In memory of NATO crimes in Serbia 15 years ago - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14380677
annatar1914 wrote:Someday Bill Clinton and his loathsome pant-suited wife will be remembered for the venal scum they were and Kosovo will be restored to Serbia.

Or rather Serbia will be restored to Kosovo, the two being in reality One.


I certainly hope so.

And let's hope to remove a terrorist monument to this war-criminal to the sewage pit of Bill Clinton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_Boulevard
#14380687
Indeed, it is a stain on the whole of the Serbian people and the face of Europe that such exists and that the plutocratic rats whose miserable claws press down upon our societies backed the organ smuggling halfwits in the war (an unapologetic NATO terror campaign and Cold War victory lap) against one of Europe's most cultured and dignified of peoples.

Hopefully when the geopolitical winds shift and the change is felt in every corner of Europe, the puppet regime in Belgrade can be put against a wall and shot where they stand; far better than they deserve.

Kosovo is Serbia.
#14380724
A little bit if respect goes a long way. Serbian people thought they were the masters of the Balkans and treated their fellow Yugoslavs accordingly. People at Yugoslavia took one long look at the Serbs and decided 'Fuck this! I rather die fighting for my freedom than be bossed around by them.' The rest is history as they say.
#14380916
Euroman wrote:A little bit if respect goes a long way. Serbian people thought they were the masters of the Balkans and treated their fellow Yugoslavs accordingly. People at Yugoslavia took one long look at the Serbs and decided 'Fuck this! I rather die fighting for my freedom than be bossed around by them.' The rest is history as they say.


Really? Wow! Thanks for that Disney version of history.

It was the Germans who thought themselves masters of the Balkans. They facilitated the break up of Yugoslavia and the job was finished by NATO after a series of terrible and wholly avoidable wars. But hey, FREEDOM!
#14380945
Far-Right Sage wrote:Indeed, it is a stain on the whole of the Serbian people and the face of Europe that such exists and that the plutocratic rats whose miserable claws press down upon our societies backed the organ smuggling halfwits in the war (an unapologetic NATO terror campaign and Cold War victory lap) against one of Europe's most cultured and dignified of peoples.

Hopefully when the geopolitical winds shift and the change is felt in every corner of Europe, the puppet regime in Belgrade can be put against a wall and shot where they stand; far better than they deserve.

Kosovo is Serbia.


Wait a minute. Kosovo is Serbia, but Crimea is not Ukraine?
#14380963
Rejn wrote:Kosovo and Serbia were historically a part of the Ottoman Empire. Clearly it all belongs to the Ottoman successor state, Turkey.


Just like Crimea.

Just goes to show that the Ottoman Empire should not have been destroyed. We could have saved ourselves a lot of bloodshed.
#14380977
Rejn wrote:Wait a minute. Kosovo is Serbia, but Crimea is not Ukraine?


That is correct.

Ethnic Russians are indigenous to Crimea and it has been part of Russia for centuries until it was given away as a short-sighted administrative procedure by Soviet premier Khruschev (incidentally, a Ukrainian). Ethnic Serbs are likewise indigenous to Kosovo and the region is enshrined in Serbian history and national folklore. They gradually became dispossessed on their own land after the Ottoman defeat and centuries of Ottoman occupation, along with successive waves of Albanian migrants flooding into Kosovo.

Those cruel monsters that the Serbs are allowed the Albanian demographic to remain in Kosovo even after obtaining independence and even built up their infrastructure, education, and cultural institutions on orders from Belgrade in the time of Tito's market-socialist Yugoslavia to the point where Albanians enjoyed a better standard of living in Yugoslav-Serbian Kosovo than in Albania proper. What did the Albanians do in return? Acted as a fifth column for a superpower high off a Cold War victory to dismantle the land of the South Slavs and colonize the area for international finance in one of the most open acts of poorly-cloaked aggression on the part of high finance in the past fifty years.
#14381365
^ this one!

Euroman wrote:A little bit if respect goes a long way. Serbian people thought they were the masters of the Balkans and treated their fellow Yugoslavs accordingly. People at Yugoslavia took one long look at the Serbs and decided 'Fuck this! I rather die fighting for my freedom than be bossed around by them.' The rest is history as they say.


Your Serbo-phobia won't justify your idiocies, not to mention crimes committed over Serbs.
#14381368
http://rt.com/news/yugoslavia-kosovo-nato-bombing-705/


15 years on: Looking back at NATO's ‘humanitarian’ bombing of Yugoslavia
Published time: March 24, 2014 04:01 Get short URL

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An explosion followed by a huge fire rages in the south-west part of Pristina in the early hours March 25, 1999 after NATO forces launched a missile attack against Yugoslavia (Reuters / Yannis Behrakis)


Exactly 15 years ago, on March 24, NATO began its 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia. The alliance bypassed the UN under a “humanitarian” pretext, launching aggression that claimed hundreds of civilian lives and caused a much larger catastrophe than it averted.

Years on, Serbia still bears deep scars of the NATO bombings which, as the alliance put it, were aimed at “preventing instability spreading” in Kosovo. Questions remain on the very legality of the offense, which caused casualties and mass destruction in the Balkan republic.

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The Yugoslav Army Headquarters building hasn't been rebuilt after being damaged by cruises missiles in April 1999 during NATO's bombing of Serbia over Kosovo. Belgrade (AFP Photo)

Codenamed 'Operation Allied Force,' it was the largest attack ever undertaken by the alliance. It was also the first time that NATO used military force without the approval of the UN Security Council and against a sovereign nation that did not pose a real threat to any member of the alliance.

NATO demonstrated in 1999 that it can do whatever it wants under the guise of “humanitarian intervention,” “war on terror,” or “preventive war” – something that everyone has witnessed in subsequent years in different parts of the globe.

Nineteen NATO member states participated to some degree in the military campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), which lasted for 11 weeks until June 10, 1999.

More rubble, less trouble

In the course of the campaign, NATO launched 2,300 missiles at 990 targets and dropped 14,000 bombs, including depleted uranium bombs and cluster munitions (unexploded cluster bombs continued to pose a threat to people long after the campaign was over.) Over 2,000 civilians were killed, including 88 children, and thousands more were injured. Over 200,000 ethnic Serbs were forced to leave their homeland in Kosovo.

In what the alliance described as “collateral damage,” its airstrikes destroyed more than 300 schools, libraries, and over 20 hospitals. At least 40,000 homes were either completely eliminated or damaged and about 90 historic and architectural monuments were ruined. That is not to mention the long-term harm caused to the region’s ecology and, therefore, people’s health. Economic damage is estimated at over US$120 billion, according to Serbian media.

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A woman passes a destroyed car March 28,1999 after a NATO missile hit downtown of Kosovo's capital of Pristina in Saturday night's NATO attack (Reuters)

News correspondents Anissa Naouai and Jelena Milincic, the authors of RT's documentary 'Zashto?' – which means “Why?” in English –traveled through former Yugoslavia to Belgrade, Kosovo, and Montenegro and spoke to people who endured the atrocities and horrors of the war and lost their friends and relatives.

“There is a bridge near the city of Nis, which was bombed at the time when a passenger train was passing through it,” Milincic recalls.The tragedy on April 12, 1999 killed 15 people and wounded 44 others, while many passengers were never accounted for.

“We felt the blast and saw flames under the locomotive. The train was blown so powerfully, half a meter from the ground. I don’t know how we stayed on the rails,” recalled witness Boban Kostic.

“Our colleague got off the train when I did,” he said. “He was really scared. But another rocket hit and blew him to pieces,” added another witness, Goran Mikic.

“Why? Why civilians? Why a train?” said Dragan Ciric. “It still torments me, if the first rocket was a mistake, what were the next three for?” he told RT.

The Chinese embassy in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade was also hit and set on fire by NATO airstrikes on May 7, 1999. Three citizens of the country were killed. The alliance called the attack “a mistake.” China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council and, along with Russia, did not support a military solution for the Kosovo crisis.

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A worker walks in front of the remains of the former Chinese embassy during its demolition in Belgrade November 10, 2010. During the NATO offensive against Yugoslavia, U.S. warplanes bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade on May 7, 1999, killing three Chinese nationals, and consequently igniting protests outside the U.S. embassy in Beijing (Reuters)

Prior to the military assault, the Milosevic regime was accused of “excessive and disproportionate use of force in Kosovo.” But was the force that NATO used when bombing the sovereign state’s territory proportionate and restrained? Rights organization Amnesty International accused the allied forces of committing war crimes.

“Indications are that NATO did not always meet its legal obligations in selecting targets and in choosing means and methods of attack, On the basis of available evidence, including NATO's own statements and accounts of specific incidents, Amnesty International believes that - whatever their intentions - NATO forces did commit serious violations of the laws of war leading in a number of cases to the unlawful killings of civilians,” the rights watchdog said in a report published in June 2000.

The alliance dismissed the accusations, saying that cases involving civilian deaths were due to technological failure or were simply “accidents of conflict.” NATO failed to say that they were due to the alliance's own failure to take all necessary precautions.

“We never said we would avoid casualties. It would be foolhardy to say that, as no military operation in history has been perfect,” said Jamie Shea, NATO’s chief spokesman, the Guardian reported at the time.

Bombing background

Former NATO Secretary General Javier Solana ordered military action against Yugoslavia following a failure in negotiations on the Kosovo crisis in France’s Rambouillet and Paris in February and March 1999.

NATO's decision was officially announced after talks between international mediators – known as the Contact Group – the Yugoslav government, and the delegation of Kosovo Albanians ended in a deadlock. Belgrade refused to allow foreign military presence on its territory while Albanians accepted the proposal.

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A US F-15C Eagle flies a mission over Yugoslavia 08 April 1999 (AFP Photo)

Back then, Slobodan Milosevic's forces were engaged in armed conflict with an Albanian rebel group, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which sought the province’s separation from Yugoslavia. Former US President Bill Clinton's special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, had earlier described the KLA as “without any questions, a terrorist group.” (The KLA was later repeatedly accused of being involved in the organ trafficking of Serbs in the late 1990s.)

However, despite not announcing the link officially, NATO entered the conflict on the side of the KLA, accusing Serbian security forces of atrocities and “ethnic cleansing” against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The main objective of the campaign was to make Milosevic's forces pull out of the province. The fact that there was violence on both sides of the confrontation was ignored both by allied governments and Western media – which stirred up public anger by focusing only on Serbs’ atrocities and being far less vocal regarding abuses by Albanians.

“All efforts to achieve a negotiated political solution to the Kosovo crisis having failed, no alternative is open but to take military action,” Solana said on March 23, 1999. “We must halt the violence and bring an end to the humanitarian catastrophe now unfolding in Kosovo.”

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A police training centre in Novi Sad, in the north of Yugoslavia burns 25 March 1999 after it was destroyed during NATO air strikes, according to the official Yugoslav news agency, Tanjug (AFP Photo)

Racak massacre controversy

An incident involving the “mass killing” of Albanians in central Kosovo’s village of Racak – a KLA stronghold – became a major excuse and justification for NATO’s decision to start its operation. Serbs were blamed for the deaths of dozens of Albanian “civilians” on January 15, 1999. However, it was alleged that the accusations could have been false and the bodies actually belonged to KLA insurgents whose clothes had been changed.

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Kosovar families enter Racak mosque where the coffins of ethnic Albanians killed on January 15 were brought in,10 February, in southern Kosovo (AFP Photo)

A central role in labeling the events in Racak “a massacre” belonged to William Walker, who headed the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission. He visited the site shortly after the incident and made his judgment.

“[Walker] arrived there having no powers to make conclusions regarding what had happened,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazenta paper in November last year.

Yugoslav authorities accused Walker of going beyond his mission and proclaimed him persona non grata, while Western leaders were infuriated over the Racak incident.
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Smoke rises over the local red cross office destroyed in last night's NATO air strike on centre of Kosovo's capital Pristina March 29, 1999 (Reuters)

“And some time later the bombing started,” Lavrov recalled, adding that the situation in Racak became the “trigger point.” Moscow insisted that an investigation should be carried out. The EU commissioned a group of Finnish forensic experts to prepare a report on the incident. Later, the European Union handed it over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Lavrov said. The full version of the document has never been made public, said the minister, who was Moscow’s permanent representative to the UN between 1994 and 2004.

“But parts of the report leaked and were quoted in the media saying that [the victims] were not civilians and that all the bodies found in Racak were in disguise and that bullet holes on clothes and bodies did not match. There was also no one who was killed at short range,” Lavrov said. “Even though I’ve repeatedly raised this issue, the report itself still has not been shown.”

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An Ethnic Albanian refugee from Kosovo looks at her destroyed kitchen after she returned to her house, reportedly destroyed by Serbs, 22 June 1999 on a road near Orahovac (AFP Photo)

NATO halted its air campaign with the signing of the Military Technical Agreement in Kumanovo on June 9, 1999, with the Yugoslav government agreeing to withdraw its forces from Kosovo. On June 10, 1999, the UN Security Council adopted resolution 1244 to establish the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK).

In August 2013, Amnesty International accused the UNMIK of failing to properly investigate the abductions and murders of Kosovo Serbs in the aftermath of the 1998-1999 war.

“Years have passed and the fate of the majority of the missing on both sides of the conflict is still unresolved, with their families still waiting for justice,” the organization said.

Moscow’s former envoy to NATO (1997-2002), Viktor Zavarzin, believes the military alliance’s aggression was “a crime against humanity” and a “violation of international laws and norms.” The event that unfolded 15 years ago laid ground to a new era of the development of international relations – the era of “chaosization of international law and its arbitrary manipulation,” Zavarzin, an MP for the United Russia party said at the State Duma plenary session on Friday.

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Photo released 11 May 1999 by the official Yugoslav news agency, Tanjug shows a view of a bridge on the Belgrade-Nis highway, 90 km south of Belgrade which was reportedly damaged during NATO air strikes the night before (AFP Photo)
#14381373
Ah yes, Racak which set the tone for Western false flags with coordination on the ground with insurgents in one of the first in a viciously deceptive series of events that would become the norm in the post-Cold War world.

There's no doubt about it - Any apologist for the destruction and devastation of Serbia and Yugoslavia is no nationalist, but a sycophant of a policy line designed only to weaken Russia, implement a neocolonialist plan to seize the copper mine in Kosovo and other assets in the former Yugoslav space which is a plot well underway and nearly 100% complete, and eliminate any independent European power which offers the threat of providing a good example for others.

The terror campaign over the skies of Belgrade and Novi Sad wasn't only to punish Serbian nationalists and loyalists of the federal market-socialist Yugoslav dream which was independent from both the Soviet Union and the United States, nor just to impress Moscow. It was an ominous demonstration and a warning for all independent actors in Europe - Integrate or die. Allow your public wealth and sovereignty to be transferred to the hands of a few foreign banks and beasts in the shape of men or your ancient cities and communities will be subject to annihilation. Ever since then and the Bulldozer "Revolution", good little puppets have been put in place in Serbia to make sure that message is adhered to and there aren't enough men of valor in either Serbia or anywhere else in Europe at the moment to stand up to such despicable forces.

On this dark anniversary, here's one of the best documentaries I've seen produced on the subject:

[youtube]waEYQ46gH08[/youtube]

Any dignified man or woman of European blood who watched those events unfold while the last bastion of social pan-nationalism in Europe was eradicated could only but shed a tear or hang their head in sorrow, powerless to stop it. I know I did and I hope now as I did then that the day is not too long off when the Serbs and all the dispossessed people of the former Yugoslavia take their vengeance and carve out a space in southeastern Europe which is uniquely theirs, not for foreign ownership. Knowing that the Serbs with their illustrious past both medieval and in the modern age take the long view of history, I have no doubt that they will liberate Kosovo when the geopolitical winds shift and be seen as the heroes they were for being the first European folk to stand up to the ominous emergence of the "new world order", the present world order, the order of plutocratic curs and their base materialistic values which have perverted every facet of social, economic, cultural, political, and spiritual life.
Last edited by Far-Right Sage on 24 Mar 2014 13:30, edited 1 time in total.
#14381378
Far-Right Sage wrote:There's no doubt about it - Any apologist for the destruction and devastation of Serbia and Yugoslavia is no nationalist, but a sycophant of a policy line designed only to weaken Russia, implement a neocolonialist plan to seize the coal mine in Kosovo and other assets in the former Yugoslav space which is a plot well underway and nearly 100% complete, and eliminate any independent European power which offers the threat of providing a good example for others.


I actually disapprove of what happened to Serbia, but your argument is incorrect. Nationalism does not require you to care about what happens to other nations, only what happens to your own. If what you say were true, it would be very difficult to reconcile nationalism and expansionism.

The destruction of Yugoslavia and emasculation of Serbia and Russia was of benefit to many nationalists; from Albanians and Croatian, to Poles and Turks.
#14381385
It depends on what you mean to say by nationalism - National chauvinism/insular nationalism or pan-nationalism. It wasn't just Serbia which saw war and destruction and many Croatian and Slovene pan-nationalists who absolutely wanted to preserve a distinct Croatian or Slovene identity were supporters of a federal Yugoslavia which did just that for the South Slavs and respected regional rights. Again, even for the Albanians, there were Albanian-language schools and cultural institutions in Kosovo which received support directly from Belgrade and the standard of living for ethnic Albanians in Serbian-Yugoslav Kosovo was higher than that in Hoxha's Albania proper. Contrary to the propaganda surrounding the Bosnian War of the 90's, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was just that, not a Serbian empire. The explosion of a more insular/exclusive form of Serbian nationalism was actually the result of a methodical terror campaign directed against all of Yugoslavia but Serbia particularly as its political epicenter. As Serbophobic forms of Croatian and Bosniak neo-fascism and Islamism respectively were backed by the economic and military power of the usual leading Western powers in the same manner neo-fascism and Islamism is whipped up today in places such as Ukraine or Syria as a divide and conquer tactic by liberal-imperialist elements, what else were the Serbs to turn to but sanctuary in their own distinct identity?

Thompson_NCL wrote:The destruction of Yugoslavia and emasculation of Serbia and Russia was of benefit to many nationalists; from Albanians and Croatian, to Poles and Turks.


Liberal nationalists and chauvinists who allowed hatred of the Serbian nation to blind them and make them believe that they would have a better future by cooperating with a liberal plot, yes, just as the Ukrainian chauvinists on the streets of Kiev collaborating with Jewish bankers to defile their country have been so blinded.
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