🚀 go-pugleaf

The Kosovo/NATO Conflict: 
Questions and Answers

By Michael Albert and Stephen R. Shalom

 

1. What are the roots of the Kosovo conflict?

Ethnic Serbs and Albanians give extended historical arguments going
back as far as 1389 or 1912 or World War II. The basic issue is that
the Kosovo province of Serbia (called Kosova in Albanian) has a large
majority -- as much as 90 percent -- of ethnic Albanians with a
roughly 10 percent Serbian minority. The Kosovo Albanians, however,
are only about 16 percent of Serbia's total population. The Kosovo
Albanians claim to be an oppressed minority within Serbia and want
self-determination. The Kosovo Serbs claim to be an oppressed minority
within Kosovo, and want protection from the Albanians. For Serbs,
Kosovo, particularly in the north, is the site of many historical
events and locales, their Jerusalem and Alamo rolled into one.

Yugoslavia consisted of 6 republics (Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia,
Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina) and in 1974 Tito gave
autonomous status to two provinces of Serbia, Kosovo and Vojvodina.
Kosovo autonomy allowed its ethnic Albanians to develop their own
institutions, but angered Serbian nationalists. The Yugoslav League of
Communists (LCY) under Tito and after his death in 1980, suppressed
nationalist ideology and political dissent.

In 1987, however, Slobodan Milosevic used anger over Kosovo to take
control of the Serbian branch of the LCY. The previous leaders,
Milosevic charged, had appeased the Albanians and failed to defend
Serb interests. In 1989, Milosevic revoked Kosovo's autonomy,
encouraging forcible Serb repression of the Albanian majority ever
since. Most Albanian Kosovars now want complete independence.

 

2. What is the KLA?

The Albanian Kosovars fought Serb control in 1989 by non-violent
resistance: they elected their own leaders, refused to cooperate with
the Serb authorities, and established their own counter-institutions.
Their "president" was Ibrahim Rugova, a follower of Gandhi, who urged
his people to reject violence while working toward independence.
Serbian repression in Kosovo since 1989 didn't attract much concern
from Washington. In 1995, when the United States sponsored talks in
Dayton, Ohio to end the fighting in Bosnia, Milosevic was feted as the
key to peace and Rugova was excluded from the conference. Thereafter
repression increased in Kosovo and Rugova had little to show for his
non-violent approach.

In 1996, an obscure organization appeared on the scene, the Kosovo
Liberation Army (KLA, or UCK in Albanian), committed to armed
struggle. They undertook some ineffectual attacks on police stations
and sometimes Serb civilians, including Serbian refugees from the
Yugoslav wars whom many Albanians viewed as colonizers intended to
shift the demographic balance. In early 1998, Serbian special police
assaulted three villages, killing more than eighty people, at least
seventeen after they had been detained or surrendered. This attack
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. Over the next months the KLA took control of
roughly 40 percent of Kosovo's territory. By late summer, however,
Serbian forces retook most of the territory, their major tactic being
to crush civilian support for the rebels by systematically destroying
towns and villages and forcing thousands of people to flee.

It is difficult to tell the KLA attitude toward Serb civilians. Human
rights groups have accused them of serious human rights violations,
including compelling Serb villagers to leave their homes, with some
killings, 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.

 

3. Why does everyone talk about the conflict spreading?

Massive refugee flows have the potential to destabilize many
surrounding countries where there is a delicate ethnic balance. In
Macedonia, for example, commentators fear that Albanian immigration
would provoke the Albanian minority to secede or would even make it a
majority, which the Macedonian majority is determined to prevent. And
having hundreds of thousands of Albanians living in refugee camps
brings visions of the Palestinians, with all the instability their
plight has caused the Middle East. In addition, Albania has warned
that it will not sit idly by if its compatriots across the border are
slaughtered, and Serbia has made incursions into Albania to prevent
the flow of weapons and recruits to the KLA. Finally, Turkey and
Greece, long-time enemies, and Bulgaria as well might get involved.
(Of course, it is a little odd for NATO to launch a war in order to
prevent two NATO members --Turkey and Greece -- from going at each
other.)

 

4. Is the U.S. motivated by humanitarianism in the Balkans?

No. But how do we prove such a claim? Suppose the U.S. is motivated to
wage war and drop bombs in this instance by humanitarian concerns. If
so, that would mean that concern for the plight of oppressed
minorities and populations ranked very high in U.S. policy-making
calculations. We would then expect, it follows, that in any case where
large populations are suffering horrible repression Washington would
try to intervene to stop the repression.

Now consider the reverse claim that U.S. foreign policy is never
motivated by concern for the well being of local constituencies but
will only opportunistically use related rhetoric for rationalization
purposes when possible. If this were true, in contrast, we would
expect that the U.S. would intervene in the affairs of other countries
only to serve domestic elites in the U.S. or to aid local elites in
other countries on behalf of U.S. elites, or perhaps to influence or
enhance policies undertaken by other countries thought to benefit U.S.
government and elite interests -- but with the human costs to victims
playing virtually no role in the calculations.

Now look at the evidence. 

Before World War II, for example, the United States could have
admitted many Jews fleeing from Hitler's Europe; it did not. 
During World War II, the United States could have bombed the death
camp at Auschwitz, slowing down the Nazi killing machine; it did not. 
When hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered in Indonesia in
1965; the killers were cheered on by the U.S. government who even
provided lists of communists to exterminate. 
When the Pakistani army began slaughtering and raping hundreds of
thousands of Bengalis in 1971, sending millions into exile, U.S.
policy was to (in Kissinger's words) "tilt in favor of Pakistan." 
When Indonesia invaded East Timor, leading to the deaths of one third
of the population, it received weapons and diplomatic support from
Washington. Just this past week, White House press secretary Joe
Lockhart was asked whether the United States supported independence
for East Timor. "Not that I am aware of," he replied. 
When the Khmer Rouge was responsible for monstrous killings in
Cambodia, the United States encouraged China to aid the Khmer Rouge
and provided covert aid of its own. 
When the government of Guatemala killed 200,000 people in the 1980s,
it was with United States aid and encouragement. 
When upwards of half a million people, mostly members of the Tutsi
ethnic minority, were exterminated in Rwanda in 1994, the Clinton
administration demanded that a UN force already on the scene be
reduced and obstructed efforts to save lives, even failing to apply
diplomatic pressure against the killers. 
Investigation of all these cases and many more -- the Turkish
treatment of Kurds in Turkey, for example -- reveals a consistent
pattern which has nothing to do with concerns for repressed
populations and everything to do with calculations of U.S. elite and
geo-political interests. In every case policy would have been roughly
opposite to what took place, if there had been humanitarian concerns.
There weren't, and there aren't.

 

5. So why is NATO now bombing in the Balkans?

Just as killings by the (U.S.-trained) junta in Haiti did not concern
U.S. policymakers until large numbers of refugees started fleeing to
the United States, so too human rights abuses in Kosovo did not
concern U.S. policymakers as long as they didn't threaten regional
stability. But as the fighting in Kosovo escalated, with large numbers
of displaced Albanian refugees, U.S. officials decided they needed to
curb the problem--not to aid locally affected people, but to prevent
losses to U.S. interests due to the conflict spreading into other
parts of Europe.

In February and March at Rambouillet in France, the United States and
its European allies invited the Albanian Kosovars and the Milosevic
government to sign an agreement that provided for the withdrawal of
Serbian security forces from Kosovo, the disarming of the KLA,
autonomy for Kosovo, a NATO peacekeeping force, and follow-up
final-status negotiations after three years. Milosevic said he was
unwilling to accept foreign troops on his territory. NATO said it
would bomb him if the Albanians signed and he didn't. (Compare this
with U.S. mediation efforts in Northern Ireland where threatening to
bomb a recalcitrant party was not part of the equation.) The Albanians
reluctantly accepted the Rambouillet agreement and Milosevic refused.

Now the primary NATO goal became maintaining its credibility. The
Clinton administration had invested heavily in expanding NATO, to make
it a primary instrument of U.S. policy not only in Europe, but beyond.
There is an elementary point of big power politics that no one denies:
threats made need to be carried out if the credibility of future
threats are to be maintained. And, likewise, threats carried out but
not yielding total victory need to be escalated until the adversary is
crushed.

So why make the initial threat to bomb? There is a predisposition in
Washington to favor military solutions. A diplomatic approach would
have strengthened the UN and international law and made 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. It
provides a rationale for U.S. domestic military spending, and an
international arms bazaar. It tells the world that the U.S. response
to problems with other nations is to bomb them. "What good is this
marvelous military force," Albright asked Gen. Colin Powell a few
years back, "if we can never use it?"

 

6. What effects do the bombings have?

In preparation for the bombing, relief workers (who might have
continued to mitigate the suffering) and international observers (who
might have continued to discourage the most blatant atrocities) were
pulled out of Kosovo. The NATO bombing then provoked a horrific
outburst of ethnic cleansing by Serbian forces as hundreds of
thousands of Albanian Kosovars were driven from their homes. Because
all reporters and international observers had left Kosovo, we do not
know the human toll of Serb actions, but it surely considerably
exceeds the toll for the previous year, during which some 2,000 ethnic
Albanian civilians had been killed and about 250,000 ethnic Albanians
had become refugees, most of them within Kosovo.

Even without the bombing, a Serbian offensive was likely imminent, but
it is hard to believe it would have been as ferocious as what has
occurred. The bombing incensed many even in Serbia's democratic
movement, so one can only imagine how it must have affected Serb
security forces in Kosovo. Unable to retaliate against NATO missiles
and warplanes, they could be expected to lash out at those most
vulnerable, ethnic Albanian civilians. Of course, none of this
mitigates the responsibility for the atrocities on the part of those
who carried them out. But if someone is holding a person hostage and
you recklessly charge forward, leading to the death of the hostage,
you also bear some responsibility -- all the more so if you rush in
not out of true concern for the hostage, but for other reasons
entirely. Many U.S. officials have acknowledged that they thought the
bombing might well lead to a paroxysm of violence from Milosevic and
that air power, the NATO tool of choice, could do nothing to stop that
violence in the short run.

Bombing, of course, has had other implications as well. Within
Yugoslavia the population has rallied to its leader, Milosevic. The
democratic opposition, previously challenging Milosevic, now appears
to be either dismantled, jailed, or, most chillingly, supporting him.
As Zoren 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. Montenegro, the smaller of the
two Yugoslav republics, had previously passed a resolution questioning
Milosevic's Kosovo policy, but the bombing has quieted its opposition
as well. These results were predictable. And the level of hostility
and tension in the whole region has climbed dramatically, making
negotiations and a lasting peace, eventually obviously required, that
much more difficult.

And then there is the horrible loss of life and means of sustaining
life that mounts with each new raid of Belgrade and Yugoslavia as a
whole. Bombing has a deadly logic of its own. What begins as
"surgical" attacks inevitably expands. "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 told Newsweek.
"Twelve days of surgical bombing was never going to turn Serbia
around," wrote New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. "Let's see
what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does. Give war a chance."

 

7. But even if badly motivated, and even if they have some bad
effects, won't the bombings at least restrain Milosevic?

Restrain him from what? The idea that doing something necessarily
improves a situation is, of course, quite false. Some things may be
beneficial. Others not. Yes, even an ill-motivated action can
sometimes have a desirable effect and therefore deserve support, but
in this case the bombing is not only ill-motivated, its effects are
horribly detrimental as well. It has worsened the plight of the
Albanian Kosovars, vastly increasing the flow of refugees and, due to
the scale, created a catastrophe of the first order. It has diminished
the internal opposition to Milosevic, and if reports are accurate
perhaps destroyed it. It has undermined the UN, turned NATO into an
offensive, interventionary institution, played havoc with
international law, and further projected the U.S. as a country eager
and willing to punish any deviations it discerns from its will with
bombs, thus acting as a threat against countries throughout the world.
All these effects are horribly negative and then there is the
devastation of Yugoslavia itself, the immediate expansion of deaths
and casualties, and the future expansion due to the wrecking of a
country's infrastructure.

The remarkable thing is that there is little dispute about the above.
Yes, our formulation has a moral tone that many others lack when
recounting these facts, but the facts are not in doubt.

 

8. But can the U.S. really be that vile? Isn't this just left cynicism
and a knee-jerk rejection of all U.S. actions?

Sometimes when a person or group holds roughly the same position
repeatedly in different contexts it indicates that the person or group
is gravitating to it reflexively or has lost touch with reason and is
bending reality to fit his or her prejudices. And yes, there are
likely critics of the bombing who have adopted a stance based not on
evidence and sound reasoning, but on a pre-determined mindset, with
facts bent to fit.

But, the facts of U.S. international relations, and of the limited
options available in this case are really not in dispute. And the
judgment drawn by critics of U.S.. policy are not leaps from those
facts or distortions of those facts or subjective impositions on those
facts, but rather very simple deductions from the facts, which, were
the culprit any other nation, would be obvious to all.

 

9. How come there are conflicting viewpoints among leftists and
progressives, some favoring bombing, some opposing it?

There has been an avalanche of media commentary emphasizing the
immense and grotesque crimes in the Balkans for nearly a decade. It is
natural that some folks, including many on the left, have become very
impassioned about wishing to see those crimes curbed. This desire,
perfectly reasonable on the face of it (though at times ignoring other
and often worse cases of repression and violence in the world), has
left some folks blind to the reality that just saying that a policy
helps people doesn't mean that, in fact, the policy does help those
people. The desire not to ignore the plight of the Kosovars is worthy.
But to advocate policies that end up hurting the Kosovars, Yugoslavia
as a whole, international law, the UN, and by the threat-effect all
who might oppose U.S. pursuits, on grounds that at least it is doing
something, is unworthy.

 

10. Why do many leftists inside Serbia deny that the Serbs have
committed atrocities? Are we being misled about that?

There are many factors at work, no doubt. Ethnic conflicts frequently
find leftists on opposite sides, swept up in the myths and distortions
of their own ethnic group. (Think of the Palestine-Israeli or the
Turkish-Greek conflicts.) Having bombs drop in your neighborhood and
nation, which destroy the daily functioning of your society, has, we
know from history, a tremendously galvanizing and homogenizing effect
on people's views. More, there is likely also honest confusion. Facts
available outside Yugoslavia may not be available inside, or at least
may not be comprehensible there.

In matters such as this, testimony from people on the scene, from
whatever persuasion, must be understood in context. Single events can
be elaborated into whole theses, a common trick of the mass media, but
in chaotic situations there are single events demonstrative of pretty
much any kind of behavior one might wish to find. What matters most is
not single examples or events, but widespread patterns of behavior and
broad policies and their broad implications.

 

11. How come many right-wingers are against this action?

Some rightwingers reflexively oppose anything Clinton does (a
draft-dodger can't lead us into war, etc.) But there are two other
sources of rightwing opposition. One is the general point that elites
can differ in their views as to what best serves U.S. elite interests.
If it doesn't work as planned, which is certainly a reasonable
projection of likelihoods, this operation may in fact leave NATO and
the U.S. in a worse place than at its outset. Therefore, for those who
doubt the bombing's capacity to lead to stable results that legitimate
NATO, reduce risk of spreading conflict, etc., there is reason to
oppose the policy.

Moreover, to some rightwingers, multilateralism -- even if it's NATO
rather than the UN -- is suspect because it reduces to some extent
U.S. freedom of action. If the situation in Kosovo might cause a
crisis in southeastern Europe, let the Europeans deal with it. The
right opposes peacekeeping operations ("the United States needs to
husband its resources for great exertions, not dissipate them in a
thousand stagnant fens" [Charles Krauthammer]). And where left critics
of the bombing argue that it will not achieve -- and will in fact
exacerbate -- any humanitarian objectives, the right is about as
concerned about the suffering in Kosovo as it is about the suffering
in America's cities.

 

12. What is the role of law in international relations and in this
crisis? Where is the UN in all this?

U.S. officials frequently proclaim their adherence to international
law, except when they don't want to. So, Washington ignored a ruling
by the World Court on Nicaragua, vetoed a Security Council resolution
calling on all states to obey international law, and more generally
acts unilaterally whenever it feels like. The same pattern pertains in
this case, too.

The Charter of the United Nations -- which is a treaty signed by the
United States and thus part of the "Supreme law of the land" --
prohibits the use or threat of force against other nations except in
self-defense to an armed attack or if authorized by the UN Security
Council. When the United States can bring along the Security Council
it is delighted to do so (for example, during the 1991 war against
Iraq), even if it takes blatant bribery to pressure other states to
assent. But where such consensus is impossible, Washington has been
happy to simply ignore the Security Council, claiming that it has
authorization from previous Council resolutions, even though most
other countries see no such authorization (the U.S.-British bombing of
Iraq in December 1998, for example) or else advancing ludicrous claims
that it is acting in self-defense (as in its recent missile strikes on
a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant).

Regional organizations like NATO simply do not have the right to act
on their own. Article 53 of the UN Charter states that "no enforcement
action shall be taken under regional arrangements or by regional
agencies without the authorization of the Security Council." So in the
case of Kosovo, the U.S. and NATO, confronting a problem, turned not
to the UN but to the Pentagon. The UN is not entirely under U.S.
auspices and could, conceivably, act independently and in a
humanitarian manner which would frequently conflict with U.S.
interests and require changes in U.S. policies.

 

13. But aren't borders an abstraction? Shouldn't we be concerned with
people rather than with nations? Why does it matter that Yugoslavia is
a sovereign nation and that this is an internal conflict rather than
between nations?

Borders exist. And the reason to be concerned about their violation
even with good motivations much less by a unilateral and illegal force
uninterested in the plight of the suffering, is because respect for
borders is one of the few impediments to the mighty doing whatever
they please with the weak. To establish the precedent that national
sovereignty is inconsequential is to remove perhaps the major
impediment to one nation sending troops, bombers, or missiles into
another. Once that is done, there remains only debate over what is
warranted, and in the world as we know it such debate is dominated by
the most powerful states and their massive media machines, most
particularly the U.S. (Military intervention, Richard Falk has
reminded us, is like the Mississippi River: it only flows from North
to South.) Thus, to deny the validity of national sovereignty is to
effectively give the U.S. carte blanche to intervene when and where it
decides -- which is, of course, from the U.S. perspective, a
delightful by-product of the current events.

 

14. What is the right way to deal with crises like this? There are two
questions: How can we reduce violence and get settlements, and what
rights are national minorities entitled to?

Crises inside sovereign nations are complex problems on the
international scene. Should Japan bomb Washington out of solidarity
with blacks subjected to horrible conditions and violence in our inner
cities? Would that improve or worsen the plight of blacks, have
ancillary affects that were positive or negative from the point of
view of justice and self-determination? The major means of impacting
relations ought to be diplomacy, international opinion, and domestic
movements. In some instances (as in the case of apartheid in South
Africa) these may be rightly augmented with economic sanctions which
are supported by the internal opposition. In other instances, however,
sanctions can amount to a deadly and immoral weapon, having as their
chief consequence huge and criminal casualties among civilians, as in
Iraq in recent years. And yes, one can certainly imagine situations
where a powerful state or community can and will devastate a minority
ethnic group if there is not some form of more powerful intervention
-- but this does not mean bombing by interested parties not seeking
true peace and which will only aggravate crimes and divisions.

Most world problems, including most humanitarian crises, don't call
for military solutions, but non-pacifists believe that there are some
situations where force is the only option. If that force is wielded by
the United States, however, it will be used to further U.S. elite
interests rather than any humanitarian objective. Other countries,
too, look out for their own elite interests, so the way to minimize
the influence of the elite-serving agendas of individual governments
is to put a humanitarian military force under democratic international
control. International control must mean the UN General Assembly, not
the Security Council which is set up in the most undemocratic way
imaginable, with five countries (the United States, Russia, Britain,
France, and China) having veto power.

Even the General Assembly does not represent real democracy. There's
no relation of votes to population, many members states are themselves
undemocratic, and even those that are formally democratic are
dominated by elites with money. True democratic control of a
humanitarian force must await global social change, but in the
meantime the General Assembly provides the best approximation.

Thus, in extreme cases, what is needed to prevent human travail is no
doubt a true peace-keeping force, under the auspices of the General
Assembly of the UN, prepared to stand between combatants and, if
necessary, to defend itself and those being abused, to create
conditions for negotiations.

What rights are national minorities entitled to? As a basic position,
we must support self-determination as a fundamental democratic right.
But there are some tough questions. What if a minority wants to
secede, but within their territory live other minorities? Such
situations have no simple solution, especially if the minority does
not live in contiguous territory. What if a minority wishes to leave a
country and take with it the bulk of the country's resources or
assets, leaving a majority behind bereft of the means to sustain
themselves?

A proper policy regarding national minorities requires a flexible
mechanism of international law and adjudication, respected by the
peoples and nations of the world, with binding powers that all abide,
and with priority attention to ensuring that the powerful do not
subjugate or otherwise delimit the options of the weak within or
between countries. We are far from having any such mechanism, but U.S.
flouting of international law moves us in precisely the wrong
direction.

 

15. What should we demand for the Balkans?

An end to the bombing. 
Pursue diplomacy, not rejecting out of hand every diplomatic overture
(such as the Russian call for talks or Milosevic's offer of a
cease-fire). 
An international peace keeping force overseen by the UN General
Assembly to stand between the combatants. 
An international system, under the auspices of the General Assembly,
to adjudicate and make decisions about the use of peace-keeping
forces. 
And an insistence that other atrocities, often perpetrated or abetted
or ignored by Washington because they serve U.S. interests, receive
the same media visibility and humanitarian attention as the atrocities
in Kosovo.