the potential results of the Genocide that might have been (cause i've seen them before), the fact that it was stopped and the undeniable truth that people's lives were saved, albeit, not every single last one of them.
Some only see the bombing and believe that there should have been a better way, although we don't know what that way would have been, as we can only guess, because we also don't have an outcome to discuss that actually occurred.
In the end, I am a realist who looks at the end results of that intervention understanding that not intervening would have been worse, and I am glad that it turned out as it did....understanding that perfect is usually not possible in the case of forced intervention and war.
It is true that some on the left are Idealists who looks at the end results feeling that it could have been done better doing something else, something that one cannot be certain as to the results because it never happened, but still feel compeled to criticize known results.
Wes Clark is a great man, and is a great General, not a perfect man nor a perfect General. that's my opinion based on my research.
Some may have forgotten about the 200,000 dead Bosnians prior to Kosovo, as well as the 800,000 dead Rwandans.....something Clark never did forget...and therefor felt that the Kosovo mission was urgent.
Clark says it better here:
"If we have learned but one thing in the tragic breakup of the old Yugoslavia, it is the need to act early and robustly in a crisis. The United States, as the leading power in NATO, should know this best of all. In 1991 America stood by as the United Nations and many European nations tried unsuccessfully to cope with devastating war in the Balkans. Some 200,000 casualties and 2 million people made homeless, capped with the gruesome massacre of more than 5,000 Muslims at Srebrenica, finally pushed the United States and NATO into action. In 1995, when the United States pledged to commit American troops to enforce peace alongside European allies, we brought the hostilities to an end.Wesley Clark OPEdIn 1999, as ethnic cleansing grew in Kosovo, NATO backed up unsuccessful diplomacy with Operation Allied Force, which reversed the Serb violence and ultimately led to Slobodan Milosevic's being removed from power and delivered to The Hague in June for prosecution. --
http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=2164&l=1
In the end, approximately 500 Civilian casualty were resulted by the bombing according to prominent Human Rights groups,..and it is estimated by most that although Casualties is never something one would want, it was a relatively small number when compared with the numbers of deaths that would have resulted if there had been no intervention.
http://www.un.org/icty/pressreal/nato061300.htm#IVA5
http://wesleyclark.h1.ru/lessons.htm#Clark%20Recalls%20'Lessons'%20of%20Kosovo
Genocide By Mass Starvation
Los Angeles Times
April 25, 1999, Sunday, Home Edition
http://www.refugees.org/news/op_eds/042599.htm
President Slobodan Milosevic's ability to stop and start massive refugee flows out of Kosovo is a chilling sign of his power and intent. From the Nazis to the Khmer Rouge, closed borders have been a serious sign that genocide is occurring. Genocide does not require gas chambers or even mass graves. A favored tactic is calculated mass starvation. That is what is happening in Kosovo.
Serb forces used food as a weapon during the war in Bosnia. They rarely engaged in battle, preferring to surround and besiege an area, subject it to shelling and cut it off from food.
Long before the bombing began, Milosevic began a systematic campaign to deplete Kosovo of its food resources. Beginning last summer, Serb forces:
restricted importation of basic items into Kosovo, including wheat, rice, cooking oil, sugar, salt, meat, milk, livestock, heating fuel and gasoline;
looted warehouses and burned fields, haystacks, winter food stocks and firewood.
killed livestock and often dropped their carcasses into wells to contaminate the water;
shot at ethnic Albanian farmers trying to harvest or plant;
Harassed, persecuted and sometimes killed local humanitarian aid workers;
created nearly 300,000 internally displaced people, most of whom stayed with private families, eating what private stores of food they had managed to save.
In the best of times, Kosovo is not a self-sufficient food producer. By early this year, with planting and harvesting brought to a halt and with food stocks consumed or destroyed, there were no food reserves outside Serbian government shops. Most of the population was dependent on humanitarian aid delivered through a network of U.N. agencies and local and international nongovernmental organizations. That network is gone. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Food Program are out of Kosovo. International nongovernmental groups have been expelled and are now working with refugees outside Kosovo. Local nongovernment groups have been decimated, their staff members lucky to become refugees themselves.
Before NATO's military objectives can be achieved, Milosevic will already have accomplished his objective: Grinding down Kosovo's 1.8 million ethnic Albanians. One rule of war is this: Men with guns do not starve; civilians do. NATO is not going to beat the Yugoslav military by starving them out, and if it did, the civilians would perish long before them.
As hunger and disease loom, various interim steps have been suggested: internal safe havens, food air drops, humanitarian corridors. Each is flawed, largely because each requires cooperation from Milosevic that in all likelihood will never come to be. Milosevic could achieve his aims simply by dragging his feet.
Everyone is concerned about the lives of NATO servicemen, but the people on the executioner's block cannot wait for a risk-free, soldier-friendly environment for their rescue. They can't wait for the amassing of 200,000 troops, if that will take months of buildup and field support. They can't wait for a "permissive environment."
Mass Graves, Mass Denial (PDF)
http://www.bard.edu/bgia/journal/vol2/63-66.pdf
http://www.religioustolerance.org/war_koso.htm
Did the Serbs commit genocide?
Civilian populations are increasingly being targeted during recent civil wars. However, atrocities must match certain specific criteria before they are considered genocide. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as "certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such. The proscribed acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, forcibly transferring its children to another group, or deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part."
Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia during the mid 1990s started as mass expulsions of civilians. It escalated to include internment in concentration camps, mass executions, rapes, etc. There was a clear policy by the Serbs "to exterminate Muslim Bosnians as a group..." Their actions were generally considered to be genocide. There is a general consensus that widespread atrocities were also committed by the Muslims and the Croats (largely Roman Catholic). But the level of their war crimes did not reach genocidal proportions.
There have been allegations that the Serbs were engaged in genocide in Kosovo before and during the NATO bombing. Media correspondents and human rights investigators conducted large-scale interviews of Kosovar refugees. The data collected show that the Geneva Conventions concerning civilians had been ignored and that extremely serious war crimes were perpetrated by the Yugoslavian army, police and militias. There appeared to be a consensus of human rights investigators that the quantity and type of documented atrocities proved that genocide was committed by the Yugoslavian government against the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. This belief was confirmed as the NATO forces occupied Kosovo. Mass graves were located and are being systematically examined by forensic specialists. Ethnic Albainians came out of hiding with horrendous stories to tell. In excess of 11,000 murders were reported to authorities. According to a report by the U.N.'s chief prosecutor in Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, on 1999-NOV-10, 2,108 complete corpses and an unknown but large number of incompete corpses were found. By 1999-NOV, a total of 195 grave sites in Kosovo had been analyzed; another four hundred remained to be investigated.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2147781.stm
Mass grave found near Srebrenica
Tuesday, 23 July, 2002, 22:35 GMT 23:35 UK
Forensic experts in Bosnia have discovered a mass grave in the north-east of the country, close to the site of the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. It is thought the grave contains the bodies of Bosnian Muslims killed by Bosnian Serb forces after they captured Srebrenica.
Skeletons 'incomplete'
The grave site was discovered on Monday near the Serb-held village of Kamenica, some 70 kilometres (45 miles) north-east of Sarajevo.
The commission said it had "reliable proof" that the remains were transported to the grave from another location, in order to conceal the remains from war crime investigators.
He said some of the skeletons were incomplete, and that others were found with their hands bound by wire.
More than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed after the fall of Srebrenica, in the worst massacre Europe has seen since World War II.
So far 6,000 bodies have been exhumed from numerous mass graves around the town, but only 300 have been identified.
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his army chief Ratko Mladic have been implicated in the Srebrenica massacres.
New mass grave found in Kosovo as Milosevic trial nears
Posted: 02/11/2002 11:10 amLast Updated: 2002-02-11 11:58:09-05
Kroni I Mbretit, Yugoslavia - Kosovo villagers have discovered a new mass grave, just two days before former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic goes on trial for engineering genocide in their province.
The remains were uncovered in western Kosovo on Sunday. The remains of up to 20 bodies were found in a shallow grave by children playing in the area.
Several villagers living near the grave will offer testimony in the upcoming trial of Milosevic, which starts tomorrow in the Hague, but their testimony will focus on other events, and not the grave uncovered Sunday.http://www.wndu.com/news/022002/news_12301.php
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/09/09/serb.grave/
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Serbian forensic experts have discovered another mass grave near a lake in southwestern Serbia.
The grave is believed to contain bodies of ethnic Albanians killed during the 1999 war in Kosovo
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/06/11/bosnia.pit/index.html
Bosnia mass grave found
June 11, 2001 Posted: 3:58 AM EDT (0758 GMT)
MOUNT MALUSA, Bosnia -- A mass grave containing bodies of victims of the notorious Foca prison camp has been discovered in Bosnia, Reuters has reported.
Bosnian Muslim officials found the grave hidden deep in a dense forest after receiving a letter signed by "a Serb from Foca," the agency said.
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Waiting for the General
By Elizabeth Drew
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16795
Clark displeased the defense secretary, Bill Cohen, and General Hugh Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by arguing strenuously that—contrary to Clinton's decision— the option of using ground troops in Kosovo should remain open. But the problem seems to have gone further back. Some top military leaders objected to the idea of the US military fighting a war for humanitarian reasons. Clark had also favored military action against the genocide in Rwanda.
http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001104.html
Clark was almost alone in pushing for a humanitarian intervention in Rwanda.
Pulitzer award winning Samantha Power for her book "A Problem from Hell" : America and the Age of Genocide
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060541644/qid=1114936910/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-7692952-2877630?v=glance&s=books
endorsed Wes Clark http://www.kiddingonthesquare.com/2003/12/redeeming_wes...
The following excerpts from Power's book give the details. The narrative surrounding the quotes was written by another person commenting on the book. Note especially Power's last comment below on Clark's pariah status in Washington:
General Clark is one of the heroes of Samantha Power's book. She introduces him on the second page of her chapter on Rwanda and describes his distress on learning about the genocide there and not being able to contact anyone in the Pentagon who really knew anything about it and/or about the Hutu and Tutsi.
She writes, "He frantically telephoned around the Pentagon for insight into the ethnic dimension of events in Rwanda. Unfortunately, Rwanda had never been of more than marginal concern to Washington's most influential planners" (p. 330) .
He advocated multinational action of some kind to stop the genocide. "Lieutenant General Wesley Clark looked to the White House for leadership. 'The Pentagon is always going to be the last to want to intervene,' he says. 'It is up to the civilians to tell us they want to do something and we'll figure out how to do it.' But with no powerful personalities or high-ranking officials arguing forcefully for meaningful action, midlevel Pentagon officials held sway, vetoing or stalling on hesitant proposals put forward by midlevel State Department and NSC officials" (p. 373).
According to Power, General Clark was already passionate about humanitarian concerns, especially genocide, before his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe.
She details his efforts in behalf of the Dayton Peace Accords and his brilliant command of NATO forces in Kosovo. Her chapter on Kosovo ends, "The man who probably contributed more than any other individual to Milosvevic's battlefield defeat was General Wesley Clark. The NATO bombing campaign succeeded in removing brutal Serb police units from Kosovo, in ensuring the return on 1.3 million Kosovo Albanians, and in securing for Albanians the right of self-governance."
"Yet in Washington Clark was a pariah. In July 1999 he was curtly informed that he would be replaced as supreme allied commander for Europe. This forced his retirement and ended thirty-four years of distinguished service. Favoring humanitarian intervention had never been a great career move."
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people2/Power/images/Problem.jpg
Samantha Power's comments on Wesley Clark at the December 17, 2003, press conference in Concord, New Hampshire after the General's testimony at the Hague .
"Good afternoon. It's a real honor for me to be here with General Clark, and with Edita Tahiri. My name is Samantha Power. I spent about seven years looking into American responses to genocide in the twentieth century, and discovered something that may not surprise you but that did surprise me, which was that until 1999 the United States had actually never intervened to prevent genocide in our nation's history. Successive American presidents had done an absolutely terrific job pledging never again, and remembering the holocaust, but ultimately when genocide confronted them, they weighed the costs and the benefits of intervention, and they decided that the risks of getting involved were actually far greater than the other non-costs from the standpoint of the American public, of staying uninvolved or being bystanders. That changed in the mid-1990s, and it changed in large measure because General Clark rose through the ranks of the American military.The mark of leadership is not to standup when everybody is standing, but rather to actually stand up when no one else is standing. And it was Pentagon reluctance to intervene in Rwanda, and in Bosnia, that actually made it much, much easier for political leaders to turn away. When the estimates started coming out of the Pentagon that were much more constructive, and proactive, and creative, one of the many deterrents to intervention melted away. And so I think, again, in discussing briefly the General's testimony, it's important to remember why he was able to testify at the Hague, and he testified because he decided to own something that was politically very, very unfashionable at the time."
http://www.kiddingonthesquare.com/2004/01/index.html
"There were a lot of Democrats who wouldn't accept Clark as a "true Democrat." One of the worst things you can do to a Democrat is to call him or her a Republican, and this is something that Clark's opponents (and their supporters) often did. I don't think there is anything Clark could have done to prove his Democratic credentials to the people who shouted "But he voted for Nixon and Reagan! He spoke at a Republican Party dinner!" Perhaps many of these people find it difficult to understand why a career military man would have voted for Presidents who were strong on national defense issues during the Cold War...nor did they want to accept that Clark also attended the Democratic Party's dinner a few weeks after the Republican's, campaigned for Dems in '02 Congressional races, and voted Dem since 1992. The above does not matter to them, and those facts were not really instrumental in convincing me that Clark was a "true Democrat." If there was one thing that convinced me that Clark was a champion of Democratic values, it was his vocal support for humanitarian intervention to stop genocide in Rwanda and the Balkans. The fact remains that several Democratic leaders - the current standard bearers of our party - shirked from their duty of defending human rights and honoring multilateral agreements because it was not politically popular at the time. Clark, on the other hand, advocated intervention to stop the genocide in Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. Well, those credentials are Democratic enough for me."
http://www.lindsayfincher.com/2004/02/
So you see, trying to instill Peace is never perfect, and war is certainly never bloodless.
