||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||| ||| ||| A N T I F A ||| ||| ||| ||| I N F O - B U L L E T I N ||| ||| _____ ||| ||| ||| ||| * News * Analysis * Research * Action * ||| ||| ||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ***** ||/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\||/\|| || * -- SPECIAL -- * April 12, 1999 * -- EDITION -- * || ||\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/||\/|| * SPECIAL EDITION * * * * _________________________________________________________________ NATO'S `HUMANITARIANISM' IN THE BALKANS _________________________________________________________________ CONTENTS ------ 1. (MC) MICHEL CHOSSUDOVSKY: Impacts of NATO's `Humanitarian' Bombings. The Balance Sheet in Yugoslavia 2. (NAT) THE NATION: The Clinton Doctrine 3. (IND) THE INDEPENDENT [London]: In Serbia, Too, The Ordinary People Feel the Suffering and Agony of War * * * AD-HOC COMMITTEE TO STOP CANADA'S PARTICIPATION IN THE WAR IN YUGOSLAVIA For immediate release, April 11, 1999. For distribution at Press Conference Monday, April 12, 10 a.m. National Press Theatre 150 Wellington Street, Ottawa _________________________________________________________________ IMPACTS OF NATO'S `HUMANITARIAN' BOMBINGS. THE BALANCE SHEET OF DESTRUCTION IN YUGOSLAVIA. _________________________________________________________________ By Michel Chossudovsky Department of Economics, University of Ottawa Ottawa, K1N6N5 Voice box: 1-613-562-5800, ext. 1415 Fax: 1-514-425-6224 E-Mail: chossudovsky@sprint.ca - Sunday, 11 April 1999 - * * * Amply documented, the bombings of Yugoslavia are not strictly aimed at military and strategic targets as claimed by NATO. They are largely intent on destroying the country's civilian infrastructure as well as its institutions. According to Yugoslav sources, NATO has engaged around 600 aeroplanes of which more than 400 are combat planes. They have flown almost 3,000 attack sorties, "with 200 in one night alone against 150 designated targets". They have dropped thousands of tons of explosives and have launched some 450 cruise missiles. The intensity of the bombing using the most advanced military technology is unprecedented in modern history. It far surpasses the bombing raids of World War II or the Vietnam War. The bombings have not only been directed against industrial plants, airports, electricity and telecommunications facilities, railways, bridges and fuel depots, they have also targeted schools, health clinics, day care centres, government buildings, churches, museums, monasteries and historical landmarks. INFRASTRUCTURE AND INDUSTRY According to Yugoslav sources: "road and railway networks, especially road and rail bridges, most of which were destroyed or damaged beyond repair, suffered extensive destruction". Several thousand industrial facilities have been destroyed or damaged with the consequence of paralysing the production of consumer goods. According to Yugoslav sources, "[B]y totally destroying business facilities across the country, 500,000 workers were left jobless, and 2 million citizens without any source of income and possibility to ensure minimum living conditions". Western estimates as to the destruction of property in Yugoslavia stand at more than US$ 100 billion. BOMBING OF URBAN AND RURAL RESIDENTIAL AREAS Villages with no visible military or strategic structures have been bombed. Described as "collateral damage", residential areas in all major cities. The downtown area of Pristina (which includes apartment buildings and private dwellings) has been destroyed. Central-downtown Belgrade -- including government buildings -- have been hit with cluster bombs and there are massive flames emanating from the destruction. According to the International Center for Peace and Justice (ICPJ): "No city or town in Yugoslavia is being spared. There are untold civilian casualties. The beautiful capital city of Belgrade is in flames and fumes from a destroyed chemical plant are making it necessary to use gas masks". CIVILIAN CASUALTIES Both the Yugoslavia authorities and NATO have downplayed the number of civilian casualties. The evidence amply confirms that NATO has created a humanitarian catastrophe. The bombings are largely responsible for driving people from their homes. The bombings have killed people regardless of their nationality or religion. In Kosovo, civilian casualties affect all ethnic groups. According to a report of the Decany Monastery in Kosovo received in the first week of the bombing: "Last night a cruise missile hit the old town in Djakovica, mostly inhabited by Albanians, and made a great fire in which several Albanian houses were destroyed ... In short, NATO attacks are nothing but barbarous aggression which affects mostly the innocent civilian population, both Serb and Albanian. THE DANGERS OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONTAMINATION Refineries and warehouses storing liquid raw materials and chemicals have been hit causing environmental contamination. The latter have massively exposed the civilian population to the emission of poisonous gases. NATO air strikes on the chemical industry is intent on creating an environmental disaster, "which is something not even Adolf Hitler did during World War II." According to the Serbian Minister for Environmental Protection Branislav Blazic, "the aggressors were lying when they said they would hit only military targets and would observe international conventions, because they are using illegal weapons such as cluster bombs, attacking civilian targets and trying to provoke an environmental disaster". A report by NBC TV confirms that NATO has bombed a the pharmaceutical complex of Galenika, the largest medicine factory in Yugoslavia located in the suburbs of Belgrade. The fumes from this explosion have serious environmental implications. "The population is asked to wear gas masks that in fact nobody [has]." Supply with drinking water for the inhabitants of Belgrade is also getting difficult after the drinking water facility at Zarkovo was bombed. HOSPITALS AND SCHOOLS NATO has targeted many hospitals and health-care institutions, which have been partially damaged or totally destroyed. These include 13 of the country's major hospitals. More than 150 schools (including pre-primary day care centres) have been damaged or destroyed. According to Yugoslav sources, more than 800,000 pupils and students do not attend schools in the wake of the war destruction. There is almost no pre-school institutions (nurseries and day-care centres) which are operational. CHURCHES, MONASTERIES AND HISTORICAL LANDMARKS NATO has also systematically targeted churches, monasteries, museums, public monuments and historical landmarks. "The targets of the attacks on historical and cultural landmarks have included the Gracanica monastery, dating back to the 14th century, the Pec Patriarchate (13th century), the Rakovica monastery and the Petrovarardin Fortress, which are testimony to the foundations of the European civilization, are in all world encyclopedias and on the UNESCO World Heritage list". THE USE OF WEAPONS BANNED BY INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION The NATO bombings have also used of weapons banned by international conventions. Amply documented by scientific reports, the cruise missiles utilize depleted uranium "highly toxic to humans, both chemically as a heavy metal and radiologically as an alpha particle emitter". Since the Gulf War, depleted uranium (DU) has been a substitute for lead in bullets and missiles. According to scientists "it is most likely a major contributor to the Gulf War Syndrome experienced both by the veterans and the people of Iraq". According radiobiologist Dr. Rosalie Bertell, president of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health: "When used in war, the depleted uranium (DU) bursts into flame [and] releasing a deadly radioactive aerosol of uranium, unlike anything seen before. It can kill everyone in a tank. This ceramic aerosol is much lighter than uranium dust. It can travel in air tens of kilometres from the point of release, or be stirred up in dust and resuspended in air with wind or human movement. It is very small and can be breathed in by anyone: a baby, pregnant woman, the elderly, the sick. This radioactive ceramic can stay deep in the lungs for years, irradiating the tissue with powerful alpha particles within about a 30 micron sphere, causing emphysema and/or fibrosis. The ceramic can also be swallowed and do damage to the gastro-intestinal tract. In time, it penetrates the lung tissue and enters into the blood stream. ...It can also initiate cancer or promote cancers which have been initiated by other cancinogens". According to Paul Sullivan, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center: "In Yugoslavia, it's expected that depleted uranium will be fired in agricultural areas, places where livestock graze and where crops are grown, thereby introducing the spectre of possible contamination of the food chain." The New York based International Action Center called the Pentagon's decision to use the A-10 "Warthog" jets against targets in Serbia "a danger to the people and environment of the entire Balkans". (Truth in Media, 10 April 1999). In this regard, a report in from Greece: "...registered an increase in levels of toxic substances in the atmosphere of Greece, and said that Albania, Macedonia, Italy, Austria and Hungary all face a potential threat to human health as a result of NATO's bombing of Serbia, which includes the use of radioactive depleted uranium shells". (see Truth in Media, 10 April 1999). THE PLIGHT OF THE REFUGEES What is not conveyed by the international media, is that people of all ethnic origins including ethnic Albanians, Serbs and other ethnic groups are leaving Kosovo largely as a result of the bombing. There are reports that ethnic Albanians have left Kosovo for Belgrade where they have relatives. There are 100,000 ethnic Albanians in Belgrade. The press has confirmed movements of ethnic Albanians to Montenegro. Montenegro has been portrayed as a separate country, as a safe-haven against the Serbs. The fact of the matter is that Montenegro is part of Yugoslavia. * * * A frequent contributor to Antifa Info-Bulletin, Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and author of The Globalisation of Poverty, Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms, Third World Network, Penang and Zed Books, London, 1997. Recent articles by Chossudovsky on the global economic crisis at: http://wwwdb.ix.de/tp/english/special/eco/6373/1.html http://www.transnational.org/features/chossu_worldbank.html http://www.transnational.org/features/g7solution.html http://www.twnside.org.sg/souths/twn/title/scam-cn.htm http://www.interlog.com/~cjazz/chossd.htm http://www.heise.de/tp/english/special/eco/ http://heise.xlink.de/tp/english/special/eco/6099/1.html#anchor1 * * * _________________________________________________________________ THE CLINTON DOCTRINE _________________________________________________________________ THE NATION April 19, 1999 http://www.thenation.com/issue/990419/0419klare.shtml By Michael Klare President Clinton's decision to use military force against the Serbs was not simply a calculated response to Slobodan Milosevic's intransigence. A careful reading of recent Administration statements and Pentagon documents shows that the NATO bombing is part of a larger strategic vision. That vision has three basic components. The first is an increasingly pessimistic appraisal of the global security environment. "In this last annual threat assessment of the twentieth century," Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified on February 2, "I must tell you that US citizens and interests are threatened in many arenas and across a wide spectrum of issues." Those perils range from regional conflict and insurgency to terrorism, criminal violence and ethnic unrest. The second component is the assumption that as a global power with far-flung economic interests, the United States has a vested interest in maintaining international stability. Because no other power or group of powers can guarantee this stability, the United States must be able to act on its own or in conjunction with its most trusted allies (meaning NATO). The third component is a conviction that to achieve global stability, the United States must maintain sufficient forces to conduct simultaneous military operations in widely separated areas of the world against multiple adversaries, and it must revise its existing security alliances -- most of which, like NATO, are defensive in nature -- so that they can better support US global expeditionary operations. Combined, these three propositions constitute a new strategic template for the US military establishment. This template is evident, for example, in the $112 billion the President wants to add to the Defense Department budget over the next six years, which will be used to procure additional warships, cargo planes, assault vehicles and other equipment intended for "power projection" into distant combat zones. Less public, but no less significant, is the US effort to convert NATO from a defensive alliance in Western Europe into a regional police force governed by Washington. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright first unveiled this scheme this past December at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels. Claiming that missile-armed "rogue states" pose as great a threat to Europe as the Warsaw Pact once did, Albright called on NATO to extend its operational zone into distant areas and to combat a wide range of emerging threats. "Common sense tells us," she said, "that it is sometimes better to deal with instability when it is still at arm's length than to wait until it is at our doorstep." Herein lies the essence of what might be termed the Clinton Doctrine -- the proposition that the best way to maintain stability in the areas that truly matter to the United States (like Western Europe) is to combat instability in other areas, however insignificant it may seem, before it can intensify and spread. Perhaps the most explicit expression of this doctrine was Clinton's February 26 speech in San Francisco -- an important statement that clearly foreshadowed the decision to bomb Serbia: It's easy...to say that we really have no interests in who lives in this or that valley in Bosnia, or who owns a strip of brushland in the Horn of Africa, or some piece of parched earth by the Jordan River. But the true measure of our interests lies not in how small or distant these places are, or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names. The question we must ask is, what are the consequences to our security of letting conflicts fester and spread. We cannot, indeed, we should not, do everything or be everywhere. But where our values and our interests are at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so. This is an extraordinary statement; not since the Vietnam era has a US President articulated such an ambitious and far-reaching policy. Moreover, as we have seen in the Balkans, Clinton has every intention of acting on its precepts. His decision to bomb Serbia is consistent with a clearly delineated strategic plan. There is a growing debate over the wisdom of bombing Serbia. Certainly many people are concerned about the humanitarian dimensions of the Serbian actions in Kosovo. But in the course of this debate it is essential not to lose sight of the larger strategic doctrine behind the bombing. If the newly hatched Clinton Doctrine is not repudiated, the bombing of Yugoslavia may be only the first in a series of recurring overseas interventions -- a prospect that should galvanize peace and disarmament groups across America. Michael T. Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, is The Nation's defense correspondent. Send your letter to the editor to letters@thenation.com. Copyright 1999 The Nation Company, L.P. All rights reserved. Unauthorized redistribution is prohibited. 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For further information regarding reprinting and syndication, please call The Nation at (212) 209-5426 or e-mail dveith@thenation.com. ***** _________________________________________________________________ IN SERBIA, TOO, THE ORDINARY PEOPLE FEEL THE SUFFERING AND AGONY OF WAR _________________________________________________________________ THE INDEPENDENT International News Saturday, 10 April 1999 http://www.independent.co.uk/stories/B1004902.html By Robert Fisk in Cuprija NATO's war is growing more brutal by the hour. I spent most of yesterday - the Orthodox Easter Good Friday - clambering through the rubble of pulverised Serb homes and broken water pipes and roof timbers and massive craters. At Cuprija, Nato jets have blasted away seven homes, two of them direct hits, during an attack on the local army barracks. In Kragujevac, the workers at the massive Zastava car plant who so stubbornly told me just over a week ago that they would sleep on the factory floor to protect their workplace - they even sent e-mails to Clinton, Albright and Solana to this effect - were rewarded with an attack by cruise missiles that smashed into the car works and wounded 120 of the men. And at Aleksinac, it now turns out that up to 24 civilians may have been killed five days ago in the attack by a Nato jet - believed by the Yugoslav military to be an RAF Harrier. Workers still digging through the wreckage yesterday told me that they had recovered 18 bodies and that six more civilians were still missing. The 13th funeral was held yesterday morning - of Dragica Milodinovic, who died of her wounds three days after her husband, Dragan, and their daughter were blasted to pieces in the bombing. At the site yesterday, I found Svetlana Jovanovic standing beside a mechanical digger, unnoticed by the policemen, rescue workers and journalists walking over the wreckage. "Both my parents died just over there - where the bulldozer is moving the rubble," she said quietly. "I was staying in Nis for the night and this saved my life." Beside her was part of the torn casing of the Nato bomb that buried the couple in their cottage. There is a lot of palpable anger in Aleksinac - a Russian resident shouted abuse when he heard me speak in English. But there was not a word of malice from Svetlana, no rhetorical condemnation of the Nato attacks. When I said how sorry I was for her family, she replied in English: "Thank you for coming to see our suffering." Spyros Kyprianou, the speaker of the Cypriot parliament, turned up at the bomb sites during the day on a hopeless mission to secure the release of the three American soldiers captured by Serb forces last week - in anticipation, no doubt, of obtaining US support for a Greek Cypriot solution to the island's partition. He was given a loud and angry account of Nato's sins from Serbian government officials - nothing about the appalling suffering of Kosovo's Albanian civilians, of course - and never had a chance to hear the names of those who died in Aleksinac. Nato says the bomb that killed the people there may have suffered a "malfunction" which caused - that obscene phrase yet again - "collateral damage". The "damage" in this case includes Svetlana Jovanovic's parents, the Milodinovics and their daughter, Jovan Radojicic and his wife, Sofia, Grosdan Milivojevic and his wife, Dragica. Nor was it "collateral": one of the bombs landed square on the Jovanovic house. It was the same story - with mercifully no deaths - at Cuprija. A farming town of 20,000 a hundred miles south of Belgrade, its local barracks was attacked early on Thursday in a raid that left a square mile of devastation through dozens of homes. The Yugoslav army garrison had abandoned the place 10 days ago - "we're not fools," a policeman said - but the civilians stayed on and waited for the inevitable. When the first of seven bombs fell, they ran to their basements as their houses collapsed on top of them. I found one home that was simply blasted from its foundations and hurled across the road into a neighbour's field, the owner left crouching - miraculously untouched - in his basement. Another bomb had exploded in a lane opposite a school, breaking the local water mains and blasting down the walls of a bungalow. True, there is a military barracks at Cuprija - at least two bombs had torn off the roof of the empty Tito-era monstrosity half a mile away. And there is a military building 800m from the site of the Aleksinac slaughter. And yes, Nato believes - and Yugoslav sources confirm - that part of the Zastava car factory is used for weapons production. It is the fate of Yugoslav industry that, thanks to Tito, hundreds of its factories have dual production facilities. And the Kragujevac car plant management had pleaded with its workers to end their sit-in. But Nato's refusal to show restraint when it knew the workers had stayed in the factory shows just how far it is now taking its war against Serbia. On Thursday, military officers at the Pentagon announced the "human shield" of Belgrade's young people on the capital's largest road bridge would not prevent them attacking the structure. I couldn't help thinking amid the devastations yesterday that if Nato goes on widening its bombing campaign to include civilians - as it very clearly did in Pristina this week, despite its preposterous claim that the Serbs bombed themselves - then the final death toll at Aleksinac could soon be academic. Perhaps there are those in Nato who will argue that after their ferocity towards the Kosovo Albanians, the Serbs deserve "a dose of their own medicine". It can always be said - in all truthfulness - Serb casualties are minimal compared with their victims in Kosovo. But if it stays its present course, Nato's offensive risks a massacre. Copyright 1999. Independent Newspapers [UK] Ltd. * * * ** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, material appearing in Antifa Info-Bulletin is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for research and educational purposes. 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