British Helsinki Human Rights Group
22 May 1999 BHHRG analysts
NATO targets Yugoslavia:
Report of a visit to Belgrade, 10th-13th May, 1999 by The British Helsinki
Human Rights Group
While NATO’s air campaign against Serbia continued into its second month
three members of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group with a French
colleague visited Belgrade.
Understandably, perhaps, in a time of war both parties to the conflict are
accused of using propaganda. For example,the UK news media regularly refers
to Serbia as a dictatorship which brooks no opposition; where there is no media
freedom enabling people to know what is really going on in the beleaguered
province of Kosovo and where people cower, hungry and frightened, at the mercy
of what British Defense Secretary, George Robertson, calls Milosevic’s “murder
machine”.
It was to investigate these and other claims that the BHHRG embarked upon its
mission.
Allegations of dictatorship
Members of the BHHRG monitored the parliamentary and presidential elections
held in Serbia in Autumn 1997. Their report, published on the Group’s
web page, reached the following conclusions:
– After serving two consecutive terms as president of Serbia Slobodan
Milosevic observed the Yugoslav Federation’s constitution by not
altering (or ignoring) its provisions to seek a third term in office. He next
stood for election as president of Yugoslavia itself.
– Such respect for constitutional propriety has not been observed by everyone
in the region: Slovenia’s president, Milan Kucan, has served three terms in
office in spite of the country’s constitutional requirement that the state
president should only be elected twice.
In other post-communist countries (Georgia, for example) the terms of the
constitution have been strained to allow the incumbent to continue holding
office.
– Although BHHRG observers found many shortcomings in the Serbian election
process these were no more serious than those observed in other places – the
Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, for example, which was hailed as
exemplary by other international monitoring groups.
– Allegations have always been made that there is no media pluralism in
Serbia. Before the war there were several opposition newspapers as well
as radio and TV outlets. Numerous anti-Milosevic foreign-funded NGOs also
operated in the country. By May 1999 much of the opposition media had
beenclosed down. However, large numbers of people receive foreign television
programmes via cable and satellite and, contrary to the received wisdom,
are aware of the situation of the Kosovan Albanians.
Members of the BHHRG failed to detect signs of the sort of behaviour
associated with a classic dictatorship while in Belgrade. People openly
criticize Milosevic – but not for the war. Many say they never voted for
his party the SPS but while the country is under attack they must stand
together whatever their political persuasion.
Some, like Vuk Draskovic, [interviewed by the BHHRG] criticize the Kosovan
Albanians for boycotting elections and thus giving the SPS a free rein. The
40 or so seats allocated to them in the Serb parliament might have been won
by the oppositionwhich would have severely reduced – or eliminated – the
SPS’s hold on power.
He also pointed out that opposition politicians favoured by the West, like
Zoran Djindjic, had forfeited any further chance of gaining public support
by leaving the country – Djindjic is in Montenegro with the West’s other
favourite, President Milo Djukanovic.
“He [Djindjic] will only be able to come to power on the top of an American tank”
says Draskovic who has stayed in the country throughout the war.
Considering that a war is on, police presence in the city is minimal.
Even the police who asked to examine the BHHRG’s cameras were courteous and
unthreatening. Ordinary people were friendly and keen to point out that
they did not blame ordinary British citizens for the bombs that were
falling on their country every day.
In both Bulgaria and Romania members of the Group were followed by local police;
crossing the Romanian border tookthree times as long as crossing into and out of
Serbia proper.
Will the Serbs bend? Public perceptions
Nearly everyone we spoke to had endured some aspect of the bombing.
People talked about being thrown out of bed [after the bombing of the Socialist
Party headquarters, for example]; of the powerful winds that blow
through a building after a particularly heavy raid pulling the person into a
vortex and seemingly towards the epicentre of the attack. Door and window
frames break loose and the building shakes. One day there was even an
earthquakein Belgrade after an air raid on the city.
Marija S. a Belgrade housewife is typical. She lives in a small,
three-room apartment with her husband, two children, younger brother and
elderlyparents. Her father has Alzheimer’s disease but she had to move
him andher mother away from their home in the vicinity of some of the heaviest
bombing. Marija and her husband have not worked since before the war and
live on meagre savings. Pensions for elderly people are paid late and
not in full. Children all over Serbia have not been to school for the past
two months.
The worst time for the family was when the first graphite bombs were
used and the electricity failed. Not only power but also water pumping
facilities are affected when this occurs. Nevertheless, they are not
giving in nor do they expect the government to bend on their behalf. Anyway,
the authorities have become better organized than ever before and the
electricity problems are sorted out quite quickly and efficiently.
There is no shortage of food. Unlike many people in the West, Serbs do
not live on a diet of fast-food. The country’s fields are properly husbanded
and fresh produce is widely available from peasant markets. Cars and
buses are running, no doubt fuelled by the large amount of illegal petrol
that is reaching the country.
The BHHRG also visited the Mufti of Belgrade who lives next to the
city’s only mosque. Despite the fact that the war is (ostensibly) being fought
on behalf of Muslim Albanians the Mufti thinks it an attack on all Muslims
as well as Serbs: “We understand American politics from what went on in
Sudan, Afghanistan and Somalia. We understand now better than before”. Like
many people he also attacked Clinton as an “immoral cowboy”. …
People are fully aware of what is happening in Kosovo but would argue
about the causes of the tragedy there. This means that they are criticized by
Western commentators for being heartless. However, the remorseless
nature of the bombing (sirens warning of an attack wail twice a day) and the
unpredictable way the bombs fall mean that people’s minds are,
understandably, directed towards their own plight.
Although Serbs have often displayed a tendency to self-pity they have a case
when they point out that c.200,000 Serbs were expelled from the Krajina in
1995 without a similar outpouring of indignation. Bitterness about the treatment
of the Krajina Serbs often flares up. A hard-working representative from the
Yugoslav Red Cross pointed out that Kosovan refugees in Montenegro were receiving
aid to the value of 300DM per month last year whereas neighbouring Krajina Serbs
got c.30DM worth of goods.
Report on the humanitarian situation by the Yugoslav Red Cross
On 8/5/99 the Yugoslav Red Cross reported that since the bombing started on
24th March more than 700 civilians have been killed and 6400 have been
injured. Obviously, this does not take into account what has happened
since including the dreadful casualities that resulted from the NATO bombing
at Korisha on 13th May.
The largest number killed or wounded are from Aleksinac. Surdulica,
Dakovica-Prizren, Orahovac, Cacak, Grdelica gorge, Kragujevac, Koris,
Valjevo, Nis, Kragujevac and Belgrade. Many of the wounded will be
invalids for the rest of their lives.
An inevitable consequence of the bombing isthat a large number of people
have lost their homes. The largest number of private apartments destroyed are
in Aleksinac, Surdulica, Nis, Novi Sad, Cacak, Cuprija, Prokuplje, Kursumlija,
Kraljevo and Belgrade
The destruction of factories and places of work has left 500,000 people
without jobs. If their families are included, this means that c.2m people
will be affected by this economic catastrophe for the forseeable future.
In Novi Sad more than 90,000 people are without running water as pipes
were destroyed when the bridges were bombed. Added to this are the
difficulties of transport and communication. The destruction of the heating
plant in Novi Belgrade will leave that part of the city without heat in the
winter if it cannot be repaired (or reconstructed) before then.
Hospitals have been hit and patients killed; health clinics are
destroyed in the bombing. The clinic in Aleksinac, for example, which served
over 60,000 people was wiped out. Disruption of electricity means that
high-tech. equipment (scanners etc.) in hospitals are unusable.
Medicines are in short supply.
Children gave not gone to school since the war began and many schools
have been bombed. Children are also among the victims some dying in horrific
circumstances.
500,000 live below the subsistence level, mostly pensioners. The Red
Cross fears that their means to operate soup kitchens will not stretch to the
numbers they fear will be in need of them, particularly when winter
comes. Pensions are paid late.
There are large numbers of internally displaced people both in Serbia
proper and Kosovo _ the Red Cross says there are c. 1.2m. Fear of
bombing has caused over one million people to relocate to the country or to be
withfriends. Added to which are the existing 500,000 refugees from Krajina
some of whom (11,500) went to Kosovo and have endured displacement twice
now. Within Kosovo itself the Red Cross estimates that 250,000 people
are internally displaced.
Yet, politicans and NATO spokesmen repeatedly deny that the war is
directed at civilians. The opposite is true: this is a war directed. Rumours
abounded that the KLA a shadowy organization with ties to Albanian
leftist groups in Switzerland and Germany was preparing to launch an armed
struggle. The US was rumoured to be promoting and financing it from an
early stage.
Many, including the moderate Albanian leader, Ibrahim Rugova, (and some
Western journalists) speculated that this was Milosevic-inspired
disinformation. Others saw it as the natural response to the
Ghandi-esque policies of Rugova which had failed to deliver full independence.
During 1998 the violence worsened. Policemen, Serb officials and even
Albanian “collaborators” were killed by KLA snipers and, according to
the UNHCR, 90 Serbian villages were ethnically cleansed in the course of the
year. Reprisals were taken against those considered to be members of the
organization. This involved the use of scorched earth tactics whereby
houses (in the case of Kosovo this often turned out to be large
compounds)were burned down to flush out the terrorists.
However, compared with Bosnia, where thousands were killed in a week during
the early part of the war in 1992 only 1700 Albanians (mainly fighters) 180
Serb policemen and 120 Serb soldiers were killed in Kosovo last year. The
regime in Belgrade has not been stupid: it knew that it was being provoked
into massiveretaliation and refused to respond in the required manner.
The killings in Kosovo were still the West’s best hope of provoking
the fall of the Milosevic regime even though the conflict was of low
intensity compared with many other places in the world. By February the
parties gathered at the chateau of Rambouillet in France to discuss peace. At
the last moment, when it looked as though some agreement might be reached
the Americans handed the Serb delegation an annexe to the final document
demanding freedom of movement (and much else) to NATO troops and personnel
not only in Kosovo but throughout the whole of Yugoslavia. No sovereign
state would have accepted such terms. Naturally, they were rejected not
just by Milosevic but by a vote in the Serbian parliament. The scene was
set for the air campaign to begin.
Perhaps the diplomatic players believed their own propaganda. Christopher
Hill, the US ambassador to Macedonia, was confident that Milosevic would
cave in before the first bombs fell despite being told by well-informed
Serbs that this was not going to happen. It is unsurprising in these
circumstances that the NATO allies were unprepared for what followed.
With such confusion and a cavalier belief in the likelihood of Serb
capitulation at the last minute, NATO went to war. Despite attempts by
CNN among others to talk up the conflict by showing what purported to be the
large movement of refugees from Kosovo in the preceding months few
appeared to have moved out of the province before March 24th. There were no
camps before then. After the bombing began huge numbers of refugees flooded
out of the province. The rest is history.
The South East European Federation
The dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991 displeased the West as did the
emergence of little nations with their motley collection of individual
ethnic minorities. Officials at the US Department of State began to
envisage a renewed federation – something more ambitious than the former
Yugoslavia because it would include countries like Romania, Albania and
Bulgaria. In fact, it would resemble something very similar to the
Stalin Dimitrov Plan scotched by Tito in 1948.
According to the idea’s proponents, such a Federation would work more
effectively if it was composed of ethnically pure units. So, Bosnia
itself was destroyed as a multi-ethnic state and put together again as an
uneasy federation of ethnically-based groups. Croatia still has Serbs in
Eastern Slavonia but complaints about the treatment of this minority persist –
even if they have been put on the ‘back-burner’ while Croat cooperation is
sought in the Kosovo war. Anyway, Croatian nationalism has been even
less popular with the international community than the Serb variety. Although
the Milosevic regime was responsible for waging war on these two
countries during the early nineteen nineties the West never tried
convincingly to stop this happening.
Further south, multi-ethnic Macedonia weighed down by the influx of
ethnic Albanians into its territory is threatened with disintegration and there
are signs that the Macedonian minority in Bulgaria is flexing its
muscles. Watch for a possible change of borders there. Both Romania and Albania
have minorities that could secede from the central authorities.
The fomentors of such a policy need to deal with weak and pliable
states. This Serbia has failed to be. Although the Serbs will often resort to
elaborate historical myths and tiresome nationalistic rhetoric they are
less likely to be pushed around, as has been amply proved. In fact, the
West’s bullying has actually toughened Belgrade’s stance on Kosovo.
Whereas before 24th March 1999 many people would have abandoned the province
they now see it is as being inextricably tied up with their own survival.
Of course, the US desire to reinvent the former Yugoslavia is also tied
to economic considerations including the ambition to control oil and gas
pipelines from Central Asia and the Caucasus region via the Black Sea.
Whether the Russians, who have been somewhat supine in the Kosovo
conflict, will also accept such acts of economic imperialism remains to be seen.
Repercussions
Hundreds of thousands of people have been rendered homeless and many
others maimed and killed as a result of the West’s political machinations and
military blunders since 24th March 1999. NATO leaders’ pronouncements
thatthis conflict is about human rights seem to be a cruel and dishonest
fig leaf put forward to hide strategic ambitions in the Balkans.
Unhappily, the Hague War Crimes Tribunal is unlikely to be a forum for
objective justice, as presently composed. Far from promoting the rule of
law the Tribunal is controlled by NATO countries: the chief judge is
American, the chief prosecutor Canadian. Until NATO took sides in this
conflict this was not necessarily a flaw of the Tribunal but now its
impartiality must be questioned.
This means that no one from a NATO country is likely to face prosecution
for war crimes – such as alleged breaches of the Geneva Convention.
However, the words of Major-General Curtis LeMay who spearheaded the
bombing of Japan in World War 11, including the dropping of the first
atombombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be prophetic: “I wasn’t
particularly worried about getting the job done. I suppose if I had lost
the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal”. It remains to be seen who will
win this war and what the response of countries like China will be to
the outcome.
Even if the conflict stops with a carefully crafted NATO ‘victory’ the
region will remain unstable with more wars – between Albanian and
Albanian, for example – possible. The followers of Ibrahim Rugova and
those of theKLA are already deeply distrustful of one another – the former
are allegedto control large sums of money collected as taxes from the Albanian
diaspora over the past few years. The KLA, according to the Wall Street
Journal (20/5/99) would dearly like to gain access to these funds.
Either side could be joined by Albanians from Albania proper who support one
side or the other as well as different political formations in Albania
itself. And, far from having their hands burnt, it is also likely that the
period of reconstruction that will, inevitably, follow the conflict will offer
Western governments fresh opportunities for meddling in the internal
politics of Serbia and the rest of the Balkans.
Large numbers of consultants, analysts and experts will descend to ‘rebuild’
the country and its neighbours. There will be rich rewards for those who do
what the donors want. A major sticking point for Western politicians in the past
has been Serbia’s failure to enter into the right kind of business deals;
all these issues will be on the table again.
In other words, there is little optimism that much good will come out of
the tragic war over Kosovo. Other places have been watching events in
the Balkans with interest. For example, a Polish diplomat publicly stated
that neighbouring Belarus ‘met all the conditions’ for a similar invasion by
the West. And during the recent presidential campaign in Slovakia, people
have been told by state and private media that if they vote for Vladimir
Meciarthe country will meet the same fate as Yugoslavia.
In the Caucasus region there is unease about the future of disputed regions like
Nagorno Karabakh.
The question is: will the United States and its allies have the stomach
fortaking on any more adventures of this kind? If they do, the world could
face the nightmare predicted in George Orwell’s 1984 with small, low-grade
wars going on all the time while people become dehumanized, impoverished
and ultimately reduced to meaninglessness.