Robert Fisk, journalist with the British 'Independent' newspaper, will
be in Melbourne Tuesday
speaking on "Threats, Lies and Videotape". He has exposed the Pentagon's
use of depleted uranium (DU) in Iraq and Kosovo.
Charles Pearson Theatre
Education Resource Centre
Melbourne University
Tuesday 18 May 7.30
Admission $10/$5.00
Australian Arabic Council 9480 2411
The "Stop the Bombing Coalition" is postponing their Public Meeting
scheduled for Brunswick Town Hall on Tuesday Night in light of Fisk's
important visit to Melbourne.
Further details: Coalition to Stop the Bombing : Jacob or Sharon 9639
7699
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War in the Balkans - 'It all went very well,' said the general.
'Another effective day'
By Robert Fisk in Brussels
[The Independent 5/15/99]
A massacre on the road to Prizren, more than 100 civilians -
most of them ethnic Albanians - torn apart in the village of
Korisa, stories of women and children ripped apart by Nato
cluster bombs. And how did Nato kick off its three o'clock
follies yesterday afternoon? Without a single word about these
frightful reports, not a single bloody word of astonishment or
compassion.
Instead, Jamie Shea and his Luftwaffe general droned on
about Nato's successful operations over Kosovo. "They went
very well," Major-General Walter Jertz informed us. "It
was another very effective day of operations."
In Saigon, during the Vietnam War, they had the five o'clock
follies. In the 1991 Gulf War, the Americans boasted of their
military successes at the four o'clock follies. In Brussels, Nato's
follies start at three o'clock. But yesterday, the Shea and Jertz
show was theatre of the obscene.
Indeed, as we all waited to hear Nato's reaction to what might be
its most terrible bloodbath to date (or Serbia's most successful
propaganda), a Nato technician projected a massive test slide on
to the screen next to the 19 flags of the alliance. "They say we're
young and we don't know - won't find out until we grow," the
words said on the screen. Were these lines from the Sonny and
Cher song supposed to be gallows humour or just monumental
ill-taste? The moment Shea and Jertz walked to the podium, we
knew.
"We still see no indications of a Serb ground force redeployal
(sic)," General Jertz announced. Forty tons of supplies had
reached the Red Cross at Pristina. "I can assure you we will do
everything possible to ensure the safe passage of these convoys."
All of us in the darkened Joseph Luns auditorium at Nato
headquarters were holding our breath. Several journalists (the
television coverage never shows this, of course) shook their
heads in disbelief. There had, it seemed, been no safe passage
in Kosovo. We were thinking of the first reports coming in -
of Nato cluster bombs bursting amid 500 Albanian refugees,
many of them children, of a massacre that would make
even the Prizren-Djakovica slaughter in April small scale.
We wanted to know about those who were young but would
never grow.
But no, General Jertz of the Luftwaffe - or the "German Air
Force" as we are for some reason encouraged to call it here -
wanted to tell us that there had been 679 Nato missions over
Yugoslavia in 24 hours, that there had been attacks on oil
refineries, electricity stations, and the Batajnica airfield.
Projected on to the slide screen - incredibly - were the words "A
GOOD DAY". Then Mr Shea - the Horatio Bottomley of Nato -
launched into his usual denunciations of Serb atrocities,
exhuming some old pictures of alleged mass graves and some
(slightly) newer ones of burnt villages.
He quoted from old human rights and newspaper articles and
managed to mispronounce the names of seven Kosovo villages.
"God knows, frankly, what we are going to find when Kosovo
is open," he said, solemnly shaking his head.
God knows, I'm sure, what Mr Shea was thinking; he was
far more frightened of what Western journalists - bused to
the scene by the Serb authorities - would find in the village
of Korisa. Fifty tractors had been destroyed in the attack, the
Serbs were reporting, close to an area that had been the scene of
sustained Nato attack.
It was, you see, significant that Mr Shea had not mentioned -
had not alluded for a second - to these extraordinary reports. Had
he thought for a moment that the Serbs had slaughtered these
people, he would have told us all he knew. But he was silent. A
colleague muttered in my ear that when Mr Shea was asked
about the reported massacre, he would express no
compassion for the dead but "promise another of his full
and thorough investigations".
And when at last he was asked, Mr Shea expressed no
compassion for the dead but promised "a full and thorough
investigation". He hoped, he added sarcastically, that the
journalists bused to the village by the Serbs would "insist on their
right to go around freely and do their own research" - Mr Shea is
now apparently a professor of journalism as well as Nato flak -
and that they would investigate "ethnic cleansing" in the nearby
town of Prizren. "You know Nato - we give the truth on these
issues, every single time, the full facts."
But it doesn't. Nato does not give "the full facts" (or "the
full fax" as Mr Shea keeps saying).
It lies. When I asked for Nato's reaction to the KLA
appointment of one of the most notorious ethnic cleansers
as its new military commander - Agim Ceku, one of
the planners of Croatia's ethnic cleansing of 300,000 Serbs
in Krajina - Mr Shea said he had no comment because "Nato
has no direct contact with the KLA".
This is totally untrue. Nato liaises with the KLA, holds security
and intelligence meetings with its commanders, maintains radio
contact with KLA men in Kosovo. Nato officials (including J
Shea Esq) regularly announce KLA operations with approval.
When I asked General Jertz if Nato was using depleted uranium
munitions in Serbia, he said it had not done so for two weeks but
that depleted uranium is harmless. This, too, is a lie. There is
growing evidence that the dust from spent depleted
uranium shells has caused an epidemic of cancers in
southern Iraq and may well be a cause of Gulf War
syndrome.
British weapons testing sites are meticulously washed down after
depleted uranium test- firings, their contents sealed in concrete.
Nothing to worry about, said the general. "You find uranium in
all sorts of things - in rocks, soil ..." No harm could be caused
by the use of such shells, Mr Shea added. So much for the
deformed babies now being born in Basra. And so much, I
suppose, for the contaminated homes of Kosovo to which Nato
claims it will return all of the Albanian refugees.
I kept wondering what this whole farce reminded me of. Here
were the two Nato men recording, minute after minute, hour
after hour, day after day, the destruction of the Kosovo
population - the fault of the Serbs, to be sure, but the symbol
none the less of Nato's total, abject failure in the Balkans. Every
day, they tell us about mass graves and death and torture. And I
recalled after a while what it all reminded me of - the discreet
voices, the dipped lights, the flags hanging like dead flowers
behind the podium, even the sinister iron Death Star, which
stands grimly outside Nato headquarters. It reminded me of an
undertaker's office.
The mock soul-searching, the old pictures, the expressions of
regret. The cockney and the general were the morticians, as
unable to contemplate an end to Nato's bombardment of Serbia
as they were to arrest old age or find a cure for death.
Kosovo is dead. Its people are dead or dispossessed. For
investigation, read autopsy. And after a while it dawned on me,
as it has dawned on others attending these preposterous
gatherings, that we are being prepared for the death of Nato.
LL.VE
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