Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Made-to-order massacres
Iraqi President-select Jalal Talabani said yesterday that more than 50 bodies had been discovered in the Tigris River. According to Democracy Now, he “suggested the bodies may have been the victims of a mass kidnapping that was reported south of Baghdad over the weekend.” Talabani offered no documentation while other Iraqi officials said the report of kidnapping was a hoax. (http://snipurl.com/e5yr)
I thought this excerpt from “Seven Deadly Spins” might be worth a revisit:
“We should remember what happened in the village of Racak back in January,” President Bill Clinton told the press on March 19, 1999. “Innocent men, women, and children taken from their homes to a gully, forced to kneel in the dirt, sprayed with gunfire—not because of anything they had done, but because of who they were.”
U.S. diplomat William Walker concurred during his mission to verify Serbian war crimes. “From what I saw,” Walker said, “I do not hesitate to describe the crime as a massacre, a crime against humanity. Nor do I hesitate to accuse the government security forces of responsibility.”
Clinton and Walker were talking about an alleged Serbian massacre of 45 Kosovar Albanians on January 15, 1999…an event that woke the sleeping (goodhearted) giant. The Washington Post chimed in, “Racak transformed the West’s Balkan policy as singular events seldom do.”
With tales of ethnic cleansing having swirled around the Balkans for nearly a decade, the region was ripe for U.S. exploitation . The Serbs were given one chance to avoid attack: The Rambouillet Accord. Demonized Serb president Slobodan Milosevic refused to sign the accord, which appeared to be nothing more than a provocation.
“The document stipulated that NATO troops would have unimpeded access throughout all of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo,” says journalist Seth Ackerman. “NATO would administer Kosovo’s new political system, take control of all local broadcast media and prepare for a referendum on Kosovo’s independence after three years. This provision contradicted the U.S. negotiators’ earlier promise that Kosovo would remain part of Yugoslavia.”
The Serbs were told to sign the document as it was written. Milosevic predictably and understandably balked and a 78-day, U.S.-led NATO air assault was initiated in the name of humanitarianism.
“The humanitarian justifications are ludicrous,” says Robert Hayden, director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. “The casualties among Serb civilians in the first three weeks of this war (were) higher than all of the casualties on both sides in Kosovo in the three months that led up to this war, and yet those three months were supposed to be a humanitarian catastrophe.”
“What a glorious victory,” pronounces Doug Henwood. “NATO killed more civilians than soldiers, accelerated the displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees, destroyed the infrastructure and poisoned the environment of southeastern Europe—and in the name of humanitarianism.”
One year after a bombing campaign that the New York Times called “a victory for the principles of democracy and human rights,” a team of Finnish pathologists who were sent to Kosovo to investigate the Racak massacre publicized its findings.
“The Finnish pathologists’ autopsy report reveals no evidence that the 40 bodies were intentionally mutilated,” says journalist John Catalinotto. “Only one of them showed any sign of being killed at close range.
“Up until the NATO bombings began in March 1999, the conflict in Kosovo had taken 2000 lives altogether from both sides, according to Kosovo Albanian sources,” reports author Michael Parenti. “Yugoslavian sources put the figure at 800. Such casualties reveal a civil war, not genocide.”
Copyright © 2005-2007 Mickey Z.
