Palestinians and Kosovars (Re: lbo-talk-digest V1 #4706

C. G. Estabrook galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
Thu Aug 9 08:33:30 PDT 2001


The contention seems to be (a) that Israeli oppression of Palestinians from 1948 to the present and Serbian oppression of Kosovar Albanians before the 1999 war are essentially similar (or that the latter is "at least equivalent" to the former), and (b) that "some sections of the Left" who condemn the former are complaisant before the latter, their complaisance apparently indicated by their failure to approve the NATO (i.e., US) attack on Serbia.

All analogies limp, and this one is lamer than most, but it's important to see why it's false. In practice, of course, there's no comparison: there's going to be no NATO war to drive the Israelis out of the occupied territories and establish a NATO-run protectorate there.

The US pays massively -- billions of dollars a year for many years -- for one of these oppressions. We Americans are overwhelmingly responsible for Israel's actions but hardly responsible for Serbia's crimes in Kosovo. Stopping doing what we are doing -- and paying for -- would be the first step toward ending Israeli oppression, as it would have been towards reducing Turkish depredations on the Kurds and Indonesian atrocities against Timorese, both numerically much worse than Serbian killing -- to say nothing of a generation of wars in Latin America, continuing now in Colombia.

Israeli oppression has gone on for two generations, while even apologists for the US/NATO attack alleged that Serbian oppression was a late development of the policy of the Milosevic regime. As Rob Schaap pointed out mordantly, PM Sharon was responsible for as many deaths on one afternoon of that 50 years as the total killings that supposedly justified the Kosovo war. Meanwhile in those years Yugoslavia under Tito was so successful that US economists were worrying about an "Illyrian model" that posed the threat of a good example to capitalist labor relations. But Germany and the US encouraged the end to that threat, once the Soviet union and Tito no longer existed.

The vast bulk of Serbian crimes against Kosovars occurred after the NATO bombing began, as a consequence, not a cause of it. A French member of the OSCE observation team testified that "in the month leading up to the war, during which he moved freely throughout the Pec region, neither he nor his colleagues observed anything that could be described as systematic persecution, either collective or individual murders, burning of houses or deportations" -- although what we now know to be a CIA-inspired civil war was underway. Throughout the '90s, Belgrade was willing to negotiate and compromise, writes E. Herman: "Among others, Milosevic supported the Vance Plan of 1991, the Jose Cutillero Plan of 1992 (a plan vetoed by the Muslim side in Bosnia-Herzegovina), the Vance-Owen Plan of 1993 (a plan eventually sabotaged by U.S. authorities, as Owen describes in his memoirs), and the Owen-Stoltenberg Plan of 1993 (also vetoed by the United States)." But the US wanted a demonstration war, and so put forward the obviously-unacceptable "Rambouillet Accords" and attacked. It was, as the NATO supreme commander announced, "entirely predictable that Serb terror would intensify as a result," but he said the NATO attack "was not designed as a means of blocking Serb ethnic cleansing"!

"As a standard of comparison, one might consider the regular murderous and destructive U.S.-backed Israeli military operations in Lebanon when Israeli forces occupying southern Lebanon in violation of Security Council orders, or their local mercenaries, are attacked by the Lebanese resistance. Through the 1990s, as before, these have far exceeded anything attributed to the FRY security forces within what NATO insists is their territory" [Chomsky].

Regarding ethnic cleansing throughout the former Yugoslavia, the Serbs were the principal victims, first in the Krajina, where the largest expulsion occurred -- 200,000 Serbs expelled by the Croatians with US aid and encouragement -- and secondly in Kosovo under NATO control. The German Foreign office admitted that the term could not properly be applied to Serbian actions in Kosovo before the NATO assault, in spite of now-admitted CIA attempts to provoke the Serbs. The "half-million Albanians driven out of Kosovo alone" (alone?) were as a result of the NATO bombing, and they have returned with a vengeance. OSCE's data show that a higher percentage of ethnic Serbs fled Kosovo during the war than did ethnic Albanians. NATO has constructed a "monoethnic state" in Kosovo after the war, and 250,000 non-Albanians fled the province in what Jan Oberg, the director of the Swedish-based Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, called "the largest ethnic cleansing in the Balkans [in percentage terms]." Robert Fisk reported that "the number of Serbs killed in the five months since the war comes close to that of Albanians murdered by Serbs in the five months before NATO began its bombardment in March 1999." And Serbian actions in the entire FRY throughout the '90s are dwarfed by the ethnic cleansing of the better part of a million Palestinians by the founding of Israel, and its continuance over fifty years.

"The liberal interventionism espoused by Madeline Albright" had only accidentally to do with ending anyone's oppression and instead put a good deal more in place. It successfully enforced US domination over the strategic Balkans region, displacing in the process the initiatives of a German-led Europe (although there were German profits from the closing of the Danube and from increased military expenditures), and demonstrated once again to the world who was in charge, regardless of the even the UN and the EU. American clientage in southeast Europe and southwest Asia are hardly unconnected.

--CGE



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