TALL
TALES
The
reason is because every tall tale told by a Kosovar "victim"
was considered unbiased "testimony" and reported as "fact"
by Western governments and the media – and the story was,
unsurprisingly, always the same. It was always the Kosovars
who were the victims, and the evil Serbs who were cast in
the role of "Milosevic's willing executioners," in the New
Republic's typically hopped-up phrase. The same methods
were used to demonize the Serbs during the Bosnian civil war,
and now we have a spate of "war crimes" trials, with indictments
based on "testimony" of similar credibility. Bosnian Serb
leader Momcilo Krajisnik is the latest to stand in the dock
for the "crime" of standing up for the independence of the
Serbian people: a few days ago, the NATO-crats came knocking
on his door in the night, dragging him out of bed and clapping
him into jail on the authority of a secret warrant issued
by that star chamber tribunal headquartered in The Hague.
The gloating New York Times [April 8, 2000] account
gives us the flavor of what life is going to be like in the
new world Tony and Bill and George and Al are building for
us:
"Long
a powerful figure, Mr. Krajisnik, 55, seemed just a slight
figure in the largest courtroom of the tribunal. Twice he
tried to speak, first asking, 'May I say a few words?' and
then saying, "I would like to ask for a couple of minutes
at this hearing to say a few words in my own defense.' Both
time Judge [Richard] May [of Britain] cut him off, saying
that no statements could be made at this stage."
VYSHINSKY
BACK IN VOGUE
Bound,
gagged, and delivered before their tormentors, all who resist
the New World Order will grovel at the feet of the Tribunal's
lord high executioners and beg for mercy – or else find themselves
in for long prison terms in the Euro-Gulag. Communism may
be dead, but show trials are even more vogueish than ever.
Not since Vyshinsky
indicted Bukharin
and Trotsky as
agents of Hitler and the Mikado have so many Stalinists had
such a good time of it. Why, it's almost like the old days
of the Moscow
Trials again, lacking only a Stalin
of sufficient stature to rival the towering evil of the original.
RESISTANCE
By
a great coincidence, the arrest of Krajisnik occurred on the
eve of the Bosnian municipal elections – a model of the New
Europe in which all Serbian opponents of the NATO military
occupation were banned from the ballot. In spite of such measures,
including the seizure of Serbian resistance radio and television
stations, and censorship imposed by the occupation forces,
the remaining Serbs, having been forcibly incorporated into
the "multiethnic" state of Bosnia-Hercegovina, stubbornly
resist the NATO-ization of their nation. Every effort to install
a democratically-elected regime of Quislings has failed, and
the NATO-crats are fuming. The American ambassador, Thomas
Miller, complains: "I'm not interested in recommending to
my bosses in Washington that they put any money into areas
where you have people who are doing all they can to obstruct
Dayton implementation." The Times account of Bosnia's
electoral charade goes on to note that "such voting patterns
have long obstructed reconstruction efforts."
THE
NAKED FACE OF EVIL INCARNATE
The
history of these persistent voting patterns, and Western efforts
to break them, underscores the eerily Orwellian atmosphere
of NATO-run Bosnia: In every election held since the imposition
of the Dayton Accords, the Serbian Democratic Party, the party
of Radovan
Karadzic and Krajisnik, has maintained full support in
the Serbian regions, and the Croatian nationalists have retained
control of their own precincts. This time, too, it seems that
in spite of threats by the Western powers to starve them out
and bring them to their knees if they didn't vote the "right"
way, the people outside the Muslim-controlled urban centers
such as Sarajevo have rejected the occupiers and their collaborators.
Yet still the NATO-crats issue press releases opining that
these elections augur the beginning of a "new era" –
yet more evidence that the forcible absorption of Serb and
Croat communities into a "multicultural" state led by a Muslim
fundamentalist party is a glorious success. But what is truly
sinister is how brazenly the NATO-crats flaunt their authoritarian
proclivities, going
so far as to post the names and "crimes" of those purged from
the electoral process on their website. This material,
which reads like a cross between The
Trial and The
Red Detachment of Women, is strangely disquieting:
it is like reading a transcript of one's worst nightmare,
each sentence building up to that truly terrifying climactic
moment when the dreamer is confronted with the naked face
of evil incarnate.
"It
is with considerable regret that the High Representative and
the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe]
Head of Mission announce the removal from office of various
public officials. These officials have failed the voters who
elected them by pursuing anti-Dayton, anti-peace, anti-reconciliation
and extra-legal agendas – especially at the local level where
their obstructionism hurts the very people they should be
helping. They have consistently refused to take ownership
of the laws of their own nation by refusing to obey the letter
or the spirit of law, regulation and court rulings."
A
DEAD GIVEAWAY
There
is something about the very language of totalitarianism that
is always a dead giveaway, no matter how hard they try to
dress it up in the guise of "democracy." Naturally, it is
for London, Bonn, Paris, and Washington to decide whom has
"failed the voters" of Banja Luka, Note, too, the piling-on
of epithets, as well as the rather arcane sound of the epithets
themselves: to be called "anti-Dayton, anti-peace, and anti-reconciliation,"
in this context, is like being called a "Trotskyite wrecker
and spy" in the Pravda of the 1930s. Written in the
style of a letter announcing a death in the family –
"we regret to inform you" – this unsigned pronunciamento
is in effect an obituary for democracy in Europe. The
eeriest parts list those elected officials unceremoniously
kicked out of office and summarize their alleged "crimes."
We learn, for example, that the Mayor of Banja Luka, Djordje
Umicevic, has been
"removed
for serious and persistent obstruction with regard to all
issues involving implementation of the General Framework Agreement
for Peace. Specifically, inflammatory statements creating
a non-conducive environment on returns and responsibility
for non-implementation of Human Rights Chamber decisions."
THE
LINGO
The
opacity of this totalitarian lingo, meant to obscure its real
meaning, only underscores its ominous aspect. Anything that
lights up the linguistic murk emanated by bureaucrats and
their journalistic allies is, nowadays, considered "inflammatory"
– and in "free," "liberated," NATO-occupied Bosnia today,
it is a high crime for which you can be deprived of your right
to vote and to run for office, like Dragan Meter; the elected
Mayor of Prozor-Rama, deposed for
"persistent
and serious obstruction of the General Framework Agreement
for Peace, including discrimination against minority populations,
failure to implement agreements reached with the International
Mediator, obstructing the education of minority children,
obstruction in enforcing property laws, and a long and wide
record of deliberate attempts to undercut reconciliation."
INTOLERANCE
WILL NOT BE TOLERATED
Translated
into simple English, Mayor Meter wasn't going along with the
program, and so they purged him for having the wrong politics.
That's "democracy," Western European-style, for you –
a little experiment in political science, funded by the ever-generous
American taxpayers, the implications of which are ominous
in the extreme. What is growing in the Bosnian laboratory,
nurtured by NATO and generously funded by American taxpayers,
is a new kind of European authoritarianism, one even more
brazen than the last. This is clear from the rhetoric of OSCE
administrators, with its shrillness and unintended ironies,
which invariably give their pronouncements a comic opera air
– such as when some anonymous writer of OSCE press releases
declares that the purging of these politically incorrect Serbian
officials should "once again make clear that intolerance and
obstructionism will not be tolerated."
THE
"CRIME" OF MILADIN SIMIC
Reading
on, we discover that Miladin Simic, the elected President
of the Municipal Assembly of Bratunac, has been "removed for
persistent, serious and aggressive obstruction to Annex
seven of the General Framework Agreement for Peace." Wow!
Surely this is a "war crime" of major proportions: I mean,
to have your right to run for office revoked, it must be a
serious charge indeed – except it turns out that it isn't.
"Annex seven" of the General Framework is a long tirade of
conditions imposed by the victorious Muslim-Croat-NATO forces
on the defeated Serbs concerning the treatment of so-called
returnees. Second only to a demand for "the repeal of domestic
legislation and administrative practices with discriminatory
intent or effect" is an edict calling for "the prevention
and prompt suppression of any written or verbal incitement,
through media or otherwise, of ethnic or religious hostility
or hatred." Under a not very imaginative interpretation of
these rules, an article reporting the news of KLA ethnic cleansings
in Kosovo, photos showing the burning of Serbian Orthodox
churches by Kosovar Muslim mobs, and probably more than half
the material on this website are all against the law in "democratic"
Bosnia.
A
THREE-RING CIRCUS
Along
with Krajisnik's show trial, the upcoming "rape camp" hearings,
and the ongoing investigations of alleged Serbian war crimes,
the Hague is being turned into a three-ring propaganda circus
that would've made Joe Stalin proud. Based on the testimony
of Bosnian Muslim "victims," which is never questioned, the
criminalization of all resistance to NATO, political as well
as military, is now to be officially established and given
the imprimatur of the Tribunal. One such Bosnian Muslim "victim"
is cited in the Times piece on the Krajisnik indictment:
we are told that "prosecutors and defense lawyers alike sat
spellbound as the unidentified survivor described how column
after column of Muslim prisoners arrived by bus" and were
shot down by Serbian soldiers. Unidentified? In America,
everyone accused of a crime is given the right to face his
accusers, to know their identity and answer their charges:
in The Hague, secret indictments are handed down based on
the testimony of secret witnesses. This is not anything Americans
would recognize as a fair trial by jury.
JOHN
MACPHEE, SOLDIER OF DEMOCRACY
Whatever
crimes Krajisnik may be guilty of, they certainly pale in
comparison to the crimes of NATO and the Western powers, who
bombed civilians from 15,000 feet and poisoned the rivers
and the land itself with "low-grade" radioactive bombs. And
speaking of war criminals, Britain's Sunday Herald
[April 9, 2000] reports
that a Scots mercenary, who admits to having committed the
most sickening war crimes and boasted about them in a sensationalistic
book, has escaped prosecution by the International Criminal
Tribunal. A Scottish bank robber and all around criminal type,
John MacPhee joined the Croatian militia in 1992 after being
released from Manchester's Strangeways prison. With a rap
sheet that seemingly begins at the moment of his conception,
including drug convictions and being a suspect in 13 murders,
MacPhee was at one time on the UK's most wanted list. But
scratch an ordinary criminal, and you find a moral idealist
– a process that seems to work both ways these days.
As the Herald reports:
"MacPhee
claims he found 'peace in war,' saying: 'After all my years
in jail and all the violence I saw in children's homes, I
was basically a maniac. When I heard about the Serbian atrocities
in Bosnia I was in jail, and I thought [that] my life has
been a waste. I decided I'd go there and fight for something
I believed in.'"
CRIMES
OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER
Now
there was a likely recruit to the ranks of the US/NATO
"humanitarian" intervention: a vicious thug who had no trouble
passing muster in the US-funded-and-backed Croatian army,
which carried out the cleansing of the Krajina region in which
thousands of Serbs were slaughtered and hundreds of thousands
forced to flee. In his book, The
Silent Cry, MacPhee admits to what the Herald
calls "a series of barbaric murders." That is an understatement,
considering the following passage from his book. He has just
arrived at a hamlet near the town of Gorny Vakuf, where the
retreating Muslim army has just raped, tortured, and killed
37 men, women, and children:
"Two
enemy soldiers were captured," he writes. "Guilty or innocent
I knew they had to die. I fixed my bayonet and before I knew
it one of them was beneath me. My hand was ripping at his
flesh, my fingers gouging his eyes, I was becoming worse than
an animal ... my aim was to kill ... I bit into his face,
blood poured down my chin, my 18 inch knife stabbed and chopped
and slashed. I speared my bayonet into his neck one final
time and lifted his body into the air with such force that
I broke the bayonet ... They shot the other enemy soldier
before I could lay a hand on him."
THE
AMERICAN CONNECTION
Having
such a way with words, not to mention a knack for giving the
worst news just the right "spin," MacPhee will soon be working
for NATO, an even more authentically working class shill than
Jamie Shea. This demon admits to raping and killing civilians,
but defends himself masterfully: "I don't consider myself
a war criminal. I regret what I did, but I don't think it
was wrong." While in theory MacPhee could still be called
to account by the Tribunal, don't hold your breath. To focus
on the atrocities committed by the Muslim and Croat armies
in the Bosnian civil war would inevitably bring up the issue
of American complicity. Reports of a group of retired American
generals, operating as "Military
Professional Resources Inc.," and based in suburban Virginia,
as the real architects of the Krajina
blitzkrieg were widely published at
the time. In 1996, MPRI
won the contract to equip and train the Bosnian-Croat army,
then fighting to crush
Serbs who wanted out of the Federation.
THE
TERRORISTS
Another
MPRI alumnus, Agim
Ceku, is now the commander of the "Kosovo Protection Corps,"
whose members are currently engaged in what the London Observer
called a "reign
of terror" in Kosovo. It was Ceku who commanded "Operation
Storm," the name given by its American sponsors to the four-day
ethnic cleansing of the Krajina, during which our friend,
MacPhee, wallowed in blood to his heart's delight. You can
bet that none of these murderers, neither the commanders or
their blood-crazed stormtroopers, will ever be brought to
the bar of justice by the International Tribunal.
BY
WHAT AUTHORITY?
And
a good thing, too, for the most egregious aspect of this whole
International Tribunal business is the question: by what authority
does this exalted panel make its judgments? The NATO-crats
invoke the Dayton Accords and the joint declarations of the
Western powers and their Muslim and Croat protectorates, as
well as the authority of the United Nations, but their actions
are essentially as lawless as any by MacPhee: the Serbian
population of Bosnia never agreed to be governed by the diktat
of a transnational judiciary. The Tribunal's "legal" authority
comes out of the barrel of a gun, as Mao
explained the Marxist theory of the state. Of course, the
Great Helmsman had in mind the "dictatorship of the proletariat"
established in the wake of the 1949 victory of the Chinese
Communist Party over the Kuomintang,
but the dictatorship of NATO is no different in principle
or operation. Neo-Stalinism is the rising power in southeastern
Europe, sponsored not by the old Stalinist apparatchiks
of Milosovic's sclerotic Serbian Socialist Party, but
by the New Labour-New Democrat-Eurosocialist alliance, the
international champions of "democracy" and "human rights."
And if that isn't enough irony for one column, then perhaps
all of us are in danger of becoming just a little bit jaded.
JOIN
THE CLUB
I
want to bring to your attention, once again, a great little
supplement to this website, and that is the Yahoo!
Antiwar.com website. Here you can post your own comments,
discuss with others the material posted on the main site,
and talk back to the editors. Yahoo is a great service, and
the site is growing, with more discussion and more members:
joining is easy (just click on "join this club" in the upper
right hand corner). Antiwar.com is more than just a website:
we're an online community, where free discussion and interaction
is a vital part of the movement we are building: a broad-based
Left-Right coalition against global interventionism and in
defense of national sovereignty. Do you have something to
say? Well, now here is a place to say it: check it out.
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