|
Google: Yugoslavia "no genocide" The results will amaze you. This is common knowledge in Europe and was known here. Vets for Peace protested this war the same way they protested Iraq. As a matter of fact, they even had a huge protest in Chicago one day when Clark was speaking. Please don't ask me to find the link. If you insist, I have it book-marked at home and would be happy to provide it. The answer to your question is yes... Hollywood- all media and hollywood... Just like Bush took Hollywood to Iraq, Clinton took Hollywood to Yugoslavia. C'mon Will, that's the oldest trick in the book... Fresh-minded but jaded, yepper ;) ---------------------- It is worth scrutinising Nato's newspeak and the seven leading lies of the Western propagandists: <snip> 4. "This is a humanitarian war." It is a funny sort of humanitarianism which goes to war in Kosovo but leaves people massacred and cultures exterminated in East Timor, Burma, Rwanda, Kurdistan and Tibet. Only a chillingly selective humanitarianism rates white lives more highly than those clad in skins of other colours. Exposure of the inconsistency invites a counter-presumption fatal to Western credibility: this war was inaugurated not to save lives but to save face. Milosevic called Nato's bluff and the Nato leaders were left with no choice but to enforce their threats or withdraw them. 5. "This war was started to stop 'genocide' or 'holocaust'." The wickedness of this language is that it warps the facts about the real holocaust; yet it is one of the Government's most hackneyed phrases. Last week, Robin Cook used the word "genocide" six times in a five-minute BBC interview, following the principle from the Scam-man's Handbook: if you repeat nonsense often enough, people will believe it. Serb policy in Kosovo is repulsively vicious and we should do everything possible, short of war, to stop it. But it is not genocide. The sufferings of the Jews in the Second World War were special: effectively without precedent, almost without parallel. Serb war objectives are depressingly commonplace: at first Yugoslav forces sought to crush the KLA by a policy of terror so thorough that the guerrillas' natural consituency would be cowed into submission. Gradually, and with increasing intensity under the Nato bombardment, the policy has hardened into an even more lethal form of extremism, which is unhappily traditional in south-east Europe. Most Serbs probably now think - even if they do not declare it explicitly - that the only way to ensure Yugoslavia's hold on Kosovo is to drive out or kill as many Albanians as necessary and replace them with Serb colonists. 6. "Nato did not foresee that the bombs would encourage the death squads." No one believes this. In reality, Nato knew what would happen but was willing to accelerate slaughter rather than back down. Last week, the spin-doctors realised their claims were preposterous and hurriedly primed Jamie Shea and Robin Cook to say instead that Nato was "shocked" by the scale of the slaughter that the bombing unleashed. It was now clear that Nato sent in the bombers without making preparations for the refugee problem which was bound to ensue. <snip> Crimes Against Truth The Independent, April 4, 1999 The relentless propaganda war is trivialising epic suffering, says Felipe Fernandez-Armesto http://www.diaspora-net.org/food4thought/fernandezarmersto.htm---- Clark, who has been making headlines by claiming that the U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq was a misjudgment based on scanty evidence, ran Clinton’s NATO war against Yugoslavia on behalf of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The House of Representatives failed to authorize the war under the War Powers Act, making it illegal. Thousands of innocent people in Serbia, Yugoslavia’s main province, were killed to stop an alleged "genocide" by Yugoslavia that was not in fact taking place. Investigations determined that a couple thousand had died in the civil war there. http://www.aim.org/publications/weekly_column/2003/09/17.html (Accuracy in Media) ----- WHO'S COUNTING? The source of the distortion appears to be the KLA. The Trepca mines, where KLA promised the discovery of 700 bodies, contained none whatsoever. A grave in Ljubenic, said to contain 350, held seven corpses. The satellite image of purported freshly-dug tombs at Pusto Selo was not of graves after all. No mass graves were located at Izbica or Kraljan nor at Klina, where 328 were supposedly massacred. But a grave of 22 civilians was discovered at Klecka -- Serbians killed by KLA. They don't count. Thirty-six ethnic Albanian "Serb sympathizers" were shot by KLA and thrown into the Radonjic canal. Neither do those bodies "count" for Tribunal purposes. Pacifica Radio's Jeremy Skahill reported that two municipal employees told him the mass grave located in their jurisdiction contained the bodies of 40 Serb and KLA soldiers, killed in uniform in a firefight, whom the municipal workers had themselves buried. Yet they refused to tell this to Tribunal investigators for fear of retribution by the KLA. Better for world opinion if the dead are "Serb-massacred civilians". Throughout last summer and fall, forensic experts from 15 countries combed Kosovo for the dead. Genocide is difficult to conceal; in Germany, Cambodia, and Rwanda massacres left massive, undeniable evidence. But half of Kosovo's reported graves have been exhumed and the body count is "disappointingly" low, under 1,000. Since the "most promising" sites were excavated first, investigators now expect to find less than 2,000 Kosovar dead, and many of those from bombing raids. (Toronto Star, Richard Gwyn, "No Genocide, No Justification for War on Kosovo," 11/3/99) Los Angeles Times correspondent Paul Watson stole back into Kosovo after bombing began and the press was expelled. The only Western journalist to experience the entire bombardment (on the receiving end), Watson recalls: "I was able to reach all of Kosovo's main cities and towns. I saw a much more complicated picture than the one relayed by refugees fleeing across the border... I lived with constant fear of my own country and its allies, and festering doubts about their claim to the moral high ground... It seemed like calling a plumber to fix a leak and watching him flood the house... No independent witnesses ever managed to see Serb atrocities... Even in Kosovo, I couldn't escape the sound of Shea's voice on satellite TV, denying things I knew to be true, insisting on others I had seen were false". (L.A. Times, "A Witness to War," 6/20/99)
The western world is primed for the vilification of Belgrade only. This mass-mailed funding appeal from Amnesty International must have proved lucrative during the war. "URGENT: EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS OF HORRIBLE HUMAN RIGHTS ATROCITIES WILL...BRING THE GUILTY TO JUSTICE IN THE HAGUE... THESE ARE CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY!...AMNESTY'S PRESENCE IN THE BALKANS...IS PUTTING A SEVERE STRAIN ON OUR BUDGET. PLEASE HELP!"
http://www.newmex.com/amistad/yugo4.html
MR. RUSSERT: Would President Buchanan try to convince an American mother that she should risk her son’s life in Kosovo?
MR. BUCHANAN: No, I would not because there’s no vital American interest in Kosovo. Tim, the Serbs, while their tactics are appalling—ethnic cleansing—are fighting for a sacred province that has belonged to them for generations. They’re fighting and dying inside their own country for their own land. It has never been a vital interest to the United States whose flag flies over Pristina. And what are we doing bombing and attacking this tiny country that has never attacked the United States to rip away from them a province that does not belong to us? I believe it is an unjust war. I think 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.
MR. RUSSERT: Senator Lieberman?
SEN. LIEBERMAN: Well, it pains me to hear Pat’s answer because with all respect, it reveals a lack of learning the lessons of World War II and, indeed, of the Cold War. I mean, Ronald Reagan did not lead us to victory in the final battles of the Cold War for us less than a decade later to allow a Communist dictator to commit aggression and genocide in the heart of Europe. Those are the lessons. Those acts assault our values. 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. That is being grotesquely violated, those values, in Kosovo today.
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. So now is the time for us to stand by our principles, to stand by our allies in NATO, who reaffirmed our friendship and partnership with one another this weekend here in Washington, who will stand with us when we are tested around the world in the future, and they’re in Kosovo. American principles and American security interests are on the line.
MR. BUCHANAN: It pains me to disagree with my friend, Joe Lieberman. But Ronald Reagan, when he put troops into Lebanon and to stabilize that government, it was a just cause. But when the 269 Marines died, Ronald Reagan looked at that and said, “It is not in our vital interest. I made a mistake.” He had the moral courage to pull them out. With regard to Kosovo, there was 2,000 killed in 1998 in a low-grade civil war. There was no genocide going on. It was an ugly little war. The massive ethnic cleansing has been caused—is a consequence of air strikes and Rambouillet. We ourselves have ignited this debacle. Now, in my judgment, the ideal is to stop the killing, to stop the suffering. And the way to do that is to work toward a negotiated peace. Milosevic apparently has agreed to have international troops in there as long as they’re not NATO. We want NATO troops in there. That is not a cause worth sending an American Army into the Balkans.
With regard to Tony Blair—excuse me, but this last week he has literally been the mouse that roared, talking about the United States or Britain going to a ground war in the Balkans. It is not going to be British troops humping up that road to Belgrade but American kids, U.S. Marines, airborne divisions. And that is not a vital interest of this country.
MR. RUSSERT: Would you partition Kosovo, give Mr. Milosevic...
MR. BUCHANAN: I would—look, if the Serbs—this is their holy place. It is their sacred territory. If they want to keep that, they’ve had it for generations and even centuries. Why are we trying to go to war to take it away from them? Of course...
MR. RUSSERT: Isn’t that appeasing Mr. Milosevic?
MR. BUCHANAN: Look, it is not appeasement. It is his—Kosovo is his province as much—how would we react if down the road they said, “You got to give up Texas and the Alamo”? How would Ariel Sharon react if an Arab League and the Europeans said, “You’ve got to give up Jerusalem and get out”?
MR. RUSSERT: But we didn’t drive out a million Texans in train cars and buses and make them refugees?
MR. BUCHANAN: Look, Tim, you’re telling me that the tactics have been appalling and disgusting and you are exactly right. What triggered the massive ethnic cleansing of Kosovo? It is my belief that it was the NATO air strikes that began this whole episode, and if we had—is there anybody here who would not accept immediately the status quo ante? Is there anyone who thinks the Kosovar Albanians are better off now than they were 32 days ago? http://www.diaspora-net.org/food4thought/liebermanbuchanan.htm
---
Toronto Globe And Mail November 3, 1999 Richard Gwyn No genocide, no justification for war on Kosovo
This discovery - more accurately, this non-discovery - first was made public three weeks ago by the Texas-based intelligence think tank, Stratfor. Stratfor estimated the number of ethnic Albanian dead in Kosovo at 500. Last weekend, the story was broadcast for the first time by the TV Ontario program Diplomatic Immunity. (Last Sunday's New York Times was still using the ``10,000 deaths'' figure.) The story has begun to appear in European newspapers. Spain's El Pais has quoted the head of the Spanish forensic team, Emilo Pujol, as saying he had resigned because, after being told to expect to have to carry out 2,000 autopsies, he'd only had 97 bodies to examine - none of which ``showed any signs of mutilation or torture.'' Because 250 of 400 suspected mass graves in Kosovo remain to be examined, it's possible that evidence of mass killings will yet be found. This is highly unlikely though, because the worst sites were dug up first. No genocide of ethnic Albanians by Serbs, therefore. No "human catastrophe.'' No ``modern-day Holocaust.'' All of those claims may have been an honest mistake. Equally, they may have been a grotesque lie concocted to justify a war that NATO originally assumed would be over in a day or two, with Milosevic using the excuse of some minimal damage as a cover for a surrender, but then had to fight (at great expense) for months. There's no question that atrocities were committed in Kosovo, overwhelmingly by the Serb forces, although the ethnic Albanian guerrillas were not innocent. Quite obviously, these forces, acting on Milosevic's explicit orders, carried out mass expulsions of people, terrorizing them and destroying their homes and property. Acts like these are inexcusable. That they occur often in civil wars (far worse are being committed by the Russians in Chechnya), is irrelevant to their horror. But they have nothing to do with genocide. No genocide means no justification for a war inflicted by NATO on a sovereign nation. Only a certainty of imminent genocide could have legally justified a war that was not even discussed by the U.N. Security Council. No genocide means that the tribunal's indictment of Milosevic becomes highly questionable. Even more questionable is theWest's continued punishment of the Serbs - the Danube bridges and the power stations remain in ruins - when their offence may well have been stupidity rather than criminality. The absence of genocide may mean something else, something deeply shaming. To halt the supposed genocide, NATO bombed targets in Serbia proper. Because of ``collateral'' or accidental damage, such as the bombing of a train, some 500 civilians were killed (Belgrade claims almost 1,000 deaths). NATO very likely killed as many people as were killed in Kosovo. The number of these dead isn't large enough to justify NATO's actions being called a ``human catastrophe.'' But, unless proof of genocide can be produced, NATO's actions were clearly a moral catastrophe.
http://web.tiscali.it/no-redirect-tiscali/Controcorrente/nogenocide.html
The NATO powers had plenty of reasons to rush charges of genocide into the headlines. For one thing, it was becoming embarrassingly clear that the bombing had inflicted no significant damage on the Serbian army. All the more reason, therefore, to propose that the Serbs, civilians as well as soldiers, were collectively guilty of genocide and thus deserved everything they got. Teams of forensic investigators from 15 nations, including a detachment from the FBI, have been at work since June and have examined about 150 of 400 sites of alleged mass murder.
There's still immense uncertainty, but at this point it's plain that there are not enough bodies to warrant the claim that the Serbs had a program of extermination. The FBI team has made two trips to Kosovo and investigated 30 sites containing nearly 200 bodies.
In early October, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported what the Spanish forensic team had found in its appointed zone in northern Kosovo. The U.N. figures, said Perez Pujol, director of the Instituto Anatomico Forense de Cartagena, began with 44,000 dead, dropped to 22,000 and now stand at 11,000. He and his fellows were prepared to perform at least 2,000 autopsies in their zone. So far, they've found 187 corpses.
A colleague of Pujol, Juan Lopez Palafox, told El Pais that he had the impression that the Serbs had given families the option of leaving. If they refused or came back, they were killed. Like any murder of civilians, these were war crimes, just as any mass grave, whatever the number of bodies, indicates a massacre. But genocide?
One persistent story held that 700 Kosovars had been dumped in the Trepca lead and zinc mines. On Oct. 12, Kelly Moore, a spokeswoman for the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, announced that the investigators had found absolutely nothing. There was a mass grave allegedly containing 350 bodies in Ljubenic that turned out to hold seven. In Pusto Selo, villagers said 106 had been killed by the Serbs, and NATO rushed out satellite photos of mass graves. Nothing to buttress that charge has yet been found. Another 82 Kosovars allegedly were killed in Kraljan. No bodies have been turned up.
Although surely by now investigators would have been pointed to all probable sites, it's conceivable that thousands of Kosovar corpses await discovery. As matters stand, though, the number of bodies turned up by the tribunal's teams is in the hundreds, not thousands, which tends to confirm the view of those who hold that NATO bombing provoked a wave of Serbian killings and expulsions, but that there was and is no hard evidence of a genocidal program.
Count another victory for the Big Lie.
http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/sevid.htm
---
Substantial evidence has emerged refuting the central justification for NATO's war against Serbia—the claim that the Milosevic regime was conducting "ethnic genocide" against Albanians in Kosovo.
During the conflict, the NATO powers asserted that somewhere between 100,000 (according to US Defence Secretary William Cohen) and 500,000 (according to an April 1999 statement of the US State Department) Albanian Kosovars had been killed by Serb forces. Such far-fetched claims were already being discounted by the end of the war last June.
But now the much-reduced official estimate of 10,000 Kosovar deaths has been discredited by the results of investigations carried out by the Hague war crimes tribunal and other agencies. Most post-war surveys estimate the actual number of deaths attributable to Serbian forces at less than 2,500.
The October 31 Sunday Times of London reported that an all-party committee of MPs had asked Britain's Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to answer for having misled the public over the scale of civilian deaths in Kosovo. Labour MP Alice Mahon, who chairs the Balkans committee, said, "When you consider that 1,500 civilians or more were killed during NATO bombing, you have to ask whether the intervention was justified.”
The November 3 Toronto Star ran an article by Richard Gwynn that drew the conclusion, "No genocide means no justification for a war inflicted by NATO on a sovereign nation. Only a certainty of imminent genocide could have legally justified a war that was not even discussed by the UN Security Council."
The US State Department claims that some 1,400 bodies have been recovered from 20 percent of suspected massacre sites. But priority was given to those sites assumed to contain the most bodies. The Texas-based publication Stratfor last month noted that "evidence of mass murder has not yet materialised on the scale used to justify the war". This is despite the fact that there are teams from 15 nations conducting investigations.
<snip> http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/nov1999/koso-n09.shtml
|