 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 April 1999 Issue No. 425 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
 |
 |
|
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 April 1999 Issue No. 425
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
|
|
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The controversy over Kosovo
By Eqbal Ahmad
Wars produce unlikely bedfellows. In one famous photograph, a smiling Joseph Stalin is seen snuggled up between Winston S. Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. NATO's current air attack on targets in Kosovo and Serbia offers us the latest demonstration of this old adage. India has joined forces with Iraq and Libya, and China made common cause with Russia in condemning the Western powers' intervention.
Among individuals who have commented on the event, a similar dissonance can be observed. Thus Ramsey Clark, former US attorney general and a quintessential American liberal who once defended me in court, denounced NATO's intervention as a gross violation of international law, and went on to be welcomed as a hero in Belgrade by, among others, the hate-monger and war criminal Slobadan Milosevic. In an article in the British Guardian, Tariq Ali has forcefully denounced NATO's intervention as a "liberal imperialist adventure". Yet he must feel uncomfortable to find himself in the same camp as the right-wing Zionists who condemn "the diktat of Rambouillet" along with the "diktat of Wye". What complex of conditions and emotions have brought about this unusual convergence of otherwise antagonistic nations and individuals?
Nation states, which provide the framework for international relations in our time, are notorious for their double standards. "Nations behave like nations", runs the cliché, meaning that they follow their national interests without regard to law, morality or the costs their policies might inflict on another country or people. Indeed, it is hard to identify a nation state that has not committed crimes, small or large, upon its own people or others. The difference, as we shall see, arises when the scale of atrocity exceeds the norm prevalent at any given time. But in every case, those governments which engage in atrocious and anti-humanitarian acts invoke the principle of sovereignty as a defence against external censure or intervention. Nor is it uncommon for them to find their claim supported by other nations and individuals.
Thus it comes as no surprise that the argument which Russia, India and China have invoked most forcefully against NATO's air war is that it violates Yugoslavia's sovereignty and the United Nations Charter. This is, of course, an entirely spurious argument. It lacks both conviction and consistency. In a recent edition of the Hindustan Times, Radha Kumar, author of Divide and Fall?: Bosnia in the Annals of Partition, wrote: "Given that Russia and India, and China more indirectly, have each intervened in other countries' wars, this protest rings hollow." She recalls the excitement and moral fervour that accompanied India's intervention in East Pakistan and reminds the reader: "Given her arguments at the time, India's present stance is both inconsistent and unconvincing. We said that Indian intervention in Pakistan's civil war was justified on both humanitarian grounds and because that war and the refugees it created posed a threat to our stability." These are precisely NATO's justification for intervening in the Balkans.
Kumar might also have noted that Pakistan, which supports the NATO action, had vigorously protested India's intervention in 1971 and its outraged foreign minister had torn up a UN Security Council Resolution and thrown it at the august assembly in disgust. Russia had supported India and the US had criticised the USSR for that support. Nation state, thy name is inconsistency!
But there is method in this madness, nonetheless -- one which generally goes by the name of the national interest. India, China and Russia have one thing in common: they suffer from unstable boundaries, unresolved territorial disputes and ethnic nationalisms which are pressing their "right to self-determination". All three are confronting armed insurgencies of varying intensity. Protracted guerrilla wars have endured in the northeast of India and in the disputed region of Kashmir, and there are putative challenges in other places. China had been facing insurgency in Sinkiang for decades, and the territorial status of Taiwan remains in dispute. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia also faces multiple challenges from within her borders, most notably in Abkhazia, Chechnya and Crimea.
Russia also has to face a number of challenges from without. The most serious of these are its increasing encirclement by NATO, and concerted American efforts to cut it off from the oil and gas resources of Central Asia. Moscow's support for Milosevic's fascist regime is morally reprehensible, but the United States and Western European nations bear a major responsibility in this, having aroused Russian anxiety by seeking to expand the western alliance into Eastern Europe. Similarly, Iraq and Libya are on the receiving end of on-going American interventions. They cannot afford, either politically or emotionally, to support yet another intrusive military action by their tormentor. This is particularly true of Iraq, which a decade after Desert Storm remains subject to American air raids, and a cruel sanctions regime which has cost the lives of an estimated half a million children. Is that a justifiable loss to inflict upon the Iraqi people in pursuit of a policy? "We think it is worth the price," the US secretary of state told one reporter. And so we draw to a close four centuries during which the distinction between fascism and imperialism has come to be increasingly blurred.
The amorality of nation states is not an occasional accident, but an entrenched character trait, and one which tends to be legitimised by "experts". Critics of national policy can rarely penetrate the armour of the expert "perception" of national interest. Yet this perception is more often than not seriously flawed. Examples of this abound. For our present purposes, a single case may suffice. Starting in 1964, critics of American intervention in Vietnam variously argued that US interests ran contrary to its engagement in Indo-China, and that the war there was immoral to boot. But policy makers and academic functionaries like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniev Brzewzinski continuously dismissed this argument as moralistic, lacking in hard-headed realism, and blind to such terrible dangers as the "domino effect". It was only after an estimated five million deaths, $200 billion of war expenditure and untold suffering that a decade later the United States withdrew from Vietnam, defeated and disgraced.
The dominoes did not fall, despite this debacle. On the contrary, in the decades following the Vietnam war, American political influence and economic power witnessed a clear revival in both Asia and the world at large. Yet, curiously, the anti-war critics whose analysis was on the mark are by now forgotten, while Kissinger and Brzewzinski continue to preside as the high priests of strategic punditry. The nexus of knowledge and power serves a single purpose: to legitimate power and devalue knowledge.
The notion of national interest has thus become a "mantra" comprehended so ritualistically that it often helps to justify those courses of action which most hurt the interests of the nation. While there is still a formalistic adherence to such 18th and 19th century precepts as the inviolability of national sovereignty, the balance of power, strategic balance, secure boundaries and international precedence, these ideas have largely lost their previous meanings and are no longer truly applicable to our times.
For example, the concept of sovereignty entails the will and capacity to maintain not only territorial independence, but national economic autonomy. Yet, some 120 United Nations members, many of whom spend the rest of their time invoking ad nauseam their "sovereign rights", happily surrender their sovereignty, as often as four times a year, to the IMF and the World Bank. Likewise, since the end of World War I, a large number of laws and conventions, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on Genocide, have been contrived to seriously circumscribe the sovereignty of nation states.
In international relations, precedence holds but little value. What would India, China or Russia stand to lose if they gave their qualified support to NATO's belated intervention in Kosovo? Russia was given a free hand to inflict great suffering upon the people of Chechnya. Hardly anyone has raised an eyebrow over Chinese repression in Sinkiang, and its intervention in Tibet has been persistently ignored by the powers that be. India suppressed the insurgency in the Punjab with an iron hand, virtually wiped out a generation of Nagas and Mizos in the 1960s and 1970s, and has been harsh on the Kashmiris. Yet apart from the occasional unfavourable human rights report, it has been largely left alone. The reasons for this insouciance are, of course, political and economic, not legal or moral, and they will remain so, irrespective of what Russia, India or China may say about Kosovo. Thus these nations could afford to take a moral and humane stand on the issue, without compromising whatever they perceive to be their "national interest".
Most critics have unequivocally opposed NATO's intervention, on the grounds that it violates national sovereignty, that the United States and Europe have condoned gross humanitarian violations by such allies as Turkey, Israel and Indonesia, and that the United States itself has been quite a consistent violator of international law. Only Noam Chomsky, the most forceful critic of the Western air war, has taken an uncharacteristically ambivalent position. Following a devastating exposition of US violations of international laws and its subversion of the United Nations, he asked: "Where does that leave the question of what to do in Kosovo?" The question remains, for Chomsky, "unanswered". The legitimacy of NATO's intervention is dubious. It has so far only added to the suffering of Kosovo's people. Yet it offers the victims at least some protection from a predatory state.
After the publication last week of my essay in this space, many readers around the world have written to express their disappointment that I too shied away from either opposing or supporting the NATO intervention. It is true that my emphasis was on the United States' and NATO's failures. But I wrote of failures in the Balkans, and especially in Kosovo, as they relate to the current Western intervention. Washington's policy has lacked seriousness of purpose, and bombs, I wrote, "cannot compensate for the absence of seriousness and resolve." The results of this policy we have before us -- an acceleration of genocide. As of this writing, half of Kosovo's citizens have been cleansed out of their homes.
For a decade, the United States discouraged the UN from taking on any role in resolving the simmering conflict in Kosovo. America did not want to see NATO's monopoly in Europe watered down. For eight years, it effectively colluded with a fascist hate-monger in Belgrade. And now it has embarked on a clinical intervention that has done little to relieve a nation under cruel assault. This is not a record worthy of applause. The imperial powers, both past and present, will have to show the same resolve as they did in 1939, if civilised opinion is wholeheartedly to support the democracies in their war against fascism. Until then, we must continue both to oppose genocide, and to bemoan this half-hearted attempt to stop it.
