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Potent Balkan intervention; BRIAN DENNY recalls why the West annexed the Trepca mining complex.
BY: BRIAN DENNY A YEAR ago this month, the huge Trepca mining and smelting complex in Kosovo was annexed by NATO troops and, to this day, remains a potent metaphor of what the West is doing in the Balkans. The Trepca complex was first developed by the British in the 1930s and then taken over by the nazis, who supplied the Third Reich with batteries from its lead. In the post-war period, the complex became one of federal Yugoslavia's major industrial assets. However, in the '70s, economic mismanagement and a heavy reliance on Western credits and International Monetary Fund loans created an enormous burden of debt and investment in the complex suffered. The mineral mines first gained noteriety in the West during the illegal attacks on Yugoslavia by NATO as the site of unspeakable mass murder by Yugoslav forces on a scale not seen since the nazi occupation. Western media claimed that around 1,500 ethnic Albanians had been chopped up by "Serbs, " who then fed the bodies into a grinder used to process ore, with the remains being thrown into furnaces. This mechanical slaughter was part of claims by former US Secretary of Defence William Cohen, backed up by compliant Western journalists, that over 100,000 ethnic Albanians had been systematically murdered. Today, of course, we know that these claims were ludicrous lies pumped out by a compliant media. The number of civilians killed during the war in Kosovo may be no more than 2,500 on both sides, according to Emilio Perez Pujol, a pathologist who led the United Nations body-searching team. At the Trepca complex, not one speck of blood was ever found, despite claims that thousands of bodies were put through grinders. Even the Western war crimes court in The Hague later admitted that it had no evidence whatsoever to back up claims of the so-called Trepca massacre. However, tribunal spokesman Alistair Graham claimed that the crimes were "possible, " while providing no evidence. "Our understanding is that it's feasible - we just cannot corroborate or disprove it, " he said. Even the Wall Street Journal admitted that, "by late summer, stories about a nazi-like body-disposal facility were so widespread that investigators sent a threeman French gendarmerie team down to the mine to search for bodies. "They found none. Another team analysed ashes in the furnace. They found no teeth or other signs of burnt bodies." The article further states that "other allegations - indiscriminate mass murder, rape camps, crematoriums, mutilation of the dead - haven't been borne out in the six months since NATO troops entered Kosovo." NATO countries had attempted to justify their murderous bombing spree, which left over 1,000 dead, by associating the Yugoslav forces with nazi atrocities - a move which has incensed survivors of the very Holocaust that the West has claimed that Belgrade worked so hard to emulate. Survivors of Buchenwald Concentration Camp chairman John Ranz says: "This gigantic campaign to brainwash America by our media against the Serbian people is just incredible, with its daily dose of one-sided information and outright lies." It was then admitted that even the infamous Racak massacre that was used to justify the 78-day destruction of Yugoslavia was also found to be fake. On January 17 this year, Deutsche Presse-Agentur stated that "Finnish forensic experts, in a final report on the circumstances of deaths two years ago of some 40 people in the village of Racak in Kosovo, found no evidence of a massacre by Serb security forces." After the open-ended NATO occupation of Kosovo began in June 1999, Western powers set about privatising the Serb province's economy. And Trepca, in the ethnically divided town of Kosovska Mitrovica, came back into focus when NATO troops stormed the works last August on the pretext that it represented an ecological danger. Protests and strikes by local workers were ignored by the Western authorities and NATO troops were used to stop any disturbances getting out of hand. Today, the Western rulers in the provincial capital Pristina have told Belgrade and local Albanians that they are the only body which has jurisdiction over how Trepca is managed and who owns and runs the complex.
Copyright 2001 People's Press Printing Society Ltd |