På "World Socialist Web Site", en website tilhørende trotskister i "den fjerde internasjonalen", ligger en interessant sammenfattende analyse av hvilken betydning overdrivelsen av dødstall har hatt for krigen i Jugoslavia. Analysen deres starter med en gjennomgang av rapporter og artikler som kritiserer de offisielle dødstallene i Kosovo, som jeg allerede har postet linker til tidligere i denne tråden (Stratfor, Sunday Times, Toronto Star etc.). Jeg gjengir derfor ikke denne delen, det første utdraget starter rett etter denne gjennomgangen:
Øistein Holen
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Hele artikkelen ligger på:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/nov1999/koso-n09.shtml
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Investigations belie NATO claims of "ethnic genocide"in Kosovo
By Chris Marsden and Barry Grey , 9 November 1999
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The Western media has, in the main, ignored these reports. But there has been an attempt at a counter-attack by some supporters of NATO's war. The London Times ran an article that said “the actual number of civilians killed" was "irrelevant". The “prevention of mass murder and ethnic cleansing, on whatever scale, remains a war aim of which NATO can be proud,” the paper declared. Guardian columnist Frances Wheen coined the term "Kosovo revisionists", equating those who dispute NATO claims of genocide with right-wing historians who deny the Nazi holocaust against the Jews.
Such statements amount to a rationalisation in advance for any military intervention that the US, Britain or NATO might decide to undertake, on the grounds of alleged human rights abuses, against any sovereign country. If the self-appointed world policemenwho happen to be the richest and militarily most powerful nationsare not even obliged to prove that the targeted country is guilty of killing and repression on a mass scale, they have a license for colonial-style domination not seen since the days of the “White man's burden” at the end of the last century.
Guardian columnist Wheen's attack on “Kosovo revisionists” is an inversion of reality. By ignoring established facts for definiteand reactionarypolitical ends, he is, in fact, aping the approach of Nazi apologists who downplay Hitler's crimes.
Commentators like Wheen who seek to dismiss the growing evidence of NATO lies generally attribute to their opponents the most despicable motives. They portray people who demand an accounting from NATO governments for their actions are indifferent to the Kosovar Albanians' plight and politically complicit with Milosevic and his crimes against ethnic minorities.
But if the scale of the alleged atrocities is not important, why did NATO choose to systematically falsify the reality in Kosovo? Or if one claims that the grossly inflated reports of executions, rapes, etc., were simply the result of innocent mistakes, how does one account for the fact that the errors unfailingly involved exaggerated estimates of Serb violence?
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In an article on June 25, the WSWS noted: “For the public to accept the destruction wrought by US/NATO bombs, it had to be convinced that the war was undertaken to prevent another Holocaust. The fabrication of the death toll was an essential component of a propaganda campaign which sought to disorient public opinion, distort the background of the war, and conceal the real political aims and material interests underlying the decision to go to war against Yugoslavia.”
The decision by the United States to go to war against Serbiataken with the full backing of Britainwas based on definite Great Power geopolitical calculations. The claim to be fighting ethnic cleansing was used to justify a war drive to cripple Serbia, considered by Washington to be an obstacle to American economic and political interests in the strategically vital Balkan peninsula and the oil-rich Caucasus and Caspian regions to the east.
The war was deliberately provoked by the US, using as a pretext exaggerated claims of Serbian human rights violations against Kosovar Albanians. By 1998 the US had shifted from denouncing the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as terrorists to a policy of arming it, while imposing sanctions on Serbia and bolstering NATO's military capabilities in both Albania and Macedonia. By mid-July, the US and NATO had completed contingency plans for a military intervention in Kosovo, including air strikes and the deployment of ground troops.
On January 15, 1999, the report of a Serbian massacre at the village of Racak, whose veracity is still disputed, provided the pretext for NATO's assault on Serbia. At the Rambouillet talks in February, the Milosevic regime was presented with an ultimatum it could not accept, which included the stationing of a large, long-term NATO force within Kosovo and free access of NATO military forces to all parts of Yugoslavia. On March 24, the first NATO bombs were dropped.
Once the bombing began, and the Serbs countered with their offensive in Kosovo, the US needed to raise the stakes in the propaganda war. As US and NATO bombs rained down on Belgrade and other cities and towns, hitting factories, hospitals, schools, churches, bridges, oil refineries, water and electricity supply installations and even TV stations, the media campaign to demonise the Serb enemy was intensified.
A series of grisly bombings of Serb and Kosovar civilians, including the destruction of passenger trains and assaults on Albanian refugees, followed by NATO's bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, fuelled public concern and distrust of NATO claims. Relations with Russia and China deteriorated. Divisions among the NATO powers widened over the scale of the bombing and the possible introduction of ground troops, with the US and Britain generally finding themselves on one side of the argument, and Germany, France, Italy and Greece on the other.
At the end of May, to keep public opposition at bay and whip their recalcitrant NATO allies into line, the US and Britain again raised the decibel level of anti-Serb propaganda. Milosevic and four other Serbian leaders were indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Increasingly, Western officials and media pundits placed the blame for anti-Kosovar atrocities on the Serbian people as a whole, who were deemed complicit because of their alleged toleration of the “new Hitler”Slobodan Milosevic.
In the aftermath of the war, the official pretexts have grown increasingly threadbare. The violence of the KLA against Kosovan Serbs, and its despotic and corrupt methods of rule over the province's Albanian inhabitants, have discredited Western attempts to portray the organisation as a force for democracy and national liberation. Now the claims of genocide have been exposed as well.
NATO's propaganda campaign found a receptive audience amongst a layer of ageing former liberals, ex-radicals and one-time anti-war protesters, who uncritically accepted the claims of NATO and the media and portrayed the military action against Serbia as a turning point in world historythe first war by the major powers conducted for “humanitarian” reasons.
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