Abolish NATO and Its Court
Sara Flounders
What is the cause of a decade of wars that have ripped apart the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia?
Is this all due to the mad machinations of one evil individual—Slobodan Milosevic? This is the official charge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia based at The Hague.
Is history ever so simple?
Are the continuing wars in the Balkans, as the media always presents them, a new cycle of “endless ethnic hatred” among the small nationalities of the region? Or are there powerful outside class forces involved in reshaping the region?
What is the hidden agenda of U.S. and West European corporate powers in this process? Is their acquisition of the major industries, infrastructure and resources of the Balkans and Eastern Europe a mere accident?
Are the resulting NATO bases in every country in the region unconnected to this transfer of ownership?
An investigator at the scene of a crime would look not only at what happened and how it unfolded but, most important, who stood to benefit. Not only the stated reasons for the war must be examined. The beneficiaries of this extreme action must be identified. Who will own the industries and natural resources? Who will get the contracts to rebuild the bombed infrastructure? Who will profit as the collectively owned industries and services are privatized?
An examination of the court, which today has the power to indict and order the arrest and prosecution of any political figure, is just the first step in understanding the forces controlling events in the region. Who established the court and what order it would impose in the region will explain a great deal about the role of outside powers in all the events of the past decade.
The proceedings of this court are of great importance to the political leaders and generals of the countries who carried out the war against Yugoslavia. When the smoke of media propaganda and war frenzy clears, how will the people of the world view this savage onslaught by the world’s largest military power, in an alliance with other powerful states, on a country smaller than the state of Ohio in size and population?
Imagine a court that allows sealed indictments, closed hearings, secret trials and hearsay evidence. Imagine a court that can change the rules on procedure and evidence at any time, even during a trial.
Imagine a court where there is no jury and there is no independent appeals body. There is no bail.
Imagine a court where a defendant or their lawyers have no right to cross-examine a witness or even to know the identity of a witness. These secret prosecution witnesses do not even have to appear in court or answer any questions. The prosecutors release statements of the anonymous witnesses to the media in a continuing stream and they are reported in great detail. Visitors to the defendant are prevented from speaking to the media.
Imagine a court that asserts the right to bar an attorney from visiting or to disqualify a defendant’s attorney for any reason, including the reason that the attorney is not friendly to the court.
Imagine a court that is paid for, staffed and assisted by private corporations and multi-billionaires, who have an enormous financial stake in the decisions.
This is the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). A court where the countries ochestrating the proceedings are the very countries that bombed Yugoslavia for seventy-eight days, dropped thousands of cluster bombs and radioactive DU bombs, bombed 480 schools and thirty-three hospitals along with market places, bridges and refugee convoys.
This is the court where former President of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic is on trial.
President Milosevic was kidnapped at Washington’s demand and in violation of Yugoslavia’s constitution, federal courts and parliament and taken to a prison cell in the Netherlands. He is to stand trial charged with responsibility for all the crimes and wars of the 1990s.
At his arraignment on July 3, 2001, President Milosevic stated his position strongly and clearly: “I consider this tribunal to be a false tribunal and the indictment a false indictment.” Then he only had time to charge, “This trial’s aim is to produce false justification for the war crimes NATO committed in Yugoslavia,” before the judge ordered his microphone cut off.
His full response to the court has been included in this book. It is a vital historical record. Anyone reading it would understand immediately why it has been suppressed by the very powers that have placed him in the dock.
President Milosevic argues that the ICTY represents an effort by the most powerful countries to destroy even a semblance of sovereignty for small and developing countries. It is an apparatus created without any standing in existing international law, treaties or the United Nations Charter.
The kidnapping and imprisonment of President Milosevic raises in the starkest way the need for a critical examination of this court, its power and its purpose. Of fundamental importance is the issue of who is charged, who is not and why. Is there any power that can contest this court?
The Real Issues
Four years ago in a book the International Action Center published, NATO in the Balkans: Voices of Opposition, we described the coming war in Yugoslavia and its far-reaching consequences. The goals of the 1999 war, who would gain and who would lose, its tactics and justifications were already clear before the 1995 signing of the Dayton Accords.
NATO in the Balkans proved to be a valuable weapon in mobilizing resistance in the face of a propaganda barrage that reached new levels of hysteria. Thousands of people bought the book so quickly we had to reprint to keep up with the demand. The book was translated into Serbian and Greek, and substantial sections printed in French, German and Italian. It became a weapon in the fight against NATO’s war.
Since that time, the two and half months of bombing, the forcible occupation of Kosovo, the overthrow of the elected government of Yugoslavia, and the kidnapping of its president and the new NATO invasion of Macedonia have changed the entire terrain. A new evaluation of a widening occupation was needed.
In this latest book published by the International Action Center, Hidden Agenda: U.S./NATO Takeover of Yugoslavia, we have gathered a series of thoughtful articles that challenge the media hysteria surrounding NATO’s bombing and evaluate the deeper issues involved in the war. Their authors are analysts and anti-war organizers, mainly from NATO countries, who had the courage before, during and after the 1999 war to challenge the lies of NATO’s rulers.
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark makes a compelling case in his powerful chapters of “Indictment of U.S./NATO For Crimes Against Peace, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.” The crimes are summarized into nineteen charges. The international conventions, treaties and laws that the U.S. government and the NATO military command violated are cited at the end of each of the nineteen charges.
In his chapter, “The Greatest Purveyor of Violence,” Clark puts the war in the Balkans in the perspective of 100 years of past U.S. wars, interventions and coups.
The ICTY—An Illegitimate Victors’ Court
The proceedings of any court give a cloak of legitimacy to the examination of any crime, whether it is a small robbery, a crime of passion or a financial fraud. In a trial all the evidence is supposed to be heard and weighed by impartial jurists and judges. A trial has standing as an official record. Over many centuries even those carrying out the most horrendous acts of slavery, piracy, and colonialism have sought to legitimize their conduct with laws and court proceedings. The conquered are placed in the dock. The victims are declared guilty of their own destruction. We challenge this scenario.
NATO pressured the UN Security Council to establish this court as a political weapon. It has all the credibility that a budget of tens of millions of dollars and endless press coverage can buy. It has the power of police forces in twenty countries to enforce its indictments.
As Jamie Shea, the official spokesperson for NATO bragged, “NATO countries are those that have provided the finances to set up the Tribunal, we are among the majority financiers.” Madeleine Albright had this court set up in 1993 in violation of the United Nations Charter when she was the U.S. Ambassador to the UN. Since its creation it has served to justify step-by-step NATO’s military occupation of the entire region. For eight years every act, every threat, every bombing by U.S. generals commanding NATO was preceded by a campaign of completely unsubstantiated charges from unidentified witnesses released by this court to the media with all the weight of law. The media dutifully reported these charges without ever researching or questioning them.
With the establishment of this court and the ability to arrest anyone in the region, NATO wields a big club over the head of any political leader who dares offer the least resistance. The court claims to be holding hundreds of secret indictments.
Any discussion of this ad hoc court must reach beyond the issue of its illegality, its financing by multi-national corporations and its unusual procedures. It is impossible to look at the court without first conducting a serious examination of the decade of outside interventions, grueling sanctions and financing of paramilitary organizations. All of this the court refuses to examine.
The political role of the ICTY has been to focus all blame on internal struggles among nationalities, which lived together in peace for fifty years. This is a little like trying to understand World War I, which started in Sarajevo, by looking at the motives of the Serbian student who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. History has confirmed that World War I was a war between the great powers for a re-division of colonies worldwide.
Any investigative body that even pretended to be fair must scrutinize the military alliance that initiated seventy-eight days of bombing, review the targets and weapons used, and examine the explanations and justifications the generals and politicians gave for today’s occupation. It must ask if this was a decision made quickly under extreme duress of rapidly unfolding events or was it the result of planning and premeditation.
The ICTY is obviously no impartial, fair court. We join with those around the world who are calling for this court to be abolished.
People’s Tribunal Against NATO’s War
A large section of the Hidden Agenda recapitulates the information presented at the various popular tribunals held throughout 1999 and 2000 around the world that found the U.S. and NATO leaders guilty of crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity for the 1999 aggression against Yugoslavia. At the June 10, 2000, final hearing in New York, the prosecution presented evidence showing first how the media propaganda prepared the war with a web of lies. Then it showed how think tanks and Cold War ideologists laid out the motiviation and strategy for the war, as well as how U.S./NATO forces provoked hostilities, proving intent—a crime against peace. Witnesses described the damages purposely caused to Yugoslav civilians, or war crimes. This was followed by the crimes perpetrated against the population in occupied Kosovo; these are considered crimes against humanity.
Section II explains a most powerful weapon in the Pentagon’s arsenal—a completely subservient media. This was a war promoted as a humanitarian intervention. It was supposed to stop crimes of unspeakable magnitude. During the war, the State Department stated that more than 100,000 people were in mass graves, some others claimed 500,000 missing and feared dead. An Internet search shows that more than 1,000 stories describing mass graves, massacres, mutilations and rapes were published or broadcast. After the war forensic teams from seventeen countries spent five months digging in Kosovo at every major site of an alleged massacre. Not one mass grave was found.
A picture is worth a thousand words. In preparing this book we reviewed thousands of pictures. The evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable. In the Photo Section III, we have tried to encapsulate into a few pages the images that tell the story of the calculated destruction of the civilian infrastructure.
Crimes Against Peace
The aim of this latest book is to document that NATO is not only guilty of war crimes, but NATO’s very existence is a crime. Section IV defines NATO as a criminal conspiracy with a global appetite. We document that the NATO powers were driven not by humanitarian concerns, but by the transnational corporations and banks’ lust for profits.
The corporate powers needed this war; the U.S. strategists needed an enemy. U.S. strategy was aimed at redefining NATO into an aggressive military alliance of U.S. and Western Europe for domination with colonial control of Africa, Asia and the Arab world—and of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. This war was a criminal conspiracy to consolidate the hold on global markets by Washington in alliance and in competition with the European powers.
Today there are new NATO bases in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo and Hungary. Nearly every country in Eastern Europe is standing in line to join NATO. On March 29, 2001, Bulgaria signed an agreement allowing NATO troops to be permanently based on Bulgarian soil. None of this is accidental. This is the plan of the “New World Order.”
At the intense negotiations at Rambouillet, France, before the war began, Washington issued an outrageous ultimatum. NATO must be given free access to all of Yugoslavia’s airports, roads, ports and communication facilities or face devastating destruction. To the NATO leaders, Milosevic’s great crime as the President of Yugoslavia was his resistance to these demands. Even after seventy-eight days of NATO bombing, Yugoslavia still refused to accept foreign troops on its soil beyond Kosovo. NATO Secretary General George Robinson told a meeting of the NATO alliance ministers on Oct 10, 2000, “We all know that in southeastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia there is an enormous opportunity for us.”
This “opportunity” is an insatiable need, an addiction. The U.S. military is today larger than the armed forces of all the other members of the United Nations Security Council combined. Weapons are the largest and most profitable export item for the U.S. economy. The United States leads in the sale of weapons to other countries. Half the annual budget for the next decade for the countries of Eastern Europe will be spent on weapons procurements so that the equipment of these “emerging economies” is interchangeable with NATO equipment. This is a bonanza for U.S. military industries.
The oil-rich states of the Persian/Arabian Gulf region have become debtor nations because these U.S. puppet states spend most of their treasury on U.S. weapons. The U.S. economy today is dependent on militarism. The military industries enrich only a few corporate shareholders. Meanwhile, past, present and planning for future wars absorbs the tax dollars of half the U.S. federal budget.
War Crimes – Bombs Drop on Serbia
In June 2000 the chief prosecutor of this specially created court for war crimes in Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, refused even to examine charges brought against the U.S. government and the NATO military alliance for the use of internationally prohibited weapons such as cluster bombs, the bombing of civilian targets such as schools, hospitals, heating plants, market places and refugee convoys.
In Section V of Hidden Agenda we present the research on environmental catastrophe, the use of radioactive weapons and the calculated targeting of the civilian infrastructure including schools, hospitals, heating plants and communications. This material is irrefutable and damning, as is a selection from the Yugoslav government’s White Book listing each bombing attack that we publish in the appendix. Its impact will be felt far beyond the Balkans and by future generations.
NATO’s War Continues
Section VI brings in the issues of U.S. and European intervention since the war. A budget of over $100 million dollars was spent to fix the Yugoslav elections of September 2000. Meanwhile the IMF and Western banks applied coordinated economic strangulation to force the privatization of nationally owned industries and drastic cuts in social services. This created further pressure for compliance. Politicians who Washington openly boasted it had placed in office kidnapped Milosevic.
Meeting all of Washington’s demands has not guaranteed peace, stability or prosperity as the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics have learned. Even tiny U.S. protectorates like Macedonia, which bowed to Washington’s demands, seceded from the Yugoslav Federation and allowed the stationing of foreign troops, now are being torn apart. A still larger NATO presence and a new round of concessions are the stated price to disarm an invasion by a guerrilla force which is armed and financed by NATO and which can still bring about dismembering of Macedonia.
The media hype during NATO’s 4,000 bombing sorties in 1995 in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its 38,400 sorties in 1999 against Serbia and Montenegro was that this was emergency action—a humanitarian war to stop massacres on an unprecedented scale. Now it is clear this was not an emergency action. It is a long-term occupation of the entire region.
Crimes Against Humanity
The end of the NATO bombing was not the end of the war. NATO’s occupation of Kosovo shows that peace and reconciliation are not on the agenda. Section VII explains the enormous impact of what in international law is labeled “Crimes Against Humanity.” We show that NATO had a conscious policy to repress and expell from Kosovo of all nationalities who opposed occupation. Cultural monuments, churches were looted and industries seized. The Roma of Kosovo, the most oppressed people of the region, suffered the most systematic persecution, along with the Serbs.
Has this war resolved the crisis, as promised? Have the NATO occupation of the entire region and the stationing of more than 65,000 troops in Kosovo and Bosnia brought peace, reconciliation or stability? No. 150,000 Serbs, Roma, Gorani and Kosovo Albanians who opposed foreign occupation have been driven out of Kosovo after it was forcibly ripped away and occupied militarily. And war has begun in Macedonia.
In July 2001 the new government of Yugoslavia met with NATO generals. At the meeting, according to Beta News Agency, Serb Deputy Prime Minister Nebojsa Covic, Yugoslav Minister of Foreign Affairs Goran Svilanovic, Yugoslav General Ninoslav Krstic and Police General Goran Radosavljevic were informed about the plan on military cooperation by the commanders of American forces in Germany. The plan is the granting of a ninety-nine-year lease to NATO for Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo. Washington also wants to lease the radar base on Kopaonik Mountain, which the Yugoslav Army equipped with British technology and the Yugoslav military airport in Sjenica would be adapted for landing of American and NATO heavy transporters.
The Appendix reports some of the most important public responses to the fraudulent charges brought by NATO’s court at The Hague. This is the material gathered internationally by People’s Tribunals to Indict NATO for War Crimes. Powerful meetings were held in Berlin, Kiev, Rome, Vienna and New York, with hearings in dozens of other cities, and a mass protest in Athens. A Berlin lawyer has brought civil charges against the federal government there for damages to the people of Varvarin, a town in Serbia, during a bombing attack on it in 1999.
The hearings confirmed in a living way that in this epoch, not only the victors write the history. The efforts of many hundreds of thousands of people in a whole variety of forms to record the truth of the war and to challenge the war propaganda is important for the living struggle against NATO. It will continue to resonate.
NATO’s Contradictions
NATO’s biggest problem is that the capitalist market, which it imposed on the Balkans and the world by force, by stealth and by promises of greater prosperity, has been unable to provide a better life or a higher standard of living, than the planned economies it destroyed. Globally in the past decade, although the wealth of the top 200 billionaires has doubled, hundreds of millions have been impoverished. Two hundred billionaires own more than the combined incomes of two billion people.
In Kosovo, today divided into five zones of direct NATO control, the unemployment rate is sixty percent. In Bosnia, where more than $5 billion has been spent since NATO forced the signing of the Dayton Accords, the economy is in ruins. What can Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic and his band of collaborators expect to solve with the $1.3 billion in loans they received for selling Milosevic to The Hague Tribunal? If they even receive it?
The insatiable capitalist market has not only brought war to Yugoslavia. The entire region from the Adriatic to Siberia has suffered the most dramatic lowering of life expectancy in recorded history, according to the 1999 UN Development Report. Whole industries that provided jobs, benefits and pensions for millions of workers have been sold off for pennies and cut up for scrap metal. In capitalist terms they were redundant and not profitable even if they supplied needed products or services. Free day care, health care and education have collapsed. Drug addiction, alcoholism and prostitution have soared in the resulting chaos and demoralization.
During a decade of unparalleled corporate profits in the United States, conditions for millions of working people actually deteriorated. Now in the coming phase of stagnation and economic downturn, what conditions can be expected?
It is the heritage of the Partisan resistance against Nazi occupation that Washington fears today. During World War II the largest resistance army in Europe against Nazi occupation was built among the many diverse nationalities of the Balkans. Fifty years later, Washington used jet aircraft in 4,000 bombing sorties in Bosnia and over 38,000 sorties in Yugoslavia along with years of economic sanctions and political destabilization to overwhelm the same region. The Pentagon has erected at Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo the largest base built since the Vietnam War because it fears that resistance will erupt again.
The Movement Against the War
It is important to have an honest evaluation of our own movement against war and corporate globalization. The collapse of the socialist countries and the years of war propaganda were effective in creating great confusion.
In many NATO countries, such as Spain, Italy and Portugal, the overwhelming majority of the people were against the NATO war, but the movements were unable to derail the war. Only in Greece was the popular movement able to concretely resist NATO. Elsewhere, in the face of a crushing U.S. juggernaut, many who had opposed past wars instead became totally complicit. This disoriented the peace movement. These turncoats included the Social Democratic parties and many Green parties of Europe, the “Olive” coalition in Italy and others who were in office and actually directed their country’s participation in the war. Nevertheless, by early June 1999, public attitudes in many of the European NATO countries had turned against the bombing.
By that time even in the U.S. the domestic support for the war was thin. Even when the barrage of propaganda was at its most intense, half the population of the U.S. was still not for sending U.S. troops. Ever since the Vietnam War distrust and skepticism of the assurances of political leaders regarding land wars runs too deep.
The Pentagon well understood that a protracted war and especially a ground war would awaken massive opposition in the U.S. and throughout Europe. The air war was intensified to force Yugoslavia to capitulate. The generals’ recurring nightmare is that any casualties among the more than 65,000 troops, at least among U.S. troops stationed in the region, could quickly undermine the occupation.
The United States may have the world’s largest military machine but ultimately this government cannot control the forces it has unleashed. There is a rising global movement against this ruthless competition and spiraling economic chaos. Six months after NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia a new movement against corporate globalization was born in Seattle. Hundreds of thousands of young activists have focused on the brutal policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the trade agreements such as NAFTA and the FTAA, and the World Trade Organization. This is a movement outraged at sweatshop conditions, prisons, environmental devastation and capitalist chaos.
We are confident that the material published in this book will contribute toward the judgment of history. NATO means continuing war, crisis and colonial domination. Here at home NATO’s existence means greater poverty and repression. This book is our effort to develop an understanding and to plant seeds of resistance. Resistance is needed, resistance is possible. The new movement against corporate globalization has shown that resistance will grow.
August 2001
Sara Flounders, a co-director of the IAC, who accompanied Ramsey Clark to Yugoslavia during the bombing in 1999, led anti-war protests in the U.S. at that time and the tribunals that followed. A solidarity organizer, she has coordinated trips to Iraq and traveled to Palestinian during the Al Aqsa Intifada. Flounders co-edited Hidden Agenda, NATO in the Balkans, Metal of Dishonor, and Challenge to Genocide: Let Iraq Live.
The book HIDDEN ADENDA, U.S./NATO TAKEOVER OF YUGOSLAVIA, from which this piece is excerpted, is available for purchase online from www.leftbooks.com.
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