Posted on 08/18/2008 8:55:08 AM PDT by Doctor13
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 television 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.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at johnpilger.com ...
On another thread, you are merrilly parroting the Russian propaganda about how Georgia slaughtered 2,000 people that has been used to justify the Russian invasion.
Here is what I wrote about it in February 2004, as part of my (unsuccessful) application to appear as a presidential "candidate" on the Showtime summer reality TV series "American Candidate," which ran in the summer of 2004:
I heard nary a peep of protest against Bill Clinton during the 1999 War in Kosovo. In that NATO-led assault – which according to some estimates cost as much as $75 billion – we bombed Belgrade for 78 days, killed almost 3,000 civilians, and shredded the civilian infrastructure (including every bridge across the Danube.)
We devastated the environment, bombed the Chinese embassy, came very close to engaging in armed combat against Russian forces, and in general, pursued a horrific and inhumane strategy to rain misery on the civilian population of Belgrade in order to pressure Milosevic into surrendering.
Why did we do all that? The US did not even have an arguable interest in the Balkans, and no one ever tried to claim that Serbia represented any kind of threat to our nation or our interests.
But for months the Clinton administration had told us that Milosevic was waging a vicious genocide against Albanians Muslims, and needed to be stopped. The New York Times called it a “humanitarian war.” In March 1999 – the same month that the bombing started – Clinton’s State Department publicly suggested that as many as 500,000 Albanian Kosovars had been murdered by Milosevic’s regime. In May of that year, as the bombing campaign was drawing to a close, Secretary of Defense William Cohen lowered that estimate 100,000.
Now, five years after the bombing, after all the forensic investigations have been completed, the prosecutors at Milosevic’s “War Crimes” trial in the Hague have barely been able to document a questionable figure of 5,000 “bodies and body parts.” During the war, the American people were told that Kosovo was full of mass graves filled with the bodies of murdered Albanians. But none have been found.
And yet, we have seen no protestors screaming: “Where are the mass graves?” – even though, in fact, there aren’t any. Well, actually, there are. But they are not in Kosovo or Serbia. They are in Iraq, where the bodies of more than 300,000 murdered Iraqis have been discovered so far, and the toll keeps mounting.
It is my very strong opinion that ANYONE who opposed the War in Iraq, but failed to condemn the Bill Clinton/NATO war crime in Kosovo at the time it was happening, has absolutely nothing to say that is worth listening to about the Bush administration’s decision to overthrow Saddam.
Great article.
I’m not sure why dirtboy is so offended.
Clintons Kosovo war was a complete fabrication.
Our current support for Kosovo is a complete joke.
Russia has no right to invade Georgia, however we gave them a good excuse with our Kosovo actions. We are being hypocrtical to complain to them about doing something we just did.
Because Doctor13 is parroting the Russian propaganda on another thread.
Apparently, it's OK for Russia to do to Georgia what Nato did to Kosovo as long as it's Serbia's pimp daddy doing the screwing.
In most quarters, that is known as rank hypocrisy. If Doctor13's opposition to Nato's action was principled, she'd turn around and decry the Russian propaganda and actions in Georgia.
The Milosevikniks insist that their hero Slobodan’s crimes never happened, and were just invented as an excuse to overthrow him. Therefore they feel justified in smearing Georgia and Saakashvili with false accusations in an attempt to do to him what they think was done to their hero Milosevic.
Nato created a fair amount of fiction of their own - recall SecDef Cohen's claim that 100,000 Kosovars were feared dead.
Nato basically took sides in a minor civil war the way that Russia took sides in Georgia. The pro-Serb posters on FR have a lot of nerve to applaud Russia doing to Georgia what Nato did to Serbia.
Eatin’ that crow, I see!
How about some ‘umble pie, too?
LOL!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.