June 10, 2000 International Tribunal for U.S./NATO War Crimes in Yugoslavia

Summation

By Ramsey Clark

Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark traveled to Yugoslavia twice during the bombing to stand in solidarity with that people against the NATO attack. He is a founder of the International Action Center and known worldwide for his activity both inside and outside the United States in defense of human rights and against U.S. military aggression and economic sanctions.

Let me remind everyone of some words from our spiritual host today, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for whom this high school of hopes and dreams is named. They are words that were very important to him, spoken in 1967 at the height of American anguish at the war in Vietnam, before the fever broke, and exactly one day short of one year before he was murdered for saying what he believed.

They are words of enormous courage and patriotism–if that's not an unpopular concept–or at least patriotism as I see it. And they are the most important words for our time. They are not chest-beating words like "give me liberty or give me death," which means, "Do what I say or I'll kill you." They are not pompous words like "Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead." They are not even modest words like "Nuts!" the words uttered by General McAuliffe during the Battle of the Bulge when he was asked to surrender.

What Dr. King said was, "The greatest of purveyor of violence on earth is my own country."

The incredible thing is that we don't all feel that constantly every day, because it is perhaps the most abundant truth of our time. Brian Becker mentioned the $300 billion that the Pentagon will spend on arms next year. That's a small part of it actually, but that happens to exceed the combined military budgets of the rest of the countries on the United Nations Security Council combined. One of the new "great evils" that we are seeking to make enemies of--the incredible people of the People's Republic of China--spend only a tenth of that, $34 billion, on their military.

But our arms include the vast majority of all weapons of mass destruction that exist on the planet. They include far and away the most sophisticated and deadly delivery systems. They include the capacity for ecocide. They could easily render Mother Earth a moonscape with literally only two launches from Trident 2 nuclear submarines. These can cover a hemisphere–half the world–and strike in one launch 408 centers of human population. That’s 816 if two are launched, with warheads ten times more powerful than the one that incinerated Nagasaki.

What utter madness.

This morning I talked about the long, hard, and often deadly roads that led so many who came here. Everyone today has gotten a glimpse of those roads, from the speakers and from the films and from the documents that you've been given. And the scenery wasn't pretty. It was hard to take.

How could we let this happen? What terrible failure of human will and courage could permit it to happen, could prevent us from tearing the place down? I'm not going to summarize the evidence. I don't think it's necessary. You have heard about as much of human violence and misery in one day as anyone ought to have to hear in a lifetime.

The case is what Roman law calls res ipsa loquitur anyway. It's obvious. It speaks for itself. Who needs to say anything about it? If you can't see it and understand that simple point by now, there's no hope. In fact it begs the question, "Isn't understanding the obvious more important than an investigation of the obscure?"

Let's just listen to what NATO says. They say it's true that they didn't intercede to save a single person being assaulted. They said that. It's obvious. Look at their technique. Until there was a cease-fire they never set foot in Kosovo or in Yugoslavia, did they? They just bombed from a distance. They bombed defenseless people. They killed thousands directly by violence and tens of thousands more for who knows how long, indirectly, by the variety of violence that they used.

It should be clear beyond question that the war crimes committed are almost beyond counting. I mentioned earlier how pathetic it seems that there's such an uproar about Amnesty International's report of four acts of violence against civilians. I saw hundreds of such acts on my two trips to Yugoslavia, one at the beginning in late March and one toward the end in late May and early June, hundreds of different direct assaults on civilians. There was no other purpose.

These were not mistakes. Nearly all of the bombing was that way.

We have to remember that the long struggle between for freedom is between remembering and forgetting. We have to remember. When the war was going on NATO was telling us how many armored vehicles it hit. If you were reading the general media about three months ago you read that it was overestimated by about tenfold. They weren't hitting military targets. They were trying to break the country down.

You can't break the spirit of the people of Yugoslavia, but you can sure make life miserable for them. Anyone who saw fifty thousand people out in Republic Square, asking to be bombed, knows that.

I remember Jahli Square in Iran in the last days of the Shah where the people wore burial shrouds and finally they were accommodated by Huey helicopters manufactured in the United States with .50-caliber machine guns in the bays that killed about 2,500 on "Black Friday," August of 1978.

The people of Yugoslavia, they stood on the bridges and the bridges were bombed. You can't break their spirit but you can set them back so far. You can make it so difficult for the future.

You ought to look at the 19 counts in the indictment for what they are. They are 19 ways of killing. How many ways of killing are there? Each one is deadly in its own design, some immediate and ghastly, some slow, torturous and wasting, from radiation, illness without medicine, malnutrition, chemical or other pollution in the environment, for your children and your grand-children and generations in the future. NATO used high-tech killing methods for 78 days, without the perpetrators of the crimes suffering casualties. If we can't bring that to a stop, what hope is there?

Some of NATO’s targets are hardest to forget. The sorrows of the many families we saw who had lost loved ones of course. I remember on the first trip in the first days of the bombing, coming into Novi Sad and seeing a huge apartment complex just half smashed down, and the rest unlivable. How many people were in there? How do you mistake an apartment complex just south of the Hungarian border.

We hit Hungary a few time too of course. We're not quite as accurate as we claim to be--just as we hit Bulgaria, Macedonia. Kosovo was devastated.

You remember, day after day pictures of U.S. bombing of Pristina, bombing the heart of Pristina, proudly announcing it and the flames coming up for the world to see on CNN. And then do we remember when the occupation came and NATO went into Pristina they looked at horror at the heart of Pristina and said, "Look what the Serbs have done to Pristina!"

What fools they take us for and make of us. Have we no memory of their boasting about their bombing? I remember meeting the Chancellor of the University of Pristina, about the fifth or sixth day of the bombing, and already three or four important buildings to higher education in Kosovo had been destroyed there. Can that be anything but the basest of crimes? It was murder, mass murder by war machines that the American citizens pay for.

In the very south, that is the last big city, going down toward Bulgaria and Greece on the main highway, the international highway that comes from Athens, all the trucks go through Nis. First the beautiful Greek Consul-General, kind of the gateway for Greek people coming up from the south all the way into Germany and Scandinavia even, 60 percent of European Greek trade coming up that highway.

And there's their consulate, virtually destroyed by bombing. I think of the Chinese Consulate overlooking the Saba river and the piles of flowers that the people of Yugoslavia brought there to show their love and sorrow at what had been done.

I remember the hospital in the south at Nis, a huge complex with a courtyard, and it looked like a city in WWII where urban warfare had gone on. All the buildings were pockmarked. We saw five unexploded cluster bombs still sticking in the ground or laying out there. A hospital yard, hit with cluster bombs designed to rip apart anybody within hundreds of yards of the place. It’s a bad rap for mother but they call them the "mother bomb." That’s the huge metal cylinder that breaks open and unleashes--depending on the model--four hundred or more hand grenade-type cluster bombs that fragment with razor sharp pieces of metal.

We do that. We did that. We cover it up. Two of Amnesty International’s complaints were about strafing of refugees. NATO forces strafed refugees a lot more than twice. The very interesting and important story appeared in the press in the United States this Thursday [June 8, 2000,] and it came apparently from pressures generated by the revelations of the slaughter of Koreans fifty years ago in late June early July of 1950 at a place called No Gun Rhi. And then there was a big dispute about whether it really happened after that.

I say revelations, but a lot of people have known about this for a long time. Then there was an effort to make it appear that this was the only offense during the whole Korean war. U.S. leveled Pyongyang, but they make treat this like it was nothing. Everything was focussed on this one bridge incident. And now they claim it didn't happen. On Thursday an Air Force colonel released a memo that said the army had been asking the air force for military support to strafe columns of refugees.

That happened in the summer of 1950, 50 years ago. It's just coming out. How many more are there in there like that?

If we don’t reveal the truth, if we don't stand on the truth, if we don't spread the truth every place we possibly can, does anyone really believe that it won't really happen again in 50 years in five years and in five months and on and on?

Look at the power and presence of our arms everywhere. The largest naval armada since WWII is in the Gulf right now, it's U.S., and nobody in the Gulf wants it there. Certainly the Moslem populations don't want it there for good reason, religious and human, and yet there it is, because who defies that kind of power?

Now I think the truth of what happened is clear. I think the important first step in our process here in this tribunal is to have our judges declare the truth as they see it. All the toil and sacrifice of thousands of people have presented it and gathered it over the last fifteen months and brought it here.

But justice is truth in action. Without action there can be nothing but sorrow. And now we begin the new road. It's a steeper harder road.

The hardest thing that I had to say in Yugoslavia was on an occasion when I spoke at the University of Belgrade. I felt it was a cruel thing to say but I had to say it. I said "you're enduring bombing now that seems unbearable, but it will be worse when the bombing ends."

How can you tell people something like that? But you have to tell the truth. Vietnam struggled against the French and the Americans for thirty years, from 1945 to 1975, and prevailed. They drove them out. Sanctions remained ion Vietnam for twenty years from 1975 to 1995. We paid no attention to it. And there can be no question that those sanctions caused more human misery and caused more human deaths than thirty years of war.

People who had nothing but a pair of pants and maybe some shoes and a rifle and a sack of ammunition, a little bowl for rice, lived under the ground for months and months and were gone from home for years and never gave up.

And yet soon after the war ended many Vietnamese were taking to the sea in open boats because it seemed hopeless at home.

Look at Iraq--nine years of sanctions. Malnutrition. Twenty-five percent of the infants born there today at weights of less than two kilos, which means that you're lucky if you make it, or maybe you're unlucky if you make it, depending on how you define luck. Because if you do make it, that is if you live, the probability that vital organs won't develop, the probability of mental retardation and physical damage, of short lives, is very high. British doctors started declaring Iraq a "generation of dwarfed people" more than five years ago, and we keep on with sanctions and more bombing.

The imperative need is for us to act, to organize and act. There will be no justice, however well known the truth is, unless we act on it. And we have to define carefully what must be done. NATO won't replace the United States as the greatest purveyor of violence on earth, but it will make our capacity to purvey violence much greater.

One thing we notice is we like for soldiers from other countries to be the ones that have to stand on the ground out there and perhaps get caught between conflicts that we created in Kosovo and elsewhere, the rising violence.

Let's switch just for a moment to see how it proceeds. We all know how deeply profound we were and are about what happened in Rwanda. Hundreds of thousands of people killed. What was behind it? How does it happen that the governments of Uganda and Rwanda and Burundi are all governments that we supported? Yesterday we read in the papers that 1.7 million people have been killed in eastern Zaire or eastern Congo as it's called now in the last two years. That's three times the number of people killed in Rwanda, where we didn't intercede, where we created the conflict very much as we created the conflicts throughout the divisions of Yugoslavia and in Kosovo.

The rate of violence in all those regions is higher than its ever been, and growing higher. And the impoverishment of the people is the deepest it's been in modern times and growing deeper. And it's because we know how to coordinate these nineteen techniques for killing, to dominate.

It's imperative first that we find the truth, that can set us free, but that we realize that the truth won't do it by itself. It will take our vision and courage and compassion and energy and perseverance for the rest of our lives and for those who come after. There is no more important business for humanity.

So we ask our tribunal to find the truth.. And then we ask all of us to act to abolish NATO now, to provide reparations for all the peoples of Yugoslavia. I would start with the poorest and most deprived and discriminated against always, that's where my hear is and it will never be elsewhere. That means you start with the poorest, but you neglect no one. There is no other way to live together. We need new concepts of federation, not segregation.

Whoever decided to use the word "Balkanize" to describe political fragmentation that will create perpetual war never imagined in her wildest dreams how the Balkans would be Balkanized by NATO into the tiniest little compartments. The masters of apartheid never had such dreams themselves, that you could break a country and hold it in so many fragments and set it against each other so you'd never have to worry about it from outside.

We ask the court to weigh the evidence and decide it truly, and we ask all of us to enlist for the duration in the struggle to overcome the powers that are impoverishing the great majorities of the people of the planet, and overwhelmingly the peoples with beautiful; darker skin. Thank you.

back to schedule and presentations