Feature - Man on a mission; Christopher James finds out why a Canadian army veteran is now a leading campaigner for the truth about Kosovo

Feature - Man on a mission; Christopher James finds out why a Canadian army veteran is now a leading campaigner for the truth about Kosovo
Morning Star - June 30, 2005

By: Christopher James

Scott Taylor is a man on a mission. The Canadian army veteran-turned-writer and peace campaigner is fighting to expose how Kosovo's fabled "mass graves" containing victims of "Serbian genocide" are a manufactured myth as phoney as Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction.

As an eyewitness to the 1999 Kosovo war, Taylor's message is an uncompromising rebuttal of everyday Western misrepresentations of the conflict - a conflict which culminated in the annexation by NATO of Serbia's southern province six years ago last month.

"Was Kosovo a messy, inter-ethnic civil war? Absolutely. Was it a planned, organised genocide? No," Taylor tells speaking tour audiences with a calm, quiet authority acquired from time in the front line as soldier and war correspondent.

Taylor is editor and founder of Esprit de Corps, an independent journal for rank-and-file Canadian military acclaimed for its exposure of corruption within army top brass, its campaigning on issues such as Gulf war syndrome and its countering of official spin surrounding the "war on terror."

By his own admission Taylor launched the magazine in 1988 as a cheerleading pro-army publication, funded by defence contractors who he today derides as "the evil military-industrial complex."

His experiences reporting from the 1991 Gulf war, witnessing unspeakable carnage inflicted on defenceless Iraqi conscripts, was the turning point for both Taylor and for Esprit de Corps, which has since transformed, he says, into "the conscience of the Canadian Defence Department."

Reporting from war-torn Bosnia in 1992, Taylor's experiences alongside Canadian troops again contrasted with mainstream media spin, which he saw as obsessed with demonising the Serbian population of the disintegrating Yugoslav federation.

He returned to the Balkans in 1999 as one of the few Western journalists to report from within Kosovo during the 78-day aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia by NATO - which was then acting as a de facto airforce for the ethnic Albanian supremacists and separatists of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

This provided "an incredible vantage point to see what was taking place," says Taylor, whose eyewitness experience contrasted sharply with that of thousands of NATO-accredited journalists reporting from refugee camps in Macedonia and elsewhere, "getting second and third-hand stories, many of which later turned out to be fabricated."

It is worthwhile recalling the extreme wartime hysteria that gripped Britain and the West at the time. So complete was the demonisation of Serbia and its political leadership that few, even on the anti-war left, opposed the barbarism deployed by NATO on the Yugoslav people and the violation of their national sovereignty.

Daily press conferences saw NATO spin doctors announce spiralling death tolls that rapidly reached upwards of 100,000 murdered Albanians, guaranteeing worldwide banner headlines that screamed of genocide and holocaust revisited on Europe.

Countless other horror stories included the claim that a further 40,000 Albanians were detained in Pristina's sports stadium awaiting a grisly fate. All this proved to be false.

One Spanish forensic team sent into Kosovo after the conflict was told to expect to conduct 2,000 autopsies. After just 187 bodies were produced, it returned home early.

"All the bodies were buried in individual graves, oriented for the most part toward Mecca out of respect for the religious beliefs of the Albanian Kosovars and without sign of torture," reported the Spanish daily El Pais, one of the few, if not the only, papers to carry the story.

The parallels between Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" and Kosovo's "mass graves" are clear, says Taylor. Both were dreamed up by politicians to sell otherwise unpopular wars to their people, although the former claim was clearly met with greater scepticism.

"These are all becoming information wars now," says Taylor. "It has become such a game for them. Spin machines manipulate the media and the media, in turn, manipulates the population."

When Yugoslav troops withdrew from Kosovo to be replaced by NATO occupiers, Taylor watched the inevitable media circus "roll in" behind them on editorial orders to find mass graves and "the shattered remnants of the Serbian army," he says.

"But they couldn't find the mass graves because they didn't exist. There were bodies of course - there had been a civil war."

Despite the unprecedented pounding that Kosovo and Serbia as a whole took from NATO, the Yugoslav army escaped almost completely unscathed.

"Some $13 billion of weaponry had been dropped on Kosovo to destroy 13 tanks, two or three of which were museum pieces used as decoys," says Taylor.

The brunt of the assault was inflicted on the country's civilian population - hospitals, factories, bridges, the electricity grid, water supplies, Serb TV and other targets were reduced to rubble while the republic's environment suffered deadly contamination through the use of depleted uranium weapons.

According to the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the new world order's phoney court where former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic continues to face genocide and war crimes charges, the total body count from Kosovo stands at 2,788.

Contrast this with wartime claims of 100,000 murdered Albanian civilians and Taylor's message comes sharply into focus, particularly when one considers that the tribunal's death toll includes combatants from both sides, as well as victims of NATO bombing.

Following the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces, Albanian separatists immediately set about clearing the province of its minority populations.

Some 200,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma, Turks and ethnic Albanians loyal to Yugoslavia have fled Kosovo since 1999, all under the nose of 18,000 NATO "peacekeepers" - actually occupiers - many based at Camp Bondsteel, a gargantuan US base sprawling over 750 acres in the south-east of the province.

Presented as simple "revenge attacks," these were in fact the start of a final push to ethnically cleanse the province of non-Albanians - a process which began with anti-Serb pogroms following the 1980 death of Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito, whose leadership ability had hitherto helped hold the federation together since the end of World War II.

As far back as 1982, long before the development of a "Washington line" on Kosovo for obedient journalists to follow, the New York Times reported that (Kosovo) Albanian nationalists have a two-point platform ... first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania."

In 1987, the same paper quoted a Kosovo Albanian nationalist leader's demand for an "ethnic Albania that includes western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, part of southern Serbia, Kosovo and Albania itself. "

Last year's "Kosovo Kristallnacht," as it was dubbed by one UN official, where Albanian supremacists rampaged through the province leaving dozens dead, hundreds wounded and 35 ancient Christian Orthodox churches, some dating from the 13th century, razed to the ground, was merely the latest violent manifestation of this racist doctrine.

- Christopher James wishes to thank Filmmakers Against War for their assistance in producing this article. Scott Taylor is the subject of a Filmmakers Against War production due for release this year.