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| NATO BOMBING -- RETURN TO BARBARISM |
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| For National Post, May 31, 1999. |
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| It is time for NATO's political leaders to admit their
unjust and unnecessary war against Yugoslavia has been a colossal failure. It is time to
put an immediate end to the bombing before ground troops are engaged and the war
escalates. For 69 days the democratic countries of the West have been systematically
smashing to pieces a modern European state. None of NATO's objectives has been achieved.
The air strikes have degenerated into a war of annihilation against the Serbian people. |
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| Yugoslavia is a small country
with a population of less than 10 million people of whom approximately 65% are of Serbian
origin. Even before the bombing, its economy had collapsed as a result of economic
sanctions. Its leader was unpopular, and in the last municipal elections in Belgrade his
party received less than 20% of the vote. It was a country that presented no threat either
to its neighbors or to European security. Prior to the NATO air attack it was balancing on
the edge of survival. |
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| Despite this, our NATO leaders
-- without consulting their parliaments or their people -- have chosen to bomb Yugoslavia
into submission. NATO has judged Serbian people to be collectively guilty of daring
to defy an ultimatum, which no sovereign nation could have accepted. The civilized world
is now standing by witnessing the destruction of a country and annihilation of its
people. There should be no misunderstanding about this. NATO is using the most dreadful
weapons of modern warfare: cluster bombs and cruise missiles. Many of the weapons being
used contain depleted uranium, which will spread deadly radioactive dust throughout the
region, contaminating for generations water, soil and crops. It may come as a surprise to
many Canadians to realize Canada is the major supplier of depleted uranium to the U.S.
military complex. |
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| NATO's unprovoked attack is a blatant violation of every
precept of international law. It is a violation of the Final Act of the Conference On
Security and Co-operation in Europe, signed in Helsinki in August, 1975, which reaffirmed
respect for sovereign equality, the inviolability of frontiers, the peaceful settlement of
disputes, non-intervention in internal affairs, and the avoidance of the threat or use of
force. It is a violation of NATO's own treaty by which it undertakes "to settle any
international dispute . . . by peaceful means . . . and to refrain from the threat or use
of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations." |
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| Some apologists for NATO, including our own
foreign minister, feebly try to justify the NATO bombing by arguing ethnic cleansing in
Kosovo had to be stopped. Prior to March 24, the Yugoslav military, using classic
counter-insurgency tactics, did burn and destroy villages in Kosovo suspected of harboring
KLA rebels, and many of the unfortunate inhabitants of these villages were killed or
displaced --but there was no mass expulsion from Kosovo. As has been verified by OSCE
monitors who were on the ground in Kosovo, the mass expulsion of Albanians took place
after the bombing. |
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| The Yugoslav army is forcing the
Albanians out of Kosovo as a strategy of war. In anticipation of a NATO ground invasion,
the Yugoslavs do not wish to fight against the world's most powerful military force while
at the same time surrounded by a hostile population. In war, the friend of your enemy is
your enemy. It is not a humane strategy, but then neither is the use of cluster bombs. |
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| If NATO felt compelled to intervene militarily in what
was a relatively low-grade armed rebellion in Yugoslavia, why then did it not follow the
rules and go before the United Nations Security Council seeking authority to intervene? We
are told NATO did not do so because it was assumed Russia or China might have vetoed such
an action. But this is precisely why the founders of the UN stipulated that before there
could be intervention in a sovereign state there must be agreement by all five of the
great powers. It was considered that intervention without unanimity might involve armed
conflict between or among the five themselves. With the advent of nuclear weapons such a
possibility had to be avoided at all costs. |
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Today some NATO leaders scorn the UN and
tell us human rights must prevail over sovereign rights. Yet none of them are able to
suggest new rules to replace the ones in place. Those who express concern about this are
regarded as old-fashioned, but is it old-fashioned to assume that until new laws are
proclaimed the old ones should be respected? It may be some of our NATO leaders are not
old enough to remember that the founders of the United Nations had lived through two
cataclysmic world wars in less than 20 years. They had witnessed the destruction of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs. Those events were fresh in in the memory of those
who drafted the United Nations framework for world peace and security
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| To their everlasting shame, our NATO leaders have chosen
war over peace in Kosovo. They have abandoned diplomacy in favor of bloodshed. They have
taken us back to the Cold War and the arms race. They have smashed the framework of world
security. They have guaranteed that we will start the new century as we did this one, with
killing and carnage. They have left us with a terrible legacy. With six months to go
before the millennium, they have taken us back to barbarism. |
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