[A-List] How silent are the 'humanitarian' invaders of Kosovo?

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by John Pilger

ZNet Commentary (December 09 2004)

Muted by the evidence of the Anglo-American catastrophe in Iraq, the
international "humanitarian" war party ought to be called to account for its
largely forgotten crusade in Kosovo, the model for Tony Blair's "onward march of
liberation". Just as Iraq is being torn apart by the forces of empire, so was
Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic state that uniquely rejected both sides in the cold
war.

Lies as great as those of Bush and Blair were deployed by Clinton and Blair in
their grooming of public opinion for an illegal, unprovoked attack on a European
country. Like the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the media coverage in the
spring of 1999 was a series of fraudulent justifications, beginning with US
Defence Secretary William Cohen's claim that "we've now seen about 100,000
military-aged [Albanian] men missing ... they may have been murdered".
David Scheffer, the US ambassador at large for war crimes, announced that as
many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" may have been
killed. Blair invoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War".
The British press took its cue. "Flight from genocide", said the Daily Mail.
"Echoes of the Holocaust", chorused the Sun and the Mirror.

By June 1999, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams began
subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The American FBI arrived to investigate
what was called "the largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history". Several
weeks later, having not found a single mass grave, the FBI went home. The
Spanish forensic team also returned home, its leader complaining angrily that
he and his colleagues had become part of "a semantic pirouette by the war
propaganda machines, because we did not find one - not one - mass grave".

In November 1999, the Wall Street Journal published the results of its own
investigation, dismissing "the mass grave obsession". Instead of "the huge
killing fields some investigators were led to expect ... the pattern is of
scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army
had been active". The Journal concluded that Nato stepped up its claims about
Serb killing fields when it "saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the
contrarian story: civilians killed by Nato's bombs ... The war in Kosovo was
"cruel, bitter, savage; genocide it wasn't".

One year later, the International War Crimes Tribunal, a body effectively set up
by Nato, announced that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo's "mass graves"
was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered
by the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army. Like Iraq's fabled weapons of mass
destruction, the figures used by the US and British governments and echoed by
journalists were inventions - along with Serb "rape camps" and Clinton's and
Blair's claims that Nato never deliberately bombed civilians.

Code-named 'Stage Three', Nato's civilian targets included public transport,
hospitals, schools, museums, churches. "It was common knowledge that Nato went
to Stage Three [after a couple of weeks]", said James Bissell, the Canadian
ambassador in Belgrade during the attack. "Otherwise, they would not have been
bombing bridges on Sunday afternoons and market places".

Nato's clients were the Kosovo Liberation Army. Seven years earlier, the KLA had
been designated by the State Department as a terrorist organisation in league
with Al Qaida. KLA thugs were feted; Foreign Secretary Robin Cook allowed them
to call him on his mobile phone. "The Kosovo-Albanians played us like a
Stradivarius", wrote the UN Balkans commander, Major-General Lewis MacKenzie,
last April. "We have subsidised and indirectly supported their violent campaign
for an ethnically pure Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the
perpetrators of the violence in the early 1990s and we continue to portray
them as the designated victim today in spite of evidence to the contrary".

The trigger for the bombing of Yugoslavia was, according to Nato, the failure of
the Serbian delegation to sign up to the Rambouillet peace conference. What went
mostly unreported was that the Rambouillet accord had a secret Annexe B, which
Madeline Albright's delegation had inserted on the last day. This demanded the
military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia, a country with bitter memories
of the Nazi occupation. As the Foreign Office minister Lord Gilbert later
conceded to a Commons' defence select committee, Annexe B was planted
deliberately to provoke rejection by the government in Belgrade. As the
first bombs fell, the elected parliament in Belgrade, which included some
of Milosevic's fiercest opponents, voted overwhelmingly to reject it.

Equally revealing was a chapter dealing exclusively with the Kosovo
economy. This called for a "free-market economy" and the privatisation
of all government assets. As the Balkans writer Neil Clark has pointed out,
"the rump of Yugoslavia ... was the last economy in central-southern Europe
to be uncolonised by western capital. 'Socially owned enterprises', the form
of worker self-management pioneered under Tito, still predominated. Yugoslavia
had publicly owned petroleum, mining, car and tobacco industries, and 75 per
cent of industry was state or socially owned."

At the Davos summit of neo-liberal chieftains in 1999, Blair berated Belgrade,
not for its handling of Kosovo, but for its failure to fully embrace "economic
reform". In the bombing campaign that followed, it was state owned companies,
rather than military sites, that were targeted. Nato's destruction of only
fourteen Yugoslav army tanks compares with its bombing of 372 centres of
industry, including the Zastava car factory, leaving hundreds of thousands
jobless. "Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed", wrote Clark.

Erected on the foundation of this massive lie, Kosovo today is a violent,
criminalised UN-administered "free market" in drugs and prostitution. More
than 200,000 Serbs, Roma, Bosniacs, Turks, Croats and Jews have been ethnically
cleansed by the KLA with Nato forces standing by. KLA hit squads have burned,
looted or demolished 85 Orthodox churches and monasteries, according to the UN.
The courts are venal. "You shot an 89-year-old Serb grandmother?" mocked a UN
narcotics officer. "Good for you. Get out of jail."

Although Security Council Resolution 1244 recognises Kosovo as an integral part
of Yugoslavia, and does not authorise the UN administration to sell off anything,
multinational companies are being offered ten- and fifteen-year leases of the
province's local industries and resources, including the vast Trepca mines, some
of the richest mineral deposits in the world. After Hitler captured them in 1940,
the mines supplied German munition factories with forty per cent of their lead.
Overseeing this plundered, murderous, now almost ethnically pure "future
democracy" (Blair), are 4,000 American troops in Camp Bondsteel, a 775-acre
permanent base.

Meanwhile, the trial of Milosevic proceeds as farce, not unlike an earlier show
trial in The Hague: that of the Libyans blamed for the Lockerbie bomb. Milosevic
was a brute; he was also a banker once regarded as the west's man who was
prepared to implement "economic reforms" in keeping with IMF, World Bank and
European Community demands; to his cost, he refused to surrender sovereignty.
The empire expects nothing less.

First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk

John Pilger's new book, Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its
Triumphs, is published by Jonathan Cape.

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-12/09pilger.cfm


Bill Totten     http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/