The anti-terrorist response
The ‘attack on Yugoslavia’
January 19, 2007 66 comments
It’s a useful rule of thumb that, if you ever see the phrase “attack on Yugoslavia” to describe the 1999 Nato bombing of Serbs (which was officially codenamed, somewhat optimistically, “Merciful Angel”), you are dealing with an apologist for genocide and may ignore everything said thereafter. So it is with this craven CiF post by Neil Clark. By 1999, “Yugoslavia” only existed vestigially as Milosevic’s “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia”, comprising the republics of Serbia and Montenegro, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia having fallen apart by 1992. And Kosovo was part of FRY itself, though unwillingly. So to say that 1999’s war was an “attack on Yugoslavia” arguably constitutes an implicit attempt to blur or Unspeak the role of Serbs, in particular, in events leading up to the war, and to portray the country as a peaceful, homogeneous whole, victim of unwarranted external aggression. Clark also happily perpetrates this sinister piece of Unspeak:
The west encouraged a terrorist group, the KLA, to provoke the Yugoslav authorities, and when the anti-terrorist response from Belgrade came…
The anti-terrorist response? A fine example, in a pseudo-argument ostensibly opposed to state violence, of defending state violence in the perpetrators’ own Unspeak terms (I am reminded of the 1994 Russian invasion of Chechnya being officially described as “the anti-terrorist special operation of the Russian troops”). In this sense the wilder conspiriologists of “anti-war” writing agree perfectly with Tony Blair that the choice is stark and binary: either all our wars are justified or none of them could ever be. Think you can pick and choose, by weighing, for instance, an actually occurring humanitarian catastrophe over here against a lack of evidence of any threat over there? Evidently, that’s not how the world is.
No greater apologists for this and other atrocities than our Living Marxism friends over at Spiked Online, it would be great to hear an Unspeak exposé of Brendan O Neil, Fiona Fox / Foster / Frank Furedi et als.
“It’s a useful rule of thumb that, if you ever see the phrase “attack on Yugoslavia” to describe the 1999 Nato bombing of Serbs (which was officially codenamed, somewhat optimistically, “Merciful Angel”), you are dealing with an apologist for genocide”.
Not really. It’s a sign that the person insists on calling the country by its proper, official name. The country which NATO attacked in 1999 was Yugoslavia, not Serbia. (fyi the republic of Montenegro was also bombed).
The support the west gave to the KLA, officially classified by the state department as a terrorist group is well documented.
I am not “an apologisit for genocide”- no genocide occured. If you think it did, and have evidence of it, why didn’t you send it to The Hague? I’m sure they would have been happy to receive it having dropped the Kosovo genocide charge from Milosevic’s indictment on account of the lack of evidence.
Speaking of historical accuracy.
Kamm’s latest post accuses Philip Agee of being a CIA defector based upon the Mitrokhin Archive. I don’t think the man is in a fit position to criticise anyone else’s treatment of historical documents.
Nato did not “attack Yugoslavia”, since of course Kosovo itself remained unwillingly part of Milosevic’s “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia”. It attacked Serbs. (Update: this is too strong; see my comment #11 below.)
No genocide charge ever appeared in the ICTY’s initial Kosovo indictment or the subsequent amended Kosovo indictments of Milosevic, so it is hard to see how one can say a nonexistent charge was “dropped” for “lack of evidence” – unless, of course, one wants to divert attention from the charges of “crimes against humanity” and “violations of the laws and customs of war” that were and remained in those indictments against Milosevic, as well as the genocide charge in the Bosnia indictment, et cetera.
In this sense the wilder conspiriologists of “anti-war” writing agree perfectly with Tony Blair that the choice is stark and binary: either all our wars are justified or none of them could ever be.
Bollocks. Just because I think NATO’s war against FRY was an unjustifiable debacle doesn’t make me an anti-war conspiriologist, whatever the hell that is. I could just as easily say that as defenders of the Kosovo campaign use the same rhetoric of those supporting the continuation of the Iraq war and any number of attacks and invasions in the past (and, probably, future) labelled as humanitarian, those who make the defense must also support the Iraq war or are at least useful idiots of Bushite imperialism. False conflation works both ways, Sparky.
BTW – given the moral purity of the Kosovo campaign is the orthodox position, how exactly does disagreeing make Neil Clark’s post “craven”? I thought it was a tad glib, especially in that “Why was it all done?” paragraph, but that’s another matter.
With the benefit of eight years hindsight, the whole Kosovo thing looks cloudier than ever. While the asinine pro-Milosevicism you attack is pretty nauseating, I think the commentator who is skeptical of the implicit or explicit “moral purity” of the campaign is right.
But whatever about the rights and wrongs of the Kosovo campaign, I just don’t understand the claim:
“Nato did not “attack Yugoslavia”, since of course Kosovo itself remained unwillingly part of Milosevic’s “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia”. It attacked Serbs.”
There was a country called Yugoslavia, it was attacked by NATO because of what was being done by the state and army of that country to a minority population. I don’t see how describing that as “an attack on Yugoslavia” is wrong, or necessarily even disapproves of the attack. By the reasoning in the sentence quoted, the Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel in 1973, say, was not an “attack on Israel” since they didn’t recognize that state’s jurisdiction.
I’m sorry if I gave the impression that I believe in some “moral purity” attached to the Nato war. I was certainly careful not to say so. Again, this is not a simple binary choice: there is quite a lot of analytical territory, though it often lies unused, between thinking the war was morally pure on the one hand, and thinking it was an unjustified attack on a sovereign country on the other, and trying to whitewash Milosevic’s crimes. Disagreeing with the first, a straw man, does not of course lead one to the second, which is craven.
I still contend that the phrase “attack on Yugoslavia” is doing some Unspeak work. It’s interesting to note that UN documents preferred the language of “FRY/Serb forces”, etc, or, as in the ICTY Kosovo indictment, “forces of the FRY and Serbia” – not “Yugoslavia”. A different analogy: if Nato or UNSC had intervened in the Rwandan genocide, would we have called that an “attack on Rwanda”?
“I still contend that the phrase “attack on Yugoslavia” is doing some Unspeak work.”
I agree to an extent. I would count myself as an opponent of the 1999 NATO bombing campaign, but i have often noticed that many of those who opposed it opted to use sneaky language to get rid of unwelcome ambiguities.
So, for instance, Neil Clark writes:
“For the first time since Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968, a European state, which threatened no other, had been attacked.”
The only sense in which the Milosevic government threatened no other state is the sense in which those states he did threaten were not internationally recognised (i.e. the sense in which Russia does not threaten Chechnya, Morocco does not threaten West Sahara, Indonesia does not threaten Iryian Jaya, Turkey does not threaten Kurdistan etc.)
Milosevic did attack Croatia, wage aggressive war in Bosnia, and effectively annexed Kosova, subjecting it to a racist occupation which responded to the KLA insurgency with the brutality we could only expect. In no sense could the people of Kosova regard Serbia as unthreatening.
Clark is more accurate, however, when he says:
The country which NATO attacked in 1999 was Yugoslavia, not Serbia. (fyi the republic of Montenegro was also bombed).
NATO did not only bomb Serbia, but also Montenegro – which tried to position itself as neutral in the conflict – and Vojvodina. Vojvodina, home to an ethnic Hungarian population and a bastion of anti-Milosevic sentiment, had a semi-autonomous status under the 1974 consitutution (the same status as Kosova).
To give an example of the lack of discrimination this involved, we might note that the Provisional IRA avoided bombing targets in Scotland and Wales, even though Scottish and Welsh troops were stationed in Northern Ireland.
A different analogy: if Nato or UNSC had intervened in the Rwandan genocide, would we have called that an “attack on Rwanda”?
This analogy is somewhat useful. Some tiny and unpleasant political sects like the Sparticists or the World Workers’ Party would probably use just that phrase if Lt-Gen. Romeo Dallaire’s plan to stop the genocide had been put into action.
But of course the UNSC did authorise intervention in Rwanda – the French army’s Operation Turquoise, which sought to protect the Hutu Power government and take on the Tutsi rebels. This is generally not characterised as an attack on Rwanda. In fact, the whole episode (like a lot of what goes in Africa) is usually swept under a metaphorical rug and left there.
But the difference between Dallaire’s proposed intervention in Rwanda and NATO’s 1999 campaign is that the first was a ground intervention to stop atrocities directly while the second was an aerial bombing campaign against the infrastructure of a state designed (to the extent it was designed) to carry on until the government capitulated to terms that could be labelled a victory.
If NATO had bombed car manufacturers in Kigali, we would probably call that an attack and demand to know what its purpose was.
“The stated casus belli was that Yugoslavia, in Blair’s own words, was “set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews in world war two””
This offering from Blair is in keeping with his general unwillingness to discuss war without being disingenuous.
“…not a single one testified that the former Yugoslav president… had ordered any crimes or violence against the civilian population of Kosovo whatsoever.”
But this is little better. It’s the famous “no smoking gun” defence which exonerates everyone of everything, especially politicians.
Are we meant to conclude that:
a) There was no violence against the civilian population;
Or b) That if there was, it didn’t happen very often;
Or c) That it did happen a lot but Milosevic didn’t know about it, he was just trying to humanely crush another country’s right to self-determination by more “surgical” force?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new.....slob07.xml
“The west encouraged a terrorist group, the KLA, to provoke the Yugoslav authorities, and when the anti-terrorist response from Belgrade came…”
I’ve gone on long enough… but… it’s worth noting, I think, that the West initially encouraged the Yugoslav authorities rather than the terrorist group in Kosova until 1998 when the conflict began to escalate rapidly.
The West’s episodes of collaboration with Belgrade during the 1990s (some really shameful stuff) are often left out by those trying to fit events into the theory of a Western imperialism consistently determined to break the old Yugoslavia up.
Oooh, it’s all got a bit tasty. I’ll go half with Clark, half with Poole.
The NATO campaign was clearly an attack on Yugoslavia in both senses: on the territory of Yugoslavia (including Kosova and Montenegro) and the forces of Yugoslavia. The fact that Yugoslavia was, at this point, a rump state with a limited shelf life is neither here nor there.
However the notion that Yugoslav military actions were an “anti-terrorist” response is a clear re-casting of the situation in a post-9/11 framework. The authorities oppressed the Albanian population to a greater or lesser extent for 10 years, while the West did pretty much nothing; however the more vigorous “cleansing” operations appear to have kicked off after the bombing began.
The situation was clearly blurred in both these cases by the presence of Serb paramilitaries on the ground, which creates an interesting grey area that unspeak is simultaneously uncomfortable with and right at home in.
Thanks for the excellent comments. It still seems to me that, while the description “attack on Yugoslavia” may be defended on the grounds offered by Alex Higgins and Merkur, it is a phrase loaded with implicit partiality. Eg, though it is true that Nato bombed infrastructure – certainly among the acts that prevent any notion of “moral purity” attaching to the campaign – it did not only bomb infrastructure, but targeted Serb forces in particular. Furthermore, to describe the events as “Nato attacked Yugoslavia” is already in some sense to Unspeak the reason for Nato’s action (an Unspeaking that Clark vigorously continued in his post): the phrase pictures FRY as the innocent victim of aggression by outsiders.
But I should concede that my statement in comment #4, “Nato did not ‘attack Yugoslavia'”, was a hasty exaggeration. Naturally, Unspeak need not be literally false to be Unspeak. “Attack on Yugoslavia” is not literally false but carries within it, or so it still seems to me, a particular judgment about the facts, or a particular preference for some facts over others – and it remains revealing that it is the preferred description of the event by those who not only disapprove of it but seek to whitewash Serb crimes, and is generally not used by others.
Also, thanks for reminding me, by example, that Kosova vs Kosovo is a subtle issue of geopolitical Unspeak in itself.
I assume that you mean that the choice of Kosova vs Kosovo commits one to a particular political position, which it clearly does. Unfortunately it’s a case where you can’t avoid Unspeak, since you have to pick a name – perhaps an interesting topic for discussion on the forum?
Steven can ‘unspeak’ with the worst of them. e.g. ‘the 1999 Nato bombing of Serbs’. I know that NATO had a few smart bombs but they weren’t ethnically targetted. Serbia is a multiethnic state where Serbs are only two thirds of the population. NATO bombs killed Serbs, Roma, Hungarians and Kosovo Albanians. Indeed two convoys of ehtnic Albanians were bombed. Interestingly they were returning to their villages at the time and not trying to leave Kosovo.
The context is that the Serbs had been thoroughly demonised and scapegoated by the time the bombing began and Milosevic had been turned into the latest ‘new Hitler’ with the usual bogus WW2 analogies. It thus became legitmate to ‘bomb the Serbs’. I see Steven Poole’s position as identical to the NATO propaganda model. Newunspeak ungood.
ps KosovA is perfectly OK if you are Albanian, but for Westerners who don’t speak with an Albanian accent can I inform you that every placename in KosovO is of Serbian language origin.
Yep, and no doubt every WW2 analogy since WW2 has been bogus. Of course, this does not mean that Milosevic “went to his grave an innocent man”, as Neil Clark’s latest craven post on his blog claims, except in the legalistic sense that he died before he could be convicted of crimes against humanity.
You are not reading very carefully.
Merkur:
Nice point. Please feel free to start a forum thread! (The poor forum is feeling forlornly ignored since the flurry of activity when I first started it.)
Every placename in Kosovo/a has a Serbian and an Albanian version, and sometimes several variant spellings. I can say this with some confidence because I worked on the first (multi-lingual) post-war maps in Pristina.
So Milosevic, ‘died before he could be convicted of crimes against humanity’. Sounds to me like we’ll give him a fair trial, then hang him.
I’ve read this sentence of yours as closely as possible Steven, it still seems like NATO propaganda to me. Please aame just one crime of any sort that was proven at the Hague against Milosevic. I hope you have evidence to back up your claims, the prosecution didn’t.
The prosecution didn’t, because he wasn’t convicted and therefore he was innocent…ah, I see. As you know, the trial was never completed either way, because he popped his clogs.
That he wasn’t convicted due to his inconvenient demise is not an argument that he wasn’t convicted because of a lack of evidence.
“Please name just one crime of any sort that was proven at the Hague against Milosevic.”
These comment threads are generally pretty hygienic and it would be a shame to spoil it.
I’ve come across people before who demand that someone produce “a single piece of evidence” to prove that war crimes were committed by Serbia/the USA/Russia/Israel/India/Britain etc. etc.
It’s an ugly game I’ve made the mistake of playing before. You produce a piece of evidence and then the person demanding it scoffs and delcares that Human Rights Watch/Amnesty International/the ACLU/the BBC/the Guardian/the New York Times/George Soros/UNRWA/UNICEF/B’Tselem/Anna Politkovskaya/Liberty/the Washington Post/whatever is so outrageously biased against America/Israel/Serbia/Russia/whoever that anything they say should be ignored.
They then pour through said evidence looking for an inconsistency which they then magnify from mole-hill size to mountain, or if they can’t be bothered, resort to boilerplate like:
‘The US Marines/Paratroop Regiments/IDF/JNA/al-Qa’ida (no really, al-Qa’ida) have such fantastic, nice shiny rules of engagement and our/their government/whatever is so not like that, that they would never, ever, ever kill a civilian in anger.’
So how about this:
Was Vukovar flattened by a force unconnected to Milosevic?
Was the Bosnian Serb Army not the recipient of weapons, money and troops from Belgrade and did someone other than them gut Sarajevo?
Did the majority of Kosovars wish to be occupied by Serbia and if not, is there any good reason why they were denied self-determination by force?
And is there any reason to believe that a war against an insurgency with popular support would not result in war crimes?
Since the answers are no, no, no and no, I think you should give a good reason for being unsatisfied with the evidence that has already been accumulated for over a decade by human rights advocates, NGOs and investigative journalists and which you find yourself with Google.
If I’m sounding impatient, I might bring up the time I spent a few Easters ago in Sarajevo’s Sniper Alley (certainly not an Unspeak name) in the home of an elderly widow whose sleeping husband was shot in his bed by the road’s namesake.
Steven should consider a separate thread dedicated to those who play the “I-demand-a-single-piece-of-evidence” game, because it is a spectacular piece of Unspeak, designed to unspeak a huge mass of evidence and context.
I like Alex Higgins’ dissection of the ludicrous game that always accompanies efforts to prove crimes against humanity.
I tend to agree that Serbia and the Serbs have been scapegoated to some extent in the Balkan wars, Milosevic was clearly implicated in the nastier recesses of those wars.
Redpaddy is not presenting a serious case. “I hope you have evidence to back up your claims, the prosecution didn’t” is absolutely feeble – of course the prosecution had evidence to back up their claims, otherwise they wouldn’t have brought the case. The question is whether that evidence would have been sufficient to convict.
I should also point out that Steven’s original statement that Milosevic “died before he could be convicted of crimes against humanity” is technically correct, while politically motivated – Milosevic also died before he could be exonerated of crimes against humanity.
In fact, I would say that Steven’s phrasing was a bit of Unspeak in itself… most pleasing to see.
A scene from the home of Mr. Screambias:
_________________________________________________
Mr Screambias: “Hi, honey, I’m home! What’s the matter?”
Mrs Screambias: “You’ve been seeing her again, haven’t you?”
“Who?”
“You know who!”
“Show me one piece of evidence proving that I’ve been seeing her.”
“Look at this phone bill – it shows you keep ringing a number in Hertfordshire.”
“Let me see that… no, this phone bill is completely inconsistent. Look, one day it says I rang Glasgow and then another day it says I rang someone in Reading! Clearly it has no idea who I rang! You still haven’t given me a single piece of evidence.”
“Well… your own friend Dave told me he saw you two together!”
“You can’t believe Dave! Remember how wrong he was about the Tawana Brawley thing? Remember how he said there was a great big massacre in Jenin? How can you believe him now he claims to have seen me screwing Judy in her BMW? And he wears glasses.”
“But I saw you with her on the local news! You were with her in a pub during a report on adultery in the greater London area!”
“You can’t believe the BBC! They are biased! BIASED! They make things up and then film them through special biased lenses!”
“Well, then why is Judy standing in the driveway with an open bottle of wine in one hand and a used condom in the other?”
“Darling, I would never cheat on you.”
To be continued…
_________________________________________________
Thank-you for your kind indulgence and good night…
Touché. But without going into the details and therefore entering the kind of situation so wonderfully satirized by Alex above, I might say that it would be as accurate – that is, literally accurate but counterpoised to the overwhelming balance of evidence – to say that, had Saddam Hussein died before the end of his trial (or “trial”, but that is another story), he would have “died before he could be exonerated of genocide”.
Of course, Milosevic ought, like anyone, to be the beneficiary of a judicial presumption of innocence. But, as is not the case with your average “enemy combatant” holed up in Guantanamo, there is already a lot of evidence and testimony to Milosevic’s crimes in the public domain. And I suspect that the claim that he “went to his grave an innocent man” aspires to wider implications than those pertaining exclusively to the status of his ICTY trial at the time of his death.
Of the comments listed above the funniest (unless you’re one of the Birmingham 6 etc) has to be, ‘of course the prosecution had evidence to back up their claims, otherwise they wouldn’t have brought the case’. can you imagine any proecuters trying this?
In fact this is exaxtly what happened. Milosevic was indicted for Kosovo before the court had any chance to gather evidence – the only pre-conflict charge related to Racak which was shown not to be a massacre of civilians but a wipe-out of a KLA unit. He then sat in prison for two years while they tried to cook up a case. They then charged him with Bosnia and Croatia (for which he had not been extradicted) because the Kosovo case was so weak. These conflicts predated Kosovo by several years.
Steven, you have made my point. All you can do is suggest the evidence is ‘in the public domain’. In which case, why can’t you be more specific? I think because you can’t. Otherwise you’d do a better job than the prosecuters who failed miserably. At the end of their case, they asked for 100 days extra hoping that a piece of killer evidence would turn up. After a few weeks they ran out of witnesses and polled the plug. Perhaps they could have asked you?
So everything in the original indictment – which, of course, I’m sure you have read – was just dreamed up? The indictment is dated 24 May 1999 and alleges crimes committed between January and April of that year. By May, they hadn’t had time actually to “gather evidence” of any sort? What a curious thesis.
That is false: in the original indictment, Racak was only the earliest specific incident cited in evidence of the two charges of murder (one count as crime against humanity, the other as war crime). The indictment also alleges a campaign of “terror and violence” and a campaign of “forced deportation”, both given as dating from 1 January 1999, and which are the basis of charges 1 (“Deportation”) and 4 (“Persecutions”), both given as crimes against humanity. Thus both of these charges also originate “pre-conflict”, if by conflict you mean specifically the Nato bombing.
The point of saying which is what, exactly? That Bosnia was old news; that there was no evidence for Milosevic’s crimes in Bosnia?
If the Kosovo case was “so weak”, as you allege, why did the ICTY judges dismiss every single defence motion to acquit on the grounds of lack of evidence relating to the Kosovo indictment in its June 2004 decision on those motions, as well as dismissing many other such motions relating to the other indictments, also specifically finding, for example, that there existed “sufficient evidence” for Milosevic’s role in “genocide” in Bosnia? (And yes, I am helping you out by linking to a site rich in public-domain evidence. Do have fun.)
Ah, redpaddy. Rule 61 of ICTY covers cases where an indicted defendant has not turned up, and makes it possible for the tribunal to issue an international arrest warrant where there are “reasonable grounds for believing” that the individual has committed any of the crimes covered.
You may use this to argue that ICTY has unreasonably reversed the presumption of guilt – I certainly would – but then you would also be required to acknowledge that the Court in fact has reasonable grounds for the indictment.
This is particularly obvious since, as Steven points out above, many of those reasonable grounds are entirely in the public domain.
Apologies – I meant “reversed the presumption of innocence” – all this Unspeak is making me itch.
I think one issue with this thread is that the grounds of criticism have changed slightly from previous posts, from an immanent critique to one based on the phrase’s users and their political motives.
The un-speak-ness of the phrase “attack on Yugoslavia” is much harder to derive from the phrase itself. Compare an Unspeak phrase of that time, shamefully picked up and used in the mainstream: the Unspeak-ness of “ethnic cleansing” can be found within the words themselves – the revolting notion of “cleansing” and the insistence on “ethnic” as a marker of absolute difference between the clean and the unclean, etc. etc.
The way I read the original post, “Attack on Yugoslavia” is cited less as inherently Unspeakish, than as an indicator (a “rule of thumb”) for recognizing the Unspeakish minds of those who usually use it. That’s not quite the same thing. I don’t think there’s a hard and fast line between the two types of interpretation, but this post seems to move away a little from the general Unspeak method. This might be why suddenly there’s more explicitly political argument and recourse to external evidence.
That’s a fair point, lamentreat. (I go into a fair amount of detail about “ethnic cleansing” in the book, by the way.) I do regularly acknowledge a difference between phrases that one could say are inherently Unspeak, and others that are exploited for Unspeaky purposes, but as you say it is not a hard-and-fast distinction. (Another example from the book is how “climate change”, while being scientifically accurate, was also preferred as a replacement for “global warming” thanks to its less alarming connotations.) Certainly the second part of the post – re Clark’s phrase “the anti-terrorist response” – is a clearer example than “attack on Yugoslavia”.
I am amazed at Steven’s willingness to take the views of the prosecution and judiciary at the ICTY as evidence in itself. This ‘international’ court was set up and financed by the Americans, At on point, Milosevic faced a British prosecuter, a British judge (who died and was replaced by another British judge) who then took away his right to defend himself and forced on him a British lawyer. They then attempted to have him tried in his absence. Typical Britsh justice.
I’m sorry Steven, they didn’t have evidence for ‘persecution’ either. As for ‘deportation’ the flow of Albanians leaving Kosovo began after the NATO bombing. As for your links – all to the ICTY case, you haven’t been able to link to the trial transcripts where it was used in court and where it was challenged and demolished.
Here’s a link for you for an expert view of the court.
‘This is a lynching’ by Edward Greenspan
http://www.balkanpeace.org/ind.....leid=13867
Edward Greenspan QC is one the top Canadian defence lawyers and probably the best.
So your response to my pointing out your false statements about the indictment is merely to make more unsubstantiated assertions, and to appeal to an article that concludes:
That tells me all I need to know. Thanks.
Ah redpaddy. Just so we can all be clear about your position, are you
a) proposing that ICTY is flawed in its processes, or
b) proposing that Milosevic was not implicated in any of the human rights abuses that took place in Kosovo, Croatia or Bosnia during the 1990s?
I think it’s important to clear this up, don’t you? Otherwise we’ll just go round in circles.
Redpaddy has made several excellent points on unspeak used by Steven in this thread. The response from Steven and others has been petulant.
“In the public domain” is as unspeak as “it is well known” or the “reliable sources” so often quoted by the BBC. Indeed an analysis of one day’s output from the BBC could provide the material for a whole book on unspeak. (As I write this I am listening to Owen Bennet Jones ‘robustly’ telling a Pakistani interviewee that “everybody knows” something or other.
Merkur,
a) It is both acceptable and right to question the processes of the ICTY
b) It is acceptable and right to question the validity of any ICTY assertion or verdict.
and c) It is notable that no politician from a nation with international clout ( the USA, UK, and Israel immediately come to mind ) has been indicted by the ICTY. Those of you in thrall to the ICTY will probably claim that no such politician exists. But if such a politician does exist then the validity of the ICTY is called into question.
Could you please be more specific about which excellent points you’re referring to, otherwise we won’t have any grounds for discussion.
I would also like to know where you believe I have been petulant, since as far as I can tell my posts have been reasonable.
It is not. It means that there is plenty of primary and secondary material available to the general public. Steven demonstrated this by linking directly to the ICTY website. Whether you agree with this information or not is irrelevant – it is clearly in the public domain, as are a large number of reports, books and other documents that tend to support the claim.
I couldn’t agree more, and you will notice that in post #25 I do exactly that, as I believe that ICTY has undermined its own processes through removing the presumption of innocence. However I will put to you the same question that I put to redpaddy, and hope that both of you give an answer. Are you
a) proposing that ICTY is flawed in its processes, or
b) proposing that Milosevic was not implicated in any of the human rights abuses that took place in Kosovo, Croatia or Bosnia during the 1990s?
Now it seems clear that you agree with a, as do I; however I would be interested to know what you feel about b, since that was the thrust of the Steven’s original post.
I disagree with Steven that those who use the phrase “attack on Yugoslavia” are apologists for genocide; however I feel quite strongly that those who deny Milosevic’s role in the Balkan Wars are apologists for gross and widespread human rights abuses.
Sure. Except that all redpaddy has managed to do so far is i) misrepresent what the ICTY indictments actually say; ii) bluster about it being funded by Americans; iii) complain about Milosevic having defence counsel “forced” on him while linking enthusiastically to an article complaining that Milosevic was doing a terrible job of defending himself; and iv) claim breezily, offering no evidence, that some unspecified claims were “demolished in court”. Perhaps you can do better?
Re #25, merkur: IANAL but is this so unusual? Isn’t it normal that arrest warrants be issued on something like “reasonable grounds” or there being a “case to answer”? The burden of proof still rests with the prosecution, and nothing actually counts as “proof” unless and until a conviction is obtained. (I suspect that redpaddy, for one, is confounding the notions of “evidence” and “proof”.)
Where can I begin, more unspeak from Steven Poole.
1. The USA funds and staffs the ICTY. This is not bluster, it is stating a fact.
2. Milosevic had the right to defend himself, however badly. The ICTY tried to take away that right.
3. As for the prosecution evidence being demolished, take the case of Racak which was alleged to have been a massacre and was the only individual incident in the indictment(rather than the catch-all ‘persecution’) that pre-dated the bombing. The proscution case took such a hammering that Racak was dropped from the indictment against Milan Milutinovic.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/arti.....10,00.html
A more amusing case was the discretiting of former MI6 officer Paddy Ashdown. He claimed to have stood in Albania and watched JNA forces shelling Kosovo Albanian villages. Unfortunately a Yugoslav general armed with detailed maps and computer 3D models was able to demonstrte that it was impossible for Ashdown to have seen what he claimed.
http://www.un.org/icty/transe54/050928ED.htm
There you are Steven, two major pieces of evdence demolished. I can guarantee there are plenty more. I understand your reluctance to cite an individual crime committed by Milosevic because you are relying on the ICTY indictments and have your own doubts as to their reliability.
redpaddy: let’s try this one more time.
Are you
a) proposing that ICTY is flawed in its processes, or
b) proposing that Milosevic was not implicated in any of the human rights abuses that took place in Kosovo, Croatia or Bosnia during the 1990s?
I’ve been unspoken. Why did my last comment come up under the name petrit2k?!
merkur, I’ve no idea, perhaps you were signed in to the forum?
redpaddy, I guess I could just go to slobodan-milosevic.org and cut out the middleman, right?
My fictionsuits are letting me down.
Steven, since you have failed to respond to my reasoned arguments, I claim victory. Like so many on the left you have been taken in by the Guardian/Observer laptop bombadiers. I’m staggered by so many who know that Blair lied about Iraq but think he was truthful about Milosevic.
As for Merkur, I did think Milosevic was at least jointly responsible until I examined the evidence and watched his trial. I’ve changed my mind and I’ve not seen anything to change it back.
As a footnote, this is a deliciously typical exchange between the British Judge and the British prosecuter after it had been shown that the prosecution’s maps suspiciously coincided with Ashdown;s testimony, but not the actual geography.
5 JUDGE BONOMY: It may be that the whole exercise of referring to
6 maps is unhelpful and the real question is was the witness able to see
7 what he says he saw at the time.
8 MR. NICE: Your Honour, I’m grateful for that.
I’m sure he was
Redpaddy is capable of answerng for himself. Whether he will submit to your cross-examination I cannot tell you.
I wonder, Merkur, whether you read Redpaddy’s posts. If you did I do not understand the reason for your question a). It is obvious that he questions the workings of the ICTY. Perhaps you had a motive which has escaped me since you say you agree with his position.
To cite the public domain in defence of any argument is foolish. This territory is a quagmire of contradictions and lies. Rupert Musdoch is probably the world’s most successful pimp.
The most prominent news in the public domain in recent years has been the Iraq War. The arguments for and against are legion. Mr Bush has just repeated the lie, in his State of the Union speech, that Iraq as involved in 911. (Whether that was adequate reason for a war is another matter.) Supposing I supported the Iraq War and cited the public domain to defend my position. I hope you would find that ludicrous. You cannot pick the bits of the public domain that suit your argument. The public domain is a single territory and a very suspect territory. It is Rupert Murdoch-land.
Thank you for your responses. I am busy for the next weeks.
PS I am in a Far East time-zone and see, just now, that my post has been pre-empted.
GG: Yes, I did read redpaddy’s posts. I was seeking to establish whether – like me – he believes that ICTY is flawed, while still maintaining Milosevic’s implication in human rights abuses carried out during the Balkan wars. In his last post, he has clearly stated that he does not believe Milosevic bears any responsibility for any of those abuses.
Personally, I find this hard to accept, since Milosevic was commander of the Yugoslav armed forces, had recently brought police and paramilitary units under his direct control, and was closely linked to a number of people in official and unofficial capacities who were directly implicated in those abuses. At the very least, he was criminally negligent.
Re: the public domain.
I withdraw my earlier reference to the “public domain” – what I meant was “publicly available”. Your understanding was as flawed as mine, since newspaper articles are not in the public domain either, since copyright still applies.
In any case, I was not “citing the public domain” to demonstrate my case. I was pointing out that most of the material that implicates Milosevic is in the public domain – the transcripts from ICTY that redpaddy linked to, for example.
You say: “This territory is a quagmire of contradictions and lies… You cannot pick the bits of the public domain that suit your argument.” I agree that it is, but I also believe that it is our civic responsibility to pick through those contradictions and lies, to try to understand the patterns of the world, rather than abdicate our destinies.
You may disagree. However I notice that you claim point out that “Mr Bush has just repeated the lie, in his State of the Union speech, that Iraq as involved in 911”. I presume that you took the report of the address from publicly available sources, and that your belief that it is a lie was also formed on the basis of publicly available sources; which tends to undermine your contention that “to cite the public domain… is foolish.”
But thanks for calling me foolish, I appreciate it.
Although redpaddy’s comments are rather unsophisticated of their type, they do reflect one interesting phenomenon. For example, he appeals to the fact that ICTY, having seen during the Milosevic trial that testimony on Racak was a morass of competing accounts (of which redpaddy himself, of course, prefers the Serb account that it was a “wipe-out of a KLA unit”), it then decided not to include Racak in the indictment against Milutinovic. However, he seems blissfully unaware that this rather militates against his view of ICTY as an imperial conspiracy pursuing trumped-up charges at any cost against innocent men. In other words, ICTY is capable of perfect justice, but only as long as its decisions can be interpreted as in favour of Milosevic. (It is the same kind of inconsistent argument as Clark was attempting with his falsehood about ICTY “dropping” a Kosovo genocide charge against Milosevic.)
I’m so glad that this conversation seems to be winding down; I assume that redpaddy has had time to consider the possibility that perhaps Blair lied about Iraq but not about Milosevic, a distinct possibility in a world where people are not always and in every way consistent.
I see that there was some concern over where we get our information. Merkur seems quite right to wonder about whether this is a suitable way of subjecting someone to debate-ending criticism, insofar as Unspeak, as a project, seems to be about paying attention to and sorting through the materials made available to us in the Murdochian dimension. In other words, this is all about paying attention to these conflicting, deceptive, instructive and codified speech acts happening in public, not because there is no truth out there, but because there is. Another option, of course, is to bypass the mediation of the media. I remember visiting Kosova, and meeting families whose husbands and sons had been murdered; driving past shelled and bullet-pocked houses; speaking to people about the terrified evacuations, the knocks at the door, the years of threats, taunts, of violent oppression. Milosevic was directly responsible for this – he was a very bad man, and very guilty, I’m afraid. The blood of so many was on his hands.
Steve, you are quite right to point out that “anti-terrorist”, as used above, is dire Unspeak; calling the KLA “terrorists” was a lie in the first place.
SW
That you are willing to pick through Blair’s statements and sort the lies from the truths is…slavish. Do you allow equal leeway to other national leaders? Milosevic?
Your description of Kosovo could apply to Basra where Blair’s soldiers can demolish a building and issue a series of conflicting statements afterwards. You probably allow the British Army their lies. They were prolific liars about their activities in Northern Ireland. Have you ever visited a Catholic district of NI following a sweep by the BA? Do you expect (or want) any British politician to be called to account?
Steven’s admiration for the ICTY in recognizing their indefensible deficiencies and using this as evidence that they can dispense “perfect justice” is a fine example of unspeak. This is the type of spin that the US and UK governments use when their soldiery commit atrocities. They express admiration for their own “rule of law” when they arrest a few uniformed suspects, who, in the mists of time, are usually acquitted. This murk obscures any consideration of the victims.
Your attempt at a superior tone, with your undergraduate jibe at Redpaddy, suggests that you have allowed Redpaddy’s superior arguments and expertise to rile you. Stay cool. Redpaddy has demonstrated his expertise in his clear Orwellian English. Would you find it more sophisticated if he were purveying the fug of the charlatan? (And Redpaddy is a sentient being and may be addressed directly.)
Merkur, I had no intention of suggesting you are foolish. I do not think you are.
( I could not resist making a response and using precious time.)
Um. Well, to provide very brief answers to your questions: Yes, Yes, No, Sure.
One may pay attention to the comments of politicians and “national leaders” in order to discern the true from the misleading, the unspeak from the lies, the misguided from the optimistic, the bullying from the desperate, policy from propaganda, and the varying combinations and conflations thereof. One may do this to Milosevic and Mandela, Bush and Blair, Saddam and Putin, Paisley and Adams; one can apply similar principles to Trevor Macdonald and Anderson Cooper, or Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis. Any “sentient being” can participate, and it is quite the opposite of being . . . “slavish”. In fact, if you look, you may find that there are even one or two web-sites where these topics are discussed.
And it really is more than a little tiresome that my commentary on Kosova – a direct response to a long thread about Milosevic and Kosova – should suddenly have to account for Basra and Belfast for GG to be satisfied. I don’t care if you waste your precious time, but please don’t waste mine.
SW
Your largesse in allowing all and sundry their lies and being prepared to sort through for the truthful bits has dubious merit. I expect probity in our leaders. Your comments are sophisicated of their type and exhibit the phenomenon of finding unpalatable truths tiresome.
Whether you like it or not I am dragging in Hungry. Their PM has recently been rightly in hot water for telling lies. Ethics is universal. It applies to Basra, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Hungry, UK and everywhere else.
We have become so sopisticated that government ministers no longer resign when caught telling lies.
Well, I’m sorry my previous comment was incomprehensible to you. But not so sorry that I can be bothered to repeat it. Since you are avoiding SW’s testimony by repeatedly changing the subject it is evident that your righteous crusade against lies leaves you no time to be interested in the truth.
Steven,
I agree that your convoluted style isn’t easy to understand.
Discussions evolve and your tart rejoinders shouldn’t prevent anyone from going where the thread leads.
But this is your blog and I leave you to it and to your puffed up truth.
Steven claims that ‘testimony on Racak was a morass of competing accounts’. In fact there were two competing accounts. The prosecution case that it was a massacre of civilians fell apart. It wasn’t helped by having Shukri Buja as their star witness. Buja was the KLA commander at Racak! His evidence was ludicrous in the extreme and helped Milosevic more than the prosecution.
I’m sorry but the ICTY’s failure to deny Milosevic the right to defend himself and the collapse of their attempt to frame him with a phony massacre is not proof of the the legitimacy of that modern Star Chamber.
Can I propose Steven’s use of the word ‘morass’ as a prime example of unspeak.
As for those who deny that the KLA are terrorist, either thay are ignorant of their methods, or are covering up for them.
If you have a strong stomach, the link below is educational
Warning graphic images
http://www.kosovo.net/erpkim04nov03.html
Good to see you back, redpaddy. It’s also good to see that you’ve feet first into that old Balkan favourite, “Who’s the war criminal?”, where two parties attempt to convince everybody else that a) they were there first, b) the other person started, and c) once the other person started it, they were so brutal that we should not consider them to be human. I’ve had about a decade of listening to it, and it gets a little tired.
Whether or not the KLA were chopping everybody’s heads off is irrelevant to the point of this discussion, which is whether anybody really believes that Milosevic was not implicated in human rights abuses committed during the Balkan wars. The guilt or innocence of other parties is utterly irrelevant to that question.
You’ve made it quite clear that you believe him not to be implicated, but I would still like to hear how you feel about my earlier statement that this is hard to accept. Milosevic was commander of the Yugoslav armed forces, had recently brought police and paramilitary units under his direct control, and was closely linked to a number of people in official and unofficial capacities who were directly implicated in those abuses.
So what, in your view, happened? Was he asleep at the wheel, or what?
Isn’t it funny how the line “they’re terrorists so they’re evil so it’s okay to do what we like to them” is anathema coming from Blair and Bush etc but suddenly becomes a shining example of argument-winning justice in the right context?
Steven can’t be arguing that there should be no state response to terrorism. The methods used by Bush and Blair post 9/11 are clearly illegal and disproportionate, but there was nothing comparable in Kosovo. The KLA are a vicious combination of terrorism and organised crime who carried out kidnapping, torture and murder. Their victims were Serbs, Roma and Albanians.
The KLA were particularly incompetent whenever they tried guerilla warfare. It is a principle of such warfare that you don’t defend fixed positions, but Racak was fortified with trenches dug around it. Any defenders would stand no chance against trained and well-armed regular troops. The dead at Racak were nearly all men of military age. They were shot at a distance and suffered injuries almost entirely above the waist, which is consistent with them being in trenches at the time.
Racak is important because it led to the Rambouillet conference where NATO and their KLA allies held a gun to the head of Yugoslavia saying ‘sign or we bomb’. It is significant that nobody will face trial for Racak which was an event that NATO and the ICTY used as a justification for the conflict.
Take a look at this page to see how stories get into ‘the public domain’
http://www.kosovo.mod.uk/atrocities.htm
It contains an astonishing litany of war propaganda put out by the UK Ministry of Defence (War) during the conflict.
Top of the list is Racak
The entry for 25 May contains this version of the classic ‘babies on bayonets’ propaganda story, ‘Women reported that in Berlenitz masked soldiers had slit the throats of young boys and then cut open the stomachs of pregnant women, skewering their foetuses on sharpened knives.’
Don’t you just love the colourful use of the word ‘sharpened’, so much more cruel than using blunt ones. Oddly enough, this crime didn’t make it onto any of the indictments, perhaps there was ‘a morass of competing accounts’.
You are certainly putting impressive effort into your propagandistic descriptions. Clearly this is much more frightening and “vicious” than merely one or the other. You have me thinking irresistibly of Osama bin Laden crossed with Al Capone.
Nice resort to an old classic, there. Men “of military age” can be nothing but fighters, as we well know from innumerable state communiqués of “counterterrorist” victories, just as all men of marriageable age are, in fact, married, and all men of an age to purchase alcohol legally are steaming drunks.
It lists very many atrocities reported by Human Rights Watch, UNHCR, various media outlets, and in interviews with refugees. No doubt you are convinced that all these bodies were in on your global conspiracy to “frame”, as you put it, Milosevic, and that everything on the list was simply made up, perhaps by a secret team of novelists. But I regret to inform you that merely picking the one that looks least plausible to you and laughing at it does not actually constitute an argument.
Oddly enough, Al Capone was charged only with tax evasion. Do you see a flaw in your logic there? (Don’t worry, that’s a rhetorical question.)
Redpaddy, before we proceed any further, I would like to ask you to do two things, as a token of your good faith:
i) read SW’s comment at #45 and tell us whether you think he is lying or not; and
ii) answer merkur’s question at #52.
Thanks.
None of SW’s allegations were proved at The Hague, his use of ‘KosovA’ indicates his allegiance. To deny that the KLA was terrorist is extraordinary. Two examples:
1. the Panda Cafe massacre
http://www.kosovo.net/ramush.html
2. The Klecka death camp and crematorium
http://www.pogledi.co.yu/galerija/sz/1.php
I can’t take anything SW says seriously if he believes the deliberate killing of innocent civilians isn’t terrorism.
As for Milosevic, he wasn’t commander of the Yugoslave armed forces during the conflicts in Slovenia or Croatia – that was the head of the federal govenment at the time, Milosevic held power only in Sebia. For example, in the case of the conflict in Slovenia it was Ante Markovic, a Croat who ordered troops to take the border posts. Milosevic opposed the conflict and supported Slovenian independence. The JNA wasn’t involved in Bosnia, the ICTY prosecution tried to prove this but failed.
I shall return to this later, but for now: I do not claim neutrality on this issue, any more than I claim neutrality on the other Balkan wars of the 1990s, or Zimbabwe, or Iraq, or The Sudan. I doubt that this lack of neutrality constitutes an “allegiance”; but the sources you, redpaddy, draw on for your “evidence” hardly evince neutrality and objectivity. So, redpaddy, that’s just a redherring. More on “terrorism” later.
Dear Steven,
Clark writes that “The west encouraged a terrorist group, the KLA, to provoke the Yugoslav authorities, and when the anti-terrorist response from Belgrade came…” From what I can gather, the issue you have is whether the response from Belgrade was an “anti-terrorist” one. Historically, Belgrade has needed very little provocation to commit the most awful crimes in Kosovo. Leaving aside whether the response was truly an “anti-terrorist” one or not, the interesting thing is that by US and UK standards Belgrade’s response would certainly have been considered “anti-terrorist.”
We know that jihadis (many what we would now call Al Qaeda) were being flown into Kosovo by the US to help the KLA. The US-“Islamo-fascist” nexus in the Balkans began during the Bosnian war and continued into Kosovo. Some of the details have since come to light: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm.....10,00.html
A “response” was the predictable result of transporting jihadis to fight the Serbs. One wonders what the US was trying to achieve in transporting hardened, vicious theocrats to an extremely unstable region if not to create a situation that would ensure a “response”. This seems to be a favoured trick of the US: they did the same in Afghanistan, and look at the place now. The Balkans is now considered to be an area of concern for the intelligence services. The jihadi genie unleashed in the Balkans is giving the intelligence services sleepless nights.
The answer, of course, is that Belgrade’s “response” was not of an “anti-terrorist” kind, but would be classed as such had the jihadis been flown in by a Middle Eastern country into the US or UK. What’s just as interesting is how many truly “anti-terrorist” responses can we count! A bottle of champagne for each you can name (ignore the likes of the Weathermen, Una bomber, Aum Shinrikyo, etc. No state-sanctioned response resulted, no “war on terror” came out of it, no endless rhetoric about defeating “enemies of civilisation”, which is the usual verbose nonsense).
Best wishes,
Tawfiq Chahboune
redpaddy: I know that I sound like a stuck record, but I’d really like to press you to actually answer the question in #52.
To summarise Tawfiq’s argument: the US imported al-Qaeda into the Balkan wars, therefore all of the discussions about Milosevic and/or the Serbian response are irrelevant? Could you clarify, I’m just not sure what you’re trying to say.
Respect! This must be the first time I’ve heard the argument that the United States flew jihadis to Afghanistan for the purpose of… well, I’m not quite sure what you think the purpose was, but it obviously worked!
What I think you mean is that the US covertly supported the mujahiddin, some of whom turned into the Taliban / al-Qaeda. This is true, but… oh god, my head hurts. I have no idea what your argument is.
US (and UK) foreign policy has always been morally suspect, which you may or may not regard as reprehensible – I certainly do. Milosevic was clearly implicated in multiple instances of human rights abuses during the Balkan Wars. “Terrorism” and “Anti-terrorism” are almost inevitably UnSpeak, particularly when used by powerful state actors with vested interests.
I don’t imagine that anybody still following this thread cares, but for the record my position is: interference by external actors – whether US, Russian, jihadist or buddhist – is an inevitable part of international relations, but in no way excuses the abuse of human rights by local actors.
Dear Merkur,
If I was unclear, I apologise. The US did transport jihadis from around the Islamic world to fight in Afghanistan. See Cooley’s Unholy Wars, as well as the admission by the head of the CIA and the National Security Adviser under Carter. This is barely controversial.
If this is the “first time I’ve heard the argument that the United States flew jihadis to Afghanistan for the purpose of… well, I’m not quite sure what you think the purpose was, but it obviously worked!” I’m not sure what to say. Yes, the US aided some sections of the “Mujahideen”. It is also manifestly the case that the US armed, trained and financed jihadis from across the Islamic world to fight in Afghanistan – and that this happened before the invasion of Afghanistan. The “purpose” was spelt out clearly by, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, which was to ensure that the USSR invaded Afghanistan, had its own “Vietnam” and that would cause its downfall. Some of these jihadis are now organised into what we call Al Qaeda.
Milosevic was a war criminal and committed grave crimes against humanity. That is plain. His crimes are not irrlevant. They are extremely relevant. My point was that he was merely using the same argument the US and UK have used and are using in the so-called “war on terror”. Everything else has nothing to with what I wrote.
Best wishes,
Tawfiq Chahboune
Tawfiq: Thank you for the clarification. Your point about the short-sightedness of US foreign policy has merit, although I think it becomes significantly weaker when one goes in for a more detailed comparison between the two situations.
[Note to self: no more late night posting.]
Tawfiq writes, ‘Milosevic was a war criminal and committed grave crimes against humanity. That is plain. His crimes are not irrelevant. They are extremely relevant.’
Yes they are, if they exist. So please Steven, SW, Mekur, Tawfiq. Can we have concrete examples of the crimes you allege. none of theis ‘public domain’ or everybody knows’ how can I refute such accusations. Name the crimes, dates and places, then I’ll reply. My examples of KLA crimes e.g. the beheadings, the Panda Cafe and Klecka went unchallenged. Can I add the KLA leader and Kosovo ‘Prime Minister’ Agim Ceku and his role in ‘Operation Storm’ and the Medak massacre.
Steve claims that the MOD website quoted the UNHCR. He didn’t say that their reports related only to refugee flows and second-hand unverified reports. The ‘babies on bayonets’ story, which even Steven can’t defend, came from the UN Population Fund. Should we believe anything from such a gullible source?
The single source quoted most often by the MOD was the UCK-Kosovapress i.e. the KLA! Check out the record of Halit Berani, a one-man atrocity exhibition.
http://online.wsj.com/public/r.....123199.htm
Finally anyone who thinks that HRW is actually a human rights organisation needs to get real.
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/.....r/HRW.html
http://www.zmag.org/content/sh.....emID=11526
Um, redpaddy, this really is going on for too long. Not that I object in general to lengthy debates and discussions (which I usually quite adore); no, I object most of all to your vacuous insistence that those who disagree with you provide “concrete” proof, while you toss off a few links to absurd pieces of propaganda about Kosovar concentration camps.
I offered my own experiences in Kosova; I do not feel obliged to provide names and dates and transcribed testimonies. Since you have rejected this – here are some passages for you to mull over:
“Brainwashed by years of Serbian propaganda that held that Serbs were the victims of genocide, the [Serb] protesters made no mention of Serbia’s war crimes. Rather, they demanded an end to Milosevic’s corrupt rule and his oppression at home. Milosevic responded by tightening control. He muzzled dissent. He authorized political assassinations. He shut down independent media stations. He stole elections his party could not win. And he began brutalizing ethnic Albanians in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo.”
Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell, pg 444.
“The KLA pledged to protect the Albanian people [sic] in their homes and win independence for the province. The KLA succeeded in raising money from Albanian émigrés and smuggling arms from its anarchic neighbor, Albania, but it failed at first to attract many recruits in Kosovo. The tide turned in March 1998, when the KLA gunned down several Serbian policemen and Milosevic struck back so violently that popular support for the KLA soared. Serbian forces swept into the region of Drenica and murdered some fifty-eight relatives of KLA strongman Adem Jashari, including women and children. With every KLA attack on a Serbian official, Serbian reprisals intensified, as Serb gunmen torched whole villages suspected of housing KLA loyalists. In the following year, some 3,000 Albanians [sic] were killed and some 300,000 others were expelled from their homes, their property burned and their livelihoods extinguished.”
Ibid, 445.
“Originating in Macedonia in 1992, the KLA was committed to armed struggle for Kosovo’s independence (and perhaps union with Albania). Its tactics – consisting mostly of guerilla attacks on isolated police stations – offered Milosevic an opportunity to condemn all Albanian resistance as ‘terrorist’ and authorize a campaign of increasing violence. In March 1998, after Serb forces – armed with mortars and backed with combat helicopters – killed and wounded dozens of people in massacres at Drenica and other Albanian villages, the international community at last responded to pleas from Rugova and began to pay closer attention. […]
“Not only were hundreds of Albanian ‘terrorists’ being killed by special police units drafted in from Serbia, but there was growing evidence that under the cover of this conflict Belgrade was planning to ‘encourage’ the departure of the Albanian population, forcing them to flee their land and livelihoods in order to save their lives. Throughout the winter of 1998-99 there were reports of Serb police actions – sometimes in response to KLA attacks, more typically involving mass executions of one or more extended families – intended to terrorize whole communities into abandoning their villages and fleeing across the borders into Albania or Macedonia.” [italics original]
Tony Judt, Postwar, 680-681.
And where did this all come from, redpaddy?
“When Serbian President Slobanan Milosevic visited Kosovo on April 24, 1987, he realized a totally new connection with their cause that transformed his leadership, their movement, and history in Yugoslavia. Milosevic told the Kosovo Serbs: ‘You should stay here. This is your land. These are your houses. Your meadows and gardens. Your memories . . . . But I don’t suggest that you stay, endure, and tolerate a situation you’re not satisfied with. On the contrary, you should change it with the rest of the progressive people here, in Serbia, and Yugoslavia.'”
Stevan Wiene, When History is a Nightmare, 102.
“By exploiting the issue of Kosovo Milosevic quickly turned himself into a ‘national’ leader, a role which enabled him to quell all opposition to his takeover of the Communist Party machine . . . Another chance event also played into his hands: in early September, a young Albanian conscript went beserk at a barracks in central Serbia, shooting four other recruits (two Bosniacs, i.e. Bosnian Muslims, one Croat and one Serb) before killing himself. Although this was clearly an individual case of mental breakdown, the Serbian media gave it great prominence as yet another example of the Albanian policy of ‘genocide’ against the Serbs . . . Up to 20,000 people attended the Serb recruit’s funeral; many of them broke off from the procession to make a pilgrimage to Rankovic’s grave, where slogans such as ‘Albanians out of Yugoslavia!’ were shouted. . . .[At a later mass rally – one of the many described as ‘Meetings of Truth’ – Milosevic addressed the crowd thus:] ‘Every nation has a love which eternally warms its heart,’ Milosevic told the crowd, ‘For Serbia it is Kosovo.'”
Noel Malcolm, Kosovo – A Short History, 342-343.
I suppose, Redpaddy, that what really smarts is summed up by Kaplan:
“if Yugoslavia was the laboratory of Communism, then Communism would breathe its last dying breath here in Belgrade. And to judge by what Milosevic was turning into by early 1989, Communism would exit the world stage revealed for what it truly was: fascism, without fascism’s ability to make the trains run on time.”
Balkan Ghosts, 76.
So, please don’t offer any more links gleaned from sites as credible as the ones that prove global warming is a hoax and that the world is run by a reptilian master-race.
Many thanks for that, SW. I fear that, finally, it may be a quixotic enterprise to attempt to educate those who do not wish to be educated. At any rate, since I have no further interest in publishing the evasive denials of others, this thread is now closed.