• invalidusernamelol [he/him]
    hexagon
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    Wanna jump in here and say that yes. Parenti in no way heaps any praises on Milosevic in this book beyond some mentions of his good negotiating at the Dayton accords and a section where he points out that there were active opposition parties and active opposition newspapers in the country.

    His main claim is that even if there was a legitimate very large scale (the 500,000 the media was occasionally claiming) organized ethnic cleansing carried out by the Serbs, it still would have nothing to do with why NATO got involved.

    NATO was backing literal Nazis in Croatia, they downplayed and ignored the ethnic cleansing carried out by them while exaggerating or parroting the claims from their generals about the Serbs. This wasn't because of some moral crusade or actual humanitarianism (his can bombs be humanitarian), it was because they wanted a cassius belli on Yugoslavia. They wanted a justification for razing their infrastructure and productive base to the ground because they resisted IMF and World Bank privatization.

    They scattered depleted uranium in fields and aquifers not to stop a genocide, but to start one. To create starvation and mass death because the drugs needed for treating the Ill were kept away by sanction and the state factories that could produce them were leveled.

    They didn't drop clusterbombs in cities that contained 26 nationalities living pretty harmoniously (for the region at least) to stop those people from killing Albanians, hell a lot of them were Albanian. They did it to terrorize and try to force them to comply to privatization.

    You don't target 164 factories and just happen to only the state owned ones. You don't level the agricultural base and power and water infrastructure of an entire nation just because you needed to to prevent a genocide that you didn't even have hard evidence for until after the bombing.

    NATO didn't even file with the ICC until after the bombing had started and most of their evidence was that "hundreds of thousands are fleeing Yugoslavia" conveniently ignoring the fact that they'd dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs on them and destroyed power and water systems.

      • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
        hexagon
        ·
        edit-2
        4 years ago

        Nope yes, on refugee camps and cities in Yugoslavia. NATO was dropping clusterbombs on civilian targets and killed ethnic Albanians living in Yugoslavia in the process. My phone did an auto correct