July 9, 2001
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Little more than a week prior to Slobodan Milosevic having been spirited away by the victors to face charges at The Hague, another alleged war criminal, Henry Kissinger, whilst wiling away a little time at the Ritz, was being served a somewhat less forceful, though decidedly unappetizing, summons to appear before the Palace of Justice in Paris.
Judge Roger Le Loire, it seems, had a stack of documents sitting on his desk implicating the former U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor in the nefarious goings-on of Operation Condor. This was the covert, coordinated effort in the 1970's of seven South American dictatorships to hunt down and murder each other's political dissidents. The United States was their senior partner and one Henry Kissinger the inspirational key figure in the operation's implementation. Many tens of thousands of journalists, teachers, union leaders, activists, etc. were 'disappeared' under its aegis. A few happened to be of French citizenship. Judge Le Loire had some questions to ask. Dr. Kissinger, able to exercise the discretion afforded an elite member of the American establishment, prudently decided to skip town. Judge Le Loire, however, wasn't the only one who had questions. About the same time, Argentine Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral and Chilean Judge Juan Guzman Tapia had both asked U.S. authorities to question Kissinger about certain 'disappearances'. They were, needless to say, rebuffed. Nevertheless, these attempted inquiries were, in all truth, small potatoes compared to the questions that human rights activists and groups around the world have, for years, posed of Kissinger's (and, to be fair, scores of other American leaders) involvement in some of the great atrocities of the latter half of the 20th century. While Operation Condor in Latin America, and Operation Chaos (the CIA's secret war on domestic dissidents) stand out for their sheer conniving and intrigue, the real casualty numbers game is won by the likes of Angola, Cambodia, Laos and East Timor. The late 60's to mid 70's, for instance, saw Kissinger & Co. particularly energetic in their malevolent machinations. Thus, the 'Secret Bombing' of Cambodia killed roughly 600,000 Cambodian innocents, and the resulting decimation of the agrarian economy led to a mass famine that may have killed a million more. Figures that were then, in classic revisionist style, just lumped onto the Khmer Rouge scorecard by American propagandists. Or take East Timor. On Dec. 7, 1975 President Gerald Ford, accompanied by Henry Kissinger, dropped by Jakarta for a little tête-à-tête with Indonesian dictator and ally, Suharto. The very next day Indonesia began its assault on the former Portuguese colony of Timor. Within four years, almost one third - approximately 200,000 - of its people had been murdered. Curiously, these 'killing fields' never made the front pages - or virtually any pages at all for that matter. Indeed, the only thing that has surpassed the awe-inspiring magnitude of these and sundry other crimes against humanity has been the heights scaled by the 'public relations' community in whitewashing both the crimes and the perpetrators. Which brings us back to The Hague and lil' ole Slobodan Milosevic, the latest Hitler clone as decreed by Washington. Now there may be some who think that, well, maybe we didn't get 'those' guys, but, at least, we got 'this' one. Better one than none. This argument, however, would be simplistic and would ignore the rather ominous fact that it is precisely 'those' guys - our guys - who by persecuting 'this' guy, are playing us all like a fiddle in pursuit of the same Machiavellian geo-strategic ploys of old. Let me illustrate what I mean. The Tribunal set to try Milosevic (the ICTY) is an independent judicial body, right? Wrong. The Tribunal was never ratified by the UN General Assembly and is manifestly a creation of the U.S./NATO forces that attacked Serbia in the first place and that had/have overwhelming geo-political-economic interests in conquering it. It has received substantial financial and material donations from private American sources including the billionaire financier George Soros, Time-Warner, the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, and directly from the U.S. government itself. All these in direct violation of its charter. Now if it walks and talks like a kangaroo then it is a kangaroo, and this is as blatantly a kangaroo court if there ever was one. That most of the media have their blinkers drawn tight about this is absolutely frightening. Even more frightening is the naiveté that is reflected in the notion that the Pentagon and NATO suddenly forsook all steely-cold political reason, turned to mush, and went crusading off on a 'humanitarian' mission. According to this perception, the Great Game is only something that was played by Alexander and Napoleon and such. Now we've entered the dawn of a new era. The American empire - sorry - nation, wasn't really interested in subverting the last socialist redoubt in Eastern Europe and prying open its economy to grasping Western transnational corporations; they didn't really have in mind securing the pipeline corridor to the oil-rich Caspian Sea basin; it never occurred to them that colonization of the Balkans was key to the expansion of NATO in its growing encirclement of Russia; it was the furthest thing from their mind to plunder the fabulously wealthy Trepca mining complex; and it is pure cynicism to suggest they would use the war as justification for a continued bloating of the American military budget... .... ....Now you could believe all that - and one day with enough love and therapy you might wake to the sun of a better world. But what about the 'genocide' in Kosovo, you ask? Hmm. Well, it's true that throughout much of the Western media prior to the NATO bombardment, the figures of ethnic Albanian deaths bandied about ranged between 10,000 and 100,000. Pretty horrific, right? The strangest thing happened on the way to the massacre though. When the NATO hostilities ceased and the forensic teams from a number of countries (including one from Canada) went in to investigate - hard as they looked, they couldn't find a genocide. What they found were less than 3,000 bodies, almost all of whom were military personnel, and many of whom were Serbian. What they had uncovered was evidence of a low level civil war with numbers accrued over more than a year that would have taken mere weeks to accumulate in any of the U.S. sponsored state pogroms in Central America during the 1980s. The Kosovo 'genocide' had been a complete fabrication, just as had been the Iraqi incubator scandal that provided a parallel 'final justification' for intervention in the Gulf War a decade earlier. But surely then, Milosevic is guilty of fomenting the bloody conflicts, both recently with respect to the ethnic Albanians, and earlier with the Croatians and Bosnians? Actually not. The Americans and, to a lesser extent, the other NATO allies had, since the late 1980s, been instrumental in sabotaging, subverting, intriguing and generally suborning the entire Yugoslavian peninsula into war. A classic contemporary example is presently being played out in Macedonia. The U.S., while protecting and supplying arms to the NLA (an offshoot of the former Kosovo Liberation Army) are simultaneously supplying the Macedonian troops. A well-known mercenary group, Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI), headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia and allied with the Pentagon, is similarly offering its services to both sides. MPRI, which provided such yeoman service in helping to tear apart the former Yugoslavia, is principally composed of ex-American generals and CIA officers. Agim Ceku, a former Croatian commander who later headed the KLA and is a known war criminal, (granted immunity by Carla del Ponte) is, however, one its more illustrious foreign members. Finally, not meaning to burst anyone's bubble, it is yet necessary to note that our lovable 'freedom fighters', the KLA, have from the get-go been virtually identical with the Albanian Mafia, and have been responsible over the past decade (as conceded by virtually every major European drug enforcement agency, and even the American DEA) for a sizeable portion of the heroin trade for the entire Western hemisphere. Shades of the Taliban. Is Milosevic guilty, then, of anything? Probably. 'Excesses' are part and parcel of war. In essence, however, Milosevic will be convicted - a foregone conclusion - for the real crime of having opposed the U.S./NATO drive into Eastern Europe. He will sit incarcerated, perhaps, for the rest of his life, as a political prisoner and branded by a good part of the world as a mass murderer beyond redemption. And Henry Kissinger?....Well, we can fancy that he may find it a bit sticky getting a drink at the Ritz..... or not. Antony C. Black is a Canadian teacher and political activist who contributes his columns to Swans. Please, DO NOT steal, scavenge or repost this work without the expressed written authorization of Swans, which will seek permission from the author. This material is copyrighted, © Antony C. Black 2001. All rights reserved. |
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