True, but he was hiding out practising alternative medicine.

If you saw his picture, did you think he look a tad like Dr. Weil?

Was the US behind the ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia?
By Stephen Gowans www3.sympatico.ca

It was one of those peeks into what really happened that are
occasionally glimpsed long after anyone cares, like finding out after
the invasion of Iraq that the US and Britain had already begun aerial
operations to pick apart Iraq’s defenses long before the invasion had
begun, at a time both countries were denying they had already made a
decision to go to war (“U.S. Moved Early for Air Supremacy: Airstrips
on Iraqi Defenses Began Long Before Invasion, General Says,” The
Washington Post, July 20, 2003).

Those who saw the news reports may have raised their eyebrows, but the
reports were too obscure to have flitted, even briefly, across the
consciousness of most (even ardent) newspaper readers. The secret,
though technically out, remained a secret, lost in the deluge of other
news, bereft of any urgency for being about an event that had happened
months before.

So who’s going to care about something that happened almost eight
years ago?

“In early August 1995,” writes researcher Gregory Elich, “the Croatian
invasion of Serbian Krajina precipitated the worst refugee crisis of
the Yugoslav civil war. Within days, more than two hundred thousand
Serbs, virtually the entire population of Krajina, fled their homes,
and 14,000 Serbian civilians lost their lives.” (“The invasion of
Serbian Krajina,” NATO in the Balkans: Voices of Opposition,
International Action Center, New York, 1998.)

This was Operation Storm, “the largest single act of ethnic cleansing
of the Yugoslav civil war,” according to Even Dyer, a journalist with
CBC Radio. “And yet not one person has been arrested and brought
before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia” (“Croatian atrocities being forgotten: Cdn. Officers,” CBC
News, July 21, 2003.)

The popular mythology about the Yugoslav civil war is that it was the
Serbs, led by Slobodan Milosevic, who embarked on a program of ethnic
cleansing to create a greater Serbia. Milosevic is on trial at the
Hague Tribunal, facing genocide charges.

So it should strike a dissonant chord that: The single greatest act of
ethnic cleansing does not have the Serb’s signature on it (they were
the victims); and the Hague Tribunal, which professes to be impartial,
has done nothing to bring the authors of the atrocity to book.

The Tribunal says the evidence is circumstantial, but senior Canadian
soldiers, including a general who commanded peacekeeping forces in the
area of Operation Storm, say they suspect the real reason for the
Tribunal’s inaction is that Western governments were in the background
pulling the strings. For example, Argentina provided artillery to the
Croats, despite a UN embargo on supplying materiel and even though
their own troops were in Croatia as peacekeepers.

And a private US military contractor, Military Professional Resources
Inc (MPRI), headed by a former US Army Chief of Staff, likely planned
the operation.

Canada’s Major-General Andrew Leslie says he doubts the Croats could
have pulled off Operation Storm themselves. “That was done by people
who really knew what they were doing.”

Leslie’s colleague, Major-General Alain Fourand, agrees.  He says he
suspects it was MPRI that was behind the operation.

The MPRI Web site, according to CBC news, “points to an article in
which the Croatian government praised the job MPRI has done for it.”

There is much that is misunderstood about the Yugoslav civil war, and
the Hague Tribunal.

For one, the Croats were a lot closer to the image of Nazis than the
Serbs were, though it was Serbs who were portrayed, for propaganda
reasons, as successors of Hitler’s fascists. After the breakaway Croat
republic violently seceded from Yugoslavia in 1991, Franjo Tudjman,
the country’s president, began to resurrect symbols of Croatia’s Nazi
puppet state past. According to Elich, “the Croatian fascist(s)
murdered as many as one million Serbs, Jews and Romani” during WWII.

And the Tribunal is funded in part by billionaire financier George
Soros, who has a long history of underwriting programs to destabilize
countries whose markets are closed, or partly closed, to Western
investment. Once a renitent government is ousted, and a Western
friendly regime is installed, Soros swoops in to buy up state assets
at fire sale prices. Soros is said to have his eyes on the massive
Trepca mining complex in Kosovo, worth an estimated $5 billion. The
Hungarian émigré spent $100 million to oust Milosevic, who presided
over a largely socially owned economy (“The billionaire trader has
become Eastern Europe’s uncrowned king and the prophet of an ‘open
society.” But open to what?” New Statesman, June 2, 2003.)

The US and Germany began supporting secessionist forces in Yugoslavia
after the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union, when the
Yugoslav federation refused to be brought wholly into the Western
orbit.  Former Communist countries were undergoing a spate of
privatization. But, according to Neil Clark, “Over 700,000 Yugoslav
enterprises remained in social ownership and most were still
controlled by employee-management committees, with only 5% of capital
privately owned.” (“The quisling of Belgrade,” The Guardian (UK),
March 14, 2003.) The West aligned itself with Alija Izetbegovic in
Bosnia, who wanted to makeover the multi-ethnic republic as an Islamic
religious state, though Bosnia had a large non-Muslim, including Serb,
population. And Tudjman, the West’s favorite in Croatia, reeked to
heaven of fascism and anti-Serb fanaticism. But both were useful as
instruments to tear apart the federation and deliver it, piece by
piece, into the hands of the West, and its corporate sector.

Later, secessionist in Kosovo would be encouraged, trained, and
bankrolled by the West, sparking a civil war that furnished NATO with
a pretext to launch a “humanitarian” war, and ultimately, the ouster
of Milosevic, working through its proxy, the Democratic Opposition of
Serbia.

The atrocities of August 1995 are now largely forgotten in the West,
and while they seem to be old news, they do shed light of recurrent
patterns that can be glimpsed today. The West’s penchant for
precipitating crises that can be used as pretexts for intervention in
countries that seek to pursue an independent course hasn’t abated. And
it’s all too common for victims of Western-backed aggressions to be
portrayed as the aggressors themselves.

North Korea, for example, is now widely understood to be a hostile
nation, even though it is the US that shows every indication of being
hell-bent on resuming a war with the impoverished country it has never
entirely renounced. Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe, part of a complement of
nations George W.  Bush has designated “captive nations,” along with
North Korea (“Bush blacklists Zimbabwe, Cuba,” news24.com, July 19,
2003) are portrayed as brutal, repressive, regimes, though the reason
they’re demonized has everything to do with their inhospitable
orientation to the global capitalist economy dominated by the United
States.

That too was the Serb’s offense, in the eyes of the West, which is why
there ever was an Operation Storm, why there’s a Star Chamber at the
Hague, and why MPRI won’t soon be facing war crimes charges.