Yugoslavia and US terrorism
by Rob Gowland* Yugoslavia was subjected to NATO air attack — using missiles and "smart bombs" — for 78 days. The country incurred losses of at least $100 billion, a huge sum for a small country. NATO deliberately knocked out every trunk route — road, rail and river — between Yugoslavia and all its neighbours as part of Washington's strategy of ruining the economy of any country that defies it. Even when the bombing is brought to a halt, the victim country goes on suffering with infrastructure and trade both in ruins. And to make sure they stay that way, sanctions are imposed. The people of Yugoslavia have accomplished some remarkable feats of reconstruction under extremely difficult conditions. In all, NATO destroyed or seriously damaged 45 road bridges and 17 rail bridges, but already most important road and rail traffic has been restored with new or reconstructed bridges. As part of US tactics to encourage the ethnic Hungarians of the north of the country to "rise up against Milosevic", NATO heavily bombed the northern city of Novy Sad and destroyed all bridges over the Danube, cutting off Novy Sad and the northern province of Vojvodina. This, it was apparently thought, would make the ethnic Hungarian population welcome the prospect of Hungarian and NATO troops as liberators and peacekeepers. Predictably, it had the opposite effect. The Hungarian minority in northern Yugoslavia has no desire to join Hungary or to bend the knee to NATO. Tito built a multi-ethnic country and Slobadan Milosevic's government has continued that policy while reaping the benefits of it at the same time. With the support of the local people and enterprises, work on reconstructing the road bridge between Novy Sad and Belgrade began just three days after the bombing was halted. It was completed in record time. Reconstruction In fact, the Serbs accomplished some remarkable feats of construction in tackling NATO's handiwork: they built new railway bridges in 60 days, for example. They set a world record for the construction of steel bridges. At the same time, despite the urgency of the situation, historic old stone bridges were carefully restored, not just replaced with modern steel structures. Since the end of hostilities the Ministry for Reconstruction has fully restored or replaced: 28 main bridges 4 railway bridges 2 roads 1 railway line 4 heating plants 7 schools or colleges 4 hospitals 445 houses or flats and the Museum of Modern Art in Belgrade. Work is presently going on at 65 sites, including ten road bridges, 12 railway bridges, two schools and 201 flats or houses. Precision bombing In the course of the Congress we saw some of the damage inflicted by NATO on the capital, Belgrade. This included a hospital for intensive care patients and a maternity hospital, both totally destroyed. At the time of the attacks they were occupied by staff and patients. These buildings were not hit by a stick of bombs dropped across a district — a hospital hit in such a case could perhaps be an accident. In Belgrade, these hospitals — and other civilian targets — were hit by missiles and "smart bombs" that were aimed with extraordinary precision using global satellite positioning technology and real time television guidance systems. They did not hit the building on either side of the target, they hit the target. Put another way, if they hit a building, that was the building they were aiming at. NATO targeted hospitals — especially maternity hospitals — as a deliberate terror tactic. For the same reason, and to impress on the world that the US and its allies could hit anything they chose whenever they chose, NATO bombed various historic government buildings even though they were empty! After NATO declared the Yugoslav and Serbian Interior Ministries, the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry and Yugoslav Defence Ministry to be "military targets", the Serbs moved all personnel and important files etc out of the buildings. They made no secret of it and NATO would have been well aware of it. Nevertheless, NATO hit all four buildings with missiles — just to show that they could, and would. The Serbs were horrified: these were historic buildings, classified by their equivalent of our National Trust. Shocked Serbs told me "Even Hitler didn't bomb these buildings". Restoration work on the Foreign Ministry, a particularly ornate structure with its roof adorned with statues and cupolas, is already under way but it will be a long process. Propaganda NATO's lying propaganda, dished out at frequent "media briefings" to a very compliant press corps which had swallowed the "ethnic cleansing" disinformation campaign hook, line and sinker, was combatted by a vibrant and defiant Serbian TV and radio. Serbian journalists took great pleasure in exposing the latest NATO lies, and were soon the target of their very own NATO disinformation campaign. They were portrayed as providing not news (like NATO apparently did) but false and lying propaganda! They were, NATO proclaimed, an integral part of the "ethnic cleansing" process. Since they were not honest journalists like their Western counterparts they deserved no special respect as non- combatants, still less as representatives of "the press". To prove their sordid propaganda role, NATO made a seemingly impossible demand: that Serbian TV allow NATO to broadcast eight hours a day over the Serb's network. To NATO's discomfiture, the head of Serbian TV agreed — on condition that NATO allow Serbian TV to broadcast for ten minutes a day on all the NATO countries' networks. NATO would have none of that and instead, no doubt in the interests of truth, bombed the headquarters of Serbian TV, killing 16 staff. Western journalists and technicians using the facilities were tipped off about an impending attack and left the building in good time. The missiles killed make-up girls, camera crew, journalists etc, and wrecked the building. Serbian TV still operates, but with a skeleton staff from temporary premises with limited equipment (new equipment cannot be imported under the sanctions). Although the majority of staff have been stood down, they are still receiving 70 per cent of their regular salary. Chinese Embassy deliberately hit I saw the Chinese Embassy, where three diplomatic staff were killed and a dozen or so injured by a missile strike. The damage is severe — they are indeed lucky the death toll was not higher. This attack broke every tenet of international law regarding the sanctity of foreign embassies and diplomatic personnel. The US, forced onto the back foot, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the world that it was the result of using old, outdated maps! No one, least of all the Chinese, bought that. If anybody had an up-to-date map of Belgrade at that time it was NATO. China was an active supporter of Yugoslavia against the US, but the other story that NATO put around to justify the strike on the Embassy — that it was a communications centre or radar post warning the Yugoslavs of incoming NATO air raids — was never taken seriously even by the US's allies. The Chinese Embassy was hit precisely because China was championing the cause of Yugoslavia and leading diplomatic efforts to force the bombing to be halted. It was hit to warn off any country that might think of siding with the Serbs. The precision of the US bombing/missile attacks makes them an ideal means of pressuring other countries. The tactics of US gangsters' protection rackets have simply been expanded to an international scale. We must also remember that at the time China's embassy was hit, China and the US were deep in negotiations over China's entry into the World Trade Organisation. No doubt, US negotiators saw this as an added inducement for China to take a less hard-line position in those negotiations. The US was showing that it could really play hardball. Trialling new weapons As in all conflicts that the US has been in over the last half century or so, the war on Yugoslavia was also used by the US to trial new weapons. Yugoslav power stations were hit with graphite bombs, intended to not only disrupt power supply but to keep the country blacked out for a lengthy time. Knocking out power plants for lengthy periods threatens the lives of hospital patients primarily: new born infants, intensive care patients, dialysis patients, people undergoing emergency surgery. It is a terror tactic, like so much of the NATO war: state terrorism at its most blatant. Serbian power workers were working to restore power within hours of the raids. Starting from scratch, they devised ways to neutralise the effects of the graphite bombs, allowing the power grid to be restored in a relatively short time. In the south of the country another weapon was used whose effects cannot be so easily overcome: depleted uranium (DU), used to tip armour-piercing shells, missiles, bombs, etc. On impact, the DU turns to powder, a radioactive dust that lingers long after the fighting is over. If the experience of Iraq is any guide, and it should be, Yugoslavia can expect a rapid increase over the next several years in various types of leukemia and other cancers, especially among the young. There were strong calls at the Congress of the Socialist Party of Serbia for a UN ban on DU, a call we in Australia should fully support.* * * *Rob Gowland, member of the Central Committee of the CPA and a Guardian staff member represented the CPA at the Fourth Congress of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) in Belgrade on February 17. This is the second of two articles on his experiences. The first appeared in last week's Guardian.