1. March 24 1999, Four Years After. In Memoriam: Yugoslavia
(by Rick Rozoff)
2. From Tanjug, Beta and Novosti news agencies
LINK:
http://www.deltax.net/bissett/a-anniversary.htm
ANNIVERSARY OF SHAME: MARCH 1999-MARCH 2002
"Byronica", March 2002
=== 1 ===
March 24 1999, Four Years After
In Memoriam: Yugoslavia
Rick Rozoff
March 24, 2003
Four years ago the Clinton-Albright regime in
Washington launched a devastating 79-day terror
bombing campaign against the nation and people of
Yugoslavia.
The first war waged against a European nation since
Hitler's Third Reich embarked on its crusade for
Lebensraum and world conquest, of militarization and
subjugation of Europe, of the attempted forcible
seizure of petroleum supplies and strategic posts in
the Middle East, the Crimea and the Caucasus.
The capital city of Belgrade was subjected to aerial
assaults from heights beyond the reach of Yugoslav air
defenses, bombings which continued unrelenting through
both Western and Eastern, Gregorian and Julian, Easter
Sundays.
Bombing and strafing and cruise missile attacks and
graphite explosives which knocked out electricity
grids and cluster bombs dispersed throughout the land,
maiming and killing civilians to this day; depleted
uranium poisoning which will become made manifest in
widespread cancer cases, neurological diseases and
birth defects for generations to come.
Cowardly attacks which, carried out from 15,000 or
more feet in the air or with the push of a button from
a warship in the Mediterranean, plunged bridges into
the Danube River, blocking Europe's main shipping
artery; destroyed the already fragile Yugoslav
economy's factories and rail lines and petroleum and
chemical depots.
Massacred passengers in civilian trains and buses;
slaughtered a refugee column; intentionally targeted a
television broadcasting facility and killed sixteen
technical staff; strafed a religious procession in a
provincial village, killing and decapitating the
priest who was leading it, then rounding back to
finish off the rescue workers who had arrived to tend
to the victims; bombed schoolyards and apartment
complexes and maternity wards. Repeatedly tried to
murder government officials by targeting their private
residences.
And devastated the Chinese Embassy.
When Clinton, Blair and their NATO allies commenced
this groundbreaking violation of international law -
bypassing, scorning and fatally wounding the United
Nations, of which Yugoslavia was a founding member -
they also effected the unmaking of the entire
post-World War II order, one which had been instituted
exactly to guard against wars of aggression by the
powerful against the powerless, against a repetition
of that unparalleled human horror that had claimed
some fifty million lives in the late 1930s and early
1940s.
One order ended. Another had begun.
One of naked, brutal and unapologetic power politics
in which wars and subversion, economic strangulation
and political isolation, diktat and brinksmanship
would reign supreme, unchallenged, without even the
figleaf of pretense or more than half-hearted
justification. What had often been observed even in
the breach was now cynically discarded even in its
seeming adherence.
Wars would now be conducted on the basis of any reason
or no reason at all as determined by whichever ad hoc
'coalition of the willing' British Prime Minister Tony
Blair and whoever happens to occupy the Oval Office in
the White House achieved through some combination of
bribery and bullying.
Four years later Yugoslavia is no more. Macedonia,
immediately afterward, was invaded by armed insurgents
from US and NATO occupied Kosovo, as was South Serbia.
Low-grade secessionist violence persists in both
locales.
Tony Blair's colonial legions effectively recolonized
the West African nation of Sierra Leone.
A mayor interstate war ensued in the Horn of Africa
with a prodigal and fruitless waste of tens of
thousands of Ethiopian and Eritrean lives.
An armed showdown on the Indian subcontinent came
within a hair's breadth of issuing in the world's
first nuclear exchange between two belligerents.
Currently the US plunges yet deeper into civil wars in
Colombia and the Philippines, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
Afghanistan has been bombed and occupied, and the real
war there is only commencing.
Now, as though to commemorate the grim anniversary,
Washington and London are replicating the Yugoslav
prototype in Iraq, preparatory to any number of future
and progressively more dangerous expeditionary and
imperial wars spanning the globe. Replete with the
full panoply of the post-United Nations era ordnance:
Depleted uranium, cluster bombs, Tomahawk and other
cruise missiles, thermobaric oxygen-sucking weapons,
mushroom cloud 'bunker buster' and MOAB bombs.
The US, Britain and Brussels threw down the gauntlet
to the true world community four years ago today. They
defied international law. They, in the most blunt
manner possible, breached the first prohibition of the
Nuremberg Charter, the violation of which sent
Hitler's lieutenants to prison cells: Crimes against
peace; launching a war of aggression.
And to continue the above analogy, of ripping to
shreds a nation in the Balkans which had been among
the earliest and most severely traumatized of all in
World war II; once again tearing republics from a
federation and even a province from a republic.
And driving in - permanent - exile and dispossession
some 400,000 civilians, the largest (presumably
irreversible) ethnic cleansing seen in Europe since
the Hitler Reich and the immediate aftermath of its
collapse.
NATO, an aggressive and voraciously expanding military
alliance, has supplanted the United Nations
Organization as arbiter of territorial and political
disputes; has absorbed and sunk roots into not only
the Balkans but the Baltic and Black and Caspian Seas
regions, now extending its tentacles from Latvia to
Uzbekistan and soon from Mauritania to the Red Sea.
The military and intelligence services, even the
judiciary and political parties, of new NATO members,
invitees and prospective next round candidates have
been purged of indigenous and popular influences,
subordinated to Brussels and its Washington and London
rulers, and some twenty nations from Eastern Europe to
Central Asia have been converted into nothing better
than military colonies supplying legionaries for
global wars and military bases for bombing and
transport missions far abroad.
Those noble few, not so much prophetic as alarmed, as
farseeing as able to reason from historical analogy,
who warned of all that lay lurking in the Pandora's
Box that was pried open on March 24, 1999, have had
their most dire predictions borne out. Alas.
Any, all, efforts to reverse and repair the travesty
of legal and political norms that now engulfs our
planet in apparent endless and intensifying sanguinary
warfare and moral confusion and anarchy must begin
with the inception of the crime, which began precisely
four years ago.
The offense must be identified, the victims
compensated, the perpetrators brought to justice.
As with the world that in so many quarters lay in
smouldering ruins in 1945, a new world of democracy,
within and between nations and people, must be
constructed if any civilization is to survive. Any
civilization worthy of survival.
Today is the best, is the obligatory, day to pledge to
that effort.
=== 2 ===
FOURTH ANNIVERSARY SINCE BEGINNING OF NATO BOMBING OF YUGOSLAVIA
BELGRADE, March 24 (Beta) - On March 24 a forth anniversary will be
marked since the day when the armies of 19 NATO member countries
launched air raids against Yugoslavia (now Serbia and Montenegro) that
lasted 11 weeks and killed according to different estimates between
1,200 and 2,500 people.
The bombing of targets in Yugoslavia started at 8 p.m. on
March 24, on order from then NATO secretary general Javier Solana and
the Yugoslav government that same night declared a state of war.
The bombing that did not stop for full 78 days heavily damaged
the country's infrastructure, factories, schools, hospitals, media
houses and culture monuments.
KRGA LAYS WREATH AT MEMORIAL TO AIR FORCE, ANTI-AIRCRAFT DEFENSE
SERVICEMEN
BELGRADE, March 24 (Tanjug) - A delegation of the Army of Serbia and
Montenegro, headed by Chief of Staff Col.Gen. Branko Krga, laid on
Monday, on the fourth anniversary of NATO's aggression on FR
Yugoslavia, a wreath at the memorial to air force and anti-aircraft
defense servicemen, outside the command building in Zemun.
In the delegation that laid the wreath at the memorial on
which are inscribed the names of 41 air force and anti-aircraft
defense servicemen who lost their lives in the aggression, were deputy
chiefs of staff, Lt.Gen. Branislav Petrovic and Admiral Radomir Grujic.
Wreaths were also laid by a delegation of the air force and
anti-aircraft defense and by the war commander of the air force and
anti-aircraft defense, retired Col.Gen. Spasoje Smiljanic, and by the
association of retired pilots and parachutists.
http://en.rian.ru/rian/index.cfm?prd_id=160&msg_id=3129522&startrow=1&date=2003-03-24&do_alert=0
Russian Information Agency (Novosti)
March 24, 2003
SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO MARK ANNIVERSARY OF NATO
BOMBINGS IN YUGOSLAVIA
BELGRADE, MARCH 24th, 2003 /FROM RIA NOVOSTI'S
CORRESPONDENT SERGEI RYABIKIN/ -- The 4th anniversary
of the start of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation's war against Yugoslavia is marked on
Monday. Commemoration services are held in all
churches in Serbia and Montenegro. Flowers are laid to
the monuments to victims of NATO bombardments.
The decision to start the bombing of Yugoslavia was
taken by NATO Secretary General Javier Solana on March
23, 1999. On the same day, the government of
Yugoslavia declared the state of imminent military
danger.
NATO's aggression began late on March 24th, 1999. The
first bombs were dropped on Pristina and [other parts
of the Serbian province of] Kosovo. Then, strikes were
dealt at airfields, command posts, barracks, military
depots, radars and civilian targets. During the first
day, Novi Sad, Kragujevac and Lucany lost 13
civilians.
The war against Yugoslavia, just as the current war
against Iraq, got no approval from the United Nations
Security Council. On June 9, 1999 representatives of
the army of Yugoslavia and NATO inked in Kumanovo an
agreement on the pullout of the Serbian army from
Kosovo. On June 10, the NATO secretary general ordered
an end to bombing. On the same day the United Nations
Security Council passed resolution 1244 on Kosovo,
which introduced a military and a civilian mission in
Kosovo, which became a protectorate of the
international community.
Over 78 days of continuous bombing of Yugoslavia, more
than 2,000 civilians were killed, 90 children among
them. NATO called their death "incidental casualties".
Simultaneously, 1,002 servicemen and policemen died of
bombs, cruise missiles and in clashes with Albanian
terrorists. Thus, the number of civilian victims was
twice as large as the losses among servicemen.
Bombardments destroyed, or seriously damaged 200
industrial enterprises, oil tanks, energy facilities,
objects of infrastructure, including 82 railway and
motor bridges. The size of total damage has not been
cited. It is estimated at 29-100 billion dollars.
After the change of power in Belgrade in 2000 October,
Western states refused to pay damage(s) to Belgrade.
(by Rick Rozoff)
2. From Tanjug, Beta and Novosti news agencies
LINK:
http://www.deltax.net/bissett/a-anniversary.htm
ANNIVERSARY OF SHAME: MARCH 1999-MARCH 2002
"Byronica", March 2002
=== 1 ===
March 24 1999, Four Years After
In Memoriam: Yugoslavia
Rick Rozoff
March 24, 2003
Four years ago the Clinton-Albright regime in
Washington launched a devastating 79-day terror
bombing campaign against the nation and people of
Yugoslavia.
The first war waged against a European nation since
Hitler's Third Reich embarked on its crusade for
Lebensraum and world conquest, of militarization and
subjugation of Europe, of the attempted forcible
seizure of petroleum supplies and strategic posts in
the Middle East, the Crimea and the Caucasus.
The capital city of Belgrade was subjected to aerial
assaults from heights beyond the reach of Yugoslav air
defenses, bombings which continued unrelenting through
both Western and Eastern, Gregorian and Julian, Easter
Sundays.
Bombing and strafing and cruise missile attacks and
graphite explosives which knocked out electricity
grids and cluster bombs dispersed throughout the land,
maiming and killing civilians to this day; depleted
uranium poisoning which will become made manifest in
widespread cancer cases, neurological diseases and
birth defects for generations to come.
Cowardly attacks which, carried out from 15,000 or
more feet in the air or with the push of a button from
a warship in the Mediterranean, plunged bridges into
the Danube River, blocking Europe's main shipping
artery; destroyed the already fragile Yugoslav
economy's factories and rail lines and petroleum and
chemical depots.
Massacred passengers in civilian trains and buses;
slaughtered a refugee column; intentionally targeted a
television broadcasting facility and killed sixteen
technical staff; strafed a religious procession in a
provincial village, killing and decapitating the
priest who was leading it, then rounding back to
finish off the rescue workers who had arrived to tend
to the victims; bombed schoolyards and apartment
complexes and maternity wards. Repeatedly tried to
murder government officials by targeting their private
residences.
And devastated the Chinese Embassy.
When Clinton, Blair and their NATO allies commenced
this groundbreaking violation of international law -
bypassing, scorning and fatally wounding the United
Nations, of which Yugoslavia was a founding member -
they also effected the unmaking of the entire
post-World War II order, one which had been instituted
exactly to guard against wars of aggression by the
powerful against the powerless, against a repetition
of that unparalleled human horror that had claimed
some fifty million lives in the late 1930s and early
1940s.
One order ended. Another had begun.
One of naked, brutal and unapologetic power politics
in which wars and subversion, economic strangulation
and political isolation, diktat and brinksmanship
would reign supreme, unchallenged, without even the
figleaf of pretense or more than half-hearted
justification. What had often been observed even in
the breach was now cynically discarded even in its
seeming adherence.
Wars would now be conducted on the basis of any reason
or no reason at all as determined by whichever ad hoc
'coalition of the willing' British Prime Minister Tony
Blair and whoever happens to occupy the Oval Office in
the White House achieved through some combination of
bribery and bullying.
Four years later Yugoslavia is no more. Macedonia,
immediately afterward, was invaded by armed insurgents
from US and NATO occupied Kosovo, as was South Serbia.
Low-grade secessionist violence persists in both
locales.
Tony Blair's colonial legions effectively recolonized
the West African nation of Sierra Leone.
A mayor interstate war ensued in the Horn of Africa
with a prodigal and fruitless waste of tens of
thousands of Ethiopian and Eritrean lives.
An armed showdown on the Indian subcontinent came
within a hair's breadth of issuing in the world's
first nuclear exchange between two belligerents.
Currently the US plunges yet deeper into civil wars in
Colombia and the Philippines, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
Afghanistan has been bombed and occupied, and the real
war there is only commencing.
Now, as though to commemorate the grim anniversary,
Washington and London are replicating the Yugoslav
prototype in Iraq, preparatory to any number of future
and progressively more dangerous expeditionary and
imperial wars spanning the globe. Replete with the
full panoply of the post-United Nations era ordnance:
Depleted uranium, cluster bombs, Tomahawk and other
cruise missiles, thermobaric oxygen-sucking weapons,
mushroom cloud 'bunker buster' and MOAB bombs.
The US, Britain and Brussels threw down the gauntlet
to the true world community four years ago today. They
defied international law. They, in the most blunt
manner possible, breached the first prohibition of the
Nuremberg Charter, the violation of which sent
Hitler's lieutenants to prison cells: Crimes against
peace; launching a war of aggression.
And to continue the above analogy, of ripping to
shreds a nation in the Balkans which had been among
the earliest and most severely traumatized of all in
World war II; once again tearing republics from a
federation and even a province from a republic.
And driving in - permanent - exile and dispossession
some 400,000 civilians, the largest (presumably
irreversible) ethnic cleansing seen in Europe since
the Hitler Reich and the immediate aftermath of its
collapse.
NATO, an aggressive and voraciously expanding military
alliance, has supplanted the United Nations
Organization as arbiter of territorial and political
disputes; has absorbed and sunk roots into not only
the Balkans but the Baltic and Black and Caspian Seas
regions, now extending its tentacles from Latvia to
Uzbekistan and soon from Mauritania to the Red Sea.
The military and intelligence services, even the
judiciary and political parties, of new NATO members,
invitees and prospective next round candidates have
been purged of indigenous and popular influences,
subordinated to Brussels and its Washington and London
rulers, and some twenty nations from Eastern Europe to
Central Asia have been converted into nothing better
than military colonies supplying legionaries for
global wars and military bases for bombing and
transport missions far abroad.
Those noble few, not so much prophetic as alarmed, as
farseeing as able to reason from historical analogy,
who warned of all that lay lurking in the Pandora's
Box that was pried open on March 24, 1999, have had
their most dire predictions borne out. Alas.
Any, all, efforts to reverse and repair the travesty
of legal and political norms that now engulfs our
planet in apparent endless and intensifying sanguinary
warfare and moral confusion and anarchy must begin
with the inception of the crime, which began precisely
four years ago.
The offense must be identified, the victims
compensated, the perpetrators brought to justice.
As with the world that in so many quarters lay in
smouldering ruins in 1945, a new world of democracy,
within and between nations and people, must be
constructed if any civilization is to survive. Any
civilization worthy of survival.
Today is the best, is the obligatory, day to pledge to
that effort.
=== 2 ===
FOURTH ANNIVERSARY SINCE BEGINNING OF NATO BOMBING OF YUGOSLAVIA
BELGRADE, March 24 (Beta) - On March 24 a forth anniversary will be
marked since the day when the armies of 19 NATO member countries
launched air raids against Yugoslavia (now Serbia and Montenegro) that
lasted 11 weeks and killed according to different estimates between
1,200 and 2,500 people.
The bombing of targets in Yugoslavia started at 8 p.m. on
March 24, on order from then NATO secretary general Javier Solana and
the Yugoslav government that same night declared a state of war.
The bombing that did not stop for full 78 days heavily damaged
the country's infrastructure, factories, schools, hospitals, media
houses and culture monuments.
KRGA LAYS WREATH AT MEMORIAL TO AIR FORCE, ANTI-AIRCRAFT DEFENSE
SERVICEMEN
BELGRADE, March 24 (Tanjug) - A delegation of the Army of Serbia and
Montenegro, headed by Chief of Staff Col.Gen. Branko Krga, laid on
Monday, on the fourth anniversary of NATO's aggression on FR
Yugoslavia, a wreath at the memorial to air force and anti-aircraft
defense servicemen, outside the command building in Zemun.
In the delegation that laid the wreath at the memorial on
which are inscribed the names of 41 air force and anti-aircraft
defense servicemen who lost their lives in the aggression, were deputy
chiefs of staff, Lt.Gen. Branislav Petrovic and Admiral Radomir Grujic.
Wreaths were also laid by a delegation of the air force and
anti-aircraft defense and by the war commander of the air force and
anti-aircraft defense, retired Col.Gen. Spasoje Smiljanic, and by the
association of retired pilots and parachutists.
http://en.rian.ru/rian/index.cfm?prd_id=160&msg_id=3129522&startrow=1&date=2003-03-24&do_alert=0
Russian Information Agency (Novosti)
March 24, 2003
SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO MARK ANNIVERSARY OF NATO
BOMBINGS IN YUGOSLAVIA
BELGRADE, MARCH 24th, 2003 /FROM RIA NOVOSTI'S
CORRESPONDENT SERGEI RYABIKIN/ -- The 4th anniversary
of the start of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation's war against Yugoslavia is marked on
Monday. Commemoration services are held in all
churches in Serbia and Montenegro. Flowers are laid to
the monuments to victims of NATO bombardments.
The decision to start the bombing of Yugoslavia was
taken by NATO Secretary General Javier Solana on March
23, 1999. On the same day, the government of
Yugoslavia declared the state of imminent military
danger.
NATO's aggression began late on March 24th, 1999. The
first bombs were dropped on Pristina and [other parts
of the Serbian province of] Kosovo. Then, strikes were
dealt at airfields, command posts, barracks, military
depots, radars and civilian targets. During the first
day, Novi Sad, Kragujevac and Lucany lost 13
civilians.
The war against Yugoslavia, just as the current war
against Iraq, got no approval from the United Nations
Security Council. On June 9, 1999 representatives of
the army of Yugoslavia and NATO inked in Kumanovo an
agreement on the pullout of the Serbian army from
Kosovo. On June 10, the NATO secretary general ordered
an end to bombing. On the same day the United Nations
Security Council passed resolution 1244 on Kosovo,
which introduced a military and a civilian mission in
Kosovo, which became a protectorate of the
international community.
Over 78 days of continuous bombing of Yugoslavia, more
than 2,000 civilians were killed, 90 children among
them. NATO called their death "incidental casualties".
Simultaneously, 1,002 servicemen and policemen died of
bombs, cruise missiles and in clashes with Albanian
terrorists. Thus, the number of civilian victims was
twice as large as the losses among servicemen.
Bombardments destroyed, or seriously damaged 200
industrial enterprises, oil tanks, energy facilities,
objects of infrastructure, including 82 railway and
motor bridges. The size of total damage has not been
cited. It is estimated at 29-100 billion dollars.
After the change of power in Belgrade in 2000 October,
Western states refused to pay damage(s) to Belgrade.