THE BOMBING

A LITTLE BACKGROUND ON THE NATO BOMBING OF SERBIA:

Clinton Administration's
Big Lies About Kosovo
Being Exposed

By Phyllis Schlafly

11-25-99


The embarrassing truth is starting to come out that the Clinton Administration lied to us about Kosovo atrocities which were supposed to justify the bombing of Yugoslavia. In five months of investigation and exhumation of the dead in Kosovo, United Nations war crimes investigators have found only 2,108 bodies.


Before the bombing, Clinton and Defense Secretary William Cohen repeatedly tossed out figures of 100,000 dead, and the State Department even claimed that up to 500,000 Kosovars were feared dead. Clinton claimed that his bombing prevented Milosevic from "deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide."


The chief prosecutor for the UN war crimes tribunal, Carla Del Ponte, can confirm only the 2,108 figure. That's what she reported to the UN Security Council.


Pathologist Emilio Perez Pujol, who led a Spanish forensic team looking for bodies, found only 187, mostly in individual graves. He calculated that "the final figure of dead in Kosovo will be 2,500 at the most. This includes lots of strange deaths that can't be blamed on anyone in particular."


The British, who seem to be more interested in getting to the truth than Congress, are pressuring Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to answer claims that Tony Blair's government misled the public over the scale of deaths in order to justify NATO's bombing of Belgrade. Alice Mahon, the Labor MP who chairs the Balkans committee, said that the Kosovo deaths were tragic but did not justify the killing of Belgrade civilians by NATO's bombing.


Lacking a constitutional or national security basis for his Yugoslav adventure, Clinton relied wholly on the humanitarian argument. That rationale has fallen apart because the numbers of Milosevic's crimes in Kososo were so grossly inflated, the indiscriminate damage done by the Clinton/NATO bombing raids was so vast, and all the people he said he was helping are far worse off than before the bombing started.


The Clinton/NATO bombing was carried on for 78 days with total disregard for human life. The bombs killed thousands of innocent civilians and even destroyed hospitals and schools.


The Clinton/NATO bombing decimated Yugoslavia's economic infrastructure and created an environmental nightmare. Not only are water and power systems destroyed, but the lifeline of the region, the Danube River, is polluted and largely impassable because of destroyed bridges.


Repeated air strikes on the Serbian town of Pancevo enveloped the area in clouds of black smoke and flames for ten days and unleashed tons of chemicals into the air, water and soil. The fish, produce and water are all contaminated.


What was advertised as an air war against Yugoslavia's military capabilities was really a war directed against the Serbian people. Dropping cluster bombs from 15,000 feet and firing missiles from many miles away guaranteed "mistakes" and "collateral damage" and prove that the targets were civilian as well as military.


U.S. Air Force Commander Lt. Gen. Michael Short admitted that the goal was to break the will of the Serbs and make them so miserable that they would force Milosevic to pull out of Kosovo. Estimates of the cost to rebuild the damage range up to $100 billion, but the costs in human misery are incalculable.


The situation in Kosovo, the province Clinton was supposed to be protecting, is even worse. The danger from unexploded British and American cluster bombs and mines is at alarming levels, according to international aid agencies.


Before the bombing began, there was no humanitarian crisis in Kosovo. It was only after the U.S. and NATO air strikes began that the Serbs started to expel Albanians from Kosovo.


The NATO "peacekeeping" force in Kosovo is completely unable to restrain the revenge-seeking Albanians who are beating and murdering the Serbs (even targeting grandmothers) and burning their homes and churches. More Serb civilians have been slaughtered in Kosovo than ethnic Albanians before the bombing began.


The daily violence continues even though there are now more NATO troops in Kosovo than Serbs. According to Human Rights Watch, 164,000 Serb civilians have been driven out of Kosovo.


The Clinton-Albright policy is based on the absurd fantasy that America and NATO can force the Serbs and Albanians to live together in a multiethnic society. Neither side wants that, and the attempt to impose our will means that U.S. troops will play the costly roles of global cop and social worker indefinitely.


The only people happy about the Yugoslavia debacle are the globalists who want America to be perpetually engaged in foreign conflicts. In a speech to the Canadian Parliament, Czech leader Vaclav Havel praised the Yugoslav war as "an important precedent for the future," saying that "state sovereignty must inevitably dissolve" and nation-states will be transformed into "civil administrative units."


When Clinton's National Security Adviser Sandy Berger spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations on October 21, he described Clinton's foreign policy as grounded in the policy of "engagement." America will now be "engaged" in Yugoslavia for the rest of our lives.

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THE MASSACRES THAT NEVER WERE: Source: Spectator (UK); IT was a lonely job, being Prime Minister, Tony Blair told the Labour party conference. He had sleepless nights. Sometimes, he said, there were 'life and death decisions to take'; which delicate hint is the closest he has so far come to taking the credit for having fought the war against Yugoslavia - and no wonder. He must realise that Kosovo has not proved to be his Falklands. This is not least because, as the province continues to languish in corruption and chaos, it is now obvious that Mr Blair's crude Manichaeism during the war was very wide of the mark. But maybe his insomnia is also connected with the fact that the extravagant claims then made for Serb evil are now proving difficult to substantiate.

On 16 May, the US defence secretary William Cohen said that Yugoslav army forces had killed up to 100,000 Albanian men of military age. This number was declared missing, the refugees having all claimed that their menfolk had been separated from them as they fled Kosovo. Tony Blair himself implied that the numbers might be even higher when he wrote in the Times on 5 June, 'We must be ready for what we know will be clear evidence of ... as yet unknown numbers of people missing, tortured and dead.' On 17 June, the then minister of state in the Foreign Office, Geoff Hoon, announced that some 10,000 people had been killed in more than 100 massacres but added, 'The final toll may be much worse.'

As journalists followed Nato troops into the province, the newspapers were strewn with maps showing scores of mass graves. There was particular excitement when 'the biggest mass grave ever' was announced to have been discovered in Ljubenic. It was said to contain 350 bodies, a figure which was blazed across the world's media. Reporting was markedly less energetic however, when the true figure turned on to be only seven. Billed as the 'biggest mass grave in Kosovo', Ljubenic was in fact not a mass grave at all. Similarly, on 11 October, a spokesman for the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague announced that no bodies or bones had been found in the mines at Trepca in northern Kosovo: rumours had been circulating in Kosovo that Serbian forces had dumped the bodies of as many as 700 Kosovars into its shafts.

Various experts have confirmed that the more extravagant claims were fantasy. In August, Pdrez Pujol, a Spanish forensic expert, told El Pais, 'I have been reading the data from the UN. They began with 44,000 deaths. Then they lowered it to 22,000. And now they're going with 11,000. I look forward to seeing what the final count will really be.' The chief Spanish inspector, Juan Lopez Palafox, added, 'They told us that we should prepare ourselves to perform more than 2,000 autopsies. The result is very different. We only found 187 cadavers and now we are going to return [to Spain].' Later the same month, a German doctor who had spent the war in the Stenkovac refugee camp in Macedonia cast light on the allegation that all the men of military age in Kosovo had been murdered. He told Die Welt, 'It was very surprising that a large number of journalists either could not or would not perceive the majority of the people in the refugee camps were men of military age. It was always represented as if there were no men in the camps at all. Even when the journalists were told this they refused to take account of it.'

So what is the final body count? A senior intelligence source in Croatia insists that, with 20 forensic teams active in Kosovo throughout the summer - some 500 professional criminologists altogether - the total number of bodies exhumed in Kosovo to date is 670. Yet, as a matter of policy, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia refuses to play the numbers game.

One might consider the Tribunal's coyness justified, since forensic investigations and autopsies are serious matters which take time. But such judicial circumspection was notoriously thrown to the wind on 22 May 1999 when the Tribunal issued its highly politically charged indictment of Slobodan Milosevic and other Yugoslav leaders at the height of Nato's war. That indictment listed the names of hundreds of Albanians allegedly murdered by Serbs: it is not clear why the Tribunal's rules of evidence are different from what they were five months ago.

Paul Risley, the spokesman for the Tribunal's prosecutor, vehemently denies a recent report by a Texas-based think-tank, Stratfor, that the number of bodies discovered to date is in the hundreds. Yet he confirms all the other data, which include the revelation that a whole string of sites where atrocities were allegedly committed have revealed no bodies at all. Risley also concedes that the number of 'mass graves' - i.e. single trenches into which numerous bodies have been thrown - is 'not very many'. However, while refusing to give a body count, he insists that the Tribunal's overall findings are consistent with the figure of 10,000 given by Geoff Hoon in June and that the autopsies indicate execution.

The main problem is that the Tribunal cannot be considered impartial. It has invested too much of its own credibility as an institution in the indictment of the Yugoslav leaders, and its efforts are overwhelmingly devoted to substantiating that charge. Meanwhile, the ethnic cleansing and racial murder of Kosovo Serbs and gypsies by Albanians has been quietly proceeding under its very nose. Only two weeks ago, a Bulgarian UN official was mistaken for a Serb in Pristina and promptly beaten and murdered by Albanians. Despite reassurances given at the time of the massacre of 14 Serbs near Lipljan in July, and despite the fact that Kosovan towns are littered with death notices of Serb civilians killed during the war and in the KLA insurrection which preceded it, no indictment of the KLA leaders by the Tribunal has been forthcoming. It is even less likely that it will bring war-crime charges against Nato itself, even though several groups have called for Nato to be prosecuted. It is difficult to see how the Tribunal could confidently affirm in May, from the safety of its offices in The Hague, that Serb leaders were personally teleguiding massacres, while it has been unable to investigate the KLA's role in murdering Serbs and gypsies after the war at a time when Tribunal investigators were actually physically present in Kosovo itself.

Suspicion must therefore remain. As an Albanian man said, whose daughter had admitted lying to the American TV channel CBC when she claimed that her sister had been killed by the Serbs: 'Against the Serbs, you had to fight in every way, even with propaganda like this' - a thought with which Alastair Campbell is unlikely to disagree. The story about Rajmonda avenging the death of her sister by indiscriminately killing Serbs had been beamed around the world at the height of the conflict. As a friend of the family said, 'If this small lie ... made some kind of impact on what Western countries did in Kosovo, then it's worth it.' Of the impact such stories had, there can certainly be no doubt whatever; their veracity, however, is a different matter.

CLINTON LIED ABOUT A GENOCIDE IN KOSOVO? DOESN'T THAT SOUND A LITTLE LIKE THE IRAQI WMDs?

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THE ATTACK ON PASSANGER TRAINS:

http://www.kosovo.net/index827.html

(Warning: GRAPHIC PHOTOS)

MORE:

LET ME REMIND YOU....

GEORGE W. BUSH SENT TROOPS INTO IRAQ TO HELP STOP TERRORISM. HE SENT IN TROOPS INTO IRAQ TO FREE THE WORLD OF TERRORISM.

CLARK NOT ONLY DOES NOT SUPPORT THIS WAR ON TERROR, BUT HE HELPED FIGHT ALONGSIDE OF TERRORISTS IN THE BALKANS.

CLARK SUPPORTED A GROUP CALLED THE KLA (KOSOVO LIBERATION ARMY) WHICH HAS TIES TO OSAMA BIN LADEN! FBI DOCUMENTS SAY SO: http://emperor.vwh.net/icdsm/more/fbi-msnbc.htm

CLARK MUCH RATHER BOMB INNOCENT PEOPLE IN A MARKETPLACE IN SERBIA WITH CLUSTER BOMBS THAN GO INTO IRAQ TO STOP AL'QUEDA AND MAKE THE WORLD SAFER.

TODAY KOSOVO IS NEARLY ETHNICALLY PURE OF ANY MINORITIES. SERBS, BOSNIANS, ROMA, AND JEWS WERE ALL DRIVEN OUT BY THE VERY GROUP CLARK HELPED AND SUPPORTED.

And where would Wesley Clark stand on the Israel-Palestinian issue? Well, we could only imagine, he's already helped ethnically cleanse Jews from Kosovo by aiding the terrorist KLA....

Targets of terrorism, Pristina's Jews forced to flee

Members of centuries-old Kosovo community mistaken for Serbs or Serb collaborators by vengeful Albanian paramilitaries

MILOVAN MRACEVICH
Special to The Globe and Mail

Belgrade -- In a seedy hotel across the street from Belgrade's Jewish Museum, the head of Kosovo's tiny Jewish community recalls the day two months ago when Albanian paramilitaries armed with submachine guns came to the door of the Pristina apartment where he and his family lived.

He told us to get out, said Cedomir Prlincevic, 61, a small, white-haired man who worked as director of the Pristina regional archive. We asked him why. He said, My house was burned. I said, But I'm not the one who did it. He said, I'm not interested. Get out or I'll slaughter you.

By the end of June, four generations of the Prlincevic family and other Jews were forced to flee Pristina, almost bringing to an end five centuries of Jewish settlement in Kosovo.

While this flight of about 40 people represented but a drop in the sea of an estimated 300,000 non-Albanians who have fled Kosovo -- mostly Serbs, Gypsies, and Montenegrins -- their departure diminishes the former multifaith character of the region.

Many Jews thought they would be spared. When ethnic-Albanian refugees fled Serb attackers this spring, Israel was among the first countries to dispatch mobile hospital units to help the sick. Israeli officials spoke of being able to relate to the plight of refugees driven from their homes for ethnic reasons.

Because Mr. Prlincevic and his family had good relations with Albanians and had protected Albanian neighbours during the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo by Serb forces, they believed they had no reason to flee when Serb forces withdrew. They also believed in the guarantees of the international community and the promises of KFOR, the peacekeeping force in Kosovo led by the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to protect Serbs and other minorities.

I had trust in the world, Mr. Prlincevic said. I never believed for a minute that I'd be the target of a primitive mass.

But when heavily armed Albanian paramilitaries arrived, apparently from Albania, the Jews of Pristina found themselves targeted and terrorized by men who either assumed they were Serbs or had collaborated with them.

It's a real inquisition down there. It's not like you can talk to someone and explain things. Those are wild people.

The Prlincevics' ethnic-Albanian neighbours were unable to protect them from the paramilitaries.

I saved two or three Albanian families during the war. When we were leaving Pristina, my neighbour called to me. He said, Neighbour. Forgive me. I couldn't help you. You helped me, but I can't help you.

An envoy of the U.S. Jewish Joint Distribution Committee met with Kosovo Liberation Army leader Hashim Thaci to seek protection for Kosovo's Jews. Mr. Prlincevic himself wrote to Mr. Thaci seeking protection. Mr. Thaci issued a letter ordering the entire Kosovo Liberation Army under my control to respect and protect all the Jews of Kosovo. But the intimidation of Jews by
paramilitary vigilantes continued unabated.

Efforts to obtain protection from KFOR also proved fruitless. Mr. Prlincevic sought personal protection, as president of the local Jewish community, from a British major. The officer told him he was too busy to talk to him that day.

I'm not saying that KFOR encouraged this violence, Mr. Prlincevic said, but the forces which were supposed to protect all nationalities didn't do their job.

Almost all of Pristina's Jews left the city during a 10-day period in late June, with the assistance of the Joint Distribution Committee. They are now living in Belgrade and Vranje, where the Federation of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia helped them settle. The JDC supports them. A historian by training, Mr. Prlincevic did research in Ottoman archives in Istanbul on Jewish
settlements in Kosovo going back to the 15th century. He says the history of Kosovo Jewry until the Second World War was one of good relations with Albanians, Turks, and Serbs, and that there was a high rate of intermarriage with these groups. His father was Serbian, and his wife, Vidosava, is a Serb.

In April, 1944, Albanian fascists, acting on Gestapo orders, interned and plundered the belongings of 1,500 of Pristina's Jews, most of whom were sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Mr. Prlincevic's mother, Bea Mandil, was one of the few who escaped being deported, but her large extended family was almost wiped out in the Holocaust.

Now in her 80s, Mrs. Mandil is proud she can still speak the Spanish she learned in her parents' home, a remnant from her ancestors who were expelled from Spain in 1492.

Her large family's eight apartments and three houses in Pristina have reportedly been looted and damaged. She now lives in a crowded Belgrade apartment with Mr. Prlincevic and other family members.

It's terrible, said Mrs. Mandil, who was married in 1938. Sixty years later, having to start again.

Less than half of Kosovo's pre-Second World War Jewish population of 1,700 survived the Holocaust, Mr. Prlincevic said. Most of those that did emigrated to Israel from 1948 to 1952.

The continuation of more than 500 years of Jewish presence in Kosovo now comes down to four Jews living in the environs of Pristina -- one of Mr. Prlincevic's sons, a daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren -- and two Turkish-Jewish families in Prizren, which comprise 22 or 23 members.

Aca Singer, a 76-year-old Auschwitz survivor who is president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia, is pessimistic about the chances for survival of the Kosovo Jewish community. He is disappointed that the Pristina Jews were forced to leave at a time of peace, with international troops present, and when the international community's representative in
Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, is a Jew from France.

Although a few Jewish families from Kosovo fled to Israel on the eve of the NATO's bombardment of Yugoslavia and five young Kosovo Jews are on a paid excursion to Israel to explore living and studying there, efforts by Mr. Singer's organization to get Israel to accept all the Kosovo Jews have been stymied thus far.

He blames Orthodox Jews within the Israeli ministries of religion and the interior for the situation, saying that they are applying purely religious criteria in defining Jewishness.

Mr. Singer is disappointed that the Kosovo Jews were left out of Israel's efforts to help refugees during the Kosovo war, when Israel sent its army hospital and humanitarian aid, and took planeloads of ethnic Albanians to Israel.

He was visiting Israel at the time, and pressed interior-ministry officials to relocate Kosovo's Jews to Israel as well. I said, If there's a problem, then accept them as Albanians, and sort out later whether they're Jews or not. They got mad at me.

For Mr. Prlincevic, however, the prospect of going to Israel -- a region, as he says, with its own ethnic conflicts -- is not heartening. If he must emigrate, he would prefer Canada, but most of all he would like to be able to return home with his family.

I can't comprehend in my 60th year, or my mother in her 81st, having to start a new life elsewhere. I'd look upon that as a moral death. This doesn't have to do with the Jewish community, it has to do with the right of a citizen to live where he belongs. I belong there, however primitive or undeveloped it is.

AND WHAT DID THE BOMBING OF SERBIA FOR 78 DAYS PRODUCE IN KOSOVO?

MORE PAIN... SUFFERING... AND TERRORISM!

HERE IS WHAT CLARK AND HIS FRIENDS DID FOR POST-WAR KOSOVO:

A little Roma boy wounded by Albanian extremists
Romas have almost been completely exterminated and driven away by Kosovo Albanians

Funeral of Ivan Jovic (A CHILD killed by Wes Clark's friends: the KLA)

Serbian civilians killed and then dumped out in the forest of Kosovo.

Homes burned

July 20: Gracko massacre victims (Click on the Link!) in the Pristina morgue. 14 Serb peasants were cold-bloodedly massacred by the Albanian extremists while they were taking harvest in the field near their village.

Over 150 churches, some as old as 600 years old, destroyed completely by the former KLA members. The same members Clark is buddies with!

At the moment Kosovo Serbs remain living in a few enclaves surrounded by KFOR troops which can only grant them security. Remaining Serb population in former multiethnic cities has dramatically dwindled (Pristina 300 out of 40.000; Pec, 20 nuns out of 20.000; Prizren 68 out of 11.000). Other cities like Urosevac, Klina, Djakovica, Decani are completely cleansed from Serbs and the total number of Serbs who had to leave Kosovo is MORE THAN 200.000, which makes almost 2 thirds of the prewar Serb population. This number is proportionally looking equal to 1.000.000 Albanians. In June KFOR troops entered the province followed by gangs of Albanian extremists who immediately established their local rule and began Nazi-like terror against Serbs, Romas, Serb speaking Moslems, Corats, Jews and others.

The BEST Website on the life of the people living in Kosovo post Wesley Clark: http://www.kosovo.com/default2.html