By Sonia Trikha Shukla
Now that the declaration of the unilateral ceasefire by the Yugoslav government has come and gone, NATO bombing can continue without that minor irritant. The ceasefire did seem an overreaction since NATO is not really waging a war. Especially not on the people of Yugoslavia. Every now and then one of the leaders from the NATO countries gets before a tele-prompter and starts telling the Serbians that they don't hate them and their fight is not against them. For that express purpose, special broadcasts are made to the Balkans. God knows who is watching them and, even more unlikely, is there anyone who believes them?
A few days ago, it was US President Bill Clinton and his Sec-retary of State Madeleine Albright (currently described as the evil witch with snake eyes over in the Balkans) who said their war is not against the Serbs (the fact that they are being killed is only incidental) but against Slobodan Milosevic.
More recently, Tony Blair sang an echo of the Clinton words in that suspiciously sincere,agitated tone which is peculiar only to someone who has lived in Islington. On the 14th day of allied bombing raids, NATO planes struck an oil refinery near Serbia's second city, Novi Sad, and destroyed a railway bridge over the Danube linking the border town of Bogojevo, 100 miles northwest of Belgrade, to Erdut, in Croatia. Allied planes hit at least five Serbian towns.
Among the targets was the residential area of the central town of Aleksinac, where five people were killed and 30 wounded, it was claimed. While the fireworks continued Blair was telling Montenegrin television: ``We have no quarrel with the people of Serbia or Yugoslavia. Indeed, we respect them. We've nothing but goodwill towards you.'' Strange way he's got of showing it.This, while the Commander of Operation Allied Force makes unmasked proclamations: ``We know where you are and we are coming after you.''
Meanwhile, his military spokesperson Air Commodore David Wilby holds the press in thrall at the NATO headquarters in Brussels as hepositions the mouse over the video replay window. Click! Splash! A Serbian aircraft repair shop was, in the immortal words of Supreme Commander Wesley Clark, ``degraded, disrupted, devastated and destroyed''. ``This technology really is amazing,'' gushed the air commodore.
Welcome to Playstation Kosovo, a 64-bit, fin de siecle fantasy game in which Messrs Clinton and Blair avert ``a humanitarian disaster in Kosovo'' and ``a broader regional conflict'' by ``degrading'' the brutal dictator's murder machine. Click! Splash! Nothing could be simpler.
Certainly not exercising the option of sending in brave, effective (but costly) ground troops. The world is being sold a bright, shining, precision-guided fallacy that Slobodan will stand still, wringing his hands and not make the Kosovo Albanians pay with their lives for wearing T-shirts urging NATO to Just Do It.
The over 400,000 Kosovar refugees in Albania bear a bleeding testimony to the murderous revenge of Slobodan Milosevic. And it isn't over yet.His latest ploy to close his borders and hem in the Kosovars with gun-point promises of safety while he landmines the area around their homeland and assures further days of misery for those who called on the West to ensure their safety. When Clinton said, ``The United States takes care of its own,'' he forgot to add, ``and of no else''.
To misquote Channel 4 filmmaker Dan Reed who was in Kosovo before all hell broke loose there: ``It would appear that the Balkans' road to hell is being paved with the West's good intentions.''
The Indian Express
April 13, 1999
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