Berlin’s Newest Drang nach Osten Started in the 1990s With the Serbs

 

As recounted in the unjustly neglected German television report “It Began with a Lie,” in April 1999, in the midst of NATO’s illegal bombing campaign against what had remained of Yugoslavia, then German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping repeatedly accused the Serbian side of installing a Nazi-style “concentration camp” in the soccer stadium in Pristina, the capital of Serbia’s Kosovo and Metohija province. Pressed by the media for proof, Scharping offered “witness testimony” – which he never subsequently produced.

A month earlier, just as the bombing had started, Scharping stated that “we never would have taken military action if there weren’t this humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo, with 250,000 refugees within Kosovo and far more than 400,000 refugees in total, and with a death toll we are not even able to count yet.”

Yet, key sources contradicted him. The OSCE reported “39 deaths in all of Kosovo—before the NATO bombers came.” Heinz Loquai, a German general attached to the OSCE, stated that “the kind of humanitarian catastrophe that, as a category of international law, would have justified going to war did not exist in Kosovo prior to the war.” And Norma Brown, a U.S. diplomat with the OSCE, confirmed: “There was no humanitarian crisis up to the beginning of the NATO bombing raids.” As the film categorically states, “Not a single report on violence in Kosovo by the OSCE was found to at least indicate an impending humanitarian catastrophe.”

Nevertheless, facts be damned, together with German Prime Minister Schroeder, Scharping and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer got what they wanted – not just the bombing and the further atomization of the former Yugoslav space, but the first post-WW II engagement of German forces in an offensive military mission. It lasted 78 days and entailed the dropping of 22,000 tons of missiles, including forbidden cluster bombs and depleted uranium ammunition, and active cooperation with a terrorist organization, the Albanian KLA, resulting in thousands of civilian and military dead and wounded, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the destruction of tens of billions of dollars in property and infrastructure.  (more...)

Berlin’s Newest Drang nach Osten Started in the 1990s With the Serbs

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