MIM Notes 191 August 1 1999

U$ and NATO exaggerated Kosovo atrocities
by MC12

As reporters and other more independent observers have 
entered the Kosovo area of Yugoslavia, evidence now 
shows that the U.$/NATO propagandists greatly 
exaggerated the scale of the atrocities committed by the 
Serbs against the Kosovo Albanians.(1) The imperialists 
cynically used reports of atrocities by the Serbs to 
build support for their attack on and subsequent 
occupation of Yugoslavia.

While it is clear that the Yugoslavian military and its 
paramilitary arms killed and displaced many Kosovo 
Albanians, the revised numbers now make it look like the 
imperialists probably killed as many people as the Serbs 
did in the last six months. MIM opposes the war between 
Yugoslavia and the Kosovo Albanians, as we oppose most 
wars between oppressed nations and civil wars within 
oppressed nations, because they divide the oppressed and 
undermine anti-imperialist unity.

U.$./NATO propagandists had said 100,000 Albanian men 
were probably killed, and Clinton himself said that 
600,000 Albanians were "trapped within Kosovo itself 
lacking shelter, short of food, afraid to go home or 
buried in mass graves dug by their executioners." USA 
Today reports that there were thousands Albanians hiding 
in Kosovo, but most of them were able to remain healthy. 
They also report that "Kosovo's livestock, wheat and 
other crops are growing, not slaughtered wholesale or 
torched as widely reported."

Kenneth Bacon, spokesman for Defense Secretary William 
Cohen, said the scale didn't matter, because "I don't 
think you can say killing 100,000 is 10 times more 
morally repugnant than killing 10,000." But the scale of 
the atrocities was very important for political 
purposes, such as comparing Yugoslavian president 
Milosevic to Hitler, whose Nazi-led Germany murdered 
millions of people and in a war that cost tens of 
millions of lives.

Such false comparisons of aggression by the weak 
Yugoslavian government with genocide by major 
imperialist powers gets in the way of analysis of the 
principle contradiction in the world today: the conflict 
between imperialism and the oppressed nations of the 
world.

There is no reason to pretend that poor country states 
can't commit atrocities against innocent people, but 
often there is a connection between the greater crimes 
of imperialism, as there is in this case. The dependence 
of Yugoslavia on the state-capitalist Soviet empire left 
them devastated when the USSR collapsed. And the co-
optation of the richer republics of Slovenia and Croatia 
by Western Europe further weakened Yugoslavia 
economically. Yugoslavia was also the victim of active 
destabilization by Western imperialists intent on 
extending their influence into the former Soviet empire. 
The Serb aggression that followed is at least partly the 
result of these imperialist machinations.

Maoists insist that revolutionaries must focus their 
energies on the principle contradiction, which is why we 
organize to oppose imperialism primarily instead of 
against oppressed nation leaders whose powers are orders 
of magnitude smaller than the imperialists'.

Notes: 1. USA Today 2 July 1999. www.usatoday.com