Don't Forget Yugoslavia
John Pilger digs beneath the received wisdom for the break-up of
Yugoslavia and points to a largely ignored memoir by the former
chief prosecutor in The Hague - and an echo from current events
in the Caucasus.
By John Pilger
15/08/08 "ICH" -- - Even as Blair the war leader was on a
triumphant tour of "liberated" Kosovo, the KLA was ethnically
cleansing more than 200,000 Serbs and Roma from the province
The secrets of the crushing of Yugoslavia are emerging, telling
us more about how the modern world is policed. The former chief
prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia
in The Hague, Carla Del Ponte, this year published her memoir
The Hunt: Me and War Criminals. Largely ignored in Britain, the
book reveals unpalatable truths about the west's intervention in
Kosovo, which has echoes in the Caucasus.
The tribunal was set up and bankrolled principally by the United
States. Del Ponte's role was to investigate the crimes committed
as Yugoslavia was dismembered in the 1990s. She insisted that
this include Nato's 78-day bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999,
which killed hundreds of people in hospitals, schools, churches,
parks and tele vision studios, and destroyed economic
infrastructure. "If I am not willing to [prosecute Nato
personnel]," said Del Ponte, "I must give up my mission." It was
a sham. Under pressure from Washington and London, an
investigation into Nato war crimes was scrapped.
Readers will recall that the justification for the Nato bombing
was that the Serbs were committing "genocide" in the
secessionist province of Kosovo against ethnic Albanians. David
Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes, announced that
as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59"
may have been murdered. Tony Blair invoked the Holocaust and
"the spirit of the Second World War". The west's heroic allies
were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose murderous record
was set aside. The British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, told
them to call him any time on his mobile phone.
With the Nato bombing over, international teams descended upon
Kosovo to exhume the "holocaust". The FBI failed to find a
single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did
the same, its leader angrily denouncing "a semantic pirouette by
the war propaganda machines". A year later, Del Ponte's tribunal
announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This
included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by
the KLA. There was no genocide in Kosovo. The "holocaust" was a
lie. The Nato attack had been fraudulent.
That was not all, says Del Ponte in her book: the KLA kidnapped
hundreds of Serbs and transported them to Albania, where their
kidneys and other body parts were removed; these were then sold
for transplant in other countries. She also says there was
sufficient evidence to prosecute the Kosovar Albanians for war
crimes, but the investigation "was nipped in the bud" so that
the tribunal's focus would be on "crimes committed by Serbia".
She says the Hague judges were terrified of the Kosovar
Albanians - the very people in whose name Nato had attacked
Serbia.
Indeed, even as Blair the war leader was on a triumphant tour of
"liberated" Kosovo, the KLA was ethnically cleansing more than
200,000 Serbs and Roma from the province. Last February the
"international community", led by the US, recognised Kosovo,
which has no formal economy and is run, in effect, by criminal
gangs that traffic in drugs, contraband and women. But it has
one valuable asset: the US military base Camp Bondsteel,
described by the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner
as "a smaller version of Guantanamo". Del Ponte, a Swiss
diplomat, has been told by her own government to stop promoting
her book.
Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent and multi-ethnic, if
imperfect, federation that stood as a political and economic
bridge in the Cold War. This was not acceptable to the expanding
European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had
begun a drive east to dominate its "natural market" in the
Yugoslav pro vinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the
Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991, a secret deal had been
struck; Germany recognised Croatia, and Yugoslavia was doomed.
In Washington, the US ensured that the struggling Yugoslav
economy was denied World Bank loans and the defunct Nato was
reinvented as an enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo "peace" conference
in France, the Serbs were told to accept occupation by Nato
forces and a market economy, or be bombed into submission. It
was the perfect precursor to the bloodbaths in Afghanistan and
Iraq.
www.johnpilger.com
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