From: "Janet M. Eaton" <•••@••.•••>
To: •••@••.•••
Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 05:06:52 +0000
Subject: ROBERT FISK - What is the point of Nato? May 13th
'An Atlantic alliance that has brought us to this catastrophe should
be wound up'..How much longer do we have to endure the folly of
Nato's war in the Balkans? In just 50 days, the Atlantic alliance has
failed in everything it set out to do. .... As a citizen of a new,
modern Europe, I don't want my continent led by the third-rate
generals and two-bit under-secretaries who have been ranting on our
television screens for the past 50 days. I don't want Europe to be
"protected" any longer by the US. If that means the end of the
Atlantic alliance, so be it."
-- Robert Fiske, The Independent, May 13, 1999
FYI,
je
Oh yes and he reminds us of the good news which this war portends
for General Clark's most loyal allies, the arms manufacturers of our
proud democracies. Boeing hit a 52-week high last week with stock
trading at just under $44 (#27). British Aerospace share prices have
gained a 43 per cent increase since Nato's bombardment commenced.
===============================================
------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 00:32:32 -0700 (PDT)
From: MichaelP <•••@••.•••>
To: "unlikely.suspects":;
Subject: ROBERT FISK - What is the point of Nato?
This writer seems to have been taking a break - over a week since he last
wrote something for the INDEPENDENT? Was he sick, or dead or ...
silenced.
Cheers
MichaelP
===============================
INDEPENDENT (London) MAY 13
ROBERT FISK - What is the point of Nato?
'An Atlantic alliance that has brought us to this catastrophe should be
wound up'
How much longer do we have to endure the folly of Nato's war in the
Balkans? In just 50 days, the Atlantic alliance has failed in everything
it set out to do. It has failed to protect the Kosovo Albanians from
Serbian war crimes. It has failed to cow Slobodan Milosevic. It has failed
to force the withdrawal of Serb troops from Kosovo. It has broken
international law in attacking a sovereign state without seeking a UN
mandate. It has killed hundreds of innocent Serb civilians - in our name,
of course - while being too cowardly to risk a single Nato life in defence
of the poor and the weak for whom it meretriciously claimed to be
fighting. Nato's war cannot even be regarded as a mistake - it is a
criminal act.
It is, of course, now part of the mantra of all criticism of Nato that we
must mention Serb wickedness in Kosovo. So here we go. Yes, dreadful,
wicked deeds - atrocities would not be a strong enough word for it - have
gone on in Kosovo: mass executions, rape, dispossession, "ethnic
cleansing", the murder of intellectuals. Some of Nato's propaganda
programme has done more to cover up such villainy than disclose it.
And, as we all know, the dozens of Kosovo Albanians massacred on the road
to Prizren were slaughtered by Nato - not by the Serbs as Nato originally
claimed. But I have seen with my own eyes - travelling under the Nato
bombardment - the house-burning in Kosovo and the hundreds of Albanians
awaiting dispossession in their villages.
But back to the subject - and perhaps my first question should be put a
little more boldly. Not: "How much longer do we have to endure this
stupid, hopeless, cowardly war?" but: "How much longer do we have to
endure Nato? How soon can this vicious American-run organisation be
deconstructed and politically 'degraded', its pontificating generals put
back in their boxes with their mortuary language of 'in-theatre assets'
and 'collateral damage'"?
And how soon will our own compassionate, socialist liberal leaders realise
that they are not fighting a replay of the Second World War nor striking a
blow for a new value-rich millennium? In Middle East wars, I've always
known when a side was losing - it came when its leaders started to
complain that journalists were not being fair to their titanic struggle
for freedom/ democracy/human rights/sovereignty/ soul. And on Monday, Tony
Blair started the whining. After 50 days of television coverage soaked in
Nato propaganda, after weeks of Nato officials being questioned by
sheep-like journalists, our Prime Minister announces the press is ignoring
the plight of the Kosovo Albanians.
The fact that this is a lie is not important. It is the nature of the lie.
Anyone, it seems, who doesn't subscribe to Europe's denunciations of
Fascism or who raises an eyebrow when - in an act of utter folly - the
Prime Minister makes unguaranteed promises that the Kosovo Albanians will
all go home, is now off-side, biased - or worthy of one of Downing
Street's preposterous "health warnings" because they allegedly spend more
time weeping for dead Serbs than the numerically greater number of dead
Albanians (the assumption also being, of course, that it is less
physically painful to be torn apart by a Nato cluster bomb than by a Serb
rocket-propelled grenade).
President Clinton - who will in due course pull the rug from under Mr
Blair - tells the Kosovo Albanians that they have the "right to return".
Not the Palestinian refugees of Lebanon, of course. They do not have such
a right. Nor the Kurds dispossessed by our Nato ally, Turkey. Nor the
Armenians driven from their land by the Turks in the world's first
holocaust (there being only one holocaust which Messers Clinton and Blair
are interested in invoking just now).
Mr Blair's childish response to this argument is important. Just because
wrongs have been done in the past doesn't mean we have to stand idly by
now. But the terrible corollary of this dangerous argument is this: that
the Palestinians, the Armenians, the Rwandans or anyone else cannot expect
our compassion. They are "the past". They are finished.
But what is all this nonsense about Nato standing for democracy? It
happily allowed Greece to remain a member when its ruthless colonels
staged a coup d'etat which imprisoned and murdered intellectuals. Nato had
no objection to the oppression of Salazar and Caetano - who were at the
same time busy annihilating "liberation" movements almost identical to the
Kosovo Liberation Army. Indeed, the only time when Nato proposed to
suspend Portugal's membership - I was there at the time and remember this
vividly - was when the country staged a revolution and declared itself a
democracy.
Is it therefore so surprising that Nato now turns out to be so brutal? It
attacks television stations and kills Serb journalists - part of
Milosevic's propaganda machine, a "legitimate target", shrieks Clare
Short.
And what about the Chinese embassy? Did the CIA really use an old map? Or
did the CIA believe that - because Mira Markovic (the wife of the Yugoslav
President) had such close relations with the Chinese government that both
she and President Slobodan Milosevic might be sleeping in the Chinese
embassy. Nato, remember, had already targeted the Milosevic residence in
an attempt to assassinate him. It had already - according to one
disturbing report - tried to lure the Serb minister of information to the
Serb television headquarters just before it was destroyed.
So why not the Chinese embassy? Would Nato do anything so desperate? Well,
Nato is desperate. It is losing the war, it is destroying itself.
As for General Wesley Clark, the man who thought he could change history
by winning a war without ground troops, we have only to recall his
infantile statement of last month about President Milosevic.
"We are winning and he is losing - and he knows it," General Clark told
us.
He did not explain why Mr Milosevic would need to be told such a thing if
he knew it. Nor did he recall that he had once accepted from General Ratko
Mladic - the Bosnian Serb military leader whose men were destroying the
Muslims of Sarajevo - a gift of an engraved pistol. Nor, of course, did
General Clark remind us that General Mladic and his colleague Radovan
Karadjic remain free in Bosnia - which is under the firm control of Nato
troops.
Nor are we going to be given the good news which this war portends for
General Clark's most loyal allies, the arms manufacturers of our proud
democracies. Boeing hit a 52-week high last week with stock trading at
just under $44 (#27) British Aerospace share prices have gained a 43 per
cent increase since Nato's bombardment commenced. The British government
said on Tuesday that "military operations" were costing #37m "excluding
munitions". Now why, I wonder, did this figure exclude munitions?
All of which makes me wonder, too, if this disastrous war isn't going to
be the end of Nato. I hope so. As a citizen of a new, modern Europe, I
don't want my continent led by the third-rate generals and two-bit
under-secretaries who have been ranting on our television screens for the
past 50 days. I don't want Europe to be "protected" any longer by the US.
If that means the end of the Atlantic alliance, so be it.
Because an Atlantic alliance that has brought us to this catastrophe
should be wound up. Until it is, Europe will never - ever - take
responsibility for itself or for the dictators who threaten our society.
Until then, Europe will never lay its own lives on the line for its own
people - which is what the Kosovo Albanians need. Until Nato is dead,
there will never be a real European defence force. And until Nato is dead,
there will be no need to seek the international mandate from the United
Nations which "humanitarian action" needs.
And the UN, ultimately, is the only institution the poor and the sick and
the raped and the dispossessed can rely on. Nato troops are not going to
die for Kosovo. So what is the point of Nato?
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