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The Myth of Western Humanitarian Intervention
Grim Lessons from the Killing in Kosovo
A Case Study
:: Part One ::
by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
In the aftermath of
the 11th September attacks, the Bush administration has
been escalating plans to impose U.S. hegemony in key strategic
regions. The oil-rich Middle East is high on the agenda. The U.S.
government and its British partner in crime are building up to a
two-pronged killing campaign in the Arab region: one part of the
campaign is already in overt motion in the Israel-Palestine conflict,
where Sharon is pushing forth with his plans to smash the Palestinian
people Sabra&Shattila-style; another part of the campaign is
proceeding steadily behind-the-scenes, where the Anglo-American duo
are attempting to galvanise a pretext to launch a full-fledged bombing
assault against Iraq.
The two-pronged
campaign is rooted in a wider military escalation that is set to be so
brutal and final in scale that the Pentagon has already established
contingency plans for nuclear war in relation to conflicts in the
region, and in other regions of strategic interest to the United
States. The motives and context of this build-up to war in the Middle
East are extremely pertinent to anyone with the slightest regard for
the future of their children, and of humanity at large. The motives of
the Bush administration, supposedly, are fundamentally benevolent.
That is the unquestionable axiom underlying almost all mainstream
political discourse in the West. The U.S. government, we are told, is
fighting a “war on terror” to save the entirety of civilisation from
destruction at the hands of international terrorism. Hence, we must
all stand behind the “war on terror”, and give it our full support –
otherwise, we are no better than the terrorists themselves, beyond the
pale of civilisation.
This paper attempts to
consider, on the basis of contemporary history, whether it is probable
– or even possible – for the Western powers to fight a “war on terror”
for benevolent purposes. It does so by studying in detail the case of
Kosovo. It is the opinion of this author that recent history provides
a principal source of insight into the most current developments in
world order under U.S.-led Western hegemony. The case of Kosovo is
particularly pertinent, since according to the ardent supporters of
interventionist Western foreign policy, Kosovo is a case par
excellence of Western humanitarianism, benevolence, and opposition
to global terrorism.
Indeed, the
intervention in Kosovo is an oft-cited example of what is supposed to
be a new idealism among the Western powers: an unwillingness to
tolerate tyranny and a relentless concern for humanitarian principles.
President Bill Clinton, who of course was deeply involved in the
intervention in Kosovo, has articulated the alleged humanitarian
implications with great eloquence:
“What is the role of the UN in preventing mass
slaughter and dislocations? Very large. Even in Kosovo, NATO’s
actions followed a clear consensus expressed in several Security
Council resolutions that the atrocities committed by Serb forces
were unacceptable, that the international community had a compelling
interest in seeing them end. Had we chosen to do nothing in the face
of this brutality, I do not believe we would have strengthened the
United Nations. Instead, we would have risked discrediting
everything it stands for… By acting as we did, we helped to
vindicate the principles and purposes of the UN Charter the
opportunity it now has to play the central role in shaping Kosovo’s
future. In the real world principles often collide, and tough
choices must be made. The outcome in Kosovo is hopeful.”[1]
This official
interpretation of the intervention in Kosovo is, however, in
contradiction to the facts on record. This paper is the first in a
two-part series conducting a critical review of the Western response
to the crisis in Kosovo, analysing the context, ramifications and
consequences of the NATO military intervention. It is the hope of this
author that this series provides crucial insight into the realities of
Western policy, a policy that deliberately divides communities,
fosters wars, and devastates countries to secure power and profit. An
impartial analysis demonstrates that neither Western diplomacy nor
NATO bombing contributed to the resolution of the conflict in Kosovo,
but rather systematically exacerbated the war to an extent that brings
into question the motives of the Western powers.
In this sense, there
are very pertinent lessons to be learned from Western policy in Kosovo
under U.S. leadership. Under the “war on terror”, the United States is
leading the Western powers in a reinvigorated policy of
interventionism with the purported aim of eliminating terrorism
worldwide. This case study of Western intervention in Kosovo, however,
discloses a matrix of interests and policies that seriously challenges
the idea that the Western powers are capable of waging such a war.
Indeed, this study suggests that the promotion of conflict and
terrorism is an integral dimension of the doctrine of Western
humanitarian intervention, pursued to secure regional Western
interests. We need to understand exactly how the doctrine of Western
humanitarian intervention is – in reality - intrinsically bound up
with the support of terrorism, the provocation of wars, the
fabrication of pretexts for intervention, and the justification of
mass murder. This understanding will allow us to see clearly what the
Western powers are planning in the increasingly volatile Middle East.
I. A
Brief History
I.I Repression of Serbs in Kosovo
It is a widespread
belief that the history of ethnic repression in Kosovo consists of
nothing but the systematic oppression of Kosovan Albanians by Serbia.
This notion has become conventional opinion largely thanks to the
efforts of Western governments attempting to provide justification for
their intervention in Kosovo on behalf of the besieged Albanian
minority. Yet this is a very misleading picture indeed. To understand
properly the crisis that erupted in Kosovo in the 1990s it is
essential to understand properly its historical context.
It is a matter of
record that prior to 1990, the principal architect of ethnic
repression in Kosovo was not the Serbian leadership, but rather the
leadership of the Kosovan Albanian community. Albanian nationalists in
Kosovo were, in fact, heavily complicit in the repression of Serbs in
Kosovo for many years, such that the Serb community (which within the
province of Kosovo itself are a minority) were the principal victims
of ethnically-motivated atrocities. In 1982, for instance, the New
York Times reported in detail that: “‘The [Albanian]
nationalists have a two-point platform’, according to Becir Hoti, an
executive secretary of the Communist Party of Kosovo, ‘first to
establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and
then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania.’…
“Mr. Hoti, an Albanian, expressed concern over
political pressures that were forcing Serbs to leave Kosovo. ‘What is
important now’, he said, ‘is to establish a climate of security and
create confidence’. The migration of Serbs is no ordinary problem
because Kosovo is the heartland of Serbian history, culture and
religion. Serbs have been in this region since the seventh century,
long before they founded their own independent dynasty here in 1168.
Some 57,000 Serbs have left Kosovo in the last decade, and the number
increased considerably after the riots of March and April last year...
The 1981 census showed Kosovo with a population of 1,584,558, of whom
77.5 percent were ethnic Albanians, 13.2 percent Serbs and 1.7 percent
Montenegrins. The population in 1971 of 1,243,693 was 73.8 percent
Albanian, 18.4 percent Serbian and 2.5 percent Montenegrin.... ‘We
don’t want to go because we have a large farm’, a Serbian farmer’s
wife said in a village near Pristina. ‘Our property hasn’t been
touched, but there are the insults and the intimidation, so we feel
uncomfortable’.”[2]
Five years later, by
1987, the plight of the Serbian minority community within the province
of Kosovo had worsened dramatically, reaching almost critical
condition: “Ethnic Albanians in the Government have manipulated
public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs…
“Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, and
flags have been torn down. Wells have been poisoned and crops burned.
Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have
been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls… As the Slavs flee the
protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian
nationalists have been demanding for years… an ‘ethnically pure’
Albanian region… Last summer, the authorities in Kosovo said they
documented 40 ethnic Albanian attacks on Slavs in two months. In the
last two years, 320 ethnic Albanians have been sentenced for political
crimes, nearly half of them characterized as severe… Ethnic Albanians
already control almost every phase of life in the autonomous province
of Kosovo, including the police, judiciary, civil service, schools and
factories. Non-Albanian visitors almost immediately feel the
independence - and suspicion - of the ethnic Albanian authorities...
While 200,000 Serbs and Montenegrins still live in the province, they
are scattered and lack cohesion. In the last seven years, 20,000 of
them have fled the province, often leaving behind farmsteads and
houses, for the safety of the Slavic north”.[3]
These unfortunate facts illustrate that
the Albanian authorities in Kosovo were responsible for a variety of
facist-style policies throughout most of the 1980s. The omission of
these facts from conventional attempts to understand the causes of the
crisis in Kosovo have granted a very one-sided view of a far more
complex conflict. The consequence has been the unwarranted
demonisation of the Serbian community, who have been blamed entirely
for the recent crisis in the late 1990s. The reality, however, is that
ethnically-motivated repression is attributable to both sides in the
history of civil conflict in Kosovo. There is a longstanding
background of entrenched mutual ethnic tensions within the province,
rooted in the nationalism of certain sections of both communities. The
Kosovan Albanian community, therefore, cannot be absolved of
responsibility, having played a devastating role in the
institutionalised repression of the Serb minority in the province for
almost a decade.
I.II Repression of Albanians in Kosovo
Partly in response to the escalation of
the repression of Serbs by Albanians in the province of Kosovo,
Slobodan Milosevic revoked Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989. There can be
little doubt that the conditions faced by the Serb minority had grown
increasingly dire under the fascist reign of Albanian extremists, who
were free to do as they pleased in an autonomous administration.
However, with Kosovo’s autonomy revoked, the tables were turned as the
victims and perpetrators of ethnic repression were reversed. Losing
its relative autonomy, Kosovo became subject to the direct rule of the
central Serb government under the leadership of Milosevic, who
subsequently imposed an apartheid-style regime on the Kosovan Albanian
community – a minority within Serbia as a whole of course - resulting
in the intense suppression of their cultural and political rights.
Stephen Zunes, assistant Professor of Politics and Chair of the Peace
and Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco,
reports that as a consequence of brutal Serb-led ethnic repression of
the Albanian community in Kosovo, the latter embarked upon what
eventually became a decade-long - largely peaceful - campaign for an
autonomous Kosovo.
Serbia, however, was unwilling to allow
this. Whether or not this refusal to grant the province autonomy or
independence was justifiable, it is clear that the historical context
of communal conflict within Kosovo no doubt contributed to the central
government’s insistence on maintaining control over the province. In
response, the Kosovan Albanians waged their struggle for autonomy
through boycotts, demonstrations, strikes and alternative
institutions. But their sustained movement for independence by
peaceful means proceeded with the indifference of the international
community, and met with little domestic progress. Zunes observes that
as a result of this failure, by 1997 an armed guerrilla force - the
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) – came to the forefront of the movement.
Unfortunately, this group of armed ultra-nationalists was considerably
less willing to compromise or guarantee the rights of the Serbian
minority in Kosovo in an autonomous or independent Kosovo.[4]
But while the KLA’s
extremist strain of Albanian nationalism rose to the forefront of the
Kosovan Albanian movement for independence from Serbia in the later
half of the 1990s, the KLA has existed as an active organization for
far longer. Contrary to the conventional view, “the KLA was not set up
in response to intensified Serb repression in Kosovo”, observes
British historian Dr. Mark Almond, who lectures in history at Oriel
College in Oxford University. Almond points out that the KLA was
established as early as 1982, and has distinctly fascist roots. “After
Tito’s death in 1980, his great regional rival, Albania’s obdurate
Stalinist Enver Hoxha, saw an opportunity to cause problems for his
Yugoslav neighbour by taking advantage of Kosovo’s large Albanian
majority. It was on Tirana’s initiative that the KLA came into being.”
The group was eventually forcefully dispersed by Yugoslav secret
police, the survivors fleeing abroad to become refugees in Hoxha’s
Albania. “Others became refugees in Germany and Switzerland. There
they bided their time”, while operating “under various
Marxist-Leninist party names” until the recent “implosion of
post-communist Albania in 1997” under the repression of the Milosevic
regime. The escalating crisis “threw a lifeline to the shadowy KLA”,
due to the inability of the Kosovan Albanian community’s peaceful
movement to effectuate meaningful social change.[5]
A spokesperson for
Kosovo had admitted in early December 1997 that the peaceful movement
had failed:
“At a time when the international community has
been underestimating and seriously ignoring the Albanian factor,
reducing it to a problem of minorities requiring solutions in
ridiculous frameworks with Serbia, when Serbia’s only way of
communicating with Albania was violence and crime, one should not be
amazed if part of the people decide to end this agony and take the
fate of Kosovo and its people in its own hands.”[6]
The demand for other
measures thus began to intensify, resulting in the eventual domination
of the KLA, which subsequently began initiating attacks on Serb
soldiers and civilians. By 1998, the KLA’s attacks were eliciting
increasingly forceful responses from the Serb military. Almond reports
that: “Before the current crisis exploded, one of the KLA’s leaders
admitted that its strategy was to provoke the Serbs into reprisals and
then gather support among ordinary Albanians and from the West. These
are classic partisan tactics.”[7] Serb forces responded to
KLA attacks on Serb police and civilians by cracking down on the KLA
and its perceived civilian supporters, often indiscriminately. This
was further accompanied by further attacks on Serb forces and
civilians by the KLA. The predictable result was a cycle of
confrontation in which “Ordinary Albanians in Kosovo [were] suffering
a terrible wave of reprisals from the Serb forces”.[8] Finally, after about a year
of such escalating conflict between Serb and KLA forces, with
civilians from both sides being killed and expelled - though it
appears that the majority of these victims were Kosovan Albanians -
NATO intervened under the pretext of having “learned the lessons of
Bosnia”.
The Western powers displayed their
concern for Kosovo in an initial period of diplomacy through the
arrangement of ‘peace talks’. Diplomacy, which was supposed to have
failed dismally, was soon replaced by a full-fledged bombing campaign.
It is normally rare for Western leaders to intervene in regional
conflicts with such ferocity and determination. Then U.S. envoy to the
UN Richard Holbrook noted that one outstanding reason for the
intervention was that the conflict within Kosovo might have easily
spread to involve European allies Macedonia, Greece and Turkey. The
Times similarly argued that in this context, the Western powers
intervened to preserve “stability”: “The fighting in Kosovo not only
threatens stability in the Balkans, and the possibility of conflict
involving Nato countries in the area, but also a flood of refugees
into Western Europe...” Other than these factors, which would be
economically detrimental to the Western powers, there was the
importance of strengthening NATO, that has long been a key instrument
of U.S. hegemony over Europe: “Failure to act now after specific
warnings and assurances would undermine the credibility of Nato.”[9]
According to critics, “credibility” here has very important implicit
meanings, bound up with the concept of “stability”. Firstly, critics
argue, it sends a message to the world that the West can bomb at will,
where and when it likes. In other words, they say, the NATO bombing
constituted a show of power, demonstrating that anyone who may impede
the expansion of Western hegemony can be blasted to fragments by
Western forces at ease. Secondly, it sends a message to the Western
public apparently proving the ongoing necessity of monumental levels
of military spending, which also results in huge profits for defence
contractors and other corporate elites.
II.I Inconsistency in Western Foreign Policy
These critical interpretations should be
impartially assessed in context with the observations of former
executive editor of the World Policy Journal, Benjamin
Schwartz, and MacArthur Fellow in Peace and International Security
Studies, Christophe Layne. Schwartz and Lane note that “while Clinton
has depicted Serbian actions in the most horrific light possible, he
remains silent about the human rights atrocities perpetrated by
America’s NATO ally Turkey, which has been waging a decades-long
military campaign of repression against its Kurdish ethnic minority…
“Like the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo,
Kurds waging a guerrilla war demand independence. Turkey has responded
to the Kurdish insurgency with the same tactics that Clinton has
imputed to Serbs: terror, ‘genocide’ and suppression of rights. Yet
the Clinton Administration does not propose bombing Ankara, which, of
course, provokes the obvious question: Why intervene in Kosovo and not
in Turkey - or Sudan, Rwanda, Congo or Sierra Leone, for that matter,
where humanitarian intervention is at least justified? The moral
argument for intervention in Kosovo is cast in terms of universally
applicable principles. But Washington picks and chooses its
humanitarian interventions, inserting itself in some conflicts and
ignoring others in which the reasons to act are at least as
compelling.”
What is worse, is that the U.S. often in
alliance with its European allies, is contributing directly to crises
in Turkey, Sudan, and Rwanda - to name only a few - by supporting the
primary perpetrators of violence. This support continues with the aim
of securing economic or strategic interests. The logical implication
is that in Kosovo, U.S. policy-makers “are using humanitarian
intervention as a pretext to mobilize public support for military
interventions undertaken for other reasons.”[10] The British Parliament’s
International Development Committee (IDC) concurred with the
conclusion that there is a clear inconsistency in justification for
Western humanitarian intervention. In a critical report on the
Government’s allegedly “ethical” foreign policy, the IDC took note of
the contradiction in the humanitarian pretexts for the intervention in
Kosovo, pointing out: “A ‘worrying discrepancy’ between the resources
deployed in Kosovo and the neglect of less strategic parts of the
world, notably Rwanda.”[11]
II.II The Economic Agenda in Kosovo
In fact, humanitarian motives were not
very high on the list of concerns when the Western powers decided to
intervene. The real essence of the Western agenda in Kosovo was in
fact candidly revealed by Clinton himself when he stated: “If we’re
going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability
to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key... That’s what
this Kosovo thing was all about.”[12] Writing in The Nation,
Schwarz and Lane comment: “He thus seems to argue that the United
States is fighting a war in Kosovo to make the world safe for
capitalism. In fact, the President and other policy-makers have long
been making similar arguments…
“In explaining its global strategy, for
instance, the Pentagon declared in 1993 that ‘a prosperous, largely
democratic, market-oriented zone of peace and prosperity that
encompasses more than two-thirds of the world’s economy’ requires the
‘stability’ that only American ‘leadership’ can provide.”
In this context, “The air war against
Serbia is just the latest installment in what appears to be
Washington’s quest to make the world safe for America’s investors and
exporters…
“Last year, speaking to the Boston
Chamber of Commerce, Defense Secretary William Cohen justified NATO
expansion as a way of ‘spreading the kind of security and stability
that Western Europe has enjoyed since after World War II to Central
and Eastern Europe.’ And, in an observation certain to resonate with
his audience, he noted: ‘And with that spread of stability, there is a
prospect to attract investment’.”[13]
Indeed, NATO’s intervention was from the
outset likely to contribute to the nationalistic disintegration of the
region, as was noted in a letter to each member of the UN Security
Council by former U.S. Attorney-General Ramsey Clark.[14]
Given the probability that NATO military action would only worsen an
already volatile situation, and given the longstanding economic and
strategic U.S. interests in regional “stability”, it is not surprising
to find that the bombing had apparently been pre-ordained long before
the escalation of the crisis. As early as 12 August 1998, the U.S.
Senate Republican Policy Committee observed that:
“Planning for a U.S.-led Nato
intervention in Kosovo is now largely in place. The only missing
element seems to be an event – with suitably vivid media coverage –
that could make the intervention politically saleable... That Clinton
is waiting for a ‘trigger’ in Kosovo is increasingly obvious.”[15]
World financial institutions based in
Washington, working closely with NATO, had also closely analysed the
consequences of a military intervention leading to eventual occupation
in Kosovo long before this crisis erupted. The World Bank undertook
“simulations” which “anticipated the possibility of an emergency
scenario arising out the tensions in Kosovo”, almost a year before the
war began.[16] Similarly, a report
released by Jurgen Reents, press spokesman for the popular Party of
Democratic Socialism at the German Parliament, reveals that a joint
U.S.-German programme titled “Operation Roots” has been in place since
the launch of Clinton’s presidency, designed to sow ethnic tensions in
Yugoslavia to encourage its disintegration. The report records that
the operation’s fundamental purpose “is the separation of Kosovo with
the aim of it becoming a part of Albania; the separation of
Montenegro, as the last means of access to the Mediterranean; and the
separation of Vojvodina, which produces most of the food for
Yugoslavia. This would lead to the total collapse of Yugoslavia as a
viable independent state.”[17] This suggests that much of
NATO’s policy towards Kosovo had been planned some time in advance
with the objective of manipulating events in such a way as to permit
NATO to occupy the region, thus expanding a U.S.-dominated military
presence in the Balkans. All that was therefore needed was a suitable
crisis to act as a “trigger”.[18]
III.I U.S. Green Light to Serb Army Atrocities
Indeed, the United
States appears to have been inextricably involved in escalating the
crisis from behind-the-scenes prior to August 1998 with the view to
create “politically saleable event” that could provide a convenient
“trigger” for already extant war plans for NATO intervention. When the
KLA began to carry out organised attacks in February 1998, “U.S.
special Balkans envoy Robert Gelbard visited Belgrade, praised
Milosevic for his new cooperation in Bosnia and branded the Kosovo
Liberation Army (KLA) ‘without question a terrorist group’.”[19] However, at this time
Gelbard conspicuously failed to properly acknowledge the Serb Army’s
repression, killing and deportation of Kosovan Albanians. New York
Times correspondent Chris Hedges notes that the effect of
Gelbard’s statement was to grant a “green light” to Serb President
Slobodan Milosevic to escalate attacks against Kosovan Albanians in
the name of fighting terrorism.[20]
The existence of an
effective “green light” to Serb violence has been noted by a variety
of commentators. Dejan Anastasievic of the Belgrade newspaper,
Vreme, observed in March 1998 that “we have four dead policemen
and the U.S. special representative to the former Yugoslavia, Robert
Gelbard, last week in Belgrade very clearly denounced terrorism. I’m
afraid Mr Milosevic has assumed this statement gave him a green light
to do whatever he wants in Kosovo.”[21] Patrick Moore similarly
reported for Radio Free Europe that according to independent Serbian
journalists, “the major powers may have led Milosevic to think that he
has a green light in Kosovo. Those who support this view note that
U.S. special envoy Robert Gelbard on his recent trip to the region
stressed that Kosovo is Serbia’s internal affair and criticized the
UCK [KLA]... U.S. Secretary of State James Baker delivered a similarly
ambiguous message to Belgrade in June 1991. The Yugoslav army attacked
Slovenia shortly thereafter.”[22] Jim Hooper of the Balkans
Institute similarly concluded that: “Holbrooke played into Milosevic’s
hands by bringing him carrots and giving the stick to the Kosovo
Albanians. Milosevic took those concessions as a green light to
proceed, and cracked down harder on the Kosovars and in Serbia itself,
withdrawing autonomy from universities and moving against independent
media.”[23]
The consequence of
these U.S. diplomatic initiatives was predicable. The West’s
simultaneous condemnation of the KLA and casting of the Kosovo problem
as an “internal affair” of Serbia, effectively displayed tacit consent
to a Serb crackdown. There is other evidence suggesting that the
Western powers had continued to support Milosevic throughout the early
period of the Serb Army’s ethnic repression and atrocities against
Kosovan Albanians. For example, although Milosevic has now been
indicted as a war criminal, and accordingly is being held on trial in
The Hague, he has only been indicted for war crimes since 1st
January 1999.[24] In this connection, two
pertinent questions must be asked: Why is it that he was not indicted
for the military campaign he commanded against the Kosovan Albanians
throughout 1997-8? And why was he not indicted for his war crimes
since 1991 in Bosnia? Director of the Sweden-based Transnational
Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF) Jan Oberg explains that
unfortunately, “The West cooperates with war criminals” when it suits
Western interests. Mentioning “crimes [Milosevic] may be directly or
indirectly responsible for since 1991” “would mean that he was a
criminal when still a partner of the West, such as in Dayton 1995”, as
well as during the 1997-8 attacks on Kosovan Albanians.[25]
It seems likely that Milosevic’s criminal policies throughout this
period were undertaken while he had still been “a partner of the
West”.
Having effectively flashed a “green
light” to the Serb crackdown, the humanitarian catastrophe
subsequently escalated. As a result, some 2-300,000 people, mostly
Albanians, were reportedly displaced within Kosovo in the ensuing
conflict in the year before the NATO bombing. Given that this is a war
crime for which Milosevic has not been indicted by the Western powers,
one may reasonably infer that the failure to do so reveals Western
approval of this period’s atrocities – or otherwise admission that
they never happened.
III.II NATO’s Covert Support of the KLA
While having at first extended tacit
approval to an unhindered crackdown by the Serb Army within Kosovo, it
was only a few months later that the Western powers under U.S.
leadership began to openly support the KLA. This was the same
organisation that “the US envoy, Robert Gelbard, in early 1998 called
a terrorist organisation”, as TFF Director Jan Oberg reports. The West
had thus publicly befriended the very armed group which it had
condemned “very strongly” for its “terrorist activities”, and which
subsequently, as Oberg notes, “built its military capacity on weapons,
ammunition and training supplied by various Western sources”; was
“given political legitimacy in Rambouillet through the embrace of the
U.S. and UK”; and “served as NATO’s ally on the ground during the
bombardments”. The disconcerting ramifications of this policy become
clear when it is noted that the Kosovo leadership at the forefront of
the peaceful movement for independence was completely ignored by the
international community. The “nonviolent line” of moderate Albanian
leader Dr. Rugova “was never given any political support, legitimacy
or concrete economic or other support comparable with what the KLA was
given by the West.” Accordingly, the West had begun “actively
support[ing] Albanian hardliners’ violence, atrocities and violations
of international laws.” This elicited an even more violent response
from the Serbs, which escalated the conflict further.[26]
The result was that according to NATO reports, by March 1999 around
2,000 had been killed, the majority Kosovan Albanians, and an
estimated 200,000 people were expelled from their homes to become
refugees.
In fact, evidence seems to confirm that
the U.S. played off both sides - Serbs and Albanians - against each
other. In the same year, 1998, that the KLA guerrillas had been
publicly condemned by the U.S. as a “terrorist group”, the CIA had
already established covert links with the armed group. These links may
have been established at least as early as 1996. According to the
London Sunday Times:
“American intelligence agents have
admitted they helped to train the Kosovan Liberation Army before
Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia... Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]
officers were ceasefire monitors in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999,
developing ties with the KLA and giving American training manuals and
field advice on fighting the Yugoslav army and Serb police.”[27]
For the sake of impartiality, one is
impelled to question what kind of “ceasefire monitoring” involves the
following actions: publicly condemning the KLA for terrorism while
casting the Kosovo issue as an internal affair of Serbia - hence
giving a green light for the Serbs to expand their violent campaign;
meanwhile covertly “developing ties with the KLA” in spite of its own
atrocities and giving them military advice which swiftly escalated
into military support. Clearly, U.S. policies seem to have been
implemented to fan the flames of civil war. The Sunday Times
further reports that:
“The KLA has admitted its long-standing
links with American and European intelligence organisations. Shaban
Shala, a KLA commander now involved in attempts to destabilise
majority Albanian villages beyond Kosovo’s border in Serbia proper,
claimed he had met British, American and Swiss agents in northern
Albania in 1996... Agim Ceku, the KLA commander in the latter stages
of the conflict, had established American contacts through his work in
the Croatian army”.
According to one European envoy: “The
American agenda consisted of their diplomatic observers, aka the CIA,
operating on completely different terms to the rest of Europe and the
OSCE [Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe].” One CIA
source admitted that: “It was a CIA front, gathering intelligence on
the KLA’s arms and leadership.” Another agent was more open, stating
that he had felt “suckered in” by the U.S. intelligence agency: “I’d
tell them [the KLA guerrillas] which hill to avoid, which wood to go
behind, that sort of thing.”[28]
The United States had thus begun with
severe public condemnation of the KLA, displaying to the Serb Army
Western approval of its crackdown on Kosovan Albanians.
Simultaneously, the KLA – which continued to carry out atrocities
against Serb police and civilians - had been in receipt of direct CIA
support, training and direction. When the Serb Army, confident in the
“green light” signalled by dubious U.S. diplomacy, began cracking down
with increasing brutality on the KLA and its perceived civilian
supporters, the U.S. responded with severe public condemnation of the
Serbs, signalling to the KLA Western approval of its violence. In this
manner, the U.S. successfully fuelled the crisis by manufacturing
conditions conducive to civil conflict, thus providing a pretext for
NATO military intervention. European diplomats have been angered by
the U.S. policy toward the KLA disclosed in March 2000, saying that:
“… this had undermined moves for a political solution to the conflict
between Serbs and Albanians... European diplomats then working for the
OSCE [as “cease-fire monitors” in Kosovo prior to air strikes] claim
it was betrayed by an American policy that made air strikes
inevitable”.[29]
Western diplomacy, purportedly initiated
to encourage both sides to come to a peaceful agreement catering for
the interests of both the Serbian and Albanian communities in Kosovo,
played a similar role in actually triggering conflict rather than
averting it. By March 1999, the Western-brokered Rambouillet peace
talks between representatives of Serbia and Kosovan Albanians, had
been brought to an ultimatum: Serbia must accept the Rambouillet
(Interim) Agreement of 23 February 1999 or be bombed.
The Rambouillet peace talks had lasted
for only two weeks before the Western powers under U.S. leadership
produced their ultimatum. This is in contrast to U.S. policy
elsewhere, for example, the Israel-Palestine peace process that has
continued for decades without any ultimatums being issued by the U.S.
on behalf of either side along with the threat of a full-scale
military intervention. Indeed, the actual peace talks leading up to
the U.S. ultimatum at Rambouillet did not amount to a significant and
fair negotiation process. As U.S. journalist David Peterson reports,
the Rambouillet talks were not really negotiations at all, but were
actually ‘proximity’ talks in which the two parties to the conflict
were kept in separate rooms from one another, while Contact Group
mediators (officials from the United States, Britain, Germany, France,
Italy and Russia) moved back and forth between the parties. This
obviously denied them the opportunity of holding face-to-face
negotiations of their own, and allowed the Contact Group to impose
their own conditions on Serb and Kosovan Albanian parties, in the form
of the Interim Agreement for Peace and Self Government in Kosovo.[30]
IV.I Legislating for U.S. hegemony in the Balkans
Serbia refused to accept the Rambouillet
Interim Agreement of 23rd February 1999. Western
commentators have largely reported that this was because of the
fascist intransigence of Milosevic and his brutal regime, which did
not want a reasonable mutually beneficial peaceful solution. The
reality of the matter was that Serbia rejected the Rambouillet accord
because it contained extremely unreasonable conditions related to the
interests of the Western powers, and which had nothing to do with a
genuine peaceful solution. The accord consisted of numerous
“non-negotiable” terms effectively legislating for NATO colonisation
of the former Yugoslavia. The text of the Rambouillet accord reveals
that the United States was less interested in averting a humanitarian
catastrophe, than exploiting the Kosovo crisis as a cover of
legitimacy under which it could extend its hegemony over the Balkan
region through NATO. The accord contained crucial provisions that
would have provided for the full-fledged military occupation of the
entire Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) by NATO - not just Kosovo.
A brief review of some of these provisions demonstrates the less than
humanitarian motives behind NATO intervention.
Chapter 4a, Article I states: “The
economy of Kosovo, shall function in accordance with free market
principles.” Kosovo happens to be rich with mineral resources
including gold, silver, mercury, molybdenum and other ores - free
market principles would serve to open the region up to Western
investors, maximising corporate profits.
Chapter 5, Article V states: “The CIM
shall be the final authority in theater regarding interpretation of
the civilian aspects of this Agreement, and the Parties agree to abide
by his determinations as binding on all Parties and persons.” The CIM
is the Chief of the Implementation Mission, to be appointed by the
European Union countries.
Chapter 7, Article XV states: “The KFOR
[NATO] commander is the final authority in theater regarding
interpretation of this Chapter and his determinations are binding on
all Parties and persons.” This chapter refers to all military matters.
The overall import is that together, the CIM and the NATO commander
were to have absolutely dictatorial powers, including for instance the
right to overturn elections, shut down organisations and media, and
overrule any decisions made by the Kosovo, Serbia or federal
governments.
Excerpts from ‘Appendix B: Status of
Multi-National Military Implementation Force’ of the Rambouillet text
are even worse. They provide for the following: “NATO personnel shall
enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft and equipment,
free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY
including associated airspace and territorial waters. This shall
include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, maneuver,
billet, and utilization of any areas or faculties as required for
support, training and operations”; “NATO is granted the use of
airports, roads, rails and ports without payment of fees, duties,
dues, tolls, or charges occasioned by mere use”; “NATO may, in the
conduct of the Operation, have need to make improvements or
modifications to certain infrastructure in the FRY, such as roads,
bridges, tunnels, buildings and utility systems”; “The Parties
(Yugoslav government) shall, upon simple request, grant all
telecommunications services, including broadcast services, needed for
the Operation, as determined by NATO... [NATO shall have] the right to
use all of the electromagnetic spectrum, free of cost”; “NATO shall be
immune from all legal process, whether civil, administrative, or
criminal”; “NATO personnel, under all circumstances and at all times,
shall be immune from the Parties’ jurisdiction in respect of any
civil, administrative, criminal or disciplinary offenses which may be
committed by them in the FRY”; “NATO personnel shall be immune from
any form of arrest, investigation, or detention by the authorities in
the FRY”. Additionally, NATO personnel would be able to “detain”
individuals and turn them over to unspecified “appropriate authority”.
Appendix B of the accord therefore outlines the demand that NATO
forces and whoever they employ can do as they wish throughout the
territory of the FRY, without any obligations regarding the laws of
the country (since such obligations are rendered obsolete under the
qualification that NATO forces must “respect the laws applicable in
the FRY” “Without prejudice to their privileges and immunities”),
while having complete and unimpeded access throughout the whole
region. Meanwhile, the FRY’s authorities would be required to follow
any NATO orders “on a priority basis and with all appropriate means.”[31]
Professor Robert Hayden, Director of the
Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of
Pittsburgh, concluded from his expert analysis of the Rambouillet
accord that:
“The administration’s Rambouillet plan
was a public relations fraud rather than a diplomatic compromise. It
provided for the independence of Kosovo in all but name and the
military occupation by NATO of all of Yugoslavia - not just Kosovo.
This was plainly a proposal that no government could accept”.[32]
It is therefore not surprising that
Serbia rejected the absurd provisions proposed in the Rambouillet
accord, particularly in Appendix B, which would have granted NATO
sweeping hegemonic and, indeed, colonial powers throughout all of
Yugoslavia. Although Serbia had rejected the idea of a NATO-led force
in Kosovo, they had agreed to an international peacekeeping force,
proposing instead a UN command.[33]
Indeed, while President Clinton claimed that NATO had “exhausted every
diplomatic effort for a settlement” and that “Serbian leaders refused
even to discuss key elements of the peace agreement”,[34] Serbia had continued to
make very clear that it was interested in a peaceful solution - it had
already accepted most provisions of the Rambouillet Accord.[35]
IV.II NATO Rejection of Reasonable Peace Terms
Subsequent reports demonstrate that it
was the United States and the Western powers, not Serbia, which had
rejected a reasonable peaceful solution. The New York Times,
reported in April 1999 that: “In a little-noted resolution of the
Serbian Parliament just before the bombing, when that hardly
independent body rejected NATO troops in Kosovo, it also supported the
idea of UN forces to monitor a political settlement there.”[36]
Indeed, the Serbian National Assembly had called loud and clear for
negotiations with the objective of
“… reaching a political agreement on a
wide-ranging autonomy for Kosovo and Metohija, with the securing of a
full equality of all citizens and ethnic communities and with respect
for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Republic of
Serbia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia… The Serbian Parliament
is ready to review the size and character of the international
presence in Kosmet [Kosovo/Metohija] for carrying out the reached
accord, immediately upon signing the political accord on the self-rule
agreed and accepted by the representatives of all national communities
in Kosovo”.[37]
Serbia had in other words unambiguously
agreed to an international presence in Kosovo in the form of a United
Nations peacekeeping mission, going so far as to accept “self-rule”
and “wide-ranging autonomy” for Kosovo. But this was unacceptable to
the United States, which was apparently more interested in imposing
hegemony over the region through NATO, while sidelining a prospective
wider UN role. Indeed, NATO’s sacred credibility was at stake. So on
24th March 1999, NATO initiated a bombing campaign against
Serbia with the professed aim of “prevent[ing] a greater humanitarian
catastrophe”, claiming - quite falsely - that it had “no alternative”
to a violent military intervention.[38]
It is clear then that the U.S.-led
Western rejection of the reasonable proposal for a peaceful solution
from Serbia illustrates a complete disinterest on the part of the West
in genuinely establishing peace and autonomy for Kosovo. As the
appended terms of the Rambouillet document reveal, the expansion of
NATO in the Balkans was a primary objective. And furthermore, as noted
in a previously cited report by the U.S. Senate Republican Policy
Committee, justification for this expansion would be provided by
manufacturing a crisis that could act as a “trigger” for NATO military
intervention.
Thanks to the slavish complicity of the
wider media and academia, both of which refused to take note of the
facts, the Western public was meanwhile led to believe that Serbia had
refused to accept, or even discuss, an international peacekeeping plan
- hence allegedly leaving NATO with “no alternative” but to bomb. But
at that time, Serbia had actually agreed to most of the provisions -
including autonomy for Kosovo - of the Rambouillet accord, requesting
UN monitors instead of NATO. Moreover, it was the West that had
imposed unreasonable non-negotiable terms in the Rambouillet accord
that would have legislated for NATO’s full-fledged colonial-style
military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia. It was, in fact, the
Western powers under American leadership who had rejected reasonable
Serb proposals for peace including wide-ranging autonomy for Kosovo
and a UN-led peacekeeping presence in Kosovo.
Indeed, the
“Rambouillet talks were a farce”, according to U.S. media analyst Seth
Ackerman of the Washington DC-based Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
(FAIR), America’s leading media watchdog. “The U.S. consistently
refused to negotiate; for example, Madeleine Albright told the Serbs,
‘We accept nothing less than a complete agreement including a NATO-led
force’.” Ackerman thus observed at the time that although “a peaceful
solution was possible”, “the U.S. has blocked that route”, preferring
instead to drop its humanitarian bombs in the name of ‘preventing a
greater catastrophe’ - which could have easily been prevented
peacefully. In other words, the West deliberately obstructed a
peaceful solution because it favoured a military solution.[39]
Seth Ackerman elaborates on this elsewhere:
“NATO described its war as a humanitarian campaign
- a war for human rights. So the media have tended to evaluate it in
those terms. But what’s missing is the recognition that the U.S. had
strategic goals in Europe that shaped the way it addressed the Kosovo
problem... Secretary of State Albright’s goal at Rambouillet was
provoking a Serbian ‘no’ and an Albanian ‘yes’ so that the Europeans
would be forced to approve NATO air strikes.”[40]
The glaring inconsistencies in the
official story of what happened in Kosovo are evident in later
developments. The principal objective of the Western powers,
purportedly, was the desire to “avert humanitarian catastrophe” in
Kosovo - that is, to “halt the genocide”, and to prevent the expulsion
of Kosovan Albanians from their homes. But as a matter of strategic
fact, the Western powers had been well-aware that a NATO bombing
campaign would only escalate the genocide and widen the humanitarian
catastrophe – which, to say the least, throws the official
humanitarian motives of the NATO powers into severe doubt.
V.I Internal U.S. Predictions on the Impact of NATO Bombing
Professor Stephen
Shalom, a political scientist at William Paterson University in New
Jersey, provides a lucid summary of the predicted impact of NATO
bombing:
“Firstly, the bombing required the removal of the
international observers and relief workers whose presence provided
some restraint. (‘The Serbs were spring-loaded to go when the last
observer left Kosovo’, said a NATO intelligence official quoted in the
Washington Post [WP], April 11, 1999.)”[41]
The Chicago Tribune
concurred with this assessment, reporting at the time that: “The
absence of international monitors in Kosovo has given a green light to
Serb ‘cleansing’ of Albanian Kosovars.”[42] “Second,” noted Professor
Shalom, “the bombing incensed many even in Serbia’s democratic
movement, so one can only imagine how it must have affected Serbian
security forces in Kosovo…
“… unable to retaliate against NATO missiles and
warplanes, they could be expected to lash out at those most
vulnerable. Third, mass expulsions would benefit the Serbian military,
who hoped a flood of refugees would ‘overwhelm and distract NATO
forces stationed on the other side of the border’ (WP, April 11, 1999,
citing Western officials). And fourth, if NATO was going to try to
force a settlement militarily, there was considerable incentive for
Milosevic to make sure he was in the strongest possible bargaining
position when the fighting ended: i.e., to try to totally wipe out the
KLA, uproot its mass base, and remove Albanians from as much territory
as possible in preparation for any partition... What were U.S.
officials thinking?”[43]
In fact, U.S. officials were thinking
exactly along these lines. Many reports indicate that U.S. officials
appear to have known all along that a bombing campaign would escalate
the humanitarian catastrophe, rather than reverse it. The Sunday
Times reports that well before the launch of NATO air strikes,
President Clinton knew that “air strikes might provoke Serb soldiers
into greater acts of butchery.” On 15th March 1999:
“Clinton and his cabinet members,
including William Cohen, the defence secretary, and Sandy Berger, the
national security adviser, sat in silence as Shelton [General Hugh
Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] outlined the thrust of
the analysis. There was a danger, he told them, that far from helping
to contain the savagery of the Serbs in Kosovo - a moral imperative
cited by the president - air strikes might provoke Serb soldiers into
greater acts of butchery. Air strikes alone, Shelton stated, could not
stop Serb forces from executing Kosovars.”[44]
The same was confirmed by U.S. House
Intelligence Committee Chair Peter Goss: “Our intelligence community
warned us months and days before [the bombing] that we would have a
virtual explosion of refugees over the 250,000 that was expected as of
last year [i.e. pre-bombing], that the Serb resolve would increase,
and that there would be ethnic cleansing.”[45]
George J. Tenet, Director of the CIA, similarly warned that the Serbs
might respond to NATO bombing with a campaign of ethnic cleansing.[46] After the initiation of
the bombing campaign and the escalation of the humanitarian
catastrophe, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon admitted that the
Pentagon had known all along that this was a probable outcome: “In the
Pentagon, in this building, we were not surprised at what Milosevic
has done.”[47] The Supreme Commander of
NATO, General Wesley Clark, who led the entire campaign, went even
further, admitting that: “We knew there were going to be some
horrendous atrocities… We knew it might lead to the expulsion of
Kosovars from certain regions of Kosovo.”[48]
He also stressed quite unambiguously
during the first few days of the bombing that it was “entirely
predictable” that Serb paramilitary atrocities would increase as a
result of NATO’s intervention, and that as a consequence the ethnic
cleansing of Kosovan Abanians would escalate. The Sunday Times,
for instance, reported that: “Nato’s supreme commander, Wesley Clark
was not surprised at the retaliatory upsurge [by the Serbs]. ‘This was
entirely predictable at this stage’, he said” concerning the bombing’s
“horrific impact” on civilians in Kosovo. Not long later Clark further
affirmed: “The military authorities fully anticipated the vicious
approach that Milosevic would adopt, as well as the terrible
efficiency with which he would carry it out”.[49]
A month after the bombing, the NATO Commander further revealed that
the NATO air war against Serbia planned by “the political leadership”,
“was not designed as a means of blocking Serb ethnic cleansing. It was
not designed as a means of waging war against the Serb and MUP forces
in Kosovo. Not in any way. There was never any intent to do that. That
was not the idea.”[50]
In other words, according to the then
Supreme Commander of NATO who steered the bombing campaign in Kosovo,
it was fully anticipated that the NATO intervention would escalate
acts of genocide, atrocities and the humanitarian catastrophe as such.
Indeed, General Wesley Clark admitted that this was because the
military intervention had nothing to do with averting Serb ethnic
cleansing, or even waging war with Serb forces in Kosovo. Yet on 24th
March 1999, President Clinton, speaking from the White House, told
reporters: “Our purpose here is to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe.
Our objective is to make it clear to Mr. Milosevic he must choose
peace or limit his plans to make war.”[51] The Western powers under
U.S. leadership therefore wished to convince the world that they had
intervened militarily to avert Kosovo’s humanitarian catastrophe, in
spite of having predicted that, “Airstrikes alone... could not stop
Serb forces from executing Kosovars” (Shelton), and having anticipated
that bombing would escalate the humanitarian catastrophe.
V.II NATO’s Escalation of the Humanitarian Catastrophe
It is hardly surprising therefore to find
that NATO’s bombing campaign directly resulted in the escalation,
exactly as anticipated, of the humanitarian crisis in Kosovo. The
impact of the West’s intervention has been noted by numerous
commentators. For instance, leading specialist in international
studies Andre Gunder Frank, currently Professor Emeritus of History at
the University of Nebraska, reported the predictable anti-humanitarian
results: “NATO bombing, as the CIA and Pentagon reportedly predicted,
has immeasurably increased the deprivation of the Kosovo Albanians’
life, property, home and country.”[52] British war correspondent
John Pilger, winner of British journalism’s highest award, reported
that:
“From 24 March [when the NATO bombings
commenced], the escalation of both atrocities and the flood of
refugees is clear in reports to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
The bombing, reported investigators of the International Strategic
Studies Association, ‘contributed heavily, perhaps overwhelmingly’.”[53]
Cultural critic and political affairs
commentator Professor Edward Said of Columbia University similarly
observed:
“[T]hat the illegal bombing increased
and hastened the flight of people out of Kosovo cannot be doubted. How
the NATO high command, with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair leading the
pack, could ever have assumed that the number of refugees would have
decreased as a result of the bombing fairly beggars the imagination.”[54]
Some commentators have attempted to
deflect from the damning implications of these facts, by suggesting
that the Serb Army had long planned to escalate violence against the
Kosovan Albanians regardless of whether or not NATO bombed. Yet this
suggestion is based on a distortion of the facts. As concluded by the
London-based Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR): “It is now
clear that Belgrade prepared the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo -
code-named Operation Horseshoe - months in advance. It was to be
executed in the event of NATO bombing. [italics added]”[55]
In other words, if these Serb plans existed, it was also planned that
they only be implemented subsequent to NATO military intervention.
However, other experts have challenged the very existence of such
plans. German General Heinz Loquai has revealed that ‘Operation
Horseshoe’ never existed at all – rather, it was a myth manufactured
by the German Minister of Defence to galvanise public support of the
NATO bombing.[56]
Even the U.S. Department of State
somewhat inadvertently admitted that “In late March 1999”, which was
when NATO’s huge air war had commenced, “Serbian forces dramatically
increased the scope and pace of their efforts”, as predicted would
occur as a consequence of NATO’s military intervention, “moving away
from selective targeting of towns and regions suspected of KLA
sympathies.” Thus, the State Department confessed that prior to NATO
intervention, Serb attacks constituted “selective targeting” directed
primarily at the KLA - not genocide - which only “dramatically
increased” thanks to NATO’s military humanism.[57]
The mayhem that consequently ensued on
the ground has been described well by leading U.S. foreign policy
analyst Professor Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology:
“The threat of NATO bombing,
predictably, led to a sharp escalation of atrocities by the Serbian
Army and paramilitaries, and to the departure of international
observers, which of course had the same effect. Commanding General
Wesley Clark declared that it was ‘entirely predictable’ that Serbian
terror and violence would intensify after the NATO bombing, exactly as
happened… [T]here are credible reports of large-scale destruction of
villages, assassinations, generation of an enormous refugee flow,
perhaps an effort to expel a good part of the Albanian population -
all an ‘entirely predictable’ consequence of the threat and then the
use of force, as General Clark rightly observes. Kosovo is therefore
another illustration of... try[ing] to escalate the violence, with
exactly that expectation.”[58]
The conclusions of the above examination
are confirmed by a comparison of the casualties before and after the
NATO bombing. Such a comparison reveals the occurrence of a very sharp
rise in deaths after the commencement of the NATO air war. The
contrast between conditions in Serbia and Kosovo before and after NATO
intervention is so striking that, as Balkans specialist Professor
Robert Hayden records: “… the casualties among Serb civilians in the
first three weeks of the war [as a result of NATO bombing] are higher
than all the casualties on both sides in Kosovo in the three months
that led up this war, and yet those three months were supposed to be a
humanitarian catastrophe.”[59]
VI.I No Genocide Prior to NATO Intervention
There is little doubt that in 1998,
Kosovo was being ravaged by a conflict that had resulted in the
killings of approximately 2,000 people, mostly Kosovan Albanians. The
cycle of violence, however, had mainly been initiated through a series
of concerted KLA attacks on Serb police and civilians, culminating in
the KLA’s takeover of approximately 40 per cent of Kosovo. The KLA
offensive had elicited a disproportionately violent response from Serb
security forces who cracked down on both KLA guerrillas and their
perceived civilian supporters among the Kosovan Albanian community.
However, a fairly detailed review of this sequence of events
demonstrates that it is inaccurate to construe the violence as a
clear-cut case of genocide perpetrated by the Serb Army on the
Albanian population of Kosovo. It is indeed striking to find that the
cycle of military violence had been initiated not by the Serbs, but by
the KLA.
On 8th December 1998, the
Foreign Minister of the European Union “expressed concern for the
‘recent intensification of military action’ in Kosovo, noting that
increased activity by the KLA has prompted an increased presence of
Serbian security forces in the region.” The North Atlantic Council had
similarly concluded that the KLA constituted “the main initiators of
violence… [in]… a deliberate campaign of provocation.” The KLA and
other Kosovan Albanian leaders explained the reasoning behind their
tactics as follows: “any armed action we undertook would bring
retaliation against civilians”; “the more civilians were killed, the
chances of intervention became bigger”. Such statements – and there
are others of this sort - reveal that the KLA attacks were designed to
deliberately provoke a brutal Serb reaction against Kosovan Albanian
civilians, which could be exploited to justify Western intervention.
When four Serb policemen were killed by KLA fighters prior to the
massacre of dozens of Kosovan Albanians at Racak, KLA leader Hashim
Thaci told the BBC: “We knew we were endangering civilians lives, too,
a great number of lives.” Another KLA guerrilla admitted with
reference to the Racak massacre that: “It was guaranteed that every
time we took action they would take revenge on civilians”.
Importantly, he also described the violence at Racak not as a
genocidal attack by Serb security forces on Kosovan Albanian
civilians, but rather as “a ferocious struggle” in which both sides
“suffered heavy losses”.[60]
In response to the escalating tit-for-tat
killings of which civilians were increasingly becoming a target, the
UN Security Council demanded a ceasefire and negotiations in September
1998. U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke brokered an agreement between
Serbia and the KLA. According to veteran Balkans specialist Tim Judah,
the agreement “had come just in time for the guerrillas”, who “were
hard pressed and were holed up in hills”. The U.S.-brokered agreement
granted the KLA “a reprieve, time to reorganise and rearm, and, as
they told anyone who cared to listen, time to prepare for their spring
[1999] offensive.”[61] Thus, after the October
ceasefire, the KLA violated the terms of the agreement as predicted,
initiating a new wave of attacks. The simultaneous assessment of the
violence by EU Foreign Ministers and the North Atlantic Council was
that:
“Kosovo Albanian paramilitary units have
taken advantage of the lull in the fighting to re-establish control
over many villages in Kosovo, as well as over some areas near urban
centres and highways… leading to statements [by Serb authorities] that
if the [Western KVM monitors] cannot control these units the
government would.”
Reviewing the ensuing violence, the UN
Inter-Agency Update reported in January the specific incidents of
fighting between Serb security forces and the KLA. “More reports were
received of the KLA ‘policing’ the Albanian community and
administering punishments to those charged as collaborators with the
Serbs.” The “cycle of confrontation can be generally described” as a
series of KLA attacks on Serb civilians and police, eliciting “a
disproportionate response by the FRY authorities” and “renewed KLA
activity elsewhere.” In a revealing statement during the commencement
of NATO bombing, British Defence Minister Lord George Robertson, later
to become NATO Secretary-General, testified before the House of
Commons that up until mid-January 1999, “the KLA were responsible for
more deaths in Kosovo than the Yugoslav authorities had been.”[62] Similarly, a UN report put
the balance of violence between Serb and Albanian paramilitaries
before NATO intervention at roughly equal.[63]
It is important to recall the U.S. role
in the crisis at this time. Having displayed a “green light” to
Serbia’s response to KLA attacks, the U.S. covertly supported the KLA
throughout the period of confrontation described above. We should
refer again to the findings of the Sunday Times that:
“American
intelligence agents have admitted they helped to train the Kosovo
Liberation Army before Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia…
Central Intelligence Agency officers
were cease-fire monitors in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, developing ties
with the KLA and giving American military training manuals and field
advice on fighting the Yugoslav army and Serbian police.”
In other words, under the cover of acting
as independent KVM ceasefire monitors, the CIA gave covert assistance
- primarily in the form of training, military advice, and strategic
planning - to the KLA in its above attacks on Serb civilians and
police, which were designed to provoke a violent Serb response.
According to one CIA agent, “I’d tell them which hill to avoid, which
wood to go behind, that sort of thing.” Covert U.S. support therefore
apparently guided the KLA to attack in a manner most likely to elicit
a brutal Serb clampdown, which could thus eventually be used to
justify airstrikes. “European diplomats then working for the OSCE
claim it was betrayed by an American policy that made airstrikes
inevitable.”[64]
Official internal German government
reports obtained by the International Association of Lawyers Against
Nuclear Arms clearly show that the German government privately denied
the existence of both ethnic cleansing and genocide in Kosovo, prior
to NATO intervention. This was apparently in spite its own public
assertions in support of U.S. claims. The internal documents thus
corroborate our conclusions above, that averting genocide was not the
basis for NATO’s intervention, and that in reality the escalation of
humanitarian crisis in Kosovo occurred as a direct product of NATO
intervention. Key excerpts from some of these documents are cited and
discussed below.
A German Foreign Office intelligence
report of 12 January 1999 observed: “Even
in Kosovo an explicit political persecution linked to Albanian
ethnicity is not verifiable. The East of Kosovo is still not involved
in armed conflict. Public life in cities like Pristina, Urosevac,
Gnjilan, etc. has, in the entire conflict period, continued on a
relatively normal basis.” The “actions of the [Serb] security forces
(were) not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically
defined group, but against the military opponent and its actual or
alleged supporters.”[65] Another internal report
noted:
“The Foreign Office’s
status reports of May 6, June 8 and July 13, 1998, given to the
plaintiffs in the summons to a verbal deliberation, do not allow the
conclusion that there is group persecution of ethnic Albanians from
Kosovo. Not even regional group persecution, applied to all ethnic
Albanians from a specific part of Kosovo, can be observed with
sufficient certainty. 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 in 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) and
people in immediate contact with it in its areas of operation... A
state program of persecution aimed at the whole ethnic group of
Albanians exists neither now nor earlier.”[66]
The
Administrative Court of Baden-Wurttenburg concluded: “The various
reports presented to the senate all agree that the often feared
humanitarian catastrophe threatening the Albanian civil population has
been averted...
“This appears to be the
case since the winding down of combat in connection with an agreement
made with the Serbian leadership at the end of 1998 (Status Report of
the Foreign Office, November 18, 1998). Since that time both the
security situation and the conditions of life of the Albanian-derived
population have noticeably improved... Specifically in the larger
cities public life has since returned to relative normality (cf. on
this Foreign Office, January 12, 1999 to the Administrative Court of
Trier; December 28, 1998 to the Upper Administrative Court of Lüneberg
and December 23, 1998 to the Administrative Court at Kassel), even
though tensions between the population groups have meanwhile increased
due to individual acts of violence... Single instances of excessive
acts of violence against the civil population, e.g. in Racak, have, in
world opinion, been laid at the feet of the Serbian side and have
aroused great indignation. But the number and frequency of such
excesses do not warrant the conclusion that every Albanian living in
Kosovo is exposed to extreme danger to life and limb nor is everyone
who returns there threatened with death and severe injury.”[67]
Near the end
of February, the Upper Adminstrative Court at Munster observed:
“There is no sufficient
actual proof of a secret program, or an unspoken consensus on the
Serbian side, to liquidate the Albanian people, to drive it out or
otherwise to persecute it in the extreme manner presently described...
Events since February and March 1998 do not evidence a persecution
program based on Albanian ethnicity. The measures taken by the armed
Serbian forces are in the first instance directed toward combatting
the KLA and its supposed adherents and supporters.”
The Court
similarly noted on 11th March: “Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo
have neither been nor are now exposed to regional or countrywide group
persecution in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.”[68] These official reports
contradict the official public line adopted by the NATO powers. They
demonstrate that the massive crisis in Kosovo was largely a production
of the NATO intervention, and almost certainly did not exist prior to
the latter. In tandem with other reports discussed above, they
disprove NATO’s justification for intervention by strongly suggesting
that there simply was no such policy of genocide on the part of the
Serb authorities.
VI.II The Impact of NATO Bombing on Serbia and Kosovo
Indeed, while the available evidence
weighs strongly in favour of the conclusion that there was no genocide
in Kosovo prior to the NATO bombing campaign, it is apparent that the
bombing directly escalated the humanitarian catastrophe to
unprecedented degrees. Gar Lipow reports these results with cutting
irony:
“Cruise missile humanitarianism has
multiplied the number of Kosovar Albanian homeless and dead, without
saving one life, or stopping one atrocity. By highest
estimates, the Kosovo civil war drove 400,000 ethnic Albanians from
their homes in 1998; 30,000 of these fled Kosovo. The first two weeks
of the bombing increased this to over one million homeless Kosovars;
more than 400,000 of whom fled Kosovo. From March 26th through April
13th, NATO escalated the atrocities to double those in the
whole year of 1998. The CIA and Pentagon both warned our government
that it would provoke massacres before it dropped the first kind and
cuddly bomb.”[69]
The overall import of all this is that
NATO’s air war was implemented before the refugee evictions and
killings began on an unprecedented scale. As had been forecast at the
outset, the intervention constituted the fundamental cause of the
rapid escalation of ethnic cleansing and other atrocities. One only
need recall the damning testimony of NATO Commander General Clark, who
noted that the war plans he was ordered to prepare by “the political
leadership” were “not designed as a means of blocking Serb ethnic
cleansing... Not in anyway. There was never any intent” to block
“ethnic cleansing”. “That was not the idea.” In that context, it is
not surprising that the NATO campaign involved the deliberate bombing
of civilians.
In April, the Washington Times
reported that NATO planned to hit “power generation plants and water
systems, taking the war directly to civilians.”[70] The New York Times
similarly reported in April that “the destruction of the civilian
infrastructure of Yugoslavia has become part of the strategy to end
the war on Kosovo... We are bringing down terror on the Serbian
people”.[71]
In May, NATO Generals admitted that “Just focussing on field forces is
not enough... The [Serbian] people have to get to the point that their
lights are turned off, their bridges are blocked so they can’t get to
work.”[72]
“NATO officials also have said they believe that putting pressure on
the civilian population will undermine the regime,” reported the
San Francisco Examiner.[73] A British Harrier pilot
who had been bombing Serbia in April 1999 was led to remark: “After a
while you’ve got to ignore the collateral damage [i.e. civilian
casualties] and start smashing those targets”[74] – in other words, bomb
indiscriminately with no regard for the civilian death toll.
NATO’s attacks were therefore aimed at
civilian targets right from the outset of the campaign, when a tractor
factory was destroyed by cruise missiles. According to an employee of
a U.S. intelligence organisation, the CIA had been charged with
crafting lists of Yugoslav economic assets – the official testified
that “basically, everything in the country’s a target unless it’s
taken off the list.”[75]
Professor Robert Hayden of the University
of Pittsburgh, a specialist in Central and East European affairs,
surveyed the results:
“Since then NATO targets have included
roads, railroad tracks and bridges hundreds of miles from Kosovo,
power plants, factories of many kinds, food processing and sugar
processing plants, water pumping stations, cigarette factories,
central heating plants for civilian apartment blocks, television
studios, post offices, non-military government administrative
buildings, ski resorts, government official residences, oil
refineries, civilian airports, gas stations, and chemical plants.
NATO’s strategy is not to attack Yugoslavia’s army directly, but
rather to destroy Yugoslavia itself”.[76]
TFF Director Jan Oberg similarly noted
that:
“Perhaps the biggest lie in all this was
the statement that ‘we are not at war with the Yugoslav people’. But
NATO destroyed 300 factories and refineries, 190 educational
establishments, 20 hospitals, 30 clinics, 60 bridges, 5 airports; it
killed at least 2,000 civilians and wounded 6,000 and many will die
and suffer because of the health infrastructure destruction. To this
you may add the sanctions since 1991 and the burden of more than
700,000 refugees from other republics and now from Kosovo. Only 12-15
tanks of 300 main battle tanks and some planes were destroyed.”[77]
Former U.S. President
Jimmy Carter concurred: “[Our attack] has been counterproductive, and
our destruction of civilian life has now become senseless and
excessively brutal...
“The American-led force has expanded targets to
inhabited areas and resorted to the use of anti-personnel cluster
bombs. The result has been damage to hospitals, offices and residences
of a half-dozen ambassadors, and the killing of innocent civilians...
[Our] insistence on the use of cluster bombs, designed to kill or maim
humans, is condemned almost universally and brings discredit to our
nation.”[78]
Other reports detailed the nature of
NATO’s attacks. “After two months of bombing, which began March 24, a
NATO bent on crippling Serbia’s war effort is going after the
country’s electricity in a serious way, and water supplies dependent
of electrical pumps are a major casualty. The high-explosive bombs are
doing permanent damage to both systems.”[79] The result was noted by
William Drozdiak: “In the past few days of NATO’s 2-month-old campaign
of air attacks against Yugoslavia, allied bombing runs have deprived
Belgrade and other major cities of much of their electricity and water
supplies by knocking out power stations.”[80]
In fact, according to
the Confederation of Trade Unions in Serbia (CTUS), the hundreds of
factories destroyed by NATO bombs were almost all state-owned.
Foreign-owned private enterprises in the country were not targeted.
“Many of these factories had been occupied by their workers, who hoped
to prevent U.S. warplanes from attacking by placing their bodies on
the line. NATO bombed them anyway,” reported Fred Gaboury. “Among the
factories destroyed are the giant Zastava plant that employed 30,000,
the Energoinvest plant in the Kosovo city of Pristina that employed
800, the Amortizeri plant that employed 4,500 workers and the 14th of
October plant that employed 5,000.”[81]
Further evidence for the fact that
civilian infrastructure constituted the prime target - with Yugoslav
military losses constituting the actual ‘collateral damage’ - comes in
the form of casualty figures. Award-winning British journalist Robert
Fisk reported that: “NATO killed far more Serb civilians than soldiers
during its 11-week bombardment of the country and most of the Yugoslav
Third Army emerged unscathed from the massive air attacks on its
forces in Kosovo”. According to “investigations by Western
correspondents and humanitarian agencies of Nato bombing incidents”,
“the official civilian casualty toll of around 1,500” was confirmed,
with 6000 wounded.
“At least 450 of these died in Nato’s
repeated ‘mistakes’, when alliance aircraft bombed a train at Grdelica,
a bridge at Varvarin, housing estates at Surdulica, Aleksinac and
Cuprija, a bus at Luzane, an Albanian refugee convoy in Kosovo and
made other attacks on civilians. Many others died in what Nato called
‘collateral damage’ in attacks around Belgrade, Kraljevo, Kragujevac,
Nis and Novi Sad.”
Meanwhile, “thousands of Yugoslav tanks,
missile launchers, artillery batteries, personnel carriers and trucks
have been withdrawn from the province with barely a scratch on them”,
while “only 132 members of the armed forces were killed in Nato
attacks” according to “figures given to The Independent by a
Yugoslav military source.”[82]
We should hence contrast the 7,500 Serb
civilians wounded and killed, with the death toll of only 132 Serb
soldiers in comparison. This blatantly contravenes NATO’s repeated
insistence that it “never intended to cause civilian casualties.”[83]
On the contrary, the figures indicate that NATO was primarily
targeting civilians, rather than the Yugoslav military. According to
NATO itself, less than one per cent of bombs miss their target, which
means that more than 99 per cent of the time NATO hits home. By NATO’s
own inadvertent admission then, if Serb civilian casualties vastly
outnumber military losses, the only explanation is that NATO was
deliberately targeting them - a fact admitted by the major American
newspapers.[84]
A crucial report from Spain details the
testimony of a Spanish fighter pilot concerning NATO’s deliberate
targeting of civilians: “The suspicions that NATO’s repeated bombing
of civilian victims and non-military targets are not the result of war
‘errors’, are confirmed by Captain Martin de la Hoz”, a Spanish pilot
who participated in the NATO bombing raids. Captain Adolfo Luis Martin
de la Hoz, who returned to Spain in May after the bombings, affirmed
the following:
“Several times our colonel protested to
NATO chiefs as to why they select targets which are not military
targets. They threw him out with curses, saying that we should know
that the North Americans would lodge a complaint to the Spanish
Army... once there was a coded order from the North American military
that we should drop anti-personnel bombs over the localities of
Prishtine (Pristina) and Nish (Nis). The colonel refused altogether
and, a couple of days later, the transfer order came.”
The report continues with the Captain’s
description of the NATO campaign:
“They are destroying the country,
bombing it with new weapons, toxic nerve gases, surface mines dropped
by parachute, bombs containing uranium, napalm, sterilization
chemicals, sprayings to poison the crops and weapons of which even we
still do not know anything. The North Americans are committing there
one of the biggest barbarities that can be committed against
humanity.”[85]
VI.III Some Reports On NATO’s Targeting of Civilian Infrastructure
For a basic
understanding of the real import of NATO’s allegedly humanitarian
targeting of civilian infrastructure in Yugoslavia, we may consider
the following excerpt from a report by Robert Fisk in The
Independent:
“On the second floor of the Serbian Clinical
Centre in Belgrade are victims of the Balkan war who will never be
mentioned in any NATO briefing. There’s a 14-year-old boy with his
head crushed, lying in a coma, eyes half-closed, a fat oxygen tube
down his throat. There’s a middle-aged farmer hit in the head by
shrapnel and expected to die within a few hours. A little further
down the emergency ward is another boy - 13 this time - with his
head swathed in bandages, moving in agony, his brain damaged and his
right leg fractured by a falling building. They are NATO’s victims.”
In another later
report, Fisk relates:
“They had been torn apart. Blood was caked around
what was left of Vojislav Milic’s cellar, and there was the smell of
meat. In the morgue, they had been unable to fit together the pieces
of his son and daughter-in-law and his two grandchildren. NATO’s bomb
- one of two which struck the homes of Surdulica - had scored a direct
hit on the house, killing at least nine other children in the
basement, the youngest only five years old... Every house in Zmaj Jove
Jovanovica Street had been ripped apart by the 2,000-lb laser-guided
bomb, their roofs flung hundreds of metres around the town, their
walls cracked or blasted to the ground, their people - those who
survived - taken to hospital in their dozens.... ‘Bits [of children]
were all over the road’, a young, American-educated man said to me.
‘We found the head of a child in a garden and many limbs in the mud.
But you don’t want to report that. CNN filmed the bodies - but they
didn’t show them on television.’ Alas, the young man was right.”[86]
Other reports give us
a similarly bleak picture of NATO’s indiscriminate bombing of civilian
infrastructure in Serbia.
“NATO carried out a daytime attack in the capital
area, severely damaging a railway bridge over the Sava River a few
miles west of Belgrade… Other strong explosions hit the Yugoslav
capital hours later. Serbian media reported NATO jets also attacked
the central town of Valijevo, hitting a factory and damaging nearby
civilian homes.”[87]
“Less than two hours after the Russian special
envoy left Belgrade after peace talks with President Slobodan
Milosevic of Yugoslavia, NATO bombed a hospital this morning. Four
people were killed and dozens wounded, including medical staff and two
women struck by broken glass while giving birth. At least 70 other
pregnant women were moved to another hospital.”[88]
“At a news conference Tuesday, Health Minister
Leposava Milicevic said that across Serbia, there were 9,500 patients
in intensive care or semi-intensive care, 3,000 patients a day in need
of dialysis and 300 infants in incubators, all at risk because of the
power shortages.”[89]
“After the attacks this morning, Radio Novosti
reported that a chemical complex at Baric, 15 miles southwest of
Belgrade, had been hit. Telephone calls around Serbia found witnesses
who reported attacks at Obrenovac, the site of a power station; at
Ostruzmica, and at Makis, a water-purifying station for Belgrade.”[90]
“‘It took only five seconds to destroy the future
of 5,000 people and their families. As of today this factory is dead,
as well as the town of Cacak itself,’ said Radomir Ljujic, managing
director of the Sloboda household utilities plant.”[91]
Senior lecturer in
Media Studies at South Bank University, Phillip Hammond, has
undertaken a critical analysis of several further examples of such
systematic ‘collateral damage’:
“The bombs that hit Nis marketplace on 3 May, for
example, were cluster bombs designed to kill and maim people with
shrapnel, although the stated target was an airport runway. Similarly,
when Nato hit a bus on 1 May, killing 47 people, was it also an
accident that Nato aircraft returned for a second strike, hitting an
ambulance and injuring medical staff at the scene? It is certain at
least that the attack on the television building in Belgrade was
carried out in the full knowledge that civilians were inside. Nato’s
definition of a ‘legitimate military target’ is flexible enough to
include homes, schools and hospitals.”[92]
As a result of the Western campaign
“staggering problems” lay ahead, reported the New York Times,
including the problem of returning refugees “to the land of ashes and
graves that was their home”, but that has now been devastated as a
result of both NATO bombing and the scorched earth campaign it
predictably induced. This has produced the “enormously costly
challenge of rebuilding the devastated economies of Kosovo, the rest
of Serbia and their neighbours.” For example in Serbia, thanks to
NATO’s pinprick missile attacks on the country’s water pumps, only 30
per cent of Belgrade’s 2 million people had running water, and the
city was down to 10 per cent of its reserves. According to Balkans
historian Susan Woodward of the Brookings Institution, “all the people
we want to help us to make a stable Kosovo have been destroyed by the
effects of the bombings.”[93]
VI.IV NATO’s Environmental Catastrophe
The NATO bombing has
resulted in the ecological devastation of the entire region. The
effects, which according to environmental experts have rather ominous
implications for the ecological future of Europe, have been documented
by the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe,
Professor Michel Chossudovsky of Ottawa University and Dr. Radoje
Lausevic of Belgrade University, among others. Dr. Lausevic, for
instance, documents NATO damage to (a) Infrastructure - general,
traffic, bridges, railways and railway stations, roads and
transporters, and airports (b) Industry - factories, refineries,
warehouses, agriculture (c) Urban and rural residential areas (d)
Pre-school institutions, schools and universities (e) Cultural and
historic monuments.[94]
Some instances of
NATO’s devastation of the environment were also reported by Steve
Crawshaw:
“The fertilizer factory was bombed, releasing huge
amounts of ammonia into the air and into the Danube. The oil refinery
was repeatedly bombed: 20,000 tons of crude oil were burnt up in one
bombardment alone, and a cloud of black smoke hung in the air for 10
days. The petrochemicals factory was bombed: 1,400 tons of ethylene
dichloride poured into the Danube, and high concentrations of vinyl
chloride, the main constituent of polyvinyl chlorides, were released
into the atmosphere at more than 10,000 times the permitted level.”[95]
British journalist
George Monbiot, who won a United Nations prize for the environment,
likewise reported around mid-April: “The chemical tanks ruptured by
NATO bombers on the outskirts of Belgrade last week contained a number
of lethal pollutants…
“Some held a complex mixture of hydrocarbons called
‘naptha’, others housed phosgene and chlorine (both of which were used
as chemical weapons in the first world war), and hydrochloric acid. As
the factories burnt, a poisoned rain, containing hundreds of toxic
combustion products, splattered Belgrade, its suburbs and the
surrounding countryside. Broken tanks and burst pipes poured naptha,
chlorine, ethylene dichloride and transformer oil, all deadly poisons,
into the Danube... Oil slicks up to 12 miles long wound their way
towards Romania... Many of the compounds released cause cancers,
miscarriages and birth defects. Others are associated with fatal nerve
and liver diseases. The effects of the bombing of Serbia’s economy
equate, in other words, to low-intensity chemical warfare.... This, in
environmental terms at least, is perhaps the dirtiest war the West has
ever fought.”[96]
These grave
consequences of the intervention were by no means accidental. In an
extensive analysis of the impact of NATO’s bombing on the Pancevo
petrochemical plant in Yugoslavia, Professor Michel Chossudovsky – a
longtime observer on Balkans affairs – concluded that:
“NATO
military strategists knew precisely what they were doing and what
would be the likely consequences. At the neighboring oil refinery, two
NATO missiles had hit on April 4th the refinery’s control rooms
killing three staff members. The strikes had set the plant on fire,
reducing it to a toxic wreck. The objective was not to avoid an
environmental disaster. The objective was to create an environmental
disaster... NATO was expecting that by ruthlessly bombing Pancevo
among other civilian sites, this would intimidate Belgrade into
accepting the Rambouillet Agreement including its infamous Military
Appendix which essentially gave NATO the right to occupy all parts of
Yugoslavia.”[97]
Chossudovsky’s study is based on
conclusive photographic and documentary evidence. It focuses
particularly on whether the resultant damage was accidental or
purposeful, in light of the specific capabilities of NATO targeting
technology.
To add to the West’s culpability, it has
been revealed that the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade
- in which three Chinese journalists were killed - was also not an
accident. Contrary to claims by Western politicians echoed by the
majority of mainstream news outlets. “NATO deliberately bombed the
Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the war in Kosovo after discovering
it was being used to transmit Yugoslav army communications”, reports
The Observer.[98]
VI.V NATO’s Destruction of Kosovo
Even the province of Kosovo, which was
purportedly supposed be under the protection of the international
community, was apparently targeted by the NATO humanitarian bombing
campaign. In fact, NATO’s bombing of Kosovo played a direct role in
escalating the refugee crisis: Kosovan Albanian civilians were often
fleeing NATO bombs in addition to Serb reprisals. Indeed, there is
abundant evidence to suggest that Kosovan Albanians were very often
fleeing NATO bombs alone. For instance, the Sunday Times
reported in March 1999 that:
“Mivei, a tall Albanian woman clutching
her four-month old baby, looked bewildered when asked if Serbian
troops had driven her out. ‘There were no Serbs’, she said. ‘We were
frightened of the bombs.’... Red Cross officials say many of the
recent arrivals [in Macedonia] intend to return to Kosovo as soon as
the NATO bombardment stops.”[99]
British media scholar Phillip Hammond
similarly noted that refugees claiming to have been bombed by Serbs,
“have sometimes proved unreliable witnesses…
“Even when told they had been bombed by
Nato, survivors of the attack on the Djakovica convoy blamed the
Serbs. From the viewpoint of ethnic Albanians who welcome Nato action,
such statements are understandable. But it is less obvious why Western
reporters should be determined to accept them. Channel Four News, for
example, reported a large exodus from Prizren on 29 April, the day
after the town had been heavily bombed by Nato. Yet this was not even
mentioned as a possible reason for the flight of refugees.”[100]
The Los Angeles Times reported
similar ominous facts that belied NATO claims: “The small craters and
mysterious fin-shaped pieces of metal found next to civilian vehicles
attacked in Kosovo suggest that they may have been hit by U.S. cluster
bombs designed to destroy tanks…
“Similar evidence has been found at
several bomb sites over the past four days, including two roads on
which tractors pulling wagonloads of Kosovo Albanian refugees were
destroyed during NATO airstrikes on Wednesday. The intact bomb
remnants, shaped like single fins about two feet long with a one-inch
hole at one end, are stamped in two places with the name ALCOA,
suggesting that the U.S. aluminum company made them... ‘The
circumstantial evidence points to some kind of cluster bomb,’ said a
US defense expert in Washington, who spoke on condition he not be
named. The refugees, at least six of whom were badly burned, may have
been the victims of the debut of U.S.-made CBU-97 cluster bombs,
guided by infrared sensors and built to spray super-hot shrapnel into
tanks”.[101]
The London-based
Times also reports the humanitarian results of NATO bombing in
Kosovo: “Charred and dismembered corpses, wrecked tractors and a
pathetic trail of personal belongings yesterday lay on the Prizren to
Dakovica road in southern Kosovo...
“The most gruesome scene was at the third site. In
the village of Bistrazin, six bodies lay cheek by jowl in the grass
meadow beneath the road, five of them women. Worse was to come: a head
lay further up the meadow, and near it a forearm and hand. On the road
itself a half-charred corpse lay slumped across the steering wheel of
a smashed tractor, slewed crazily across the shrapnel-pitted tarmac.
On its trailer lay an indeterminate number of blackened body parts,
and one leg hooked over the back of a trailer. A few yards away pieces
of brain tissue lay spattered about across the road.”[102]
A similar event
occurred later on 1st May when NATO bombed a bus of Kosovan
Albanian civilians: “Yugoslav authorities said between 34 and 60
people were killed, many of them children, when the missile hit the
bus as it crossed a bridge in Kosovo at midday Saturday…
“Dozens of bodies and body parts, including a
child’s arm, were scattered near the bridge. The charred bodies of at
least two children could be seen.... ‘They did not hit anything but
the bus. There was nothing else there,’ said Rajko Maksic, 45, a local
farmer. ‘I heard a plane and then I heard a blast. I saw falling
bodies. I heard screams. Then I ran to help get the bodies out. ‘What
can I say. What can I think. This is a horror. All I can think about
were the children that I saw,’ he said.”[103]
British media scholar
Phillip Hammond pointedly asks: “when Nato hit [the] bus on 1 May,
killing 47 people, was it also an accident that Nato aircraft returned
for a second strike, hitting an ambulance and injuring medical staff
at the scene?”[104]
Civilian structures
were systematically targeted even when no military structures were in
sight. NATO’s claim that such attacks were mistakes simply fails to
explain how such ‘mistakes’ could occur repeatedly, or rather
systematically. How could NATO with its advanced technology,
‘mistakenly’ bomb civilian vehicles in Kosovo such as a group of
refugees in tractors without any military objects in sight? How could
NATO ‘mistakenly’ destroy a civilian bus full of Kosovan Albanians,
again with the area being totally devoid of anything other than
civilian structures, with no military objects in the vicinity - and
then return for a second strike at the medical crew trying to help the
injured? The force of these questions is accentuated in light of the
fact, previously briefly indicated, that NATO bombing was directly
responsible for the Kosovo refugee crisis. No doubt, Serb Army
reprisals played a significant role, but reports show that the NATO
bombing campaign also played a highly significant role - not merely in
provoking the Serb Army as predicted, but in devastating Kosovo
directly.
U.S. correspondent Marcus Gee, for
instance, referred to reports showing that the escalation of the
refugee crisis was primarily the impact of NATO bombing, rather than
Serb reprisals. He refers to the findings of Pulitzer Prize winning
LA Times correspondent Paul Watson: “One of the few Western
journalists reporting from inside Kosovo says his impressions clash
with NATO reports of what is happening in the war-torn province. Paul
Watson, a Canadian who works for the Los Angeles Times, says he
has seen no evidence that Serb authorities have massacred Albanians in
the Kosovo capital of Pristina”, contradicting NATO assertions.
Watson, who was in Kosovo since NATO began bombing on 24th
March, stated: “It is very hard to hide an anarchic wholesale
slaughter of people… There is no evidence that such a thing happened
in Pristina.” Watson reported, however, that many civilians fled the
area around Pristina’s airport after a NATO bombing there, and
concluded from his overall observations of the NATO campaign:
“I see a pretty clear pattern of
refugees leaving an area after there were severe air strikes… I don’t
think that NATO member countries can, with a straight face, sit back
and say they don’t share some blame for the wholesale depopulation of
this country. If NATO had not bombed, I would be surprised if this
sort of forced exodus on this enormous scale would be taking place.”
He thus noted that the centre of the
Kosovo capital of Pristina had been totally devastated by the NATO
bombing.[105] When asked about the
damage inflicted by NATO bombs on the Kosovo capital, Watson replied:
“The very center of the city is
devastated. The government buildings have been hit. The main special
police or ministry of interior police headquarters has been hit. A
residential area, the oldest street, in fact, in Pristina which was
ethically mixed. In years past it had Jewish residents next to Serbian
residents, next to ethnic Albanians, next to ethnic Turks. That took a
direct hit. The post office was hit, etc… Those that were hit last
night included a graveyard, a children’s basketball court outside an
apartment complex, and the main bus station... The cemetery is one
that was hit. It’s the second time it’s been hit with large craters
where there used to be graves... There is no sign of tire marks or
track marks from armored vehicles or anything to suggest that there
was a military target in the sort of something that might have been
hidden in among apartment buildings.”[106]
These reports suggest
that the devastation of Kosovo was more a result of NATO bombing than
anything else. They also indicate that the massive exodus of Kosovan
Albanian civilians, blamed by NATO on the Serb Army, was on the
contrary very often the result of NATO bombing of civilian
infrastructure in Kosovo. In other words, NATO was actively
participating in the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.
Further testimony
supporting this conclusion comes from an official holding “a high
security post” in the German government, who reports that according to
the internal acknowledgement of the German Defense Ministry, reasons
for the escalation of the refugee crisis included: “Excess on the part
of Yugoslav soldiers and police force, often triggered by the KLA
attacks carried out under cover of Kosovo-Albanian civilians”; “The
results of the NATO bombing, such as the lack of potable water in
nearly all cities of Kosovo and general devastation”; “Understandable
fear of getting caught in the crossfire between the KLA, the Yugoslav
military, and NATO attacks.”[107]
Indeed, the United
Nations High Commission for Refugees has confirmed that most of the
destruction of Kosovo was due to NATO bombing, rather than an assault
from the Serb Army. James Petras, Professor of Sociology at the State
University of New York, reports that: “In the process of evaluating
the damage in Kosova, the UN High Commission for Refugees revealed
that the majority of Albanian houses, hospitals, and schools damaged
during the 78-day war were caused by NATO bombing.”[108] Former chief editor at
Radio Television Pristina, now working for the Kosovo Democratic
Initiative, Fatmir Seholi, in an interview with members of the North
American Solidarity With Yugoslavia Delegation led by Professor Barry
Lituchy of CUNY, similarly testified that the devastation of Kosovo,
including Albanian casualties, was caused primarily by NATO bombing:
“After NATO bombing stopped, I went with [temporary
UN special representative for Kosovo] Sergio de Mello to visit Kosovo,
and we visited almost every part of Kosovo. The trip lasted five days.
We visited almost every village and city in Kosovo, and we saw what
damage resulted from NATO bombing, and what damage resulted from
gangs. I want to point out that Mr. Sergio de Mello seemed
disinterested in damage from NATO bombing in Kosovo. Most of those
killed due to NATO bombing were Albanians. In just one strike from
NATO in the village of Korisa, they killed 105 people. Mr. de Mello
wasn’t interested.”[109]
While much of the
mainstream media and academia have lauded NATO’s intervention as a
noble humanitarian effort that saved Kosovo from the Serb Army, the
reality of the matter is that Kosovo was totally devastated as a
direct consequence of NATO bombing. The San Francisco Chronicle
reported the results:
“Forty percent of Kosovo’s water supply is of poor
quality – ‘polluted by a range of materials including human, as well
as animal, corpses.’ Only 12 percent of the health facilities that
existed before the NATO bombing still exist, and 60 percent of the
schools have been damaged or destroyed. Meat is reliably available in
only 7 percent of the villages, fruit in 18 percent and wheat in 35
percent. Agriculture was also seriously damaged. The wheat harvest
this year is expected to be half it normal size, and the corn crop
just 10 percent of normal.”[110]
The impact of the
bombing thus continues to affect the lives of civilians in Kosovo even
now. Professor James Petras further notes that “the destructive legacy
of NATO’s war lives on in Kosova’s everyday life. British and U.S.
made cluster bombs and depleted uranium ammunition found throughout
the province are killing and wounding dozens of Kosovars every week.”[111] In this connection the
BBC reported:
“A British biologist, Roger Coghill, says he
expects the depleted uranium (DU) weapons used by US aircraft over
Kosovo will cause more than 10,000 fatal cancer cases... In mid-June
scientists at Kozani in northern Greece were reporting that radiation
levels were 25% above normal whenever the wind blew from the direction
of Kosovo. And Bulgarian researchers reported finding levels eight
times higher than usual within Bulgaria itself, and up to 30 times
higher in Yugoslavia.”[112]
It is reasonable to
deduce from these facts that NATO bombing contributed substantially,
directly and indeed primarily, to the killings and expulsions of
Kosovan Albanians and the general devastation of Kosovo. As shown
above, not only is there clear evidence that vast numbers of Kosovan
Albanians were killed by NATO bombs, there is also clear evidence that
Kosovo’s infrastructure was destroyed by NATO bombing, with vast
numbers of Kosovan Albanian refugees fleeing not Serb reprisals but
NATO bombs.
It is further highly
probable that the refugee crisis was not merely a result of the
combination of NATO bombing with Serb reprisals against the Kosovan
Albanians, but of violent clashes between Serb and KLA forces in which
the KLA also struck at Serb civilians within Kosovo. Statistical data
suggests that NATO and KLA violence against Serbs in Kosovo far
outweighed that of Serb violence against Albanians in the province.
The vast majority of the victims of the crisis – i.e. those who fled
Kosovo - were not Kosovan Albanians, but non-Albanians of Serbian or
Montenegrin ethnicity. Balkans specialist David Binder, formerly of
the New York Times, noted OSCE data on the crisis showing that
during the bombings, 46 per cent of those who fled Kosovo were
Albanians, compared to 60 per cent who were Serbians or Montenegrins.
Binder concluded that “proportionally more Serbs were displaced during
the bombing, and they did not return to Kosovo.”[113]
It therefore seems
that the “staggering problems” of Kosovo, as well as the whole of
Yugoslavia, are primarily “the effects of the bombings” - deliberately
inflicted and fully anticipated by the Western powers. It also appears
that neither the Serb Army nor the KLA can be absolved of
responsibility for the crisis. However, it is certainly clear that the
United States exploited ethnic tensions to play both sides against one
another, escalating the conflict and justifying a military
intervention. NATO intervention subsequently resulted in the
exacerbation of the humanitarian crisis, the escalation of ethnic
cleansing, and the destruction of Serbia and Kosovo. The principal aim
of this policy was the extension of U.S. strategic and economic
interests in the Balkans.
There are very
important lessons to be learned from the case of Kosovo - the
principal lesson being that the Western powers under U.S. leadership
are more than willing to cultivate conflict and manufacture
justifications for an interventionist terrorist foreign policy,
motivated by power and profit.
[1] Presidential Document, Administration of
William J. Clinton, Vol. 35, No. 38, 27 September 1999, p.
1782.
[2] Howe, Mike,
New York Times, 12 July 1982.
[3] Binder, David,
New York Times, 1 November 1987.
[4] Zunes, Stephen,
‘Bombing Serbia Not The Answer’, Progressive Response
(Foreign Policy In Focus), 23 March 1999, Vol. 3, No. 10; Zunes,
‘Kosovo: One Year Later’, Foreign Policy In Focus News
Release, 21 March 2000.
[5] Almond, Mark,
‘What the KLA really is’, Spectator, 3 April 1999.
[6] cited in
Vickers, Miranda, Between Serb and Albanian: A History of
Kosovo, Columbia, 1998.
[7] Spectator,
3 April 1999.
[9] Riddel, Peter, ‘The politicians must
now let us know their true objectives’, The Times, 31
March 1999.
[10] ‘The Case
Against Intervention in Kosovo’, Nation, 19 April 1999.
[11] Guardian,
5 August 1999.
[12] Cited in
Nation, 19 April 1999.
[14] Clark, Ramsey, letter to members of the
UN Security Council, International Action Center, New York, 5
April 1999, http://www.iacenter.org/bosnia/iacyug3.htm.
[15] Cited in
New Statesman, 17 May 1999.
[16] World Bank Development News, Washington DC, 27
April 1999.
[17] Cited in
Wilson, Gary, ‘Who’s the KLA? German Document Reveals Secret KLA
Role’, Workers World News Service (reprinted from Workers
World newspaper), 29 April 1999; ‘A German Insider’s View of
the Kosovo Conflict’, Truth In Media Global Watch Bulletin,
20 April 1999 (reported from “credible sources in the
international intelligence community”, http://www.truthinmedia.org/Kosovo/
War/day28.html); Balkania Report, ‘Plotting the War Against
Serbia: An Insider’s Story’, April 1999, http://www.balkania.net.
[18] The Racak massacre was undoubtedly one of the key
events providing justification for the NATO intervention. The
discovery of bodies in the Kosovo village of Racak played a
crucial role in pushing NATO into war. The Washington Post
(18 April 1999) noted that “Racak transformed the West’s Balkan
policy as singular events seldom do.” Yet severe doubt has been
cast on the reality of the alleged massacre of Kosovan Albanian
civilians at Racak. In March 1999, several European governments,
including Germany and Italy, were pressing the OSCE to fire its
American head William Walker based on information from OSCE
monitors in Kosovo that the Racak bodies “were not - as Walker
declared - victims of a Serbian massacre of civilians”, but were
rather KLA guerrillas killed during fighting (Berliner
Zeitung, 13 March 1999). After the massacre, the European
Union hired a Finnish team of forensic pathologists to
investigate the deaths. Their report was kept secret for two
years. The German daily Berliner Zeitung (16 January
2001) reports that the Finnish investigators could not establish
that the victims were civilians, whether they were from Racak,
or even exactly where they had been killed. Furthermore, the
investigators found only one body that showed traces of an
execution-style killing, and no evidence at all that the bodies
had been mutilated. The Berliner Zeitung also reports
that these findings were completed as early as June 2000 -
however, their publication had been blocked by the UN and the EU.
Also see ‘Dark Clouds Over a Massacre’, Le Figaro, 20
January 1999; ‘Were the Dead in Racak Really Massacred in Cold
Blood?’, Le Monde, 21 January 1999. For an overall review
of the issue, see FAIR Media Advisory, ‘Doubts On A Massacre:
Media Ignores Questions About Incident That Sparked Kosovo War’,
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, New York, 1 February 2001.
[19] Reuters, 9
March 1998.
[20] Judah, Tim, Wall Street Journal,
7 April 1999; Sciolino, Elaine and Bonner, Ethan, New York
Times, 8 April 1999; Chomsky, Noam, ‘Kosovo Peace Accord’,
Z Magazine, July/August 1999.
[21] BBC News,
‘Kosovo: A New Yugoslav Crisis?’, 2 March 1998.
[22] Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty Newsline, 2 March 1998. It is worth noting
here that former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia James Bisset
has indeed confirmed the existence of a deliberate “green light”
to Belgrade in regard to the attack on Slovenia. See Bisset,
James, ‘The Claims and Assertions by NATO about Kosovo were
Lies’, speech to the Canadian Hellenic Federation of Ontario,
19-21 May 2000.
[23] Erlanger,
Stephen, ‘US Ready To Resume Sanctions Over Kosovo Strife’,
New York Times, 6 June 1998.
[24] Oberg, Jan,
‘Some Ethical Aspects of NATO’s Intervention in Kosovo’,
Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research (TFF) Press
Info 73, 14 July 1999, http://www.transnational.org.
[25] Ibid. Also see Saif-ad-Deen,
Abd-ar-Rahmaan, Srebrenice, Kosova and the New Crusade,
Islamic Human Rights Commission, London, July 1998, http://www.ihrc.org.
For further discussion of the evidence for tacit Western support
of early Serb attacks against the KLA/Kosovan Albanians see
Siddiqui, Iqbal, ‘U.S. acts on behalf of Serbs while feigning
neutrality in Kosova’, Crescent International, 16-30
November 1998; Siddiqui, Iqbal, ‘U.S. admits its forces help the
Serb’s genocidal campaign in Kosova’, Crescent International,
16-31 December 1998.
[26] Oberg, Jan, ‘Some Ethical Aspects of
NATO’s Intervention in Kosovo’, op. cit.
[27] Walker, Tom
and Laverty, Aidan, ‘CIA aided Kosovo guerrilla army’, Sunday
Times, 12 March 2000.
[30] Peterson, David, ‘What the Documents
Really Say About the Occupation of Kosovo’, ZNet, March 1999,
http://www.zmag.org.
[31] To evaluate the full Rambouillet text
visit the following web-site, where it is available for complete
perusal, http://www.state.gov/www/regions/eur/ksvo_rambouillet_text.html.
Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo,
23 February 1999; reproduced in Le Monde diplomatique, 17
April 1999.
[32] IPA News Release, ‘Despite Denials from
NATO Offical, Questions Emerging’, Institute for Public
Accuracy, Washington DC, 27 April 1999; IPA News Release,
‘Earth Day and Rambouillet’, Institute for Public Accuracy,
Washington DC, 21 April 1999, http://www.accuracy.org/press.htm.
[33] FAIR Media Advisory, ‘They Call This
Victory? Bombing “Success” Must Be Weighed Against Human Cost,
Missed Chances for Peace’, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, New
York, 4 June 1999, http://www.fair.org.
[34] ‘A Just and
Necessary War’, New York Times, 23 May 1999.
[35] Hayden, Robert, ‘Humanitarian
Hypocrisy’, Jurist: The Law Professor’s Network, 1999, http://jurist.law.pitt.edu.
[36] The New York Times, 8 April
1999.
[37] Zimonjic, Vesna Peric, Inter Press
Service (IPS), 23 March 1999; Agence France Press (AFP), 23
March.
[38] President Clinton, first statement on
NATO attacks, 24 March 1999; New York Times, 25 March
1999.
[39] IPA News Release, ‘Earth Day and
Rambouillet’, Institute for Public Accuracy, Washington DC, 21
April 1999, http://www.accuracy.org/press.htm.
[40] IPA News
Release, ‘Bombing of Yugoslavia: One Year Later’, Institute for
Public Accuracy, Washington DC, 24 March 2000, http://www.accuracy.org/press.htm.
[41] Shalom,
Stephen R., ‘Reflections on NATO and Kosovo’, New Politics,
Summer 1999.
[42] Mertus, Julie,
Chicago Tribune, 1 April 1999.
[43] Shalom, Stephen R., ‘Reflections on
NATO and Kosovo’, op. cit.
[44] ‘NATO
Attacks’, Sunday Times, 28 March 1999.
[45] Goss, Peter, BBC, ‘Panorama: War Room’,
19 April 1999.
[46] Washington
Post, 7 April 1999.
[47] Guardian,
6 April 1999.
[48] BBC News, 28
April 1999.
[49] ‘Overview’, New York Times, 27
March 1999; Sunday Times, 28 March 1999; Newsweek,
12 April 1999.
[50] BBC News, 19 April 1999.
[51] ‘NATO
Attacks’, Sunday Times, 28 March 1999.
[52] Frank, Andre
Gunder, ‘U.S./NATO’s Hypocritical Oath’, ZNet, 4 April 1999,
http://www.zmag.org.
[53] Pilger, John,
‘Nothing in My 30 Years of Reporting Wars Compares with the
Present Propaganda Dressed as Journalism’, New Statesman,
12 July 1999.
[54] Said, Edward,
‘The treason of the intellectuals’, Al-Ahram Weekly,
24-30 June 1999, No. 435.
[55] Anastasijevic, Dejan, ‘How Milosevic
Won the War’, Institute for Peace & War Reporting, 12 May 1999,
http://www.iwpr.net.
[56] Sunday
Times, 2 April 2000.
[57] U.S. State Department, Erasing
History: Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo, May 1999, issued just
before 12 May 1999.
[58] Chomsky, Noam, ‘The Current Bombings:
Behind the Rhetoric’, ZNet; Chomsky, ‘Crisis in the Balkans’,
Z Magazine, May 1999, http://www.zmag.org.
[60] EU General
Affairs Council cited in Agence Europe, 9 December 1998,
No. 7559; Little, Alan, ‘Moral Combat: NATO At War’, BBC2
Special, 12 March 2000; ‘How Nato was sucked into Kosovo
conflict’, Sunday Telegraph, 27 February 2000; Current
History, March 2000.
[61] Judah, Tim,
Kosovo: War and Revenge, Yale University Press, New Haven,
2000, p. 178.
[62] House of
Commons Select Committee on Defence, Minutes of Evidence,
Examination of Witnesses, Questions 380-399, 24 March 1999.
[63] New
Statesman, 17 May 1999.
[64] Sunday
Times, 12 March 2000.
[65]
Intelligence report from the Foreign
Office, January 12, 1999 to the Administrative Court of Trier (Az:
514-516.80/32 426).
[66]
Opinion of the Bavarian
Administrative Court, October 29, 1998 (Az: 22 BA 94.34252).
[67]
Opinion of the Administrative Court
of Baden-Württemberg, February 4, 1999 (Az: A 14 S 22276/98).
[68] Opinion of the
Upper Administrative Court at Münster, February 24, 1999 (Az: 14
A 840/94,A); opinion of the Upper
Administrative Court at Münster, March 11, 1999 (Az: 13A
3894/94.A). Internal German documents cited in Eric Canepa,
Brecht Forum, New York April 28, 1999. All these reports can be
read online at http://www.suc.org/kosovo_crisis/documents/ger_gov.html.
Also see Junge Welt, 24 April 2000, where these documents
were featured and examined.
[69] Lipar, Gar, ‘Summarizing the Case
Against the Bombing’, Znet, http://www.zmag.org, viewed June
1999.
[70] Washington
Times, 25 April 1999.
[71] The New York Times, 9 April 1999.
[72] Philadelphia Inquirer, 21 May
1999.
[73] Hundley, Tom,
‘NATP bombs Serbs into survival mode’, San Francisco Examiner,
26 May 1999.
[74] Officer,
September 1999.
[75] Hayden, Robert, ‘Humanitarian
Hypocrisy’, op. cit.
[76] Ibid.
References here cited by Hayden include: New York Times,
30 April, 1999, p. 1; a list of infrastructure damage between
March 24 and April 19 compiled by the European Movement in
Serbia, a non-governmental group that was pro-West before the
war. List was posted by MSNBC.COM on 26 April 1999. Pictures of
many destroyed buildings may be found on http://www.beograd.com,
among other sources.
[77] Oberg, Jan, ‘Some Ethical Aspects of
NATO’s Intervention in Kosovo’, Transnational Foundation for
Peace & Future Research (TFF) Press Info 73, 14 July 1999,
http://www.transnational.org.
[78] Carter, Jimmy,
New York Times, 27 May 1999.
[79] Erlanger,
Steve, ‘Reduced to a “Caveman” Life, Serbs Don’t Blame
Milosevic’, New York Times 25 May 1999.
[80] Drozdiak,
William, ‘NATO OKs Attack on Telecommunications’, San
Francisco Chronicle, 27 May 1999.
[81] People’s
Weekly World, 14 June 1999.
[82] Fisk, Robert, ‘Serb army “unscathed by
Nato”’, The Independent, 21 June 1999; Hayden, Robert,
‘Humanitarian Hypocrisy’, op. cit.
[83] Fisk, Robert, ‘How fake guns and
painting the roads fooled Nato’, The Independent, 21 June
1999.
[84] Hayden, Robert, ‘Humanitarian
Hypocrisy’, op. cit. Also see Newsweek, 15 May 2000.
[85] Morales, Jose Luis, ‘Spanish Fighter
Pilot Admits NATO Purposely Attacks Civilian Targets’,
Articulo 20 (a Spanish weekly), 14 June 1999. It is worth
pointing out that the notion that bombing Serb civilians was
justified because they supported Milosevic and his policies is
disingenious. In his role as President of Yugoslavia, Milosevic
was not freely and fairly elected at all. He was chosen by the
Yugoslav federal assembly, in an irregular vote in which he was
the only candidate. To understand Milosevic’s level of popular
support within his country, consider the fact that an opposition
coalition won November 1996 local elections in 14 of Serbia’s
largest cities - including those communities particularly
bombarded by NATO attacks (e.g. Belgrade, Novi Sad, Kragujevac,
aak, Nis). In fact, there were massive anti-Milosevic
demonstrations in 1991, 92, 93, 94 and 96-97. It is therefore
inconsistent to attempt to hold the Serbian people morally
responsible for Milosevic’s policies, given that he was an
unpopular dictator; see Naureckas, Jim, ‘Legitimate Targets?:
How U.S. Media Supported War Crimes in Yugoslavia’, Extra!,
July/August 1999, http://www.fair.org/extra/index.html.
[86] Fisk, Robert,
‘“Collateral Damage”: The Victims You Don’t See On CNN’,
Independent, 2 April 1999; Fisk, ‘Families Blasted in “Just
Another Mistake”’, Independent, 29 April 1999.
[87] Kempster, Norman and Paddock, Richard C., ‘Ground
War Planning Heats Up’, San Francisco Chronicle, 22 April
1999.
[88] Erlanger,
Stephen, ‘Staff at the Hospital asks Why 4 had to Die’, New
York Times, 21 May 1999.
[89] San
Francisco Examiner, 26 May 1999.
[90] ‘Allied Jets Attack Belgrade Area Again’, New
York Times, 20 May 1999.
[91] ‘Serbs Lament Bombing of Factory’, San
Francisco Chronicle, 1 April 1999.
[92] Hammond,
Phillip, ‘NATO’s Propaganda War’, Living Marxism on-line
magazine, 1 June 1999.
[93] Schmemann, Serge, ‘Kosovo Problems Just
Beginning’, The Times, 3 June 1999; New York Times,
25 May 1999.
[94] Chossudovsky,
Michel, ‘Impacts of NATO’s “Humanitarian” Bombings: The Balance
Sheet of Destruction in Yugoslavia’, posted on the Internet 11
April 1999; Lausevic, Radoje, ‘Overview of Ecological
Consequences of NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia until May 20th’
Eaton, Janet M., ‘Ecological Catastophe: NATO Bombings in the
Balkans’, commissioned by Regional Environmental Center for
Central and Eastern Europe, for the Bulletin,
Quarterly Magazine, 7 July 1999, Vol. 8, No.4, http://www.flora.org/flora.mai-not/12187,
http://www.flora.org/flora.mai-not/12864.
[95] ‘NATO’s
Yugoslavia bombing uncorked toxic chemicals,’ San Francisco
Examiner, 26 July 1999.
[96] Monbiot,
George, ‘Consigning Their Future to Death’, Guardian, 22
April 1999.
[97] Chossudovsky,
Michel, ‘NATO Willfully Triggered An Environmental Catastrophe
in Yugoslavia’, Emperors-Clothes, June 2000, http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/chuss.
[98] Sweeney, John
& Jens Holsoe & Ed Vulliamy, Observer, 16 October 1999.
[99] Allen-Mills,
Tony, Sunday Times, 28 March 1999.
[100] Hammond,
Phillip, ‘NATO’s Propaganda War’, op. cit. The Sunday Times
similarly reports the inconsistencies in many Kosovan Albanian
accounts (28 March 1999).
[101]
Watson, Paul, ‘Cluster Bombs
May be What Killed Refugees’, Los Angeles Times, 17 April 1999.
[102] Walker, Tom,
‘Charred Corpses Litter Site of Attack’, Times, 16 April
1999.
[103] ‘NATO Admits
Hits Bus, Raids Go On’, Reuters, 2 May 1999.
[104] Hammond,
Phillip, ‘NATO’s Propaganda War’, LM on-line magazine, 1
June 1999.
[105] Gee, Marcus,
The Globe and Mail, 14 April 1999.
[106] CBC Radio
(Canada), ‘As It Happens: Paul Watson in Pristina’, 13 April
1999.
[107] ‘Erkldrung
eines Insiders aus dem Bonner Regierungsapparat zum Balkan-Krieg
vom 7 April 1999’, http://www2.pds-online.de/bt/index.htm. This
is the same report confirmed by Jurgen Reets, press spokesman of
the PDS at the German Parliament, and which has been further
authenticated by a multitude of sources in the international
intelligence community. Also see Wilson, Gary, ‘Who’s the KLA?
German Document Reveals Secret KLA Role’, Workers World News
Service (reprinted from Workers World newspaper), 29
April 1999; ‘A German Insider’s View of the Kosovo Conflict’,
Truth In Media Global Watch Bulletin, 20 April 1999
(reported from “credible sources in the international
intelligence community”); Balkania Report, ‘Plotting the War
Against Serbia: An Insider’s Story’, April 1999.
[108] Petras,
James, ‘Aftermath: NATO in Kosova’, Z Magazine, October
1999.
[109] Elich, Gregory (transcriber) and Lituchy, Barry
(interviewer), ‘If They Find Me They Will Kill Me: Interviews
with pro-Yugoslav Albanian Refugees from Kosovo’, North American
Solidarity with Yugoslavia Delegation, International Action
Center, 9 August 1999.
[110] ‘Kosovo’s
Damage,’ San Francisco Chronicle, 9 July 1999.
[111] Z Magazine,
October 1999.
[112] BBC News,
‘Depleted Uranium `Threatens Balkan Cancer Epidemic`’, 30 July
1999.
[113] Binder,
David, ‘Why the Balkans?’, Blaetter fuer deutshe und
internationale Politik, May 2000.
Mr. Nafeez Ahmed is a
British political analyst and human rights activist based in London. He is
Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and a
Researcher at the Islamic Human Rights
Commission.
Source:
by courtesy & ©
2002
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
by the same author:
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