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TechnoratiThe Precedent Was Set In The Balkans
In April 1999, just after the United States and NATO launched their air war to punish Yugoslavia for sending troops into Kosovo, its independence-minded province, the Star Tribune published my op-ed piece under the headline "NATO action unwisely undercuts U.N."
The article warned that the well-established principles of national sovereignty, upon which the U.N. Charter and international law are based, were too important to be set aside when it suits powerful nations, no matter how well-intended. All powerful nations can protect their own sovereignty; it is smaller, weaker nations that need its protection. The article warned that U.S. and NATO aggression against Yugoslavia established a precedent that "regional super-powers" could (and would) use to invade their neighbors, notwithstanding the U.N. system.
Russia's response to Georgia's invasion of its own independence-minded province, South Ossetia, shows that Russia learned the lesson taught by the U.S./NATO precedent in Yugoslavia.
The Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia have chafed under the rule of Georgia's central government, not unlike Kosovo's uneasy relationship with the Yugoslavian central government. Most of the people of both provinces rebelled against Georgia's declaration of independence from Russia and have carried Russian passports. Many "South" Ossetians believe they have more in common with their cousins in Russia's province of "North" Ossetia than they do with Georgia -- a country with a different language and culture. Abkhazia has Islamic roots, while Georgia was one of the first Christian countries.
Americans also need to remember that the most recent crisis was triggered by the U.S.-trained and financed Georgian army's invasion of South Ossetia, which resembled nothing so much as Yugoslavia's invasion of Kosovo, which triggered U.S./NATO attacks -- but only after Yugoslavia rejected U.S. demands to permit U.S. military occupation of the country.
The Russians have done in a few days using ground troops what it took U.S. and NATO forces to accomplish from the air with 90 days of bombing, which included civilian targets, as well as the Chinese embassy.
The American people must think twice before we permit our leaders from either party to draw us back into another Cold War against what John McCain calls the "Russian Empire," which is being added to the so-called "Long War" against a nonentity called terrorism. Americans must remember that in other parts of the world, the United States is a far more dangerous "imperial power" than any threat that might come from Moscow.
After all, Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia are all on Russia's borders, not thousands of miles away on another continent, like Yugoslavia and Kosovo. And U.S. efforts to bring Georgia into NATO (which requires the United States to go to war if one of its members is attacked) is a little like Mexico being made an ally of Russia.
The inescapable fact is that the rest of the world will learn from the example set by its most powerful nation. That's true whether the example is the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib or the use of military power to attack other nations -- even for the most compelling of reasons, such as to protect human rights, or because of a threat from "weapons of mass destruction."
Peter Erlinder, a professor at William Mitchell College of Law, served as lead defense counsel in the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
© 2008 The Star Tribune
16 Comments so far
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serbian atrocities DID NOT start after the bombing, and you G. Romero, are simply talking out of your ass. do you think the serb seige of sarajevo was fun and games? maybe you would like to be one of those red-splotches that are still there on the streets of that city. do you have any idea of the serb-initiated murder and atrocity that happened in outlaying villages before the bombings or even the seige on sarajevo? serb apologists should crawl back up into the asshole they were birthed from, as your stance is pure ignorance that nearly borders on evil.
i've spoken with many a bosniak and serb. ill share a brutally representative story because im simply sick of the ignorance of people like g. romero. one bosniak, who was once a father, told how his neighbors, serbs, formed a militia in his village. one day they came to his house. they tied him up. they shot his son in front of his family. then they cut out the son's liver. they stabbed thefather with bayonets, eventually forcing him to eat a bite from the liver of his son..in front of his daughter and wife. they then raped his wife in front of him and shot her. then they raped his daughter, doused her in gasoline, and burned her alive in front of him. he begged them to kill him. they laughed. they told him they wanted him to live so he would suffer fully. they went on to slaughetr most of the bosniaks in thevillage. the father later escaped to sarajevo. all the villages he saw on the way were destroyed in similar fashion.
he got there in time to be caught in the seige. this is representative of what happened in bosnia. the point is, it was universally agreed that american bombers did recue the bosniaks in sarajevo. and everyone knows they waited too long, and came almost too late.
For a great source on the issue of Kosovo I would recommend "Strange Liberators" by Gregory Elich.
GRomero August 16th, 2008 7:31 pm
When someone atrats quoting Chomsky as a source of facts, I usually check my wallet to make sure its still there.
But your points are well made (though I think the Serbs were a bit busy before the bombing) and your last is the literal truth.
"War is ugly, uncontrollable when it starts and unpredictable. Should be a LAST resort. For defense only.
Something I hope US citizens learn FINALLY before allowing more Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq x 2, and all other military adventures"
Paul_GA August 16th, 2008 3:54 pm
Oh, those unintended consequences! They can really bite one's posterior, eh?
"This country would be SO much better off if it would return to the neutrality desired by the Founders …"
Amen brother!
Thanks for the article Lbanus. I have a tremendous respect for John Pilger's journalism, and I'm glad I can add this to my files.
Its more evidence on how propaganda is used to "manufacture consent".
Democrats have given us every war that has killed more than 10,000 Americans.
WW I (no reason for us to enter this war)
WW II (FDR set that up)
Korean War (also a set up to give the UN it's first war)
Vietnam War (they had oil, but we found it was not as much as we thought, so we left)
Say what you will about Republicans, their wars have been directed against weak sisters that result in few American casualties (relatively speaking).
Obama got the Russian war hawk Brzezinski driving his foreign policy (of course McCain has Shultz and Kissinger, so there is no real difference here). Remember, it was the Dems that got us involved in the Balkans under Clinton. We are still occupying Kosovo with a large base.
We used the Islamic extremists Brzezinsk trained up in Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets, to create conflict in the area (they attacked Muslims and blamed it on the Serbs so we could justify NATO's action to stop "genocide") The idea of offering NATO membership in such an unstable area is begging for a repeat of WW I. But then, thats what the war hawks want.
Offering NATO membership to Georgia is double lunacy.
Most liberal leaders are of the neo-malthusian variety who want to cull the herd to protect Gaia. Calling them humanists is like calling Eugenics a humane science. They like big wars, kills more people.
ezeflyer said:
"Liberals are against war. They are humanists."
Ummmmmmmmm...can anyone say Vietnam or Iraq before it was popular to be against it?
The democrats called Vietnam 'our war'. But maybe you are saying that the Democrats generally are not liberals, rather conservatives. On this I would agree with a well made point.
saffiyah said:
"Liberals have been cheering it on, too, like they did when the US invaded Yugoslavia to split Kososvo off."
Liberals are against war. They are humanists.
Right and left wing conservatives cheer for war. They are bestialists.
Well said and very true GRomero. But I doubt AdeleTheCzech is no taware or such interpretations of what occurred at this stage. The following was written by John Pilger:
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m46471&s1=h1
Under the title Don't forget Yugoslavia he reported this to-day.
The secrets of the crushing of Yugoslavia are emerging, telling us more about how the modern world is policed. The former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague, Carla Del Ponte, this year published her memoir, The Hunt: Me and War Criminals. Largely ignored in Britain, the book reveals unpalatable truths about the West's intervention in Kosovo, which has echoes in the Caucasus.
The tribunal was set up and bankrolled principally by the United States. Del Ponte's role was to investigate the crimes committed as Yugoslavia was dismembered in the 1990s. She insisted that this include NATO's 78-day bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999, which killed hundreds of people in hospitals, schools, churches, parks, and television studios and destroyed economic infrastructure. "If I am not willing to [prosecute NATO personnel]," said Del Ponte, "I must give up my mission." It was a sham. Under pressure from Washington and London, an investigation into NATO war crimes was scrapped.
Readers will recall that the justification for the NATO bombing was that the Serbs were committing "genocide" in the secessionist province of Kosovo against ethnic Albanians. David Scheffer, U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, announced that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" may have been murdered. Tony Blair invoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War." The West's heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose murderous record was set aside. The British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him anytime on his mobile phone.
With the NATO bombing over, international teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume the "holocaust." The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines." A year later, Del Ponte's tribunal announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide in Kosovo. The "holocaust" was a lie. The NATO attack had been fraudulent.
That was not all, says Del Ponte in her book: the KLA kidnapped hundreds of Serbs and transported them to Albania, where their kidneys and other body parts were removed; these were then sold for transplant in other countries. She also says there was sufficient evidence to prosecute the Kosovar Albanians for war crimes, but the investigation "was nipped in the bud" so that the tribunal's focus would be on "crimes committed by Serbia." She says the Hague judges were terrified of the Kosovar Albanians – the very people in whose name NATO had attacked Serbia.
Indeed, even as Blair the war leader was on a triumphant tour of "liberated" Kosovo, the KLA was ethnically cleansing more than 200,000 Serbs and Roma from the province. Last February the "international community," led by the U.S., recognized Kosovo, which has no formal economy and is run, in effect, by criminal gangs that traffic in drugs, contraband, and women. But it has one valuable asset: the U.S. military base Camp Bondsteel, described by the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner as "a smaller version of Guantanamo." Del Ponte, a Swiss diplomat, has been told by her own government to stop promoting her book.
Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent and multi-ethnic, if imperfect, federation that stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to dominate its "natural market" in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991, a secret deal had been struck; Germany recognized Croatia, and Yugoslavia was doomed. In Washington, the U.S. ensured that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans and the defunct NATO was reinvented as an enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo "peace" conference in France, the Serbs were told to accept occupation by NATO forces and a market economy, or be bombed into submission. It was the perfect precursor to the bloodbaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The neocons and their Zionist backers would no doubt be familiar with the gulag's leadership and the primary executioners throughout the great Stalinist reigns of terror since Bolshevick leadership was primarily their own kind. And they slaughtered more than the Nazis did too. They spilt blood like mankind had never before or since seen in torrents across the Soviet sphere.
Corruption remains so rife in the former Soviet democracies that it is beyond a joke to imperil peace in europe with reckless posturing about the Russian response to Georgian aggression against the breakaway enclaves of south Ossetia and Abkazia. The US has no moral authority to intervene anywhere, anymore. US leadership is lost. Her citizens better restrain their overgrown military. Gun slinger Bush and his buddies better back off before they really make other big hitters respond in kind. International Institutions and the Rule of Law have now been fatally undermined. NATO should be abolished as soon as possible. Abolition of all nuclear weapons worldwide must become another top priority for this generation. We can no longer wait in hope. Its just far too dangerous for mankind and other living things. Real diplomacy and the equitable sharing of resources should be possible or we perish like sheep to the slaughter.
Adele, the US armed and trained the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to fight the Serbs before NATO started the bombing. Casualties were low, 2000, with the KLA causing most of them. (See Noam Chomsy's Hegemony or Survival) for sources. Serbian atrocities started AFTER the bombing, and was a known that it will happen if NATO bombs - but did it anyway. It wanted to flex its NATO muscles in eastern Europe.
Point is - actions are evaluated by consequences, and in this case- Arming and training the KLA to commit terrorist attacks against Serbia, and then the NATO bombing campaign, led to Serbian atrocities. Think about it- if bombs are raining in on your cities, what do you think is going to happen? War is ugly, uncontrollable when it starts and unpredictable. Should be a LAST resort. For defense only.
Something I hope US citizens learn FINALLY before allowing more Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq x 2, and all other military adventures.
Oh, those unintended consequences! They can really bite one's posterior, eh?
This country would be SO much better off if it would return to the neutrality desired by the Founders ...
(I just can't get the hang of the editing feature here.) Anyway, I meant to add that U.N. help was "off the table" during the shooting war; UNSCOM was able to enter afterwards and certainly has done well maintaining the peace.
Has everyone forgotten what atrocities the Serbs were perpetrating in the Balkans during the Clinton Administration? I certainly would have preferred U.N. rather than U.S. intervention there, but Russia used its veto power in the Security Council to stand with Milosevic, and U.N. help was therefore off the table.
It doesn't make sense to me that we wring our hands over our failure to intervene and stop the Rwandan genocide, while at the same time criticizing our intervention in the Balkans. You'd think the footage of thousands of Muslim Kosovar families hiding in snowy woods in a bitter cold winter with no food, after the Serbs had driven them from their homes, would still reverberate. Yugoslavia was a put-together country, not one that arose naturally in history. I think we did the right thing there, as well as in Bosnia, considering the Serb atrocities in Srebrenica and elsewhere.
This was another use of the Pentagon of small nationalities, in this case the Georgians, against official US government enemies, the Russians. It does not take Einstein to figure all this out. This is just one more front in the US controlled NATO offensive against China and Russia. Liberals have been cheering it on, too, like they did when the US invaded Yugoslavia to split Kososvo off.
Russia must protect its national security. It learnt this from the USA with its doctrine of preemptive strikes.
Shrub Bush, Cockroach Condi (the Godmother of the Israeli massacre at Qana in 2006), and the evil UNAMERICAN NeoCons deny there is hypocrisy in supporting the independence of Kosovo, and denying the independence of South Ossetia. Surely Americans are smart enough to see through the evil NeoCon spin about this.