Tony Blair with KLA leader and now-indicted war criminal Hashim Thaci
Top secret papers reviewed by The Grayzone reveal Tony Blair demanded strikes on civilian targets in Yugoslavia days before NATO attacked them. While the UK military acknowledged a NATO strike on Hotel Jugoslavia would mean inflicting "some civilian casualties," it insisted the deaths were "worth the cost."Declassified British Ministry of Defence (MOD) files reviewed by The Grayzone reveal that
officials in London conspired to embroil US troops in a secret plan to occupy Yugoslavia and "topple" President Slobodan Milosevic during NATO's 1999 war on the country. Though the crazed scheme was never implemented, details of the plot reveal precisely how British officials successfully shaped Washington into a blunt force instrument of their vanquished empire in years to come.
March 24 marks the 25th anniversary of Operation Allied Force, NATO's 78-day-long bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. Still venerated in Western mainstream as a successful "humanitarian intervention" conducted to prevent an impending "genocide" of Kosovo's Albanian population, the war was in fact a wantonly destructive,
illegal assault on a sovereign, multiethnic country, based on lies and
atrocity propaganda. Belgrade had in fact been engaged in a counterinsurgency battle against the
CIA and MI6-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an Al Qaeda-linked extremist group.
The KLA — funded by the narcotics trade and organ harvesting — explicitly sought to maximize civilian casualties, in order to precipitate Western intervention. In May 2000, a British parliamentary committee concluded all purported abuses of Albanian citizens by Yugoslav authorities occurred after NATO's bombing began, finding that the alliance's intervention had actually encouraged Belgrade to aggressively neutralize the KLA. Meanwhile, in September 2001, a
UN court in Pristina determined that Belgrade's actions in Kosovo were not genocidal in nature, or intent.
These findings are largely overlooked today. A February
Politico investigation into the West's post-war pillage of Kosovo axiomatically asserted that NATO intervened in Yugoslavia "to halt an unfolding genocide against the ethnic-Albanian population." Similarly forgotten is just
how close leading NATO states came to invading Belgrade during that chaotic spring.
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