max90, And in Yugoslavia.... I do not think that the air war is going too well just reading between the lines...
First we call up an additional F-117 Stealth Fighter Flight Wing. Now we are sending the Carrier USS Roosevelt into the Adriatic to add 50 more conventional aircraft to the NATO capability. This says to me that the initial strikes have failed to accomplish their purpose.
And let's see what happens when the Russian Spy Ship takes position shortly in the Adriatic near the NATO Fleet and starts sending information on NATO's operations back to the Yugoslavians. Shades of the Cold War.
Eerie, eerie historical similarity here. In April 1941 Nazi Ground Forces bombarded Belgrade for three days before entering the City on Easter Sunday 1941. Here the NATO Forces choose Good Friday 1999 to attack Belgrade proper for the first time. Civilian casualties must have been high tonight. This whole Balkan Affair has a tremendous stench to it, just a tremendous stench...
And meanwhile with 2,000,000 dead in the Sudan and with 6-6,500,000 displaced or refugees many who are currently starving to death, and an active slave trade flourishing and promoted by the Sudanese Government ... where is the Cavalry riding to the rescue????
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News Article by SCOTSMAN on April 01, 1999 at 10:13:24:
A moral imperative - then why not Sudan?
THE SCOTSMAN
Monday March 29
WHY Kosovo? Why not Sudan, where 5,000 people are being killed each month in a bloody war that has dragged on for 15 years? Why not Rwanda in 1994? In Kosovo, 500,000 have fled their homes, according to NATO. In Sudan, five million are displaced because of the war. In Rwanda, genocide claimed one million in 100 days.
"Ending this tragedy is a moral imperative," President Bill Clinton said
after the first air strikes against Serbian forces responsible for the
brutality in Kosovo.
"It is also important to America's national interests," Mr Clinton added,
as he told Americans of the powderkeg at the heart of Europe that has
exploded twice before thiscentury.
However, the idea that there are a different set of dominoes in Kosovo
from Sudan or other humanitarian hotspots around the world doesn't wash with many.
"The fact is that it's right next to Europe and it's a bunch of people who are Caucasian," said Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"It's race and proximity," Mr Cordesman, a military analyst and former US delegate to NATO, continued. "If they weren't that close and they weren't Caucasian we wouldn't be there."
But people are searching for a deeper, more palatable, answer. "People don't like being honest about the answers," Mr Cordesman said. "If you want a morality play go to Oberammagau."
No matter its size, Kosovo sits on a fault-line between Europe, Asia and the Middle East. It is the crucible where Islam meets both the western and orthodox branches of Christianity.
To the south are the US allies Greece and Turkey. To the north, its new democratic friends in central Europe. All around there are other fledgling democracies that could be overwhelmed by new waves of refugees from Kosovo.
NATO and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe bind the US to Europe. The Helsinki Final Act commits them both to eliminating violence and war, including the settlement of boundary disputes.
Twice this century, Americans have paid a terrible price for ignoring
European crises until they erupted into wars.
Max Kampelman, the vice-chairman of the US Institute for Peace, said
yesterday: "By ignoring European crises we've hurt ourselves and we've had to pay a great price. Had we involved ourselves before we might have been able to avoid World War One and World War Two.
"Now we're doing what we can to avoid World War Three. We're doing what we have the capacity to do. This area of Europe has to be handled with kid gloves because the potential for damage is so great."
Joseph Montville, the director of preventive diplomacy at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said: "We've had a very vivid example of Europe's inability by itself to act in a decisive way at the beginning of the Yugoslav war.
"We literally subcontracted the worry about Yugoslavia. We prayed and
wished it would go away, or that the Europeans would handle it. They
couldn't," he said of Europe's futile effort to douse the flames of ethnic
and religious division ignited by Slobodan Milosevic's earlier forays into
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia.
"Europe is not a state," he added. "It's a committee. There's a lot of
internal rivalry and competition. And there's a failure to act with
decisiveness."
Mr Kampelman said: "If we let Milosevic get away with this, like we let
SaddamHussein get away with it, we're encouraging other potential
power-hungry and brutal people. We're more likely to have to face a
serious Sudan if we don't do something here."
Mr Montville said: "We have enormous potential for moral authority if
we're consistent in applying it. There's a combination of moral
consistency and very practical consequences of failure to act."
But there's the rub. A failure to act this time in the Balkans could
result in the collapse of governments in the region and the potential
drawing in against their will of Greece and Turkey on opposite sides of
the war.
Roger Winter, director of the US committee for refugees and an old Africa hand, asked: "How can you say that a moral imperative is limited
geographically? How can you act if a moral imperative can be selectively applied?"
A total of 2.6 millionSudanese were threatened with famine last year -
100,000 to 200,000 died of starvation in what was described as the worst
humanitarian catastrophe of the decade. A total of 1.9 million have been killed in the grinding 15-year civil war that pits the largely Arab,
Muslim north against the largely black, Christian and animist south;
60,000 a year, 5,000 a month.
In Rwanda in 1994, the Hutus slaughtered one million Tutsis in 100 days in a conscious act of genocide.
When the moral imperative rubs shoulders with the national interest of the United States it is a powerful force, everyone admits.
"If it doesn't, the moral imperative is the weak sister," said Mr Winter,
who has worked in Sudan for 20 years. "When the situation rises to the level in Rwanda in 1994 of real genocide or in the Sudan, where the numbers are currently and cumulatively staggering, then I say that we -and the international community - have to have an unusual response."
"Ending the war in Sudan is a moral imperative." |
