http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5148092-103645,00.html
Letters
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No 'neat distinctions' over killings in Kosovo
Tuesday March 15, 2005
Guardian
Robin Cook appears to have joined a strange trend evident both in former
Yugoslavia and outside the region, whereby indicted war criminals are
praised as "dignified", "honourable" and "heroic" for surrendering to the
international criminal tribunal at the Hague (The lesson I learned from
Milosevic, March 11).
Remarkably, Cook also reveals that he "had a number of contacts with the
Kosovo Liberation Army before and during Nato's intervention" against
Belgrade in 1999. The former foreign secretary describes the KLA as
"ruthless", stating that "it would be naive to imagine that they [KLA] made
a neat distinction between Serb combatants and Serb civilians".
I wonder why Cook did not share his wisdom with us during the Nato bombing
of Yugoslavia. Instead, amid Nato claims that theirs was purely a
humanitarian intervention, he praised, as he does today, "brave" KLA
fighters and even held a joint press briefing with a KLA representative.
This was, of course, the Robin Cook before the resignation from the
government over the Iraq war.
Dr Dejan Djokic
Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies, University of Nottingham
Robin Cook's grasp of events seems oddly shaky for someone so closely
involved. He praises the KLA's courage in fighting the Serbs "with no
artillery, armour or air cover". But Nato, the world's most powerful air
force, provided the KLA with total air supremacy. In weight of metal and
technology, it was the Serbs who were outgunned. The KLA, far from lone
courage against the odds, in fact had the world's leading military
superpower as their ally and backup.
Cook's grasp of timing is also a little odd, as he says that Nato
"intervened to stop ethnic cleansing", which actually happened after we
attacked, not before. Halting, then reversing ethnic cleansing was (quite
rightly) added to Nato's objectives later, but neither Blair nor Clinton
mention mass ethnic cleansing in their "going to war" justifications. Robin
Cook, like Tony Blair over Iraq, seems tempted to discreetly change history.
Alistair Fletcher
London
Robin Cook claims that it is "naive" to expect the Kosovo Liberation Army to
have made a "neat distinction" between fighting the Yugoslav army and
Serbian police and attacking innocent Serbian civilians. He justifies their
atrocious ethnic cleansing of Serb civilians with the assertion that they
were fighting during "vicious ethnic cleansing by Slobodan Milosevic".
He ignores the fact that the Roma, too, were victims of the KLA's ethnic
cleansing, and many Albanian civilians were also murdered for not supporting
them. In fact, Ramush Haradinaj's indictment refers to crimes against Roma
and Albanian civilians, as well as Serbs.
Harry Hayball
London
Serbian News Network - SNN
[email protected]
http://www.antic.org/
