Kosovo Crisis
August 1st, 1998
Air campaign brings death to Kosovars
AS FIRST-HAND observer to the aftermath of Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic’s
policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I agreed
with the NATO air campaign to save the Kosovars from a similar fate. The brutal
war started by the Yugoslavian Army through their vassal Bosnian Serb allies
came dangerously close to destroying an entire people. Two-hundredfifty-thousand
people are missing and presumed to be dead and 1.5 million are refugees (out
of a prewar population of only 4 million). Virtually every mosque, religious
school, library and museum that had any connection to the Ottoman period that
was or is in Serbian-held territory was destroyed. The ground in what’s left
of Bosnia and Herzegovina is sewn with more than 100,000 land mines. Thousands
of villages and hamlets sit empty as the residents have fled or are dead. The
transportation system is largely destroyed, electric production is a fraction
of pre- war levels and unemployment is 60 to 70 percent - all in a nation that
prior to the war had a higher standard of living than Portugal, Greece or Turkey
(all NATO members).
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