Almost ten years ago, Serbia's bloody reprisals against the Albanian rebels in the then province of Kosovo roused the world to indignation. There was angry talk of hammers being taken to nuts, and as the conflict escalated and villages burned, for all their deep misgivings, the big powers resolved to do something.
What a contrast there is between the frantic activity undertaken then to halt the killings of civilians in Kosovo and the almost nonchalant attitude of the West towards the carnage unfolding in Gaza.
No one can claim not to know what is going on there, even if the bald statistics of this uneven struggle invite a certain disbelief: between 54 and 61 killed on the Palestinian side in a single day. On the other side, two dead, both soldiers. Can this be termed a fight? Given that half the dead Palestinians were incontrovertibly civilians and included several children, and that of the other half only their age and sex even allows us to conveniently write them off as "militants", it might be thought Saturday's events in Gaza deserved to be termed a massacre. Yet there is no sense of real urgency in Western capitals about Gaza, nor contrition on the part of Israel over what its forces are doing. On the contrary, the Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, yesterday declared that military operations will not only continue but grow in scale in pursuit of the goal of "bringing down" the Hamas-led government in the strip. Fresh bombing raids, targeting the offices of Hamas leaders, showed those were not idle words. This is the counsel of madness and despair, a kind of desperate macho politics that must end in more killings on the same monstrous scale as Saturday's.
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