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'War in the Balkans' symposium, 29 May 1999
Edwina Hughes, Peace Movement Aotearoa.
Kia ora, my topic today is 'bombing is not a solution'. At Peace Movement Aotearoa
we are in contact with peace groups and others around the world who are opposed to
the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Throughout Europe, in the United States, Canada,
Russia, Australia and here there has been continual protest against it.
Opposition to the bombing has been almost totally ignored by the mass media. The occasional
reports of vigils in Wellington, for example, have been dismissed as 'protest by
local Serbs' - including the gathering of around seventy women representing more
than ten countries.
Our collective opposition comes from the knowledge that violence breeds violence,
and you cannot create peace, or security, by bombing. We do not support the repressions
or atrocities perpetrated by the Milosevic government, by armed militias, or others
against any individual or group of people. We condemn all violence, bloodshed and war.
To keep within the allotted time this morning, there are many points I have not included
in my comments - for example, the topic of the NATO governments' hypocrisy is one
on which I could happily speak for hours.
The comments which follow are divided into five main sections -
* the first - there is no basis for this bombing in international law.
It is clearly in breach of a number of international agreements and treaties which
recognise the sovereignty and territorial integrity of nation states - for example,
the United Nations Charter.
It also violates those international treaties in which the parties have agreed to
refrain from the threat and use of force. Foremost among these is the North Atlantic
Treaty itself - the NATO founding document.
The governments responsible for the bombing have ignored those articles of Protocol
1 of the Geneva Conventions which relate to the protection of civilians. This total
disregard for the agreements by which international peace and security are maintained,
is an extraordinarily dangerous precedent for ignoring peaceful solutions in the future
resolution of conflict.
Some have argued that international human rights agreements, such as the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, take precedence over those relating to nation states.
They say humanitarian intervention is therefore justified. However, I am not aware
of any provision in any human rights document which defines bombing as a humanitarian intervention.
This brings me to the second section :
* bombing does not protect people, or prevent atrocities, rather it tends to increase
reprisal attacks, precipitates humanitarian catastrophe and is itself an atrocity.
One of the stated objectives of the NATO bombing is 'to protect the ethnic Albanians
in Kosovo, and prevent further atrocities'. Yet it is clear that since the bombing
started, it has instead brought terrible harm to them. Reprisal attacks by army and
militia units have increased, not diminished.
You will all have seen some of the consequences of the airstrikes on TV - the mass
exodus of people fleeing both the reprisals and the bombs. As the NATO spokesman
said in the first or second week of the bombing, there is now a humanitarian disaster
of a size not seen in Europe since the second world war.
The NATO Supreme Commander, General Wesley Clark, was himself quoted on the 6th April
as saying 'air strikes will not prevent the Serb atrocities in Kosovo, but the bombing
will go on until the oppression ends'.
We do not yet know, and possibly never will, the number of Kosovars killed or injured
directly by the bombing. NATO bombs, although they are smart bombs (so we are told)
cannot distinguish ethnic origin - they kill and maim ethnic Albanians along with
everyone else who gets in their way.
The anger and hatred fuelled by the bombing has not only worsened reprisal attacks
over the past two months, but it will continue to fester into the future and reduce
the chances for ever achieving a satisfactory level of peace and security. It also
increases the likelihood of support for further nationalistic, oppressive regimes in the
years ahead.
Another apparent objective of the NATO bombing is to get rid of Milosevic. The rhetoric
around this is a startling echo of one of the objectives of the Gulf war - to get
rid of Saddam Hussein.
Yet after eight years and despite the deaths of more than one and a half million people
in Iraq through pursuit of this objective - Saddam Hussein remains in power.
As I said before, even 'smart' bombs cannot differentiate between those individuals
they are supposed to kill and others.
This brings me to the third section :
* bombing strengthens oppressive regimes (and individuals); and silences opposition
to them.
Bombing inevitably creates an even more repressive atmosphere of terror than that
which existed before it started. This acts to ensure those in power stay there. It
effectively ends any internal opposition, especially from non-governmental organisations
such as pro-democracy, human rights, social justice and anti-militarism groups. It is
one of the many ironies of this bombing that the voices of anti-war groups in Yugoslavia
can no longer be heard because of it.
There has been almost complete mass media silence about the opposition of such groups
to the Milosevic regime - as but one example, Women in Black, who have stood in public
against all warmongering and atrocity in Former Yugoslavia, every week over these
past years. There has been no coverage of the refuseniks - those men, Serb and others,
who have refused to be part of the bloodshed over the past seven or eight years -
whose choice has been to flee, join up, or be shot. Nor has there been any coverage
of the European governments refusal to grant asylum to those who tried to flee because
they did not want to fight.
To justify these airstrikes, the NATO governments have kept quiet about their complicity
in supporting atrocity. By pretending there has been no opposition to Milosevic,
that there has been no-one calling for an end to the violence, they have managed
to demonise 'the Serbs' as a people who are deserving of whatever horrors now happen to
them.
This is, of course, a necessary step towards their ultimate propaganda success - which
is to conceal the effects of what they themselves are now doing and to obscure the
reality of war.
This leads me to the fourth section :
* Bombing kills and injures people, and causes psychological as well as physical harm.
It has catastrophic environmental consequences, which have a long term effect on
the health and wellbeing of the people in the area.
This may seem a blindingly obvious point to make - however, if you were only to rely
on what the NATO spokesmen are saying, and the mass media coverage of the bombing,
you may very well believe that no-one has been killed or maimed in these airstrikes
... except for those hurt in the thirteen 'accidents' NATO has grudgingly accepted some
responsibility for. In these cases, such as the bombing of a refugee convoy, NATO
spokesmen have said they "deeply regret the loss of life" - the mass media solemnly
report this as though death is an unlikely and unexpected consequence of bombing.
Victoria Brittain described this phenomenon in her analysis of the Gulf war in 1991.
She said :
"Perhaps there has never been a war in which the contrast between the images and the
actual events have been so acute ... the media mostly showed a war without bodies,
a war without suffering, a war that was a wonder of technology ... By the time the
United States airforce revealed that 70% of the eighty eight thousand five hundred tons
of explosives dropped ... in forty three days of war had missed their targets, it
was too late to change the image of technological success." [The Gulf Between Us : The Gulf war and beyond.]
The airstrikes against Yugoslavia have now been going on for sixty six days.
Until they stop, we won't have anything like a complete picture of what this unrelenting
bombing campaign has done. It is likely that the destruction will be on a similar
level to that done to Iraq during the Gulf war - the convener of the post-war United Nations mission there described it with these words :
" nothing that we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of
devastation which has now befallen [Iraq]. The recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic
results upon the economic infrastructure of what had been, until January 1991, a rather highly urbanised and mechanised society. Now, most means of modern life support
have been destroyed or rendered tenuous. Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated
to a pre-industrial age" ... [Ahtisaari, M. (1991),
Report to the Secretary-General on humanitarian needs in Kuwait and Iraq in the immediate post-crisis environment ]
The demolition of Yugoslavia's infrastructure amy be worse.
We know that oil refineries and stores, chemical and other manufacturing plants, and power stations amongst other things have been bombed in Yugoslavia. What we do not yet know is the extent of the toxic contamination caused by the destruction of these installations - although we assume it is extensive.
Neither do we know what the consequences of this will be to the ecology of the area, nor to the health and wellbeing of the people.
Depleted uranium ammunition has been used in Yugoslavia - for those of you who are unfamiliar with this particular type of weapon, its use in the Gulf war has been cited as one of the causes of Gulf War Syndrome - the range of debilitating diseases and immune system failures experienced by many Gulf war veterans. Furthermore, the remnants of the depleted uranium shells, and of the tanks and other targets hit by them, are thought to be responsible for the massive rise in leukaemia and birth defects in some areas in Iraq.
We come now to the fifth and final section -
* the way of thinking which promotes the perception that bombing is a solution, acts to exclude other ways of resolving conflict.
Europe has an institution set up specifically to help maintain peace and security in the region and to resolve conflict by peaceful means. That institution is the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the OSCE, established in 1975 by the Helsinki Accords.
Last year, when it had been obvious for some time that the situation in Kosovo was deteriorating, it was agreed that two thousand, unarmed OSCE monitors would be sent there. Less than half of those monitors were sent, and those that were, went in groups which were too small to be effective. An opportunity to prevent the escalation of violence was missed.
In part, this was because the OSCE (like the United Nations) does not have the resources to do its peaceful work - it has a total budget one thousand times smaller than NATO's organisational budget, yet the OSCE has 54 member states and NATO has only nineteen.
Clinton recently asked the United States Congress for eleven billion dollars to bomb the people of Yugoslavia, yet he has never asked for eleven billion dollars to enable peaceful resolution of conflict to take place. This is what happens when bombing is seen as a solution - alternatives are not properly explored, and they certainly aren't given any resources.
The NATO bombing has to be seen in this wider context.
Bombing only brings benefit to military forces and to those governments who believe their national interests must be protected by killing others. The major benefit goes to those involved in the arms industry, whose wealth comes from death and destruction.
The amount of money spent globally on weapons and armed forces is so large as to be incomprehensible. Yet the dollars are only part of the problem - there are also the human resources wasted - the human minds devoted to researching and developing better ways to kill, the millions of people physically maimed and mutilated or psychologically destroyed by war.
As well there are the physical resources wasted - the land destroyed by explosives, or permanently contaminated by chemicals and radioactivity; the massive amounts of fuel used in waging war, the metals which are used to make weapons and machines for the sole purpose of blowing them up.
While this huge haemorrhage of resources goes into killing, we live in a world where food and clean water are not readily available for the majority of the people. Where death from starvation and the diseases linked to malnutrition and poverty are pandemic.
It seems to me there is already enough suffering in the world without this way of thinking which deliberately creates more.
The solution to armed conflict is both very simple and very difficult - universal and total disarmament is the simple bit, changing the way of thinking to make that possible is the difficulty.
When the NATO bombing stops, and the people start to rebuild their shattered lives in the bombed out ruins, the arms dealers (government and private) will be straight back in there selling arms to the various groups. The tragic cycle of atrocity, reprisal, death and destruction will begin again.
The ultimate tragedy is that nothing will have been learnt from this unmitigated disaster.
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