What Don’t We Know About The War In Kosovo?

Elena Topoleva, Russia

      And again we are talking about the war... It seems quite recently everything went dark before our eyes when we heard the word "Chechnya". Do you remember: tanks in the streets of Grozny, innocent people are killed by bombs, mothers in despair are rushing along the war roads in search of their lost sons, drunken generals are giving commands to attack.

      At that time we all were against it, we cursed the crazy leaders who had made this massacre possible, we clenched our fists, sitting... in front of our TV-sets. And only very few - the soldiers’ mothers, a handful of dissidents - went out into the streets to say "No!" openly and loudly. It wasn’t once that I had to blush answering my European and American friends’ questions. However, all questions might be reduced to one: "Why do Russians sit out in their kitchens? Why don’t they protest against the war openly?" "Half Paris would have come out into the streets if they had seen on TV how terribly and absurdly 18 year old boys were perishing"- a French woman used to say. She was followed by an American woman, a participant in the Moscow anti-war action "Women in Black" : "There would have been not a hundred women who would have come out to demonstrate their protest but thousands." I was ashamed. For myself and for my passive compatriots who always kept aside.
      Now bombs are exploding again, but this time it is not happening here in Russia but in the unfortunate Yugoslavia. Very near. And it wounds us much stronger than the recent bombings of Iraq. The wave of rage against the aggressor is rising inside us. Just look at the name thought up by the valiant NATO people: "Allied Force"! ( translated into Russian as "Decisive Force" -translator’s comment). They must have been thinking it over for a long time, or some one might think that the force was not really so decisive and it actually might not realize what it would lead to if it were used. Various "foxes" and "storms" demonstrated the play of mind and here... it is so straightforward, without any evasions: yes, we are a force and we decide who will live and who will die.
      There started bombings, horrifying in their methodical and temporal exactitude (it had been clear all along that "technical errors" could not be avoided). Since the first hours of the war we were reported about the casualties amongst the local population, about civilian objects being destroyed. A maternity home was hit by a bomb. "Well, tomorrow or the day after all the European capitals - the NATO members - will be filled with crowds of indignant protesters,- I was naive enough to think. In a day or two Americans will remember Vietnam and pour down the streams of indignation on Clinton and Albright". Nothing of the kind happened and is unlikely to happen. Victory in the war is demanded not by the NATO leaders but by rank-and-file citizens of the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany...
      What is going on? Before the results of the poll in those and other counties supportive of the military operation became known, I had nearly no doubts left, neither had many of my compatriots: the NATO which had tried to appear in sheep’s clothing proved to be a beast with bared teeth. A long forgotten image of "a nasty aggressor" came out bright and alive again. The lines of Igor Irtenyev came to mind:
Disgusting, scary, hairy,
Embodying universal evil,
The NATO spread to the east
And to our borders it has crept...

      There was a terrible disappointment. Those who gave us lessons of democracy and taught us to respect human rights and value the life of man above all values proved to be the same "mad sultans" as our "democratic leaders" who unleashed the war in Chechnya. And even worse, because they ordered to bomb the territory of another country.
      And still something was wrong, something did not fit in. O’key, as for the NATO, it was clear - it was an enemy... But my friends from America, France, England, Belgium , who have grown in number so much for the last few years, they surely were not enemies. They were not wolves, they didn’t bare their teeth, on the contrary, they always showed sincere support and friendly feelings. They did not only theoretically professe democratic values but actually followed them in their everyday life. And they are not protesting against the bombings, do not arrange any actions or meetings .Why?
      Yes, we think it fair to blame the NATO for assuming the right to decide the fate of the world, including even the countries which do not belong to the Alliance. At the same time the leaders of the Alliance are not interested in the opinion of neither UN, nor the people of the NATO countries, nor the country fallen under aggression. But aren’t we ourselves judging them in the same way without going into details of what’s going on in Kosovo and why the NATO is supported by millions of people in America and Europe? It’s hard to believe that all these people are villains or idiots.
      Today we are living in the open space of information with dozens of various mass media at hand. These sources may be dependent on their masters but they are independent of each other and thus, as I recently thought, are constructing the objective picture of the world by the diversity of their approaches. In my efforts to straighten out the situation I paid close attention to news reports on Russian TV and in the papers and at the same time kept asking my foreign friends about their point of view. The channels of Russian TV were full of pictures of disastrous destruction and thousands of refugees. What and who do these people escape from? At first nothing was told about it at all, and it seemed obvious: of course, they are fleeing from the bombings. And suddenly, the first shocking discovery. About a week after the beginning of bombing it was first told of ethnical purges in Kosovo Later this subject was discussed more or less regularly in the mass media, but somehow all the remarks were casual and tangential. What is the usual beginning of front-page articles and TV reports dedicated to the conflict? The account of deaths and destruction caused by the NATO bombings. Villages burnt by Serb soldiers, massive decimation of Kosovo Albanians, excruciations and tortures, and at last, soldiers raping women on the fresh ruins of their burnt houses– all this I know from my American and French friends and not at all from Russian mass media. What do they see on TV, read in the newspapers? The information is different altogether. It seems that western mass media are speaking of some other country and other conflict. Every day they are shown brutalities enacted by the Serb Army and told of the new fascist threat. "If we do not stop Milosevic today, it may be too late tomorrow"- Americans and Europeans are infixed with these ideas day and night. "Tomorrow the new Hitler can begin his European campaign and we all will be to blame for not stopping him, like we didn’t stop the Fuhrer in 1939."
      Again that age-old question: who is right and who is wrong? I have no doubts left that Milosevic and his vassals are a malady and are killing, raping, beating, and robbing innocent people in Kosovo. But has the merciless NATO operation brought any positive results? Are there less people dying? No, the victims of Serb terror are now matched by the victims of air strikes. Has the flow of refugees decreased? No, it has increased many times. One could go on with those "positive" results. And nevertheless, the opinion polls in Europe and America still show that people demand to go all out to win. Is it massive madness, hypnosis or is it again that we don’t possess some knowledge they have?