May 1999

"We're going to ask for £5.00 for fuckin'.....you know Bosnia or whatever" (Shaun Ryder of the peerless 'Happy Mondays'. He recently decided to make the music business parasites on his band's guest list for their forthcoming tour, pay a minimum of £5.00 to Kosovon refugee charities or be refused admission.)

Kosovo. No don't switch websites. It isn't just Shaun Ryder who has difficulty comprehending the minefield of minutiae involved in this tragic conflict. The long names, the presumed difference in cultures, the funny languages spoken.

So we switch off to it. I confess I switched off right through the Bosnian crisis. I don't know a Serbo-Croat from a Serbo Crouton. Shamefully I didn't want to see that genocide was happening again in Europe. So I switched off. I switched over.

When the latest outbreak started in Kosovo, when NATO started bombing, I took the easy way out again. I proclaimed that I was ashamed, but I didn't know enough to have an opinion. A dumb get out. I turned straight to the back pages of newspapers. I preferred to read about Manchester United football games in Europe than genocide against European citizens.

But I can't switch over anymore. I saw the BBC's Newsnight programme last night. It was turn of the century genocide hour on BBC2.

Half the show was devoted to Kosovo and half to Rwanda. And half my useless ditzy mind was still elsewhere. On last weeks column about writing in cafes. Whether it was any good. Have I any ability? Should I have used a different word, bon mot, or phrase, here or there? But an image appeared on the screen that made me realize it didn't matter. That made any talk of writing in cafes (even McDonalds) seem like a privileged fooling around in the (petit) bourgeois world while Europe burns. A little disabled girl with a lovely diddumz face sits with her Mother in a refugee camp. She's about seven or eight, the same age as my own niece. The announcer informs us that her Mother has carried the child for 2 days because Serb soldiers would not allow her to take her daughter's wheelchair. You wanted to hug the girl's poor face, to hold her. Another innocent child at the end of this cruel century born a victim - a victim of genocidal aims. This has been a century constantly punctuated by heartbreaking inhumanity. Abhorrent genocide.

I had intended that each edition of this column was going to be esoteric, foppish, even Wildean (I should be so lucky!). I had never wanted it to be yet another weekly 2000 words mulling over current events. But suddenly there doesn't seem to be anything else. I feel utter impotence and pointlessness in only being able to write about Kosovo. But writing about other things would be unforgivably negligent, vain, ostrich like. (Or am I using the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians merely to bolster my ego? Trying to turn a clever (caring) phrase so I'll look good? Not to convey their turmoil.)

It's an appalling reflection on my self satisfied, introspective narcissism, that it took this child's face to jolt me into reality.

So I come to you dear www peruser not as an expert, but a newcomer to this issue. Trying to make sense out of this abysmal chaos.

Yes Kosovo's confusing. These situations always are. Its barest essentials though are hideously simple. These situations always are. A government seeking to wipe a group of its own citizens off the face of the planet.

When did we start to call this process "ethnic cleansing"? A convenient yuppie packaged byword for genocide. People speak of "the ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo without having to picture it. It's a distinctly non-onomatopoeic phrase. Cleansing evokes washing up liquid, softness, clean hands. At least genocide is a hard word. We think of gas on someone's back in Belsen when we hear the word 'genocide.'

Whilst we are fortunate enough in this country to be able to avoid the bombs and missiles we cannot avoid the propaganda shells launched at us from all angles.

We now know that idiotic lies were told about Iraqi soldiers in the Gulf war. Tabloid headlines screamed about Kuwaiti babies being snatched out of incubators. After the war four lines in the middle of broadsheets whispered that this was nonsense. To suggest however, (as a few British MPs have,) that mass atrocities are not taking place in Kosovo, that it's largely NATO propaganda, is obscene.

They sound like those trade unionists who for years accepted KGB sponsored trips of Russia & pretended to themselves they were in a workers paradise. They blamed the capitalist press for "spreading lies about the USSR " when any Pole, East German or Slovak who wasn't some automaton patsy for the KGB could have informed them of the real Pravda.

It is highly likely that Serb atrocities are being exaggerated and hyped up to the limit to try and bolster public support in NATO countries. But the central kernel of truth remains the same. Slobadan Milosevic seeks to rid Kosovo of Albanians by any means. He is a genocidal psychotic.

Several NATO lies have been uncovered. NATO should stop lying in its broadcasts because this only lessens their case. This is not 1939. We now have the internet, mass global media. and ubiquitous camera lenses. It's simply much harder to fob off truth seekers nowadays

But Kosovo is confusing. Is it possible to trust the motives of the USA who has waded through the blood of thousands of people in Central and South America? With their pitiful Statue of Liberty which should be covered in blood. Vietnamese blood. Chilean blood, El Salvadoran blood, Native American blood. The blood of Japanese Americans interned in labour camps by their own Government during WW2. Has the great United States suddenly mutated from serial killer into a kindly trumpet player in a Salvation Army band before our very eyes? Is this the first humanitarian war?

Perhaps Serbian claims that America wants to establish a protectorate in Europe are true. They may well seek a USA friendly dictator in Serbia to replace Milosevic.

I confess dear WWW peruser that I have the heart of a commie. I instinctively oppose anything that sniffs of imperialism. Kosovo in 1999 was initially no exception.

My instinct tells me that bombs and tanks cannot solve any conflict. Clive Lawton writing about Kosovo in the London Jewish News, however, points out that many Jewish people believe that the Allies could, and should, have bombed the railway lines to Auschwitz during WW2. I am one of those Jews who frequently make this point. Have we now the chance, using bombs &/or a ground force to halt the murder of Kosovon Albanians before it reaches Shoah proportions? I don't feel well equipped enough to answer that question. But I also, dear www peruser have the soul of a Jew, and therefore if the answer to this question is "yes", then I support this war. Even though many many innocent lives will be lost and Yugoslavia devastated. However suspicious of the full agenda of the USA and NATO we may be, we must support anything that prevents genocide.

People are forever spouting PC platitudes. Their against "ethnic cleansing", and they "hate racism", but get them down the pub and after a few necked they'll start whinging about the "bloody gyppos parking their caravans on the heath".

I grew up in a middle class area in Essex, part of the London suburbs. There was no such thing as PC in those days. It was perfectly acceptable, behind, and in front of, middle class closed doors, to badmouth Pakistanis. Blame them for "taking our jobs" as the daft phrase went. I had parents who only avoided the flames of Auschwitz and Belsen by being born in Africa and not Europe.

They did not allow such talk. They raged against it.

These nouveau riche, Tory voting, Essex twonks wouldn't have joined the football hooligan skins and Oxbridge Graduates who made up the 1970's National Front, but their conversation wasn't dissimilar. I remember hearing Robert Brokenshire, and Stefan Minnows talking in the playground one day.

"D'you see Top Of The Pops last night?"

"Yeah but its been taken over by Wogs"

Emboldened by the (Jew) liberalism of my household I cut in, "There's nothing wrong with that".

"Whose side you on Konisberg?" Brokenshire spat out of his bland, blonde, pale faced mouth.

My brother-in-law's best friend was recently badly beaten as he cycled home.

His crime was not having a white skin.

They screamed "Paki" as they threw Muzzer off his bike and "Black Bastard "as they kicked his head in. (I hope they all die of 6 heart attacks, each one more painful than the last). He is the gentlest man I've ever met, and its almost impossible to imagine meeting someone who doesn't like him. This is where "Paki" hating talk ends. With "Paki" bashing.

Kosovo is only the mass, (elected) manifestation of this phenomenon.

If my nieces and nephew were pieces of pop music they should most definitely be reviewed in the NME as "eclectic".

My sister is English/South African Jewish, my Brother in Law is Pakistani Muslim. Therefore their children are both Muslim and Jewish by the laws of both religions. My nephew was nearly a Jewish Muslim born on Christmas Day! With great pecuniary foresight he saved himself huge psychiatry bills later on in life by hanging on till January. They are marvellous children. I wish I could stop fearing that they will suffer cheap name calling at school when they are older. But I can't. There's so many boneheads in this country passing on their genetically modified, missing link, knuckle scraping, hapless DNA to their children that I worry terribly for them.

Walking down the street I see 15 people with mobile phones every 2 minutes. Computers run the world and yet man's most basic instinct to hack your next door neighbour and his children to death because he is a little different is still alive and flourishing.

In Rwanda in 1994 (as the other half of this cheery edition of Newsnight reminded us) hacking your victim to death was literally the most popular method of genocide. Eight hundred thousand people were killed in the space of 3 months for having the temerity to be born Tutsi not Hutu.

Will some loner with a mild flair for words be writing a column for the year 3000's equivalent of an internet site in McDonalds (the year 3000's equivalent of McDonalds will obviously be McDonalds) despairing over the latest child to have her guts ripped out by one of the new, all the rage, portable nuclear weapons? The year 3000's first choice weapon of all genocidal Governments. (Every hot-blooded right thinking American also carries one for protection. -- " I don't care how old the constitution is damn it, its my right to bear arms")

I hope not.

It is hard to believe anything can really ever change. No amount of technology, of education, of civilization can seem to wipe away genocidal tendencies.

Beneath bleak nihilism there is however some light. Millions of British people have donated tens of thousands of pounds to Kosovan refugees. Statistically my own research after 35 years of living on this sceptred Isle, tells me that many of these people are probably racists. Yet when they see those TV pictures their instincts are not xenophobic. They know these people must be helped. Many, I believe, would support the use of ground troops if they thought it would end the genocide, and bring down the bloated, pugnacious, hoary Hitler that is Slobodan Milosevic. This seems to be the inevitable way this war is progressing, and perhaps is the only solution.

Whatever transpires from the hideous events in the Balkans this widespread compassion and giving is enormously encouraging. It suggests that somewhere, deep down, the mass of people, all of us, know it's right to love your neighbour.

Now let's put our mouths and actions where this money is in our day to day lives.