IS NATO RIGHT TO BOMB YUGOSLAVIA?
A PERSONAL VIEW
by
RICHARD BURNS
Cambridge, England
I am not a politician and I am not a journalist. But I think today we face
the most serious international crisis in Europe since the outbreak of the
Second World War.
Over the last fifteen years, I have watched events in Yugoslavia very
closely. In 1987, I was lucky enough to spend three years living and working
in what was then a beautiful and friendly country. Since my return to
Cambridge in 1991, I have watched Yugoslavia progressively fall apart. In
that time, I have been more or less stunned into keeping quiet rather than
try to confront in public the views and interpretations put forward by the
majority of Western politicians and journalists, of nearly all persuasions.
Knowing Yugoslavia, I am perhaps not an entirely typical Western TV viewer.
I have been outraged and sickened like everyone else by pictures of
refugees, battles and atrocities, but I have always tried to get underneath
the broadcast images - because I know that images of suffering can be angled
and spliced to serve political ends. And I have felt constantly bitter and
angry about the daily biases and distortions in our media. What stunned me,
I think, was a typical feeling, that so many people have in this country:
whatever I say won't make any difference anyway. But now
that Yugoslavia is likely to be bombed, I finally feel obliged to speak out.
I should have spoken out earlier.
My view is this. In attempting to deal with the Kosovo crisis, NATO's policy
has become increasingly unreliable, irrational and dangerous. This policy
now poses a danger not just to the Balkans but to the whole world.
Surely, the duty of any outsider mediating in an inter-ethnic conflict
should not be to take sides with one party but to gain the confidence of
both by behaving as fair referee and arbiter. But NATO has never been an
honest broker in the Balkans. Far from it. The Paris talks last week were so
heavily weighted against the Serbs that their delegation could not possibly
have agreed with a scrap of dignity or honour. The NATO group's explicit aim
was to get the Kosovo Albanians to agree to its proposals and so isolate the
Serbs and either shame them into an almost impossible climb-down or
deliberately provoke them to refusal.
Accordingly, the ethnic Albanians at least for the time being sorted - or
pretended to sort out - their internal squabbles, and for good tactical
reasons lapped up NATO's 'peace-plan's - as the best way of eventually
wresting the territory of Kosovo from Serbia.
With their explicit territorial ambitions for a Greater Albania, it would
suit the KLA very well to get Serbia bombed. Every inch of ground they mine
and every gunshot their snipers fire is intended to do its bit towards
locking NATO's missiles onto Serbian positions. Yet the KLA is not a
national government but the rebel army of a militant and violent separatist
movement. And if NATO's intention is to drop bombs on Yugoslav military
installations, one might ask, why not equally on the KLA, which is also an
organised force which is killing innocent people?
In fact it is highly unlikely that NATO will bomb the KLA because, over the
last ten years, both individually and collectively, Western countries have
done everything in their power first to destabilise and then to aid and abet
the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
I suggest that the arguments against bombing Yugoslavia so strongly outweigh
those in favour that to embark upon a bombing campaign is at best misguided
and at worst lunatic. Firstly, Yugoslavia is a sovereign country. Its
government and leaders have every right under international law to defend
themselves from attack. By becoming an international aggressor and siding
openly with a rebel force, NATO would contrave precisely the international
laws which it is pledged to support. No European sovereign state has been
attacked from outside since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968,
and before that, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 - and before that,
Hitler. These are the dangerous precedents that NATO is now blithely
following.
Secondly, NATO possesses no mandate from the United Nations to act as an
international police force. Many countries outside NATO are strongly opposed
to bombing, including Russia and China, and those countries should be
listened too carefully, not ignored. Even countries inside NATO seem
unhappy, especially Italy and Greece.
Thirdly, the recent bombing of Iraq by NATO has shown that bombs have hardly
damaged the barbarous regime in that country but have simply enabled the
Americans and British to show off and try out their new toys. And bombs have
certainly not been effective. In this connection, as far as Iraq is
concerned, the BBC Panorama programme on 22nd March has proved beyond any
doubt that NATO not only used the UNSCOM weapons inspection mission as a
cover for its own spying activities - so making a mockery of the United
Nations' dwindling claims to be any sort of genuinely representative and
effective international organisation - but by following its own power-crazed
interests ruined a genuine opportunity for the UN weapons inspectors'
mission for peace in the Middle East.
Fourthly, the Serbs' argument that NATO's policy, first at the negotiating
table and secondly through its bombing campaign, ultimately aims at support
for an Albanian Republic of Kosovo and a 'Greater Albania', is hardly
possible to refute. It is a moot point whether such a policy is wise in the
long-term. A Greater Albania which included Kosovo would inevitably threaten
Macedonia. It could also threaten Greece.
But, surely, the most convincing argument of all is that in Kosovo, where
armed conflict has already exploded, bombing by superpowers will not solve
anything, but on the contrary, will exacerbate all existing problems and
concatenate more of them. In this part of the Balkans, by forcing the local
opponents into even more extreme positions, bombing will distance the
chances of meaningful peace and liberalisation for decades to come.
Neighbouring countries are likely get sucked in - in the first instance
Macedonia, which already has its own long-standing problem of rapidly
increasing numbers of ethnic Albanian citizens (already one third of the
population), and is desperately trying to maintain balance and moderation.
Further ripples of destabilisation are capable of involving Croatia, Bosnia,
Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and even Turkey and Italy. And destabilisation
will not necessarily remain confined to this immediate zone. Russia is
Serbia's traditional ally. The Russians could not experience bombs on Serbia
as anything less than a snub, a taunt, a stab, a provocation. Russia has
already been made to feel vulnerable enough, and a weakened Russia could all
too easily look to an external war to unite its population. That really
could be dangerous.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO has turned itself progressively
into a club of short-sighted and ignorant technocratic bullies smugly
masquerading as defenders of human rights. At least during the Cold War
there was a balance of power. Now that Russia is in economic and political
confusion, there is nothing in the world to oppose the might of NATO, and
power has gone to its leaders' heads. Surely it is now time to question
Britain's role in this spurious organisation. We have increasingly become
compliant lackeys to the USA, and what is worse, we take our pro-American
attitude so much for granted that we have forgotten why we adopt it. As a
result, we have become little more than agents for American global
imperialism.
Connected with all this, is the apparently incidental fact that the British
government has not allowed Parliament itself to debate either the bombing of
Iraq or the projected bombing of Serbia. At first sight this may appear to
be a merely British domestic matter, a relatively minor side-issue. But it
is certainly one that has not gone unnoticed, is not regarded as merely
coincidental, and is not likely to be forgotten by those of us in Britain
who are interested in upholding our democracy. Calls for unity in order to
combat threats and dangers posed outside are well worn techniques deployed
by those in power to avert internal dissent and to centralise power and
decision-making processes.
We ought to treat such tactics by our own rulers with the greatest degree of
suspicion, and look carefully to the defence of our own hard won 'freedoms'.
Apart from the fact that in the present precarious world order, NATO simply
cannot be allowed to go dropping bombs with impunity wherever it likes,
there is yet another convincing argument against bombing, and one that is
strictly strategic. To be effective militarily, bombing would need to be
followed up by the presence of an army on the ground, and this could in turn
suck in forces which had originally been intended as peace keepers. Such a
scenario could easily include our own British troops. Frankly, the image of
our British or for that matter French professional soldiers engaged in
hand-to-hand fighting against their Serbian counterparts must be abhorrent
to anyone who remembers the history of the last two world wars, when the
Serbs were our loyal allies and were popularly regarded as brave, even
heroic fighters. Of course it goes without saying that no one would expect
American ground troops to do that kind of job any more. Washington remembers
its own Vietnam fiasco all too well. The American answer to its allies these
days appears to be a hyped up version of: 'OK you guys, you just use our
technology, and we'll co-ordinate the bombs and missiles. You Europeans can
do the dirty work on the ground.
As it is, even experienced British and American generals have publicly
questioned the use of bombs by NATO in Kosovo. Their argument is that
military and political outcomes have not been thought through or prepared
for. What would happen, for example, if President Milosevic ordered his
forces to attack NATO ground forces which are now stationed on the
Macedonian border? Nobody seems to have any answer to that question.
The notion that air bombardment should be used to force the Serbs back to
the conference table has also been aired. "The door is still open," say NATO
spokesmen. "All that would be needed would be a single phone call." For all
its plausibility to western TV viewers, this idea shows a rather poor
reading or understanding of the patterns of pride and defiance in the face
of aggressors which have marked Serbian history and culture for seven
centuries - unless of course NATO intends to flatten the whole of Serbia.
Yet Madelaine Allbright and Robin Cook keep arguing that to do something is
better than to do nothing.
("Muddily-Not-At-All-Bright" and "Cock Robin" would be more accurate names
for these all-but comic figures, so sadly lacking in all basic skills of
diplomacy other than the peremptory issuing of ultimatums. They certainly
appear as ridiculous in Serbian eyes as they do in our own. As an irreverent
aside, I can't help wondering how long Cook would last in Mo Molan's
position in Northern Ireland. Five minutes?) The spurious NATO claim is that
intervention now will prevent worse.
GR
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