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This excellent letter, from our friend and regular commenter Neil Craig, appears in the Morning Star.

During the former attorney general's testimony to the Iraq inquiry the word "precedent" was used 16 times, overwhelmingly in regard to the precedent established by bombing Yugoslavia.

This was said to have been justified on the "new legal theory" that "a reasonable case could be made - I'm sorry, there was a reasonable case," to quote this eminent legal authority's testimony, that it was lawful to bomb people.

The interesting thing is that, whatever we may suspect about the honesty of the case made for WMD in Iraq, we know for an absolute fact that the case for the Yugoslav war - that Milosevic was engaged in genocide - was not only untrue but a deliberate lie. Like Iraq, Kosovo was a war undertaken without UN authority - and we never even attempted to get authority.

The real precedent provided by Kosovo, as Goldsmith said, is that "simply it is enough to say there is a reasonable case," however dishonestly, and that you can get away with murder. Mass murder.

Whatever whitewash we see at the Iraq inquiry, the case that Blair and his supporters are guilty of war crimes is undeniable. Indeed in Kosovo we saw the NATO-armed KLA, reappointed as NATO police, engaging in the ethnic cleansing of 350,000 people carried out under NATO command authority.

The NATO-funded war crimes commission has charged many Serbs largely on the grounds that they were part of a "joint criminal conspiracy." It can hardly now be denied that Blair, his supporters and at least his entire party organisation, were part of a joint criminal conspiracy to commit war crimes - and probably twice.

Neil Craig
Glasgow

The importance of the Yugoslavia ‘precedent’ cannot be underestimated.
As I argued here, and elsewhere, the road to Baghdad began in the Balkans, and, as Neil Craig says, the fact that Blair got away scot-free with an illegal and deceitful war in 1999, only emboldened him to do it again in 2003.

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This piece of mine appears in The Guardian.

On the subject of OFH, I was disappointed to see the show's prequel, 'Rock and Chips', receive a panning by most tv critics. I thought it was rather good. How about you?

ONLY FOOLS AND HORSES: A 'triffic' hit in Serbia.
Unlikely as it may seem, Del Boy and the rest of the Trotters have achieved cult status in Serbia.
Neil Clark.

Prince Lazar. Miloš Obilic. Prince Mihailo Obrenovic III. To this list of Serbian national heroes must be added another, more unlikely name: Derek Trotter.

The BBC sitcom Only Fools and Horses, which returned to our screens last night in the shape of a one-off prequel, Rock and Chips, has been sold to countries around the world. But it is in Serbia where Del Boy has achieved genuine cult status.

I first experienced the ­phenomenon on a visit to ­Belgrade in the late 1990s. The first question I was asked after saying I was from Britain was whether I was a fan of Del Boy. The second was whether I'd ever met David Jason.

During Nato's attack on ­Yugoslavia in 1999, Clare Short defended the bombing of ­Serbian state television by claiming it was a "source of propaganda". But when I was there all it seemed to be transmitting were the escapades of Trotters ­Independent Trading.

Today there are Serbian Facebook appreciation sites ­devoted to Mucke, the Serbo-Croat name for Only Fools and Horses, which translated means "suspicious job" or "shady business". In the ­Skadarlija district of Belgrade you can dine at Mucke, which claims to be the world's only restaurant devoted to the ­series. ­Naturally, Del Boy's ­favourite pina colada cocktail is also on offer.

In the kiosks on Knez ­Mihailova, the city's main ­boulevard, you can not only buy Only Fools and Horses DVDs, but "Dell Boy" [sic] badges, inscribed with some of his ­famous catchphrases. I bought one there last summer that read "This time next year, we'll be millioners."

Serbs who visit Britain for the first time are keen to hit the Trotter trail. "When I went to London my host asked me what I wanted to see first. ­Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, or Big Ben? I said I wanted to go to Peckham," Vesna Pesic, a businesswoman from Belgrade tells me.

So why is the programme, loveable as it is, particularly popular in Serbia?

"The life of Del Boy and ­Rodney is very similar to life here. They always have some crazy ideas to make money. They always get themselves in some ridiculous situations," says Svetlana Zecevic, an ­officer in the Serbian Ministry of Finance, and a huge fan of the show. As Del Boy might say, lovely jubbly.

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This article of mine, on anti-democratic developments in Serbia, appears in the New Statesman

Imagine a country where the self-styled democrats threaten press freedom and where “anti-democratic" forces try to defend it. Such an Orwellian state of affairs exists in Serbia, where a draconian new media law from the Democratic Party-led government has been attacked not only by the political opposition, but by national and international human rights groups.

Under the law, media outlets and journalists can be fined for offences including publication of what is deemed to be false or libellous information. Editors face fines of up to €25,000 - fearsome enough were this to be imposed in the UK, but a colossal sum in Serbia, where salaries are about a fifth of the size. The law suspends citizens' right to set up publications and introduces a registration system for media outlets.

The government claims the law will introduce "order into the chaotic media", but opponents say it has been rushed through in order to prevent the press from criticising Serbia's ruling elite.

“The adopted changes abolish all domestic and European standards of the freedom of the media," says Vladimir Vodinelic, a Belgrade professor of law. The head of the OSCE Serbia mission, Hans Ola Urstad, warns that they may lead to "self-censorship and the closure" of news outlets.

The prime movers behind the law are the small but influential party GI7 Plus, which threatened to leave the governing coalition if the law was not passed. G17 was one of the "pro-democracy" organisations supported by the US's National Endowment for Democracy in its push to topple Slobodan Milosevic's regime in the 1990s. That yesterday's "democratic" opposition is now acting like an authoritarian group is an irony not lost on Serbs.

“In the 1990s I wrote many articles attacking Milosevic and the government," says Dragan Milosavljevic, a journalist. “It is much harder to criticise the democratic government today."

When a restrictive media law was introduced in Yugoslavia in 1998, as the country faced the prospect of Nato airstrikes, there was widespread condemnation from western governments. Will the same condemnation be offered again? We shouldn't hold our breath.

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Svetlana reports:

Foreign ministers of the 57-nation Organization of The Islamic Conference (OIC) did not adopt the original text, written by Albanians, of the resolution pushed by Saudi Arabia — American proxy in the Middle East — which urged all the members of the international Muslim organization to immediately recognize independence of southern Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija.

What good news.

The modus operandi of the neocons and their ‘liberal’ imperalist allies is the same as all imperialists down the ages: to divide and conquer. In the Balkans that meant pitting Orthodox Christians against Muslims, Catholics against Orthodox Christians- Serbs against Croats, Kosovan Albanians against Serbs and so forth. And while Serbs, Kosovan Albanians, Bosnian Muslims and Croats were fighting each other-in conflicts instigated from without- the imperialists came, set up military bases and stole their land and resources.

It’s good to see that the vast majority of Islamic countries aren’t falling for it.

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What do you think of the senior US politician who said of Israel:

"We should go to Tel Aviv and we should have a Japanese-German style occupation of that country"

What a disgusting Judeophobic, fascist scumbag, eh?

Except the politician in question, US Vice President Joe Biden didn’t say those things about Israel, but about Serbia. As I highlighted in a Guardian article here, Serb-bashing is one of the last acceptable forms of racism in the world today. If Biden had made his comments about having a 'Japanese-German style occupation' of Israel, or indeed any other country, he would not only not be US Vice-President, he’d probably be in prison for race-hate crimes. But he said them about Serbia, and so he gets to be appointed the second most powerful man in the most powerful country in the world.

Today, Biden visits Serbia- to try to bully the government there to accept an ‘independent’ (ie US vassal state) Kosovo and to support the failed US puppet state of Bosnia. Let’s hope this loathsome racist gets the reception he deserves.
(Svetlana has more details on the protests planned by Serbs at the racist's visit.)

UPDATE: I have amended this post due to not being able to find 100% authentication of other anti-Serb quotes ascribed to Biden. If anyone can send in links to the primary sources where Biden made the alleged comments: "Serbs are illiterate degenerates, baby killers, butchers and rapists" and "all Serbs should be put in Nazi-style concentration camps", please let me know and I will reinsert the quotes and amend the piece again. Many thanks. In any case, Biden's disgusting remarks about a 'Japanese-German style occupation' of Serbia are damning enough, especially given the horrors that the Serbs experienced during the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia in World War Two.

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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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Former Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini recently admitted that NATO aggression against Serbia (March 24 — June 10, 1999) had nothing to do with the alleged humanitarian concerns — NATO bombed Serbia for three months because the United States and Britain wanted to have a military base on its territory.

Dini said Serbian officials would have signed the ultimatum issued by the West at the conference in Rambouillet, if it had excluded only one word.

- The problem was only one adjective. It would have been sufficient for Serbia if the document excluded the word "military" and left only the "international presence" in Kosovo, but the U.S. insisted on NATO getting an opportunity to enter the province - Dini explained.

You can read more on this story over at Svetlana’s brilliant new anti-war website De(Construct).net

Next time you read a commentator in the MSM talk about NATO’s ‘humanitarian’ intervention in Kosovo, just email them the link.

It’s time to set the ‘official’ record straight.

POINT OF CLARIFICATION: The country which NATO illegally bombed in 1999 was of course called the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and not Serbia, which did not exist as a sovereign state at that time. But I've kept 'Serbia' in the account above because it was the word used by the Lamberto Dini.

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Three cheers to the following countries:

Algeria, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Chile, China, Congo, Costa Rica, Cuba, Cyprus, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Fiji, Greece, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, Honduras, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Lesotho, Liechtenstein, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mexico, Montenegro, Myanmar, Namibia, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Philippines, Romania, Russian Federation, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Syria, Timor-Leste, United Republic of Tanzania, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.


All of them voted for the Serbian Resolution at the UN that the International Court of Justice rule on the [il]legality of unilateral secession of its southern Kosovo and Metohija province.

Against the Serbian initiative were, erm, six countries:
Albania, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and United States of America.
(the 'international community' gets smaller by the day doesn't it?!)

The quote of the day in the General Assembly's debate came from Dumisani Kumalo, South Africa's Ambassador to the UN, who in response to the US Ambassador said:

"Perhaps 48 countries did recognize Kosovo independence, but it may be worth mentioning that the other 144 did not."

The most significant country of the list of countries supporting Serbia is Indonesia-the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country. The neocons and their liberal imperialist allies like to use their championing of Kosovan independence as a show that they’re not anti-Muslim. It’s great to see that Islamic countries aren’t falling for it.

And by the same measure, those Serbs who (mistakenly) think that Islam is their enemy(and not the neocons) should also look very carefully at the list of countries who supported them.

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Back in 2002, in an article for The Spectator entitled ‘Colonial Wars‘, I wrote:

On the very day that KLA hardliner Hashim Thaci (having discarded his Balaclava and combat fatigues for a designer suit) was being warmly embraced by Mrs Albright for signing the Rambouillet 'peace' treaty, Europol was submitting a report for all European interior ministers on the connection between Thaci's organisation and the Albanian drug gangs that were supplying Western Europe with more than 75 per cent of its heroin.

Now we know that the Mrs Albright’s ‘warm embrace’ to the KLA’s Mr Thaci wasn‘t all to do with the achievement of US foreign policy goals in the Balkans...

One further thought:
I've heard of film stars sleeping with directors in order to get a starring role, but I think this is the first time I've heard of anyone sleeping with a politician in order to get a new state.

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