Madeleine Albright at Lenin's Tomb:
NY Press
10/21/99
Sam Schulman
Madeleine at Lenin's Tomb
Madeleine Albright is back at work. She?s been lobbying officials of the
European Union to withhold fuel oil shipments even to constituencies in
Serbia that are governed by anti-Milosevic politicians. Her theory is that a
cold and miserable civilian populace will deliver the villain to foreign
justice more willingly than a warm and comfy one would.
There are several problems with Albright?s scheme. The first is that it has
often been tried and it has never worked. In fact, the opposite is more
usually the case?only when your belly is full can you concern yourself with
right and wrong, as the morally repulsive but well-fed Brecht said so often.
Albright?s strategy is really a continuation of the thinking that lead to
the unnecessary, disastrous and idiotic war itself. The Yugoslav war?causing
thousands of pointless civilian deaths, dispossessing nearly a million
people temporarily, another hundred thousand forever, and forcing NATO
troops to stand by and watch the KLA rid Kosovo systematically of its native
Serbs?was conducted almost entirely against civilian targets. Milosevic?s
army was virtually untouched. The same can?t be said for civilian Serbia.
The result of the air war was nil: Gen. Mike Jackson has declared that only
Russian intervention brought the "war against ethnic cleansing" to an
end?whereupon ethnic cleansing began in earnest.
What failed during the war, Albright reasons, will work now. So far it hasn?
t. In fact, just last week, the EU?s attempt to strengthen the "democratic"
opposition to Milosevic backfired, embarrassing opposition leaders by making
them look like "pro-Western puppets." Why bother to oppose Milosevic if you?
ll be just as cold when winter comes?
Then there?s the dirty provenance of this idea. Though no Marxist will admit
it, the tactic comes from a persistent strain in Communist thought: the
worse the better. The more suffering among the masses, the sooner revolution
will come. Sometimes the notion is credited to Lenin, at other times to
Stalin or Trotsky, but every faction has advocated it at one time or
another, since it fits so well into notions of historical inevitability.
Even today, among the Yugoslav left opposition, there are those who believe
in its power. A Serbian politician called Vladan Batic told the Suddeutsche
Zeitung in August that making civilians suffer is good for democracy: "We
want to increase social tensions. We can then canalise them into political
demands." This is an old dream that has never worked, it?s not working now
and is likely to bring the opposition into disrepute.
And then there?s law and common decency. This administration believes in
international law, even when it is hypocritical or disadvantageous to our
national interest, like the nuclear test ban and ABM treaties. (Of course
our National Security Adviser doesn?t believe in nations, as he?ll tell
anyone who will listen.) But the U.S. abides by the 1977 Protocol Additional
to the Geneva Convention. And while this document is full of quaint
fancy?can you imagine that the U.S. is obliged to forswear the "use of force
against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of
any State"??we are supposed to live under its provisions. These include
Article 51, which declares that civilians should not be targeted, even
incidentally, by military operations, and Article 55, which suggests that
civilians should not be starved or harmed and civilian facilities not be
destroyed.
The Clinton administration has harmed a lot of people, but usually has done
so with precision in the pursuit of some selfish end. Those who?ve been hurt
have put themselves in harm?s way, usually by the desire to be a public
servant or in some other way to help the Clintons. Albright, like Lenin,
targets not individuals but classes of people. Her methods are about as
refined as those of the KLA mob in Pristina last week who chose their victim
by asking him the time. Because the American UN aid worker answered in his
carefully learned Serbo-Croat, he was identified as a member of a class that
deserved only liquidation.
The Serbs are in the same boat in Albright?s eyes?innocent or guilty, there?
s no escape from the Secretary of State?s notion of justice. One tries to
use words carefully, but I can?t think of a person in public life in the
West who so thoroughly combines wickedness and incompetence, who has caused
so much immediate harm, and on so many continents has set so much long-term
mischief in train. Wouldn?t it be nice if the people so upset about the
Brooklyn Museum affair turned their attention to the crime she?s now urging
in our names? |
