Special (extra) ZNet Commentary
March 24, 1999
NATO's Humanitarian Trigger
By Diana Johnstone
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 U.S. 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 consecration 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 enevitable police retaliation as "ethnic cleansing",
promise the rebe is 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 U.S. and China, but for weaker States that really need it.
National boundaries will be no obstacle to NATO intervention.
Thanks to Kosovo, the U.S. 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 masssacre, 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 on 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 spririt, they developed narrow ethnocentricy.
Graduates in these fields were prepared above all 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 U.S. air power into the conflict on the Albanian side.
The Serbs have nothing to gain by restraint, once it is clear that
t hey will be blamed anyway for whatever happens.
By identifying the Albanians as "victims" per se, and the Serbs as the
villains, the United States 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 "U.S.-style democracy and free market econom
y 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 f or
expanding NATO as an instrument to ensure U.S. 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.
Vasic Darko
International secretary of LYCY(SKOJ)