Sir, - Am I the only man in Ireland to support wholeheartedly the NATO actions in the Balkans? Ever since the crisis came to a head a few months ago with the removal of the independent observers and the commencement of the NATO aerial war, your pages have been full of articles and comments, almost all critical of the NATO actions. I have got to the stage where I can take no more of it and I just have to register a public protest.
Every occasion on which a NATO bomb killed civilians was seized upon almost gleefully as though civilian deaths were avoidable in a war situation. The NATO errors are highlighted as though wars could be pursued without injuring anybody save the immediate combatants.
Yes, the Albanian citizens of Kosovo may have been killed by NATO, but due to human or technical error. Their deaths are not to be compared with the intentional systematic slaughter carried out by official Serb forces. In a very short time these accidental deaths will be forgotten by the Kosovars when the intentional Serb slaughters will live on.
After all, the citizens of present-day France, Belgium and Holland forgive the huge civilian losses incurred as a consequence of Allied bombings, yet remember the Nazi killings in a different light. Rotterdam is remembered but the night Allied bombers killed 1,400 in Nijmegen and The Hague is known to few.
I for one am glad to see NATO acting in defence of an issue such as this. Aren't we the smug little group of islanders far from conflict who can sit by and wring our hands and say: "Isn't it terrible?" I for one am glad to have lived under the (free) umbrella of NATO during the long years of Soviet Russian threat and I would ask your readers to appreciate that there must be some valid reason for all those newly free and independent Central Europeans seeking NATO membership. The reason is fear. And it is not fear of the US. - Yours, etc.,
Anthony Hanrahan, Oxford Road, Ranelagh, Dublin 6.