London Terror Bombings Kill 37, Wound 700

[A592]

i think it is just provocation... something else is cooking behind.... i can smell it...

[Pamooshjian]

At first glance that sounds heartless. But I suppose it's an accurate description about how most people feel about others' pain and suffering. They feel sad but won't do much if anything to help out. However, I remember the outpouring of support and help that England and other countries in Europe gave during the earthquake of '88. So, try to be a little less harsh. Never let another's moral decay cause decay in your heart.

Sorry, but I can't do that. We also sent turkey support when they had the earthquake, so does that mean we're ready for love now?

I have to bring myself to show no sympathy. I felt the same way about the FBI building in Oklahoma city, because of what they did in Waco and I felt the same way for the 9/11. Incidentally, during the barbaric US lead NATO attack on Kosovo, there were the same amount of Serb civillians killed as there were on 9/11.

If I was heartless, I wouldn't have sympathy for all those Iraqis that have been killed and still being killed.

[anoush719]

War is Peace
An analysis of NATO's humanitarian bombing
To the Editor,

For six weeks, we have been fighting what has been described as a "clean, hygienic operation" against Serbia, without the "domestic political effects of body bags being unloaded."[1] In our modern clean war, the ultimate in sanitized violence, NATO bombers have nearly exhausted military targets and have begun shifting their strategy to the "destruction of civilian infrastructure."[2]

What NATO Allied Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark has described as "bringing the war home to Belgrade" has meant demolishing, roads, railways, bridges, factories, oil refineries, power plants, hospitals, schools, monasteries, churches and government buildings.[3] According to Yugoslav sources, the bombing of their social and economic infrastructure has left 500,000 workers jobless and 2 million without any source of income. Also destroyed for the sake of peace in the Balkans are thirteen major hospitals and numerous clinics, more than 150 schools and day care centers (leaving more than 800,000 out of school) and enough refineries, fuel depots and chemical plants to expose hundreds of thousands to poisonous fumes and incur protest from the U.N. Council on Sustainable Development. Western damage assessments are approximately $100 billion, a staggering figure.[4]

Estimates of direct civilian bombing casualties were about 1,000 a week ago, but much more dangerous are the secondary effects of lacking food, medicine, clean water, fuel, effective sewage and sanitation systems, and functioning hospitals, which are likely to produce a situation similar to that in Iraq, where, according to UN estimates, the international sanctions are killing 90,000 civilians, mainly children, every year. When asked on national TV about the killing of half a million Iraqi children over five years, Madeleine Albright described the decision to continue as "a very hard choice," but "we think the price is worth it." A terrorist would nod approvingly; a few (or a few hundred thousand) enemy civilians need to be killed to achieve the desired political ends.[5]

The attacks now continue to escalate, with cluster bombs (the "functional equivalent of land mines") and "dumb bombs" (used for what was called "carpet bombing" in Vietnam) replacing our rapidly depleting stocks of "smart bombs." This is generally blamed on the obstinance of our victims; according to Anthony Lewis of The New York Times the "scale of the operation so far has been nowhere near large enough to make Mr. Milosevic believe we mean business."[6]

Thomas Friedman finds "the idea that people are still going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are 'cleansing' Kosovo outrageous." He continues: "Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (they certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389, too." How about the Stone Age? We should "give war a chance," with a "merciless air war" that targets "every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory." General Klaus Naumann, chairman of NATO's military committee, would concur. He estimates that Serbia, home to 13 million people, has been set back 10 years economically and warns that if Milosevic doesn't accept NATO terms, "he may end up being the ruler of rubble."[7]

The above facts are generally undisputed. We should now carefully consider the reasons given to pound Serbia to worthless rubble.

The generally accepted reason is that we need to protect the Kosovar Albanians from the Serbs by, in Clinton's words, "exact[ing] a very high price for Mr. Milosevic's policy of repression and ... seriously diminish[ing] his military capacity to maintain that policy." I have discussed the "high price" to the Serbian people; let's now consider why "looking away simply is not an option ... when we have the power to do something."[8]

Before the bombings, there had been a long history of tension between Serbs and Albanians. For years, Kosovo Albanians, under the highly popular Ibrahim Rugova, pursued separatist ends through non-violent means, boycotting Serbian national institutions, including elections, and creating their own democratic counter-institutions, from schools to government. At the 1995 Dayton accords, Rugova's party wasn't even invited, and the resulting partition of Yugoslavia left Kosovo Albanians feeling widely betrayed by the U.S. policy of rewarding those who, through violence, had consolidated the most territory before the peace talks. It's ironic that the mainstream U.S. media now reports that "force is the only language that leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic understand," and that we wish, coincidentally, to speak.[9]

During the following year, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) rose to prominence. Funded from and based abroad, they attacked police stations and took credit for hundreds of assassinations, of Serb officials and refugees (considered "colonizers") and Albanians in favor of reconciliation with the Serbs (considered "collaborators"). This earned the KLA the label of "terrorists," by both Serbia and the U.S., although in a 1984-style ideological reversal, they are now considered "freedom fighters" here, a shift that has aroused little comment.[10]

Serb security forces responded brutally and often against civilians who merely allowed KLA attacks to occur, killing roughly 2000 Albanians, driving thousands into the ranks of the KLA, and causing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes. This was certainly a humanitarian crisis, but it was far from genocide.[11]

To understand what level of state violence compels us to send in our humanitarian bombers and what level we write off as mere domestic unrest, we should consider other areas of U.S. foreign policy. Colombia's "counter-insurgency" war has, like Serbia's, displaced about a million people, but they are the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid and their death squads received training and support from the U.S. Defense Department and CIA. During the 1980's, the U.S. supported Guatemalan troops as they killed 200,000 people.[12]

The list goes on and on. After Indonesia invaded East Timor, killing a third of its population, the U.S. doubled its military aid. Our continued covert training was uninterrupted by the latest massacre in East Timor, just weeks ago. With weapons sold by an enthusiastic U.S., Turkey has killed more than 40,000 Kurds and a U.S.-armed Iraq has gassed and massacred Kurds since 1975, with the mainstream press loyally looking the other way until Saddam Hussein turned from faithful ally to Hitler-like enemy.[13]

If violence against civilians, ethnic or otherwise, meant that the U.S. has any moral duty whatsoever to act, then one would think that even if we didn't bomb Indonesia, Columbia, Turkey and our other rights-violating allies, we would at least cut off military assistance to the killers. It is truly difficult to pretend that "turning out the lights in Belgrade" and reducing Serbia to rubble is being done to stop genocide by the same Clinton administration that (to justify the decision to veto U.N. peacekeepers) forbade the State Department from even using the word "genocide" to describe the killings of more than 800,000 Tutsi's in Rwanda.[14]

We should not pretend that the Albanians' interests matter in the slightest to the military planners responsible for our current war. Reports from the Pentagon and the CIA predicted greatly escalated Serbian violence and General Wesley Clark, the supreme NATO commander described the increased brutalization of our proteges as "entirely predictable," shortly after the bombing began. In a later interview he nonchalantly continued: "I can't say I'm surprised by any of this. The military authorities fully anticipated the vicious approach that Milosevic would adopt, as well as the terrible efficiency with which he would carry it out." Likewise, Milosevic is the official enemy, but, as anyone could have predicted, the bombing has destroyed the chances of democratic Serbian opposition groups.[15]

What makes this entire war all the more tragic is the ready availability of diplomatic solutions to the crisis, sabotaged and spurned repeatedly by the U.S. The Serbian National Assembly ("Milosevic" in U.S. propaganda) has been far more open to a negotiated settlement, both before and during the bombing, then the mainstream media would have it seem. Even though Serbia has agreed to let refugees return home under the protection of U.N. peacekeepers, its refusal to accept the Rambouillet ultimatum (which, according to one independant observer, gave Milosevic the option of "losing Kosovo immediately, losing Kosovo in three years or being bombed") is taken as evidence that negotations are impossible and that Serbia will only understand force.[16]

A far more likely goal than the professed humanitarian one is to teach a lesson to weak nations around the world that the U.S. will mercilessly intervene where it pleases and that international law and the U.N. will not stand in its way. An article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs describes our policy rather nicely as "unilaterally rewrit[ing] the rules by intervening in domestic conflicts on an irregular, case-by-case basis." What these rules amount to is that brutal repression and genocidal attacks on ethnic minorites are acceptable for allies of the United States and death warrants for its enemies. Even if this is justified and one thinks that the rules of world order should allow the U.S., considered a "rogue superpower" according to the conservative Samuel Huntington in last month's Foreign Affairs, to exert global military hegemony, with the occasional savage bombing to prove it, it is despicably cynical to pretend that this is being done for the sake of the innocent civilians whose slaughter our bombing has so drastically escalated, "entirely predicably."[17]

Last week, NATO bombed Serbian state TV headquarters (because it was broadcasting "hateful propaganda") illegally attacking a purely civilian target, illegally failing to warn civilians of the attack and illegally killing up to 16 people, all civilians, in an illegal war. Perhaps the claim could be made that as citizens in a democracy our failure to protest the on-going "hygienic war" makes us complicit in the bombing of Serbia into rubble, the greatly escalated violence against Kosovar Albanians, the xxxxxling of international law and the "entirely predictable" waves of casualties and refugees, all done in the name of democracy and human rights.[18]

Or maybe that's just more hateful propaganda.

Aram Harrow '01
May 5, 1999

Footnotes
[1] John Kenneth Galbraith, International Herald Tribune, 4-26-99

[2] Dennis Kucinch D-OH, New York Times, 4-9-99

[3] Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune, 4-29-99

[4] "Official Estimate of Civilian Destruction in Yugoslavia," Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: Ministry of Foreign Affiars, 4-12-99 http://www.transnational.org/feature...ruct12499.html

Pacifica Network News, 4-30-99

[5] Chapman

Noam Chomksy, "The Current Bombings: Behind the Rhetoric," March 1999, http://www.zmag.org/Chomsky/articles...t_bombings.htm

[6] Norman Smith, "A Plea for the Total Ban of Land Mines by International Treaty." Loyola of Los Angelos International and Comparative Law Journal April 1995

Anthony Lewis, New York Times, 3-27-99

[7] Thomas Friedman, New York Times, 4-23-99

Chapman

[8] Radio Address to the Nation by the President, 4-3-99 http://www.pub.whitehouse.gov/uri-re...9/4/5/1.text.1

[9] Stephen R. Shalom, "Reflections on NATO and Kosovo," Summer 1999 www.zmag.org/shalomnp.htm

Dan Rodricks, Baltimore Sun, May 3, 1999

[10] Shalom

Chomsky

[11] Chomsky

[12] Shalom

Human Rights Watch, Columbia's Killer Networks, 1996

[13] Gar Lipow, "Summarizing the Case Against the Bombing," www.zmag.org/lipowkoso.htm

[14] Shalom

[15] "Allies Batter Yugoslav Capital," Memphis Commerical Appeal, 3-27-99

Newsweek, 4-12-99

[16] Hector Sierra, Mainichi Daily News, 4-8-99

[17] Michael J Glennon, "The New Interventionism", Foreign Affiars, May/June 1999

Samuel Huntington, "The Rogue Superpower," Foreign Affairs, March/April 1999

[18] Philip Sherman, New York Times, 4-26-99

"Amnesty International seeks urgent explanation from NATO on television station attack," 4-23-99, http://www.amnesty.org/news/1999/47004399.htm

[anoush719]

I have read on more than one occasion and in more than one place that England is particularly fond of bringing war and bombing to civilian populations. In fact that they were often the agitators for intensifying such efforts.

I dare say they weren't feeling like such big hog dogs when they found themselves on the receiving end of SHOCK AND AWE.

[GSTracer05]

I can't believe you guys are sitting here trying to justify what has occured in London. I am not a supporter of many of US and NATO policies but to sit here and say that you do not care if people are dying, whether it be a US, British, or Iraqi citizen is just absurd. It's easy to sit in the safety of your little home and type out your ignorant and biased opinions when you have not lost a family member, relative, or friend to war or terrorism. Human life is human life.

Also mistakes are a part of human nature. Has the US and its allies made many mistakes? Sure. But to say that you do not feel any symapthy for the lives lost due to a retaliation, a cowardly retaliation, is just not right.

And as for Anoush719, you must think you're very clever with your "shock and awe" reference. I'd like for you and your family members to have lived in Iraq at the time of Sadam's regime, when he beat, tortured, raped, gased, and killed hundreds, if not thousands of people, and then see you come on here and just mouth off on stuff you've read and heard in the media. What have you done to give back to the country that has given you freedom, the ability to live a relatively safe life, and the chance to pursue prosperity and happiness to a degree that you could not find in other third world nations?

[Siggie]

I agree with GSTracer.
The US and allies (GB) have killed Iraqis. We should be sad and upset that people have died and others yet have lost their loved ones. If you value life, you should value it unconditionally. Why should you not care or feel sadness because of this attack?
What did those people who were killed, their friends, and their family have to do with Iraq? Because they live in the country that killed Iraqis they deserve to die?
If the US gets attacked it's the same? The majority of the country didn't even vote for Bush, yet people shouldn't feel sadness were we to die?
Yet we call the Turks barbarian. It is through the same method of rationalization that they killed our ancestors. People are people. Why should we think, they're British, they're American, they're whatever, so they deserve to die? That's how people are able to commit such acts against their fellow human beings; by not thinking of them as such and instead classifying them as different and not of "their" kind.

[GSTracer05]

Sorry, but I can't do that. We also sent turkey support when they had the earthquake, so does that mean we're ready for love now?

I have to bring myself to show no sympathy. I felt the same way about the FBI building in Oklahoma city, because of what they did in Waco and I felt the same way for the 9/11. Incidentally, during the barbaric US lead NATO attack on Kosovo, there were the same amount of Serb civillians killed as there were on 9/11.

If I was heartless, I wouldn't have sympathy for all those Iraqis that have been killed and still being killed.

You show no sympathy for the countless lives of young children that were lost in the FBI building daycare because of what happened in Waco?

The FBI building bombing was a planned murder. That is all there is to it. As for Waco, that could have been avoided by both sides. Take your own house. You have the right to possess arms but if a full division of FBI arrive at your doorstep for one reason or another, do you not try to come outside and talk and negotiate? Or do you barricade yourself with your guns and go into a stand-off and escalate the situation.

If a simple police officer arrives and knocks on your door, and you have nothing to hide, do you confront him, or tell him to f-ck off and respect your privacy and civil rights?

Since you are so up to date on current events and foriegn policies, maybe you'd like to share with us the reasons for our bombing of Kosovo. What did we gain? or even Iraq, people said we went in for the oil. Where is that oil? Have you seen our gas prices. We have poured billions of dollars into that country to help build a new government and an infrastructure to help the people get back on their feet and what do they do on a daily basis? Bomb our troops and their own fellow Iraqi citizens. Do you forget all of the beheadings? The word "barbaric" should be reserved for that....

[anoush719]

I believe you guys have things backwards about who values life around here.

Tell us, what did those people or any of you for that matter do about their country's war crimes and genocidal behavior against innocent Serbian and Iraqi civilians? Did you raise your voice or even write to one person to tell them to STOP THE KILLING? Now who is falling into what kind of mentality...

I would also remind you that MANY Armenians live in Iraq and were also victims of this horrendous bombing. So Sadaam was this really bad guy, you know that for a fact, worse even than your terrorist president bushowitz. So it's OK and it's justified to genocide his people. After all, they were in a civil war, a real threat. Where's the weapons of mass destruction BTW? So this is how you thank these people for givng refuge to Armenians?

I for one raised my voice to stop the killing. If you sit back and say nothing, then they think it's OK to behave like technological genocidal barbarians. Modern day turkish savages. No wonder they are allies of the turks.

[Siggie]

Anoush you missed the largest point. Why shouldn't we be sad for these 700+ people and their families? Did they deserve it? Do two wrongs make a right?

[anoush719]

Anoush you missed the largest point. Why shouldn't we be sad for these 700+ people and their families? Did they deserve it? Do two wrongs make a right?

I think you're the one who missed the point and the others as well who objected to our viewpoint. So sure if you want to have all kinds of sympathy for these people, be my guest, but don't expect it from me. I am fresh out. Why are some people more deserving of sympathy than others?

I am still haunted by the sight of broken bodies, the sight of the lights being turned out on respirators and babies' refrigerators that kept their milk fresh, of the body of a Serbian priest being splattered all over a bridge. I am haunted by train passengers being blown to bits and television station personnel being burned alive. I am haunted by children picking up debris from cluster bombs and being maimed for life and of children and unborn being permanently rendered deformed and sick because of radiation from depleted uranium. So the sympathy has quite run out for me.