Bravo, Bravado
March 26th, 2008NATO is not messing around with violent protests in Serbia.
NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo will respond with “all appropriate means” when faced with deadly weapons in Serb protests, a spokesman for the KFOR peacekeeping force said on Wednesday. “We are not a police force. We don’t have the same rules. Don’t expect KFOR to send flowers when we are being shot at,” KFOR spokesman Col. Jean-Luc Cotard told a news conference in Pristina, capital of newly independent Kosovo.
The NATO-led peacekeeping force of 16,000 bristled at Serb allegations of “brutality” during riots on March 17 in the flashpoint town of Mitrovica, a Serb stronghold and now a bastion against Albanian-dominated independent Kosovo. Serbia’s nationalist Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica accused the allied force of turning “snipers and banned weapons” on Serb protesters as they battled over a United Nations court building the Serbs had occupied.
NATO said Serbs hardliners fired automatic weapons and threw grenades and Molotov cocktails during the clash. A 25-year-old Ukrainian U.N. policeman was killed by a grenade and a Serb protester was shot in the head and gravely wounded. “I make a strict distinction between citizens and murderers,” Cotard said. KFOR, in such circumstances, was entitled “to use all appropriate means”, he said.
At the least, this shows that there are still military forces in the world who understand that military force is not supposed to be soft and gentle. A violent action often deserves a violent response, and so it is with brutal attempts to stifle a democracy. And that isn’t all the encouragement freedom and progress have to claim today: Iraq’s government is fighting the militias, and their Prime Minister personally led the Iraqi force against them, warning them to stop fighting because it’s time to stabilize.
I know, “encouragement freedom and progress have to claim…” sounds propagandistic, perhaps, or violent, but please do not take it so. What I mean is that there is a school of thought that calls for violence not to be confronted because violence is violence and so retaliation is wrong. I do not think that right, especially not in Serbia, and I am simply encouraged by the sight of an Iraqi-run military operation.