I am sure it was.
Peace,
              Andrej


----- Original Message -----
From: Tresy Kilbourne <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 1999 12:44 AM
Subject: [CHOMSKY] More on the New Humanism--and "Body Baggery"


> I thought I'd spare Andrej the trouble of inputting Hitchens' recent
> discussion of Chomsky's book on Kosovo. Don't thank me, AG. It was my
> pleasure.
>
> --
> Tresy Kilbourne
> Seattle WA
>
>
> Genocide and the Body-Baggers
>
> Christopher Hitchens
>
> During the Kosovo war, Serbia's only remote sympathizer within NATO was
the
> government of Greece, which is joined to Belgrade by many common ties of
> history, geography and Christian Orthodoxy. The Serbian official in charge
> of Kosovo, a certain Mr. Angelkovic, probably thought that he was among
> friends, therefore, when he told a comrade of me, a senior official in the
> Foreign Ministry of Athens, that all he wanted to do was to reduce the
> non-Serb population of Kosovo to "a manageable level." This plea--like
most
> Milosevic propaganda [and Andrej's], so self-pitying and yet so
> horrific--was enough to nauseate Angelkovic's Hellenic auditors. Yet it
> doesn't seem quite enough to discompose some of our native revisionists,
who
> are now wondering aloud whether it wasn't NATO that committed the "real"
war
> crimes.
>
> I share with these revisionists a revulsion from the facile use of the
term
> "genocide." This toxic term has been both overused and underused in the
> recent past. In Rwanda, where Madeleine Albright acted on Clinton's
> instructions to veto a United Nations resolutions calling for pre-emptive
> action (and later supported a French military intervention on the side of
> the mass murderers), the Administration sedulously avoided using the word
> genocide," because it is a threshold word that triggers a law, solemnly
> passed by Congress, mandating intervention. In other words, the more
> genocide there was, the less Washington would stress it.
>
> On the other hand, in the dill of indictment against General Pinochet,
most
> of which is well warranted, the charge that he committed "genocide" stands
> out as self-evidently absurd. He didn't try to exterminate or erase the
> population of Chile, and he didn't in fact reduce it by more than a few
> thousand. He did commit an appalling number of crimes, including crimes
> against humanity as generally defined, and he should stand trial whether
> he's feeling well or not. Once again, incidentally, the Clinton
> Administration manages to be adequately uninformed on a crucial subject,
and
> has been of little or no help in furnishing relevant information on the
> subject.
>
> Defined by international law, "genocide" means any concerted attempt to
> destroy the identity or existence of a people. There is no room for doubt
> that this is what the Milosevic regime intended in Kosovo. The clearing of
> the cities and villages and universities, and the deployment of "special
> forces" in the task, leaves no penumbra of doubt. Was this provoked by
> bombing from NATO? It would be a bold person who would maintain, after
> Bosnia, that it was not also, at the very least, a deeply laid contingency
> plan. Ethnic-cleansing battalions do not just blossom from nowhere under
the
> pretext or excuse of the violence that purports to thwart them.
>
> doing nothing is also an intervention. NATO forces stood by while
Srebrenica
> was overrun. We don't know exactly where all the 9,000 men from that "safe
> haven" are interred either, but I wouldn't' relish the job of going to the
> widows of Tuzla and urging calm. It seems improbably that the missing men
> have all gone AWOL to safe jobs in the neighboring countries. When
Milosevic
> was received, after Srebrenica, by Richard Holbrooke, as a "partner in
> peace" at Dayton, he asked only two conditions for favoring Ohio with his
> presence. The firs was immunity from prosecution, and the second was a
> promise that Kosovo would not be mentioned at the conference. Both demands
> were granted. That was an intervention too. But--as with Rwanda--it was a
> negative intervention and thus did not draw any ire from the quiet-life,
> body-bag-minded forces who claim to be the American "peace" movement.
>
> Those who so wittily question the casualty figures in Kosovo are therefore
> pushing at an open door. It was clear at the time, from the hordes of
> refugees crowding the Macedonian and Albanian frontiers, that no attempt
was
> being made to slaughter them al. A few exemplary mass killings, the more
> capricious the better, and the reinforced memory of years of racist rule,
> and the people would move en masse. Anglekovic and his deputies, by
> destroying the ID papers and homes of the fugitives, made no secret of
their
> belief they'd seen the last of them. That counts as a deliberate attempt
to
> disperse a population and erase its memory. (My Greek friend assures me
that
> stage two, also long meditated, would have been the importing of Serbian
> settles from the Krajina.) The NATO intervention repatriated all or most
of
> the refugees and killed at least some of the cleansers. I find I have
> absolutely no problem with that. It's nothing when compared with the
> disgrace of having once been Milosevic's partner in peace.
>
> With Noam Chomsky's book The New Military Humanism, Lessons from Kosovo,
the
> problem is not body-baggery. Chomsky really does oppose imperialist was on
> principle. But his argument rests too heavily on double standards. If the
> Kosovo intervention really was humane and disinterested, as its proponents
> claim, then (he demands) what about East Timor? The book was written
before
> the international detachments arrived in Dili and before the Indonesian
> occupiers sailed away. And, though that intervention was disgracefully
late
> (and no punishment was visited on Indonesian forces or "infrastructure"),
I
> cannot think of any other grounds on which Chomsky could have opposed it.
> The rescuing forces are principally Australian. Australia, to its shame,
was
> one of the few nations that actually recognized the annexation of East
> Timor. So of course there is hypocrisy. And, as we are learning every day
> from Chechnya, there will always be double standards. Clinton and Gore
will
> never permit their client Yeltsin to be indicted for war crimes. Still, it
> seems to be obvious that without the Kosovo operation and the exalted
> motives that were claimed for it, the pressure to save East Timor would
have
> been considerably less. Skeptical though one ought to be about things like
> the reliance of NATO on air power and the domination of the UN by the
> nuclear states, the "double standard" may still be made to operate against
> itself.