RFE/RLThu, 13 Oct 2016 17:47 UTC
© REUTERS/ Chris Keane
U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has issued an apology for the U.S. role in the 1999 bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia.
The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, during former U.S. President Bill Clinton's administration, reined in Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and led to the end of the war in Kosovo.
"
The bombing of Serbs, who were our allies in both world wars, was a big mistake," Trump told Serbia's weekly magazine
Nedeljnik in
an interview published on October 13.
"Serbians are very good people," he added. "
Unfortunately, the Clinton administration caused them a lot of harm, but also throughout the Balkans, which they made a mess out of."
Trump pledged to have "a new policy with the Balkans if [he] won" the election on November 8.
Bill Clinton, husband of Trump's Democratic rival in the presidential election, Hillary Clinton, was president during the vicious war in Yugoslavia.
NATO's bombing campaign killed hundreds of civilians
but also ended ethnic cleansing in parts of the former Yugoslavia.
Comment: Trump just made a few more friends, foreign and domestic. You can bet Killary and her neocon friends are steaming.
Update: Too good to be true? The interview did provoke some self-righteous paramoral indignation among Democrats:
But the Trump campaign says the interview
never happened:
On Thursday, the Belgrade weekly Nedeljnik published what it said was an interview with Trump, under the headline "I apologize to Serbia." The five-question interview was supposedly answered via email, through Trump's campaign director in Indiana, the paper told US media.
...
The interview was quickly noticed by the US magazine Newsweek, and soon thereafter by other media outlets. Newsweek quoted London-based professor Eric Gordy, who described the remarks as "another sign of (Trump's) alignment with Russia."
Hillary Clinton's campaign echoed Gordy in a statement shortly after noon on Thursday, accusing Trump of pushing "the talking points of his ally" Russian President Vladimir Putin. "While Hillary Clinton has stood up to Russia, Trump continues to pander to Putin," said Clinton's foreign policy adviser Laura Rosenberger.
...
Marko Prelevic, one of the authors of the interview, told both Newsweek and BuzzFeed News that the questions were sent out by email and that the answers came back through Suzanne Jaworowski, head of the Trump-Pence campaign in Indiana. Contact with the campaign was established through Vladimir Rajcic, a Serbian-American actor, Prelevic said.
However, Jaworowski said the interview never happened. "There was no Trump interview on Serbia," she told Politico on Thursday afternoon. "I don't know where that came from. I never facilitated any kind of interview with a Serbian reporter."
"This was a hoax and we look forward to receiving a formal retraction and apology from all involved,"added Jason Miller, the campaign's senior communications adviser.
The quote about the bombing that Nedeljnik attributed to Trump sounded nearly identical to a quote the Serbian press has been reporting for almost a year, supposedly from a Larry King interview on CNN but without ever citing a source.
The only documented instance of Trump mentioning the Kosovo War is in his October 1999 appearance on Larry King's show, when he said, "I would have done it a little bit differently."
That the interview was fake, but the things said in it are true, things which led to many Americans accusing Trump of treason, says a LOT about how Russia is aligned with Truth, and America with The Big Lie.
Better late than never.