HALIFAX MP Alice Mahon has come in for a bit of stick lately from members of her own Government and the media. For daring to suggest that killing Serbian civilians is not the best way to stop a dictator killing Albanian civilians, Mrs Mahon has been roundly condemned.

I think it was Jonathan Swift who said something along the lines of when a man of genius appears in the world, you can guarantee that all the fools would conspire against him. Now I wouldn't go as far as describing Mrs Mahon as a genius, but I have long admired her political integrity.

After reading reports about her recent visit to Serbia, I must say that I have now added remarkable courage to the list of the qualities the formidable lady displays. Mrs Mahon's stance is so refreshing in a country where we are more used to seeing mediocre politicians strutting around trying to appear tough and statesmenlike in the face of adversity.

As usual the adversity has to be faced by people thousands of miles away from where our 'tough' politicians are strutting at any given moment. Quite clearly NATO leaders and their public relations people are talking nonsense about the war.

The logic they are espousing is that it is quite acceptable to kill innocent civilians by dropping bombs on their heads if it is done by our side, but 'an evil beyond belief' for the other side to kill civilians at close quarters.

If Serbian planes had dropped bombs from high altititude on Albanian civilians, then there would be cries of anguish from NATO and references to war crimes tribunals when the conflict ended. But when we drop bombs on both refugee convoys and Serbian civilians they are either 'tragic mistakes' or 'unintended consequences'.

NATO went to war ostensibly to save civilians. That clearly didn't work as the suffering of the Albanians in Kosovo intensified as soon as the bombing campaign began.

Under the cloak of war the Serbs were able to terrorise, butcher and expel the Kosovo Albanians from Serbia. So many Kosovan Albanians died and lost their homes precisely because NATO started the bombing campaign not in spite of it.

Before it was launched the number of dead Albanians about matched the number of dead Serbs, killed by the terrorist Kosovan Liberation Army. Incidentally, these drug-smuggling murderers have now been given a NATO propaganda makover, emerging as white knights and models of inter-ethnic tolerance.

Is there anyone in NATO who seriously believes that the Albanians would have behaved any differently to the Serbs had they had the upper hand in Kosovo? It seems that NATO is now pursuing a similar but arms-length campaign of terror against the Serbian population. A NATO spokesman said: "We cannot completely exclude the possibility of harm to civilians, or to civilian property during a conflict such as this one."

Killing Serbian civilians to achieve the political aim of ousting their Government is to abandon any pretext of moral authority.

What we are left with is a bunch of NATO poltroons determined to massacre anyone at all in order to save face and extricate themselves from a hopeless situtation their own ignorance and ego-mania landed them in.

This is not to mention the billions and billions of pounds which will have to be spent eventually to sort the mess out, if it ever can be sorted out.

As far as the NATO leaders were concerned the Serbian Government would cave in after the first few bombing raids and comply with whatever conditions were imposed.

So the decision to send in the bombers was not only cowardly, it was also stupid. I am also getting sick of this stupid lie, repeated by NATO leaders and apologists ad nauseum, that NATO is at war with 'Slobodan Milosovic'. It is a logical absurdity for the armed forces of a military pact to be at war with a single person.

If NATO leaders and their public relations parrots think they can justify this war with Serbia, then why are they so afraid to come out and say 'we are at war with Serbia'?

Their attempt to personalise the war is simply an attempt to cloud the devastating effect the bombing is having on the Serbian population.

It is this same as the bombing of Iraq. 'We are at war with Saddam Hussain' say our brave NATO leaders.

If that is so, why don't they go to Iraq and attack him personally instead of ordering crippling sanctions and despatching bombers to kill Iraqi civilians from a safe distance?

Those Serbian civilians fortunate enough to escape direct harm will suffer for years from the economic devastation from the prolongued bombing campaign.

Mrs Mahon probably suffers from the inability to see a moral difference between a dead Albanian child riddled with Serbian bullets and a dead Serbian chiild riddled with NATO bomb shrapnel.

She perhaps does not understand that we have to wring our hands with righteous anguish and vow to press on the crusade to the bitter end at the sight of one, and shrug our shoulders while shedding a few crocodile tears over the other. Long may she remain blind and ignorant.

As for the rest of us, the position remains: We will continue to kill civilian men, women and children until one man decides to do as he is told. We should be so proud of ourselves.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.