Re: NATO, Kosovo, Russia

March 24, 1999

 NATO's Humanitarian Trigger
 By Diana Johnstone

>From James Rubin to Christiane Amanpour, the broad range of government
and media opinion is totally united in demanding that NATO bomb Serbia.
This is necessary, we are told, in order to "avert
a humanitarian catastrophe", and because, "the only language
Milosevic understands is force"...
which happens to be the language the U.S. wants to speak.

Kosovo is presented as the problem, and NATO as the solution.
In reality, NATO is the problem, and Kosovo is the solution.

 After the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO needed a new excuse
for pumping resources into the
military-industrial complex. Thanks to Kosovo,
NATO can celebrate its 50th anniversary next month
by consecration of its new global mission: to intervene anywhere
in the world on humanitarian
grounds. The recipe is easy: arm a group of radical secessionists
to shoot policemen, describe the
inevitable police retaliation as "ethnic cleansing", promise the rebels
that NATO will bomb their
enemy if the fighting goes on, and then interpret the resulting
mayhem as a challenge to NATO's
"resolve" which must be met by military action.

Thanks to Kosovo, national sovereignty will be a thing of the past
-- not of course for Great Powers
like the U.S. and China, but for weaker States that really
need it. National boundaries will be no
obstacle to NATO intervention.

Thanks to Kosovo, the U.S. can control eventual Caspian oil pipeline
routes
between the Black Sea
and the Adriatic, and extend the European influence of favored ally
Turkey.

Last February 23, James Hooper, executive director of the
Balkan Action Council, one of the many
think tanks that have sprung up to justify the ongoing transformation
of former Yugoslavia into NATO
protectorates, gave a speech at the Holocaust Museum in
Washington at the invitation of its
"Committee of Conscience". The first item on his list of "things
to do next" was this: "Accept that the
Balkans are a region of strategic interest for
the United States, the new Berlin if you will, the testing
ground for NATO's resolve and US leadership. [...]
The administration should level with the American
people and tell them that we are likely to be in the
Balkans militarily indefinitely, at least until there is
a democratic government in Belgrade."

In the Middle Ages, the Crusaders launched their
conquests from the Church pulpits. Today, NATO
does so in the Holocaust Museum. War must be sacred.

This sacralization has been largely facilitated
by a post-communist left which has taken refuge in
moralism and identity politics to the exclusion of any analysis
of the economic and geopolitical
factors that continue to determine the macropolicies shaping the world.

Jean-Christophe Rufin, former vice president of "Doctors
Without Borders" recently pointed to the
responsibility of humanitarian non-governmental organizations
in justifying military intervention. "They
were the first to deplore the passivity of the political response
to dramatic events in the Balkans or
Africa. Now they have got what they wanted, or so it seems.
For in practice, rubbing elbows with
NATO could turn out to be extremely dangerous."

Already the call for United Nations soldiers to intervene
on humanitarian missions raised suspicions
in the Third World that "the humanitarians could be the
Trojan horse of a new armed imperialism",
Rufin wrote in "Le Monde". But NATO is something else.

"With NATO, everything has changed. Here we are
dealing with a purely military, operational
alliance, designed to respond to a threat, that
is to an enemy", wrote Rufin. "NATO defines an
enemy, threatens it, then eventually strikes and destroys it.

"Setting such a machine in motion requires a detonator.
Today it is no longer military. Nor is it
political. The evidence is before us: NATO's trigger,
today, is... humanitarian. It takes blood, a
masssacre, something that will outrage public opinion so
that it will welcome a violent reaction."

The consequence, he concluded, is that "the civilian populations
have never been so potentially
threatened as in Kosovo today. Why? Because those potential
victims are the key to international
reaction. Let's be clear: the West wants dead bodies. [...]
We are waiting for them in Kosovo. We'll
get them." Who will kill them is a mystery but previous incidents
suggest that "the threat comes from
all sides."

In the middle of conflict as in Kosovo, massacres can
easily be perpetrated... or "arranged". There
are always television crews looking precisely for that "top story".

Recently, Croatian officers have admitted that in 1993 they
themselves staged a "Serbian bombing"
of the Croatian coastal city of Sibenik for the benefit of
Croatian television crews. The former
Commander of the 113th Croatian brigade headquarters,
Davo Skugor, reacted indignantly. "Why
so much fuss?" he complained. "There is no city in Croatia
in which such tactical tricks were not
used. After all, they are an integral part of strategic planning.
That's only one in a series of
stratagems we've resorted to during the war."

 The fact remains that there really is a very serious Kosovo problem.
It has existed for well over a
century, habitually exacerbated by outside powers (the Ottoman Empire,
the Habsburg Empire, the
Axis powers during World War II). The Serbs are essentially a
modernized peasant people, who
having liberated themselves from arbitrary Turkish Ottoman
oppression in the 19th century, are
attached to modern state institutions. In contrast, the Albanians
in the northern mountains of Albania
and Kosovo have never really accepted any law, political or
religious, over their own unwritten
"Kanun" based on patriarchal obedience to vows, family
honor, elaborate obligations, all of which
are enforced not by any government but by male family and clan
chiefs protecting their honor,
eventually in the practice of blood feuds and revenge.

The basic problem of Kosovo is the difficult coexistence
on one territory of ethnic communities
radically separated by customs, language and historical
self-identification. From a humanistic
viewpoint, this problem is more fundamental than the problem of State
boundaries.

Mutual hatred and fear is the fundamental human catastrophe
in Kosovo. It has been going on for a
long time. It has got much worse in recent years. Why?

 Two factors stand out as paradoxically responsible for this worsening
-- paradoxically, because
presented to the world as factors which should have improved the
situation.

1 - The first is the establishment in the autonomous Kosovo of the
1970s and 1980s of
separate Albanian cultural institutions, notably the Albanian
language faculties in Pristina
University. This cultural autonomy, demanded by ethnic Albanian leaders,

turned out to
be a step not to reconciliation between communities but
to their total separation.
Drawing on a relatively modest store of past scholarship,
largely originating in Austria,
Germany or Enver Hoxha's Albania, studies in Albanian history
and literature amounted
above all to glorifications of Albanian identity. Rather than
developing the critical spririt,
they developed narrow ethnocentricy. Graduates in these fields were
prepared above all
for the career of nationalist political leader, and it is striking
 the number of literati among
Kosovo Albanian secessionist leaders. Extreme cultural autonomy has
created two
populations with no common language.

In retrospect, what should have been done was to combine Serbian
and Albanian studies, requiring
both languages, and developing original comparative
studies of history and literature. This would
have subjected both Serbian and Albanian national
myths to the scrutiny of the other, and worked to
correct the nationalist bias in both. Bilingual comparative
studies could and should have been a way
toward mutual understanding as well as an enrichment of universal
culture. Instead, culture in the
service of identity politics leads to mutual ignorance and contempt.

The lesson of this grave error should be a warning elsewhere,
starting in Macedonia, where Albanian
nationalists are clamoring to repeat the Pristina experience
in Tetova. Other countries with mixed
ethnic populations should take note.

2. The second factor has been the support from foreign powers,
especially the United
States, to the Albanian nationalist cause in Kosovo.
By uncritically accepting the version
of the tangled Kosovo situation presented by the Albanian lobby,
American politicians
have greatly exacerbated the conflict by encouraging the armed
Albanian rebels and
pushing the Serbian authorities into extreme efforts to wipe them out.

The "Kosovo Liberation Army" (UCK) has nothing to lose
by provoking deadly clashes, once it is
clear that the number of dead and the number of refugees
will add to the balance of the
"humanitarian catastrophe" that can bring NATO and U.S.
air power into the conflict on the Albanian side.

 The Serbs have nothing to gain by restraint, once it is clear that they
will
be blamed anyway for whatever happens.

By identifying the Albanians as "victims" per se, and the Serbs
as the villains, the United States and
its allies have made any fair and reasonable political situation
virtually
impossible. The Clinton
administration in particular builds its policy on the assumption that
what the Kosovar Albanians --
including the UCK -- really want is "democracy," American style.
In fact, what they want is power over
a particular territory, and among the Albanian nationalists, there is
a bitter power struggle going on
over who will exercise that power.

Thus an American myth of "U.S.-style democracy and free market economy
will
solve everything" is
added to the Serbian and Albanian myths to form a fictional screen
making
reality almost impossible
to discern, much less improve. Underlying the American myth
are Brzezinski-style geostrategic
designs on potential pipeline routes to Caspian oil and methodology for
expanding NATO as an
instrument to ensure U.S. hegemony over the Eurasian land mass.

Supposing by some miracle the world suddenly turned upside down,
and there were outside powers
who really cared about the fate of Kosovo and its inhabitants,
one could suggest the following:

1 - stop one-sided demonization of the Serbs, recognize the genuine
qualities,
faults, and fears on all
sides, and work to promote understanding rather than hatred;

2 - stop arming and encouraging rebel groups;

3 - allow genuine mediation by parties with no geostrategic or
political interests at stake in the region.