Kosovo

Another Case of Mass Deception?

Published on Thursday, September 2, 2004 by the Globe and Mail / Canada
by Lawrence Martin

"Where are the bodies? Was the other big war of the last decade, Kosovo in 1999, triggered by bogus allegations as well? Another case of mass deception?

In Iraq, it's the missing mass weapons of destruction. In Kosovo, it's the missing mass graves.
In alleged ethnic cleansing exercises by Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, as many as 100,000 to 200,000 civilians were said to have gone missing or been killed in Kosovo, many of them buried in mass graves. Members of a Canadian forensic team to the Serbian province have come forward to label the numbers nonsense. No mass graves, they say, and, on both the Albanian and Serb sides, only a few thousand dead. A mockery of the numbers used to justify the war.

U.S. defence secretary William Cohen was alleging that as many as 100,000 Albanian Kosovars had gone missing. Mr. Blair, in a preview of his comportment on Iraq, was crying horror upon horror. President Bill Clinton wanted to shift the focus off his domestic problems -- Monica Lewinsky etc. -- and was gung-ho for a NATO invasion.

Looking back a couple of years after the conflict, defence minister Art Eggleton acknowledged that the propaganda coming out of the Pentagon was extraordinary. But the Chrétien Liberals, on close terms with the Clinton Democrats, weren't about to buck the White House on Kosovo, as they would on Iraq. "

Withdraw From the Balkans! And End a Disastrous Intervention
(Nebojsa Malic left his home in Bosnia after the Dayton Accords and currently resides in the United States.)

"(...)On the same day, two American "national security consultants" published an opinion piece in the International Herald Tribune, claiming that the difference between a "success" in Bosnia and failure in Iraq was the insufficient number of troops for the latter. It is an utterly misplaced comparison; the occupation of Bosnia took place at the end of a brutal civil war, with the three sides hating each other more than they hated the foreigners. It does, however, provide an occasion to reflect on the alleged "success" of Imperial intervention in the Balkans, compared to the obvious failure of Iraq.

Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia in 1991, with the vocal support of Germany, Austria, the Vatican, and somewhat less pronounced backing from the United States. Contrary to popular perception, the crumbling federal government did not try to crush the secession.
(...)
As the negotiations dragged on to no avail, Croatia's military was being armed and trained by the United States, as an asset to be used in the Bosnian War. After several probing attacks, such as the Medak incident (1993), Croatian forces assaulted Serb zones in May and August 1995, in full sight of impotent UN troops. It was the largest single instance of ethnic cleansing in the modern Balkans wars, and it went completely unpunished.
(...)
Supported by the United States, Izetbegovic chose to declare Bosnian independence unilaterally, sparking a conflict first with the Serbs, then the Croats. In the resulting mayhem, no one was innocent.
(...)
In 1998, the U.S. intervened again, this time on the side of Albanian militants seeking to separate the province of Kosovo from Serbia and carve out an ethnically pure "Greater Albania." After a staged massacre and an ultimatum designed to be rejected, NATO began bombing Serbia on March 23, 1999.

The attack was clearly illegal, and the attackers knew it. But the bombing went on for 78 days, justified daily by the vilest lies from the NATO propaganda mill. In the end Belgrade backed down, signed an armistice, and allowed the NATO/KLA occupation of Kosovo. All of the accusations were proven false; there was no "genocide."