Posted on 06/22/2006 8:30:21 AM PDT by Fighting Irish
The embarrassing truth is starting to come out that the Clinton Administration lied to us about Kosovo atrocities which were supposed to justify the bombing of Yugoslavia. In five months of investigation and exhumation of the dead in Kosovo, United Nations war crimes investigators have found only 2,108 bodies.
Before the bombing, Clinton and Defense Secretary William Cohen repeatedly tossed out figures of 100,000 dead, and the State Department even claimed that up to 500,000 Kosovars were feared dead. Clinton claimed that his bombing prevented Milosevic from "deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide."
The chief prosecutor for the UN war crimes tribunal, Carla Del Ponte, can confirm only the 2,108 figure. That's what she reported to the UN Security Council.
Pathologist Emilio Perez Pujol, who led a Spanish forensic team looking for bodies, found only 187, mostly in individual graves. He calculated that "the final figure of dead in Kosovo will be 2,500 at the most. This includes lots of strange deaths that can't be blamed on anyone in particular."
The British, who seem to be more interested in getting to the truth than Congress, are pressuring Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to answer claims that Tony Blair's government misled the public over the scale of deaths in order to justify NATO's bombing of Belgrade. Alice Mahon, the Labor MP who chairs the Balkans committee, said that the Kosovo deaths were tragic but did not justify the killing of Belgrade civilians by NATO's bombing.
Lacking a constitutional or national security basis for his Yugoslav adventure, Clinton relied wholly on the humanitarian argument. That rationale has fallen apart because the numbers of Milosevic's crimes in Kososo were so grossly inflated, the indiscriminate damage done by the Clinton/NATO bombing raids was so vast, and all the people he said he was helping are far worse off than before the bombing started.
The Clinton/NATO bombing was carried on for 78 days with total disregard for human life. The bombs killed thousands of innocent civilians and even destroyed hospitals and schools.
The Clinton/NATO bombing decimated Yugoslavia's economic infrastructure and created an environmental nightmare. Not only are water and power systems destroyed, but the lifeline of the region, the Danube River, is polluted and largely impassable because of destroyed bridges.
Repeated air strikes on the Serbian town of Pancevo enveloped the area in clouds of black smoke and flames for ten days and unleashed tons of chemicals into the air, water and soil. The fish, produce and water are all contaminated.
What was advertised as an air war against Yugoslavia's military capabilities was really a war directed against the Serbian people. Dropping cluster bombs from 15,000 feet and firing missiles from many miles away guaranteed "mistakes" and "collateral damage" and prove that the targets were civilian as well as military.
U.S. Air Force Commander Lt. Gen. Michael Short admitted that the goal was to break the will of the Serbs and make them so miserable that they would force Milosevic to pull out of Kosovo. Estimates of the cost to rebuild the damage range up to $100 billion, but the costs in human misery are incalculable.
The situation in Kosovo, the province Clinton was supposed to be protecting, is even worse. The danger from unexploded British and American cluster bombs and mines is at alarming levels, according to international aid agencies.
Before the bombing began, there was no humanitarian crisis in Kosovo. It was only after the U.S. and NATO air strikes began that the Serbs started to expel Albanians from Kosovo.
The NATO "peacekeeping" force in Kosovo is completely unable to restrain the revenge-seeking Albanians who are beating and murdering the Serbs (even targeting grandmothers) and burning their homes and churches. More Serb civilians have been slaughtered in Kosovo than ethnic Albanians before the bombing began.
The daily violence continues even though there are now more NATO troops in Kosovo than Serbs. According to Human Rights Watch, 164,000 Serb civilians have been driven out of Kosovo.
The Clinton-Albright policy is based on the absurd fantasy that America and NATO can force the Serbs and Albanians to live together in a multiethnic society. Neither side wants that, and the attempt to impose our will means that U.S. troops will play the costly roles of global cop and social worker indefinitely.
The only people happy about the Yugoslavia debacle are the globalists who want America to be perpetually engaged in foreign conflicts. In a speech to the Canadian Parliament, Czech leader Vaclav Havel praised the Yugoslav war as "an important precedent for the future," saying that "state sovereignty must inevitably dissolve" and nation-states will be transformed into "civil administrative units."
When Clinton's National Security Adviser Sandy Berger spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations on October 21, he described Clinton's foreign policy as grounded in the policy of "engagement." America will now be "engaged" in Yugoslavia for the rest of our lives.
Where was the GOP opposition?
What about wonderkin Wesley Clark?
Doncha mean WAR CRIMINAL CLARK???
No it won't....check out www.savekosovo.org. There is a group of us that won't let it die.
I also have this collection of quotes:
Circa 1998:
There's a military insurrection that is taking shape, backed by the members of the Albania Diaspora in Germany, Switzerland, and right here in New York City, where a lot of Albanians and Albanian-Americans are sending a lot of money and support to Kosovo. (Gosh - NYC? -SG)
Holbrooke: An independent Kosovo would "unravel Southeastern Europe."
JIM LEHRER: And they want an independent Kosovo ruled by Albanians, right?
RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Yes. And more. I met with several Albanian leaders in Kosovo who said their goal is an independent Kosovo, their goal is to recreate the Greater Albania that existed briefly during the 30's and 40's, which includes Albania, Kosovo, and part of Macedonia. That, I can tell you, Jim, would unravel Southeastern Europe and dramatically increase the chances of a general war. And that's why the situation is both not the same as Bosnia and why it's so dangerous.
I really need to stress this point so people do not misunderstand it. The Kosovo Albanians have been very badly treated for over a decade by the Serb minority in Kosovo. Their rights have been denied and the Yugoslav federal constitution was changed to reduce their powers. This was entirely wrong, and it led to the inevitable reaction which we're now seeing. At the same time, the violent solution which is being advocated by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army, which is really not an army but a lot of different groups that are gradually forming an infrastructure of resistance, this approach is highly dangerous to stability in the region.
Yes, a mass grave was found...it had Serbs, the biggest one yet. In my inquiry I asked a close friend i knew in Kosovo to give me what he knew, which is separate from this article. He was personally involved in the searching.
Quote:
"Regarding mass graves prior to September 1999, I can only tell you of the 2 that I was personally involved with. Both contained the bodies of murdered Kosovo Serbs. I think they were both discovered in August. One contained 8 or nine male bodies and was located past Malisheve (the road that ran behind Camp Monteith) towards the Serbian border, I think it was near the village called Podgorca or something like that. The bodies were buried just below the surface. ICFY was later involved in the recovery of the bodies. The other was 4 or 5 Serb male bodies (it look like they had been beaten) that had been dumped in a slit trench in a wooded area used for training by the VJ close to Gjilan/Gnjilane - going out on the road that was later blocked off for the police RHQ heading towards Mucibaba about a Km out of town turn left up into the wooded area. These were both quite clearly revenge murders, taken apparently purely because they were Serbs. This was pretty prevalent in the GN area in June to September, indiscriminate attacks were being taken against any group or individual Serb that had remained if they strayed out of the relative protection of their enclave. There might have been one or two others but I was not involved and do not remember the exact details."
Source: Personal statement to me from an OSCE Official.
Except for Phyillis Schafley readers and here on FR don't expect this to get any play at all in the MSM.........EVER!
Specifically, what focus of information would you like to have......
We won't until the Serbs themselves are willing to come clean upon the subject, but, alas, there's little hope for that coming to pass.
Point being, there was an effort to transport corpses out of Kosovo and hide them in Serbia proper, much like the effort to hide the evidence of the Srebrenica mass executions.
Serbia's about the only European country where the government can transport hundreds of corpses to police grounds, burn and bury them, and the responsible agencies can carry on "business as usual" after the corpses have been recovered. (800+)
No worries, however - if the Serbs are unwilling to deal with the criminals in their midst, there are other ways of addressing the issue, mainly isolating the Serbs and ensuring they don't exercise any power over those they have recently victimized.
Which is why Kosovo will be granted independence this year - we're just tired of the Serb's BS.
And if some still think, after 6 years of Republican leadership, that Bill Clinton is the deus ex machina of American Balkan policy, well, some folks you just can't reach, and after a while it becomes a waste of time to even try.
Who's "we?"
[shameless self-bump]
The only "marches" I know of were by American Serbs -- but because we are "normal Americans" with jobs who didn't realize that newspapers shut down for the weekend and that you have to call TV stations if you want them to show up --we marched on Saturdays and we were completely ignored.
The protests in other countries (like Greece & Italy) re the NATO bombing, were either ignored by the media or quashed by the US State Dept. Greeks told us (when were there a year later) that there were continual protests in the streets of Athens -- but then "Mad Maddie Albright" & the US State Dept threatened to issue a "Travel Warning to Greece" if they didn't stop. If that would have happened, the Greek economy -- heavily dependant on tourism -- would have collapsed, so these little shop-owners had to back off or literally "lose the bread on their table". So when NATO & the UN did show up, Greeks showed their passive aggression by giving incorrect directions to places when asked and turning around street signs en masse so that they all pointed back to Athens just to confuse the internationals! Greek men also risked their lives and went to Kosovo as unpaid volunteer bus drivers for Serbian children.
Re "move-on" and the Soros crowd, who do you think help sponsor the break-up of Yugoslavia? Soros is up to his neck in blood! Diana Johnstone's book, "Fool's Crusade --Yugoslavia, NATO & Western Delusions" is an excellent book on the subject of the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia, not just about the "who" and "when" but also the "why". She does describe how Soros has hijacked the Left (who would normally have been protesting the war) for his own ends and how most Liberals became convinced that Yugoslavia was their own personal "Spanish Civil War", filled with all the pathos and romance of a Hemingway novel.
It is hard to understand why Britain and the US State Department would ignore all the evidence against those they support in the break-up of Yugoslavia and risk US interests in the region -- until you realize that the US State Department (and British equivalent) are largely a bureaucracies covering their own ass and covering their own mistakes. And they have been screwing up big time with Yugo since WWII. Rather than admit those mistakes and move on, one lie gets covered by another and another until the mountain is so high that they actually begin to believe their own bull, ignoring the tankers full of blood that their lies costed those who live there!
I was raised to be proud to be an American, but I am truly ashamed of this. I do not know when or if I will ever stop being ashamed of it, because it has made me doubt what we are doing everywhere.
You cant have your cake and eat it too.
marker
'...bombed for 78 days with total disregard for human life'. Plus the pollution of the Danube, people driven from their homes, etc.. Not a peep about this out of Liberals. A forgotten quagmire. US 'meddling'. But if Clinton did it, it's okay.
hershey...thats because Clinton sucks..no wait, that is monica...
To the best of my knowledge in digging through documented history, the above is very accurate. Starting in WWII , the Serbs in their own land of Kosovo have been persecuted, executed, and exhiled. The Albanians have been pouring into Kosovo, outbreeding, and taking over -- driving the Serbs from their homes and country. The genoicide and ethnic cleansing was perpetrated UPON the Serbs not by them. That they would be angry at all this and at the foreigners supporting the invaders is understandable.
That Clinton and cronies helped those invaders by waging war on the Serbs is another chapter in the long line of Democrat presidents (Wilson, FDR, Truman, LBJ) screwing up other nations and planting the seeds for future unending conflict that Republican Presidents then have to deal with (and get wrongly blamed for).
[another shameless self-bump]
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