noen tilleggsopplysninger i anledning mine paranoide spekulasjoner 0-4 i går.
0. Man har i lang tid visst om Milosevics planer for etnisk rensing av
Kosovo.
1. Ultimatum som påskudd for bombing. OSSE-folkene trekkes ut.
2. Bombing (mål: for å provosere fram den etniske rensingen).
...
Jeg tror ikke det er særlig grunn til å tro på eksistensen av planer nevnt
under punkt 0, selvom f.eks. Garvik argumenterer for det. Slike argumenter
er vel heller forsøk på omskriving av historien.
Legger ved noe fra TFF (Covering Up NATO's Balkan Bombing Blunder, TFF
PressInfo 61 April 14, 1999, http://www.transnational.org/pressinf/pf61.html)
som kaster lys over dette.
(Sitat)... Was there a plan to cleanse the area? No one who maintains it
has shown any hard evidence. Before March 24 this year no politician had
told us about Milosevic' alleged plan. No humanitarian organizations had
warned about a major, systematic campaign to drive out 1-2 million people.
If OSCE with 1500 verifiers knew about such a plan - and they listened in
on Yugoslav communication - why did it not alert the world? If Belgrade
wanted to get rid of all Kosovo-Albanians, it could have done so at any
time since 1991. It never touched any Albanian leader or tried to prevent
the building of their parallel state. Why did NATO threaten to bomb
Yugoslavia if it would not sign the Rambouillet document but said nothing
about bombing it because of the existence of such a plan?
Are 40.000 troops and 300 tanks indicative of such a plan? Hardly. Troops
and tanks are not the prime tools to make people run away. They were
deployed in the province when NATO deceived Yugoslavia. You see, Holbrooke
probably forgot to tell Milosevic that NATO would deploy an 'extraction
force' in Macedonia. Its task was to protect the 'extraction' from Kosovo
of the unarmed OSCE verifiers in the event of NATO bombings - an activity
that could lead to them being taken hostage by the Serbs. So, NATO's bomb
threat was real from October. Would your country do nothing if threatened
for months with bombings by history's most powerful military alliance?
With the OSCE verifiers peacefully out, NATO did not withdraw the force but
had already begun to increase it from 3.000 to 12.000 (and forgot to
consult the Macedonian parliament). Yugoslavia had very legitimate reasons
to see this as an extremely unfriendly "signal" and moved troops down to
the Macedonian border to "signal" its determination to fight that force,
should it cross the border into Kosovo. KLA was sucked in by the presence
of the Yugoslav units and fighting intensified in an area where no fighting
had taken place before. All this BECAUSE of NATO's policies.
What is now called evidence of a grand design for ethnic cleansing by
Western leaders was nothing but the response to NATO's remarkably unwise,
clumsy and adventurous attempt to force Macedonia into the role of an ally
and major NATO base. It was a perfectly natural response to NATO's repeated
threat of a massive air campaign. It - predictably - resulted in an almost
complete political destabilization of the Macedonian government and a
socio-economic destabilization because of the NATO-provoked refugee flows.
Finally, Milosevic is a 'cruel dictator'? Well, if so why has the West
helped him be central, relied on his signature in Dayton and never extended
any help to the opposition in Belgrade - not even when 1,5 million people
demonstrated against him a couple of years ago? Why has ambassador
Holbrooke and scores of Western diplomats had 'interesting' talks with
him? Why did the West hope for a last-minute concession from him to avoid
the bombing it threatened? What do we do with 'cruel dictators' who are
elected by citizens many of whom would certainly call him authoritarian or
see his policies a catastrophic but who never saw him as a cruel dictator?
And why does NATO repeat the mistake from Iraq - to bomb a country only to
see its people unite completely behind their leader?
In summary, NOT ONE OF NATO's PRESENT ARGUMENTS HOLD WATER. They contradict
facts, they contradict what Western leaders themselves told us yesterday.
What we witness is a pitiful attempt at "perception management" and media
war against public opinion.
We should get suspicious," concludes Jan Oberg, "when Western civilian and
military top leaders within days seek to rewrite and falsify history, omit
well-documented facts and central actors, change the sequence of events and
forget what they stated and did only a couple of weeks ago. It's
particularly disturbing if you see a systematic bias or tendency in those
changes. And it bodes ill, indeed, when the majority of journalists ask
only politically correct questions to State Department and NATO spin
doctors and spokespersons at a time that could well turn out to be a
defining moment of history."
(sitat slutt).
Knut Rognes