Reflections On NATO And Kosovo
By Stephen R. Shalom
The U.S.-led NATO war against Yugoslavia has caused much
confusion on the left. Many, moved by the evident suffering of
the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, have supported - with varying
degrees of reluctance or enthusiasm - the NATO assault. A few,
moved by the outrage of NATO's attack, have chosen to defend
Milosevic. Both of these approaches are deeply flawed,
politically and morally.
I. U.S. Motivations
Two million refugees! 2,200 villages destroyed! At least
2,000 civilians slaughtered by government-backed killers!
In the face of these abominations, the United States
government decided to act, with the help of its NATO allies. U.S.
fighter-bombers and helicopters and U.S. and NATO small arms,
tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery were all brought
to bear on the situation.
But these weapons of war were not used to attack the
perpetrator of the atrocities. Instead, these armaments were
provided, often free or at bargain-basement prices, to the
killers for them to use in carrying out their atrocities.
The killers I am referring to, of course, are the security
forces and deaths squads of the Turkish government that have been
waging a scorched-earth campaign against the country's Kurdish
minority for years, and the numbers above come from a 1995 report
by Human Rights Watch, which also notes that weaponry from the
United States has made up 80 percent of Turkey's foreign-source
arms and has been directly implicated in attacks on civilian
villages, extrajudicial executions, torture, and indiscriminate
fire.
This horror story, showing the total lack of humanitarian
concern on the part of U.S. policymakers, can be repeated many
times over. Sometimes the United States has simply ignored mass
murder. In Rwanda in 1994, for example, the extermination of more
than half a million people did not induce Washington to employ
even modest diplomatic means to restrain the slaughter. In other
cases, the United States has not just been oblivious to
large-scale killings, but has been directly complicit. During the
anti-communist massacres in Indonesia in 1965, for example,
Washington provided, weapons, diplomatic support, and even lists
of names of people to liquidate. When Pakistani troops went on a
rampage of murder and rape in 1971, sending millions into exile,
U.S. policy was (in Henry Kissinger's words) to "tilt in favor of
Pakistan." In Guatemala during the 1980s, 200,000 people were
killed by government forces, backed by Washington. And this year,
Colombia is the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid
(after Israel and Egypt), as its counter-insurgency war has
displaced over a million people. Despite Colombia's appalling
human rights record, "a U.S. Defense Department and Central
Intelligence Agency team worked with Colombian military officers
on the 1991 intelligence reorganization that resulted in the
creation of killer networks that identified and killed civilians
suspected of supporting guerrillas" (Human Rights Watch,
Colombia's Killer Networks, 1996).
And in some cases, the United States doesn't just support
killers, but does the killing itself, as in the current sanctions
regime imposed on Iraq, that, coupled with the wartime targeting
of civilian infrastructure, has led to perhaps more than a
million excess deaths.
So the claim by Clinton and company that they have been
moved to action over Kosovo because of their humanitarian concern
has not the slightest shred of credibility. Before the bombing
began, estimates of the civilian death toll in Kosovo were in the
range of 2,000 and the number of refugees (most of them still
within Kosovo) somewhat over 300,000. These are terrible numbers
and they are an indictment of Milosevic's brutality. But they are
hardly different from - and in some cases they hardly compare
with - atrocities around the world that have elicited not a peep
of humanitarian concern from Washington. (1)
It is important to make clear that the argument is not being
made here that because the United States failed to act humanely
in some or in many cases, it should therefore never act humanely.
Rather, the argument is that U.S. policy in the face of other
humanitarian crises tells us something about U.S. motives, and
U.S. motives are relevant for our understanding of how the United
States will act in this case, what ends it will seek, and what
precedents will be established.
Some on the left who support the U.S./NATO intervention in
Kosovo have put forward their view of the particular way the
intervention ought to be carried out so as to achieve
humanitarian ends. Thus, Bogdan Denitch has backed the
intervention while opposing the bombing of Belgrade and other
Serbian cities and urging that ground troops rather than bombing
be employed since the only way to stop the ethnic cleansing is on
the ground. But when the left lends support to U.S. intervention,
the White House doesn't then turn over command of the operation
to the left. Rotten governments pursuing policies for their own
reasons and interests, rather than for humanitarian reasons, will
carry out those policies in a manner designed to serve their
interests, not those of the left or of humanitarianism.
To use an analogy suggested by Gar Lipow, if a terrorist is
holding people hostage in the living room of a house and the
police charge in wildly, they will be putting those hostages at
risk. Even more reckless would to charge into another room of the
house (because it's safer: there's no terrorist there) and start
destroying things of value to the terrorist. Such a strategy
would seem ideally designed to put the hostages in the greatest
possible danger. No one concerned about the well-being of the
hostages would behave in this way, but it is exactly the strategy
followed by NATO (regardless of what Denitch may have wished). A
cynic might suggest that Washington in fact didn't mind giving
Milosevic time to destroy the KLA (Kosova Liberation Army) before
forcing him to back down (armed Albanians can be a destabilizing
force). But even if (as is likely) this interpretation goes too
far, it is clear that Clinton has not acted as someone who places
the welfare of Albanian Kosovars very high on his list of
concerns. And everything we know about Clinton and U.S. foreign
policy should have left us in no doubt about this. If you don't
care about Kurds or Timorese or Palestinians or Iraqis on
humanitarian grounds, you probably are not going to care very
much about the Kosovars.
A ground invasion of Kosovo, it should be noted, while not
as obviously oblivious to the Albanian's plight, would hardly
have served them much better. The Yugoslav army is no push-over
and NATO forces could not possibly have occupied Kosovo before
the ethnic cleansing that we've witnessed in the past weeks.
Milosevic clearly wouldn't want a disloyal Albanian population
behind his lines, and refugee flows would disrupt any NATO
offensive. In addition, there would be horrific "collateral
damage" to Kosovar civilians from NATO attacks. (The U.S. record
in conquering territory containing "friendly" civilians has not
been inspiring. In the battle of Manila in February 1945, for
example, as many as 100,000 non-combatants died - from rampaging
Japanese troops, but also from U.S. artillery fire.)
Many of the left interventionists insist that they have been
outspoken critics of U.S. policies in Turkey and Timor. They want
humanitarian policies followed in all these cases, they declare,
but in Kosovo too. We can take them at their word, but the moral
consistency or motives of the left interventionists are not what
is at issue. Rather it's the moral consistency and motives of
those running the intervention.
The motives for this war have nothing to do with
humanitarianism and everything to do with asserting U.S. power,
with maintaining U.S. and NATO credibility, with creating a
military instrument that Washington can use in Europe and beyond,
free from any UN restraint. (Despite the end of the Cold War, the
NATO military alliance has recently been expanded at U.S.
urging.) And these motives, not those of the left, determine how
the United States has acted and will act regarding Kosovo.
As long as Milosevic could oppress the Albanian minority
without creating large refugee flows that might destabilize the
region, Washington was uninterested in the Kosovo issue. (Thus in
1995, the United States excluded the Kosovo issue and Ibrahim
Rugova, the Albanian Kosovar leader and advocate of non-violence,
from the Dayton negotiations; with Rugova's approach bearing no
fruit, the KLA soon emerged.) Once significant fighting began in
1998, the Kosovo question became a test of wills between NATO and
Milosevic. At Rambouillet, Milosevic was told "sign or be bombed"
- a demand ideally suited to flexing U.S. muscle, far less to
reaching some kind of agreement. The diplomatic route might
strengthen the UN and international law and make Russia a player,
all of which would interfere with U.S. freedom of action.
Bombing, on the other hand, leads with the U.S. strong suit and
enhances the U.S. reputation for toughness. ("That the U.S. may
become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are
attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to
all adversaries", declared a 1995 Pentagon planning document.)
Once threats are made, of course, they must be carried out if the
credibility of future threats is to be maintained. ("What good is
this marvelous military force", Albright asked Gen. Colin Powell
a few years back, "if we can never use it?") And, likewise,
threats carried out but not yielding total victory need to be
escalated until the adversary is crushed. (And, thus, diplomatic
proposals and cease-fire offers are dismissed out of hand.)
There are other motives, as well, for the bombing. There is
the boost it provides to military spending - not so much because
of the ordinance expended, but because attacks on Yugoslavia (and
Iraq) "draw attention to the sad fact that peace on earth is not
here", in the words of one Wall Street analyst (NYT, April 11,
1999). Higher military budgets mean higher profits for defense
contractors and, as important, government-funded research and
development which benefits all the high-tech sectors of the
economy. And getting NATO members to appreciate their need for
more weapons will provide an added bonanza for U.S. arms
companies.
II. Consequences
The consequences of the NATO bombing have been horrendous,
first and most tragically for the Kosovo Albanians.
Serbian security forces were not benign before March 1999,
but the bombing unleashed a barbaric outburst of ethnic cleansing
on a large scale. At this writing a million Kosovars have been
uprooted and the level of killing - although unknown - surely
exceeds the 2,000 of the past year and we can only hope it is not
many times higher. Responsibility for the atrocities rests
clearly on the Serbian military and paramilitary forces and those
who lead them. But NATO actions have contributed to the
catastrophe in four ways. First, the bombing required the removal
of the international observers and relief workers whose presence
provided some restraint. ("The Serbs were spring-loaded to go
when the last observer left Kosovo", said a NATO intelligence
official quoted in the Washington Post, April 11, 1999.) Second,
the bombing incensed many even in Serbia's democratic movement,
so one can only imagine how it must have affected Serbian
security forces in Kosovo; unable to retaliate against NATO
missiles and warplanes, they could be expected to lash out at
those most vulnerable. Third, mass expulsions would benefit the
Serbian military, who hoped a flood of refugees would "overwhelm
and distract NATO forces stationed on the other side of the
border" (WP, April 11, 1999, citing Western officials). And
fourth, if NATO was going to try to force a settlement
militarily, there was considerable incentive for Milosevic to
make sure he was in the strongest possible bargaining position
when the fighting ended: i.e., to try to totally wipe out the
KLA, uproot its mass base, and remove Albanians from as much
territory as possible in preparation for any partition. Whether
Milosevic has also calculated that many military-aged males can
be neutralized before they become potential KLA fighters, and
intellectuals eliminated before they can provide their skills to
the Albanian cause remains unknown amid the wartime propaganda.
What were U.S. officials thinking? There are two
possibilities. Either they were stupid for failing to realize
that Milosevic was not going to fold up after the first few bombs
fell or else they anticipated events and yet followed a course
that they knew would cause an immense humanitarian crisis, for
which they had not even prepared adequate relief supplies.
To have expected a brief bombing to get Milosevic to reverse
course was a total misreading of Balkan history. Milosevic had
come to power in Serbia precisely by exploiting the issue of
Kosovo - he had declared himself the champion of the Kosovo Serb
minority oppressed by the Albanians - and thus he was far more
likely to hang tough over Kosovo than he had been over Bosnia.
Rather than acknowledge this incredible misjudgment, many
officials have been rushing to the media to explain that this is
all exactly what they anticipated. "I can't say I'm surprised by
any of this", stated NATO Supreme Commander Gen. Wesley Clark.
"The military authorities fully anticipated the vicious approach
that Milosevic would adopt, as well as the terrible efficiency
with which he would carry it out" (Newsweek, April 12, 1999). It
is measure of the current moral climate that policymakers are
more worried about appearing stupid than immoral.
The Albanian Kosovars have not been the only victims of the
U.S. bombing. Serbian democracy has been set back substantially.
Milosevic has been able to use the war as an excuse for further
clamping down on the independent media. More depressingly,
however, many who were in the streets two years ago in
pro-democracy demonstrations have rallied to the flag. As Zoran
Djindjic, the leader of Serbia's Democratic Party and an
organizer of pro-democracy demonstrations in 1996-97 put it, the
"bombs have marginalized any dissenters here." Washington, he
said bitterly, has spent more on one day's bombs than it ever
spent helping the democracy movement in Yugoslavia (NYT, March
29, 1999). In addition, Montenegro, the smaller of the two
Yugoslav republics, had previously passed a resolution
questioning Milosevic's Kosovo policy, but the bombing has muted
its criticisms as well.
Left supporters of the bombing argue that the opposition in
Serbia had not been very outspoken on their government's
oppressive policies in Kosovo. There is considerable truth in
this claim, as in their observation that "Serbia cannot have
democracy and Kosovo" (Denitch and Ian Williams, Nation, April
26, 1999). But cruise missiles and bombs hardly inspire the
Serbian population to thoughts of John Stuart Mill. I support a
Palestinian state. Most Israelis - whether Labor or Likud -
oppose meaningful Palestinian self-determination. Does anyone
think that NATO surgical strikes on Tel Aviv would improve the
prospects for Israeli democracy or reduce the influence of
anti-democratic forces in Israeli life? Would NATO bombardment of
downtown Jakarta over the issue of freedom for East Timor
strengthen the hand of Indonesian democrats?
NATO "has not deliberately targeted Serbian civilians",
insists Branka Magas, another left interventionist
(http://www.bosnia.org.uk). But these sorts of wars, particularly
those fought by governments who rank their credibility above all
else, follow a deadly dynamic. The first bombs hit military
targets outside the cities. But when there is no surrender, it
becomes necessary to up the ante, and then military sites in
Belgrade are struck. Three days into the attacks, Anthony Lewis
wrote in the March 27 New York Times that the "scale of the
operation so far has been nowhere near large enough to make Mr.
Milosevic believe we mean business." And when this doesn't yield
the desired results, targeting restrictions are increasingly
relaxed. "We have to drop the bridges and turn out the lights -
there should be no more outdoor rock concerts in downtown
Belgrade", Sen. John McCain declared (Newsweek, April 12, 1999).
"Twelve days of surgical bombing was never going to turn Serbia
around", wrote New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman on April
6. "Let's see what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does.
Give war a chance."
Smart bombs are technologically remarkable, but still often
miss their targets. So far the bombing has caused several hundred
civilian deaths, a toll that will surely go up, perhaps
exponentially as U.S. frustration with Milosevic grows, but this
isn't the main catastrophe that threatens. That will come after
the war when the wartime targeting of the civilian infrastructure
- the power plants, the fuel supplies, the bridges - leaves the
civilian population without adequate means to sustain decent
lives amid a ruined environment. And this will have the same
disastrous impact on democratic prospects in Serbia as U.S.
policy has had on Iraq, where a ruthless leader has been able to
turn the devastating economic assault on the populace to
strengthen his position.
A letter-writer to the New York Times (March 31, 1999)
wrote:
"...just as the Holocaust could not have taken place without the
acquiescence of the German public, the Serbian people clearly
bear responsibility for the actions taken by their Government.
Consequently, NATO should cease what appears to be its policy of
avoiding all but highly targeted attacks on Serbia."
Concurring, Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times
(April 23):
"Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs
certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every
week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country
back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want
1389? We can do 1389 too."
What is needed, says Friedman, is a "merciless" air war,
targeting "every power grid, water pipe, bridge, [and] road..."
This indeed seems to have become U.S. policy, and it is the
moral logic of Milosevic. In the view of the Yugoslav leader (a)
the KLA has committed terrorist acts, (b) much of Kosovo's
Albanian population has acquiesced in those acts and supports the
KLA and thus bears responsibility for the terrorism, and
therefore (c) military actions against the KLA need not worry
about harm to civilians; dual use facilities - things of benefit
both to the KLA and the civilian population, such as villages -
are thus fair game.
The other major consequence of the NATO attack is that the
fragile structures of international law have been seriously
weakened and the precedent that U.S. and NATO military power may
be deployed - not where international law or the United Nations
dictate - but wherever Washington chooses.
Left interventionists reject this argument, claiming instead
that the precedent is being established that ethnic cleansing is
impermissible and that the international community will stop it
when it occurs. But this is another place where moral consistency
and motives matter. Had the United States acted to stop
atrocities in Turkey and Pakistan and El Salvador and many other
countries (where, of course, no military intervention was
required - it would have been enough to end U.S. support for the
butchers) and then acted to stop atrocities in Kosovo as well,
the precedent might well have been established that severe human
rights abuses will not be tolerated. But it is a very different
precedent that follows from a United States which ignores some
atrocities, participates in others, and intervenes against only
those where some other U.S. interest is at stake.
What lesson do we think Turkey's leaders are learning from
the attack on Kosovo? Surely not: "This shows what happens to all
who commit atrocities against ethnic minorities." Isn't it more
likely that their conclusion is going to be - as will that of
anyone who considers cases like Turkey, Timor, Palestine, and
Iraq pre-1990 (when Saddam Hussein was a U.S. ally and murdered
Kurds) on the one hand, and cases like Iraq post-1990 and Kosovo
on the other - that serving U.S. interests allows you to do
whatever you want with your ethnic minorities and opposing U.S.
interests will get you attacked, regardless of your human rights
record?
The real precedent of the NATO assault on Yugoslavia is that
a U.S.-dominated military alliance may arrogate to itself the
right to attack another country, bypassing international law and
the United Nations.
III. International Law
Denitch and Williams claim that in fact the NATO actions
diminish the United Nations less than would leaving Milosevic to
stand in violation of more than 50 Security Council resolutions.
But would they also consider it a contribution to world law and
the UN if Russia or the Arab League decided to attack Israel so
that that country's brazen defiance of countless Security Council
resolutions would not stand? Would Japanese bombing of Jakarta
for its flouting Security Council resolutions on East Timor
promote the rule of law? Or perhaps Libya or Iraq or Osama Bin
Ladin could be encouraged to set off some bombs in New York City
to enhance the prestige of the World Court, whose ruling against
the United States on Nicaragua has been shamelessly ignored by
Washington. No, vigilantism doesn't does not heighten respect for
law.
The Security Council of the United Nations, say Denitch and
Williams, was blocked from action by the prospect of Chinese and
Russian veto. Twelve out of the fifteen members, they note,
refused to support a Russian draft resolution on March 26
condemning the bombing. But a vote after the fact, particularly
after the stepped up ethnic cleansing that the bombing had set
off, on a resolution that crassly included no condemnation of
that accelerated ethnic cleansing, is not the same as prior
Security Council authorization for the bombing. The UN Charter is
quite clear in prohibiting enforcement action by regional
organizations without the authorization of the Security Council.
(The Rio Group, an organization of Latin American countries,
issued a communique on March 25, 1999 regretting the recourse to
the use of force in the Balkan region in contravention of the UN
Charter.)
To be sure, the Security Council is a terribly undemocratic
body, with five countries having permanent membership and the
right of veto. But the answer to the undemocratic nature of the
Council is not to resort to an organization that is even less
accountable to world opinion, namely NATO. The value of the
United Nations is that it places some small check on unilateral
big power actions. Sometimes (as during the Gulf War) the United
States will be able to bribe, cajole, and intimidate the UN into
going along with it, but not always. To bypass the UN for NATO is
to unleash big powers, particularly the biggest of them all, to
act without restraint.
Of course, socialists and democrats do not consider law to
be sacrosanct. Civil disobedience is often a moral imperative and
revolution is sometimes necessary. But the story of democracy has
been the struggle to get governments to obey the law, both
domestic and international - not because the law is
unproblematic, but because the alternative is arbitrary power. We
don't want the government to protect us from crime by engaging in
illegal searches or by denying defendants a fair trial - not
because we fetishize law, but because we fear arbitrary power. To
give the United States carte blanche to violate international law
will increase human suffering. Sure, if Washington were run by
angels we might be less concerned about the need for law. But -
and here the discussion of moral consistency and motives comes in
again - there are no angels inside the Beltway.
National sovereignty, say Denitch and Williams, is a
"dubious" right. But while certainly not an absolute, it does
provide some measure of protection for the weak. When Latin
American countries pressed the United States in the 1930s to give
a pledge of non-intervention, they no doubt realized that some
hypothetical interventions could be beneficial. But counterposed
to those theoretical possibilities was the grueling reality of
U.S. marines landing whenever U.S. interests were threatened.
There is a tension in international law between the right of
national sovereignty and the individual rights of human beings:
governments are supposed to refrain from intervening in the
internal affairs of other countries, but at the same time
governments have international obligations to respect the human
rights of their people. What should a government do when some
other government is violating its people's rights? It should urge
the violator to adhere to its international human rights
obligations; it should use its diplomatic influence to try to end
the abuses. Certainly, it should avoid supporting oppressive
regimes. But generally it should not begin bombing the other
country to punish human rights violations.
This is so for at least three reasons. First, because
outsiders can rarely bring people freedom; freedom comes from
one's own activity. Second, because violence is so often
counter-productive. And third, because the right of humanitarian
intervention is an asymmetrical right - it is the right of the
powerful to intervene in the affairs of the weak, and not vice
versa. Humanitarian intervention, Richard Falk has reminded us,
is like the Mississippi River: it only flows from North to South.
Uruguay cannot use B-52s to punish Britain for its policy in
Northern Ireland. Yemen cannot launch cruise missiles on
Washington out of solidarity with the oppressed in U.S. cities.
So we need to be very careful about a right that can be enjoyed
only by the powerful.
From the point of view of the powerful, the humanitarian
rationale for intervention has great appeal. Because every
country violates human rights to some extent, if the United
States were allowed to decide which human rights abuses were most
serious and which warrant intervention, Washington would have a
built-in rationale for intervening wherever and whenever it
wanted. Again, given the motives of U.S. foreign policy, this
cannot be a welcome prospect.
Genocide, of course, is different. There the human stakes
are so high that our general presumption against non-intervention
may be overridden. But what was going on in Kosovo before March
1999 was not even close to genocide. (2)
The two thousand Kosovar deaths, most at the hands of
Serbian security forces, between March 1998 and March 1999 were
appalling and inexcusable, as were the several hundred thousand
displaced persons. But this was not genocide. We cheapen the term
if we use it to characterize every atrocity. Nor is ethnic
cleansing, despicable as it is, the same as genocide. When in
1948 Israel expelled three quarters of a million Palestinians,
propelled by a massacre here and there to speed the flight, this
was ethnic cleansing; it was not genocide.
Writing in The Nation of March 30, 1998, when the death toll
was a small fraction of 2,000 and the refugee count in the tens
of thousands, Ian Williams declared that Belgrade's behavior was
"on the verge of triggering the duties of signatories to the
Genocide Convention." But if these atrocities approached
genocide, then the term had no meaning at all, and dozens of
countries would be engaging in genocide every year. The Genocide
Convention requires signatories to act to stop genocide - though
it doesn't specify how the existence of genocide is to be decided
and what actions should be taken. Does Williams really think that
China should have intervened (indeed, was duty bound to
intervene) in India to stop "genocide" in Kashmir (where the toll
far exceeded that of Kosovo)? According to Amnesty International,
in June 1997, 40,000 people fled their homes during Philippine
army counter-insurgency operations against the Moro Islamic
Liberation Front. Should North Korea have intervened? Was North
Korea obligated to intervene?
In 1994, actual genocide took place in Rwanda - the goal of
the Power Hutu regime was not to drive the Tutsi out of the
country, but to kill every Tutsi man, woman, and child they could
lay their hands on - and the world stood by. The U.S. State
Department even prohibited its officials from using the word
"genocide" to describe the situation, despite clear information
that this is precisely what was going on. Many people, including
many on the left, seem to have drawn the wrong lessons from this
horror story. The lesson is not that every atrocity should be
called genocide. (Genocide should be called genocide; lesser
crimes should be called what they are - which doesn't preclude
the most vigorous condemnation.) Nor is the lesson that
humanitarian concerns require the United States to side-step the
United Nations and international law. (The UN could have acted -
it had a peacekeeping force in Kigali - but the force was
downsized when the killings began at the insistence of the United
States; and all further UN action was blocked by Washington.) Nor
is the lesson that military intervention is the only way to deal
with such crises. (Various non-military measures could have
helped immensely - such as threatening the killers with a loss of
aid and being held accountable, or pressing France, which had
much influence in Kigali, to restrain its ally.) Nor, finally, is
the lesson that any military intervention is better than nothing.
(The UN finally authorized the French to intervene, a move
cheered by the killers; perhaps 20,000 Tutsis were saved - more
than half a million had been slaughtered - but because France had
its own dirty motives it helped the killers regroup over the
border, which has led to a continuing human rights catastrophe in
the entire Great Lakes region of Africa.)
Glib use of the term genocide causes another problem. During
World War II, when it was proposed that the United States air
force bomb Auschwitz or the rail links leading to the death camp,
Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy refused, saying that it
"might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans." This
was morally abhorrent, given that the Nazis were already doing
the worst; there was no more vindictive action possible. To argue
in early March 1999 that Milosevic was committing genocide
against the Kosovar Albanians encouraged the view that nothing
could be worse and that therefore NATO bombardment couldn't hurt.
But much in fact could be worse, and NATO bombing has led to just
that.
IV. Milosevic
Some on the left have gone from the correct observation that
there was no genocide in Kosovo to a position whitewashing
Milosevic's very real crimes, including the savage ethnic
cleansing now going on. For example, Diedre Griswold of the
International Action Center criticizes those who demand that
Milosevic cease his horrific policy of ethnic cleansing,
declaring that such a demand is tantamount to "blaming the
victim" (http://www.iacenter.org/blamvict.htm). It is no wonder
that well-meaning people are confused by events in Kosovo when
they hear leftists propounding such morally obtuse nonsense.
To be sure, the U.S. government is doing all it can to
demonize Milosevic and U.S. government claims and those of much
of the lock-step media need to be examined with an extremely
critical eye. But that enemy leaders are demonized by U.S.
propaganda does not make those leaders victims. After all, U.S.
propaganda also sought to demonize Hitler during World War II and
Stalin before and after the war, two gentlemen about whom the
first word that comes to mind would not be "victim." So we
mustn't take official U.S. claims on faith, but nor should we be
blind to overwhelming evidence of criminal behavior.
Our argument against the NATO assault on Yugoslavia is not
that the United States is attacking the innocent Milosevic, but
that the attack will do nothing to help and much to hurt those
whom Milosevic has been victimizing, as well as undermine the
prospects for democracy in Serbia (which is, of necessity, an
anti-Milosevic force) and, by legitimating U.S. power
unrestrained by law or the UN, worsen the prospects for Kurds and
Timorese and so many other of the world's victims.
The NATO attack has recklessly unleashed Serbian forces to
escalate the level of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. But this does
not absolve Milosevic of his criminal responsibility. The
International Action Center asks why thousands of civilians are
now "reportedly fleeing Kosovo":
The explanation carried by the media comes completely from
U.S. and NATO military authorities, who claim the refugees are
victims of a Serbian "rampage". No really independent reporting
is allowed. The possibility that they may be fleeing because
their villages are being destroyed by U.S. and NATO missiles and
bombs is curtly dismissed (http://www.iacenter.org/liesfcts.htm).
No mention is made of why there are no "independent"
Yugoslav reporters on the scene now that Milosevic has silenced
the country's independent media. Nor is there any consideration
as to why there were several hundred thousand refugees before the
bombing began. No doubt some refugees are fleeing the bombing,
but the overwhelming thrust of refugee accounts indicates a
rather different source for their flight. Indeed, there were
massive refugee flows in the first days of the bombing when NATO
planes were barely active in Kosovo. (3)
Milosevic is no innocent victim. Even in 1997, before the
fighting began in earnest in Kosovo, the UN General Assembly
called on his regime to "take all necessary measures to bring to
an immediate end all human rights violations against ethnic
Albanians in Kosovo, including, in particular, discriminatory
measures and practices, arbitrary searches and detention, the
violation of the right to a fair trial and the practice of
torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and to
revoke all discriminatory legislation, in particular that which
has entered into force since 1989", the year in which he
rescinded Kosovo's autonomous status. The General Assembly
further called on Yugoslavia to "release all political prisoners
and to cease the persecution of political leaders and members of
local human rights organizations", and to "allow the return in
safety and dignity of Albanian refugees from Kosovo to their
homes" (Resolution 52/139).
Milosevic was no less an innocent victim during the war in
Bosnia. Monstrous crimes against humanity were committed by
Serbian forces in Bosnia and, if the perpetrators are ever
brought to trial for war crimes, Milosevic deserves a prominent
place in the dock.
V. Alternatives
The people of Kosovo are entitled to self-determination. It
would have been wonderful if the ethnic Albanians could have
established ties with democratic forces throughout Serbia to
fight for a multi-ethnic state fully protecting minority rights.
But long years of oppression and a perceived lack of response
from the Serbian side made the Kosovars eager for independence,
and the ultimate judgment must be theirs. So leftists should
support an independent Kosova, insisting of course that in turn
it recognize full democratic rights and protections for the
Serbian minority.
But supporting something in principle and getting there are
two different things. The strategy pursued by Ibrahim Rugova -
non-violent resistance to Serbian rule, with the building of
democratic counter-institutions - seemed to me to offer the best
hope for achieving a just result, given the realities of the
power imbalance and the need to minimize the hostility between
the ethnic communities. But Rugova and the cause of the Kosovar
Albanians was ignored by the United States as it put together its
Dayton Accords in 1995, discrediting the non-violent route. In
these circumstances the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA, or UCK in
Albanian) emerged. They undertook some attacks on Serbian police,
Albanian "collaborators", and sometimes Serb civilians, including
Serbian refugees from the Yugoslav wars whom many Albanians
viewed as colonizers intended to shift the demographic balance.
These were not the first acts of violence - they were proceeded
by the daily violence of Serbian rule - but the remarkable
self-restraint of the Albanians was coming undone. Serbian
security forces responded with great brutality to KLA attacks,
which in turn drove thousands of Albanians into the KLA, and
though still called terrorists by the Serbian authorities, they
became a serious guerrilla army, with mass support. But attacks
on civilians have continued, though not approaching the scale of
atrocities committed by Serbian forces. The KLA claims not to
target civilians, while acknowledging that abuses are committed
by fighters in the field; I have seen no KLA statement, however,
endorsing a multiethnic Kosova. And while popular backing of the
KLA is extensive, threats and possibly attacks against Rugova's
associates suggest that democratic persuasion is not the only
factor in KLA growth (see Tim Judah in The Observer, Sept. 27,
1998).
Should the left have urged the United States to support and
arm the KLA prior to March 1999? (4) I am sympathetic to the
argument that says that if people want to fight for their rights,
if they are not asking others to do it for them, then they ought
to be provided with the weapons to help them succeed. Such an
argument seemed to me persuasive with respect to Bosnia. But I
think there are four good reasons to reject this argument with
respect to the KLA.
First is the nature of the KLA. Given the frightful ethnic
violence in the Balkans, endorsement of an organization lacking a
clear commitment to ethnic tolerance seems highly dangerous. (In
Bosnia, on the other hand, there was a strong commitment to a
multiethnic state, though reduced as the war and the ethnic
cleansing wore on and as dependence on Islamic arms - because of
the Security Council's arms embargo - grew.) Surely the lesson of
conflicts from Palestine to Northern Ireland is that attacks on
civilians set off a cycle of violence and hatred that undermines
the prospects for peace or justice.
The ideology of the KLA is difficult to pin down.
Knowledgeable observers describe its leadership as split, with
"hints of fascism on one side and whiffs of communism on the
other", and with both factions having "little sympathy with or
understanding of democratic institutions" (Chris Hedges, Foreign
Affairs, May-June 1999). The fact that the KLA has gained the
support of most Kosovars has surely made the organization more
democratic than its origins would suggest, but its politics are
still troubling.
Second, the KLA had no credible chance of military victory.
To have provided arms in such a situation would have encouraged
suicidal efforts. (Even with the mammoth NATO bombing, the
Serbian military still seems to have the upper hand vis-a-vis the
KLA in Kosovo.) Of course, one can argue that if people want to
engage in a suicidal struggle, that's up to them. But the price
would be paid not just by the KLA fighters, but by the Albanian
civilian population, not all of whom were freely choosing such a
course of action. Nor is it clear that even the KLA would choose
such a suicidal course if it were not for the expectation of
being able to draw in foreign military assistance. Supplies of
arms create the expectation of further help (even if explicitly
denied): had the U.S. provided arms, many Kosovars would no doubt
have concluded that if they got into trouble, the U.S. military
would come to their rescue. And just because people who are
oppressed believe that the U.S. should intervene to assist them,
the left doesn't automatically have to support such intervention.
Palestinians may want the United States to bomb Tel Aviv;
Timorese may want the U.S. to bomb Jakarta (or even Washington).
But the left doesn't have to defer to their wishes or agree with
them that social justice would best be served by such actions.
Do people have the right of armed resistance against
oppression? Not being a pacifist, I believe they do have such a
right. But surely we need to consider the likely consequences of
armed struggle in each particular situation. The KLA has
correctly pointed to the lack of progress under Rugova's
non-violent approach. But KLA killing of Serb police led
predictably to atrocities against ethnic Albanian civilians. And
the flow of KLA arms and recruits over the Albanian border led
predictably to Serb clearing of border areas of civilian
villages. Just as NATO actions do not provide any moral
justification for Milosevic's atrocities, so too KLA actions do
not justify the brutal Serbian attacks on Kosovo civilians. But
just as NATO bears responsibility for the foreseeable
consequences of its actions, so too does the KLA. And for the
left to have urged arming the KLA in 1998 would have made it
responsible as well for the larger scale atrocities that the
Serbs would have let loose against a still relatively defenseless
civilian population.
A third problem with having urged the arming of the KLA is
that the same rotten motives that make U.S. military intervention
dangerous make its supplying arms dangerous. Washington supplies
arms not out of humanitarian concern, but to further its own
interests. So when it helped arm the Kurds in Iraq in the early
1970s, it was not with the intention of supporting the Kurdish
goal of an independent state, but simply to destabilize Iraq.
According to a classified report by the House Select Committee on
Intelligence leaked to the press, U.S. officials "hoped that our
clients [the Kurds] would not prevail. They preferred instead
that the insurgents simply continue a level of hostilities
sufficient to sap [Iraqi] resources... This policy was not
imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue
fighting. Even in the context of covert action, ours was a
cynical enterprise." Then, in 1975, aid to the Kurds was suddenly
cut off, and as Saddam Hussein massacred the rebels, Washington
denied them asylum. "Covert action", explained Henry Kissinger in
secret testimony, "should not be confused with missionary work."
(5)
Finally, for the United States to arm the KLA sets a very
different precedent from arming Bosnia (leaving aside the
Security Council arms embargoes in both cases). Bosnia was an
independent country, a member of the United Nations. That states
may defend themselves is an internationally recognized right. But
to arm the KLA means that the United States is deciding which
rebel movements in which countries should receive weapons. This
seems an awfully dangerous precedent, because we know that
Washington will decide not on the basis of justice (let alone
socialist principles), but on the basis of U.S. interests. Thus,
in the U.S. view, the Salvadorans being slaughtered by death
squads were not worthy of outside support, while the Contras
attacking Nicaragua were.
So if NATO's bombing was unacceptable and arming the KLA was
inadvisable, what could have been done to protect the Albanians
of Kosovo?
"We had to do something!" insist the interventionists. This
is not a compelling argument. One should do something only if so
doing is likely to improve things. In this case, the bombing
decidedly made things worse. True, no one will doubt Clinton's
determination and toughness, but this has been a disaster for the
people supposedly being helped.
In March 1999 there were no good choices, no policy that
would have brought immediate security and justice to the Kosovar
Albanians. But where some policies - like NATO bombardment -
could have been predicted to make things worse, others had a
chance of mitigating the suffering. In particular, continued
negotiations - diplomacy - was the best of the bad choices.
On March 23, the Serbian Parliament voted to reaffirm
Milosevic's rejection of foreign troops as part of the
Rambouillet agreement. (The agreement provided for three years of
autonomy for Kosovo, the withdrawal of most Serbian forces, the
disarming of the KLA, the presence of 28,000 NATO troops, and
final status to be negotiated later.) But the parliament also
stated that Serbia was willing to "'examine the character and
extent of an international presence in Kosovo' immediately after
the signing of an autonomy accord 'acceptable to all national
communities in Kosovo,' the local Serb minority included." (Vesna
Peric Zimonjic, Inter Press Service, March 23, 1999) This
formulation had many problems, but was worth pursuing, not
because Milosevic was a man of honor whose word could be trusted
- he's a gangster - but because pursuing it offered the best
chance of saving lives.
Would Milosevic have continued his attacks on Albanian
villages while negotiations continued? Presumably, but one needs
to realize the dynamic that NATO bombing threats had created. In
October 1998, NATO had agreed to suspend the order authorizing
air strikes in return for Milosevic's agreeing to withdraw the
bulk of his forces from Kosovo. But, as the New York Times
reported on April 18, 1999:
The Kosovo Albanian rebels were pushing ahead with their own
war aims. Sensing that the [October 1998] deal essentially placed
the world's most powerful military alliance on their side -
despite NATO's continued assurances that it did not want to
become the guerrilla army's "air force" - the rebels quickly
reclaimed territory abandoned by the Serbian forces and mounted a
continuous series of small-scale attacks.
None of this justifies the criminal Serbian attacks on
civilians. The bombing threats, however, encouraged KLA actions
at a time when they could not defend themselves from the expected
Serbian reaction. "Diplomacy backed with force" makes for
ineffective diplomacy.
VI. What Now?
We are now in the midst of a horrendous bombing campaign
said to be for the protection of the Kosovar Albanians which has
set off massive ethnic cleansing and probably not stopped a
single atrocity. On April 13, NATO commander Clark acknowledged
that there were then slightly more Serbian troops in Kosovo than
when the bombing began. At the same time, Clinton tells us that
there are hundreds of thousands of Albanian refugees within
Kosovo without adequate food. NATO, he assures us, is thinking
very hard about how to get food to them, but air-drops are ruled
out because of the danger to NATO pilots.
To continue this strategy is morally grotesque. Even if it
finally gets Milosevic to capitulate (though many NATO planners
are skeptical that air power alone can do this) the ethnic
cleansing - along with large numbers of killings and deaths from
starvation and disease - will already have taken place. And, as
the Associated Press reported (Newark Star Ledger, April 18,
1999),
Now that NATO's air campaign in Yugoslavia is taking aim at
bridges, roads and rail lines used by civilians, it will be
harder to bomb Serb forces without killing ethnic Albanians
fleeing Kosovo, U.S. defense officials and military analysts say.
To switch to a ground war would likely be just as bad. No
one knows for sure what would happen of course. It is possible
that the Serbian military will surrender quickly, but this
outcome is not suggested by either the history of Yugoslavia's
resistance movement in World War II or the rallying around the
flag that we've seen in Serbia under the U.S. bombing. In the
more probable event that the Serbs put up a fight, the
consequences for the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian
civilians still in Kosovo will be grim, given the brutishness of
Serbian forces and the extremes to which U.S. forces will go to
avoid harm to their own soldiers. (We've seen the accidental, but
reckless, attacks on civilians in cases where NATO pilots were
not under attack; it would surely be worse when NATO forces were
drawing fire.) Moreover, the number of troops that NATO considers
necessary for a ground invasion would take a considerable time to
deploy - time during which the plight of the ethnic Albanians
will grow worse.
Arming the KLA in conjunction with NATO air (and maybe
ground) attacks can have no quick impact on the situation. By the
time KLA forces in Albania or elsewhere outside Kosovo could be
armed and trained, the worst would have happened to those within
Kosovo. And, of course, the incentive for the Serbians to kill
all potential KLA fighters would be even greater.
Arming the KLA without continuing the NATO war would take
even longer to have any positive effect inside Kosovo, surely too
long to prevent appalling human costs to the ethnic Albanians
there. If NATO stopped bombing and proceeded to build up and
equip a KLA force on the border, the provocation to atrocities in
Kosovo would be maximized.
Thus, the solution now is the same as it was on March 24:
pursue diplomacy. This is not an ideal solution; it is just the
best among miserable choices. The first step must be to accept a
cease-fire, the stopping of NATO bombing and of Serbian military
and paramilitary operations in Kosovo. Then humanitarian relief
agencies and international observers - from the United Nations or
from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
(OSCE) - must be deployed. Peacekeepers too, again from the UN or
OSCE, not NATO are needed. If Russia is involved in the process,
rather than being slapped in the face, some kind of arrangement
in this regard seems possible. (6) All refugees who wish to
return to Kosovo must be permitted to do so, with funding from
the NATO powers who were so eager to spend money on an
irresponsible military operation.
The people of Kosovo still need self-determination. That
they are less willing than ever to be part of a Serbian-dominated
Yugoslavia is understandable. The international community should
use its diplomatic efforts to encourage this result in a way that
causes the least harm to the Albanian and Serb people of Kosovo.
Ousting Milosevic is also a crucial requirement for social
justice in Serbia, but it can't be accomplished by NATO bombs.
That, the people of Serbia will have to do themselves.
For the left in the United States, the need to oppose
oppressive regimes is critical. Many of these can best be
combated by working to get the U.S. government to stop supporting
them. But when this isn't enough, we shouldn't be looking to the
United States or its military alliances to pursue justice or
humanitarianism. We need to build the movements and the
institutions that can challenge both the Milosevics and the NATOs
of the world.
Notes:
1. Nor have leading NATO members been significantly more
humanitarian in their foreign policies. Britain has become
Indonesia's chief weapons supplier (with Blair having granted
more weapons export licences to Jakarta than did the previous
Conservative government), France supported the genocidalist
regime in Rwanda, and Germany is Turkey's second largest supplier
of arms.
2. Note that many of those who defend the NATO intervention point
to the savagery following March 24 as justification for the
bombing. But this makes no moral or logical sense. What would we
think of an apologist for Japanese militarism who defended the
attack on Pearl Harbor by pointing to the fact that Washington
responded by forcing Japanese-Americans into concentration camps?
Worse yet, what would we think of this justification for
attacking Pearl Harbor if the attackers reasonably expected that
the result of the attack would be precisely the stepped-up
oppression of Japanese-Americans?
3. Diana Johnstone, writes in In These Times, May 16, 1999,
"Kosovo's ethnic Albanian civilians have been trapped between
devastating NATO bombing raids, KLA thugs and Serbian police."
That she can describe the bombing as devastating and the KLA as
thuggish, but yet find no adjective to characterize the Serbian
police is revealing, as is the fact that she resolutely denounces
the first two but not the third.
4. Some on the left claim that the KLA was already being armed by
U.S. and German intelligence, but the evidence is extremely
dubious (apart from the fact that it would make no sense given
that Washington denounced the KLA as "without any question a
terrorist group" in February 1998). For example, Michel
Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa claims CIA backing for
the KLA on the basis of an unsupported claim by right-wing
conspiracy nut John Whitley (who says that the Bilderbergers
planned, financed, and started the Kosovo war) as quoted by
another right-wing source, "Truth in Media", which reprints "for
what it's worth" an alleged letter from a KLA soldier claiming
that the KLA has been dressing up as Serbs and then ethnically
cleansing Albanians. (See Chossudovsky at
http://www.globalpolicy.org; Truth in Media at
http://www.truthinmedia.org/Kosovo/day10up2.html.) For a
trenchant critique of leftists mucking about with rightwing
conspiracy theorists during the Gulf War, see Chip Berlet, Right
Woos Left: Populist Party, LaRouchian, and Other Neo-Fascist
Overtures to Progressives, And Why It Must Be Rejected,
Cambridge, MA: Political Research Associates, Oct. 7, 1992.
Funding for the KLA seems to have come from the Albanian
diaspora and possibly drugs - what revolutionary movement can
apply for foundation grants? - and their weapons from underground
arms markets, facilitated by the collapse of the Albanian
government in 1997.
5. House of Representatives, Select Committee on Intelligence, 19
Jan. 1976 (Pike Report) in Village Voice, 16 Feb. 1976; William
Safire, Safire's Washington, New York: Times Books, 1980, p. 333.
6. Needless to say, Russia no more has clean hands here than does
NATO. But it might nonetheless be able to use its leverage with
Yugoslavia to contribute to a diplomatic solution.
[This article will appear, along with comments by members of the
editorial board, in the Summer 1999 issue of New Politics and on
the New Politics web site.]
(Source: ZNET )
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