(To be read in continuation of earlier
papers titled "The Kosovo Tragedy: In Perspective" and "NATO's Psywar
against Yugoslavia")
The NATO's ill-advised, ill-planned, ill-executed and politically
ill-supervised air bombing of Yugoslavia seems to have acquired an uncontrolled and
uncontrollable inertia of its own.
There are no tangible results to boast about after 46 days of
relentless bombing leaving behind a trail of destruction and human suffering.
The spectre of the war having a negative impact not only on
China's relations with the US and the UK, but even on China's internal stability, is now
staring the West in the face after the disastrous bombing of the Chinese Embassy in
Belgrade by the US on
May 8.
For the first time since 1979, the anti-reform and anti-West
elements in the Chinese Communist Party and in the PLA, which had till now been
marginalised by the outward-looking Jiang Zemin-Zhu Rongji leadership, see a possibility
of their being able to turn the tide in their favour by exploiting the genuine public
anger against the NATO, and particularly the US and the UK, over the bombing of the
Chinese Embassy.
The apparent policy of the Chinese leadership is to let the
people blow out steam for the present, in the hope that once this happens, the anti-US and
anti-NATO emotions will subside. If, unfortunately, this does not happen, there could be
unpredictable consequences for peace and stability in China and even in Korea.
The rapid turn of events has taken place at a time when there
have been unconfirmed reports of rumblings in the PLA against the political leadership
because of the latter's orders to PLA business establishments to close down. Jiang's
ability to bring the protests under control quickly would depend on the co-operation he
receives from the PLA.
On the basis of reports available till the recording of this
note, the political leadership, though slightly nervous, seems to be confident of being
able to prevent the public anger from getting out of control and the PLA seems to be fully
behind the political leadership.
A real threat to the leadership could arise if the millions of
workers of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) thrown out of jobs since last year in the
interior provinces fall a prey to the rhetoric of the anti-reform and anti-West remnants
in the Party and join the protesting masses in the urban areas. It should be very easy for
these remnants to turn the anger of these unemployed workers against the West and the
political leadership by projecting the SOE reforms as carried out by the leadership under
the diktat of the US, the very same Satan which has now killed innocent, defenceless
Chinese in Belgrade.
Despite China's opening-up and the economic miracle, the
traditional anti-foreign and anti-West feelings are still very strong in Chinese society,
particularly in the interior provinces, and it required only the Belgrade
diplomatic-cum-military disaster to make these feelings come bursting out to the surface.
The developments in China, therefore, need close monitoring for
the next few days.
The Belgrade disaster was waiting to happen. When one allows
one's policies, thinking and operational plans to be influenced not by a lucid and logical
analysis of the ground situation, but by an irrational dislike of an individual (President
Slobodan Milosevic) and by an obsessive urge to teach him a lesson, one's judgement gets
distorted beyond measure.
The NATO's undeclared war against Yugoslavia was started on the
basis of half-baked plans, on the expectation that the war would not last more than a week
and that Milosevic would sue for peace after a few days of bombing. This has proved to be
a miscalculation.
The NATO's planning was preceded by an intensive psychological
study of Milosevic by the CIA's psychological experts, but not by a psychological study of
the Serbs---of their ethnic pride, of their emotional attachment to Kosovo, of their
indomitable spirit as exhibited against the Nazis during the second World War and against
Stalin thereafter, their legendary reputation as guerilla fighters, their willingness to
put up with any suffering to face external threats to their culture and civilisation and
the tactics employed by them against the Nazis such as forcing them to commit mistakes
through carefully-planted false intelligence, harassing them from behind their back etc.
The NATO's war machine became a prisoner of its own Psywar
machine and its anti-Milosevic rhetoric and the NATO's political leadership has landed
itself and its war machine in a quagmire from which it doesn't know how to extricate
itself without loss of face.
The NATO's psywar machine kept telling the people that the NATO
was winning the war and that the Serb military machine was being so badly mauled that it
was only a question of days before Milosevic lifted his telephone and accepted the NATO's
conditions.
This has not yet happened. The daily press briefings at the NATO
headquarters disturbingly reminded one, who had grown up professionally during the Vietnam
war, of the days of Robert McNamara, whose psywar experts similarly tried to convince
themselves and the American people on the basis of a statistical analysis of body counts
and infrastructure counts that the US was winning the war.
When the NATO bombing of the so-called military targets in
Yugoslavia, particularly in Belgrade, did not cow down Milosevic and the Serbs, they
started bombing media centres, an action that an analyst has described as censorship
through Cruise missiles, power stations and water supply plants.
These indiscriminate bombings reflect not an iron determination
as projected by President Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair, but an impotent anger at
the defiance of Milosevic . The NATO's hopes that the sufferings inflicted on the common
people through the denial of basic necessities such as water and electricity would make
them rise against Milosevic have till now been belied.
Hitler tried similar intimidatory tactics against the people of
London and of the USSR. Instead of demoralising them, it only steeled their determination
to face the onslaught whatever be the sufferings.
Despite over six weeks of relentless bombings of oil refineries,
oil storage depots, bridges, roads and railways, buildings housing military and other
government offices, the Serb war machine has lost nothing of its resilience,
resourcefulness and innovative spirit. Despite the NATO claims to the contrary, the
Yugoslav military continues to move freely across Kosovo and frustrate the forays of the
CIA-aided Kosovo Liberation Army.
Knowledgeable observers say that only one-third of the so-called
military targets struck by NATO bombings were really military targets. The rest of them
were all non-military targets, which the CIA had been incorrectly identifying as military
targets under mounting pressure from the Pentagon and the NATO headquarters to identify
more and more military targets. Just as it had falsely identified the Chinese Embassy as
the headquarters of the Yugoslav Weapons Procurement Office.
The Weapons Procurement Office used to be located in an old
building at the same spot in the late 1980s. Subsequently, the Yugoslav Government shifted
the office to another building and allotted the plot to China for the construction of a
new Embassy building.
Belgrade, before the NATO's war, was an open city in which the
CIA had a strong presence. Moreover, CIA officers under cover used to visit Belgrade
frequently as members of the entourage of Richard Holbrooke, the Balkan envoy of President
Clinton. They should have known and they would have known that at the spot where the
procurement office stood, now stood the new buildings of the Chinese Embassy.
Under the pressure of the NATO headquarters for more and more
target identification to keep up their daily rate of bombing of Belgrade, satellite images
of the spot as interpreted by photo-interpreters who had never seen Belgrade and hence did
not know that the Chinese Embassy stood there, were rushed to Brussels, without being
vetted by CIA field operatives who had served in Belgrade recently. Had the field
operatives or even the former chauffeur of the US Ambassador been consulted, they would
have told the interpreters about the Chinese Embassy.
In the mad urge to identify and destroy more and more military
targets, a disastrous mistake was committed with unpredictable diplomatic consequences.
The Cruise missiles and other precision-guided weapons are only
as accurate as the target identification data fed into them. The poor quality of the
target information was evident even in August last year when US Cruise missiles attacked a
pharmaceuticals factory in the Sudan mistaking it for a chemicals factory and camps of the
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and other Kashmiri extremists in Afghanistan mistaking them to be
camps of the Arab mercenaries of Osama Bin Laden.
In this connection, reference is invited to our paper dated
November 3,1998, on the US Bombing of Terrorist Camps In Afghanistan.
B.RAMAN
(10-5-99)
(The writer is Additional
Secretary (Retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India,and, presently, Director, Institute
for Topical studies, Chennai. )
