‘With the suspension of NATO bombing, all reports are confirming that NATO’s military action failed to destroy Yugoslavia’s military apparatus – clarifying that NATO’s strategy was aimed primarily at securing Yugoslavia’s compliance with NATO’s demands by making life intolerable for the civilian population. Nonetheless the fundamental questions about this conflict will not go away.

‘NATO said this was a war for the refugees. But the United Nations Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) reported its first registered refugees outside Kosovo on March 27, three days after bombings began.

‘NATO said its bombing was for humanitarian values, but targeted its round the clock bombing mainly on the destruction of the civilian infrastructure. Bridges, power supplies, hospitals, water supplies, schools, old peoples homes in the whole of Yugoslavia, not Kosovo solely, have been destroyed. NATO targeted Yugoslavia’s media and communications, to try to prevent news of the effects of its bombing to be transmitted around the world. What sort of humanitarian values depend on the suppression of free speech?

‘NATO now says no money is to be allocated to rebuilding Yugoslavia, only, possibly, to Kosovo: although US Senate Republican leader Trent Lott tells us that since the US spent ‘$100 million a day" bombing Yugoslavia "I feel very strongly, and I think most senators feel very strongly, that the overwhelming bulk of whatever rebuilding is done in Kosovo should be done by the Europeans".

‘We are told by Bill Clinton that "the values of civilisation have prevailed". But this was the most cowardly war in history. Bombs were dropped on civilian targets, for 78 days, from 15,000 feet, making civilian casualties, which could otherwise have been avoided, a certainty. NATO leaders may engage in unseemly backslapping that their tactics avoided NATO military casualties, and the political backlash which these would have brought, but this was not a mark of "civilisation". The conduct of NATO’s action had all the hallmarks of a colonial power, akin to 19^th century "civilisation" which pounded the inhabitants of African or Asian villages from their gunboats and subdued entire populations with vastly superior firepower from a safe distance.

‘The truth is that NATO’s war on Yugoslavia was not for humanitarianism, for the interests of the Kosovo Albanians nor for democracy. It was a war to advance the goal of US hegemony over Europe and the world.

‘NATO’s war was, therefore, not a one-off. As NATO’s new strategic concept on "out of area" operations makes clear, it may well be the first in a new series of wars by the US in a struggle for global dominance. But the US will have to contend with the alarm its has provoked among the Chinese and Russian people, as well as the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and the new awareness of millions of people world-wide in the anti-war movement to which this war has given birth.’