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Max Boehnel: Let's decode some of the language we are hearing around this war. Can you comment on the use of the terms humanitarian crisis, genocide, and ethnic cleaning as they are being applied to Kosovo?
Noam Chomsky: Well for starters, the concept called "humanitarian crisis" has a technical meaning, which does not have much to do with what might reasonably be assumed to be the defining criteria of the term. The technical meaning of humanitarian crisis is a problem somewhere that threatens the interest of rich and powerful people. That is the essence of what makes it a crisis. Now, any disturbance in the Balkans does threaten the interest of rich and powerful people, namely, the elites of Europe and the US. So when there are humanitarian issues in the Balkans, they become a humanitarian crisis. On the other hand, if people slaughter each other in Sierra Leone or the Congo, it's not a humanitarian crisis. As a matter of fact, Clinton just refused to provide the relatively puny sum of $100,000 for a peace making force in the Republic of the Congo which might well have averted a huge massacre. But those deaths do not constitute a humanitarian crisis. Neither do the many other deaths and tragedies to which the U.S. directly contributes: the massacres in Colombia, for example, or the slaughters and expulsions of people in southeastern Turkey, which is being carried out with crucial support from Clinton. Those aren't humanitarian crises. But Kosovo is a crisis because it is in the Balkans.
Now the term genocide, as applied to Kosovo is an insult to the victims of Hitler. In fact, it's revisionist to an extreme. If this is genocide, then there is genocide going on all over the world. And Bill Clinton is decisively implementing a lot of it. If this is genocide, then what do you call what is happening in the southeast of Turkey? The number of refugees there is huge, it's already reached about half the level of Palestinians expelled from Palestine.
If it increases further, it may reach the number of refugees in Colombia, where the number of people killed every year by the army and paramilitary groups armed and trained by the United States is approximately the same as the number of people killed in Kosovo last year.
Ethnic cleansing, on the other hand, is real. Unfortunately, it's something that goes on and has been going on for a long time. It's no big innovation. How come I'm living where I am instead of the original people who lived here. Did they happily walk away?
MB: So human rights abuses in Kosovo are termed a "humanitarian crisis" by the world's most powerful state. But how did we get from that to all out war?
NC: Well, let's look at the situation from the US point of view: There's a crisis, what do we do about it? One possibility is to work through the United Nations, which is the agency responsible under treaty obligations and international law for dealing with such matters. But the U.S. made it clear a long time ago that it has total contempt for the institutions of world order -- the U.N., the World Court, and so on. In fact, the US has been very explicit about that. This was not always the case. In the early days of the UN, the majority of countries backed the US because of its overwhelming political power. But that began to change when decolonization was extended and the organization and distribution of world power shifted. Now the US can no longer count on the majority of countries to go along with its demands. The UN is no longer a pliant and therefore no longer a relevant, institution. This proposition became very explicit during the Reagan years and even more brazen during the Clinton years. So brazen that even right-wing analysts are worried about it. There is an interesting article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, an establishment journal, warning Washington that much of the world regards the US as a "rogue superpower" and the single greatest threat to their existence. In fact, the US has placed itself totally above the rule of international law and international institutions.
NATO at least has the advantage of being pretty much under US domination. Within NATO there are differences of opinion, so when there was a question last September of sending unarmed NATO monitors into Kosovo, every NATO country (with the possible exception of Britain) wanted the operation authorized by the UN Security Council as is required by treaty obligation. But the US flatly refused. It would not allow the use of the word "authorize." It insisted that the UN has no right to authorize any US action. When the issue moved on to negotiations and the use of force, the US and Britain, typically the two warrior states, were eager to use force and abandon negotiations. In fact, continental European diplomats were telling the press that they were annoyed by the saber-rattling mentality of Washington. So NATO as a whole was driven to the use of force, in part, reluctantly. In fact the reluctance increases as you get closer to the region. So England and US are quite enthusiastic, others quite reluctant, and some in between.
MB: Why was the US so eager to use force?
NC: The reason is obvious. When involved in a confrontation, you use your strong card and try to shift the confrontation to the arena in which you are most powerful. And the strong card of the United States is the use of force. That's perhaps the only realm of international relations where the US has a near monopoly. The consequences of using force in Yugoslavia were more or less anticipated. The NATO Commanding General Wesley Clark stated that it was entirely predictable that the bombing would sharply increase the level of atrocities and expulsion. As indeed it did. The NATO leadership could not have failed to know that the bombing would destroy the quite courageous and promising democracy movement in Serbia -- as indeed it did; and cause all sorts of turmoil in surrounding countries -- as indeed it has, though still not at the same level of crisis as Turkey or other places.
Nevertheless, it was necessary, as the Clinton foreign policy team kept stressing, to preserve the credibility of NATO. Now when they talk about credibility, they are not talking about the credibility of Denmark or France. The Clinton Administration doesn't care about those countries' credibility. What they care about is the credibility of the United States. Credibility means fear: what they are concerned with is maintaining fear of the global enforcer, namely, the US. And that's much more important than the fate of hundreds of thousands of Kosovars, or whatever other consequences are incurred. So the US and NATO have helped to create a humanitarian catastrophe by knowingly escalating an already serious crisis to catastrophic proportions.
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