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No genocide no justification in kosovo

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   http://www.snd-us.com/Liberty/st_1758.htm

http://www.snd-us.com/Liberty/st_1758.htm

Srdja Trifkovic
Kosovo: Invented Massacres
No genocide, No justification

"The Kosovo genocide" is the most outrageous lie of the year, perhaps the decade. It did not happen, period.

This will not come as a surprise to those of our readers (remember the long-debunked myth of "Srebrenica"!), but it remains insufficiently known to the Western public. Not for the first time, the Europeans were the first to let the cat out of the bag. In September Spain's foremost daily El Pais published a report on the findings of the Spanish police and forensic experts who had returned from Kosovo. The very first line of Pablo Ordaz's article was clear: "Crimes of war - yes, Genocide - no":

"This was definitely shown yesterday by the group of Spanish experts formed by officials from the Scientific Police and Civilian Forensics that has just returned from Istok, the Zone in the North of Kosovo under the control of the [Spanish foreign] Legion. 187 cadavers found and analyzed in 9 villages were buried in individual graves, oriented for the most part toward Mecca out of respect for the religious beliefs of the Albanian Kosovars and without sign of torture. "There were no mass graves. For the most part the Serbs are not as bad as they have been painted," reflected the forensic official Emilio Perez Pujol. That was not the only irony. Also questioned were the successive counts that are being offered by the "allies" on the tragedy of Kosovo. "I have been reading the data from UN," said Perez Pujol, Director of the Forensic Anatomical Institute of Cartagena. "And 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 Spanish mission left Madrid in early August. After preliminary NATO briefings they departed with the feeling that they were going on a road to hell:

"They told us that we were going to the worst zone of Kosovo and should prepare ourselves to perform more than 2000 autopsies until late November. The result is very different. We only found 187 cadavers and now we are back," explained the chief inspector, Juan Lopez Palafox, responsible for the Office of Anthropology and Scientific Police. The forensic people, as well as the police, applied their experience in Rwanda in order to determine what occurred in Kosovo at least in that section assigned to the Spanish detachment and they were not able to find evidence of genocide. "In the former Yugoslavia," said Lopez Palafox, "crimes were committed, some no doubt horrible, but they derived from the war."

Closer to home, Richard Gwyn's commentary in The Toronto Star (November 3) had a self-explanatory title: No genocide, no justification for war on Kosovo. Gwyn reminded his readers of repeated US/NATO claims, made during the bombing, that the genocidal Serb forces had dumped some of the countless thousands of slaughtered Albanian civilians into the Trepca mine by trucks under the cover of darkness. That story was very big for a while:

"Trepca - the name will live alongside those of Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka," verily chortled The Daily Mirror, one of the unspeakable organs of the British yobbery. Giving the fib an aura of authenticity The New York Times claimed at the time that the residents on the edge of the mine reported an "unusual, pungent bittersweet smell, which they assumed to be burning bodies." The corpses were supposedly thrown down the shafts, or were disposed of entirely in the mine's huge vats of hydrochloric acid." But Richard Gwyn points out that such stories were given credibility at the very top of the regimes in Washington and London:

"That was six months ago, in the middle of the war undertaken to halt what both President Clinton and British Prime Minister Blair called "a human catastrophe."' Estimates of the number of ethnic Albanians slaughtered went upward from 10,000. U.S. Defence Secretary William Cohen put the count at 100,000."

On October 12, however, Kelly Moore - a spokeswoman for the Hague "war crimes tribunal" - was compelled to admit that the investigators had found "absolutely nothing" at Trepca. There were not 1,000 bodies down the mine shafts at Trepca, there were none at all; and the vats had never been used to dispose of human remains. Shortly afterward, says Gwyn, the tribunal reported on its work at the most infamous of all the mass graves of ethnic Albanians, at Ljubenic near the town of Pec. NATO officials had claimed that 350 victims had been hastily buried there by the retreating Serbs; five bodies were actually found. Gwyn's conclusions are terse and categorical: there was no genocide of ethnic Albanians by Serbs, no "human catastrophe" and no "modern-day Holocaust." We are dealing with "a grotesque lie concocted to justify a war that NATO originally assumed would be over in a day or two No genocide means no justification for a war inflicted by NATO on a sovereign nation."

In a long and detailed article in the Spectator of London ("The Massacres that Never Were," 25 October) John Laughland openly declared the "mass graves" of Kosovo a myth. In Britain, at least, there has been some political fallout from the revelations. The defensive posture of the establishment was obvious in the feeble claim by the editorialist of The Times of London (November 2 1999) that "the actual number of civilians killed to scare the rest off is irrelevant; the prevention of mass murder and ethnic cleansing, on whatever scale, [sic!] remains a war aim of which Nato can be proud."

This is a desperate claim indeed, and foreign secretary Robin Cook knows it. At the time of this writing he still evaded increasing public pressure to explain his outspoken justification of the bombing by the "genocide."

The Sunday Times ("Cook accused of misleading public on Kosovo massacres," October 31) reported that an all-party Balkans committee of MPs had asked the Foreign Office to comment on the disparity of numbers:

"At the height of the war western officials spoke of a death toll as high as 100,000. President Clinton said the Nato campaign had prevented "deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide". Geoff Hoon, then a Foreign Office minister and now the defence secretary, later scaled down the estimates. "It appears that about 10,000 people have been killed in more than 100 massacres," he said. The most outspoken challenge to these figures has come from Emilio Perez Pujol, a pathologist who led the Spanish team looking for bodies in the aftermath of the fighting. He said: "I calculate that the final figure of dead in Kosovo will be 2,500 at the most, including lots of strange deaths that can't be blamed on anyone."

Alice Mahon, the Labour MP who chairs the Balkans committee, said that the deaths were tragic but did not justify the military action taken by Nato:"When you consider that 1,500 civilians or more were killed during Nato bombing, you have to ask whether the intervention was justified," she said."

Four of those civilians were Chinese, and a detailed investigative article in the Observer of London (17 October) reported that NATO deliberately bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade last May, supposedly because the embassy was relaying Yugoslav military radio signals. The report contradicted the public assurances of NATO leaders - taken at face value by all mainstream U.S. media - that the attack had been "accidental." The Observer's sources included "a flight controller operating in Naples, an intelligence officer monitoring Yugoslav radio traffic from Macedonia and a senior [NATO] headquarters officer in Brussels."

The report was picked up by the media all over the world. The Guardian carried it simultaneously with the Observer, and the Times of London ran a follow-up article on the official reaction the next day (October 18). The Globe and Mail, Canada's most prestigious daily, ran the full Reuters account prominently in its international section; so did the Times of India, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Irish Times, to mention but some.

And yet none of America's major TV networks or leading dailies have deemed this story worthy of coverage, even though it was covered by AP, Reuters and other major wires. The Washington Post was something of an exception, but it relegated the report to a 90-word summary in its "World Briefing" (October 18), under the Agitprop-correct headline "NATO Denies Story on Embassy Bombing."

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, a New York-based group, pointed out that the difference in perspective with which American journalists have greeted this story can be observed by comparing the headlines over several international news agencies' dispatches about the Observer exposé: "NATO Bombed Chinese Embassy Deliberately--UK Paper" (Reuters); "NATO Bombed Chinese Embassy Deliberately: Report" (Agence France Presse); "NATO Bombed Chinese Embassy Deliberately, Observer Claims" (Deutche Presse-Agentur)... but "NATO Denies Deliberate Embassy Hit" from our own AP. Come back, Pravda, all is forgiven.

The New York Times has referred to the "accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy" at least 20 times since last May. The last reference was on October 17 - the day the Observer published its report. Some news are fitter to print than others... Ah, lest we forget: in July CIA director George Tenet testified in Congress that out of the 900 targets struck by NATO during the three-month bombing campaign against the Serbs, only one was developed by the CIA. Yes, it was the Chinese Embassy (AP, July 22).

In the virtual-reality world of our non-state-controlled media, the lies and PR fabrications - mass graves, rape camps, genocide, etc, etc - are used to justify actions that produce all too real victims.




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