On Kosovars, Apaches, and 'Ethnic Cleansing'.

• Author: Grossman, Zoltan
• Position: Brief Article

Back in 1991, I was a witness during the Wisconsin Ojibwe spearfishing contlict, monitoring harassment and violence by anti-Indian groups. One night, after listening to too many chants of "Indians Go Home" and "White Man's Land," I decided to warm up for a minute in a car. The car radio had on graphic news reports about the war in the disintegrating Yugoslavia. It struck me that the nationalists calling for a Greater Serbia, a Greater Croatia, and a Greater Albania were using the same rhetoric as the anti-treaty protesters on that cold boat landing. Rather than blaming their own leaders for their economic problems, they were manipulated to blame the ethnic group living next door, and to clear them out of "their" territory

Eight years later, we can see the United States at war in Yugoslavia, supposedly to stop "ethnic cleansing"--the forced removal of a population. The bombing and the forced expulsions are mutually reinforcing forms of violence that simply feed off one another.

NATO claims the bombing is a "humanitarian intervention" to prevent the sort of ethnic cleansing that has escalated since the air strikes began. This selective humanitarianism downplays the same abuses being perpetrated by US allies such as Turkey, Indonesia, Colombia, and Croatia.

A 1995 offensive by the Croatian Army--with the help of U.S. air strikes and military trainers--ethnically "cleansed" hundreds of thousands of Serbs from the Krajina region, where they had lived for centuries. The Serbs in Croatia had revolted against a government that prevented their self-rule, much like the Kosovar Albanians later did against Serbia. Many of the expelled Krajina Serbs were resettled in Kosovo, exacerbating the ethnic tensions that have now erupted into war.

In neighboring Bosnia later that year, the brutal Serbian and Croatian "cleansing" of Muslim communities set the stage for the Dayton Accords. The US rubber-stamped the de facto ethnic partition of the country between Serbia and Croatia, dooming any hope for a multiethnic future that includes all three Bosnian ethnic groups. The idea that NATO opposes Balkan "ethnic cleansing" flies in the face of recent US approval of "pure" ethnic boundaries that were drawn by forced removals.

The NATO double-standard overlooks the history of harsh and methodical "ethnic cleansing" to build the land base of the United States itself. This history not only...