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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
But a circus tent of NATO opponents, from Tom Hayden to Arianna Huffington, won't face reality.
May 27, 1999 | I had never spoken on an ethnically cleansed panel until last Sunday, when I was invited, at the last minute, to provide "balance" to a lineup of 26 speakers at the Nation Institute/Pacifica teach-in on the war in Yugoslavia. I felt like Alice in LaLaland. There were three Serbs on the speaker's list -- and not one single Kosovar or Albanian -- and few of the other speakers wasted time or tears on the "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo. It seemed odd to hear apologists for genocide in a West L.A. synagogue, but hey, this was California.
I have a long record of calling for intervention against Milosevic. I argued for action by the West back when the Serbian tyrant was only practicing -- shelling cities like Vukovar into rubble, dragging hospital patients from their beds and shooting them, minor stuff like that. I had berated the United Nations and the West for their acquiescent complicity in Milosevic's ethnic cleansing of Bosnia -- as well as the genocide in Rwanda. And because they did not stop him earlier, it means that ground troops will almost certainly be needed to stop Milosevic, who is almost certainly going to be belatedly indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal Thursday.
His career shows that he will make any sacrifices, of Albanians, Bosnians or Serbs, to get his ends. In 1989, he had begun the break-up of Yugoslavia by withdrawing the autonomy of Kosovo and imposing a form of apartheid on the Albanian majority. With amazing forbearance, the Kosovars practiced passive resistance, encouraged by looking at what happened to the Bosnians, and by promises from the United States that they would be looked after.
In the meantime, Milosevic had started and lost one war in Slovenia and another in Croatia, and had caused the deaths of a quarter of a million people in the inconclusive Bosnian war. As the United Nations watched and the United States shouted but did nothing, he had ethnically cleansed whole swathes of Bosnia and Croatia, and connived as his "own" Serbs were in turn swept out of the Krajna. Eleven cease-fires were agreed to and then broken as "negotiations" continued. In short, I am more concerned about deliberate genocide in Kosovo than NATO accidents. And I do not think that negotiations will do more than give him a breathing space for his next atrocity.
This was not a view shared by my friends on the California left, it seems, with the honorable exception of the L.A. Weekly's Harold Meyerson, who dragged himself from his sick bed to make his point. To be fair, many in the audience were unpleasantly surprised at the company they found themselves keeping. Trotskyists and Serbian nationalists heckled and booed in two-part harmony during my presentation, demonstrating Belgrade-style freedom of speech. In comradely contrast, the California left was happy to cheer the Cato Institute's Christopher Layne, Republican Arianna Huffington and an assortment of rabid Serbs in the common cause of ignoring genocide in a faraway country about which, it soon became obvious, so many of them knew so little.
The stars of the show were Huffington, Rev. Jesse Jackson and California state Sen. (and former Chicago Seven defendant) Tom Hayden, strange bedfellows who were worth the price of admission. I watched Hayden as several speakers lamented the plight of the Palestinians, whose suffering, of course, has never merited NATO intervention against Israel. Hayden didn't squirm, even though he's still remembered for a visit he made with his former spouse, Jane Fonda, to Ariel Sharon's army as it bombed Beirut and provided cover for the massacres of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila. At least Hayden is consistent: Ariel Sharon, of course, also supports the Serbs.
Hayden seemed shocked to find that, unlike his beloved Irish Republican Army, the KLA is not made up of saints. Hayden supports Irish nationalism in expelling the British from the North, but he cannot sympathize with Kosovar Albanians. He calls Kosovo "the spiritual soul of Serbia," not caring that it is currently inconveniently populated by Albanians, who before Milosevic's recent moves against them made up 90 percent of the country.
The KLA has another big strike against it where Hayden is concerned: Its members are Muslims. A Turk must have jumped out the woodpile once and frightened the young Hayden. He referred to five centuries of war between Orthodox Christianity and Islam, and implied that the KLA was some sort of proto-Taliban. It is lucky for the Vietnamese that they were Buddhist Communists and not Muslim Communists, or Senator Tom might not have been there for them.
In comparison, Jesse Jackson, clad in a black safari suit, won my admiration by saying that what is happening in Kosovo is genocide and if bombing would stop it, he would support it. The applause was somewhat underwhelming, but the Serbian nationalists had the good sense not to jeopardize their new chumminess with California's liberals by booing him for his suggestion that the "Kosovoreans," as he called them, were having a bad time. He insisted on three points -- an end to the ethnic cleansing, a return of the refugees to Kosovo and a multilateral peacekeeping force -- which are precisely NATO's conditions for ending the bombing.
