Since I missed last week's Flashback Friday (again), I decided to share another piece I wrote, this time an essay about one of my many political hobby horses: the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. I believe it was one of the worst episodes in the history of American foreign policy, exceeded in terms of reprehensibility only by the big wars like Iraq and Vietnam, so imagine my luck when it was listed as a possible prompt for an essay I had to write back in college. This was one of the first papers I wrote for school that I felt that I had an actual investment in, so much so that I found myself in the novel position of having to
cut information from my paper, rather than pad it as is usually the case. As such, this is the full, original paper I wrote, including the abstract and all the information I didn't include in the version I submitted to my TA. I had to reformat the citations though, as they were originally footnotes, which apparently don't lend themselves to Blogger well.
War In Kosovo: A Matter of Credibility, Not Compassion
This
paper demonstrates that the American-led 1999 intervention in Kosovo was
motivated by concerns about perceptions of American and NATO’s credibility and
justifications for the alliance’s continued existence rather than the
humanitarian concerns publicly given prior to and during it’s execution. Evidence
is marshaled from professors and researchers versed in the Balkan conflicts, a
key military figure in the operation itself, and two journalists who covered
the war as it unfolded. None of this is to say that humanitarian reasons played
no role in NATO’s decision to intervene; rather, it is simply that they were
secondary to realist issues of prestige and credibility. This important
distinction sheds light on the decision of Slobodan Milosevic to concede to
NATO’s demands as well as the question of whether the operation was a success
or not. Through a solely humanitarian or constructivist lens, the operation was
a failure, but if viewed from a realist perspective, as American and NATO
officials did, it was a success.
NATO’s 78-day
bombing of Kosovo is practically all but forgotten in the public consciousness,
and so also is the political analysis of that particular crisis. This is very unfortunate
since when the conflict is brought up or referenced, as it was when it seemed
the United States and its allies were about to intervene in Syria last year,
its origins, conduct, and outcome are misremembered. Such incorrect
recollections and analyses confuse or even outright negatively influence
Americans perceptions and reactions to current foreign policy issues. This is not
merely a theoretical concern, an esoteric subject for debates between scholars
of international relations: these incorrect memories enable presidents’ to
invoke humanitarian issues in a particular state as a casus
belli against said state
even if the United Nations Security Council has not permitted military
intervention on the part of foreign actors or to engage in an air war with a
nation that has not aggressed against the U.S. without asking Congress to
authorize such action. Scenarios such as these materialized in former president
George W. Bush’s non-UN sanctioned invasion of Iraq and President Barack
Obama’s bombing of Libya without Congressional approval, but they had undeniable
precedent in the 1999 Kosovo war. Thus, it is imperative to carefully examine
the reasons and outcomes of America’s decision to lead NATO in attacking the
now-dissolved Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). In this paper, I will
debunk claims that the war was motivated solely or primarily by Western concern
about human rights violations by the FRY against ethnic Albanians and
demonstrate that NATO and in particular, American concern about being perceived
as unwilling to act against potential enemies as well as the need to revamp
NATO’s mission following the end of the Cold War were the primary reasons for
the intervention. The effects of these realist priorities can be seen in the
conclusion of the conflict, when NATO settled for occupying Kosovo rather than
the whole of Yugoslavia in exchange for Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s
decision to withdraw Serb forces from the province. Although human rights
violations continued after NATO intervened (this time, against Serbs who remained in Kosovo) and were
quite possibly exacerbated by the bombing, the U.S. and NATO, if viewed from
the realist vantage point of many of their officials and spokesmen, got what
they wanted from the intervention: credibility and purpose.
Most
prominent among the hazy memories of the Kosovo War is the notion that it was
predominantly a humanitarian war, forced upon NATO by the aggressive policies
of Slobodan Milosevic. Laying blame for the various troubles in the Balkans
solely at the feet of Milosevic and Serbia did not begin with Kosovo.
Throughout the decade, headlines such as “The Serbs Asked For It” (in reference
to NATO’s 1995 intervention in Bosnia against Serb separatists) in the Los
Angeles Times and stridently anti-Serb editorials by
prominent figures such as The New York Times’ Anthony Lewis
and Thomas Friedman gave the
impression that the Serbs were uniquely evil amongst the peoples of the former
Yugoslavia. This is not to say that the Serbs, whether in Bosnia or Kosovo,
were totally innocent or victimized by a sinister conspiracy within Western
media: it is simply to establish that such coverage of the war lead to an
overwhelmingly negative perception of Serbia on the part of Americans, regardless
of Serbia’s strategic irrelevance to American interests. Considering this, it
is not surprising that many accepted the accounts of massacres and torture in
Kosovo as sufficient rationale for war. The Clinton administration recognized
this and offered moral reasons that emphasized the brutality of FRY soldiers
and police to the public. “We act to protect thousands of innocent people in
Kosovo from a mounting military offensive… Ending this tragedy is a moral
imperative,” then-president Clinton said in a speech the day the bombing
commenced.
Similar statements were made by NATO officials such as General Klaus Naumann,
who claimed, “Armed intervention against a sovereign country without a Security
Council mandate was in this case a last ditch effort to stop massive abuses of
human rights.” Naumann’s
statement is interesting, in that it implicitly suggests that although the
intervention did not have approval from the UN, it was justified on the basis
of preventing human rights violations. Indeed, past UN inaction had allowed
Serbs to commit atrocities like those done at Srebrenica and Sarajevo, so
Naumann’s point seemed a fair one to American and other Western citizens.
However, one must ask, if humanitarian crises in autocratic nations warranted
intervention, why was Yugoslavia singled out for bombardment when there were
clearly other candidates for such treatment. One of the participants in the
NATO operation, Turkey, had spent most of the decade waging it’s own war
against Kurdish insurgents. The tactics used by the Turkish military chillingly
resembled those employed by the Yugoslav forces in Kosovo: burning, bombing and
shelling Kurdish enclaves at such a degree that as many as 3,000 villages were
destroyed and 2 million Kurds were made into refugees, to say nothing of the
countless innocents killed.
The possibility that an alliance would initiate a bombing campaign against one
of it’s own members under any circumstances is understandably implausible, but
it weakens said-alliance’s position when it cites human rights abuses as a
pretext for war while overlooking or even facilitating the aforementioned
member’s atrocities, as the Clinton administration did when it sent Turkey
Cobra helicopters and F-16 bombers which were subsequently used to obliterate
entire Kurdish villages.
It is even more egregious when there were other nations that treated ethnic
minorities as poorly as or even worse than the Serbs treated the Kosovar
Albanians, as James Kurth pointed out:
“Sadly,
in the 1990s, the actions of the Serb government against the Albanians in
Kosovo… were not especially unique. The decade saw at least four comparable
examples where a state representing one ethnic group undertook systematic
violence against another ethnic group living within the boundaries of the
state. This was the case in Rwanda in 1994 (the Hutu regime against the
Tutsis), Burundi from 1993 to the present (the Tutsi regime against the Hutus),
Sudan throughout the 1990s (the Islamic regime against the Christians), and
Iraq throughout much of the 1990s (the Iraqi Ba’ath regime against the Kurds).”
Kurth goes on to add that
with the exception of Iraq, neither the U.S. nor NATO seriously considered
intervening to halt human rights violations in any of the above countries.
One is left curious as to why stopping Serb atrocities against Albanians was,
to quote Bill Clinton a second time, “ a moral imperative”
but stopping the Hutu genocide against the Tutsis was not or why the objective
of neutralizing Slobodan Milosevic warranted bypassing the UN Security Council
and Congress but neutralizing Saddam Hussein didn’t.
Then there
is the question of the conduct of the war itself: despite being branded as a
humanitarian war, NATO’s bombing campaign actually increased the danger to both
Serb civilians and the Kosovar Albanians it claimed to be acting on behalf of.
Just days after talks between NATO and Milosevic failed in March of 1999, the
Serbs began expelling Kosovars at an unprecedented rate,
a measure almost certainly meant to solidify their control over the province
before the bombing began. From the start, the NATO bombing failed as a
humanitarian endeavor because it actually worsened the crisis it sought to
contain. Even General Naumann admitted this, writing
“Premised
on humanitarian needs, it was difficult to defend the NATO intervention
logically and politically when it was initially causing damage but did not
prevent the expulsion of the Kosovars. That a huge outflow of refugees followed
the initial bombing was embarrassing, to say the least.”
As if driving the Serbs into
committing even more atrocities wasn’t enough, NATO’s determination to keep
causalities at a minimum lead the alliance to require their pilots to fly at
higher altitudes to avoid Yugoslav radar and anti-air missiles, reducing the
danger to the pilots but increasing the risk to civilians, as the pilots had
greater difficulty in identifying targets.
Policies such as this lead to incidents such as a NATO fighter firing twice
upon a bridge as a train crossed it, killing at least 14 Serb civilians,
the destruction of the civilian-staffed Serbian state television and radio
headquarters and the
bombing of an ethnic Albanian convoy that resulted in the death of 73 refugees.
Protecting the lives of one’s soldiers in a particular operation is a laudable
goal and should be prioritized, but when doing so jeopardizes the lives of the
civilians the soldiers are supposed to protect, one must reconsider the wisdom
of the operation in question.
Having
demonstrated that the United States and NATO, far from being convicted that
ethnic cleansing and genocide must be halted in their tracks wherever they may
occur, were prone to ignoring humanitarian crises and even working with states
that caused them, in addition to failing to consider how their actions might trigger
more atrocities and endanger civilian lives, one can now consider two more
likely causes for the American-led intervention in Kosovo: credibility and
purpose. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, both the United
States and NATO faced political crises of identity: having premised their
foreign policies entirely on countering the Soviets for the last 40 years, what
role would they play in the world now that the most significant threat to them
was no more. The solution for both actors was simple: find new enemies. These
new enemies included “rogue states” or autocratic regimes with connections of
varying degrees to terrorists and believed to be pursuing weapons of mass
destruction. These states, particularly Middle Eastern ones like Iraq and Iran
“exercised an important influence on the way that the Clinton administration
came to conceive of new purposes for NATO and to perceive the conflicts in the
former Yugoslavia.” Thus,
Yugoslavia was perceived by the U.S. not as a member of the developed world
like Great Britain or France, but as yet another malevolent actor on the
international stage like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Muammar Gadaffi’s Libya. This
treatment of Yugoslavia was especially prudent as Clinton sought to not only
redefine NATO but to expand it eastward, which would inevitably bring the
alliance into conflict with the fiercely independent Serbs.
In many ways, the Kosovo war can be thought of as a test run – or in the eyes
of dictators, a warning - for future American and NATO operations against rogue
states, as it involved action against an internationally-isolated state
oppressing a segment of it’s population and totally eschewed deployment of
ground forces in favor of air power. In that sense, it was successful, as it
showcased not only NATO’s resolve to act against rogue states, but also it’s
ability to quickly mobilize it’s forces and utilize them to devastating effect.
Naturally, these goals and actions alienated Russia and China, the two nations
capable of resisting the U.S. and NATO. Russia adamantly opposed NATO
encroachment on it’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe,
and China viewed humanitarian intervention in Kosovo as a dangerous precedent
in regards to it’s occupation of Tibet and confirmations of it’s concerns about
“U.S. hegemonism”. These
attitudes necessitated the U.S.’s bypassing the United Nations and acting
through NATO instead, as Russia and China would almost definitely veto any
resolution authorizing intervention in the Security Council, a course of action
that remains heatedly debated to this day. This fact was recognized by General
Naumann, who wrote “Some countries may be inclined to intervene and feel
justified in doing so if blatant violations of human rights were met with
indifference or, worse, a veto in the Security Council”,
indirectly referencing the U.S.’s approach to Kosovo. The influence of this
precedent can be seen in the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the “Coalition of The
Willing”, an alliance of convenience to counter claims that the United States
was acting unilaterally against Iraq and in violation of the United Nations
charter. Why the “Coalition of The Willing” was not taken as seriously as an
obsolete alliance trying to reinvent itself is a subject for another paper.
Equally
importantly, the NATO bombing demonstrated Clinton’s and by extension the
U.S.’s credibility in matters of foreign policy. As President of the United
States, Clinton had to make sure that not just his word but the word of whomever
held the office carried weight within the international community. This was
surely why, “shortly after taking office, [Clinton] had reaffirmed the validity
of the Christmas warning issued in 1992 by President Bush.”
The Christmas warning was a promise by George H.W. Bush to intervene
unilaterally in Kosovo if Milosevic moved against the Albanians there, and is
especially noteworthy as it precedes NATO’s bombing by almost 10 years. Even
more noteworthy is that Clinton felt the need to reiterate it and act on it
years later after it had been issued and the president who originally made it
had been replaced by him, suggesting it was very important to him. It is
possible that both domestic and international doubts about Clinton’s commitment
to use force after the Black Hawk down incident in Somalia and American failure
to intervene in Rwanda motivated his decision to go to war with Yugoslavia.
Indeed, in the speech he gave on the first day of the bombing, Clinton stated
that the first objective of the intervention was “to demonstrate the
seriousness of NATO’s purpose so that the Serbian leaders understand the
imperative of reversing course”,
putting it before the widely-reported humanitarian goal of protecting Kosovar
Albanians. Clinton’s speech illustrates the motives behind Operation Allied
Force perfectly: halting Serb ethnic cleansing was a priority, but showing bad
actors that the United States and NATO are not to be taken lightly was even
more important in their eyes.
If the goal
of the mission was to demonstrate American resolve, it worked. After 78 days of
bombing, Milosevic, compounded by other factors, realized that NATO’s resolve
was stronger than he had anticipated and pulled Serb forces out of Kosovo in
June of 1999. He had interpreted earlier moves by NATO, such as air exercises
in countries bordering the FRY, as bluffs,
and believed that he could wait out any action the alliance took. But as the
war dragged on, Milosevic’s erstwhile supporters turned on him, holding him
responsible for the violence that befell Serbia.
Even Russia, his longtime benefactor, urged him to seek a peaceful solution.
At last, Milosevic relented: Kosovo would be a province of Yugoslavia no more,
occupied instead by NATO peacekeepers who would supervise their new state of
quasi-independence. Curiously however, not only did NATO not force Milosevic to
step down, but it also withdrew it’s demand from the earlier Rambouillet
Agreement to allow unlimited access to all of the FRY for it’s soldiers and
personnel.
This settlement is very revealing, as it shows that rather than objecting to
Milosevic on predominantly moral grounds, NATO was willing to compromise with
him when it best suited their purposes. If they really viewed Milosevic as the
modern-day Hitler sensationalistic journalists and reporters claimed him to be,
it is highly unlikely they would have consented to any agreement in which
Milosevic remained in a position to someday wage war again. Not that human
rights violations ended with the departure of Milosevic and his forces from
Kosovo: far from it actually. After the war, NATO found itself tasked with
protecting Serbs and other minorities who found themselves disenfranchised in
the now-independent Kosovo. As Branislaw Krstic-Brano observed:
“Serbs
and other non-Albanians were forced to flee… Major O. Irgence, a KFOR
spokesman, stated that for five months (from June 12 to November 10), 379
people were killed in the province and that ‘a disproportionately large number
of victims are Serbs, taking into account that they currently make up about 6
percent of the population.’”
Accounts like this belie the
claim that, as a humanitarian mission, Kosovo was a success. Whether or not
acts are human rights violations is not incumbent on whether the people they’re
being perpetrated against belong to a group that until recently committed the
same acts. With this in mind, if NATO’s goal genuinely was to halt atrocities
in Kosovo, it failed, as Serbs, Roma and Jews faced persecution under their
watch.
However,
if one endorses the view that the U.S. and NATO primarily approached the
conflict with a realist frame of mind, then the Kosovo war was an unqualified
success. It was accomplished without deploying boots on the ground and almost
no military causalities, it demonstrated American resolve and commitment to
future threats, and it gave NATO a new lease on life when it seemed that it
might no longer be relevant. The influence of realism can also be seen in the
war’s outcome, when Milosevic finally understood how serious NATO was and
conceded to their demands. Almost certainly pleased with how the operation
turned out, NATO permitted Milosevic to remain as President of the FRY and
abandoned it’s designs on the entirety of Yugoslavia, settling for Kosovo alone.
After all, they had gotten what they really wanted: purpose and credibility.
