From TELOS's print edition, #114 - Winter 1999
angelfire.com
(page 155)
Symposium on the Kosovo Crisis
As a journal dealing primarily with critical theory, Telos does not, as a rule, become embroiled in current political issues. The following symposium was hastily organized for two reasons. First, the Kosovo crisis touches on many theoretical issues which have been the focus of the journal during the past few years. Second, we have been asked to support a manifesto opposing NATO intervention --a manifesto sponsored by some French intellectuals whose work has appeared in the pages of the journal and many of whose positions we share. The opinions in the following pages are meant to clarify why neither the journal as a whole nor most of its editors can support the following Manifesto of the International Committee "Non … la Guerre/Stop the War."
Europeans Want Peace!
Wednesday, March 24, 1999 will be remembered as a gloomy day in our history: for the first time since 1945, a European sovereign state is being bombed by a military alliance under American command, with total contempt for the rules of international law and in breach of the United Nations Charter.
NATO's agression against Serbia is unacceptable and will only worsen the conflicts it is supposed to resolve. The first victims of the bombings are the Serbs and the Albanians, i.e., the very people NATO's sorcerer's apprentices are pretending to help. This "humanitarian" motive is nothing but a smokescreen, which fools no one: Palestinians, Kurds or Tibetans, struggling against oppression and for international recognition, have never had the benefit of any military support. NATO, originally a purely defensive alliance, is now, under our very eyes, turning into the willing instrument of American and Western aggression in the world.
The restoration of peace in the Balkans depends on an immediate end to military operations, through a clear rejection of American strategies for dividing Europe, and by the opening of genuine political and diplomatic negotiations with the aim of uniting the parties through a long-term peace plan, i.e., a plan which takes into account the right of all peoples to self-determination.
The signatories of this petition condemn the decision of the French and European governments to join this war without even consulting parliaments. They invite French and European citizens to show, by all means available, their rejection of the American war in Europe and their sympathy with the civil populations that are being bombed.
Join the International Committee "Stop the War," Cchampetie@aol.com
Response to a Mendacious Manifesto
Frank Adler
I am shocked and deeply saddened at the cynical one-sidedness of the "Europeans Want Peace!" Manifesto; so much contempt for "Western" (especially American) aggression against Serbia, and not a single sentence condemning Serb atrocities committed against the Kosovar Albanians. No mention of the systematic brutality (expulsion, murder, rape, robbery, and humiliation) that was openly practiced by Serb forces and widely reported well before the NATO bombs began to fall. Instead, we are being told to believe that Serbia is the victim, and NATO, a tool in the hands of American warmongers, is the aggressor. Europeans, the Manifesto says, should reject "American strategies for dividing Europe," and support peace negotiations, which take into account "the right of all peoples to self-determination." Apparently, those who signed the Manifesto see nothing inconsistent with these objectives in the actions of Slobodan Milosevic who, were it not for the American aggressors, would be more than happy to welcome back all the Kosovar refugees his forces have brutally expelled, and to restore the regional autonomy that he himself suppressed in 1989 as the first step toward the constitution of a Greater Serbia.
Instead of compassion for the Kosovar victims and outrage against the thuggery the Serbs call ethnic cleansing, the Manifesto signers vent their anger at the US, as if it were the primary cause, not only of the Kosovo crisis, but of destabilizing Europe politically, colonizing it economically, and cretinizing it culturally. Somehow, MacDonalds and Bruce Willis action films, both abominations, though not ones forced upon unwilling European consumers, become conflated with a purely defensive NATO operation, one taken as a last resort after months of negotiation, broken agreements, and unabated terror against the Kosovars. Such anti-Americanism was the subject of a brilliant polemic by Pascal Bruckner (Le Monde, April 7th), which begins by observing that it cynically places on the same plane those who would save the Kosovars and those who would liquidate them. Referring to a parallel petition signed by [French sociologist/philosopher] Pierre Bourdieu and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, calling for an immediate cessation of NATO bombing and self-determination for the Kosovars, Bruckner rhetorically asks by what magical trick does one pass from one to the other? One wonders about the ideological lenses through which certain European intellectuals of the Left and the Right now join ranks in denouncing the US, rather than condemning the real protagonist of the crisis, Slobodan Milosevic, without whose multiple and repeated offenses there would have been no NATO response whatsoever.
As a Jew and as a college professor who teaches a course on the Holocaust, I cannot be indifferent to a pattern of Serb aggression that seems all too familiar to accounts of the horrors visited upon European Jews by Germany and collaborationist states during WWII, when practicing their own form of ethnic cleansing with the aim of rendering Europe Judenfrei: deportation, confiscation of property, destruction, dehumanization, execution. I refrain from using the loaded term genocide and making a direct comparison, for, as Elie Wiesel says, to make Kosovo identical to Auschwitz is to make Auschwitz identical to Kosovo. It is not that, thank God! But the family resemblance is unmistakable. Implicit in the Manifesto is the charge of selective morality: why intervene on behalf of the Kosovars and not the Kurds, Tutsis or other groups facing liquidation? Signers of the Manifesto would have us believe that coming to the aid of the Kosovars is nothing more than a pretext for Americans to intervene and dominate as they always do. First, on principle, the practice of ethnic cleansing should always be condemned and combatted. Despite their new-found reverence for unqualified national sovereignty, signers of the Manifesto affirm "the right of all peoples to self-determination." Curiously, and despite historical and contemporary examples, they fail to recognize that these two principles, often in conflict, will become more problematic as ethno-nationalism becomes more prevalent. Second, because not all victimized groups are or can be helped, it does not follow that no group can. Of course, interests are at play along with moral principles. Kosovo is in Europe and within NATO's legitimate purview. A destabilization of the Balkans would be disastrous for all concerned, and certainly the peaceful integration of former Yugoslavia into the European Community (as with Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic) would end the economic and political isolation, orchestrated by Milosevic, that has so noticeably degraded life in what once had been, under Tito, a relatively affluent communist state.
As opposed to the Manifesto, my own view is that NATO's intervention was too little too late. Each instance of prior hesitation only emboldened Milosevic and led to more Serb aggression. If Vukovar had been prevented in 1991, there would have been no Srebrenica in 1995. Have we already forgotten? The Serb siege of Vukovar left over 5,000 dead, including 200 of the 265 patients who were removed from the municipal hospital and summarily executed. At Srebrenica, under the eyes of Dutch U.N. peacekeeping troops, Serb troops directed by General Mladic systematically executed between 8,000 and 10,000 Bosnian Muslims. And without Srebrenica there never would have been Ra‡ak, the village in Kosovo where 45 residents were executed this past January. And after that, how many more Ra‡aks had there been before the West finally took some action? Opponents of the NATO bombing claim that it was the cause of the intensified ethnic cleansing that led to the exodus of more than 500,000 Kosovar refugees. They forget that, during the summer of 1998, an earlier Serb offensive already had generated an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 Albanian refugees. We know now that, during the Rambouillet Conference and the Holbrooke mission to Belgrade, Serb plans had already been made for executing Kosovar intellectuals, journalists, and political activists, as well as for the scorched-earth campaign that actually began several days before the first bombs fell. No sooner did the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) monitors leave Kosovo than the plan (code-named Horseshoe) was put into effect.
Given this lamentable record of Western indifference, compounded by prolonged, fruitless negotiations and empty threats, it is hard to comprehend the Manifesto's depiction of American and European leadership as overly aggressive or trigger-happy. This is not Vietnam redux. In fact, practically all of the Western leaders are of the anti-war generation and were opponents of the Vietnam adventure, so much so that political pundits have noted an unusual situation where the Left seems to be hawks, and the Right doves. That alone should tell you something about how this military operation is different, and why we are there.
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