Well, this week it's a dead-heat between these two gems:
In the Daily Express, Stephen Nash of Middle Barton, (in similar vein to this post from last week), writes:
So, Business Secretary Lord Mandelson is accusing Labour rebels and trade unions of ‘ideological‘ opposition to any partial sell-off of Royal Mail to a foreign buyer.
But in my view, it’s the EU that is ideological, and Mandelson is prepared to defy the will of the British people to do its bidding. Royal Mail, once envied and successful, is being systematically broken up in the name of competition. The history of privatised utilities and public services is one of greed, cherry-picking and profiteering. Inevitably, when there are shareholders and directors expecting dividends and bonuses, the result will be less service for more money.
While in the Morning Star, Phil Brand of London, writes:
In response to the letter regarding the trial of the Serbian generals in The Hague, I seem to remember Alan Clark MP referring to the "heroic" Kosovo Liberation Army as "thugs with drugs."
I appreciate that he was no friend of the left, but at least he saw them for what they were.
It is interesting how no KLA men are on trial for atrocities carried out in the 1999 Kosovo campaign in which the dismantling of Europe's last socialist state was undertaken by a NATO imperialist onslaught.
One point I would make response to Phil Brand’s excellent letter, which itself was in response to another great letter by Mark Holt, is that the generals in question were not serving Serbia, which did not then exist as a sovereign state, but the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It’s not a pedantic point, but an important one. The supporters of that deceitful and illegal war, like to portray the NATO action as a response to ‘Serbia’s aggression against Kosovo‘- pretending that a country named ‘Serbia’ had attacked a country named ‘Kosovo’ But that’s simply not true- Kosovo and Serbia were both part of the same country- Yugoslavia- and to talk of ‘Serbian‘ aggression against Kosovo is totally absurd. And very, very dishonest.
Those who opposed the illegal NATO action, should not fall into the trap of using the dishonest language of its supporters.
8 comments:
A very good point, Milosevic is always being held responsible for Yugoslav aggression when he was president of Serbia then Serb 'ethnic cleansing' when he was president of Yugoslavia. These experts should remember that an independent Serbia did not exist between 1918-2006. What a nasty nationalistic country that willingly abolished itself to create Yugoslavia.
The worst KLA atrocities were not carried out during the war but afterwards when they had been enrolled as our "police".
Yes but many were committed before remember when the KLA murderd a lode of Serbian teenagers in a bar and NATO regarded it as an equal act to the JNA attak on KLA fighters? a comparisson NATO would only use for the Serbs not them not their allies. On the Subject have you seen MAH's artical on Tudhman? hes is truly insane.
More than that, Kosovo was not one of Yugoslav constituent republics, but a province of Serbia.
Excellent article, Neil.
Why you haven't been nominated for an Orwell prize is nothing short of obvious.
Neil, to be more precise--and not at all to contradict your distinction between Serbia, Kosovo and Yugoslavia: Kosovo was not an 'equal partner' with Serbia in the Yugoslav Federation; it was an autonomous (and at its behest had had this autonomy reduced) province of the Republic of Serbia.
What's interesting to me is how Serbian President Milutinovic was acquitted of crimes that had originally been laid at Yugoslav President Milosovic's feet--and Milosevic thorougly demonstrated the bogusness of these charges in the very first movement of his symphonic trial. It is as if NATO and the ICTY sacrificed President Milosevic's life and acquitted President Militunovic so as not to have to prove the impossible notion that they bore executive responsibility for these so-called crimes in Kosovo.
The KLA acted as a wing of NATO in their late 1997 invasion of Serbia (Kosovo) from Albania, Bosnia and Macedonia. Like so many other nations targeted for regime change to facilitate the selling off of resources on the globalized 'free-market', those brave partisans who sought to defend their homes and families from this vile foreign aggression were cast as the aggressors and tried as the perpetrators of the crimes of which they, themselves, were the victims.
All the best, Mick
That Kosovo was part of Serbia rather than a constituent republic is of legalisyic importance. The entire NATO support of the ex-Nazis in Croatia & Bosnia was based on the false claim thatsoverignty lay with the constituentv republics rather than the federation. That is not what the constitution said nor what NATO said when underd article 1, section 1, clause 1 of the Helsoinki treated they guaranteed to uphold the territorial integrity of all European countries. Having reversed their position once they used this new definition of state sovereignty to prevent Republica Srpska & Bihac achieving independencr & to "justify" the Krajina genocide. By that definition Kosovo was under Serb sovereignty (previously it was recognised as being under Yugoslav sovereignty).
Subsequwntly NATO have again wholly reversed themselves by saying that the non-Albanian (& formely non-Albanian) areas do not have the right to secede from the "nation" of Kosovo Albanian immigrants.
I think we may safely say that the statements made in support of this by almost every leading UK politician represents the very highest standard of honesty to be expected from these obscene, murdering, child raping, organlegging Nazi war criminals.
It should also be noted that Kosovo was recognized as a province and internal affair of the Federal Republic of Serbia (within the newly formed Yugoslav Federation--'Yugoslavia' always prefaced with an 'ex-' or 'former-' or 'rump-', and almost immediately to become Serbia/Montenegro) by the Dayton Agreement, or Dayton Accords, or Paris Protocol, or Dayton-Paris Agreement, negotiated by craven Fascists Tudjman, Izetbegovic, Holbrooke and Clinton, with Serbia's two-term socialist president Slobodan Milosevic, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995, and formally signed in Paris on December 14, 1995. Presaging, I suppose, the subsequent betrayal of Yugoslavia and Serbia at Rambouillet in 1999, which brought about the 78-day terror-bombing (Newsweek's term) of that heroic country.
But, yeah. Mick
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