Sir, - The war of aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is undeclared, illegal, immoral and counter-productive. NATO knows as much, which is why its spokesmen very skilfully resort to a manipulative use of language which serves to conceal the true nature of its operations.
The first principle of NATO propaganda is to deny that air strikes carried out with the help of weapons of mass destruction amount to war at all (Jamie Shea: "We are not waging a war"). The second principle is to falsify the nature of that war by declaring one's own imperialist aggression a "humanitarian war" - a contradiction in terms. The third principle is to define the enemy in such narrow terms that the massive use of deadly force becomes palatable. NATO is not attacking Yugoslavia as a whole but Serbia, and not even Serbia as a country but merely its President (Glenys Kinnock: "We must bomb Milosevic into oblivion").
This manipulation of language continues with every briefing we are witnessing on our screens. NATO did not bomb a vacuum cleaner factory but a weapons plant; not a train but merely the bridge underneath it; not a number of tractors but a single military vehicle; not a trek of ethnic Albanian refugees but a Serb military convoy with a human shield; not the President's private residence but a command and communications centre. Nor did NATO ever destroy a television station because Serb TV is, of course, "not a media but an instrument of war" (Jamie Shea).
These distortions and contortions remind me of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel This Side of Paradise where the protagonist remarks on the "quarter-educated, stale-minded men" of world War One who are in their "usual ghastly muddle. One minute it's "the brutality and inhumanity of these Prussians - the next it's `we ought to exterminate the whole German people' " NATO is in the same ghastly muddle. How many Serbian dead does it require to prevent Albanian dead? Have we forgotten that inside Serbia there are more than 600,000 refugees who were driven out of or, if you will, "ethnically cleansed" from Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and yes, Kosovo? Not only did NATO fail to bomb the countries that expelled them but it is now dropping bombs on the very homes of those refugees.
An unambiguous long-term political strategy, confused short-term war aims, mounting war crimes and devious language are the hallmark of Western expansionism in Easter Europe (in Clinton's parlance "an undivided democratic Europe"). The appalling repression of ethnic Albanians in the Serb province of Kosovo is merely a pretext. - Yours, etc., Hans-Christian Oeser,
Ballinclea Heights, Killiney, Co Dublin.