@Sentero
 

que se serait-il passé sir l’OTAN avait prétendu envahir et occuper la Serbie au lieu d’y faire des raids aériens...

Nato’s War Crimes

Unfortunately, it is the powerful who write the laws of the world—and the powerful who ignore these laws when expediency dictates. The attacks launched against Yugoslavia in March-June 1999 were in violation of the following international and national laws :

· The UN Charter clearly guarantees the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The FRY had attacked no United Nations member ; therefore, there were no grounds for war against it. Under the UN Charter, collective action can be taken only with Security Council support, which was not forthcoming given the veto power exercised by China and Russia. So the NATO powers simply bypassed the United Nations.

· NATO’s own charter says it can take military action only in response to aggression committed against one of its members. Yugoslavia had attacked. no NATO member.

· Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution requires a declaration of war from the US Congress. Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering, testifying on behalf of the Clinton administration before the House Committee on International Relations, admitted that Kosovo was part of a sovereign state and bombing a sovereign state was an act of war. When asked whether an act of war requires the approval of Congress, Pickering demurred, “Not every act of war requires it.” So the Constitution was conveniently circumvented. As Representative Tom Campbell (R-Cal.) complained, “No emergency prevented the president from making his case before Congress. He simply chose not to do so.”1

· The War Powers Act requires the president to get permission from Congress should he engage in a limited military “action” for more than sixty days. The bombings continued past sixty days and the White House lifted not a finger to bring the matter before Congress. Nor did the liberal hawks in Congress express the slightest concern about the illegalities of Clinton’s war.

As George Kenney, a former state department official in the Bush Administration, put it : “Dropping cluster bombs on highly populated urban areas doesn’t result in accidental fatalities. It is purposeful terror bombing.”8 (The use of cluster bombs is ipso facto a violation of international law and a war crime.) NATO planners actually spelled out beforehand the estimated number of people who would be killed when they bombed a Belgrade office building that housed political parties and television and radio stations : 50 to 100 government and party employees, and 250 civilians. As William Blum notes, here were decision-makers consciously planning to hit a particular target, knowingly killing a substantial number of civilians, then publicly insisting afterward that it was unintended.9 …

Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation. The Attack on Yugoslavia, Verso, 2000