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How Silent are the 'Humanitarian' Invaders of
Kosovo?
John Pilger, 8 December 2004
author of
Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs
"..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...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... Erected on the
foundation of this massive lie, Kosovo today is a violent, criminalised
UN-administered "free market" in drugs and prostitution..."
[Courtesy New Statesman -
www.newstatesman.co.uk
- see also NATO, Kosovo & Tamil Eelam,
Nadesan Satyendra,
1999
& Understanding Kosovo - Nadesan
Satyendra, 31 October 1998]
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 14 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 10 and 15 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 40
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.
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