Artículo de John Pilger publicado en el New Statesman el 24 de enero del 2000: Kosovo, convertido en el primer estado mafioso de la historia, está literalmente sembrado de bombas de racimo sin explotar. Este es el resultado de la ética de Tony Blair
John Pilger - Kosovo, close to being a Mafia state, is
littered with unexploded bombs. That's the result of ethical
Blairism
The Blair government's resumption of arms sales
to Indonesia ends an unreported hoax. The four-month "ban",
supposedly in re-sponse to the renewed repression in East Timor,
was hardly a ban at all. Licences were merely extended, so that
no future business would be lost; and parliament and the public
were not told. Now, with 170,000 East Timorese held hostage by
the Indonesian military in camps in West Timor and British-supplied
Saladin armoured cars used in attacks on civilians elsewhere in
Indonesia, the military dictatorship that still runs the country
(regardless of its democratic trappings) will be encouraged in
its campaign against the popular resistance.
At the same time, the ethical Blairites are eager to resume arms
sales to the Pakistani military dictatorship, which three months
ago crushed an elected government. Pakistan's appalling human-rights
record makes a grim joke of the European code of conduct on arms
sales, adopted when Britain held the EU presidency. This is
unsurprising; British arms exports have long gone to regimes with
appalling human-rights records.
The ethical Blairites, however, add another dimension. Consider
the legacy of their "new moral crusade" in Kosovo last
spring. Clare Short, an avid crusader, said then: "Nato is
not killing civilians. The very carefulness of our operations is
to ensure that there is minimum damage to civilians." This
was manifestly false. Several thousand civilians were killed and
thousands more maimed, many by cluster bombs which are, in effect,
air-dropped, time-activated landmines. Those that did not explode
immediately now lie in wait for unsuspecting civilians, often
children, who pick them up; on detonation, they release dozens of
"bomblets" that cause horrific injuries.
I saw something of the human carnage they caused in Indochina
following the American bombing; 30 years later, they are still
killing and injuring. Not long ago, in tiny Laos, the British
Mines Advisory Group found 700 unexploded bomblets in one school
playground. According to the Asia correspondent of the Wall
Street Journal, cluster bombs have given Laos "an annual
nationwide casualty rate of 20,000, more than half of them deaths".
For Laos, now read Kosovo. Last April, Paul Watson of the Los
Angeles Times, who distinguished himself by remaining in
Kosovo during the Nato bombing, reported that cluster bombs had
turned "parts of the province into a no-man's land"
which was "littered" with unexploded bomblets. At
Pristina Hospital, he witnessed the "horrific wounds"
of Albanian children, caused by delayed-action clusters. (It was
Watson who memorably wrote: "Even in Kosovo, I couldn't
escape the sound of [Nato spokesman Jamie] Shea's voice . . . it
haunted me at the strangest times, denying things that I knew to
be true, insisting on others that I had seen were false.")
With Robert Fisk's reporting, Watson's witness to the carnage
caused by Nato was rare. This was not so much a reporters' war as
one dominated by drum-beating lifestyle columnists who never
acknowledged that British pilots were using terror weapons
against civilians, sowing Kosovo with a harvest of death and
suffering that was in explicit violation of the Ottowa Convention,
which prohibits the production and use of anti-personnel mines.
Subsequent scrutiny of Ministry of Defence statistics reveals
that, contrary to Clare Short's fiction of "carefulness",
more than 75 per cent of bombs dropped by the RAF were free-fall,
including the 78,057 cluster bomblets released.
"It would be wrong to assume," said Blair last April,
"that bombs and missiles that miss their target necessarily
cause collateral damage." Read again that statement and you
get a sense of the craven sophistry with which respectable
regimes cover their crimes. Blair is afraid of the truth getting
out and his ministers blocked disclosure of the percentage of
British bombs and missiles that "went astray" in Kosovo.
They justify this by recourse to the Code of Practice on Access
to Government Information, a decree of state secrecy that no
Soviet-era apparatchik could better.
The ethical Blairites claim they did not use depleted uranium in
Kosovo, as John Major did in Iraq. Can we believe that? Their co-crusaders,
the Americans, used it. The physicist and chemist Professor Hari
Sharma, a world authority on depleted uranium, says: "The
danger is equal to that of a long-term weapon of mass destruction.
The inhalation of even the smallest dust particle may cause
irreparable cell damage in unprotected people, resulting in a
cancer epidemic that over time could kill thousands of the
exposed" - in other words, the very people Blair claimed to
be liberating.
Also unreported is the installation in Kosovo of a paramilitary
regime with links to organised crime. Indeed, Kosovo may become
the world's first Mafia state. As they oversee the ethnic
cleansing of 240,000 Serb and Roma civilians, Nato and its United
Nations partners have established a "working relationship"
with the Kosovo Liberation Army, which Robin Cook and Madeleine
Albright once dismissed as a terrorist group. Much of the KLA is
criminalised, with war criminals, common murderers and drug
traders forming an "interim administration" that will
implement the "free-market reforms" required by the US
and Europe. Their supervisors are the World Bank and the European
Development Bank, whose aim is to ensure that western mining,
petroleum and construction companies share the booty of Kosovo's
extensive natural resources: a fitting finale to the new moral
crusade. Watch for others.
Obviamente, la publicación de este artículo en este website no comercial al igual que el resto de artículos no se debe a ningún interés económico sino al deseo de dar a conocer los hechos aquí expuestos que son negados u ocultados deliberadamente a la opinión pública por quienes por carecer de la menor decencia iniciaron en marzo la guerra contra Yugoslavia, y que desgraciadamente son los que todavía nos gobiernan...