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The trial of Radovan Karadzic in The Hague, which has been stalled by the former Bosnian Serb leader's refusal to show up in court, is likely to be used by the West to justify NATO's current policy of "humanitarian intervention."

At a time when the NATO-led operation in Afghanistan is becoming increasingly unpopular in countries which have committed troops to this theatre of war, Western officials are likely to propagate the generally accepted notion - created by Western governments to cover up the real, geo-political motives for their involvement in the Yugoslav civil war - that it was NATO intervention which ended the Bosnian war.....

However, as the case of Iraq has shown, the West has no compunction in fabricating a story for its own self-gain.

The Yugoslav civil war was a conflict which could have been averted had it not been for the actions of the US, German and certain other European governments who, according to Lord Peter Carrington, chairman of the Geneva-based conference on Yugoslavia, "made it sure there was going to be a conflict" in that region.

You can read the whole of Marcus Papadopolous’s brilliant Morning Star article on how the west deliberately destroyed socialist Yugoslavia, here.

With the Iraq war widely discredited and the Afghanistan war increasingly unpopular, it really will, as I argued here, be ‘game over’ for the serial warmongers, once people acknowledge the truth about what went on in the Balkans in the 1990s.

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This piece of mine appears in the Morning Star.

Opposition to the tyranny of the neoliberal new world order is mounting by the day.

In the last few days, we've seen London's financial heartland brought to a standstill by anti-globalisation protesters and large demonstrations against NATO in Strasbourg and Kehl. And, two weeks ago in Belgrade, peace campaigners and anti-imperialists from all over the world met for a two-day conference to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the brutal, unlawful NATO aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The event was organised by the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals, an association set up in 2000 to promote the ideals of peace and co-operation, the equality of nations, states and peoples, the respect for social, economic, civil and other human rights and to fight all forms of domination.

The forum, which is a full member of the general assembly of the World Peace Council, supports the peaceful and just resolution of all disputes, the observance of international law and in particular respect for the UN Charter and the right of all countries, big or small, to sovereignty over their own natural wealth.
Speakers at the conference came from all over the world, including from countries which had taken part in the NATO aggression of 10 years ago.

From Britain, former Labour MP Alice Mahon, one of only 11 MPs to vote against the war in 1999, related how she had visited Yugoslavia during the bombing and saw the results of NATO's "criminal act" at the Zastava car factory, which was destroyed by 20 cruise missiles. What has emerged over the past 10 years confirms that the war against Yugoslavia lacked both legal and moral legitimacy. It set a bad example which has been followed already in Afghanistan and Iraq," she said.

Belgian anti-imperialist writer and film-maker Michel Collon also drew connections between the attack on Yugoslavia and later US-led acts of aggression.
"Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq - they are not three separate wars but all the same war," he declared. While Yugoslavia was isolated in 1999, Collon stressed the positive global developments since then and in particular events in south America, where Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has helped to inspire other countries to stand up to US imperialism.

Professor Velko Vlkanov, president of the Bulgarian Anti-Fascist Union, reminded delegates that the attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 was not only an infringement of the UN Charter but also a breach of NATO's own rules, which state that the alliance can only take military action if a member state is attacked. He urged Serbia to launch a legal action against the states who committed the aggression to the UN International Court.

From the US, former attorney-general Ramsey Clark, founder of the International Action Centre, passionately denounced NATO's actions 10 years ago and the lies that were told to justify the war.

Yugoslavia had to be destroyed because it was the last economy in central-south Europe which remained uncolonised by global capital. We can see what NATO's real objectives were by analysing its targets in the 1999 bombing campaign.
Revealingly, state-owned companies rather than military sites were specifically targeted by the world's richest nations. NATO only destroyed 14 tanks, but 372 industrial facilities were hit, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed.

Also present were speakers from Cuba, Palestine, Russia, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Portugal, France and from Serbia itself.

Zivadin Jovanovic, the much respected former Yugoslav foreign minister and president of the Belgrade Forum said that NATO's 1999 assault was aimed at subduing the role of the UN and reworking international law in line with self-proclaimed "American interests" worldwide.

Sadly, many on the left fell hook, line and sinker for the lie that the attack on Yugoslavia was motivated out of "humanitarian" concern for Kosovan Albanians.
By believing the pro-war propaganda pumped out incessantly by the Western media, they failed to see the significance of NATO's actions and why it was imperative for all progressives and anti-imperialists to unite in opposition to the war.

NATO's attack was designed to send out a very clear warning to all independent-minded countries which resisted the neoliberal model of globalisation - comply or die.

"The aggression against Yugoslavia was an unveiled and grim message to all the states worldwide that they could experience the same destiny unless they sided with US policy," said Belgrade Forum director Vladislav Jovanovic.

"It did not take long for the threat contained in that message to become a reality. Afghanistan was invaded first, with an extorted blessing of the UN security council, then came Iraq as well, without the security council's approval, but with the assistance of colossal lies. The next potential target is Iran."

In concluding his speech, Vladislav Jovanovic said that the 10th anniversary of the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia should help the "dawn to replace darkness" and allow the "force of law to restore its might and prevail over the law of force."

As we survey the death and destruction caused by 10 years of US-sponsored aggression from Belgrade to Kabul and Baghdad, we must indeed all hope that this dark chapter in world history is at last coming to an end.

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This article of mine appears in the New Statesman.

Imagine if, ten years ago, your country had been bombed in contravention of international law for 78 days and nights, leading to the death or injury of more than 1,500 people, and that the reasons for the attack had subsequently been exposed as fraudulent. You would reasonably expect your government to mark the anniversary with a series of official events, and to issue a strong denunciation of those who launched the aggression.

But in Serbia, the pro-western ruling elite seems more concerned about keeping the US embassy onside than with commemorating the Nato bombing of ten years ago in an appropriate fashion.

The biggest event to mark the anniversary was an international conference, organised by the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals, a non-governmental organisation. Delegates from around the world attended, including the former US attorney general Ramsey Clark and the Labour ex-MP Alice Mahon. Yet Deputy Prime Minister Ivica Dacic was the only participant from the Serbian government. His speech was one of the meeting’s most low-key.

On 24 March, a major anti-Nato rally was held in Belgrade’s main square, Trg Republike. There were speakers from the US, Germany and Russia – but no input from the Serbian government. The most it came up with was a commemorative sitting of the cabinet, at which Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic declared that the attack of ten years ago was “illegal, contrary to international law, without a decision by the United Nations Security Council”. Those looking for a more passionate denunciation of Nato actions from governing circles have been disappointed.

The reality is that Serbia’s ruling elite are seeking to take the country closer to the Nato fold. Serbia is to open its first diplomatic and military mission at Nato headquarters in Brussels this summer, and military manoeuvres involving soldiers from several Nato states will take place in Serbia this autumn.

Such moves fly in the face of public opinion. “There is an overwhelming majority of those among the Serbs who believe Serbia’s entering a Nato pact would have been a bigger disgrace than if Jacqueline Kennedy had married Lee Harvey Oswald,” Matija Beckovic, one of Serbia’s leading poets, told an anti-Nato gathering late last month.

Meanwhile, pro-American politicians in Serbia continue to blame the conflict of the late 1990s on the country itself and on Slobodan Milosevic, then leader of the rump Yugoslavia. But a growing weight of evidence indicates that the 1999 war had little to do with Milosevic, and everything to do with the US’s economic and military hegemonic ambitions in the Balkans.

Lord Gilbert, the UK’s defence minister in 1999, has admitted that “the terms put to Milosevic at Rambouillet [the international conference preceding the war] were absolutely intolerable . . . it was quite deliberate”. In an affidavit to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Colonel John Crosland, the UK’s military attaché in Belgrade from 1996-99, stated that the US had decided on regime change in Serbia and had decided to use the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army to achieve that end. Last month, a documentary on Serbian state television showed that the deaths of 40 people in Racak in January 1999 resulted from a legitimate anti-KLA police action and were only declared a “massacre” by the US Kosovo Verification mission to justify Nato actions.

“The war was not Serbia’s fault, nor the fault of Slobodan Milosevic,” Aleksandar Vucic, deputy leader of the Serbian Progressive Party, told me. “It was the fault of those who did the bombing.” Such views may not go down well in western corridors of power, but they undoubtedly chime with what most ordinary Serbs think.

With the Serbian economy in free fall and pro-western factions likely to pay the price in elections expected before the end of this year, it is probable that future anniversaries of the Nato bombing will receive more enthusiastic support from governing circles.

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Sorry for the lack of posts over the past few days but I have been busy taking part in and attending the various events in Serbia to mark the 10th anniversary of the illegal NATO aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Over the next month or so I’ll be posting plenty on this brutal war and its significance.

To kick off our series of posts on 1999- here’s my 2006 article from The Morning Star on how the road to Baghdad began in Belgrade - and how it won’t end there until supporters of US sponsored ‘humanitarian interventions’ start to see the bigger picture.

In the words of E.M. Forster: 'Only connect'.


FROM BELGRADE TO BAGHDAD AND BEYOND

Divide and conquer has been the classic Imperial strategy since Roman times.

Today’s Empire builders are no different. The particular genius of the modern neo-conservative project has been the use of the theory of ‘humanitarian intervention’, to co-opt liberal-left support for a centuries old project of conquest.

In 1990s it was the Serbs- and their “extreme nationalist” leader Slobodan Milosevic who posed the threat to peace and civilised values. In 2001 it was Mullah Omar and the Islamic hardliners of the Taliban. In 2003 it was the turn of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, with its deadly arsenal of WMD. Now its Iran’s President Ahmadenijad’s alleged attempts to develop nuclear weapons which need to be countered.

Each time a sizeable section of the liberal-left has supported, not those attacked or threatened, but the aggressors. You might have thought that by now, the pattern would be clear to all. But the enduring success of the New World Order’s propaganda machine can be seen by the reaction of many on the left to Milosevic’s death.

Milosevic, a life-long socialist, was a man all true progressives should have mourned. A man steeped in partisan culture, (both his parents fought the Nazis in World War Two), he never once made a racist speech: the famous Kosovo Polje address of 1989 which his critics claimed whipped up ancient ethnic hatreds, was in fact a statement of support for multi-ethnic, socialist Yugoslavia. Far from being a rabid warmonger, the late Yugoslav leader was, in the words of Lord Owen ‘the only leader who consistently supported peace’ and ‘a man to whom any form of racism is anathema’.

The dismemberment of Yugoslavia was initiated not by Milosevic, but by the German decision to prematurely recognise the breakaway republics of Slovenia and Croatia, against all the norms of international law. And war in Bosnia would have been avoided too had US Ambassador Warren Zimmerman not personally intervened at the eleventh hour to sabotage the 1992 Lisbon Agreement which provided for the peaceful division of the republic. ‘If you don’t like it, why sign it’ Zimmerman told the hard-line Bosnian separatist leader Alija Izetbegovic, thereby lighting the touch paper to a conflict which would claim over 90,000 lives. Even after the 1995 Dayton agreement which ended the war in Bosnia, the Imperial appetite was not satiated.

Milosevic’s rump Yugoslavia had to be destroyed too, by providing weapons and training for a separatist terror group, the Kosovan Liberation Army. When the inevitable security clampdown from Belgrade came, the West was at hand to issue the ultimatum, producing a document at the Rambouillet Peace Conference, which as Defence Minister Lord Gilbert has conceded, was deliberately designed to be rejected by the Yugoslav delegation.

Why was it all done? Milosevic’s Yugoslavia was targeted not for ‘humanitarian’ reasons as many still believe, but simply because it got in the way. ‘In post Cold War Europe, no place remained for a large, independent minded socialist state that resisted globalisation', the words not of a left-wing conspiracy theorist, but George Kenney, an official at the Yugoslav office of the US State Department.

There's no doubting who has benefited from the wars which the West is happy to pin on Milosevic. One militarily and economically strong independent nation, has been replaced by a series of weak and divided World Bank/IMF/NATO protectorates. Western capital has unhindered access to raw materials and markets throughout the region, while in Kosovo, Camp Bondsteel, the U.S.'s biggest from scratch military base since the Vietnam war, jealously guards the route of the $1.3bn Trans Balkan AMBO pipeline, guaranteeing Western control of Caspian oil supplies.

It’s worth remembering that the very same people who clamoured most loudly for action against Milosevic in the 1990s, were those who were at the forefront of the propaganda war against Iraq a few years later. And today, the very same hawks are trying to convince us of the necessity of ‘strong action’ against Iran.

Among the members of the executive of the Balkan Action Committee, who lobbied for US involvement on the side of Izetbegovic in Bosnia, and then for full scale war against Milosevic’s Yugoslavia in 1999, are three names that will need no introduction: Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. ‘It‘s either take action now, or lose the option of taking action’ was Perle’s recent comment on Iran: in addition to signing (along with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) a notorious letter to President Clinton in 1998 calling for a ‘comprehensive political and military strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime’, he also acted as adviser to Izetbegovic’s delegation at Dayton.

It’s time those who supported the military actions against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and the current 'strong' line on Iran, realised that the biggest danger to peace did not come from Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein, or, now, from President Ahmadinejad, but from the serial warmongers who threatened them. The road to Baghdad began in the Balkans. But it won’t end there, unless the liberal-left supporters of U.S. sponsored “humanitarian” interventions start to see the bigger picture.

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