[lbo-talk] NATO/Kosovo: The Liberal's Favorite War

Peter Hart Ward pward at peterhartward.com
Mon Jul 9 17:53:51 PDT 2007


Compared to (say) the US-backed Indonesian terror in East Timor around the same time, the crimes committed in Yugoslavia, as terrible as they were, don't count as genocide, unless we seriously diminish the meaning of the word. Atrocities were committed on all sides, and arguably the worst of these was the Croatian dictatorship's explosion of Serbs, a fact omitted from history. Even the ICJ was forced to concede that Serbia did not commit genocide, the mass graves have never turned up, and no evidence was found suggesting that the country was even planning an "ethnic cleansing". As for Srebrineza (nothing to do with Serbia and Kosovo regardless, inspite of the fact that the massacre was used as a reto-justification for the NATO war), the court found that killings were not directed by the Serbian government and that, unlike UNPROFOR (who were well positioned but refused to intervene), there wasn't a lot Belgrade could have done to stop it from happening if they had wanted to.

The KLA were regarded (by UK Times among others) as a bunch of narcotrafficking thugs who probably owed their existence to CIA funds and arms. Regardless, the bombing of Serbia, targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure (as Wesley Clark likes to brag) in flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention laws, was supported with overwhelming enthusiasm by liberals and opposed, on no principled grounds, by conservatives.*

Serbia had a functioning, if corrupt (like all governments I know of), government destroyed and has been plunged into lawlessness, and Serbs in Kosovo have been rounded up and put in what amount to concentration camps. (Even Bosnia-Herzegovina has little in the way of government, apparently surviving, to the extent that it does, mainly on E.U. handouts--the blue "a gift from E.U." trams you see there, e.g.)

The NATO/Kosovo War is not significant because it was particularly terrible (Iraq is much worse, of course), it is significant because it shows that imperial power-lust is bipartisan. When a country defies it's master, the U.S., as Milosovich had the misfortune to do, punishment (of the civilians) is in order. (N.B.: The sanctions on Iraq that caused about a million "excess" deaths also seems to have been a calculated act of terrorism aimed at the civilians.)

It is time to put and end to what Jean Bricmont calls "Humanitarian Interventions"; it is time to face up to reality and oppose all crimes of State regardless what noble cause they are committed in the name of.

If Al Gore, saviour du jour, is seroius about reconciliation of past mistakes he should recuse himself to the International Court of Justice, along with accomplices Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, to stand trial for war crimes.

*Most of the Kosovo atrocities followed, as predicted, the bombing campaign and amounted to about 10,000 deaths. Prior to the war there were about 2,000 deaths.

***

Peter Ward Brooklyn, NY



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