http://www.semanarioserbio.com/?p=6978
http://www.naiz.info/es/iritzia/articulos/crimea-vs-kosovo
https://aurorasito.wordpress.com/2014/11/12/per-la-crimea-il-mondo-e-stato-sullorlo-della-guerra-nucleare/
Todos conocemos la cuestión de Crimea pero este reportaje de un periodista serbio explica, por las reacciones que ha provocado, por qué son tan pocos los periodistas occidentales que abordan la situación existente en esa península...
En direct de Crimée
Nous savons tous ce qu’il en est de la Crimée, mais ce reportage d’un journaliste serbe explique, par les réactions qu’il a provoquées, les raisons pour lesquelles très rares sont les journalistes occidentaux à rendre compte de la situation.
Traduction
Svetlana Maksovic
Source
Srpski Glas (Australie)
Ecrivain, poète et journaliste. Il a publié des romans : Le Serment en 2010 (Zavet), Je réussirai en 2012 (Nema šanse da ne uspem), Le Serment des héros en 2014 (Zavet heroja) et une collection de poèmes L’aube de l’éternité en 2014 (Osvit večnosti).
Son roman Le Serment des héros a été publié en russe à l’occasion du centenaire de la Grande guerre avec un avant-propos de Sergueï Narychkine, le président de la Douma d’Etat de Russie.
There was an interesting announcement recently that went almost entirely unnoticed in the Canadian media.
On June 17, Peter Szijjarto, foreign minister of Hungary’s centre-right government, made the startling declaration that his national security forces will erect a four-metre wall along the entire 175 kilometres of shared border with Serbia.
Szijjarto’s rationale for resorting to such a drastic measure results from a months-long flood of asylum seekers pouring into southern Hungary. While tens of thousands of these desperate illegal immigrants have been caught, detained and returned into Serbia, the vast majority have used the processing time for their asylum applications to simply disappear into other western European countries.
This, of course, explains why there is no public outcry from other members of the European Union over Hungary’s decision to fence out this wave of desperate humanity.
For impoverished Serbia, staunching the flow of these refugees at its northern border has generated the opposite reaction.
“I thought the Berlin Wall had fallen, but now new walls are being constructed,” stated Serbia’s foreign minister, Ivica Dacic, referring to the Cold War barrier that stood from 1961 until 1991.
“We are absolutely and fiercely against (Hungary’s) decision to build a fence.”
While the nationalities of those fleeing through Serbia into Hungary and beyond include Syrians, Somalis and even Afghans, the irony is that the vast majority of asylum seekers are ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.
The most recent exodus began in earnest in the fall of 2014, when the Serbian government relaxed travel restrictions on Albanians entering from the declared independent state of Kosovo. Serbia has never recognized Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence and still legally considers the region to be sovereign Serbian territory.
In 1999, Kosovo was ravaged by a brutal civil war between ethnic Albanian separatists and Serbian security forces. The root cause of the public discontent was a severely depressed economy, overpopulation and unemployment. The Albanian underworld was able use that unrest to ignite and impassion a wave of nationalist sentiment that soon boiled over into a full-scale armed insurgency.
That year was the 50th anniversary of NATO and, given the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was a strong desire for NATO leaders to prove that the alliance was still relevant. Thus, NATO threw its full weight behind the Albanian Kosovo rebels.
In the spring of 1999, NATO warplanes, including Canadian CF-18s, launched a 78-day bombing campaign — not just against Serbian military targets in the disputed territory of Kosovo but against civilian infrastructure and utilities throughout all of Serbia. With NATO combat forces, including Canadians, massed in Macedonia for a possible ground war, the Serbian government negotiated a ceasefire on June 10, 1999.
Under the negotiated terms of UN Resolution 1244, Kosovo was to remain the sovereign territory of Serbia after a brief military occupation by NATO troops. Serbian security forces were to resume control of Kosovo’s border crossings and provide protection for the numerous sacred Serbian religious sites and monasteries within the disputed territory.
Of course, that was never actually in the cards. NATO negotiators had never wanted to have ground troops fight their way through Kosovo’s forebodingly steep mountain passes. Therefore, they agreed to all Serbian demands, knowing full well that they would never honour the deal.
In February 2008, that duplicity was formalized when the United States hastily recognized Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence and strong-armed allies such as Canada into following suit.
However, the precedent of such declarations of territorial independence based upon ethnic regional majority has prevented many countries from recognizing Kosovo. For instance, Spain, with its Basque separatist movement, and Azerbaijan, with its claim over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, cannot recognize a unilaterally declared independence.
With Russia using its veto to deny Kosovo membership in the UN and Spain, Slovakia, Greece and Cyprus doing likewise to keep it out of the European Union, Kosovo has remained in a strange quasi-limbo status on the international stage.
What matters most, however, is that at the end of the day, you cannot subsist on flags. Despite its declared independence, unemployment, poverty, corruption and widespread crime are driving a new flood of Albanian Kosovars to seek a better life — anywhere but in Kosovo.
The people of Ukraine who see their salvation in the form of a NATO intervention should take a good look at NATO’s “success” in Kosovo. Short-term military solutions do not solve long-term economic problems.
Source:
http://thechronicleherald.ca/opinion/1295935-on-target-ukraine-could-learn-from-kosovo%E2%80%99s-troubles?utm_source=website&utm_medium=mobi&utm_campaign=full-site
Kosovo and Ukraine: Compare and contrast
There have been at least two countries in Europe in recent history that undertook ‘anti-terrorist’ military operations against ‘separatists’, but got two very different reactions from the Western elite.
The government of European country A launches what it calls an‘anti-terrorist’ military operation against ‘separatists’ in one part of the country. We see pictures on Western television of people’s homes being shelled and lots of people fleeing. The US and UK and other NATO powers fiercely condemn the actions of the government of country A and accuse it of carrying out‘genocide’ and ’ethnic cleansing’ and say that there is an urgent ‘humanitarian crisis.’ Western politicians and establishment journalists tell us that ‘something must be done.’ And something is done: NATO launches a ‘humanitarian’ military intervention to stop the government of country A. Country A is bombed for 78 days and nights. The country’s leader (who is labeled ‘The New Hitler’) is indicted for war crimes – and is later arrested and sent in an RAF plane to stand trial for war crimes at The Hague, where he dies, un-convicted, in his prison cell.
The government of European country B launches what it calls an ‘anti-terrorist’ military operation against‘separatists’ in one part of the country. Western television doesn’t show pictures or at least not many) of people’s homes being shelled and people fleeing, although other television stations do. But here the US, UK and other NATO powers do not condemn the government, or accuse it of committing ‘genocide’ or‘ethnic cleansing.’ Western politicians and establishment journalists do not tell us that ‘something must be done’ to stop the government of country B killing people. On the contrary, the same powers who supported action against country A, support the military offensive of the government in country B. The leader of country B is not indicted for war crimes, nor is he labeled ‘The New Hitler’ despite the support the government has got from far-right, extreme nationalist groups, but in fact, receives generous amounts of aid.
Anyone defending the policies of the government in country A, or in any way challenging the dominant narrative in the West is labeled a “genocide denier” or an “apologist for mass murder.” But no such opprobrium awaits those defending the military offensive of the government in country B. It’s those who oppose its policies who are smeared.
What makes the double standards even worse, is that by any objective assessment, the behavior of the government in country B, has been far worse than that of country A and that more human suffering has been caused by their aggressive actions.
In case you haven’t guessed it yet – country A is Yugoslavia, country B is Ukraine.
Yugoslavia, a different case
In 1998/9 Yugoslavian authorities were faced with a campaign of violence against Yugoslav state officials by the pro-separatist and Western-backed Kosovan Liberation Army (KLA). The Yugoslav government responded by trying to defeat the KLA militarily, but their claims to be fighting against ’terrorism’ were haughtily dismissed by Western leaders. As the British Defence Secretary George Robertson and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook acknowledged in the period from 1998 to January 1999, the KLA had been responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Yugoslav authorities had been.
In the lead-up to the NATO action and during it, lurid claims were made about the numbers of people who had been killed or ‘disappeared’ by the Yugoslav forces. “Hysterical NATO and KLA estimates of the missing and presumably slaughtered Kosovan Albanians at times ran upwards of one hundred thousand, reaching 500, 000 in one State Department release. German officials leaked ‘intelligence’ about an alleged Serb plan called Operation Horseshoe to depopulate the province of its ethnic Albanians, and to resettle it with Serbs, which turned out to be an intelligence fabrication,” Edward Herman and David Peterson noted in their book The Politics of Genocide.
“We must act to save thousands of innocent men, women and children from humanitarian catastrophe – from death, barbarism and ethnic cleansing from a brutal dictatorship,” a solemn-faced Prime Minister Tony Blair told the British Parliament - just four years before an equally sombre Tony Blair told the British Parliament that we must act over the ‘threat’ posed by Saddam Hussein’s WMDs.
Taking their cue from Tony Blair and Co., the media played their part in hyping up what was going on in Kosovo. Herman and Peterson found that newspapers used the word ‘genocide’ to describe Yugoslav actions in Kosovo 323 times compared to just 13 times for the invasion/occupation of Iraq despite the death toll in the latter surpassing that of Kosovo by 250 times.
In the same way we were expected to forget about the claims from Western politicians and their media marionettes about Iraq possessing WMDs in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion, we are now expected to forget about the outlandish claims made about Kosovo in 1999.
But as the award winning investigative journalist and broadcaster John Pilger wrote in his article Reminders of Kosovo in 2004, “Lies as great as those told by Bush and Blair were deployed by Clinton and Blair in grooming of public opinion for an illegal, unprovoked attack on a European country.”
The overall death toll of the Kosovo conflict is thought to be between 3,000 and 4,000, but that figure includes Yugoslav army casualties, and Serbs and Roma and Kosovan Albanians killed by the KLA. In 2013, the International Committee of the Red Cross listed the names of 1,754 people from all communities in Kosovo who were reported missing by their families.
The number of people killed by Yugoslav military at the time NATO launched its ‘humanitarian’ bombing campaign, which itself killed between 400-600 people, is thought to be around 500, a tragic death toll but hardly “genocide.”
“Like Iraq’s fabled weapons of mass destruction, the figures used by the US and British governments and echoed by journalists were inventions- along with Serbian ‘rape camps’ and Clinton and Blair’s claims that NATO never deliberately bombed civilians,” says Pilger.
No matter what happens in Ukraine...
In Ukraine by contrast, the number of people killed by government forces and those supporting them has been deliberately played down, despite UN figures highlighting the terrible human cost of the Ukrainian government’s ‘anti-terrorist’ operation.
Last week, the UN’s Human Rights Office said that the death toll in the conflict in eastern Ukraine had doubled in the previous fortnight. Saying that they were “very conservative estimates,” the UN stated that 2,086 people (from all sides) had been killed and 5,000 injured. Regarding refugees, the UN says that around 1,000 people have been leaving the combat zone every day and that over 100,000 people have fled the region. Yet despite these very high figures, there have been no calls from leading Western politicians for ‘urgent action’ to stop the Ukrainian government’s military offensive. Articles from faux-left‘humanitarian interventionists’ saying that ‘something must be done’ to end what is a clearly a genuine humanitarian crisis, have been noticeable by their absence.
There is, it seems, no “responsibility to protect” civilians being killed by government forces in the east of Ukraine, as there was in Kosovo, even though the situation in Ukraine, from a humanitarian angle, is worse than that in Kosovo in March 1999.
To add insult to injury, efforts have been made to prevent a Russian humanitarian aid convoy from entering Ukraine.
The convoy we are told is ‘controversial’ and could be part of a sinister plot by Russia to invade. This from the same people who supported a NATO bombing campaign on a sovereign state for “humanitarian”reasons fifteen years ago!
For these Western ‘humanitarians’ who cheer on the actions of the Ukrainian government, the citizens of eastern Ukraine are “non-people”: not only are they unworthy of our support or compassion, or indeed aid convoys, they are also blamed for their own predicament.
There are, of course, other conflicts which also highlight Western double standards towards‘humanitarian intervention’. Israeli forces have killed over 2,000 Palestinians in their latest ruthless ‘anti-terrorist’ operation in Gaza, which is far more people than Yugoslav forces had killed in Kosovo by the time of the 1999 NATO ‘intervention’. But there are no calls at this time for a NATO bombing campaign against Israel.
In fact, neocons and faux-left Zionists who have defended and supported Israel’s “anti-terrorist”Operation Protective Edge, and Operation Cast Lead before it, were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Israel it seems is allowed to kill large numbers of people, including women and children, in its “anti-terrorist” campaigns, but Yugoslavia had no such “right” to fight an “anti-terrorist” campaign on its own soil.
In 2011, NATO went to war against Libya to prevent a “hypothetical” massacre in Benghazi, and to stop Gaddafi ‘killing his own people’; in 2014 Ukrainian government forces are killing their own people in large numbers, and there have been actual massacres like the appalling Odessa arson attack carried out by pro-government ‘radicals’, but the West hasn’t launched bombing raids on Kiev in response.
The very different approaches from the Western elite to ‘anti-terrorist’ operations in Kosovo and Ukraine (and indeed elsewhere) shows us that what matters most is not the numbers killed, or the amount of human suffering involved, but whether or not the government in question helps or hinders Western economic and military hegemonic aspirations.
In the eyes of the rapacious Western elites, the great ‘crime’ of the Yugoslav government in 1999 was that it was still operating, ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an unreconstructed socialist economy, with very high levels of social ownership - as I highlighted here.
Yugoslavia under Milosevic was a country which maintained its financial and military independence. It had no wishes to join the EU or NATO, or surrender its sovereignty to anyone. For that refusal to play by the rules of the globalists and to show deference to the powerful Western financial elites, the country (and its leader) had to be destroyed. In the words of George Kenney, former Yugoslavia desk officer at the US State Department: “In post-cold war Europe no place remained for a large, independent-minded socialist state that resisted globalization.”
By contrast, the government of Ukraine, has been put in power by the West precisely in order to further its economic and military hegemonic aspirations. Poroshenko, unlike the much- demonized Milosevic, is an oligarch acting in the interests of Wall Street, the big banks and the Western military-industrial complex. He’s there to tie up Ukraine to IMF austerity programs, to hand over his country to Western capital and to lock Ukraine into ‘Euro-Atlantic’ structures- in other words to transform it into an EU/IMF/NATO colony- right on Russia’s doorstep.
This explains why an ‘anti-terrorist’ campaign waged by the Yugoslav government against ‘separatists’ in 1999 is ‘rewarded’ with fierce condemnation, a 78-day bombing campaign, and the indictment of its leader for war crimes, while a government waging an ‘anti-terrorist’ campaign against ‘separatists’ in Ukraine in 2014, is given carte blanche to carry on killing. In the end, it’s not about how many innocent people you kill, or how reprehensible your actions are, but about whose interests you serve.
http://byebyeunclesam.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/kosovo-e-ucraina-analogie-e-differenze/
Kosovo e Ucraina: analogie e differenze
Neil Clark per rt.com
Ci sono stati almeno due Paesi in Europa nella storia recente che hanno intrapreso operazioni militari “anti-terrorismo” contro “separatisti”, ma hanno ottenuto due reazioni molto diverse dalle élite occidentali.
Il governo del Paese europeo A lancia quella che definisce una operazione militare ‘anti-terrorismo’ contro ‘separatisti’ in una parte del Paese. Noi vediamo immagini sulla televisione occidentale di abitazioni che vengono bombardate e un sacco di persone in fuga. Gli Stati Uniti, il Regno Unito e le altre potenze della NATO condannano ferocemente le azioni del governo del Paese A e lo accusano di perpetrare ‘genocidio’ e ‘pulizia etnica’ e dicono che vi è una urgente ‘crisi umanitaria’. Politici occidentali e giornalisti dell’establishment ci raccontano che ‘bisogna fare qualcosa’. E qualcosa è fatto: la NATO lancia un intervento militare ‘umanitario’ per fermare il governo del Paese A. Il Paese A è bombardato per 78 giorni e notti. Il leader del Paese (che è etichettato come ‘il nuovo Hitler’) è accusato di crimini di guerra – e viene poi arrestato e inviato con un aereo della RAF per essere processato per crimini di guerra a L’Aia, dove muore, non-condannato, nella sua cella carceraria.
Il governo del Paese europeo B lancia quella che definisce una operazione militare ‘anti-terrorismo’ contro ‘separatisti’ in una parte del Paese. La televisione occidentale non mostra immagini, o almeno non molte, di abitazioni che vengono bombardate e persone in fuga, anche se altre emittenti televisive lo fanno. Ma qui gli Stati Uniti, Regno Unito e le altre potenze della NATO non condannano il governo, o lo accusano di aver commesso ‘genocidio’ o ‘pulizia etnica’. Politici occidentali e giornalisti dell’establishment non ci dicono che ‘bisogna fare qualcosa’ per impedire che il governo del Paese B uccida la gente. Al contrario, gli stessi poteri che hanno sostenuto l’azione contro il Paese A, sostengono l’offensiva militare del governo nel Paese B. Il leader del Paese B non è accusato di crimini di guerra, né è etichettato come ‘il nuovo Hitler’, nonostante il sostegno che il suo governo ha da gruppi nazionalisti estremi, della destra radicale, ma in realtà, riceve generose quantità di aiuti.
Chiunque difenda le politiche del governo nel Paese A, o in alcun modo contesti la narrazione dominante in Occidente viene etichettato come “negatore del genocidio” o un “apologeta dell’omicidio di massa.” Ma un tale obbrobrio non aspetta coloro che difendono l’offensiva militare del governo nel Paese B. Sono coloro che si oppongono alle sue politiche che vengono infangati.
Ciò che rende i doppi standard ancora peggiori, è che da qualsiasi valutazione oggettiva, il comportamento del governo nel Paese B è stato di gran lunga peggiore di quello del Paese A e che più sofferenza umana è stata causata dalle sue azioni aggressive.
Nel caso in cui non abbiate ancora indovinato – il Paese A è la Jugoslavia, il Paese B è l’Ucraina.
Jugoslavia, un caso diverso
Nel 1998/9 le autorità jugoslave hanno dovuto affrontare una campagna di violenza contro i funzionari statali jugoslavi da parte dell’Esercito di Liberazione del Kosovo (UCK), pro-separatista e sostenuto dall’Occidente. Il governo jugoslavo ha risposto cercando di sconfiggere l’UCK militarmente, ma le sue rivendicazioni di stare lottando contro il ‘terrorismo’ sono state altezzosamente respinte dai leader occidentali. Come riconobbero il Segretario alla Difesa britannico George Robertson e il ministro degli Esteri Robin Cook nel periodo dal 1998 al gennaio 1999, l’UCK era stato responsabile di più morti in Kosovo che le autorità jugoslave.
Nell’imminenza dell’azione della NATO e durante essa, vennero fatte affermazioni sensazionali circa il numero di persone che erano state uccise o ‘fatte scomparire’ dalle forze jugoslave. “Isteriche stime dei dispersi e presumibilmente macellati kosovari albanesi, formulate dalla NATO e dall’UCK, ai tempi correvano oltre i centomila, raggiungendo i 500.000 in un rapporto del Dipartimento di Stato. Funzionari tedeschi fecero trapelare ‘intelligence’ su un presunto piano serbo chiamato Operazione Ferro di Cavallo volto a spopolare la provincia dai suoi Albanesi etnici, e di rimpiazzarli con Serbi, che si rivelò essere una fabbricazione dei servizi”, notano Edward Herman e David Peterson nel loro libro La politica del genocidio.
“Dobbiamo agire per salvare migliaia di uomini innocenti, donne e bambini da una catastrofe umanitaria – dalla morte, barbarie e pulizia etnica di una dittatura brutale”, disse con atteggiamento solenne il Primo Ministro Tony Blair al Parlamento britannico – appena quattro anni prima che un altrettanto severo Tony Blair dicesse al Parlamento britannico che dovevamo agire di fronte alla ‘minaccia’ rappresentata dalle armi di distruzione di massa di Saddam Hussein.
Prendendo spunto da Tony Blair e co., i media hanno giocato la loro parte nel dare enfasi a quello che stava succedendo in Kosovo. Herman e Peterson hanno scoperto che i giornali hanno usato la parola ‘genocidio’ per descrivere le azioni jugoslave in Kosovo 323 volte rispetto alle sole 13 volte per l’invasione/occupazione dell’Irak, nonostante il bilancio delle vittime in quest’ultimo sia superiore a quello del Kosovo di 250 volte.
Allo stesso modo in cui ci si aspettava che dimenticassimo le dichiarazioni dei politici occidentali e dei loro media marionette sull’Irak in possesso di armi di distruzione di massa nell’imminenza dell’invasione del 2003, ora si attendevano che ci dimenticassimo le bizzarre affermazioni fatte sul Kosovo nel 1999.
Ma, come il premiato giornalista investigativo e televisivo John Pilger ha scritto nel suo articoloPromemoria del Kosovo nel 2004, “bugie grandi come quelle raccontate da Bush e Blair sono state impiegate da Clinton e Blair manipolando l’opinione pubblica per un illecito attacco non provocato contro un Paese europeo.”
Il bilancio globale delle vittime del conflitto in Kosovo è ritenuto essere tra 3.000 e 4.000, ma questa cifra include le perdite dell’esercito jugoslavo, e serbi, rom e kosovari albanesi uccisi dall’UCK. Nel 2013, il Comitato Internazionale della Croce Rossa ha elencato i nomi di 1.754 persone provenienti da tutte le comunità del Kosovo, che risultanto scomparse alle loro famiglie.
Il numero di persone uccise dai militari jugoslavi al momento in cui la NATO lanciò la sua campagna di bombardamenti ‘umanitari’, che a sua volta uccise tra le 400-600 persone, è pensato essere di circa 500, un numero di vittime tragico ma difficilmen
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