Protests over savage bombing spread worldwide
By Gary
Wilson
Protests against NATO's attack on Yugoslavia are spreading
worldwide. Demonstrations have been held in every major city of
the U.S. and Europe.
A worldwide day of action against the war is set for April
17, with protests planned in over 100 cities.
Demonstrations have taken place every day across Yugoslavia.
In Belgrade, 15,000-20,000 rallied on April 3. Demonstrators
have been wearing target signs with the words "NATO target"
pinned to their chests.
Thousands of sleep-deprived residents carrying placards and
waving flags gathered in Belgrade's Republic Square for a "rock
against the bombs" protest, the French Press Agency reported
April 4. "Sorry, we are still singing" was the placard seen
most often in the crowd of mostly young demonstrators.
In the Montenegro capital Podgorica, an anti-NATO outdoor
rock concert April 4 drew over 20,000.
The Los Angeles Times reported: "Danica Sokovic, 23, came to
the concert wrap ped in a flag of the former Yugoslav
federation and wearing a paper bull's-eye target, which has
been adopted as a symbol by anti-NATO protesters across the
country.
"`We still have the former Yugoslavia in our heart,' Sokovic
said. She displayed a hand-held poster with one side saying, in
a reference to the [NATO] bombing next to the maternity
hospital: `Are the 70 babies responsible?'"
NATO's "precision" bombing of the Interior Ministry building
in downtown Belgrade caused particular outrage across
Yugoslavia because the bombs hit right next to a maternity
hospital, forcing a nighttime evacuation of newborn babies into
a bomb shelter. The headlines the next day across the country
were, "Bombs on babies."
Over 80,000 marched through the streets of Rome April 3
chanting: "Enough of NATO bombing, no to war, yes to
peace."
On April 5, over 150,000 joined "NATO out!" protests
nationwide in Germany. The anti-war march in Berlin drew some
20,000.
Club-wielding Belgian police arrested more than 200 as they
broke up an anti-war protest outside NATO's headquarters on
April 4. Michel Collon, a journalist with the Belgian newspaper
Solidaire and author of "Liar's Poker: The Great Powers,
Yugoslavia and the Next Wars," was pulled off the line by the
Brussels special police force, taken into custody, and placed
in a van, where he was beaten until unconscious. He suffered
broken ribs and a broken collar bone.
Collon is a prominent opponent of the war who was on a
speaking tour in February across the United States. The tour
was sponsored by the International Action Center in an effort
to build public awareness of the growing threat of war.
Every day of the bombing, anti-NATO protests have been held
in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. Daily demonstrations have
also been held in Greece, where workers staged a two-hour
general strike against the war on April 2.
Opposition is wide throughout Asia, with India, China and
Vietnam all condemning the bombing. Vietnam lost 3 million
people during the U.S. war there in the 1960s and 1970s. To
Vietnam, the war against Yugoslavia looks much the same.
"NATO is made up of countries like Britain, the U.S., Spain,
Germany and Italy that have a long history of colonial rule
over much of the world, and they have no right to militarily
impose their views on other nations," an unnamed Asian official
said in a March 29 IPS report.
In Tokyo, Japan, the first protest of the NATO bombing was
held on April 2 by InterBand, a number of women's groups
helping refugees in the former Yugoslavia, and non-governmental
organizations involved in security issues. Two days later, 400
anti-war activists from all over Japan came to Tokyo for a
meeting and demonstration to protest the "New Guidelines" for
Japanese-U.S. military collaboration. They tie the Japanese
military to U.S. aggressive moves anywhere in the world. The
protest also warned of the impending end of Article 9 of the
Japanese Constitution, which bans war.
In South Africa, the South African Communist Party has
strongly denounced NATO's bombing.
The U.S. media have yet to report on Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic's request that Nelson Mandela become a
mediator in negotiations to end the war. The U.S. government
has refused to respond to this request.
The International Action Center web site lists over 50
cities across the United States where demonstrations have been
held. On April 7, thousands are expected to demonstrate outside
NBC-TV headquarters in New York City. The call for the
demonstration declares: "NBC is owned by GE, one of the biggest
military contractors and suppliers of jet engines to NATO.
Instead of telling the truth about the U.S. war against
Yugoslavia, NBC serves as a public relations firm for the
Pentagon and the major war profiteers."
The role of the media
The war has revealed the role of the media, which serves up
Pentagon and State Department war propaganda as news.
As Norman Solomon noted in his Media Beat column, "About an
hour before the first missiles struck Yugoslavia, viewers heard
a Fox News Channel anchor make an understandable slip: `Let's
bring in our Pentagon spokesman -- excuse me, our Pentagon
correspondent.'"
Lies, even blatant lies, have filled the big
business-controlled news media. NBC News reported that Kosovo
Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova--the most popular Albanian
leader in Kosovo--had been shot and was believed to be dead.
NATO "confirmed" that he had disappeared.
When Rugova then turned up on Belgrade television, meeting
with Yugoslav President Slobodon Milosevic and denoun cing
NATO's bombing, officials in Washington were apoplectic. Rather
than just say that they had lied about their earlier reports,
they tried to claim that the Yugoslav TV reports were
false.
Finally, on April 5 Rugova met with report ers and the
Russian ambassador in his house in the Kosovo capital of
Pristina, according to a French Press Agency reporter who was
there. He repeated his demand that NATO's "bombing should be
halted." When asked if the claim made by NATO and U.S.
officials that his meeting with Milosevic had been faked,
Rugova replied, "I was in Belgrade."
For opposing the bombing of his own country, Rugova was
branded a traitor by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army,
which has ordered its forces to kill him on sight.
NATO had reported that Fehmi Agani, an adviser to Rugova,
had been killed along with four other Kosovo Albanian leaders.
All are alive and well. Time magazine Pentagon reporter Mark
Thompson admitted, "Plainly, your credibility is dented if
people you said were dead show up alive three days later.
Clearly there have been a lot of false reports."
As television cameras were showing streams of young men
crossing the border from Kosovo into Montenegro and Macedonia,
the TV voices were repeating a NATO claim that all "Kosovo
Albanian men between the ages of 16 and 60" had been rounded up
and presumably massacred.
The Boston Globe printed an article retracting earlier
reports it had carried on this, although it didn't say it was a
retraction or that it had printed blatant propaganda lies. The
Globe reported April 3 that "the mystery was not simply where
the men had gone." No, the mystery was why they were "streaming
across the border from Kosovo."
The reason, it turns out, may be that the Kosovo Liberation
Army was forcing all men in Kosovo to join its ranks or face
death, according to reports in the Italian media. The Globe
called them fleeing KLA soldiers.
The Globe report continued that the appearance of "so many
of the presumed dead raised broader questions about the quality
of the information NATO officials receive and distribute to the
world." This is an admission that the Globe and other major
papers simply repeat whatever NATO tells them to report.
CNN, the war network, puts on "experts" from the U. S.
Institute for Peace to "explain" what is happening in
Yugoslavia. But the USIP is not a peace organization of any
kind.
The Institute for Peace is funded by the U.S. government and
secretly tied to the CIA. The head of the USIP is Chester
Crocker. Under him is Max Kampelman.
Crocker was a Reagan administration official whose policy of
"constructive engagement" strengthened and emboldened the
racist apartheid government of South Africa.
Kampelman was also a Reagan administration official who has
spent much of the 1990s advocating the breakup of Yugoslavia
and a NATO military occupation of the Balkans. The USIP was set
up by Congress with a primary goal of supporting the breakup of
Yugoslavia and supporting the overthrow of the Yugoslav
government.
Recently, a new sponsor has appeared on CNN's prime news
hours: Lockheed Martin, maker of the F-117 Nighthawk, the
stealth fighter bomber shot down over Yugoslavia.
NATO's terror bombing
The bombing campaign is clearly meant to terrorize all the
people of Yugoslavia. It is meant to topple the government by
intimidation with the threat of annihilation. The Chicago
Tribune reported April 5, "The latest phase of bombings against
urban center infrastructure appears to be directly affecting
civilians more than soldiers."
Schools, hospitals and factories have been targeted. A
cruise missile on April 3 knocked out the heating plant for the
homes of 300,000 in the suburb of New Belgrade.
On April 6, NATO bombed a row of apartment buildings and a
hospital in the Yugoslav mining town of Aleksinac. The attack
killed 17 people. Dozens of others were wounded. Eyewitness
reports describe a scene of bloody carnage, with corpses and
body parts strewn around the blood-soaked crumbled heaps of
corrugated steel and seared brick.
The city most damaged has been Novi Sad, not a military
center but a cultural and economic center. Novi Sad is famous
for its rich ethnic mix of peoples: Serbs, Hungarians, Slovaks,
Romanians and others. It is a beautiful and ancient city. U.S.
bombs have destroyed historic structures with famous red-tiled
roofs, hundreds of years old.
But the brutality of the U.S.-led NATO attack is being met
with a determination to resist that the Clinton administration
had not counted on.
Yugoslav demonstrators regularly denounce the cowards who
drop bombs from the sky to kill babies on the ground. They
challenge the U.S. and NATO to send in ground troops. If
Clinton officials are surprised by the resistance they've met
so far, they will be even more surprised by the fight they will
get on the ground.
And they will find that the Yugoslav resistance fighters
will be joined around the world by anti-war actions in every
major city. And in the United States they will find that more
and more people will join the ranks of the demonstrations, just
as more and more GIs will make their opposition more widely
known.
For information on demonstrations against the war, readers
can contact the International Action Center, 39 W. 14 St.,
Suite 206, New York, NY 10011, phone (212) 633-6646, web
www.iacenter.org.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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