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NATO’s BALKAN BLUNDER (part 1)
Article first appeared in the winter edition of The Mediterranean Quarterly , Vol. 12, Number1, 2001.
The military intervention in Yugoslavia by NATO forces in spring 1999 raises disturbing and unresolved international security issues that have long- range implications for world peace. Despite strident claims by NATO leaders that the air strikes were successful and that the undeclared war was a major victory, close analysis reveals the intervention to have been an unmitigated disaster. 
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It failed to achieve any of its claimed objectives, caused a humanitarian disaster in both Yugoslavia and Kosovo, and destabilized the Balkans and it paved the way for further bloodshed and violence. Even more seriously, by resorting to the use of force without United Nations authority, NATO has dismantled the traditional framework of global peace and security that had existed since the end of the Second World War. The illegal action on the part of the Western Democracies has also served as an ominous signal to Russia and China that NATO is prepared to wage war in violation of and without regard for the precepts of international law. Indeed, NATO’s Kosovo war may yet be seen as a miscalculation of historic proportions.
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NATO was established in1949 as a mutual defense system and was based on the principles of the U N Charter Article 1of the founding agreement declares unequivocally that its members would “…settle any international disputes in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purpose of the United Nations.” NATO leaders were prepared to ignore the principle article of this historic alliance in waging an aggressive, if undeclared, war against Yugoslavia. 
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During the long years of the Cold War, NATO was more than just a powerful military force defending the free world from the realities of communist tyranny. It was an organization that stood for the rule of law, for democratic institutions, and for all those things that distinguished the Western democracies from the communist and Nazi dictatorships. NATO was a commanding moral force that acted as a symbol of hope for the civilized world. A symbol not only for those living in the West but also for the millions caught behind the iron curtain and for many people in other parts of the world.
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That symbol was cynically destroyed by the 78 day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. By choosing violence over diplomacy and resorting to the illegal use of force, NATO broke all the ground rules .As a result, our Western Democracies have lost the moral high ground. It will not be easy to get it back. The new set of political leaders, the Clintons, the Blairs, the Schroeders, and the Chretiens, have proven themselves to have about as much respect for the rule of law and the truth as the former Communist Party bosses of the old Soviet Empire. This is the real tragedy of Kosovo.
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It is now clear that these political leaders- all of them from Western democratic countries- lied about Kosovo. We were told that mass murders were taking place in Kosovo. The United States secretary of defense, Mr. Cohen stated that one hundred thousand Albanian Kosovars had perished. The British prime minister, Tony Blair spoke of genocide. President Bill Clinton repeated this charge by asserting that the bombing was to stop “deliberate, systematic efforts at …genocide.” We were led to believe that Milosevic, even before the bombing, had plans to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of its Albanian population. The German defense minister, Rudolph Scharping, claimed that this devilish plan, code-named, Operation Horseshoe, had been disclosed through intelligence sources and subsequently presented it to the German public as justification for NATO’s intervention. 
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It has now been revealed through the disclosures of the German general, Heinz Loquai, that the so-called Operation Horseshoe was a complete falsehood. It was fabricated by the defense minister Scharping to rally a faltering German public behind the NATO bombing campaign. The London Times of 2 April 2000 exposed this lie and reported the testimony of General Loquai, who noted that there was no evidence to indicate that Milosevic had planned to ethnically cleanse Kosovo before the air strikes began.
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The incident that turned the tide towards military intervention was the so-called Racak Massacre, of January 1999, in which Serbian security forces allegedly had summarily executed, in cold blood forty-five Albanian civilians. World headlines quoted observer, William Walker’s, outraged declaration that this horrifying crime was proof of genocide. From the outset, French journalists who were on the ground when the alleged Racak massacre was said to have taken place had regarded the incident with suspicion. More recently, German investigative reporters for Berlin Zeitung have charged on March 24 2000 that the autopsy reports, to which they gained access, indicate no evidence of an execution scenario. It appeared the victims might have been killed in the fighting that had taken place the day before between the Security forces and the KLA and later placed in a ditch to simulate a massacre. There are those who are of the opinion that General Walker may have had a part to play in staging this incident.
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During and after the bombing campaign, NATO authorities assured us that the air strikes against Yugoslavia had inflicted a crippling defeat on the Serbian military. NATO spokespeople even today continue to hail the bombing as a major victory. Yet we now have learned from a suppressed US Air Force Report, which was published in the May15 issue of Newsweek magazine, that the number of military targets destroyed “was a tiny fraction of those claimed.” The report indicated there were only fifty-eight confirmed hits by NATO pilots, not the seven hundred and forty four originally claimed by NATO authorities. The Serbian army left Kosovo essentially intact and with its battle flags flying.
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Genocide and mass murders did not take place in Kosovo. It is now acknowledged that prior to the bombing there were approximately two thousand Albanian and Serbian fatalities. This is not a surprising figure, given that a civil war had been underway in Kosovo for several years. During the bombing campaign it is estimated there were a further ten thousand deaths. However, teams of forensic experts that have been in Kosovo since the cease-fire, exhuming mass gravesites, have so far managed to find only about 2000 bodies. There is no certainty that these were victims of the Serbian security forces or indeed that all of them were Albanians. Such a figures, however deplorable, can hardly be described as mass murder or genocide. The conflict in Kosovo could not compare with the killing grounds in Turkish Kurdistan, Colombia, East Timor, Sri Lanka, or any number of other hot spots in the world.
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As time goes by and memoirs are published, undoubtedly the uncovering of other lies and falsehoods will throw more light on the real reasons why NATO on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary decided to bomb Yugoslavia. Certainly the full story has not yet been told. Why was there no serious attempt to negotiate with the Serbian side at Rambouillet? What was the extent of U S and German financial and military assistance to the KLA? Why was it decided to pull the more than thirteen hundred observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe out of Kosovo after Milosevic had agreed to their presence in an effort to de-escalate the fighting? Over time the true story will emerge, but there can be no dispute that lies were told to justify the bombing.
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It may not come as a complete surprise to many observers of the political process to realize that our political leaders cannot be relied on to tell the truth. It is particularly worrisome when the lies involve foreign policy issues that deal with matters of life and death, of war and peace, and of the destruction of cities and the displacement of people. What is perhaps even more distressing is how easy it was for NATO leaders to gain almost overwhelming support for the attack on Yugoslavia.

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All of the mainstream media in the NATO countries, with the exception of Greece, fully backed the bombing The legislatures in these countries supported the war, even though there was no opportunity in most of the NATO countries to debate the matter. The almost total acceptance of NATO’s propaganda campaign by the media and the obsession to accept at face value atrocity stories told by Albanian Kosovars and often embellished by NATO spokespeople remains one of the most disturbing elements of the conflict, disturbing, because it demonstrates how easy it is for the modern state to manipulate an ill-informed and disinterested public and to enlist the support of the media as a major ally in this endeavor. Few leading public figures spoke out against the war or questioned its validity. Even after finding that the war was illegal the British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee concluded that the intervention was justified on humanitarian grounds.
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Humanitarian grounds seem to be the latest dogma for justifying military action against a sovereign state. In large part it explains the reluctance of the ‘establishment” to question the NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia. In an age of political correctness, it is difficult for anyone to challenge the appropriateness of bombing people. Killing is apparently acceptable if it is done for humanitarian purposes. At the same time our Western democracies have been carefully selective about where they will intervene in the name of human rights.

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Some defenders of the Kosovo intervention coach the support in terms of the international community’s larger role. They say that simply because others argue that the international community cannot intervene everywhere should not mean that it must not intervene anywhere. This is an unsatisfactory argument, because it does not address the critical issue in all interventions. 

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Few would dispute that there will be occasions when intervention in a sovereign state is necessary to prevent the wholesale massacre of people. Rwanda serves as an example in which it might well have prevented genocide. However the core problem is lack of agreement on the criteria to be followed by the international community in deciding when to intervene. Here is where the humanitarian interventionists fail to provide a satisfactory alternative to the ground rules that are now in place that UN authority must first be obtained.
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Those who argue that the Security Council does not always respond to the challenges posed by the new human security threats overlook the possibility of going direct to the General Assembly. This is what President Harry Truman did to gain U N approval for military support for South Korea in order to oppose the invasion from the north. Unfortunately, following the rules is not an option for the new humanitarians. They offer instead nothing but vague abstractions and generalities about a human security agenda and the primacy of personal security over state sovereignty. This falls far short of providing a realistic formula for international action. It results in the rule of the jungle in which the powerful states are immune to intervention and only small defenseless states are vulnerable.
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In the case of Kosovo, NATO didn’t bother to approach the U N before bombing Yugoslavia. We now know that all of the other NATO countries were concerned about this but were overruled by the United States. James Rubin has written in a special feature in the Financial Times of September 29,2000 that the British were particularly worried that bombing Yugoslavia without UN approval would be illegal. In a telephone conversation with Madeline Albright, Robin Cook, the British foreign minister explained that his Foreign Office lawyers believed the bombing without UN authority would be illegal. Albright’s angry reply to Cook, according to Rubin, was, “ get new lawyers.”
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The NATO countries, led by the United States, were prepared to ignore the U N and launch air strikes against Yugoslavia, in direct violation of the UN Charter and NATO’s own founding treaty. Yet these same countries are adamant in insisting that a subsidiary organ of the UN, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia [ICTY], should be fully respected. Unfortunately, this Tribunal has lost all credibility by its obvious bias in favor of its NATO patrons. The tribunal has become a political organ of NATO. It’s decision to issue indictments against Milosevic in the middle of the bombing campaign was a blatant attempt to gain public support for the bombing. After all, who could not support punitive action being taken against a nation headed by an accused war criminal?
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So far, every attempt to get the tribunal to even entertain charges against NATO leaders for the most serious crime of all, waging aggressive war, has met with no success. The notorious Agim Ceku, who in 1995 led Croatian military forces in Operation Storm, which ethnically cleansed all of the Serbs from their ancestral lands in Croatia and included the slaughter of hundreds of innocent civilians, has not been indicted. This is the same commander whose Croatian forces two years previously, in September 1993, had attacked Canadian UN forces in the Medak pocket and in overrunning Serbian villages left ample evidence of horrendous crimes against the civilian population. Agim Ceku has been rewarded for his deeds by being appointed the head of the Kosovo Protection Corps in Kosovo.
 
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