G'day Chris,
Still bloody busy, but I feel obliged to make the point that you should tell
us what form of critique of leftie positions this is meant to represent. A
couple of f'rinstances, if I may :
>But what has this to do with genocide? Are the revisionists
>saying that “only” 2000 dead is not genocide, but 10,000 dead
>is? In the UN Genocide Convention, “genocide” is defined as
>acts “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in
>part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. Such
>acts, with these aims, are not restricted to killing, but
>include “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions
>of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction
>in whole or in part”, such as uprooting people from their homes.
We (I use the word to refer to what struck me as the majority position on
leftie lists) didn't make a quantitative distinction between genocide and
anything else, at all. There's no proof genocidal intent prevailed before
March 1999. There is circumstantial proof that it didn't. 2000 dead, over
more than twelve months of a situation involving a foreign-armed and
foreigner-supplemented (many of the commissioned officers were foreigners)
military insurrection (the KLA), denotes something other than genocide. The
Yugoslav army and (probably more pertinently) the irregular militias proved
seven years earlier that they're technically capable of dispensing casualty
figures like that in a week if they're serious. Very few defended
Milosovic's ruling sect in particular, Chris. I certainly didn't. We just
focused on the most appropriate (least worst) ways to handle the Kosovo
problem of February 1999, and we let ourselves ask 'how did it get to
this?'. Perhaps one's answer to that question depends on how far back you
look. Me, I looked back to circa 1988 (and I know you keep posts, so no
need for any repetition here). Suffice to say Euro/US policy was all over
it like a melanoma then, and only grew in naked intensity. That there were
willing local organs for these opportunists to exploit was not at issue.
>The Nuremberg Tribunal Charter explicitly lists deportation
>of the civilian population as one of its “crimes against
>humanity”. The genocide in Kosova was not a question of
>numbers of dead, but the fact that half the population of
>Kosova had been driven across borders, and around 80% of
>those remaining inside Kosova had also been uprooted from
>their homes.
Not 'had been'. Grammatically, this formulation hints at a pre-NATO
deportation. 'Was' is more appropriate. Before the NATO thuggery, 80 000
ethnic Albanians did leave Kosovo - and ran away to ... Belgrade! After the
initial strikes, that all changed - just as everybody predicted.
>Ironically, by doing a hatchet job on the brutalised
>Albanians in order to criticise NATO, these revisionists
>let NATO off the hook. NATO did not act in response to the
>genocide; the NATO bombing precipitated it. And when
>Milosevic launched his genocide using the NATO pretext,
>NATO did nothing to defend the Albanian victims for fear
>that actions against Serb military forces in Kosova would
>aid the KLA, the main thing NATO wanted to avoid.
All true - and none of it contradicting what most of us had to say at the
time. It may have been a pretext for some - it was also the sort of excess
that always looks strategically rational to an establishment government when
confonted with, inter alia, a civilian army (look at how the Yanks rounded
up and effectively tried to 'intern' the Vietnamese peasantry in 1965-8 -
and don't tell me My-Lai was the only My-Lai either).
>Veteran Kosovan human rights campaigner Veton Surroi
>described an average day in the war: “It doesn't take
>much for a Serbian police unit to burn a village, but
>they [NATO] were up there 15,000 feet away bombing
>television transmitters. It was very annoying.”
And very illuminating. Whatever NATO was up to, it had nothing to do with
its stated aims. We had Iraq and Somalia behind us by then, and we were
right to be suspicious. US military intervention made things worse, but
that ain't even the point. Their approach work was such that it was always
going to be worse (for the people locally involved, I mean - natch), and
they knew it would make it worse. The thing is to look for what, from a US
(or NATO) establishment point of view, would foreseeably get better. Alms
for the US military industrial complex, reliable oil supplies, and extended
hegemony are three that come to mind. Is that so daft?
Cheers,
Rob.
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