[Peace-discuss] Fwd: ZNet Update & Pilger Commentary

[Morton K.Brussel]

[Remembering… .  mkb]

> HOW SILENT ARE THE 'HUMANITARIAN' INVADERS OF KOSOVO?
> John Pilger
>
> Muted by the evidence of the Anglo-American catastrophe in Iraq, the
> international "humanitarian" war party ought to be called to account 
> for
> its largely forgotten crusade in Kosovo, the model for Tony Blair's
> "onward march of liberation". Just as Iraq is being torn apart by the
> forces of empire, so was Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic state that
> uniquely rejected both sides in the cold war.
>
> Lies as great as those of Bush and Blair were deployed by Clinton and
> Blair in their grooming of public opinion for an illegal, unprovoked
> attack on a European country. Like the build-up to the invasion of 
> Iraq,
> the media coverage in the spring of 1999 was a series of fraudulent
> justifications, beginning with US Defence Secretary William Cohen's
> claim that "we've now seen about 100,000 military-aged [Albanian] men
> missing... they may have been murdered." David Scheffer, the US
> ambassador at large for war crimes, announced that as many as "225,000
> ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" may have been killed. Blair
> invoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War". The
> British press took its cue. "Flight from genocide," said the Daily 
> Mail.
> "Echoes of the Holocaust," chorused the Sun and the Mirror.
>
> By June 1999, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams
> began subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The American FBI arrived
> to investigate what was called "the largest crime scene in the FBI's
> forensic history". Several weeks later, having not found a single mass
> grave, the FBI went home. The Spanish forensic team also returned home,
> its leader complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become
> part of "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because 
> we
> did not find one - not one - mass grave."
>
> In November 1999, the Wall Street Journal published the results of its
> own investigation, dismissing "the mass grave obsession". Instead of
> "the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect ... the
> pattern is of scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist
> Kosovo Liberation Army had been active." The Journal concluded that 
> Nato
> stepped up its claims about Serb killing fields when it "saw a fatigued
> press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by
> Nato's bombs ... The war in Kosovo was "cruel, bitter, savage; genocide
> it wasn't."
>
> One year later, the International War Crimes Tribunal, a body
> effectively set up by Nato, announced that the final count of bodies
> found in Kosovo's "mass graves" was 2,788. This included combatants on
> both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the Albanian Kosovo 
> Liberation
> Army. Like Iraq's fabled weapons of mass destruction, the figures used
> by the US and British governments and echoed by journalists were
> inventions - along with Serb "rape camps" and Clinton's and Blair's
> claims that Nato never deliberately bombed civilians.
>
> Code-named 'Stage Three', Nato's civilian targets included public
> transport, hospitals, schools, museums, churches. "It was common
> knowledge that Nato went to Stage Three [after a couple of weeks]," 
> said
> James Bissell, the Canadian ambassador in Belgrade during the attack.
> "Otherwise, they would not have been bombing bridges on Sunday
> afternoons and market places."
>
> Nato's clients were the Kosovo Liberation Army. Seven years earlier, 
> the
> KLA had been designated by the State Department as a terrorist
> organisation in league with Al Qaida. KLA thugs were feted; Foreign
> Secretary Robin Cook allowed them to call him on his mobile phone. "The
> Kosovo-Albanians played us like a Stradivarius," wrote the UN Balkans
> commander, Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, last April. "We have
> subsidised and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an
> ethnically pure Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the
> perpetrators of the violence in the early 1990s and we continue to
> portray them as the designated victim today in spite of evidence to the
> contrary."
>
> The trigger for the bombing of Yugoslavia was, according to Nato, the
> failure of the Serbian delegation to sign up to the Rambouillet peace
> conference. What went mostly unreported was that the Rambouillet accord
> had a secret Annexe B, which Madeline Albright's delegation had 
> inserted
> on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of
> Yugoslavia, a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation. As
> the Foreign Office minister Lord Gilbert later conceded to a Commons'
> defence select committee, Annexe B was planted deliberately to provoke
> rejection by the government in Belgrade. As the first bombs fell, the
> elected parliament in Belgrade, which included some of Milosevic's
> fiercest opponents, voted overwhelmingly to reject it.
>
> Equally revealing was a chapter dealing exclusively with the Kosovo
> economy. This called for a "free-market economy" and the privatisation
> of all government assets. As the Balkans writer Neil Clark has pointed
> out, "the rump of Yugoslavia... was the last economy in 
> central-southern
> Europe to be uncolonised by western capital. 'Socially owned
> enterprises', the form of worker self-management pioneered under Tito,
> still predominated. Yugoslavia had publicly owned petroleum, mining, 
> car
> and tobacco industries, and 75 per cent of industry was state or
> socially owned."
>
> At the Davos summit of neo-liberal chieftains in 1999, Blair berated
> Belgrade, not for its handling of Kosovo, but for its failure to fully
> embrace "economic reform". In the bombing campaign that followed, it 
> was
> state owned companies, rather than military sites, that were targeted.
> Nato's destruction of only 14 Yugoslav army tanks compares with its
> bombing of 372 centres of industry, including the Zastava car factory,
> leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. "Not one foreign or privately
> owned factory was bombed," wrote Clark.
>
> Erected on the foundation of this massive lie, Kosovo today is a
> violent, criminalised UN-administered "free market" in drugs and
> prostitution. More than 200,000 Serbs, Roma, Bosniacs, Turks, Croats 
> and
> Jews have been ethnically cleansed by the KLA with Nato forces standing
> by. KLA hit squads have burned, looted or demolished 85 Orthodox
> churches and monasteries, according to the UN. The courts are venal.
> "You shot an 89-year-old Serb grandmother?" mocked a UN narcotics
> officer. "Good for you. Get out of jail."
>
> Although Security Council Resolution 1244 recognises Kosovo as an
> integral part of Yugoslavia, and does not authorise the UN
> administration to sell off anything, multinational companies are being
> offered 10 and 15 year leases of the province's local industries and
> resources, including the vast Trepca mines, some of the richest mineral
> deposits in the world. After Hitler captured them in 1940, the mines
> supplied German munition factories with 40 per cent of their lead.
> Overseeing this plundered, murderous, now almost ethnically pure 
> "future
> democracy" (Blair), are 4,000 American troops in Camp Bondsteel, a
> 775-acre permanent base.
>
> Meanwhile, the trial of Milosevic proceeds as farce, not unlike an
> earlier show trial in The Hague: that of the Libyans blamed for the
> Lockerbie bomb. Milosevic was a brute; he was also a banker once
> regarded as the west's man who was prepared to implement "economic
> reforms" in keeping with IMF, World Bank and European Community 
> demands;
> to his cost, he refused to surrender sovereignty. The empire expects
> nothing less.
>
> First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk
> <outbind://10/www.newstatesman.co.uk>
>
> John Pilger's new book, Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and
> its Triumphs, is published by Jonathan Cape.
>
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