A Place to Stand

Hi,

you left a comment on my blog and here's my answer.

I have some experience of the Yugoslavian conflict as I come originally from Trieste (Italy) town on the border with the former Yugoslavia, my family has a house in what's now Croatia that we inherited from my granfather, I spent there all my holidays since the age of 0 till my early 20's.
As such I saw the nationalistic ethnic ideas getting hold into people's minds and provoking a break up in society.
All of my then neighbours not of Croatian ethnicity had to move because they were targeted by fascists. I witnessed this with fear and immense sadness.
I saw a generation of kids I grew up with becoming complete nationalistic assholes.
I know personally many that from all the corners of Yugoslavia moved to Italy because their lands had become warzones, and these were people from all Yugoslavian ethnicities.
In short, it was a mess with national armies battling through towns and giving support to militias of fascist hillibillies making a law of themselves.
And in the face of prolongued plight an intervention on humanitarian grounds was indeed justified.
The UN forces on the ground were powerless as the Srebrenica massacre demonstrated. There 7000 people were murdered because the UN mission was completely humanitarian and had no mandate beyond assisting civilians in need.
Only that with ethnic cleansing the civilians are themselves the targets, not collateral damage.
This difference meant that a rethink of the involvement had to take place and as such air strikes to disable Serbian army capabilities were put forward.

I am not a military strategist, but it is quite obvious that if you must enter a war you should do so assertively and achieve your objectives as quickly as you can and plan this in a way that avoids civilian casualties and minimizes losses among enemy combatents. I believe that the Un strikes did actually achieve those aims.

Speaking of Libdem involvement, Paddy Ashdown was in Sarayevo as UN commissioner, he saw with his own eyes the massacres that the ethnic craze produced.

I was not a Libdem yet but from my border town saw the people fleeing the war zone and from my house in Croatia saw a peaceful countryside becoming an environment hostile to the non ethnic omogenous.
When the bombing of Serbia started I was in London and my best friend at the time was a Serbian photographer that had been on the front line embedded with the Serbian Army. Those were terrible days and we were very worried for all those that may get hurt, and as we witnessed events unfolding we thought long and hard of all the stupid people and ideas that had brought us to that point and I really can't remember us blaming the Libdems then.

You raise the point that atrocities were carried out by other ethnicities but only the Serbs got bombed. Your point being? that we should have bombed them all?
Or that we should have committed a large army to keep order all around Yugoslavia like what we are supposed to be doing in Afghanistan and previously in Iraq ?
Well, as you can see now, it's not an easy thing to do so I hope that in the light of these considerations you may want to reconsider comparing Libdems to Nazis.
 

If you want responses, it might help to tone the mania down by a few orders of magnitude. Really, though, why would you want to engage with what, according to you, is "a party whose every single member is, officially, a racist, Nazi, child raping, genocidal, organlegger"?

Also, where on Earth are you dredging all this garbage from? And, for God's sake, why?? You've shown you can write on other issuess without your brain falling apart, so why can't you show even a hint of critical capacity on this one?

How does 'there are 1300 Serbs officially missing and presumed dead' become "our police kidnapped at at least 1,300 Serbs & dissected them while still alive to sell the parts to our hospitals"?

The E.U. is investigating rumors that SOME (maybe 10 or so) Serbs were victims of organ-legging, but you must know that these are just unsubstantiated rumors, and also that EVERY conflict since transplants became a reality has seen such rumors. In fact, you might want to amend your google search link, because even though it includes the word Kosovo I think it brings up mostly reports of Israeli harvesting of Palestinian organs.

But of course you prefer to ascribe every single unexplained disappearance to what is more than likely to be an urban legend. And every single one of your other allegations is similarly blown up out of nothing or next to nothing. And your bias isn't just showing - it's waving giant neon signs in the air and bellowing "look at me, I love the Serbs, especially the saintly Milosevic who never oppressed minorities at all, no, not once, or if he did then they deserved it because they were all child-rapists and organleggers who worked for the Nazi Ashdown".

Why not say that our police murdered ten billion Serbs? You could hardly make yourself less credible by doing so.
 

Hi. I'm Martin Gradwell, brother of the Michael Gradwell, with whom you have recently tangled ( http://politicsfornovices.blogspot.com/2009/09/does-lancaster-have-morecambe.html ). Michael mentioned you, so I thought I'd come and see what kind of person claims that the Lib Dems are "a party whose every single member is, officially, a racist, Nazi, child raping, genocidal, organlegger & whose every single member feels they cannot factually say otherwise".

Unlike my brother I don't have a political blog, but I am a Lib Dem. I don't recall being racist or Nazi, or raping children, or committing genocide, or legging organs. I'm pretty sure I would remember if I had ever done any of these things. I don't think that the Lib Dems in general are particularly noted for these things either. I feel sure that there are at least one or two members, probably several, who have completely refrained from one or more of those activities.

When others fail to respond to your inflammatory ravings and give them an undeserved platform, you say that they "censor in the Nazi cause". So will you publish this comment? I suspect not. I suspect that even though you are far too immoderate to actually deserve a response, at least some other Lib Dems will have been moved to point out the obvious here: that they are not monsters, and that their party is not one known for its monstrousness. Yet, I see no replies here. Have there really been none? I also note that you make no mention e.g. of my brother's rebuttals. So will this comment see the light of day? Let's see....
 

Satisfied?

I have made a number of very specific allegations including that the bombing of Yugoslavia was aggressive & thus a war crime; that the war was fought to support NATO armed terrorists known to be engaged in genocide; that in the subsequent occupation these terrorists, employed by us as police, were allowed to commit massacres, such as Dragodan where 210 civilians were murdered close to our HQ in the British zone; that our police commited genocide; that our police ethnicaly cleasnsed 350,000; that our police kidnapped thousands of schoolgirls to sell to western brothels; that our police kidnapped & dissected as many as 1,300 people while still alive to sell their body organs. All of this was done with the full & unanimous support of the "Liberal Democrats" & I consider anybody who loyally supports the party without calling for members who have a case to answer for such crimes to face trial is condoning genocide.

You are wrong about me censoring LibDems wishing to defend the party here. Totally wtong. Your brother did decide to stop publishing my comments & has replied since by email, but clearly chose not to reply publicly so I have respected his choice. Beyond that & your reply which clearly does not address the issues & one response on 1 other blog nobody, among all 80,000 members has felt able to dispute any facts put.

That obviously includes all those in Parliament at the time.
 

"..your reply which clearly does not address the issues"

You have indeed made a number of specific allegations, mostly relating to racism, Nazism, child rape, genocide, and bootlegging of organs. You seek to tie the Lib Dems in with these allegations. I say "I don't think that the Lib Dems in general are particularly noted for these things". How is this not addressing the issues?

I'll be more specific. The bombing you refer to was NOT conducted by the Lib Dems. It was conducted by NATO. The governing body of NATO is NOT the Lib Dems. It is the North Atlantic Council. This council is composed of "member states' Ministers of State, Ministers of Defence, or Heads of Government". Note that in general these will all be high-up members of the parties in power. NOT Lib Dems. The opposition has no say whatsoever. This applies doubly to a small third party which at the time was roughly on a par with the Greens. Even Tory backbenchers had no say in NATO's decision. MP's were not consulted in any meaningful way prior to the NATO bombings. Their role was solely to decide, AFTER the event, whether or not to endorse it as individuals.

Where does the Liberal Democrat party come in all this? Nowhere. We're going back a bit here, and my memory isn't perfect so I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that 90's manifestos never included any commitments to specific actions in the Balkans, or even any mention of the Balkans or any part thereof. Individual party members were at all times free to decide for themselves whether or not the bombings undertaken by NATO had been legal or justified, and whether or not they should support an ongoing NATO presence in the region. Many prominent Lib Dems concluded that a NATO presence was necessary in order to prevent or minimise future massacres, but that doesn't mean there was, as you put it, 'full & unanimous support of the "Liberal Democrats"'. It was entirely possible for a Lib Dem to assert, for instance, that the NATO bombings were illegal. But you went far beyond that.

Most of your allegations are simply absurd. "Our police kidnapped & dissected as many as 1,300 people while still alive to sell their body organs", you say. The reality is that there is a sensational allegation, the entire evidence in support of which seems to be a house containing, and I quote from your blog, "traces of blood .. as well as remains of old, used medical material (gauze, a used syringe, two plastic infusion bags hardened in mud, empty drug bottles, among them of drugs used for muscle relaxation)". Don't you think this evidence might be more reasonably explained by, say, a single amputation of a combatant who had been shot in the leg?

Finally, you insist on both having your cake and eating it. You say genocide is anathema to any real Liberal, yet you refuse to even consider the possibility that Liberal Democrats who supported NATO actions did so because they wanted to oppose genocide. You ignore everyone's stated motives, and assume instead that they acted as they did because they were Nazi scum. Meanwhile you refuse to accept even mild criticism of Serbia, and when diplomat Charles Crawford tells you about Serbian racism and oppression from his first hand experience, your response is to say Charles is more racist than the SS were. Is it really any wonder that people won't debate you?

I've probably missed out quite a lot still, but the allegations I haven't covered are, if anything, even more far out than the ones I have.
 

That Ashdown c vociferously supported every action against the Yugoslavs is a matter of record. Thjatb the Party in Parliament enthusiasticly & unanimously supported that criminal war is a matter of record. That they were aware it was being done to promote genocide is also a matter of record since the Fioreign Secretary had already told Parliament that it was the NATO oeganised KLA that were the ones engaged in racial genocide. You make a fair point that the government & other parties supported these crimes but no other party supported genocide unimously - the LDs alone have that honour.

The evidence of organlegging was sufficient to convince del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the NATO funded & controlled ICTY & it is difficult to imagine any judicial character more unwilling to be convined. The organlegging is clearly still going on im NATO/EU controlled Kosovo with, therefore, the total support of these governments. Anybody now denying these atrocities would, if not a total hypocrit, have to also deny the Jewish Holocaust on the same grounds. I think the LDs have proven that, if political alignments changed, they would have no ethical objection to doing that, nor indeed to voting for new gas chambers.