Marauding in Kosovo

When starvation and exposure begin to claim the lives of thousands of women and children in Kosovo a few weeks from now, no one will be able to claim ignorance as an excuse for inaction. "Massive war crimes have been committed here," John Shattuck, assistant secretary of state for human rights, said during a recent visit to the Serbian province.

Serbian troops led by the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, are systematically uprooting Kosovo's ethnic Albanian population. Village by village, houses are burned, livestock slaughtered, crops destroyed and people shot or sent fleeing into the mountains. Hundreds of thousands have been forced from their homes. Milosevic promised to establish 11 centers for displaced people; his troops already have shelled three of them. Even those not forced to flee are threatened by a Serb blockade of food and medicine.

This humanitarian disaster cannot be ended without a political solution, and a political solution is impossible without a U.S. resolve to use force, if necessary, against Milosevic's marauding soldiers. President Bill Clinton and his team have promised again and again to show such resolve but their threats have proved empty. Instead, Clinton sends his emissaries, again and again, to plead with the war criminal to stop his crimes. Milosevic has learned he can defy them at no cost.

What is unfolding is genocide at one remove. "A massacre is not necessarily committed only with knives," a displaced woman said. Analogously, Milosevic is managing to destabilize moderate governments throughout the region without waging a war against them, simply by overwhelming them with refugees. NATO, blustering about its contingency plans, becomes a laughingstock. The longer Clinton dithers the greater the cost will be.

-- The Washington Post