from The Independent June 21, 1999
Robert Fisk - Was it rescue or revenge?
Bestialisation is an unpleasant sport. The Serbs bestialised the
Albanians for years. Terrorists, mafia, communists, Marxists,
murderers. Officially directed at the Kosovo Liberation Army, these
epithets came to be applied to the entire Kosovo Albanian
community. And when General Nabojsa Pavkovic warned that
"settling scores... is what we'll do if our country is attacked from
the
air or the ground," the Albanians knew what to expect. The moment
Nato commenced its blitz against Yugoslavia, the harassment of the
Kosovo Albanians turned into persecution, and the atrocities into
mass murder.
But now it is we who are doing the bestialising. Nazis, Gestapo,
blood-stained thugs, genocidal. The Serbs. In just a few short
sound-bites, we are now bestialising a whole people. Serbs Out,
Nato In, Refugees Back. That was how George Robertson - with
appalling simplicity and even more awful results - summed up the
west's ambitions in Kosovo earlier this month. And sure enough, the
Serbs are moving out. At least 50,000 Serb civilians - half the
remaining Serb population of the province - have already fled the
homes that Messrs Clinton and Blair promised to protect. Perhaps
half the gypsy population of Kosovo have fled with them on their
wooden carts and ponies. Serbian Kosovo is turning into Albanian
Kosovo.
True, it was Serb forces - not the KLA - which dispossessed the
Albanians of Kosovo. Serb forces executed the Albanian men of
countless villages across the province. The KLA have committed
atrocities, but not on this scale. Yet it remains a sad and
devastating fact that the vast majority of war crimes - almost the
entire mass dispossession and "ethnic cleansing" of Albanians -
occurred after Nato had begun its war.
Had we been prepared to intervene on land at the beginning - at the
cost, no doubt, of Nato soldiers' lives - countless murdered
Albanians would still be alive. And had we attempted to sort out the
whole Kosovo crisis when the Albanians first appealed for our help
at Dayton in 1995 - when Richard Holbrooke and his chums told
them to get lost - the last three months' bloodbath might never have
occurred, and hundreds of thousands of dispossessed Albanians
would still be in their homes
Moral outrage is a very powerful emotion. I felt it a year ago when I
saw the Serb police looting houses in the village of Comerane. I felt
it a few days' later when a Serb police officer threatened to rape an
Albanian woman who was travelling with me. I felt it when The
Independent's own Albanian interpreter emerged from the heart of
darkness just over a week ago with a frightful story of her two
months' persecution in Kosovo. I knew what to expect when British
KFOR troops entered the MUP police headquarters in Pristina and
found their collection of baseball bats, strapped bed,
knuckledusters.
Because I have visited another identical police station with a torture
basement. Indeed, I have been interrogated on the first floor,
surrounded by policemen holding identical baseball bats. And that
police force was engaged in the persecution, dispossession and -
with the help of that nation's armed forces - the burning of villages
and the murder of their ethnic inhabitants. But readers who fear
another Nato bombing campaign can relax. This police station
happened to be in a city called Diyarbakir, and the country whose
police forces are involved in torture and murder is called Turkey.
And Turkey is a member of Nato, supporting - albeit without
enormous enthusiasm - our righteous war against Serbia. And
Turkey is not (quite) in Europe. Hence the need for our masters to
say that we are discovering war crimes unknown "in Europe" since
the Second World War.
But back to Kosovo, where our moral outrage is at its loudest. In our
reporting of Kosovo's "liberation", there is no longer any mention of
the bombing campaign that preceded it. The hundreds of Serb and
Albanian civilians killed by Nato bombs have been expunged from
the record. The train at Grdelica, the two hospitals, the Chinese
embassy, the bridge at Varvarin - with its beheaded priest and its
female high-school student with her stomach torn out - the housing
estates in Nis, Surdelica and Cuprija, and the Albanian refugee
convoy destroyed in April - all must now be forgotten. The evil we
now uncover makes such matters irrelevant, even if most of that evil
had not yet been committed when we began our blitz against
Yugoslavia.
Having witnessed much of the war - far too much of the war - I am
convinced it was unnecessary; that there must have been some way
of avoiding Nato's brutal bombardment and the wickedness that
Serb forces unleashed against the Albanians once that
bombardment began. True, their "cleansing" of Kosovo had already
started, but on an infinitely smaller scale. And Nato General Wesley
Clark's assertion that the post-attack onslaught against the
Albanians was "entirely predictable" still seems to be the height of
cynicism.
I wonder, in the future, whether we can allow a European army to be
driven by the United States. It was America, courtesy of Madeleine
Albright, that pushed for this war. It was an American air force that
took the leading role in bombing a European nation.
While the Albanians were being assaulted, US Defence Secretary
William Cohen was referring (on 1 April) to "our gallant forces
serving on the front line" - forces that were sitting on their bottoms
in
Albania doing nothing. And when the time came for Nato troops to
move into Kosovo, what was America's role? It wanted the safest bit
of the province to control, and wasted so much time arguing about
its right to arrive along with the British that the Russians moved in
to
capture Pristina airport.
Nato unleashed a war that produced a refugee exodus on a Biblical
scale. It went on to slaughter hundreds of civilians in order to
return
the refugees, most of whom were in their homes when the blitz
began. And then it watched the exodus of half of Kosovo's other
population - the Serbs - whom it was also meant to protect. And it
then proclaimed a victory.
This may go down well in the United States, but I don't think Europe
should suffer this kind of treatment. I don't believe that American
generals should be in charge of the destruction of a European
nation, however barbaric its ruler. I don't think think the European
Union should tolerate any repeat performances.
Yes, we Europeans are weak. We prefer to let the Americans wield
the big stick, and to fall into line behind their generals. But if we
are
going to control our own destinies, our future, those much trumpeted
"values" that Tony Blair keeps talking about, and our defence, we've
got to do it ourselves. Which means the end of Nato and the
creation of a real European defence force, one which cannot be
accused of obeying American orders; a brigade, or a division, or an
army which - if it really intends to protect the innocent and keep the
peace - has the moral courage to go in on the ground to save life,
rather than wait until the lives are lost and then punish those
responsible.
There was a moment back in April, early in the bombing campaign,
when Nato's lie became obvious. "Had we not acted," said
President Clinton, "the Serb offensive would have been carried out
with impunity."
And there we have it. Ours was a punishment campaign, not a
preventive action. It was intended to avenge the Albanians, not to
save them - and to revenge ourselves on the Serbs, I have no doubt,
for the humiliation we suffered at their hands in Bosnia. The
Albanian refugees will now return to their "predictably" burned
homes and the "predictable" mass graves of their loved ones. The
Serbs will continue to flood out of the province that Nato had sworn
to preserve.
And the Americans will continue to make the decisions. Europe
deserves better. So do the Kosovo Albanians. So do the Serbs.
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