owlo
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- Mar 27, 2015
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Maybe I'm misunderstanding it but from the same url you've provided of the tabled motion it states:
"President Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Cohen claimed, entirely without foundation, that 'we've now seen about 100,000 military-aged [Albanian] men missing.....they may have been murdered' and that David Scheffer, the US ambassador-at-large for war crimes, announced with equal inaccuracy that as many as '225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59' may have been killed"
Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm presuming that it was due to these alleged numbers that Nato intervened?
Yet in actual fact the number of deaths was closed to 1% of the last figure tabled?
"the International War Crimes Tribunal, a body de facto set up by NATO, announced that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo's 'mass graves' was 2,788"
And as part of this motion. They wanted the UK government to assist Kosovo with cleaning up the mess from NATOs invasion?
"believes the pollution impact of the bombing of Kosovo is still emerging, including the impact of the use of depleted uranium munitions; and calls on the Government to provide full assistance in the clean up of Kosovo."
I don't think it's that bad?
He said specifically: fraudulent justifications for intervening in a 'genocide' that never really existed in Kosovo (Bear in mind this was in 2004, and the evidence was well established)
The evidence is, genocide existed in Kosovo. It's indisputable.
From Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Kosovo_War
- HRW claims that the Yugoslav Army indiscriminately attacked Kosovo Albanian villages.[23] Police and military forces had partially or completely destroyed thousands of Albanian villages in Kosovo by burning or shelling them.[23] According to a UNHCR survey, nearly 40% of all residential houses in Kosovo were heavily damaged or completely destroyed by the end of the war. Out of a total of 237,842 houses, 45,768 were heavily damaged and 46,414 were destroyed.[24] In particular, residences in the city of Peja was heavily damaged. More than 80% of the 5,280 houses in the city were heavily damaged (1,590) or destroyed (2,774).[25]
- Of the 498 mosques in Kosovo that were in active use, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) documented that 225 mosques sustained damage or destruction by the Yugoslav Serb army.[38] In all, eighteen months of the Yugoslav Serb counterinsurgency campaign between 1998-1999 within Kosovo resulted in 225 or a third out of a total of 600 mosques being damaged, vandalised, or destroyed alongside other Islamic architecture during the conflict.[39][40][38] Additionally 500 Albanian owned kulla dwellings (traditional stone tower houses) and three out of four well preserved Ottoman period urban centres located in Kosovo cities were badly damaged resulting in great loss of traditional architecture.[41][39] Kosovo's public libraries, in particular 65 out of 183 were completely destroyed with a loss of 900,588 volumes, while Islamic libraries sustained damage or destruction resulting in the loss of rare books, manuscripts and other collections of literature.[42][43] Archives belonging to the Islamic Community of Kosovo with records spanning 500 years were also destroyed.[42][43] During the war, Islamic architectural heritage posed for Yugoslav Serb paramilitary and military forces as Albanian patrimony with destruction of non-Serbian architectural heritage being a methodical and planned component of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.[39][44]
And here you go, 13,517 victims: List of Kosovo War Victims Published | Balkan Insight
With regards to the remarks, this is what Cohen said, in 1999: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/balkans/stories/cohen051699.htm - With the large numbers displaced, it was likely hard to know.
Here's an article in 2000 stating that the NATO powers exxagerated deaths and the 100,000 claim: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/aug/18/balkans3
However, commentators yesterday stressed that the new details should not obscure the fact that the major war crime in the tribunal's indictment of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, and four other Serb officials is the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo and forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of people.
"The point is did we successfully pre-empt or not," Mark Laity, the acting Nato spokesman, said last night. "I think the evidence shows we did. We would rather be criticised for overestimating the numbers who died than for failing to pre-empt. Any objective analysis would say there was a clear crisis. There was indiscriminate killing. There were attempts to clear hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes."
It's classical Corbyn in my opinion. Misrepresenting or misunderstanding something to make a stand.
Interesting page or two. Seperate from Corbyn how do you go about advocating for peace and ceasefires and negotiations and it not be political suicide and geopolitically naive? Is it possible? Or is it just a bad strategy and the threat of violence is almost a requirement of peace.
I guess the political suicide part is kind of unavoidable as your almost guaranteed to be dealing with at least one murderous scumbag.
This. If you are weak, there will always be somebody to fill the void.
I'm aware that you're being hit from all sides here, so understand that you may not reply but in what way do you consider Corbyn to be authoritarian? I get you don't like him or his policies but to consider him authoritarian, especially relative to Starmer, is bewildering to me.
I've checked what I said now, and I did indeed say he was slightly more authoritarian than Starmer. It was a poorly worded comment though, I think they [and all major parties in Britain] have been pretty bad for it and Starmer is definitely no better. It mostly revolves around foreign affairs (his happiness to support castro/hezbollah/hamas/whoever despite them taking positions that he hates, and not criticizing them), but also for the fact he did indeed vote for the IPA. The way he threatened the press, anybody who stepped out of line, his identity politics etc, and his general lack of desire for freedom over civil liberty.