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Al-Ahram Weekly 23 - 29 March 2000 Issue No. 474 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 23 - 29 March 2000 Issue No. 474
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons A complete turnabout in political thinking
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
Every year, Cairo University's Faculty of Economics and Political Sciences hosts a seminar to discuss the annual Strategic Report put out by Al-Ahram's Centre for Political and Strategic Studies. The 1999 report presented for discussion at this year's seminar provoked a heated controversy among Egyptian intellectuals, many of whom, myself included, described it as reflecting a complete turnabout in political and strategic thinking.
In its opening section, entitled The Arabs and Global Interaction, the report devoted the first chapter to the Kosovo crisis, which was portrayed as a typical example of what it called the dangers of misreading the global situation, whether out of ignorance or as a result of deliberate distortion. Proceeding from this premise, the report goes on to denounce those who condemned NATO's military intervention in Kosovo, accusing them of downplaying the facts which prove that it was a legitimate response to aggression, specifically, to the campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing which the Serbs began launching against the Albanian Muslims in Kosovo since the end of the seventies.
The report further criticised the opponents of the NATO intervention for what it claims was their false allegation that the tragedy of Kosovo began after the intervention, which they portrayed as the key factor behind the mass exodus of the Albanian Kosovars, while totally ignoring the fact that the problem originated as far back as 1978. With the outbreak of the wars of independence in Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia, the Serb Republic launched a war of extermination against the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovena and a campaign of harassment against the Muslim population of Kosovo aimed at driving them out of the province and replacing them with Serbs. According to the report, more than a quarter of a million Muslim Kosovars were expelled in the period between 1993 and 1998, and 170 villages were destroyed. Thousands were killed and injured and many common graves were discovered. And, even after Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was forced to the negotiating table, he went on playing for time in order to expel as many Muslim Kosovars as he could before committing himself to a peace agreement. "That is why," concludes the Report, "there was no choice but to intervene militarily".
The report denounced not only Arab nationalist, leftist and Islamic movements for not condemning Serbian crimes more forcefully, but also Arab capitals, including Cairo, for adopting what the report describes as a "weak and ambiguous" stand towards the NATO operation. Instead of openly condemning the military intervention in the Balkans, Arab governments expressed their disapproval in an indirect manner, through asserting that any such move should be undertaken under the auspices of the United Nations, not by a military pact, and only on the basis of a mandate from the Security Council which alone could invest the operation with legitimacy.
In my address to the Cairo University seminar (I was asked to comment on the first section of the report), I criticised the report for skirting the all-important issue of international legality and for failing to address the vital question of when military intervention by NATO in the absence of a mandate from the UN Security Council could be regarded as an acceptable option.
Then there is the issue of national sovereignty. True, the sovereignty of states has been greatly eroded in the conditions of globalisation and especially with the achievements of contemporary information technology applied to the field of espionage (the refinements of intelligence-gathering gadgets, including surveillance satellites). But this by no means justifies positive action to violate national sovereignty still further. This is all the more true for the countries of the South which are keen to protect their sovereignty as much as they can against the onslaught of globalisation that has further curtailed freedoms acquired at a very high price.
The report's characterisation of the military intervention as a legitimate response to aggression is based on the assumption that aggression did indeed occur. Thus a necessary -- not, in all cases, sufficient -- condition for the validity of this characterisation is to present concrete evidence that the Serbs did commit aggression, in the form of genocide, against the Albanian Kosovars. Instead, the report relied on unconfirmed reports which have since been, if not disproved, then greatly discredited. In its March issue, which appeared after the seminar, Le Monde Diplomatique published the results of a thorough investigation it had conducted into the facts and figures NATO presented to justify its Balkan adventure. The results give a totally different picture of the situation as it built up before the NATO intervention in March 1999.
Le Monde Diplomatique does not deny that massacres happened similar to other massacres that happen elsewhere in the world. But to say that a deliberate genocide of an entire people was perpetrated, justifying NATO military intervention without even going back to the UN Security Council, is a totally different matter.
Some Western quarters tried to justify the intervention by alleging that the number of Albanian victims of Serb ethnic cleansing in Kosovo had reached a quarter of a million. This figure was repeated by many sources. But as soon as the operations were over, and more even-handed inquiries became possible, figures went down dramatically. 5-digit figures replaced 6-digit figures. After it had been claimed that the victims of genocide had been somewhere between 500,000 and 100,000, estimates went down to 10,000. This was the figure cited by President Clinton on 25 June 1999.
And even that figure was not confirmed. The dead that were actually counted amounted to 2,018. Moreover, there is no proof that they were all Albanians, or that they were all victims of massacres. It was established that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), formed by fanatics on the Albanian side, also engaged in wide-scale killing. Atrocities were committed by both sides and reached a climax following NATO's intervention, which was itself responsible for many civilian casualties. NATO raids were not limited to military targets, but included hospitals, schools, power stations, Serbia's central television centre and the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
Thus, as established by Le Monde Diplomatique, the initial body count (half a million) went down 250 times! According to the prestigious French monthly, the Rambouillet agreements, presented as the only way out of the crisis, actually contained secret clauses that were not disclosed. At the last minute, they were rejected by Belgrade because of the addition of a clause that the Serbian side rightly saw as an infringement of sovereignty. Also according to Le Monde Diplomatique, things could have been otherwise. Dobrica Cosic, the former speaker of Serbia's Parliament, had come up in 1992-3 with a proposal to partition Kosovo. The proposal was refused at the time by moderate Albanian Kosovar leader Ibrahim Rugova, self-proclaimed president of an independent Republic of Kosovo. But as things degenerated critically after Rambouillet, the parties could certainly have agreed to a solution which would have avoided all the bloodshed. Because of the intervention, both Kosovo and Serbia have been totally destroyed. Moreover, it has now become clear that coexistence between the various ethnic groups in Kosovo, in particular, between Albanian and Serbian Kosovars, has become impossible. Ironically, NATO is today threatening the Albanian Kosovars as it once threatened the Serbian Kosovars.
In the final analysis, NATO's intervention was justified on the basis of false information. There is a recent precedent for the use of misinformation to justify political acts. It was an unfounded rumour of a popular uprising in the town of Timisoara that sparked a nationwide uprising in Rumania and brought about Ceaucescu's downfall. After the fact, it emerged that the Timisoara incident had been fabricated by opponents of the ex-dictator to endow themselves with legitimacy and to justify the mock trial and execution of Ceaucescu and his wife.
There is no excuse in the information age to formulate opinions on the basis of inaccurate information. The 1999 Strategic Report of Al-Ahram's Centre for Political and Strategic Studies has done just that in its handling of the Kosovo crisis, building theoretical constructions and adopting positions on the basis of information it had not verified. In relying on media reports we now know to have been grossly inflated, the report failed to take account of the fact that the new information technology is a double-edged sword: on the plus side, it affords free, immediate and widespread access to information; on the minus side, it allows for the easy manipulation of information. Because there is no guarantee that the information available is not biased, it should not be accepted at face value.
