NATO’S ‘HUMANITARIAN’ RAMPAGE
May 14, 1999
By Gregory Elich
Nothing so clearly illustrates the reckless and ruthless nature of NATO’s Balkan war as its bombardment of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade on May 7. Three 1,000-lb. laser-guided bombs struck the building, killing three and wounding 20.. Five minutes later, NATO bombs also blasted the nearby Hotel Yugoslavia.
Tens of thousands of protestors demonstrated in response at US and British embassies and consulates in China. The protestors rained rocks on the US embassy in Beijing and consulate in Shanghai, smashing windows. Student demonstrators in Beijing, waving red flags, chanted, "Down with imperialism." Twenty-year old student Sun Chao said, "Today they can bomb our embassy, tomorrow they can bomb my capital. I’m waiting for them." High school student Zhao Xin pointed out, "NATO bombs everything. Civilians are bombed, the president’s residence is bombed, and now even our embassy which is protected by international law."
At an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, called by China, Chinese ambassador Qin Huasun declared, "We strongly condemn NATO’s act and will express our indignation. NATO’s barbarian act is a gross violation of the United Nations Charter, international law and the norms governing international relations." Qin said the embassy "from the fifth floor to the basement" had been destroyed, and "that is a crime of war and should be punished."
The same night of the embassy bombing, NATO planes dropped cluster bombs near a hospital and on an outdoor market in Nis, killing 15 and wounding 70. Countering NATO’s bland assertion that "there was no attempt to harm civilians during this strike," ‘The Times’ reported that "there was no denying the evidence of the body of a grandmother lying in the street, one eye open, the other blasted neatly and fatally into her skull. On the other side of the narrow street an old man sprawled in a congealing mess of what used to be his life’s blood. Between them were scattered the egg boxes and carrots they had just bought at the market. At least six of those who had died lay with their most ghastly wounds covered by blankets and tablecloths. Ambulance crews said that they, too, had come under attack. At Nis medical center, shattered glass and pockmarked walls bore witness to the claim. Walls, trees and cars were peppered with small, deep potholes. Street after street was littered with countless metal fragments that the local people said had exploded around them."
The attacks followed what has become a daily pattern. Factories, plants, roads, railways, residential areas, hospitals, refugee camps, bridges, busses, schools, everything is a target for NATO. Last month NATO bombed a complex of chemical and fertilizer plants and oil refineries at Pancevo, on the northern outskirts of Belgrade. Hundreds of thousands of homes in Belgrade were engulfed in a poison cloud, containing deadly chemicals and gasses such as phosgene, chlorine and hydrochloric acid. Workers at Pancevo were forced to dump tons of ethylene dichloride, a deadly carcinogen, into the Danube, to avoid a worse disaster were the plant to be struck by a missile. ‘The Guardian’ reported, "As the factories burnt, a poisoned rain, containing hundreds of toxic combustion products, splattered Belgrade, its suburbs and the surrounding countryside. Broken tanks and burst pipes poured naptha, chlorine, ethylene dichloride and transformer oil, all deadly poisons, into the Danube. Oil slicks up to 12 miles long wound their way toward Romania."
These poisonous chemicals, having soaked into the soil, will present a serious health risk to the people of the Balkans for many years to come. ‘The Guardian’ concludes, "Many of the compounds released cause cancers, miscarriages and birth defects. Others are associated with fatal nerve and liver diseases. The effects of the bombing of Serbia’s economy equate, in other words, to low-intensity chemical warfare."
On the night of May 13, NATO planes blasted a large group of mainly Albanian refugees sleeping in the open in the village of Korisa. Over 100 were killed, and their charred and mutilated bodies were strewn over the area. Nearly a month before, on April 14, NATO cluster bombs struck a column of refugees, killing 75. Evidence indicates the use of a new type of cluster bomb, CBU-97, ‘Jane’s Defence Weekly’ reported that the Pentagon was eager to introduce the CBU-97 cluster bomb, "a high-tech, heat-seeking bomb" designed to "spray super-hot shrapnel" with "greater lethality." Cluster bombing of civlians has become a daily event. According to a Yugoslav orthopedist, "Neither I nor my colleagues have ever seen such horrific wounds as those caused by cluster bombs. They are wounds that lead to disabilities to a great extent. The limbs are so crushed that the only remaining option is amputation. It’s awful, awful."
NATO is also bombarding Yugoslavia with hundreds of depleted-uranium (DU)-tipped bombs and missiles. The high-density of DU weapons give them a higher capability of penetration upon impact than conventional weapons, but their explosion releases thousands of radioactive particles, presenting a health hazard. Use of these weapons in Iraq resulted in a startling 700 percent increase in leukemia in areas affected, as well as a dramatic increase in birth defects.
According to Yugoslav trade union presidents Radoslav Ilic and Tomislav Banovic, NATO has inflicted over 100 billion dollars damage to the Yugoslav economy. Ilic declared that "this aggression has all the characteristics of a dirty war, in which workers are the biggest sufferers. Workers and the products of their work have become military targets, and the international progressive public is too slow in awakening..."
The purported justification for the barbarity of NATO’s "humanitarian" bombing is concern for the very real suffering of refugees from the Kosovo region. A simple picture of "ethnic cleansing" is presented, with NATO selflessly concerned for the return of the refugees to their homes. What lies behind this picture? Reality, as always, is more complex than propagandists would have one believe. There was no refugee crisis prior to NATO’s bombing on March 24. Concomitant with NATO’s bombing, hundreds of thousands of people fled their homes. The causes are many. NATO places blame squarely on the Yugoslav government, which is led by a coalition of the Serbian Socialist Party and the Yugoslav United Left (JUL), itself a coalition of 23 communist and left parties. Is it possible that these parties, which have long prided themselves on a commitment to a multi-ethnic society, have suddenly turned racist?
There have been many abuses, but it is precisely the anarchy and chaos of NATO’s bombing that has created an environment where thugs and paramilitary gangs can operate freely. One Serbian official pointed out, "It was a catastrophe. Podujevo was emptied in about three hours. There were a lot of vile and angry people, maddened, who were out of control." According to a recent article by a ‘New York Times’ reporter in the field, the first wave of refugees in Kosovo’s capital city of Pristina left because they were ordered or threatened. The second wave left "because of the bombing downtown on the night of April 6 to 7," and the third wave "left in a generalized panic, because everyone else seemed to be leaving."
According to the same report in the ‘New York Times’, "In the first two weeks after the bombing started on March 24, radical Serbs with guns, masked paramilitaries and at least some police rampaged through thr city, burning and looting and ordering Albanians to leave. Thieves ran rampant... The situation is calmer now, residents of varying ethnic groups say." Zoran Andjelkovic, president of the temporary executive council for Kosovo, says that the first ten days or so of chaos included fierce clashes among angry civilians. Andjelkovic pointed out that gangs of criminals ran wild, ordering people to leave so that their homes could be robbed. Both Albanian and Serbian gangs roamed the region. "I’m very proud we could stop it here" in Pristina, Andjelkovic said, "and get the situation under control," adding that more than 380 people in Kosovo have been arrested for these crimes and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 5 to 20 years. According to another article in the ‘New York Times’, "senior Yugoslav and Serbian officials...insist that the army and the police have moved to rein in the paramilitaries and did not participate in any organized ‘ethnic cleansing.’"
A ‘Los Angeles Times’ journalist reporting from Kosovo, says he had seen no evidence of a massacre in Pristina. "It is very hard to hide an anarchic wholesale slaughter of people. There is no evidence that such a thing happened in Pristina.... I have spoken personally to people who have been ordered to leave their homes by police in black. I’ve also spoken to people who are simply terrified.... I see a pretty clear pattern of refugees leaving an area after there were severe air strikes... I don’t think that NATO member countries can, with a straight face, sit back and say they don’t share some blame for the wholesale depopulation of this country. If NATO had not bombed, I would be surprised if this sort of forced exodus on this enormous scale would be taking place." When a reporter for ‘The Times’ asked an Albanian refugee woman in Tetovo, Macedonia, whether Serb troops had driven her from her home, she responded, "There were no Serbs. We were frightened of the bombs." The reporter also noted that "Red Cross officials say many of the most recent arrivals intend to return to Kosovo as soon as the NATO bombardment stops." Vast numbers of people have been driven from their homes by NATO’s fierce bombardment.
Many refugees have fled their homes to avoid being caught in the all-out warfare between Yugoslav army and police and the secessionist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). When Western officials aborted the Paris peace conference and announced the imminent bombing of Yugoslavia, it lit a match to the conflict. Some refugees have also fled to avoid the widespread forcible conscription carried out by the KLA. KLA soldiers are forcing Albanian men they encounter to enlist. Those who refuse are either severely beaten or killed.
Never has there been a more fierce pro-war propaganda campaign. Robert Hayden, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Russian and East European Studies, dismissed State Department claims of 100,000 to 500,000 missing Albanian men as "ludicrous - the story is ludicrous. NATO is running a propaganda campaign, there’s no question about that. There have been lots of discrepancies in the official story, but what is interesting is that, until now, there has been amazingly little scrutiny of that story."
One story that has received scrutiny, albeit not well publicized, is NATO’s set of satellite photographs of mass graves in Kosovo. MIT political science professor Barry Posen pointed out, "Long neat rows of individual graves, 150 neatly dug graves - these are not mass graves. It’s weird to think they would have a mass murder, recruit grave diggers, and properly orient the graves toward Mecca so as to give them some semblance of a proper Muslim burial." Residents of the village Izbica, population 70, were baffled when asked about NATO’s claim of a mass grave in the area. Albanian villager Bajram Salja, on whose farm the mass grave was claimed to exist, said, "Whoever says so is lying. There were no killings here and no one has killed anyone. It is not true that there was a massacre here. There are no mass graves here. Those who say so lie." A Dutch map analyst who specializes in satellite photographs, examined NATO’s "before and after" photos of mass graves in the villages of Pusto Selo and Izbica. He concluded that in photos of Pusto Selo, a house is present in the second photo that did not appear in the first, saying, "Either the Kosovars had time between the massacres to build a house in a few nights, or the photo has been manipulated." The second photo of Izbica, he said, had "touch-up work which could only be the result of two different pictures being superimposed."
Despite the appearance of movement in the direction of a peaceful settlement, NATO remains committed to imposing an occupation of Yugoslavia, its only essential war aim. NATO’s goal, according to an official holding a "high-security post in the [German] government," is the "total collapse of Yugoslavia as a viable, industrial state," and the "military and ethnic destabilization of Yugoslavia, the last bastion of resistance in the Balkans."
Last month, a peace proposal by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was simply ignored by Western officials. The plan called for "the formation of an international peacekeeping force in Kosovo," the "return to their homes" of all refugees and "the right of Albanians of the province to total autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia." US State Department Spokesman James Rubin declared, "Nobody in the United States or any of the NATO countries envisages the United Nations Secretariat and the blue-helmeted peacekeeping unit to play any role in the peacekeeping force... It has to be a NATO core force, which for us means the NATO forces must be under the command of a NATO commander, meaning through the authority of the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe - period, full stop." US Secretary of Defense William Cohen promised, "We are not only not going to stop the bombing, we’re going to intensify the bombing."
During a recent press conference, JUL spokesman Ivan Markovic announced that the Yugoslav "national goals are expressed in the political views of our country’s political leadership. These national goals are, to recap:
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic recently declared, "We are committed to peace, to the equality of people and the equality of national communities. We will remain firmly committed to them. We are determined to defend the country and we will defend it to the end."