Sir, – Owen O'Loughlin's response (Letters, March 25th) to Kathy Sheridan's article "It was Nato bombers and tanks that finally stopped the war in Kosovo" (Opinion & Analysis, March 23rd) points out her omission that the Nato intervention in Kosovo was illegal under international law "with no UN Security Council resolution authorising the same". But he omits to inform readers that it was the failure of the UN Security Council in 1999 to authorise action to halt "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo which led to Nato's intervention.
Milosevic was prosecuted for genocide and war crimes by the Hague war crimes tribunal.The Bosnian and Kosovar survivors of his reign of terror are living among us in Ireland today and are today increasingly troubled by Russian’s manoeuvring to destabilise the region. They are having to watch shocking TV images of Moscow-backed Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik planning to re-establish an independent Republika Srpska army, the same one that was convicted of ethnic cleansing and genocide during the war in Bosnia.
Fintan O Toole in an article on the “blindness” of the Left to the “horrors of Kosovo” (Opinion & Analysis, June 25th, 1999) described “the systematic implementation by Belgrade over the course of the 1990s of a programme for eliminating the Albanian presence in Kosovo and the incorporation of the territory into Serbia proper”. And how Kosovars supported the Nato intervention.
He noted that “the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, bravely attacked Nato’s breaches of human rights while retaining a sense of the horror of Milosevic’s crimes and of the urgency of intervention”.
Having watched Milosevic slaughter his way through Bosnia and Kosovo – the West only intervened after the Srebrenica genocide– and Assad’s chemical weapons attacks and mass murder of Syrians helped by Putin, whose barbarism is only now really coming to light in Ukraine – surely our main focus should be on Kathy Sheridan’s urgent question “How would you stop a psychopathic Putin now?” – Yours, etc,
VALERIE HUGHES,
Cabra,
Dublin 7.