Global Policy Forum

By Steven Gan

They fought for independence against a brutal dictatorship for decades. Their people faced ethnic cleansing, rapes, famine. And only an international military force could protect them, they said.

Kosovo? No, East Timor.

No one, however, is imploring that Jakarta be reduced to rubble. Not even Nobel Laureate Jose Ramos Horta. While Serbia is bombed to the Stone Age, he lamented, Indonesia received only ''mild rebukes'' for its 23- year ethnic cleansing of East Timorese.

Indonesian troops marched into East Timor in 1975, killing 200,000 people -- more than one-third of the population. The Americans responded to this human catastrophe by doubling military aid to Jakarta, sold more than US$1.1 billion worth of weapons and blocked the United Nations from taking effective action. The ''military'' option in East Timor, said Ramos Horta, is not sending smart bombs or stealth planes but halting arms supplies.

Ramos-Horta is one Asian who does not buy the Nato war. Many, however, joined the call for blood, in part because of Nato's well-oiled propaganda machine. The Western media, too, is cheerleading the war. No doubt there is often intense pressure in wartime for the media to serve as propagandists rather than journalists - -- while journalists present the world in all its complexity, propagandists simplify the world into good and evil.

President Slobodan Milosevic, said Brussels spin- doctors, is the modern-day reincarnation of Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot. High-powered terms such as ''genocide'' and ''ethnic cleansing'' are liberally used. Clearly, genocide is what happened to six millions Jews and other minorities in World War II, to the one million dead in Cambodia, to 800,000 dead in Rwanda, and to 200,000 dead in East Timor.

In Kosovo, the 2,000 killed last year does not qualify as full-on genocide, tragic though it may be. Yes, the death toll is appalling and a ''serial ethnic cleanser'' like Milosevic must be brought to trial, which is why there is a pressing need for an International Criminal Court. Efforts in that direction are already under way, but the US is dead set against it.

That said, the number of people killed in Kosovo is no more than those slaughtered by Indonesian ''tribal head-hunters'' in Kalimantan. And it is definitely less gruesome than the 145,000 Iraqis -- and 124 Americans - - - who, according to the US Bureau of Statistics, were killed in the Gulf War. There, 6,000 are still dying every month because of the economic sanctions, said former UN humanitarian coordinator Dennis Halliday. But in this case, argued US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, ''the price is worth it''.

Nato said Yugoslavia is a humanitarian war to save the embattled Kosavars. President Bill Clinton should know better. While he works himself into a lather of moral indignation over Kosovo, he should perhaps recall that five years ago he pointedly refused to help the Rwandans being summarily butchered. Clinton, said Roger Winter of the US Committee for Refugees, was afraid to label this wholesale massacre as ''genocide''. By calling it genocide, he said, Clinton would have had to acknowledge that the US had a moral obligation to intervene.

Subsequently, the US opposed sending UN peacekeepers. ''A US intervention might have averted genocide in Rwanda, but there was no action,'' lamented Edward Said, a Palestinian intellectual. ''The stakes were not high enough, and black people not worth the effort.''

Perhaps Rwanda and East Timor do not figure in the Western humanitarian radar. Take Turkey then, a country only a few hundred kilometres from Kosovo. According to the Turkish parliament's own investigation, 4,000 Kurdish villages have been destroyed by the military, leaving 30,000 dead and creating three million refugees in the past 15 years. Here, Ankara's weapons of choice for its ethnic cleansing are imported from the US and Germany. And all this, when Turkey is a Nato member and home to 14 US military bases.

Consider also the ethnic cleansing even closer to Kosovo's border. In 1995, the Croatian army expelled 300,000 Serbs from their homes in Krajina. According to India's Satish Nambiar, former head of mission of the UN forces in Bosnia, Operation Storm was masterminded by US army generals acting as advisers to Croatia's Franco Tudjman (this is the same man who claimed that the Holocaust was a myth and said he was ''proud not to have a drop of Jewish or Serbian blood''). Soon afterwards, Tudjman was a guest at Clinton's inauguration.

It is astounding how quick the world has gone to war. After all, it was only two months ago that a draft solution on Kosovo was worked out by an American, assisted by an Austrian and a Russian. However, the Russian representative was not informed of a last- minute appendix to the document. It required Yugoslavia to allow Nato unfettered access to not only Kosovo, but all of the country's territory and with all cost borne by the host.

This was presented to the Yugoslav government at Rambouillet as a non-negotiable package. ''It was not even take it or leave it,'' said Milosevic. ''It was take it or else.'' Put simply, it was a case of ''give us your country, or we will destroy it''. Not surprisingly, while Milosevic accepted the autonomy portion of the deal, he rejected the military clause.

But what surprised Nato was that the Kosovar Albanians also refused to sign the pact. They eventually inked the document after being told that it could be used as a pretext to launch the air strikes. On March 23, the day before the attack began, the Serbian parliament adopted a resolution expressing willingness to review the ''range and character of an international presence'' in Kosovo.

But the US was not interested in anything other than Nato forces. Milosevic, said US officials, only understands military force. It is also the language that the Americans prefer to speak. Indeed, it is not because of the ''genocide'' in Kosovo, as claimed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, that is the casus belli: Yugoslavia is bombed precisely because it refused to allow hostile foreign troops on its soil.

But the Kosovo Liberation Army, which Nato now supports, is no angel either. It espouses an ultra- nationalist ideology and advocates a programme of ethnic cleansing that differs from Milosevic only in that it lacks the power to enforce its vision. Clearly, in such an age-old ethnic feud, there can be no silver- bullet solution.

Human rights advocates are nonetheless justified to argue that the international community must not stand idly by when people are being slaughtered wholesale. But doing something doesn't mean inflaming the situation further. Nato bombings, by all intents and purposes, are doing just that: it escalates the violence in Kosovo.

Look at the results. The month-long Nato assault has not only failed to protect the Kosovars. It has worsened their plight. The attack has strengthened Milosevic. It has undermined the UN and international laws. It has killed hundreds of civilians, both in Serbia and Kosovo. It has wreaked the infrastructure of a whole nation. It has destabilised the frontier states. It has wasted billions of dollars. Clever, no?

The Nato ''war to save lives'' pretext is not new. On Sept 23, 1938 Hitler wrote to Britain's Neville Chamberlain that ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia had been ''tortured'', that 120,000 had been ''forced to flee the country'', that the ''security of more than three million human beings was at stake''. Hitler was of course laying the ground for humanitarian intervention. But while Nato is obviously not Hitler -- the Serbs would dispute that -- ''humanitarian intervention'' has often been used as a cover for other interests.

In the past, bringing civilisation to the natives provided the excuse for the colonisation of the Third World. Today, ''human rights'' may be the cloak for a new type of military intervention worldwide. Yes, human rights supporters no doubt do have good intentions. But they should be aware that such good intentions can be manipulated by the powers-that-be to serve their interests, and against those that human rights defenders seek to protect.

Said Yugoslav expert Diana Johnson: ''Western media and governments are unquestionably more concerned about human rights abuses that obstruct the penetration of transnational capitalism, to which they are organically linked, than about, say, the rights of Russian miners who have not been paid for a year.'' Such a narrow approach in human rights fails to address the global structures that violates basic human rights, especially in a world where there is a wide gulf between rich and poor.

Since the collapse of the Soviet threat, Nato had been looking for a reason to exist to mark its 50th anniversary. Enter Kosovo, which apparently has a problem and Nato is the solution. Instead, it is Nato that has a problem and Kosovo the solution. And having started the war, Clinton is arguing that the bombing must continue because Nato cannot ''lose credibility''. Having got into the business of saving lives, Nato is now in the business of saving face.

US officials frequently proclaim their adherence to international laws, except when it is not in their interests to do so. Which was why Washington vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to obey international law. Before the strikes, France had called for a Security Council resolution to authorise the deployment of Nato troops. The US flatly refused, unwilling to concede any authority to the UN, and in so doing, even violated Nato's own pact.

''By casting off the UN and its charter, Nato is imposing on the whole world and the next century an ancient law -- that might is right,'' said Russian Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The old League of Nations died, he added, because it did nothing to help Ethiopia when it was invaded by fascist Italy. Now the UN can do nothing but watch the assault on Yugoslavia.

There is no doubt that the abuse of human rights will continue to persist in many parts of the world. And if there is to be a humanitarian military force to keep peace, it should be under democratic international control. That control means the UN General Assembly, not the Security Council, which is dominated by five veto-power wielding countries. Even the General Assembly does not represent real democracy. True democracy will have to wait for global social change, but for now, the General Assembly will do.

However, in the absence of global democracy, national sovereignty must be respected. Clearly, powerful countries don't want national sovereignty: they can protect themselves, and more so, it hampers their imperialistic designs. The rest of the world, however, needs it badly. To deny the validity of national sovereignty is to effectively give the West carte blanche to intervene when and where it pleases. The only other alternative shield for Third World nations is to acquire nuclear weapons. But this is no real option: the world is already awash with nuclear bombs.

This, in the nutshell, is what the New World Order has in store for the next millennium. ''Barbarians are at the gate,'' said Branislav Andjeli, a webmaster of Yugoslav (beograd.com). ''They shout: 'We are the United States. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated'.''

The US, he said, decides which terrorist organisation should be bombed and which is given money and arms; which mass expulsion of populations to aid and which to label genocide; which economies to support through loans and trade, and which to destroy through sanctions and currency speculations. It can select with impunity which international laws and agreements are politically expedient to adopt or honor, or which to ignore. Its goal is to assimilate all world's cultures and resources.

He is obviously alluding to Star Trek's Captain Jean- Luc Picard in ''First Contact'' who vowed to battle a ruthless collective of cyborgs called the Borg. ''They invade our space and we fall back,'' lamented Picard. ''They assimilate entire worlds and we fall back. Never again, the line must be drawn here! This far, no further.'' And Yugoslavia, insisted Andjeli, is where the line must be drawn.

The underlying message on the Tomahawks launched against Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq is clear. If a tin- pot dictator wants to commit genocide, his regime better kowtow to the West. That way, the West can turn a blind eye. Ask Suharto. Indeed, the world is not so much threatened by Cuba, North Korea and Yugoslavia as by a rouge superpower and its crony states, who speak of liberty but trample on global democracy, and who talk about the rule of law, but stomp on international laws. They are, if you will, the global Trenchcoat Mafia.

But resistance, despite the near-total domination of the West and its omnipresent media, is not futile. The next millennium will determine whether we continue to live under a global apartheid where ''might is right'', or a global democracy where all nations are equal before international law.