Byoblu-Mondocane from Belgrade – Fulvio Grimaldi at the International Conference, 21-24 March 2024, on the 25th anniversary of the NATO aggression. On air Sunday 9.30pm. Repeats, barring unforeseen circumstances, Monday 09.30, Tuesday 11.00, Wednesday 22.30, Thursday 10.00, Saturday 16.30, Sunday 09.00.
What you see above are the covers of documentaries I made in Serbia during the 1999 NATO aggression and subsequent events. Sorry if this time I’m starting from a personal story. I believe this is justified by its emblematic character regarding the passage of the press from information, in so-called democratic countries, to propaganda serving the Empire. A transition that involved those who declared themselves to be left-wing, with consequences whose results we are seeing, between the catastrophic and the criminal, in the time of the political West’s unleashing of war.
There are two events in my life and profession that seem to me to be invested with paradigmatic value, even though they happened to a simple street reporter.
Bloody Sunday, the bloody Sunday of Derry, Northern Ireland, when it happened that I was the only international journalist present to document the massacre of 14 defenseless demonstrators at the hands of British paratroopers; and an editorial meeting at TG3, on the morning of March 25, 1999, after the night in which NATO had begun the attack on Serbia which would see 78 days of carpet bombing, including depleted uranium. Genocide is not a concept that originated in Gaza.
After having worked for almost a decade to disintegrate the multinational, multi-confessional, socialist Federation of Yugoslavia, the four major European countries, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, plus the Vatican of the Polish Woytila, inserting themselves in the role of mercenaries in the “War of one hundred years” of the United States (1917-2024), attack directly the last stronghold of anti-capitalist resistance in the Balkans. It was the region that once again needed to be “normalized” in view of the conquest of Eurasia, triggering a conflict that would involve, and increasingly involves, Europe.
We, having US and NATO bases in Friuli and the Adriatic, placed ourselves on the front line, despite the majority opposition to the war and some oceanic demonstrations that denounced its criminal nature. The absolute protagonist of this return to war in Europe, the one that still today is defined and, humorously, defines itself as the “left”. In government there is the first “communist” prime minister, Massimo D’Alema, supported by other even tougher and purer communists, Cossutta, Diliberto and Rizzo (now on a boat with Alemanno), so enthusiastic about the undertaking that they split from Rifondazione Comunista, the main opposition party, to enter the war government. Not irrelevant news, in light of his pronouncements today: Sergio Mattarella is deputy prime minister and then minister of Defense. He contributes to killing Article 11 of the Constitution. All people from the pocket of Togliatti and De Gasperi, with Gladio insertions.
Let’s go back to the morning of that March 25th. Director of TG3, Ennio Chiodi, “left” Christian Democrat. Password for the various editions of news programs and columns: “The humanitarian intervention against the dictator Milosevic has begun.” Shortly after, the columns of the good and just, often clerical, NGOs and Social Centers depart, some in perfect bad faith, the others ignorant as cucks. Armed with supremacist racism, Nazi-Atlantic prejudice, high humanitarian values. The same, today, as migrants, as Tsar Putin, as for the climate. Everyone in Sarajevo, the “martyr city”.
Luca Casarini (now a migrant sailor, “immediately sainted” in the Vatican) and his white onesies stand out, guests of George Soros’s opposition B52 TV (Milosevic dictator!), Sant’Egidio, Women in Black, ACLI, ARCI, Caritas (a ship full of weapons for the Kosovars was discovered in Ancona). In short, the whole prosperous brigade of pacifiers who facilitate imperial enterprises so much. The “NATO Left”, or “human rights” newsletter, “il manifesto” newsletter was born and distinguished itself, increasingly becoming an authentic fifth column in the marches of the Empire.
I’m leaving too. To Belgrade, with a newly purchased camera, on a bus with Slavs who did not want to resign themselves to the collapse of the most original and interesting political, social and cultural experiment, carried out on this side of the Iron Curtain.
I knew about Serbia, about the many parties that operated freely in the republics and provinces (I met them in the middle of the war in Belgrade, very active in their headquarters), about the citizens who freely voted and, above all, about a deadly economic grip on Yugoslavia, commissioned to the IMF and BM after the disappearance of Marshal Tito so that, with the usual noose of debt and then of “structural reforms, taking advantage of unprecedented social problems and nationalistic frictions which, invariably fomented, arise, we were able to remove from the scene a treacherous and spurious like Yugoslavia, friend of the USSR, leader of the very insidious Non-aligned.
I knew about the sweetness of the German economic space offered by Berlin to the subjects of Slovenia and Croatia, about Woytila and Pannella in camouflage, about the Islamist pan-Albanianism cultivated in Kosovo, Bosnia and Macedonia by the petrotyrants of the Gulf, where George Soros and his institutes operated in competition and its ethnically clean universities (reserved only for Albanians), and the Albanian Teresa of Calcutta, with its ethnically clean health facilities.
Giovanna Botteri, correspondent for my TG3, also operated very effectively, glorifying the mafia gangs of the KLA of the organ trafficker and mass killer, Hashim Thaci, trained by the CIA, loved by Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State and covered by KFOR ( UN force still committed to guaranteeing the narco-state), and by attributing all sorts of atrocities to the defenders of Yugoslav unity, he earned the most valuable RAI correspondence, New York and then Beijing and then Paris. I met her in Baghdad, under attack in 2003. Indispensable.
Bombs and missiles in Belgrade. Once there was a blackout throughout Serbia, so much so that the incubators and those inside them were turned off, there was no more play. In Pancevo the petrochemical concentration was pulverized with toxic substances spread over half the province. In Kragujevac, the heart of the Balkan working class, Zastava, was hit with uranium (then rebuilt in a year by the workers alone). In Novi Sad a panic alarm every thirty minutes, the refineries on fire and dioxin in all the blood, the three most beautiful bridges in Europe crumbled with people on them. In Nis a deluge of cluster bombs, prohibited, sowing splinters and necrosis in all organs. Millions of Serbs refugees from slaughterhouses in Krajina and Kosovo.
And the trains, and the houses, and the hospitals and the Danube made to spread by dint of rain from seeded clouds, and the state TV to be silenced, with missiles, like every other rumor, at the cost of 16 victims, and the Chinese embassy with three dead, and the two missiles dribbled into the Zastava, and the incinerated hotel where, half an hour earlier, we had narrowly missed staying and the first CIA color revolution with the fascist mercenaries of Otpor, and Slobodan Milosevic at my place interviewed before he arrested him, Zoran Đinđić, an Abu Mazen who from Vienna indicated to NATO his fellow citizens to attack, before handing over the patriot president to the Yankee shapers who acted as magistrates in The Hague who, unable to convict him, had him die in cell.
It’s all over then. No, the Empire and its scullions never manage to finish the job. Serbia is under fire like never before. Regardless. It is enough that it exists, there in the middle, in front of Russia, with its “Serbs to die for”.
There’s more to the show. But I want to close with an image that opens and closes my well-titled docufilm “Serbs to die for”. Image that I have in mind with the same vividness of colors and profiles as 25 years ago. Serbs, women, men, boys, old people, all on the Branco bridge, in the center of Belgrade, in full bombardment of all the bridges, with a “Target” sign on their chest: hit me, son of a bitch! You do not scare me.