Sir, - The latest exercise in revisionism from the Serbian Information Bureau (August 26th) on events in the former Yugoslavia would make simply for black comedy were it not for the suspicion that it reflects a view of events shared by many in this country. The bureau has shown a shrewd appreciation of Irish political mores, particularly in the promotion of the "all sides bad, no side good" version of events.
A recent example of how this revisionism seems to have taken root here came to us courtesy of RTE's Sunday Show of August 6th. In the course of a brief reprise of the war in Bosnia we were assured by a studio's worth of journalists that: (a) the chief problem that the Serbs had during the war was bad press coverage; and (b) that the Bosnian government was "only 2 per cent less bad" than its Bosnian Serb counterpart.
This month the UN released its report on UN peacekeeping operations. It is scathingly critical of its own role over the past decade, both in Bosnia and elsewhere. The key phrase runs as follows:
"No failure did more to damage the standing and credibility of UN peacekeeping in the 1990s than its reluctance to distinguish victor from aggressor." Is there perhaps a similar kind of pathology afflicting some corner of the Irish psyche?
The SIB uses the exaggerated claims of NATO estimates of Kosovar casualties as ammunition to damn not only last year's intervention, but also retrospectively to ridicule the by now increasing substantiated murder rate of non-Serbs in Bosnia, and even the integrity of the War Crimes Tribunal. The desperate thrust of the logic is transparent: as soon as the body count for Bosnia is conceded, it is necessary to admit that in Kosovo NATO saved lives, whereas in Bosnia it wasted lives - up to 250,000 - by intervening too late! Those who, along with the SIB, trumpet NATO's propaganda and the admittedly cowardly and on occasion criminal manner in which the intervention was carried out as damning evidence against the principle of the intervention either fail to understand or choose to ignore this most elementary fact. Absent too from this agenda is any acknowledgement that the demolition of the Kosovar community was well advanced months ahead of the NATO intervention.
Last week too the ashes of Kurt Schork - the chronicler par excellence of the siege of Sarajevo and a recent casualty of the war in Sierra Leone - were interred in Sarajevo. It was a testament to that great journalist's belief in the cause of Bosnia and in the proper role of the journalist in confronting evil and defending those fundamental freedoms that were so clearly under attack in Bosnia. It is in the witness of those like Schork that our best hope lies against the apostles of revisionism, obscurantism and appeasement. - Yours, etc.,
Peter Walsh, Valerie Hughes, Kosovo Ireland Solidarity, Dublin 2.