Tomahawks can8217;t civilise

The images of this end-of-the-century European war come from western journalists excluded from the actual theatres of war and concentrate...

The images of this end-of-the-century European war come from western journalists excluded from the actual theatres of war and concentrated on the borders of Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro; from daily briefings by NATO and western capitals where restraint applies to information about military operations, not the political propaganda which offers up all the terrible imagery of the past from the Khmer Rouge and George Orwell8217;s totalitarian state to the Nazis; and, to a far lesser extent, from Yugoslavian state-controlled media which reveals little about Belgrade8217;s battlegrounds, focuses on civilian casualties and also recalls the Nazis. Almost nothing is known of the damage inflicted by the greatest military machine assembled since the second world war. An incomplete picture emerges of the response from Serb forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army. The result, when it comes to understanding what the war is doing to human beings, is complete moral confusion. All that can be seen with clarity is the strong ineach of several contexts beating up the weak.

Television shows the unending, grim march of civilians out of Kosovo, driven from their homes by what must be assumed to be the combined impetus of allied bombing and Serb action. Figures from the US State Department at the weekend tell of a humanitarian crisis spreading at an accelerated rate. An official spokesman estimated 140,000 Kos-ovar Albanians have gone to Albania, 120,000 of them since March 24; 80,000 have gone to Macedonia, 70,000 since March 24; 55,000 to Montenegro, 30,000 since March 24. Add to that the exodus of Serbs, Turks and others from Pristina, capital of Kosovo, and elsewhere under the impact of local battles or allied bombs. The huge movement of uprooted people is the outcome so far of this disastrous war.The Paris peace deal is dead. NATO bombing, originally intended to achieve what diplomacy could not, and Serb action to pre-empt the liberation of Kosovo by forcing people to flee the province, have created new facts on the ground. It isa whole new situation, horrendous in human terms but one that could have the effect of concentrating minds on the essentials of finding political answers as distinct from trying to secure Kosovar hearths and homes by bombing Be-lgrade. Getting to a political solution requires a halt to the terror in Kosovo and for western capitals to abandon th-eir belief in the civilising mission of Tomahawk cruise missiles and to build on president-designate of the European Commission, Romano Prodi8217;s call at the weekend for a Balkan solution. For that western capitals need to do what they have resisted from the beginning of this decade which is to stand back and look through wide-angle lenses at the whole ethnic mosaic in the region. They would then see the Balkans picture as the International Conference on the former Yugoslavia attempted to see it before Germany rushed to recognise Slove-nia and Croatia, Britain and France capitulated to Bonn, before America wandered absent-mindedly into the cauldron and the still fragileBosnian settlement.

It would mean giving up piecemeal aproaches and stabs at dealing with each crisis as it arises. The people of Kosovo are voting with their feet for a Balkan-wide political solution and not just for emergency relief measures. In order to read that message right, the west must first recognise some of its myths for what they are.

8220;What8217;s the point of having all this firepower if you8217;re never going to use it?8221; Madeleine Albright once famously asked the Pentagon. The answer has come back from Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Belgrade and is, cruise missiles do not produce lasting political or human rights remedies. Sending ground troops into Kosovo is the mantra now. If the west does find the political will and domestic support for protracted war on the ground, it can be under no illusion about the consequences. There can be no hope of escaping the Vietnam quagmire. American-Euro-pean tensions over the command and control of NATO forces and political and military objectives will beexacerbated. They will be taking on nothing less than carving out new nation states in the region by military force, rather than popular sanction, and with all it entails in new ethnic divisions and human tragedy.

A regime change in Belgrade as the answer to everyone8217;s prayers is another enduring myth exploded by the war so far. Protracted bombing may bring about Slobodan Milosevic8217;s downfall in a military coup or otherwise. But to leave Serbian nationalist sentiment out of the calculations is a colossal blunder. The actions of any successor government, unless decisively defeated militarily, will be severely circumscribed by popular passions aroused by war, the imminent loss of Kosovo, memory of what Serbs have suffered at the hands of other ethnic groups and the perception that they have been systematically victimised by the most powerful nations on earth. If western leaders do not trust regime voices on this, they could listen to what Aleksa Djilas, historian, son of Milovan Djilas and critic ofMilosevic, told a western journalist. Djilas believes the west has committed a series of blunders by not curbing the KLA, by pushing an agreement that advanced the independence of Kosovo and by going to war to enforce it. He says, 8220;In the war against Bosnia I would have avoided the draft. I would never have shot a Moslem. But now if I was drafted I would probably not resist.8221; This is from a sane intellectual. And this is what another opponent of the regime says about what NATO has done for Milosevic: the bombing has consolidated the common people around him 8220;and made him, in effect, a king, if not an emperor8221; says crown prince Alexander of Yugoslavia.

With the appeasement at Munich on their minds, western leaders have persuaded themselves they have got to do something in Kosovo. Apart from the moral relativism of giving atrocities in Europe greater weight than atrocities in, say, Asia or Africa, there is the confusion of ends and means. An undeclared war against a sovereign state underlines the legaland moral ambiguity of NATO8217;s position. If morality is the driving force, western powers should call off their dogs of war and do what morality and pragmatism demand: commit themselves with whatever it takes in money, time and effort to the political and economic reconstruction of the Balkans.