YOU'RE
KILLING ME
Worse
than Shea is the arrogant Carla Del Ponte, the chief UN war
crimes tribunal prosecutor, who airily dismissed the overwhelming
evidence of NATO's criminality: in a speech to the Security
Council last week she told a breathlessly waiting world that
"I am now able to announce my conclusion, following a full
consideration of my team's assessment of all complaints and
allegations, that there is no basis for opening an investigation
into any of those allegations or into other incidents related
to the NATO bombing." Whew! Boy, am I glad that's
over with – the suspense was killing me!
 EXCUSES,
EXCUSES
As
if anybody expected anything other than apologias from Madam
Del Ponte, the chief high executioner of the New World Order
crowd, and her black-robed kangaroo court, the American news
media triumphantly reported this long-awaited revelation as
if it were real news. But what about all those Serbian civilians
slaughtered by US and British warplanes flying over 15,000
feet – and unable to avoid killing civilians – eh,
Carla? It's all the fault of the Serbian government, she answers:
"Since these events, there has literally been no cooperation
with my office. This severely hampers my ability to conclude
my investigations involving Serbian victims, particularly
where such victims are residing in the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia." She slyly added that the Serbian government,
for some reason, refuses to issue her and her "investigators"
visas to enter the country: ``The fact that I am unable to
gain access to the victims and evidence makes such allegations
rather hollow,'' she said. Perhaps the visa problem is due
to the indictment handed down against practically every member
of Milosevic's government, branding them "war criminals" and
calling for their immediate trial in the Hague. In any case,
Del Ponte and her crew of whitewashers have access to Kosovo,
where a great many of NATO's war crimes occurred.
SCENE
OF THE CRIME
Among
the accusations brought by a wide variety of human rights
organizations, including Amnesty
International, is one that fingers the NATO-crats for
bombing refugee convoys and civilians within Kosovo proper.
All this goes unmentioned. Yugoslavia is caricatured as completely
uncooperative, yet Del Ponte admits that Yugoslavia cooperated
to the extent of submitting "a substantial amount of material
concerning particular incidents." In addition, human rights
organizations from all over the world have compiled a large
number of reports. There was plenty of evidence –
enough, at least, to warrant a full-scale investigation.
CARLA'S
HIGH HORSE
But
Del Ponte was not interested: in answer to Russia's deputy
representative to the UN, Gennadi Gatilov, who rather diplomatically
summed up this obvious whitewash as "premature," the bitch
turned to him and snapped that she was "rather stupefied in
particular when it was said that there is a politicization
in our work. I completely reject that accusation. It is an
accusation I will not accept. For months I have been attempting
to get in touch with the authorities of the Russian Federation
to tell them what our work is about and how we do it." Oh,
get off your high horse, Carla, and give us all a break: the
Russians don't need you to tell them what your so-called work
is all about and how you go about peddling your propaganda;
they remember the Moscow show trials, the ritualized purge
sessions of the various "People's Tribunals" that invariably
and ceaselessly condemned the "enemies of the people." They
know your kind, Carla, in the East – homeland of Stalin
and the GPU – all too well.
A
SLIGHT CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The
mentality of these people, the inner workings of the bureaucratic
mind, are fascinating to behold – in the same way that
the sight of a deadly snake or spider is fascinating in its
creepy alien-ness. According to Del Ponte, the Tribunal under
Louise Arbor, her Canadian predecessor, began the whole sham
process by appointing a "working group" in May of last year
"comprising military lawyers, military analysts and other
experts to examine and assess all allegations against NATO."
Like the Tribunal itself, this phony "working group" did its
dirty work in secret, with no public testimony and the identities
of the "investigators" unknown – but not unfathomable
in the general sense that most were no doubt officials and
military officers of the very governments that the Tribunal
was supposedly investigating. Del Ponte promised that she
would soon release not only the details of her findings, but
the criteria applied – and we await these pearls of Solomonic
wisdom with bated breath. Until then, however, the remarks
of the "US ambassador at large for war crimes" – a kind
of roving Andrej
Vyshinsky – will have to suffice. . . .
CONSIDER
YOURSELF LUCKY
Spinning
the Clintonian party line to reporters, ambassador David Scheffer
hailed Del Ponte's faux "finding" as the apotheosis of justice.
After all, he said "the Tribunal could have rejected the allegations
at the outset. By taking a year to examine them rigorously,
it has been 'bending over backwards to be as fair and equitable
as possible.'" We ought to consider ourselves lucky that they
take such care to go through the motions – when they
really don't have to, now do they? At least we bother, Scheffer
seems to be saying – and for that we are supposed to
be grateful.
THE
REAL THING
While
Madam Del Ponte's magisterial remarks to the Security Council
were meant to provide a rationale, however thin, for the doctrine
of "humanitarian" conquest now officially embraced by the
Western powers acting in concert, we must turn to Gen. Wesley
Clark, the former NATO commander, for the unadorned version
of neo-Stalinism with a human face. The Tribunal, with its
careful lawyers’ phrases, puts a bourgeois liberal gloss on
things, but the General gruffly brushed off all such talk
in
a speech to the Brookings Institute: "I noticed on the
news today there's criticism of the attack on the Serb media.
Well of course, that was a controversial target, but the Serb
media engine was feeding the war." A television transmitter,
a newspaper office, the site of a server that hosts anti-NATO
websites – these are no different than, say, a fortified
anti-aircraft position or a Serbian tank. They are all "engines"
of war. In this new equation, as enunciated by NATO’s chief
warlord, a carload of enemy journalists is the same as a column
of enemy troops. Clark later confided to reporters that "you're
always making trade-offs in these decisions, but in this case
it was a huge step to be able to take out this major
instrument of provocation." The question is, a step toward
what? He’s right, though – it was a huge step, and one
taken without so much as a whimper of protest from our courtier
media.
BRINGING
THE WAR HOME
In
the simple mind of Wesley Clark, the rationale for bombing
a television station and murdering civilians is that they
weren't innocent, they were soldiers in Milosevic's
war against his own people. The
state media has been "a crucial instrument of Milosevic's
control over the Serb population," and "exported fear, hatred
and instability in the neighboring regions. So it was
a legitimate target of war, validated by lawyers in many countries
and validated by the international criminal tribunal." In
other words, the great crime of the Serbian RTS television
broadcasting network was that it wasn't CNN. Instead of the
braying mouthpiece of the KLA, Christiane Amanpour, some other
government shill – albeit one from the other side –
was spinning the news to suit their own purposes. All's fair
in love and the information war – including blowing your
enemy to pieces.
SUDDENLY,
THIS SUMMER
The
Kosovo issue will not go away: this is going to be a long
hot summer in that "liberated" land. With Montenegro at the
boiling point, and local elections in that flashpoint sub-republic
scheduled just in time to provoke a crisis, continued KLA
infiltration of Serbia proper almost ensures that renewed
fighting is bound to break out. It's only a matter of time
– and how much time is crucial. For if the crisis can
be postponed until after the US presidential election, then
the War Party is home free – since both "major" party
candidates are firmly in the interventionist camp when it
comes to Kosovo. The recent incident in which the brother
of the president of Montenegro pistol-whipped
a prominent member of the opposition Liberal party (which
calls for immediate secession from Yugoslavia) dramatically
underscores the ongoing low-level conflict that could break
out into open warfare at any moment. No doubt the CIA and
allied Western intelligence agencies are working hard to damp
down the fires smoldering throughout the region, but this
may not, in the end, be enough. . . .
THE
WAR PARTY AND THE GOP
It
could very well be that Kosovo will be a major issue this
presidential election year – and only one candidate,
namely Pat Buchanan, could possibly benefit from such an unsurprising
development. While Bush has waffled, somewhat, on this issue
in the past, his advisors have infused him with a new enthusiasm
for Clinton's war. Not only did he personally intervene to
turn back the Republican majority in Congress that demanded
an accounting, a timetable, and an exit strategy by a date
certain, but he is actively considering the ultra-interventionist
Senator Chuck Hagel as his running mate: Hagel is reportedly
on the short list of GOP vice-presidential candidates. During
the Kosovo war, he was one of the noisiest
of the loudmouth hawks, second only to McCain, and co-sponsored
a Senate resolution demanding
the introduction of ground troops. Senator Hagel was one of
the few congressional Republicans to support McCain's presidential
bid. In building bridges to the warmongering McCain, Dubya
is also reassuring the foreign policy establishment that he
won't pull out of Kosovo – and will, in fact, continue
Clinton's war on a scale undreamed of by Clinton, just as
Nixon carried to the end the war policy of his Democratic
predecessors.
THE
BUCHANAN FACTOR
The
political implications of the ongoing crisis in the Balkans
are potentially enormous. Those Republicans who opposed this
illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral war against a people
who had never attacked us, who were not guilty of the heinous
crimes attributed to them, and wanted only to preserve their
internationally-recognized borders against external encroachment
have only one place to go in the event of a flare-up, and
that is to Buchanan. In a March 24 speech
to the Antiwar.com national conference held in San Mateo,
Pat eloquently summed up the immorality and tragedy of our
bipartisan policy in the Balkans:
"Last
year, for 78 days, U.S. pilots flew thousands of missions
against Serbia, destroying bridges, factories, electrical
grids, and, yes, even hospitals, schools and the occasional
embassy. Yet, before launching his war, Mr. Clinton never
received the authorization of Congress. But as a consequence
of our triumph over Serbia, young men and women from California,
Kentucky, Florida and Maine are in Kosovo policing territory
that has been violently contested for hundreds of years.
"As
of now, we do not know if US troops will end up fighting Serbs,
or Kosovar Albanians, or first one, then the other. But it
is a near certainty that United States will one day be forced
to pull out of Kosovo, after having earned the lasting hatred
of Serbs – a people who never harmed the United States
– and of the Albanians, whose aspirations will not be
satisfied until the US helps to carve out an ethnically pure
Greater Albania."
ACT
TWO
Buchanan
is well
on his way to winning the presidential nomination of the
Reform Party, and the means to communicate his message to
millions of Americans. The impact of TV ads demanding "Bring
the Boys (and Girls) Home Now!" in the middle of the shooting
could be enormous – and a turning point in American politics.
The stage is set, the actors are ready – and the curtain
rises . . .
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