Meulan, 2010
Six Decades of
Terror:
NATO is al
QAEDA-pt1
—by Mick
Collins
{In honor of the Pre-trial Defense Brief that got the Mladic case put on hold because of the Prosecution's complete inability to set forth specific perps and the crimes they committed in the DEFENSE of YUGOSLAVIA against NATO and NATO-proxie forces; in honor of the materialization of a long-awaited push-back in Chicago and elsewhere against the Fascist forces that terrorize the whole world under the banner of North Atlantic anti-Communism; and in honor of the return of a warm sun to brighten our days as we enter another political cotillion season to choose the Lords and Ladies of Wastedom, our very own executioners; and in hopes of shedding even more light on the stanky dankness that is home to the sentimental swine and greed-head droolers of the Human Rights and Stop the Fucking Genocide hustles, while they play on ignorant guilt and general false-consciousness to cushion their useless tenures: here is a post from the gayer Paris-days about who is really terrorizing whom.
Have a beautiful day. Take a Fascist to lunch. Then poison him. mc}
*************
[This is the first
installment of our series commemorating the last 15 years of the six decades of
US-backed global anti-majoritarian (i.e., anti-Communist or Fascist) terrorism.
Brief recap:
11 March 2006 is the date of President
Slobodan Milosevic's death at the hands of the NATO Tribunal in The Hague
(mistakenly and illegally credited to the UNSC);
23 March 1999 marks the beginning of NATO's
terror-bombing of Yugoslavia over Kosovo;
6 April 1994 is the date of the double
presidential assassination that is said to have triggered a paroxysm of mass
killing in Rwanda, come to be known as the 'Genocide of 100 Days,' in a
parallel campaign of NATO terror in Central Africa;
and 23 April 1999 is the date independent
journalism began its slow dance of death in the world media with the bombing of
Belgrade's Radio/Television Serbia (RTS), which killed 16 journalists and
station staff, and, as with the other cited atrocities (or 911), has gone without
an investigation worthy of the name—and its real perps have gone
unapprehended—but the victims of all these NATO crimes will continue to pay for
them in perpetuity.
We are just back from an all-too-short stay in
Belgrade (we being my son Max and I), where a truncated version of this text
was presented at an anti-NATO/EU/Fascist rally in Republic Square on Tuesday
night the 24th.
The initial intention of this writing was to
convey in English the essence of a statement made for the Commemoration Conference
at the Sava Center, by French General Pierre-Marie Gallois, one of Serbia's
oldest and best friends in France, and the man who accepted the unconditioned
release of two French NATO pilots downed over Bosnia in December 1995, from his
Yugoslav Army homologue, General Radko Mladic. Both these men are venerated by
their peoples as great war heros, though Mladic has been turned by NATO
expedience and cowardice into a most-wanted war crimes suspect unto
genocidaire.
But Max's presence at my side in Belgrade
changed a lot. Just as this visit to Serbia, to Slobodan Milosevic's grave in
Pozarevac, and to the prison where Dragoljub Milanović, the chief of RTS, is
currently stepping off a dime bid—a 'reckless endangerment' beef so humbug it'd
bend Lady Justice double and choke her with her own vomit—this whole trip has
racked focus on the Western wars for commercial and financial domination
against small independence-minded nations, revealing them for the hideous
campaigns of global terror and victim-blaming they really are.
So, NATO is al QAEDA, nobullshit!—but will
Obama be Osama? Stay tuned for Part 2. –mc]
************************
Six Decades of Terror:
NATO is al QAEDA—pt 1.
—Belgrade, 23 March 2009
Ten years ago, while NATO was ‘terror-bombing’
Yugoslavia over Kosovo (Newsweek’s pre-911 terminology), I had already been
working on the Balkan Dossier for about four years. In 1995, during my first
summer in Paris, I wrote a play about the Bosnian war, Black Samba, which was
done in New York City at Soho Rep in 1998. By then the nation of Yugoslavia was
just a memory in America, or a trivia question, like “Automobiles for $50: In
what Southeastern European country is the Yugo manufactured?”. I couldn’t
figure out why or how everyone fell into the easy, uncritical use of names like
the ex-, or former-, or rump-Yugoslavia. I didn’t know what had become of the
Yugoslavs, where their Yugoslavia had gone, but I had a hunch I knew the guys
who’d gotten rid of it pretty well.
During the 1999 NATO bombing, the young woman
with whom I was working to produce the Paris revival of my first Los Angeles
play, WinoTime,—and who would later get me my greatest reproduction, my son
Max—t ook me to a little restaurant, just outside Paris in Montreuil, called Le
Café Yougoslavie. We would watch the gruesome news reports from Belgrade's RTS
on a wall-sized projection TV. What we saw was people just like us—not little
Southeast Asians or black Africans or swarthy Middle Easterners—, living in
houses like ours—not in thatched huts or broken down refugee camps—, with cars
like ours, and little families with beautiful kids—like everywhere in the
world: we saw all this being destroyed, being blown to pieces, live and in
color, and it was all being sponsored by those good people in the Human Rights
business. It really made no sense—or, at least, what sense I did make of it was
almost too cynical and too sinister to be anything else but inHuman Wrongs.
From the very beginning of the discussion, the
conflict in the Balkans was seen to be an internecine battle among the
once-Federated Republics, which had almost magically been declared independent
sovereign nations by, first Germany, then the fledgling EEC-EU, and finally,
once the US had weighed in, the entire ‘International Community’—less Russia
and China, of course. It was instantly identified, even by the best historians,
as a ‘civil war,’ just like the one that went down there during WWII: a war
over territory, waged by the various Yugoslav ‘national minorities’, Croats, Bosnians
and Serbs, with their goal of becoming a ‘national minority’ but within their
own nations.
The disappearance of the United
Nations-founding member-state of Yugoslavia, the nation of the Southern Slavs,
into the historico-toxic fog of a disinformation-driven civil war, allowed the
original aggression against the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia by
US and EU financial and commercial interests, backed by endless waves of
private-military terrorists, just like those being deployed in the Middle East
and Central Africa at the same time, to be occulted within, even effaced from,
the Historical Record, and eventually retro-blamed on the very Slav victims of
the aggression, itself. Western financial speculators from Enron, Goldman Sachs
and Credit Suisse/First Boston supported the extra-legal secessions from
Yugoslavia, especially by Croatia and Bosnia, and seized the recently
deregulated markets, then used their formidable Private Military Contractors,
like DynCorp and MPRI, to dissolve all public sector protection from the now
emaciated Yugoslav State by going after the Yugoslav People’s Army, the JNA. As
long as Yugoslavia could be seen to be acting out age-old religious, ethnic and
national animosities; as long as the Slavs, in defending themselves, could be
seen to be trying to kill each other off: it was stupidly simple to convince
the world that all the killing had its origins not in response to any foreign
aggression, but in the restlessness of the hateful native tribes, and that the
best way to put a stop to it was, first, to choke them hard with embargoes and
other economic sanctions, then to interpose the world’s most powerful military
force, but call it a ‘Humanitarian Intervention,’ and, finally, just bomb the
shit outta all these petty ‘nationalists’ until they’re begging for peace—then
bomb them some more. However costly in human lives this joint criminal
enterprise might be, the Chicago School policy adopted by the Western Business
interests involved dictated that it should be paid. Of course this war—like all
wars—was great for Business, but those who actually paid the real costs were no
longer of much economic good for anything else.
The time, of course, was very right. The
Soviet Union was broken up, and the European Union was about to put ink to its
Maastricht Treaty. Globalization was on a roll, freeing capital to go wherever
it wanted, to do whatever it wanted and without answering to anyone but its
self-valorizing self. One by one, the countries that had depended on the Soviet
Union for support to maintain their subsidized housing and domestic
food-farming sectors, their universal free health care systems, their universal
free education and their guaranteed full-employment; these former spudniks were
freed from their orbits of privileged trade with Russia (especially in the
realm of energy resources) and allowed, with full liberty and the wily
ministrations of Western investment banks and brokers, to develop into morbidly
exploitive and criminally anarchic market economies—all now the crushing
bondage of NATO membership. Today, too late, they wish things had gone another
way.
Yet the European moral vacuum necessary for
this kind of Orwellian anti-rationality to be passed off as progress (e.g.,
wage slavery as an improvement on a socially guaranteed, healthy working life;
victimization by profit-driven medical/pharmaceutical complexes that guarantee
death by debt as preferable to socially supported protection against
catastrophic illness; forced labor in the service of militarism and the wastage
of never-ending war as preferable to living a peaceful, reflective and
[pro]creative life) was sucked out in France by the elevation and celebration
of nouveaux collabos-intellos, like Bernard Kouchner and Bernard Henri-Levy;
and in the US by the achievement of state power by class collaborationists, and
just common greed-heads, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and
even the porcine Richard Holbrooke.
Only such lunatic sociopaths could accept
rewards, however grand the money amounts or haughty the positions, for foisting
onto their fellows a false consciousness, a culture of murderous lies and
manipulations—the very sort of atmosphere that has allowed the tyranny of NATO
to continue well beyond its real anti-Soviet relevancy. And even though by now
they all, BK & BH-L & Holbrooke, have admitted in their various
writings that the rationale of a ‘Serbian fascist aggression’ against, and the
ethnic cleansing of, all non-Serbs (non-Slavs?) from the other innocently self-determining
former-Yugoslav Republics, as well as its own southern province of Kosovo; that
the tabloid stories of death and rape camps, even unto ‘a genocide of
non-Serbs’ (non-Christians?), were the pure creations of Western
marketing—principal among the tub-thumpers being Ruder-Finn International ‘s
director James Harff, whose motto, ‘The client comes first, second and third.
The Truth? We’ll get back to you on that after lunch,’ became the overly long
mantra of everyone in the War Biz.
‘The French Doctor' Kouchner, in a scene from
his autobiography, A Warrior for Peace, describes a dying Bosnian president
Izetbegovic telling him that it was at the instigation of his Western
minders—like Ambassador Warren Zimmermann, who talked him into pulling his
signature off the 1992 Lisbon Accords, and on the word of President Clinton,
himself, (who also ordered up the Srebrenica phantasmagoria)—that the Serbian
death camp lie was cooked up:
INT: A SARAJEVO HOSPITAL ROOM--Day
An obviously dying old man lies in bed with all
the necessary tubes and monitors in place and beeping:
Dr. K
You
remember President Mitterand’s visit?
President Izedbegovic
(Through a death rattle)
I
remember.
Dr. K
In
the course of conversation, you mentioned that there were
{makes
the quotes with his fingers} “EXTERMINATION CAMPS”
in
Bosnia. You repeated that to journalists. That provoked a lot
of strong feelings in the world. . . . (beats)
François {referring
to
French President François Mitterand} sent me to Omarska. . .
and
. . . we opened some other prisons. (several beats) They
were
pretty horrible places, ok? . . . But the people there were
not
systematically exterminated. . . {LONG PAUSE} You know
that,
right?
President Izedbegovic
(Reluctantly)
Yeah. (beats) I thought my revelations would put a rush on the
[NATO] bombing. . . . I saw how the French and others reacted.
Richard Holbrooke
You
saw that at Helsinki President Bush didn’t react.
President Izedbegovic
(Resignedly)
Yes
. . . I tried. But it was a bad call. . . . (beats) There were no
Death
Camps, however shitty those places were.
Bernard Henri-Levy wrote in his book, Who
Killed Daniel Pearl?, about the ‘open secret’ among the supporters of the
Bosnian Muslims concerning the lies and manipulations that the Serb atrocity
stories were, including the so-called Siege of Sarajevo, the bombing of
bakeries and market places and, especially, the rape and death camps. But this
secret truth never mitigated BH-L's support for the ferocious bombing of
Serbian/Yugoslav positions in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, and then, again, over
Kosovo in 1999. Throughout, BH-L kept clutching Bosnian Muslims to his
blue-blazer-clad bosom.
And just to show that the Kosovo terror bombing
was not some isolated aberration of US foreign policy in the Balkans: Scott
O’Grady, a USAF pilot who took part in the 1992-1995 NATO bombing of Serb
positions in Bosnia, and the subject of John Glenn’s film, Behind Enemy Lines [included in the CM/P
seminar, Movies and the UnMaking-Of History], confessed in his book, Return
With Honor, that he was briefed before his fateful mission that the massacres
of civilians in Sarajevo had been authorized by the Izetbegovic government,
itself, and not carried out by the Serbs. Despite O’Grady’s disclosures of the
real balance of forces on the ground in Bosnia, the Hollywood-led demonization
of the Bosnian Serbs in films like Welcome to Sarajevo and The Fourth Angel,
made NATO’s terrorizing of Yugoslavia in 1999 both understandable and
forgivable.
Women, too, showed themselves capable of
abandoning moral dignity and shunning human decency for the sake of power and
position. Who could forget Madeleine Albright, in a grotesque impersonation of
a human being, claiming to CBS’s Leslie Stahl that the price of half a million
Iraqi children’s lives was worth paying to stop Saddam Hussien. The same sort
of ghoulish accounting was employed by Bernard Koucher’s wife, Christine
Ockrent (a leading French radio and TV journalist), when she suggested that all
the hundreds of thousands of refugees being created by the 1999 NATO terror in
Serbia’s southern province, were preferable to allowing Milosevic and his ‘Serb
thugs’ to kill as many or more Kosovo Albanians by doing nothing. This is not
just human discernment degraded by ignorance; this is Human Reason and Decency
mortgaged to geopolitical expediency. And it is also proof that women are no
more likely to get it right than men.
But Holbrooke, Albright, Kouchner and their
ilk seem so co-opted by the political powers that they are not able to be in
the same room with Truth and Justice, even with the fierce gravity of the
ever-burgeoning mass of legally determined evidence. Judicial calls like the
ICTY’s acquittal of Serbian President Milan Miltunovic on all charges of crimes
against humanity in Kosovo; the ICTR's verdict in the Military I case, where
the so-called Extremist Hutu ‘masterminds’ of the Rwandan Genocide were
acquitted on all charges of ‘planning or conspiring to commit genocide’; the
February 2007 ICJ ruling absolving Serbia of any active responsibility for
genocide in Bosnia: these judgments indicate that the expedient application of
the charge of Genocide, so essential to sustaining the global spread of
neocolonial domination, is historically unfounded, judicially unprovable, and
can only be stipulated to or otherwise ordered by a court ‘to take judicial
notice of’—as was done by the Appeals Chamber at the ICTR on 16 June 2006.
So, now years after the discovery of the
decomposing body of lies on which these congenital, carrion-slarving cowards
have nourished their public careers, Holbrooke and Kouchner have once again
been rewarded with promotions—Holbrooke with Obama’s appointment to be the US's
man in Afghanistan and Pakistan (officially charged with supervising the
bombing of wedding parties and mosques), and Kouchner with the French Foreign
Minister’s gig from the sweaty, ever-more demented and Nixon-like Nicolas
Sarkozy—and all without ever having to acknowledge their complicity in one of
the great war crimes and national betrayals of the late 20th Century: NATO’s
78-day and 79-night terror bombing of Yugoslavia/Serbia-Montenegro.
So why can’t all this evidence of who were the
real aggressors and who were the real aggressed be applied to correcting the
Historical Record, rehabilitating the policies of those governments that
sinned, and repairing and restoring the lives of those who were wrongfully
damaged in this geopolitical crime spree known as globalization? An important
reason—though far from the only reason—is a want of solidarity among the
targeted countries with the establishment of ruling compradors. In the past ten
years, we have all lost the sense of our shared history to an atomizing
multifarious terror, and our struggles for Independence and Justice are only
effective when they are joined. Divided we fail.
Like that young woman who got me my son: ten
years ago, as we sat together in the Café Yougoslavie—now called ‘Il y a une
fois un Yougoslavie’ (Once upon a time there was a country called
Yugoslavia)—and as we watched the suffering of the Serbian people, our Slavic
kith and kin, she vowed to come with me to Belgrade, and she assured me that
everything would be all right. That hooked me back then.
However, now she’s at home in Paris, and I’m
not sure just how far things are from ever being all right—at home or anywhere
else—because I still have a feeling that most things are gone terribly wrong.
But because Max is with me here in Belgrade, I do have hope—real live hope. And
by giving him this opportunity to come to Belgrade and meet some truly heroic
people, I feel like these paternal strivings of mine, to get things right in
the world, will not end with me, and, maybe, ten years from now, when we come
back to Serbia, Max will have made far more things far better than I ever
could.
That’s my audacity of hope. Because today is a
new day. There’s a new administration in Washington (though it is redolent of
the corruption of the previous Democratic government that destroyed Yugoslavia
and Rwanda), and for the first time in my life I can support a US president
because he seems truly to want to promote majoritarian interests.
So far, my President Obama has shown his
intelligence and decency by listening, deeply and intently, to everyone who
speaks to him, and fully considering everything before he speaks—and some of
his statements are so politic, like his position on the expansion of NATO (‘All
countries that want to join, should be allowed to join!”), as to be almost
comical.
If we can all get together to write the true
history of the real crimes against humanity committed against Yugoslavia,
against Serbia and all the Slavic people, and present this story to President
Obama; if we can show him the horrific misdeeds of his Democratic predecessors,
the Clintons, the Holbrookes, the Bidens and Wes Clark’s NATO, in perpetuating
a moribund socio-economic system, a system of production that only destroys
life through terror, war and waste; if he can be shown the unprovoked violence,
the unnecessary death and destruction, the wanton murder of brave patriots
protecting their homes and families, the criminalization of national
self-defense, the flagrant theft of territory and resources and the
indeterminate indenture of ordinary people with extraordinary courage:
perhaps—and just perhaps—we can begin to make tomorrow a better day for Max and
his generation and all the generations to come.
Mick Collins
CirqueMinime/Paris
