[PEN-L:6559] (Fwd) NATO's actions causing "human rights catastrophe" - UN H

[ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224]]

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date sent:              Fri, 07 May 1999 18:03:00 -0700
To:                     [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From:                   Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:                NATO's actions causing "human rights catastrophe" - UN Human
        Rights Commissioner

The Toronto Star                                                May 7, 1999

A HUMAN-RIGHTS CATASTROPHE

        Large numbers of innocent civilians have been killed by 
        NATO's actions; parallels to situation in Iraq.

        By Richard Gwyn

        The comments made a few days ago by Mary Robinson, the 
United Nations' Chief Commissioner for Human Rights, about what 
is going on in Yugoslavia, were exactly those you'd expect 
someone in her position to make.
        "A human-rights catastrophe" was unfolding, said Robinson. 
"Large numbers of innocent civilians have been killed."
        This is much the same as many commentators have been saying. 
Except for one critical fact. The innocent civilians Robinson was 
referring to were the Yugoslavs in Belgrade and elsewhere, who 
night after night are being pounded, and sometimes killed, by 
NATO's now six-week-old bombing campaign.
        Robinson's comments about what is being done in Kosovo by 
the Yugoslav army and special police were far more severe.
        "We are seeing terrible violations to vulnerable people week 
after week," she said.
        But her observations about what NATO is doing were stinging.
        "Civilian installations are being targeted on the basis that they 
are or could be of military application. And NATO remains the sole 
judge of what is or is not acceptable to bomb."
        Most stinging of all was Robinson's comments that, "What we 
are in effect seeing is that war-making has become the tool of 
peacemaking."
        All newspapers carried reports of Robinson's speech, made to 
the closing session of a meeting of the Human Rights Commission 
in Geneva. But if you'd blinked, you could easily have missed it.
        There were no front-page headlines. There were no follow-up 
interviews of Robinson.
        Her anguished plea was like a pebble dropped into the water 
that made a small splash before being quickly covered over by 
NATO spin doctors.
        Robinson isn't alone in her anguish about NATO's strategy. 
Pope John Paul II has appealed for an end to the bombing. So has 
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author and dissident whose attacks 
upon the Soviet system were once so widely applauded in the West.
        Instead, not only has NATO's bombing continued and 
intensified but its targeting of civilians has now become its explicit 
policy.
        After new graphite bombs destroyed the Yugoslav electrical 
power system - putting hospital patients at grave risk - NATO 
spokesperson Jamie Shea declared, "NATO has its finger on the 
light switch now. We can turn the power off whenever we want."
        There is something obscene about a war being fought for 
humanitarian purposes that is itself becoming an inhumane war.
        That this inhumanity is mindless, rather than the deliberate 
brutality that has been wreaked upon the ethnic Albanians of 
Kosovo by the Yugoslav army and special police, does not in any 
way mitigate the criminality of the act.
        The 500 dead Yugoslav civilians (so far) are as dead as the 
slaughtered ethnic Albanians.
        Indeed, before long the number of dead Yugoslav civilians will 
equal the number of Kosovars killed in the year-long civil war that 
justified NATO's declaration of war on Yugoslavia.
        Nor is the conduct entirely mindless.
        NATO's decision not to fight a ground war represented a 
conscious preference for civilian Yugoslav casualties rather than for 
military casualties of both the Yugoslav army and of NATO 
contingents.
        All air wars reduce civilians to anonymous objects. Which 
makes them easy to kill.
        As well, the demonization of the enemy and the personalization 
of their leader - acts that democracies always undertake to muster 
up public support for their wars - further distances those pressing 
the button from those on whom the cruise missiles fall.
        The parallel is with Iraq.
        There, neutral observers like Amnesty International have 
estimated that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children have died of 
malnutrition and of common diseases for which medicines are no 
longer available, while the U.S. and its allies continue to hurl bombs 
at the country and to blockade it with sanctions.
        The terrible truth is that democracies can be as violent, if in a 
sterile, surgical way, as more repressive and less-advanced 
societies.
        Hiroshima and Dresden are evidence of this.
        Because of the entirely legitimate disgust and outrage in the 
West at Serbian atrocities, public disquiet about the inhumanity of 
our own war has been muted.
        But it is beginning to reveal itself. In Germany, polls for the first 
time are measuring majority opposition to the war.
        Here at home, the New Democrats have broken ranks with all 
other parties to call for a bombing pause.
        The most revealing evidence of rising self-doubt is the way 
Western leaders are now reaching out to Russia to try to broker 
some acceptable deal with Belgrade.
        What's revealing here is that six weeks ago, NATO justified its 
bypassing of the United Nations' Security Council with the 
argument that the unreliable Russians might veto any war 
resolution.
        The contradiction of turning war-making into a tool of 
peacemaking is becoming unsustainable.