It's 1999 and once again the Balkans are in flames, once again the villages burn sending smoke to hang like burial shrouds in the sky over the once peaceful hills and fields, once again men find their last resting place in muddy mass graves by the roadsides, once again the nightly news bring us an almost desensitising deluge of images of despairing women, children crying in incomprehension at what is happening to them, and the old people carried like driftwood by yet another violent storm of history, their eyes vacant, beyond caring. The circumstances of geography and history seem to conspire against some places to make them epicentres for all kinds of human misery, and the Balkans, the soft underbelly of Europe, appear to be especially cursed by fate with their seemingly never-ending spiral of violence, procession of atrocities, and litanies of hatreds, both of the petty and the grandiose kinds. When as a result of a failed pyramid scheme Albania descended briefly into a civil war a few years ago all the army arsenals were systematically looted by the roving bands of men who got away with over a million AK-47s, not counting the more sophisticated weaponry. How much of it had found its way up north, across the Yugoslav border, is anyone's guess, but the newsreels show the Kosovo Albanian freedom-fighters having an increasingly well armed and organised presence that is a far cry from the sneakers and grandpa's old shotgun image of desperation only a few months ago. All that without any help from fellow Muslims form the Middle East as was the case in the Bosnian conflict (not counting the reports in the "Sunday Times" last year, about the terrorist megastar Osama Bin Laden's private efforts at infiltrating troops and supplies into Kosovo). The Kosovo Liberation Army is a hard-core Marxist guerrilla force, quite similar in that respect to the Stalinist-inclined Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) which is currently engaged in a war of internal attrition with the Turkish government and has recently gained considerable world-wide publicity after the capture of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan and the predictable eruption of Kurdish anger). That a communist partisan force is fighting for a cause of ethnic autonomy in the year 1999, ten years after the collapse of the internationalist experiment of the Berlin Wall, may seem like a bizarre case of anachronism, yet at the same time it is strangely appropriate in the context of the conflict revolving around the consequences of a 14th century battle. Kosovo might by 90% Albanian Muslim, but in the Serbian eyes it is forever part of the Serb spiritual commonwealth, sanctified by the Serbian blood spilled on the battlefield of Kosovo-Polje over six hundred years ago - in 1389 - in the last unsuccessful attempt to stop the Turkish tide from washing over all of the Balkans. On the same principles Australia could lay a claim to Gallipolli. Be that as it may, it is also the cause of the resentment at the lack of Western understanding and appreciation at the Serbs' role as the bulwark against the Muslim territorial aggression (never mind that the Albanians actually fought alongside Serbs at Kosovo-Polje). This preoccupation with the past seems entirely irrational and unthinkable for someone living in a country like Australia where a hundred-year-old building is considered a part of the national heritage. It's as if we were still re-fighting the battle of Agincourt or Lepanto. Such long a memory, so little forgiveness. The Balkans are a Jurassic Park of collective remembrance, one of the few places in the world where the fires of history are constantly stoked, mostly by the men for whom nationalism is a last justification of otherwise naked power. While the Poles have learned not to call Lvov theirs, and the Germans accepted the reality of Danzig being Gdansk, only a few hundred kilometres to the south the next generation keeps on re-fighting the wars of their ancestors, spurred on by their elders, idealistic fools or opportunists who have substituted nationalism for the failed god of communism as their guiding light. The dirty secret of the Balkan conflict is that the ethnic cleansing "works", in a sense of providing long-term ethnic (though not necessarily social or economic) stability. In 1945 the newly reconstituted Poland expelled 6 million ethnic Germans from East Prussia, Western Pomerania and Silesia, historically German lands granted to Poland under the Yalta settlement as a compensation for the Soviet annexation of the historically Polish parts of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Probably up to one million German civilians died as a result of the forced exodus, which was accompanied by a similar, although bloodless by comparison, migration of Poles expelled from the "Eastern territories" (often the whole towns were resettled in toto a thousand kilometres to the west. My grandfather was among the millions caught up in this movement of nations, ending up a resident in a German industrialist's villa, whose owner was forced to leave behind all his possessions). As horrific as the whole process was, it has resulted in Poland being now perhaps the most stable country in Central-Eastern Europe, untroubled by any secessionist tensions and internal ethnic hatreds. A bloody divorce of India and Pakistan in the late '40s combined with a forced mass exchanges of Muslim and Hindu populations has also arguably saved at least Pakistan some ethnic problems, as India still retains a considerable Muslim minority, the source of constant tensions and intra-ethnic violence. A pessimistic observer might conclude that only "western" countries where the traditions of democracy, individual rights and the rule of law have developed over the course of many centuries can peacefully sustain multicultural constructs; everywhere else multi-ethnic empires and states seemed to have been held together only through fear and the overwhelming power of central authority, be it the foreign occupier (the Ottoman Empire) or the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship (the Soviet Union). So the ethnic cleansing might "work" but it doesn't make it good. What was acceptable in the tumultuous times half a century ago surely should have no place at the dawn of the third millennium. We hope that we have outgrown that sort of simplistic, crude utilitarian calculus; our universal commitment to liberal values such as the inherent worth of every individual challenges us to look beyond the Realpolitik and pragmatism of jungle politics as practiced by, and benefiting the likes of Milosevic. But the killing goes on and our attempts at expressing moral indignation and outrage more often than not neither successfully assuage our own consciences nor bring help to the victims of violence and war. From a purely human and humane point of view there is no doubt that we - the heirs of the Judeo-Christian western liberal-democratic civilisation - need to do something. We have tolerated far too many holocausts this century, we can't cross the threshold of the next century with our boots leaving bloody footsteps on the floor. The thousands murdered and the hundreds of thousands of exiled people who for centuries have called Kosovo their home surely need to be protected (although where does that leave the tens of thousands that have recently perished in places like Turkey, Algeria or Sierra Leone is anyone's guess). And so NATO goes into action for the first time in its fifty years of existence, not to protect one of its members against the external aggression as its mission suggests, but to uphold the integrity of European civilisation in the forgotten corner of the continent. And so the Stealth Bombers and flocks of more conventional Allied warplanes sweep over the Balkans and bomb the hell out of Serbs (the admissions by the military staff that the air raids achieve woefully insignificant successes tend not to be reported as prominently on the nightly news as colourful explosions against the nigh-time sky). We bomb the military installations, then we move onto bridges and government buildings. Meanwhile the ethnic cleansing intensifies on a previously unprecedented scale, and the Serbian population (seemingly) closes in behind Slobodan Milosevic in an eerie re-run of the Saddam Hussein scenario where a hated despot on the verge of political extinction becomes something close to a national hero for standing up to the external aggression (I continue to be mystified though at the naive attitude of Western journalists who ask a man on the street of a dictatorship what he thinks about his dictator, and then unquestioningly and sincerely report the strong popular support. The man knows, unlike the journalists, that the journalists come and go but the secret police remains). So what we're doing doesn't seem to be working. Clinton and NATO have gone into action without any clear strategy and seemingly without any thought given to issue of escalation and disengagement - the makings of another Vietnam, this time without "the best and the brightest" in charge but with the usual fingerprints of the '60s generation which mouths cliches about universal values and principles but unlike their predecessors is not even willing to put someone else's sons where their mouth is. Yet another failure of the man who didn't inhale and didn't impale. Yet I'm still sickened by the sight of the Socialist Worker posters calling on people to demonstrate against the "NATO aggression". I'm sickened by Alex Mitchell of "Sun-Herald" who says that much, but it takes him six paragraphs. In a chilling deja vu of the Cold War, the enemy of the United States suddenly becomes beatified and the butcher is miraculously transformed into an innocent victim of aggression by a gung-ho militaristic cowboy superpower. The more things change. So welcome to the world of international relation, power politics and brute force. While we debate the future of our taxation system or the merits of dropping Shane Warne out of the test eleven, others debate the future of whole nations. How simple the GST suddenly looks by comparison.