Newsgroup: it.politica.polo
Titolo: Hypocrisy and blunders in the Balkans

Hypocrisy and blunders in the Balkans
The Kosovo War
By Robert Fisk
31 December 1999
This year, a brutal army – acting on the orders of a ruthlessly
ambitious politician – laid waste to one of its historic provinces,
slaughtering thousands, driving up to a half a million people from their
homes. Human rights workers, the European Union and the United States
warned that the killing must stop. The rampaging army claimed it was
fighting separatist "terrorism". So what did we in the West do about it?
Absolutely nothing. We didn't bomb Russia's bridges or power stations or
railway lines or barracks or television transmitters or – by mistake, of
course – buses and a passenger train and a hospital and refugee convoys.
No, we tut-tutted and appealed for a political solution in Chechnya. And
Madeleine Albright, the scourge of President Slobodan Milosevic, told us
how important it was to keep good relations with Russia, that Moscow
should not be ostracised.
Perhaps the double standards would have been sharper had the two events
coincided. If the Russian army had bombarded Grozny as NATO was bombing
Belgrade, a few more questions would have been asked about the "human
values" which the West was supposedly upholding in Kosovo.
If we can go to war because Albanians were being persecuted in Kosovo by
the Serbs, why couldn't we go to war when Chechens were being
dispossessed of their homes and driven from their villages? Instead,
NATO's campaign closed just in time for President Boris Yeltsin and his
prime minister to claim that it gave Russia the right to crush the
rebels of its recalcitrant southern province. One day, perhaps,
historians will add the Chechen dead to the casualties of Kosovo and
Serbia.
If, that is, we ever know the casualty figures. For the dead of the only
war fought by the European powers since 1945 have still to be counted;
more than half the mass graves of Kosovo have still to be opened and the
Serbs have still to give a final figure for their civilian and military
losses.
There may be 4,000 Albanian corpses –victims of Serb forces – still
undiscovered in the frozen soil of Kosovo this winter; around 2,000 have
already been dug up. And the town war memorials of Serbia suggest that
the Yugoslav army's dead may be more than the 600 claimed by Milosevic.
Perhaps 1,500 Serb civilians were killed by NATO. In all, more than
8,000 people were killed in the war for Kosovo. Not one of them was a
soldier of the NATO alliance. For if we went to war with the Kosovo
Albanians, we were not prepared to die for them.
In Pristina, another variation of the old joke – that NATO was ready to
fight to the last Albanian – is going the rounds. As one survivor put it
to a French reporter when NATO troops eventually entered the ruins of
Kosovo: "While you were flying high in the skies above us, we down here
were dying." And it is true.
Once the NATO bombardment began, the Serbs turned with far greater
savagery upon their Kosovo Albanian enemies who – having waited with
enthusiasm for the bombs that would free them from their Serb oppressors
– found that NATO could not save them. While Franco Stamatovic and the
other Serb war criminals were unleashing their cruelty upon the
Albanians, up to half a million men, women and children were driven from
their homes. Only more than four months later would NATO's
"bloke-in-the-street" spokesman, James Shea, cynically sum it all up.
"Sometimes," he said, "things have to get worse in order to get better."
They didn't tell the Albanians that at the time.
The aim of the war – to force the Serbs to accept a political settlement
in Kosovo that would also give the Albanians a referendum to decide
their own future – had quickly to be redefined. Instead of bombing
Serbia to save the Albanians, we were now apparently bombing Serbia to
get the Albanian refugees "back into their homes" – most of whom were
still in their homes when the war began. And when, after 79 days of
bombing, NATO marched into Kosovo, the referendum that might have given
the Kosovo Albanians independence was quietly dropped from the peace
agreement.
"Independence for Kosovo – the only way to peace in the Balkans," say
the Albanian bumper stickers in Pristina today. But the honeymoon is
over. Soldiers from the NATO-led "peace-keeping" force are tearing the
stickers off cars entering the few remaining Serb areas. UN police
forces in the province are being abused in public. The Albanians want
their own land, not a UN-created administration linked to Serbia. As for
the remaining minority Serbs, only around 40,000 of the pre-war
population of 250,000 are still there. Serbia drove 50 per cent of the
Albanian population out of the province. Now Kosovo Albanians have
driven 80 per cent of the minority Serb population out of the province.
The "peace-keepers" could not keep the "peace".
Should we have tried to save the Albanians in their moment of agony?
Could we have crossed the frontier and fought the Serbs instead of
skulking along the Macedonian border while President Bill Clinton
opposed a ground offensive? At the least, the Serbs would not have had
time to slaughter so many innocent civilians. But war for the West must
now be cost-free. We bomb. Others die. We got a taste of this in the
1991 Gulf war, then again in the year-long bombing campaign against Iraq
that started once more in December, 1998. The Kosovo war reached
perfection. Not a single Serb bullet hit a single NATO soldier. Just one
NATO pilot was shot down and – and he was rescued.
Our Western leaders – Tony Blair's "spokesman" Alastair Campbell and
NATO – demanded that the few foreign journalists in Yugoslavia should
"break free" from the Serbs accompanying them to scout around Kosovo.
But NATO didn't have the guts to send a single heavily-armed NATO
soldier into Kosovo to save the Albanians. Our soldiers never engaged
the enemy. Instead, fearful that the Western alliance might start to
disintegrate as the bombing failed to bring Milosevic to heel, NATO's
bombing targets became more promiscuous. Power stations, housing
estates, small bridges were hit, even a tobacco factory. NATO apologised
when it bombed a mass convoy of refugees being driven from their homes
by the Serbs. But just over half way through the air bombardment, NATO
took a strategic decision. It would no longer apologise for anything it
did. So when American jets struck a narrow bridge at Varvarin at midday
on the village's market day – blasting Serb civilians into the Morava
river – and then came back 20 minutes later and killed the rescue
workers, there was not a word of regret.
When NATO arrived in Kosovo, it watched the Serb war criminals streaming
out in their trucks along with the Yugoslav army. And did nothing. It
wasn't worth a single NATO casualty to arrest a single Serb paramilitary
– even though hundreds of Hague war crimes investigators would
subsequently be working for months in the province to identify the very
same criminals. Most of the Serb killers retired to Montenegro or
central Serbia, confident that NATO would not pursue them. And they were
right. NATO's original demand for complete access to all of Serbia –
made at the "peace" talks in Paris which preceded the war and refused by
the Serbs – was also quietly dropped once Milosevic allowed NATO troops
into Kosovo.
For now, NATO will stay in Kosovo, just as it will stay in Bosnia. And
for now, Milosevic will remain in power. His opponents cannot stir a
people who are using all their energy to survive a winter any more than
American exhortation can provoke the crushed people of Iraq to overthrow
Saddam Hussein. Besides, Milosevic's enemies in Belgrade are only
protesting at his mistakes – not at the atrocities committed in Serbia's
name in Kosovo.
We have taken our revenge on Milosevic for Bosnia. We have "taught the
Serbs a lesson". We have fought for "human values" in Europe. As for
Chechnya, that's too bad. Russia has nuclear weapons. Serbia does not.

 By Robert Fisk
Mr. Fisk ha la vista piu' lunga di tanti commentatori italiani....