war crimes
Conspiracy: The Planning and Preparation for War
By Pat Chin, International Action Center
Welcome to the "Conspiracy: The Planning and Preparation for War" panel.
We are fortunate to have with us today, several very knowledgeable speakers who will analyze different aspects of the U.S.-led NATO war against Yugoslavia.
So that we can accommodate as many people as possible following the presentations, please try and keep your remarks to 2-3 minutes.
My name is Pat Chin and I will be chairing this panel.
Here is some historical information that was studiously ignored by the big business media in their "cleansed" coverage of the brutal US/NATO war against Yugoslavia.
The devastating breakup of what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was instigated by the Clinton White House, in collaboration with Germany, and was part of a ruthless conspiracy to grab territory, markets and resources.
This was launched on November 5, 1990 when Congress passed the Clinton-backed Foreign Appropriations Law 101-513. This new law denied aid, loans and credits to any republic of the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia that did not follow Washington's dictates.
As amply documented in the book "NATO in The Balkans," which I urge everyone to obtain, the new law--like the Rambouillet Accords--was a death warrant. So deadly was one provision that a CIA report "predicted a bloody civil war," wrote author Sara Flounders who is with us today.
"A section of Law...suddenly and without previous warning cut off all aid, credits, and loans from the U.S. to Yugoslavia within six months.
"The law also demanded separate elections in each of the six republics that made up Yugoslavia, requiring State Department approval of election procedures and results before aid to the separate republics would be resumed."
The passage of this law was meant to destabilize Yugoslavia through economic strangulation. And it worked.
Even after the federation was broken up, the U.S. caused a UN Security Council vote in 1992 that imposed a sanctions blockade against what was then left of the former Yugoslavia--that is, on Serbia and Montenegro.
The Clinton-backed maneuver on Capitol Hill and in the UN was the classic colonial tactic of divide and rule.
NATO started bombing Yugoslavia March 24 after the government refused to sign the Rambouillet Accords, a document of surrender cooked up by the U.S. Appendix B made demands that no sovereign country could be expected to accept. In fact, the document was planned for rejection--that was the desired outcome.
The whole Rambouillet process was closed to any negotiation. It was a total sham. Rambouillet, in fact called for, among other things, the total occupation of Yugoslavia by NATO with the full cost to be borne by the Yugoslav government. The imperialists were saying, "Give us your country or we’ll destroy it."
Another part of the conspiracy to crush Yugoslavia for the purpose of capitalist expansion involved the manipulation of refugees.
Images of ethnic Albanian displaced persons streaming across the border out of Kosovo--their numbers greatly inflated--were used by the big-business media in a calculated bid to justify and win broad support for the bombing of Yugoslavia.
The plight of the refugees was also used to obscure the real crime taking place in the region--that is, the savage NATO aggression against that sovereign country.
Not mentioned was the fact that the refugee "crisis" was in fact created by NATO and that most people were forced from Kosovo after the bombing started.
And not all the refugees--most of whom were forced from the province after NATO bombs destroyed their homes and livelihoods-- were ethnic Albanians.
A fact finding report issued by the International Strategic Studies Association calculated that at least one-third of the refugees appeared "to be fleeing further into Serbia to avoid the Kosovo Liberation Army."
NATO clearly needed vivid images of huge numbers of displaced persons heading south and that is why it bombed on April 14 a convoy of Albanians who were traveling back north to their homes in Kosovo. Sixty-five people were slaughtered in the attack and scores wounded.
One month later, NATO again killed 87 ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo border town of Korisa.
The deliberate targeting of returning Kosovo Albanians and those who did not leave the province, was meant to chill any undercutting of its scheme to use fleeing refugees to justify the criminal attack on Yugoslavia.
According to NATO and the White House, the Albanians were leaving Kosovo because of the Yugoslav government's policy of alleged ethnic cleansing, rather than because of well documented KLA terror and the NATO onslaught.
Also not mentioned under the "plight of the refugees" are the 200,000 Serbs who were brutally ethnically cleansed from the Krajina region of Croatia in 1995, and the 14,000 who were slaughtered by NATO-backed Croatian forces after the Congress passed Law 101-513.
Like the Serbs, there are other groups of refugees who have not received such favorable attention from the U.S. and this reflects Washington’s total hypocrisy about protecting human rights.
In the early 1990s, for example, when thousands of Haitians ran from a bloodbath in their country following a CIA-backed military coup against the progressive government there, they were turned back on the high seas by the U.S. Coast Guard, or herded in concentration-camp like facilities at U.S.-occupied Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
But those citizens running from Socialist Cuba were encouraged to do so and given permanent residency once here.
Africans, however, aren’t that lucky. The continent has some 7.3 million refugees according to UN figures.
An article in the May 9 New York Times documented the fact that even though Africa has the largest population of refugees, the UN had spent $1.23 per day per person on ethnic Albanian refugee-victims of the NATO war and only 11 cents per person in Africa.
In addition, while some camps in Africa have only one doctor per 100,00 refugees, the Macedonia camps had as many as one doctor per 700 people--higher than in some parts of Los Angeles.
African camps hold up to 500,000 displaced persons. Six thousand die each day from cholera and other public health diseases. In Macedonia, the largest camp held 33,000 people and there were no reported deaths from public health emergencies such as an epidemic or starvation.
On July 27, the UN High Commission for refugees complained to the Security Council that for this year it had received just $127 million of its $302 million dollar budget for African refugees. That compares with $225.7 million received this year for Kosovo refugees.
The U.S. government feigns sympathy for refugees only when it suits their economic interests.
Commission of Inquiry
c/o International Action Center
39 West 14th Street, Room 206
New York, NY 10011
email: iacenter@iacenter.org
http://www.iacenter.org
phone: 212 633-6646
fax: 212 633-2889
