NATO Futures Past

Lest we forget, here's yet another memorable instance of Western 'duplicity'

To set the scene, I shall quote from Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers (London, 2012), 456-7; here and in the following, emphases mine:

It would certainly be misleading to think of the Austrian note [the ultimatum to Serbia delivered on 28 July 1914] as an anomalous regression into a barbaric and bygone era before the rise of sovereign states. The Austrian note was a great deal milder, for example, than the ultimatum presented by NATO to Serbia-Yugoslavia in the form of the Rambouillet Agreement drawn up in February and March 1999 to force the Serbs into complying with NATO policy in Kosovo. Its provisions included the following:

‘NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft and equipment free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access through the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, including associated airspace and territorial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, manoeuvre, billet and utilization of any areas or facilities as required for support, training, and operations.’

Henry Kissinger was doubtless right when he described Rambouillet as ‘a provocation, an excuse to start bombing’, whose terms were unacceptable even to the most moderate Serbian. The demands of the Austrian note pale by comparison.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I note that part of my (in-law) family is originally from Bosnia-Herzegovina; she came to Austria as a refugee in the early 1990s after her Serbian father was killed by his neighbours.

I also have a lot of friends and colleagues from former Yugoslavia, mostly Serbs and Croats, and I know a couple of other people from the ‘smaller’ (in numerical terms) nations.

While I roundly condemn the crimes committed in the 1990s, I am of the firm conviction that ‘we’ in ‘the West’ bear ultimate responsibility for the conduct of ‘Western’ politicians and militaries. I’m aware of the severe limitations of ‘popular sovereignty’, too, esp. within supranational institutions, such as the EU and NATO, but unless and until we denote accurately what happened in 1999, we’ll repeat these deeds.

Every single time ‘we’ take to the field of battle, ostensibly to ‘spread our values’ or the like.

Now, the below piece comes in my translation, with emphases and [snark] added.

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The Unredeemed Chemical War against Serbia: Who Will Finally Hold NATO to Account?

Does the final verdict against Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladić really complete the investigation into war crimes in Yugoslavia?

By Hartmut Sommerschuh, Berliner Zeitung, 14 June 2021 [source]

For seventy-eight days in 1999, NATO bombed Serbian hospitals, schools, waterworks and chemical plants without a UN mandate. This first war of aggression with German participation since 1945 led to an ecological and human catastrophe. But churches, environmental associations, and the Bündnis 90/The Greens remain silent to this day.

On 24 March 1999, NATO began its air strikes against Serbia. Of all people, Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and his colleague Rudolf Scharping [SPD] fuelled the war mood. In order to prevent ‘ethnic cleansing’, further ‘expulsions’, and a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’, it is urgently necessary to intervene. These claims have long since been refuted, as retired Lieutenant Colonel Jochen Scholz, former advisor to the Inspector-General of the Bundeswehr in the Ministry of Defence, has already confirmed many times. Until the last day before the attack, the Bundeswehr Intelligence Office’s situation reports for members of parliament only spoke of a bloody civil war between KLA soldiers and the Serbian army.

NATO Shelled Hospitals, Schools, Monasteries, and Industrial Plants

In an ORB Arte film from the summer of 1999 by Sascha Adameck entitled ‘Bombs on Chemical Plants’ [orig. Bomben auf Chemiewerke], Michael Rose, the British general and former commander of the UN peacekeepers in Bosnia, explained

The goal was to defeat and destroy Milošević’s military. But that ended in failure. The list of targets was then expanded to include so-called civil-military targets, i.e., bridges, roads, electricity supply, hospitals and even television stations.

NATO destroyed or damaged 60 bridges, 110 hospitals, 480 schools, 365 monasteries, television stations, electricity and water infrastructure, and 121 industrial plants. 2,500 people died. To this day, a particularly cynical war crime is considered to be the deliberate bombing of the large chemical plants in Pančevo, Novi Sad and Bor, in addition to the use of over 30,000 depleted uranium shells in over 80 locations.

On April 4, 1999, twelve days after the start of the air strikes, rockets hit for the first time the Pančevo refinery. The leaking oil burned for two weeks. On April 6, 1999, long-range bombers attacked the older oil refinery in Novi Sad. 80,000 tons of oil leaked and 20,000 tons burned. A huge cloud of soot, tar, oil particles, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides lay over the city. Only a fraction of these later triggered the diesel scandal and debates about annual fatalities in Germany’s strict legal regime [that would VW manipulating exhaust pipe emissions].

On April 15 and 18, 1999, and even on June 8, shortly before the ceasefire, NATO completely destroyed the Serbian chemical plant in Pančevo. Only a few years earlier it had been modernised with US help. Computer-controlled rockets hit the fertiliser factory, the oil refinery, the PVC factory and, exactly to the meter, a half-full tank containing 450 tons of vinyl chloride [hi, East Palestine, Ohio, residents, you’re treated to the same as were the Serbs in 1999: go figure], the carcinogenic precursor for PVC production. It was one of the containers that the plant management had reported to NATO as particularly dangerous. Although 8,000 tons of ammonia were transported to Romania as a precaution, hundreds of tons of this deadly gas also escaped.

A 20-kilometre-long cloud of toxic gas lingered over the suburbs of Belgrade into the vegetable and grain chambers of Serbia for more than ten days. 40,000 people were evacuated. The concentration of vinyl chloride alone temporarily rose to 10,600 times the international limit. As the wind shifted, the cloud continued to creep into Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary. Even 550 kilometers south, scientists at the Greek university station Xanthi measured highly toxic dioxins and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon compounds.

Serbia has the Highest Rates of Lung Cancer in Europe Today

Just a few years after the end of the war, Serbian doctors such as leading Belgrade oncologist Vladimir Čikarić and neurologist Danica Grujičić observed a dramatic increase in cancer rates and mortality. Today Serbia is at the top of Europe for lung and breast cancer. It was only in May 2018 that doctors in the west-oriented Belgrade parliament were able to push through the establishment of a commission of inquiry into all the consequences of the attacks with depleted uranium ammunition and on the chemical industry.

For the toxicologist Ursula Stephan from Halle/Saale, the bombing of the Serbian chemical plants is still an unpunished, deliberate chemical attack that consciously accepted thousands of victims of long-term damage. When all German environmental associations remained silent about it in 1999, Stephan was chairwoman of the German Incident Commission [orig. Störfall-Kommission], an expert association for industry safety concerns and also for the consequences and prevention of chemical accidents. At the end of July 1999, at the request of the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF office in Vienna), she was the only expert in Germany willing to visit the destroyed chemical sites in Serbia (one of over 150 ‘world centres of biological diversity’) and provide an expert opinion on the medical and environmental aspects.

Almost at the same time, specialists from the UN environmental agency (UNEP), which was then headed by Klaus Töpfer, were on site examining the damage caused by the chemical attacks, including experts from the Brandenburg State Environment Agency. But in the end in their report they kept the ball flat in a NATO-friendly manner and, as a conclusion to their analyses, explained that most of the ‘pollution’ caused by the spilled and burned chemicals were legacy issues from before the war [nothing to see here, folks, move on; I do wonder how these people sleep at night].

According to German Law, This was a ‘Catastrophe’

Ursula Stephan, on the other hand, declared the extent of the destruction, the soil pollution, and, above all, the extensive poison gas clouds as an ‘exceptional incident’ according to the strict German laws. As a catastrophe, so to speak. That is, as a catastrophe out of control, for the dimensions of which there is no experience, no predictability, no preparation options and therefore no defence scenarios. Comparable to Chernobyl or Fukushima [let that sink it; also, ‘thank you, NATO’].

According to the experts, over a billion cubic meters of air-polluting substances were released from 78,000 tons of burned explosives and rocket fuel and the exhaust gases from over 150,000 flight hours of bombers and cruise missiles in addition to all the chemicals [dropping bombs for peace—or ‘the climate’—is about as useful as f****** for virginity, proverbially speaking]. This total amount of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and unburned hydrocarbons was the largest contributor to air pollution and the greenhouse effect since the Gulf War [linke break added]

‘Anyone who attacks the chemical industry’, said Ms. Stephan in the ORB environmental TV program ‘Ozon’ in 1999, ‘knows what he is doing.’

Even during the air raids, Berlin University Professor of Environmental Planning Knut Krusewitz had described these strikes against chemical centres as a new type of environmental war, with which NATO specifically circumvented the Geneva ban on chemical weapons and violated the UN General Assembly’s Enmod Convention of 1978. According to which ‘environmentally altering techniques that have widespread, long-lasting or serious effects’ are prohibited as a means of warfare. But to this day there has been great silence about the dramatic consequences of NATO’s first war of aggression with German participation.

The Wende of 1989 Once Brought About Environmental Protection

Where has it gone, the unity of the environmental and peace movement that has grown in both East and West? [what a brilliant question, eh?] In May 1983, during a European conference on nuclear disarmament in West Berlin, Petra Kelly, Gert Bastian, and three other Green Party members of the Bundestag spontaneously visited East Berlin peace activists. And they unfurled a banner on Alexanderplatz demanding ‘disarmament in East and West’ against the NATO double-track decision: ‘The Greens—Swords into Plowshares.’ The Kleinmachnow graphic artist Herbert Sander modelled this biblical symbol on a famous Soviet sculpture in front of the New York UN building in 1980. And Protestant youth groups in the GDR used it as a bookmark during a ten-day ‘Decade of Peace’.

Source; I’ve added the image, which does not appear in the original article.

The activities of the green peace activists Kelly and Bastian with this symbol, which was canceled by the Stasi, demonstrated in a spectacular way the peace and environmental ideas from which the Monday demonstrations grew out of in 1989 in the Berlin Environmental Library, the Dresden Kreuzkirche, the Wittenberg Peace Circle, and the Leipzig Nikolaikirche. And finally the peaceful revolution of 1989. Now, over 30 years after the bloodless departure of the East Germans, the question must be asked: what has become of the ideals of the West German Greens and East German environmental movements? And what about the commandment of peace from the fundamental UN Charter of 1945: In their international relations, all members refrain from any threat or use of force that is directed against the territorial integrity or political independence of a state or is otherwise incompatible with the goals of the United Nation.

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Hartmut Sommerschuh lives as an author in Potsdam. From November 1989 to 2003 he was editorial director and, after the SFB and ORB were merged to form RBB, he was the editor in charge of the environmental programme ‘Ozon’. In 1999, the aforementioned film ‘Bombs on Chemical Plants’ (author: Sascha Adamek) was made under his responsibility for Arte.

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Bottom Lines

The big lie about ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P), inaugurated with the war of aggression vs. Yugoslavia in 1999, is at the very heart of the ‘rules-based order’.

Its authors—among them, prominently, Irish-born Obama careerist Samatha Power—are among the chief culprits of Western depravities in the name of peace, humanitarianism, and, yes, a pseudo variety of ‘idealism’.

Are ‘the others’ a tad better? Well, look at Mr. Putin, and the answer is obvious, isn’t it? The one and only thing Mr. Putin has going for himself is that he’s relatively more ‘honest’ (sic) about his intentions and reasons compared to ‘the West’.

Should we, as ‘the West’ embrace that kind of pseudo-liberal ‘idealism’?

A hard question, esp. if in some cases, non-intervention appears arguably a worse decision (see: Rwanda). On the other hand, leadership by example only works if one’s conduct is exemplary.

Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and many others in recent memory are testaments to Western hypocrisy. I suppose ‘we’ either embrace this indelible blot on our societies or we’ll hold those responsible to account.