Misión Verdad
Editor’s note: Since the early months of last year, this platform has been analysing the serious consequences of military interventions for supposedly humanitarian purposes. Now that the Venezuelan opposition, articulated under the absolute tutelage of Washington, is drawing a new “D-Day” (February 23) to introduce “humanitarian aid,” it is convenient to refresh the memory and look at recent historical examples of the social tragedies that this method of regime change has left behind. Above all, however, and hence the validity and importance of republishing this research, it is necessary to insist on the people and agendas that have promoted, for some time now, that a credible threat of military intervention hangs over Venezuela. Without further ado, let us remember.
The 21st century was inaugurated by a new mechanism of intervention and war against sovereign nations promoted by the official high command of the Pentagon and its European “partners” in NATO. This is “humanitarian intervention”, a geopolitical tool used in some regions of the world within the framework of the strategy conceptualized by military intelligence advisors such as Thomas Barnett and supported by the US bureaucracy under the hand of retired Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski.
The 21st century was inaugurated by a new mechanism of intervention and war against sovereign nations promoted by the official high command of the Pentagon and its European “partners” in NATO. This is “humanitarian intervention”, a geopolitical tool used in some regions of the world within the framework of the strategy conceptualized by military intelligence advisors such as Thomas Barnett and supported by the US bureaucracy under the hand of retired Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski.
The aforementioned Pentagon plan for the planet is based on the binary division between North (“the Functioning Core”) and South (“Non-Integrating Gap”). In the map below, taken from a presentation made by Barnett in 2003, we can see that in the upper part are the countries of the so-called “First World”, where large private capital and business are concentrated and political stability is intended to be reserved; in the lower part, in red, the “Third World” is drawn, a region that would be destined, according to the US military, to be “Balkanized”, in other words, to be dismembered territories, absorbed in chaos, from where these large central capitals of the North capture wealth for their own opulence.
The very term “Balkanisation” was coined after the first experience of “humanitarian intervention” in the world, with the exploitation of human rights and international law in favour of NATO’s strategic interests, applied to the former Yugoslavia. Let us review this and four other cases of this type of war (and its variants) in order to draw attention to the current Venezuelan situation within the framework of this US military plan and Antonio Ledezma’s proposal to request an intervention in this manner.
Yugoslavia
In 1999, NATO bombed Belgrade, one of Europe’s oldest cities, as part of the ( manufactured ) armed conflict between the Albanian separatists of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and the military and police forces of Yugoslavia, then made up of Serbia and Montenegro.
According to NATO leaders, the Yugoslav government had created a “humanitarian catastrophe” on the pretext of an alleged genocide (ethnic cleansing) of the Kosovars. The measure that the gringo-European organisation would take was not sanctioned by the UN Security Council, a matter that we know did not matter to them.
Air strikes were carried out from March to June 10, 1999. According to estimates published by Sputnik World, some 2,500 people died under the bombs and more than 10,000 were injured. The economic damage was estimated at between 30 and 100 billion dollars. The partition of Yugoslavia into “republics”, with the interlocking of an immense U.S. military base in the heart of Kosovo, was known as “Balkanization”, because it broadened the legal-political panorama in the map of the Balkans.
Today, Kosovo is the product of this “humanitarian intervention”, a logistical centre of drug trafficking and the arms market in Europe, and functions as a “factory of Albanian-Kosovar terrorists” fighting in the ranks of the Daesh in the Middle East and part of the Balkans towards Asian territory. Quite a paradigm.
Iraq
The most momentous fake news in recent history, Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” was used against Iraq for its invasion. The government of George W. Bush used false evidence to involve numerous countries in supporting the military operation that later occupied Iraqi territory, as allegedly Saddam’s government would have used such weapons against the Kurdish population.
For years, the US and its “allies” maintained an economic and financial embargo on Iraq that manufactured the unstable conditions of food and medical supplies, which served as a justification for “humanitarian intervention” for the West. This together with the “weapons of mass destruction” were the media carrot to the military stick.
The operation was sold based on absolutely nothing, under the pretext of the “freedom” of the Iraqi people, because after the arrival of the American and British troops, they found no evidence of the aforementioned weaponry.
Between March 30 and May 1, 2003, the armies of the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Australia and Poland invaded and took control of the Iraqi government. On the US side alone, some 5,500 soldiers and mercenaries from private security companies died in combat. Of the Iraqis, 1,500,000 died, depending on the source, including 120,000 civilians.
It should be noted that from the ethnic wars manufactured in Iraq and by the intervention conducted by U.S. military, the well-known Islamic State was born, which in 2014 took the city of Mosul.
Libya
Western media viralized montages and false news about the alleged massacre perpetrated by the government of Muammar Qaddafi against the Libyan population. Under the guise of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the U.S. took the lead with NATO to invade and bomb Libya, thus permitting access to mercenary-terrorist groups to take over the main regions of the African country.
Libya was labelled a “humanitarian crisis” with the intention of deepening the intervention dossier, despite the fact that the country lived in one of its most prosperous times under the aegis of Qaddafi’s Arab socialism.
The colour revolution in Libya began with “peaceful” protests that ended in assassinations with the use of conventional weapons by demonstrators against Libyan security forces. Civilian deaths were attributed to Qaddafi and his government, while the Pentagon was drafting the adoption of Resolutions 1970 and 1973 before the UN Security Council, which authorized a no-fly zone on Libyan territory. The consequences are evident today, when the once most prolific country in Africa is now a cauldron of chaos.
Figures provided by Telesur illustrate more than 20,000 people killed by the “humanitarian intervention”, in addition to some 350,000 refugees due to the crisis caused by the war.
Between extreme poverty and civil war, which began in the early 1990s, Somalia has experienced one of the worst famines in human history. According to the Red Cross, it has killed 1.5 million people. The reports of the IMF and the World Bank on economic and monetary policy on the Somali government of the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, an ally of US oil companies, have channelled such an unfortunate fate. Local gangs in conflict contributed to the smuggling of food for weapons with Western contractors.
In 1993, the Pentagon used the “humanitarian intervention” tool on Somalia with 30,000 Marines in an operation called “Restore Hope”. Conoco Somalia Ltd., a gringo oil company, was the only major transnational that maintained an active office in the state capital Mogadishu before and during the invasion. The company ceded its infrastructure and facilities in Mogadishu to be used as an embassy and headquarters for the special convoy of U.S. troops.
Reports indicate that hunger and the health crisis in the African country multiplied 10 times more than at the beginning of the war. “Humanitarian aid” was merely a camouflage for the militarization of general resources and the beginning of the ” Balkanization” project in the Horn of Africa, where USAID has the most ongoing business, a region forgotten by the world.
Haiti
The abuse of American invasions and occupations of Haiti in the history of the last century has taught the U.S. that it should devise a new pretext to re-militarize the Caribbean island. In 2010 there was one which, in addition to the tragedy of 222,570 people killed by the earthquake, and which left 1.5 million people destitute and with material losses estimated at 7.9 billion dollars, was also lucrative.
The new Haitian “humanitarian invasion” of the United States and the UN took control of the island and installed the MINUSTAH mission with more than 7,000 soldiers and policemen. Hundreds of denunciations of criminal violations (sexual and use of force) by foreign security forces (Blue Helmets, U.S. Army) on the Haitian population and in addition, the UN received a legal complaint from the Haitians themselves who suffered from the cholera epidemic caused by the multilateral organization. The disease killed more than 8,300 people and sickened more than 650,000 since October 2010, almost 7% of the population. The UN had no response.
But the recolonization of Haiti came with a multimillion-dollar scam and a selective assassination: in July 2017, Klaus Eberwein, a former Haitian state official, was found dead. Eberwein tried to denounce the Clinton Foundation before his country’s senate for fraud and corruption within the framework of “humanitarian aid” from the West to the island. Eberwein said 0.6 percent of international donations to the Clinton Foundation, expressly intended to help Haitians directly and rebuild vital infrastructure after the 2010 earthquake, ended up in the hands of Haitian organizations. Another 9.6% ended up in the hands of the Haitian government. The remaining 89.8%, or $5.4 billion, was channelled to non-Haitian organisations, with the entity headed by the Clinton couple being the principal culprit.
It was a humanitarian aid package that did nothing to assist.
The “Humanitarian” Intervention Plan in Venezuela
Justice fugitive Antonio Ledezma has been on tour in several Western countries to promote the so-called “humanitarian intervention” to overthrow the Bolivarian government in the name of “civil society”. International representative of the group Soy Venezuela, the former mayor of Caracas became the lord and master of the interventionist voice against the country where he was born, and in spite of the record of such military actions by the U.S. and CIA, he continues to lobby with other leaders of Voluntad Popular y Primero Justicia for resources of soft power and hard power over Venezuela that would lead to a “humanitarian intervention”.
Ledezma has met with at least a dozen top politicians from around the world, such as Florida Governor Rick Scott; Latin American Presidents Sebastián Piñera, Mauricio Macri and former President ( because of corruption) Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, and Vice President of Panama; with Europeans Emmanuel Macron, Mariano Rajoy; U.S. Vice President Mike Pence; to name but a few recent examples.
A scenario of national destruction and death is the end of Antonio Ledezma’s request, as happened with Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Somalia and Haiti. It is not we who say it, but history.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
