Verdict

The attack on Yugoslavia constitutes the most brazen international aggression since the Nazis attacked Poland to prevent "Polish atrocities" against Germans. Walter J. Rockler, Former Prosecutor to Nurnberg war crimes trials, in a letter to Chicago Tribune.

So you thought this war was about human rights?

"If we're going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key.... That's what this Kosovo thing is all about."

U.S. President Bill Clinton in a speech delivered the day before his televised address to the American people about the crisis in Kosovo. Quoted in "The Case Against Intervention in Kosovo", by Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne, The Nation Magazine, April 19, 1999 issue.

Chronicle of a non-advertised ethnic cleansing

''The nationalists have a two-point platform, first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania."

Becir Hoti, an executive secretary of the Communist Party of Kosovo, quoted in a 1982 article of NYTimes.

Echos from another humanitarian intervention

'We're not inflicting pain on these fuckers,' Clinton said, softly at first. 'When people kill us, they should be killed in greater numbers.' Then, with his face reddening, his voice rising, and his fist pounding his thigh, he leaned into Tony [Lake, then his national security adviser], as if it was his fault. 'I believe in killing people who try to hurt you.. And I can't believe we're being pushed around by these two-bit pricks.'"

--Clinton ordering the bombing of civilian targets in Somalia, as quoted in All Too Human, George Stephanopoulos

(from http://www.counterpunch.org)

Án educational miracle

Mr Cook has also assured us that he "knows" that the Serbs executed 20 Albanian teachers in front of their pupils in Goden. What he does not appear to know is that Goden is a village with just 200 inhabitants - yet, it seems, with a teacher/pupil ratio beyond even the fantasies of the NUT conference fringe.

Mick Hume, editor of LM magazine, in the Times, April 15.

The relativity of time according to Prof. Albright

"I don't see this as a long-term operation. I think that this is . . . achievable within a relatively short period of time."
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, March 24

"We never expected this to be over quickly. The President himself has said, 'This is not a 30-second commercial.' We are in there for a long time."
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on "Meet the Press" a few days later
Both quotes by Richmond Times-Dispatch, Monday, April 19, 1999

At least, they died in good faith

"The pilot dropped the bomb in good faith, as you would expect of a trained pilot from a democratic NATO country to do". Jamie Shea, about the NATO bombing against a Kosovar refugees' convoy, April 15.
Presumably, dead refugees should be proud that they were killed by a trained pilot from a democratic country who was acting in good faith and not left alive by some semi-civilised undemocratic Serb thugs.

Almost in rage?

The bombing campaign--15,000 bombs and missiles so far--is working, says Germany's Gen. Klaus Naumann, NATO's senior military officer. "We will see how they will feel after a few more weeks and months or what have you of continuously pounding them into pieces."
Quoted in the Slate, 5/5/99

Tell me whom you consider as liberator...

An excerpt from a Kosovo Liberation Front page dedicated to the history of Kosovo according to them:
As Germany overtook Yugoslavia in 1941, the Kosovar people were liberated by the Germans. All Albanian territories of this state, such as Kosova, western Macedonia and border regions under Montenegro, were re-united into Albania proper. Albanian schools, governmental administration, press and radio were re-established.
(See: http://www.klpm.org/question.htm)

Oppressed minority or nothing-balls?

When ethnic Albanian guerrillas originally rejected the peace settlement fashioned by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a friend told Newsweek that "She's angry at everyone-- the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO." Rather than question its own handiwork, another Clinton administration official raged: "Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothing-balls [the Albanians] to do something entirely in their own interest-- which is to say yes to an interim agreement--and they defy us."
Quoted by Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute in article Reinforcing Failure

Short on humanism

"I think no power to your refrigerator, no gas to your stove, you can't get to work because the bridge is down - the bridge on which you held your rock concerts -- and you all stood with targets on your heads. That needs to disappear at 3 o'clock in the morning.".

USAF Gen. Michael Short, quoted by the Observer in "Belgrade open for business as usual" (May, 16)

Lapsus linguae

More incidents are virtually inevitable. "This is war," said Maj. Gen. Charles Wald, the operations director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared at the Pentagon briefing.
NATO nations, however, insist that they are not waging a war against Yugoslavia but are merely conducting a military campaign to pressure the Milosevic to accept a settlement. General Wald quickly realized his slip of the tongue.
"It's combat, as I said," he immediately corrected himself.

Quoted by Michael R. Gordon in the NYTimes article "NATO, Describing Village as Army Post, Admits Strike" (May 16, 1999)

Those omniscient Yugoslavs

``The responsibility for that tragedy rests with the Serb forces who rounded up those refugees from the hillside, forced them back to Korisa and in particular forced those 100 refugees not to return to their homes but to settle, squeezed together, in those two compounds'' Robin Cook justifying the Korisa bombing, as quoted by Reuters dispatch, May 17.
Million dollar question: How did the Serbs know where to place the human shields? Is the Yugoslav Army omniscient or was it just a lucky guess that NATO was going to hit Korise thinking it was a military command post?

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"We are not romantic people! We are the Sega generation"

NATO pilot replying to CNN reporter's question whether he had any qualms about killing innocent civilians.

Justice according to US/NATO

"You're more likely to see the UN building dismantled brick-by-brick and thrown into the Atlantic than to see NATO pilots go before a UN tribunal" Rep. Lester Munson of the International Relations Committee, quoted by the National Post in article "We'll never hand pilots to Arbour: U.S. official", May 22.

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