The Dominion (Canada)
March 22, 2006
PEACE FROM ABOVE
The final article in a five-part series on the former Yugoslavia
by Dru Oja Jay
Belgrade burning after a night bombing raid. In 1999, NATO planes dropped
twenty thousand tonnes of bombs on targets in the former Yugoslavia, killing
upwards of 3,000 human beings and injuring thousands more. Targets included
power plants, hospitals, industrial infrastructure, schools, churches,
historic sites, water and sewage facilities, apartment buildings, temporary
housing for refugees, traveling refugees, the state television station,
bridges, and socially-owned, worker-run factories. Michael Parenti, Jeremey
Scahill and others have noted that buildings owned by multinational
corporations remained curiously unscathed, though the Chinese Embassy was
levelled by NATO bombs. One and a half tonnes of depleted uranium munitions
were used in attacks. Cluster bombs were used. Bombing also resulted in the
incineration of 80,000 tonnes of crude oil in a heavily populated area, and
the contamination of the Danube river with hundreds of tonnes of toxic
chemicals.
NATO planes, it was reported, often waited fifteen minutes after bombing a
target before hitting it again, killing rescue workers.
Canada participated in the bombing, though neither the public nor parliament
were consulted in the decision.
NATO's bombing campaign continues to be dubbed a "humanitarian intervention"
against Serbian forces, allegedly bent on the wholesale slaughter of
innocent Muslims and Croats.
"This is America at its best. We seek no territorial gain. We seek no
political advantage," President Clinton told television viewers.
The stated reason for the bombing was to force Serbians to sign the
Rambouillet agreement, which called for the unconditional NATO occupation of
the whole of Yugoslavia. The "agreement," which most observers say was
simply an ultimatum, would have empowered a NATO-designated official to
"issue binding directives" to the governments of Yugoslavia and Kosovo.
According to a source quoted by George Kenney, US State Department officials
bragged that the US had "deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs
would accept." While the Rambouillet document nominally sought autonomy for
ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, the Americans seemed to make several assumptions
about what the Albanians would do with their autonomy. Among other things,
the agreement called for a "free-market economy" in Kosovo and the
privatization of all government-owned assets.
Writing in the Guardian, Neil Clark notes that "NATO only destroyed 14
tanks, but 372 industrial facilities were hit--including the Zastava car
plant [known for its production of the 'Yugo'] at Kragujevac, leaving
hundreds of thousands jobless. Not one foreign or privately owned factory
was bombed."
In other news, Clark reports that Kosovo's Trepca mine complex--estimated to
be worth $5 billion, and called "war's glittering prize" by the New York
Times--was seized by 2,900 NATO troops, who used tear gas and rubber bullets
to take it over. Now held "in trust" by the UN, the mine has largely been
sold off to foreign investors and firms.
Reporting of this kind lends a degree of credibility to an account like that
of Michael Parenti, who maintains that Yugoslavia was dismantled and
attacked because it refused to submit to western interests and privatize its
industry in the manner imposed on the rest of post-communist eastern Europe.
(Parenti is hardly unique in holding this view, however. Former State
Department official George Kenney and retired US Air Force Colonel Allan
Parrington both came to a very similar conclusion independently.) That the
standard of living in such countries has declined significantly, while
unemployment, crime and inequality have risen across the board seems to be
little more than a footnote to official accounts.
What political agenda the media is serving by demonizing Serbs and Milosevic
in particular? Is it because, as a diverse set of observers suggest, that
the Serbs were demonized and bombed for having put up the toughest
resistance to the imposition of a privatized free-market economy?
If and when there is a real debate in Canada about the Yugoslavian civil
war, perhaps an explanation will emerge that accounts for the facts that are
now available to everyone. Until then, the evidence is more favourable to
the case made by people like Parenti than it is to remarkably unequivocal
view that blame for the entire conflict rests on one man.
The explanation of NATO's role as "humanitarian intervention," however
appealing, has the additional burden of contradicting almost every precedent
of US foreign policy in the last three decades, in addition to requiring the
commentator to ignore the verified facts on the ground.
The bombing itself was a serious war crime by most definitions of the term.
Bill Clinton and Jean Chrétien, however, are unlikely to appear in front of
a war crimes tribunal any time soon, as the tribunal itself is funded and
controlled by the United States and other NATO members.
In November of 1999, Canadian lawyers David Jacobs and York University law
professor Michael Mandel presented a formal request that the International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), where Milosevic was
until recently on trial, investigate sixty-seven NATO leaders (including
Bill Clinton and Jean Chrétien) in the deaths of thousands of civilians.
They presented three volumes of evidence to substantiate their request.
Continued failure to act, they said, was a violation of the court's mandate.
Two months later, ICTY prosecutor Carla Del Ponte made it clear that NATO
leaders would not be investigated. Mandel wrote that he and his colleagues
could not "understand the failure of the Tribunal to act on these and the
many other complaints against the NATO leaders. The law is clear. The
evidence is overwhelming."
Responding to a reporter's question about why the International Court of
Justice did not have jurisdiction over NATO countries, NATO spokesperson
Jamie Shea was quite plain:
The charge by Yugoslavia was brought under the genocide convention. That
does not apply to NATO countries. As to whom it does apply, I think we know
the answer there.
Needless to say, the press does not share Shea's refreshing honesty when it
comes to NATO exceptionalism and the selective application of international
law.
