|
of the Belgrade Coup
Editor & Webmaster
Leon Chame - 2008
Yugoslav Associates:
- Zoran Radojicic
- Dejan Vukelic
- George Orwell
Contributing Websites:
- Original Sorces
- Transnational (TFF)
- Fair sources
- WSWS
avgust 20, 2008
| |
Who is Telling us the Truth about the Serbs?
"When men differ in opinion,
both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; when truth
and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter."
In the last three months we have seen the one who should be the guardian of the flame
of free speech, the President of the United States,
bomb the Yugoslav TV studios, transmitters, and the nation's electric power plants for the
stated purpose of silencing that nation's electronic media. "Serb radio and TV is an instrument of propaganda and
repression," a NATO spokesman, Air Commodore David Wilby, declared on April 8.
"It is ... a legitimate target in this campaign."
In spite of bombing the studios, and killing journalists and make-up artists, the Serbs
somehow managed to continue sending reports out. NATO spokesman
Jamie Shea and Bill Clinton announced the growing "success" in destroying
Slobodan Milosevic's military. Shea said that over
10,000 of the 40,000 Serb soldiers in Kosovo had been killed, two-thirds of its MIGs
destroyed and 40 per cent of Milosevic's 280 tanks had been destroyed, along with 60% of
their artillery and mortars, while "wiping out" Milosevic's MIGs.
A month ago, on May 24th, Bill Clinton wrote a letter to the editor in the New York
Times in which he said:
"Meanwhile, our air campaign has destroyed or damaged one-third of Serbia's
armored vehicles in Kosovo, half its artillery, most of its ability to produce ammunition,
all its capacity to refine fuel and done enormous damage to other sectors of its economy.
Though he has driven hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians from their homes, Mr.
Milosevic has not eliminated the Kosovar Liberation Army. Indeed, its ranks are swelling,
and it has begun to go on the offensive against Serb forces hunkered down to hide from air
strikes."
On the day the bombing stopped, Milosevic was shown on
CNN telling the people of Yugoslavia that the "476 soldiers" who were killed
were heros. Who was lying? Jamie Shea and Bill Clinton, or the "indicted war criminal", Slobadon
Milosevic? Milosevic claimed only 476 soldiers were killed. Shea and Clinton were saying, before the bombing stopped, that 10,000 Serb
soldiers were killed, the KLA was going on the offensive against the Serbs, and that NATO
had taken out "half its artillery."
And then, the Yugoslav army came out of hiding and started leaving Kosovo. The entire world was able to count tanks
as they left, and the number of soldiers - of the 40,000 that were reportedly there - less
the 10,000 reportedly killed. As it turned out, only
13 tanks had been destroyed, not 112.
In the London Telegraph yesterday, John Simpson, who reported the war from Belgrade,
announced that
"Time and again when I was in Belgrade my colleagues back in
London used to ask me about signs of casualties. The military death toll must be pretty
high by now, they would say; what about the funerals, the death notices, the anecdotal
evidence that lives were being lost? "I always answered,
quite truthfully, that the only casualties I heard anything
about were civilians. Not surprisingly, as it turned out. Something like 400
soldiers seem to have been killed, as compared with about 1,700 civilians. Night after
night Nato would hit army barracks and government ministries, as though the Yugoslav army
were obliging enough to hang around there."
After more than 40,000 or so sorties and thousands of tons of bombs, what NATO hit were empty barracks, canvas and wood replicas of
artillary and mortars, old armored personnel carriers, broken-axled and rusting, which the
Serbs had carefully left out for NATO pilots to see and bomb from 13,000 feet. From 13,000 feet, apparently, farm tractors were mistaken for armored personnel
carriers so a real, but dead, personnel carrier was a reasonable decoy.
Of the "wiped out MIGs" - all but three of them recently came out of hiding and flew back
to Belgrade.
In spite of the humbling truth now becoming obvious to all - that NATO did lie, John Simpson still
believes the REST of the charges: "Now we see the terrible evidence that made
President Clinton and Tony Blair determined to carry on in spite of everything; and the
torture chambers and mass graves of Kosovo will join the other dark horrors of the 20th
century. But good intentions are not quite enough." And, let's not forget all those raped Albanian women - that Clinton mentioned in
his letter to the New York Times:
"The Balkans are not fated to be the heart of European darkness, a region of
bombed mosques, men and boys shot in the back, young women raped, all traces of group and
individual history rewritten or erased. Just as leaders took their people down that road,
leaders must take them back to a better tomorrow. Ultimately, we and our allies can help
make this happen, if we stick with NATO's campaign and follow through with a strategy to
insure that the forces pulling southeastern Europe together are stronger than the forces
tearing it apart."
A month after Clinton's letter was printed, on June 22, 1999 the New York Times printed
an article which stated, in part: "So far, there is no
solid evidence of systematic rapes by the Serbs, as was reported in Bosnia, and not a
single woman said in the interviews that she was sexually penetrated by a Serbian soldier."
Now, rape and war historically have gone together. In fact, as recent American history
with the Tailgate scandal and statistics on many US college campuses appears to indicate,
some men don't even need the excuse of a war to rape women. And,
haven't we been told by the President that a major justification for the bombing was
because Serb soldiers were raping Albanian women? How dare
the Albanian women deny being raped!
So, what do we have here? The women that were supposed to have
been raped en masse are saying they weren't. Now Albanian
husbands who left their wives and children to face the evil Serbs alone while they ran and
hid in the hills are raping and killing Serb women, including at least one nun, but now reject and want to divorce their wives
because the husbands (and the world media) BELIEVE the Serb soldiers always rape women?
And we are all supposed to believe this is the gospel truth because Bill Clinton and Jamie
Shea said it? Is this as accurate as the 10,000 dead Serb soldiers we were told about just
a couple of weeks ago?
Clinton and NATO tried very hard to silence the Serb media while flooding the world
airwaves with what turns out to have been NATO
"error." The truth is coming out about the lies told of
"10,000" dead Serb soldiers and most of its tanks, planes and artillery being
destroyed. It was Milosevic, not Jamie Shea, who gave the most
accurate number.
My friend in the Marines, Master Sergeant Frankinburger sent me over the week-end a bit
of a different view than what we are hearing from those who seem to be desperately trying
to justify 78 days of bombing:
Dear Mary,
Took a security patrol out a couple of days ago. Didn't run across any bad guys. The
little village we went through was interesting. Through an interpreter, I found out that
it had been occupied by regular VJ troops until a couple of weeks ago. The old man I spoke with said that the Serb troops didn't steal or destroy
anything in the village and left everything as they had found it. Asked him about
mines and he said that they removed all of them and took them with them when they left.
Obviously very disciplined regular army troops. The people in the
village were ethnic Albanian but didn't seem to harbor a lot of resentment toward the
Serbs, I suppose having the regular VJ in their village kept the MUP and paramilitary
away. The old man ended up guiding us through the fields and trails in the area.
(Good patrol tip, walk only where the locals walk.) He also went into his house and gave
us some smoked sausage, tomatoes, bread, and peppers. Very poor people, so this really
meant a lot. We've had nothing but MREs for three weeks so the feast we had when we
returned to our lines was the highlight of the day. Anyhow, this was just one small
village and in no way can it be construed to represent what is going on or happened in the
rest of the country. Just some simple farmers who would be glad just to be left alone to
work the soil and live their lives. Mostly old folks, women, and children. And the little
ones just about broke my heart. They have a healthy fear of men with guns. Ain't a Marine
here doesn't have a soft spot for the kids. This mess over here isn't their fault. It's a
side of this hell hole that isn't glamorous enough to make the evening news.
Semper Fi',
Michael
The sad thing is - these gentle Albanians Master Sergeant Frankinburger met are also in
danger from rampaging KLA terrorists, just as the young wife who is being cast aside by
her cowardly husband is in danger of being divorced or possibly even executed. Why? Because they are not saying hateful,
nasty things about Serbs, which is the KLA's doctrinal basis
for seizing Kosovo.
If NATO and the United States is so sure of the identity of all those people in
"mass graves" in Kosovo - how come they overestimated the number of dead
Serb soldiers by 95%, and the number of destroyed tanks by 89%?
The whole world now hates the Serbs, thanks to the media. Are
those war crime stories "justifying" the bombing as inaccurate as the body
counts and tanks destroyed stories? And, how does the raping, killing, ethnic cleansing,
and murder rate of the Serb forces compare with what we are able to photograph of the
raping, killing, ethnic cleansing and murder rate of the KLA?
|
