MrSteve, Though I don't pay that much attention to the BBC 'Have Your Say' section, I have noticed that the opinions will occasionally swing almost completely in one direction, before eventually balancing out. So it might be wise to give it a week and seeing what happens. Both the Times and the Observer have carried pieces that present a slightly different view of Milosevic: Brendan Simms (Times): We have long known from his co-conspirators, from intercept evidence, and from many other sources that Milosevic was the directing spirit behind the early and decisive stages of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia during the spring and summer of 1992, when hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Croats were driven from their homes by Serbian paramilitaries. More recently, evidence has surfaced to link him, or at least his security apparatus, to the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 in which about 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered. Milosevic’s responsibility for the expulsion of more than 1m Kosovar Albanians in 1999 is indisputable. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2082018,00.html Nerma Jelacic (Observer): The same man's official and paramilitary forces expelled me from my home in Visegrad, the town which borders what at the time was Milosevic's Serbia. I was 14 when I was ethnically cleansed. But before I fled, I watched my country being ravaged, my people killed by his thugs. I was robbed of my childhood by, among others, the Yugoslav National Army, the same men I had been taught in whose trust I should place my safety and my life. The strategy was replicated throughout eastern Bosnia in 1992. It continued in other parts of the country for three more years, culminating with the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica. Milosevic's actions in what was a bloody decade scarred me and my people's lives at regular intervals. When I was 10, he started inciting ethnic hatred in Kosovo; by my 13th birthday, the Yugoslav army was destroying Vukovar and the monuments of Dubrovnik. When I turned 14, his troops made my family stateless. When I reached my 21st birthday, it was only to read about the dead of Kosovo. Aged 25 I, alongside millions of Bosnians, Croats, Kosovars and Serbians whose lives he ruined, finally got to see him in the dock, at the war crimes tribunal in the Hague. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1729011,00.html

Steve - the BBC forums like many others can easily be the subject of semi-organised campaigns to make sure that certain views get to the top of the pile. It's a trusim to say that the winners always vilify the losers, and hardly worth pointing out. In this case, there are still a number of wierd recalcitrant pseudo-marxists around who supported 'the Serbs' in the breakup of Yugoslavia, I think because they were still officially the descendents of the old and rather more progressive government of Yugoslavia, even though in reality they were nationalist racist thugs hiding behind this image. None of this excuses any other nationalist racist participants in the conflict - Tudjman especially, who after some initial opposition to his own 'ethnic cleansing' programmes, of course become 'our bastard.' However it is an absolutely ludicrous post-hoc reinvention of events to try to claim that Al-Qaeda was behind the Bosnian Muslims! We end with a very strange collection of somewhat uneasy bedfellows - the 'blame everything on the Americans' SWP types and the 'blame everything on the Muslims' neocons etc... all of whom seem basically to be trying to excuse what Milosevic did on the grounds that 'X' was just as bad... or worse that Milosevic was acting in an ethically acceptable manner. Others are undoubtedly also to blame, and the NATO powers certainly wanted to see Milosevic punished, but none of this makes Milosevic less guilty... people need to get beyond their ideologies to see the real human suffering.

After doing some extensive searching, I have come to the conclusion that the whole Kosovo NATO campaign was completely unjustified. These are the people you should tell then: Phone: +31 70 512 5285 Fax: +31 70 512 8668 Email: kralt.icty@un.org Web-site: http://www.un.org/icty/index.html

Steve, I want to point out first that I don't necessarily disagree with you... From what I've seen, the public were taken to war on false premises and the conduct of the war was illegal. However... Could you define: "justified"?

I realise this could seem annoying, but I'm going to ask you to define "reasonable"...

Steve, (Is that your first or second name? Apologies if I'm not addressing you properly...) Are you trying to point out that "reasonable" is subjective? To be honest, I'm trying to figure out my own position, rather than putting forward a truly coherent argument. I do think, however, that a lot of us use short-hand terms like "justified" without having a really concrete definition of it. A number of the arguments here seem to spring from the fact that we can use these terms differently. Our language can also be a little loose. For example, when you stated that the bombing of Kosovo was unjustified, do you mean that people shouldn't have supported it in the first place, or that on consideration of the consequences they can't support it now?

Steve, It came about because I had trouble getting a email address with my full name I know the problem. The question then remains whether they really believed genocide to be taking place at the time. Ahhhh... I might just have had a moment of clarity. Are you arguing that it wasn't justified on the premises given, as opposed to not being justified on any terms - which is a far more wide-ranging and philosophical issue? I may have been reading more into your original statement than was intended. Which brings us back to the issue of confusing terms.

Steve, I think we're broadly in agreement. The handling of the Kosovo campaign has been highly criticised, and rightly so in my opinion. As far as I understand it (and my knowledge is quite sketchy - John Kampfner's 'Blair's Wars' is my main source) there were reasonable grounds for the international community to step in. Human Rights reports show that ethnic cleansing was going on - though nowhere near the scale claimed. Emphasis on the important of NATO is seen as one of the main reasons for going to war. A number of people were starting to question the need for the organisation, Kosovo was seen as a way of demonstrating its relevance. Europe, led by our very own Blair, relied on US forces as always. However, the Clinton administration were reluctant to commit ground forces, as American causalities in war in deep, dank corner of Europe would have been a PR nightmare, which is why they pursued the far more dangerous (for civilians) policy of aerial bombardment. Without access to the relevant documents, its always difficult to judge the decisions made by our politicians (other than whether they chime with general opinion). On how they handle situations, especially when a wealth of expert opinion is available, I think we're in a far better position to judge.

Rather like with the issue of "detaining" suspected terrorists - they always say they can't release the evidence as it would compromise our intelligence services. Taking any politician's word for something is never really advisable. Yes, this bothers me a lot and no-one ever mentions it, certainly not the media. It's a difficult point to argue. I think if push came to shove the general public would agree that the safety of our people should come first, so the media's really on a hiding to nothing if they push the point too far.

I think it's one of those issues where emotion will always trump rational argument. In theory the protection of civilians should be put first. However, it would ultimately come to down to whether one of them, the faceless and the foreign, should be protected at the expense of one of us, one of our sons and daughters... The tabloids would have a field day if our troops were put in "unnecessary" risk. The chances that they'd be deployed when they were really needed would decrease significantly as well. It's a tough issue.

MrSteve, I admire your cosmopolitan egalitarianism. However, when your nation had the chance to employ it, you instead chose to enslave the world. If you had power again, you would undoubtedly do the same. Your self-righteousness makes you a fraud. Europeans can never be trusted with any real power.