And let's not forget that no one has an exclusive claim on war crimes. On the NY Times "Forum" web site, I just took Anthony Lewis to task for a comment he made in his column today: "The capacity for evil exists in any people, in any human being. But national histories are different."
I said that Lewis was trying to have it both ways by making a comment like that and suggested that readers turn to Guardian columnist Decca Aitkenhead's excellent piece "Killing Is Thrilling" for an eloquent statement of the truly *universal* capacity for evil.
Here's the text of this piece, which ran yesterday:
Killing Is Thrilling
By Decca Aitkenhead
Before we grow too numb to such tales, here is another short account of what soldiers and police did to a man they suspected of belonging to a rebel army. They dragged him from his bed at 4.30am, shot at his screaming wife and baby, and marched him to barracks where they made him run barefoot across broken glass and barbed wire between two lines of military police who beat him. They tied him up with a bag over his head, and beat him repeatedly; a week later, 17lb lighter, he was photographed naked and sent to a camp, where he soon learned how lucky he had been. Other detainees had been beaten in the kidneys and testicles, bent over electric fires, anally raped with objects, burnt with matches, urinated on, deprived of sleep, assaulted with electric cattle prods and terrorised by Russian roulette played with blanks.
The victim of this torture was not a Kosovan Albanian but an IRA suspect, Kevin Hannaway, interred in the early seventies, and the men who beat and abused him belonged to the very army currently helping to liberate Kosovo. Less than a generation after torturing IRA suspects, British troops are discovering Serb police stations refashioned as crude torture chambers, and it is as if they cannot believe their eyes. A corporal who rescued two sisters from Serb paramilitary rapists last week said afterwards, "The men in that building were the worst scum." A trooper from 1 Para said, "I just don't understand how people could treat other human beings like this? They must be sick in the head."
How indeed. It is the obvious question, although one that suggests an awfulness so chill that, in a way, the idea that anyone could give a cogent answer is almost worse than our daze of incomprehension. But it is necessary for the Nato powers to be able to provide an answer, in order that they can organise the random horror into a political framework in which we can locate some sense. And so it is that every Nato leader is repeatedly assuring us that the rape and the torture and all the sick abandon in Kosovo are the unique consequences of ethnic cleansing, a creed conceived by a monster in Belgrade. There is a Serb canon in which torture chambers are possible - even inevitable - and a western canon in which they are not. Ethnic cleansers become sadists; we do not. Serbs are barbarians, and our boys are disciplined peacekeepers.
This account may be immensely reassuring, but that is as much as you can say for it. A new book, An Intimate History of Killing, has revealed some uncomfortable truths about our boys, by publishing extracts from letters sent home by Allied servicemen in both world wars, and Americans in Vietnam. In one, a first world war officer described seeing enemies' bodies exploding and hearing their screams as "one of the happiest moments of my life"; another described sticking a bayonet in a man as "gorgeously satisfying"; another wrote of "big masturbations!" after a good killing. Many men experienced a huge sexual thrill in killing - "It was like the best sex ever", "I had a hard on" and so on - and there were endless accounts of comrades committing rape and atrocities - and sometimes even confessions by the letter-writers themselves.
These were not men corrupted by the mad creed of ethnic cleansing. Nor were RUC officers in the 1970s, and yet by June 1978 an Amnesty International report had concluded that "Maltreatment of suspected terrorists by the RUC has taken place with sufficient frequency to warrant establishment of a public inquiry." A year later, a doctor confirmed that during his three years attending Castlereagh barracks, he treated countless detainees for punctured ear drums and broken bones. For what it is worth, I've witnessed more mindless, casual, violent cruelty among squaddies after a good night in the pub than I have yet to encounter in any other British men.
However unimaginable the atrocities of Serb paramilitaries and police seem, and however much we wish to believe that normal people like us could not commit them, the ugliest truth is that soldiers all over the world have done things that would make your blood freeze. Brutal sadism is not a state of mind exclusive to men made bad by ethnic cleansing - it is the horribly ordinary condition of militarised men made monstrous by war.
The distinction is an important one. Those of us who are angrily intolerant of the Serbs still dismissing evidence of their soldiers' atrocities as KLA propaganda should remember that the RUC chief in 1977 publicly accused IRA prisoners of harming themselves to discredit the police, and that a programme dealing with the 1978 Amnesty report was banned from being broadcast. The account of Kevin Hannaway's torture comes from Gerry Adams' autobiography, and that is still reason enough for many Britons to blithely dismiss it as pure lies; likewise, veterans groups have denounced An Intimate History of Killing as feminist propaganda. We all construct our history according to what we are willing to believe, and the Serb people are no different; just as there is no Serb monopoly on atrocity, nor do they have a monopoly on distorting history. Just last week, as Nato's forensic experts were sifting their way through Kosovo in pursuit of war criminals, we were promising anonymity to the soldiers involved in the Bloody Sunday massacre.
Inevitably, you must wonder whether barbarism is the natural condition of man let loose, or the depraved state of man when corrupted by violence. However interesting the question may be, it matters very little right now. What matters is that we recognise that all military men are capable of inhumanity under the right - or wrong - circumstances, and that it is our absolute moral imperative to prevent those circumstances developing again in Kosovo.
Supporters of the war have been flourishing evidence of Serb atrocities with such extravagance of glee as to teeter on indecency. What they choose to ignore is that it was militarised normality - the normalisation of power by might - that legitimised and encouraged these acts of inhumanity. If we militarise the Balkans indefinitely, we risk reinforcing the very conditions which help breed the violence we are supposed to be defeating. The trooper from Para 1 was confident enough about his role last week: "this is why we are here," he said, "to make sure this can never happen again." But the more triumphalist our faith in our own military justness, the less willing we may be to acknowledge the danger of a less honourable aftermath. It is interesting that Americans have come closest to confronting their own servicemen's cruelties in Vietnam, a war whose wisdom and justice they hold in the greatest doubt. A belief that Nato's war against Serbia was just should not be allowed to obscure our understanding of what may well be yet to come.
Our press have been unsure in what light to cast the two ex-British soldiers found last week fighting for the KLA. One had lost count of the number of Serbs he had killed; "I didn't see them as people - they were just targets. I felt nothing when they fell," he said, and his remarks were generally reported sympathetically. British troops are of course assumed to be self-disciplined - more responsible than that pair of plucky, if a little wayward, have-a-go heroes. But what will happen when our troops grow impatient with Kosovan acts of violent revenge, or grow to despise the KLA renegades, or begin to hold proud Serb civilians responsible for their soldiers' deeds?
The corporal who saved the sisters from Serb rapists was perfectly candid about his feelings towards the men. "My inclination would have been to take them around the back and kill them."
[end]
Carl Remick