Politbiroa vec tokom meseca jula u svim krajevima Jugoslavije pocele su akcije partizanskih odreda.
Cas istorije odrzan je ispred zgrade jer je Muzej zatvoren vec duze vremena i nije u funkciji. Spomen ploca na kuci je necitljiva, slova izbledela. U svom izlaganju predsednik Centra je istakao da je ova kuca jedinstvena u Evropi i da bi mnoge zemlje pozelele da je imaju. Razlog: 4.jula 1941. samo su se sovjetski ljudi i Britanci tukli s Nemcima u Evropi.Izmedju sovjetskog i britanskog fronta bio je mrak. I onda se u Jugoslavija upalio plamen ustanka , koji ce se kao pozar brzo rasiriti nasom zemljom a kasnije i po Evropi.
Posle istorijskog casa prisutni su posetili Kucu cveca, polozili buket na Titov grob i posetili izlozbu o poklonima Titu u Muzeju 25.maj.
Il 17 giugno scorso un gruppo di persone, membri del Centro Tito, della LCJ in Serbia e di Nuova Jugoslavia, hanno partecipato alla trasmissione di Olivera Kovacevic "Si-forse-no" sulla TV serba. Il tema era: Tito e Jovanka Broz. I nostri membri hanno colto l'occasione per aprire la polemica con i principali ospiti della trasmissione: Rasim Ljajic Ministro per i profughi e Petar Simic pubblicista sulla nazione jugoslava e la riabilitazione dei criminali di guerra oggi in Serbia. Durante la trasmissione sono stati mostrati a milioni di spettatori i dati sull'inchiesta eseguita per questa occasione, dalla quale si deduce che Tito e Jovanka hanno lasciato un buon ricordo nei cittadini serbi; impressiona la risposta alla domanda: avete un ricordo buono o cattivo di JB Tito? La risposta è stata: 66% buono, buono e cattivo 13,1 %, cattivo 11,7 %, non lo so 9, 2 %.
Dan borca
Ima jedna stara kuća u Beogradu koju bi poželela da ima svaka evropska zemlja. To je kuća porodice Ribnikar u Botićevoj 5. U njoj je 4.jula 1941. Politbiro KPJ (Tito, Ranković, Milutinovic, Lola Ribar, Žujević, Djilas, Vukmanović) doneo odluku o dizanju ustanka protiv okupatora. U to vreme, Engleska i SSSR su bile jedine zemlje u Evropi , koje su se tukle sa nemackim divizijama. SAD još nisu bile u ratu. Prostor izmedju engleskog i sovjetskog fronta bio je u mraku. A onda se upalilo svetlo u Jugoslaviji - partizanski požar je brzo zahvatio celu zemlju.
Jugoslavija je dala veliki doprinos pobedi nad fašizmom.Nije to odlučilo ishod rata ali smo dosta dali. SAD su stupile u rat 8.12.1941. Englezima je laknulo jer su dotle oni i sovjeti nosili glavni teret rata.Tada je Staljin vec počeo da tera Nemce na Zapad.
Jugoslavija je maja 1945. stajala u stroju pobednika. Njen ugled u svetu bio je ogroman. Jedan je od osnivača OUN a kasnije i Pokreta nesvrstanih. Koreni toga su u dvorištu kuće Ribnikara.U njoj je dugo bio Muzej 4.jul i taj dan se slavio kao najveći jugoslovenski praznik. Danas je kuća muzej zarasla u korov.Četničko nedićevska vlada Tadić – Dinkić- Dačić bi je najradije porušila buldožerom. Tako je sa većinom spomenika NOB u Srbiji , koji su , inače, jedan od najvecih brendova Srbije , i mogli bi mnogo više koristiti i ugledu i budžetu Srbije nego sada.. Zašto? Jer podsecaju na Tita, KPJ i partizane. U njima nema ništa o četnicima i nedićevim žandarmnima.
Još jedna zemlja slavi 4.jul – SAD. Tog dana. 1776 američki Kongres proglasio je nezavisnost zemlje. Dotle su ih Englezi trtili. Nemam ništa protiv toga ali imam protiv ovoga : brojni američki čankolizi na čelu sa najvišim državnim zvaničnicima pohrlili su u dvorište ambasade da im čestitaju taj dan a dvorište Muzeja 4.jul zvrji prazno. Očito da se čankolizi osećaju više gradjanima Amerike nego Srbije!
Stevan Mirkovic, general u penziji i predsednik Centra Tito.
Poursuivant sa campagne de falsification, Reporters sans frontières accuse le président du Venezuela de vouloir interdire une chaîne de télévision privée d’opposition. En réalité, note Salim Lamrani, le président Chavez n’a pas son mot à dire en matière de licence audio-visuelle. par contre, la Justice a des griefs précis contre une chaîne qui, après avoir participé au coup d’État manqué de 2002, diffuse des appels au meurtre et des contenus racistes.
http://www.voltairenet.org/article160852.html
2) Les mensonges de Reporters sans frontières sur le Venezuela
Mi è stato segnalato questo articolo della Bbc del 10.7.2009, Venezuela imposes new media curbs. Curbs: imbrigliamento. Nell’articolo viene denunciato un attacco di Chavez alla libertà di stampa. L’articolo, che riporta unicamente i commenti delle opposizioni a Chavez, scrive che i canali Tv satellitari e via cavo considerati nazionali dovranno trasmettere i discorsi del presidente Chavez. Infine, ricordando quanto avvenuto a Rctv, scrive che questa legge sarà applicata a dozzine di enti televisivi internazionali.
La nuova legislazione con il termine "Tv nazionali" intende Tv che producono oltre il 70% all’interno del paese.
In precedenza, l’11.6.2009 il Washington Post scrisse un articolo analogo, a firma di J. Forero, dal titolo Chávez Raising Pressure On Defiant TV Network. Nell’articolo viene citata una giornalista della rete Tv Globovision, J. Briceño, cui è stato negato l’accesso alla sede del partito di Chavez. Da notare che, per il Washington Post, Globovision è la sola voce antigovernativa. Il WP ha però la bontà di ricordare che il governo venezuelano considera Globovision un media terrorista e sovversivo, accusando pubblicamente il suo direttore “of hatching assassination plots against the president, generating panic by covering an earthquake before state television issued an official report, and inciting Venezuelans to deadly violence”. Chavez e ministri hanno paragonato Globovision ai media rwandesi che aizzarono la violenza che portò al genocidio del 1994. Un po’ come radio padania da noi. Anche WP ricorda la vicenda di Rctv.
Naturalmente, si tratta di un insieme di alcune verità decontestualizzate e un mucchio di fregnacce.
Anche lo Knight Center, il Centro per il giornalismo dell’Università del Texas, si è occupato del caso, con qualche dettaglio in più. Uno dei massimi finanziatori del centro Knight è il Miami Herald, quotidiano che ha attraversato diversi scandali per i molti giornalisti su libro paga del governo Usa per la loro attività di propaganda anticubana, legata agli esuli anticastristi.
L’articolo del KC che a noi interessa di più è quello di I. Bachmann, 7/10/2009, dal titolo Chávez Government Threatens Cable TV, Proposes Further Radio Restrictions. Il Ministro venezuelano D. Cabello spiega che la nuova norma si applicherà, a partire dal 10 luglio, alle stazioni radio fuori legge. La proposta di legge per limitare il monopolio dei mezzi di comunicazione prevede che nessun privato potrà possedere oltre 3 stazioni radio. Infine, la Bachman riporta che Chavez "reiterated his call not to tolerate more "terrorism" by Globovisión".
Allora, procedo con ordine.
* * * ORDINE NEL FAR WEST RADIOTELEVISIVO * * *
La statistica corretta della distribuzione delle frequenze radio e tv la fornisce il sito sempre molto ben documentato a 360 gradi venezuelanalysis, nell’articolo di J. Sugget, 10.7.2009, Venezuelan National Assembly Discusses Limits to Concentration of Media Ownership:
i network radio fm+am sono 1188: private 55.3%, comunitarie locali 35.9%, pubbliche 8.8%;
le reti tv sono 108: private 60.1%, comunitarie locali 34.3%, pubbliche 5.6%.
Inoltre 27 famiglie controllano 1/3 delle frequenze radio-tv; 48 stazioni sono raggruppate sotto un unico proprietario - M. Granier, proprietario di Rctv.
La nuova legge mette ordine nel Far West radiotelevisivo (il "radio latifundo" come viene chiamato dal Governo venezuelano). Quello che si dovrebbe fare, e non si fa, ad esempio, in Italia.
La legge proposta come riforma delle Tlc aumenta il numero di provider via cavo sotto la giurisdizione delConatel (l’Authority per le Tlc). Le Tv via cavo nazionali dovranno registrarsi presso il Conatel, pagare le tasse e sottostare alle leggi del paese. Attualmente, molte stazioni via cavo sono registrate come internazionali, evitando le tasse e le leggi del paese.
La norma sarà discussa per un mese prima di essere votata dal parlamento. Attualmente, sono 240 le stazioni radio complessive (il 20.2%) che non hanno regolarizzato la loro posizione entro la deadline del 2.6.2009: a queste, probabilmente non verrà rinnovata la concessione e le frequenze saranno recuperate dallo stato e dalle comunità.
* * * MEDIA EVERSORI …ED EVASORI: CON L’APPOGGIO DI RSF, UN TERREMOTO * * *
Il giornalista di venezuelanalysis T. Pearson, il 6.6.2009, nell’articolo Venezuelan Government Fines Opposition TV Globovision, segnala come la Suprema corte ha sancito in via definitiva che la maggiore Tv opposta a Chavez, Globovision, dovrà pagare:
una multa di 0.77 milioni di Us$ comminatale dal Conatel nel dicembre 2003 per uso non autorizzato delle frequenze radio;
una multa di 2.3 milioni di Us$ per evasione fiscale - Globovision trasmise messaggi pubblicitari di organizzazioni politiche (di opposizione) senza pagare le rispettive tasse. Analoghe misure furono prese anche per Rctv, Televen e Venevision: solo le ultime due pagarono.
Riguardo alla prima multa, Globovision è accusata di violare l’Art.29 della Legge sulla Responsabilità Sociale di Radio e Tv (legge Resorte),
which sanctions media outlets that ‘promote, justify or incite war; promote, justify or incite disruption of public order.
Fra dicembre 2002 e gennaio 2003, ai tempi del lunghissimo sciopero dei lavoratori del settore idrocarburi, finanziato -come poi si scoprì- dalla Cia, Globovision sospese tutta la sua programmazione per trasmettere in maniera continuativa messaggi anti-governativi, incitando alla sovversione.
Questi stessi fatti vengono raccontati in un altro articolo di J. Sugget, 13.5.2009, Venezuela Investigates Radio and Television Stations for Irresponsible Behavior:
It is one thing to inform about a seismic movement, and another thing to use a natural event to try to generate panic and terror in people and take advantage of it politically [...] Globovision are repeat offenders in media terrorism against Venezuelan democracy and we are not going to sit with our arms crossed.
Il contenuto del passaggio precedente si riferisce sia alla vicenda del terremoto del 4 maggio 2009, che ai continui incitamenti alla violenza contro il governo legittimo venezuelano.
L’intervento di S. Lamrani, 26.6.2009, Reporters Without Borders’ lies about Venezuela, come nello stile del professore e giornalista francese sempre molto dettagliato e ben documentato, parla, fra le altre cose, della vicenda del terremoto.
All’alba del 4.5.2009 si ebbero due scosse sismiche di forte intensità, ad un’ora di distanza l’una dall’altra, la prima a Maracaibo e la seconda a Caracas. Non ci furono né vittime né danni strutturali. Il governo mise tempestivamente in atto le adeguate misure di controllo, protezione ed informazione della popolazione, chiedendo allo stesso tempo a tutte le radio e tutte le Tv di tranquillizzare la popolazione stessa.
Globovision si comportò in modo anomalo ed eversivo. Intervenne direttamente il direttore della rete, riportando dettagli del sisma del tutto errati, spargendo il panico fra la popolazione e "denunciando" il governo di trasmettere un messaggio di paura e terrore:
All we can do is be patient, be very patient waiting for our authorities to inform us, to give us precise information, give us true information of what is happening at this moment because we do not have anyone to go to. […] At this moment those official sources who provide so much propaganda ought to be informing the public about what is happening, rather than us having to go to the U.S. meteorological service to inform the people that there has been an earthquake.
La vicenda del terremoto è esemplare del comportamento dei media venezuelani perfino in situazioni di allarme naturale in cui lo scontro politico non c’entra nulla, ma è quella che darà il via a tutta la polemica contro Chavez. Infatti, niente poco di meno Reporters Sans Frontieres tenne bordone a Globovision, scrivendo una lettera aperta che scuscitò scalpore e sentimenti antichavisti in tutto il mondo:
In what way does reporting on an earthquake, however poorly, fit within this definition of an offense?
(RSF, 28.6.2009: Open letter to President Hugo Chavez to protest about official hounding of Globovisión.)
RSF è un’associazione no profit che però riceve circa 4 milioni di Us$ l’anno di finanziamenti da multinazionali Usa quali Saatchi & Saatchi, Publicis (concessionaria delle strategie di promozione delle forze armate Usa), Coca Cola, Bacardi (che a Miami finanzia i violenti gruppi anticastristi). Inoltre, come ricorda G. Minà, 10.12.2007, I tanti modi di essere "Senza frontiere", RSF riceve finanziamenti minori anche dalla Cia, tramite il Ned.
Per questi motivi e per la sua doppia morale -R. Menard, il direttore, giustificò moralmente le torture di Abu Grahib e tutte le altre malefatte Usa-Cia in giro per il mondo, mentre sistematicamente ha attaccato, ed attacca, Cuba, Venezuela ed alleati- ad RSF venne sospeso dall’Onu, nel 2003, il suo rapporto di collaborazione "per atti incompatibili con i principi e gli obiettivi della carta delle Nazioni Unite".
Anche Lamrani, nel suo già citato articolo del giugno 2009,
come anche in S. Lamrani, 2.7.2009, Médias de la haine - Reporters sans frontières contre la démocratie vénézuélienne, ed in S. Lamrani, 19.6.2009, Les mensonges de Reporters sans frontières sur le Venezuela,
fa un’accurata analisi delle menzogne (recenti) di RSF -alcune davvero pacchiane, come ad esempio che Globovision è l’unico media di opposizione- riguardo il Venezuela. Lascio a voi l’approfondimento. Il problema è che queste stesse menzogne divengono verità per i nostri media.
* * * RIASSUNTO DELLA VICENDA DI RCTV, 2002-2006 * * *
Nel 2006 a Rctv, la rete Tv venezuelana con maggiore "anzianità di servizio", il Conatel e la Giustizia (non l’esecutivo) non rinnovarono la (ventennale) concessione delle frequenze, in base ad una legge precedente all’ascesa di Chavez al potere, estesa nel 2001.
La Ley Orgánica de Telecomunicaciones afferma che una licenza può non essere ratificata nel caso sussistano gravissimi motivi. In particolare, l’Art. 171 stabilisce che "a chiunque utilizzi i servizi per i quali ha ricevuto un’abilitazione, allo scopo di commettere crimini", verrà revocata la licenza; dopo cinque anni può nuovamente farne richiesta.
Sia Rctv che Globovision parteciparono attivamente, tramite suoi dirigenti (gli imprenditori parteciparono ai finanziamenti del golpe), anchorman e giornalisti, al golpe del 2002. Diffusero continui appelli all’assassinio di Chavez ed all’uccisione dei suoi sostenitori, infarcendo ogni loro programma, dai talk show ai Tg, di contenuti razzisti verso Chavez e gli indios.
Ebbene, Chavez non chiuse nessuna delle due Tv – non ne aveva il potere, né lo ha tuttora. Rctv poté trasmettere in chiaro per altri quattro anni; al momento dello scadere della licenza, non le fu rinnovata. OggiRctv trasmette sul satellite, diffusamente in tutto il paese, mentre le sue frequenze in chiaro passarono a Tves - una Tv indipendente finanziata da soldi pubblici.
Globovision ancora oggi può trasmettere in chiaro.
Ora vi chiedo: un golpe e l’istigazione all’omicidio non sono due motivazioni sufficientemente gravi? Quale paese democratico accetterebbe il comportamento delle due Tv? Ad esempio, a chi, giustamente, si infiamma tanto perché Tg4 è una rete abusiva e dovrebbe essere sul satellite, chiedo: perché Tg4 sì ed Rctv, per motivi ben più gravi, no? Questo è l’atteggiamento ambivalente, la doppia morale, de la Repubblica verso il Venezuela.
Se vi interessa il mio parere, Chavez avrebbe avuto tutto il sacrosanto diritto di promulgare un decreto legge straordinario per ritirare immediatamente le concessioni ad entrambe le Tv, nel 2002, mentre dirigenti ed anchorman responsabili sarebbero dovuti finire in galera. Ma fu molto più liberale di quanto probabilmente sarebbe stato un qualsiasi governo occidentale.
Nota: a giugno 2006, prima del non rinnovo della concessione a Rctv, il 97% dei canali Tv, il 99% delle radio ed il 100% dei quotidiani erano in mano dei privati. Oggi la situazione è un po’ cambiata, ma siamo lontani da un reale pluralismo - di fatto, il governo ha voce solo tramite Telesur, dal luglio 2006, una Tv di respiro Pan-americano.
* * * GLOBOVISION (COME PRIMA RCTV): ASSASSINATE IL PRESIDENTE * * *
Oggi si urla alla censura verso Globovision, senza capire però in quale forma si attuerebbe. Per farle pagare, con gli interessi, le sue tasse evase? Per costringerla a rettificare le palesi ed abnormi falsità?
Ecco quindi l’altro punto della questione: ora Globovision, pare (ma non ho trovato conferma da altri giornali che non siano quelli "occidentali"), dovrà trasmettere i messaggi del Presidente della Repubblica, restando salva, naturalmente, la libertà di linea editoriale della testata - ma almeno non sarà più totalmente senza alcun contraddittorio.
Gli esempi del grave comportamento di Globovision sono numerosissimi.
J. Suggett, 8/5/2009/, Venezuelan Supreme Court Denies Restraining Order Against RCTV and Globovision, ricorda come Globovision accusò il governo venezuelano di supportare le Farc colombiane: l’accusa era falsa ma, ricorderete, riempì le pagine dei nostri quotidiani.
J. Suggett, 16/10/2008, Venezuelan Newspaper Editor Investigated for Inciting President’s Assassination, riporta un fatto gravissimo: il 15.10.2008 il noto giornalista venezuelano Rafael Poleo incitò all’assassinio del presidente Chavez dagli schermi di Globovision, augurandogli la stessa fine di Mussolini. L’incredibile fatto, ricordato anche da Lamrani nel suo già citato articolo del giugno 2009, in cui riporta anche la trascrizione parola per parola, è presente anche su youtube (Chávez y Mussolini, 13.10.2008).
Naturalmente RSF discolpa Globovision. Questo episodio non fu il primo né l’ultimo - né da parte di Globovision, né da parte di Rctv. E già nel maggio 2007, Marcel Granier di Rctv incoraggiò l’assassinio di Chavez.
Se siete interessati a sapere qualcosa di più sugli eventi del golpe del 2002 e visionare qualche filmato (che comprenda anche l’atteggiamento dei media), andate nel sito di arcoiris.tv e cercate i documentari: Puente Llaguno - Documentario sul colpo di stato dell’ 11 Aprile 2002 e La Rivoluzione non sarà teletrasmessa.
Sempre Lamrani riporta tutta una serie di passaggi nelle trasmissioni di Globovision - eccone alcune tradotte:
"Qualsiasi asino imbastato ne sa più sul petrolio che Chávez"
"Gli imbecilli hanno votato per Chávez" (non vi ricorda qualcosa?)
"I chavisti non pensano, ragliano"
"I sindaci chavistes hanno bisogno soltanto di una mela per essere maiali"
"Cosa si spetta per agire? Ora basta!"
"… il suo desiderio [del regime] di ridurci in schiavitù"
Il 28.2.2004, Globovision ha diffuso un video di un discorso di Chávez, silenziando l’audio originale per sostituirlo con grida di scimmia ed altri di animali selvaggi, in un chiaro riferimento razzista.
Infine, per legarsi agli attuali fatti di cronaca in Honduras, T. Pearson, 1/7/2009, Venezuelan Opposition Deny Honduran Coup, segnala come tutti i media venezuelani in mano all’opposizione, giustificano ed esaltano il colpo di stato onduregno, legandolo alla necessità di contrastare i nemici dell’orco Chavez e, naturalmente, augurandosi un’analoga fine per quest’ultimo.
In quale paese del mondo tutto questo sarebbe tollerato così a lungo ?
Nel Venezuela di Chavez.. che però, viene descritto dai nostri media come un dittatore spietato.
* * * ULTIME NOTE * * *
Sull’atteggiamento dei media venezuelani rispetto a Chavez, cito a mo’ di esempio G. Grandin della NY University (Democracy Now!, 21.9.2006 e 4.10.2006):
[The Venezuelan] media is chronically obsessed with Chávez, and critical in a way that would be completely alien for most US observers." After the media-backed 2002 coup attempt, Venezuela passed ’social responsibility’ legislation regulating the media but has largely declined to enforce it.
Sulle implicazioni nordamericane nel golpe del 2002, oltre al sito venezuelafoia, a G. Minà e G. Carotenuto con i loro articoli di Latinoamerica, a S. Lamrani su Reseau Voltaire, si può leggere un sobrio articolo del New York Times: J. Forero, 3.12.2004, Documents Show C.I.A. Knew Of a Coup Plot in Venezuela.
In definitiva, l’unico punto su cui gli articoli della "nostra" stampa mi trova d’accordo, è la riprovazione per l’allontanamento della Briceño, anche se -come al solito- i termini della faccenda non sono chiari.
The Bundeswehr is back to the World Military Stage
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/64608 )
Stop NATO - July 18, 2009
Germany And NATO's Nucleus Nexus
The reunification of Germany and the start of NATO's post-Cold War expansion, drive east and beginning of its transformation into a global military force occurred on the same day, October 3, 1990.
On that date East Germany was absorbed into the Federal Republic and simultaneously into NATO, the first of thirteen additions to the bloc from that time to the present year.
United since 1990 within its pre-1938 borders, Germany has cast aside most all post-Potsdam Agreement and Nuremberg Principles constraints and become a military power engaged in wars on the European and Asian continents (Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan since 2001) and naval surveillance and interdiction operations in the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
NATO membership was the gateway for Germany to send troops, warplanes and warships outside its borders and overseas for the first time since the end of World War II; to date to Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Sudan and off the coast of Somalia as well as deploying AWACS, Tornado warplanes and tanks to the US since the activation of NATO's Article 5 in 2001. The latter also led to the participation of the German Navy in the nearly eight-year-old Operation Active Endeavor monitoring and interdiction patrols throughout the Mediterranean Sea.
The nation has the third largest military budget of all European states, only surpassed by Britain and France. Germany's military spending is larger than Russia's, for example, even after German spending dropped and Russian increased last year. The numbers were $46.8 and $40 billion, respectively.
It also has the third largest army of any exclusively European state (Russia and Turkey excluded from this category) with some quarter of a million troops.
Though not itself a nuclear power, Germany hosts an undisclosed (for apparent reasons) number of the estimated 350-480 US nuclear warheads deployed in Europe to this day under NATO arrangements.
According to one report of two years ago "At least 20 US atomic warheads are reportedly still deployed underground at the German air base in the
southwestern town of Buechel, where they can be mounted on German Tornado fighter planes...." [1]
According to a statement of the opposition Left Party, an additional 130 US warheads may be stored at the Ramstein Air Base, headquarters for the United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) and also a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) installation. The same report adds "German air force pilots headquartered in Buechel will be ordered to drop nuclear bombs in case of a military attack or war." [2]
Regarding Germany's unabashed housing of nuclear weapons, the Director of NATO's Nuclear Policy Section Guy Roberts said in 2007 that "Each decision in this field is up to national sovereignty. Each nation is free to decide whether or not it wants to actively participate in the joint management of nuclear devices." [3]
Last year German government spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm made a statement that didn't receive much coverage in the international news, to wit "For the foreseeable future ... we remain of the view that a deterring military capacity includes not only conventional capacity but also nuclear components.
"There is a NATO policy framework for the presence of US nuclear weapons in Europe. But the security details and the handling of those weapons are a matter of bilateral arrangements." [4]
For bilateral, one is to understand the United States which placed the nuclear weapons and Germany which stores them and would deliver them if ordered to by the US and NATO. Among the American nuclear arms in Europe are 200-350 air-launched B-61 bombs stored in air bases in Germany, Turkey, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands. [5]
Last year an internal U.S. Air Force report, The Blue Ribbon Review of Nuclear Weapons Policies and Procedures, "recommended that American nuclear assets in Europe be 'consolidated,' which analysts interpret as a recommendation to move the bombs to NATO bases under 'U.S. wings,' meaning American bases in Europe."
The news source cited above also revealed that "Although technically owned by the U.S., nuclear bombs stored at NATO bases are designed to be delivered by planes from the host country." [6] If the deployment of nuclear arms at US and NATO air bases in Europe wasn't alarming enough, in January of 2006 former German Defense Minister Rupert Scholz was quoted as stating "Germany needed to ponder building its own nuclear deterrence system."
In Scholz's own words, "We need a serious discussion over how we can react to a nuclear threat by a terrorist ***state*** [emphasis added] in an appropriate manner - and in extreme cases with our own nuclear weapons." [7]
Only hours after assuming the mantle of the French presidency in May of 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy spoke of a "holy" (his precise word) alliance with Germany and "underscored...France's willingness to use its nuclear weapons to defend Germany in case of a hostile attack." Sarkozy's Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie was quoted as saying, "If Germany asked us for help, it is probable that European solidarity would come into play. For us, nuclear weapons are the ultimate protection against a threat from abroad." [8]
Later in the year a German news source wrote of a reiteration of the offer and said that "President Nicolas Sarkozy has asked Germany to open talks about a possible role the country could play in France's nuclear defence system" and that "Sarkozy told German leaders that French nuclear weapons were also protecting neighbouring Germany, which was one reason why they should think about a closer cooperation in that area." [9]
NATO membership alone allows for - in fact necessitates - this policy but its public mention at such a high level signifies a qualitatively new emphasis on the use of nuclear weapons.
Another aspect of Sarkozy's proposed new Holy Alliance was detailed this past February:
"German troops are to be posted in France for the first time in 60 years, in an effort to uphold military cooperation between the ex-foes.
"Paris has agreed in principle to a proposal made by Germany earlier this year to allow a German battalion to be stationed in eastern France." [10]
This February German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke of NATO's collective defense obligation and an account issued by her office summarized her position as follows: "NATO has proved its worth as a defence alliance, which is why Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty (which lays out the right to individual and collective self-defence) should in the Chancellor's view continue to embody the substance of NATO. In future its main responsibility should continue to be to ensure the defence of member states. But today we face new threats and new conflicts. We must also prevent Iran developing nuclear weapons at all costs." [11]
A year before five former military chiefs of staff of major NATO states - General John Shalikashvili (former US chief of staff under Clinton and NATO's ex-Supreme Allied Commander), General Klaus Naumann (Germany's former top military commander and ex-Chairman of NATO's Military Committee), Lord Inge (former British Chief of the General Staff), General Henk van den Breemen (former Dutch chief of staff) and Admiral Jacques Lanxade (former French chief of staff) - issued a joint 150-page document which affirmed that the option of a nuclear first strike is indispensable, "since there is simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world." [12]
Germany's Naumann was Chairman of the NATO Military Committee during the war against Yugoslavia in 1999.
On the eve of the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, Romania - for which the document discussed above was largely prepared - a German news source wrote that "A French officer was quoted as saying that the document showed US determination to hand NATO the task of fighting terrorism on all five continents" and that "NATO will discuss the use of so-called mini-nukes behind closed doors at its Bucharest summit...." [13]
This January a high-level task force appointed by Pentagon chief Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense Task Force on Defense Department Nuclear Weapons Management chaired by former defense secretary James Schlesinger, released a report advocating that the "United States should keep tactical nuclear bombs in Europe and even consider modernizing older warheads on cruise missiles...." The document states "The presence of U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe remains a pillar of NATO unity." [14]
A Washington Post report on the study mentions that "The Natural Resources Defense Council, which specializes in nuclear matters, recently reported that about 400 U.S. B-61 tactical nuclear bombs are stored at bases in several NATO countries, including Germany, Italy, Turkey and the United Kingdom." [15]
The 1990 Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany (or the 2 + 4 Agreement) with the Federal Republic of Germany, The German Democratic Republic, the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union in the final months of its existence expressly prohibited the "manufacture, possession of, and control over nuclear" weapons.
How faithfully Berlin, Brussels and Washington have abided by that pledge in both letter and spirit has been seen. US nuclear weapons stored in Germany "can be mounted on German Tornado fighter planes" because "nuclear bombs stored at NATO bases are designed to be delivered by planes from the host country" and "German air force pilots headquartered in Buechel will be ordered to drop nuclear bombs in case of a military attack or war." And as a former German defense minister urged "We need a serious discussion over how we can react...with our own nuclear weapons."
Part 1
New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40658
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14332
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/new-nato-germany-returns-to-world-military-stage-part-1-by-rick-rozoff/
Part 2
From WW II To WW III: Global NATO And Remilitarized Germany
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40691
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14377
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/from-ww-ii-to-ww-iii-global-nato-and-remilitarized-germany-part-ii-by-rick-rozoff/
Part 3
Germany: First New Post-Cold War World Military Power
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40717
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14415
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/germany-first-new-post-cold-war-world-military-power-part-iii-by-rick-rozoff/
For all three previous articles combined see:
The Bundeswehr is back to the World Military Stage
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/64608
Note on references: Germany's largest presswire, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, is only available by subscription and the cost for individuals is prohibitively expensive. Websites in Iran, Azerbaijan and China are among the best sources for DPA material in English, so citations are sometimes secondary.
1) Islamic Republic News Agency, September 1, 2007
2) German party marks Hiroshima anniversary, calls for removal of
warheads
Islamic Republic News Agency, August 6, 2007
3) Rainews 24 (Italy), April 10, 2007
4) Agence France-Presse, June 23, 2008
5) Ibid
6) Time Magazine, June 19, 2008
7) Deutsche Press-Agentur, January 26, 2006
8) Islamic Republic News Agency, May 17, 2007
9) Der Spiegel from Agence France-Presse, September 15, 2007
10) Press TV, February 6, 2009
11) Federal Republic of Germany, The Federal Chancellor, February 7, 2009
12) Michel Chossudovsky, The US-NATO Preemptive Nuclear Doctrine:
Trigger A Middle East Nuclear Holocaust to Defend "The Western Way
of Life"
Global Research, February 11, 2008
13) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, April 2, 2008
14) Washington Post, January 9, 2009
15) Ibid
===========================
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Oggetto: JVP proposes practical initiative to minimize issues of Tamil masses
Data: 16 luglio 2009 16:15:52 GMT+02:00
| JVP proposes practical initiative to minimize issues of Tamil masses |
| Wednesday, 15 July 2009 23:26 |
| A practical programme to minimize the issues and difficulties confronted by the Tamils in Sri Lanka and to build national unity was presented to the government by the JVP. The programme was presented to the media by the Leader of the JVP Somawansa Amarasinghe at a media meeting held at ‘Mahagedera,’ the Head Office of the JVP at Pelawatta today (15th). The media meeting was also attended by General Secretary of the JVP Tilvin Silva, Parliamentarian Anura Dissanayake and Deputy Chairman of Committees of Parliament Ramalingam Chandrasekar. The full text of the programme presented by the JVP is as follows: The only wish of the Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, Burgher and Malay citizens of this country is to build the future of Sri Lanka when separatist terrorism has been defeated and the country is at a decisive juncture. In directing the country towards this noble task the most essential and foremost task is to build national unity. In building national unity it is essential to comprehend the national question and find correct solutions. We have to overcome this challenge by defeating communalism and separatism. To completely resolve the national question it is necessary to establish genuine democracy and remove socio-economic inequality among various communities. This may not be a challenge capitalist rulers could overcome. However, at this moment, when separatist terrorism has been defeated, an environment has been created to implement several essential introductory measures that these rulers cannot evade. We present here several immediate introductory practical steps that could be taken to build trust among different nationalities in Sri Lanka.
I. All circulars, documents that contain laws, regulations and resolutions of the government should be made available in Sinhalese and Tamil. II. Displaying all notice boards and notices in government offices, name boards of public roads, public vehicles and public places in Tamil Language too should be made compulsory. III. Recruiting those with competence in Tamil to serve in state institutions should be expedited and priority should be given to such recruitments in areas where there is a Tamil speaking majority. IV. Measures should be taken to hold seminars, lectures held for the public by various state institutions in Tamil as well. V. Steps should be taken to fulfill practical needs that is required for citizens to have education in their mother tongue in any educational institute.
I. The ‘Task force to redevelop the Northern and Eastern Provinces’ consisting of representatives from all political parties that represent Parliament should be appointed immediately. II. All people’s representatives that represent Parliament should be given opportunity to visit IDP camps, review their needs and find suitable solutions. III. A ‘programme of voluntary participation’ for redevelopment of the Northern and Eastern Provinces should be implemented. IV. A reasonable compensation should be paid to all those families whose members lost their lives due to the war and special emphasis should be drawn to improve the standard of life of those including widows who were tormented by the war in the North and the East. V. A special programme should be implemented for the old who have lost their relatives and orphans. VI. Steps should be taken to draw up a ‘National Defense Plan’ and remove, in several stages, the ‘High Security Zones’ that are a hindrance to daily livelihood and economic activities. VII. All armed groups that are still active in the North and the East in a manner that obstructs establishing democracy in those areas should be completely disarmed. VIII. A secretariat to collect data regarding all those citizens who were driven away from the North and the East should be implemented immediately in order to resettle them and a complete report should be submitted. IX. Financial and physical resources should be made available specially to areas that were battered by the war and also areas that suffer from poverty. X. A general procedure should be followed that would not harm the dignity of residents when people are registered by police stations for security reasons.
I. Steps should be taken to fulfill their basic needs and register them at least within 6 months II. A special mediation should be made to make available water, food, health and sanitary facilities in IDP camps that are being maintained and human resources including doctors, nurses and funds on par with the numbers in the camps and their needs should be made available with the understanding of the abovementioned “Council of Task Force. ’ III. Members of the same families who are detained in different camps should be united in one camp until they are resettled. IV. The mental environment and practical needs of the more than 50,000 students should be promptly made available and those students who sat the GCE A/L examination this year should be given an extra opportunity. V. A report containing all particulars of those who have been apprehended and surrendered due to terrorist war should be presented to the Parliament. VI. The fundamental rights of the people in IDP camps and also after they are resettled should be protected according to human rights regulations found in the Constitution.
I. A mediation should be made to elevate cultural components of exclusive literary and aesthetic fields of Tamil and Muslim people to national level II. Broaden the radio and TV medium maintained in Tamil III. Commencing, as an introductory measure, at least one bi-lingual school in Divisional Secretariat areas where the main nationalities live in large numbers IV. Establish a national centre and its branches in Divisional Secretariat areas to report injustices and unequal treatment based on nationality, religion and language and find solace to those victims in order to halt such injustices and unequal treatment. V. Implementing a special project to expedite the issue of birth certificates, identity cards of Tamil citizens required to confirm their citizenship VI. Establishing a ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ to examine injustices that have occurred to various communities, study and propose measures to abolish animosity and distrust among various communities. Political Bureau, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna. 15.07.2009. |
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/from-ww-ii-to-ww-iii-global-nato-and-remilitarized-germany-part-ii-by-rick-rozoff/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14332
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/new-nato-germany-returns-to-world-military-stage-part-1-by-rick-rozoff
Stop NATO - July 16, 2009
Germany: First New Post-Cold War World Military Power
The reemergence of Germany as an active military power in Europe and increasingly worldwide occurred entirely under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which West Germany joined in 1955 and the East was brought into with reunification in 1990. The citizens of the former German Democratic Republic were given no opportunity to discuss much less vote on the issue.
The first post-World War II deployment of German military forces outside its borders - and outside of NATO's self-defined security zone - in active military roles rather than in multinational exercises and United Nations missions was fostered and initiated under the chancellorship of Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl in the first half of the last decade.
But it was the Social Democrat-Green Party coalition government of Gerhard Schroeder and Joschka Fischer, what the Western press regularly referred to (with no tincture of irony and less understanding of political history) as a Red-Green alliance, that involved Germany in its first wars since the fall of Berlin in 1945. In fact two wars in less than two and a half years.
Chancellor Schroeder and his foreign minister Joschka Fischer provided Tornado warplanes for the 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 and troops for the post-invasion occupation of Afghanistan after October, 2001. Both were NATO operations and the second was in response to the first-ever activation of the Alliance's Article 5 mutual military assistance clause.
Humanitarian Intervention: 1939 And 1999
Writing in his memoirs years after the event, Schroeder justified his participating in the first unprovoked military assault against a European nation that had not threatened any other country since Hitler's blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939-1941 by describing his motivations at the time, 1999:
"Now, on the cusp of the 21st century, the real challenge seemed to me not just to douse the most recent fire in the Balkans, but to bring peace to the region....The goal was exclusively humanitarian."
Sixty years before the war upon which he reflected a predecessor of Schroeder as chancellor of Germany said:
"I ordered the German Air Force to conduct humanitarian warfare....In this campaign I gave an order to spare human beings."
The latter is from Adolf Hitler's speech in Danzig/Gdansk on September 19, 1939.
It's also worth noting that one of the main justifications Hitler used for the invasion of Poland eighteen days before that speech was the alleged abuse and persecution of ethnic minorities. ("More than 1,000,000 people of German blood had in the years 1919-20 to leave their homeland. As always, I attempted to bring about, by the peaceful method of making proposals for revision."}
In an interview with an American television station during the war against Yugoslavia German Foreign Minister Fischer said, "I think tradition and historical experiences, historical fears are very important. And for us now we have to find our role. And this is, on the military level, a very difficult one, but we are taking part in the air campaign. We have ships in the Adriatic."
The air campaign wreaked death and destruction from the skies for 78 days, not sparing factories, bridges, refugee columns, passenger trains, religious processions, apartment complexes, hospitals and the Chinese embassy.
Weakening United Nations, Strengthening NATO
The aggression Fischer endorsed and help to direct, malicious and cowardly as it was, was also conducted without UN authorization and in flagrant violation of the principles upon which the United Nations Organization was formed.
Article 33 of the United Nations Charter states:
"The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice."
The mediation indicated is to be conducted as a last resort in the UN Security Council and not unilaterally at NATO Headquarters in Brussels.
The Nuremberg Tribunal convened after the defeat of the last European power that arrogated to itself the right to attack other nations on the continent and to redraw its borders and defined crimes against peace as the worst violation of international law.
Principle Vl of the 1950 Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal characterized crimes against peace as the "Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances" and as the "Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under."
From The Balkans To South Asia And Middle East: Air War Followed By Ground War, Naval Blockades
Although the tool employed to pry open the door barring the resumption of military aggression in Europe was so-called humanitarian intervention, that rationale would be discarded immediately after 50,000 NATO troops marched into the Serbian province of Kosovo. Few wars in moderns times have not hid behind the pretext of defending the national security and safety of the citizens of the aggressor and of protecting innocents from harm and mistreatment.
The Schroeder-Fischer administration put Germany back into the business of waging war from the skies and on the ground and the country has continued to travel the same route ever since. Troops, armored vehicles and Tornados were transferred to South Asia and warships to the coasts of Lebanon and Somalia.
Humanitarian intervention was an ad hoc ruse employed to launch NATO as an active 'out of area' warfighting machine and a political body to circumvent and replace the United Nations. Once the first part of that objective had been achieved it was dropped as quickly as it had been concocted and wars could then be conducted for traditional reasons: Territorial designs, the acquisition of resources, control of vital transport routes including sea lanes, punishing recalcitrant adversaries, revenge.
In the process Germany became the first major post-Cold War international military power. So much so indeed that even Time Magazine couldn't ignore the transformation - the Transformation as will be seen later - and in January of this year ran a feature entitled "Will Germany's Army Ever Be Ready for Battle?"
In two sentences the Time report summed up how much territory has been traversed since what many in the world thought was the end of German militarism in 1945.
"The German army as it stands today is a relatively young creation, born after a period of demilitarization following the end of World War II. [T]he Bundeswehr has become increasingly engaged in international missions and is coming under pressure to step up its involvement in out-and-out warfare."
The turning point was, of course, 1990.
"Since the 1990s, after reunification, German forces have become more involved in military missions abroad....There are currently 247,000 soldiers enrolled in the Bundeswehr and German troops are now serving all over the world, in places such as Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia and Lebanon." [1]
Why Wars Are Really Launched
By 2006 "Germany [had] about 9,000 soldiers deployed in German missions around the world, a level [that] could increase to...14,000 troops in five theaters of operation." At the time Defense Minister Franz-Josef Jung identified a main purpose of such missions and humanitarian intervention was conspicuously not mentioned:
"Eighty percent of our trade occurs on the seas, which naturally includes the security of energy supplies and raw materials."
The exact words could have been used in 1914 and 1941.
In discussing the White Paper his ministry had just released, one which highlighted the transformation of the Bundeswehr into an international intervention force, Jung reiterated that NATO relations "remain the
basis for Germany and Europe's shared security" and that Germany's alliance with the United States was of "paramount importance" to the nation. [2]
Jung added that "the government needs the ability to use the Bundeswehr inside of Germany...." [3]
Later that year Chancellor Angela Merkel initiated the next step in Germany's expanding militarization and demanded an end to caps on defense spending. "You cannot say that the planned defense budget for the next 20 years is sacrosanct. A German government cannot say, 'Please, don't take part in any new conflicts in the next decades, because we can't afford it.'" [4]
As she spoke German armed forces were deployed on eleven international military missions and would soon begin a twelfth by sending warships and troops to enforce the naval blockade of Lebanon's Mediterranean coast.
The Transformation
A German news report in the autumn of 2006 revealed that "An official plan to modernize the Bundeswehr - to turn it from an unwieldy behemoth created to defend its own borders into a lithe organization ready to take on asymmetric threats around the world - has been underway for several years.
"Known in policy circles simply as 'the transformation,' it is due to be completed by 2010." [5]
That conversion process included acquiring 600 Taurus air-launched cruise missiles. "Taurus is a 1,400–kilogram, all-weather guided missile with a range of more than 350 kilometers. The system will equip Tornado, Eurofighter and F-18 aircraft of the German and Spanish air forces." [6]
It also, in 2006, included plans to spend six billion euros on "new navy frigates, submarines, helicopters and armored personnel vehicles."
In relation to Defense Minister Jung's earlier comments, "Germany's military leadership has especially focused on modernizing the country's navy fleet." [7]
At roughly the same time it was announced that Germany would acquire 405 Puma tanks, "the most modern infantry tank on the market," comparable to the US Abrams tank used in Iraq. This month Berlin formally placed an order for the Pumas and a spokesman for its manufacturer said "NATO countries already equipped with the Krauss-Maffei Wegmann's Leopard tanks - such as Spain, Turkey, Greece and Australia - would be ideal customers." [8]
The Puma, which "sets new global standards for armored vehicles," was first unveiled at the Bundeswehr's fifty-year anniversary celebrations in Munster in 2006. "New types of missions...require a highly mobile weapons system that is ready for international deployment...." [9]
The preceding autumn Germany acquired two new submarines to add to eleven already in the Baltic Sea which then Defense Minister Peter Struck described as "a milestone" for his nation's navy. [10]
The Tornado multirole warplane first used against Yugoslavia in 1999 and since deployed to Afghanistan is reported to be capable of delivering nuclear warheads, including the twenty the US maintains at the German air base at Buechel.
Since 1989 German Tornado fighter-bombers have been based at the Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico in the Southwestern United States. The American base "is the only location where the German Air Force trains aircrews in Tornado aircraft operations and tactics." [11] Last year the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency advocated the continuation of the arrangement, stating that it would "contribute to the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the military capabilities of Germany and enhancing standardization and interoperability with U.S. forces." [12]
Bundeswehr In South And Central Asia
In 2006 NATO first requested that the Luftwaffe send Tornado planes to Afghanistan where Berlin has stationed 3,700 troops, the third largest contingent in NATO's International Security Assistance (ISAF) force, with the only the US and Britain providing larger numbers of troops. Germany has its own base in Uzbekistan near Termez and as such has the only foreign forces left in that nation since the US and other NATO forces were expelled in 2005. As of three years ago Germany had transported over 125,000 troops through the base. [13] Last year the German military announced plans to build a 67-kilometer railway line from Uzbekistan to Northern Afghanistan, complementing the air bridge it already operates.
In 2007 Germany delivered the first six Tornados to the war front in Afghanistan even though "More than three-quarters of Germans - 77 percent - said the country shouldn't comply with NATO's request to send Tornado jets to Afghanistan...." [14]
Plans for the warplanes were that they "would operate across the entire country, taking aerial pictures of Taliban positions and passing the information on to other NATO partners who would carry out strikes." [15]
A German defense official at the time finally acknowledged that "What happens in Afghanistan is combat. Our troops have already been engaged in that, also in the north." [16]
Though a year earlier a Defense Ministry spokesman, with no reference to alleged peacekeeping and certainly not to humanitarianism, admitted that "German military aircraft are seeing action in the volatile southern region of Afghanistan" and that "German military aircraft are supporting NATO operations in volatile southern Afghanistan." [17]
No More 'Humanitarian' Bombs
In a Der Spiegel feature called "Slouching Towards Combat," a warning was issued that "He who spies targets, contributes to later bombing attacks with all the consequences that go along with them, including the ominous collateral damages previously known from the war in Kosovo." [18] The admonition fell on deaf ears in Berlin.
The same source had earlier sounded another alarm, one worth quoting in length.
"Now it's Tornado surveillance jets, equipped with cameras - and cannons. The Germans are allowing themselves to get deeper and deeper involved in the Afghanistan conflict, and there is no end in sight.
"Between Christmas and New Year [2006], US C-17 transport planes will unload heavy German Marder tanks at the German military's central headquarters in Mazar-e-Sharif.
"German Tornado jets were already deployed in combat situations about eight years ago - in order to 'avert a humanitarian catastrophe' in the Kosovo conflict, as the Bundestag resolution...stated then. It was the first time that German troops were deployed in combat since World War II. This time the Tornados are meant to fly as reconnaissance planes - but that can of course be changed at any time. They fire armor-shattering uranium munitions from their cannons and drop laser-guided precision bombs on the farms where the Taliban take refuge.
"But they also drop so-called 'general purpose bombs' - regular explosives of the kind commonly used for carpet bombing during World War II and in Vietnam." [19]
In 2007 Germany additionally sent several Kleinfluggeraet Zielortung drones to the war theater, a type "much better suited to relay target information for artillery used by the Dutch troops in their fight against the Taliban...." [20]
At the same time former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who had first sent German combat troops to Afghanistan and for the first time ever to Asia, urged the current government to "widen its military operation into the southern part of the war-afflicted country." [21]
Early in 2007 Germany signaled its intent to send its most sophisticated battle tank, the Leopard 2A6, to Southern Afghanistan, although German troops are stationed in the until recently comparatively peaceful North.
Last year Germany assumed command of NATO's Rapid Reaction Force in Afghanistan. A news report on that development added that "When the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) deployed in Afghanistan in
early 2002, some 850 German troops were in its ranks.
"That number has increased more than fourfold.
War Of West, NATO, Civilization: From Afghan Capital To North To Southern War Zone
"Confined at first to Kabul, the Germans' mission was widened to the northern part of the country, where they took command in 2006....A few days ago the German Defence Ministry announced it was raising the ceiling on its troop deployments in Afghanistan from 3,500 to 4,500. And the next escalation is due on Monday as Germany takes over the [Rapid] Reaction Force in the north." [22]
Earlier in the year an American presswire report titled "Germany enters Afghan war" said that "Germany...will now send battle forces to Afghanistan.
"NATO has for the second time requested that the German government deploy a unit of 250 battle soldiers to Afghanistan as part of a rapid-response force.....The unit would have to enter bloody combat if needed...." [23]
Der Spiegel reported last October that Germany, which has disguised its role in the war in Afghanistan behind the mask of so-called provincial reconstruction and other civilian projects, had spent over 3 billion euros on the Afghan War and that "Germany's military expenditures in Afghanistan are nearly four times as high as its civilian aid." [24]
This year, as part of Washington's and NATO's massive escalation of the war in Afghanistan, German troop strength is to be boosted from 3,700 to 4,400 no later than next month and Berlin has agreed to send four AWACS for the war effort in South Asia.
As German combat deaths increased to 35 late last month, Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung demonstrated no reservations about sacrificing more soldiers and to any who had misgivings about a war that will soon be eight years old and that is only intensifying he blustered: "My answer is clear: we are in Afghanistan because we have to protect there the security of citizens in Germany." [25] A decade before some reference to the well-being of the local population would have been invoked, however disingenuously.
A week before, Jung, casting aside all use of peacekeeping, reconstruction and other euphemisms, told a German public television station: "If we are attacked we will fight back. The army has the necessary answers. In recent battles we have done well and we will continue to do so in the future." [26]
Former defense minister Volker Ruhe, in referring to the fact that the Bundeswehr is conducting the largest and longest military operation in its history, said: "It is delusive if the Government pretends that the
Afghanistan operation is a sort of armed development assistance. It is a war of NATO, of the West, of civilisation...." [27]
Afghanistan and Central Asia are not the only places where the German military is waging a "war of NATO, of the West, of civilisation."
Battle Duty: Germany Returns To Middle East
After Israel's war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 NATO nations began a naval blockade of the country's coast. It was announced shortly thereafter that "Germany is to take the lead in patrolling the Lebanese coast and the German parliament is expected to vote next week on the historic deployment of the German army in the Middle East.
"Up to 3,000 troops and some 13 vessels are then planned to be sent to the troubled region. They are to prevent sea-based arms smuggling mainly from Syria to Hezbollah militants." [28]
That is, the German military returned to the Middle East for the first time since World War II.
Describing the mission as it was being planned, Defense Minister Jung stated, "German soldiers have to be prepared against the will of ships' captains to board ships suspected of smuggling weapons. In this regard, one can speak of battle duty." [29]
In late 2008 there were 1,000 German troops stationed on eight ships off the Lebanese coast.
By February of last year "Germany contributed 2,400 personnel, including 625 soldiers, to the naval mission and led the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) for 17 months, with a maritime force consisting of among others two frigates and two supply ships. The multinational force also includes ships from France, Spain and Portugal." [30]
Two years later a Lebanese news report, "German Tanks to Lebanon to Control Border with Syria," said that "Germany has decided to provide Lebanon with 50 Leopard tanks in addition to other military equipment to upgrade its border control with Syria" and that "a German military delegation is expected to arrive in Lebanon early in 2009 for discussions with Lebanese military officials regarding providing the Lebanese army with more military supplies." [31]
Since the early 1990s Germany has not so much sold but given Israel six Dolphin submarines capable of launching nuclear-tipped missiles. One of those submarines recently crossed the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean in what Reuters characterized as a "signal to Iran."
Germany has military personnel assigned to NATO in Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, where in the latter instance they are part of the NATO Training Mission - Iraq in Baghdad.
Beginning in 2006 major German news sources revealed that the foreign intelligence agency BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) during the Schroeder-Fischer years had provided the US information on bombing targets in Iraq leading up to and during the attack against the nation in 2003.
If so, it would represent nothing new. More than two years before, in February of 2001, the BND released a report which stated it possessed "evidence" that "Iraq has resumed its nuclear programme and may be capable of producing an atomic bomb in three years" and was working on chemical and biological weapons. [32]
Berlin also trains Iraqi and Afghan officers and troops on its own soil.
Germany Military Returns To Africa And Targets Gaza
Germany has provided troops for the NATO mission in the Darfur region of Sudan and the European Union deployment in Congo as well as a nominal force for the EU's military role in Chad and the Central African Republic in the conflict-ridden triangle of those two nations and Sudan.
In 2005 the government of Togo, a former German colony, accused Berlin of complicity in plotting its overthrow. Three years earlier Germany sent troops to join French, British and American allies in Ivory Coast after an invasion of and coup attempt in that nation.
Late last year Germany joined the European naval deployment in the Horn of Africa to complement its involvement with the NATO mission there. The Cabinet authorized "as many as 1,400 German Navy soldiers and one warship go to the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia as part of a joint EU effort" which "together with German soldiers involved in Enduring Freedom and NATO's Allied Provider missions, could be moved back and forth at will...." [33]
Before the deployment was authorized defense chief Jung said "German warships should be used against pirates wherever German interests are threatened." [34]
During and immediately after the Israeli offensive in Gaza from December 27, 2008-January 18 2009 it was announced that "Germany plans to send experts to detect Gaza tunnels" [35] and that "Technical experts from Germany are to travel to Egypt in the coming days to help secure its border with the Gaza Strip." [36]
In the middle of the war Chancellor Angela Merkel "suggested German
peacekeepers be sent to Gaza" and Eckart von Klaeden, a foreign policy spokesman for Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, said "the use of German troops was feasible but they must have 'robust' powers." [37]
In January a meeting was held in London of the Gaza Counter-Arms Smuggling Initiative (GCASI) and was followed up last month in Ottawa, Canada.
It was reported in a story called "Canada hosts a summit of NATO countries participating in the Israeli siege of Gaza Strip" that the second meeting of the Gaza Counter-Arms Smuggling Initiative was held with the "declared goal of tightening the Israeli siege and blockade of the Gaza Strip." [38]
The GCASI members are Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States.
While the assault on Gaza was still underway a feature called "Israeli unilateral ceasefire to pave the way for deployment of NATO forces" offered this analysis of the role that the Gaza Counter-Arms Smuggling Initiative was intended to play:
"Germany, Great Britain and France already offered to send their naval forces to guard the Gaza Strip coastal waters. With the naval forces of leading European NATO powers already deployed off the coast of Lebanon and – allegedly to thwart pirates – off the Somali coast, the extension of NATO presence to the coastal waters of the Gaza Strip is designed to create a permanent hold on the entire area from the Horn of Africa and beyond, through the Suez Canal and up the eastern Mediterranean coast." [39]
Training Armed Forces For New Caucasus Wars
A German Defense Ministry envoy visited the Georgia capital of Tbilisi this January and met with Deputy Defense Minister Giorgi Muchaidze, who said that "Georgia approaches closer to NATO standards” in large part because "Germany has been helping Georgia’s Defence Ministry for a long time" and "Up to 2,000 officers were trained in Germany." [40]
Germany conducts comparable military training for the armed forces of Azerbaijan, like Georgia which fought a war with Russia last August a nation that may resume armed hostilities any day over so-called frozen conflicts in the South Caucasus.
In late May of this year Georgian Deputy Defense Minister Giorgi Muchaidze paid a three-day visit to Berlin where "The sides held military and political negotiations in the framework of the cooperation of Defense Ministries of Georgia and Germany in 2009. The parties also discussed the situation in Georgia after the August war...." [41]
Article 5 War Clause: Defending NATO Members, Allies From Baltic To Black Sea
In June Defense Minister Jung was in Lithuania preparatory to Germany resuming its command of the NATO Baltic air patrol and he and his Lithuanian counterpart "agreed on the need to implement the commitment on Ukraine and Georgia's future membership of the alliance."
As to what support for Ukraine's and Georgia's "NATO aspirations" entailed, Jung said "this process must involve all new members of the alliance, whereas NATO itself must ensure collective defence and strengthen its military response forces so that it can give an immediate response when the need arises." [42]
Defending Berlin With Warships Off Cape Town
In 2006 Germany led 19-day joint military maneuvers in South Africa where Berlin has long-standing ties to the defense establishment going back to the longstanding cooperation between West Germany and the former apartheid regime there. The exercises off Cape Town included an estimated 1,300 soldiers and sailors, warplanes and warships.
A description of the war games said "Two of the world's most advanced warships, South Africa's SAS Amatola and Germany's FGS Hamburg, together with fighter aircraft were protecting a virtual Berlin from attack.
"Berlin was successfully defended." [43]
A year later NATO held naval exercises in South Africa in which warships from the navies of Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United States participated.
The drills marked the "the first time that South Africa engage[d] its newly acquired frigates as well as its submarines in a training exercise with foreign forces in local waters.
"South Africa's new warships were acquired from a German company." [44]
....
The road from Bosnia and Kosovo has been a long one for the Bundeswehr. It has crossed four continents and no less than fourteen war and conflict zones. It has permitted a military buildup unimaginable a generation ago and has led to German military forces being dispersed to many nations and regions they had never been to before.
It has also permitted Germany to become the third largest arms exporter in the world and the supplier of advanced weapons - tanks, warplanes, submarines - to scores of nations.
Part I
New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40658
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14332
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/new-nato-germany-returns-to-world-military-stage-part-1-by-rick-rozoff/
Part II
From WW II To WW III: Global NATO And Remilitarized Germany
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40691
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14377
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/from-ww-ii-to-ww-iii-global-nato-and-remilitarized-germany-part-ii-by-rick-rozoff/
1) Time Magazine, June 27, 2009
2) Deutsche Welle, October 25, 2006
3) Ibid
4) Deutsche Welle, September 7, 2006
5) Ibid
6) Defense News (US), November 10, 2005
7) Die Welt, August 25, 2006
8) United Press International, July 8, 2009
9) Agence France-Press, May 8, 2006
10) Xinhua News Agency, October 19, 2005
11) Defense Security Cooperation Agency, July 18, 2008
12) Ibid
13) Der Spiegel, Febuary 8, 2009
14) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, February 7, 2007
15) Ibid
16) Ibid
17) Pakistan Tribune, October 5, 2006
18) Der Spiegel, December 22, 2006
19) Der Spiegel, December 21, 2006
20) United Press International, March 12, 2007
21) Islamic Republic News Agency, August 19, 2007
22) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, June 29, 2008
23) United Press International, January 31, 2008
24) Der Spiegel, October 12, 2008
25) Associated Press, July 2, 2009
26) Agence France-Presse, June 24, 2009
27) Defense Professionals (Germany), June 26, 2009
28) Deutsche Welle, September 8, 2006
29) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, August 26, 2006
30) Deutsche Welle, February 29, 2008
31) Naharnet, December 23, 2008
32) BBC News, February 25, 2001
33) Deutsche Welle, December 10, 2008
34) Der Spiegel, November 21, 2008
35) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, January 19, 2009
36) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, January 14, 2009
37) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, January 7, 2009
38) Al-Jazeerah, June 11, 2009
39) Arab Monitor, January 17, 2009
40) Trend News Agency, January 14, 2009
41) Trend News Agency, June 2, 2009
42) Interfax-Ukraine, June 10, 2009
43) Xinhua News Agency, March 14, 2006
44) BuaNews (South Africa), August 28, 2007
===========================
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L'ANSA ha commesso un incredibile errore, dovuto a crassa ignoranza, oppure persiste nella lucida campagna di odio razziale antiserbo condotta coerentemente in tutti questi anni per poter spaccare la Jugoslavia prima, la Serbia poi, e consentire l'occupazione coloniale del territorio kosovaro da parte delle truppe occidentali, alleate sin dai bombardamenti del 1999 con i terroristi pan-albanesi dell'UCK?
( a cura di AM su segnalazione di AT. Sui metodi usati dall'UCK per strappare il Kosovo al paese multinazionale cui apparteneva, instaurando un regime di apartheid sotto l'egida della NATO, si veda ad esempio: https://www.cnj.it/documentazione/ORRORI/orrore8.htm )
---
http://www.ansa.it/site/notizie/awnplus/italia/news/2009-07-11_111397037.html
Rimini:arrestato per crimini guerra
---
Rimini 11 luglio 2009. Fa il camionista a Bellaria, ed è considerato un lavoratore modello, ma è accusato di crimini di guerra in Kosovo, e per questo ora rischia in patria 40 anni di carcere.
Un serbo di 36 anni, M. G., è stato arrestato dall'ufficio immigrazione della Questura di Rimini che, in collaborazione con l'Interpol, ha eseguito il mandato di cattura internazionale emesso dalla corte di Belgrado. Ora l'uomo è a disposizione della Corte d'appello di Bologna, che dovrà decidere sull'eventuale estradizione.
Il camionista ha fatto parte dell'esercito serbo, poi nel 1999 si e’ arruolato come volontario nell’Uck, l’esercito di liberazione del Kosovo, del quale e’ poi diventato ufficiale, quindi è passato nel Tmk, la discussa protezione civile kosovara, nella quale sono confluiti moltissimi guerriglieri, e ne è divenuto capitano.
Dieci anni fa, insieme ad altri esponenti dell’Uck, l'uomo effettuò un blitz in una casa a Klina, in Kosovo: non fu lui a sparare, ma il proprietario dell'abitazione venne freddato con un colpo alla testa. L'uomo poi è arrivato in Italia, probabilmente per 'liberarsi' da questo suo passato scomodo: ma la giustizia internazionale ha continuato a cercarlo.
[Cronaca]
Muharem Gashi, serbo di 36 anni, camionista, residente a Bellaria, è stato arrestato dall'Ufficio Immigrazione della Questura di Rimini.
Nei sui confronti una pesante accusa: crimini di guerra contro la popolazione civile, imputazione per la quale rischia 40 anni di carcere.
La Questura riminese, in collaborazione con l'Interpol, ha eseguito il mandato di cattura internazionale spiccato dalla corte di Belgrado.
Quando, nel 1999, era ufficiale dell'Uck, l'esercito di liberazione del Kosovo (formazione paramilitare e terroristica), Gashi - insieme ad altri - fu protagonista di un blitz in una casa kosovara nel corso del quale fu ucciso il proprietario ed altre persone rimasero ferite.
Adesso il 36enne è a disposizione della Corte d'appello di Bologna, che dovrà decidere se ci sono gli estremi per l'estradizione.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14332
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/new-nato-germany-returns-to-world-military-stage-part-1-by-rick-rozoff
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40691
Stop NATO
July 14, 2009
From WW II To WW III: Global NATO And Remilitarized Germany
The reunification of Germany in 1990 did not signify a centripetal trend in Europe but instead was an anomaly. The following year the Soviet Union was broken up into its fifteen constituent federal republics and the same process began in Yugoslavia, with Germany leading the charge in hastening on and recognizing the secession of Croatia and Slovenia from the nation that grew out of the destruction of World War I and again of World War II.
Two years later Czechoslovakia, like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia a multiethnic state created after the First World War, split apart.
With the absorption of the former German Democratic Republic into the Federal Republic, which since 1949 had already claimed an exclusive mandate to govern all of Germany, the entire nation was now subsumed under a common military structure and brought into the NATO bloc.
Wasting no time in reasserting itself as a continental power, united Germany inaugurated its new claim as a geopolitical - and military - power by turning its attention to a part of Europe that it had previously visited in the two World Wars: The Balkans.
With military deployments and interventions in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia from at least as early as 1995-2001 onward, the German Bundeswehr had crossed a barrier, violated a taboo and established a new precedent that paralleled the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, the latter in flagrant contravention of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Hitler's sending the Wehrmacht into the Rhineland in that year has been observed by historians to have marked a decisive turning point in plans by the Third Reich towards territorial expansion and war. In fact, the standard argument runs, the provocation in 1936 made possible the next year's bombing assault on the Spanish town of Guernica, the Munich betrayal of Czechoslovakia and the Anschluss takeover of Austria in 1938, the attack on Poland in 1939 and with it the beginning in earnest of a second European conflagration which wouldn't end before some fifty million people had been killed.
The comparison between German military deployments in the Rhineland in 1936 and later ones in the Balkans in the 1990s will only appear extreme if the history of the years immediately following World War II are forgotten.
In the last of three meetings of the leaders of the major anti-Axis powers in the Second World War - Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States - in Potsdam, Germany after the defeat of the Third Reich, Winston Churchill [later replaced by his successor as prime minister, Clement Attlee], Joseph Stalin and Harry Truman met and discussed precise plans for Europe in general and Germany in particular for the post-war period.
The Potsdam Conference issued a Protocol which stipulated that there was to be "a complete disarmament and demilitarization of Germany" and all aspects of German industry that could be employed for military purposes were to be dismantled. Additionally, all German military and paramilitary forces were to be eliminated and the production of all arms in the nation was prohibited.
It is now evident in retrospect that two nations whose heads of state were present either had no plans at the time to adhere to the Potsdam Agreement or if so quickly abandoned them.
A British document from the months preceding the surrender of Nazi Germany in May of 1945 and the subsequent Potsdam Conference of July 17-August 2 called "Operation Unthinkable: 'Russia: Threat to Western Civilization'" was declassified and made public in 1998. A photocopy of the Joint Planning Staff of the British War Cabinet report identified by the dates May 22, June 8, and July 11, 1945 is available for viewing on the website of Northeastern University in Boston at:http://www.history.neu.edu/PRO2/pages/002.htm
"The overall political objective is to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire.
"A quick success might induce the Russians to submit to our will....That is for the Russians to decide. If they want total war, they are in a position to have it."
A few years ago a Russian appraisal of the document would state "This was the groundwork for the notorious Operation Unthinkable, under which World War II was to develop immediately, without interim stages, into a third world war, with the goal of ensuring the total defeat of the Soviet Union and its destruction as a multinational community." [1] The total defeat of the Soviet Union and its disappearance as a multinational community in fact occurred in 1991.
The British wartime document consistently refers to the then Soviet Union as Russia, incidentally, and as such suggests plans not only for war but for a change of political system and a vivisection of the sort seen later in a post-war - that is, post-World War III - Russia.
When revelations concerning Operation Unthinkable became public in the late 1990s the strongest response to them came, not surprisingly, from post-Soviet Russia.
In March of 2005 Russian historian Valentin Falin was interviewed by the Russian Information Agency Novosti website in a feature called "Russia Would Have Faced World War III Had It Not Stormed Berlin" and spelled out the details of Churchill's plans:
"The new war was scheduled to start on July 1, 1945. American, Canadian, and British contingents in Europe, the Polish Expeditionary Corps and 10-12 German divisions (the ones that had not been disbanded and kept in Schleswig-Holstein and Southern Denmark) were supposed to participate in the operation." [2]
In further observations that provided the article its title, Falin added, "Behind the determination of the Soviet leadership to capture Berlin and reach the demarcation lines established during the 1945 Yalta conference attended by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill was a task of great importance - to make all possible efforts to foil a political gamble envisioned by the British leader with the support of influential US circles, and to prevent the transformation of World War II into World War III, where our former allies would have turned into enemies." [3]
The Russian scholar, author of the book The Second Front, argued further that the taking of Berlin, which cost the lives of 120,000 Soviet soldiers, preempted Western plans for what may well have triggered a continuation of the Second World War into a third one.
"The battle for Berlin sobered up quite a few warmongers and, therefore, fulfilled its political, psychological and military purpose. Believe me, there were many political and military figures in the West who were stupefied by easy victories in Europe by the spring of 1945.
"One of them was US General George Patton. He demanded hysterically to continue the advance of American troops from the Elbe, through Poland and Ukraine, to Stalingrad in order to finish the war at the place where Hitler had been defeated.
"Patton called the Russians 'the descendants of Genghis Khan.' Churchill, in his turn, was not overly scrupulous about the choice of words in his description of Soviet people. He called the Bolsheviks 'barbarians' and 'ferocious baboons.' In short, the "theory of subhuman races" was obviously not a German monopoly. [4]
In a subsequent interview with the same source, Falin provided more information:
"U.S. Under-Secretary of State Joseph Clark Grew wrote in his diary in May 1945 that as a result of the war the dictatorship and domination of Germany and Japan passed over to the Soviet Union, which would present as much threat to Americans in the future as the Axis powers. He added that a war against the Soviet Union was as imminent as anything in this world can be. Grew was supposed to be a friend of the late President Roosevelt." [5]
Recalling the dimensions of the proposed Operation Unthinkable - the
combined attack (and invasion) force was to consist of 112-113 divisions including 10-12 Wehrmacht divisions - the Russian historian added that "The file on Operation Unthinkable declassified in 1998 says nothing about the propaganda chimeras about Moscow's alleged plans of occupying 'defenseless Europe' and pushing to the Atlantic coast, as the Chiefs of Staff worked on practical operations directives." [6]
Falin wrote an article a year later titled "Cold War an offspring of 'hot war'" in which he says that the British "MI5 head, Sir Stewart Menzies, held a series of secret meetings with his German counterpart, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, in the unoccupied part of France to discuss making Germany a friend and the Soviet Union an enemy." [7]
Sixty five years after the defeat of Nazi Germany there is more rather than less examination of the accusation that American and British government and military figures conspired with the Nazis before World War II and with German Defense Ministry and Wehrmacht officials in the waning days of the war.
In commenting on the rising tide of WWII revisionism in the West, reaching its nadir - to date - on this July 3rd with the passage of a resolution called Reunification of Divided Europe by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) which in effect makes the former Soviet Union (and by implication current Russia) co-responsible for provoking WWII, veteran Russian journalist Valentin Zorin reminded his readers of several events usually swept under the carpet by leading Western circles and their compliant media and scholars:
"The infamously failed Munich conspiracy of the western politicians and the Nazi Fuehrer sought to make the German Army march against the Soviet Union. In those days Moscow was pressing for forming an anti-Hitler coalition and invited a British and French delegation to that end. The talks proved long and fruitless. London and Paris actually sabotaged the talks while urging the Fuehrer to attack the USSR.
"Even after the war had broken out, top-echelon leaders in London and Paris would not give up their attempts to make Hitler’s divisions turn about and attack the Soviet Union. A several-month-long period of strange developments came to be known as a Phoney War. While deliberately inactive at the front, the British and French rulers engaged themselves in secret bargaining with Hitler.
"The secrecy of the bargaining was buried for a good half century later, on the 17th of August 1987, when Hitler’s Deputy in the Nazi Party Rudolph Hess, tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to life in prison, died at Berlin’s Spandau Prison in unexplained circumstances. 10 days before Germany attacked the Soviet Union Hess flew solo to Scotland to start secret talks with the circles close to the British government. It later transpired that the talks focused on ending fighting between the UK and Germany and agreeing on joint action against the Soviet Union...." [8]
It's important to point out that neither the academician Falin nor the journalist Zorin is invested in invoking the events of 1939-1945 in defense of the former USSR and its leadership at the time or in settling scores regarding conflicts of past decades. Instead they and others, including Russia's current political leadership, are far more concerned - more alarmed - about matters of the present and the impending future.
With the NATO Alliance, which in recent years has come to refer to itself routinely as Global and 21st Century NATO, encroaching upon contemporary Russia from most all directions and with increasingly brazen historical revisionism growing out of Western post-Cold War triumphalism reaching the point that Nazis and their collaborators are being exonerated while modern Russia is being tainted ex post facto as a villain in the Second World War, the prospect of a "transformation of World War II into World War III" mentioned above is not so far-fetched.
As Valentin Zorin's article also says, "Some quarters would like to redraw the post-war boundaries in Europe and the Far East, question the validity of the UN Charter and bury the Nuremberg Tribunal rulings in oblivion. It is these modern-day revenge-seekers that channel and obviously fund the large-scale propaganda campaign of falsifying the history of the Second World War." [9]
It's been seen above that the leaders of Britain, the United States and Soviet Russia agreed in the summer of 1945 at the Potsdam Conference to the total demilitarization of Germany. All indications were that once that systemic disarming of the nation was completed Germany would never militarize again.
Instead in 1950, while fighting a war in Korea which included troops from most of its new NATO allies and which escalated into armed conflict with China, the United States started the process of forcing the rearming of West Germany and its eventual incorporation into NATO. Members of the US-led military bloc pushed for the creation of a European Defence Community (EDC) with an integrated army, navy and air force, composed of the armed forces of all its member states.
A European Defence Community treaty was signed in May of 1952 but defeated by Gaullists and Communists alike in France. With that nation in opposition, the EDC was dead but the US and Britain found other subterfuges to remilitarize the Federal Republic.
With the creation of the Western European Union in 1954 West Germany was permitted - for which read encouraged - to rearm and was given control over its own armed forces, the Bundeswehr.
The following year the Federal Republic of Germany was inducted into NATO. The Soviet Union and its allies responded by establishing the Warsaw Pact later in 1955.
Two of the fundamental purposes in launching the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance in 1949 were to base nuclear weapons, which the US had a monopoly on at the time of the bloc's founding, in Europe and to rearm Germany as a military bulwark on the continent and for use abroad.
Anyone still in thrall to the notion that NATO was planned as a defensive alliance against a Soviet military threat in Europe would do well to recall that:
The Warsaw Pact was formed six years after and in response to NATO, especially to NATO's advance into Germany.
The Warsaw pact, already long moribund, officially dissolved itself in 1991. Eighteen years later NATO still exists without any pretense of a Soviet or any other credible threat.
In the past decade alone it has expanded from 16 to 28 member states, all of the twelve new ones in Eastern Europe and four of those bordering Russian territory.
During the same ten year period it waged its first air war, against Yugoslavia, outside the bloc's own defined area of responsibility and its first ground war, in Afghanistan, a continent removed from Europe, half a world away from North America and nowhere near the North Atlantic Ocean.
That NATO officially expanded into the former Warsaw Pact by admitting the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland at its sixtieth anniversary summit in 1999 while in the midst of its first war, the 78-day bombing onslaught against Yugoslavia - ten years after the end of the Cold War - is an irrefutable retroactive indictment of its true nature and purpose since inception.
The bloc continues to maintain nuclear warheads in Europe, including on air bases in Germany, with long-range bombers and missiles able to deliver them. NATO recently renewed the commitment to its nuclear doctrine, which continues to include the first use of nuclear weapons.
The world's largest and only surviving military bloc, one which now takes in a third of the planet's nations through full membership or various partnerships, was born out of the last days of World War II in Europe. It's fundamental purpose was to unite the military potential of the countries of the continent's west, north and south into a cohesive and expanding phalanx for use at home and abroad. Victors and vanquished of the most mass-scale and murderous conflict in history - Britain, the US and France and Germany and Italy - were gathered together under a joint military command.
If the transition from WW II to a far deadlier, because nuclear, WW III was averted, an argument nevertheless exists that the Second World War never ended but shifted focus. As an illustrative biographical case study of the seamless adaptation, the New York Times ran a reverential obituary three years ago from which the following is an excerpt:
"Gen. Johann-Adolf Count von Kielmansegg, a German Panzer division officer during World War II who became commander in chief of NATO forces in Central Europe during the height of the cold war, died on May 26 in Bonn. He was 99....By the start of World War II, he was commander of a Panzer, or armored, division. In 1940, he took part in the German invasion of France, sweeping around the Maginot line's obsolete fortifications in eastern France and rushing to the English Channel. After fighting on the Russian front, he joined the General Staff in Berlin. Restored to tank duty, he fought the American Army in western Germany...." [10]
It would be intriguing to learn what Count von Kielmansegg thought at the end of his nearly century-long life about the return of his homeland to the ranks of nations sending troops to and waging war against others both near and far.
It would prove equally edifying to hear whether he thought that his career as a military commander ever truly changed course or rather pursued a logical if not inevitable path from the Wehrmacht to NATO.
Lastly, it doesn't seem unjustified to believe that the Count might at the end of his days have been proud of a Germany that had become the third largest exporter of weapons in the world, one which had arms agreements with 126 nations - over two-thirds of all countries - and that had troops deployed to war and post-conflict occupation zones in at least eleven countries at the same time and would soon, at this year's NATO summit, use its army at home again.
Part I
New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40658
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14332
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/new-nato-germany-returns-to-world-military-stage-part-1-by-rick-rozoff
1) Russian Information Agency Novosti, June 30, 2005
2) Russian Information Agency Novosti, March 28, 2005
3) Ibid
4) Ibid
5) Russian Information Agency Novosti, June 30, 2005
6) Ibid
7) Russian Information Agency Novosti, March 3, 2006
8) Voice of Russia, July 3, 2009
9) Voice of Russia, July 3, 2009
10) New York Times, June 4, 2006
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Stop NATO
July 12, 2009
New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage, Part 1
When the post-World War II German states the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, West and East Germany, respectively, were united in 1990, it was for many in Europe and the world as a whole a heady time, fraught with hopes of a continent at peace and perhaps disarmed.
Despite US pledges to the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would not move "one inch" eastward, what German reunification achieved was that the former German Democratic Republic joined not only the Federal Republic but NATO and the military bloc moved hundreds of kilometers nearer the Russian border, over the intervening years to be joined by twelve Eastern European nations. Five of those twelve new NATO members were republics of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union itself, neither of which any longer exists.
Far from issuing in an era of disarmament and a Europe free of military blocs - or even of war - the merging of the two German states and the simultaneous fragmentation of the Eastern Bloc and, a year later, the USSR was instead followed by a Europe almost entirely dominated by a US-controlled global military alliance.
Within mere months of reunification Germany, then governed by the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union-led government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, set to work to insure the fragmentation of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia would parallel that of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, with each broken down into all of its constituent republics.
The Kohl government and its Free Democrat Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher immediately pushed for recognition of the Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Slovenia. Croatia was the site of the Nazi-administered Independent State of Croatia during World War II and Slovenia had been parceled out among Germany and its Italian and Hungarian fascist allies.
What the rulers of newly unified Germany accomplished is best expressed in a line from Victor Hugo's poetic drama Cromwell: Strike while the iron is hot and in striking make it hot.
By the end of 1991 Germany had browbeaten the other members of the European Community, now the European Union, into recognizing the secession of both republics.
As the above pressure was being applied by Berlin the Deputy Foreign Minister of Serbia Dobrosav Vezovic warned "This is a direct attack on Yugoslavia," one which "erases Yugoslavia from the map of the world." [1]
Germany was now back on the road to redrawing the map of Europe and would shortly embark on the use of military force outside its borders for the first time since the Third Reich.
Berlin later deployed 4,000 troops to Bosnia in 1995, its largest mission abroad since World War II, but its return to direct military aggression after an almost 55-year hiatus would occur with NATO's war against Yugoslavia in 1999.
The standard Western rationale for that war, Operation Allied Force, is that it was an intervention to prevent alleged genocide in the Serbian province of Kosovo, a crisis that had flared up almost instantaneously, and the 78-day bombing war was then justified by what the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once termed the teleological suspension of ethics.
It was no such thing. The separation of Kosovo from Serbia and the further dissolution of the former Yugoslavia to the sub-federal republic level was the final act of a decade-long drama, but one envisioned before the lifting of the curtain on the first one.
In January of 1991 former US Congressman Joseph DioGuardi in his capacity of the President of the Albanian American Civic League wrote to German Chancellor Kohl demanding the following:
"The European Community, hopefully led by the Federal Republic of Germany, recognizes the Republic of Kosova as a sovereign and independent state as the only logical and effective solution to protect the Albanian people in Kosova from their Serbian communist oppressors." [2]
Five months earlier, in August of 1990, DioGuardi had escorted six US Senators, including Robert Dole, on a tour to Kosovo.
A year before the war began German newspapers ran headlines on the order of “Mr. Kinkel threatens a NATO intervention in Kosovo,” referring to then German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel, who is also quoted in 1998 as saying "Of course you have to consider whether you are permitted from a moral and ethical point of view to prevent the Kosovo-Albanians from buying weapons for their self-defense.” [3]
Canadian professor and political analyst Michel Chossudovsky has written extensively and trenchantly on the role of the German BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst/Federal Intelligence Service) in arming and training the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army before and in preparation for the NATO onslaught against Yugoslavia on his Web site Global Research at http://www.globalresearch.ca
It was in Kosovo that Germany, which had deployed troops to Bosnia and run a military hospital in Croatia earlier in the 1990s, crossed the post-World War II red line when the Luftwaffe (with its Tornado multirole combat fighters) engaged in combat operations for the first time since 1945.
The precedent was exacerbated when Germany followed up the bombing by military occupation as over a thousand of its troops accompanied their NATO allies into Kosovo in June of 1999. A German general assumed command of the 50,000-troop NATO Kosovo Force (KFOR).
Quoting from memory an account by an American reporter of the words of an older ethnic Albanian witnessing the arrival of the first German troops in Kosovo: "Where have you been? We missed you. The last time you were here you drew the borders the right way."
The Rubicon had been crossed, Germany had been declared by its Western allies cleansed of its Nazi past and was free to dispatch troops and wage war again, this time on the world stage.
As a Der Spiegel feature put it this past February, "The phase of German military intervention that began 10 years ago during the Kosovo war is in no way coming to an end, despite the fact the majority of Germans wish it would. On the contrary: The era of foreign deployments for Germans and their military forces has just begun." [4]
The lid of Pandora's chest had been thrown open and by 2007 "According to Germany`s Defense Ministry, roughly 8,200 soldiers are serving in missions in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Bosnia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Georgia, Kosovo and Sudan, making Germany one of the top contributors to international missions." [5]
How post-Cold War unified Germany and the German public were being prepared for the new international military role was insightfully analyzed a year before the Kosovo War by Diana Johnstone. The following is an excerpt from her article "Seeing Yugoslavia through a dark glass" which is far more penetrating than it may be comparatively lengthy:
"In the Bundestag, German Green leader Joschka Fisher [to become foreign minister later in the same year, 1998] pressed for disavowal of 'pacifism' in order to 'combat Auschwitz,' thereby equating Serbs with Nazis. In a heady mood of self-righteous indignation, German politicians across the board joined in using Germany's past guilt as a reason, not for restraint, as had been the logic up until reunification, but on the contrary, for 'bearing their share of the military burden'.
"In the name of human rights, the Federal Republic of Germany abolished its ban on military operations outside the NATO defensive area. Germany could once again be a 'normal' military power—thanks to the 'Serb threat.'
"On the contrary, what occurred in Germany was a strange sort of mass transfer of Nazi identity, and guilt, to the Serbs. In the case of the Germans, this can be seen as a comforting psychological projection which served to give Germans a fresh and welcome sense of innocence in the face of the new 'criminal' people, the Serbs, But the hate campaign against Serbs, started in Germany, did not stop there.
"If somebody had announced in 1989 that, well, the Berlin Wall has come down, now Germany can unite and send military forces back into Yugoslavia — and what is more in order to enforce a partition of the country along similar lines to those it imposed when it occupied the country in 1941 — well, quite a number of people might have raised objections. However, that is what has happened, and many of the very people might who have been expected to object most strongly to what amounts to the most significant act of historical revisionism since World War II have provided the ideological cover and excuse." [6]
The campaign was not without effect in Germany as subsequent events have proved and has been accompanied by the rehabilitation, honoring and even granting of veteran benefits to Nazi collaborators, including former Waffen SS members, in Croatia, Estonia, Latvia and Ukraine in recent years.
Following its military interventions in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, Germany sent troops to Macedonia in 2001 after armed continents of the Kosovo-based National Liberation Army (NLA), an offshoot of the Kosovo Liberation Army led by Ali Ahmeti, also a founder of the KLA, invaded the country in the summer of 2001. In connivance with the 50,000 NATO troops in Kosovo, Ahmeti's brigands brought fighters, arms and even artillery past American checkpoints on the Kosovo-Macedonia border to launch deadly raids against government and civilian targets.
In one incident 600 Bundeswehr soldiers were caught in the crossfire between the NLA marauders and government security forces (7)
Years later Benjamin Schreer, military expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, reflected on the consequences of what Johnstone had described: "The decision of the SPD [Social Democratic Party] and Greens to send German troops into Kosovo in 1999 has transformed the Bundeswehr....The Bundeswehr is now operating on a global scale." [8]
The press wire report from which the quote was taken provides these details:
"The mission in Afghanistan had German troops, roughly 100 special forces who, for the first time since World War II, took part in ground combat.
"The Kommando Spezialkraefte, known by its acronym KSK, is a highly trained and well-equipped special unit that has successfully been assigned to Kosovo and Afghanistan. Most of their operations, however, are classified." [9]
After September 11, 2001 German military missions and deployments were expanded exponentially and in addition to Germany deploying AWACS to the US in Operation Eagle Assist it also "took part in [Operation Active Endeavor] which has German units monitor the Mediterranean waters....In Afghanistan and East Africa, German troops battle...with sea units, ground troops and special forces.
"The Bundeswehr, once restricted by the German constitution to exclusively domestic protection, can now send armed troops to foreign countries." [10]
Having exploited as well as in an integral way engineered the breakup of Yugoslavia, with Kosovo as the altar and Serbia as the paschal lamb whose slaying wiped clean decades of German guilt, Berlin was now free to play the role assigned to it by NATO: That of an international military power operating on four continents, a far wider range of deployment and engagement than had been achieved by either Bismarck or Hitler.
In a feature called "Preparing Germany's Military for War," it was reported in 2005 that then German Defense Minister Peter Struck was "proposing that...his department considers missions other than peace-keeping and stabilization for the Bundeswehr" and that "the Bundeswehr could be asked to play a stronger role in Africa in the future." [11]
While visiting German troops in Uzbekistan on his way to Afghanistan, Struck was quoted as saying "For those of us who were born after the war this is an unfavorable idea but we must be realistic. It is possible that we will consider going to other countries and separate warring parties by military means" and that the Bundeswehr must be prepared to "carry out peace enforcement missions anywhere in the world." [12]
In late 2006 Struck's successor, Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung, released a 133-page White Paper which stated "The Bundeswehr is to be thoroughly restructured into an intervention force." [13]
In an article entitled "Germany plans to remake its Army into a rapid-reaction, humanitarian-intervention force," Newsweek commented: "The pace of change has indeed been unsettling. It took a constitutional-court ruling in 1994 to permit German soldiers to be deployed abroad at all. Today, close to 10,000 Bundeswehr troops find themselves stationed in places as far-flung as Bosnia, Djibouti and southern Sudan...." [14]
Germany has become so comfortable with its current global military status that last week Chancellor Angela Merkel conferred the first combat medals on German soldiers since World War II.
"The new Cross of Honour for Bravery, is the military's first such medal since the end of World War II when it stopped awarding the Iron Cross tarnished by its use in Nazi Germany. Some see this as another sign of Germany emerging from its post-World War II diplomatic and military shell since the country's reunification in 1990." [15]
A column in the Times of London embraced this further reemergence of a militarized Germany, and one moreover of an expeditionary and aggressive nature - the soldiers awarded by Merkel were veterans of the Afghan war - with this panegyric:
"When Germany once again has the confidence proudly to parade its military heroes, its journey from the darkness of diplomatic and military purdah - via reunification in 1990 - is surely complete.
"Germany's new medal, the Honour Cross, stands as a bold response to the
growing role played in the world by German military.
"The presentation by Chancellor Angela Merkel marks a potent moment in Germany's return to the heart of the community of nations." [16]
Last November German Defense Minister Jung laid the foundation stone for "the first national memorial to soldiers killed serving in the country's post-World War II military."
Combat deaths and their commemoration, for decades considered matters of a dark and distant past, are now commonplace as "Germany...has emerged gradually from its postwar diplomatic and military shell, increasingly
puts soldiers in the line of fire in places such as Afghanistan." [17]
The process of German reunification, the first effect of which was to place the entire territory of the nation in NATO, had been consummated with the rebirth of a major military power thought by many to have reached its final quietus in 1945.
The mainstream weekly Der Spiegel wrote in 2005 in a feature aptly named "Germany's Bundeswehr Steps out on the Global Stage" that "With reunification, the nation had not just regained full sovereignty: it also became subject to rules that had effectively been put on ice during the Cold War. On the new international stage, political influence was reserved for those who were willing and able to assert their interests in concert with their partners. If need be, by force. If need be, by military means."
The celebratory piece went on to say:
"Today the Bundeswehr has become one of the most powerful tools available to German foreign-policy makers.
"[T]he German government is in the process of fostering a totally different breed of soldier. The elite members of the Kommando Spezialkrafte (Special Forces Command), or KSK...are highly trained professionals who can hold their own with their colleagues from the British SAS or American Delta Force....
"Germany has 'finally reached a state of normality,' and its democracy will now be 'defended directly' wherever threats arise. That could be anywhere, soon even in Africa." [18]
In the culmination of almost twenty years of German and allied efforts to subvert and tear apart the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, its truncated successor the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and finally Serbia, almost on the first anniversary of the Western-supported secession of Kosovo in February of 2008 Berlin announced that it was donating 200 vehicles to the newly formed Kosovo Security Force, a revamped Kosovo Liberation Army headed up by a KLA commander who has already proclaimed his intention to join NATO.
The German offering is "a substantial contribution to the build up" of the fledgling army of an illegal entity not recognized by over two-thirds of the world including Russia, China and India. [19]
In an interview with Radio Kosova this February Colonel Dieter Jensch, senior official of the German Defense Ministry, boasted that "The Bundeswehr is helping the Kosovo Security Force through material assistance, which includes the donation of 204 vehicles and other technical equipment, and we have assigned a team of 15 professional military officers to help in building the KSF structures."
The account from which the above emanates added "The assistance is valued at 2.6 million Euros. Germany will also send 15 military personnel to help build KSF structures and to train the members of this force.
"The building of the Kosovo Security Force and its professional training is expected to cost 43 million Euros. Germany is among the first countries to help in building this force. It has already sent 15 military officers to help in building the structures of this force and to train its members." [20]
Yesterday the Balkans and today the world.
1) New York Times, December 18, 1991
2) Albanian American Civic League, January 6, 1991
3) Suddeutsche Zeitung, July 30, 1998
4) Der Spiegel, February 9, 2009
5) United Press International, March 20, 2007
6) CovertAction Quarterly, Fall 1998
7) Michel Chossudovsky, Washington Behind Terrorist Assaults In Macedonia
Global Research, September 10, 2001
Michel Chossudovsky, America at War in Macedonia
June 2001
Rick Rozoff, Human Rights Watch: Dear Mr. Ahmeti
August 1, 1009
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/yugoslaviainfo/message/3364
8) United Press International, August 30, 2005
9) Ibid
10) Ibid
11) Deutsche Welle, June 6, 2005
12) Ibid
13) Newsweek, November 13, 2006
14) Ibid
15) Deutsche Welle, July 6, 2009
16) The Times, July 7, 2009
17) Associated Press, November 28, 2008
18) Der Spiegel, June 17, 2005
19) Associated Press, February 13, 2009
20) Kosova Information Center, February 9, 2009
===========================
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« Color revolution » fails in Iran
La technique des coups d’État par en bas
La « révolution colorée » échoue en Iran
par Thierry Meyssan*
La « révolution verte » de Téhéran est le dernier avatar des « révolutions colorées » qui ont permis aux États-unis d’imposer des gouvernements à leur solde dans plusieurs pays sans avoir à recourir à la force. Thierry Meyssan, qui a conseillé deux gouvernements face à ces crises, analyse cette méthode et les raisons de son échec en Iran.
24 JUIN 2009
Depuis
Beyrouth (Liban)
Les « révolution colorées » sont aux révolutions ce que le Canada Dry est à la bière. Elles y ressemblent, mais n’en ont pas la saveur. Ce sont des changements de régime ayant l’apparence d’une révolution, en ce qu’ils mobilisent de vastes segments du Peuple, mais relevant du coup d’État, en ce qu’il ne visent pas à changer les structures sociales, mais à substituer une élite à une autre pour conduire une politique économique et étrangère pro-US. La « révolution verte » de Téhéran en est le dernier exemple.
Origine du concept
Ce concept est apparu dans les années 90, mais trouve ses origines dans les débats US des années 70-80. Après les révélations en chaîne sur les coups d’État fomentés par la CIA dans le monde, et le grand déballage des commissions parlementaires Church et Rockefeller [1], l’amiral Stansfield Turner fut chargé par le président Carter de nettoyer l’agence et de cesser tout soutien aux « dictatures maison ». Furieux, les sociaux démocrates états-uniens (SD/USA) quittèrent le Parti démocrate et rejoignirent Ronald Reagan. Il s’agissait de brillants intellectuels trotskistes [2], souvent liés à la revue Commentary. Lorsque Reagan fut élu, il leur confia la tâche de poursuivre l’ingérence US, mais par d’autres moyens. C’est ainsi qu’ils créent en 1982 la National Endowment for Democracy (NED) [3] et, en 1984, l’United States Institute for Peace (USIP). Les deux structures sont organiquement liées : des administrateurs de la NED siègent au conseil d’administration de l’USIP et vice-versa.
Juridiquement, la NED est une association à but non lucratif, de droit US, financée par une subvention annuelle votée par le Congrès à l’intérieur du budget du département d’État. Pour mener ses actions, elle les fait co-financer par l’US Agency for International Development (USAID), elle-même rattachée au département d’État.
En pratique, cette structure juridique n’est qu’un paravent utilisé conjointement par la CIA états-unienne, le MI6 britannique et l’ASIS australien (et occasionnellement par les services canadiens et néo-zélandais).
La NED se présente comme un organe de « promotion de la démocratie ». Elle intervient soit directement ; soit par ses quatre tentacules : l’une destinée à corrompre les syndicats, une seconde chargée de corrompre les patronats, une troisième pour les partis de gauche et une quatrième pour ceux de droite ; soit encore par l’intermédiaire de fondations amies, telles que la Westminster Foundation for Democracy (Royaume-Uni), l’International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development (Canada), la Fondation Jean-Jaurès et la Fondation Robert-Schuman (France), l’International Liberal Center (Suède), l’Alfred Mozer Foundation (Pays-Bas), la Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, la Friedrich Naunmann Stiftung, la Hans Seidal Stiftung et la Heinrich Boell Stiftung (Allemagne). La NED revendique avoir corrompu ainsi plus de 6 000 organisations dans le monde en une trentaine d’années. Tout ça, bien entendu, étant camouflé sous l’apparence de programmes de formation ou d’assistance.
[PHOTO: Les quatre instituts satellites de la NED - http://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/gif/fr-NED-2.gif ]
L’USIP, quant à lui, est une institution nationale états-unienne. Il est subventionné annuellement par le Congrès dans le budget du département de la Défense. À la différence de la NED, qui sert de couverture aux services des trois États alliés, l’USIP est exclusivement états-unien. Sous couvert de recherche en sciences politique, il peut salarier des personnalités politiques étrangères.
Dès qu’il a disposé de ressources, l’USIP a financé une nouvelle et discrète structure, l’Albert Einstein Institution [4]. Cette petite association de promotion de la non-violence était initialement chargée d’imaginer une forme de défense civile pour les populations d’Europe de l’Ouest en cas d’invasion par le Pacte de Varsovie. Elle a rapidement pris son autonomie et modélisé les conditions dans lesquelles un pouvoir étatique, de quelque nature qu’il soit, peut perdre son autorité et s’effondrer.
Premières tentatives
La première tentative de « révolution colorée » a échoué en 1989. Il s’agissait de renverser Deng Xiaoping en s’appuyant sur un de ses proches collaborateurs, le secrétaire général du Parti communiste chinois Zhao Ziyang, de manière à ouvrir le marché chinois aux investisseurs états-uniens et à faire entrer la Chine dans l’orbite US. Les jeunes partisans de Zhao envahirent la place Tienanmen [5]. Ils furent présentés par les médias occidentaux comme des étudiants a-politiques se battant pour la liberté face à l’aile traditionnelle du Parti, alors qu’il s’agissait d’une dissidence à l’intérieur du courant de Deng entre nationalistes et pro-US. Après avoir longtemps résisté aux provocations, Deng décida de conclure par la force. La répression fit entre 300 et 1000 morts selon les sources.
20 ans plus tard, la version occidentale de ce coup d’État raté n’a pas variée. Les médias occidentaux qui ont couvert récemment cet anniversaire en le présentant comme une « révolte populaire » se sont étonnés de ce que les Pékinois n’ont pas gardé souvenir de l’événement. C’est qu’une lutte de pouvoir au sein du Parti n’avait rien de « populaire ». Ils ne se sentaient pas concernés.
La première « révolution colorée » réussit en 1990. Alors que l’Union soviétique était en cours de dissolution, le secrétaire d’État James Baker se rendit en Bulgarie pour participer à la campagne électorale du parti pro-US, abondamment financé par la NED [6]. Cependant, malgré les pressions du Royaume-Uni, les Bulgares, effrayés par les conséquences sociales du passage de l’URSS à l’économie de marché, commirent l’impardonnable faute d’élire au Parlement une majorité de post-communistes. Alors que les observateurs de la Communauté européenne certifièrent la bonne tenue du scrutin, l’opposition pro-US hurla à la fraude électorale et descendit dans la rue. Elle installa un campement au centre de Sofia et plongea le pays dans le chaos six mois durant, jusqu’à ce que le Parlement élise le pro-US Zhelyu Zhelev comme président.
La « démocratie » : vendre son pays à des intérêts étrangers à l’insu de sa population
Depuis lors, Washington n’a cessé d’organiser des changements de régime, un peu partout dans le monde, par l’agitation de rue plutôt que par des juntes militaires. Il importe ici de cerner les enjeux.
Au-delà du discours lénifiant sur la « promotion de la démocratie », l’action de Washington vise à l’imposition de régimes qui lui ouvrent sans conditions les marchés intérieurs et s’alignent sur sa politique étrangère. Or, si ces objectifs sont connus des dirigeants des « révolutions colorées », ils ne sont jamais discutés et acceptés par les manifestants qu’ils mobilisent. Et, dans le cas où ces coup d’État réussissent, les citoyens ne tardent pas à se révolter contre les nouvelles politiques qu’on leur impose, même s’il est trop tard pour revenir en arrière.
Par ailleurs, comment peut-on considérer comme « démocratiques » des oppositions qui, pour prendre le pouvoir, vendent leur pays à des intérêts étrangers à l’insu de leur population ?
En 2005, l’opposition kirghize conteste le résultat des élections législatives et amène à Bichkek des manifestants du Sud du pays. Ils renversent le président Askar Akaïev. C’est la « révolution des tulipes ». L’Assemblée nationale élit comme président le pro-US Kourmanbek Bakiev. Ne parvenant pas à maîtriser ses supporters qui pillent la capitale, il déclare avoir chassé le dictateur et feint de vouloir créer un gouvernement d’union nationale. Il fait sortir de prison le général Felix Kulov, ancien maire de Bichkek, et le nomme ministre de l’Intérieur, puis Premier ministre. Lorsque la situation est stabilisée, Bakaiev se débarrasse de Kulov et vend, sans appel d’offre et avec des dessous de table conséquents, les quelques ressources du pays à des sociétés US et installe une base militaire US à Manas. Le niveau de vie de la population n’a jamais été aussi bas. Felix Kulov propose de relever le pays en le fédérant, comme par le passé, à la Russie. Il ne tarde pas à retourner en prison.
Un mal pour un bien ?
On objecte parfois, dans le cas d’États soumis à des régimes répressifs, que si ces « révolutions colorées » n’apportent qu’une démocratie de façade, elles procurent néanmoins un mieux-être aux populations. Or, l’expérience montre que rien n’est moins sûr. Les nouveaux régimes peuvent s’avérer plus répressifs que les anciens.
En 2003, Washington, Londres et Paris [7] organisent la « révolution des roses » en Géorgie [8]. Selon un schéma classique, l’opposition dénonce des fraudes électorales lors des élections législatives et descend dans la rue. Les manifestants contraignent le président Edouard Chevardnadze à fuir et prennent le pouvoir. Son successeur Mikhail Saakachvili ouvre le pays aux intérêts économiques US et rompt avec le voisin russe. L’aide économique promise par Washington pour se substituer à l’aide russe ne vient pas. L’économie, déjà compromise, s’effondre. Pour continuer à satisfaire ses commanditaires, Saakachvili doit imposer une dictature [9]. Il ferme des médias et remplit les prisons, ce qui n’empêche absolument pas la presse occidentale de continuer à le présenter comme « démocrate ». Condamné à la fuite en avant, Saakachvili décide de se refaire une popularité en se lançant dans une aventure militaire. Avec l’aide de l’administration Bush et d’Israël auquel il a loué des bases aériennes, il bombarde la population d’Ossétie du Sud, faisant 1600 morts, dont la plupart ont la double nationalité russe. Moscou riposte. Les conseillers états-uniens et israéliens s’enfuient [10]. La Géorgie est dévastée.
Assez !
Le mécanisme principal des « révolutions colorées » consiste à focaliser le mécontentement populaire sur la cible que l’on veut abattre. Il s’agit d’un phénomène de psychologie des masses qui balaye tout sur son passage et auquel aucun obstacle raisonnable ne peut être opposé. Le bouc-émissaire est accusé de tous les maux qui accablent le pays depuis au moins une génération. Plus il résiste, plus la colère de la foule croît. Lorsqu’il cède ou qu’il esquive, la population retrouve ses esprits, les clivages raisonnables entre ses partisans et ses opposants réapparaissent.
En 2005, dans les heures qui suivent l’assassinat de l’ex-Premier ministre Rafik Hariri, la rumeur se répand au Liban qu’il a été tué par « les Syriens ». L’armée syrienne, qui —en vertu de l’Accord de Taëf— maintient l’ordre depuis la fin de la guerre civile, est conspuée. Le président syrien, Bachar el-Assad, est personnellement mis en cause par les autorités états-uniennes, ce qui tient lieu de preuve pour l’opinion publique. À ceux qui font remarquer que —malgré des moments orageux— Rafik Hariri a toujours été utile à la Syrie et que sa mort prive Damas d’un collaborateur essentiel, on rétorque que le « régime syrien » est si mauvais en soi qu’il ne peut s’empêcher de tuer même ses amis. Les Libanais appellent de leurs vœux un débarquement des GI’s pour chasser les Syriens. Mais, à la surprise générale, Bachar el-Assad, considérant que son armée n’est plus la bienvenue au Liban alors que son déploiement lui coûte cher, retire ses hommes. Des élections législatives sont organisées qui voient le triomphe de la coalition « anti-syrienne ». C’est la « révolution du cèdre ». Lorsque la situation se stabilise, chacun se rend compte et que, si des généraux syriens ont par le passé pillé le pays, le départ de l’armée syrienne ne change rien économiquement. Surtout, le pays est en danger, il n’a plus les moyens de se défendre face à l’expansionnisme du voisin israélien. Le principal leader « anti-syrien », le général Michel Aoun, se ravise et passe dans l’opposition. Furieux, Washington multiplie les projets pour l’assassiner. Michel Aoun s’allie au Hezbollah autour d’une plate-forme patriotique. Il était temps : Israël attaque.
Dans tous les cas, Washington prépare à l’avance le gouvernement « démocratique », ce qui confirme bien qu’il s’agit d’un coup d’État déguisé. La composition de la nouvelle équipe est gardée secrète le plus longtemps possible. C’est pourquoi la désignation du bouc-émissaire se fait sans jamais évoquer d’alternative politique.
En Serbie, les jeunes « révolutionnaires » pro-US ont choisi un logo appartenant à l’imaginaire communiste (le poing levé) pour masquer leur subordination aux États-Unis. Ils ont pris comme slogan « Il est fini ! », fédérant ainsi les mécontents contre la personnalité de Slobodan Milosevic qu’ils ont rendu responsable des bombardements du pays pourtant effectués par l’OTAN. Ce modèle a été dupliqué en nombre, par exemple le groupe Pora ! en Ukraine, ou Zubr en Biélorussie.
Une non-violence de façade
Les communicants du département d’État veillent à l’image non-violente des « révolutions colorées ». Toutes mettent en avant les théories de Gene Sharp, fondateur de l’Albert Einstein Institution. Or, la non-violence est une méthode de combat destinée à convaincre le pouvoir de changer de politique. Pour qu’une minorité s’empare du pouvoir et l’exerce, il lui faut toujours, à un moment ou à un autre, utiliser la violence. Et toutes les « révolutions colorées » l’ont fait.
[PHOTO: Srdja Popovic (à gauche), leader serbe du mouvement Otpor, Gene Sharp, fondateur de l’Albert Einstein Institution (au centre) et son adjoint le colonel Robert Helvey, doyen de l’École de formation des attachés militaires d’ambassade. - http://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/jpg/fr-sharp-serbie-2.jpg ]
En 2000, alors que le mandat du président Slobodan Milosevic courait encore pour un an, il convoqua des élections anticipées. Lui-même et son principal opposant, Vojislav Koštunica, se retrouvèrent en ballotage. Sans attendre le second tour de scrutin, l’opposition cria à la fraude et descendit dans la rue. Des milliers de manifestants affluèrent vers la capitale, dont les mineurs de Kolubara. Leurs journées de travail étaient indirectement payées par la NED, sans qu’ils aient conscience d’être rémunérés par les États-Unis. La pression de la manifestation étant insuffisante, les mineurs attaquèrent des bâtiments publics avec des bulldozers qu’ils avaient acheminé avec eux, d’où le nom de « révolution des bulldozers ».
Dans le cas où la tension s’éternise et que des contre-manifestations s’organisent, la seule solution pour Washington est de plonger le pays dans le chaos. Des agents provocateurs sont alors postés dans les deux camps qui tirent sur la foule. Chaque partie peut constater que ceux d’en face ont tiré alors qu’ils s’avançaient pacifiquement. L’affrontement se généralise.
En 2002, la bourgeoisie de Caracas descend dans la rue pour conspuer la politique sociale du président Hugo Chavez [11]. Par d’habiles montages, les télévisions privées donnent l’impression d’une marée humaine. Ils sont 50 000 selon les observateurs, 1 million d’après la presse et le département d’État. Survient alors l’incident du pont Llaguno. Les télévisions montrent clairement des pro-chavistes armes à la main tirant sur la foule. Dans une conférence de presse, le général de la Garde nationale et vice-ministre de la sécurité intérieure confirme que les « milices chavistes » ont tiré sur le peuple faisant 19 morts. Il démissionne et appelle au renversement de la dictature. Le président ne tarde pas à être arrêté par des militaires insurgés. Mais le Peuple par millions descend dans la capitale et rétablit l’ordre constitutionnel.
Une enquête journalistique ultérieure reconstituera en détail la tuerie du pont Llaguno. Elle mettra en évidence un montage fallacieux des images, dont l’ordre chronologique a été falsifié comme l’attestent les cadrans des montres des protagonistes. En réalité, ce sont les chavistes qui étaient agressés et qui, après s’être repliés, tentaient de se dégager en utilisant des armes à feu. Les agents provocateurs étaient des policiers locaux formés par une agence US [12].
En 2006, la NED réorganise l’opposition au président kenyan Mwai Kibaki. Elle finance la création du Parti orange de Raila Odinga. Celui-ci reçoit le soutien du sénateur Barack Obama, accompagné de spécialistes de la déstabilisation (Mark Lippert, actuel chef de cabinet du conseiller de sécurité nationale, et le général Jonathan S. Gration, actuel envoyé spécial du président US pour le Soudan). Participant à un meeting d’Odinga, le sénateur de l’Illinois s’invente un vague lien de parenté avec le candidat pro-US. Cependant Odinga perd les élections législatives de 2007. Soutenu par le sénateur John McCain, en sa qualité de président de l’IRI (le pseudopode républicain de la NED), il conteste la sincérité du scrutin et appelle ses partisans à descendre dans la rue.
C’est alors que des messages SMS anonymes sont diffusés en masse aux électeurs de l’ethnie Luo. « Chers Kenyans, les Kikuyu ont volé l’avenir de nos enfants…nous devons les traiter de la seule manière qu’ils comprennent… la violence ». Le pays, pourtant un des plus stables d’Afrique, s’embrase soudainement. Après des journées d’émeutes, le président Kibaki est contraint d’accepter la médiation de Madeleine Albright, en sa qualité de présidente du NDI (le pseudopode démocrate de la NED). Un poste de Premier ministre est créé qui revient à Odinga. Les SMS de la haine n’ayant pas été envoyés depuis des installations kenyanes, on se demande quelle puissance étrangère a pu les expédier.
La mobilisation de l’opinion publique internationale
Au cours des dernières années, Washington a eu l’occasion de lancer des « révolutions colorées » avec la conviction qu’elles échoueraient à prendre le pouvoir mais qu’elle permettrait de manipuler l’opinion publique et les institutions internationales.
En 2007, de nombreux Birmans s’insurgent contre l’augmentation des prix du fuel domestique. Les manifestations dégénèrent. Les moines bouddhistes prennent la tête de la contestation. C’est la « révolution safran » [13]. En réalité, Washington n’a que faire du régime de Rangoon ; ce qui l’intéresse, c’est d’instrumenter le Peuple birman pour faire pression sur la Chine qui a des intérêts stratégiques en Birmanie (pipelines et base militaire de renseignement électronique). Dès lors, l’important est de mettre en scène la réalité. Des images prises par des téléphones portables apparaissent sur YouTube. Elles sont anonymes, invérifiables et hors contexte. Précisément, leur apparente spontanéité leur donne autorité. La Maison-Blanche peut imposer son interprétation des vidéos.
Plus récemment, en 2008, des manifestations estudiantines paralysent la Grèce à la suite du meurtre d’un jeune homme de 15 ans par un policier. Rapidement des casseurs font leur apparition. Ils ont été recrutés au Kosovo voisin et acheminés par autobus. Les centre-villes sont saccagés. Washington cherche à faire fuir les capitaux vers d’autres cieux et à se réserver le monopole des investissements dans les terminaux gaziers en construction. Une campagne de presse va donc faire passer le poussif gouvernement Karamanlis pour celui des colonels. Facebook et Twittter sont utilisés pour mobiliser la diaspora grecque. Les manifestations s’étendent à Istanbul, Nicosie, Dublin, Londres, Amsterdam, La Haye, Copenhague, Francfort, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Barcelone, etc.
La révolution verte
L’opération conduite en 2009 en Iran s’inscrit dans cette longue liste de pseudos révolutions. En premier lieu, le Congrès vote en 2007 une enveloppe de 400 millions de dollars pour « changer le régime » en Iran. Celle-ci s’ajoute aux budgets ad hoc de la NED, de l’USAID, de la CIA et tutti quanti. On ignore comment cet argent est utilisé, mais trois groupes principaux en sont destinataires : la famille Rafsandjani, la famille Pahlevi, et les Moudjahidines du peuple.
L’administration Bush prend la décision de commanditer une « révolution colorée » en Iran après avoir confirmé la décision de l’état-major de ne pas attaquer militairement ce pays. Ce choix est validé par l’administration Obama. Par défaut, on rouvre donc le dossier de « révolution colorée », préparé en 2002 avec Israël au sein de l’American Enterprise Institute. À l’époque j’avais publié un article sur ce dispositif [14]. Il suffit de s’y reporter pour identifier les protagonistes actuels : il a été peu modifié. Une partie libanaise a été ajoutée prévoyant un soulèvement à Beyrouth en cas de victoire de la coalition patriotique (Hezbollah, Aoun) aux élections législatives, mais elle a été annulée.
Le scénario prévoyait un soutien massif au candidat choisi par l’ayatollah Rafsandjani, la contestation des résultats de l’élection présidentielle, des attentats tous azimuts, le renversement du président Ahmadinejad et du guide suprême l’ayatollah Khamenei, l’installation d’un gouvernement de transition dirigé par Mousavi, puis la restauration de la monarchie et l’installation d’un gouvernement dirigé par Sohrab Sobhani.
Comme imaginé en 2002, l’opération a été supervisée par Morris Amitay et Michael Ledeen. Elle a mobilisé en Iran les réseaux de l’Irangate.
Ici un petit rappel historique est nécessaire. L’Irangate est une vente d’armes illicite : la Maison-Blanche souhaitait approvisionner en armes les Contras nicaraguayens (pour lutter contre les sandinistes) d’une part et l’Iran d’autre part (pour faire durer jusqu’à épuisement la guerre Iran-Irak), mais en était interdit par le Congrès. Les Israéliens proposèrent alors de sous-traiter les deux opérations à la fois. Ledeen, qui est double national États-unien/Israélien sert d’agent de liaison à Washington, tandis que Mahmoud Rafsandjani (le frère de l’ayatollah) est son correspondant à Téhéran. Le tout sur fond de corruption généralisée. Lorsque le scandale éclate aux États-Unis, une commission d’enquête indépendante est dirigée par le sénateur Tower et le général Brent Scowcroft (le mentor de Robert Gates).
Michael Ledeen est un vieux briscard des opérations secrètes. On le trouve à Rome lors de l’assassinat d’Aldo Moro, on le retrouve dans l’invention de la piste bulgare lors de la tentaive d’assassinat de Jean-Paul II, ou plus récemment dans l’invention de l’approvisionnement de Saddam Hussein en uranium nigérian. Il travaille aujourd’hui à l’American Enterprise Institute [15] (aux côtés de Richard Perle et Paul Wolfowitz) et à la Foundation for the Defense of Democracies [16].
Morris Amitay est ancien directeur de l’American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Il est aujourd’hui vice-président du Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) et directeur d’un cabinet conseil pour de grandes firmes d’armement.
Le 27 avril dernier, Morris et Ledeen organisaient un séminaire sur l’Iran à l’American Enterprise Institute à propos des élections iraniennes, autour du sénateur Joseph Lieberman. Le 15 mai dernier, nouveau séminaire. La partie publique consistait en une table ronde animée par l’ambassadeur John Bolton à propos du « grand marchandage » : Moscou accepterait-il de laisser tomber Téhéran en échange du renoncement de Washington au bouclier anti-missile en Europe centrale ? L’expert français Bernard Hourcade participait à ces échanges. Simultanément, l’Institut lançait un site internet destiné à la presse dans la crise à venir :IranTracker.org. Le site inclut une rubrique sur les élections libanaises.
En Iran, il appartenait à l’ayatollah Rafsandjani de renverser son vieux rival, l’ayatollah Khamenei. Issu d’une famille d’agriculteurs, Hachemi Rafsandjani a fait fortune dans la spéculation immobilière sous le Chah. Il est devenu le principal grossiste en pistaches du pays et a arrondi sa fortune durant l’Irangate. Ses avoirs sont évalués à plusieurs milliards de dollars. Devenu l’homme le plus riche d’Iran, il a été successivement président du parlement, président de la République et aujourd’hui président du Conseil de discernement (instance d’arbitrage entre le parlement et le Conseil des gardiens de la constitution). Il représente les intérêts du bazar, c’est-à-dire des commerçants de Téhéran.
Durant la campagne électorale, Rafsandjani avait fait promettre à son ex-adversaire devenu son poulain, Mirhossein Mousavi, de privatiser le secteur pétrolier.
Sans connexion aucune avec Rafsandjani, Washington a fait appel aux Moudjahidines du peuple [17]. Cette organisation protégée par le Pentagone est considérée comme terroriste par le département d’État et l’a été par l’Union européenne. Elle a effectivement mené de terribles opérations dans les années 80, dont un méga-attentat qui coûta la vie à l’ayatollah Behechti ainsi qu’à quatre ministre, six ministres adjoints et le quart du groupe parlementaire du Parti de la république islamique. L’organisation est commandée par Massoud Rajavi, qui épouse en première noces la fille du président Bani Sadr, puis la cruelle Myriam en seconde noces. Son siège est installé en région parisienne et ses bases militaires en Irak, d’abord sous la protection de Saddam Husein, puis aujourd’hui sous celle du département de la Défense. Ce sont les Moudjahidines qui ont assuré la logistique des attentats à la bombe durant la campagne électorale [18]. C’est à eux qu’il revenait de provoquer des accrochages entre militants pro et anti-Ahmadinejad, ce qu’ils ont probablement fait.
Dans le cas où le chaos se serait installé, le Guide suprême aurait pu être renversé. Un gouvernement de transition, dirigé par Mirhussein Mousavi aurait privatisé le secteur pétrolier et rétabli la monarchie. Le fils de l’ancien Shah, Reza Cyrus Pahlavi, serait remonté sur le trône et aurait désigné Sohrab Sobhani comme Premier ministre.
Dans cette perspective, Reza Pahlavi a publié en février un livre d’entretiens avec le journaliste français Michel Taubmann. Celui-ci est directeur du bureau d’information parisien d’Arte et préside le Cercle de l’Observatoire, le club des néo-conservateurs français.
On se souvient que Washington avait prévu identiquement le rétablissement de la monarchie en Afghanistan. Mohammed Zaher Shah devait reprendre son trône à Kaboul et Hamid Karzai devait être son Premier ministre. Malheureusement, à 88 ans, le prétendant était devenu sénile. Karzai devint donc président de la République. Comme Karzai, Sobhani est double national états-unien. Comme lui, il travaille dans le secteur pétrolier de la Caspienne.
Côté propagande, le dispositif initial était confié au cabinet Benador Associates. Mais il a évolué sous l’influence de l’assistante du secrétaire d’État pour l’Éducation et la Culture, Goli Ameri. Cette iranienne-états-unienne est une ancienne collaboratrice de John Bolton. Spécialiste des nouveaux médias, elle a mis en place des programmes d’équipement et de formation à l’internet pour les amis de Rafsandjani. Elle a aussi développé des radios et télévisions en langue farsi pour la propagande du département d’État et en coordination avec la BBC britannique.
La déstabilisation de l’Iran a échoué parce que le principal ressort des « révolutions colorées » n’a pas été correctement activé. MirHussein Mousavi n’est pas parvenu à cristalliser les mécontentements sur la personne de Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Le Peuple iranien ne s’est pas trompé, il n’a pas rendu le président sortant responsables des conséquences des sanctions économiques états-uniennes sur le pays. Dès lors, la contestation s’est limitée à la bourgeoisie des quartiers nord de Téhéran. Le pouvoir s’est abstenu d’opposer des manifestations les unes contre les autres et a laissé les comploteurs se découvrir.
Cependant, il faut admettre que l’intoxication des médias occidentaux a fonctionné. L’opinion publique étrangère a réellement cru que deux millions d’Iraniens étaient descendus dans la rue, lorsque le chiffre réel est au moins dix fois inférieur. Le maintien en résidence des correspondants de presse a facilité ces exagérations en les dispensant de fournir les preuves de leurs imputations.
Ayant renoncé à la guerre et échoué à renverser le régime, quelle carte reste-t-il dans les mains de Barack Obama ?
| Thierry Meyssan Analyste politique, fondateur du Réseau Voltaire. Dernier ouvrage paru : L’Effroyable imposture 2 (le remodelage du Proche-Orient et la guerre israélienne contre le Liban). |
[1] Les multiples rapports et documents publiés par ces commissions sont disponibles en ligne sur le site The Assassination Archives and Research Center. Les principaux extraits des rapports ont été traduits en français sous le titre Les Complots de la CIA, manipulations et assassinats, Stock, 1976, 608 pp.
[2] « Les New York Intellectuals et l’invention du néo-conservatisme », par Denis Boneau, Réseau Voltaire, 26 novembre 2004.
[3] « La NED, nébuleuse de l’ingérence démocratique », par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 22 janvier 2004.
[4] « L’Albert Einstein Institution : la non-violence version CIA », par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 4 janvier 2005.
[5] « Tienanmen, 20 ans après », par le professeur Domenico Losurdo, Réseau Voltaire, 9 juin 2009.
[6] À l’époque, la NED s’appuie en Europe orientale sur la Free Congress Foundation (FCF), animée par des républicains. Par la suite, cette organisation disparaît et cède la place à la Soros Foundation, animée par des démocrates, avec laquelle la NED fomente de nouveaux « changements de régime ».
[7] Soucieux d’apaiser les relations franco-US après la crise irakienne, le président Jacques Chirac tente de se rapprocher de l’administration bush sur le dos des Géorgiens, d’autant que la France a des intérêts économiques en Géorgie. Salomé Zourabichvili, n°2 des services secrets français, est nommée ambassadrice à Tbilissi, puis change de nationalité et devient ministre des Affaires étrangères de la « révolution des roses ».
[8] « Les dessous du coup d’État en Géorgie », par Paul Labarique,Réseau Voltaire, 7 janvier 2004.
[9] « Géorgie : Saakachvili jette son opposition en prison » et « Manifestations à Tbilissi contre la dictature des roses », Réseau Voltaire, 12 septembre 2006 et 30 septembre 2007.
[10] L’administration Bush espérait que ce conflit ferait diversion. Les bombardiers israéliens devaient simultanément décoller de Géorgie pour frapper l’Iran voisin. Mais, avant même d’attaquer les installations militaires géorgiennes, la Russie bombarde les aéroports loués à Israël et cloue ses avions au sol.
[11] « Opération manquée au Venezuela », par Thierry Meyssan,Réseau Voltaire, 18 mai 2002.
[12] Llaguno Bridge. Keys to a Massacre. Documentaire d’Angel Palacios, Panafilms 2005.
[13] « Birmanie : la sollicitude intéressée des États-Unis », par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 5 novembre 2007.
[14] « Les bonnes raisons d’intervenir en Iran », par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 12 février 2004.
[15] « L’Institut américain de l’entreprise à la Maison-Blanche »,Réseau Voltaire, 21 juin 2004.
[16] « Les trucages de la Foundation for the Defense of Democracies », Réseau Voltaire, 2 février 2005.
[17] « Les Moudjahidin perdus », par Paul Labarique, Réseau Voltaire, 17 février 2004.
[18] « Le Jundallah revendique des actions armées aux côtés des Moudjahidines du Peuple », Réseau Voltaire, 13 juin 2009.
Vi propongo questo articolo dell’analista politico Thierry Meyssan che ho tradotto dal francese. Si tratta della lunga parabola delle rivoluzioni colorate, a partire da quella cinese del 1989, finita nel bagno di sangue di Tien An Men, fino al tentativo, fallito anch’esso, di capovolgere il presidente Ahmadinejad, rieletto a furor di popolo, con quasi 11 milioni di voti di scarto rispetto al suo avversario, nelle ultime elezioni iraniane. Un pezzo di rara saggezza e di meticolosa ricostruzione storica che ha la forza di uno pugno intellettuale sferrato nei denti di chi, soprattutto a sinistra, si è stracciato le vesti e si è commosso di fronte alla reazione violenta (ma poteva esserlo di più) dei poteri costituiti iraniani, rei di non essersi inginocchiati al cospetto dei principi della santissima democrazia (occidentale) e a quelli, ancor più pretestuosi, dei diritti umani. Tra i neoservi s’iscrive, con un brano farneticante e illogico (almeno rispetto alla sua precedente produzione teorica) - che non ci risparmia nemmeno l’uso di un linguaggio conformista e spocchioso, per quanto appena più sottile - anche Slavoj Zizek, del quale ho spesso, incautamente, perorato le teorie dalle pagine virtuali di questo blog.
Il filosofo sloveno, che passa per essere un intenditore del pensiero di Marx e di Lenin, finisce nella rete mediatica ordita dal circuito manipolatore filo-statunitense come il più sguarnito (di armi critiche) uomo della strada, di colui che affolla quell’“astrazione indeterminata” comunemente definita pubblica opinione. Meyssan dà, sotto questo aspetto, una vera e propria lezione di marxismo a Zizek, sostenendo il punto secondo il quale non si è mai vista una rivoluzione che anziché puntare alla trasformazione delle strutture sociali (ergo ai rapporti sociali intorno ai quali queste si condensano) mira a rovesciare fisicamente un gruppo di dominanti per sostituirli con altri, ma più proni al potere imperiale statunitense (altro che resurrezione del sogno popolare o utopia della rivoluzione! Sei tu che sei triste e sconfortante caro Zizek). E Lenin, da par suo, era ancor meno suscettibile ai rivoluzionarismi spirituali che animano Zizek, tanto da aver ritenuto oggettivamente rivoluzionaria la lotta dell’emiro afghano (nonostante costui si basasse su principi pienamente monarchici). Stalin riprende le affermazioni di Lenin nel suo “I principi del Leninismo”: “Nelle condizioni dell'oppressione imperialistica, il carattere rivoluzionario del movimento nazionale non implica affatto obbligatoriamente l'esistenza di elementi proletari nel movimento, l'esistenza di un programma rivoluzionario o repubblicano del movimento, l'esistenza di una base democratica del movimento. La lotta dell'emiro afghano per l'indipendenza dell'Afghanistan é oggettivamente una lotta rivoluzionaria, malgrado il carattere monarchico delle concezioni dell'emiro e dei suoi seguaci, poiché essa indebolisce, disgrega, scalza l'imperialismo, mentre la lotta di certi «ultra» democratici e «socialisti» «rivoluzionari» e repubblicani dello stampo, ad esempio, di Kerenski e Tsereteli, Renaudel e Scheidemann, Cernov e Dan, Henderson e Clynes durante la guerra imperialista, era una lotta reazionaria, perché aveva come risultato di abbellire artificialmente, di consolidare, di far trionfare l'imperialismo”. Non vede dunque Zizek, in questa congiuntura storica, dove stanno i resistenti all’ordine imperiale e i veri reazionari? Ed invece, contraddicendo sempre Lenin, l’orda degli intellettuali infatuati solo dalla loro stessa fama di “radicalissimi”, si mettono completamente a rimorchio delle parole d’ordine e delle campagne di manipolazione dei peggiori dominanti, quelli egemoni: “Tutta la storia della democrazia borghese mette a nudo questa illusione: per ingannare il popolo, i democratici borghesi hanno sempre lanciato e sempre lanciano ogni sorta di "parole d'ordine". Si tratta di controllare la loro sincerità, di mettere a confronto le parole con i fatti, di non appagarsi della frase idealistica o ciarlatanesca, ma di cercar di scoprire la realtà di classe”. I fatti sono quelli che ci descrive Meyssan, e non la fandonie propinateci da Zizek. Avete materiale per giudicare da soli.
La tecnica dei colpi di Stato dal basso
Fallisce in Iran la « rivoluzione colorata »
di Thierry Meyssan*
La « rivoluzione verde » di Teheran è l’ultimo avatar delle « rivoluzioni colorate » che hanno permesso agli Stati Uniti d’imporre in parecchi paesi dei governi al loro soldo senza dover ricorrere alla forza. Thierry Meyssan, che ha consigliato due governi di fronte a queste crisi, analizza questo metodo e le ragioni del suo fallimento in Iran.
Depuis
Beyrouth (Liban)
Le « rivoluzioni colorate » stanno alle rivoluzioni come il Canada Dry sta alla birra. Vi assomigliano ma non ne hanno il sapore. Sono dei cambi di regime che hanno l’apparenza di una rivoluzione, in quanto mobilitano vasti settori del Popolo, ma rientrano nel colpo di Stato in quanto non mirano a cambiare le strutture sociali, ma a sostituire un’élite ad un’altra per condurre una politica economica ed estera filo-USA. La « rivoluzione verde » di Teheran ne è l’ultimo esempio.
Origine del concetto
Questo concetto compare negli anni 90, ma trova le sue origini nei dibattiti USA degli anni 70-80. Dopo le rivelazioni a catena sui colpi di Stato fomentati dalla CIA nel mondo e dopo che le commissioni parlamentari Church e Rockefeller [1] hanno ampiamente vuotato il sacco, l’ammiraglio Stansfield Turner viene incaricato dal presidente Carter di ripulire l’agenzia e di far cessare ogni sostegno alle « dittature fatte in casa ». Furenti, i social-democratici statunitensi (SD/USA) lasciano il Partito democratico e raggiungono Ronald Reagan. Si tratta di brillanti intellettuali trotzkisti [2], spesso legati alla rivista Commentary. Quando Reagan viene eletto, affida loro il compito di continuare l’ingerenza USA, ma con altri metodi. È così che essi creano, nel 1982, la National Endowment for Democracy (NED) [3] e, nel 1984, l’United States Institute for Peace (USIP). Le due strutture sono organicamente collegate: alcuni amministratori della NED siedono nel consiglio di amministrazione dell’USIP e viceversa.
Giuridicamente, la NED è un’associazione non a scopo di lucro, di diritto USA, finanziata da una sovvenzione annuale votata dal Congresso all’interno di un budget del dipartimento di Stato. Per condurre le sue azioni, essa le fa co-finanziare dall’US Agency for International Development (USAID), anch’essa legata al dipartimento di Stato. In pratica, questa struttura giuridica non è che un paravento utilizzato congiuntamente dalla statunitense CIA, dal britannico MI6 e dall’australiano’ASIS (e, occasionalmente, dai servizi canadesi e neozelandesi).
La NED si presenta come un organo di « promozione della democrazia ». Essa interviene sia direttamente, cioè attraverso uno dei suoi quattro tentacoli : uno destinato a corrompere i sindacati, un secondo incaricato di corrompere gli imprenditori, un terzo per i partiti di sinistra ed un quarto per quelli di destra ; sia, ancora, con l’intermediazione di fondazioni amiche, come la Westminster Foundation for Democracy (Regno Unito), l’International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development (Canada), la Fondation Jean-Jaurès e la Fondation Robert-Schuman (Francia), l’International Liberal Center (Svezoa), l’Alfred Mozer Foundation (Paesi Bassi), la Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, la Friedrich Naunmann Stiftung, la Hans Seidal Stiftung e la Heinrich Boell Stiftung (Germania). La NED rivendica di aver così corrotto nel mondo più di 6 000 organizzazioni in una trentina d’anni. Tutto ciò, beninteso, mascherato sotto l’apparenza di programmi di formazione o di assistenza.
[FOTO: I quattro istituti-satellite della NED]
Per quanto riguarda l’USIP, si tratta di un’istituzione nazionale statunitense. È sovvenzionato annualmente dal Congresso nel budget del dipartimento della Difesa. A differenza della NED, che serve da copertura ai servizi dei tre Stati alleati, l’USIP è esclusivamente statunitense. Sotto la copertura della ricerca in scienze politiche, può stipendiare delle personalità politiche straniere.
Da quando dispone di risorse, l’USIP finanzia una nuova e discreta struttura, l’Albert Einstein Institution [4]. Questa piccola associazione di promozione della non violenza è inizialmente incaricata di ideare una forma di difesa civile per le popolazioni dell’Europa occidentale in caso di invasione del Patto di Varsavia. Essa prende rapidamente autonomia e modella le condizioni per cui un potere statuale di qualsiasi natura possa perdere la sua autorità e crollare.
Primi tentativi
Il primo tentativo di « rivoluzione colorata » fallisce nel 1989. Si tratta di rovesciare Deng Xiaoping appoggiandosi su uno dei suoi vicini collaboratori, il segretario generale del Partito comunista cinese Zhao Ziyang, in modo da aprire il mercato cinese agli investitori statunitensi e da far entrare la Cina nell’orbita USA. I giovani sostenitori di Zhao invadono piazza Tienanmen [
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