All the terrorists of the world left unbombed

This is in response to Jeff Heidman's letter on Friday. First, I've not heard anyone call Milosevic's actions "acceptable." In Serbia many aren't fond of him, but the bombings have led to a crackdown on dissent and have helped further polarize everyone.

This whole action blatantly violates international law, as has been pointed out several times in the Wildcat. UN Security Council approval is required before one country attacks another sovereign country which has not been fighting outside its borders. France put such a request before the Security Council though NATO stated it should be, and is, capable of operating outside U.N. influence.

According to an article in The Nation which can be found at http://www.thenation.com/issue/990419/0419editors.shtml, this also violates the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which basically says a country can't use force to compel another country to sign a peace deal, which is explicitly what we are doing.

This action is scuttling what progress had been made in recent years with Eastern Europe. This has convinced Belarus and Russia to admit Serbia into a military union after this mess is over; Russia has hinted that it may become involved militarily if we escalate; Russia and China (both members of the U.N. Security Council) are fuming; Russian nationalists and other sorts we do not want in power have gained support and credibility from this. We have stated in very clear terms that if we want to attack some other country for whatever reason, we can and will totally disregard all laws to do so.

Isn't it curious that we see only the Albanian victims of this (and not even the Serb-sympathizing/anti-secessionist Albanians the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) has killed), and not the Serbs?

There are plenty of heartbreaking pictures the Serbs could cough up from KLA attacks, and many more since the NATO attacks began.

The term "genocide" has been tossed around rather loosely in the media. Before the NATO bombings, the general figure for the number of Kosovars

the Serbs had killed was 2000. Many of those 2000 were terrorists, though there were some civilian casualties. You have to keep in mind that the terrorist KLA (think the IRA but much nastier) is engaged in war with Serbia, and that there is no simple, clean way for Serbia to handle the problem (Vietnam comes to mind, where there was no simple way of knowing who was fighting and who was a harmless civilian).

If Serbia was seriously out to commit genocide, do you think there would be hundreds of thousands of refugees instead of hundreds of thousands of corpses?

Since we are bombing Serbia for having killed 2000 people in a nasty war against heavily armed guerrillas, why not bomb China (Tibet), Turkey (the Kurds), Israel (Palestine), Indonesia (East Timor), and basically all of South America (state terror against indigenous and general populations)?

Bomb Albania too - they're supporting the KLA. If Milosevic is to be included among the state terrorists of the world, he isn't that impressive compared to many of our allies, whose actions we deem "acceptable." Keep in mind that we gave Iraq aid back in the '80s after Saddam gassed 2000 Kurds.

Morgan Feather
Russian and Slavic languages junior