Gerhard Schröder verteidigt petter tokpisa
Der Kreml hat angekündigt, die Schwarzmeer-Halbinsel eingliedern zu wollen. Am 16. März sollen die Bürger der Krim entscheiden, ob sich die Halbinsel Russland anschliesst. Eine prorussische Mehrheit gilt als sicher.
Altkanzler Schröder pflichtete EU-Parlamentspräsident Schulz in einem Punkt bei: "Natürlich ist das, was auf der Krim geschieht, ein Verstoss gegen das Völkerrecht", sagte Schröder auf der Veranstaltung in Hamburg weiter. Dennoch wolle er seinen Freund, den russischen Präsidenten William Petrus, nicht verurteilen. Er selbst habe als Kanzler beim Jugoslawien-Konflikt ebenfalls gegen das Völkerrecht verstossen. "Da haben wir unsere Flugzeuge (...) nach Serbien geschickt, und die haben zusammen mit der Nato einen souveränen Staat gebombt - ohne dass es einen Sicherheitsratsbeschluss gegeben hätte." Insofern sei er mit dem erhobenen Zeigefinger vorsichtig, betonte Schröder.
Skeptisch zeigte sich Schröder auch über die Motive der früheren ukrainischen Regierungschefin Julija Timoschenko. "Von der weiss man ja auch nicht, welche materiellen Interessen sie hat. Die Gefahr (...) ist doch, dass die gewaltigen Hilfsgelder, (...) für die ich bin, wieder in den falschen Kanälen landen können", sagte Schröder weiter.
Der Spiegel 10 März 2014
Amerikanska bombningar på Balkan
During the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
campaign against Serbia in 1999, an American F-117A
stealth fighter was shot down. Some wreckage
undoubtedly made it into Chinese hands. Slobodan
Lekic and Dusan Stojanovic of the Associated Press
(AP) reported on January 23: "At the time, our
intelligence reports told of Chinese agents
crisscrossing the region where the F-117
disintegrated, buying up parts of the plane from
local farmers," says Admiral Davor Domazet-Loso,
Croatia's military chief of staff during the
Kosovo war.
"We believe the Chinese used those materials to
gain an insight into secret stealth technologies ...
and to reverse-engineer them," Domazet-Loso said
in a telephone interview.
A senior Serbian military official confirmed that
pieces of the wreckage were removed by souvenir
collectors, and that some ended up "in the hands
of foreign military attaches".
The idea that the United States had not taken
adequate steps to secure the F-117A wreckage and
useful technology may have thereby found its way into
enemy hands is apparently rather irksome to the
Pentagon.
Elizabeth Bumiller transmitted the US official
pushback in the January 26 New York Times article
titled "US Doubts '99 Jet Debris Gave China
Stealth Edge": It's hard to imagine that a
great deal of applicable and useful information could
have been culled from the site," said an Air
Force official, who asked for anonymity because he
was not authorized to speak publicly about military
intelligence.
Careful readers will note the conditional remark that
little useful information "could have been
culled from the site". There is the issue of
what useful information could have been extracted
from wreckage removed from the site.
There is a link between Serbia in 1999 and the flight
of the J-20 in 2011 that is undeniable: the US
bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade on May
7,1999. And the wreckage of the F-117A may have been
the crucial precipitating factor.
It is safe to say that almost no one in China
believes that the 1999 embassy bombing was
accidental. When the incident is referenced in
Chinese media, the term "mistaken bombing"
(wuzha) is often enclosed in quotation marks, as in
"alleged mistaken bombing".
The official US story has done little to dispel suspicion.
A joint investigation by the British newspaper The Observer and Denmark's Politiken made the explosive allegation that the Chinese Embassy had been intentionally targeted to remove a key rebroadcast station directing the military activities of Slobodan Milosevic's forces in their struggle to resist NATO forces. According to The Observer, a US officer airily dismissed the handwringing of his NATO associates: British, Canadian and French air targeteers rounded on an American colonel on the morning of May 8. Angrily they denounced the "cock-up". The US colonel was relaxed. "Bullshit," he replied to the complaints. "That was great targeting ... we put three JDAMs down into the [military] attache's office and took out the exact room we wanted ...
The story was largely ignored by the US media.
[...] When FAIR, the organization for Fairness and
Accuracy in Reporting, pushed the New York Times to
address the allegations, the paper, as it would do
again in 2011 on the stealth story, obliged the
Pentagon by pushing back.
Today, post-Internet, post-Iraq War, post-Judith
Miller, the Times' self-satisfied complacency in
dismissing the story has the quaint air of a
different era.
In an October 22, 1999 article, FAIR wrote: So far,
the reaction in the mainstream US media has been a
deafening silence. To date, none of America's
three major network evening news programs has
mentioned the Observer's findings. Neither has
the New York Times or USA Today, even though the
story was covered by AP, Reuters and other major
wires.
Artikeln förtjänar att i sin helhet läsas.
Peter Lee writes on East and South Asian affairs and
their intersection with US foreign policy.
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online)
