Letter: Kosovo

Stewart Knowles Fleet,Hampshire
Tuesday 20 April 1999 00:02 BST
Comments

Sir: War is bad enough but I feel I can take no more heart-on-sleeve melodrama from Robert Fisk with his irritating picture by-lined "reports" from Belgrade.

He led the paper on Friday (16 April) with his "horror story" from the roadside where lay the bodies of those killed by bombs from a Nato aircraft. This, as Nato has admitted, was a dreadful accident and not, as Fisk contends, an atrocity.

Rape and the whole grisly business of ethnic cleansing, these are atrocities and they are perpetrated by Serbs on the ground, not by Nato from the air.

All war is terrible. Every death is a tragedy. Fisk's award-winning descriptive writing makes great play with the emotive detail. He cannot resist the poetry. But a corpse with no head is still a man killed in an awful accident. He is no more and no less dead than a child killed in a road accident and the tragedy for the bereaved is neither more nor less.

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