THE
RAPE OF YUGOSLAVIA
Faced
with a terrorist insurgency rising from within the borders
of Yugoslavia, Milosevic launched an often brutal campaign
to rid Kosovo of the KLA, who, under
the influence of an ultra-nationalistic ideology with totalitarian
overtones, were targeting Serbian civilians and had
declared war on the state. For that, his nation was gang-raped
by NATO and old Slobo was dragged to the Hague in chains,
where an entity that declaring itself the "International
Criminal Tribunal for War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia"
has put him on trial for "crimes against peace."
TRUTH
WILL OUT
This
in spite of the post-war headlines: "Cook
accused of misleading public on Kosovo massacres," [London
Times]; "Where
Are Kosovo's Killing Fields?" asked Stratfor, the online
foreign policy analysts; "Despite
Tales, the War in Kosovo Was Savage, but Wasn't Genocide,"
averred the War Street Journal, whose editorialists
supported the Kosovo war (as they do every American war);
"Serb
killings exaggerated by the West," said the London Guardian
[8/18/00].
The
Guardian story details the Orwellian
process whereby initial claims of 100,000 victims of "genocide"
were shrunk drastically to under 3,000 (counting both Serbs
and Kosovar Albanians). When several
teams of forensic investigators returned from Kosovo,
their job finished, they came out with stunning news: the
Clinton administration had been lying about the alleged
Serbian "genocide." As the former Yugoslavia lay in smoking
ruins, however, the truth hardly mattered: NATO, after all,
had won. The Guardian ruefully noted the backtracking
of the NATO-crats:
"As
war crimes experts from Britain and other countries prepare
to wind down the exhumation of hundreds of graves in Kosovo
on behalf of the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, officials concede they
have not borne out the worst wartime reports. These were
given by refugees and repeated by western government spokesmen
during the campaign. They talked of indiscriminate killings
and as many as 100,000 civilians missing or taken out of
refugee columns by the Serbs."
THE
KOSOVO FRAUD EXPOSED
The
British
journalist John Laughland has exposed this gigantic
fraud at
some length, and I dealt with this subject in
a previous column: I won't repeat
myself here except to note that none of this wildly
inaccurate reporting was ever acknowledged by the
Clinton
News Network or any of the other media outlets that
served, during the Kosovo war, as willing executioners of
the truth. Yet Carla Del Ponte and the other make-believe
officials of this makeshift "tribunal" the word itself
denotes an arbitrary authority of dubious standing –
had to string together some sort of case against the fallen
Serbian leader. After all, they had scheduled the show trial
well in advance, and the audience was waiting. The show
must go on!
So
they simply broadened their indictment to include every
single act of brutality committed in the Balkans since 1989:
the endless ethnic cleansing and re-cleansing, the massacres,
the chauvinism and fanaticism. Although there was plenty
of blame for this bloody history to go around – more
than enough even for a three-sided civil war Del Ponte
attributes it all to a single man whose mythic evil was
supposed to have been demonstrated in The Hague. Except
it isn't turning out that way
.
THE
SCORE SO FAR: SLOBO, 2 – DEL PONTE, 0
It
turns out that the wily Milosevic, before getting into the
dictator business, had been trained as a lawyer, although
he never practiced. But it looks like he didn't need much
practice: the guy's a natural. He's already
gotten the prosecutor's chief witness heaved out for
presenting hearsay evidence that is technically admissible
but was ruled out of order by the judge. Not only that,
but he so effectively exposed the tall tales of the third
witness, one Agim Zeqiri, that Mr. Zeqiri simply
refused to answer any more questions, pleading "illness,"
and was excused by the judge over Milosevic's strenuous and
perfectly reasonable objections.
After
having been allowed to go on for hours about how his family
and friends were all victimized by the demonic Serbs, Milosevic
got the witness to admit on the stand that he and his fellow
villagers were actively aiding the KLA: it soon became apparent
that what Mr. Zequiri had described was not a "massacre"
but a pitched battle between Serbian troops and armed KLA
fighters. Another witness, Fehim Elshani, was so combative
that he had to be reproved by the judge, and instructed
to answer Milosevic's questions. The obvious incompetence
of the prosecutors is a terrible embarrassment. According
to the International Herald Tribune,
"During
the course of Elshani's testimony somewhat disorganized
questioning from a prosecutor left a central issue unclear:
Who exactly bombed Elshami's compound, killing seven people
in his own yard and two in his brother's?"
"RESISTANCE
IS FUTILE
."
The
trial of Slobodan Milosevic can only turn out to be an epic
farce, from its comedic beginning to its predetermined end:
it is like some policy wonk's idea of a Noh
play, a ritualized and highly stylized evocation of
what life is going to be like in the New World Order. Any
nation that gets out of hand, that asserts its sovereignty
too boldly, and resists assimilation into the Euro-American
Borg,
will see its rebel princes dragged in back of the conqueror's
chariot, like barbarians in an ancient
Roman triumph, and put on display in the Coliseum
for the mob's amusement. This trial is meant as a lesson,
and a warning, not only to the Eastern Europeans and their
fellow Slavs in Russia, but to any similarly "rogue" regime
anywhere that "resistance
is futile," as the Borg
like to say.
OR IS IT?
As
Milosevic is demonstrating, however, it isn't futile:
even if (or, rather, when) he is convicted. For the sheer
crudeness of the little morality tale now being played out
in the Hague like an amateur skit, with key actors forgetting
their lines, and the props visibly collapsing before the
eyes of the audience is, indeed, serving as a warning
to all the peoples of Europe and beyond: it could happen
to you!
GETTING
THE MESSAGE
Certainly
this was the
message that Austrians got and were meant to get
when they faced diplomatic sanctions (including
those imposed by the US) and open threats for voting
for the "wrong" candidates in an ostensibly free election
and elevating
the Austrian Freedom Party into the government. As
the Council of Europe gets ready to outlaw "hate speech"
and "xenophobia" on the Internet, the anti-immigration
stance of the FPO is soon to become a criminal and fully
prosecutable act. The
Italians, who voted the "post-fascist" Allianza Nacional
into the government, are also treading on some
very thin ice: the "open borders" immigration stance
of the Euro-crats is fiercely
opposed by two major pro-government parties, including
the separatist Northern League, without whose support Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi would have to hold new elections.
The same coalition of politically correct left-liberals
(Susan Sontag, Michael Lerner, Geraldine Ferraro, Bianca
Jagger) and anxious
American neoconservatives who supported the Kosovo war
because it was waged against the "xenophobic" Serbs, were
almost
as hysterical over developments in Southern Europe.
THE
HAUNTING
But
of course Rome will never be bombed, as Belgrade was, because
the Americans would never permit it. And yet – while
Washington is more than glad to give Del Ponte and her kangaroo
court free rein in the Balkans, and let them take up from
where Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright left off –
American complicity in this parody of justice will doubtless
come back to haunt us.
A
CLEAR IF NOT ENTIRELY PRESENT DANGER
For
decades, One-Worlders
have been agitating
for an International Court that would subsume all national
sovereignties under its own power, and have the authority
to override
even the US Constitution. American Presidents, including
even the fulsomely Wilsonian Clinton, hesitated to sign
on to a treaty binding the US to such a Court's decisions,
and not only because it would be filibustered to death in
the Senate. The prospect that American soldiers would have
to one day face a Del Ponte clone and stand in the dock
accused of war crimes would make any American President
– no matter how shiftless and disloyal cringe, and
hesitate before signing on the dotted line. In the post-9/11
world, a Republican White House has made it clear that they,
and not some motley assembly of Euro-pygmies, will sit in
judgement on the "axis of evil," and dispose of evil-doers
as they see fit. Yet the Milosevic trial ensures that the
possibility of eventual American accountability is not completely
excluded – although not in a way any patriot can approve
of.
DANGER
ZONE
The
US put pressure on Yugoslav President Vojislav
Kostunica to give in to the witch Del Ponte, and, as
long and hard as he fought, the only
principled politician in the entire country was forced,
in the end – by
the US and its Yugoslav sock puppets – to accept a
fait accompli: Milosevic was simply kidnapped and
taken into custody. One need not impute moral equivalence
between Milosevic's thugs and American soldiers to see that
the show trial in The Hague sets a dangerous precedent,
one that we may live to regret.
WE'VE
COME A LONG WAY, BABY
The
danger is not immediate, but far from negligible. A
recent news story in Business Day reports:
"Milosevic
is accused of launching a campaign of terror against the
Albanian majority in the Serbian province that resulted
in 800000 deportations and at least 900 deaths before it
was ended by Nato bombers."
We've
come a loooong way from the charge of 50,000 victims
of "Serbian genocide" routinely thrown around during the
orgy of war hysteria culminating in the Kosovo war. Nine-hundred
– that's just about equal to the number
of "revenge killings" credited to the Kosovo "Liberation"
Army, which, contrary to the myth-makers, was never
disbanded. You'll note that the Tribunal has inflated
its numbers by holding Milosevic responsible for the massive
flight that resulted from the NATO bombing, but how many
fled Afghanistan as a result of American bombs? How many
civilians were killed, "accidentally" or whatever, in "Operation
Enduring Freedom"? No matter whose statistics you accept,
it's still more than Milosevic is charged with killing in
Kosovo.
THE
SLOBO-RUMMY CONNECTION
Ah,
but it's a matter of intent, you say: we killed civilians
by accident, whereas the last Stalinist in Europe did it
by design. But Milosevic makes some
very familiar arguments about the inevitability of collateral
damage and the absolute necessity of stopping the KLA terrorists.
Minus the Serbian accent, and without considering Slobo's
almost complete lack of charm, he could easily pass for
Donald Rumsfeld vowing to pursue a "war on terrorism" to
the very end with whatever
it takes.
THE
SELL-OUT
I
hold no
brief for Milosevic, as I have made very
clear in the past on more
than one
occasion, but his trial is nothing less than an abomination,
a twisted perversion of justice that ought to alarm every
patriotic American no matter what their views on the present
war. By acceding to the wishes of the Europeans, and sanctioning
this farce, the US government is setting itself up for a
fall and selling its own military down the river.
KOSTUNICA
ON TARGET
Kostunica
was right
to say of the trial: "There has been little legality
but much shallow, superficial... and often forged quasi-history.
There has been politicking, hypocrisy and strange inconsistencies."
And the Yugoslav President was dead-on target when he
pointed out that not only Milosevic is on trial here:
"The
prosecution's claim that this trial is against one person,
not all Serbs, that there is no collective guilt but only
individual, sounds extremely stretched."
Equally
far-fetched is the contention of Del Ponte's amen corner
in the US and Europe that the "crimes" of which Milosevic
stands accused justify the Kosovo war in retrospect. While
Al
Qaeda was sending aid and volunteer fighters to the KLA,
so were we: an unholy alliance if ever there was
one. Far from being a just war, the evisceration of the
former Yugoslavia by Bill Clinton and his NATO allies was
a crime that upset the delicate Balkan balance of power
and unleashed the demon
of Albanian
ultra-nationalism. It is a crime for which we may yet
pay a high price indeed.
