The process of repetition is so relentless that prominent personages on the Left now feel compelled to genuflect before this demonization orthodoxy, referring to unspecified and unverified Serbian "brutality" and "the monstrous Milosovic." Thus do they reveal themselves as having been penetrated by the very media propaganda machine they criticize on so many other issues.To reject the demonized image of Milosovic and of the Serbian people is not to idealize them or claim they are faultless or free of crimes. It is merely to challenge the one- sided propaganda that has laid the grounds for NATO's destruction of Yugoslavia.
Up until the NATO bombings began in March 1999, the conflict in Kosovo had taken 2000 lives from both sides, according to Kosovo Albanian sources. Yugoslavian sources had put the figure at 800. Such figures reveal a civil war, not genocide. The forced expulsion policy began after the NATO bombings, with thousands being uprooted by Serb forces in those southern Kosovo areas where KLA mercenaries were operating. The bitter Serbian
reaction seems to have been: "You invite death and destruction upon us, we'll drive you out and remove the KLA support base."We should keep in mind that tens of thousands more are fleeing Kosovo because it is being mercilessly bombed by NATO. An Albanian woman crossing into Macedonia was 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." Some fifty thousand Serbian residents of Kosovo have taken flight (mostly north but some to the south). Are the Serbs ethnically cleansing themselves? Or are these people not fleeing the bombing?
The refugee tide caused by the bombing is now being used by U.S. warmakers as justification for the bombing, a necessary pressure to be put on Milosovic to allow "the safe return of ethnic Albanian refugees."
While Kosovo Albanians were leaving in great numbers-- usually well-clothed and in good health, some riding their tractors, truck, or cars, many of them young men of recruitment age--they were described as being "slaughtered." And Serbian attacks on KLA strongholds or the forced expulsion of Albanian villagers were described as "genocide." Experts in surveillance photography and wartime propaganda have recently charged NATO with "running a propaganda campaign" on Kosovo that lacks any supporting evidence. State Department reports of mass graves and of 100,000 to 500,000 missing Albanian men "are just ludicrous," according to independent critics.
In contrast to its public assertions to justify NATO's attacks, the German Foreign Office privately continued to deny that there is any evidence that genocide or ethnic cleansing is 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."
Ethnic Enmity and U.S. "Diplomacy"
Some people argue that it is not class but nationalism that is the real motor force behind these conflicts. 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 the Mung people in Vietnam and the Muskito Indians in Nicaragua. And as the CIA did in Bosnia. It is a matter of public record that the CIA has been active in Bosnia. Consider these headlines: The Guardian (Manchester/London), November 17 1994: "CIA AGENTS TRAINING BOSNIAN ARMY"; The London Observer, November 20, 1994: "AMERICA'S SECRET BOSNIA AGENDA"; The European, November 25, 1994: "HOW THE CIA HELPS BOSNIA FIGHT BACK."
As for "ancient national enmities": 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 some intermarriage. But when the economy and the social fabric starts to go into a tailspin, then it becomes easier to induce internecine conflicts and social discombobulation. As already noted, in Yugoslavia the most retrograde separatist elements were given every advantage in money, organization, propaganda, arms, and hired thugs, while operating with the knowledge that they had the full might of the U.S. national security state to their backs.
NATO is 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 has attacked no NATO member. Unable to get a mandate for war through the U.N. Security Council, U.S. leaders simply bypassed the United Nations altogether. And they have discarded diplomacy. Traditional diplomacy is a process of negotiating disputes through give and take, a way of pressing one's interests only so far, arriving eventually at a solution that may leave one side more satisfied than the other but not to the point of forcing either party into 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 non-negotiable, though called "accords" or "agreements," as in the Rambouillet agreements. The other side's reluctance to accede 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 military destruction is delivered upon the recalcitrants so that they might learn to see things the way Washington does.
Actually, Milosovic accepted all the demands laid down in the Rambouillet agreements except one: he refused to hand over a large region of the Serbian Republic, i.e., Kosovo, to foreign occupation--nor accept the additional stipulation that these troops could move at will into any other part of Yugoslavia. Instead the Serbs offered to accept U.N. supervisors in Kosovo, a proposal that went unnoticed in the U.S. media until recently.
Many liberals are discomforted by the aerial destruction of Yugoslavia but are convinced that "this time" the U.S. national security state is really fighting the good fight. Liberals and even some progressives will say, "Yes, the bombings don't work. The bombings are stupid! But we have to do something." In fact, the bombings are other than stupid: they are profoundly immoral. And in fact they do work; they are destroying Yugoslavia and turning it into a deindustrialized, recolonized, beggar-poor nation of cheap labor, defenseless against capital penetration, so splintered and battered down that it will never rise again.
Consider the cry of pain sent over the Internet by Serbian environmental activist Branka Jovanovic: "Serbia is one of the greatest sources of underground waters in Europe and the contamination [from U.S. depleted uranium and other explosives] will be felt in the whole surrounding area all the way to the Black Sea." NATO chooses "extremely dangerous targets" including ones near nuclear reactors, nuclear waste storage facilities, and
petro-chemical factories, including a chloride plant that still uses a technology similar to what existed in Bhopal. "It is not necessary for me to explain what the blowing up of one such factory would represent. Not only Belgrade, situated ten kilometers away, would be endangered but therest of Europe too." "Four national parks have been bombed," Jovanovic notes, "national reser-vations" that make Yugoslavia "among thirteen of the world's richest bio-diversity countries." The depleted uranium missiles that NATO is using "will bring dangerous consequences to the health not only of soldiers but also of the whole population, and you know that toxins and radioactivity know no nationality or borders." Jovanovic then goes on to describe the shock and suffering of children and elderly people and the "humanitarian catastrophe" created by the NATO bombing that will have "severe consequences to the generations of people living in this country."
Part 4