NATO was not the cause of the problems in the Balkans, as he tries to insinuate. From time to time the international community is presented with a threat of such magnitude that appeasement rather than at least a credible threat of force represents the greater threat to international peace and security.
Madam, - On behalf of Kosova Ireland Solidarity we wish to refute in the strongest possible terms the gross distortion of recent Balkans history presented by Andy Storey of Afri.
From 1987 it was increasingly clear that Slobodan Milosevic, exploiting to the full resurgent Serbian ultra-nationalism, was such a threat. And it was the consistent and effectively predictable failure of the EU to confront this threat, as Milosevic carefully "pushed the envelope" from 1989 to 1992, climaxing with the ghastly "cleansing" of Bosnia and the ensuing three-year pogrom of non-Serbs, which eventually compelled military intervention by NATO - much too late, as it happened.
Subsequent events in Kosova and Macedonia, together with the toppling of Milosevic, constitute a yet unfinished coda to these earlier earth-shattering events - yet it is the military incompetence displayed by NATO at the time, in a strategically mismanaged but politically necessary intervention in Kosova, that seems to be for Afri, and indeed many others, the only story worth retelling.
It is a tragedy for Irish politics that many elements of what should form the core of a radical, dissenting counterbalance to the political centre has so consistently misrepresented events in the Balkans over the past decade, all in the name of some spurious anti-NATO, anti-EU anti-etc. crusade. - Yours, etc.,
VALERIE HUGHES, PETER WALSH, Kosova Ireland Solidarity, Dublin 2.