Bombing of Yugoslavia Awakens Anti-U.S. Feeling Around World
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 18, 1999; Page A01
BUENOS AIRES—It's thousands of miles from Belgrade, and there's not
a Serb in sight. But Gonzalo Etcheberry is passing a wall on a busy
street
here spray-painted with the words, "Yankee, out of the Balkans." He
didn't write the slogan, but he couldn't agree more.
"Your bombs in Yugoslavia are from the side of America that I can't
stand," said Etcheberry, a 21-year-old medical student wearing a
black
Pearl Jam T-shirt. "I hate it when the U.S. plays judge and God."
Such feelings are common in Argentina -- and in many other parts of
the
world far from the conflict over Kosovo. As the NATO air offensive
against Serb-controlled Yugoslavia concludes its eighth week and such
blunders as the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and
airstrikes
on Kosovo refugees grab headlines worldwide, NATO warplanes are
inflicting collateral damage of another kind -- damage to its
international
reputation. And Uncle Sam, NATO's dominant power, is bearing the
brunt
of public anger.
Here in Argentina, one of Washington's closest Latin American
allies, a
poll last week showed that 64 percent of the populace opposes the
NATO air campaign. More respondents had a negative opinion of NATO
than of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
In Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and other regions
with little
direct interest in the conflict, opposition to the bombing is
surfacing in
statements by elected officials, in newspaper editorials, opinion
polls,
public protests, Internet banter and street graffiti. Increasingly,
there is little
subtlety to the NATO-bashing. "NATO is blindly bombing Yugoslavia,"
Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said in a fiery political
speech
last week. "There is a dance of destruction going on there.
Thousands of
people rendered homeless. And the United Nations is a mute witness
to all
this. Is NATO's work to prevent war or to fuel one?"
In the view of analysts here and elsewhere, the anti-NATO backlash
shows that Washington's portrayal of the conflict as a humanitarian
mission
is being superseded by lingering anti-Western feelings in countries
with bad
memories of U.S. intervention and European colonialism. While the
plight
of the Kosovo refugees has evoked widespread sympathy, with many
countries offering financial and logistical support to the relief
effort, there is
also growing criticism outside NATO that the allies were too quick to
abandon diplomacy for war.
The mistaken bombings of civilians and of the Chinese Embassy have
intensified those feelings, foreign policy analysts say. "Milosevic
has been
able to successfully evoke the powerful message that he is defending
his
homeland and that he's the underdog facing Yankee might," said
Jerrold
Post, director of the political psychology program at George
Washington
University. "And that is striking a chord internationally."
Even in some countries that have shown support for the allies,
doubts are
surfacing. In Japan, for instance, the bombing of the Chinese
Embassy --
coupled with vivid television images of scattered civilian corpses
after other
NATO misfires -- seems to have cooled any enthusiasm for Japanese
participation in the Kosovo conflict.
"Why do we have to get involved in this issue? It's not our issue at
all," said
Taro Kono, a member of parliament from Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi's
Liberal Democratic Party. "The United States and NATO have
unilaterally
decided that the Serbs are the bad guys. I'm not sure it's so easy
to tell
who's right and who's wrong."
Opposition appears to be growing fastest in the developing world.
Since
the end of the Cold War, many developing nations grudgingly have come
to accept the United States as an economic model and leader. At the
same
time, many analysts say, the war has so graphically underlined U.S.
status
as the sole superpower that it has sparked resentment. Such feelings
have
been exacerbated by the impression that the United States and NATO
have largely ignored the United Nations and international opinion in
launching the air campaign.
"If Latin America is against the war in Yugoslavia, does it affect
Washington's decision to continue bombing? No," said Rafael Fernandez
de Castro, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in
Washington. "It
may complicate relations down the line, but right now it means very
little."
Nevertheless, skepticism is becoming widespread and varied. In the
Middle East, where the West was widely criticized for failing to
come to
the aid of Muslims during the Bosnian war earlier this decade, few
Arab
voices defend NATO's efforts to protect the largely Muslim Kosovo
Albanians. An exception is Jordan's new King Abdullah, who has urged
the United States not to waver in the battle with Belgrade.
For many Arabs, though, the NATO bombings have evoked disturbing
parallels with the continuing U.S.-led air campaign against Iraq,
whose
sanctions-bound population is the object of widespread sympathy in
the
Arab world. Jordan Times columnist Rami Khouri wrote last week that
the
United States and Britain have now made the "perpetual bombing of a
weak and defenseless target" something routine.
In Africa, "most ordinary people are too busy with the struggle of
day-to-day life" to focus closely on Kosovo, "and there has been
feeling
that it's white folks' business," said Babacar Toure, publisher of
the Sud
daily newspaper in Dakar, Senegal. But media accounts of errant bombs
and dead civilians have prompted debate among intellectuals, he said,
notably on the way NATO has sidelined the United Nations and its
African
secretary general, Kofi Annan.
People "are wondering what it is that drives NATO and what the rest
of
the world can expect from it," said Mahmoud Mamdani, a Ugandan
political scientist at the University of Cape Town. "Will it simply
behave in
a way that tends to establish its own hegemony?"
In the Philippines, one of Washington's closest allies in Asia,
protesters
have been marching daily in opposition to a plan for military
exercises with
the United States. Large anti-American protests denouncing the war
are
also being staged in Pakistan and India. Vietnam has condemned the
NATO attacks, calling for peaceful resolution of the issue.
An editorial in Chile's La Tercera de la Hora, a major daily
newspaper
there, said of the Chinese Embassy bombing: "Not only did it leave .
. .
[three] dead and 25 wounded, but it also weakened even more the
position of the European and U.S. powers in their effort to continue
this
military operation against the government of Slobodan Milosevic."
The war is striking a particularly bitter note in Latin America,
where
Washington's support of repressive governments in decades past has
left a
legacy of suspicion about its motives. Political opposition
movements are
using the war to their advantage, linking "Yankee bullying" in the
Balkans to
market-oriented economic reforms favored by Washington in Latin
American countries. For example, in Bogota, Colombia, demonstrators
gathered recently in front of a state university to condemn both
NATO's
bombing of Yugoslavia and the privatization of state-run companies.
"I don't think Milosevic is a saint, but the United States is on an
ego trip,"
said Etcheberry, the Argentine medical student.
For now, at least, mounting opposition to the war does not appear to
translate into widespread anger at all things American. In
Argentina, for
instance, recent polls by Gallup Argentina for the newspaper La
Nacion
showed that while 64 percent of Argentines oppose the war in
Yugoslavia
and 30 percent have a negative view of NATO, 56 percent said they
still
have a "favorable view" of the United States.
"Most Argentines want to keep excellent relations with the United
States,
receive U.S. investment and consume its music and its fast food,"
said
Martin Granovsky, managing editor of Buenos Aires's left-leaning
newspaper Pagina 12. "But at the same time, there remains here a
Latin
American tradition that is critical of U.S. military interventions
of any kind."
Correspondents Kevin Sullivan in Tokyo, Pamela Constable in Bombay,
Howard Schneider in Cairo, and researcher Robert Thomason in
Washington contributed to this report.
DEVELOPMENTS IN THE BALKANS
* Public support for the air war in Yugoslavia is softening and a
majority of
Americans believe the United States and its NATO allies should
negotiate
a settlement with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to end the
fighting, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
* Leading European NATO allies staked out different approaches to
ending the war in Kosovo today, with Britain pushing for ground
troops
and Germany and Italy advocating a temporary bombing halt as part of
a
peace settlement.
* European Union foreign ministers met in Brussels with Russian
Foreign
Minister Igor Ivanov to try to hammer out the details for a U.N.
resolution
on a peace settlement but emerged after three hours without any
progress
to report. Ivanov repeated Moscow's call for a bombing halt but said
Russia would move ahead on the diplomatic front without one.
* Bad weather in the Balkans forced NATO to scale back its air
attacks
even as intense fighting was reported between Serb-led Yugoslav
forces
and the Kosovo Liberation Army.
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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