Thread: Don't forget Yugoslavia

Don't forget Yugoslavia

14 Aug 2008

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger digs beneath the received wisdom for the break-up of Yugoslavia and points to a largely ignored memoir by the former chief prosecutor in The Hague - and an echo from current events in the Caucasus.

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.

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=500

Why should it bother you... If Mexicans decide to take back (In they're minds) lands that they think were taken from them. Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California ... what are you going to do... the UN already has a program to give back lands to indigonous people

President Clinton caused major problems down the road when these wackos from south of the boarder become the majority in these states and want to break away from the US

So now... how can we say no way to the UN giving the lands back after we bombed Serbia into submission to give the lands to people that slowly migrated into Serbia proper... do we now get bombed into submission to force us to give the lands back to Mexico

They owned it how long? Six years? Then The United States bought the land from Mexico.

No to the world, and UN.

DEPORT ILLEGAL CRIMINAL ALIENS

I happen to believe that there was mass genocide. The Number on reason, a trained military attacking unarmed impoverished civilians. Additionally, I recall watching a TV report interviewing the survivors living in refugee camps set up by the UN and American reporters interviewing the victims. Most no longer had homes and many were the sole survivors in their family. They just captured Radovan Karadzic that should tell it all. General Ratko Mladic is still at large.

You know, every military action by the US is not a conspiricy. More often than not, facts don't sell books.

Dixie

April 9, 2007
Genocide Court Ruled for Serbia Without Seeing Full War Archive
By MARLISE SIMONS

THE HAGUE — In the spring of 2003, during the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, hundreds of documents arrived at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague marked “Defense. State Secret. Strictly Confidential.â€

Serbia Wary: UN Begins Transfer of Kosovo Authority to EU
Spiegel Online
August 19 2008
By Charles Hawley



The agreement may be technical in nature, but Serbia views Monday's accord between the UN and the EU in Kosovo as being illegal. The EU mission has little legal backing, but it is insinuating itself into the newly independent country

The United Nations and the European Union both insist that it was a technical move. On Monday in Kosovo, the UN mission there, known as UNMIK, and the EU signed an agreement enabling the handover of office space and vehicles to the EU's mission known as EULEX. It is nothing to get worked up about, people close to the two missions insist.

Serbia and Russia, though, apparently didn't get the message. Both countries protested vehemently at what they see as an incremental increase in European Union responsibility in Kosovo despite the UN Security Council having thus far refused to give EULEX the green light.

Serbian Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic said the deal was illegal and reiterated that Belgrade "does not accept EULEX." He told reporters that "what they are signing now, we don't see as what Serbia has insisted on." Aleksandr Konuzin, Russia's ambassador to Serbia, promised Moscow would provide "energetic support" to Belgrade's resistance of the European Union mission. Konuzin also insisted that any change to UNMIK's mandate "must be approved by the UN Security Council."

UNMIK has been administering Kosovo since the end of the Serbia-Kosovo war in 1999. With Kosovo having declared independence from Serbia in February, however, the international community has been struggling to adapt. Europe offered to send legal and police support to help the fledgling country. Doing so, though, would require that the UN mission be officially amended, something Russia has been unwilling to agree to. Moscow has long supported Serbia's resistance to Kosovo independence.

Ironically, the agreement signed on Monday comes as a direct result of Russia's ongoing intransigence. In June, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gave the go-ahead for structural changes to the UN mission, citing "a profoundly new reality in which UNMIK can no longer perform as effectively as in the past the vast majority of its tasks as an interim administration." He authorized a "reconfiguration" of UNMIK to work more closely with the European Union under the umbrella of international law.

Legal Limbo for the Europeans

"The Secretary-General recognized the situation on the ground in Kosovo. He asked for guidance from the Security Council, but he didn't get it. So now he is asking UNMIK and EULEX to proceed," an official close to the UNMIK mission told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Moving forward, though, promises to be difficult. The European Union had hoped that EULEX would be able to provide both justice and policing assistance for (...)

http://europenews.dk/en/node/13239