What We Can Learn From War On Yugoslavia Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit source - shermuse@sonic.net What We Can Learn From the War on Yugoslavia by Chuck Sher, founder of The Petaluma Progressives, P.O. Box 445, Petaluma, CA 94953; 707/765-2817 There are several lessons we can learn from the destruction of yet-another sovereign country by the U.S. military. Perhaps the basic one is that we cannot trust the U.S. corporate media to present us with the relevant facts about a situation-only their "approved" facts, and even those are suspect, as we shall see. In addition, the extent to which the U.S. media acts as a cheerleader for the Pentagon and the State Dept. is appalling-"our" missiles and "our" forces versus "their" evil and crafty leader, always portrayed as "the new Hitler". It's like a bad "B" movie, but the carnage carried out in our name with billions of our tax dollars is all too real. The third aspect of the media's complicity in U.S. war crimes is the censoring of any historical perspective that would cast doubt on official U.S. claims that we have the right to the moral high ground in world affairs. Let's start with this last point. If humanitarian concern was the real motivation for U.S. actions then why is our government not bombing Turkey for the brutal repression of their Kurdish population, more extensive by any accounting than Serbian repression of Kosovar Albanians? Is it because Turkey is useful to the U.S. as an ally? (In fact, the U.S. has heartily supported the Turkish government in this endeavor with money, high tech weapons and essential diplomatic support.) Why does the U.S. not support the East Timorese in their struggle to free themselves from the genocidal Indonesian occupation of their country (over 200,000 people slaughtered)? Why does our government not protest as Palestinians are slowly but surely squeezed out of Arab East Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions which forbid an occupying power from importing its own population into territories captured in an armed conflict? Why did we pay for death-squad governments in El Salvador and Guatemala who killed hundreds of thousands of their citizens? And on and on. In each of these cases, the U.S. government lets human rights abuses go unnoticed, and in most cases directly aids the culprits, if they are useful in advancing the real U.S. agenda-to ever-increase the power of "our" interests around the world. But what about the claims of genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass murders by the Serbian forces? Everybody alluded to them but what do we really know for sure? Let's start with the claim of "genocide". During the period of active civil war in Kosovo, from February 1998 to March 1999 when the NATO bombing started, at most 2000 people were killed, on all sides, including about 100 Albanian Kosovars killed by the KLA for "collaborating" with the Yugoslavian authorities. (These are NATO's own figures.) A tragedy, certainly-genocide, hardly. In their attempt to secede from Yugoslavia by force of arms, the KLA initiated over 1100 armed attacks on Serbian police and military forces, and the casualty figures are about what you would expect as a result of a yearlong civil war. This leaves no room for genocide and, in fact, nothing resembling genocide was going on before the NATO bombing started. The impression to the contrary was foisted upon the American public by our government and unquestioningly repeated by the mainstream media as if it were fact instead of the war propaganda that it was. How about ethnic cleansing? In this regard, it is important to distinguish between the period before the NATO attacks and after. Before the NATO bombs started falling there were a couple hundred thousand people who were displaced during the civil war in Kosovo. But according to the UN High Commission on Refugees, these people were not being systematically driven out of Kosovo, since only 18,500 refugees entered Albania, for example, and about 16,000 entered Macedonia from March of 1998 to March of 1999. After the NATO bombing, of course, hundreds of thousands of people did flee Kosovo, but you can't justify US policy based on what happened after the US intervened, right? The Kosovars who were internally displaced during the civil war phase were not being ethnically cleansed out of Kosovo but, for the most part, were made homeless by the fighting in a given region. This was because the modus operandi of the KLA was to fire on Serb forces from inside houses in a village. The Serbs would then chase everyone out of the village (often destroying the village in the process) in order to get the guerrilla forces of the KLA out into the open. Again, a tragedy, including instances of gratuitous destruction of Albanian Kosovar villages-but not ethnic cleansing, where the object is the removal of the population from the country. How about mass murders of civilians? There were several well-publicized "massacres" such as the one at Racak, mentioned by Clinton in justifying US intervention. NATO's account of Racak, however, was disputed by Le Monde and La Figaro, among other European media, because several independent forensic teams examined the scene there and concluded that there was no proof that the 40-some bodies in the ditch at Racak were not KLA fighters who had died in the previous days' fighting and had been planted there to make it look like a massacre. If you remember the market bombing in Sarajevo that was supposed to have been from Serb artillery but was later found to have more likely been a bomb that the Bosnian Muslims fired themselves, you'll get the idea. Likewise for totally unproven claims of mass graves, with "before" and "after" satellite photos but never a "during" photo that would have provided any real evidence of wrongdoing, etc. etc. This is not to claim that innocent people weren't killed by Serb forces during the Kosovo civil war; but the U.S. has ulterior motives for manipulating public opinion (discussed later) and so you must be wary of reports of atrocities when making up your mind about what went on in Yugoslavia, as elsewhere. Internal government documents from Germany's Foreign Office published in the German newspaper JungeWelt on April 24, 1999, categorically state that no genocide or systematic ethnic cleansing occurred before the NATO bombing started. For example they report, "the actions of 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." Or again, "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 its areas of operation. . .A state program or persecution aimed at the whole ethnic group of Albanians exists neither now nor earlier (written in January, 1999.)" There were, no doubt, atrocities committed by Serbian forces during the civil war in Kosovo (and by the KLA as well). As Prof. Robert Hayden of the University of Pittsburgh stated, it was "a brutal repression of a brutal civil war". But atrocities have happened in numerous places around the world, often with U.S. aid to the perpetrators. The crucial point, never mentioned once in U.S. corporate media, is that the United Nations, not a U.S.-led NATO, is the only body authorized under international law to intervene in such cases. Clinton's attack on Yugoslavia was thus in direct violation of the U.N. charter, NATO's original charter (which stipulates that NATO is to be a purely defensive alliance), the Geneva Conventions (which expressly forbid attacks against civilian infrastructure) and the U.S. War Powers Act. As Walter Rockler, a former prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials after World War II recently wrote in the Chicago Tribune, "For some to shout 'war criminal' at Milosevic only emphasizes that those who live in glass houses should be careful about throwing stones. The Nuremberg Court found that to initiate a war of aggression, as the U.S. has done to Yugoslavia, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime." If that is so, then why doesn't the International Tribunal also indict Clinton for attacking Yugoslavia, killing over 1000 innocent Yugoslav civilians and destroying much of the civilian infrastructure? Again according to Prof. Robert Hayden, "When questioned about NATO liability for war crimes, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said that, 'NATO is the friend of the Tribunal. . . NATO countries are those that have provided the finances to set up the Tribunal; we are among the majority financiers.' Mr. Shea clearly knows that he who pays the piper calls the tune." In short, the U.S. rationale for attacking Yugoslavia was based on a fabrication and was actually undertaken for other, less humanitarian, reasons. What might those be? First, it is clear that the U.S. has decided that NATO is a more pliant military tool than the U.N. The U.N. would never have authorized an armed attack on Yugoslavia but NATO would and did, at the U.S. government's request. In direct defiance of the U.N. charter that all NATO countries have signed, NATO's charter was changed, during the bombing of Yugoslavia, to allow it to carry out preemptive military actions anywhere in the world. Kosovo was thus the first test case of this "New World Order" where the US, under the NATO fig leaf, can attack any country at will, without justifying it to anyone. This is a direct and flagrant violation of international law, but being the world's only superpower means you never have to say you are sorry, or justify your actions according to the rules that apply to other countries. A second reason surfaces when you read the text of the Rambouillet ("accept-it-or-be-bombed") Agreement, which was the U.S.'s sole attempt at "diplomacy". Among other violations of Yugoslav sovereignty, like allowing NATO troops free rein anywhere in Yugoslavia, it would have required that "the Kosovo economy shall function in accordance with free market principles." There wouldn't be any Western corporate self-interest rearing its ugly head here, would there, including lust for the $5 billion in minerals laying in Kosovo's Stari Trg mines, currently state-owned? This is just one example of the fact that the underlying purpose of U.S. foreign policy in the Balkans, as elsewhere, is to make the world safe for the Fortune 500. Lastly, U.S. motives for attacking Yugoslavia were driven by the Pentagon's need to have some rationale for spending almost $300 billion dollars of our tax money every year to be the unelected policeman of the world. Why is this the case? For one reason, war and the preparation for war are a huge economic enterprise in the US and therefore an essential mainstay of the U.S. economy-without them, who knows what would happen? That means that if there are no real enemies, then perhaps we have to fabricate them-a thesis worth considering. In addition, the Pentagon's role is to protect "American interests" anywhere in the world, meaning the interests of U.S. investors and multinational corporations, not the interests of the American people. Don't be fooled-we pay, big business profits, and anyone in the way gets bombed. As Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne wrote in The Nation, "Clinton recently exhorted Americans to accept the 'inevitable logic' of globalism and free trade. But the Administration's Balkan policy shows that globalization is not inevitable-it depends on America's overseas military commitments and its willingness to wage war if necessary." Americans are not a heartless people but we have been trained to accept our government's stated positions (endlessly repeated in the mainstream media) as being the gospel truth. But you don't have to be one of the sheep. Read Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Z Magazine and The Nation and listen to Pacifica Radio. For in-depth information on Kosovo, check out ZNet on the Internet at www.lbbs.org and Ramsey Clark's International Action Center at www.iacenter.org., two marvelous resources for alternative articles on many subjects. You owe it to your fellow man to find out the truth of what happened in Yugoslavia and around the world, and then to protest what you consider immoral actions-by writing your elected officials in Washington, writing letters to the editor, and bringing up these questions with people in your daily life. The U.S. empire-and make no mistake, it is the most violent and rapacious empire in world history-only exists because U.S. citizens go along with it. You can make a difference. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nyteeu-06.19.99-04:40:02-1157