First I want to congratulate the Slobodan Milosevic International Committee for conducting this conference. The imperialist countries depend on their enormous propaganda machine to justify their criminal actions. They rewrite historical truth and disguise their crimes with lies. One of their greatest weapons is their attempt to demonize those popular leaders who attempt to defend the historic victories of the oppressed peoples and nations.
A review of the attempt to demonize Milosevic illuminates this tactic by the oppressor class to attempt to weaken and divide the resistance against its rule. The imperialists applied similar demonization campaigns against Muammar Gaddhaffi, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe and many others and continue today against Nicolás Maduro, Bashar al-Assad and others.
Thus a defense of the contributions of President Milošević is a defense of the right of oppressed peoples to fight for sovereignty of their nations and freedom from exploitation of their labor and theft of the natural resources of the land they inhabit.
This conference provides an opportunity to expose the reactionary and predatory role of the NATO military alliance under U.S. leadership. NATO continues its attempt to expand the hegemony of the Western imperialists and to reverse the struggles for national liberation that were won during the existence of the socialist Soviet Union.
Your conference will expose the ten-year aggressive war the NATO imperialists waged against the multi-national Yugoslav state. I’m sure the contributors from the Serbian and other peoples of Yugoslavia will provide the details of the crimes committed against them. From the center of world imperialism, the United States, we want to support your condemnation of these crimes and to honor Milošević for his contribution to historic truth. He did this during his heroic defense of Yugoslavia and condemnation of NATO, made while defending himself at the kangaroo court in The Hague.
The role of NATO
When NATO was established in 1949 under U.S. domination, it was falsely presented as defense against the socialist Soviet Union. From that time until 1990, however, the NATO forces main use was to prevent social revolutions in Western and southern Europe. It repressed social movements specifically in Greece – imposing a military dictatorship from 1967-74, threatened intervention in Portugal in 1974-75 and prevented social changes in Italy.
After the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, NATO exposed its predatory role, going on the offensive. In the 1990sthe NATO powers — with German and U.S. imperialism in the lead — were taking every step to weaken and destroy Yugoslavia.
From the start, Berlin aided reactionary separatist forces in each republic of the multinational socialist federation of Yugoslavia.
To regain hegemony over Berlin and the other NATO powers, Washington pushed the conflict toward open war, where the Pentagon’s preeminent place in destructive power would predominate
U.S. President Bill Clinton stepped up the drive toward war. Together with Germany and France and using air bases in Italy, the U.S. began bombing and firing missiles at mainly civilian targets in Serbia on March 24, 1999. The bombing lasted for 78 days and killed 3,000 people. Bridges, schools and hospitals were hit, along with the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and Yugoslav television and radio studios.
Heroism in defense of Yugoslavia
Many of the residents of Serbia and Montenegro — whether Serbs, Roma, Jews or other Yugoslav peoples — showed their heroism during the 78 days of open war. They walked in open spaces and defiantly defended bridges wearing T-shirts with targets on them. Those in the military were ready to fight and camouflaged their equipment so well that the bombing destroyed few tanks.Parents sent their children to grandparents in the villages, while carrying on their work in the major cities.
Yugoslavs should know that these actions were an inspiration to anti-imperialists in the United States, who were encouraged by the people’s heroic actions in defense of their land and their social rights.
Since NATO’s intervention against Yugoslavia, the U.S. has turned the alliance into a type of imperialist police force. No longer confined to Europe, NATO has become a worldwide intervention force at the service of the transnational monopolies that exploit global labor and resources. The U.S. has used NATO in its occupations of Iraq and especially Afghanistan, made war against Libya and Syria, and has threatened intervention in Belarus and Ukraine, even threatening Russia this year with war exercises marching toward Russian borders.
The U.S. and NATO powers succeeded, with guns and money, in breaking up the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia. They succeeded in overthrowing the last independent government in Eastern Europe, the one in Belgrade. To add to the crimes of the imperialist powers in the Balkans, they blamed the victims of this aggressive war.
The NATO powers used the UN to set up the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia as a political instrument to punish anyone in the Balkans who resisted the imperialist takeover of the region. It brought charges against Milošević right in the midst of the U.S./NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in May of 1999, obviously to bring additional pressure on the Yugoslav leadership.
The imperialists have the advantage of owning the most powerful propaganda machine in world history. But the ICTY failed miserably when it tried to prove to the world that Slobodan Milošević was guilty of any of the crimes committed against the people of the Balkans in the 1990s.
This propaganda offensive obscured the interference, subversion and “divide and conquer” tactics practiced by German and U.S. imperialism, most of all, in connivance with neo-fascist groupings in the republics of Croatia and Bosnia and in Serbia’s Kosovo province.
From the day he was kidnapped from a Belgrade prison to Scheveningen in The Hague and placed under NATO imprisonment, Milošević carried out, under horribly unequal conditions, a heroic legal and political battle against the people who ordered him there. Like his fellow Balkans political prisoner of the 1930s, Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dmitrov, who successfully defended himself against bogus Nazi charges that he burned the Reichstag, Milošević waged his own legal defense in the bogus NATO court.
Ill much of the time, Milosevic worked with the aid of a handful of supporters and little money before hostile judges who make up the rules as they go along. He still demolished the prosecution by exposing “witnesses” as stool pigeons and war criminals trading lies for
immunity.
We were proud to learn that Milošević used a book the International Action Center published, Hidden Agenda, as a keystone of his defense. Ramsey Clark, the leader of the IAC, made a key contribution to this book. The NATO court spent tens of millions of dollars, prepared for a year, put on 295 prosecution witnesses over two years and proved nothing. On the contrary, Milošević turned the tables on the 500,000 pages of so-called evidence against him,and showed that Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Gen. Wesley Clark and the rest of the NATO heads of state and government and their generals were the real “butchers of the Balkans” and the ones who deserved to be on trial for war crimes.
The best concise summary of his argument is given in Milosevic’s own 2004 opening defense talk, which we published the English version of in “The Defense Speaks—For History and the Future,” by the International Action Center (IAC), Ramsey Clark’s organization.
Death to NATO
Long live Yugoslavia
John Catalinotto
(Speech at the International Conference MILOSEVIC – AGAINST NATO CRIMES, FOR A NEW WORLD)