US, NATO Lie to Justify Genocide and Destruction in Yugoslavia

Seventeen years ago today, on March 24, 1999, NATO began a 78-day deadly and devastating U.S.-backed intervention of Yugoslavia. It was the first time in history that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization decided they would attack a country without the approval of the U.N. Security Council.

Nineteen countries took part in the aggression led by the United States that was supposed to stop the repressive activities of the Slobodan Milosevic government and to establish a framework for its Southern province, Kosovo, under international law. Milosevic was president of Serbia from 1989 to 1997, and of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000.

The attack was carried out under the former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s administration and the rationale that it would prevent a “humanitarian disaster in Kosovo,” a “genocide of Kosovar Albanians“ caused by Milosevic and “comparable to Nazi atrocities in the Second World War.”

It was not the first, nor the last time, in subsequent years in different parts of the globe that U.S.-backed interventions would be initiated under the premise of a “preventive war.”

In the case of Yugoslavia, various parties later agreed that the alleged “genocide” never happened and that instead it was just another excuse to dismantle the socialists as well as federal dimensions of a unitary Yugoslav state and to break the country into ever-smaller pieces by bombing its people into submission.

This way, NATO’s bombing caused a much larger catastrophe than it averted.

The illegal bombing destroyed and damaged 25,000 homes, 300 miles of roads and close to 400 miles of railways. Many public buildings were damaged, including 14 airports, 19 hospitals, 18 kindergartens, 69 schools, 176 cultural monuments and 44 bridges.

The attacks killed at least 5,000 people (some sources claim it was closer to 18,000), injured 12,500, and left the area contaminated with depleted uranium, a chemical element internationally banned which to date is still causing childhood cancer rates to spike all over the Balkans.

The bombing of Yugoslavia was made possible by a number of public lies which were spread in an attempt to justify intervention into an internal conflict, which was eventually exploited by foreign powers to advance policy goals.

Myth 1: US-NATO Attacked After Milosevic Refused Talks

In 1999, Kosovo was a region of Yugoslavia where ethnic Albanians were the majority. And because Kosovo was part of Yugoslavia, the U.S.-backed NATO campaign violated international law.

While the U.S. government claimed that negotiations on Kosovo with Milosevic had failed and that the ongoing discrimination against Kosovo Albanians represented genocide, later statements by then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright proved that there were no negotiations.

The U.S. gave Milosevic an ultimatum, telling him, firstly, to grant autonomy to Kosovo. Secondly, to allow NATO to station 30,000 ground troops in Yugoslavia and, lastly, to allow a NATO-conducted referendum for Kosovo’s independence from Yugoslavia.

Milosevic made it clear that he would not allow a foreign-occupying army in Yugoslavia because it would be a gross violation of the country’s sovereignty and their independence.

NATO began bombing the country without further negotiation attempts.

Myth 2: Milosevic, a Danger that Needed to Be Stopped

It was well understood by NATO leadership that the bombing was not a response to the huge crimes in Kosovo, but rather their cause.

At the time bombing started, there were two potential diplomatic options for discussion, which included two proposals. One by NATO and another by the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

As Noam Chomsky once explained, “After 78 days of bombing, a compromise was reached between them, suggesting that a peaceful settlement might have been possible, avoiding the terrible crimes that were the anticipated reaction to the NATO bombing.“

The Bill Clinton administration was also wildly inconsistent in its practice of humanitarian interventions. The U.S. launched two military campaigns against Serbia while ignoring more widespread slaughter in Rwanda or justifying the Russian assault on Chechnya during the same period of time.

Myth 3: US-NATO Wanted to Protect Human Rights

A United Nations court has ruled that Serbian troops did not carry out genocide against ethnic Albanians during Slobodan Milosevic’s campaign of aggression in Kosovo from 1998 to 1999.

John Norris, who was Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott’s communications director during the Clinton Administration wrote a book in which he explains the real purpose of the war from his point of view. Norris explains that the bombing had nothing to do with concern for Kosovar Albanians.

The U.S. decided to bomb because Serbia, the last corner of Europe which had not subordinated itself to the U.S.-run neoliberal programs, and which was not carrying out the required social and economic reforms.

Myth 4: KLA, a Genuine Liberation Army

The Kosovo Liberation Army was an ethnic-Albanian “paramilitary organization” that sought the separation of Kosovo from Yugoslavia.

Before the bombing there had been killings on both sides which were distributed between the KLA attacking from Albania and the Yugoslavian security forces.

In 1998, the KLA was considered a terrorist organization by the U.S., but one year later the CIA financed them, while Albright offered them training in the U.S. “in order to get the Albanians’ … acceptance (of the peace plan),” and in hope to transform the KLA “from a guerrilla group into a police force or a political entity, much like the African National Congress did in South Africa.”

NATO’s illegal intervention revealed the dangers of “humanitarian imperialism” and how the criteria permitting such interventions has become more self-serving both in Yugoslavia and in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Originally published on 2016-03-23

Author: Marija Marković

Source: TeleSur

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!

Donate to Support Us

We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

READ MORE!

Orwell at the UN: Obama Re-Defines Democracy as a Country that Supports U.S. Policy

In his Orwellian September 28, 2015 speech to the United Nations, President Obama said that if democracy had existed in Syria, there never would have been a revolt against Assad. By that, he meant ISIL. Where there is democracy, he said, there is no violence or revolution. This was his threat to promote revolution, coups and violence against any country not deemed a “democracy.” In making this hardly-veiled threat, he redefined the word in the vocabulary of international politics. Democracy is the CIA’s overthrow of Mossedegh in Iran to install the Shah. Democracy is the overthrow of Afghanistan’s secular government by ...

These are all the Countries where the US has a Military Presence (in 2015)

On Mar. 24, US president Barack Obama announced that all 9,800 US troops currently stationed in Afghanistan will remain until the end of 2015. This generated a fair amount of criticism: it was, after all, Obama’s promise that the last American troop would leave the country in 2014. How have Obama’s plans for pulling out of Afghanistan fared so far? Those expecting the US to leave Afghanistan, however, should take a minute to consider this: the US still hasn’t left Germany. In fact, there are quite a few places the US hasn’t left, and while certainly most of them don’t pose a threat to American soldiers, ...

How Kosovo was Turned into Fertile Ground for ISIS

Every Friday, just yards from a statue of Bill Clinton with arm aloft in a cheery wave, hundreds of young bearded men make a show of kneeling to pray on the sidewalk outside an improvised mosque in a former furniture store. The mosque is one of scores built here with Saudi government money and blamed for spreading Wahhabism — the conservative ideology dominant in Saudi Arabia — in the 17 years since an American-led intervention wrested tiny Kosovo from Serbian oppression. Since then — much of that time under the watch of American officials — Saudi money and influence have transformed this ...

Hating Russia is a Full-Time Job: Neocons Resurrect Tribal Memories to Fan the Flames

Having just returned from a trip to Russia, I am pleased to report that the Russian people and the officialdom that I encountered displayed none of the vitriol towards Americans that I half expected as a response to the vilifying of Moscow and all its works that pervades the U.S. media and Establishment. To be sure, many Russians I spoke with were quick to criticize the Trump Administration for its hot and cold performance vis-à-vis the bilateral ties to Moscow while also expressing mystification over why the relationship had gone south so quickly, but this anger over foreign policy did ...

A Book Review: “The Biggest Prison on Earth – A History of the Occupied Territories”

The history of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is continued with Ilan Pappe’s recent work, The Biggest Prison on Earth. For those who have read Pappe’s earlier histories, it is clear the original Zionists recognized the existence of the Palestinian population and the resistance most likely to rise from it. Also recognized are the actions taken throughout the occupation and settlement that the Jewish settlers were intent on marginalizing, displacing, and cleansing as much of Palestine as they could of its residents. The revelation in this continuation of the history is the high degree to which these policies were officially planned ...

Trump the Great

If Trump can defeat the oligarchy and save America, he can go down in history as Trump the Great. Liberals, progressives, and the left-wing (to the extent that one still exists) are aligning with the corrupt oligarchy against president-elect Trump and the American people. They are busy at work trying to generate hysteria over Trump’s “authoritarian personality and followers.” In other words, the message is: here come the fascists. Liberals and progressives wailed and whined about “an all white male cabinet,” only to be made fools by Trump’s appointment of a black male and two women, one a minority and one a Trump ...

What Trump Has in Common with the Last German Emperor

President Donald Trump appears sui generis. Other troublesome populists, like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, hold power. But no other nation of great influence is governed by someone so little rooted in reality and so much dominated by personality. However, the president has a historical soul mate who ruled a century ago. The similarities are striking, though their lives obviously differed in important ways. One wonders: was the German Empire’s Kaiser Wilhelm II reincarnated as President Trump? Wilhelm II was born in 1859 in the house of Hohenzollern. A grandson of British queen Alexandrina Victoria, he grew up in a life of wealth ...

The Failure of US Democracy

I am now convinced that the Oligarchy that rules America intends to steal the presidential election. In the past, the oligarchs have not cared which candidate won as the oligarchs owned both. But they do not own Trump. Most likely you are unaware of what Trump is telling people as the media does not report it. A person who speaks like this: - is not endeared to the oligarchs. Who are the oligarchs? — Wall Street and the mega-banks too big to fail and their agent the Federal Reserve, a federal agency that put 5 banks ahead of millions of troubled American homeowners who ...

A Croatian Role in the Destruction of Yugoslavia in the 1990s (I)

“Thousands joined a peaceful protest on Saturday in the Croatian town of Vukovar to express their anger at Croatian institutions for their “silence” over war crimes committed during the 1990s war” (Balkan Transitional Justice, 2018-10-13). The following essay is my constructive contribution to the above article. Preface On the occasion of more than two decades of the end of the civil war on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia (1991−1995), it is necessary to reassess the real causes and cardinal perpetuators of Yugoslavia’s internal and external bloody destruction. In the western scientific literature of the “liberal democracy” scholars (like by the journalists and policymakers as ...

The Russian War Crimes in Syria in 2016-2018: Exclusive Photo Evidence from the Cabinet of Boris Johnson & Theresa May

Exclusive photos of the Russian war crimes in Syria and the Middle East by "Free Media Group" volunteers, 2016-2018 with a proper illustrations of the Russia's militant imperialism. The authenticity of photos and their descriptions are certified by the UK Cabinet of Boris Johnson & Theresa May: The My Lai Massacre by Russian soldiers The Russian soldiers at the spot of My Lai Massacre with their victims Aleppo citizen with a daughter during the Russian destruction of the city Russian Orthodox monk in Moscow in protest against the Russian invasion of Syria Syrian children of war and the Russian occupant soldier Killed Russian student in ...

Kosovo Albanian Jihadists Planned to Attack Venice’s Rialto Bridge

Italian police broke up an alleged jihadist cell in Venice who had celebrated last week’s terrorist attack in London and planned to blow up the city’s famous Rialto Bridge in the hope of killing hundreds of tourists. In a series of overnight raids, anti-terrorism police arrested three suspects, all of them Kosovars who were living in Italy. Fisnik Bekaj, 24, Dake Haziraj, 25, and Arian Babaj, 27, were allegedly admirers of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and were secretly recorded discussing how they were ready to die for the sake of jihad. A fourth person, an unnamed minor ...

Brainwashed Nation

The United States is immersed in a political St. Vitus’s dance typical of empires in convulsion. The confident colossus that watched its arch-rival disintegrate from 1989-1991 now has its highest office occupied by a malevolent clown enabled by supporters befitting a casting call for a Hieronymous Bosch panel. The liberal class gnashes its teeth and blames Trump, the Koch brothers, the Tea Party. But the shock is hardly credible. The current political trap befits a country that internalized its own Cold War propaganda campaign from 1945-1991. The unrelenting flow of messages aimed at keeping Americans fearful and accommodating debased our ...

The U.S. is not a Democracy, It Never was

One of the most steadfast beliefs regarding the United States is that it is a democracy. Whenever this conviction waivers slightly, it is almost always to point out detrimental exceptions to core American values or foundational principles. For instance, aspiring critics frequently bemoan a “loss of democracy” due to the election of clownish autocrats, draconian measures on the part of the state, the revelation of extraordinary malfeasance or corruption, deadly foreign interventions, or other such activities that are considered undemocratic exceptions. The same is true for those whose critical framework consists in always juxtaposing the actions of the U.S. government ...

NATO’s Illegal War Against Serbia

Facts And Truth @ YouTube: “Remember why NATO spent 78-days bombing Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999? There was the ethnic cleansing. The atrocities. The refugees chased out of Kosovo by the Serb army. The mass graves. The heaps of bodies tossed into vats of sulphuric acid at the Trepca mines. NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said there were 100,000 Kosovo Albanian Muslims unaccounted for. Problem is, none of it happened.” Forensic report throws doubt on US/NATO claims of Racak “massacre” By Richard Tyler wsws.org, 12 February 2001 A forthcoming article by three Finnish pathologists throws further doubts upon official descriptions of a “massacre” in ...

Syria: Should Turkey Trust the U.S. Gangsters?

Last week, the Turkish Armed Forces entered Afrin in Syria’s Aleppo. According to the Syria-based Kurdish Hawar News Agency, Turkey also intends to deploy troops near the Raju area and place its armored vehicles there. Many Syrian experts believe that Ankara cooperates with the U.S.-backed Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki. Earlier, Spokesman of the armed opposition group Abdulsalam Adbulrazaq reported that Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki had reached an agreement with the Turkish troops over the deployment of Turkish soldiers at monitoring positions in Western Aleppo. According to preliminary estimates, Turkey will provide opposition militants with all necessary weapons, and Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki ...

Journey to Aleppo: Exposing the Truth Buried under NATO Propaganda

Aleppo has become synonymous with destruction and “Syrian state-generated” violence among those whose perception of the situation in the war-torn nation is contained within the prism of mainstream media narratives. The NATO-aligned media maintains a tight grip on information coming out of this beleaguered city, ensuring that whatever comes out is tailored to meet State Department requirements and advocacy for regime change. The propaganda mill churns out familiar tales of chemical weapons, siege, starvation, and bombs targeting civilians–all of which are attributed to the Syrian government and military, with little variation on this theme. The purpose of this photo essay and my ...

100 Years of Using War to Try to End All War

This April 4th will be 100 years since the U.S. Senate voted to declare war on Germany and 50 since Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against the war on Vietnam (49 since he was killed on that speech’s first anniversary). Events are being planned to help us try to finally learn some lessons, to move beyond, not just Vietnam, but war. That declaration of war on Germany was not for the war that makes up the single most common theme of U.S. entertainment and history. It was for the war that came before that one. This was the Great War, ...

Kosovo History – Fifth Part

The series of long-scale Christian national movements in the Balkans, triggered off by 1804 Serbian revolution, decided more than in the earlier centuries, the fate of Serbs and made ethnic Albanians (about 70% of whom were Muslims) the main guardians of Turkish order in the European provinces of Ottoman Empire. At a time when the Eastern question was again being raised, particularly in the final quarter of 19th and the first decade of 20th century, Islamic Albanians were the chief instrument of Turkey’s policy in crushing the liberation movements of other Balkan states. After the congress of Berlin (1878) an ...

The US has Invaded 71 Nations since 1776

Make 4 July Independence from America Day (2014). Originallz published in 2014 Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement! Donate to Support Us We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

Hitllary Clinton Plans to Destroy Russia

Leaked emails are filling in the picture of a Bill-and-Hillary-Clinton plan to destroy Russia – a plan which had originated with US President George Herbert Walker Bush in 1990, and which has been followed through both by his son George W Bush, and by both of the Clintons, but which has only recently started to become documented by leaked publications of personal communications amongst the key operatives who were the insiders running this operation behind the scenes, and who include Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, George W Bush, Victoria Nuland, Jeffrey Feltman, Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, Saudi Crown Prince ...