-Caveat Lector- >From wsws.org WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : The Balkan Crisis Amidst the media propaganda Key facts in press accounts refute official rationale for Balkan war By Martin McLaughlin 22 April 1999 The two most influential daily newspapers in the United States, the New York Times and the Washington Post, each published lengthy articles last Sunday giving an inside account of how the Clinton administration reached its decision to shift policy in the Balkans and move toward a military confrontation with Yugoslavia. These two accounts, though clearly written with the cooperation of high-level American policymakers, nonetheless give a picture of the turn towards war in the Balkans which undermines the official rationale for the bombing of Yugoslavia. The behind-the-scenes reports demonstrate that it was a shift in American policy, not a decision by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his Serb nationalist regime, which triggered the present crisis, resulting in the biggest humanitarian disaster in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Throughout 1998 the policy of the Clinton administration was to employ military threats, economic inducements and political pressure as the basis for an agreement on Kosovo with Milosevic. After an offensive in the spring by the Kosovar Albanian guerrilla group, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), and a counteroffensive during the summer by Yugoslav Army troops, US representative Richard Holbrooke brokered a cease-fire in October. The cease-fire, like similar ones during the Bosnia civil war of 1992-95, did not represent a lasting end to the fighting. It was merely a reduction in the level of violence during the winter months, while both sides rearmed and regrouped, preparing to renew the warfare in the spring. Nonetheless, the agreement was supported by the six members of the "Contact Group"--the US, Russia, Germany, France, Britain and Italy--which have met regularly over the crisis in the former Yugoslavia. As late as January 15, according to the Post account, "Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright was pressing--and losing, for the moment--a campaign to scale up US and NATO intervention in Kosovo." Four days later a meeting of top Clinton administration officials in the White House Situation Room approved a radical new plan for Kosovo, proposed by Albright. According to the Times: "It again threatened bombing if Mr. Milosevic did not go along with the West. But, for the first time, it demanded that he accept NATO troops in his own country to enforce a deal under which he would withdraw almost all his security forces and grant Kosovo broad autonomy." (There is more that could be said about these accounts. The fact that the turn towards war emerged in the midst of the impeachment drive against the Clinton White House is an indication of the enormous instability and recklessness of American policy. Clinton did not even attend the key January 19 meeting where US policy was reversed, since he was meeting with his lawyers on the impeachment trial and rehearsing his State of the Union speech.) Massacre at Racak What intervened to effect the dramatic change in US policy was the January 15 massacre of 45 ethnic Albanian peasants outside the small Kosovo village of Racak. The Post says, "Racak transformed the West's Balkan policy as singular events seldom do. The atrocity ... convinced the administration and then its NATO allies that a six-year effort to bottle up the ethnic conflict in Kosovo was doomed. In the next two weeks, they set aside the emphasis on containment that had grown over the years." What actually happened in Racak is far from clear. The first US official on the scene, William Walker, head of the group of unarmed monitors dispatched to Kosovo by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, immediately branded the deaths a Serb atrocity. But eyewitness accounts were conflicting, and no Serb military or police unit could be identified. The official Serbian government version is that the KLA either carried out the killings itself, to provide a pretext for US and NATO intervention, or took casualties of a firefight between KLA and Yugoslav forces, dressed them in civilian clothes, rearranged the bodies and fired single shots into the heads of each victim in order to simulate a mass execution. There are several aspects of the Racak incident which make it impossible to simply dismiss the Serbian government account as propaganda. Initial reports, cited by Clinton in his speeches defending the bombing campaign, describe the victims as having been sprayed with bullets from Serb machine guns. Later accounts, including those in the Post and Times last Sunday, speak of civilians killed execution-style, each one dying from a bullet in the back of the head. There are political grounds for believing that the KLA could have played a role, as the Serbian side charges. It is well known that the KLA based its strategy on providing a suitable pretext for US and NATO intervention in Kosovo against the Yugoslav army and Serb paramilitary forces. The Times notes that the KLA had launched a new offensive under cover of the cease-fire negotiated in October by the Clinton administration: "The Kosovo Albanian rebels were pushing ahead with their own war aims. Sensing that the deal essentially placed the world's most powerful military alliance on their side--despite NATO's continued assurances that it did not want to become the 'KLA's airforce'--the rebels quickly reclaimed territory abandoned by the Serbian forces and mounted a continuous series of small-scale attacks. American intelligence officials warned Congress that the rebels were buying weapons, improving their training and were become [sic] a more formidable force." At the same time, according to the Post account, "US intelligence reported almost immediately that the KLA intended to draw NATO into its fight for independence by provoking Serb forces into further atrocities. Warnings to the rebel leaders from Washington restrained them somewhat, but they assassinated a small-town Serb mayor near Pristina and were believed responsible for the slaying of six Serb youths at the Panda Cafe in Pec on Dec. 14." Concern over the KLA's provocative activities was a major dividing point between the United States and its European NATO allies in the months before the bombing began. The Post cites one unnamed US official saying, "One of our difficulties, particularly with the Europeans ... was getting them to accept the proposition that the root of the problem is Belgrade." As late as January 21, 1999, when Clinton telephoned British Prime Minister Tony Blair to argue for the new US policy of demanding a NATO troop presence in Kosovo, according to the Post, "Clinton knew that his NATO allies believed the Albanian guerrillas of the KLA were driving the violence as much as Belgrade." Secretary of State Albright saw Racak as the opportunity to overcome European resistance to NATO intervention in Kosovo, the Post reports, provided that the administration moved quickly: "According to confidants, she realized that the galvanizing force of the atrocity would not last long. 'Whatever threat of force you don't get in the next two weeks you're never getting,' one adviser told her, 'at least until the next Racak.'" There is a clear recent precedent for the use of an atrocity story as the basis for brushing aside obstacles to outside intervention in the former Yugoslavia. In January 1995 a mortar shell landed in a crowded market in the Muslim-controlled portion of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital city. Dozens were killed, many of them women and children, and the gruesome images were shown on television screens worldwide. The market square tragedy became the basis for a sharp reversal in US and NATO policy in Bosnia, leading to an ultimatum to the Bosnian Serbs, backed by the threat of bombing, and set in motion the intervention which produced the Dayton Accords and the occupation of Bosnia by a mixed US and European force. While the market square attack was immediately blamed on the Bosnian Serbs, a later investigation by the United Nations failed to substantiate these claims, and concluded, from an analysis of the trajectory of the mortar shells, that they had most likely been fired from Muslim artillery positions overlooking the city. If this is the case, those responsible for the attack clearly intended the resulting bloodshed to trigger American and NATO intervention, and they succeeded. Who is William Walker? The final and most dubious factor in the Racak incident is the role of William Walker, the US government official who arrived on the scene of the massacre within hours and spearheaded the resulting propaganda offensive against the Serbs. Walker has a long and bloody record as a US operative specializing in support for guerrilla wars against governments targeted by the State Department and Pentagon for destabilization. In the 1980s Walker was a deputy to one of the key figures in the secret US network to arm the Nicaraguan Contras, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams. Much of the US material and military assistance to the Contras was managed by the so-called Restricted Interagency Group, or RIG, which consisted of mid-level officials from the State Department, Pentagon, CIA and National Security Council. Abrams represented the State Department, with Walker assisting him, while Lt. Col. Oliver North represented the NSC and served as the group's chief. Under terms of the Boland Amendment, adopted in 1984 by the US Congress, the Reagan administration was barred from delivering anything but "humanitarian aid" to the Contras. At the direction of North and Abrams, Walker took charge of an operation based at Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador to transport these supplies to the Contras. Weapons and ammunition were included along with food, clothing and medicine, in flagrant violation of the legal ban. Walker was initially a target of Iran-Contra Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, but Walsh's prosecutors eventually decided not to prosecute the subordinate, instead focusing on his boss Elliott Abrams, who pled guilty to charges of lying to Congress about the illegal secret arms shipments, and was pardoned by President George Bush. The veteran of the US "dirty war" in Central America has now emerged as a point man for American operations in the Balkans. The question is raised: did Walker, as he did in Central America, use his "humanitarian" work in Kosovo as a cover for arms-smuggling to the KLA and other illegal secret operations? And did his covert work include his role as the chief publicist of the Racak massacre, the casus belli for the US turn towards war against Yugoslavia? See Also: One month of the Balkan War: a balance sheet [21 April 1999] Radio interview with WSWS Editorial Board Chairman David North The historical, political and economic background to the war in the Balkans [21 April 1999] WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : The Balkan Crisis ""In this respect, Blair could be compared with the cowardly, ineffectual child who allies himself with the playground bully. "" British cabinet minister accuses Labour MPs opposed to NATO bombing of "appeasing" fascism By Julie Hyland 22 April 1999 Clare Short, International Development Secretary in the Labour government, has denounced MPs from her own party as "equivalent to the people who appeased Hitler". Her outburst was directed against 13 Labour MPs critical of the NATO bombardment of Serbia who had tried to force a vote in the House of Commons debate on Kosovo on Monday evening. The dissident Labour MPs were seeking to register their opposition to the war, but the attempt, led by Tony Benn and Tam Dalyell, fell far short of the 40 members needed to bring on a vote. Short said that she was "ashamed" that such people were members of the Labour Party. She likened them to pro-Nazi sympathisers in the Second World War. "There were people then who thought Hitler was a good thing, there were people who opposed action being taken against Hitler," she said. Her remarks are not the first time the Labour government has sought to cloak NATO aggression with the garb of "anti-fascism". Such imagery has been essential in attempting to maintain shaky public support behind the war drive. In an interview with Newsweek magazine a fortnight ago, Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that his government's policy was motivated by the lessons of the Nazi holocaust. His generation had learnt the cost of attempting to "appease dictators", he claimed. Both Blair and Short's comments are based on flagrant historical falsification. It was not the British establishment's attempts to "appease" Hitler that enabled the Nazi dictatorship to carry out genocide, but their active support for Hitler before the war. During a previous Commons debate on the Balkans, Benn read from documents taken from the captured German Foreign Office at the end of the Second World War. One recorded an exchange between Hitler and Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary, prior to the outbreak of war. Halifax told the dictator: "Herr Chancellor, on behalf of the British Government, I congratulate you on crushing communism in Germany and standing as a bulwark against Russia". The British ruling class welcomed the victory of fascism in Germany as a pre-emptive strike against a socialist movement of the European working class. Moreover, they saw it as a means for overthrowing the Soviet Union. Only when the Nazi dictatorship's expansion began to threaten the British Empire did the ruling class decide, reluctantly, to move against it. Even so, despite their knowledge of the "Final Solution", Jewish refugees attempting to flee Germany and Eastern Europe were barred from entry to Britain. No military or economic grounds exist for Blair's comparison between 1930s Germany (a country seeking to violently establish its own world Reich, or empire) with present day Serbia, a small and impoverished land. The only country whose national sovereignty is being violated in today's war is Serbia. When Milosevic refused to agree to a virtual take-over of the country by US-led NATO troops, the current bombardment began. Previously, when Milosevic's clampdown on internal dissent was aimed at facilitating the imposition of IMF economic diktats against a hostile population, the democratic rights of the Balkan peoples counted for nothing within the British establishment. In the Dayton Accord for Bosnia, the Western governments dropped any action against the "war criminal" Milosevic, in return for his aid in enabling them to carve out spheres of imperialist influence within the country based on its partition along ethnic lines. The Blair government's concern for "humanitarian principles" is based solely on the cold calculation of its foreign policy interests. The British ruling class fears that the expansion of the European Union--under German hegemony--and the launch of the euro will lead to its isolation on the continent. Britain's enthusiastic participation in the action against Serbia, under US leadership, is an attempt to use its not insignificant military advantages to make up for its economic and political weakness. In this respect, Blair could be compared with the cowardly, ineffectual child who allies himself with the playground bully. The price of Blair's "reflected glory" is being paid by the defenceless civilians sheltering in Yugoslavia's devastated cities, or the refugee convoys trying to escape to safety, or the tens of thousands forcibly detained on the border to Montenegro in conditions of utter degradation. For weeks, the British government claimed that its actions were motivated by concern for the Kosovar Albanians. On Tuesday, it revealed the extent of its magnanimity--announcing it would grant immediate asylum to just 126 Kosovar women and children. Short's outburst must serve as a warning to all critically minded people. Only last week, senior Labour officials were involved in a "whispering" campaign against BBC World Affairs editor John Simpson. Complaining that his news reports from Serbia were too "critical" of the NATO action, they let it be known that they considered him to be Milosevic's "stooge". Following NATO's attack on the refugee convey--which caught it in a web of lies and disinformation--Blair's senior press adviser, Alistair Campbell, was seconded to NATO to prevent any further "public relations disasters". Such blatant attempts to censor the press are now being followed by denouncing the parliamentary opponents of the war as virtual supporters of fascism. Despite government claims to the contrary, there is mounting evidence that NATO is preparing the invasion of Serbia using ground troops. One unnamed military official was quoted recently saying its objective would be "to strangle Serbia". Short's remarks are part of preparing public opinion for this eventuality by poisoning the political atmosphere to prevent the possibility of free and critical discussion. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Copyright 1998-99 World Socialist Web Site All rights reserved ~~~~~~~~~~~~ >From http://www.schrepf.com/TSG/Personen/EdwardVIII-e.html Edward VIII, King of England by Lynn Bradick Biography Edward VIII, also known as the Duke of Windsor was born on 23rd June 1894 at White Lodge in Surrey, England. Son of George V and Queen Mary, he was named Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David Windsor but was known to his family as "David" and later became publicly known as the Duke of Windsor. He succeeded to the throne following the death of his father in 1936. Alleged allegations during his short reign, that he was having an affair with Wallis Simpson, the American wife of a London shipping broker, emerged and he was advised by both the Government and the Head of the Church of England to reveal all. Subsequently, in December of that year he abdicated and his brother, the Duke of York then became George VI. Edward & Mrs. Simpson fled the country and following their marriage in 1937 at Chateau de Cande, Monts, France, they resided both in France and the USA. He was created Duke of Windsor during WWII and governed the Bahamas from 1940 until 1945. In 1937 he visited Germany where he met Hitler. Speculation that he was was a liaison to Hitler's Germany was rife. However, there was no proof of this, albeit it was known that he sympathized with the Nazis. Until 1952 he lived with his wife Wallis Simpson in excile but returned to England on the death of his brother George VI. For the first time since his abdication he took part in a Royal ceremony. At the age of 78 he died in Paris but his body was brought back to England and now lies in a cemetery at Windsor, in Berkshire. <<I was hoping to find more -- I had seen a biography on A&E, revealing Ed the 8th's partiality to the German Fascists. Churchill sent him off to the Bahamas to get him out of Europe, therefore. There was quite a bit of acquience/ambivalence in Britain regarding the Continental activities until the Germans got greedier. Interesting how changes in perspective occur. Needless to say, there was sympathy for Herr Hitler at the very TOP of the British government. Who knows what would have happened without the Simpson woman's appearance. For additional information on Ed the 8th, go to: http://www.incwell.com/Biographies/EdwardVIII.html .>> ~~~~~~~~~~~~ <<To show how the Americans were being courted.>> >From http://metalab.unc.edu/pha/policy/1941/411112a.html MAJESTY, KING GEORGE VI, AT THE OPENING OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS AND THE HOUSE OF COMMONS November 12, 1941 [Parliamentary Debates, November 12, 1941.] MY LORDS AND MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS: The developments of the past year have strengthened the resolution of My Peoples and of My Allies to prosecute this war against aggression until final victory. Meanwhile, My Government, in consultation with the Allied Governments, and with the goodwill of the Government of the United States of America, are considering the urgent problems which will face them when the nations now enduring the tyranny of the oppressor have regained their freedom. I well know that My People will continue to respond wholeheartedly to the great demands made upon them to furnish My Forces with the instruments of victory, and that they are determined to meet, to the utmost of their power, the needs of the Soviet Union in its heroic conflict. The United States are furnishing My Peoples and My Allies with war supplies of all kinds on a scale unexampled in history. My relations with Turkey, with whom I have a valued treaty of alliance, remain firmly based on trust and friendship. I welcome the restoration to his Throne of His Majesty the Emperor of Ethiopia. Thus, the first country which fell a victim to aggression has been the first to be liberated and re-established. My loyal subjects in Malta continue to face air attack with a fortitude that commands My deepest admiration. MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS: You will be asked to make further financial provision for the conduct of the war. MY LORDS AND MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS: The fulfilment of the task to which we are committed will call for the unsparing effort of every one of us. I am confident that My People will answer this call with the courage and devotion which our forefathers never failed to show when our country was in danger. My Government will continue to take all practical steps to sustain the health and well-being of My People under the stress of war. And I pray that Almighty God may give His blessing to your counsels. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. -Thomas Huxley + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
