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.
I am glad to be with you.
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?
Actually, we have for the first time
a very authoritative comment on that
from the highest level of the 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 the 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.
Take a look at 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
in the West. You can’t talk about it,
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.
Given this clear documentary record,
I want to ask you about the elite intellectual
opinion,
what you call…
In the United States.
... 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?
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 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 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 the Iraq war,
a ton of debate about the 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 1980s. It’s
:
“The travail of the Russian soldiers.
Too many are getting 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 to help them
at the request of the legitimate government.
The terrorists are preventing us
from doing all the good things we wanted to
do,” etcetera.
I have read Japanese counter-insurgency documents
from the second world war,
from the 1930s. It was the same:
“We're trying 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 go back to British imperialism, it's the same.
I mean even people of the highest moral integrity
like John Stewart Mill were talking about
how 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 British rule and civilization and so on.
Now in the United States it’s the same.
Now take the bombing of Kosovo.
That was a critically important event
for American intellectuals
and the reason had to do with
what was going on during the 1990s.
And the 90s are for the West,
not just the U.S. France and England were
worse.
It's 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
the French press, the British press.
It 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.
Now, this particular humanitarian charade
was...
That’s pre Kosovo.
Right.
And it was specific in a sense because
it was based on the claim that it was preventing genocide.
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?
First of all let me just fix the timing.
The things you've been quoting are from
the late 90s.
Before Kosovo.
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 just the Western sources,
about 2,000 people were killed.
The killings were distributed.
A lot of them were coming, in fact,
according to the British government
(which was the most hawkish element of the
Alliance)…
up until January 1999,
the majority of the killings were by the KLA guerrillas
who were coming in as they said,
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 20th they indicate nothing.
March 20th they indicate an increase in KLA
attacks.
But, though it was ugly, by international
standards
it was almost invisible unfortunately,
and it was very distributed.
If the British are correct,
the majority [of attacks] was coming from
the KLA guerrillas.
And as it later turned out,
the KLA was also receiving financial and military
support.
They were being supported by CIA in those
months.
And to call that genocide
is really to insult the victims of the holocaust.
Western intellectuals were praising themselves
for their magnificent humanitarianism,
while much worse atrocities were going on
right across the border, in Turkey.
That’s inside NATO, not at the borders of
NATO.
They were saying, “How can we allow this at the borders of NATO?”
but how about inside NATO
where Turkey was carrying out…?
… 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 were they 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
in 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 guerrillas 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
with the US and Britain supporting them, much worse,
but 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 godsend,
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, if you look at the coverage...
for example, there was one famous incident
which just completely reshaped the Western opinion
and that was the photograph
of the thin man behind the barbed wire.
A fraudulent photograph.
You remember.
The thin man behind the barbed wire.
So that was Auschwitz and
“we can’t have Auschwitz again.”
The intellectuals went crazy
and the French were posturing on television
and doing the usual antics.
Well, 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.
He’s 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 barbed 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, there was one tiny newspaper in England,
probably three people,
called LM, which ran a critique of this,
and the British (who haven’t the slightest
concept
of freedom of speech), ran this total fraud...
a major corporation, ITN,
a big media corporation, had publicized these,
so the corporation sued the tiny newspaper
for libel.
Now the British libel laws are absolutely
atrocious.
The person accused has to prove that
what he’s reporting was not done with 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 an office,
who probably don’t have the pocket-money,
it’s obvious what is going to happen,
especially under these grotesque libel laws.
So yes, they were able to prove... the little
newspaper
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.
After they had 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,
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.
He couldn’t get it published.
Well, that’s when Kosovo came
along.
It was the same thing—
that you cannot tell the truth about it.
I’ve gone through a ton of reporting
on this, and
almost invariably they inverted the chronology.
There were atrocities,
but after the bombing.
The way it’s presented is:
the atrocities took place
and then we had to bomb to prevent genocide—
just inverted.
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
where The Guardian misquoted 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...
... the 1999 bombing.
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 its 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, are there any prospects
for there being any responsibility taken for
these crimes?
I’d say the crimes were reported
but they were cheered.
It’s not that they were unknown.
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 we have the right to bomb it.
That happens all the time.
It just happened last year, in November 2004.
One of the worst war crimes in Iraq
was the invasion of Fallujah.
That's one thing,
but there was worse.
The invasion of Fallujah was kind of similar
to Srebrenica,
if you look, but...
They invaded Fallujah.
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 behind their backs,
doctors thrown on the floor,
hands behind their backs.
There was a picture of it on the front page
of The New York Times.
They said it was wonderful.
The Geneva Convention forbids hospitals to be...
It was 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 with no mention of the Geneva Conventions,
and it was presented as a wonderful thing
because the Fallujah 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 wouldn't bomb it,
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 Yugoslavia.
They presented a brief,
saying they should look into NATO war crimes.
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 said 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 a case to the World Court...
which also rejected it.
The Court accepted it
and in fact deliberated for a couple of years.
It may still be [being deliberated],
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 a 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
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?
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...
Maybe they’ve finally reached that…
they finally did that...
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
any more than…
they will know that...
They sort of probably remember the bombing,
the capture of the General Hospital in Fallujah,
but was there any comment saying that was
a war crime?
What struck me was that you compared
the Srebrenica massacre with the Fallujah invasion.
Why is that?
Because there are similarities.
In the case of Srebrenica,
women and children were trucked out
and then came, the massacre.
In the case of Fallujah,
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 not 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.
Incidentally this Guardian affair –
part of it which was total fraud,
on the part of the editors,
not the reporter.
They blamed it on the reporter,
but it was the editors.
One of the things that they were infuriated
about
was that she asked me
about the thin man behind the barbed wire,
“Isn’t that a horrible atrocity?”
I said, “Well,
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 don't have censorship.
It’s a 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…
Unpublished.
It came out in his unpublished papers,
thirty years later.
In it what he said is, Animal Farm is a satire
of this totalitarian state,
but 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 cannot find anywhere in
the main stream
a suggestion that it is wrong to invade
another country,
that 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 ever read the Nuremberg Judgments,
but after the Nuremberg Judgments,
Justice Jackson, Chief of Council for the Prosecution, U.S. Justice,
made very, very eloquent statements about
how we must...
[He said] we are sentencing these people to death
for the crimes which they committed.
They are crimes which [are punishable] when anybody commits them,
including when we commit them.
We have to live up to that.
He said we are handing the defendants a
poisoned chalice,
and if we sip from this poisoned chalice,
we must be treated the same way.
One 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 Nuremberg.
Does the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia?
Yes.
And that’s not even questioned.
In fact, there was a so-called,
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 consequences of the bombing.
He did recognize that in a lecture, a Morgenthau Lecture
in New York a 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 Horseshoe,”
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 doesn't matter.
The bombing was because of their “high values,”
and their “nobility” and was to stop genocide.
If you say anything else,
a torrent 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.
[The US] blew up the country...
Let me just interrupt.
I’m sorry, we won’t have time to go into
that.
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?
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...
They admittedly used British and U.S. intelligence
right in the middle of bombing.
You 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, 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
in the dock alongside him?
Then they realized that it was a weak case,
so they added the early Balkan wars.
OK, a lot of horrible things happened there.
But the worst crime, the one
that they were really going to charge him
for 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, 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.
Does this mean that you are a “Milosevic
sympathizer”?
No, he was terrible.
In fact he should have been thrown out.
In fact, he probably would have been thrown out
in the early 90s,
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 an 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.
In what sense?
Because they didn't have to go through with
the trial.
Now they can build up an image
about how he would have been convicted as another Hitler,
had he lived.
But now they don’t have to do it.
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 precedents for targeting of media
by the United States afterward–
notably in Afghanistan and Iraq–
that it set a precedent for legitimizing media houses
and labeling them as propaganda
in order to bomb them in U.S. invasions.
Do you make any connection there?
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 United States or the West.
It leads to hysteria, but I’ll say it.
In 1998, Clinton bombed the major pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, OK?
That was the plant that’s using most of
the pharmaceuticals
and veterinary medicines for a poor African
country
that’s under embargo.
They can’t replace them.
What’s that going to do?
Obviously, it's going to kill 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 was some evidence.
So the German Ambassador,
who is a fellow at 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 Head of the Near East Foundation,
a very respectable foundation,
their regional director had done field work in Sudan,
did a 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 there was going to be a humanitarian catastrophe
and gave examples of aid workers
being pulled out from areas where people
were dying at a vast rate and so on.
You cannot 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.
Let’s just suppose that Al Qaeda 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,
it didn’t happen!
Not discussed.
In fact, the only issue that is discussed.
There is discussion.
It is whether the intelligence was correct
when it claimed that it was also producing
chemical weapons.
That is the only question.
[If you] mention anything else, the usual
hysteria, and tirades.
This is a very disciplined...
Western intellectual culture is extremely
disciplined,
and rigid.
You cannot go beyond fixed bounds.
It’s not, it’s not censored.
It’s all voluntary, but it’s true, and, incidentally,
not every society is 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, best-known writers,
academics, journalists, artists.
I mean they not only protest atrocities like the Kurdish massacres, but
they protest them constantly,
but they are also constantly carrying out
civil disobedience against them.
I’ve also participated with them sometimes.
And they will publish banned writings
which they report and present to the Prosecutor’s Office,
demanding to be prosecuted.
That’s not a joke.
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 and
I hear them telling me Turkey isn't civilized enough
to enter the European Union,
I burst out laughing!
It’s the other way around.
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?
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 their 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
he didn’t mention.
You can easily believe you are noble.
I mean, to me it’s obvious
that it was going to harm the democratic movement.
I wrote 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.
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...
He was a war criminal himself.
What about the Krajina expulsion, which he
was...
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?
My feeling has been for a long time
that the only realistic solution
is one which in fact was offered by the president
of Serbia,
I think, back round 1993,
namely some kind of partition,
with the Serbian--
by now very there are very few Serbs left--
but with what were the Serbian areas
being part of Serbia,
and the rest being what they call “independent,”
which means they’ll join Albania.
I just don’t see...
I didn’t see any other feasible solution
ten years ago.
I still don't see any other.
Shall we wrap up?
Professor Chomsky, thank you very much.
