Balkan Repository Project

Don Feder

Jewish World Review June 14, 1999

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/

NATO'S EMPIRE of half a billion has bombed a nation of 10 million to submission. Still, the Serbs aren't the only losers.

Americans now confront a daunting new era when their sons and daughters will be sent to remote corners of the globe to settle age-old disputes, redraw boundaries and confer statehood on fractious minorities.

In the three months of NATO's air assault (Operation Collateral Damage), we dropped more explosives on Yugoslavia than on either Japan or Germany during any comparable period in World War II.

There were an estimated 13,000 civilian casualties, including 2,500 dead. NATO's solemn assurance that its objective was to "degrade" Slobodan Milosevic's war-making capacity ranks as one of the century's great lies.

The alliance hit hospitals, bridges, water pumping stations, TV stations and the nation's power grid. Yugoslavia's unemployment rate approaches 90 percent. Rebuilding could cost $60 billion.

One example of the way in which NATO targeted Belgrade's war machine was the bombing of a bridge in Varvarin (nine dead) when it was teeming with market-day crowds. A second strike minutes after the first decapitated a priest who was trying to aid the wounded. And the alliance calls Milosevic a war criminal?

It was an unprecedented assault on a country whose troops never crossed its borders. We did it for the 1 million Kosovar Albanians driven into exile, Clinton insisted.

But the mass expulsions didn't begin until after the air war started. Once it became clear that the West was determined to take Kosovo away from it, Belgrade decided to create facts on the ground.

This century has been marked by a series forced population movements. No one suggested bombing the Indians when they pushed several million Muslims into Pakistan in 1948.

The latest Balkans drama started when the Kosovo Liberation Army -- our terrorist, drug-running allies -- began killing Serbs and Albanian "traitors" in 1998. This prompted Yugoslavia's push against the guerrillas (much like Turkey's war against the Kurdistan Workers' Party) which in turn led the West to demand a Serb surrender at Rambouillet.

In Western eyes, all humanitarian disasters are not equal. In 1995, Croat dictator Franjo Tudjman drove 300,000 Serbs out of the Krajina region, killing 14,000 in the process. Having determined that the Serbs (including women and children) are the enemies of civilization, Clinton and NATO ignored this ethnic cleansing.

There are no Boy Scouts in the Balkans. What the Serbs did in Kosovo was done to them by Croats, Bosnian Muslims and -- yes -- Kosovo Albanians.

What now for Kosovo? While paying lip-service to Yugoslav sovereignty, the province will be wrenched from the Serbs. Kosovo will become a NATO protectorate. An army of occupation, including 7,000 U.S. troops, will be stationed there indefinitely, witness the Bosnia peacekeepers.

Our promise to "demilitarize" the KLA is as cynical as our nod of the head to Yugoslav sovereignty. There are already 6,000 to 10,000 Albanian fighters on the ground in Kosovo who can easily blend with returning refugees.

The only ones who won't be armed are an estimated half million Serbs and other non-Albanians. Denizens of Macedonian refugee camps clamor for revenge -- witness the near lynching in one camp of several gypsies, who are regarded as Serb allies. The coming ethnic cleansing in Kosovo won't be reported on CNN, and so it will be as if it never happened.

The New World Order is on a roll. Now that we've firmly established the principle that NATO must ride to the rescue of victims of human-rights abuses (notwithstanding that the target country has committed no act of external aggression), there will be no stopping our latter day Woodrow Wilsons.

There are literally hundreds of separatist movements the world over. When another insurrection begs us to bomb its adversaries in the name of averting a humanitarian disaster, what will we say? The excuse that they're not Europeans (so, presumably, we don't care how many of their villages burn) will only hold for so long.

The ultimate victims of our conquest of Yugoslavia won't be the Serbs or the Kosovo Albanians, who'd still be in their homes if Clinton hadn't intervened, but the troops of the NATO imperium.

In what steaming jungles and bleak forests will Americans leave their bones while trying to tidy up a messy world? While our leaders preen and posture, Americans will die and do eternal sentry duty for a utopian vision of a world without ethnic strife which will never be.