FROM WAPO:

War in Ukraine: What you need to know

The latest: Russia claimed Friday to have seized control of Soledar, a heavily contested salt-mining town in eastern Ukraine where fighting has raged in recent days, but a Ukrainian military official maintained that the battle was not yet over.

Russia’s Gamble: The Post examined the road to war in Ukraine, and Western efforts to unite to thwart the Kremlin’s plans, through extensive interviews with more than three dozen senior U.S., Ukrainian, European and NATO officials.

Photos: Washington Post photographers have been on the ground from the beginning of the war — here’s some of their most powerful work.

How you can help: Here are ways those in the U.S. can support the Ukrainian people as well as what people around the world have been donating.

Read our full coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war. Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for updates and exclusive video.

 

NATIONAL SECURITY

U.S. readies another massive military package for Ukraine

The Pentagon is expected to provide, for the first time, Stryker fighting vehicles in anticipation of a coming offensive

 

By Alex Horton

 and 

John Hudson

 

Updated January 18, 2023 at 9:35 p.m. EST|Published January 18, 2023 at 8:17 p.m. EST

 

The Biden administration is preparing to announce a roughly $2.5 billion military aid package for Ukraine that is expected to include dozens of Bradley and Stryker armored vehicles, according to two people familiar with the decision, as the Pentagon intensifies its support ahead of an expected counteroffensive against entrenched Russian forces.

 

The war has entered a phase, U.S. officials have said, that will require Ukrainian units to attack enemy forces in a concerted way, using tanks, armored vehicles, artillery and aviation in what is known as combined arms warfare. Bradleys and Strykers would significantly bolster their firepower and allow soldiers to move quickly around the battlefield.

The coming transfer could contain nearly 100 Strykers, one of these people said. It would mark the first time the Pentagon has supplied Ukraine with such vehicles. Those familiar with the plan spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it ahead of a formal announcement.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/01/18/stryker-bradley-armored-vehicles-ukraine/

 

 

THE MEDIA, LIKE THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE WASHINGTON POST DO NOT QUESTION ANY VALIDITY OF WHAT CRAP THE ADMINISTRATION AND THE PENTAGON OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IS DOING. IT IS A ROTTEN MEDIA "FAIT ACCOMPLI" THAT AMERICAN MIGHT IS RIGHT AND THE RUSKIES ARE WRONG. 

 

THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH "NATIONAL SECURITY" AS CLAIMED BY THE WASHINGTON POST AT THE HEAD OF THESE NEO-RELIGIOUS MILITARY ARTICLES. THIS HAS TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT THE RUSSIANS ARE DEFENDING THEIR HOMELAND AGAINST AN INVADING — SERIOUSLY DECEITFUL AND DANGEROUS — AMERICAN EMPIRE (WITH THE HELP OF ACCOMPLICES — THE EU/UK/NATO) IN A REGION THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH "AMERICAN SECURITY".

 

BUT THE SHITTY NARRATIVE IS POWERFUL, LIKE THAT PROPAGANDA FABRICATED AGAINST SADDAM, FOR WHICH ONLY THE NEW YORK TIMES APOLOGISED A FEW YEARS LATER. 

MEANWHILE, ONE WOULD HAVE ROCKS IN THEIR HEADS AND RATS IN THEIR PANTS NOT TO KNOW THAT THE RUSSIANS WILL DEFEND UNTIL ALL ARMAMENTS IN UKRAINE ARE "EXTINGUISHED". SO WHY HELP A LOSING SIDE TO LOOSE MORE AND MORE AND AT THE SAME TIME ENTER A "PHASE" THAT COULD DEGENERATE INTO A MASSIVE WORLD WAR? YES WE KNOW, THE US WANTS UKRAINE TO TESTBED THE LATEST AMERICAN HARDWARE....

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE SHOULD TELL ZELENSKY TO MAKE A DEAL, LOSE A FEW (RUSSIAN) PROVINCES AND GET A LIFE. BUT NO.

 

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE WANTS TO SUPPLY KIEV WITH WEAPONS THAT WILL HIT RUSSIA'S CRIMEA (YES CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN, WAS RUSSIAN TILL 1954 AND HAS BEEN RUSSIAN SINCE 2014) SO ZELENSKY AND HIS NAZIS CAN DEFEAT RUSSIA.

 

THIS WON'T HAPPEN. THIS CANNOT HAPPEN. RUSSIAN CANNOT LOSE. REPEAT THIS, TEN TIMES...

THIS WON'T HAPPEN. ZELENSKY CANNOT DEFEAT RUSSIA. RUSSIAN CANNOT LOSE.

ZELENSKY CANNOT DEFEAT RUSSIA. RUSSIAN CANNOT LOSE.

ZELENSKY CANNOT DEFEAT RUSSIA. RUSSIAN CANNOT LOSE.

ZELENSKY CANNOT DEFEAT RUSSIA. RUSSIAN CANNOT LOSE.

ZELENSKY IS A TURD.

 

YOU ARE FUCKING MORONS, AMERICAN DUMB LOONIES. YES YOU ARE! STUPID DANGEROUS ADMINISTRATIONS —  AND THE NYT AND THE WAPO MEDIA ARE DANGEROUS PROPAGANDISTS! 

 

READ FROM TOP. AND READ THIS — EVEN IF IT PLACES RUSSIA IN A BAD LIGHT (NOTE RUSSIA IS DEFENDING ITSELF AGAINST A NEFARIOUS INVADING EMPIRE — THE AMERICAN EMPIRE — IN UKRAINE, EVEN IF THE PROPAGANDIST MEDIA DO NOT WANT TO LET YOU KNOW THE TRUTH:

 

 

By Rebecca Gordon | TomDispatch

 

Let me start with a confession: I no longer read all the way through newspaper stories about the war in Ukraine. After years of writing about war and torture, I’ve reached my limit. These days, I just can’t pore through the details of the ongoing nightmare there. It’s shameful, but I don’t want to know the names of the dead or examine images caught by brave photographers of half-exploded buildings, exposing details — a shoe, a chair, a doll, some half-destroyed possessions — of lives lost, while I remain safe and warm in San Francisco. Increasingly, I find that I just can’t bear it.

And so I scan the headlines and the opening paragraphs, picking up just enough to grasp the shape of Vladimir Putin’s horrific military strategy: the bombing of civilian targets like markets and apartment buildings, the attacks on the civilian power grid, and the outright murder of the residents of cities and towns occupied by Russian troops. And these aren’t aberrations in an otherwise lawfully conducted war. No, they represent an intentional strategy of terror, designed to demoralize civilians rather than to defeat an enemy military. This means, of course, that they’re also war crimes: violations of the laws and customs of war as summarized in 2005 by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

The first rule of war, as laid out by the ICRC, requires combatant countries to distinguish between (permitted) military and (prohibited) civilian targets. The second states that “acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population” — an all-too-on-target summary of Russia’s war-making these last 10 months — “are prohibited.” Violating that prohibition is a crime.

  

The Great Exceptions

How should war criminals be held accountable for their actions? At the end of World War II, the victorious Allies answered this question with trials of major German, and Japanese officials. The most famous of these were held in the German city of Nuremberg, where the first 22 defendants included former high government officials, military commanders, and propagandists of the Nazi regime, as well as the banker who built its war machine. All but three were convicted and 12 were hanged..

The architects of those Nuremberg trials — representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France — intended them as a model of accountability for future wars. The best of those men (and most of them were men) recognized their debt to the future and knew they were establishing a precedent that might someday be held against their own nations. The chief prosecutor for the United States, Robert H. Jackson, put it this way: “We must not forget that the record on which we judge the defendants today is the record on which we will be judged tomorrow.”

Indeed, the Nuremberg jurists fully expected that the new United Nations would establish a permanent court where war criminals who couldn’t be tried in their home countries might be brought to justice. In the end, it took more than half a century to establish the International Criminal Court (ICC). Only in 1998 did 60 nations adopt the ICC’s founding document, the Rome Statute. Today, 123 countries have signed.

Russia is a major exception, which means that its nationals can’t be tried at the ICC for war crimes in Ukraine. And that includes the crime the Nuremberg tribunal identified as the source of all the rest of the war crimes the Nazis committed: launching an aggressive, unprovoked war. [NOTE: THE WAR WAS PROVOKED BY UKRAINE NOT ADHERING TO THE MINSK AGREEMENTS AND THE BOMBING OF THE DONBASS. It all started with the Russian military operation to enforce Security Council Resolution 2202 and protect the entire Ukrainian population from its "integral nationalist" government. Of course, this event is not at all what is perceived in the United States, the European Union, Australia and Japan. The West is convinced that Russia has invaded Ukraine to change its borders by force. Yet this is neither what President Vladimir Putin announced, nor what the Russian army did, nor how events unfolded.]

 

Guess what other superpower has never signed the ICC? Here are a few hints:

• Its 2021 military budget dwarfed that of the next nine countries combined and was 1.5 times the size of what the world’s other 144 countries with such budgets spent on defense that year.
• Its president has just signed a $1.7 trillion spending bill for 2023, more than half of which is devoted to “defense” (and that, in turn, is only part of that country’s full national security budget).
• It operates roughly 750 publicly acknowledged military bases in at least 80 countries.
• In 2003, it began an aggressive, unprovoked (and disastrous) war by invading a country 6,900 miles away.

War Crimes? No, Thank You

Yes, the United States is that other Great Exception to the rules of war. While, in 2000, during the waning days of his presidency, Bill Clinton did sign the Rome Statute, the Senate never ratified it. Then, in 2002, as the Bush administration was ramping up its “global war on terror,” including its disastrous occupation of Afghanistan and an illegal CIA global torture program, the United States simply withdrew its signature entirely. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld then explained why this way:

 

“…[T]he ICC provisions claim the authority to detain and try American citizens — U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, as well as current and future officials — even though the United States has not given its consent to be bound by the treaty. When the ICC treaty enters into force this summer, U.S. citizens will be exposed to the risk of prosecution by a court that is unaccountable to the American people, and that has no obligation to respect the Constitutional rights of our citizens.”

 

That August, in case the U.S. stance remained unclear to anyone, Congress passed, and President George W. Bush signed, the American Servicemembers Protection Act of 2002. As Human Rights Watch reported at the time, “The new law authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied country being held by the [International Criminal] Court, which is located in The Hague.” Hence, its nickname: the “Hague Invasion Act.” A lesser-known provision also permitted the United States to withdraw military support from any nation that participates in the ICC.

The assumption built into Rumsfeld’s explanation was that there was something special — even exceptional — about U.S. citizens. Unlike the rest of the world, we have “Constitutional rights,” which apparently include the right to commit war crimes with impunity. Even if a citizen is convicted of such a crime in a U.S. court, he or she has a good chance of receiving a presidential pardon. And were such a person to turn out to be one of the “current and future officials” Rumsfeld mentioned, his or her chance of being hauled into court would be about the same as mine of someday being appointed secretary of defense.

The United States is not a member of the ICC, but, as it happens, Afghanistan is. In 2018, the court’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, formally requested that a case be opened for war crimes committed in that country. The New York Times reported that Bensouda’s “inquiry would mostly focus on large-scale crimes against civilians attributed to the Taliban and Afghan government forces.” However, it would also examine “alleged C.I.A. and American military abuse in detention centers in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, and at sites in Poland, Lithuania, and Romania, putting the court directly at odds with the United States.”

Bensouda planned an evidence-gathering trip to the United States, but in April 2019, the Trump administration revoked her visa, preventing her from interviewing any witnesses here. It then followed up with financial sanctions on Bensouda and another ICC prosecutor, Phakiso Mochochoko.

Republicans like Bush and Trump are not, however, the only presidents to resist cooperating with the ICC. Objection to its jurisdiction has become remarkably bipartisan. It’s true that, in April 2021, President Joe Biden rescinded the strictures on Bensouda and Mochochoko, but not without emphasizing this exceptional nation’s opposition to the ICC as an appropriate venue for trying Americans. The preamble to his executive order notes that

 

“the United States continues to object to the International Criminal Court’s assertions of jurisdiction over personnel of such non-States Parties as the United States and its allies absent their consent or referral by the United Nations Security Council and will vigorously protect current and former United States personnel from any attempts to exercise such jurisdiction.”

 

Neither Donald Rumsfeld nor Donald Trump could have said it more clearly.

So where do those potential Afghan cases stand today? A new prosecutor, Karim Khan, took over as 2021 ended. He announced that the investigation would indeed go forward, but that acts of the U.S. and allies like the United Kingdom would not be examined. He would instead focus on actions of the Taliban and the Afghan offshoot of the Islamic State. When it comes to potential war crimes, the United States remains the Great Exception.

In other words, although this country isn’t a member of the court, it wields more influence than many countries that are. All of which means that, in 2023, the United States is not in the best position when it comes to accusing Russia of horrifying war crimes in Ukraine.

 

What the Dickens?

I blame my seven decades of life for the way my mind can now meander. For me, “great exceptions” brings to mind Charles Dickens’s classic story Great Expectations. His novels exposed the cruel reality of life among the poor in an industrializing Great Britain, with special attention to the pain felt by children. Even folks whose only brush with Dickens was reading Oliver Twist or watching The Muppets Christmas Carol know what’s meant by the expression “Dickensian poverty.” It’s poverty with that extra twist of cruelty — the kind the American version of capitalism has so effectively perpetuated.

When it comes to poverty among children, the United States is indeed exceptional, even among the 38 largely high-income nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). As of 2018, the average rate of child poverty in OECD countries was 12.8%. (In Finland and Denmark, it was only 4%!) For the United States, with the world’s highest gross domestic product, however, it was 21%.

Then, something remarkable happened. In year two of the Covid pandemic, Congress passed the American Rescue Plan, which (among other measures) expanded the child tax credit from $2,000 up to as much as $3,600 per child. The payments came in monthly installments and, unlike the Earned Income Credit, a family didn’t need to have any income to qualify. The result? An almost immediate 40% drop in child poverty. Imagine that!

Given such success, you might think that keeping an expanded child tax credit in place would be an obvious move. Saving little children from poverty! But if so, you’ve failed to take into account the Republican Party’s remarkable commitment to maintaining its version of American exceptionalism. One of the items that the party’s congressional representatives managed to get expunged from the $1.7 trillion 2023 appropriation bill was that very expanded child tax credit. It seems that cruelty to children was the Republican party’s price for funding government operations.

Charles Dickens would have recognized that exceptional — and gratuitous — piece of meanness.

The same bill, by the way, also thanks to Republican negotiators, ended universal federal public-school-lunch funding, put in place during the pandemic’s worst years. And lest you think the Republican concern with (extending) poverty ended with starving children, the bill also will allow states to resume kicking people off Medicaid (federally subsidized health care for low-income people) starting in April 2023. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that one in five Americans will lose access to medical care as a result.

Great expectations for 2023, indeed.

 

We’re the Exception!

There are, in fact, quite a number of other ways in which this country is also exceptional. Here are just a few of them:

• Children killed by guns each year. In the U.S. it’s 5.6 per 100,000. That’s seven times as high as the next highest country, Canada, at 0.8 per 100,000.
• Number of required paid days off per year. This country is exceptional here as well, with zero mandatory days off and 10 federal holidays annually. Even Mexico mandates six paid vacation days and seven holidays, for a total of 13. At the other end of the scale, Chile, France, Germany, South Korea, Spain, and the United Kingdom all require a combined total of more than 30 paid days off per year.
• Life expectancy. According to 2019 data, the latest available from the World Health Organization for 183 countries, U.S. average life expectancy at birth for both sexes is 78.5 years. Not too shabby, right? Until you realize that there are 40 countries with higher life expectancy than ours, including Japan at number one with 84.26 years, not to mention Chile, Greece, Peru, and Turkey, among many others.
• Economic inequality. The World Bank calculates a Gini coefficient of 41.5 for the United States in 2019. The Gini is a 0-to-100-point measure of inequality, with 0 being perfect equality. The World Bank lists the U.S. economy as more unequal than those of 142 other countries, including places as poor as Haiti and Niger. Incomes are certainly lower in those countries, but unlike the United States, the misery is spread around far more evenly.
• Women’s rights. The United States signed the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 1980, but the Senate has never ratified it (thank you again, Republicans!), so it doesn’t carry the force of law here. Last year, the right-wing Supreme Court gave the Senate a helping hand with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe v. Wade. Since then, several state legislatures have rushed to join the handful of nations that outlaw all abortions. The good news is that voters in states from Kansas to Kentucky have ratified women’s bodily autonomy by rejecting anti-abortion ballot propositions.
• Greenhouse gas emissions. Well, hooray! We’re no longer number one in this category. China surpassed us in 2006. Still, give us full credit; we’re a strong second and remain historically the greatest greenhouse gas emitter of all time.

Make 2023 a (Less) Exceptional Year

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were just a little less exceptional? If, for instance, in this new year, we were to transfer some of those hundreds of billions of dollars Congress and the Biden administration have just committed to enriching corporate weapons makers, while propping up an ultimately unsustainable military apparatus, to the actual needs of Americans? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if just a little of that money were put into a new child tax credit?

Sadly, it doesn’t look very likely this year, given a Congress in which, however minimally and madly, the Republicans control the House of Representatives. Still, whatever the disappointments, I don’t hate this country of mine. I love it — or at least I love what it could be. I’ve just spent four months on the front lines of American politics in Nevada, watching some of us at our very best risk guns, dogs, and constant racial invective to get out the vote for a Democratic senator.

I’m reminded of poet Lloyd Stone’s words that I sang as a teenager to the tune of Sibelius’s Finlandia hymn:

“My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine
But other lands have sunlight, too, and clover,
And skies are somewhere blue as mine.
Oh, hear my prayer, O gods of all the nations
A song of peace for their lands and for mine”

So, no great expectations in 2023, but we can still hope for a few exceptions, can’t we?

 

https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/15/why-america-might-want-to-lower-its-expectations/  AND PLEASE:

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

 

 

BY SETAREH SADEGHI AND CHRISTOPHER WEAVER.   ·. JANUARY 19, 2023

 

Some of the most incendiary accusations made against Iran’s government by corporate media, celebrity influencers and Western leaders in the past months are little more than fabrications. And most remain uncorrected.

Protests in Iran that ostensibly began as a reaction to the death of a woman in police custody in September 2022 have prompted unprecedented international opposition to its government, not only from the usual Western, Israeli and Saudi suspects, but from celebrity social media influencers with no previous record of commenting on Iranian affairs. 

Iran is now the target of a carefully coordinated information war with a single goal to drive international support for regime change by any means – whether through sanctions, armed insurrection, military intervention, or some combination of the three.

Before a largely uncritical audience of billions of admiring Instagram followers who do not speak Farsi and have little to no understanding of Iranian politics or culture, a collection of Hollywood actors, washed-up rockers and top models have pumped out viral posts depicting ghastly abuses of protesters by Iran’s security forces, including retaliatory home demolitions and outright massacres. 

While Western media outlets from the BBC to the New York Post have spun out a series of reports accusing Iran of killing more protesters than civilians killed by Russia in Ukraine, think tank pundits and leaders of NATO governments have claimed that Tehran has sentenced 15,000 people to death simply for participating in anti-government demonstrations.

These horrific stories would certainly seem to legitimize the calls for regime change, but there’s just one problem: they are just stories. 

Indeed, some of the most incendiary accusations leveled against Iran’s government by legacy media outlets, celebrities and Western leaders in the past months are simply fabrications, while others lack critical context that deadens their impact. And as we will see, few, if any, of the bogus reports and phony social media posts have been retracted or corrected by official fact-checkers. 

The examples of regime change disinformation listed below represent a mere snapshot of the propaganda war launched against Iran since protests and violent anti-government riots erupted in September 2022. Taken together, however, they expose the near-total refusal of corporate media and social media fact-checkers to exercise even the most basic standards of integrity whenever Iran’s government is the subject.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://thegrayzone.com/2023/01/19/irans-unrest-fake-news/

 

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

 

 

by Kit Klarenberg et Tom Secker

 

Numerous intelligence files sent by Canadian peacekeepers expose CIA covert operations, illegal arms deliveries, imported jihadist fighters, potential false flags and staged atrocities.

The established myth of the Bosnian War is that Serbian separatists, encouraged and led by Slobodan Milošević and his cronies in Belgrade, sought to forcibly seize Croatian and Bosnian territories with the aim of creating an irredentist "Greater Serbia". . At every step, they would have purged indigenous Muslims in concerted and deliberate genocide, while refusing to engage in constructive peace talks.

This narrative was aggressively perpetuated by mainstream media at the time, and further legitimized by the UN-established International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) once the conflict ended. It has become axiomatic and indisputable in Western consciousness since then, reinforcing the sense that negotiation invariably equates to appeasement, a mentality that allowed NATO war hawks to justify multiple military interventions in subsequent years. .

However, an extensive trove of intelligence cables sent by Canadian peacekeeping troops in Bosnia to National Defense Headquarters in Ottawa, first published by Canada Declassified in early 2022, demonstrates that this narrative is not is just a web of lies.

The documents provide an unparalleled, first-hand, real-time view of the war as it unfolded, with the prospect of a peace rapidly deteriorating into a crushing bloodbath that ultimately resulted in death. painful experience of multi-confessional and multi-ethnic Yugoslavia.

The Canadian soldiers were part of a larger United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) sent to the former Yugoslavia in 1992, in the vain hope that tensions would not escalate into all-out war and that an amicable settlement could be concluded by all parties. They stayed to the bitter end, long past the point when their mission was reduced to a miserable and life-threatening failure.

Peacekeepers' increasingly grim analysis of the reality on the ground offers a candid perspective on the history of the war that has been largely hidden from the public. It is a story of CIA covert operations, literally explosive provocations, illegal arms deliveries, imported jihadist fighters, potential false flags and staged atrocities.

The full Canadian UNPROFOR cables can be read at this link.

And you can see the key extracts (in English) of the files mentioned in this article on this link.

“External interference in the peace process”

It is a little-known but openly acknowledged fact that the United States laid the groundwork for war in Bosnia, sabotaging a peace agreement brokered by the European Community in early 1992. Under its auspices, the country would be a confederation, divided into three semi-confederations or autonomous regions according to ethnic criteria. Although far from perfect, each side would generally have gotten what it wanted – particularly self-government – ​​and that would have been a better outcome than an all-out conflict.

However, on March 28, 1992, the United States Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman, met with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, a Bosnian Muslim, to reportedly offer Washington's recognition of the country as a independent state. He further promised unconditional support in the inevitable war that will follow, should he reject the community proposal. A few hours later, Izetbegovic took to the warpath and fighting broke out almost immediately.

According to popular belief, Americans feared that Brussels' leading role in the negotiations would weaken Washington's international prestige and help the future European Union emerge as an independent power bloc after the collapse of the Communism.

While such concerns were no doubt entertained by US officials, the UNPROFOR cables reveal a much darker agenda at work. Washington wanted Yugoslavia reduced to rubble and planned to violently bring the Serbs to heel by prolonging the war as long as possible. For the United States, the Serbs were the ethnic group most determined to preserve the existence of the troublesome independent republic.

These goals were very effectively served by Washington's absolutist aid to the Bosnians. It was an article of faith in the Western mainstream at the time, and it still is today, that Serbian intransigence in the negotiations blocked the way to peace in Bosnia. Yet UNPROFOR cables repeatedly indicate that this was not the case.

In telegrams sent from July to September 1993, at the time of a ceasefire and a new attempt to peacefully partition the country, Canadian peacekeepers repeatedly attribute a stubborn character to the Bosniaks, not the Serbs . As a representative excerpt indicates, the objective " insurmountable »From« satisfying the demands of the Muslims will be the main obstacle to any peace talks ».

Various passages also refer to how " outside interference in the peace process " n / A " did not help the situation " and " no peace "could not be reached" if outside parties continue to encourage Muslims to be demanding and inflexible in negotiations ».

By “external” assistance, UNPROFOR of course meant Washington. His unconditional support for the Bosnians motivated them to " [negotiate] as if they had won the war ", whereas they had until then " lost ».

« Encourage Izetbegovic to hold for new concessions " and " the clear desire of the United States to lift the arms embargo against Muslims and to bomb Serbs are serious obstacles to an end to the fighting in the former Yugoslavia said the Blue Helmets on September 7, 1993.

The next day, they reported to headquarters that " the Serbs agreed to the terms of the ceasefire ". Meanwhile, Izetbegovic was basing his negotiating stance on " popular image of Bosnian Serbs as the bad guys ". Validating this illusion had a concomitant benefit – namely, precipitating NATO airstrikes on Serbian areas. This did not escape the Blue Helmets:

« Serious talks in Geneva will not take place as long as Izetbegovic believes airstrikes will be launched against the Serbs. These airstrikes will considerably strengthen his position and will probably make him less cooperative in negotiations. ».

Simultaneously, Muslim fighters left no chance for the peace talks, they launched offensive after offensive and were fully willing and able to help Izetbegovic's goal. Throughout the last months of 1993, they launched countless attacks on Serbian territory throughout Bosnia, in violation of the ceasefire.

In December, when Serbian forces launched their own "major attack", a cable that month claimed that since the beginning of the summer, " most Serbian activity had been defensive or in response to Muslim provocation ».

A September 13 UNPROFOR cable noted that in Sarajevo, " Muslim forces continue to infiltrate the Mount Igman area and daily shell BSA [Bosnian Serb Army] positions around the town "," the declared objective " being " to increase Western sympathy by provoking an incident in order to be able to blame the Serbs for it ».

Two days later, the "provocations" against the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) continued, although " BSA exercise restraint ". This area remained a key target for the Bosniaks for some time thereafter. Transmissions from July to September end with an ominous cable:

« The occupation of Mount Igman by the BSA does not negatively affect the situation in Sarajevo. It's just an excuse for Izetbegovic to delay negotiations. His own troops were the worst violators [emphasis added] of the [July 30] ceasefire agreement ».

Arrival of the mujahideen: "Muslims do not hesitate to shoot at their own people or at UN areas"

Throughout the conflict, the Bosnian mujahideen worked tirelessly to escalate the violence. Muslims from all over the world poured into the country from the second half of 1992, waging jihad against Croats and Serbs. Many had already gained battlefield experience in Afghanistan in the 80s and early 90s after arriving in fundamentalist groups infiltrated by the CIA and MI6 in Britain and the United States. For them, Yugoslavia was the next recruiting ground.

The mujahideen frequently arrived on "black flights", accompanied by an incessant flow of weapons in violation of the UN embargo. It began as a joint Iranian and Turkish operation, with financial backing from Saudi Arabia, although as the volume of weapons grew the US took over, ferrying the deadly cargo to an airport in Tuzla on the using fleets of C-130 Hercules aircraft.

Estimates of the number of Bosnian mujahideen vary widely, but their essential contribution to the civil war seems clear. US Balkan negotiator Richard Holbrooke said in 2001 that the Bosnians " would not have survived without their help and called their role in the conflict " pact with the devil ».

Mujahideen fighters are never explicitly mentioned in UNPROFOR cables, nor are Bosniaks – the term “Muslims” is used liberally. However, the diverted references to the first are numerous.

An intelligence report from the winter of 1993 observed that " weak and decentralized command and control systems of the three opposing parties had produced a widespread proliferation of weapons and the existence of various official and unofficial paramilitary groups, which often had individual and local objectives ". Among these “unofficial” groups, there were of course the mujahideen.

More clearly, in December of that year, peacekeepers noted how David Owen, a former British politician who served as the European Community's chief negotiator in the former Yugoslavia, " had been sentenced to death for being responsible for the deaths of 130 Muslims in Bosnia his sentence having been pronounced by the “Court of Honor of Muslims”. It was understood that " 45 people were in place across Europe to carry out the sentence ».

Owen was certainly not responsible for the deaths of 130 Muslims, as far from the case of so many Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs in total during the war. Bosnian religious extremists also lacked a network of agents across the continent ready to carry out fatwas transmitted by a "Court of Honor".

Following this incident, which had never been publicly revealed before, there were reports of “Muslims” planning false flag provocations. In January 1994, a cable observed:

« Muslims do not hesitate to shoot at their own people or at UN areas and then claim that the Serbs are the culprits in order to gain more Western sympathy. Muslims often place their artillery very close to UN buildings and sensitive areas such as hospitals in the hope that Serb counter-bombardment fire will hit these sites under the watchful eye of the international media. ».

Another cable reports how " Muslim troops posing as UN forces had been spotted wearing UNPROFOR blue helmets and a combination of Norwegian and British combat clothing », driving vehicles painted in white and marked UN. The Director General of the Blue Helmets feared that if such collusion became "widespread" or " be used to infiltrate Croatian lines ", that " would greatly increase the chances of legitimate UN forces being targeted by the Croats ».

« This may be exactly the intention of the Muslims, perhaps to provoke further pressure for airstrikes on the Croats “adds the cable.

In the same month, UNPROFOR cables speculated that "Muslims" would target Sarajevo airport, the destination of humanitarian aid to Bosnians, with a false flag attack. As " the Serbs would be the obvious culprits "in such a scenario, " Muslims would gain great propaganda value from such Serbian activity ", and he was " so very tempting for Muslims to carry out the bombings and blame the Serbs for it ».

America's Proxy Wars, Then and Now

In this context, the cables linked to the Markale massacre take on a particularly striking character. On February 5, 1994, an explosion ravaged a civilian market, killing 68 and injuring 144.

Responsibility for the attack - and the means by which it was carried out - has been hotly disputed ever since, with separate official investigations yielding inconclusive results. The UN at the time was unable to name a culprit, although UNPROFOR troops have since testified that they suspect the Bosnian side was responsible.

As a result, cables from this era refer to " disturbing aspects " of the event, in particular journalists " headed to the scene so quickly " and " a very visible presence of the Muslim army in the neighborhood ».

« We know that Muslims have fired on their own civilians and the airfield in the past in order to get media attentionconcluded one of the cables. A later memo observes that " Muslim forces outside Sarajevo have in the past planted explosives in their own positions and then detonated them in full view of the media claiming it was a Serb bombardment. This was later used as a pretext for Muslim 'counterfire' and attacks on Serbs ».

Nevertheless, in the 2003 conviction of Serbian General Stanislav Galić for his role in the siege of Sarajevo, the ICTY found that the massacre was deliberately perpetrated by Serbian forces, a decision upheld on appeal.

The authors of this article make no judgment on what happened or did not happen in Markale on that fateful day. However, the obscurity surrounding the event foreshadowed crucial events that warranted escalations in every subsequent Western proxy war, from Iraq to Libya to Syria to Ukraine.

Since the start of the proxy war in Ukraine on February 24, deliberate war crimes, real incidents misrepresented as war crimes and potentially staged events have been virtually daily occurrences, accompanied by volleys of demands and counterclaims of guilt. In some cases, those responsible on one side even went from celebrating and claiming credit for an attack to blaming the other side within days or even hours. Substance and spin have become inseparable, even symbiotic.

In the years to come, who did what to whom and when may well become, like the ICTY, a matter for international tribunals. There are already moves to set up a similar body once the war in Ukraine is over.

Dutch parliamentarians have demanded that Vladimir Putin be tried in The Hague. The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs has requested the creation of a special tribunal. The Kyiv-based NGO Truth Hounds collects evidence of alleged Russian atrocities across the country every day in service of such a tribunal.

There is no doubt that the forces of kyiv and Moscow have committed atrocities and killed civilians in this conflict, just as there is no doubt that all three parties to the war in Bosnia have been guilty of heinous acts and massacres of innocent and/or defenseless people. It is reasonable to assume that the savagery will become increasingly ruthless as the war in Ukraine continues, much the same as it did during the breakup of Yugoslavia.

The exact duration of the fighting is uncertain, although EU and NATO officials predicted it could last several years. It seems that the Western powers clearly intend to keep the proxy war going for as long as possible. On October 11, the The Washington Post reported that the United States privately conceded that kyiv was incapable of " win the war outright “, but also had” ruled out the idea of ​​pushing Ukraine to the negotiating table ».

This highlights another myth that arose as a result of the Yugoslav wars and which persists to this day. It is widely held that negotiation and attempts to reach a peaceful settlement would only have emboldened the Serbian “aggressors”.

This dangerous myth has served as the justification for all sorts of destructive Western interventions. Citizens of these countries still live today with the consequences of these actions, often as migrants after fleeing cities and towns burned by wars of regime change.

Another toxic legacy of the Balkan wars also lives on: Westerners' concern for human life is determined by which side their governments take in any given conflict. As Canadian UNPROFOR cables demonstrate, the United States and its allies have cultivated support for their wars by covering up a reality that even their own armies have documented in clinical detail.

source: The Grayzone via The Citizen's Gazette

 

 

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