http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index2.php/ex/examples/features
http://www.espritdecorps.ca/man_on_a_mission__christopher_ja.htm
Man on a Mission
CHRISTOPHER JAMES finds out why a Canadian army veteran is now a leading
campaigner for the truth about Kosovo
(Morning Star - June 30, 2005) www.morningstaronline.co.uk
SCOTT Taylor is a man on a mission. The Canadian army veteran, turned
writer
and peace campaigner, is fighting to expose how Kosovo's fabled "mass
graves" containing victims of "Serbian genocide" are a manufactured myth
as
phoney as Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction.
As an eyewitness to the 1999 Kosovo war, Taylor's message is an
uncompromising rebuttal of everyday Western misrepresentations of the
conflict - a conflict which culminated in the annexation by NATO of
Serbia's
southern province six year's ago this month.
"Was Kosovo a messy, inter-ethnic civil war? Absolutely. Was it a planned,
organised genocide? No," Taylor tells speaking tour audiences with a calm,
quiet authority acquired from time in the frontline as soldier and war
correspondent.
Taylor is editor and founder of Esprit de Corps - an independent journal for
rank-and-file Canadian military, acclaimed for its exposure of corruption
within army top brass, its campaigning on issues such as Gulf War syndrome
and its countering of official spin surrounding the "war on terror."
By his own admission Taylor launched the magazine in 1988 as a cheerleading
pro-army publication, funded by defence contractors who he today derides as
"the evil military-industrial complex."
His experiences reporting from the 1991 Gulf War, witnessing unspeakable
carnage inflicted on defenceless Iraqi conscripts, was the turning point for
both Taylor and for Esprit de Corps, which has since transformed, he says,
into "the conscience of the Canadian Defence Department."
Reporting from war-torn Bosnia in 1992, Taylor's experiences alongside
Canadian troops again contrasted with mainstream media spin, which he saw as
obsessed with demonising the Serbian population of the disintegrating
Yugoslav federation.
He returned to the Balkans in 1999 as one of the few Western journalists to
report from within Kosovo during the 78-day aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia
by NATO - which was then acting as a de facto airforce for the ethnic
Albanian supremacists and separatists of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
This provided "an incredible vantage point to see what was taking place,"
says Taylor, whose eyewitness experience contrasted sharply with that of
thousands of NATO-accredited journalists reporting from refugee camps in
Macedonia and elsewhere, "getting second and third-hand stories, many of
which later turned out to be fabricated."
It is worthwhile recalling the extreme wartime hysteria that gripped Britain
and the West at the time. So complete was the demonisation of Serbia and its
political leadership that few, even on the anti-war left, opposed the
barbarism deployed by NATO on the Yugoslav people and the violation of their
national sovereignty.
Daily press conferences saw NATO spindoctors announce spiralling death tolls
that rapidly reached upwards of 100,000 murdered Albanians, guaranteeing
worldwide banner headlines that screamed of genocide and holocaust revisited
on Europe. Countless other horror stories included the claim that a further
40,000 Albanians were detained in Pristina's sports stadium awaiting a
grisly fate. All this proved to be false.
One Spanish forensic team sent into Kosovo after the conflict was told to
expect to conduct 2,000 autopsies. After just 187 bodies were produced, it
returned home early.
"All the bodies 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," reported the Spanish daily El Pais,
one of the few, if not the only, papers to carry the story.
The parallels between Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" and Kosovo's
"mass graves" are obvious, says Taylor. Both were dreamed up by politicians
to sell otherwise unpopular wars to their people, although the former claim
was clearly met with greater scepticism.
"These are all becoming information wars now," says Taylor. "It has become
such a game for them. Spin machines manipulate the media and the media in
turn manipulates the population."
When Yugoslav troops withdrew from Kosovo, to be replaced by NATO occupiers,
Taylor watched the inevitable media circus "roll in" with editorial orders
to find mass graves and "the shattered remnants of the Serbian army," he
says.
"But they couldn't find the mass graves because they didn't exist. There
were bodies of course - there had been a civil war."
Despite the unprecedented pounding that Kosovo, and Serbia as a whole, took
from NATO, the Yugoslav army escaped almost completely unscathed.
"Some $13 billion of weaponry had been dropped on Kosovo to destroy 13
tanks, two or three of which were museum pieces used as decoys," says
Taylor.
The brunt of the assault was inflicted on the country's civilian population
- hospitals, factories, bridges, the electricity grid, water supplies, Serb
TV and other targets were reduced to rubble while the republic's environment
suffered deadly contamination through the use of depleted uranium weapons.
According to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY), the new world order's phoney court where former Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic continues to face down genocide and war crimes charges,
the total body count from Kosovo stands at 2,788.
Contrast this with wartime claims of 100,000 murdered Albanian civilians and
Taylor's message comes sharply into focus, particularly when one considers
that the ICTY death toll includes combatants from both sides as well as
victims of NATO bombing.
Following the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces Albanian separatists immediately
set about clearing the province of its minority populations. Some 200,000
Serbs, Jews, Roma, Turks and ethnic Albanians loyal to Yugoslavia have fled
Kosovo since 1999, all under the nose of 18,000 NATO "peacekeepers"
(actually occupiers), many based at Camp Bondsteel, a gargantuan US base
sprawling over 750 acres in the south-east of the province.
Presented as simple "revenge attacks," these were in fact the start of a
final push to ethnically cleanse the province of non-Albanians - a process
which began with anti-Serb pogroms following the 1980 death of Yugoslav
president Josip Broz Tito, whose towering leadership had hitherto helped
hold the federation together since the end of World War II.
As far back as 1982, long before the development of a "Washington line" on
Kosovo for obedient journalists to follow, the New York Times reported
that:
"[Kosovo] Albanian nationalists have a two-point platform.first to establish
what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger
with Albania to form a greater Albania."
In 1987 the same paper quoted a Kosovo Albanian nationalist leader's demand
for an "ethnic Albania that includes western Macedonia, southern Montenegro,
part of southern Serbia, Kosovo and Albania itself."
Last year's "Kosovo Kristallnacht", as it was dubbed by one UN official,
where Albanian supremacists rampaged through the province leaving dozens
dead, hundreds wounded and 35 ancient Christian Orthodox churches, some
dating from the 13th Century, razed to the ground, was merely the latest
violent manifestation of this racist doctrine.
* Christopher James wishes to thank Filmmakers Against War for their
assistance in producing this article. Scott Taylor is the subject of a
Filmmakers Against War production due for release this year.
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