The New York Times - OP-ED

Saturday, May 29, 1999

Abroad at Home

Anthony Lewis

Which Side Are We On?

The indictment of Slobodan Milosevic by the International War Crimes Tribunal told us nothing new about his character or his record. He has been carrying out crimes against humanity since 1991, when his forces leveled the Croatian city of Vukovar and executed 260 men in a Vakovar hospital.

But the indictment does make a difference, a profound one. It clarifies the nature of NATO's war against Mr. Milosevic over Kosovo. And it requires those who have been critical of that war to think again about which side they are on.

Just as Mr. Milosevic is the first serving head of state to be charged with war crimes, so this is war is a first. The reason was eloquently stated by President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic last month in a speech to the Canadian Parliament, reprinted in The New York Review of Books.

"This is probably the first war that has not been waged in the name of 'national interest,'" President Havel said, "but rather in the name of principles and values...

Kosovo has no oilfield to be coveted; no member nation in the alliance [NATO] has any territorial demands on Kosovo... It is fighting out of concern for the fate of others. It is fighting because no decent person can stand by and watch the systematic state-directed murder of other people."

NATO air attacks have killed Serbian civilians. That is regrettable. But it is a price that has to be paid when a nation falls in behind a criminal leader. It happened in Germany. And it has happened again in Serbia.

How can a young man, a Serbian parliamentary, demand money from an Albanian family for a child's life - and, when they have none to give, knife the child? That, and other savageries, could take place only because an evil leader had infected his people with the notion that others are less human - are untermenschen.

Even Serbs distant from the atrocities have been affected. Reports from Belgrade say most people see themselves as victims. They are oblivious to what Serbian forces have done to other human beings over the last eight years - oblivious to Vukovar, to the rape camps and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, to the massacres in Kosovo.

In 1992 the Serbian commander in Bosnia, Ratko Mladic, told his gunners in the hills around Sarajevo, "Burn it all." And they did: hospitals, universities, mosques, homes. That should be remembered when Serbs today describe themselves as victims.

That NATO's purpose is just does not, of course, mean that it has fought the war wisely. It has not. Serious military analysts are agreed that the alliance should have forsworn the use of ground troops at the start of its campaign, and should not have begun the air war so tepidly.

Nor was the war inevitable. American diplomacy went in fits and starts before the final crisis, seeming to lose its way in dealing with Mr. Milosevic's broken promises on Kosovo. In the critical months beginning in January 1998 President Clinton was persistently distracted by a special prosecutor obsessed by sex. And Mr. Milosevic well knew that.

But we are in the war now, and for the most urgent political as well as moral reasons we must win. Even achieving NATO's declared objectives in Kosovo will not necessarily end the menace of Slobodan Milosevic. Unless he is captured, he will no doubt make more trouble in Montenegro and elsewhere. But victory, limited though it be, is essential.

The indictment of Mr. Milosevic may change the politics of the war in this country. Many Republicans have tried to use the war politically. That was the strategy of Representative Tom DeLay, the G.O.P. whip, when a motion to support the war came before the House. He urged Republicans to vote no, making it Bill Clinton's war - an astonishing position for a party that usually touts its patriotism. The motion lost on a tie vote.

The president should go to the country now, on the strength of the Milosevic indictment, to tell people what this war is about. He needs stronger public support as a moment of truth approaches.

A summit meeting of the seven leading economic powers and Russia will be held in Cologne on June 18. If the air war has not brought Mr. Milosevic to accept NATO's demands by then, the prospect of winter means that the unthinkable will have to be confronted: a ground war.