Following the lead or the U.S., Canada is participating in a massive
military assault against a sovereign nation in Central Europe. The
Federal Republic or Yugoslavia is a small country of approximately 12
million. Its crime is that it is fighting to preserve its territorial
integrity against an armed secessionist movement. Every other nation
would do the same.
When Abraham Lincoln went to war against the Confederate south “to
preserve the union,” as he put it, he was regarded as a national hero
and Washington bore long and vindictive grudges against any countries -
including Canada and Britain that did not leap to support it.
Has not Britain waged a decades long war against the Irish Republican
Army? Was it not a Canadian government in Ottawa that invoked the War
Measures Act and moved troops into Quebec when faced with “apprehended
insurrection.”
We are told that Yugoslavia refused to sign a “peace agreement” with its
armed separatist.. There is no peace agreement. There is an 81 page
document, drawn up by the U.S., which will in effect sever Kosovo, long
regarded as the cradle of Serbian nationhood, from Yugoslavia. Belgrade
was told to sign or be bombed.
The majority of the population of the separatist region are of a
different ethnic group than those in the rest of Yugoslavia, we are
told. If this were justification for secession, most nations in the
world, including Canada and the U.S., would disintegrate overnight.
A long political and media campaign to demonize the Serbs has culminated
with Bill Clinton's comparison of war-torn Yugos1avia to Hitter's
Germany. Equating a weak, already partially dismembered country under
economic sanctions for almost a decade, struggling to hang on to its
heartland, surrounded and menaced by the world's most powerful nation
armed to the teeth with the latest high tech weapons, to Nazi Germany
only goes to graphically illustrate that truth is the first casualty of
war.
Lest anyone be confused, the attack on Yugoslavia is not a United
Nations' operation in any way, nor does it have U.N. sanction. Both
Russia and China have condemned it unequivocally. It is a unilateral and
unprecedented act of war by' the world’s most powerful military alliance
in violation of international law and of NATO’s own charter, which
provides for defence in the case of attack against a member nation. No
member nation of NATO has been attacked or threatened by Yugoslavia.
Why is Canada, the famed peacemaker, involved in the illegal destruction
of a founding member of the U.N. and our ally in both world wars? Today,
Yugoslavia is virtually defenceless, yet with a long and proud history
of fighting for its independence - for almost five centuries the
southern Slavs led by Serbia fought against the Ottoman Empire, for
years Yugoslavia fought against Hitler's Nazis and, under Tito, against
control by the Soviet Union.
As in Iraq, many of the bombs and missiles raining on the people of
Yugoslavia are coated with depleted ur£uranium. The radioactive fallout
will, as is happening today in Iraq, ensure an £agonizing death for tens
of thousands in the years ahead, long after the bombs stop falling.
After years of pious b1eating by Canadian governments about war crimes
(only those by small nations, mind you), we are committing one of vastly
larger proportions as these words are being written.
Who has given NATO the authority to attack Yugoslavia? What exactly is
the Kosovo Liberation Army (regularly described as a terrorist
organization less than a year ago) on whose side we are now entering
this conflict? How, and with whose financial backing, did it emerge as a
fully equipped army complete with anti-tank weapons, uniforms and
grenade launchers? What is its connection to U.S. intelligence and, as
recently reported in the London Times, to the heroin trade? If NATO has
become an instrument of terror against the virtually defenceless
population of our former ally – and it has – Canada should reconsider
its membership in that organization.
David Orchard is the autnor of the recently updated and reissued
bestseller
"The Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to
American Expansionism".
He farms at Borden, Saskatchewan. Recently he
placed second in the PC Party leadership contest. He can be reached by
telephone at (416) 466-0753 or (306) 344-5757, by fax (306) 244-3790, by
e-mail; ccafttor@sympatico.ca.