Crimes of Fascism; Crimes of Silence - the Myth of Albanian Revenge
By George Thompson (posted 12-17-1999) Introduction by Jared Israel
Editor's Note: This is the first of six parts of an Report that every American needs to read. It has bothered me for several years that the American press has NEVER made any effort to honestly report what is happening in the Balkans.
How can I say that? Because every report, going back to the Bosnian conflicts, were invariably reported only from the Muslim perspective. I spent a lot of time checking numbers of Muslims who actually lived in the towns where, it was reported, large numbers of Muslims were "massacred" by Serbs. The numbers killed often exceeded the numbers that were there in the first place by thousands. Reporters were not reporting where all the supposedly "missing" Muslims had come from.
It has not been said in this report, but the facts are so different than what you are being told, just as was the case in the 1930s when Adoph Hitler was convincing the German people that the Poles were planning to "attack Germany," as he planned his attack ON Poland, that you, as an individual are faced with the sobering challenge: Are Americans standing silently by as an entire nation of people are being killed or forced to flee yet ANOTHER European nation?
Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources (www.originalsources.com)
The Committee for National Solidarity Tolstojeva 34, 11000 Belgrade, YU
www.emperors-clothes.com
Introduction
There are three positions on Serbian government military action during the 78 day bombing of Yugoslavia.
Position one: Serbian armed forces engaged in genocide on a vast scale; the NATO/KLA forces were right and the Yugoslav government was wrong.
Position two: Serbian forces were bad but not as bad as Position One suggests; there was right and wrong on both sides.
And Position three: there is no evidence that Serbian forces committed atrocities. Moreover the Serbs were fighting a just war; they were and remain right.
POSITION 1: NATO ARGUES GENOCIDE
Position One includes a broad spectrum of NATO leaders, political parties and various intellectuals. In Europe, most of the Social Democrat leaders and many of the conservative ones, in the US, Clinton as well as Dole plus many supposed intellectuals, such as Christopher Hitchens from The Nation, Todd Gitlin who writes for Mother Jones, and Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust celebrity. The list is incomplete, to be sure, but you get the idea: a diverse group with enthusiastic support for NATO as the organizing principle.
Position One justified bombing Yugoslavia by arguing it was necessary to stop a modern-day Holocaust:
"Mr. Clinton tried to paint a compelling portrait of the atrocities inside Kosovo, evoking images of Hitler's slaughter of the Jews".(1)
We were told that perhaps hundreds of thousands of Albanians were being butchered. (How bombing would halt this alleged slaughter was unclear but that didn't matter; the idea here was really punishment not prevention.) NATO and the media continued making these Holocaust claims after the bombing stopped. Here's an example from Canadian TV:
OFF Camera [i.e. Narrator]: Skender Murati would not protest if all the Serbs left. He doesn't care if it now appears the Albanians are no better than the Serbs. He's gone through too much.
OFF: Do you think it's possible that you could ever live with Serbs again?
SKENDER MURATI (Translated): For me, life with Serbs has ended, no matter what happens in the future. There is no life with a Serb anymore ...when you take into account that hundreds of thousands of people are dead. [Our emphasis. From THE NATIONAL MAGAZINE, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC TV) September 27, 1999]
Note the technique used here. The Narrator, that is, the Voice of Anonymous Authority, says: "He [the Albanian gentleman] doesnt care if it now appears the Albanians are no better than the Serbs."
The Narrator offers no evidence that the Serbs are bad; he merely reminds his viewers of what they have been told in countless earlier broadcasts: Serbs provide the standard against which other evils are to be measured.
Thus, no matter how "bad" the Albanians are they can only play catch-up with the Serbs.
The Narrator uses a similar method to characterize Mr. Murati's attitude: this Albanian has "gone through too much" to worry about what outsiders think of Albanians. The Narrator mentions Mr. Muratti's suffering in passing, thereby communicating that said suffering is beyond question: of course he suffered. Didn't all Albanians suffer at Serbian hands?
The possibility that Mr. Muratti's "pain" may be a Public Relations lie invented to build support for the Kosovo Liberation Army and against the Serbs is beneath consideration.
In this way Mr. Muratti's remarks are validated in advance and we are set-up for the slam-dunk: Mr. Murati refers in passing to "hundreds of thousands of dead." No evidence is presented for this crazy claim; that because there IS no evidence. But by dint of clever writing and because viewers have been subjected to so much anti-Serbian baloney in the past that they have trouble thinking straight, the "hundreds of thousands" figure is swallowed, whole.
This particular show was aired Sept. 27th. By then a miracle had occurred, at that time still unnoticed by the Western Media. A group of Spanish forensic scientists had held a press conference where they said: NATO lied. We were sent to Kosovo, they said. We were told we'd be doing autopsies on 2000 victims of Serbian genocide. It was all lies.
It was all lies! May those Spanish forensic experts and policemen live long, happy lives. The rulers of our planet do not figure on moral courage. (For the full translation of the Spanish Forensic scientists' report, and a commentary, see note #21 at the end.)
The Spanish experts' press conference was picked up by one magazine, El Pais. Emperors-clothes.com had the El Pais piece translated. We and others, and then many thousands of others, plastered it all over this last vestige of democracy, the Internet.
Various Websites and then newspapers picked it up. An ember of intellectual honesty flared: some newspapers actually began subjecting NATO's mass-murder claims to the awkwardness of scrutiny. Serb-baiters like Richard Gwyn turned fickle and commented that with NATO's claims of Serbian mass murder obviously false, there was a real possibility that the genocide justification "may have been a grotesque lie concocted to justify a war." (Toronto Star, 11/4/99) Who would have thought it was possible?
Damage control was called for. The so-called "War Crimes" Tribunal threw together a progress report on the Great Kosovo Cadaver Hunt. The statement was delivered by Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte herself.
Del Ponte avoided the matter of the Spanish experts. Instead she dwelt on Numbers. In 6 months, said del Ponte, her battalion of forensic experts had found 2108 bodies.
An exhaustive analysis published by Emperors-Clothes proves that there's no reason to believe that any of the alleged 2108 are victims of alleged Serbian terror. It's not even clear that most are Albanians, and those who are may have died from natural causes or been killed by NATO bombs or by the KLA, which has always targeted uncooperative Albanians, and so on. (See note #22 at the end.) This complication - i.e., no evidence - has produced psychosis in the NATO camp. On the one hand, the loyal media ploughs forward like a brain-dead elephant, explaining away Albanian attacks on Serbs as "revenge for Serbian atrocities". But why revenge? Revenge for what? There were no massacres.
Meanwhile, NATO leaders are scrambling for the high ground. This has been attempted with most spectacular gracelessness by Assistant Secretary of Defense Kenneth Bacon, who claimed in a November 16 letter to the NY Times that boss William Cohen had never said huge numbers of Albanians were killed by Serbs. Huh? (Unfortunately for Bacon it is possible to retrieve the text of previous statements from the Internet. See note # 23 at the end)
Some NATO apologist even argued that numbers don't really matter: one dead Albanian is as bad as 100,000. Huh? Do these people read their scripts before they speak?
Down but not out
So Position One has had its foundation knocked out from under; it is now an argument suspended in thin air. Sorry buddy, no bodies, no genocide.