So NATO has a ``right'' to bomb Yugoslavia and a further right to bomb Yugoslav TV for telling its people and the world its side of the story: Ibrahim Rugova, the moderate Kosovo Albanian leader coming back from NATO's dead; ``collateral damage'' from a train that was bombed; and more collateral damage to Kosovo refugees and civilian convoys on at least three occasions -- all initially denied till put out on Belgrade TV.

Milosevic is no angel and may have much to answer for. But he and his Serbian countrymen have been demonised in the kind of highly selective disinformation blitz that has become the standardprecursor of brutal wars to oust ``bad'' dictators in order to ensure, in this case, the ``credibility of NATO'' and make the world safe for the values it espouses. Ever more fearsome weapons can usefully be tested on the side while several ``good'' dictators remain on the right side of history.

The cameras have focussed on the terrible and moving plight of the Kosovar refugees. Yugoslavia has been bombed both because they are leaving and, sometimes, not leaving. Here cause and consequence have become part of a single tragic sequence. NATO bombing is now as much a factor in their flight and misery than the tyranny of the Serbs who are fighting to preserve what is left of their erstwhile country which NATO-Europe moved too soon to dismember. There is independent United Nations evidence that the Kosovo Liberation Army was not entirely innocent of more recently spiralling violence and mayhem.

NATO's war must stop. Milosevic has offered a negotiated settlement with an international, not NATO, presence in anautonomous Kosovo to which the Kosovar refugees may return. Rather than explore the offer, the hawks in NATO have intensified the war. The Yugoslav economy and infrastructure have been savaged while the month-long bombing, especially of chemical plants and refineries, has fouled the European environment.

NATO has launched a new cold war. It has further undermined the UN which has been increasingly sidelined or crudely manipulated in a most arrogant and dishonest manner. The NATO war, like the Iraq war, is illegal and violative of the UN Charter. The world is told that even if the UN Charter does not sanction NA-TO's war, America and Europe cannot stand by idly while gross violations of human rights occur. This is both specious and dangerous. It is a case of `heads I win, tails you lose' because the US and NATO have chosen brazenly to disregard or defy the UN on the one hand and recognise or ignore human rights selectively as suits their interests on the other.

Iraq was rightly punished for aggressionagainst Kuwait. Then? West Asian politics and oil interests intruded. It is now established that the UNSCOM mission was wailfully subverted by the US for intelligence gathering for its own purposes. The sanctions against Iraq constitute a deliberate war against the civil population, particularly women and children who have been its worst victims.

Hundreds of men, women and children are being killed and maimed every year even today by the so-called unexploded ordnance unleashed by the US in the 1960s and 1970s over Vietnam and Cambodia and during its ``secret war'' in Laos when over two million tonnes of ordnance was rained down for all of nine years. Villagers attribute many strange ailments and deaths to Agent Orange and other defoliants used by the Americans. All this uncompensated ``collateral damage'' to make the world safe for democracy and good governance?

What consequences for any of these and many more dreadful events? No talk of a war crimes tribunal as in Yugoslavia. No wonder that the USopposed the International Criminal Court as it will not allow its military personnel to be tried by any other than its own courts. More, it has the might to have arrogated to itself the right to place its domestic law above international law and subject other sovereign nations to its own domestic law.

During the 1980s, the US was so intent on fighting the ``evil empire'' in Afghanistan that it knowingly countenanced the reckless spread of small arms by conniving at planned leakages that fuelled murder, mayhem and terrorism, imperilling human rights, Islamic fundamentalism, narcotics and nuclear proliferation. So a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory had to be bombed.

Amnesty International's 1998 report ``The United States of America -- Rights for All'', reveals ``a persistent and widespread pattern of human rights violations in the USA.'' Read on: ``Beyond the USA's own borders, US government policies have often led to human beings being sacrificed for political, economic and military interests ... The USAhas continued to use international law and inter-governmental systems when they serve US foreign policy interests, but has sometimes discarded or condemned these systems when they are perceived to run counter to its interests.''

``The USA dominates the global market for arms and security equipment exports. It has supplied, and continues to supply, arms, security and training to governments and armed groups that commit torture, political killings and other human rights abuses in countries around the world''. Between 1991 and 1993 the US Commerce Department (on information obtained by the Federation of American Scientists) issued 350 export licences worth over $ 27 million for a variety of equipment like thumb-screws, leg-irons, strait jackets, and ``specially designed implements of torture'' which went to 57 countries, ``many of them with poor human rights records.''

The Kosovars must surely be enabled to return to their homes in safety and with dignity. Neither should Yugoslavia be destroyed. NATO iswinning no war. It is losing the peace by unleashing new hatreds and enmities.

The new world order these trends spell, unless fast and firmly corrected, is frightening. Let not absolute power corrupt absolutely.