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

(...). 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 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.

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.