This is necessary, we are told, in order to "avert a humanitarian catastrophe", and because, "the only language Milosevic understands is force"... which happens to be the language the US wants to speak. Kosovo is presented as the problem, and Nato as the solution. In reality, Nato is the problem, and Kosovo is the solution.

After the collapse of Soviet Union, Nato needed a new excuse for pumping resources into the military-industrial complex. Thanks to Kosovo, Nato can celebrate its 50th anniversary next month by consecration of its new global mission: to intervene anywhere in the world on humanitarian grounds.

The recipe is easy: arm a group of radical secessionists to shoot policemen, describe the inevitable police retaliation as "ethnic cleansing", promise the rebels that Nato will bomb their enemy if the fighting goeson, and then interpret the resulting mayhem as a challenge to Nato's "resolve" which must be met by military action.

Thanks to Kosovo, national sovereignty will be a thing of the past - not of course for great powers like the US and China, but for weaker states that really need it. National boundaries will be no obstacle to Nato intervention. Thanks to Kosovo, the US can control eventual Caspian oil pipeline routes between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, and extend the European influence of favoured ally Turkey. Last February 23, James Hooper, executive director of the Balkan Action Council, one of the many think tanks that have sprung up to justify the ongoing transformation of former Yugoslavia into Nato protectorates, gave a speech at the Holocaust Museum in Washington at the invitation of its "Committee of Conscience". The first item on his list of "things to do next" was this: "Accept that the Balkans are a region of strategic interest for the United States, the new Berlin if you will, the testingground for Nato's resolve and US leadership. The administration should level with the American people and tell them that we are likely to be in the Balkans militarily indefinitely, at least until there is a democratic government in Belgrade."

In the Middle Ages, the Crusaders launched their conquests from the Church pulpits. Today, Nato does so in the Holocaust Museum. War must be sacred. In the middle of conflict as in Kosovo, massacres can easily be perpetrated... or "arranged". There are always television crews looking precisely for that "top story". Recently, Croatian officers have admitted that in 1993 they themselves staged a "Serbian bombing" of the Croatian coastal city of Sibenik for the benefit of Croatian television crews. The former commander of the 113th Croatian brigade headquarters, Davo Skugor, reacted indignantly. "Why so much fuss?" he complained. "There is no city in Croatia in which such tactical tricks were not used. After all, they are an integral part of strategic planning. That'sonly one in a series of stratagems we've resorted to during the war."

The basic problem of Kosovo is the difficult coexistence on one territory of ethnic communities radically separated by customs, language and historical self-identification. From a humanistic viewpoint, this problem is more fundamental than the problem of state boundaries. Mutual hatred and fear is the fundamental human catastrophe in Kosovo. It has been going on for a long time. It has got much worse in recent years. Why?

Two factors stand out as paradoxically responsible for this worsening - paradoxically, because presented to the world as factors which should have improved the situation. The first is the establishment in the autonomous Kosovo of the 1970s and 1980s of separate Albanian cultural institutions, notably the Albanian language faculties in Pristina University. This cultural autonomy, demanded by ethnic Albanian leaders, turned out to be a step not to reconciliation between communities but to their total separation. Studiesin Albanian history and literature amounted above all to glorifications of Albanian identity. Extreme cultural autonomy has created two populations with no common language.

In retrospect, what should have been done was to combine Serbian and Albanian studies, requiring both languages. This would have subjected both Serbian and Albanian national myths to the scrutiny of the other, and worked to correct the nationalist bias in both. The lesson of this grave error should be a warning elsewhere, starting in Macedonia, where Albanian nationalists are clamouring to repeat the Pristina experience in Tetova. Other countries with mixed ethnic populations should take note.

The second factor has been the support from foreign powers, especially the United States, to the Albanian nationalist cause in Kosovo. By uncritically accepting the version of the tangled Kosovo situation presented by the Albanian lobby, American politicians have greatly exacerbated the conflict by encouraging the armed Albanian rebels andpushing the Serbian authorities into extreme efforts to wipe them out. The "Kosovo Liberation Army" (UCK) has nothing to lose by provoking deadly clashes, once it is clear that the number of dead and the number of refugees will add to the balance of the "humanitarian catastrophe" that can bring Nato and US air power into the conflict on the Albanian side. The Serbs have nothing to gain by restraint, once it is clear that they will be blamed anyway for whatever happens. By identifying the Albanians as "victims" per se, and the Serbs as the villains, the United States and its allies have made any fair and reasonable political situation virtually impossible.

Underlying the American myth are Brzezinski-style geostrategic designs on potential pipeline routes to Caspian oil and methodology for expanding Nato as an instrument to ensure US hegemony over the Eurasian land mass.Supposing by some miracle the world suddenly turned upside down, and there were outside powers who really cared about the fate of Kosovo andits inhabitants, one could suggest the following: