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Date sent: Tue, 06 Apr 1999 16:27:21 -0700
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From: Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: US/NATO'S HYPOCRITIC OATH
US/NATO'S HYPOCRITIC OATH
by Andre Gunder Frank
April 4, 1999
The US government wishes to invoke international law to protect
three American soldiers held by the Yugoslav government under the
Geneva Convention regarding prisoners of war. Yet at the same
time,
The 19 states of NATO led by the United States are or have
just been flagrantly violating international law - and without
even any declaration of war - in wantonly bombing military
and civilian targets in Yugoslavia, including two buildings
in the very center of Belgrade on April 2 deliberately
blocking a major international waterway normally used for
commercial shipping by non combatant and neutral
countries, by bombing a culturally significant bridge over
the Danube in Novi Sad and plunging it into the river.
The NATO states deliberately by-pass the entire United Nations
organization and set aside the consultative procedures it, and
especially its Security Council, offers for the discussion and
settlement of international Disputes. These include in particular
those that guarantee human rights and those that may threaten the
peace. Thereby the NATO member states including the United
States are blatantly abrogating - even more than violating - the
mainstay of international law
NATO and particularly the United States has been obstructing
international criminal law by deliberately failing to arrest and
remand to the War Crimes Court in The Hague persons indicted for
genocide and other violations of human rights who are in the de
facto and perhaps de jure jurisdiction of NATO forces in Bosnia,
members of which provided for such arrest and remand as part of
the settlement at Dayton, USA.
The very man, Milosevic, who at Dayton was selected and
supported to guarantee and implement the Dayton agreement is
now being demonized and used as the pretext for this illegal NATO
bomb attack against an entire country. However, Milosevic
abrogated Kosovo autonomy already ten years ago and began his
autocratic rule fanning Serbian nationalism even more than ten
years ago, when it was also Western generated causes of and then
Western support for the breakup of Yugoslavia that gave Milosevic
that opportunity. [Shades of the first US/Western support and then
blame of Saddam Hussein, to whom Milosevic is only now being
compared.]
NATO bombing has effectively emasculated the very Serbian
opposition to Milosevic and his rule, which offered the best chance
and mechanism for a democratic, peaceful political settlement and
the furtherance of more humanitarian policies in Serbia, including
Kosovo, and also in the Serbian populated regions of Bosnia. This
domestic opposition to Milosevic was long led by the Serbian
Peace, Women's and other Democratic movements. They became a
world wide model of peaceful mobilization when they brought
hundreds of thousands of people out into the streets during a
months of winter nights and which thereby obliged Milosevic to
revoke a number of undemocratic and illegal measures. If the
NATO powers had had even the slightest interest in promoting
democracy or human rights anywhere in Yugoslavia, including at
the time in Bosnia and Croatia, they would have worked with rather
then undercut the domestic democratic movements. [Again exactly
the same was and still is true in Iraq].
NATO bombing, as the CIA and Pentagon reportedly predicted,
has immeasurably increased the deprivation of the Kosovo
Albanians' life, property, home, and country. It is difficult to see
how any measures could now or ever in the future restore even
what little they had before NATO bombs and Serbian persecution
drove them out into neighboring countries - where the humanitarian
concern of NATO had not made the slightest preparation to care
for them. And still at the time of this writing, the number of
Albanian refugees FROM Serbia does not yet or is only just
beginning to match the number of Serbian refugees TO Serbia, who
were forced out Of Croatia by ethnic cleansing that was itself
instigated and supported by NATO policy. So there is more than
just hypocrisy in the comparison and relation of these two flows of
refugees. It will be a macabre irony if the Croatian Serbs, who were
displaced with NATO help and still have found no place to take
root, end up in Serbian Kosovo after NATO also helps to chase the
Albanians out!
NATO member states have always denounced and combated all
'terrorist' military and para-military forces [except of course those
that they themselves have trained, armed and financed around the
world from Indochina, via Afghanistan and Angola to Columbia and
Guatemala and Nicaragua]. Yet now the military wing of the
Albanian movement in Kosovo have become 'freedom fighters', alas
without hardly a leg to stand on any more in Kosovo after ten days
of NATO bombing and Serb military offensive. Ironically
hypocritical also is the NATO support to and intended if not
realized protection of the very Albanian organizations that the
police forces of several of the same NATO member states have
accused of large scale drug trafficking, in violation of course also of
international law.
There is also at least a touch of hypocrisy in the discussion in the
United States of now bringing up charges of genocide in Kosovo .
For its government delayed 40 years to sign the international
genocide convention, and in the meantime instigated it in
Guatemala [as President Clinton recently admitted there], done it
through carpet bombing in Indochina [were the Vietnamese,
Laotians and Cambodians swept under the carpet?] and waited for
those otherwise defamed Vietnamese to stop the genocide in
Cambodia. and also to supported it or looked the other way
elsewhere, including turning a blind eye to NATO members
Turkey's genocidal policy towards its own and neighboring Kurds.
Indeed, the United States itself has been responsible for the death
for many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children
through bombing and the resulting damage and poisoning with
depleted but still radioactive uranium, and a soon decade long
embargo, that cripples the Iraqi economy and social services - and
what for? First and foremost to sustain the already low price of oil
by keeping a maximum of Iraqi oil off the world market. And even
still very recently in other parts of the former Yugoslavia, the
United States and some of its same NATO partners first set up
some 'safe havens' in Bosnia, and then 'helplessly' stood by to watch
massive massacres and ethnic cleansing. For 'safe' areas were taken
over by Bosnian Serbs [with help from the same Yugoslav army]
who massacred whole communities of Muslims in Srebrenica and
elsewhere then of course to take over their properties. Hundreds of
thousands of Serbs were themselves driven out by Croatians who
similarly enriched themselves, only on a still larger scale. Maybe the
Genocide convention was still too recently signed by the United
States yet to intervene under its cover then.
Shameful hypocrisy also has been the consistent failure, nay even
refusal, of the major Western NATO powers first to avoid and then
to remedy the breakup of Yugoslavia and its dreadful consequences
that are allegedly of age old 'ethnic' origin. Far from it, for at each
step of the way, it was the these same Western powers and their
policy or lack thereof that provoked and condoned the domino-like
set of events that are too long even to summarize. Moreover, each
time it was the Western powers who [deliberately?] refused to
accept settlements to avoid bloodshed until it was much too late
and the combination of countless deaths with their power politics
resulted in what was essentially the self -same settlement that had
been rejected years before, e.g. the Owens Plan and the Dayton
Agreement. So again at Rambouillet the Western powers held out
for a 'settlement' that they knew MUST be unacceptable to
Yugoslavia, while in Paris all major Yugoslav parties, including the
Albanians, came to an agreement that the Western powers rejected.
So NATO started bombing because it wanted to and not as it
hypocritically alleges because all other options had run out. No
sooner did NATO bombs start falling than the Russian Prime
Minister flew to Belgrade and negotiated an agreement that would
have stopped the persecution and exodus of Albanians in Kosovo
and would have permitted an immediate cease fire. But of course
that was not acceptable to the major [although yes to some minor]
NATO powers, for whom the plight of the Albanians is no more
than a hypocritical excuse for the American NATO offensive in the
Balkans.
P.S. The First Lady of the first NATO power Hillary Rodham
Clinton, speaking in Morocco a couple of days ago, lamented the
human tragedy in Yugoslavia, but said she was even more disturbed
by twisting the truth and falsifying history. Alas she found fault for
this hypocrisy only in the President of Yugoslavia and not at all in
her presumably ever faithful and truthful husband, the President of
the United States.
QED.
[PEN-L:4904] (Fwd) US/NATO'S HYPOCRITIC OATH
ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224] Tue, 6 Apr 1999 23:09:13 -0500
