The Telegraph
Original link: We are bandits guilty of murder
We are bandits guilty of murder
By Harold Pinter
2-May-1999
THE Nato war is a bandit action, committed with no serious consideration
of the consequences, confused, ill thought,
miscalculated, an act of deplorable machismo. Yet, according to opinion
polls most British people support this war,
believing we may have a moral duty to intervene and the moral authority
to do so.
What is moral authority? Where does it come from? How do you achieve it?
Who bestows it upon you? How do you
persuade others that you possess it? You don't. You don't have to
bother. What you have is power. Bombs and power. And
that's your moral authority.
Until the West started negotiating with the Kosovo Liberation Army, thus
bestowing moral authority on its uprising, the
number of people who died in Kosovo through political violence was fewer
than in the preceding decade in Northern
Ireland. Think about that.
The British populace and media have accepted 40 days of bombing in this,
the biggest conflagration since the Second World
War, with surprisingly few questions. Images of the real and horrible
plight of the Kosovo Albanians produce an emotional
upsurge whereby we feel right to intervene, and that somehow
contributions to Kosovo appeals and support for bombing
have a moral equivalence.
Not enough questions are asked of the politicians, spin doctors and Nato
commanders and of what they knew. They knew that
when the bombing began, immediate and major ethical cleansing by Serbian
paramilitaries was likely to occur as part of a
planned operation. Intelligence reports showed the cleansing was coming
but Nato leaders claim they had no idea it would
be on such a scale. They did not need spy satellites to learn that as
long ago as October, when Nato first threatened bombing
Serbia, Vojislav Seselj, the loathsome vice-president and suspected war
criminal, promised in parliament that as soon as the
first Nato bomb dropped "all the Albanians would vanish from Kosovo".
Contrary to the usual accusations, President Milosevic is not an
all-powerful tyrant. He managed to stay in power only after
losing popular electoral support by making a pact with opposition
hardmen such as Seselj. Cleansing Kosovo in the event of
a Nato attack was the likely price of the deal with Seselj. Bomb-happy
Nato began hurling weapons, and hundreds of
Kosovar refugees, televisual victims, spewed through border posts and on
to our screens. Less than half of British people
polled in surveys had supported bombing when it began. But now Blair and
his war party had a war that people would
support.
Nobody disputes that the Kosovar Albanians were brutally expelled. Yet
who asked whether the bombs were dropped
responsibly (if bombs can be dropped responsibly)? Nato pinned the blame
for the exodus solely on the Serbs and they were
being cynical with the truth.
A fundamentally inaccurate picture of Serbians has given rise to their
being demonised. It is time to unmask the repeated
distortions, disinformation and plain ignorance propagated by this
Government with the effect of fostering public support for
the war. Ministers gave the impression that Serbs were somehow "to
blame" for being bombed because they supported
Milosevic. Yet in the last election, in autumn 1996, Milosevic was
defeated! The bonehead bombing by Nato of a people, as
opposed to strictly military targets, had the consequence of enraging
them and stifling opposition so that Milosevic
strengthened his previously tenuous grip on power.
The Government's mantra is: "We tell the truth. They lie." We are being
spun and managed, and kept on message with the
desperate assertion that this a replay of the Holocaust and Milosevic is
Adolf Hitler. The trains on to which ethnic Albanians
were forced did not lead to gas chambers but to Macedonia. I cannot see
how you can compare "ethnic cleansing", which is
essentially the expulsion of people from a given area, to the
extermination of a race. But if you even question these assertions
you run the risk of being called an appeaser or pro-Serb by Clare Short.
Let us probe some of our lies, such as the one given in writing on April
12 to the International Federation of Journalists that
Yugoslav television would not be bombed. Ten days later it was, with the
loss of some two dozen lives. As Nato "always
tells the truth", these civilians had no reason to expect to die. This
was justified by the Nato spokesman, Jamie Shea, because
Belgrade television displayed "tolerance for brutality".
"Tolerance for brutality" - remember that phrase - remember it if this
conflict continues to deepen, remember it if it lasts
months or years. Tolerant Tony Blair shrugged off the deaths, there were
no words of regret. Whatever one might say about
Radio Television Serbia's ugly output, the Geneva Convention states
quite clearly that only civilians directly involved in
hostilities may be killed. The make-up girl who was killed wielded a
powder compact, not a Kalashnikov.
So we are guilty not only of lying but of murder, and also hypocrisy. We
rightly condemned the killing of the journalist
Slavko Curuvija, who wrote things that Milosevic did not like. But Nato
killed Belgrade media workers for saying things
that Nato doesn't like.
It is not the point that Serbian paramilitaries have committed far more
murders. In ignoring the United Nations and all
customary guidelines of international law the "19 democratic nations"
(as Nato wrongly calls itself) may claim the moral
authority to intervene on humanitarian grounds if their own credentials
are beyond question. Let us cite the record of a Nato
member, democratic Turkey: 1.4 million Kurds cleansed in a repression
far worse than Kosovo, including air bombardment
of its own citizens. Furthermore, I will reveal in a television
programme on Tuesday how the Clinton Administration aided
ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia in 1995.
If you are going to start a war it is a good idea to have a war aim. Our
media accept each different pronouncement of "why
we bomb" with sleepy equanimity. At first our bombers went to "prevent a
humanitarian catastrophe" and enforce the
Rambouillet agreement from several miles up. When the humanitarian
catastrophe duly came, the non-compliance of
Milosevic meant Rambouillet was tossed aside.
It would be amusing, if it were not so depressing, to trace, for
example, the shifting position on what kind of peace force we
want. As cruise missiles continued exploding to no avail, Robin Cook,
the Foreign Secretary, began to drop the stipulation
that it should be a Nato or "Nato-led" force. Then, when Russian
diplomacy edged towards the notion of a truly international
peace force, this prospect was duly rejected and the "Nato led force"
idea crept back into play. On another front, Clinton
declared that the arrest and indictment of Milosevic as a war criminal
is a stated aim. Soon after, Robin Cook and Madeleine
Albright, the US Secretary of State, declared on Breakfast with Frost
that justice, in the shape of arraigning Milosevic,
would be a nice by-product but is not a war aim.
Is it about getting the Kosovo Albanians back? No air war has ever
worked without a ground assault, nor - if anything were
left of Kosovo after a ground war - would a Nato protectorate be likely
to help ethnic Albanians return. In nearby Bosnia,
despite the presence of tens of thousands of Nato troops, only 78,000 of
the 1.2 million people displaced by the war have
been able to return to their homes.
These are the kind of facts we need to be thinking about. This is how we
will come to understand that Tony Blair is leading
us in a sanctimonious crusade that bestows a sheen of moral purpose but
is fundamentally hollow. If we are not to be guilty
of hypocrisy by tackling only Milosevic, we risk a permanent state of
global war. Messrs Blair and Clinton will need to
continue like humanitarian sharks, constantly swimming and gobbling up
nasty little minnows as and when they decree. But
no bigger fish like Turkey or China, please! Then we might really start
having to look at ourselves.
Harold Pinter and Stuart Urban, the film-maker, have made the first
programme for British television arguing resolutely
against the war. Counterblast is on Tuesday, BBC2, 7.30pm |
