Tony Blair told the House of Commons this afternoon that Nato was "well on
course to getting the refugees back" to Kosovo.As he spoke, and without the slightest assistance from Nato, a great tide of
ethnic Albanians was surging back into Kosovo from the south, while a
swelling stream of ethnic Serbs was pouring out of it to the north.
"Thank goodness we did intervene," said the Prime Minister.
What colossal, self-satisfied, blithering nonsense. Kosovo is a blighted and
shattered place today precisely because of Nato's policies. The western
allies may not have carried out the ethnic cleansing, but they created the
ideal conditions for it, and continue to do so.
Leaders like Mr Blair have airily absolved themselves from blame for the
wicked and idiotic air strikes-only policy, by saying that the Serbian assault
on the Albanians would have happened anyway.
That flies in the face of all logic and of all the facts. The orgy of
violence began with the first air strikes, and was hardly interrupted, let
alone stopped, by the 78-day hail of bombs and missiles.
Since the Nato bombardment began on March 24 - not before, but since - three
quarters of a million people have fled from Kosovo. Another half a million
fled into the hills inside the province. While hundreds of innocent civilians
were killed by the air strikes, the Yugoslav military machine and the fascists
its protected were able to go on killing and destroying. They were motivated
by the Nato onslaught, not inhibited by it.
Now the horror stories are coming thick and fast, and our Prime Minister is
still stuck in self-congratulation mode.
Maybe he will listen to Britain's own war crimes coordinator, David Gowan,
who emerged from an initial visit to Kosovo to speak of "chilling evidence of
atrocities".
He said of the ghastly mass grave discovered by British troops at the border
village of Kacanik: "We found a lot of graves. They had been recently dug.
There was a smell of decomposition. It was a very ugly scene indeed."
The scale of the atrocities was greater than previously thought. "There's
already evidence coming in as K-For goes into Kosovo of atrocities that we
hadn't known about; bodies found in the street, mass graves which we hadn't
known about before. I cannot give you an overall figure but it is very, very
disturbing."
There is a tide of evidence from refugee and other sources that the
floodgates of fascist vileness were opened in the immediate aftermath of
Nato's demented aerial assault. Now the ground forces are expected somehow to
pick up the pieces, cheered on at a safe distance by people like Blair who
put them in their present desperate position.
They are supposed to protect the remnants of the Serbian population from the
untrained and undisciplined thugs of the Kosovo Liberation Army. They have to
cope with the tide of returning refugees. They have to sit on the powderkeg
of Russia's token but potentially explosive military presence in Pristina
airport, while the politicians and diplomats mumble their way to a compromise.
On top of all that, they have to deal with the disgusting aftermath of all
the butchery and torture that went on while Nato directed its high-tech
weaponry at the wrong targets, and turned Kosovo from a crisis to a calamity.
Today, aerospace industry salesmen at the Paris Air Show are licking their
chops in anticipation of bumper orders, as defence departments stock up their
depleted arsenals.
And we call Slobodan Milosevic a war criminal.
Related documentary
Kosovo
Down to earth
Labour's first electoral upset since 1992, in last week's Euro-polls, has got
the party flapping like wet hens. There has been heady talk of an early
return from the political wilderness for Peter Mandelson, the darling of
democracy or the prince of darkness, depending on your point of view.
Today brings more worrisome news for the apparatchiks. An Evening Standard
poll of City types, mandarins, think-tank bods, and - wait for it - media
executives, suggests that the chattering classes are having second thoughts
about Saint Tony. The percentage who thought he was doing a good job has slid
from 75 to 57 - exactly the same rating scored by Gordon Brown. Robin Cook's
personal score has gone down from 57 per cent to 13, which is very
heartening. But poor John Prescott, who deserves better, has also gone down,
to 23 per cent.
In a party which takes such fol-de-rol seriously, this is dreadful. For the
rest of us, it is hugely reassuring to think that, at last, the bubble of
omnipotence is being pricked.
Related documentary
European parliament elections
Useful link
Labour party
