By Brian Carnell

Wednesday, June 7, 2000

Recently Amnesty International released a report accusing NATO of committing war crimes during its war in Kosovo. The alleged crimes included the attack by NATO warplanes on a Serbian TV station that killed 16 civilians. According to Amnesty International, that is a war crime, because NATO intentionally targeted a civilian facility.

Not so, according to NATO spokesman Jamie Shea who claimed that civilians at say a BBC or CNN TV station are really civilians, while civilians at this TV station weren't really civilians after all. Shea told ITN:

Asked about the bombing of a Serb TV station in which several civilians were killed, Mr Shea said: "The television station was attacked because it was not the BBC or CNN, it was being used to push out propaganda and to create a climate of hatred in which the persecution of Albanians could be accepted as normal by the greater majority of the Serb population."

No civilian deaths occurred because of any deliberate targeting by Nato forces, and they did not therefore constitute war crimes, he went on to say. Nato pilots should not feel any sense of guilt, he said.

So, in other words, if NATO doesn't like what they are saying, it is perfectly legal for it to bomb civilians at any time -- except, remember, they are really not civilians, since NATO did not deliberately target civilians according to Shea. Perhaps NATO pilots spent a few seconds conscripting the hapless TV station employees into the Serbian army prior to firing their missiles to make it all legal.

Even NATO's after-the-fact justification of its intervention in Serbia make absolutely no sense, which is par for the course.

Source:

Nato hits back at Amnesty war crimes allegation. ITN, June 7, 2000.

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