NATO's ‘humanitarian’ bombing of Yugoslavia

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NATO's ‘humanitarian’ bombing of Yugoslavia

Postby conniption » Mon Mar 24, 2014 4:14 pm

RT

15 years on: Looking back at NATO's ‘humanitarian’ bombing of Yugoslavia

Published time: March 24, 2014 04:01

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An explosion followed by a huge fire rages in the south-west part of Pristina in the early hours March 25, 1999 after NATO forces launched a missile attack against Yugoslavia (Reuters / Yannis Behrakis)


Exactly 15 years ago, on March 24, NATO began its 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia. The alliance bypassed the UN under a “humanitarian” pretext, launching aggression that claimed hundreds of civilian lives and caused a much larger catastrophe than it averted.

Years on, Serbia still bears deep scars of the NATO bombings which, as the alliance put it, were aimed at “preventing instability spreading” in Kosovo. Questions remain on the very legality of the offense, which caused casualties and mass destruction in the Balkan republic.

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The Yugoslav Army Headquarters building hasn't been rebuilt after being damaged by cruises missiles in April 1999 during NATO's bombing of Serbia over Kosovo. Belgrade (AFP Photo)

Codenamed 'Operation Allied Force,' it was the largest attack ever undertaken by the alliance. It was also the first time that NATO used military force without the approval of the UN Security Council and against a sovereign nation that did not pose a real threat to any member of the alliance.

NATO demonstrated in 1999 that it can do whatever it wants under the guise of “humanitarian intervention,” “war on terror,” or “preventive war” – something that everyone has witnessed in subsequent years in different parts of the globe.

Nineteen NATO member states participated to some degree in the military campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), which lasted for 11 weeks until June 10, 1999.

More rubble, less trouble

In the course of the campaign, NATO launched 2,300 missiles at 990 targets and dropped 14,000 bombs, including depleted uranium bombs and cluster munitions (unexploded cluster bombs continued to pose a threat to people long after the campaign was over.) Over 2,000 civilians were killed, including 88 children, and thousands more were injured. Over 200,000 ethnic Serbs were forced to leave their homeland in Kosovo.

In what the alliance described as “collateral damage,” its airstrikes destroyed more than 300 schools, libraries, and over 20 hospitals. At least 40,000 homes were either completely eliminated or damaged and about 90 historic and architectural monuments were ruined. That is not to mention the long-term harm caused to the region’s ecology and, therefore, people’s health, as well as the billion-dollar economic damage.

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A woman passes a destroyed car March 28,1999 after a NATO missile hit downtown of Kosovo's capital of Pristina in Saturday night's NATO attack (Reuters)

News correspondents Anissa Naouai and Jelena Milincic, the authors of RT's documentary 'Zashto?' – which means “Why?” in English –traveled through former Yugoslavia to Belgrade, Kosovo, and Montenegro and spoke to people who endured the atrocities and horrors of the war and lost their friends and relatives.

“There is a bridge near the city of Nis, which was bombed at the time when a passenger train was passing through it,” Milincic recalls.The tragedy on April 12, 1999 killed 15 people and wounded 44 others, while many passengers were never accounted for.

“We felt the blast and saw flames under the locomotive. The train was blown so powerfully, half a meter from the ground. I don’t know how we stayed on the rails,” recalled witness Boban Kostic.

“Our colleague got off the train when I did,” he said. “He was really scared. But another rocket hit and blew him to pieces,” added another witness, Goran Mikic.

“Why? Why civilians? Why a train?” said Dragan Ciric. “It still torments me, if the first rocket was a mistake, what were the next three for?” he told RT.

The Chinese embassy in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade was also hit and set on fire by NATO airstrikes on May 7, 1999. Three citizens of the country were killed. The alliance called the attack “a mistake.” China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council and, along with Russia, did not support a military solution for the Kosovo crisis.

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A worker walks in front of the remains of the former Chinese embassy during its demolition in Belgrade November 10, 2010. During the NATO offensive against Yugoslavia, U.S. warplanes bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade on May 7, 1999, killing three Chinese nationals, and consequently igniting protests outside the U.S. embassy in Beijing (Reuters)

continued


~

ЗАШТО? WHY? Revisiting NATO atrocities in Yugoslavia after 15 yrs (Part 1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M42BAJAk84
Published on Mar 24, 2014

Fifteen years after NATO's 78-day bombardment of Yugoslavia, memories of the bombing still haunt present-day Serbia. NATO killed over 2,000 people, hundreds were civilians, 88 were children. Serbs ask 'why?' above all. Why did NATO smash their cities, kill their children, bomb hospitals and schools? RT presents 'Zashto?' (Why?) on the trauma of terror in Serbia.



ЗАШТО? WHY? Revisiting NATO atrocities in Yugoslavia after 15 yrs (Part 2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9tX8onPsnM
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Re: NATO's ‘humanitarian’ bombing of Yugoslavia

Postby Elvis » Tue Mar 25, 2014 6:15 am

Why? Good question, here's a pretty good answer:

Kosovo’s “Mafia State” and Camp Bondsteel: Towards a Permanent US Military Presence in Southeast Europe
Washington’s Bizarre Kosovo Strategy could destroy NATO

By F. William Engdahl
Global Research, April 12, 2012
12 April 2012

In one of the more bizarre foreign policy announcements of a bizarre Obama Administration, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has announced that Washington will “help” Kosovo to join NATO as well as the European Union. She made the pledge after a recent Washington meeting with Kosovan Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in Washington where she praised the progress of the Thaci government in its progress in “European integration and economic development.” 1

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Her announcement no doubt caused serious gas pains among government and military officials in the various capitals of European NATO. Few people appreciate just how mad Clinton’s plan to push Kosovo into NATO and the EU is.

Basic Kosovo geopolitics

The controversial piece of real estate today called Kosovo was a part of Yugoslavia and tied to Serbia until the NATO bombing campaign in 1999 demolished what remained of Milosevic’s Serbia and opened the way for the United States, with the dubious assist of EU nations, above all Germany, to carve up the former Yugoslavia into tiny, dependent pseudo states. Kosovo became one, as did Macedonia. Slovenia and Croatia had earlier split off from Yugoslavia with a strong assist from the German Foreign Ministry.

Some brief review of the circumstances leading to the secession of Kosovo from Yugoslavia will help locate how risky a NATO membership or EU membership would be for the future of Europe. Hashim Thaci the current Kosovo Prime Minister, got his job, so to speak, through the US State Department and not via free democratic Kosovo elections. Kosovo is not recognized as a legitimate state by either Russia or Serbia or over one hundred other nations. However, it was immediately recognized when it declared independence in 2008 by the Bush Administration and by Berlin.

Membership into the EU for Kosovo would be welcoming another failed state, something which may not bother US Secretary Clinton, but which the EU at this juncture definitely can do without. Best estimates place unemployment in the country at as much as 60%. That is not just Third World level. The economy was always the poorest in Yugoslavia and today it is worse. Yet the real issue in terms of the future of EU peace and security is the nature of the Kosovo state that has been created by Washington since the late 1990’s.


Mafia State and Camp Bondsteel

Kosovo is a tiny parcel of land in one of the most strategic locations in all Europe from a geopolitical standpoint of the US military objective of controlling oil flows and political developments from the oil-rich Middle East to Russia and Western Europe. The current US-led recognition of the self-declared Republic of Kosovo is a continuation of US policy for the Balkans since the illegal 1999 US-led NATO bombing of Serbia—a NATO “out-of-area” deployment never approved by the UN Security Council, allegedly on the premise that Milosevic’s army was on the verge of carrying out a genocidal massacre of Kosovo Albanians.

Some months before the US-led bombing of Serbian targets, one of the heaviest bombings since World War II, a senior US intelligence official in private conversation told Croatian senior army officers in Zagreb about Washington’s strategy for former Yugoslavia. According to these reports, communicated privately to this author, the Pentagon goal already in late 1998 was to take control of Kosovo in order to secure a military base to control the entire southeast European region down to the Middle East oil lands.

Since June 1999 when the NATO Kosovo Force (KFOR) occupied Kosovo, then an integral part of then-Yugoslavia, Kosovo was technically under a United Nations mandate, UN Security Council Resolution 1244. Russia and China also agreed to that mandate, which specifies the role of KFOR to ensure an end to inter-ethnic fighting and atrocities between the Serb minority population, others and the Kosovo Albanian Islamic majority. Under 1244 Kosovo would remain part of Serbia pending a peaceful resolution of its status. That UN Resolution was blatantly ignored by the US, German and other EU parties in 2008.

Germany’s and Washington’s prompt recognition of Kosovo’s independence in February 2008, significantly, came days after elections for President in Serbia confirmed pro-Washington Boris Tadic had won a second four year term. With Tadic’s post secured, Washington could count on a compliant Serbian reaction to its support for Kosovo.

Immediately after the bombing of Serbia in 1999 the Pentagon seized a 1000 acre large parcel of land in Kosovo at Uresevic near the border to Macedonia, and awarded a contract to Halliburton when Dick Cheney was CEO there, to build one of the largest US overseas military bases in the world, Camp Bondsteel, with more than 7000 troops today.

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The Pentagon has already secured seven new military bases in Bulgaria and Romania on the Black Sea in the Northern Balkans, including the Graf Ignatievo and Bezmer airbases in Bulgaria and Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in Romania, which are used for “downrange” military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Romanian installation hosts the Pentagon’s Joint Task Force–East. The US’s colossal Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo and the use and upgrading of Croatian and Montenegrin Adriatic harbors for US Navy deployments complete the militarization of the Balkans.[ii]

The US strategic agenda for Kosovo is primarily military, secondarily, it seems, narcotics trafficking. Its prime focus is against Russia and for control of oil flows from the Caspian Sea to the Middle East into Western Europe. By declaring its independence, Washington gains a weak state which it can fully control. So long as it remained a part of Serbia, that NATO military control would be politically insecure. Today Kosovo is controlled as a military satrapy of NATO, whose KFOR has 16,000 troops there for a tiny population of 2 million. Its Camp Bondsteel is one of a string of so-called forward operating bases and “lily pads” as Donald Rumsfeld called them, for military action to the east and south. Now formally bringing Kosovo into the EU and to NATO will solidify that military base now that the Republic of Georgia under US protégé Saakashvili failed so miserably in 2008 to fill that NATO role.


Heroin Transport Corridor

US-NATO military control of Kosovo serves several purposes for Washington’s greater geo-strategic agenda. First it enables greater US control over potential oil and gas pipeline routes into the EU from the Caspian and Middle East as well as control of the transport corridors linking the EU to the Black Sea.

It also protects the multi-billion dollar heroin trade, which, significantly, has grown to record dimensions
in Afghanistan according to UN narcotics officials, since the US occupation. Kosovo and Albania are major heroin transit routes into Europe. According to a 2008 US State Department annual report on international narcotics traffic, several key drug trafficking routes pass through the Balkans. Kosovo is mentioned as a key point for the transfer of heroin from Turkey and Afghanistan to Western Europe. Those drugs flow under the watchful eye of the Thaci government.

Since its dealings with the Meo tribesmen in Laos during the Vietnam era, the CIA has protected narcotics traffic in key locations in order partly to finance its covert operations. The scale of international narcotics traffic today is such that major US banks such as Citigroup are reported to derive a significant share of their profits from laundering the proceeds.

One of the notable features of the indecent rush by Washington and other states to immediately recognize the independence of Kosovo is the fact that they well knew its government and both major political parties were in fact run by Kosovo Albanian organized crime.

Hashim Thaci, Prime Minister of Kosovo and head of the Democratic Party of Kosovo, is the former leader of the terrorist organization which the US and NATO trained and called the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, or in Albanian, UCK. In Kosovo crime circles he is known as Hashim “The Snake” for his personal ruthlessness against opponents.

In 1997, President Clinton’s Special Balkans Envoy, Robert Gelbard described the KLA as, “without any question a terrorist group.” It was far more. It was a klan-based mafia, impossible therefore to infiltrate, which controlled the underground black economy of Kosovo. Today the Democratic Party of Thaci, according to European police sources, retains its links to organized crime.

A February 22, 2005 German BND report, labeled Top Secret, which has since been leaked, stated, “Über die Key-Player (wie z. B. Haliti, Thaci, Haradinaj) bestehen engste Verflechtungen zwischen Politik, Wirtschaft und international operierenden OK-Strukturen im Kosovo. Die dahinter stehenden kriminellen Netzwerke fördern dort die politische Instabilität. Sie haben kein Interesse am Aufbau einer funktionierenden staatlichen Ordnung, durch die ihre florierenden Geschäfte beeinträchtigt werden können.“ (OK=Organized Kriminalität). (Translation: “Through the key players—for example Thaci, Haliti, Haradinaj—there is the closest interlink between politics, the economy and international organized crime in Kosovo. The criminal organizations in the background there foster political instability. They have no interest at all in the building of a functioning orderly state that could be detrimental to their booming business.”3

The KLA began action in 1996 with the bombing of refugee camps housing Serbian refugees from the wars in Bosnia and Croatia. The KLA repeatedly called for the “liberation” of areas of Montenegro, Macedonia and parts of Northern Greece. Thaci is hardly a figure of regional stability to put it mildly.

The 44 year old Thaci was a personal protégé of Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright during the 1990s, when he was a mere 30-year old gangster. The KLA was supported from the outset by the CIA and the German BND. During the 1999 war the KLA was directly supported by NATO. At the time he was picked up by the USA in the mid-1990s, Thaci was founder of the Drenica Group, a criminal syndicate in Kosovo with ties to Albanian, Macedonian and Italian organized mafias. A classified January 2007 report prepared for the EU Commission, labeled “VS-Nur für den Dienstgebrauch” was leaked to the media. It detailed the organized criminal activity of KLA and its successor Democratic Party under Thaci.

A December 2010 Council of Europe report, released a day after Kosovo’s election commission said Mr Thaci’s party won the first post-independence election, accused Western powers of complicity in ignoring the activities of the crime ring headed by Thaci: “Thaci and these other ‘Drenica Group’ members are consistently named as ‘key players’ in intelligence reports on Kosovo’s mafia-like structures of organised crime,” the report said. “We found that the ‘Drenica Group’ had as its chief – or, to use the terminology of organised crime networks, its ‘boss’ – the renowned political operator … Hashim Thaci.” 4

The report stated that Thaci exerted “violent control” over the heroin trade. Dick Marty, the European Union investigator, presented the report to European diplomats from all member states. The response was silence. Washington was behind Thaci.5

The same Council of Europe report on Kosovo organized crime accused Thaci’s mafia organization of dealing in trade in human organs. Figures from Thaçi’s inner circle were accused of taking captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a number of Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys that were sold on the black market. In one case revealed in legal proceedings in a Pristina district court in 2008 organs were said to have been taken from impoverished victims at a clinic known as Medicus – linked to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) organ harvesting in 2000.6

The question then becomes, why are Washington, NATO, the EU and inclusive and importantly, the German Government, so eager to legitimize the breakaway Kosovo? A Kosovo run internally by organized criminal networks is easy for NATO to control. It insures a weak state which is far easier to bring under NATO domination. Combined with NATO control over Afghanistan where the Kosovo heroin controlled by Prime Minister Thaci originates, the Pentagon is building a web of encirclement around Russia that is anything but peaceful.

The Thaci dependence on US and NATO good graces insures Thaci’s government will do what it is asked. That, in turn, assures the US a major military gain consolidating its permanent presence in the strategically vital southeast Europe. It is a major step in consolidating NATO control of Eurasia, and gives the US a large swing its way in the European balance of power. Little wonder Moscow has not welcomed the development, nor have numerous other states. The US is literally playing with dynamite, potentially as well with nuclear war in the Balkans.


*F. William Engdahl is author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. He may be contacted via his website, http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net

Notes

1 RIA Novosti, US to Help Kosovo Join EU NATO: Clinton, April 5, 2012, accessed in
http://en.rian.ru/world/20120405/172621125.html.

2 Rick Rozoff, Pentagon and NATO Complete Their Conquest of The Balkans, Global Research, November 28, 2009, accessed in
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=16311.

3 Tom Burghardt, The End of the Affair: The BND, CIA and Kosovo’s Deep State, accessed in

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/The_End_of_th ... Deep_State.

4 The Telegraph, Kosovo’s prime minister ‘key player in mafia-like gang,’ December 14, 2010, accessed in
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... -gang.html.

5 Ibid.

6 Paul Lewis, Kosovo PM is head of human organ and arms ring Council of Europe reports, The Guardian, 14 December 2010.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/kosovo-s-m ... rope/30262



But you knew that.
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Re: NATO's ‘humanitarian’ bombing of Yugoslavia

Postby semper occultus » Wed Jul 30, 2014 10:05 am

Senior Kosovo figures face prosecution for crimes against humanity

Possible indictment of senior officials of former Kosovo Liberation Army relate to claims of ethnic cleansing since 1999

Julian Borger, diplomatic editor The Guardian, Tuesday 29 July 2014 09.42 BST

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/29/senior-political-figures-kosovo-prosecution-crimes-humanity

Link to video: Kosovo conflict: evidence of 'very limited' organ trafficking, says chief prosecutor

Leading political figures in Kosovo face indictment by a special EU court for crimes against humanity, including killings, abductions, sexual violence and other abuses of Serb and Roma minorities, according to the chief prosecutor leading a three-year special investigation (pdf).

The threat of indictments comes in a progress report published on Tuesday morning in Brussels by Clint Williamson, an American prosecutor appointed by the EU in 2011 to investigate ethnic cleansing committed in Kosovo since the 1999 Nato intervention brought an end to the conflict there.

Williamson does not name the suspects but describes them as "senior officials of the former Kosovo Liberation Army" (KLA), which fought an insurgency against the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Many former KLA commanders went on to leadership positions after Kosovo declared independence in 2008. It is believed at least some of the indictments prepared by the EU special investigative task force (SITF) are against top figures still actively involved in politics.

Williamson's investigation confirmed earlier allegations that in a "handful" of cases, organs taken from executed prisoners were trafficked for profit, but 15 years after the crimes, the SITF has not been able to gather enough concrete evidence to mount a viable prosecution.

The indictments for wholesale human rights violations are likely to have a far-ranging impact on Kosovo's future and will be embarrassing for the US and western European governments, which provided enthusiastic backing for the KLA leadership during and after the war.

The indictments cannot be issued until a special court to try the cases is established, almost certainly in the Netherlands. But its creation has been held up by bureaucratic delays over funding in the European commission and political turmoil in Kosovo. Williamson said he hoped the court would be set up by early next year, but the cases will be tried by a new chief prosecutor. He will step down after a three-year term next month.

Williamson said he was leaving for personal reasons, to rejoin his family in the US, rather than professional factors.

"There have been press reports that I was leaving because the investigation is collapsing. That is completely untrue. I think we have had a very solid investigation with very good results," he told the Guardian.

In his report, Williamson said the investigation had been rendered far more difficult by pervasive intimidation of witnesses, describing it as "a dark cloud over the country".

"We have taken steps to counter the impact of the witness intimidation and we will continue to do so. We will actively investigate these activities and will prosecute any individuals found to have been involved," Williamson says in his report.

"There is probably no single thing that poses more of a threat to rule of law in Kosovo and of its progress toward a European future than this pervasive practice."

Ten thousand people died in the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict, many of them Kosovan civilians killed in a brutal Serbian counterinsurgency. War crimes committed by both Serbian forces and the KLA have been tried in the international criminal court for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), but that did not examine abuses since 1999.

The EU investigation covered abuse of Kosovo Serbs and other minorities at the hands of the victorious KLA commanders.

The crimes include "unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, other forms of inhumane treatment, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites".

"This effectively resulted in the ethnic cleansing of large portions of the Serb and Roma populations from those areas in Kosovo south of the Ibar river, with the exception of a few scattered minority enclaves," the SITF report says.

"We believe that the evidence is compelling that these crimes were not the acts of rogue individuals acting on their own accord, but rather that they were conducted in an organised fashion and were sanctioned by certain individuals in the top levels of the KLA leadership. The widespread or systematic nature of these crimes in the period after the war ended in June 1999 justifies a prosecution for crimes against humanity."

The SITF investigation largely confirms the findings of an earlier Council of Europe enquiry led by a Swiss politician, Dick Marty, in 2010.

It upholds the Marty report's finding that a "handful" of prisoners had been murdered so that organs could be taken and sold. But Williamson said that "to prosecute such offences … it requires a level of evidence that we have not yet secured."

"Fifteen years down the line, we have solid information that these things happened, but no physical evidence. There are no bodies, no names of victims," Williamson told the Guardian.

"The likely reaction of a defence counsel in a murder case would be: there's not enough information to know what I am defending against, and a judge would probably agree. That said, it's certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that additional evidence will emerge in the next few months, and we will continue pursuing it."

The creation of a special European court would require a change in the Kosovo constitution and therefore a two-thirds majority in parliament. In theory, the suspects themselves could use their political power to obstruct it, but Williamson said that there would face substantial opposition inside Kosovo and beyond.

"I think it would be difficult for them politically if they attempted to block this. If the EU approach doesn't work, the most likely alternative is something set up through the UN security council and most Kosovars oppose that," Williamson said.

"So, it would be a hard sell to say that they were acting for the interests of Kosovo as opposed to just trying to save their own skins. There is a lot of pressure out there to make this work though and people across the political spectrum have been publicly supportive of it, so I am optimistic it will stay on track."

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Re: NATO's ‘humanitarian’ bombing of Yugoslavia

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 30, 2014 10:20 am


On Dominoes, WMDs And Putin’s “Aggression”: Imperial Washington Is Intoxicated By Another Big Lie
by David Stockman • July 29, 2014

.........
Puleese! The Kiev government is a dysfunctional, bankrupt usurper that is deploying western taxpayer money to wage a vicious war on several million Russian-speaking citizens in the Donbas—-the traditional center of greater Russia’s coal, steel and industrial infrastructure. It is geographically part of present day Ukraine by historical happenstance. For better or worse, it was Stalin who financed its forced draft industrialization during the 1930s; populated it with Russian speakers to insure political reliability; and expelled the Nazi occupiers at immeasurable cost in blood and treasure during WWII. Indeed, the Donbas and Russia have been Saimese twins economically and politically not merely for decades, but centuries.

On the other hand, Kiev’s marauding army and militias would come to an instant halt without access to the $35 billion of promised aid from the IMF, EU and US treasury. Obama just needs to say “stop”. That’s it. The civil war would quickly end, permitting the US, Russia and the warring parties of the Ukraine to hold a peace conference and work out the details of a separation agreement.

After all, what is so sacrosanct about preserving the territorial integrity of the Ukraine? Ever since the middle ages, it has consisted of a set of meandering borders in search of a nation that never existed owing to endemic ethnic, tribal and religious differences. Its modern boundaries are merely the fruit of 20th century wars and the expediencies of a totalitarian state during the decades of its rise, rule and disintegration.

There was until recently a neighboring “state” of equally artificial lineage called Czechoslovakia. It was carved out of the German and Austrian empires by the vengeful victors at Versailles, urged on by scheming Czech nationalists who coveted the resources of the Slovaks. But notwithstanding revolutions, the Stalinist oppression, the Cold War, the Prague Spring and all the rest of the 20th century mayhem—-the machinations at Versailles didn’t birth a state that was viable or sustainable. Accordingly, separation has been had, and the parties are better off for it—as are its neighbors and the larger world.

And on the topic of partition there is the ghost of Yugoslavia–another state that emerged in whole cloth from the madness of Versailles. Yes, it has been partitioned now into half a dozen smaller states—-Slovenia, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Kosovo and Bosnia. But the operative point is that the partitioner was none other than Washington and its European groupies who had no regard for those happenstance 20th century-made borders when it suited their purpose.

So the sanctimonious yelping from Washington about the sacred territorial integrity of the Ukraine is ahistorical tommyrot. In fact, however, it is a thin fig leaf for a far more insidious purpose. Namely, the self-aggrandizement of the Warfare State machinery that was left stranded in Imperial Washington without purpose or justification when the Cold War ended two decades ago.

So the Warfare State machinery—including its spy network, state department, aid agencies and NGO supplicants— invented enemies and missions to justify their continued existence and their massive dissipation of fiscal resources. Those are upwards of $1 trillion annually if you count everything including veterans and homeland security.

Thus, after arming the mujahedeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s, their Taliban successors were deemed our enemy after the cold war ended—even though they never poised a scintilla of threat to the citizens of Lincoln NE or Worcester MA. So too with our 1980′s ally Saddam Hussein, and also with Khadafy, Assad and the warring tribal potentates and cutthroats of Yemen, Somalia and Waziristan, to name just a few.

But it is in eastern Europe that the Warfare State machinery has most egregiously made an enemy and mission out of whole cloth. As the Cold War was drawing to a close in the late 1980s, then Secretary of State James Baker made a sensible deal with Gorbachev. In return for Soviet acquiesce in the reunification of Germany, the US would insure that NATO did not expand by a “single inch”.

Since then, of course, there has been a senseless bipartisan betrayal and stampede in the opposite direction. Starting under Clinton and extending through Bush and Obama, NATO has been expanded from 16 nations at the end of the Cold War to 28 countries today.


Yet the very recitation of its new members underscores the historical farce that this needless expansion amounted to. For better or worse, the formation of NATO in the late 1940′s involved what were perceived to be vital national security interests against a Stalinist policy that by the lights of the hawks and militarists of the day amounted to a violation of his Yalta obligations. Accordingly, NATO constituted an alliance of real nations—England, France, Italy and West Germany—-that could make a meaningful contribution to collective security against the perceived Soviet threat of the times.

But Albania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Slovakia and Slovenia? And that is not to forget Moldova, Georgia, Macedonia and the Ukraine—all of which are still coveted for membership by the NATO apparatchiks. What could these micro-states possibly contribute to American security? That’s especially the case since the Warsaw pact had been dissolved; the Soviet Empire has erased from the pages of history; and the Russian successor was left with an Italian sized GDP encumbered with the destructive legacy of a state-dominated economy that had been appropriated by a passel of thieves, opportunists and oligarchs.

In short, today’s Ukrainian crisis is the outcome of the mindless 20-year drive of the Warfare State to push an obsolete NATO to the very doorstep of Russia, and into the messy remnants of the Soviet disintegration. Stated differently, Putin has been in power for 15 years, yet during 13 of those years there was no hue and cry from Washington, London and Brussels that he was an incipient Hitler bent on sweeping conquest. Even the so-called invasion of Georgia in 2008 was a tempest in a teapot provoked by local pro-Russian separatists who did not want to be ruled by a de facto American interloper in Tbilisi.


......

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NATO's ‘humanitarian’ bombing of Yugoslavia

Postby MacCruiskeen » Mon Aug 01, 2016 5:21 pm

August 1, 2016
The Exoneration of Milosevic: the ICTY’s Surprise Ruling

by Andy Wilcoxson


The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague has determined that the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic was not responsible for war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

In a stunning ruling, the trial chamber that convicted former Bosnian-Serb president Radovan Karadzic of war crimes and sentenced him to 40 years in prison, unanimously concluded that Slobodan Milosevic was not part of a “joint criminal enterprise” to victimize Muslims and Croats during the Bosnian war.

The March 24th Karadzic judgment states that “the Chamber is not satisfied that there was sufficient evidence presented in this case to find that Slobodan Milosevic agreed with the common plan” to permanently remove Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Bosnian Serb claimed territory.[1]

The Karadzic trial chamber found that “the relationship between Milosevic and the Accused had deteriorated beginning in 1992; by 1994, they no longer agreed on a course of action to be taken. Furthermore, beginning as early as March 1992, there was apparent discord between the Accused and Milosevic in meetings with international representatives, during which Milosevic and other Serbian leaders openly criticised Bosnian Serb leaders of committing ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and the war for their own purposes.”[2]

The judges noted that Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic both favored the preservation of Yugoslavia and that Milosevic was initially supportive, but that their views diverged over time. The judgment states that “from 1990 and into mid-1991, the political objective of the Accused and the Bosnian Serb leadership was to preserve Yugoslavia and to prevent the separation or independence of BiH, which would result in a separation of Bosnian Serbs from Serbia; the Chamber notes that Slobodan Milosevic endorsed this objective and spoke against the independence of BiH.”[3]

The Chamber found that “the declaration of sovereignty by the SRBiH Assembly in the absence of the Bosnian Serb delegates on 15 October 1991, escalated the situation,”[4]but that Milosevic was not on board with the establishment of Republika Srpska in response. The judgment says that “Slobodan Milosevic was attempting to take a more cautious approach”[5]

The judgment states that in intercepted communications with Radovan Karadzic, “Milosevic questioned whether it was wise to use ‘an illegitimate act in response to another illegitimate act’ and questioned the legality of forming a Bosnian Serb Assembly.”[6] The judges also found that “Slobodan Milosevic expressed his reservations about how a Bosnian Serb Assembly could exclude the Muslims who were ‘for Yugoslavia’.”[7]

The judgment notes that in meetings with Serb and Bosnian Serb officials “Slobodan Milosevic stated that ‘[a]ll members of other nations and ethnicities must be protected’ and that ‘[t]he national interest of the Serbs is not discrimination’.”[8] Also that “Milosevic further declared that crime needed to be fought decisively.”[9]

The trial chamber notes that “In private meetings, Milosevic was extremely angry at the Bosnian Serb leadership for rejecting the Vance-Owen Plan and he cursed the Accused.”[10] They also found that “Milosevic tried to reason with the Bosnian Serbs saying that he understood their concerns, but that it was most important to end the war.”[11]

The judgment states that “Milosevic also questioned whether the world would accept that the Bosnian Serbs who represented only one third of the population of BiH would get more than 50% of the territory and he encouraged a political agreement.”[12]

At a meeting of the Supreme Defense Council the judgment says that “Milosevic told the Bosnian Serb leadership that they were not entitled to have more than half the territory in BiH, stating that: ‘there is no way that more than that could belong to us! Because, we represent one third of the population. […] We are not entitled to in excess of half of the territory – you must not snatch away something that belongs to someone else! […] How can you imagine two thirds of the population being crammed into 30% of the territory, while 50% is too little for you?! Is it humane, is it fair?!’”[13]

In other meetings with Serb and Bosnian Serb officials, the judgment notes that Milosevic “declared that the war must end and that the Bosnian Serbs’ biggest mistake was to want a complete defeat of the Bosnian Muslims.”[14] Because of the rift between Milosevic and the Bosnian-Serbs, the judges note that “the FRY reduced its support for the RS and encouraged the Bosnian Serbs to accept peace proposals.”[15]

The Tribunal’s determination that Slobodan Milosevic was not part of a joint criminal enterprise, and that on the contrary he “condemned ethnic cleansing”[16] is of tremendous significance because he got blamed for all of the bloodshed in Bosnia, and harsh economic sanctions were imposed on Serbia as a result. Wrongfully accusing Milosevic ranks right up there with invading Iraq only to find that there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction after all.

Slobodan Milosevic was vilified by the entire western press corps and virtually every politician in every NATO country. They called him “the Butcher of the Balkans.” They compared him to Hitler and accused him of genocide. They demonized him and made him out to be a bloodthirsty monster, and they used that false image to justify not only economic sanctions against Serbia, but also the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia and the Kosovo war.

Slobodan Milosevic had to spend the last five years of his life in prison defending himself and Serbia from bogus war crimes allegations over a war that they now admit he was trying to stop. The most serious charges that Milosevic faced, including the charge of genocide, were all in relation to Bosnia. Now, ten years after his death, they admit that he wasn’t guilty after all – oops.

The ICTY did nothing to publicize the fact that they had cleared Milosevic of involvement in the joint criminal enterprise. They quietly buried that finding 1,303 pages into the 2,590 page Karadzic verdict knowing full well that most people would probably never bother to read it.


The presiding judge in the Radovan Karadzic trial, O-Gon Kwon of South Korea, was also one of the judges in the Slobodan Milosevic trial. Milosevic’s exoneration by the Karadzic trial chamber may be an indication of how the Milosevic chamber would have eventually ruled, at least on the Bosnia charges, if Milosevic had lived to see the conclusion of his own trial.

It’s worth recalling that Slobodan Milosevic died under a very suspicious set of circumstances. He died of a heart attack just two weeks after the Tribunal denied his request to undergo heart surgery in Russia.[17] He was found dead in his cell less than 72 hours after his attorney delivered a letter to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in which he said that he feared he was being poisoned.[18]

The Tribunal’s official report on the inquiry into his death confirmed that, “Rifampicin had been found in a blood sample taken from Mr. Milosevic on 12 January 2006.” And that “Mr. Milosevic was not told of the results until 3 March 2006 because of the difficult legal position in which Dr. Falke (the Tribunal’s chief medical officer) found himself by virtue of the Dutch legal provisions concerning medical confidentiality.”[19]

The presence of Rifamicin (a non-prescribed drug) in Milosevic’s blood would have counteracted the high blood pressure medication he was taking and increased his risk of the heart attack that ultimately did kill him. The Tribunal’s admission that they knew about the Rifampicin for months, but didn’t tell Milosevic the results of his own blood test until just days before his death because of “Dutch legal provisions concerning medical confidentiality” is an incredibly lame and disingenuous excuse. There is no provision of Dutch law that prohibits a doctor from telling the patient the results of his own blood test — that would be idiotic. On the contrary, concealing such information from the patient could be seen as malpractice.

This all gives rise to well-founded suspicion that powerful geopolitical interests would rather Milosevic die before the end of his trial than see him acquitted and have their vicious lies exposed. U.S. State Department cables leaked to Wikileaks confirm that The Tribunal did discuss Milosevic’s medical condition and his medical records with U.S. Embassy personnel in The Hague without his consent.[20] They clearly didn’t care about medical confidentiality laws when they were blabbing about his medical records to the American embassy.

It’s an unsatisfying outcome that Milosevic has been quietly vindicated for the most serious crimes that he was accused of some ten years after his death. At a minimum financial compensation should now be paid to his widow and his children, and reparations should be paid to Serbia by the western governments who sought to punish Serbia in order to hold Milosevic “accountable” for crimes that their own Tribunal now admits he wasn’t responsible for, and was in fact trying to stop.

Notes.

[1] ICTY, Karadzic Judgment, 24 March 2016, Para. 3460
< http://www.icty.org/x/cases/karadzic/tj ... gement.pdf >

[2] Ibid., Footnote 11027

[3] Ibid., Para. 3276

[4] Ibid., Para. 2709

[5] Ibid., Para. 2710

[6] Ibid., Para. 2685

[7] Ibid., Para. 2687

[8] Ibid., Para. 3288

[9] Ibid., Para. 3284

[10] Ibid., Para. 3289

[11] Ibid., Para. 3295

[12] Ibid., Para. 3290

[13] Ibid., Para. 3297

[14] Ibid., Para. 3293

[15] Ibid., Para. 3292

[16] Ibid., Para. 3280

[17] ICTY Case No. IT-02-54 Prosecutor v. Slobodan Milosevic, Decision on Assigned Counsel Request for Provisional Release, February 23, 2006

[18] Text of Slobodan Milosevic’s Letter to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
< http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/sm030806.htm >

[19] Judge Kevin Parker (Vice-President of the ICTY), Report to the President of the ICTY: Death of Slobodan Milosevic, May 2006; ¶ 31, 76
< http://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_mi ... report.pdf >

[20] U.S. State Dept. Cable #03THEHAGUE2835_a, “ICTY: An Inside Look Into Milosevic’s Health and Support Network”
< https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/03TH ... 835_a.html >

This article originally appeared www.slobodan-milosevic.org
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See also, from ten years ago:

March 13, 2006
Rest Easy, Bill Clinton: Milosevic Can't Talk Anymore

by Jeremy Scahill

[...]

It is ironic that Milosevic's last legal battle was an attempt to compel his old friend-turned-nemesis Bill Clinton to testify at his trial. If successful, Milosevic would have grilled the man who was U.S. president through the entire Yugoslav war in what would have been a fiery direct examination. Clinton and Milosevic were once pals who talked collective strategy in the 1990s. Milosevic had many damning stories to tell and, without a doubt, uncomfortable questions to ask Clinton. The judges in Milosevic's case clearly worked to keep those moments from ever happening, and the U.S. government made clear its forceful opposition to such subpoenas of U.S. officials, even considering invading a country that would put a U.S. official on trial. With or without Clinton, Milosevic's defense would have brought to light some serious documentation of U.S. war crimes, but he died, muzzled, before he really got started.

Little attention, therefore, has been paid to Milosevic's long-term efforts – which predated 9/11, the 1999 NATO bombing, and his own trial – to expose the presence of al-Qaeda in the Balkans, from Bosnia to Kosovo. With 9/11, Milosevic's talk of al-Qaeda was easily dismissed as laughable, pathetic opportunism. But those who followed Milosevic's career and more importantly the events of the 1990s in Yugoslavia know it was not. Those allegations were based on events the U.S. does not want discussed in an international court. Following the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, many mujahedin eventually turned their sights on Yugoslavia, where they went to fight alongside the Bosnian Muslims against the Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats. Once again, the U.S. and bin Laden were on the same team. To this day, there are reports of training camps in Bosnia, which remains under occupation. It is also a likely training ground for future blowback.

In his opening statement, Milosevic alluded to some of the information he would introduce during his defense.

"In 1998 when [Clinton envoy Richard] Holbrooke visited us in Belgrade, we told him the information we had at our disposal, that in Northern Albania the KLA is being aided by Osama bin Laden, that he was arming, training, and preparing the members of this terrorist organization in Albania. However, they decided to cooperate with the KLA and indirectly, therefore, with bin Laden, although before that he had bombed the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania [and] had already declared war."

Milosevic concluded that "one day all this will have to come to light, these links."

That, however, is unlikely, and more so now that Milosevic is dead.

To be sure, there will never be indictments of these U.S. war criminals at The Hague: Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Jamie Rubin, William Cohen, Sandy Berger, Richard Holbrooke, and Wesley Clark. ...

https://www.antiwar.com/orig/jscahill.p ... cleid=8692
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: NATO's ‘humanitarian’ bombing of Yugoslavia

Postby elfismiles » Tue Aug 02, 2016 9:30 am

Everyone's on-edge over ISIS ...

Terrifying scenes as 40 people are injured in beer festival stampede after someone shouts 'ISIS' for joke
10:24, 2 Aug 2016
Updated 13:36, 2 Aug 2016
By Kara O'Neill
It is believed that a member of the crowd also fired a toy gun, causing mass panic in the audience

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news ... ed-8543905



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9r0zm4surY
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Re: NATO's ‘humanitarian’ bombing of Yugoslavia

Postby conniption » Thu Aug 18, 2016 5:34 am

defend democracy press

Milosevic and the destruction of Yugoslavia. Unpleasant truths no one wants to know.


12/08/2016

By Giullietto Chiesa

Outrageous: Slobodan Milosevic cleared of charges by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. But no-one is talking about it!

The ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) has discharged Slobodan Milosevic from 1992-95 Bosnian war crimes allegations. This is definitely prime time news, while it holds endless political implications. Oddly enough, though, no major international mainstream media seems to have noticed.

Well, it is understable for everyone to be keeping it quiet: those who with one voice did dub him the “butcher of the Balkans”; those who associated him to Hitler, initiating a pattern which would later be extended to Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, and which many would like to stretch further on to Bashar al-Assad. It is easy to read in the silence of the West’s chancellors, most notably the United States’, who doomed Yugoslavia and willed the end of Milosevic.

They may well do that, since Slobodan Milosevic’s “rehabilitation” is nowhere to be seen yet. The court ruling where to look for is the one which led the same court to issue a 40-years sentence for Radovan Karadzic. Therefore, one is to read through the bulky papers ruling before being able to realize that Milosevic was not guilty for the charges for which he spent the last five years of his life behind bars and encircled by universal shame. That’s the trick. Karadzic’s sentence dates back to 24th March of this year. We’re halfway through August and the worldwide mainstream media are not even remotely showing any sign of awareness. Or they figure it is more convenient not to.

This way, no Western leader is going to have to apologize at all, to Yugoslavia, to Serbia, to the unwitting peoples of Europe. Actually, if we knew better, it would be their turn to be sitting on the stand now. Precisely in that 24th March ruling, the court who tried Milosevic stated that “the Chamber is not satisfied that there was sufficient evidence presented in this case to find that Slobodan Milosevic agreed with the common plan” (ICTY, Karadzic Judgment, 24 March 2016, Para. 3460) demanded by the Serbs to expel Bosnian muslims and Croato-Bosnians out of Bosnian territory.

Yet, the wording here is willingly blurry. The point is not “sufficient evidence”. The same sentence reaffirms more than once, and by quoting documented evidence, the existence of substantial divergences between Milosevic and Karadzic in several crucial turnpoints of that mournful crisis. For instance, the ruling assessed that Milosevic opposed the decision of establishing a Serb Republic.

More than a few other instances have now surfaced, revealing what was already well-known to those who genuinely wished to know: that is, Milosevic had been striving to the end – namely, the set off of NATO bombings over Serbia- to strike an agreement with Western leaders – and it was Mme Albright who decided no-one was to sign that deal.

Five years of prison – the last of his life- were agreed for up in high European and US headquarters, in utter disrespect for any form of justice and in the name of an act of abuse by means of which Yugoslavia has been torn apart and shattered to bits. And his death in prison took place in highly suspicious circumstances and blatantly inhuman conditions. Officially, he died from a heart attack. However, that came two weeks after the Court had denied him permission to be treated in Russia, as he had requested. The former Yugoslavian President died in his cell three days after his lawyer had managed to send a letter to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in which he wrote he feared of being poisoned.

We do know now what kind of “justice” was the one that Court was after: the victor’s. They now clear Milosevic’s name, while still concealing their persuasion. It is no act of carelessness. Korean justice O-Gon, who presided Karadzic’s trial, was also to be found in the lot who tried Milosevic, that is until he died. That justice had deep insight in both trials’ works and records. We are but left with wondering on whose payroll he and his honorable colleagues might be. The West is drowning in its own filth, along with those values it shamelessly claims everyday to be willing to protect.
_____

Author: Giulietto Chiesa

Translation: Oliviero Martini
Giulietto Chiesa is one of the best known Italian journalists. He was Moscow correspondent for twenty years for “L’Unità” and “La Stampa”. He worked with all major Italian television channels, from the TG1 to TG3 and TG5 and is currently political analyst for major Russian television channels. He is the only Italian journalist to be repeatedly mentioned in the autobiography of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he has repeatedly interviewed. He writes a blog for “Il Fatto Quotidiano”. His own blog is http://www.megachip.info/. He is founder and director of Pandoratv.it web tv. An expert in international politics and communications scholar, he founded the political-cultural movement “Alternativa”. Among his credits there are some best-sellers such as “Endless War”, “Superclan” (with Marcello Villari), “Barack Obush” (with Pino Cabras) and the movie “Zero, an inquiry into 9/11”. He is one of the initiators of Sofia Club and of the Delphi Inititative. His new book, “Putinophobia” is to come out simultaneously in France, where the author was invited as a guest at the Paris Book Fair, and in Russia.


~~~


defend democracy press

Milosevic Exonerated, as the NATO War Machine Moves on


15/08/2016
By Neil Clark

The ICTY’s exoneration of the late Slobodan Milosevic, the former President of Yugoslavia, for alleged war crimes committed in the Bosnia war, proves again we should take NATO claims regarding its ’official enemies’ not with a pinch of salt, but a huge lorry load.

For the past twenty odd years, neocon commentators and ‘liberal interventionist’ pundits have been telling us at every possible opportunity, that Milosevic (a democratically elected leader in a country where over 20 political parties freely operated) was an evil genocidal dictator who was to blame for ALL the deaths in the Balkans in the 1990s. Repeat after me in a robotic voice (while making robotic arm movements): ‘Milosevic’s genocidal aggression’ ‘Milosevic’s genocidal aggression’.

But the official narrative, just like the one that told us that in 2003, Iraq had WMDs which could be launched within 45 minutes, was a deceitful one, designed to justify a regime change-op which the Western elites had long desired.

The ICTY’s conclusion, that one of the most demonized figures of the modern era was innocent of the most heinous crimes he was accused of, really should have made headlines across the world. But it hasn‘t. Even the ICTY buried it, deep in its 2,590 page verdict in the trial of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic who was convicted in March of genocide (at Srebrenica), war crimes and crimes against humanity.

There was no official announcement or press conference regarding Milosevic‘s exoneration. We’ve got journalist and researcher Andy Wilcoxson to thank for flagging it up for us.

How very different it all was when the trial of the so-called ‘Butcher of the Balkans’, began in February 2002! Then, you‘d have to have been locked in a wardrobe not to be aware of what was going on.

CNN provided blanket coverage of what was described as “the most important trial since Nuremberg.” Of course, Milosevic’s guilt was taken as a given. “When the sentence comes and he disappears into that cell, no one is going to hear from him again,” declared US lawyer Judith Armatta from the Coalition for International Justice, an organization which had the former US Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman, as an advisory board member.

Anyone who dared to challenge the NATO line was labeled a “Milosevic apologist”, or worse still, a “genocide denier”, by ‘Imperial Truth Enforcers’.

But amid all the blather and the hype surrounding the ’trial of the century’ it soon became apparent the prosecution was in deep, deep trouble. The Sunday Times quoted a legal expert who claimed that “Eighty percent of the prosecution’s opening statements would have been dismissed by a British court as hearsay.” That, I believe, was a generous assessment.

The problem was that this was a show trial

, one in which geopolitics came before hard evidence. It’s important to remember that the original indictment against Milosevic in relation to alleged Kosovo war crimes/genocide was issued in May 1999, at the height of the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia and at a time when war was not going to plan for the US and its allies.

The indictment was clearly designed to exert pressure on Milosevic to cave into NATO’s demands.

The trouble for NATO was that by the time Milosevic’s trial was due to start, the Kosovo narrative had already unraveled. The lurid claims made by the US and its allies about genocide and hundreds of thousands being killed, catalogued by the great John Pilger here, had been shown to be false. In September 2001, a UN court officially held that there had been no genocide in Kosovo.

So in an attempt to beef up their weakening case against Milosevic the prosecutors at The Hague had to bring in new charges relating to the war in Bosnia, accusing ‘Slobo’ of being part of a ‘joint criminal conspiracy’ to kill/ethnically cleanse Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims in pursuance of a ’Greater Serbia’ project.

In normal criminal prosecutions evidence is collected and then, if it’s deemed sufficient, charges are brought. But the opposite happened in the case of Milosevic: he was charged for political reasons and the hunt for evidence then followed.

The irony is that the former Yugoslav President had already been praised by President Clinton for his role in brokering a peace deal in Bosnia in 1995, which was signed in Dayton, Ohio.

The truth is that Milosevic was no hardcore Serb nationalist but a lifelong socialist, whose commitment was always to a multi-racial, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia.

His aim throughout his time in power was not to build a ’Greater Serbia‘, but to try and keep Federal Yugoslavia together, as the ICTY now belatedly acknowledges.

Not only was Milosevic not responsible for ethnic cleansing which took place in Bosnia, he actually spoke out against it. The ICTY noted Milosevic’s “repeated criticism and disapproval of the policies made by the Accused (Karadzic) and the Bosnian Serb leadership.” Milosevic, a man for whom all forms of racism were anathema, insisted that all ethnicities must be protected.

But in order to punish Milosevic and to warn others of the consequences if they dared to oppose US power, history had to be re-written. The pro-Yugoslavia socialist who had opposed the policies of the Bosnian Serb leadership had to be turned, retrospectively, into the villain of the Bosnian War and indeed blamed for all the bloodshed which took place in the Balkans. Meanwhile, the aforementioned US Ambassador Warren Zimmerman, whose malign intervention to scupper a diplomatic solution helped trigger the Bosnian conflict got off scot-free.

The ‘Blame it All on Slobo’ campaign saw facts simply thrown out of the window. One article, written, I kid ye not, by an Oxford University Professor of European Studies even had Milosevic as leader of Yugoslavia in 1991 (the year that Slovenia broke away). In fact the Bosnian Croat, Ante Markovic, was the leader of the country at the time.

Inevitably, Milosevic was likened to Hitler. “It was just like watching the evil strutting Adolf Hitler in action,” wrote the News of the World’s political editor, when Milosevic had the temerity to defend himself in court. “There were chilling flashes of the World War Two Nazi monster as the deposed Serb tyrant harangued the court.”

To make sure readers did get the Milosevic=Hitler point, the News of the World illustrated their diatribe with a picture of Hitler ‘The Butcher of Berlin’, in front of a concentration camp, with a picture of Milosevic ‘The Butcher of Belgrade’ superimposed on a picture of a Bosnian concentration camp. Which in fact, he had nothing to do with.

Very conveniently for the prosecution, Milosevic died suddenly in his cell in March 2006.

Going by what we had seen at the trial up to that point, it’s inconceivable that a guilty sentence could have been passed. A whole succession of ’smoking gun’ witnesses had turned out to be dampest of damp squibs.

As I noted in an earlier piece:

Star witness Ratomir Tanic was exposed as being in the pay of Western security forces, whilst ex-Yugoslav secret police chief Rade Markovic, the man who was finally going to spill the beans on Milosevic and reveal how his former master had ordered the expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, in fact did the opposite and testified that he had been tortured to tell lies and that his written statement had been falsified by the prosecution.

In addition, as I noted here, the former head of security in the Yugoslav army, General Geza Farkas (an ethnic Hungarian), testified that all Yugoslav soldiers in Kosovo had been handed a document explaining international humanitarian law, and that they were ordered to disobey any orders which violated it. Farkas also said that Milosevic ordered no paramilitary groups should be permitted to operate anywhere in Kosovo.

When Milosevic died, his accusers claimed he had “cheated justice”. But in fact, as the ICTY has now confirmed, the injustice was done to Milosevic.

While he had to defend himself against politically-motivated charges at The Hague, the US and its allies launched their brutal, illegal assault on Iraq, a war which has led to the death of up to one million people. Last year a report from Body Count revealed that at least 1.3 million people had lost their lives as a result of the US-led ‘war on terror’ in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Those sorts of figures help us get Kosovo into some kind of perspective. Even if we do hold Milosevic and the Yugoslav government responsible for some of the deaths there in 1999, (in a war which the West had clearly desired and provoked) far, far, greater death and destruction has been caused by the countries who were the keenest to see the President of Yugoslavia in the dock. As John Pilger noted in 2008, the bombing of Yugoslavia was the “perfect precursor to the bloodbaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Since then we’ve also had the NATO destruction of Libya, the country which had the highest living standards in the whole of Africa and the backing of violent ‘rebels’ to try and achieve ‘regime change’ in Syria.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see a pattern here.

Before a US-led war or ‘humanitarian intervention’ against a targeted state, a number of lurid claims are made about the country‘s leader and its government. These claims receive maximum media coverage and are repeated ad nauseam on the basis that people will bound to think they’re true.

Later it transpires that the claims were either entirely false (like the Iraq WMD ones), unproven, or greatly exaggerated. But the news cycle has moved on focusing not on the exposure of the fraudulent claims made earlier but on the next aggressive/genocidal ‘New Hitler’ who needs to be dealt with. In 1999 it was Milosevic; now it’s Assad and Putin.

And guess what, dear reader? It’s the same people who defend the Iraq war and other blood-stained Western military interventions based on lies, unproven claims or great exaggerations, who are the ones doing the accusing.

As that very wise old saying goes: When you point one finger, there are three fingers pointing back to you.
_____
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. He has written for many newspapers and magazines in the UK and other countries including The Guardian, Morning Star, Daily and Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Week, and The American Conservative. He is a regular pundit on RT and has also appeared on BBC TV and radio, Sky News, Press TV and the Voice of Russia. He is the co-founder of the Campaign For Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66
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