Back in 1999 few people seemed to notice what had happened to NATO. Under the leadership of President Clinton and Tony Blair, it converted itself from a very successful defensive alliance into an organisation with the self-awarded power of pro active interventions around the world on behalf of an undefined “international community”.
Its first target was Serbia which had been in the sights of the USA since the early nineties.
It was with a feeling of doom-laden deja-vu that I recently heard on the news that Croatian and Albanian football fans at the Euro competition had been chanting “Kill the Serbs!” There is an old Austrian saying “Im Balkan stirbt niemand” – Nobody dies in the Balkans (not of natural causes, that is). In 1999 people certainly were dying in Kosovo in fighting between the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) and Yugoslav federal forces.
Statistics from before the war suggested that an Albanian in Kosovo was about as likely to meet a violent death as an ordinary inhabitant of Washington DC at the same period whereas a Serb was several times more likely to come to an untimely end. Nonetheless this was adduced by the Americans as evidence of genocide by the Serbs. They also helped the KLA provide fake evidence of a mass execution at Racak. Bodies from fighting in the area were assembled to look like victims of a firing squad. The Western media accepted the tale eagerly without question. New Labour applied all its considerable powers of media manipulation to the project.
The massacre that never was constituted sufficient evidence for America-led NATO to present the ultimatum of Rambouillet which demanded free access for NATO troops to all of Yugoslavia for an unspecified period and a commitment to the eventual independence of Kosovo – or else they would bomb – and so they did. It is interesting to compare statements of the different leaders of fragmented Yugoslavia – some of whom were supported by the West as suitable promoters of civilised European values. Just have a guess from their words which leaders received the benison of American and Western approval, as well as arms and technical support.
Hellbound and Down 