As the events in Kosovo unfolded, few questioned the imperative for war. But
                 the obscurities of the Rambouillet negotiations reveal a hidden agenda; one that has
                 paved the way for Nato's unaccountable abuse of power in the future. Rebecca
                 Sumner uncovers what we were never told.
                        There was Nato, an overtly American-led and militaristic organisation,
                 engaging in a war from which it apparently stood to gain very little. We might
                 object to the propaganda and deplore the civilian killings, but few of us questioned
                 the fundamental imperative for war. Wrong-footed, we stood about bemused,
                 reluctantly agreeing with Glenys Kinnock when she argued that here, at last, was a
                 justifiable Western intervention.
                        Milosevic had killed 2000 civilians in the year leading to Nato's bombings. We
                 were bombarded with pictures of dying Kosovar Albanians. The enemy was
                 demonised in the most emotive terms, playing on our cultural devastation from
                 World War II. Indeed, Blair claimed the Nazi holocaust as his motivation
                 (Newsweek) and Clare Short denounced the Labour MPs who requested a
                 parliamentary vote as "equivalent to the people who appeased Hitler."
                        We were the forces of light. Our motive; humanitarianism. Yet the
                 humanitarian argument is famously flawed; the very governments using it supported
                 the single greatest case of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia in the 1990s - in Krajina,
                 1995. America and Britain - who spearheaded the Kosovo campaign - perform
                 atrocities globally, aiding the persecution and killing of Kurdish, East Timorese,
                 Columbian and Iraqi people - and a host of others.
                        Nevertheless, we were at last on The Right Side, protecting the rights and lives
                 of the innocent. Well, some of them. According to the Yugoslav Provisional
                 Assessment of Destruction and Damages (unpublished in Britain), Nato's bombing
                 killed several thousand civilians; "Nearly eight hundred thousand civilians were
                 forced to flee Millions have been exposed to poisonous gasses Almost 2.5 million
                 citizens have no means to sustain minimal living conditions." Destroyed
                 infrastructure - including 480 educational establishments, 365 religious centres and
                 34 hospitals - forms a depressingly extensive list.
                        As the campaign rolled out, it increasingly appeared to be a tragic parody of
                 humanitarianism. Jamie Shea's assertion that actions were efficiently directed
                 against military hardware was absurd. After we were told that two-thirds of
                 Serbia's MiG-29s and 40% of its tanks had been destroyed, media coverage
                 showed three-quarters of the MiG-29s and 95% of the tanks intact. As the truth
                 about civilian casualties emerged (three to four times more civilians than soldiers
                 were killed), Alistair Campbell lashed out at the media for reporting them. We
                 entered the realm of Orwellian doublespeak, brilliantly captured by Jeremy Hardy;
                 "Some say that the humanitarian disaster caused by Nato's humanitarian
                 intervention can only be resolved by all-out ground humanitarianism." (The
                 Guardian)
                        But war is bloody. Kosovar Albanians were being murdered. We had to do
                 something. Ludicrous logic aside (if the aim is to save lives, surely not escalating the
                 violence is preferable to escalating the violence), there is no realistic basis for the
                 assumption that intervention will reconcile these ethnic groups. If the lessons of
                 Bosnia are noted, it will do just the opposite. Indeed, the present levels of violence
                 in Kosovo reveal reconciliation as untenable - at least for a generation or two.
                        The most disturbing flaw in the humanitarian argument is this; the powerful
                 define 'humanitarian' to suit their needs. Thus America simultaneously supports the
                 killing of Turkish Kurds and independence for Iraqi Kurds. And thus, troops rush
                 to protect Albanian Kosovars while the UN peace-keeping forces protecting
                 Rwandan Tutsis (over half a million of whom were being murdered) were stepped
                 down - at the insistence of the US.
                        If a country is powerful, its legitimacy to enforce 'humanitarianism' rests not on
                 its previous record but on its rhetoric. Whilst no amount of pretty speaking could
                 save Iran from ridicule when it offered to prevent massacres in Bosnia, America -
                 aided by a handful of spin doctors and a steady stream of graphic pictures - led
                 Nato to intervene in a 600 year-old civil war in Kosovo, with absolutely no
                 mandate.
                        Humanitarianism is the card up the sleeve of post-Vietnam Western
                 governments; it is not a genuine motivation for war.
                        A more plausible motive was containment; until refugees looked set to
                 destabilise the region, Nato seemed uninterested. Regional turbulence however,
                 was unlikely to cause quite as much disruption as did Nato's containment effort,
                 which seriously aggravated the Russians and Chinese and looked for a while likely
                 to spark World War III.
                        A cynic might add economic motivations. War forced the Nato states to
                 massively increase their arms expenditure as well as underlining the need for
                 long-term military spending. And then, as US Secretary of State Albright said,
                 "What good is this marvellous military force if we can never use it?"
                        These imperatives themselves are nothing new - despite the
                 smoother-than-ever marketing that accompanied the bombing (we are consumers
                 of war - just ask The Sun). The real precedent that has been set is more sinister.
                        According to international law - and Nato's founding documents - Nato must
                 be subordinate to the UN and comply with international law. In Kosovo however,
                 the Alliance waged war without declaring war (illegal), used cluster bombs
                 (outlawed for exceptional inhumanity) and repeatedly refused to subordinate their
                 actions to the UN.
                        Other aspects of international law are more problematical. On the one hand,
                 the rights of individuals against oppressive states are guaranteed (lending the claim
                 of 'humanitarian bombing' tenuous legitimacy). On the other, the use of force -
                 unless it is in self-defence or authorised by the Security Council after it has
                 determined that peaceful means have failed - is outlawed.
                        Nato was obviously acting neither on humanitarian grounds nor in self-defence.
                 But peaceful means - hadn't they failed? We all heard that the Rambouillet
                 negotiations collapsed after Serbia refused to co-operate.
                        The full text of the Rambouillet Accord was unknown until it was published on
                 the Internet a few weeks into the war. The Contact Group (who led the talks) had
                 agreed to remain silent. When it was finally brought to the attention of two of the
                 most senior officials in the German foreign ministry, they were "completely
                 surprised"; the text was "completely new" to them.
                        Yugoslavia's participation was conditional; it was assured that military
                 measures would only be discussed after Kosovan autonomy had been signed off.
                 Accordingly, the Rambouillet document avoided military references. "We have
                 accepted the text," said Serb President Milan Milutinovic "and are ready to grant
                 broad autonomy to Kosovo."
                        On the last day of initial negotiations, the final draft was presented with a new
                 appendix. Appendix B demanded that Yugoslavia relinquish its sovereignty,
                 subjecting the whole country (including Montenegro and Serbia) to Nato
                 occupation:
                        "Nato personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and
                 equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the
                 Federal Republic of Yugoslavia including associated airspace and territorial waters.
                 This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, maneuver, billet, and
                 utilization of any areas or facilities "
                        Nato also demanded unconditional immunity from any criminal and disciplinary
                 action, use of all streets, airports and ports and broadcasting rights across the
                 whole electro-magnetic spectrum.
                        This incredible appendix went unreported - to the public and politicians alike.
                 The US State Department's fact sheet (Understanding the Rambouillet Accords)
                 and The Foreign Office's message to diplomats summarising the Accord both
                 omitted any mention of it.
                        On February 23, the co-Chairmen of the talks (Robin Cook and his French
                 counterpart, Hubert Vedrine) released a statement saying the accord "respect[ed]
                 the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of
                 Yugoslavia." The negotiations, they said, had launched a process "bringing together
                 those long divided". In fact, the Serb delegation had repeatedly been refused the
                 opportunity to be 'brought together' with the Kosovar Albanians; the delegations
                 did not once meet, despite Serbian requests to do so.
                        One might reasonably argue that delaying the military issue would have played
                 into the hands of the Serbs, who could later refuse an international presence. Here
                 lies the crux of the matter; the Serbs were willing to have an international presence
                 - as long as it was not Nato. A UN force was approved. To peacefully secure
                 Kosovo's autonomy, the West only had to offer UN rather than Nato forces.
                        On 24 February, Cook was interviewed by Radio 4. "We put very strong
                 pressure on the Serb side to recognise that it had to have an international military
                 presence... We want it to have a Nato command structure."
                        These extraordinary circumstances suggest the 'peaceful negotiations' were
                 designed to provide a pretext for war. In fact, the groundwork had been laid
                 months before. In August 1998, the US Senate Republican Policy Committee
                 commented; "Planning for a US-led Nato intervention in Kosovo is now largely in
                 place. The only missing element seems to be an event - with suitably vivid media
                 coverage - that could make the intervention politically saleable That Clinton is
                 waiting for a 'trigger' in Kosovo is increasingly obvious."
                        The delegations agreed to meet again on 15 March. On 5 March, Cook and
                 Vedrine "emphasise[d] that an invited international military force is an integral part
                 of the package Those who put obstacles in the way will be held responsible."
                        Yugoslavia faced a harsh choice; to either relinquish its sovereignty or reject
                 the entire Accord.
                        On March 17, the Yugoslav Deputy Premier Markovic stated; "The Serbian
                 Government delegation has not received any answer to the question - why the draft
                 can no longer be amended The talks have been conducted in a manner contrary to
                 any normal method of negotiation."
                        The Serbs refused to sign up. Surprisingly, the Kosovar Albanians also
                 refused, later signing on March 18. Cook and Vedrine released another statement;
                 "In Paris, the Kosovo delegation seized [the] opportunity... Far from seizing this
                 opportunity, the Yugoslav delegation has tried to unravel the Rambouillet Accords."
                 Nato had its justification.
                        Milosevic sent this response; "We stay with our strong opinion to solve the
                 problems in Kosovo... The fact that negotiations did not take place in Rambouillet
                 and in Paris does not mean that we should give up."
                        On 24 March, the Yugoslav parliament proposed a UN monitor in Kosovo
                 and Nato began bombing.
                        If the Rambouillet Accords were orchestrated to justify a war, and if the
                 motive was not humanitarian, what was Nato's objective? Looking back at the
                 facts, a picture emerges:
                 1. Nato went to great lengths to prepare the war
                 2. Nato broke international law on several counts
                 3. For the first time, Nato acted beyond its jurisdiction (its member states)
                 4. Nato refused to subordinate itself to the UN
                        A quick survey of global events and opinion elucidates this picture:
                 The US refused France's call for a UN Security Council resolution to authorise the
                 deployment of peace-keepers, insisting "Nato should be able to act independently
                 of the United Nations". German plans for handing control to the UN were given
                 similarly short shrift.
                        On May 15, UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, spoke out against Nato,
                 saying that the use of force "must be under the authority of the United Nations".
                 The conference was not reported.
                        Marco Boni, South African foreign affairs spokesman, said; ''The erosion of
                 the UN Charter and the authority of the UN Security Council cannot be tolerated."
                 Former American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger commented that sending
                 Nato forces constituted an "exceeding of the Nato authority and of the international
                 law without precedent."
                        In this light, it would not be ludicrous to question whether Nato's aggression
                 was really aimed at Yugoslavia, or at international law and the UN. At every
                 possible instance, the Alliance undermined the UN, which - to some degree -
                 checks US powers. By obfuscating the Rambouillet negotiations, Nato forced the
                 hand of international bodies, promoting its own powers from being defensive of its
                 members to being aggressive and borderless.
                        Once the Cold War - and Nato's raison d'etre - was over, the Alliance set
                 about creating a new role for itself. A few years later, Nato has acted beyond the
                 remit of its own member states, international law and its founding documents,
                 waging war on a sovereign country without any mandate. Since the end of the Cold
                 War, Nato has - at US urging - been expanded.
                        The timing corresponds perfectly with Nato's announcement of its 'New
                 Security Agenda'. On March 9 2000, Dr. Javier Solana, Nato's Secretary General,
                 spoke in London; "The old security agenda, over Nato's first 40 years, was based
                 on a relatively simple strategic imperative: territorial defence. It was a passive,
                 reactive agenda, imposed by the dictates of the Cold War. We are now, thankfully,
                 rid of this straitjacket And with this change, we can shape the security agenda, not
                 be driven by it. We can lift our sights higher. Today, Nato is setting the security
                 agenda in ways we could only dream of a decade ago."
                        Effectively, Nato has - in our names - conducted a war against international
                 law on Serbian soil. The victory has not been 'peace' in Kosovo; the intervention
                 has killed thousands, escalated violence and exacerbated a situation that is likely to
                 take generations to resolve.
                        Rather, Nato's victory has been the brilliantly orchestrated precedent that has
                 been set. The UN has been humiliated and sidelined and Nato is acknowledged as
                 the world's greatest power. The facts beg a terrifying question: To whom now, is
                 Nato accountable?

                               By Rebecca Sumner, Freelance Journalist
                                    Email: [email protected]

"Determined to transform a potential liability into a defining asset, Vice President Al Gore today
formally introduced Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut as his Democratic running mate
and portrayed his selection of Mr. Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, as a measure of his devotion to
tolerance and his willingness to break barriers" – thus the New York Times's (8/9/00) entirely
predictable attempt to bully people into voting for Al Gore. If you are for "tolerance" and a
"willingness to break barriers" you have to be for Gore. If you are not for Gore, then you are
obviously against "tolerance" and a "willingness to break barriers." Just in case, we did not quite get
the message, there is the inevitable clincher: "Mr. Gore compared his selection of Mr. Lieberman to
his party's choice of John F. Kennedy as the first Roman Catholic presidential nominee 40 years
ago."

Gore now basks in the glow of having made a supposedly brave decision. "Mr. Gore… selected
him despite his religion and any possible anti-Semitic backlash," the Times intones piously. Leave
aside for the moment the absurd idea that provoking "racists" and "anti-Semites" to do their
damnedest is a perilous enterprise. The truth is, putting Lieberman on the ticket is about as
non-controversial you can get. You cannot get more mainstream than Senator Joseph Lieberman of
Connecticut. He is chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. And he has never come across
a United States military intervention that he was not willing to fund to the hilt or to pop on the
Newshour with Lim Lehrer to defend with his usual sanctimony. This is why the Wall Street
Journal cannot get enough of him despite his liberal voting record in the Senate. Lieberman has
been a fervent advocate of expanding NATO. He urged military intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo.
He supported every bombing mission flown over Iraq over the last 10 years. Lieberman voted
against limiting NATO expansion to only Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. He voted
against limiting the President's powers to impose sanctions on other states. He voted in favor of
giving the IMF every dollar it asks for. He voted in favor of strengthening the trade embargo against
Cuba.

George Dubya, Dick Cheney, Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman are all reading from the same script.
All four are ardent advocates of the American Empire. One wonders what on earth Cheney and
Lieberman will argue about in their Vice Presidential debate. Who will be the first to organize an
invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein? Who will be the first to recognize the independence of
Montenegro? Who will be the first to organize a military expedition to Belgrade to seize Slobodan
Milosevic and ship him off to The Hague? Who will be the first to invite the Baltic states and
Ukraine to join NATO? Who will be the first to secure funding to build the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline?
Who will be the first to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem? Who will tighten the
screws on the "rogue states" – sorry, "states of concern" – the hardest? Lieberman is without doubt
far more of an interventionist than Cheney Where Cheney might on occasion follow traditional
Republican caution about getting involved in fights in far off places peripheral to US interests, to the
self-righteous Lieberman any US hesitation at all is evidence of moral turpitude. Gore-Lieberman
2000 is the demented world-view of the New Republic and Weekly Standard brigade incarnate.

Lieberman's claim to be the conscience of the Democratic Party, perhaps of the US Congress,
perhaps even of the American people stems from his speech denouncing President Clinton's
transgressions in the Oval Office. "[T]he President apparently had extramarital relations with an
employee half his age," he declared sonorously, "and did so in the workplace, in the vicinity of the
Oval Office. Such behavior is not just inappropriate. It is immoral. And it is harmful, for it sends a
message of what is acceptable behavior to the larger American family, particularly to our children,
which is as influential as the negative messages communicated by the entertainment culture." Terrific
stuff. But that was not really the issue and Lieberman knew it. Clinton had been accused of perjury
– a rather more serious matter. "I believe that the harm the President's actions have caused extend
beyond the political arena," he went on, "I am afraid that the misconduct the president has admitted
may be reinforcing one of the worst messages being delivered by our popular culture, which is that
values are fungible. And I am concerned that his misconduct may help to blur some of the most
important bright lines of right and wrong in our society." Yet one instance of misconduct that
Lieberman did not address himself to, either in his speech or, to the best of my knowledge, ever
since, was Clinton's bombing caper over Sudan launched just two days after his public admission of
lying about Monica Lewinsky. During that infamous bombing run – undertaken to distract an
appalled nation – Clinton destroyed a pharmaceutical factory within a poor African nation. This,
however, did not fill Lieberman with anguish. He has never offered an apology or expressed his
condolences or regrets to the Sudanese.

As he concluded his speech, Lieberman urged Congress not to do anything rash. He also went out
of his way to make sure everyone knew that he did not wish the President to resign. "It seems to me
that talk of impeachment and resignation at this time is unjust and unwise. For that reason, while the
legal process moves forward, I believe it is important that we provide the President with the time
and space and support he needs to carry out his most important duties and protect our national
interest and security." In December 1998, the day before the impeachment vote was to take place in
the US House of Representatives, Bill Clinton decided that, in order to "protect our national interest
and security" he had to bomb Iraq. The ostensible reason was Saddam Hussein's refusal to allow
United Nations inspectors to continue checking for alleged weapons of mass destruction. Lieberman
– predictably enough – was on the Newshour that night vigorously applauding Clinton's action. The
President "remains our commander-in-chief," he intoned, "and I think it should be clear to everyone
looking at this that he had a pressing responsibility to do exactly what he did tonight as our
commander-in-chief. Honestly, if he did not, I think that he would have been derelict in his duties."
Clinton's attack accomplished nothing whatsoever. 20 months later and Saddam still refuses entry to
the UN inspectors. Will Jim Lehrer have the courage to ask the morally upright Senator whether,
perhaps in retrospect, he now has doubts as to the usefulness of a bombing mission he had once so
stoutly defended?

The answer almost certainly is no. We are living at a time when it is the bombers who are deemed
reasonable, mature, bipartisan, and thoughtful. And it is the skeptics who are dismissed as
extremists. Lieberman once described Kosovo as the "heart of Europe." It is nothing of the sort. It is
the backwater of Europe. But thanks to hysterics like him, the United States now has troops
stationed in parts of the world that are of marginal significance at best. Here is how Lieberman once
justified dispatching US forces to Bosnia: "When the Senate debated whether to ratify the
President's decision to send 20,000 American soldiers to Bosnia, I proposed that we had to view
our vote to send Americans into harm's way both as an expression of our continuing interest in
European peace as well as an integral part of our mutual responsibility with the NATO nations. With
Bosnia, our allies were calling on us to help them come together and act with force to stop
aggression in Europe." Behind the vacuous pieties is the standard US inversion of the truth. The
Europeans had put forward a number of peace plans for Bosnia, each one of which the United
States deliberately sabotaged. The Clinton Administration was itching to bomb the Serbs; the
Europeans were desperately trying to prevent this. Eventually, Albright, Holbrooke and Lieberman
got their way.

Back in October 1998, Lieberman was already urging military intervention in Kosovo. Appearing
on the Newshour with his usual sidekick Senator John Warner – widely believed to be the stupidest
man to enter the Senate in a generation – and fielding the customary toothless questions from Jim
Lehrer, Lieberman trotted out standard boilerplate about "the credibility of the United States and
NATO." Asked to justify US bombing of a small country that had never done us any harm,
Liberman rambled on (making all the classic "neo-conservative" pit stops along the way): "We have
been involved in two world wars in this century, actually three, if you consider the cold war.
Because we didn't get involved early enough to stifle conflict….So it's a question of acting early to
stop a broader war in the Balkans, but also it's a question of acting out of our humanitarian values to
prevent the kind of starvation of women and children and freezing to death of women and children
and older people that will occur if this aggression by Serbia doesn't stop." That the Balkans were
going up in smoke in large part due to US meddling is a factor that never seems to enter the
Lieberman moral equation.

In a memorable exchange on NBC's Meet the Press on April 25, 1999, at the height of NATO's
onslaught on Yugoslavia, Pat Buchanan suggested to Lieberman: "We have failed in our strategic
objectives, and it is now becoming basically no longer a war for Kosovo but a war to save NATO's
credibility and NATO's face. And that does not justify sending an army of 100,000 American
ground troops into the Balkans." Lieberman responded with the usual bromides about Munich and
appeasement: Buchanan "reveals a lack of learning the lessons of World War II and, indeed, of the
Cold War….America is more than a piece of real estate. America is a series of moral principles that
begin with the right to life and liberty that the Declaration says our creator gave us….Also, the
Second World War taught us that if you don't stop a smaller conflict in Europe early it's going to
spread and we're going to get into a world war." Buchanan responded by tartly asking if NATO
action had brought peace in the Balkans any nearer: "We have widened the war. We have estranged
the Russians. We have destabilized Macedonia and Montenegro and we have ignited, not caused,
but ignited, the greatest human rights catastrophe in the history of the Kosovar Albanians. How can
you defend the policy of Balkan Bay of Pigs?"

Lieberman had no answer other than to urge US escalation: "I hope the air campaign, even if it does
not convince Milosevic to order his troops out of Kosovo, will so devastate his economy, which it's
doing now, so ruin the lives of his people, that they will rise up and throw him out. But there is no
substitute for victory here. If it takes ground troops, we must use them." So here was this
supposedly highly moral man, this non-partisan figure, this passionate pontificator on "values"
demanding that the United States commit war crimes. Terrorizing civilians, destroying their
economy, ruining their lives so as to get them to change their government is without question a
flagrant and outrageous violation of the laws of war. Lieberman worries about gangsta rap. But the
United States as a gangsta state is more than OK by him.

                        The final toll of civilians confirmed massacred by Yugoslav forces in
                        Kosovo is likely to be under 3,000, far short of the numbers claimed
                        by Nato governments during last year's controversial air strikes on
                        Yugoslavia.

                        As war crimes experts from Britain and other countries prepare to
                        wind down the exhumation of hundreds of graves in Kosovo on
                        behalf of the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former
                        Yugoslavia in the Hague, officials concede they have not borne out
                        the worst wartime reports. These were given by refugees and
                        repeated by western government spokesmen during the campaign.
                        They talked of indiscriminate killings and as many as 100,000
                        civilians missing or taken out of refugee columns by the Serbs.

                        The fact that far fewer Kosovo Albanians were massacred than
                        suggested by Nato will raise sharp questions about the
                        organisation's handling of the media and its information strategy.

                        However, commentators yesterday stressed that the new details
                        should not obscure the fact that the major war crime in the tribunal's
                        indictment of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, and four
                        other Serb officials is the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo and forced
                        deportation of hundreds of thousands of people.

                        "The point is did we successfully pre-empt or not," Mark Laity, the
                        acting Nato spokesman, said last night. "I think the evidence shows
                        we did. We would rather be criticised for overestimating the
                        numbers who died than for failing to pre-empt. Any objective
                        analysis would say there was a clear crisis. There was
                        indiscriminate killing. There were attempts to clear hundreds of
                        thousands of people out of their homes."

                        When Yugoslav forces withdrew from Kosovo in June last year, Nato
                        spokesmen estimated that the Serbs had killed at least 10,000
                        civilians. While the bombing was under way William Cohen, the US
                        defence secretary, announced that 100,000 Kosovo Albanian men of
                        military age were missing after being taken from columns of
                        families being deported to Albania and Macedonia. "They may have
                        been murdered," he said. The fear was they might share the fate of
                        the men who were separated from their wives and children and
                        executed when Serb forces overran the town of Srebrenica in
                        Bosnia.

                        But while some 7,000 Bosnian Muslims died in the week-long
                        Srebrenica massacre in 1995, less than 3,000 Kosovo Albanian
                        murder victims have been discovered in the whole of Kosovo. "The
                        final number of bodies uncovered will be less than 10,000 and
                        probably more accurately determined as between two and three
                        thousand," Paul Risley, the Hague tribunal's press spokesman,
                        said yesterday.

                        In three months of digging this summer, the tribunal's international
                        forensic experts found 680 bodies at 150 sites. This was in addition
                        to the 2,108 bodies found at 195 sites last year before exhumations
                        were called off because of winter frosts. "By October we expect to
                        have enough evidence to end the exhumations by foreign teams,
                        and they will not be necessary next year," Mr Risley added.

                        Although the tribunal has received reports of another 350 suspected
                        grave sites, it believes the cost and effort of uncovering them would
                        not be justified. Some suspicious mounds or patches of rough earth
                        in fields where villagers reported a foul stench turned out to contain
                        dead animals or to be empty.

                        When the tribunal's teams reached Kosovo last summer, shortly
                        after the international peacekeepers, they were given reports of
                        11,334 people in mass graves, but the results of its exhumations
                        fall well short of that number. In a few cases, such as the Trepca
                        mine where hundreds of bodies were alleged to have been flung
                        down shafts or incinerated, they found nothing at all.

                        The tribunal's indictment of President Milosevic includes the charge
                        that during Nato's bombing campaign Serb police shot 105 ethnic
                        Albanian men and boys near the village of Mala Krusa in western
                        Kosovo. Witnesses claimed hay was piled on the bodies and set
                        alight. Tribunal experts believe the remains may have been
                        tampered with later, since the bones of only a few people were
                        found.

                        Motives questioned

                        The exhumation of less than 3,000 bodies is sure to add fuel to
                        those who say Nato's intervention against Yugoslavia was not
                        "humanitarian" and that it had other motives such as maintaining its
                        credibility in a post-cold war world. Others say Nato's air strikes
                        revealed a grotesque double standard since western governments
                        did nothing when hundreds of thousands were being massacred in
                        Rwanda.

                        Carla del Ponte, the tribunal's chief prosecutor, told the UN security
                        council: "Our task is not to prepare a complete list of war casualties.
                        Our primary task is to gather evidence relevant to criminal charges."

                        Evidence of the forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of
                        people was overwhelming before the tribunal gained access to
                        Kosovo but the exhumations are aimed at finding evidence for the
                        charges of mass murder.

                        "Their benefit is to link forensic evidence to particular units of the
                        police and army operating in particular parts of Kosovo. It wasn't a
                        case of rogue units. The Serbian police state was fully involved," Mr
                        Risley said. But officials will not say how many of the 2,788 bodies
                        exhumed show clear signs of being victims of summary execution
                        such as being shot in the head from close range.

                        No Nato government has sought to produce a definitive total of
                        murdered ethnic Albanian civilians since the Serb offensives began
                        in March 1998, a year before the bombing. "No one is interested,"
                        complained a senior international official in Kosovo involved in
                        helping victims' families. "Nato doesn't want to admit the damage
                        wasn't as extensive as it said. Local Albanian politicians have the
                        same motive. If you don't have the true figure, you can exploit the
                        issue."

                        http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4052755,00.html

Last Friday, August 18, 2000, the London Guardian published an article entitled
"Serb Killings 'exaggerated' by West." It was subheaded: "Claims of up to
100,000
ethnic Albanians massacred in Kosovo revised to under 3,000 as exhumations near
end."

That article, in a well-known British newspaper, appears to be reverberating
around the world. Knowing of my interest in this subject, and my skepticism
about the
so-called "genocide," readers from all over the world have e-mailed me copies of
the Guardian article and commentary about it.

Justin Raimondo, (http://www.antiwar.com), wrote yesterday:

     "Think of what this has to mean: Madeleine Albright, James Rubin, and Jamie
Shea didn't pull             this off single-handedly. Not only the US government, but
     the worldwide media fabricated a "genocide" and, on that basis, launched a
savage war
     against a sovereign nation that had never attacked us, in the name of
     "humanitarianism - a war, I might add, that was stopped but has not ended.

     THE CASE OF THE MISSING CORPUS DELICTI

     In a sense, the NATO-crats have been tripped up by their own web of
propaganda: in their eagerness to charge Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic
     with "war crimes," and indict him before their self-appointed "War Crimes
Tribunal," Western governments have had to follow at least the forms of
     legality: due process, the rules of evidence - and, in the case of murder,
not to mention "genocide," the necessity of producing the corpus delicti. Where
are
     the bodies, all 100,000 of them?

In a great fanfare of publicity last year, scores of forensic experts flooded
Kosovo searching for those 100,000 bodies. At least one thousand of them were
supposed to
be in the Trepca mine, according to the Albanians. Not a single body was found
in the Trepca mine.

But the true nature of the Kosovo war was never a secret. Any journalist willing
to do some independent research had more than ample evidence that Clinton's
so-called "Humanitarian War" to stop a "genocide" was a lie. The U.S. State
Department, independent scientists and Interpol, Europe's international police
investigators ALL knew that the so-called "Kosovo Liberation Army" or KLA was
the military wing of Europe's major drug cartel. On the day Clinton started the
bombing, March 23, 1999, I wrote:

     "Today, without a vote in the Congress or the UN, President Clinton has in
effect declared war on Yugoslavia, which is approximately the size of the State
     of Kentucky. He is providing the Air Support the KLA lacks. Kosovo, which
is demanding independent status, is about 4,000 square miles which is about
     one tenth of Yugoslavia. The KLA is composed largely of non-Albanian
mercenaries who are financed with the Kosovo-Albanian heroin trade in
     Scandinavia, Italy, and the Czech Republic."

Part of the successive effort to convince the American people that we needed to
bomb Yugoslavia was the Clinton Administration's cunning scheme to change the
meaning of the word "genocide." That too was not hard to discern early in the
bombing. On March 29, 1999 I wrote:

     "Undersecretary James Rubin said on CNN yesterday that the Serbs were
"committing genocide" by driving Albanians out of their homes and telling them
     to leave the province. The Albanian population is said to be 1,800,000 and
the Serb population of Kosovo 200,000. However, at the borders, CNN reports a
     'trickle' of refugees - guessing that the Albanians are too terrified to
leave their homes.

     "One of those stories - or perhaps both of them are wrong. That's not a
problem for James Rubin. He appears to have changed the definition of genocide
     anyway. The Dictionary definition of genocide is 'the deliberate and
systematic extermination of a national or racial group.' Rubin says that
genocide
     'includes' driving people out of their homes and forcing them to go
somewhere else.

     "If that is the case, that opens up a whole new set of 'war crimes' - for
example, the Croatians driving something like 700,000 Serbs out of Croatia a
couple
     of years ago. With Rubin's new definition of 'genocide' Croatian President
Tudjman is a war criminal. There were only about a million Serbs IN Croatia.

     "On the other hand, Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-NJ) said yesterday on CNN
that if Milosevic doesn't sign the document written, apparently, by
     the United States and presented to him in Paris for his signature, the
Clinton administration will "destroy his nation." When a nation is destroyed,
     of course, it isn't the head of the country who suffers. It's the people
whose houses, places of worship, schools and jobs that are destroyed. Many of
the
     people remaining in Kosovo, for example, will be killed.

Thanks to the support of senators like Lieberman, who may be rewarded by the
American people this fall with a boost in his status to Vice-President, Clinton
was able
to bomb Yugoslavia INCLUDING Kosovo for 79 days, destroying hospitals,
factories, schools, homes, water and power plants. Why? Because Milosevic would
not
sign a document in Rambouillet agreeing to allow NATO troops free reign in ALL
of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo.

And who, really, WERE the people fleeing Kosovo after the bombing began?
Actually, just about anyone who could, Serbs as well as Albanians. However, what
CNN
and other major news sources never reported was the fact that a huge proportion,
probably a third, of the Albanian living in Kosovo were illegal aliens who had
fled
across the mountain when the Communist regime in Albania collapsed and then its
economy collapsed, leaving 70% of the workers unemployed. In April 1999 I point
that out:

     Today in Kosovo, there is a much LARGER Albanian population than there was
in March of 1999 because KFOR has allowed anyone to stream across the
     border. So many of the so-called "refugees" in Kosovo now, living on the
Aid provided by over 600 international organizations and nations, never lived
     there before while most of the non-Albanians - Serbs, Gypsies, (Roma),
Egyptians, Montegegrines, Jews - have been driven out in order to make room for
     the invading horde from Albania.

     The American media reported none of that. But, in May, after the American
bombers bombed a Belgrade hospital, wiping out its maternity wing, we saw,
     thanks to Yugoslav TV, images of medical personnel trying to save tiny
babies in incubators after the electrical system had been destroyed. A reporter
in
     Brussels asked NATO spokesman Jamie Shea about it and Shea's answer was:

         "President Milosevic has got plenty of back-up generators. His armed
forces have hundreds of them. He can either use these back-up
         generators to supply his hospitals, his schools, or he can use them to
supply his military. His choice. If he has a big headache over this, then that
         is exactly what we want him to have and I am not going to make any
apology for that.

         "Secondly, I don't know if anybody realizes this. It's not often
remembered but over 50% of the refugees in Albania and the former Yugoslav
         Republic of Macedonia are under 18 years of age. Children, or at least
adolescents. 40% are under 14 years of age. 20,000 are under one year
         old and at least 100,000 babies have been born since this crisis in
March in those refugee camps, without incubators, without electricity,
         without medical support, without water, without a roof over their
heads, with absolutely nothing. And therefore they are still considerably less
         fortunate than those babies in Belgrade. NATO doesn't wish any harm to
any baby but let's make it clear here, the suffering, the real suffering,
         not the TV images, but the real suffering is in this business
overwhelmingly on the side of the Kosovar Albanians who don't have the choice,
         unfortunately, between an incubator with electricity supplied by
President Milosevic or an incubator without electricity. They simply have no
         incubator because they have been forced out of their homes and into
fields."

     The top reporters in the world were in that room. Not one of them
challenged this story. I pointed out that it was a mathematical impossibility
for 100,000
     babies to have been born in those refugee camps in 2 months time. According
to the UN figures, 60% of the refugees were children. The five refugee camps
     only HELD 77,000 people totally. At least 40% of the adult refugees were
men, (CNN reporting notwithstanding) and not all the Albanian women were of
     child-bearing age and nine months pregnant when the bombing started. So, we
were told by NATO's top propagandist, in effect that refugee camps that
     were occupied by approximately 27,000 adult women somehow managed, in a
space of two months, to produce 100,000 babies. And to this day, I have not
     seen a challenge of that figure from any journalist besides me.

     And, exactly who was it now that was responsible for the people fleeing
Kosovo? In that same article I also noted:

         "And who is it that has forced the Albanians out of their homes? Has
anyone noticed, besides me, that every time NATO brags about increasing
         and intensifying the air strikes that a new batch of Albanians arrive
at the borders for the Western nations to take care of? When a few days go
         by without bombs in Kosovo, the flow of refugees slows to a trickle or
stops. Are we all supposed to be too stupid to notice that?"

     The report in the Guardian that is only now being reported is old news. I
wrote a year ago, in August 1999: "NATO's 100,000 Kosovo Deaths Shrinking to
     3000-6000 Deaths and asked a simple question seemingly ignored by the world
media: "Where are the graves of the KLA terrorists who died in the ground
     war between them and the Yugoslav army?" Now we find that fewer than 3000
bodies have been found by the forensic experts. But exactly who ARE those
     3000 bodies? How many of them died in battles with the Yugoslav army?
Milosovic himself put the Yugoslav army deaths from the ground war with the
     KLA and the bombs dropped by NATO at 476. We know that some of the KLA
soldiers died when NATO bombs dropped on them.

     I pointed out a year ago that the best kept secret in the war was where the
KLA soldiers/terrorists were buried and how many there were. I get e-mail from
     many sources, and one of them has been KLA supporters in Kosovo. I asked a
couple of them how many KLA soldiers died. On three different occasions I
     was told 2,000.

     During the bombing I was not only criticized for my skepticism of NATO
propaganda, but was told on more than one occasion to stop writing those
stories.
     People in my own family refuse to believe the extent to which they were
lied to about the Serbs.

     The hard fact of the matter is that, using the definition put forth by the
U.S. State Department's Jamie Shea when the bombing began in March 1999, the
     "genocide" taking place in the Balkans has been led by none other than the
President of the United States, Bill Clinton, supported by the American TV
     Networks and major newspapers, plus most of official Washington, D.C. -
Democrats and Republicans, although many Republicans wanted to adhere to the
     U.S. Constitution and the Democrats wanted to totally ignore it. Some
Republicans, among them Bob Dole for whom I voted in 1996, have received
     hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds from the Albanian lobby
in America. Other Republicans have Albanian/KLA sympathizers on their
     staffs and their policies reflect a strong anti-Serb bias.

     However, as one of the House Impeachment managers pointed out, "Facts are
stubborn things." Eventually we have to face them. Sometimes it takes years
     or generations. It appears that in the information age those stubborn facts
are bubbling to the surface more quickly.

     To comment: [email protected]  Fax # (801) 426-8316

     To access Mary Mostert's Kosovo articles mentioned in this article: go to
     http://www.originalsources.com/OS5-00MQC/5-30-2000.1.html -Clinton: The
First American President to Commit Genocide in Europe
     http://www.originalsources.com/OS8-99MQC/8-5-1999.1.html - The Secret of
Kosovo - Where the KLA Terrorists Who Died in the Ground War are
     Buried
     http://originalsources.com/OS6-99MQC/6-15-1999.1.html - Is Clinton Creatng
the First Drug Dealer Terrorist State in Europe?
     http://www.originalsources.com/OS5-99MQC/5-26-1999.1.html - NATO Says
200,000 Albanian Women Gave Birth to 100,000 Babies in Two Months?

     http://www.originalsources.com/OS4-99MQC/4-27-1999.1.html- Clinton's
Hypocrisy and the American Public's Willingness to be Deceived
     http://www.originalsources.com/OS4-99MQC/4-2-1999.1.html - Albanians don't
allow Greeks or other minorities to live in Albania
     http://www.originalsources.com/OS3-99MQC/3-29-1999.1.html - The Cherokees'
Trail of Tears and Rubin's New "Genocide" Definition
     http://www.originalsources.com/OS3-99MQC/3-23-1999.2.html - Clinton Orders
Air Strikes in Support of Drug-Trade Financed KLA
     http://www.originalsources.com/OS3-99MQC/3-19-1999.1.html - Today the
Senate May Move to Defund Clinton's Bombing Bank
     http://www.originalsources.com/OS3-99MQC/3-15-1999.1.html - Why Is Clinton
Willing to Fight for Iran's Friends, Drug Dealers and Terrorists?
     http://www.originalsources.com/OS3-99MQC/3-11-1999.1.html - Peacekeeping:
Albanians Terrorize Kosovo, Clinton Threatens to Bomb Milosevic

KOSOVO. THREE men in a car hurl a grenade at a group of children playing basketball and then speed off.
Nine children are left injured. All are lucky to be alive. This gruesome scene is not from early last year. It happened last week
in the village of Crkvena Vodica, and the victims were Serb, not Albanian. The Guardian gave just two paragraphs to the
story on Saturday.
Shootings, bombings, kidnappings, murders and intimidation have forced most of Kosovo's pre-war Serb and Roma Gypsy
populations to flee. The Guardian and the rest of the press justified NATO's intervention as the only way to stop "ethnic
cleansing" against Albanians. Well, NATO now occupies Kosovo and ethnic cleansing is continuing, this time against
non-Albanians and those who defend them. On Friday a bomb damaged a building which houses the offices of Ibrahim
Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo, and of the authority representing Serbs in Kosovo. But, say the Guardian, foreign
secretary Robin Cook, and NATO chief George Robertson, such killings are as nothing compared with the atrocities
committed by Serb forces in Kosovo.
Remember the claims by NATO governments during the war about obscene atrocities and "genocide" by Serbs in Kosovo?
US defence secretary William Cohen said as the bombing intensified in March that 100,000 Albanian men of military age
were missing, adding, "They may have been murdered."
The media dutifully repeated the wartime propaganda. Even the left of Labour paper Action for Solidarity ["Shachtmanist
entryists" in Blair's party] quoted "100,000 Young Men Slaughtered". Opponents of the war faced vilification, particularly at
the hands of allegedly liberal journalists who backed the bombing. John Sweeney, journalist on the Guardian's sister paper,
the Observer, accused anti-war campaigner John Pilger of being an apologist for mass murder.

Remit

Sweeney predicted that those against the war would hang their heads in shame when the war ended and "tens of thousands of
bodies are discovered in mass graves".
Investigators for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia reported last week. After a year of examining
hundreds of sites they discovered less than 3,000 bodies of civilians in the whole of Kosovo.
That figure fits the estimate by the International Committee of the Red Cross earlier this year of about 2,400 Albanian dead.
The tribunal's findings are significant.
It is a pro-Western body. Its remit excludes investigating NATO war crimes. It is allowed to retry someone found innocent
until it gets a conviction. Its rules of evidence favour the prosecution. And much of its $93 million budget comes from private
sources, notably US billionaire George Soros.
Yet its investigators say they have not found mass graves. Rather, according to Benedicte Giaever of the Organisation for
Security and Cooperation in Europe, "What we have are consistent small numbers-two here, five there, ten here, seven
there."

Shot

The tribunal refuses to say how many of those people were shot at close range - executed - and how many were killed by
long range fire or explosions, what NATO refers to as "collateral damage" when its bombs kill civilians.
"Those of us who opposed the war are absolutely vindicated. We were right to challenge NATO's claims because this will
happen again," said Phillip Knightley, author and anti-war campaigner. Serbian forces did commit atrocities in Kosovo but on
nothing like the scale NATO and the media claimed-and mainly after NATO started bombing.
Audrey Gillan was one of the few journalists to say this at the time. She described again in the Guardian on Monday how
journalists were under instructions from their editors at the time to come up with the most grotesque atrocity stories.
Basic procedures, such as checking facts or taking account of the distressed state of Albanian refugees, went out the
window. The Guardian now blames NATO governments for misleading the public over the scale of the horror and the
success of the bombing, conveniently whitewashing the media's role.
It still backs the bombing "in spite of the lies". It gives no apology for spreading those lies or for refusing space to anti-war
campaigners. "Liberal bombers" such as Sweeney and Jonathan Freedland have yet to admit they were wrong. They are
quite prepared to churn out the same stuff the next time the West goes to war.
Who exactly should be hanging their heads in shame?

from:
Socialist Worker [London weekly], No. 1711, 26 August 2000
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/

On Aug. 17 NATO officials privately conceded that the figures they
released in 1999, allegedly a count of the people killed by Yugoslav
forces in Kosovo and repeated in headlines all over the Western world,
were much higher than the actual number of people killed there.

Independent findings by forensic teams of many nationalities working for

ICTY, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in
the Hague, have forced NATO's admission. The ICTY say that a total of
fewer than 3,000 bodies were exhumed and all have been examined.

While they have not yet officially released their report, spokespeople
for ICTY said that "at most, 3,000 people were killed". They also said
that there was no evidence of mutilations, that not all the dead can be
proved to be victims of murder or execution and that many among them
were Serbs or other non-Albanians.

Last year NATO charged that Yugoslav forces had massacred at least
10,000 people, but only after NATO spokespeople first tried to imply that 500,000,
then 250,000, then 100,000 supposedly "missing" people had also been killed.

They used such claims to try to justify NATO bombings, that had in fact
no basis under United Nations treaty laws, or, indeed, NATO's own
charter.

NATO has now been forced to admit, in effect, that it waged a lying war
of deliberate propaganda via the Western media, to win support for its
own illegal intervention that is known to have killed over 3,000 Yugoslavian
citizens, about one-third of them children.

Washington and NATO have not produced the slightest hard evidence that
Yugoslav forces carried out even a small-scale massacre of civilians,
let alone anything like the "genocide" which they were repeatedly charged
with in the Western press and on TV news bulletins.

The ICTY - itself created and funded by the NATO powers - has now been
forced to expose NATO's "Big Lie".

According to a report in the August 18 British Guardian, Mark Laity, the
new acting NATO spokesperson, said: "NATO never said the missing were all dead.
The figure we stood by was 10,000." Laity even protested, desperately trying
to pretend that NATO's intervention had probably stopped further killing.

The truth is that NATO's bombing killed thousands of people, and drove
many thousands more - Albanians as well as Serbs - from their homes. And,
that only since NATO occupied Kosovo, right-wing Albanian forces have killed
some 1,000 people, mostly Serb and Romany, while pushing those of all 23
other non-Albanian ethnic groups - (not one of which had any complaints when
ruled from Belgrade ! - for almost a century !) - right out of the
region.
John Catalinotto (FP/R)

-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Aug. 31, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------