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A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West

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Noam Chomsky presents an utterly devastating refutation of the justifications used to launch the Kosovo war and the idea that the people of East Timor benefited from the new moral fervor allegedly unleashed in American foreign policy.

This book has his most recent writings on the Kosovo war. He presents evidence from mainstream western news sources, Western diplomatic sources, reports of the war crimes tribunal, the U.S. government and the OSCE, and so on to show that the situation in Kosovo in the year before Nato began bommbing was hardly genocidal. Merely violence against suspected KLA collaborators and disproportionate retaliation as a result of KLA attacks and kidnapping against Serb civillians and policeman with the stated goal of provoking Serb violence to try to draw in the Western powers. He shows that Nato i.e. the United States deliberately sabotoged the pre-bombing negotiations by inserting a clause in appendix B in the peace accord they drafted at Rambouillet calling for an exclusively Nato occupation of Kosovo that would have virtual control over the rest of Yugoslavia as well. He shows that the Serb parliament in the days before the bombing denounced the withdraw of the verification monitors and passed a resolution agreeing to an international security presence in Kosovo, which like the clause in Appendix B was ignored. Once the bombing began, Serb tactics shifted to refugee expulsion and became much more violent, though vastly exagerated by Nato it seems, an absoultely predictable result of the bombings in the word of general Wesely Clark. The common response to this is that Milosevic was planning to expel the Albanians anyway, though the only evidence for this is the plan "Operation Horshoe" seemingly fabricated by the German defense ministry. Chomsky says that it is probably likely that Milosevic actually had such plans drawn up as it became likely that his country was about to be attacked by the world largest superpowers who were indiscreetly supporting a rebel group claiming to represent its most volatile minority. Just as Israel no doubt has plans to expel the Palestinians if Iran or Syria attack it. What would we say if Iran attacked Israel which caused the later to implement its diabolical plan and then Iran justified its attack by Israel's implementation of that plan? Chomsky suggests tongue in cheek that it would have been better if Nato allowed Milosevic to expel the Albanians, then started bombing and then allow the refugees back; or perhaps ordered the Albanians to get out of Kosovo, then start bombing and then allow the refugees back. After several months of serious war crimes against the Yugoslav and Kosovar peoples, Nato accepted dropped its appendix B demand and agreed to an international occupation force "with substantial Nato participation" and nothing more. But that was only on paper. In practice Nato i.e. the Americans instituted an exclusive Nato occupation of Kosovo. The KLA since under Nato's eyes has conducted a campaign of ethnic cleansing against gypsies, Jews, Serbs, their Albanian enemies and watches over a country where they only thing functioning is the sex slave industry.

Chomsky asks why zero in on the crimes of Milosevic? Why not call for the bombing of Indonesia (or Washington and London), the country that committed the worst genocide relative to population against the holocaust in East Timor from 1975 onwards with heavy support from the U.S., Britain, France, Japan, Australia and other freedom loving nations. Why weren't the supporters of the bombing upset that thousands of people were being killed as the Kosovo war was happening by the death squads organized by Kopassus, the Indonesian secret police, beneficiaries of years of U.S. training and idealism? Why did they not call for Clinton and Blair to bomb or much more rationally simply withdraw their military, diplomatic and economic support? If these leaders did not respond, Chomsky asks sardonically, why aren't these brethren joining the Bin Laden network? Why did the U.S. provide forensics support for East Timor war crimes investigations long after the rain season had washed away most of the evidence? Why did it take some small but effective gestures after most of East Timor had been destroyed and its population expelled? Why is the U.S. continuing to provide heavy support for barbaric governments in Colombia and Turkey, which continues to make life hell for its "miserable Kurds"(Alexander Sohlzhenitsyn's words). Serious and important questions.

(...). I had always towed the party line about the evil Serbs and their misdeeds, but have changed my tune after reading this enlightening, if disturbing book. Some may accuse Chomsky of being an apologist for Serb atrocities, but it is clear after reading this text that all sides, most notably NATO, were engaged in quite troublesome behavior that cost many thousands of lives. I heard Bill O' Reilly dismiss Chomsky as a "revisionist," and it is sadly interesting that most critics of this and similar works simply stick a "communist", "liberal", or "revisionist" label on the author without ever addressing the points made within the work. If you are looking for a wealth of facts on deceitful and imperialist American policy in Serbia/Yugoslavia and Indonesia/East Timor, I doubt if a better source could be found.

Here Chomsky compares and contrasts the responses of western governments (specifically, those of Clinton's USA and Blair's Britain) to two instances of "ethnic cleansing", both of which received extensive media attention at the end of the millennium. In Kosovo, there was NATO intervention, a 78-day bombing campaign, and a much-publicised war crimes tribunal; in East Timor, at the very most, a few regretful shakes of the head and perhaps the suspicion that we are not, as yet, quite living up to our high ideals of truth, justice and liberty. Chomsky collates some of the facts underlying this apparent irony and shows that, as usual, the paradox has a rather simple solution. For example: (1) The indictment against Milosevic confines itself largely to crimes committed after the bombing began; it seems logical to assume that (a) "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo was not a major motivation for the bombing, and (b) any crimes committed before the bombing are not a major concern of our new generation of moral crusaders. Nevertheless, on the grounds that they sanctioned and participated in "ethnic cleansing", Milosevic and his cronies have been routinely portrayed as the worst enemies of human life and moral decency since Adolf Hitler. (2) The 1999 massacre in East Timor (much advertised in advance as the inevitable consequence if a referendum concerning independence from Indonesia should go the wrong way) was the latest episode in an extremely well-documented record of slaughter dating from the Indonesian invasion of 1975. All the atrocities, including the accession to power of the Indonesian leader Suharto in 1965, with its attendant third of a million casualties, were carried out with western backing and with US armament and training. The solution to that paradox, then, is obvious: the west has, as is traditional, no problem with genocide just so long as it's done by the right people. Chomsky is adept at drawing out the salient points (e.g. the timing of the Serbian war crimes indictment noted above) from voluminous and often skewed information; and, as befits a scientist, his sources of evidence are painstakingly documented. The focus on two contrasted sets of events throws the Standards of the West into sharp and unpleasant perspective.

Chomsky's latest book exposes recent US-British foreign policy: he focuses on these states' support for Turkish, Colombian and Indonesian atrocities, and their destruction of Yugoslavia. The spin tries to cover up their, and their agents' crimes, whose casualties are `collateral damage'; the enemy's crimes, exaggerated and fabricated, are always `genocidal'. NATO nowadays claims that it may intervene wherever it likes, whenever human rights are in peril. But this reborn, `ethical', imperialism fools few. The South Summit of 2000, of 133 nations comprising 80% of the world's peoples, declared, "We reject the so-called `right' of humanitarian intervention." Last year, Nelson Mandela accused the British and US governments of "encouraging international chaos by ignoring other nations and playing `policeman of the world'." He said that he resented their "riding roughshod over the United Nations and launching military actions against Iraq and Kosovo." Chomsky notes that in 1994 the Turkish state's repression peaked, and also in 1994 Turkey became the world's largest arms importer, 80% from the USA. In 1999, Colombia became the leading recipient of US `aid', after a decade of the worst repression in the Western hemisphere, killing over 3,500 people and displacing two million. For the last forty years, the Indonesian army has relied on the US and British states for its training, funds and supplies. They aided its bloody coup in 1965, its invasion of Timor in 1979, and its murderous assaults on East Timor in 1999. After this last crime, but only after it, the US state cancelled its cooperation with the Indonesian army, which at once withdrew from East Timor. So the US could have prevented the crime, had it wished. Chomsky denounces the illegal NATO attack on Yugoslavia. He observes that the two key State Department reports and the International War Crimes Tribunal indictment of Milosevic and his associates focus almost entirely on their actions after the NATO bombing started on 24 March 1999. So, logically, those actions could not have been the reason for NATO's decision to attack. But the Tribunal is not investigating the NATO's war crime of aggression against a sovereign country.

Chomsky uses the NATO bombing of Milosevic as a framework for analyzing the direction of Western foreign policy, specifically in East Timor. While NATO (remember, not UN) forces were destroying non-military targets and infrastructure in the name of a "just cause", US sponsored paramilitaries were rampaging through E Timor slaughtering thousands. It is the awareness of this hypocrisy (as well as the well documented FACT that NATO bombing would worsen the humanitarian crisis it was designed to alleviate) that forms the framework for his analysis. With recent events in the world (easy to predict for those of us who actually know our own foreign policy, our history, and the history of the regions and people in question) Chomsky is one of the few, non PC, intellectuals who are willing to actually hold their own nation to the standards that we hold other nations to. Not surprisingly, CNN, Fox, and the other worthless entertainment disseminators masquerading as flag-waving "news" outlets refuse to cover the obvious issues raised by Chomsky (or Zinn, Fisk, Pilger, Nader, Roy, Herman, Said; the list is much to long to list). Oh well, its just the bodies and misery of the "evildoers" (read: Bush Daddy's old friends who no longer know their place) that are piling up in the name of corporate US hegemony. Also, beware of negative reviews like the one above (nothing wrong with negative reviews, but it woiuld be nice if they would at least attempt to deal with and refute Chomsky's thesis) that quote passages completely out of context.

This is scholar and public servant Noam Chomsky at his analytic best. The focus is "new internationalism where the brutal repression of whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated," as thunderingly stated by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Never content with rhetoric, Chomsky examines the record of new internationalism for actual results, paticularly in test cases like East Timor, Kosovo, and NATO member Turkey with its repressed Kurdish population. The tone is sober, the style searching, the results depressing for a new millenium, demonstrating that more of the same old bloody double-standard wine is being served, this time in new rhetorical bottles. There's no need to editorialize on the professor's findings. They speak eloquently for themselves. Instead a salute is due him: his tireless ongoing pursuit of truth, pleasant or not, his refusal to bow down before the gods of government and media, his steady deep regard for the powerless and voiceless - all in modest, accessible fashion - recommend him as the conscience of the nation and the hope of a better America.

This is Chomsky at his continued best. His insight into and knowledge on American's involvement in Kosovo and East Timor is once again unparalled by other intellectuals. Chomsky is one of the most important assets to truth and knowledge ever to exist.