C. Heartfield,
You write "NATO is the definitive cause of the recent events, the Milosevic regime merely reacting" and this is really reaching too far and is untrue. There is nothing about NATO bombs that forces Serb forces to drive hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. The Serb army may not be involved in genocide, but it is involved in ethnic cleansing. Their intent is clearly malevolent. NATO did not form that intent. Mind you, I said before that the Serb army would have been *irresponsible* not to act if they believed, as they had reason to believe, that the KLA would use the NATO bombardment as air cover for their operations. However, such action clearly does not include what the Serbs are doing now (and it is a Serb army since Yugoslavia is clearly gone and Serbs are a self-identifying group, which group did things like virtually illegalize the use of the Albanian language in Kosovo) .
As usual we have two problems that we are trying to treat as one by picking sides. The first problem is that the people of the Balkans are uncivilized and cannot resist the temptation to use ethnicity as an excuse for violence. This, I believe, is no insult but a clear representation of the facts. After weeks and months of hearing claims and counter-claims of atrocious behavior by Serbs, Croats, Albanians and all the rest, I have simply added up the instances of atrocious behavior and come to the conclusion that these people, all of them, are essentially hooligans. This does not make them unique. The Hutus and the Tutsis are also hooligans as are a host of other cultures. We have seen the process by which people
- like the Israelis - become hooligans. It only takes a few decades for people to lose their decency.
The second problem is that powers larger than the common Balkan native have been encouraging this hooliganism for centuries. This latest episode is simply another example. The sad part is that the gains made encouraging this kind of war are so petty. Clinton is looking for a legacy, so he decided to bomb a country. Actually, he has decided to bomb a few, but this one he really went after in earnest. NATO wants to scare a thoroughly defeated Russia, so they accede to the Clinton ambition. Searching for a larger geo-political significance to this war is fruitless and misleading in my view. It is a petty war in a place tailor-made (and well-tailored at that) for such wars.
There is a cultural significance to this war and I think you are seeing it there in Britain. On American National Public Radio there was a report that a majority of Britons now favor the use of ground troops in Kosovo - a daft endeavor that is being unclearly thought out and simultaneously embraced all over the West. The poll numbers are stacking up that way all over Europe, apparently. This is clear evidence that Europe is going Clinton-Blair. I've said before and I will say again that this era will be seen in the future as that era when the swing to the right solidified. Anglo-American finance capitalism is coming to dominate Europe and with it American (and now British, it seems) values.
As for the problem and the "what to do?" about Kosovo, it seems clear that the Serbs and the Albanians cannot live together because they will not. Some mass action was the only way the problems in Kosovo were going to be sorted. Unfortunately, the mass action taken was the scaring off of much of the Albanian population instead of the mobilization towards peace and the creation of a more comprehensive civil society. Greater Serbia and Greater Albania will be, and essentially already have been created. That process started when Serbs and Albanians began to live more and more separate lives in Kosovo. The now formal separation will solve very little so long as the people of that region live so lawless and underemployed but it will at least define the battlefield for the combatants.
As for the question of whether the NATO bombings should stop, of course they should. On the other hand, what good does a well-armed Serbia do anybody? I don't know. All the damage that can be done has been done and the U.S. and NATO, while unable to take credit for a complete fiasco in the Balkans, can at least say they helped.
peace