THE
WITCH REBUFFED
The
real objective of all this caterwauling is the ritual humiliation
and political marginalization of Yugoslav President Vojislav
Kostunica. For the demand to surrender Miloevic is sure
to cause fissures in the fragile pro-government coalition,
and pose a direct challenge to the authority of the new
President, who has always spoken out against the Tribunal
as a "political instrument." If the NATO-crats thought Kostunica
was going to cave, they were bound to be sorely disappointed:
as Antiwar.com columnist Nebojsa Malic pointed out in his
last "Balkan Express" column, the occupiers of Kosovo
don't seem to realize whom they're up against. Kostunica
turned the Spanish harridan out on her ear, to the applause
of his own people and the horrified exclamations of the
"international community." Retaliation was not long in coming.
THE
WITCHING HOUR
After
she picked herself up off the floor, the Witch was alternately
whining and threatening, averring that President Kostunica
was "not properly informed" about her kangaroo court and
saying that "dialogue [with him] was not possible. I tried
for half-an-hour to explain about the tribunal. I had to
sit and listen to his long complaints." The imperious Del
Ponte usually does not have to listen to anybody, and she
clearly did not like it one bit, quickly reverting to threat
mode: "He can and must change his mind," she hissed. "Full
cooperation with my office cannot be avoided if Yugoslavia
wants full membership in the international community. If
there is no cooperation, new sanctions can be imposed."
Yes, but not without the cooperation of the United States.
Will Dubya, who campaigned on a promise to get us out of
the Balkans – and burbled about "humility" as a guiding
principle of our foreign policy – go along with the
Witch's sanctions?
SURPRISE,
SURPRISE
Unfortunately,
the answer appears to be yes. I'm not surprised, and if
you were reading this
column during the recent election campaign, you
won't be too taken aback by the news either. As I pointed
out at the time Bush was flat-out lying to our faces: Dubya's
Kosovo deception was a ploy to lull conservative opponents
of globalism into believing that, on Election Day 2000,
they could safely vote Republican without having to worry
about the foreign policy consequences all that much. The
Bushies made vague noises about getting out of Kosovo, and
even now they are sending signals that Republicans have
reason to hope for a less activist foreign policy: the spinners
never sleep and the lies never stop. For now that the ICTFY
and its media allies are launching a major propaganda blitz
designed to re-demonize the Serbs – and, perhaps, set
them up for another drubbing – Team Bush is playing
right along.
NPR.GOV
A
recent
documdrama staged by the US government-owned-and-operated
National Public Radio alleges that the Serbs, in order to
cover up their alleged war crimes during the Kosovo civil
war, had burned thousands of bodies in the Trepca mines.
The OSCE immediately denied
that this was even a possibility, but that didn't stop a
spokesman for Bush's State Department from endorsing
NPR's unsourced and highly propagandistic report. The
NPR piece had barely hit the airwaves when US government
spokesman Richard Boucher told the Associated Press that
"information obtained by the US government beginning in
1999 confirms there were massive killings and there were
attempts to burn bodies and otherwise cover up evidence
at places throughout Kosovo.'"
NOT
A TRACE
But
OSCE spokeswoman Claire Trevana was quite clear about the
unreliability of the NPR story: "Our people have had a report
of this, but they found no evidence to substantiate it."
Trevena added that a team of French forensic scientists
outfitted with sophisticated equipment that was assigned
to search for any trace of human remains at Trepca "found
nothing there." Boucher said the United States stands by
its Clinton era (May and June 1999) briefings of the ICTFY
"on the Serb campaign to destroy the evidence. It's a fact
that we know of and that we've reported on in the past."
Boucher said he was "disappointed" that Kostunica did not
defer to the Witch's demands. "These things need to be worked
out," Boucher opined, "and the obligation flows from the
government to the tribunal." In other words: you guys lost
the war, and you had better bend
over and grab your ankles – or else.
CORPUS
DELICTI
During
the Kosovo war there were several estimates of the scale
of Milosevic's "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo: at one point
CNN was claiming that as many as 50 to 100 thousand Kosovars
had been slaughtered, and US government spokesmen echoed
this charge (or was that vice-versa?) But if were mass killings,
then where are the bodies? This is a question we
at Antiwar.com have been asking ever since the war ended,
and a number of journalists in the mainstream media –
overseas journalists, naturally, notably John
Laughland – have been making similar inquiries.
Now, Michael Montgomery and Stephen Smith of American RadioWorks
think they have an answer: the Trepca "crematorium."
NPR'S
TABLOID JOURNALISM
It
is an image that evokes the shadow of the Holocaust, one
that was used to great effect by the War Party in the period
leading up to US intervention in Kosovo, and which they
clearly believe hasn't outlived its usefulness. Before and
during the war, Western news accounts generally depicted
the Serbs as little short of Balkan Nazis, whose centuries-old
struggle with the Muslims was the product of their incorrigible
"racism." This lurid imagery is carried forward in the Montgomery-Smith
piece, buttressed by tabloid-style interviews with anonymous
first-name-only sources, and presented in the stereotypical
hectoring style of war propaganda at its crudest. The claim
is that up to 1,500 bodies were burned in a bizarre wartime
crematorium set up the by the Serbs at the Trepca lead mining
complex in northern Kosovo. The story focuses in on the
alleged massacre at Izbica, where over 150 unarmed noncombatants
– men, women, and children – were supposedly slaughtered.
A home video smuggled out of Kosovo during the war allegedly
showed details of the killings, and was dutifully shown
on CNN: this was an important propaganda campaign for the
NATO-crats, as the narrator of the NPR report points out:
"Izbica
was …important to western governments, but not just for
issues of justice and deterrence. Three weeks into NATO's
aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia, Serbian forces were refusing
to budge from Kosovo and criticism of the campaign was mounting
in western countries. If the aim of the massive air campaign
was to save Albanian lives, Izbica was an acute example
of a failing strategy. Increasingly pressed by a wary public,
U.S. and European officials sought to rally public support
for the war. They looked to Izbica."
Two
years after the conclusion of the war, with the total body
count still disappointingly low, and no evidence of mass
killings by the Serbs, they are looking to NPR to justify
the war in the court of public opinion – and provide
a rationale for the continued assault on Serbian sovereignty.
But Montgomery and Smith's "The Promise of Justice: Burning
the Evidence" is a strangely crude concoction of anonymous
quotes and wild suppositions that is not half as convincing
as some of the surrealistic propaganda that used to come
out of Milosevic's state-controlled Serbian media. Montgomery
and Smith sprinkle their report with provocative citations
from one "Branko," who claimed to be a member of a super-secret
Serbian unit assigned to cover-up Milosevic's "genocide."
The NPR piece informs us that "they spoke only after we
agreed not to reveal their identities and would only meet
in public places like noisy cafes. The men were interviewed
separately in Serbia and Montenegro. They served in different
units. Their stories provide a detailed picture of how Serbian
forces-under orders from Slobodan Milosevic's senior commanders-systematically
destroyed the bodies of dead Albanians to obliterate evidence
of mass killings."
A
FISHY STORY
But
why are these men talking now? What could possibly be their
motive, if not remorse – especially since they will
find themselves in the dock at The Hague and in for a loooong
stretch behind bars? Yet none of them expresses the least
sign of any remorse as they casually recount the most horrific
scenes of a Belsen-like crematorium: bodies sliced up like
bologna and dropped into the hellish flames. "Several of
the Serbian fighters who took part in burning Albanian bodies
– including Dusko – expressed no remorse. In fact,
Dusko only wishes he could have done more." This is very
odd, and very fishy, for what interest would an unrepentant
Serbian ultra-nationalist and self-confessed mass murderer
have in implicating himself and providing his avowed enemies
with enough rope to hang both him and his country?
THE
DJINDIC FACTOR
Clearly
certain elements within Serbia would benefit from the circulation
of this story. It is well-known that Zoran Djindic, the
newly-installed prime minister of Serbia, advocates a radical
purge of the army and the police, but was prevented from
making a clean sweep of the old guard by Kostunica –
who perhaps believes that the generals of the little army
that fought the West to a standstill deserve something better
than to be handed over to the enemy. Swept into power on
Kostunica's coattails, Djindic has never been elected to
anything in a popular election, having not quite lived down
his chumminess with Madeleine Albright and other US government
officials, as he waited out the bombardment of his country
in neighboring Montenegro. No depleted uranium poisoning
for him! Djindic has to be very careful, now that
he has managed to slither up the ladder to very near the
top, not to appear too craven when it comes to pleasing
his masters in Washington, and so in public he is somewhat
ambiguous on just what ought to happen to Milosevic. But
there can be no doubt that if the top Serbian military figures
he has targeted for ouster are indicted by the ICTFY this
would prove to be a rather large notch in his belt. Montgomery
and Smith cite details supposedly provided by unnamed "army
and police sources," which could mean officers slated to
replace those indicted for alleged war crimes.
ANOTHER
CLUE
Another
key to the motivation of these otherwise mysterious confessions
is the information, related by Montgomery and Smith, that
this grisly work was carried out by "Milosevic's Praetorian
guard," an elite unit of loyalists who could be entrusted
to keep quiet about their leader's crimes. As "Dusko," a
member of this unit supposedly put it:
"You
can't expect a regular soldier 18 or 19 years old to do
this kind of work," he said. "It's a stressful thing to
do. You wouldn't want regular Army guys exposed to this
kind of thing. You didn't want them going home after the
war and blabbing to their mothers or friends about what
they did in Kosovo."
AN
UNHOLY ALLIANCE
But
why would members of the notorious Serbian death squad known
as Frenkies' Boys, who did Milosevic's dirty work during
the Bosnian civil war and stuck by their leader in the face
of NATO bombs, now start blabbing to NPR, Carla Del Ponte,
and the world at large about crimes they committed with
their own hands? The idea that Milosevic loyalists might
be interested in splitting the formerly United Opposition
over the issue of The Hague and Milosevic's fate is not
altogether incredible. Surrounded by enemies on both the
left and the right, President Kostunica is fighting to maintain
his country's independence and dignity from within as well
as from without. If the remnants of the old regime are now
cooperating with American stooges like Djindic to sideline
Kostunica over this issue, it won't be the first case of
strange bedfellows in the Byzantine history of Serbian political
intrigue.
CREDIBILITY
GAP
The
basic technique of the NPR story is essentially a rerun
of the method utilized by the War Party before and during
the Kosovo war: retailing Kosovar tall tales as fact. We
are treated to a wide-eyed account of villagers from Zahac,
who claim their sons were "disappeared" by Serbian paramilitaries
and spirited off to parts unknown – perhaps to Trepca.
Yet these same villagers also say that, as news of the disappearances
spread, Albanians have been turning up at their doors claiming
to have seen their lost sons and husbands in prison, or
in some distant village, and offering information –
for a price. Montgomery and Smith, who haughtily remark
that "there is still money to be made from the Kosovo war,"
seem to dismiss these claims as the work of obvious scam
artists, and perhaps some of them are. But who is to say
that all or even most of them aren't telling the truth?
RISEN
LIKE LAZARUS
Certainly
the claims of these Albanian entrepreneurs need to be investigated,
especially in view of the way Albanians who were supposed
to have died in the war had a habit of turning up, alive
and well, as soon as the smoke cleared. Remember that Ibrahim
Rugova was widely believed to have been murdered by the
Serbs when the war started, along with Fehmi Agani, former
chief negotiator for the Kosovars, and Baton Haxhiu, editor
of the Pristina daily Koha Ditore, all of whom turned
up unharmed, after NATO military spokesman David Wilby claimed
they had been executed – a phenomenon that caused me
to wonder, at
the time, who or what was raising all these Balkan Lazaruses
from the dead. Perhaps the 1,500 "missing" Kosovars will
follow their example, and turn up bright-eyed and busy-tailed:
have they looked in the jails of Europe, where thousands
of Kosovars are doing time for drug-dealing, pimping, crimes
of violence and racketeering?
THE
MONTGOMERY & SMITH SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM
The
leitmotif of the NPR piece is that we will never know whether
the NATO-crats were right when they bandied around the startling
numbers that dragged us into the Kosovo war in the first
place: 100,000, 50,000, then 10,000 Kosovars supposedly
killed by Serbs on the rampage. Who knows but that
any one of those numbers could be correct – because
the "evidence" has been "incinerated" at Trepca and lost
forever. Now they don't have to produce any bodies. The
methods of the Montgomery and Smith school of journalism
– sources wrapped in a shroud of anonymity – reflect
the legal methods of the ICTFY, which issues secret indictments
on the basis of testimony taken from anonymous witnesses.
Now that they are relieved of the necessity of coming up
with the corpus
delicti, the great "crime" of the Serbs – who dared
to defend themselves against an unprovoked attack –
can be prosecuted and punished.
"ILLEGAL
BUT LEGITIMATE"
Naturally,
anything coming out of a US government-run "news" source
such as NPR is automatically suspect, especially in matters
related to foreign policy: NPR was a virtual arm of the
NATO press office during the Kosovo war. But the objectivity
of the two authors of this story is suspect on other grounds,
notably their joint
consultancy with the so-called Independent
International Commission on Kosovo, set up by the governments
of the NATO countries at the instigation of billionaire
George Soros and UN secretary general Kofi Annan. Other
consultants were Petrit Bushati, Albania's ambassador to
the US, Sven Alkalaj, Bosnia-Hercegovinia's ambassador,
and that noted paragon of journalistic objectivity, none
other than Clinton shill Sidney
Blumenthal. The commission's mandate was to "present
a detailed, objective analysis of the options that were
available to the international community to cope with the
crisis." Not too surprisingly, a panel consisting of NATO
cheerleaders, notably Richard
Goldstone, Michael
Ignatieff, and Richard
Falk, concluded that:
"The
NATO military intervention was illegal but legitimate. It
was illegal because it did not receive prior approval from
the United Nations Security Council. However, the Commission
considers that the intervention was justified because all
diplomatic avenues had been exhausted and because the intervention
had the effect of liberating the majority population of
Kosovo from a long period of oppression under Serbian rule."
FIBS,
BIG AND LITTLE
"Illegal
but legitimate" – oh, that's rich! The anti-Serbian
propaganda mill is gearing up for a major barrage, and I
have yet another, even more outrageous example – but
it will just have to wait for my next column, as this one
is plenty long enough already. One of my New Years' resolutions
was to try to keep my columns as short as possible, but,
unfortunately, the War Party has been working overtime recently,
and there is a lot of ground to cover. With the incoming
administration being courted by lobbyists, both foreign
and domestic, each making the case for intervention in their
particular area, these are busy times for warmongers, and,
therefore, for us. So tune in Wednesday for more debunking
of the War Party's little fibs.
Please
Support Antiwar.com
A
contribution of $50 or more will get you a copy of Ronald
Radosh's out-of-print classic study of the Old Right conservatives,
Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics
of American Globalism. Send contributions to
Antiwar.com
520 S. Murphy Avenue, #202
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
or
Contribute Via our Secure Server
Credit Card Donation Form
or
Have an e-gold account?
Contribute to Antiwar.com via e-gold.
Our account number is 130325
