By Laurie Mayer
The first thing to understand about NATO’s disastrous 78 day ‘humanitarian bombing’ of Kosovo in 1999 is that it was no accident.
It was the culmination of years of covert planning by leading western powers, notably Germany, the US and NATO. Their deliberate policies and unconscious blunders combined to intensify conflict and instability in the Balkans which was then manipulated for their own ends.
The motive for armed intervention was not the alleviation of human suffering but the relentless pursuit of self interest – hardcore realpolitik. Humanitarianism was simply a pretext – the noble cause cloaking base ambition.
Germany, recently reunited, was seeking ways to reinvent itself and assert its influence in the newly proclaimed European Union. The Balkans offered scope for the new Germany to bury its past and build a bright new future.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, German foreign policy worked increasingly to undermine the position of Serbia, its wartime enemy and traditionally a client state of Russia. It was also keen to help its close wartime ally Croatia where more than 1.5 million Serbs had been slaughtered in Croat-run German death camps.
Throughout the 1970s French general and geopolitician, Pierre Gallois, attended regular European strategy meetings and recalls Franz Josef Strauss, the German Defence Minister, stressing the three factors that shaped his country’s Balkan policy:
‘Serbian resistance contributed to Germany losing two world wars – it was necessary to punish people. Second…was to reward the Croats and Muslims who joined Germany during the war …third was the entry of Croatia and Slovenia to the European union economic zone which would create opportunities for realising German interests – in the Dalmatian coast and Mediterranean.’
The United States, as the world’s sole superpower, also had pressing priorities in Southern Europe. It wanted to regain its dominance of European defence strategy now threatened by the growing ambitions of the EU to take the lead in this area.
Anthony Lake, President Clinton’s National Security Advisor, complained bitterly that the failure to bring peace to Bosnia in the early 1990s was ‘a cancer eating away at U.S. foreign policy’, undermining its credibility. Clinton wanted the problem resolved, once and for all, before the presidential election of 1996.
Washington saw strategic opportunities to acquire land in Kosovo for a massive military base, Camp Bondsteel, that could command a huge area covering Southern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Another concern was securing the Caspian oil pipeline across the Balkans thereby guaranteeing American oil supplies for a generation.
The U.S. could also exploit Yugoslavia’s mineral wealth including silver and acquire valuable business assets at knock down prices.
Carla del Ponte, the former Chief Prosecutor at the Hague told investment bankers Goldman Sachs in 2005 that the work of the Criminal Tribunal was ‘intended to deliver profits to private companies.’
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright personally led a takeover bid for the Kosovan post and telecommunications company, PTK, while NATO Commander, General Wesley Clark, chaired a company with interests in Kosovo’s coal mining industry.
Undoubtedly the most urgent consideration was the future of NATO. The alliance approaching its fiftieth anniversary in April 1999 faced a major identity crisis. It was desperately seeking a new purpose following the breakup of the Soviet Union. Created as an exclusively defensive alliance, it was preparing itself for a more proactive, indeed positively aggressive role in advancing western interests in Europe and beyond.
The nonaligned socialist federation of Yugoslavia was economically weak and vulnerable. Politically its strategic importance was much diminished by the collapse of the USSR. The constituent republics could be conveniently reconfigured as an eastward extension of NATO to deter any future threat from Russia. It was ripe for plunder.
The pretext for international intervention was the ‘human catastrophe’ of genocide and ethnic cleansing reportedly unfolding in the Balkans and its supposed threat to regional stability. But the scale of deaths had been hugely exaggerated. U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry claimed up to half a million with no evidence to substantiate this figure.
George Kenney, acting head of the US State Department ‘s Yugoslav Desk in 1992 pointed out : ‘the news media’s fundamental pervasive lie has been to report uncritically, in lockstep, the wildly inflated death statistics provided by the Bosnian government…there has never been a shred of evidence – none at all – for repeated claims that 200,000 or more people, mostly Muslims, were killed.’
As for the threat to regional stability, the Balkan wars were clearly a civil war within the sovereign territory of Yugoslavia and as such presented no threat whatsoever to NATO members. But Madeleine Albright remained adamant:
‘America will never be fully secure if Europe is not stable….will never be at peace until Slobodan Milosevic, who has now started four wars, is stopped.’
And yet Milosevic was publicly praised as ‘a peacemaker’ by Albright’s own deputy, Richard Holbrooke, who said the Dayton peace plan could not have happened without him.
And David Owen, Europe’s chief negotiator on Bosnia, asserted that Milosevic’s acceptance of the Cutileiro peace plan was ‘concrete evidence that he was not an advocate for a Greater Serbia.’
The U.S. remained fixated on regime change and the propaganda machine was in overdrive to persuade public opinion of the moral legitimacy, if not legality, of attacking a sovereign nation in the throes of a civil war.
British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook pointed out that times had changed and sovereign states did not seem to be making a good job of making the world a safer place. ’Confidence in our peace and security’ he said, ‘depends on the credibility of NATO…the consequences of NATO inaction would be far worse than the result of NATO action.* Overthrowing Milosevic and breaking up Yugoslavia could unlock a wide range of geopolitical benefits and Kosovo was the key.
The province of Kosovo, the cradle of Serbian civilisation, had been granted autonomy by Tito in 1974, but most ethnic Albanian Kosovars had long supported full independence and ultimate union with a Greater Albania.
Following the death of Tito in 1980 and the demise of the Soviet Union ten years later, Yugoslavia’s own days were clearly numbered.
The final decade of Tito’s rule had seen foreign debt increase from $2 billion to $20 billion – a massive problem for a country that had invested very little in modernising its economy for the best part of four decades. All parts of the population quickly began to feel the consequences as the financial position deteriorated at an ever increasing pace. The government was soon reduced to a state of paralysis. The abrupt withdrawal of American aid in 1990, combined with U.N. and EEC trade sanctions, triggered a spectacular economic crash. By 1993, 39% of the population was existing on less than $2 a month and hyperinflation was to reach one trillion percent. The utter chaos and chronic shortages of food and power fuelled inter communal rivalries and demands for independence.
Croatia and Slovenia, the richest parts of Yugoslavia were the first to unilaterally declare independence in June 1991. This was illegal under both international law and the Yugoslav constitution. Secession required a nationwide vote which had not been held.
This didn’t stop Germany granting almost immediate recognition, a move the rest of the EU regarded as premature and dangerous. They had first wanted a guarantee to protect the rights of Serbs and other minorities. Germany claimed it wanted to preserve the integrity of Yugoslavia but could not deny its people the right of self determination.
In 1991 Germany’s former defence minister Rupert Scholz told military and business leaders the Yugoslav conflicts were:
‘undeniably of fundamental pan European significance.’ Yugoslavia itself, he said, was ‘a product of the First World War, a very artificial construction, having nothing to do with the right of self-determination…. In my opinion, Slovenia and Croatia must be immediately recognised internationally…when this recognition has taken place, the Yugoslavian conflict will no longer be a domestic Yugoslav problem, where no international intervention can be permitted.” (Emphasis added)
Internationalising these domestic problems became an urgent priority.
In May 1992, only 6 days after taking office as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Klaus Kinkel, declared: ‘We must force Serbia to its knees.’ As Director of German military Intelligence in the early 1980s, it was Kinkel who had virtually taken over the Yugoslav intelligence service replacing pro Yugoslavs with Croat officers known to favour secession.
But another problem from the German perspective was that the Serbs in Yugoslavia favoured a multi-national state to separatism.
Germany has always emphasised the importance of ethnic identity. During reunification the great rallying cry was “Wir Sind ein Folk” – we are one people. Afterwards Germany saw itself as the natural champion of minorities seeking self determination.
The German political elite viewed the nation state as increasingly inadequate and outdated – democracy as oppressive – a cause of conflict between nationalities. According to this school of thought the objective is not the rule of the majority by elections but exemption from majority rule for minority groupings.
As Michael Libal, head of the German foreign ministry’s Yugoslav department put it:
‘Serb hegemonies and Serb nationalism were far more to blame for the crisis than the secessionist forces which were left no other choice than to try to escape the spectre of Serb domination.’* (Limits of Persuasion, Germany and the Yugoslav crisis 1991-1992, Michael Libal and Donald D Halstead)
Serbs, of course, had already experienced the actual terrors of Croat domination during the Second World War.
But a new Europe of peoples rather than states would give Germany, with its numbers and economic strength, the promise of a wider sphere of influence. Smaller “folk states”, grateful for recognition, would be more likely to accommodate German interests and ambitions. The prize of membership of the European club would further promote compliance.
And so Germany came to grant recognition despite solemn undertakings to its European partners that it would not. The rest of the EU soon followed suit because the European project desperately needed consensus. The Maastricht treaty, only signed in December 1991, bound members to a common foreign and defence policy. European unity could not be seen to fall at the first hurdle.
Enter Dr. Goebbels
In making the case for intervention and winning hearts and minds nothing could be left to chance. In any war the first rule of successful propaganda is to demonise and dehumanise the enemy by seizing the moral high ground – drawing a clear line between good and evil. However, in the context of the Balkans, making such binary distinctions was challenging.
The region’s long and bloody history of conflict is literally Byzantine, highly complicated and nuanced. U.N. commander General Philippe Morillon told the tribunal that in the Bosnian wars ‘there were no good guys and bad guys, only bad guys.’
This was not the message the big NATO powers wanted the world to hear. They needed a clear black and white narrative, simple and easily understood that would command unwavering public support.
The American PR firm Ruder Finn hired by the Croatian government found the solution – Dr. Goebbels’ old Nazi trick of telling the Big Lie. Their award winning campaign was brilliantly successful in branding Slobodan Milosevic as a modern day Hitler and the Serbs as brutal fascists committing atrocities on an industrial scale – the worst since the Second World War.
Their victims, of course, were all cast as wholly blameless innocents. Ruder Finn Director, James Harff, targeted the American Jewish community and knew straight away he had ‘played the right card ’:
‘There was an immediate shift in terminology in the press using expressions with a strongly emotive element such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps etc. all intended to evoke Nazi Germany, the gas chambers and Auschwitz. The emotional impact was so great that no one could go against it without being accused of revisionism.’
By dint of endless media repetition this gross distortion was planted in the public mind as truth and quickly became universally accepted as the official narrative. As Napoleon famously observed ‘history is a set of lies that people have agreed upon.’
The lie enshrined in law
From 1993 the Balkans fiction was given the added aura of adjudicated fact by the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the ICTY.
This political court, originally conceived by the CIA as ‘a policy option’, was delivered by Madeleine Albright, then U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and widely known as the ‘mother of the Tribunal.’ Overwhelmingly funded and staffed by the U.S. for the sole purpose of convicting its enemies, the ICTY was the ultimate anomaly – an illegal court.
The UN’s statute made no provision whatsoever for the establishment of such a body. A travesty of justice, it has been rightly described as ‘a rogue court with rigged rules.’ 80% of those indicted were Serbs often condemned to life sentences on the basis of anonymous testimony and uncorroborated hearsay. More than 90% of evidence was based on hearsay.
The tribunal routinely suppressed details of crimes against Serbs declaring them irrelevant. Serbs were only ever presented as aggressors. Of the total of almost 1600 years of prison sentences imposed by the ICTY just 64 applied to crimes where Serbs were victims!
This is how Michael Scharf, a key architect of the ICTY, explained his brief:
‘In creating the ICTY the U.N. Security Council set three objectives. First to educate the Serbian people who were long misled by Milosevic’s propaganda about the acts of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by his regime; second, to facilitate national reconciliation by pinning prime responsibility on Milosevic and other top leaders and disclosing the ways in which the Milosevic regime had induced ordinary Serbs to commit atrocities; and third to promote political catharsis while enabling Serbia’s newly elected leaders to distance themselves from the repressive policies of the past.’
Richard Holbrooke, US Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, openly admitted that the ICTY was ‘a huge useful tool that enabled us to exclude two of the most wanted criminals in Europe, Karadzic and Mladic, from the Dayton Peace process and we used it to justify everything that followed.’
What followed was the most egregious abuse of international laws and rights imaginable. The wholesale trashing of the traditional concepts and principles of justice, state sovereignty, political independence and territorial integrity which had regulated international relations for centuries. The whole Westphalian system of binding international treaties was seen as an impediment to great power intervention in a new era of globalisation. The world had indeed moved on.
By the late 1990s the political zeitgeist strongly favoured the notion of intervention on humanitarian grounds. In his Chicago speech of April 1999, one month into NATO’s bombing campaign, British prime minister Tony Blair proclaimed:
‘the dawn of a new world of principles and values where human beings were more important than the state.’ This so called Doctrine of the International Community was ‘a new generation drawing the line for values…a new internationalism where brutal repression of whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated and those responsible for such crimes will have nowhere to hide.’
This was simply untrue. Events soon proved the ICTY’s promise to end impunity for those who committed crimes against humanity was exposed as complete hypocrisy when, predictably, it refused to consider the many war crimes committed by NATO itself.
If it was a war crime for Serbs to drop cluster bombs on the Croatian capital Zagreb why wasn’t it a war crime for NATO to drop cluster bombs on the Serb city of Nis? If it was criminal for the Serbs to bomb the TV building in Sarajevo why wasn’t it a war crime when NATO bombed the TV station in Belgrade. The partiality of the court could not have been more blatant.
Worse still, NATO had breached its own statute to commit what the Nuremberg Judgement deemed the ultimate crime – waging a war of aggression.
Former Nuremberg prosecutor Norman J Rockler condemned NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia as ‘the most brazen international aggression since the Nazis invaded Poland.’
This new world of principles and values made for some strange bedfellows. After the Dayton agreement ending the Bosnian war in 1995, the western powers turned their attention to supporting insurgent Kosovo Albanians in their pursuit of independence – an unholy alliance of liberal democracies colluding with the drug traffickers and terrorists of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Secretly arming, aiding and abetting Albanian nationalists in defiance of a UN arms embargo on all sides. NATO only amended its statute to permit offensive action a month after it started bombing Kosovo – a clear acknowledgment it had acted illegally in the first instance.
Media Amnesia
It is commonly forgotten that the first media reports of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Kosovo in the early 1980s referred not to Serbian violence against Kosovar Albanians but quite the reverse. It was the Albanians’ brutal persecution and wide scale expulsion of the Serbian minority that was hitting the headlines, years before Milosevic came to power. In July 1982, The New York Times reported what it called a Serb ‘exodus’:
‘Serbs …have been harassed by Albanians and have packed up and left the region…The nationalists have a two-point platform, …first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania… Some 57,000 Serbs have left Kosovo in the last decade.’
Other minorities including Catholic Albanians, Turks, Gypsies and Gorani, were also subjected to growing intimidation and discrimination.
In 1987 Slobodan Milosevic was sent to the capital Pristina where he witnessed Serbs being attacked by Albanian police and remarked to a couple of victims that the police ‘had no right to beat them.’ This private comment was picked up by television and seized on to brand Milosevic as a rabid nationalist campaigning for a Greater Serbia.
He was nothing of the kind. After the longest criminal trial on record, over four years, the Hague prosecutors had to admit they had no evidence of Milosevic advocating for a Greater Serbia. He had always been a staunch defender of a multicultural Yugoslavia. The real nationalists in Kosovo were the Albanians.
By 1989 a further 170,000 Serbs had been driven out of their homes. It became a mounting reign of terror with armed nationalists enforcing loyalty to their cause – even executing other Albanians they considered collaborators or for simply having Serbian friends.
Arming the insurgents
In early 1996, the US, Germany and the UK started to arm and train a professional Kosovo Liberation Army at various locations in Macedonia and over the border in Albania.
Osama Bin Laden sent several thousand battle-hardened jihadi fighters from Bosnia to be part of this force. The rest consisted mainly of Albanian volunteers from Kosovo and Albanian and international mercenaries.
The German secret service, BND, together with military intelligence, played a major role in the creation of the K.L.A. They were in charge of selecting recruits for the command structure. Training and communications equipment was provided by Germany’s elite commando force the KSK. Arms were smuggled in from East Germany. Funding was raised by an Albanian foundation known as The Fatherland’s Call with branches in Düsseldorf, Bonn and other European capitals. Reporters covering the conflict were surprised to find some K.L.A. fighters even wearing German army combat jackets complete with insignia in front of the television cameras.
Agim Ceku, the K.L.A. commander in the latter stages of the conflict, had established American contacts through his work in the Croatian army, which had been modernised with the help of Military Professional Resources Inc, an American company specialising in military training and procurement. This company’s personnel were in Kosovo, along with others from a similar company, Dyncorps, helping the American-backed programme for the Bosnian army. In 1995 Ceku played a leading role in the brutal ethnic cleansing of more than 300,000 Serbs from the Krajina region of Bosnia – forced in three days to leave land they had inhabited for centuries.
James Bissett, a former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, confirmed that the K.L.A. was being trained by ‘former U.S. military personnel, working under the guise of private contractors,’ and that ‘U.S. intelligence helped prepare the K.L.A. for the broader conflict.’
American intelligence agents have since admitted their role. CIA officers were ceasefire monitors in Kosovo in 1998-9 developing ties with the K.L.A, covertly supporting, arming, and equipping them. They provided US military training manuals and gave field advice on fighting the Yugoslav Army and Serb police. They also supplied aerial reconnaissance to direct NATO fighter planes. NATO became the K.L.A’s airforce.
When the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which co-ordinated the monitoring, left Kosovo a week before airstrikes began, many of its satellite telephones and global positioning systems were secretly handed to the K.L.A, ensuring that guerrilla commanders could stay in touch with NATO and Washington. Several K.L.A. leaders had the mobile phone number of General Wesley Clark, the NATO commander.
Relatively low-level skirmishes between Albanian nationalists and Serb special police continued throughout 1996-7 but the Spring of the following year brought a steep escalation with much more intense fighting. This was almost certainly due to the K.L.A secretly infiltrating over the mountains from Albania to base themselves in Kosovar villages from which they launched their attacks, deliberately exposing villagers to Serb reprisals.
The International Herald Tribune reported the success of Albanian provocation:
‘The K.L.A. had a simple but effective plan. It would kill Serbian policemen. The Serbs would retaliate, Balkan style, with widespread reprisals and the occasional massacre. The West would get more and more appalled, until finally it would, as it did in Bosnia, take action. In effect the United States and much of Europe would go to war on the side of the K.L.A. . It worked.’(IHT/Washington Post, Roger Cohen, ‘The Winner in the Balkans is the KLA’, 18 June, 1999) K.L.A leader Hashed Thaci told the BBC: ‘We knew full well that any armed action we undertook would trigger a ruthless retaliation against our people.’
For several months the K.L.A. steadily gained more territory, to the point where it controlled around 60% of the Serbian province. The Serbs, now aware of the K.L.A. plan to take the whole province by force, regrouped and fought back in defence of their sovereign territory. They regained the lost ground, driving the K.L.A. army back to the border at which point a ceasefire was imposed without negotiation. The Serbs were forced to give up the ground they had recovered which was immediately reoccupied by the K.L.A.
Casus Belli
The crucial tipping point was in January of 1999 when William Walker, the American OSCE Head of Mission, rushed to the village of Racak to instantly declare a clearly staged massacre ‘an unspeakable Serb atrocity.’ The bodies of 45 Albanians were found piled in a ditch, allegedly innocent civilians.
An international forensic team subsequently established that almost all the dead were members of the K.L.A. bearing fresh traces of gunpowder on their hands. They had been shot from multiple angles and at varying ranges suggesting death in combat as opposed to a massacre. Overnight their bodies had been dressed in civilian clothes and placed together but most still wore army boots.
Claims of an atrocity were always highly suspect as the Serb forces, retaliating for the shooting of four Serbian police officers, had invited a film crew along to witness their assault on Racak, a known K.L.A. stronghold.
A number of European diplomats questioned the motives and loyalties of William Walker. He dismissed suggestions that he had wanted war in Kosovo, but admitted the CIA was almost certainly involved in the countdown to airstrikes.
Initially some ‘diplomatic observers’ arrived, followed in October by a much larger group that was eventually swallowed up into the OSCE’s Kosovo Verification Mission. Walker said: ‘Overnight we went from having a handful of people to 130 or more. Could the agency have put them in at that point? Sure they could. It’s their job. But nobody told me.’
CIA sources who have now broken their silence say these observers were more closely connected to the agency. ‘It was a CIA front, gathering intelligence on the K.L.A.’s arms and leadership,’ said one. Another agent, who felt he had been “suckered in” by an organisation that ran amok in post-war Kosovo, said: ‘I’d tell them which hill to avoid, which wood to go behind, that sort of thing.‘
Numerous diplomats in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, concluded from Walker’s background that he was inextricably linked with the CIA. He had been personally recruited by Madeleine Albright as a safe pair of hands to head OSCE. His track record speaks volumes. Walker had been the ambassador to El Salvador at a time when atrocities had been committed by US backed insurgents there. In the era of US expansion driven by the doctrine of ‘manifest destiny’ he ran unauthorised military expeditions into Mexico and Central America aimed at establishing US colonies.
In Kosovo, Walker’s Verification Mission was largely staffed with intelligence officers pursuing a political agenda of making matters worse in the province in order to destabilise Milosevic.
Phoney Peace Talks
After Racak the full extent of American duplicity became apparent. The peace talks at Rambouillet in France to supposedly avert bombing were nothing of the sort. There were no face to face negotiations between the two sides, just the Americans shuttling from side to side. The objective was never to promote peace but always to provoke war.
The proof is this extract from a Washington hearing of the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee dated August 12,1998:
‘Planning for a U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo is now largely in place…. The only missing element seems to be an event – with suitably vivid media coverage – that would make the intervention politically saleable.’ Racak was that missing element.
In Rambouillet Secretary of State Madeleine Albright presented the Serbs with a last minute non negotiable ultimatum demanding unrestricted access for NATO troops to any part of Yugoslavia- in effect an army of occupation. This ultimatum was kept secret and not made public knowledge until after the bombing.
It was a demand the diplomatic community said no foreign nation could possibly accept. In the words of Henry Kissinger, a former U.S.Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Prize Winner:‘The Rambouillet text, which called on Serbia to admit NATO troops throughout Yugoslavia was a provocation, an excuse to start bombing.’
Albright maintained that the Serbs ‘needed a little bombing to help them see sense.’
Germany justified intervention in Kosovo on the grounds that:
‘Belgrade was evidently attempting to force a military solution, making the systematic expulsion of the civilian population part and parcel of its military tactics…. In view of this humanitarian catastrophe the international community saw no alternative to trying to prevent further human suffering, oppression and violence against the civilian population by means of targeted air strikes.’
The Cost of ‘Humanitarian Bombing.’
Germany took part in the 78 day NATO bombing campaign that claimed to target the Yugoslav army yet intentionally caused massive collateral damage.
U.S. Air Force General Michael Short specifically stated that the purpose of the war was to force the civilian population to rebel against the Milosevic government.
Nearly half the population of Kosovo, around 850,000 people fled. According to the OSCE 46% of Albanians left but proportionally even more Serbs, 60%, fled never to return.
The fact is NATO bombing actually provoked rather than prevented the humanitarian catastrophe. There were no refugees until the bombing began. The resulting devastation and dislocation was then used retrospectively to justify the action.
NATO commander General Wesley Clark repeatedly stated that the huge flood of refugees and heightened violence after the bombing began were “entirely predictable’ . Clark also said he knew nothing about any Serbian planned ethnic cleansing of Albanians, the so called Operation Horseshoe. This operation, frequently referred to in NATO press briefings, was later exposed as a Croatian hoax.
German court already ruled ‘no evidence of group persecution’
Scarcely mentioned in the media was the fact that the humanitarian case for intervention had been comprehensively rejected by a German court a fortnight before bombing started. Hearing asylum requests in February 1999, Munster’s Upper Administrative court found no evidence in government sources to support the existence of a programme of ethnic cleansing.
Foreign office reports ‘do not allow the conclusion that there is group persecution of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. The violent actions of military and police since since February 1998 were aimed at separatist activities and are no proof of a persecution of the whole Albanian group in Kosovo or in a part of it.’
The court found that from the end of 1998 both the security situation and the conditions of life of the Albanian population had ‘noticeably improved and life in the larger cities had returned to relative normality.’ Its conclusion was categoric :
“Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have neither been nor are now exposed to regional or countrywide group persecution in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’ (See- A New Generation Draws the Line- Noam Chomsky, chap.3)
When asked by the press in 2000 why Milosevic had not been charged with causing genocide in Kosovo as stated in his original indictment Carla Del Ponte, ICTY’s chief prosecutor replied – ‘because there is no evidence of genocide in Kosovo.’
On the day bombing began, Britain’s Defence Minister George Robertson, about to become NATO Secretary General, told MPs ‘the Kosovo Liberation Army were responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Yugoslav authorities had been.’
The North Atlantic Council agreed that the KLA were “the initiators of violence” in “a deliberate campaign of provocation.”
And the same can be said of NATO. This purely defensive organisation designed for Europe’s safety during the Cold War, had no status of any kind to intervene in the affairs of a sovereign U.N. state. When it started bombing Serbia in March 1999, its statute still restricted it to defensive operations only. The UN Charter defines the prevention of unprovoked international aggression against a sovereign state as its most important principle. NATO only amended its own statute to permit offensive action as it celebrated its 50th anniversary – one month into the Kosovo bombing campaign. A clear acknowledgment it had acted illegally in the first instance.
Former Nuremberg prosecutor Norman J Rockler told US television an estimated 14,000 day and night bombing sorties were carried out in less than three months with just two percent of laser guided bombs striking military targets. The vast majority destroyed schools, homes, hospitals, roads, bridges, Serb television and even the Chinese embassy. Smart bombs, dumb bombs, cluster bombs and bombs containing depleted uranium killed more than a thousand men women and children on the ground contaminating land for years.
Rockler condemned the NATO action which he concluded ‘violates and shreds the basic provisions of the U.N. Charter and other conventions and treaties.’
The consequences of this ‘humanitarian intervention’ have been appalling, the legacy truly toxic. The ‘success’ of the Kosovo war opened the way for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, another illegal intervention justified by claims which proved entirely false – that Iraq was harbouring weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to international security. This war cost hundreds of thousands of lives and, to this day, Iraq remains chaotic and impoverished. Asked whether the death of half a million Iraqi children, more than died in Hiroshima, was a price worth paying Albright replied – it was a hard choice ‘but we think the price was worth it.’ That’s easy to say when you’re not the one paying the price and quite impossible to reconcile with humanitarian concern.
On the ground in Kosovo the effects of international intervention have been equally catastrophic. The few Serbs who have remained live under constant intimidation from an Albanian majority led by the international criminals who orchestrate drug and people smuggling throughout Europe. Kosovo is a classic example of a would-be independent state consigned to endless existence as a failed state.
More than twenty years after the final Balkan war in Kosovo, life for the Serbs is considerably worse. Serbia was recently listed as the 7th poorest country in Europe.
It is by far the greatest victim of criminal interference by the international community. Not only was its economy deliberately destroyed by massive and illegal NATO bombing, its recovery is now constrained by a degree of conditionality and political bullying tantamount to continuing sanctions. The damage to the Serbian economy was estimated at 30-50 billion dollars. Unemployment is running at almost 10% and there is a continuing brain drain. The European Union classifies the Serbian economy as ‘fragile’ while the European Parliament estimates that by 2050 Serbia will lose more than a third of its population compared to 1990. The prospects for improvement remain uncertain. Successive polls show nearly half of all Serbs now oppose joining the EU which is still insisting that Serbia recognise the independence of Kosovo as a condition of membership.
The former head of the Soviet desk at the CIA, Charles Beebe recently stated his conviction that the illegal bombing of Kosovo is what persuaded Vladimir Putin that the West can not be trusted:
‘Things really started to go bad with the NATO Kosovo intervention in 1999 which had a profound effect on Russian perceptions. We had urged Russia to trust us that NATO enlargement did not threaten Russian interests, that NATO was currently a defensive alliance- no reason for Russia to have security concerns and then, only a few weeks after Poland Hungary and the Czech Republic were formally brought into the alliance suddenly NATO is brought into a military operation, out of area, up against a state that had not attacked NATO for things that had gone inside that state internally and we did it without U.N. security council authorisation. In other words, from Russia’s point of view, it was clearly illegal and offensive. And they asked themselves what would prevent this allegedly defensive alliance doing this inside Russia for similar reasons?’
It’s a good question with no clear answer.
To avoid future conflict the U.S. and its allies must learn to listen, engage in open and honest debate and recognise the shifting balance of power. It is neither acceptable nor realistic to try to impose western values and its way of life on the rest of the world. Other people have rights too.
At the recent BRICs conference in Kazakhstan, Putin asked repeatedly whether it was fair that the U.S. failed to honour its private assurances that NATO would not extend ‘one inch eastwards’ after German reunification. Trust has clearly broken down and will require major long term efforts to rebuild. It is always easier to hate than understand but continuing to distort history and pervert justice endangers us all.
To have demonised Serbia, our most loyal and effective ally throughout the Second World War, is utterly shameful. The moral imperative is to keep telling the truth and set the record straight.
[Laurie Mayer is a retired television and radio journalist. He reported for many years for BBC
Television News, winning the Royal Television Society’s Reporter of the Year Award in 1986. He then became presenter of BBC Breakfast News and anchor of BBC TV News programmes. He moved to Sky News as a main presenter and hosted coverage of the OJ Simpson trial.]
