A Place to Stand

President "Snake" (his KLA name) Thaci of Kosovo & former Prime Minister "slippery" Blair

Last week I had another letter published in the Morning Star. It is based on a previous thread here. Once again it went out to all major UK papers & some overseas ones & yet I have not seen it published elsewhere, though I did mention the same points on Melanie Philips' blog. I do regard the points I made as very important & is something all of the dead tree & broadcast media have ignored. I was not surprised the propagandist media ignored it, though the Morning Star choosing it shows it worthy of publication - the attempt to write the Yugoslav wars out of history & make the dead unpersons is truly Orwellian & therefore says much about the society we live in.

During the former attorney general's testimony to the Iraq inquiry the word "precedent" was used 16 times, overwhelmingly in regard to the precedent established by bombing Yugoslavia.

This was said to have been justified on the "new legal theory" that "a reasonable case could be made - I'm sorry, there was a reasonable case," to quote this eminent legal authority's testimony, that it was lawful to bomb people.

The interesting thing is that, whatever we may suspect about the honesty of the case made for WMD in Iraq, we know for an absolute fact that the case for the Yugoslav war - that Milosevic was engaged in genocide - was not only untrue but a deliberate lie. Like Iraq, Kosovo was a war undertaken without UN authority - and we never even attempted to get authority.

The real precedent provided by Kosovo, as Goldsmith said, is that "simply it is enough to say there is a reasonable case," however dishonestly, and that you can get away with murder. Mass murder.

Whatever whitewash we see at the Iraq inquiry, the case that Blair and his supporters are guilty of war crimes is undeniable. Indeed in Kosovo we saw the NATO-armed KLA, reappointed as NATO police, engaging in the ethnic cleansing of 350,000 people carried out under NATO command authority.

The NATO-funded war crimes commission has charged many Serbs largely on the grounds that they were part of a "joint criminal conspiracy." It can hardly now be denied that Blair, his supporters and at least his entire party organisation, were part of a joint criminal conspiracy to commit war crimes - and probably twice.

Neil Craig

Neil Clark, a solid supporter of the truth on Yugoslavia & regular writer for the Morning Star has chosen this as his letter of the week saying

This excellent letter, from our friend and regular commenter Neil Craig, appears in the Morning Star....

The importance of the Yugoslavia ‘precedent’ cannot be underestimated.
As I argued here, and elsewhere, the road to Baghdad began in the Balkans, and, as Neil Craig says, the fact that Blair got away scot-free with an illegal and deceitful war in 1999, only emboldened him to do it again in 2003.

I have added a comment

Thanks for the kind words Neil.

I am perhaps not of the conventional left but share objectives with anybody who wants human progress. I am very proud to have had several letters published in the Morning Star (my earliest was used as evidence that my opposition to genocide in Bosnia was "illiberal" & "incompatible with membership" of the LibDems) not just on Yugoslavia but on the opposite objectives of Marxist socialism & Greenery & even on space development.

The Star has proven itself far more liberal than any other part of our national media who simply censor mention of the atrocities & dissections our government participates in (& ignore space too).

It is interesting that such consistent opposition to war crimes & genocide, even when the victims are from a socialist regime, comes only from the most honourable parts of the "left" & from the libertarian "right".

Labels: letters, Media, Yugoslavia