Post by Bozur on Jan 4, 2010 15:23:30 GMT -5
CHRONICLES ONLINE, Friday, May 26, 2000
GLOBALIZATION WAR: A CANADIAN VIEW
by David Orchard
In March 1999, the most powerful military force in history attacked tiny Yugoslavia, a country one-fifth the size of my home province of Saskatchewan. For seventy-nine days the Canadian Air Force, without a declaration of war, without a parliamentary resolution and outside the bounds of legality, participated in a massive around-the-clock air bombardment in support of a shadowy, armed Kosovo secessionist movement seeking to break up what remained of Yugoslavia.
Admitting its intention was to break Yugoslavia's spirit, NATO targeted civilian structures, dropping over 23,000 bombs (500 by Canada) and cruise missiles in a campaign of terror bombing, described recently by Alexander Solzhenitsyn as follows:
I don't see any difference in the behaviour of NATO and of Hitler. NATO wants to erect its own order in the world and it needs Yugoslavia simply as an example: We'll punish Yugoslavia and the whole rest of the planet will tremble.
As many qualified analysts have pointed out, the bombardment of Yugoslavia was a flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter that prohibits the use of force by any state against another except in self-defense, or when expressly authorized by the United Nations, neither of which occurred with Yugoslavia. It was also a violation of NATO's own charter and of international law on a number of other fronts.
The Canadian government maintained it was bombing to prevent a humanitarian crisis, "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing." Yet Roland Keith, Canadian field office director of the Kosovo Verification Mission in the weeks just prior to the bombing, reported that "the clear majority" of the violence he saw in Kosovo was instigated by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In his words "there was no ethnic cleansing going on that I witnessed and certainly no genocide."
Shortly after the bombing started Lt. General Satish Nambiar, former commander of the United Nations forces in Yugoslavia, stated that we did not witness any genocide beyond killings and massacres on all sides that are typical of such conflict conditions. I believe none of my successors and their forces saw anything on the scale claimed.
The total death toll on all sides in Kosovo in the year prior to the bombing was 2000. Nambiar writes: It was the West that proceeded to escalate the situation into the current senseless bombing campaign. He condemns the "double standard" whereby "all Serbs have been driven out of Croatia and the Muslim-Croat Federation" and ignored. The United Nations have been made totally redundant, ineffective and impotent, declares Nambiar, by NATO's bombing intended to terrorize Serbia into submission.
The United Nations Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported the first registered refugees out of Kosovo on March 27th - three days after the bombing began. Civilian casualties after the first twenty-one days of bombing exceeded all casualties on both sides in Kosovo in the three months before the war. It is clear that the claim that NATO was bombing Yugoslavia to solve a "humanitarian crisis" is not credible.
Following World War II the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal ruled that to initiate a war of aggression... is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime. Yet this is precisely what Canada and its NATO allies have done in Yugoslavia. In the words of Walter J. Rockler, former prosecutor at Nuremberg, the attack on Yugoslavia constitutes the most brazen international aggression since the Nazis attacked Poland to prevent 'Polish atrocities' against Germans.
For Canada to drop bombs in favor of the breakup of another multi-ethnic state defies comprehension. A founding member of both the UN and the Non-Aligned Movement, Yugoslavia was Canada's staunch ally in World War I and again in World War II when it stood at the forefront of the fight against both Hitler's Nazis and Mussolini's Fascists. Attempting to defend the bombing prominent U.S. spokespersons, followed almost immediately by External Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy, went so far as to say that the principle of non-interference in the affairs of sovereign nations is obsolete because of globalization and the "new world" we now live in. The implications of such a claim are profound and in response to this kind of thinking, twenty high-ranking judges of Greece's supreme administrative court issued a statement on the war:
The only valid crisis management, according to international law, remains as ever the UN. And no other organization that is by definition inferior to it can remove or usurp this role. NATO cannot abolish international law nor can it produce new, generally recognized principles of international legality... Consequently, however serious the crisis in Kosovo may be, it remains an internal Yugoslav affair and belongs to the exclusive jurisdiction of the sovereign Yugoslav state. Any humanitarian or other interest on the part of the UN, other international organizations or third countries may be manifested only in a peaceful way and by diplomatic means within the context of the UN Charter...
NATO acted in a self-appointed role. It did not have - nor could it have - any competence to become involved in the matter of Kosovo. It first dictated an insolent ultimatum disputing the very sovereignty of Yugoslavia, and upon its rejection launched an aggressive war accompanied by the revival of dark propaganda that sought to exploit the misery of the refugees to draw attention away from the violation of international law.
Unable to defend their actions on legal grounds NATO politicians and the media in their countries made an all out effort to convince public opinion that Yugoslavia deserved the onslaught, churning out endless accusations of Serb atrocities, many of which were accepted and repeated by prominent writers and cultural figures. Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano, expressing shock at Western intellectuals' support for the attack on Yugoslavia, said:
If things go on as they are in the next few years, the Pentagon and NATO will be selecting their enemies by lottery...Seeing how easily the world accepts a change in bad guys and the appearance of new bad guys fills me with stupefaction and also with horror and concern.
The propaganda campaign culminated in President Clinton's comparison of war-torn Yugoslavia to Hitler's Germany. Equating a weak, already partially dismembered country under sweeping economic sanctions for almost a decade, struggling to hang on to its heartland, surrounded and under attack by the world's most powerful nations armed to the teeth with the latest high tech weapons, to Nazi Germany graphically illustrated that truth is the first casualty of war.
Questioning the publicly proclaimed motivation of his country American historian and World War II pilot Howard Zinn, among others, correctly concluded that the United States does not have a "humanitarian" aim in Kosovo: its whole history shows that its foreign policy has never been guided by such concerns.
Why then did NATO attack Yugoslavia?
Most wars have historically been over trade. When the U.S. invaded Canada in 1812, Andrew Jackson declared, "We are going to... vindicate our right to a free trade, and open markets... and to carry the Republican standard to the Heights of Abraham." In 1839, Britain demanded China accept its opium and attacked when China said no, forcing that country to both accept opium and give up Hong Kong. When Thailand refused British trading demands in 1849, Britain "found its presumption unbounded" and decided a better disposed King [be] placed on the throne... and through him, we might, beyond doubt, gain all we desire.
A century and half later NATO said it was attacking Yugoslavia to force it to sign the Rambouillet "peace agreement," even though the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, to which Canada and most NATO countries are signatory, states that any treaty obtained by force or the threat of force is void. Significantly, although rarely publicized, the economic section of Rambouillet stipulated: "The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles" and "There shall be no impediments to the free movement of persons, goods, services and capital to and from Kosovo."
During the war Bill Clinton elaborated:If we're going to have a strong economic relationship
that includes our ability to sell around the world,
Europe has got to be the key; that's what this
Kosovo thing is all about... It's globalism versus
tribalism.
Tribalism was the word used by 19th century free trade liberals to describe nationalism. And this war was all about threatening any nation that might have ideas of independence or sovereignty. Almost alone in Eastern Europe Yugoslavia refused to allow U.S. military bases on its soil. According to the speaker of the Russian Duma, Yugoslavia annoys NATO because it conducts an independent policy, does not want to join NATO and has an attractive geographic position.
The Canadian government, citing urgent deficit conditions, has cut Medicare, agricultural research, social housing and even shelters for battered women, yet it spent tens of millions to bomb Yugoslavia, millions more to bring Albanian refugees to Canada and maintain them here and is spending further millions to occupy Kosovo. All the while Canada is abandoning its own sovereignty and economy to U.S. demands, whether it be magazines, fish, wheat, lumber or transportation.
The implications for democracy of the attack on Yugoslavia are far reaching. Who exactly ordered Canada into war? Do unelected generals at NATO now determine Canada's foreign policy, including decisions of war and peace? It is clear our parliament does not. Canadian war planes were in the air before parliament discussed the issue and no vote was ever taken on the matter. In a crowning abdication of responsibility, Prime Minister Chrйtien declared that whatever the NATO "team" decided about a ground war, Canada would go along. In the U.S. the elected representatives voted both against a declaration of war and against supporting the air war, yet it went on anyhow.
Globalization undermines both democracy and national sovereignty, the main guarantors of human rights. In a remarkably frank March 28, 1999, New York Times article, that paper's chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman wrote:For globalization to work, America can't be afraid to
act like the almighty superpower that it is... The
hidden hand of the market will never work without a
hidden fist - McDonald's cannot flourish without
McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And
the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon
Valley's technologies is called the US Army, Air
Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
As NATO troops entered Kosovo it was announced that the province's new currency would be the German mark. After months of being told that Slobodan Milosevic was the key problem we heard Washington's Balkans expert, Daniel Serwer, explain: "It's not a single person that's at issue, there's a regime in place in Belgrade that is incompatible with the kind of economy that the World Bank... has to insist on."
The assault on Yugoslavia represents a turning point in world history with profound implications for both democracy and the rule of law. Yet the silence following the end of the bombing is deafening. The situation cries out for a parliamentary inquiry to examine how Canada got involved in an illegal attack, using internationally outlawed weapons, on a former ally. At the same time it is more urgent than ever that Canada regain its sovereignty so that it can stand for justice, play an independent role in world affairs and never again participate in an unprovoked assault on another nation contrary to both law and morality.
(Mr. Orchard, a leading Canadian opponent of NAFTA, was the runner-up in last year's Progressive Conservative Party leadership contest. He gave this speech at a recent conference in Toronto jointly organized by The Lord Byron Foundation and the Centre for Peace in the Balkans.)
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