The Spectator Saturday, June 14, 2003
How the battle lies were drawn
The WMDs haven't turned
up. In 1999 there was no genocide
in Kosovo. But, says Neil Clark, Tony Blair has never allowed
the facts to get in the way of a good war
If you ever get to
Belgrade Zoo, don't miss the snake house. There, in
nicely heated tanks, you will see two rather fearsome-looking pythons,
one named Warren and the other Madeleine. The names of Bill Clinton's
secretaries of state - Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright - will
not be forgotten quickly in the capital of the former Yugoslavia. Seeing
the
two pythons slithering in their tanks reminded me of the murderous foreign
policy of the Clinton administration and the enthusiastic support it
received from New Labour.
For amid the present
furore over the no-show of Iraqi WMDs, let us
remember that in Kosovo our humanitarian Prime Minister dragged this
country into an illegal, US-sponsored war on grounds which later proved
to be fraudulent. In 2003 Tony's Big Whopper was that Saddam's WMDs
'could be activated within 45 minutes'. In 1999 it was that Slobodan Milosevic's
Yugoslavia was 'set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination
of the Jews during
World War Two'
Clare Short
now complains that the Prime Minister 'duped' the public
over the non-existent Iraqi threat. But four years ago, Short and her
fellow
Cabinet resigner Robin Cook were enthusiastic collaborators in Blair's
equally squalid campaign to 'dupe' the British public over Kosovo.
Cook's role in the war on Yugoslavia was described by the late Auberon
Waugh as a 'national disgrace'. A closer examination of the part played
by
the former foreign secretary in the military conflict makes you wonder
why he
too did not end up commemorated in a Belgrade snake house.
Consider his role
in the farcical 'peace negotiations' at Rambouillet -
the successful conclusion of which Washington and London desired as much
as they wanted Hans Blix's weapons inspectors to be able to complete their
mission in Iraq.
Cook claimed that
'the reason they [the Serbs] refused to agree to the
peace process was that they were not willing to agree to the autonomy
of
Kosovo, or for that autonomy to be guaranteed by an international
military presence at all'. In fact, the Yugoslavs had by February 1999
already agreed to most of the autonomy proposals and had assented to a
UN (but not Nato) peacekeeping team entering Kosovo.
It was the unwelcome
prospect of Milosevic signing up to a peace deal
and thereby depriving the US of its casus belli that caused Secretary
of
State Albright, with the connivance of Cook, to insert new terms into
the
Rambouillet accord purposely designed to be rejected by Belgrade.
Appendix B to chapter seven of the document provided not only for the
Nato
occupation of Kosovo, but also for 'unrestricted access' for Nato aircraft,
tanks
and troops throughout Yugoslavia. The full text of the Rambouillet document
was kept secret from the public and came to light only when published
in Le
Monde Diplomatique on 17 April. By this time, the war was almost a month
old and the casting of Milosevic as the 'aggressor' had already successfully
been achieved.
The Kosovan war was,
we were repeatedly told, fought 'to stop a
humanitarian catastrophe'. 'It is no exaggeration to say that what is
happening is
racial genocide' - claimed the British Prime Minister - 'something we
had hoped
we would never again experience in Europe. Thousands have been murdered,
100,000 men are missing and hundreds forced to flee their homes and the
country.' The Serbs were, according to the US State Department,
'conducting a campaign of forced population movement not seen in Europe
since WW2'. One US Information Agency 'fact' sheet claimed that the number
of Albanians
massacred could be as high as 400,000. Undeterred by the complete lack
of evidence to back up the claims of Washington and London, political
pundits, from Lady Thatcher to Ken Livingstone, weighed in with op-ed
pieces
comparing Slobodan Milosevic to Adolf Hitler.
But despite its overwhelming
military superiority, Nato's assault on
Yugoslavia did not go according to plan. The second week of April was
a
particularly bad news week for the humanitarian interventionists. On 12
April Nato bombers hit a passenger train in southern Serbia, killing 10
civilians and injuring 16 others. It was also revealed that the alliance
was, despite earlier
denials, using depleted uranium. And, worst of all
for the hawks in the US and Britain, EU leaders were due to meet to discuss
a German peace plan which would involve a 24-hour suspension of bombing
and UN peacekeepers entering Kosovo.
With public support
for war faltering, and a Downing Street spokesman
talking of a 'public-relations meltdown', it was time for the Lie
Machine to go into overdrive. Dr Johnson believed patriotism to be the
last refuge
of the scoundrel. He clearly hadn't considered the invention of enemy
rape
camps. On 13 April an ashen-faced Robin Cook told journalists of 'fresh
evidence' that 'young women are being separated from the refugee columns
and forced to undergo systematic rape in an army camp at Djakovica near
the
Albanian border'. In fact, Cook's 'evidence' (which was founded solely
on uncorroborated claims by Albanian refugees) was not 'fresh' at all,
but
had first been presented by US defense spokesman Kenneth Bacon at a press
conference the week before. Not to be outdone by her Cabinet colleague,
Clare Short also joined in enthusiastically to add breaches of women's
rights to the long litany of Serb sins. 'The actual rape reports are
still in the hundreds,' claimed the International Development Secretary,
'but
they're deliberate and organised and designed to humiliate, often in
front of fathers and husbands and children, you know, just to give anguish
and humiliation
to the whole family.' For the record, the UNHCR found no
evidence of a rape camp at Djakovica and even Human Rights Watch, the
George Soros-financed NGO hardly known for its pro-Yugoslav stance, announced
that it was 'concerned that Nato's use of rape camps to bolster support
for
the war relied on unconfirmed accounts'. The hysteria over Serb rape camps
rallied support for the war, even though the next day an attack by a
Nato plane on a convoy of Albanians killed 64 and wounded 20.
Apologists for the
government now claim that we should not jump to hasty conclusions over
the failure of coalition forces to find any Iraqi WMD.
But as far as Kosovo is concerned, we have already had plenty of time
to
discover the truth. When John Laughland, writing in The Spectator in
November 1999, claimed that the mass graves in Kosovo were a 'myth', he
was loudly denounced by Francis Wheen, Noel Malcolm and a whole host of
Nato apologists
and lap-top bombardiers.
Four years on, it
is Wheen and the supporters of intervention in Kosovo
who have the explaining to do. At the Trepca mine, where Nato told us
that
up to 700 bodies had been dumped in acid and whose name the Daily Mirror
predicted would 'live alongside those of Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka',
UN
investigators found absolutely nothing, a pattern repeated at one Nato
mass-grave site after another. To date, the total body count of
civilians killed in Kosovo in the period 1997-99 is still fewer than 3,000,
a
figure that includes not only those killed in open fighting and during
Nato air
strikes, but also
an unidentified number of Serbs. Clearly it was an
exaggeration - of Munchausenian proportions - for the Prime Minister to
describe what happened in Kosovo as 'racial genocide'.
In both Kosovo and
Iraq, the government's war strategy seems to have
been threefold: 1. In order to whip up public support for war, tell lies
so
outrageous that most people will believe that no one would have dared
to
make them up. 2. When
the conflict is over, dismiss questions about the
continued lack of evidence as 'irrelevant' and stress alternative
'benefits' from the military action, e.g., 'liberation' of the people.
3. Much
later on, when the truth is finally revealed, rely on the fact that most
people have lost interest and are now concentrating on the threat posed
by the
next new Hitler. An admission of the government's culpability for the
Kosovan
war only slipped out in July 2000, when Lord Gilbert, the ex-defence
minister, told the House of Commons that the Rambouillet terms offered
to the
Yugoslav delegation had been 'absolutely intolerable' and expressly designed
to
provoke war. Gilbert' s bombshell warranted scarcely a line in the
mainstream British media, which had been so keen to label the Yugoslavs
the guilty party a year before.
Last week, to the
party's eternal shame, only 11 Labour MPs voted for an independent judicial
investigation into the way the British Prime
Minister led us into war against Iraq. But, important as such an inquiry
would
be, it will not be enough. What is also needed is a similar, concurrent
investigation into how the Blair government also deceived the nation
over Kosovo. New Labour, of course, would rather we all forgot about
non-existent mass graves, mythical rape camps and phantom WMDs. The interests
of democracy and accountable government - to say nothing of those killed
in
two shameful conflicts - mean that we must never do so.