The dismemberment policy was initiated by Germany, the United States, and other Western powers. Yugoslavia was the one country in Eastern Europe that would not voluntarily abolish its public sector and install a free-market system, the one country that had no interest in joining NATO or the European Union. The U.S. goal was to transform the Yugoslav nation into a cluster of weak, dependent right-wing polities whose natural resources would be completely accessible to multinational corporate exploitation, including the enormous mineral wealth in Kosovo; with an impoverished population constituting a cheap labor pool that would help depress wages in Europe and elsewhere; and whose petroleum, engineering, mining, fertilizer, pharmaceutical, construction, and automobile industries would be dismantled or destroyed outright, thereby offering no further competition with existing Western producers.
U.S. rulers also wanted to abolish Yugoslavia’s public-sector services and social programs—just as they want to abolish our public-sector services and social programs. The ultimate goal was the privatization and Third Worldization of Yugoslavia, as it is the privatization and Third Worldization of the entire world, including the United States itself. Much of the Yugoslav economy remained in the not-for-profit public sector, including the Trepca mining complex in Kosovo, described in the New York Times as “war’s glittering prize . . . the most valuable piece of real estate in the Balkans . . . worth at least $5 billion” in rich deposits of coal, lead, zinc, cadmium, gold, and silver.31
That U.S. leaders planned to dismember Yugoslavia is not a matter of speculation but of public record. As early as 1984, the Reagan administration issued U.S. National Security Decision Directive 133: “United States Policy towards Yugoslavia,” labeled “secret sensitive.” It followed closely the objectives laid out in an earlier directive aimed at Eastern Europe, one that called for a “quiet revolution” to overthrow Communist governments while “reintegrating the countries of Eastern Europe into the orbit of the World market.”32
In November 1990 the Bush Sr. administration managed to persuade Congress to pass the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, which provided aid only to the separate republics, not to the Belgrade government, and only to those forces whom Washington defined as “democratic,” that is, free-market separatist parties.
In 1992 another blow was delivered. A freeze was imposed on all trade to and from Yugoslavia, bringing recession, hyperinflation, greater unemployment, and the virtual collapse of the health care system. At the same time, the IMF and other foreign creditors mandated that all socially owned firms and worker-managed production units be transformed into private capitalist enterprises. 33
In February 1999, U.S. officials at Rambouillet made clear their dedication to capitalist restoration. The Rambouillet agreement—actually an ultimatum imposed by the Clinton White House upon what remained of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro)—declared: “The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles.” There was to be no restriction on the movement of “goods, services, and capital to Kosovo,” and all matters of trade, investment and corporate ownership were to be left to the private market.34
Another goal of U.S. policy was media monopoly and ideological control. In 1997, in what remained of Serbian Bosnia, the last radio station critical of NATO policy was forcibly shut down by NATO “peacekeepers” in order to advance democracy by “bringing about responsible news coverage.”35 Likewise, NATO bombings destroyed the two government TV channels and dozens of local radio and television stations, and killed sixteen newspeople in one instance. By the summer of 1999 the only TV one could see in Belgrade, when I visited that city, was German television, CNN and various U.S. programs. Yugoslavia’s sin was not that it had a dictatorial media but that the publicly owned portion of its broadcasting system deviated from the Western media ideological monopoly that blanketed most of the world.
One of the great deceptions, notes Joan Phillips, is that “those who are mainly responsible for the bloodshed in Yugoslavia—not the Serbs, Croats or Muslims, but the Western powers—are depicted as saviors.”36
In Croatia, Washington’s choice separatist leader was Franjo Tudjman, who claimed in a book he authored in 1989, that “the establishment of Hitler’s new European order can be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews,” and that “only” 900,000 Jews, not six million, were killed in the Holocaust. Tudjman’s government adopted the fascist Ustasha checkered flag and anthem.37 Tudjman presided over the forced evacuation of over a half-million Serbs from Croatia between 1991 and 1995, replete with rapes and summary executions.38 This included the 200,000 from Krajina in 1995, whose expulsion was propelled in part by attacks from NATO war planes and missiles. Tight controls were imposed on Croatian media, and anyone who criticized President Tudjman’s reign risked incarceration. Yet the White House hailed Croatia as a new democracy.
In Bosnia, U.S. leaders supported the Muslim fundamentalist Alija Izetbegovic, an active Nazi in his youth, who called for strict religious control over the media and wanted to establish an Islamic Bosnian republic. Bosnia was put under IMF and NATO regency. It was not permitted to develop its own internal resources, nor allowed to extend credit or self-finance through an independent monetary system. Its state-owned assets, including energy, water, telecommunications, media and transportation, were sold off to private firms at giveaway prices.
In early 1999, the democratically elected president of Republika Srpska, the Serb mini-state in Bosnia, who had defeated the West’s chosen candidate, was removed by NATO troops because he proved less than fully cooperative with NATO’s “high representative” in Bosnia. The latter retained authority to impose his own solutions and remove elected officials who proved in any way uncooperative.39
None other than Charles Boyd, former deputy commander of the U.S. European command, commented in 1994: “Much of what the Croatians call ‘the occupied territories’ is land that has been held by Serbs for more that three centuries. The same is true of most Serb land in Bosnia. . . . In short the Serbs were not trying to conquer new territory, but merely to hold onto what was already theirs.” While U.S. leaders claimed they wanted peace, Boyd concluded, they encouraged a deepening of the war.40
Kosovo presented a similar pattern. U.S. rulers aided separatist forces such as the self-styled Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), previously considered a terrorist organization by Washington. The KLA was a longtime player in the heroin trade that reaches from Afghanistan to Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Norway, and Sweden.41 KLA leaders had no social program other than the stated goal of cleansing Kosovo of all non-Albanians, a campaign that was pursued for decades. Between 1945 and 1998, the non-Albanian Kosovar population of Serbs, Roma, Turks, Gorani (Muslim Slavs), Montenegrins, and several other ethnic groups—subjected to systematic intimidation and expulsion—shrank from some 60 percent to about 20 percent. Meanwhile, the Albanian population grew from 40 to 80 percent (not the 90 percent repeatedly reported in the press), benefiting from a higher birth rate and a heavy influx of immigrants from Albania.
In 1987, the New York Times reported:
Ethnic Albanians in the [Kosovo provincial] government have manipulated public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs. . . . Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, and flags have been torn down. Wells have been poisoned and crops burned. Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls. . . . As the Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years . . . an “ethnically pure” Albanian region. . . .42
While the Serbs were repeatedly charged with ethnic cleansing, they themselves have been the victims of such cleansing in Kosovo. Serbia itself is now the only multi-ethnic society left in the former Yugoslavia, with some twenty-six nationality groups, including thousands of Albanians who have lived in and around Belgrade for many years.
The Serbs were the des
ignated enemy probably because they presented the biggest obstacle to the breakup of Yugoslavia. They were the largest ethnic group in the federation, the one most committed to keeping the country together, and with a working class that was most firmly socialist. The U.S. public was bombarded with stories demonizing the Serbian people and their elected leaders. The Serbs were accused of massacres, mass rapes, and even genocide. Yugoslavia’s democratically elected president, Slobodan Miloseviç, was portrayed as a bloodthirsty tyrant and “Serbian nationalist.” In fact, Miloseviç and his wife, Mira Markoviç, herself an active player in Yugoslav national politics, had long polemicized against nationalistic supremacy of any stripe (including Serbian nationalism), and for multi-ethnic unity.43
All sides in the secessionist wars committed atrocities, but the reporting seemed consistently one-sided. Incidents of Croat and Muslim war crimes against the Serbs rarely made it into the U.S. press, and when they did they were accorded only passing mention. 44 Meanwhile Serb atrocities were played up and sometimes even fabricated. John Ranz, chair of Survivors of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, USA, asked where the TV cameras were when hundreds of Serbs were slaughtered by Muslims near Srebrenica. 45 The official line, faithfully parroted by many U.S. liberals and elements of the sectarian left, was that Bosnian Serb forces committed all the atrocities at Srebrenica.
Are we to trust U.S. leaders and the corporate-owned news media when they dish out atrocity stories? Recall the story about the five-hundred premature babies whom Iraqi soldiers laughingly ripped from incubators in Kuwait, a tale repeated and believed throughout the Gulf war of 1990-91, only to be exposed as a total fabrication years later. During the Bosnian war in 1993, the Serbs were accused of pursuing an official policy of rape. “Go forth and rape,” a Bosnian Serb commander supposedly publicly announced to his troops. The source of that story never could be traced. The commander’s name and the troop units to whom he spoke were never produced. The time and place of this supposed happening was never determined. Even the New York Times belatedly ran a tiny retraction, coyly allowing that “the existence of ‘a systematic rape policy’ by the Serbs remains to be proved.”46
The “mass rape” theme was resuscitated in 1999 to justify the continued NATO attacks on Yugoslavia. A headline in the San Francisco Examiner boomed: “SERB TACTIC IS ORGANIZED RAPE, KOSOVO REFUGEES SAY.”47 No evidence or testimony was given in the story itself to support the charge of organized rape. Buried in the nineteenth paragraph, we read that reports gathered by an official mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) found no such organized rape policy. The actual number of rapes were in the dozens, “and not many dozens,” according to the OSCE spokesperson. A few dozen rapes is a few dozen too many, but can it serve as a justification for aerial assaults upon civilian populations and the destruction of a nation?
The Serbs were blamed for the Sarajevo market massacre. According to the report leaked out on French TV, however, Western intelligence knew that it was Muslim operatives who had bombed Bosnian civilians in the marketplace in order to induce NATO involvement. Even international negotiator David Owen, who worked with Cyrus Vance, admitted in his memoir that the NATO powers knew all along that it was a Muslim bomb.48 On one occasion the New York Times ran a photo purporting to be of Croats grieving over Serbian atrocities when in fact the murders had been committed by Bosnian Muslims. The Times printed an obscure retraction the following week.49
Up until the NATO bombings began in March 1999, the conflict in Kosovo had taken some 2000 lives from both sides, according to Kosovo Albanian sources. Yugoslavian sources put the figure at about 800. Such casualties reveal a civil war, not mass genocide. Belgrade was condemned for the forced-expulsion policy of Albanians from Kosovo. But such expulsions began in discernible numbers only after the NATO aerial attacks commenced. Tens of thousands fled Kosovo because it was being mercilessly bombed by NATO, or because it was the scene of sustained ground fighting between Yugoslav forces and the KLA, or because they wanted to avoid conscription into the war or were just afraid and hungry. Asked by a news crew if she had been forced out by Serb police, an Albanian woman responded, “There were no Serbs. We were frightened of the [NATO] bombs.”50 Thus the refugee tide caused by the bombing was used by U.S. officials as a justification for the bombing.
British journalist Audrey Gillan interviewed Kosovo refugees about atrocities and found an impressive lack of evidence or credible specifics. One woman caught him glancing at the watch on her wrist, while her husband told him how all the women had been robbed of their jewelry and other possessions. A spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees talked of mass rapes and what sounded like hundreds of killings in three villages, but when Gillan pressed him for more precise information, he reduced it drastically to five or six teenage rape victims. Even in regard to those six, he admitted that he had not spoken to any witnesses, and that “we have no way of verifying these reports.”51 Officials said there were refugees arriving who talked of sixty or more being killed in one village and fifty in another, but Gillan “could not find one eye-witness who actually saw these things happening.” Yet every day western journalists reported “hundreds” of rapes and murders. Sometimes they noted in passing that the reports had yet to be substantiated. If so, why were such unsubstantiated stories given such prominent play?
After NATO forces occupied Kosovo, the stories about mass atrocities continued fortissimo. The Washington Post reported that 350 ethnic Albanians “might be buried in mass graves.”52 But mass graves of Albanian victims failed to materialize. The few sites actually unearthed offered up as many as a dozen bodies or sometimes twice that number, but with no clear evidence regarding causes of death or even the nationality of victims. In some cases there was reason to believe the victims might be Serbs.53
On 19 April 1999, while the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia were in full swing, the State Department announced that up to 500,000 Kosovo Albanians were missing and feared dead. A few weeks later the Defense Department announced that 100,000 military- aged ethnic Albanian men had vanished and might have been killed by the Serbs.54 Such widely varying but staggering figures from official sources went unchallenged by the media and by the many liberals and leftists who supported the “humanitarian rescue operation.”
On June 17, just before the end of the war, British Foreign Office Minister Geoff Hoon said that “in more than 100 massacres” some 10,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed (down from the 500,000 and 100,000 bandied about by U.S. officials). A day or two after the bombings stopped, the Associated Press and other news agencies, echoing Hoon, reported that 10,000 Albanians had been killed by the Serbs. No one explained how this figure was arrived at. No war sites had yet been investigated and NATO forces had barely begun to roll into Kosovo.
On August 2, Bernard Kouchner, the United Nations’ chief administrator in Kosovo and premier disinformationist, asserted that about 11,000 bodies had been found in common graves throughout Kosovo. He cited as his source the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Republic of Yugoslavia (ICTY), the court that was set up by the Western powers to try Miloseviç et al. But the ICTY denied providing any such information. To this day, Kouchner has not explained how he came up with his numbers.55
As with the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts, so with Kosovo: unsubstantiated references to “mass graves,” each purportedly filled with hundreds or even thousands of victims, were published in daily media reports for weeks on end. When it came down to hard evidence, the mass graves seemed to disappear. In mid-June 1999, the FBI sent a team to investigate two of the sites listed in the war-crimes indictment against Slobodan Miloseviç, one purportedly containing six victims and the other twenty. The team lugged 107,000 pounds of equipment into Kosovo to handle what was hailed as the “largest crime scene in the FBI’s forensic history,” but it came up with not a single report about mass graves. After two weeks the FBI team returned home empty-handed. 56
Likewise a Spanish
forensic team was told to prepare for at least 2,000 autopsies, but found only 187 bodies, usually buried in individual graves, and showing no signs of massacre or torture. Most seemed to have been killed by mortar shells and firearms. One Spanish forensic expert, Emilio Pérez Pujol, acknowledged that his team found not one mass grave. He dismissed the widely publicized references about mass graves as being part of the “machinery of war propaganda.” All across Kosovo the search for killing fields continued, but bodies failed to materialize in substantial numbers—or any numbers at all.57
The worst incident of mass atrocities ascribed to Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Miloseviç allegedly occurred at the Trepca mine. As reported by U.S. and NATO officials, the Serbs threw a thousand or more bodies down the shafts or disposed of them in the mine’s vats of hydrochloric acid. In October 1999, the ICTY released the findings of Western forensic teams investigating Trepca. Not one body was found in the mine shafts, not a shoe or belt buckle, or any evidence that the vats had ever been used to dissolve human remains.58
By late autumn of 1999, the media hype about mass graves had fizzled noticeably. The many sites unearthed, considered to be the most notorious, offered up a few hundred bodies altogether, not the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands previously trumpeted, and with no evidence of torture or mass execution. In many cases, there was no reliable evidence regarding the nationality of victims. No mass killings means that the ICTY war crimes indictment of Miloseviç “becomes highly questionable,” notes Richard Gwyn. “Even more questionable is the West’s continued punishment of the Serbs.”59
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