[NYTr] Destroying Yugoslavia: Wars, Lies and "mass rape" charges

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Workers World - Dec 2, 2007
http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-115/


Lavender & red, part 114

Wars, lies and 'mass rape' charges

By Leslie Feinberg

Unsubstantiated imperialist media accusations of systematic mass rape
became the “weapons of mass destruction” pretext for the breakup of the
former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, orchestrated by the
United States and Germany. But it was NATO armies and their fascist
hirelings that brought systematic sexual violence—including mass rape
of women and girls.

Rape and sexual exploitation are a feature of imperial warfare.

The Pentagon and CIA have long trained torturers to use rape, gender
degradation and sexual humiliation as violent weaponry—from the School
of the Assassins to Abu Ghraib to Guantánamo.

An unusually clear view of the imperialist troop indoctrination that
rape is a “spoil,” a “right” taken through the patriarchal conquest of
empire, appeared in a series of still pictures in the July 6, 1997,
German newspaper Bild am Sonntag. The photographs showed German
soldiers in battle fatigues during a break from training for their
military mission against the former Yugoslavia. They were staging
simulated rape, torture and noose lynching of civilians.

U.S. and German imperialism bankrolled neofascist forces in Croatia and
Bosnia and in Serbia’s Kosovo province. Rape is a terror weapon in the
arsenal of fascist violence, which targets oppressed nationalities,
ethnicities, religions, sexes, gender expressions and sexualities.

The actions of private mercenary armies, like DynCorp commandos, are
subject to even less scrutiny than Pentagon troops. These privately
owned “foreign legions” have been assured of virtual immunity from
prosecution.

Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill wrote in November 2005,
“DynCorp employees in Bosnia, where the company plays a major policing
role, have engaged in organized sex-slave trading with girls as young
as 12, and DynCorp’s Bosnia site supervisor was filmed raping a woman.”

A company whistleblower, whom DynCorp initially fired but eventually
settled with, filed a suit that described “coworkers and supervisors
literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment,
and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the
individual slaves they had purchased.” (CommonDreams.org)

U.S.-NATO industrialize mass rape

In Kosovo, capitalist profiteers literally established large-scale mass
rape as a profit-generating industry.

“The first case of sex-slave trafficking came to light in October—four
months after NATO-led peacekeepers entered the province,” revealed a
Washington Post report on April 24, 2000.

Even the Post’s preservation of imperialist double
speak—”peacekeepers”—cannot obfuscate the consequences of capitalist
reconquest: “Kosovo, which had some local prostitution but no
trafficking problem before the peacekeepers arrived after the Kosovo
war ended last June, is just another new market.”

NATO troops, including from the U.S., were customers.

The Post article elaborated that in the prior decade, “Hundreds of
thousands of women from the former Soviet republics and satellites have
been trafficked to Western Europe, Asia and the United States.”

They were tricked into travel or kidnapped from Moldavia, Ukraine,
Bulgaria and Romania. The Post reported that the women and girls were
repeatedly raped and beaten to break their resistance to enslavement.

While some people forced into prostitution industries are paid at least
a small sum, these women and girls were bought and sold like chattel.

The procurers, the Post article stated, “work under the protection of
major crime figures in Kosovo, officials said, including some with
links to the former anti-Serbian rebel force, the Kosovo Liberation
Army.”

The U.S. and Germany armed and equipped the so-called Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA) against the Yugoslav government. The New York Times—which
supported the war to break up Yugoslavia—nevertheless reported on March
28, 2000, that many of the leaders of the KLA trace their roots to a
fascist unit set up by the Italian occupiers during World War II.

Yet while the U.S. and Germany had spent a decade bankrolling fascist
groupings to destabilize the former socialist Yugoslavia, the
imperialist propaganda machinery slandered the Serbs as fascists. How
PR firm pulled off ‘Big Lie’

Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels built the German imperialist media
blitzkrieg on the “Big Lie”—the premise that any lie or distortion can
be publicly accepted as truth if it is broadcast loud enough and
frequently enough.

James Harff, director of the Ruder Finn Global Public Affairs public
relations firm, adds, “Speed is vital. ... It is the first assertion
that really counts. All denials are entirely ineffective.”

Harff knows what he’s talking about. The Washington-based firm of Ruder
Finn was hired to handle public relations and win support for the
breakaway Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzogovina and the
opposition in Kosovo.

Harff did an interview in April 1993 with Jacques Merlino, associate
director of French TV 2. Harff boasted about how his firm had developed
an ad campaign designed to make the Serbs appear to be fascists.

Harff said his proudest achievement in this effort was, “to have
managed to put Jewish opinion on our side. ... Tens of thousands of
Jews perished in Croatian camps, so there was every reason for
intellectuals and Jewish organizations to be hostile towards the Croats
and the Bosnians. Our challenge was to reverse this attitude and we
succeeded masterfully.”

Harff bragged: “We outwitted three big Jewish organizations—the B’nai
B’rith Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the
American Jewish Congress. In August, we suggested that they publish an
advertisement in the New York Times and organize demonstrations outside
the United Nations. That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish
organizations entered the game on the side of the [Muslim] Bosnians, we
could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind.”

Harff added, “By a single move we were able to present a simple story
of good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself. ... Almost
immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with use
of words with high emotional content such as ethnic cleansing,
concentration camps, etc., which evoke images of Nazi Germany and the
gas chambers of Auschwitz. No one could go against it without being
accused of revisionism. We really batted a thousand in full.”

Merlino asked, “But between 2 and 5 August 1992, when you did this, you
had no proof that what you said was true.”

Harff put it all out on the table when he concluded, “Our work is not
to verify information. We are not equipped for that. Our work is to
accelerate the circulation of information favorable to us, to aim at
judiciously chosen targets. ... We are professionals. We had a job to
do and we did it. We are not paid to moralize.”

For more information read part 114 of Lavender and Red at
www.workers.org and “NATO in the Balkans” (International Action Center,
New York: 1998).

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