IN THE INFORMATION WAR,  A VICTORY FOR PEACE

Reflections on the one year anniversary of the US/NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia

Text of a speech given to Dayton Peace Action, Dayton, Ohio, 3/21/00

By Geoff Berne

It's a privilege to have been asked by Dayton Peace Action to speak
regarding this past year of war in Yugoslavia.

An organization like yours that's dedicated to peace is a rare one in
the landscape of today's geopolitics in which stronger countries like
ours are said to have "national interests" that justify going to war.  A
person who is for peace signals that he most likely does not have a
multinational investment portfolio and probably doesn't care whether the
bulk of Americans who invest in foreign enterprises and ventures prosper
or not.  If you reject the notion that nations such as ours have the
right to send troops to protect the investment of capital in a foreign
country like Kuwait or Yugoslavia, you'll be looked on as a clueless
individual who somehow hasn't gotten the message that investment in the
economies of foreign countries is the life's blood of our American
system, a thing that Americans who own stocks are ready to die for, or
kill for, even if you are not.  May you, notwithstanding, continue to
carry the peace banner.

I have spent the past year being one of a chorus of people that has
raised an outcry about the Balkan war on the internet, and has refused
to let the matter die as the media and our national leadership try to
move on to other things.  What anybody who has followed the war on the
web has quickly realized is that it has caused a crisis of consistency
for people of every political inclination: from so-called Democratic
Socialists (many of whom vigorously supported the bombing of a socialist
country) to conservative libertarians (who supposedly believe in a free
market economy but defended Yugoslavia - a country bombed for its
refusal to adopt a free market economy).

Somehow through the confusion of seeing right and left trade their
traditional positions on the justness of war an antiwar computer
consensus emerged that demanded to be heard and became a factor that had
to be reckoned with. Within mere months, the war opposition that had
taken root among the public bubbled to the surface in the House of
Representatives last May in a tie vote registering no-confidence in the
administration's war policy, 213-213, a vote followed just a few weeks
later by an abrupt halt in the bombing. Can one recall a more dramatic
triumph of democracy than in this affirmation of the goal of peace by
the representatives of the people?

The Pentagon fought the information war in the Balkans using the old
media: newspapers and TV.  They failed to stir the traditional pro-war,
patriotic fervor, however, because, increasingly, public opinion is
being shaped today not by TV but by computer.

As compared with their support for action against the Ayatollah Khomeini
in Iran and against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the public's reaction to
this war was to sit on its hands and turn away from the kiddie cartoon
version of a war in Yugoslavia that the video media crafted with the
help of military and CIA psychological operations specialists who
literally occupied CNN newsrooms and production facilities.  Even in
spite of all that effort, like a big budget Hollywood movie that nobody
went to see, "Operation Allied Force" was a disaster at the box office.
Does anybody even remember that corny name?

As we approach the one year anniversary of the start of NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia three days from now, let's take satisfaction that the war has
been such an embarrassing subject that not a single presidential
candidate from the two major parties has so much as mentioned it!  Given
the fact that the war was undeclared and indeed that the word "war" was
not even used to describe an operation that involved 40,000 Western
bombing sorties, the uprooting of a million people, ten thousand
civilian deaths, and the destruction of 1,500 towns and 40 per cent of
the buildings in Kosovo alone by the NATO bombing - to the point that
1.2 billion dollars would now be needed to rebuild housing in Kosovo
alone - given the fact that even with all that bloodshed and destruction
NATO was able to destroy only 13 Yugoslavian tanks, and is it any wonder
"Kosovo" is a war regarding which no major political candidate has dared
speak its name?

Odds are, however, that this issue will not stay quiet very much longer
because, for one thing, the war is still going on and in fact heating up
with every passing day, and furthermore those who originally set it in
motion had grandiose goals that are still far from being achieved, goals
that can only be achieved by a confrontation with Yugoslavia's
unyielding regime.

As far as the war still going on is concerned, indications are that
another call by the United States for a resumption of bombing and
perhaps ground operations will be made in the very near future. A
blockade of the Republic of Montenegro set up early this month by the
Milosevic government  seems to set the stage for yet another U.S./NATO
rescue mission.  This time it would be on behalf of the government of
Montenegro President Milo Djukanovic, the king of European cigarette
smuggling, who is expected to follow in the footsteps of Slovenia,
Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and (soon to be added to this
list, Kosovo), and stage a secession from the Yugoslav federation.

Also indicative that the war is recharging is the renewal of Albanian
aggressive acts, not only against Serb civilians but this time even
against NATO/UN peacekeeping personnel. Persecution, bombings, and
killings of Serbs by revenge-minded Albanians have taken place under the
nose of and with the apparent protection of the greatly overmatched UN
international peacekeepers. In a sign of the underwhelming international
support that there is for the Balkan mission, the UN countries who
supposedly pledged to provide a total of 5,000 troops to police the
streets of Kosovo instead only provided 2500.   In the past few weeks,
everyone in a position of authority in relation to Kosovo, from UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan on down, has proclaimed the area to be out
of control. Either a mono-racial Albanian state entirely "cleansed" of
Serbs will emerge in Kosovo, a republic that NATO at war's end had
agreed would remain as a territorial part of the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, or Kosovo will be partitioned as in Bosnia and Cold War
Berlin.

Incredible as it may seem, NATO had gone to war without first having in
place a game plan for postwar occupation of a country that it invaded
and occupied. Now that it has total authority, it's making up a new
script each day as it goes along. Ten years is the minimum forecast I
have read for how long this travesty of an occupation will last, and
some have said fifty. Its mission compromised to the core, its authority
mocked by their having served as protectors to the gangland violence of
its Kosovo Albanian dependents, the UN occupation and security force has
reduced retiring NATO commander Clark to putting out desperate calls for
more troops - and caused NATO's own field officers and monitors to warn
that troops may now be needed to quell these same Albanians that we
embraced and set up as a fighting force in the first place.

On February 13th, in the city of Mitrovica where 50,000 of the remaining
100,000 Serbs who have not yet been driven out of Kosovo still live, UN
personnel were  overmatched by sniper fire and crowds throwing rocks and
grenades in a march on the city that's known for its prized Trepca
mineral mines. Wresting control of the mines and their 17 billion tons
of coal reserves, plus lead, zinc, cadmium, silver, and gold treasures
from the government in Belgrade has been seen as a goal not just of the
Albanian insurgents of Kosovo but also of the international industrial
and investment interests who stand poised to reap major benefits from
NATO dominion over the area.

The mines have been called "the most valuable piece of real estate in
the Balkans." Many of Kosovo's pro-secession Albanians who had worked in
the mines were weeded out and replaced with Poles, Czechs, and Serbs by
the Milosevic administration in the 1980's after having committed a
spate of strikes, sabotage incidents, and violence against
fellow-Albanian miners who remained loyal to the government in Belgrade.

The guns of insurgents who fought for the KLA and for secession of
Kosovo from Yugoslavia are still targeted on these fellow -Albanians
"traitors" who remain pro-Belgrade and whom they would like to oust from
the mines. The 70,000 Albanians who rallied in Mitrovica have plainly
lost patience with the UN occupation which they had expected would
re-establish employment in the mines for Albanians who are pro-KLA.
Obviously the mines are not just a flashpoint, they are the flashpoint
for any future hostilities in Kosovo.

The Trepca mines first attracted notice in the early days of the war
when NATO spokesmen  alleged that they held one thousand bodies of
Albanian victims of Serb ethnic murders.  The Mirror of London wrote
that the name Trepca would "live alongside those of Belsen, Auschwitz
and Treblinka, etched in the memories of those whose loved ones met a
bestial end in true Nazi Final Solution fashion."  But in the aftermath
of the bombing ceasefire investigators for the International Criminal
Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found no human remains there at
all!

If the name Trepca continues to live in infamy it will be as a symbol
not of genocide but of the official invention of a fake genocide to
justify war against a nation that had committed no offense other than a
refusal to allow the major Western nations to plunder it.

Along with Trepca all other evidence of Serb genocide has collapsed, the
100,000 ethnic murders of which "Mr." Milosevic was accused by Defense
Secretary Cohen were pure invention as admitted even by hardliner Adem
Demaci of the KLA who put the figure at closer to seven thousand.
However, the ICTY forensic teams who were sent to look for bodies wound
up actually finding remains of only a few hundred persons and even these
bodies were conceded to have been likely insurgent combat troops rather
than innocent civilians.  At the very most, the ICTY teams estimated
that the total count of bodies found would be something like  2,000. No
less an authority than KLA "minister" Hashim Thaci has himself now
admitted that the notorious so-called "massacre" at Racak, the incident
that outraged the world and gained world support for NATO action, was
the result of a bald-faced provocation by KLA terrorists who used the
photographed bodies of their own snipers as "proof" of a Serbian ethnic
bloodbath.

While this is not news on the television media, which refuse to report
these revelations, it's big news on the internet where official lies and
disinformation are routinely deflated in a matter of hours after being
proclaimed. Indeed, in spite of NATO's seeming media advantage, the
winners of the information age's first internet war have been the forces
of peace!  A determined information-gathering resistance movement on the
internet has grown in influence over this past year to such a point that
it has succeeded in stripping away the humanitarian fig leaf that NATO
wore when the war first started and with it all credibility of the
governments of nineteen of the most powerful countries in the world.
That is a big, big accomplishment.

Hence while a new war, even an expanded war, has perhaps never been so
close, the power of those who seek peace has never seemed greater,
either.

The next time this country goes to war, whether in the Balkans or
against some small, defenseless country elsewhere on the planet, how can
our pretense of humanitarian motive be believed now that internet
researchers have exposed our hidden intentions in Yugoslavia and forced
revisions of the official spin on that war to be made in the historical
record?

The entrance of the U.S. into the Balkans was shocking when it happened
because of our trampling of international war codes, treaties, and rules
of conduct taken for granted for decades, and even centuries.  The UN
Security Council - out of business.  The Geneva Convention prohibiting
aggression against civilian populations - null and void.  The War Powers
Act forbidding foreign military intervention without Congressional
authorization - never heard of it. I even read that we had violated the
Treaty of Westphalia of 1648!  The internet revolution broke down the
mystique of foreign affairs expertise, allowing citizens like ourselves
to have technical information such as this.  Now we have an opportunity
to sort through the sheer mountain of data, and, if we stay the course,
to find out exactly what goes on inside the Leviathan of the war
machine, and exactly how a nightmarish war such as we have seen in
Yugoslavia is made from drawing board through fait accompli.

It's exactly appropriate that among the most influential sources of
truth about this war have been two websites, the absolutely essential
antiwar.com and one entitled The Emperor's New Clothes - www.tenc.com.
Here are just some of the revelations with which that latter website and
others have succeeded in tearing away the aura of righteous purpose in
which the makers of the NATO war on Yugoslavia have vainly struggled to
clothe themselves.

By the time the bombing was two weeks old it was clear to anybody
following it on the internet that restoring ethnic harmony in Kosovo was
not the reason we were in Yugoslavia. Now a year later a consensus has
grown that what the U.S. had sought for Kosovo is for it to be a
permanent colonial protectorate, a launching pad for America to move
into the former Soviet bloc countries.  Prior to the war, America had
military bases in 100 countries around the world but not Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was the very the last country in Europe without an American
base. Now, thanks to the war the largest American base in Europe is in
Kosovo.

Emperor's Clothes has published many entries by writer Diana Johnstone.
She characterizes Yugoslavia as "a testing ground and a metaphor for the
Soviet Union." In other words, American orchestration of the downfall of
Yugoslavia (by abetting the breakaway of its member republics) is only a
dress rehearsal for future usage of the same dismemberment strategy
against Russia. Supporting the idea that America is positioning itself
to revive the Cold War struggle against Russia are several articles on
Emperor's Clothes including a 1996 paper by Sean Gervasi which asserts
that America wants to have the status of a "European power," and to
expand eastward, eventually taking over the running and economic
exploitation of former east bloc countries such as the Ukraine, Georgia,
and Azerbaijan.

As long as four years ago Gervasi was proclaiming that far from being a
tightly knit partnership, the western alliance is falling apart. In his
analysis, fearing that the emergence of the European Union, of which the
U.S. is not a member, would make Germany rather than ourselves the
supreme power in Europe, the U.S. sought war in the Balkans to carve out
a post-Cold War domain for NATO, of which we are a member,  and a way to
make NATO be the supreme power in Europe.

Gervasi's theory is as follows:  worried that our fellow NATO countries
had only weakly supported American action in the Gulf War (with our
so-called allies relying almost wholly on American manpower and
firepower), the U.S. cooked up a Balkan crisis in order to lift NATO out
of its doldrums and establish American supremacy by dazzling our allies
with American high tech firepower.  Implicit in this theory is that
America had acted in the hope that Europe would see that this country
sets the standard for military manufacture and would have to buy
American military goods.

As early as the 1980's American strategists were plotting ways that NATO
intervention against "rogue nations" would give the U.S. and its fellow
members of NATO a new cause.  Just as the old empires of Europe
conquered whole continents in the name of a "civilizing mission," NATO
would roam the planet as protectors of human rights and as humanitarian
rescuers.

Another contributor to Emperor's Clothes (and other antiwar websites),
Michael
Chossudowsky, documents the way the U.S. used the American-controlled
International Monetary Fund, with its power of foreclosure as financial
lender, to smash the Yugoslavian economy, render that country helpless
against foreign takeover, and create such outrageous social and economic
conditions that military intervention by outside countries would seem
like the only solution.

Finally, once again from Emperor's Clothes, on March 12th we were
privileged to get the first American posting of investigations by the
major London newspapers and BBC television that show how America's CIA
created the pro-Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army to spread terror against
Serbia and the government in Belgrade. When Belgrade acted to stop the
shootings, burnings, and kidnappings by the KLA Western media portrayed
Belgrade's law & order measures  as racial genocide against Albanians.
In such way the impression was created of a humanitarian crisis that
NATO used as cover for a military aggression.

Now one year after the initial bombing of Yugoslavia, America has
installed itself as an occupying power in Kosovo.  Like Korea, like
Berlin and the two Germanies during the Cold War, Yugoslavia is now a
divided country with two republics (Bosnia and Kosovo) that are
protectorates run by outside international bodies mainly staffed by
Americans.

Is the United States simply getting carried away with its own
self-righteous sense of a mission to save mankind, as many anti-war
conservatives who hate the idea of governments acting on the basis of
paternalistic compassion, such as Pat Buchanan, charge, or is the U.S.
committing itself to interventionism because of some more practical and
self-interested motive?

We do not read much about it or hear about it in the major media, but
the internet has carried dozens of articles about the economic benefits
that the U.S. stands to reap from its presence in Kosovo: first of all
the U.S. seeks to build an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan in the former
Soviet Central Asia right across Kosovo and Croatia. With its domination
of Kosovo the U.S. would have control over the future main supply of oil
to the European continent.

And in Kosovo as in many other countries before it, America has sided
with factions  that reap huge profits from the drug trade thus
implicitly suggesting that our government has a stake in that trade that
has become a vital form of military financing.  First Afghanistan, then
the Nicaraguan contras, then Panama, and now it's our latest client,
Albania.  80 percent of Europe's heroin supply comes from Albania, which
has used drug sales to fund KLA expansion into Kosovo and made Kosovo an
indispensable link in the Albanian drug trade.  Our armed forces are
being readied for an expedition to stop the drug trade in Colombia.  Has
one word been said to suggest that the military in Kosovo might want to
stop the drug trade in Kosovo as well?

It's been hard for anyone who knows the truth about the KLA and drugs to
watch TV personalities such as Geraldo Rivera go to Albania and stand
side by side in solidarity with these anti-Serb rebels whom they
characterize as freedom fighters.  Only on the internet do we discover
that these brave patriots are funded almost entirely by profits from
heroin and other major-scale organized crime activity including
prostitution.

Give credit to the internet resistance, then, for exposing truths such
as these about the war in Yugoslavia.  In today's information wars,
computer truth forces are the modern day successors of the war
resistance of Yugoslavian partisans and chetniks who stood up to Hitler
during World War II.

In just three days we will mark the one year anniversary of NATO's air
invasion of Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999. It so happens that that date
coincides with another anniversary, the birth of Yugoslavian resistance
to Adolf Hitler on March 26-27, 1941.  On that date after Hitler had
struck a deal with Yugoslavia's Prince Regent, Yugoslavia's armed forces
rose up and overthrew his government, as crowds spat on the German
minister's car.  Allow me to quote from William L. Shirer's classic
account of the years of the Third Reich:

"The coup in Belgrade threw Adolf Hitler into one of the wildest rages
of his entire life.  He took it as a personal affront and in his fury
made sudden decisions which would prove utterly disastrous to the
fortunes of the Third Reich.  Yugoslavia (he said) would be crushed with
'unmerciful harshness.' He ordered Goering to 'destroy Belgrade in
attacks by waves' with bombers operating from Hungarian air bases." He
then postponed his invasion of Russia by four weeks thus guaranteeing
that it would end in failure and the snows of the Russian winter.

The bombing of Belgrade by the Luftwaffe began on April 6, 1941, razing
the city to the ground and killing 17,000 civilians. In an eerie
forshadowing of today's tradition of giving each war its own
action-movie title such as "Operation Desert Storm" in Iraq and
"Operation Allied Force" in Kosovo, Hitler's air attack on Yugoslavia
was called "Operation Punishment."  On April 13, 1941, Yugoslavia was
overwhelmed by the German blitz, and the army surrendered at Sarajevo.
Under the occupation industrialist Alfried von Krupp and Reichsmarshall
Hermann Goering personally divided up the spoils of Yugoslavia's
precious mines. However the Yugoslavian partisans, consisting primarily
of Serbs, fought on, resisting all foreign domination including, after
the war, that of the Soviet Union.

Of all the countries that were overrun by Hitler's armies, Yugoslavia
set a unique example in fighting back and offering armed resistance.
The heroic resistance to military aggression demonstrated by the Serbs
of Yugoslavia, which started with Serbia's declaration of independence
after World War I and has now withstood three invasions including
NATO's, should not only not be forgotten, but should inspire us today.

Yugoslavia is once again being eyed as an outpost for the west in
Central Europe, a fortified American emplacement in readiness for war
with Russia.  The stubborn Serbs of that country have shown that they
will endure any suffering to prevent their land from being used for such
a scenario.  We must find the strength to match the Serbs in their
heritage of resistance to war, and it looks as though we will be called
upon to do so if, as appears likely, NATO's war against Yugoslavia
intensifies in the very near future.


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