>While delaying its detailed response, it was perhaps significant that
>yesterday the NATO spokesman insisted that the attacks on the sanatorium in
>Surdelica and the bridge in Navarin were legitimate military targets. There
>was no response to the questioning of why the bridge was attacked during
>the middle of the day, when it might be expected to have civilians on it.
>Shea's reply was merely to give a list of gross numbers of Kosovo Albanian
>civilians displaced, tortured or murdered.
>Some of this might just be widening the margins of tolerance of the amount
>of civilian casualties there are prepared to say are accidental collateral
>damage.
>But there are real possibilities that the NATO command has shifted its
>concept of what is a legitimate target. This would be consistent with their
>impression that morale has broken in the Serb population in the last couple
>of weeks. It may be calculating that the deaths of 50 Serb civilians in two
>days, far from strengthening Serb resolve may weaken it ahead of a crucial
>sert of meetings determining the interpretation of the G8 conditions which
>Serbia has said it will accept.
>I was against the widening of the war to economic targets and I am against
>this further widening. But I would say to the many sincere, intelligent,
>informed , and committed left-wing subscbribers that it is not enough
>merely to oppose everything that western governments do as a matter of
>course. It is necessary to oppose them on the basis of a wider strategy
>challenging their claim to be the hegemonic arbiters of international
>justice and instead pinpoint the issues that would shape a juster concept
>of international world governance, which is being fashioned now, through
>such struggles.
>In this case that includes recognition of the right of the people of Kosovo
>to self-determination. That is why Carter's criticism of NATO is reformist
>but more useful than the blanket 'revolutionary' critical stance of more
>left wing members of marxism-space.
>
>Chris Burford
>London