Tunesia, Egyt and now Yemen: a domino effect in the Middle East?

"We find the actions of the government firing upon its own citizens to be outrageous and unacceptable," Harper told reporters in Vancouver on Monday. "We call on the government to cease these actions immediately."

Indeed even a very palpable threat of action didn't do anything to reduce the killings Saddam inflicted on the Iraqis.

Consider, for a moment the ghastly killings in Croatia and Bosnia following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, and how long it took and how much effort was required to induce the European powers to do something about the ethnic cleansing going on in their own backyards.

The depiction of the war in the international media maximized the impression of European Union powerlessness to settle a major war on its borders without America's intervention.

The economic heat was being turned up on the tiny but strategic Balkan country, and the Bush administration was doing the turning. In 1992 Washington imposed a total economic embargo on Yugoslavia, freezing all trade and plunging the economy into chaos, with hyperinflation and 70 per cent unemployment as the result. The Western public, above all in the United States, was told by the establishment media that the problems were all a result of a corrupt Belgrade dictatorship. The American media chose rarely if ever to mention the provocative Washington actions, or the IMF policies which were driving events in the Balkans.

...

In November 1990, under pressure from the Bush administration, the U.S. Congress passed the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act. The new U. S. law provided that any part of Yugoslavia failing to declare independence from Yugoslavia within six months of the act would lose all U.S. financial support. The law demanded separate elections, supervised by the U.S. State Department, in each of the six Yugoslav republics. It also stipulated that any aid go directly to each republic, and not to the central Yugoslav government in Belgrade. In short, the Bush administration demanded the self-dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation. They were deliberately lighting the fuse to an explosive new series of Balkan wars.

The road to the Dayton Accords reveals this dynamic. The peace agreement was signed only after Croatia, supported by the U.S. and having its military forces trained by retired U.S. military officers, drove 200,000 Serbs from their homes in the Serb Krajina area of Croatia. This ethnic cleansing campaign, called Operation Storm, combined with a massive NATO bombardment of Bosnian Serb territory and a successful Croat-Muslim offensive that retook 20 percent of Bosnia from Serb forces, brought Serbia to the negotiating table.

Western officials justified this policy on the grounds that only ethnic cleansing by Serbs counts as ethnic cleansing. U.S. Ambassador to Zagreb, Peter Galbraith, said of Operation Storm that it did not constitute ethnic cleansing because "ethnic cleansing is the specialty of the Serbs."

Then-European Union mediator in the former Yugoslavia, Carl Bildt, made a revealing statement after Operation Storm:

If we accept that it is all right for Tudjman to cleanse Croatia of its Serbs, then how on earth can we object if Yeltsin cleanses Chechnya or if one day Milosevic sends his army to clean out the Albanians from Kosovo?

Steven Harper: We find the actions of the government firing upon its own citizens to be outrageous and unacceptable. We call on the government to cease these actions immediately.

We don't, however, find the actions of the US regularly having its proxies or troops fire on citizens, rape, torture or murder the same, outrageous or unacceptable, ... or at least we don't say so, ... ummm, out loud that is.

In fact, we have joined them in doing so to the Afghan people. We did this because though we knew that such an invasion was illegal and immoral, we didn't want to piss the Americans off too much ... we didn't join them in Iraq or Vietnam, you see and, well, we thought that they might start to get a little testy. You know how they can be and all.

We call for respect for the universal rights that these -- peoples of this region, as peoples all around the world, have: the right to peaceful assembly, to freedom of expression. And we recognize their legitimate aspirations

• Qatar condemned the use of military aircraft and machine guns against unarmed protesters and called for an emergency meeting of the Arab League.

Any attempts to repeat the unrest in Russia would be quashed, he said.

(also, Afghanistan has its own thread or three)

"As we gain a greater understanding of what is happening, because communication has been very effectively shut down.... we will take appropriate steps in line with our policies, our values, our laws, but we are going to have to work in concert with the international community."