Yugoslavia bombing a wrong move to mark NATO's jubilee

By Partogi J. Samosir

MOSCOW (JP): The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) marked its 50th anniversary jubilee in April with a disgrace caused by a wrong move -- bombing Yugoslavia.

There are at least four factors why NATO has already suffered a moral and political defeat.

Firstly, NATO's bombing violates both the United Nations (UN) Charter and the NATO Treaty itself. Article 2, section 7 of the UN Charter, for example, expressly forbids UN intervention "in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state..."

All NATO members are signatories to the UN Charter and bound by it under international law. By bombing Serbia without first getting approval from the UN Security Council, NATO has broken the law. So all NATO members have made themselves war criminals.

Moreover, NATO has committed a series of rhetorical blasphemies to drum up support for their action. One word they should not have used, but did, was genocide (the systematic, planned extermination of a racial or ethnic group).

On March 29, 1999, British Defense Minister George Robertson said: "We are confronting a regime which is intent on genocide."

German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping on the same day said: "The Serbs were committing a genocide."

However, in a genocide, the actor does not let a single refugee go. They kill every single one of them. Therefore, based on those interpretations the Serbs do not qualify.

"Genocide" means to kill everyone in a race. The Serbs are doing something else -- savagely expelling a hostile ethnic group from territory it claims as its own.

There are actually many precedents for this. In 1945, the Czechs expelled over two million ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland, causing horrific human tragedies in an ethnical cleansing of their nation. No one called that a genocide. It was evil and horrible, but it was not a genocide.

In this issue, the UN has used words such as "extreme brutality and ruthlessness," and "mass deportations" to describe the Serb's actions, while Britain toned it down to "brutal ethnic cleansing".

Now that the West might be forced to take in refugees because they have falsely raised the moral stakes so high, the word "genocide" has been dropped. This means we can intern them behind barbed-wire at Guantanamo Bay with a clear conscience.

Secondly, let's look at the peculiar logic behind NATO's "peace mission" in Kosovo. They dragged the warring parties to some two-bit pastry shop called Rambouillet, held a gun to their heads, and said "if you do not sign our version of a peace deal and allow us to protect the ethnic groups, then we are going to bomb and kill them".

After arm-twisting the Albanians into signing a deal that they did not believe in, NATO carried out their threat.

NATO bombed the Serbs on behalf of the Albanians, assuming, like Dr. Evil, that everything would go their way. No contingency planning at all. For example, there was no plan on how to counter the obvious and natural reaction of the Serbs to take all of their Tomahawk-inspired fury out on a totally defenseless Kosovar population. What was NATO's reply? "They were going to do it anyway." In fact, CIA leaks showed that Clinton was warned that bombing could spark mass ethnic cleansing.

Thirdly, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) are diehard Marxist- Leninists who have been linked to Osama bin Laden. A Jan. 21 article in the French newspaper Liberation claims that KLA front man Adem Demaci is an unabashed disciple of Mao, and that the KLA leaders are all deep admirers of the late Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. The March 28 edition of The New York Times wrote that the KLA was "originally made up of diehard Marxist-Leninists, as well as by descendants of the fascist militias raised by the Italians in World War II". The United States has fought two lengthy combat wars and one 45-year Cold War to contain communism, but now they are fighting alongside them to depose a democratically-elected leader.

The KLA may have duped NATO and Serbia both to serve its own Machiavellian domestic agenda. The guerrilla tactics of Marxists, like the KLA, call for the terrorist group to kill enough enemies (in this case, ethnic Serbs) in order to trigger reprisals so terrible that life for the average Kosovar becomes unbearable, and thereby radicalizes the situation.

Now that the situation is suitably radicalized, KLA military police are now forcing, at gunpoint, male Kosovar refugees into service, according to the April 1 Associated Press wire.

The KLA is even forcing refugees in Albania and Macedonia into service. In other words, the NATO bombing and the subsequent Serbian reprisals against Albanians have both perfectly served the KLA's domestic agenda, providing it with defenseless refugees to fatten its rolls.

The strength of the KLA would have seemed to mislead Clinton's claim that the Serbs planned to ethnically cleanse Kosovo this spring "all along anyway". The KLA only appeared in February 1998. They announced themselves by launching terrorist attacks on Serb police and villagers.

By early midsummer, some estimates were that the KLA had controlled up to two-thirds of Kosovo. The big powers only got involved when the Yugoslav forces retaliated and retook most of Kosovo, which is, after all, internationally recognized as an integral part of Yugoslavia.

Furthermore, although the operation was by no means civilized, the number of casualties -- roughly 800 dead on both sides during last year's battles -- was remarkably low compared to the opening months of the Bosnian war, when it was estimated by some that tens of thousands were slaughtered and raped.

The last factor is the negative impact of the bombing itself. NATO's bombing has made an enemy of Montenegro, the strategically vital junior republic in Yugoslavia. In presidential elections last year, Montenegrins elected Milan Djukanovic, an enemy of Milosevic who reached out to the West. Djukanovic's victory meant a majority of Montenegrins wanted to move away from Milosevic and towards the West.

They opposed the crackdown in Kosovo and encouraged locals to desert units serving there. How did NATO exploit this division in Yugoslav society? As a result of the bombing, thousands are pouring into the streets daily in order to denounce NATO as the second coming of Hitler. Today, Montenegrins are solidly behind the Serbs and Milosevic.

NATO knowingly destroyed the biggest maternity ward in all of the Balkans. On April 3, Clinton and NATO were clearly frustrated at the ineffectuality of their surgical air-strike campaign, and decided to get nasty by sending three cruise missiles into the Yugoslav and Serbian Interior Ministry buildings. Those buildings had long been emptied. Ever since Tito, Yugoslav's basic war plan is based on decentralized partisan warfare.

It was no secret that a maternity ward full of people was located next door to the target just 30 metres away. It was no secret that the target had been emptied long before the strike. It kind of muddles up that whole high moral ground thing a little, doesn't it? Or did NATO intend to show that they could play just as cold and mean as the next quasi-Hitler?

Moreover, in 1991, most Russians admired Westerners and listened to what they said regarding the restructure of the Russian economy and that NATO is a defensive organization whose goal is to unite Europe into one peaceful kingdom. And then the Russians woke up. They had to, because the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) advice destroyed Russia's economy faster than you could say "Gary Peach". NATO is unilaterally scrapping the ABM Treaty, enlarging itself so as to completely surround and isolate Russia. Now, they are ruthlessly bombing Russia's oldest historical ally and slaughtering its citizens.

It would be the same as if a victorious Soviet Union were to bomb London and destroy its bridges because they did not allow the Warsaw Pact troops to occupy Ulster. All this might explain why over the past few months, the number of Russians who believe that they should fear a NATO attack has soared to 63 percent, up from the low twenties just a few months ago (CNN, April 3, 1999).

On a longer term, the most negative effect will be the bitter disillusion of Russian democrats in the West. Russian democracy is a young one. Russian democratic leaders grew up in Soviet conditions and learned to admire and respect the Western civilized democratic structure and policy. But now, many prominent Russian leaders have openly announced "Western democrats are as bad as ours" (Arbatov, 1999).

Furthermore, this bombing could draw Russia into an uncontrollable escalation of the conflict, and possibly even a war. Russia's dispatch of ships to the Adriatic more or less officially puts the U.S. and Russia in military confrontation again. This is a horrific blunder considering that Americans spent 40 years and hundreds of billions of dollars to achieve the neutralization of the Russian military threat. Now it is all back, for the sake of... an unknown subject?

The writer is Second Secretary at the Indonesian Embassy in Moscow.