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Two Print Interviews
and Two Audio Interviews
With Noam Chomsky

Radio Nation Interview via Real Audio
CBC Interview

 

Print Interview, April 8, 1999

Max Boehnel: Let's decode some of the language we are hearing around this war. Can you comment on the use of the terms humanitarian crisis, genocide, and ethnic cleaning as they are being applied to Kosovo?

Noam Chomsky: Well for starters, the concept called "humanitarian crisis" has a technical meaning, which does not have much to do with what might reasonably be assumed to be the defining criteria of the term. The technical meaning of humanitarian crisis is a problem somewhere that threatens the interest of rich and powerful people. That is the essence of what makes it a crisis. Now, any disturbance in the Balkans does threaten the interest of rich and powerful people, namely, the elites of Europe and the US. So when there are humanitarian issues in the Balkans, they become a humanitarian crisis. On the other hand, if people slaughter each other in Sierra Leone or the Congo, it's not a humanitarian crisis. As a matter of fact, Clinton just refused to provide the relatively puny sum of $100,000 for a peace making force in the Republic of the Congo which might well have averted a huge massacre. But those deaths do not constitute a humanitarian crisis. Neither do the many other deaths and tragedies to which the U.S. directly contributes: the massacres in Colombia, for example, or the slaughters and expulsions of people in southeastern Turkey, which is being carried out with crucial support from Clinton. Those aren't humanitarian crises. But Kosovo is a crisis because it is in the Balkans.

Now the term genocide, as applied to Kosovo is an insult to the victims of Hitler. In fact, it's revisionist to an extreme. If this is genocide, then there is genocide going on all over the world. And Bill Clinton is decisively implementing a lot of it. If this is genocide, then what do you call what is happening in the southeast of Turkey? The number of refugees there is huge, it's already reached about half the level of Palestinians expelled from Palestine.

If it increases further, it may reach the number of refugees in Colombia, where the number of people killed every year by the army and paramilitary groups armed and trained by the United States is approximately the same as the number of people killed in Kosovo last year.

Ethnic cleansing, on the other hand, is real. Unfortunately, it's something that goes on and has been going on for a long time. It's no big innovation. How come I'm living where I am instead of the original people who lived here. Did they happily walk away?

 

MB: So human rights abuses in Kosovo are termed a "humanitarian crisis" by the world's most powerful state. But how did we get from that to all out war?

NC: Well, let's look at the situation from the US point of view: There's a crisis, what do we do about it? One possibility is to work through the United Nations, which is the agency responsible under treaty obligations and international law for dealing with such matters. But the U.S. made it clear a long time ago that it has total contempt for the institutions of world order -- the U.N., the World Court, and so on. In fact, the US has been very explicit about that. This was not always the case. In the early days of the UN, the majority of countries backed the US because of its overwhelming political power. But that began to change when decolonization was extended and the organization and distribution of world power shifted. Now the US can no longer count on the majority of countries to go along with its demands. The UN is no longer a pliant and therefore no longer a relevant, institution. This proposition became very explicit during the Reagan years and even more brazen during the Clinton years. So brazen that even right-wing analysts are worried about it. There is an interesting article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, an establishment journal, warning Washington that much of the world regards the US as a "rogue superpower" and the single greatest threat to their existence. In fact, the US has placed itself totally above the rule of international law and international institutions.

NATO at least has the advantage of being pretty much under US domination. Within NATO there are differences of opinion, so when there was a question last September of sending unarmed NATO monitors into Kosovo, every NATO country (with the possible exception of Britain) wanted the operation authorized by the UN Security Council as is required by treaty obligation. But the US flatly refused. It would not allow the use of the word "authorize." It insisted that the UN has no right to authorize any US action. When the issue moved on to negotiations and the use of force, the US and Britain, typically the two warrior states, were eager to use force and abandon negotiations. In fact, continental European diplomats were telling the press that they were annoyed by the saber-rattling mentality of Washington. So NATO as a whole was driven to the use of force, in part, reluctantly. In fact the reluctance increases as you get closer to the region. So England and US are quite enthusiastic, others quite reluctant, and some in between.

 

MB: Why was the US so eager to use force?

NC: The reason is obvious. When involved in a confrontation, you use your strong card and try to shift the confrontation to the arena in which you are most powerful. And the strong card of the United States is the use of force. That's perhaps the only realm of international relations where the US has a near monopoly. The consequences of using force in Yugoslavia were more or less anticipated. The NATO Commanding General Wesley Clark stated that it was entirely predictable that the bombing would sharply increase the level of atrocities and expulsion. As indeed it did. The NATO leadership could not have failed to know that the bombing would destroy the quite courageous and promising democracy movement in Serbia -- as indeed it did; and cause all sorts of turmoil in surrounding countries -- as indeed it has, though still not at the same level of crisis as Turkey or other places.

Nevertheless, it was necessary, as the Clinton foreign policy team kept stressing, to preserve the credibility of NATO. Now when they talk about credibility, they are not talking about the credibility of Denmark or France. The Clinton Administration doesn't care about those countries' credibility. What they care about is the credibility of the United States. Credibility means fear: what they are concerned with is maintaining fear of the global enforcer, namely, the US. And that's much more important than the fate of hundreds of thousands of Kosovars, or whatever other consequences are incurred. So the US and NATO have helped to create a humanitarian catastrophe by knowingly escalating an already serious crisis to catastrophic proportions.

 

MB: Some people say that unless American soldiers start being shipped home in body bags, there will not be a serious anti-war effort in this country. What is your assessment of that?

NC: I don't agree with that at all. I mean, look at the history: During the 1980's there was overwhelming opposition to US atrocities in Central America. As a matter of fact, opposition was so strong that the Reagan Administration had to back off and resort to using international terrorist networks like the Contras to carry out its policies. And there were no Americans in body bags then. Today there's strong opposition to US support for Indonesian slaughter in East Timor, and there are no American body bags. If you look at the opposition to the Vietnam War, Americans were of course being killed, but that was by no means the decisive factor. I think that the notion that only dead American soldiers will inspire a peace movement -- in other words, that people are motivated only by self-interest -- is US propaganda. It's intolerable for the propaganda system to concede that people might act on moral instinct, which is in fact what they do.

 

MB: How do you reconcile that view with the fact that, according to polls at least, the majority of Americans would support an escalation of the war, for example, through the deployment of NATO ground troops?

NC: You have to keep in mind what these people are hearing. The public is getting its marching orders from Washington. And these orders are to disregard all other atrocities, even ones much worse than Kosovo, especially in places where the US is involved. Focus your attention only on this disaster and pretend to yourself that the crisis is all about one evil man who is carrying out genocide. This is what we are being told by our media day and night. It's effective. Most people accept the marching orders. Then they say we've got to do something, like send ground troops.

The Pentagon and the European forces are strongly against it, mainly for technical reasons. I mean it would be a catastrophe. Sounds easy to send ground troops, but think about it. First of all, it would not be easy to get them in, and would most probably take months to get them ready. It would mean facing a major guerilla war that would probably level the whole region. That's what happens when you send in ground troops and cause greater catastrophes. It would simply escalate the atrocities.

 

MB: What steps do you think people who oppose this war should take now?

NC: There is no question that people of conscience must take action against this. What can we do to end this war? Same thing as always, there's no magical trick. It requires education, explanation, organizing, demonstrating, exerting pressure... all things that we know. And this is very hard to do; it's not like flipping on a light switch. It takes work.

 

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CBC Radio Interview Transcribed
April 16, 1999

http://home.cbc.ca/real/radio/news-audio/ram/aih990416.ram

MLF: Do you think that, by in large, you and we are getting a reasonably accurate picture of what is going on in this war?

NC: I think the reporters on the ground, many of them, are producing quite accurate stories: the way the framework and the interpretation handles the facts is another question. Inaccurate isn't the word for it, it is ludicrous.

MLF: Well tell us about that.

NC: This is presented, well I haven't read the Canadian media, but in the United States and what I've seen of Europe, its presented as an humanitarian endeavor, and that is repeated over and over. Well, if anything is obvious, it's the opposite, it cannot possibly be considered by a rational person as having humanitarian motives.

MLF: You don't believe that the reason for the NATO action was to rescue the Kosovo Albanians from oppression?

NC: It is virtually inconceivable on rational grounds and there are simple reasons for that. One reason is simply Kosovo itself. Up until the US/NATO bombing March 24th, there had been, according to NATO, 2000 people killed on all sides, and a couple of hundred thousand refugees. Well, that's bad, that's a humanitarian crises, but unfortunately it's the kind you can find all over the world. For example, it happens to be almost identical in numbers to what the state department describes as the last year in Colombia: 300,000 refugees, 2 or 3 thousand people killed, overwhelmed by the military forces and the para military associates, who the US arms, and in fact arms are going up. That' s the way the US, Britain and other countries act when there are humanitarian crises, namely they escalate them. Now, what happened in Kosovo, well in fact the same thing. There were options on March 23rd, and they chose an option which, predictably, changed the situation from a Colombia style crisis to maybe approaching a disaster, and that was a conscious choice. The effects? Let me quote the US/NATO commanding General, Wesley Clark: two days after the bombing he said it was "entirely predictable" that the reaction of the Serb army on the ground would be exactly as it was.

MLF: I must interject here and say that our own foreign Minister has said nobody foresaw the scale of Milosevic response.

NC: That's ridiculous, maybe they didn't foresee the exact scale, but when you bomb people they don't throw flowers at you. They react

MLF: Let me ask you what you think the motive was.

NC: One thing is that any kind of turbulence in the Balkans is what's called in technical terms a crisis. That means it can harm the interests of rich and powerful people. So if people are slaughtering each other in Sierra Leone, Colombia, Turkey, or whereever, that doesn't affect rich and powerful people very much, therefore they are glad either to just watch it, or even contribute to it, massively as in the case of Turkey or Colombia. But in the Balkans it's different, it can affect European interests and therefore US interests, so it becomes a crisis, any kind of turbulence. Then you want to quiet it down. Well, how do you do that? The US flatly refuses to allow the institutions of international order to be involved, so no UN, and that's pretty explicit. So they have to turn to NATO. Well, NATO the US dominates, so that's acceptable and then you turn to force. Why force? Well, several reasons, and here I think Clinton, Blair, and others have been pretty honest about it. The point that they reiterate over and over is that it is necessary to establish the credibility of NATO. Now all we have to do is translate from Newspeak. What does credibility of NATO mean? Are they concerned with the credibility of Italy or the credibility of Belgium? Obviously not. They are concerned with the credibility of the United States. Now what does the credibility of the United States mean? Well, you can ask any Mafia don, and he'll explain it. So, suppose some Mafia don is running some area in Chicago, what does he mean by credibility? He means that you have got to show people that they better be obedient or else. That's credibility.

MLF: I want to ask you to go back to the United Nations for a moment though, because--and if I may bring up the Canadian arguments again--because Canada has long been a supporter, in fact, of the UN, of international law, in every instance I can think of except this one. The argument our foreign minister and our Prime Minister give now, and in fact all of Parliament, is that, yes but, the UN is now a helpless organization, it could do nothing to prevent slaughters and massacres, therefore we had to do something, and, there is the UN Human Rights Declaration that gave them authorization.

NC: The UN Human Rights Declaration gives no authorization. It is perfectly true that there is a tension between the UN charter which bars the use of a threat or the use of force, and the Universal Declaration which guarantees, theoretically, the rights of people against oppressive states. But Canada doesn't care at all about ththe latter;  Canada has a horrible record in that respect. For example, take Suharto's Indonesia, which is a brutal, murderous state. I think Canada was supporting it all the way through, because it was making money out of the situation. And we can go around the world, Canada strongly supported the US invasion of South Vietnam, of the whole of Indochina. In fact Canada became the per capita largest war exporter, trying to make as much money as it could from the murder of people in Indochina. In fact, I'd suggest that you look back at the comment by a well known and respected Canadian diplomat, I think his name was John Hughes, some years ago, who defined what he called the Canadian idea, namely "we uphold our principles but we find a way around them". Well that's pretty accurate, and Canada is not unique in this respect, maybe a little more hypocritical.

MLF: So, Professor Chomsky, has this action done any harm to the United Nations and the advancement of international law or was it already a moot thing?

NC: Of course it has. You could argue that since the United States, the leading power in the world, has brazen contempt for international law it doesn't mean much, but there is no doubt that this act is another blow against a rather fragile system of world order. But that's, in a way, you could argue, the least of it. I mean it has been of extreme harm to the people of Kosovo, that is obvious. It has undermined, and maybe permanently destroyed, a courageous and promising democratic movement in Belgrade, which was the best hope of getting rid of Milosevic. And it has caused considerable disruption and danger in surrounding areas, including the Yugoslavia republic of Montenegro and also Macedonia.

MLF: Let me ask you a question about our perceptions, rhetoric, and manipulation then, because our opinion polls right now tell us that the majority of Americans and Canadians support this action and as far as I can tell they are doing it because they believe it is the right thing to do, that it was the humanitarian thing to do, that they are saving people.

NC: That's right, and the reason is clear enough. If you are told over and over again, morning to night, with close to 100% unanimity thundering at you that "we are doing this to save lives" you might tend to believe these absurd claims, although you could know with a moment's reflection their absurdity.

MLF: Do you think that people are also affected by the interviews with refugees, including the people who were supposedly bombed by NATO by mistake, who say, well it was a tragedy of course but we don't care, tell NATO to keep on, we are with NATO, NATO's doing the right thing.

NC: There are many people around the world who think you ought to bomb Washington, that doesn't make it a wise course of action.

MLF: But these are the victims who are saying carry on.

NC: Well of course they say it. Similarly  the victims in Turkey would be delighted if the US would stop arming the Turkish government and would bomb Ankara...

MLF: But, they have lost, as you just said... they are all refugees now and they are still saying it is the right thing to do.

NC: When you are a refugee, what you hate is the person who most immediately drove you out with a gun, of course. If people sitting in Toronto can't think through the fact that the US, Canadian, and British actions escalated the atrocities, predictably, how do you expect a refugee on the ground to think about it.

MLF: There is near unanimity about this in the Canadian parliament. If what your are saying is correct, how is it that everyone is so misled, so wooly headed about this?

NC: I think the facts that I just described are quite plain. For one thing, we live in highly indoctrinated societies, with an intellectual class that is extremely subordinate to power, and since people are as a result totally bombarded with propaganda about how its not our fault if the consequence of our actions is an escalation of atrocities, they don't think about it.

MLF: Would you have done anything different?

NC: On March 23rd? Well, there were three choices. One was to act in such a way as to escalate the atrocities, that's what was chosen. A second choice was do nothing. A third choice is to act as to mitigate the atrocities. Now if you can't think of any way to mitigate atrocities the best choice was to do nothing. Okay, was there any way to mitigate the atrocities? Well, I suppose there were diplomatic options that were open; the Serbian parliament passed a resolution on March 23rd, the day before the bombing, in which it said that they would not accept a NATO force, (hardly surprising, Canada wouldn't accept a Warsaw pact force) but they proposed that there could be a move toward autonomy for Kosovo, and that after that, there should be an international force. Well, is that an acceptable offer? We don't know, because the US wouldn't even pay any attention to it. But pursuing that offer, through the mechanisms of world order such as the UN Security Council or neutral countries like India or others would certainly have been better than doing nothing and vastly better than acting to escalate the atrocities.

MLF: What do we do now?

NC: If a doctor is giving you medicine which is killing you, the first thing you would want if for him to stop giving you the medicine, not give more of it. So the first thing we ought to do is stop doing what is harming the situation. The second thing we should do is hand over diplomacy and negotiations to some credible source, so hand it over to the Security Council, to neutral countries, maybe India, South Africa, Scandinavian countries, any one who hasn't completely discredited themselves, to have them undertake diplomatic initiatives and see if there is a way to resolve the distinction between, for example, the Serbian parliament proposal and the NATO proposal.

MLF: Do you think we are likely to do any of that?

NC: The US and Canada? Very unlikely, because these are "jingoist" countries, which are highly subordinate to power and where people don't stop to think through the consequences of what they are doing,..unfortunately.

MLF: NATO, will be celebrating its 50th anniversary next week and they are all congratulating themselves on having found a new role.

NC: Yes, they have found a new role and a very ugly role, a role which has sharply escalated atrocities, exactly as they predicted, and that has caused extreme damage elsewhere, including the democratic movement in Belgrade, let alone world order. So if they want to celebrate that, fine. I'm not going to be celebrating.

MLF: Professor Chomsky, I thank you very much for talking to us today.