This paper was first presented at the international conference on
"Justice and War" held in Paris on Monday, October 25, 1999
First my thanks to the Institute for kindly inviting me to take part in this
conference and thereby to express my personal solidarity with the people of
Yugoslavia who have been unjustly subjected to bombing, economic sanctions,
political isolation and slander by the governments and media of the NATO
countries. My presence here is above all in protest against the cruelty of the
self-styled humanitarians who wield enormous economic and technological power
without a trace of wisdom or compassion, whose wealth and military might have
brought them to the state of mind which the ancient Greeks called hubris.
So, I have come here as a friend, to participate in the joint effort to
establish the truth, a truly daunting task. To speak to you here today is
particularly difficult for me. I fear I am in the uncomfortable and altogether
unusual position to speak to people who may largely agree with me. If I say once
more that Yugoslavia was bombed not to benefit the Kosovo Albanians, but to
benefit NATO, you may object that, well, everybody knows this already. In the
NATO countries, however, most people do not know this already. They still
believe, because that is what they have been told over and over, that the war
was undertaken for "humanitarian" reasons, to save the Kosovo Albanians from
"ethnic cleansing" and even "genocide". Today, there is a growing awareness that
something has gone wrong. However, public criticism focuses on the way in which
the NATO action was prepared, carried out and followed up, without yet seriously
challenging the humanitarian pretense used to justify the criminal aggression.
The small minority of people who have followed events are perfectly aware
that the major reason for bombing Yugoslavia in March 1999 was to demonstrate
NATO’s new mission in time for the organization’s 50th anniversary in April.
NATO needed a new raison d'etre following the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact.
"Humanitarian Intervention"
Aggressive wars and imperial enterprises are usually carried under the
disguise of noble pretexts. The pretexts change, but each must seem plausible in
its own historical period. The notion of "humanitarian intervention" grew out of
a combination of contemporary factors: the drastic decline of progressive
political thinking at the end of the Cold War, the decline of the protective
role of the weaker national governments, the rise of "non-governmental
organizations", the multiplication of internal armed conflicts often along
ethnic lines. The idea was "in the air", a product of the Zeitgeist. In the
early nineties, it was theorized by one of the most prestigious United States
"think-tanks", the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In 1992, the
Carnegie Endowment published a book entitled Self-Determination in the New World
Order. Not terribly interesting in itself, the book is quite interesting in
retrospect because it foreshadowed, prior to the election of Clinton, the policy
of the Clinton administration in Kosovo. Not only that, it was the product of a
team of policy-makers who went on to design that policy.
So, allow me to quote: "As of mid-1992, neither the United States nor the
world community has reached a point where humanitarian calamities resulting from
self-determination claims or internal repression automatically trigger
collective military intervention to accomplish strictly humanitarian objectives.
But humanitarian intervention will become increasingly unavoidable".
In the post-Cold War world, the Carnegie Endowment study noted, "groups
within states are staking claims to independence, greater autonomy, or the
overthrow of an existing government, all in the name of self-determination". In
regard to these conflicts, "American interests and ideals compel a more active
role". The United States will have the final word as to when and how to
intervene. "The United States should seek to build a consensus within regional
and international organizations for its position, but should not sacrifice its
own judgment and principles if such a consensus fails to materialize".
What is noteworthy here is that the United States policy-makers proposed
"collective military intervention", and not any sort of diplomatic or political
solution, as the inevitable outcome of "self-determination claims", which could
be expected to meet with "internal repression". And already in 1992, this
military action was labeled "humanitarian intervention".
The statement that "humanitarian intervention will become increasingly
unavoidable" was a self-fulfilling prophecy in the unusually literal sense that
those who made it helped it come true. The 1992 book, Self-Determination in the
New World Order, was the product of a group of foreign policy specialists
brought together by the Carnegie Endowment President to work out new policy
options for the post-Cold War period. That president was Morton Abramowitz, a
former US ambassador to Thailand who has specialized in intelligence matters,
and who went on to be a champion of the "UCK" and an advisor to the Kosovo
Albanian delegation at Rambouillet; Abramowitz has since become president of the
influential Council on Foreign Relations. He is also on the board of the
International Crisis Group, the Brussels-based think-tank that formulates policy
options for the "international community" in Bosnia and Kosovo, and is financed
by both Western governments and private foundations, notably the Soros
foundation. Abramowitz may be considered the eminence grise behind the US policy
of support to the Albanian secessionists in Kosovo.
The Abramowitz group of specialists that pondered the theory of "humanitarian
intervention" in the early 1990s included Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke
and Leon Feurth, who is the foreign policy advisor to Albert Gore, now vice
president and leading candidate for the presidency to succeed Clinton. The
authors of the book I have cited on Self-Determination in the New World Order
were Morton Halperin, head of State Department policy planning under Madeleine
Albright, and David Scheffer, who is Albright’s special envoy for war crimes
issues.
So, here we have a team that first evolved the theory of "humanitarian
intervention" and then put it into practice. From what I know of American
policy-makers I would not, however, leap to the conclusion that this is a
conspiracy. Rather, I think it is closer to hubris: the arrogance of a small
elite group of people who take it upon themselves to decide how to use the
immense military power of the United States, and who never question their own
right to do so or their own righteousness. Madeleine Albright is widely quoted
as having asked rhetorically what good it was to have the world’s greatest
military power if one didn’t use it. Having found what they consider a
theoretical excuse to use that power, they eagerly seized what looked like a
perfect occasion to put it into practice. They probably convinced themselves.
They imagined that they were "present at the creation" of a new era of
unchallenged US power, that they were constructing something grandiose... when
in reality they embarked on a frightful course of destruction.
The Military-Industrial Complex
It was commonly said in Washington that "NATO must either go out of area, or
out of business". Such expenditure, and such a massive US military presence in
Western Europe were no longer credible in the defensive terms of the North
Atlantic Treaty. To survive, it was argued, NATO had to be expanded in two ways:
it needed to take in new members from the old Soviet bloc, and it needed to
extend its mission to the defense of vaguely defined "security interests" of its
members anywhere in the world.
Why was such expansion needed? Experts searching for new "strategic threats"
were unable to agree on anything convincing. But the think-tanks and
futurologists continued to search for plausible reasons because they were
handsomely paid to do so. The institutes that finance such theorizing in search
of enemies are funded by the industries and financial institutions that profit
from Pentagon contracts and related sales to US military allies.
The arms industry needs NATO. In the past half century, the
military-industrial complex has become a determining factor in US public life,
subsidizing advanced industrial research that gives the United States its
commercial advantage in high tech fields, financing political campaigns and
controlling major media. Expansion of NATO means new markets for US military
contractors. To join NATO, Central Eastern European countries will be required
to strain their budgets in order to procure the latest US military equipment.
Poland alone is expected to buy 100 to 150 new fighter planes, meaning contracts
worth some two to six billion dollars for Lockheed or Boeing. Not surprisingly,
then, the reluctance of many US congressmen to endorse NATO expansion was
overcome by a powerful lobby, the US Committee to Expand NATO, presided by
Lockheed’s chief executive. It was US private corporations and not Member State
governments that provided the US$ 8 million to pay for NATO’s birthday party
last April.
This direct interest of the arms industry goes hand in hand with the more
general US interest in strengthening NATO as the primary instrument for
maintaining US supremacy over its main economic partner, the European Union. In
the race between the EU and NATO to take over the former communist countries of
Eastern Central Europe, NATO has been winning. The militarization of the
Yugoslav crisis has greatly contributed to this militarization of European
unification.
However, President Clinton could not tell the American people: "We are going
to expand NATO to help the arms industry earn more billions of dollars". Nor
could he even say: "We are going to bomb Yugoslavia in order to assert NATO’s
predominance over the European Union as the instrument of European integration".
What he could say was "humanitarian intervention". And the amazing thing is, the
American people believed him.
The New World Order
One last citation from the Halperin-Scheffer book: "The vision of a ‘new
world order’ since 1990 has been a world with one superpower — the United States
— in which the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle, disputes are
settled peacefully, aggression is firmly met by collective resistance, and all
people are justly treated". This is a remarkable statement since it refers to a
"rule of law" that has not yet been written and implicitly rejects existing
international law as "the rule of the jungle". To quote further: "International
law — as it always has done — will respond and adjust to the behavior of nations
and the actions of multilateral institutions". The NATO war against Yugoslavia,
in flagrant violation of existing international law, announced the new
dispensation.
A major feature of this "new world order" is the demolition of national
sovereignty, an essential principle of existing international law. A world with
a single superpower is a world where only that superpower has a sure claim to
"national sovereignty" — an outdated concept for the rest. Lesser sovereign
nations are to be broken down not only from the outside, by the pressures of
economic globalization, but also and more acceptably from the inside. The reason
is simple: weak governments of small states cannot protect their resources or
the welfare of their populations from the demands of "the markets", that is,
from the interests of transnational investment capital.
The Carnegie Endowment in 1992 not only developed the theory of "humanitarian
intervention" but undertook a campaign to win over powerful media figures and
politicians to this new policy option. The Democratic presidential candidate,
Bill Clinton, with no experience or even notable interest in international
affairs, eventually turned over his foreign policy to the Abramowitz
"humanitarians". The liberal media adopted the themes with enthusiasm.
Madeleine Albright saw the Kosovo crisis as a unique opportunity to impose
the new "strategic concept" of unlimited "out of area" engagement by a major
fait accompli justified as "humanitarian intervention".
The United States is a "free market democracy" with emphasis on the "market",
which includes a "free marketplace of ideas". The marketplace is in fact largely
monopolized by economic interests and mass media, but it is free in the sense
that there is no official ideology. There is, instead, a sum total of
best-selling ideas — which have actively been promoted by opinion-making
institutions. This shifting best-seller list of ideas makes up the ideology, and
the public opinion, of the moment.
Foreign policies also need to sell themselves on a very special, bifurcated
marketplace. There is the "up market" of the professional geostrategists, the
"foreign policy community" with its think-tanks, elite clubs and sober
publications. And there is the "down market" that goes all the way down to the
British tabloids. A successful policy will be one that can sell itself both to
the up market, as being in line with dominant interests, and to the down market,
as appealing to ready stereotypes and gratifying emotions.
"Humanitarian intervention" is essentially for the down market, even though
it may involve prominent intellectuals and famous show business celebrities. For
the "up market", there is Zbigniew Brzezinski and his Realpolitik objective: "to
perpetuate America’s own dominant position for at least a generation and
preferably longer still". This involves creating a "geopolitical framework"
around NATO that will initially include Ukraine and exclude Russia. This will
establish the geostrategic basis for controlling conflict in what Brzezinski
calls "the Eurasian Balkans", the huge area between the Eastern shore of the
Black Sea to China, which includes the Caspian Sea and its petroleum resources,
a top priority for US foreign policy.
The Brzezinski geostrategy may recall the quip about NATO and Europe: "to
keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down". Can this be
exactly what the Germans want, now that Germany is back to being what its
leaders call a "normal" power? Brzezinski openly wants to prevent a juncture
between Germany and Russia that would lead to a European superpower out of US
control.
This and other considerations may suggest that the German-American strategic
partnership is not quite as solid as claimed. But for the moment it is
interesting to see how the divergent geopolitical aims and approaches of Germany
and the United States have combined to tear apart Yugoslavia in what I would
call a two-phase movement.
Destruction in Two Phases
Transforming Yugoslavia from a medium-sized independent state, with a unique
reputation in the region for resistance to foreign empires, into a series of
ethnic statelets whose economic assets can be easily expropriated and whose
territory can be used for NATO bases on the way to Ukraine and the Caspian
certainly fits in generally to the Brzezinski scheme of things.
However, it seems that the initial support to secessionist movements in
Yugoslavia came from Germany, not from the United States. And again in Kosovo,
there are strong indications that Germany was the first to provide support for
the Albanian secessionist movement, including the "UCK". In both cases, Germany
was the first to intervene, but the United States, with agile opportunism,
managed to take control of the game and play it to American advantage. The game
is not over.
In this two-phase movement, Germany and its traditional volkisch — which
might be roughly translated as ethnic nationalist or separatist — approach to
Central Eastern Europe dominates the first phase of attack against the targeted
nation-state. In the second phase, the United States takes over with a
rhetorical "multiculturalism" justifying a takeover of political and economic
decision-making by the "international community".
In Germany, the volkisch approach was flagrant in the right-wing press
campaign of 1991 and 1992 championing the Croats as "real Europeans" in contrast
to the Serbs, stigmatized as Oriental barbarians with no place in civilized
Europe. This was a revival of the traditional German policy toward the Balkans
of divide and rule through emphasis on ethnic identities, and manipulation of
Croatian and Albanian nationalism in particular to weaken Serbia. In addition,
German policy toward Yugoslavia reflected the influence and interests of the
powerful associations of Vertriebene, representing over twelve million Germans
and their descendants who were expelled from Eastern European countries after
World War II. It has been in their quite conscious interest to stigmatize
"ethnic cleansing" as a peculiarly Serbian, that is, Slavic practice, equivalent
to genocide. This stigmatization strengthens the hand of ethnic Germans in their
efforts to regain their property and positions in Poland, the Sudetenland and
elsewhere. With the rise of the right-wing leader Jorg Haider, Slovenia is under
increasing pressure to satisfy Austrian claims. It is clearly easier to bring
such pressure on small states eager above all to join the European Union than on
a big Yugoslavia with a tradition of independent non-alignment.
In the United States, the origins of the policy toward Yugoslavia are much
more confused. The influence of certain lobbies has pushed US policy in the
German direction, but the underlying ideology and interests are somewhat
different. Serbs who were not surprised to see Germany designate them as the
enemy have plunged into consternation by the anti-Serb turn of US policy.
Lobbies are a big part of the explanation. In American politics, ethnic lobbies
can decide elections, and politicians pay a lot of attention to their demands.
The extraordinary influence of the Cuban exile lobby in Florida is the most
striking example. But lobbies of anti-communist exiles from Eastern Europe —
often including Nazi collaborators — have also had a very negative influence. In
the case of Yugoslavia, the nationalist Croatian lobby was extremely active.
Together, the Croatian and Albanian separatist lobbies reinforced each other’s
credibility by presenting themselves as victims and stigmatizing Yugoslavia as a
mistake of history, a prison of peoples oppressed by Serbs.
These anti-Yugoslav, anti-Serb lobbies were able to extend their influence
without any serious contradiction. There were no comparable pro-Yugoslav or
pro-Serb lobbies, inasmuch as Serb emigre communities had no project for getting
US support to change Yugoslavia. Political divisions between Serbs persist in
emigration. Even today, when Serbian-Americans are suffering from the
demonization of the Serbian people, there is still no coherent, effective
Serbian lobby in the United States.
Using professional public relations techniques, the Croatian and Albanian
lobbies prepared congressmen and editors to interpret the Yugoslav conflicts as
an attack by Serbs on everybody else. By supporting the Albanians in particular,
the United States has adopted an ethnic policy parallel to that of Germany. In
Kosovo, the armed Albanian separatist rebels provided the "self-determination
claims" causing "humanitarian calamities" needed to trigger "collective military
intervention".
US support for the Bosnian Muslims was of a different nature. United States
support for the Bosnian Muslims apparently had less to do with Yugoslavia than
with the opportunity it offered to pursue a strategic alliance with such
important allied Muslim states as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, and to
prove that despite its unswerving support to the State of Israel, America really
loved Muslims. And indeed, the United States has repeatedly favored Islamic
political currents as an effective counter balance to nationalisms that risk
endorsing protectionist economic policies. As an added bonus, support for Muslim
Bosnia could prove a thorn in the side of Germany, which had moved so rapidly to
assert its influence in Croatia.
The US sponsorship of a Muslim Bosnia was the first part of "phase two":
support for independent Bosnia-Herzegovina was definitely not volkisch but was
cast in terms of multiculturalism. In this respect, the sporadic Serbian attempt
to gain Western sympathy by recalling Serbia’s historic role as bulwark of
Christian civilization against encroaching Islam misfired badly. It appealed
only to a small and isolated fringe on the far right. For the most part,
contemporary public opinion in the West is too ignorant about the Balkan past to
understand the historical basis for this argument and instead projects its own
past — the Crusades, colonialism, exploitation of Muslim immigrant workers —
onto the Serbs. Support for the Muslims was even a sort of atonement for past
Christian sins. Izetbegovic was celebrated as a champion and martyr of tolerance
and multiculturalism. The Serbs thus became the scapegoat for the bad conscience
of that part of the West — including precisely the liberal currents
traditionally allied with the Serbs — that is more ashamed than proud of its
"Christian heritage".
The New Crusade
Despite the role of right-wing nationalist movements in the dismantling of
the old Yugoslavia, the NATO crusade against Belgrade has been pursued most
vigorously by center left political formations in the NATO countries in the name
of "humanitarian intervention". This represents the second phase, with its
American ideology and harmony with the goals of US-sponsored globalization.
The political center left represented by this generation of American liberal
and European social democratic leaders, in the absence of effective economic
policies to promote the social justice they traditionally claim to serve, have
in the past decade found a successful role for themselves as ideological
apologists for globalization. These politicians are the ideal salesmen for
globalization with a human face, in the name of human rights without borders as
the virtuous cause they need in order to distinguish themselves from "the
right", presumed to be indifferent to human suffering. Obliged to accept tax
breaks for big investors, mass dismissals of factory workers and cutbacks in
social programs, in terms of domestic policy the "third way" retains its
position on the left primarily by championing cultural diversity. The enemy can
no longer be capitalism, accepted as the best and only socio-economic system.
The enemy now is nationalism, portrayed as the source of all modern evil. For
the "third way" of the left, we are living in a world where dominant economic
forces, known euphemistically as "the markets" are neutral and innocent arbiters
of all things, whose influence can only be healthy and even benevolent. Like
theologians of other religions, since their god — the Market — is almighty and
good, they are left with the problem of evil in the world. This must come
exclusively from bad people who adopt wrong ideas, and foremost among these
wrong ideas is "nationalism". The erstwhile champions of working class
internationalism thus transform themselves into champions of international
financial capital. This ensures them much more favorable media coverage than
their predecessors.
In the United States, an extremely nationalist country where schoolchildren
are required to pledge allegiance to the flag every morning, anti-nationalism is
today the dominant ideology — for the rest of the world. The Yale-educated US
Deputy Secretary of State, Nelson Strobridge ("Strobe") Talbott the Third,
perfectly reflects current American ruling class attitudes when he writes: "I'll
bet that within the next hundred years (...) nationhood as we know it will be
obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority". The origin of
that authority is implicit in the title of this essay, "America Abroad; The
Birth of the Global Nation", published in the July 20, 1992 edition of Time
magazine. Making the matter quite clear, he adds the observation that such
multilateral financial institutions as the International Monetary Fund and the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade "can be seen as the protoministries of
trade, finance and development for a united world".
The political editor of the New York Times, Thomas Friedman,
celebrated the start of the bombing of Yugoslavia with a notorious article
announcing frankly that "the hidden hand of the market will never work without a
hidden fist" and that "for globalism to work, America can’t be afraid to act
like the almighty superpower that it is". Friedman illustrated his praise of
globalization as the ultimate guarantor of world peace by a detail that must be
particularly appreciated here in Belgrade: "It’s true", he wrote, "that no two
countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war since they each got
their McDonald's". He called this "the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict
Prevention". Except that it is not true. To be sure, with all its McDonald's,
Serbia did not attack the United States, but those McDonald’s did not prevent
the United States from attacking Serbia.
In Europe, anti-nationalism has been indispensable in the promotion of
European unification. The more the European Union has been reduced to an
instrument of transnational business and finance, the more it has been
necessary, in public rhetoric, to stress its noble mission of putting an end to
the national antagonisms that led to major European wars. The nation-state has
been stigmatized as the cause of war, oppression and violation of human rights.
This interpretation overlooks both the persistence of war in the absence of
strong states and the historic function of the nation state as the most
effective existing framework for the social pact enabling citizens to build
structures of social protection and cultural development, as well as to develop
legal systems able to provide equality before the law and to defend citizens’
rights. Demonizing as "nationalism" the only existing context for the
functioning of institutionalized democracy obviously facilitates the dictates of
"the markets", which are innocent of nationalist prejudice.
In this regard, we can see why, among the various "nationalisms" that have
accompanied the collapse of Yugoslavia, the only "bad" nationalism in the
NATOland perspective has been Serbian nationalism. Various factors may be
mentioned, such as the strength of the Croatian nationalist and Albanian
lobbies, the traditional German-Austrian policy, the belief — whether true or
not — that Serbia was more attached to socialism than the other parts of
Yugoslavia, and even, allow me to say, certain bad mistakes or misdeeds made by
Serbian nationalists, who are human like everybody else. However, the
fundamental political fact is that Serbian nationalism is inextricably linked to
the Serbian view of their role as state-builders in the Balkans. This was an
asset to the Western allies at the start of the twentieth century. But now is a
time when the great powers are not trying to build states, but to weaken them in
favor of "the markets".
Germany and the United States
In the interplay of German and American propaganda against Yugoslavia, a very
particular role has been played by the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer.
The traditional right-wing ethnic or volkisch German policy was contrary to the
anti-nationalist liberal ideological climate of post-Cold War Europe. True, it
was alarmingly successful in Germany in gaining support for Croatian secession,
but the Serbien muss sterbien revival was not translatable in the rest of the
European Union (except, of course, Austria) and was totally unsuitable for
winning consensus for German military intervention in the Balkans. In order to
reverse Germany’s post-World War II policy of never sending military forces
against another country, it was necessary to come up with arguments that silence
the peace movement whose conspicuous blossoming in the 1980s had done so much to
create the image of a new, peaceful Germany the Russians could trust with
reunification. For this task, nobody could be better suited than the German
Greens’ chosen leader — chosen, incidentally, above all by the German media, who
for well over a decade had "discovered" in Fischer a "realist" to celebrate,
thus strengthening his position within his own party. From the time the Greens
were first elected to the Bundestag in 1993, the German media featured Fischer’s
clever speeches and contrasted favorably his "realism" with the supposed
"fundamentalism" of his more principled colleagues. Almost as much as his friend
in Frankfurt, Dany Cohn-Bendit, Joschka Fischer owed his political success to
having been selected by the media for star status. This of course has much to do
with talent in expressing ideas that suit the economic interests controlling
those media.
During the peace movement of the 1980s, Fischer defended NATO against critics
within his own movement by an anti-nationalist argument: the "keeping Germany
down" function. German nationalism, he argued, could best be kept under control
within the NATO framework. This was not very original, and indeed largely echoed
positions within the Social Democratic Party. Much more original was his
argument, as it emerged in the mid-1990s, in favor of sending German military
forces to Yugoslavia. The argument was simplicity itself, and went like this:
"There are two ‘never again’ principles in the Green identity. One is ‘never
again war’, and the other is ‘never again Auschwitz’... when they clash, as in
Bosnia — or later Kosovo — one has to be sacrificed to the other". Thus all that
was needed was a massacre, real or staged, labeled "Auschwitz" and the German
Luftwaffe could take to the skies and bomb Belgrade just as in 1941, this time
alongside the Americans.
Fischer’s line of argumentation and his attachment to "multiculturalism"
produced a rationale for aggression against Serbia far more acceptable to his
NATO allies than that of his conservative predecessors. Indeed, the enthusiasm
in Washington over the surprising rise of this self-educated, one-time
street-fighting "revolutionary" is so amazing as to suggest some sort of prior
meeting of minds. Before Fischer even took office, Richard Holbrooke declared
that he would make "a great foreign minister". Fischer earned his place in the
highest councils of power by his remarkable success in changing the look and the
official rationale of German policy toward Yugoslavia from its original focus on
ethnic identities to something quite different but still peculiarly German — a
sort of penance for Auschwitz. This was a properly German excuse for
"humanitarian intervention".
In this way, German and American elements have merged in the ideological
construction used to justify military aggression against the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia and occupation of Kosovo. The pretext had to be extreme to justify
violation of virtually every relevant treaty or international convention.
The success of this "humanitarian" lie can be illustrated by a paradox. The
protests in Seattle last December against the World Trade Organization showed
that a huge new popular movement is developing to oppose "globalization". The
people who went into the streets to denounce the WTO should have been
demonstrating earlier against the NATO war in Yugoslavia. The fact that most of
them did not proves that they did not understand that the NATO assault on
Yugoslavia was precisely an integral part of that forced globalization they
oppose. The people who should be opposing NATO’s war policy have been
temporarily confused and demobilized by the "humanitarian" claims of the center
left hypocrites in office in most of the NATO countries.
This makes our task clear: we need to make our people understand that NATO is
the military arm of an unjust, undemocratic and destructive economic
globalization. The war against Yugoslavia was deliberately launched by Madeleine
Albright and her colleagues in order to initiate a new phase of imperialist
intervention, more dangerous and destructive than the imperialism of the past.
This is the truth that must be recognized for justice to be done.
Dr. Diana Johnstone is a journalist from the United States of America.