"Perhaps the West wanted to keep the world safe for arms manufacturers."

-- Toronto Sun editor Lorrie Goldstein on Nato bombing of Serbia and Kosovo

Selective moral outrage exposes our hypocrisy

By Lorrie Goldstein

NE OF the problems with selective outrage against immorality is that it is immoral in and of itself. Ever since Nato's victory in Yugoslavia, we have been witnessing one of the most sustained examples of selective moral outrage and demonization of a people ever recorded in the modern era.

Day after day after day after day the media are filled with stories of Serbian atrocities that left an estimated 10,000 innocent Kosovar Albanians dead - down from allegations during the war by Nato officials and U.S. President Bill Clinton that more than 100,000 had in fact been killed. Cabinet ministers from Nato countries visit Kosovo and declare themselves devastated. There are countless calls to bring indicted war criminal Slobodan Milosevic to justice. The media have been falling all over themselves reporting what is essentially the same atrocity story over and over as each new mass grave is found. All perspective has been lost as we declare the Serbs bad, Nato good, and the story, over.

What follows is not intended to excuse Serbian atrocities committed against innocent Muslims, nor to overlook the plight of the more than 800,000 now-returning refugees who were driven out by Milosevic's henchmen.

That said, where was our equivalent moral outrage in:

• Chechnya, where more than 30,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed and up to 140,000 refugees created after Russian President Boris Yeltsin sent troops into the Muslim republic in December 1994 to crush its bid for independence. Why no Nato calls to indict Yeltsin as a war criminal? Why no demands for Russians to rise up and remove him from office? Why no orders given to the CIA to topple him?
• East Timor, where massacres and ethnic cleansing have been a fact of life for 24 years. Since Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975, 200,000 East Timorese out of a pre-invasion population of 690,000 have died from starvation, war and disease, including up to 60,000 killed in mass executions during the first two months of the invasion.

As Rick Mercer wrote recently in The Nation, "The Serb atrocities in Kosovo ... pale in comparison to Indonesia's record of slaughter. There is a very good reason why the documented genocide in East Timor has been met with silence over the years in the same countries where leaders now are beating their chests and proclaiming the righteousness of their military adventure in the Balkans: Several of these nations have aided and abetted the Indonesian war criminals who have cultivated East Timor's killing fields."

In Canada, of course, the same Liberal government now calling for Milosevic's head, feted former Indonesian dictator Suharto at the infamous APEC summit in Vancouver in 1997.

• Sri Lanka, where a 16-year civil war between the Sri Lankan army and rebel Tamil Tigers has claimed some 57,000 lives and the West has remained all but silent.
• Tibet, where China's invasion in 1950 and subsequent brutal crackdown eventually created 130,000 refugees, including the Dalai Lama. Since that invasion, an estimated 1.2 million people - one fifth of Tibet's pre-invasion population - have died due to torture, famine, persecution and imprisonment.
• Iraq, where, in the eight years since our victory in the Gulf War, at least 250,000 Iraqi children under the age of five - 500,000 according to the United Nation's Children's Fund - have died due to malnutrition and disease caused by continuing economic sanctions imposed, ironically enough, by the UN Security Council. Oddly, no one calls this a war crime.
• Rwanda, where up to one million people were slaughtered in a 14-week civil war between early April and mid-July of 1994. Most of the killing was carried out by members of the Hutu majority bent on exterminating the Tutsi minority. Following this genocide, two million Hutus fled the country, ending up in huge refugee camps in Zaire, Tanzania and Burundi. Meanwhile, 500,000 Tutsis were internally displaced inside Rwanda and an estimated 100,000 children were separated from their families. The West essentially did nothing.
• Refugees? World-wide there are, conservatively, an estimated 13.5 million people who fit the definition of someone in genuine need of protection and/or assistance, excluding those who have been permanently resettled elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the hundreds of civilians killed by Nato bombs during the 78-day air war and an estimated 100,000 Serbian (and Gypsy) refugees fleeing Kosovo in fear of retaliation by returning ethnic Albanians, are treated as a footnote to this ongoing human disaster, barely worthy of mention.

But given our record of indifference to human suffering, often on a far greater scale than what occurred in Kosovo, the true motives behind our "humanitarian" bombing of Yugoslavia require scrutiny. Perhaps this war was inevitable given the need for Nato to re-invent itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had been its raison d'etre. Perhaps the West wanted to keep the world safe for arms manufacturers. Whatever the motives, could we at least tone down the self-righteous chest-pounding over Yugoslavia, given that the atrocities we said we wanted to stop only began in earnest after Nato began bombing in what up to then had been a civil war, where there were atrocities on both sides. As it is, our selective moral outrage is exposing our own hypocrisy.