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‘The Kosovo Dilemma’ goes astray

The 1999 NATO-led bombing against Serbia was a humanitarian intervention, not a U.S. and European power grab

By Paul Hockenos

Stuart Anderson’s “The Kosovo Dilemma” (5/14/08) is badly in need of correction.

As I have argued before in these pages, the 1999 NATO-led bombing campaign against Serbia was a legitimate humanitarian intervention designed to halt the persecution of Kosovar Albanians in Kosovo. In 1998 during the first phase of the 1998-1999 war, the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), acting against an unarmed civilian population, forced 300,000 ethnic Albanians from their homes. Serb reprisals continued through winter 1998-1999 and the offensive resumed in early 1999. By April 1999 a combination of Serb ethnic cleansing and NATO air strikes had forced 850,000 (overwhelmingly Albanians) from their homes. The very same actors — JNA, irregular paramilitaries, local police — that perpetrated ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, including the Srebrenica massacre, were on the ground and active in Kosovo.

The January 15,1999 massacre at Racak was just one example. As in Bosnia, the Serbs objective was to create an ethnically homogenous territory. The Western powers watched on as the Serbs perpetrated genocide in Bosnia; they intervened in Kosovo not because they were spoiling for war but because of the pressure of public opinion to act. (During the Bosnia war President Clinton’s response to Serb ethnic cleansing was not moral outrage but concern about the opinion polls. “I’m getting creamed on this,” he exclaimed to advisers.)

It is positively ludicrous to attribute an economic motive to the Kosovo intervention. What could the countries of Western Europe and North America possibly gain in terms of trade or treasure from the campaign against Serbia or even an independent Kosovo? Certainly the intervention spared Western Europe another protracted refugee crisis like those during the Bosnia and Croatia wars. The millions of displaced peoples cost the Europeans billions and disrupted regional trade for over four years, which had hugely negative repercussions — particularly for neighboring countries like Bulgaria, Romania, and Macedonia.

Kosovo is a poor, underdeveloped, landlocked patch of mostly arid, mountainous terrain. Its most profitable sectors are cement and gravel production. Regardless of what Clinton said while rallying support for intervention, Kosovo neither had nor has any economic value to the United States.

As for international law, while it is true that the campaign happened without UN Security Council approval, it was waged in the name of universal human rights, which is also part of international law. Three years of UN inaction and half-hearted measures in Bosnia served as a fig leaf for Western powers that wanted no part of that war — and it resulted in disaster. Finally, by 1999, the major western countries stopped making excuses and responded to Slobodan Milosevic with the only language he would listen to, namely the force of arms, and with the only multilateral force at the West’s disposal, NATO.

As wars do, this one took innocent lives and caused environmental damage. I would rather it had been waged without cluster bombs and the targeting of infrastructure, to say nothing about the loss of innocent lives. But the wars in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo had already taken over 150,000 lives by spring 1999. Everybody — and the environment too — would have been better off had the West acted sooner to stop Milosevic.

Certainly, the war did contribute to the rationale for NATO’s continued existence, something that NATO military planners and many Western leaders wanted. But the air strikes in early 1999 were not waged exclusively or even primarily to justify NATO’s post-Cold War existence. The fact is that there was no other multinational force capable of such an intervention, something the EU is in the process of changing.

Anderson goes astray on many important facts, a result of dubious sources one can dredge up by trolling the Internet.

David Binder, for example, is a longtime Serb apologist who falls over himself in the most right-wing Serbian diaspora publications and government Web sites praising Serbia’s World War II monarchists and Serbdom in general. His contention that Kosovo Albanians “raped” Kosovo Serbs during the 1980s is a piece of Serbian nationalist propaganda that has long been discredited, as have most of Binder’s other claims. Anderson’s contention of “ethnic Albanian violence against Serbs, Roma and other non-Albanians” in the 1990s is preposterous. Throughout the 1990s, the Kosovo Albanians conducted a strategy of nonviolent resistance in Kosovo, the centerpiece of which was a “parallel state” that had neither police, army, nor an operational paramilitary force. All of the usual means of violence in Kosovo were in Serbian hands, which they used liberally against the ethnic Albanians, a fact substantiated by nearly every independent monitoring agency or eyewitness on the ground at the time.

Likewise, his numbers on the Serb exodus after the 1999 war are way off: European Stability Initiative, a think tank, estimates there were 129,475 Serbs in postwar Kosovo; 65,000 of nearly 200,000 pre-war Serbs had fled. Even Kosovo’s Serbian National Council claims there are at least 100,000 Serbs still in Kosovo, a far cry from Anderson’s 20,000.

The completely unsubstantiated claim that Kosovo is a “mafia state” or “mafia society” is also straight from the pages of Serb propaganda, which has long tried to defame the Albanians as crooks, gangsters, pimps, and traffickers. The corruption in Kosovo isn’t any worse than that in Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania, and nobody calls them “mafia states.” But Anderson’s biggest howler last: MPRI is not “Multiphoton Resonance Ionization,” but Military Professional Resources Incorporated.

In the post-Balkan War distribution of territory in 1912, Kosovo was awarded to Serbia. Over nearly a century in different state forms, Serbia proper never treated Kosovo as a multiethnic territory, one whose diverse inhabitants are equal citizens with full political rights. Serbia coveted Kosovo strictly in terms of its territory, not its inhabitants, and through one policy or another attempted to shift the demographic balance in favor of the Serbs. Serbia has forfeited the right to Kosovo. Independence for Kosovo – and the inclusion of both Kosovo and Serbia in the EU — is the only way to lay the groundwork for long-term peace and stability in the western Balkans.

Paul Hockenos has written for In These Times from Eastern Europe since 1989. He is the author, most recently, of Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History of Postwar Germany (Oxford University Press).

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  • Reader Comments

    Paul,
    It is absolutely clear that it is you who spread anti Serb propaganda. It is not a secret that Kosovo is a hub of human trafficking and info about it for years are published by Western media.

    One of the last is revelation by Ms. Del Ponte about 300 young Serbs killed by Albanians for human organs.

    But regardless of all of this you are asking:

    “It is positively ludicrous to attribute an economic motive to the Kosovo intervention. What could the countries of Western Europe and North America possibly gain in terms of trade or treasure from the campaign against Serbia or even an independent Kosovo?”

    Could you explain to me, please, why the bombing of Serbia started after rejection by Yugoslavia presented to her Appendix B in Rambouillet conference?

    This Appendix was very similar to SOFA presented now to Iraqi puppet government. As you know al Sadr and even al Sistani opposed to it.

    And also, why US build in Kosovo one of the biggest military base, Camp Bondsteal, if Kosovo doesn’t represent any economic or strategic interest to US?

    What about the way of planed pipelines such as NABUCO or South Stream going from Caspian See basin to Europe?

    Why Hitler was trying to occupy the Balkans and pushed toward Baku oil reserves?

    Don’t assume that everybody is so naive as you think.

    Posted by yacek1 on Jun 25, 2008 at 7:15 AM

    “In 1998 during the first phase of the 1998-1999 war, the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), acting against an unarmed civilian population, forced 300,000 ethnic Albanians from their homes.”

    That’s one way to look at the situation.  However, it should be noted that thousands of Albanians crossed the border into Greece, Macedonia and Serbia (mainly Kosovo) during the 90s.  After Milosevic’s Kosovo Polje speech the Yugoslav authorities started (far too late) a passport verification programme and began to expel illegal immigrants.  We don’t describe this as ‘ethnic cleansing’ when applied to western Europe, so why would we use that term in the case of Serbia.

    The Albanians leaving Kosovo back to their country in large numbers began right after Nato’s bombardments started, and this seems quite natural.  The murderous activities of the KLA against Serbs and even of their own who community who didn’t agree with their objectives was reason for the YU authorities for a heavy crackdown.

    Greece too expelled tens of thousands, but they didn’t have to cope with a KLA, meaning no military operations.  This was different in Macedonia, but violence there subsided, partly due to international mediation.  This could have been the policy in Serbia too, but the West decided otherwise.  We see the results of the illegal interference in Serbia’s affairs today—mayhem and distress.  However, we haven’t witnessed (former) leaders of the responsible Nato countries defending their case yet in a court of law.

    I regard the Western press as one of the culprits because of its spreading of KLA propaganda, unhindered by, it must be said, counter-offensive openness from Belgrade.  The anti-’Serb’ bias in the media is still easily to detect.

    Rgds - JJ

    Posted by jjvanka on Jun 25, 2008 at 7:46 AM

    Dobrica Cosic Former Serbian President “We lie to deceive ourselves, to console others; we lie for mercy, we lie to fight fear, to encourage ourselves, to hide our and somebody else’s misery. We lie for love and honesty. We lie because of freedom. Lying ie is the trait of our patriotism and the proof of our innate smartness. We lie creatively, imaginatively, inventively.”

    Six pivotal themes in Serbian propaganda are:

    1. Victimization, in which Serbs were constructed as collective victims first of the NDH, then of Tito’s Yugoslavia, and more specifically of Croats, Albanians, Bosnians, and other non-Serbs.

    2. Dehumanization of designated ‘others’, in which Croats were depicted as ‘genocidal’ and as ‘Ustaše’, Bosnians were portrayed as ‘fanatical fundamentalists’, and Albanians were represented as not fully human. These processes of dehumanization effectively removed these designated ‘others’ from the moral field, sanctifying their murder or expulsion.

    3. Belittlement, in which Serbia’s enemies were represented as
    beneath contempt.

    4. Conspiracy, in which Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, the Vatican,
    Germany, Austria, and sometimes also the Bosnians as well as the U.S. and other foreign states, were seen as united in a conspiracy to break up the SFRY and hurt Serbia. In this way, the Belgrade regime’s obstinate disregard for the fundamental standards of international law was dressed up as heroic defiance of an anti-Serb conspiracy.

    5. Entitlement, in which the Serbs were constructed as ‘entitled’ to create a Greater
    Serbian state to which parts of Croatia and Bosnia would be attached, under the motto,’ All Serbs should live in one state.’

    6. Superhuman powers and divine sanction. The Serbs were told that they were, in some sense, “super”. They were the best fighters on the planet, they could stand up to the entire world, and they were sanctioned by God himself, because of Tsar Lazar and the fact that Lazar had chosen the heavenly kingdom. Moreover, since Lazar had chosen the heavenly kingdom, the Serbs, encouraged to view themselves as Lazar’s heirs, were entitled to the earthly kingdom which Lazar had repudiated, as their patrimony.

    Serbian society began to stray down the path to war more or less unwittingly. Already in the years 1981—86, long before the other republics experienced anything like a ‘national awakening’, Serbia (and here one may include Kosovo too) was already sliding into a syndrome in which myths, threats, the allure of victory, and
    belligerent rhetoric filled the public discourse, giving Serbs a sense of common destiny but also separating them, psychologically, from the other peoples of socialist Yugoslavia. That this was an unhealthy state of collective mind is clear from the prominence of the themes of victimization, conspiracy, national entitlement, and divine sanction of the Serbian national project, as well as from the insistent campaigns of dehumanization, demonization, and belittlement of Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians, as well as other peoples and states, which began at this time. This syndrome, in an individual, would be considered psychotic; to the extent that it permeated much of Serbian society, perhaps especially in the countryside, one may speak of Serbia having been sucked into a kind of collective psychosis. And to the extent that Serbian war propaganda aimed at reinforcing and stimulating this state of mind, we may say that it aimed at inculcating and reinforcing neurotic and psychotic syndromes in Serbian society. This psychosis had its cultic saints – portraitsof Milošević and Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović were often displayed alongside those of saints canonized by the Church – had its bards (such as Simonida Stanković and Ceca Ražnjatović), and even had its offi

    Posted by Albiqete on Jun 25, 2008 at 8:14 AM

    official music – “turbo-folk”, a pop mixtureof folk-ethnic style with a rhythmic pounding beat. Moreover, this psychosis could even transport those infected to a state of consciousness which they mistook for a better world. Miloševi, for example, arriving dramatically at Kosovo polje in a helicopter on 28 June 1989, told those gathered for the six hundredth anniversary of Serbia’s mythic confrontation with its national destiny, that in that
    the - century battle, Serbia had defended not just herself but all of European culture and civilization. Fine oratory might even be called the elixir of national psychosis.

    Posted by Albiqete on Jun 25, 2008 at 8:19 AM

    I don’t like spinach either.  Though I see no reason to write about it.  :o)

    Posted by jjvanka on Jun 25, 2008 at 9:40 AM

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