"Ethnic cleansing" and US foreign policy

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WSWS : Readers' forums : US-NATO attack Yugoslavia

"Ethnic cleansing" and US foreign policy

By "Dan DeLeon"
24 April 1999

The latest US attack on a sovereign nation in violation of international law was promoted and legitimized as an attempt to aid the Kosovar Albanians. Undertaking hostile and criminal attacks on sovereign nations in violation of international law needs to be presented to the public in a way that not only will legitimate such obviously criminal acts but will also psychologically disarm any and all dissent. Who could possibly be so low as to object to helping poor defenseless refugees. Any comprehensive analysis of these recent events would have to make reference to a number of stark anomalies that give credence to the fact that wars are never fought for humanitarian purposes as the mouthpieces of US imperialism might have us think. Point #1 would be the fact that shortly before commencing this latest aggression the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague was about to indict three Croatian generals for war crimes who had been trained by a CIA "cutout" by the name of Military Professional Resources, Inc. with headquarters in Virginia. Conveniently this fact has been safely kept out of the realm of public awareness as a result of having been OBE--overtaken by events. A quarter of a million ethnic Serbs were "ethnically cleansed" from the Krajina region of Croatia with the aid and assistance of this CIA "cutout"--Military Professional Resources, Inc. working with the regime of Franjo Tudjman. It seems that history is once again repeating itself as the selfsame Croatian fascists who were responsible for acts of genocide that resulted in the deaths of over one million Serbs in WWII have succeeded again in a ruthless campaign of genocide and "ethnic cleansing" against their Serb neighbors, this time with the support of the new regional hegemon--the USA! What more though could we have expected from the moral degeneracy that finds a home for itself in Washington, DC.

One of the reasons that the US worked so hard block the establishment of the now newly established ICC-International Criminal Court was because of all the war crime skeletons that Washington has in its proverbial closet!! No mention has ever been made of the fact that the US was responsible for wholesale genocide during the Vietnam war in the so called "free-fire zones" and as a result of such CIA operations as " Project Phoenix". Then there is the problem of Central America where the US Army School of the Americas, Ft. Benning, GA trained, equipped and supported in the field the national military forces of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Well established research studies have proven conclusively that these very forces were responsible for the genocide of 300,000 Mayan peasants in Guatemala alone--a crime of horrendous proportions that no one to this day has been held accountable for in spite of the known facts. Since the end of W.W.II over 100,000,000 people have died as a result of casualties suffered from wars that in some measure were supported by US imperialism!! This is more than the combined casualty figures for both W.W.I and W.W.II. The first plainly and well established case of genocide in this century--the Ottoman Turkish Empire's systematic murder of a million Christian Armenians is something that the collective arrogance and hubris of American imperialism refuses to accept even to this day. This very denial of the facts of recent history alone should be enough to galvanize the American and global community to acceptance of the task at hand. It seems that for US imperialism some lives are indeed worth more than others!

The US imperialists are still in denial in regard to the 100,000 Christians who were ruthlessly murdered by the Indonesian regime of US installed dictator Suharto! Estimates are well into the millions in regard to the deaths that insued from the CIA supported coup that installed Suharto.

Another obvious contradiction is the fact that the irredentism that the US plutocrats so violently object to on the part of the Serbians is such a part of our own history that we just take it for granted. In Hawaii, our most recent state, the indigenous Hawaiian population has been pushed to the margins in the same way that other native Americans saw themselves stripped of their native lands. The Mexican-American War resulted in the wholesale "ethnic cleansing" of Mexican nationals from the territory of Texas which had formerly been a part of that country. It was Sam Houston and his ruthless band of terrorists who were responsible for instigating and fomenting a war against Mexico. They were also responsible for caring out acts of terror and "ethnic cleansing" against citizens of Mexico living peacefully in their own country. There only crime was not to have been born a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant! The Texas territory had been marked as territory that the new rising republic needed for expansion and Mexican nationals were people who were in the way of that expansion. Just as Sam Houston and his "Texas rangers" were a Trojan horse introduced into the territory of another sovereign nation for the purpose of subverting law and order with an eye to succession and bringing that territory into the new republic; so the KLA has functioned from day one with its headquarters in New York City.

Organized, trained and supplied by the CIA, this drug mafia has been turned into the perfect instrument of "national liberation" for the stated purpose of creating an independent Kosova and/or a Greater Albania. It seems that this method of internal destabilization has a long history that goes back to our very roots as a nation. Unfortunately for 100,000,000 people since W.W.II it is the perfection of this methodology that has contributed to their untimely deaths in what some have called " the most violent century in history ". Now we know conclusively who has been, in some measure, responsible for the deaths of these 100,000,000 people since the end of W.W.II can we still afford to wring our hands over the genocidal deaths of 6,000,000 alone in WWII?

That statement is not to make light of the Holocaust but to show that indeed there has been an ongoing holocaust that US imperialism continues to play the major role in and for which it refuses to accept any measure of responsibility.

The world can only be made safe for democracy when people begin to see that politics can not be separated from economics. The kind of "democracy" that US imperialism seeks to impose is not democracy at all as it seeks to leave in place the very economic foundations that contribute to the rise of authoritarian and/or fascist regimes. It is of course these very regimes, installed by the CIA as was done in Indonesia and Chile that have been responsible for this being " the most violent century in history". That though is the very nature of imperialism. It is an international system of political economy set up to primarily serve only the financial needs of a small enormously wealthy class of economic despots who act through governments using them as their "executive committee". There are a lot of good things that one can say about America and especially about the American people. This though is not the time to engage in narcissistic self-praise but rather to coldly and rationally assess the facts. These facts need to be presented to the American people so that they can make an informed decision in regard to affecting the kinds of social change WE THE PEOPLE truly need in order to safeguard our liberty and not the liberty of some freebooting class of international pirates who happen to have their corporate headquarters here in the USA. Contrary to what some may think these are indeed life and death issues as there are now 7,000 long range strategic nuclear weapons that according to some sources have been re-targeted on Western Europe and North America as a result of this latest Clinton outrage. Once again we can see that our (mis)leaders are really nothing more than high stakes gamblers ever in pursuit of greater loot via the instrument of greater control of the global economy. The fact they would so risk the lives of so many people in their mad power pursuits is just one more reason why serious and permanent social change needs to be on the agenda.

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"Ethnic cleansing" and US foreign policy

By "Dan DeLeon" 24 April 1999

By "Dan DeLeon"
24 April 1999