World Affairs
Vol. 3, Number 1 (Jan.–Mar. 1999)

Bombs, Sanctions and State Destruction: US Action in a Unipolar World
By Raju G C Thomas

 

Unrestrained and discriminatory US actions in the Balkans are generating serious problems in the area.

When General Colin Powell, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, resisted bombing the Serbs in the early 1990s, the then US ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright responded: ‘What is the point of having this superb military you are always talking about, if we cannot use it?’ In the CBS news programme “60 Minutes” (May 12, 1996), news correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Ambassador Albright: ‘We have heard that half a million children have died [as a result of the economic sanctions against Iraq]. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And you know, is the price worth it?’ Albright responded: ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.’

These impromptu remarks by Madeleine Albright who was elevated to Secretary of State in January 1997, reflect the reckless and callous attitude within the American foreign policy community. They include key organisations of the audio-visual and print media who drive American policy with selective and slick reporting and images. Their outlook is that when American diplomatic initiatives are rejected, Washington must resort to bombs and sanctions, but only against those states and nations that are unable to retaliate against the United States, and where such actions will not affect the interests and well-being of other states. Indeed, most states have chosen to jump on the American bandwagon, rather than alienate the world’s sole superpower.

The Albright doctrine reflects the new arrogance of unrivalled power in a unipolar military world. The doctrine, built around the Munich Syndrome and the Domino Theory, assumes that if Slobodan Milosevic is appeased in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, then other “Hitlers” such as Saddam Hussain will take heart and go on an expansionist rampage in other places. If the evil Serbs are not stopped by NATO bombs and rockets in Kosovo, the war will spread through Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Russia, Germany.... Meanwhile, NATO, the only military alliance left on this planet, will collapse. World peace will be in danger.

Richard Holbrooke, the man who pummelled the Serbs into accepting the Dayton Agreement in 1996 accompanied by massive American bombing, expressed this enormous world responsibility shouldered by Washington as follows: ‘There will be other Bosnias in our lives—areas where early outside involvement can be decisive, and American leadership will be required. The world’s richest nation, one that presumes to great moral authority, cannot simply make worthy appeals to conscience and call on others to carry the burden. The world will look to Washington for more than rhetoric the next time we face a challenge to peace.’ If the American destruction of Vietnam, Iraq and Yugoslavia are the yardsticks, this threat to do more good to the rest of the world should be taken seriously. Amos Perlmutter, an Israeli professor working in the US, summed up this post-Cold War imperial American mentality as follows:

‘US ambassadors Richard Holbrooke, Christopher Hill and William Walker have surrogated for the Ottoman governor, the kaymakam, for settling disputes in what used to be provinces of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Some argue that American-NATO-UN and OSCE ambassadors and negotiators have replaced the Austro-Hungarian rulers. Bosnia is an American-NATO creation. Furthermore, the United States is responsible for the creation, training, equipping and modernisation of the Muslim army of Croat-Muslim Bosnia. It has given military aid to Croatia. This was not even done by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The American kaymakams Christopher Hill and William Walker are separately creating a new entity out of Kosovo in the name of negotiating with Yugoslavia over its autonomous province.’

The underlying problem in the post-Cold War era is that there is no countervailing military power. Balance of power theory in Western strategic literature taught that only a system of countervailing power may ensure the sovereignty independence of states, both large and small. Now that the US-led West is militarily, economically and politically dominant, American leaders and observers argue that world peace and justice have a better chance without a prevailing global balance of military power, except in regions and even within countries where it advances American foreign policy goals, eg, South Asia, the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia. Germany’s reunification was not expected to threaten Europe, although the first action of a united Germany was to push for the secessions of Slovenia and Croatia. Likewise, at the end of the Cold War, preserving NATO without much military opposition was not enough. The expansion of NATO to make it even more powerful is now the American objective. At the meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in December 1994, Russian president Boris Yeltsin condemned American efforts to project Russia as a future threat in order to justify NATO’s expansion. According to Yeltsin, ‘We hear explanations to the effect this allegedly is the expansion of stability just in case there are undesirable developments in Russia.’

 

The Transformation of the United Nations

US military dominance, backed by the ability to threaten economic punishments or to promise economic rewards to those who oppose or support American policies, has changed the character of the United Nations. The UN system has been reduced to an obedient organisation of the United States and the West, a return to the early years of the UN when its membership did not include the emerging independent Afro-Asian bloc of states. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact alliance, voting in the Security Council is now almost always unanimous in favor of US policies with an occasional abstention or negative vote. States with veto powers, including Russia and China, have rarely ventured to veto US-sponsored or supported UN resolutions. Bandwagoning with the dominant state is preferred to balancing. This has serious implications for small and medium states.

During the Gulf crisis of 1990-91, China abstained on some of the Security Council resolutions but never vetoed any of them. Indeed, until autumn 1994, neither Russia nor China dared veto American-sponsored Security Council resolutions on any issue regarding Iraq or the former Yugoslavia, even if they did not agree. Only Yemen and Cuba dared vote against some of the UN resolutions. For this Yemen was punished severely by Saudi Arabia, the main ally of the US in the Middle East, through the expulsion of all Yemeni workers from Saudi Arabia and the termination of all Saudi economic assistance. Cuba remains under long-standing economic sanctions imposed by the US.

The Anglo-American attack on Iraq in mid-December 1998, without consulting with the Security Council, further demonstrates unrestrained American power. The December 1998 bombing had followed an aborted attack by the US a month earlier when UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan intervened to bring about a compromise with the Iraqi authorities. However, by the following month, the pretext for bombing Iraq was UNSCOM’s report written by Richard Butler, with help from US officials in drafting the final report. However, the report acknowledged that ‘the majority of inspections of facilities and sites under the continuing monitoring system were carried out with Iraq’s cooperation.’ The International Atomic Energy Agency report even stated that Iraq ‘has provided the necessary level of cooperation to enable the above enumerated activities to be completed effectively and efficiently.’ But bombing Iraq had become a painless and popular American option. The problem remained that Russia, China and France would veto any UN Security Council resolution authorising another major attack on Iraq, and there was little support from the region or other countries for such military action. Consequently, the US and Britain bypassed the Security Council to launch the next attack with cruise missiles, and strategic and tactical bombers on an Iraq incapable of defending itself.

On the civil war in the former Yugoslavia (defined as “Serbian aggression” by the US), there were no negative votes in the Security Council on a series of resolutions that were introduced between 1991 and 1996. Despite serious reservations by some members on some of those resolutions sponsored by the US and its new found Muslim and Third World “allies” in the Security Council and General Assembly. By late 1994, after expressing several grave misgivings, Russia finally vetoed a Security Council resolution sponsored by the US to embargo Serbian oil to the Bosnian and Krajina Serbs.

When the US sought to lift the arms embargo to the former regions of Yugoslavia in order to enable arms to flow to the Muslims in the Bosnian civil war, it appeared that four vetoes may have been cast by the remaining four permanent members of the Security Council. But that never happened and was unlikely to have happened despite all the informal disagreements that were expressed. However, to avoid embarrassing the other permanent members of the Security Council, all of whom were opposed to the lifting of the arms embargo to the Bosnian Muslims in 1994, the US took the case to the General Assembly in November where it got its non-binding resolution passed by a margin of 97 votes in favour, 61 abstentions, and without a single negative vote being cast. Surely, every one of those 61 countries who abstained also disagreed with the UN resolution in varying degrees, and yet none dared or cared to vote against the US. It is pertinent to note that Canada and the European nations including Germany, abstained. Such voting in the UN defies credibility.

A demonstration of what the US wants, it gets at the UN, may be seen in the American prevention of Boutros Boutros Ghali from seeking a second term as Secretary-General. Then ambassador to the UN and now secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, carried a personal dislike and antagonism towards Boutros Ghali. According to the Washington Post, “It was she, sources say, who crafted and pushed the plan to dump the UN secretary-general.” She wished to replace him with the Ghanian, Kofi Anan. Fourteen out of 15 members of the Security Council voted in November 1996 to renew Boutros Ghali’s term. The US vetoed Boutros Ghali’s appointment and eventually got its man, Kofi Anan, appointed to the position. No state, not even France who earlier opposed the US on this issue, was prepared to object. If the UN voting patterns described above were to occur within any country that claimed to be a free and democratic society, it would invite scepticism and derision.

 

The Corrupting of International Law and Justice

This kind of behaviour would appear to be inevitable by any dominant individual, group, corporation or state, even if they acted in a benevolent manner most of the time in most situations. Exceptions to the general trend of benevolent behaviour by the dominant actor must raise concerns, especially where such actions amount to a violation of international law and to a denial of fairness and justice. Thus, international law does not apply to the United States if it does not agree with international legal decisions where these may run counter to US national interests and policy goals. For example, in 1986 the US refused to accept a 14-to-1 vote by the judges of the International Court of Justice which indicted the US for violating the rights of Nicaragua under the Sandista regime when the US mined its harbours. Only the British judge dissented.

Unlike the ICJ, the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) set up at The Hague is a different order of business. It is primarily American-sponsored, supported and organised. The investigation into the war crimes was conducted by Cherif Bassouni, an Egyptian Muslim, with operations set up at a Catholic university in Chicago, a city with a large Croatian diaspora. The United States provided about 25 attorneys to get the ICTY going, and the bulk of the legal staff to prosecute the war criminals. The purpose of the exercise was primarily to prosecute Serbs although a few Croats and Muslims were thrown in to give some notion of fairness.

The three justices for the ICTY were selected with the approval of the United States, with the chief justice being an American, Gabrielle Kirk MacDonald, a woman with experience only within the American justice system. Predictably, her perceptions and prejudices conformed entirely with that of the American administration and media. The Australian and Malaysian judges attempted to display some sense of impartiality in the highly selective and predominantly Serb war criminal cases before them. In convicting the Serb defendant, Dusko Tadic on some counts but dismissing several other counts, a case which was given widespread coverage in the American audio-visual and print media, these two non-American judges rejected the claim that these were “war crimes” because the conflict in Bosnia was a civil war involving no “Serbian aggression.” The strong dissenting opinion of the American justice Gabrielle MacDonald was a straightforward endorsement of the American position.

Far greater war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in China, Cambodia, and East Pakistan, have produced no equivalent ad hoc tribunals. A feeble attempt was made to set up war crimes tribunal in the case of Rwanda to deal with the genocide of nearly a million Tutsis by Hutus in the space of two months in 1994. But the Rwanda Tribunal is barely working and nobody pays much attention. Thousands of Hutus accused of genocide languish for years in cramped and inhuman prisons awaiting legal retribution from the minority Tutsi regime restored to power in Kigali. That these Africans were all Catholics was irrelevant compared to the great concern for White Muslims and Catholics in the former Yugoslavia, the emphasis being on the preferred race and not religion.

The US is unwilling to have any permanent war crimes tribunal that would have jurisdiction over its citizens. In 1998, during the 156-nation negotiations in Rome for such an international court, the US was isolated being among the few resisters to the proposed permanent tribunal. The resistance is understandable since the American record is far from clean on such war crimes issues. It will not tolerate any suggestion that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two purely civilian targets with no strategic or military value, may be construed as war crimes. And how willing is the US to reveal and try their own citizens for war crimes? Was My Lai the only case of a civilian massacre during the Vietnam War where about three million Vietnamese died? For the My Lai massacre of over a hundred civilians, only Lieutenant William Calley was convicted, given a 20-year sentence and then released after serving just 35 months of house arrest. During the 1993 American peacekeeping operations in Somalia, US forces went beserk and killed nearly 1,000 civilians in Mogadishu. There were no indictments or convictions.

 

The Destruction of Iraq and Yugoslavia

The US has subjected Arab Iraq and Serbian Yugoslavia to bombs and sanctions on the grounds that they committed aggression. Equating the behaviour of both Serbian Yugoslavia and Arab Iraq is misleading. Saddam Hussain’s Iraq invaded and annexed another neighbouring sovereign state. Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia did not invade and annex neighbouring states such as Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria or Greece. Serbian leadership merely sought first to preserve the old Yugoslavia as much as possible, and subsequently to encompass as many Serbs and as much territory within the remnant Yugoslavia. Allegations of Serbian “aggression” were contrived by recognizing the internal provinces of Yugoslavia as independent states against the wishes of its Serbian residents. One could generate instant Chinese, Indian, Turkish, Israeli and British anger, for instance, by simply recognizing Tibet, Kashmir, Kurdistan, Palestine and Northern Ireland as independent states against the wishes of the federal authorities of these states.

Again, whereas both Saddam’s and Slobodan’s policies and rhetoric have reduced Arabs and Serbs to poverty and desperation, they are not “Hitlers” of the same evil or magnitude. Unlike Hussain, Milosevic has not shot all his past, present and prospective opponents. The crimes Milosevic committed were mainly against Serbian interests, namely, Belgrade’s forced withdrawal from centuries-old Serbian territory by the diktats of Secretary Albright, and envoy Holbrooke.

Meanwhile, the entire Serbian nation has been driven to economic destitution, only because all other ethnic groups of the former Yugoslavia were given the right to secede from Yugoslavia with German and American support. The former Yugoslavia was essentially dismembered by the German and American-led international recognition of the internal “republics” of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) against the wishes of the Serb-led federal authorities in Belgrade. This was an innovative non-military method of aggression and state destruction. It was in violation of international law that forbids secession against the wishes of the federal authorities, and violation of the 1975 Helsinki Accords Final Agreement that had guaranteed the boundaries of the states of Europe. Keep in mind that the slaughter in the former Yugoslavia always began after the push from the outside for new state recognition of Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. There were no human tragedies before then. However, the Serbs of Krajina and Bosnia who also declared their independence were denied the right to secede from these newly carved out states, but instead were all driven out of Krajina, Slavonia and the Croat-Muslim Federation with American military training and assistance. There were nearly one million Serb refugees in 1998, more than any other group.

Paradoxically, Yugoslavia’s 70-year international frontiers could be taken apart in cavalier fashion, but not the new frontiers of the newly created states of Croatia and Bosnia which never existed in modern history. The exception is, of course, the Kosovo region of Serbia, the emotional heartland of the Serbs where some 250 historic churches, monasteries and religious sites once stood dating back a thousand years, and where Franz Weber, the Swiss art and cultural historian, has identified some 1,800 Byzantine historical sites.

Following the 1991 Gulf War, the United States sought to separate the northern Kurdish territory and the southern Shia Arab territory from Iraq to weaken and contain Saddam Hussain and his regime. Only objections from Turkey, America’s ally in NATO, who face an even more serious Kurdish separatist movement, have prevented the United States from separating and recognizing an independent Kurdish state out of Iraq. Syria and Iran, who also have Kurdish inhabited territory within their states, have objected to such an independent Kurdish republic. As regards a new Shia Arab state being carved out of southern Iraq, the Gulf Arab sheikdoms are apprehensive that such a state may become closely tied to Iran. While there are differences in the alleged crimes of Serbia and Iraq, the wholesale infliction of death and human suffering by the “international community” (a pseudonym for the United States), remain the common experience of both states and their populations. Both these two weak states have defied the sole unrivalled superpower and have paid a heavy price.

In Iraq, estimates of the number of innocents who have died from relentless American-sponsored sanctions range between a million and 1.7 million, including more than half a million children. An article in The New England Journal of Medicine, assessed through a study of monthly and annual infant mortality rates in Iraq that ‘an excess of more than 46,900 children died between January and August 1991.’ In 1993, Iraqi Health officials claimed that well over 100,000 children had died from malnutrition, vaccine-preventable diseases, contaminated water supplies, spread of malaria, the poor functioning of hospitals, and lack of medicine. In December 1994, Egypt’s Middle East News Agency reported a UNICEF official, Thomas Ekfal, as saying that about 500,000 children have died in Iraq since the United Nations Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Baghdad. The UNICEF official also warned that another 1.5 million children could die if the sanctions continued. All of this death and suffering have been attributed to Saddam Hussain for his failure to make good use of the limited oil exports allowed for humanitarian purposes. In January 1999, however, Vice-President Al Gore announced that the US was willing to allow more Iraqi oil sales to allow Baghdad to import food and medicine to relieve the suffering. But if this policy is justifiable now, why was it not justifiable earlier when the death and suffering were known for years?

The selectivity and insensitivity of State Department policy under Secretary Madeleine Albright may be seen during the planned genocide of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda in March-April 1994 when nearly one million Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutus in about two months. In the post-Second World War era, only the genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s committed by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge rivalled that of Rwanda. Occurring in the midst of the Yugoslav crisis, and obsessed by single-minded efforts to bomb the Serbs, the Rwanda crisis was relegated into the background by Albright. In his book, ‘ We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families,’ Philip Gourevitch pointed out the irresponsibility of then Ambassador Albright in this tragedy: ‘Her name is rarely associated with Rwanda, but ducking and pressuring others to duck, as the death toll leapt from thousands to tens of thousands, was the absolute low point in her career as a stateswoman.’

Adding to the cruelty of sanctions is Washington’s willingness to bomb Iraqis and Serbs. In the 1991 war against Iraq, the US and its allies carried out 2,000 bombing aerial sorties a day totalling well over 100,000 sorties in the 42-day assault. There were extensive civilian casualties. In one known case, American bombers mistakenly attacked the Amariyah bomb shelter in Baghdad during the Gulf War in 1991 where they thought Saddam Hussain was hiding. It turned out that women and children were sheltering here. Estimates of the number of innocent women and children killed ranged from 1000 to 1500. Former US Attorney-General Ramsey Clark claims that two bombs were dropped on the Amariyah bomb shelter. The first did not kill everybody. While screaming women and children who were still alive tried to escape, a second American bomb directed at the same target killed nearly everybody. There were only 17 survivors from the bombing on the shelter. The episode was shrugged off as Saddam’s fault.

In the attack on the Bosnian Serbs in the autumn of 1996, NATO flew 3,400 sorties, including 750 attack missions against 56 ground targets. This was in response to the American media’s complaint that the war by the Serbs against Muslims and Croats did not constitute “a level playing field.” Apparently, throwing the entire military might of NATO at the ragtag Bosnian militia fighting without the support of the Yugoslav army, without air cover, and crushed by economic sanctions, constitute a level playing field according to the American sense of fairness.

 

The Western Propaganda War

The justification for such American policy was based on a massive propaganda blitz conducted officially by the US government and unofficially by the US media portraying Serbs as Nazis, a whole nation of mass murderers. Richard Holbrooke (who called all Serbs “assholes”), Madeleine Albright (who called all Serbs “awful”), and the public relations firm, Ruder Finn, have been particularly active and adept at demonising and dehumanising the Serbian people for the benefit of Croats, Muslims and Albanians. Claims by the news media that 200,000-300,000 people were killed, and that 20,000-60,000 women were raped by Serbs amount to fabrications.

George Kenney, the former State Department official who headed the Yugoslav desk, has protested these figures repeatedly. He writes:

‘You associate me with efforts to “rewrite history.” What history? Surely you cannot mean that journalistic accounts accurately reflected events. I could offer dozens of examples that exerted at critical times debilitating influence over policy, but take one: the number killed. Starting in mid-1993, using statistics given by Bosnian officials, virtually every large media organisation published a boilerplate figure of 200,000-250,000 killed and they continue to do so. But the respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in its 1996 Yearbook [Oxford University Press] estimates 30,000-50,000 total by the end of the war, on all sides. Which is most likely to be right?... Hysterical journalists, especially revved up by visions of Nazi concentration camps and the killing fields of Cambodia? Bosnia was not at all like that. When journalists brand as ‘Serb apologists’ those who call for dispassionate analysis of what has happened, something has gone badly wrong with the public debate.’

Regarding allegations that the Serb militia raped 100,000 women, then 60,000, then 40,000, then 20,000, Diana Johnstone writes:

‘Today the public is largely convinced that mass rape as a deliberate Serbian war strategy of ethnic cleansing is a proven fact. This past March [1997] a group of nine US women senators sent a letter to President Clinton demanding tougher prosecution of Serbian war criminals and claiming that ‘investigators have documented rapes of over 50,000 women and girls.’ Yet the oft-repeated figure of 50,000 is not based on any documentation. The commission to investigate war crimes in the former Yugoslavia set up by the Security Council to prepare the documentary basis for the ICTY received reports of more than 1,600 cases of rape, and interviewed 223 victims who reported up to 4,500 cases. But at the conclusion of its work in May 1994, the commission had gathered 575 affidavits with precise identifications... In testimony before a Senate committee in August 1995, commission chairman Bassiouni said 20,000 rapes was a “sustainable projection.” Indeed, all larger figures are “projections” based not on victims’ complaints, but on hearsay, from a conflict where rumours and vivid accusations have been every bit as much as a “weapon of war” as was rape, and no doubt more so.’

The centrepiece of the anti-Serbian American propaganda was the showing of an emaciated man on TV and newspapers, as demonstration of widescale concentration camps in the mode of Nazi camps during the Second World War. The photograph and the five-second video clip of Fikret Alic with the camera going up down his skeleton body, has been shown repeatedly. The picture was taken on August 5 at Trnopolje by an award winning British television team led by Penny Marshall of ITN, with her cameraman, Jeremy Irvin, and accompanied by Ian Williams of British Channel Four, and Guardian reporter, Ed Vulliamy. A Bosnian TV film crew accompanied this group filming the British group. Has anybody wondered why the other men in the film clip look reasonably healthy and happy? Why was the rest of the film never shown?

A German journalist, Thomas Deichmann, who investigated the whole incident and claims to have examined the unused film footage, writes:

‘The fact is that Fikret Alic and his fellow Bosnian Muslims were not imprisoned behind a barbed wire fence. There was no barbed wired fence surrounding Trnopolje camp. It was not a prison, and certainly not a “concentration camp”, but a collection centre for refugees, many of whom went there seeking safety and could leave again if they wished. The barbed wire fence is not around Bosnian Muslims; it is around the cameramen and the journalists. It formed part of a broken-down barbed wire fence encircling a small compound that was next to Trnopolje. The British news team filmed from inside this compound, shooting pictures of the refugees and the camp through the compound fence.

According to Deichmann, the unused footage shows how cameraman Irvin zoomed through the compound’s barbed wire fence from various angles, apparently searching for the most dramatic shot. Most of the refugees were marked by their experience of the war, but few looked as emaciated as Fikret Alic. None of the British journalists claimed it was a concentration camp. It is no coincidence that that picture of Fikret Alic and the film clip are rarely, shown now. But no corrections or retractions have been issued, unlike the CNN-Time magazine report in July 1998 (based on eight months of investigation) that the United States had used Sarin nerve gas in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

The repeated American propaganda weapon to rationalise the slow killing of over 1.5 million innocent Iraqis is that Saddam Hussain is a dangerous monster who used poison gas against Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war and against Iraq’s own Kurdish citizens. This claim has two problems. First, both Iran and Iraq used chemical weapons against each other during their eight-year war. Second, at the termination of the Iran-Iraq war, Professors Stephen Pelletiere and Leif Rosenberger and Lt Colonel Douglas Johnson of the US Army War College undertook a study of the use of chemical weapons by the belligerents in order to better understand battlefield chemical warfare. They write:

‘In September 1988—a month after the war had ended (the Iran-Iraq war)—the State Department abruptly, and in what many viewed as a sensational manner, condemned Iraq for allegedly using chemical weapons against its Kurdish population· with the result that numerous Kurdish civilians were killed. The Iraqi government denied that any such gassing had occurred... Having looked at all the evidence that was available to us, we find it impossible to confirm the State Department’s claim that gas was used in this instance. To begin with there were never any victims produced. International relief organisations who examined the Kurds—in Turkey where they had gone for asylum—failed to discover any. Nor were there any found inside Iraq. The claim rests solely on testimony of the Kurds who had crossed the border into Turkey, where they were interviewed by staffers of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.’

Regarding the Halabjah incident where Iraqi soldiers were reported to have gassed their own Kurdish citizens, the U.S. Army War College investigators observed:

‘It appears that in seeking to punish Iraq, Congress was influenced by another incident that occurred five months earlier in another Iraq-Kurdish city, Halabjah. In March 1988, the Kurds at Halabjah were bombarded with chemical weapons, producing many deaths. Photographs of the Kurdish victims were widely disseminated in the international media. Iraq was blamed for the Halabjah attack even though it was subsequently brought out that Iran too had used chemical weapons in this operation, and it seemed likely that it was the Iranian bombardment that had actually killed the Kurds.’

In March 1991 as the massive US-led attack on Iraq ended, I was visiting the USAWC to give a lecture on South Asian security and discussed the problem with Professor Pelletiere. I recall Pelletiere telling me that the USAWC investigation showed that in the Iranian mass human wave battlefield strategy, Teheran used non-persistent poison gas against Iraqi soldiers so as to be able to attack and advance into the areas vacated by Iraqis. On the other hand, Baghdad used persistent gas to halt the Iranian human wave attacks. There was a certain consistency to this pattern. However, in the Halabjah incident, the USAWC investigators discovered that the gas used that killed hundreds of Kurds was the non-persistent gas, the chemical weapon of choice of the Iranians. Note it was the Iranians who arrived at the scene first, who reported the incident to UN observers, and who took pictures of the gassed Kurdish civilians.

This USAWC study was released in the summer of 1990 when the US was anti-Iranian and even somewhat pro-Iraqi. The report would have substantiated the evils of the Iranian regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. Suddenly, however, Saddam Hussain’s Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait in August and the truth of the Halabjah incident became inconvenient. The revelation was dispatched into oblivion. However, the propaganda that Iraqis gassed their own Kurdish civilians is constantly invoked by the media. It was reactivated by President Clinton in December 1998 to justify the further bombing and destruction of Iraq.

This American strategy of suppressing or obfuscating the truth for the sake of policy convenience was even more stark during the prolonged Yugoslav crisis. No Serbian point of view was allowed in the media and in national and international forums. It helps to advance Washington’s one-sided “good versus evil” policy. Thus, Holbrooke’s book, To End a War is viciously anti-Serb using purely Croatian and Muslim propaganda figures without questioning their veracity. It has received unmitigated praise. Even history has been re-written in support of America’s bombs and sanctions policy against the Serbs. Philip Cohen, a dermatologist with no knowledge of Serbo-Croatian, no background on Yugoslavia, and no training in history or political science, has produced a nonsensical thesis entitled Serbia’s Secret War, almost all of it derived from Serbo-Croatian sources which Cohen does not understand. I paraphrase here: During World War Two, it was the devout Catholic Croatians with no militaristic tradition who were the non-fascist Yugoslav group, who rushed to take up arms, who allied with the Western powers, who joined the godless communist partisans to fight their best friends the German Nazis, in order to save their fascist pro-German Serb enemies, the ethnic group whom Croatians hate. Like Holbrooke’s self-righteous and prejudicial discourse, Cohen’s illogical thesis has now received widespread academic praise in the West.

In the US, where unbearable hardship and suffering is measured by the rise of gasoline prices at the pump by about 50 cents a gallon, or the Dow Jones industrials falling by a hundred points, bombing and sanctioning small nations is easy. No such policies will be countenanced even remotely against big and influential countries such as China for its actions in Tibet, Russia in Chechnya, India in Kashmir, Turkey in “Kurdistan”, or Indonesia in East Timor. Routine Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories have been no more pleasant. The Serbian treatment of Albanians in Kosovo would appear no different. However, bombing and sanctioning Serbs is easy because there are only some 10 million Serbs worldwide lacking the resources to counter the Western propaganda against them.

 

The Morality of the Dominant State

At one time, American policy was concerned mainly with “national security” and the security of its allies, and the promotion of its national interests abroad, primarily economic. Today, facing little or no specific military threats to itself or its allies, or serious challenges to its general national interests, the US has begun to turn to the promotion of American “national values” abroad: democracy, capitalism, human rights. The exceptions are when such promotion, in whole or in part, adversely affects American self-interests. There is a presumption in Washington that being the sole superpower also implies sole possession of wisdom and moral power, and that American goodness is self-evident.

The often neglected problem in the American use of force and sanctions in support of strategic and/or moral principles, has been the short and long-term harmful effects on innocent people. Thus, if the Serbs massacre 45 Kosovo civilians and suspected KLA guerrillas in cold blood along with some of their supporters (as in January 1999), this is a war crime. But when American bombers, without sanction from the Security Council, attack Iraqi Republican Guards sleeping in their barracks killing some 200 of them without provocation (as in December 1998) because Saddam Hussain allegedly failed to cooperate with UNSCOM, this is not a war crime. This problem of “collateral damage” appears particularly significant at a time when NATO faces no serious military opposition to the exercise of its vast military power, no potential harm to the populations of its member states, no harm even to its military forces who are given the mandate to attack small countries incapable of fighting back. The rationalisation for the American threat and use of force is that diplomacy without such recourse would be ineffective. However, if this principle is valid then it must also apply to the US and the West, an overlooked point.

US sponsored economic sanctions are usually targeted at entire nations or ethnic groups to reduce them to poverty and desperation in the hope that they will overthrow their rulers, or on the expectation that the rulers will change their policies to conform to the demands of the United States and the West. The declared intentions of such actions are to advance the American moral agenda in the world, although these actions may also advance Western security interests. But who would dare or care to bell the cat?

 

Epilogue: The Separation of Kosovo at NATO Gunpoint

In early 1999, the Western powers have chosen now to separate Kosovo from Serbia because the Albanians want independence. The American assumption is that Serbs can have no legitimate grievances and rights in the conflicts that occurred in Croatia, Bosnia and now Kosovo. As throughout the Yugoslav crisis, the Serbian point of view on Kosovo is blacked out in the US and much of the Western media. Serbs are not allowed the right to defend themselves against various accusations. The right of Self-determination which was allowed to Slovenians, Croatians, Muslims and Albanians, will never be allowed to the Serbs of Krajina and Bosnia.

On the Kosovo issue, the standard and repetitive Western media propaganda against the Serbs is as follows: that Kosovo is 90 per cent Albanian; Albanians are oppressed by the Serbs; their autonomy was taken away; they were massacred and driven from their homes. On the other hand, the unreported Serbian claim is that Kosovo was only 60 per cent Albanian in the 1930 Yugoslav census and even less before World War One; Serbs were oppressed during the Tito regime and forced to leave Kosovo; the autonomy given to Albanians in Kosovo by Tito in 1974 (a region no different from Serb majority Krajina in Croatia), was taken away by Milosevic with the approval of the other republics; that, as in Bosnia, Serbian massacres of Albanians in Kosovo always appear to occur when it is not in the Serbian interests to do so, and always conveniently to invite NATO bombing of Serbs just as they are about to win the war.

In Kosovo, there were once over a thousand Serbian Orthodox churches, monasteries, and holy shrines, with many still intact but the rest mainly in ruins. The names of most places in Kosovo are Serbian and have been for centuries. Serbs have a greater moral, political and international legal right to Kosovo, than Croatia has to Krajina, Jews have to Jerusalen, China to Tibet, India to Kashmir, Sri Lanka to the Tamil regions, Turkey to Kurdistan, Britain to Northern Ireland, Canada to Quebec, and the United States to California and Texas. Yet Serbs have been given the choice of either NATO bombing and severance of Kosovo with immediate effect, or NATO occupation and severance of Kosovo three years later.

That all of these actions constitute a flagrant violation of International Law, the UN Charter and the Helsinki Final Act of 1974 which guaranteed the boundaries of the states of Europe is immaterial. The implications of such American-led dishonesty and arbitrary double standards applied to the Serbs, will prove far reaching in the future for other states with minorities who wish to secede.