New military humanism
SRadulovi
Tell the truth, but don't expect anyone to listen
WEDNESDAY BOOK
The New Military Humanism:
Lessons from Kosovo
by Noam Chomsky
(Pluto Press, £9.99)
THANK GOD for Noam Chomsky. In a West ever more saturated by "safe"
reporting, by dog-like support for governments who embark on "moral"
wars, he is a unique figure: brave, intelligent and independent. Little
wonder that no newspaper in America will give him a regular column. His
latest book proves why. Ruthless in his analysis of Nato's lies,
relentless in his emphasis on the parallels between Kosovo, Central
America and Turkey he believes that this year's bombardment of Serbia
undermines what is left of international law.
How many times, for example, did we see on television any serious
investigation into the CV of William Walker, the US diplomat leading the
OSCE team to Racak after the January massacre of 45 Albanian civilians?
Racak was widely regarded as one cause of the Nato bombardment. "I do
not hesitate to describe the crime as a massacre, a crime against
humanity," Walker told his largely uncritical audience of journalists.
As Chomsky points out, Walker was American ambassador to El Salvador,
"where he administered the US support that allowed the government to
carry out extreme state terror, peaking, in November 1989, in an
outburst of violence that included the murder of six leading Salvadoran
dissident intellectuals, Jesuit priests along with their housekeeper
and her daughter". Walker later advised James Baker, the Secretary of
State, not to jeopardise the US relationship with El Salvador by
investigating "past deaths, however heinous".
Why didn't we hear this background information when Walker was beating
the drums of war? Or why didn't we ask ourselves why the Turks couldn't
show a little "humanism" towards the Kurds they had driven from their
homes? Or why America felt so willing to support "humanitarian"
intervention in Kosovo when it spent so much time in 1979 condemning
Vletnam's intervention in Cambodia?
As the Kosovo war began, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was invited to
visit the huge refugee camps in Macedonia and lectured at the White
House on "the Perils of Indifference". Yet, as Chomsky again reminds
us, Wiesel resigned the chair of a 1982 conference on genocide for fear
that any discussion of Turkey's ferocious 1915 genocide against the
Armenians might anger Turkey - a principal American (and now Israeli)
ally. I also recall how, after the massacre of Palestinian civilians in
Beirut in 1982 by Israel's militia allies, Wiesel's only response was to
express "sadness". Yet he had no problem in telling us the Kosovo
conflict was a "moral war".
But Chomsky's arguments do sometimes contain a weak link. His
strengths - and weaknesses - can be found in one critical paragraph of
this short, angry book. Chomsky refers to Serb atrocities in
Kosovo, "which are quite real and... often ghastly. We discover that the
bombing was not... undertaken in 'response' to ethnic cleansing and to
'reverse' it, as... leaders alleged". Clinton and Blair instead "decided
in favour of a war that led to a radical escalation.of ethnic cleansing,
along with other deleterious effects".
His point is obvious and true: most of the Kosovo Albanians for whom we
supposed fought the war "to return them to their homes" were still there
when it began. Nato knew when it started its bombardment that the Serbs
would turn upon the civilians of Kosovo. Chomsky is one of the few
voices reminding the world that the aims of the war were changed once
the bombing got underway.
No, the problem lies in Chomsky's description of Serb atrocities
as "quite real" and "often ghastly". "Quite real ' is a cop-out for
very real. Atrocities "sharply escalated" after Nato's bombardment, he
says, but does not explain what these were: mass executions, rape,
torture. The index refers to "atrocities" in Afiica, Columbia, East
Timor and Turkey without the appearance of "Serbia".
The moral is simple. If you're going to put the boot into the West,
don't pussy-foot about the other side's butchery. Equally, if you're
going to tell the truth - and Chomsky does - don't expect anyone to
listen. He has a mi-nority audience and this book, which should be read
by anyone interested in the Kosovo war, will have a neces sarily small
circulation. When free people want to wear chains, there's not much you
can do to help them.
ROBERT FISK