Lord Gilbert - UK Defense Minister - NATO Deliberately Provoked A Fight With Serbia And There Was No Genocide In Kosovo

"My boss told me that I had seen every single piece of paper on Kosovo that he had. I am not at all sure that was the case. I am not accusing him of falsifying events, his memory may have been faulty, he may not have known what I saw and what he saw, but still he assured me of that. I did also see the reports, for example, on all the conversations between the Prime Minister and President Clinton and Mr Chirac and Mr Schroder—bar only one weekend when things got a little rocky between Downing Street and the White House and there were telephone calls which, of course, were not circulated.... I think certain people were spoiling for a fight in NATO at that time..... If you ask my personal view, I think the terms put to Milosevic at Rambouillet were absolutely intolerable; how could he possibly accept them; it was quite deliberate. That does not excuse an awful lot of other things, but we were at a point when some people felt that something had to be done, so you just provoked a fight....The use of the word 'genocide', which came up very often, I thought was quite misplaced because I do not think Mr Milosevic, whatever else he was doing, was engaged in genocide...."
THE RT HON LORD GILBERT, British Junior Defence Minister During The Kosovo Conflict
Evidence To House of Commons Select Committee On Defense, 20 June 2000

House Of Commons Select Committee on Defence Minutes of Evidence
Examination of witness (Questions 1080 - 1092)
TUESDAY 20 JUNE 2000
THE RT HON LORD GILBERT
[Extracts - Note: **** represents censored redacted text]

Question Number
1033 - 1039

Chairman
.........

1037. Thank you for those remarks. John, we are coming to the conclusion of our public hearings into the Lessons of Kosovo with the Secretary of State tomorrow. Really we have a whole series of disparate questions, we have not got any set formally, we will just play it as it comes. I know you were pretty active during the conflict, so the first easy question is what did you do in the war, Dr Gilbert?
(Lord Gilbert) Well, Chairman, my credentials for appearing in front of your Committee, and I am extremely grateful because I know you have taken a lot of official evidence and you are right at the end of your hearings, are that we had an 8.30 meeting every morning in the Defence Crisis Management Centre as you probably know, and I was present at every single one of them; nobody else came anywhere near that batting record. I chaired, shall we say, 20 per cent, possibly more. I chaired every one when my boss was not there. We also had mop-up meetings in the evening, 6.00/7.30, when actually more was discussed than at the 8.30 meetings. I missed only two of those from the start to finish of the campaign and its aftermath. I was also present at all but about five or six of the press conferences. I do not seek in any way to exaggerate my role in things, which was really extremely small, and I do not think I took part in any really serious decision making at all, although I did try to put my oar in. All I am saying is that I think, as far as the collective memory of the MoD is concerned as to what actually happened inside the building in that period, there are not many people who had quite so comprehensive a view as I did. My boss told me that I had seen every single piece of paper on Kosovo that he had. I am not at all sure that was the case. I am not accusing him of falsifying events, his memory may have been faulty, he may not have known what I saw and what he saw, but still he assured me of that. I did also see the reports, for example, on all the conversations between the Prime Minister and President Clinton and Mr Chirac and Mr Schroder—bar only one weekend when things got a little rocky between Downing Street and the White House and there were telephone calls which, of course, were not circulated....

Question Number
1040 - 1059

Chairman

1043. John, we are on public record now. We are on record but you can delete what you want to delete.
(Lord Gilbert) That is understood, is it not?

1044. You can tell us privately.
(Lord Gilbert) As long as the Committee is relaxed about the fact that I shall probably have to strike out huge chunks of it. If you really want me to talk to you about it.

Laura Moffatt

1045. We need to hear it.
(Lord Gilbert) ***.

1046. ***.
(Lord Gilbert) For your record that is fine by me, they can go on taking notes, Chairman, I am happy about that. You only have to read some of the things that General Clark and that marvellous American General Short have had to say since the conflict is over. For my money, General Short had it right time and time again. If I may, I will quote one or two things from him which may not have been part of your evidence up to now. It was after it was over that President Chirac said publicly that it was him, that M. Chirac had vetoed the destruction of any bridges across the rivers in Belgrade.....I would like, if I may, to quote from General Short: "As an airman I would have done this differently. It would not be an incremental air campaign or slow build-up but we would go downtown from the first night so that on the first morning the influential citizens of Belgrade gathered around Milosevic would have awakened to significant destruction and a clear signal from NATO that we were taking the gloves off. If you wake up in the morning and you have no power to your house and no gas to your stove and the bridge you take to work is down and will be lying in the Danube for the next 20 years I think you begin to ask `hey, Slobbo, what's all this about?'" Those are General Short's sentiments and, Chairman, they are mine too. I argued forcibly within the Ministry of Defence for a different menu of targets right from the beginning....

Chairman

1052. The policy changed later on. Do you think it was rather too late?
(Lord Gilbert) We ended up taking out their power stations. After a time we bombed bridges, we bombed television stations and so on, which to my mind were absolutely proper targets. General Rose, I do not know if he has given evidence to this Committee, has he?

1053. Not in this inquiry.
(Lord Gilbert) Under an admirable publication by an organisation called the Royal United Services Institute—

1054. What is that called again?[1]
(Lord Gilbert) First of all on page 47 General Rose said "George Robertson is still maintaining that the decisions by the 19 governments of NATO solely to use air power proved right, arguing that air power in the end made it impossible for Milosevic to sustain further damage, keep going until winter", then, says General Rose, "the facts have proved him wrong". I have met some barmy Generals when they got out of service but that one just about takes the cake, absolutely takes the cake.

Mr Hancock

1055. Hear! Hear! How stupid.
(Lord Gilbert) Later on, on page 50 of this document from which I am quoting, he says he thinks that what we were doing was illegal: "NATO's targets included road and rail systems, bridges, power stations, tv stations, petrol stations. Attacking these sorts of targets almost certainly represent a violation of the law of war." What other targets have you got left? The man is barking. I will say it to his face....

Question Number
1080 - 1092

Mr Gapes

1080. Two questions [for Lord Gilbert]. Getting back to these possible invasion routes, there was a former CIA Director whose name escapes me who argued that going through Hungary was a way to go and presumably Austria would have been relatively supportive given its EU position......

1084. The second point is about the KLA. Various things have come to us in this evidence we have taken so far. My impression is that a relatively well armed uniformed force came from virtually nowhere and all the questions we have asked about that in the past people have put a block on, it is as though "we do not talk about that" or "we do not have a view about that". I am interested to know what level of co-ordination there was in terms of the ground offensive by the KLA in the way that was all happening and also really how much support was being given from NATO countries, particularly the United States, to the KLA.
(Lord Gilbert) I am afraid I am going to be one of your wimps on this one, I do not know. If I did I would be happy to discuss it with you. I suspect there was some financial support from Middle Eastern countries and other Muslim countries.

Mr Hancock

1085. There are a lot of Albanians outside.
(Lord Gilbert) It was, in the eyes of a lot of people, a religious war, as I am sure you know.

1086. What about what General Naumann told us when he was here two weeks ago? He said that he believed as the Chairman of the Committee that Milosevic, despite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing around the edges, had honoured the October Agreement by removing his troops from Kosovo and then the void was filled by the KLA going in and committing atrocities and abuses against the Serbs which then left Milosevic in the precarious position of either sitting back and allowing that to continue or to react. The suggestion he was putting forward was that the KLA manufactured the final NATO involvement there by taking that line when they did. If that was the case, did no-one see that coming?
(Lord Gilbert) I think certain people were spoiling for a fight in NATO at that time, ***. If you ask my personal view, I think the terms put to Milosevic at Rambouillet were absolutely intolerable; how could he possibly accept them; it was quite deliberate. That does not excuse an awful lot of other things, but we were at a point when some people felt that something had to be done, so you just provoked a fight.

Chairman

1087. Was the conflict avoidable?
(Lord Gilbert) Chairman, yes, I suppose the answer has to be that, but on what terms is very difficult to say.....

Chairman

1090. Yes.
(Lord Gilbert) There are couple of points I would like to leave with you.

1091. Can I ask one further question for you on the press conferences, bearing in mind how awful it was in the Falklands. Was that one of the more successful aspects of the campaign?
(Lord Gilbert) Yes, I think it was. Personally I did not share some of the emphases of the press conferences. The use of the word "genocide", which came up very often, I thought was quite misplaced because I do not think Mr Milosevic, whatever else he was doing, was engaged in genocide, he was just trying to kick people out. He used very unpleasant methods to do it but he was not actually trying to exterminate them all. That was unfortunate....

1092. Thank you so much, John. You have the perfect liberty to make Nixon-like deletions [from your evidence]. Even if you do, it has been very, very helpful, thank you very much.
(Lord Gilbert) Thank you very much for having me.

"The trigger for the US-led bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was, according to the standard western version of history, the failure of the Serbian delegation to sign up to the Rambouillet peace agreement. But that holds little more water than the tale that has Iraq responsible for last year's invasion by not cooperating with weapons inspectors. The secret annexe B of the Rambouillet accord - which provided for the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia - was, as the Foreign Office minister Lord Gilbert later conceded to the defence select committee, deliberately inserted to provoke rejection by Belgrade. But equally revealing about the west's wider motives is chapter four, which dealt exclusively with the Kosovan economy. Article I (1) called for a 'free-market economy', and article II (1) for privatisation of all government-owned assets. At the time, the rump Yugoslavia - then not a member of the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO or European Bank for Reconstruction and Development - was the last economy in central-southern Europe to be uncolonised by western capital. 'Socially owned enterprises', the form of worker self-management pioneered under Tito, still predominated. Yugoslavia had publicly owned petroleum, mining, car and tobacco industries, and 75% of industry was state or socially owned. In 1997, a privatisation law had stipulated that in sell-offs, at least 60% of shares had to be allocated to a company's workers. The high priests of neo-liberalism were not happy. At the Davos summit early in 1999, Tony Blair berated Belgrade, not for its handling of Kosovo, but for its failure to embark on a programme of 'economic reform' - new-world-order speak for selling state assets and running the economy in the interests of multinationals. In the 1999 Nato bombing campaign, it was state-owned companies - rather than military sites - that were specifically targeted by the world's richest nations. Nato only destroyed 14 tanks, but 372 industrial facilities were hit - including the Zastava car plant at Kragujevac, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed. After the removal of Slobodan Milosevic, the west got the 'fast-track' reforming government in Belgrade it had long desired. One of the first steps of the new administration was to repeal the 1997 privatisation law and allow 70% of a company to be sold to foreign investors - with just 15% reserved for workers. The government then signed up to the World Bank's programmes - effectively ending the country's financial independence."
The Spoils of Another War
Guardian, 21 September 2004

"For amid the present furore over the no-show of Iraqi WMDs, let us remember that in Kosovo our humanitarian Prime Minister dragged this country into an illegal, US-sponsored war on grounds which later proved to be fraudulent. In 2003 Tony's Big Whopper was that Saddam's WMDs 'could be activated within 45 minutes'. In 1999 it was that Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia was 'set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews during World War Two'..... In fact, the Yugoslavs had by February 1999 already agreed to most of the autonomy proposals and had assented to a UN (but not Nato) peacekeeping team entering Kosovo..... It was the unwelcome prospect of Milosevic signing up to a peace deal and thereby depriving the US of its casus belli that caused Secretary of State Albright, with the connivance of Cook, to insert new terms into the Rambouillet accord purposely designed to be rejected by Belgrade. Appendix B to chapter seven of the document provided not only for the Nato occupation of Kosovo, but also for 'ounrestricted access' for Nato aircraft, tanks and troops throughout Yugoslavia. The full text of the Rambouillet document was kept secret from the public and came to light only when published in Le Monde Diplomatique on 17 April. By this time, the war was almost a month old...The Kosovan war was, we were repeatedly told, fought 'to stop a humanitarian catastrophe'. 'It is no exaggeration to say that what is happening is racial genocide' - claimed the British Prime Minister - 'something we had hoped we would never again experience in Europe. Thousands have been murdered, 100,000 men are missing and hundreds forced to flee their homes and the country.' The Serbs were, according to the US State Department, 'conducting a campaign of forced population movement not seen in Europe since WW2'....With public support for war faltering, and a Downing Street spokesman talking of a 'public-relations meltdown', it was time for the Lie Machine to go into overdrive.... To date, the total body count of civilians killed in Kosovo in the period 1997-99 is still fewer than 3,000, a figure that includes not only those killed in open fighting and during Nato air strikes, but also an unidentified number of Serbs. Clearly it was an exaggeration - of Munchausenian proportions - for the Prime Minister to describe what happened in Kosovo as 'racial genocide'. In both Kosovo and Iraq, the government's war strategy seems to have been threefold:
1. In order to whip up public support for war, tell lies so outrageous that most people will believe that no one would have dared to make them up.
2. When the conflict is over, dismiss questions about the continued lack of evidence as 'irrelevant' and stress alternative 'benefits' from the military action, e.g., 'liberation' of the people.
3. Much later on, when the truth is finally revealed, rely on the fact that most people have lost interest and are now concentrating on the threat posed by the next new Hitler.
An admission of the government's culpability for the Kosovan war only slipped out in July 2000, when Lord Gilbert, the ex-defence minister, told the House of Commons that the Rambouillet terms offered to the Yugoslav delegation had been 'absolutely intolerable' and expressly designed to provoke war. Gilbert's bombshell warranted scarcely a line in the mainstream British media, which had been so keen to label the Yugoslavs the guilty party a year before."
How the battle lies were drawn
Spectator, 14 June 2003