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The parallel that comes to mind, mentioned by Solzhenitsyn, is Hitler's use of the national conflict between Sudeten/Germans and Czechs, the pressure on Czechoslovakia (with the support of England). Japan's attack on Manchuria 1931-45 and Italy's attack on Ethiopia 1935-41 were also against the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 (Briand got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926, Kellogg in 1929):
Durring the creation of US 62 states, among them all major powers, agreed to renounce war as political instrument and to settle all international disputes by peaceful means. But US Criminal Bill Clinton decided that Us treaty is worthless paper and the USA can act according to the doctrine "full spectrum dominance".
Madeleine Albright was probably the first neocon Secretary of State was instrumental in unleashing this war. Previous this female sociopath was infamous for her reply to the question posed by 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl about the sanctions against Iraq in May 1996.
“We have heard that a half million children have died,” stated Stahl. “I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”
“I think this is a very hard choice,” replied Albright, “but the price–we think the price is worth it.”
An Imperial Strategy For a New World Order - The Origins of World War III
NATO and Yugoslavia
The wars in Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s served as a justification for the continued existence of NATO in the world, and to expand American imperial interests in Eastern Europe.
The World Bank and IMF set the stage for the destabilization of Yugoslavia. After long-time dictator of Yugoslavia, Josip Tito, died in 1980, a leadership crisis developed.In 1982, American foreign policy officials organized a set of IMF and World Bank loans, under the newly created Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), to handle the crisis of the $20 billion US debt.
The effect of the loans, under the SAP, was that they,
“wreaked economic and political havoc... The economic crisis threatened political stability ... it also threatened to aggravate simmering ethnic tensions.” [2]
In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic became President of Serbia, the largest and most powerful of all the Yugoslav republics.
Also in 1989, Yugoslavia’s Premier traveled to the US to meet President George H.W. Bush in order to negotiate another financial aid package. In 1990, the World Bank/IMF program began, and the Yugoslav state’s expenditures went towards debt repayment.
As a result, social programs were dismantled, the currency devalued, wages frozen, and prices rose.
The “reforms fueled secessionist tendencies that fed on economic factors as well as ethnic divisions, virtually ensuring the de facto secession of the republic,” leading to Croatia and Slovenia’s succession in 1991.[3]
In 1990, US the intelligence community released a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), predicting that Yugoslavia would break apart, erupt in civil war, and the report then placed blame on Serbian President Milosevic for the coming destabilization.[4]
In 1991, conflict broke out between Yugoslavia and Croatia, when it, too, declared independence. A ceasefire was reached in 1992. Yet, the Croats continued small military offensives until 1995, as well as participating in the war in Bosnia. In 1995, Operation Storm was undertaken by Croatia to try to retake the Krajina region.
A Croatian general was recently put on trial at The Hague for war crimes during this battle, which was key to driving the Serbs out of Croatia and “cemented Croatian independence.”
The US supported the operation and the CIA actively provided intelligence to Croat forces, leading to the displacement of between 150,000 and 200,000 Serbs, largely through means of murder, plundering, burning villages and ethnic cleansing.[5] The Croatian Army was trained by US advisers, and the general on trial was even personally supported by the CIA.[6]
The Clinton administration gave the “green light” to Iran to arm the Bosnian Muslims and,
“from 1992 to January 1996, there was an influx of Iranian weapons and advisers into Bosnia.”
Further, “Iran, and other Muslim states, helped to bring Mujihadeen fighters into Bosnia to fight with the Muslims against the Serbs, 'holy warriors' from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Yemen and Algeria, some of whom had suspected links with Osama bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan.”
It was,
“Western intervention in the Balkans [that] exacerbated tensions and helped to sustain hostilities. By recognizing the claims of separatist republics and groups in 1990/1991. Western elites - the American, British, French and German - undermined government structures in Yugoslavia, increased insecurities, inflamed conflict and heightened ethnic tensions.
And by offering logistical support to various sides during the war, Western intervention sustained the conflict into the mid-1990s. Clinton's choice of the Bosnian Muslims as a cause to champion on the international stage, and his administration's demands that the UN arms embargo be lifted so that the Muslims and Croats could be armed against the Serbs, should be viewed in this light.” [7]
During the war in Bosnia, there,
“was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran, together with a range of radical Islamist groups, including Afghan mojahedin and the pro-Iranian Hizbullah.”
Further, “the secret services of Ukraine, Greece and Israel were busy arming the Bosnian Serbs.” [8]
Germany’s intelligence agency, the BND, also ran arms shipments to the Bosnian Muslims and Croatia to fight against the Serbs.[9] The US had influenced the war in the region in a variety of ways. As the Observer reported in 1995, a major facet of their involvement was through,
“Military Professional Resources Inc (MPRI), a Virginia-based American private company of retired generals and intelligence officers. The American embassy in Zagreb admits that MPRI is training the Croats, on licence from the US government.”
Further, The Dutch “were convinced that US special forces were involved in training the Bosnian army and the Bosnian Croat Army (HVO).” [10]
As far back as 1988, the leader of Croatia met with the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to create “a joint policy to break up Yugoslavia,” and bring Slovenia and Croatia into the “German economic zone.”
So, US Army officers were dispatched to Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, and Macedonia as “advisers” and brought in US Special Forces to help.[11] During the nine-month cease-fire in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, six US generals met with Bosnian army leaders to plan the Bosnian offensive that broke the cease-fire.[12]
In 1996, the Albanian Mafia, in collaboration with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a militant guerilla organization, took control over the enormous Balkan heroin trafficking routes. The KLA was linked to former Afghan Mujaheddin fighters in Afghanistan, including Osama bin Laden.[13]
In 1997, the KLA began fighting against Serbian forces,[14] and in 1998, the US State Department removed the KLA from its list of terrorist organizations.[15] Before and after 1998, the KLA was receiving arms, training and support from the US and NATO, and Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, had a close political relationship with KLA leader Hashim Thaci.[16]
Both the CIA and German intelligence, the BND, supported the KLA terrorists in Yugoslavia prior to and after the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The BND had KLA contacts since the early 1990s, the same period that the KLA was establishing its Al-Qaeda contacts.[17] KLA members were trained by Osama bin Laden at training camps in Afghanistan.
Even the UN stated that much of the violence that occurred came from KLA members, “especially those allied with Hashim Thaci.” [18]
The March 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo was justified on the pretense of putting an end to Serbian oppression of Kosovo Albanians, which was termed genocide. The Clinton Administration made claims that at least 100,000 Kosovo Albanians were missing and “may have been killed” by the Serbs.Bill Clinton personally compared events in Kosovo to the Holocaust. The US State Department had stated that up to 500,000 Albanians were feared dead. Eventually, the official estimate was reduced to 10,000, however, after exhaustive investigations, it was revealed that the death of less than 2,500 Albanians could be attributed to the Serbs.
During the NATO bombing campaign, between 400 and 1,500 Serb civilians were killed, and NATO committed war crimes, including the bombing of a Serb TV station and a hospital.[19]
In 2000, the US State Department, in cooperation with the American Enterprise Institute, AEI, held a conference on Euro-Atlantic integration in Slovakia. Among the participants were many heads of state, foreign affairs officials and ambassadors of various European states as well as UN and NATO officials.[20] A letter of correspondence between a German politician present at the meeting and the German Chancellor, revealed the true nature of NATO’s campaign in Kosovo.
The conference demanded a speedy declaration of independence for Kosovo, and that the war in Yugoslavia was waged in order to enlarge NATO, Serbia was to be excluded permanently from European development to justify a US military presence in the region, and expansion was ultimately designed to contain Russia.[21]
Of great significance was that,“the war created a raison d'être for the continued existence of NATO in a post-Cold War world, as it desperately tried to justify its continued existence and desire for expansion.”
Further, “The Russians had assumed NATO would dissolve at the end of the Cold War. Instead, not only has NATO expanded, it went to war over an internal dispute in a Slavic Eastern European country.”
This was viewed as a great threat. Thus,
“much of the tense relations between the United States and Russia over the past decade can be traced to the 1999 war on Yugoslavia.” [22]
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Aug 02, 2020 | www.unz.com
Belgrade has been razed 44 times. In the 20th century, it was bombed thrice. In World War II, hundreds of thousands of Serbs were mass murdered by Croats, an undisputed fact still little known.
From the taxi into town, I was reintroduced to the concrete housing blocks that are typical of the former Eastern Bloc. Belgrade's few high-rises are left over the 1970's, perhaps the worst decade for architecture ever. Its gorgeous buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been crumbling for decades.
I passed a monstrously huge banner of Serbian soldiers, with the lead one a stern female saluting, with accusation in her eyes. This draped the former Yugoslav Defense Ministry . Bombed by NATO in 1999, its mauled remains are left as is .
At a nearby park days later, I'd chance upon a bronze statue of a small girl holding a rag doll. Framed by a black marble slab resembling butterfly wings, she stood on a grave-like marker that's partly inscribed, "DEDICATED TO THE CHILDREN KILLED BY NATO AGGRESSION 1999."
Most of the world, though, don't see Serbians as victims so much as perpetrators of genocide, as recently evidenced by the Siege of Sarajevo and, even more so, Srebrenica.
On July 13th, 2012, Eric Margolis wrote :
During the mid 1990's, the world turned its back on the massacres of Muslims in Bosnia. The UN would not call it genocide because that would have demanded military intervention. Most shamefully, the Muslim world also closed its eyes as up to 160,000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered, starved and tortured in Serb-run concentration camps. At least 10,000 Muslim girls and women were gang raped, some in special rape camps.
A hundred-and-sixty-thousand is an atrociously high number of victims, but how many were actually slaughtered, as opposed to tortured or starved? Surely, Margolis didn't mean they were all starved, tortured then slaughtered? It's an oddly ambiguous passage for a seasoned author.
In any case, Margolis had seen it coming:
In 1988, I wrote warning that Milosevic would create disaster in Bosnia and Kosova, the Albanian-majority region of southern Serbia. I was denounced in Belgrade and declared an enemy of the Serbs. In truth, I had always been an admirer of Serbs as courageous, intelligent people. But the Serbs that Milosevic rallied were the scum of the gutter, criminals, racists, brutal pig farmers, fanatical priests.
On December 8th, 2017, The Saker presented an entirely different take :
Truly, that war had it all, every dirty trick was used against the Serbs: numerous false flags attacks, pseudo-genocides, illegal covert operations to arm terrorists groups, the covert delivery of weapons to officially embargoed entities, deliberate attacks against civilians, the use of illegal weapons, the use of officially "demilitarized zones" to hide (fully armed) entire army corps – you name it: if it is disgusting it was used against the Serbian people. Even deliberate attacks on the otherwise sacrosanct journalistic profession was considered totally normal as long as the journalists were Serbs. As for the Serbs, they were, of course, demonized. Milosevic became the "New Hitler" (along with Saddam Hussein) and those Serbs who took up arms to defend their land and families became genocidal Chetniks.
On January 3rd, 2019, The Saker added :
Brigadier-General Pierre Marie Gallois of the French Army has condemned the NATO destruction of Yugoslavia, and has gone on record stating that the endless stories of Serb atrocities, such as mass rapes and the siege of Sarajevo were fabricated. Gallois also argues that the German elite sought revenge for the fierce Serb resistance during the two world wars, especially with regard to the Serb partisans that held up German divisions that were headed towards Leningrad and Moscow during Operation Barbarossa. While relentlessly demonized, the Serbs were in many ways the greatest victims of the NATO-orchestrated Balkan wars, as hundreds of thousands of Serbs were forcibly expelled from both Croatia and Kosovo while Serbia was turned into a free-fire zone by NATO for over seventy days. Washington took advantage of the conflict to solidify control over its European vassals.
The Saker's parents fled to Belgrade as Russian refugees, and he even had a Serbian godmother, so there is a strong emotional attachment here, which The Saker freely admits.
Still, The Saker at his website has rebutted the inflated hooey of Srebrenica with some hard facts .
It's entirely unclear, even approximately, how many were intentionally executed, instead of being killed in battle, whether by Serbs or other Muslims, or who died because of starvation, suicide or illness.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia's star witness, and the only one convicted of direct participation in the Srebrenica "genocide," was not a Serb, but a Bosnian Croat, Drazen Erdemovic.
On June 27th, 1996, the ICTY itself declared Erdemovic mentally impaired, yet, on July 5th, 1996, it put him on the witness stand anyway.
Even more incredibly, Erdemovic admitted he had fought for all three sides during that conflict, Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims. Dude couldn't decide whom he was trying to kill or defend.
In exchange for his testimonies against Serbs, Erdemovic was jailed for just five years, then given a new identity and whisked to a new country, so who knows, he might be living next to you as John Smith.
3It's just a neighborhood squabble, you might be thinking. Who cares about Montenegroes? I've got my own black asses to kiss. I'm already kneeling, massa.
As always, though, there are lessons aplenty from the Balkans.
Serbs didn't have a country for five centuries, and Croats went stateless for eight, yet neither lost their fierce sense of nationhood, that is, their nationalism. It's not a debatable concept, but a deeply felt necessity, for how can any population with a unique history, heritage and identity not have its own homeland?
In the 21st century, such tribal thinking is not just deemed barbaric, but evil, Nazism, in short, except in Israel, of course. Gas chambers, remember?
When nations are contorted, tortured or simply enticed into any supranational entity, a correction, often violent, is inevitable, and that's exactly what has happened, repeatedly, in the Balkans. Wholesome pig farmers convulsed against the Ottomans, Austro-Hungarian Empire and Communists, etc. There is no progress beyond this.
This innate nationalism can only be purged when a population has been thoroughly cowed and/or brainwashed into renouncing itself, but the Serbs, for all for their defeats and humiliations down the centuries, never did. There's a magnificent lesson there.
Rebecca West, "So in the first battle of Kossovo the Serbs learned the meaning of defeat, not such defeat as forms a necessary proportion of all effort, for in that they had often been instructed during the course of their history, but of total defeat, annihilation of their corporate will and all their individual wills. The second battle of Kossovo taught them that one may live on such a low level of existence that even defeat cannot be achieved. The third taught them that even that level is not the lowest, and that there is a limbo for subject peoples where there is neither victory nor defeat but abortions which, had they come to birth, would have become such states."
Repeatedly butchered, suffocated and written off, Serbs have rebirthed themselves, thanks to their nationalism.
4When the Turks were in Belgrade, they embellished this city with 273 beautiful mosques, so where the hell are they?! Only one is left, unfortunately, and the Bajrakli Mosque almost joined all the rest when it was torched in 2004, in retaliation for the burning of Serbian churches in Kosovo.
Built in 1575, it is elegant, intimate and handsomely proportioned, with the only false note the jivey, concrete minaret, clearly a recent replacement. Inside , I admired its minbar , octagonal wooden tablets etched with calligraphy and, especially, the stone, baroque frame around some verse, a nice East meets West touch. Light angled in from high windows . The darkened dome soothed.
It's an active mosque. Half a dozen suited Muslims milled outside, until they all left, so that I could have cleared out their mosque had I wanted to, and started World War III. Outside the gate, there was an old beggar , but she too disappeared, because I had already given her sixty cents.
Leaving the Bajrakli Mosque, I walked by Dukat, a Turkish restaurant, then Zein, a Lebanese one. The Arabic Zuwar was also nearby. Though not nearly as cosmopolitan as, say, Busan, contemporary Belgrade is no xenophobic backwater. Chinese takeouts dot the city, and there's even a Chinese shopping center at Blok 70, in New Belgrade.
I'm writing this in a bar, Dzidzi Midzi , where American pop music is played nonstop. On its walls are mostly photos of American icons, such as Hitchcock, Dylan, Hendrix, Buffalo Bill, Jack Nicholson, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Louis Armstrong and Bruce Lee (who was born in San Francisco, graduated from the University of Washington, married an American and is buried in Seattle). Though imploding, America still mesmerizes. Tellingly, there's just one Serb, Nicolas Tesla, and one Russian, Yuri Gagarin, who's depicted as a generic, faceless astronaut, with a quotation in English, "I see no god up here "
This is no touristy brewpub, but a Janko Janković joint in Hadžipopovac, a neighborhood of drab buildings, frankly. I'm paying $1.90 for a pint of Staropramen, and a flatbread sandwich with prosciutto and gouda is just $2.50.
Although Vietnam doesn't have an embassy here, there's a Vietnamese at the University of Belgrade. Here nine years and working on his second degree, this young man's so in love with Serbia, he's changed his name to Hoan Zlatanovic. Odder still was the Japanese who fought alongside Serbs and Russians in Bosnia. A self-declared "Japanese cheknik," he risked his life while forgoing a salary and his monthly cigar.
Oddest, perhaps, is Serbia's yearning to join the European Union, though not NATO, which already includes Croatia, Slovenia, Albania, North Macedonia and Montenegro. They're all leaning West. Last to board, they'll get to enjoy some choppy sailing with the big boys.
Bombing Serbia, America gave Russia and China a wakeup call, and forced them towards a new understanding. Everything changed after 1999. Again, this tiny nation played an outsized role in remaking our world.
Balkanizing, Americans can look here for warnings and inspiration. Five hundred years from now, a Serbian nation will still exist.
Linh Dinh's latest book is Postcards from the End of America . He maintains a regularly updated photo blog .
Erik Sieven , says: August 1, 2020 at 8:43 pm GMT
Franz , says: August 1, 2020 at 10:03 pm GMT"Gallois also argues that the German elite sought revenge for the fierce Serb resistance during the two world wars, especially with regard to the Serb partisans that held up German divisions that were headed towards Leningrad and Moscow during Operation Barbarossa"
I wonder whether this french general has talked to some actual Germans. Everybody who knows just a little bit about german elites in the nineties knows that this an abstruse idea.
Balkanizing, Americans can look here for warnings and inspiration. Five hundred years from now, a Serbian nation will still exist.
Beautiful tail on a beautiful essay. Thanks, Linh.
As also, the Serbs had no choice in any Balkanization, but their American counterparts look on sheepishly as their plutocrat masters are inflicting it on the USA. Our end won't be justice: The same scum who used 1999 as practice are just using what they learned in California, etc. They won't be happy till the whole world is stateless and landless. Except them.
"Balkanization" is a curiously old subject. As a true wet-behind-the-ears nipper the first public speech I ever heard was during the one (and only) week I ever spent in New England. Ayn Rand gave her speech, entitled Global Balkanization at Boston's Ford Hall Forum in 1977. Just as a curiosity I wanted to see if it has any of it held up. She might have been on everyone's brown list by then, but her energy levels were still high:
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Jun 25, 2020 | www.defenddemocracy.press
President Bill Clinton's favorite freedom fighter just got indicted for mass murder, torture, kidnapping, and other crimes against humanity. In 1999, the Clinton administration launched a 78-day bombing campaign that killed up to 1500 civilians in Serbia and Kosovo in what the American media proudly portrayed as a crusade against ethnic bias. That war, like most of the pretenses of U.S. foreign policy, was always a sham.
Kosovo President Hashim Thaci was charged with ten counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international tribunal in The Hague in the Netherlands. It charged Thaci and nine other men with "war crimes, including murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture." Thaci and the other charged suspects were accused of being "criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders" and the indictment involved "hundreds of known victims of Kosovo Albanian, Serb, Roma, and other ethnicities and include political opponents."
Hashim Thaci's tawdry career illustrates how anti-terrorism is a flag of convenience for Washington policymakers. Prior to becoming Kosovo's president, Thaci was the head of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), fighting to force Serbs out of Kosovo. In 1999, the Clinton administration designated the KLA as "freedom fighters" despite their horrific past and gave them massive aid. The previous year, the State Department condemned "terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army." The KLA was heavily involved in drug trafficking and had close to ties to Osama bin Laden.
But arming the KLA and bombing Serbia helped Clinton portray himself as a crusader against injustice and shift public attention after his impeachment trial. Clinton was aided by many shameless members of Congress anxious to sanctify U.S. killing. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CN) whooped that the United States and the KLA "stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values." And since Clinton administration officials publicly compared Serb leader Slobodan Milošević to Hitler, every decent person was obliged to applaud the bombing campaign.
Both the Serbs and ethnic Albanians committed atrocities in the bitter strife in Kosovo. But to sanctify its bombing campaign, the Clinton administration waved a magic wand and made the KLA's atrocities disappear. British professor Philip Hammond noted that the 78-day bombing campaign "was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what it called 'dual-use' targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an attempt to terrorize the country into surrender."
Read also: From the very beginning: Α conscious plan to destroy Greece!NATO repeatedly dropped cluster bombs into marketplaces, hospitals, and other civilian areas. Cluster bombs are anti-personnel devices designed to be scattered across enemy troop formations. NATO dropped more than 1,300 cluster bombs on Serbia and Kosovo and each bomb contained 208 separate bomblets that floated to earth by parachute. Bomb experts estimated that more than 10,000 unexploded bomblets were scattered around the landscape when the bombing ended and maimed children long after the ceasefire.
In the final days of the bombing campaign, the Washington Post reported that "some presidential aides and friends are describing Kosovo in Churchillian tones, as Clinton's 'finest hour.'" The Post also reported that according to one Clinton friend "what Clinton believes were the unambiguously moral motives for NATO's intervention represented a chance to soothe regrets harbored in Clinton's own conscience The friend said Clinton has at times lamented that the generation before him was able to serve in a war with a plainly noble purpose, and he feels 'almost cheated' that 'when it was his turn he didn't have the chance to be part of a moral cause.'" By Clinton's standard, slaughtering Serbs was "close enough for government work" to a "moral cause."
Shortly after the end of the 1999 bombing campaign, Clinton enunciated what his aides labeled the Clinton doctrine: "Whether within or beyond the borders of a country, if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing." In reality, the Clinton doctrine was that presidents are entitled to commence bombing foreign lands based on any brazen lie that the American media will regurgitate. In reality, the lesson from bombing Serbia is that American politicians merely need to publicly recite the word "genocide" to get a license to kill.
Read also: Derrière l'affaire Benalla, la banalisation de la violence policièreAfter the bombing ended, Clinton assured the Serbian people that the United States and NATO agreed to be peacekeepers only "with the understanding that they would protect Serbs as well as ethnic Albanians and that they would leave when peace took hold." In the subsequent months and years, American and NATO forces stood by as the KLA resumed its ethnic cleansing, slaughtering Serb civilians, bombing Serbian churches and oppressing any non-Muslims. Almost a quarter-million Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities fled Kosovo after Mr. Clinton promised to protect them. By 2003, almost 70 percent of the Serbs living in Kosovo in 1999 had fled, and Kosovo was 95 percent ethnic Albanian.
But Thaci remained useful for U.S. policymakers. Even though he was widely condemned for oppression and corruption after taking power in Kosovo, Vice President Joe Biden hailed Thaci in 2010 as the "George Washington of Kosovo." A few months later, a Council of Europe report accused Thaci and KLA operatives of human organ trafficking. The Guardian noted that the report alleged that Thaci's inner circle "took captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a number of Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys, which were sold on the black market." The report stated that when "transplant surgeons" were "ready to operate, the [Serbian] captives were brought out of the 'safe house' individually, summarily executed by a KLA gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic."
Despite the body trafficking charge, Thaci was a star attendee at the annual Global Initiative conference by the Clinton Foundation in 2011, 2012, and 2013, where he posed for photos with Bill Clinton. Maybe that was a perk from the $50,000 a month lobbying contract that Thaci's regime signed with The Podesta Group, co-managed by future Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, as the Daily Caller reported.
Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo where a statue of him was erected in the capital, Pristina. The Guardian newspaper noted that the statue showed Clinton "with a left hand raised, a typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses. In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999." It would have been a more accurate representation to depict Clinton standing on a pile of corpses of the women, children, and others killed in the U.S. bombing campaign.
In 2019, Bill Clinton and his fanatically pro-bombing former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, visited Pristina, where they were "treated like rock stars" as they posed for photos with Thaci. Clinton declared, "I love this country and it will always be one of the greatest honors of my life to have stood with you against ethnic cleansing (by Serbian forces) and for freedom." Thaci awarded Clinton and Albright medals of freedom "for the liberty he brought to us and the peace to entire region." Albright has reinvented herself as a visionary warning against fascism in the Trump era. Actually, the only honorific that Albright deserves is "Butcher of Belgrade."
Clinton's war on Serbia was a Pandora's box from which the world still suffers. Because politicians and most of the media portrayed the war against Serbia as a moral triumph, it was easier for the Bush administration to justify attacking Iraq, for the Obama administration to bomb Libya, and for the Trump administration to repeatedly bomb Syria. All of those interventions sowed chaos that continues cursing the purported beneficiaries.
Bill Clinton's 1999 bombing of Serbia was as big a fraud as George W. Bush's conning this nation into attacking Iraq. The fact that Clinton and other top U.S. government officials continued to glorify Hashim Thaci despite accusations of mass murder, torture, and body trafficking is another reminder of the venality of much of America's political elite. Will Americans again be gullible the next time that Washington policymakers and their media allies concoct bullshit pretexts to blow the hell out of some hapless foreign land?
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Jun 24, 2020 | www.unz.com
Robjil , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:21 pm GMT
@Druid55 That is the western MSM sugared up version of what happened in Yugoslavia. Western MSM learned their lesson about being truthful about war when US and friends were in Vietnam.Lies and lies only come from western MSM these days so wars and regime change games can go on with anyone noticing or caring.
Western MSM notifies their puppet readers that all the US and friends does is "humanitarian" stuff these days. Most puppet readers lap up this junk.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/natos-rape-of-yugoslavia/5375189
March 24, 1999 will go down in history as a day of infamy. US-led NATO raped Yugoslavia. Doing so was its second major combat operation.
It was lawless aggression. No Security Council resolution authorized it. NATO's Operation Allied Force lasted 78 days.
Washington called it Operation Noble Anvil. Evil best describes it. On June 10, operations ended.
From March 1991 through mid-June 1999, Balkan wars raged. Yugoslavia "balkanized" into seven countries. They include Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia.
Enormous human suffering was inflicted. Washington bears most responsibility.
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Aug 20, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org
In a 2011 review for The American Conservative, I scoffed, "After NATO planes killed hundreds if not thousands of Serb and ethnic Albanian civilians, Bill Clinton could pirouette as a savior. Once the bombing ended, many of the Serbs remaining in Kosovo were slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground. NATO's 'peace' produced a quarter million Serbian, Jewish, and Gypsy refugees."
In 2014, a European Union task force confirmed that the ruthless cabal that Clinton empowered by bombing Serbia committed atrocities that included murdering persons to extract and sell their kidneys, livers, and other body parts .
Clint Williamson, the chief prosecutor of a special European Union task force, declared in 2014 that senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had engaged in "unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites."
The New York Times reported that the trials of Kosovo body snatchers may be stymied by cover-ups and stonewalling: "Past investigations of reports of organ trafficking in Kosovo have been undermined by witnesses' fears of testifying in a small country where clan ties run deep and former members of the KLA are still feted as heroes. Former leaders of the KLA occupy high posts in the government." American politicians almost entirely ignored the scandal. Vice President Joe Biden hailed former KLA leader and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in 2010 as "the George Washington of Kosovo." A few months later, a Council of Europe investigative report tagged Thaci as an accomplice to the body-trafficking operation.
Clinton's war on Serbia opened a Pandora's box from which the world still suffers. Because politicians and pundits portrayed that war as a moral triumph, it was easier for subsequent presidents to portray U.S. bombing as the self-evident triumph of good over evil. Honest assessments of wrongful killings remain few and far between in media coverage.
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy , The Bush Betrayal , Terrorism and Tyranny , and other books. Bovard is on the USA Today Board of Contributors. He is on Twitter at @jimbovard. His website is at www.jimbovard.com This essay was originally published by Future of Freedom Foundation .
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Aug 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
stevek , 18 minutes ago link
Creative_Destruct , 22 minutes ago linkHillary has always loved to kill people. Its in her (evil) blood.
TheDayAfter , 1 hour ago link"This damn Serbian war is a symbol of all that is wrong with the righteous approach to the world and to problems within this nation."
Story of the last several decades (fill in the blank with your pick of the name of a US war or a SJW cause):
This damn _________ war is a symbol of all that is wrong with the righteous approach to the world and to problems within this nation.
Kissinger had many flaws, but he hit the nail on the head when he said:
"The fundamental problem in politics is not the opposition of wickedness, but the restraint of righteousness"
TeaClipper , 1 hour ago linkWe all know the Hypocrisy of that War. Clinton had to distract the masses from MonicaGate and Hillary had to prove to the MIC that she could be beneficial to them.
Result : Those Kosovo Albanians had a state handed to them, and instead of building it(with uncle Sam's and EU help) as prosperous country, they used their weapons and "expertise" in becoming the low level gangsters of Europe. Every Europol analysis points to the direction of Kosovo Albanians as the criminal thugs in prostitution and drug trade and protection rackets. The largest percentage of a single ethnic group in European jails is that of Albanians.
PKKA , 3 hours ago linkThe most unjust and illegal of wars in the late 20c.
There was only one reason to bomb white Christian brothers in Serbia thereby aiding the Muslim of Kosovo and Albania, and that was Russia, which by that stage had got its act together and dealt with the traitorous oligarchs who had sold their country out to the west.
Hillary and her cronies no doubt lost a lot of money when the Russians shut their rat lines down.
I hope I live long enough to see those fuckers swing, and Tony Blair, Alistair Campnell and Peter Mandelson as well.
Joe A , 3 hours ago linkAgain, your Muslims are to blame for everything. Muslims are all different. And it is necessary to separate the faithful Muslims from the bandits who are only covered by Muslim slogans.
NATO and your godless government are to blame!An Afghan Freedom Fighter in Donbass - ENG SUBTITLE
HoyeruNew , 3 hours ago linkIt happened at the time of the Lewinsky affair and the possible impeachment of Clinton. They needed a distraction.
Milosevic btw. agreed to all conditions imposed on the FR of Yugoslavia except for one condition that nobody would accept: the full and unhindered access to the territory of FRY by NATO troops. That effectively meant an occupation. Nobody would agree to that. NATO and Albright deliberately came up with that condition for they knew it was unacceptable. Even Kissinger said that condition was over the top. NATO and Albright wanted that war. Serbia btw. saved Albright twice when she was still a little Slovakian Jewish girl whose family found refuge twice in Serbia. Once they escaped the Nazis that way and the second time the communists.
NATO thought they would need 48 hours but they needed 78 days and Milosevic only gave in after NATO switched from hitting military targets to civilian targets: Hospitals, commuter trains, civilian industry, an open market, random houses in random villages. After Milosevic pulled out his troops out of Kosovo, the KLA started killing Serbs and moderate Albanians, not to mention engage in organ trafficking (...). As the article said, well over 200k Serbs, moderate Albanians, Roma and other minorities were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo.
The US also used cluster bombs and DU weapons. Of the 4000 Italian KFOR troops that went into Kosovo after the bombing, 700 are dead from cancer and leukemia with several hundreds more seriously ill. The American KFOR troops wore hazmat suits. The Italians did not have them and were not warned. Today, many people in southern Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo itself are sick and dying.
ItsDanger , 2 hours ago linkyes just like USA tried to help Vietnam against communists... by killing 2 million Vietnamese. and tried to help Korea by killing 20 % of the population. and by helping Iraq get rid of "bad" Saddam Hussein by killing 2 million Iraqies.
Oh, the Americans are oh so helpfiul!
seryanhoj , 1 hour ago linkNot disagreeing with you but lets remember that communists were killing a lot of people in other areas not long before those wars in SE Asia. May have been a wash in the end.
Magnum , 3 hours ago link13 million gallons of agent orange dropped on Vietnamese forests was our way of saying we love you. The genetic deformities are still widespread.
So glad they kicked the US out of there.
JoeBattista , 3 hours ago linkThat conflict led to hundreds of thousands of BOSNIANS moving to USA. Gotta keep the refugees flowing no matter what....
seryanhoj , 1 hour ago linkBring back the draft. On the whole Americans have no idea what the carnage of combat produces. Combat vets do. And the ones that aren't natural psychopaths never want to experience it again. This volunteer army we have is over loaded with a them. A military draft will actually bring some sort civilian control.
seryanhoj , 1 hour ago linkThey killed the draft so they would no longer be embarrassed by student protests and having to mow them down.
It worked. Today's snowflakes don't care about slaughter , only mini verbal aggressions against perverts.
He–Mene Mox Mox , 3 hours ago linkSuch ********. Do the millions we kill have any human rights? It's been going on for 4000 years. Ruthless pursuit of empire and fabricating phony justifications.
Red Corvair , 4 hours ago linkHillary seems to enjoy killing people. If it wasn't Gaddaffi, it was all the people on her body bag count, and now it's known she encouraged killing people in Serbia. Someone needs to take that old cow out into the center of the town and burn her at the stake.
Partially true, otherwise as usually excellent Dr. Paul, ... The Pandora's box situation was opened years before Clinton's bombing of Serbia, which was part of a larger scheme started nearly a decade before.
That was when the US armed the religious extremists in Bosnia, in order to bring war, "civil war" and chaos, and disintegration, the way they more recently tried to do with Syria, or "succeeded" in doing in Libya, bringing chaos and open-air slave markets in a country that was one of the most developed on the African continent under Gaddafi (a truth that was so easily erased by propaganda).
And the whole neocon scheme started two decades before, with the Zbigniew Brzezinski doctrine, when the US started arming the mujahedin in Afghanistan, provoking the trap for the Soviet invasion of 1979, which was the real opening of US neocon's Pandora's box we are regrettably so familiar with by now. We've all fallen in that old neocon/military-industrial-congressional-complex trap by now. And there seems to be no end in sight to those eternal wars "for civilization" (the old colonial trope dressed under new fatigues). Unless serious societal and political changes take place in the US to put an end to the US "imperial" death drive.
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Aug 16, 2019 | www.fff.org
Twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton commenced bombing Serbia in the name of human rights, justice, and ethnic tolerance. Approximately 1,500 Serb civilians were killed by NATO bombing in one of the biggest sham morality plays of the modern era. As British professor Philip Hammond recently noted, the 78-day bombing campaign "was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what it called 'dual-use' targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an attempt to terrorise the country into surrender."
Clinton's unprovoked attack on Serbia, intended to help ethnic Albanians seize control of Kosovo, set a precedent for "humanitarian" warring that was invoked by supporters of George W. Bush's unprovoked attack on Iraq, Barack Oba-ma's bombing of Libya, and Donald Trump's bombing of Syria.
Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo, and there is an 11-foot statue of him standing in the capitol, Pristina, on Bill Clinton Boulevard. A commentator in the United Kingdom's Guardian newspaper noted that the statue showed Clinton "with a left hand raised, a typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses. In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999." It would have been a more accurate representation if Clinton was shown standing on the corpses of the women, children, and others killed in the U.S. bombing campaign.
Bombing Serbia was a family affair in the Clinton White House. Hillary Clinton revealed to an interviewer in the summer of 1999, "I urged him to bomb. You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?" A biography of Hillary Clinton, written by Gail Sheehy and published in late 1999, stated that Mrs. Clinton had refused to talk to the president for eight months after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. She resumed talking to her husband only when she phoned him and urged him in the strongest terms to begin bombing Serbia; the president began bombing within 24 hours. Alexander Cockburn observed in the Los Angeles Times,
It's scarcely surprising that Hillary would have urged President Clinton to drop cluster bombs on the Serbs to defend "our way of life." The first lady is a social engineer. She believes in therapeutic policing and the duty of the state to impose such policing. War is more social engineering, "fixitry" via high explosive, social therapy via cruise missile . As a tough therapeutic cop, she does not shy away from the most abrupt expression of the therapy: the death penalty.
I followed the war closely from the start, but selling articles to editors bashing the bombing was as easy as pitching paeans to Scientology. Instead of breaking into newsprint, my venting occurred instead in my journal:
- April 7, 1999: Much of the media and most of the American public are evaluating Clinton's Serbian policy based on the pictures of the bomb damage -- rather than by asking whether there is any coherent purpose or justification for bombing. The ultimate triumph of photo opportunities . What a travesty and national disgrace for this country.
- April 17: My bottom line on the Kosovo conflict: I hate holy wars. And this is a holy war for American good deeds -- or for America's saintly self-image? Sen. John McCain said the war is necessary to "uphold American values." Make me barf! Just another Hitler-of-the-month attack.
- May 13: This damn Serbian war is a symbol of all that is wrong with the righteous approach to the world and to problems within this nation.
The KLA
The Kosovo Liberation Army's savage nature was well known before the Clinton administration formally christened them "freedom fighters" in 1999. The previous year, the State Department condemned "terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army." The KLA was heavily involved in drug trafficking and had close to ties to Osama bin Laden. Arming the KLA helped Clinton portray himself as a crusader against injustice and shift public attention after his impeachment trial. Clinton was aided by many congressmen eager to portray U.S. bombing as an engine of righteousness. Sen. Joe Lieberman whooped that the United States and the KLA "stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values."
In early June 1999, the Washington Post reported that "some presidential aides and friends are describing [bombing] Kosovo in Churchillian tones, as Clinton's 'finest hour.'" Clinton administration officials justified killing civilians because, it alleged the Serbs were committing genocide in Kosovo. After the bombing ended, no evidence of genocide was found, but Clinton and Britain's Tony Blair continued boasting as if their war had stopped a new Hitler in his tracks.
In a speech to American troops in a Thanksgiving 1999 visit, Clinton declared that the Kosovar children "love the United States because we gave them their freedom back." Perhaps Clinton saw freedom as nothing more than being tyrannized by people of the same ethnicity. As the Serbs were driven out of Kosovo, Kosovar Albanians became increasingly oppressed by the KLA, which ignored its commitment to disarm. The Los Angeles Times reported on November 20, 1999,
As a postwar power struggle heats up in Kosovo Albanian politics, extremists are trying to silence moderate leaders with a terror campaign of kidnappings, beatings, bombings, and at least one killing. The intensified attacks against members of the moderate Democratic League of Kosovo, or LDK, have raised concerns that radical ethnic Albanians are turning against their own out of fear of losing power in a democratic Kosovo.
American and NATO forces stood by as the KLA resumed its ethnic cleansing, slaughtering Serbian civilians, bombing Serbian churches, and oppressing non-Muslims. Almost a quarter million Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities fled Kosovo after Clinton promised to protect them. In March 2000 renewed fighting broke out when the KLA launched attacks into Serbia, trying to seize territory that it claimed historically belonged to ethnic Albanians. UN Human Rights Envoy Jiri Dienstbier reported that "the [NATO] bombing hasn't solved any problems. It only multiplied the existing problems and created new ones. The Yugoslav economy was destroyed. Kosovo is destroyed. There are hundreds of thousands of people unemployed now."
U.S. complicity in atrocities
Prior to the NATO bombing, American citizens had no responsibility for atrocities committed by either Serbs or ethnic Albanians. However, after American planes bombed much of Serbia into rubble to drive the Serbian military out of Kosovo, Clinton effectively made the United States responsible for the safety of the remaining Serbs in Kosovo. That was equivalent to forcibly disarming a group of people, and then standing by, whistling and looking at the ground, while they are slaughtered. Since the United States promised to bring peace to Kosovo, Clinton bears some responsibility for every burnt church, every murdered Serbian grandmother, every new refugee column streaming north out of Kosovo. Despite those problems, Clinton bragged at a December 8, 1999, press conference that he was "very, very proud" of what the United States had done in Kosovo.
I had a chapter on the Serbian bombing campaign titled "Moralizing with Cluster Bombs" in Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton–Gore Years (St. Martin's Press, 2000), which sufficed to spur at least one or two reviewers to attack the book. Norman Provizer, the director of the Golda Meir Center for Political Leadership, scoffed in the Denver Rocky Mountain News, "Bovard chastises Clinton for an illegal, undeclared war in Kosovo without ever bothering to mention that, during the entire run of American history, there have been but four official declarations of war by Congress."
As the chaotic situation in post-war Kosovo became stark, it was easier to work in jibes against the debacle. In an October 2002 USA Today article ("Moral High Ground Not Won on Battlefield") bashing the Bush administration's push for war against Iraq, I pointed out, "A desire to spread freedom does not automatically confer a license to kill . Operation Allied Force in 1999 bombed Belgrade, Yugoslavia, into submission purportedly to liberate Kosovo. Though Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic raised the white flag, ethnic cleansing continued -- with the minority Serbs being slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground in the same way the Serbs previously oppressed the ethnic Albanians."
In a 2011 review for The American Conservative, I scoffed, "After NATO planes killed hundreds if not thousands of Serb and ethnic Albanian civilians, Bill Clinton could pirouette as a savior. Once the bombing ended, many of the Serbs remaining in Kosovo were slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground. NATO's 'peace' produced a quarter million Serbian, Jewish, and Gypsy refugees."
In 2014, a European Union task force confirmed that the ruthless cabal that Clinton empowered by bombing Serbia committed atrocities that included murdering persons to extract and sell their kidneys, livers, and other body parts. Clint Williamson, the chief prosecutor of a special European Union task force, declared in 2014 that senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had engaged in "unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites."
The New York Times reported that the trials of Kosovo body snatchers may be stymied by cover-ups and stonewalling: "Past investigations of reports of organ trafficking in Kosovo have been undermined by witnesses' fears of testifying in a small country where clan ties run deep and former members of the KLA are still feted as heroes. Former leaders of the KLA occupy high posts in the government." American politicians almost entirely ignored the scandal. Vice President Joe Biden hailed former KLA leader and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in 2010 as "the George Washington of Kosovo." A few months later, a Council of Europe investigative report tagged Thaci as an accomplice to the body-trafficking operation.
Clinton's war on Serbia opened a Pandora's box from which the world still suffers. Because politicians and pundits portrayed that war as a moral triumph, it was easier for subsequent presidents to portray U.S. bombing as the self-evident triumph of good over evil. Honest assessments of wrongful killings remain few and far between in media coverage.
This article was originally published in the July 2019 edition of Future of Freedom .
Category: Foreign Policy & WarJames Bovard is a policy adviser to The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is a USA Today columnist and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New Republic, Reader's Digest, Playboy, American Spectator, Investors Business Daily, and many other publications. He is the author of Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty (2017, published by FFF); Public Policy Hooligan (2012); Attention Deficit Democracy (2006); The Bush Betrayal (2004); Terrorism and Tyranny (2003); Feeling Your Pain (2000); Freedom in Chains (1999); Shakedown (1995); Lost Rights (1994); The Fair Trade Fraud (1991); and The Farm Fiasco (1989). He was the 1995 co-recipient of the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the recipient of the 1996 Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. His book Lost Rights received the Mencken Award as Book of the Year from the Free Press Association. His Terrorism and Tyranny won Laissez Faire Book's Lysander Spooner award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. Read his blog . Send him email .
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Jun 30, 2019 | dissidentvoice.org
The hostess at the seaside restaurant had an eastern European accent, so he asked her where she was from. She said, "Belgrade, Serbia." He told her he was sorry for what the U.S. government led by Bill Clinton had done to her country and that he considered Clinton a war criminal. She said the bombing in 1999 was terrifying, and even though she was young at the time, she vividly remembered it.
It traumatized her, her parents, and her family. Then she smiled and said that in the month she had been in the U.S. for her summer job, all the Americans she had met had been so friendly. He welcomed her to the U.S., and as he was walking away, he remembered that Clinton's savage bombing of Serbia that had killed so many Serbian children and other innocents had been code-named "Operation Noble Anvil."
He wondered what kind of "noble" people would think of innocent children as anvils: "heavy usually steel-faced iron blocks on which metal is shaped," and did the friendly Americans accept Clinton's sick lies when he ended his March 24, 1999 war address to the American people with these words: "Our thoughts and prayers tonight must be with the men and women of our armed forces, who are undertaking this mission for the sake of our values and our children's future. May God bless them, and may God bless America."
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May 13, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca
Region: Europe , USA Theme: History , US NATO War Agenda
Twenty years have passed since the U.S.-orchestrated NATO attack on Yugoslavia. As the United States readied its forces for war in 1999, it organized a peace conference that was ostensibly intended to resolve differences between the Yugoslav government and secessionist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo on the future status of the province. A different scenario was being played out behind the scenes, however. U.S. officials wanted war and deliberately set up the process to fail, which they planned to use as a pretext for war.
The talks opened on February 6, 1999, in Rambouillet, France. Officially, the negotiations were led by a Contact Group comprised of U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill , European Union envoy Wolfgang Petritsch , and Russian diplomat Boris Mayorsky . All decisions were supposed to be jointly agreed upon by all three members of the Contact Group. In actual practice, the U.S. ran the show all the way and routinely bypassed Petritsch and Mayorsky on essential matters.
Ibrahim Rugova , an ethnic Albanian activist who advocated nonviolence, was expected to play a major role in the Albanian secessionist delegation. Joining him at Rambouillet was Fehmi Agani , a fellow member of Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo.
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright regularly sidelined Rugova, however, preferring to rely on delegation members from the hardline Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which had routinely murdered Serbs, Roma, and Albanians in Kosovo who worked for the government or opposed separatism. Only a few months before the conference, KLA spokesman Bardhyl Mahmuti spelled out his organization's vision of a future Kosovo as separate and ethnically pure:
"The independence of Kosovo is the only solution We cannot live together. That is excluded." [i]
Rugova had at one time engaged in fairly productive talks with Yugoslav officials, and his willingness to negotiate was no doubt precisely the reason Albright relegated him to a background role. Yugoslav Minister of Information Milan Komnenić accompanied the Yugoslav delegation to Rambouillet. He recalls,
"With Rugova and Fehmi Agani it was possible to talk; they were flexible. In Rambouillet, [KLA leader Hashim] Thaçi appears instead of Rugova. A beast." [ii]
There was no love between Thaçi and Rugova, whose party members were the targets of threats and assassination attempts at the hands of the KLA. Rugova himself would survive an assassination attempt six years later.
The composition of the Yugoslav delegation reflected its position that many ethnic groups resided in Kosovo, and any agreement arrived at should take into account the interests of all parties. All of Kosovo's major ethnic groups were represented in the delegation. Faik Jashari , one of the Albanian members in the Yugoslav delegation, was president of the Kosovo Democratic Initiative and an official in the Provisional Executive Council, which was Yugoslavia's government in Kosovo. Jashari observed that Albright was startled when she saw the composition of the Yugoslav delegation, apparently because it went against the U.S. propaganda narrative. [iii] Throughout the talks, Albright displayed a dismissive attitude towards the delegation's Albanian, Roma, Egyptian, Goran, Turkish, and Slavic Muslim members.
U.S. mediators habitually referred to the Yugoslav delegation as "the Serbs," even though they constituted a minority of the members. The Americans persisted in trying to cast events in Kosovo as a simplistic binary relationship of Serb versus Albanian, disregarding the presence of other ethnic groups in the province, and ignoring the fact that while some ethnic Albanians favored separation, others wished to remain in multiethnic Yugoslavia.
After arriving at Rambouillet, the secessionist Albanian delegation informed U.S. diplomats that it did not want to meet with the Yugoslav side. Aside from a brief ceremonial meeting, there was no direct contact between the two groups. The Yugoslav and Albanian delegations were placed on two different floors to eliminate nearly all contact. U.S. mediators Richard Holbrooke and Christopher Hill ran from one delegation to the other, conveying notes and verbal messages between the two sides but mostly trying to coerce the Yugoslav delegation. [iv]
Luan Koka, a Roma member of the Yugoslav delegation, noted that the U.S. was operating an electronic jamming device.
"We knew exactly when Madeleine Albright was coming. Connections on our mobile phones were breaking up and going crazy." [v]
It is probable that the U.S. was also operating electronic listening equipment and that U.S. mediators knew everything the delegations were saying in private.
Albright, Jashari said, would not listen to anyone.
"She had her task, and she saw only that task. You couldn't say anything to her. She didn't want to talk with us and didn't want to listen to our arguments." [vi]
One day it was Koka's birthday, and the Yugoslav delegation wanted to encourage a more relaxed atmosphere with U.S. mediators, inviting them to a cocktail party to mark the occasion.
"It was a slightly more pleasant atmosphere, and I was singing," Koka recalled. "I remember Madeleine Albright saying: 'I really like partisan songs. But if you don't accept this, the bombs will fall.'" [vii]
According to delegation member Nikola Šainović ,
"Madeleine Albright told us all the time: 'If the Yugoslav delegation does not accept what we offer, you will be bombed.'" Šainović added, "We agreed in Rambouillet to any form of autonomy for Kosovo," but sovereignty remained the red line. [viii]
From the beginning of the conference, U.S. mediator Christopher Hill "decided that what we really needed was an Albanian approval of a document, and a Serb refusal. If both refused, there could be no further action by NATO or any other organization for that matter." [ix] It was not peace that the U.S. team was seeking, but war.
As the conference progressed, U.S. negotiators were faced with an alarming problem, in that the Yugoslav delegation had accepted all of the Contact Group's fundamental political principles for an agreement, balking only at a NATO presence in Kosovo. On the other hand, the secessionist delegation rejected the Contact Group's political principles. Something had to be done to reverse this pattern.
On the second day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the Yugoslav delegation with the framework text of a provisional agreement for peace and self-rule in Kosovo, but it was missing some of the annexes. The Yugoslavs requested a copy of the complete document. As delegation head Ratko Marković pointed out,
"Any objections to the text of the agreement could be made only after an insight into the text as a whole had been obtained."
Nearly one week passed before the group received one of the missing annexes. That came on the day the conference had originally been set to end. The deadline was extended, and two days later a second missing annex was provided to the Yugoslav delegation.[x]
When the Yugoslavs next met with the Contact Group, they were assured that all elements of the text had now been given to them. Several more days passed and at 7:00 PM on February 22, the penultimate day of the conference, the Contact Group presented three new annexes, which the Yugoslavs had never seen before. According to Marković, "Russian Ambassador Boris Mayorsky informed our delegation that Annexes 2 and 7 had not been discussed or approved by the Contact Group and that they were not the texts drafted by the Contact Group but by certain Contact Group members, while Annex 5 was discussed, but no decision was made on it at the Contact Group meeting." The Yugoslav delegation refused to accept the new annexes, as their introduction had violated the process whereby all proposals had to be agreed upon by the three Contact Group members. [xi]
At 9:30 AM on February 23, the final day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the full text of the proposal, containing yet more provisions that were being communicated for the first time. The accompanying note identified the package as the definitive text while adding that Russia did not support two of the articles. The letter demanded the Yugoslav delegation's decision by 1:00 PM that same day.[xii] There was barely time enough to carefully read the text, let alone negotiate. In essence, it was an ultimatum.
Quite intentionally, U.S. mediators included provisions in the final version of the text that no sovereign nation could be expected to accept. Neoliberal economic interests are always front and center when U.S. officials are involved, and they surely were not unaware of Kosovo's abundant reserves of mineral resources, ripe for exploitation. The first point in Article 1 of the Economic Issues section of the text states:
"The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles."
Western investors were favored with a provision stating that authorities shall "ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources." [xiii] One may wonder what these stipulations had to do with peace negotiations, but then the talks had far more to do with U.S. interests than anything to do with the needs of the people in the region.
Twitter and the Smearing of Corbyn and Assange: A Research Note on the "Integrity Initiative"The document called for a Western-led Joint Commission including local representatives to monitor and coordinate the implementation of the plan. However, if commission members failed to reach consensus on a matter, the Western-appointed Chair would have the power to impose his decision unilaterally. [xiv] Local representatives would serve as little more than window-dressing for Western dictate, as they could adopt no measure that went against the Chair's wishes.
The Chair of the Implementation Mission was authorized to "recommend" the "removal and appointment of officials and the curtailment of operations of existing institutions in Kosovo." If the Chair's command was not obeyed "in the time requested, the Joint Commission may decide to take the recommended action," and since the Chair had the authority to impose his will on the Joint Commission, there was no check on his power. He could remove elected and appointed officials at will and replace them with handpicked lackeys. The Chair was also authorized to order the "curtailment of operations of existing institutions." [xv]Any organization that failed to bend to U.S. demands could be shut down.
Chapter 7 of the plan called for the parties to "invite NATO to constitute and lead a military force" in Kosovo. [xvi]The choice of words was interesting. In language reminiscent of gangsters, Yugoslavia was told to "invite" NATO to take over the province of Kosovo or suffer the consequences.
Yugoslavia was required "to provide, at no cost, the use of all facilities and services required" by NATO. [xvii]Within six months, Yugoslavia would have to withdraw all of its military forces from Kosovo, other than a small number of border guards. [xviii]
The plan granted NATO "unrestricted use of the entire electromagnetic spectrum" to "communicate." Although the document indicated NATO would make "reasonable efforts to coordinate," there were no constraints on its power. [xix] Yugoslav officials, "upon simple request," would be required to grant NATO "all telecommunication services, including broadcast services free of cost." [xx]NATO could take over any radio and television facilities and transmission wavelengths it chose, knocking local stations off the air.
The plan did not restrict NATO's presence to Kosovo. It granted NATO, with its "vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]." [xxi] NATO would be "granted the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tools, or charges." [xxii]
The agreement guaranteed that NATO would have "complete and unimpeded freedom of movement by ground, air, and water into and throughout Kosovo." Furthermore, NATO personnel could not be held "liable for any damages to public or private property." [xxiii] NATO as a whole would also be "immune from all legal process, whether civil, administrative, or criminal," regardless of its actions anywhere on the territory of Yugoslavia. [xxiv]Nor could NATO personnel be arrested, detained, or investigated. [xxv]
Acceptance of the plan would have brought NATO troops swarming throughout Yugoslavia and interfering in every institution.
There were several other objectionable elements in the plan, but one that stood out was the call for an "international" (meaning, Western-led) meeting to be held after three years "to determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo."[xxvi] It was no mystery to the Yugoslav delegation what conclusion Western officials would arrive at in that meeting. The intent was clearly to redraw Yugoslavia's borders to further break apart the nation.
U.S. officials knew the Yugoslav delegation could not possibly accept such a plan.
"We deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept," Madeleine Albright confided to a group of journalists, "because they needed a little bombing." [xxvii]
At a meeting in Belgrade on March 5, the Yugoslav delegation issued a statement which declared:
"A great deceit was looming, orchestrated by the United States. They demanded that the agreement be signed, even though much of this agreement, that is, over 56 pages, had never been discussed, either within the Contact Group or during the negotiations." [xxviii]
Serbian President Milan Milutinović announced at a press conference that in Rambouillet the Yugoslav delegation had "proposed solutions meeting the demands of the Contact Group for broad autonomy within Serbia, advocating full equality of all national communities." But "agreement was not what they were after." Instead, Western officials engaged in "open aggression," and this was a game "about troops and troops alone." [xxix]
While U.S. officials were working assiduously to avoid a peaceful resolution, they needed the Albanians to agree to the plan so that they could accuse the Yugoslav delegation of being the stumbling block to peace. U.S. mainstream media could be counted on to unquestioningly repeat the government's line and overlook who the real architects of failure were. U.S. officials knew the media would act in their customary role as cheerleaders for war, which indeed, they did.
British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook revealed the nature of the message Western officials were conveying to the Albanian delegation when he said,
"We are certainly saying to the Kosovo Albanians that if you don't sign up to these texts, it's extremely difficult to see how NATO could then take action against Belgrade." [xxx]
Western officials were practically begging the secessionists to sign the plan. According to inside sources, the Americans assured the Albanian delegation that disarmament of the KLA would be merely symbolic and that it could keep the bulk of its weaponry so long as it was concealed. [xxxi]
Albright spent hours trying to convince Thaçi to change his mind, telling him:
"If you say yes and the Serbs say no, NATO will strike and go on striking until the Serb forces are out and NATO can go in. You will have security. And you will be able to govern yourselves." [xxxii]
That was a clear enough signal that the intent was to rip the province away from Yugoslavia and create an artificial state. Despite such assurances, Thaçi feared the wrath of fellow KLA members if he were to sign a document that did not explicitly call for separation. When U.S. negotiators asked Thaçi why he would not sign, he responded:
"If I agree to this, I will go home and they will kill me." [xxxiii]
This was not hyperbole. The KLA had threatened and murdered a great many Albanians who in its eyes fell short of full-throated support for its policy of violent secession and ethnic exclusion.
Even NATO Commander Wesley Clark , who flew in from Belgium, was unable to change Thaçi's mind. [xxxiv] U.S. officials were exasperated with the Albanian delegation, and its recalcitrance threatened to capsize plans for war.
"Rambouillet was supposed to be about putting the screws to Belgrade," a senior U.S. official said. "But it went off the rails because of the miscalculation we made about the Albanians." [xxxv]
On the last day at Rambouillet, it was agreed that the Albanian delegation would return to Kosovo for discussions with fellow KLA leaders on the need to sign the document. In the days that followed, Western officials paid repeated visits to Kosovo to encourage the Albanians to sign.
So-called "negotiations" reconvened in Paris on March 15. Upon its arrival, the Yugoslav delegation objected that it was "incomprehensible" that "no direct talks between the two delegations had been facilitated." In response to the Yugoslavs' proposal for modifications to the plan, the Contact Group informed them that no changes would be accepted. The document must be accepted as a whole. [xxxvi]
The Yugoslav position, delegation head Ratko Marković maintained, was that "first one needs to determine what is to be implemented, and only then to determine the methods of implementation." [xxxvii]The delegation asked the Americans what there was to talk about regarding implementation "when there was no agreement because the Albanians did not accept anything." U.S. officials responded that the Yugoslav delegation "cannot negotiate," adding that it would only be allowed to make grammatical changes to the text. [xxxviii]
From the U.S. perspective, the presence of the Yugoslav delegation in Paris was irrelevant other than to maintain the pretense that negotiations were taking place. Not permitted to negotiate, there was little the Yugoslavs could do but await the inevitable result, which soon came. The moment U.S. officials obtained the Albanian delegation's signatures to the plan on March 18, they aborted the Paris Conference. There was no reason to continue engaging with the Yugoslav delegation, as the U.S. had what it needed: a pretext for war.
On the day after the U.S. pulled the plug on the Paris talks, Milan Milutinović held a press conference in the Yugoslav embassy, condemning the Paris meeting as "a kind of show," which was meant "to deceive public opinion in the whole world." [xxxix]
While the United States and its NATO allies prepared for war, Yugoslavia was making last-ditch efforts to stave off attack, including reaching out to intermediaries. Greek Foreign Minister Theodoros Pangalos contacted Madeleine Albright and told her that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević had offered to engage in further negotiations. But Albright told him that the decision to bomb had already been made. "In fact," Pangalos reported, "she told me to 'desist, you're just being a nuisance.'" [xl] In a final act of desperation to save the people from bombing, Milutinović contacted Christopher Hill and made an extraordinary offer: Yugoslavia would join NATO if the United States would allow Yugoslavia to remain whole, including the province of Kosovo. Hill responded that this was not a topic for discussion and he would not talk about it. [xli]
Madeleine Albright got her war, which brought death, destruction, and misery to Yugoslavia. But NATO had a new role, and the United States further extended its hegemony over the Balkans.
In the years following the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, NATO was intent on redefining its mission. The absence of the socialist bloc presented NATO not only with the need to construct a new rationale for existence but also with the opportunity to expand Western domination over other nations.
Bosnia offered the first opportunity for NATO to begin its transformation, as it took part in a war that presented no threat to member nations.
Bombing Yugoslavia was meant to solidify the new role for NATO as an offensive military force, acting on behalf of U.S. imperial interests. Since that time, NATO has attacked Libya, and engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a variety of nations in Africa. Despite NATO's claim that it is "committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes," the record shows otherwise.
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Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People , and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period , published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is https://gregoryelich.org . Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich
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Apr 26, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
karlof1 , Apr 25, 2019 3:45:08 PM | linkGeorgeV , Apr 25, 2019 2:50:04 PM | link
Well known Twitter "bot" Ian56 has published a thread about Biden . I suggest people give it a looksee. Ian asks in his first entry:Smiling Joe Biden, the glad handler from Delaware, is nothing more than another neocon wolf in sheep's clothing. His tenure as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1993 resulted in the infamous Anita Hill debacle due to his failure to investigate Ms. Hill's allegations that then SCOTUS nominee Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her several years earlier. The result was an embarrassing televised hearing that exposed Biden's incompetence, along with that of other members of the committee.
In the end, an unqualified right wing legal 'bump on the log' attained a seat as a Supreme Court justice. Later it was proven that Ms. Hill's claims were true, but the damage was done. BTW, Biden's penchant for fascists was on display in the Yugoslavian civil war.
"How the hell does the Oligarchy think they are going to get Creepy Joe Biden past the public? I mean the average American Joe is extremely dumb & ignorant, but even they are not that dumb."
I just posted the answer @11. Welcome to 1984. We are now officially at war with Eastasia!
Mike Maloney , Apr 25, 2019 5:02:05 PM | link
The good thing about Biden entering the race is that it complicates an already difficult path to the nomination for the slew of establishment candidates. Biden is not a first choice for the Democratic intelligentsia. Sample Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight regularly and you'll know that Kamala Harris and boy-mayor Buttigieg are the favorites. Of course, Trump would eat either whole.Fastfreddy , Apr 25, 2019 5:12:08 PM | linkI'm rooting for Sanders, not because I believe him to be uniquely authentic, but because he is the one who scares the shit out of the big-ticket donors who guide the Democratic Party.
Read last week's front-pager from Jonathan Martin. Guaranteed if Bernie walks away with the primary in a rout, you'll see prominent Dems back a third party candidate.
FWIW/ There is a very brief youtube video of Biden proclaiming proudly that he is a Zionist.NemesisCalling , Apr 25, 2019 7:02:38 PM | linkThe fact that Biden survived the "GropeGate" stuff from a view weeks ago reinforces how the msm is cooking coverage or withholding it altogether.Jen , Apr 25, 2019 7:22:22 PM | linkTake a look at some video compilations of ol' Gropey-Joe as he is swearing in elected reps and photo-documenting the occasion.
Irrespective of his Obama-esque policies and status as standard-bearer for TPTB, the guy is just a straight up creep. And a particularly bad Catholic.
...
I agree that Sanders-Gabbard would absolutely destroy Trump and garner perhaps even more backing than Obama c. 2008.
I put the scary Socialist angle that is used against Sanders as carrying the same weight as the whole Crouching Blackman, Hidden Muslim thing that followed Obama during his run.
It is just hard to tell as to how sensible they (Sanders and Gabbard) would be allowed to be WRT FP.
But Trump had an opportunity to love his country. And he chose orherwise. SAD!
As long as Hunter Biden is still a director of Burisma Holdings (which includes at least one other unpleasant individual on the Board of Directors), there is always a chance that elements within or connected to the Ukrainian government (even under Volodymyr Zelenskiy's Presidency, when he has his back turned on his fellow politicians), the previous Poroshenko government or Poroshenko himself, and / or the Maidan Revolution - Crowdstrike, Dmitri Alperovich and Chalupa sisters, we're looking at all of you - might try to derail any or all of the Democratic Party presidential candidates in attempts to have Joe Biden declared the official Democrat presidential contender in 2020. The only question is how openly brazen these people are going to be in order to save their pet project in Kiev before Ukraine erupts in civil war (and it won't be civil war in the Donbass area) and the entire country goes down in flames.Maybe someone who really, really hates Biden in the Democrat camp could remind the DNC of this little episode where Biden threatened Poroshenko in 2016 that the US would pull US$1 billion in guarantees if the Porky one didn't pull his Prosecutor General.
As for the rest of the 20 candidates, I would prefer Tulsi Gabbard out of the lot. In this respect India's general elections, already under way, are going to be important. Gabbard needs to let go of Narendra Modi and his Hindutva BJP party - her friendship with Modi and his association with Hindutva are sure to come under scrutiny as will also any connections she and her office staff have with The Science of Identity Foundation organisation.
Copeland , Apr 25, 2019 7:45:32 PM | link
Joe Biden is hard wired to the corruption in the corporate DNC. The tell on this will be when the media starts to roll him out with the fanfare of a new model car. It is hard to imagine that he can inspire voters in the primaries. But if the sell goes overboard and it becomes obvious that the fixers are determined to hand him the nomination; then it will be a real poke in the eye, and another PSYOPS to grossly demoralize voters in this country. Biden is about as exciting as a glass of milk that's curdled overnight on the end table by the bed.Jackrabbit , Apr 25, 2019 8:23:55 PM | linkThe Deep State wanted a MAGA nationalist to counter the challenge from Russia and China and that's what they got.Copeland , Apr 25, 2019 9:41:35 PM | linkSanders is a sheepdog/stooge that works for the Zionist establishment and Deep State just like Biden and a few others that are in the race. As much as you wag your 'tale', the stink remains.
The oligarchy reels out all tired scams over and over, until you want to cry out in anguish. Don't let them wear you down. Never capitulate. If Biden by some horrible chance has the winning hand, I'm guessing he will pick Gillibrand for his VP, a centrist of compromising kind, a shapeshifting clone to remind people of Hillary on some subconscious level. More of the same will fix us right up, on our journey to virtual political reality, and the end of humanity. These fucks will use the "little nukes" as they tuck us into bed.
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Apr 04, 2019 | www.amazon.com
Still another noted that Fascism is often linked to people who are part of a distinct ethnic or racial group, who are under economic stress, and who feel that they are being denied rewards to which they are entitled. "It's not so much what people have." she said, "but what they think they should have -- and what they fear." Fear is why Fascism's emotional reach can extend to all levels of society. No political movement can flourish without popular support, but Fascism is as dependent on the wealthy and powerful as it is on the man or woman in the street -- on those who have much to lose and those who have nothing at all.
This insight made us think that Fascism should perhaps be viewed less as a political ideology than as a means for seizing and holding power. For example, Italy in the 1920s included self-described Fascists of the left (who advocated a dictatorship of the dispossessed), of the right (who argued for an authoritarian corporatist state), and of the center (who sought a return to absolute monarchy). The German National Socialist Party (the
Nazis) originally came together ar ound a list of demands that ca- tered to anti-Semites, anti-immigrants, and anti-capitalists but also advocated for higher old-age pensions, more educational op- portunities for the poor, an end to child labor, and improved ma- ternal health care. The Nazis were racists and, in their own minds, reformers at the same time.
If Fascism concerns itself less with specific policies than with finding a pathway to power, what about the tactics of lead- ership? My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remem- ber best were charismatic. Through one method or another, each established an emotional link to the crowd and, like the central figure in a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the sur- face. This is how the tentacles of Fascism spread inside a democ- racy. Unlike a monarchy or a military dictatorship imposed on society from above. Fascism draws energy from men and women who are upset because of a lost war, a lost job, a memory of hu- miliation, or a sense that their country is in steep decline. The more painful the grounds for resentment, the easier it is for a Fascist leader to gam followers by dangling the prospect of re- newal or by vowing to take back what has been stolen.
Like the mobilizers of more benign movements, these secular evangelists exploit the near-universal human desire to be part of a meaningful quest. The more gifted among them have an apti- tude for spectacle -- for orchestrating mass gatherings complete with martial music, incendiary rhetoric, loud cheers, and arm-
lifting salutes. To loyalists, they offer the prize of membership in a club from which others, often the objects of ridicule, are kept out. To build fervor, Fascists tend to be aggressive, militaristic, and -- when circumstances allow -- expansionist. To secure the future, they turn schools into seminaries for true believers, striv- ing to produce "new men" and "new women" who will obey without question or pause. And, as one of my students observed, "a Fascist who launches his career by being voted into office will have a claim to legitimacy that others do not."
After climbing into a position of power, what comes next: How does a Fascist consolidate authority? Here several students piped up: "By controlling information." Added another, "And that's one reason we have so much cause to worry today." Most of us have thought of the technological revolution primarily as a means for people from different walks of life to connect with one another, trade ideas, and develop a keener understanding of why men and women act as they do -- in other words, to sharpen our perceptions of truth. That's still the case, but now we are not so sure. There is a troubling "Big Brother" angle because of the mountain of personal data being uploaded into social media. If an advertiser can use that information to home in on a consumer because of his or her individual interests, what's to stop a Fascist government from doing the same? "Suppose I go to a demonstra- tion like the Women's March," said a student, "and post a photo
on social media. My name gets added to a list and that list can end up anywhere. How do we protect ourselves against that?"
Even more disturbing is the ability shown by rogue regimes and their agents to spread lies on phony websites and Facebook. Further, technology has made it possible for extremist organiza- tions to construct echo chambers of support for conspiracy theo- ries, false narratives, and ignorant views on religion and race. This is the first rule of deception: repeated often enough, almost any statement, story, or smear can start to sound plausible. The Internet should be an ally of freedom and a gateway to knowledge; in some cases, it is neither.
Historian Robert Paxton begins one of his books by assert- ing: "Fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain." Over the years, he and other scholars have developed lists of the many moving parts that Fascism entails. Toward the end of our discussion, my class sought to articulate a comparable list.
Fascism, most of the students agreed, is an extreme form of authoritarian rule. Citizens are required to do exactly what lead- ers say they must do, nothing more, nothing less. The doctrine is linked to rabid nationalism. It also turns the traditional social contract upside down. Instead of citizens giving power to the state in exchange for the protection of their rights, power begins with the leader, and the people have no rights. Under Fascism,
the mission of citizens is to serve; the government's job is to rule.
When one talks about this subject, confusion often arises about the difference between Fascism and such related concepts as totalitarianism, dictatorship, despotism, tyranny, autocracy, and so on. As an academic, I might be tempted to wander into that thicket, but as a former diplomat, I am primarily concerned with actions, not labels. To my mind, a Fascist is someone who identifies strongly with and claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use whatever means are necessary -- including violence -- to achieve his or her goals. In that conception, a Fascist will likely be a tyrant, but a tyrant need not be a Fascist.
Often the difference can be seen in who is trusted with the guns. In seventeenth-century Europe, when Catholic aristocrats did battle with Protestant aristocrats, they fought over scripture but agreed not to distribute weapons to their peasants, thinking it safer to wage war with mercenary armies. Modern dictators also tend to be wary of their citizens, which is why they create royal guards and other elite security units to ensure their personal safe- ty. A Fascist, however, expects the crowd to have his back. Where kings try to settle people down, Fascists stir them up so that when the fighting begins, their foot soldiers have the will and the firepower to strike first.
petarsimic , October 21, 2018
Madeleine Albright on million Iraqis dead: "We think the price is worth It"<img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png"> P. Bierre , June 11, 2018Hypocrisy at its worst from a lady who advocated hawkish foreign policy which included the most sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam, when, in 1998, Clinton began almost daily attacks on Iraq in the so-called no-fly zones, and made so-called regime change in Iraq official U.S. policy.
In May of 1996, 60 Minutes aired an interview with Madeleine Albright, who at the time was Clinton's U.N. ambassador. Correspondent Leslie Stahl said to Albright, in connection with the Clinton administration presiding over the most devastating regime of sanctions in history that the U.N. estimated took the lives of as many as a million Iraqis, the vast majority of them children. , "We have heard that a half-million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And -- and, you know, is the price worth it?"
Madeleine Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it.
Does Albright present a comprehensive enough understanding of fascism to instruct on how best to avoid it?Anat Hadad , January 19, 2019While I found much of the story-telling in "Fascism" engaging, I come away expecting much more of one of our nation's pre-eminent senior diplomats . In a nutshell, she has devoted a whole volume to describing the ascent of intolerant fascism and its many faces, but punted on the question "How should we thwart fascism going forward?"
Even that question leaves me a bit unsatisfied, since it is couched in double-negative syntax. The thing there is an appetite for, among the readers of this book who are looking for more than hand-wringing about neofascism, is a unifying title or phrase which captures in single-positive syntax that which Albright prefers over fascism. What would that be? And, how do we pursue it, nurture it, spread it and secure it going forward? What is it?
I think Albright would perhaps be willing to rally around "Good Government" as the theme her book skirts tangentially from the dark periphery of fascistic government. "Virtuous Government"? "Effective Government"? "Responsive Government"?
People concerned about neofascism want to know what we should be doing right now to avoid getting sidetracked into a dark alley of future history comparable to the Nazi brown shirt or Mussolini black shirt epochs. Does Albright present a comprehensive enough understanding of fascism to instruct on how best to avoid it? Or, is this just another hand-wringing exercise, a la "you'll know it when you see it", with a proactive superficiality stuck at the level of pejorative labelling of current styles of government and national leaders? If all you can say is what you don't want, then the challenge of threading the political future of the US is left unruddered. To make an analogy to driving a car, if you don't know your destination, and only can get navigational prompts such as "don't turn here" or "don't go down that street", then what are the chances of arriving at a purposive destination?
The other part of this book I find off-putting is that Albright, though having served as Secretary of State, never talks about the heavy burden of responsibility that falls on a head of state. She doesn't seem to empathize at all with the challenge of top leadership. Her perspective is that of the detached critic. For instance, in discussing President Duterte of the Philippines, she fails to paint the dire situation under which he rose to national leadership responsibility: Islamic separatists having violently taken over the entire city of Marawi, nor the ubiquitous spread of drug cartel power to the level where control over law enforcement was already ceded to the gangs in many places...entire islands and city neighborhoods run by mafia organizations. It's easy to sit back and criticize Duterte's unleashing of vigilante justice -- What was Mrs. Albright's better alternative to regain ground from vicious, well-armed criminal organizations? The distancing from leadership responsibility makes Albright's treatment of the Philippines twin crises of gang-rule and Islamist revolutionaries seem like so much academic navel-gazing....OK for an undergrad course at Georgetown maybe, but unworthy of someone who served in a position of high responsibility. Duterte is liked in the Philippines. What he did snapped back the power of the cartels, and returned a deserved sense of security to average Philippinos (at least those not involved with narcotics). Is that not good government, given the horrendous circumstances Duterte came up to deal with? What lack of responsibility in former Philippine leadership allowed things to get so out of control? Is it possible that Democrats and liberals are afraid to be tough, when toughness is what is needed? I'd much rather read an account from an average Philippino about the positive impacts of the vigilante campaign, than listen of Madame Secretary sermonizing out of context about Duterte. OK, he's not your idea of a nice guy. Would you rather sit back, prattle on about the rule of law and due process while Islamic terrorists wrest control over where you live? Would you prefer the leadership of a drug cartel boss to Duterte?
My critique is offered in a constructive manner. I would certainly encourage Albright (or anyone!) to write a book in a positive voice about what it's going to take to have good national government in the US going forward, and to help spread such abundance globally. I would define "good" as the capability to make consistently good policy decisions, ones that continue to look good in hindsight, 10, 20 or 30 years later. What does that take?
I would submit that the essential "preserving democracy" process component is having a population that is adequately prepared for collaborative problem-solving. Some understanding of history is helpful, but it's simply not enough. Much more essential is for every young person to experience team problem-solving, in both its cooperative and competitive aspects. Every young person needs to experience a team leadership role, and to appreciate what it takes from leaders to forge constructive design from competing ideas and champions. Only after serving as a referee will a young person understand the limits to "passion" that individual contributors should bring to the party. Only after moderating and herding cats will a young person know how to interact productively with leaders and other contributors. Much of the skill is counter-instinctual. It's knowing how to express ideas...how to field criticism....how to nudge people along in the desired direction...and how to avoid ad-hominem attacks, exaggerations, accusations and speculative grievances. It's learning how to manage conflict productively toward excellence. Way too few of our young people are learning these skills, and way too few of our journalists know how to play a constructive role in managing communications toward successful complex problem-solving. Albright's claim that a journalist's job is primarily to "hold leaders accountable" really betrays an absolving of responsibility for the media as a partner in good government -- it doesn't say whether the media are active players on the problem-solving team (which they have to be for success), or mere spectators with no responsibility for the outcome. If the latter, then journalism becomes an irritant, picking at the scabs over and over, but without any forward progress. When the media takes up a stance as an "opponent" of leadership, you end up with poor problem-solving results....the system is fighting itself instead of making forward progress.
"Fascism" doesn't do nearly enough to promote the teaching of practical civics 101 skills, not just to the kids going into public administration, but to everyone. For, it is in the norms of civility, their ability to be practiced, and their defense against excesses, that fascism (e.g., Antifa) is kept at bay.
Everyone in a democracy has to know the basics:
• when entering a disagreement, don't personalize it
• never demonize an opponent
• keep a focus on the goal of agreement and moving forward
• never tell another person what they think, but ask (non-rhetorically) what they think then be prepared to listen and absorb
• do not speak untruths or exaggerate to make an argument
• do not speculate grievance
• understand truth gathering as a process; detect when certainty is being bluffed; question sources
• recognize impasse and unproductive argumentation and STOP IT
• know how to introduce a referee or moderator to regain productive collaboration
• avoid ad hominem attacks
• don't take things personally that wrankle you;
• give the benefit of the doubt in an ambiguous situation
• don't jump to conclusions
• don't reward theatrical manipulationThese basics of collaborative problem-solving are the guts of a "liberal democracy" that can face down the most complex challenges and dilemmas.
I gave the book 3 stars for the great story-telling, and Albright has been part of a great story of late 20th century history. If she would have told us how to prevent fascism going forward, and how to roll it back in "hard case" countries like North Korea and Sudan, I would have given her a 5. I'm not that interested in picking apart the failure cases of history...they teach mostly negative exemplars. Much rather I would like to read about positive exemplars of great national government -- "great" defined by popular acclaim, by the actual ones governed. Where are we seeing that today? Canada? Australia? Interestingly, both of these positive exemplars have strict immigration policies.
Is it possible that Albright is just unable, by virtue of her narrow escape from Communist Czechoslovakia and acceptance in NYC as a transplant, to see that an optimum immigration policy in the US, something like Canada's or Australia's, is not the looming face of fascism, but rather a move to keep it safely in its corner in coming decades? At least, she admits to her being biased by her life story.
That suggests her views on refugees and illegal immigrants as deserving of unlimited rights to migrate into the US might be the kind of cloaked extremism that she is warning us about.
"Fascism is not an exception to humanity, but part of it."Matthew T , May 29, 2018Albright's book is a comprehensive look at recent history regarding the rise and fall of fascist leaders; as well as detailing leaders in nations that are starting to mimic fascist ideals. Instead of a neat definition, she uses examples to bolster her thesis of what are essential aspects of fascism. Albright dedicates each section of the book to a leader or regime that enforces fascist values and conveys this to the reader through historical events and exposition while also peppering in details of her time as Secretary of State. The climax (and 'warning'), comes at the end, where Albright applies what she has been discussing to the current state of affairs in the US and abroad.
Overall, I would characterize this as an enjoyable and relatively easy read. I think the biggest strength of this book is how Albright uses history, previous examples of leaders and regimes, to demonstrate what fascism looks like and contributing factors on a national and individual level. I appreciated that she lets these examples speak for themselves of the dangers and subtleties of a fascist society, which made the book more fascinating and less of a textbook. Her brief descriptions of her time as Secretary of State were intriguing and made me more interested in her first book, 'Madame Secretary'. The book does seem a bit slow as it is not until the end that Albright blatantly reveals the relevance of all of the history relayed in the first couple hundred pages. The last few chapters are dedicated to the reveal: the Trump administration and how it has affected global politics. Although, she never outright calls Trump a fascist, instead letting the reader decide based on his decisions and what you have read in the book leading up to this point, her stance is quite clear by the end. I was surprised at what I shared politically with Albright, mainly in immigration and a belief of empathy and understanding for others. However, I got a slight sense of anti-secularism in the form of a disdain for those who do not subscribe to an Abrahamic religion and she seemed to hint at this being partly an opening to fascism.
I also could have done without the both-sides-ism she would occasionally push, which seems to be a tactic used to encourage people to 'unite against Trump'. These are small annoyances I had with the book, my main critique is the view Albright takes on democracy. If anything, the book should have been called "Democracy: the Answer" because that is the most consistent stance Albright takes throughout. She seems to overlook many of the atrocities the US and other nations have committed in the name of democracy and the negative consequences of capitalism, instead, justifying negative actions with the excuse of 'it is for democracy and everyone wants that' and criticizing those who criticize capitalism.
She does not do a good job of conveying the difference between a communist country like Russia and a socialist country like those found in Scandinavia and seems okay with the idea of the reader lumping them all together in a poor light. That being said, I would still recommend this book for anyone's TBR as the message is essential for today, that the current world of political affairs is, at least somewhat, teetering on a precipice and we are in need of as many strong leaders as possible who are willing to uphold democratic ideals on the world stage and mindful constituents who will vote them in.
An easy read, but incredibly ignorant and one eyed in far too many instancesAvid reader , December 20, 2018The book is very well written, easy to read, and follows a pretty standard formula making it accessible to the average reader. However, it suffers immensely from, what I suspect are, deeply ingrained political biases from the author.
Whilst I don't dispute the criteria the author applies in defining fascism, or the targets she cites as examples, the first bias creeps in here when one realises the examples chosen are traditional easy targets for the US (with the exception of Turkey). The same criteria would define a country like Singapore perfectly as fascist, yet the country (or Malaysia) does not receive a mention in the book.
Further, it grossly glosses over what Ms. Albright terms facist traits from the US governments of the past. If the author is to be believed, the CIA is holier than thou, never intervened anywhere or did anything that wasn't with the best interests of democracy at heart, and American foreign policy has always existed to build friendships and help out their buddies. To someone ingrained in this rhetoric for years I am sure this is an easy pill to swallow, but to the rest of the world it makes a number of assertions in the book come across as incredibly naive. out of 5 stars Trite and opaque
Biast much? Still a good start into the problem&amp;amp;amp;lt;img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/0e64e0cb-01e4-4e58-bcae-bba690344095._CR0,0.0,333,333_SX48_.jpg"&amp;amp;amp;gt; NJ , February 3, 2019We went with my husband to the presentation of this book at UPenn with Albright before it came out and Madeleine's spunk, wit and just glorious brightness almost blinded me. This is a 2.5 star book, because 81 year old author does not really tell you all there is to tell when she opens up on a subject in any particular chapter, especially if it concerns current US interest.
Lets start from the beginning of the book. What really stood out, the missing 3rd Germany ally, Japan and its emperor. Hirohito (1901-1989) was emperor of Japan from 1926 until his death in 1989. He took over at a time of rising democratic sentiment, but his country soon turned toward ultra-nationalism and militarism. During World War II (1939-45), Japan attacked nearly all of its Asian neighbors, allied itself with Nazi Germany and launched a surprise assault on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, forcing US to enter the war in 1941. Hirohito was never indicted as a war criminal! does he deserve at least a chapter in her book?
Oh and by the way, did author mention anything about sanctions against Germany for invading Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Poland? Up until the Pearl Harbor USA and Germany still traded, although in March 1939, FDR slapped a 25% tariff on all German goods. Like Trump is doing right now to some of US trading partners.
Next monster that deserves a chapter on Genocide in cosmic proportions post WW2 is communist leader of China Mao Zedung. Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants compares to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the total worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.
We learn that Argentina has given sanctuary to Nazi war criminals, but she forgets to mention that 88 Nazi scientists arrived in the United States in 1945 and were promptly put to work. For example, Wernher von Braun was the brains behind the V-2 rocket program, but had intimate knowledge of what was going on in the concentration camps. Von Braun himself hand-picked people from horrific places, including Buchenwald concentration camp. Tsk-Tsk Madeline.
What else? Oh, lets just say that like Madelaine Albright my husband is Jewish and lost extensive family to Holocoust. Ukrainian nationalists executed his great grandfather on gistapo orders, his great grandmother disappeared in concentration camp, grandfather was conscripted in june 1940 and decommissioned september 1945 and went through war as infantryman through 3 fronts earning several medals. his grandmother, an ukrainian born jew was a doctor in a military hospital in Saint Petersburg survived famine and saved several children during blockade. So unlike Maideline who was raised as a Roman Catholic, my husband grew up in a quiet jewish family in that territory that Stalin grabbed from Poland in 1939, in a polish turn ukrainian city called Lvov(Lemberg). His family also had to ask for an asylum, only they had to escape their home in Ukraine in 1991. He was told then "You are a nice little Zid (Jew), we will kill you last" If you think things in ukraine changed, think again, few weeks ago in Kiev Roma gypsies were killed and injured during pogroms, and nobody despite witnesses went to jail. Also during demonstrations openly on the streets C14 unit is waving swastikas and Heils. Why is is not mentioned anywhere in the book? is is because Hunter Biden sits on the board of one of Ukraine's largest natural gas companies called Burisma since May 14, 2014, and Ukraine has an estimated 127.9 trillion cubic feet of unproved technically recoverable shale gas resources? ( according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).1 The most promising shale reserves appear to be in the Carpathian Foreland Basin (also called the Lviv-Volyn Basin), which extends across Western Ukraine from Poland into Romania, and the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the East (which borders Russia).
Wow, i bet you did not know that. how ugly are politics, even this book that could have been so much greater if the author told the whole ugly story. And how scary that there are countries where you can go and openly be fascist.Interesting...yes. Useful...hmmmGderf , February 15, 2019To me, Fascism fails for the single reason that no two fascist leaders are alike. Learning about one or a few, in a highly cursory fashion like in this book or in great detail, is unlikely to provide one with any answers on how to prevent the rise of another or fend against some such. And, as much as we are witnessing the rise of numerous democratic or quasi-democratic "strongmen" around the world in global politics, it is difficult to brand any of them as fascist in the orthodox sense.
As the author writes at the outset, it is difficult to separate a fascist from a tyrant or a dictator. A fascist is a majoritarian who rouses a large group under some national, racial or similar flag with rallying cries demanding suppression or exculcation of those excluded from this group. A typical fascist leader loves her yes-men and hates those who disagree: she does not mind using violence to suppress dissidents. A fascist has no qualms using propaganda to popularize the agreeable "facts" and theories while debunking the inconvenient as lies. What is not discussed explicitly in the book are perhaps some positive traits that separate fascists from other types of tyrants: fascists are rarely lazy, stupid or prone to doing things for only personal gains. They differ from the benevolent dictators for their record of using heavy oppression against their dissidents. Fascists, like all dictators, change rules to suit themselves, take control of state organizations to exercise total control and use "our class is the greatest" and "kick others" to fuel their programs.
Despite such a detailed list, each fascist is different from each other. There is little that even Ms Albright's fascists - from Mussolini and Hitler to Stalin to the Kims to Chavez or Erdogan - have in common. In fact, most of the opponents of some of these dictators/leaders would calll them by many other choice words but not fascists. The circumstances that gave rise to these leaders were highly different and so were their rules, methods and achievements.
The point, once again, is that none of the strongmen leaders around the world could be easily categorized as fascists. Or even if they do, assigning them with such a tag and learning about some other such leaders is unlikely to help. The history discussed in the book is interesting but disjointed, perfunctory and simplistic. Ms Albright's selection is also debatable.
Strong leaders who suppress those they deem as opponents have wreaked immense harms and are a threat to all civil societies. They come in more shades and colours than terms we have in our vocabulary (dictators, tyrants, fascists, despots, autocrats etc). A study of such tyrant is needed for anyone with an interest in history, politics, or societal well-being. Despite Ms Albright's phenomenal knowledge, experience, credentials, personal history and intentions, this book is perhaps not the best place to objectively learn much about the risks from the type of things some current leaders are doing or deeming as right.
Wrong warningEach time I get concerned about Trump's rhetoric or past actions I read idiotic opinions, like those of our second worst ever Secretary of State, and come to appreciate him more. Pejorative terms like fascism or populism have no place in a rational policy discussion. Both are blatant attempts to apply a pejorative to any disagreeing opinion. More than half of the book is fluffed with background of Albright, Hitler and Mussolini. Wikipedia is more informative. The rest has snippets of more modern dictators, many of whom are either socialists or attained power through a reaction to failed socialism, as did Hitler. She squirms mightily to liken Trump to Hitler. It's much easier to see that Sanders is like Maduro. The USA is following a path more like Venezuela than Germany.
Her history misses that Mussolini was a socialist before he was a fascist, and Nazism in Germany was a reaction to Wiemar socialism. The danger of fascism in the US is far greater from the left than from the right. America is far left of where the USSR ever was. Remember than Marx observed that Russia was not ready for a proletarian revolution. The USA with ready made capitalism for reform fits Marx's pattern much better. Progressives deny that Sanders and Warren are socialists. If not they are what Lenin called "useful idiots."
Albright says that she is proud of the speech where she called the USA the 'Indispensable Nation.' She should be ashamed. Obama followed in his inaugural address, saying that we are "the indispensable nation, responsible for world security." That turned into a policy of human rights interventions leading to open ended wars (Syria, Yemen), nations in chaos (Libya), and distrust of the USA (Egypt, Russia, Turkey, Tunisia, Israel, NK). Trump now has to make nice with dictators to allay their fears that we are out to replace them.
She admires the good intentions of human rights intervention, ignoring the results. She says Obama had some success without citing a single instance. He has apologized for Libya, but needs many more apologies. She says Obama foreign policy has had some success, with no mention of a single instance. Like many progressives, she confuses good intentions with performance. Democracy spreading by well intentioned humanitarian intervention has resulted in a succession of open ended war or anarchy.The shorter histories of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Venezuela are much more informative, although more a warning against socialism than right wing fascism. Viktor Orban in Hungary is another reaction to socialism.
Albright ends the book with a forlorn hope that we need a Lincoln or Mandela, exactly what our two party dictatorship will not generate as it yields ever worse and worse candidates for our democracy to vote upon, even as our great society utopia generates ever more power for weak presidents to spend our money and continue wrong headed foreign policy.
The greatest danger to the USA is not fascism, but of excessively poor leadership continuing our slow slide to the bottom.
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Mar 23, 2019 | original.antiwar.com
This month marks the 20th anniversary of Operation Allied Force, NATO's 78-day air war against Yugoslavia. It was a war waged as much against Serbian civilians – hundreds of whom perished – as it was against Slobodan Milošević's forces, and it was a campaign of breathtaking hypocrisy and selective outrage. More than anything, it was a war that by President Bill Clinton's own admission was fought for the sake of NATO's credibility.
One Man's Terrorist
Our story begins not in the war-torn Balkans of the 1990s but rather in the howling wilderness of Afghanistan at the end of the 1980s as defeated Soviet invaders withdrew from a decade of guerrilla warfare into the twilight of a once-mighty empire. The United States, which had provided arms, funding and training for the mujahideen fighters who had so bravely resisted the Soviet occupation, stopped supporting the jihadis as soon as the last Red Army units rolled across the Hairatan Bridge and back into the USSR. Afghanistan descended deeper into civil war.
The popular narrative posits that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, Washington's former mujahideen allies, turned on the West after the US stationed hundreds of thousands of infidel troops in Saudi Arabia – home to two out of three of Sunni Islam's holiest sites – during Operation Desert Shield in 1990. Since then, the story goes, the relationship between the jihadists and their former benefactors has been one of enmity, characterized by sporadic terror attacks and fierce US retribution. The real story, however, is something altogether different.
From 1992 to 1995, the Pentagon flew thousands of al-Qaeda mujahideen, often accompanied by US Special Forces, from Central Asia to Europe to reinforce Bosnian Muslims as they fought Serbs to gain their independence from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The Clinton administration armed and trained these fighters in flagrant violation of United Nations accords; weapons purchased by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran were secretly shipped to the jihadists via Croatia, which netted a hefty profit from each transaction. The official Dutch inquiry into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which thousands of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were slaughtered by Bosnian Serb and Serbian paramilitary forces, concluded that the United States was "very closely involved" in these arms transfers.
When the Bosnian war ended in 1995 the United States was faced with the problem of thousands of Islamist warriors on European soil. Many of them joined the burgeoning Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which mainly consisted of ethnic Albanian Kosovars from what was still southwestern Yugoslavia. Emboldened by the success of the Slovenes, Croats, Macedonians and Bosnians who had won their independence from Belgrade as Yugoslavia literally balkanized, KLA fighters began to violently expel as many non-Albanians from Kosovo as they could. Roma, Jews, Turks and, above all, Serbs were all victims of Albanian ethnic cleansing.
The United States was initially very honest in its assessment of the KLA. Robert Gelbard, the US special envoy to Bosnia, called it "without any question a terrorist group." KLA backers allegedly included Osama bin Laden and other Islamic radicals; the group largely bankrolled its activities by trafficking heroin and sex slaves. The State Department accordingly added the KLA to its list of terrorist organizations in 1998.
However, despite all its nastiness the KLA endeared itself to Washington by fighting the defiant Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milošević. By this time Yugoslavia, once composed of eight nominally autonomous republics, had been reduced by years of bloody civil war to a rump of Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. To Serbs, the dominant ethnic group in what remained of the country, Kosovo is regarded as the very birthplace of their nation. Belgrade wasn't about to let it go without a fight and everyone knew it, especially the Clinton administration. Clinton's hypocrisy was immediately evident; when Chechnya fought for its independence from Moscow and Russian forces committed horrific atrocities in response, the American president called the war an internal Russian affair and barely criticized Russian President Boris Yeltsin. But when Milošević resorted to brute force in an attempt to prevent Yugoslavia from further fracturing, he soon found himself a marked man.
Although NATO called the KLA "the main initiator of the violence" in Kosovo and blasted "what appears to be a deliberate campaign of provocation" against the Serbs, the Clinton administration was nevertheless determined to attack the Milošević regime. US intelligence confirmed that the KLA was indeed provoking harsh retaliatory strikes by Serb forces in a bid to draw the United States and NATO into the conflict. President Clinton, however, apparently wasn't listening. The NATO powers, led by the United States, issued Milošević an ultimatum they knew he could never accept: allow NATO to occupy all of Kosovo and have free reign in Serbia as well. Assistant US Secretary of State James Rubin later admitted that "publicly we had to make clear we were seeking an agreement but privately we knew the chances of the Serbs agreeing were quite small."
Wagging the Dog?
In 1997 the film Wag the Dog debuted to rave reviews. The dark comedy concerns a Washington, DC spin doctor and a Hollywood producer who fabricate a fictional war in Albania to distract American voters from a presidential sex scandal. Many observers couldn't help but draw parallels between the film and the real-life events of 1998-99, which included the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton's impeachment and a very real war brewing in the Balkans. As in Wag the Dog , there were exaggerated or completely fabricated tales of atrocities, and as in the film the US and NATO powers tried to sell their war as a humanitarian intervention. An attack on Yugoslavia, we were told, was needed to avert Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanians.
There were two main problems with this. First, there was no Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars until after NATO began mercilessly bombing Yugoslavia. The German government issued several reports confirming this. One, from October 1998, reads, in part:
The violent actions of the Yugoslav military and police since February 1998 were aimed at separatist activities and are no proof of a persecution of the whole Albanian ethnic group in Kosovo or a part of it. What was involved in the Yugoslav violent actions and excesses since February 1998 was a selective forcible action against the military underground movement (especially the KLA) A state program or persecution aimed at the whole ethnic group of Albanians exists neither now nor earlier.
Subsequent German government reports issued through the winter of 1999 tell a similar story. "Events since February and March 1998 do not evidence a persecution program based on Albanian ethnicity," stated one report released exactly one month before the NATO bombing started. "The measures taken by the armed Serbian forces are in the first instance directed toward combating the KLA and its supposed adherents and supporters."
While Serbs certainly did commit atrocities (especially after the ferocious NATO air campaign began), these were often greatly exaggerated by the Clinton administration and the US corporate mainstream media. Clinton claimed – and the media dutifully parroted – that 600,000 Albanians were "trapped within Kosovo lacking shelter, short of food, afraid to go home or buried in mass graves." This was completely false . US diplomat David Scheffer claimed that "225,000 ethnic Albanian men are missing, presumed dead." Again, a total fabrication . The FBI, International War Crimes Tribunal and global forensics experts flocked to Kosovo in droves after the NATO bombs stopped falling; the total number of victims they found was around 1 percent of the figure claimed by the United States.
However, once NATO attacked, the Serb response was predictably furious. Shockingly, NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark declared that the ensuing Serbian atrocities against the Albanian Kosovar population had been "fully anticipated" and were apparently of little concern to Washington. Not only did NATO and the KLA provoke a war with Yugoslavia, they did so knowing that many innocent civilians would be killed, maimed or displaced by the certain and severe reprisals carried out by enraged Serb forces. Michael McGwire, a former top NATO planner, acknowledged that "to describe the bombing as a humanitarian intervention is really grotesque."
Bloody Hypocrites
The other big problem with the US claiming it was attacking Yugoslavia on humanitarian grounds was that the Clinton administration had recently allowed – and was at the time allowing – far worse humanitarian catastrophes to rage without American intervention. More than 800,000 men, women and children were slaughtered while Clinton and other world leaders stood idly by during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The US also courted the medievally brutal Taliban regime in hopes of achieving stability in Afghanistan and with an eye toward building a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. Clinton also did nothing to stop Russian forces from viciously crushing nationalist uprisings in the Caucuses, where Chechen rebels were fighting for their independence much the same as Albanian Kosovars were fighting the Serbs.
Colombia, the Western Hemisphere's leading recipient of US military and economic aid, was waging a fierce, decades-long campaign of terror against leftist insurgents and long-suffering indigenous peoples. Despite horrific brutality and pervasive human rights violations, US aid to Bogotá increased year after year. In Turkey, not only did Clinton do nothing to prevent government forces from committing widespread atrocities against Kurdish separatists, the administration positively encouraged its NATO ally with billions of dollars in loans and arms sales. Saudi Arabia, home to the most repressive fundamentalist regime this side of Afghanistan, was – and remains – a favored US ally despite having one of the world's worst human rights records. The list goes on and on.
Much closer to the conflict at hand, the United States tacitly approved the largest ethnic cleansing campaign in Europe since the Holocaust when as many as 200,000 Serbs were forcibly expelled from the Krajina region of Croatia by that country's US-trained military during Operation Storm in August 1995. Krajina Serbs had purged the region of its Croat minority four years earlier in their own ethnic cleansing campaign; now it was the Serbs' turn to be on the receiving end of the horror. Croatian forces stormed through Krajina, shelling towns and slaughtering innocent civilians. The sick and the elderly who couldn't escape were executed or burned alive in their homes as Croatian soldiers machine-gunned convoys of fleeing refugees.
"Painful for the Serbs"
Washington's selective indignation at Serb crimes both real and imagined is utterly inexcusable when held up to the horrific and seemingly indiscriminate atrocities committed during the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia. The prominent Australian journalist John Pilger noted that "in the attack on Serbia, 2 percent of NATO's missiles hit military targets, the rest hit hospitals, schools, factories, churches and broadcast studios." There is little doubt that US and allied warplanes and missiles were targeting the Serbian people as much as, or even more than, Serb forces. The bombing knocked out electricity in 70 percent of the country as well as much of its water supply.
NATO warplanes also deliberately bombed a building containing the headquarters of Serbian state television and radio in the middle of densely populated central Belgrade. The April 23, 1999 attack occurred without warning while 200 employees were at work in the building. Among the 16 people killed were a makeup artist, a cameraman, a program director, an editor and three security guards. There is no doubt that the attack was meant to demoralize the Serbian people. There is also no doubt that those who ordered the bombing knew exactly what outcome to expect: a NATO planning document viewed by Bill Clinton, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac forecast as many as 350 deaths in the event of such an attack, with as many as 250 of the victims expected to be innocent civilians living in nearby apartments.
Allied commanders wanted to fight a "zero casualty war" in Yugoslavia. As in zero casualties for NATO forces, not the people they were bombing. "This will be painful for the Serbs," Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon sadistically predicted. It sure was. NATO warplanes flew sorties at 15,000 feet (4,500 meters), a safe height for the pilots. But this decreased accuracy and increased civilian casualties on the ground. One attack on central Belgrade mistakenly hit Dragiša Mišović hospital with a laser-guided "precision" bomb, obliterating an intensive care unit and destroying a children's ward while wounding several pregnant women who had the misfortune of being in labor at the time of the attack. Dragana Krstić, age 23, was recovering from cancer surgery – she just had a 10-pound (4.5 kg) tumor removed from her stomach – when the bombs blew jagged shards of glass into her neck and shoulders. "I don't know which hurts more," she lamented, "my stomach, my shoulder or my heart."
Dragiša Mišović wasn't the only hospital bombed by NATO. Cluster bombs dropped by fighter jets of the Royal Netherlands Air Force struck a hospital and a market in the city of Niš on May 7, killing 15 people and wounding 60 more. An emergency clinic and medical dispensary were also bombed in the mining town of Aleksinac on April 6, killing at least five people and wounding dozens more.
Bridges were favorite targets of NATO bombing. An international passenger train traveling from Belgrade to Thessaloniki, Greece was blown apart by two missiles as it crossed over Grdelica gorge on April 12. Children and a pregnant woman were among the 15 people killed in the attack; 16 other passengers were wounded. Allied commander Gen. Wesley Clark claimed the train, which had been damaged by the first missile, had been traveling too rapidly for the pilot to abort the second strike on the bridge. He then offered up a doctored video that was sped up more than three times so that the pilot's behavior would appear acceptable.
On May 1, at least 24 civilians, many of them children, were killed when NATO warplanes bombed a bridge in Lužane just as a bus was crossing. An ambulance rushing to the scene of the carnage was struck by a second bomb. On the sunny spring afternoon of May 30, a bridge over the Velika Morava River in the small town of Vavarin was bombed by low-flying German Air Force F-16 fighters while hundreds of local residents gathered nearby to celebrate an Orthodox Christian holiday. Eleven people died, most of them when the warplanes returned and bombed the people who rushed to the bridge to help those wounded in the first strike.
No One Is Safe
The horrors suffered by the villagers of Surdulica shows that no one in Serbia was safe from NATO's fury. They endured some 175 bombardments during one three-week period alone, with 50 houses destroyed and 600 others damaged in a town with only around 10,000 residents. On April 27, 20 civilians, including 12 children, died when bombs meant to destroy an army barracks slammed into a residential neighborhood. As many as 100 others were wounded in the incident. Tragedy befell the tiny town again on May 31 when NATO warplanes returned to bomb an ammunition depot but instead hit an old people's home; 23 civilians, most of them helpless elderly men and women, were blown to pieces. Dozens more were wounded. The US military initially said "there were no errant weapons" in the attack. However, Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre later testified before Congress that it "was a case of the pilot getting confused."
The CIA was also apparently confused when it relied on what it claimed was an outdated map to approve a Stealth Bomber strike on what turned out to be the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Three Chinese journalists were killed and 27 other people were wounded. Some people aren't so sure the attack was an accident – Britain's Observer later reported that the US deliberately bombed the embassy after discovering it was being used to transmit Yugoslav army communications.
There were plenty of other accidents, some of them horrifically tragic and others just downright bizarre. Two separate attacks on the very Albanians NATO was claiming to help killed 160 people, many of them women and children. On April 14, NATO warplanes bombed refugees along a 12-mile (19-km) stretch of road between the towns of Gjakova and Deçan in western Kosovo, killing 73 people including 16 children and wounding 36 more. Journalists reported a grisly scene of "bodies charred or blown to pieces, tractors reduced to twisted wreckage and houses in ruins." Exactly one month later, another column of refugees was bombed near Koriša, killing 87 – mostly women, children and the elderly – and wounding 60 others. In the downright bizarre category, a wildly errant NATO missile struck a residential neighborhood in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, some 40 miles (64 km) outside of Serbia. The American AGM-88 HARM missile blew the roof off of a man's house while he was shaving in his bathroom.
NATO's "Murderous Thugs"
As the people of Yugoslavia were being terrorized by NATO's air war, the terrorists of the Kosovo Liberation Army stepped up their atrocities against Serbs and Roma in Kosovo. NATO troops deployed there to keep the peace often failed to protect these people from the KLA's brutal campaign. More than 164,000 Serbs fled or were forcibly driven from the Albanian-dominated province and by the summer of 2001 KLA ethnic cleansing had rendered Kosovo almost entirely Albanian, with just a few die-hard Serb holdouts living in fear and surrounded by barbed wire.
The KLA soon expanded its war into neighboring Macedonia. Although NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson called the terror group "murderous thugs," the United States – now with George W. Bush as president – continued to offer its invaluable support. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice personally intervened in an attempt to persuade Ukraine to halt arms sales to the Macedonian army and when a group of 400 KLA fighters were surrounded at Aracinovo in June 2001, NATO ordered Macedonian forces to hold off their attack while a convoy of US Army vehicles rescued the besieged militants. It later emerged that 17 American military advisers were embedded with the KLA at Aracinovo.
Credibility Conundrum
The bombing of Yugoslavia was really about preserving the credibility of the United States and NATO. The alliance's saber rattling toward Belgrade had painted it into a corner from which the only way out was with guns blazing. Failure to follow threats with deadly action, said President Clinton, "would discredit NATO." Clinton added that "our mission is clear, to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO's purpose." The president seemed willfully ignorant of NATO's real purpose, which is to defend member states from outside attack. British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed with Clinton, declaring on the eve of the war that "to walk away now would destroy NATO's credibility." Gary Dempsey, a foreign policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote that the Clinton administration "transformed a conflict that posed no threat to the territorial integrity, national sovereignty or general welfare of the United States into a major test of American resolve."
Waging or prolonging war for credibility's sake is always dangerous and seems always to yield disastrous results. Tens of thousands of US troops and many times as many Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian soldiers and civilians died while Richard Nixon sought an "honorable" way out of Vietnam. Ronald Reagan's dogged defense of US credibility cost the lives of 299 American and French troops killed in Hezbollah's 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. This time, ensuring American credibility meant backing the vicious KLA – some of whose fighters had trained at Osama bin Laden's terror camps in Afghanistan. This, despite the fact that al-Qaeda had already been responsible for deadly attacks against the United States, including the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
It is highly questionable whether bombing Yugoslavia affirmed NATO's credibility in the short term. In the long term, it certainly did not. The war marked the first and only time NATO had ever attacked a sovereign state. It did so unilaterally, absent any threat to any member nation, and without the approval of the United Nations Security Council. "If NATO can go for military action without international blessing, it calls into question the reliability of NATO as a security partner," Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, then Moscow's ambassador to NATO, told me at a San Francisco reception.
Twenty years later, Operation Allied force has been all but forgotten in the United States. In a country that has been waging nonstop war on terrorism for almost the entire 21st century, the 1999 NATO air war is but a footnote in modern American history. Serbs, however, still seethe at the injustice and hypocrisy of it all. The bombed-out ruins of the old Yugoslav Ministry of Defense, Radio Television of Serbia headquarters and other buildings serve as constant, painful reminders of the horrors endured by the Serbian people in service of NATO's credibility.
Brett Wilkins is a San Francisco-based author and activist. His work, which focuses on issues of war and peace and human rights, is archived at www.brettwilkins.com
Read more by Brett Wilkins
- IHCHR: 11,800 Civilians Killed In US-Led Air Strikes in Syria, Iraq – February 22nd, 2019
- Why Must Ilhan Omar Apologize for Telling the Truth? – February 13th, 2019
- Elliott Abrams: A Human Rights Horror Show in Three Acts – February 1st, 2019
- Former Blackwater Guard Found Guilty of Murder for Role in Nisour Square Massacre – December 20th, 2018
- Afghan Officials: US Air Strike Kills at Least 30 Civilians, Including 16 Children – November 28th, 2018
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Feb 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Vladislav Sotirovic via Oriental Review,
NATO's Aggression Against Serbia and Montenegro in 1999The NATO launched a military intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) on March 24th, 1999 in the name of protection of human rights of Kosovo Albanians. In other words, the 78 days of barbaric air-strikes were formally justified by "humanitarian intervention" which was mainly based on the false flags and fake news (like the Rachak case) by Western corporate mass media or brutal lies from the ground (like by William Walker – a Head of the Kosovo Verification Mission).
In essence, regional organizations like the NATO, according to the UN Charter, do not have the right to interfere in internal affairs of any country, not even in internal affairs of their own member states. This superior international document and instrument of global security explicitly demand the approval of the UNSC for the undertaking of any armed action by any regional organization. The NATO never asked and never became authorized to carry out military intervention against Serbia and Montenegro in 1999 and, therefore, according to modern Public International Law, this "humanitarian" intervention under arms was a pure act of brutal aggression against a sovereign country and as such a crime against peace. Subsequently, human rights served in this case just as a justification for the realization of certain geopolitical aims in the Balkans. It became of crystal visibility in February 2008 when Kosovo Albanians proclaimed an independent Republic of Kosovo which became recognized by all US' satellites around the world. In 1999 NATO did not bomb Serbia and Montenegro for the sake of Kosovo independence but only to protect "human rights" (of Albanians). However, the same NATO nothing did to continue the protection of human rights (of Kosovo Serbs and other non-Albanians) after the war when the province became put under complete protectorate and control by the NATO who nothing did to prevent comprehensive ethnic cleansing of the province committed by Albanian extremists (former members of the KLA).
Although, as it is presented above, every armed intervention is strictly prohibited by both Public International Law and the UN Charter, the NATO, established in 1949 on the foundation of Article 51 of the UN Charter which is dealing with the right to collective and individual self-defense, attacked the FYR on March 24th, 1999 with continual barbaric air-strikes for the next 77 days. The term "air-strikes", the NATO was regularly used at its own press conferences during the aggression on Serbia and Montenegro like the term "collateral damage" for the mass destruction and civilian casualties resulted by the NATO bombing. In their official statements, NATO's officials declaratively claimed that the focal reason for those (illegal) air-strikes was a set of humanitarian issues among them the most important have been three:
1) protection of individual human rights,
2) violation of Albanian rights in Kosovo as a national minority, and
3) prevention of the potential policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing against ethnic Albanians by Yugoslavia's security forces.
Nevertheless, the aggression was accompanied by dirty and powerful media propaganda which was, of course, directly supported by a number of politically "correct" legal and human rights experts for the purpose to wash the brains of the Western audience. Most of them justified the aggression with the right of Kosovo Albanians to self-determination, although such right is not supported by any valid international instrument if the right to self-determination means the destruction of territorial integrity of the country. However, the same experts did not recognize the same right to self-determination to Croatia's and Bosnia's Serbs during the break up of ex-Yugoslavia.
Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, center, with court security guards at left and right, appears before the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Tuesday July 3, 2001. Milosevic walked into the U.N. tribunal courtroom, Tuesday, without lawyers to represent him against charges of war crimes against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1999. Milosevic died in his prison cell in the Hague on March 11, 2006 allegedely of a heat attack jist a few months begore the verdict to be annouced.
To keep in our mind, according to Public International Law and the UN Charter, the aggression also includes bombing by the armed forces of one country against the territory of another country or use of any arms and armed forces of one country against the territory of another as, for instance, NATO used Kosovo Albanian KLA as ground forces during the Kosovo War. But the crucial fact in relation to the 1998−1999 Kosovo War was that since there was no real humanitarian catastrophe before the NATO aggression starred on March 24th, 1999 against the FRY, it had to be created what exactly NATO did during the air-strike campaign of 78 days in order to justify its occupation of the province after the war followed by Kosovo's secession from Serbia in 2008.
Violation Of Human Rights In KosovoNo one claims that human rights of all citizens including and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo-Metochia have not been violated to a certain extent before NATO's military campaign in 1999. This fact was approved in several resolutions by the UNSC before the NATO aggression but what is systematically hidden as a fact is that original flagrant violation of human rights in the province came from the side of Albanian KLA as this terrorist organization launched a widespread policy of attacking, kidnapping and killing of the Serbs in order to provoke Serbia's security forces who reacted as they did it by violation of human rights of those Albanians who participated in the actions of and/or supported the KLA's activities. Here we have to keep in mind that a majority of Kosovo's Albanians did not support the methods of combat by the KLA including and Dr. Ibrahim Rugova – a political leader of Kosovo's Albanians. In order to calm down a political situation in the province, the Yugoslav Government concluded with different international organizations, like the OSCE or the NATO, several agreements allowing the OSCE monitoring mission in Kosovo-Metochia. The Yugoslav Government as well as agreed to restrain the activities by its security forces if the opposite side (the KLA) would do the same. That the Albanian side before NATO's aggression was committing war crimes is clear from the invitation to both the Yugoslav and Kosovo's Albanian sides by the international community to cooperate with the UN special Tribunal (est. 1993) for the crimes committed on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia (including Kosovo-Metochia too). The fact was that regarding this invitation to cooperate with the Tribunal's prosecutor in the Hague, the leaders of the "Albanian national community" were also invited but not only the Yugoslav side to participate in the investigation for all offenses within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal. The Albanian side was, in other words, invited to participate in the investigation of personal involvement of the KLA members in the crimes committed against other ethnic groups in Kosovo-Metochia, with the final political aim to secede the province from the FRY.
Nevertheless, in no one resolution on Kosovo before March 24th, 1999, it was not mentioned any "threat to peace" in the province nor did they order the UNSC to form international armed forces with the right to re-establish the peace and order in Kosovo, that was to undertake certain armed actions against Serbia and Montenegro. In 1998, the FRY as a sovereign state was combating separatist Albanian movement in Kosovo-Metochia, in some cases with inordinate use of force, but, nevertheless, there was no real humanitarian catastrophe at that time. The recent historical experience of violation of human rights according to contemporary definition, in the province suggests that the critical situation was escalating with the creation of the KLA in 1995 which took comprehensive terrorist actions for the sake to bring about the secession of Kosovo from Serbia. The Yugoslav security forces came into serious conflict with different groups of the KLA, and the judiciary of the FRY accompanied by relevant experts and scholars justifiably qualified the armed actions of Kosovo's separatists as classic terrorism and criminal acts against a sovereign state. [iv]
Former leader of KLA Ramush Haradinaj arrested on 5 January 2017 on a Serbian arrest warrant by French border police upon his arrival at EuroAirport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg on a flight from Pristina. Serbian authorities urged France to extradite Haradinaj, citing that he personally took part in the torture, murder, and rape of civilians. On 27 April 2017, a French court turned down a Serbian request to extradite Ramush Haradinaj and released him. Since September 9, 2017 Haradinaj is the Prime Minister of self-proclamed Kosovo.
In essence, there were prior to NATO's aggression on the FRY the problems of protection of human rights in Kosovo-Metochia, but certainly no to such extent as it was exaggerated by the Western mass media and policymakers at least no bigger than in many other corners of the world like in Colombia or Turkey's eastern part populated by ethnic Kurds. Surely, the situation in regard to human rights in Turkey since 1994 onward is much more serious than it was in Kosovo-Metochia in 1998 as the Kurdish human and minority rights are drastically violated like in 1994 when a large number of the Kurdish villages were destroyed by the Turkish police and regular army's forces and when almost one million of ethnic Kurds fled Turkey to neighboring states but the US administration simply did nothing to protect the Kurdish human rights. Even no initiative was launched for the UN to undertake a legitimate international action in order to prevent Turkey's authorities to stop with the production of a humanitarian catastrophe.
Producing Humanitarian Catastrophe But Characterized As No AggressionThe focal result of NATO's bombing of Serbia and Montenegro was a huge number of refugees of all nationalities from Kosovo-Metochia that became, in fact, a real humanitarian catastrophe. However, during such exodus of people, NATO's military aggression under the umbrella of the "armed humanitarian intervention" became even strengthened in spite of all prohibitions which have been existing in Public International Law. However, during and after the bombardment of the FRY, the UN resolutions, like the UNSC Resolution of June 10th, 1999, simply did not mention the bombardment at all for a very reason: if mentioned it would have to be officially qualified as "aggression" what means a violation of Public International Law and the UN Charter. In this case, however, due to the established voting system in the UNSC (threat of using Russian and Chinese veto rights), no resolution could be adopted. The Resolution of June 10th, 1999, in fact, is speaking only about deployment of international security forces including and those of the NATO in the province after the war for the sake to " establish safe environment for all people in Kosovo, as well as to facilitate safe return of all displaced people and refugees to their homes". In other words, nowhere in the whole text of the resolution is mentioned the bombardment of the FRY and, therefore, a pure act of aggression against a sovereign state. That was the same with another previous resolution adopted during the aggression (Resolution 1239 on May 14th, 1999) which does not say any single word about NATO's bombardment but instead it only says that international community expresses serious concern in respect to the humanitarian catastrophe in and around Kosovo as a result of continuing crisis but who produced this crisis is absolutely unclear from the text of the resolution. The same text confirms the rights of all refugees and displaced persons to return to their homes in a safe and dignified manner but what was a real background of the crisis is not clear. According to the UN resolutions on Kosovo, the NATO barbaric bombardment and a classic act of aggression on a sovereign state, in fact, believe or not, never happened!
https://www.youtube.com/embed/2M42BAJAk84
We have to mention that there were several attempts by Russia and China in the UNSC to adopt an appropriate resolution in which would be recognized that NATO's air-strikes in 1999 really happened on the ground and subsequently they had to be characterized as "aggression". However, such resolution's proposals failed as not being adopted for the only reason – used veto rights by the USA, the UK, and France (the Western obstruction).
Arguments Against Humanitarian InterventionThere are several focal objections by the scholars, policy-makers, and lawyers to humanitarian intervention advocated at various times. Here, we will address the most important arguments against humanitarian intervention taking primarily the case of NATO's bombing of the FRY in 1999:
Conclusion
- No real basis for humanitarian intervention in Public International Law . The common good is best preserved by maintaining a ban on any use of force not authorized by the UNSC. Interveners have typically either claimed to be acting in self-defense according to the "implied authorization" of the UNSC resolutions and the UN Charter or have refrained from making any reasonable legal argument based on Public International Law at all.
- States do not intervene for primarily humanitarian reasons . States always have mixed real reasons for humanitarian and other interventions and are very rarely prepared to sacrifice their own soldiers overseas. It means that humanitarian intervention is guided by calculations of national interest but not by what is best for the victims in whose name the intervention is formally carried out.
- States are not allowed to risk the lives of their own soldiers in order to save strangers . Political leaders do not possess any moral right to shed the blood of their own citizens on behalf of suffering foreigners. Citizens are having the exclusive responsibility of their own state, and their state is entirely their own business and, therefore, if a civil authority has broken down this is the responsibility only of the citizens and political leaders of that state but not of the foreign powers.
- T he issue of abuse . In the absence of a not politically colored mechanism for deciding when a real humanitarian intervention is permissible, states have a possibility to espouse humanitarian motives just as a formal pretext to morally cover the pursuit of national self-interest as, for instance, A. Hitler did with the Sudetenland.
- Selectivity of response . States all the time apply principles of humanitarian intervention selectively following their own national interest but not real protection of human rights. In other words, a state's behavior is always governed by what the Government decides to be in their interest and, therefore, states are selective about when they choose to intervene. As an example, the selectivity of response is the argument that NATO's "humanitarian" intervention in Kosovo in 1999 could not be driven by real humanitarian concerns as it has done nothing to address, for instance, the very much larger humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur, a province in West Sudan (Darfur genocide).
- A problem of moral principles . There is no generally reached consensus on a set of moral principles about humanitarian intervention which should not be permitted in the face of disagreement about what constitutes extreme cases of the violation of human rights.
- Practically, humanitarian intervention does not work . Humanitarian intervention is not workable as the outsiders cannot impose human rights especially by those who have the same problem in their homes. Democracy can be established only by a domestic struggle for liberty but not from the outside. It means that human rights cannot take root if they are imposed by outsiders. The argument is that the oppressed people should by themselves overthrow non-democratic authority.
The norms of Public International Law and doctrine of collective security after 1945 presented above, unfortunately, did not stop different forms of armed interventions around the globe but especially by the US – a country which became a global champion of aggression. Armed "humanitarian" interventions are still going to be a reality of the present and future international relations under the umbrella of the R2P.
After the Cold War, the most brutal, illegal and shameful "humanitarian intervention" was in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo-Metochia in 1999 that was, in fact, NATO's aggression against the FRY in a form of an air campaign. However, beside this example of "humanitarian intervention" as a violation of Public International Law, there were many similar interventions before like when in 1983 the USA invaded a sovereign state of Granada with some 8.000 soldiers under justification to protect the lives of about 1.000 American citizens living there under the belief that they were threatened due to the unrest in this country. However, the real reason of such "humanitarian intervention" has been of purely political and geostrategic nature rather than humanitarian one as US' troops occupied the whole island (state) of Granada including and those parts in which US' citizens did not live. The focal proof of abuse of Public International Law was a fact that the American troops de facto occupied Granada as they stayed on the island even after all the American citizens had left and changed the Government of it.
From the presentation above, it is quite clear that NATO's military action against Serbia and Montenegro in 1999 cannot be characterized as a just war of "humanitarian intervention" even according to the criteria by the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius not to speak about the modern set of criteria incorporated into the UN Charter and Public International Law. Therefore, the action was rather a classic example of brutal military aggression against a sovereign state covered by politicized Western mass media. It is true that "media are not only spectator in modern conflicts, but must be considered active participants forming public opinion and also creating and directing threat perception" that was exactly the case of the 1998−1999 Kosovo War when the Western corporate mass media succeeded to convince public opinion that NATO's "humanitarian intervention" was a just war.
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Oct 09, 2018 | www.unz.com
Kiza says: October 7, 2018 at 7:50 am GMT 500 Words @Quartermaster I am not going to insult you personally, but as a cheap paid troll you have absolutely no clue about the subject you are typing about for your Israeli masters. FB has not explained everything perfectly but what he wrote is correct. It is not true that an airforce would target radar installations only with HARM missiles, which all NATO countries and Israel have, but in practice HARM are the only missiles to reliably target mobile air defence. During the attack on Serbia, US flew more than 90% of NATO missions and it managed to destroy three missile batteries and one radar station (using HARM). But the mobility of the Serbian immobile air defences had two major effects:
1) Unlike Iraq, Serbia let NATO bomb targets without always switching on its air defences to be detected and destroyed; this grossly reduced NATOs air effectiveness because with every bomber they had to constantly send at least one support plane with jammers, HARMs etc. NATO tried to claim a virtue out of this by saying that they were soft on Serbia and will get tougher, but in reality their military attack was becoming difficult to manage, expensive and risky (the NATO unity was beginning to fray).
2) It was a running joke in Serbia how NATO planes would attack some completely empty hill (Serbia is a relatively hilly country), create literally free fireworks for the villagers, just because there was an air defense installation on the hill maybe 5-10 hours ago. A similar joke was how the Serbian military or even the local villagers would spread a strip of black builders plastic over a river and NATO planes flying at above 5 km to avoid manpads would blast this $2 bridge with $200,000 worth of bombs (adding mission cost to the cost of bombs).Regarding US F117, it was more "stealth" than F35 and similar stealth to the smaller F22, but the Serbians used the Checkoslovakian TAMARA passive radar, using ionospheric scatter, and also launched multiple operator guided missiles at F117 without a proper engagement radar to be HARMed. Self-confident in stealth the pilots of F117 did not manoeuvre, thus it was easy to predict their path even without the targeting and engagement radar.
Forcing US to retire F117 was the second costliest damage the Serbians have done (Lockheed did not cry, through their lobbyists they turned the loss into an opportunity to sell more rubbish). But the biggest cost to US was that Milosevic sold several unexploded cruise missiles and all F117 parts to China and used the money to rebuild and repair all civilian buildings in Serbia destroyed by NATO. Later, UK and US did a colour revolution in Serbia, got their hands on Milosevic, who then died from a health "accident" in NATO jail.
Kiza , says: October 7, 2018 at 8:16 am GMT
@Cyrano You are spot-on. The Serbian military fought NATO to a draw, proven by the fact that the peace treaty signed in Kumanovo in FYRM, did not contain the Rambouye clauses and even left Kosovo under Serbian jurisdiction as per UNSC 1244.FB , says: October 8, 2018 at 5:03 pm GMTEven this military draw was forced on Serbia by increased bombardment of civilian targets in Serbia combined with open threats of carpet bombing by US B57. Serbia is a fairly densely populated country, no jungles to hide in as in Vietnam. The civilian targets were bombed to show that they could do carpet bombing with impunity (with the help of MSM). Thanks to media, to this day very few people in the West know that towards the end of the 78-day war, US and UK deliberately targeted several completely civilian facilities (bridges, hospitals and schools) and in just a few days of such targeting killed about 200 civilians.
Naturally, any agreements with the West are totally pointless. After the Kumanovo agreement, US and UK organized a color revolution in Serbia, took Kosovo away and got their Serbian puppets to agree to all Rambouye demands. Serbia did not lose the war, but it lost the agreement peace with the West.
@KizaVojkan , says: October 9, 2018 at 12:25 am GMT' to my knowledge the Serbians did not use a radiating radar to shoot-down one/two F117. They used a passive radar, which does not emit at all, it only receives a rough and noisy location of the stealth plane '
This is complete nonsense once again you choose to pontificate on things in which you have no knowledge
In your earlier comment, you identified this 'passive radar' allegedly used by the Serbs as the Czech 'Tamara' system which the Serbs did not possess
Not only that but this kind of system is not used for guiding SAM shots, and is certainly not any kind of 'anti-stealth' weapon this category of device is known as an emitter locator system [ELS], and is used to listen in on radio emissions from hostile aircraft and to then track them, by means of a number of geometrically deployed antennas that can then triangulate the bearing and direction of the aircraft
However, the basic physics involved means that these emitter locators are effective at tracking signals OTHER THAN the aircraft's onboard radar this would include the IFF [identification friend or foe transponder signal] and other onboard radio emitters which are OMNIDIRECTIONAL emitters
An aircraft radar's narrow pencil beam could not reach multiple [at least 2] ELS antenna [which would be geographically dispersed] to provide the needed triangulation
Once again Dr Carlo Kopp provides an excellent technical overview of ELS systems here
' A topic which appears to crop up with monotonous regularity [is] Warsaw Pact equipment "capable of detecting stealth aircraft".
These claims invariably involve either the Czech designed and built Tesla-Pardubice KRTP-86 Tamara or ERA Vera Emitter Locating Systems, or the Ukrainian designed and built Topaz Kolchuga series of Emitter Locating Systems.
More than often this equipment is described as 'anti-stealth radar', 'radar' or 'passive radar', all of which are completely incorrect.
Much of everything else you have farted out here regarding the Serb takedown of the F117 is similar bullshit
The 3′rd battery of the 250′th Air Defense missile Brigade, commanded by then Lt Col Zoltan Dani killed both F117s [the second one made it back to Aviano, Italy but was scrapped, as USAF Col Riccioni confirms in his F22 report I linked to earlier] as well as the kill on the F16 of then 555′th squadron Commander, then Lt Col David Goldfein, who, since 2016 happens to be Gen Goldfein and the USAF Chief of Staff
Here is Goldfein's F16 canopy and tail feathers on display at the Belgrade Aviation Museum
Incidentally, Col Riccioni mentions in that same report that Goldfein was doing 'other than what he was supposed to be doing' when shot down I guess in today's USAF that means you have the 'right stuff' to become The Chief
Also incidentally, the Goldfein kill was overseen by Col Dani's Deputy Maj Bosko Dotlic, as Col Dani was off duty at the time
The point is that that one single S125 battery accounted for ALL the confirmed kills of the Serb IADS in 1999 [although there are many more 'probable' kills that either ditched in the Adriatic, or limped back but were scrapped]
This speaks to my earlier point about human competence and the 'hawks' and 'doves' just like a small fraction of fighter pilots rack up the overwhelming majority of kills the same goes for air defense commanders, submarine captains, tank commanders etc
You have spewed here a whole lot of garbage about 'secret' anti-stealth weapons and 'lucky shots' etc which is a complete insult to the historical record and the great work by Col Dani and his men and to the entire principle of working and training hard to achieve professional competence in a military skill
Here is a picture of the side of the 3′rd Battery Command Cabin, with Three kills stenciled in the F117 [black] on top a B2 [not confirmed] and Goldfein's F16 in white at bottom
The battery used the standard SNR125 'Low Blow' engagement radar [1960s vintage technology] which operates at 9 GHz, so it is NOT a low-frequency radar proving that low frequency is not necessary to take out 'stealth' aircraft
As per standard Russian air defense design doctrine, the S125 uses a separate acquisition and tracking radar which DOES operate at a lower frequency in this case the P15 'Flat Face' which operates in the decimetric wavelength band [which is similar to ATC radar frequency of about 1.2 to 1.4 GHz...ie L band]
As explained previously the acquisition radar serves to find and track the target at long range and cues the engagement radar to scan a precise sector where the acquisition radar has found the target the engagement radar's increased precision [due to its higher frequency and antenna size] then provides pinpoint accuracy to guide the missile
It is this combination of separate radars working together that allows the targeting of low observable aircraft and what the 3′rd Battery did was a textbook example of using the equipment to its full potential despite the fact that this old radar technology was in fact susceptible to jamming, which the Nato forces employed massively
Col Dani also trained his men hard to be able to disassemble their radar and launchers within 90 minutes and load everything up on trucks and move to another location he also exercised strict discipline with regard to emissions allowing the radar to be turned on only for very short bursts at a time about a minute or two at most
This is all textbook Soviet operating procedure and the difference was the exceptional work ethic and competence that Col Dani maintained in his unit
It should be noted here that the Serb air defense was in fact very successful overall war is a game of survival and attrition and what the Serbs accomplished was noted by air combat practitioners
'The air campaign over Kosovo severely affected the readiness rates of the United States Air Force's Air Combat Command during that period. Units in the United States were the most badly affected, as they were were stripped of their personnel and spare parts to support ACC (Air Combat Command) and AMC (Air Mobility Command) units involved in Operation Allied Force.
The Commander of the USAF's Air Combat Command, General Richard E Hawley, outlined this in a speech to reporters on 29 April, 1999.[10] Further, many aircraft will have to be replaced earlier than previously planned, as their planned fatigue life was prematurely expended.
PGM inventories needed to be re-stocked, the warstock of the AGM-86C Conventional Air-Launched Cruise Missile dropping to 100 or fewer rounds.[11] Of the more than 25,000 bombs and missiles expended, nearly 8,500 were PGMs, with the replacement cost estimated at $US1.3 billion.[12]
Thus the USAF suffered from virtual attrition of its air force without having scored a large number of kills in theatre. Even if the United States' best estimates of Serbian casualties are used, the Serbians left Kosovo with a large part of their armoured forces intact.
Incidentally, several years ago the downed USAF pilot Col Dale Zelko, traveled to Serbia to visit the man who shot him down Col Dani a film The Second Meeting was made here is a trailer
PS I will have more to say later, as you have littered this thread with all kinds of technically incorrect crapola
@Johnny Rico NATO failed to defeat the Yugoslav army so NATO targeted Serbian civilians. You have suffered far more losses than you acknowledge so you started killing women and children. You rained the main marked and the main hospital of my hometown with cluster bombs. That's why Serbia accepted UN resolution 1244 and the Kumanovo agreement. Given the ultimatum in Rambouillet, that's not what I would call a capitulation. The only reason Serbia signed was because you threatened to mass murder Serbian civilians. Why would you threaten to massacre civilians if you had so soundly defeated the Yugoslav army? Never have so many American military died during training exercises than during the aggression against Serbia. We consider you to be shit at war. Extremely armed fags who pee in their pants when they face opposition. But believe what you want.Vojkan , says: October 9, 2018 at 12:44 am GMT@Kiza The Russians failed to defend Serbia in 1999. That's the Serbian approach.peterAUS , says: October 9, 2018 at 12:55 am GMT
Why on Earth would Russians defend Serbs who only remember "Russian" brothers when they're in dire straits?
Why would the Russian "love" us more than we "love" them? What is their interest? Because Serbs love "Tolstoevsky"?
Don't blame the Russian for Serbian failures. In true love as in a true contract, you have to give in order to take. Russia has given us a lot with no expectance of return. If she expected anything, we have given her nothing. We aren't Russia's spoiled child.@VojkanBeefcake the Mighty , says: October 9, 2018 at 1:43 am GMTNATO failed to defeat the Yugoslav army so NATO targeted Serbian civilians.
Actually, they started to target civilian infrastructure. The objective was to intimidate the regime in Belgrade into surrender by pushing the country towards stone age.
I guess you could be onto something here:
You have suffered far more losses than you acknowledge .
and
Never have so many American military died during training exercises than during the aggression against Serbia.
As for
That's why Serbia accepted UN resolution 1244 and the Kumanovo agreement.
there was a little matter of Russia guaranteeing something too, I guess. While the drunkard was in the Kremlin.
Perceptions aside (Argentinians still believe they sank Royal Navy aircraft carrier in '82, for example) NATO delivered what its political masters wanted at the time.
Serbs lost .BADLY.That's all what matters, really.
@Vojkan Yes. It's pretty much standard American practice to bomb civilian infrastructure immediately, regardless of the degree of resistance put up by the opposing military.Cyrano , says: October 9, 2018 at 1:48 am GMT@Vojkan I don't mean to interfere in inter-Serbian squabble, but I'll volunteer an opinion anyway. I think you are exaggerating what Russia has done for Serbia for example. How so? As a proud Balkaneer ( I am exaggerating here a little bit myself – the proud part) I have to say that we in the Balkans have always benefited from the simple fact that usually Russia's enemies are our enemies too, so when Russia takes care of their enemies, they automatically take care of our enemies too.Vojkan , says: October 9, 2018 at 1:54 am GMTBut I don't think that the Russians would necessarily put their neck on the line for the Balkan Slavs to defend them against enemies that are not their enemies as well. So, unfortunately for Serbia, that equation didn't work for them in the 90's – simply put – Serbia's enemies were not automatically Russia's enemies too. Russia was still trying to be friends with the west. I forgot who it was, but some prominent Russian politician at the time said: "We are not going to start nuclear war with US over Serbia".
But it seems that Serbia is always the canary in the mine – whenever someone attacks Serbia – Russia is next. That's why that buffoon Yeltsin had to go. Friendship with the west was over the moment they attacked Yugoslavia (Serbia). Now the Russia didn't start a nuclear war over Serbia, but they still might have to – to defend themselves, and as always Serbia will benefit from this – if anything is left over from this world after things go nuclear.
@peterAUS Serbs did lose badly. Albeit not on the battlefield. Though there never was a real battlefield.Vojkan , says: October 9, 2018 at 2:09 am GMT
I have no reason to doubt the accounts of my friends in the military who sought in the rare conversations I've had with them on the subject, to humble down their achievements.
I believe Russians capitalised on the Serb's defeat. I can't blame them for that. No one is responsible for what happened to Serbs, as it happened, but Serbs. They're so keen on making the wrong decisions for the sake of appearing glorious, you can't blame the devil for that. It's their informed choice@Beefcake the Mighty To be fair, they only did it after they realised that the Serb military were too smart to be depleted by aerial bombardment and that in order to defeat them, you'd have to fight them on the ground. That's why NATO bombarded civilians. On a man to man basis, Serbs and Russians are the best soldiers in the world. No navy seal, no marine, no SAS can match them. Fighting for their homes gives them the little bit of adrenaline needed to prevail.Vojkan , says: October 9, 2018 at 2:40 am GMT@Cyrano My point was never "Russians" are our brothers. My point is, whatever cultural, religious or blood affinity I have with the Russians, they have their interests and we have ours. I cannot expect of Russians to defend Serbia for "ses beaux yeaux". The same goes the other way around. To some people Russia has "betrayed" Serbia, to some other Serbia has "betrayed" Russia. Yet the West sees us as one whole, Russia and little "Russia". I didn't ask myself before but now I love Russia infinetely more than the West. Russia has asked me nothing, has given me nothing and is expecting nothing from me.
If we can have a mutually beneficial relationship with Russia, great. We will never have that with the USA or the UK or Germany or France. They're guilty of the spoilation of Serbs' lives and private properties. Russians never spoiled Serbs of anything.
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Oct 08, 2018 | southfront.org
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says that people having "poor" memories of NATO's 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia are wrong because the military bloc did this to protect civilians and save lives.
"I stressed that we did this to protect civilians and to stop the Milosevic regime," Stoltenberg stated during a meeting with the students of Belgrade University.
The NATO secretary stated further that the bloc supports a "dialogue" between Serbia and its breakaway region [now a self-proclaimed state] of Kosovo. According to him, Belgrade has to "look into the future" for furher cooperation between the two sides.
The attitude showed by Stoltenberg is a common example how the US-NATO propaganda works. Any actions, incluindg illegal military interventions, false flag provocations and mass civilian casualties, are being explained by the need to "defend democracy", "protect civilians" and "save lives".
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Sep 23, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com
Patient Observer September 21, 2018 at 12:08 pm
https://theduran.com/clinton-yeltsin-docs-shine-a-light-on-why-deep-state-hates-putin-video/?mc_cid=fc46ed9187&mc_eid=d04cb5a32det Al September 21, 2018 at 12:45 pmLots of interesting information regarding conversations between Bill Clinton and Yeltsin but allow me to focus on the NATO bombing of Serbia:
Although Clinton and Yeltsin enjoyed friendly relations, NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia tempered Moscow's enthusiastic partnership with the West.
"Our people will certainly from now have a bad attitude with regard to America and with NATO," the Russian president told Clinton in March 1999. "I remember how difficult it was for me to try and turn the heads of our people, the heads of the politicians towards the West, towards the United States, but I succeeded in doing that, and now to lose all that."
Yeltsin urged Clinton to renounce the strikes, for the sake of "our relationship" and "peace in Europe."
The declassified White House Yeltsin files reveal the drama at the turning point in US-Russia relations, when Yeltsin pleaded, threatened and despaired trying to make Clinton call off the bombing of Yugoslavia.
"It is not known who will come after us and it is not known what will be the road of future developments in strategic nuclear weapons," Yeltsin reminded his US counterpart.
But Clinton wouldn't cede ground.
Clinton to Yeltsin on Milosevic: "It will be your decision if you decide to let this bully destroy the relationship we worked hard for over six and a half years to build up I'm sorry he is a Serb. I wish he were Irish or something else, but he is not."
"Milosevic is still a communist dictator and he would like to destroy the alliance that Russia has built up with the US and Europe and essentially destroy the whole movement of your region toward democracy and go back to ethnic alliances. We cannot allow him to dictate our future," Clinton told Yeltsin.
It was much more than the all-out bombing campaign by NATO. Serbia resisted for more than 70 days by courage and intelligence including bagging at least one stealth aircraft and its army remaining virtually untouched and ready to take on a NATO land invasion.
If I remember correctly, Clinton or whomever threatened to carpet bomb Belgrade if Russia did not stop supporting Serbia.
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Aug 24, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com
ET AL August 24, 2018 at 1:42 am
PATIENT OBSERVER August 24, 2018 at 4:25 amFor me, I would say that the ' few days of bombing Serbia ' in 1999 ripped any last vestiges of belief that the West was here to help mega violently (deliberate bombing of the Chinese embassy) away from everyone. Of course plenty happened in the years running up to that event The other is when China joined the WTO on 11/12/2001 and hit the ground running – they were expected to behave meekly and ask the great white men for their advice and follow it.
The 78 day all-out NATO bombing of Serbia was the act that, I believe, shocked/energized Russia's patriotic elements into action. The fact that little Serbia, after years of severe sanctions and every dirty trick imaginable would not buckle to the empire showed Russia that the Empire was not invincible.
The deliberate attack on the Chinese embassy IIRC triggered waves of spontaneous demonstrations in China of such intensity that the Chinese government had to take means to dampen. But, the message was not lost on the leadership.
Those acts of hubris and cruelty by the Empire may have been the beginning of its end.
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Aug 08, 2018 | consortiumnews.com
By Vladimir Golstein
in Belgrade
Special to Consortium NewsRight across the street from my hotel, tucked behind tall office buildings, is the rather large Church of St. Mark. Hidden in St. Mark's shadows is a tiny Russian Orthodox church. The Church of the Holy Trinity, known simply as the Russian Church, is famous for holding the remains of Baron Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel , the Russian Civil War leader of the Whites. It is hard to find, but luckily, a friend took me there.
As we were looking around the church, not particularly interested in Wrangel, a couple of Russians asked me to take their picture in front of his tomb. Trying to find a proper angle for the picture, I noticed a small plaque on a wall nearby. It listed the names of Russians who died fighting for Yugoslav Serbs during the conflict with separatist Albanians in Kosovo and the subsequent NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.
As we left the church, we took a small path toward the top of the park. There we observed another brutal sign of that war: a destroyed building next to the TV center. It too had a plaque. It screamed, " Zashto " (For What? Why?). Below it were the names of all the TV people NATO killed during that attack. In all, as many as 2,500 civilians may have been killed by NATO, according to the then Yugoslav government, though the real number may never be known.
On the one hand, the question Zashto is both idle and provocative. It implies a laceration of wounds, a refusal to forget and to start anew. On the other, there is an obvious need to find an answer to this question simply to prevent future destruction and senseless murders.
We won't find answers to this question in the official narratives, which tell us that the noble Clinton administration decided to stop flagrant violations of human rights in the extremely complex situation in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo by bombing the Serbs into respecting minorities both on its own and on neighboring territories. (In fact the large exodus of Kosovo Albanians to Albania proper only began after NATO bombs started to fall.)
Testing the Limits
Russians who died fighting for Yugoslavia. (Photo by Vladimir Golstein)
Behind these official stories, a much sadder picture emerges. Why did these people die? Why did this NATO operation go ahead without UN Security Council authorization nor proof of self-defense, requirements of the UN Charter? Was it to satisfy the lust for power of U.S. and NATO leaders, of liberal interventionists like Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton, and Susan Rice? To assuage the Clinton administration's guilt over its failure to respond to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda? Was it to set up America's largest military base in Europe since the Vietnam War, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo? For American access to Kosovo's vast mineral wealth and other business opportunities, including for Ms. Albright ? Or was it to finally kill off a rather successful Yugoslav experiment in the "third way" between the West and the Soviet Union?
It seems these people had to die for all those reasons and to put into practice the doctrines of responsibility to protect ( R2P ) and full spectrum dominance , doctrines cooked up by liberal interventionists and neocons in Washington. Those who died were essentially guinea pigs of a New World Order experiment to see how far the world could be pushed to implement R2P, a policy that could be used to mask imperial ambitions.
And it worked. Yugoslavia was unable to stand up to the power of NATO operating outside the mandate of its obsolete charter: namely to defend Western Europe against an alleged Soviet threat. Indeed one could argue that with the Cold War over, another motive for the attack on Yugoslavia was to provide NATO with a justification to exist. (It would later go even further afield outside its legal theater of operation, into Afghanistan and then Libya.)
Russia could do little to help the Serbs. Then the Chinese Embassy was hit as well, as a test it seems, though The New York Times said it was a mistake. The Chinese did nothing.
Thus was R2P implemented -- with no protection for Yugoslav Serbs. They had to die in the experiment to explore the limits of U.S. power and the limits of its resistance.
Vladimir Golstein, a former associate professor at Yale University, manages the Department of Slavic Studies at Brown University and is a commentator on Russian affairs.
Noel cowling , August 7, 2018 at 4:16 pm
Aurora , August 7, 2018 at 8:55 pmIf my memory serves me correctly, President Bill Clinton had set up a summit meeting with Russian President Yevgeny Primakov here in the USA. Primakov was in flight on his way here for that summit meeting when President of Vice, Al Gore, without Clinton's permission or knowledge, called Primakov, in flight, to tell him NATO had decided to bomb Kosovo. Primakov immediately ordered his plane to turn around and return to Russia, thus cancelling the summit meeting...
rosemerry , August 6, 2018 at 3:57 pmIn Russia that is known as "The Primakov Loop."
Thomas Binder , August 6, 2018 at 6:35 amThanks Vladimir. The Serbs are demonized by so many, especially the Germans-many believe it was because they fought so valiantly against the Nazis in WW2. Diana Johnstone has written "Fools' Crusade- Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions", and Michel Collon "Media Lies and the Conquest of Kosovo", but books with this point of view are not readily publicised. Nor is the fact that after his death (no trial had yet taken place) Slobodan Milosovic was finally found nOT to have been responsible for all the murderous acts he was accused/assumed to be responsible for.
We can note now of course the Russian reaction to the "annexation of Crimea" after a referendum, no bloodshed and the referendum also of Russians all over the Federation, while Kosovo was ripped from Serbia by trickery and not consent, and we see how it is now. Russia is sanctioned, the people who overthrew the Ukrainian government are not mentioned, Crimea is not allowed to return to Russia. Slight difference from the "nation" of Kososvo!
Jackson , August 5, 2018 at 2:21 pmThe war against #Serbia under #R2P was the #MilitaryIndustrialFinancialMedialComplex'es ruling the #USA/#NATO/#ISR/#SAU empire (#PNAC's) test for eternal war against #AlQaeda outside international law & interference of #USLegislators for getting full-spectrum dominance.
jose , August 5, 2018 at 6:00 pmNATO should have been disbanded after the fall of the Soviets. When you arm people and train them to kill, they will look for an enemy to fight. War becomes inevitable.
Björn Lindgren , August 5, 2018 at 7:25 amIt is hard to disagree with your post. Nato, disgracefully, has become a terrorist organization that has dedicated itself to be the paw of the western elite. Shamefully, other countries have joined Yugoslavia as victims of Nato criminality. Well done Jackson.
rosemerry , August 6, 2018 at 4:01 pmFOR REASON OF STATE, FOR REASON OF INTEREST
There might be still more reasons for the destruction of Yugoslavia.
Germany had put its mind into destabilizing Yugoslavia to get a "Hinterland". Added to this, a revenge motive: Nazi Germany occupation of Yugoslavia failed, and this has never been forgotten. And lastly, Yugoslavia was a member of the non-alignment movement, not obeying US-NATO.
And, of course, after the collapse of the Warsaw pact, NATO had no enemy, no purpose. But, it invented one: full US spectrum global dominance.
Sweden has also been punished to obey the US.
During the years of PM Olof Palme, Sweden was also a member of the non-alignment movement. Palme was educated in and friendly to the US, but critized the US war in Vietnam. (Nixon hated Palme, and withdraw the US diplomats from Sweden).
1992 foreign submarines penetrated Swedish waters repeatedly.
The submarine incident at Hårsfjärden, a marine base, was not made by Russia, but was made by US and British submarines. Afterwards, both Caspar Weinberger and Sir Keith Speed confirmed this. Weinberger even thanked Sweden for not blowing up the US mini-sub (which we could have done. (Read, "Hårsfjärden. Det hemliga ubåtskriget mot Sverige," by Ola Tunander).
Purpose: pushing Sweden westward.
Already in the mid 50s, William Colby, later head of the CIA, was in Sweden organizing stay-behind groups, recruting Swedish voluntary ex-soldiers from the Finnish wars against Soviet Union. In the 50-s these people were organized in "Sveaborg", a Nazi group.
A good hypothesis is, that Olof Palme was assassinated by a US stay-behind group, consisting of Nazi military and police.
Which, of course, had to be stonewalled "for reason of state". Today, Sweden is "cooperating" shamelessly with NATO, invite, and have excersices with NATO. This week, the Swedish government annonced that it will purchase US "Patriot" anti-missiles with "ballistic capability" (Hey, hey!).
Supporting the insane belligerent US and UK nuclear armament (for a nuclear first-strike?) against neoliberal, oligarchic Russia, which is planning to keep up in the race towards the abyss. That is, Sweden is now d e f a c t o a member of NATO, without the Swedish people or parliament have had a say. NATO which eventually is falling apart, and with a lunatic US president and his military government in the White House, in a US empire collapsing. The peace aspirations of Sweden are long forgotten. And so, is the Helsinki Conference and agreement (1975-1983) for common security, disarmamanet , and a nuclear-free zone in Europe.
The question is if Germany, France, UK (with Corbyn in 10 Downing) and Russia will organize a new Helsinki Conference and Agreement?
Maybe, "for reasons of interest".
--
David G , August 6, 2018 at 6:01 pmThanks so much for this comprehensive addition to the discussion. Sweden indeed has been placed in an invidious position. Pretending that NATO has any purpose even vaguely related to peace is laughable.
Zivadin Jovanovic , August 5, 2018 at 4:54 amGreat comment, Björn Lindgren. Many thanks.
The withering away of Swedish neutrality into an empty formality has become so obvious, but never remarked upon in the U.S. I'm sure most cable TV talking heads just assume Sweden is in NATO – indeed, I've heard the error made, albeit corrected after the next commercial break.
I appreciate reading your committed, highly informed perspective. Maybe you could submit an article on this under-reported subject to Consortium News?
Patrick Armstrong , August 4, 2018 at 5:30 pmExcellent article in the eve of 20th anniversary of NATO aggression on Yugoslavia which will be marked by Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals, March 23, 24rth, 2019.
NATO 1999 aggression was meant to be precedent and turning point in global conduct toward globalization of military interventionism (Avganistan, Iraq, Libya, etc.). Willy Wimmer wrote to Schoerder on May 2nd, 2000, USA position: "The war against Yugoslavia was conducted in order to correct the mistake of General Eisenhower from the 2ndWW. Subsequently, for strategic reasons, USA troops had to be stationed there ". And: "It is clear that it is the precedent to be recalled any time" The Bondstil base in Kosovo was only the first in the ensuing chain of new USA bases in Bulgaria (4), Rumania (4), Albania (2), Baltic states
Branko Mikasinovich , August 4, 2018 at 4:45 pmI think VG is quite correct in this: it was a test. And the test was of the neocon/humanitarian intervention marriage. Yes, the USA has doe a lot of this sort of thing in its history, but there has always been some opposition inside the USA. This time, they figured it out and "humanitarian bombing" was born. We have seen a lot more humanitarian bombing since.
ToivoS , August 4, 2018 at 1:18 pmA great and truthful article about Western Policy, NATO and US. A courageous and informative analysis of Mr. Golstein. Thank you.
FB , August 8, 2018 at 9:24 amGoldstein writes Russia could do little to help the Serbs. Then the Chinese Embassy was hit as well, as a test it seems, though The New York Times said it was a mistake. The Chinese did nothing.
Actually the Chinese did do something. They changed their attitude towards the US. I have yet to meet a Chinese national who believes that the embassy hit was a "mistake". They and their government view it as a deliberate attack on their sovereignty. But they realized they were not in a position respond so they then began military planning for possible conflict between China and the US Navy in the Western Pacific. In 2000 they started a 10 plan to achieve the ability to sink any US aircraft carrier within a 1000 km of their shores. We won't know if they have achieved that ability until a real test is conducted. But that is the something they have done.
Theo , August 4, 2018 at 10:51 amGood point Toivos The Chinese have never forgotten the Belgrade embassy bombing and they never will. Ask any Chinese today, even those living in the West the Chinese are an ancient people with a long and proud memory the embassy bombing was a step too far. All of these hubristic missteps will come back to haunt the empire
David G , August 4, 2018 at 11:16 amI remember well the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia under the pretext to stop the genocide that was allegedly committed by the Serbs. The saddest thing for me was that Germany was participating in the bombing campaign. My father who was in Yugoslavia as a Wehrmacht soldier was outraged as were many others. After almost sixty years German bombers were over Serbia again. My dad used to say German soldiers on foreign soil had never been good neither for the foreign country nor for Germany. That's why until today the Germans have an aversion to all military and the deployment of German soldiers in foreign countries is not very popular.
Antiwar7 , August 4, 2018 at 11:42 amThe 1999 air attacks were the coup de grace, but I think Germany had the (dis)honor of leading the vivisection of Yugoslavia from the start.
As Vladimir Golstein rhetorically asks: "Or was it to finally kill off a rather successful Yugoslav experiment in the 'third way' between the West and the Soviet Union?"
Indeed it was, and that surely appealed to all the Western powers. But Germany was particularly interested in removing a possible continental rival, and took the lead in making sure it happened – not at all to absolve the U.S., under whose aegis it was ultimately operating.
Theo , August 4, 2018 at 3:56 pmThe German people and the German government are different. The German government has had an anti-Serb animus for over 150 years: that's clear. But the German people, as Theo's dad shows, can be very nice. My father was a POW in Germany for 4 years during WWII, and most of the German people he encountered were quite nice to him.
rosemerry , August 6, 2018 at 4:04 pmYou are right. The vivisection of Yugoslavia began when Germany recognized the independence of Slovenia before any other country did. The German government with Genscher as foreign minister didn't consult with any of the European allies. Especially France was not amused at all.
Juan P. Zenter , August 4, 2018 at 7:29 amIt was Germany, 9 days after reunification, which led the removal of Croatia from Yugoslavia and beginning the breakup of a successful multicultural country.
Jessika , August 4, 2018 at 5:30 amYugoslavia was a federation of states and was, thus, an obstacle to consolidating EU and NATO power in Southeastern Europe. Once the federation was destroyed, the individual states that comprised it could be absorbed by EU/NATO. That was the ultimate outcome of NATO bombing there, despite all denials about that being the intent.
j. D. D. , August 4, 2018 at 7:59 pmThanks for the article, the photo of the beautiful church, and the reflection on this horrible chapter from the book of atrocities disguised as "humanitarian" to fool the masses. This also helped Bill and Hillary Clinton distract the American public from the Monica Lewinsky affair.
FB , August 8, 2018 at 9:31 amI don't see it that way. Rather, as President Clinton was hit with the Lewinsky scandal and put on the defensive immediately following his speech to NY's Council on Foreign Relations in which he called for "a new world financial archithitecture," VP Al Gore, who later shunned the president, saw the opportunity to determine policy. It was Gore, in consultation with Hillary Clinton, who decided to launch the criminal bombing of Serbia, informing PM Primakov after taking a phone call meant for the president. Whereupon the PM turned around his flight in mid-air over the Atlantic and returned to Russia. By launching an illegal attack on Russia's ally, the VP and the future Sec. of State, were offering a foreshadowing of the hawkish and belligerent anti-Russian policy that was to follow for the next 17 years.
nonsense factory , August 3, 2018 at 11:50 pmDisagree these are minor details that are meaningless. Yugoslavia had already been systematically dismembered starting the very instant after German unification and the fall of the Soviet Union. Coincidence ? Maybe a child could believe it by 1999, the final chapter of the dismemberment, Kosovo, was ready, after several years of laying careful groundwork of subversion, propaganda and agitation
The Nato war of aggression in 1999 would have proceeded no matter what to think that the Lewisnky nonsense had anything to do with anything is ridiculous
MH , August 7, 2018 at 2:13 pmOne major factor in the NATO bombing and the overall agenda in the region was control of territory for a proposed gas/oil pipeline export route from Central Asia to Europe. The creation of Camp Bondsteel was directly related to that goal, and the chief contractor (KBR-Halliburton) played the same role there that they did in the construction of numerous military bases in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
That's been a dominant theme in U.S. foreign policy and military strategy circles ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Numerous routes have been proposed – trans-Afghanistan pipeline, the Nabucco pipeline, etc., all with the same goal – getting Central Asia fossil fuels (leased to US and British majors like Exxon, Chevron, BP, etc.) to global markets while bypassing Iran and Russia.
Monbiot in the Guardian, 2001 (when it was still a fairly decent paper, rather than a gung-ho enforcer of the Blairite neoliberal agenda), said this:
"For the past few weeks, a freelance researcher called Keith Fisher has been doggedly documenting a project which has, as far as I can discover, has been little-reported in any British, European or American newspaper. It is called the Trans-Balkan pipeline, and it's due for approval at the end of next month. Its purpose is to secure a passage for oil from the Caspian sea. . ."
"In November 1998, Bill Richardson, then US energy secretary, spelt out his policy on the extraction and transport of Caspian oil. "This is about America's energy security," he explained. "It's also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don't share our values. We're trying to move these newly independent countries toward the west. We would like to see them reliant on western commercial and political interests rather than going another way. We've made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it's very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right. . ."
Paul Stuart, in the WSWS, 2002, noted:
"According to leaked comments to the press, European politicians now believe that the US used the bombing of Yugoslavia specifically in order to establish Camp Bondsteel. Before the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the Washington Post insisted, "With the Middle-East increasingly fragile, we will need bases and fly over rights in the Balkans to protect Caspian Sea oil.""
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/04/oil-a29.htmlForward project of American imperial power in the name of control of energy resources and the cash flows arising from them, in a nutshell. Or, "business as usual since the 1950s". Since JFK, it's all been done under the cover of "humanitarian intervention" and "protecting democracy" which is why so many American citizens have no idea what the true aims of these wars have really been
Bob Van Noy , August 3, 2018 at 8:11 pmSadly, Monbiot's column aside, the Guardian's coverage of what most of us here think of as a war against Yugoslav independence was unabashedly pro-NATO and anti-Serb. The outlet did it's best to confuse otherwise war skeptical liberals -- by demonizing the Serbs as bloodthirsty savages purveying late 1930s genocide -- about the true character of "the west's" aggression against the Serbs. Unlike Iraq, where the Graundiad reversed their pro-war stance, the paper only doubled down on its anti-Serb biases, culminating in trumpets and coronets for Hague's prosecutors ludicrously inept (at best) handling of Milosevic's trial.
Jimbobla , August 3, 2018 at 6:55 pmThank you Vladimir Golstein for this article. I'm sure you know the answers to the questions you ask in the paragraph titled "Testing the Limlts". The answer to each of them is given to us and to the world in F. William Engdahl's devastating book entitled "Manifest Destiny" : Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance. I say devastating because Mr. Engdahl thoroughly describes a series of American administrations responsible for all of these crimes and more.
It will be up to us (American Citizens) to educate ourselves as to the real history of our government acting secretly, without broad consensus, and illegally. This article is a good beginning but the discussion needs to be broadened and further documented. Then we can begin to find a resolution.
irina , August 4, 2018 at 12:01 amHow one can wonder how the German population stood aside while the Nazis committed their atrocities while at the same time not speaking out at our own apparent daily military excesses is beyond me.
christina garcia , August 4, 2018 at 1:02 amNot to mention meekly paying for these daily military excesses, with no protest.
Sam F , August 4, 2018 at 8:48 amhere is an historical answer, My Grandfather and Grandmother were born in Koenigsberg Prussia what is now known as Kaliningrad. The City of Emanuel Kant and not quite in the 1930's fans of National Socialism. My Grandfather owned a brick factory and a saw mill . They were capitalists, not National Socialists. And you JIMBOBLA , fyi, My Opa was caught by the Russian Army 1943, my family was totally disunited. It took the Red Cross 3 years to find my family members and repatriate them .The Nazi organization disliked capitalism . I can prove every single sentence I wrote. Please be careful when you write Nazism
christina garcia , August 4, 2018 at 1:04 amIf you disagree, you should really address the issue of "how the German population stood aside while the Nazis committed their atrocities." Are you arguing that Nazi atrocities were justified by the USSR dispersing a family in 1943 Kaliningrad, during a war in which Nazis killed over 20 million Russians? It would be interesting to hear an argument with substance and references.
Milojkovic , August 5, 2018 at 8:11 pmit is beyond you because you never experienced these atrocities
Consortium's Fan , August 7, 2018 at 10:28 amDear Christina, I am very sorry about what happened to your family. They probably didn't have a choice, otherwise the Nazis would have hurt them. Maybe you'd have never been born if they dared to resist actively. Probably good people, unfairly caught in the whirlwind of history and human brutality. They were then retaliated against by other Nazi victims without deserving so, just because of their ethnicity. I am a Serb, living in U.S. Trust me, I can relate. I was here in U.S. during those terrible days of 1999, living through them as if in a daze. Life is now "kinda back to normal", but I try my best not to think just how big a part of me had died in that bombing. My grandfather, who was just a peasant but a very devoted Christian, died in a horrible pain from the terminal stomach cancer because there was no pain medication for him; plus the pharmaceutical factories were bombed after having been accused of being able to produce chemical weapons in a coordinated NATO propaganda just days before. In agony, he was trying to undress himself, and was screaming and running around the garden. Several of our family members were killed by Wehrmacht in WW II. I think that Germany had no business participating in this bombing. Look up Varvarin bridge. It was shameful. And yes, unfortunately, it was a German hand holding the match that lit up the powder keg that was Yugoslavia in early 90's.
Lois Gagnon , August 3, 2018 at 5:37 pmDid YOU, Christina Garcia, experience atrocities? Judging by you comment, I am confidently saying you DIDN'T. You know NOTHING about atrocities. Read and watch films about Nazi doings. And compare them to "dispersing a family" in a wartime. A recent film worth seeing is SOBIBOR, entirely based on archives, – a Nazi concentration camp in Poland's Sobibor – hence the name. Educate yourself.
rosemerry , August 6, 2018 at 4:11 pmWestern populations for the most part are so thoroughly brainwashed they still cling to the belief they live in civilized countries and their militaries keep them safe from barbarians. Unf*cking believable.
Realist , August 3, 2018 at 5:24 pmThe likelihood of damage being caused by the USA NOT intervening anywhere must be vanishingly small!!!!!
Jean , August 3, 2018 at 6:14 pmTo U.S. authorities, foreign lives simply do not matter. No need to conduct any "intelligence assessment" to determine their culpability. They shamelessly commit mass murder right out in the open with impunity.
Realist , August 3, 2018 at 11:39 pmWhat makes you think USA lives matter to them. I see no evidence of that either.
LarcoMarco , August 4, 2018 at 1:50 pmNothing makes me think that. Why do you think I chose the phraseology that I did? It gained currency in reaction to the murderous abuses by American police on our own streets.
REDPILLED , August 4, 2018 at 4:54 pmIt gained currency when that other Donald (Rumsfeld) essentially said that G.I's were cannon fodder.
Drew Hunkins , August 3, 2018 at 5:17 pmThat despicable attitude long predates war criminal Rumsfeld: "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy."? Henry Kissinger
Antiwar7 , August 4, 2018 at 11:45 amMichael Parenti's book "To Kill a Nation" is the best book on the criminal NATO war on Yugoslavia. Followed closely by Diana Johnstone's seminal book "Fool's Crusade."
dj anderson , August 3, 2018 at 4:57 pmAgreed: those are excellent books, the best English language works on the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Jeff Harrison , August 3, 2018 at 4:55 pmThank you for this article. Noam Chomsky also bravely gave a fine accounting. https://chomsky.info/200005__/
REDPILLED , August 4, 2018 at 4:59 pmOne wonders how many times these sorts of things have to happen, and fail before the rest of the world says enough of your bullshit, "West".
Joe Tedesky , August 3, 2018 at 4:50 pmThe rest of the world has already passed judgment on the imperialistic, war-waging U.S.: Polls: US Is 'the Greatest Threat to Peace in the World Today'
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/08/07/polls-us-greatest-threat-to-peace-world-today.htmlGary Weglarz , August 3, 2018 at 8:25 pmIsn't it sad that the most enduring monuments the U.S. is leaving for it's worldly legacy are but artifacts of war and destruction. We could have done much better than this.
Joe Tedesky , August 3, 2018 at 9:24 pmJoe – Exactly. I sometimes find myself thinking the "what if" to the U.S. mayhem of just my own lifetime. "What if" the CIA hadn't coordinated the assassinations of JFK and Lumumba, as well as of course the murder or overthrow of dozens of elected leaders in former colonies who simply aspired to helping their own people, rather than acting as proxies to the continuing pillage by U.S. & Western capitalism. What if instead those leaders were allowed to lead their nations into a non-aligned world and not forced to be beholden to either the U.S. or Soviet systems by threats of U.S. military and economic violence? What if Malcolm and MLK and RFK had not been murdered by forces connected to the U.S. ruling institutions, and had instead by now had become elder statesmen in a more humane and democratic U.S. system that would stand in stark contrast to the insane neoliberal capitalist freak show which has been forced upon the world, and who's mystical – "invisible hand" – can be found tightly wrapped around the throats of the poor everywhere?
Yes Joe I agree, I think we could have lived in a very different world had not the greed and pathology of U.S. and Western oligarchy quite intentionally and violently destroyed any possibility of a more humane and egalitarian world by routinely murdering those more humane leaders who could have helped us reach it. That possibility of a more humane world was replaced instead with the odious Maggie Thatcher's "there is no alternative" global nightmare of continued neocolonial pillage euphemistically called neoliberal capitalism. Only the fine-tuning of the rational for mass murder has changed. Now we have "duty to protect" – which translated from 'newspeak' means = "we now must bomb and kill you because we care about you so very, very much." Sort of a Western postmodern version of earlier justifications for slaughtering the indigenous in order to – "save their souls" I suppose. We in the West have created this current version of global "reality" through absolutely amoral unrelenting mass violence over 500+ years now, and sadly there does not seem to be any real evidence of a change of heart or direction in our global mayhem.
Gary Weglarz , August 3, 2018 at 11:11 pmGary I agree whole heartedly with every word you wrote. I would add to how intriguing it would be to learn of the high deception played during the passage of the Federal Reserve back in 1913. Then I'd push out of the way those who blocked Claude Pepper from endorsing Henry Wallace into the 1944 Democratic Convention. This alone may have changed the course of the establishment of the CIA, and avoided the disaster that is happening in Palestine to this day.
Thatcher & Reagan surly introduced us into this new economy which is often said to be doing so great, and there we are ruined by an overly eager Fed lender along with an out of sight Defense budget. Your job isn't there, and with that you are told to blame the union. Ah, the Union wasn't that what Margaret & Ronny sabotaged eventually . nice work.
I do believe the assassination era was the biggest turning point, as it sent a strong message to the would be seekers of sane government policies who would incur such tragedy if explored. Joe
REDPILLED , August 4, 2018 at 5:04 pmJoe – I quite agree. The assassination era was the huge turning point, but as you point out the corruption and manipulation of democracy by the oligarchy goes way back. Yes, imagine if Wallace had been the VP for FDR? Had Wallace's nomination not been sabotaged, perhaps the Dulles brothers would have spent their remaining time on earth learning woodworking skills in prison workshop after being convicted for the treason of their Nazi dealings – instead of leading the CIA and State Dept. into the corrupt secrecy of multiple regime changes, assassinations, and endless insane cold war posturing. The Dulles CIA era, including it's loving embrace of the Nazi war criminals, seems to have a been in retrospect a very dark prelude leading up to the assassination era to follow. Ike certainly had some foreboding of the evil to come given his parting comments.
Bob Van Noy , August 4, 2018 at 8:35 amA brief recommended reading list:
- The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot
- The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the attack on U.S. Democracy by Peter Dale Scott
- The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government by Mike Lofgren
Consortium's Fan , August 7, 2018 at 10:42 amJoe and Gary, very nice and well informed thread, thank you. Clearly we all share the history that both of you mentioned and we also see through the now crumbling obfuscation. It will become our new duty to use that past experience and a new hope to help make an official case for correcting the official record and reclaiming Democracy. Actually it's a worthy endeavor and we're uniquely positioned to help
Realist , August 4, 2018 at 6:03 pm"Sort of a Western postmodern version of earlier justifications for slaughtering the indigenous in order to – "save their souls" I suppose."
Or even earlier justifications (by the Holy Inquisition in the Middle Ages) to burn people alive to "save their souls".
Stephen J. , August 3, 2018 at 4:45 pmExcellent point, Joe. I wonder how different the history books will look if this country somehow manages to shed the warmongering hegemonists who have been in control for at least the last 70 years (or, one might argue, from its inception).
I'd also like to see an English translation of the current world history books, used in the schools of China, Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan, Cuba, Vietnam or dozens of other countries not part of the American World Empire. I'll bet American actions and motives are not portrayed to be as noble and pure as the driven snow. I'll bet even Mexico has a quite different take. Canada? You stopped our invasion in 1812, aided the slaves sent to you via the Underground Railway and refused to cooperate in the Vietnam fiasco. What happened since then? Now you extradite AWOL GI's who don't want to go back to the numerous "sand boxes" we play in. I'll bet those books, if ever published in English, would not be allowed on public library shelves in the U.S.
Interesting article.
I believe there are many questions that need answering about NATO. For instance: July 14, 2018 The Diabolical "Work" of NATO and Its Allies: Why Are These War Criminals Still Free?
NATO's recent meeting or summit in Brussels July 11 – 12, 2018, could be described as a gathering of heinous hypocrites. [1] There are millions of people dead, millions are refugees, their countries have been destroyed and our ruling hypocrites spout the words "rule of law." Has there ever been a gang of human reptiles (are they even human?) so evil, dressed in expensive suits [and dresses] and operating out of houses of power called "parliaments" and other houses of ill repute? These criminals, or gangsters, or bandits, or reprobates (Add your own epithet) are up to their filthy necks in the blood of the victims of their planned carnage.
Yet it was reported: "The summit will also discuss the fight against terrorism." Gee! Does that statement about fighting "terrorism" smack of hypocrisy? There is evidence that NATO and its members have, in fact, been consorting with, and supporting, terrorists. [2]
[much more info at link below]
http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-diabolical-work-of-nato-and-its.html
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Aug 08, 2018 | www.unz.com
Sic Semper , August 8, 2018 at 1:37 pm GMT
I vividly recall the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. I was nine-years-old and we were not wired for cable then. There also was no remote control for the 27″ Zenith color console. I was forced to watch some of the coverage for those reasons. Sarajevo was held up as a utopian city where Serbs, Croats and Muslims all lived in a beautiful city peacefully.El Dato , Next New Comment August 8, 2018 at 2:04 pm GMTIt was so beautiful said the announcers. And in less than a decade that Olympic stadium was turned into a cemetery as those peaceful Croats, Serbs and Muslims slaughtered each other. Once the Soviet Army withdrew from Yugoslavia and the nation disintegrated back into its ethnic lines, the killings started.
Imagine what is coming in the United States where the simmering hatreds are invited and exploited by not three distinct groups, but hundreds. Image what is to come when "historically aggrieved" peoples who have been weaponized for generations to despise their non-homogenous neighbors.
The erasure of common nationhood and the instilling of grievance as a caste system will see the US descend into chaotic slaughter the likes of which have never been seen before.
When Pakistan separated from India after the British pulled out, Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus slaughtered each other, stopping trains filled with refugees being repatriated into their new nations and slaughtering every one of them. Americans have been so denuded of historical understanding that these histories are unknown.
The malevolence of humanity seething just under the surface until the opportunity arises for it to burst forth is forgotten by placated propagandized people. What people in world history have been more propagandized and placated than Americans who have been viewing carefully crafted scripts since their eyes were first able to focus on a tv screen and whose desperately poor are morbidly obese?
Stocking a warehouse to the rafters with volatile materials, packing them in so tightly until they near critical mass, now add in some agitation -- and light a match. The most devastating weapon ever devised in not the hydrogen bomb, it is a population bomb. A 100 megaton nuclear weapon destroys cleanly -- one flash and a wind storm -- it's all over aside from lingering sunshine units. In a thousand years the land will forget what had happened.
A population bomb where the very people have been weaponized will prove far more devastating and remain scarring the land for eons and that common memory lives on in the survivors igniting anew every few decades.
@Sic SemperOnce the Soviet Army withdrew from Yugoslavia and the nation disintegrated back into its ethnic lines, the killings started.
That never happened though because the Soviet Army was never in Yugoslavia in the first place. It was Tito who maintained order with an iron fist.
At some point the Western Powers decided the that old Communist Apparachik Milosevic would be the Bad Guy and the Croatian freedom-loving "our bastards" the good guys to be internationally recognized and thus enflamed the passion of secession. The thing just flew apart. And afterwards we had to bomb the country in order to save it.
I vaguely remember a pretty explanation in First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia by David N. Gibbs
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Aug 05, 2018 | russia-insider.com
23 Years Ago the US Backed a Brutal Croatian Ethnic Cleansing of Serbs Miodrag Novakovic ( FBReporter ) Sat, Aug 4, 2018 | 4,303 445 If there was a nation that could safely conclude from its own historical experience that "Crime Pays", than it must be the newest EU member, Croatia. In the modern history this tiny Catholic nation committed one of the most horrific genocides in WWII over Serbian Orthodox Christian population residing in Croatia and Bosnia, murdering at least one million people; and recently in 1995, Croatia conducted (under US supervision) the biggest and permanent ethnic cleansing "military operation" against its (again) Serbian population, expelling over 200,000 of them in just three days (the real number of ethnically cleansed Serbs from Croatia during the wars in 90ies, is at least twice larger)- unofficially becoming the most ethnic cleanse European state.
If you believe, that Croats "en masse", would be ashamed of such reputation, then you are dead wrong. Actually most of them are very proud, and for the last 23 years they are celebrating it very loudly, and doing everything in their power to prevent (after being pressured by the international community) the return of hundreds of thousands of Serbs to their ancient land, and to avoid returning of their stolen property, mostly (real estates, farm lands, etc.).
https://www.youtube.com/embed/lw0qZmFhPBg
"We could not prevent the slaughter of the Serbs by the Croatians, including elderly people and children " – UNPROFOR French Lieutenant-General Jean Cot
Elderly Krajina' resident murdered in his home by Croatian soldiers. His guilt- He was a Serb
WHEN WESTERN "DEMOCRACIES" ORCHESTRATE ETHNIC CLEANSINGSOf course, if would be unreasonable, for this evident and well documented war crimes, and crimes against humanity, to blame only Croats. If their hands are soaked in the blood, of innocent Serbian civilians, up to their arms, then the hands of their Western sponsors (namely USA and Germany) are soaked in the blood at least up to their elbows. Simply Croats would never get away with "such perfect crime", if they were not backed, in every possible way, by their American and German sponsors.
This week will mark 22 years, since on August 4th 1995, Croatia lunched so called military-police operation, named Storm, against Serb' held and controlled Krajina region. Croats backed by US military-logistic & air support, CIA intelligence drone reconnaissance, and open political support from Washington, completed their "operation" in just three days. On August 7th they declared "victory".
Their "victory resulted": in a complete ethnic cleansing of Krajina region, and a murder of at least 2,000 Serbs; vast majority of them were defenseless civilians. Official sources claim that: 1,192 Serbian civilians were killed or missing, and around 200,000 thousands (entire Krajina population) were expelled from their ancient land. Their property was destroyed, looted and stolen, by the Croatian "soldiers" (who performed this "operation" under direct Washington' supervision, while UNPROFOR peacekeepers assigned for the protection of UN designated "Krajina Safe Zone" just stood by, doing almost nothing to prevent the slaughter).
Croatian "soldiers" in "liberated Krajina"
IMPERATIVE WAS TO ESTABLISH US MILITARY PRESENCE IN YUGOSLAVIATo understand this US complicity, and its direct military involvement, in such horrendous atrocity against one ethnic group, in one, of many, civil wars, which erupted, when former Socialist Yugoslavia "fell apart", again with covert or overt Western support, we have to look here at the wider picture-
When the Clinton' government, together with their major European allies, decided in 90ies, that the best American interest in the Balkans will be to back armed rebellion of the separatist administrative regions in Western Yugoslavia, and openly support the breakup of, internationally recognized, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, while it was still the UN member, they consciously opened the Pandora box.
They openly sided politically & militarily with Slovenian and Croatian Catholics from the Western Yugoslavian Republics, and with Islamic fundamentalists from Bosnia, in their civil and religious wars against Orthodox Christian Serbs living outside, then administrative Republic of Serbia (and later in 1999, US & NATO started another illegal war against Serbia, on behalf of Islamic Albanian separatists from Kosovo, ultimately "stealing" this Southern Serbian province).
Croatian and Bosnian Serbs, who simply wanted to remain in their Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and not to be "taken away" by Catholic and Islamic separatists, and not to be stripped of their constitutional rights, under existing Yugoslavian laws, naturally rebelled against such illegal and violent Yugoslavian outcome, and they subsequently declared own autonomy within the Yugoslavian separatist' regions.
And then all hell broke loose
The historical roots of such American approach, could be found in the Western (mainly British and American) support of "Anti-Stalin" communist leader of post-WWII Yugoslavia Marshal Josip Broz Tito (who was Croat himself), who provided Western leaders with assurances that he will, not only keep Yugoslavia outside the Soviet bloc, but he would align militarily his country with NATO alliance as well; and later in Reagan' presidential directive NSDD133, from 1984, which outlined US strategic interest to expand its military presence to Yugoslavia.
Croatian and US military leadership celebrating "joint operation"- the biggest ethnic cleansing in Europe since WWII
THEY ARE KILLING "LITTLE RUSSIANS" TOO, AREN'T THEY ?The "only" obstacle to this US (read NATO) expansionist policy in the former Yugoslavia, was Serbian (majority) population, which was, due to its traditional friendship with Russia, considered as "problematic" and had to be decimated, "broken into pieces", and Republic of Serbia to be disabled as an independent state, during so called "spontaneous" civil wars in 90s.
I am not trying here to state that in the Western society exist some unexplained hatred against Serbs (in same time, there is a lots of prejudice, and media & Hollywood bias, picturing Serbs primarily as "bad guys"), actually I believe that people and their politicians in the West could not care less about Serbs (Serbians), and most of them have no clue where to find Serbia on the geographic map. But in same time, as we can observe these days in the West, particularly in United States, there is a lot of unfounded and unreasonable hatred for the Russians
And if we are familiar with the popular saying among Western diplomats, that "Serbs are Little Russians", then is not difficult to put two and two together, and understand their desire to "disable" any Russian-friendly nation in the region.
As long as you are a Serb, regardless of your age, for Croats and their US sponsors, you are a "fair game"
CROATIAN WAR CRIMES AGAINST SERBS WERE SO EVIDENT, AND ON SUCH LARGE SCALE, THAT WESTERN CONTROLLED ICTY HAD NO CHOICE, BUT TO SENTENCE CROATIAN LEADERSHIPWestern controlled ICTY (International Crime Tribunal for Yugoslavia) reluctantly brought charges for war crimes and ethnic cleansing, against (war time) ultra-nationalistic Croatian leadership and group of its generals. But in the wake of overwhelming evidence and international outcry, they had little choice.
In 2001 ICTY brought charges for war crimes against Croatian president general Franjo Tudjman (who will be remembered for publically saying "that he was very proud that his wife was neither Jew or Serb"), Croatian defence minister Gojko Susak (prior to war- open Neo-Nazi ideologist), and two other former (renegade) Yugoslav Army generals, (promoted into supreme commanders of Croatian army) Janko Bobetko and Zvonimir Cermenko. Their indictment was actually travesty of justice, because at the time they were charged, all of them (with exception of General Janko Bobetko), were already dead (by natural cause). General Bobetko died one year after indictment, before he could be delivered to ICTY.
" The decision to launch Operation Storm is not controversial; what is controversial, however, is 'the successful effort' of some Croatian officials headed by President Franjo Tudjman to 'exploit the circumstances' and implement the plan to drive Serbs out of Krajina ." -- ICTY prosecutor Alain Tieger
When the indictment of Croatian generals Ante Gotovina, Ivan Cermak and Mladen Markac, for their war crimes and ethnic cleansing of Croatian Serbs in Krajina, during "operation" Storm in 1995, was announced in 2008- Serbs who survived US sponsored pogrom and ethnic cleansing, were naively hoping that at last some justice will be served.
Even, with such unprecedented obstruction of ICTY by Croatian government, Catholic Church and wider Croatian society, who concealed and destroyed many war documents, facilitated escape and concealment of indicted Croatian war criminals, and intimidated not only victims and witnesses, but ICTY leadership as well- the trial of those three Croatian generals came to conclusion in 2011, and after the overwhelming evidence (the evidence, Croats were not able to conceal or destroy), Gotovina was sentenced to 24 years, Markac to 18 years, while Cermak was acquitted.
Serbian victims hoped that at the end at least some justice was served- but they were wrong again. There is a Serbian saying: "A crow doesn't pick out another crow's eyes."-
In 2012, ICTY appeal chamber overturned the decision of lower chamber, and unconditionally acquitted Croatian war criminals Gotovina and Markac for all crimes. Entire Croatia and its diaspora erupted in joy and massive celebration.
Their historical experience that Crime Pays have been proven yet again
Serbian children getting starved to death and slaughtered by knife in a first-ever death camp for children and infants established by Croats in Jastrebarsko, Sisak, Stara Gradiska, Independent State of Croatia in WW2
Even, after the ICTY had proved (from the audio and written transcript of Croatian war leadership meeting in July 1995) – that there was very credible evidence of existence of a joint criminal enterprise, with intent to forcibly remove ethnic Serbs from Croatia, and that civilian areas in Krajina, including the subsequent civilian refugee columns, were indiscriminately shelled by Croatian artillery, and bombed & machine gunned by Croatian air-force – that did not prevent the real ICTY masters to pervert the course of justice.
One would wander who and what was behind such obvious and embarrassing justice travesty, demonstrated in this example. What had forced American controllers of ICTY to change their mind, and influence the tribunal to free of any charges, these obvious and heavy documented, war criminals?
Just remember that at that time, US government offered $5 million reward for the capture of war criminal Ante Gotovina, making him the ICTY most wanted man. He was at that time sheltered by Croatian government, and through the notorious Vatican' "Rat Channels", that were used at the end of WWII to facilitate the escape of Nazis, he was hidden (among the other Croatian war criminals) in a Catholic monastery, to be smuggled to Tenerife, where he was eventually captured by the Spanish police, in 2005.
Serbian civilians fleeing US/CRO joint operation "Storm" were bombed, machine-gunned, and ran by Croatian tanks, mercilessly- thousands of innocent people just perished
INTERNATIONAL "POST-MORTEM" RESPONSEIt is worth to mention accusations and reactions, to such perversion of justice by ICTY, from some highest international bodies and public persons, at that time-
US Security Council, on August 10th 1995 issued "post-mortem" (when ethnic cleansing of Serbs was already completed) resolution #1009, demanding from Croatia to halt military operation, and condemning targeting of UN peacekeepers (during the operation Storm, Croats had killed three UN soldiers) – but UNSC failed to request a withdrawal of the Croatian forces, and de-facto accepted new "ethnically cleanse" reality!?
The only UN official, who was fully aware of the horrific aspect of this US sponsored "operation", and who was trying to prevent further Croatian atrocities against Serbian population, was, at that time, the Head of UN mission in Yugoslavia, Thorvald Stoltenberg, who urged UN Secretary Yasushi Akashi to request NATO strikes against Croatian army, to prevent further atrocities against civilians.
Of course, that never happened, especially if we know that Croatian operation Storm, was directly supervised by the retired US generals (via Pentagon military contractor MPRI), while US Air Force conducted air raids against Serbian Air Defense systems in Krajina, and CIA officers operated surveillance drones, which provided intelligence for advancing Croatian troops, from two Croatian bases in Adriatic.
Even, EU negotiator Carl Bildt, and US ambassador in Croatia Peter Galbraith, publically condemned Croatian atrocities in Krajina- but they too stayed short of requesting some concrete and punitive measures.
" It is important that these [Serb] civilians start moving and then the army will follow them, and when the columns start moving, they will have a psychological effect on each other. That means we provide them with an exit, while on the other hand we feign (pretend) to guarantee civilian human rights and the like " -- Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, during War Council meeting in July 1995
The only ones from UN troops who tried to prevent Croatian atrocities, and in couple occasions fought bravely against bloody-thirsty Croatian soldiers, where Canadian peacekeepers from "Patricia Company", but they too, where upon return to Canada, silenced and their experience never got real media traction. Their testimony simply did not fit with the Western agenda, that Serbs are the only bad guys
THE REAL ATROCIOUS OUTCOME OF THE BIGGEST ETHNIC CLEANSING IN POST-WWII EUROPE IS MUCH HIGHER, THEN THE OFFICIAL FIGURES STATEWhile ICTY prosecutors accepted the fact that some 200,000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed in just couple of days from Krajina region, they "lowered" the number of murdered Serbian civilians to 324. Serbian sources on the ground documented 1,192 dead or missing civilians, while Croatian Helsinki Committee documented 677 killed.
Human Rights Watch documented at least 5,000 Serbian homes razed to the ground by Croatian forces, and HRW accused Croats for summary executions of elderly and disabled Serbs, who stayed behind due to inability or unwillingness to leave their homes. We can only imagine if the entire defenseless Serbian civilian population stayed behind, and faced bloody-thirsty Croatian soldiers- in that case we would be talking here about a full scale genocide, not "just" the ethnic cleansing!?
To better understand what kind of "Croatian justice" were facing defenseless Serbian civilians, who decided not to leave their homes during operation Storm, here is one excerpt from Wikipedia, describing one of many of Croatian "post-Storm" atrocities against innocent civilians-
"The Varivode massacre was a mass killing that occurred on 28 September 1995 in the village of Varivode , Croatia during the Croatian War of Independence . According to United Nations officials, soldiers of the Croatian Army (HV) and Croatian police killed nine Croatian Serb villagers, all of whom were between the ages of 60 and 85. [4] After the war, six former Croatian soldiers were tried for committing crimes in the village, but were all eventually released due to lack of evidence On the night of 28 September 1995, Croatian soldiers entered the village of Varivode and killed nine elderly Serb villagers. The civilians that were killed were Jovan Berić, Marko Berić, Milka Berić, Radivoje Berić, Marija Berić, Dušan Dukić, Jovo Berić, Špiro Berić and Mirko Pokrajac. After the executions occurred, the bodies were buried in a cemetery near the village without the knowledge of the families of the victims. [4] After the massacre, Croatian authorities denied reports of widespread atrocities targeting Serbs and said that they were propaganda. Later, the government blamed the atrocities on uncontrollable elements within the Croatian Army and Croatian police. [25] Christiane Amanpour 's report from October 1995 said that the "United Nations believes 12 Serb civilians were massacred." [25] In the first one hundred days following Operation Storm, at least 150 Serb civilians were summarily executed, and many hundreds disappeared as part of a widespread campaign of revenge against Croatia's Serb minority. [26] The bodies of the killed Serbs were never exhumed, autopsies were never performed and much of the evidence that could have been used against the perpetrators of the crime was discarded. [27] Despite this, six Croatian soldiers were tried for committing crimes in the village. The soldiers were Ivan Jakovljević, Peri Perković, Neđeljko Mijić, Zlatko Ladović, Ivica Petrić and Nikola Rašić. However, in 2002 they were all released due to the lack of evidence against them. [27] In July 2012, the Supreme Court of Croatia ruled that the Republic of Croatia was responsible for the deaths of the nine Serb villagers who were killed in Varivode. The Supreme Court declared, "two months after the conclusion of Operation Storm, an act of terrorism was committed against the Serb inhabitants of Varivode for the purpose of causing fear, hopelessness and to spread feelings of personal insecurity among the citizens." [35] – Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varivode_massacre
By 2012, Croatian government received 6,390 reports about committed war crimes against Serbian civilians, during and after operation Storm, but did little or nothing to bring the perpetrators to justice.
To make things worse and more humiliating for surviving Krajina Serbs, Croatian government is still refusing to return (or reimburse) 140,000 Serbian homes, stolen from ethnic Serbs. 795 Serbs, presumed dead, are still missing, 1,604 bodies were retrieved- according to NGO "Veritas".
Croats were attacking Krajina using the strategy of "Scorched Earth", with unconditional US support
DID THE CROATS SUCCESSFULLY BLACKMAIL U.S. GOVERNMENT INTO SUBMISSION, FORCING THEM TO OVERTURN THE INITIAL ICTY RULING!?Defense ministers celebrating the joint outcome of the biggest ethnic cleansing in Europe since WWII- Left: US William Perry, Right: CRO Gojkos Susak
The initial ICTY ruling in 2011, which sentenced Croatian generals Gotovina and Markac to long term imprisonment, was expected, and very well supported by the "conclusive evidence". Even, according to many international experts, this sentencing was not enough tough, and did not cover the full scale of war crimes and atrocities, committed by Croatian political and military leadership, during and in the aftermath of operation Storm. Still, many Serbian victims were satisfied that they finally achieved at least some justice
So, when in November 2012 ICTY appeal chamber ruled that Croatian generals are innocent of all charges and free to go, the news came to many as a complete shock, and reaffirmed them in a belief that ICTY tribunal is just another NATO war tool, in their efforts to punish and humiliate, not only the Serbian government, but the numerous Serbian victims of civil wars in 90ies, whose executors were never (and probably never will be) brought to justice.
The ruling was very controversial, not only because it ignored all the hard evidence, including the forensics and the testimony of the international observers, but because the formal excuse for the liberating judgment was – that in the prosecutor documents were missing the Croatian artillery log books, that according to the Appeal chamber, were the only document that would prove the Croatian intent to drive Serbian population from Krajina. The same books were previously repeatedly requested by the ICTY prosecutors, and Croatia did not even deny its existence, but simply refused to cooperate with ICTY and hand them over. Finally, when in 2008 Croatia was warned by European leaders that non-cooperation with ICTY might affect the prospect of its EU membership – somebody from the Croatian leadership simply destroyed these books, and they informed Hague tribunal that Artillery logs no longer exist. Even such provocative and blunt obstruction of the international justice by the Croatian government, did not result in any repercussions for them, and practically they were forgiven for their deeds. Crime pays – doesn't it?
Anyway, ICTY tribunal had plenty of other evidence, proving the intentional destruction of Serbian civilian infrastructure was very well documented by the international observers, and in April 2011 ICTY had no choice but to sentence general Gotovina to 24 years, and general Markac to 18 years.
Another fact that indicates that Appeal chamber' ruling was the political one, and result of some external interference was its split decision – the chamber ruled by the majority decision 3 – 2, implying that there were serious doubts and disagreements, by at least two of the Appeal chamber judges.
"American concern is that if General Gotovina is arrested he may carry out a threat to disclose previously unknown extent of US covert involvement in the Krajina offensive " – London Times, June 14th, 2003.
Gotovina was arrested, but only shortly, until Croatian blackmail convinced their US masters, to pull strings in ICTY, and free him unconditionally
CROATIAN OFFICIALS PROVIDED A PLENTY OF EVIDENCE THAT U.S. GOVERNMENT WAS INVOLVED IN "STORM" MILITARILY, AND HAD A FULL CONTROL OVER WAR (CRIMES) ACTIVITIES THAT TOOK PLACE ON THE GROUNDAs soon the ICTY indictments against Croatian leaders were announced in 2001, the Croatian government, NGOs, public, and very well organized and connected diaspora, displayed anger and disagreement, promising that they will do everything in their power to obstruct ICTY investigations and prevent trials against their "national heroes". When in 2011, the first instance judgment by ICTY was issued and Croatian generals were sentenced to long term imprisonment, the Croatian Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor and President Ivo Josipovic publicly expressed their shock and rejection of the ruling, promising to help to overturn the judgment, on appeal!?
And they started their campaign – of obstruction of justice, of abetting the accused war criminals, of the intimidation, and finally, of the blackmail, of ICTY and US officials –
On July 4th, 2002, NGO associated with Croatian government "Croatian World Congress- CWC" filed complaint with ICTY citing what proofs, about US direct involvement in ethnic cleansing of Krajina, they have:
" US officials aided General Gotovina and the Croatian army in operation Storm by violating UN arms embargo and allowing Croatia to obtain weapons US officials established a CIA base inside General Gotovina' military base, which provided the US officials with real-time video footage of events transpiring on the ground during Operation Storm (and thus imputing to them knowledge of events on the ground ), but also from which they could provide such intelligence data to General Gotovina to assist him in conducting Operation Storm . If General Gotovina carried out pre-planed campaign to deport 150,000 to 200,000 Croatian Serbian civilians, the CIA base was not only used to provide knowledge to US officials of such plan and course of conduct on the part of General Gotovina , but was also used to assist General Gotovina in achieving the goals of his alleged plan . The US official gave the green light for the Operation and provided diplomatic and political support for it . The US officials at all times had the ability to halt the military operations . Accordingly, the US officials named in the complaint should be indicted for having aided and abetted General Gotovina. "
Ethnic cleansing in Krajina was the joint US/CRO criminal enterprise History will be the judge
If you read carefully through this CWC statement (threat), they are not even trying to deny Gotovina' war crimes, they are just implying bluntly, that if their lovely General was sentenced, they would gladly provide ICTY with the evidence of Croatian-American "Joint criminal enterprise to forcibly remove the Serb population from Croatia ", as it states the ICTY indictment from 2001, of course omitting the US participation (which was the very secret deal, at least until Croatian officials started "mouthing" their "American friends").
Croatian complaint to ICTY specifically named the highest US officials, alleging that they, along General Gotovina, committed too war crimes against Serbian population:
"On behalf of the Croatian World Congress, a non-governmental organization that is a member of the United Nations with advisory status, you are hereby notified pursuant to Article 18(1) of the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia of the existence of information concerning serious violations of international humanitarian law (hereinafter "IHL"), namely that officials of the United States of America, including but not limited to William Jefferson Clinton , Anthony Lake , Samuel Berger , Richard Holbrooke , Peter Galbraith and/or George J. Tenet (hereinafter collectively referred to as "U.S. officials"), aided and abetted Croatian General Ante Gotovina , who was indicted by your office on 8 June 2001."
War Criminals at work together- Croatian general Kresimir Cosic and US supreme commander general Wesley Clark
We are not going here to present detailed evidence of US crimes, committed during the operation Storm. Of course, the Croatian war crimes on the ground were very brutal, systematic and savage, they did "the physical work", but from the evidence provided by numerous Croatian officials and their organizations, it is very obvious, that operation Storm would never happen, or if happened never would be successful, without US military support and direct supervision, or without US approval.
Just to give you "a taste" what kind of American support Croats were enjoying during their atrocious operation against innocent Serbian civilians, will present you with some documented facts:
The Green Light for the operation came a couple days prior the assault- President Clinton passed the order directly to US military attaché in Zagreb Colonel Richard Herrick; Herrick passed order to Croatian head of military intelligence Markica Rebic (the others involved directly were defense minister Gojko Susak, Miro Tudjman and Miro Medimurac, heads of Secret Service and Intelligence Service). US masters were so pleased with Rebic' service, that they rewarded him with Meritorious Service Medal, delivered to him by Ambassador Galbraith in 1996. The other people from USG involved in this joint criminal enterprise with Croats, in addition to Clinton, were Anthony Lake and William Perry. US masters imposed the time limit on operation Storm- it had to be completed in 5 days.
Long before the Storm, in 1992 USG with Croatian approval established CIA reconnaissance base on island of Brac, from where CIA operators were flying unmanned aircraft spying on Serbian positions in Krajina, Bosnia and part of Serbia itself. USG requested that this cooperation to be held a top secret, so outsiders don't find that US is taking sides in the Balkans' civil wars. But it did not stay for too long the top secret. On January 1st, 1994, Croatian state security apprehended a spy on the base perimeter. They delivered him right away to General Gotovina, to find out it was their German ally, precisely it was German military attaché Hans Schwan.
This incident alerted USG, which wanted to conceal any covert activities on behalf of CG, so they promptly removed CIA base to new secret location, in Sepurina, near city of Zadar. This new location was covered by three security layers, to ensure the full secrecy. From new base CIA started immediately collecting photographic and video evidence of Serbian activities in Krajina and Bosnia, and passing them to Croats, and to Pentagon. There was 24 hours, 6 member intelligence crew, present on site- consisting of three CIA and three Croatian military officers.
Croatian military base Sepurine, near Zadar, from which CIA operated drones, aiding operation Storm, and providing live video feed of "military activities" on the ground to Pentagon
"STORM" WASN'T THE FIRST ETHNIC CLEANSING, UNDERTAKEN BY CROATIA AND US, AS A JOINT CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE:It is interesting that disgruntled (by ICTY indictment) Croatian Officials and Croatian World Congress body, in their complaint to ICTY, are providing the evidence about USG intelligence and logistical support for another Croatian genocidal operation, named Flash, that took place in Western Slavonia, between May 1st and 3rd, 1995, which resulted in another complete ethnic cleansing of Serbian population- prior to the operation this area was populated by 29,000 Serbs, after Flash, only 1,500 remained.
The number of killed civilians is unknown because Croats prevented UNPROFOR troops from accessing the area, until they did "the sanitation" (read: removing the evidence of their crimes, because entire Serbian refugee columns were massacred and overran by Croatian tanks). Estimates of killed civilians rage between one hundred to couple thousands. Another example of "the successful US-CRO joint criminal enterprise"?
The interesting details, revealed here by Croatian sources, is- that US military attaché Herrick was attached to the Croatian mobile military command, during the genocidal operation Flash, supervising it directly- and the head of CIA branch in Zagreb Marc Kelton was directly coordinating expulsion of Slavonia' Serbs, with Croatian president Tudjman son Miro.
In the eve of the attack on Krajina, on August 4th 1995, between midnight and 4 a.m. Croatian forces were ordered to turn off all telecommunication devices, to unable US air force to electronically disable all Serbian communications.
The outcome of Joint US/CRO "justice"
According to NATO spokesman Jim Mitchell in Aviano, Italy, two US military planes EA-6B Prowlers were dispatched to Krajina air space. USAF planes, on the top of jamming Serbian telecommunications, destroyed the airport Udbine, and Radar and Serbian Air Defense near Knin, in order to prevent any Serbian air support or defence, against invading Croatian forces.
Here, US military attaché Herrick was replaced by the Colonel John Sadler, who was embedded with Gotovina command unit, directly supervising operation Storm. Pentagon was also directly monitoring the operation via live video feed.
Shortly after the biggest joint (US/CRO) ethnic cleansing in Europe was completed, US head of DIA General Colonel Patrick Hughes visited Croatia to coordinate further military actions against Serbs in Bosnia and if necessary in Republic of Serbia
Crime pays, doesn't
ghartwell AriusArmenian • 4 hours ago ,
AriusArmenian • a day ago ,Hitler, it has been reported, in 'Secret History of the Twentieth Century' by Herbert Dorsey, commended the USA for having 'gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand.' This way of 'winning the West' type-casts American as imperialist and certainly sympathetic with much we associated with fascism. America lead the world in race-based lawmaking to safeguard the historically white character of the country. Including immigration legislation to guarantee the predominance of northern Europe and shut the doors on Jews, Italians, Asians and others. Nazi commentators called this keeping out the 'undesirables.' The eugenics movement took root in the United States in the early 1900's.
Richard AriusArmenian • a day ago ,This article concerns the largest ethnic cleansing in Balkans that was committed by Croatia with US operational support. The US committed multiple war crimes in the Balkans in the 1990's.
After the 1990's the US has clearly emerged the fascist rogue state of the 21st century.Merijn AriusArmenian • 17 hours ago ,Also today in Yemen ,US tax dollars at work .
Don't forget The Freemason-Muslimbrotherhood & the Mujahideen-al-Qaeda & Osama Bin Laden beheaded many Serbs in Bosnia...
Clinton wanted to create a Wahhabi Islamic State in Europe...
https://www.google.nl/amp/s...http://csef.ru/en/oborona-i...
Kosovo became a Paradise too....for Criminals that is
https://www.google.nl/amp/s...Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic, lower right, meeting with Al-Qaeda linked Arab-Afghan mujahedeen in Bosnia..
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Mar 29, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Posted by: ashley albanese | Mar 28, 2018 6:47:49 PM | 33
Germany - if I remember correctly - was instrumental on behalf of her client state Croatia in persuading the U S to acquise in the destruction of Yugoslavia.
Many could see at the time that this would unravel all the balances put into place after the travail of World War 2 . So it is proving to be . The German peoples' for whatever reasons have a history of 'overeach'. On one hand the Germans are now - after millennium - within settled borders but the political and economic wisdom and patience still seems lacking .ashley albanese | Mar 28, 2018 6:47:49 PM | 33
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Oct 02, 2017 | failedevolution.blogspot.gr
'Double standard & hypocrisy': Serbian president on EU denouncement of Catalan referendum Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has accused the EU of hypocrisy and double-standards following its denouncement of the Catalonian referendum as illegal, while acknowledging the independence of the breakaway province of Kosovo.
" The question every citizen of Serbia has for the European Union today is: How come that in the case of Catalonia the referendum on independence is not valid, while in the case of Kosovo secession is allowed even without a referendum, " B92 quoted Vucic as saying during a news conference.
" How did you proclaim the secession of Kosovo to be legal, even without a referendum, and how did 22 European Union countries legalize this secession, while destroying European law and the foundations of European law, on which the European policy and EU policy are based? "
On Monday the European Commission echoed the Spanish government's stance that the referendum held in Catalonia was illegal, describing the events on Sunday, which saw voters being beaten by Spanish riot police, as an "internal matter". By contrast in 2010, the European Parliament adopted a resolution urging its member states to recognize Kosovo's independence.
" This is the best example of the double standards and hypocrisy of the world politics, " Vucic said.
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Jul 30, 2017 | nationalinterest.org
The U.S. Sanctions Bill Is a Win for Russia The National InterestАТО Willem Post , July 29, 2017 10:36 AM
Willem Post АТО , July 29, 2017 5:01 PMWillem Post: "Russia peacefully annexed Crimea"
Haha! You should listen to Poo teen (aka Putin) speach when he rcognized that "green humans" in Crimea were Russian armed forces soldiers. And that so-called voting was a farce under the Russians machine guns.
And don't forget: according to Ukrainian laws
no part of the country can decide its parting without a vouting of the whole country
ATO,
Is that happened regarding Kosovo?The Parliament, egged on by the US and EU, declared the Kosovo area independent. And much later that was ratified by popular vote to "make it look legal".
Kosovo's population were ethnic Albanians, who are Muslim. The EU foolishly applauded creating a Muslim State in the Middle of East Europe.
The Kosovo area had been part of Serbia for over 1000 years. Serbia did not agree to its dismemberment, but was bombed into submission with B-52s by NATO under Bill Clinton.
Crimea already was an independent state within Ukraine with its own parliament. The popular vote to be annexed by Russia took place in peace because Russia had adequate Green men to keep the peace and keep Ukraine armed forces on their bases, so they could not interfere.
Russia can have 22,000 armed services troops in Crimea, per Russia-Ukraine agreement. Russia never exceeded that number, as it was not necessary, i.e., there was no military invasion and voters were not herded to the polls to vote by guns.
Oligarch mercenaries would have entered Crimea, and it would have been just as bad as Donetsk, etc., with thousands killed.
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Not only Russia/China/India, 40% of humanity - the only 3 out of the UN Security Council 15 members that voted against the US/NATO war on ("on" because it was the coward's war, from the air, not the traditional war, on the ground, "in") Yugoslavia - but most analysts would see the war as foreboding things to come, like the Gulf war in 1991 was seen at the time.
The minor conflict, in and around Kosovo, is now developing more or less as expected: the trilateral low intensity war (NATO-KLA-Serbs) is there and will probably escalate much further. It will drag on for decades, generations, centuries as No. 4 of a succession of Serbian-Albanian fights only since 1878 (the other three being on conjunction with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in that region, leading up to and including the First world war, Mussolini's Greater Albania in connection with the Second world war).
It is also very tragic because the crisis of 1998-99 could probably have been solved by (for more see http://www.transcend.org):
- expanding the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission by a factor of 10, up to 12-20,000;
- verifying that the observers are there to dampen, even eliminate acts of ethnic cleansing, not for other purposes;
- closing the border between Albania and Kosovo/a to prevent UCK infiltration (as was done between Serbia and Macedonia);
- open negotiations on the status of Kosovo/a with republic within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as one option;
- open negotiations about the status of Southern Balkans with confederation as one option;
- guaranteed and protected return of displaced persons including Serbs back to Krajina/Slavonija and to Bosnia and Hercegovina.
The first three measures of peacekeeping would provide space for the next three to start meaningful peacemaking/peacebuilding.
Consequences of the war
Instead of any real effort to solve the conflict we got the following "Consequences of NATO's War on Yugoslavia": (8)
- NATO state terrorism against Yugoslavia destroyed 300 factories and refineries, 190 educational establishments, 20 hospitals, 30 clinics, 60 bridges, 5 airports;
- to the estimated 2,000 deaths (600 military) and 6,000 wounded come those who die from destruction of health infrastructure;
- only 12-15 tanks (of 300 main battle tanks) were destroyed;
- almost all destruction was to public, not private enterprises;
- the US hatred of nonaligned/neutral countries may have been a factor in targeting Yugoslavia;
- some countries join NATO as an insurance against being bombed;
- remember that between November 1998 and March 1999 there was no evidence of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo; Germany sent back 11,000 Kosovar refugees;
- the Spanish pilot Adolfo Luis Martin de la Hoz, in Articulo 20, 14 June 1999: "They are destroying the country, bombing it with novel weapons, toxic nervous gases, surface mines dropped with parachute bombs containing uranium, black napalm, sterilization chemicals, sprayings to poison the crops and weapons of which we even still do not know anything. The North Americans are committing one of the biggest barbarities that can be committed against humanity". He refused to bomb, so did his superior, a colonel. Both were removed.
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12/08/2016
Outrageous: Slobodan Milosevic cleared of charges by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. But no-one is talking about it!
The ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) has discharged Slobodan Milosevic from 1992-95 Bosnian war crimes allegations. This is definitely prime time news, while it holds endless political implications. Oddly enough, though, no major international mainstream media seems to have noticed.
Well, it is understable for everyone to be keeping it quiet: those who with one voice did dub him the "butcher of the Balkans"; those who associated him to Hitler, initiating a pattern which would later be extended to Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, and which many would like to stretch further on to Bashar al-Assad. It is easy to read in the silence of the West's chancellors, most notably the United States', who doomed Yugoslavia and willed the end of Milosevic.
They may well do that, since Slobodan Milosevic's "rehabilitation" is nowhere to be seen yet. The court ruling where to look for is the one which led the same court to issue a 40-years sentence for Radovan Karadzic. Therefore, one is to read through the bulky papers ruling before being able to realize that Milosevic was not guilty for the charges for which he spent the last five years of his life behind bars and encircled by universal shame. That's the trick. Karadzic's sentence dates back to 24th March of this year. We're halfway through August and the worldwide mainstream media are not even remotely showing any sign of awareness. Or they figure it is more convenient not to.
This way, no Western leader is going to have to apologize at all, to Yugoslavia, to Serbia, to the unwitting peoples of Europe. Actually, if we knew better, it would be their turn to be sitting on the stand now. Precisely in that 24th March ruling, the court who tried Milosevic stated that "the Chamber is not satisfied that there was sufficient evidence presented in this case to find that Slobodan Milosevic agreed with the common plan" (ICTY, Karadzic Judgment, 24 March 2016, Para. 3460) demanded by the Serbs to expel Bosnian muslims and Croato-Bosnians out of Bosnian territory.
Yet, the wording here is willingly blurry. The point is not "sufficient evidence". The same sentence reaffirms more than once, and by quoting documented evidence, the existence of substantial divergences between Milosevic and Karadzic in several crucial turnpoints of that mournful crisis. For instance, the ruling assessed that Milosevic opposed the decision of establishing a Serb Republic.
More than a few other instances have now surfaced, revealing what was already well-known to those who genuinely wished to know: that is, Milosevic had been striving to the end – namely, the set off of NATO bombings over Serbia- to strike an agreement with Western leaders – and it was Mme Albright who decided no-one was to sign that deal.
Five years of prison – the last of his life- were agreed for up in high European and US headquarters, in utter disrespect for any form of justice and in the name of an act of abuse by means of which Yugoslavia has been torn apart and shattered to bits. And his death in prison took place in highly suspicious circumstances and blatantly inhuman conditions. Officially, he died from a heart attack. However, that came two weeks after the Court had denied him permission to be treated in Russia, as he had requested. The former Yugoslavian President died in his cell three days after his lawyer had managed to send a letter to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in which he wrote he feared of being poisoned.
We do know now what kind of "justice" was the one that Court was after: the victor's. They now clear Milosevic's name, while still concealing their persuasion. It is no act of carelessness. Korean justice O-Gon, who presided Karadzic's trial, was also to be found in the lot who tried Milosevic, that is until he died. That justice had deep insight in both trials' works and records. We are but left with wondering on whose payroll he and his honorable colleagues might be. The West is drowning in its own filth, along with those values it shamelessly claims everyday to be willing to protect.
Author: Giulietto Chiesa
Translation: Oliviero Martini
Giulietto Chiesa is one of the best known Italian journalists. He was Moscow correspondent for twenty years for "L'Unità" and "La Stampa". He worked with all major Italian television channels, from the TG1 to TG3 and TG5 and is currently political analyst for major Russian television channels. He is the only Italian journalist to be repeatedly mentioned in the autobiography of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he has repeatedly interviewed. He writes a blog for "Il Fatto Quotidiano". His own blog is http://www.megachip.info/. He is founder and director of Pandoratv.it web tv. An expert in international politics and communications scholar, he founded the political-cultural movement "Alternativa". Among his credits there are some best-sellers such as "Endless War", "Superclan" (with Marcello Villari), "Barack Obush" (with Pino Cabras) and the movie "Zero, an inquiry into 9/11". He is one of the initiators of Sofia Club and of the Delphi Inititative. His new book, "Putinophobia" is to come out simultaneously in France, where the author was invited as a guest at the Paris Book Fair, and in Russia.
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July 17, 2012
US Policy in the Balkans: Imperial ambition or side issue of no great importance?
Many questions remain as to the real reasons for the NATO and US bombing of the former Yugoslavia. Was it a test run for an even grander plan of world domination? Was it a political move to draw attention away from a US president's infidelities? Recently the site Wikileaks began publishing the Statfor e-mails, some of them contain bombshells, others an inside look into the often twisted thinking behind US policy. You decide which one this is.
Recently while going through some information on the Wikileaks site, as many journalists I am sure do, trying to find something of interest or perhaps a bombshell, I came across an e-mail regarding an article by the founder, CEO and self-described chief intelligence officer of the private intelligence corporation Stratfor.
The original can be seen here: http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/299114_geopolitical-intelligence-report-russia-kosovo-and-the.html
The reason Stratfor is an important organization to watch, in my opinion, is because they provide intelligence to private individuals and corporations worldwide that is used in the implementation of policy and the formation of plans and goals. Stratfor also closely echoes the official and often unspoken position of the U.S. on issues that have global impact. Those two points and the fact that Stratfor has, or at least wants you to believe they have, close connections to the U.S. intelligence community may allow the observer to obtain a look at the thinking that is used in the formulation of U.S. policy and/or activities.
As a piece currently published on their site shows Stratfor does not hide the U.S.' imperial ambitions or its plans at world domination, which brings me back to the subject of the e-mail I mentioned above. The article by George Friedman, about which the e-mail was written, was disturbing as it describes in an open, candid and arrogant manner U.S. policy regarding Kosovo, the Balkans and the former Yugoslavia.
The article itself was written in December of 2007 but is still revealing enough to be of historical significance as it shows the attitude of the U.S. towards Russia as well, during a time when Russia welcomed the U.S. with (for lack of a better expression) open arms.
His first claim regarding Kosovo, is that it is an "archaic topic", he also says it isn't regarded seriously and that you "… hear about it but you don't care." This is definitely a point that the Serb people would have a problem with and clearly shows a belittling attitude toward the whole conflict.
His comments about Russia are no better and he states that at the time of the Yugoslavia campaign, Russia was weak and its wishes were irrelevant. He goes on to describe how the U.S. intentionally lied to Russia so Russia would end the war the U.S. started, and was apparently helpless to stop, by promising Russia a peacekeeping role in Kosovo which the U.S. never allowed. He also repeats how the events in Kosovo "fly in the face of Russia" as if this alone is reason enough for what they are doing in Serbia.
Mr. Friedman goes on to admit that the so called "atrocities" that were supposed to have occurred in Kosovo and what the Clinton administration said was taking place were all fabrications and that this "was not the point". So what was the point? The point was that the U.S. and NATO had geopolitical plans for the Balkans and were set on dividing and remaking the region to their own advantage or as Mr. Friedman put it "continue the policy of re-engineering Yugoslavia."
Regarding supporting the independence of Kosovo he admits in perfectly clear terms that the U.S. and NATO (KFOR) are operating "… without either a U.N. or NATO mandate."
The arrogance continues with opinions-presented- as-fact regarding Russia and Russian thinking or beliefs. Mr. Friedman also makes several statements and claims regarding what President Vladimir Putin was thinking or feeling as if he had access to the President's thoughts or emotions. Something completely inappropriate when speaking about a head of state, a leader which it was clear the writer knew almost nothing about.
The piece ends with the following and I quote, "But here is the basic fact: For the United States and its allies, Kosovo is a side issue of no great importance." I am sure that for the Serbian people, who view Kosovo as an integral and extremely important part of their heritage and country, such a statement and such thinking would be cause for alarm, to say the least.
Neither Mr. Friedman nor Startfor responded to requests for comments or an interview regarding the e-mail in question.
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A parallel with the world around 1930
But how about the major conflict, NATO/AMPO/TIAP againstthe world? What does this remind us of? How many years have we been set back by this war by "19 democracies" (NATO)/"democratic totalitarianism" (Zinoviev)? Possible ans wer: 65 years.
The parallel that comes to mind, mentioned by Solzhenitsyn, is Hitler's use of the national conflict between Sudeten/Germans and Czechs, the pressure on Czechoslovakia (with the support of England). Japan's attack on Manchuria 1931-45 and Italy's attack on Ethiopia 1935-41 were also against the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 (Briand got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926, Kellogg in 1929): 62 states, among them all major powers, agreed to renounce war as political instrument and to settle all international disputes by peaceful means.
The exceptions were wars of self-defense or miliary obligations from the League Covenant, the Monroe doctrine or alliance obligations - similar to the UN Charter Article 2(4), with exceptions. Both valid international law, with holes.
The three dictatorships were above the law and the League. They brushed all resolutions aside, lifted by their visions of a New Order: Neuordnung/Nuovo Ordine/dai-to-a. Their propaganda was as massive as the NATO propaganda with its insulting "apologies" for "collateral damage" that so obviously was intended by those on top from the very beginning. (The world did not have Internet at the time, that helps today).
But the power was on the side of those "above the law" because of a criterion of their own choice - although there was probably more popular will behind what those dictatorships did than for the sneaky action by the "democracies"). The dictatorships followed up what they started: the Second world war. The USA, using NATO-AMPO-TIAP, is probably tempted to do the same, starting with North Korea and Colombia(?), to implement their New World Order.
Unfortunately, this kind of politics is accompanied by a general attitude of self-righteousness and self-appointment. To the present President, William Jefferson Clinton, America has become the world's "indispensable nation". Since JCS has been drawn upon to show the political/military tradition enacted, it is worth pointing out that to one recent Chairman of the JCS, Colin Powell, "America was created by divine providence to bring order to the world", and to his successor, John Shalikashvili, the USA is nothing less than a "global nation with global interests". To such a nation world hegemony is not a right. It is a duty to be "international police force", whether others agree or not.
The US/UK-NATO attack: What could be the real motives?
When two countries with a very belligerent track record, able to legitimize their belligerence, launch a war, we have to identify motives in the subtext rather than in published texts.
Here is a list of possible (not mutually exclusive) motives; the list may serve to identify motivations in other conflict arenas:
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Society
Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers : Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy
Quotes
War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes : Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce : Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes
Bulletin:
Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law
History:
Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds : Larry Wall : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS : Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development : Scripting Languages : Perl history : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history
Classic books:
The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month : How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite
Most popular humor pages:
Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor
The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D
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