From Yugoslavia to Iraq to Sudan

Eight years ago on March 24, 1999, the U.S. began bombing the city of Pristina in Kosovo, the opening of the 79-day war on Yugoslavia.

The brutality of the U.S. bombers is intentionally forgotten by the big U.S. media. U.S. bombs and rockets targeted civilians, hitting passenger trains, destroying the chemical industry, and poisoning the Danube River. Schools were bombed as were hospitals as well as television broadcast centers during live newscasts. As has been documented since that time, U.S. generals told the Yugoslav leaders that unless they surrendered, the capital city of Belgrade would be carpet-bombed so heavily that nothing would be left standing.

Now, eight years later, this war is not being described as the crime it was.

Like the U.S. war on Iraq, the war on Yugoslavia was based on lies. The lies were told by President Bill Clinton, his cabinet members and his generals.

The big lie was that the war was necessary to “stop genocide,” even though there was no genocide to stop.

Genocide has a legal definition under international law, and the U.S. imperialists claimed that gave them legal justification for their war on Yugoslavia. Genocide in that case means the massive, systematic killing of an “ethnic, racial or religious group” by a state power.

The U.S. sanctions on Iraq before the war that killed more than a million Iraqis probably qualifies under this definition as genocide. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has involved the massive killing of Iraqis.

But in a ruling that also comes eight years after the war, the International Court of Justice—though packed with U.S.-friendly judges—could find no basis for charging the Yugoslav government or the Serbian government with genocide. The headlines, put into the back pages of the newspapers and mostly ignored on the TV news, said: “Serbia not guilty of genocide.”

The ruling did not say there were no deaths, that there was no brutality. It says that there was no genocide being carried out by the Yugoslav government, which was the basis that Clinton and the Pentagon launched the 1999 war.

The significance of this should not be lost. Just as there were no “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, there was no genocide in Yugoslavia. But the Clinton administration was threatening war unless Yugoslavia surrendered to a U.S. takeover. The reports of genocide were intentionally whipped up in order to create a justification for the war. This is the same formula the Bush administration used for its war on Iraq.

Similar formulas have been used to justify other imperialist wars. And will be used again in the future unless the imperialists are stopped.

Already claims of “genocide” in Darfur are being used to whip up calls for imperialist military intervention in Sudan. The well-financed “Save Darfur Coalition” is advancing this agenda. But for whom?

To know what is happening in Darfur it is necessary to look at the history of British imperialism and U.S. intervention in the region as well as Sudan’s rich oil resources. It is not an accident that the calls for imperialist military intervention would put the U.S. in control of the oil region of Sudan.

Whenever the imperialists start pointing the finger elsewhere and shouting “genocide,” that’s when you know that they have a secret agenda. And it has nothing to do with anything humanitarian.