Allied Farce:
A Wartime Diary
Allied Farce:
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by Justin Raimondo 5/28/99
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ANOTHER WITCHThis war has an excess of Amazonian warriors: in addition to the bellicose Madeleine Albright, the Valkyries of the War Party include Hillary Rodham, Bianca Jagger, Vanessa Redgrave and now UN Tribunal chief prosecutor Louise Arbour, whose indictment of Slobodan Milosevic and his government for "war crimes" is the latest arrow in NATO's quiver. With her Albrightian girth, and her glasses settled way down on the end of her witch-like nose, Arbour is the quintessential international bureaucrat: arrogant, self-righteous, and utterly humorless. One news story described her as "tough and unflappable," a portrait that conjures up the image of a buzzard hanging around a bloody battlefield. LOUISE TO SLOBO: 'FIGHT OR DIE'This whole process of declaring recalcitrant subverters of the New World Order "war criminals," once a propaganda tool used primarily by the Soviet Union to demonize its enemies and set them up for liquidation, has now been institutionalized in the UN Tribunal, and the NATO-crats are using it to full advantage. As a more than willing tool of the War Party, Arbour is utterly shameless, and she has hardly missed an opportunity to make herself useful. For years she has relentlessly pursued Serbian "war criminals," while ignoring all evidence of Bosnian Muslim atrocities. The ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the Krajina did not impress her as worthy of investigation. The war crimes of NATO – the deliberate targeting of the civilian population in a campaign of terror, the concerted attack on the physical and economic infrastructure of Yugoslav society – are apparently none of her concern. With this phony "indictment," she has effectively torpedoed the prospect of a negotiated settlement: for if Milosevic shows up for talks, he may find himself under arrest. The Milosevic government is effectively cornered. Arbour's role as NATO's trumpet is to deliver a clear message to Belgrade: fight or die. KANGAROO COURTBy what authority does the UN Tribunal claim jurisdiction over the internal affairs of the Yugoslav nation? This is a question that is considered impolite and even reactionary to pose, let alone answer, which is precisely why it needs to be asked. Set up for the purpose of legitimizing the de-Serbianization of the Balkans, the Tribunal is a UN front for the Islamic states that finance its operations – Pakistan and Malaysia have put out 93 percent of the money – and make up much of its personnel. Even its name is presumptuous: the International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia. An agency of international adjudication more biased and imbalanced would be hard to imagine: of the 11 judges, four are Islamic, four Roman Catholic and three are secularists. None are Orthodox. In what is essentially a religious war pitting Bosnian/Albanian Muslims and Croatian Catholics against the Orthodox Serbs, this amounts to abandoning even the pretext of impartiality. Louise Arbour's Tribunal is nothing but a kangaroo court, with no more moral or legal validity than the "peoples courts" that conducted the Moscow show trials of the 1930s. Although there is no world government, as yet, the internationalists think that if they act as if there is, and create all these phony institutions with high-sounding names, then eventually everyone will come to accept their legitimacy without a whole lot of argument. Accountable to no one, elected by no one, the Tribunal is a law unto itself, and, as such, is not an instrument of justice but a weapon in NATO's arsenal. RACAKLet us take a look at the charges leveled against Milosevic and his ministers. According to the indictment, "On or about January 15, 1999, in the early morning hours, the village of Racak was attacked by forces of the federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) and Serbia. After shelling by the VJ units, the Serb police entered the village later in the morning and began conducting house-to-house searches. Villagers who attempted to flee from the police were shot throughout the village. A group of approximately 25 men attempted to hide in a building, but were discovered by the Serb police. They were beaten and then were removed to a nearby hill, where the policemen shot and killed them. Altogether, the forces of the FRY and Serbia killed approximately 45 Kosovo Albanians in and around Racak." Arbour played a high profile role in the propaganda blitz that followed the Racak allegations, arriving at the Macedonian border and demanding possession of the evidence as well as access to the scene of the alleged crime. The forensic evidence was already being examined, however, not only by Yugoslav but by Belarussian doctors, who came to the same conclusion as a team of Finnish experts: that the heavily armed Kosovars were killed in a firefight with the police. This is also the testimony of a French television crew that was in the village when the police entered. According to these eyewitnesses, employees of Associated Press TV (APTV), what happened is that the Kosovo Liberation Army attacked the village and the police engaged them in a pitched battle, managing to drive them back into the hills at around 3:20 pm, and then leaving under sporadic KLA fire. There were some 15-20 KLA casualties, and when the guerrillas came out of hiding they went down to the village. According to an account published in Le Monde ["Were the dead in Racak really massacred in cold blood?" by Christophe Chatelot, January 21, 1999], the Serb military operation "was neither a surprise, nor a secret": before a shot was even fired, OSCE observers and journalists were thoroughly apprised of the situation, and afterward were invited into the village to see for themselves four lightly injured civilians. That night, after the OSCE observers and the police had left, along with their retinue of journalists, the KLA moved back into the village. The next morning, the "war crime" of the Serbians was "discovered" by KLA guides who knew just where to lead the journalist pack: to a ditch filled with bodies where corpses in civilian clothing were artfully arranged to suggest a mass killing. The scene is complete with the arrival of U.S. envoy William Walker, who denounces "the crime committed by the Serbian police and the Yugoslav army." The American and British media immediately went into overdrive, reporting a "brutal massacre" of the Kosovars carried out by the Serbs, and leading directly to Rambouiellet and the NATO assault. But the whole thing is based on the unquestioned acceptance of a lie. Certain questions were never asked by the US government, or by the Tribunal, such as: why did the OSCE observers fail to notice nearly 50 bodies in a ditch? If the men were shot in the head at close range near the ditch, then what accounts for the mysterious absence of cartridge cases in the immediate vicinity? Surely there would have been more blood present if 23 men had really been massacred in this place. The OSCE sent in a team of Finnish pathologists to investigate. Their report, the contents of which leaked out, was held back during the Rambouiellet meetings "in the interests of peace" (!) according to Die Welt [March 8, 1999]. The shots that killed the supposedly "massacred" Albanian Kosovars were fired from a distance, and additional bullets were fired at them at point blank range, and knife wounds inflicted, only after they had been dead for hours. The "massacre" at Racak was a fraudulent tableaux of death directed and produced by the KLA, and performed solely for the benefit of the Western media. What is amazing about all this is that you don't have to dig very deeply to uncover the truth: the BBC, and Radio France International, as well as the French newspapers, Die Welt, and others all reported on this. Surely the U.N. Tribunal has the means to uncover this information, yet it chose to issue an indictment that contradicts the known facts. And Louise Arbour, having rendered an invaluable service to the NATO overlords, is due to be amply rewarded with that seat on the Canadian Supreme Court she has always coveted. There she will enforce Canada's strict laws against "hate speech," and apply the same standards of "justice" she used to frame the Serbians: when the history of this war is written, the name of Louise Arbour will become a synonym for judicial complicity in the crimes of NATO: to "Arbourize" somebody will mean that you have framed them, set them up, and put them on display like Christians in the Roman arena – now there is an image that aptly sums up the Serbians' predicament. CYBER-SABOTEURS OF THE CIAAccording to Newsweek [May 22] the Central Intelligence Agency is conducting a cyberwar against the Yugoslav government, using hackers to break into overseas banks and "diddle with Milosevic's bank accounts." But this attack is likely to boomerang, and badly: does the US really want to undermine confidence in an already shaky international banking system? THANKS FOR YOUR HELPA few items: The response to the coverage of Antiwar.com on the Lehrer News Hour has been overwhelming, and we are still going through the hundreds of emails, contributions, and inquiries we received as a result: we are working on sending out thank you letters as quickly as possible, along with a complimentary pamphlet, and thanks for your patience. Also: we received many answers to our request for help last week, when our Webmaster, Eric Garris, had to go to Los Angeles on business and needed access to a computer in order to keep the site updated. Thanks to all who volunteered, but especially to Jeff Phillips of Los Angeles, who took in Eric sight unseen and was the perfect host. Justin
Raimondo's Wartime Diary Please Support Antiwar.comA contribution of $20 or more gets you a copy of Justin Raimondo's Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against US Intervention in the Balkans, a 60-page booklet packed with the kind of intellectual ammunition you need to fight the lies being put out by this administration and its allies in Congress. Send contributions to Antiwar.com or
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Past Diaries Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against US Intervention in the Balkans (1996). He is an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, in Auburn, Alabama, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Libertarian Studies, and writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (forthcoming from Prometheus Books). |
