=========
part 2of3
...More Atrocity Stories
Atrocities (murders and rapes) occur in every war, which is
not to condone them. Indeed, murders and rapes occur in
many peacetime communities. What the media propaganda
campaign against Yugoslavia charged was that atrocities
were conducted on a mass genocidal scale. Such charges
were used to justify the murderous aerial assault by NATO
forces.
Up until the bombings began in March 1999, the conflict in
Kosovo had taken 2000 lives altogether from both sides,
according to Kosovo Albanian sources. Yugoslavian sources
had put the figure at 800. In either case, such casualties
reveal a limited insurgency, not genocide. The forced
expulsion policy began after the NATO bombings, with
thousands being uprooted by Serb forces mostly in areas
where the KLA was operating or was suspected of operating.
In addition, if the unconfirmed reports by the ethnic Albanian
refugees can be believed, there was much plundering and
instances of summary execution by Serbian paramilitary
forces -- who were unleashed after the NATO bombing
started.
We should keep in mind that tens of thousands fled Kosovo
because of the bombings, or because the province was the
scene of sustained ground fighting between Yugoslav forces
and the KLA, or because they were just afraid and hungry.
An Albanian woman crossing into Macedonia was eagerly
asked by a news crew if she had been forced out by Serb
police. She responded: "There were no Serbs. We were
frightened of the [NATO] bombs."21 During the bombings, an
estimated 70,000 to 100,000 Serbian residents of Kosovo
took flight (mostly north but some to the south), as did
thousands of Roma and other non-Albanian ethnic groups.22
Were these people ethnically cleansing themselves? Or were
they not fleeing the bombing and the ground war?
The New York Times reported that "a major purpose of the
NATO effort is to end the Serb atrocities that drove more
than one million Albanians from their homes."23 So, we are
told to believe, the refugee tide was caused not by the
ground war against the KLA and not by the massive NATO
bombing but by unspecified atrocities. The bombing, which
was the major cause of the refugee problem was now seen as
the solution. The refugee problem created in part by the
massive aerial attacks was now treated as justification for
such attacks, a way of putting pressure on Milosevic to allow
"the safe return of ethnic Albanian refugees."24
While Kosovo Albanians were leaving in great numbers --
usually well-clothed and in good health, some riding their
tractors, trucks, or cars, many of them young men of
recruitment age -- they were described as being
"slaughtered." Serbian attacks on KLA strongholds and the
forced expulsion of Albanian villagers were described as
"genocide." But experts in surveillance photography and
wartime propaganda charged NATO with running a
"propaganda campaign" on Kosovo that lacked any
supporting evidence. State Department reports of mass
graves and of 100,000 to 500,000 missing Albanian men
"are just ludicrous," according to these independent critics.25
As with the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts, the image of
mass killings was hyped once again. The Washington Post
reported that 350 ethnic Albanians "might be buried in mass
graves" around a mountain village in western Kosovo. Such
speculations were based on sources that NATO officials
refused to identify. Getting down to specifics, the article
mentions "four decomposing bodies" discovered near a large
ash heap, with no details as to who they might be or how
they died.26
An ABC "Nightline" program made dramatic and repeated
references to the "Serbian atrocities in Kosovo" while
offering no specifics. Ted Kopple asked angry Albanian
refugees what they had witnessed? They pointed to an old
man in their group who wore a wool hat. The Serbs had
thrown the man's hat to the ground and stepped on it,
"because the Serbs knew that his hat was the most important
thing to him," they told Kopple, who was appropriately
appalled by this one example of a "war crime" offered in the
hour-long program.
A widely circulated story in the New York Times, headlined
"U.S. REPORT OUTLINES SERB ATTACKS IN KOSOVO," tells
us that the State Department issued "the most
comprehensive documentary record to date on atrocities."
The report concludes that there had been organized rapes
and systematic executions. But reading further into the
article, one finds that stories of such crimes "depend almost
entirely on information from refugee accounts. There was no
suggestion that American intelligence agencies had been able
to verify, most, or even many, of the accounts . . . and the
word 'reportedly' and 'allegedly' appear throughout the
document."27
British journalist Audrey Gillan interviewed Kosovo refugees
about atrocities and found an impressive lack of evidence.
One woman caught him glancing at the watch on her wrist,
while her husband told him how all the women had been
robbed of their jewelry and other possessions. A
spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees
talked of mass rapes and what sounded like hundreds of
killings in three villages. When Gillan pressed him for more
precise information, he reduced it drastically to five or six
teenage rape victims. But he admitted that he had not
spoken to any witnesses and that "we have no way of
verifying these reports."28
Gillan noted that some refugees had seen killings and other
atrocities, but there was little to suggest that they had seen
it on the scale that was being reported. Officials told him of
refugees who talked of sixty or more being killed in one
village and fifty in another, but Gillan "could not find one
eye-witness who actually saw these things happening." It
was always in some other village that the mass atrocities
seem to have occurred. Yet every day western journalists
reported "hundreds" of rapes and murders. Sometimes they
noted in passing that the reports had yet to be substantiated,
but then why were such stories being so eagerly publicized?
In contrast to its public assertions, the German Foreign
Office privately denied there was any evidence that genocide
or ethnic cleansing was a component of Yugoslav policy:
"Even in Kosovo, an explicit political persecution linked to
Albanian ethnicity is not verifiable. . . . The actions of the
[Yugoslav] security forces [were] not directed against the
Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically defined group, but against
the military opponent and its actual or alleged supporters."29
Still, Milosevic was indicted as a war criminal, charged with
the forced expulsion of Albanian Kosovars, and with
summary executions of a hundred or so individuals. Again,
alleged crimes that occurred after the NATO bombing had
started were used as justification for the bombing. The
biggest war criminals of all were the NATO political leaders
who orchestrated the aerial campaign of death and
destruction.
As the White House saw it, since the stated aim of the aerial
attacks was not to kill civilians; there was no liability, only
regrettable mistakes. In other words, only the professed
intent of an action counted and not its ineluctable effects.
But a perpetrator can be judged guilty of willful murder
without explicitly intending the death of a particular victim --
as with an unlawful act that the perpetrator knew would
likely cause death. As George Kenney, a former State
Department official under the Bush Administration, put it:
"Dropping cluster bombs on highly populated urban areas
doesn't result in accidental fatalities. It is purposeful terror
bombing."30
In the first weeks of the NATO occupation of Kosovo, tens of
thousands of Serbs were driven from the province and
hundreds were killed by KLA gunmen in what was described
in the western press as acts of "revenge" and "retaliation," as
if the victims were deserving of such a fate. Also numbering
among the victims of "retribution" were the Roma, Gorani,
Turks, Montenegrins, and Albanians who had "collaborated"
with the Serbs by speaking Serbian, opposing separatism,
and otherwise identifying themselves as Yugoslavs. Others
continued to be killed or maimed by the mines planted by the
KLA and the Serb military, and by the large number of NATO
cluster bombs sprinkled over the land.31
It was repeatedly announced in the first days of the NATO
occupation that 10,000 Albanians had been killed by the
Serbs (down from the 100,000 and even 500,000 Albanian
men supposedly executed during the war). No evidence was
ever offered to support the 10,000 figure, nor even to
explain how it was so swiftly determined -- even before
NATO forces had moved into most of Kosovo.
Repeatedly unsubstantiated references to "mass graves,"
each purportedly filled with hundreds or even thousands of
Albanian victims also failed to materialize. Through the
summer of 1999, the media hype about mass graves
devolved into an occasional unspecified reference. The few
sites actually unearthed offered up as many as a dozen
bodies or sometimes twice that number, but with no certain
evidence regarding causes of death or even the nationality of
victims. In some cases there was reason to believe the
victims were Serbs.32
Lacking evidence of mass graves, by late August 1999 the
Los Angeles Times focused on wells "as mass graves in their
own right. . . . Serbian forces apparently stuffed...many
bodies of ethnic Albanians into wells during their campaign of
terror."33 Apparently? The story itself dwelled on only one
village in which the body of a 39-year-old male was found in
a well, along with three dead cows and a dog. No cause was
given for his death and "no other human remains were
discovered." The well's owner was not identified. Again when
getting down to specifics, the atrocities seem not endemic
but sporadic.
Ethnic Enmity and U.S. "Diplomacy"
Some people argue that nationalism, not class, is the real
motor force behind the Yugoslav conflict. This presumes that
class and ethnicity are mutually exclusive forces. In fact,
ethnic enmity can be enlisted to serve class interests, as the
CIA tried to do with indigenous peoples in Indochina and
Nicaragua -- and more recently in Bosnia.34
When different national groups are living together with some
measure of social and material security, they tend to get
along. There is intermingling and even intermarriage. But
when the economy goes into a tailspin, thanks to sanctions
and IMF destabilization, then it becomes easier to induce
internecine conflicts and social discombobulation. In order to
hasten that process in Yugoslavia, the Western powers
provided the most retrograde separatist elements with every
advantage in money, organization, propaganda, arms, hired
thugs, and the full might of the U.S. national security state
at their backs. Once more the Balkans are to be balkanized.
NATO's attacks on Yugoslavia have been in violation of its
own charter, which says it can take military action only in
response to aggression committed against one of its
members. Yugoslavia attacked no NATO member. U.S.
leaders discarded international law and diplomacy.
Traditional diplomacy is a process of negotiating disputes
through give and take, proposal and counterproposal, a way
of pressing one's interests only so far, arriving eventually at
a solution that may leave one side more dissatisfied than the
other but not to the point of forcing either party to war.
U.S. diplomacy is something else, as evidenced in its dealings
with Vietnam, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, and now Yugoslavia.
It consists of laying down a set of demands that are treated
as nonnegotiable, though called "accords" or "agreements,"
as in the Dayton Accords or Rambouillet Agreements. The
other side's reluctance to surrender completely to every
condition is labeled "stonewalling," and is publicly
misrepresented as an unwillingness to negotiate in good
faith. U.S. leaders, we hear, run out of patience as their
"offers" are "snubbed." Ultimatums are issued, then aerial
destruction is delivered upon the recalcitrant nation so that it
might learn to see things the way Washington does.
Milosevic balked because the Rambouillet plan, drawn up by
the U.S. State Department, demanded that he hand over a
large, rich region of Serbia, that is, Kosovo, to foreign
occupation. The plan further stipulated that these foreign
troops shall have complete occupational power over all of
Yugoslavia, with immunity from arrest and with supremacy
over Yugoslav police and authorities. Even more revealing of
the U.S. agenda, the Rambouillet plan stated: "The economy
of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market
principles."
Rational Destruction
While professing to having been discomforted by the aerial
destruction of Yugoslavia, many liberals and progressives
were convinced that "this time" the U.S. national security
state was really fighting the good fight. "Yes, the bombings
don't work. The bombings are stupid!" they said at the time,
"but we have to do something." In fact, the bombings were
other than stupid: they were profoundly immoral. And in fact
they did work; they destroyed much of what was left of
Yugoslavia, turning it into a privatized, deindustrialized,
recolonized, beggar-poor country of cheap labor, defenseless
against capital penetration, so battered that it will never rise
again, so shattered that it will never reunite, not even as a
viable bourgeois country.
When the productive social capital of any part of the world is
obliterated, the potential value of private capital elsewhere is
enhanced -- especially when the crisis faced today by
western capitalism is one of overcapacity. Every agricultural
base destroyed by western aerial attacks (as in Iraq) or by
NAFTA and GATT (as in Mexico and elsewhere), diminishes
the potential competition and increases the market
opportunities for multinational corporate agribusiness. To
destroy publicly-run Yugoslav factories that produced auto
parts, appliances, or fertilizer -- or a publicly financed
Sudanese plant that produced pharmaceuticals at prices
substantially below their western competitors -- is to
enhance the investment value of western producers. And
every television or radio station closed down by NATO troops
or blown up by NATO bombs extends the monopolizing
dominance of the western media cartels. The aerial
destruction of Yugoslavia's social capital served that purpose.
We have yet to understand the full effect of NATO's
aggression. Serbia is one of the greatest sources of
underground waters in Europe, and the contamination from
U.S. depleted uranium and other explosives is being felt in
the whole surrounding area all the way to the Black Sea. In
Pancevo alone, huge amounts of ammonia were released into
the air when NATO bombed the fertilizer factory. In that
same city, a petrochemical plant was bombed seven times.
After 20,000 tons of crude oil were burnt up in only one
bombardment of an oil refinery, a massive cloud of smoke
hung in the air for ten days. Some 1,400 tons of ethylene
dichloride spilled into the Danube, the source of drinking
water for ten million people. Meanwhile, concentrations of
vinyl chloride were released into the atmosphere at more
than 10,000 times the permitted level. In some areas, people
have broken out in red blotches and blisters, and health
officials predict sharp increases in cancer rates in the years
ahead.35
National parks and reservations that make Yugoslavia among
thirteen of the world's richest bio-diversity countries were
bombed. The depleted uranium missiles that NATO used
through many parts of the country have a half-life of 4.5
billion years.36 It is the same depleted uranium that now
delivers cancer, birth defects, and premature death upon the
people of Iraq. In Novi Sad, I was told that crops were dying
because of the contamination. And power transformers could
not be repaired because U.N. sanctions prohibited the
importation of replacement parts. The people I spoke to were
facing famine and cold in the winter ahead.
With words that might make us question his humanity, the
NATO commander, U.S. General Wesley Clark boasted that
the aim of the air war was to "demolish, destroy, devastate,
degrade, and ultimately eliminate the essential
infrastructure" of Yugoslavia. Even if Serbian atrocities had
been committed, and I have no doubt that some were, where
is the sense of proportionality? Paramilitary killings in
Kosovo (which occurred mostly after the aerial war began)
are no justification for bombing fifteen cities in hundreds of
around-the-clock raids for over two months, spewing
hundreds of thousands of tons of highly toxic and
carcinogenic chemicals into the water, air, and soil, killing
thousands of Serbs, Albanians, Roma, Turks, and others, and
destroying bridges, residential areas, and over two hundred
hospitals, clinics, schools, and churches, along with the
productive capital of an entire nation.
A report released in London in August 1999 by the Economist
Intelligence Unit concluded that the enormous damage
NATO's aerial war inflicted on Yugoslavia's infrastructure will
cause the economy to shrink dramatically in the next few
years.37 Gross domestic product will drop by 40 percent this
year and remain at levels far below those of a decade ago.
Yugoslavia, the report predicted, will become the poorest
country in Europe. Mission accomplished.
Postscript
In mid-September 1999, the investigative journalist Diana
Johnstone emailed associates in the U.S. that former U.S.
ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, who had backed
Tudjman's "operation storm" that drove 200,000 Serbians
(mostly farming families) out of the Krajina region of Croatia
four years ago, was recently in Montenegro, chiding Serbian
opposition politicians for their reluctance to plunge
Yugoslavia into civil war. Such a war would be brief, he
assured them, and would "solve all your problems." Another
strategy under consideration by U.S. leaders, heard recently
in Yugoslavia, is to turn over the northern Serbian province
of Vojvodina to Hungary. Vojvodina has some twenty-six
nationalities including several hundred thousand persons of
Hungarian descent who, on the whole show no signs of
wanting to secede, and who certainly are better treated than
the larger Hungarian minorities in Rumania and Slovakia.
Still, a recent $100 million appropriation from the U.S.
Congress fuels separatist activity in what remains of
Yugoslavia -- at least until Serbia gets a government
sufficiently pleasing to the free-market globalists in the
West. Johnstone concludes: "With their electric power
stations ruined and factories destroyed by NATO bombing,
isolated, sanctioned and treated as pariahs by the West,
Serbs have the choice between freezing honorably in a
homeland plunged into destitution, or following the 'friendly
advice' of the same people who have methodically destroyed
their country. As the choice is unlikely to be unanimous one
way or the other, civil war and further destruction of the
country are probable."
Michael Parenti is the author of Against Empire, Dirty Truths,
America Besieged, and most recently, History as Mystery, all
published by City Lights Books. This article is excerpted from
his forthcoming book, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on
Yugoslavia, to be published by Verso, October 2000.
Notes:
1.New York Times, July 8, 1998.
2.New York Times, October 10, 1997.
3.For more detailed background information on the stratagems preceding the NATO bombing,
see the collection of reports by Ramsey Clark, Sean Gervasi, Sara Flounders, Nadja Tesich,
Michel Choussudovsky, and others in NATO in the Balkans: Voices of Opposition (New York:
International Action Center, 1998).
4.Joan Phillips, "Breaking the Selective Silence," Living Marxism, April 1993, p. 10.
5.Financial Times (London), April 15, 1993.
6.See for instance, Yigal Chazan's report in The Guardian (London/Manchester), August 17,
1992.
7.See Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (London: Penguin, 1995), p.
211; also Diana Johnstone, "Alija Izetbegovic: Islamic Hero of the Western World,"
CovertAction Quarterly, Winter 1999, p. 58.
8.Michael Kelly, "The Clinton Doctrine is a Fraud, and Kosovo Proves It," Boston Globe, July 1,
19 99.
9.San Francisco Chronicle, May 5, 1999 and Washington Times, May 3, 1999.
10.New York Times, November 1, 1987.
...part 3 Message 14929688 |
