BOMBINGS WERE NO 'ACCIDENT'
NATO hits civilian targets as popular resistance
grows
By Fred Goldstein
With each new report of another so-called U.S./NATO
"mistake" in which civilians have been killed by missiles and
bombs, it becomes clearer that the military strategy of the
imperialist planners is now directed heavily at the civilian
population. War crime is being piled on war crime. Buses,
neighborhoods, factories, hospitals, clinics are destroyed. The
latest attack on the electrical power grid knocked out 70
percent of the electricity in the country.
This criminal act of devastation aimed at the civilian
population was NATO's answer to President Slobodan Milosevic's
generous gesture of releasing three captured U.S. soldiers at
the suggestion of the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Even the controlled big-business press can't hide the truth.
According to the Washington Post of April 29, "Belgrade
experienced heavy NATO bombing early Wednesday morning, hours
after NATO bombs had killed at least 20 civilians in the
southern Serbian city of Surdulica, Serbian state television
and western news agencies said. In what appears to have been an
accident of war, as many as 300 houses were destroyed ... 11
people were wounded and 30 were missing in the attack."
The Los Angeles Times of May 2 reported that "a NATO air
strike blew a civilian bus in half Saturday afternoon on a
bridge in the Kosovo village [of Luzane] killing at least 24
people and critically wounding 16 others. At least four of the
victims were ethnic Albanian children...."
As ambulances raced to and from the burning wreckage, "a
fighter-bomber struck again with two bombs that hit a short
bridge" about two miles away. A small group of journalists
"watched another detonation minutes later when an ambulance was
trying to cross. Shrapnel from the blast wounded a civilian
medical technician and prevented other ambulances from reaching
the carnage."
When NATO bombed the power grids in Belgrade and other
cities, it said they were strictly military. Hospitals, for
example, had their own backup systems, so no one should
worry.
But an Associated Press dispatch of May 3, printed in the
Washington Post, described how "anxious nurses shuttled from
bed to bed at the Institute for Prematurely Born Infants hoping
backup generators would keep their tiny patients warm and
supplied with oxygen enough to stay alive."
The backup generators last for only two to three hours and
give limited power. "If we want those babies to survive, we
need a constant power supply," said Leposava Milicevic, the
Serbian Minister for Public Health. Furthermore, generators
require fuel and the hospital fuel supply had been
destroyed.
Multiply this crisis by the thousands that face other
patients, elderly people needing elevators, food destroyed by
non-functional refrigeration systems, etc., and you get a
massive attack on the entire civilian population.
Another New York Times report of April 30 said that
"although markets are still full of produce, people worry, too,
about the quality of the food and produce being grown.
Fertilizer plants have been bombed, as have chemical plants
that are said to be spewing toxic fumes.
"The Serbian environment minister, Branislav Lazic, said
Thursday that large quantities of chlorine and other noxious
gases had been released into the air because of the bombing of
a refinery and petrochemical plant at Pancevo." The damage
"knows no borders," he said, and may affect the rest of the
Balkans.
This latest atrocity follows the bombing of the television
stations, the destruction of factories and office buildings
leaving 500,000 workers unemployed, the destruction of bridges,
railroads, highways, museums, monuments and religious sites,
all supposedly by "accident" or in pursuit of "military"
objectives. It amounts to a massive war on the entire people of
Yugoslavia.
Murder of civilians is no `mistake'
It is the purest hypocrisy for Pentagon and NATO authorities
to continually express their "regrets" at so-called "collateral
damage." In truth, this is a systematic strategy of war by the
U.S.-led NATO military forces. Furthermore, it is an inevitable
strategy under the circumstances of a war of national
resistance like the one the Yugoslav government is now engaged
in.
At Rambouillet, the Yugoslav people were told they must
submit to an armed occupation by U.S.-led NATO forces and allow
them to set up a NATO-controlled sector in Kosovo, which is
part of Yugoslavia. The present struggle is a war to maintain
their sovereignty and national independence.
The Pentagon perhaps thought that the attacks on the
military structure of the Yugoslav Army would bring about a
rapid collapse and capitulation. But after the initial
destruction of planes on the ground, anti-aircraft positions,
barracks, munitions depots and fuel supplies, the high command
of imperialism found they were being deluded by their own
propaganda.
Their propaganda barrage was to focus on demonizing
President Slobodan Milosevic. The war would be laid entirely at
his doorstep. NATO would then sit back and wait for Milosevic
and the military to crumble and capitulate. But despite wave
after wave of cruise missiles and thousands of sorties flown by
F-117s, F-116s and B-2 bombers, the population of Yugoslavia
united behind the struggle.
Where bridges went down, ferries were erected. When the
television station was bombed out, ingenious technicians had it
up in a few hours. When strategic buildings were bombed, their
staffs and offices had already been moved and were
functioning.
Heroic workers repaired damage; medical workers came to the
rescue. Where roads were out, new routes were found. The
Yugoslav masses began to improvise under the war-time regime
and have so far adapted to every escalation imposed by the war
criminals. All the capitalist reporters have noted that, under
this enormous bombardment, there is no sense of panic in the
cities--only sorrow and rage at the U.S. and NATO.
The brass and the Clinton administration, which entered this
war with great gusto, soon found that their problem was not the
Yugoslav military, which is enormously outgunned by the
trillions of dollars in military hardware of the combined NATO
forces. They found that the military and government resistance
was just an expression of the resistance of the vast majority
of the Yugoslav population of Serbia and Montenegro, including
all 26 nationalities living there.
As for the military, the New York Times of April 30 admitted
that "American officials in Washington ... characterized as
`greatly exaggerated' claims by Western leaders and NATO
commanders that the bombing had damaged Yugoslav Army morale
and hampered the ability to conscript troops."
The Times quotes an American military official "with long
years of experience in the region" as saying that "indications
are that young men are responding to the draft now in
significantly higher numbers than in the past." The officer
corps has been "revitalized" by the struggle and by its ability
to endure and improvise.
War against a whole people
This is the basis for NATO's war against the civilian
population. The military must inevitably try to destroy the
spirit of the population and its collaboration in the military
effort. As Napoleon Bonaparte said, in war morale is to
materiel as a hundred is to one. The morale of the masses is
the main obstacle to the air war victory dreamed of by the
generals. And the morale of the population is what makes a
ground war so dangerous for the U.S/ NATO allies.
This is totally consistent with the previous wars waged by
imperialist oppressors.
When Hitler bombed Belgrade in April 1941 prior to his
occupation of Serbia, he ordered that no factories be destroyed
because he wanted to use them for the military-industrial
machine of German imperialism. His orders were to bomb the
civilian population.
This was to terrorize the masses into accepting the
occupation. But immediately after the occupation, the Partisan
resistance began its guerrilla campaign against the Nazi
occupiers. In 1942 Hitler ordered 100 Serb males executed for
every Nazi soldier killed by the resistance, and 50 for every
soldier wounded.
This was supposed to destroy the fighting morale of the
resistance. But the Nazis were eventually defeated at the cost
of two million lives.
The U.S. tried the same strategy in Vietnam, first sending
in military advisers to organize a puppet army against the
forces of the National Liberation Front. Soon, the Pentagon was
setting villages aflame, moving populations into concentration
camps called "strategic hamlets." They found they were fighting
against a war of national resistance to an imperialist
takeover. They quickly devised a strategy--a failed
strategy--of fighting the civilian population.
During the Korean War, the U.S.-led UN forces bombed every
single structure above one story and millions were killed in a
war against the population. The Korean people were fighting to
determine their socialist destiny, a struggle they still carry
on to this day against the designs of the U.S. government.
And the struggle against Iraq, while touted as a war against
Saddam Hussein, really was a war against the Iraqi people, who
have steadfastly refused to submit to neocolonial domination.
The war began with the bombing of Baghdad, a merciless invasion
and, for the past eight years, economic sanctions which have
killed many more people than bombing.
All these countries, whether socialist or bourgeois
nationalist, have in common that they are fighting to retain
their independence from a takeover by imperialism. And
imperialism, feeling that it has been set free by the collapse
of the USSR, is enraged at the resistance and will not hesitate
at any war crime to get its way.
The pretext that NATO went to war to protect the Albanian
people of Kosovo is patently manufactured. Nothing has caused
the Albanians more harm than the U.S. bombing of their
territory, their capital, their mosques, their university and
their people. They are displaced because of a war of
devastation started by a ruthless power that is arming and
training the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army.
In one year Washington has brought devastation to the
province of Kosovo, maneuvering the people there into a trap
between the Yugoslav Army, which is defending its territory
against an imperialist-backed separatist insurgency, and the
KLA.
Jesse Jackson asked the U.S. government to "take the moral
high ground" and to "give peace a chance" when he persuaded
President Milosevic to give up the captured U.S. soldiers as a
gesture of good will.
The U.S. answered the Yugoslav gesture with the bombing of a
bus and the power outage of the entire country. Moral appeals
will never stop imperialism. Only the organized resistance of
the anti-war movement together with the resistance of the
Yugoslav people will stop them from continuing this brutal
war.
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