WW
Tue, 27 Feb 2001 05:10:08 -0800
------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the March 1, 2001 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- WEST'S WAR CRIMINAL PROTESTED IN BELGRADE: NATO OCCUPIERS LET KLA STEP UP TERROR ATTACKS By John Catalinotto Despite serious concessions from the new regime in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, the U.S./NATO powers have kept up pressure on the government there for a complete capitulation. They have also done nothing to stop the heavily armed "Kosovo Liberation Army" from terrorizing the remaining Serb and Roma population in the province or from attacking Serb forces over the provincial border. Over the 20 months of NATO occupation of Kosovo, KLA terror attacks have driven 200,000 Serbs and tens of thousands of Roma and other peoples out of the province. The remaining Serb and Roma people, and even many people in the Albanian community, consider the KLA to be a right-wing gang. U.S. and German imperialism armed and supported the KLA for years as a weapon against Yugoslavia and to create a pretext for their own military intervention. In their latest attack, on Feb. 18 KLA-backed commandos blew up a Serbian police car over the Kosovo border in Serbia, killing three people. Just two days before that, KLA forces carried out a terrorist attack on a bus in a convoy carrying Serb civilians to grave sites in Kosovo. A 220-pound bomb demolished the bus, killing at least seven people and wounding another 40. The blast did not touch the tanks from the NATO occupation forces known as K-FOR that were leading the convoy. According to a report in the Feb. 19 Time Magazine, this attack "required a high level of technical sophistication and organization" and was meant as a warning to K-FOR that they too are vulnerable to KLA terror. K-FOR is the occupation force in Kosovo, mostly from NATO countries. These imperialist powers in Kosovo have tried to give Belgrade the impression they might play a neutral role between the KLA and the new Serb regime. Up to now, however, they have done nothing to stop their KLA clients from carrying out terror against the Serb and Roma population. Both Washington and Berlin backed the Oct. 5 coup against the government led by the Socialist Party of Serbia whose leader is Slobodan Milosevic. But they are not giving the new regime a free ride. They want it to turn SPS leaders over to them for imperialist war-crimes trials in the Hague. According to a Feb. 10 report in the Montenegran newspaper Podgorica Vijesti, at a Feb. 9 meeting in the Federation Palace in Belgrade top federal and Serbian officials discussed Yugoslavia's cooperation with the Hague war crimes tribunal and "an agreement was reached" on extraditing Milosevic. This attempt at blatant imperialist takeover has begun to awaken resistance in the war-weary population. PROTESTS GREET EX-NATO HEAD European Union Foreign Minister Javier Solana might have thought his former role directing NATO during its 78-day aggression against Yugoslavia would be ignored on his visit to Belgrade Feb. 8. But some 2,000 World War II veterans and members and supporters of the Socialist Party of Serbia and Radical Party showed him that memories of such crimes are still alive. The Union of Yugoslav World War II Partisans said they "strongly protested" Solana's visit. Perisa Simonivic of the SPS called the visit a "shame" for the new Belgrade administration and an "utmost expression of cynicism by the European Union." Tomislav Nikolic of the Radical Party said the visit by "one of the biggest living war criminals is a huge tragedy for our people. Solana's visit is the same as if Adolf Hitler was alive after World War II and came to Belgrade after it ended." Police arrested left Radical Party leader Sinisa Vucinic in front of the Palace of the Federation in Belgrade. When Milosevic was president, an arrest of a demonstration leader would result in headlines and angry editorials in the Western press. This arrest was hardly mentioned. The demonstration showed that the struggle against NATO, while on the defensive in Yugoslavia, is still living. On the issue of defending Yugoslav sovereignty against the United States, NATO and the EU, the left is still able to come out on the streets. The new Belgrade regime' s capitulation to U.S./EU imperialism will soon be apparent to the population. This new coalition regime's most right-wing, pro-NATO forces-- under the leadership of the new Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic--are trying to take police measures to suppress the SPS and the nationalist Radical Party before these leftist groups regain popular support. Serb prosecutors already brought charges against the former general director of Radio-Television of Serbia, Dragoljub Milanovic. They charged him with failing to evacuate the TV building although he knew NATO had targeted it. The Pentagon launched the missiles that killed 16 television workers there. Yet Milanovic, an SPS leader and Milosevic supporter, was charged. There have been at least four protest demonstrations since Milanovic's arrest. The charges against him were first made by Hague Tribunal head Carla del Ponte when she visited Belgrade last month. They give credence to the reports Feb. 3 in a Budapest newspaper, Nepszabadsag, that the new Belgrade government had made a deal to bring Milosevic to trial. In return, NATO is supposed to assist in stopping KLA- type attacks on villages in Serbia near the Kosovo border. 'IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE BIG LIE' Meanwhile, some of the major media in Germany have finally begun to expose lies German officials told to justify the German armed forces' role in the war against Yugoslavia. The most important of these exposes came in early February on a news magazine program called "Monitor" on the major German television network ARD. Reporters presented the statements of top government spokespeople, especially Defense Minister Rudolph Scharping, and one by one exposed them as outright lies and exaggerations. Since the aggression against Yugoslavia was the first German foreign war since World War II, the government had tried to convince the population that a "humanitarian disaster" was taking place in Kosovo--a "genocide." Scharping, Foreign Minister Joseph Fischer and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder pulled out all stops in making these claims. The ARD broadcast in February showed how allegations about a Jan. 15, 1999, "massacre" in the town of Racak in Kosovo were completely manufactured by the KLA working with U.S. agent William Walker, who was directing the Observer Mission in Kosovo at the time. Even U.S. diplomat Norma Brown, an aide to Walker at the time, told ARD "there was no humanitarian crisis [in Kosovo] until NATO began to bomb. ... Everyone knew that a humanitarian crisis would arise if NATO started to bomb." It was not just the German officials who told and broadcast the lies to justify the war. So did all the heads of NATO countries, including former top officials of the U.S. government--President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Secretary of Defense William Cohen. Sixty Minutes and "20-20" still have not presented the truth to the U.S. public about these lies. The ARD program showed that it is not Milosevic who should be brought before a war crimes tribunal, but the heads of the NATO powers. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. 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