Don’t Worry Mr. Milosevic, America is With You

Nothing has underlined the bizzarely random nature of America's foreign policy quite so well as the decision to launch air strikes against Serbia.

It isn't that the Serbian government haven't been guilty of the "rolling genocide", "killing of innocent people" in Kosovo and all the other things Clinton and the Congress have accused them of. Of course they have: both the media and international groups have documented it.

It's just that America has an "ally" whose commission of the same crimes on as great a scale in the last few years has also been documented by the media and international groups.

This makes it very hard to accept at face value Clinton's justification for the air strikes ("that if you don't stand up to brutality and the killing of innocent people, you invite the people who do it to do more of it").

After all, "standing up to brutality and the killing of innocent people" is exactly what Clinton did not do while Turkey launched a massive military campaign against the Kurds during Clinton's three years in office (1992-1995). At least 3,000 villages were destroyed and over two million Kurds -- as many as the entire population of Kosovo -- were forced to flee their homes and become refugees.

According to Amnesty International, after a human rights mission found that the massacre of eleven Kurdish villagers at Guclukonak in January 1996, had been carried out by the Turkish Army, the Turkish government sentenced three members of the mission to 10 months in jail for "insulting the security forces". That was three years ago, and nobody has tried to punish Turkey for it.

A group of European intellectuals including Nobel laureate Dario Fo signed a statement last month pointing out that the "repression, the destruction of villages, the torture, the murders perpetrated by the Turkish army and police, the millions of Kurds forced to flee and become fugitives have been amply documented and denounced by all of the international bodies and the European Parliament's investigatory commissions".

Yet despite all this, Turkey is considered a staunch US ally and is a major recipient of US military and economic aid. Ironically, as a NATO member, Turkey is a party to the air strikes against Yugoslavia. So the killers of Guclukonak will help try to punish the killers of Racak and Rugovo.

All of this suggests that the plight of the Kosovar Albanians has very little to do with the NATO air strikes, other than as a pretext. If Serbia were considered a "staunch US ally" like Turkey, it could kill as many Albanians as it wanted, and nobody would care.