Burying the US-NATO War on Yugoslavia
Workers Worled - Apr 14, 2005 issue
http://www.workers.org/2005/ed-itorials/yugoslavia-0414/
Editorial
No headlines about this war
The pro-Pentagon propaganda machine here usually celebrates war
anniversaries, especially wars with few U.S. casualties. Yet take a
look at Google News for March 24: Yugoslavia turned up only 38
independent hits. Thirty-four of them involved chess champion Bobby
Fischer's asylum in Iceland. The war was almost ignored.
Did someone think it would be harder now to convince people of the 10
years of organized lies and propaganda used to justify aggression
against Yugoslavia? Shining a light on the Balkans exposes too much
truth about imperialist aggression and its consequences.
On March 24, 1999, a U.S.-led NATO force launched its first sustained
aggression against what remained of the once quite successful
socialist country of Yugoslavia. At the time, the NATO leaders and
U.S. President Bill Clinton claimed this was a "humanitarian war." It
featured 78 days of "humanitarian bombing." NATO's propagandists gave
the world the obscene term "collateral damage."
During those 78 days, U.S.-NATO forces bombed Yugoslavia's industrial
infrastructure, including television stations, apartment complexes and
schools. The bombs killed over a thousand civilians, about one-third
of them children. They polluted a beautiful country with chemicals,
oil spills, and depleted
uranium.
The humanitarian side was supposedly helping the Albanian people of
the Kosovo and Metochia province of Serbia. To this province the war
brought a continued NATO occupation with a United Nations cover. It
brought the biggest U.S. military base in Eastern Europe. It brought
the most reactionary and corrupt groupings from the Albanian
population into power.
Now Kosovo's biggest industries are drug running and prostitution of
impoverished women from the East. Meanwhile these ultra-rightists have
driven out over 200,000 Serbs, Roma people, Jews and all other
nationalities in a very non-humanitarian pogrom under NATO's watch.
Serbia and the other former Yugoslav republics are not free. They are
appendages of Western European and U.S. imperialism. Joblessness has
reached new heights, poverty new depths. German capital owns Serbia's
media lock, stock and barrel, and controls its banks. U.S. Steel owns
its biggest steel mills.
Clinton kept better relations with his imperialist allies, and gave
them a share of the loot, but NATO bombed Yugo slavia for the same
imperialist reasons that Bush invaded Iraq: to overthrow an
independent state, to place a puppet in power and to seize control of
the resources. The war should be remembered, but as a great
imperialist crime.
Serbian News Network - SNN
[email protected]
http://www.antic.org/
