ELECTIONS '98
COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Madeleine's Waterloo

Massacres of innocent civilians. Wild-eyed militiamen engaged in genocide and ethnic cleansing, selecting religious/ethnic minorities and shooting them in cold blood. Several hundred thousand survivors trekking over rugged terrain -- ragged refugees carrying all their pathetic belongings, fleeing in panic. Rapes and abductions of women and children. Wailing women. Orphaned children. Filthy refugee camps, and the hopeless eyes of the survivors. All the horrors of humans at their worst.

Kosovo, 1999? Yes, but also Jammu and Kashmir, 1989. Or Tibet, 1959. Or Bangladesh, 1971. Or Rwanda, 1994.

But no Cruise missiles were fired at terrorist mercenaries in Kashmir, or Chinese marauders in Tibet, or Pakistani killers in Bangladesh or rampaging Hutus in Rwanda. Nobody issued ultimata against the perpetrators; nobody undertook airlifts to house the refugees; nobody cared.

So why weren't the Americans and the British so incensed about the human rights violations in those cases? I suppose the human rights of white Europeans are manifestly greater than those of mere Indians or Tibetans or Bengalis or Africans. So much for all the lofty principles trotted out to justify what is merely a major military misadventure by NATO. And how soon they forget their own human rights violations -- it was only in 1963 that the Civil Rights Act was passed in the US.

Indians should nevertheless view US aggression with some alarm -- it is entirely possible that a similar adventure to 'liberate' Kashmir and the North-East from India is under consideration somewhere in the Pentagon. And that is an excellent reason to have the Agni II and nuclear weapons -- no Seventh Fleet will steam into the Bay of Bengal loaded with Tomahawk Cruise missiles if a stray Agni could hit it with, shall we say, a tactical nuclear warhead.

As NATO's Kosovo operation demonstrates yet again, military power will be used against the weak, all scruples be damned, UN or no UN; international law or no international law. India should be wary of this; but in truth, the Balkan mess is not India's problem. India should express regret at this modern Crusade pitting Muslims and Christians against each other but otherwise keep quiet -- it is not part of the 'Brown Man's Burden' to worry about this.

India might at most have a role as a neutral and objective observer -- Hindu Indians can perhaps be impartial arbitrators with no particular sympathies to either Muslims or Christians. For instance, I read a report by General Satish Nambiar, who led the UN Peace-Keeping Force in Bosnia-Herzegovina -- and his views are much more balanced than the shrill partisanship of the western media.

As is now widely suggested by analysts, the Americans miscalculated badly -- they expected the Yugoslavs to fold rapidly in the face of overwhelming airpower. But they forgot the lessons of their own recent history -- Vietnam, which also refused to bow down to high-technology weapons. The Serbs, (as the Vietnamese in their day), are fighting for their homeland, which makes a difference.

Of course, the displaced Kosovars deserve all our sympathy and support. They are just like the displaced Kashmiri Pandits living in squalor in camps in Delhi; or the Tibetans living in Dharmsala, struggling to maintain their culture. My heart goes out to them. As Euripides said in 431 BCE, "There is no greater sorrow on earth than the loss of one's native land."

But there is also the Serb perspective that is completely ignored by the global media empires. I received some forwarded email, apparently (I have no way of verifying all this) from a Yugoslav named Bosko Gajic (egajicb@Eunet.yu), an alumnus of IIT Mumbai. Apparently this was written from an air-raid shelter during a NATO attack. He writes about the 500,000+ Serbs displaced from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, implying they are victims too.

Gajic claims, among other things, that Kosovo, an integral part of historical Serb territory, was overrun by Albanians after World War II, because of unfettered immigration sanctioned by Marshal Tito, a Croat; and that a lot of today's refugees are in fact Serbs, fleeing the war. I am not sure why I should believe Gajic any less than I believe CNN, the BBC, or other media. After all, they all represent just one side of the conflict.

It is nevertheless quite possible that the Serbs -- the latest victims of ritual demonisation by the pliant US media -- are brutes. I have read that Serbs -- or was it Croats? - collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and happily sent lots of people to death camps. That doesn't matter, though. What matters is that they have outmanoeuvred NATO. They have succeeded in getting rid of the inconvenient Kosovars and pushing them into Macedonia, Albania and other countries.

The roots of this conflict go back a long way, and it is basically religious in origin. As I said in my column On the persistence of time two years ago, the Serbs were trounced by the Ottoman Turks in 1389 CE, leading to five hundred years of Turkish rule. The Serbs are Orthodox Christian Slavs, and the Turks are Muslim. The Turks converted some Serbs and Albanians to Islam. Most Kosovars are Muslim. In effect, the Serbs are now saying to them, "We want you Muslims out."

I suspect a lot of (Christian) Europeans are rather sympathetic to this idea -- witness the fact that the European Economic Community has consistently refused to admit Turkey, mostly because it is Muslim. The prospect of Kosovo, yet another Muslim country (in addition to Albania and Bosnia) in the middle of Europe is probably not wildly popular among EU citizens.

As detailed in Samuel P Huntington's Clash of Civilizations , the cleavage areas where religions and ethnicities clash are likely to lead to the worst conflicts. The old Yugoslavia was one such. The Kosovo problem was predictable, as it pits two exclusivist, belligerent belief systems against each other. And there will not be a simple solution to it, either. NATO should have known that it would get its nose bloodied by sticking it into the Balkan morass.

It seems likely that ground troops will now get involved -- with the resultant body-bags shipped back to America containing the remains of US soldiers. This will rapidly make the war very unpopular indeed in the US. In fact, this may stick to Bill "Teflon" Clinton more than Monicagate or Paulagate or Whitewater. Poor Al Gore will probably lose the next election.

I do feel bad that Gore, an earnest person, will take the fall. But I am pleased that Madeleine Albright has finally demonstrated her level of incompetence. She is my least favourite American, as I said in my column Madeleine and Bill and the Attila-the-Hen School of Foreign Policy. She is obnoxious, foul-mouthed, prone to lecturing, and the very picture of misplaced female machismo, coupled with a track record of accomplishing almost nothing -- the Ugly American personified.

Albright has alienated practically everyone she has dealt with in the world of diplomacy because of her jingoistic pit-bull attitude. She seems to believe she is the only one wearing trousers in the Clinton administration, and definitely the only one with the cojones to do anything macho. I am told that she personally overrode wiser counsel that suggested that the Kosovo problem did not need an invasion, but more negotiation.

Then, I hope, Kosovo will prove to be Madeleine Albright's personal Waterloo. Her head should roll for the biggest tactical blunder since Dienbien Phu. She seems to have forgotten that while it is okay to engage in genocide against Iraq -- after all, they are merely a bunch of Arabs -- carpet-bombing blond, blue-eyed Europeans (even if they have been conveniently portrayed as devils) is just not a done thing.

The ineptitude with which the whole operation has been handled gives the impression that it was hastily conceived by politicians, without much buy-in from the military. (The other, more frightening, possibility is that the American military, despite what Hollywood says, is also clueless. This, too, has been rumoured -- that minus hi-tech hi-jinks, the US GI is pretty raw.)

The timing of the Kosovo expedition is rather suspicious -- why did Clinton and Albright embark on this immediately after China's theft of nuclear secrets came out, and just before Chinese strongman Zhu Rongji was due in the US? As my friend Varsha Bhosle says, the Chinese are always in the midst of mischief. Does the term "diversionary tactic" ring a bell? Remember the "Monica War" on Iraq? Remember the film "Wag the Dog"? Is there some 'understanding' with China that Clinton would rather keep under wraps?

Whatever the truth behind this sordid misadventure, Albright comes out of it looking like the insane jingoist General Jack D. Ripper -- with his "precious bodily fluids" problem -- in Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove. Albright is giving women in politics a bad name. I have a theory -- to survive in the male world of politics, a woman has to be so aggressive, more of a Real Man than most men, that they end up becoming very strange people indeed.

Rajeev Srinivasan