Re: British TV jury finds against Nato
>Chris Burford wrote:
>
>>While I welcomed the end of western imperialist appeasement of Serbian
>>fascism in Bosnia, I specifically denounced and exposed the ethnic
>>cleansing by the Croat regime of Kraijina, as zealously as Doug and others
>>are exposing the imperialist features of the present war by NATO.
>
>So, Chris, you'll admit that if what Serbs are doing in Kosovo is a
>genocidal war crime, then what the Croats did was a genocidal war crime
>too, and that U.S. assistance to the Croats makes the U.S. an accessory to
>a genocidal war crime?
Yes.
Just as you wish to be credited with a more dialectical position than being in favour of the current Serbian regime, so I do not want my position to be presented as in support of the NATO war, particularly as it has developed, although it suits Louis Proyect to represent that as my position and censor my contributions on marxism-panix.
Please see my fuller reply on the international definition of genocide in the post of that thread title.
According to the detailed BBC documentary based on extensive interviews with the main protagonists "Death of Yugoslavia", Tudjman knew that the US would protest and knew that he could get away with it. There would be an element of guess work in the fine details and if all the correspondence were published, and all the telephone calls transcribed, some will have turned more of a blind eye than others. But a trial of the US government on that count, would be salutary.
With your contacts how could you set up a progressive commission looking at the record of offences of genocide in Yugoslavia? It would however not be able to exclude the Serbian nationalist regime as one of the indicted.
>
>And how about targeting civilian water supplies? Is that a war crime? Oh,
>excuse me, not targeting water supplies - just the power system. As the New
>York Times informs us: "'We have not targeted the water system,' said Peter
>Daniel, a NATO spokesman in Brussels, Belgium. 'The difficulties with water
>supply relate mostly to the difficulties that exist with the supply of
>electricity.'" Sort of like that excuse from the other day that the bomb
>didn't successfully guide itself to its target.
>
>Doug
See my clause by clause answer on genocide.
Poisoning wells in Kosovo to force an ethnic group to leave its homeland is genocide. Waging economic warfare against a country to force it to allow occupation of part of its terrority inhabited by a national minority by an international force is war, not genocide. There are many reasons for denouncing the war by NATO against Serbia but genocide is not one of them.
Chris Burford
London