I kjølvannet av debatten om hvor store dødstallene egentlig var i Kosovo,
har en annen viktig debatt dukket opp internasjonalt: Var NATOs krig
rettferdig, hvis dødstallene nå viser seg å være mye lavere enn først antatt?
Denne debatten ble i går oppsummert i Toronto Star av Thomas Walkom (jeg
kommenterer til slutt):
http://www.thestar.com/back_issues/ED19991116/opinion/991116NEW02_OP-WALKOM1
6.html
----------
Body-count debate on Kosovo
FIVE MONTHS after the end of
NATO's 78-day war against
Yugoslavia, an intriguing debate has
surfaced. Call it the body-count
debate.
Or, to be more precise: How many
deaths does it take to justify bombing
another country?
On one side are those who argue that
the number of bodies dug up so far in
Kosovo by war crimes investigators does not support NATO's
charge of genocide levelled against Yugoslavia.
On the other are those who say that numbers don't matter, that
an atrocity is an atrocity. According to this camp, those who
would distinguish among horrors on the basis of statistics are,
themselves, engaging in an abomination.
Luckily for readers of this newspaper, this interesting debate
has been taking place right in the pages of The Star.
Columnist Richard Gwyn kicked it off on Nov. 3 with a piece
questioning the rationale behind NATO's bombing. During the
war, Gwyn pointed out, NATO officials used extravagant
language to justify their actions. The Yugoslav government,
they said then, was engaging in genocide; Kosovar Albanians
were being slaughtered by the thousands. U.S. Defence
Secretary William Cohen said the number of murdered
Kosovars could reach 100,000.
Months later, there is no evidence of genocide. When one
suspected mass grave was opened, it was empty. True, ethnic
Albanians were murdered. But the number did not approach
100,000.
Gwyn concluded that the scale of atrocities perpetrated by
Serbs in Kosovo was not enough to justify NATO's bombing
campaign - a campaign which itself killed between 500 and 1,000
civilians.
Nine days later, Star columnist and editorial writer Gordon
Barthos joined the debate. In a powerful and angry piece, he
disputed the logic of those who would use the lack of mass
graves to denigrate NATO's war. Dead is dead, Barthos wrote.
A 2-year-old Kosovar named Afrim Imeraj was brutally
slaughtered by Serbs, as were five other ethnic Albanian
children. War crimes investigators have already found 2,108
bodies in Kosovo. Surely the fact that most were not interred in
massive gravesites is immaterial.
On Monday, Barthos was bolstered by Rosie DiManno,
another Star columnist. Attacking ``the Serb apologists - along
with a quite vocal group of media dissenters '' DiManno argued
that to even try to quantify the horror in Kosovo was obscene.
``The numbers game is an alarming argument,'' she wrote,
``since it operates on the premise that there are degrees of
calamity to justify humanitarian - or for that matter, strategic -
intervention.''
It's hard not to be sympathetic to the Barthos-DiManno view.
How can you quantify tragedy? Even if no one else had died in
Kosovo, would the murder of 2-year-old Afrim Imeraj be any
less vile? Isn't one death one too many?
Alas, it probably isn't. For while we may find the quantification
of horror repugnant, we engage in it constantly. If 25 are killed
in a bus crash near Ankara, a one-paragraph account might
make the newspapers here. But when was the last time you saw
a headline reading ``Bus plunge kills one in Turkey''?
So it is with barbarity. On June 21, according to the organization
Human Rights Watch, a 77-year-old Serbian Kosovar named
Marica Stamenkovic was murdered in her home, allegedly by
members of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Since the war ended,
more than 200 - mainly elderly Serbs and Roma - have been
murdered in Kosovo.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says
these killings are part of a ``disturbing pattern,'' a deliberate
attempt to use terror to drive non-Albanians from the province.
It calculates that approximately 150,000 non-Albanians - mainly
ethnic Serbs and Roma - have fled or been forced from Kosovo
since NATO's bombing ended. This exodus has eased up
recently, the U.N. agency concluded glumly, but only because
there are so few non-Albananians left.
The Stamenkovic murder didn't make the papers here. Nor did
Western leaders threaten to bomb KLA strongholds. In the
world of real politics, one death isn't enough. Even 200 isn't
enough. Probably 2,108 isn't enough.
That's why the gruesome statistics do matter so much.
Approximately 2,000 people - Serbs, Albanians and others -
were killed in Kosovo's civil strife during the 12 months before
NATO bombed. But the Western public didn't much care. We
needed more bodies to get our juices up. We needed - we really
needed - those reports of mass graves. If the NATO campaign
was to have popular support at home it had to have thousands
and, preferably, tens of thousands of victims.
Otherwise, how could we justify killing Belgrade civilians, who
had nothing to do with Kosovo? Otherwise, how could we
justify putting our own pilots at risk?"
----------
Denne debatten foregår også i en rekke andre internasjonale medier og fora,
men Toronto Star kan her tjene som et typisk eksempel - de to standpunktene
som presenteres her ser ut til å være karakteristiske for debatten overalt.
- Den ene standpunktet går ut på at det etter de siste offentliggjorte tall
ikke er "nok" døde kosovoalbanere til at man på grunnlag av dette kan
rettferdiggjøre NATOs krig mot Jugoslavia, i og med at NATO selv bombet
ihjel 1500 sivile (i artikkelen her hevdes 500-1000).
- Den andre standpunktet går ut på at man ikke kan kvantifisere grusomheter
bare med tall: Serberne begikk uhyrlige og avskyelige overgrep, og antallet
overgrep er derfor mindre vesentlig. Typen overgrep som ble begått
rettferdiggjør alene NATOs krig.
Problemet med begge disse standpunktene er at de ser helt bort i fra at
krigen ikke ble satt igang for å forhindre 100000, 10000 eller 2000 drap.
Langt de fleste av disse drapene skjedde tross alt etter at krigen var satt
igang, og var derfor opplagt ikke motivet for å starte krigen. (De etniske
utrenskningene var heller ikke motivet, se tidligere innlegg
<http://www.itk.ntnu.no/ansatte/Andresen_Trond/kk-ffra0110990320.html> for mer
om dette). Manglende underskriving av Rambouillet-avtalen var påskuddet som
ble brukt for å starte krigen. (Når det gjelder USA og andre aktørers
egentlige motiver, se f.eks. Galtungs artikkel på
<http://www.transnational.org/forum/meet/coldwar.html>)
Ingenting tyder på at vi ville fått overgrep og drap i samme skala i vår
hvis vi ikke hadde trukket ut OSSE, og deretter startet bombingen.
Bombingen var bensin på bålet i Kosovo, og alternativene til bombing var mange.
Antallet døde i Kosovo er imidlertid interessant fordi det på så tydelig
måte avslører NATOs propagandaapparat. Under krigen ble det fra
bombetilhengere lagt stor vekt på hvor mange drepte det var i Kosovo,
nettopp for å rettferdiggjøre bombingen. Nå sies det fra de samme at
antallet er helt irrelevant, og at typen overgrep som ble begått er mye
viktigere.
Det ser dessverre ut til at NATO i det store og hele vinner
propagandakrigen: Ideen om at bombingen ville vært rettferdiggjort hvis
bare "nok" kosovoalbanere døde etterpå har slått rot, selv om disse drapene
altså skjedde etter at bombingen startet...
Øistein Holen
Se også:
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/320/oped/A_question_of_numbers+.shtml
IWPR
http://www.iwpr.net/balkans/news/bcr121199_2_eng.htm
+ siste Dag og tid.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jan 13 2000 - 15:17:40 MET