I shall argue here this evening that the NATO action in Serbia had nothing to do with the fate of the Kosovan Albanians but was yet another blatant and brutal assertion of US power.
The bombing was not only an action taken in defiance of International Law and in contempt of the United Nations, it was also totally unnecessary. The negotiation process at Rambouillet is said to have been exhausted but this was not in fact the case. At the start of the crisis there were two main objectives: to restore substantive autonomy to Kosovo and to ensure that the Yugoslav government respected the Kosovars' political, cultural, religious and linguistic freedoms. The plan at the Rambouillet conference was to achieve these two aims by peaceful means. The Serbs had specifically agreed to grant Kosovo a large measure of autonomy. What they would not accept was NATO as the international peace keeping force, or rather, an occupying force, a force whose presence would extend throughout Yugoslavia. They proposed a protectorate under United Nations auspices. NATO would not agree to this and the bombing started immediately. I'd like to remind you that the bombing of Iraq last December followed a similar pattern. The United Nations was saying: "Now wait a minute, surely we can work something out," when the US and Great Britain said it was too late to work anything out and started the bombing. They1re still doing it, by the way. And the sanctions upon Iraq continue, from which thousands of Iraqi children are dying every month.
The United States has finally agreed to a resolution of the Serbian conflict which differs in no significant respect from that which the Yugoslav parliament was ready to accept before the violence started. Why therefore was this action taken? I believe the United States wanted to make Kosovo into a NATO - or rather American - colony. This has now been achieved. I shall return to this in due course.
Nothing else has been achieved. NATO gave Milosevic the excuse he needed to escalate his atrocities, thousands of civilians, both Kosovan and Serbian, have been killed, the country has been poisoned and devastated. The Serbian atrocities are savage and disgusting but there is little doubt that the vast escalation of these atrocities took place after the bombing began. To cite "humanitarian reasons", in any event, as NATO originally did, really doesn1t bear scrutiny. There are just as many "moral" and "humanitarian" reasons, for example, to intervene in Turkey. The Turkish government has been waging a relentless war against the Kurdish people since 1984. The repression has claimed 30,000 lives. Not only does the United States not intervene, it actively subsidises and supports what is effectively a military dictatorship and of course Turkey is an important member of NATO. The revelations of the Serbian police torture chambers are horrific but the Turkish police torture chambers practise exactly the same techniques and bring about exactly the same horror. So did the Guatemalan and El Salvadoran and Chilean torture chambers before them. But these were our torture chambers so they never reached the front pages. Those torture chambers were defending democracy against the evil of subversion, if you remember. Turkey is still doing it, with our full support, our weapons and our money. In 1975 Kissinger and Ford gave the nod to the Indonesian government to invade East Timor. 200,000 East Timorese people, a third of the population, were murdered. The West has maintained a very active business relationship with Indonesia ever since. The arms trade has flourished. Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people continues while Israeli settlement of the West Bank goes on in contravention of International Agreements and UN Resolutions. In all these cases humanitarian considerations are not exactly at the forefront of US foreign policy. Human life - or human death - I would say - means little to Blair and certainly nothing to Clinton. Don't let us forget that Clinton ensured his Presidential candidacy by going to Arkansas to witness the execution of a mentally deficient 18 year-old. Nato has claimed that the bombing of civilians in Serbia were accidents. I suggest that the bombing of civilians was part of a deliberate attempt to terrorise the population. NATO's supreme commander, General Wesley K Clark, declared just before the bombing began: "Unless President Milosevic accepts the International Community's demands we will systematically and progressively attack, disorganise, ruin, devastate and finally destroy his forces." Milosevic's "forces", as we now know, included television stations, schools, hospitals, theatres, old people's homes. The Geneva Convention states that no civilian can be targeted unless he is taking a direct part in the hostilities, which I take to mean firing guns or throwing hand grenades. These civilian deaths were therefore acts of murder.
A body of lawyers and law professors based in Toronto in association with the American Association of Jurists, a non-government organisation with consultative status before the United Nations, has laid a complaint before the War Crimes Tribunal charging all the NATO leaders (headed by President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair) with war crimes committed in its campaign against Yugoslavia. The list of crimes include: "wilful killing, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly, employment of poisonous weapons or other weapons to cause unnecessary suffering, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, devastation not justified by military necessity, bombardment of undefended towns, villages, dwellings or buildings, destruction or wilful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences, historic monuments." The charge also alleges "open violation of the United Nations Charter, the NATO Treaty itself, the Geneva Conventions and the principles of International Law."
It is worth remarking here that the enormous quantities of high explosives dropped on Serbia have done substantial damage to irreplaceable treasures of Byzantine religious art. Precious mosaics and frescos have been destroyed. The 13th century city of Pec has been flattened. The 16th century Hadum mosque in Djakovica, the Byzantine Basilica in Nis and the 9th century church in Prokuplje have been badly damaged. The 15th century rampart in the Belgrade fort has collapsed. The Banovina palace in Novisad, the finest work of art-deco architecture in the Balkans has been blown up. This is psychotic vandalism.
Why were cluster bombs used to kill civilians in Serbian marketplaces?
The NATO high command can hardly have been ignorant of the effect of these weapons. They quite simply tear people to pieces. The effect of depleted uranium in the nose of missile shells cannot be precisely measured. Jamie Shea, our distinguished NATO spokesman, would probably say, "Oh come on lads, a little piece of depleted uranium never did anyone any harm". It can be said, however, that Iraqi citizens are still suffering serious effects from depleted uranium after nine years, not to mention the Gulf War syndrome experienced by British and American soldiers. What is known is that depleted uranium leaves toxic and radioactive particles of uranium oxide that endanger human beings and pollute the environment. NATO has also targeted chemical and pharmaceutical plants, plastics factories and oil refineries, causing substantial environmental damage. Last month the Worldwide Fund for Nature warned that an environmental crisis is looming in the lower Danube, due mainly to oil slicks. The river is a source of drinking water for 10 million people.
Tony Blair said the other day "Milosevic has devastated his own country." This statement reminds me of the story of the English actress and the Japanese actor. The Japanese actor couldn't understand why the English actress was so cold towards him, so unfriendly. Finally he appealed to the director. He said, "We have a love scene to do tomorrow but she simply won't smile at me, she never looks at me, she won't speak to me. How can we play the love scene?" The director said to the actress "Now what's the trouble, darling? Kobo is really an extremely nice man." The actress looked at the Japanese actor and said "He may be - but some of us haven't forgotten Hiroshima."
This is standing language - and the world - on its head. There is indeed a breathtaking discrepancy between, let us say, US government language and US government action. The United States has exercised a sustained, systematic and clinical manipulation of power worldwide since the end of the last World War, while masquerading as a force for universal good. Or to put it another way, pretending to be the world's Dad. It's a brilliant - even witty - stratagem and in fact has been remarkably successful. But in 1948 George Kennan, head of the US State Department set out the ground rules for US foreign policy in a "top secret" internal document. He said "We will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day dreaming and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation. The day is not far off when we will have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans the better". Kennan was a very unusual man. He told the truth.
I believe that the United States, so often described - mostly by itself - as the bastion of democracy, freedom and Christian values, for so long accepted as leader of the "free world", is in fact and has in fact been for a very long time a profoundly dangerous and aggressive force, contemptuous of international law, indifferent to the fate of millions of people who suffer from its actions, dismissive of dissent or criticism, concerned only to maintain its economic power, ready at the drop of a hat to protect that power by military means, hypocritical, brutal, ruthless and unswerving.

But US foreign policy has always been remarkably consistent and entirely logical. It1s also extremely simple. "The free market must prevail, big business must be free to do business and nobody - but nobody - can get in the way of that". A banker I know addressed a meeting of potential US investors on the complex political and economic structure of Mexican society, attempting to place this in an historical context. An American investor stood up and said "Listen, we don't give a damn about any of that, all we want to know is - what do we get for our dollar?"

NATO is America's missile. As I think I indicated earlier, I find nothing intrinsically surprising in what is essentially an American action. There are plenty of precedents. The US did tremendous damage to Iraq in the Gulf War, did it again last December and is still doing it. Earlier this year it destroyed a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, declaring that chemical weapons were made there. They were not. Baby powder was. Sudan asked the United Nations to set up an international enquiry into the bombing. The United States prevented this enquiry from taking place. All this goes back a very long way. The US invaded Panama in 1990, Grenada in 1983, The Dominican Republic in 1965. It destabilised and brought down democratically elected governments in Guatemala, Chile, Greece and Haiti, all acts entirely outside the parameters of international law. It has supported, subsidised and in a number of cases engendered every right-wing dictatorship in the world since 1945. I refer again to Guatemala, Chile, Greece and Haiti. Add to these Indonesia, Uruguay, The Philippines, Brazil, Paraguay, Turkey, El Salvador, for example. Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered by these regimes but the money, the resources, the equipment (all kinds), the advice, the moral support as it were, has come from successive US administrations. The devastation the US inflicted upon Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the use of napalm, agent orange, was a remorseless, savage, systematic course of destruction, which however failed to destroy the spirit of the Vietnamese people. When the US was defeated it at once set out to starve the country by way of trade embargo. Its covert action against Nicaragua was declared by the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 1986 to be in clear breach of international law. The US dismissed this judgement, saying it regarded its actions as outside the jurisdiction of any international court. Over the last six years the United Nations has passed six resolutions with overwhelming majorities (at the last one only Israel voting with the US) demanding that the US stop its embargo on Cuba. The US has ignored all of them.

Milosevic is brutal. Saddam Hussein is brutal. But the brutality of Clinton (and of course Blair) is insidious, since it hides behind sanctimony and the rhetoric of moral outrage. Very little moral outrage is expressed in the United States about its own prison system. There are nearly two million people in prison in the United States.

Campaigns against Torture

These are some of the devices used in these prisons. The restraint chair is a steel-framed chair in which the prisoner is immobilised with four-point restraints securing both arms and legs and straps which are tightened across the shoulders and chest. The prisoner's arms are pulled down towards his ankles and padlocked and his legs secured in metal shackles. Prisoners are often left strapped in restraint chairs for extended periods in their own urine and excrement.

A stun gun is a hand-held weapon with two metal prongs which emits an electrical shock of roughly 50,000 volts. The use of stun guns and stun belts is widespread. The belt on the prisoner is activated by a button on the stun gun held by a prison guard. The shock causes severe pain and instant incapacitation. This has been described as torture by remote control. Mentally disturbed prisoners have been bound, spread-eagled on boards for prolonged periods in four-point restraints without medical authorisation or supervision. It is common practice for prisoners to be shackled during transportation by leg irons or chains. Pregnant women are not excluded. Sexual abuse and rape by guards and inmates in these prisons are commonplace.

In 1997 thirty-six states operated fifty-seven 'supermax' facilities housing 13,000 prisoners. More are under construction. These are super maximum security facilities. They are designed for isolation of dangerous prisoners but in fact prisoners may be assigned to 'supermax' units for relatively minor disciplinary infractions, such as insolence towards staff or, in the case of both men and women, complaints about sexual abuse. Severely disturbed prisoners are held within these facilities receiving neither appropriate evaluation or treatment.

Prisoners spend between 22 and 24 hours a day in claustrophobic and unhealthy conditions. The concrete cells have no natural light. The doors are solid steel. There is no view of and no contact with the outside world.

United Nations Human Rights Committee stated in 1995 that conditions in these prisons were 'incompatible' with international standards. The UN special Rapporteur on torture declared them inhuman in 1996.

Thirty-eight states out of fifty employ the death penalty. Lethal injection is the most popular method, followed by electrocution, the gas chamber, hanging and the firing squad. Lethal injection is regarded as the most humane method. But in fact some of the case histories of injections that go wrong are as grotesque as they are grisly.

Mental deficients and people under eighteen do not escape the death penalty. However, the assistant attorney-general of Alabama did make the following observation: "Under Alabama law you cannot execute someone who is insane. You have to send him to an asylum, cure him up real good, then execute him."

Amnesty International stated that all these practices constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. But the 'International Community' has not been invited to comment on a system at one and the same time highly sophisticated and primitive, shaped in every respect to undermine the dignity of man.

Why is NATO in Yugoslavia? This question is related to another. Why has NATO, which was effectively made redundant at the end of the Cold War, in fact expanded? Why are Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary members of NATO? The answer appears to lie in the considerable potential oil wealth in the Caspian Sea region. One of the Guardian newspaper intellectuals had this to say the other day: "How absurd it is," he jeered, "to refer to the oil in the Caspian Sea region as having anything to do with the NATO operation. The Caspian Sea is over a thousand miles from Yugoslavia." It is indeed. But to get the oil from the Caspian Sea into the hands of the West you can't use buckets. You need pipelines and those pipelines have to be installed and protected. The oil reserves in the Caspian Sea are vast. The pipelines mean that security in the Balkans is of concrete economic and strategic importance. The US Energy Secretary, Bill Richardson has explained it quite clearly "This is about America's energy security. It's also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don't share our values. We are trying to move these newly independent countries toward the West. We would like to see them reliant on Western commercial and political interests. We've made a substantial political investment in the Caspian and it's important that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right."

I'm now going to use the term imperialism, which some of you might think no longer means anything. I believe that imperialism remains an active and vibrant force in the world today.

Using the vehicle of financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, imperialism is in a position to dictate policy to smaller states which rely on their credit. Through their domination of the world market, the imperialist powers drive down prices for raw materials and keep the smaller states impoverished. The more these countries borrow, the more destitute and dependent they become. Palmerston said of the British Empire, "It has neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies. It has only permanent interests."

There was a time, by the way, when I thought Tony Blair would do well to consult one - or even two - of you ladies and gentlemen here tonight. I was struck by the demented light of battle in his eyes. But now I1m not at all sure that he's actually gone round the bend. I've come to the conclusion that his moral fervour and fanaticism is a masquerade. There's a big financial cake to be cut somewhere in the centre of all this. And this government would like a nice thick slice of it.

I suggest that it was in the interest of the imperialist states - the USA, the United Kingdom and Germany - to fragment what was an effectively, if precariously, unified Yugoslavia. The way to do this was to demand the break-up of nationalised industries and to impose austere neo-liberal policies which exacerbated simmering ethnic tensions. The economic pressure exerted upon Yugoslavia lay the objective foundations for the dissolution of the Balkan State. The break up was accelerated by Germany which abruptly recognised the independence of Croatia and Slovenia in 1991 and the US which gave its approval to Bosnian succession in 1992. Naturally to break up a state into many parts is to reduce the strength of that state.

The dismantling of the USSR has created a power vacuum in Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia. The principle significance of Yugoslavia at this critical juncture is that it lies on the Western periphery of a massive swathe of territory into which the major world powers aim to expand. This process expresses the most profound requirements of the profit system. Today's trans-national companies, as we know, measure their success in global terms. No market in the world can be ignored by General Motors, Toyota, Airbus, or Coca-Cola. These immense operations compete across continents to achieve dominance. For them, the penetration of one-sixth of the globe newly opened to capitalistic exploitation is a life and death question. The greatest untapped oil reserves in the world are located in the former Soviet Republics bordering the Caspian Sea (Azerbaijan, Kazaksthan and Tuzmentistahn). These resources are now being divided between the major capitalist countries. This is the fuel that is feeding militarism and which threatens to lead to new wars of conquest by imperialist powers against local powers. Brezinski, the former national security chief under Carter stated in 1997: "America's status as the world premier power is unlikely to be contested by any single challenger for more than a generation. No state is likely to match the United States in the four key positions of power , military, economic, technological and cultural - that confer global political clout."
Having consolidated its power in its base in the Western Hemisphere, the US, Brezinski argues, must make sustained efforts to penetrate the two continents of Europe and Asia. "America's emergence as the sole global superpower" he continues, "now makes an integrated and comprehensive strategy for Eurasia imperative. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that the country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. In Eurasia the immediate task is to ensure that no state or combination of states gains the ability to expel the United States or even diminish its decisive role. An enlarged NATO will serve the short term and long term interests of US policy."
The US House Committee on International Relations has begun holding hearings on the strategic importance of the Caspian region. Doug Bereutter, the committee chairman spoke as follows: "Stated US policy goals regarding energy resources in this region include fostering the independence of the new states and their ties to the West, breaking Russia1s monopoly over oil and gas transport routes, encouraging the construction of East/West pipelines that do not transit Iran and denying Iran dangerous leverage over the central Asian economies." Mortimer Zuckerman, the editor of US News and World Report said last month that the "Central Asian resources may revert back to the control of Russia or to a Russian led alliance. This would be a nightmare situation. We had better wake up to the dangers or one day the certainties on which we base our prosperity will be certainties no more. The potential prize in oil and gas riches in the Caspian sea, valued up to 4 trillion dollars, would give Russia both wealth and strategic dominance. The potential economic rewards of Caspian energy will draw in their train Western military forces to protect our investment if necessary." It could be argued that the significance of the military action against Yugoslavia rests in the fact that Kosovo was a testing ground for wars that might follow in the former Soviet region - to protect the interests of the United States.
The nuclear "balance" in the world, if there is such a thing, has been severely disturbed by recent events. The Ukranian parliament has voted unanimously to return the country to its former nuclear status. The Russian National Security Council recently approved the modernisation of all strategic and tactical nuclear warheads. It decided to develop strategic low-yield nuclear missiles capable of pinpoint strikes anywhere in the world. In Beijing the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade has resulted in a shift away from the no-first-strike principle. I believe it is not fanciful to conclude that the United States is on course to bring about a Third World War which will be the end of us all, with the possible exception of Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair and all the generals and all the presidents of multi-national companies eating baked beans and hamburgers in their McDonalds nuclear bunker deep down in Arizona.