Kosovo Is Echoed across the World Writers on the War: Wole Soyinka President of the International Parliam Ent of Writers Launches a New Series

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THE ARMENIANS will recognise themselves in Kosovo. They understand only too well a world that turns a blind eye to the structured violation of its kind, and then goes further to insult the claims and duty of memory by the manipulation of language, inventing a syntax of denial in the testaments of reality. They will be among the first to assert, and with unassailable truth, that because 1915 was denied, 1939 was made inevitable, and the once unthinkable of 1999 now confronts the conscience of the world in a wearisomely familiar replay. So would the Tutsi of Rwanda, albeit employing different reference points: that because Europe ignored 1994 - at least until much too late, 1999 …