Reminders of why USAgov and NATO must be dismantled

[Zenaan Harkness]

http://russia-insider.com/en/kosovo-evil-little-war-almost-all-us-candidates-liked/ri13583
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Kosovo: An Evil Little War (Almost) All US Candidates Liked
Nebojsa Malic
Originally appeared at RT (
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/337034-kosovo-us-candidates-war/ )

Although the 2016 presidential election is still in the primaries
phase, contenders have already brought up America’s failed foreign
wars. Hillary Clinton is taking flak over Libya, and Donald Trump has
irked the GOP by bringing up Iraq. But what of Kosovo?

The US-led NATO operation that began on March 24, 1999 was launched
under the “responsibility to protect” doctrine asserted by President
Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. For 78 days, NATO
targeted what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – which
later split into Serbia and Montenegro – over alleged atrocities
against ethnic Albanians in the southern province of Kosovo.
Yugoslavia was accused of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” as bombs
rained on bridges, trains, hospitals, homes, the power grid and even
refugee convoys.

NATO’s actions directly violated the UN Charter (articles 53 and 103),
its own charter, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and the 1980 Vienna
Convention on the Law of Treaties. The war was a crime against peace,
pure and simple.

Though overwhelmed, Yugoslavia did not surrender; the June 1999
armistice only allowed NATO to occupy Kosovo under UN peacekeeping
authority, granted by Resolution 1244 – which the Alliance has been
violating ever since.

US Secretary of State at the time, Madeleine Albright, was considered
the most outspoken champion of the “Kosovo War.” She is now a vocal
supporter of candidate Clinton, condemning (
https://www.rt.com/usa/331671-clinton-steinem-albright-backlash/ )
women who don’t vote for her to a “special place in Hell.”

Clinton visited the renegade province in October 2012, as the outgoing
Secretary of State. She stood with the ‘Kosovan’ government leaders –
once considered terrorists, before receiving US backing – and
proclaimed unequivocal US support for Kosovo’s independence,
proclaimed four years prior.

“For me, my family and my fellow Americans this is more than a foreign
policy issue, it is personal,” Clinton said. Given the Kosovo
Albanians had renamed a major street in their capital ‘Bill Clinton
Avenue’ and erected a massive gilded monument to Hillary’s husband,
her comments were hardly a surprise.

She is unlikely to be condemned for those remarks by her rival for the
Democratic presidential nomination, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
While arguing that Congress should have a say in authorizing the
intervention, Sanders entirely bought into the mainstream narrative
about the conflict, seeing it as a case of the evil Serbian “dictator”
Slobodan Milosevic oppressing the unarmed ethnic Albanians. He saw
“supporting the NATO airstrikes on Serbia as justified on humanitarian
grounds” ( http://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-nato/#kosovo-crisis
).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8S19u91Dfs

One Sanders aide, Jeremy Brecher, resigned in May 1999 (
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/bernie-sanders-troubling-history-supporting-us-military-violence-abroad
) arguing against the intervention as it unfolded, since the “goal of
US policy is not to save the Kosovars from ongoing destruction.”

Trouble is there was no “destruction.” Contrary to NATO claims of
100,000 or more Albanians purportedly massacred by the Serbs, postwar
investigators found fewer than 5,000 deaths – 1,500 of which happened
after NATO occupied the province and the Albanian pogroms began.

Western media, eager to preserve the narrative of noble NATO defeating
the evil Serbs, dismissed the terror as “revenge killings.” NATO
troops thus looked on as their Albanian protégés terrorized, torched,
bombed and pillaged across the province for years, forcing some
250,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma, and other groups into exile.

After George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, his administration
adopted the Clinton-era agenda for the Balkans, including backing an
independent Albanian state in Kosovo. None of the Republicans, save
2012 contender Ron Paul, have criticized the Kosovo War since.

Billionaire businessman Donald Trump actually has been critical –
though back in 1999, long before he became the Republican front-runner
and the bane of the GOP establishment. In October that year, Trump was
a guest on Larry King’s CNN show, criticizing (
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/10/08/trump.transcript/ )
the Clintons’ handling of the Kosovo War after a fashion.

    “But look at what we’ve done to that land and to those people and
the deaths that we’ve caused,” Trump told King. “They bombed the hell
out of a country, out of a whole area, everyone is fleeing in every
different way, and nobody knows what’s happening, and the deaths are
going on by the thousands.”

The problem with Trump, then as now, is that he is maddeningly vague.
So, these remarks could be interpreted as referring to the terror
going on at that very moment – the persecution of non-Albanians under
NATO’s approving eye – or the exodus of Albanians earlier that year,
during the NATO bombing. Only Trump would know which, and he hasn’t
offered a clarification.

Though he has the most delegates and leads in the national polls for
the Republican nomination, the GOP establishment is furious with Trump
because he dared call (
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/332416-trump-iraq-us-elections/ ) George W.
Bush a liar and describe the invasion of Iraq as a “big fat mistake.”
According to the British historian Kate Hudson (
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/14/usa.kosovo ), however,
the 2003 invasion was just a continuation of the “pattern of
aggression,” following the precedent set with Kosovo.

    #MarchPogrom of Serbs in #Kosovo happened under UN & NATO
administration. Crime without punishment for 11th year.
pic.twitter.com/sy9c4GlndW
    — Anti-Serbism Monitor (@AntiSerbism)
    March 17, 2015 ( https://twitter.com/AntiSerbism/status/577732537344221184 )

Last week Secretary of State John Kerry reluctantly branded (
https://www.rt.com/usa/335971-isis-genocide-iraq-syria/ ) the actions
of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in Iraq and Syria
“genocidal” towards the Christians, Yazidis, Shiites and other groups.
He cited examples of how IS destroyed churches, cemeteries and
monuments, and murdered people simply because of who they were.

It was March 17, eight years to the day since 50,000 Albanians began a
three-day pogrom in Kosovo, doing the very same things – while their
activists in the US were raising funds for the very same John Kerry,
as he ran for president as the Democratic candidate.
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http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/karadjic-told-me-i-saved-serbs-genocide-god-knows-we-are-right/ri13574
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Karadjic Told Me: 'I Saved Serbs From Genocide. God Knows We Are Right'
Personal reflections on a Serb leader who was sentenced to 40 years in
prison for crimes against humanity
Daria Aslamova (Komsomolskay Pravda)

Photo: Radovan Karadjic and Daria Aslamova, 1993
http://russia-insider.com/sites/insider/files/lfkf.jpg

Translated by Julia Rakhmetova and Rhod Mackenzie

The author is a veteran war correspondent who reported from numerous
hot spots throughout the world

This man gave me my first professional tape recorder (his own). With
this man I drank wine at night in the town of Pale near Sarajevo in
March, 1993, during the Bosnian War, with him reading me his poems in
Serbian. A poet and psychiatrist, the Serbian politician Radovan
Karadjic was  sentenced ( http://www.kp.ru/daily/26508.4/3377436/ ) to
40 years' imprisonment by a duplicitous International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for ‘crimes against humanity’ (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity ).

They even blamed him for ‘genocide (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide ) against Bosnian Muslims (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosniaks )’ in the town of Srebrenica
when he had nothing to do with it. He was a politician, not a general.
(By the way, when the ‘world community’ refers to the massacre of
Muslim men in Srebrenica, it forgets that it was in reprisal for the
murder of Serbian villagers in neighboring towns and villages).

There was a cruel civil war taking place in Bosnia back then, which
began with shootings at a Serbian wedding party in Sarajevo. Bosnian
Muslims got help from the West and the Muslim world, but no one helped
the Serbs. Even Russia, though making loud statements, refused to
supply arms.

The Bosnian Muslims received $2 billion (!) to purchase arms over the
3 years of the war, and 4,500 Al-Qaeda jihadists came to the country
thanks to the US, including Osama Ben Laden. They cut off Serbs’ heads
and threw them like cabbages into a basket. We have shocking
photographs http://www.kp.ru/share/i/4/1084796/big.png (not
recommended for people under 18 and sensitive adults) of those
murders. The murderers are still alive and recruiting new young
terrorists around the world, including for ISIS.  When arrested, they
were provided with new passports. And now for that interview with
Karadjic.

    "My job was great”, - he said. “Thousands of Serbs were liberated
and avoided genocide. Our biggest mistake was poor propaganda. The
world is against us because we were proud and didn’t want to be
humiliated by making excuses. We let this happen, and now the world
considers Serbs evil incarnate.

    Yes, it’s bad for us. But as a psychiatrist, I can say that the
law that applies to an individual, such as ‘stay alone and you will
become mature’, also applies to a nation. Forced isolation will break
him down if he is spiritually weak, or he will rise above it, if he is
worth it. Now the Serbs are alone but this will bring them spiritual
growth and wisdom. God knows we are in the right.”

Sometimes it seems to me that he’s talking about us Russians.
"