It’s a classic case of pot calling the kettle black: Reuters, a wire service notorious for enabling Imperial intervention by publicizing the most crass and wanton propaganda during the wars in Kosovo, Bosnia and Macedonia (actually, since the beginning of the Yugoslav breakup) is now accusing the Serbian government of falsifying Kosovo’s history.
According to Reuters Belgrade correspondent Douglas Hamilton, the Serbian government site devoted to documenting Serb suffering during the UN/NATO/KLA ongoing occupation of Kosovo “skip[s] the bloodiest part of [Kosovo’s] recent history… glosses over what Serbs did to Albanians before 1999.”
Hamilton then proceeds with a quote from Halil Matoshi, a “prominent Kosovo Albanian writer jailed in Serbia,” who says the site is “a total denial that the war took place,” and that it creates an impression that “there was no repression by the police and army, the state was just defending its territory by legal means.”
Well, you said it, Halil, not me…
Hamilton and his colleague in Pristina, Matt Robinson, then proceed to regurgitate the Official Truth about Kosovo, as rendered by Jamie Shea, Alistair Campbell, Christiane Amanpour and yes, Reuters: it was Milosevic “whose repression of Kosovo Albanians in the 1990s triggered an Albanian insurgency, provoked NATO into its first war and landed him in The Hague on charges of genocide.”
Bull. This is textbook scapegoating. Albanian separatism in Kosovo predated Milosevic by over a century; the KLA terrorism that Hamilton affectionately dubs “insurgency” would not have happened without outside support (namely the U.S.). NATO was not “provoked” into anything, it chose to go to war as a consequence of a deliberate decision by U.S. policymakers (Madeleine Albright first and foremost, but others as well). NATO’s “first war” was an act of premeditated, unprovoked aggression, no matter what noble excuses its media whores peddle to the terminally naive. Unless Milosevic’s very existence was “provocation,” as Saddam Hussein’s was four years later, in another aggressive war.
As for the Hague, Hamilton makes it sound as if Milosevic’s actions left this noble, impartial paragon of justice no choice but to arraign him on charges of genocide. Except that Milosevic wasn’t charged with genocide in Kosovo – since there wasn’t one, and even the Hague Inquisition thought it a stretch to make that much up (given that they’ve revised the term “genocide” to fit whatever they want it to be, that’s saying something). Not to mention – though I will – that the ICTY is a sham court, and that Milosevic ended up in its dungeon in a way as illegal and illegitimate as NATO’s war was.
Towards the end, Hamilton plays the numbers game. He claims – just as Reuters claimed for years that the number of dead in Bosnia was 250,000 – that some “12,000 Albanians were killed in the war and 800,000 were deported or fled … as Serbia poured up to 44,000 troops and police into the province.”
There simply isn’t any evidence that 12,000 – or 10,000, as is claimed more often – Albanians died in the war. None whatsoever. If there was, wouldn’t it have been produced by now? It’s been almost six years since the KLA, NATO and the UN took over Kosovo. And sorry, the “Serbs covered it up so well, we can’t find any” story is so stupid, only a completely brain-dead would believe it.
The pinnacle of cynicism surely has to be that Serbia’s considered “genocidal” for sending 44,000 troops and police into the province threatened by an outside invasion, while NATO’s initial occupation force was – over 40,000 troops!
Finally, Hamilton uses Amnesty International data to claim that “600 Serbs” were killed in the bombing (Serbian government claims about 2000, but they haven’t exactly provided specific evidence, either), and “180,000 Serbs fled Kosovo fearing Albanian revenge attacks.” So, Albanians were all expelled at gunpoint (genocide!), but Serbs “fled” (choice) in fear of “revenge” (justified). Mind you, this is the same load of excrement Reuters has been feeding the public since 1999. Have they no decency? Have they no decency at all?
Apparently not.