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The US-NATO War on Yugoslavia It’s Illegal, Inhumane and Must Be Stopped by Janette Rainwater printer friendly version 2 3 4 5 p1 I was around for the Vietnam War and this feels like deja vu all over again. The Clinton administration and its media lackeys tell us that we must continue bombing Serbia and Kosovo because: 1. There is ethnic cleansing going on in Kosovo and the only way to stop it is to bomb the Serbs into submission. This is a humanitarian enterprise to save the Kosovar Albanians. 2. Milosevic refused to sign the Rambouillet “peace agreement”. 3. Milosevic is the newest Hitler and we must get rid of him. Let’s take these one by one. 1. The United States has not suddenly become a nation horrified by outrages to ethnic minorities— otherwise we would have intervened in: a. Rwanda, where 800,000 Tutsis were massacred by the Hutu majority (plus tens of thousands of Hutus who protested) --- and the UN authorities received a fax warning of this three months in advance b. Turkey, where our ally (and third largest recipient of US military aid) has killed over 40,000 of its Kurdish citizens over the last 15 years and razed 4000 villages c. Indonesia, Tibet, and so on. Compared to these countries, the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo was mild before March 24th when the bombing started---- since 1997, 2000 deaths (about half of which were Serbs) and about 250,000 internal refugees, and those were mostly created by the confrontations between the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Serb forces. (There has been little media coverage of the harassment by the KLA that caused Serbs to leave Kosovo in the ‘70s and ‘80s although a 1982 article in the New York Times mentions that 57,000 Serbs had recently left Kosovo for “political and economic reasons.”) The massive exodus of Albanians from Kosovo began three days after the bombing started when Milosevic unloosed the paramilitaries— the Seseljites, the Arkanites, the criminal element who put on a mask and work for whatever they can loot. The US media, however, now implies that this war is being promulgated to punish and prevent the ethnic cleansing that happened because of the bombing! NATO generals now say that they predicted this ethnic cleansing; however, they made no prior provisions for housing, feeding, or clothing these poor people who are now being so cynically exploited for the purpose of prolonging the war. Our media were also remiss in not telling us in detail about the rapid and professional ethnic cleansing of the Serbs from the krajina --- a part of southern Croatia where Serbs had lived for several centuries-- that was carried out by the Croats in August, 1995. In just a few days more than two hundred thousand Serbs were expelled from their homes at gunpoint and 14,000 Serbs were killed. Instead the media showed us satellite photographs of the mass graves of Muslims killed by the Serbs at Srebrenica taken weeks before and cynically released at this time by then-US Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright to divert the world’s attention. |
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Site last changed November 20, 2001. © Janette Rainwater 1997-2001 All rights reserved. Unauthorized use of any of the material contained herein is strictly prohibited. |
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