If ethnic cleansing is wrong in Balkans, it's wrong
in Mideast
By Charley Reese
Published in The Orlando Sentinel on May 4, 1999
Well, good news for Palestinians. President Clinton and other NATO heads of state have
said repeatedly and explicitly that "ethnic cleansing shall not stand" and that
refugees have a right to return to their homes.
This, in fact, is their justification for war against Yugoslavia.
Well, bless my pita bread, there's no group of people in the world who are more clearly
victims of ethnic cleansing than the Palestinian refugees who have been rotting in refugee
camps for 50 years. Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and again in 1967. They
were forced out and have been forbidden to return specifically because they are
Palestinians.
Because we are all sure that Clinton and the other heads of state who lead the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization are men of honor and wouldn't think of lying, we can be sure
then that as soon as this Balkan business is completed that Israel will be presented with
an ultimatum just like the one presented to Slobodan Milosevic.
Israel will be told to withdraw its forces from the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem,
to consent to occupation of thoseareas by an international military force, and shall allow
all Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and to live there safely. Or else the
bombs will fall on Tel Aviv.
I know that some of you are cynical. Some of you think that the Israeli lobby protects
Israel not only from the United States but from enforcement of the more than 60 United
Nations resolutions directed against Israeli abuses of Palestinians and neighboring
countries.
Some of you probably think that Clinton and company are lying about ethnic cleansing
just because they've done nothing about Tibet's occupation and 1 million killed; or the 2
million dead in the Sudanese civil war; or the 1 million dead in the Angola civil war; or
the 65,000 dead in the Algerian civil conflict; or the 40,000 dead in the Nagorno-Karabakh
civil conflict; or the 750,000 killed in Rwanda and so on and so on.
Shame on you for being a cynic. Don't you know that American voters decided character
doesn't matter, but if it did you could count on Clinton to tell the truth about
everything except his sex life, financial arrangements with the Chinese, and what he
really thinks about Al Gore.
So, when he says ethnic cleansing won't stand and refugees must go home, the residents
of Israel had better vacuum out their bomb shelters and get ready for the West to strike a
blow for justice. I say that because it's hard to imagine any Israeli prime minister not
doing the same thing Milosevic did and reject the dictate. Naturally, once the bombing
starts, whoever is prime minister will be demonized. Because I suppose it would be awkward
to accuse a Jewish prime minister of being another Hitler, he may be compared to Stalin or
Pol Pot or Mao.
It has been said that NATO is really in search of a mission (before Milosevic it was an
army with neither enemy nor mission). Well, if the new mission is to stamp out ethnic
cleansing and undo it, it will have enough wars to keep the arms manufacturers in
billion-dollar clover for the next century. There are about 15 million ethnically cleansed
refugees in the world.
I don't know where the use of the words ethnic cleansing originated. People used to be
called just refugees or displaced persons. Sometimes the words population exchange or
population transfers were used. But now ethnic cleansing is the favorite phrase.
Well, so be it, if ethnic cleansing is wrong in the Balkans, it's wrong in the Middle
East, and it's high time the U.S. Congress and the executive branch apply the same concern
for ethnically cleansed Palestinians as they profess to have for the Albanians.
After all, Palestinians were practically first in line.
[Posted 05/03/1999 7:11 PM EST]
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/columnists/reese/050499_reese04_21.htm
