Gramsci wrote:Easy there tiger, no need to go all "Bob", I was offering my opinion, which is just that, an opinion. You asked for people to tell you what they think... and I did. In a way I thought wasn't the least bit Bobish.

Mazec wrote:Furthermore, it seems as though the media has simplified the shit out of this issue and taken advantage of the US/Western European ignorance and indifference toward the Balkans to create a black and white scenario where the poor widdle Kosovar Albanians are portrayed as the Jews and the Serbs, of course, are the Nazis.

clocker bob wrote: The Serbs have gotten a raw deal in the US media. The war crimes were exaggerated, the 'tyranny' of Milosevic was grossly exaggerated, the mass graves in Kosovo were exaggerated. Rampant bias has steered the history of this region in US history books for the past 90 years.

Wood Goblin wrote: I want to like you, Bob. I really do. And while the Croats are hardly on the side of the angels, the Serbs most assuredly did NOT get a raw deal.

ivan wrote:I feel very bad for serbs remaining in Kosovo, I understand that they have been subject to reprisal attacks and that the creation of a Kosovan state would likely mean a mass exodus of Serbs from Kosovo, but the current interim situation can not be expected to go on indefinitely.

The region is in an economic and social rut, it has up to recently had a negative GDP and the Albanian and Serbian communities remain segregated and hostile. I believe a gradual granting of sovreignty to Kosovo is the best that can be done in a bad situation.

Wood Goblin wrote: What utter shit this is. The only reason you believe it is because you also believe that Human Rights Watch can't be trusted and because you insist that the photographs of said graves have been doctored.

globe and mail of canada wrote:Where are the bodies? Was the other big war of the last decade, Kosovo in 1999, triggered by bogus allegations as well? Another case of mass deception?

In Iraq, it's the missing mass weapons of destruction. In Kosovo, it's the missing mass graves.

In alleged ethnic cleansing exercises by Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, as many as 100,000 to 200,000 civilians were said to have gone missing or been killed in Kosovo, many of them buried in mass graves. Members of a Canadian forensic team to the Serbian province have come forward to label the numbers nonsense. No mass graves, they say, and, on both the Albanian and Serb sides, only a few thousand dead. A mockery of the numbers used to justify the war.

In The Hague this week, the war-crimes tribunal reopened with Mr. Milosevic's calling the genocide charges against him a lie and a treacherous distortion of history. He may well be the treacherous distorter. If his Serb armies weren't guilty as charged in Kosovo, there was his past record of bloodshed to consider. As someone wrote, Kosovo for Mr. Milosevic was like tax evasion for Al Capone: something they could nail him on.

But that doesn't excuse going to war on the basis of flim-flam. The Kosovo story has etchings of Iraq all over it. The United States (the Democrats this time) and Britain (Tony Blair again) demonize an enemy with fraudulent accusations. They play the gullible media, Canada's included, like a violin.

The latest person to debunk the genocide numbers is retired Vancouver homicide detective Brian Honeybourn, a member of the forensic team. He told The Ottawa Citizen this week that his nine-member group found mainly single graves, with a couple of exceptions being one of 20 bodies and another 11. He wonders how genocide charges against Mr. Milosevic can stand up. "It seems as though The Hague is beginning to panic."

Garth Pritchard, a Canadian filmmaker, accompanied the forensic team to Kosovo. "This was a massacre that never happened." He joined mission leader Brian Strongman in lambasting Canadian Louise Arbour, the special prosecutor for the tribunal that brought the charges against Mr. Milosevic. Ms. Arbour, now the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, was used as a pawn by war-hungry Washington and London, they said. "I was standing there when the forensic teams were telling Louise Arbour there were no 200,000 bodies and she didn't want to know," Mr. Pritchard told the Citizen.

Ms. Arbour's career path lit up after her war-crimes work. She was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada, then to her UN post.

The findings, or non-findings, of the Canadian forensic team are consistent with those of other teams of experts sent over since the war ended. At the time of the conflict, James Bissett, a former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, and Lewis MacKenzie, a major-general with a wealth of experience in the Balkan theatre, took issue with the tales being spun. But they, as well as some voices in the media, were drowned out by the drumbeat of war. U.S. defence secretary William Cohen was alleging that as many as 100,000 Albanian Kosovars had gone missing. Mr. Blair, in a preview of his comportment on Iraq, was crying horror upon horror. President Bill Clinton wanted to shift the focus off his domestic problems -- Monica Lewinsky etc. -- and was gung-ho for a NATO invasion.

Looking back a couple of years after the conflict, defence minister Art Eggleton acknowledged that the propaganda coming out of the Pentagon was extraordinary. But the Chrétien Liberals, on close terms with the Clinton Democrats, weren't about to buck the White House on Kosovo, as they would on Iraq. The allies were all on board for an attack, making it extremely unlikely that Canada would be the odd one out.

But having everybody in the wagon doesn't excuse what happened. If the forensic teams' stories are correct, the missing dead in Kosovo is indeed a scandal comparable to the absence of WMD in Iraq. In a five-year period, political leaders twice duped their populations into going to war.

Wood Goblin wrote:
I want to like you, Bob. I really do.

Kosovo - the site of a genocide that never was - is now a violent "free market" in drugs and prostitution. What does this tell us about the likely outcome of the Iraq war?

Muted by the evidence of the Anglo-American catastrophe in Iraq, the "humanitarian" war party ought to be called to account for its forgotten crusade in Kosovo, the model for Blair's "onward march of liberation". Just as Iraq is being torn apart by the forces of empire, so was Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic state that uniquely rejected both sides in the cold war.

Lies as great as those told by Bush and Blair were deployed by Clinton and Blair in their grooming of public opinion for an illegal, unprovoked attack on a European country. Following the same path as the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the media coverage in the spring of 1999 was a series of fraudulent justifications, beginning with the then US defence secretary William Cohen's claim that "we've now seen about 100,000 military-aged [Albanian] men missing . . . they may have been murdered". David Scheffer, the then US ambassador-at-large for war crimes, announced that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" may have been killed. Blair invoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War". The British press took its cue. "Flight from genocide," wrote the Daily Mail. "Echoes of the Holocaust," chorused the Sun and the Mirror. In parliament, the heroic Clare Short compared to Nazi propagandists those (such as myself) who objected to the bombing of defenceless people.

By June 1999, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams began subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The American FBI arrived to investigate what was called "the largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history". Several weeks later, having not found a single mass grave, the FBI went home. The Spanish forensic team also returned home, its leader 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 - not one - mass grave".

In November 1999, the Wall Street Journal published the results of its own investigation, dismissing "the mass grave obsession". Instead of "the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect . . . the pattern is of scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army has been active". The Journal concluded that Nato stepped up its claims about Serbian killing fields when it "saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrary story: civilians killed by Nato's bombs . . . The war in Kosovo was cruel, bitter, savage. Genocide it wasn't."

One year later, the International War Crimes Tribunal, a body in effect set up by Nato, announced that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo's "mass graves" was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army. Like Iraq's fabled weapons of mass destruction, the figures used by the US and British governments and echoed by journalists were inventions - along with Serbian "rape camps" and Clinton's and Blair's claims that Nato never deliberately bombed civilians.

Antero wrote:Which option is likely to get the least number of people killed?

I'm down with that one.