Syndicate: A great articl

[Naskov@aol.c]

On the Eve of War, NATO's Humanitarian Trigger 

Diana Johnstone was the European editor of In These Times from 1979-'90, and 
press officer of the Green group in the European Parliament from 1990-'96. 
She is the author of The Politics of Euromissiles: Europe in America's World 
(London/New York, Versa Schucken, 1984) and currently writing on the former 
Yugoslavia. 

>From James Rubin to Christiane Amanpour, the broad range of government and 
media opinion is totally united in demanding that NATO bomb Serbia. This is 
necessary, we are told, in order to "avert a humanitarian catastrophe," and 
because, "the only language Milosevic understands is force"... which happens 
to be the language the US wants to speak. 

Kosovo is presented as the problem, and NATO as the solution. 

In reality, NATO is the problem, and Kosovo is the solution. After the 
collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO needed a new excuse for pumping resources 
into the military-industrial complex. Thanks to Kosovo, NATO can celebrate 
its 50th anniversary next month by construction of its new global mission: to 
intervene anywhere in the world on humanitarian grounds. The recipe is easy: 
arm a group of radical secessionists to shoot policemen, describe the 
inevitable police retaliation as "ethnic cleansing," promise the rebels that 
NATO will bomb their enemy if the fighting goes on, and then interpret the 
resulting mayhem as a challenge to NATO's "resolve" which must be met by 
military action. 

Thanks to Kosovo, national sovereignty will be a thing of the past-not of 
course for Great Powers like the US and China, but for weaker States that 
really need it. National boundaries will be no obstacle to NATO intervention. 

Thanks to Kosovo, the US can control eventual Caspian oil pipeline routes 
between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, and extend the European influence of 
favored ally Turkey. 

Last February 23, James Hooper, executive director of the Balkan Action 
Council, one of the many think tanks that have sprung up to justify the 
ongoing transformation of former Yugoslavia into NATO protectorates, gave a 
speech at the Holocaust Museum in Washington at the invitation of its 
"Committee of Conscience." The first item on his list of "things to do next" 
was this: "Accept that the Balkans are a region of strategic interest for the 
United States, the new Berlin if you will, the testing ground for NATO's 
resolve and US leadership....The administration should level with the 
American people and tell them that we are likely to be in the Balkans 
militarily indefinitely, at least until there is a democratic government in 
Belgrade." 

In the Middle Ages, the Crusaders launched their conquests from the Church 
pulpits. Today, NATO does so in the Holocaust Museum. War must be sacred. 

This sacralization has been largely facilitated by a post-communist left 
which has taken refuge in moralism and identity politics to the exclusion of 
any analysis of the economic and geopolitical factors that continue to 
determine the macropolicies shaping the world. 

Jean-Christophe Rufin, former vice president of "Doctors Without Borders" 
recently pointed to the responsibility of humanitarian non-governmental 
organizations in justifying military intervention. "They were the first to 
deplore the passivity of the political response to dramatic events in the 
Balkans or Africa. Now they have got what they wanted, or so it seems. For in 
practice, rubbing elbows with NATO could turn out to be extremely dangerous." 

Already the call for United Nations soldiers to intervene on humanitarian 
missions raised suspicions in the Third World that "the humanitarians could 
be the Trojan horse of a new armed imperialism," Rufin wrote in Le Monde. But 
NATO is something else. "With NATO, everything has changed. Here we are 
dealing with a purely military, operational alliance, designed to respond to 
a threat-that is, to an enemy," wrote Rufin. "NATO defines an enemy, 
threatens it, then eventually strikes and destroys it. "Setting such a 
machine in motion requires a detonator. Today it is no longer military. Nor 
is it political. The evidence is before us: NATO's trigger, today, is... 
humanitarian. It takes blood, a massacre, something that will outrage public 
opinion so that it will welcome a violent reaction." 

The consequence, he concluded, is that "the civilian populations have never 
been so potentially threatened as in Kosovo today. Why? Because those 
potential victims are the key to international reaction. Let's be clear: the 
West wants dead bodies. [...] We are waiting for them in Kosovo. We'll get 
them." Who will kill them is a mystery but previous incidents suggest that 
"the threat comes from all sides." 

In the middle of conflict as in Kosovo, massacres can easily be 
perpetrated... or "arranged." There are always television crews looking 
precisely for that "top story." 

Recently, Croatian officers have admitted that in 1993 they themselves staged 
a "Serbian bombing" of the Croatian coastal city of Sibenik for the benefit 
of Croatian television crews. The former Commander of the 113th Croatian 
brigade headquarters, Davo Skugor, reacted indignantly. "Why so much fuss?" 
he complained. "There is no city in Croatia in which such tactical tricks 
were not used. After all, they are an integral part of strategic planning. 
That's only one in a series of stratagems we've resorted to during the war." 

The fact remains that there really is a very serious Kosovo problem. It has 
existed for well over a century, habitually exacerbated by outside powers 
(the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, the Axis powers during World War 
II). The Serbs are essentially a modernized peasant people, who having 
liberated themselves from arbitrary Turkish Ottoman oppression in the 19th 
century, are attached to modern state institutions. In contrast, the 
Albanians in the northern mountains of Albania and Kosovo have never really 
accepted any law, political or religious, over their own unwritten "Kanun" 
based on patriarchal obedience to vows, family honor, elaborate obligations, 
all of which are enforced not by any government but by male family and clan 
chiefs protecting their honor, eventually in the practice of blood feuds and 
revenge. 

The basic problem of Kosovo is the difficult coexistence in one territory of 
ethnic communities radically separated by customs, language and historical 
self-identification. From a humanistic viewpoint, this problem is more 
fundamental than the problem of State boundaries. 

Mutual hatred and fear is the fundamental human catastrophe in Kosovo. It has 
been going on for a long time. It has got much worse in recent years. Why? 

Two factors stand out as paradoxically responsible for this 
worsening-paradoxically, because presented to the world as factors which 
should have improved the situation. 

1. The first is the establishment in the autonomous Kosovo of the 1970s and 
1980s of separate Albanian cultural institutions, notably the Albanian 
language faculties in Pristina University. This cultural autonomy, demanded 
by ethnic Albanian leaders, turned out to be a step not to reconciliation 
between communities but to their total separation. Drawing on a relatively 
modest store of past scholarship, largely originating in Austria, Germany, or 
Enver Hoxha's Albania, studies in Albanian history and literature amounted 
above all to glorifications of Albanian identity. Rather than developing the 
critical spirit, they developed narrow ethnocentricy. Graduates in these 
fields were prepared for the career of nationalist political leader, and it 
is striking the number of literati among Kosovo Albanian secessionist 
leaders. Extreme cultural autonomy has created two populations with no common 
language. 

In retrospect, what should have been done was to combine Serbian and Albanian 
studies, requiring both languages, and developing original comparative 
studies of history and literature. This would have subjected both Serbian and 
Albanian national myths to the scrutiny of the other, and worked to correct 
the nationalist bias in both. Bilingual comparative studies could and should 
have been a way toward mutual understanding as well as an enrichment of 
universal culture. Instead, culture in the service of identity politics leads 
to mutual ignorance and contempt. 

The lesson of this grave error should be a warning elsewhere, starting in 
Macedonia, where Albanian nationalists are clamoring to repeat the Pristina 
experience in Tetova. Other countries with mixed ethnic populations should 
take note. 

2. The second factor has been the support from foreign powers, especially the 
United States, to the Albanian nationalist cause in Kosovo. By uncritically 
accepting the version of the tangled Kosovo situation presented by the 
Albanian lobby, American politicians have greatly exacerbated the conflict by 
encouraging the armed Albanian rebels and pushing the Serbian authorities 
into extreme efforts to wipe them out. 

The "Kosovo Liberation Army" (UCK) has nothing to lose by provoking deadly 
clashes, once it is clear that the number of dead and the number of refugees 
will add to the balance of the "humanitarian catastrophe" that can bring NATO 
and US air power into the conflict on the Albanian side. 

The Serbs have nothing to gain by restraint, once it is clear that they will 
be blamed anyway for whatever happens. 

By identifying the Albanians as "victims," and the Serbs as the villains, the 
US and its allies have made any fair and reasonable political situation 
virtually impossible. The Clinton administration in particular builds its 
policy on the assumption that what the Kosovar Albanians-including the 
UCK-really want is "democracy," American style. In fact, what they want is 
power over a particular territory, and among the Albanian nationalists, there 
is a bitter power struggle going on over who will exercise that power. 

Thus an American myth of "US-style democracy and free market economy will 
solve everything" is added to the Serbian and Albanian myths to form a 
fictional screen making reality almost impossible to discern, much less 
improve. Underlying the American myth are Brzezinski-style geostrategic 
designs on potential pipeline routes to Caspian oil and methodology for 
expanding NATO as an instrument to ensure US hegemony over the Eurasian land 
mass. 

Supposing by some miracle the world suddenly turned upside down, and there 
were outside powers who really cared about the fate of Kosovo and its 
inhabitants, one could suggest the following: 

1. stop one-sided demonization of the Serbs, recognize the genuine qualities, 
faults, and fears on all sides, and work to promote understanding rather than 
hatred; 

2. stop arming and encouraging rebel groups; 

3. allow genuine mediation by parties with no geostrategic or political 
interests at stake in the region. 
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