By bombing Yugoslavia US wipes floor with int'l law - expert

Photo: East News

15 years ago the United States cut up Yugoslavia's map. If prior to that Washington had played behind the scenes, in the situation of Serbia the Americans acted openly. Without the UN SC resolution, the NATO bombed peaceful cities for 11 weeks ruthlessly destroying the civilian and military infrastructure, thus in essence wiping the floor with international law.

What in the West would later be called "humanitarian intervention" has in fact nothing to do with humanism – 78 days of bombing took lives of 2,000 people, two thirds of whom were peaceful civilians. Over 10,000 people were wounded.

By late 1990s the USA finally took the leading position in the world politics. Back then Washington faced a new task – to install that fact firm in the minds of the world community. The American authorities picked Yugoslavia as the instrument of persuasion.

The antiterrorist operation of the Serbian Special Forces in the village of Račak in January 1999 was picked as the pretext for the bombings of that country. Portraying that case as a mass murder of civilian population the USA announced the beginning of the "humanitarian intervention" and started to ruthlessly destroy the civilian and military infrastructure of Yugoslavia without any decision made by the UN Security Council. By acting that way Washington practically wiped the floor with international law, thinks Vladimir Kozin, an expert at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies.

"For 78 days the Americans and the NATO bombed Yugoslavia; they dropped 27,000 tons of various missile and bomb ammunition; 2,000 civilians were killed, of them 400 children; 40,000 houses were destroyed."

Only later it came to light that the mass burial of representatives of the civilian Albanian population reportedly shot by the Serbian troops was a falsification organized by the American special services. The majority of people found near the village of Račak were rebels of the Liberation Army of Kosovo.

The NATO aggression resulted in the fall of Yugoslavia. The economy of the countries that made up that entity was totally destroyed; the agriculture was eliminated by a wave of sanctions, while the industrial production was practically completely demolished.

Washington did not choose Yugoslavia as its victim accidentally. According to Elena Guskova, head of the Center for the Studies of Modern Balkans' Crisis at the Institute for Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the military aggression against that country was a part of a complex operation to destroy the multinational state.

"The causes were the refusal of Yugoslavia's leadership to take orders and its unwillingness to accept the will imposed from the outside. The talks between Slobodan Milošević and Richard Holbrooke (who back then was the US Special Envoy to Cyprus and Yugoslavia) in October 1998 did not bring the desired results. Slobodan Milošević did not allow deploying NATO troops on his territory. Then he was told, "we will punish you"."

As a result of the NATO operation Kosovo declared its independence. That was what Washington was after. The Americans immediately built their military base Camp Bondsteel there – second largest in Europe. It allows the USA to control the area of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and the routes in the Middle East, Northern Africa and in the Caucasus, as well as the transit of energy resources from the Caspian Region and Central Asia. For the USA its military base in Serbia is quite legal and beneficial. The Americans do not pay for the use of the land in Kosovo.
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