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'Climate Upheaval': Wildfires Kill Dozens Across Mediterranean
At least nine nations in northern Africa and southern Europe are struggling to contain blazes. Meanwhile, policymakers are still allowing corporate interests to pour more fossil fuels onto the raging fire of climate chaos.
Jul 26, 2023
Algeria, Croatia, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia, and Turkey.
What do these nine countries have in common? All of them are currently battling deadly infernos made worse by the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.
And yet, governments worldwide continue to greenlight new coal, oil, and gas production—exacerbating planet-heating pollution and ensuring that heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather disasters will increase in frequency, duration, and intensity.
Algeria and Tunisia
In Algeria, roughly 8,000 firefighters on Tuesday struggled to control conflagrations burning across 15 provinces in the country's drought-stricken north, where temperatures reached 122°F. The fires, which prompted the evacuation of more than 1,500 people, have killed at least 34 individuals so far.
"Witnesses described fleeing walls of flames that raged 'like a blowtorch,' destroying homes and coastal resorts and turning vast forest areas into blackened wastelands," The Guardian reported.
Amid heavy winds, two border crossings with neighboring Tunisia have been closed, as authorities there grapple with fires burning in the northwestern region of Tabarka.
Croatia
In Croatia, firefighters on Tuesday worked to contain blazes spreading just south of Dubrovnik, a major tourist destination. The task has been made more difficult by fierce winds in the area, which are keeping firefighting aircraft grounded.
France
In France, hundreds of firefighters were mobilized Tuesday in an attempt to control wildfires near the Nice international airport and on the outskirts of Arles.
Greece
In Greece, more than 20,000 people have been evacuated in recent days from homes and hotels as wildfires rage on the island of Rhodes.
At least three people have died so far, including two pilots whose firefighting plane crashed on Tuesday.
Italy
Italy has been pummeled by a combination of storms in the north, which killed at least seven people on Tuesday, and wildfires in the south, which have also led to multiple deaths.
"While the north was drenched, the heatwave across the south persisted, with temperatures of 47.6°C (117°F) recorded in the eastern Sicilian city of Catania on Monday," The Guardian reported. "The bodies of two people in [their] 70s were found in a house destroyed by the flames, while an 88-year-old woman was found near the Sicilian city of Palermo."
"Italian firefighters said they tackled nearly 1,400 fires between Sunday and Tuesday, including 650 in Sicily and 390 in Calabria, the southern mainland region where a bedridden 98-year-old man was killed as fire consumed his home," the newspaper noted.
On social media, Sicily's civil protection minister Nello Musumeci wrote: "We are experiencing in Italy one of the most complicated days in recent decades—rainstorms, tornadoes, and giant hail in the north, and scorching heat and devastating fires in the center and south. The climate upheaval that has hit our country demands of us all... a change of attitude."
Portugal
In Portugal, hundreds of firefighters scrambled Tuesday to extinguish blazes near Cascais, another popular tourist destination. The country is already hard-hit by drought, and wind gusts are accelerating the spread of flames.
Spain
A fast-moving wildfire in the heart of the Spanish island of Gran Canaria prompted authorities to order evacuations, close roads, and deploy dozens of firefighters and several helicopters on Tuesday.
Turkey
In Turkey, officials on Tuesday evacuated a hospital and a dozen homes in the coastal town of Kemer, where firefighters continued to battle flames.
Europe is the fastest-warming continent on the planet, which has already endured 1.3°C of temperature rise since the late 1800s. July has seen the hottest day and week in recorded history and is on pace to be the hottest month ever. 2023 will likely go down as the hottest year ever, though the potential record is not expected to last long because newly arrived El Niño conditions are projected to make 2024 even hotter.
Last year's brutal heatwaves killed more than 61,000 people in Europe alone. Existing policies put the world on track for up to 2.9°C of temperature rise by the end of the century, prompting United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to call business-as-usual a civilizational "death sentence."
"Most people still don't know what peril they are in," climate scientist Peter Kalmus tweeted last week. "This will be the coolest summer for the rest of your life, and that shouldn't be just a meme—it should be actually terrifying. The only path out of this heat nightmare is to end fossil fuels ASAP."
"Keep in mind that climate catastrophe is caused by those who run the fossil fuel industry, who have lied and blocked action for decades," he added. "It will get far, far worse until we stop them. We can stop them, but we need to get angry, take risks, and do it!"
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Croatian President Warns Sending NATO Tanks to Ukraine Only 'Prolongs the War'
"I hope that some talks are going on, otherwise we are inching toward the Third World War," said President Zoran Milanovic.
Jan 30, 2023
Croatian President Zoran Milanovic became the latest critic to condemn the decision of Western countries, including the United States, to send dozens of tanks to Ukraine to help fight the war against Russia, warning that continued military escalation will not help bring the conflict to an end.
"I am against sending any lethal arms there," Milanovic said at a press conference. "It prolongs the war."
The Biden administration last week announced that it will send more than 30 Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine, while German officials confirmed they will supply Ukrainian soldiers with 14 Leopard 2 tanks. Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, and the United Kingdom have already dispatched tanks to the country, which was invaded nearly a year ago by Russian forces.
Conservative British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said last week that the continued military support for Ukraine will "ensure Ukraine wins this war and secures a lasting peace," but peace advocates have long said that countries including the U.S. must prioritize promoting diplomacy between Ukraine and Russia.
"What is the goal of this war? A war against a nuclear power that is at war in another country? Is there a conventional way to defeat such a country?"
The Stop the War Coalition in the U.K. announced an upcoming demonstration last week following the announcement by the U.S. and Germany, saying, "Arming Ukraine and sending tanks is a step further away from negotiation."
In October, progressives in the U.S. House said in a letter to Biden that "the alternative to diplomacy is protracted war" before distancing themselves from the statement under pressure. The White House has resisted calls to aggressively push for peaceful negotiations even from Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark Milley.
Milanovic's most recent comments follow his accusation earlier this month that the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO) are fighting a "proxy war against Russia through Ukraine."
"What is the goal of this war?" Milanovic asked on Monday. "A war against a nuclear power that is at war in another country? Is there a conventional way to defeat such a country?"
He also predicted that European countries will "pay the price" for becoming militarily involved in the way and that Europe will ultimately pour more resources into the effort to end the war through military might.
"America pays the least," he said. "Not a single American tank will go to Ukraine in a year. Only German tanks will be sent there."
Last week, he expressed hope in a television interview that negotiations between Ukraine and Russia are ongoing.
"Supplies of Western tanks to Ukraine will extend the war. If America and Russia don't agree, and that's not in sight so far, the war won't be over," he told N1. "I hope that some talks are going on, otherwise we are inching toward the Third World War."
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'People Here Will Start Dying': Dire Warnings as Stranded Refugees Freeze in Hellish Conditions Near Bosnia-Croatia Border
The conditions of the refugee camp are being decried as "not for human beings" as officials demanded immediate relief for those languishing there.
Dec 03, 2019
Human rights defenders and aid organizations are issuing dire warnings this week after witnessing the hellish conditions of an encampment of stranded refugees in the freezing forests of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
An envoy of officials on Tuesday visited the camp known as Vucjak--situated approximately five miles from the nearby border with Croatia in a forest that has grown atop a former landfill--where they saw hundreds of migrants huddled in leaking and drafty tents as temperatures in the region have dropped to freezing or below.
"Vucjak must be shut down today," said Dunja Mijatovic, commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe and a member of the delegation. "Otherwise the people here will start dying."
Mijatovic said that as a citizen of Bosnia, she was "ashamed" of how the refugees were being treated, decried the conditions of the refugee camp as "not for human beings," and called for immediate relief for those languishing there.
According to Reuters:
Bosnia is struggling to deal with an upsurge in migrant numbers since Croatia, Hungary and Slovenia closed their borders against undocumented immigration. The migrants hope to get to wealthy western Europe and find work there.
Some lacked warm clothes and were wrapped in blankets, some traipsed through the snow and mud in flip-flops to collect firewood. One man brushed snow from the roof of his tent to prevent it collapsing.
Al-Jazeera also reported Tuesday from the Vucjak camp:
An 24-year-old Afghan man identified as Mauloddin, who set off from his war-torn homeland more than three years ago to seek refuge in Europe, told Reuters, "You see... it's very cold weather, (there is) no sleeping, no food."
"People are people," he added, "not animals."
Rezwanullay Niazy, also a 24-year-old Afghan, said: "We spent all our money... We came close to Europe, and now they closed the Croatian and Slovenian borders. When we go there they strike us, they hit us."
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Killing for Credibility: A Look Back at the 1999 NATO Air War on Serbia
Twenty years later, Operation Allied force has been all but forgotten in the United States. It should not be.
Mar 24, 2019
This month marks the 20th anniversary of Operation Allied Force, NATO's 78-day air war against Yugoslavia. It was a war waged as much against Serbian civilians--hundreds of whom perished--as it was against Slobodan Milosevic's forces, and it was a campaign of breathtaking hypocrisy and selective outrage. More than anything, it was a war that by President Bill Clinton's own admission was fought for the sake of NATO's credibility.
One Man's Terrorist...
Our story begins not in the war-torn Balkans of the 1990s but rather in the howling wilderness of Afghanistan at the end of the 1980s as defeated Soviet invaders withdrew from a decade of guerrilla warfare into the twilight of a once-mighty empire. The United States, which had provided arms, funding and training for the mujahideen fighters who had so bravely resisted the Soviet occupation, stopped supporting the jihadis as soon as the last Red Army units rolled across the Hairatan Bridge and back into the USSR. Afghanistan descended deeper into civil war.
The popular narrative posits that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, Washington's former mujahideen allies, turned on the West after the US stationed hundreds of thousands of infidel troops in Saudi Arabia--home to two out of three of Sunni Islam's holiest sites--during Operation Desert Shield in 1990. Since then, the story goes, the relationship between the jihadists and their former benefactors has been one of enmity, characterized by sporadic terror attacks and fierce US retribution. The real story, however, is something altogether different.
From 1992 to 1995, the Pentagon flew thousands of al-Qaeda mujahideen, often accompanied by US Special Forces, from Central Asia to Europe to reinforce Bosnian Muslims as they fought Serbs to gain their independence from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The Clinton administration armed and trained these fighters in flagrant violation of United Nations accords; weapons purchased by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran were secretly shipped to the jihadists via Croatia, which netted a hefty profit from each transaction. The official Dutch inquiry into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which thousands of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were slaughtered by Bosnian Serb and Serbian paramilitary forces, concluded that the United States was "very closely involved" in these arms transfers.
When the Bosnian war ended in 1995 the United States was faced with the problem of thousands of Islamist warriors on European soil. Many of them joined the burgeoning Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which mainly consisted of ethnic Albanian Kosovars from what was still southwestern Yugoslavia. Emboldened by the success of the Slovenes, Croats, Macedonians and Bosnians who had won their independence from Belgrade as Yugoslavia literally balkanized, KLA fighters began to violently expel as many non-Albanians from Kosovo as they could. Roma, Jews, Turks and, above all, Serbs were all victims of Albanian ethnic cleansing.
The United States was initially very honest in its assessment of the KLA. Robert Gelbard, the US special envoy to Bosnia, called it "without any question a terrorist group." KLA backers allegedly included Osama bin Laden and other Islamic radicals; the group largely bankrolled its activities by trafficking heroin and sex slaves. The State Department accordingly added the KLA to its list of terrorist organizations in 1998.
However, despite all its nastiness the KLA endeared itself to Washington by fighting the defiant Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic. By this time Yugoslavia, once composed of eight nominally autonomous republics, had been reduced by years of bloody civil war to a rump of Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. To Serbs, the dominant ethnic group in what remained of the country, Kosovo is regarded as the very birthplace of their nation. Belgrade wasn't about to let it go without a fight and everyone knew it, especially the Clinton administration. Clinton's hypocrisy was immediately evident; when Chechnya fought for its independence from Moscow and Russian forces committed horrific atrocities in response, the American president called the war an internal Russian affair and barely criticized Russian President Boris Yeltsin. But when Milosevic resorted to brute force in an attempt to prevent Yugoslavia from further fracturing, he soon found himself a marked man.
Although NATO called the KLA "the main initiator of the violence" in Kosovo and blasted "what appears to be a deliberate campaign of provocation" against the Serbs, the Clinton administration was nevertheless determined to attack the Milosevic regime. US intelligence confirmed that the KLA was indeed provoking harsh retaliatory strikes by Serb forces in a bid to draw the United States and NATO into the conflict. President Clinton, however, apparently wasn't listening. The NATO powers, led by the United States, issued Milosevic an ultimatum they knew he could never accept: allow NATO to occupy all of Kosovo and have free reign in Serbia as well. Assistant US Secretary of State James Rubin later admitted that "publicly we had to make clear we were seeking an agreement but privately we knew the chances of the Serbs agreeing were quite small."
Wagging the Dog?
In 1997 the film "Wag the Dog" debuted to rave reviews. The dark comedy concerns a Washington, DC spin doctor and a Hollywood producer who fabricate a fictional war in Albania to distract American voters from a presidential sex scandal. Many observers couldn't help but draw parallels between the film and the real-life events of 1998-99, which included the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton's impeachment and a very real war brewing in the Balkans. As in "Wag the Dog," there were exaggerated or completely fabricated tales of atrocities, and as in the film the US and NATO powers tried to sell their war as a humanitarian intervention. An attack on Yugoslavia, we were told, was needed to avert Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanians.
There were two main problems with this. First, there was no Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars until after NATO began mercilessly bombing Yugoslavia. The German government issued several reports confirming this. One, from October 1998, reads, in part:
The violent actions of the Yugoslav military and police since February 1998 were aimed at separatist activities and are no proof of a persecution of the whole Albanian ethnic group in Kosovo or a part of it. What was involved in the Yugoslav violent actions and excesses since February 1998 was a selective forcible action against the military underground movement (especially the KLA)... A state program or persecution aimed at the whole ethnic group of Albanians exists neither now nor earlier.
Subsequent German government reports issued through the winter of 1999 tell a similar story. "Events since February and March 1998 do not evidence a persecution program based on Albanian ethnicity," stated one report released exactly one month before the NATO bombing started. "The measures taken by the armed Serbian forces are in the first instance directed toward combatting the KLA and its supposed adherents and supporters."
While Serbs certainly did commit atrocities (especially after the ferocious NATO air campaign began), these were often greatly exaggerated by the Clinton administration and the US corporate mainstream media. Clinton claimed--and the media dutifully parroted--that 600,000 Albanians were "trapped within Kosovo... lacking shelter, short of food, afraid to go home or buried in mass graves." This was completely false. US diplomat David Scheffer claimed that "225,000 ethnic Albanian men... are missing, presumed dead." Again, a total fabrication. The FBI, International War Crimes Tribunal and global forensics experts flocked to Kosovo in droves after the NATO bombs stopped falling; the total number of victims they found was around 1 percent of the figure claimed by the United States.
However, once NATO attacked, the Serb response was predictably furious. Shockingly, NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark declared that the ensuing Serbian atrocities against the Albanian Kosovar population had been "fully anticipated" and were apparently of little concern to Washington. Not only did NATO and the KLA provoke a war with Yugoslavia, they did so knowing that many innocent civilians would be killed, maimed or displaced by the certain and severe reprisals carried out by enraged Serb forces. Michael McGwire, a former top NATO planner, acknowledged that "to describe the bombing as a humanitarian intervention is really grotesque."
Bloody Hypocrites
The other big problem with the US claiming it was attacking Yugoslavia on humanitarian grounds was that the Clinton administration had recently allowed--and was at the time allowing--far worse humanitarian catastrophes to rage without American intervention. More than 800,000 men, women and children were slaughtered while Clinton and other world leaders stood idly by during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The US also courted the medievally brutal Taliban regime in hopes of achieving stability in Afghanistan and with an eye toward building a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. Clinton also did nothing to stop Russian forces from viciously crushing nationalist uprisings in the Caucuses, where Chechen rebels were fighting for their independence much the same as Albanian Kosovars were fighting the Serbs.
Colombia, the Western Hemisphere's leading recipient of US military and economic aid, was waging a fierce, decades-long campaign of terror against leftist insurgents and long-suffering indigenous peoples. Despite horrific brutality and pervasive human rights violations, US aid to Bogota increased year after year. In Turkey, not only did Clinton do nothing to prevent government forces from committing widespread atrocities against Kurdish separatists, the administration positively encouraged its NATO ally with billions of dollars in loans and arms sales. Saudi Arabia, home to the most repressive fundamentalist regime this side of Afghanistan, was--and remains--a favored US ally despite having one of the world's worst human rights records. The list goes on and on.
Much closer to the conflict at hand, the United States tacitly approved the largest ethnic cleansing campaign in Europe since the Holocaust when as many as 200,000 Serbs were forcibly expelled from the Krajina region of Croatia by that country's US-trained military during Operation Storm in August 1995. Krajina Serbs had purged the region of its Croat minority four years earlier in their own ethnic cleansing campaign; now it was the Serbs' turn to be on the receiving end of the horror. Croatian forces stormed through Krajina, shelling towns and slaughtering innocent civilians. The sick and the elderly who couldn't escape were executed or burned alive in their homes as Croatian soldiers machine-gunned convoys of fleeing refugees.
"Painful for the Serbs"
Washington's selective indignation at Serb crimes both real and imagined is utterly inexcusable when held up to the horrific and seemingly indiscriminate atrocities committed during the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia. The prominent Australian journalist John Pilger noted that "in the attack on Serbia, 2 percent of NATO's missiles hit military targets, the rest hit hospitals, schools, factories, churches and broadcast studios." There is little doubt that US and allied warplanes and missiles were targeting the Serbian people as much as, or even more than, Serb forces. The bombing knocked out electricity in 70 percent of the country as well as much of its water supply.
NATO warplanes also deliberately bombed a building containing the headquarters of Serbian state television and radio in the middle of densely populated central Belgrade. The April 23, 1999 attack occurred without warning while 200 employees were at work in the building. Among the 16 people killed were a makeup artist, a cameraman, a program director, an editor and three security guards. There is no doubt that the attack was meant to demoralize the Serbian people. There is also no doubt that those who ordered the bombing knew exactly what outcome to expect: a NATO planning document viewed by Bill Clinton, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac forecast as many as 350 deaths in the event of such an attack, with as many as 250 of the victims expected to be innocent civilians living in nearby apartments.
Allied commanders wanted to fight a "zero casualty war" in Yugoslavia. As in zero casualties for NATO forces, not the people they were bombing. "This will be painful for the Serbs," Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon sadistically predicted. It sure was. NATO warplanes flew sorties at 15,000 feet (4,500 meters), a safe height for the pilots. But this decreased accuracy and increased civilian casualties on the ground. One attack on central Belgrade mistakenly hit Dragisa Misovic hospital with a laser-guided "precision" bomb, obliterating an intensive care unit and destroying a children's ward while wounding several pregnant women who had the misfortune of being in labor at the time of the attack. Dragana Krstic, age 23, was recovering from cancer surgery--she just had a 10-pound (4.5 kg) tumor removed from her stomach--when the bombs blew jagged shards of glass into her neck and shoulders. "I don't know which hurts more," she lamented, "my stomach, my shoulder or my heart."
Dragisa Misovic wasn't the only hospital bombed by NATO. Cluster bombs dropped by fighter jets of the Royal Netherlands Air Force struck a hospital and a market in the city of Nis on May 7, killing 15 people and wounding 60 more. An emergency clinic and medical dispensary were also bombed in the mining town of Aleksinac on April 6, killing at least five people and wounding dozens more.
Bridges were favorite targets of NATO bombing. An international passenger train traveling from Belgrade to Thessaloniki, Greece was blown apart by two missiles as it crossed over Grdelica gorge on April 12. Children and a pregnant woman were among the 15 people killed in the attack; 16 other passengers were wounded. Allied commander Gen. Wesley Clark claimed the train, which had been damaged by the first missile, had been traveling too rapidly for the pilot to abort the second strike on the bridge. He then offered up a doctored video that was sped up more than three times so that the pilot's behavior would appear acceptable.
On May 1, at least 24 civilians, many of them children, were killed when NATO warplanes bombed a bridge in Luzane just as a bus was crossing. An ambulance rushing to the scene of the carnage was struck by a second bomb. On the sunny spring afternoon of May 30, a bridge over the Velika Morava River in the small town of Vavarin was bombed by low-flying German Air Force F-16 fighters while hundreds of local residents gathered nearby to celebrate an Orthodox Christian holiday. Eleven people died, most of them when the warplanes returned and bombed the people who rushed to the bridge to help those wounded in the first strike.
No One Is Safe
The horrors suffered by the villagers of Surdulica shows that no one in Serbia was safe from NATO's fury. They endured some 175 bombardments during one three-week period alone, with 50 houses destroyed and 600 others damaged in a town with only around 10,000 residents. On April 27, 20 civilians, including 12 children, died when bombs meant to destroy an army barracks slammed into a residential neighborhood. As many as 100 others were wounded in the incident. Tragedy befell the tiny town again on May 31 when NATO warplanes returned to bomb an ammunition depot but instead hit an old people's home; 23 civilians, most of them helpless elderly men and women, were blown to pieces. Dozens more were wounded. The US military initially said "there were no errant weapons" in the attack. However, Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre later testified before Congress that it "was a case of the pilot getting confused."
The CIA was also apparently confused when it relied on what it claimed was an outdated map to approve a Stealth Bomber strike on what turned out to be the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Three Chinese journalists were killed and 27 other people were wounded. Some people aren't so sure the attack was an accident--Britain's Observer later reported that the US deliberately bombed the embassy after discovering it was being used to transmit Yugoslav army communications.
There were plenty of other accidents, some of them horrifically tragic and others just downright bizarre. Two separate attacks on the very Albanians NATO was claiming to help killed 160 people, many of them women and children. On April 14, NATO warplanes bombed refugees along a 12-mile (19-km) stretch of road between the towns of Gjakova and Decan in western Kosovo, killing 73 people including 16 children and wounding 36 more. Journalists reported a grisly scene of "bodies charred or blown to pieces, tractors reduced to twisted wreckage and houses in ruins." Exactly one month later, another column of refugees was bombed near Korisa, killing 87--mostly women, children and the elderly--and wounding 60 others. In the downright bizarre category, a wildly errant NATO missile struck a residential neighborhood in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, some 40 miles (64 km) outside of Serbia. The American AGM-88 HARM missile blew the roof off of a man's house while he was shaving in his bathroom.
NATO's "Murderous Thugs"
As the people of Yugoslavia were being terrorized by NATO's air war, the terrorists of the Kosovo Liberation Army stepped up their atrocities against Serbs and Roma in Kosovo. NATO troops deployed there to keep the peace often failed to protect these people from the KLA's brutal campaign. More than 164,000 Serbs fled or were forcibly driven from the Albanian-dominated province and by the summer of 2001 KLA ethnic cleansing had rendered Kosovo almost entirely Albanian, with just a few die-hard Serb holdouts living in fear and surrounded by barbed wire.
The KLA soon expanded its war into neighboring Macedonia. Although NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson called the terror group "murderous thugs," the United States--now with George W. Bush as president--continued to offer its invaluable support. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice personally intervened in an attempt to persuade Ukraine to halt arms sales to the Macedonian army and when a group of 400 KLA fighters were surrounded at Aracinovo in June 2001, NATO ordered Macedonian forces to hold off their attack while a convoy of US Army vehicles rescued the besieged militants. It later emerged that 17 American military advisers were embedded with the KLA at Aracinovo.
Credibility Conundrum
The bombing of Yugoslavia was really about preserving the credibility of the United States and NATO. The alliance's saber rattling toward Belgrade had painted it into a corner from which the only way out was with guns blazing. Failure to follow threats with deadly action, said President Clinton, "would discredit NATO." Clinton added that "our mission is clear, to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO's purpose." The president seemed willfully ignorant of NATO's real purpose, which is to defend member states from outside attack. British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed with Clinton, declaring on the eve of the war that "to walk away now would... destroy NATO's credibility." Gary Dempsey, a foreign policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote that the Clinton administration "transformed a conflict that posed no threat to the territorial integrity, national sovereignty or general welfare of the United States into a major test of American resolve."
Waging or prolonging war for credibility's sake is always dangerous and seems always to yield disastrous results. Tens of thousands of US troops and many times as many Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian soldiers and civilians died while Richard Nixon sought an "honorable" way out of Vietnam. Ronald Reagan's dogged defense of US credibility cost the lives of 299 American and French troops killed in Hezbollah's 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. This time, ensuring American credibility meant backing the vicious KLA--some of whose fighters had trained at Osama bin Laden's terror camps in Afghanistan. This, despite the fact that al-Qaeda had already been responsible for deadly attacks against the United States, including the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
It is highly questionable whether bombing Yugoslavia affirmed NATO's credibility in the short term. In the long term, it certainly did not. The war marked the first and only time NATO had ever attacked a sovereign state. It did so unilaterally, absent any threat to any member nation, and without the approval of the United Nations Security Council. "If NATO can go for military action without international blessing, it calls into question the reliability of NATO as a security partner," Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, then Moscow's ambassador to NATO, told me at a San Francisco reception.
Twenty years later, Operation Allied force has been all but forgotten in the United States. In a country that has been waging nonstop war on terrorism for almost the entire 21st century, the 1999 NATO air war is but a footnote in modern American history. Serbs, however, still seethe at the injustice and hypocrisy of it all. The bombed-out ruins of the old Yugoslav Ministry of Defense, Radio Television of Serbia headquarters and other buildings serve as constant, painful reminders of the horrors endured by the Serbian people in service of NATO's credibility.
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By Canceling Debt, Croatia Grants 'Fresh Start' to 60,000 Citizens
Unprecedented move comes as other European Union governments continue to burden poorest citizens with austerity
Feb 03, 2015
In an unprecedented move many hope will jump-start an economy plagued by years of recession, Croatia on Monday wiped out the personal debt for roughly 60,000 of its poorest citizens.
The government program, named "fresh start," aims to help some of the 317,000 of Croatians whose bank accounts have been blocked because of unpaid bills.
Under the terms of the plan, an individual's debt must be lower than 35,000 kuna ($5,100), and his or her monthly income should not be higher than 1,250 kuna ($138). Those applying for debt cancellation are not allowed to own any property or have any savings.
Deputy Prime Minister Milanka Opacic told a cabinet meeting last month that they expect roughly 60,000 citizens will be applicable, saying, "Thus they will be given a chance for a new start without a burden of debt."
According to the Washington Post, the Croatian government has convinced multiple cities, public and private companies, the country's major telecommunications providers, as well as nine banks to support the plan and absorb the debt. The government will not refund the companies for their losses.
The Post continues:
Overall, the debt of all Croats amounts to $4.11 billion--and the debt that is about to be wiped out accounts for less than 1 percent of that. However, for those who are eligible the agreement will make a significant difference by enabling them to gain access to their bank accounts. By reducing debt by less than 1 percent, Croatia frees nearly 20 percent of the country's debtors from their obligations.
For a country that has suffered a recession six years in a row, Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said, "This is the first time that any (Croatian) government tries to solve this difficult problem and we are proud of it."
The rare move comes as other European Union governments continue to burden their poorest residents with ongoing austerity.
Economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, agreed the move was unprecedented, telling The Post: "I can't think of anything comparable." However, Baker voiced concern that the move might backfire if lenders begin to charge higher interest rates to low-income borrowers.
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'This is a Catastrophe': Epic Floods Threaten Balkans
Unprecedented rains swell rivers, threaten power plants and resurgence of landmines
May 18, 2014
Tens of thousands are fleeing their homes in the Balkans amidst epic floods triggered by unprecedented rainfall that have already claimed the lives of dozens.
Three months worth of rain fell on the region in just three days.
"This is a catastrophe unseen in Serbia," Predrag Maric, the head of the the Serbian Interior Ministry's emergencies unit, said at a news conference.
On Sunday water levels in Serbia's River Sava "are expected to peak," BBC News reports, "threatening the country's biggest power plant." Reuters reports that
Serbia's EPS power utility said a fresh flood wave from the Sava and Mlava rivers threatened the Nikola Tesla and Kostolac power plants. Capacity has already been cut back at the Nikola Tesla plant in Obrenovac, Serbia's largest.
The Mlava overwhelmed sandbag flood defenses on Sunday morning near Kostolac, threatening to flood coal mines and the plant itself.
"These are the kind of waters not seen in 1,000 years, let alone 100," Serbia's Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said during a televised cabinet session.
At least 12 people have been reported dead from the flooding in Serbia.
Like Serbia, neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina has declared a sate of emergency due to the flooding, and at least 19 people were reported killed as of Saturday.
The flooding in Bosnia has unleashed another danger: the thousands of landmines that litter the country from the 1992-1995 war.
The flooding has swept away warning signs indicating where there was landmine danger, and may have unburied some landmines.
The Associated Press reports that the landmines could pose an "international problem" because they could be carried away by floodwaters to rivers and potentially travel "through half of southeast Europe or get stuck in the turbines of a hydroelectric dam."
Croatia has reported one death and two missing so far as a result of the epic flooding in the region as well.
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