Sir, - President Clinton said recently that the graveyards of former Yugoslavia are full of the victims of President Milosevic's broken promises. (The horrifying photographs in The Irish Times, October 20th, showing relatives identifying 274 bodies from a mass grave near Tuzla, makes this point only too tragically.) Yet, astoundingly, the Western powers continue to put their trust in the word of this indictable war criminal.
It is clear that the extension of the NATO deadline by 10 days has already been interpreted by Milosevic as a sign of NATO weakness and a licence to continue his policy of destroying the Kosovan people. Since the Holbrooke-Milosevic Agreement, there have been well-verified reports that Serb shelling continues in Drenica and other parts of Kosovo. With the new deadline rapidly running out, most of the battalions which have been marked for return to Serbia are still in place.
In these circumstances, it beggars belief that the best Western response in the face of so much destruction and provocation is the dispatch of 2,000 unarmed OSCE observers. Your paper quotes an OSCE official as stating that his mission "will not confront or try to penetrate into an area that is insecure where there is any kind of hostile action or an immediate danger of hostile action." In view of what happened in Bosnia, is this OSCE mission a remotely credible response to one of the most ruthless and shameless war machines in history? Robert Fox, an experienced commentator on Balkan politics, has remarked that this OSCE intervention amounts to a "mission impossible".
Already, within days of the signing of a so-called peace agreement, two UN aid convoys have been cancelled. It would seem inevitable that the experience of Bosnia will soon be repeated, whereby starving populations will be denied food for weeks while international mediators engage in protracted negotiations with bandit Serb forces.
As at Dayton in 1995, the recent agreement did not involve the leaders of Kosovo. Given Western disregard over so many years for the victimisation of the people of Kosovo, it is hardly surprising that they have taken up arms in their own defence. Must we now expect that their failure to respect an agreement to which they were not signatories will henceforth be used as a further reason for, in effect, abandoning them to the mercy of Milosevic? Will we soon hear, as in the case of Bosnia, the disingenuous excuse that both sides are equally violent and that the problem is fundamentally intractable? (These considerations do not, however, justify the reported kidnapping of Serb journalists by KLA elements, or indeed any other instances of war crimes allegedly committed by them.)
A new low in Western cynicism regarding Milosevic was surely reached with the statement by a NATO official (International Herald Tribune, October 20th) indicating that "it would require some grossly disproportionate action by either side" to justify the large scale NATO intervention necessary to guarantee the safety of the Kosovan people. In this regard, we note that there are currently areas of Kosovo which have been sealed off from international inspection. We also know that hundreds of men have been taken away in trucks by Serb forces. How many more horrifying pictures of mass graves will it take to galvanise the Western powers to launch effective and final action against Milosevic's genocidal war machine? - Yours, etc., Valerie Hughes,
Ireland Kosovo Solidarity Group,
Rathmines,
Dublin 6.