Whatever Nato says, the war was waged against innocent civilians and the tyrant is still in place.
Walter Rockler, the American lawyer who prosecuted the Nazis at
Nuremberg, recently referred to the crimes of Milosevic. “The notion
that these can be redressed,” he wrote, “with random destruction and
killing by advanced technological means is mere pretext for our arrogant
assertion of dominance and power [and] constitutes a continuing war
crime.”
He quoted the playwright Henrik lbsen: “Don’t use that foreign word ‘ideals’. We have that excellent native word ‘lies’.”
The “humanitarian victory” in the Balkans is false, because it is based on lies. The biggest lie was Nato’s declared objective.
“It is clear cut,” said George Robertson on March 25. “It is to avert an impending humanitarian catastrophe.”
The opposite was true. “Bombing will imperil the lives of tens of
thousands of refugees,” pleaded the Catholic Relief Services from
Kosovo. Nato provoked a wave of Serb atrocities and expulsions, giving
Milosevic the catastrophe he wanted, all of which was “entirely
predictable”, remarked General Clark, forgetting the script.
What kind of humanitarian victory leaves 10,000 innocent civilians
dead or maimed, their country and region poisoned, and Kosovo in ruins,
littered with explosives and an atomic dust from depleted uranium?
What kind of just cause undermines the very democratic forces capable
of removing a vicious tyrant? For all Blair’s moralising and media
stunts in refugee camps, he saw to it that Britain took a miserly 2,000
Kosovan refugees. Even far-away Australia took double that figure.
The “crusade for civilisation” was the cowards’ war. From heights of
15,000 feet, heroic pilots hurled hi-tech nail bombs. The unpublished
list of targets hit shows a clear pattern of a deliberate campaign of
terror.
Was there really any difference between the massacre in Racak, when
Milosevic’s special units killed 26 people, and an American pilot
blowing a bus in half during rush hour on a bridge, leaving the bridge
intact and killing 40 people?
Or another destroying a passenger train, then returning 20 minutes
later to shoot up those attending the victims? In all these cases, it
was claimed that civilians were the regrettable victims of attacks on
military targets. The “we must do something” propaganda could never
justify the absurdity of punishing a crime by killing its innocent
bystanders .
The biggest lie was that all the suffering and destruction was
unavoidable. On June 2, Milosevic accepted, with a smile, terms almost
identical in principle to those he had agreed at Rambouillet six weeks
before the bombing began – terms which then so excited Robin Cook that
he boasted to parliament about a “90%” peace agreement.
On March 23, the day before the bombing began, the elected parliament
in Belgrade called for an “international presence in Kosovo immediately
after the signing of an accord for self-administration in Kosovo … to
be decided by the [UN] Security Council”.
That is the situation now, yet Nato bombed for more than two months before accepting it. What was gained?
Another big lie was spun by those echoing Queen Victoria’s
description of the Crimean war as “popular beyond belief”. At least a
third of the British people were against it, a remarkable figure when
you consider the barrage of pro-war propaganda.
In the countries where most of humanity lives, there was massive
opposition. According to the Washington Post, a majority of Americans
rejected the notion that Nato “did the right thing”.
It was the opponents of the bombing who exposed the hypocrisy of
western leaders and their long appeasement of the blood-soaked Milosevic
as “the man we can do business with, who understands the realities of
Yugoslavia”.
As recently as last October, Robin Cook and other EU ministers were
arguing Milosevic’s case – that his actions in Kosovo were in response
to the KLA’s “terrorism” and its violations of Security Council
resolution 1199. A senior US official described Milosevic as “Nato’s
indispensable partner in the effort to stabilise Kosovo.”
The author David Edwards describes “a kind of moral sightseeing
whereby we observe the ‘terrible tragedy’ of human rights abuses, but do
not even discuss, let alone deal with their true causes”.
An almost wilful refusal to trace the contours and true motives of
great power, simply because it is “ours”, transforms those paid to keep
the record straight to mere moral sightseers of the Diana school. Will
they dare look into the shadows now forming?
Last year, Jonathan Steele described in this newspaper an American
strategy to launch a nuclear bomb at “rogue” states. That is, of course,
quite possible now.
In the meantime, Serbia and forgotten Iraq provide the enforcer’s
blueprint. Destroy the country, terrorise the people, keep the tyrant.
In Iraq, 4,000 infants die every month as a direct result of
Anglo-American-led sanctions. Robin Cook’s new comrade-in-arms,
Madeleine Albright, was asked about this. “This is a very hard choice,
she replied, “but we think the price is worth it.”
