I thought I'd spare Andrej the trouble of inputting Hitchens' recent
discussion of Chomsky's book on Kosovo. Don't thank me, AG. It was my
pleasure.

--
Tresy Kilbourne
Seattle WA


Genocide and the Body-Baggers

Christopher Hitchens

During the Kosovo war, Serbia's only remote sympathizer within NATO was the
government of Greece, which is joined to Belgrade by many common ties of
history, geography and Christian Orthodoxy. The Serbian official in charge
of Kosovo, a certain Mr. Angelkovic, probably thought that he was among
friends, therefore, when he told a comrade of me, a senior official in the
Foreign Ministry of Athens, that all he wanted to do was to reduce the
non-Serb population of Kosovo to "a manageable level." This plea--like most
Milosevic propaganda [and Andrej's], so self-pitying and yet so
horrific--was enough to nauseate Angelkovic's Hellenic auditors. Yet it
doesn't seem quite enough to discompose some of our native revisionists, who
are now wondering aloud whether it wasn't NATO that committed the "real" war
crimes.

I share with these revisionists a revulsion from the facile use of the term
"genocide." This toxic term has been both overused and underused in the
recent past. In Rwanda, where Madeleine Albright acted on Clinton's
instructions to veto a United Nations resolutions calling for pre-emptive
action (and later supported a French military intervention on the side of
the mass murderers), the Administration sedulously avoided using the word
genocide," because it is a threshold word that triggers a law, solemnly
passed by Congress, mandating intervention. In other words, the more
genocide there was, the less Washington would stress it.

On the other hand, in the dill of indictment against General Pinochet, most
of which is well warranted, the charge that he committed "genocide" stands
out as self-evidently absurd. He didn't try to exterminate or erase the
population of Chile, and he didn't in fact reduce it by more than a few
thousand. He did commit an appalling number of crimes, including crimes
against humanity as generally defined, and he should stand trial whether
he's feeling well or not. Once again, incidentally, the Clinton
Administration manages to be adequately uninformed on a crucial subject, and
has been of little or no help in furnishing relevant information on the
subject.

Defined by international law, "genocide" means any concerted attempt to
destroy the identity or existence of a people. There is no room for doubt
that this is what the Milosevic regime intended in Kosovo. The clearing of
the cities and villages and universities, and the deployment of "special
forces" in the task, leaves no penumbra of doubt. Was this provoked by
bombing from NATO? It would be a bold person who would maintain, after
Bosnia, that it was not also, at the very least, a deeply laid contingency
plan. Ethnic-cleansing battalions do not just blossom from nowhere under the
pretext or excuse of the violence that purports to thwart them.

doing nothing is also an intervention. NATO forces stood by while Srebrenica
was overrun. We don't know exactly where all the 9,000 men from that "safe
haven" are interred either, but I wouldn't' relish the job of going to the
widows of Tuzla and urging calm. It seems improbably that the missing men
have all gone AWOL to safe jobs in the neighboring countries. When Milosevic
was received, after Srebrenica, by Richard Holbrooke, as a "partner in
peace" at Dayton, he asked only two conditions for favoring Ohio with his
presence. The firs was immunity from prosecution, and the second was a
promise that Kosovo would not be mentioned at the conference. Both demands
were granted. That was an intervention too. But--as with Rwanda--it was a
negative intervention and thus did not draw any ire from the quiet-life,
body-bag-minded forces who claim to be the American "peace" movement.

Those who so wittily question the casualty figures in Kosovo are therefore
pushing at an open door. It was clear at the time, from the hordes of
refugees crowding the Macedonian and Albanian frontiers, that no attempt was
being made to slaughter them al. A few exemplary mass killings, the more
capricious the better, and the reinforced memory of years of racist rule,
and the people would move en masse. Anglekovic and his deputies, by
destroying the ID papers and homes of the fugitives, made no secret of their
belief they'd seen the last of them. That counts as a deliberate attempt to
disperse a population and erase its memory. (My Greek friend assures me that
stage two, also long meditated, would have been the importing of Serbian
settles from the Krajina.) The NATO intervention repatriated all or most of
the refugees and killed at least some of the cleansers. I find I have
absolutely no problem with that. It's nothing when compared with the
disgrace of having once been Milosevic's partner in peace.

With Noam Chomsky's book The New Military Humanism, Lessons from Kosovo, the
problem is not body-baggery. Chomsky really does oppose imperialist was on
principle. But his argument rests too heavily on double standards. If the
Kosovo intervention really was humane and disinterested, as its proponents
claim, then (he demands) what about East Timor? The book was written before
the international detachments arrived in Dili and before the Indonesian
occupiers sailed away. And, though that intervention was disgracefully late
(and no punishment was visited on Indonesian forces or "infrastructure"), I
cannot think of any other grounds on which Chomsky could have opposed it.
The rescuing forces are principally Australian. Australia, to its shame, was
one of the few nations that actually recognized the annexation of East
Timor. So of course there is hypocrisy. And, as we are learning every day
from Chechnya, there will always be double standards. Clinton and Gore will
never permit their client Yeltsin to be indicted for war crimes. Still, it
seems to be obvious that without the Kosovo operation and the exalted
motives that were claimed for it, the pressure to save East Timor would have
been considerably less. Skeptical though one ought to be about things like
the reliance of NATO on air power and the domination of the UN by the
nuclear states, the "double standard" may still be made to operate against
itself.