Промышленный лизинг Промышленный лизинг  Методички 

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Oddly enough, no one accuses the Zapatistas of being involved with drug trafficking, so Washingtons effective participation in the war being waged against them can only be seen in ideological terms.

Colombia, 1990s-present

By the end of the decade, Colombia-the most violent nation in the world-had become the third largest recipient of US military aid, with hundreds of American military personnel posted there in a growing number of military and radar bases to aid in counter-insurgency actions against leftist guerrillas. The US has aided government bombing raids and other military functions by providing helicopters, intelligence information about guerrilla movements, satellite images and communications intercepts. At times, US planes fly overhead during combat operations. The guerrillas claim that Americans are conducting covert counterinsurgency operations and warned that they will be targeted. 76

Again, the public rationale given for taking sides in a civil war has been to fight drugs . To drive home this point, US drug czar Barry McCaffrey routinely refers to the leading guerrilla group, FARC, as narco-traffickers . But the DEAs Acting Administrator testified in 1999 that the DEA had not yet really come to the conclusion that the FARC and ELN are drug trafficking entities per se ,77 even though the guerrillas do finance themselves in part through protecting and taxing drug producers.

However, the main recipient of the American aid, the Colombian military, is involved in drug trafficking, at the same time being intimately linked to paramilitary forces which are also active in drug trafficking and in protecting drug producers.78 In November 1998, a Colombian Air Force cargo plane that landed at Ft. Lauderdale, Florida was found to contain 1,639 pounds of cocaine. In 1996, Colombian Air Force officers tried to smuggle heroin to the United States aboard the plane used by then-President Ernesto Samper. 79 Samper himself was labeled a drug trafficker by a senior Clinton administration

official.80

As Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) pointed out in 1999, in speaking of Colombia: What we are really seeing is a ratcheting up of a counterinsurgency policy masquerading as a counter-drug policy. 81

In a 1994 report, Amnesty International estimated that more than 20,000 people had been killed in Colombia since 1986, mainly by the military and its paramilitary allies- not in the drug wars but for political reasons . Many of the victims were trade unionists, human-rights activists and leaders of legal left-wing movements. Amnesty charged that U.S.-supplied military equipment, ostensibly delivered for use against narcotics traffickers, was being used by the Colombian military to commit these abuses in the name of counter-insurgency. 82 As with Mexico, much of this aid is in violation of congressional human-rights laws. The Pentagon has barely masked its scorn of these restrictions.83



A March 1997 letter by members of the House Foreign Operations Subcommittee to Secretary of State Albright stated that efforts by the Colombian government to take action to curb the increased abuses committed by paramilitary groups, or to curb extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture, political killings and other forms of human rights abuses committed by security forces [i.e., the regular military] are not sufficient to warrant the provision of over $100 million in military assistance and the resumption of lethal aid. 84

The lethal aid, however, has continued. Washington suspects that the Colombian insurgents, if they ever took power, would just not fit in very well in the globalized economy of the New World Order.

Yugoslavia, 1995-99

In April 1996, President Clinton visited Russia during a pause in the brutal military struggle between Moscow and its breakaway province of Chechnya. At a press conference, the president declared:

You say that there are some who say we should have been more openly critical. I think it depends upon your first premise; do you believe that Chechnya is a part of Russia or not? I would remind you that we once had a Civil War in our country in which we lost on a pet-capita basis far more people than we lost in any of the wars of the 20th century over the proposition that Abraham Lincoln gave his life for, that no State had a right to withdraw from our Union. 85

Three years later Clinton destroyed much of Yugoslavian civilized life and culture in Operation Bomb for Humanity, in effect rejecting the idea that Slobodan Milosevic had the right to try to prevent the province of Kosovo from withdrawing from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The United States, under the cover of NATO, intervened in a civil war less violent than the American civil war; indeed, a lot less violent, and of shorter duration, than several other civil conflicts going on in the world at the same time, such as in Turkey, Sri Lanka, Indonesia/East Timor, Angola and other places in Africa; and it was the supposed extreme (one-sided?) violence of Serbia against the Kosovars that tore at the heartstrings of the kindly American and NATO leaders.

To those who argue that the US couldnt be saving the entire world, it must be pointed out that far from simply not saving certain peoples, Washington had been actively supporting Turkey and Indonesia for years in their mailed-fist military suppressions, and helped Croatia carry out, and then cover up, its ethnic cleansing of the Krajina Serbs in 1995.86 Turkey, in fact, had nearly threatened to veto the NATO decision that it could act on Kosovo unless



A Concise History of US Global Interventions 165

Ankara was assured that this policy could never be applied to Turkeys treatment of

Kurds.87

But it was imperative for the United States that certain principles be established: 1) that NATO-in the absence of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact-still had a purpose in life; 2) that NATO had the right to intervene anywhere, even outside of its own geographical boundaries, and without having to seek explicit authority from the UN Security Council; 3) that NATO was to be the military arm of the New World Order (corporate headquarters located in Washington, DC).

Yugoslavia was not inclined to worship these principles; nor, as we have seen, had the Serbs shown proper reverence for joining the club of globalized American allies cum obedient junior partners. Most of their industry and financial sector was still state owned. They had not even banned the word socialism from polite conversation yet. Veritable dinosaurs they were! All in all, an ideal humanitarian bombing target. The fact that Milosevic is a dictator was of no strategic significance, except for its propaganda value.

So Yugoslavia, which for years had feared an attack from the East (the Soviet Union), instead was devastated by the Western free world . While the bombing attacks were being carried out, Serbian TV was also targeted, because it was broadcasting things which the United States did not like. The bombs took the lives of many of the stations staff, and both legs of one of the survivors, which had to be amputated to free him from the wreckage. 88

Once you kill people because you dont like what they say, observed noted British foreign correspondent, Robert Fisk, you change the rules of war. 89

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the whole conflict is the collective amnesia that appears to have afflicted countless intelligent, well-meaning people, who are convinced that the US/NATO bombing took place after, the mass forced deportation of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo was well underway; which is to say that the bombing was launched to stop this ethnic cleansing . In actuality, the systematic forced deportations of large numbers of people did not begin until a few days after the bombing began, and was clearly a reaction to it, born of extreme anger and powerlessness. This is easily verified by looking at a daily newspaper for the few days before the bombing began the night of March 23/24, and the few days after. Or simply look at the New York Times of March 26, page 1, which reads:

...with the NATO bombing already begun, a deepening sense of fear took hold in Pristina [the main city of Kosovo] that the Serbs would now vent their rage against ethnic Albanian civilians in retaliation [emphasis added].

On March 27, we find the first reference to a forced march or anything of that sort.



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