A New Year’s Peace for Warmongers

A New Year’s Peace for Warmongers
by Michael R. Allen

When the New Year arrived to the Eastern establishment of media and government, talk of a "new world peace" flowed as free as the vintage champagne being slurped at the White House. Commentators praised the smooth transition to the year 2000, and proclaimed that the world’s peoples must create a lasting peace to honor the great day.

Of course, this American ebullience was cloaked in a dark irony: that the United States had just pressured the International Criminal Tribunal to overlook NATO war crimes against the Serbian people, and subsequently the investigation into such crimes was dropped. Since the US was the major backer of NATO's operations, no one expects it to rush to expose its own dirty laundry. Yet for the government to proclaim peace triumphant was shameless. New Year's Eve was a night of peace only for the Orwellian word-twisters who do not have to live in fear of a government that they control.

Chances for a real peace to thrive in the New Year were lost two days before the end of last year, when the United Nations' chief war crimes prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, made her announcement:

"NATO is not under investigation by the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. There is no formal inquiry into the actions of NATO during the conflict in Kosovo."

This decision is one that can only bode ill for the free world. NATO's bombings may have been 99.6 percent accurate, but the civilian losses in life and property are still real. NATO first breached its own charter to create a war based on thin evidence that Serbs were "systematically killing" the separatist Kosovars (still unproven). Then it conducted a 78-day air war against the Serbs until they were smashed to smithereens. Afterwards, it handed power to the Kosovars' slimiest elements. What NATO did looks at least unethical, if not criminal.

A Pentagon spokesman, Rear Admiral Craig Quigley, says everything went well in the war: "We’re darn sure we followed the laws of armed conflict for anything and everything in Kosovo." The "laws of armed conflict" aren't the same as "just war" laws, though. While the just war rules preclude involving noncombatants in the war - which would have been everyone who got bombed, since NATO and the Kosovars started the war, not the Serbs - the laws of armed conflict are vague and largely defined by the winners. Those are the laws that Del Ponte's court are going to uphold from now on, not old Catholic notions of right and wrong.

If the Tribunal were to uphold the just war laws, the United States would have to be tried along with NATO. Its role in everything that went wrong in the spring is as large as that of its parent organization.

NATO was able to use American soldiers and equipment in its miserable campaign to "keep peace" for the separatists in Kosovo - a campaign that resulted in three months of bombing for the Serbs from whom the Kosovars wanted to separate. This campaign unjustly terrorized the Serbian people through bombing accidents and increased violence against them by separatists. Rather than spread world peace, the NATO activity elevated to power murderous separatists with Stalinist inclinations.

The United States is inextricably linked with the failure of the NATO activity: its soldiers mistakenly bombed Serbian villages, its money funded operations in Kosovo, its State Department promulgated the lie that there was genocide against the Kosovars, and its people had to have this done without their consent. Americans should be outraged that their government participated in the NATO campaign against Serbia.

For the future of peace in the world, a full-scale investigation of NATO's crimes should be launched. The Serbs and other civilians hurt during the war need to be recompensed for their tragic losses, and those responsible for this disaster punished. In the interest of preserving the rule of law, heads of state who allowed their militaries to be commandeered for NATO should be the first to roll.

NATO's crimes must be investigated while they are still fresh on the minds of the world. If the International Tribunal won’t hear the evidence, fine. Let the rest of us who seek truth collect the evidence and post it within reach of the eyes of our fellow citizens. The criminal symbiosis of the US government and NATO will surely receive the condemnation of history, even if it remains legally unchecked.

No citizen of any country can enjoy peace so long as an organization like NATO can collect flimsy evidence of a purported wrong (genocide, ethnic cleansing) and then proceed to bomb the purported aggressor with the help of the military of the Defender of the Western World, the United States of America. No single country can beat back that sort of attack. The Serbs couldn't, even with intermittent Russian help. The power of NATO coupled with the power of the US, unrestrained by any law, has the potential to destroy every country that doesn't tow the line.

Del Ponte is endorsing that power to destroy by refusing to hold NATO accountable for its crimes. The New Year will be anything but peaceful as the warmakers look to strike somewhere else.

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