>Dragan
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>>>To the West, there may be a good reason for a diversified approach (i.e. double standards), depending who was the Turkey allied with in different times.<<
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>Well, Turkey was allied with Germany in WWI as I recall. Later on a man called Adolf Hitler started another holocaust and observed (correctly) when challenged on how history would judge, that a generation later nobody remembered the Armenian slaughter. Then there was a fellow called Winston Churchill who thought it was an excellent idea to use poison gas on those pesky kurds. Just like that horrible Saddam. And there was another hero called "Bomber Harris" who arranged fire-bombing of German cities and was proud of the most ghastly and calculated civilian massacre on record- mostly women, children and elderly. A record which has since been gleefully claimed by the heroes of Stalist Russia, Cambodia and other friendly states with whom our industries are slavering to trade.
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>How cool we are to maintain such a sensitive, "diversified" memory as you put it.

And then it's all about media coverage. As you can find the coverage about the Kurds in Turkey pretty much nowhere (unless you look for what Kurds themselves publish, or maybe some humanitarian organizations - but let's stay with major media),just the same you couldn't find much about what was going on in Chile after 1973, at least not for a long time.

The numbers can also be blown out of proportion as needed. In the winter of 1996/97, we had 88 days of protests over the local elections that Milosevic stole. His TV kept silent for more than a month, and then started some coverage, but usually showing shots taken two hours before the people gathered, just to show there's just a handful of them, though the average was about 100000 people each day in Belgrade alone. When, OTOH, he staged a counter-rally, paying people to come and ordering local transportation to supply free busses, he gathered no more than a few thousand, and yet claimed he had 500000 people. Someone calculated the size of the place, and came up with a ridiculous result: half a million people there would mean 40 people per square meter :).

But that's live people. Counting dead people is not less prone to adding and taking zeros as needed. The total numbers for Yugoslavia 1999 are pretty well known now: about 1200 soldiers and other army personnel, 2-3000 of civilians in Serbia proper, and about 2000 of Albanians (and the UN experts still didn't come up with the percentage of them being killed by their own). My sources may be off some - check with UN websites. Yet the CNN et al claimed 100000 civilian victims among Albanians, and the claim was widely used as a pretext to stretch the bombing way beyond any reason.

The same mme Albright, who persuaded the generals into this bombing, has also been a proponent of sanctions against Iraq. Knowing how many Iraqis died of diseases and starvation, reporters once asked her "Was it worth it?", and she confirmed.

The net result of just two these actions: Milosevic stayed in power a year longer than he would. Saddam is still in power. I've heard the diabetes doesn't exist in Iraq anymore. All the patients were left to die.