From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Tue Aug 19 2008 - 16:23:39 EDT
Critical Analysis
Don't Forget Yugoslavia
By John Pilger
Aug 19, 2008, 04:48
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.
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
14 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 pro vinces 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.
Source: The New Statesman
http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3587
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