I did a little research this morning. I looked up the manifestos and the demonstrations that were held in Spain against the NATO intervention in the Balkans. In case you don't believe me, here's a Spanish activists' page from 1999 proudly talking about the demos they'd held against the war. Now, we know that Slobodan Milosevic was a major prick, that 200,000 or so people were killed in the fighting in the ex-Yugoslavia, most of them civilians murdered by Serbs, and that more than 850,000 people were forced to leave their homes. Probably the most famous single events of the Balkan wars were the massacre at Srbrenica, where at least six thousand mostly Muslim men were murdered by Serbs, and the two-year shelling of Sarajevo, which culminated with a direct hit on the marketplace in August 1995 that killed 43 people and convinced the United States to say enough was enough. We then forced them to reach the accord at Dayton which stopped the war in Bosnia, and when they tried the same thing in Kosovo and killed some 3000-10,000 people, the Americans said no way, José, and organized NATO into the bombing campaign that resulted in the end of the Kosovo war and the eventual fall of Milosevic. Here's the United Nations' indictment before the International War Crimes Tribunal in case you need your memory refreshed about exactly how evil Slobodan is.

Among those who publicly opposed the war in Kosovo and accused the Americans of imperialism and mass murder and wanting the oil and the like were Ramsey Clark, Robert Fisk, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, José Saramago, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Regis Débray, Eduardo Galeano, Tony Benn, Alice Mahon, and Ignacio Ramonet. Oh, yeah, Fidel Castro too. Seen those names recently in a similar context? Among the Spanish organizations that demonstrated publicly against the Kosovo war were the "mainstream Communist" United Left political party, the ETA front political party Herri Batasuna, the PCE(r) (a bunch of real wacko far leftists who support the terrorist gang GRAPO), the Green Party, and the Trotskyist labor union, third largest in the country, CGT. These folks were among the organizers of the anti-American "peace" protests yesterday in Spain. To their credit, the Spanish Socialist Party did not oppose the Kosovo intervention, and neither did Convergence and Union.