VII. For consideration by the Summit

362. The purposes and principles of the United Nations are set out clearly in the
Charter, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Their relevance and
capacity to inspire have in no way diminished. If anything they have increased, as
peoples have become interconnected in new ways, and the need for collective
responsibility at the global level has come to be more widely felt. The following
values, which reflect the spirit of the Charter, are - I believe - shared by all
nations, and are of particular importance for the age we are now entering:

Freedom. Men and women have the right to live their lives and raise their
children in dignity, free from hunger and squalor and from the fear of
violence or oppression. These rights are best assured by representative
government, based on the will of the people.
Equity and solidarity. No individual and no nation must be denied the
opportunity to benefit from globalization. Global risks must be managed in a
way that shares the costs and burdens fairly. Those who suffer, or who
benefit least, are entitled to help from those who benefit most.
Tolerance. Human beings must respect each other, in all their diversity of
faith, culture and language. Differences within and between societies should
be neither feared nor repressed, but cherished.
Non-violence. Disputes between and within nations should be resolved by
peaceful means, except where use of force is authorized by the Charter.
Respect for nature. Prudence should be shown in handling all living species
and natural resources. Only so can the immeasurable riches we inherit from
nature be preserved and passed on to our descendants.
Shared responsibility. States must act together to maintain international
peace and security, in accordance with the Charter. The management of risks
and threats that affect all the world?s peoples should be considered
multilaterally.

Kofi Annan "We the Peoples" April 2000
http://www.un.org/millennium/sg/report/full.htm

Acts of murder

Up to 38 aircraft have been
shot down or crashed. This
is suppressed, of course

By John Pilger
Tuesday May 18, 1999

The room is filled with the bodies
of children killed by Nato in
Surdulica in Serbia. Several are
recognisable only by their
sneakers. A dead infant is
cradled in the arms of his father.
These pictures and many others
have not been shown in Britain; it
will be said they are too horrific.
But minimising the culpability of
the British state when it is
engaged in criminal action is
normal; censorship is by omission
and misuse of language. The
media impression of a series of
Nato 'blunders' is false. Anyone
scrutinising the unpublished list
of targets hit by Nato is left in
little doubt that a deliberate
terror campaign is being waged
against the civilian population of
Yugoslavia.

Eighteen hospitals and clinics
and at least 200 nurseries,
schools, colleges and students'
dormitories have been destroyed
or damaged, together with
housing estates, hotels, libraries,
youth centres, theatres,
museums, churches and
14th-century monasteries on the
World Heritage list. Farms have
been bombed, their crops set on
fire. As Friday's bombing of the
Kosovo town of Korisa shows,
there is no discrimination
between Serbs and those being
'saved'. Every day, three times
more civilians are killed by Nato
than the daily estimate of deaths
of Kosovans in the months prior
to the bombing.

The British people are not being
told about a policy designed
largely by their government to
cause such criminal carnage. The
dissembling of politicians and the
lies of 'spokesmen' set much of
the news agenda. There is no
sense of the revulsion felt
throughout most of the world for
this wholly illegal action, for the
punishment of Milosevic's crime
with a greater crime and for the
bellicose antics of Blair, Cook
and Robertson, who have made
themselves into international
caricatures.

'There was no need of censorship
of our dispatches. We were our
own censors,' wrote Philip Gibbs,
the Times correspondent in
1914-18. The silence is different
now; there is the illusion of
saturation coverage, but the
reality is a sameness and
repetition and, above all, political
safety for the perpetrators.

A few days before the killing of
make-up ladies and camera
operators in the Yugoslav
television building, Jamie Shea,
Nato's man, wrote to the
International Federation of
Journalists: 'There is no policy to
attack television and radio
transmitters.' Where were the
cries of disgust from among the
famous names at the BBC, John
Simpson apart? Who interrupted
the mutual back-slapping at last
week's Royal Television Society
awards? Silence. The news from
Shepherd's Bush is that BBC
presenters are to wear pinks,
lavender and blues which 'will
allow us to be a bit more
conversational in the way we
discuss stories'.

Here is some of the news they
leave out. The appendix pages of
the Rambouillet 'accords', which
have not been published in
Britain, show Nato's agenda was
to occupy not just Kosovo, but all
of Yugoslavia. This was rejected,
not just by Milosevic, but by the
elected Yugoslav parliament,
which proposed a UN force to
monitor a peace settlement: a
genuine alternative to bombing.
Clinton and Blair ignored it.

Britain is attacking
simultaneously two countries
which offer no threat. Every day
Iraq is bombed and almost none
of it is news. Last week, 20
civilians were killed in Mosul, and
a shepherd and his family were
bombed. The sheep were
bombed. In the last 18 months,
the Blair government has
dropped more bombs than the
Tories dropped in 18 years.

Nato is suffering significant
losses. Reliable alternative
sources in Washington have
counted up to 38 aircraft crashed
or shot down, and an undisclosed
number of American and British
special forces killed. This is
suppressed, of course.

Anti-bombing protests
reverberate around the world:
100,000 people in the streets of
Rome (including 182 members of
the Italian parliament),
thousands in Greece and
Germany, protests taking place
every night in colleges and town
halls across Britain. Almost none
of it is reported. Is it not
extraordinary that no national
opinion poll on the war has been
published since April 30?

'Normalisation,' wrote the
American essayist Edward
Herman, depends on 'a division of
labour in doing and rationalising
the unthinkable, with the direct
brutalising and killing done by
one set of individuals... [and]
others working on improved
technology (a better crematory
gas, a longer burning and more
adhesive Napalm). It is the
function of experts and the
mainstream media to normalise
the unthinkable for the general
public.'

This week, the unthinkable will
again be normalised when Nato
triples the bombing raids to 700 a
day. This includes blanket
bombing by B-52s. Blair and
Clinton and the opaque-eyed
General Clark, apologist for the
My Lai massacre in Vietnam, are
killing and maiming hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of innocent
people in the Balkans. No
contortion of intellect and
morality, nor silence, will diminish
the truth that these are acts of
murder. And until there is a revolt
by journalists and broadcasters,
they will continue to get away
with it. That is the news.


http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,2763,207255,00.html

http://www.brittrade.com/kosovo/

Kim, this site is not for you, I don't think you'll have a capacity to understand it

"According to Nato estimates,
1,500 civilians were killed as a
consequence of the bombing."

http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,2763,197391,00.html

War is no joke

This is a poisonous bloody
mess, which we have made
worse

By Jeremy Hardy
Saturday May 22, 1999

Last week, I recommended that
readers refer to John Pilger's
column in the New Statesman, in
particular, his quotation of the
Rambouillet accords. On
Tuesday, Pilger addressed the
document on this page, only to
be personally rubbished by the
paper's diplomatic editor the
following day.

Given the spleen of the attack on
the integrity of a man I
shamelessly respect, I am
reluctant to enter the debate. I
hope Monday will not see a
column the writer of which asks,
'Is Hardy merely a stupid git or a
threat to all our children?'

However, because I quoted Pilger
quoting Rambouillet, I am
implicitly attacked for repeating
'a canard [French for duck] now
circulating among Serb
apologists'. I am not a Serb
apologist but, since all opponents
of the war are so labelled, I
suppose it includes me.

Moreover, I mentioned the
Rambouillet clause enforcing
free-market principles, which, the
diplomatic editor insists, does
not exist. Pilger was quoting from
two sections of Rambouillet
without the use of three dots to
separate them. But, the words
indeed exist, unless an internet
wag is playing tricks on us, which
is possible given that no sane or
responsible person could have
written the accords. However,
having scrolled through it and not
stumbled upon a picture of
Madeleine Albright's head on
Pamela Anderson's body, I've
concluded it's not a prank.

Some interesting letters have
appeared defending the
document. It appears that its
provisions are standard terms of
any agreement. Check your Radio
Rentals contract and it's
probably all there. Mere
technicalities - nothing to worry
about.

What, you may ask, would be a
situation in which these
provisions would be normal or
routine? I'm serious; I'd like to
know. Is it usual for soldiers in a
foreign country to be immune
from arrest or prosecution by the
local authorities? I know the
occupation of the North of
Ireland involves the security
forces getting away with murder
but the odd squaddie gets nicked
occasionally.

Rambouillet has been compared
to the Dayton agreement, which
Milosevic signed. Would not the
fact that he signed Dayton so
readily suggest both that it was a
very bad agreement and that it
had a different purpose from
Rambouillet, which he was not
intended to sign?

Nato assisted the segregation of
ethnic groups in Bosnia and
Croatia, including the 200,000
Serbs of Krajina, forcibly ejected
by cleansers such as Agim Ceku,
now a top commander in the KLA.

Now I shall be accused of being a
Serb apologist. But I am not
taking sides. This is not a game
of heroes and villains, although
those who were 'terrorists' three
months ago are now
hugger-mugger with their former
accusers.

This is a poisonous, bloody mess,
which we have made worse. The
winner is nationalism, any
nationalism you choose to back.
All the competing nationalisms in
the region conspire to divide
people for the worst possible
reasons, and to leave the worst
possible people in power.

I read somewhere a description
of the vast ethnic distinction
between Albanians and Serbs. It
seems Serbs are small, dark and
squat (like Hitler) and Albanians,
blonde and covered with freckles
(like the Milky bar Kid). People of
mixed race, I suppose have
smaller, darker freckles and
striped hair. Yugoslavia was once
such a multicultural society that
it recognised the futility of
separatist ideologies. Look at it
now.

Kosovo is written about as
though it is a Serb colony, not
surprisingly because the
authorities and the Serb
paramilitaries have behaved as
though they were colonial
masters. I needn't point out why
we in the West recognise the
patterns of behaviour. But it is
not in fact a Serb colony, it is, like
the whole region, a former
Turkish colony.

The area was subsequently
messed about by
Austria-Hungary, Germany and
Italy. I say this not to embarrass
our Nato allies or EU partners.
After all, everyone's piling in now.
My point is that, rather than
trying to ride one ethnic horse for
our own glorification, we could
try to understand what has
happened.

P>Almost all Albanian refugees
seem to want the bombs. I
wouldn't blame them if they
wanted Serbia wiped off the map.
But I wouldn't be surprised if
Serbs who had Albanian friends
two months ago now hate them
with a passion. Racism is not a
philosophy, it is a delusional
emotional spasm, and bombing
maternity hospitals is certainly a
novel way of tackling it.

That's not to say we're not all
getting jolly emotional over here
too. Our government has
successfully ridden a wave of
semi-popular emotion. 'We can't
just stand by' - although we do
usually. 'We can't ignore what's
going on in our backyard -
although we've managed not to
peek out the front and see
Ireland for the past 30 years.

We can only get so upset in this
life, so we may as well let others
set the agenda about what
should upset us. Then we can
cheer on what we hope will be
the prosecution of evil. That will
make us feel better, which is the
most important thing, isn't it?