on 2/8/00 5:33 PM, Robert Fisk wrote:

> It was not a war crime, Human Rights Watch says. In fact, Nato committed no
> war crimes, according to Kenneth Roth and his investigators. But it
> committed "violations of international humanitarian law" - which amounts to
> about the same thing.

Is this where we are supposed to quote the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, on
words meaning just what she wants them to mean? I suppose negligent homicide
and premeditated murder amount to "about the same thing," too, if you ignore
everything but the dead bodies and how they got there.

Let's refresh our memories, shall we? Until the inconvenient release of the
preliminary ICTY report on Serbian atrocities in Kosovo, and now the HRW
report, a veritable cottage industry was churning out Serbian apologetics on
the Internet. The gist: Serbs innocent, NATO guilty. There were at most a
couple hundred of Serb "abuses," they crowed, but thousands of NATO "war
crimes". The truth, it now turns out, is exactly the opposite--or more
precisely, what everyone except the crackpot Left expected from the outset.

So does anyone on the CL admit their error? Of course not. Robert Fisk is a
good example. Instead, just move the goalposts. First, selectively quote
international law; then obliterate well-known (and common-sense) legal
distinctions between war crimes and violations of humanitarian law
(distinctions outlined in the HRW report, so Fisk can't say he didn't know
about them); finally, focus with laserlike moral scrutiny on 1-2 apparently
indefensible attacks in the hopes of distracting attention from the big
picture: tens of thousands of NATO sorties, 250+ unjustified civilian
deaths.* Voila! NATO, still bad; Serbs, not so bad. Laptop pacifism means
never having to say you're sorry.

For the record, I wholeheartedly endorse HRW's call for an open inquiry into
the attacks that were prima facie unjustified under the Geneva Convention. I
think it's important that NATO not be allowed to "redefine the laws of war"
(or hide behind the usual face-saving bureaucratic lies), just as I think
it's important that the crackpot Left not be allowed to salvage their
shattered credibility by conducting their own kangaroo court on the subject.

Not that I expect that to stop them.

*HRW lists 500+ NATO-caused civilian deaths, of which roughly 50% -- 250 or
so -- are not justified under the laws of war.


--
Tresy Kilbourne
Seattle WA