Column
U.S. should think twice beford maiking Kosovo a model for future
wars
By ROSEMARY RADFORD RUETHER
The process of spinning the NATO
attack on Serbia as a success is well under way in the Western media. It has
been presented as a humanitarian war, in effect a noble, altruistic
intervention to save the Kosovar Muslims from ethnic cleansing by
racist Serbs.
The truth, however, is that while such ethnic cleansing was indeed
in process, the intervention not only failed to stop it, it precipitated its
rapid completion. Today almost all the Kosovar Albanians have been turned into
refugees, many concentrated in refugee camps that may well become the seedbed
for guerrilla movements of revenge for generations to come.
As the post hoc analysis unfolds, therefore, it is important to
step back and try to evaluate the whole picture. One might begin by examining
the traditional criteria of just war, since the war was justified
by humanitarian concern and since other wars will probably be waged in
the future invoking similarly noble-sounding motives.
Just war theory demands that the war: 1) be entered into as a last
resort, when all efforts to deter war through negotiations have been exhausted;
2) in self-defense, in response to attack on ones own country; 3) by
proportional means that do not create more damage than that inflicted by the
aggressor; and 4) which have some hope of effectively meeting the goals of the
war, which must be to restore the status quo prior to the aggression and not
the taking of the territory of other countries.
One can ask whether any war has ever really fit these criteria,
yet it should be evident that this war has disastrously failed to do so. The
demands of the U.S. negotiators prior to the war included not only NATO
occupation of Kosovo but also of Serbia itself, terms so extreme as to preclude
their acceptance. None of the NATO countries was being invaded by Serbia. But,
most of all, the criteria of proportional means and effective meeting of ends
fails by so wide a mark as to become obvious even to casual American newspaper
readers.
Aerial bombing is totally ineffective against the expulsion of an
ethnic population. Moreover, the decision to fight the war entirely by air
assured a high level of mistakes. Daily we heard stories of
accidents, such as the bombing of bridges, columns of refugees,
hospitals, barracks occupied not by Serbian soldiers but by the KLA, not to
mention the Chinese Embassy. NATO spokespersons boast that only about 5 percent
of their bombs have gone astray, but given the tens of thousands of sorties
flown during the course of the war, this means that more than a thousand bombs
hit the wrong targets.
One must ask, what is actually being targeted? It must be clear
that in Serbia, as in the bombing of Iraq that still continues, there is no
real distinction between military and civilian targets. The ultimate aim is the
destruction of the industrial infrastructure of the region its
electrical systems, oil refineries, factories and the like.
The victims are primarily ordinary Serbians whose means of daily
life are being systematically destroyed, while Milosevics army,
particularly those attack troops used to expel Kosovars, were least affected.
Nor did such attacks generate popular resistance to Milosevic and his policies,
but rather promoted national unity in victimization and the silencing of
opposition.
Most underreported in the American press (although widely reported
in the Latin American and European press) is the ecological disaster the
bombing is causing. The use of degraded uranium bombs, for example,
generates a carcinogenic cloud of oxide of uranium carried by winds for miles.
The fallout attacks the lungs, kidneys and tissues. Graphite bombs widely used
in cities to destroy electrical systems disperse thousands of microscopic
carbon fibers that attack the human body.
The destruction of oil refineries and factories has poured
thousands of tons of oil and highly toxic waste into the rivers, which flow
into neighboring countries, such as Romania and Bulgaria. As in Iraq, the
bombing has largely destroyed the ability of Serbia to produce clean drinking
water, with the threat of major outbreaks of disease. Clearly these disasters,
already documented by European agencies, are only the tip of the iceberg. The
full accounting of the damage to human life and the environment has only
begun.
Given the extreme disproportionality of the destructive force used
in Yugoslavia, one must ask: What were the real goals? Was this war really
about the rights of Kosovar Albanians or was their plight a pretext for a
campaign to establish NATO (and the United States) as the military policeman of
Europe, as well as to open Southern Europe to a multinational takeover in the
name of reconstruction? Hard questions need to be asked both about
the conduct of this war and the model it provides for American-led wars of
humanitarian intervention in the future.
Rosemary Radford Ruether is a professor of theology at
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Ill.
National Catholic Reporter, July 2,
1999
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