------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date sent: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 13:32:25 -0700 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: A WAR AGAINST ALL OF THE SERBS The Chicago Tribune April 29, 1999 A WAR AGAINST ALL OF THE SERBS It's hard to justify a policy whose chief achievement — and possibly its main purpose — is to make life miserable, frightening and dangerous for people who have no control over what is going on in Kosovo. By Steve Chapman War is to morality what the desert is to fish: a uniformly inhospitable clime. That's true even if the war is small and limited. The air campaign in Yugoslavia was conceived as a brief, surgical strike on Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic and his murderous military and paramilitary forces. But in five short weeks, it has expanded into a war on one group of his victims: the Serbian people. After bombing and re-bombing all the strictly military sites it could find, without inducing Milosevic to surrender, NATO expanded its list to include facilities whose destruction will do the most harm to civilians. NATO Allied Supreme Commander Gen. Wesley Clark, an advocate of what is known as "bringing the war home to Belgrade," finally got permission to take out mainstays of the Serbian economy, including the nation's electric power grid. Purely economic facilities were originally off-limits, but The Wall Street Journal reports that this "restriction is slipping almost daily." NATO is also planning a naval blockade to cut off Serbia's oil supplies. Even many of the attacks on "military" targets have had far less effect on Milosevic's campaign of terror than on the daily life of his long-suffering populace. Rail lines have been severed, industrial plants flattened and bridges demolished. Often, bystanders have found themselves classified, posthumously, as "collateral damage." Travel is hazardous, and just getting to work can be nearly impossible. Last week, at least 10 employees were killed when allied warplanes blasted a most unmilitary target--the official state television station in Belgrade. Why? Because "it has filled the airwaves with ... lies over the years," said a NATO spokesman. Well, so has Bill Clinton, but NATO hasn't fired any cruise missiles at the White House. The alliance deserves some credit for clearly going out of its way to minimize direct civilian casualties. It also can be excused if some strikes unavoidably kill non-combatants. But it's hard to justify a policy whose chief achievement--and possibly its main purpose--is to make life miserable, frightening and dangerous for people who have no control over what is going on in Kosovo. The apparent goal is to inflict so much pain as to force Milosevic to change his policies or to force his people to change rulers. "We're holding civilians hostage," says DePaul University political scientist Patrick Callahan, an expert on just-war theory. He may not get an argument from German Gen. Klaus Naumann, chairman of NATO's military committee, who says Yugoslavia has been set back economically by 10 years and figures that the air campaign could eventually turn the clock back half a century. Naumann warns that if Milosevic doesn't retreat, "he may end up being the ruler of rubble." NATO, in short, plans to reduce a country that is home to 10 million people to a huge pile of worthless debris. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the most fervent supporter of the air war, endorses that approach, telling the Serbs, "Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1398? We can do 1398, too." Why stop at 1398? Why not revive the idea, proposed but never adopted in Vietnam, of bombing the enemy all the way back to the Stone Age? If the aerial onslaught continues month after month, as threatened, some civilians will be blown up, but many more will be endangered by the secondary effects--food shortages, lack of fuel, loss of medicines, destruction of water, sewage and sanitation systems, poorly functioning hospitals, and the like. In Iraq, the international economic embargo already has had these consequences, causing some 90,000 deaths a year, by United Nations estimates. In Yugoslavia, as in Iraq, it's unlikely that punishing the villain's subjects will advance our larger purpose. Disrupting transportation hasn't stopped or even slowed the Serb offensive in Kosovo: Milosevic has more soldiers there today than he did when the bombing began. Interrupting state TV didn't weaken his grip. Curtailing oil supplies will cause no more than modest inconvenience to Serbian military forces: They'll get whatever fuel is available, while civilians will do without. All we are doing is uniting the Serbs in justified hatred of the West. Torturing or killing innocents in order to further a political goal is normally regarded as terrorism. But deliberately and needlessly inflicting pain on the people of Serbia, while creating conditions that promise to spawn disease and death, is seen by NATO as a perfectly legitimate strategy. Americans are highly attuned to the risks of losing soldiers and pilots in combat, but we need to beware of the bigger danger of this and every war: coming to resemble the enemy.
[PEN-L:6319] (Fwd) A WAR AGAINST ALL OF THE SERBS
ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224] Sun, 2 May 1999 22:20:03 -0500