Mr. Dyer justifies NATO war
I refer to Gwynne Dyer's latest Viewpoint, The meaning of Kosovo published on June 19, 1999. Mr. Dyer is again trying to justify NATO's criminal act of war on Yugoslavia that cost the lives of at least 2,000 innocent civilians, 5,000 more wounded and maimed and millions traumatized, left locked in a country in ruins.
Theory goes that NATO had to do something to help the Albanian minority in Serbia which was oppressed by Milosevic's cruel regime. NATO wanted to help so much, that it had to sideline OSCE and its slow and unsatisfactory ways (with Russian presence), override the UN and its Security Council because of Russian and Chinese opposition. NATO had to set precedents regarding existing sovereign rights of states. It even had to change the very nature of NATO as a defensive alliance into something quite the opposite. It did not stop in its pursuit of human rights even at the cost of alienating China and pushing Russia even further away from the rest of Europe. And all that because of one man: Mr. Milosevic.
If the West genuinely wanted to help the Albanian-Kosovars, they would have advised them to participate in Yugoslav elections on all levels (instead of boycotting them repeatedly and reverting to armed rebellion in the end). This way, and due to their number and percentage, the Albanians would have had at least 20 percent of the seats in both Serbian and Yugoslav parliaments and would be "kingmakers" if not kings (Mr. Milosevic's Socialists hold the government with mere 35 percent of the vote by constant change of coalition partners); it might be possible for them to request further reforms in one direction or the other in trade-offs with other political parties, and based on their political weight. And most important, all this without war, without death and destruction. Would Mr. Milosevic be an issue then? Albanian votes, together with Serbian and Montenegrin opposition would have taken care of that.
But now it is too late for all this. Somebody somewhere thought that Serbs deserved a little bombing and Mr. Dyer was and still is one of them. And I don't like him for that.
BRANIMIR SALEVIC
Jakarta