June 1999

LONDON- A nuclear war creeps up on the world by an unmarked path. As India and Pakistan confront each other daily over “the line of control” that marks the temporary division over their rival claims for the state of Kashmir the chance of their conflict spiralling out of control can no longer be dismissed. And if that happens the nuclear weapons that both sides exhibited to the world for the first time last year are within a hairtrigger of being used. “The first false alert could be last”, said one seasoned observer not very long ago. We should think of Kashmir as a permanent Cuban missile crisis, when in nose to nose nuclear brinkmanship the risk of inadvertent nuclear war is unacceptably high. With only 4 or 5 minutes warning time before a nuclear weapon fired from one country would detonate in the other there is no time for second thoughts...

By Phillip Knightley who places the Kosovo atrocity stories in their historical context The Indepedent June 27, 1999 If history is any guide, then many of the atrocity stories from Kosovo that have dominated the media since the end of the war will turn out to be false. Written and filmed by some of the self-styled “mass-grave correspondents”, they may at the moment appear to have the chilling ring of truth: after all, mass graves have unquestionably been found. Some of the stories may indeed be genuine, but many will vanish under investigation, or the scrutiny of time. When passions have cooled – as one hopes that they will even in the hate-strewn Balkans – we may even hear the confessions of those who invented them. Invented? In the case of Kosovo the inventions will have been the work not of British journalists but of those feeding them with information. In...

Similar Crises Get Divergent Treatment in the New York Times From Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. Media analysis, critiques and news reports New York, June 25, 1999 An article in the June 24 New York Times reported on the trial in Turkey of captured Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan. The Times provided background on the war between Kurdish separatist guerrillas and Turkish security forces:“The war that Ocalan has waged has cost more than 30,000 lives and made him the object of intense hatred. It has also made him a heroic figure to many Kurds who live in Turkey’s southeast.”Contrast this description with the way the New York Times presents the background of another, very similar, separatist war (3/27/99):“The Serbian campaign against the ethnic Albanians has seen more than 2,000 killed in the last year, with hundreds of thousands of Kosovars driven from their homes, according to the United Nations.” The...

A Proposal on an International Non-Military Force for Peace ByMel Duncanand David Hartsough From: Civilian Peace Service http://www.superaje.com/~marsin/cps.htm 24 June 1999 INTRODUCTION Tanks rumble into Kosovo. NATO proclaims victory from 15,000 feet above after eleven weeks of pounding bombs without a single Alliance casualty. The Serb army retreats from the province to the cadence of their butcher leader also proclaiming victory. The KLA marches in. Over a million Kosovar Albanians resentfully return to the rubble of home as Kosovar Serbs are cleansed northwards out of their homes. The irradiated landscape soaked in blood, strewn with land mines and pocked with mass graves flows with hate. Thousands of well armed multinational troops will attempt to keep the hatred at bay while relief organizations beg for millions to help rebuild from the carnage. While the technology has dramatically advanced, we end this century, the bloodiest century of humankind, the way we began...

The Independent of London, June 6, 1999 by Mark Almond From the start of the Nato air campaign, Tony Blair was the most hawkish proponent of the claim that this was a war of a new type – “for principles, not national interest” – and it was one that air power alone could win (even if he sometimes gave the impression of wanting a good old-fashioned ground war). Slobodan Milosevic has not yet signed the EU-Russian peace plan, but the success of Nato’s 11-week air campaign has forced the armies of sceptics, as well as the Yugoslav forces, to accept that awesome air power alone can settle disputes. A sinister precedent has been set. Television viewers watching videos of smart bombs knocking out precisely chosen targets in Yugoslavia may feel that they have witnessed the hi-tech equivalent of what Goethe saw at the Battle of Valmy in September 1792, when...

LONDON- If the war with Slobodan Milosevic is now in abeyance it is, perhaps, to remind us that only temporarily were we allowed to forget that the one with Saddam Hussein continues. The bombing never stopped; neither do the sanctions. The one important thing always to recall when discussing what next to do about Saddam Hussein is what President Bill Clinton has said more than once: that the UN arms inspectors found and destroyed more Iraqi weapons of mass destruction than were destroyed during all the days of intensive bombardment during the days of the Gulf War. Briefly put, most of the work of disarming Iraq has now been done. The UN inspectorate may not have been a perfect fool-proof system but it was pretty good. Nothing that existed before, in the annals of warfare, short of total military occupation, had such a record of success in disarming a nation. If...

Jeste li procitali Rezoluciju 1244 Saveta bezbednosti UN-a o miru na Kosovu? Pa, ne moze se bas reci da je koherentna. Kad bi uputstvo za rukovanje vaseg kompjutera imalo tako brojne nejasnoce i protivrecnosti, pa jos kad bi mu i nekoliko desetaka stranica bilo istrgnuto, izvesno je da bi vam se operativni sitem neprestano rusio i zapinjao a mislim da je upravo to ono sto ce se dogoditi NATO-u na Kosovu. Medjutim, ova Rezolucija je IPAK dovoljno jasna u svojim osnovnim crtama pa ce nam dozvoliti da se posle evo, prve nedelje NATO-ovog kosovskog mirotvorstva zapitamo sta se to uopste tamo dogadja? kaze direktor TFF-a, Jan Oberg. U ovoj i u sledecoj informaciji (Pres Info # 72) mozete pratiti analizu nekih od vec uocenih ociglednih problema. Rezolucijom se osudjuje svako nasilje lokalnih strana umesanih u sukob dok ona istovremeno ne sadrzi ni najblazi oblik spomena izuzetno brutalnog ubijanja koje je...

“Did you read UN Security Council Resolution 1244 about peace in Kosovo? Well, it is not exactly coherent. If your computer manual was this much of a mishmash and contradictions and if dozens of pages were missing, you would probably have operative system failures and bombs – and I think this is what will happen with NATO in Kosovo. But the resolution IS clear enough on essentials for us to ask after one week of NATO ‘peace’-keeping in Kosovo what on earth is going on,” says TFF director Jan Oberg. Here and in PressInfo 72 follow some of the already manifest problems. It condemns all acts of violence by the local parties, but has not even a mild statement about the uniquely brutal NATO-caused killings and devastation of a country of 12 million people. It expresses a determination to resolve the humanitarian crisis – well and good – but does...

LONDON- Logjams that busy, but unthinking, beavers have been building up for decades are now to be broken up. The distance between inaction and action on dismantling the dams that impede social progress in Third World countries has been narrowed and the rivers of opportunity should be able to run a little faster. On Friday, President Bill Clinton makes [made] an historic visit to the Geneva headquarters of the International Labour Organisation, one of the oldest UN bodies, established to bring unions, employers and government into a closer working relationship. His speech in favour of a convention aimed at eliminating the most intolerable forms of child labour is, by any measure, an important milestone. On Saturday, the Group of 8, the world’s leading industrial nations together with Russia, open their heads of government meeting in Cologne and debt relief for the poorest nations is, after Kosovo, the most significant item on...

When There is Little Left for a Radical to Say By Robin Hahnel ZNet Commentary June 16, 1999 Paul A. Volcker is best known as the conservative, inflation fighting Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1979 through 1987. Prior to that he served Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in a variety of capacities. After retiring from the Fed he became Chairman of James D. Wolfenson & Co. Inc. and is the Henry Kaufman Visiting Professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Paul Volcker is exactly the kind of person I would expect to be invited to make the luncheon address to the Overseas Development Council Conference on Making Globalization Work (March 18, 1999). But I did not expected him to have this to say: “Everybody talks about globalism these days to the point we are all sick of the term. But what...

From the Spanish weekly “Articulo 20” No. 30, of June 14, 1999, about the NATO bombing raids against Yugoslavia and the role of Americans inmaking all decisions. By Jose Luis Morales The pilots of Spanish planes who participated in bombing raids against Yugoslavia do not feel like “supermen” nor as masters of air space. Quite on the contrary, they say that our forces play to the tune of music played by the North Americans, and accuse NATO of having honoured with medals the bombing of civilian targets, what they otherwise name “collateral damages”. Captain Adolfo Luis Martin de la Hoz, who returned to Spain end of May after having participated in the bombings since the beginning, an “authentic expert for the dreadful F-18”, the war plane most often used in the war strategy of “scorched land” in the Balkans, is very categoric: “First of all, I want to make it...

Ignore the Dangerous Precedent Set Media Advisory  As NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia neared its conclusion, the press began debating whether or not the war was a success. Many mainstream commentators and reporters were critical of NATO’s tactics, but NATO’s basic spin on the war–it was a just war waged against genocidal evil, and it has improved the region’s chances for peace and democracy–went almost unchallenged. The idea that the war in Kosovo has proved that military force is an integral part of a humanitarian foreign policy appeared again and again in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post. As Thomas Friedman put it (New York Times, 6/4/99), if Slobodan Milosevic really carries out his end of the deal, then NATO’s action in Kosovo “will establish that an air war for limited humanitarian goals can be effective, albeit costly.” A Washington Post editorial of the same day followed...