-Caveat Lector- From http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/today/aug29/Leaders/endintears.shtml }}>Begin PUBLICATION DATE:Wednesday, 29 August 2001 Nato action could all end in tears By Eamonn McCann Many readers must have felt an urge over the past week to 'phone the Ministry of Defence in London and shout out a plea for the cancellation of the operation in Macedonia. Call it off now, we'd have begged them. It has no chance. Far more likely it will make everything worse, and end in bitterness, betrayal and tears. Of course, we wouldn't have been listened to. Nato governments will have consulted the best intelligence money can buy before undertaking Operation Essential Harvest, the mission to disarm insurgent Albanians. Armed with this understanding, Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson (one and the same as the former Labour MP George 'Wee Geordie' Robertson), pronounced: "We anticipate the task will be completed in a matter of weeks". The initial mandate for Essential Harvest lasts 30 days. The Nato force, Wee Geordie went on to explain, was not mandated to impose any course of action on anyone. Its task was to collect guns from "rebels" who, conveniently, had agreed to hand them over "voluntarily". It's at this point that people in Coleraine, Cullybackey, Lisburn and Swatragh will have looked up from their newspapers or paused for a moment from washing the dishes and murmured to themselves that becoming a Lord seems to have robbed Wee Geordie of any bit of sense he ever had. There was something worrisome, too, about the discrepancy between the number of guns the Albanians agreed to hand over and the number the government in Skopje expected Nato to collect. The former said around 3,300, the latter estimated 80,000. The difference was described by Robertson as "a detail". Sighs of sad bemusement across the North at this will scarce have subsided before news came of the first British casualty. Sapper Ian Collins of the Royal Engineers was struck by a piece of concrete thrown from a bridge at his Landrover as he drove away from Skopje airport around teatime on Sunday. Official reaction to the 22-year-old's death will have deepened a sense of foreboding in the people of these parts. Robertson, on the other hand, was simply bewildered by the turn of events. The attack was "absurd", he declared, "considering Nato troops are (in Macedonia) to assist the people and government". British Defence Minister Geoffrey Hoon came in on cue, script unchanged from his days at the NIO: the youths who had flung the concrete "represent nothing", but constituted merely "a hooligan element". People here, on the other hand, will automatically, and accurately, have understood that the youths concerned were opposed to Nato's presence because they believe that Nato, far from being neutral, is in the country to prop up the other side. Many here will reasonably have assumed, too, that there will be more of this sort of thing. Almost certainly, the youths were Macedonian, not Albanian. They will have been aware that the National Liberation Army Nato says it has come to disarm is a parallel force to the Kosovo Liberation Army which Nato helped arm and in support of which Nato airplanes laid Serbia waste in 1999. They are highly unlikely to accept the Nato forces' bona fides. Ian Collins' father asks, "Why are we in Macedonia?" And the MoD answers by stressing the importance of completing the mission and making a success of the political reforms. In a letter to the Guardian last Saturday, retired British ambassador Brian Barder observed: "Each Nato intervention so far has failed to prevent or reverse ethnic cleansing, has turned out to entail an open-ended commitment, and precipitated a fresh crisis next door, domino-style. Perhaps it's time to ask whether. . . Nato's well-meaning interventions are not in fact making bad situations worse?. Some would give him an argument about the well-meaningness of Nato's intentions. But as to the outcome, he's spot on. As so many of us here, unlike Nato and the MoD, have understood all along. >> View our fast download Text-Only Edition << � Belfast Telegraph Newspapers Ltd. 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