Posted on 02/14/2002 2:31:56 AM PST by Arkle
For the record, please explain the controlling international authority under which NATO attacked Yugoslavia.
I am not a NATO apologist, but I am most certainly not a Milosevic apologist either. And the "Muslim terrorist" exuses that Milosevic would like to bring (and many people here repeating them gladly) also lack some crutial facts related, that many of the crimes comitted happened when the was no KLA in Kosovo (had not existed), yet many innocent civilians got killed anyway. When numerous paramilitary forces were in "action", such as those of Mladic, Karadzic, Martic and Arkan, all supported and financed by Milosevic as he himself admitted, defending Serb interests of course. Unfortunately, it was everything but that. Those were not terrorist groups? Bombing entire villages and cities, killing so many civilians?
And of course this raises the question of where any court derives its legitimacy. Unless a court is legitimized by God himself, then its legitimacy ultimately rests upon how many people think the court is legitimate. This IT court is floating in midair right now, but with a few more trials and a few more precedents under its belt, people will begin to perceive it as being "real", and that's where its legitimacy will be anchored.
But the IT shouldn't be legitimate in people's minds, because it is nothing more than a tool for powers that reject the God-given individual rights of human beings. Milosevic has a golden opportunity to by a flie in the IT's oinment, and that's why I'm cheering him on, despite the fact that he is old-school commie trash.
Nip it in the bud, Slobo!
Where are our idealistic young Hemingways and John Dos Passos' today, rushing out across the ocean to take up arms against the enemies of liberty? Better to just kick back and watch the television now, I suppose.
The New York Times, November 1, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition, Section 1; Part 1, Page 14, Column 1; "In Yugoslavia, Rising Ethnic Strife Brings Fears of Worse Civil Conflict", By DAVID BINDER, Special to the New York Times.
Also, check this out from the summer of 1999:
Disinformation and Serbia: U.S. Media Bias
A major news story about Serbia, not covered in the American press, was published in Covert Action Quarterly (CAQ) last Fall. The story detailed how a famous photo from 1992, in Trnopolje, Bosnia showing an alleged Serbian death camp was in fact a phony. The original photo, taken by Independent Television (ITN) from Great Britain, showed an emaciated Muslim man with his shirt off behind barbwire with his imprisoned comrades behind him. This photo ran worldwide and was just used again June 14th by Time magazine. It was the first significant emotional presentation of the Serbian military as Nazi-like thugs.
Presidential candidate, Bill Clinton, making reference to the photo promised military action against the Serbs if elected. According to CAQ this photo was a gross misrepresentation of the situation. The men in the picture were not behind barbwire, but rather were standing outside of a small fenced enclosure next to a farm house in an open field that had been serving as a refugee transit site. The photographers shot the photo from within the fenced enclosure looking out on an open field. The Hague Tribunal confirmed in 1994 that there was no barbwire surrounding the camp at Trnopolje in 1992.
So how has a phony photo of alleged Serbian death camp continued to be used to portray the Serbian government as a holocaust perpetrator in Kosovo? One part of the answer is that the American public relations firm Ruder Finn was originally hired by the Croatian secessionists, Bosnian Muslins, and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to foster negative images of the Serbs as Nazi demons. Ruder Finn admittedly targeted American women and Jews with the promotion of often unconfirmed news stories of Serbian rape/death camps, and various human atrocities. News stories showing attacks and ethnic cleansing of Serbs were repressed or undercovered. The result is that the American public has been lead to believe that the Serbs are the vicious aggressors in the Balkans and the other panics innocent victims. Nothing could be further from the truth. The KLA alone was listed by the US State department as a terrorist organization until just last year. They had been conducting bombings, assassinations, ambushes (financed by heroin sales) on both Albanian moderates and Serbs in Kosovo for several years, increasing their attacks ten-fold in 1998. Serbian police responses were often brutal, especially in the villages from which the KLA was known to operate. Yet last year only approximately 2,000 deaths occurred on both sides in all of Kosovo. Serbian police attacks were not an ethnic cleansing campaign, but rather part of a measured response by a legitimate government to ongoing terrorist activities.
American media has been so accepting of "demonize-the-Serb" stories that there was no questioning of the news story last January of the alleged Serbian massacre at Racak where some 40 Kosovo Albanians were said to have be gunned down by Serb police. Found by the "neutral" former Oliver North aide, William Walker, the bodies were a perfect photo opportunity to justify increased NATO demands for direct intervention and bombings. Yet, there was a complete failure of the American press to cover the European Union's forensic team's report on March 17th stating that they were unable to confirm that a massacre had occurred, and that it was possible that the bodies had been moved to that location after death.
The American press has been filled with daily reports of mass graves and torture sites in Kosovo. Yet a recent story of a KLA torture chamber found by German NATO troops received scant attention in the press. Perhaps if the Serbs buried the 2,000 plus civilian victims of NATO's bombing campaign in a single mass grave, the US press might pay more attention to both sides of the story instead of serving as a NATO disinformation distribution service.
Peter Phillips is an associate professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and the director of Project Censored.
So what you're saying is, in effect, is that there was no Muslim terrorism before you read about the KLA in your crappy Slovenian newspaper.
bluester, if you care so much about Muslims, why don't you encourage Slovenia's government to help build a big mosque in downtown Ljubljana. A real Turkish mosque complete with sniper tower and loudspeakers, so the entire city can hear jihad propaganda in Turkish until 3a.m. The sort built by Turkish aggressors in Serbian lands for centuries. Not one of those converted warehouses "tolerated" by those false prophets of "human rights" in Western Europe.
By The People's Will perhaps.
During the war my brother in law was stationed as a Lt Cmdr in the Ops center in Stuttgart. He told me Milosevic used to get a snootful and call the ops center raving about what they were doing to him. Half the time it was the middle of the night and some corporal was answering the phone so that’s who he would be trying to negotiate with.
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