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Text
of a speech given to Dayton Peace Action, Dayton, Ohio, March
21, 2000
It's
a privilege to have been asked by Dayton Peace Action to speak
regarding this past year of war in Yugoslavia.
An
organization like yours that's dedicated to peace is a rare one
in the landscape of today's geopolitics in which stronger countries
like ours are said to have "national interests" that justify going
to war. A person who is for peace signals that he most likely
does not have a multinational investment portfolio and probably
doesn't care whether the bulk of Americans who invest in foreign
enterprises and ventures prosper or not. If you reject the notion
that nations such as ours have the right to send troops to protect
the investment of capital in a foreign country like Kuwait or
Yugoslavia, you'll be looked on as a clueless individual who somehow
hasn't gotten the message that investment in the economies of
foreign countries is the life's blood of our American system,
a thing that Americans who own stocks are ready to die for, or
kill for, even if you are not. May you, notwithstanding, continue
to carry the peace banner.
I
have spent the past year being one of a chorus of people that
has raised an outcry about the Balkan war on the internet, and
has refused to let the matter die as the media and our national
leadership try to move on to other things. What anybody who has
followed the war on the web has quickly realized is that it has
caused a crisis of consistency for people of every political inclination:
from so-called Democratic Socialists (many of whom vigorously
supported the bombing of a socialist country) to conservative
libertarians (who supposedly believe in a free market economy
but defended Yugoslavia -- a country bombed for its refusal to
adopt a free market economy).
Somehow
through the confusion of seeing right and left trade their traditional
positions on the justness of war an antiwar computer consensus
emerged that demanded to be heard and became a factor that had
to be reckoned with. Within mere months, the war opposition that
had taken root among the public bubbled to the surface in the
House of Representatives last May in a tie vote registering no-confidence
in the administration's war policy, 213-213, a vote followed just
a few weeks later by an abrupt halt in the bombing. Can one recall
a more dramatic triumph of democracy than in this affirmation
of the goal of peace by the representatives of the people?
The
Pentagon fought the information war in the Balkans using the old
media: newspapers and TV. They failed to stir the traditional
pro-war, patriotic fervor, however, because, increasingly, public
opinion is being shaped today not by TV but by computer.
As
compared with their support for action against the Ayatollah Khomeini
in Iran and against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the public's reaction
to this war was to sit on its hands and turn away from the kiddie
cartoon version of a war in Yugoslavia that the video media crafted
with the help of military and CIA psychological operations specialists
who literally occupied CNN newsrooms and production facilities.
Even in spite of all that effort, like a big budget Hollywood
movie that nobody went to see, "Operation Allied Force" was a
disaster at the box office. Does anybody even remember that corny
name?
As
we approach the one year anniversary of the start of NATO bombing
of Yugoslavia three days from now, let's take satisfaction that
the war has been such an embarrassing subject that not a single
presidential candidate from the two major parties has so much
as mentioned it! Given the fact that the war was undeclared and
indeed that the word "war" was not even used to describe an operation
that involved 40,000 Western bombing sorties, the uprooting of
a million people, ten thousand civilian deaths, and the destruction
of 1,500 towns and 40 per cent of the buildings in Kosovo alone
by the NATO bombing - to the point that 1.2 billion dollars would
now be needed to rebuild housing in Kosovo alone - given the fact
that even with all that bloodshed and destruction NATO was able
to destroy only 13 Yugoslavian tanks, and is it any wonder "Kosovo"
is a war regarding which no major political candidate has dared
speak its name?
Odds
are, however, that this issue will not stay quiet very much longer
because, for one thing, the war is still going on and in fact
heating up with every passing day, and furthermore those who originally
set it in motion had grandiose goals that are still far from being
achieved, goals that can only be achieved by a confrontation with
Yugoslavia's unyielding regime.
As
far as the war still going on is concerned, indications are that
another call by the United States for a resumption of bombing
and perhaps ground operations will be made in the very near future.
A blockade of the Republic of Montenegro set up early this month
by the Milosevic government seems to set the stage for yet another
U.S./NATO rescue mission. This time it would be on behalf of the
government of Montenegro President Milo Djukanovic, the king of
European cigarette smuggling, who is expected to follow in the
footsteps of Slovenia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia,
and (soon to be added to this list, Kosovo), and stage a secession
from the Yugoslav federation.
Also
indicative that the war is recharging is the renewal of Albanian
aggressive acts, not only against Serb civilians but this time
even against NATO/UN peacekeeping personnel. Persecution, bombings,
and killings of Serbs by revenge-minded Albanians have taken place
under the nose of and with the apparent protection of the greatly
overmatched UN international peacekeepers. In a sign of the underwhelming
international support that there is for the Balkan mission, the
UN countries who supposedly pledged to provide a total of 5,000
troops to police the streets of Kosovo instead only provided 2500.
In the past few weeks, everyone in a position of authority in
relation to Kosovo, from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on down,
has proclaimed the area to be out of control. Either a mono-racial
Albanian state entirely "cleansed" of Serbs will emerge in Kosovo,
a republic that NATO at war's end had agreed would remain as a
territorial part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or Kosovo
will be partitioned as in Bosnia and Cold War Berlin.
Incredible
as it may seem, NATO had gone to war without first having in place
a game plan for postwar occupation of a country that it invaded
and occupied. Now that it has total authority, it's making up
a new script each day as it goes along. Ten years is the minimum
forecast I have read for how long this travesty of an occupation
will last, and some have said fifty. Its mission compromised to
the core, its authority mocked by their having served as protectors
to the gangland violence of its Kosovo Albanian dependents, the
UN occupation and security force has reduced retiring NATO commander
Clark to putting out desperate calls for more troops - and caused
NATO's own field officers and monitors to warn that troops may
now be needed to quell these same Albanians that we embraced and
set up as a fighting force in the first place.
On
February 13th, in the city of Mitrovica where 50,000 of the remaining
100,000 Serbs who have not yet been driven out of Kosovo still
live, UN personnel were overmatched by sniper fire and crowds
throwing rocks and grenades in a march on the city that's known
for its prized Trepca mineral mines. Wresting control of the mines
and their 17 billion tons of coal reserves, plus lead, zinc, cadmium,
silver, and gold treasures from the government in Belgrade has
been seen as a goal not just of the Albanian insurgents of Kosovo
but also of the international industrial and investment interests
who stand poised to reap major benefits from NATO dominion over
the area.
The
mines have been called "the most valuable piece of real estate
in the Balkans." Many of Kosovo's pro-secession Albanians who
had worked in the mines were weeded out and replaced with Poles,
Czechs, and Serbs by the Milosevic administration in the 1980's
after having committed a spate of strikes, sabotage incidents,
and violence against fellow-Albanian miners who remained loyal
to the government in Belgrade.
The
guns of insurgents who fought for the KLA and for secession of
Kosovo from Yugoslavia are still targeted on these fellow -Albanians
"traitors" who remain pro-Belgrade and whom they would like to
oust from the mines. The 70,000 Albanians who rallied in Mitrovica
have plainly lost patience with the UN occupation which they had
expected would re-establish employment in the mines for Albanians
who are pro-KLA. Obviously the mines are not just a flashpoint,
they are the flashpoint for any future hostilities in Kosovo.
The
Trepca mines first attracted notice in the early days of the war
when NATO spokesmen alleged that they held one thousand bodies
of Albanian victims of Serb ethnic murders. The Mirror of London
wrote that the name Trepca would "live alongside those of Belsen,
Auschwitz and Treblinka, etched in the memories of those whose
loved ones met a bestial end in true Nazi Final Solution fashion."
But in the aftermath of the bombing ceasefire investigators for
the International Criminal Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)
found no human remains there at all!
If
the name Trepca continues to live in infamy it will be as a symbol
not of genocide but of the official invention of a fake genocide
to justify war against a nation that had committed no offense
other than a refusal to allow the major Western nations to plunder
it.
Along
with Trepca all other evidence of Serb genocide has collapsed,
the 100,000 ethnic murders of which "Mr." Milosevic was accused
by Defense Secretary Cohen were pure invention as admitted even
by hardliner Adem Demaci of the KLA who put the figure at closer
to seven thousand. However, the ICTY forensic teams who were sent
to look for bodies wound up actually finding remains of only a
few hundred persons and even these bodies were conceded to have
been likely insurgent combat troops rather than innocent civilians.
At the very most, the ICTY teams estimated that the total count
of bodies found would be something like 2,000. No less an authority
than KLA "minister" Hashim Thaci has himself now admitted that
the notorious so-called "massacre" at Racak, the incident that
outraged the world and gained world support for NATO action, was
the result of a bald-faced provocation by KLA terrorists who used
the photographed bodies of their own snipers as "proof" of a Serbian
ethnic bloodbath.
While
this is not news on the television media, which refuse to report
these revelations, it's big news on the internet where official
lies and disinformation are routinely deflated in a matter of
hours after being proclaimed. Indeed, in spite of NATO's seeming
media advantage, the winners of the information age's first internet
war have been the forces of peace! A determined information-gathering
resistance movement on the internet has grown in influence over
this past year to such a point that it has succeeded in stripping
away the humanitarian fig leaf that NATO wore when the war first
started and with it all credibility of the governments of nineteen
of the most powerful countries in the world. That is a big, big
accomplishment.
Hence
while a new war, even an expanded war, has perhaps never been
so close, the power of those who seek peace has never seemed greater,
either.
The
next time this country goes to war, whether in the Balkans or
against some small, defenseless country elsewhere on the planet,
how can our pretense of humanitarian motive be believed now that
internet researchers have exposed our hidden intentions in Yugoslavia
and forced revisions of the official spin on that war to be made
in the historical record?
The
entrance of the U.S. into the Balkans was shocking when it happened
because of our trampling of international war codes, treaties,
and rules of conduct taken for granted for decades, and even centuries.
The UN Security Council - out of business. The Geneva Convention
prohibiting aggression against civilian populations - null and
void. The War Powers Act forbidding foreign military intervention
without Congressional authorization - never heard of it. I even
read that we had violated the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648! The
internet revolution broke down the mystique of foreign affairs
expertise, allowing citizens like ourselves to have technical
information such as this. Now we have an opportunity to sort through
the sheer mountain of data, and, if we stay the course, to find
out exactly what goes on inside the Leviathan of the war machine,
and exactly how a nightmarish war such as we have seen in Yugoslavia
is made from drawing board through fait accompli.
It's
exactly appropriate that among the most influential sources of
truth about this war have been two websites, the absolutely essential
antiwar.com and one entitled The Emperor's New Clothes - www.tenc.net.
Here are just some of the revelations with which that latter website
and others have succeeded in tearing away the aura of righteous
purpose in which the makers of the NATO war on Yugoslavia have
vainly struggled to clothe themselves.
By
the time the bombing was two weeks old it was clear to anybody
following it on the internet that restoring ethnic harmony in
Kosovo was not the reason we were in Yugoslavia. Now a year later
a consensus has grown that what the U.S. had sought for Kosovo
is for it to be a permanent colonial protectorate, a launching
pad for America to move into the former Soviet bloc countries.
Prior to the war, America had military bases in 100 countries
around the world but not Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was the very the
last country in Europe without an American base. Now, thanks to
the war the largest American base in Europe is in Kosovo.
Emperor's
Clothes has published many entries by writer Diana Johnstone.
She characterizes Yugoslavia as "a testing ground and a metaphor
for the Soviet Union." In other words, American orchestration
of the downfall of Yugoslavia (by abetting the breakaway of its
member republics) is only a dress rehearsal for future usage of
the same dismemberment strategy against Russia. Supporting the
idea that America is positioning itself to revive the Cold War
struggle against Russia are several articles on Emperor's Clothes
including a 1996 paper by Sean Gervasi which asserts that America
wants to have the status of a "European power," and to expand
eastward, eventually taking over the running and economic exploitation
of former east bloc countries such as the Ukraine, Georgia, and
Azerbaijan.
As
long as four years ago Gervasi was proclaiming that far from being
a tightly knit partnership, the western alliance is falling apart.
In his analysis, fearing that the emergence of the European Union,
of which the U.S. is not a member, would make Germany rather than
ourselves the supreme power in Europe, the U.S. sought war in
the Balkans to carve out a post-Cold War domain for NATO, of which
we are a member, and a way to make NATO be the supreme power in
Europe.
Gervasi's
theory is as follows: worried that our fellow NATO countries had
only weakly supported American action in the Gulf War (with our
so-called allies relying almost wholly on American manpower and
firepower), the U.S. cooked up a Balkan crisis in order to lift
NATO out of its doldrums and establish American supremacy by dazzling
our allies with American high tech firepower. Implicit in this
theory is that America had acted in the hope that Europe would
see that this country sets the standard for military manufacture
and would have to buy American military goods.
As
early as the 1980's American strategists were plotting ways that
NATO intervention against "rogue nations" would give the U.S.
and its fellow members of NATO a new cause. Just as the old empires
of Europe conquered whole continents in the name of a "civilizing
mission," NATO would roam the planet as protectors of human rights
and as humanitarian rescuers.
Another
contributor to Emperor's Clothes (and other antiwar websites),
Michael Chossudowsky, documents the way the U.S. used the American-controlled
International Monetary Fund, with its power of foreclosure as
financial lender, to smash the Yugoslavian economy, render that
country helpless against foreign takeover, and create such outrageous
social and economic conditions that military intervention by outside
countries would seem like the only solution.
Finally,
once again from Emperor's Clothes, on March 12th we were privileged
to get the first American posting of investigations by the major
London newspapers and BBC television that show how America's CIA
created the pro-Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army to spread terror
against Serbia and the government in Belgrade. When Belgrade acted
to stop the shootings, burnings, and kidnappings by the KLA Western
media portrayed Belgrade's law & order measures as racial genocide
against Albanians. In such way the impression was created of a
humanitarian crisis that NATO used as cover for a military aggression.
Now
one year after the initial bombing of Yugoslavia, America has
installed itself as an occupying power in Kosovo. Like Korea,
like Berlin and the two Germanies during the Cold War, Yugoslavia
is now a divided country with two republics (Bosnia and Kosovo)
that are protectorates run by outside international bodies mainly
staffed by Americans.
Is
the United States simply getting carried away with its own self-righteous
sense of a mission to save mankind, as many anti-war conservatives
who hate the idea of governments acting on the basis of paternalistic
compassion, such as Pat Buchanan, charge, or is the U.S. committing
itself to interventionism because of some more practical and self-interested
motive?
We
do not read much about it or hear about it in the major media,
but the internet has carried dozens of articles about the economic
benefits that the U.S. stands to reap from its presence in Kosovo:
first of all the U.S. seeks to build an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan
in the former Soviet Central Asia right across Kosovo and Croatia.
With its domination of Kosovo the U.S. would have control over
the future main supply of oil to the European continent.
And
in Kosovo as in many other countries before it, America has sided
with factions that reap huge profits from the drug trade thus
implicitly suggesting that our government has a stake in that
trade that has become a vital form of military financing. First
Afghanistan, then the Nicaraguan contras, then Panama, and now
it's our latest client, Albania. 80 percent of Europe's heroin
supply comes from Albania, which has used drug sales to fund KLA
expansion into Kosovo and made Kosovo an indispensable link in
the Albanian drug trade. Our armed forces are being readied for
an expedition to stop the drug trade in Colombia. Has one word
been said to suggest that the military in Kosovo might want to
stop the drug trade in Kosovo as well?
It's
been hard for anyone who knows the truth about the KLA and drugs
to watch TV personalities such as Geraldo Rivera go to Albania
and stand side by side in solidarity with these anti-Serb rebels
whom they characterize as freedom fighters. Only on the internet
do we discover that these brave patriots are funded almost entirely
by profits from heroin and other major-scale organized crime activity
including prostitution.
Give
credit to the internet resistance, then, for exposing truths such
as these about the war in Yugoslavia. In today's information wars,
computer truth forces are the modern day successors of the war
resistance of Yugoslavian partisans and chetniks who stood up
to Hitler during World War II.
In
just three days we will mark the one year anniversary of NATO's
air invasion of Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999. It so happens that
that date coincides with another anniversary, the birth of Yugoslavian
resistance to Adolf Hitler on March 26-27, 1941. On that date
after Hitler had struck a deal with Yugoslavia's Prince Regent,
Yugoslavia's armed forces rose up and overthrew his government,
as crowds spat on the German minister's car. Allow me to quote
from William L. Shirer's classic account of the years of the Third
Reich:
"The
coup in Belgrade threw Adolf Hitler into one of the wildest rages
of his entire life. He took it as a personal affront and in his
fury made sudden decisions which would prove utterly disastrous
to the fortunes of the Third Reich. Yugoslavia (he said) would
be crushed with 'unmerciful harshness.' He ordered Goering to
'destroy Belgrade in attacks by waves' with bombers operating
from Hungarian air bases." He then postponed his invasion of Russia
by four weeks thus guaranteeing that it would end in failure and
the snows of the Russian winter.
The
bombing of Belgrade by the Luftwaffe began on April 6, 1941, razing
the city to the ground and killing 17,000 civilians. In an eerie
forshadowing of today's tradition of giving each war its own action-movie
title such as "Operation Desert Storm" in Iraq and "Operation
Allied Force" in Kosovo, Hitler's air attack on Yugoslavia was
called "Operation Punishment." On April 13, 1941, Yugoslavia was
overwhelmed by the German blitz, and the army surrendered at Sarajevo.
Under the occupation industrialist Alfried von Krupp and Reichsmarshall
Hermann Goering personally divided up the spoils of Yugoslavia's
precious mines. However the Yugoslavian partisans, consisting
primarily of Serbs, fought on, resisting all foreign domination
including, after the war, that of the Soviet Union.
Of
all the countries that were overrun by Hitler's armies, Yugoslavia
set a unique example in fighting back and offering armed resistance.
The heroic resistance to military aggression demonstrated by the
Serbs of Yugoslavia, which started with Serbia's declaration of
independence after World War I and has now withstood three invasions
including NATO's, should not only not be forgotten, but should
inspire us today.
Yugoslavia
is once again being eyed as an outpost for the west in Central
Europe, a fortified American emplacement in readiness for war
with Russia. The stubborn Serbs of that country have shown that
they will endure any suffering to prevent their land from being
used for such a scenario. We must find the strength to match the
Serbs in their heritage of resistance to war, and it looks as
though we will be called upon to do so if, as appears likely,
NATO's war against Yugoslavia intensifies in the very near future.
Geoff
Berne is a southwestern Ohio newspaper and internet contributor,
member of advocacy organizations, and political consultant.
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