1.
Danilo Mandic: Professor Noam Chomsky, in your,
if I am not mistaken, first TV media appearance for Serbian media, thank you
very much for being with us.
2.
Noam Chomsky: I am glad to be with you.
3.
DM: Last month marked the seventh anniversary of
the beginning of the bombing of Yugoslavia. Why did NATO wage that war or I
should say why did the United States wage that war?
4.
NC: Actually, we have for the first time a very
authoratative comment on that from the highest level of Clinton administration,
which is something that one could have surmised before, but now it is asserted.
This is from Strobe Talbott who was in charge of the…he
ran the Pentagon/State Department intelligence Joint Committee on the diplomacy
during the whole affair including the bombing, so that’s very top of Clinton
administration; he just wrote the forward to a book by his Director of
Communications, John Norris, and in the forward he says if you really want to
understand what the thinking was of the top of Clinton administration this is
the book you should read and take a look on John Norris’s book and what he says
is that the real purpose of the war had nothing to do with concern for Kosovar
Albanians. It was because Serbia was not carrying out the
required social and economic reforms, meaning it was the last corner of Europe
which had not subordinated itself to the US-run neoliberal programs, so
therefore it had to be eliminated. That’s from the highest level. Again,
we could have guessed it, but I’ve never seen it said before. That
it wasn’t because of the Kosovo Albanians, that we know. And this is a point of
religious fanaticism that the West can’t talk about for interesting reasons
having to do with Western culture, but there is just overwhelming
documentation, impeccable documentation. Two big compilations of the
State Department trying to justify the war, the OSCE records, NATO records, KIM
Monitor records, long British Parliamentary inquiry which led into it. They
all showed the same thing - and sort of what we knew, I mean it was an ugly
place, there were atrocities there.
5.
DM: Given this clear documentary record I want
to ask you about the elite Intellectual opinion, what you call…
6.
NC: In the United States.
7.
DM: …in the United States and in the West in
general, because reviewing it you would get the impression - you would be
forgiven for imagining that every critic of the NATO intervention was one of
two things: either a “Milosevic sympathizer” or someone who doesn’t care about
genocide. What does this mean?
8.
NC: First of all that’s a common feature of
intellectual culture. One good U.S. critic, Harold
Rosenberg once described intellectuals as the “herd of independent minds.” They
think they are very independent but they are a stampede in a herd, which is
true; when there is a party line, you have to adhere to it and the party line
is systematic. The party line is subordination to state power and to state
violence. Now you are allowed to criticize it but on a very narrow grounds. You
can criticize it because it is not working or for some mistake or benign
intentions that went astray or something, like you see
right now in Iraq war, the tone of debate about Iraq war but take a look at it -
it’s very similar to the debate in PRAVDA
during the invasion of Afghanistan. Actually I brought this up to a Polish
reporter recently and I asked him if he had been reading PRAVDA. He just
laughed and said yeah it’s the same. Now you read PRAVDA in the nineteen
eighties, it’s you know: “the travail of the Russian soldiers that are going to
get killed and now there are these terrorists who prevent us from bringing
justice and peace to the Afghans, we of course did not invade them, we
intervened and helped them at the request of the legitimate government, the
terrorists are preventing us from doing all good the things we wanted to do
etc.” I have read
Japanese counter-insurgency documents from the second WW, from the ninety
thirties - the same, you know: “...we tried to bring them an earthly paradise,
but the Chinese bandits are preventing it ...” in fact I don’t
know of any exception in history. If you want, British
imperialism is the same, I mean even people of the highest moral integrity like
John Stewart Mill were talking about, well we have to intervene in India and
conquer India because the barbarians can’t control themselves, there are
atrocities, we are to bring them the benefits of the British rule and
civilization and so on. Now in the United
States it’s the same. Now take bombing of Kosovo; that was an incredibly
important event for American intellectuals and the reason it had to do it all
was for what was going on during nineties. And the nineties are for the West, not just
the U.S. and France and England were the worst - probably the low point in
intellectual history for the West, I think. I mean it was like a comic strip
mimicking a satire of Stalinism, literally. You take a look at the New York
Times or read the French press, the British press, there was all full of talk
about how there is a “normative revolution” that has swept through the West,
for the first time in history, a state namely the United States, “the leader of
the free world” is acting from “pure altruism”, ...Clinton’s policy has entered
into a “noble phase,” with a “saintly glow” on and on, I am quoting from the
liberals.
9.
DM: Now, this particular humanitarian sharade
was...
10.
NC: That’s pre Kosovo.
11.
DM: Right. And it was specific in a sense because
it was based on the claim that it was preventing genocide.
12.
NC: Now this is, see there are no examples yet.
13.
DM: Let me just read something that you said in
an interview around the time of the bombing. You said that the term “genocide”
as applied to Kosovo is an insult to the victims of Hitler. In fact, it’s
revisionist to an extreme.” What did you mean by that?
14.
NC: First of all let me just fix the timing. The
things I’ve been quoting are from the late nineties.
15.
DM: Before Kosovo.
16.
NC: Yeah. Now, they needed some event to
justify this massive self-adulation, OK? Along came Kosovo fortunately and
so now they had to stop genocide. What was the genocide in Kosovo? We know from
the Western documentation what it was. In the year
prior to the bombing, according to Western sources about two thousand people
were killed, the killings were distributed, a lot of them were coming in fact
according to British government, which was the most hawkish element of the
Alliance, up until January 1999 a majority of killings came from the KLA
guerillas who were coming in as they said, you know, to try to incite a harsh
Serbian response, which they got, in order to appeal to Western humanitarians
to bomb. We know from the Western records that nothing changed between
January and March, in fact up until March 20 they indicate nothing. March 20th
they indicate an increase in KLA attacks. But, it was ugly but by
international standards it was almost invisible unfortunately and it was very
distributed. If the British are correct, the majority was coming from the
KLA guerillas.
17.
DM: And as it later turned out the KLA was also
receiving financial and military support.
18.
NC: They were being supported by CIA in those
months. And to call that genocide, is really to
insult the victims of the holocaust, you know, if that’s genocide than the
whole world is covered with genocide. In fact it’s
kind of striking; right at the same time the Western intellectuals were
praising themselves for their magnificent humanitarianism, much worse
atrocities were going on right across the border, in Turkey. That’s inside
NATO, not at the borders of NATO… “how can we allow this on the borders of
NATO,”… but how about inside NATO where Turkey was
carrying, had driven probably several million Kurds out of their homes,
destroyed about 3500 villages laid waste the whole place, every conceivable
form of torture and massacre you can imagine, killed nobody knows how many
people, we don’t count our victims, tens of thousands of people, how they were
able to do that? The reason is because they were getting 80% of their arms from
Clinton and as the atrocities increased, the arms flow increased. In fact in
one single year, 1997, Clinton sent more arms to Turkey than the entire Cold
War period combined! Up until the counter-insurgency. That was not
reported in the West. You do not report your own crimes, that’s critical. And
right in the midst of all of this, “how can we tolerate a couple of thousand
people being killed in Kosovo, mixed guerillas and ...” In fact the 50th
Anniversary of NATO took place right in the middle of all of this. And there
were lamentations about what was going on right across NATO’s border. Not a
word about the much worse things going on inside NATO’s borders, thanks to the
massive flow of arms from the United States. Now that’s only one case.
Comparable things were going on all over where the U.S. were supportive of much
worse, but this, you had to focus on this, that was the topic for “the herd of
independent minds.” It played a crucial role in their self image because they
had been going through a period of praising themselves for their magnificence
in their “normative revolution” and their “noble phase” and so on and so forth,
so it was a god-sent, and therefore you couldn’t ask any questions about it.
Incidentally the same happened in the earlier phase of the Balkan wars. It was
awful, and so on and so forth. However, but if you look at the coverage, for
example there was one famous incident which has completely reshaped the Western
opinion and that was the photograph of the thin man behind the barb-wire.
19.
DM: A fraudulent photograph, as it turned out.
20.
NC: You remember. The
thin men behind the barb-wire so that was Auschwitz and ‘we can’t have
Auschwitz again.’ The intellectuals went crazy and the French
were posturing on television and the usual antics. Well, you know, it was investigated and carefully
investigated. In fact it was investigated by the leading Western specialist on
the topic, Philip Knightly, who is a highly respected media analyst and his
specialty is photo journalism, probably the most famous Western and most
respected Western analyst in this. He did a detailed analysis of it. And he
determined that it was probably the reporters who were behind the barb-wire, and
the place was ugly, but it was a refugee camp, I mean, people could leave if
they wanted and, near the thin man was a fat man and so on, well and there was one tiny newspaper in England, probably three people, called LM
which ran a critique of this, and the
British (who haven’t a slightest concept of freedom of speech, that is a total
fraud)…a major corporation, ITN, a big media
corporation had publicized this, so the corporation sued the tiny newspaper for
lible. Now the British lible laws were absolutely atrocious. The person
accused has to prove that the, what he’s reporting is not done in malice and he
can’t prove that. So and in fact when you have a huge corporation with
batteries of lawyers and so on, carrying out a suit against the three people in
the office, who probably don’t have the pocket-money, it’s obvious what is
going to happen. Especially under these grotesque lible laws. So yes, they were
able to prove the little newspaper…and couldn’t prove it wasn’t done out of
malice, they were put out of business. There was just euphoria in the left
liberal British press. You’ve read The Guardian and The Observer, they thought
it was wonderful.
21.
DM: Mentioning The Guardian, what you describe
is...
22.
NC: Sorry, incidentally..., after they put the
newspaper out of business under this utterly grotesque legal case of the
British laws, the left liberal newspapers, like The Guardian were just in a
state of euphoria about this wonderful achievement. They had managed to destroy
a tiny newspaper because it questioned some image that they had presented and
they were very proud of themselves for it, which was probably misunderstood or
misinterpreted. Well, Philip Knightly, he wrote a very harsh critique of the
British media for behaving in this way, and tried to teach them an elementary
lesson about freedom of speech. He also added that probably the photograph was
misinterpreted. Couldn’t get published. Well, you know, that’s when Kosovo came
along, it was the same thing. That you can not tell the truth about it, look
I’ve gone through a ton of reporting on this, almost invariably they inverted
the chronology. There were atrocities...
23.
DM: But after the bombing.
24.
NC: After the
bombing. The way it’s presented is: the atrocities took place and then we had
to bomb to prevent genocide, just inverted.
25.
DM: Let me ask you about the conduct of the
actual war. You mentioned The Guardian, it’s interesting because you yourself
had recently had an unpleasant experience...
26.
NC: Over this.
27.
DM: ... when The Guardian misquoting you over
Srebrenica. It misquoted you to make it appear as if you were questioning the
Srebrenica massacre. But let me bring you back to the conduct of the actual
war. That was another...
28.
NC: ... the 1999 bombing.
29.
DM: The bombing, which was also overlooked or
selectively covered by the Western media in general. Now, Amnesty International, among others, reported that “NATO
committed serious violations of the rules of war during it’s campaign”,
numerous human rights groups concur and document various war crimes. One of
them had its anniversary two days ago, when the Radio Television Serbia was
bombed, the national television, its headquarters, killing 16 people. First of
all, why were these crimes completely unreported, and secondly, is there any
prospects for there being any responsibility taken for these crimes?
30.
NC: I’d say the crimes
were reported but they were cheered. It’s not that they were unknown, like the
bombing of the radio station, yes, it was reported and the TV station, but it’s
fine. Because the TV station was described as a propaganda outlet, so therefore
it was right to bomb. That happens all the time. It just happened last year, in
November 2004. One of the worst war crimes in Iraq...
31.
DM: Al Jazeera ...
32.
NC: ... was invasion of Falluja. Al Jazeera’s
one thing, but there was worse. The invasion of Falluja was kind of similar
to Srebrenica, if you look, but ... They invaded Falluja; the first thing the
invading troops did, U.S. troops, was to take over the general hospital and
throw the patients on the floor, they were taken out their beds, put on the
floor, hands tied on their backs, doctors thrown on the floor, hands on their
backs, it was a picture of it in the front page of the The New York Times, they
said it was wonderful.
33.
DM: The Geneva Convention forbids hospitals to
be...
34.
NC: It’s a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions and George Bush
should be facing the death penalty for that, even under the U.S. law. But
it was presented, no mention of the Geneva Conventions, and it was presented as
a wonderful thing, because the Falluja general hospital was a “propaganda
center,” namely it was releasing casualty figures, so therefore it was correct
to carry out a massive war crime. Well, the bombing of the TV station was
presented the same way. In fact, as I’m sure you
recall, there was an offer from NATO that they would not bomb if they agreed to
broadcast six hours of NATO propaganda. Well, this is considered quite right. How
can it be dealt with? A group of international lawyers did appeal to the
International Tribunal on the Yugoslavia. They presented a brief, saying they
should look into NATO war crimes, but what they cited was reports from Human
Rights Watch, Amnesty International and admissions by the NATO command. That
was what they presented, the…I am forgetting, but I
think it was Karla Del Ponte at the time; she would not look at it, in
violation of the laws of the Tribunal, because she “had faith in NATO.” And
that was the answer. Well, something else interesting happened after
that: Yugoslavia did bring the case to the War Court...
35.
DM: Which also rejected the case.
36.
NC: The Court accepted it and in fact
deliberated for a couple of years it may still be, but what is interesting is
that the U.S. excused itself from the case and the Court accepted the excuse.
Why? Because Yugoslavia had mentioned the Genocide
Convention and the U.S. did sign the Genocide Convention (after forty years),
it ratified it, but it ratified it with reservation, saying “inapplicable to
the United States”. So in other words, the United States is
entitled to commit genocide, therefore and that was the case that the U.S.
Justice Department of President Clinton’s brought to the World Court and the
Court had to agree. If a country does not accept World Court
jurisdiction, it has to be excluded, so the U.S. was excluded from the trial,
on the grounds that it grants itself the right to commit genocide. Do you think
this was reported here?
37.
DM: The World Court, though, excused itself from
hearing the case trying the illegality of the war, on the grounds that
Yugoslavia was not a full member of the United Nations at the time when the
case was brought to the…
38.
NC: Maybe they’ve finally reached that...
39.
DM: ...they finally did that...
40.
NC: ...for several
years they were deliberating but that’s the sequence, does any of this get
reported? You can ask your friends at Princeton, ask the faculty. They don’t know. I mean these… any more than… they will know
that, they sort of probably remember the bombing, the capture of the General
Hospital in Falluja but, was there any comment saying that was a war crime?
41.
DM: What struck me was that you compared the
Srebrenica massacre with the Falluja invasion, why is that?
42.
NC: Because there are similarities.
43.
DM: Like what?
44.
NC: In the case of Srebrenica women and children
were trucked out and then came, you know, the massacre. In the case of Falluja, the
women and children were ordered out, they weren’t trucked out, they were
ordered out, but the men weren’t allowed to leave and then came the attack. In
fact, it turned out that the roads out were blocked. Well, I mean all
things, it’s not the same story, but that part is similar. I actually mentioned
that a couple of times. Storms of protest hysteria, you know. Incidentally
this Guardian affair - part of it which was totally fraud is on the part of the
editors, not the reporter. They blamed it on the reporter, but it was the
editors. One other thing
that they were infuriated about was that she asked me what about the thin man
behind the barb-wire, isn’t that a horrible atrocity? I said well, you know, it’s
not certain that it was correct. OK, that led to the hysteria. That’s
when Philip Knightly tried to intervene to present once again his analysis and
once again his critique of the media, but couldn’t. He is a very prominent,
prestigious person. You just cannot break ranks; that’s not tolerated. I mean,
we are lucky, we do not have censorship, it’s free society, but the
self-censorship is overwhelming. Actually, Orwell once wrote about this, in
something that nobody has read. Everyone has read Animal Farm and almost nobody
has read the introduction to Animal Farm...
45.
DM: Unpublished.
46.
NC: Unpublished, came out in his unpublished
papers, thirty years later. In it what he said is, Animal Farm is a satire of
this totalitarian state, he said free England is not very different. In free
England unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force and he gave
examples. It’s very similar here. And it does not matter how extreme they are,
I mean the Iraq invasion is a perfect example. There is
not, you can not find anywhere in the main stream a suggestion that it is
wrongful to invade another country. If you had invaded another country
you have to pay reparations, you have to withdraw and the leadership has to be
punished. I mean, and I don’t know if you have read the Nuremburg Judgments,
but after the Nuremburg Judgments, Justice Jackson, Chief of Council of
Prosecution of the U.S. Justice, made very, very eloquent statements about how
we must…we are sentencing these people to death of the crimes for which they
committed or crimes when anybody commits them, including when we commit them,
we have to live up to that. He said “we are handing the defendants a poison
chalice, and if we sipped from this chalice we must be treated the same way.”
Can’t be more explicit! They also defined aggression. Aggression
was defined in terms which just apply absolutely and without exception not only
to the invasion of Iraq but to all sorts of other invasions, in Vietnam and
many others, actually even terrorist war against Nicaragua, technically falls
under the crime of aggression as defined in Nuremburg.
47.
DM: Does the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia?
48.
NC: Yes. And that’s not even questioned. In fact
there is a, there was a so-called, an Independent Commission of Inquiry on the
Kosovo bombing led by a very respected South African jurist - Justice Goldstone - and they concluded that the bombing was,
in their words, “illegal but legitimate”. Illegal
makes it a war crime. But they said it was legitimate because it was necessary
to stop genocide. And then comes the usual inversion of the history. Actually,
Justice Goldstone who is a respectable person, later recognized that the
atrocities came after the bombing. And that they were furthermore the
anticipated consequence, he did recognize that in a lecture in New York, couple
of years ago, he said: “well, nevertheless we can take
some comfort in the fact that Serbia was planning it anyway, and the proof for
they were planning it is” guess what - “Operation Horse-Shoe”, - a probable intelligence fabrication that was publicized
after the bombing, so even if it was true, it wouldn’t matter. And
furthermore, even if that was true, it was a contingency plan. Now look, Israel
has a contingency plans to drive all the Palestinians out of the West Bank if
there is a conflict, so does that mean that Iran has the right to bomb Israel? Now, the U.S. has contingency plans to invade Canada, OK
so does that mean that everybody has a right to bomb the United States? That’s the last straw of justification on the part of a
respectable person. But for the “herd of independent minds” it just does
not matter. The bombing was because of their “high values”, and their “nobility”
and was to stop genocide. Say anything else, you know… tons of vilification and
abuse comes. But it’s not just on this issue, it’s on every issue. So try to
bring up the idea…take, say, the Vietnam War, a lot of time has passed, a huge
amount of scholarship, tons of documentation, blew up the country...
49.
DM: Let me just interrupt, I’m sorry, we won’t
have time to go into that...
50.
NC: OK.
51.
DM: I want to ask you about some of the present
developments that are being used again to fabricate a lot of these issues.
Slobodan Milosevic died last month. What is the significance of his death in
your view?
52.
NC: Milosevic was, he committed many crimes,
not a nice person, terrible person, but the charges against him would have
never have held up. He was originally indicted on the Kosovo charges. The indictment was issued right in the middle of bombing
which already nullifies it. It used British, it admittedly used British
and the U.S. intelligence right in the middle of bombing, can’t possibly take
it seriously. However if you look at the
indictment, it was for crimes committed after the bombing. There was one
exception: Racak. Let’s even grant that the claims are true, let’s put that
aside. So, there was one exception, no evidence that he was involved or you
know, it took place, but almost the entire indictment was for after the
bombing. How are those charges going to stand up unless you put Bill
Clinton and Tony Blair on the dock alongside? Then they realized that it was a
weak case. So they added the early Balkan wars, OK? Lot of horrible things
happened there. But the worst crime, the one that they were really going to
charge him for that genocide was Srebrenica. Now, there is a little
problem with that: namely there was an extensive, detailed inquiry into it by
the Dutch Government, which was the responsible government, there were Dutch
forces there, that’s a big, you know, hundreds of pages inquiry, and their
conclusion is that Milosevic did not know anything about that, and that when it
was discovered in Belgrade, they were horrified. Well, suppose that had entered
into the testimony?
53.
DM: Does this mean that you are a “Milosevic
sympathizer”?
54.
NC: No, he was terrible. In fact he should
have been thrown out, in fact he probably would
have been thrown out and in the early nineties if the Albanians had voted, it
was pretty close. He did all sorts of terrible things but it wasn’t a
totalitarian state, I mean, there were elections, there was the opposition, a
lot of rotten things, but there are rotten things everywhere and I certainly
wouldn’t want to have dinner with him or talk to him, and yes, he deserves to
be tried for crimes, but this trial was never going to hold up, if it was even
semi-honest. It was a farce; in fact they were lucky that he died.
55.
DM: In what sense?
56.
NC: Because they did not have to go through out
the whole trial. Now they can, you can build up an image about how he would
have been convicted as another Hitler.
57.
DM: Had he lived.
58.
NC: But now they don’t have to do it.
59.
DM: I just want to bring you back to the bombing
of the RTS. Some have argued that this particular act of NATO’s in 1999 set
precedants for targeting of media by the United States afterward - in the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq - that it set a precedant for legitimizing media houses
and labeling them as propaganda in order to bomb them in U.S. invasions. Do you
make any connection there?
60.
NC: Well, I mean, the
chronology is correct. But I don’t think they need excuses. The point is: you
bomb anybody you want to. Let’s take 1998, so it was before. Now in
1998, here’s another thing you’re not allowed to say in the States and the West
that leads to hysteria, but I’ll say it - in 1998 Clinton bombed the major
pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, OK? That was, this is
the plant that’s using the most of the pharmaceuticals and veterinary medicines
for poor African country that’s under embargo, can’t replace it. What’s that
going to do? Obviously they killed unknown numbers of people, in fact the U.S.
barred an investigation by the UN so we don’t know and of course you don’t want
to investigate your own crimes, but there were some evidence. So the German Ambassador, who is a fellow at the Harvard
University to Sudan wrote an article in Harvard International Review in
which he estimated the casualties in the tens of thousands of deaths. The research of the Head of the Near East Foundation, a
very respectable foundation, their regional director had field work in Somalia
and in Sudan, he did the study, he came out with the same conclusions, probably
tens of thousands of dead. Right after the bombing,
within weeks, Human Rights Watch issued a warning that it was going to be a
humanitarian catastrophe and gave examples of aid workers being pulled out from
areas where people were dying and so on. You can not mention this. Any mention of this
brings the same hysteria, as criticizing the bombing of the TV station. So it’s
unmentionable, it is a Western crime and therefore it was legitimate. [Noah
Baumbach & Kent Jones.] Let’s just suppose that Al Quaida blew
up half the pharmaceutical supplies in the U.S., or England or Israel or any
country in which people lived. Human beings, not ants, people. Fine. Can you
imagine the reaction, we’d probably have a nuclear war, but when we do it to a
poor African country - didn’t happen! Not discussed, in fact the only issue
that is discussed if there is discussion is whether the intelligence was
correct when it claimed that it was also producing chemical weapons. That is
the only question. Mention anything else, the usual hysteria, and tirades… This is a very disciplined, Western intellectual culture is
extremely disciplined. And rigid. You can not go beyond fixed bounds. It’s not,
you know, it’s not censored, it’s all voluntary but it’s true and it’s not,
incidentally, not free societies like this. In fact the third world
countries are different. So take, say, Turkey, half third world; I mean in
Turkey, the intellectuals, the leading intellectuals, now best known writers,
academics, journalists, artists I mean they not only protest atrocities about
the Kurdish massacre, they protest it constantly, but they were also constant
in carrying out civil disobedience against them. I also participated with them
sometimes. And they go publish banned writings which reported presented them to
the Prosecutor’s Office, demand they were prosecuted. It’s not a joke, you
know, facing… sometimes they are sent to prison, that’s no joke. There’s
nothing like that in the West. Inconceivable. When I am in Western
Europe I hear them telling me Turkey is not civilized enough to enter the
European Union. I burst out laughing! It’s the other way round.
61.
DM: Speaking of democratic movements, there was
a...
62.
[crew]: This is the last question.
63.
DM: OK, two more quick questions; one: you
mentioned the democratic movements in various countries. There was of course a
promising democratic movement in Serbia before and, of course, during the
bombing. And people like Wesley Clark had claimed that this bombing would be of
benefit to the anti-Milosevic forces, when it of course turned out to be a
disaster. Was this a sincere evaluation on behalf of NATO?
64.
NC: Well, I can’t look into their minds. When you commit a crime it is extremely easy to find a
justification for it. That’s true of personal life; it’s true of international
affairs. So yes, maybe they believed it. I
mean, I think there’s convincing evidence that the Japanese fascists believed
that they were doing good when they carried out things in the Second World War.
John Stewart Mill surely believed he
was being honorable and noble when he was calling for the conquest of India
right after some of the worst atrocities which I mentioned, you can easily
believe you are noble. I mean, to me it’s obvious that it was going to
harm the democratic movement, I heard about it and I couldn’t get much
information but it was obvious that it was going to happen. I mean it is happening right now in Iran. There is a
democratic movement in Iran, they are pleading with the United States not to
maintain a harsh embargo, certainly not to attack, it is harming them, and it
strengthens the most reactionary violent elements in the society, of course.
65.
DM: Let me ask you one final question about the
future. Negotiations over Kosovo’s final status are under way right now, the
United States is backing Agim Ceku, who was someone
involved in ethnic cleansing not only in...
66.
NC: Not someone. He was a war criminal himself.
What about the Krajina expulsion, which he was....
67.
DM: First of all, what do you see as an
appropriate, realistic solution for the final status of Kosovo and how does
that differ from what the United States is now promoting?
68.
NC: My feeling has been for a long time that the
only realistic solution is one that in fact was offered by the President of
Serbia I think back round 1993 [Chomsky is referring to the proposal of former
Serbian President of Yugoslavia, Dobrica Cosic], namely some kind of partition,
with the Serbian, by now very few Serbs left but the, what were the Serbian
areas being part of Serbia and the rest be what they called “independent” which
means it’ll join Albania. I just don’t see…I didn’t see any other feasible
solution ten years ago.
69.
DM: Shall we wrap up? Professor Chomsky, thank
you very much.
70.
(Room ambience, room tone, reaction shots ...)
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