John : Russians feel the NATO onslaught in Serbia is the beginning of WW3.
What Russia sees
There is anger, contempt and incredulity about Nato among these educated people
By Karen Hewitt
The Guardian, Saturday April 24, 1999
For a month I have been teaching Russian students, in cities like Perm and Nizhny Novgorod which used to be major centres of the former Soviet 'industrial-military complex'. Here, Russian teachers and professionals, decent local politicians and legal idealists who have been defending what they genuinely thought to be Western values, are overwhelmed with anger, contempt and incredulity at Nato policies.
'How do you help refugees by creating thousands more of them? What is the point of bombing cities and peaceful civilians?'
I say that Nato's strategy is muddled and confused but full of good intentions. They are unimpressed. America is a super-power which is always ready to bomb other countries, they tell me. Do I not believe that there is a broader strategy behind the bombings?
Sitting around the kitchen tables, I found their thinking more and more alarming - but not easy to refute. In classes I would ask the students what they knew about the situation.They insisted that they did not support Milosevic; they were against ethnic cleansing and the cruel treatment of all Yugoslavians including Kosovo Albanians. They knew about quarrels among the Kosovan leaders and groups, and about the drug-smuggling which finances many of their arms and activities.
On the other hand, they were vague about the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and they showed some anti-Muslim prejudice. ('Why destabilise Europe in order to support Muslims who are supported by Turkey which suppresses Kurds? What is the reason?')
Serious Russian TV news provides lengthy reports from Brussels and question-and-answer sessions with correspondents throughout the Balkans. Naturally the news is biased; there are no long sympathetic interviews with Nato policy-makers and generals; the spokesmen from the weary lines of refugees declare that they are fleeing first from bombing and secondly from Milosevic's Serbs; villainous-looking Albanians announce that they are longing to march into Serbia alongside Nato forces.
Viewers also see the crowds of middle-aged men and women linking hands in peaceful protest as they stand on the Danube bridges. Or workers sleeping in factories to try to protect them from being bombed. Or the bloody mess of bombed refugees with Nato voices coolly reporting that this was probably another Serbian ruse.
While not defending the bombing, I tried to give these students a brief history of the break-up of Yugoslavia from the British point of view, our confusion and guilt about not doing anything much during earlier atrocities, the lessons - the wrong lessons - learnt about the swift Serbian withdrawal after the brief bombing raids in Bosnia, the belief that sometimes countries ought to intervene to protect victims.
'All countries have their internal problems but Nato doesn't bomb them. Why didn't Nato bomb Northern Ireland?' (Angry laughter].
I explained to them, as so often we have to explain to Americans, that the IRA is not the Army of the Republic of Ireland and that the British government is not forcing itself upon an unwilling majority . They listened with interest: 'All right, so it is more complicated in Ireland. But it is always more complicated in internal affairs. Kosovo is not simply about massacres of Albanians. What about the Serbs who have long historical claims to the territory?'
So I ask them for their own explanations of Nato policy, and suddenly they are not only angry, they are young and frightened. They explain it thus. America is obsessed with proving how powerful it is. Europe, of which Russia is now a part, is becoming politically and economically too powerful for US comfort. So it must destabilise Europe in its most sensitive parts - in the Balkans.
'Hang on,' I say, 'Most of the Nato countries are European: why should they be wanting to destabilise Europe?'
'Because they are poodles of America, they want to cling to the strongest power - and also sell their arms. But as the Danube is destroyed for trading, and the economic possibilities of all these European countries are destroyed, they will realise that this is a war against Europe. And against Russia.'
'Against Russia?'
'Why can't you see it? They didn't bomb us when we attacked Chechnya - though the situation is exactly the same as the Serbs attacking the Albanians. Maybe they didn't bomb us because we have nuclear arms. But they realise they can bomb other Slav countries, in order to force us Russians to enter the war. That's why they use Nato and not the UN, and why they refuse Russian attempts to have diplomacy. And then, in destroying the European economy and attacking the Slav countries, they will have started the third world war. Don't you think this will happen?'
This was their response to an otherwise incomprehensible war which seemed to violate all moral and strategic sense. Somewhere there must be an over-arching explanation, a politically - if not morally - intelligible US policy. An American dream of ultimate grandeur.
Embarrassed, I suggested that most probably the Nato powers had given hardly a thought to Russia except in terms of diplomatic bargaining games. I said we had no concept of Slav loyalties. I tried to explain the cock-up theory of events. But I was talking to people with a solid education in world history, and ineradicable knowledge of what Hitler's anti-Slav dreams had meant for Russia. If I thought their reaction was close to paranoia, they thought mine was naively parochial and unhistorical.
Back in Moscow I met Russians familiar with the West who had been in Britain when the war started. They too were incredulous at what they had seen. 'We used to be told democracy means freedom of information. Your government suppresses information. How can you be so ignorant - and not care that you are so ignorant? You never discuss the view from
Russia and Eastern European countries which have a different history. Yugoslavia is part of that history, and your politicians only listen to America. Are our students really so stupid?'
I wonder. The fears of a third world war obsessing those angry, white-faced students, as they huddled against the bitter Russian spring and redefined the American-led future, now suddenly seem a lot less preposterous than they did four weeks ago.
• Karen Hewitt, of the Oxford University Institute for Slavonic Studies, is an honorary professor at Perm University
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