Recently Amnesty International released a report accusing NATO of committing war crimes during its war in Kosovo. The alleged crimes included the attack by NATO warplanes on a Serbian TV station that killed 16 civilians. According to Amnesty International, that is a war crime, because NATO intentionally targeted a civilian facility.
Not so, according to NATO spokesman Jamie Shea. According to Shea, civilians at say a BBC or CNN TV station are really civilians, while civilians at this TV station weren’t really civilians after all. Shea told ITN (Nato hits back at Amnesty war crimes allegation):
Asked about the bombing of a Serb TV station in which
several civilians were killed, Mr Shea said: “The
television station was attacked because it was not the BBC
or CNN, it was being used to push out propaganda and to
create a climate of hatred in which the persecution of
Albanians could be accepted as normal by the greater
majority of the Serb population.”No civilian deaths occurred because of any deliberate
targeting by Nato forces, and they did not therefore
constitute war crimes, he went on to say. Nato pilots
should not feel any sense of guilt, he said.
So, in other words, if NATO doesn’t like what they’re saying, it is perfectly legal for it to bomb civilians at any time — except, remember, they’re really not civilians, since NATO didn’t deliberately target civilians according to Shea. Perhaps NATO pilots spent a few seconds conscripting the hapless TV station employees into the Serbian army prior to firing their missiles to make it all legal.
Even NATO’s after-the-fact justification of its intervention in Serbia make absolutely no sense, which is par for the course