Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx 
	Economic & Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions  £20 p.a. [P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50 London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd]  
No 0995 April 21st 1999                                                                                                                                         10p 

An assessment of the latest developments over Ireland will appear, at last, in next EPSR. A 'stand firm' statement by Republican News is printed this week. 

The cover-up of blitzkrieg's failure and its 'own goal' disasters is exposing NATO as a sick fraud, bent on destruction for its own sordid commercial and tradewar interests, and marked by vicious imperialist infighting. US domineering arrogance looks doomed to the most spectacular come-uppance in history. The punishing defeat for the CIA's KLA crooks for inflicting civil war on Serbia is a complete 'democratic rights' non-issue

The total lies of all bourgeois 'political democracy' are poised to humiliate the degenerate imperialist bullying being inflicted in the Balkans.

Western meddling is creating a catastrophe for Serbia's Albanian minority while leaving its own warmongering 'prowess' looking sickeningly inept.

The combination of maximum concern about lost prestige if US imperialism sustains too many casualties, plus minimum concern for explaining truthfully what Washington's foul purposes are in this destructive adventure, has set up a propaganda nightmare for NATO.

Despite being utterly brainwashed, the international capitalist media let slip report after report which just ridicule the West's pretence of 'high moral aims and noble achievements'.

The fraud of 'intervention for humanitarian purposes' has only produced intolerable degradation for the refugees caused by NATO's war. The arm's length blitzkrieg has topped this with direct butchery of scores of manipulated Albanian families from the air.

And even this outrage has been subjected to the same inhuman spin-doctoring, multiplying the suffering and embarrassment still further as the American 'master race' shows concern only for sanitising its own rotten reputation.

Nearly a week has passed but still the appalling massacre by NATO blitzkrieg-arrogance of dozens of Albanian families on the road near Djakovica is being milked for what hate-making anti-Serb propaganda can be squeezed out of it.

The monster pro-imperialist opportunists of New Labour are tripping over themselves to play chief stooge to this barbaric US-warmongering lie-machine called NATO.

As strings are pulled under them, Government and Establishment figures still all swear how the West "had to declare war in the air on Serbia to try to prevent Milosevic's plans for total ethnic cleansing of the Albanian population from the Kosovo region of Serbia".

But when the inhuman refugee crisis first began emerging after one week of war and New Labour ministers were chided for not having foreseen and made preparations for such a mass tragedy, they all replied: "But who could have imagined that Milosevic would respond to NATO armed pressure with such savage ethnic cleansing."

The total contradiction still remains. Either NATO really did know about supposed Milosevic 'plans' for total ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, in which case the monstrous suffering four weeks on by the still uncared-for refugees (whatever really caused them) is simply fascist inhumanity. Or else there were no such Belgrade plans, and the Serbs have unsurprisingly just reacted savagely to their Albanian minority for the KLA's civil-war conspiracy to bring NATO blitzkrieg in on its side, — in which case all the propaganda about how NATO 'had to go to war' is revealed as the most infamous disinformation in modern history, — the most evil 'free world' brainwashing of mankind (among many close rivals for the title) since the notorious 'Gulf of Tonkin incident', — entirely fictitious, — which 'justified' the launching of fullscale Western imperialist war on the Vietnamese national liberation struggle in 1964.

Inconveniently for the West, its much-hyped dedication to 'honesty and truth' has only just now, 35 years late, — let slip some new details of US imperialism's outrageous warmongering stunt against the people of Indo-China:

The scene has an eerie topicality. The President of the United States appears on television and informs the nation that "to prevent further aggression" he must bomb the oil depots and military installations of a foreign country. But this was August 1964 and as President Lyndon Johnson spoke, American planes were already bombing North Vietnam following "unprovoked aggression" by the North Vietnamese against two American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

The White House spin doctors, in a vein only too familiar this week, gave out stories of unprovoked aggression against the Maddox, an electronic surveillance ship, on August 2 and on August 4 claimed an attack, in pitch dark in a raging storm, in which 43 enemy torpedoes were launched against the Maddox and the Jo Turner. Few challenged the story. Congress was soon to give Johnson virtually every power he needed to go to war.

So an involvement which previously entailed only American "military advisers" in South Vietnam escalated into a war that was to last 11 years, cost 58,148 American and hundreds of thousands of Asian lives and eventual US humiliation.

The official version of what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin has long been considered questionable. But the LBJ Memorial library recently released transcripts of the tapes of telephone conversations on those fatal days, between Johnson and his secretary of defence, Robert McNamara.

The transcript makes it clear that Johnson and his administration misled Congress, concealing provocative US-directed covert operations in the Gulf. While there was clearly a US-provoked attack on August 2, the tapes raise serious doubt as to whether there was any attack on the Maddox on August 4.

The CIA's chief radar analyst, Gene Poteat, appears on the programme telling how, as the media awaited Johnson’s broadcast that night announcing the bombing of North Vietnam, Poteat was asked to assess radar reports from the destroyers confirming the attack.

He said it was impossible to reach a conclusion, on the fragmentary material he was given.

But Poteat told the Guardian this week that, through private contacts, he later got the material. His conclusion is that there could not possibly have been any torpedoes fired at the destroyers.

Speaking from Virginia this week, he said: "Several months later, private sources helped me obtain meteorological and radar information about what the radar operators really saw that night. I realised there could not possibly have been a torpedo boat there, simply because the weather was so atrocious. As for the radar tracks, I realised that none of them was lined up as though they were anywhere near conducting an attack. The conclusion I reached was that it was absolutely not possible the destroyers were targets at all. Furthermore, sonar contacts are not valid under those kind of weather condition. But this was well after the fact and too late."

His findings are supported by a cable on August 4 from the Commander of the Maddox, which was seen by McNamara. It cast doubt on the firing of torpedoes, and said: "Freak weather effects on radar and over-eager sonar men may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sighting by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action takes place." But Johnson had already booked his television appearance.

John Bayley, communications officer on the Maddox, was also not convinced they were under fire. Now retired from a position with IBM and speaking from North Carolina this week, he said: "I saw the logbooks later which said there were 43 torpedoes in the water. But I saw no evidence of an attack."

"It’s pretty obvious," Poteat said, "they had made up their minds what they were going to do, the President and McNamara. They wanted to go to war. I was stunned when I read the paper next morning and the air attacks had started.

"I thought there is nothing wrong with getting the facts before you do it. It would have been easy to determine absolutely whether it was a credible attack or not, and done fairly quickly".

From his office in Washington this week Robert McNamara, appointed secretary of defence in 1961, was initially happy to discuss the Gulf of Tonkin affair. But the encounter went rapidly downhill when he was pressed on the issue of going to war on the evidence of an attack that had never taken place. And why was it necessary to rush to war within hours of dubious reports from the Gulf of Tonkin?

McNamara refused to accept that it was reasonable of the North Vietnamese to feel provoked by the Maddox going within 11 miles of their coast, which the previous night had been the target of American-directed commando raids (in a newsreel briefing of the time McNamara told the US media the Maddox was 30 to 60 miles off the coast).

In the minds of some people and perhaps in the minds of the Vietnamese, it was thought to be part of what were known as the 34A operations, covert operations ostensibly run by the South Vietnamese but surely involving substantial CIA and US support.

But the crucial question was, how could McNamara and his military chiefs have amassed convincing evidence of an attack which did not exist? The problem about August 4 is that it turned out there were absolutely no torpedoes fired.

"There wasn’t an attack, period," he agreed.

But here was an incident that didn’t take place, so there couldn’t have been any evidence that it had taken place, yet he had acted on the assumption it had.

"Are you going to quote me on anything we have discussed?" McNamara asked. I reminded him that was clear from the outset. He said: "I think the interview has got to be cancelled."

Finally, McNamara agreed to drop his objections to our interview if the following passage appeared: "Nobody I know has stated that those making the decision in the Johnson administration had no basis for concluding that it was probable, not certain but probable, that the second attack had taken place. What I think is clear: a) it didn’t take place; b) we made a great effort to find whether it did — on the basis of that we believed it was highly probable that it had; c) we hadn't responded to the first attack which we thought was a provocation; and d) therefore, we thought we should respond to a highly probable second attack."

And these are the revelations which the warmongering capitalist press itself is prepared to admit, even as it knows that such admissions might damage the present warmongering adventure against Milosevic, so dear to its heart.

What even more searing exposure could a communist press make of such pathetic imperialist confessions?

As things stand, however, the current 'free world' brainwashing against Serbia by the 'free' capitalist press is set to continue, only marginally relieved by the occasional bit of un-spin-doctored 'own goal' reporting.

An unusual current example of self-damage has been the vividness of bourgeois admissions (about how Albanian families actually suffered slaughtering NATO blitzkrieg) compared to the invariably dull lifelessness with which stories of alleged 'Serbian atrocities' are always told to Western newsmen.

At the supposed 'massacres by Serbs' at Reçak and Mala Krusha (where the video was taken), there was no authentic language at all to graphically describe what was meant to have happened, - shocking butchery.

In a flat monotone, it was all: "And then the Serbs killed him; and then the Serbs killed him", etc, etc, - leading to the obvious conclusion that the 'massacres' were staged by the Albanian separatists themselves, using dead bodies genuinely killed by Serbs but killed in genuine civil-war battles and skirmishes, - and then 'arranging' them suitably with learned 'atrocity' descriptions to accompany the gruesome-looking pictures, carefully stage-managed.

Compare that fraudulent material, and much else besides of unconvincing wailing over other alleged killings, rape-camps, and the like, - with the following undoubted eye-witness evidence of the NATO massacre, - made all the more realistic against the cock-up imperialist slaughter by having the quickly-spread NATO cover-up lie (about a 'Serb aircraft' being responsible) plainly tendentiously dragged in as guesswork in response to CIA-spin prompting, - and sticking out like a sore thumb in comparison with the unmistakably accurate account of the NATO-inflicted actual carnage, - not guessed about but directly seen and reported:

THE survivors of the air attack on Wednesday which turned their expulsion from Kosovo into a scene of carnage were agreed on one damning conclusion yesterday: the pilot of the plane which bombed their convoy must have seen that it was full of civilians.

Interviews with shocked and traumatised Kosovans, as they huddled in tents in a newly erected camp in the relative safety of Albania, told a terrible but consistent story.

"There was only one plane but it came down three times. On the first two runs the bombs dropped at the side of the road but the third one hit our tractor and the trailer. It was uncovered and loaded with people. My father was killed," said Nexhde Cela, a dark-haired 15-year-old. He had a bloody scar on his right cheek.

As the finger of suspicion pointed increasingly towards a Nato pilot, the only crumb of comfort for the alliance was the deportees’ unwillingness to blame it. None of the deportees said the aircraft which made three low-level passes over their convoy of tractors, cars and exhausted pedestrians was a Nato plane.

Those who were ready to hazard a guess as to its identity said it was Serb. But none had solid evidence or claimed to have seen any markings which could have proved the plane's provenance. They could not recognise the aircraft type. The only basis for their claims that the plane was Serb was inference.

"It was flying very low, which Nato planes don’t do. It couldn’t have been Nato because it struck right at the convoy," said Mihrije Dervishi, a middle-aged woman from Kastriod, a village in the Drenica region of central Kosovo. She did not want to think the unthinkable. "I saw bodies without heads and others without legs, about seven or eight people at least. We did not want to stop but carried on towards the border."

Nexhde Cela, the 15-year-old who saw his father blown to pieces, was making a brave attempt to remain calm as we spoke to him. As Italian medics treated scores of people for shock and minor wounds nearby, he stood outside a tent describing the tragedy quietly. But 10 minutes later we found him slumped on a tent floor, weeping beside his mother and grandmother. His mother had bandages on both hands. She parted his thick hair to show blood on his scalp.

A few feet away an elderly woman cradled a child in her lap. He was moaning and shrieking uncontrollably. He was terrified. His father had been blasted away in front of his eyes. The man, Ferhat Bajrami, from the village of Batusha, had been driving the second of the two tractors that bore the brunt. His widow, Xhevrike, was sobbing and her five other fatherless children sobbed with her.

"We thought of jumping out of the tractor and hiding when the plane came over. But there was no time," she said as she breast-fed her youngest child.

Wandering forlornly between the rows of tents, Sadik Rama, aged 84, had blood stains on his coat and sweater. The explosion had pierced his ear drums. Like the Bajrami family, he had been riding on the second trailer.

"The plane bombed three times. It hit the orchards by the road the first two times. The third time it hit our tractor and trailer," he said.

The tractor in front took the worst hit, sending an unknown number of people to their deaths. He could find no survivors from that trailer in the camp yesterday. Witnesses said Serb forces arrived shortly after the bombing and took the dead and severely injured away.

"Three died on our tractor, the driver, his sister and another man, " said Mr Rama.

His account matched those of the other survivors on the second tractor. 

Apparently including some of the casualties from the first tractor, he added: "Altogether I saw at least five dead but I can’t really describe it. I felt I was going out of my mind. "

Xhyle Hasani, a woman from Klodernica, was on a tractor behind those that were hit. As she passed the scene of the atrocity, she remembers hearing someone who had lost both legs screaming: "Mother, don't leave me here."

The attack happened as the convoy of several thousand people crossed a railway bridge near Landovica about eight miles north of Prizren. The convoy included people from nearby villages in west Kosovo as well as hundreds from the Drenica region

Hasan Hyseni, a middle-aged man, also said he had seen tanks hidden in houses shortly before the attack. A Nato plane had been trying to hit them, he recounted. Shortly afterwards the convoy was bombed by a plane which he insisted was Serb. But his version did not match the account of the vast majority of witnesses who remembered seeing only one plane.

The head of the family was slumped over the wheel of his tractor, his body melted and fused to the burned-out wreck of the vehicle. In the blackened remains of a trailer were charred bones and torn limbs. More were spread across this road in western Kosovo yesterday.

The scene was evidence, the Yugoslav army said, of a horrific bomb attack by Nato aircraft against a column of ethnic Albanian refugees on the move in the province. The attack killed 72 refugees, said Serb military officials.

One bomb just north of Bistrazin, a village about 10 miles north of the western town of Prizren, left a large crater at the edge of the road. Nearby stood sullen armed Serbian police.

In a field next to the road lay six unclaimed bodies, two of them women, one a young boy, ashen from the force of the terrifying blast that killed them. Not far away lay a ghastly, solitary male head.

"When the bomb fell, people flew several metres in the air," said one young ethnic Albanian man presented to reporters by the Serbian military.

There seemed to be 12 corpses, but it was hard to be sure from the mangled remains. In the distance, the deep, repeated boom of guns signalled the continuing war in Kosovo. A warplane, apparently a Nato jet, flew high above in the clear blue skies.

"They were predominantly women, children and the elderly," said Colonel Slobodan Stojanovic, not without a hint of triumph at what must be the Serbians’ greatest propaganda coup since the conflict began.

At the village of Zrze, south of Bistrazin, blankets, clothes, bloodied sacks of flour and family photographs were strewn over the road and surrounding fields. A second bomb there threw the body of an old man into a tree, where his corpse remained yesterday.

On the ground next to another burned-out tractor trailer lay a wooden double-headed eagle, the Albanians’ national symbol. Its head had been snapped off

In the hospital in Bistrazin, six bodies lay in the morgue. Eleven ethnic Albanian refugees, who said they had been returning from the border with neighbouring Albania, said they had not had time to take cover.

At the scene, what appeared to be bomb fragments carried the words "For use on MK-82", but it was not possible to verify on the spot whether or not this was Nato ordnance.

Now in Zrze, "a plane" came from behind us and dropped about six bombs before flying away to Prizren. It was very scary. A bridge we’d just crossed was hit and a piece of concrete hit me in the back as I was trying to shield the children with my body".

He had no doubts that the plane was Serbian and not Nato’s: "It flew very low and Nato is always high up. For three weeks now we hear them [Nato planes] but we never see them. We know their sound, and this wasn’t one of theirs," he insisted.

At Bistrazin, they found burning tyres guarding the bridge against more Nato strikes. About 80 yards from it, a single crater was carved 3ft deep and 10ft across into the eastern flank-of-the road. The blast had blown apart a tractor and trailer 6ft away. The driver’s carbonised body lay slumped over the wheel, while beneath the trailer at the back lay the body of a young woman. The trailer had partially collapsed on a mattress, beneath which were more human remains.

Vetim Hajradini, a witness, said: "'The bombs fell among children. There was a large explosion and people were flying through the air."

The next craters shown to the press were two miles south, where three missiles appeared to have hit the same eastern side of the tarmac. The body of a man had been hurled against a tree on the opposite side of the road.

Some of the bomb fragments near the wreckage had code and serial numbers attached. They included: 962148377NY on one fragment; "schem" 872110 and 96214 ASSY 87 2112 on another; and "for MK-82, f...guided bomb" on another.

But the craters on the Djakovica-Prizren road all hit the tarmac at the precise point where blast damage is maximised — uncanny accuracy for simple iron bombs.

Relatively lightweight missiles, with optical guidance devices, are a more likely explanation, fired from a height of at least 10,000ft, and at these great altitudes distinguishing tractors from tanks is impossible.

This has drawn some analysts to believe that one of the Nato planes that had done the damage at Meha followed the highway south, and fired three more times at a convoy its pilot assumed had the same military components seen north of Djakovica.

But despite it being so plainly obvious what horrific disaster had been caused by NATO arrogant indifference (in reality) to victims suffering, ferocious propaganda disinformation is still being poured out, one week later, about this tragic genuine atrocity on the Djagovica road, committed by the 'caring' West, — the only real massacre to have been confirmed so far. And these relentless lies and distortions colour even these authentic accounts of blitzkrieg mayhem, foolishly parroting the CIA lie that it was a Serb plane, but then giving the game away by then reporting how it bombed a Serbian bridge while at the same time admitting the lengths the Serbs go to to protect their bridges by putting a tyre-burning smokescreen around them, etc.

These grotesque contradictions, which the 'honest and objective Western media' retail straight while pretending not to notice their self-blunting stupidity and hoping no one else will notice it either, - are the inevitable result of the fundamental fraudulence of the entire Western 'humanitarian' posture covering up imperialism's real crisis-aggressive aims. This phoniness is also undermining Washington's cool:

PRESIDENT CLINTON was yesterday accused of going to war despite the repeated warnings of senior US intelligence and military advisers, who told him that bombing Serbia could lead to a humanitarian disaster and a military fiasco.

As a dismayed America watched its captured soldiers being paraded on Serb television and the Kosovo conflict threatened to spiral into the worst foreign policy crisis of his presidency, Mr Clinton also found himself on the defensive on another, more familiar front, insisting that the impeachment trial stemming from his relationship with the former White House trainee Monica Lewinsky was "not a badge of shame".

For weeks before the Nato bombardment George Tenet, the CIA Director, was predicting that an air campaign might only exacerbate Serb brutality in Kosovo. At the same time, according to The Washington Post, several senior military advisers told the President that air power alone would never halt the Serb offensive, a warning backed up by military intelligence.

Mr Clinton and his senior aides pressed ahead, wedded to a decision taken some six months ago that ground troops should not be deployed in Kosovo and would not need to be. With recrimination rising and morale dropping at the White House, in the space of a few days Mr Clinton’s tone has changed from bullish exhortation to something dose to pleading.

"It takes a while to get up and going," he said in television interview on Wednesday night "I would urge all the American people, indeed the people in all the Nato nations, to stay with your leaders, to give us a chance." Senior administration spokesmen are becoming increasingly snappy and defensive, and earlier this week Mr Clinton felt it necessary to gather his top foreign policy officials for some spine-stiffening talk.

AMERICA’S vast generation of baby-boomers has suffered jitters about war ever since Vietnam, the searing experience of their youth.
 
Vietnam taught them to mistrust their Government’s war aims and to be especially sceptical of "mission creep", the escalation of bombing sorties and troop levels. At the height of the Vietnam War, 450 body bags bearing the remains of American soldiers were flown home in one week.

As a result, unease is widespread and reaction to an episode like the hostage-taking of three US soldiers or the loss of a F117 fighter-bomber can be out of proportion. Risk avoidance has become a national obsession.

A classic example was President Clinton’s first military fiasco in Somalia six years ago, when army rangers were ambushed. Eighteen American soldiers were killed and some of their bodies were mutilated. The uproar at home led to bipartisan congressional calls for a US withdrawal. Mr Clinton complied.

It does not help that Mr Clinton worked hard to evade the Vietnam draft. His lack of military service and the disdain he expressed then for the armed forces continue to undermine confidence in his authority now that he is Commander-in-Chief.

Worse, perhaps, American forces have shrunk in size and are short of spare parts and recruits at all levels. Some retired officers point to a decline in warrior mentality among the forces.

Concerns are voiced, however that the army seems determined to turn itself into one big, happy, diverse family. Last month a meeting of sergeants-major was addressed by Lieutenant-General Claudia Kennedy, army deputy chief of staff for intelligence. She lectured them on the army’s new politeness policy, dubbed "COO". This stands for Consideration of Others and she made clear that those who did not join in COO sessions were "resistant and insensitive to others". Such behaviour would not be tolerated, she said.

Many in the audience, some with four combat tours, behind them, were squirming and rolling their eyes.

The problem, of course, is not the mind-corrupting qualities of any particular individualist philosophy as such among the blizzard of egocentric subjectivisms now occupying the place where Western COLLECTIVE political and social thinking should be. The problem of confused American-imperialist global philosophy, ascribed above to one source of atomising social friction, is in fact the result of the historical bankruptcy in general of the whole bourgeois-individualist way of life, springing ultimately from the insoluble contradictions of its global economic-exploitation system.

These are now half-mad societies where the US-imperialist commander-in-chief apparently (according to capitalist press reports) took virtually no part at all in the decision-making to inflict total blitzkrieg war on a tiny nation in central Europe because he was obsessed with how to get out of his latest office-groping scandal, but now allegedly saves the planet from a devastating wider war through an inspired 40-minute phone conversation with the total alcoholic buffoon currently president of Russia. Yet the 'frightfully intelligent' £1 million-a-year salaried TV presenters nightly pretend to take all this warmongering idiocy as though it were sensible rational civilised human behaviour, responsive to objective analysis. It is not, it is gibberish. Imperialism is in crisis, and on its way to self-destruction, bourgeois society is steadily driving itself mad.

Bourgeois governments are just lying through their teeth about the war's real aims and conduct while the share prices of the West's leading arms manufacturers and reconstruction monopolies all soar skywards. Confused Albanian peasants are coached by the most primitive flag-waving and Mosque-undermining to declare that they are glad that NATO blitzkrieg has total destroyed their lives, and they want more of it, please, - while in reality, they are being treated despicably as refugee-pawns in imperialism's gameplan for global warmongering which in a few months time could no more care about displaced Albanians from Serbia than they now care about 4 million Palestinians evicted more than 50 years ago from their homeland as another part of imperialism's nonstop global warmongering plans, and still rotting in tents to this day, and routinely regularly bombed by Zionist-imperialist forces of 'Israel' that the Palestinians were originally 'ethnically cleansed' to make room for. Why does Blair not make his promise to 4 million Palestinian refugees that he makes to Serbia's Albanian minority about "restoring to them possession of what is rightfully theirs", etc?

And despite the now quite demented levels to which the hysterical demonisation of the Serbs has been taken, - with the 'liberal', 'left', and barmy Christian element of public opinion almost foaming at the mouth as though tiny Serbia, trying to rescue its population and its territory from the ethnic-strife-ridden free-market breakup of the former harmonious Yugoslav socialist federation, - were the devil incarnate, 
- still large sections of bourgeois opinion itself are showing increasing unease at where this imperialist warmongering adventure will lead next.

While Robin Cook daily becomes more and more indistinguishable from a poor-man's Josef Goebbels, screeching about the 'fascist Serbs' while justifying the utter blitzkrieg devastation of their tiny impoverished country and making quite clear just who the fascist-imperialist aggressors really are, - parts of the capitalist press quietly reflect the deepening concerns (for all sorts of reasons) of some bourgeois thinking which is fast losing confidence that Western domination really knows what it wants to achieve, where it is going, and how to get there.

The Times routinely speaks in the following doubtful tones:

LARGE tracts of southern Kosovo lie abandoned, with houses broken and burnt and fields untended. Three weeks of Nato bombing has given Serb forces the lawless vacuum in which to uproot and destroy — in the most Balkan manner—the Kosovo Liberation Army and the community it fought for.

As hundreds of thousands of Albanians have fled, the Serbs have dug in using distinctly low-tech cunning inherited from their partisan ancestors to counter Nato’s sophisticated threat. During an extended press trip to the now infamous six-mile stretch of death where Nato mistook refugees for a military convoy, the Yugoslav Army gave us ample time to view the new Kosovo. Most impressions were gleaned through a bus window, but the picture was clear.

The Serbs are preparing to fight Nato ground forces, and would rather have their historically troublesome Albanian neighbours elsewhere— preferably over the mountains which form Kosovo’s natural frontier.

Nowhere is Serb resistance more evident than in the Lepanac Valley, threading across the southern border of Kosovo and Macedonia, towards the ski-resort of Breznvica. The natural beauty is written into Serb folklore it was here that resistance to the Nazis and Italian Fascists was strongest during the Second World War and it is here that men reliving the youth of Tito are ready to spill Nato’s blood on the eve of the millennium.

Bereft of its Albanian population, the valley is almost completely militarised. Beaten up lorries and stolen cars rattle about, filled with regular Yugoslav Army soldiers and new recruits from the local population who hardly needed any prompting. Many wear the old rough wooden khaki uniforms of their fathers and grandfathers and all look natural fighters.

Radovan Urosevic, who is in charge of the Serb media centre in Pristina, told me that his father fought hand-to-hand with the retreating Germans and Italians and their Albanian collaborators. The Italians, he said were captured and kept as cheap labour; Albanians were killed.

In today's Brezovica, blanketed by primroses and walnut blossom, the Serbs, are ready again. Peasant farmers and soldiers are digging into the steep hillsides. Burning piles of tyres send thick, choking smoke into the sky to confuse Nato’s smart bombs.

Nearby Albanian villages have been emptied. Many of their houses were still burning yesterday.

The Serbs can hold out for a long time; make no mistake about it.

One of the more worrying characteristics that has emerged during the first month of the war is the degree to which rhetoric has taken over from reality. Daily, we are being subjected to increasingly irrelevant accounts of military actions being routinely undertaken by Nato against civilian and military targets in Yugoslavia — without any real analysis as to whether what is being done is delivering the stated objectives.

Instead, we get the sort of fairy tale told by Shea that "every morning President Milosevic wakes up and realises that in the last 24 hours he has become weaker, he also sees that Nato is becoming stronger".

These musings are usually accompanied by emotional descriptions of the terrible things that are being done by Milosevic’s brutal regime — as if their repeated telling would somehow justify the continuation of a Nato strategy that has already failed.

Before long, the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo will be halted — not because of anything Nato may have done, but because there will be no Kosovo Albanians left in Serbia.

The alliance’s credibility is already hanging on a thread. Clear thinking coupled with firm action, not words, are required if it is to emerge intact from its war in the Balkans. We urgently need to find a way for Nato to extricate itself with some vestige of honour from this increasingly messy situation.

Whatever the outcome of the war, Nato cannot continue to ignore the fact that it has suffered a strategic defeat. It cannot go on using words to conceal the absence of a suitable exit strategy from the increasingly counter-productive war in which it is now involved. Above all, it is worth reminding the political and military masters of Shea, who recently described life in Kosovo as "nasty, brutish and short", that Thomas Hobbes also wrote that words were "the money of fools".

General Sir Michael Rose is a former commander of the UN in Bosnia and author of Fighting for Peace

Everyone sneers at Serb nationalism, from the fake-'left' to the barking-mad rightwing imperialists, and Milosevic's dim and limited political perspectives are of no use or interest to longterm anti-imperialist revolution. A NATO defeat is what the world requires; the question of any Milosevic 'victory' is utterly irrelevant.

But Serb nationalism could be the rock on which imperialism stubs its toe, as happened in Yugoslavia (and elsewhere) to the last great outbreak of warmongering imperialist aggression in Europe to escape from capitalist-system crisis, under the Axis imperialist powers, led as now by the Luftwaffe. And this Serb nationalism is no different from any other sense of national honour, dignity, and security, - as the capitalist press itself occasionally is forced to admit:

A 38-year-old teacher called Vucici Muldinovic may not be the last to be buried alive with her two children, her father and her sister in the cellar of a pleasant detached house on Vuk Karadic Street yesterday. Vucici Muldinovic saved her two children, Diana, aged 14 and Milos, 10, but she could not save her 55-year-old father Dragan and her sister Martina, aged 39, an accountant.

"When the cellar came in on top of us we were suffocating and my children were crying 'Mummy, Mummy, save us.' I was digging and digging with my hands to try and get a hole so we could get out. In the end I got through it. Then I pulled my son out and stretched in for the hand of my daughter."

Bratislav Muldinovic, a young physician, was on duty at the time of the strike, and only learned later that it had killed his sister and father.

"An entire street was wiped out," said another doctor, speaking on condition of anonymity.

 Outside what's left of the Muldinovics’ house, people are shuffling past to see the damage as the daylight breaks.

General Lubisha Stomirivic of the Yugoslav army arrives in a black land cruiser with a message to "Mr Blair, Her Majesty the Queen of England and the United Kingdom".

The message is: "In this suburban street are buried the lies about precision weapons. There are no precision weapons."

The general has a point. In Aleksinac, just off the highway from Belgrade south to Kosovo, 12 civilians were killed and around 50 people injured on Monday night. At 9.45pm three of Nato's precision bombs struck. The first gouged a hole in a sugar beet field beside the main road; a second crashed down on the small houses on Kapunka Street and a third landed in the Muldinovic back garden, flattening the house and car.

Next door, Serba Stominovic, aged 65, stared into the sitting room of his home that no longer had a wall: "I began building that house when I was a child. I had two televisions and a grand piano and now everything has gone."

What remains of another two of his neighbours, Vosdam and Dragnica, both in their 80s, is hard to make out. Their bodies are covered in the same red dust of suburban bricks that coated the streets after the explosion. A policeman shines his torch into the rubble and beside their kitchen sink and a toilet bowl is the leg of Vosdam, the old man's thick woolly night sock still in place.

"They were very old and Vosdam was deaf so they didn't go to the shelter at night. Their daughter is a doctor in Nis," said a neighbour who runs a bicycle shop across the road.

Next door in the medical centre, in the room where Dr Dragan Brankovic slept and survived, a glass vase holding tulips has been blown across the table along with the remains of last night's pasta, now covered in the same dust as the old people's bodies.

The only sound is the tinkling of shuffling feet over broken glass and the comforting noise of water running from smashed pipes.

A nurse comes down the stairs screaming at an English photographer, shoving him towards the door: "You can take your pictures in your own country.

"Is this a humanitarian action?"

The photographer looks away and still full of rage she pushes him again.

Dr Brankovic urges her to calm down, but wants to say this: "In the past two weeks, the leaders in your country have been behaving like badly treated psychiatric patients."

But the general, striding along Vuk Karadzic Street, has another message. "This is a genocidal anti-Serb air operation. America, France, Germany and Britain have proved that fascism was not buried at Nuremburg. Here in one of the oldest streets in this town named after the great Serbian poet, Vuk Karadizc, who was our Shakespeare, I ask the mothers and children of the Nato pilots to be ashamed of the work of their sons and fathers in our land in the last 13 days. Their account will be paid in the future."

Workers everywhere should fight for an imperialist defeat in this insane warmongering. To help the West Balkanise the region and dominate it through divide-and-rule, thereby ensuring the Yugoslav socialist federation should never again rise from the dead, - the bandit-like KLA, whose funds come from European drug-running, went into league with the CIA as Contra-like stooges to diminish Serbia. But having unleashed civil war on the Serbian state, the Albanian minority are now paying the penalty of losing that civil war. By recruiting the combined airforce might of the whole of NATO to its cause, any theoretical 'right to self-determination' for Serbia's Albanian minority has been blown to pieces, - utterly superseded by a major warmongering turn in the international imperialist crisis which from the world's workers point of view now requires one thing only, - a huge defeat for NATO. Build Leninism. Royston Bull

World Revolutionary Socialist Review
 (edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

Nelson inquiry just another RUC dirty trick

IT WAS 3am and just a few short hours after the brutal killing of Lurgan solicitor Rosemary Nelson when the telephone rang in the NIO Secretary of State’s residence. The caller, RUC Chief Ronnie Flanagan, was seeking Mo Mowlam’s endorsement of his decision to bring David Philips, Kent Chief Constable, into the murder investigation. Mowlam gave the go ahead, leaving the RUC chief to announce the assistance of the senior British police officer together with agents of the FBI.

It was all good PR. Here was the RUC, a force so ruthlessly territorial in the past, who had thwarted Stalker and neutralised Stevens, inviting outsiders in. Irish nationalist and international demands for a fully independent investigation into the Nelson murder were met with a congenial Ronnie Flanagan, "open to anything which brings about the best prospects for a successful conclusion to this investigation" while insisting the RUC remain the "best means" to this end.
      
Speaking on BBC Radio Ulster, Flanagan claimed the overwhelming body of opinion was that the RUC was best placed to handle the investigation. The RUC Chief agreed that there were some legitimate public concerns but insisted the RUC was "sensitive" to those and was acting in a way to allay them. And for some, the prompt appointment of a British police officer and soliciting the help of the American FBI might have appeared as tacit acceptance of accountability by the RUC. But was the RUC really addressing nationalist fears or simply covering their backs in the face of fierce public criticism?

Within hours, assurances given to Bertie Ahern by British PM Tony Blair were being denied by Kent police and Downing Street. Refusing to give any details, including names and ranks, a spokesperson for Kent said two detectives had gone to Belfast, but only to assist the RUC. Downing Street officials insisted that Philips would be scrutinising the investigation, not leading it. The implication of accountability which accompanied Flanagan’s announcement of the appointment of a British police chief was finally dashed with the realisation that Philips may never actually leave his Kent Constabulary desk.

The investigation would not be headed by Philips so much as supervised. It was all semantics, the image of a senior outside policeman with his own team at the cutting edge of the investigation faded into the promise of a cursory glance of a report complied by the RUC delivered to an office miles away from the streets of Lurgan. Flanagan reassured the public that Philips and the FBI would "retain their role of oversight on the case". Just what particular oversight the RUC Chief had in mind can only be guessed at although as the week progressed his choice of words seemed increasingly appropriate.

Two of the four FBI agents left the Six Counties a few days after their arrival. Special agent John Guido, in charge of all FBI operations in Britain, returned to the American Embassy in London, where he is based. A second FBI officer, described as an information management specialist, flew back to the USA with no plans to return. The two remaining agents are based in the RUC’s headquarters. Leading American lawyer and chairperson of the Americans for a New Irish Agenda group, Frank Durkan, questioned the FBI's impartiality. "They’re not about to bite back at their new partners with an unfavourable report," he said.

And then there was David Philips himself. The actions of Ronnie Flanagan in appointing David Philips to oversee the RUC investigation does not make this inquiry independent or indeed acceptable," said Sinn Féin Assembly member Dara O'Hagan.

"Question marks already exist over the manner in which David Philips' Kent constabulary conducted the inquiry into the Metropolitan Police Investigation of the Stephen Lawrence murder. Indeed at one point, the Kent police actually 'commended’ their Metropolitan colleagues on their investigation, conclusions with which the recently published MacPherson Report 'disagreed roundly’."

Dublin’s Sunday Business Post exposed Philips’ role in the dirty tricks conspiracy to remove John Stalker, Deputy Chief Constable for Greater Manchester, from the shoot-to-kill inquiry in 1986. David Philips, then Manchester’s Assistant Chief Constable, agreed to the establishment of a secret unit to investigate Stalker. 

Bizarre and unfounded allegations emanating from this unit led to Stalker’s removal from the inquiry into allegations of an RUC shoot-to-kill policy. Small wonder that it was David Philips’ name which tripped so readily from Ronnie Flanagan’s lips when he made that early morning telephone call to Hillsborough.

Meanwhile, a report criticising the RUC investigation into allegations of RUC harassment and intimidation, including death threats against Rosemary Nelson prior to her murder, had been leaked to the media. A damning indictment, the report by the Independent Commission for Police Complaints (ICPC) accused RUC officers conducting the investigation of open hostility and blatant sexism against the Lurgan solicitor. The ICPC was forced to take the unprecedented step of scrapping the RUC investigation and giving the job to Metropolitan Chief Commander Niall Mulvihill.

"If the ICPC had no confidence in the ability of the RUC to investigate the death threats against Rosemary," said husband Paul Nelson, "how can my family be expected to have confidence in their ability or indeed their willingness, to effectively investigate her murder." The truth of Paul Nelson’s assessment was indisputable but the fudge continued.

Addressing the British House of Commons, NIO Minister Lord Dubs described the RUC as the "best qualified" to investigate Nelson’s murder. The Minister was "confident that the investigation would be carried out impartially". Mo Mowlam insisted that the investigation would be "solid". Flanagan had reacted speedily to address fears by inviting the Kent Chief Constable to head the inquiry and calling for FBI assistance, she assured.

Media revelations continued. Senior members of the RUC had tried to improperly influence the ICPC report, declared Ireland on Sunday. Individual members of the ICPC, tasked with supervising the RUC investigation were reported as having come under intense pressure to "tone down" and omit some of the many criticisms. When the RUC failed to pressurise ICPC members, it fell to the Metropolitan Police to dig them out of the hole.

In sharp contrast to the leaked ICPC report, a ten-page review by Mulvihill attempts to play down the seriousness of the ICPC’s findings. Drunken obstruction and arrogant non cooperation by the RUC becomes a "breakdown in communication coupled with a series of unrelated administrative and organisational problems combined to create an 'air of concern’ which was wholly at odds with, and disproportionate to, the actual situation."

Meanwhile, Flanagan was directly criticised by UN Special Rapporteur Data Param Cumaraswamy. In a second report, Cumaraswamy accused the RUC of showing complete indifference to the allegations of RUC threats against defence lawyers contained in reports from non-government organisations. Flanagan is criticised for "allowing the situation to deteriorate" by his inaction.

The UN Rapporteur also responded to Flanagan’s dismissal of his earlier report, which Flanagan said was based on "hearsay" and insists there is prima facie evidence of collusion fortified by the British government’s refusal to publish the Stevens' Inquiry. •

World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

DURING the March 26 session of the Human Rights Commission (HRC), Juan Antonio Fernández, a member of the Cuban delegation, once again spoke on behalf of Cuba, on this occasion to condemn the repugnant violation of millions of innocent people’s human rights by the brutal North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air attacks.

 "Madam Chairperson:

"While this commission proceeds at rapid pace to complete our agenda, very close to us bombs are failing on Belgrade. Those who have launched this barbaric aggression are the very persons who, both historically and in recent times, have fomented ethnic, national and religious contradictions in that multinational country.

"Cuba refuses to remain indifferent to the fact that those very persons who have just unleashed a barbaric war of aggression, extermination and dismemberment against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia can stand here in this Palace of Nations and speak in such a hypocritical manner.

"The supreme commander of the NATO forces, using words that call into question his humanity, has ordered his forces to attack, destroy and systematically and progressively devastate. One man is being blamed as a way of explaining the genocide unleashed by the North Atlantic military alliance and the United States against children, women, the elderly, young people and the entire Serbian people.

"How can that be justified by stating that the weapons of extermination will serve to save other lives? However smart those bombs are, they are blind. The bombs that are today falling on Pristina, Pancevo and other cities in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia are the same that could again fall on Kabul, Khartoum, Tripoli, Baghdad, Benghazi or anywhere else; they do not distinguish between the children of Jesus Christ and those of Allah, between soldiers and civilians, between Serbs and Kosovars, between adults and newborn infants.

"We shouldn’t let ourselves be deceived. The powerful’s divide-and-conquer tactic is as old as humanity itself; but if we abide by historical truth rather than its crude manipulation, one must condemn in this forum those who, by identifying with only one of the parties’ erroneous actions or practices that have occurred in that territory, are really attempting to stigmatize in the eyes of the world a nation and its entire people, one that over the centuries has defended its dignity and independence like few others.

"An unusual and abusive publicity, political and finally armed experiment is currently attempting to destroy the pride of that people, to humiliate it and bring it to its knees through an unacceptable settling of accounts in response to that indomitable spirit of defiance, demonstrated by its heroic resistance to the Nazi hordes.

"Little and poor Cuba, likewise brutally besieged, defamed and blockaded, but with all the moral authority which emanates from its example, demands the instant cessation of the aggression. It likewise demands respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and calls for the renewal of negotiations for a peaceful solution to the conflict.

"The peoples of Yugoslavia deserve a real rather than an imposed, contemptible peace manipulated by foreign intervention forces. We are sure that the aggressor will pay dearly for the enormous error of committing such a crime, and that the world will respond quickly."

In the interest of time, restricted to only three minutes, the Cuban delegate did not read out two important paragraphs of his speech, which state:

"If lucidity was to prevail in terms of human destiny, all of the rights of every man and woman on the planet, and the stability and survival of national states, nobody would accept the horrific unipolar inferno that NATO, with the United States at the head, is attempting to impose on the rest of the world.

"Millions of persons throughout the world see the use of force as a defeat for humanity, profoundly hate injustice, and condemn the abuse of international law, political and military blackmail and the wholesale, flagrant and systematic violation of human rights of peoples who, lamentably, this Commission appears to evade with politicized, manipulated debates and grave risks to freedom of expression."

These two paragraphs were circulated as part of the text of the speech distributed to Commission delegates.

After Fernández’ speech, the HRC chairperson raised an objection to the relevance of the statement formulated by Cuba, and asked for an explanation. In the name of the Cuban delegation, Juan A. Fernández restated the island's right to respond to the defense of the NATO attack by some members of the institution during the session. •

World Revolutionary Socialist Review 
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

AN PHOBLACHT/REPUBLICAN NEWS

THE AGREEMENT CANNOT BE RENEGOTIATED

The governments say that decommissioning is no longer a precondition. It never was. Yet is has been allowed to block the Agreement. If the governments are now serious, that blockage must be removed and d'Hondt must be triggered

LAST WEEK at Hillsborough, the 26-County and British governments tried to break the political logjam by putting forward their Joint Declaration. They failed to do so.

There seems to be very obvious contradictions between the Good Friday Agreement and the Joint Declaration in relation to the decommissioning issue. The former describes this as a voluntary act while the Declaration characterises it as an ''obligation".

The only thing which is clear after the Hillsborough talks is that Unionists have been successful in their relentless pursuit of the decommissioning issue. In reality, the unionist strategy is not about weapons but about negotiating strength and is based on their refusal to move except at the most minimal of paces. Their tactics have most notably prevented the establishment of the all-Ireland institutions and are now endangering the entire peace process.

Last week, the d'Hondt procedure should have been triggered by the British government, but instead of the transfer of powers and the institutions which the Irish people voted for, we had another collapsed deadline and considerable doubt as to when — or even if — d'Hondt will ever be triggered.

The Agreement, now one-year-old, is in deep crisis. The hopes and confidence of many people in the Six Counties is now derived from the continuation of the ceasefires as opposed to confidence in the political process.

For the vast majority of people, the fact that the IRA's weapons are not in use is hugely important. The silence of IRA guns is a clear sign of that organisation’s commitment to the search for a lasting peace settlement.

Since Good Friday 1998, the provocations, irritations and insults faced day in and day out by republicans and nationalists have been ceaseless and multi-faceted. From British Army harassment and increased militarisation across many areas of the Six Counties to RUC intimidation and collusion, to loyalist shootings, bombings and burnings.

The latest provocation has been the demand on the IRA to disarm. It is a demand which the IRA has made clear it feels under no obligation to accede to, but the unionist leadership has now successfully narrowed the entire peace process to this issue.

The unionist strategy is supported by the securocrats within the British establishment, who have opposed the peace process from the beginning and whose objective is a military defeat of the IRA. The danger in which such a strategy places the entire process has been made clear to both governments on many occasions.

Sinn Féin advocated a ’Yes’ vote in referendums on the Good Friday Agreement. This decision was taken after weeks of intense debate. Despite the strength of feelings involved, republican activists remained united and disciplined. Sinn Féin made substantial concessions in committing itself to the Agreement but such concessions have been ignored by unionists and their allies.

Sinn Féin has participated in the process in good faith. It has honoured all its commitments. The unionist political leadership has not. The Good Friday Agreement is now a year old. The Executive, the all-Ireland Ministerial Council, and the other all-Ireland bodies should now be functioning with full powers. Instead, only one institution, the Assembly, is in shadow formation. It is the one institution which was most desired by unionists and least desired by nationalists and republicans.

The announcement that the British Army will vacate the GAA pitch at Crossmaglen is welcome, but demilitarisation needs more than a mere local announcement. In the Good Friday Agreement, the British government committed itself to publicise an overall strategy dealing with the removal of the British military, its installations and repressive powers. One year later, nationalists await the publication of this strategy.

The endorsement of the Good Friday Agreement involved all of the people of this island. The vast majority voted ’Yes’ and did so because they wanted a transformation of the situation in the North. But they have been disappointed. Vitally important aspects of the Agreement have been shelved.

These include the right to "freedom from sectarian harassment". This is most sharply felt by the people of Garvaghy Road, who have faced a yearly siege by the most fanatical elements of the Orange Order and its supporters in Portadown. These are the people who mimic the kicking to death of Robert Hamill and publicly celebrate the assassination of Rosemary Nelson. Since last July, there have been over 150 loyalist marches in and around the area. Nationalists are virtually excluded from the town centre and are treated like prisoners in their own land. David Trimble’s refusal to talk to the people of this, his own constituency, is a sad reflection on his commitment to equality. The Dublin government also has a responsibility to defend the people of the Garvaghy Road.

Human rights organisations across the world have pressed for a number of independent and internationally-based investigations and inquiries. The harassment and killing of Rosemary Nelson, the Robert Hamill case and the release of Lee Clegg all demonstrate the corrupt nature of the British judicial system in the Six Counties and the unacceptability of the RUC. There is also the Pat Finucane case and the role of Brian Nelson and other British Intelligence agents. There has been no progress on any of these issues. Another case is that of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings and the call by the victims’ families for a truly independent judicial inquiry. The Dublin government must also take up their case.

The implementation of the Good Friday Agreement is the bedrock of the current phase of the peace-process. There can be no renegotiation or rewriting of the Agreement by any of the parties to it. The various provisions of the Agreement are quite clear. The multiple breaches of the Agreement in relation to the establishment of the political institutions are well known and have threatened the entire process for several months now. The provisions of the Agreement in relation to the issue of decommissioning are unambiguous. There is an obligation on all parties to honour their commitment to work constructively and in good faith with the International Commission and to use any influence they may have to secure disarmament. Sinn Féin has and will continue to honour its obligations in relation to these commitments and objectives. Other parties must do likewise. No one can impose obligations or commitments beyond what is in the Agreement.

The Hillsborough declaration is not an agreement between the parties, but a draft position between the two governments. So the impasse remains. The institutions are blocked and the Agreement is stalled.

The governments say that decommissioning is no longer a precondition. It never was. Yet is has been allowed to block the Agreement.

If the governments are now serious, that blockage must be removed and d’Hondt must be triggered. That is the only possible and logical meaning of the phrase "decommissioning is not a precondition".

Republicans will do their best to find a way out of the impasse. The way forward proposed in the governments’ declaration will prove counter-productive if it amounts to an ultimatum to the IRA.

The fact that the Hillsborough talks ended in an adjournment means that there was no agreement and no deal. The Agreement is stalled. It will take a huge effort to get it moving again. There is a particular onus on the governments and a particular requirement that they do not move away from the Agreement.

Clarity in the position of the governments is urgently required. Sinn Féin’s position is very clear - any resolution of the present difficulties must be made within the context of the Agreement. Sinn Féin has also made it clear that it cannot deliver the demand for IRA weapons, no matter how this is presented.

The current impasse is a unionist impasse, created by people who, for decades, have been used to exercising a veto over political progress. That must change.

If we are to see real and meaningful change, all vetoes must be removed and all the participants must be part of an inclusive process based on equality and respecting the democratic mandates of all involved.

Despite the current difficulties, Sinn Féin will return to the renewed discussions  determined to see the full implementation of the Agreement.