[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Don't forget what happened in Yugoslavia

[Bill Totten]

Even as Blair the war leader was on a triumphant tour of "liberated"
Kosovo, the KLA was ethnically cleansing more than 200,000 Serbs and
Roma from the province

by John Pilger

New Statesman (August 14 2008)


The secrets of the crushing of Yugoslavia are emerging, telling us more
about how the modern world is policed. The former chief prosecutor of
the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague, Carla
Del Ponte, this year published her memoir The Hunt: Me and War Criminals
(2008). Largely ignored in Britain, the book reveals unpalatable truths
about the west's intervention in Kosovo, which has echoes in the Caucasus.

The tribunal was set up and bankrolled principally by the United States.
Del Ponte's role was to investigate the crimes committed as Yugoslavia
was dismembered in the 1990s. She insisted that this include Nato's
78-day bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999, which killed hundreds of
people in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and tele vision studios,
and destroyed economic infrastructure. "If I am not willing to
[prosecute Nato personnel]", said Del Ponte, "I must give up my
mission". It was a sham. Under pressure from Washington and London, an
investigation into Nato war crimes was scrapped.

Readers will recall that the justification for the Nato bombing was that
the Serbs were committing "genocide" in the secessionist province of
Kosovo against ethnic Albanians. David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large
for war crimes, announced that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men
aged between fourteen and 59" may have been murdered. Tony Blair invoked
the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War". The west's
heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose murderous
record was set aside. The British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, told
them to call him any time on his mobile phone.

With the Nato bombing over, international teams descended upon Kosovo to
exhume the "holocaust". The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and
went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily
denouncing "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines". A year
later, Del Ponte's tribunal announced the final count of the dead in
Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma
murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide in Kosovo. The "holocaust"
was a lie. The Nato attack had been fraudulent.

That was not all, says Del Ponte in her book: the KLA kidnapped hundreds
of Serbs and transported them to Albania, where their kidneys and other
body parts were removed; these were then sold for transplant in other
countries. She also says there was sufficient evidence to prosecute the
Kosovar Albanians for war crimes, but the investigation "was nipped in
the bud" so that the tribunal's focus would be on "crimes committed by
Serbia". She says the Hague judges were terrified of the Kosovar
Albanians - the very people in whose name Nato had attacked Serbia.

Indeed, even as Blair the war leader was on a triumphant tour of
"liberated" Kosovo, the KLA was ethnically cleansing more than 200,000
Serbs and Roma from the province. Last February the "international
community", led by the US, recognised Kosovo, which has no formal
economy and is run, in effect, by criminal gangs that traffic in drugs,
contraband and women. But it has one valuable asset: the US military
base Camp Bondsteel, described by the Council of Europe's human rights
commissioner as "a smaller version of Guantanamo". Del Ponte, a Swiss
diplomat, has been told by her own government to stop promoting her book.

Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent and multi-ethnic, if imperfect,
federation that stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold
War. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community,
especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to
dominate its "natural market" in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and
Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991, a secret
deal had been struck; Germany recognised Croatia, and Yugoslavia was
doomed. In Washington, the US ensured that the struggling Yugoslav
economy was denied World Bank loans and the defunct Nato was reinvented
as an enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo "peace" conference in France, the Serbs
were told to accept occupation by Nato forces and a market economy, or
be bombed into submission. It was the perfect precursor to the
bloodbaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

_____

John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary
film-maker, is one of only two to have twice won British journalism's
top award; his documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and
the US. In a New Statesman survey of the fifty heroes of our time,
Pilger came fourth behind Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. "John
Pilger", wrote Harold Pinter, "unearths, with steely attention facts,
the filthy truth. I salute him".

http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2008/08/pilger-kosovo-war-nato-serbs


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/