This war shames our country
by A.N.Wilson
19 April 1999
Several friends rang up towards the end of last week to say that they were going to watch me on BBC television’s Question Time, the telly-equivalent of Any Questions? I had to tell them that my appearance on the show had been cancelled. Oddly enough, it was only as I was explaining this fact to other people that I began to wonder what reason the producers of the programme had in mind.
I had assumed, with genuine naivete, that they had found someone more amusing to appear. It never occurred to me that I was being censored. Then I remembered that the cancellation came through a day or two after I’d published an article deploring the Nato bombing campaign in the Balkans and stating that this fiasco had made me into a pacifist.
Surely in England, one is allowed to say what one likes? Ha, ha. Reading John Pilger’s brilliant article in the latest issue of the New Statesman confirms my hunch that there is a policy of censorship at work. He describes trying to get a piece published about the bombing. It has been published all over the world, but the normally free medium of BBC Radio has turned it down. Having read his article in the Statesman, I’m not altogether surprised. Pilger points out that before 25 March, UN observers put the balance of atrocities caused by Serb and Kosovar paramilitaries as “about even”.
He points out that Nato has bombed a car factory in Zastovo in which 10,000 people were working at the time of the raid. Such uncomfortable truths do not sit easily beside Tony Blair’s claim that this is a war between Good and Evil. In yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, John Simpson describes the way in which the Blair propaganda machine smears his reputation and claims that he is a tool of the Milosevic regime – an absurd libel on one of our most independent-minded and courageous reporters.
The truth is that this war against the Serbs is, from the British point of view, a disgusting, murderous blunder. They told us they could stop Milosevic by bombing selected targets. The result was an outpouring of those Kosovars we claimed we wanted to protect. Nato has already lost more planes than it dares admit, and killed more civilians. Possibly, as Pilger’s conspiracy theories suggest, it serves some devious purpose of American expansionism.
From the point of view of British national interest, it does nothing except bring disgrace on our country. We are always told that truth is the first casualty of war. But there is something peculiarly repellent about self-righteous goody-goodies such as Blair and Defence Secretary George Robertson telling lies.
One expected Thatcher to be a murderess – she looks and sounds like one. But there is something creepy about a bombing war conducted by boy scouts and kirk-elders. One particular whopper is Robertson telling radio audiences that all the bombing targets were approved personally by himself and Blair. This self-important falsehood must have raised a few eyebrows among the Nato Bomber Command.
© Associated Newspapers Ltd., 19 April 1999