[sangkancil] Why Asians should reject Nato strikes (The Nation, Bangkok)
Here's a flipside view of the Kosovo war.
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The Nation (Bangkok)
May 4, 1999
Why Asians should reject Nato strikes
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
humanitarian 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 divide 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 afoot, 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 humanitarian
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 -- the same 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 carry out 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 probably 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 recently 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.
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