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North Atlantic Treaty Organization (view source)
Revision as of 20:10, June 13, 2011
, 20:10, June 13, 2011→Kosovo
=== Kosovo ===
=== Kosovo ===
After the fall of the [[Soviet Union]] and the end of the [[Cold War]]. NATO had seemed to lose it purpose as it no longer had the threat of USSR. NATO began to shift its focus to from its original defense alliance to a more offensive mode. In 1999 the [[United States]] led its NATO allies on a bombing campaign to stop [[Yugoslav]] President Slobodan Milošević's ethic cleansing of the Albanians inside of [[Kosovo]]. The mission in [[Kosovo]] did not go as well as planned. After the air strikes, havoc reigned over [[Kosovo]], abuses continued and human rights organizations listed abuses committed by the Alliance members during the campaign. In an attempt to solve the violence NATO countries and the [[United Nations]] took on a mission to stabilize and reconstruct the country. A mission which is currently ongoing.
After the fall of the [[Soviet Union]] and the end of the [[Cold War]]. NATO had seemed to lose it purpose as it no longer had the threat of USSR. NATO began to shift its focus to from its original defense alliance to a more offensive mode. In 1999 the [[United States]] led its NATO allies on a bombing campaign to stop [[Yugoslav]] President Slobodan Milošević's ethic cleansing of the Albanians inside of [[Kosovo]]. The mission in [[Kosovo]] did not go as well as planned. After the air strikes, havoc reigned over [[Kosovo]], abuses continued and human rights organizations listed abuses committed by the Alliance members during the campaign. In an attempt to solve the violence NATO countries and the [[United Nations]] took on a mission to stabilize and reconstruct the country. A mission which is currently ongoing.
==== NATO War Crimes ====
According to Professor Robert Hayden from the University of Pittsburgh:
<blockquote>
NATO's attacks have been aimed against civilian targets since literally the first night of the bombing, when a tractor factory in the Belgrade suburb of Rakovica was destroyed by cruise missiles. Since then NATO targets have included roads, railroad tracks and bridges hundreds of miles from Kosovo, power plants, factories of many kinds, food processing and sugar processing plants, water pumping stations, cigarette factories, central heating plants for civilian apartment blocks, television studios, post offices, non-military government administrative buildings, ski resorts, government official residences, oil refineries, civilian airports, gas stations, and chemical plants. NATO's strategy is not to attack Yugoslavia's army directly, but rather to destroy Yugoslavia itself, in order to weaken the army. With this strategy it is military losses that are "collateral damage," because most of the attacks are aimed at civilian targets.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
The level of damage done to clearly non-military infrastructural targets in Serbia would seem to render NATO military commanders and at least some NATO political leaders liable to the same charge that was made against Ratko Mladi and Radovan Karadi by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), "extensive destruction of property:" that they
individually and in concert with others planned, instigated, ordered or otherwise aided and abetted in the planning, preparation or execution of the extensive, wanton and unlawful destruction of ... property, not justified by military necessity or knew or had reason to know that subordinates were about to destroy or permit others to destroy ... property or had done so and failed to take necessary and reasonable measures to prevent this destruction or to punish the perpetrators thereof."
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
The war supposedly in defense of human rights has produced war crimes by NATO, and a civilian casualty rate that is at least three time higher than the casualty rate of the "intolerable" violations of human rights that NATO was supposedly acting to correct. <ref> [http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/hayden.htm Humanitarian Hypocrisy.] University of Pittsburgh. </ref>
</blockquote>
=== Modern History ===
=== Modern History ===