"A mature great power...will eschew the theory of a global and universal duty which not only commits it to unending wars of intervention but intoxicates its thinking with the illusion that it is a crusader for righteousness...."

Walter Lipmann

Sourcing Media

I had the opportunity last week to access CNN's up to the minute coverage of the crisis in Kosovo and have to admit that, after a couple of days it began to be hard not to want to see NATO airplanes start to score direct hits on Belgrade's parliament buildings.  The influence of  image washes of refugees, the emotional impact of exhausted and beaten US captives, and the ongoing vilification of Slobodan Milosovic, all mold together and combine with the subliminal North American expectation to 'win, win, win' and to know that we'll always win.  It came as no great surprise then that a continent watching CNN and the like now  supports sending ground troops into a sovereign state in Europe, something that amounts essentially to occupation.  When a consistent source of information on the conflict for the mainstream media is Pentagon 'correspondents' (apparently a FOX reporter accidentally introduced the one such 'correspondent' as a 'spokesperson') is it in any wonder.

However, a brief departure from the CNN flow to dig up some alternative news sources over the Net reveals a very different picture.  Those actually living in Kosovo, who you would surely think would be a primary source of information, have a very different perspective on the NATO bombing.  Professor Vojin Dimitrijevic, former Vice-Chairman of the UN Human Rights Commission, and writing for the Belgrade Center for Human Rights, claims that "The air strikes erased in one night the results of ten years of hard work of groups of courageous people in the non-governmental organisations and in the democratic opposition",  "we regard the NATO's decision 'to use violence for humanitarian reasons' as a sign of incompetence and impotence".  Veran Matic, (a winner of many international awards for media and democracy, and named this year as one of the hundred Global Leaders for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum) the editor-in-chief of Belgrade's banned Radio B-92 writes that "the bombing has jeopardized the lives of 10.5 million people and unleashed an attack on the fledgling forces of democracy in Kosovo and Serbia."  Matic goes on to quote Zoran Zivkovic, the opposition mayor of the city of Nis, "Twenty minutes ago my city was bombed.  The people who live here are the same people who voted for democracy in 1996, the same people who protested for a hundred days after the authorities tried to deny them their victory in the elections. Today my city was bombed by the democratic states of the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Canada!  Is there any sense in this?"  (Frankly, the only thing that you might get an entire population pouring into the streets in protest in the so-called democratic states of the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Canada is if you were to threaten to take away their cable television).  Matic concludes his brief letter by saying that "NATO's bombs have blasted the germinating seeds of democracy out of the soil of Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro and ensured that they will not sprout for a very long time."

Mainstream media has tended to paint a picture of the Serbians as the sole perpetrators of the conflict. Footage of trainloads of Albanians being deported are hauntingly reminiscent of the Holocaust, but it should be remembered that it was in fact the Albanians who allied themselves with the Nazis, and the Serbs who fought them. The Rambouillet peace negotiations, which the Serbs have been solely blamed for ditching, were also opposed by the ethnic Albanians on the grounds that it did not guarantee their independence.  The US twisted the Albanians arms by threatening to cut off the KLA's arms supply, and by informing them that, without their assent, NATO could not bomb Serbian targets. All sides in the Balkan wars have demonstrated atrocious behavior, not only the Serbs.  Days before the NATO bombing began the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague reported massive ethnic cleansing, summary executions and indiscriminate shelling of civilian populations committed by the Croatian Army (with tacit backing from the US) against the Croatian Serbs in its summer 1995 offensive, an offensive that resulted in the displacement of around 300,000 citizens.  Where were NATO and CNN then?

In fact, where have NATO and CNN been when 80,000 were killed in Algeria, around 10,000 in the Ethiopian-Eritrean war in the last few weeks, 820,000 in Rwanda in the last five years, 1,500,000 in Sudan in the last 15 years?  One place that NATO and the international community have given considerable attention to in the last few years is Iraq, where more than a million have died as a result of current Western sanctions, about 5,000 children per month according to current estimates. (Figures from Transnational Foundation).

International Law + 'Humanitarian Intervention'

The ostensible reason behind NATO's offensive is, indeed, a laudable one.  That of protecting a community of people from a campaign to forcefully remove them from their homeland.  However, such a task must be carried out by an international legal body, not by a task force representing a small fraction of global opinion, albeit the most heavily armed.  NATO's intervention has broken numerous treaties and obligations stipulated by international law.  Article 2 of the UN Charter prohibits the use of force against sovereign states not involved in outside aggression; the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties forbids the use of force to compel any state to sign an international agreement; and the Helsinki Accord Final Act guarantees the boundaries of European states.  Nationally the US government failed to invoke the War Powers Act or put in place the congressional requirements to declare a state of war. As a recent editorial for The Nation states, "Such concerns are not just legal niceties; this 'intervention' has established new parameters for the United States and NATO to make war without any of the checks and balances provided by US law, international agreements or even the realpolitik of the Security Council.  Wars without borders, figurative or literal." (`Destroying Kosovo' The Nation Editorial, April 19, 1999).

Noam Chomsky, in an article published in Z Magazine entitled 'The Current Bombings: Behind the Rhetoric', demonstrates that there is in fact a legal tension between the UN Charter, which bans force violating state sovereignty, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees the rights of individuals against oppressive states.  It is the latter right that NATO proclaims to be upholding in its action of 'humanitarian intervention'.  However, as Chomsky points out, the validity of such intervention is obviously premised on the good faith of those doing the intervening, in particular their record of adherence to the principles of international law.  It was probably on these grounds that Iran's previous offer to intervene as a humanitarian force in the Balkans was ignored.  But has the US's humanitarian record proven to be better in comparable situations?

In Columbia, whose President Gaviria has been held responsible for "appalling levels of violence" by human rights groups, where State Department estimates put the level of killing by government and paramilitary groups at about the level in Kosovo, and where civilian flight is over a million, the government is the leading recipient of US arms and training.  In 1994, Turkey - where state sanctioned repression of the Kurdish population drove over a million Kurds from the countryside, and where the levels of violence are considered to be equal to that in Kosovo – became the biggest single importer of American military hardware in the same year that repression against the Kurds was considered the most violent.  In Laos to this day thousands of children and poor farmers are killed everyday as a result of the heaviest bombing of civilian targets in history in the late 60's.  The reason being that the US military saturated the Plain of Jars with 'bombies', miniature anti-personnel weapons with an astonishing (and cruelly suspicious) failure-to-explode rate of 20-30%.  Barry Wain of the Wall Street Journal estimates that there are still 20,000 casualties per year, over half of them children according to the Central Mennonite Committee.  The US has proven to be elusive and evasive when requests have been made for help in the clean up operation and for procedures to render the devices harmless.

The term `humanitarian intervention' has in fact been invoked before.  In Japan's attack on Manchuria, in Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, and in Hitler's occupation of Czechoslovakia in which the Nazi's were apparently "filled with the earnest desire to serve the true interests of the peoples dwelling in the area".  On the other hand, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December of 1978 claiming, rightly, that it was being attacked by the Khmer Rouge, and ending the barbaric regime of Pol Pot, the US press vilified the Vietnamese for breaking international law, and the US subsequently imposed harsh sanctions on the country.

NATO's blatant disregard for international law and treaties has, no doubt, further eroded the credibility of the only institutions purporting a semblance of global unity and therefore political credibility.  France's efforts to secure a UN Security Council resolution to authorize a NATO peacekeeping mission in Kosovo was flatly refused by Washington, which insisted on its authority to act independently of the UN.  As Chomsky writes, "The contempt of the world's leading power for the framework of world order has become so extreme that there is nothing left to discuss."  Such unilateral action spites the other superpowers (particularly Russia, who not only have considerable vested interest in the area both geographically and historically, but who will also feel betrayed by NATO's breaking of its promises regarding its encroachment into central Europe) and all other members in the global community, who are bound to begin to perceive the US as a 'rogue superpower'.  The US will be considered, according to Foreign Affairs journalist Samuel Huntington, "the single greatest threat to their societies", a threat which is likely to invite counterbalancing coalitions.

'Humanitarian Intervention' – A Free Market Trojan Horse?

While it would be wrong to assume that the NATO force has no humanitarian concern whatsoever, it would also be very wrong to believe that that is the only reason that they are in the Balkans.  James Hooper, executive Director of the Balkan Action Council, speaking to Washington's 'Committee of Conscience' said the following: "Accept that the Balkans are a region of strategic interest for the US, the new Berlin if you will, the testing ground for NATO's resolve and US leadership…the administration should level with the American people and tell them that we are likely to be in the Balkans militarily indefinitely, at least until there is a democratic government in Belgrade."  By democratic I think we can assume that Hooper means US backed.  Both the US's close alliance with numerous non-democratic regimes, and its current dictatorial behavior with regards to international law, demonstrates its profound ambivalence towards the concept beyond the rhetoric.

As long ago as the early 60's, in an era of increasing commitment to Vietnam, US policymakers believed it to be a responsibility that it should "impose" upon economically vital regions "an informal empire of  'virtuous omnipotence' that guaranteed a safe, stable and predictable environment conducive to expanding trade relations". (Christopher Layne, Benjamin Schwarz `Making the World Safer for Business', The Nation).  Current policies have begun to mimic those of the 60's.  The Pentagon recently declared that "a prosperous, largely democratic, market-oriented zone of peace and prosperity that encompasses more than two-thirds of the world's economy" requires safekeeping that only the US can provide.  Defense Secretary William Cohen claims that NATO expansion is required to `spread stability', "And with that spread of stability, there is a prospect to attract investment."  President Clinton, on the day before the bombing began, claimed that "if we're going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key…That's what this Kosovo thing is all about."  (How ironic that purely Capitalist objectives run amok over democratic processes, and that Free Trade could prove to cost millions daily in the violent securing of 'safe' markets. Capital rules democracy.)

The logic then is that, in order to ensure safe markets in a globally interdependent economic system, the US must expand its political will into areas that, in fact, do not threaten the US in any way.  Instability anywhere endangers stability everywhere…in Clinton's words, "what are the consequences of letting conflicts fester and spread", "the flames will spread."  This is an identical stance to that of the Cold War years' 'domino effect' and what led the US into Vietnam.  Furthermore it is a stance that implicitly declares the US's right to use military force to re-arrange another sovereign states' internal affairs if it is deemed threatening to 'secure global economic interdependence'.

An ostensible excuse for the US and NATO to aggressively pursue its policy of 'restabilisation' is humanitarian catastrophe.  Jean-Christophe Rufin, former vice-president of 'Doctors without Borders' said in an interview with `Le Monde' that "the humanitarians could be the Trojan Horse of the new armed imperialism."  "Setting such a machine in motion requires a detonator.  Today it is no longer military.  Nor is it political.  The evidence is before us: NATO's trigger today is…humanitarian.  It takes blood, a massacre, something that will outrage public opinion so that it will welcome a violent reaction."  Rufin's analysis is particularly haunting in light of the current tragedy in Kosovo, in which NATO bombing 'predictably' radically exacerbated the condition of the refugees.  Now NATO saves the day by sending in humanitarian aid, hand delivered by American ground forces, while CNN fuels the outrage at home with images of total disaster and captured allied soldiers.  NATO's original role as a defensive alliance has transformed into an aggressive US led vehicle for securing foreign markets.

The Results of Intervention

The results of the conflict so far, and its likely long-term result, seem to reflect the voices of those on the ground in Kosovo.  (In fact, NATO spokespeople, or Pentagon correspondents, don't really seem to have any opinion at all on what they hope the long-term results of the conflict will be, other than that they are determined to win it.)  NATO's bombing has driven out almost all humanitarian organisations and has given Milosovic the excuse and the free reign to carry through his project of driving the Albanians out.  Its almost certain to increase the animosity between the peoples – the Serbians will now feel justified in blaming the Albanians for calling down a full scale foreign invasion on their sovereign soil – disabling future negotiations and a subsequent peaceful resettlement.  As an article in the Financial Times put it, "every bomb that falls on Serbia and every ethnic killing in Kosovo suggests that it will scarcely be possible for Serbs and Albanians to live beside each other in some sort of peace." (Financial Times, Mar.27).  Under threat of invasion many citizens who previously protested against Milosovic in 1997 now feel honor-bound to defend their country against foreign invasion.

Other negative fallouts of the bombings include the continued regional destabilisation resulting from an all-out war on Balkan soil, and the devastation of Yugoslavian industrial complexes, government buildings and key bridges – all of which will require millions to rebuild.  Nor can the sheer shock of a nation being bombed with hundreds of thousands of pounds of explosives, frequently targeted at environmentally sensitive installations, be underestimated.  As Jan Oberg, (the director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, who describes NATO's `humanitarian intervention' as `B-52 humanitarianism'), writes, "Bombing will produce what it purports to prevent."

There is no doubt that the treatment of Kosovo Albanians by Slobodan Milosovic and the Yugoslav Serbs is reprehensible in the extreme.  It is, thank God, natural and good that nations, and the citizens of nations the world over, should empathize with their plight, and wish to bring an end to it.  However, the current strategy of NATO and the United States is also reprehensible.  It is a great arrogance for one powerful nation to believe that it can resolve the civil problems of another nation (we should not forget that the United States had its own civil war as it emerged as a nation not so long ago, a war which also had its origins in racial prejudice) - a nation with profound and complex attachments to its geography, history and ethnicity.  It is stupidity to imagine that these problems could be resolved by bombing.  "Violations of human rights", writes Louis Henkin,  "are indeed all too common, and if it were permissible to remedy them by external use of force, there would be no law to forbid the use of force by almost any state against almost any other.  Human rights, I believe, will have to be vindicated, and other injustices remedied, by other, peaceful means, not by opening the door to aggression and destroying the principle advance in international law, the outlawing of war and the prohibition of force."

Winning

NATO, having ignored such admonitions as those of Walter Lippmann, cited in the opening quotation of this article, and Louis Henkin, have gone ahead and begun to bomb Kosovo.  Now that they have engaged militarily they feel compelled to win, or lose face.  It is extremely difficult to know what '' 'winning' such a situation could possibly mean.  Would it be the complete collapse of the Yugoslav government and its replacement by a pliant and obedient dictator sympathetic to Western free marketeering and bribery?  Would it be the ethnic cleansing of the Serbians?  To the citizenry of NATO countries the war is yet to be much more than a TV game (we can surely look forward, in the next year or so, to computer games in which we can bomb exact replicas of Belgrade in virtual B-2 bombers), there is no cost paid by us for our slathering for victory. So it is that the need to 'win' becomes so cruelly absurd in that the cost of this detached and yet egotistical desire for 'victory' is paid largely by the devastated civilian population of Kosovo.

`Destroying Kosovo'.  Editorial in The Nation, April 19, 1999.

`The Current Bombings: Behind the Rhetoric'.  Noam Chomsky on Z-Net.

`Making the World Safer for Business'.  Christopher Layne + Benjamin Schwarz.

`NATO's Humanitarian Trigger'. Diana Johnstone on Z-Net.

`The Case Against Intervention in Kosovo'. Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwarz for The Nation, April 19, 1999.

`The Clinton Doctrine'. Michael T.Clare for The Nation, April 19, 1999.

Open Letter from The Belgrade Center for Human Rights on Radio B-92 (web).

`Bombings-Incompatible With Humanitarian Concerns'.  Jan Oberg for Transnational Federation web site.

`Protecting the Kosovars'. Edward Said on Z-Net.

`The Myth and Milosovic'. Marlene Nadle in The Nation, April 19, 1999.

`Bombing the Baby with the Bathwater'. Veran Matic on Radio B-92 (web).

`Message from Milica Dedijer – A Green in Belgrade'. Milica Dedijer on Radio B-92 (web).

 

www.transnational.org

http://www.thenation.com/index.shtml

www.zmag.org

http://helpb92.xs4all.nl/