Precedence: bulk
A BELGRADE ECOLOGIST CRIES OUT FOR PEACE
By David Bacon
SAN FRANCISCO, CA (4/4/99) -- NATO bombs rained down on her city,
beginning in its suburbs and then moving into the heart of Belgrade.
First the planes and cruise missiles came just at night. But then their
aerial assault seemed to know no set time of day. Finally, Branka
Jovanovic sat down at her computer terminal and typed out a cry for peace,
sending it out on the internet to the world.
While Yugoslavs and Serbs today are routinely painted in the US
media as bloodthirsty nationalists, Jovanovic can hardly be called by such
a name. She belongs to the German Greens. She is president of the
environmental committee NZS in Belgrade. She is even honorary president of
the Ecological Party of Tirana, capital of Albania, and has helped to
organize numerous groups promoting dialogue between Muslims and Serbs. Her
own children, she points out, are born of a mixed marriage.
An ecologist, she sought to put a human face on the environmental
catastrophe caused by the bombing.
"NATO chooses targets in the vicinity of extremely dangerous
machinery," she explained. "On the very first day, the municipality of
Grocka was hit, where the Vinca nuclear reactor is situated, containing a
great storage of nuclear waste." Jovanovic also listed petrochemical and
artificial fertilizer plants in Pancevo, and a chlorine plant in Baric,
which, she says, still uses the old technology of the plant in Bhopal,
India, where a chemical leak led to the deaths of thousands.
"It is not necessary for me to explain what blowing up one such
factory would represent," she declared. "Not only would Belgrade, at a
distance of 10 kilometers, be endangered, but the rest of Europe would be
too.
"On the second day," she recounted, "in the Belgrade suburb of Sremcica
a chemical production factory and a rocket fuel storage facility were hit,
causing a mild toxic exposure of the surrounding area. Four national parks were
hit - all members of the international association of national reservations. You
must realize that Yugoslavia is among 13 of the world's richest bio-diversity
countries."
On the third day, she told her unknown readers, the fleets of NATO
bombers and cruise missiles struck Belgrade's neuro-psychiatric clinic.
They came perilously close to the Yugoslav Cinematheque, one of the richest
film archives in the world, listed as a world cultural treasure. The
village of Gracanica was also hit - site of a medieval monastery now being
considered by UNESCO for inclusion on the world heritage list.
She went further to warn of the impending use of B-1 and A-10
bombers, "carrying missiles with depleted uranium previously used in Iraq
and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Their use will bring about dangerous consequences
to the health not only of soldiers, but also the whole population. As you
know, toxins and radioactivity know no nationality or borders."
But Jovanovic didn't just describe damage to inanimate facilities.
She detailed the reaction of workers to the bombing of their factories. In
the former Yugoslavia's unique variant of socialism, the country's
industrial facilities weren't just treated as the property of the state in
general, but as that of the collective of workers who labored in them.
Their feelings at seeing their worksites bombed was not simply outrage at
an attack on their country, but a more deeply personal response.
"The workers in the greater part of our great industrial complexes
have decided to make a 'living wall' around their work places," Jovanovic
said. "They are doing this not only because they are defending their
country, but also because they have become so impoverished by the years of
sanctions that the destruction of factories would mean their condemnation
to poverty equal to execution."
While President Clinton frames the NATO assault in terms of human
rights, the bombing of the factories may be a truer guide to its
intentions. Yugoslavia has remained the pariah of U.S. policy in the
Balkans since the secession of Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and
Bosnia-Herzegovina. While these states have carried out the kinds of
economic reforms mandated by the International Monetary Fund in countries
around the world, Yugoslavia has not.
In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the economy also lies prostrate as a result
of five years of civil war. But there the Dayton accords, which ended the
fighting, created a novel situation, in which NATO enjoys an unprecedented
political and economic role. The NATO-backed military authority has the
power to remove the head of state, and recently exercised it to force the
president of the Serbian republic in Bosnia from office.
By agreement, the head of the Bosnian Central Bank is not Bosnian,
but an appointee of the IMF. Throughout most of the rest of the world, the
IMF has insisted on the privatization of industry, and the creation of
investment opportunities for multinational corporations, as a precondition
for loans for economic development.
Secretary of Defense William Cohen, in fact described NATO's
mandate in those terms to the Boston Chamber of Commerce last year.
Expanding into Eastern Europe (of which the Balkans, of course, are a part)
spreads political stability, "and with that spread of stability," he noted,
"there is a prospect to attract investment." Instability, on the other
hand, he cautioned, " destroys lives and markets."
The Rambouillet agreement, rejected by Yugoslavia prior to the
bombing, required it to accept the stationing of 28,000 NATO soldiers in
Kosovo. The agreement also specified that "the economy of Kosovo shall
function in accordance with free market principles."
NATO, of course, does not describe its current objectives in
bombing Belgrade or intervening in Kosovo in free market terms. President
Clinton and NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana say the alliance's actions
are intended to protect the human and national rights of Kosovo's ethnic
Albanian population.
"If the aim of this intervention was the prevention of humanitarian
catastrophe," Jovanovic warned, "its result will be a far greater
humanitarian catastrophe with far more severe consequences to generations
of people living in this country."
There is no doubt that civil war between Serbs and Albanians has
led to a vast exodus of refugees. In the fighting between the Yugoslav
Army and the Kosovo Liberation Army, villages have been destroyed and the
civilian population has been increasingly treated as indistinguishable from
actual combatants.
Yet far from trying to reduce civil war in Kosovo, NATO strategy
may inflame it. As early as last July, New York Times reporter Chris
Hedges documented a vast influx of German marks and fresh recruits into the
KLA, most of it coming from Croatia. As NATO massed thousands of troops in
Macedonia, on Kosovo's border, Hedges described a new level of professional
training, which he ascribed to mercenary support, among other factors.
Also in July, the Christian Science Monitor carried an article
stating that the KLA had appeared before the U.S. National Security Council
and Senator Jesse Helms, raising funds. For the past year, numerous
articles in the Italian, Balkan, and even U.S. press have also documented
KLA involvement in large-scale heroin shipments into western Europe in
exchange for weapons.
Mercenary support from Croatia is an especially ominous sign,
raising the specter of U.S. covert intervention. The U.S. has defended the
Croatian government diplomatically since its separation from the former
Yugoslavia, despite its rehabilitation of Croatia's last independent
government, which collaborated with the Nazis in the mass murder of Serbs
and other Yugoslav nationalities.
Since gaining independence, the Croatian military has been supported and
trained by a leading mercenary organization, Military Professional Resources
Inc., based in suburban Virginia. Headed by several retired U.S. generals, the
group provided logistical support to the Croatian Army, which bombarded the city
of Knin in 1995. Military Professional Resources' contract with the Croatian
government was approved by the State Department. The bombardment and a
scorched-earth military campaign led to the exodus of over 200,000 Serbs from
the Croatian region of Krajina, by far the largest incident of ethnic cleansing
in the recent Balkan wars.
Three Croatian generals were indicted last month by the Hague War
Crimes Tribunal for the bombardment, and the deaths of many Serbs. No
representatives of Military Professional Resources Inc. were charged,
however.
But according to one of the most astute observers of the Balkans,
NATO action in Yugoslavia has had a target greater than local economic
reforms. The late Sean Gervasi, a Philadelphia-born writer, U.N. diplomat,
and fellow at Washington's Institute for Policy Studies, noted in 1996 that
"Yugoslavia is significant not just for its own position on the map, but
also for the areas to which it allows access. And influential American
analysts believe that it lies close to a zone of vital US interests, the
Black Sea-Caspian Sea region."
When bombs began falling on Belgrade, they had already been falling
for weeks on another country - southern Iraq. Both flank the greatest pool
of petroleum in the world - the vast fields of Central Asia. While those
oil deposits were off limits during the cold war, since the fall of the
Soviet Union they have become the object of intense activity designed to
gain their control.
As U.S. oil companies began making deals for exploration and
development with the governments of former Soviet republics, Gervasi notes
that NATO began declaring it had interests in the region. This was a vast
geographical extension for an alliance whose origin lies in a cold-war
front in western Europe against the now-disappeared Soviet Union.
In 1997, 500 members of the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division,
part of a multinational force led by the commander of the U.S. Atlantic
Command, Marine Gen. John Sheehan, conducted military maneuvers in
Kazakhstan, a former Soviet Central Asian republic.
Last year, nearby Azerbaijan proposed upgrading its relations with
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to a permanent joint forum. Both
countries are located thousands of miles from the North Atlantic, but under
their soil slosh the future profits of Chevron, which already has a
multi-billion-dollar investment in Kazakhstan.
Former U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who is now head of the
Halliburton oil exploration company, emphasized last year the strategic
importance of the Caspian. "It's almost as if the opportunities have
arisen overnight," he said.
Gervasi warned that in Yugoslavia the United Nations framework for
negotiating resolutions to international problems was being discarded, and
in its place, NATO was emerging as a military enforcement mechanism
beholden only to western industrial countries, especially the U.S. On the
U.N. Security Council, both Russia and China have veto power over any
military operations, and would probably use it to prevent intervention to
protect oil interests, as they would also undoubtedly have done in
Yugoslavia.
"Western producers, banks and pipeline companies want to be assured
of 'political stability' in the region. They want to be assured that there
will be no political changes which would threaten their new interests or
potential ones," Gervasi warned.
Jovanovic condemned the use made of her country as a pawn in this
geopolitical power game. With bombs raining on Belgrade's streets, "there
is no time to begin this appeal," she said, "with a discussion of the
causes and mechanisms for the outbreak of this crisis." Nevertheless, she
bitterly denounced "the unknowing diplomatic interventions, the lack of
will for peace both in my country and your countries, which brought about
the destruction of a significant multi-ethnic country in Europe, the former
Yugoslavia."
NATO's intervention, she cried, will not bring peace and will only
result in further ethnic cleansing of both Albanians and Serbs. "I am
afraid that NATO diplomacy is creating the prerequisite for long-lasting
hatred and lack of confidence, which will disable all future discussion
between the Serbs, Albanians and other national communities about political
solutions."
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david bacon - labornet email david bacon
internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1631 channing way
phone: 510.549.0291 berkeley, ca 94703
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