- _______ ____ ______ / |/ / /___/ / /_ // M I D - E A S T R E A L I T I E S / /|_/ / /_/_ / /\\ Making Sense of the Middle East /_/ /_/ /___/ /_/ \\ CHOMSKY - ON BOMBING YUGOSLAVIA http://www.MiddleEast.Org News, Information, & Analysis That Governments, Interest Groups, and the Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know! --------------- To receive MER regularly email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] MER WEEKEND READING: CHOMSKY ON BOMBING YUGOSLAVIA "The three hundred and fifty thousand Kosovar refugees are roughly half the number of refugees that resulted from the Israeli expulsion of Palestinians in 1948. These population expulsions are called 'atrocities' only when some enemy commits them." Prof. Noam Chomsky (In April when interviewed that number was correct) "If this administration had a moral compass, it would not have undertaken the bombing." Prof. Noam Chomsky MER - Washington - 30 May 1999: If ever there was a brilliant, independent, courageous, and moral intellectual of Jewish heritage, it is surely Noam Chomsky. If ever there was a self-seeking intellectual hypocrite of Jewish heritage, it is Michael Lerner (that's Tikkun Magazine for those who don't know). Briefly, this is the same Michael Lerner who not so long ago during the Palestinian Intifada prevented other American Jewish intellectuals, Chomsky among them, from taking out a paid ad in his magazine supporting Palestinian Statehood and condemning Israeli repression. And today this is the same Michael Lerner, a kind of self-professed Jewish humanistic liberal complete with skullcap, who now promotes the Apartheid-like policies of the "Oslo Peace Process" and its adjunct, the corrupt and repressive "Authority" of Yasser Arafat. This said -- just to put things in clearer perspective -- the following comments by Noam Chomsky about America's bombing of Yogoslovia are of considerable interest as published in a recent issue of Lerner's magazine. But no one should be surprised that Lerner then takes the opportunity of presenting Chomsky's views to pen a sappy, disjointed, morally incoherent essay of his own -- pretending to be in some kind of dialogue with Chomsky but reaching the opposite conclusions. Lerner and the "Peace Now" liberals that congregate around Tikkun are not only backing the U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia but they are among the main groups beginning to push for an invasion of Yugoslavia and the capture/trial of Slobodan Milosovek and government. Somehow, it seems, such advocacy makes them feel better about the Holocaust and themselves, about Israel they have for so long championed, and about their lofty, however disingenuous and selective, morality. Incidentally, in his own tearful essay (which we leave to another day) Lerner says nothing about Chomsky's comparison of the refugee exodus of 1999 from Kosovo to the refugee exodus 50 years earlier from what the world then called Palestine. We wonder why... No, actually, we know why. And so we eagerly await the day when Lerner and the liberal Jewish establishment of the U.S. -- one of the most powerful and wealthy groups in contemporary American society -- will dare to advocate the "return" of the three million plus Palestinian refugees to their homes (with Western army escorts no less) as they now do for the Kosovar Albanians of which they know so little. STOP U.S. INTERVENTION An interview with Noam Chomsky The following piece (in Tikkun) includes statements made by Noam Chomsky as part of an essay he wrote on the Z Magazine website on March 27, 1999, and representative statements he made in an interview with Michael Lerner on April 5, 1999. Question: Many Jews believe that the intervention by the United States in Kosovo is a humanitarian act which deserves our support. Chomsky: Then they are deluding themselves. The right of humanitarian intervention, if it exists as a category in international law, is premised on the "good faith" of those intervening. That assumption of good faith is based not on their rhetoric but on their record, in particular their record of adherence to the principles of international law, World Court decisions, and so on. But if we look at the historical record, the United States does not qualify. To be sure, there has been a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo in the past year, overwhelmingly attributable to Yugoslav military forces. The main victims have been ethnic Albanian Kosovars, some 90 percent of the population of this Yugoslav territory. The standard estimate is two thousand deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees. But let's look at the U.S. record. Consider, for example, Colombia. In Colombia, according to State Department estimates, the annual level of political killing by the government and its paramilitary associates is about at the level of Kosovo, and refugee flight primarily from their atrocities is well over a million. Yet Colombia has been the leading Western hemisphere recipient of U.S. arms and training even as violence there increased through the 1990s. Our assistance is still increasing, now under a "drug war" pretext dismissed by almost all serious observers. The Clinton administration was particularly enthusiastic in its praise for Colombian president Gaviria, whose tenure in office was responsible for "appalling levels of violence" according to human rights organizations, even surpassing his predecessors. Or consider Turkey, a neighbor to the former Yugoslavia. By a very conservative estimate, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. Over a million Kurds fled to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994 as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside. The year 1994 marked two records: it was, according to Jonathan Randal who reported from the scene, both "the year of the worst repression in the Kurdish provinces" of Turkey and the year when Turkey became "the biggest single importer of American military hardware and thus the world's largest arms purchaser." When human rights groups exposed Turkey's use of U.S. jets to bomb villages, the Clinton administration found ways to evade laws requiring suspension of arms deliveries, much as it was doing in Indonesia and elsewhere. Colombia and Turkey explain their (U.S.-supported) atrocities on grounds that they are defending their countries from the threat of terrorist guerrillas—as does the government of Yugoslavia. I could supply many other recent examples of the moral fiber behind U.S. foreign policy directions (consider, for example, the effects of our economic boycott of Iraq, where it is estimated that about five thousand children die a month from the malnutrition and malnutrition-related diseases brought on by the UN embargo insisted upon by the United States). These and other examples might also be kept in mind when we read the awed rhetoric about how the "moral compass" of the Clinton administration is at last functioning properly in the case of Kosovo. If this administration had a moral compass, it would not have undertaken the bombing. Predictably, the threat of NATO bombing led to an escalation of atrocities by the Serbian army and paramilitaries and to the departure of international observers, which of course had the same effect. Two days after the bombing began, Commanding General Wesley Clark declared that it was "entirely predictable" that Serbian terror and violence would intensify after the NATO bombing, exactly as happened. A standard argument for the bombing is that we had to do something: we could not simply stand by as the atrocities continued. That is never true. One choice, always, is to follow the Hippocratic principle: "First, do no harm.." If you can think of no way to adhere to that elementary principle, then do nothing. There are always ways that can be considered. Diplomacy and negotiations are never at an end. Q: What are the primary arguments that would lead a progressive person to be opposed to U.S. military intervention in Kosovo, if our stated goal is to stop the genocide there? Chomsky: That was not the stated goal. That is a goal that was concocted weeks later, for the simple reason that no one was claiming that "genocide" was taking place before the bombing. The stated goal was to prove the credibility of NATO, to stop ethnic cleansing that was going on inside of Kosovo, and to bring stability to Eastern Europe. To quote from Clinton's televised address, the stated goal was about credibility, upholding values, protecting our interests, and advancing the cause of peace. Look at the background. Starting in 1989, when Milosevic had withdrawn autonomy from the Kosovars, the Kosovars had launched a quite remarkable nonviolent opposition which persisted for the next six years. They were in effect creating a parallel civil society. Meanwhile, in order to achieve a peace settlement in Bosnia at the Dayton peace talks in 1995, the United States completely sold out the Kosovars' struggle for autonomy and, they hoped, eventual independence. Bosnia was effectively partitioned between greater Croatia and greater Serbia. Kosovo was to remain under the authority of Serbia. Because the United States rewarded pre-Dayton nonviolence with a willingness to sell out their interests, many Kosovars concluded that the United States only respected force and violence. At that point, the Kosovo Liberation Army, previously aragtag force, began to gain popular support and soon began a significant guerrilla struggle, attacking police stations and carrying out other actions.. According to the United States and NATO, the Serbian crackdown began in February of 1998. Now what humanitarian interest suddenly stirs the United States? The two thousand people killed in Kosovo this year, while an atrocity, is a fraction of the atrocities committed in southeastern Turkey in their own country against Kurds in the 1990s where deaths, presumably mostly Kurdish, are estimated at thirty thousand and refugees at well over a million. It's one-tenth the number of civilians that Israel killed in Lebanon in 1982 after invading another country with no pretext whatsoever. The three hundred and fifty thousand Kosovar refugees are roughly half the number of refugees that resulted from the Israeli expulsion of Palestinians in 1948. These population expulsions are called "atrocities" only when some enemy commits them. Q: You think there's no difference between Israel in 1948 and … Chomsky: Every two cases are different: I was simply talking about scale. At the end of 1998 there was a cease-fire in Kosovo. Two thousand European monitors were introduced. Then that cease-fire broke down. The threat of NATO bombings increased the level of violence. The monitors were withdrawn, which again increased the level of violence. By the end of March NATO bombed, and then we saw a huge escalation of violence. Q: What is your theory about why the United States engaged in this action, if not for humanitarian concerns? Certainly the bombing does not help Clinton politically; he must have known that he would almost certainly face a divided country and the risk of being drawn into sending troops to fight. No president would risk this unless he either really believed in what he was doing or had some overwhelming American interest at stake. Chomsky: The United States is not going in there to save the oppressed. If we wanted to save the oppressed we could have supported the nonviolent movement instead of selling them out at Dayton. Any kind of turbulence in the Balkans is a threat to the interests of rich, privileged, powerful people. Therefore, any turbulence in the Balkans is called a crisis. The same circumstances would not be a crisis were they to occur in Sierra Leone, or Central America, or even Turkey. But in Europe, the heartland of American economic interests, any threat in the Balkans has the possibility of spilling over. Refugees cause problems in Europe. The Kosovo conflict could lead to a Greek-Turkish war, or bring in the Russians, or undermine Macedonia. Why did they pick this strategy? We could have turned to the UN, as is required by international law and treaty obligations. But Madeleine Albright, speaking for the United States, has made it clear that we will act "multilaterally when we can and unilaterally when we must" (meaning when you at the UN don't go along with us). The United States rejected World Court jurisdiction over ten years ago; we stated officially that we can no longer accept the World Court because the countries of the world no longer accept our position. So that leaves us with NATO, where the United States dominates. Within NATO, there was a debate about how to proceed. The United States and Britain advocated force. NATO powers, including Britain, wanted to get UN authorization for sending unarmed monitors. The United States refused to allow the "neuralgic word 'authorize'," the New York Times reported. The Clinton administration "was sticking to its stand that NATO should be able to act independently of the United Nations." We carried out the bombing, even with the expectation of increased atrocities, in order, in part, to preserve the "credibility" of NATO. Q: What do you expect will be the resolution to this action? Chomsky: Some Western leaders have begun talking about an eventual partition of Kosovo. This would be an ugly outcome, because 90 percent of the province is Albanian. The likely partition would give the northern part of their country, the part that has not only the historical monuments that the Serb nationalists care about but most of the resources and wealth as well, to the Serbs. The south, which is kind of like a desert, would go to the 90 percent of Kosovars who are Albanian. Yet that ugly solution would be better than another outcome that may be in the minds of some military leaders — that once the Albanian population is expelled and the Serbs flee to the north, the United States may just carpet bomb the country, a Carthaginian solution aimed at showing our "credibility," as we did in Vietnam south of the twentieth parallel. ______________ M I D - E A S T R E A L I T I E S For past MER articles go to: http://WWW.MiddleEast.Org COMMENT OR MESSAGE FOR MER? Call: 1800 724-6644, ID 202 362-5266 [EMAIL PROTECTED] / Fax: 202 362-6965 / Phone: 202 362-5266
