I’ve been watching BBC world service television news. Hadn’t we been told that “Kosovo was empty”, after the Serbs “ethnically cleansed” the whole province of its Albanians? Who then are all those people crowding the streets and cheering NATO?

Meanwhile, Serbs are leaving, the way Albanians left before, and there isn’t even any bombing to run away from. BBC commentary says they are running away in fear of reprisals by returning Kosovar refugees, who will want to get even with their tormentors. Well maybe. But it looks very much as if they are running away in fear of the Kosovars who are right there en masse, jeering Serbs and cheering NATO… not to mention the KLA, which is hanging around fully armed and has already killed several Serbs in Pristina, without any reaction whatsoever from NATO forces there.

Since nobody knows any history, the impression may prevail that the Serbs had no business being there anyway. After all, the Albanophones who live in the province call themselves “Kosovars”, unlike their equally Albanophone brothers, parents or cousins just across the borders in Albania, Macedonia, or other parts of Serbia, so the place must be theirs.. The Serbs are just called Serbs whether or not their ancestral lands are in Kosovo, Bosnia or Croatia… and so they don’t “belong” anywhere. Throw them out!

To nobody’s great surprise, the first thing the British NATO forces did in Kosovo was to “discover a mass grave”. Since it has rough sticks as grave markers with dates of birth and death written on them (and the ones I saw were all in the military age bracket, e.g. “72-99”) and is situated in a cemetery, it looks more like hastily buried battlefield dead than a “mass grave from a massacre”. The situation is not immediately clear, since there has been a war here between Serb forces and KLA guerrillas, and even the KLA report that many were killed fighting. A reasonable response would be to conclude that the jury is still out on this one, rather than to devote the top of every news broadcast to the “first horrifying revelation of Serbian war crimes”.

But the jury is never out when it comes to the Serbs.. The jury, judge and executioner have already decided in advance that this, as the ineffable Robin Cook declared with his usual mock indignation, is an appalling atrocity that reminds us of why NATO had to go into when it did to put an end to Serb barbarism.

Yes, now NATO is going to go on “discovering” the evidence of the crimes that it omnisciently punished beforehand with two and a half months of devastating bombing.

This is a truly post-modern concept of justice. It needn’t be bound by old-fashioned chronology. Why wait for the crime when you can punish first? Especially when the punishment may even provoke the crime! A perfect, complete system of justice in a new time frame, faster than the speed of light.