There IS an
Alternative to Bombing
By JONATHAN
POWER
March 31, 1999
LONDON- It took too many years of bombing before America
discovered its limitations in Vietnam. In Britain, people
still today argue over the mass bombing that brought on the
firestorm that destroyed the magnificent German city of
Dresden. Did it break the will of the people or unite them
in loathing--as it seems to be doing now in Belgrade--for
the perpetuators.
There are at least four ways of looking at Yugoslavia,
and each gives its own pointers to policy. The first is that
of the periscope. We should have seen what was coming and
acted--invaded/bombed or whatever--earlier. It would have
avoided Bosnia and certainly Kosovo. Perhaps there is some
truth to this. But I prefer to remember the few voices who
argued, long before local war-making span out of control,
that UN peacekeepers could have been on the ground cooling
and separating things off before tempers and the sour spirit
of revenge gained their force. This is what happened in
Cyprus and, three decades on, the divided communities live
in peace side by side, albeit with a manned UN line down the
middle, the first attempt at post-war European ethnic
cleansing stymied before too many people were killed.
The second way is the hands off: We should have let the
local quarrel on the periphery of civilized Europe, that by
no stretch of the imagination can be seen as part of NATO's
mandate, burn itself out. We do this all the time--in
Afghanistan, Cambodia, Rwanda, the Congo, Angola, Somalia,
Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and so on. We mediate around
the edges, send in a flutter of human rights observers, even
on occasion, for brief spells until the bullets start to fly
too close, UN troops. Usually these conflicts do run
themselves into the ground in time. The lesson of civil wars
is that peace in the long run is best served if there is a
clear cut victor. Peacekeeping, as in Angola, merely
stalemates a war for a while. Even, as in Cyprus, when it
manages to separate the protagonists, and produce years of
peace, it doesn't seem able to settle the matter. Northern
Ireland is the same. If it wasn't that European Union
membership--and lots of higher education--isn't gradually
making nonsense of frontiers, at least among those who
think, the Good Friday peace settlement of last year would
have long gone the way of all previous accords.
The third way, the worst possible of all worlds, is to go
in with an aerial sledgehammer, when one's patience with
watching years of continuous atrocities on the television,
finally snaps.
After a week of this it is very clear that on its own
this policy cannot work. Yugoslavia's fissured political
landscape has never been so unified. Only an invasion that
actually quells the local army and grabs the levers of power
and ordains by fiat a new beginning will change the picture.
And even that can be a slow, tortuous process, as the
British used to warn--but now have taken to forgetting--was
what they had learnt the hard way in Northern Ireland
The fourth way is the Chile model: we idly sit by and
watch General Austustino Pinochet torture and slaughter
those who oppose him and then, when his guard is down, we
catch up with him later. This is justice by hindsight, you
might say. Why didn't we go into Chile, the supposed bastion
of long-lived democracy in South America? Embarrassed cough.
The U.S. helped precipitate Pinochet's takeover. Nevermind,
the march of western civilization means, belatedly, we have
re-written our laws to catch up with him. Torture,
permissible then, is now outlawed by international treaty.
Present and future torturers can no longer come to London to
take tea with Mrs Margaret Thatcher, shop in New York's
Bloomingdales, bank in Geneva or seek medical treatment in
Paris. The wonderful thing, after the British Law Lords'
judgment, is that the Pinochet model can now be concertinad.
We don't have to wait three decades for a mandate. We can
send the long arm of the law to seek out the state torturers
now; the immunity of the wicked sovereign no longer
exists.
What is more, in the Balkans we have the special mandate
of the UN War Crimes Tribunal. Yet although NATO
peacekeeping troops in Bosnia have picked up a small number
of alleged war criminals they have steered purposefully
clear of the Bosnian massacre-masterminds Radovan Karadzic
and General Mladic, even though arrest warrants have been
issued for them. As for Croatia's Franco Tudjman and
Slobodan Milosevic, the two originators of the pogroms, the
Tribunal has seemed reticent to publically name them as
being wanted for trial.
This is what is needed, not bombing. Indict Milosevic. If
there is enough evidence to bomb him, there's certainly
enough evidence to arraign him. Surely he could be snatched.
Between them the western powers have a great deal of
experience in this.
Of course, Yugoslav opinion would rally round in the
short run. But quickly, I suspect, as in Chile with
Pinochet, once it sees the emperor has no clothes, opinion
would gravitate to more moderate leaders. From everything we
know Milosevic is a man apart. No other person on the scene
is so rich in political guile, so astute in his moves, so
fully in command of the rich vocabulary of the nationalistic
nether world. Out of the way, the tools of peace would
become useable. But left to sit on his throne, bombed from
the sky, his people at his feet, he becomes more invincible
by the day.
Copyright © 1999 By JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail:
JonatPower@aol.com
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