Back on Topic, this is a great editorial in Toronto Star and totally expresses my feelings on the subject:
THE TORONTO STAR
Friday, April 23, 1999
OPINION
Demonizing the Serbs, to save face
By Richard Gwyn - Home and Away
ASIDE FROM GREECE, where the commonality is the Orthodox faith, the one
Western democracy where there is considerable sympathy for the Serbs,
although in no way support for what they are doing in Kosovo, is Israel.
Reflecting this popular mood, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has
annoyed Washington by failing to join in the general condemnation of the
Serbian government.
The reason for this responsiveness to the Serbs is that Israelis remember
that during World War II, the one European country where Jews were
comparatively safe was Serbia.
The performance of the Serbs during the awful era of the Holocaust -
matched, in Europe, only by the Danes - derived from the ideology of Tito's
partisans, a substantial majority of whom were Serbs. They were Communists.
They believed therefore in the brotherhood of man, which made a Jew,
provided that he or she was a true member of the proletariat, no different
from a Serb, a Croat, a Muslim.
The wartime record of some other Yugoslavs was quite different. The Fascist
Croat Ustashe outdid the Nazis in their ferocity against Jews, Gypsies,
Serbs. The Waffen SS 21st division was recruited almost entirely from ethnic
Albanians. In the winter of 1944-45 it carried out the last ethnic cleansing
exercise of the war. It did this in Kosovo, against the Serbs.
This history does not in any way exonerate or ameliorate the atrocities
committed by Serbs, first in Bosnia, now in Kosovo.
It does mean that they do not deserve to be demonized as a people as opposed
to being criticized, severely, for the actions of some of them. The
demonizing of Serbs has become the unadmitted policy of NATO. Day after day,
NATO officials like spokesman Jamie Shea use hot-button phrases like
"Holocaust" and "genocide," and make accusations about mass rapes, human
shields, mass graves, without providing any specific evidence for them.
This week, Shea declared that the Serbs in Kosovo were rounding up Albanian
youths "to use as human shields or as blood donors for wounded Serbs." The
Yugoslav Health Minister described this accusation as "disgusting." She's
right. Unless substantiated, these kind of hearsay accusations are
dangerously close to hate propaganda.
In every war, truth is always the first casualty - from the mythical story
of the mass rape of Belgian nuns by the Germans in World War I to the
totally fabricated (by a U.S. PR firm hired by the Kuwaitis) story that the
invading Iraqi soldiers had torn babies from out of oxygen incubators. But a
war conducted for the sake of altruism - if also for the sake of NATO's
self-interest in creating a job for itself - ought to be conducted by some
minimal standards of decency and morality. As the war has progressed, NATO
has performed increasingly as an immoral organization (also as a thoroughly
incompetent one, but that's another matter).
Its military strategy having failed - despite the bombing, the Serbs have
actually added to troops in Kosovo - NATO is now conducting a war of
attrition against the Serb people.
It is out to inflict so much pain upon the Serb people, by bombing bridges
across the Danube far from the fighting, by destroying heating plants and
fertilizer plants and TV towers, and passenger trains, that they will force
their government to surrender.
NATO can't admit this of course. But to justify the increasing "collateral"
damage, and the killing and wounding of civilians, it now depends on
demonizing the Serb people so that the stomachs of the Western public won't
begin to heave too much.
There is something quite sickening in the way a humanitarian war is now
being waged in a manner that depends upon the "enemy" being depicted as
subhumans.
To repeat, none of this in any way excuses what Serbs have done, and still
are doing, in Kosovo.
But we are at risk of losing our own moral compass. To illustrate just how
far we have wandered, consider this proposal for ending the war. All
refugees return. All troops and special police are withdrawn. NATO troops
move in to protect the population. The region becomes self-governing, with a
referendum on independence held in three years.
Ideal for Kosovo, of course. By why not ideal equally to the Krajina region
of Croatia from which Croat troops - trained and directed by retired
American officers - ethnically cleansed 300,000 Serbs in 1996 from lands in
which they had lived for centuries and about which the West did, then and
now, nothing?
Not for one second would NATO apply to Croatia the rules it's demanding of
Serbia, and is now enforcing by mass bombing. But why not? Is it ethnic
cleansing NATO really cares about? Or is it just saving its face?
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