You asked how you could help

16 April (0:45 a.m.)

You asked how you could help.  One of the ways is to translate this text
into Italian (I can read Italian but am not so good at it to translate this
text with any precision).  Please, if you find the text reasonable
(everything in it is facts --- I give you my word for it), translate it and
spread it around, or, even better, try to have it published some where...

To tell you about the situation here -- we are all in mortal danger, each
day, every hour.  Bombs are becoming so random that there is no pattern,
and everything is being hit -- both military and civilian targets.

Thank you so much!!

------

There are two main issues in the NATO aggression on Serbia/Yugoslavia.  The
first issue deals with the *legal* issues and the second with claims about
*genocide* over the Albanian population in the Serbian province of Kosovo. 
I will try to clarify both of these issues.

1. NATO's attack is a violation of Article 2 of the UN Charter that
prohibits the use of force against a sovereign state where it has not
committed aggression on other states. Serbia did not attack any
neighbouring states outside its sovereign borders.  The Security Council
did not sanction the use of force here.  If the issue had been submitted to
the Security Council, it would certainly have been vetoed by Russia and
China.   NATO knows it and therefore bypassed it.  Efforts by NATO to
justify these actions through earlier resolutions of Chapter 7 of the
Charter are acts of distortion and convenience.

2. NATO's attack is a violation of NATO's own charter which claims it is a
defensive organisation and is only commmitted to force if one of its
members is attacked.  No member of NATO was attacked.

3. The so-called Rambouillet "Agreement" (not signed by Serbia) is a
violation of Articles 51 and 52 of the 1980 Vienna Convention on the Law of
Treaties that forbids coercion and force to compel any state to sign a
treaty or agreement.  Serbia is being asked to sign this "Agreement"
through NATO bombs and missiles.

4. This attack is a violation of the Helsinki Accords Final Acts of 1975
which guarantees the territorial frontiers of the states of Europe.  What
this so-called peace plan offers is:

a. the severence of Kosovo through NATO bombing with immediate effect; or

b. the severence of Kosovo through NATO occupation three years later.

The Serbs, evidently, chose (b).

5. If the sequel to the bombing is recognition of Kosovo as an independent
state, this will violate international law that prohibits recognition of
provinces that unilaterally declare independence against the wishes of the
federal authorities.

The most frequent critics and respondents of the above five claims about
the violation of accepted norms of international law argue that NATO's
attack on Serbia was justified under the 1948 Genocide Convention and/or
other general humanitarian principles.  This kind of rebuttal can be met
with the following:

1. NATO cannot unilaterally invoke the Genocide Convention and authorise
such strikes.  Only the Security Council can do so which was deliberately
bypassed by NATO because it knew that Russia and China Would veto such an
attack.

2. There was no genocide going on in Kosovo at the time the NATO aggression
was launched.  Cries of Serbian aggression and genocide within its own
province were being made in the US Congress in April 1998 when only 80
people had died and less than 100,000 internally displaced.  At the time of
the attack, 2,000 had died on both sides and 250,000 Albanians had been
displaced. It was the threat of NATO attack and the subsequent terror
bombing that parallels the fire bombing of Tokyo and Yokohama during WWW II
that triggered the Serbian retaliation and humanitarian catastrophe in
Kosovo.

3. There was no humanitarian intervention by the US and the West when the
Nigerian authorities crushed the Biafra separatist movement between 1967
and 1970, causing the deaths of one million Ibos;  when Pakistani forces
forces killed one million and drove out ten million Bengalis during the
East Pakistani secessionist struggle in 1971;  when the Pol Pot regime
killed one million Cambodians, to name only a few cases  --- some more
recent examples are Colombia, Turkey and East Timor.

4. Ethnic cleansing is not genocide.  If it were, the Allied Powers were
guilty for the expulsion of some 12 million Germans from Poland,
Czechoslovakia and elsewhere at the end of WW II.  And surely European Jews
committed genocide when they drove out nearly a million Palestinians to
carve out the state of Israel in 1948.

5. There is now an ethnically pure Greater Croatia.  There are almost
900,000 Serbian refugees ethnically cleansed from Croatia and the (Bosnian)
federation  -  300,000 in Republika Srpska, and 600,000 in Serbia.  This is
more than any other ethnic group in the former Yugoslavia!  Croatia
conducted the largest single ethnic cleansing of the war with American
military support.

6. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute determined that
about 35-50,000 people died on all sides during the Bosnian civil war, not
250,000.  The investigative team for the Hague Tribunal interviewed only
223 Bosnian women claiming to have been raped, and collected another 755
affidavits.  Allegations of 20-60,000 rapes were guesses.  The same thing
is happening now with Kosovo:  allegation after allegation, without any
proof.

7. Russia, China and India, representing well over half the human race, got
it right about the Kosovo crisis.  NATO, the only alliance left in the
galaxy, committed aggression on Serbia.  This all about saving NATO's face
at a dreadfully heavy price for the Serbs.  If NATO is above the
international law, then so is every other state and organisation.  It has
set a terrible precedent.