Apologies for clogging up inboxes with yet another posting on the Kosovan
crisis.
It seems to me that positions on whether NATO intervention in Kosovo is
justified or not depend on whether it is believed that a genocide is
occurring in Kosovo or not. If this intuition is correct, then it would be
worth moving the debate onto this issue.
For what it's worth, I do not believe that what the Serbs having been doing
in Kosovo, nasty and vicious as it is, does constitute a genocide. Taking
my cue from Baumann's >Modernity & the Holocaust<, it seems to me more like
a pogrom. The point of a pogrom is not to exterminate, but to intimidate,
and intimidation of the local Albanian population certainly appeared to the
object of the pre-intervention Serb activities in Kosovo. Since the
intervention, Serb objectives have shifted from intimidation to expulsion,
but in neither case, do the Serbs appear to have had as their principal
objective the extermination of a population, and it seems to me that this is
the principal objective of a genocide. For instance, Baumann notes that
during the German retreat from the USSR in 1944/45, significant resources
were diverted from the Wehrmacht to the SS in order that the Nazi programme
of extermination be promoted more vigorously before imminent defeat actually
arrived. If this is the behaviour of a genocidal regime, I don't see any
evidence of this in the current Serb regime's behaviour.
To repeat, I find the Serb actions in Kosovo to be reprehensible and
unjustifiable, but, having said that, so are Indonesian actions in East
Timor, Chinese actions in Tibet, Turkish actions in Kurdistan, etc, etc. If
the Serbian action in Kosovo really were genocide, then the current
intervention, which, let me remind colleagues, is in complete contravention
of the basic principles of international law and of the United Nations, and
which is ultra vires in terms of the NATO Charter (NATO is a strictly
defensive alliance), and which is causing great strains in the stability of
regimes in neighbouring states, especially Macedonia, might be justified in
terms of a higher morality. If it is not, then it is hard to see how the
intervention can be justified, especially when consequential rather than
deontological morality is the basic currency of international relations.
To conclude, I appreciate that this is an issue that excites great passions,
I offer these thoughts in the spirit of David Crouch's posting. We need to
be sure that we are witnessing a genocide. I am not sure that we are:
others may care to convince me (& others).
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