NATO’s War on Serbia and Milosevic Trial

To give a perspective on western form of perverse entertainment and education of its young and adult minds alike, let us re-visit the demonization of Slobodan Milosevic and Serbia. I had watched the unraveling of Yugoslavia and NATO led war on Serbia from Ankara and Bucharest and was horrified by western spins, lies and propaganda.

Before the Nato led war on Yugoslavia , the then British Defense Minister  George Robertson ( he was later made Nato's Secretary General , a normal US practice to reward subservient and loyal British functionaries)  said that the war was  to "prevent a humanitarian catastrophe" and stop "a regime which is intent on genocide". Genocide word was used many times. US President Bill Clinton referred to "deliberate, systematic efforts at . . . genocide".

Countered John Pilger in New Stateman in November 1999. “The British press took their cue.”FLIGHT FROM GENOCIDE," said a Daily Mail headline over a picture of Kosovars children in a lorry. Both the Sun and Mirror referred to "echoes of the Holocaust". Figures were supplied. The US defense secretary, William Cohen, said: "We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing . . . They may have been murdered." Geoffrey Hoon, then Foreign Office minister, put the Albanian dead at 10,000, adding that "the final toll may be much worse". A widely quoted US Information Agency fact sheet claimed: "The number of unaccounted-for ethnic Albanian men ranges from a low of 225,000 . . . to over 400,000." Cherie Blair told the Sun she was "horrified about the rape camps"

Nevertheless, after the war, thousands of western journalists and forensic investigators, found no evidence of mass murder on the scale used to justify the NATO bombing of Serbia. The head of the Spanish forensic team attached to the International Criminal Tribunal, Emilio Perez Pujol, said  that as few as 2,500 were killed .He told Al Pais" I called my people together and said, 'We're finished here.' I informed my government and told them the real situation. We had found a total of 187 bodies." He complained angrily that he and colleagues had become part of "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one – not one – mass grave".

In November 1999, the Wall Street Journal published the results of its own investigation, dismissing "the mass-grave obsession." Instead of "the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect ... the pattern is of scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had been active." The Journal concluded that NATO stepped up its claims about Serb killing fields when it "saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by NATO’s bombs...."

"The FBI has found 200 bodies in 30 sites. The village of Ljubenic was believed to hold a mass grave of 350 bodies. Seven bodies were found. So far, 20 forensic teams operating in Kosovo have found 670 bodies. Perhaps the most significant disclosure, confirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal on 11 October, was that the Trepca lead and zinc mines contained no bodies. Trepca was central to the drama of the investigation: the corpses of 700 murdered Albanians were presumed hidden there. On 7 July, the Mirror reported that a former mineworker, Hakif Isufi, had seen dozens of trucks pull into the mine on the night of 4 June and heavy bundles unloaded. He said he could not make out what the bundles were. The Mirror was in no doubt: "What Hakif saw was one of the most despicable acts of Slobodan Miloevic’s  war – the mass dumping of executed corpses in a desperate bid to hide the evidence. War-crimes investigators fear that up to 1,000 bodies were incinerated in the Auschwitz-style furnaces of the mine with its sprawling maze of deep shafts and tunnels."

"All this was false," said Pilger

“We (NATO) killed more innocent civilians than the Serbs did?" the Mail

Continued Pilger, "This is not to say that evidence supporting a figure close to 10,000 may not yet materialize; fewer than half of the 400 "crime scenes" have been examined. However, a pattern of truth versus propaganda is emerging. The numbers of dead so far confirmed suggest that the NATO bombing provoked a wave of random brutality, murders and expulsions, very different from systematic extermination: genocide. Other atrocities of particular media interest, such as the "rape camps" that so horrified Cherie Blair, are turning out to be fiction. Dr Richard Munz, the doctor at the huge Stenkovac refugee camp told Die Welt: "The majority of media people I talked to came here and looked for a story . . . which they had already . . . the entire time we were here, we had no cases of rape. And we are responsible for 60,000 people." He stressed that this did not mean that rape did not happen, but it was not the tabloid version. The same is true of the Milosevic regime. No one can doubt its cruelty and atrocities, but comparisons with the Third Reich are ridiculous.

"These facts and the questions they raise have not been judged newsworthy. A database search reveals hardly a word in the news pages of the serious mainstream national papers, with the exception of the Sunday Times. The Guardian has published only a piece by their columnist Francis Wheen, critical of the author of an article on the Kosovo figures in the Spectator on 30 October. BBC News, to my knowledge, has remained silent on the subject."

Perhaps a troubled Andrew Alexander put it best in his column in the Mail. "Could it turn out to be," that we killed more innocent civilians than the Serbs did?"

And now the piece de resistance

"The famous story of Serb concentration camps was built on a photo of a gaunt man surrounded by others, staring at the viewer from behind barbed wire; surely an image to chill one to the bones. It took years before a German journalist Thomas Deichman, in an article titled "The picture that fooled the world," described how the famous photo was staged by its takers, British journalists, who were photographing the inhabitants from inside barbed wire which was protecting agricultural products and machinery from theft in a refugee and transit camp. The men stood outside of it; and at no time was there a barbed-wire fence surrounding the camp. But by that time the image had done its deed, terminally slamming the Serbs as genocidal mass murderers."

The Tribunal (ICTY) was obliged by its charter to investigate and prosecute all credible charges of war crimes in Yugoslavia, including NATO forces. But a petition by Toronto based International law professor  to Louise Arbour , the tribunal prosecutor ,with a compilation of evidence on NATO war crimes, with an accompanying legal analysis of why these constituted serious crimes were first stalled by Arbour and then by Del Ponte for over a year, with the latter announcing that there was no basis for even opening an investigation with a crime base of only 500 dead, although Arbor’s May 1999 indictment of Milosevic was based on a crime base of 340 victims. Mostly from a war zone, made by UK and US only.

NATO’s bombings resulted in the deaths of estimated 500 to 3,000 Serb civilians---- But Tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte issued a report in June 2000, declaring NATO not guilty. Del Ponte said—"I accept the assurances given by NATO leaders…," that their press releases are reliable evidence, and that all of their killings of civilians and destruction of civilian sites were "genuine mistakes,"