"THE AMERICAN President, his English factotum and various European politicians, not to mention the overwhelming majority of the liberal media, tell us every day that Milosevic is Hitler. In order to crush such a leader it is necessary to wage war.
That Milosevic is a brutal leader has never been in doubt. But is he alone? Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu is an equally brutish politician, who defies UN resolutions and regularly bombs targets in Lebanon.
And what of Milosevic's counterpart in Croatia, Franjo Tudjman? He has authorised the ethnic cleansing of Serbs and, on occasion, Bosnians. He presides over a regime which has rehabilitated wartime fascists who collaborated with the Nazi occupiers during the Second World War.
But Netanyahu and Tudjman are on "our side", and that's all that colins. "Our side" has practised atrocities on a large scale in the second half of the century. In the name of freedom and democracy the Anglo-Saxon powers have backed dictators much worse than Milosevic (who, we should remember, is an elected politician) and helped them to power on every continent.
The Indonesian dictator, Suharto, was being armed by Britain and America right till the day he was toppled by a popular uprising which received no support from either Washington or London. Indonesia, admittedly, is a faraway country, not visible from a Tuscan vineyard; but what about Turkey? It can certainly be sighted by a New Labour MP sunbathing on a Greek island. What successive governments in Ankara have inflicted on their Kurdish citizens is as bad as, if not. worse than, the treatment meted out to the Kosovars.
The argument used by the Turkish authorities is exactly the same as that employed by the Serb leadership. In torturing, maiming, killing and denying autonomy to the Kurds they are simply defending the unity of the Turkish state. How many TV viewers are aware of the fact that this is still taking place or that Turkey is an important member of Nato? It is the blatant double standard that compels any critical observer to look for the deeper reasons that underlie this conflict." (An except from Tariq Ali, writing in the Independent, March 28) East Timorese guerrillas - fighting on against Indonesian military repression on Timorese civilians by. the