Diana Johnstone : Do We Really Need an International Criminal Court?

CounterPunch  Weekend Edition
May 6 -8, 2011

A Pretext for War

Do We Really Need an International Criminal Court?

By DIANA JOHNSTONE

A little over four years ago, CounterPunch ran an article I wrote based on my presentation at an international conference held in Tripoli on the International Criminal Court. At a moment when the ICC is being used, predictably, to justify the NATO aggression against Libya, including the targeted assassination of Moammer Qaddafi, or a ground invasion ostensibly to capture him, I think it would be appropriate to rerun this article.--DJ

We agree. AC/JSC.

Year after year, people in the Arab countries are helpless spectators to the ongoing destruction of Iraq and Palestine by the United States and Israel. They see families wiped out by bombs in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon. They see Arabs tortured and humiliated in Abu Ghraib and in Guantanamo. They see Israel regularly carrying out "targeted" assassinations in the Occupied Territories (splashing death around the target) while extending its illegal settlement of land belonging to Palestinians. Probably no people have greater cause to yearn for an equitable system of international justice. But where are they to look for it?

Well, what about the International Criminal Court (ICC)? The ICC is supposed to punish perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity. It has been in operation since July 2002, but seldom gets as much attention as it received during a symposium in mid-January at the Academy of Graduate Studies in the Libyan capital, Tripoli. Underlying the two-day discussion on the "ambition, reality and future prospects" of the ICC was the question: is the ICC a first baby step toward international justice? Or is it just another element of Western "soft power", imposed on small countries?

Although Libyan leader Moammer Gadhafi has expressed the second view, on balance most of the legal experts and academics -- from Libya and other Arab countries, but also from Europe, China and South America -- tended to lean toward the first view. Although nobody denied the evident shortcomings of the ICC, lawyers and jurists generally see it as "better than nothing" and point out that democratic legal systems have evolved from institutionalized power relations toward greater justice.

Selectivity

Meanwhile, a new war front was opening up. Urged on by the United States, Ethiopia invaded Somalia to restore disorder. U.S. war planes bombed fleeing members of the Islamic Courts Council that only recently managed to end the clan fighting that had ravaged Mogadishu for some fifteen years. The newly installed, U.S.-backed president, Abdulli Yusuf Ahmed, 73, announced that there would be "no talks" with the defeated Islamists, who were to be wiped out as they fled.

Now it so happens that among the war crimes listed in the Statute of Rome that governs the ICC is this one (Article 8.2.b.xii): "Declaring that no quarter will be given". This is exactly what the Ethiopian-U.S.-backed conquerors were doing. But there was no chance that the ICC would deal with this latest outburst of international criminal behavior.

Indeed, after four and a half years of existence, the ICC has taken just one suspect into its custody: Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, head of a rebel militia in the impenetrable Ituri forest in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (ex-Zaïre). He is held under Article 8 (war crimes), section 2.e.vii on charges of recruiting children under the age of 15 to fight in his militia.

This is certainly bad behavior, but considering all that is going on in the world today, it hardly seems to rank among "the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole" (Article 5, defining the crimes within jurisdiction of the court). A French judge working as an investigator in the ICC Prosecutor's office, Bernard Lavigne, acknowledged that since it is clearly unable to deal with all the crimes in the world, the Court is necessarily selective. He defended the selection of this lone suspect by the need to start off with an air-tight case that the Prosecution was sure to win.

Therein, however, lies one of the ICC's more subtle and insidious vices. Although the Statute formally upholds the "presumption of innocence", all the details point to a Court whose job is not meant to sort out the innocent from the guilty, but to punish the (presumed) guilty. Politically, the creation of the ICC responds to demands of various NGOs, given great resonance by Bosnia and especially Rwanda, to "end impunity" and to comfort victims. The underlying political assumption is that both the criminals and the victims can be easily identified prior to trial -- the trial being more a demonstration of the concern of the international community for justice than the search for a justice, and a truth, that may be elusive or seriously contested.

Like the ad hoc tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the ICC, despite its title, is not essentially set up to deal with international conflicts, but rather to administer "international" justice to internal conflicts, in countries too weak to resist its authority.

The total impotence of the ICC to deal with the most dangerous crimes truly "of concern to the international community as a whole", those that outrage public opinion not only in the West but in all parts of the world, those that seriously threaten world peace, is most strikingly due to:

-- the fact that the crime of aggression is not covered;

-- the fact that the United States and its citizens are immune to prosecution, first of all because the United States has not ratified the ICC Statute, and secondly, because the United States has used its unprecedented economic and political clout to pressure countries into signing Bilateral Immunity Agreements (BIAs) that exempt Americans from prosecution. One hundred and two countries have signed BIAs with the United States.

Aggression exempted

Article 5 of the Rome Statute limits the jurisdiction of the Court to:

(a) The crime of genocide;

(b) Crimes against humanity;

(c) War crimes;

(d) The crime of aggression.

However, it goes on to specify that the Court "shall exercise jurisdiction over the crime of aggression once a provision is adopted [...] defining the crime and setting out the conditions under which the Court shall exercise jurisdiction with respect to this crime." In short, the crime of aggression is for the time being exempted from the Court's jurisdiction.

The formal reason is that aggression is "not defined". This is a specious argument since aggression has been quite clearly defined by U.N. General Assembly Resolution 3314 in 1974,

which declared that: "Aggression is the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State", and listed seven specific examples including:

-- The invasion or attack by the armed forces of a State of the territory of another State, or any military occupation, however temporary, resulting from such invasion or attack, or any annexation by the use of force of the territory of another State or part thereof;

-- Bombardment by the armed forces of a State against the territory of another State or the use of any weapons by a State against the :territory of another State;

-- The blockade of the ports or coasts of a State by the armed forces of another State...

The resolution also stated that: "No consideration of whatever nature, whether political, economic, military or otherwise, may serve as a justification for aggression."

The real reason that aggression remains outside the jurisdiction of the ICC is that the United States, which played a strong role in elaborating the Statute, before refusing to ratify it, was adamantly opposed to its inclusion. It is not hard to see why..

This went against the nearly unanimous opinion of most of the world, which recalls that the Nuremberg Tribunal condemned Nazi leaders above all for the crime of aggression, as the "supreme international crime" which "contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole".

It may be noted that instances of "aggression", which are clearly factual, are much easier to identify than instances of "genocide", whose definition relies on assumptions of intention.

Defenders of the ICC stress that "aggression" may be defined, and thus come under the active jurisdiction of the Court, at the Review Conference which should be held in 2009 to consider amendments. Even so, an amendment comes into force only one year after ratification by seven eighths of State Parties to the Statute, and applies only to State Parties (which so far notoriously do not include the United States). And should the United States turn around and choose to ratify the Statute, it may still declare that for a period of seven years it does not accept the jurisdiction of the Court for its nationals (Article 124). All this means that the earliest conceivable (but highly improbable) date when U.S. crimes, including aggression, might be brought under ICC jurisdiction would be 2017. Even then, there is scarcely any possibility that an American citizen, or any person acting on behalf of the United States, would end up in the dock at the ICC.

For one thing, the ICC must turn over jurisdiction to any State which proves "willing and able" to try the case in its own courts.

Moreover, Article 16 allows the Security Council to suspend any ICC investigation or prosecution for a period of 12 months. The suspension can be renewed indefinitely. These days, the Security Council is generally viewed throughout the world as an instrument of U.S. policy.

The BIAs would still apply.

And incidentally, employing poison gases counts as a war crime, but not the use of nuclear weapons.

In short, the ICC is established according to double standards to deal with small fry.

A court for "failed states"

Indeed, it is hard to see how the ICC can deal with any but extremely weak or "failed" States. According to Article 17, a case is not admissible unless the State concerned is genuinely "unwilling or unable" to investigate and prosecute it. The Court itself can determine whether the State concerned is "unwilling or unable".

At this point, the scene grows very murky. The Democratic Republic of Congo cooperated in turning over the case of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo to the ICC because he was a rebel against the State, and that troubled State has reason to want to be in the good graces of the ICC. But what if a State refuses, or shows itself "unwilling or unable" to pursue a case? What then? The ICC has no police force of its own. Will it then call on the Security Council to authorize arrest -- meaning military action on the territory of the "unwilling" State?

The preamble to the Rome Statute emphasizes that "nothing in this Statute shall be taken as authorizing any State Party to intervene in an armed conflict or in the internal affairs of any State". But this seems to be contradicted by the provisions of the Statute itself in regard to "unwilling" States.

Rather than a Court to keep the peace, the ICC could turn out to be -- contrary to the wishes of its sincere supporters -- an instrument to provide pretexts for war.

"If you can't beat them, join them."

It appeared from the Tripoli symposium that Arab intellectuals have an ambivalent attitude toward the ICC. On the one hand, many fear that the ICC can be instrumentalized to serve what they see as the long term U.S.-Israeli policy of breakig up Arab States and fragmenting the Middle East along ethnic or religious lines, as a way of "divide and rule". In such a strategy, ethnic conflicts over territory and resources can be depicted by Western media and NGOs as one-sided cases of "genocide" requiring urgent international intervention. The trial run was Yugoslavia, and Iraq is the prime example.

Jurists themselves, professionally attached to the construction of a new legal institution, may be oblivious to strategic aspects. But the very emphasis on applying criminal law to political conflicts tends to reinforce the Manichean view (typical of the Bush administration and of Israel) that the world's troubles are due to "bad guys", "terrorists", criminals that must be rooted out and punished. This precludes analysis of underlying causes of conflicts.

Like other Arab States, except for Jordan (and two formerly French territories, Djibouti and the Comoro Islands), Sudan is not a Party to the Rome Statute and thus does not fall under ICC jurisdiction. This fact has not prevented the mounting campaign for international intervention to stop what is described as "genocide" in Darfur. Some observers on the ground contend that this campaign is characterized by a limitless inflation of the number of casualties, to upgrade massacres to the status of "genocide". Whatever the reality, the call for "intervention", implying military intervention, is not accompanied by any clear explanation of how this would solve the underlying problems of religious identity and claim to scarce resources that have caused the crisis in Darfur. The well-financed and (largely) well-intentioned campaign to "save Darfur" actually tends to eclipse any effort to find genuine political and economic solutions by way of negotiation carried out by parties familiar with the history and culture of the region.

As can be seen in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the armed "rescue" of a country or region tends to be followed by a sharp drop in interest, and above all of the economic and practical aid promised at the outset.

In Tripoli, some argued that Sudan would be better placed to defend itself from impending military intervention if it were Party to the ICC. As a Belgian lawyer put it, for small countries the problem is to "avoid being entrapped", and for this purpose it is better to join the ICC than to stay out of it.

Many Arab and Third World intellectuals are tired of standing on the sidelines and "complaining". Joining the ICC might be a way to "join the world" and improve their own countries. This viewpoint seems particularly frequent among women lawyers and human rights NGOs.

But as one participant put it, "Inside or outside; the small countries are on the sidelines".

The view from Tripoli

To conclude with a subjective note, from the peaceful atmosphere of Tripoli the rabid Bushist-Blairist fantasies about the deadly threat from "Islamo-fascism" seem particularly grotesque. The semi-socialist regime installed 37 years ago by Colonel Moammer Kadhafi has widely redistributed oil revenues, educating the population and creating a large middle class thanks to a service sector (largely bureaucratic) that employs some 80 per cent of the population. This makes it a singularly tranquil society -- some bureaucrats may be superfluous, but they are not homeless, begging or thieving. Colonel Kadhafi is eccentric, sleeping in tents instead of palaces, but it is hard to avoid the feeling that he has been demonized not for his faults but for his support to Arab unity (which failed), to the Palestinians and to other liberation causes -- which was natural for a country like Libya that had been the victim not so very long ago of a ruthless colonization by Mussolini's forces, which subjected the local population to summary executions, mass deportations and concentration camps. Looking around, one may conclude that Kadhafi's "soft" dictatorship could well be the best transitional modernizing regime that exists in the Arab world.

In any case, the ICC symposium followed its own ambivalent course without interference from the government. The overall impression was of a great thirst for peace, development and justice -- all under threat from the fanatic Western "war on terror". Islamic extremism is a problem to be dealt with in a growing number of Arab countries (not Libya, apparently, where the devout but moderate Muslim practice seems to preempt the extremists), but which is clearly aggravated by U.S. aggression and Israeli persecution of the Palestinians.

Justice and globalization

I give the last word to excerpts from the contribution of a retired Libyan gentleman who has held high positions in the past, but now prefers to remain anonymous:

"The dominant system is oriented towards an international business law considered as the supreme reference overhanging all national law and of course international public and private law. The WTO has defined in this context an arsenal of principles and procedures all the way to and including a juridical system based on the negation of the elementary principles of separation of powers that characterize democracy.

"This is totally unacceptable. We need exactly the opposite. We need a business law that is respectful of the rights of nations, people and labor, and respectful of the environment, rights of communities, women, while ensuring the conditions for further progress of democratization of societies.

"We have to advocate an International Law of the Peoples, which should combine:

"-- The respect of national sovereignty, allowing people to choose their future according to their wishes.

"-- The respect of Human Rights, not only political rights but also social rights and the right to development and peace.

"No solution is reached through abolishing one of the two terms of the equation. We can neither abolish sovereignty nor can we abolish human rights.

"The principle of respect for the sovereignty of nations must be the cornerstone of international law. The fact that this principle is violated today with so much brutality by the democracies themselves constitutes an aggravating, rather than mitigating circumstance. [...] The solemn adoption of the principle of national sovereignty in 1945 was logically accompanied by the prohibition of recourse to war. [...] With the militarization of the globalization process, which is closely associated with the neo-liberal option and with its predilection for the supremacy of international business law, it has become more imperative than ever that priority be given to this reflection on people's rights."

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. She can be reached at  diana.josto@yahoo.fr

 

__._,_.___

Go After Qaddafi

Go After Qaddafi

Stop worrying about an "exit strategy." What America needs in Libya is an entrance strategy.

By Christopher Hitchens

 

Posted Monday, April 25, 2011, at 12:37 PM ET

Libyan rebel sniperThe embarrassing failure of NATO's strategy with the Libyan "rebels" is easier to understand when it is contrasted with its closest parallel case, which is probably that of Kosovo. After Slobodan Milosevic had attempted to cleanse the province of its Albanian minority, and after it had finally become clear to the governments of NATO that he had completely ceased to be a thinkable "partner for peace," a bombing campaign against Serbian units and positions began. To answer those who doubted that aerial strategy alone could do the needful job, it was pointed out that insurgent forces of the Kosovo Liberation Army, operating on the ground, would take their cue from the bombing and work in coordination with it. Those who didn't like this policy used to sneer that it made us "the air force of the KLA." And this sneer, as it happens, was more or less accurate. (I well remember one Kosovar militant crudely rejoicing in the sudden appearance of friends in the sky, and saying that it enabled his comrades to "fuck Milosevic with Clinton's dick"—an arresting image in any context.)

PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...REPRINTSSINGLE PAGE

There were other crude things about the KLA as well, such as its sidelines in smuggling and even trafficking, and its lack of tenderness toward Serbian civilians. But it was a genuinely rooted guerrilla force with real knowledge of the terrain and the society, and it had evolved out of a decade-long struggle of wholesale passive and civic resistance under the leadership of Ibrahim Rugova. There were clannish and tribal elements involved in the ranks, inevitably for that region, and I have never seen so much ammunition fired pointlessly into the air as at a KLA rally in the mountains. But the outfit could fight sure enough when it came to it, and the option of restored rule of Kosovo by Belgrade had by then joined the list of things that were no longer feasible or thinkable. As the attrition intensified, military and political logic more and more dictated that the bombing switch to the source—Milosevic's "command and control" in his capital city. It wasn't long before he was raving and ranting in the dock, where he had long belonged.

Now to Libya: Quite obviously Col. Muammar Qaddafi has joined the list of deranged dictators whose acceptability is at an end, and it is unimaginable that he should emerge from the current confrontation with control over any part of the country. Equally obviously, we shall have to go to Tripoli to remove him. But we will not be doing so in the rearguard of any victorious insurgent army. In Afghanistan we could call upon some fierce and hardened fighters in the shape of the Northern Alliance. In Iraq, the Kurdish peshmerga militias had liberated substantial parts of the country from Saddam Hussein under the protection of our "no-fly zone." But the so-called Libyan rebels do not just fire in the air and strike portentous attitudes for the cameras. They run away, and they quarrel among themselves, and they are not cemented by any historic tradition of resistance or common experience. They are a rabble, in other words, and the proper time to be sending trainers and "advisers" would be after Qaddafi has gone, when it will indeed be helpful and necessary to offer facilities and advice for a reconstituted Libyan army. Meanwhile, it is ridiculous and embarrassing to be their air force.

Advertisement

In a weirdly neutral and vague joint op-ed article, written by heaven knows whom, President Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy persisted in defining the intervention as an essentially humanitarian one, presumably conducted under the rubric of the United Nations' nebulous "duty of care" doctrine. They also seemed to persist in saying that "regime change" is not a fully declared objective of the operation. The first claim is being badly undermined by the slow but heavy bleeding that is being inflicted on the wretched inhabitants of Misurata and other towns: a needless and costly prolongation of the agony. And the second claim is absurd on its face: You do not use drones and cruise-missiles against the armed forces of a state, and send weapons to that government's self-declared opponents, in order merely to modify the regime's behavior. The direct interference in Libya's "internal affairs" could not be more blatant than it is. Where is the virtue in pursuing this sporadically, with inadequate firepower, with no serious fighting forces on actual Libyan soil, and in letting the pace of events be dictated by the slowest-moving forces?

In effect, this half-baked approach leaves the initiative with Qaddafi. It also means that the mounting death rate, which recently included the lost life of my much-admired Vanity Fair colleague Tim Hetherington along with several others, is not justifiable by any commensurate military or political gains. These are lives that are being frittered away. Hetherington's last tweet described what he saw in Misurata the day before his death: "Indiscriminate shelling by Qaddafi forces. No sign of NATO." How shameful. What is utterly lacking in Libya, still, is an entrance strategy.

The great vulnerability of one-man states—their built-in weakness and our great hope—is precisely the feature that defines them. Terrifying though Milosevic and Saddam were, and impressive though many people found their elite security forces, they proved under serious pressure to be what Mao Zedong used to call "paper tigers." Only one delusional individual had to crack, or be cracked, and it was all over. And, compared with the duo mentioned above, Qaddafi is practically a nonentity. Did you happen to see his recent "Cannonball Run" through the streets, gesticulating hysterically from the back of a pickup? It was many things, but it was not impressive or frightening.

The special forces of almost any NATO state—most certainly those of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France—are more than equal to the task of taking him out on their own. If he can't be arrested, he can certainly be killed. This doesn't seem to me to violate the letter or the spirit of, say, the official prohibition on assassination of foreign leaders first promulgated during the administration of President Gerald Ford. Qaddafi is now the commander and symbol of a depraved armed force with which we are engaged in direct hostilities. Like Mullah Omar or Osama Bin Laden, he is a legitimate military target and, if only the international courts would not also be so laggard, a legitimate legal and political one as well.

I have heard it argued that the pursuit of Qaddafi runs the risk of civilian casualties, as I presume in theory it must do. But the failure to target him most certainly means a steady and continuous and increasing flow of civilian deaths. To refuse to soil our hands with this homicidal lunatic is an odd way of keeping them clean.

Become a fan of Slate on Facebook. Follow Slate and the Slate Foreign Desk on Twitter.

279 Comments

Add Yours

Or join the discussion
on the Fray

http://www.slate.com/id/2292067/

Bosnia in worst crisis since war as Serb leader calls referendum

Milorad Dodik faces heavy EU sanctions if vote goes ahead, international community's representative in Sarajevo warns

• Ian Traynor, Europe editor
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 April 2011 15.55 BST

Bosnia is facing its worst crisis since the end of the war 16 years ago because of Serb secessionist policies aimed at paralysing the country, according to the leading international official overseeing the state.

Valentin Inzko, the Austrian diplomat who is the international community's high representative in Sarajevo, told the Guardian he would act to halt a referendum called by Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian Serb leader, on whether to reject Bosnia's state war crimes court and special prosecutor's office established in 2005 by international decree.

Inzko said heavy European Union sanctions could be imposed on Dodik and his coterie if he did not back down from the vote, which the Bosnian Serb parliament approved by a huge majority this month.

"This is definitely the most serious crisis since the signing of the Dayton agreement [which ended the four-year war in 1995]," said Inzko. "Never before has such a referendum been planned. The intention is to roll back all the achievements. It challenges the role of the high representative. It would be a direct attack on the Dayton settlement ... I would repeal this law."

Dodik, the president of the Serbian half of Bosnia known as the Republika Srpska, pledged this week that he would not back down and that the vote would go ahead.

The decision to stage the referendum was posted officially on Wednesday, meaning the vote must take place within eight weeks. Dodik argued that the court and prosecutors were biased against Serbs and the court's authority should be rejected.

He claimed the Bosnian Muslim leadership, with international support, was bent on creating a domineering Islamic state.

Dodik regularly taunts the international envoys, who have struggled to manage Bosnia since the 90s. He professes no loyalty to a state called Bosnia-Herzegovina, and questions its viability. The referendum is seen as his most destabilising move and as a step towards Bosnia's breakup, which could trigger a war.

"Many think this referendum is a rehearsal for a future one on Republika Srpska status [secession], but those are just speculations, unrealistic at this time," he said last week.

The EU's new Balkan envoy, Miroslav Lajcak, is to go to Banja Luka, Dodik's base, to read him the riot act and order him to call off the vote, according to senior diplomats.

Inzko indicated that the international community was heading for a showdown with Dodik and that at some point in the next fortnight he would invoke his official powers to try to stop the referendum.

"I hope [Lajcak] can talk them out of doing this. Otherwise I will have to act. The [Bosnian Serb] law would be annulled. The deadline can't be very long, 10 days to two weeks maximum."

Lajcak is expected to warn Dodik that if he defies the international referendum ban, he could face EU sanctions similar to those placed on Robert Mugabe and Muammar Gaddafi: a ban on travel and the freezing of his assets and bank accounts.

EU governments recently agreed a "toolbox" of carrots and sticks to reverse years of failure in Bosnia. Catherine Ashton, the EU's foreign policy chief, is about to appoint a new "special representative" in Sarajevo with beefed up powers.

The showdown with Dodik is likely to intensify Bosnia's dangerous drift and paralysist. The deadlock since elections last October has left the country without a central government for seven months, with no breakthrough in sight.

Describing Bosnia as the "principal challenge to stability in Europe this year", James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, has called Bosnia the "principal challenge to stability in Europe this year"last month said last month that the country was "in disarray".

"Ethnic Serb rhetoric about seceding from Bosnia will continue to inflame passions," he reported. "Ethnic agendas still dominate the political process … US-EU efforts to broker compromises have met with little success."

The Muslim-Croat half of the country is also acutely dysfunctional. Bosnian Croat leaders, based in Mostar in the south-west, are in effect boycotting the federation government and parliament after losing out in coalition negotiations. They are complaining bitterly about being ignored by the larger Bosnian Muslim community, and last week formed the Croatian National Assembly to co-ordinate policy-making across ethnic Croat majority areas. "I don't have a problem with this if it is constitutional," said Inzko. "We will see if they establish parallel structures or not. That's very important. Then I'd have to do something."

The Croats are demanding that Bosnia be split into three along ethnic lines to include a separate Croatian entity. Dodik is encouraging these demands to hasten the breakup of the country he constantly calls illegitimate and unworkable.

Senior diplomats in Sarajevo say that would be a belated triumph for Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, the Serbian and Bosnian Serb leaders who led the war effort to destroy the country and were indicted for genocide. "That would mean Srebrenica [where Serbs murdered 8,000 Bosnian Muslim males] would be abroad for the Bosnian Muslims," said a senior diplomat. "The international community will never accept that."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/28/bosnia-crisis-serb-leader-referendum

Admission about the KLA: Gunter / Worthington... - by Julia Gorin

 

...  After Worthington's gentle chiding of Gunter, a slightly adjusted version of the Gunter article appeared in The Edmonton Journal. It's only a little less stupid than the first, lamenting toward the end that the West wasn't serious about "bringing Serbia to its knees."    ... ...  And the war was not won until NATO inserted troops on the ground.   [What? It did?  Or is he talking about the peacekeeping mission that "won the war" by helping the Albanians ethnically purify the province?]  ...   http://www.juliagorin.com/wordpress/?p=2614 A Confused National Post Writer Makes an Easy Admission about the KLA by Julia Gorin            April 25th 2011 In this otherwise retarded March 25th National Post article regurgitating all the old NATO propaganda and cheering the targeting of civilian infrastructure in 1999 — plus advocating help to the Libyan rebels who he admits are Qaeda-connected — writer Lorne Gunter easily makes an admission that our political elite still won't. Indicating that more people know this than are letting on: There's yet another parallel with Kosovo: The rebels we are defending may yet turn out to be our enemies. In 1999, the Kosovo Liberation Army was our ally against the Serbs, but they were also al-Qaeda's drug mules for opium from Afghanistan into central and Western Europe. The very people we were fighting to liberate had been criminals whom Western police agencies were attempting to drive out of business. There's a potential for the same in Libya. At the very least, the rebels in the eastern half of the country are said to have al-Qaeda ties. Maybe they do, maybe they don't; but until it had a falling out with Gaddafi in the 1990s, al-Qaeda did much of its training in eastern Libya, so claims of al-Qaeda connections for the rebels are plausible. All this is what comes from being late to the fight. Had the West intervened a week earlier, when the rebels had the upper hand, we might now not be contemplating stepping up our involvement. Back then, the rebels had the manpower and momentum to move on Gaddafi's strongholds without Western support. But dithering by the United States, NATO and the United Nations cost the rebels their advantage… Huh? One wonders if he read the preceding part of his article before writing the last part. At least God made Peter Worthington, to straighten the man out, and in the same newspaper: Peter Worthington: Why Libya is not the new Kosovo (March 29) Lorne Gunter, one of the wiser columnists in the media [oh shit!], opines in the National Post that there are a lot of parallels between the war in Libya and the 1999 NATO war against Serbia in Kosovo. While there are some parallels in the air war, that's where the comparison ends. Kosovo was a phony war orchestrated by the U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on the fabricated grounds that Slobodan Milosevic was waging genocide in Kosovo…Forensic people poured into "liberated" Kosovo to document genocide and exhume mass graves. They found evidence of atrocities – both by Serbs and by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) — but no mass graves…Last week marked the 12th anniversary of the air attack on Belgrade and select [sic] Serbian targets, yet in that 12 year period, no mass graves have been found. Investigations showed that prior to the air war, atrocities abounded in Kosovo on roughly a 50% basis – half by Kosovars, half by Serbs. NOTE: The investigators put it that way because they were striving for parity. In fact, even Lord Robertson admitted that before the NATO bombing, the majority of deaths were caused by the KLA; a British parliamentary inquiry concluded that until January 1999 most of the crimes were the KLA's; according to confidential minutes of the North Atlantic Council (NAC), even William "Massacre at Racak!" Walker admitted the KLA was "the main initiator of the violence…It has launched what appears to be a deliberate campaign of provocation". This is how William walker himself reported the situation then, in private. GENERAL KLAUS NAUMANN CHAIRMAN, NATO MILITARY COMMITTEE Ambassador Walker stated in the NAC that the majority of violations was caused by the KLA. [Reporter ALLAN LITTLE] Walker didn't admit that in public at the time. He still doesn't. Back to Worthington: One of the prime reasons for the war was a so-called massacre of 45 Kosovar civilians by Serbs at the town of Racak…Thanks largely to French journalists and forensic investigators from Finland, it became more likely (depending on one's objectivity) that the Racak victims had been killed during fighting between Serbs and the KLA, and the bodies moved and arranged to appear that they'd been massacred. Examination showed most had been killed from a distance — little evidence to indicate executions. Nonetheless, the cursory walk-through by William Walker led to charges of massacre against Milosevic which, had he not died before his trial was completed, might have been a huge embarrassment to NATO and the International Court. The air war over Kosovo was not the U.S.'s or NATO's finest hour. […] After Worthington's gentle chiding of Gunter, a slightly adjusted version of the Gunter article appeared in The Edmonton Journal. It's only a little less stupid than the first, lamenting toward the end that the West wasn't serious about "bringing Serbia to its knees." Bringing Serbia to its knees? "On behalf of whom?" asks Liz, who circulated the item today. "Muslims? Why 'target' Serbia at all, an ally in two world wars?" Because most people aren't even as smart as this guy. Yikes. Libyan conflict Kosovo war all over again Militarily, NATO's campaign in Libya reminds me of its 1999 war in Kosovo. Then, as now, there was a great rush to enter the conflict, largely because of media-driven claims of human rights abuses. A dozen years ago, the allegation was ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians by bloodthirsty Serbs. In Libya today, it is threats by Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi to annihilate his enemies, live, as the world watches on CNN. In Kosovo, claims of genocide proved false. After the war had ended, several attempts were made to find the mass graves of innocent Kosovars that the Serbs had purportedly filled with corpses. Nothing was ever found on the scale described prewar, when Western voters were being sold on the need to intervene. Investigators from the European Union in particular scoured Kosovo's countryside in vain for years. United Nations prosecutors told their forensic investigators again and again to dip more, to find the bodies they were sure were there. But none showed up. In all, about 5,000 people were killed in the three-month war, but about equal numbers were killed by both sides. I suspect something similar will be found in Libya years from now when the din of war permits sober analysis: Col. Gadhafi, as evil and cruel as he has been to stay in power for 41 years, was mostly engaging in bravado when he threatened to "wipe out" the rebels opposing his regime. The threat that prompted NATO's air war against Gadhafi and his forces was no more real than Kosovarian claims [there it is! and check out "Kosovoians" here] of crimes against humanity inflicted on them by Belgrade's forces. But the greatest parallel between Kosovo and Libya is the feckless (and, therefore, largely useless) air campaign that is the strategic centrepiece of either war. …I'll admit I was rooting for those Libyans seeking to free themselves from the clutches of a brutal strongman. Who doesn't cheer the freedom-seeking [sic: sharia-seeking] underdog? But I forgot that many on the left have no clue how to run a war once they've begun one. And as we've seen by now, neither do those on the right. Then Gunter again goes into lamenting that we didn't do more damage to civilians in 1999, and advocates for more Western testosterone in Libya: In the spring of 1999, NATO spent 79 days blowing up stuff in Kosovo and Serbia on the premise that enough big, loud explosions would frighten Serbia strongman Slobodan Milosevic into capitulating to Western demands that he free Kosovo. For at least 69 of those 79 days, the bombing was ineffectual. This was mostly due to the NATO belief it was wrong to destroy land and public works during a war and the hopeless and arrogant prediction Milosevic would be persuaded to give up power by the mere awesomeness of NATO air power…[F]or much of the war, the West was bombing barns, tractors and cattle…Milosevic and his cronies quickly figured out we weren't serious. They then correctly calculated that if they were prepared to sustain some damage - or, more correctly, let their people sustain the damage - they could retain power more or less indefinitely. This is what Gadhafi has figured out, too: The West is a toothless tiger in this war. We are not always unprepared to fight seriously. We are fighting very real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq [Not!]. And part of us - the French - are fighting an actual war in Ivory Coast while at the same time helping with the phoney war in Libya. Yet occasionally, when we don't want to look like Imperialists or bullies or Crusaders, we pull our punches in the hope our gleaming military might will win the day for us and we won't have to resort to total war. There is a scene from the Kosovo campaign that more than any other typified what I came to believe about that war. On day 44 or 45, ordinary Serbs demonstrated in support of the Serbian president on a bridge over the Danube at night. The remarkable features - at least from a military point of view - were that the bridge was intact six weeks into a "war" and it was well illuminated by street lights that, obviously, were still drawing reliable electrical power. The West wasn't serious about bringing Serbia to its knees. It was only in the air campaign's last 10 days that NATO began targeting power stations, refineries, rail lines, bridges and water treatment plants - facilities whose destruction would squeeze the Serbians and their government. And the war was not won until NATO inserted troops on the ground. [What? It did? Or is he talking about the peacekeeping mission that "won the war" by helping the Albanians ethnically purify the province?] If the West is now not prepared to blow up targets that matter to Col. Gadhafi and it is not prepared to send troops, then it is not serious enough to have rattled its sabre in the first place.

 

UNMIK: Kosovo is country "stuck in the middle"

UNMIK: Kosovo is country "stuck in the middle"

 

25 April 2011 - Issue : 932

 

The head of the United Nations mission (UNMIK) in Pristina has warned the international community not to repeat in Libya the mistakes made in the armed intervention in Kosovo.

In an interview for the German Press Agency dpa, Lamberto Zannier called for an exit strategy, recalling that the UN and NATO were left ruling and policing Kosovo once hostilities ended after 78 days almost ten years ago.

In Kosovo "there was no clear strategy," with decisions on the key status question "being constantly postponed in the spirit of 'we'll see,'" Zannier said.

"Today, we are still 'seeing'." "The Kosovars assumed that the international community would have, in some way or another, de facto recognized the events, but we have seen a different result," Zannier was quoted as saying.

A large part of the international community has sided with Serbia, among them Russia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

"With the declaration of independence, Kosovo set out on an autonomous path, but it has not managed to go the whole way, it is still stuck in the middle," Zannier observed. Commenting on the Council of Europe report that accuses Prime Minister Hashim Thaci of having directed organ-trafficking, drug and arms smuggling operations over the past decade, under the eyes of UNMIK and the rest of the international community, Zannier said that "things that are not written" in the report but which are known could lead to a reopening of the case.

Zannier said UNMIK had collected some evidence from witnesses and passed them on to the UN tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which could not substantiate the allegations, amid suspicions that key witnesses were intimidated into silence.

http://www.neurope.eu/articles/106163.php

Western Policy Makers Play With Threat Of New Balkans War

 

http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/04/25/49426351.html

Voice of Russia
April 25, 2011

Do the Balkans want a War?
Igor Siletsky

-The first thought that comes to mind after reading all these "journalist investigations" is that the West wants to preserve the status quo in the Balkans, which suits it. In this system Belgrade acts as a "guilty child", who is still under punishment.
-Should The Hague Tribunal start conducting an unbiased investigation, many influential persons will be surely hurt. And not only in the Balkans.
Suffice it to mention here the information concerning the current Kosovo authorities that was made public by the former ICTY chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte - that Pristina was involved in the trafficking of human organs.

The Balkans are on the verge of a new war, Western political observers and analysts have been saying. They believe that a precedent for the worsening of the situation was given to the countries of the former Yugoslavia by the international community, when it sentenced Croatian General Ante Gotovina. For their part, Russian political analysts, who see no prerequisites for a new conflict, say that a new outbreak of tensions is beneficial for the West.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY or The Hague Tribunal) delivered a verdict for three Croatian generals on April 15th. All of them were accused of committing crimes against the Serbs during Operation Storm 1995. According to the court ruling, Ante Gotovina was sentenced to 24 years in prison, Mladen Markac to 18 years, and the third defendant, Ivan Cermac, was acquitted. 

So why has the verdict triggered such stormy emotions not only among the Croats but also in the Western countries?

The point is that throughout the history of the existence of The Hague Tribunal the key defendant for the UN court, who was often referred to as "Doctor Evil," was Yugoslavia's last president Milosevic and of course his supporters and Serbia itself.

There even appeared people in some countries in Europe and in the USA who started saying that the justice of The Hague was one-sided. This postulate needed no proofs for either Russia or the other countries which were not involved in the "anti-Yugoslav coalition". However, judging by the facts, those in The Hague have decided to improve their image and to put into life the principle that was declared by the tribunal itself, that is, that "all sides are to blame for the atrocities and that no nation was more responsible than the other". As a result, the Croatian generals, who were accused of ousting 100,000 peaceful civilians and of murdering hundreds of Serbs, were jailed. As it might seem, justice was obtained. And the fact that the Croats have got angry is simply an expected "side effect".

However, what followed was that the angry "progressive public"- meaning the leading Western media - has undertaken to conduct an investigation of its own. "The Washington Times", "The Wall Street Journal", Newsweek, and "The Jerusalem Post", after studying Storm Operation 1995, came to the conclusion that Ante Gotovina had committed no crimes at all. Moreover, the general is a real Croatian patriot and hero, and his campaign had not only restored Croatia's territorial integrity but had also destroyed the dream of the deceased Serb ruler Slobodan Milosevic about "Greater Serbia". Besides, the Western editions said that by its irresponsible verdicts The Hague Tribunal is stirring up a new war.

The first thought that comes to mind after reading all these "journalist investigations" is that the West wants to preserve the status quo in the Balkans, which suits it. In this system Belgrade acts as a "guilty child", who is still under punishment. And all the other parts of the former Yugoslavia act as sufferers, whose sufferings are linked to the violent "senior" and who receive small presents and bonuses in consolation. Thus, Kosovo has obtained independence, and Croatia is only one step away from accession into the European Union (EU). By the way, the Croats themselves are looking forward to this. 

However, there aree other reasons as well. Should The Hague Tribunal start conducting an unbiased investigation, many influential persons will be surely hurt. And not only in the Balkans.

Suffice it to mention here the information concerning the current Kosovo authorities that was made public by the former ICTY chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte - that Pristina was involved in the trafficking of human organs. Which means that not only Croats also killed the Serbs and not only vice versa. That is why it is necessary to continue studying the latest Balkan crisis, the head of the Centre For the Study of the Modern Balkan Crisis  under the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yelena Guskova says:

"The new data about the human organ trafficking and about the atrocities committed  by the Croats offer proof that it is necessary to study the Balkan crisis and that it is necessary to be objective while doing this. Of course, there're many conflicts in the world. But if we start analyzing how all the other countries developed in the 90s and what occurred to the Balkans and to the post-Yugoslav space, we'll undoubtedly arrive at the conclusion that the Serbs, the Croats and the Muslims have already suffered too much. They have no potential to take up arms again. Thus, to say that a new war will break out in the Balkans soon is no good."

"Thus, instead of intimidating the Balkan nations by saying that a new war will break out, it is necessary to afford the UN court an opportunity to go on with its investigations. And the Croats, the Serbs, the Albanians, and the Bosnians will decide themselves how they should coexist together. One thing is certain though: they will not start fighting because they had enough of it."

A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity

Priznanje da je na Dunavu nastala civilizacija pre svih

 

December 1, 2009

A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.

For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.

The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture's visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta "goddess" figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.

New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have approached the threshold of "civilization" status. Writing had yet to be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe.

The little-known culture is being rescued from obscurity in an exhibition, "The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.," which opened last month at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. More than 250 artifacts from museums in Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania are on display for the first time in the United States. The show will run through April 25.

At its peak, around 4500 B.C., said David W. Anthony, the exhibition's guest curator, "Old Europe was among the most sophisticated and technologically advanced places in the world" and was developing "many of the political, technological and ideological signs of civilization."

Dr. Anthony is a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., and author of "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World." Historians suggest that the arrival in southeastern Europe of people from the steppes may have contributed to the collapse of the Old Europe culture by 3500 B.C.

At the exhibition preview, Roger S. Bagnall, director of the institute, confessed that until now "a great many archaeologists had not heard of these Old Europe cultures." Admiring the colorful ceramics, Dr. Bagnall, a specialist in Egyptian archaeology, remarked that at the time "Egyptians were certainly not making pottery like this."

A show catalog, published by Princeton University Press, is the first compendium in English of research on Old Europe discoveries. The book, edited by Dr. Anthony, with Jennifer Y. Chi, the institute's associate director for exhibitions, includes essays by experts from Britain, France, Germany, the United States and the countries where the culture existed.

Dr. Chi said the exhibition reflected the institute's interest in studying the relationships of well-known cultures and the "underappreciated ones."

Although excavations over the last century uncovered traces of ancient settlements and the goddess figurines, it was not until local archaeologists in 1972 discovered a large fifth-millennium B.C. cemetery at Varna, Bulgaria, that they began to suspect these were not poor people living in unstructured egalitarian societies. Even then, confined in cold war isolation behind the Iron Curtain, Bulgarians and Romanians were unable to spread their knowledge to the West.

The story now emerging is of pioneer farmers after about 6200 B.C. moving north into Old Europe from Greece and Macedonia, bringing wheat and barley seeds and domesticated cattle and sheep. They established colonies along the Black Sea and in the river plains and hills, and these evolved into related but somewhat distinct cultures, archaeologists have learned. The settlements maintained close contact through networks of trade in copper and gold and also shared patterns of ceramics.

The Spondylus shell from the Aegean Sea was a special item of trade. Perhaps the shells, used in pendants and bracelets, were symbols of their Aegean ancestors. Other scholars view such long-distance acquisitions as being motivated in part by ideology in which goods are not commodities in the modern sense but rather "valuables," symbols of status and recognition.

Noting the diffusion of these shells at this time, Michel Louis Seferiades, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, suspects "the objects were part of a halo of mysteries, an ensemble of beliefs and myths."

In any event, Dr. Seferiades wrote in the exhibition catalog that the prevalence of the shells suggested the culture had links to "a network of access routes and a social framework of elaborate exchange systems — including bartering, gift exchange and reciprocity."

Over a wide area of what is now Bulgaria and Romania, the people settled into villages of single- and multiroom houses crowded inside palisades. The houses, some with two stories, were framed in wood with clay-plaster walls and beaten-earth floors. For some reason, the people liked making fired clay models of multilevel dwellings, examples of which are exhibited.

A few towns of the Cucuteni people, a later and apparently robust culture in the north of Old Europe, grew to more than 800 acres, which archaeologists consider larger than any other known human settlements at the time. But excavations have yet to turn up definitive evidence of palaces, temples or large civic buildings. Archaeologists concluded that rituals of belief seemed to be practiced in the homes, where cultic artifacts have been found.

The household pottery decorated in diverse, complex styles suggested the practice of elaborate at-home dining rituals. Huge serving bowls on stands were typical of the culture's "socializing of food presentation," Dr. Chi said.

At first, the absence of elite architecture led scholars to assume that Old Europe had little or no hierarchical power structure. This was dispelled by the graves in the Varna cemetery. For two decades after 1972, archaeologists found 310 graves dated to about 4500 B.C. Dr. Anthony said this was "the best evidence for the existence of a clearly distinct upper social and political rank."

Vladimir Slavchev, a curator at the Varna Regional Museum of History, said the "richness and variety of the Varna grave gifts was a surprise," even to the Bulgarian archaeologist Ivan Ivanov, who directed the discoveries. "Varna is the oldest cemetery yet found where humans were buried with golden ornaments," Dr. Slavchev said.

More than 3,000 pieces of gold were found in 62 of the graves, along with copper weapons and tools, and ornaments, necklaces and bracelets of the prized Aegean shells. "The concentration of imported prestige objects in a distinct minority of graves suggest that institutionalized higher ranks did exist," exhibition curators noted in a text panel accompanying the Varna gold.

Yet it is puzzling that the elite seemed not to indulge in private lives of excess. "The people who donned gold costumes for public events while they were alive," Dr. Anthony wrote, "went home to fairly ordinary houses."

Copper, not gold, may have been the main source of Old Europe's economic success, Dr. Anthony said. As copper smelting developed about 5400 B.C., the Old Europe cultures tapped abundant ores in Bulgaria and what is now Serbia and learned the high-heat technique of extracting pure metallic copper.

Smelted copper, cast as axes, hammered into knife blades and coiled in bracelets, became valuable exports. Old Europe copper pieces have been found in graves along the Volga River, 1,200 miles east of Bulgaria. Archaeologists have recovered more than five tons of pieces from Old Europe sites.

An entire gallery is devoted to the figurines, the more familiar and provocative of the culture's treasures. They have been found in virtually every Old Europe culture and in several contexts: in graves, house shrines and other possibly "religious spaces."

One of the best known is the fired clay figure of a seated man, his shoulders bent and hands to his face in apparent contemplation. Called the "Thinker," the piece and a comparable female figurine were found in a cemetery of the Hamangia culture, in Romania. Were they thinking, or mourning?

Many of the figurines represent women in stylized abstraction, with truncated or elongated bodies and heaping breasts and expansive hips. The explicit sexuality of these figurines invites interpretations relating to earthly and human fertility.

An arresting set of 21 small female figurines, seated in a circle, was found at a pre-Cucuteni village site in northeastern Romania. "It is not difficult to imagine," said Douglass W. Bailey of San Francisco State University, the Old Europe people "arranging sets of seated figurines into one or several groups of miniature activities, perhaps with the smaller figurines at the feet or even on the laps of the larger, seated ones."

Others imagined the figurines as the "Council of Goddesses." In her influential books three decades ago, Marija Gimbutas, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, offered these and other so-called Venus figurines as representatives of divinities in cults to a Mother Goddess that reigned in prehistoric Europe.

Although the late Dr. Gimbutas still has an ardent following, many scholars hew to more conservative, nondivine explanations. The power of the objects, Dr. Bailey said, was not in any specific reference to the divine, but in "a shared understanding of group identity."

As Dr. Bailey wrote in the exhibition catalog, the figurines should perhaps be defined only in terms of their actual appearance: miniature, representational depictions of the human form. He thus "assumed (as is justified by our knowledge of human evolution) that the ability to make, use and understand symbolic objects such as figurines is an ability that is shared by all modern humans and thus is a capability that connects you, me, Neolithic men, women and children, and the Paleolithic painters in caves."

Or else the "Thinker," for instance, is the image of you, me, the archaeologists and historians confronted and perplexed by a "lost" culture in southeastern Europe that had quite a go with life back before a single word was written or a wheel turned.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01arch.html?pagewanted=print

Thank you, Muammar

17.04.2011

 

Thank you, Muammar Al-Qathafi. For the vast majority of human beings, time on this planet is an anonymous passage. They are born naked, leave nothing and die lying down. In your case, you have left a legacy and a philosophy of Governance which will serve as a beacon of light for thousands of generations. And you  refuse to lie down.

Thank you Muammar Al-Qathafi. I sincerely hope that you live among us for many years to come and that you weather this imperialistic storm, dampening the flames of religious extremism and terrorism, fanned by a clique of sickening protagonists who wish to rape Libya and Africa, whose murderous campaign is based around greed and lies.

Many of us in the international community saw this coming. They tried and failed in (where else?) Benghazi in the 1990s and have been itching for a second attempt. The "innocent civilians" they refer to are none other than the terrorists they have trained and into whose ranks the Benghazi Islamist extremists have flocked. They lied about Libyan bombing campaigns, they now lie about cluster bombs (why would your forces deploy cluster weaponry into areas they have to pass through?) and let us be honest, if a "regime" is turning "the full weight of its heavy weaponry" on unarmed civilians the death toll would thousands, not six. Lies and stupidity go hand in hand and the ones who believe in the nonsense being spread by the mainstream media are those sheep whose passage on Earth will remain anonymous, as indeed it should.

In your case, Muammar Al-Qathafi, your passage among us will never be anonymous and you will be remembered for generations to come, thousands of years in the future, as a man who showed us a Third Option and who has left a written legacy which should be fundamental and compulsory reading for every primary school student. It is a manual of Governance for a perfect society.

Your Green Book is not a Utopic treatise but indeed the blueprint behind what you successfully implemented in your country, which was the poorest in the world when you received it and which you have transformed into the richest in Africa in terms of human development indices. For this you will be remembered.

You will be remembered for the system of Governance which was going to receive a UN humanitarian prize in March. You will be remembered for your model which provided free education, free healthcare, free houses. You will be remembered for your agricultural revolution which turned the desert green. You will be remembered for making your people prosperous and proud to be Libyans while taking little for yourself.

 

You will be remembered for living in a tent when others built palaces and you will be remembered for never turning your back on your roots and your people. You will be remembered for your system of democratic governance through People's Committees and Popular Congresses (Jamahiriya) - real democracy which rises above the mafia-style governance of western "parliamentary democracy". What sort of democracy is that?

You will be remembered for providing a social model which answers the needs of Humankind, taking into account the need for an umbrella State and also introducing the vector to reward human endeavour. Decades ago you saw through the weak points in the Socialist Model and the Capitalist Model and gave us a Third Way.

You will be remembered for your Third Universal Theory providing a manual of economic government which you successfully introduced into your country. Your enemies - they are few but powerful - whatever the result of today's debacle, will be remembered as the self-seeking protagonists they are. Within a single decade, they will be seen as the failures that are and their entry into the annals of history may be a few lines, maybe less and they will have contributed absolutely nothing whatsoever towards the future of humanity. Nothing.

 You will be remembered for your political, economic and social axes of your Third Universal Theory which is truly universal and will, I have no doubt, provide a model of Governance for this Planet and all those discovered in the Cosmos in the millennia to come. For this, Muammar Al-Qathafi, you will be remembered.

Yet your work did not end in Libya and with your people. After freeing thousands from the tyranny of colonialist practices and the humiliating yolk of Imperialism, you exported your ideas and ideals, benefiting not just a few cronies (like your enemies do) but directly affecting and building institutions for hundreds of millions of people across Africa. That is why Africans call you the King of Kings.

Your African legacy

The media controlled by your enemies are certainly not ignorant of the facts I am about to refer to but for sure they will never mention them. You will be remembered for your pioneering work in the African Continent - it was you who gave Africa the possibility to connect all countries and cities - and rural areas - in a vast telecommunications project facilitating distance learning, telemedicine and so on.

You will be remembered for your satellite technology which cost 400 million USD, freeing Africa from the burden of paying 500 million USD a year for the use of Western satellites. You paid 300 million USD of this. You will be remembered for having that 30 billion USD set aside - which Obama stole - money destined for African banking projects which would have circumvented western financial interests, holding Africa down for decades with high interest rates. That is why they attacked.

You will be remembered for standing up for the entire African continent at a time when Europeans were trying to fan the flames of racism, dividing North Africa from the rest of the continent. You will be remembered for your support of the ANC against apartheid, for your open approach to religious tolerance, you will be remembered for bringing prosperity, dignity and above all, hope, to Africa.

So nobody is fooled by the lies of your enemies. Hoping you will remain among us for many more years, understanding that nobody is eternal, and respecting your tremendous legacy...

In the name of thousands of millions of human beings, here today or to come tomorrow, thank you, from the bottom of our hearts.

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

Pravda.Ru

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/17-04-2011/117596-thank_muammar-0/

Bill Dorich responds to "Two U.S. Citizens from Bosnia Held in Wartime Killings," - Los Angeles Times

April 14, 2011

 

Letter to the Editor

Los Angeles Times:

 

In your article, Two U.S. Citizens from Bosnia Held in Wartime Killings, the Times once again reveals the ugly 'partisan press' that your newspaper perpetrate throughout the Bosnian Civil War when these pages never published one single article during the breakup of former Yugoslavia that was written by a Serbian journalist, author, scholar or political leader. Your one-sided reporting has been contemptible.

 

Your so-called journalist, Stephen Ceasar is equally culpable of a lack of ethics and morals. If these were two Serbs accused of these war crimes the headline would have surely screamed SERBS! But because these alleged killers are Muslims your reporter and this newspaper hoodwink your readers leaving the obvious conclusion that these two criminals are Serbians.

 

Your reporter knows full well the identity of these monsters but like the Times lap dog he grovels at the feet of some sick editor who continues his campaign to paint Serbs with collective guilt… a pox on all of your houses. Your subscribers deserve to read the facts and the truth and determine for themselves if the identity of the accused deserve protection by a major metropolitan newspaper.  Shame on the Times.

 

Do I expect this letter to appear on your pages?  I am not that stupid or gullible. But it will be published on every Serbian website around the world to expose the Los Angeles Times' continued ugly and irresponsible display of yellow journalism.

 

William Dorich

Los Angeles, CA 

 

The writer is the author of 5 books on Balkan history including his 1992 book, Kosovo.

 

Message from Colonel Mu'ummar Qaddafi

13.04.2011

 

Gaddafi Unplugged and Uncensored

 Translated by Professor Sam Hamod, Ph.D.

Recollections of My Life: Col. Mu'ummar Qaddafi, The Leader of the Revolution. April 5, 2011.

In the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful...

For 40 years, or was it longer, I can't remember, I did all I could to give people houses, hospitals, schools, and when they were hungry, I gave them food. I even made Benghazi into farmland from the desert, I stood up to attacks from that cowboy Reagan, when he killed my adopted orphaned daughter, he was trying to kill me, instead he killed that poor innocent child. Then I helped my brothers and sisters from Africa with money for the African Union.

I did all I could to help people understand the concept of real democracy, where people's committees ran our country. But that was never enough, as some told me, even people who had 10 room homes, new suits and furniture, were never satisfied, as selfish as they were they wanted more. They told Americans and other visitors, that they needed "democracy" and "freedom" never realizing it was a cut throat system, where the biggest dog eats the rest, but they were enchanted with those words, never realizing that in America, there was no free medicine, no free hospitals, no free housing, no free education and no free food, except when people had to beg or go to long lines to get soup.

No, no matter what I did, it was never enough for some, but for others, they knew I was the son of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the only true Arab and Muslim leader we've had since Salah-al-Deen, when he claimed the Suez Canal for his people, as I claimed Libya, for my people, it was his footsteps I tried to follow, to keep my people free from colonial domination - from thieves who would steal from us.

Now, I am under attack by the biggest force in military history, my little African son, Obama wants to kill me, to take away the freedom of our country, to take away our free housing, our free medicine, our free education, our free food, and replace it with American style thievery, called "capitalism," but all of us in the Third World know what that means, it means corporations run the countries, run the world, and the people suffer. So, there is no alternative for me, I must make my stand, and if Allah wishes, I shall die by following His path, the path that has made our country rich with farmland, with food and health, and even allowed us to help our African and Arab brothers and sisters to work here with us, in the Libyan Jamahiriya.

I do not wish to die, but if it comes to that, to save this land, my people, all the thousands who are all my children, then so be it.

Let this testament be my voice to the world, that I stood up to crusader attacks of NATO, stood up to cruelty, stood up to betrayal, stood up to the West and its colonialist ambitions, and that I stood with my African brothers, my true Arab and Muslim brothers, as a beacon of light. When others were building castles, I lived in a modest house, and in a tent. I never forgot my youth in Sirte, I did not spend our national treasury foolishly, and like Salah-al-Deen, our great Muslim leader, who rescued Jerusalem for Islam, I took little for myself...

In the West, some have called me "mad", "crazy", but they know the truth yet continue to lie, they know that our land is independent and free, not in the colonial grip, that my vision, my path, is, and has been clear and for my people and that I will fight to my last breath to keep us free, may Allah almighty help us to remain faithful and free.

　

c: Col. Mu'ummar Qaddafi, 2011/05/04

Copyright Col. Mu'ummar Qaddafi, - Mathaba.Net

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/13-04-2011/117563-message_from_qaddafi-0/