Sunday, May 23rd, 1999

How else to stop the cleansing?

    Q: If NATO is not to pursue a policy of force to stop the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, How else is it to be stopped or is it something we just live with?

    The term "ethnic cleansing" was actually invented on Kosovo, or at least that's the context we first heard of it, applied to a real situation. There was a claim to achieve "ethnically clean Kosovo", back in early eighties. It was gradually performed by overpopulating, beating, occasionally raping, burning crops, and finally buying off the property (sometimes in presence of guns). Nobody reacted much, specially not NATO, so it lasted, with varying intensity, for decades. Hundreds of villages became "ethnically clean".

    Next time we heard about this term, was during the Croatian and Bosnian wars. All three warring sides were trying to achieve some sort of compact territory, and the most effective one was "Operation Storm", with net effect of 500,000 refugees in one week. NATO reacted this time, by helping the army which did it.

    This time, it's Kosovo again. The cleansing is not performed quietly, under the shadow of night, it's done with lots of noise, under umbrella of bombs. NATO actually made this happen - providing the umbrella. Before the bombing, it was a rough police action against a drug cartel which was hiding behind a secession/iredent movement (or is it vice versa?).

    Ah, I forgot to explain who is who - in the first case, it was the Albanians expelling Serbs from Kosovo; the claim for "ethnical cleanness" was declared by Albanian politicians of the time. In the second case, the 500,000 are the Serbs from Krajina. In the third case, it's Albanians from Kosovo.

    We lived with it before. We didn't like it then, we don't like it now. But, we're not sure bombing may solve it either. It can only speed it up, by giving pretext ("they called NATO to bomb us") and the environment ("the OSCE guys went out, nobody's watching").

    Besides, what was wrong with the first agreement in Rambouillet? Both sides agreed to it. That could have been a solution, and no ethnic cleansing took place at the time. The only thing that agreement didn't provide for was NATO presence on Kosovo. So it had to be dismantled and replaced with an ultimatum, when everything actually began - bombing, cleansing, war.

Geoff from globalnet.co.uk