Blindness to horrors of Kosovo shows left's bankruptcy

The left-wing approach to world affairs used to consist of two essential steps: (a) look at what the United States of America is doing; (b) oppose it.

It was, for the most part, a sensible policy. Almost invariably, from the 1950s to the early 1990s, the US was to be found on the side of vicious and corrupt regimes. Barbaric oligarchies struggling to maintain control over their populations had a loyal friend in Uncle Sam.

Anyone who threatened the geopolitical interests of the US or the more immediate interests of American multinational corporations could be murdered, tortured and raped with the active collaboration of the world's greatest democracy. Opposing American power and standing up for decency usually amounted to the same thing.

It's not so easy any more. The world after the Cold War doesn't offer such simple rules of thumb. But old habits die hard and much of the left continues to take its moral bearings from a simple reversal of the American line. For many radicals and socialists, it was easier, in the Kosovo crisis, to make light of the treatment of the Kosovars than to find yourself on the same side of the argument as the Pentagon.

A tough-minded, critical, left-wing approach to international conflict has never been so urgent as it is in Ireland now. We are about to be bounced into the NATO-led Partnership for Peace without an honest assessment of what we are getting into. A common EU defence and foreign policy is becoming a reality. We have become, through our booming economy, an integral part of the world's privileged elite of nations, without having a clear sense of our responsibilities in the international community.

The left, with its traditions of international solidarity, its innate scepticism of power blocs and its willingness (at least in theory) to place human values above the self-interests of the rich, should be able to speak clearly and forcefully about these issues. Instead, in much of the debate on Kosovo, dissent has been characterised by evasion.

On Tuesday last, for example, Kieran Allen, of the No to War Campaign, replied to a piece I wrote in last Saturday's Irish Times. Nowhere in his article do any of the following words appear: Albanian, genocide, massacre, torture, rape, ethnic cleansing. Saddam Hussein, Franjo Tudjman, the Indonesian government and the Suez Canal all get a look in.

The actual subject of my article, the systematic Serb policy of destroying the Albanian population of Kosovo and the responsibility of the international community in the face of it, is completely avoided. That the Kosovars don't merit even a stray platitude makes my point much more eloquently than anything I could write. Kieran Allen does assure us that the anti-war movement in Ireland and elsewhere had an alternative strategy for dealing with Milosevic. It "advocated his overthrow by the democratic opposition". Could he mean the democratic opposition in Kosovo that was shot down on the streets of Pristina, Pudojevo and Ferijaz or in the mines of Trepca, when workers protested the revocation of Kosovo's autonomy?

The democratic opposition in Bosnia that was left at the mercy of Milosevic's artillery on the hills above Sarajevo? Or the democratic opposition in Serbia whose leader, Vuk Draskovic, was in government with Milosevic at the start of the Kosovo war, whose party governs Belgrade with the support of Milosevic's party, and who, on Tuesday, denounced plans for street demonstrations against Milosevic because he "doesn't want to call people in the streets (sic) in these difficult times"? And are the obligations of the international community entirely fulfilled by issuing a press release calling for the overthrow of a bloody dictator?

A more substantial exercise in denial is that of Bill McSweeney, of the Irish School of Ecumenics, in a letter to the editor responding to the same article of mine. In that article I referred to a piece written in 1995 by Vojislav Seselj, outlining a programme for the destruction of the Kosovars.

Bill McSweeney, whose work I greatly admire, condemns my "insinuation, without evidence, that the views of this nationalist moron constituted the policy actively pursued by Belgrade in its cleansing of Kosovo". The implication seems to be that I had wrongly tarnished the Milosevic regime as a whole with the ravings of an irrelevant crank.

Seselj, alas, is not an irrelevant crank. He was, until last week, the deputy prime minister of Serbia. His private paramilitary army, raised with the active encouragement of Milosevic himself, carried out many of the worst atrocities in Croatia and Bosnia. And his ravings were precisely "the policy actively pursued by Belgrade in its cleansing of Kosovo".

Seselj advocated the introduction of a Serb curriculum in Kosovo schools in order to force Albanians out of the education system. This was done and virtually all Albanian teachers were dismissed from their jobs. Seselj wanted Albanian professionals forced out of their jobs; this was done. He wanted a programme of colonisation; it was carried out. He wanted a programme of economic deprivation and harassment to make life "intolerable" for the Albanians; it was implemented.

It is profoundly worrying that someone of Bill McSweeney's stature seems unaware of the systematic implementation by Belgrade over the course of the 1990s of a programme for eliminating the Albanian presence in Kosovo and the incorporation of the territory into Serbia proper.

When the war criminal Arkan described the entire Albanian population of Kosovo as "tourists", when the Serb police began to introduce torture chambers as a routine part of their apparatus, when Serb leaders repeatedly complained of the "excessive" birth rate among the Albanians, was it unreasonable to conclude that the Belgrade regime was planning the obliteration of the Kosovars?

Nowhere, moreover, in the traditional leftwing critiques of NATO's actions has there been an acknowledgement that the Kosovars supported NATO intervention. If the left has nothing to say about the fate of the Kosovars, it leaves the field to those who do. The United States, which sells eight-and-a-half billion dollars worth of arms every year to non-democratic regimes, which owes the United Nations one-and-a-half billion dollars in unpaid dues, is left as the champion of human rights. Conversely, the legitimate critique of NATO's tactics and the terrible human cost they imposed on civilians is utterly undermined.

It might be noted that the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, bravely attacked NATO's breaches of human rights while retaining a sense of the horror of Milosevic's crimes and of the urgency of intervention. She reminded us that the Irish voice in the world does not have to be either muffled by loyalty to the West or distorted into simplistic slogans.