------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date sent: Fri, 07 May 1999 18:03:00 -0700 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: NATO's actions causing "human rights catastrophe" - UN Human Rights Commissioner The Toronto Star May 7, 1999 A HUMAN-RIGHTS CATASTROPHE Large numbers of innocent civilians have been killed by NATO's actions; parallels to situation in Iraq. By Richard Gwyn The comments made a few days ago by Mary Robinson, the United Nations' Chief Commissioner for Human Rights, about what is going on in Yugoslavia, were exactly those you'd expect someone in her position to make. "A human-rights catastrophe" was unfolding, said Robinson. "Large numbers of innocent civilians have been killed." This is much the same as many commentators have been saying. Except for one critical fact. The innocent civilians Robinson was referring to were the Yugoslavs in Belgrade and elsewhere, who night after night are being pounded, and sometimes killed, by NATO's now six-week-old bombing campaign. Robinson's comments about what is being done in Kosovo by the Yugoslav army and special police were far more severe. "We are seeing terrible violations to vulnerable people week after week," she said. But her observations about what NATO is doing were stinging. "Civilian installations are being targeted on the basis that they are or could be of military application. And NATO remains the sole judge of what is or is not acceptable to bomb." Most stinging of all was Robinson's comments that, "What we are in effect seeing is that war-making has become the tool of peacemaking." All newspapers carried reports of Robinson's speech, made to the closing session of a meeting of the Human Rights Commission in Geneva. But if you'd blinked, you could easily have missed it. There were no front-page headlines. There were no follow-up interviews of Robinson. Her anguished plea was like a pebble dropped into the water that made a small splash before being quickly covered over by NATO spin doctors. Robinson isn't alone in her anguish about NATO's strategy. Pope John Paul II has appealed for an end to the bombing. So has Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author and dissident whose attacks upon the Soviet system were once so widely applauded in the West. Instead, not only has NATO's bombing continued and intensified but its targeting of civilians has now become its explicit policy. After new graphite bombs destroyed the Yugoslav electrical power system - putting hospital patients at grave risk - NATO spokesperson Jamie Shea declared, "NATO has its finger on the light switch now. We can turn the power off whenever we want." There is something obscene about a war being fought for humanitarian purposes that is itself becoming an inhumane war. That this inhumanity is mindless, rather than the deliberate brutality that has been wreaked upon the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo by the Yugoslav army and special police, does not in any way mitigate the criminality of the act. The 500 dead Yugoslav civilians (so far) are as dead as the slaughtered ethnic Albanians. Indeed, before long the number of dead Yugoslav civilians will equal the number of Kosovars killed in the year-long civil war that justified NATO's declaration of war on Yugoslavia. Nor is the conduct entirely mindless. NATO's decision not to fight a ground war represented a conscious preference for civilian Yugoslav casualties rather than for military casualties of both the Yugoslav army and of NATO contingents. All air wars reduce civilians to anonymous objects. Which makes them easy to kill. As well, the demonization of the enemy and the personalization of their leader - acts that democracies always undertake to muster up public support for their wars - further distances those pressing the button from those on whom the cruise missiles fall. The parallel is with Iraq. There, neutral observers like Amnesty International have estimated that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children have died of malnutrition and of common diseases for which medicines are no longer available, while the U.S. and its allies continue to hurl bombs at the country and to blockade it with sanctions. The terrible truth is that democracies can be as violent, if in a sterile, surgical way, as more repressive and less-advanced societies. Hiroshima and Dresden are evidence of this. Because of the entirely legitimate disgust and outrage in the West at Serbian atrocities, public disquiet about the inhumanity of our own war has been muted. But it is beginning to reveal itself. In Germany, polls for the first time are measuring majority opposition to the war. Here at home, the New Democrats have broken ranks with all other parties to call for a bombing pause. The most revealing evidence of rising self-doubt is the way Western leaders are now reaching out to Russia to try to broker some acceptable deal with Belgrade. What's revealing here is that six weeks ago, NATO justified its bypassing of the United Nations' Security Council with the argument that the unreliable Russians might veto any war resolution. The contradiction of turning war-making into a tool of peacemaking is becoming unsustainable.
[PEN-L:6559] (Fwd) NATO's actions causing "human rights catastrophe" - UN H
ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224] Sun, 9 May 1999 21:46:39 -0500