This is not surprising, I suggest. Death counts in Kosovo seem to be much less than the worst feared, although they are at least in 4 figures ie between 1000 and 10,000.
Although sadism and brutality may be used, what was happening in Kosovo and in East Timor was a rational policy of terror to cowe the population either to accept or to be expelled. A phenomenon of human conflict that has occurred for tens of thousands of years.
Is the reaction of "the world community" all nonsense, and moral panic?
Well, on the one hand we know that it is a thin line between excesses in the use of armed terror to genocide as in Ruanda or with the Jews of White Russia after the Nazi invasion. But the cascade of alarm and panic about the treatment of defenceless people is also a rational response to danger. Even if the militias did not want to exterminate or torture more than a small proportion of the population, they were forcing them into conditions where they might well die in tens of thousands of starvation or disease.
We badly need objective human rights abuse studies in Kosovo and in Timor to catalogue how many deaths there were so that the debate about intervening in the next crisis can be more objective. This is part of the inevitable development of an understanding of global governance, in which marxists and other progressive people should play a part.
Chris Burford
London