"Humanitär Intervention" / om Pilgers artikel 04 12 09

Som inledning till Pilgers utmärkta betraktelse över "Humanitarian
Interventions" vill jag göra en elak analogi visavi Ordfront.

Historiens mest massiva propagandasatsning från "Corporate Military Media"
var inledningen till NATO´s bombningar på Balkan. Den nya
världsordningen -att USA ämnade styra världen med våld och att man ej längre
tolererar att länder eller allianser av länder samverkar på sätt som USA kan
uppfatta som insubordination kommer att i förebyggande (Pre-emtive)  syfte
angripas- behövde exemplifieras i praxis. Balkan blev det första exemplet.
Vasallstaten Swärjes media samverkade som alltid med Imperiets
propagandasatsningar.

"Folkets" Ordfront Magasin var vid ett fåtal tillfällen en kritisk röst som
störde "maktens megafoner" DN m.fl.

Ordningen är nu återställd. Ordfront´s självständiga redaktion är utrensad.
Dess nya Chefsredaktör är ej ur "folkdjupet" utan från "eliten", han kommer
från en "fin familj" en kulturskribent från DN - släkt med Bonnier..
Balkanfonder är årets vinnare på börsen. Det enormt rika gruvkomplexet
Trepca´s privatisering har administrerats i en orgie av korruption bakom en
legitimerande fasad av FN och Världsbanken.
Swänska globala Corporations gör storaffärer och i Trepca´s gruvgångar
mullrar jättelika swänska gruvmaskiner.

Swänska Corporations har stora förväntningar på den nya världsordningens
senaste exempel Irak. Börsen i Bagdad pekar mot stjärnorna. Propagandan och
desinformationen har varit massiv och kostsam men vinstutsikterna förefaler
mycket lovande.  Det gäller att vara måttfull i kritiken mot imperiet om
juniorpartern Swärje skall få vara med och dela på rovet.

Tidigare ordförande i Ordfront Christina Hagner är även redaktör för Rädda
Barnens tidskrift. Hon vet betydelsen av måttfull kritik. Bidragen från
näringslivet till humanitär hjälp är inte försumbara.
Ordfronts Chefsredaktör och ansvarige utgivare Leif Ericsson och Christina
Hagner har visat stor förståelse för NATO´s humanitära bombningar. Swänska
Globala Corporations och vinnarna på börsen tackar Leif och Christina för
deras bemödanden och hoppas på fortsatt gott samarbete och kommande vinster
i Irak, Iran och Venezuela.

Vi känsliga hjärtnupna demokrater och rättviseivrare som inte vill kriga för
snöd vinning låter John Pilger sammanfatta utvecklingen av den "Humanitära
krigföringen"på Balkan.

Bo Modén




ZNet Commentary
How Silent Are The 'humanitarian' Invaders Of Kosovo? December 09, 2004
By John Pilger

Muted by the evidence of the Anglo-American catastrophe in Iraq, the
international "humanitarian" war party ought to be called to account for its
largely forgotten crusade in Kosovo, the model for Tony Blair's "onward
march of liberation". Just as Iraq is being torn apart by the forces of
empire, so was Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic state that uniquely rejected
both sides in the cold war.

Lies as great as those of Bush and Blair were deployed by Clinton and Blair
in their grooming of public opinion for an illegal, unprovoked attack on a
European country. Like the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the media
coverage in the spring of 1999 was a series of fraudulent justifications,
beginning with US Defence Secretary William Cohen's claim that "we've now
seen about 100,000 military-aged [Albanian] men missing... they may have
been murdered." David Scheffer, the 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 killed. Blair invoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the
Second World War". The British press took its cue. "Flight from genocide,"
said the Daily Mail. "Echoes of the Holocaust," chorused the Sun and the
Mirror.

By June 1999, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams began
subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The American FBI arrived to
investigate what was called "the largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic
history". Several weeks later, having not found a single mass grave, the FBI
went home. The Spanish forensic team also returned home, its leader
complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of "a
semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find
one - not one - mass grave."

In November 1999, the Wall Street Journal published the results of its own
investigation, dismissing "the mass grave obsession". Instead of "the huge
killing fields some investigators were led to expect ... the pattern is of
scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation
Army had been active." The Journal concluded that Nato stepped up its claims
about Serb killing fields when it "saw a fatigued press corps drifting
toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by Nato's bombs .... The war
in Kosovo was "cruel, bitter, savage; genocide it wasn't."

One year later, the International War Crimes Tribunal, a body effectively
set up by Nato, announced that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo's
"mass graves" was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs
and Roma murdered by the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army. Like Iraq's fabled
weapons of mass destruction, the figures used by the US and British
governments and echoed by journalists were inventions - along with Serb
"rape camps" and Clinton's and Blair's claims that Nato never deliberately
bombed civilians.

Code-named 'Stage Three', Nato's civilian targets included public transport,
hospitals, schools, museums, churches. "It was common knowledge that Nato
went to Stage Three [after a couple of weeks]," said James Bissell, the
Canadian ambassador in Belgrade during the attack. "Otherwise, they would
not have been bombing bridges on Sunday afternoons and market places."

Nato's clients were the Kosovo Liberation Army. Seven years earlier, the KLA
had been designated by the State Department as a terrorist organisation in
league with Al Qaida. KLA thugs were feted; Foreign Secretary Robin Cook
allowed them to call him on his mobile phone. "The Kosovo-Albanians played
us like a Stradivarius," wrote the UN Balkans commander, Major-General Lewis
MacKenzie, last April. "We have subsidised and indirectly supported their
violent campaign for an ethnically pure Kosovo. We have never blamed them
for being the perpetrators of the violence in the early 1990s and we
continue to portray them as the designated victim today in spite of evidence
to the contrary."

The trigger for the bombing of Yugoslavia was, according to Nato, the
failure of the Serbian delegation to sign up to the Rambouillet peace
conference. What went mostly unreported was that the Rambouillet accord had
a secret Annexe B, which Madeline Albright's delegation had inserted on the
last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia,
a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation. As the Foreign Office
minister Lord Gilbert later conceded to a Commons' defence select committee,
Annexe B was planted deliberately to provoke rejection by the government in
Belgrade. As the first bombs fell, the elected parliament in Belgrade, which
included some of Milosevic's fiercest opponents, voted overwhelmingly to
reject it.

Equally revealing was a chapter dealing exclusively with the Kosovo economy.
This called for a "free-market economy" and the privatisation of all
government assets. As the Balkans writer Neil Clark has pointed out, "the
rump of Yugoslavia... was the last economy in central-southern Europe to be
uncolonised by western capital. 'Socially owned enterprises', the form of
worker self-management pioneered under Tito, still predominated. Yugoslavia
had publicly owned petroleum, mining, car and tobacco industries, and 75 per
cent of industry was state or socially owned."

At the Davos summit of neo-liberal chieftains in 1999, Blair berated
Belgrade, not for its handling of Kosovo, but for its failure to fully
embrace "economic reform". In the bombing campaign that followed, it was
state owned companies, rather than military sites, that were targeted.
Nato's destruction of only 14 Yugoslav army tanks compares with its bombing
of 372 centres of industry, including the Zastava car factory, leaving
hundreds of thousands jobless. "Not one foreign or privately owned factory
was bombed," wrote Clark.

Erected on the foundation of this massive lie, Kosovo today is a violent,
criminalised UN-administered "free market" in drugs and prostitution. More
than 200,000 Serbs, Roma, Bosniacs, Turks, Croats and Jews have been
ethnically cleansed by the KLA with Nato forces standing by. KLA hit squads
have burned, looted or demolished 85 Orthodox churches and monasteries,
according to the UN. The courts are venal. "You shot an 89-year-old Serb
grandmother?" mocked a UN narcotics officer. "Good for you. Get out of
jail."

Although Security Council Resolution 1244 recognises Kosovo as an integral
part of Yugoslavia, and does not authorise the UN administration to sell off
anything, multinational companies are being offered 10 and 15 year leases of
the province's local industries and resources, including the vast Trepca
mines, some of the richest mineral deposits in the world. After Hitler
captured them in 1940, the mines supplied German munition factories with 40
per cent of their lead. Overseeing this plundered, murderous, now almost
ethnically pure "future democracy" (Blair), are 4,000 American troops in
Camp Bondsteel, a 775-acre permanent base.

Meanwhile, the trial of Milosevic proceeds as farce, not unlike an earlier
show trial in The Hague: that of the Libyans blamed for the Lockerbie bomb.
Milosevic was a brute; he was also a banker once regarded as the west's man
who was prepared to implement "economic reforms" in keeping with IMF, World
Bank and European Community demands; to his cost, he refused to surrender
sovereignty. The empire expects nothing less.

First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk

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