Dear Comrades and Friends,
I would like to thank the conference organisers for the opportunity to make this brief contribution.
I am sure other contributors will highlight and deal with the current situation regarding NATO but I would like to focus on what actually happened back in 1999/2000.
I think clarity of this period is essential for two main reasons. One, to help in understanding the nature of subsequent developments. Two, because it is fashionable today, especially amongst the so called left, to rewrite history, and therefore an entire generation is being fed only the official NATO narrative, a fact that most media outlets are more than happy to go along with. Therefore I feel it is a responsibility to put the true story out there and let it be examined and studied.
These are a few of my personal recollections of that period.
I was one of over 200 international observers and monitors to the Yugoslav presidential and parliamentary elections of 2000.
I was not, at this point, a supporter of President Milosevic. In fact the night before I got the plane to Belgrade I received a phone call from a colleague advising me to be careful while in Yugoslavia because the UK media were calling President Milosevic a dictator who did not tolerate any opposition and mentioned his speech at the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, held on 28 June, 1989 and his call for a Greater Serbia, as the spark that eventually led to the civil wars that followed.
Therefore, once in Belgrade, it came as a surprise as we travelled from the airport to our hotel, to see opposition posters lining the walls and to hear an opposition radio station broadcasting over the airwaves.. As one colleague remarked at the time “If Milosevic is a dictator who stamps out all opposition he must be the most ineffective dictator in history.
Of course, as we were soon to realise, Yugoslavia was not ruled by a dictator but was in fact a parliamentary democracy, with many shades of political opinion active within that democracy.
.The following day we met with the Federal Electoral Commission, an elected, all-party body, which is responsible for organising the elections and ensuring that election procedures are adhered to. They explained that the voting on 24th September would cover the Federal Assembly, Presidential and local elections.
Within two days of arriving in Belgrade we began to realise the extent of outside interference in the internal affairs of the sovereign state of Yugoslavia. We were of course aware of the threats regarding sanctions and the withholding of economic aid emanating from the U.S. and Britain, but that was only a small part of it.
The National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up by the U.S. Congress had initially funded the Yugoslav opposition to the tune of one hundred million dollars. They had also funded opposition TV and radio stations and newspapers as well as such institutions as the so- called Humanitarian Law Centre , the Centre for Democracy Foundation, and the G17 group.
The G17 were a group of economists in Belgrade who outlined a programme, endorsed by the opposition, which included the adoption of the German mark as a legal currency for the whole of Yugoslavia, a move that would have the immediate effect of making the country an economic dependency of Germany. Furthermore, the G17 proposals regarding the Yugoslav economy would actually mean the transfer into foreign hands of that economy. Add to this the renewed threats coming from Britain and the U.S. that economic aid and the lifting of sanctions was conditional on the outcome of the upcoming elections. American warships recently arrived in the Adriatic were a further intimidation.
The monitors gave several interviews to the western media, I spoke to CNN and tried to stress the extent of U.S. Britain and German interference. At the same time the Canadian press ran a story that all western journalists had been expelled from Yugoslavia, yet we were speaking to western journalists and even had a BBC crew staying in the same hotel as us.
So this was the environment within which the Yugoslav elections would take place.
Nevertheless, as monitors we were allowed to go anywhere, speak to anyone and make all enquiries necessary to enable us to assess the validity of these elections.
Some colleagues went down to Montenegro, others to Kosovo, and I, with others, travelled to the Rasha district, stopping at several Belgrade polling stations on the way.
The casting of the vote was done behind screens, with separate papers for federal/presidential and local elections. Votes were deposited in boxes that were lined up on tables, different boxes for each election of course. Behind the tables were representatives of all participating parties. We noted there was no police present at any station we visited. When we mentioned that in England you could see a policeman on duty at the polling station, the Yugoslavs drily commented that if they did that here they would be bombed again and accused of being a police state !
In the centres of Kraljevo and Novi Pazar we visited ten polling stations and at the latter had the opportunity to speak to the council leader.
In the council offices we were shown photo albums which documented the destroyed buildings and had photographs of the people killed by the 1999 NATO bombing raids. The dead ranged from a three- year old girl to an eighty-seven year old great grandma.
The area was bombed over two-hundred times and the council leader told us that NATO would target buildings with their first bombing runs and then some fifteen minutes later would return and bomb the exact same target again. She concluded that the only possible reason for this was to hit the attending emergency services.
Polling closed at 8pm . Present at the count were representatives of all participating parties, the election committee, local monitors, foreign observers, TV cameras and radio stations. When the votes had been counted and the figures agreed by all parties, a statement was signed by all the relevant representatives. Thus, if these ballot papers were subsequently lost or tampered with in any way, there was a document at source that could confirm the original and true result.
Satisfied that the elections had been conducted in good order we made our way back to Belgrade.
Back at our hotel we talked to a freelance journalist who’s findings matched our own. Previously he had many articles published in the British press but he knew that this time he didn’t have a story they wanted to hear.
It is instructive here to mention our interview with the London Times newspaper. Hopefully it will convey the true role of the media.
The Diplomatic Editor of the Times, Richard Beeston, asked for an interview at the hotel. His main line of questioning was if we had seen or thought that any fraud had occurred in these elections. We explained we had seen nothing to suggest such and that if we had suspected anything it would be in our interest, for credibility sake, and in the interests of the Yugoslav people, to reveal it.
At the end of the interview I asked him if he had seen or suspected any fraud. He answered that he had seen nothing untoward. Yet twenty-four hours later, in his report in the Times Beeston wrote about widespread fraud and vote rigging in the Yugoslav elections !
Obviously he knew the story he was going to write before he even arrived in Belgrade.
The election results were as follows: For the Federal Assembly the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS. the party of President Milosevic) and its allies had won a working majority.
The Presidential election saw none of the participants gain the necessary 50% plus which was required to win.
Therefore the top two candidates would contest a 2nd round . The two top candidates were Slobodan Milosevic and Vojislav Kostunica.
However, that 2nd round of voting never took place, The western backed coup in October toppled the Milosevic government and placed Kostunica at the helm.
That event worried and puzzled me. Why was it necessary to action a coup when it was possible Kostunica could win the 2nd round vote anyway ?
The answer, in the end, was simple and brutal. The aim of the western powers was to destroy Yugoslavia. Milosevic and the SPS were trying to hold the union of Southern Slavs together, so they had to be removed by any means. And even if their man, Kostunica had won that 2nd round election the majority the SPS had in the Federal Assembly could prevent the aims of the west being realised.
So not only was it necessary to remove the President, but it was necessary to annul the Federal Assembly vote too. Hence the coup .
Back in the UK I began to investigate the previous events in Yugoslavia, and make my way through the anti- Milosevic propaganda in an attempt to uncover and understand developments.
I started with getting hold of a copy of the Milosevic speech the BBC had portrayed as the spark to the civil wars that too place in the 1990s.
The text of the speech was readily available to find by any journalist worthy of the name, but rather than doing their own research it appeared the media were content to follow the BBC propaganda line.
Far from the speech being a call for Greater Serbia and an attack on ethnic minorities, it was in fact the opposite. Here are parts of that speech:
” Serbia has never had only Serbs living in it. Today, more than in the past, members of other peoples and nationalities also live in it. This is not a disadvantage for Serbia. I am truly convinced that it is its advantage. National composition of almost all countries in the world today, particularly developed ones, has also been changing in this direction. Citizens of different nationalities, religions, and races have been living together more and more frequently…
Socialism in particular, being a progressive and just democratic society, should not allow people to be divided in the national and religious respect. The only differences one can and should allow in socialism are between hard working people and idlers and between honest people and dishonest people. Therefore, all people in Serbia who live from their own work, honestly, respecting other people and other nations, are in their own republic.
…Yugoslavia is a multinational community and it can survive only under the conditions of full equality for all nations that live in it.”
Looking into the propaganda claims that the Serbs were conducting ethnic cleansing led me to uncover the true situation.
“ The expulsion and terrorising of 240,000 Serbs and other minorities from Kosovo since NATO took charge is of little media interest. The Society for Endangered People say 90,000 Gypsies have been forced to flee an ethnic cleansing campaign conducted on a grand scale by the Kosovo Liberation Army. But who cares about Gypsies, let alone the demonised Serbs?” John Pilger New Statesman 15th November 1999.
Who indeed was caring about the ethnic minorities that were being driven from Kosovo by NATO and the KLA?
“The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia currently has the largest refugee and displaced population in Europe. Even before the Kosovo crisis, Yugoslavia had the largest number of refugees following the conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia: There were 500,000 identified refugees. The Kosovo crisis then saw a further 230,000 people displaced into Serbia, which receives very little media attention or funding, and whose civilian population has suffered hugely from the effects of sanctions and recent armed conflicts.” Sam Younger. Director General British Red Cross 1st Dec. 1999.
So despite suffering from almost ten years of sanctions and trying to recover from a three month bombing blitz, it was the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the government of Slobodan Milosevic that took in ¾ million refugees from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, and those refugees comprised twenty-six different ethnic groups. Yet it was Yugoslavia and the Serbs that were, and still are, believed to be responsible for acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Indeed, in the New World Order the truth is firmly stood on its head, and the majority of the political left in Britain are only too eager to accept it.
Uncovering and exposing the lies of the mainstream media is an ongoing process and discussions about events such as the Rambouillet ‘negotiations’ (early 1999), where NATO wanted to impose a military occupation over all of Yugoslavia; the role of the ICTY, which was used to try and justify the NATO aggression and to punish the victims of that aggression; and finally the kidnapping, trial and murder of President Milosevic; These are subjects that need to be dealt with in future contributions.
However, for the moment let me end my brief contribution by commenting on the role of the mainstream media.
The struggle to establish historical truth is ongoing and it is plain given the history of the BBC that rather than assist in this struggle their primary function is to protect the major powers and distort the historical record. However the BBC and the mainstream British media, who, together with the ICTY, refuse to address the ultimate war crime perpetrated by NATO and the Western powers, that of launching a war of aggression, would do well to remember the ruling which came out of the Nuremberg War Crimes trial.
The role of propaganda and propagandists figured prominently at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal at the end of World War Two where the prosecutors at Nuremberg set out a legal principle,
‘That planning and launching an aggressive war constituted a criminal act and that those who helped prepare such a war through their propaganda efforts were as guilty as those who drew up the battle plans or manufactured the munitions.’
Ian Johnson
(Contribution to the International Conference MILOSEVIC – AGAINST NATO CRIMES, FOR A NEW WORLD)