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Munchausens At The Hague, Cowards At Woods Hole
by Stephen Gowans
February 25, 2002
Mun.chau.sen
After Baron K. F. H. von Münchhausen,
a proverbial teller of exaggerated
tales. A liar.
Cow.ard
One who shows or yields to ignoble fear.
If Carla del Ponte, The Hague's chief
prosecutor, were a piece of chocolate,
she wouldn't so much resemble the
chocolate of her native Switzerland as
she would a bar of Ex-Lax, the faux
chocolate laxative made in America, whose
sole purpose is to draw forth copious
quantities of shit. For what else is
The Hague Tribunal but shit? And
American?
Said del Ponte, "every individual
irrespective of his position, his rank
or the power he holds can be brought to
justice for war crimes, crimes against
humanity and genocide." (1) This, to
mark the opening of the trial of former
Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic,
who, illegally abducted and
transported to The Hague, (sparking
paeans in the Western press to how the
rule of law had been vindicated) faces
charges of war crimes, crimes against
humanity and genocide.
The fashion on the American Left, or
large parts of what's called the
American Left, is to say, "Were it
true that every leader could be brought
to justice, then Clinton, Blair,
Schroeder, Albright, Fischer, and a
long list of NATO supremos, would be
sitting in the dock with Milosevic."
That NATO leaders should be sitting in
the dock is true enough. As John
Laughland, writing in the February 16
Guardian put it, "It has always been
obvious that the NATO attacks on
Yugoslavia were illegal under the post-war
United Nations-based system. Not only
were the attacks not approved by the
security council, that body was not
even consulted."
Of course, NATO leaders aren't going
to be answering for their crimes
against peace. Who's going to make
them? For one, they created the tribunal,
appointed the prosecutors, provided
the staff, and furnished part of the
tribunal's budget. It's their creation.
The tribunal also gets help from
financier George Soros's Open Society
Institute. (2) That's "open" society,
as is in open markets, as in not
communist, as in not socialist, as in
not resembling the social ownership
model of the Yugoslav economy under
the communists and Milosevic's Socialist
Party. Milosevic's socialism is rarely
mentioned in the media, lest two and
two are put together, and four, rather
than five, is the answer, and the
name Allende suddenly springs to mind.
But there's another reason NATO
leaders won't ever have to answer for
violating the UN Charter, refusing to
consult the Security Council, and
elevating themselves above
international law. The Hague Tribunal
hasn't the jurisdiction to prosecute crimes
against peace. Indeed, there is no
longer any such thing as a crime against
peace, the basis of Nuremberg and the
UN Charter. That was tossed out by Blair
and Clinton, who declared a new world
order, one in which NATO, or more to
the point, the US, could intervene at
will in the internal affairs of
sovereign states.
John Laughland says this was
adumbrated by the Nazis. "Like today's
globalists," he points out, "the Nazis
argued that economic realities had
changed and that, therefore, the great
powers should have the legal right to
interfere in the internal affairs of
smaller nations in their sphere of
influence."
"According to Nazi theory of 'great
space'," continues Laughland, "state
sovereignty was a bogus invention of
materialistic liberalism." Or in
today's language, it's a bogus
invention of leaders who want a shelter
behind which to violate human rights,
build weapons of mass destruction, or
harbour Osama bin Laden.
The preferred view of the Chomsky Left
is that Milosevic is a little thug,
an unlikeable man who did some bad
things, but not as bad as what NATO
leaders did. The big thugs live in
Washington and London, we're told.
Is Milosevic a thug, even a little
one, as this view holds? I'll be
honest.
I don't know. But I do know it is
generally considered appropriate to
have a sound basis for alleging someone is a
thug, which means something more than
someone else's unsubstantiated
accusations. But all too often newspaper
reports are taken at face value, even
by those who've spent some
considerable time writing books on
media bias. And what I've seen so far
from del Ponte, resembles what Tony
Blair splattered across the public
record as "incontrovertible" evidence
of Osama bin Laden's masterminding
9/11 -- old newspaper stories based on
innuendo, hearsay, and illegitimate
inference. In other words,
accusations, without a lot of meat on
them.
Let's take the allegation that
Milosevic used his 1989 speech as
Kosovo Field to whip Serbs into an
ultra-nationalist frenzy. The tribunal's
prosecution made sure to trot this out
in its opening remarks. It's a good
story. But that's all it is. A story,
repeated by the press, and now picked
up by the tribunal. But it's fiction. (3)
Funny thing. The press originally
reported the story correctly, only later
to turn it on its head at a time NATO
was pounding Yugoslav hospitals,
factories, power stations, homes,
embassies, apartment buildings and
refugee columns with bombs, showing a few
thousand Serb civilians an early exit
from this life. That NATO might want to
create a myth about a horrible
ultra-nationalist to deflect criticism
of its bombing campaign is hardly a
possibility to be dismissed.
On June 29, 1989, the day following
the infamous speech the Tribunal says
shows Milosevic as an
ultra-nationalist demagogue, The
Independent reported:
"There is no more appropriate place
than this field of Kosovo to say that
accord and harmony in Serbia are vital
to the prosperity of the Serbs and of
all other citizens living in Serbia,
regardless of their nationality or
religion,' [Milosevic] said. Mutual
tolerance and co-operation were also
sine qua non for Yugoslavia: 'Harmony
and relations on the basis of equality
among Yugoslavia's people are a
precondition for its existence, for
overcoming the crisis.'"
Milosevic "talked of mutual
tolerance," The Independent added,
"'building a rich and democratic society' and
ending the discord which had, he said,
led to Serbia's defeat here by the Turks
six centuries ago."
The same day, the BBC reported,
"Addressing the crowd, Milosevic said
that whenever they were able to the Serbs
had helped others to liberate
themselves, and they had never used
the advantage of their being a large
nation against others or for
themselves."
"He added that Yugoslavia was a
multi-national community," the BBC
continued, "which could survive
providing there was full equality for
all the nations living in it."
Twelve years later, on April 1, 2001,
the BBC would change its story,
claiming Milosevic had "gathered a
million Serbs at the site of the
battle to tell them to prepare for a new
struggle."
The BBC was not alone. Newspapers that
had originally reported Milosevic's
speech as conciliatory, now claimed he
delivered an ultra-nationalist
diatribe.
On June 3rd, 1999, with large parts of
Serbia laying in ruins after being
targeted by NATO warplanes, The
Economist said,
"But it is primitive nationalism,
egged on by the self-deluding myth of
Serbs as perennial victims, that has
become both Mr. Milosevic's rescuer
(when communism collapsed with the
Soviet Union) and his nemesis. It was
a stirringly virulent nationalist speech
he made in Kosovo, in 1989, harking
back to the Serb Prince Lazar's
suicidally brave battle against the
Turks a mere six centuries ago, that saved his
leadership when the Serbian old guard
looked in danger of ejection. Now he
may have become a victim of his own
propaganda."
On July 9th, the international edition
of Time reported,
"It was St. Vitus' Day, a date steeped
in Serbian history, myth and eerie
coincidence: on June 28, 1389, Ottoman
invaders defeated the Serbs at the
battle of Kosovo; 525 years later, a
young Serbian nationalist assassinated
Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz
Ferdinand, lighting the fuse for World
War I. And it was on St. Vitus' Day, 1989,
that Milosevic whipped a million
Serbs into a nationalist frenzy in the
speech that capped his ascent to power."
And on July 28th, as questions were
being asked about NATO's 78-day
bombardment, The New York Times
weighed in with this:
"In 1989 the Serbian strongman,
Slobodan Milosevic, swooped down in a
helicopter onto the field where 600
years earlier the Turks had defeated
the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo. In a
fervent speech before a million Serbs,
he galvanized the nationalist passions
that two years later fuelled the
Balkan conflict."
Gregory Elich, a researcher and
writer, decided to check the media's
depiction against a transcript of
Milosevic's speech. (4) Tracking down
a US government translation of the address,
Elich discovered the media (and now
the Tribunal) had the story all wrong.
Not only had Milosevic not whipped up
nationalist fervor, he'd tried to do
the very opposite, as the press reports
the day after the speech had shown.
"Serbia," said Milosevic at Kosovo
Field, "has never had only Serbs living
in it. Today, more than in the past,
members of other peoples and
nationalities also live in it. This is
not a disadvantage for Serbia. I am
truly convinced that it is its
advantage. National composition of
almost all countries in the world today,
particularly developed ones, has also
been changing in this direction. Citizens
of different nationalities, religions,
and races have been living together
more and more frequently and more and
more successfully." (5)
Hardly an appeal to hate-filled nationalism.
Milosevic continued:
"Equal and harmonious relations among
Yugoslav peoples are a necessary
condition for the existence of
Yugoslavia and for it to find its way
out of the crisis and, in particular, they
are a necessary condition for its
economic and social prosperity. In
this respect Yugoslavia does not stand
out from the social milieu of the
contemporary, particularly the developed,
world. This world is more and more
marked by national tolerance, national
co-operation, and even national
equality. The modern economic and
technological, as well as political
and cultural development, has guided
various peoples toward each other, has
made them interdependent and
increasingly has made them equal as
well [medjusobno ravnopravni]. Equal and
united people can above all become a
part of the civilization toward which
mankind is moving." (6)
So, where did the Tribunal come up
with the idea that Milosevic used his
Kosovo Field speech to transform
himself from communist party apparatchik,
to virulent Serb nationalist, intent
on building a "Greater Serbia"? Did it
rely on the wildly inaccurate later
press reports for its research? Did
its researchers ever actually read
Milosevic's Kosovo Field address? Or have
they simply spun the story to justify
NATO's intervention?
Look no further than NATO spokesman
Jamie Shea for the answer.
"It's not Milosevic that has allowed
Justice Arbour her visa to go to Kosovo
to carry out her investigation. If her
court, as we want, is to be allowed
access, it will be because of NATO so
NATO is the friend of the Tribunal.
NATO countries are those that have
provided finance to set up the
Tribunal, we are amongst the majority
financiers." (7)
NATO funds the tribunal, furnishes it
with its staff, appoints the
prosecutors, and provides the
evidence. Its obvious partiality, its
motive for lying (to justify NATO
intervention), and its demonstrated
willingness to lie (del Ponte's obvious mendacity
about any leader being in the position
to be dragged before a court to answer
for crimes against humanity), should
at the very least send a signal that
maybe, just maybe, the charges against
Milosevic are fabricated. Strangely,
that signal has been unheeded by much
of what's called the Chomsky Left.
Instead, Chomsky and his disciples
have accepted at face value most of
the charges made by the press and the
Tribunal without bothering to examine
them, or at least, without bothering
to challenge them. Take for example,
Edward Herman, who writes brilliantly
on Washington's hypocrisy. Herman's
shtick, if you want to call it that,
is to say: "Yes, yes, Milosevic
(insert any leader here demonized by
Washington) is a thug, but Clinton (insert
whichever American leader you like) is
a bigger thug."
Herman recently wrote that "the murder
of between 800 and 3,000 unarmed
Palestinians, mainly women and
children, at Sabra and Shatila in
1982..[is]...20 to 50 times the deaths
in the Racak massacre that
precipitated NATO's bombing of
Yugoslavia," carrying on in his, "American
leaders and their allies (in this case
Sharon) are worse than America's
official enemies" (in this case,
Milosevic, who is apparently held
responsible for the Racak massacre)
tradition. (8)
But there are three problems with this:
1. It's doubtful that the incident at
Racak "precipitated NATO's bombing of
Yugoslavia," as Herman puts it, any
more than the Gulf of Tonkin affair
precipitated America's bombing of
North Vietnam. Racak was a pretext, not a
precipitating event, a point Herman,
on other occasions, has made.
2. While Milosevic is held responsible
for the deaths at Racak, the media
have been quick to point out that the
ethnic cleansing and murders carried
out by ethnic Albanians in Kosovo
against the Serb minority is not, by
itself, evidence that NATO forces are
complicit in the crimes. Yes, the
atrocities have been carried out under
NATO's nose, the media observes, but
that doesn't mean NATO is allowing
them to happen, or approves them, or
facilitates them. On the other hand,
Milosevic is held directly responsible
for the incident at Racak. If it
happened, it must be because Milosevic
either ordered it, or allowed it to
happen, the reasoning goes -- an example
of stunning hypocrisy you'd think
Herman would seize upon. Milosevic is
being judged by a different standard.
3. There are substantial reasons to
doubt that a massacre ever occurred at
Racak, and good reasons to suspect the
incident was contrived to offer a
pretext for NATO bombing.
The official story went like this: on
January 15, 1999, Serb policemen
entered the Kosovo village of Racak, a
KLA stronghold, and killed men, women
and children at close range, after
torturing and mutilating them.
Chillingly, the Serb police were said
to have whistled merrily as they went
about their work of slaughtering the
villagers. (9)
It was a horrible tableau, sure to
whip up the indignation of the world
-- and it did.
US Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright, as eager to scratch her ever
itchy trigger finger as her boss was to
scratch his illimitable sexual itches,
demanded that Yugoslavia be bombed
immediately. Albright, like a kid
agonizingly counting down the hours to
Christmas, would have to wait until
after Milosevic's rejection of NATO's
ultimata at Rambouillet to get her wish.
Bill Clinton, not to be surpassed in
expressing indignation, said, "We
should remember what happened in the
village of Racak...Innocent men, women,
and children were taken from their
homes to a gully, forced to kneel in
the dirt, sprayed with gunfire -- not
because of anything they had done, but
because of who they were." (10)
But the French newspaper Le Monde
doubted the authenticity of the
massacre.
It reported on Jan. 21, 1999, a few
days after the incident, that an
Associated Press TV crew had filmed a
gun battle at Racak between Serb
police and KLA guerillas. The crew was
present because the Serbs had tipped
them off that they were going to enter
the village to arrest a man accused
of shooting a police officer. Also
present were two teams of
international monitors.
It seems unlikely that if you're about
to carry out a massacre you would
invite the press -- and international
observers -- to watch.
The film showed that as the Serbs
entered Racak they came under heavy fire
from KLA guerillas positioned in the
surrounding hills. The idea that the
police could dig a trench and then
kill villagers at close range while being
fired upon troubled Le Monde. So too
did the fact that, entering the village
after the firefight to assess the
damage and interview the villagers, the
observers saw no sign of a massacre.
What's more, the villagers said nothing
about a massacre either.
It was only a day later, when
Washington's man in Kosovo, William Walker,
returned with the press in tow -- at
the KLA's invitation -- that a trench
was found filled with bodies.
Could the police have returned after
their firefight with the KLA, when the
observers and TV crew had gone, and
carried out the massacre under cover
of darkness?
That seems unlikely. Racak is a KLA
stronghold. Serb police had already
discovered that if they were going to
enter the village they would have to
deal with guerillas, or what,
Washington, would call terrorists, if
the tables were turned. How could they
torture, mutilate and cold-bloodedly
kill villagers at close range while
harassed by KLA gunfire?
And why, wondered Le Monde, were there
few signs of spent cartridges and
blood at the trench?
Adding to the implausibility of the
claim, a report last February by the
Finnish forensic team that
investigated the incident on behalf of
the European Union said none of the bodies
were mutilated, there was no evidence
of torture, and only one was shot at
close range -- all at variance with
the official story. (11)
Thirty-seven of the corpses had
gunpowder residue on their hands, suggesting
that they had been using firearms, and
only one of the corpses was a woman,
and only one was under 15 years of
age.
The pathologists say Walker was quick
to come to the conclusion a massacre
had happened, even though the evidence
was weak.
And they point out that there is no
evidence the deceased were from Racak.
If there aren't good reasons to
dismiss the incident entirely, there
at least very good reasons to doubt it.
But Herman, as disciple, is no
different from Chomsky, the Messiah.
In his The New Military Humanism,
Lessons From Kosovo, (12) Chomsky
neither accepts Racak as genuine or a
fake. Instead, he compares
Washington's concern over the events
at Racak to the lack of concern over events of
similar or greater enormity perpetrated
by US clients. If US foreign policy is
really driven by humanitarian intent,
Chomsky asks, why the inconsistency?
This is a clever way to expose the
institutional patterns of American
foreign policy -- a kind of reductio
ad absurdum approach. If what you say is
true, then x, y, and z, must follow,
and since they don't, what you say
must be false. In this case, however,
Chomsky broaches Racak not to
challenge the claim that a massacre
occurred, but to challenge the claim the
decision to bomb Kosovo was precipitated by
humanitarian concern over events such
as the alleged massacre at Racak. It
is still possible, however, to believe
that a massacre did occur, while
accepting Chomsky's analysis that
NATO's humanitarian concern was a
stalking horse behind which the alliance
pursued other goals. The truth or falsity of
the claimed massacre is neither here
nor there in Chomsky's analysis,
another reason the analysis is clever:
it avoids altogether the difficult
problem of assessing whether the
accusations NATO, and now the Tribunal,
made against Milosevic are true or
false. While useful in laying bare
Washington's hypocrisy -- a Herman
speciality -- it has the unfortunate,
and doubtless unintended consequence, of
encouraging others to take a
pusillanimous position. Since what
NATO says about Milosevic could be
true, and since I could look like an
apologist for horrible atrocities, I'll take
the easy path and declare everyone a
thug -- Milosevic, Blair, Clinton. If
I'm wrong about Milosevic, so what? It
will never be said I was an apologist
for a monster, and my moral hymen
remains intact -- or so it seems. But
thinking like that suffuses lynch
mobs. Is it moral to allow the innocent to
be railroaded into a jail cell on
false charges?
So, as the high priests of the Chomsky
Left think they're making headway
with their "Milosevic is bad, but
Clinton was worse" line, their
co-religionists work themselves up
into high dudgeon over Milosevic, not
Clinton. An ardent Z-Netter (Z-Net
being the church of Noam Chomskyism,
presided over by its Pope, Michael
Albert, at Woods Hole, Mass.) wrote me
that it was all right that NATO bombed
Serb Radio-TV, an obvious war crime,
because Milosevic is a thug who
deserves what he gets and the radio-TV
building was Milosevic's Ministry of
Propaganda. So irredeemably evil is
Milosevic, that destroying anything he
touched, must, by definition, be
good. He hoped Milosevic would meet
the same fate as Mussolini -- strung
upside down from a bridge. This was
followed by a paean to Otpor, the
"grassroots" movement funded and
trained by Washington, to bring down
Milosevic "peacefully," but not, as
the Z-Netters seemed to have missed,
to establish a libertarian socialist
society, or "parecon," the Pope's
participatory economics model, but to
turn the economy over to the IMF and
WTO so that Yugoslavia's assets can be
sold off to the highest bidder, while
millions of Serbs are thrown out of
work.
There's something disquieting about
the Church of Chomskyism. Willing to
allow the press to have its head where
official US enemies are concerned,
the faithful channel their
considerable enmity into the media-led
two minute hate against the latest Emanuel
Goldstein. But while Church doctrine holds
that Western leaders are bigger thugs,
the hate-filled, almost hysterical
denunciations reserved for the world's
Milosevics, Mugabes and Lukashenkos,
are accompanied by a measured,
reasonable, tone where Bush, Blair and
other NATO war-mongerers are concerned.
Milosevic can be called a murderer,
dictator and thug; his ouster, by
force, can be applauded, but it would
be considered over the top to call Bush
Jr. anything as incendiary, and calling
for an insurrection to pressure the
president to step down would be
denounced as the height of
irresponsibility. It's all right to
hope Milosevic is strung up, but
Chomskyites would never wish the same
fate on Bush or Clinton, though Church
doctrine holds these leaders to be
bigger thugs, and therefore, presumably
deserving of an equal or worse fate.
On another front, Chomsky remarked in
a recent interview that "If there is a
serious proposal as to how to
overthrow Saddam, we should surely
want to consider it. He remains as much a
monster as he was when the US and
Britain supported him." (13)
Yes he does. But there's something
pusillanimous in this, as in Chomsky's
accepting Milosevic as a thug: First,
a succession of US presidents, their
minions, and their eminence grise,
have been every bit as much monsters
as Saddam, not least of which were those
who supported Saddam, yet I have no
doubt Chomsky would decry as
recklessly irresponsible any "serious
proposal as to how to overthrow" any U.S.
president, past or present.
Second, in this, as in other cases,
Chomsky remains silent on who the
successor to the overthrown monster
will be. Which isn't to suggest that
Saddam Hussein is a great choice, but
it doesn't follow that getting rid of
one bad egg means the next egg won't
also be unremittingly rotten, if not
more so. That the new government is
installed by Washington and is
constrained, if not inclined, to
pursue policies to benefit US foreign
policy goals and economic interests,
is simply ignored. Hence, in the case
of Yugoslavia, Chomsky lauds the
overthrow of Milosevic but says nothing of
who follows, and on whose behalf they
work, cautioning others not to make
too much of US backing of the
opposition. Likewise, we're to consider any
serious proposal to oust Saddam, while
turning a blind eye to the fact that
any "serious proposal," by definition,
is one intended to aggrandize US
interests at the expense of ordinary
Iraqis. Any serious proposal would not
involve installing the Iraqi communist
party in power, for example, or
anyone for that matter who has even a
passing interest in Albert's parecon.
As Chomsky's critics of the Left put
it, the State Department must be pleased.
The problem here is that with attacks
on foreign leaders coming from all
parts of the American political
spectrum, that peculiarly American
conceit is strengthened -- that "we" have a
right, if not a moral obligation, to
intervene in the affairs of sovereign
nations to oust unpleasant leaders and
impose our own. Were that not
offensive enough, it's all done
without a tittle of an effort made to
substantiate whether the charges against
foreign leaders are anything other than pure
wind and self-serving
pro-interventionist propaganda, or if
there's substance to the charges,
whether American leaders would be
excused for doing exactly the same
under similar circumstances. So it is that
NATO's Munchausens have almost free
rein to propagate pro-interventionist
nonsense virtually unopposed. There's
no opposition from Western media and
no opposition from the Chomsky Left.
Worse, the press and the Messiah talk
as one, both in favour of tribunals.
The Hague Tribunal isn't, despite what
newspaper editors tell you, a step
forward for justice. It's simply a way
of obscuring the motives NATO had for
lying about why it intervened
militarily in Yugoslavia. Not justice,
but its antithesis.
Here's how it works: NATO fires from
the hip, accusing Milosevic of all
manner of atrocities and crimes. Spin,
it's called. The problem is war-time
spin is often recognized for what it
is -- mendacity, the truth getting
lost in the fog of war, pressure to put
things in the worst possible light. So
NATO hits upon the idea of
establishing a tribunal to indict Serb
leaders on war crimes charges, ignoring the fact
that the UN Security Council hasn't
the jurisdiction to establish a
criminal court. Jurisdiction or not, a
tribunal is established. The same "fog
of war" charges are made, but now,
the charges seem to have more
substance because they're made by a
tribunal, said to be backed by "the
international community," and because
legal language is pressed into service:
indictment, prosecution, conviction,
trial. It's one thing to have Jamie
Shea, in the midst of a NATO bombing
campaign say that Milosevic committed
genocide, since Jamie Shea has a
motive to lie under those
circumstances, but it's quite another
-- or so it seems -- to say Milosevic was
convicted by an International
Tribunal. It seems so much less like the
self-serving propaganda of NATO, and
so much more impartial. But is it? It's not
Jamie Shea making the charges, or Blair,
but it is people NATO hired and
appointed, whose salaries they pay,
making exactly the same charges with as
little evidence as Blair and Shea ever
had, repeating the same whoppers from the
same press reports that were used the
first time NATO sought to put a moral
gloss on its immoral acts.
But does the tribunal change anything?
Is del Ponte really any different
from Shea? If NATO lied about there
being 100,000 Kosovar Albanians murdered
to justify a bombing campaign that
under Nuremberg and the UN Charter is
a crime against peace; if it lied about
a passenger train that was travelling
too fast for a NATO pilot's missile to
avoid; if it lied about Serbs
attacking a refugee column that had
really been attacked by NATO; if it
lied about Albanian Kosovars imprisoned in
a Pristina stadium; if it lied about
organized rapes; if it lied about
dozens of other things, (14) why
shouldn't we expect the same from a tribunal
that was set up and is controlled by
the very same governments that lied so
freely in the first place?
Look at it this way. If someone who
has lied to you over and over again
sets up a tribunal, hires the prosecutors,
provides the evidence, and selects the
judges, is it not criminally stupid to
accept the tribunal as anything other
than a continuation of the same
pattern of lying? Is it not criminally
irresponsible to accept the charges
made against those who are indicted as
beyond dispute, or even as probably
true?
Ewan MacColl, who Washington never
liked (he was denied a visa in 1962 to
enter the US because of his political
leanings), died before The Hague
Tribunal was established, but he seems
to have anticipated its hypocrisy.
It's illegal to carve up your missus,
wrote MacColl,
Or put poison in your old man's tea
But poison the rivers, the sea, and
the skies
And poison the mind of a nation with
lies
If it's done in the interest of free
enterprise
Then it's proper and perfectly legal.
(15)
MacColl would have known it's not
Swiss chocolate del Ponte is serving.
Moreover, he would have said so.
Notes
1. Deutshce Press-Agentur, February
11, 2002 (back)
2. See Jared Israel, Official
Statements Prove Hague 'Tribunal'
Belongs to NATO,
http://www.tenc.net/docs/h-list.htm
(back)
3. Francisco Gil-White, Assistant
Professor of Psychology at the University
of Pennsylvania and a Fellow at the
Solomon Asch Center for Study of
Ethnopolitical Conflict, examined the
media's depiction of Milosevic's
Kosovo Field speech, comparing press
reports against a BBC transcript of
the address. See Expert in Psychology of
Ethnic Conflict Changes his Mind about
Yugoslavia,
http://emperors-clothes.com/milo/gw.htm
. The press reports on
the Kosovo Field speech are taken from
Gil-White's work. Gil-White's article
is highly recommended.
See also Stephen Gowans, When it comes
to Milosevic stories, more than a
little scepticism is in order, Media
Monitors Network,
http://www.mediamonitors.net/gowans43.html
(back)
4. Milosevic's Speech, Kosovo Field,
June 28, 1989,
http://www.swans.com/libray/art8/smilos01.html
(back)
5. Ibid. (back)
6. Ibid. (back)
7. May 17, 1999 Transcript of NATO
press conference by Jamie Shea & Major
General W. Jertz in Brussels
Transcribed by M2 PRESSWIRE (c) 1999
cited in
Jared Israel, Official Statements
Prove Hague 'Tribunal' Belongs to
NATO,
http://www.icdsm.org/more/belongs.htm
(back)
8. Edward Herman, Final Solution in
the Occupied Territories,
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-02/11herman.cfm
(back)
9. See also Stephen Gowans, Sorting
Through the Lies of the Racak Massacre
and other Myths of Kosovo, Media
Monitors Network,
http://www.mediamonitors.net/gowans1.html
(back)
10. March 19, 1999 address to the
nation, cited in FAIR: Media Advisory,
An Update on Racak, July 18, 2001,
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/racak-update.html
(back)
11. FAIR: Media Advisory, An Update
on Racak, July 18, 2001,
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/racak-update.html
See also Racak 'massacre' exposed as
fraud, Workers World, Feb. 15, 2001,
http://www.workers.org/ww/2001/yugo0215.html
(back)
12. Noam Chomsky, The New Military
Humanism, Lessons From Kosovo, New
Star Books, Vancouver, 1999, p. 40 - 48.
(back)
13. Stephen R. Shalom Interviews Noam
Chomsky, January 2002
http://www.zmag.org/shalom0122.htm
(back)
14. See Stephen Gowans, Genocide or
Veracicide Will NATO's Lying Ever Stop?
http://www.swans.com/library/art7/gowans02.html
(back)
15. Legal-Illegal, Words and music by
Ewan MacColl, From Hot Blast,
Folkways. Published in Broadside #154,
1984 (back)
Stephen Gowans is a writer and
political activist who lives in
Ottawa, Canada. He writes a regular
column for Canadian Content and is
also a frequent contributor to the Media
Monitors Network. In addition, Gowans
maintains his own Web site, What's
Left in Suburbia?, that is filled with
relevant information.
Munchausens At The Hague, Cowards At Woods Hole
by Stephen Gowans
February 25, 2002
Mun.chau.sen
After Baron K. F. H. von Münchhausen,
a proverbial teller of exaggerated
tales. A liar.
Cow.ard
One who shows or yields to ignoble fear.
If Carla del Ponte, The Hague's chief
prosecutor, were a piece of chocolate,
she wouldn't so much resemble the
chocolate of her native Switzerland as
she would a bar of Ex-Lax, the faux
chocolate laxative made in America, whose
sole purpose is to draw forth copious
quantities of shit. For what else is
The Hague Tribunal but shit? And
American?
Said del Ponte, "every individual
irrespective of his position, his rank
or the power he holds can be brought to
justice for war crimes, crimes against
humanity and genocide." (1) This, to
mark the opening of the trial of former
Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic,
who, illegally abducted and
transported to The Hague, (sparking
paeans in the Western press to how the
rule of law had been vindicated) faces
charges of war crimes, crimes against
humanity and genocide.
The fashion on the American Left, or
large parts of what's called the
American Left, is to say, "Were it
true that every leader could be brought
to justice, then Clinton, Blair,
Schroeder, Albright, Fischer, and a
long list of NATO supremos, would be
sitting in the dock with Milosevic."
That NATO leaders should be sitting in
the dock is true enough. As John
Laughland, writing in the February 16
Guardian put it, "It has always been
obvious that the NATO attacks on
Yugoslavia were illegal under the post-war
United Nations-based system. Not only
were the attacks not approved by the
security council, that body was not
even consulted."
Of course, NATO leaders aren't going
to be answering for their crimes
against peace. Who's going to make
them? For one, they created the tribunal,
appointed the prosecutors, provided
the staff, and furnished part of the
tribunal's budget. It's their creation.
The tribunal also gets help from
financier George Soros's Open Society
Institute. (2) That's "open" society,
as is in open markets, as in not
communist, as in not socialist, as in
not resembling the social ownership
model of the Yugoslav economy under
the communists and Milosevic's Socialist
Party. Milosevic's socialism is rarely
mentioned in the media, lest two and
two are put together, and four, rather
than five, is the answer, and the
name Allende suddenly springs to mind.
But there's another reason NATO
leaders won't ever have to answer for
violating the UN Charter, refusing to
consult the Security Council, and
elevating themselves above
international law. The Hague Tribunal
hasn't the jurisdiction to prosecute crimes
against peace. Indeed, there is no
longer any such thing as a crime against
peace, the basis of Nuremberg and the
UN Charter. That was tossed out by Blair
and Clinton, who declared a new world
order, one in which NATO, or more to
the point, the US, could intervene at
will in the internal affairs of
sovereign states.
John Laughland says this was
adumbrated by the Nazis. "Like today's
globalists," he points out, "the Nazis
argued that economic realities had
changed and that, therefore, the great
powers should have the legal right to
interfere in the internal affairs of
smaller nations in their sphere of
influence."
"According to Nazi theory of 'great
space'," continues Laughland, "state
sovereignty was a bogus invention of
materialistic liberalism." Or in
today's language, it's a bogus
invention of leaders who want a shelter
behind which to violate human rights,
build weapons of mass destruction, or
harbour Osama bin Laden.
The preferred view of the Chomsky Left
is that Milosevic is a little thug,
an unlikeable man who did some bad
things, but not as bad as what NATO
leaders did. The big thugs live in
Washington and London, we're told.
Is Milosevic a thug, even a little
one, as this view holds? I'll be
honest.
I don't know. But I do know it is
generally considered appropriate to
have a sound basis for alleging someone is a
thug, which means something more than
someone else's unsubstantiated
accusations. But all too often newspaper
reports are taken at face value, even
by those who've spent some
considerable time writing books on
media bias. And what I've seen so far
from del Ponte, resembles what Tony
Blair splattered across the public
record as "incontrovertible" evidence
of Osama bin Laden's masterminding
9/11 -- old newspaper stories based on
innuendo, hearsay, and illegitimate
inference. In other words,
accusations, without a lot of meat on
them.
Let's take the allegation that
Milosevic used his 1989 speech as
Kosovo Field to whip Serbs into an
ultra-nationalist frenzy. The tribunal's
prosecution made sure to trot this out
in its opening remarks. It's a good
story. But that's all it is. A story,
repeated by the press, and now picked
up by the tribunal. But it's fiction. (3)
Funny thing. The press originally
reported the story correctly, only later
to turn it on its head at a time NATO
was pounding Yugoslav hospitals,
factories, power stations, homes,
embassies, apartment buildings and
refugee columns with bombs, showing a few
thousand Serb civilians an early exit
from this life. That NATO might want to
create a myth about a horrible
ultra-nationalist to deflect criticism
of its bombing campaign is hardly a
possibility to be dismissed.
On June 29, 1989, the day following
the infamous speech the Tribunal says
shows Milosevic as an
ultra-nationalist demagogue, The
Independent reported:
"There is no more appropriate place
than this field of Kosovo to say that
accord and harmony in Serbia are vital
to the prosperity of the Serbs and of
all other citizens living in Serbia,
regardless of their nationality or
religion,' [Milosevic] said. Mutual
tolerance and co-operation were also
sine qua non for Yugoslavia: 'Harmony
and relations on the basis of equality
among Yugoslavia's people are a
precondition for its existence, for
overcoming the crisis.'"
Milosevic "talked of mutual
tolerance," The Independent added,
"'building a rich and democratic society' and
ending the discord which had, he said,
led to Serbia's defeat here by the Turks
six centuries ago."
The same day, the BBC reported,
"Addressing the crowd, Milosevic said
that whenever they were able to the Serbs
had helped others to liberate
themselves, and they had never used
the advantage of their being a large
nation against others or for
themselves."
"He added that Yugoslavia was a
multi-national community," the BBC
continued, "which could survive
providing there was full equality for
all the nations living in it."
Twelve years later, on April 1, 2001,
the BBC would change its story,
claiming Milosevic had "gathered a
million Serbs at the site of the
battle to tell them to prepare for a new
struggle."
The BBC was not alone. Newspapers that
had originally reported Milosevic's
speech as conciliatory, now claimed he
delivered an ultra-nationalist
diatribe.
On June 3rd, 1999, with large parts of
Serbia laying in ruins after being
targeted by NATO warplanes, The
Economist said,
"But it is primitive nationalism,
egged on by the self-deluding myth of
Serbs as perennial victims, that has
become both Mr. Milosevic's rescuer
(when communism collapsed with the
Soviet Union) and his nemesis. It was
a stirringly virulent nationalist speech
he made in Kosovo, in 1989, harking
back to the Serb Prince Lazar's
suicidally brave battle against the
Turks a mere six centuries ago, that saved his
leadership when the Serbian old guard
looked in danger of ejection. Now he
may have become a victim of his own
propaganda."
On July 9th, the international edition
of Time reported,
"It was St. Vitus' Day, a date steeped
in Serbian history, myth and eerie
coincidence: on June 28, 1389, Ottoman
invaders defeated the Serbs at the
battle of Kosovo; 525 years later, a
young Serbian nationalist assassinated
Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz
Ferdinand, lighting the fuse for World
War I. And it was on St. Vitus' Day, 1989,
that Milosevic whipped a million
Serbs into a nationalist frenzy in the
speech that capped his ascent to power."
And on July 28th, as questions were
being asked about NATO's 78-day
bombardment, The New York Times
weighed in with this:
"In 1989 the Serbian strongman,
Slobodan Milosevic, swooped down in a
helicopter onto the field where 600
years earlier the Turks had defeated
the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo. In a
fervent speech before a million Serbs,
he galvanized the nationalist passions
that two years later fuelled the
Balkan conflict."
Gregory Elich, a researcher and
writer, decided to check the media's
depiction against a transcript of
Milosevic's speech. (4) Tracking down
a US government translation of the address,
Elich discovered the media (and now
the Tribunal) had the story all wrong.
Not only had Milosevic not whipped up
nationalist fervor, he'd tried to do
the very opposite, as the press reports
the day after the speech had shown.
"Serbia," said Milosevic at Kosovo
Field, "has never had only Serbs living
in it. Today, more than in the past,
members of other peoples and
nationalities also live in it. This is
not a disadvantage for Serbia. I am
truly convinced that it is its
advantage. National composition of
almost all countries in the world today,
particularly developed ones, has also
been changing in this direction. Citizens
of different nationalities, religions,
and races have been living together
more and more frequently and more and
more successfully." (5)
Hardly an appeal to hate-filled nationalism.
Milosevic continued:
"Equal and harmonious relations among
Yugoslav peoples are a necessary
condition for the existence of
Yugoslavia and for it to find its way
out of the crisis and, in particular, they
are a necessary condition for its
economic and social prosperity. In
this respect Yugoslavia does not stand
out from the social milieu of the
contemporary, particularly the developed,
world. This world is more and more
marked by national tolerance, national
co-operation, and even national
equality. The modern economic and
technological, as well as political
and cultural development, has guided
various peoples toward each other, has
made them interdependent and
increasingly has made them equal as
well [medjusobno ravnopravni]. Equal and
united people can above all become a
part of the civilization toward which
mankind is moving." (6)
So, where did the Tribunal come up
with the idea that Milosevic used his
Kosovo Field speech to transform
himself from communist party apparatchik,
to virulent Serb nationalist, intent
on building a "Greater Serbia"? Did it
rely on the wildly inaccurate later
press reports for its research? Did
its researchers ever actually read
Milosevic's Kosovo Field address? Or have
they simply spun the story to justify
NATO's intervention?
Look no further than NATO spokesman
Jamie Shea for the answer.
"It's not Milosevic that has allowed
Justice Arbour her visa to go to Kosovo
to carry out her investigation. If her
court, as we want, is to be allowed
access, it will be because of NATO so
NATO is the friend of the Tribunal.
NATO countries are those that have
provided finance to set up the
Tribunal, we are amongst the majority
financiers." (7)
NATO funds the tribunal, furnishes it
with its staff, appoints the
prosecutors, and provides the
evidence. Its obvious partiality, its
motive for lying (to justify NATO
intervention), and its demonstrated
willingness to lie (del Ponte's obvious mendacity
about any leader being in the position
to be dragged before a court to answer
for crimes against humanity), should
at the very least send a signal that
maybe, just maybe, the charges against
Milosevic are fabricated. Strangely,
that signal has been unheeded by much
of what's called the Chomsky Left.
Instead, Chomsky and his disciples
have accepted at face value most of
the charges made by the press and the
Tribunal without bothering to examine
them, or at least, without bothering
to challenge them. Take for example,
Edward Herman, who writes brilliantly
on Washington's hypocrisy. Herman's
shtick, if you want to call it that,
is to say: "Yes, yes, Milosevic
(insert any leader here demonized by
Washington) is a thug, but Clinton (insert
whichever American leader you like) is
a bigger thug."
Herman recently wrote that "the murder
of between 800 and 3,000 unarmed
Palestinians, mainly women and
children, at Sabra and Shatila in
1982..[is]...20 to 50 times the deaths
in the Racak massacre that
precipitated NATO's bombing of
Yugoslavia," carrying on in his, "American
leaders and their allies (in this case
Sharon) are worse than America's
official enemies" (in this case,
Milosevic, who is apparently held
responsible for the Racak massacre)
tradition. (8)
But there are three problems with this:
1. It's doubtful that the incident at
Racak "precipitated NATO's bombing of
Yugoslavia," as Herman puts it, any
more than the Gulf of Tonkin affair
precipitated America's bombing of
North Vietnam. Racak was a pretext, not a
precipitating event, a point Herman,
on other occasions, has made.
2. While Milosevic is held responsible
for the deaths at Racak, the media
have been quick to point out that the
ethnic cleansing and murders carried
out by ethnic Albanians in Kosovo
against the Serb minority is not, by
itself, evidence that NATO forces are
complicit in the crimes. Yes, the
atrocities have been carried out under
NATO's nose, the media observes, but
that doesn't mean NATO is allowing
them to happen, or approves them, or
facilitates them. On the other hand,
Milosevic is held directly responsible
for the incident at Racak. If it
happened, it must be because Milosevic
either ordered it, or allowed it to
happen, the reasoning goes -- an example
of stunning hypocrisy you'd think
Herman would seize upon. Milosevic is
being judged by a different standard.
3. There are substantial reasons to
doubt that a massacre ever occurred at
Racak, and good reasons to suspect the
incident was contrived to offer a
pretext for NATO bombing.
The official story went like this: on
January 15, 1999, Serb policemen
entered the Kosovo village of Racak, a
KLA stronghold, and killed men, women
and children at close range, after
torturing and mutilating them.
Chillingly, the Serb police were said
to have whistled merrily as they went
about their work of slaughtering the
villagers. (9)
It was a horrible tableau, sure to
whip up the indignation of the world
-- and it did.
US Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright, as eager to scratch her ever
itchy trigger finger as her boss was to
scratch his illimitable sexual itches,
demanded that Yugoslavia be bombed
immediately. Albright, like a kid
agonizingly counting down the hours to
Christmas, would have to wait until
after Milosevic's rejection of NATO's
ultimata at Rambouillet to get her wish.
Bill Clinton, not to be surpassed in
expressing indignation, said, "We
should remember what happened in the
village of Racak...Innocent men, women,
and children were taken from their
homes to a gully, forced to kneel in
the dirt, sprayed with gunfire -- not
because of anything they had done, but
because of who they were." (10)
But the French newspaper Le Monde
doubted the authenticity of the
massacre.
It reported on Jan. 21, 1999, a few
days after the incident, that an
Associated Press TV crew had filmed a
gun battle at Racak between Serb
police and KLA guerillas. The crew was
present because the Serbs had tipped
them off that they were going to enter
the village to arrest a man accused
of shooting a police officer. Also
present were two teams of
international monitors.
It seems unlikely that if you're about
to carry out a massacre you would
invite the press -- and international
observers -- to watch.
The film showed that as the Serbs
entered Racak they came under heavy fire
from KLA guerillas positioned in the
surrounding hills. The idea that the
police could dig a trench and then
kill villagers at close range while being
fired upon troubled Le Monde. So too
did the fact that, entering the village
after the firefight to assess the
damage and interview the villagers, the
observers saw no sign of a massacre.
What's more, the villagers said nothing
about a massacre either.
It was only a day later, when
Washington's man in Kosovo, William Walker,
returned with the press in tow -- at
the KLA's invitation -- that a trench
was found filled with bodies.
Could the police have returned after
their firefight with the KLA, when the
observers and TV crew had gone, and
carried out the massacre under cover
of darkness?
That seems unlikely. Racak is a KLA
stronghold. Serb police had already
discovered that if they were going to
enter the village they would have to
deal with guerillas, or what,
Washington, would call terrorists, if
the tables were turned. How could they
torture, mutilate and cold-bloodedly
kill villagers at close range while
harassed by KLA gunfire?
And why, wondered Le Monde, were there
few signs of spent cartridges and
blood at the trench?
Adding to the implausibility of the
claim, a report last February by the
Finnish forensic team that
investigated the incident on behalf of
the European Union said none of the bodies
were mutilated, there was no evidence
of torture, and only one was shot at
close range -- all at variance with
the official story. (11)
Thirty-seven of the corpses had
gunpowder residue on their hands, suggesting
that they had been using firearms, and
only one of the corpses was a woman,
and only one was under 15 years of
age.
The pathologists say Walker was quick
to come to the conclusion a massacre
had happened, even though the evidence
was weak.
And they point out that there is no
evidence the deceased were from Racak.
If there aren't good reasons to
dismiss the incident entirely, there
at least very good reasons to doubt it.
But Herman, as disciple, is no
different from Chomsky, the Messiah.
In his The New Military Humanism,
Lessons From Kosovo, (12) Chomsky
neither accepts Racak as genuine or a
fake. Instead, he compares
Washington's concern over the events
at Racak to the lack of concern over events of
similar or greater enormity perpetrated
by US clients. If US foreign policy is
really driven by humanitarian intent,
Chomsky asks, why the inconsistency?
This is a clever way to expose the
institutional patterns of American
foreign policy -- a kind of reductio
ad absurdum approach. If what you say is
true, then x, y, and z, must follow,
and since they don't, what you say
must be false. In this case, however,
Chomsky broaches Racak not to
challenge the claim that a massacre
occurred, but to challenge the claim the
decision to bomb Kosovo was precipitated by
humanitarian concern over events such
as the alleged massacre at Racak. It
is still possible, however, to believe
that a massacre did occur, while
accepting Chomsky's analysis that
NATO's humanitarian concern was a
stalking horse behind which the alliance
pursued other goals. The truth or falsity of
the claimed massacre is neither here
nor there in Chomsky's analysis,
another reason the analysis is clever:
it avoids altogether the difficult
problem of assessing whether the
accusations NATO, and now the Tribunal,
made against Milosevic are true or
false. While useful in laying bare
Washington's hypocrisy -- a Herman
speciality -- it has the unfortunate,
and doubtless unintended consequence, of
encouraging others to take a
pusillanimous position. Since what
NATO says about Milosevic could be
true, and since I could look like an
apologist for horrible atrocities, I'll take
the easy path and declare everyone a
thug -- Milosevic, Blair, Clinton. If
I'm wrong about Milosevic, so what? It
will never be said I was an apologist
for a monster, and my moral hymen
remains intact -- or so it seems. But
thinking like that suffuses lynch
mobs. Is it moral to allow the innocent to
be railroaded into a jail cell on
false charges?
So, as the high priests of the Chomsky
Left think they're making headway
with their "Milosevic is bad, but
Clinton was worse" line, their
co-religionists work themselves up
into high dudgeon over Milosevic, not
Clinton. An ardent Z-Netter (Z-Net
being the church of Noam Chomskyism,
presided over by its Pope, Michael
Albert, at Woods Hole, Mass.) wrote me
that it was all right that NATO bombed
Serb Radio-TV, an obvious war crime,
because Milosevic is a thug who
deserves what he gets and the radio-TV
building was Milosevic's Ministry of
Propaganda. So irredeemably evil is
Milosevic, that destroying anything he
touched, must, by definition, be
good. He hoped Milosevic would meet
the same fate as Mussolini -- strung
upside down from a bridge. This was
followed by a paean to Otpor, the
"grassroots" movement funded and
trained by Washington, to bring down
Milosevic "peacefully," but not, as
the Z-Netters seemed to have missed,
to establish a libertarian socialist
society, or "parecon," the Pope's
participatory economics model, but to
turn the economy over to the IMF and
WTO so that Yugoslavia's assets can be
sold off to the highest bidder, while
millions of Serbs are thrown out of
work.
There's something disquieting about
the Church of Chomskyism. Willing to
allow the press to have its head where
official US enemies are concerned,
the faithful channel their
considerable enmity into the media-led
two minute hate against the latest Emanuel
Goldstein. But while Church doctrine holds
that Western leaders are bigger thugs,
the hate-filled, almost hysterical
denunciations reserved for the world's
Milosevics, Mugabes and Lukashenkos,
are accompanied by a measured,
reasonable, tone where Bush, Blair and
other NATO war-mongerers are concerned.
Milosevic can be called a murderer,
dictator and thug; his ouster, by
force, can be applauded, but it would
be considered over the top to call Bush
Jr. anything as incendiary, and calling
for an insurrection to pressure the
president to step down would be
denounced as the height of
irresponsibility. It's all right to
hope Milosevic is strung up, but
Chomskyites would never wish the same
fate on Bush or Clinton, though Church
doctrine holds these leaders to be
bigger thugs, and therefore, presumably
deserving of an equal or worse fate.
On another front, Chomsky remarked in
a recent interview that "If there is a
serious proposal as to how to
overthrow Saddam, we should surely
want to consider it. He remains as much a
monster as he was when the US and
Britain supported him." (13)
Yes he does. But there's something
pusillanimous in this, as in Chomsky's
accepting Milosevic as a thug: First,
a succession of US presidents, their
minions, and their eminence grise,
have been every bit as much monsters
as Saddam, not least of which were those
who supported Saddam, yet I have no
doubt Chomsky would decry as
recklessly irresponsible any "serious
proposal as to how to overthrow" any U.S.
president, past or present.
Second, in this, as in other cases,
Chomsky remains silent on who the
successor to the overthrown monster
will be. Which isn't to suggest that
Saddam Hussein is a great choice, but
it doesn't follow that getting rid of
one bad egg means the next egg won't
also be unremittingly rotten, if not
more so. That the new government is
installed by Washington and is
constrained, if not inclined, to
pursue policies to benefit US foreign
policy goals and economic interests,
is simply ignored. Hence, in the case
of Yugoslavia, Chomsky lauds the
overthrow of Milosevic but says nothing of
who follows, and on whose behalf they
work, cautioning others not to make
too much of US backing of the
opposition. Likewise, we're to consider any
serious proposal to oust Saddam, while
turning a blind eye to the fact that
any "serious proposal," by definition,
is one intended to aggrandize US
interests at the expense of ordinary
Iraqis. Any serious proposal would not
involve installing the Iraqi communist
party in power, for example, or
anyone for that matter who has even a
passing interest in Albert's parecon.
As Chomsky's critics of the Left put
it, the State Department must be pleased.
The problem here is that with attacks
on foreign leaders coming from all
parts of the American political
spectrum, that peculiarly American
conceit is strengthened -- that "we" have a
right, if not a moral obligation, to
intervene in the affairs of sovereign
nations to oust unpleasant leaders and
impose our own. Were that not
offensive enough, it's all done
without a tittle of an effort made to
substantiate whether the charges against
foreign leaders are anything other than pure
wind and self-serving
pro-interventionist propaganda, or if
there's substance to the charges,
whether American leaders would be
excused for doing exactly the same
under similar circumstances. So it is that
NATO's Munchausens have almost free
rein to propagate pro-interventionist
nonsense virtually unopposed. There's
no opposition from Western media and
no opposition from the Chomsky Left.
Worse, the press and the Messiah talk
as one, both in favour of tribunals.
The Hague Tribunal isn't, despite what
newspaper editors tell you, a step
forward for justice. It's simply a way
of obscuring the motives NATO had for
lying about why it intervened
militarily in Yugoslavia. Not justice,
but its antithesis.
Here's how it works: NATO fires from
the hip, accusing Milosevic of all
manner of atrocities and crimes. Spin,
it's called. The problem is war-time
spin is often recognized for what it
is -- mendacity, the truth getting
lost in the fog of war, pressure to put
things in the worst possible light. So
NATO hits upon the idea of
establishing a tribunal to indict Serb
leaders on war crimes charges, ignoring the fact
that the UN Security Council hasn't
the jurisdiction to establish a
criminal court. Jurisdiction or not, a
tribunal is established. The same "fog
of war" charges are made, but now,
the charges seem to have more
substance because they're made by a
tribunal, said to be backed by "the
international community," and because
legal language is pressed into service:
indictment, prosecution, conviction,
trial. It's one thing to have Jamie
Shea, in the midst of a NATO bombing
campaign say that Milosevic committed
genocide, since Jamie Shea has a
motive to lie under those
circumstances, but it's quite another
-- or so it seems -- to say Milosevic was
convicted by an International
Tribunal. It seems so much less like the
self-serving propaganda of NATO, and
so much more impartial. But is it? It's not
Jamie Shea making the charges, or Blair,
but it is people NATO hired and
appointed, whose salaries they pay,
making exactly the same charges with as
little evidence as Blair and Shea ever
had, repeating the same whoppers from the
same press reports that were used the
first time NATO sought to put a moral
gloss on its immoral acts.
But does the tribunal change anything?
Is del Ponte really any different
from Shea? If NATO lied about there
being 100,000 Kosovar Albanians murdered
to justify a bombing campaign that
under Nuremberg and the UN Charter is
a crime against peace; if it lied about
a passenger train that was travelling
too fast for a NATO pilot's missile to
avoid; if it lied about Serbs
attacking a refugee column that had
really been attacked by NATO; if it
lied about Albanian Kosovars imprisoned in
a Pristina stadium; if it lied about
organized rapes; if it lied about
dozens of other things, (14) why
shouldn't we expect the same from a tribunal
that was set up and is controlled by
the very same governments that lied so
freely in the first place?
Look at it this way. If someone who
has lied to you over and over again
sets up a tribunal, hires the prosecutors,
provides the evidence, and selects the
judges, is it not criminally stupid to
accept the tribunal as anything other
than a continuation of the same
pattern of lying? Is it not criminally
irresponsible to accept the charges
made against those who are indicted as
beyond dispute, or even as probably
true?
Ewan MacColl, who Washington never
liked (he was denied a visa in 1962 to
enter the US because of his political
leanings), died before The Hague
Tribunal was established, but he seems
to have anticipated its hypocrisy.
It's illegal to carve up your missus,
wrote MacColl,
Or put poison in your old man's tea
But poison the rivers, the sea, and
the skies
And poison the mind of a nation with
lies
If it's done in the interest of free
enterprise
Then it's proper and perfectly legal.
(15)
MacColl would have known it's not
Swiss chocolate del Ponte is serving.
Moreover, he would have said so.
Notes
1. Deutshce Press-Agentur, February
11, 2002 (back)
2. See Jared Israel, Official
Statements Prove Hague 'Tribunal'
Belongs to NATO,
http://www.tenc.net/docs/h-list.htm
(back)
3. Francisco Gil-White, Assistant
Professor of Psychology at the University
of Pennsylvania and a Fellow at the
Solomon Asch Center for Study of
Ethnopolitical Conflict, examined the
media's depiction of Milosevic's
Kosovo Field speech, comparing press
reports against a BBC transcript of
the address. See Expert in Psychology of
Ethnic Conflict Changes his Mind about
Yugoslavia,
http://emperors-clothes.com/milo/gw.htm
. The press reports on
the Kosovo Field speech are taken from
Gil-White's work. Gil-White's article
is highly recommended.
See also Stephen Gowans, When it comes
to Milosevic stories, more than a
little scepticism is in order, Media
Monitors Network,
http://www.mediamonitors.net/gowans43.html
(back)
4. Milosevic's Speech, Kosovo Field,
June 28, 1989,
http://www.swans.com/libray/art8/smilos01.html
(back)
5. Ibid. (back)
6. Ibid. (back)
7. May 17, 1999 Transcript of NATO
press conference by Jamie Shea & Major
General W. Jertz in Brussels
Transcribed by M2 PRESSWIRE (c) 1999
cited in
Jared Israel, Official Statements
Prove Hague 'Tribunal' Belongs to
NATO,
http://www.icdsm.org/more/belongs.htm
(back)
8. Edward Herman, Final Solution in
the Occupied Territories,
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-02/11herman.cfm
(back)
9. See also Stephen Gowans, Sorting
Through the Lies of the Racak Massacre
and other Myths of Kosovo, Media
Monitors Network,
http://www.mediamonitors.net/gowans1.html
(back)
10. March 19, 1999 address to the
nation, cited in FAIR: Media Advisory,
An Update on Racak, July 18, 2001,
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/racak-update.html
(back)
11. FAIR: Media Advisory, An Update
on Racak, July 18, 2001,
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/racak-update.html
See also Racak 'massacre' exposed as
fraud, Workers World, Feb. 15, 2001,
http://www.workers.org/ww/2001/yugo0215.html
(back)
12. Noam Chomsky, The New Military
Humanism, Lessons From Kosovo, New
Star Books, Vancouver, 1999, p. 40 - 48.
(back)
13. Stephen R. Shalom Interviews Noam
Chomsky, January 2002
http://www.zmag.org/shalom0122.htm
(back)
14. See Stephen Gowans, Genocide or
Veracicide Will NATO's Lying Ever Stop?
http://www.swans.com/library/art7/gowans02.html
(back)
15. Legal-Illegal, Words and music by
Ewan MacColl, From Hot Blast,
Folkways. Published in Broadside #154,
1984 (back)
Stephen Gowans is a writer and
political activist who lives in
Ottawa, Canada. He writes a regular
column for Canadian Content and is
also a frequent contributor to the Media
Monitors Network. In addition, Gowans
maintains his own Web site, What's
Left in Suburbia?, that is filled with
relevant information.