STOP NATO: �NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- ListBot Sponsor -------------------------- Start Your Own FREE Email List at http://www.listbot.com/links/joinlb ---------------------------------------------------------------------- It's highly unfortunate that Al-Ahram columnist Mohammed Sid-Ahmed, whose style has always partaken of the stodgy academic (the "Brown Englishman" that Richard remarked on recently) but who in the past has proven capable of better, should have stitched together the unimaginative crazy-quilt of Western received opinions he has on the Milosevic case. A new day in international legality, indeed, but hardly one to celebrate. It's in fact a continuation and dangerous escalation of the precedent established with the invasion of Panama and the forcible abduction of Manuel Noriega - again nothing to applaud - as it is of the invasion of Grenada in 1983 with the resultant seizure of government leaders Hudson Austin and Benjamin Coard, who were thrown in tiger cages awaiting execution. Eighteen years later and the world knows nothing about their fate. After repeating all the standard self-celebratory cliches about the selling of Milosevic, and Yugoslavia's national independence, in a manner that suggests a kidnapper's cutting and pasting of sentences on to a ransom note, the author resorts to the liberal Western line: So too with Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Ariel Sharon. He's probably right about the middle name, but is dead wrong on the other two. Pinochet and Sharon will never - never - face a war crimes tribunal, because they serve Western interests; in fact the next victim of the Milosevic model has already been identified on this list by Kole: Robert Mugabe. And already preceding him is Liberia's Charles Taylor. The point that evidently escapes Sid-Ahmed, though one would have to be intentionally blind to miss it, is that Slobodan Milosevic's 'crime' was that he performed the task for which his people elected him - to defend Serbia and Yugoslavia against internal and external attacks, all unprovoked. Doing so put him at odds with NATO, and rather than selling out his nation and people as so many of his neighboring heads of state have done he intentionally ran all the personal risks he's since confronted. Alert Egyptians will have already come to the same conclusion that the leaders of Libya, Iraq and other Arab countries have, that the State Department-orchestrated toppling of Milosevic's government last autumn and the subsequent illegal detention and appalling abduction were affronts to the world community, and a further intensification of Washington's and NATO's drive toward brutal subjugation of the world. Not only has the new Axis launched a frontal assault on international law and the national sovereignty of ALL nations, it's delivered a chilling threat to all peoples and leaders who attempt to defend their interests against the globalist monolith. Threat? No, challenge. And that challenge will be taken up. If the Sid-Ahmeds of the world have their way, though, and popular resistance to imperialism is ever truly crushed, how long will it be before a NATO-led coalition - perhaps with a "reformist" Yugoslav contingent - turns its attention to Egypt tself? A point well worth pondering, Monsieur columnist of the New Cairo Times. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
