URL for this article is http://emperors-clothes.com/news/erlang.htm Kostunica says some backers "unconsciously work for American imperial goals" 'NY Times' article with commentary by Jared Israel and Max Sinclair www.tenc.net [Emperor's Clothes] Below are excerpts from an important 'NY Times'article. In it, the reporter, Steven Erlanger, concedes that the charges we and many other people have raised about US meddling in Yugoslavia are true. Indeed Erlanger adds information we had no way of knowing. For example, he reports that "suitcases full of cash" are sent across the borders into Yugoslavia to fund the "democratic opposition". Note that despite his shocking evidence to the contrary, Mr. Erlanger still calls this US-funded opposition "independent": "Independent journalists and broadcasters here have been told by American aid officials "not to worry about how much they're spending now," that plenty more is in the pipeline, said one knowledgeable aid worker. Others in the opposition complain that the Americans are clumsy, sending e-mails from "state.gov" - the State Department's address - summoning people to impolitic meetings with American officials in Budapest, Montenegro or Dubrovnik, Croatia."( NY Times, 9-20-2000) Mr. Erlanger's article includes various attacks on the Yugoslav government in general and Mr. Milosevich in particular. As usual, these attacks include no supporting evidence. The trick here is repetition: make an accusation a thousand times and people think "Yeah, I remember him. He's that dictator." The image colors the man, no matter whether it is true or false. Because repetition is key, every "news" story about Yugoslavia is required to include a number of attacks on the Serbs and their government. "When speaking of the Serbs it is considered proper to say something negative. More than one thing is optional. But one is obligatory." (From 'The Obligatory Bash' at emperors-clothes.com/analysis/obligato.htm ) In his article, Mr. Erlanger quotes a report on US meddling in Yugoslavia that appeared in the Yugoslav paper, 'Politika'. What he is actually quoting is a statement that a number of U.S., Canadian and Dutch antiwar activists signed, which was published on Emperor's Clothes and picked up by Politika . (1) Notice that Erlanger quotes Vojislav Kostunica admitting that our charges are true. Actually, at first Kostunica denies our charges. He says they represent the "ravings of the regime." (Why do people refer to the elected government of Yugoslavia as a 'Regime'?). In any case, we did not get our information from the Yugoslav government, we got it from documents that we discovered while doing research on the Internet. After denying the charge that the "democratic" opposition takes US money, Kostunica makes an about-face. He says that "nongovernmental" organizations that take American money "are even unconsciously working for American imperial goals." What does it mean to "unconsciously" take millions of US dollars and work for American Imperial goals? What's the practical mechanism at work? Do these people get "suitcases full of cash," receive instructions from their paymasters, and then carry out political actions that serve "American imperial goals," all unconsciously? Do they have a mental disease? Everybody says Mr. Kostunica is a super-untarnished man and it is unfortunate to have to question a man like that, but common sense suggests that people do notice when they are handed a suitcase full of cash. Perhaps Mr. Kostunica is mistaken. Perhaps these people are fully conscious when the US operative give them their money. Tthey go back to their hotel and open the suitcase. They look at the money. Tthey dump the money on the bed. And it is only then, as they roll around amidst the thousand dollar bills, that they slip into a stupor. It is good that Mr. Kostunica has admitted this, although keep in mind, he only admitted it to Erlanger, not to the Yugoslav people. Shouldn't he tell them too? Moreover, he does not appear to grasp the implications. The people he is talking about, who take the U.S. government money, are not from Mars. They are Yugoslavs. They are not his enemies. They are the organizations that back him. Otpor that puts up his posters and hands out his fliers and goes to his demonstrations; Vesna Pesic with her US-paid Women in Black; the economists at G-17 Plus, funded by the U.S. Congress, who wrote his International Monetary Fund takeover plan; Radio B292, the US-financed rdio station; his own campaign manager, chief spokesman and strategist, Zoran Djindjic. His whole organization, the people who would staff a Kostunica government, they are the ones "unconsciously" taking U.S. money and "working for American Imperial goals." Mr. Kostunica is like a man sinking into a swamp. Already he is up to his neck in people who "unconsciously work for American Imperial goals;" yet he professes not to notice the smell of the U.S. State Department.. What has the government of my country done to this world? What a spectacle, that this Washington, which bombed the good people of Yugoslavia, that blocks medicine from entering that country, that blocks Yugoslavia from importing spare parts to fix the bridges and hospitals the US bombed last year; that has put racist gangsters in charge of Kosovo - what a spectacle that this Washington now tries to bribe and coerce its way into controlling Yugoslavia. And once in control, what would Washington do to the Yugoslav people, who have been resisting Washington for ten years? Kosovo is the US government's model. Washington, with its "democratic" this and its "independent" that, and all the time they want to buy people, especially young people, corrupt them with the lure of gold. When, and it will happen, the decent people of America learn that they have been lied to, when they learn what crimes are being committed in their name, may God help the U.S. State Department. ***. The following is from 'The New York Times', September 20, 2000 * Reprinted for fair use only - (C) 'NY Times' Milosevic, Trailing in Polls, Rails Against NATO By STEVEN ERLANGER BELGRADE, Serbia, Sept. 19 - In his race for re-election, President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia is running against NATO and the United States, not against his democratic opposition. He is not entirely mistaken to do so. The United States and its European allies have made it clear that they want Mr. Milosevic ousted, and they have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to get it done. Portraying himself as the defender of Yugoslavia's sovereignty against a hostile, hegemonic West led by Washington, Mr. Milosevic and his government argue that opposition leaders are merely the paid, traitorous tools of enemies who are continuing their war against him by other means. In March 1999, NATO began a 78-day bombing campaign to drive Serbian forces out of Kosovo. The Yugoslav elections are on Sunday, but there has hardly been a day since the bombing began that state television news has not railed against "NATO aggressors." With the campaign at its height, the government has spread its attacks to include all opposition political parties, independent newspapers, magazines and electronic media, the student organization known as Otpor - or Resistance - and any nongovernmental organization working to promote democracy, human rights or even economic reforms. While Mr. Milosevic is trailing the main opposition leader, Vojislav Kostunica, in opinion polls, the anti- Western campaign is having an impact. The money from the West is going to most of the institutions that the government attacks for receiving it - sometimes in direct aid, sometimes in indirect aid like computers and broadcasting equipment, and sometimes in suitcases of cash carried across the border between Yugoslavia and Hungary or Serbia and Montenegro. Most of those organizations and news media (3) could not exist without foreign aid in this society, which is poor and repressive and whose market is distorted by foreign economic sanctions. [Comment by Emperor's clothes - if Yugoslavia is so repressive why haven't they arrested these people who are financed by an enemy power?] (4) and (5) Even with foreign aid, government restrictions on newsprint supplies and high and repeated fines after suspiciously quick court cases make it hard for the independent news media to reach their natural market. As for the opinion polls that show Mr. Kostunica in the lead, the information minister, Goran Matic, charges that the polls are orchestrated and manipulated by the Americans and the Central Intelligence Agency, who help pay for them. According to Mr. Matic, Mr. Milosevic is actually far ahead of Mr. Kostunica, and the polls simply serve as a vehicle for the opposition to claim that the government stole the election once Mr. Milosevic wins. Mr. Matic asserts that the Atlantic alliance has come up with various scenarios, such as infiltrating soldiers wearing Yugoslav Army and police uniforms, to make it possible for the opposition to start civil unrest in the streets after the election while claiming that the police and the army are actually on their side. Mr. Matic has attacked various nongovernmental organizations, including the Center for Free Elections and Democracy, which is trying to monitor the fairness of the election, as paid instruments of American and alliance policy. Many such organizations have been raided by the police, who confiscate computer files and also appear to be gathering evidence about foreign payments. "President Milosevic will win this election," said Ljubisa Ristic, the president of the Yugoslav United Left party, founded by Mr. Milosevic's wife, Mirjana Markovic. "This is not Hollywood." Washington and the West, she said, "are like little kids, wanting something to happen so much they're fooling themselves." Mr. Ristic said the alliance's war produced a new solidarity among Yugoslavs and "killed many illusions people had about the West and about their own opposition leaders, who went to the countries that were bombing us to seek their support." The issues, Mr. Ristic said, are clear now. "It's a decisive time," he said. "This is not an election so much as a referendum, a decision on being an independent country or a colony. People see what's happened in Kosovo, what happens when NATO troops enter the country, and they are not going to allow the alliance's hand- picked candidates to win." Even before the Kosovo war, the United States was spending up to $10 million a year to back opposition parties, independent news media and other institutions opposed to Mr. Milosevic. The war itself cost billions of dollars. This fiscal year, through September, the administration is spending $25 million to support Serbian "democratization," with an unknown amount of money spent covertly to help the failed rallies of last year, which did not bring down Mr. Milosevic, or to influence the current election. For next year, the administration is requesting $41.5 million in open aid to Serbian democratization, though Congress is likely to cut that request. Independent journalists and broadcasters here have been told by American aid officials "not to worry about how much they're spending now," that plenty more is in the pipeline, said one knowledgable aid worker. Others in the opposition complain that the Americans are clumsy, sending e-mails from "state.gov" - the State Department's address - summoning people to impolitic meetings with American officials in Budapest, Montenegro or Dubrovnik, Croatia. But there is little effort to disguise the fact that Western money pays for much of the polling, advertising, printing and other costs of the opposition political campaign - one way, to be sure, to give opposition leaders a better chance to get their message across in a quasi-authoritarian system where television in particular is in the firm hands of the government. While that spending allows the opposition to be heard more broadly, deepening the opposition to Mr. Milosevic, it also allows the government here to argue that it has real enemies, and that the Serbian opposition is in league with them. Just today, in the state-run newspaper Politika, a long article used public information from the United States - including Congressional testimony and Web site material - to show that the United States is financing the opposition. " `Independent,' `nongovernmental' and `democratic' are the standard phrases the C.I.A. uses to describe organizations established all over the world to destroy the governments and the societies that the U.S. government wants to colonize and control," the paper wrote. The Congressional testimony, from July 29, 1999, cited American officials then involved with Yugoslav policy, like Robert Gelbard and James Pardew, telling Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware about their projects. They describe the creation of a "ring around Serbia" of radio stations broadcasting into Serbia from Bosnia and Montenegro, the spending of $16.5 million in the previous two years to support "democratization in Serbia," and another $20 million to support Montenegro's president, Milo Djukanovic, who broke away from Mr. Milosevic in 1998. The testimony listed some of the recipients of American aid here, including various newspapers, magazines, news agencies and broadcasters opposed to Mr. Milosevic, as well as various nongovernmental organizations engaged in legal defense and human rights and projects to bring promising Yugoslav journalists to the United States for professional training. All such projects are portrayed by Politika and state television as a way to undermine the legal government, and the recipients are labeled traitors to their country. Opposition leaders like Mr. Kostunica regard such tactics by the government as crass propaganda, but even he is skeptical of American intentions in paying for nongovernmental organizations, some of whom, he believes, are even unconsciously working for American imperial goals and not necessarily Serbian values. Other democratic leaders, like Zoran Djindjic and Zarko Korac, regard such attacks as an indication of Mr. Milosevic's desperation and anxiety on the eve of the first election he is likely to lose in his entire political career. Given the stakes for Mr. Milosevic, they believe that he will do all he can, including the wholesale stealing of votes, to ensure a victory in the first round of voting. "The stakes are fundamental for Milosevic," Mr. Korac said. "These elections are crucial, not necessarily for the immediate handover of power, but because for the first time Mr. Milosevic will be delegitimized in the eyes of his own people. He was an elected dictator, with popular and legal legitimacy. But from now on he's a true dictator, and he will only be able to rule by force - that's a big step for Serbia." [Comment by Emperor's Clothes: What is an "elected dictator"? Is democracy something that exists independent of real life so that a person is DEFINED as being democratic if he gets US approval and DEFINED as undemocratic if he does not, and therefore if someone who does not get US approval wins an election, then that election is by definition undemocratic and the elected official is a dictator? ] Copywright (c) NY Times. Reprinted For Fair Use Only. Footnote: (1) 'How the U.S. has Created a Corrupt Opposition in Serbia' http://emperors-clothes.com/engl.htm (2) See "Statement by Paul B. McCarthy, National Endowment for Democracy to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe". It can be read at ( http://emperors-clothes.com/news/ned-1.htm (3) "Emperor's Clothes Interviews Radio B292 at http://emperors-clothes.com/interviews/emperor.htm (4) Erlanger calls the money that the U.S. government spends to bribe Yugoslavs "foreign aid". Foreign aid? Isn't foreign aid money that one country gives another to help with some project? Not any more. This change in definition is part of a whole New World Order dictionary in which "democratic" means "US government approved" and "civil society" means "organizations set up by the US government and its front groups" and "peace activist" means "someone who tries to prevent the population from resisting attacks by US-financed terrorists" and "election monitor" means "someone who works to destabilize a country by destroying the people's confidence in its institutions" and "independent media" means "paid by the U.S. government to support those groups and individuals who are also paid by the U.S." A fair election is one that the US-backed side wins. (5) Erlanger justifies the US practice of giving bribe money to Yugoslav organizations on the grounds that these organizations are poor and need the money. Never mind that the quantities of money are immense. Never mind that using the "I'm poor" argument one could justify any crime. Erlanger goes on to comment that one of the reasons these organizations are poor is that the Yugoslav "market is distorted by foreign economic sanctions." Let's stick with that for a moment. The sanctions were imposed by the United States government and its allies. They have badly hurt the Yugoslav economy. They have increased poverty and therefore made US money much more attractive. So first the US government impoverishes people and then it seduces them with monetary bribes which are attractive because...they are poor. Makes perfect sense. www.tenc.net [Emperor's Clothes] _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
