India-Pakistan War Of 1971 a Precedent For NATO and Yugoslavia

By Andrew I. Killgore

A columnist friend in Texas for whom I have great affection wrote that NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia was “plain illegal.” He made his best argument, but from my point of view the 1971 India-Pakistan war provided a much better precedent for what happened in Europe in April and May.

In early 1971 Pakistani army units in East Pakistan, made up almost exclusively of officers and men from West Pakistan, began a brutal crackdown against the overwhelmingly Bengali population of East Pakistan. Most of my professor/writer/journalist/entrepreneur friends in the East Pakistan capital of Dhaka, where I had been assigned for three years, from mid-1967 to mid-1970, were “disappeared,” and up to 10 million Bengalis fled for safety into adjacent India.

This titanic mass of humanity overwhelmed roads, housing, communications and everything else in the affected areas of India, and New Delhi decided it could not accept what amounted to an aggression against itself.

It ordered into East Pakistan the vastly larger Indian army, which quickly defeated the outnumbered Pakistani military units, and the millions of Bengali refugees started returning home. The West Pakistan troops, the source of the brutality against the Bengalis, were withdrawn forever, and East Pakistan became independent Bangladesh.

What Yugoslav President Slobodon Milosevic did to the Kosovars resembles what the Pakistan army did to the Bengalis, except that news accounts say well over half of the 1.8 million mostly Muslim Kosovar Albanians were “ethnically cleansed.” While many Kosovars hid in the mountains of their own country, perhaps 800,000 fled into the neighboring independent nations of Albania and Macedonia, and overwhelmed facilities in both places, particularly in ethnically unstable Macedonia.

While countries from all over Europe and the Middle East sent relief supplies and workers, the United States, Germany, Canada, Britain, Turkey and many other nations also helped to ease the burden by temporarily airlifting thousands of Kosovar refugees to their own countries.

Now with the hostilities seemingly ended, the Kosovars will return to their homes as soon as the Yugoslav army and police units in Kosovo, like the Pakistani army units in East Pakistan, are replaced by a NATO military force in which the refugees have confidence.

Whether the Kosovar Albanian majority (which was 90 percent of the Kosovo population before the ethnic cleansing began) can ever live peacefully in some kind of autonomy in Kosovo, side by side with the Serbs after all the brutality they have suffered at the hands of Belgrade, remains to be seen. Much may depend on what has happened to the thousands of Kosovar men who were separated from their fleeing families and held by the Serbs. Unfortunately, in the case of East Pakistan, some of the worst fears of mass slaughter were confirmed.

Whether NATO’s action against Yugoslavia was “legal” or not, the nightly television footage from Macedonia and Albania of suffering Kosovar families fleeing from their country with little more than the clothes on their backs was too compelling to permit doing nothing to stop it.

The United States tried twice in the 20th century to stay out of Europe’s wars. Twice we failed. If the U.S. had entered earlier, World War I might have ended much earlier, and without such an unjust peace. Then World War II might not have happened at all. But if it did, and again the U.S. had entered earlier, the worst horrors of its final year would certainly have been prevented.

At present the United States and Europe are safely tied together by NATO. If NATO had let Milosevic win in Kosovo, however, it would have been the end of that alliance, and ultimately the cutting of the military tie between the U.S. and Canada on the one hand, and Europe on the other. In the absence of such a tie, a fractured Europe with its fissiparous tendencies might soon be headed down the well-worn fratricidal path that made the 20th century there such a blood-soaked horror.

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report.