John Pilger… anyone remember Kosovo?

2005-01-10

Richard Moore

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Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 16:48:24 +0100
From: Torstein Viddal <•••@••.•••>
Reply-To: Torstein Viddal <•••@••.•••>
To: "•••@••.•••" <•••@••.•••>
Subject: An ugly example of Matrix lies: Yugoslavia

Richard,
I just wanted to share with you a new text by John Pilger, that
appeared on one of the lists I follow. I think this is one of the
subject areas today where the ordinary European has the least clue as
to what is going on, even compared with Iraq and Afghanistan, that
are, after all, quite focused from different angles.

tv


Pilger concludes:

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.


HOW SILENT ARE THE 'HUMANITARIAN' INVADERS OF KOSOVO?
John Pilger

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.

First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk
<outbind://10/www.newstatesman.co.uk>

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