Former Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini recently admitted that NATO aggression against Serbia (March 24 — June 10, 1999) had nothing to do with the alleged humanitarian concerns — NATO bombed Serbia for three months because the United States and Britain wanted to have a military base on its territory.
Dini said Serbian officials would have signed the ultimatum issued by the West at the conference in Rambouillet, if it had excluded only one word.
- The problem was only one adjective. It would have been sufficient for Serbia if the document excluded the word "military" and left only the "international presence" in Kosovo, but the U.S. insisted on NATO getting an opportunity to enter the province - Dini explained.
You can read more on this story over at Svetlana’s brilliant new anti-war website De(Construct).net
Next time you read a commentator in the MSM talk about NATO’s ‘humanitarian’ intervention in Kosovo, just email them the link.
It’s time to set the ‘official’ record straight.
POINT OF CLARIFICATION: The country which NATO illegally bombed in 1999 was of course called the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and not Serbia, which did not exist as a sovereign state at that time. But I've kept 'Serbia' in the account above because it was the word used by the Lamberto Dini.
17 comments:
It's not just the MSM. If you read any of the Trot blogs ( I don't recommend it - it was a novelty for a while, for me) you would find that it's still a matter of debate whether or not Serbia was the new Nazi Germany. You must be aware that even the Morning Star got a lot of flak for giving space to yourself and the Committed for the Defence of Slobodan Milosevic; and their editorials on Yugoslavia are pathetic - as bad as the MSM. These people seem to have infinite enthusiasm for fighting non-existant nazis ( and even the BNP have a better position on Yugoslavia, as on a lot of things - whether they're sincere is another matter), and an infinite interest in arcane pseudo-dialectical gobbledegook, but just don't seem to be interested enough to check out the facts about the destruction of a modern European nation by the US war machine.
Of course, the ' Labour movement' is even worse; they're not interested in anything but their well-paid jobs.
The 'Serbia' or rather'rump Yugoslavia' as Nazi Germany one is totally ludicrous and anyone who makes the claim is either a liar or a complete imbecile. No other part of the former Yugoslavia received so many refugees as Serbia-inluding many, many Muslims. Can you imagine Jews fleeing to Nazi Germany? Milosevic was such a racist/Nazi that he presided over the most multiethnic part of the former Yugoslavia- a place where the rights of all the minorites was guaranteed by law. Milosevic's rump Yugoslavia was also the place where the Roma community was treated the best- Nazis are not known for their good treatment of Roma.
Sure, if I was a hostile country intent on genocide in Kosovo, I wouldn't agree to letting the pesky UN MILITARY get in my way.
but to turn it around to make the UN look unreasonable?
Proposterous.
The trotskyist blogs are always preferable to those of 'septic tankies'. Less obsessional too!
Roland Hulme:
Enough with the genocide BS. If the war in 1998/1999 was a genocide then every single conflict that has ever happened is also a genocide.
Re Ronald Hulme and Andy- told you so. If you didn't laugh you'd cry.
roland: I'm surprised that an intelligent man like you is still talking about 'genocide' in Kosovo. It didn't happen
(if it did, where are all the bodies?) and neither was any planned.
andy aka philip cross: I think the word 'obsessional' applies to you!
I was took back by Rolands daft comment, he usually makes more sense than this. Smashing piece neil, wouldn't hold your breath waiting for "andy" to fathom even the basics such as the distinct lack of bodies or has he got form for this sort of rubbish. This "genocide" he waffles on about was like Iraqi "WMD's."
Lies, pure lies, and damned neocons.
Indeed, in Kosovo the stated (though not real reason) for intervention were the AMDs: Albanians of Mass Disappearance. Recall TBs trembly-lip performance when telling us of the missing 100,000 who could well have been...? By that time the media portrayal of the Serbs was such that we could all guess the likely fate of the AMDs.
Funny thing though is that, overall it seems that it is the Serbs that have been disappearing. Dear me, world events can be so confusing - especially to Balkan correspondents of the BBC & Guardian.
-JM
Anoymous: thanks. 'andy' aka philip cross does have plenty of 'form'- just take a look at the earlier Barack Obama landslide/Janet Daly gets it wrong thread.
JM: absolutely. whenever i think of how so many 'top' media commentators got it so wrong on Kosovo I always think of Upton Sinclair's line: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."
The 'official' version was that the Serbs were the bad guys and committing 'genocide'- and even if there was no evidence to back this up- that was the line that had to be peddled.
Hmmm. The serbs DID commit the murder of thousands of civilians in Bosnia (http://www.radionetherlands.nl/features/science/050711rf if you're wondering 'where the bodies are.')
So I think it's fair to assume that was their intent in Kosovo, too.
Neil's a journalist. I'm sure he wouldn't want his blog becoming a propoganda outlet where certain inaccurate 'truths' become accepted as fact, despite evidence to the contrary (like how some Muslim blogs refer to the holocaust as a hoax - that being the 'official line' on the blog, even though it's not true.)
All nations did things they're not proud of. Britain invented the concentration camp. Germany democratically elected Hitler and turned a blind eye to the extermination of the Jews. The Serbians dug their mass graves. Now they're going to have to stop lying about them.
hi roland:
i haven't met a serb yet who denied that serbs committed crimes in the balkan wars of the 90s. no one is saying that.
but the crimes you refer to in bosnia were not committed by JNA, the Yugoslav Army, but by Bosnian Serb forces. Kosovo was a completely different situation. Milosevic, who was appalled by the Srebrenica massacre, was determined that the counter-terrorist action in Kosovo was done 'by the book' and that the Yugoslav army did not target civilians- unlike NATO who bombed passenger trains, schools, tv studios, bridges etc.
roland, it was propaganda that got us the war and subsequent smashing of Yugoslavia which had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the fictitious genocide in kosovo or anywhere else in that territory.(the real war crimes were NATO's, the local HR absues came after NATO finsihed bombing the crap, preparing the groundwork for the break up of that country). Propaganda got us the war and present attempts to smash Iraq into manageable provinces, and nothing, absolutely nothing to do with WMD's or Saddams HR absues or any other such crap. Neil Clark, John Pilger et al are amongst the very few who kept the pressure up against the propagandists, became targets of the propagandists (see maggots who crawl out from time to time here, cif, ). If you haven't gathered this much so far, I reckon you'd be as well shutting yourself inside that freezer you're pictured peeping out from.
There is no war, no battle, no act of civil unrest where both sides don't do their best to kick the shit out of the other side at some point, neither Neil nor anyone else whose been fighting state propaganda and illegal wars and real and wholesale genocides, would deny this fact of life. Just remember, the chaos caused in former Yugoslavia, the terrible abuses committed by NATO got a clean slate because silly people took their eye off the ball, allowing the same criminals to go after Iraq - and they're still getting away with it which is why they'll target the next country, the next people and people like you will spout some minutiae that does nothing to help either the people on the ground or the deposed "dictators" by far worse dictators.
With the best will in the world,roland, open your fucking eyes.
Best
Pru
Sorry Roland Hulme, the International Committee on Missing Persons is a Nato propaganda organisation - check its executive and officers on its site. I quote below their chief operations officer from Mar. 2007 on the state of the evidence - still none, I'm afraid! If you know of any developments since Mar 2007, or anything else to contradict what I write below, please let us know.
I have no doubt that some massacres took place - the Dutch government report has plenty of eyewitness accounts, unlikely to be complete fabrications - but I've seen no evidence that this was more than dozens here and there, at most, sporadic and spontaneous, and not systematic. Not nice, but par for the course in a bloody civil war - Srebrenica had been used as a base for the murderous terrorising of nearby Serb villages, for years.
But, so far there has been NOT ONE body identified as having been summarily executed by Serbs at Srebrenica.. So far only 45 bodies from the missing list have been identified from sites around Srebrenica - see the link to the forensic evidence submitted to the ICTY below - with the cause of death, or who did the killing, not ascribed. Since then, there has been a constant drip, drip, in the media, mostly for the (NATO front) International Committee on Missing Persons, claiming thousands of new identifications - in the words of the chief Operating Officer of the ICMP, on 12 Mar 2007 ( see below for details and link), the ICMP does not establish date, place or cause of death, or ethnicity. So it is inappropriate to claim that the bodies identified (if accurate; he also admits that the ICMP's procedures aren't transparent) were summarily massacred by Serbs after the fall of Srebrenica.
The forensic evidence submitted to the ICTY is available on an Anti-Serbian -' Balkan Witness Debate: the Srebrenica Massacre ' - website on the internet at
http://tinyurl.com/2vbdno ( Scroll down to page 90, Annex B: positive identifications, and count them for yourself - I make it 45, with manner of death, and who did the killing, not ascribed)
The forensic evidence, presented to the ICTY, DOES date from 2000, but the website was last updated on Dec 12, 2007 - so I assume that, on such a virulently anti-Serbian site, if there WAS any more substantial, concrete evidence, they would be shouting about it. But the most important point is that, for years before the ICTY kangaroo courts, and ever since, the media have been presenting the figure of 8000 as a proven fact.
.On 14 March 2007, Glasgow's 'Scotsman' newspaper posted, on its website, an interview with Adam Boys, ICMP's Chief Operating Officer and Director of Finance since September 2000 at:
http://tinyurl.com/6re88b ( the interview has disappeared, but the blog discussion, in which Boys participates, which is the imporant bit, is still there)
He initially claims:
"To date the ICMP has positively identified about 3000 bodies of Srebrenica victims and has partial remains of about 1000 more. The ICMP still predicts that about 8000 were killed in the massacre. "
A blog debate follows in which Boys participated, In his replies to posts #33 and #34 Adam Boys
stated (in posts 37 and 38):
"The date of death, manner of death, and who did the killing are a matter for the courts. "
It will be a decision for the (Nato-appointed) regional governments whether a list of those identified from Srebrenica will be available online.
Asked whether there is: " a publicly accessible database, broken down by date of death, place remains found, cause of death, ethnicity (established by DNA from relatives) etc. details? "
Boys evades the question by answering " There is the ICRC list of missing. It does not show ethnicity. Neither do our records. " I take that as a NO.
Asked whether there are " scientific reports detailing the methodology, results and interpretations?"
Boys says yes. I look forward to these being made available for public scrutiny.
Those figure just seem to keep melting away, don't they.
And, in case anyone should bring up the Bosnian Serb 'confession' , I couldn't put it better than Ed Herman:
"But didn't the Bosnian Serbs "confess" that they had murdered 8,000 civilians? This has been the take of the Western media, but again demonstrating their subservience to their leaders' political agenda. The Bosnian Serbs actually did put out a report on Srebrenica in September 2002, [67] but this report was rejected by Paddy Ashdown for failing to come up with the proper conclusions. He therefore forced a further report by firing a stream of Republica Srpska politicians and analysts, threatening the RS government, and eventually extracting a report prepared by people who would come to the officially approved conclusions. [68] This report, issued on June 11, 2004, was then greeted in the Western media as a meaningful validation of the official line-the refrain was, the Bosnian Serbs "admit" the massacre, which should finally settle any questions. Amusingly, even this coerced and imposed report didn't come near acknowledging 8,000 executions (it speaks of "several thousand" executions). What this episode "proves" is that the Western campaign to make the defeated Serbia grovel is not yet terminated, and the media's continuing gullibility and propaganda service.
IS THAT PLAIN? Even the original missing list, never claimed there were 8000 MUSLIMS missing!
SUMMARY: AS OF MARCH 2007, THERE WERE 45 BODIES FROM SITES AROUND SREBRENICA IDENTIFIED AS BEING ON 'THE MISSING LIST', ETHNICITY NOT MADE EXPLICIT;. MORE BODIES MAY HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED, BUT IT IS NOT KNOWN WHETHER THEY WERE ON THE MISSING LIST, WHEN THEY DIED, WHO KILLED THEM, OR WHETHER THEY WERE SERBS OR MUSLIMS. IS THAT CLEAR?
Forensic evidence
http://tinyurl.com/2vbdno
Adam Boys Interview
http://tinyurl.com/6re88b
Roland Hulme:
The vast majority of those killed by Serb forces (from Vukovar to Srebrenica to Racak) were POWs or killed by accident. The intentional killings that happened were decentralized and happened without the knowledge of the political leadership until after they had occurred.
Here is what Croat soldiers did to Serb civilians in Vukovar before Serb soldiers massacred Croat POWs:
http://www.serbianna.com/features/krajina/warning.shtml
And here is what Muslim soldiers did to Serb civilians in Srebrenica before Serb soldiers massacred Muslim POWs:
http://www.serbianna.com/features/srebrenica/warning.shtml
So if Serb soldiers killing Croat/Muslim/Albanian POWs constitutes genocide then Croat/Muslim/Albanian soldiers killing Serb civilians is also genocide (unless of course you are biased against Serbs like all others who parrot the crimes done by Serbs as justification of crimes against Serbs).
(I forgot to add this.)
As for Racak: 37 out of 40 "victims" had gunpowder residue on their hands.
http://www.mediamonitors.net/gowans1.html
http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/smorg032405.htm
http://de-construct.net/e-zine/?p=3493
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=racak+%22gunpowder+residue%22&btnG=Search&meta=
All this nonsense about "genocide" in Krajina/Bosnia/Kosovo was proven false during the last century. You might as well call the war between Germany and Poland as an act of aggression by Poland or the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Germany as a humanitarian intervention. I really cant believe that the USA/UK/EU/NATO is using the exact same propaganda techniques as Hitler and Goebbels! It defies all sense of decency and ethics.
Even during blockade of Milosevic's Serbia, and even now in totally destroyed in every sense Serbia, Serbian social service would react in time and save some abused child. If we read in paper about some poor abused child, we read that it was hurt, but we don't wait child to be dead, so that public pay notice.
So, dear UK&USA people, I think it is better that you do something for yours child's rights. Think more about your children like baby P, baby in microwave and less about Balkans.
And if you so want to know (ask some Jewish sites, if you don't believe Serbian ones) more than 700 000 Serbs + Jews and Gypsies (third of them were children) were killed at the same brutal ways, like that baby P was, during WWII, by Ustase (Nazi Croatian army), and hundreds of thousands Serbs were killed in even more brutal ways by Turks.
But Turks, Croats didn't kill all Serbs,if decide to become Muslims, Catholics, they would left them alone, and during the time, new Muslims and Croats would become even cruel than original ones. So that is why in some parts of Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, which were and are Serbian territory live big number of Muslims and Catholic Serbs (Croats).
And even if we did killed that 8000 people in Srebrenica, and some in Croatia (which isn't true) it isn't enough. 700 000 + the number of victims during the last war is too much more than the number given by NATO.
So, don't care about things that you don't know nothing about (there are of course exceptions), care about things you know, and you can change, because I am sick of reading, sick articles about sick people from yours rich, democratic countries.
Maybe it is possible if you force your Government to spend more money on social and health care, than for bombing some country.
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