"At the same time, though, where are the leaders of the international community who also helped to bring events in the Balkans about? Have we ever heard one word of apology or acknowledgment of failure or responsibility from anyone in leadership positions of Unprofor, the United Nations or the major governments that they got it wrong?"--William D. Montgomery, former special representative of the U.S. president and secretary of state for Bosnian Peace Implementation in 1996-97. Also, U.S. ambassador to Croatia from 1998 to 2000 and ambassador to Serbia and Montenegro from 2000 to 2004. (IHT, 07.12.2005)
The Hague, The Netherlands--In a vote of 13-2, Serbia has been cleared of charges of genocide surrounding the Bosnian conflict of 1992-1995, with only 50 protesters outside of the court calling-for a guilty verdict. Where were you, almighty moralists and apologists for NATO? Nowhere near the Hague, that's for certain.
NATO (through German diplomatic channels) allowed for Croatia and Slovenia to break away from Yugoslavia, a move that was strongly-opposed by Serbs, and which likely would have prevented the cataclysm that ensued. Yet, looking at the reporting today, the West's role in all of this is imperceptible:Bosnia's Muslims and Croats followed Slovenia and Croatia in breaking away from Yugoslavia in April 1992, against the wishes of Bosnian Serbs, who were left as a one-third minority in what had previously been a Yugoslav republic ruled from Belgrade. This triggered a war in which at least 100,000 people were killed. Backed by the Yugoslav army, the Serbs captured two-thirds of Bosnia and besieged Sarajevo. Tens of thousands of non-Serbs were killed and hundreds of thousands forced from their homes. (Reuters, 02.26.2007)
It must be an unpleasant an disorienting feeling to be someone who swallowed the line that it was all about the Serbs, when KLA (later to become Al-Qaida) was and is involved-in similar depredations.
Cognitive-dissonance is natural, however, and earned for those who wholeheartedly-embraced this notion, ignoring the facts, and accepting the hyperbole. Now you all have a tiny-piece of what it felt like to be a German after WWII. The article still fails to mention that over 200,000 Eastern Orthodox Serbs were relocated forcibly during the conflict thanks to NATO policies, but our crimes don't exist. The Hague has done a disservice by ignoring these facts. But, if you follow the media closely, this isn't new. This is my favorite-part of the ruling:The Serbian leaders "should have made the best effort within their power to try and prevent the tragic events then taking shape," in the U.N. enclave, the scale of which "might have been surmised," the ruling said. However, it rejected Bosnia's claim for monetary reparations. ...Serbia's claim that it was powerless to prevent the massacres "hardly tallies with their known influence" over the Bosnian Serb army, said the ruling. The ruling did not specify what Serbia could have done. (AP, 02.26.2007)
I think we know what Serbia could have done--attack the UN, NATO, and the KLA. That's fair, isn't it? Considering the total chaos of the conflict, it's unsurprising that the Hague "did not specify", because that would reveal Western-involvement in funding the KLA (particularly by the US State Department).
Again, our crimes don't exist...unless you do some digging in the margins of the known record of what occurred.
But, according to most in America, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the bombings of Dresden, Munich, and the fire-bombings of Tokyo and nearly every Japanese city during WWII by Allied forces, were not war crimes. Yet, the reality is, there were. A winner's justice is never justice. The UN, and all the members of NATO are equally responsible for the what occurred during the Bosnian war, and inflicted heavier-casualties during the 1999 aerial-bombings. During that same period, President William Jefferson Clinton's administration was committing a calculated act of genocide against Iraqi citizens through the no-fly zone, and aerial-bombardment of crucial infrastructure. This makes him and everyone who was involved in the expediting of these acts war criminals.
As a result of this, approximately 500,000 Iraqi children--almost an entire generation--died. Coupled with the invasion of Iraq--the thousands of murders, the cultural-looting, torture, rape, and more, we have all the ingredients of genocide as an ongoing-policy of the United States towards Iraq. That's attempted genocide, folks.Someone should ask Rahm Emanuel why he did nothing to dissuade the president and the State Department from this course, and why he isn't today. But these facts escape most of the public, and certainly the majority of the intelligentsia in the West.
There is blood on our hands, and today's verdict--while fairer than expected--was still shot-through with irony and a hollowness that is typical of our daily rationalizations. We're not learning, as much as we would like to convince ourselves that we are. These are the seeds of our own destruction that might come sooner than we think, unless we change our foreign policy in a radical sense. This will require more involvement by the public.
Revised 08.31.2008
"The bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 allegedly to stop ethnic cleansing and prevent the Balkans from becoming once again the powder keg of Europe has backfired. Kosovo has become exclusively an Albanian province with the exception of a few stalwart Serbians in the Mitrovica area who live surrounded by barbed wire and are threatened daily with murder and mayhem by their Albanian neighbours. The Balkans, since the end of the bombing, have been in constant turmoil caused by the KLA terrorist activities." --James Bissett, former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, 1990-1992.“It's very expensive to be me. It's terrible the things I have to do to be me.” --Anna Nicole SmithOur Apologist Mainstream Media--Remember the O.J. trial? I do, and I want that memory erased for good. Give me some of that Total Recall erasing, like it was never there. It's good that her tits are big enough to hide the rapidly disintegrating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but what about "the Juice"?
That moron was used to hide most of the facts of the Balkans war that the Clinton administration was waging, done primarily to dismantle Yugoslavia as a third-path economy, rather than a "humanitarian-invasion." There is no such thing, it's a fiction.
Where was the media coverage of the invasion of Rwanda during that same period? There wasn't much, because the place wasn't seen as strategically important or valuable at that time. But at least we rewarded Osama Bin Laden with a precinct and gave him a Bosnian passport during the Balkans conflict.Correct, you're a sucker if thought there was really a systematic ethnic-cleansing in the Balkans. Ours--and other NATO forces, along with mercenaries--murdered more human-beings than the Serbs could ever muster. But, our crimes don't exist, only other countries do that. The one thing
Ironically, we can thank George W. Bush for stripping-away this delusion forever, with his openly-criminal usage of illegal rendition, torture, murder--he's given the game away, and there's no more denying that these tactics are common features of our foreign policy. More revelations are coming.Look at Dafur: has anyone invaded them to stop a real genocide? War crimes are a part of war, but the atrocities in Srebrenica--all Bosniak Muslims--amounted to the murders of 8,000 people. Sorry, but as bad as this sounds, that's nothing compared to the death tolls in Iraq, and that's just one example of American war crimes. All "ethnic-cleansing" did was to provide a pretext to invade, which NATO knew would occur when Croatia and Slovenia notified them through Germany that they wanted to split from Yugoslavia: "Germany granted recognition to Slovenia and Croatia on 18 December 1991, while other European community members and the US followed suit," states the Nations Encyclopedia.
This is also from www.nationsencyclopedia.com, and is followed by what is the standard line on NATO involvement with this sentence: "The international community stood firmly in support of the preservation of Yugoslavia."
Strange, since everything they did in the run-up to the Balkans war made this an impossibility. At the same time, though, where are the leaders of the international community who also helped to bring events in the Balkans about? Have we ever heard one word of apology or acknowledgement of failure or responsibility from anyone in leadership positions of Unprofor, the United Nations or the major governments that they got it wrong? ...We are rightly looking for full accountability from the parties in the region. I am sorry that we are not doing the same for ourselves. (William D. Montgomery was special representative of the U.S. president and secretary of state for Bosnian Peace Implementation in 1996-97, U.S. ambassador to Croatia from 1998 to 2000 and ambassador to Serbia and Montenegro from 2000 to 2004.) (IHT, 07.12.2005)
NATO charter members at that time knew full-well that the atrocities were coming, and merely allowed a force of 375 UN peacekeepers to defend the village and its inhabitants. But the Serbs suffered greater-losses at the hands of NATO:If what happened to Kosovo Albanians and Bosnian Moslems was genocide, what of the treatment of Orthodox Serbs? After NATO's air war, 200,000 were driven from Kosovo. Most who remain cower behind barbed-wire barricades in Mitrovica. Altogether, 2 million Serbs were expelled from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, and 240 of their churches were destroyed. When this happens to anyone else, it's called ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide. The tragedy has its roots in the early 1990s, when the West decided Bosnians and Croatians were entitled to their own states. (Free Republic, 12.03.2001)
Yeah, but what does this have to do with Anna Nicole Smith and OJ? They provide media "white-outs", a distraction. Yes, you take a the disastrous lives of worthless celebrities who are on-hand at that particular historical moment, and you make them a SHIBBOLETH. Anyone like these vermin will do, just so long as they're vulnerable due to their own behaviors and their infliction on others. Feel inflicted? Manipulated? I do. If O.J.'s head exploded, or he was run-over by a truck, I wouldn't care. Anna Nicole Smith? Her life was worthless compared to someone who's being put-upon by our troops in Iraq, or anywhere our foreign policy has dominion. That's right: American foreign policy needs people like this to function nowadays, pathetic. And why do think Hillary Clinton won't apologize for her vote on authorizing the use of force in Iraq?
Has her husband ever apologized for the murdering of 500,000 Iraqi children during the 1990s? Taken together, Clinton's and Bush's policies towards Iraq amount to attempts at genocide, yet nobody bats-an-eye. America gets the world it deserves. They get Joe Lieberman (who called Muslim extremists fighting Serbs "freedom fighters") and George W. Bush.
Revised 08.31.2008
