Sir, - The coalition's spin doctors are now busy exhorting "patience" in relation to the Afghan campaign, reminding us that the Balkan air war also got off to a hesitant start - followed by "success". The aptly named OAF - Operation Allied Force, NATO's attack on Kosovo and Serbia - was allegedly a success because Milosevic's forces were withdrawn from Kosovo. Milosevic was voted out of power 15 months later and eventually when US bribery worked he was delivered to the Hague Tribunal. It seems we are not expected to remember the details of OAF's outrageous aggression, unauthorised by the UN, against a sovereign state.
Apart from the hundreds of civilian deaths, "regrettable but inevitable", said President Clinton).
Some $2billion worth of damage was done to Serbia's economy, leaving that already impoverished country the poorest in Europe. The Serbs had not attacked or threatened any NATO country - or sheltered any terrorists. Yet in their millions they suffered - and continue to suffer as a direct result of OAF. For instance, the destruction of Novi Sad's three bridges left 60,000 ordinary peaceable citizens completely cut off from their workplaces. This caused immense hardship; these were people wholly dependent on their wages. Because of disrupted Danubian traffic, Romania and Bulgaria also suffered, the former losing $915million in trade during 1999. More than 3,500 Romanian shipping workers lost their jobs.
The environmental damage was colossal and literally immeasurable, so many lethal pollutants leached into the ground-water or were carried down the Danube to the Black Sea.
Post OAF, the UN Environmental Protection Agency and the World Wide Fund for Nature despatched teams of scientists to the region and they found the "the presence in soil and water of notable quantities of mercury, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, ethylene dichloride and other highly toxic substances including dioxins". Depleted Uranium (DU), in the deadly form of ceramic aerosols, was spread over Kosovo, and for generations to come will endanger life there.
Unexploded cluster bomblets (notoriously, these have a high failure rate on impact), are still lying around waiting to blow up playing children and ploughing farmers. Geoff Hoon, the British Minister of Defence, has recently tried to mislead the public by implying that cluster bombs are less harmful to civilians than landmines. In fact they are far more dangerous. To quote Paul Rogers: "A standard British cluster bomb produces nearly 300,000 shrapnel shards over an acre and a half, shredding anything exposed to it."
Clearly OAF lacked "proportionality", one of the requirements for a war deemed to be just. No display of moral acrobatics - "accepting the new role of military alliances as defenders of rights" - could disguise the fact that OAF's violence was grossly disproportionate to its ostensible objective. Extreme suffering, mental and physical, and grievous long-term economic damage was inflicted on populations uninvolved in Milosevic's forces' brutal campaign against KLA "terrorists", as they were described by Robert Gelberd, the US envoy to Serbia, on February 23rd, 1998. That was exactly 13 months before NATO began to bomb Serbia on behalf of those same "terrorists". Some merry-go-rounds move very fast.
Operation Enduring Freedom is being equally "successful" in its showering of Afghanistan with cluster bombs and DU and its "regrettable but inevitable" killing of civilians. Focussing public attention on an individual (Saddam, Milosevic, bin Laden) is a useful ploy. If the latest "demon" can be presented as fair game for civilised governments, if people can be persuaded that by eliminating one man the world will be made a safer place, then the militarists' excesses become more acceptable. Yet everyone who stops to think, before emotionally plunging into "the fog of war", sees that bin Laden's killing would make the world a much less safe place - indeed the hunt through Afghanistan has already done this.
Like OAF, it is a US power-projection exercise devoid of rationality, justice and compassion. The defenceless Afghan majority is not responsible for September 11th, nor did they invite bin Laden to set up his headquarters in their country. The CIA organised that, back in the 1980s, and US taxpayers paid the bill for the CIA's training of bin Laden and his men and the building and equipping of his Afghan training camps.
It is time for the Irish Government to withdraw the support it should never have given to the coalition's cruel, senseless and extremely dangerous War Against Terrorism. Yours, etc.,
Dervla Murphy, Lismore, Co Waterford.