Genocide: this time we are to blame.

Writing at the end of April, 1999, after more than a month of aerial attacks, it is clear that NATO is in the process of bombing Serbia back into the proverbial Stone Age. Canada and the other western nations, under the leadership of US President Bill Clinton, are now in effect committing genocide against the Serbs while furiously denouncing the crimes of others. We must stop the bombing immediately.

The crimes of the Communist rulers of Serbia are indeed horrific: "ethnic cleansing" with an admixture of genocide, if we are to believe the news reports. By May 4,700,000 Yugoslav-Kosovo citizens, mostly Muslim, had been driven into neighbouring states. Their menfolk, tens of thousands of them, the reports say, have been murdered so as to cut off all chance of returning. Only old men, women, and children are allowed to escape. (Yet a British doctor reporting on refugees in Macedonia says a scrutiny of the large camps revealed "very large numbers of young men" National Post, May 5.)

None of this is new except for the sheer scale of the savagery. "Cleansing with genocide" has been practised by the Serbian army and secret police since 1991 when first Slovenia, then Croatia, broke away from Marshall Tito's Yugoslavia after his death, and after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet tyranny in 1989. But because Croatians were supposed to be the bad guys of World War II--they had been ruled by the short-lived fascist Ustashi regime--and the Serbs the good guys because they fought the Nazi occupiers, the West took little notice of Serb atrocities against Croatians in 1992 and 1993, occupying and "cleansing" Croatian land and systematically destroying their cities and their Catholic churches.

Only when Milosevic's shift from Marxism to the "greater Serbia" philosophy brought ethnic cleansing and mass executions to Muslims in Bosnia and Hercegovina in the mid-nineties was there an outcry. But while the army, controlled and officered by Serb career Communists, hardened itself year by year for ever greater atrocities, Milosevic, while being denounced as a war criminal, was treated as a responsible statesman by the allies ready for negotiations. Then when all relations broke down, Clinton decided on an air war only, in order to defeat Milosevic without human casualties on NATO's part.

Total war

As most students of history know, the modem concept of "total war"--which deliberately blots Out the distinction between soldier and civilian--was born with Germany's submarine warfare against Great Britain in the First World War. It failed, but it has found plenty of imitations since. The distinction between military and collateral damage in the Serbian bombardment is ludicrous because it is illusionary. First there were only "military" targets, it was claimed, ammunition dumps, airfields, and barracks. Next came roads, bridges, railroads, car plants, oil refineries. Then TV and radio communications, hydroelectric plants, and industries. Today, the entire infrastructure of the Serbian economy, already a financial basket case before the air war ever started, is being destroyed. There is now mass unemployment, environmental pollution on a grand scale, and such physical destruction that it will take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild the country, if rebuilding will take place at all. What do es one expect after flying 600 to 700 sorties and bomb missions every day!

It is in Milosevic's interest to keep the tally of civilian casualties as low as possibly so as not to disturb the populace. But, clearly, thousands of civilians have died and many more are wounded. This is nothing to what is to come: famine and mass starvation. When oil, natural gas, and electricity are cut, everything from cooking and baking bread to planting the farmer's field becomes impossible.

Already the Serb army in Kosovo cannot withdraw even if it wanted to do that. The destruction all around it makes retreat well-nigh impossible. And what of those they have rounded up and held back from leaving? They will die even more quickly than the Serbs themselves.

We are facing the destruction of a thousand-year-old Christian civilization and a nation of eleven million people. Needless to say, Western leaders refuse to listen to God and His Church. After prevaricating for eight years, the only "solution" they recognize is blowing the country to bits, waiting for total surrender, a policy which leads to the genocide of two nations at once. Serbs and Kosovars will both perish.

Canada has followed the United States mindlessly. We are ruled by an autocratic Prime Minister who, building on the example of his predecessors Mulroney and Trudeau, has centred all power in his own person. Consulting no one but his advisors in his Prime Minister's Office, he dismisses other views out of hand. He should be overthrown by his own party.

For the first time in this century of violence, Canada has joined an indefensible war. We are participants in genocide. Shame on us all.