Majority of Americans oppose troops in Bosnia

by Tim Wheeler

This article was reprinted from the December 2, 1995 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

Despite a poll that the majority of the people do not think U.S. interests are at stake in Bosnia, President Clinton pushed ahead with his plan to deploy 20,000 U.S. troops in the war-torn region at a cost to taxpayers of $2 billion.

In his televised speech Monday night, President Clinton pleaded that vital U.S. interests and the cause of peace were at stake. USA Today, CNN and Gallup conducted a poll of 632 adults immediately after the speech. When asked "Does sending troops protect U.S. interests?" 52 percent answered "No." Peace activists warned that NATO intervention will escalate the war danger, not contribute to peace.

"A NATO force is not a peacekeeping force. It is an intervention force," said Edith Villastrigo, Washington representative of Women Strike for Peace. "This is going to create more killing, more trouble. We should go back to the United Nations and demand more negotiations until an agreement is reached that satisfies all the ethnic groups there."

The United States, she charged, tilted heavily toward the Bosnian Muslims and the Croats. That tilt is reflected in the agreement reached during negotiations at Wright- Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. "The U.S. says they are going to supply weapons and training to the Bosnian Muslim army which is hardly the role of an impartial peacemaker," she said. "We should oppose putting U.S. troops there." Gervasi said the Serbs will never forget the role of the Ustashe Nazi puppet regime in Croatia during World War II which exterminated 700,000 Serbs. "The U.S. and their clients want to crush the Serbs. It will be a dangerous situation. The U.S. has committed itself to one side in a civil war."

Jim West, chair of the International Affairs Department of the Communist Party USA, told the World, "The Balkans have been a cockpit of imperialist rivalries since before World War I. It is a doorway to the Middle East and its oil. Now we're going to have 60,000 NATO troops in this cockpit . Our position is: withdraw all troops and their weapons from foreign soil -- U.S. troops included."

In brazen violation of a UN arms embargo, a secretive outfit called Military Professional Resources based in Alexandria, Va., sent former high-ranking U.S. military officers to Zagreb to train the Croatian army while the Clinton administration winked. "Croatia became our de facto strategic ally," a State Department official told the New York Times. "Arms flowed into Croatia despite the embargo ... Now we're starting to wonder: What have we unleashed in Croatia and where is it going?"

NATO needed a provocation as a pretext for U.S. intervention. It came with the August 28 bombing of a Sarajevo market in which 37 people were killed. Within a day, UN Protection Force commander, Gen. Rupert Smith, concluded that the Serbs fired the lethal mortar round. Clinton ordered the NATO bombing raids to begin, setting the stage for an all-out offensive against the Serbs.

But David Binder, a well-informed New York Times correspondent, writing in The Nation, Oct. 2, exposed this as a crude frame up of the Serbs. He quotes four specialists stationed in Sarajevo -- two American officers, a Canadian, and a Russian. They told Binder they believe "that the mortar round was fired not by the Serbs but by Bosnian government forces." Similar suspicions were raised following the Feb. 5, 1994 mortar explosion that killed 68 Sarajevans in the adjacent Markale marketplace. The Serbs were blamed for this massacre, too.

Russian Col. Andrei Demurenko, an artillery officer, said the nearest Serb position to the marketplace was more than a mile away. The chances of striking the marketplace, less than thirty feet wide, from that distance is "one in a million." Noting that no UN artillery observers heard the distinctive high-pitched whistle of an incoming mortar round, Demurenko believed the explosion came from some other weapon. Demurenko went on Sarajevo TV and declared the UN report a "falsification."

The Canadian specialist called the UN report "highly suspect" citing "anomalies" in the recovered mortar fuse which "had not come from a mortar tube at all." He and fellow Canadian officers in Bosnia were "convinced that the Muslim government dropped both the Feb. 5, 1994 and the Aug. 28, 1995 mortar shells on the Sarajevo markets."

"Why would the Bosnian government kill its own people?" Binder asks. "Clearly the (NATO) air strikes had already been planned. Only a pretext was needed. As one U.S. officer put it, 'We have become the Muslim Air Force.'"