>And indeed NATO is guilty as charged in the indictment above.
>But Serbia is guilty of contravening international standards against
genocide.
I think I must try to make a line of demarcation with Charles here. All wars are barbaric and tend to involve atrocities. In principle we should be against wars, and we should be particularly vigilant against wars in which our own ruling class is probably trying to further its own interests.
However, deaths through war are not genocide. I agree that a special case could be made against cluster bombs, (as can also be made against the mines that the Serbs are sowing over the Kosovars homeland), and it probably should. But NATO's aim is not to kill civilians which clearly technically it could have done very easily in large numbers.
The charge of genocide of the Albanian Kosovars (which may come back to haunt Milosevic sometime when he flies to London for medical treatment in the next millenium when he thinks he is entitled to a graceful old age) is based on partial definitions which we could argue about. But they include things like forced depopulation of a large part if not all of an ethnic community, and actions against a large demographic section of that community, like 200,000 men probably between the ages of 16 and 56 say.
No doubt Charles is right that cases under different headings could be lodged with international courts, but the present weakness of the anti-war movement in the west is that it has little effective response to the massive ability of the state in its widest sense to emphasise the inhumanity of the treatment of the Kosovans. Beside that, young families being unable to brew coffee in Belgrade flats does not have the same human impact.
Given the premise that citizens of the USA should be especially active against their ruling class in its overseas adventures, it is a pity that there has not been more discussion on this list of the lessons of practice.
Chris Burford
London