Yesterday marked 12 years since the beginning of the US-NATO humanitarian peace-keeping mission aggression against Yugoslavia/Serbia/Kosovo. Civilians were the unspoken victims of US-NATO bombings. The bombing was indiscriminate, killing farmers, factory workers, reporters, diplomats, people in cars, buses and trains, hospital patients, the elderly and children. More than 2,000 civilians have been killed and more than 7,500 wounded. Heralded by the global media as a humanitarian bombings mission, US-NATO’s ruthless bombing of Yugoslavia/Serbia/Kosovo and Belgrade can only be described as a humanitarian catastrophe. Thirty percent of those killed in the bombings of Belgrade were children. Today, I thought of Milica Rakic, a 3-year-old girl, who was killed by a NATO bomb in her own home in Belgrade. Rest in peace Milica. We’ll miss you.
Milica, and more than 2,000 civilians killed, and for what? This bombing did nothing more than create an even worse crisis in Yugoslavia/Serbia/Kosovo. Brett Wilkins, a social justice advocate based in San Francisco, California, has such an amazingly good essay on how US-NATO bombed the wrong side, and was targeting the people of Serbia as much– if not more– than the military. I’m having trouble deciding which parts to quote. The whole thing is great, and is a must read. Yes, US-NATO bombed the wrong side:
As the people of Yugoslavia were being terrorized by NATO’s air war, the terrorists of the Kosovo Liberation Army stepped up its atrocities against Serbs and Gypsies in Kosovo. Shockingly, the NATO troops deployed there to keep the peace often failed to intervene to protect these ethnic minorities from the KLA’s brutal campaign of beating, kidnapping and murder. More than 164,000 Serbs were driven from the Albanian-dominated province. By the summer of 2001 KLA ethnic cleansing had rendered Kosovo almost entirely Albanian with just a few die-hard Serb holdouts living in fear and surrounded by barbed wire.
