Editor, the New Statesman:
In his 19 June interview with the New
Statesman, Noam Chomsky, if he is quoted accurately, makes an
egregiously false statement about the 1999 Kosovo war. Chomsky, speaking of
Serbian actions in Kosovo, says that "there were terrible atrocities, but
they were after the [NATO] bombings."Information on Serbian killings and
displacements of Kosovo Albanians, before the NATO intervention, is readily
available to anyone who would look for it.
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In 1998, starting more than
a year before NATO intervened, Serbian forces engaged in widespread killings
of Albanians, destruction of villages, and
expulsions of the civilian population. (1)
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Serbian authorities killed over 1900 Albanians, burned over 40,000 houses
and flats, and looted extensively in the year before the NATO intervention. (2)
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About 460,000 people had
been expelled from their towns and villages before the beginning of NATO’s
intervention. (3)
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In its March 1999 report on the situation in
Kosovo, the International Helsinki Foundation (IHF) observed:
The IHF has for 15 months drawn attention to the pattern of large scale
attacks and reprisals of Serbian security forces and paramilitary militia.
We believe that this pattern suggests a coherent policy aimed at a future
partition of Kosovo following the decimation of its Albanian social and
political fabric — where residents have not been killed or physically
forced from their homes, they leave for fear of state terror that uses
torture, mutilation, and degradation to achieve its ends. (4)
Prof. Chomsky is an expert on
many subjects, but the Yugoslav wars are not among them, and he is poorly
served by his choice of information sources. Chomsky's ill-informed denial
of the war crimes of Serbian forces is an injustice to the victims of
Milosevic's crimes.
Roger Lippman
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