Kurt Waldheim, former Austrian president and UN Secretary-General, died yesterday.
In the Balkans, he will be remembered primarily as a Nazi officer involved in atrocities against Serbs and Jews in western Bosnia.
Robert Fisk has an interesting and informative obituary detailing Waldheim's "career" in the Belfast Telegraph and the Independent.
So here's a war criminal who not only "escaped justice" but eventually rose to the highest office of the UN, the very organization which later (overstepping its already generously broad mandate) established the illegal "tribunal" for political persecution of Balkans leaders (and some more than others). And no, that's not a typo.
Having covered up the genocide the Nazis and their allies conducted in Yugoslavia during World War Two, the Empire - which, after all, has those very same allies today - fabricated a "genocide" supposedly committed by the Serbs, and has used the "tribunal" as a tool of political pressure to ensure Serb submission. For years we've been hearing about "war criminals eluding justice" and "ending the culture of impunity." The hypocrisy is astounding.
3 comments:
Thanks for publicizing this.
Submitted to Digg:
http://digg.com/political_opinion/The_appalling_hypocrisy_of_Kurt_Waldheim
Time and again recently, after Bush's Albanian independence speech, I've been catching in the press the number 10,000 for how many people were killed by the Serbs and the reason for Nato involvement. Seeing as around 2,500 were said to have been found in those "mass" graves, even when we were being told there could be 100,000 during the height of the hysteria, just how did they arrive at this 10K figure? I suspect its just laziness, and collusion as usual, but I'd like your take.
This really merits a separate posting, but I'll try and give a simple answer: "10,000" is a completely arbitrary number. It started out as an "estimate" by the UK Foreign Office, and got ingrained in the minds of the public through endless repetition.
In all likelihood, Blair's spin doctor Alistair Campbell simply shaved off a zero from the ludicrous "estimate" of 100,000 bandied about during the aggression.
Now here's the catch. Serbian authorities' comprehensive death toll, involving both Serb and Albanian civilians, government troops and KLA terrorists, as well as the people still listed as "missing" is just over 9,000. Yet the NATO propagandists have been talking not about 10,000 people killed, but Albanian civilians, which is obviously false.
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