NATO attack: Behind the rhetoric

This is the first of two articles on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombings of Serbia written by Noam Chomsky, a noted social and political affairs.

WASHINGTON: There have been many inquiries concerning NATO (meaning primarily U.S.) bombing in connection with Kosovo. A great deal has been written about the topic, including Znet commentaries. I'd like to make a few general observations, keeping to facts that are not seriously contested.

There are two fundamental issues: What are the accepted and applicable "rules of world order"? And how do these or other considerations apply in the case of Kosovo?

* What are the accepted and applicable "rules of world order"?

There is a regime of international law and international order, binding on all states, based on the United Nations (UN) Charter and subsequent resolutions and World Court decisions. In brief, the threat or use of force is banned unless explicitly authorized by the Security Council after it has determined that peaceful means have failed, or in self-defense against "armed attack" (a narrow concept) until the Security Council acts.

There is, of course, more to say. Thus there is at least a tension, if not an outright contradiction, between the rules of world order laid down in the UN Charter and the rights articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD), a second pillar of the world order established under U.S. initiative after World War II.

The charter bans force violating state sovereignty; the UD guarantees the rights of individuals against oppressive states. The issue of "humanitarian intervention" arises from this tension. It is the right of "humanitarian intervention" that is claimed by the United States/NATO in Kosovo, and that is generally supported by editorial opinion and news reports (in the latter case, reflexively, even by the very choice of terminology).

The question was addressed in a news report in the New York Times (March 27), headlined Legal Scholars Support Case for Using Force in Kosovo. One example is offered: Allen Gerson, former counsel to the U.S. mission to the UN.

Two other legal scholars are cited. One, Ted Galen Carpenter, "scoffed at the administration argument" and dismissed the alleged right of intervention. The third is Jack Goldsmith, a specialist on international law at Chicago Law school. He says that critics of the NATO bombing "have a pretty good legal argument", but "many people think (an exception for humanitarian intervention) does exist as a matter of custom and practice". That summarizes the evidence offered to justify the favored conclusion stated in the headline.

Goldsmith's observation is reasonable, at least if we agree that facts are relevant to the determination of "custom and practice".

We may also bear in mind a truism: the right of humanitarian intervention, if it exists, is premised on the "good faith" of those intervening, and that assumption is based not on their rhetoric but on their record, in particular their record of adherence to the principles of international law, World Court decisions, and so on. That is indeed a truism, at least with regard to others.

Consider, for example, Iranian offers to intervene in Bosnia to prevent massacres at a time when the West would not do so. These were dismissed with ridicule (in fact, ignored); if there was a reason beyond subordination to power, it was because Iranian "good faith" could not be assumed.

A rational person then asks obvious questions: Is the Iranian record of intervention and terror worse than that of the United States?

And other questions, for example: How should we assess the "good faith" of the only country to have vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to obey international law? What about its historical record?

Unless such questions are prominent on the agenda of discourse, an honest person will dismiss it as mere allegiance to doctrine. A useful exercise is to determine how much of the literature -- media or others -- survives such elementary conditions as these.

* How do these or other considerations apply in the case of Kosovo?

There has been a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo in the past year, overwhelmingly attributable to Yugoslav military forces.

The main victims have been ethnic Albanian Kosovars, some 90 percent of the population of this Yugoslav territory. The standard estimate is 2,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees.

In such cases, outsiders have three choices: try to escalate the catastrophe, do nothing or try to mitigate the catastrophe.

The choices are illustrated by other contemporary cases. Let's keep to a few of approximately the same scale, and ask where Kosovo fits into the pattern.

* Colombia. In Colombia, according to U.S. State Department estimates, the annual level of political killing by the government and its paramilitary associates is about at the level of Kosovo, and refugee flight primarily from their atrocities is well over a million.

Colombia has been the leading Western hemisphere recipient of U.S. arms and training as violence increased through the 1990s, and that assistance is now increasing, under a "drug war" pretext dismissed by almost all serious observers. The Clinton administration was particularly enthusiastic in its praise for President Gaviria, whose tenure in office was responsible for "appalling levels of violence", according to human rights organizations, even surpassing his predecessors. Details are readily available.

In this case, the U.S. reaction is: escalate the atrocities.

* Turkey. By very conservative estimate, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of over a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital Diyarbakir from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside. The year 1994 marked two records: It was "the year of the worst repression in the Kurdish provinces" of Turkey, Jonathan Randal reported from the scene, and the year when Turkey became "the biggest single importer of American military hardware and thus the world's largest arms purchaser". When human rights groups exposed Turkey's use of U.S. jets to bomb villages, the Clinton administration found ways to evade laws requiring suspension of arms deliveries, much as it was doing in Indonesia and elsewhere.

Colombia and Turkey explain their (U.S.-supported) atrocities on grounds that they are defending their countries from the threat of terrorist guerrillas. As does the government of Yugoslavia.

Again, the example illustrates: try to escalate the atrocities.

* Laos. Every year thousands of people, mostly children and poor farmers, are killed in the Plain of Jars in Northern Laos, the scene of the heaviest bombing of civilian targets in history it appears, and arguably the most cruel: Washington's furious assault on a poor peasant society had little to do with its wars in the region.

The worst period was from 1968, when Washington was compelled to undertake negotiations (under popular and business pressure), ending the regular bombardment of North Vietnam. Kissinger-Nixon then decided to shift the planes to bombardment of Laos and Cambodia.

The deaths are from "bombies", tiny antipersonnel weapons, far worse than land mines: They are designed specifically to kill and maim, and have no effect on trucks, buildings, etc.

The plain was saturated with hundreds of millions of these criminal devices, which have a failure-to-explode rate of 20 percent to 30 percent according to the manufacturer, Honeywell.

The numbers suggest either remarkably poor quality control or a rational policy of murdering civilians by delayed action. These were only a fraction of the technology deployed, including advanced missiles to penetrate caves where families sought shelter.

Current annual casualties from bombies are estimated from hundreds a year to "an annual nationwide casualty rate of 20,000", more than half of them deaths, according to the veteran Asia reporter Barry Wain of the Wall Street Journal -- in its Asia edition.

A conservative estimate, then, is that the crisis this year is approximately comparable to Kosovo, though deaths are far more highly concentrated among children -- over half, according to analyses reported by the Mennonite Central Committee, which has been working there since 1977 to alleviate the continuing atrocities.

There have been efforts to publicize and deal with the humanitarian catastrophe. A British-based Mine Advisory Group (MAG) is trying to remove the lethal objects, but the United States is "conspicuously missing from the handful of Western organizations that have followed MAG", the British press reports, though it has finally agreed to train some Laotian civilians. The British press also reports, with some anger, the allegation of MAG specialists that the United States refuses to provide them with "render harmless procedures" that would make their work "a lot quicker and a lot safer".

These remain a state secret, as does the whole affair in the United States. The Bangkok media reports a very similar situation in Cambodia, particularly the eastern region where U.S. bombardment from early 1969 was most intense.

In this case, the U.S. reaction is: do nothing. And the reaction of the media and commentators is to keep silent, following the norms under which the war against Laos was designated a "secret war" -- meaning well-known, but suppressed, as also in the case of Cambodia from March 1969. The level of self-censorship was extraordinary then, as is the current phase. The relevance of this shocking example should be obvious without further comment.

I will skip other examples of trying to escalate the catastrophe and doing nothing, which abound, and also much more serious contemporary atrocities, such as the huge slaughter of Iraqi civilians by means of a particularly vicious form of biological warfare -- "a very hard choice", U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright commented on national TV in 1996 when asked for her reaction to the killing of half a million Iraqi children in five years, but "we think the price is worth it".

Current estimates remain about 5,000 children killed a month, and the price is still "worth it". These and other examples might also be kept in mind when we read awed rhetoric about how the "moral compass" of the Clinton administration is at last functioning properly, as the Kosovo example illustrates.

Just what does the example illustrate? The threat of NATO bombing, predictably, led to a sharp escalation of atrocities by the Serbian army and paramilitaries, and to the departure of international observers, which, of course, had the same effect.

Window A: The threat of NATO bombing, predictably, led to a sharp escalation of atrocities by the Serbian army and paramilitaries, and to the departure of international observers, which, of course, had the same effect.

Window B: There are two fundamental issues: What are the accepted and applicable "rules of world order"? And how do these or other considerations apply in the case of Kosovo?