CONFLICT-YUGOSLAVIA: War Dealt UN a Death Blow, Says Cuban Leader

By Patricia Grogg and Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta and Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, May 26 1999 (IPS) - The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) war against Yugoslavia has dealt a “mortal blow” to the United Nations, according to the president of the Cuban parliament, Ricardo Alarcon.

“After the Balkan war, the rubble of the United Nations will be among the debris that will have to be swept up,” and what is left of the global body will have to do “the dirtiest and most laborious work – returning people to that country after the war,” Alarcon said in an interview with IPS.

Cuban ambassador to the United Nations from 1966 to 1978 and a former foreign minister, Alarcon is a member of the Political Bureau of Cuba’s ruling Communist Party, and has been president of the National Assembly (parliament) since 1993. He is considered one of the Cuban leaders closest to President Fidel Castro.

For years Alarcon has headed the conversations with senior U.S. officials on migration questions, the only issue on which the two countries have been able to strike any sort of agreement in four decades of bilateral tension.

Besides the “mortal blow” to the United Nations, the NATO airstrikes against Yugoslavia have also given the coup de grace to contemporary international law and a number of principles regarded as inviolable, he argued.

“Yugoslavia is not being punished for invading a neighbour; Yugoslavia itself has been invaded. The same forces that attacked Iraq in 1991 because it had violated the territorial integrity of Kuwait are now attacking a state that has not attacked anyone.”

In Alarcon’s view, NATO has already lost the war in Yugoslavia. “All the power of the world against a small country, and they don’t know what to do. The only strategy that seems to predominate is to continue doing the same, while accumulating errors.”

NATO’s defeat becomes evident when the anti-air batteries reappear every night, and Yugoslavia refuses to yield to the West and its state-of-the-art military technology, he maintained. Whatever happens, “some day we will talk of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ Yugoslavia.

“This is the first war in Europe since Germany’s surrender (in 1945) that has occurred without UN input and without taking heed of the limits self-imposed by the major powers during the Cold War, and which led to the creation of the UN Security Council,” he added.

“Fifty years ago NATO was set up supposedly to check the advance of communism and confront the so-called Soviet threat, and in the East the Warsaw Pact was created to defend against what was seen as the Western threat.

“The long announced war between the Soviet Union and the United States never occurred. The Warsaw Pact disappeared, just as the Soviet Union did. But NATO will not disappear even though there is no longer an East-West conflict,” Alarcon maintained.

The 62-year-old politician maintained that humanity was setting out on the 21st century in the highest-risk situation experienced since World War II, burdened by the heavy challenges of sustainable development, population growth and conservation of the environment.

An increasingly unsafe world in the midst of “what has been termed the North-South confrontation, which during one era attempted to hide behind all the rhetoric of the East-West clash.

“We live in a disjointed world, without the balance implied by the existence of the socialist bloc,” Alarcon commented. “All problems have been multiplied, and there is no one sitting down at the table to put things in order, and no way to even do so.”

In order to confront the growing risks that lie ahead, “human creativity will have to be developed” and “the world will have to sit down to dialogue, if there is to be any world in the future,” he warned.

The aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia has made it clear that “sovereignty has limits and doesn’t protect anyone from alleged violations of certain patterns of conduct or ways of thinking that are in style somewhere in the West.”

Yugoslavia’s socialist era “was the only moment in the history of that country during which Muslims, Christians, Eastern Orthodox and Catholics, Croatians, Serbs, Slovenes and Albanians coexisted, perhaps with tension, but essentially in peace,” he said.

Finding a solution to the ethnic conflict in the Balkans will be even more complicated “after this brutal war” – a war that NATO wants to conduct “without getting its hands dirty, without losses, without even acknowleding the enemy’s casualties,” while justifying civilian deaths with “the cynical definition of ‘collateral damages.’

“A problem that will last for centuries has been created. If the Serbs recall the defeat they suffered 600 years ago in today’s Kosovo, how many centuries will have to pass for these people to forget what is happening to them” now, Alarcon wondered.

“To think the world is so idiotic as to believe that all of this has been done to preserve the rights of those people would imply a very low opinion of human intelligence.”