Robert Fisk:
> INDEPENDENT (London) MAY 13
>
> ROBERT FISK - What is the point of Nato? An Atlantic alliance that has
> brought us to this catastrophe should be wound up
>
> How much longer do we have to endure the folly of Nato's war in the
> Balkans? In just 50 days, the Atlantic alliance has failed in everything
> it set out to do. It has failed to protect the Kosovo Albanians from
> Serbian war crimes. It has failed to cow Slobodan Milosevic. It has
failed
> to force the withdrawal of Serb troops from Kosovo. It has broken
> international law in attacking a sovereign state without seeking a UN
> mandate. It has killed hundreds of innocent Serb civilians - in our name,
> of course - while being too cowardly to risk a single Nato life in
defence
> of the poor and the weak for whom it meretriciously claimed to be
> fighting. Nato's war cannot even be regarded as a mistake - it is a
> criminal act.
>
> It is, of course, now part of the mantra of all criticism of Nato that we
> must mention Serb wickedness in Kosovo. So here we go. Yes, dreadful,
> wicked deeds - atrocities would not be a strong enough word for it - have
> gone on in Kosovo: mass executions, rape, dispossession, "ethnic
> cleansing", the murder of intellectuals. Some of Nato's propaganda
> programme has done more to cover up such villainy than disclose it. And,
> as we all know, the dozens of Kosovo Albanians massacred on the road to
> Prizren were slaughtered by Nato - not by the Serbs as Nato originally
> claimed. But I have seen with my own eyes - travelling under the Nato
> bombardment - the house-burning in Kosovo and the hundreds of Albanians
> awaiting dispossession in their villages.
>
> But back to the subject - and perhaps my first question should be put a
> little more boldly. Not: "How much longer do we have to endure this
> stupid, hopeless, cowardly war?" but: "How much longer do we have to
> endure Nato? How soon can this vicious American-run organisation be
> deconstructed and politically 'degraded', its pontificating generals put
> back in their boxes with their mortuary language of 'in-theatre assets'
> and 'collateral damage'"?
>
> And how soon will our own compassionate, socialist liberal leaders
realise
> that they are not fighting a replay of the Second World War nor striking
a
> blow for a new value-rich millennium? In Middle East wars, I've always
> known when a side was losing - it came when its leaders started to
> complain that journalists were not being fair to their titanic struggle
> for freedom/ democracy/human rights/sovereignty/ soul. And on Monday,
Tony
> Blair started the whining. After 50 days of television coverage soaked in
> Nato propaganda, after weeks of Nato officials being questioned by
> sheep-like journalists, our Prime Minister announces the press is
ignoring
> the plight of the Kosovo Albanians.
>
> The fact that this is a lie is not important. It is the nature of the
lie.
> Anyone, it seems, who doesn't subscribe to Europe's denunciations of
> Fascism or who raises an eyebrow when - in an act of utter folly - the
> Prime Minister makes unguaranteed promises that the Kosovo Albanians will
> all go home, is now off-side, biased - or worthy of one of Downing
> Street's preposterous "health warnings" because they allegedly spend more
> time weeping for dead Serbs than the numerically greater number of dead
> Albanians (the assumption also being, of course, that it is less
> physically painful to be torn apart by a Nato cluster bomb than by a Serb
> rocket-propelled grenade).
>
> President Clinton - who will in due course pull the rug from under Mr
> Blair - tells the Kosovo Albanians that they have the "right to return".
> Not the Palestinian refugees of Lebanon, of course. They do not have such
> a right. Nor the Kurds dispossessed by our Nato ally, Turkey. Nor the
> Armenians driven from their land by the Turks in the world's first
> holocaust (there being only one holocaust which Messers Clinton and Blair
> are interested in invoking just now).
>
> Mr Blair's childish response to this argument is important. Just because
> wrongs have been done in the past doesn't mean we have to stand idly by
> now. But the terrible corollary of this dangerous argument is this: that
> the Palestinians, the Armenians, the Rwandans or anyone else cannot
expect
> our compassion. They are "the past". They are finished.
>
> But what is all this nonsense about Nato standing for democracy? It
> happily allowed Greece to remain a member when its ruthless colonels
> staged a coup d'etat which imprisoned and murdered intellectuals. Nato
had
> no objection to the oppression of Salazar and Caetano - who were at the
> same time busy annihilating "liberation" movements almost identical to
the
> Kosovo Liberation Army. Indeed, the only time when Nato proposed to
> suspend Portugal's membership - I was there at the time and remember this
> vividly - was when the country staged a revolution and declared itself a
> democracy.
>
> Is it therefore so surprising that Nato now turns out to be so brutal? It
> attacks television stations and kills Serb journalists - part of
> Milosevic's propaganda machine, a "legitimate target", shrieks Clare
> Short.
>
> And what about the Chinese embassy? Did the CIA really use an old map? Or
> did the CIA believe that - because Mira Markovic (the wife of the
Yugoslav
> President) had such close relations with the Chinese government that both
> she and President Slobodan Milosevic might be sleeping in the Chinese
> embassy. Nato, remember, had already targeted the Milosevic residence in
> an attempt to assassinate him. It had already - according to one
> disturbing report - tried to lure the Serb minister of information to the
> Serb television headquarters just before it was destroyed.
>
> So why not the Chinese embassy? Would Nato do anything so desperate?
Well,
> Nato is desperate. It is losing the war, it is destroying itself.
>
> As for General Wesley Clark, the man who thought he could change history
> by winning a war without ground troops, we have only to recall his
> infantile statement of last month about President Milosevic. "We are
> winning and he is losing - and he knows it," General Clark told us.
>
> He did not explain why Mr Milosevic would need to be told such a thing if
> he knew it. Nor did he recall that he had once accepted from General
Ratko
> Mladic - the Bosnian Serb military leader whose men were destroying the
> Muslims of Sarajevo - a gift of an engraved pistol. Nor, of course, did
> General Clark remind us that General Mladic and his colleague Radovan
> Karadjic remain free in Bosnia - which is under the firm control of Nato
> troops.
>
> Nor are we going to be given the good news which this war portends for
> General Clark's most loyal allies, the arms manufacturers of our proud
> democracies. Boeing hit a 52-week high last week with stock trading at
> just under $44 (#27) British Aerospace share prices have gained a 43 per
> cent increase since Nato's bombardment commenced. The British government
> said on Tuesday that "military operations" were costing #37m "excluding
> munitions". Now why, I wonder, did this figure exclude munitions?
>
> All of which makes me wonder, too, if this disastrous war isn't going to
> be the end of Nato. I hope so. As a citizen of a new, modern Europe, I
> don't want my continent led by the third-rate generals and two-bit
> under-secretaries who have been ranting on our television screens for the
> past 50 days. I don't want Europe to be "protected" any longer by the US.
> If that means the end of the Atlantic alliance, so be it.
>
> Because an Atlantic alliance that has brought us to this catastrophe
> should be wound up. Until it is, Europe will never - ever - take
> responsibility for itself or for the dictators who threaten our society.
> Until then, Europe will never lay its own lives on the line for its own
> people - which is what the Kosovo Albanians need. Until Nato is dead,
> there will never be a real European defence force. And until Nato is
dead,
> there will be no need to seek the international mandate from the United
> Nations which "humanitarian action" needs.
>
> And the UN, ultimately, is the only institution the poor and the sick and
> the raped and the dispossessed can rely on. Nato troops are not going to
> die for Kosovo. So what is the point of Nato?
>
>
> |
