Source: http://www.lbbs.org/ushyp.htm
Accessed 17 April 1999

 
US/NATO'S HYPOCRITIC OATH 

by Andre Gunder Frank
[April 4, 1999]

The US government wishes to invoke international law to protect 3 American soldiers held by the Yugoslav government under the Geneva Convention regarding prisoners of war.

Yet at the same time,

 

• The 19 states of NATO led by the United States are or have just been flagrantly violating international law - and without even any declaration of war - in wantonly bombing military and civilian targets;in Yugoslavia, including two buildings in the very center of Belgrade on April 2 deliberately blocking a major international waterway normally used for commercial shipping by non combatant and neutral countries, by bombing a culturally significant bridge over the Danube in Novi Sad and plunging it into the river.
• The NATO states deliberately by-pass the entire United Nations organization and set aside the consultative procedures it, and especially its Security Council, offers for the discussion and settlement of international Disputes. These include in particular those that guarantee human rights and those that may threaten the peace. Thereby the NATO member states including the United States are blatantly abrogating - even more than violating - the mainstay of international law.
• NATO and particularly the United States has been obstructing international criminal law by deliberately failing to arrest and remand to the War Crimes Court in The Hague persons indicted for genocide and other violations of human rights who are in the de facto and perhaps de jure jurisdiction of NATO forces in Bosnia, members of which provided for such arrest and remand as part of the settlement at Dayton, USA.
• The very man, Milosevic, who at Dayton was selected and supported to guarantee and implement the Dayton agreement is now being demonized and used as the pretext for this illegal NATO bomb attack against an entire country. However, Milosevic abrogated Kosovo autonomy already ten years ago and began his autocratic rule fanning Serbian nationalism even more than ten years ago, when it was also Western generated causes of and then Western support for the breakup of Yugoslavia that gave Milosevic that opportunity. [Shades of the first US/Western support and then blame of Saddam Hussein, to whom Milosevic is only now being compared].

NATO bombing has effectively emasculated the very Serbian opposition to Milosevic and his rule, which offered the best chance and mechanism for a democratic, peaceful political settlement and the furtherance of more humanitarian policies in Serbia, including Kosovo, and also in the Serbian populated regions of Bosnia. This domestic opposition to Milosevic was long led by the Serbian Peace, Women's and other Democratic movements. They became a world wide model of peaceful mobilization when they brought hundreds of thousands of people out into the streets during a months of winter nights and which thereby obliged Milosevic to revoke a number of undemocratic and illegal measures. If the NATO powers had had even the slightest interest in promoting democracy or human rights anywhere in Yugoslavia, including at the time in Bosnia and Croatia, they would have worked with rather then undercut the domestic democratic movements [again exactly the same was and still is true in Iraq].

NATO bombing, as the CIA and Pentagon reportedly predicted, has immeasurably increased the deprivation of the Kosovo Albanians' life, property, home, and country. It is difficult to see how any measures could now or ever in the future restore even what little they had before NATO bombs and Serbian persecution drove them out into neighboring countries - where the humanitarian concern of NATO had not made the slightest preparation to care for them. And still at the time of this writing, the number of Albanian refugees FROM Serbia does not yet or is only just beginning to match the number of Serbian refugees TO Serbia, who were forced out Of Croatia by ethnic cleansing that was itself instigated and supported by NATO policy. So there is more than just hypocrisy in the comparison and relation of these two flows of refugees. It will be a macabre irony if the Croatian Serbs, who were displaced with NATO help and still have found no place to take root, end up in Serbian Kosovo after NATO also helps to chase the Albanians out!

NATO member states have always denounced and combated all 'terrorist' military and para-military forces [except of course those that they themselves have trained, armed, and financed around the world from Indochina, via Afghanistan and Angola to Columbia and Guatemala and Nicaragua]. Yet now the military wing of the Albanian movement in Kosovo have become 'freedom fighters', alas without hardly a leg to stand on any more in Kosovo after ten days of NATO bombing and Serb military offensive. Ironically hypocritical also is the NATO support to and intended if not realized protection of the very Albanian organizations that the police forces of several of the same NATO member states have accused of large scale drug trafficking, in violation of course also of international law.

There is also at least a touch of hypocrisy in the discussion in the United States of now bringing up charges of genocide in Kosovo. For its government delayed 40 years to sign the international genocide convention, and in the meantime instigated it in Guatemala [as President Clinton recently admitted there], done it through carpet bombing in Indochina [were the Vienamese, Laotians and Cambodians swept under the carpet?] and waited for those otherwise defamed Vietnamese to stop the genocide in Camodia, and also supported it or looked the other way elsewhere, including turning a blind eye to NATO members Turkey's genocidal policy towards its own and neighboring Kurds. Indeed, the United States itself has been responsible for the death for many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men,women and children through bombing and the resulting damage and poisoning with depleted but still roadioactive uranium, and a soon decade long embargo, that cripples the Iraqi economy and social services - and what for? First and foremost to sustain the already low price of oil by keeping a maximum of Iraqi oil off the world market. And even still very recently in other parts of the former Yugoslavia, the United States and some of its same NATO partners first set up some 'safe havens' in Bosnia, and then 'helplessly' stood by to watch massive massacres and ethnic cleansing. For 'safe' areas were taken over by Bosnian Serbs [with help from the same Yugoslav army] who massacared whole communities of Muslims in Srebrenica and elsewhere then of course to take over their properties. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs were themselves driven out by Croatians who similarly enriched themselves, only on a still larger scale. Maybe the Genocide convention was still too recently signed by the United States yet to intervene under its cover then.

Shameful hypocrisy also has been the consistent failure, nay even refusal, of the major Western NATO powers first to avoid and then to remedy the breakup of Yugoslavia and its dreadful consequences that are allegedly of age old 'ethnic' origin. Far from it, for at each step of the way, it was the these same Western powers and their policy or lack thereof that provoked and condoned the domino-like set of events that are too long even to summarize. Moreover, each time it was the Western powers who [deliberately?] refused to accept settlements to avoid bloodshed until it was much too late and the combination of countless deaths with their power politics resulted in what was essentially the self-same settlement that had been rejected years before, e.g. the Owens Plan and the Dayton Agreement. So again at Ramboulleit the Western powers held out for a 'settlement' that they knew MUST be unacceptable to Yugoslavia, while in Paris all major Yugoslav parties, including the Albanians, came to an agreement that the Western powers rejected. So NATO started bombing because it wanted to and not as it hypocritically alleges because all other options had run out. No sooner did NATO bombs start falling than the Russian Prime Minister flew to Belgrade and negotiated an agreement that would have stopped the persecution and exodus of Albanians in Kosovo and would have permitted an immediate cease fire. But of course that was not acceptable to the major [although yes to some minor] NATO powers, for whom the plight of the Albanians is no more than a hypocritical excuse for the American NATO offensive in the Balkans.

P.S. The First Lady of the first NATO power Hilrary Rodham Clinton , speaking in Marocco a couple of days ago, lamented the human tradgedy in Yugoslavia, but said she was even more distrubed by twisting the truth and falsifying history. Alas she found fault for this hypocrisy only in the President of Yugoslavia and not at all in her presumably ever faithful and truthful husband, the President of the United States.

QED.