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on our Kosovo pages: www.zmag.org/zmag/kosovo.htm
Whose Atrocity Is Bigger
(from a forthcoming article to be published by the Progressive)
By Howard Zinn
Milosovic has committed atrocities. Therefore it is okay for us to commit
atrocities. He is terrorizing the Albanians in Kosovo. Therefore we
can
terrorize the population of cities and villages in Yugoslavia.
I get e-mail messages from Yugoslav opponents of Milosovic, who
demonstrated against him in the streets of Belgrade (before the air
strikes began), who tell me their children cannot sleep at night,
terrified by the incessant bombing. They tell of the loss of light,
of
water, of the destruction of the basic sources of life for ordinary
people.
To the bloodthirsty Thomas Friedman of the NEW YORK TIMES, all
Serbs must be punished, without mercy, because they have "tacitly
sanctioned" the deeds of their leaders. That is a novel definition
of
war guilt. Can we now expect an Iraqi journalist to call for bombs
placed
in every American supermarket on the grounds that all of us have
"tacitly sanctioned" the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq caused
by our eight-year long embargo.
Official terrorism, whether used abroad or at home, by jet bombers or
by
the police, is always given an opportunity by the press to explain
itself,
as
is never done for ordinary terrorists. The thirty one prisoners and
nine
guards massacred at Governor Rockefeller's orders in the Attica uprising;
the
twenty-eight women and children of the organization MOVE, killed in
a fire
after their homes were bombed by Philadelphia police; the eighty-six
men,
women, and children of the Waco compound who died in an attack ordered
by
the Clinton Administration;, the African immigrant murdered by a gang
of
policemen in New York -- all of these events had explanations which,
howeverabsurd, are dutifully given time and space by the media.
One of these explanations is in terms of numbers, and we have heard
both
Clinton and his forked-tongue counterpart Jamie Shea pass off the bombing
of Yugoslav civilians by telling us the Serb police have killed more
Albanians
than we have killed Serbs (although as the air strikes multiply, the
numbers are getting closer). They have killed more than we have, so
it's
okay
to bomb not just Serbs but Albanian refugees, not just adults but children,
and to use the cluster bombs which have caused unprecedented amputations
in Kosovo hospitals. There were those who defended the 1945 firestorm
bombing of Dresden (100,000 dead? -- we can't be sure) by pointing
to the
Holocaust. As if one atrocity deserves another. And with no chance
at all
that one could prevent the other (just as our bombings have done nothing
to stop the mayhem in Kosovo, indeed have intensified it). I have heard
the deaths of several hundred thousand Japanese citizens in the atomic
strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki justified by the terrible acts of
the
Japanese military in that war.
I suppose if we consider the millions of casualties of all the wars
started
by national leaders these past fifty years as "tacitly" supported by
their
populations, some righteous God who made the mistake of reading Friedman
might well annihilate the human race.
The television networks, filling our screen with heartrending photos
of the
Albanian refugees -- and those stories must not be ignored -- have
not
given
us a full picture of the human suffering we have caused by our bombing.
An
e-mail came to me, a message from Professor Djordje Vidanovic, a professor
of linguistics and semantics at the University of Nis: "The little
town of
Aleksinac, 20 miles away from my home town, was hit last night will
full force. The local hospital was hit and a whole street was simply
wiped
off. What I know for certain is 6 dead civilians and more than 50 badly
hurt. There was no military target around whatsoever."
That was an "accident". As was the bombing of the Chinese Embassy. As
was
the bombing of a civilian train on a bridge over the Juzna Morava River,
as
was the bombing of Albanian refugees on a road in southern Kosovo,
as was
the destruction of a civilian bus with twenty four dead including four
children (there was a rare press description of the gruesome scene
by Paul
Watson of the LOS ANGELES TIMES).
Some stories come through despite the inordinate attention to NATO
propaganda, omnipresent on CNN and other networks (and the shameless
Jamie
Shea announced we bombed a television station in Belgrade because it
gives
out propaganda). The NEW YORK TIMES reported the demolition of four
houses
in the town of Merdare by anti-personnel bombs "killing five people,
including Bozina Tosovic, 30, and his 11-month old daughter, Bojana.
His
wife, 6 months pregnant is in the hospital.
Steven Erlanger reported, also in the NEW YORK TIMES, that NATO missiles
killed at least eleven people in a residential area of Surdulica, a
town in
southern Serbia. He described "the mounded rubble across narrow Zmaj
Jovina
Street, where Aleksandar Milic, 37, died on Tuesday. Mr. Milic's wife,
Vesna, 35, also died. So did his mother and his two children, Miljana,
15
and Vladimir, 11 -- all of them killed about noon when an errant NATO
bomb
obliterated their new house and the cellar in which they were sheltering."
Are these "accidents", as NATO and U.S. officials solemnly assure us?
One
day in 1945 I dropped canisters of napalm on a village in France. I
have no
idea how many villagers died, but I did not mean to kill them. Can
I absolve
what I did as "an accident"? Aerial bombings have as inevitable consequences
the killing of civilians, and this is foreseeable, even if the details
about
who will be the victims cannot be predicted.
The word "accident" is used to exonerate vicious actions. If I race
my car
at eighty miles an hour through a street crowded with children, and
kill
ten of them, can I call that an "accident"? The deaths and mutilations
caused by the bombing campaign in Yugoslavia are not accidents, but
the
inevitable result of a deliberate and cruel campaign against the people
of
that
country.
When I read a few weeks ago that cluster bombs are being used against
Yugoslavia, I felt a special horror. These have hundreds of shrapnel-like
metal fragments which enter the body and cannot easily be removed,
causing
unbearable pain. Serb children have picked up unexploded bombs and
been
mutilated as they exploded. I remember being in Hanoi in 1968 and visiting
hospitals where children lay in agony, victims of a similar weapon
--
cluster bombs -- their bodies full of tiny pellets.
Two sets of atrocities -- two campaigns of terrorism -- ours and theirs.
Both must be condemned. But for that, both must be acknowledged, and
if one
is given enormous attention, and the other passed over with official
explanations given respectful attention, it becomes impossible to make
a
balanced moral judgement.
There was an extraordinary report by Tim Weiner in the NEW YORK TIMES
contrasting the scene in Belgrade with that in Washington where the
NATO
summit was taking place. "In Belgrade...Gordana Ristic, 33, was preparing
to spend another night in the basement-cum-bomb shelter of hear apartment
building. 'It was a really horrible night last night. There were explosions
every few minutes after 2 A.M....I'm sorry that your leaders are not
willingto read history.'
"A reporter read to her from Clinton's speeches at the summit meeting.
She
sounded torn between anger and tears. 'This is the bottom to which
civilization, in which I believed, has gone. Clinton is playing a role,
singing a song in an opera. It kills me' As she slept, NATO's leaders
dined
on soft-shell crabs and spring lamb in the East Room of the White House.
Dessert was a little chocolate globe. Jessye Norman sang arias. And
as the
last limousine left, near midnight. Saturday morning's all-clear sounded
in
Belgrade...."
安倍
rentai@labyrinth.net or yabe@wvu.edu
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The jade burned on the mountain remains its natural color,
The lotus, blooming in the furnace, does not lose its freshness.
Ngo An (Vietnamese Zen monk, eleventh century A.D.)
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