Lady Dame Pauline Neville Jones Fan club - recent sighting
Raymond Whitaker. Independent today 6/5/07
147 soldiers dead in Iraq, 54 in Afghanistan - the human cost of 'humanitarian intervention' The PM's stand over the Balkans earned him credit, but he soon squandered it.
"Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, former political director of the Foreign Office and head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, recently told the Policy Exchange in London that Britain would have to persevere in Afghanistan, "which has become a test of our capacity and Nato's". But in the future, she added, "I don't think there will be a great appetite for humanitarian intervention."Presumably the "The PM's stand over the Balkans", involved the bombing of civilians with 2,000 HE bombs, deliberate targeting of TV stations and their staff, killing journalists etc.,Certainly it was a stand that Lady Dame Pauline Neville Jones was able to benfit from commercally as a "private" citizen.
Many will remember and few forget how Lord Hurd and Lady Dame Jane Pauline Neville Jones joined NatWest Markets, investment arm of the National Westminster Bank on fat salaries., on a salary of £250,000 a year. In Belgrade in 1996 they had a memorable breakfast with Slobodan Milosevic, then head of a cash strapped and beleaguered government and Serbian workers quieing up for unpaid wages.
NatWest obliged by helping Slobodan Milosevic sell off the post and telephone system, PTT, and obtained a contract to advise on debt management and then tried the same trick on the Serbian electricity industry (the bits that suvived NATO bombing). The Italians and Greeks cleaned up on the telecomms deal. But NatWest did well thank you out of supplying advice from the folks you stitched up the Dayton accords, and so did Lord Hurd and Dame Pauline.
Of course the , "The PM's stand over the Balkans earned him credit" ... nice little earner for the Fan club as well.
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"Travesty
By Edward Herman - Z Magazine
Apr/30/2007
Review of John Laughland, Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice (London/Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2007).
John Laughland’s superb new book, Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice, is the fourth important critical study of the issues pertaining to the Balkans wars that I have reviewed in Z Magazine. The earlier three were Diana Johnstone’s Fools’ Crusade (2002), Michael Mandel’s How America Gets Away With Murder (2004), and Peter Brock’s Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting (2005). It is an interesting and distressing fact that none of the three earlier books has been reviewed in any major U.S. paper or journal, nor, with the exception of Z Magazine (and Swans and Monthly Review, which later ran a fuller version of the Johnstone review), in any liberal or left journal in this country (including The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive, or Mother Jones). This is testimony to the power of the established narrative on the recent history of the Balkans, according to which Clinton, Blair and NATO fought the good fight, though coming in late and reluctantly, to halt Serb ethnic cleansing and genocide managed by Milosevic, with the bad man properly brought before a legitimate court to be tried in the interest of justice.
This narrative was quickly institutionalized, with the help of an intense propaganda campaign carried out by the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim governments (assisted by U.S. PR firms), the U.S. and other NATO governments, ..." more in link.
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