Listen to Democracy Now, April 12, 1999
with NOAM CHOMSKY AND EDWARD SAID ON KOSOVO
Listen to Democracy Now, October 6, 2000
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TABLE OF CONTENTS: |
"THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Slobodan Milosevic on Monday accused the United States and other Western nations of deliberately breaking up Yugoslavia, and denied knowledge of the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica." - Washington Post, Feb 18, 2002
"Yes, there were atrocities. But no, they don't measure up to the advance billing," says House intelligence chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla. Instead of 100,000 ethnic Albanian men feared murdered by rampaging Serbs, officials now estimate that about 10,000 were killed. 600,000 ethnic Albanians were not ...buried in mass graves ... as President Clinton told a veterans group in May...they are healthy. " - USA Today, 07/02/99
Not only did the forced removal of civilians result from the NATO bombing, but administration claims of mass killings--made to rally popular support for the war--turn out to have been exaggerated. Clinton defended the intervention on the grounds that the Yugoslavs had slaughtered "tens of thousands." Secretary of Defense William Cohen termed it a "horrific slaughter." .... The numbers we now have tend to disprove those claims. To date, according to U.N. reports, forensic specialists working under U.N. auspices have exhumed 2,108 bodies. It is far from certain that all of these victims perished as a result of Yugoslav atrocities; some may have been combatants, others may have been civilians caught in the cross-fire between the Yugoslav army and the KLA. Still others may have been civilians killed by NATO bombs. In the end, the number of civilians believed killed by the Yugoslav army in Kosovo is certain to have been far less than the Clinton administration and NATO claimed. ... Ironically, the U.S.-led NATO bombing precipitated the very humanitarian crisis the administration claimed it was intervening to stop. - Washingon Post, 3/26/00, B1, "We Were Suckers For the KLA"
"War crimes investigators have found nothing in a Kosovo mine shaft where hundreds of bodies were rumored to be hidden..." - Reuters (US), October 13, 1999
"I have been reading the data from UN said Perez Pujol, Director of the Forensic Anatomical Institute of Cartagena. "And they began with 44,000 deaths. Then they lowered it to 22,000. And now they're going with 11,000. I look forward to seeing what the final count will really be." ... "They told us that we were going to the worst zone of Kosovo. That we should prepare ourselves to perform more than 2000 autopsies. That we would have to work until the end of November. The result is very different. We only found 187..." - El Pais, 23 septiembre 1999
...despite the presence of U.S. and NATO peacekeepers, once Yugoslav forces left Kosovo the KLA began a new campaign of terror, this time targeting the province's Serbian and Gypsy populations. This campaign of ethnic cleansing continues unabated. Albright's assertion March 8 in a speech in Prague that the KLA "disbanded" is a fiction. Politically, the KLA leadership constitutes the backbone of Kosovo's de facto government. ... In a disturbing replay of the events leading to the U.S. intervention, the KLA is attempting to provoke a violent Serb response in the hope that NATO again will be drawn into war, and that this time NATO will do the KLA the favor of finishing off the Milosevic regime. - Washingon Post, 3/26/00, B1, "We Were Suckers For the KLA"
...one crucial elemenent seems lacking, according to trial observers: the "smoking gun" that can link the events in Kosovo directly to orders from Milosevic. ... "I never got any order, nor did I hear about any order or plan to expel Albanians," said Markovic, one of the highest-ranking witnesses who prosecutors had hoped would directly implicate Milosevic. ... Milosovic arranged large transfers of funds to help pay for the Kosovo operation, which he referred to as an "anti-terrorist campaign" against guerillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA. ... ...he has denied any plan to "ethnically cleanse" the province, saying ethnic Albanians who left were fleeing NATO bombardment or KLA conscription. - Washington Post, 7/27/02 A18, "At Milosevic's Trial, No 'Smoking Gun'"
The United States and its European allies have made it clear that they want Mr. Milosevic ousted, and they have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to get it done.
The money from the West is going to most of the institutions that the government attacks for receiving it - sometimes in direct aid, sometimes in indirect aid like computers and broadcasting equipment, and sometimes in suitcases of cash carried across the border between Yugoslavia and Hungary or Serbia and Montenegro.
As for the opinion polls that show Mr. Kostunica in the lead, the information minister, Goran Matic, charges that the polls are orchestrated and manipulated by the Americans and the Central Intelligence Agency, who help pay for them.
Even before the Kosovo war, the United States was spending up to $10 million a year to back opposition parties, independent news media and other institutions opposed to Mr. Milosevic. The war itself cost billions of dollars. This fiscal year, through September, the administration is spending $25 million to support Serbian "democratization," with an unknown amount of money spent covertly to help the failed rallies of last year, which did not bring down Mr. Milosevic, or to influence the current election. For next year, the administration is requesting $41.5 million in open aid to Serbian democratization....
Just today, in the state-run newspaper Politika, a long article used public information from the United States - including Congressional testimony and Web site material - to show that the United States is financing the opposition. " 'Independent,' 'nongovernmental' and 'democratic' are the standard phrases the C.I.A. uses to describe organizations established all over the world to destroy the governments and the societies that the U.S. government wants to colonize and control," the paper wrote.
Socialist Yugoslavia resists corporate America: First we bomb, then take over media and influence elections, and finally complete neo-liberalism take-over with the IMF/World Bank. - Listen to Wav file, Democracy Now
Listen to Democracy Now, October 6, 2000