John Pilger sees only one Balkan winner: the arms trade.
‘The struggle of people against power,’ wrote Milan Kundera, ‘is the
struggle of memory against forgetting.’ The idea that the Nato bombing
has to do with ‘moral purpose’ (Blair) and ‘principles of humanity we
hold sacred’ (Clinton) insults both memory and intelligence. The
American attack on Yugoslavia began more than a decade ago when the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund set about destroying the
multi-ethnic federation with lethal doses of debt, ‘market reforms’ and
imposed poverty.
Millions of jobs were eliminated; in 1989 alone, 600,000 workers,
almost a quarter of the workforce, were sacked without severance pay.
But the most critical ‘reform’ was the ending of economic support to the
six constituent republics and their recolonisation by Western capital.
Germany led the way, supporting the breakaway of Croatia, its new
economic colony, with the European Community giving silent approval. The
torch of fratricide had been lit and the rise of an opportunist like
Milosevic was inevitable.
In spite of his part in the blood-Ietting of Bosnia, Milosevic, the
‘reformer’, became a favourite among senior figures in the US State
Department. And in return for his co-operation in the American partition
of Bosnia at Dayton in 1995, he was assured that the troublesome
province of Kosovo was his to keep. ‘President Milosevic,’ said Richard
Holbrooke, the US envoy, ‘is a man we can do business with, a man who
recognises the realities of life in former Yugoslavia.’ The Kosovo
Liberation Army was dismissed by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
as ‘no more than terrorists’. Last October, the Americans drafted a
‘peace plan’ for Kosovo that that was pro-Serbia, giving the Kosovans
far less autonomy and freedom than they had under the old Yugoslav
federation.
But this deal included, crucially for the Americans, a Nato military
presence. When Milosevic objected to having foreign troops on his soil,
he was swiftly transformed, like Saddam Hussein, from client to demon.
He was now seen as a threat to Washington’s post-cold war strategy for
the Balkans and eastern Europe. With Nato replacing the United Nations
as an instrument of American global control, its ‘Membership Action
Plan’ includes linking Albania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovenia and
Slovakia. Like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic before them, these
impoverished countries will be required to take part in a ?22 billion
weapons’ buildup. The beneficiaries will be the world’s dominant arms
industries of the US and Britain – the contract for fighter aircraft
alone is worth pounds 10 biIIion.
Like the 1991 ‘moral crusade’ in the Gulf, which slaughtered more
than 200,000 people, including the very minorities the West claimed to
be protecting, the terror bombing of Serbia and Kosovo provides a
valuable laboratory for the Anglo-American arms business. Mostly
unreported, the Americans are using a refined version of the depleted
uranium missile they tested in southern Iraq, where leukaemia among
children and birth deformities have risen to match the levels after
Hiroshima. The RAF is using the BL755 ‘multi-purpose’ cluster bomb,
which is not really a bomb at all but an air-dropped land-mine: readers
will recall the Blair government’s ‘ban’ on land-mines. Dropped from the
air, the BL755 explodes into dozens of little mines, shaped liked
spiders. These are scattered over a wide area and kill and maim people
who step on them, children especially.
Britain’s new military-industrial-arms trade, which Margaret Thatcher
built and the taxpayer subsidises through ‘soft loans’ to
dictatorships, is central to the ‘Blair project’. Each time New Labour
has sought to bring big business into the fold, arms companies or their
representatives have been at the head of the queue. A New Labour backer
is Raytheon, manufacturer of the Patriot missile and currently under
contract to the Ministry of Defence to build tanks. More arms contracts
have been approved by the Blair government than by the Tories; and
two-thirds of arms exports go to regimes with appalling human rights
records – such as the dictatorship in Jakarta, which is currently
deploying death squads in East Timor.
Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that British-supplied small arms
have caused in East Timor the equivalent of the Dunblane massacre many
times over. Last year, the Defence Secretary, George Robertson,
intervened in a Courtaulds Aerospace deal for armoured vehicles, headed
for Indonesia’s Kopassus special forces whose commander, General
Prabowo, he described (in a letter to Robin Cook) as ‘an enlightened
officer, keen [on] human rights’. Kopassus is the Waffen SS-style force
that spearheaded the invasion of East Timor, murdered five journalists
and is responsible for the worst atrocities in the illegally occupied
territory. When Prabowo’s father-in-law, the tyrant Suharto, was toppled
from his throne last year, the general was also sacked.
The parallels with Kosovo and East Timor are striking. However, no
bombs will fall on Jakarta. They might hit the local offices of British
Aerospace (supplier of machine guns and Hawk fighter bombers) and the
Defence Export Sales Organisation, the Blair government’s official
merchants of death who, as Thatcher used to say, ‘are batting for
Britain’.
