Why did we bomb Belgrade?

Why did we bomb Belgrade?

International Affairs 76, () ‒

MICHAEL MCCGWIRE

In principle, the question was answered by our political leaders in the daysfollowing the start of NATO’s air campaign against Serbia. In practice, theanswers raised new questions as to why these intelligent men were saying suchthings.

Using similar words in various formulations, George Robertson and RobinCook explained (repeatedly) that the political objective was to avert a humani-tarian disaster in Kosovo and/or to prevent a crisis from becoming a cata-strophe. This was to be achieved by strategic and precision bombing of militarytargets (initially in Serbia) in order to reduce the capability of Serb forces to:continue with their violence; repress the Kosovar Albanians; order ethniccleansing. There was an obvious disjunction between the stated militaryobjective of degrading Serbia’s military capability (a slow process) and theimmediate political objective of halting the forced expulsions and associatedkillings in Kosovo. Indeed, bombing Belgrade seemed likely to inflame thesituation, and made sense only if one believed that this demonstration ofNATO resolve would cause Slobodan Milosevic to halt the process himself.That did not happen. We were then told—despite events in Bosnia andCroatia—that no one could have foreseen that Milosevic could have been sowicked. The continued bombing was justified by describing what was happen-ing in Kosovo (which was terrible enough) using exaggerated and emotive lan-guage, including talk of genocide which, in common parlance, clearly did notapply. Meanwhile, our leaders continued to demonize Milosevic.

In the past, demonizing has been used to justify offensive military action thatin other circumstances might be questionable. Abdul Nasser (whom Britainlikened to Hitler) at the time of the Suez crisis is one such example; MuammarQadhafi as ruler of Libya is another.

So what exactly was afoot? Was this a punishment beating in the Balkans,where NATO, dissatisfied over UN ineffectiveness, was taking the law into itsown hands? Or was there something more to the whole affair?

This article is divided into two parts. The first is descriptive, reviewing thesituation through to the end of 1998 and then summarizing events during thefirst six months of 1999. The second part revisits the evidence, following up

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various anomalies to construct a story that is more plausible (and in many waysmore laudable) than what we were told at the time.

What happened?

Disintegration

Yugoslavia was one of the states most severely affected by the foreign debt crisisin the 1980s, but its special role in NATO strategy had ensured continuingaccess to Western credits. However, the winding down of the Cold Warremoved this leverage and exposed Yugoslavia to the full rigours of IMFconditionality. At the same time, Yugoslavia lost its niche position in the ColdWar global economy and found itself in competition with the newly inde-pendent states of central Europe for Western trade and favours. The resultanteconomic austerity and budgetary conflict was hugely divisive and placed heavystrains on the complex political and socio-economic structure of the federalstate, accentuating nationalistic tendencies which, for different reasons, were onthe rise in Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia. These strains and the economicattractions of independence for Croatia and Slovenia led inexorably to thedisintegration of the federal state.

Yugoslavia was a federation of the Southern Slav peoples, and its politicalstructure combined aspects of a union between sovereign territories withestablished borders, and a union between sovereign peoples, whose memberscould be living anywhere within the Federation. The right to secede wasunclear and contested. The West (particularly the United States) took the viewthat the former republics were states-in-waiting and treated claims on theirterritory as international aggression. For Serbia and Croatia, which hadsignificant minorities living outside their borders, such claims involvedlegitimate disputes about how to divide up a failed state. This appliedparticularly to Bosnia-Herzegovina, which comprised three national communi-ties. None had an overall majority, and the Serb minority strongly opposed themove to declare independence from the Federation.

In other words, the West was oversimplifying when it identified Serbaggression as the root cause of the Bosnian conflict; even the label ‘multi-ethniccivil war’ missed the full complexity of what followed the failure of theYugoslav state, about which the West had ample warning. And, whatever themerits of individual cases, there was little to choose between the differentfactions and their leaders. Each was adept at manipulating the aid process andthe media, and made whatever gains that opportunity allowed, the level of bru-tality being largely determined by relative capabilities and the situation on theground. Territories and their people were both the pieces and the board for thisruthless game. Although all sides were guilty of atrocities, up to July 1995 (andincluding events at Srebrenica), the Bosnian Serbs had committed the over-whelming majority. However, in August 1995, the US-supported Croatianarmy, on the direct authority of the Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, drove

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Serb forces from the Krajina and ‘cleansed’ the area of its 200,000 inhabitants.This was by far the largest expulsion up to that point, and was achieved in fourdays. The Croats started by shelling villages and towns to create panic and adisorganized mass exit; this was followed up by assault troops looting shops anddwellings, and then by the brutal paramilitaries. The Croatian modus operandiwas so effective that the Serbs adopted the same approach when they occupiedKosovo in March 1999.

By the time of the assault on the Krajina, the war had turned against theBosnian Serbs and NATO was able to bomb with impunity. In 1993, Milosevichad been unsuccessful in pressurizing them to accept UN-brokered peace pro-posals; the Bosnian Serbs had felt there was a better deal to be had by continuingthe war. In 1995, they finally accepted that it was time to negotiate, and Miloseviconce again acted as the influential intermediary between his fellow Serbs andthe West, leading ultimately to the Dayton Accord.

Kosovo

By all accounts, Milosevic is a callous, ruthless, politically adept, power-huggingman. He can be socially engaging, but must never be trusted. The West hasalternated between vilifying him and finding him indispensable. He did notcreate the Kosovo problem, but he did exploit it.

The Albanians had resisted incorporation into Yugoslavia in 1918 and againin 1944. There was an inherent conflict between their long-established wish tounite Kosovo with Albania, and the emotional attachment by Serbs throughoutYugoslavia to Kosovo and its holy places. By 1961, Albanians already comprised67 per cent of Kosovo’s population and the Serbs only 24 per cent; in 1991, theethnic imbalance would be 90:10.

In 1974 the federal constitution had been amended to make Kosovo anautonomous province of the Serbian republic. This went a long way towardssatisfying the aspirations of the Albanian majority, but there were still those whopressed for full republican status for Kosovo and ultimate union in a GreaterAlbania. Following Tito’s death, there were widespread student-led riots and aperiod of federally imposed martial law. Meanwhile, there was growing polit-ical protest among the 200,000 Serbs about their subordinate status and theAlbanians’ oppressive discrimination.

Milosevic seized on this issue as a means of gaining the leadership of theSerbian Communist Party in 1987, which allowed him to appeal to a muchwider constituency in Serbia, including anti-communists and right-wing nation-alists. By the time of the ‘million-man’ celebration of the anniversary of theBattle of Kosovo in 1389, Milosevic had been elected President of the SerbRepublic. More significant, in the multi-party elections held in December 1990(the first in half a century), Milosevic’s newly formed Serbian Socialist Partywon the support of 65 per cent of those voting (47 per cent of the full electorate).New laws disadvantaging the Albanians were introduced in 1989 and a con-

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stitutional amendment revoking Kosovo’s autonomy was passed in September1990. The Kosovo Albanians responded by declaring independence and holdinga clandestine referendum, which elected Ibrahim Rugova, leader of the Demo-cratic League of Kosovo (DLK) and a convinced Gandhian, as President. Aspart of their response to the ‘Serbianization’ of the province and what was seenas colonial rule from Belgrade, they set about organizing an alternative societywith an improvised political structure, schools and a medical system.

The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) emerged fully on the scene only in thewake of the Dayton Accord, when it argued that Rugova’s strategy of passiveresistance had failed. Apart from some sporadic terrorist attacks, it was mainlyoccupied establishing the organizational structure to support a guerrilla war, butthe situation was radically transformed when rioting in Albania led to the loot-ing of state armouries. This resulted in the ready availability of a large number ofKalashnikovs at $10 each.

In February 1998, following a particularly brutal Serbian reprisal, the Albaniansin the Drenica area took up arms, leading to a major KLA offensive; by Julythey controlled more than 30 per cent of the province. Emboldened by its success,the KLA declared its goal to be a Greater Albania, banned all political parties inthe territory it controlled, repressed various minorities (particularly Serbs andRomanies) and denounced Rugova, his DLK party and the Kosovo shadowparliament. No love was lost between the two factions. The KLA leadershipcame mainly from those who had been imprisoned for their political views andmoved abroad on release. Rugova’s DLK included those who had worked forand with the provincial authorities, prior to autonomy being revoked.

At the end of July 1998 the Serbs launched a counter-offensive, driving backthe KLA and burning rebellious villages. The human cost of this operation wassome 800 dead and perhaps 200,000 persons displaced.

This cursory review indicates that while Milosevic exacerbated thesituation in Kosovo, inflaming ethnic animosities and introducing discr-iminatory and repressive policies, the underlying problem was not of his mak-ing. There is a strong argument that the one possibility of defusing thesituation in Kosovo lay with the Albanian majority after provincial autonomywas granted in 1974. They had the singular opportunity at that time ofadopting policies that would reassure the dwindling Serb minority that itsrights and interests were being fully observed and would continue to berespected in the future. But, as we know from Northern Ireland, that is notthe way majorities behave. By 1987 the oppression of the Serb minority inKosovo was a political issue ripe for picking, if not by Milosevic, then by oneof the right-wing nationalist parties. It is relevant that Kosovo was first placedon the political agenda by Serbian academics; that the revocation of Kosovo’sautonomy had widespread support among the political class in Serbia; that thenecessary constitutional amendment was made possible by a deal struck withSlovenia; and that Serb repression in Kosovo was not an issue during the anti-Milosevic protests in winter 1996–7.

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Promoting Milosevic to arch-demon of the Balkans may have eased theWest’s collective conscience about its inept performance in 1985–95, but hewas just one player in the Balkan tragedy, a play in four acts with a cast ofcorrupt and ruthless demons (‘gangsters wearing suits and ties’) spawned by thedisintegration of Yugoslavia. It is fanciful to think that General Ratko Mladicand his nominal political boss Radovan Karadzic were merely puppets dancingto Milosevic’s strings. As for the President of Croatia, the arch-nationalistFranjo Tudjman, he was an equally, if not more, unpleasant character—aswitnessed by the ‘cleansing’ of Krajina on his orders, described above.

Demonizing Milosevic diverted attention from the intractable nature of theKosovo problem and Serbia’s legitimate interests as the sovereign power. Kosovocomprised elements of anti-colonial nationalism (Kenya, Southern Rhodesia),gathering in the ‘greater’ Albanian nation (Serbia, Croatia, Ireland) and, in termsof sheer animosity, the Arab–Israeli conflict, with its contested historical claimsfor the same territory. These elements were interlaced with the competingdemands of human rights, internal security and the security of the Serbian state,which faced the classic conundrum of how to suppress the insurgents withoutacting as their recruiting sergeant.

During the first half of the 1990s the threat could be easily contained, thanksto Rugova’s policy of passive resistance. But following Dayton and the sub-sequent availability of Kalashnikovs, there emerged a qualitatively new threat ofAlbanian-based guerrillas enjoying local support inside Kosovo, which wasinflamed by the brutality of the Serb response.

The road to Rambouillet

On 27 December 1992 George Bush warned Milosevic that if Serbia began awar in Kosovo, the United States would consider it a direct threat to USnational interests and would be obliged to act. This warning was reiterated byBill Clinton on taking office in January and amplified in February by his Secre-tary of State, who expressed the fear that if Serbian influence extended intoKosovo and Macedonia, it would draw into the fray countries such as Albania,Greece and Turkey.

The ‘Christmas message’ reflected the view in Washington that the rootcause of the Yugoslav conflict was territorial aggression by Serbia, which wasassumed to be an old-fashioned expansionist state led by a dictator. This made iteasy to assume that, having been prevented from taking over Slovenia, Croatiaand Bosnia, Milosevic would turn his eyes to Macedonia. At that time, humanrights were not the primary issue.

The failure to consider Kosovo’s future status at Dayton is partly explainedby the fact that any viable solution to the Kosovo problem would create a dan-gerous precedent that could destabilize the fragile inter-ethnic modus vivendi inthe southern Balkans. That failure was bound to discredit Rugova’s policy ofnon-violent resistance and embolden those who advocated liberating Kosovo

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by resort to arms; but on their past showing, and particularly after the implosionof Albania in 1997, they were not deemed to pose a serious threat to politicalstability in the province. This assessment was overturned by the success of theKLA’s impromptu offensive, and its taking control of more than one-third of theprovince. Northern Ireland is comparable in size to Kosovo; this was equivalentto the IRA seizing military control of Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone.

It is widely believed that the United States gave Milosevic the go-ahead tolaunch a counter-offensive to put the KLA back in its box. Whether this is trueor not, it makes absolute sense in terms of the policy concerns that promptedthe ‘Christmas message’. In 1998 the KLA was still classified by the StateDepartment as a terrorist organization, and its publicly stated goal was a GreaterAlbania which, if achieved, would unstitch the complex patchwork of thesouthern Balkans.

In May 1998, at the height of the KLA offensive, US envoys persuaded Milo-sevic to meet Rugova, and by the beginning of September the two sides hadagreed to talk about a three-year ‘interim’ solution involving a degree ofKosovar autonomy. Meanwhile, a new player had joined the cast: the ArmedForce of the Republic of Kosovo (FARK). This was unsurprising; not only didthe KLA have irredentist aims, but it was difficult to know who was in charge.In contrast, FARK (which was said to rely on Saudi money and Turkish logisticsupport) was directly responsible to Rugova. The KLA rubbished Rugova’sproposal and fighting continued. Later that September, in the centre of Tirana,the KLA assassinated the man who had been tasked by Rugova to set up FARK.

International concern about the conflict in Kosovo, continuing Serbrepression, and the effect of winter on the Albanians who had taken to the hillsto escape the counter-offensive, was expressed in UN Resolution 1199, andearly in October the United States persuaded Milosevic to agree to a ceasefire.Under the threat of NATO bombing, he also agreed to accept that the conflictwas now an international issue, to withdraw heavy weapons and equipmentfrom Kosovo, to allow air reconnaissance over the territory, and to permit 2,000unarmed international observers to monitor the ceasefire. Serb forces in Kosovowere to revert to their level prior to February, namely 22,000 (10,000 Ministryof Interior Police [MUP] and 12,000 army).

As the Serb forces withdrew, so the KLA moved forward, often occupyingthe Serbs’ former positions. Prior to the KLA’s spring offensive, the greatmajority of Kosovars had supported Rugova’s conflict-avoidance strategy andwere sceptical of the KLA’s pretensions. But having tasted ‘victory’ that summer(followed swiftly by ‘defeat’), the local populace switched to actively supportingthe guerillas. In acknowledgement of this new reality, the United States startedtalking to the KLA in November, with two meetings in Kosovo and one inSwitzerland; early in December, a further meeting took place in Washington.Meanwhile, renewed fighting had broken out. The KLA were applying a lessonlearned from the Bosnian conflict: to gain their independence, they would needto draw the United States in on their side. The Serbs played their part to perfection.

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On 15 January, in a brutal reprisal for some KLA violence, Interior Ministrytroops killed 45 people in the village of Racak and some 5,000 fled to the hills.

Meeting on 29 January 1999, the six-nation ‘Contact Group’ summoned thewarring parties to attend at Rambouillet on 6–14 February, to agree an interimpolitical settlement to the Kosovo conflict. The Serbs were warned that if theyrefused to attend or to comply with that settlement, they would be liable tomilitary reprisals.

Rambouillet

It was one of the oddities of Rambouillet that although Russia was a member ofthe Contact Group (which originated in 1992), it was only ‘involved in theoutskirts’ of the proximity talks, which were strictly confined to NATO mem-bers. In preparation for this meeting, the Contact Group had drawn up a set often principles that would structure the final agreement; these were non-negotiable. Key points were that interim arrangements were to be agreed for aperiod of three years, during which the final settlement would be negotiated;that the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia was to be respected, implying contin-ued Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo; that the rights (particularly cultural) of allcommunities were to be respected, implying far-reaching autonomy forKosovo; and that these interim arrangements were to be implemented throughinternational participation. As the Serb parliament had endorsed the restorationof Kosovo autonomy when it considered the original US interim solution latein 1998, Milosevic had no difficulty in accepting these principles as the basis fora settlement.

Despite having met with the United States on 27 January, the KLA (whichnow had the upper hand in the Kosovar delegation) was unwilling to accept thedraft, as there was no commitment to an ultimate option of independence.Although the US Secretary of State arrived to take personal charge of the talks,the KLA still refused to agree to the terms.

For their part, the Serbs had few problems with the existing political pro-visions (including restoring Kosovo autonomy) and the schedule for with-drawing Serb forces from Kosovo; but they could not stomach certain aspects ofthe implementation provisions, most importantly the insistence that the 28,000strong implementation force (K-FOR) would be an arm of NATO. Their ini-tial position was that they would agree only to an unarmed, non-NATO force,but as the talks neared their deadline, Milan Milutinovic (Serbia’s primeminister and chief negotiator) appears to have accepted the need for an interna-tional military presence in Kosovo. He was adamant that Belgrade could notagree to NATO forces policing the agreement, but is said to have indicated thatparticipation by certain European members of NATO (and of course Russia)would be acceptable, as long as it was not an explicitly NATO force. However,as the nature and composition of the implementation force were not open tonegotiation, this feeler was not followed up.

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Even if the Serbs had been willing to accept the presence of NATO forces,the scope of the ‘status of forces’ set out in an appendix to the Agreementcreated an insurmountable obstacle. The terms were standard UN wordingand were acceptable in respect to Kosovo. However, the appendix explicitlyreferred to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), which meant the termsapplied equally to Serbia and Montenegro. NATO forces (men, weapons,equipment) were to be allowed unimpeded access throughout the FRY andits associated air and sea space; ‘access’ included the right to bivouac andmanoeuvre, and the use of any areas or facilities as required for support,training and operations. NATO personnel (in general; not just K-FOR) hadthe right to enter/exit the FRY on production of an identity document.

On 23 February, faced by both parties’ refusal to accept the interim agree-ment, the negotiations were adjourned until 15 March. To persuade the KLAto sign, the United States is reported to have committed itself to early elec-tions, to retention by the militias of their personal weapons, to preventing anyfuture Yugoslav challenges to the interim or final political status of Kosovo,and to considering the issue of independence if regional and internationalcircumstances permitted. Besides the incentive that NATO would be unableto bomb Serbia if the KLA did not sign, it seems that the clincher was aninformal promise by Madeleine Albright that a referendum on self-deter-mination would be held after three years.

There were no such sweeteners for the Serbs, and Belgrade faced up to thenear-certainty of NATO military action. NATO already had military unitsdeployed on Kosovo’s southern border, which had originally been intendedas an ‘extraction force’ should the safety of the OSCE observers be endan-gered. This force was now some 9,000 strong, posing an immediate threat.On 13 March, fighting resumed in the north and south of Kosovo, probablyinitiated by the KLA, to ensure that the United States remained on side.

The meeting reconvened on 15 March, but neither NATO nor the Serbswere prepared to compromise on the major points at issue. Negotiations wereterminated on 19 March, on the 20th OSCE observers were ordered to with-draw, on the 22nd the Serbs launched their offensive in Kosovo, and on the24th NATO bombing began.

Sub-text to Rambouillet: NATO’s 50th birthday

The celebratory NATO summit and 50th birthday party were scheduled for23–5 April in Washington. For at least the previous nine months, this long-planned anniversary had been an increasingly important consideration in USpolicy regarding Kosovo, and it introduced time constraints that ranged fromthe trivial (Rambouillet could not reassemble until the foreign ministers hadreturned from attending the accession ceremony for new NATO members on12 March), to the strategic.

There was growing pressure to get Kosovo sorted out before the birthday

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summit, and preferably before the Easter celebrations at the beginning of April.The Contact Group’s rapid response to the killings at Racak and the originalschedule for Rambouillet (Serb agreement to its terms by 14 February—or else)had allowed six weeks for military action before April. KLA prevaricationmeant five of those weeks had been wasted. The timetable was nowuncomfortably tight. The birthday celebrations, moreover, were much morethan a deadline; the forthcoming summit was intended as a powerful affirmationof NATO’s continuing relevance in the post-Cold War world. NATO (orrather its leading members) had not come well out of the Bosnian imbroglio.The confrontation with Milosevic would be a crucial test of NATO’s credibility.

Military action against Serbia would also provide useful precedents for thenew strategic concept that was to be approved at the April summit. The USfavoured a policy of NATO willingness to take enforcement action in theabsence of specific UN authorization. In the case of Kosovo it could be arguedthat NATO was acting within the spirit of two earlier UN Resolutions (1160and 1199), which identified Serbian misdemeanours and implied UN action,should corrective measures not be taken. Furthermore, some members (primar-ily the United States) wanted NATO to extend its role beyond Alliance bor-ders. The Balkans were technically ‘out of area’, but they were also located onNATO’s side of the old ‘iron curtain’ and clearly of concern to western Europe.

The anniversary would be the occasion for welcoming Poland, Hungary andthe Czech Republic as new members of NATO. For understandable reasons,Russia viewed NATO enlargement with concern, particularly as it breachedthe bargain struck in 1990 that allowed a unified Germany to be part of NATO.While membership for the ‘Visegrad Three’ was accepted as reflecting a certainpolitical, cultural and geographical symmetry, Russia was not reconciled toNATO enlargement as an ongoing process and was adamant in vetoing mem-bership for the former Soviet republics.

The expansion of NATO had been seen by the Clinton administration as anevolutionary process that could possibly include a democratic Russia, whichwould in all circumstances participate as partner in a larger security regimeembracing greater Europe. Unfortunately, the Republican-dominatedCongress was against partnership with Russia. It stressed rivalry, even enmity,and favoured incorporating as many countries west of Russia’s borders aspossible, particularly the Baltic republics. These mutually exclusive objectivesexplain contradictory NATO pronouncements that advocated a cooperativesecurity regime in Europe while insisting that the door to NATO membershipmust remain open. In May 1997 the Founding Act between NATO and Russiaestablished a mechanism ‘for consultations, coordination and … where appro-priate, for joint decisions and joint action’. A year later, the Senate resolutionratifying the treaty on NATO expansion laid down conditions that wouldexclude Russia from NATO’s decision-making process and limit mutualconsultations to only those topics on which NATO already had an agreedposition.

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War and peace

Once the Serbs had seen the ‘Implementation’ chapter of the Rambouilletagreement, they would have realized that war with NATO was inevitable.When it came, aerial bombardment was certain, but the Yugoslav military hadto cover the full range of threats. This included NATO’s 9,000 strong ‘extract-ion’ force in Macedonia (which could be reinforced) and the likelihood of amajor Kosovar insurrection, led by a rapidly expanding KLA that would besupplied and reinforced from Albania.

The adjournment on 23 February seems to have been taken as a signal thatthe die was cast. By November 1998, Serb force levels in Kosovo had been broughtback to 22,000 (as agreed), but at the end of February 1999 they stood at25,000; by mid-March they had risen to 29,000 and the first tanks were arriving.When NATO air strikes started on 24 March, there were 36,000 troops alreadyin the province (of which 16,000 were MUP), with another 8,000, armoured,in transit. The order on 20 March to withdraw OSCE observers provided finalconfirmation, and on 22 March the Serbs launched their pre-emptive offensive.

The Serb military requirement was relatively straightforward: rapidly clearthe southern and western parts of Kosovo that bordered Macedonia andAlbania, driving the KLA across the border in the process; at the same time,impose ruthless internal security throughout the province. And that is whatseems to have happened. According to the UN’s disaster assessment (as reportedin July), the northern and eastern parts of the province suffered little, whereasthe villages stretching to the Albanian mountains in the west were charredrubble and whole sections of the western cities of Pec and Djakovica wereblackened shells. The military rationale for the operation drew on numerousprecedents from the Second World War, through Vietnam, to the present day.The Croatian cleansing of the Krajina provided the most recent template for anoperation that had to be well under way by the time NATO air assets becameavailable to deny Serbia its use of heavy weapons. The operation resulted inmore than 800,000 Albanians fleeing the province, while tens of thousands lefttheir homesteads for the hills.

It is a moot point whether this mass expulsion and the associated killingswere also an example of premeditated ‘ethnic cleansing’ or just a particularlybrutal demonstration of the MUP at work and the vicious behaviour of para-militaries. The figures for refugees imply that something approaching half theAlbanian population of Kosovo remained in place. The argument that Belgradesaw this as a manageable number which could be balanced by the resettlementof the 600,000 Serbs expelled from Bosnia and Croatia is plausible—except thatthose refugees had consistently chosen to settle elsewhere. In any case, the mili-tary argument was compelling.

On 24 March, NATO’s air campaign got under way, By 10 June it had flownover 27,000 sorties and used more than 23,000 bombs and missiles, with nocasualties to NATO personnel. There was extensive damage to Serbia’s military

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infrastructure, generously defined to encompass industrial installations, road andrail transport, and telecommunications facilities (including TV stations). Aquarter of the SAM radars were destroyed, but NATO was less successful inrespect of Serb armour and heavy weapons, with exact numbers in dispute. TheSerbs put their losses in the low tens and admitted to only 500 men killed.There is reported to have been significant collateral damage to civilian facilities,including two hospitals and several schools. It appears to be accepted that some1,500 civilians were killed, and presumably several times that number wounded.

The immediate effect of the air strikes was to rally Serb opinion againstNATO and to increase Milosevic’s intransigence over the deployment of aninternational military force. However, by the end of April the principle of aninternational force had been largely accepted. With Viktor Chernomyrdinacting as mediator, the focus was on the composition of the force and whowould be in charge, with Russia seeking to emphasize the role of the UN. Thefinal formula, spelt out in the peace plan agreed on 3 June and amplified a weeklater in UN Resolution 1244, was for an international security presence withsubstantial NATO participation.

Milosevic’s acceptance of this formula may have been influenced by evidencethat Britain and France were actively contemplating a ground-force assault onKosovo, and growing Russian exasperation was certainly a factor. But it wasmore important that significant changes had been made to the formula Milosevicrejected in March. In particular, three points of principle had been conceded:

• The deployment of an international security and civil presence in Kosovowas to be under UN rather than NATO auspices.

• There was no mention of K-FOR’s right to ‘unrestricted passage andunimpeded access’ throughout the rest of the Federal Republic (i.e. Serbia).

• While the Rambouillet accords were to be ‘taken into account’ when‘facilitating a political process designed to determine Kosovo’s final status’,there was no mention of a three-year transition period, nor of MadeleineAlbright’s assurance to the KLA that the political process would involve areferendum.

NATO could point to the fact that the timetable for withdrawing allYugoslav forces from Kosovo had been cut from months to a matter of days,and that only a very small number would be allowed back for border controland guard duties. More important was the specification of substantial NATOparticipation in the international security presence and the need for unifiedcommand and control. While the latter implied NATO C3 in Kosovo, this wassignificantly less than Rambouillet, which had specified that K-FOR wouldoperate ‘under the authority and subject to the direction of and the politicalcontrol of the North Atlantic Council through the NATO chain of command’.

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What was it all about?

Reviewing the outcome of the Kosovo imbroglio, two questions cry out foranswers. Why did NATO go to war with Belgrade? And, having done so,why did it make such a mess of it? I refer to the situation on the ground inKosovo and not to the relatively few targeting mishaps of the air campaign. Instrictly military terms, what NATO air forces set out to do they did well andwith remarkable precision, achieving their assigned objective of degradingYugoslavia’s military capability. Whether it was the optimal objective isanother matter.

To answer these questions, we need to revisit Rambouillet and the run-up tothe talks to see if we can arrive at a clearer understanding of what was actuallytaking place.

Why did NATO go to war?

In their statement of 29 January, the Contact Group noted that the criticalsituation in Kosovo raised ‘the prospect of a humanitarian catastrophe’. The letterfrom the NATO Secretary-General to Milosevic declared that the Alliance’sobjective was ‘to avert a humanitarian catastrophe’. This would be done by‘compelling compliance’ with the demands of the international community,and ‘acceptance’ of an interim political settlement. The Contact Group’s state-ment made it clear that the terms of that settlement had largely been decided,with only a ‘limited number of points’ needing final negotiation between theparties, and required Yugoslavia to ‘accept the level and nature of internationalpresence deemed appropriate by the international community’ (i.e. the ContactGroup). ‘The demands’ of the international community included a ceasefire, anend to the disproportionate use of force, and the reduction of Yugoslav forcelevels in Kosovo to those pertaining in February 1998. The means of com-pellance would be NATO air strikes on Yugoslavia.

These ultimata were addressed to both sides of the dispute, but as NATO hadno means of ‘compelling’ the KLA to do anything, this procedural impartialitydid not correct the impression that NATO was already parti pris. This was rein-forced by reports of US consternation when the KLA resisted signing thesettlement, and that one of the inducements to sign was that only when they didso would NATO be able to bomb Belgrade.

As a reason for going to war, ‘averting a humanitarian catastrophe’ certainlyresonated, but what was the definition of a catastrophe? According to NATO,the conflict in 1998 (including the KLA spring offensive and the summercounter-offensive by the Serbs) resulted in the deaths of something over 1,500Kosovar Albanians, while the KLA (according to George Robertson) killed aslightly larger number of Serbs during the same period. Was this why wewent to war in 1999, killing another 2,000 Serbs (1,500 of them civilians) andindirectly causing the deaths of an even larger number of Albanians?

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The great bulk of the deaths in 1998 occurred before the deployment of theKosovo [ceasefire] Verification Mission, established by the OSCE in October.According to Robertson, the KVM had allowed tens of thousands of Kosovarsto return to their homes, and this despite the lengthy delay in getting the processup and running, with the result that only 1,300 observers (out of 2,000 authorized)were in place by 20 March. Since the KVM seems to have been achieving positiveresults, notwithstanding start-up problems and the shortage of monitors, onemight have expected the ‘international community’ to have persisted with thispeaceable and potentially cost-effective approach, perhaps tripling the numberof observers to allow 24-hour cover and a more effective presence.

But, despite the doubts of some members, there seems to have been awillingness to war among NATO political leaders. This has been explained asreflecting the opinion that Milosevic was the root cause of the Balkan tragedy,coupled with a sense of revulsion—and guilt—over Srebrenica. In 1993, whenthe Security Council had declared six ‘safe areas’ in Bosnia, the Secretary-General had asked for a force of 70,000 troops under NATO control to preventattacks launched from inside these areas and to deter attacks from the outside.This had been turned down by the United States and other members, with theresult that in July 1995, Srebrenica’s only protection was a few hundred UNpeacekeepers, who were taken hostage by the Serbs.

Whether or not Srebrenica was the reason, the available evidence supportsthe widespread impression that Rambouillet was set up to fail. The summons tothe meeting was explicit that the lengthy Interim Agreement was not open tonegotiation except on a few points, and those did not include the nature andsize of the ‘implementation force’. The studied avoidance of any reference tothe UN and the insistence that the operation would be solely under NATOauspices, NATO-led and NATO-manned, was a known obstacle to acceptanceby Belgrade. To make matters worse, as noted above, the appendix specifyingthe ‘status of forces’ allowed K-FOR the free run of Serbia and Montenegro.

Others have argued that the appendix merely replicated the standardagreement for UN peacekeeping forces; this is true, but misleading. The issuewas one of geographical scope and, by UN procedure, the appendix shouldhave applied to Kosovo only and not the whole Federal Republic. If it was adrafting error, this could have been easily corrected, so it is fair to assume thatthe inclusion of this obviously unacceptable condition was deliberate. Why thebelt and braces? Perhaps to cover the possibility that Milosevic might unex-pectedly soften his stance on a NATO implementation force.

What, then, was the purpose of Rambouillet? There were five possibleoutcomes: (1) both sides refuse to sign; (2) both sides sign; (3) Belgrade refusesuntil the brink of bombing; (4) Belgrade gives in after NATO’s military resolvehas been tested; (5) Belgrade embarks on a contest of political will and cohesion.One would have expected (2) to have been the ‘purpose’ of the meeting, butthe evidence argues otherwise, which leaves (3) or (4) as the preferred outcomes.This brings us back to the sub-text of NATO’s birthday, the importance of

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demonstrating the continuing relevance of the alliance on its 50th anniversary,and the opportunity presented by the Kosovo crisis to further the out-of-areaissue and to establish NATO’s right to act without specific UN endorsement.There was also an urge to punish and humiliate Milosevic.

Although the plan (if such it was) went horribly wrong, it provides aplausible explanation for much that is puzzling about Rambouillet, particularlythe inclusion of a ‘killer clause’ in the text. Lord Carrington, former Secretary-General of NATO and subsequently Chairman of the Hague Peace Conferenceon Yugoslavia, has observed that Rambouillet required Milosevic to ‘allowNATO to use Serbia as a part of the NATO organization’, a loss of sovereigntythat was clearly unacceptable.

There remains, however, an anomaly that cannot be explained by the politicsof NATO’s anniversary and its new strategic concept, namely the ceilingimposed on Serb force levels in Kosovo. This seems to be of some significanceto NATO, since the fact that the ceiling was breached was always included inthe list of indictments, however truncated. But the permitted force levels didnot make military sense. In October 1998, NATO insisted that Milosevic agreeto limit Serb forces in Kosovo to the numbers deployed at the beginning ofFebruary; roughly 20,000 in all. True, a ceasefire was in place and the deploy-ment of a verification mission was planned. Nevertheless, NATO’s insistencethat the Serbs should revert to the force levels that pertained before theemergence of a guerrilla movement enjoying substantial local support was hardto justify, in absolute as well as relative terms. For comparison, British armystrength in Northern Ireland during the first half of the 1970s peaked at 22,000;there were another 4,000–5,000 men in the Ulster Defence Regiment, and theRoyal Ulster Constabulary was 13,000 strong, making roughly 40,000 in all,with the UDR and RUC having substantial reserves living locally. Althoughapproximately the same size, Northern Ireland had a significantly smaller popu-lation than Kosovo, only 35–40 per cent of whom were potential nationalists;90 per cent of Kosovars were potential nationalists and the borderlands withAlbania were mountainous.

The force-level anomaly, the seeming lack of urgency in establishing theverification mission, the unsubstantial nature of the ‘humanitarian catastrophe’used in January to justify summoning the parties to Rambouillet, the absoluteinsistence that K-FOR should comprise NATO forces ‘subject to the directionof and the political control of the North Atlantic Council’, and the closeinvolvement of US Special Envoys Richard Holbrooke and Christopher Hillsince (at least) May 1998: all these can be explained by reference to GeorgeBush’s 1992 ‘Christmas message’ to Milosevic. To recap, President Bush hadwarned Milosevic that if war were brought to Kosovo, the United States wouldbe obliged to act; the message was reiterated by Clinton on taking office inJanuary 1993, and the fear that such a war would serve as a fuse train for a majorconflict in the southern Balkans was spelt out in February. Five years down theroad, the story would have run something like this.

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Following an unexpected KLA offensive in the spring, the Serbs had re-established the status quo ante by September 1998, resulting in a large number ofrefugees from the fighting. Holbrooke and Hill had meanwhile been negoti-ating the outline of a long-term peace settlement involving the restoration ofKosovo autonomy, which was accepted in principle by Milosevic and Rugova,but rejected by the KLA. Failure to create an alternative military force (FARK)under Rugova’s political control, and the rapidly growing political and militarystrength of the KLA (bolstered by funds from the diaspora), brought the largerproblem into focus. If events were allowed to continue along their present tra-jectory, the inevitable result would be major civil war in Kosovo (or, moreproperly, a war of national liberation), with foreseeably dire consequences.

It would seem that, drawing on the experience of 1991–5, the US decided itwas no good intervening once such a war had started; that it was unrealistic toexpect the Security Council to authorize a pre-emptive intervention; and thateven if it did, the UN would inevitably complicate matters, if not render suchan operation ineffective. Only NATO could meet the requirement.

Bosnia provided a persuasive precedent. NATO troops had been deployedthere for nearly three years, implementing an agreement signed by the warringparties at Dayton. A similar approach could be adopted towards Kosovo. Usingthe authority of existing UN Resolutions and under the threat of air strikes fornon-compliance, at a suitable moment the warring parties would be summonedto attend proximity talks. There, they would be required to sign an agreementdrawn up by NATO negotiators, setting out the terms of a peace settlement andproviding for the deployment of a NATO implementation force in Kosovo.The size of the force would be determined in part by the possibility that Serbunits would ignore orders to allow NATO a peaceable entry. Obviously, thefewer Serb forces the better, but to insist on lower numbers than were presentin February 1998 would arouse suspicion.

On 14 October, under the threat of NATO air strikes, Milosevic agreed tocomply with the terms of UN Resolution 1199, including withdrawing hiscounter-offensive forces. This augured well for air power, and on 24 Octoberthe adoption of the ‘Dayton model’ as NATO policy was signalled by the visitof SACEUR and the chairman of NATO’s Military Committee to Belgrade,where they secured Milosevic’s personal agreement on force ceilings in Kosovo.The agreement would also provide a legalistic justification for NATO air strikesshould Belgrade, faced by the certainty of war, reinforce its troops in Kosovo.By early November, NATO national authorities had started work on planningthe deployment of the implementation force and SACEUR had been told toprepare for an air force war with zero losses. It is unclear when the developmentof this policy became enmeshed with the political build-up to NATO’s anni-versary. It does, however, seem likely that the timetable for the celebrations waswhat prompted the decision to use the killings at Racak to justify setting theRambouillet process in train.

Taking action to forestall a civil war would seem to be a commendable

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initiative. Why, then, was NATO so reluctant to admit what was afoot? Onecan think of two kinds of reason, one relating to undesirable precedents in theregion. The more important kind relates to the terms of the UN Charter andthe North Atlantic Treaty; even if it relied heavily on the Universal Declarationon Human Rights, NATO would be sailing perilously close to the legal wind.Hence George Robertson’s insistence (after the bombing was under way) that itwas ‘not a war’. He had in fact let slip the forbidden term ‘civil war’ inFebruary, but from September 1998 the codeword for that calamity had been‘humanitarian catastrophe’. As this euphemism first surfaced in Resolution1199, when the immediate humanitarian problem was the effect of winter onthe 50,000 who had taken refuge in the mountains, NATO’s real objective waswell concealed from everybody, including its electorates.

So, why did NATO go to war? In essence, to compel Milosevic to accept thedeployment of 28,000 NATO troops in Kosovo, whose presence was deemednecessary to avert a civil war. While keeping the peace, their role would be tooversee the implementation of a political settlement that would restore sub-stantial autonomy to Kosovo, something the Serb parliament had already agreedin principle in late 1998.

Accepting the objective of averting a civil war, could it have been achievedwithout bombing Serbia? One can only speculate, but the formula that underlaythe final peace agreement clearly had potential and a variant is said to have beenadvanced by the Serbs at Rambouillet. A central feature would have been theemphasis on the UN, fudging the question of the NATO core, and enlargingthe force if need be so as to ensure a reasonably balanced presence in order toreassure Belgrade. This approach would have required involving Russia as a fullpartner in the negotiation and implementation processes, rather than slightingits opinion until things went wrong.

A possible alternative would have been to try the OSCE route, building onthe verification mission to secure Belgrade’s acceptance of a sizeable andsomewhat more capable body. Britain’s acknowledgment in October of themerits of a European Security and Defence Identity made it possible to think interms of EU participation, with an Anglo-French combined joint task force atits core. On the supposition that such a body would not be opposed by Serbforces in Kosovo, it could be smaller (and hence less threatening) than theNATO implementation force, but would have the possibility of reinforcement,should the need arise.

Practical or not, neither of these approaches would have been acceptable tothe United States, whose taste for multilateralism had been soured by Somaliaand whose relations with the UN were frequently hostile. As regards the OSCE,the United States was determined to prevent the emergence of an alternativeEurope-wide security structure that could challenge its authority; NATO was aknown quantity, whose collective decisions could be shaped through bilateralnegotiations with member states. Meanwhile, the Republican-dominatedCongress accepted only grudgingly Russia’s involvement in NATO affairs and

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forbade any discussion on policy issues before NATO’s own position had beendecided.

At the celebratory summit in April, Clinton spoke of US policy being basedon diplomacy backed by force. At Rambouillet the threat of force took centrestage, but of diplomacy there was precious little. Except for a very few points,the terms of the ‘agreement’ were presented as an ultimatum: ‘Sign—or else’.Nominally chaired by the foreign ministers of Britain and France, Rambouilletwas Madeleine Albright’s personal project, her ‘Dayton’. But her personalcredibility was also tied up with NATO’s, which was very much on the line.There was considerable pressure in official circles and in the press to demon-strate that NATO at 50 still had a role to play.

In what way did we make a mess of the war?

It must first be acknowledged that NATO did achieve its objective of deployinga NATO force in Kosovo, whose mission was to prevent a civil war. And,although it was achieved at significant cost in lives and homes of the KosovarAlbanians, the latter felt it was a price worth paying to have brought NATO inon their side against Serbia, which was severely punished. That was not,however, what NATO intended. So what went wrong and why?

Of the many unintended consequences, four were particularly damaging.The most immediate was the flood of refugees from Kosovo and the death anddestruction from which they fled. Despite NATO claims to the contrary, therewas a common-sense link between the bombing of Serbia and the behaviour ofits forces in Kosovo, and the destruction did in fact peak during the first twodays. To those who had been following the Kosovo crisis more closely, whileSerb forces were clearly the instrument of the unfolding ‘humanitarian disaster’,NATO’s long-trailered urge to war was undoubtedly a primary cause.

Second, Rambouillet bestowed a legitimacy on the KLA, which emergedfrom the war with an enhanced military capability, a greatly improved organi-zational structure, and leaders who saw themselves (and were seen by many) asKosovo’s government-in-waiting, overshadowing Rugova. Concessions madeto the KLA both before and after the war ‘because they had signed’ and despitetheir terroristic behaviour and aim of a Greater Albania, further enhanced theKLA’s status and their military capability, storing up trouble for the future.

Third, eleven weeks of bombing not only did extensive damage to Serbia’sindustrial infrastructure, it disrupted the trade and communications of itsneighbours as well as more distant areas. Serbia lies at the heart of the Balkansand the fact that it will take five years or more to recover from this poundingwill have a strongly negative effect throughout the region, while the cost ofrestoring the infrastructure will be over $20 billion.

The fourth and most damaging unintended consequence, whose long-termcosts have yet to be fully realized, is the effect that the prolonged war has had onNATO’s image. It was, of course, hugely embarrassing for the anniversary cele-

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bration, which had carried such high political expectations. But far more seriouswas the damage done to the carefully cultivated image of a redesigned NATO,intended primarily to ‘project stability’ throughout Europe, helping to bringgood governance and market economics to the eastern parts of the region.Instead, the world at large saw a political–military alliance that took unto itselfthe role of judge, jury and executioner. Despite Russian objections to NATOmilitary action, the alliance claimed to be acting on behalf of the internationalcommunity and was ready to slight the UN and skirt international law in orderto enforce its collective judgement. The world saw an organization given tomoralistic rhetoric, one no less economical with the truth than others of itskind; a grouping of Western states with an unmatched technical capacity to kill,maim and destroy, that was limited only by their unwillingness to put their‘warriors’ at risk.

Why did we make a mess of the war?

Having adopted the ‘Dayton model’ as the way to solve the problem ofKosovo, NATO then failed to make the major adjustments needed to accom-modate the important differences between the two situations. After four yearsof on-and-off conflict, Dayton presented the warring parties with a territorialsettlement that largely reflected the situation on the ground. Croatia havingregained the Krajina, the settlement was between the three main ethnic groupsliving in the former republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Given the continuousinvolvement of the international community, the role of NATO air power inbringing the sides into rough balance, and the contested political status of thewarring entities and their leaders, it was realistic to bring the three sides togetherin proximity talks and insist that they agree on a settlement, drawn up bymediators. It was also reasonable to insist on the deployment of a NATO-ledimplementation force in the former republic, which was already awash withUN officials, international agencies and UNPROFOR soldiers.

The differences from the situation in 1999 are obvious, but three are worthhighlighting: Serb sovereignty over Kosovo was not in dispute; Serbia was notsome newly formed statelet, nor was it war-weary; and the international presencein Kosovo, agreed by Belgrade, was limited to 2,000 unarmed observers, subordin-ated to the OSCE. In such circumstances, while ‘take it or else’ proximity talksmay have been suitable for agreeing a political settlement restoring substantial auto-nomy to the Kosovo Albanians (which had already been agreed in principle bythe Serbs), Milosevic had grounds for arguing that the composition of an imple-mentation force was a matter for negotiation between Belgrade and the UN.

It appears that NATO’s political leaders assumed that Milosevic, who wasseen as a dictator and the sole decision-maker, would cave in when threateneddirectly with air strikes; and if not, then surely after a short, sharp, bombingcampaign to show that NATO meant business. By any measure, it was a high-risk strategy.

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The gamble failed because of three common errors: overlapping objectives; amismatch between objectives and resources; and misreading one’s opponentsactions/reactions. In the Kosovo crisis, the last of these was crucial.

Know your enemy NATO insisted that the enemy was Milosevic. By demonizingone man, ignoring the complexities of Belgrade politics and absolving theSerbian people of any blame for the policy in Kosovo, NATO political leadersseem to have blinded themselves to how the Serbs would react to the threat andactuality of a bombing campaign. The Serbs have always been proud of theirability to fight in defence of their interests and their capacity to absorb punish-ment. There was ample evidence of popular support for Serb policy in Kosovo,and as late as February 1999 an opinion poll in the opposition paper DnevniTelegraf showed that 37 per cent were willing to defend Kosovo by force ‘underany circumstances’. In July, a third of the Serb parliament voted against ratifyingthe peace agreement.

As the result of events in 1992–5, NATO was seen by the (redefined) Yugo-slav army as an instrument of US policy and a declared enemy. By 1992, theUnited States was siding with the Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs. By 1994,retired US service personnel were helping to rebuild, re-equip and train theCroatian army. In 1995, NATO air assets essentially worked in support ofCroatian and Muslim forces when they drove the Serbs back in Bosnia. Andnow, in 1999, the United States had aligned itself with the KLA. NATO lookedas if it were preparing to do serious harm to Serbia. It was demanding it beallowed to deploy a heavily armed force in Kosovo, giving it a second beach-head in the Balkans under the political control of the North Atlantic Council.NATO already had troops in Macedonia and Bosnia, Hungary was about tojoin the Alliance and Romania was a favoured applicant for membership.NATO controlled the Adriatic, Montenegro was being encouraged to secede,and Yugoslav intelligence had reported US military construction in Bulgaria. Itcould be called encirclement.

Besides misreading how seriously Serbia saw the threat to its national survival,NATO was guilty of wishful thinking about the Serb response to air attack. Thesituation on the ground and the sequence of events leading up to Dayton in1995 were completely different from the circumstances that pertained in 1999.Similarly, what Milosevic conceded in October 1998 under the threat of air strikesbore no relation to what Serbia was being asked to concede at Rambouillet.

Lastly, NATO seems to have pulled the wool over its own eyes by insistingthat the military action it was threatening ‘was not a war’. Hence the shockedsurprise of its political leaders when Serbia, facing certain attack by theremaining superpower and its allies, took preventive military action: action thatSACEUR described as entirely predictable.

Overlapping objectives One can identify two long-term political objectives. Onewas to avert civil war in Kosovo; the other was to demonstrate NATO’s

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continuing utility and future potential. An ancillary objective—to punishMilosevic—affected attitudes, if not plans.

Although there was a need for early and concerted action to achieve the firstobjective, an undesirable urgency was introduced by the time-bound schedulefor NATO’s anniversary. The second (and less important) objective seems tohave persuaded NATO to use the Dayton approach of tight deadlines anddiktat, rather than concentrate on finding a way (other than the use of force) ofpersuading Milosevic to accept an effective international force to implement thepolitical settlement. The fusion of the two objectives meant that a full analysis ofalternative ways of averting civil war in Kosovo was sacrificed to showing offNATO’s political muscle and demonstrating its commitment ‘to meeting awide range of threats to our shared interests and values’.

There were a number of different ways of organizing (or ‘growing’) an effec-tive international presence in Kosovo. Carrots as well as sticks could have beenused to persuade Belgrade to cooperate, and more effort could have beeninvested in boosting Rugova and diminishing the KLA. But in the real world ofpolitics, the longer-term and more important objective of avoiding civil warhad to yield precedence to the immediate requirement to bolster NATOcredibility by punishing Milosevic for taking issue with its demands.

Matching objectives to resources The resources allocated to SACEUR by NATO’spolitical leaders were long-range cruise missiles and manned aircraft, the latterlimited to operating above 15,000 feet; i.e. a capability for strategic bombard-ment. While there can be argument about the tempo, intensity and targetingphilosophy of the actual campaign, the capability was, in theory, sufficient toachieve the immediate political objective of persuading Belgrade to sign up toRambouillet. In practice, if the threat itself was insufficient to make Milosevicsign, history should have warned that strategic bombing would at best take timeand (in terms of the initial objective) was unlikely to be fully successful. In theprocess, it was bound to cause significant civilian casualties, which would causeserious damage to NATO’s image and most likely bring its public relations intodisrepute.

It is true that bombing degraded Serbia’s military capability, but that appliedmore to infrastructure than to fighting forces, which were practised in operatingunder enemy aerial domination. Meanwhile, bombing could do nothing aboutpreventing the clearing of Kosovo; nor, in practical terms, could anything else.In theory, NATO could have run the operational plan in reverse, starting withthe military envelopment of Kosovo by air, meanwhile deterring interference fromSerbia’s main forces by threatening the aerial devastation of their country (deter-rence being more effective than compellance). In practice, the military complexityand political unacceptability of such an operation meant it was a non-starter.

Some argue that NATO should have been poised to launch a land invasionof Kosovo to reinforce the threat of bombing, bringing additional pressure onMilosevic to sign. That is an exercise in hindsight; besides which, such an the

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invasion would have had to wait until the main exodus was over. However, asthe weeks of bombing went by, the growing burden of the refugee populationon Macedonia’s fragile political economy gave a new importance to the immedi-ate objective of enabling the Kosovars to return to their homes. This changedthe terms of the debate about ground-force involvement.

To conclude

Similarities between the Suez and Kosovo crises extend beyond the demonizingof Nasser and Milosevic and the claim to be acting on behalf of the ‘inter-national community’. They include the failure to achieve the declared objectiveof either operation (safe passage of shipping/avoiding a humanitarian disaster),and the need for considerable international assistance to rectify the damage theywrought. The list goes on; but it is of interest that Suez turned out to be awatershed in the postwar world, both in terms of the policies and pretensions ofthe two imperial powers and in a more general sense concerning the politicalacceptability (and utility) of ‘great power’ military intervention. In many waysSuez can be seen as the real beginning of post-colonialism and the superpowerera, along with peacekeeping and the explosion of UN membership.

Kosovo may well prove to be a comparable watershed in the post-Cold Warworld, but it is far from clear what lies on the other side. One reads of concernaround the world at NATO’s departure from long-established policies, at theslighting of the UN, and at the resort to coercive diplomacy under the guise ofhumanitarian intervention. And we have seen NATO’s air campaign used as aprecedent by Russia, which, unfortunately for the Chechens, lacks precision-guided weapons.

NATO enlargement had been put on hold by the end of 1998, but sup-portive behaviour during and after the air campaign reopened the question ofRomania’s candidacy and added Bulgaria to the favoured list. NATO’s cloaknow extends to the Black Sea, adding to Russia’s concerns. In the UnitedStates, rather than bolstering support for NATO, the war aroused significantopposition, not least because US forces did almost all the work and took most ofthe risks. This conformed to the pattern in the Gulf war, the air strikes in Bosniaand the continuing campaign against Iraq, and reinforced the ‘unilateralist’trend in national security policy. Contrary to what was hoped of the 50thanniversary, the transatlantic relationship has re-entered the US debate.

There is talk in Europe of a ‘Marshall Plan’ for the Balkans, although little hasbeen done and Serbia, the key to the region, will be excluded until it gets rid ofMilosevic. EU members are reluctant to provide the funds and the UnitedStates, having borne the major cost of the war, is unwilling to foot the bill—which reminds us that it would have been so much cheaper if, in the mid-1980sand subsequently, the West had avoided doctrinaire solutions and taken thelong view. If we had continued to prop up the economy of its Yugoslav client,enabling it to weather the debt crisis and the loss of its niche position, the

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Federation could have made a peaceful transition to democracy and a marketeconomy, rather than succumb to populist nationalism and inevitable disinte-gration, with incalculable costs in social disruption and human suffering.

There are other lessons to be drawn from the Balkan tragedy, including thetendency to define complex conflicts in oversimplified and moralistic terms,labels which then drove policy and shaped public expectations. In part, thisreflected our damaging ignorance of the convoluted politics of the situation, adebility compounded by our slow learning curve. Reacting to each conflict inturn, the West applied undigested lessons from the previous one, whereas theunderlying causes of the ‘four successive wars’ were qualitatively different, eachrequiring a particular set of responses.

The application of the ‘Dayton model’ to Kosovo is a case in point, the effectbeing accentuated by NATO’s simultaneous pursuit of two objectives that werenot fully compatible. It is symptomatic that the substantive political objective ofaverting civil war had to yield precedence to the time-bound public relationsobjective, with its deadline of NATO’s birthday. This ruled out considerationof potentially more fruitful ways of achieving the substantive objective within adifferent time-frame. This was a classic example of image taking precedenceover substance, which is not uncommon in today’s political world. It is oftenassociated with a rhetorical style that is more concerned with effect than withaccuracy; in Animal Farm-speak, words come to mean what our leaders say theydo. When commenting on Chechnya, a spokesman for Number 10 can stilldescribe the mass expulsions from Kosovo as ‘a programme of racial genocide’,although the facts on the ground say otherwise. Robin Cook speaks of ‘theliberation of Kosovo’ although he knows (as co-chairman of Rambouillet) thatSerbia remains the sovereign power. But the really grotesque example is descri-bing eleven weeks of bombing as ‘humanitarian intervention’.

We are also told that Kosovo was a new kind of war—one designed to pro-tect values, not interests. But is that factually correct? Although our concern forhuman rights in Kosovo had been registered by a UN Resolution in March1998, the evidence suggests that the need for NATO military intervention wasnot finally decided until October. It was prompted by the KLA’s brutalrejection of the US-brokered political solution to the problem, which wasbased on restoring provincial autonomy with Rugova as president. The purposeof NATO’s intervention was to pre-empt a civil war, a war that would triggerGeorge Bush’s ‘Christmas warning’ about US action to defend vital interests inthe Balkans. The second objective, of demonstrating NATO’s continuingutility and future potential, was clearly concerned with public relations, notvalues. As final refutation, the resources allocated to SACEUR were intendedto force Milosevic to agree to the deployment of a NATO force in Kosovo, andwere not designed to avert a humanitarian disaster. It was hoped that the threatof bombing would cause Milosevic to cave in. If he did not, as SACEURhimself has said, the forced expulsion of the Kosovar Albanians was utterlypredictable, and NATO would be unable to do anything about it.

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No one questions the underlying good intentions, but one suspects thatmuch of the moralistic rhetoric, the demonizing, the claim to be pioneering aforeign policy based on values as well as interests, was a form of denial. It servedto conceal from all of us the unpalatable fact that leaders and their people haveto accept their share of the blame for unintended consequences—in this case thehumanitarian disaster in Kosovo and the civilian casualties in Serbia.

* * *

In November it was refreshing to learn on the evening news that a seniorRussian general had officially acknowledged civilian casualties in Chechnya, forwhich Russia ‘accepted moral responsibility.’ NATO, please copy.

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Why did we bomb Belgrade?

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