[CTRL] New Statesman: 'Ethical Blairism'

[Mrs. Jela Jovanovic, Secretary General]

-Caveat Lector-   <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">
</A> -Cui Bono?-

===========================
The Committee for National Solidarity
Tolstojeva 34, 11000 Belgrade, YU
January 26, 2000
Kosovo, close to being a Mafia state, is littered with unexploded bombs.
That`s the result of ethical Blairism
New Statesman
John Pilger
24th January 2000
The Blair government`s resumption of arms sales to Indonesia ends an
unreported hoax. The four- month "ban" supposedly in re-sponse to the
renewed repression in East Timor, was hardly a ban at all. Licences were
merely extended, so that no future business would be lost, and
parliament and the public were not told. Now, with 170,000 East Timorese
held hostage by the Indonesian military in camps in West Timor and
British-supplied Saladin armoured cars used in attacks on civilians
elsewhere in Indonesia, the military dictatorship that still runs the
country (regardless of its democratic trappings) will be encouraged in
its campaign against the popular resistance.
At the same time, the ethical Blairites are eager to resume arms sales
to the Pakistani military dictatorship, which three months ago crushed
an elected government.
Pakistan`s appalling human-right record makes a grim joke of the
European code of conduct on arms sales, adopted when Britain held the EU
presidency. This is unsurprising; British arms exports have long gone to
regimes with appalling human-rights records.
The ethical Blairites, however, add another dimension. Consider the
legacy of their "new moral crusade" in Kosovo last spring. Clare Short,
an avid crusader, said then "Nato is not killing civilians. The very
carefulness of our operations is to ensure that there is minimum damage
to civilians". This was manifestly false. Several thousand civilians
were killed and thousand more maimed many by cluster bombs which are, in
effect, air-dropped time-activated landmines. Those that did not explode
immediately now lie in wait for unsuspecting civilians, often children,
who pick them up; on detonation, they release dozens of "bomblets" that
cause horrific injuries.
I saw something of the human carnage they caused in Indochina following
the American bombing; 30 years later, they are still killing and
injuring. Not long ago, in tiny Laos, the British Mines Advisory Group
found 700 unexploded bomblets in one school playground. According to the
Asia correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, cluster bombs have given
Laos "an annual nationwide casualty rate of 20.000 more than half of
them deaths".
For Laos, now read Kosovo. Last April, Paul Watson of the Los Angeles
Times, who distiguished himself by remaining in Kosovo during the NATO
bombing, reported that cluster bombs had turned "parts of the province
into no-man`s land" which was "littered" with unexploded bomblets. At
Pristina Hospital, he witnessed the "horrific wounds" of Albanian
children, caused by delayed-action clusters. (It was Watson who
memorably wrote: Even in Kosovo, I couldn`t escape the sound of (Nato
spokesman Jamie) Shea`s voice it haunted me at the strangest times,
denying things that I knew to be true, insisting on others that I had
seen were false").
With Robert Fisk`s reporting, Watson`s witness to the carnage caused by
Nato was rare. This was not so much a reporters` war as one dominated by
drum-beating lifestyle columnists who never acknowledged that British
pilots were using terror weapons against civilians, sowing Kosovo with
harvest of death and suffering that was in explicit violation of the
Ottowa Convention, which prohibits the production and use of
anti-personnel mines. Subsequent scrutiny of ministry of Defence
statistics reveals that, contrary to Clare Short`s fiction of
"carefulness" more than 75 per cent of bombs dropped by the RAF were
free-fall, including the 78,057 cluster bomblets released.
"It would be wrong to assume" said Blair last April, "that bombs and
missiles that miss their target necessarily cause collateral damage."
Read again that statement and you get a sense of the craven sophistry
with which respectable regimes cover their crimes. Blair is afraid of
the truth getting out and his ministers blocked disclosure of the
percentage of British bombs and missiles that "went astray" in Kosovo.
They justify this recourse to the Code of Practice on Access to
Government Information, a decree of state secrecy that no Soviet-era
apparatchik could better.
The ethical Blairites claim they did not use depleted uranium in Kosovo,
as John Major did in Iraq. Can se believe that? Their co-crusaders, the
Americans, used it. The physicist and chemist Professor Hari Sharma, a
world authority on depleted uranium, says: "The danger is equal to that
of a long-term weapon of mass destruction. The inhalation of even the
smallest dust particle may cause irreparable cell damage in unprotected
people, resulting in a cancer epidemic that over time could kill
thousands of the exposed" - in other words, the very people Blair
claimed to be liberating.
Also unreported is the installation in Kosovo of paramilitary regime
with links to organised crime. Indeed, Kosovo may become the world`s
first Mafia state. As they oversee the ethnic cleansing of 240,000 Serb
and Roma civilians Nato and its United Nations partners have established
a "working relationship" with the Kosovo Liberation Army, which Robin
Cook and Madeleine Albright once dismissed as a terrorist group. Much of
the KLA is criminalised, with war criminals. common murderers and drug
traders forming an "interim administration" that will implement the
"free-market reforms" required by the US and Europe. Their supervisors
are the World Bank and the European Development Bank, whose aim is to
ensure that western mining, petroleum and construction companies share
the booty of Kosovo`s extensive natural resources: a fitting finale to
the new moral crusade. Watch for others.


Secretary General
Mrs. Jela Jovanovic
Art  historian
===========================

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