|
valid
even after the war as the mental conditions that started the
bombing did not change yet....
Why
Asians should reject
Nato
strikes
by
Steven Gan
first
published 4.5.1999 in THE
NATION,
Thailand's Independent Newspaper, Vol.23
As
the 'humane' bombs fall from the skies of Yugoslavia, human
rights advocates fall over themselves to support the
onslaught. But before they buy war, they should first read
the fine print on the label, writes Steven Gan.
They
fought for independence against a brutal dictatorship for
decades. Their people faced ethnic cleansing, rapes, famine.
And only an international military force could protect them,
they said.
Kosovo?
No, East Timor.
No
one, however, is imploring that Jakarta be reduced to
rubble. Not even Nobel Laureate Jose Ramos Horta. While
Serbia is bombed to the Stone Age, he lamented, Indonesia
received only ''mild rebukes'' for its 23-year ethnic
cleansing of East Timorese.
Indonesian
troops marched into East Timor in 1975, killing 200,000
people -- more than one-third of the population. The
Americans responded to this human catastrophe by doubling
military aid to Jakarta, sold more than US$1.1 billion worth
of weapons and blocked the United Nations from taking
effective action. The ''military'' option in East Timor,
said Ramos Horta, is not sending smart bombs or stealth
planes but halting arms supplies.
Ramos-Horta
is one Asian who does not buy the Nato war. Many, however,
joined the call for blood, in part because of Nato's
well-oiled propaganda machine. The Western media, too, is
cheerleading the war. No doubt there is often intense
pressure in wartime for the media to serve as propagandists
rather than journalists -- while journalists present the
world in all its complexity, propagandists simplify the
world into good and evil.
President
Slobodan Milosevic, said Brussels spin-doctors, is the
modern-day reincarnation of Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot.
High-powered terms such as ''genocide'' and ''ethnic
cleansing'' are liberally used. Clearly, genocide is what
happened to six millions Jews and other minorities in World
War II, to the one million dead in Cambodia, to 800,000 dead
in Rwanda, and to 200,000 dead in East Timor.
In
Kosovo, the 2,000 killed last year does not qualify as
full-on genocide, tragic though it may be. Yes, the death
toll is appalling and a ''serial ethnic cleanser'' like
Milosevic must be brought to trial, which is why there is a
pressing need for an International Criminal Court. Efforts
in that direction are already under way, but the US is dead
set against it.
That
said, the number of people killed in Kosovo is no more than
those slaughtered by Indonesian ''tribal head-hunters'' in
Kalimantan. And it is definitely less gruesome than the
145,000 Iraqis -- and 124 Americans -- who, according to the
US Bureau of Statistics, were killed in the Gulf War. There,
6,000 are still dying every month because of the economic
sanctions, said former UN humanitarian coordinator Dennis
Halliday. But in this case, argued US Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright, ''the price is worth it''.
Nato
said Yugoslavia is a humanitarian war to save the embattled
Kosavars. President Bill Clinton should know better. While
he works himself into a lather of moral indignation over
Kosovo, he should perhaps recall that five years ago he
pointedly refused to help the Rwandans being summarily
butchered. Clinton, said Roger Winter of the US Committee
for Refugees, was afraid to label this wholesale massacre as
''genocide''. By calling it genocide, he said, Clinton would
have had to acknowledge that the US had a moral obligation
to intervene.
Subsequently,
the US opposed sending UN peacekeepers. ''A US intervention
might have averted genocide in Rwanda, but there was no
action,'' lamented Edward Said, a Palestinian intellectual.
''The stakes were not high enough, and black people not
worth the effort.''
Perhaps
Rwanda and East Timor do not figure in the Western
humanitaria radar. Take Turkey then, a country only a few
hundred kilometres from Kosovo. According to the Turkish
parliament's own investigation, 4,000 Kurdish villages have
been destroyed by the military, leaving 30,000 dead and
creating three million refugees in the past 15 years. Here,
Ankara's weapons of choice for its ethnic cleansing are
imported from the US and Germany. And all this, when Turkey
is a Nato member and home to 14 US military
bases.
Consider
also the ethnic cleansing even closer to Kosovo's border. In
1995, the Croatian army expelled 300,000 Serbs from their
homes in Krajina. According to India's Satish Nambiar,
former head of mission of the UN forces in Bosnia, Operation
Storm was masterminded by US army generals acting as
advisers to Croatia's Franco Tudjman (this is thesame man
who claimed that the Holocaust was a myth and said he was
''proud not to have a drop of Jewish or Serbian blood'').
Soon afterwards, Tudjman was a guest at Clinton's
inauguration.
It
is astounding how quick the world has gone to war. After
all, it was only two months ago that a draft solution on
Kosovo was worked out by an American, assisted by an
Austrian and a Russian. However, the Russian representative
was not informed of a last-minute appendix to the document.
It required Yugoslavia to allow Nato unfettered access to
not only Kosovo, but all of the country's territory and with
all cost borne by the host.
This
was presented to the Yugoslav government at Rambouillet as a
non-negotiable package. ''It was not even take it or leave
it,'' said Milosevic. ''It was take it or else.'' Put
simply, it was a case of ''give us your country, or we will
destroy it''. Not surprisingly, while Milosevic accepted the
autonomy portion of the deal, he rejected the military
clause.
But
what surprised Nato was that the Kosovar Albanians also
refused to sign the pact. They eventually inked the document
after being told that it could be used as a pretext to
launch the air strikes. On March 23, the day before the
attack began, the Serbian parliament adopted a resolution
expressing willingness to review the ''range and character
of an international presence'' in Kosovo.
But
the US was not interested in anything other than Nato
forces. Milosevic, said US officials, only understands
military force. It is also the language that the Americans
prefer to speak. Indeed, it is not because of the
''genocide'' in Kosovo, as claimed by Prime Minister Tony
Blair, that is the casus belli: Yugoslavia is bombed
precisely because it refused to allow hostile foreign troops
on its soil.
But
the Kosovo Liberation Army, which Nato now supports, is no
angel either. It espouses an ultra-nationalist ideology and
advocates a programme of ethnic cleansing that differs from
Milosevic only in that it lacks the power to enforce its
vision. Clearly, in such an age-old ethnic feud, there can
be no silver-bullet solution.
Human
rights advocates are nonetheless justified to argue that the
international community must not stand idly by when people
are being slaughtered wholesale. But doing something doesn't
mean inflaming the situation further. Nato bombings, by all
intents and purposes, are doing just that: it escalates the
violence in Kosovo. Look at the results. The month-long Nato
assault has not only failed to protect the Kosovars. It has
worsened their plight. The attack has strengthened
Milosevic. It has undermined the UN and international laws.
It has killed hundreds of civilians, both in Serbia and
Kosovo. It has wreaked the infrastructure of a whole nation.
It has destabilised the frontier states. It has wasted
billions of dollars. Clever, no?
The
Nato ''war to save lives'' pretext is not new. On Sept 23,
1938 Hitler wrote to Britain's Neville Chamberlain that
ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia had been ''tortured'', that
120,000 had been ''forced to flee the country'', that the
''security of more than three million human beings was at
stake''. Hitler was of course laying the ground for
humanitarian intervention. But while Nato is obviously not
Hitler -- the Serbs would dispute that -- ''humanitarian
intervention'' has often been used as a cover for other
interests.
In
the past, bringing civilisation to the natives provided the
excuse for the colonisation of the Third World. Today,
''human rights'' may be the cloak for a new type of military
intervention worldwide. Yes, human rights supporters no
doubt do have good intentions. But they should be aware that
such good intentions can be manipulated by the
powers-that-be to serve their interests, and against those
that human rights defenders seek to protect.
Said
Yugoslav expert Diana Johnson: ''Western media and
governments are unquestionably more concerned about human
rights abuses that obstruct the penetration of transnational
capitalism, to which they are organically linked, than
about, say, the rights of Russian miners who have not been
paid for a year.'' Such a narrow approach in human rights
fails to address the global structures that violates basic
human rights, especially in a world where there is a wide
gulf between rich and poor.
Since
the collapse of the Soviet threat, Nato had been looking for
a reason to exist to mark its 50th anniversary. Enter
Kosovo, which apparently has a problem and Nato is the
solution. Instead, it is Nato that has a problem and Kosovo
the solution. And having started the war, Clinton is arguing
that the bombing must continue because Nato cannot ''lose
credibility''. Having got into the business of saving lives,
Nato is now in the business of saving face.
US
officials frequently proclaim their adherence to
international laws, except when it is not in their interests
to do so. Which was why Washington vetoed a Security Council
resolution calling on all states to obey international law.
Before the strikes, France had called for a Security Council
resolution to authorise the deployment of Nato troops. The
US flatly refused, unwilling to concede any authority to the
UN, and in so doing, even violated Nato's own
pact.
''By
casting off the UN and its charter, Nato is imposing on the
whole world and the next century an ancient law -- that
might is right,'' said Russian Nobel Laureate Alexander
Solzhenitsyn. The old League of Nations died, he added,
because it did nothing to help Ethiopia when it was invaded
by fascist Italy. Now the UN can do nothing but watch the
assault on Yugoslavia.
There
is no doubt that the abuse of human rights will continue to
persist in many parts of the world. And if there is to be a
humanitarian military force to keep peace, it should be
under democratic international control. That control means
the UN General Assembly, not the Security Council, which is
dominated by five veto-power wielding countries. Even the
General Assembly does not represent real democracy. True
democracy will have to wait for global social change, but
for now, the General Assembly will do.
However,
in the absence of global democracy, national sovereignty
must be respected. Clearly, powerful countries don't want
national sovereignty: they can protect themselves, and more
so, it hampers their imperialistic designs. The rest of the
world, however, needs it badly. To deny the validity of
national sovereignty is to effectively give the West carte
blanche to intervene when and where it pleases. The only
other alternative shield for Third World nations is to
acquire nuclear weapons. But this is no real option: the
world is already awash with nuclear bombs.
This,
in the nutshell, is what the New World Order has in store
for the next millennium. ''Barbarians are at the gate,''
said Branislav Andjeli, a webmaster of Yugoslav
(beograd.com). ''They shout: 'We are the United States.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated'.''
The
US, he said, decides which terrorist organisation should be
bombed and which is given money and arms; which mass
expulsion of populations to aid and which to label genocide;
which economies to support through loans and trade, and
which to destroy through sanctions and currency
speculations. It can select with impunity which
international laws and agreements are politically expedient
to adopt or honor, or which to ignore. Its goal is to
assimilate all world's cultures and resources.
He
is obviously alluding to Star Trek's Captain Jean-Luc Picard
in ''First Contact'' who vowed to battle a ruthless
collective of cyborgs called the Borg. ''They invade our
space and we fall back,'' lamented Picard. ''They assimilate
entire worlds and we fall back. Never again, the line must
be drawn here! This far, no further.'' And Yugoslavia,
insisted Andjeli, is where the line must be
drawn.
The
underlying message on the Tomahawks launched against Sudan,
Afghanistan and Iraq is clear. If a tin-pot dictator wants
to commit genocide, his regime better kowtow to the West.
That way, the West can turn a blind eye. Ask Suharto.
Indeed, the world is not so much threatened by Cuba, North
Korea and Yugoslavia as by a rouge superpower and its crony
states, who speak of liberty but trample on global
democracy, and who talk about the rule of law, but stomp on
international laws. They are, if you will, the global
Trenchcoat Mafia.
But
resistance, despite the near-total domination of the West
and its omnipresent media, is not futile. The next
millennium will determine whether we continue to live under
a global apartheid where ''might is right'', or a global
democracy where all nations are equal before international
law.
STEVEN
GAN, a member of The Nation's editorial team, was a former
Amnesty International prisoner of conscience when he was
arrested at the 1996 Asia-Pacific Conference on East Timor
[Apcet II] in Kuala Lumpur. He also covered the 1991
Gulf War from Baghdad.
(german
version)
Emanzipation
Humanum,
version 16.6.99, criticism, suggestions as to form and
content, dialogue, translation into other languages are all
desired
e-mail
contact:
Steven
Gan
http://emanzipationhumanum.de/english/kosovo.html
|