hob•gob•lin, hob'gob''lin, n.
Something causing dread or unreasonable
fear.
"Don't send me anything like that again,"
he wrote, the words spelled out in
capitals to emphasize his anger. "Milosevic is a cold-blooded
murderer. And you're a holocaust denier." I flinched.
When I had asked
about a hundred people to sign a petition appealing for
Slobodan Milosevic's release from
jail, I fully expected I'd draw a few fevered
replies, but nothing quite so heated. I was hoping a few
would sign. A silly hope, really. Why
would anyone sign a petition to free Slobodan
Milosevic, the butcher of Belgrade, the genocidist, the
ethnic cleanser, the modern-day
Hitler? I'm mean, this guy was evil. Just about everyone
said so. NATO said so. The White House said so. Tony
Blair said so. Newspapers said so.
Even Noam Chomsky, a ferocious critic of US foreign
policy, and no friend of NATO, had nothing good to say of
Milosevic. Was I crazy, or just sick?
Let's just say I was skeptical.
Milosevic was accused by NATO of
organizing the murder of 100,000
Albanian Kosovars, a claim which, in the course of NATO's 78-day
bombing campaign, the north Atlantic
alliance could make without the public
having any way of checking. What many people don't know is that
NATO has backed away from the claim;
that pathologists failed to turn up anywhere
near the number of bodies NATO warned were strewn across
Kosovo; that Milosevic had been
indicted on war crimes that involved fewer deaths
than the number killed by NATO's bombs; that there was
only one pre-bombing incident
Milosevic was indicted on -- the infamous Racak
massacre -- and it was probably a fake, engineered by the
KLA, with the collusion, if not at the
behest, of the US; that there are compelling
reasons to question the impartiality and purpose of the
tribunal that has indicted Milosevic.
Every war proceeds along this path. Those
who stand to be killed, dismembered,
and dispossessed, are demonized, turned into the hobgoblins
the American journalist H.L. Menken accused practical
politicians of using to menace the
population into consenting to what would otherwise
not be consented to. Few are
going to consent to the killing of
innocents. So you turn the innocent
into the guilty. Butchers. Murderers.
Genocidists. Only later are the stories revealed to be gross
exaggerations, often outright fabrications.
Less than a decade before NATO planes
began their bombing runs on Serb
cities, Iraqi soldiers were reviled for dumping Kuwaiti babies
out of incubators, cruelly leaving
them to die on cold hospital floors. This
was the height of savagery, demanding a response. Nayirah,
a Kuwaiti teenager, testifying before
the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus
Committee in October, 1990, told of how as a volunteer at
the Al-Idar Hospital, she witnessed
the horrific scene of Iraqi soldiers brutally
tossing newborns from their incubators. Such was Iraqi
disrespect for life. This was how Iraq
treated the defenseless. But long after the
story inflamed the world's indignation, reporters
discovered it was pure fiction,
carefully crafted with the help of the PR firm Hill and
Knowlton. And far from being an impartial witness,
Nayirah was the daughter of the
Kuwaiti Ambassador to the US.
By the time the deception was uncovered,
it was too late. The story had done
its job. Americans were firmly onside their government's
decision to bomb Baghdad back to the
middle-ages, Baghdad had been bombed back
into the middle-ages, countless innocent civilians were
dead, and human rights organizations
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had
been deceived, accepting the story uncritically, failing
to check its veracity. This prompted
Harper's publisher John R. MacArthur, to declare
that "human rights hawks have become less interested in
the objective investigation of
atrocities than they are in their own arguments for
armed intervention, whether genuine or merely alleged."
With the press taking a delight in
sensational stories of atrocities, human rights
organizations prepared to believe the worse on the
flimsiest evidence, and the public's
weakness for being misled by lying politicians, getting
consent to bomb a modern, secular, Middle-Eastern society
back into the middle-ages wasn't all
that difficult. Today, Americans still remember
the original story of the incubators. Few remember the
debunking. It's always like that. "It
is the first assertion that really counts," says
one PR executive.
Three years later, James Harff, director
of the Washington-based PR firm, Ruder
Finn Global Public Affairs, boasted to French TV of how his
firm scored a PR coup for its clients, the breakaway
Yugoslav republics of Croatia and
Bosnia-Herzegovina. He'd turned Serbs into the new Nazis,
he crowed, and he'd done it by targeting the Jewish
community.
Serbs made up a significant part of the
Croatian and Bosnian populations. When
the republics decided to secede from the Yugoslav
federation, egged on by the US and Germany, many Serbs
rebelled. With Serbs in the way,
something had to be done. Enter Ruder Finn.
"By a single move," explained Harff, "we
were able to present a simple story of
good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself. We
won by targeting the Jewish audience. Almost immediately
there was a clear change of language
in the press, with use of words with high
emotional content such as ethnic cleansing, concentration
camps, etc., which evoke images of
Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. "
"But...you had no proof that what you
said was true," objected Jacques
Merlino, the interviewer.
"Our work is not to verify information,"
shot back Harff. "Our work is
to accelerate the circulation of
information favorable to us."
There was nothing new in this.
Fantastical tales have always been told
of unbelievable, intolerable cruelties committed by the
other side. Severed heads used as
soccer balls, a W.W.I favorite, every now and then
dusted off and pressed into service anew, along with
equally gruesome, and entirely bogus
stories. The history of tall tales of atrocities is
as long as the history of war itself, and the people who
craft the tales are as vital to waging
war successfully as generals, pilots,
infantrymen, and ordinance officers.
Would the information favorable to NATO,
and unfavorable to Serbs, be
circulated in the Kosovo crisis? With the press corps willingly
letting itself be spoon-fed by
Washington, the answer was straightforward.
Investigative journalism is expensive. Playing back what
politicians, generals and PR firms
say, all of whom had an interest in portraying the
Serbs as butchers, isn't. So the press passed along what
it was told, looked where it was told
to look, didn't see what official sources never
mentioned. As a business, the press minimizes costs. If
the truth gets minimized along the
way, so be it.
Which isn't to say that all allegations
of atrocities committed in war are
politically-inspired fabrications. The United States, with its
Mai Lais, its Thanh Phongs, its No Gun
Ris, its carpet bombings and cluster
bombs and depleted uranium ordinance, its napalm and Phoenix
programs, its Fat Boys and Enola Gays,
knows all too well, or would, if it wasn't
so deluded by its own myths.
But the transgressions of official enemies
are amplified, twisted, distorted, and spun, even
manufactured out of whole cloth, like
the story of the incubators dashed upon the floor of
the Kuwaiti hospital. American atrocities, and those of
its allies, are covered up, minimized,
rationalized, explained away, not only
officially, but by human rights organizations, too. Human Rights
Watch, shot through with links to the
US foreign policy establishment,
absolved NATO of war crimes in the alliance's 78-day air war
against Yugoslavia, despite the
bombing of civilian bridges, radio-television
buildings, refugee convoys, trains, and factories. There
were some very serious violations of
humanitarian law, Human Rights Watch acknowledged,
but only that. No war crimes. And yet evidence that NATO
was gunning for civilians -- the
defining feature of a war crime -- was staring
everyone in the face. There were the civilian deaths.
Unfortunate collateral damage, the
same phrase Timothy McVeigh used to describe the
168 killed in the bombing of the Oklahoma federal
building. But the issue was, Did NATO
strike at civilian targets deliberately? Human
Rights Watch said no.
US Air Force Lt. General Michael Short,
who had something do with the bombing,
had another view. Interviewed in the Washington Post, Short
explained what the bombing of Yugoslavia was all about,
"If you wake up in the morning and you
have no power to your house and no gas to your
stove and the bridge you take to work is down and will be
lying in the Danube for the next 20
years, I think you begin to ask, 'Hey, Slobo,
what's this all about? How much more of this do we have
to withstand?'"
This was the deliberate use of terror to
induce a civilian population to
pressure a government for political change. But terror employed
by governments, official terror,
somehow escapes the ignominy of being
labeled what it is -- terrorism. It's just good tactics, foreign
policy, in the words of historian Howard Zinn, or boldly,
humanitarian intervention.
And when NATO started bombing bridges,
and automobile and cigarette
factories, when it sent cruise missiles hurtling towards
petrochemical plants and oil depots,
when it disrupted the civilian electrical power
grid, it was plain that NATO was cranking up the misery
factor, terrorizing the civilian
population, and doing a reprise of what the
US-led coalition had done in Iraq: cripple a country's
civilian infrastructure. Sanctions,
which would ensure the civilian
infrastructure remained crippled, and Washington's refusal to
send heating oil to Serbia long after
Serb security forces had withdrawn from
Kosovo, only made it clearer that civilians, and civilian
infrastructure, were targets. And it made clear that
Washington's enmity had little to do
with Kosovo.
Those whose skepticism was dulled by
jingoism, and those who suppressed
open expressions of skepticism lest the allegations of Serb
inhumanity to Albanian Kosovars turn
out to be true, joined the greater number who
believed what they were told. Serbs are animals,
Milosevic no better than Hitler. They
were only getting what they deserved. "Sure," said
some, "NATO's going about this in entirely the wrong way,
and its bombing campaign is immoral.
But the Serbs are just as bad or worse."
Others, like Canadian journalist Carol Off, said that she
was glad NATO bombed Yugoslavia. Serbs
were horrible animals. And anyone the Serbs
liked, like former Canadian Major-General Lewis MacKenzie,
who questioned NATO's intervention in
Kosovo, were almost as bad as the
Serbs, opined Off. Being admired by the Serbs, as MacKenzie was,
was like being admired by Nazis -- a
fate not to be wished for.
So here was Milosevic and his willing
Serb executioners accused of
organizing a genocide that NATO had to stop, when suddenly
NATO's estimates of ethnic Albanian
dead dropped to 10,000. Still a big number,
yes, but a tenth of what it used to be. How solid could
these estimates be if they could be
reduced ten fold overnight?
And then another sign NATO's PR flacks
were following Menken's create
hobgoblins strategy. Press conferences started to reek of
propaganda.
Take the case of the satellite photos of
mass graves that never existed. If you
pressed NATO today it could say, "We never said there were mass
graves." And they'd be right, because they didn't.
Instead they said that a photo taken
by a satellite showed signs consistent with mass
graves. Strangely, the satellite wasn't around when Serbs
were dumping Albanians into ditches,
so we didn't actually see the nasty deed the
photos hinted at being committed. Curious how there was a
gaping hole in the evidence. Maybe the
film was being changed.
Instead, we got something that
was consistent with mass graves. Having a
education from some of the finest schools in the world is
consistent with having a finely honed
intelligence, but you wouldn't say George W.
Bush is a bright light. Going to church every Sunday with
the family bible clutched conspicuously
under your arm may be consistent with
leading a chaste life, but you'd never say that Bill Clinton, who
was conspicuous in his church going,
wasn't being felated in the Oval Office
by a young intern. Likewise, many things can be consistent with
mass graves without actually being mass graves. The
disturbances in the terrain of my
backyard are consistent with mass graves too, but you'll
make no gruesome subterranean discoveries if you dig
beneath the surface. All you'll find are
the roots of flowers. Phrases like, "the
disturbances in the terrain are consistent with mass graves", is
political-speak for saying one thing without really saying
it. If people believe what you didn't
say, great. That's what PR, and politics, is all
about.
And then after 78-days of NATO
bombing, when forensic pathologists were
dispatched to Kosovo to unearth the legions of dead Albanian
civilians said to have been slaughtered
by Milosevic's security forces, came more
reason to believe NATO's stories of genocide were nothing
more than gross hyperbole. The
pathologists couldn't find all the bodies they were
led to believe they'd find. Dr. Peter Markesteyn, a
Winnipeg forensic pathologist, was among
the first war crimes investigators to arrive in
Kosovo after NATO ended its bombing campaign.
"We were told there were
100,000 bodies everywhere," said Dr.
Markesteyn. "We performed 1,800 autopsies -- that's it."
Fewer than 2,000 corpses. None
found in the Trepca mines. No remains in
the vats of sulfuric acid. Most found in isolated graves -- not in
the mass graves NATO warned about. And
no clue as to whether the bodies were
those of KLA fighters, civilians, even whether they were Serb or
ethnic Albanian.
No wonder then that of all the
incidents on which Slobodan Milosevic has
been indicted for war crimes, the total body count is not
100,000, not 10,000, not even 1,800 --
but 391!
That's 109 lives fewer than the
500 Yugoslav civilians Human Rights
Watch estimates were killed by NATO
bombs, and it's many fewer than the
larger number other groups estimate were ushered into early graves
by NATO's humanitarian intervention. And
it's far fewer than what the death toll
will eventually be once those who have yet to die from cancers
induced by the terrible environmental devastation of the
war are finally carried off as late --
and unaccounted for -- casualties.
And it's also less than the
number of Palestinians who have been killed
so far by the IDF -- the Israeli army -- in the latest
Palestinian uprising. The difference is
that the IDF, under the direction of Ariel
Sharon, is an occupying army, while the Yugoslav security
forces, under Slobodan Milosevic, were
conducting an counterinsurgency operation
within their own borders. Moreover, we have evidence now
that the insurgency was being helped
along by Washington. A European KFOR
battalion commander told the British newspaper, The Observer: "The
CIA has been allowed to run riot in
Kosovo with a private army designed to
overthrow Slobodan Milosevic." Not a spontaneous uprising against
Serb repression, but a calculated,
US-engineered insurgency. Throwing
kindling on the fires of armed rebellion, and sometimes dousing
them with gasoline, is something the US,
with its hypocritical denunciations of
state-sponsored terrorism, has more than a little experience with.
The "contras", Washington's proxy army in Nicaragua, comes
to mind as just one of dozens of other
guerilla groups funded, trained and
encouraged by an incessantly meddling US. The KLA is just the
latest in an endless series of
US-sponsored terrorist groups.
But Sharon, the architect of a
long string of atrocities, including the
infamous Sabra and Shatila massacres, isn't under indictment for
war
crimes. Nor is he ever likely
to be -- not as long as the United States
wields a veto at the UN. And nor, for that matter, is
Clinton, Blair, Shroeder, Chretien or
any other NATO leader under indictment, for the
same reason.
Indeed, that itself is one of
the main reasons the war crimes tribunal
is a corruption. Because it was established by the UN Security
Council, each of whose members wields a
veto, Security Council members and their
allies effectively enjoy immunity from prosecution. They can
commit war crimes aplenty -- and do --
with impunity, all the while sanctimoniously
using human rights as cover for extending their hegemony to
those few remaining parts of the globe
not yet under their heel.
What's more, there's some
question as to whether at least one of the war
crimes Milosevic is accused of ever happened. And then
there's the revealing issue of when they
happened.
It seems that all of the war
crimes Milosevic is being tagged with, but
one, happened after the bombing -- highly curious, since
the bombing was said to be necessary to
stop a genocide, that, it seems now, NATO had no
evidence of. If they did, why haven't they brought it
forward?
Moreover, the one pre-bombing
incident, the Racak massacre -- which the
United States cited as a major reason for the bombing
campaign -- is more likely to have been
faked by the KLA, than to have represented the
cold-blooded killing of ethnic Albanian noncombatants, as
the KLA, and Washington's man in Kosovo
at the time, William Walker, alleged.
It was Walker, at the time head
of the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM)
who, on the morning of January 16, 1999, led the press to the
Kosovar village of Racak, a KLA
stronghold. There some 20 bodies were found in
a shallow trench, and 20 more were found scattered
throughout the village. The KLA, and
Walker, alleged that masked Serb policemen had
entered the village the previous day, and killed men, women
and children at close range, after
torturing and mutilating them. Chillingly, the
Serb police were said to have whistled merrily as they went
about their work of slaughtering the
villagers.
It was a horrible tableau, sure
to whip up the indignation of the world
-- and it did. Clinton's Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright, as eager to scratch her
ever itchy trigger finger as her boss was to scratch his
illimitable sexual itches, demanded that
Yugoslavia be bombed immediately.
Albright, like a kid agonizingly counting down the hours to
Christmas, would have to wait until
after Milosevic's rejection of NATO's ultimata
at Rambouillet to get her wish.
Bill Clinton, not to be
surpassed in expressing indignation, said, "We
should remember what happened in the village of Racak...Innocent
men, women, and children were taken from
their homes to a gully, forced to kneel
in the dirt, sprayed with gunfire -- not because of anything they
had done, but because of who they were."
Sadly, you would have never
heard Clinton, and you won't hear George W.
Bush, say , "We should remember what happened in the
villages of Mai Lai and Thanh Phong and
No Gun Ri. Innocent men, women, and children were
murdered by American soldiers." Americans don't commit
atrocities. Only Iraqis. And other
official enemies. And Serbs.
But not everyone was so sure
that Walker's story was to be believed. The
French newspaper La Monde had some trouble swallowing the
story. It reported on Jan. 21, 1999, a
few days after the incident, that an
Associated Press TV crew had filmed a gun battle at Racak between
Serb police and KLA guerillas. Indeed,
the crew was present because the Serbs
had tipped them off that they were going to enter the village to
arrest a man accused of shooting a
police officer. Also present were two teams
of KVM monitors.
- It seems unlikely that if
you're about to carry out a massacre that you
- would invite the press -- and
international observers -- to watch.
-
- The film showed that as soon as
the Serbs entered Racak they came under heavy fire from KLA guerillas
positioned in the surrounding hills. The idea that the police could dig
a trench and then kill villagers at close
range while under attack
troubled La Monde. So too did the fact that,
entering the village after the
fire fight to assess the damage and
- interview the villagers, the
KVM observers saw no sign of a massacre.
- What's more, the villagers said
nothing about a massacre either.
- Yet, when Walker returned the
next day with the press -- at the KLA's
invitation -- there was the trench with the bodies.
Could the police have returned
later on and carried out the massacre
under cover of darkness?
That seems unlikely. Racak is a
KLA stronghold. Serb police had already
discovered that if they were going to enter the village they would
have to deal with the guerillas. How
could they torture, mutilate and
cold-bloodedly kill villagers at close range while harassed by KLA
gunfire?
And why, wondered La Monde,
were there few signs of spent cartridges and
blood at the trench?
And now there's a report that the Finnish forensic
pathologists who
investigated the incident on behalf of the European Union,
say there was no evidence of a
massacre. In an article published in Forensic Science
International, the Finnish team writes that none of the
bodies were mutilated, there was no
evidence of torture, and only one was shot at
close range.
Thirty-seven of the corpses had gunpowder residue on their
hands,
suggesting that they had been using firearms, and only one
of the
corpses was a woman, and only one was under 15 years of age.
Not the picture Clinton painted of
innocent men, women and children, dragged
from their homes, and sprayed with gunfire.
The pathologists say Walker was quick to come to the
conclusion that there was a massacre,
even though the evidence was weak.
And they point out that there is no evidence that the
deceased were from Racak.
The KLA, the Serbs charge, faked the massacre by
laying out their fallen comrades in the
trench they, themselves, prepared, and the United States
used the staged massacre as a pretext for the bombing.
- The Washington Post said, "Racak transformed the West's Balkan
policy as singular events seldom do. The
atrocity...convinced the administration
and then its NATO allies that a six year effort to bottle up the
ethnic conflict in Kosovo was doomed."
-
- We'll never know for sure what really happened at Racak, but the
- evidence linking Milosevic to a brutal massacre is pretty slim.
- Paul Buteux, the political scientist, echoes a cliché that is
- sententiously uttered after every war, but never learned from.
"The
- first casualty of war is the truth," he observes.
-
- "It gets very murky. I have no doubt that whoever was putting
those
- intelligence reports together prior to the NATO air campaign
would be
- under pressure to put things in the worst possible light. There
was a
- point when the spin doctors came in."
-
- Putting things in the worst possible light? There's a big
difference
- between putting things in the worst possible light and turning
1,800
- corpses into 100,000, between arguing that a genocide had to be
stopped by a bombing campaign, and being
able to adduce only one incident of a war
crime -- and a doubtful one at that -- occurring before the bombing.
-
- And given the record of NATO's paltering with the truth, how
sure can we be that incidents referred to
in the war crimes indictment that happened
after the bombing aren't similarly based on "pressure to put things
in the worst possible light" and the
handiwork of "spin doctors"? There are
good reasons to question "the impartiality, and ultimately,
the purpose of the International Criminal Tribunal," says
Canadian lawyer Christopher Black.
-
- The tribunal was established by the UN Security Council in 1993,
in an effort, the UN Security Council
said, to restore peace to war-torn
- Bosnia, the break away Yugoslav republic.
-
- Bosnia, one of six republics of the former Yugoslav Federation,
was made up of Serbs, Croats and Muslims,
none of which were in a majority. In 1992,
the European Union brokered an agreement among all three
communities to establish a unified state, after Croats and
Muslims attempted to secede from
Yugoslavia. But Washington encouraged Alija
Itzebegovic, head of the Islamist, right-wing and
anti-Communist Party for Democratic
Action, to declare a sovereign state.
-
- Itzebegovic, a nasty character, had been jailed in the 80's for
- advocating an ethnically pure Islamic Bosnia. He had a long
history of
- anti-communism, belonging to a group that collaborated with Nazi
- occupiers in W.W.II, and being involved in a 1949 revolt against
Tito,
- the founder of the Yugoslav federation. After being released
from
- prison, Itzebegovic maintained close contact with US-backed
exile
- groups. He was just the kind of person the US has always taken a
shine to -- fanatically anti-Communist and
willing to work with Washington to
undermine a government pursuing an independent course. The result
was a horrible civil war.
-
- But the Security Council, or more specifically the US, whose
interests
- in Bosnia were aligned with Itzebegovic's, had a problem. It
didn't have
- jurisdiction to intervene in a civil war. So it simply redefined
what
- was domestic and what was international, and presto, it had an
in.
- Fighting in Bosnia represented a threat to international peace,
the
- Security Council reasoned, because it threatened to engulf the
entire
- region. And human rights violations could no longer be
considered purely domestic concerns, it
said. They were of concern to the entire
- international community. The UN, therefore, was duty bound to
act.
- Madeline Albright, notes Black, could largely be credited with
UN's
- decision to arrogate onto itself the mandate to intervene in
Bosnia. She persuaded Russia and China to
vote for the tribunal's creation in return
for economic goodies.
-
- It was hardly surprising then that Serbs, who were resisting
- Itzebegovic's, and his US-backer's designs on Bosnia, would
become the central focus of the war crimes
tribunal. The greater part of the
- indictments were directed at Serbs, though there was substantial
- evidence of war crimes committed by the US-backed Muslim and
Croat communities, as well.
-
- Little has changed. Asked why the tribunal refuses to
investigate NATO war crimes, Carla del
Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor says, "The primary
focus of the Office of the Prosecutor must be on the
investigation and prosecution of the
(leaders of Yugoslavia) and Serbia who have already
been indicted." So, the US-backed tribunal acts to prosecute
Serbs. And it doesn't act to prosecute
NATO leaders, like Madeline Albright, who is
known by prosecutors as "the mother of the Tribunal," lawyer
Black explains. Walter Rockler, who
prosecuted Nazis at the Nuremberg War
Crimes Tribunal, describes the tribunal with unimpeachable common
sense.
-
- Says Rockler, "NATO policy makers clearly are guilty of war
crimes in
- Yugoslavia, but the prosecution staff...is not independent, so
they are
- not going to charge those who effectively appointed them. It's
like
- asking administration officials to jail their own boss."
While the tribunal's connection to the US and NATO inspire
little confidence in the impartiality of
the body, neither do the tribunal's rules.
Prisoners can be held indefinitely without bail. All confessions
are assumed to be voluntary unless proved otherwise. And
suspects can be held for 90 days without
charge, plenty of time to extract phony
confessions.
-
- Today, Milosevic is held in a Belgrade jail by Serb authorities.
His
- arrest on April 1 by hooded men (since when do the police wear
- balaclavas?), came at the deadline the US had set for progress
to be
- made in transferring Milosevic to the Hague to face war crimes
charges.
-
- Unless it was satisfied that steps were taken to put Milosevic
behind
- bars, the US administration announced, promised economic aid
would not be forthcoming.
-
- The US-backed Serb authorities -- they had come to power with
the help of suitcases full of cash,
courtesy of Washington, the Washington
Post explained -- complied, citing abuse
of power and corruption as the reason for
the arrest. Months later, evidence has yet to be adduced. But
evidence is beside the point. Zoran Djindic, head of the Serb
republic, says Milosevic has to be handed
over to the Hague, otherwise Yugoslavia
will be isolated by the international community. What's right, or
just, hardly matters. All that matters is
what Washington demands. Last October,
Vojislav Kostunica, the Yugoslav president, complained
bitterly that the US was moving the goal posts on conditions
to end sanctions, something anyone
familiar with US policy on Iraq could well
have anticipated. Sanctions, said Washington, would be removed once
Milosevic was ousted. And yet with Milosevic driven from
power, sanctions were kept in place.
Deliver Milosevic to the Hague, said
Washington, then sanctions will end. Will sanctions ever end?
-
- Washington's boldness in crafting entirely unbelievable and
absurd
- reasons for keeping the vice of sanctions screwed down tight
knows no limits. Iraq, a shriveled shell
of its former self, is still held up
- with inimitable American chutzpah as a threat to world peace and
- security, and deserving of continued subjection to a vile and
murderous regime of sanctions that have
killed well over a million civilians.
Sanctions, point out political scientists John and Karl Mueller,
have "contributed to more deaths during
the post-Cold War era than all the weapons
of mass destruction throughout history." Meanwhile, Iraqi
babies, placed in old and malfunctioning incubators, still in
use because sanctions hold up replacement
parts and new equipment, die from
hypothermia -- a tragically ironic counterpoint to the carefully
crafted lie about Iraqi soldiers
destroying Kuwaiti incubators.
-
- And now, President George W. Bush, has decided that the
situation with respect to " Milosevic, his
close associates and supporters and persons
under open indictment for war crimes" constitutes "an unusual
and extraordinary threat to the national
security and foreign policy of the United
States," meriting the continued application of emergency powers
to Yugoslavia. Apparently, Milosevic is cooking up plans to
invade Maine from his Belgrade cell. Only
when he's safely locked away at the Hague
can the world rest soundly. Until the next hobgoblin comes along.
