The following is an article published on the 29th of March 2023 on RT, written by Nebojsa Malic, a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. The article becomes even more relevant now that UN has played the faux-“genocide” card with regard to Srebrenica. I am reposting it in full in the blog.
How the US and NATO reuse the 1990s Yugoslavia wars playbook in Ukraine
If certain strategies and tactics seem familiar, that’s because they are over 20 years old
The emotionally charged and often hyperbolic terms used by the US and its allies to describe the conflict in Ukraine gives the notion that it is something unprecedented and unseen since the Second World War. That is quite literally not true.
If anything, the behaviours, tactics and even strategies embraced by the government in Kiev and its Western patrons bear an uncanny similarity to the conflicts that destroyed Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In sharp contrast to all the reminiscing – though nowhere near enough remorse – on the recent anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, even the critics of the Western establishment seem to have forgotten about the Kosovo War, which began on March 24,1999.
After all, Operation Allied Force (NATO’s official name for the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia) is proof that NATO’s claim of being a “defensive alliance” is a lie. So is the notion that changing borders by force is something that is simply not done in the “rules-based world order,” what with the US-led bloc occupying Serbia’s province of Kosovo and endorsing its “independence” in 2008. The West was so law-abiding, it tried to justify the unjustifiable by inventing the doctrine of “responsibility to protect” and setting up an “independent” commission to declare the war “illegal but legitimate.”
No wonder, then, that the “international community” wants this forgotten, to the point where they are trying to pressure Serbia to legitimize it by threatening sanctions, isolation, and “internal turmoil.”
In May 1999, after weeks of failing to bomb Serbia into submission, NATO sought to shore up its unity and credibility by having its pet tribunal in The Hague charge President Slobodan Milosevic with war crimes. Parallels with events of the past weeks write themselves.