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Early Day Motion 392

From Hansard:

Early Day Motion 392

JOHN PILGER AND KOSOVO

Session: 2004-05
Date tabled: 14.12.2004
Primary sponsor: Smith, Llew
Sponsors:

That this House welcomes John Pilger’s column for the New Statesman issue of 13th December, reminding readers of the devastating human cost of the so-termed ‘humanitarian’ invasion of Kosovo, led by NATO and the United States in the Spring of 1999, without any sanction of the United Nations Security Council; congratulates John Pilger on his expose of the fraudulent justifications for intervening in a ‘genocide’ that never really existed in Kosovo; recalls President Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Cohen claimed, entirely without foundation, that ‘we’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged [Albanian] men missing…..they may have been murdered’ and that David Scheffer, the US ambassador-at-large for war crimes, announced with equal inaccuracy that as many as ‘225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59’ may have been killed; recalls that the leader of a Spanish forensic team sent to Kosovo returned home, complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of ‘a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one mass grave’; further recalls that one year later, the International War Crimes Tribunal, a body de facto set up by NATO, announced that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo’s ‘mass graves’ was 2,788; believes the pollution impact of the bombing of Kosovo is still emerging, including the impact of the use of depleted uranium munitions; and calls on the Government to provide full assistance in the clean up of Kosovo.

(Emphasis added.)

Signatures include:

Name: Corbyn, Jeremy. Party: Labour Party. Constituency: Islington North. Date Signed: 15.12.2004.

Name: McDonnell, John. Party: Labour Party. Constituency: Hayes & Harlington. Date Signed:
15.12.2004.

From yesterday’s Guardian:

Ratko Mladić convicted of war crimes and genocide at UN tribunal

The former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladić, nicknamed the ‘butcher of Bosnia’, has been sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

More than 20 years after the Srebrenica massacre, Mladic was found guilty at the United Nations-backed international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague of 10 offences involving extermination, murder and persecution of civilian populations.

Edit: In the comments Jacob asks, “I was wondering what the massacre perpetrated by a Bosnian Serb in Bosnia had to do with Kosovo…” Fair point; in my efforts to make a Drudge-style snarky juxtaposition I failed to make the link clear. Given that we are talking about mass murders rather than day-to-day political point-scoring, I should have done so.

The link is that Mladic’s war crimes in Bosnia were part of the Yugoslav War(s), in which Slobodan Milosevic played a notorious role, which included egging on the Bosnian Serbs as well as his own crimes in Kosovo. The British Hard Left turned a blind eye to it all.

My intention was to point up how tawdry EDM 392, and by extension the whole business of soft-pedalling the crimes in former Yugoslavia, looks now in the light of yesterday’s conviction of Mladic.

13 comments to Early Day Motion 392

  • Presumably they felt NATO should have waited until the perpetrators of mass murder in Bosnia did much the same in Kosova rather than drawing the obvious inference from their actions in the recent past.

  • Natalie Solent (Essex)

    My memory of these events has faded a little, but as I recall Slobodan Milosevic was happy to let Mladic get on with it while maintaining plausible deniability.

    From the Wikipedia article on Milosevic:

    However, the Court did find that Milošević and others in Serbia had committed a breach of the Genocide Convention by failing to prevent the genocide from occurring and for not cooperating with the ICTY in punishing the perpetrators of the genocide, in particular General Ratko Mladić, and for violating its obligation to comply with the provisional measures ordered by the Court.

  • Jacob

    Yes, I was wondering what the massacre perpetrated by a Bosnian Serb in Bosnia had to do with Kosovo…

  • Natalie Solent (Essex)

    Jacob, you ask, “I was wondering what the massacre perpetrated by a Bosnian Serb in Bosnia had to do with Kosovo…”

    They were both part of the Yugoslav War(s), in which Slobodan Milosevic played a notorious role, which included egging on the Bosnian Serbs as well as his own crimes in Kosovo. The British Hard Left turned a blind eye to it all.

    But you are right, the connection is not made clear in the post. My intention was more to point up how tawdry EDM 392, and by extension the whole business of soft-pedalling the crimes in former Yugoslavia, looks now in the light of yesterday’s conviction of Mladic. I will edit the post to try to make it clearer.

  • Yes, I was wondering what the massacre perpetrated by a Bosnian Serb in Bosnia had to do with Kosovo…

    That’s a bit like wondering what actions by the USMC had to do with actions by the US Army, even though they answer to the same ultimate authority. The Bosnian Serbs could not do anything substantive without the approval and support of Milošević in Belgrade, so clearly anyone acting shocked, shocked I tell you, at the notion Serbian forces would have acted any differently in Kosova strikes me as bizarre (and indeed many were indeed ‘disappeared’, even if there were no massacres on the scale of Srebrenica) . It was Serbian forces under direct control of Belgrade who carried out murders against Croatian civilians in Vukovar.

  • Paul Marks

    John Pilger and Jeremy Corbyn looked at the same things that I did.

    The Red Star patches on the caps of the army commanded from Belgrade – and the Marxist support (via the wife) for the (then) leader of the Serbs.

    From this they concluded that these forces must be SUPPORTED – regardless of how many men, woman and children they murdered. Supported especially against the capitalist Americans – the arch enemy of Progressive forces.

    Yes I just said that John Pilger and Jeremy Corbyn supported the deliberate mass murder of civilians because the murders were committed by their ideological kin.

  • Fred Z

    My first impulse on seeing the the phrase “United Nations” before the name of any organization is to think its personnel are dishonest and incompetent at everything but rape, fraud, violence, communism, embezzlement, peculation and Israel bashing.

    Does anyone have any reason why I should not think this of “the United Nations-backed international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague”?

    But not to worry, I think the same things about anything involving Corbyn and his ilk.

  • Paul Marks

    That John McDonnell supported the mass murder of civilians should shock no one – as he, for example, is open in his admiration for Mao (the largest scale mass murderer in history), but Jeremy Corbyn presents himself as a nice-old-English-eccentric.

    Would a nice person really appoint John McDonnell as Shadow Chancellor? No they would not. Jeremy Corbyn is not a nice-old-English-eccentric, he is not harmless. If he was convinced that a population was “reactionary” and no amount of “education” could change them, he would have them wiped out. Partly as a matter of duty of course, but watching Mr Corbyn at Prime Minister’s Question Time, it is hard not to think that he would not also enjoy giving the order. The constant LYING (the tower block in London did not burn down because it had nine million Pounds spent on it making wildly misguided changes – it burned because of “a system that puts profits above people” which is as truthful as saying “it was burned by wicked elves”) and his hate-tuisted face as he denounces “the rich” for (mythical) tax dodging and so on, shows what sort of person Mr Corbyn really is.

  • mila

    One of the biggest pushers in the UK media of the idea that Serbian war crimes were a fabrication was Spiked magazine and its associated commentators, including Brendan O’Neill. Unsurprisingly there is zero mention on the Spiked Website of the Mladic Conviction.

  • Brendan is usually on the side of the angels on oh so many subjects, but when he hits one of his blind spots, he goes full retard.

    Never go full retard. Contrarian is just a more succinct way of describing someone as a fuckwit cunt.

  • Thailover

    “…the so-termed ‘humanitarian’ invasion of Kosovo, led by NATO and the United States in the Spring of 1999, without any sanction of the United Nations Security Council…”

    Gee, I wasn’t aware that independent nations required UN permission to act on their own.

  • Julie near Chicago

    Thai. Thumbs-up.

  • Mr Black

    I’m rather coming around to the view that we should let the ethnics murder each other as much as they want and can. Peace is made that way, not by forcing hated rivals to live in the same streets for eternity. This is the way it has always been.