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Date sent: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 14:17:12 -0800
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From: Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: NATO BOMBING IS CRIMINALLY DANGEROUS
WAR IS PEACE BIG BROTHER ASSURES US:
BUT NATO BOMBING IS DANGEROUSLY CRIMINAL AND CRIMINALLY DANGEROUS
by Andre Gunder Frank
March 26, 1999
NATO bombing of Serbia is in abject violation of international law
by taking it into your own hands to destroy it. That makes this
NATO action first dangerously criminal and then criminally
dangerous. The American NATO Military Commander's claim that
he is speaking and acting for the 'International Community' is a
deliberate hoax, since the membership of NATO is only about 15
percent of the states and even less than that of the population of the
United Nations, whose two largest countries with 2 billion people
and many others oppose this action. UN Secretary General Kofi
Annan put it mildly the day bombing started on March 24 that
NATO member states should 'consult' the UN Security Council
before attacking. They did no such thing in the knowledge that two
permanent members would have exercised their veto. Therefore
NATO action is criminal and dangerously so because it is yet
another important step in the systematic violation of the UN
Charter and the total abrogation of international law. NATO action
and its expansion is also criminally dangerous for a whole series of
political, legal, social, economic, and of course moral reasons to be
detailed below.
NATO IS DANGEROUSLY CRIMINAL
NATO action is no only criminal, but dangerously so; because it
extends not only the violation but the very elimination of the UN
Charter, structure, and process and its replacement by NATO and
its dominant power in the United States. It is difficult to decide
where to start a quick review of this process. In 1950 the United
States was able to fight Korean War under the UN flag, because in
the Security Council China was represented by the regime in
Taiwan, and the USSR was absent the day of the vote. Never mind
that the UN Charter requires the affirmative vote of all permanent
members. In 1961, the UN was used as a cover for United States
foreign policy in the Congo, which resulted in the installation by the
CIA of Mobutu after the expulsion and killing of Lumumba and the
death there of UN Secretary General Hammerskjold. In the 1980s,
the United States alleged that it is not subject to the rulings of UN
International Court in the Hague after the latter found that US
mining of the Nicaragua harbour violated the UN Charter.
But in 1990/91 the United States and its allies availed themselves of
the UN and its Security Council to 'legitimate' the war against Iraq
by pulling legalistic wool over the eyes of the world community to
pretend that their action was carried out for the UN. Nonetheless,
the then UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar clearly said 'This is
a US war, not a UN war." His resignation for that reason would
have made it much more loud and clear. In fact, the US led war
against Iraq clearly violated at least seven different clauses of the
UN Charter. The first one is that Article 27, Clause 3 of the UN
Charter requires the affirmative vote of all permanent members.
That was not the case, since China abstained [and the USSR only
voted yes after being bribed to do so in its economic crisis. If it had
at least abstained, China might have voted No, and probably France
also]. This requirement is again relevant today: The United States
and its NATO allies did not 'consult' the Security Council as the UN
Secretary General reminded us simply because it is obvious that this
time Russia would have vetoed this operation, and maybe China
too.
The American pretence that no new Security Council resolution
was required to legalize this NATO action is a sheer lie in yet
another attempt to pull wool over world eyes. Indeed, that was so
already in the war against Iraq. For Article 42 of the UN Charter
bars the resort to war until the Security Council determines that all
peaceful means to resolve the dispute have been exhausted pursuant
to Article 41. [We return to peaceful means below]. Of course,
there was never any compliance with any one of these and other
requirements of the UN Charter, and least of all the provision that
the military action be under UN military command [which has never
been really established], and not under that of the USA or NATO.
On the contrary, the Iraq war initiated another dangerous precedent
in this regard: although it was not a NATO operation, NATO
offered its infrastructural facilities and some military equipment,
which were used by its member allies in their illegal war against
Iraq.
So the United States converted the United Nations into a de facto
arm of its own foreign policy and its spokespersons and the media
availed themselves the tried and true methods of Joseph Goebels to
lie so much as to persuade as also in Big Brother's 1984 WAR IS
PEACE double speak about international law and morality.
Bosnia offered the opportunity to take another major dangerous
step down this criminal road. In the beginning, The Helsinki
Security Organization OSCE and the United Nations were active in
trying to defuse and then resolve the conflict. Both failed because
its principal members, principally the United States, Britain, France,
and also Germany and Russia were unable to agree and unwilling to
act. That scuttled not only the Owens plan, which provided for
essentially the same things as the Dayton agreement but would have
avoided three years of war and saved countless lives. But this
impasse and paralysis, especially of and by the United States which
prior to an election demanded the use of European but no American
troops, also paved the way to today in another way: The United
Nations declared itself unable, and what's worse incompetent, to
resolve the conflict in Bosnia -- and handed it over for 'resolution'
lock, stock and barrel to NATO!
At the time, hardly anybody noticed or noted this further
qualitatively significant step in the de facto dismemberment of the
United Nations and its alleged de jure replacement by NATO, and
de facto by the United States, which then dictated its terms of
'settlement' at Dayton, Ohio, USA. Among them were the capture
and trial of war criminals in the former Yugoslavia, which the same
United States has resolutely opposed and prevented ever since then.
Thus, not only international law, but even its own dictates are
conveniently flouted by the United States whenever they are
inconvenient. That happened again when the US and UK
governments unilaterally bombed Iraq again in January 1999 again
in violation of the United Nations Charter and even resolutions and
international law but even of their own dictates.
Ironically if not tragically, this attack on Serbia is also in direct
violation of the NATO Charter itself, which allows defensive action
only in response to an attack on a member state, which
Serbia/Yugoslavia certainly has not done. Moreover NATO is itself
subordinated to the United Nations also by its own NATO Charter,
which reads:
"The North Atlantic Treaty Washington D.C., April 4, 1949 The
Parties to this Treaty reaffirm their faith in the purposes and
principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to
live in peace with all peoples and all governments....
Article 1 The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the
United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they
may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that
international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and
to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of
force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United
Nations."
So, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of this agreement in
Washington next week, the United States and [its?] NATO have
step by step set themselves up as accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury,
and executioner of international 'law' however it suits them in total
violation of the charters of both the United Nation and of NATO
itself. And if it does not suit some member/s, like Greece which
naturally objects to fanning flames on its borders, never mind,
except that for celebratory purposes such internal NATO
disagreement can be embarrassing or even inconvenient, as is the
denial of fly-over rights along the way to Serbia by neutral Austria.
And if NATO action does not suit anybody else in the world, so
much the better; since that will only demonstrate in practice to one
and all who is really 'in charge' in this one world. Alas, that position
and practice is criminally dangerous, particularly in a world in
which economic power is shifting, and military - nuclear!- power is
diversifying.
CRIMINALLY DANGEROUS
This war is also criminally dangerous for more reasons than it is
possible even to summarize here. So I will concentrate only on two
kinds of reasons, political and moral. Far from safeguarding
international security, the expansion of NATO membership,
coverage and military action itself poses a very serious danger.
There was absolutely no European security interest, and not even
much political support, for the eastward expansion of NATO to
include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Indeed, the
principal motor force for this move was domestic politics in the
United States. In Russia however, NATO's eastward expansion was
rightly perceived as aggressive and threatening. So is, of course, the
recent proposal again to increase 'defense' spending and to revive
the Star Wars program with anti-ballistic missiles in direct violation
of the ABM treaty. All Russian political parties have been united in
opposition to this American and NATO threat and now to its
bombs, whatever their differences on other issues. These political
and domestic policy differences themselves have been sharpened by
the growing Russian economic crisis, which much of the Russian
public sees rightly as the result of what it is, less a form of
American Way modernization and ever more a modernized form of
American carpet bagging. But the Russian public and its politics are
likely to be even further aggravated by this American and NATO
foreign policy, which threatens a country still armed to the teeth
with nuclear weapons and whose army desperately needs renewed
economic and popular support to rally around the flag.
Yet NATO not only threatens further eastward expansion of
membership, but it helps move the boundaries and center of gravity
of NATO's attention into the Balkans and Southeastern Europe,
where they clash with Russia's interests. This threat and danger is
confirmed by NATO military intervention in Bosnia, and now by its
attack on Serbia. All these moves and NATO's use of Macedonia as
a staging area also pose additional threats and dangers of NATO
military penetration even further south-east perhaps including
Southwest Asia [wrongly called the Near or Mid East], the
Caucasus, and the Caspian Sea where long term strategic disputes
rage about oil and pipe-line routes. The US has already held joint
military 'excercises' with and in Kazakstan in whose major oil
deposits Russia and China also have vital interests.
This NATO intervention in Serbia, far from containing trouble, is
likely to spread it further southeast through domino like knock on
effects in Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. All
also harbour intra- and inter- state ethnic conflicts that can be
fanned as they were in Yugoslavia -- and then invite more NATO
'peace' keeping. Indeed, that is why there already is Greek
opposition within NATO to its attack on Serbia and its pledge to be
a non-nuclear zone was just withdrawn by Ukraine, which along
with other CIA states also feels threatened. These developments
represent a weak underbelly for NATO, particularly given other
regional Greco-Turkish conflicts within the NATO alliance.
The pretence by NATO, US President Clinton, UK Prime Minister
Blair and their myriad official and other fellow travellers in the
media and elsewhere is that they are engaged in a humanitarian
mission to protect innocent civilians. Moreover they allege that they
have no alternative but to do use military means to pursue their
humanitarian mission, because the bad guy on the other side will
not listen to reason. But none of these pretences reflect the reality
whose most important factors are hidden by so much of a smoke
screen that the public can no longer even distinguish smoke from
mirror. The Western NATO powers have so far acted exclusively in
their - not always common - political interests and have never ever
lifted a humanitarian finger to safeguard or help anybody in
Yugoslavia itself, or elsewhere for that matter. Nor are the
humanitarian NATO bombs designed or able to do so.
The United Nations Charter stipulates in its Article 41 that all
peaceful means to resolve - indeed to forestall escalation - of
conflict be exhausted before the United Nations, not NATO or any
member state, resort to military force. Far from exhausting the use
of such peaceful means in the former Yugoslavia, the principal
NATO partners exhausted all the means of the Yugoslavs and their
successor to forestall and de-escalate conflict among them. Any
objective examination of recent history will demonstrate that not
400 years of ethnic conflict in Yugoslavia but 20, 10, and 2 years of
criminally dangerous action and inaction by the Western powers is
responsible for the past, present, and future disaster.
To begin with, it has been primarily US monetary/economic and
political/military policy that aggravated the world economic crisis
and shifted its burden to those least able to bear it, including
especially the Soviet Union/Russia and Yugoslavia. The latter was
already so burdened by foreign debt that it was already clear in
1984 that without relief the result had to be military rule, civil war,
or both. Then to add insult to injury and do even more injury, the
IMF pushed the Yugoslav Federal state to de facto suicide by
obliging it to eliminate from its budget the transfer payments to its
constituent republics, which were the de facto cement that held the
federation together. Therewith, the Federation of Yugoslavia lost
its political economic raison d'etre at the same time that a renewed
economic recession, IMF structural adjustment, and growing
poverty and polarization hit the country and its people.
When Slovenia and Croatia sought to abandon the Yugoslav ship,
the German foreign minister Genscher supported them [along with
his Austrian colleague who also sought economic benefits there]
and presented its European Union allies with the following
ultimatum: EU recognition of secession or Germany will go it
alone. The EU caved in with the full knowledge that the
independence of Slovenia and Croatia had to lead to the same in
Bosnia, which had to lead to civil war and further partition. And
President Milosevic in Belgrade naturally used these opportunities
handed to him to escalate and fortify Serbian nationalism, not the
least by using the Serbian officered 'Yugoslav' army against all three
new countries and to support the Bosnian Serbs, as well as to divest
Albanians in Kosovo of more and more of their constitutional
rights. The danger posed by Milosevic and his chauvinist politics
was so obvious that even I was able to warn against them in
publications in 1990/91, including one published by the United
Nations. Yet it took a long time for anyone in the West, let alone
the United Nations, to lift a finger to dissuade Milosevic. And then
it was primarily to impose an ineffective embargo on Serbia, which
has publicly sustained Milosevic politically and economically, it is
said, for his and his inner circle's private purses.
So for years none of the Western powers did anything to stop or
even discourage him, except that for its own purposes the United
States first opposed partition, then changed its mind and accepted
it, and then started to push for intervention so long as it would not
cost American troops. Britain and France, who would have had to
supply the troops, and of course Germany dragged their feet as
well. Russia also for its own reasons opposed intervention. Ethnic
cleansing and every kind of horror and human tragedy was the
result. But all of it could have been avoided by the implementation
by the United Nations and/or the Western powers of economic,
political and social policies with the least bit of humanitarian
concern for the welfare of the people such as that ever professed as
a cover for the naked political policy that the Western powers
implement in their own interests. This self interest, now especially
by the Clinton administration in the United States, also guided and
permeated the Dayton 'Peace' Accords that belatedly ended the war
in Bosnia -- with essentially the same provisions favorable to the
Serbs proposed by the Owen Plan and rejected by the United States
three years earlier. And Dayton provided much more for policing
Bosnia than for democratizing, let alone developing or even
reconstructing it economically. For that, only very few dollars were
budgeted; and hardly a cent was ever made available. But the
Dayton accords are themselves violated daily even regarding the
policing, for again American domestic political interests have
prevailed to prevent arresting the principal and most other war
criminals and bringing them to justice at the UN Court in The
Hague. The establishment by the UN of a permanent International
Criminal Court to try violations of human rights was also opposed
and is still hamstrung by the small minority vote of United States
and its Chinese, Israeli, Iraqi and Libyan 'traditional' allies. So much
for humanitarian concern for the welfare and human rights of the
people by the United States and its NATO allies.
Moreover, just as the Bosnian disaster was pre-programmed into
the German and European support for independence in Slovenia
and Croatia, so did Dayton set the stage or at least fail to prevent
the escalation of Serbian oppression and the aggravation of the
conflict in Kosovo. Nor was anything done or even attempted to
prevent, let alone to reverse, this process until it was indeed too
late. Again the claim that peaceful conflict resolution failed and
made military bombing necessary is more smoke and mirrors. Or is
it a smokescreen for even more dangerously criminal and criminally
dangerous measures?
One thing is certain. Bombing Serbs in Serbia and even in Kosovo
is not designed to and cannot promote the welfare of the Albanian
population in Kosovo and also not in neighbouring states. If it
were, then with the same argument NATO could also bomb its
NATO member Turkey to protect its even more abused Kurds, or
the so far non-member Israel that has so institutionalized its ethnic
cleansing of Palestinians as to make it all but 'invisible' though to
help it do so is the only country in the world to have legalized
torture and itself just wantonly bombed Lebanon again.
Besides, all informed opinion insists that NATO bombing will
politically strengthen Milosevic and Serbian nationalism rather than
weakening either, as NATO pretends. Surely, if the Western
powers really sought to achieve or even to serve any of their
professed objectives, any Western aided economic and social
development program for the entire population would have done so
better. But then, instead of economic structural adjustment and then
military intervention, so would it have been in Somalia, Rwanda
and elsewhere. Moreover the NATO military attack on Serbia now
again undermines the peace settlement in neighbouring Bosnia and
risks putting its own military 'peace' keeping personnel there
[including it is said a whole British armoured division] in Serbian
harm's way. The offensive use of German military power for the
first time since World War II and again against Serbs will also be
politically used by Milosevic to strengthen his hand and his
followers' resolve.
And what about the quiet NATO military build up in also
neighbouring Macedonia? First the now 10,000 [or more?] troops -
including another armoured division of 5,000 men and equipment
already brought by the British months ago were said to be there to
permit the evacuation of the 2,000 unarmed OSCE observers in
Kosovo, so they would and could not become Serbian hostages.
Then the bombing started without any notice that all observers have
been evacuated to Macedonia, and we are told that the NATO
troops are there ready to cross over into Serbian Kosovo just in
case of Serbian reprisals against Albanians there. But according to
official double speak of the United States, we are informed that its
troops in Macedonia will never be used to make peace but only to
keep it. Either way, we are not told how these NATO troops could
possibly protect either the two thousand observers or the two
million Albanians; nor the already three hundred thousand refugees
among them, whose fear and flight - that is de facto ethnic cleansing
- is of course only increased by NATO bombing. The same and the
removal of OSCE observers can only expose the remaining
Albanian population to greater hatred, oppression and ethnic
cleansing by the Serbs. So for what are NATO troops and their
ground force military equipment in Macedonia? More pre-
programmed 'mission creep'.
For the whole operation is based on the false official premise that it
will protect Albanian interests by bringing President Milosevic to
his knees and/or forcing him out of office by dividing his domestic
support. Less consideration has been given to how this NATO
operation may become divisive among and within its member states,
and with what consequences. At this writing, the Prime Minister of
Italy, whose air bases the United States uses to bomb Serbia, has
already made dovish remarks in Germany, whose Green Party
foreign minister [still?] supports this adventure but whose Social
Democrat finance minister was forced to resign in a conflict with
the defense minister over additional finance for this German
contribution to NATO. In the most hawkish member of NATO
[perhaps excepting Thatcher/Blairite Britain], the use of American
ground troops in the Balkans and thereabouts will not go down as
well as Desert Storm did in Iraq -- unless the operation can be sold
at home as a second [really third] cold war against the Russians.
They for their part are talking [and planning?] to arm the Serbs and
perhaps also to send military personnel, albeit as mercenary
'volunteers' from an army that today goes unpaid. But rekindling
and firing up another cold war and heating it up to boot entails
obvious criminal dangers of its own. Besides that, it may entail
some less obvious global geo-political and military consequences,
including the fortification of a Sino-Russian alliance, this time
perhaps also including India -- each with nuclear weapons.
Thus, far from preserving the peace, NATO is threatening - indeed
already undoing - it. Far from promoting and enforcing
international law, NATO is violating and destroying it. Far from
serving any humanitarian ends, NATO and its principal powers are
negating them all. One of these ends should be to speak the truth
instead of spreading lies about all of the above. So let's at least
some of us, as the pacifist Society of Friends [Quakers] saying has
it, SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER!
[PEN-L:4585] (Fwd) NATO BOMBING IS CRIMINALLY DANGEROUS
ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224] Fri, 26 Mar 1999 23:15:28 -0600
