-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.29/pageone.html <A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.29/pageone.html">Laissez Faire City Times - Volume 3 Issue 29 </A> ----- Laissez Faire City Times July 19, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 29 Editor & Chief: Emile Zola ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Yugoslavia, mon amour by Craig Goodrich The pundits and talking heads have moved on to other subjects; the Current Hot Topics seem to be how Washington can further increase the cost of health care in America, and how the Vice President is basing his campaign on a radical new repackaging of the totally counterproductive policies of the last half-century. But all through most of June�and of course on the 4th of July�we were treated to endless tributes on TV and in print to the administration's great victory and the "moral vision" underlying US intervention in Yugoslavia. Some people, of course, don't have the privilege of simply changing the subject when it becomes "old news." And most adults have come to realize that what happened yesterday has a fairly strong influence on what's happening today � though this basic concept seems to escape our politicians. So before "Operation Allied Force" becomes just another footnote in the depressing history of the 20th century, it might not be a bad idea to take another look at America's Great Moral Triumph. The Great Moral Triumph Leaving aside the fact that any reference to the Clinton administration and morality in the same sentence will provoke derisive laughter everywhere outside the Washington Beltway, one does not even have to take a particularly long view of the situation in Yugoslavia to see through the pretense; just the immediate history of the operation refutes any claim to moral justification. At Rambouillet the US presented the Yugoslav delegation with a set of demands, intimating that if they did not sign, they would be bombed. When the Yugoslav parliament passed a resolution accepting autonomy for Kosovo and UN troops to enforce a cease-fire in the province, the US, without consulting or even advising its NATO allies, added an Appendix B to its list of demands, which specified that NATO troops were to have free rein everywhere in Yugoslavia, to be immune from prosecution for crimes, and to have control of Yugoslav broadcast facilities. No country in the world would allow its head of state to sign such a document. Under the Vienna Convention on Treaties of 1963, agreements negotiated under threat of force are null and void. And of course, threatening to bomb a country which is not attacking its neighbors (or anyone else) is ipso facto an act of aggressive war under the UN Charter. The NATO treaty itself permits going to war only to defend a NATO member from attack. Thus the US officials at Rambouillet were already in violation of fundamental international laws even before "Operation Allied Force" actually began. Toxic Chemicals and Dust Once the bombing started, there was no serious effort to avoid civilian casualties, either in Kosovo or elsewhere in Yugoslavia. By the time the campaign ended, NATO had killed more than 2,000 civilians -- Serbs, Gypsies, Albanians, Hungarians, you name it -- compared to fewer than 600 Yugoslav soldiers. Within the first month, when NATO had already managed to turn a dirty little civil war into a major humanitarian disaster, US bombs destroyed a cigarette factory and damaged a 300-year-old former Austrian fortress full of museums and cafes, on the grounds that they were military targets. More than 200 schools have been hit; one bitter Yugoslav joke is that they were military targets because some of the kids might grow up to be soldiers. The chemical plant at Pancevo was repeatedly attacked, starting April 18, apparently in the belief that it provided nylon stockings and bug spray for the army. This and similar attacks have caused an ecological nightmare in all of southeastern Europe, contaminating groundwater and polluting the Danube�which flows through Romania and Bulgaria to the Black Sea�with hundreds of tons of toxic chemicals. In May, the Romanian Environment Ministry reported that acid rains along the Yugoslav border had been caused by the bombing, and that several localities had found greatly increased levels of heavy metals in the Danube. Contributing to the ecological damage were bombs sheathed with depleted uranium, which emits dangerous radiation and has a half-life in the thousands of years. When the bombs explode, a toxic dust is widely dispersed, to be breathed by humans and animals, to settle on crops, and -- again -- to contaminate groundwater. Fun with Cluster Bombs Then of course there were the cluster bombs. These are anti-personnel weapons which consist basically of a huge box of hand grenade-like canisters about the size and shape of a soda can or a baseball. Several hundred feet above the ground, the mother bomb explodes, spreading the canisters over an area the size of several football fields. Then at a height of a few yards above the ground, each canister explodes, sending shrapnel in all directions. They are utterly useless against anything much more solid than a cardboard box, but they chop and shred flesh quite effectively. On May 7, in the middle of the day, we dropped cluster bombs on the downtown area of Nis, killing and injuring scores of shoppers, destroying 20 homes, and damaging a hospital. No military (or even industrial) area was anywhere nearby. A few weeks later a NATO plane dropped cluster bombs into the crowded market area of a village at midday. The ostensible "military target" was a bridge in the middle of town. The bridge, built in the mid-19th century, was barely wide enough for a horse and buggy, let alone a tank. But just to make sure, NATO dropped some more cluster bombs on it a few minutes later, killing several more villagers -- and beheading the local priest, who had rushed to the scene to help casualties from the first bombs. His necktie was undisturbed, said a witness, but there was no head above it. Cluster bombs are ineffective against bridges anyway, but they'll do quite a job on anyone standing near one.... The little canisters are usually painted a bright yellow or orange, and they have an 8 percent failure rate, which means about one out of twelve fail to go off in the air. So they lie on the ground, ready to explode some random interval after they are next disturbed. Several Italian fishermen in the Adriatic have been killed pulling up the canisters in their nets, dumped there prior to landing by returning NATO pilots. The pretty little things, looking like toys, are all over Kosovo, since that small area (about 60 miles square) was the most intensively bombed. Several Albanian children have been killed playing with them since the bombing stopped, as have two Gurkhas from a British bomb disposal squad. Based on NATO figures, there are more than 12,000 unexploded canisters scattered over Yugoslavia, an area about the size of Kentucky. In Laos and Cambodia, small children are still finding the bomblets left by the US more than a quarter of a century ago. They are finding them, and they are dying. Racist Apologia Such otherwise rational liberal commentators as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times attributed a sort of collective guilt to the entire Serbian people, advocating bombing the whole country back to a preindustrial condition. "You want 1389? We can do 1389, too." Precisely how this logic differs from the ostensible crime of the Milosevic re gime�brutalizing the entire Albanian population of Kosovo in punishment for the activities of the Albanian supremacists of the KLA�was never explained. And in any case, Serbia is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in Europe; only 63 percent of its citizens are Serbs. In Novi Sad, the capital of Vojvodina, Serbs are not even a majority�yet that city was bombed even more heavily than Belgrade. Even if one accepts Friedman's lunatic racist apologia for the bombing, NATO's campaign makes no sense. NATO�s Clever Frauds During the meetings on the Macedonian border between NATO and Yugoslav military officers, the NATO representatives tried to hustle and bluster the Yugoslavs into signing a document which completely ignored crucial aspects of the G-8 accord to which both the Yugoslav parliament and the UN Security Council had just agreed. When the Yugoslav officers insisted on the accepted terms and called for Russian support, they were accused of stalling and trickery by the shamelessly partisan American press. (Another casualty of this operation has been the international reputation of the global news service CNN; most of the world now understands that CNN is simply a mouthpiece for the American administration. The fact that the administration has to be Democratic is a nuance that is as yet understood only by Americans.) Once inside Kosovo, of course, NATO proceeded to completely disregard the G-8/UN accord and run the province according to its own wishes, ignoring the Russians' role in the settlement and turning the effective governance of Kosovo over to the racist KLA. Some observers have praised NATO's cleverness in using fraudulent diplomacy as a tool to bypass Yugoslavia's formidable ground defenses. On the other hand, the next time NATO (or the US) needs to come to a military agreement with some other country, they might find it difficult to negotiate, since their opponent will simply not believe any assurances they may offer. The Kosovo trick will work only once. The Terms of the Great Victory The settlement was heralded by the American media as a surrender by Yugoslavia. It was nothing of the kind. What NATO pretended to accept differed from the Rambouillet ultimatum in three crucial respects: 1.The troops occupying Kosovo were to be under UN, rather than NATO, command; 2.No foreign troops were to be allowed access to the rest of Yugoslavia; 3.Yugoslav sovereignty and territorial integrity were to be respected. (Rambouillet had essentially called for independence for Kosovo after three years.) In short, these are the terms that the Yugoslav parliament had for the most part agreed to a month before the bombing began. It was in fact a NATO capitulation; the Yugoslav position had hardly changed at all. The total damage to Yugoslavia by the 78 days of NATO bombing is estimated at about $136 billion. The total Gross Domestic Product of the country -- radically reduced over the last decade by the insane "economic sanctions" imposed at US insistence�was about $17 billion last year. This means that it would take eight years of Yugoslavia's total GDP just to repair the damage caused by this utterly pointless bombing campaign. In fact, of course, the Yugoslav GDP will be substantially reduced�by at least 25 percent next year alone�due to the destruction of its industrial base, and the entire GDP can't be devoted to rebuilding, any more than a family can devote its entire income to a car payment. So ten million Yugoslavs will suffer for decades into the next century for having had the audacity to resist an American ultimatum. Clinton�s Nihilistic Vandalism So much for the new NATO -- that is, the new US -- "moral vision." World War I was the war which set the tone for the entire 20th century, and which also began when a Great Power presented an ultimatum to Serbia. According to some historians, it was the vandalism and brutality of the Kaiser's troops against the Belgians that in the long run cost Germany the war, because it turned worldwide public opinion against the Central Powers and allowed Britain and (eventually) the United States to enter the war. Bill Clinton's "moral vision" appears to most of the world to consist of equal parts of ruthlessness, mendacity, and cowardice. It remains to be seen what effect this will have on international relations in the 21st century. But considering the flimsy pretext and political motivations for the bombing, its violation of every known principle of international law, and its total pointlessness, future historians will almost certainly view this operation as the greatest single act of random nihilistic vandalism in Europe since the Nazi occupation of Poland ended more than fifty years ago. William Jefferson Clinton has his legacy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Craig Goodrich lives in the woods in northern Alabama with his wife, two children, and four cats. He is a former Congressional candidate of the Libertarian Party of Alabama. He welcomes comments. Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit his web site at http://airnet.net/craig/g4c . -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 29, July 19, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Published by Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc. Copyright 1998 - Trademark Registered with LFC Public Registrar All Rights Reserved ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris 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
