Even when the big-business media here get around to
reporting some of the truth about last year's war
against Yugoslavia, they draw conclusions that serve
their paymasters.

Newsweek magazine got hold of an internal U.S. Air
Force report showing that only 58 of NATO's so-called
high-precision strikes hit their military targets.
This compares with the 744 NATO claimed at the end of
the bombing campaign.

A special investigation team from the United States
and other NATO air forces searched Kosovo on foot and
by helicopter.

U.S. top officers had boasted that NATO forces had
disabled "around 120 tanks," "about 220 armored
personnel carriers" and "up to 450 artillery and
mortar pieces" in 78 days of bombing.

The investigators reported instead that NATO had hit
just 14 tanks, 18 APCs and 20 artillery and mortar
pieces, less than one-10th of NATO claims.

These figures are quite close to the losses Yugoslav
forces reported at the end of the war. NATO
spokespeople had dismissed the Yugoslav report as
"disinformation" at the time. It was NATO that was
lying.

The investigators found out that U.S. and NATO
high-altitude air power was effective chiefly against
civilian targets. It was the bombing of cities and
power stations that most damaged Serbia.

Newsweek reported this in its May 15 issue. The
article deduced from this that it was NATO's strikes
against civilian targets that forced the Yugoslav
government to allow the occupation of Kosovo.

And it concluded from these facts that the Pentagon
will now be able to use this precedent--bombing the
civilian infrastructure without taking casualties--to
impose Washington's will on most of the world.

In no way did Newsweek show the human suffering of the
Yugoslav people. Nor did the article mention that
purposely bombing civilian targets is a war crime
under conventions the U.S. government has signed.

What choosing civilian
targets means

It would have been easy enough to do a story on that
suffering. Anyone in Belgrade this spring could see
the buildings hit by U.S. missiles. They could see the
bombed bridges across the Danube in Novi Sad further
to the north.

Or they could arrange a visit to Dragisa Misovic, one
of the major hospitals serving Belgrade. There,
hospital spokesperson Spomenka Stojicic would show
them the damage caused by two bombings in May 1999.

The first missiles struck on May 19. It hit the
Neurology Center directly. This building was
completely destroyed together with the first-aid
station and outpatient clinic within the Special
Children's Pulmonary and Tuberculosis Hospital.

In the Maternity Center nearby, one woman had just
undergone a Caesarian section. She and her newborn
escaped serious physical injury despite the trauma of
the explosion.

Seven buildings suffered irreparable damage. Four
others would require serious reconstruction work.

In all, two-thirds of the hospital was put out of
service by the bombing. Much of it is still out, said
Stojicic. Some services have been moved to existing
buildings and must share facilities. And a few have
been rebuilt with foreign contributions.

"The ongoing embargo against Yugoslavia," said
Stojicic, "hurts us because we lack the ability to
earn the money to pay for the repairs. In addition, it
makes everything much more expensive. We are limited
to doing emergency care in many areas."

The Swiss Red Cross had helped begin rebuilding the
Maternity Center. The German anti-NATO peace movement
had just made a contribution. But it still isn't near
the $7 million needed for repairing or rebuilding the
buildings.

This was not the most gruesome civilian target. It
didn't embody the horror of a strike at a bus or a
train with their many civilian casualties. Yet this
example of damage to the civilian infrastructure is
typical of many across Yugoslavia that add to the
ordeal of the population.

Stojicic asked one of the visitors for his button
showing a bird on a blue background, a logo for the
German movement to bring NATO to trial for war crimes
against Yugoslavia. And she asked another for a Free
Mumia Abu-Jamal button for her son.

There are both German and U.S. movements to try NATO
leaders for such crimes.

Put U.S./NATO leaders on trial

New revelations that NATO's high-altitude bombing of
Yugoslavia was far less successful than claimed at the
time are "further proof of U.S. war crimes against
Yugoslavia," said Sara Flounders, national
co-coordinator of the International Action Center.

"This will provide additional evidence for the
International War Crimes Tribunal we will hold in New
York June 10 to try U.S. and NATO political and
military leaders for war crimes, crimes against
humanity and crimes against peace," Flounders said.

"The claim of high accuracy with little harm to
civilians," said Flounders, "was just another in the
long line of lies NATO spokespeople used to justify
massive attacks on civilian targets in Yugoslavia."

Flounders noted that the report, submitted last
summer, had never been made public. A second study,
which reported hits closer to NATO and the Pentagon's
boasts, was used.

"The Newsweek article avoided the implication that the
U.S. and NATO commanders violated the rules of war by
striking civilian targets," said Flounders. "Instead,
it pointed to the efficacy of striking the civilian
infrastructure of a country, which in the case of
Yugoslavia includes hundreds of schools, dozens of
hospitals and almost every major industry. In effect
it advocated new war crimes."

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark drew up the
original charge sheet against NATO leaders, with 19
charges. Charge number 9, said Flounders, was:
"Attacking Objects Indispensable to the Survival of
the Population of Yugoslavia."

This includes "depriving the population of Yugoslavia
of food, water, electric power, food production,
medicines, medical care and other essentials to their
survival, [by engaging] in the systematic destruction
and damage by missiles and aerial bombardment of food
production and storage facilities, drinking water and
irrigation works for agriculture, fertilizer,
insecticide, pharmaceutical, hospitals and health-care
facilities, among other objects essential to human
survival."

"The NATO commanders, fearing the complete failure of
their campaign against the Yugoslav military,
concentrated on hitting civilian targets," said
Flounders. "This is clearly a war crime, and we will
prove this before the world on June 10."

    I am a former secretary to a California-based Citizen’s Committee
set up to monitor the International Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ITY) since
its establishment. I resigned in 1997 but you will find me in an article
I had sent to the Tribunal and the Secretary General of the United
Nations as a reprint from the Paris-based trilingual journal Dialogue
(no20,1996). It is entitled “Contextualizing Hate—The Hague Tribunal,
the Clinton Administration and the Serbs.” A copy is enclosed.
The ITY was set-up, under open indictments,  ostensibly to punish all
those involved in the armed intra-ethnic conflicts who killed innocent
civilians since 1991. It became obvious by the third year of its
operation that the Tribunal’s Prosecutor pursued only the Serbs as
alleged criminals in a tripartite conflict. In one prominent case, two
high-ranking officers of the Bosnian Serb Army were kidnapped in
Sarajevo after Dayton and delivered to the Hague without being accused
of anything. This is the case which led to a change from open to secret
indictments to pre-empt additional accusations against a Tribunal with
an anti-Serb bias impossible to mask.
     Although two Chief Prosecutors have followed the one from South
Africa and although some alleged criminals of Croat and Bosnian Muslim
background were indicted, there is hardly any doubt that the reality
emerging in the first three years of ITY’s  work is the same. It pursued
mainly Serbs. This is also confirmed by the fact that the alleged Croat
and Bosnian Muslim criminals have been accused of doing harm to one
another’s civilian populations but not to  Serb civilians. It is only in
the most recent times that the ITY has looked at all at what was done to
the Serb civilians in Western Slavonia (August 1991- March 1992) and
Krajina (mainly August 1995). This was done only under pressure from a
variety of complaints.
    Against this background, it is not surprising that you have rejected
international (not only Serb) claims that NATO committed war crimes
without mentioning the other two areas in ITY indictments, those of
crimes against humanity and peace. You simply did not have the will and
courage to bite the hands that feed you as the major NATO players in the
78 days of bombing are also the major supporters and financial backers
of your Tribunal. Nor is it surprising that you have claimed to have
been “stupefied” to “even hear” Russia’s claims that the ITY is
“politicized” and “biased” against the Serbs. At this point it seems
salutary to show you just how the Tribunal is really polluted with
political considerations.
     Tuzla is a major NATO base in Bosnia. One of its Discotheques is
run by Nasir Oric. He was the Bosnian Muslim Commander at Srebrenica. He
happens to be a self-admitted war criminal of the most bestial kind. For
nearly a year, from the UN-protected Srebrenica, Oric and his “elite
corps” raided its Serb countryside. They destroyed 48 Serb villages,
looting, torching and killing about 1,800, including women and children.
    The good old Ottoman art of impaling was "enhanced" by roasting the
victims of the mujehadin alive on the spit. May we send you the
photographs of [partly carbonized] victims? This is what led to the Serb
capture of Srebrenica, the evacuation of its women and children, and the
flight of the Muslim soldiers under Izetbegovic's orders, to northern
Bosnia.
        Oric bragged to at least two foreign reporters and showed one of
them a video tape of the mayhem. You do not even have a “secret”
indictment against him under the bogus claim that he had been” killed.”
He will not be grabbed by the NATO troops and sent to the Hague out of
fear that this would alienate and radicalize the Bosnian Muslims against
NATO ground personnel.
    Exactly the same type of fear of alienating NATO's allies concerns
the case of Agim Ceku, General of the Kosovo Liberation Army. He is now
a major player in what is happening in Kosovo but you have excluded
Kosovo’s Albanians from the category of war criminals since the war at
Kosovo is defined as an internal civil war while Bosnia was
internationalized in order to get at the Serbs. Actually, you are
seeking evidence of mass murders of Albanian civilians at Kosovo from
which to shore-up an indictment against Milosevic (curiously made public
after Judge Arbour’s visit to Madeleine Albright, ITY’s “Mother” in
Washington), stemming from the Bosnian conflict. Yet, Agim Ceku was a
general of the Croat Army responsible for the ethnic cleansing of
Krajina in August 1995, the looting and torching all of the Serb
properties as well as killing several hundred, probably more, of older
Serbs who either could not or would not run. Agim Ceku is now saluted by
NATO troops and remains the behind-the-scenes coordinator of the ex-KLA.
To grab him and ship him to the ITY at the Hague could alienate the
still-extant KLA from NATO and impel some of its more extreme elements
to cause harm to the NATO and U.N personnel in situ. Clearly, Madame
Prosecutor, your Tribunal is “politicized” as is documented beyond
refutation by the two cases. Both  Oric and Ceku should have been
indicted, tried and sentenced long ago if your Tribunal really belonged
to a civilized judicial system, with the mechanics of a real court of
law. It is an instrument of an emerging  neo-Nazism. What makes it Right
is the Might of NATO and more specifically the U.S. Super-Power. Its
would be lofty ends justify the dirtiest of means and humiliations of
Serbs in particular.
   The ITY is a tragi-comic political theater, draped in judicial robes,
engaged in over-blown acting and pompous self-esteem, providing endless
perqs and high-paying remunerations, a “sweetheart deal” for those
“pre-selected” to sit on it and most unlikely to oppose any secret
indictments or pre-conceived verdicts  against the Serbs. Let me now
pass on the components of your rejection.
You have not denied in any known instance that the accusations against
NATO indeed fall  within  the Tribunal’s mandate from the Security
Council. In fact, one of the key assignments in your Security Council
mandate demands it. However,  you tabled, in the MAmerican sense,  for
the time being  these accusations because you were” too busy searching
for mass graves at Kosovo.” Well, your legal staff acted pretty fast as
the accusations were multiplying in several European countries and in
the United States. You are, I am sure, at least aware that Citizens
Tribunals have been working for some time to indict NATO leaders and
principal actors as having committed war crimes, crimes against humanity
and against peace. In rejecting the war-crimes charge you are quoted to
have said that while “accidents” have taken place,   you are “ satisfied
that there was no deliberate targeting of civilians.” I am not sure what
evidence you had examined in person but the numbers of churches,
schools, non-military factories, water purifying facilities, heating oil
depositories  and even medical facilities fully or partially destroyed,
add up to staggering numbers. ALL OF THEM ARE CIVILIAN TARGETS EVEN IF A
SINGLE CIVILIAN WAS NOT DIRECTLY KILLED IN ANY. Targeting all of them
could not have been an  “accident.”
    If you need another proof of NATO war crimes here it is and you can
look it up. In her 10th May last speech at the University of
California’s Berkeley Campus, Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright
admitted: “to have raised the bar” high enough so that “Milosevic could
NOT jump over it” because “YUGOSLAVIA NEEDED A LITTLE BOMBING.” This is
a prima facie confession of the “Mother” of your Tribunal. It refers to
the addition of Appendix B at Rambouillet after the Serbs were ready to
sign an agreement to restore Autonomy to Kosovo. Appendix B demanded the
occupation of Yugoslavia, including Belgrade, by NATO troops. The intent
is deliberate bombing of a country and not even you can exclude its
civilian population simply because you do not have the courage to
practice law instead of politics.
    There is also a memo, which your legal toadies could not somehow
excavate from the NATO files. It reveals the change from going
exclusively after military targets into the civilian ones. It is a prima
facie document showing that CIVILIAN TARGETS WERE DELIBERATELY INCLUDED
after the initial bombings failed to produce Milosevich’s signature to
the main text and Appendix B of the proposed Rambouillet Accord. I am
sure that you must be aware how ridiculous is the claim of NATO
Secretary General Lord Robertson that the “alliance acted entirely in
accordance with international law.” It is illegal, under extant
International Law, by international convention, to secure Presidential
signatures with a pointed gun and the threat to use it. It is further
illegal under International Law to mount 78 days of bombing a sovereign
state without a mandate from the Security Council. The U.N. Charter
demands it but it was shredded instead. As there was not even a formal
declaration of war, the Constitutions of at least two member-states,
France and the United States, were violated because they allot that
power to declare war only to their respective Legislatures. Lord
Robertson is simply extending ad infinitum the lies and propaganda used
first to mount the NATO attack and later to whitewash this collective
crime and its aftermath.
    You cannot negate the physical evidence of destruction from the air
in Yugoslavia (which still includes in theory Kosovo itself), enshrined
with pictures, names, dates and targets actually hit. The Yugoslav
government has published four factual volumes that need no further
discussion about authenticity.  No one can deny that civilian targets
have been extensively hit. Figures for civilian deaths and for those
injured more or less seriously do vary. Some 3000 dead have been claimed
at the maximum with three times that number for the maimed. On the
lowest end about 300 dead and some 2,000 injured are on hand.  We even
have a visually recorded tragedy in the complaints of General Clark that
NATO’s  civilian authorities would not allow him to “further extend” the
number of civilian targets, another item of evidence “missed.” Clearly,
Madame Prosecutor, your entire case for rejection rests only on the
presumed lack of INTENT to punish the Serb civilians. The intent is
clearly admitted by the U.S. Secretary of State more than a year after
the bombs stopped falling on civilian targets in Yugoslavia. The INTENT
WAS  TO ACTUALLY  PUNISH YUGOSLAVIA. How much more proof do you need to
shed your judicial glaucoma and see the real shapes of dead Serbs and
Albanians from NATO bombs, parachuted mines, cluster bombs (many
unexploded and killing daily), shells with depleted uranium which will
be hitting local genes for decades to come since it is a mutant without
known limits?
    When you were appointed to replace Louise Arbour, a reputation
preceded you from your native Switzerland. Its criminal elements and its
politicians could not “crack” your judicial integrity. In fact, they
deflected  you because of it,  like “The Godfather”  of Mario Puzo, with
an offer you could not refuse.
    It is a pity that what ordinary criminals and local politicos could
not do has been reversed by the heady brew of rendering some sort of
“international justice”. It is curious that you "missed” a major
collective crime committed under  the open sky --  rockets and cluster
bombs against Sunday markets, against bridges, passenger trains and
busses by day, maternity hospitals by night.

 Sincerely,
Raymond K. Kent

http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/060800amnesty-nato.html

     June 8, 2000
 

     By STEVEN ERLANGER

     PRAGUE, June 7 -- In an extensive report that infuriated NATO
     leaders, Amnesty International said today that NATO violated
     international law in its bombing war over Yugoslavia by hitting targets where civilians were sure to be
     killed.

     In particular, the human rights group said that NATO's bombing of the Belgrade headquarters of
     Radio Television Serbia, on April 23, 1999, ''was a deliberate attack on a civilian object and as such
     constitutes a war crime." Sixteen people died in the predawn attack, nearly all of them technicians,
     security workers and makeup artists.

     NATO has defended the bombing as an attack on the "propaganda machine" of President Slobodan
     Milosevic of Yugoslavia.

     International law forbids direct attacks on civilians and civilian targets and requires all feasible
     precautions to prevent civilian deaths. In some cases, Amnesty said, NATO failed to take sufficient
     precautions to minimize civilian casualties. The number of civilian deaths from NATO air strikes
     "could have been significantly reduced if NATO forces had fully adhered to the laws of war," the
     report said.

     Amnesty also condemned a NATO attack on a bridge at Varvarin on May 30, 1999, in which at
     least nine people died. "NATO forces failed to suspend their attack after it was evident that they had
     struck civilians," the report said, and it criticized NATO for ordering its pilots to fly so high that they
     could not take proper precautions against bombing civilians. In particular, the report criticized the
     bombing of convoys of Albanian refugees near Djakovica on April 14 and Korisa on May 13.

     The report was released less than a week after Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor for the war
     crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, told the United Nations Security Council that
     her investigation had found no basis for charging NATO with war crimes. Mrs. Del Ponte said that
     although "some mistakes were made by NATO," she was "very satisfied that there was no deliberate
     targeting of civilians or unlawful military targets."

     Still, some tribunal officials said privately that they hoped their report would cause NATO countries
     to review their rules of engagement in order to lessen the chances of civilian casualties.

     NATO's secretary general, Lord Robertson, called Amnesty's accusations baseless. He said that
     NATO "made every effort to minimize civilian casualties." NATO's mistakes, he said, were few and
     should be weighed "against the atrocities that NATO's action stopped."

     The report by Amnesty does not try to weigh the violations committed by Serbian officials and
     forces; rather it tries to hold the members of NATO up to the highest standards of international law
     and behavior.

     The Amnesty report is similar in its findings to a detailed report by Human Rights Watch in February.
     Of the 500 or so Yugoslav civilians killed in Serbia and Kosovo by NATO bombs, half died because
     of NATO violations of laws and practices on protecting civilians, said Kenneth Roth, executive
     director of Human Rights Watch, in a telephone interview from New York.

     Amnesty was scathing about the bombing of the television station, which went off the air only briefly.
     "NATO deliberately attacked a civilian object, killing 16 civilians, for the purpose of disrupting Serb
     television broadcasts in the middle of the night for approximately three hours."

The allegations made in the Amnesty International report today that NATO
violated the laws of war in its conduct of the Kosovo air campaign last
year are baseless and ill-founded.

Madame Carla del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor of the UN's International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, told the UN Security Council
last week, "I am very satisfied there was no deliberate targeting of
civilians or of unlawful military targets by NATO during the bombing
campaign."  She stated, "I am now able to announce my conclusion,
following
a full consideration of my team's assessment of all complaints and
allegations, that there is no basis for opening an investigation into any
of those allegations or into other incidents related to the NATO
bombing."

NATO scrupulously adhered to international law, including the law of war,
throughout the conflict and made every effort to minimise civilian
casualties.  Unfortunately, as we have always acknowledged, among over
ten
thousand bombing missions, in a few cases mistakes were made, or weapons
malfunctioned, leading to civilian deaths or injuries. We deeply regret
such incidents.  But such incidents must be weighed against the
atrocities
that NATO's action stopped.
NATO's air campaign put an end to the most brutal ethnic violence seen in
Europe since World War II.  Extensive documentation by the OSCE, Human
Rights Watch and the media show that Serbian military and police forces
engaged in a deliberate, massive, and prolonged campaign of violence against Kosovar Albanian civilians in gross violation of international
law and civilised norms of behaviour.  The clear priority now is to bring to justice the war criminals that perpetrated this violence against the
people.

Nato's intervention in Kosovo, the House of Commons foreign affairs
select committee has ruled, was illegal under international law, but
justified on moral grounds. Even in the age of the new imperialism, this
is a pretty breathtaking conclusion. We are being asked to accept that
it is morally fine to break international law, as long as we do so with
good intentions. This is because we are the good guys - so although we
do things that may look wrong, they are not wrong really. If Slobodan
Milosevic breaks international humanitarian law, which we could
certainly argue that he did, we are entitled to break international law
to teach him what's what.
It is the sort of argument that, were it to be put by anyone not quite
as nice or pure in heart as we are, might make me a touch uneasy. But it
gets worse.
Nato's actions were illegal under Nato's own treaty, which does not
permit it to undertake aggressive military action without a UN mandate.
The foreign affairs committee's solution to this is to propose that Nato
rewrite its charter. It's a brilliant solution, as long as the only part
that bothers you is Nato's breach of its own rules. If, like me - and a
stream of expert witnesses who testified to the committee - you are also
bothered by the fact that international law does not permit the alliance
to bomb Kosovo on its own recognisance, however worthy the intention,
then changing Nato's rules will not reassure you.
The inconvenience, of course, is that a UN mandate requires us to sign
up the awkward squad - the Russians and the Chinese - or at least, to
persuade them not to veto any action we might wish to take. Certainly
this is difficult, but it hardly supports Nato's claim to be on the side
of democracy, justice and the rule of law if it ditches the rules when
they do not suit.
Also, according to Amnesty International, the way the military campaign
was conducted involved Nato forces in the commission of a series of war
crimes. As the Amnesty report points out, aspects of the rules of
engagement - specifically the requirement that Nato aircraft fly above
15,000ft - actually made full adherence to international humanitarian
law virtually impossible. Direct attacks on civilians, attacks that do
not attempt to distinguish between military and civilian targets and
those with a disproportionate im pact on civilians are prohibited. Given
the disparity between civilian and military casualties in the bombing
campaign, it would be interesting to hear Nato's argument that these
rules had not been broken.
A close reading of the select committee's report reveals a twinge or two
of unease on this front, though, given the general tone, it is no
surprise that it stops short of endorsing Amnesty's comments.
You could take the robust view that a war crime committed by men with
pure hearts and high moral purpose (ie our side) is not a war crime.
George Robertson, indeed, has come perilously close to such a position.
Or you can acknowledge that the fact that Milosevic is a very bad man
does not in any way diminish Nato's responsibility to respect the laws
of war. It is from the observance of such laws that Nato derives its
claim to moral superiority over men like Milosevic and Saddam Hussein
and its right to sit in judgment on them. Once you throw that thought
away, rather an important baby disappears down the plughole.
If we no longer feel that a UN mandate is necessary in order to
intervene militarily in another country, could we perhaps have a new set
of rules that will govern future interventions? I ask because it would
be nice to know how we are to judge which of the 30 or 40 armed
conflicts that rage around the world at any moment in which we might get
involved on this unilateral basis. Secondly, if we accept that we are
allowed to commit acts of doubtful legality in pursuit of our noble
ideals, do we continue to support the international community's right to
prosecute other individuals for war crimes and crimes against humanity?
And thirdly, if we are content to violate one of the most basic
principles of the UN charter, does this mean that we regard the
organisation as fatally flawed? If so, what does that mean for our
continued membership? Would we support other members of the security
council who decided to dispense with the irksome restraints represented
by international law? If the Chinese decided to invade Taiwan, for
instance, would we slap them on the back and say "welcome to the club"?
Or would we tut-tut and threaten a boycott of soft toys until they came
round to our point of view?
Surely the point of the post-Nuremberg effort to build international law
- painfully slow and flawed though it has been - was to provide a
universally agreed measure by which the actions and misdeeds of states
could be judged and through which they could be sanctioned. Of course it
is irksome to have to persuade one's fellow states, many of whom act out
of ignoble motives. But the alternative is to sacrifice the principle of
international law while claiming (as scoundrels might) to be acting in
defence of humanitarian principle.
[email protected]

Shortly after NATO missiles and bombs began killing civilians in Kosovo and
Serbia, Michael Mandel, a law professor at York University in Canada, filed
a complaint with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia alleging that NATO and key leaders in the US and Great Britain
had committed war crimes. Over the next year, Mandel, and his colleagues,
have supplemented the original complaint with numerous other filings,
documenting human rights violations by the humanitarian warriors

Through the course of the war, NATO's 25,000 missile strikes and bombing
raids would kill between 500 and 1,800 civilians and permanently injure
thousands of others. Thousands of more deaths were indirectly caused by
predicable retaliatory and defensive actions taken by both the Serbs and the
KLA. The raids on Yugoslavia also provoked a refuge crisis, with more than a
million people fleeing Kosovo to escape the bombing. The bombings nearly
destroyed the economy of Yugoslavia, causing between $60 and $100 billion in
damage to a country that was already one of the poorest in Europe. After the
bombing ceased, Kosovo, under the control of NATO troops, was allowed to be
hit by waves of ethnic violence, assassination and purges, much of it
conducted by the KLA.

But so far the United Nations' tribunal has yet to even open an
investigation into the complaints, despite a new report by Human Rights
Watch-an early and avid proponent of intervention-condemning the civilian
casualities.
On March 15, Mandel sent another complaint to Justice Carla del Ponte, the
new chief prosecutor for the tribunal, who replaced Justice Louise Arbour in
October. Mandel's sharply worded letter protests the tribunal's refusal to
investigate NATO's actions, saying that del Ponte has turned "the
investigation into more of a farce than a judicial proceeding." Mandel's
letter makes a solid case that far from being an independent investigator,
the tribunal has conducted itself "as if it were an organ of NATO and not
the United Nations."

Mandel had hoped that Del Ponte, who comes from Switzerland which is
nominally outside the NATO alliance, would take a more aggressive stance
than Arbour, the Canadian. And there seemed to be reason for optimism. At a
December press conference Del Ponte declared that she would be quite willing
to hold NATO accountable if evidence of crimes was unearthed. "If I am not
willing to do that, then I am not in the right place," Del Ponte said. "I
must give up my mission." This did not sit well with NATO and the US State
Department, which strongly protested. On December 30, Del Ponte quickly
backpedaled, issuing a retraction saying that "NATO is not under
investigation" and there was "no formal inquiry" going on.

Since then Del Ponte has been moving closer and closer to NATO. On January
19, Del Ponte had a private meeting with NATO secretary general George
Robertson, the subject of numerous war crimes complaints. After the meeting,
Del Ponte made a point of saying that she had not broached the topic of NATO
war crimes with Robertson or any other NATO leader. Two weeks later Del
Ponte was in London where she had a session with British foreign minister
Robin Cook, also identified as a responsible party in several war crimes
complaints filed with the tribunal. Following that meeting Del Ponte was
asked if any progress had been made in the investigation of NATO. "Our work
is not yet done, but what we can say is that up until now we have no
indications that we should open an inquiry," Del Ponte said. But there is no
evidence that the UN tribunal has even started looking into NATO's actions.
In fact, on March 9, a spokesman for Del Ponte praised NATO troops, saying
that they "respect the rule of law" and that any "prosecution is very
unlikely."

Mandel calls Del Ponte's refusal to open an inquiry a "disgrace" and says
that the tribanal has evidence that "NATO planners not only knowingly killed
civilians, but deliberately set out to do so." He points specifically to the
bombing of the Grdelica and Varvarin Bridges (on April 12 and May 20) and
the strikes on the Nis marketplace on May 7. Mandel notes that all the
strikes on Yugoslavia were carried out without any risk to NATO pilots or
leaders, a scenario that violates the Geneva code. "This was a war fought
against civilians of all ethnicities with bombing from altitudes so high
that the civilians bore all the risks of the inevitable collateral damage,"
Mandel says.

Mandel makes a powerful case that the UN tribunal had been working for NATO
from the beginning. "This war must be understood as an attempt by the United
States, through NATO, to overthrow the authority of the United Nations and
to replace it with NATO's military might, to be used wherever strategically
advantageous and whatever the human consequences," Mandel says.

Mandel is convinced that the US backed the creation of the UN tribunal only
in order to advance its on strategic interests in the Balkans. He has
marshaled a compelling set of facts to back up this assertion, starting in
January 1999, when Judge Arbour made a high-profile visit to the Kosovo
border, where she endorsed the US/KLA accounts of Serb atrocities at Racak.
This made-for-tv event became a rallying point for the war, despite later
accounts that the events in Racak had been great exaggerated.

Shortly after the NATO bombing raids had started, Arbour announced the
indictment of "Arkan", which had been kept secret since 1997, helping to
amplify the drumbeat of US-backed propaganda about Serbian atrocities. After
the press began to focus on civilian deaths, Arbour again came to NATO's
rescue, holding a joint appearance with Robin Cook, where she accepted a
NATO-prepared dossier on Serbia "war crimes." Soon thereafter, Arbour met
with Madeleine Albright, who used the opportunity to inform the world that
the US was the principal financial backer of the UN tribunal.

Two weeks later, Arbour announce the indictment of Milosevic for the events
at Racak based on undisclosed evidence gather in the middle of a war zone.
After the bombing came to an end, Instead, Arbour handed over the
investigation of Serbian war crimes to NATO troops in Kosovo, even though
they had motives to falsify evidence in order to justify their own actions.
The speed with which the Tribunal indicted Slobo and his associates stands
in stark contrast to lethargic pace of the investigation into NATO's crimes.

"These actions cannot be regarded as the acts of an impartial prosecutor,"
says Mandel. "Not when NATO was in the midst of a controversial war in
flagrant violation of international law." CP

(submitted to the international tribunal against NATO war crimes in New York
on the fortcoming weekend)

I  Preamble

1) NATO, the United States of America, the Federal Republic of Germany, the
United Kingdom, Turkey, Spain, the Netherlands, Croatia, Hungary, Italy,
France and others - after failing to force the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia at the so-called "peace negotiations" in Paris and Rambouillet to
accept an extortionate ultimatum which in fact aimed at the occupation of
the entire territory of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and had been
declared a condition sine qua non - without a declaration of war and without
a resolution by the United Nations Security Council launched warlike rocket
and bombing attacks against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, deliberately
murdering Serbs, Kosovo-Albanians, Roma, Muslims, Orthodox-Christians,
Catholics and foreign nationals.

By doing this they destroyed and damaged economic, social, cultural,
medical, diplomatic and religious resources.

In the course of their criminal war of aggression, NATO and the
above-mentioned states cut off the population of Yugoslavia from food,
water, electric energy, food production, medicines and medical services. By
means of rocket and aerial bombing attacks they systematically destroyed and
damaged waterworks and agricultural irrigation installations, factories,
fertilisers and vegetation, pharmaceutical production works, hospitals and
health service installations as well as other objects needed for human
survival. The aggressors attack chemical factories, oil refineries, petrol
and natural gas stores, fertiliser plants, installations and localities with
the aim of releasing, on a wide scale, radioactive and other dangerous
substances into the atmosphere, the soil, the ground-water and the
foodchain, poison the environment and harm the population. They employed
banned arms, attacked the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with rockets, bombs
and missiles which contained Depleted Uranium (DU) and released radioactive
substances into the atmosphere the soil, the ground-water, the foodchain as
well as into solid objects, thus exposing the Yugoslav population to health
hazards for generations to come.

2) With these actions NATO and the above-mentioned states violated
International Law, especially art. 2 chapter 7 of the UN-Charter; the
Declaration on Non-intervention; the Resolution on the Definition of
Aggression, 1997 UNGA 3314; articles 52 and 53 of the Convention on the Law
of Treaties of 23 May, 1969; the Treaty on the Banning of War, the
Briand-Kelog-Pact of Paris, 1928, articles 1 and 2; the Hague Conventions,
especially the Fourth Hague Convention of 18 October, 1907; the Geneva
Convention on the Protection of Civilians in Times of War, 1949; the
Statutes of the Nuremberg Tribunal, principles VI a, b and c; the Geneva
Additional Protocol 1977, articles 48 and 51; the Geneva Protocol on the Use
of Asphyxiating, Poisonous and Similar Gases as well as of Bacteriological
Substances in Wars, of 1925; the European Convention on the Peaceful
Settlement of conflicts, of 29 April, 1957 and also violated national penal
codes concerning murder, duresse, dangerous threat, wilful destruction,
arson, damage to the environment, formation of gangs for the purpose of
carrying out criminal plots and genocide.
 

II  THE VIENNA TRIBUNAL BRINGS A POLITICAL INDICTMENT AGAINST:

The Federal Government of the Republic of Austria
Chancellor Mag. Victor Klima
Vice Chancellor and Minister of Foreign Affairs Dr. Wolfgang Sch-ússel
Minister of Defence Dr. Werner Fasslabend
Former EU-Special Representative Dr. Wolfgang Petritsch, present High
Representative for Bosnia
Former Minister of Foreign Affairs Dr. Alois Mock
 

a) in particular against former minister of foreign affairs Dr. Alois Mock
on the basis of the well-founded suspicion of openly taking position
(politically, economically and logistically) and intervening in a civil
war - thereby violating neutrality - by abetting the destruction of the
sovereign Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, through furthering - in
contravention of international law - and politically supporting the
secession by force of member republics of the SFR of Yugoslavia by way of
the official recognition - in violation of international law and the status
of neutrality - of member republics of the SFR of Yugoslavia which had
seceded with the use of force.

(Violation of the neutrality law; of the UN-Charter; of the principle
regarding the obligation of non-intervention in matters which, according to
the Charter, pertain to the national competence of a state; Declaration of
the United Nations)

b) in particular against the former EU-Special Representative Dr. Wolfgang
Petritsch on the basis of his collaboration in the "peace accords"
elaborated in the course of the so-called "peace negotiations" in Paris and
Rambouillet, including Annex B which contains an extortionate occupation
diktat postulating, as conditio sine qua non, the occupation of the entire
national territory of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with the threat, in
case of non-compliance, of immediate war actions through bombing attacks
against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
(Jeopardizing of neutrality according to Austrian penal code, paragraph 320;
violation of chapter 1 art. 2 and chapter 7 of the UN-Charter; the
Declaration on Non-intervention of 24 October, 1970; the Briand-Kelog-Pact
of 27 August, 1928; of art. 52 and 53 of the Convention on the Law of
Treaties; violation of paragraphs 105, 106 of the Austrian penal code
/severe duresse/)
c) against the Austrian Federal Government and the above-mentioned statesmen
on the grounds of the well-founded suspicion of having abetted the
aggressive actions of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (see above I/1)
which, having mandated itself, without decision or mandate by the Security
Council, by violating the obligation under international law to renounce on
the use of force in international relations and in relations among states,
waged a war of aggression against the territory of a sovereign state, and
thus, on the well-founded suspicion of having violated Austria's Everlasting
Neutrality, enshrined in international law, by not adhering to the
obligations of an everlastingly neutral state to always comport itself in
times of war and of peace in a manner that excludes favouring one side of a
conflict and also on the grounds of the well-founded suspicion of openly
taking sides - politically, economically and logistically - in a civil war.

c2) and in particular against Federal Chancellor Mag. Victor Klima and
foreign Minister Dr. Wolfgang Sch-ússel on the basis of their open support
for and abetting of the NATO war of aggression - violating international
law - at the EU-summit in Berlin and the 50th anniversary NATO-summit in
Washington.

(accessory to the violation of the UN-Charter; the Briand-Kelog-Pact; the
Declaration on Non-intervention; the Declaration on Non-interference; the
Resolution on the Definition of Aggression; art. 22 and 23 of the fourth
Hague Concention as well as of the other norms of international law set out
under I/2, and of the violation of the law on neutrality)

d) on the basis of the well-founded suspicion of abetting the violation of
the ban on waging "ecological war" carried out by NATO - see I/1 on the
perpetration of criminal actions (i.e. bombing of oil refineries, chemical
factories and others, damaging and destroying installations, thereby causing
negative effects on the environment, locally and regionally) as well as the
use of banned weapons (cluster bombs and munition made of depleted uranium,
DU)

(Violation of the UN-Charter and the other norms of international law listed
under I/2, in particular the 1925 Geneva Agreement on the Banning of
Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases; the Convention on the Banning of the
Use of Means Affecting the Environment, 1977; the Geneva Convention of 12
August, 1949 on the Protection of Civilians in Times of War)

e) on the basis of the well-founded suspicion that at the time of war the
Austrian Federal Government did not verify violations of the Austrian air
space by NATO-airforces with regard to their armaments not did it protest
against such violations, although it would have been obliged to do so
according to international law as well as according to Austrian neutrality
law - violations which, although not authorised in this case by Austria,
increased massively during that period, according to information provided by
Austrian air traffic control (which fact does not elucidate how many of
these overflights possibly took place in support of the NATO air war); based
also on the fact repeated transits through Austria by NATO vehicles to bases
in Hungary for a long time previously, which can be assumed to have been not
solely "humanitarian" transports.

(Violation of the 1965 Declaration on Non-intervention; of the Agreement on
the Peaceful Settlement of International conflicts - First Hague Convention
on the Outbreak of Hostilities; of the Third Hague Convention of 18 October,
1907; of the Austrian Neutrality Law; of the Austrian Federal Law of 18
October, 1977 on the import, export and transit of war material)

f) based on a well-founded suspicion of transmitting perceptions, regardless
of their content of truth, pertaining to the intelligence department,
regarding activities on the territory of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,
by Austrian authorities to NATO services, which fact must lead to the
assumption of violation of neutrality obligations by Austria.

(Violation of the Declaration of Non-interference; of the Briand-Kelog-Pact
of 1928; of the UN-Charter; of the Austrian law on neutrality)

g) based on the well-founded suspicion of restraining the effectuation of
non-military and non-violent possibilities of conflict resolution; such as
the prevention by neutral Austria of tasks ascribed to the OSCE, possibly by
means of a "withdrawal order" addressed to NATO; of handing over, for the
first time ever, of a mandate to a US-representative, in this case US
Ambassador William Walker (during whose period as US Ambassador in El
Salvador the dirty war in El Salvador, carried out with the complicity of
the USA, reached its climax); failure on the part of the Federal Government
to oppose the - improper - use of the OSCE in the strategic preparation of
the War against Yugoslavia and the logistic support of NATO as well as
failure to eliminate the suspension of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as
member of the organisation with a view to favour attempts at bringing about
negotiated settlements.

(Violation of the stipulations of the CSCE and OSCE; of the Austrian law on
neutrality; violation of the agreement on protection and compromise
procedures within the OSCE, Stockholm, 15 December, 1992)

h) on the basis of the well-founded suspicion of at least tacitly consenting
to inflammatory reporting, especially regarding the Serbian sector of the
population of the Yugoslav Republic; on the well-founded suspicion of
inciting population groups on the territory of the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia against each other, especially in media subjected to public law
and of omitting - on the part of the Federal Government of Austria - to
intervene in order to insist on publishing denials, thus raising doubts
regarding Austria's everlasting neutrality.

(Violation of the braodcasting law and the Austrian neutrality law)

III
On the basis of the suspicion outlined above, the representatives of the
preparatory committee of the Vienna Tribunal demand that the Vienna Tribunal
of 4 December, 1999 indict the Federal Government of Austria and the
statesmen listed above on the grounds of favouring and supporting the NATO
aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and of being accessory
to a conspicuous violation of international law; as well as on the
well-founded suspicion of approval (which has to be rejected out of
political, moral and humanist convictions) of a "New World Order" which was
a consequence of this war and which contains a continuously proclaimed right
of "humanitarian intervention" on the part of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation (NATO) that is to be carried out with the force of arms and the
backing - on a global scale - of the strongest military power.

The verdict will be placed at the disposal of the International Tribunal,
represented by Mr. Ramsey Clark, for the general indictment before the
International Court of Justice in The Hague.

On Saturday, June 10, 2000, the International Tribunal on
U.S./NATO War Crimes Against the People of Yugoslavia found U.S. and
NATO political and military leaders guilty of war crimes.
At this people's tribunal meeting in New York, held before over 500
people, a panel of 16 judges from 11 countries rendered this verdict
regarding the March 24-June 10, 1999 U.S./NATO assault on Yugoslavia.

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, the lead
prosecutor at the International Tribunal on U.S./NATO War Crimes Against
Yugoslavia, urged those present and those they represented
from the 21 countries participating to carry out a sentence of
organizing a campaign to abolish the NATO military pact.

Ben Dupuy, former ambassador at large during the Aristide
Administration in Haiti, the Rev. Kiyul Chung of Korea, and
auto worker Martha Grevatt, who heads the AFL-CIO’s official
constituency group Pride at Work, read the three parts of
the verdict (included below).

Participants taking the witness stand included
eyewitnesses, researchers who visited Yugoslavia, renowned political and
economics analysts, historians, physicists, biologists,
military experts, journalists and lay researchers. (A list of all the judges,
and the witnesses and their topics is included below.)

Many of these witnesses have in the past 15 months
presented to audiences worldwide a complete picture of the war NATO
waged against Yugoslavia. For the tribunal, however, all limited
themselves to a single area of expertise that made up a single part of
the evidence against the political and military leaders of the
United States and the other NATO countries.

Taken together, the judges decided, each single part
contributed to construct a proof that beyond a reasonable doubt proved the
guilt of the accused, just as the proper placing of single tiles can
build a mosaic.

The witnesses described how NATO forces used the media to
spread lies to demonize the Serbs and their leadership in order to
prepare public opinion to prepare for war. Then they showed the
real economic and geopolitical interests of the imperialist
powers--the U.S. and Western Europe—in seizing economic control of the area
from the Balkans to the oil-rich Caspian Sea.

Finally they demonstrated how Washington rigged the “Racak
massacre” and then used the so-called Rambouillet accord—in
reality an ultimatum demanding NATO's military control of all of
Yugoslavia--to provoke the war. Taken together this all proved a crime
against peace.

They also showed the use of illegal weapons, the purposeful
choice of civilian targets and the destruction of the environment and
the civilian infrastructure that add up to war crimes. And the expulsion
of hundreds of thousands of people from Kosovo and Metohija
that prove crimes against humanity.

The witnesses’ presentations were accompanied in many cases
by slides and videos displayed on a large screen on the stage
of the auditorium at Martin Luther King Jr. High School in
Manhattan. This screen was easily visible both to the judges, who sat on
the stage, and to the hundreds in the audience, many of whom stayed
throughout the nine-hour day.

In addition, pictures and videos were on display in the
hall outside the auditorium, and documentary evidence was offered in books
or in research papers.

The International Action Center, founded by Clark in 1992,
organized this final session of the tribunal. There was also
participation by those who had organized similar tribunal hearings in Germany,
Italy, Austria, Russia, Ukraine, Yugoslavia and Greece, where thousands
declared U.S. President Clinton a war criminal last November in Athens.

In addition to the witnesses, there were also important guest
presentations from representatives of the governments Yugoslavia
and Cuba. In addition, Ismael Guadalupe from Vieques,
Puerto Rico showed in a powerful speech how the practice runs against
his small island laid the basis for U.S./NATO aggression around the world.

According to the IAC organizers, total registration, including justices,
witnesses and staff was 511. Invited speakers, witnesses
and judges came from Haiti, Spain, Turkey, Korea, Puerto Rico, India,
Germany, United States, Canada, Italy, Yugoslavia, Russia, Britain,
Belgium, Iraq, Greece, Austria, France, and Portugal. The U.S.
government refused visas to four people from Ukraine, whose message
was read from the stage.

There were also representatives of the Roma people—often
referred to by the derisive term "gypsy." Shani Rifati, a Roma
witness who was born in Pristina, capital of Kosovo, told how NATO
occupation has led to the expulsion of 100,000 Romas. He pointed out
that the verdict condemned the persecution of Roma people, the first
time this has happened in any international tribunal.

Five different television crews taped the entire
proceedings, including Serbian television and a three-camera crew from Australia,
as well as alternate media sources in the U.S. like the Peoples Video Network.

The Members of the Independent Commission of Inquiry to
Investigate U.S./NATO War Crimes Against the People of
Yugoslavia, meeting in New York, having considered the
Initial Charges and Complaint of the Commission dated July 31,
1999, against President William J. Clinton, Gen. Wesley Clark,
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Prime Minister Tony Blair,
Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, President Jacques Chirac, Prime Minister
Massimo D’Alema, Prime Minister Jose Maria Azmar, the
Governments of the United States and the other NATO member
states, former Secretary General Javier Solana and other
NATO leaders, and Others with nineteen separate Crimes Against
Peace, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in violation of the
Charter of the United Nations, the 1949 Geneva Conventions, other
international agreements and customary international law;

Having the right and obligation as citizens of the world to
sit in judgement regarding violations of international
humanitarian law;

Having heard the testimony from Commissions of Inquiry and
Tribunals held within their own countries during the past
year and having received reports from numerous other Commission
hearings which recite the evidence there gathered;

Having been provided with documentary evidence, eyewitness
statements, photos, videotapes, special reports, expert
analyses and summaries of evidence available to the Commission;

Having access to all evidence, knowledge and expert opinion
in the Commission files or available to the Commission staff;

Having been provided by the Commission, or otherwise
obtained, various books, articles and other written materials on
various aspects of events and conditions in Yugoslavia and other countries
in the Balkans, and in the military and arms establishments;

Having considered newspaper coverage, magazine and
periodical reports, special publications, TV, radio and other media
coverage and public statements by the accused, other public officials
and public materials;

Having heard the presentations of the Commission of Inquiry
in public hearing on June 10, 2000, and the testimony, evidence and
summaries there presented;

And having met, considered and deliberated with each other
and with Commission staff and having considered all the evidence
that is relevant to the nineteen charges of criminal conduct
alleged in the Initial Complaint, make the following findings:

The Members of the International War Crimes Tribunal find
the accused Guilty on the basis of the evidence against them
and that each of the nineteen separate crimes alleged in the Initial
Complaint has been established to have been committed beyond a
reasonable doubt. These are:

1. Planning and Executing the Dismemberment, Segregation
and Impoverishment of Yugoslavia.
2. Inflicting, Inciting and Enhancing Violence Between and
Among Muslims and Slavs.
3. Disrupting Efforts to Maintain Unity, Peace and
Stability in Yugoslavia.
4. Destroying the Peace-Making Role of the United Nations.
5. Using NATO for Military Aggression Against, and
Occupation of, Non-Compliant Poor Countries.
6. Killing and Injuring a Defenseless Population throughout
Yugoslavia.
7. Planning, Announcing and Executing Attacks Intended to
Assassinate the Head of Government, Other Government
Leaders and Selected Civilians in Yugoslavia.
8. Destroying and Damaging Economic, Social, Cultural,
Medical, Diplomatic -- including the Embassy of the People’s
Republic of China and other embassies -- and Religious Resources,
Properties and Facilities throughout Yugoslavia.
9 Attacking Objects Indispensable to the Survival of the
Population of Yugoslavia.
10. Attacking Facilities Containing Dangerous Substances
and Forces.
11. Using Depleted Uranium, Cluster Bombs and Other
Prohibited Weapons.
12. Waging War on the Environment.
13. Imposing Sanctions through the United Nations that are
a Genocidal Crime Against Humanity.
14. Creating an Illegal Ad-Hoc Criminal Tribunal to Destroy
and Demonize the Serbian Leadership. The Illegitimacy of this
Tribunal is Further Demonstrated by its Failure to Bring Any Case
Regarding the Oppression of the Romani People, Who Have Suffered the
Highest Rate of Casualties of Any People in the Region.
15. Using Controlled International Media to Create and
Maintain Support for the U.S. Assault and to Demonize Yugoslavia,
Slavs, Serbs and Muslims as Genocidal Murderers.
16. Establishing the Long-Term Military Occupation of
Strategic Parts of Yugoslavia by NATO Forces.
17. Attempting to Destroy the Sovereignty, Right to Self-
Determination, Democracy and Culture of the Slavic, Muslim,
Roma and Other Peoples of Yugoslavia.
18. Seeking to Establish U.S. Domination and Control of
Yugoslavia and to Exploit Its People and Resources.
19. Using the Means of Military Force and Economic Coercion
in Order to Achieve U.S. Domination.

The Members hold NATO, the NATO states and their leaders
accountable for their criminal acts and condemn those found
guilty in the strongest possible terms. The Members condemn the NATO
bombardments, denounce the international crimes and
violations of international humanitarian law committed by the armed
attack and through other means such as economic sanctions. NATO has
acted lawlessly and has attempted to abolish international law.

The Members urge the immediate revocation of all embargoes,
sanctions and penalties against Yugoslavia because they
constitute a continuing crime against humanity. The Members call for the
immediate end to the NATO occupation of all Yugoslav
territory, the removal of all NATO and U.S. bases and forces from the
Balkans region, and the cessation of overt and covert operations,
including the “International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia”
in the Hague, aimed at overthrowing the government of Yugoslavia.

The Members further call for full reparations to be paid to
the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia for death, injury, economic and
environmental damage resulting from the NATO bombing, economic sanctions
and blockades. Further, other states in the region which have
suffered economic and environmental damage due to the NATO bombing
and economic sanctions on Yugoslavia must also be awarded
reparations.
The Members condemn the threat or use of military
technology against life, both civilian and military, as was used by
the NATO powers against the people of Yugoslavia.

The Members urge public action and mobilization to stop new
and continued sanctions and aggressions by the U.S. and other
NATO powers against Iraq, Cuba, North Korea, the countries of
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Puerto Rico, Asia,
Sudan, Colombia and other countries. We ask for the immediate
cessation of overt/covert activities by the U.S. and NATO in such countries.

The Members believe that the interests of peace, justice
and human progress require the abolition of NATO, which has proved
itself beyond any doubt to be an instrument of aggression for the
dominant, colonizing powers, particularly the United States. The
Pentagon, the central and key element of NATO and the greatest single
threat to the people of the world, must be disbanded.

The Members urge the Commission to provide for the
permanent preservation of the reports, evidence and materials
gathered to make them available to others, and to seek ways to provide the
widest possible distribution of the truth about the U.S./NATO war
on Yugoslavia.

We urge all people of the world to act on recommendations
developed by the Commission to hold power accountable and to secure
social justice on which lasting peace must be based.

Done in New York this 10th day of June, 2000

10 a.m. Doors open. Registration, if possible, show videos
in the cafeteria or auditorium.

11:00 a.m. - 11:30 p.m Catrin Schuetz and Anya
Mukarji-Connolly introduce judges and prosecutors: List of judges for the
International Tribunal on U.S./NATO War Crimes against Yugoslavia--New
York, June 10, 2000

1. Ben Dupuy--Haiti--Former Ambassador at Large for Haiti
under the first government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and
currently secretary general of the Popular National Party (PPN) of
Haiti.

2. Angeles Maestro Martin--Spain--Elected member of Spanish
parliament from Madrid and a leader in the movement to end
sanctions against Iraq .

3. Cimile Cakir --Turkey; journalist for newspaper serving
Kurdish community and member of Turkish Human Rights Association.
Imprisoned four years in Turkey for human rights activity..

4. Rev. Kiyul Chung--Korea--Rev. Ki Yul Chung, chairperson
of the Executive Committee of the Congress for Korean Unification
in North America.

5. John Nickels--Roma--U.S. representative of the International
Romani Union and also a judge in the Romani community in
the U.S.

6. Jorge Farinacci--Puerto Rico--leader of the Socialist
Front of Puerto Rico and a long-time leader of the independence
movement in Puerto Rico.

7. Ray Laforest--Haitian-American--labor unionist in the
American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and a
leader of the Haitian Coalition for Justice, an organization that
fights police brutality in New York.

8. Uma Cutwal -originally from India, Uma Cutwal is
president of Local 375 of the Civil Service Technical Union District
Council 37 of American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees.

9. Dr. Christa Anders--Germany--doctor of medicine and an
organizer of the German/European Tribunal.

10. Raniero La Valle--Italy--Former senator who has served
14 years in the Italian parliament and an anti-war leader in
Catholic circles and spokesperson for the Italian War Crimes Tribunal movement.

11. Dr. Wolfgang Richter--Germany--Chairperson of the
Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and Human Dignity and a
leader of the War Crimes Tribunal movement in Germany.

12. Martha Grevatt--United States--National Secretary of
the AFL- CIO for Lesbian/Gay/Bi/Trans Labor Organization called
Pride at Work, and active in the United Auto Workers.

13. Michael Ratner--United States--Civil Rights Attorney on
the National Board of the Center for Constitutional Rights and
he took the U.S. government to court for violating the War Powers Act
in its undeclared war against Yugoslavia.

14. Yole Stanesic--Yugoslavia, Russia--Montenegrin poet and
writer living in Russia, member of the tribunals in Yaroslav, Kiev
and Belgrade.

15. John Black--United States--retired President of the
Health and Hospital Workers Union in Pennsylvania, responsible for
bringing many thousands of hospital workers into the union. As a
teenager in Germany he was active in the anti-Nazi underground
resistance.

16. Dr. Berta Joubert--Puerto Rico--psychiatrist working in
public health and organizer of Puerto Rican and African American
anti-racist activities in Philadelphia.

Short opening remarks by Ramsey Clark, who will be lead
prosecutor.

Opening greetings from Mikhail Kuznetsov of the
International Peoples Tribunal organized from Russia and Ukraine and
other former Soviet countries.

Our first witness is Lenora Foerstel (Maryland) of Women
for Mutual Security. She has recently edited a book War, Lies and
Videotape; about the control of the media.

Jared Israel (Massachusetts). Jared Israel produced a film
called Judgement showing how the corporate media distorted a
picture to produce a Big Lie.

Jean Hatton (Great Britain), from the anti-war movement in
Britain. Spoke of how massacre stories were used to justify the war.
 

Christopher Black (Canada), one of a group of Canadian
attorney’s who filed a suit charging NATO with war crimes at what is
called the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia at
the Hague. Speaks on ICFTY, how the Hague Tribunal was a part of the
preparation for war.

Monica Moorehead (U.S.) of Millions for Mumia and
contributing editor to Workers World newspaper, an expert on the
prison-industrial complex in the United States.

Michel Collon, (Belgium) author of two books on the
Balkans, Liar’s Poker, and Monopoly; and contributor to the weekly
newspaper, Solidaire, on the geo-political aims of the war, the
Caspian pipelines.

Kadouri Al Kaysi an Iraqi American who has organized to
expose the impact of sanctions on Iraq.

Stratis Kounias, vice-president of the Greek Committee for
Peace and Professor at the University of Athens on NATO’s role in
Greece and the Greek anti-war movement.

John Catalinotto (New York), journalist and researcher who
has represented the International Action Center at tribunals in
Vienna and Belgrade, on Washington’s premeditated plan regarding NATO
and the attack on Yugoslavia.

Roland Keith (Canada), a monitor for the Observer Mission that was
supposed to maintain the peace in Kosovo in 1998, before
the war, on the real role of the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe’s Observer mission in Kosovo and Metohija.

Preston Wood (California), who participated in hearings in
Novi Sad and who organized opposition to the war in Los Angeles,
especially in the Lesbian/Gay/Bi/Trans community to present to the
tribunal the truth about the supposed massacre in Racak, Kosovo, used to
justify the attack on Yugoslavia.

Richard Becker (California), who has written and spoken
extensively on the role of the talks held in Rambouillet, France in
February and March 1999. Rambouillet ultimatum as provocation.

Gregor Kneussel (Austria), from the Austrian tribunal about
the role of Constitutionally neutral Austria regarding Yugoslavia
and in delivering this NATO ultimatum.

La Riva, Gloria Prosecutor (California), used the video she
produced, NATO Targets, to show how the U.S./NATO bombs hit civilian
targets, from hospitals to bridges to factories.

Sarah Sloan (New York), IAC Commission of Inquiry
researcher on NATO claim it tried to minimize damage to civilian
facilities in Yugoslavia. She used a March 15, 2000 Newsweek article that
exposed that NATO hit very few military targets.

Ellen Catalinotto (New York) is a midwife who has delivered
over 1,200 babies to mostly poor women in the New York City. She
also cares for HIV infected women and is involved in research on
ways to prevent the transmission of HIV from pregnant women to
their babies. She reported on NATO’s bombing of 33 hospitals
including damage to the maternity ward at Dragisa Micovic hospital in
Belgrade.

Prof. Ivan Yatsenko (Russia), former Soviet officer and
foreign representative, now teaches law in Moscow. He described
damage to Yugoslav industrial infrastructure and how it cost a
half-million jobs.

Admiral Elmar Schmaehling (Germany), former admiral and
leading spokesperson for the German tribunal movement. He spoke on
the aggressive posture of NATO since the collapse of the USSR
and its illegal attack on Yugoslavia.

Judi Cheng (New Jersey), IAC researcher. She showed how
unreasonable it was to believe that the bombing of Chinese
embassy in Belgrade was an accident.

Dr. Janet Eaton (Canada), biologist and environment expert
Dr. Janet Eaton to the stand, on destruction of the environment in
Yugoslavia, especially the damage from attacks on the petrochemical
plant at Pancevo and other industrial targets.

Dr. Carlo Pona (Italy) A physicist who attended a
conference in Belgrade about depleted uranium and has written about this
subject, Pona explained why DU is dangerous to humans and how it was
used in Yugoslavia.

Fulvio Grimaldi (Italy), video maker and journalist.
Grimaldi, who has just completed edited a film on sanctions in Iraq and
Yugoslavia, described the combined impact of impact of bombing and
sanctions on the population of Yugoslavia.

Deirdre Griswold (New York) has recently visited sites of
U.S. war crimes in south Korea, is editor in chief of Workers World
newspaper. She spoke about the pattern of criminal conduct
of the U.S. military and how the 1950 war crimes led to a
continuing 50- year occupation of Korea.

Shani Rifati (Roma), originally from the Romani community
in Kosovo, publishes an English-language newsletter about
Romani affairs named Voice of Roma. He spoke of the horrors the
Roma people faced in Kosovo under K-FOR and KLA occupation.

Milos Raickovich Serb-American composer and anti-war activist,
spoke on the destruction of churches and cultural sites in
occupied Kosovo and Metohija.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky (Canada), an expert historian
and economist, showed the role of the so-called Kosovo
Liberation Army and its ties to U.S. and German intelligence services, ties
to NATO and the United Nations Rep. Bernard Kouchner.

Scott Taylor (Canada), former soldier, who now publishes
the Ottawa-based magazine, Espirit de Corps, celebrated for its
unflinching scrutiny of the Canadian military. He also appears
regularly in the Canadian media as a military analyst. He witnessed the
expulsion of the Serb population from the Krajina in Croatia by an army
led by KLA General Ceku.

Professor Barry Lituchy (New York), who has recently
returned from a trip to Yugoslavia, described how the NATO occupying
forces known as K-FOR have participated in expelling parts of the
population from Kosovo.

Professor Greg Elich (United States), has recently visited
the Balkans. He spoke on the un-humanitarian nature of . NATO’s
occupation of Kosovo.

Gilles Troude (France), on the editorial board of Balkans-Info, a pro-
Yugoslavia, anti-NATO monthly published in Paris, France
since 1996. He described France’s role in the war and in
suppressing dissent at home.

Professor Jorge Cadima (Portugal), a regular contributor on
NATO-related subjects to to Avante, the weekly newspaper of the
Portuguese Communist Party, spoke on the role of NATO in
Portugal since 1949 and on popular resistance to the war.

5:30-6:15 Messages of solidarity and struggle

Ismael Guadalupe (Puerto Rico) The Committee for the Rescue
and Development of Vieques on the relationship of Vieques to
Yugoslavia. He showed how the U.S. used Vieques for target
practice to prepare for the war against Yugoslavia, and
they do so for all foreign aggression.

Representative of Cuban Interest Section, spoke on Cuba’s
suit against U.S. for the costs of the embargo.

UN Ambassador Jovanovic of Yugoslavia, gave evidence of his
own government’s charges against the U.S. and NATO for war
crimes. His talk was in fact a summary of much of the day’s
proceedings.

Brian Becker, co-director of the IAC, spoke on the need to
form a worldwide movement to abolish NATO.

Ramsey Clark reiterated some of the main points developed
during the day and stressed the need to come to a unified
conclusion that would find NATO guilty over a broad spectrum of charges—the
19 charges included in the original indictment—and lead to a
struggle to abolish NATO.

International Action Center
39 West 14th Street, Room 206
New York, NY 10011
email: [email protected]
web: www.iacenter.org
phone: 212 633-6646
fax:   212 633-2889

 Among the many ironies of the NATO war against Yugoslavia was
 the role of the International Criminal Tribunal and its chief
 prosecutor, Louise Arbour, elevated by Canadian Prime Minister
 Jean Chretien to Canada's highest court in 1999. It will be argued
 here that as Arbour and her Tribunal played a key role in
 EXPEDITING war crimes, an excellent case can be made that in a
 just world she would be in the dock rather than in judicial robes.

 In the midst of NATO's 78-day bombing campaign against
 Yugoslavia, Arbour participated in an April 20 press conference with
 British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to receive from him
 documentation on Serb war crimes. Then on May 27, Arbour
 announced the indictment of Serb President Slobodan Milosevic and
 four of his associates for war crimes. The inappropriateness of a
 supposedly judicial body doing this when Germany, Russia and
 other powers were trying to find a diplomatic resolution to the
 conflict, was staggering.

 At the April 20 appearance with Cook, Arbour stated that

      "It is inconceivable...that we would agree to be guided by the
      political will of those who may want to advance an agenda."

 But her appearance with Cook and the followup indictments fitted
 perfectly the needs of the NATO leadership. There had been
 growing criticism of NATO's increasingly civilian
 infrastructure-oriented bombing of Serbia. Arbour's and the
 Tribunal's intervention declaring the Serb leadership to be guilty of
 war crimes was a public relations coup that justified the NATO
 policies and helped permit the bombing to continue and escalate.
 This was pointed out repeatedly by NATO leaders and
 propagandists: for example, Madeleine Albright noted that the
 indictments

      "make very clear to the world and the publics in our countries
      that this [NATO policy] is justified because of the crimes
      committed, and I think also will enable us to keep moving all
      these processes [i.e., bombing] forward" (CNN, May 27).

 Arbour herself noted that "I am mindful of the impact that this
 indictment may have on the peace process," and although indicted
 individuals are "entitled to the presumption of innocence until they
 are convicted, the evidence upon which this indictment was
 confirmed raises serious questions about their suitability to be
 guarantors of any deal, let alone a peace agreement." (CNN, May
 27). So Arbour not only understood the political significance of her
 indictment, she suggested that interference with diplomatic efforts
 was justified because the indicted individuals, though not yet found
 guilty, were not suitable to negotiate. This hugely unjudicial political
 judgment, along with the convenient timing of the indictments, points
 up Arbour's and the Tribunal's highly political role.

 Arbour's service to NATO in indicting Milosevic was the logical
 outcome of the Tribunal's de facto control and purpose. Established
 by the Security Council in the early 1990s to serve the Balkan
 policy ends of its dominant members, the Tribunal's funding and
 interlocking functional relationship with the leading NATO powers
 have made it NATO's instrument. (1)

 Although Article 32 of the Tribunal's Charter declares that its
 expenses shall be provided in the general budget of the United
 Nations, this proviso has been regularly violated. In 1994-1995 the
 U.S. government provided it with $700,000 in cash and $2.3 million
 in equipment, and numerous other U.S.-based governmental and
 non- governmental agencies have provided the Tribunal with
 resources.

 Article 16 of the Tribunal's charter states that the Prosecutor shall
 act independently and shall not seek or receive instruction from any
 government. This section also has been systematically violated.
 NATO sources have regularly made claims suggesting their
 authority over the Tribunal: "We will make a decision on whether
 Yugoslav actions against ethnic Albanians constitute genocide,"
 states a USIA Fact Sheet, and Cook asserted at his April 20 press
 conference with Arbour that "we are going to focus on the war
 crimes being committed in Kosovo and our determination to bring
 those responsible to justice, " as if he and Arbour were a team
 jointly deciding on who should be charged for war crimes.

 Tribunal officials have even bragged about "the strong support of
 concerned governments and dedicated individuals such as Secretary
 Albright," further referred to as "mother of the Tribunal" (by Judge
 Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, president of the Tribunal). In 1996
 Arbour met with the Secretary-General of NATO and its supreme
 commander to "establish contacts and begin discussing modalities
 of cooperation and assistance." Numerous other meetings have
 occurred between prosecutor and NATO, which was given the
 function of Tribunal gendarme.

 Arbour acknowleged (April 20) that "the real danger is whether we
 would fall into [following somebody's political agenda] inadvertently
 by being in the hands of information-providers who might have an
 agenda that we would not be able to discern." But even an imbecile
 could discern that NATO had an agenda and that simply accepting
 the flood of documents offered by Cook and Albright entailed
 ADVERTENTLY following that agenda. Arbour's April 20
 reference to the "morality of the [NATO] enterprise" and her
 remarks on Milosevic's possible lack of character disqualifying him
 from negotiations, as well as her rush to help NATO with an
 indictment, point to quite clearly understood political service.

 The Arbour-Tribunal bias was dramatically illustrated by the
 disposition of an internal Tribunal report on Operation Storm, which
 described war crimes committed by the Croatian armed forces in
 their expulsion of more than 200,000 Serbs from Krajina in August
 1995. (6) In only four days "at least 150 Serbs were summarily
 executed, and many hundreds disappeared," totals that exceeded
 the 241 victims of the Serbs named in the indictment of Milosevic.
 But as the United States supported the Croat's ethnic cleansing of
 Serbs in Krajina, and refused to provide requested information, no
 indictment of any Croat officer named in the report, or head of state
 Tudjman, was ever brought by the Tribunal.

 According to Arbour, the Tribunal was "subject to extremely
 stringent rules of evidence with respect to the admissibility and the
 credibility of the product that we will tender in court," thus
 precluding "unsubstantiated, unverifiable, uncorroborated
 allegations" (April 20). This is a gross misrepresentation of what
 John Laughland described in the Times (London) as "a rogue court
 with rigged rules" (June 17, 1999). The Tribunal violates virtually
 every standard of due process: among others, it fails to separate
 prosecution and judge; witnesses can testify anonymously;
 confessions are presumed free and voluntary unless the contrary
 can be established by the prisoner; and "rules against hearsay,
 deeply entrenched in Common Law, are not observed and the
 Prosecutor's office has even suggested not calling witnesses to give
 evidence but only the tribunal's own 'war crimes investigators'"
 (Laughland).

 As noted, Arbour presumes guilt before trial; the concept of
 "innocent till convicted" is rejected, and she can declare that people
 linked with Arkan "will be tainted by their association with an
 indicted war criminal" (March 31). Arbour clearly does not believe
 in the basic rules of Western jurisprudence. And within a month of
 her elevation to the Canadian Supreme Court she joined a court
 majority that grafted onto Canadian law the dangerous Tribunal
 practice of permitting a more liberal use of hearsay evidence in
 trials. (2) The consequent corruption of the Canadian justice system,
 both by her appointment and her impact, mirrors that in the
 Canadian political system, whose leading members supported the
 NATO war without question.

 In bombing Yugoslavia from March 24 to June 8 1999, NATO
 violated the UN Charter requirement that it not use force without
 UN Security Council sanction. (3) It was also guilty of aggression in
 attacking a sovereign state that was not going beyond its borders.
 In its defense, NATO claimed that "humanitarian" concerns
 demanded these actions and justified seemingly serious law
 violations. (4) This reply sanctions law violations on the basis of
 self-serving judgments that contradict the rule of law, but it is also
 dubious on its own grounds. The NATO bombing made "an internal
 humanitarian problem into a disaster" in the words of Rollie Keith,
 the returned Canadian OSCE human rights monitor in Kosovo.
 Furthermore, NATO refused to negotiate a settlement in Kosovo
 and insisted on a violent solution; in the words of one State
 Department official, NATO deliberately "raised the bar" and
 precluded a compromise resolution because Serbia "needed to be
 bombed." These counter- facts suggest that the alleged
 humanitarian basis of the law violations was a cover for starkly
 political and geopolitical objectives.

 NATO was also guilty of more traditional war crimes, including
 some that the Tribunal had found indictable when [allegeldy] carried
 out by Serbs. Thus on March 8, 1996, the Serb leader Milan Martic
 was indicted for [allegeldy] launching a rocket cluster-bomb attack
 on military targets in Zagreb in May 1995, on the ground that the
 rocket was "not designed to hit military targets but to terrorize the
 civilians of Zagreb." But the same case could be made for numerous
 NATO bombing raids, as in the cluster-bombing of Nis on May 7,
 1999, in which a market and hospital far from any military target
 were hit in separate strikes--but no indictment has yet been handed
 down against NATO.

 But NATO was also guilty of bombing non-military targets as
 systematic policy. On March 26, 1999, General Wesley Clark said
 that "We are going to very systematically and progressively work
 on his military forces...[to see] how much pain he is willing to
 suffer." But this focus on "military forces" wasn't effective, so
 NATO quickly turned to "taking down...the economic apparatus
 supporting" Serb military forces (Clinton's words); targets were
 gradually extended to factories of all kinds, electric power stations,
 water and sewage processing facilities, transport, public buildings,
 and even schools and hospitals. In effect, it was NATO's strategy to
 bring Serbia to its knees by gradually escalating its attacks on the
 civil society.

 But international law makes civilian targets off limits; the "wanton
 destruction of cities, towns or villages or devastation not justified by
 military necessity" is prohibited (Sixth Principle of Nuremberg,
 formulated in 1950 by a UN-sponsored international law
 commission). "Military necessity" does not allow the destruction of
 a civil society to make it more difficult for the country to support its
 armed forces, any more than civilians can be killed directly because
 they pay taxes supporting the war machine or might some day
 become soldiers. Making an entire population a hostage is a blatant
 violation of international law and its implementing acts are war
 crimes.

 In December 1999, it was finally reported that post-Arbour
 prosecutor Carla Del Ponte was reviewing the conduct of NATO, at
 the urging of Russia and several other "interested parties" ("U.N.
 Court Examines NATO's Yugoslavia War," NYT, Dec. 29, 1999).
 But the news report indicates that the focus is on the conduct of
 NATO pilots and their commanders, not the NATO decision-makers
 who decided to target the civilian infrastructure. It also suggests the
 public relations nature of the inquiry, which would "go far in
 dispelling the belief...that the tribunal is a tool used by Western
 leaders to escape accountability." The report also indicates the
 delicate matter that the tribunal "depends on the military alliance to
 arrest and hand over suspects." It also quotes Del Ponte saying
 that "It's not my priority, because I have inquiries about genocide,
 about bodies in mass graves." We may rest assured that no
 indictments will result from this inquiry.

 NATO's leaders, frustrated in attacking the Serb military machine,
 quite openly turned to smashing the civil society of Serbia as their
 means of attaining the desired quick victory. Arbour and the
 Tribunal helped NATO by indicting Milosevic, thereby giving
 NATO the moral cover needed for escalated attacks on the hostage
 population.

 Arbour and the Tribunal thus present us with the amazing spectacle
 of an institution supposedly organized to contain, prevent, and
 prosecute for war crimes actually knowingly facilitating them.
 Furthermore, petitions submitted to the Tribunal during Arbour's
 tenure had called for prosecution of the leaders of NATO, including
 Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, for the commission of war
 crimes. If she had been a prosecutor in Canada, Britain or the
 United States, she would have been subject to disbarment for
 considering and then accepting a job from a person she had been
 asked to charge. But Arbour was elevated to the Supreme Court of
 Canada by Chretien with hardly a mention of this conflict of interest
 and immorality. **

 Christopher Black (5) is part of the team of Canadian lawyers who
 have attempted to bring war crimes charges against NATO before
 the War Crimes Tribunal. At present, Mr. Black is serving as the
 attorney for one of the defendant at the Rwandan war crimes
 hearings. He believes that Western meddling is in large measure
 responsible for the horrendous killing in Rwanda. He plans to write
 an article for Emperors-Clothes on the subject.

 Edward S. Herman is the author of many books including 'Real
 Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda' (June 1998)
 and 'Triumph of the Market: Essays on Economics, Politics, and the
 Media' (October 1995).

 (1) See Money Talks - US Funds ICTY Public Relations at
 http://emperors-clothes.com/news/press.htm

 (2) Back to the dark ages by Jared Israel at
 http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/bac.htm

 (3) See NATO's War & World Security by Prof. Raju G. C. Thomas
 at http://www.emperors-clothes.com/analysis/security.htm

 (4) See HUMANITARIAN WAR: Making the Crime Fit the
 Punishment by Diana Johnstone at
 http://www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/Johnstone/crime.htm

 (5) See An Impartial Tribunal? Really? by Christopher Black at
 http://www.emperors-clothes.com/analysis/Impartial.htm

 (6)See Conditions of Serbs in Croatia, by Alice Mahon, MP at
 http://www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/mahon/croatia.htm

                                                R. K. Kent
                                     Emeritus Professor of History
                                University of California at Berkeley

The claim that Serbs carried out a campaign of “ethnic cleansing”
against “Kosovars” prior to the end of March 1999 and of “genocide”
before and after NATO’s “air war” against Yugoslavia is still very much
around in the “news.” Most recently, the Hague Tribunal for Yugoslavia
has tabled a review of submitted international legal briefs holding
NATO’s civilian and military leaders responsible for war crimes and
crimes against humanity and peace as a result of an attack on
Yugoslavia. The Tribunal’s response has been that it is too busy
searching for bodies and evidence of genocide within Kosovo to consider
accusations against NATO. The Tribunal has received since a 900-page
report from the European Union holding that no “genocide” took place in
Kosovo even during the 78 days of air attacks. . Eight months have
passed since NATO troops moved unopposed into a Kosovo under the UN
Administration. Reporters and TV crews have crisscrossed Kosovo in
search of “mass graves”  for a long time. In one case, a TV Crew
promised to pay out $250,000 for information leading to the location of
an actual “mass grave.”

“Mass grave” is probably the most emotion-charged appellation not only
in English but in many other languages as well. As such, it lends itself
to sensationalism calculated to incite for or against. It immediately
brings to mind the gruesome 1945 film images of hundreds of emaciated
bodies dumped, unburied, into large pits dug within Nazi concentration
camps. A mass of the twisted, the deformed and the extinguished came
from living humans in a profoundly disgusting and revolting way. Their
only bonds were the belonging to the Jewish Faith and/or a Slavic
ethnicity  There was, however, a difference.. While  Slavs were
designated by the Nazis as “sub-human” (Untermenschen), they were
“useful”  for crude mass labor needed in wartime projects. They were not
being exterminated as a race or a religious group. In the end, the
“sub-humans” of Russia and Serbia could fight the Nazi divisions in
their own lands and contribute to the ultimate defeat of Adolf Hitler’s
Third Reich. The  different European nationals of Jewish faith never did
any physical harm to their ultimate executioners. Yiddish is a Germanic
language, tell-tale sign of powerful cultural assimilation. They were
just the same subjected to a structured and implemented physical
destruction as an ethno-religious group irrespective of different
citizenships. Outside of Germany. with one exception,  the dirty work of
the Nazis was carried out by the German occupying forces throughout
Continental Europe. The exception was provided by the Croat Nazis
(Ustashe) who did the work themselves. They murdered some 35,000 Jews,
along with several hundred thousand Orthodox Serbs, number of Roms and
anti-Nazi Croats.

Physical destruction of the Jews with different nationalities within
occupied Europe had one other unique feature. It was carried out, with
Teutonic efficiency, in an unparalleled bureaucratic way via modern
means of transportation, concentration and mass killing. In the long
list of Man’s inhumanity to Man, there is nothing else like this
Holocaust. Its Greek roots meaning the “burnt whole,” total physical
destruction. Its numbers are staggering and no amount of historical
revisionism attempted today can alter this fact. The generally accepted
figure runs into some 6,000,000 Jews who lost their lives and
possessions throughout Europe. Unquestionably, the Holocaust provides
also the clearest definition  of what “genocide” really is, total
physical elimination of humans who belong to a single religious or
ethnic group or to both at the same time. While genocidal attempts
recur, the Holocaust is a unique historical event. To the everlasting
credit of Its survivors and succeeding generations of Jews, the
Holocaust remains a living memory in many parts of the world. There is,
nonetheless, an enormous difference between keeping its memory alive as
a planned and executed Evil as well as an alarm against future genocidal
attempts, on the one hand, and calculated uses of its memory as
justification to kill other humans, destroy their infrastructure and
poison their soil, on the other. This is precisely how the memory of the
Holocaust has been used in ways calculated to “ease” the peoples of
Western Europe and the United States into supporting or at least not
actively opposing the U.S./NATO “intervention” in Yugoslavia.

This “intervention” (a very antiseptic word} is actually reminiscent of
the Nazi punitive expeditions against the Serbs in World War Two. It
bears Adolf Hitler’s distinct signature through Western alliances with
the successor anti-Serb nationalists in Croatia, in Bosnia and most
recently in Kosovo. It reveals the two basic components of Nazi
ideology. Might alone makes Right. Ends justify the Means. It has
shredded the UN Charter. In scant eleven weeks it has mauled
International Law that took centuries to develop since its Dutch founder
Grotius. It has made a mockery of language and logic as NATO bombs and
missiles were media-tipped in Humanitarian concerns. It has come with
the most repelling deceptions and ruthless propaganda that turns Josef
Goebbels into a rank amateur. It has led to a reign of cerebral terror,
enlisting adherents in all major Western media  to deform “the Serbs”
beyond recognition.

Only yesterday, they were widely perceived as an honorable and tragic
people who sided with the Allies in two World Wars, losing almost a
quarter of their 7 million population in 1941-1944 alone By eliminating
historical contexts that invalidate much of the deception, by equating
sporadic Serb atrocities with premeditated “genocide,” individuals
behind the U.S./NATO “air war”  will soon face, especially at night, a
merciless enemy that cannot be defeated. They will face the angry ghosts
of the real Holocaust victims for perverting Its moral legacy in what
was once Yugoslavia . “The Serbs” became neo-Nazi  butchers of the fin
de si?cle via an endless search for “mass graves” that contain only
their alleged victims. There could be nothing more demeaning to the
memory of the Holocaust than the staging of “genocide” so as to punish
with impunity another ethno-religious group, the Christian Orthodox
Serbs. If there is anything that can be added, it must be an ultimate
paradox. Of all the populations under Nazi occupation in World War II,
the Serbs have one of the best collective records of standing with and
by their Jews. What about the concrete body numbers and” mass graves “
at Kosovo? What about William S. Cohen’s assertion that some “100,000
ethnic Albanian men “were mass executed by the Serbs? What about
intolerable “ethnic cleansing” that “required” the “air war?” The
100,000 figure has since been scaled down to “10,000.”

Shortly before the NATO bombs and missiles fell from the Yugoslav skies,
the Helsinki Watch reported that the war within Kosovo between the
“Kosovo Liberation Army” (K.L.A.} and Serb police and army units,
produced about 3,000 deaths. About 2,000 Albanians and 1,000 Serbs.
After months of searching, carried out by unimpeded forensic
international teams, 2,108 bodies have been exhumed and investigated
(report from Pristina, 10 November 1999) before the winter’s onset. In
many , probably most cases, identities of the dead could not be
ascertained. along with when and just how lives were lost. Mass graves?
A Spanish forensic team pulled out of Kosovo as “mass graves” failed to
surface. In graves with more than one body it could not be easily
determined whether these were due to massacres of a group, communal or
collective burials of “collateral damage” in an ongoing war both on the
ground and from the air. The one widely reported “massacre” at Racak and
the “resulting mass grave”  could not be confirmed as such by a 21-kilo
report with 3,000 photographs provided by a medical expert from Finland.

A mere claim by an interesting U.S. special  envoy to Kosovo (with long
and vast experience in Central American horror stories) went around the
world before anyone could seriously examine the open grave. The “Racak
massacre” was used in a calculated, cold-blooded way to  justify  the
“air war.” It is reminiscent of yet an earlier massacre, a real one,
attributed to the Serbs. It was the “Third Market-place massacre” at
Sarajevo, Bosnia. Within hours after an ABC TV crew recorded the gore in
color,  NATO launched a three-week bombing campaign against the Bosnian
Serbs. Yet, an extensive in situ report exculpated the Serbs. An
immediate  demand was made to keep it secret. It came from Madeleine
Albright, then Ambassador to the UN. The thrust of this report was
leaked out by a respected UN official, Mr. Akashi of Japan. It remains
secret to this day.

“Ethnic cleansing” has been generally understood as the permanent
expulsion ,through the use of terror,  of an undesired group from its
area of residence. From a variety of sources, figures of anywhere from
100,00 to 200,000 have been advanced for the Kosovo Albanians “cleansed”
before the air war. There is no doubt that Albanian civilians, mostly
women, children and the elderly, fled from their homes. They did so to
escape “collateral damage” since the K.L.A. insurgents retreated
regularly into their clan compounds after each ambush of Serb policemen
(some 300 killed between mid-1998 and March 1999). The Serb ripostes
invariably created civilian casualties which radicalized Albanians in
the Diaspora and sent the Western media into overdrive. The problem here
is that local refugees from armed hostilities fled into nearby woods
without abandoning their general area, let alone Kosovo. Moreover, most
returned to their homes following the Holbrooke-Milosevic agreement to
pull the Serb Third Army out of Kosovo. Many non-Serb sources, including
some European Observers allowed into Kosovo, have formally declared that
Serbs did not target the Kosovo Albanians as a group, concentrating on
the K.LA. instead. The actual “ethnic cleansing” began after 24th March
1999, the day of first NATO strike in Yugoslavia. Almost 800,000 Kosovo
Albanians spilled out into neighboring countries, including Serbia in
the ensuing ten weeks. While on the subject of Serb refusals to “live
with” other ethnicities, it is worth mentioning that there are over
200,000 Kosovo Albanians residing in Serbia today. About 80,000 are in
the greater Belgrade alone. They are Yugoslav citizens. Many are recent
refugees who did not wish to be impressed by the K.L.A. into its war
with the Serbs.

The “air war” over Serbia and Kosovo lasted 78 days of relentless
strikes with bombs and missiles. It was completely out proportion
against the alleged “sins” of the Serbs. The term “air war”  is
neo-Orwellian. . It was hardly a war between two opposing (air }forces.
It posed no real risks to pilots flying at high altitude and not a
single NATO pilot was lost in aerial combat or to ground fire (one was
picked-up by air rescue). In striking contrast, thousands of banned
cluster bombs were dropped in Serbia and Kosovo In addition to depleted
uranium (mutant with unknown limits), graphite was spread around,
entering into sweet water ducts. Electrical generators were destroyed
along with a major, American-built, petro-chemical complex, releasing
huge amounts of different toxins into the soil, water and air. A major
Serb city (Pancevo) had to be evacuated. Potential parents were urged
not to conceive children until scientific research could evaluate the
mutant risks. Schools, hospitals, factories without any military links,
apartment buildings, homes, Orthodox Churches and a Synagogue (at Nis)
were damaged or destroyed along with bridges, flyovers [cloverleafs] ,
roads, radio and TV stations, even the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Some
two-three thousand Serb civilians, including children, were killed
(three times the casualties from K.L.A. guns) with three times as many
wounded, more or less seriously. Over 600,000 Serbs, with dependents,
were left without jobs. This was happening in a Serbia already harboring
almost a million refugees “ethnic” victims of “cleansing” from other
parts of what was once Federal Yugoslavia.

With all of this in the background and leaving the post “air-war”
evolution of Kosovo aside, our self-styled successors of Niccolo
Machiavelliare still searching for “mass graves” in ex-Yugoslavia, still
affectionately “punishing the Serbs” while tinkering with Mankind for
its own Good.

Raymond K. Kent

 MADRID, July 17 (Tanjug) - One year after the NATO aggression on Yugoslavia,
the truth is starting to dawn - NATO war crimes - use of radioactive bombs - ethnic
cleansing operations against Serbs - a Kosovo mafia which controls the black
market of international aid and prostitution financed by the KLA and NATO troops -
that is the reality of Kosovo and Metohija as seen by the Spanish monthly magazine,
"Mundo Obrero", in an article ironically entitled "We - War Criminals !"

The magazine of the Spanish left points out what many had already predicted a year
ago, that such an outcome of the NATO aggression on Yugoslavia and the subsequent
deployment of peacekeepers in Serbia's Kosovo and Metohija province was inevitable.
However, all such warnings were rejected as biased, since they allegedly came from
circles whose sentiments were regarded as hostile toward NATO, "Mundo Obrero" said.

 "A year ago, Angitu (the coordinator of Spain's United Left) was 'lynched' in the media,
even in many left-wing sectors, because he had dared to brand Javier Solana as a war
criminal. But now even Amnesty International apparently backs him up, claiming that
the military organization - headed by Solana - has violated the Geneva Convention and
is indeed guilty of committing war crimes, which are now destined to be investigated
seriously by the International Court of Criminal Appeal," the monthly said.

Posted July 16, 2000
http://home.pacbell.net/fakta/Demons.html

he vast majority of the accusations against the Serbs in the American
media in the last decade are fabrications. The question
arises why did the media broadcast these distortions. The anti-Serbian
campaign has three origins. The first one is Senator
Robert Dole. He was influenced by the Ustashe on his staff and by
Albanian campaign contributions. The second one is the
public relations firm Ruder Finn, which was hired by the Croats, Moslems
and Albanians. The third one is the State
Department. After the recognition of Bosnia in April 1992 the U.S.
needed to put military and economic pressure on the
Serbs, who did not accept the arbitrary partition of Yugoslavia. In
order to obtain the support of the American public it needed
to demonize the Serbs.

                                 The Accusations

 There is a vast discrepancy between what the American mass media and
the U.S. government report about Yugoslavia on
one hand, and the facts available in articles, books, web sites, and the
historical record.

 In the beginning of the war in Bosnia some strange “news” appeared in
the media. For example, one such report claimed that
a Serbian terrorist organization bombed the World Trade Center in New
York. A few days later it was determined that
actually a fundamentalist Moslem group did it. No apology or correction
was ever issued. The media also broadcast a bizarre
story that the Serbs raped Moslem women and prevented them from
terminating their pregnancy. They also incessantly
repeated that the Serbs were “aggressors” although not one Serbian
soldier ever crossed the borders of Yugoslavia. These
were signs that there was something wrong with the coverage of the
Yugoslav conflict. And indeed there was!

Lie about the political objectives of the war
 We were told that the Serbs launched a war of aggression against Bosnia
with only one goal in mind - to commit genocide.
They murdered 250 000 people. In reality the number of dead is 40 000
Thomas) (much smaller number than the casualties of
the U.S. civil war buried in mass graves). These are not merely Moslems
and Croats killed by Serbs but also Serbs killed by
Croats and Moslems. Thirdly, and most importantly, these are not people
killed in cold blood but in war. “Mass grave” is
defined as a grave that contains more than one body. The propagandists
labeled evictions and deportations as “genocide” and
attributed it solely to the Serbs. The terms “mass grave” and “genocide”
were frequently juxtaposed.

Lie about “aggression”
 But were not the Serbs aggressors? The truth is that the Bosnian
government unilaterally and illegally declared independence
and attempted to drag the Serbian
population with it. The Serbs simply wished to remain in Yugoslavia and
feared to be subjected to Moslem fundamentalist rule.
They established their own administration in areas inhabited
predominantly by Serbs. The Bosnian government tried to dislodge
them. The Serbs viewed the war as a desperate struggle for survival. To
describe the Serbs as “aggressors” is an example of
how even a lie absurd on the face of it can become the truth when
repeated one hundred times.

The picture that fooled the world
 In August 1992 a number western newspapers and TV stations displayed a
picture of a “concentration camp” in Trnopolje. It
showed undernourished Moslem “prisoners” behind a barbed wire fence and
was accompanied by dramatic subtitles such as
“Belsen 92” (Daily Mirror, August 7, 1992). Apparently the “proof” that
the Serbs were running Nazi style concentration
camps was found. But when journalist Thomas Deichman investigated,
something very different transpired. It was not a
“concentration camp” but a center for refugees, who were free to leave
at any time. The barbed wire was not around the
refugees but around the TV crew. They filmed the scene from a nearby
fenced compound, which had nothing to do with the
refugees. The motive for this distortion was sensationalism. Deichman)

Misidentified dead bodies
 In several cases the media showed the dead bodies of Serbs and labeled
them as “Muslim victims” (Newsweek, January 3,
1993) or Croats killed by the Muslims claiming that those were Serbian
atrocities (New York Times, August 7, 1993). The
body of a Serb killed by Croats in Vukovar in November 1991 was used by
CNN on “Sixty minutes” as a proof of Serbian
“genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”, and then again by Christiane Amanpour
on June 1, 1997. Lituchy)

Moslem shelling for propaganda purposes
 General Charles G. Boyd reported: “no seasoned observer in Sarajevo
doubts for a moment that Muslim forces found it
in their interest to shell friendly targets” Boyd) Similarly David Owen:
“Around this time the UN had clear evidence that
Muslim forces would from time to time shell the airport to stop the
relief flights and refocus world attention on the
siege of Sarajevo.” Owen) UN Human Rights officer, James Luko wrote:
"The evidence was clear that ‘at times’ during an
important axis event - or when the Serbs actually restrained in shelling
at a particular time or place - Muslim forces
shelled their own areas." Luko 96-02-11)  The Moslems used this trick
several times.

Bread line massacre
 One such case was the breadline massacre in Sarajevo on May 27, 1992,
which killed 22 people. The UN issued a report
blaming the bombing on the Moslems but most of the Western media blamed
it on the Serbs. The tragedy was used as an
excuse to impose draconian Sanctions on Serbia. Levinsohn 314,  Doyle)

Marketplace bombing I
 The bombing of Markale - a marketplace in Sarajevo, which occurred on
February 5, 1994, was attributed to the Serbs. But
a UN report indicated that the shell likely came from the positions of
the Bosnian Moslems. There was a cover-up attempt, in
which the U.S. government was probably involved, and the report was
classified. Owen 260)

Marketplace bombing II
 The marketplace bombing on August 28, 1995 is more complicated because
the political involvement was much heavier.
According to UN Human Rights Officer James Luko the original six French
investigators concluded that the shell came from
the Muslim side. They were then taken off the case. “It is a scandal
here - we all know about it but it will take someone
on the inside of the incident to give us details and names of who were
pulling the strings of this investigation.” Luko
96-04-01 15:58:34) The new investigators concluded that the shell could
have come from either side. The bombing of the Serbian
positions began before the UN investigation was completed.
“Investigation” by the American Embassy concluded that the shell
came from the Serbian side.

Srebrenica
 The safe haven of Srebrenica was supposed to be demilitarized. It was
not. The Moslems harassed the nearby Serbs with
mortar fire. The Serbs had warned for two weeks that they would
retaliate if the fire did not stop. Two hours before the attack
the Bosnian command in Sarajevo ordered the Moslem soldiers to withdraw
from the outer defense perimeter. They were very
well armed. UN Human Rights officer James Luko wrote: “And why did
Sarajevo order this - because they wanted
Srebrenica to fall and fall hard to finally get NATO actively involved
against the Bosnian Serb Army.” Luko 96-01-26)
The fall of Srebrenica was well coordinated with the American media.
They immediately began to broadcast stories about
8000 murdered Moslem men. John Shattuck of the State Department went on
TV and stated that they were all massacred in a
large warehouse; blood was even on the ceiling. At the same time James
Luko posted a message on
America-on-Line stating that it was himself who briefed Shattuck and
that no evidence of any massacre existed. (Many of the
Bosnian soldiers made it back to join the main Bosnian army; some were
killed in battle.) The US government also released a
satellite photo of a purported “mass grave”. But James Luko pointed out
that although the US had substantial aerial
reconnaissance it was not able to produce a single photo of any
execution, mass burials, bulldozers etc. - only a football
stadium size mass grave after the fact. Luko 96-04-01) To my knowledge
nobody ever found where the “mass grave” actually
was or what was in it.

Did the Serbs “murder” military age men?
 During the war in Bosnia the Serbs were often accused of murdering
Moslem men of military age. Curiously it is the same
group that gets killed on the battlefields of every war. The purpose of
wars usually is not to kill the enemy’s military age men
per se, but to achieve certain political objective. In some cases other
groups suffer as well. For example the ultimate objective
of the United States in WWII was not to intern Japanese Americans in
concentration camps or to wipe out the civilian
population of Hiroshima. These were merely means for fighting the war.
Presumably the purpose of stationing American troops
in Okinawa is not to rape teenage Japanese girls. The Serbs prosecuted
the war in order to maintain political independence
from Sarajevo and Zagreb.

Lies about peace plans
 When the Vance-Owen Peace Plan was proposed, the American press
distorted it. For example Time magazine published a
map that bore no resemblance to the one envisaged in the plan. Owen
100)  Another opportunity for peace was lost.

Lie about end of war in Bosnia
 A few months after Dayton, Mr. Clinton declared: “Under US leadership a
peace is taking place in Bosnia.”  But the reality is
very different. Between 1992 and 1994 five peace plans were proposed.
Milosevic supported all of them Owen 354) and the
United States torpedoed all of them. Owen 364) The Dayton Agreement was
merely a rehash of the Contact Group Plan. Owen.
330)

Ahimsa?
 The American media painted the following picture of Kosovo: the
Albanians are peaceful, gentle people. They lived in idyllic
environment until Milosevic came and
decided to oppress them. While many Albanians may indeed be peaceful and
gentle a significant percentage of them are
extremely hostile and intolerant. Fleming) It was them who provoked the
conflict in Kosovo. We were told that the leader of
the Kosovo Albanians, Ibrahim Rugova, whose closest historical
counterpart is actually Konrad Henlein, is another Mahatma
Gandhi. While ahimsa (non-violence) is a centuries old tradition in
India, the same can hardly be said about Albania. The
centuries old tradition there is gjakmarrja (“taking of blood”).
According to B. Baldwin it explains most of the country’s
history. Vendettas are practiced to the present day. The rituals have
been codified by Lek Dukagjini in the Great Code
(Kanun) in the 15-th century. Baldwin)

Racak
 The Racak “massacre” was predicted long before it happened: “It is
becoming increasingly apparent that the Clinton
Administration has set American policy on a course that is likely to
lead to some sort of U.S.-led NATO military
intervention ... The only missing element appears to be an event -- with
suitably vivid media coverage -- that would
make intervention politically salable”, wrote Senator Larry Craig in
August 1998. Craig) The expected event occurred on
January 15, 1999. The Serbian police attempted to enter the village in
order to detain suspected murderers. The KLA opened
fire and a battle took place. Hundreds of villagers safely evacuated.
Journalists and OSCE observers had been invited and
observed the operation. The next day the head of OSCE, William Walker
and KLA alleged that the Serbs murdered 45
unarmed villagers. This was followed by the usual demonization of the
Serbs by major Western media. Some newspaper
articles spoke of  “mutilated bodies”, “bloody gouged eyes”, “smashed
foreheads”, “shot at close range”, “decapitated” etc.
Racak) French journalists studied the film taken by the AP TV crew and
concluded that it contradicts Walker’s version. Figaro,
Le Monde) Interestingly William Walker had also been involved with a
massacre in El Salvador, which he attempted to cover
up. The finding of the Finnish team of forensic experts was inconclusive
but was subject to further spin by the media. The team
nevertheless found that all the victims were killed by hand-held
firearms at long range and no bodies were mutilated. The
Serbian police determined that all the victims had traces of gunpowder
on their clothes, which means that they had fired
weapons. For some reason the Finnish team did not perform this test.
SIRIUS) It can be concluded that:
1) No proof exists that the Serbs police deliberately killed unarmed
civilians in cold blood
2) A battle between the Serbian police and the KLA had taken place. It
is plausible thatdeaths resulted.
3) Circumstantial evidence suggests that the allegations were Hollywood
staged to prepare
the public opinion for a war against Yugoslavia. The incident clearly
shows the same pattern as those earlier during the war in
Bosnia.

Lies during the bombing campaign
 General-turned-a-spin-doctor Wesley Clark ordered military spokesman
David Wilby of Britain to tell the press at a March
29 briefing that "according to reliable"
information, Professor Fehmi Agani and four other prominent
ethnic-Albanian leaders had been executed. According to New
York Times only a few days later sources in Kosovo indicated that Agani
was safe. Tanjug)

 On March 30, 1999 James Rubin stated that Serbs were herding Albanians
into Pristina stadium. He attributed the report to
KLA commander Hashim Thaci. Thaci
claimed that 100 000 people were thus massed. On March 31 an AFP
reporter visited the stadium, found it empty with the
grass intact. AFP) The same day James Rubin denied that he ever had said
that Albanians had been herded into the stadium.
Trifkovic) Even though this lie was immediately exposed, rumors
continued to circulate on the Capitol Hill that the Serbs killed
100 000 Albanians.

 NATO claimed that the Serbs were killing all military age Albanian men.
On April 2, 1999 spokesman Jamie Shea asked
dramatically: “Will the authorities in Belgrade please tell us what has
happened to the Kosovo Albanian men between the ages
of 16 and 60?". Boston Globe discovered these men turned up at
Macedonian and Albanian borders. Globe)

Lie about start of war in Kosovo
 In his speech on March 24, 1999, in which he attempted to justify the
air strikes against Yugoslavia, President Clinton made a
number of false statements. The most blatant lie was the accusation that
the Albanians were prohibited to speak their own
language. In fact there has always been an Albanian-language university
in Pristina. A number of newspapers in Albanian, such
as Koha Ditore, were published in Kosovo. What the president omitted is
just as significant as what he invented. There was no
single word in his speech about the military Appendix B to the proposed
Rambouillet “Agreement”. It provided for a total
military occupation of Yugoslavia. Rambouillet) It was an impossible
condition and was apparently designed to provoke a war
rather than to bring peace. Mr. Clinton did not tell the truth. This
time he lied in order to murder.

Lie about the end of war in Kosovo
 “Milosevic Capitulates” exclaimed San Jose Mercury News in large
letters on the front page on June 3, 1999. Other
newspapers ran similar stories. In reality the peace plan brokered by
Viktor Chernomyrdin differs very little from what Serbia
offered at Rambouillet (although the media did not report it then). NATO
dropped a number of conditions such as Appendix B
or referendum on Kosovo’s independence. FAIR, Cockburn)

Cynicism
 The most cynical trick used against the Serbs was to drive them to
desperation and to denounce them when they acted
accordingly. One such example was the U.S. assisted Croatian attack on
the UN safe haven of Krajina, which resulted in
murders of more than 10,000 Serbian civilians and the ethnic cleansing
of a quarter million of the Serbian residents. During the
fighting the Serbs fired six rockets on Zagreb. It was nothing compared
to the firebombing of Dresden. It nevertheless became
an opportunity for another wave of anti-Serb hysteria in the press. Even
worse example was the air campaign against
Yugoslavia because of Kosovo. When the bombing started, the Serbs
correctly identified the Albanian separatists as the
source of their predicament, and some Serbian paramilitaries took the
laws in their own hands. Isolated incidents occurred
when Albanians were told to leave their homes; some were even shot. The
Serbian government immediately punished the
perpetrators. But the architects of the U.S. foreign policy, after a
decade of demonization, economic sanctions, war, threats,
Albanian separatist terrorism, had at last a tangible proof of Serbian
misdeeds. These regrettable incidents, which occurred
only after the bombing started, were immediately used as a justification
of the bombing, which was supposed to prevent them.
But had the Serbs decided to remove the entire Albanian population from
Kosho they would have been well within the
precedent set by the major powers in Postdate in 1945, where they
decided to remove 2.5 million Germans from
Czechoslovakia as an irredentist group guilty of terrorism and
collaboration with external aggressor. Removal)

 The list goes on and on. During the war in Bosnia we were led to
believe that the Moslems were badly outgunned although
there was roughly a military parity. The media did not mention that the
Moslems placed mortars near civilian targets in
Sarajevo in order to draw Serbian fire. They did not report that the UN
sanctions committee was refusing to issue permits for
food and medicine such as penicillin but they gave prominent coverage to
Sen. Dole’s pronouncements that the arms embargo
on Bosnia was “illegal and immoral”. They did not say anything about the
horrendous Moslem shelling of the Serbian suburb of
Grbavica. They did not say anything about the destruction of the Moslem
properties by the Croats. There was nothing in the
media about the anti-Serbian terror in Croatia in 1989. Nothing about
the fascist past of Alija Izetbegovic, nothing about his
“Islamic Declaration”. Nothing about American Red Cross, headed by
Senator Dole’ wife Elizabeth, refusing to provide help
to the Serbian refugees, some of whom froze to death. Nothing about
Moslem terrorist Naser Orich operating around
Srebrenica. Nothing about the Ustashist concentration camp in Odzak. The
media did not say that 80% of human rights
violations after Dayton occurred in the Moslem-Croat federation. There
was not a single article about Kosovo, which did not
make the exaggerated claim that Kosovo was “90% Albanian” but none of
them ever explained the reason thereof i.e.
massacres of Serbs by the Albanian SS Skanderbeg and Balli Kombetar in
WWII. The media claimed the Albanians were
excluded form the Serbian health care system when in reality they
boycotted it. There was nothing in the media about the KLA
terror, nothing about KLA drug trafficking, nothing about the massive
anti-war demonstrations in Greece and Italy, nothing
about the effort of former Nuremberg prosecutor Walter J. Rockler to
indict NATO leaders. It would take volumes to
describe all the falsehoods and distorted reporting. To make a long
story short - we have witnessed a massive deception
campaign. But who orchestrated it? It had three primary sources
described below.

                               Senator Robert Dole

 In 1986 Senator Dole and Joe DioGuardi, Representative of Albanian
origin, introduced concurrent resolution 150 blaming
the Serbs for oppressing the Albanians in Kosovo. This is rather
curious. We were told that the root of all evil in the Balkans
was Slobodan Milosevic. But he did not consolidate his power until 1987.
The same year he made the famous speech in
Pristina, where he said, “nobody will beat these people” and thus
unleashed the demon of Serbian nationalism. In particular,
we were told, the oppression really started in 1989 when the autonomy of
Kosovo was curbed for no reason. But apparently
Senator Dole had already predicted all that a few years earlier. And how
did the Serbs manage to oppress the Albanians when
in 1986 the administration of Kosovo was in Albanian hands? Another
curious thing is that at the time when Resolution 150
was introduced, the American newspapers were reporting exodus of Serbs
from Kosovo because of harassment. Between
1974 and 1986 57 000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo. Exodus)
Dole and DioGuardi nevertheless managed to
dupe a number of members on both sides of the isle. Why did Senator Dole
do this? It turns out that his foreign policy adviser,
Ms. Mira Baratta, is a granddaughter of an Ustashist officer. Res 150)
This has never been reported in the American media.

 But who are the Ustashe and how did they get on Mr. Dole’s staff? To
answer this question we have to go back three
quarters of a century in history when Yugoslavia was created. The trend
towards national unification and self-determination
began in the 19. century.  Prime examples are the unifications of
Germany and Italy. These countries were created from a
number of tiny states that shared the same language and culture. The
process culminated after the war with the blessings of
Woodrow Wilson. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Ireland
were unified or liberated. While most of the
new nation states proved to be a success or at least a viable
arrangement, Yugoslavia turned out to be an exception.
Unification)  The Croats joined the Yugoslav union voluntarily but
changed their mind shortly thereafter. They soon became
determined opponents of Yugoslavia. Incorporation) The most fanatical
were the infamous Ustashe. They found their patron in
Mussolini and set up camps for training terrorists in Italy and Hungary.
They waged a campaign of propaganda and terror
against the Yugoslav State. According to Rebecca West: “But the Croat
terrorists did have their successes. They were far
from inefficient. They distributed treasonable newspapers and pamphlets
all over the world, many most persuasively
written. They started an able and unscrupulous propaganda office in
Vienna, which wounded the King’s feelings
bitterly and succeeded in poisoning European opinion” (Nothing new
here.)  The Milosevic then was Yugoslav king
Alexander, whom the Ustashe murdered in Marseilles in 1934. After the
occupation of Yugoslavia by German forces the
Ustashe set up a Croatian government in Zagreb and quickly established a
reputation for brutality:  “To make their state more
purely Croatian, the ustashe set about exterminating its Serb, Jewish,
and Gypsy inhabitants with a brutality that
shocked even the Germans and occasionally obliged the Italians to
intervene.” [Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 12, p. 215]
Aarons 74)  (That explains why today we hear so much about “genocide”.)
After the war many fascists, including war criminals,
were recruited by western intelligence services since it was believed,
perhaps plausibly, that now the main enemy was
communism. (That is why we now hear so much about “war criminals”.)
Prominent among these fascists were the Ustashe.
Many of them came to the United States. Aarons) More questionable was
their recruitment by the Republican Party for
political purposes. It was a fatal mistake, from which the Western
democracy may never recover. Shortly after WWII the
GOP was forming so-called "ethnic division". Its objective was to create
ex-fascist ethnic opposition to the Jewish influence
and to attract “ethnic” voters. At the time when the GOP courted them
the Ustashists were involved in terrorist acts. Aarons
270)  This ethnic division was the work of Richard Nixon. He also
promised to create so called "ethnic council” within the
party, which was indeed established after 1972. Fleming) Eventually
Ustashe ended up on the staff of Robert Dole. Literally
like some alien virus in a science fiction movie they infiltrated the
very top echelons of the American political establishment and
camouflaged themselves as the very opposite of what they are.

 Mr. Dole was also a recipient of Albanian campaign contributions. For
example, in 1987 the sum was $1.2 million. Children) It
is likely that much of the money came from heroin sales of the Albanian
Mafia. Res 150)  The situation in Kosovo went from
bad to worse; between 1986 and 1989 170,000 more Serbs left the
province. The voices of protest among the Serbs
intensified and the communist authorities were compelled to act. In 1989
the autonomy of Kosovo was reduced. This was then
described in the American media as an arbitrary act of oppression by
Milosevic. Jacques Ellul, in a different context, observed:
“at the time of Munich ... there was the same inversion of the
interpretation of facts”. Ellul 58)

                                   Ruder Finn

 In their campaign of hatred end deceit, Sen. Dole and Rep. DioGuardi
had a big help. In 1992 the governments of Croatia,
Bosnia, and the Kosovo Albanians hired the powerful public relations
firm Ruder Finn Global Public Affairs to influence the
western public opinion. Ruder Finn flooded the American and European
media as well as the United Nations with press
releases. Between June and December 1992 Ruder Finn conducted more then
30 interviews with major American
newspapers, sent 13 news releases, 37 faxes, 17 letters, and 8
statements. It made 80 telephone calls to newspaper and TV
editors, 48 calls to members of the House, 20 calls to members of the
Senate. Furthermore it set up meetings between Bosnian
officials and influential American politicians including Al Gore and the
acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagelburger. Owen
119) The materials fed to the American media originated in Zagreb,
Sarajevo, and Pristina. Florence Levinsohn observed: “The
American media and government are well used to dealing with public
relations firms, and they would be much more
likely to accept information as reliable coming from fellow Americans”
Levinsohn) The US media thus became a
megaphone for the Ustashist propaganda. Momcilo Selic noticed that:
"Even a cursory glance at any Croat émigré
newspaper of, say, 20 years ago will show a collective Serb portrait
that coincides with what passes for truth today,
after all the alleged Serb misdeeds in the current war. What is
strangely puzzling is that all the imputed Serb atrocities
of the present - and much more - were  ommitted by the Croats, ... in
World Wars I and II." Selic)

 Ruder Finn is responsible for circulating the reports of massive rape
of Moslem and Croat women by the Serbs. On
December 13, 1992 The New York Times reported that 50,000 women had been
thus raped. Such a ludicrously large
number gives the impression that the rapes were somehow systematically
organized by the Serbian military. But as of July
1994 the UN had only 800 documented rapes by all parties in the war. The
ultimate source of these accusations were the
Bosnian and Croatian governments. Ruder Finn also organized a campaign
to attribute the breadline massacre in Sarajevo on
May 27, 1992 to the Serbs although UN investigation determined that the
culprit were 'Bosnian forces loyal to Alija
Izetbegovic'. The tragedy was used to impose draconian sanctions on
Serbia. The sanctions prevented Yugoslavia from hiring
a public relations firm on their own.

 Using public relations firms in order to influence the American foreign
policy had a precedent. During the Gulf crisis Kuwait
employed Hill and Knowlton. Its spinmasters staged a dramatic appearance
of a young girl named Nariyah before Congress.
She testified about thousands of rapes and Iraqi soldiers killing babies
in incubators. The stories turned up to be a fraud and
the girl the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador. Lituchy) The fake stories
were widely publicized by the media and so called
human rights organizations (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch),
which do not comprehend that the falsely accused
also have rights. The Kuwait PR campaign was used as a model by the
neo-fascist Yugoslavs. They demonized the Serbs by
demonizing Slobodan Milosevic. The entire Yugoslav conflict was
simplified. All the problems stemmed from one person, who
suddenly appeared out of the blue. Just like Saddam Hussein he was an
aggressor, dictator, and second Hitler (i.e. second
second Hitler). In reality Milosevic is more liberal than the
universally admired Tito. (But even Tito was far better alternative
than Ustasha). In 1990 the Communist Party even gave up its monopoly of
power and Yugoslavia has had multi-party
elections ever since. Milosevic was just caught in the middle of the
turmoil. But there is one crucial difference between the
campaign against Hussein and against the Serbs. Although Saddam Hussein
has been demonized beyond recognition it is
nevertheless true that he is a brutal dictator. A case can be made that
he invaded a de jure and de facto sovereign country. The
Security Council authorized the ejection of the Iraqi forces from
Kuwait. The propaganda attempted to make him look even
worse than he actually did. In case of Yugoslavia it has all been
fabricated from A to Z. All the stories are incubator babies.

                               The State Department

 “Credibility” and “leadership” are the false idols that motivated the
American foreign policy establishment during the Yugoslav
crisis. When the Croatian nationalists
attempted to unilaterally secede from Yugoslavia the United States and
most European countries opposed it. A notable
exception was Germany. Germany) It put tremendous pressure on the other
EEC members and the European community
recognized independent Croatia and Slovenia in early 1991. It was a
major blow to American pride and “leadership”.
Furthermore the Croatian lobby in the United States demanded that the
U.S. also recognize Croatia. The State Department
had argued earlier that if Croatia and Slovenia were recognized then all
Yugoslav republics had to be recognized. There was
an opportunity to wrest “leadership” back from the archival Germany. The
United States agreed to recognize Croatia if Europe
recognizes Bosnia. Woodward 283) It happened on April 6, 1992. Thus
Bosnia was created, a bizarre country, which had never
existed, which the Croats and the Serbs (more than half of the
population) do not want to be a part of, within arbitrary borders
drawn by a communist dictator. It came into existence in order to prove
U.S. “leadership” i.e. “primarily to demonstrate
that we run the world”. Rockler)

 The recognition of the secessionist Yugoslav republics was a violation
of international law, namely the Montevideo Convention
and the Helsinki Agreement. Thomas) It was also a violation of the
Bosnian constitution. It was a betrayal of America’s ally. It
destroyed the European order established after WWI (an old goal of all
the fascists) by a series of treaties in accordance with
the principles set forth by Woodrow Wilson. Holbrooke) Essentially it
was an act of aggression against Yugoslavia. Partition) It
was the primary cause of the war in Bosnia. Owen 46) It is certainly
absurd to claim that the Croats and the Moslems have the
right to self-determination and at the same time to describe the Serbian
claim to the same as racism. It is absurd to claim that
“internal borders” are inviolable but external (i.e. real) borders can
be changed at will. It is absurd to chop a nation into three
pieces and claim that it is as an aggressor.

 The Serbs had a very good reason why they did not want to become a
minority in Bosnia and Croatia - they remembered
very well what happened to them in WWII in the hands of the Croats and
the Bosniaks. (The Serbs were a majority in Bosnia
until they were massacred in WWII.) They did not accept the unilateral,
arbitrary partition of Yugoslavia and that was more
than he State Department could fathom. How does such a small nation of
only ten million dare to reject a decision made for
them in Washington, DC? It was the same spirit the Serbs demonstrated in
the last two world wars when they resisted the
invading forces and waged a struggle against impossible odds. It won
them universal admiration. But not this time around. Now
the Serbian defiance threatened U.S. “credibility” as well as the
inflated egos of those who made the disastrous decisions. The
Serbs had to be crushed. In order to do that it was necessary to set the
American public
opinion against them. It was not difficult since the American public had
already been  conditioned by Senator Dole and Ruder
Finn to believe that the Serbs were diabolical  people. So the State
Department began to crank out its own anti-Serbian
fabrications. As one State Department official put it during the Kosovo
bombing campaign: “the demonization of Milosevic is
necessary to maintain the air attacks”. Cohen) In short, they  lied for
credibility. The irony is that the Serbian position was
the same as the American position before April 6, 1992 when a change of
heart occurred. But now the Serbs became demons
- for insisting that they not be torn out of Yugoslavia, to which they
had belonged for 75 year.

                                   Conclusion

 Are the Serbs really subhuman beasts ruled by a bloodthirsty monster
bent on genocide? Such is the picture of the Serbs
painted by the American media. It is the image of the Serbs in the minds
of those who flooded the press and TV with it. It is a
true reflection of the minds of the Ustashe, the Albanian chauvinists,
and the imperialist party among the U.S. foreign policy
elite - a Rorschach test of a kind.

 Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda observed that “Propaganda of
agitation  succeeds each time it designates
someone as the source of all misery, provided that he is not too
powerful.” Ellul 73) We have to get away from the habit of
picking small nations one by one and unleashing a lynch mob against
them.

 He also noticed that “The propagandist will not accuse his enemy of
just any  misdeed; he will accuse him of the very
intention that he himself has and trying to commit the very crime that
he himself is about to commit.” Ellul 58) Those
who accused  Milosevic of smuggling weapons to Bosnia, themselves
smuggled weapons from Iran. Those who described the
Serbian refusal to secede from Yugoslavia as “aggression” against Bosnia
and Croatia and as an inconceivable racist horror
that would destroy a multiethnic society, then proceeded to do exactly
that in Kosovo. Those who accused the Serbs of
committing war crimes, claiming that diplomatic immunity did not apply,
then committed one on March 24, 1999. Rockler) They
must be brought to justice!
 

NOTES:

The Accusations

Thomas) The source of this figure is Prof. Raju G. C. Thomas Department
of Political Science, Marquette University

Deichman) Thomas Deichmann: “The Picture that Fooled the World”, LM
Magazine, February 1992
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/images/bosnia/camp.htm

Lituchy) Barry Lituchy: “Media deception and the Yugoslav civil war”,
The College Voice, College of Staten Island, City
University of New York, February 1995

Boyd) Charles G. Boyd: “Making Peace with the Guilty (The Truth about
Bosnia)”, Foreign Affairs, September/October
1995, p. 28

Owen) David Owen: Balkan Odyssey, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995, p.
244; Owen makes this point several times e.g.
p. 41, p. p. 44-45

Luko 96-02-11)  Message posted on America-on-Line by UN Human Rights
Officer James Luko on 96-02-11 13:47:01 EST

Luko 96-02-19) Message posted on America-on-Line by UN Human Rights
Officer James Luko on 96-02-19 06:57:24.

Levinsohn 314) Florence Hamlish Levinsohn: Belgrade (Among the Serbs),
Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1994, p. 314; Leonard
Doyle: “Muslims slaughter their own people”, The Independent, August 22,
1992

Owen 260) “a senior ballistic expert in Zagreb had studied a map of
likely trajectory  patterns produced by UN
investigators in Sarajevo and believed the angle at which the mortar had
hit the roof of the market stall indicated that
the firing point was more likely to be 1,100-2,000 meters from the
impact than 2,000-3,000 meters, and that this
would tend to indicate that the mortar had been fired from a Bosnian
army position. When this highly charged
information reached the UN in New York on Tuesday everything was done to
clamp down on the number of people
who saw it so as to reduce the chance of press leak.” [Owen, p. 260].

Luko 96-01-26) Message posted on America-on-Line by UN Human Rights
Officer James Luko on 96-01-26 18:24:48 EST.

Luko 96-04-01) Message posted on America-on-Line by UN Human Rights
Officer James Luko on 96-04-01 15:28:34 EST.

Owen 100) “Meanwhile in the US the VOPP was coming under further ill
informed attack. Time magazine printed a big
piece with the sub-headline ‘Milosevic should be pleased. The West’s
plan will reward his aggression by giving him
almost everything he wants.’ Disgracefully, the accompanying map bore so
little relation to ours that it was
unrecognizable. I tried to counter these stories and there was
question-and-answer piece in Newsweek under the
heading ‘We’ve reached the crunch’, but the formidable disinformation
machine that was operating in the US
[emphasis added] swamped our small press office in Geneva and we began
on public relations grounds alone to think
we would do better if we were physically in New York.” [Owen, p.100]

“From the spring of 1993 to the summer of 1995, in my judgment, the
effect of US policy, despite it being called
‘containment’, was to prolong the war of the Bosnian Serbs in
Bosnia-Herzegovina.” [Owen, p.365]

Owen 354) Ibidem, p. 354

Owen 364) Ibidem, p. 364

Owen. 330) “The US initiative accepted many of the crucial points that
the Americans had resisted putting on the
negotiating table within the Contact Group for more than a year.” [Owen,
p. 330]

“Not surprisingly this initiative was welcomed in the EU, though with an
understandable frustration that the
Americans could not have agreed to put it on the negotiating table
months earlier, a sentiment shared fully by the
Russians. In Belgrade, the initiative posed no problems for Milosevic,
who had been arguing these points for months.”
[Owen, p. 330]

Fleming) Journalist Thomas Fleming visited Kosovo personally and left
with the following impression: "I visited a ruined
church overlooking one of the villages where the resistance began, and
after spending a few moments on the streets of
Petch, I became convinced that the Serbian tales of oppression are not
all propaganda. Getting out of the car I began
walking toward the bazaar, when several muscular Albanians walked up to
me to make it plain I did not belong. They
did not know who or what I was, except that I was not Albanian. One of
them stuck his face in into mine and glared.
Anywhere else, I might have pushed his face in. Here it might have meant
our lives.
 As a young man, I used to frequent rough places and have been
black-only bars at two o'clock in the morning and
told to get my white a-- out if I knew what was good for me; as an adult
I have been jeered by feminists, slandered by
conservatives, and mugged by blacks and gypsies: I have talked to
communists and Klansmen, white racists and black
racists and Jewish racists, but I never knew what real hatred was until
I ran into the Albanians." [Thomas Fleming:
“Ghosts in the Graveyard”, War & Propaganda (The True Story About the
Balkans), The Rockford Institute, 934 North
Main Street, Rockford, Illinois 61103, 815-954-5053]
There are several examples of this mentality. For example in June 99 an
Albanian gang in a refugee camp in Macedonia
attempted to mutilate and kill a 7-year-old Gypsy boy; “The look in
their eyes when they tried to tear this boy’s arm out -
there was just fire in their eyes.” David Rohde: “Kosovar Attack on
Gypsies Reveals Desire for Revenge”, NY Times,
6/7/99
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a375c145b185c.htm
In August Albanian terrorists razed the homes of 6000 Gypsies in
Rasadnik, Kosovo. A week earlier they burned Azam Azizi,
a Gypsy alive. (The humanitarian NATO forces stood by.) [“Gypsies Burned
Alive By KLA Terrorists”, Original Sources
http://originalsources.com/OS8-99HL/8-19-1999.3.shtml

Baldwin) Barry Baldwin: “Ruritanian Revenge and Reality”, Chronicles,
January 1998

Craig) Senator Larry E. Craig: “Bosnia II: The Clinton Administration
Sets Course for NATO Intervention in Kosovo”
http://www.senate.gov/~rpc/releases/1998/kosovo.htm

Racak) Melissa Eddy: “Trail of Bodies Tells Kosovo Tale”, The Associated
Press, AP-NY-01-16-99 1718EST; Juliet
Terzieff: “Horror on the hillside in Kosovo”, The Times of London,
January 17, 1999

Figaro, Le Monde) Rene Girard: “The images filmed during the attack on
the village of Racak contradict the
Albanian’s and OSCE’s version”, Le Figaro, January 20, 1999; Cristopher
Chatelot, Le Monde, January 21, 1999]

SIRIUS) A lot of  materials on Racak has been collected by the Strategic
Issues Research Institute:
http://www.siri-us.com/backgrounders/Archives_Kosovo/KLA-Racak.html
http://www.siri-us.com/backgrounders/Archives_Kosovo/KLA-Racak-Forensics.html

Tanjug) Tanjug, April 4, 1999

AFP) Agence France Presse March 31, 1999 Kosovo-stadium 16:04 GMT

Trifkovic) Srdja Trifkovic, Serbian Unity Congress, 1999

Globe) Anne E. Kornblut: “Some of Kosovo's missing men turn up at the
border”, Boston Globe, 04/03/99, page A8

Rambouillet) Text of the proposed Rambouillet Agreement:
http://www.state.gov/www/regions/eur/ksvo_rambouillet_text.html

FAIR, Cockburn) “They Call This Victory”, Fairrness and Accuracy in
Reporting, 130 W. 25th Street, New York, NY
10000, June 4, 1999
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/victory.html
Alexander Cockburn: Victory?, NewsMax.com, June 5, 1999
http://38.201.154.108/commentarchive.shtml?a=1999/6/5/063711

Removal) The number of Germans killed during the removal is disputed,
but it is probably higher than the number of Albanians
killed in Kosovo after the start of the bombing. Yet it has never been
used as a proof of inherently bestial nature of the Czechs
or as after-the-fact justification of Hitler’s annexation of the
Sudetenlands. A large number of Germans were also removed
from Poland with less than human methods.

Senator Robert Dole

Res 150) These events have been documented by Strategic Issues Research
Institute
http://www.siri-us.com/backgrounders/KLA-Dole-Kos-Res.150_6-86.html

Exodus) Strategic Issues Research Institute collected a number of
articles about Kosovo from the eighties. The ordeal of the
Serbs is well documented.
http://www.siri-us.com/backgrounders/Archives_Kosovo/Kosovo-1980s.html
See also Alex N. Dragnich: “The Future of Kosovo”, War & Propaganda (The
True Story About the Balkans), The
Rockford Institute, 934 North Main Street, Rockford, Illinois 61103,
815-954-5053

Aarons 74)  See also Mark Aarons, John Loftus: Unholy Trinity, St.
Martin’s Press, New York, 1991, p. 74; and Florence
Hamlish Levinsohn: Belgrade (Among the Serbs), Ivan R. Dee, Chicago,
1994, p. 36

Unification) It is worthwhile noting that Germany and Italy are more
diverse linguistically than Yugoslavia. For example the
Italian dialects are mutually incomprehensible while the language spoken
by the Serbs and the Croats is identical. Nor do we
refer to the former countries as “Prussia dominated Germany” or
“Sardinia dominated Italy”. I have never heard the term
“Czech dominated Czechoslovakia”. There are also substantial regional
differences within Italy and Germany: the disparity,
even enmity between the Italian North and South is notorious. The
difference in outlook and mentality between the Catholic
south and the Protestants north in Germany is widely acknowledged. Yet
the unity of these two countries has never been in
serious jeopardy. Nobody ever questioned the unity of Poland. The Czech
and Slovak politicians opted for a hasty split of the
country in 1990 but coexistence was possible and favored by a slight
majority. Civil war was out of the question. Moldavia
was only forcibly separated from Romania by Stalin after WWII.

Incorporation) Had not Croatia been incorporated into Yugoslavia after
WWI and especially after WWII it would have been
considered a defeated country on par with Gemany. Serbia would have been
a victor and could have dictated the borders
between the two countries.

West 605) Rebecca West: Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, Penguin Books, 1994,
p. 605; see also Levisohn, p.11

Aarons) Mark Aarons, John Loftus: Unholy Trinity, St. Martin’s Press,
New York, 1991

Aarons 270)  Ibidem, p. 270

Fleming) Thomas Fleming: "Under Western Lies", War and Propaganda

Children) Peter J. Children: “U.S. Betrayal of Serbia Runs Deep, Reaches
High”, American Srbobran, February 28, 1996

Ellul 58) Jacques Ellul: Propaganda, Vintage Books, New York, 1973, p.
58
 

Ruder Finn

Owen 119) David Owen: Balkan Odyssey, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995, p.
119. If I recall it correctly, Lawrence
Eagelburger is one of those who publicly opposed the breakup of
Yugoslavia. Then he began to refer to Milosevic as “war
criminal” basically because Milosevic (like most Serbs) still opposed
it.

Levinsohn 313) Florence Hamlish Levinsohn: Belgrade, Among the Serbs,
Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1994, p.313

Selic) Momcilo Selic: “Letter From Serbia”, War & Propaganda (The True
Story About the Balkans), The Rockford Institute,
934 North Main Street, Rockford, Illinois 61103, 815-954-5053

Lituchy) For further information on Ruder Finn see also Barry Lituchy:
“Media deception and the Yugoslav civil war”, The
College Voice, College of Staten Island, City University of New York,
February 1995; and Isabel Vincent: “International
Media Under Attack in Serbia”, National Post, November 23, 1998
http://www.nationalpost.com/news.asp?s2=world&f=981123/2041845.html

The State Department

Germany) If the German government had any contacts with Senator Dole or
his staff is a question that has yet to be answered.

Woodward 283) Susan L. Woodward: Balkan Tragedy, The Brookings
Institution, Washington, D.C., 1995, p. 283

Rockler) The phrase was used in a slightly different context in the
following article: Walter J. Rockler: “War Crimes Law
Applies To U.S. Too”, Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1999
http://suc.org/kosovo_crisis/html/0523_ct.html

Owen 46) “The recognition of Bosnia Herzegovina was the trigger that
many had predicted it would be to the formal
outbreak of war ... The critical mistake made by the EC as well as by
the US was to continue down to the path
towards recognizing Bosnia-Herzegovina in the Spring of 1992 when every
single sign indicated that it would be like
pouring petrol on a smoldering fire.” (David Owen: Balkan Odyssey,
Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995,  p.46)

“When I started on the Balkan desk I quickly became convinced by the
strong consensus among intelligence analysts
that recognition would worsen the problems in Croatia and bring war in
Bosnia.” (George Kenney: “Steering Clear of
Balkan Shoals”, The Nation, January 8/15, 1996, p.23)

“NATO’s recognition in 1992 of an independent, sovereign state of Bosnia
called into being a civil war, not a
country.” (Henry Kissinger: “America in the Eye of a Hurricane”, Los
Angeles Time Syndicate, September 8, 1996, p. C07)

Holbrooke) Richard Holbrooke began to publicly question the Treaty of
Versailles. Its abolition was one of the key foreign
policy objectives of Adolf Hitler.

Partition) There would not be any point trying to keep Yugoslavia
together at all cost if the constituent nations could not and did
not want to live together. But before splitting a country an agreement
should have been reached among all the parties. This was
the objective of the European negotiator Lord Carrington. But his own
government pulled the rug from under him by
unilaterally recognizing Croatia within arbitrary rather than negotiated
borders.

Thomas) Raju G.C. Thomas: “Nations, States, and Secession: Lessons from
the Former Yugoslavia”, Mediterranean
Quarterly, Volume 5, Number 4, Fall 1994, p. 40-65

Cohen) “said one State Department official ... ‘Our quandary is that the
demonization of Milosevic is necessary to
maintain the air attacks, but each time we denounce him, it's harder to
shake hands with him.’ “ Roger Cohen:
“Milosevic's Acts May Prevent More Talks”, San Francisco Chronicle,
Tuesday, March 30, 1999
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/03/30/MN67315.DTL

Conclusion

Ellul 73) Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, Vintage Books, 1973, p. 73

Ellul 58)  Ibidem, p. 58

Rockler) Walter J. Rockler: “War Crimes Law Applies To U.S. Too”,
Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1999
http://suc.org/kosovo_crisis/html/0523_ct.html

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