Irish Times: When is slaughter of innocents not an outrage?
THE IRISH TIMES Opinion: Wednesday, June 16, 1999
By Vincent Browne
"The world is going to be outraged", said William Cohen, the US
Secretary for Defence, on Monday night. He was speaking of the emerging
evidence of the mass slaughter of Kosovan Albanians by Serbian security forces.
And it is likely that the world will indeed be outraged and justifiably so.
But what is it about the world's capacity for outrage, that, apparently,
there is barely a tittle of outrage about another mass slaughter that has
occurred over 79 days from March 24th last? A mass slaughter perpetrated, in
the main, by forces under the control of Mr Cohen and of his boss, President
Clinton. It was President Clinton who told on March 25th the about-to-be
victims of that mass slaughter: "I cannot emphasise too strongly that the
United States and our European allies have no quarrel with the Serbian
people".
The following is a random catalogue of what Mr Clinton and his friends did
to the people with whom he has "no quarrel":
- March 24th: the first night of the bombing, hundreds of private
houses were blown to bits in the vicinity of Leskovac.
- March 29th: civilian areas of Pristina were bombed and so were water
installations.
- April 8th: 50 civilians were massacred when a passenger train was
bombed in Klisura.
- April 14th: 72 refugees were murdered and 35 injured, including
many women and children, when a refugee convoy was attacked on a bridge by NATO
planes between Djakovica and Prizren.
- April 23rd: NATO planes bombed a television station in Belgrade and
murdered 15 people.
- April 27th: NATO bombs murdered 12 children and eight adults and
injured 150 others in Surdulica
- May 3rd: NATO bombed a bus near Savine Vode and murdered 20
civilians.
- May 14th: Nearly 100 ethnic Albanian civilians, mainly women,
children and old people, were murdered when NATO dropped cluster bombs on them.
Several hundred civilians were murdered, maybe well over a thousand, by NATO
forces.
While NATO did not directly target these civilians, in conducting the aerial
bombardment it undertook and with the kind of bombs it used, it was entirely
foreseeable that a large number of innocent people would be killed.
For instance, in the case of the targeting of bridges that were used
primarily by civilians, it is not enough to say that NATO was merely reckless
as to the fate of civilians. NATO knowingly murdered these civilians. More than
that. In the conduct of the bombing campaign, NATO targeted not just the
military apparatus of Milosevic, it sought to devastate and did devastate the
civilian infrastructure of Yugoslavia. Electricity power stations, water
supplies, schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, train tracks, factories, offices
and thousands of homes have been torn apart.
All this done to a people with whom there is "no quarrel". And
there is no "world outrage", hardly any outrage at all. Even if it is
accepted that the end was justified -- and manifestly intervention to stop
massacres and ethnic cleansing was justified -- have we got to a stage whereby
the morality of the end justifying the means is now universally endorsed? Are
there no constraints on the means, not even questions of proportionality? In
the campaign to "degrade" the Serbian military capacity, was it
really necessary to target bridges which were being used in the normal course
of daily life by millions of civilians?
Was it necessary to cut off power and water supplies to the people with whom
there was "no quarrel", given how crucial such supplies are to the
essentials of contemporary living? Was a campaign of bombardment from a very
high altitude, with all the error to which such bombardment is prone,
justified, when the inevitable consequence was to cause indiscriminate loss of
life and physical devastation?
But more than that.
The intervention by NATO without the sanction of a UN mandate has had other
potentially disastrous implications. It has had a further destabilising effect
on Russian political society, igniting dangerous nationalist impulses within
the world's second-largest nuclear power. There is the potentially explosive
standoff with the Russian troops in Kosovo. China has also been enraged, as has
much of the rest of the world. There is an apprehension that America, the sole
remaining super-power, is about the establishment of an American world order
under American law and American domination.
The Associated Press published on Saturday a catalogue of the number of
people killed in various conflicts around the world in the last 20 years. The
following are some of the highlights: Afghanistan: 2 million; Algeria: 75,000;
Bosnia: 250,000; Burundi: 250,000; Chechyna 18,000-100,000; Colombia: 30,000;
Guatemala: 200,000; Liberia: 150,000; Persian Gulf War 4,500-45,000; Rwanda:
500,000-800,000; Sierra Leone: 14,000; Sri Lanka 58,000; Sudan: 1.5 million-1.9
million.
By comparison, at most 10,000 have been killed in Kosovo and of this NATO
has killed well over half (these include members of the Serbian security forces
killed since March 24th). So what was it that caused the United States and its
allies to intervene, in defiance of international law, in Kosovo, given that at
the very most no more than 3,000 were killed there before the bombing began?
Why was nothing done to stop the catastrophic loss of life in Sudan or
Rwanda? Why has the US done nothing or so little to stop the slaughter in
Turkey or Colombia or Liberia?
Why did the US participate in the appalling carnage in Guatemala?
Why wasn't more effort made to reach a diplomatic solution to the Kosovo
crisis before March 24th? Why were the Russians not involved from the outset in
the proposed international military force that was to enter Kosovo with
Yugoslavia's permission? Why were there terms in the Rambouillet Agreement
that, manifestly, Yugoslavia could not accept and which were unnecessary to the
humanitarian mission that supposedly was contemplated (that part which would
have given NATO forces unrestricted rights throughout the whole territory of
Yugoslavia)? On Thursday night last, President Clinton went on US television
and spoke directly again to the Serbian people. He told them "you endured
79 days of bombing" all because of Mr Milosevic. Apparently it did not
occur to him how outrageous it was to cause the Serbian people to endure 79
days of bombing because of the actions of someone over whom the Serbian people
have no control (that is according to Mr Clinton himself).
Nor did it occur to him to offer even an expression of regret for the
massacre, grief and devastation he had rained upon them, the people with whom
he has no quarrel.
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