BRIEFING BY THE DEFENCE SECRETARY, MR. GEORGE ROBERTSON, CHIEF OF THE DEFENCE STAFF, GENERAL SIR CHARLES GUTHRIE AND COMMANDER ALLIED RAPID REACTION CORPS, LT GENERAL MIKE JACKSON
10 MAY 1999
This is an unedited extract from remarks made by the then UK Defence Secretary, George Robertson, during a briefing that he, the Chief of the Defence Staff , General Sir Charles Guthrie, and the Commander of the Allied Rapid Reaction Force, Lieutenant General Mike Jackson gave about the Kosovo war on 10 May 1999 – some six weeks after the start of the 78-day Nato bombardment of Serbia. We have added comments in bold italics.
“It is important however to recall why we are engaged in this mission and why we had to reluctantly take action. Six weeks ago, after the collapse of diplomatic talks in Paris, talks which Milosevic had used to camouflage the start of his wholesale ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, NATO started to attack from the air the military machine behind that violence.
[1. The Rambouillet talks did not collapse because of intransigence by Milosevic. They collapsed because the Nato allies, at the very last moment, added a secret annex which gave Nato huge powers within the sovereign nation of Serbia – powers that, when the annex was finally made public just before the end of the war, were denounced throughout the world as demands that no sovereign nation could possibly accept. 2. As soon as the Kosovo war ended, some 90 UN observers who had remained in position in Kosovo throughout the fighting, moved swiftly to gather definitive information about what had happened during the conflict. They found that there had be no ethnic cleansing before the start of the Nato bombing on 24 March 1999; that total deaths from all sides had been around 4,000, almost evenly divided between Serbs and Albanians; that 2,000 of the deaths were direct consequences of the Nato bombing and that the remaining 2,000 had overwhelmingly resulted from military engagements between the two sides.]
The military objective was and remains to disrupt Serb violence and to weaken the military machine that has been the instrument of the genocidal attacks on the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. [Since there had been no violence or genocide by the Serbs, this claim was completely without foundation.]
It could all have been over very quickly if Milosevic had recognised that NATO and the wider international community was utterly determined to stop the killing and the cleansing. But we always warned that it could take time against a brutal and a corrupt dictator intent on decapitating Albanian society in Kosovo. We also warned Milosevic that we would not relent or compromise in the face of his escalation of the evil repression. [Slobodan Milosevic had twice been democratically elected as President of Serbia. The elections had been independently verified by official international observers meeting all the established standards of fairness. Milosevic was never a dictator and had no intention of ‘decapitating Albanian society in Kosovo. It was the KLA, supported by western nations, that was intent on converting Serbian Kosovo into a sovereign Albanian state.]
Night after night, day after day, we have targeted, hit and progressively destroyed the military capability of Serbia so that they can do less and less damage to the Kosovar children, women and men. This is a just cause, to disrupt the violence against innocent civilians and their property and to commit ourselves to getting them home in safety once again. [Official figures at the end of the war showed that fewer than 2% of the bombs dropped by Nato during its 78-day bombing campaign had hit military targets. Nato’s objective was to destroy Serbia’s infrastructure by targeting schools, hospitals, factories, utilities, homes, shops and churches. In the early 2000s two international economic think tanks respectively estimated the cost of the damaged inflicted at $50 billion and $100 billion.]
We can’t tell what horrors we are going to find when we finally get into Kosovo, but from the refugees, from the evicted people themselves, comes a consistent and believable catalogue of nightmares – murderous violence, mass graves, rape camps, flattened villages, mutilation and torture. This is the genocide that NATO seeks to disrupt and then to eventually stop. [International forensic teams called in by Nato immediately the Kosovo war ended to collect evidence of war crimes and genocide left Kosovo after some seven weeks of searching, angrily protesting that they had found no mass graves and no indication of any other abuses. They felt they had been brought in under entirely false pretences. In all its trials, despite handing down many guilty verdicts, the ICTY failed to provide any concrete evidence of genocide in either Kosovo or Bosnia. Particularly telling was that the forensic and scientific evidence that had allegedly gathered was never made available to the court – and never will be because laws were passed in both Croatia and Bosnia to ensure that this cannot happen.]
And at some point Milosevic, or those who take his orders from him, will have to realise that air attack follows air attack, the whole Serbian military might is being permanently destroyed because it will never ever be rebuilt.
[Ironically the massive Nato bombardment had barely any impact on Serbian military might. Nato’s focus was always on destroying Serbia’s economy.]
And patriotic Serbs, and there are patriotic decent Serbs, must realise that this man Milosevic is destroying their country and putting its whole future in jeopardy, and his contemptuous and contemptible brutality has led to one of the greatest manmade humanitarian disasters of this century and we must and we will bring this humanitarian disaster to an end and we are not going to be deflected from that goal.[The Kosovo war came about solely because the western alliance wanted, for its own selfish reasons, to destroy the Yugoslav Federation. Milosevic was demonised not because he wanted a ‘Greater Serbia’: in reality, he was the only Yugoslav leader who wanted to preserve multi-racial Yugoslavia and, when that became impossible, sought at every opportunity to help bring about peace. Even Richard Holbrooke, the hard-line US negotiator at Dayton, admitted that agreement would never have been reached without the help of Slobodan Milosevic.]
We believe the points made above demonstrate beyond doubt that the western allies knowingly misled the world throughout the Kosovo war. More than half way through the bombardment, western political and military leaders must have been aware that reports of massive ethnic cleaning by the Serbs before the start of bombing on 24 March were completely untrue. Satellite pictures and other forms of intelligence must have shown them that those who fled to the border during that period were not driven out by the Serbs; they were either trying to secure their own safety or obeying orders to leave issued by the KLA leadership. From this it follows that there was no justifiable excuse for Nato’s illegal bombing campaign. It was illegal and wholly unjustifiable.
(George Robertson was UK Defence Secretary from 1997-1999. He was Secretary-General of Nato from 1999-2003. He was made a UK Life Peer in 1999.)