Another excellent read from the British press:
They probably thought Bulgaria was part of Serbia
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By A. N. Wilson (Columnist)
02 May, 1999
Independent on Sunday
independent.co.uk
A recent survey by Gallup suggests that public support for the war
grows and grows, each bloody, bungling week that it continues.
Apparently, our arguments, the anti-war arguments, have counted for
absolutely nothing: namely that bombing could only make life
infinitely worse for the people it was supposed to help. The hundreds
of thousands of refugees pouring into Macedonia (the next theatre of
war if this crisis continues) and Albania only convince the
pro-bombers of the rightness of their cause.
You could go round in circles for ever arguing with these people. We,
the anti-bombers would want to say the worst atrocities only took
place under the cover of bombing. The bombers would say that Milosevic
had planned all along to massacre, rape and pillage. The
pacific-minded ask why then adequate provision was not made in advance
to help the refugees. And the armchair bombers say, "What? And give
Milosevic carte blanche to expel the Kosovan Albanians into our
carefully prepared refugee camps?"
These arguments have been rehearsed so often that they would be boring
if they were not so enraging, so heart-rending. Behind them, however,
lurks a whole range of bigger, more nebulous questions: what is Nato's
game? Why have the rapists and cut-throats in other parts of the world
not provoked a five-week bombing campaign from the massed power of
America and her allies? What is so special about the Balkans? If we
are all internationalists now (hooray!) - Tony's latest conviction -
why can't we produce a shopping list of places, from Rwanda to East
Timor to Israel, where flagrant abuses of human rights should surely
excite our Prime Minister's moral indignation and the wrath of
America's more hawkish generals and air marshals?
We don't ask such questions merely for the pleasure of making cheap
anti-Blair or anti-Clinton points, irresistible as these are. It is
all too easy to wonder why Tony and Cherie could grin as they shared
jokes and steamed dumplings with the mass murderers of Beijing, but
feel uncontrollable indignation when they contemplate the savagery of
our former allies in war, the Serbs.
Maybe it is in the blunder of bombing Bulgaria that some of the answer
lies. The answer, that is, to our underlying, uneasy question - what's
it all for? What does Nato hope to achieve by simply bombing a
European nation into political non-existence? How is the cause of
European civilisation served by more and more B52s, Harriers and
Tornados taking off into the night skies on their monstrous missions?
What is the end-game?
The almost certain answer is that there is no one single aim behind
this war. Blair might believe, or might like us to believe, that it is
simply a very forceful method of preventing one group of bullies from
intimidating, raping and massacring another group of people. But in
that case, what explains - politically and psychologically - his
perceptible hawkishness when compared with all the other European
leaders? When Gerhard Schroder or President Yeltsin appear to be able
to extract some assurances from the Serbs, some hope that a
peacekeeping force might be allowed into Kosovo, it has sounded, to
date, as if Tony was the one urging Bill not to believe those guys,
but just to keep on bombing. We all know that a peacekeeping force
will eventually have to move into the region. Equally, we know that
the failure to help the former Yugoslavia find peace with its
conflicting races and religions is the greatest of all the EU's
failings.
The pro-bombing party would want to say that it was Europe's failure
to act, first in Bosnia then in Kosovo, which necessitates an American
intervention now - for that is what we mean by Nato intervening.
We anti-bombers feel our European paranoia stir up all kinds of
profoundly pessimistic misgivings. Could it be that the greatest
super-power in the world (indeed, apart from China the only
superpower) only half likes the success of the European Union? We are
not suggesting that there was anything like a plot, still less a
sustained policy here. We are thinking more of the habits of mind
which are suggested by this bombing campaign. This isn't a war being
conducted by the Noel Malcolms or the Melanie Macdonaghs, the tiny
band of Western Europeans who are for their own eccentric reasons
obsessed by the Balkans. It is being conducted not merely by automatic
weapons but by politicians and generals who until five weeks ago
probably would have believed it if you'd told them that Bulgaria was
part of Serbia.
If Tony Blair's instincts had been as European as it suits him,
sometimes, to pretend, he would have been joining British peacekeeping
forces with the Italians, the French, the Russians and the Germans to
work for rehabilitation and peace in Yugoslavia. Instinct, history and
memory would have told him, as it tells true Europeans, the calamities
which can befall the rest of Europe when the Balkans go wrong.
He has no such instincts, memories or sense of history. Blair's
instincts, like those of his Dominatrix or Fairy Godmother, Lady
Thatcher, are to go running to America as a pathetic way of pretending
that Britain still matters, still struts large on the world stage. We
don't. Our involvement in the Balkans war and the particular way in
which we've urged our European partners to go along with a bungled
American campaign is not just morally repellent: it is politically
tragic. It springs from our ambivalence about Europe as a whole: that
sense that the EU was bringing about a new realpolitik has been
wrecked by the bombs. Is that in fact the big idea?
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