Sir, - The catastrophe which is now taking place in Kosovo should primarily be laid at the door of Slobodan Milosevic, a genocidal dictator who has been bad news for the Balkans since the day he took power.
The question is not whether international intervention was necessary - clearly it was. Like many others I would have been in favour of a more interventionist international policy, at an earlier date, rather than what is now taking place. However, we should have considered at the time what circumstances and what manner of intervention might have been workable and might have prevented the genocide which is now taking place.
In the past decade, the UN has been marginalised and a system of collective world security has been replaced by one dominated by a country whose political maturity in international affairs is in inverse proportion to its military might, and which is itself not a disinterested party in many local conflicts. This is a calamity. Moreover, it is manifestly not providing world security. Boys with toys, secure in their remote fastnesses in another continent or miles up in the sky, are not the key to communal security on the ground. Bombing Serbia is not only wrong - it is stupid and ineffective and has greatly worsened the condition of those it was supposed to assist. The visual pornography of macho, game-console television footage and the lies of spokespersons of all sides only serve further to dehumanise our reactions to what is happening.
It is an irony that the explicit version of the Cold War which we had until 1989 represented such an extreme danger to world peace that both NATO and the Warsaw Pact recognised the utility of allowing genuinely disinterested countries like Ireland an effective role in peacekeeping. All of this was swept away by a triumphalist "West" after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet, if the pre-1989 consensus still obtained, we would probably now have a UN peacekeeping force in Kosovo, backed by the US, Russia, and the Serbian government, with a membership and a mandate which would be both effective and fair. A superpower-dominated NATO is not the future of world peace and security - it is its biggest threat.
Ireland's behaviour in all of this has been shameful. We wring our hands; we "regret" but we do not "condemn"; we have no clear position. More than most countries, we should have done more to safeguard the UN role, however imperfect. Now we are being rushed into the arms of a superpower-dominated military alliance which cannot possibly be an honest broker in world affairs and whose actions are arguably illegal. We should re-examine this policy.
In the present crisis, there is one concrete and effective way in which we can assert some kind of morally acceptable role for the country. Europe is now facing its greatest refugee crisis since the second World War. Impoverished Macedonia has already accepted tens of thousands of Albanian Kosovars and may expect to receive many more. We are a wealthy country with a past history of commitment to helping those less well off than ourselves. We should now be generous, not only in terms of our contribution to international aid organisations but also in a radical revision of our existing mean-minded and restrictive policies towards refugees and asylum seekers from Kosovo and other troubled parts of the world. - Yours, etc., Piaras Mac Einri,
Director, Irish Centre for Migration Studies, National University of Ireland, Cork.