나토의 유고슬라비아 침공: 아직도 유럽을 배회하는 유령

2021-5-18

NATO’s war against Yugoslavia: the ghost that still haunts Europe

by Rick Rozoff

Twenty-two years ago today the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia/ was subjected to the 55th straight day of bombardment from the then 19-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with 23 days more to go.

– 1999년 나토는 유고슬라비아에 총 78일간 공습을 퍼붓는다. 소위 “인도적 개입”을 내세우며 말이다. 수법은 이렇다. 미국 작전세력은 코소보의 알바니아계 무슬림들에게 무기를 쥐어주며  “코소보 자유군(Kosovo Liberation Army)”을 조직해 세르비아계 주민을 ‘먼저’ ‘조직적으로’ 학살하게 만든다. 그러면 분개한 세르비아계가 알바니아인들에게 보복으로 반응한다. 그러면 보복의 악순환이  끝없이 진행된다.  그런 와중에 미국은 세르비아계 지도자 밀로세비치가 미국이 권하는 유고 해체 및 체제 이행에 거부하기 때문에 그를 “도살자”라며 부르며 발칸의 ‘히틀러 만들기’를 시작한다. 어리버리한 세계 “민주시민들”은 – 학력과 관계 없이 만장일치로 – 그런 줄 믿으며 밀로세비치를 욕하고 미국의 “인도적 개입”과 무차별 공습을 박수 치며 지지한다. 국제정치의 모든 것이 다 ‘이런 식’이다. 자유주의 세계체제의 악귀성을 총론적으로 이해하는 사람이라면 이처럼 개별 사건에 관해 금새 구도를 잡고 적들의 의중을 간파하겠지만 총론적 인식이 부재한 대부분의 주류 미디어 광신도들은 살인자들이 요구하는 대로 사건을 본다.  

– ‘살인기계’ 나토… 미국 말 안 듣고 순종하지 않는다고 조진 거다. “발칸의 도살자”는 세르비아 지도자 밀로세비치가 아니라 나토라는 것을 안다면 99년 이후 유고슬라비아 해체의 90퍼센트는 이해한 것이다.    

Many families in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Niš/ daily fled to bomb shelters during the aerial onslaught.

The permanent trauma inflicted on millions of civilians, especially children,/ is perhaps impossible to calculate.

And it has been denied or ignored by Europe and the world.

As forgotten as the cluster bomb fragments and depleted uranium left behind by NATO’s “humanitarian intervention.”

The air war/ was justified by U.S. President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and NATO Secretary General Javier Solana as a noble crusade to stop, to employ/ an expression not uncommon at the time, the “worst genocide since Hitler” in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

The operation, Operation Allied Force for NATO, Operation Noble Anvil for the U.S.,/ began with a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from ships and submarines in the Adriatic Sea.

(In all over 1,000 NATO military aircraft) flew 30,000 combat sorties over a nation of slightly more than 10 million people, two million of those in Kosovo; a military bloc whose combined population at the time/ was some 850 million and which included/ three of the world’s nuclear powers.

During the war, arguably the most lopsided since the U.S.’s invasion of Grenada in 1983, American and other Western officials maintained a steady drumbeat of increasingly hyperbolic, and criminally unconscionable, claims of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo killed by Yugoslav forces.

– 유고슬라비아 군대가 코소보 알바니아 사람들을 인종청소한다고 미디어에서는 사기쳤다….영미주류 미디어는 거짓말 제조기로서 글로벌 악귀들의 대중 정신 통제 무기다. 그 이상도 이하도 아니다. 10만명을 죽였다고 떠들다가 곧 말을 바꿔 20만명 죽였다로 거짓말을 증폭시켰다.  

On May 16 Defense Secretary William Cohen/ appeared on Face the Nation and said: “We’ve now seen/ about 100,000 military-aged men/ missing….They/ may have been murdered.” Almost immediately afterward another American official/ raised/ that number to 200,000.

The scare tactics/ worked, as NATO’s top military commander, General Wesley Clark, was able to continue/ daily bombing missions over the small nation months after all targets of military value/ had been hit and hit repeatedly.

– General Wesley Clark 이 사람은 나토 최고 사령관이었다는데 나중에 펜타곤의 레짐체인지 국가들 명령을 내부고발한 사람임. 두번째 처가 중국 아내라고 함.  

A passenger train, a religious procession, a refugee column, Radio Television of Serbia headquarters. a vacuum cleaner factory, bridges, marketplaces, apartment courtyards, the Swiss embassy in Belgrade and the Chinese embassy as well, with three journalists killed and 27 other Chinese injured.

Cluster bombs[1], graphite bombs and depleted uranium[2] ordnance/ were used widely.

No one,/ not a single individual, has been held accountable for those war crimes. Nor for what should be a war crime and one of the most grave at that: intentionally fabricating and exaggerating/ atrocity stories to agitate for and escalate/ a war.

Few Western politicians and journalists/ would have escaped/ that charge over their roles in 1999.

When the Yugoslav government of President Slobodan Milosevic/ was compelled to accede to NATO diktat on June 10, over 200,000 ethnic Serbs,

Roma and other minorities/ left/ Kosovo with Yugoslav troops, and NATO and its so-called “Kosovo Liberation Army” cutthroats/ – for whom and with whom it waged the war – marched into Kosovo.

(After the latter/ arrived) even more, perhaps a hundred thousand or more, Serbs, Roma, Turks, Jews, Egyptians, Ashkali and members of other ethnic minority communities,/ along with no few Albanians, fled/ the province.

Numerous Serbs, Roma and Albanian “collaborators”/ were murdered in what the Western press invariably described as revenge killings. (During the air war Britain’s Daily Telegraph/ reported/ [100,000 ethnic Albanians/ fled/ Kosovo to other parts of Serbia].)

★★★ // The permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of non-ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and the expulsion of over a quarter of a million Serbs from Croatia in the early 1990s/ are/ the two largest cases of irreversible ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II. Decades later no one/ has been held accountable for those crimes either. //

Most all of the above/ has been forgotten if it was ever known.

That’s how it was planned.

While NATO was celebrating its fiftieth-anniversary jubilee in Washington, D.C. and inducting/ the first new members since Spain in 1986, and former members of the Warsaw Pact at that – the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland – a high-profile, low-risk war/ was/ just the thing to launch/ new global NATO on the world.

The victim,/ Yugoslavia, had been mortally wounded; four years later it/ no longer existed, even on the map.

The corpse/ was expected to rest silently.

But its ghost/ refuses to disappear.

On May 14 Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, responding to a comment by his Slovenian counterpart, Borut Pahor, to the effect that there should be no redrawing of borders in Europe, said:

“We have a differing view on Kosovo’s independence. When I hear that, as Pahor says, there are no border changes without conflict, I agree, and that should be clear to all who have been generating/ conflicts and wanted to change/ Serbia’s borders.” That is a reference to the West – the U.S., European Union and NATO – successfully wrenching/ Kosovo from Serbia in 2008, in violation of the 1999 Kumanovo Agreement. Vucic backed up his contention that national borders should not be arbitrarily or unilaterally changed by stating that only borders recognized by the United Nations/ are legitimate. However, he said that a contrary practice/ had been at work since 1999, the result of “the brutal hypocrisy of Western powers that have no principles, or have principles as needed.”

President Vucic was in Prague, the Czech Republic on May 18 and met there with President Miloš Zeman. Zeman/ was/ prime minister of the Czech Republic in 1999 when his country/ joined/ NATO and the war against Yugoslavia/ was launched.

The Czech leader’s spokesman, Jiri Ovcacec,/ confirmed that “President Miloš Zeman/ presented/ public apologies to President Aleksandar Vucic for the [NATO] bombardments of Yugoslavia in 1999,” and that he/ “personally asked/ the Serbian people for forgiveness.”

During the war Prague/ refused/ NATO’s warplanes/ the right to land in Czech territory. Today Zeman himself told the press after his meeting with Serbia’s president:

“We were hopelessly looking for at least one more [NATO] country that would join us and come out against [the bombardments of Yugoslavia]. We remained all alone.” Displaying that rarest of virtues for a politician, penitence, he also said his government/ should have exercised/ more resolve in demanding/ the end of the bombing once it had commenced.

When the Czech Republic/ joined/ NATO in 1999 it was accompanied by Hungary and Poland, fellow members of the Visegrad Four group in Central Europe.

The fourth member, Slovakia,/ was not invited because the party of three-time prime minister Vladimír Mečiar/ was not to the liking of the U.S., NATO and the EU.

The following year Mečiar/ dropped out of politics, with his Movement for a Democratic Slovakia party colleague Augustín Marián Húska disclosing: “The NATO war against Yugoslavia in 1999/ was/ also a signal to us, to not pursue/ any vision of political independence anymore. We/ have seen/ what will happen to forces that want to be independent.”

– 주권국가식의 독립을 원하면 다 조지는 나토, 북대서양 조약기구 아니고 북대서양 테러 기구다!  

On May 7 the governments of Serbia and China/ commemorated/ the NATO bombing of China’s embassy in Serbia in 1999. Serbian Minister of Labor, Employment, Veteran and Social Affairs Dr. Darija Kisic Tepavcevic, head of the Association of Journalists of Serbia Vladimir Radomirovic, Chinese ambassador to Serbia Chen Bo and others/ laid/ wreaths (in honor of three Chinese journalists (killed in the attack)).

– 중국 대사관도 당시 폭격 받았다. 나토가 거기 중국 대사관이 있었는지 몰랐을까? 

The Chinese ambassador/ thanked/ the Serbian people for keeping alive the memory of the victims (who, she/ said, “paid/ the price of truth, justice, and righteousness with their lives).

“We/ will never forget/ the crime (conducted by the aggressor), who most brutally violated/ human rights, in the name of the so-called protection of human rights.”

If most of the rest of the world/ has forgotten/ NATO’s first war and its bloody emergence on the world stage, China and Serbia/ have not.

On March 26, to mark/ the beginning of NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia and Serbia’s Remembrance Day for the Victims of the NATO Aggression, Hua Chunying, spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry,/ stated:

“China/ would like to remind/ NATO/ [that they/ still owe/ a debt of blood to the Chinese people …]. The dead/ have passed away, but the living/ need/ more vigilance and reflection.”

It’s worth quoting him further as a reminder that the crime of 1999 has indeed haunted not only Europe but the world ever since it was perpetrated; that what is seemingly past/ is/ really both prologue and precedent.

“Whether in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya or Syria, we should never forget the lives of ordinary people lost to repeated bombardment, the crumbling walls under the shells, the glorious historical sites consumed by the flames.

“The US and some Western countries/ have kept their mouths open about human rights and kept their mouths shut about their responsibilities…. When they blatantly launched a war against a sovereign country without the Security Council’s authorization, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and the dispersal of millions of people, did they ever care about the human rights of the people in those countries? Is this what they mean by international rules? Shouldn’t they be held accountable for their war actions?”

Those questions, which had they been asked twenty-two years ago might have spared millions of lives in the nations the Chinese diplomat enumerated and others, need to be asked now and with a passion and insistence hitherto absent.

_________________________

9 Comments

THOUGHTS ON “NATO’S WAR AGAINST YUGOSLAVIA: THE GHOST THAT STILL HAUNTS EUROPE”

ralphiesmom

May 18, 2021 at 5:49 pm

THANK YOU, RICK ROZOFF!

Doug Hope

May 18, 2021 at 9:55 pm

NATO has become a mega war machine of war profiteers with an unspoken mission statement to conquer/ the world, or most of it. NATO is charting a collision course with Russia AND China! and nobody seems to notice?!

Rick Rozoff

May 19, 2021 at 10:35 am

You’re completely right. The reason this site/ was created (or revived) was to expose/ just what you’ve pointed out.

Anne Williamson

May 19, 2021 at 8:14 am

It wasn’t too long after the Soviet collapse that the ‘insider’ NATO justification mantra for its continued existence/ changed from keeping Germany down, Russia out and the US in into “Out of Area or Out of Business,’ and thus was born the Partnership 4 Peace scam which accustomed the American people to NATO acting outside of its Treaty area and therefore primed for NATO expansion. I was in NYC at the time and was thoroughly appalled by the parsity of discussion and debate prior to the first expansion.

In Russia, over the years Gorbachev has suffered quite proper criticism for his many errors and naivite RE; the West, but his greatest crime was taking James Baker’s “not one inch” words at face value rather than demanding a written treaty before dismantling the Warsaw Pact – and that stupidity came at a time when the USSR still had leverage (reunification of Germany).

Literally millions of people have paid a very high price in property destruction, reduction of savings thanks to the taxman – even their very lives and body integrity – for the lifeline support of what is the American’s standing global army. What a trick it was over 70 years ago to convince the Europeans that the American occupation of their lands/ was/ a mutually beneficial arrangement, and not an occupation!

RR, thank you so much for your close attention to NATO’s history and current schemes, a truly vital story that all others/ have largely and foolishly abandoned. I am personally very grateful for your carefully considered and sober-minded efforts.

Rick Rozoff

May 19, 2021 at 11:28 am

Thanks so much for the vote of confidence. But it doesn’t take too much perception to see that a global military bloc with 70 members and partners on all six inhabited continents – and which is poised to recruit/ India to the network next month – is a subject worth attending to. I agree with you in not being able to comprehend why no one else seems to care about it, even when it’s – repeatedly – brought to their attention.

beau

May 19, 2021 at 1:19 pm

one of amerika’s greatest achievements: destroying a country that posed it no threat to get a blowjob off the front page. destroy a nation and permanently harm people’s psyche’s so a lying, serial philanderer can get his lies and philandering off the front page.

do such actions make a nation ‘great’, or not?

ghostsofhistory

May 20, 2021 at 8:43 am

A very insightful article from Rick. The Kosovo War convinced me that the end of the Cold War had not brought peace to Europe – the world – that NATO’s “victory” would eventually lead to world war (the one everybody thought could no longer happen) as it expanded further east. It was only a matter of time. And while it is slow in coming, all the evidence still points to that conflagration: unless a way is found to stop it.

https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/

Rick Rozoff

May 20, 2021 at 8:53 am

Your insights were prescient, in every respect.

Anon

May 22, 2021 at 12:27 pm

Russia, China, Iran and other EEU states and Africa should unilaterally exit the UN and establish another world body based in Russia or China. The current UN set-up has failed dismally like the original League of Nations. It is surprising that given all the illegal regime change wars, the deaths of Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Gadaffi, illegal sanctions since the end of the Cold war, no real change like this/ has been shouted out from rooftops. It is the most glaring failure which urgently needs to be addressed. Adjoining the alternate world body to promote peace should be a real Criminal court with real bite to apprehend western war criminals like Bush 1 and his cabinet, Clinton and his cabinet, Bush2 and his cabinet, Obama and his cabinet and Blair and his cabinet.

This alternate body should also have its own NATO to arrest these war criminals and those who threaten peace, should they not be handed over or surrender.

The current status quo cannot continue whilst the criminal west is threatening the planet. SOMETHING NEEDS TO CHANGE AND CHANGE NOW. Not after WWIII when it’s too late. THE CURRENT UN IS A FAILURE and year in- year out this decrepit body/ goes through the motions without affecting/ meaningful, much needed change to a bleeding world.

[1] 집속탄

[2] 열화 우라늄탄