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Wednesday, September 04, 2013

Here’s one we made before


We posted about the consequences of the humanitarian intervention in Libya. Kosovo was another that the West claimed was a success.  In 1999 NATO launched an air campaign against Serbia.  U.S. warplanes hit the Pancevo petrochemical plant in Pancevo, sending a toxic cloud with 2,000 tons of chemicals over the Serbian city on the Danube, and also released ch emicals from other strikes on industrial plants and depots. NATO jets also use Depleted Uranium munitions. NATO’s campaign in Kosovo is remembered as an air war that crushed Milosevic’s resolve through precision weapons and military smarts, but that interpretation overlooks the crucial fact that the threat of a bona fide invasion - boots on the ground - played a key role in bringing Milosevic to the negotiating table. NATO thought that the Kosovo intervention would be short and that the Serbs would quickly crumble, but Serbia showed remarkable resilience in the face of intense NATO bombing. It took 78 days of sustained bombing and the fact that NATO was preparing a ground invasion to cow Milosevic into talks.

Rather than protect the Kosovars, the ethnic cleansing intensified. NATO Commanding General Wesley Clark later admitted that U.S. “military authorities fully anticipated the vicious approach that Milosevic would adopt.” Prior to the air war’s start on March 24, 1999, only some 2,500 civilian innocents had died in the Serb-Albanian civil war, whereas during the 11-week bombing effort, an estimated 10,000 civilians were killed

In the fog of war, NATO accidentally bombed a convoy of refugees killing 78.  NATO's first response was: "We didn't do it, the Serbs did it." That changed to "we did bomb the column, but the Serbs killed the refugees." Finally, NATO accepted fault and apologized. Still, NATO's glib cockney spokesman, Jamie Shea, pushed the edges of Orwellian doublespeak when he declared that the pilot had "dropped his bombs in good faith." Later, NATO played an audio-tape supposedly of the pilot in question. But it turned out that the recorded pilot was involved in a completely different operation. The real tape was withheld.

The Chinese embassy was bombed, in the era of sat-nav blamed on an out of date map. The civilian Serbian television station was deemed a legitimate military target, killing 16 employees. In several attacks, including the Grdelica railroad bridge on 12 April 1999, the road bridge in Lužane on 1 May 1999 and Varvarin bridge on 30 May 1999, NATO forces failed to suspend their attack after it was evident that they had struck civilians. In other cases, including the attacks on displaced civilians in Djakovica on 14 April 1999 and Koriša on 13 May 1999, NATO failed to take necessary precautions to minimize civilian casualties. "Civilian deaths could have been significantly reduced during the conflict if NATO forces had fully adhered to the laws of war," said Sian Jones, Amnesty International’s Balkans expert said.

The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) were involved in various humanitarian crimes of their own during their quest for freedom.  Clinton's special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, described the KLA as "without any questions, a terrorist group." Once the KLA came to power it began to ethnically cleanse Serbs and Roma (Gypsies) from Kosovo. 40,000 Serbs who once lived in Pristina, fewer than 250, mostly elderly, are confined in two apartment complexes. Amnesty International  slammed the UN in Kosovo for failing to properly investigate abductions and killings of Kosovo Serbs in the aftermath of the war. Their report alleges that for nearly a decade after the conflict, UN police and prosecutors failed to investigate war crimes and deliver justice to the relatives of victims. Former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia, James Bissett, wrote in  2001, "War on terrorism skipped the KLA,"

Jean Bricmont’s book Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War  relates  how“to call on an army to wage a war for human rights implies a naive belief of what armies are and do, as well as a magical belief in the myth of short, clean, ‘surgical’ wars.”

KFOR — short for Kosovo Force — and it remains there to this day a force numbering some 5,500. In 2010 a report by the Council of Europe describes Kosovo  as a country subject to “mafia-like structures of organised crime”. It accuses KLA commander and current prime minister, Hachim Thaci, of heading a criminal network involved in murder, prostitution and drug trafficking.  In the memoirs of International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, revealing that a 2008 investigation into the “organ harvesting” had been dropped because it was supposedly “impossible to conduct.”  It exists now as a US fiefdom, heavily dependent on international aid and with all major decisions pertaining to the economy, public spending, social programmes, security and trade controlled by the US, which has established its largest base in the Balkans at Camp Bondsteel.

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