Kosovo:

The Politics of Delusion

There really was, it seemed, a nation on this earth prepared to fight
for the freedom of other men, and to fight at her own expense, and at
the cost of hardship and peril to herself; a nation prepared to do this
service not just for her near neighbours, for those in her part of the
world, for lands geographically connected with her own, but even
prepared to cross the sea in order to prevent the establishment of an
unjust dominion in any quarter of the globe, and to ensure that right
and justice, and the rule oflaw, should everywhere be supreme.

Livy (Titus Livius, 59Bc-AD17), The History of Rome from its

Foundation, XXXIII-33 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976),
p. 127 - on the reaction of the Greeks to the Roman victory
over their former Macedonian overlords.

'If men were all virtuous', returned the artist, 'J should with great
alacrity teach them all to fly. But what would be the security of the
good, if the bad could at pleasure invade them from the sky? Against
an army sailing through the clouds, neither walls, nor mountains, nor
seas, could afford any security. A flight of northern savages might hover
in the wind, and light at once with irresistible force upon the capital
of a fruitful region that was rolling under them.'

Doctor Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia,

first published in 1759 (Shorter Novels, Eighteenth Century,
Everyman, 1930, p. 14).
 Kosovo:
The Politics of Delusion

Edited by

MICHAEL WALLER,
..
KYRIL
..
DREZOV
and BULENT GOKAY

~ ~~o~~~~n~s~~up
LONDON AND NEW YORK
 First published in 2001 by
FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS

This edition published 2013 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OXI4 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an iriforma business

Copyright of collection © 2001 Frank Cass & Co. Ltd

Copyright of chapters © 2001 contributors

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Kosovo: the politics of delusion
1. Operation Allied Force, 1999 - Evaluation 2. Security,
International 3. Intervention (International law) 4. Kosovo
(Serbia) - History - Civil War, 1998- 5. Kosovo (Serbia)
Politics and government - 1980- 6. Yugoslavia - Foreign
relations - 1992-
I. Waller, Michael, 1934- II. Drezov, Kyril III. Gokay, Bulent
949.7'1'03

ISBN 978-0-7146-5157-6 (hbk)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kosovo / edited by Michael Waller, Kyril Drezov, and Bulent Gokay.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7146-5157-5 (hbk)
1. Kosovo (Serbia)-History-Civil War, 1998- 2. North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
I. Waller, Michael, 1934- II. Drezov, Kyril. III. Gokay, Bulent.

DR2087 .K664 2001

949.7103-dc21
2001017197

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced
into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher
of this book.

Typeset in 10.5/12 pt Baskerville by Vitaset, Paddock Wood, Kent.

 Contents

Introduction Vll

PART I

1. Kosovo/Kosova: A Land of Conflicting Myths 3

Aleksandar Pavkovic
2. Albanian Schooling in Kosovo 1992-1998: 11
'Liberty Imprisoned'
Denisa Kostovicova
3. The Growing Pains of the Kosovo Liberation Army 20
Tim Judah
4. The Kosovo Liberation Army: The Myth of Origin 25
James Pettifer
5. Tirana's Uneasy Role in the Kosovo Crisis, 1998-1999 30
Miranda Vickers
6. Kosovar Refugees in Albania: The Emergency Response 37
Alba Bozo
7. 'Come,friendly bombs .. .': International Law in Kosovo 43
Patrick Thornberry
8. Collateral Damage: The Impact on Macedonia of the 59
Kosovo War
Kyril Drezov
9. 'Kosovized' Bosnia 71
Zoran Cirjakovic

PART II

10. Bombing Yugoslavia: It Is Simply the Wrong Thing to Do 79

Kyril Drezov and Biilent Ceikay
11. Should NATO Bomb Serbia? 83
Christopher Brewin
12. Looking Neither Forward Nor Back: NATO's Balkan 90
Adventure
Andrew Fear
13. Gardening 95
Alex Danchev
14. Rational Means to Useful Ends 98
Michael Waller
15. Kosovo: Why Intervention was Right 104
Matthew Wyman
16. So Much Expended for So Little Good III
John Sloboda
17. Lessons of Kosovo 120
Martin Dent
18. The Limitations of Violent Intervention 131
Sofia Damm
19. The Natural Environment and the Balkan Conflict 138
Andrew Dobson
Conclusions 142

DOCUMENTS

The Rambouillet Text, February 1999 (Appendix B: Status 157

of the Multi-national Military Implementation Force)
Press Statement by Dr Javier Solana, Secretary-General of 162
NATO, 23 March 1999
UN Security Council Resolution 1244, 10 June 1999 164
Annex 1 (G-8 Statement, 6 May 1999) 168
Annex 2 (Milosevic-Chernomyrdin-Ahtisaari Agreement, 169
3 June 1999)

Chronology of Events 172

Maps 178
Notes on Contributors 181
Index 184
 Introduction

On the night of24 March 1999, NATO forces started their air offensive
against Yugoslavia. The bombing of Yugoslavia continued until 10 June
-lasting 79 days, with 1,200 aircraft dropping around 20,000 bombs
and hundreds of missiles from a height of 15,000 feet. According to
NATO estimates made during the campaign, around 5,000 members
of the Yugoslav armed forces were killed and hundreds of their tanks
and heavy guns were destroyed in Kosovo; in the meantime about 1.4
million Kosovo Albanians were forced from their homes - 500,000
were allegedly displaced inside Kosovo, and 850,000 fled to the neigh-
bouring countries; 100,000 Albanian men were reported missing,
presumably killed by the Serbs. The picture that emerged after the end
of the bombing looked somewhat different: in Kosovo NATO's bomb-
ing had destroyed 13 tanks and killed about 400 Serbian soldiers
(an equal number had been killed by the Kosovo Liberation Army),
throughout Yugoslavia anywhere between 500 and 1,400 civilians
were killed by NATO bombs - a 'collateral damage' that could be three
times higher than the Serbian military casualties; some 2,000 Kosovo
Albanians - both KLA fighters and civilians - were killed by Serbian
forces after the beginning of the air campaign. NATO's takeover of
Kosovo in mid-June changed the refugee statistics as well: half of the
850,000 refugees outside the province returned to Kosovo by the end
ofJune, the expected half a million internally displaced Albanians did
not materialize, and about 100,000 Serbian refugees (half of the local
Serbian population) fled or were evicted from Kosovo.
Why did Kosovo become the focal point of NATO's undeclared
war against Yugoslavia? The American-inspired 'international com-
munity', with NATO as its military arm, is the next in a long succession
of outside powers - the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the
Habsburg Empire, the Soviet empire - to impose order on the Balkans.
In 1995 NATO acquired its first Balkan protectorate in Bosnia, follow-
ing a clash with Slobodan Milosevic and the forces of Serbian national-
ism under his control. Routine human rights violations, escalating
violence, irreconcilable claims and danger of a spill-over into neigh-
bouring states, made Kosovo the natural candidate for another NATO
involvement in the Balkans.
Vlll Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

For centuries Serbs and Albanians have inhabited Kosovo, and from
the nineteenth century it became the centre of competing claims and
ethnic strife. For the Serbs, Kosovo is the heartland of the medieval
Serbian kingdom where many of the important monuments of the
Serbian Orthodox Church are situated. And for the Albanians, Kosovo
is the cradle of their struggle for independence, the place where the
Prizren League was founded in 1878.
Over the centuries administrative power in Kosovo changed hands
many times between Serbs and Albanians, Christians and Muslims.
Domination of one ethnic group over another emerged as a defining
feature of Serb-Albanian relations in Kosovo, whether during the
Ottoman period, the world wars or under communism.
Under Tito and his successors Kosovo was the poorest and most
volatile part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The period
of Serbian control and repression under security police chief Aleksandar
Rankovic (1945-66), was followed by a period of Albanian domination
(1967-89). According to the 1974 constitution Kosovo enjoyed a quasi-
republican status within Yugoslavia, although it remained formally an
autonomous province of Serbia. Albanian demonstrations for full
republican status within Yugoslavia were suppressed by federal troops
in 1981, and relations between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo took a
turn for the worse. In the late 1980s the Serbian leadership under
Milosevic discarded the rhetoric of communism and embraced the
hitherto dissident ideas of Serbian nationalism - in particular the
call for the restoration of full Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo. In this
way the Serbian communists managed to keep power and prevented
the emergence of genuine opposition to their rule. Kosovo was just a
pawn in this power game. The Serbs had already lost effective control
of Kosovo due to the demographic preponderance of the Kosovo
Albanians. However, the adoption of the traditional Serb obsession
with Kosovo as MiloseviC's official policy implied that Kosovo should
be kept at all costs. In 1989 the autonomy enshrined in the 1974 consti-
tution was severely curtailed, and full Serbian control over Kosovo was
re-established.
The Kosovo Albanians met the imposition of Serbian rule over
Kosovo with determined resistance. The Serbian takeover of Kosovo's
institutions provided the Albanians with a rationale for the creation
of their 'parallel state' in Kosovo. At the same time as the Serbs were
reintegrating Kosovo within the Serbian legal framework, the Kosovo
Albanians declared Kosovo first a republic within Yugoslavia (1990)
and then an independent state (1991).
After the abolition of Kosovo's autonomy the Serbs and the
Albanians inhabited two separate, yet parallel worlds. The Serbs took
over all administrative, social and economic posts in the province. The
Introduction IX

Albanians in turn established their own political institutions, and

developed a vibrant private sector outside the official Serbian economy.
Albanian students from the primary school to the university level were
enrolled in their own parallel education system. In the evenings,
Serbian youngsters went out to Serbian cafes, and Albanians to their
cafes. There was total ethnic segregation, with no mixing between
Serbs and Albanians.
Both Serbs and Albanians were caught between the clash of two
exclusive national projects: the Serbs wanted to keep Kosovo as part
of Serbia at any cost, irrespective of Albanian opposition, and the
Albanians wanted to turn Kosovo into an independent state, irrespec-
tive of Serbian opposition. For nearly ten years most Albanians were
committed to non-violent struggle for independence, but in 1998 and
1999 they gradually switched their support to armed struggle. The
initial successes of the Kosovo Liberation Army led to a violent Serbian
backlash, the massacre of civilians, NATO threats of air strikes, failed
negotiations at Rambouillet, NATO air strikes and, finally, the negoti-
ated withdrawal of all Serbian forces from Kosovo and their replace-
ment by NATO troops. It was in this way that the international
community acquired its second Balkan protectorate.
This collection of essays examines both the escalation of the Kosovo
conflict to a full-scale war and the aftermath of that war. It looks at the
origins and implications of the Kosovo conflict in two stages: Part I
deals with the background and history of the conflict, while Part II
gives diverse opinions on NATO's attack on Yugoslavia and the con-
sequent occupation of Kosovo by KFOR. There is also a separate
section of documents relating to Kosovo, and a chronology of events.
The collection presents the results of six seminars which took place
in Keele and Cambridge between 26 October 1998 and 15 December
1999. It combines a dispassionate treatment of key aspects of the
Kosovo conflict with highly charged personal opinions about the rights
and wrongs of NATO's intervention.
Special thanks are due to Diego Garro for designing the book cover.

Michael Waller; Kyril Drezov and Bulent Gokay

July 2000
This page intentionally left blank
PART I
This page intentionally left blank
 1. Kosovo/Kosova: A Land of
Conflicting Myths

ALEKSANDAR PAVKOVIC

Apart from its political and military aspects, the conflict over Kosovo
is a conflict of national ideologies, which motivates each of the ethnic
groups engaged in the conflict. The core elements of these ideologies
are the national myths which justify each group's claims of control over
Kosovo and help define its national identity. This essay is an attempt
to outline a few salient features of the Serb and Kosovo Albanian
national myths as well as of the communist 'multinational' myth, which
motivated and justified the initial creation of Kosovo as a sub-federal
unit in communist Yugoslavia.
The very name of this region has been politically contested since it
became a province in communist Yugoslavia. The official Yugoslav/
Serb version, in force from 1945 to 1967, and then again from 1990
until the time of writing, is 'Kosovo and Metohija' or, in its abbreviated
form, 'Kosmet'. 'Kosovo' in Serbian means 'the field of blackbirds' and
'Metohija' 'the land of (Eastern Orthodox) monasteries', the latter
being a pre-communist appellation of the western part of the present-
day province, of the valley of Beli Drim bordering on Albania. Kosovo
Albanian elites have always rejected the appellation 'Metohija' as
implying the Serbian possession of or presence in the province. As a
result, when the communist Kosovo Albanian elite took control of
the province in 1967, the word 'Metohija' was deleted from its official
name and the official communist appellation became (in its Serbo-
Croat version) 'Kosovo'. As Albanian became the first official language
of the province, the Albanian version 'Kosova' was firmly established
among the Albanian population as the only acceptable name for the
provInce.
Thus, during the rule of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia,
from 1945 to 1990, the province's official name came to reflect the
nationality and therefore the linguistic preferences of the communist
political elites in power in the province. From late 1944 to 1967 - the
period of 'Kosovo and Metohija' - the province was controlled by
4 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

the Yugoslav and Serbian communist elites from Belgrade, with the
participation of trusted Kosovo Albanian communist cadres. The com-
munist control over the province was not unchallenged, but the most
important challenge - the mass Albanian armed uprising in 1944-45
- was crushed by the much larger communist-led Yugoslav army. How-
ever, in 1966 the removal from power of the unofficial chief of the
Yugoslav secret police and Vice-President of Yugoslavia, Aleksandar
Rankovic, signalled the victory of the local communist elites through-
out Yugoslavia over the centralizing communist and secret police
apparatus. Mter his fall, the local Kosovo Albanian elite replaced the
Serbian elites in power in the province - this time with the participation
of the trusted Serbian cadres from Kosovo - and the Serbian part of
the appellation, 'Metohija', was not only dropped from the official
name but banned from all public discourse in Yugoslavia. Calling the
province 'Kosovo and Metohija' became a sign of dissidence - in
particular of Serb nationalist dissidence. Using the banned appellation
signalled one's rejection of the Kosovo Albanian political domination
of the province and even of the legitimacy of communist rule over
Serbia. In 1988 Slobodan Milosevic, the then head of the League of
Communists of Serbia, took over the principal plank - 'United Serbia!'
- from the Serb nationalist dissident platform, and the appellation
'Kosovo and Metohija' returned to public discourse in Serbia. The
process was completed in 1990 with the promulgation of the new
constitution of the Republic of Serbia: as the province was stripped of
its political and legal autonomy, which it had enjoyed since 1974, this
appellation was officially reinstated. These constitutional changes did
no more than codify the removal of the communist Kosovo Albanian
elite from power in the province (achieved a year earlier) and the
return of the province to control by the Serbian elite in Belgrade. In
1989 the Albanian term 'Kosovo' became the Albanian dissident
appellation - and the official one, 'Kosovo and Metohija', became for
the Albanian population yet another symbol of Serbian oppression.
By rejecting this symbol of Serbian oppression, the Kosovo
Albanian leaders and their constituencies rejected not only Serbian
rule over the province but also the Serbian share of the province's
history. The province was, they argued, never a 'Metohija', the land of
Serbian monasteries, I because the Serbs have always been a hostile
enemy occupier of the Albanian land. By rejecting the appellation, they
were rejecting a particular - Serbian - version of the province's past,
and even an aspect of the historical landscape of Kosovo. The actual
Kosovo landscape is dotted with around a thousand Serbian Orthodox
churches and monasteries - many of them dating from the time of
the medieval Serbian kingdom and many already in ruins. Rejected as
KosovolKosova: A Land of Conflicting Myths 5

a symbol of enemy occupation, these religious monuments were

subjected to destruction or desecration after the forced withdrawal of
the Yugoslav army from the province in 1999.
The destruction of Serbian Orthodox monuments, which started in
1999, may be thus viewed as a destruction of the visible historical
symbols of the national myth of the defeated and expelled national
group, the Serbs. Prior to this, the Yugoslav League of Communists,
during its rule over the province, also endeavoured to suppress histori-
cal national myths, albeit usually without resorting to the destruction
of medieval monuments. The first step in this endeavour was the
creation, by the first communist constitution of Yugoslavia in 1946, of
the autonomous region ('oblast') of Kosovo and Metohija within the
federal republic of Serbia. Until then Kosovo, in its present boundaries
and under that name, never formed a separate political or adminis-
trative unit. In creating this sub-federal unit, the Yugoslav communist
party leaders were, in their opinion, imitating the most progressive
constitution in the world: Stalin's 1936 constitution of the USSR and
its hierarchy of union republics, autonomous republics and autono-
mous 'oblasts'.
In creating in 1946 an autonomous region with an Albanian
majority within Serbia, the Yugoslav communists were intentionally
rejecting the Serbian claim to Kosovo as the historical cradle of Serbian
statehood. The region of Kosovo and Metohija, the Yugoslav com-
munist ideologues had always insisted, is not an exclusive Serbian
patrimony: it belongs to the Albanians and to the Serbs and to all other
people who are living there. The Albanians as well as all other non-
Slav nationalities (except, of course, the hated and expelled Germans)
formed part of the Yugoslav socialist community of equal nations, and
nationalities tied together in 'brotherhood and unity'. 2 Being equal
members of the Yugoslav community, the Albanian national minority
- or 'nationality'- also shared the land on which they lived with the
Serbs and all other national groups inhabiting Kosovo. According to
the communist doctrine, no national group had an exclusive right of
control or of possession of the province. Under the communists, it was
the present and not the past that was important: it did not matter who
settled the territory first or whose medieval state was founded and lost
in this or any other region. The victory of the communists, these proud
inheritors of the Enlightenment project, should have heralded the end
of all historical national myths. The collapse of the communist project,
however, proved the ultimate resilience of those past national myths.
But, by creating an autonomous 'oblast' on the Stalinist ideal, the
Yugoslav communists unwittingly created yet another myth - the myth
of the political community of Kosovo. This myth began to take on a
6 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

reality of its own only with the ascendancy of the Kosovo Albanian com-
munist elite in 1967. It was only when the Kosovo Albanian political
elite took power in the province that a political community started to
take shape in the province with a Kosovo Albanian party nomenklatura
and its mass constituency independent of the previous centre in
Belgrade. If and when Kosovo becomes an independent state, the 1946
communist myth will have transformed itself into a fully fledged politi-
cal reality. There is, by now, a sense of deja vu in this transformation of
Yugoslav communist myths into political realities: Macedonia and
Bosnia-Herzegovina, which until recently likewise existed only in the
realm of communist mythology, became independent states in the
early 1990s. But this late twentieth-century myth of a Kosovo political
community may yet yield to an older - and possibly more powerful -
myth of the liberation and unification of all Albanians into a single
state, including the lands of Kosovo.
Not only did the communists create yet another national myth but
their efforts to eliminate all previous national myths failed: both the
Albanian myth of their descent from the Illyrians and the Serbian myth
of the sacred land of Kosovo proved impossible to eradicate by
education and by political suppression upon which the communist
authorities embarked in 1945. The Serbian myth is expressed in a cycle
offolk epics among whose early admirers were Goethe and the brothers
Grimm. Even under the communist regime these epics continued to
be recited in many Serbian homes and, as examples of the artistry of
the oppressed classes, taught in primary schools throughout Serbia.
The tale of the folk epics is simple: the Ottoman Sultan Murad
called on the Serbian Tsar Lazar 3 to accept his rule or to enter into
battle against him. The Serbian Tsar opts for battle, knowing full well
that he will lose to the much larger force: in a memorable phrase, much
repeated in the Serbian official media since 1990, he chose the 'ever-
lasting heavenly empire' in preference to the earthly one. In a scene
reminiscent of the Last Supper, one of the Lazar's noblemen accuses
another of intended treachery on the field of battle; the accused noble-
man, Milos Obilic, vows to kill the Ottoman Sultan. And so he does -
but he and all the Serbian nobility die in the battle on St Vitus' day, 28
June 1389. The fallen nobility became martyrs for their faith and their
leader, Tsar Lazar, a saint, all celebrated in the Serbian Orthodox St
Vitus liturgy. But the most haunting and original poems in the cycle
deal not with the Serbian nobility and their sacrifice but with the grief
of the surviving mothers and sisters, and the emptiness and human
devastation the battle brought to the land.
However, for the political myth, it is not the grief and the devas-
tation but a curse uttered by Tsar Lazar before the battle that ultimately
matters:
KosovolKosova: A Land of Conflicting Myths 7
Whoever is a Serb and of a Serb blood,
And comes not to fight at Kosovo,
May he never have any progeny
His heart desires, neither son nor daughter;
Beneath his hand let nothing decent grow
Neither purple grapes nor wholesome wheat;
Let him rust away like dripping iron
Until his name is extinguished.

In later readings of this verse, Kosovo came to symbolize the whole of

Serbdom and the fight for Kosovo came to signify the struggle for the
freedom of the Serbs. In short, Kosovo, from the early nineteenth
century, has become the main symbol and focus of the nationalliber-
ation of the Serbian lands from foreign rule - first Ottoman and later
of the Habsburgs. Thus the Serbian liberation of Kosovo, which was
until 1912 under the rule of the Ottomans, came to be a symbol for
the liberation of all Serbdom from foreign rule. 4 The symbolism of
Kosovo, as exemplified in Tsar Lazar's curse, has linked the Serb
national identity with a readiness to sacrifice one's life for the freedom
of the Serbs and their lands.
But Tsar Lazar's curse ties Serb identity not only to the sacred cause
of national liberation but also to Kosovo: in this world of myth, Kosovo
and its battle gave birth to Serbdom. Thus arose a myth of the 'holy
land' of Kosovo - the land soaked with the blood of the Kosovo martyrs
and thus sacred to all Serbs. These two myths - that of the Serbs as a
nation of freedom fighters, and that of Kosovo as the sacred Serbian
land - were banned under communism, but after 1981 gradually re-
entered the public discourse of Serbia. The immediate trigger was
huge Albanian riots throughout Kosovo in 1981 leading to a state of
emergency and to continuing political violence in the province. The
violence and the ensuing media attention brought to light an increas-
ing emigration of Serbs and Montenegrins from Kosovo. The two
myths provided a convenient and easily intelligible framework for
conceptualizing their flight: the Serb sacred land is being taken over
by the foreign enemy, the Muslim Albanians whose religion links them
with the mythological enemies, the Ottomans. This loss of land was
further regarded as a reflection of the continuing and shameful loss of
Serb identity as a nation of freedom fighters. In 1986 the myths pro-
vided the rhetorical framework for a systematic political mobilization
of the Serbs: to recover their national pride and their identity as
freedom fighters, it was argued, the Serbs needed to recover control
of Kosovo, their sacred land. MiloseviC's speech at the celebration of
the six-hundredth anniversary of the battle of Kosovo was a crowning
expression ofthis kind of political rhetoric: delivered at the field ofthe
8 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

battle in 1989, it called on the Serbs to live up to the ideals of Obilic

and other Kosovo heroes.
Thus in the post-1981 version of the Serbian myth Kosovo is both
the sacred land of the Serbs and the land which at the time needed to
be liberated anew from its latest occupier, the Kosovo Albanians. As is
to be expected, in the modern Albanian myth the roles are simply
reversed: Kosova is the land of Albanians from time immemorial,
which is to be liberated from its latest occupier, the Serbs. The Albanian
claim on Kosova within this myth is not based on the memories of a
medieval state and its glorious loss. It goes much further back in
history, to the tribes which the ancient Greeks and Romans found in
the Balkans and which the Greeks named Illyrians. Although there are
no written remains of the Illyrian language(s), the place names and
the Greek and Roman references to it gave rise to a nineteenth-century
theory of the direct descent of Albanians from the ancient Illyrians.
This theory, based primarily on the alleged derivation of Albanian
words and place names from the ancient Illyrian, provided the basis -
and the scholarly aura - for the national myth about Illyrian descent
of the Albanians that was taught in Albanian as well as Kosovo Albanian
schools.; According to the myth, the ancient Illyrians are the first
settlers of the Balkan lands and the present-day Albanians are their
sole and direct descendants. Therefore, all the lands on which the
Albanians presently live are theirs by the right of first occupation. The
Serbs and all others came later as foreign intruders and occupiers of
the land to which they have no right whatsoever; if these intruders are
allowed to stay on this land, it is only with the permission, or as guests,
of the first settlers, the Illyro-Albanians.
As with the Serbian, so the Albanian myth is also one of the struggle
for national liberation: the first settlers, the Illyro-Albanians, have
throughout history valiantly struggled for their freedom from all the
later occupiers of their ancestral lands. The latest round of that struggle
started in 1998 with the mass uprising in western Kosova, led by the
Kosova Liberation Army, and ended with NATO forces' entrance into
Kosova in 1999. While it presents a straightforward justification for
the national liberation of Kosovo Albanians, this myth also aims to
justify the unification of all Albanians - 'the first settlers' - into a single
state, thus re-creating the mythical ancient state of Illyricum, con-
veniently located in the present-day Albania, Kosovo and western
Macedonia. As it stands, the myth of the Illyrian descent and first
settlement aims to justify not only the struggle for independence of
Kosova, but also its unification with the other lands currently popu-
lated by Albanians.
A parallel myth of the ancient Dardanians, once again the first
settlers of Kosovo, has been conveniently created to justify the struggle
Kosovo/Kosova: A Land of Conflicting Myths 9

for the independence ofKosovo itself. These tribes - once again named
by the ancient Greeks and later conquered by the ancient Romans -
allegedly had a kingdom of their own on the territory of present-day
Kosovo and northern Macedonia. Within this myth, the struggle for
the liberation of Kosovo from Serb rule becomes a struggle for the
recovery of the ancient land of the Dardanians and thus a re-creation
of their ancient kingdom. According to the myth, the aim of the
national liberation of Kosovo appears to be the creation of a state of
Kosovo separate from Albania, not the unification of all Albanians into
one state.
By replacing the unification of all Albanians with the re-creation of
an independent Kosova-Dardania, this myth may threaten the legiti-
macy of the ultimate goal of Albanian unification for which the Kosova
Liberation Army had fought in the first place. The threat is easily
removed by proclaiming the ancient Dardanians to be just a branch of
the Illyrians. And thus we come to the integrated Illyrian-Dardanian
myth: 6 the independent Kosovo will indeed be a re-creation of the
ancient Dardanian kingdom but its ultimate unification with Albania
will only reflect the alleged membership of the Dardanians in the
Illyrian family. By creating a unified state of all Albanians, a new
Illyricum, the first settlers of the land - Illyro-Dardano-Albanians -
would have finally asserted their inalienable right to their ancestral
lands. How this is to be achieved and where the capital of the re-created
Illyricum should be cannot, at the moment, be resolved by the appeal
to this or any other national myth.
Both the Serbian and the Albanian myths of national liberation are
thus myths of the recovery of the same 'lost' land by the nation that is
its sole and rightful 'possessor'. Each myth calls for personal sacrifice
in the sacred cause of this recovery and justifies the expulsion of the
enemy - the enemy being any other inhabitants of the land, who are
deemed to be temporary and hostile occupiers. In short, each myth
demands of its target nation members that they should be ready to die
for its cause, if necessary, and to participate in and condone the expul-
sion or dispossession of the enemy, that is, of the members of the
'occupier' national group.
The rhetoric of the expulsion of the enemy clearly exhibits the
intolerant nature of the national liberation movements which deploy
it: their aim is not to liberate all individual inhabitants of the land but
only an imagined collectivity - the nation which is currently alleged to
be suffering from dispossession. As the history of national liberation
movements in the Balkans and elsewhere shows, such rhetoric bodes
ill for many individuals from all national groups living in Kosovo: the
'national liberators' will kill those who resist or oppose this type of
liberation, and will force many others to leave the land of their birth.
10 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

The most recent expulsion of the majority of Serbs, Roma and other
non-Albanians from Kosovo as well as the murder of the alleged
Albanian traitors, starting in 1999, conforms to this traditional pattern
of national liberation .7
It is not difficult to imagine another kind of liberation of the
inhabitants of Kosovo and many other parts of the Balkans, which
would aim to secure political and civil liberties for all of its inhabitants
irrespective of their ethnicity. However to achieve this kind of liber-
ation, the peoples of the Balkans would need to be liberated from the
very myths of national liberation - such as the ones outlined above -
which have for so long justified violence, war, dispossession and
expulsion throughout the region.

NOTES

One of the principal political arguments in support of Serb rule over Kosovo
refers to monasteries and historical monuments - as a sign of the continuity of
Serb claims to the province from the Middle Ages to the present.
2 'Brotherhood and Unity' is a communist slogan from the time of the Second
World War which became a symbol ofTito's Yugoslavia.
3 Respectively, the Ottoman Sultan Murad I and Prince Lazar Hrebljanovic, the
lord of a small region in present-day Kosovo.
4 For a thorough account of the battle and of its later significance, see Thomas A.
Emmert, Serbian Golgotha: Kosovo, 1389 (New York: East European Monographs/
Columbia University Press, 1990).
5 The origins of the myth are often ascribed to Johann Georg von Hahn's 'Sind
die Albanese Autochthonen?' in his Albanesische Studien (J ena: Friederich Manke,
1854). For a contemporary polemic elaboration of this myth and references in
support of it, see S.S. Juka, Kosova: The Albanians in Yugoslavia in the Light of
Historical Documents (New York: Waldon Press, 1984). For an up-to-date account
of the Illyrians which indicates the absence of evidence for this myth, see John
Wilkes, The Illyrians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). For a brief discussion of the
relation of modern Albanian to the ancient languages see Martin E. H uld, Basic
Albanian Etymologies (Columbia, Ohio: Slavica, 1985), pp. 158-9.
6 For the latest elaboration of the myth see Selemi Pulaha, 'On the Autochthony
of Albanians in Kosova and the Postulated Massive Serb Migration at the End
of the XVIIth Century', International Journal of Albanian Studies, Vol. 2, 1998,
Introduction (accessed on 16 March 1999 at www.albanian.com/IJAS/voI2/isl!
art2.html!).
7 For an account of the role of national liberation ideologies in the twentieth-
century wars in the Balkans, see Aleksandar Pavkovic, The Fragmentation of
Yugoslavia: Nationalism and War in the Balkans, second edition (London:
Macmillan, 2000).
 2. Albanian Schooling in Kosovo
1992-1998: 'Liberty Imprisoned"

DENISA KOSTOVICOV A

For the Albanians in Kosovo, classes in primary and secondary schools,

and at university, began late at the start of the 1991-92 school year.
When they commenced in January 1992 after a four-month delay,
students headed for makeshift classrooms in private houses, adapted
shops, attics and cellars. The emergence of the Albanian 'parallel' edu-
cational system in Kosovo was a result of Albanians' refusal to accept
Belgrade's control over Kosovo education. The Serbian strategy of
denying Albanians access to schools and the university was a response
to the non-compliance of the Albanians.
The 'parallel' education system was simultaneously a metaphor of
prison and freedom for Kosovo Albanians. Whilst education in private
houses epitomized Albanian non-violent resistance in Kosovo, it
spawned a challenge not only to Serb rule but also to the passive policy
of the Kosovo Albanian leadership. In addition, the Serbian-Albanian
battle over education was a battle for Kosovo in miniature. It demon-
strated that the idea of ethnic tolerance in Kosovo was doomed after
nearly nine· years of ethnic confrontation and segregation.
There is a close historical link between politics and education in
Kosovo. Political control by one ethnic group in the province implies
a denial of education to the other. The return of Kosovo to Serb rule
in the interwar Yugoslavia heralded the closure of Albanian schools
opened under the auspices of Austria-H ungary during the First World
War. Education was provided in Serbian only, until the policy was
reversed during the Second World War. In areas under German and
Italian control in Kosovo, Albanians began to learn in their mother
tongue. They took over Serbian schools and named them after Albanian
historical figures. This pattern was replicated once again after Serbia's
abolition of Kosovo's autonomy in 1990, only then it was the Serbs who
achieved the upper hand. Rejection of education on Serbia's terms led
to the barring of some 400,000 Albanian students at all levels from
school and university buildings in the au tumn of 1991.
12 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

The communist period was an aberration in an ethnically exclusivist

approach to education in Kosovo. Under the slogan of 'brotherhood
and unity' education was provided both to Serbs and Albanians in their
respective languages. The spread of Albanian education reached its
peak after 1974. Then the adoption ofa new federal constitution gave
substantial autonomy to Kosovo and, within its scope, self-rule in the
field of education. However, ideological tensions were built into the
educational system, and this is where they exploded. Like their fellows
elsewhere in former Yugoslavia, Albanian students learned their
national literature and history in accordance with the policy of national
affirmation. However, the selection of the 'national knowledge' was
strictly consigned to the study of only those historical and cultural
personalities and events that furthered their sense of belonging to the
Yugoslav socialist state. In spite of ideological checks, the rapid growth
of mass education in the Albanian language led to an equally rapid
discovery of national identity for the Albanians in Kosovo, not only in
terms of opposition to Serbs but also in terms of fraternity with
Albanians in Albania.
In the spring of 1981 Albanian student protests broke out at Pristina
University, and soon engulfed the entire province. The university
was immediately labelled a 'fortress of Albanian nationalism' and the
demonstration a 'counterrevolution'. For the Serbs, Albanian education
became synonymous with Albanian secessionism and irredentism, as
the protesters demanded the elevation of the province of Kosovo into
a republic, and even a merger with Albania.
The 1981 protests triggered the application of a series of measures
in Albanian-language education designed by the then communist
authorities. Textbooks were purged of 'nationalist content', a number
of writers from Albania were banned and a hitherto intense educa-
tional and cultural co-operation between Kosovo and Albania was
halted. Many students were expelled from schools, educators were
fired and others found themselves behind bars. In the late 1980s,
Albanians practically lost control over the Kosovo curriculum after the
imposition of the so-called Joint kernels'. These were envisaged as a
common core of educational content for, and representative of, all
national groups. The new policy meant the end of a distinct Kosovo
curriculum. In addition, Albanians protested that the Albanian national
content was grossly underrepresented in the new curricula. Though
the project of Joint kernels' was soon abandoned, it was a harbinger
ofthe Serbian quest for control of the Albanians' education in Kosovo.
The campaign in the Serbian media against the Kosovo Albanians
intensified in the late 1980s, and Kosovo's schools were not by-passed.
The dwindling numbers of Serbian students and teachers (which
reflected a rapid decline in the percentage of the Serbian population
Albanian Schooling in Kosovo 1992-1998 13

of Kosovo) was interpreted by the Serbs as yet more proof of an

Albanian drive to wrest Kosovo from Serbia through their numerical
preponderance and intimidation. The segregation in Kosovo's schools
started when Serbs demanded physical separation from Albanians as
a remedy to what they argued was their insecurity in the Albanian-
dominated school environment.
Ethnic shifts were introduced in mixed Serbian-Albanian schools
in 1990/91: Serbian students had classes in the morning and Albanian
students in the afternoon. Even though Albanians were allowed to use
classrooms that remained empty in the Serbian shift, the incipient
physical separation thwarted any possibility of building the bridge of
tolerance across ethnic lines. By contrast, the imposition of segregation
was followed by an alleged massive poisoning of mostly Albanian sec-
ondary school students in the spring of 1990. Albanians argued that
this was how the Serbs were trying to 'ethnically cleanse' Kosovo. The
Serbs denied the charges, describing the affair as a staged ploy aimed
at drawing media attention to Kosovo.
In the course of the 1980s education in Albanian gradually emerged
as the main pillar of resistance against what Albanians perceived as
an anti-Albanian Serbian policy in communist guise. The tensions
over Kosovo's educational system preceded the abolition of Kosovo's
autonomy in 1989, and illustrated the general pattern of the Serbian-
Albanian confrontation in and over Kosovo: 'Serbian action' and
Wbanian reaction'. By abolishing Kosovo's autonomy the Serbs
declared the unification of Serbia, and in response the Albanians
declared independence. The Serbs did not limit themselves to taking
control over Kosovo's territory, they deemed it equally important to
impose their rule over Kosovo's schools - the most important basis for
the construction of nationhood. A series oflegal measures adopted by
the Serbian parliament aboli'ihed the educational autonomy of the
Albanians in Kosovo, and eventually led to the exclusion of Albanians
from school and university buildings in the province.
This move was interpreted by the Albanians as a 'direct onslaught
on their national being'. It triggered the launch of the parallel Albanian
educational system, and the activation of an intricate system of soli-
darity in the Albanian commu ''lity. Albanians donated their houses free
of charge to be used as schools. One gave a besa (an Albanian word of
honour) that his house would be used as a school until the very end -
when 'Kosovo becomes free'. A rudimentary tax system was created
whereby every member of the Albanian community would make a
financial contribution for the working of the school system.
In the 1990s the segregation between Albanians and Serbs in
Kosovo's schools was total. Yet schools had been the most important
social field where Serbs and Albanians mixed before 1990. Until then,
14 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

there existed a structural incentive for the intermingling of two com-

munities, and possible blunting of prejudices towards the other ethnic
group. Among the youth of Kosovo there were rudiments of co-
operation across ethnic lines: for example, one Albanian rock band
- the Ramadan Band - had a Serb member. Now, however, with
Albanians practically forced into their entirely separate, alternative
school space, walls of division were raised between young Serbs and
Albanians. The grounds for a flourishing of prejudice were created,
charged with animosity and inviting revenge. On their way to school
lessons - most often held in bare and cold rooms - Albanians passed
by their former schools, usually half-empty as the number of Serbs
in Kosovo was not enough to fill them. Also, many empty schools in
Kosovo were turned into housing for Serbian refugees who ended up
in Kosovo after the fall of the Serb region of Krajina, in Croatia.
Private houses became a hallmark of the Albanian 'parallel' system.
Nevertheless, Albanians used some proper school buildings as well.
Throughout Kosovo there were schools in all-Albanian areas that were
used solely by Albanians. But there were also cases where Albanians
were denied access to these schools even though there were no Serbs
to attend them. Another example for Albanian use of school facilities
resulted from a strategy that could be labelled 'human exchange of
students', whereby two mixed schools became one all-Albanian and
one all-Serbian. However, it was the joint use of primary school build-
ings by Serbs and Albanians that became a showcase of segregation.
The Serbian authorities largely tolerated education in the Albanian
language in primary school buildings (the reason that they offered this
is that primary education up to eighth grade is obligatory by law).
Serbian and Albanian students would use the same building, but with-
out any contact. Such schools had two separate entrances and school
administrations - one for Serbs and the other for Albanians. Many
schools were divided by walls built in school halls and corridors in
order to prevent the mixing of Serbian and Albanian students who
attended the school at the same time. Or, instead, a system of 'ethnic
shifts' was used: Albanian and Serbian students would use the same
classrooms at different times of day. Even in such situations the distri-
bution of space was uneven. Many classrooms remained empty during
the Serbian shift, while the Albanian shift was overcrowded. Whilst
many secondary school students benefited from sharing arrangements,
and held classes in already overcrowded primary school buildings,
university students were exclusively consigned to private houses.
The parallel organization of political parties, economy, education,
publishing, healthcare and so on set up by the Albanians in Kosovo
after 1990 was described as an exercise in 'internal liberation' by Ibrahim
Rugova (Kosovo's unrecognized president). Arguably, education was
Albanian Schooling in Kosovo 1992-1998 15

the most important segment of the Albanians' 'parallel state' in Kosovo.

Ever since the declaration of Kosovo's independence, Albanians
referred to the Serbian rule in Kosovo as a 'foreign occupation'. But
it is in these conditions of 'occupation' that the Albanians gained the
freedom to run their educational system without being accountable to
Serbia - for the first time since the end of the Second World War. Not
unlike their ethnic foes, the Kosovo Albanian educational authorities
adopted new curricula that were nationalized in order to promote the
Albanian national identity.
The establishment and survival of 'parallel' education was used by
Albanian political activists as an important symbol and proof of Alban-
ian statehood in Kosovo. One Albanian analyst suggested that Ibrahim
Rugova should more accurately be called 'President of the Parallel
Schools of Kosovo' than 'President of the Kosovo Republic', his official
title. Kosovo's 'parallel' schools represented the only centrally adminis-
tered institutional segment of Albanian statehood that the Serbian
authorities tolerated in Kosovo. Attempts to convene an Albanian
parliament in Kosovo or establish a police force were thwarted, whilst
the government of the self-proclaimed Kosovo Republic had to seek
safety in exile. Albanians argue that by demonstrating their ability to
run the independent education system, they showed also an ability to
run their own independent state in Kosovo.
However, this very same education system - in private houses, often
in inadequate cellars and garages - helped sustain the metaphor of
Kosovo as a prison. Daily experience of schools lent credence to one
overwhelming perception amongst the Albanians - ofKosovo as a mega
burg (Albanian for 'mega prison') - and hence to the longevity, and
perhaps the credibility, of the idea of a 'Kosovo Republic'. During their
protests demanding access to school buildings in the early 1990s,
students carried a poster with one word written on it - 'school' - but
in it the two letters '0' were connected like handcuffs. Such a symbolic
representation of imprisonment derived directly from the perception
of the educational facilities available to the Albanians at primary, sec-
ondary and university levels. In private houses conditions were often
rudimentary, with wooden planks as benches, and a piece of black-
board. In proper schools many cellars with security rails on the
windows and bare light-bulbs hanging from the ceilings were turned
into classrooms due to overcrowding.
As Kosovo Albanians sought what they called 'liberation from
Serbia', the parallel education system emerged as a focus of resistance
to Serbian rule. Repression by Serbian police turned the Albanian
school into a singular 'life school of resistance', in the words of Albanian
analyst Shkelzen Maliqi. The seal of the Kosovo Republic on the school
certificates embodied the idea of a Kosovo free from Serbian rule, and
16 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

the Serb police force did not view it with benevolence. But even though
the schools epitomized resistance to Serbs, they also spawned oppo-
sition to the Albanian political leadership.
In the autumn of 1997, the series of peaceful demonstrations of
Albanian university students in Pristina had one goal: 'the liberation
of the occupied buildings'. Albanian university students turned not
only against Serbian policy in Kosovo, but also against the policy of
passive resistance spearheaded by the Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova.
In the early 1990s it was precisely Rugova's support for independence
that placed him at the head of the Albanian national movement in
Kosovo. Hence, the opposition could out-flank him only on the issue
of means (non-violence), but not the goal. Rugova's opponents focused
their criticism on education, deemed to be the success-story of the non-
violent resistance: according to them all that 'parallel education' ever
did was help prevent children from loitering in the streets.
The public protests of Albanian students brought about a funda-
mental transformation in the Albanian movement. A peaceful, static
and invisible movement turned active and visible, and there were
protests - albeit still peaceful - in the streets. However, the increased
activity of the Kosovo Liberation Army coincided with the students'
protests, pushing the limits of activism. The students, who had hitherto
enjoyed the undivided support of the Albanian community in Kosovo,
were soon overshadowed by the explosion of euphoria after the first
public appearance of the KLA. The students could stage a protest, but
their non-violent activism seemed as ineffective as Rugova's passive
pacifism. By contrast, the KLA's guns seemed to match the definition
of effectiveness.
The situation in Kosovo since the early 1990s was often described
as a situation of status quo, one 'neither of war nor peace'. Both
communities were deeply entrenched; Serbs refused to make any
constitutional concessions to the Albanians, and the Albanians refused
anything short of independence. No political headway was made until
September 1996, when Slobodan Milosevic, the then Serbian President,
and Ibrahim Rugova signed an education agreement. It was secretly
brokered by the Community ofSt Egidio, the Vatican goodwill mission.
This agreement foresaw 'the return of the Albanian students and
teachers back to schools (and faculties),. According to the official state-
ment, the agreement was of 'social and humanitarian value' and there-
fore was 'beyond political debate'. But as no precise implementation
procedure was worked out, it was effectively stillborn.
Albanians argued that the Serbs signed the agreement as a gesture
of co-operation with 'the international community'. However, they did
nothing to implement it as they did not genuinely wish any substantial
change in Kosovo - not even a limited one - such as granting Albanians
Albanian Schooling in Kosovo 1992-1998 17
the right to education in proper school buildings. The Albanians
signed under international pressure as well. Some Albanian analysts,
however, argued that their leaders were loath to implement it, lest it
should mean that they had given up their claim for independence and
accepted merely a 'cultural autonomy' for Kosovo in Serbia.
Nevertheless, the signing of the educational agreement appeared
at first to herald a break in the uncompromising climate of the Serbian-
Albanian confrontation over the status of Kosovo. It looked as if it was
possible to conduct negotiations on limited issues, rather than on the
overall political solution for Kosovo. But the implementation of the
education agreement showed that the resolution of limited issues
depended directly on the resolution of Kosovo's political status.
The implementation of the education agreement got underway in
the spring of 1998, two years after it was signed, and after the slaughter
of some 80 Albanians in the Drenica region in central Kosovo. Western
diplomats put pressure on Serbs and Albanians to sign a protocol
with a detailed implementation timetable. They also warned that the
process would be monitored, while the omission to implement it would
carry political consequences. The protocol envisaged that Serb and
Albanian students would share buildings in shifts. Thus, it sanctioned
the segregation that was introduced in the Kosovo education system
in the early 1990s. Notably, it fell short of satisfying the demand of
Albanian students for 'liberation of the occupied buildings'. Even
though they demanded the return to the situation prior to 1990,
Albanian students did not mention their Serbian counterparts in any
of the demands or information released to the public. With numbers
on their side, the discourse adopted by the Albanian students lent itself
to the interpretation that they were de facto reclaiming buildings for
themselves. Whilst the driving motive of Albanian negotiators was to
ensure better facilities for students, they were nevertheless accused by
some of their radical co-nationals of committing an 'act of collabo-
ration' and of being 'traitors'. Worse, Serbian officials immediately
interpreted the protocol as heralding the 'reintegration' of Albanians
into the Serbian state, through what was described in the protocol as
're-entry' of Albanian students into the buildings.
A foreign analyst captured the role of the Albanian 'parallel'
education system by saying: ~t first it gave them dignity, and in the
end it became a cause of self-destruction'. The ability to set up a parallel
education system had a very positive psychological and political impact
on the Albanian community in the early days after the abolition of
autonomy, but later on it just seemed to prove that peaceful resistance
was leading nowhere. Critics attacked Rugova of being at the head of
a national 'movement that made no move'. Meanwhile, the Albanian
education system itself came under strain as many teachers were not
18 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

paid for years. Widespread joblessness among Kosovo Albanians

(following mass dismissals of Albanians from state enterprises and
institutions in the early 1990s) meant that they had less and less money
to contribute for education. Inadequate facilities as well as an unpro-
mising future for graduates were two of the reasons that caused a sharp
decline in the number of students.
In the 1989/90 school year there were 304,836 primary school
students, whilst in the year 1995/96 the number of registered students
in primary schools had dropped to 268,543. In other words, the
number of primary school students was reduced by 11.9 per cent. 2
Similarly the number of secondary school children declined from
71,257 in the 1990/91 school year to 56,187 in the year 1995/96, or by
21.44 per cent. 3 The number of university students was halved, from
25,260 in the 1989/90 academic year to 13,763 in the year 1995/96. 4
According to estimates based on the mortality rate of children of pri-
mary school age (from 7 to 14 years), in the year 1995/96, some 27 per
cent, or about 98,500, primary school age children were not enrolled
in primary schools. Of these, some dropped out of primary school or
never even started school, or emigrated with their parents." A signifi-
cant decrease in the female enrolment in primary and secondary
schools underlined a 're-traditionalization' of the Albanian community.6
By bringing Albanian and Serbian students together to share the
same facilities, the protocol aimed at normalizing relations in the
sphere of education. However, it turned out that walls of division
among the youth were sturdier than policy-makers thought. The first
university building where the agreement was to be implemented was
the building of the Technical Faculty in Pristina. Serbian students,
hitherto the sole users of the faculty, interpreted the idea of sharing
the faculty building as evidence of the impending loss of Kosovo.
Hence, they refused to share it with Albanian students. They locked
themselves in, and refused to leave the building until they were physi-
cally thrown out by Serbian police. But before the police intervened,
a group of students managed to smash windows, demolish furniture
and destroy libraries, whilst the building and the laboratories were
stripped of equipment, and the electrical wiring was destroyed.
The demolished building of the Technical Faculty in Pristina became
a dispiriting testament to the prospects of sharing and co-existence
between the Serbs and the Albanians in Kosovo. It indicated no change
in the deadly 'zero-sum' pattern of the Serbian-Albanian conflict in
Kosovo which, if anything, was only reinforced by the physical separ-
ation so coarsely implemented in Kosovo's education in the 1990s. The
walls of division were torn down in Kosovo's schools following the
NATO intervention in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the spring
of 1999. However, the inter-ethnic intolerance that they helped solidify
Albanian Schooling in Kosovo 1992-1998 19

was there to stay as Kosovo's schools changed their ethnic occupants

once agaIn.

NOTES

The author would like to thank the Open Society Institute, Budapest/New York,
the Cambridge Overseas Trust and the Department of Geography, Cambridge
University for their support.
2 Halim Hyseni dhe Bajram Shatri, 'Studim: Gjendja dhe pozita e arsimit shqip
ne Kosove ne periudhen 1990-95 dhe mundesit e zhvillimit te merejme',
Instituti ekonomik, Pris tina, January 1996, pp. 38-9.
3 Ibid., p. 66.
4 Hajrullah Koliqi, The Survival of the University of Prishtina 1991-1996 (Pristina:
University of PriStina, 1997), p. 61.
5 There are no accurate figures to account for the number of those not attending
school or the reasons for their non-attendance.
6 Education in general, and female enrolment in schools as part of it, played a
crucial role in the rapid modernization of the Kosovo Albanian society after the
Second World War.
 3. The Growing Pains of the Kosovo
Liberation Army

TIM JUDAH

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Kosovo Liberation Army

(KLA), I must rank as one of the most successful guerrilla organizations
of modern times - especially since it has never won a battle.
The KLA barely numbered 200 when some of its masked members
made their first public appearance at a funeral in November 1997, and
the organization was unknown outside Kosovo and Balkan circles. A
little over a year later the US Secretary of State, the British and French
foreign ministers and top NATO officials were all, literally, begging the
KLA to sue for peace - on terms which suited the West. Compare this
situation to that of the Palestine Liberation Organization. It took that
organization more than a quarter of a century to achieve talks. In East
Timor, Fretilin has long been forgotten, and it has also taken almost a
quarter of a century for the Indonesians to think about changing their
policy towards the annexed province. Likewise, Polisario is no closer
to gaining independence for Western Sahara than it was when it was
founded in 1973.
The Kosovars 2 have, of course, geography on their side. The fear
that the war in Kosovo could spill over into Macedonia and then suck
in the rest of south-eastern Europe - the so-called 'doomsday scenario'
- is very real and a prime motivating factor in securing the attention
of the major powers.
Yet, the curious thing is just how haphazard were the beginnings
of this organization. Its political roots can be traced to Kosovo's years
of political upheaval in the early 1980s, which centred on Pristina U ni-
versity. These were, of course, the years of substantial Albanian political
autonomy in Kosovo but many Kosovars demanded full republican
status for the province. Among them were small Marxist-Leninist
groups, known as Enverists, after Enver Hoxha, the Albanian com-
munist leader. In fact the allure of Enverism, the ideology of neigh-
bouring Albania, was small if not irrelevant. These hard-liners simply
dreamed of a day when all Albanians would be united in one state.
The Growing Pains of the Kosovo Liberation Army 21

The authorities moved to crush the unrest and many of the Enver-
ists were sent to jail. Mterwards many of them went into exile, in
Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere, living amongst the local Gastar-
beiter communities, which are up to 500,000 strong. In 1982 some of
them founded a tiny radical party, the Levizja Popullore e Kosoves, the
Popular Movement for Kosovo or LPK, which argued that Kosovo
would only achieve freedom through an armed uprising.
In terms of political impact the LPK hardly registered on the scale,
either at home or abroad, until at least 1995. The reason for this was
that after the demise of the old one-party state in 1989, Kosovo
Albanian politics came to be dominated by the Democratic League of
Kosovo (LDK) led by the pacifist Ibrahim Rugova. Of course, Rugova
stood foursquare for independence, especially after the break-up of
the old Yugoslavia, but he argued that it would be a fatal mistake
to begin an uprising or to try to make war on the Serbs. In 1992, as
hundreds of thousands were being ethnically cleansed in Bosnia,
Rugova said: 'We would have no chance of resisting the army. In fact,
the Serbs only wait for a pretext to attack the Albanian population and
wipe it out. We believe that it is better to do nothing and stay alive than
to be massacred.'
Horrified by the brutality of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, the
vast majority of Kosovars were happy to support Rugova. They also
understood that even it they wanted to start an uprising, it was simply
not feasible to do that at the time. Kosovo was landlocked, and there
was no way to import significant quantities of arms into the province.
As the wars raged in Croatia and Bosnia, the presidents of both these
countries attempted to persuade the Kosovar leadership to open a
'second' or 'southern' front against the Serbs, but these invitations were
spurned. This was not just because the Kosovars did not want to die
for the sake of others but also because they could not import enough
guns.
Marginal though they were, the men from the LPK still began
to organize for war. In late 1992 a secret conference was held in
Macedonia, to be followed by another one in Pristina in early 1993. At
both of these conferences the LPK played a key role in the creation of
the KLA. However, until early 1998 its actions remained limited to the
shooting of policemen: this served to undermine the confidence of
Serb officials but did not fundamentally challenge Serbian rule in the
provlllce.
On the political front it was the Dayton agreements for Bosnia in
November 1995 that shifted the political landscape in Kosovo. Until
then most Albanians had believed that their demands would be
addressed at any final post-Yugoslav reckoning of accounts. They were
horrified, then, that Dayton did not even touch on the question of
22 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

Kosovo. Soon after that the European Union states recognized the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia - that is to say, Serbia and Montenegro
- and their territorial integrity.
This political trauma began to undermine the authority ofIbrahim
Rugova, the president of Kosovo's self-declared phantom state since
1992. He had rallied support for non-violent resistance with assur-
ances that the international community would eventually support
Kosovo's independence. But, that was not what foreign diplomats were
saying. Autonomy within Serbia was what Albanians could hope for at
best. It was clearer by the day that independence would not 'fall from
the sky' - that is, from 'the international community'. Whereas, in the
past, there appeared to be no real alternative to non-violence, now
members of the LPK, especially abroad, and the fledgling KLA at
home, could say: 'We told you so - and now there is a choice'. Still,
until 1997, the basic problem of how to import significant quantities
of weapons remained. It was solved in the most extraordinary and
unexpected way.
In the spring of 1997, in the wake of the collapse of a string of
pyramid investment schemes in the country, Albania simply imploded.
The government collapsed, the army dissolved and the police fled.
Even more importantly, the state armouries were thrown open,
releasing a million Kalashnikovs on to the market for $16 each. The
significance of this was not lost on the Kosovars.
The LPK stepped up its campaigning amongst the Gastarbeiters,
asking people to switch to them the 'voluntary' 3 per cent income tax
paid to Rugova's government-in-exile (for schools back home and so
on). At first people were sceptical: Rugova's people had previously
claimed that every KLA action was in fact a smear-tactic-cum-stunt
arranged by the Serbian secret police. Still, slowly but surely, people
began to take the LPK and the KLA more seriously. Jashar Salihu, a
former political prisoner living in Switzerland, managed the increasing
amounts of money in the 'Homeland Calling' fund. With this cash the
KLA began to buy guns, uniforms, and training from retired Western
officers. The KLA also stepped up the organization of a network of
sleepers and sympathizers across Kosovo.
One of the KLA's key men was Adem Jashari, who came from the
village of Prekaz in the central Drenica region. Historically Drenica
was associated with the karak uprisings of the past. 3 Jashari was a local
tough, and several years before he had killed a Serbian policeman and
had been convicted, but the police were too frightened to try to arrest
him because he would shoot at them from his house. J ashari hated the
Serbs, but he was no ideological guerrilla. In the words of one source:
'He liked to get drunk and go out and shoot Serbs'. Maverick though
he was, J ashari was now becoming associated with the KLA; foreign
The Growing Pains of the Kosovo Liberation Army 23
journalists were hunting for him, and policemen were still being killed.
Finally the police decided to go in and get him. On 28 February 1998,
the police took revenge on some other Drenica families that they
believed to be connected to the KLA, killing 17 people. On 4 March,
they moved on the Jashari compound. The family resisted fiercely, so
their group of houses was shelled and some 80 people, mostly
members of Adem Jashari's extended family, were killed.
The effect of these massacres was to electrify Kosovo. Reacting
quickly, the KLA began to dispatch arms and uniforms over the border
from Albania; the sleepers 'awoke', village militias began to form and
clan elders, especially those from Drenica, decreed that now was the
time to fight the Serbs. Whether they were KLA or not, they soon began
to call themselves KLA. In this way, a small guerrilla movement that
was making preparations for war suddenly found itself wedded to a
far older tradition of Kosovar kafak uprisings.
The KLA made a series oflightning advances: it punched through
a supply corridor to the Albanian border and soon found itself in
control of most of Drenica and part of the Decani region along the
border. However the KLA were able to take these almost completely
ethnic Albanian areas not through force of arms but rather through
the lack of any serious Serbian resistance. At first, seemingly unsure
what to do, the Serbs simply did not fight back, falling back to the main
roads in several areas.
This lack of any stiff Serb resistance led to a false sense of optimism
on the part of some KLA commanders. One tried to take a vital coal
mine, while another attempted to take the town of Orahovac. Both
were disastrous failures and prompted a m~or Serbian offensive in
late July and August. In a matter of weeks thousands of houses were
reduced to cinders and a quarter of a million were left homeless, camp-
ing on the hills. The KLA appeared to have been crushed. Realizing
that it could not take on the far more heavily armed Serbs, the KLA
simply melted into the woods. And, if it had not been for television,
things might have stayed this way.
The effect of television came into playas the cameras found the
quarter of a million camping on the hills. If they could not be brought
under shelter very soon, they would surely perish as the winter set in.
This nightmare scenario brought Richard Holbrooke, the architect
of the Dayton deal, back on to the stage. By threatening Slobodan
Milosevic with air strikes, he secured a deal on 13 October whereby
Serb forces in the province were supposed to be drawn down, and up
to 2,000 unarmed 'verifiers' from the Organization for Security and
Co-operation in Europe were drafted in to oversee the process.
The result was not just that the refugees began to come off the hills;
as the Serbs pulled back, the KLA advanced to fill the vacuum. With
24 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

the level of fighting much reduced, the KLA had the time to train
seriously and, above all, to consolidate a rather chaotic command struc-
ture which had come into existence during the first days of the conflict.
Significantly some of the top military commanders were young, in their
late twenties and early thirties, and unlike some of the older prison
generation they had a more pragmatic streak. The military command
stood in parallel to a political directorate, the head of which was the
military commander Hashim Thaci, then aged 29. Other members of
the directorate included Pleurat Sejdiu, the KLA's London
representative, Bardhyl Mahmuti, its eminence grise, based in Vevey in
Switzerland, and Jashar Salihu, the head of the 'Homeland Calling'
fund.
By February 1999, when all parties were convened to talk in
Rambouillet, it was clear that 'the young Turks' of the KLA had finally
vanquished the old guard leadership. To the amazement of many,
Hashim Thaci headed up the Kosovo delegation, forcing Ibrahim
Rugova into a humiliating position as deputy. On their return to
Kosovo a power struggle saw the demise of the veteran dissident Adem
DemaCi, whom the KLAhad appointed as their political representative
in Pristina.
In a year the KLA had transformed the geo-strategic situation of
the southern Balkans. It had empowered the Kosovo Albanians and
finally put an end to any Western hope that Kosovo, as an issue, would
just simmer quietly without anyone actually having to do anything
about it.

NOTES

In Albanian: Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves (UCK).

2 The term used by Albanians in Kosovo to define themselves. It has become a
marker, distinguishing Kosovo Albanians from the inhabitants of the Republic
of Albania, or from Albanians elsewhere.
3 The kar;aks (outlaws) were active in Serb-controlled Kosovo in the 1920s. The
Serbs consider them bandits, and for the Albanians they are freedom fighters.
 4. The Kosovo Liberation Army:
The Myth of Origin

JAMES PETTIFER

In 1996 the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was an obscure organi-

zation that numbered no more than a few hundred members, most of
whom were not even in Kosovo. Throughout 1997-98 it evolved into
the central force of Kosovo politics: an 18-month period of armed
struggle within Kosovo galvanized the previously frozen status quo and,
in March 1999, a major European war began with NATO bombing
Yugoslavia in response to its anti-KLA activities in Kosovo. Opinions
may differ about what exactly happened in Kosovo politics in the last
three years, but it can be stated with certainty that NATO would not
have intervened in Yugoslavia without the emergence of the KLA. Such
a scenario was impossible to imagine in May 1996, when as ajournalist
I wrote my first report about the KLA, after shootings in the Decani
region that resulted in the death of several Serb policemen. What is
self-evident truth in 1999 would have looked quite beyond rational
political calculation in 1996.
It has become natural for students of politics, historians, diplomats,
peacekeepers and peacemakers - all the so-called 'international com-
munity', in fact - to ask the questions: Who are the KLA? Where did
they come from, to produce such a cataclysmic change in the political
climate? What do they believe? What do they want, in political terms?
And the most important question of all for foreign ministries: Who are
the leaders? How can they be influenced?
At one level, the question is easy to answer, because small groups of
radicals opposed to the pacifist policies of Dr Ibrahim Rugova and the
Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) had been in existence for many
years, mostly in Germany and Switzerland. I Occasional public meet-
ings and articles in radical Kosovar newspapers were vehicles for the
increasing dissatisfaction of many exiles with the lack of concrete
political progress. But such groupings seemed to be utterly marginal
to the main Kosovo political struggle, and looked lost in a world of
conspiracy, defunct Marxist ideology and the delusions of exile. Yet
26 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

behind the fac;ade of cigarette smoke and endless coffee-drinking, a

tough and effective movement was emerging, a movement that would
prove itself a political survivor, despite its many weaknesses and
problems. Here we should bear in mind some of the problems that the
KLA has had to face. Every guerrilla movement has to go through a
long learning curve, and it usually takes a long time to achieve military
efficiency. The KLA has had to do all its learning in public, under
intense Serbian military pressure and equally intense media scrutiny.
At a second level, the internal political situation in Kosovo was
transformed by the spring 1997 rising in Albania, which transferred
large numbers of looted weapons into private hands. At least some of
these weapons found their way to Kosovo, and allowed for the for-
mation of popular self-defence forces against MiloseviC's security
apparatus.
At a third level, the leadership of Ibrahim Rugova was fatally
compromised by the autumn 1995 Dayton Accords, which delivered
nothing to the Kosovars. Rugova had led his followers to believe that
his special relationship with the United States would allow a deal at
Dayton that would bring at least some degree of self-government to
Kosovo, if not full independence. But nothing materialized, and after
Dayton more and more Kosovars turned to radical paths of political
thought and action.
But this still leaves the question - why the KLA? What was the real
origin of the organization? Modern revolutionary movements have
usually had a Marxist character, even in the post-1980 days ofIslamic
revolutions in Iran and elsewhere. Marxist movements have a tight
internal discipline and a degree of bureaucracy, and when their history
is written one usually knows the day when the central committee or
similar structures met, and a specific decision was taken. This does not
seem to be the case with the KLA. There was a sense of a militant
popular movement which tried to clear the Serb forces from particular
localities, first of all in the central Drenica region. When I visited the
village of Klina in this region in January 1998, the villagers were
proudly boasting that there was no Serb police presence there at all.
When I asked who had achieved this, the answer was simply 'the young
men did it'. They were, in fact, merely local armed groups. The KLA,
as such, was only mentioned in cafes in Pristina. When I asked my
friend Veton Surroi 2 what was happening, he just said, 'they were the
same people that you wrote about before. They are very underground
and very conspiratorial.' And it is from this state of affairs that the
peculiar power of the KLA grew.
Myth is important here. The KLA was at once 'the people', in an
undifferentiated sense, resisting oppression in a just military struggle
that was only being attempted after all peaceful avenues with Ibrahim
The Kosovo Liberation Army: The Myth of Origin 27

Rugova had failed, yet it was also a secret conspiracy, the kind of elitist,
underground organization that seemed to belong more to the world
of Tsarist Russia in the nineteenth century than to the present day:
masterminds in Switzerland planning the liberation of Kosovo. This
has meant that the prevailing questions about the KLA - who ran it,
who controlled it, and so on - could never be answered satisfactorily
in the early days. 'The Myth of Origin' was an unanswerable question,
because to account for the origin of the KLA one would at least have
to imply answers to the questions of who founded it, what they
believed, and so on. Most of all, 'founding fathers' could be identified,
whether they were the current leaders of the organization or not. But
the time demanded a blanket organization that any Kosovo Albanian
could join, and the single common denominator was a belief that
military struggle was a legitimate means of liberating Kosovo from
Serbian rule. Thus the KLA has always had a peculiar power, despite
its manifold military and organizational weaknesses: it is in essence
whatever you wish it to be, but basically it is the people armed, united,
undivided by party or faction. Many different political currents
contributed to the growth of the KLA, but the leadership managed to
absorb and integrate them all.
We now know who the leaders of the KLA are. They began to
emerge during the long and testing summer of 1998. Perhaps the first
was Jakup Krasniqi, KLA's official spokesman, for the simple reason
that someone had to speak to the international press, who were
employing some of their best reporters to try to discover who the
leaders of the movement were. It is a sign of the power and importance
of the modern media that the clandestine side of the KLA was able to
survive the attentions of diplomats for much longer than those of the
journalists. Nevertheless, the attitude of the KLA to journalists was less
than welcoming for much of the time, and it was to remain so.
Transparency seems impossible in a war against Slobodan Milosevic.
Did this sense of conspiracy and clandestine behaviour assist or
hinder the KLA? This is something that is best left to future historians,
but there is no doubt in my mind that the mythical and secretive nature
of the organization assisted the KLA considerably in the early phases
of its struggle. The quest of the media and diplomats to find 'the people
who mattered', and the impossibility of doing so led to more and more
interest in the movement, particularly among newspaper editors.
Imagery was also helpful to the KLA. The young fighters seemed like
something left over from the Partisan days of the Second World War,
and important early martyrs, such as the J ashari family, provided a
visual connection with the days of Albanian nationalist struggle against
the Ottomans. The picture of J ashari on the wall of the offices of the
Party for Democratic Prosperity in Tetovo, draped in the Albanian flag,
28 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

could have been that of a man who died in 1898, rather than 1998.
The KLA were perceived as classic Balkan rebels, the oppressed in the
hills taking on the foreign occupiers, the Serbs, who - in a similar way
to the earlier Ottomans - controlled the province by methods of fear,
and physical control of roads and towns. And most important for the
international media, they were 'the underdogs', risking all for their
country, an attractive image compared to the heavily protected and
repressive Serbian security forces.
At the heart of this strength of imagery is the mystical identification
of the KLA with all the (Albanian) people of Kosovo, so that, though
the fortunes of the KLA might vary, it has never lost its capacity to
inspire fear in its opponents and respect among politicians in the West.
It has done so by preserving its mythical core of identity with the
people as a whole, whereas, by contrast, the Democratic League of
Kosovo of Ibrahim Rugova came more and more to be seen as an
organization above the people, with a distinct communist ethos in some
of its political modi operandi, in particular the claims to unique wisdom
and foresight often attributed to Rugova himself by some of his more
uncritical followers. It is odd that Rugova's party is generally seen as
a right-wing organization compared to the KLA, when the whole ethos
of the 'presidency' as it evolved under Rugova was much closer to the
hierarchical and centralized model of the Yugoslav League of Com-
munists, built around one leading man. This model stands in sharp
contrast to the loose and decentralized structures of the KLA. In this
respect the KLA is clearly the product of wartime improvisations in the
late 1990s, while the LDK was shaped by the attempts at peaceful
change in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The KLA has 'turned the
mirror around' from nearly ten years of almost exclusive focus on one
man, Rugova, as the embodiment of the aims and aspirations of all
Kosovars. In 1998 the KLA embodied a near total demolition of
authority, in contrast to the previous highly traditional focus at the top
of the hierarchical pyramid of authority in Kosovo Albanian life.
Around the time of the Rambouillet conference (February-March
1999) the KLA underwent a visible change. Its leaders became public
figures and they formed a government in exile in Tirana, locked in
fierce competition with the earlier government in exile headed by
LDK's Bujar Bukoshi. KLA's prime minister in exile, Hashim Thaci,
was previously a student in the political science faculty at Zurich
University, and he looks like a completely modern politician in his
good suit and with his mobile telephone. So has the old myth of origin
disappeared, has the obscurity of a rural revolution in the Kosovo
countryside gone where the people and the leaders are one and the
same in their rebellious aspirations, and armed to fight the Serbs? It
is too early to give a definite answer to this question. Western diplomats
The Kosovo Liberation Army: The Myth of Origin 29

will try, understandably, to bring the KLA into the normal parameters
of Western political discourse. No doubt Hashim Thaci can discuss Mill
or Thomas Hobbes with all the fluency of an Oxford PPE graduate.
But his other name is 'Snake', and he is a natural, elemental force from
the Kosovo countryside, a rural revolutionary who seeks to destroy
Serbian rule. Thaci's thirtieth birthday came in April 1999, at a time
when he was deep inside Kosovo, fighting the Serbs and communi-
cating daily with Western politicians and military men on his mobile
phone. At the very same time NATO jets were fighting against
MiloseviC's regime high above the Kosovo countryside, living in a
parallel technological world to the men in the forests with their
Kalashnikovs. And just as it was impossible to foresee the current situ-
ation a year or 18 months ago, it is equally impossible to foresee the
exact ultimate outcome of the present conflict.

NOTES

This world has been ably depicted by Miranda Vickers in her excellent book,
Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo (Hurst: 1998).
2 Veton Surroi is a leading Pristina intellectual and publisher of the influential
Kosovar daily Koha Dilore.
 5. Tirana's Uneasy Role in the Kosovo
Crisis, 1998-1999

MIRANDA VICKERS

In March 1998, in the immediate aftermath of the killings of 80

Albanians in Kosovo, a show of solidarity by all sides of the Albanian
political spectrum culminated in a huge demonstration in support of
the Kosovars in Tirana. After that, however, there were few similar
displays of pan-Albanian solidarity. Although public sympathy for the
plight of the Kosovo Albanians was widespread, there was an apathetic
reluctance to turn this sympathy into positive action. On 5 February
1999 there was a demonstration in Tirana to support the Kosovars,
organized by the right-wing Republican Party. Around 3,000-4,000
people attended the rally in Skenderbeg Square, but most of these were
Kosovar students, refugees and northerners with strong family ties
with relatives in Kosovo. Noticeably absent from the demonstration
were ordinary Albanians.
Despite the proximity of the war in Kosovo, Albanians generally
took a far more detached and philosophical attitude towards the
subject of Kosovo than did the Kosovo Albanians. They argued that it
was all a matter of 'great power' politics, something entirely beyond
the influence of Tirana. Throughout 1998 and early 1999 the Albanian
public as a whole remained largely preoccupied with the deteriorating
economic and internal security situation of their country. The Kosovo
Albanians, on the other hand, wanted Tirana to treat Kosovo not just
as a matter of foreign policy, but as the paramount 'national' concern.
Successive Albanian governments had been severely criticized by all
sectors of the Kosovar political structure for not arguing for self-
determination for Kosovo and for stronger measures to be adopted
against the Belgrade authorities. The regime of former president Sali
Berisha (1992-97) was widely thought to have had a specific 'Kosovo
policy' but this was a mistaken belief. Within a few months of Berisha's
Democratic Party's election victory back in 1992, Berisha, at the behest
of Western governments, was forced to abandon calls for the inde-
pendence of Kosovo and to follow the path, later reinforced by Prime
Tirana's Uneasy Role in the Kosovo Crisis, 1998-1999 31

Minister Fatos Nano's administration, that any solution to the Kosovo

problem must be achieved within the framework of Yugoslavia, and
that there could be no change of international borders. Despite this
fact, however, Kosovo Albanians were generally sympathetic to Berisha's
administration. It was made up largely ofGhegs, I and was fiercely anti-
communist. During the Second World War, the Ghegs fought pre-
dominantly for the nationalist Balli Kombetar against the mainly Tosk
communist partisans.
The socialist, Tosk-dominated government of Prime Minister Fatos
Nano, which came to power in the wake of the violent spring uprising
in 1997 that forced Berisha from power, found itself increasingly
isolated from the wary Kosovar political leadership. The resignation
of Fatos Nano in the autumn of 1998, however, paved the way for a
defrosting of relations between Tirana and Pristina. The new socialist-
led coalition of Premier Pan deli Majko quietly distanced itself from the
policy of Majko's predecessor, who took the view that Kosovo should
not gain independence but become a third Yugoslav republic alongside
Serbia and Montenegro. Majko had to balance a show of solidarity with
the Kosovars, whilst showing restraint over the question of indepen-
dence for Kosovo. He avoided spelling out exactly what solution he
envisaged, saying that it was for the people of Kosovo to decide.
Instead, Tirana called for a solution to the Kosovo problem through
negotiation and dialogue, as opposed to violent uprising.
As the conflict in Kosovo edged increasingly closer to the Albanian
border, and consequently threatened to draw Albania into a wider
Balkan conflict, the Albanian government's reaction shifted sharply
from initial concerns regarding human rights abuses in Kosovo to
requests to Western governments to acknowledge the Kosovo Alban-
ians' right to self-determination. In the face of Albania's weakness,
however, the Majko government - similar to its predecessors - put
unswerving faith in the ability of ' the international community' to solve
the Kosovo problem.
Meanwhile, northern Albania had become a vital staging area for
the war in Kosovo, posing severe challenges to Tirana's control over
its borders. Tirana lacked the military forces, the political consensus
and the willpower to monitor effectively the border with Kosovo. For
local Albanians the Kosovo conflict had come as an economic lifeline.
While few locals themselves ever ventured over the precarious moun-
tain trails into Kosovo, entrepreneurs were making a good living by
selling weapons, equipment and supplies - some of them looted from
army depots during the 1997 uprising, others imported. The security
vacuum inside Albania had given the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)
a relatively free hand to operate throughout the north of the country
where many of the local population have strong family ties with their
32 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

kinsfolk over the border in Kosovo. It would have been political suicide
for the government to be seen to be cracking down on KLA activity
anywhere in Albania. Therefore, in the interests of 'national solidarity'
the Tirana authorities were forced to turn a blind eye to the activities
of Kosovar insurgents in Albania.
The fear oflocal inhabitants of a possible Serb attack increased after
the spate of declarations by Serb officials in early 1999 that KLA
guerrillas were sheltering in villages in the Kukes district. The tension
fuelled rumours about alleged plans in Belgrade for military interven-
tion in northern Albania to wipe out KLA bases. Although ethnic
Albanian separatists had been training in Albania for almost a decade,
their camps were secreted away from public view and the Tirana govern-
ment strenuously denied such activities were occurring. Throughout
1998, however, the presence oflarge numbers ofKLAguerrillas is well
documented: they were seen training in Albania's remote northern
highlands, and 'recuperating' in the clubs and bars of Tirana. Despite
several occasions since May 1998 when Serb shellfire was directed on
to Albanian territory, the Albanian army had hesitated to return fire.
The Albanian government was anxious to avoid any confrontation with
the large number of Serbian troops dug in just a few hundred metres
across the border. Until the end of January 1998 there was a conspic-
uous absence of Albanian military hardware along the border. Instead,
Tirana attempted to unite feuding Kosovo Albanian factions.
Over the summer and autumn of 1998, the political voice of the
Kosovo Albanians was weakened by ideological disagreements and
personal animosities, particularly between the moderate LDK leader
Ibrahim Rugova and the KiA's then political representative Adem
DemaCi. As a result, international mediators had to go to considerable
lengths to try to persuade rival ethnic Albanian groups to bury their
differences and form a united negotiating team to participate in peace
talks. However, a breakthrough occurred only after the involvement
of the Albanian government in the beginning of 1999, and the KLA
agreed to participate, along with other Kosovo Albanian political
groups, in the peace negotiations at Rambouillet.
Following Belgrade's abolition of Kosovo's autonomy in 1989,
ethnic Albanians found themselves dismissed en masse from civic and
state institutions. In response, Kosovo Albanians set up the Democratic
League of Kosovo (LDK), headed by Ibrahim Rugova. A 'parallel'
state, which financed an extensive network of schools and health
clinics, operated in Kosovo under the auspices of the LD K after 1991.
The LDK leadership was increasingly criticized for its lack of creativity,
its tendency to monopolize power and for keeping the Albanian
movement in a bureaucratic grip, leaving little space for criticism and
Tirana's Uneasy Role in the Kosovo Crisis, 1998-1999 33

dialogue. The most vocal attacks on the LD K came from Adem DemaCi,
who argued that Albanians could no longer continue to support
Rugova's passive stance - a more active resistance to the situation was
needed. Although Kosovo Albanian leaders were united by the
common goal of independence for Kosovo, beyond that they were
bitterly divided by personal and ideological differences, petty rivalries
and the desire for power.
By the beginning of 1999 the LDK represented some very specific
interest groups, at a time when the KLA increasingly enjoyed broad-
based popular support. The LDK maintained its dwindling support
primarily amongst Kosovo's urban, educated population centred in
Pristina, who had been wary of the KLAsince the guerrilla movement's
first public emergence back in 1996, and had tried unsuccessfully to
gain control over it for most of 1998. The KLA for its part had persis-
tently tried to undermine Rugova's influence amongst rural Kosovars
by denigrating his policy of 'peaceful resistance', which so noticeably
failed to protect unarmed villagers from Serb attacks. The KLA argued
that contrary to his claim that he was president of the Kosovars'
'parallel' state, Rugova represented nothing more than an illusion, and
served the interests of a small minority of wealthy and influential
families. Rugova was viewed with extreme caution in Albania as well,
because the ruling socialists there saw him as 'a lackey' of the former
president Sali Berisha.
The deep-rooted differences between rival Kosovo Albanian politi-
cal groups were well known before the Rambouillet talks began. No
meaningful peace talks could convene, however, without the presence
of the KLA since they were responsible for dictating the pace of events
on the ground. Therefore the main diplomatic hurdle was to get the
Kosovo Albanians to reach an understanding amongst themselves. For
any effective and lasting negotiations on a settlement to the Kosovo
crisis to be achieved a broad political pact was needed amongst the
Kosovars. Thus, towards the end of 1998 international mediators
attempted to rally divided Kosovar leaders behind efforts to secure an
autonomy deal for Kosovo. However, all attempts to bring the KLA
under the control ofthe LDK and Rugova failed.
A major breakthrough occurred in February 1999, when the [(LA's
representative Adem DemaCi paid a visit to Tirana at the invitation of
Prime Minister Majko. The red carpet treatment given to Demaci
highlighted the Albanian leadership's drive to force some degree of
unity between feuding Kosovar factions, at a time when increased
border skirmishes threatened to draw Albania into a potential conflict
with Yugoslavia. Tirana wooed the Kosovars with claims that a uni-
fication of approaches of Albanian politicians on both sides of the
34 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

border would force Western governments to take the Albanian national

question in the Balkans more seriously. The move was also designed
to strengthen Majko's nationalist credentials following the breakdown
of relations between Tirana and the Kosovars in the wake of the 1997
Crete meeting of former premier Fatos N ano with Slobodan Milosevic.
It was hoped that a possible end to the divisive and damaging divisions
between Kosovar politicians would cast a beacon of light into the
long dark tunnel towards a political solution to the Albanian national
question that so dogs Tirana's politics.
A resolution of the Kosovo crisis was of critical importance to Tirana
for a number of reasons apart from finally solving the emotive
'Albanian national question'. As long as the war in Kosovo continued,
Albania was likely to remain a political and economic 'basket case',
because the war and the overwhelming presence of the KLA in
northern Albania, made it almost impossible for the government to
regain control over the entire north-eastern sector of the country.
Albania was still recovering from the uprising that swept the country
in 1997 and left its institutions in tatters, and was not keen to see a
worsening of the conflict in Kosovo. Foreign investors were extremely
reluctant to invest in Albania whilst the Kosovo conflict threatened
to draw Albania into war. Albania had also taken in thousands of
Kosovar refugees which was proving a heavy burden on the national
budget.
Following the success of DemaCi's visit, the KLA agreed to
participate in the Rambouillet peace talks. KLA spokesman Albin Kurti
told a press conference that 'Albania will have a great impact in the
future true unification of Albanians. As far as the self-declared
members of the self-declared parliament [a reference to the LDK] are
concerned, we think that they have been brought down to earth by the
Albanian officials and have been convinced to join the KLA.'2
The Albanian Premier found himself in a very difficult position: on
one hand he was asked by the Western governments to bring together
disaffected and factious Kosovar leaders in order to present a united
Albanian voice, whilst on the other hand he was encouraged by the
same Western governments not to mention the T word - that is, 'inde-
pendence' for Kosovo - in return for the promise of financial aid for
Albania. All Albanians, whether from Albania, the former Yugoslavia
or the large diaspora, strongly believe that their nation was divided by
the 'great powers' at the beginning of the twentieth century. The
Rambouillet Conference was interpreted by the m~ority of Albanians
throughout the world as a sign that the enforced division of their
nation must be rectified in order to bring stability to the Balkans. As
one Albanian daily newspaper wrote: 'the Albanian nation was divided
in half by the incorrect placing of borders at the end of the Balkan
Tirana's Uneasy Role in the Kosovo Crisis, 1998-1999 35

Wars at the beginning of this [the twentieth] century, and may well
constitute a major reason for the eruption of a new Balkan war'."
Thus, there was united optimism about the Rambouillet Conference
across the Albanian political spectrum. The talks were viewed as an
historic moment: just as the 'great powers' oversaw the twentieth-cen-
tury fate of the Albanian nation, so it was perceived that at Rambouillet
they would now reshape the nation's destiny into the next millennium.
The leader of the centrist Democratic Alliance Party, Neritan Ceka,
said that 'it is important that in Rambouillet it was decided that within
three to five years Kosovo would be independent ... The road to its
achievement has its own difficulties, but there is a European political
will that was previously lacking and a military force that stands behind
this will.' 4
'Albanians on the Eve of their Future Destiny' - this is how the pro-
Berisha daily Albania viewed the Rambouillet meeting. Its editorial
stated that 'The maps in London and Paris in 1913-1914 were
truncated to the great loss of Albanians ... The Balkan map that
emerged from the doors ofthe European castles was the source of the
present crisis in Kosovo." Although there was no mention of any
unification of Kosovo with Albania, the editorial implied that 'Kosovo
is only the start of the formation of a real Albanian state'. 6 The main
opposition leader Sali Berisha condemned in a statement the inter-
national mediators at the Rambouillet talks for failing to support the
idea of an independent Kosovo. 'It is a pity to see pressure put on the
Albanian delegation to give up their demand that in three years
Kosovo Albanians can express their will in a referendum to vote for
independence. Such an agreement (without the referendum) fatally
damages the interests of the Albanians', he said. 7
The escalation of fighting in Kosovo, and its ever closer proximity
to Albania, pushed Prime Minister Majko towards increasingly overt
support for the Kosovars. Government rhetoric on Kosovo also became
noticeably tougher. KLA spokesman Rexhe Iberdemaj welcomed the
shift in tone in Tirana. 'We expect the government of the Albanian
state to support our demands and we believe some correct steps have
been taken recently in this direction. We also expect that co-operation
between Kosovo Albanians and the Albanian government will be
strengthened.' H
In 1998-99 Albania - viewed by all Kosovar factions as 'the mother
country' - provided an indispensable 'national support mechanism'
for Kosovo Albanians. It made available relief and shelter to ethnic
Albanian refugees, gave diplomatic support on the international scene
and enabled the various Kosovar political leaders to use Tirana as a
seemingly neutral but also nationally sympathetic base to discuss their
differences and grievances.
36 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

NOTES

The Albanians of the former Yugoslavia are members of an historically more

traditional and patriarchal Albanian cultural subgroup called Ghegs, while
Albanians living south of the Shkumbi River in central Albania are called Tosks,
who are historically more advanced and open to modernizing influences.
2 Kosova Daily News, 2 February 1999
3 Gazetar Shqiptare, 10 February 1999.
4 KohaJone, 9 February 1999.
5 Albania, 7 February 1999.
6 Ibid.
7 Albania Daily News, 20 February 1999.
8 Albania Daily News, 22 January 1999.
 6. Kosovar Refugees in Albania:
The Emergency Response

ALBA BOZO

When the first few hundred Kosovar refugees arrived in Albania in

May 1998, neither the government of Albania nor the international
community could have known that by April-May 1999 their numbers
would be as high as 478,000. The large number of refugees crossing
into Albania, especially after the beginning of the NATO bombing
campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), challenged
all national and international factors involved in the emergency.
In many countries a special framework exists in order to bring
together all the appropriate institutions in the case of crises or emer-
gencies. However, in Albania there is no such overarching framework.
Slow institutional reform and democratization of administrative
structures after 1990 additionally complicated the situation. After 1997
especially, different international agencies involved themselves to a
considerable degree in Albanian affairs by offering support to central
and local authorities. For example, the Organization for Security and
Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) mission in Albania had opened field
offices in many towns, which liaised on a regular basis with Albanian
local authorities on a wide variety of issues. Consequently, the OSCE
field offices were the first to get involved with the refugee emergency.
Whilst OSCE had been a well-established agency in Albania for several
years, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
came with the mass influx of Kosovar refugees in 1999. By April 1999,
when the trickle of refugees had turned into a flood, UNHCR gradu-
ally replaced OSCE as the main agency dealing directly with the
refugees. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came to
Albania in the wake of the bombing campaign, in order to prepare
the infrastructure of the country for possible conflict. NATO forces
in Albania established a separate command structure called AFOR.
Although AFOR was not devised as a refugee support agency, by the
very fact of being on the ground its forces were caught in the spiralling
refugee crisis. To sum up, by the time the influx of refugees was at its
38 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

most acute, there was a myriad of factors involved in dealing with it.
Most prominent among them were Albanian local authorities, the
central government in Tirana, OSCE headquarters in Tirana and field
offices, the UNHCR mission and officers on the ground, AFOR's high
command located in Durres and its support officers in other parts of
Albania.
On 28 March 1999 the Council of Ministers of Albania established
a government commission to co-ordinate the response to the humani-
tarian emergency created by the mass influx of Kosovar refugees. l It
included representatives from all ministries, the Prime Minister's
office, and the Council of Ministers. In order to tackle adequately the
problems ofKosovar refugees, during spring-summer 1999 the repre-
sentatives of Albania's central and local government had to collaborate
closely with international actors in a temporary structure called the
Emergency Management Group (EMG). The EMG was officially estab-
lished on 31 March 1999, and throughout the emergency it involved
all the main actors, that is, the government of Albania, the Organi-
zation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the NATO
Albania Force (AFOR).2 From the very beginning, Professor Kastriot
Islami acted as the representative of the Albanian government in EMG,
and also as liaison between EMG and the Albanian government
commission on the emergency. The main organizations involved in
EMG were supported by other actors such as the European Com-
munity Monitor Mission (ECMM), which together with OSCE was
responsible for identifying refugee needs and providing the other
actors with such information. There were representatives of non-
governmental organizations who co-ordinated the distribution of
necessary goods among the refugees. And finally there were repre-
sentatives of the Western European Union (WEU)/Multinational
Advisory Police Element (MAPE) to provide co-ordination for the
policing of refugee camps and collective centres, and to ensure the
security of refugee transports and movements in the country.
EMG consisted of different teams, or desks, most prominent among
them being a joint logistics desk (mainly NATO and the Ministry of
Transport), food desk (World Food Programme/WFp, Ministry of
Agriculture), health desk (World Health Organization/WHO, Ministry
of Health), information desk (OSCE, ECMM) and security desk
(Ministry of Public Order, WEU/MAPE).3
The humanitarian emergency that befell Albania can be described
as consisting of four main phases: the influx and reception of the
refugees; the relocation of refugees; the repatriation of refugees; and
the rehabilitation of refugee-affected areas in the country. UNHCR as
a lead agency played an important role in all phases of the emergency
Kosovar Refugees in Albania: The Emergency Response 39
- by providing for the refugees' accommodation, transport during the
relocation and repatriation phases, and preparation for their winter
shelter. It also provided co-ordination and support during the rehabi-
litation phase of the areas affected by the refugees. NATO largely
provided for the logistics during the emergency, and especially for the
escorts of the refugees during relocation. However, in all phases of the
emergency the brunt of the refugee crisis was borne by Albanian local
authorities and by hundreds of thousands of ordinary Albanians.
Albanian local authorities were the first to accommodate the refugees
during the initial flow, they again played the crucial role in the re-
location of refugees further inland as the bombing continued, and
finally these authorities were the primary actor in the repatriation of
the refugees back to Kosovo.

RECEPTION

The whole Kosovar refugee emergency was extraordinary in its

nature, but what was most extraordinary was the way in which Albania
- and particularly the Albanian local authorities and people - dealt
with the rapidly changing circumstances during those six months of
refugee movements in and out of Albania. As a result of the NATO
bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in April-May 1999
there were about 478,000 refugees in Albania, and 300,000 of these
refugees were hosted by Albanian local families. This is phenomenal
given that Albania is the poorest country in Europe. The swift response
of the local authorities is also surprising if one bears in mind the
recurrent crises that have plagued Albania since the change of regime
in 1990, and the continuous changes in the local administration that
have occurred with every change of government and party in Tirana.
The generosity and goodwill of thousands of families throughout
Albania who opened their doors to the Kosovars for months without
consistent material reward was perhaps decisive for a successful
response to the emergency.
This observation is not intended as a denigration of the very real
contributions ofUNHCR, and ofa large number ofNGOs which were
active in Albania during the refugee crisis. However, UNHCR offIcers
were only able to deal with limited numbers of refugees during both
the accommodation and repatriation phases - partly because these
officers were not familiar with the administrative procedures of the
Albanian local government administration, and partly because of their
very short contracts which did not allow time for the attainment of
appropriate knowledge on how to deal with the rapidly changing
circumstances of the emergency. For the whole duration of the
40 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

emergency, one of the challenges for UNHCR was to ensure appro-

priate co-operation between its officers and Albanian local government
authorities.

RELOCATION

In mid-May the bombing was still going on, and the northern border
areas around Kukes could no longer accommodate the large number
of refugees. Besides, there were border clashes between Albanian and
Serbian forces, and there was also media speculation about turning
northern Albania into a base for a NATO ground war against Yugo-
slavia. The relocation of refugees from northern Albania to the central
and southern areas of the country became necessary. Not only had
huge numbers of refugees to be moved with limited means and
especially through roads in very bad condition, but the operation had
to be done quickly, often within 24 hours. The speed was necessary
because of the continuing influx of large numbers of refugees from
Kosovo, and fears of Yugoslav bombing of refugee areas round Kukes.
Again it was the Albanian local authorities who transferred hundreds
of thousands of refugees to safe areas - sometimes with help from
international actors, but often relying only on their own limited
resources.

REPATRIATION

During the repatriation phase the response from NATO and UNHCR
was consistently slow. When the NATO air campaign was still going on
in May, the issue of repatriation of the refugees was brought up in the
EMG discussions. At that time both NATO and UNHCR officers
considered it an inappropriate task for them to deal with. By mid-J une,
when these lead agencies started to plan for repatriation, the refugees
were already returning to their homes in Kosovo at the rate of20,000-
30,000 each day - approximately 1,000 refugees per hour. This
spontaneous repatriation was executed mainly through transport
organized by Albanian local authorities, or by private means. The
refugees who could afford to pay organized their own transport to
move their families and belongings. Although neither UNHCR nor the
Albanian government wanted to encourage spontaneous repatriation
before the deadlines established by EMG, they were forced to help the
refugees - the latter were eager to return immediately to their home-
land, and nothing could hold them in Albania any longer. In these
circumstances Albanian local authorities paid for bus transport for
Kosovar Refugees in Albania: The Emergency Response 41

refugees directly to Kosovo, and later these expenses were reimbursed

by UNHCR. By the time the actual EMG repatriation started on 1 July,
most ofthe refugees had already returned or had made arrangements
to this effect, thus reducing the numbers that the EMG, through the
logistic support of NATO, would repatriate. It was mostly women,
children and older people who were finally evacuated according to the
EMG plan. In any case, the EMG railway repatriation plan was not
only slow but also difficult to implement in Albania's case because of
the poor condition of the railway services in the country. Refugees had
to travel both by bus and by train, and to stay overnight in two different
transit centres in Mjeda and Kukes, before they could be bussed to
Kosovo.
Concurrently with the repatriation, UNHCR was organizing winter
accommodation for refugees who might possibly want to stay. The
working figures were far larger than the real figures of refugees left in
the country by that time, and therefore much valuable time and
resources were invested in the overwintering programme rather than
in the ongoing repatriation. From about half a million refugees at the
height of the crisis, no more than 20,000 Kosovars remained in Albania
by September 1999.

REHABILITATION

The mam achievement of UNHCR was the rehabilitation of the

refugee-affected areas in Albania, where a lot of agricultural land on
which camps were built was returned to its previous state, and most
collective centres where refugees had stayed were rehabilitated and
returned to their owners in a good condition. UNH CR - either directly
or by enlisting an NGO - paid local people to clear the concrete
foundations of the camps that were built on private or state-owned
agricultural land, and also to clear the refuse, and to rehabilitate
private and public buildings (especially schools) that were used as
refugee collective centres during the emergency.
Throughout the emergency one of the greatest problems was the
dilapidated state of the roads, especially the ones leading to the north,
and the pitiful condition of Albania's only civilian airport in Tirana.
The latter was closed to civilian flights for about three months because
AFOR forces were using it. In agreement with the Albanian govern-
ment, from April 1999 AFOR provided engineers for road, rail,
runway and seaport improvements. 4 AFOR was also involved in the
construction of shelter, warehouse and sanitation facilities, in the
improvement of communication infrastructure, and in airfield manage-
ment support for the Tirana airport. 5 However, as soon as the refugees
42 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

returned to Kosovo, AFaR was put under the command of the NATO
force in Kosovo/KFOR, and the focus of NATO operations shifted to
Kosovo.
The Albanian government and people claimed that they were not
adequately reimbursed considering the size of their contribution to the
emergency. A country with a devastated economy like Albania found
it very difficult to host the large numbers of refugees. Even though
NGOs and international organizations provided support, there was
still a fair amount of expense that the Albanian people had to
undertake themselves. But such a 'material loss' (if one may call it so)
was a moral gain for Albania's reputation in the world community. The
Albanian families who hosted more than 60 per cent of the refugees
during the emergency and the Albanian local authorities that dealt
with the refugees during the crisis restored Albania's pride, and
changed the image of the country as 'a land of a yearly anarchy'.

NOTES

Kastriot Islami, 'The Kosovo Crisis: Albania's Response to the Refugee Emer-
gency of 1999' (Briefing Paper, Office of the Prime Minister, Tirana, September
1999), p. 2.
2 Ibid., p. 3.
3 See also ibid., pp. 7-10.
4 Ibid., p. 6.
5 Ibid., pp. 6-7.
 7. 'Come, friendly bombs , • I

International Law in Kosovo

PATRICK THORNBERRY

The legality of the NATO intervention in Kosovo is widely challenged

by governments, politicians, NGOs and the critical public in many
states. It is assumed for present purposes that the reader is familiar
with the main lines of development of the Kosovo conflict. The present
essay focuses on possible justifications of the intervention on the basis
of general norms and the claims of the protagonists. If the justifications
do not hold, then international law has been violated. Violations by
one side do not cancel out illegalities on the other. Even if it is judged
that the NATO intervention rests on dubious grounds, the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) - and whoever else violates the law - is
not thereby exculpated. Of course, parties to international conflicts
typically engage in a rhetoric of self-justification, which may never be
tested before a truth-seeking tribunal. This is not completely the case
here: judicial elements already accompanied the diplomacy and the
bombs - the International Court of Justice (lC]) and the tribunal for
the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) were called to the fray. However, the
tribunals will not judge the whole issue, confined as they are to the
specifics of their jurisdiction.
] udgments of compliance with international standards must also
address the claim that international law is a self-correcting mechanism;
that today's illegality is tomorrow's norm. On this view, Kosovo prin-
ciples will in time cease to be judged adversely by law and become the
standards ofjudgment- new principles of international customary law
will overcome, modify or supplement the old. Great circumspection is
advised before adapting this theory to present developments. It is not
clear what are the principles to be extracted from the crisis in view of
radical divergences in the interpretation of events. Ifit is conceded that
some - which? - customary norms are being replaced in an irruption
of new standards, what about the fundamental treaties of the age and
the norms of jus cogens? The prohibition of genocide is regularly
counted among norms of jus cogens, but so is the prohibition afforce
44 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

set out in Article 2(4) of the UN charter - a key indicator of inter-

national law's systemic embodiment of respect for state sovereignty. If
some NATO governments claim that the intervention was a crusade to
arrest a genocide, the FRY claims that its sovereignty has been
flagrantly breached in fundamental violation ofthe Charter. Reflection
on these and other issues will occupy the diplomats and academe for
some time to come. We are in general terms witnessing a sea-change
in the relations between sovereignty and human rights (reflected on
below), but the precise contribution of the Kosovo imbroglio is as yet
unclear. If Kosovo is a stop on the voyage to somewhere, direction and
destination are still shrouded in mist.

THE CHARTER FRAMEWORK

While international legal principles on the use of armed force have

undergone constant evolution throughout history, the development of
principle in the United Nations era has tended to elevate the UN
Charter into the unassailable fons et origo of contemporary doctrine.
The elements of the UN framework are tolerably well known. The first
'Purpose' of the UN is the maintenance of 'international peace and
security'. Article 2(3) provides for the settlement of international
disputes by peaceful means, and Article 2(4) states that all members of
the UN

shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of

force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any
State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the
United Nations.

Article 2(7) protects the state in its domestic jurisdiction from inter-
vention by the UN, except in the case of enforcement measures
ordered by the Security Council under Chapter VII of the Charter.
The Security Council has the 'primary responsibility for the mainten-
ance of international peace and security',2 and can determine the
existence of threats to the peace, and so on - in dealing with which it
possesses the power to decide on measures up to and including the use
of armed force. States are recognized as having a limited right of self-
defence in the event of an armed attack against them 'until the Security
Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace
and security'.3 Enforcement action by regional 'arrangements or
agencies' requires authorization by the Security Counci1. 4 In addition
to these normative details, Article 103 of the Charter provides for the
supremacy of obligations under the Charter over obligations arising
International Law in Kosovo 45

from any other international agreement. Further, Charter principles

are assumed to have a status beyond 'mere' treaty law. Reviewing inter-
national customary law on the use of force, the International Court of
Justice in Nicaragua v the United States 5 found that customary law
corresponded in its essentials to the principles of the UN Charter.
Further, as noted above, Article 2(4) of the Charter is almost universally
cited as a paradigm case of a fundamental rule -jus cogens - which can
only be derogated from by a rule of similar status. 6 The perception of
the pre-eminence of the Charter as the governing framework for the
use of force appears to be challenged by protagonists in the Kosovo
case. There was clearly an invasion of a sovereign state. The NATO
action was not a case of self-defence: NATO members were not
attacked by the FRY. Ostensibly, events in Kosovo were an 'internal
affair' of the FRY. There was no explicit authorization by the UN
Security Council for the action, which thus took place outside the UN
framework. The NATO allies do not, however, concede that their
action was illegal. On the contrary, the claim is that the action was
justified, and for the highest motives. Is this view legally sustainable?

'LINKAGE' WITH THE UN

Despite the absence of a Security Council resolution explicitly

authorizing or otherwise endorsing the use of force against the FRY
(compare Security Council resolution 678 in the Kuwait case), NATO
statements claim or 'suggest' that actions are somehow 'linked' to UN
Security Council resolutions - and to a broader 'international com-
munity', apparently postulated as a 'higher' justification of transcen-
dent significance. Key phrases in NATO documents mimic the UN
Charter. Thus, the NATO Heads of State and Government Statement
on Kosovo 7 claims that the action 'supports the political aims of the
international community', that governments will seek a Security Council
resolution requiring the withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo, and
the installation there of a force 'multinational in character' - with non-
NATO contributions. The demands of NATO are characterized as
those of ' the international community'. Co-operation is promised with
the ICTY. NATO, it is stated, will not tolerate threats to regional peace
and security. The NATO statement of 12 April is more explicit on
the UN, accusing the FRY of violating Security Council resolutions,
demanding that President Milosevic must work for an agreement 'in
conformity with international law and the Charter of the United
Nations'. The latter document - The Situation in and around Kosovo 8 -
expresses Alliance gratitude for the general support of the 'inter-
national community', and there is reference to the UN High
46 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

Commissioner for Refugees, and to accountability to the ICTY in

accordance with Security Council resolutions. The US Deputy Secretary
of State referred to an 'unprecedented and promising degree of
synergy' 9 on the part of UN and NATO, noting that 'the UN has lent
its political and moral authority to the UN effort' - Simma \0 notes the
absence of 'legal' in the sentence. The Foreign Minister of Germany
spoke of NATO action conforming with 'the sense and logic'll of such
resolutions as the Security Council had managed to pass. A UK Foreign
Office written answer in November 1998 - citing intervention in
northern Iraq in 1991 - referred to the legitimacy of a limited use
offorce 'in support of purposes laid down by the Security Council but
without the Council's express authorization' in order to avert a
humanitarian catastrophe. 12
Up to the point of armed intervention by NATO, the key resolutions
in respect to the Kosovo crisis are: 1160 (1998), 31 March 1998; 1199
(1998), 23 September 1998; and 1203 (1998), 24 October 1998.
Following the intervention, resolutions 1239 (1999) of 14 May 1999
and 1244 (1999), 10 June 1999, complete the picture for the present.
In Resolution 1160, the Security Council 'acting under Chapter VII
of the Charter', noting the excessive use of force by Serbian police
forces and acts of terrorism by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)
called for a political solution to the Kosovo issue. The Security Council
agreed that any solution to the Kosovo problem should be 'based
on the territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia',
while supporting 'an enhanced status for Kosovo which would include
a substantially greater degree of autonomy and meaningful self-
administration'. There follows a list of measures, including an arms
embargo, the setting-up of a Committee of the Security Council and a
procedure, with international elements, to verify progress in meeting
a list of objectives including the withdrawal of police units and the
ending of repression against the civilian population. Justice' elements
enter in the form of a notification that the authorities of the FRY are
under an obligation to co-operate with the ICTY. The closest approxi-
mation to a 'threat' appears in operative paragraph 19 which empha-
sizes 'that failure to make constructive progress towards the peaceful
resolution of the situation in Kosovo will lead to the consideration of
additional measures'. Resolution 1199 sharpens up the earlier reso-
lution, demanding, inter alia, that the FRY cease all action affecting the
civilian population and withdraw security units used for civilian
repression, enable international monitoring and facilitate the safe
return of refugees. The resolution notes the commitments entered into
by the President of the FRY in his joint statement with the President
of the Russian Federation of 16 June 1998: (a) to resolve problems by
political means; (b) not to carry out repressive actions against the
International Law in Kosovo 47
civilian population; ... (e) to facilitate the return of refugees. 13 Reading
this with the rest of the resolution, it seems clear that the FRY President
had not, in the opinion of the Security Council, respected these
commitments. The 'threat' in 1160 ... is amplified in 1199 - in the form
of the Security Council deciding that 'should the concrete measures
demanded in this resolution and resolution 1160 not be taken, [the
Council would] consider further action and additional measures to
maintain or restore peace and stability in the region'.14 Hence the
designation by German Foreign Minister Kinkel of resolution 1199 as
a 'springboard resolution' .15 Resolution 1203 incorporates a number
of references to the earlier resolutions and affirms that the 'unresolved
situation' in Kosovo 'constitutes a continuing threat to peace and
security in the region'. By then, the number of 'agreements' on the
situation was multiplying, so that 1203 endorses FRY/OSCE and FRY/
NATO agreements on verification of 1199 requirements and calls for
the full implementation of these commitments as well as the accord
reached by President Milosevic and US Special Envoy Holbrooke. 16
The resolution demands immediate action from the FRY and the
Kosovo Albanian leadership to co-operate with international efforts
to improve the humanitarian situation - 1199 and 1203 both make
reference to an 'impending humanitarian catastrophe'. Like the
others, 1203 stops sort of authorizing force.
The Security Council's resolutions prior to the intervention do a
number of things. They determine that the Yugoslav government has
created a humanitarian emergency, a conclusion fortified by UN and
other documents not emanating from the NATO camp, including the
Statement by the Secretary-General to the UN Commission on Human Rights, 17
the Report by the High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Situation of
Human Rights in KOSOVO,IR the Briefing of the UN High Commissioner for
Refugees to the UN Security Council,19 and the Report of the OSCE Kosovo
Verification Mission. 20 Second, they are drawn up under Chapter VII of
the Charter and characterize the situation in Kosovo as a threat to
peace and security in the region. The Security Council has demon-
strated an increasing tendency to call for or authorize intervention in
internal situations through a range of cases from Iraq, through
Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia, connecting these with threats to inter-
national peace and security.21 It has developed, as it were, an in-house
doctrine of humanitarian intervention, blurring boundaries between
the internal and the international. The erosion of the domestic sphere
by the Council has often been challenged, but the movement has not
been arrested.
Kosovo is not a case of interference by the Security Council in
internal affairs. Some authorities have suggested that Security Council
resolutions preceding the action in Kosovo give 'an informal nod of
48 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

approval' to the NATO enterprise. 22 In view of the difficulties in con-

struing even the cases of explicit authorization by the Council, this
looks like too cavalier an approach. The truth is that the above Security
Council resolutions - taken singly or together - did not authorize the
use of force against the FRY. The resolutions and other documents
established - if independently of the USA, UK and others - the
existence of a serious situation, 'a threat to peace and security in the
region'. The various linkages, appeals to a more profound under-
standing of the exigencies of the 'international community', 'synergies'
with, in accordance with the 'sense and logic' of, or 'in support of the
principles of' Security Council resolutions, and the rest, do not
amount to a justification for intervention under the law of the Charter.
They assume rather the shape of a Polo mint - a circular confection
of 'connections' around a hole where the law should be. Simma 23
characterized the matter differently, finding the NATO interventions
to be illegal but concluding that 'only a thin red line separates NATO's
action on Kosovo from international legality' . If we choose to charac-
terize the action through metaphors, the effect of Security Council
resolutions 1239 and - particularly - resolution 1244 would appear to
be to narrow further the aperture or thin the red line. The Security
Council's 'resolution' of the issues in 1244 passes without a whisper of
criticism of the NATO action, save only the tame paragraph in the pre-
amble to 1244 - 'Bearing in mind [my italics] the purposes and principles
of the Charter of the United Nations, and the primary responsibility
of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and
security'. Is it the case, Higgins pertinently asks, that

in our unipolar world ... does now the very adoption of a resolution
under Chapter VII ... trigger a legal authorization to act by NATO
when it determines it necessary? 24

HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION

A second possible ground for the NATO action is the customary law
doctrine of humanitarian intervention (where a state or group of states
interferes 'dictatorially' in the internal affairs of another state in order
to protect the population of that state) - or elements thereof - from
repressive action by its own government. Contemporary writings
sometimes speak of a 'revival' of this 'classical' doctrine, underplaying
the fact that the existence of any such doctrine in positive law was
almost always strongly contested. There is no reference to any such
doctrine in the UN Charter, and it cannot sit easily with Article 2(4) of
the Charter, despite the inclusion of promotion of respect for human
International Law in Kosovo 49

rights as among the purposes of the United Nations. 25 By the 1980s,

the clear consensus oflegal opinion was that unilateral intervention by
state A to protect the population of state B against the depredations of
its own government was illegal. This was reinforced by the Advisory
Opinion of the International Court of Justice in the case of Nicaragua
v United States of America,26 where the court stated that 'as to respect
for human rights in Nicaragua, the use of force could not be the
appropriate method to monitor or ensure such respect'.27 The Court
exempted from this prohibition 'the provision of strictly humanitarian
aid to persons or forces in another country'.28 The dicta on this
exception may have filtered into the various interventions authorized
by the Security Council itself where interventions were typically
intended to facilitate the creation of secure environments for delivery
of humanitarian relief.29 Similar exercises could in theory be applied
to interventions not authorized by the Council, although the scope of
the exception to non-intervention is far from clear. But aid delivery is
a different issue from full-scale invasion whatever the objectives, and
the NATO action comes under the prohibition not the exception to it.
The 1980s' view is reflected in UK Foreign Office Policy Document no. 148
(1986) which, following a review of authorities, concluded that 'the best
case that can be made in support of humanitarian intervention is that
it cannot be said to be unambiguously illegal'. On the other hand, the
document continued: 'the overwhelming majority of contemporary
legal opinion comes down against the existence of a right of humani-
tarian intervention'. This was for three reasons: (i) the UN charter does
not specifically incorporate such a right; (ii) state practice over the last
two centuries provides only a handful of genuine cases, but possibly
none; (iii) the alleged right is open to abuse.
The negative assessment of humanitarian intervention by the UK
was revised in conjunction with Iraqi repression of the civilian popu-
lation 'most recently in Kurdish populated areas' in the wake of the
Kuwait crisis. Security Council Resolution 688 condemned the repres-
sion, and demanded that Iraq end it and allow access to the popu-
lations by international humanitarian organizations. Following 688,
the UK, USA and France established the so-called 'safe havens' in
northern Iraq. However, there is some ambiguity in the UK position.
On the one hand, it was stated in a Foreign Office memorandum that
the deployment of forces was 'entirely consistent with the objectives of
Security Council resolution 688' ,30 but, on the other, it was later stated
before the Foreign Mfairs Committee that 'the states taking action in
northern Iraq did so in the exercise of the customary international law
principle of humanitarian intervention'.3l The UK recognized an
evolution in international law in this respect, contradicting earlier
assertions. The newer statement to the Foreign Affairs Committee
50 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

includes the following paragraph: 'the practice of states does show over
a long period that it is generally accepted that in extreme circum-
stances a state can intervene in another state for humanitarian
reasons'. There are four principles relevant to the assessment of such
'extreme circumstances'. (i) Was there a compelling and an urgent situ-
ation of extreme humanitarian distress which demanded immediate
relief? (ii) Was the other state (the target state) able and willing to meet
that distress? (iii) Was there a practical alternative to the intervention?
(iv) Could the intervention be limited in time and scope? An abstract
application of these principles to the Kosovo case could conclude that
(i) is authenticated by the Security Council resolutions, and (ii) by the
evidence of massive repression. Point (iii) is more open, but requires
evaluation in the light ofthe failure of negotiations. Point (iv) indicates
perhaps some notion of proportionality and that the intervention
should not be open-ended. De minimis, this suggests the need for clear
objectives on the part of the intervening powers.
In the two basic NATO documents outlined above, there is refer-
ence to a range of 'humanitarian' considerations for the intervention.
In the Statement on Kosovo/ 2 the NATO determination to prevail over
a 'campaign of terror' is asserted and the crisis in Kosovo is deemed
to represent a fundamental challenge to the values of 'democracy,
human rights and the rule oflaw'. 33 Paragraph 4 describes the infliction
by Belgrade of 'immense human suffering'. Paragraph 8 refers to a
'massive humanitarian catastrophe', and paragraph 11 to 'atrocities'.
The heads of state and government express their support for 'the
objective of a democratic FRY which protects the rights of all minori-
ties'.34 There are also references to the threat of destabilization to the
region caused by Belgrade's actions. The NATO Ministerial Docu-
mentIS is more explicit on the justification for action. Paragraph 2 notes
that the FRY has repeatedly violated Security Council resolutions in
the 'unrestrained assault' on Kosovar civilians directed by President
Milosevic, thereby creating a massive humanitarian catastrophe 'which
also threatens to destabilize the surrounding region'. The resolution
continues:

We condemn these appalling violations of human rights and the

indiscriminate use of force by the Yugoslav government. These
extreme and criminally irresponsible policies, which cannot be
defended on any grounds, have made necessary and justify the
military action by NATO. 36

Germany has been clear on the humanitarian purpose of the

action, using the language of 'humanitarian catastrophe'. 37 President
Chirac spoke of defending 'peace on our soil, peace in Europe'. 38 Prime
International Law in Kosovo 51

Minister Blair spoke of preventing Milosevic 'from continuing to per-

petuate his vile oppression against innocent Albanian civilians' .39
Among commentators, Christopher Greenwood is clear that charac-
terizing the intervention as humanitarian describes it properly.40
Simma doubts if NATO threats (the situation before intervention) can
be regarded as 'humanitarian intervention' - 'these threats rather
constitute reprisals, or countermeasures, intended to induce the FRY
to comply with its obligations arising'.41 This characterization does not
survive the 'official' justifications. The UK position has been that
forcing Milosevic back to negotiations was a desirable but secondary
consideration 42 - and rendered more problematic in some respects by
his indictment by the ICTY for crimes against humanity and violations
of the laws or customs of war.4:l The strongest attack on NATO's
humanitarian pretensions came from the Yugoslav counsel 44 in the
FRY's case before the IC] against ten NATO countries. Counsel's first
contention was that there was no doctrine of humanitarian interven-
tion recognized in international law. But aside from that, the attack
could not qualify as a humanitarian intervention because: (i) there was
no genuine humanitarian purpose, and (ii) the modalities selected -
high-altitude bombing, use of anti-personnel weapons and so on -
further disqualified the mission as humanitarian. For the first criticism,
counsel characterized the action as part of 'an ongoing geopolitical
agenda unrelated to human rights'.
The FRY's points have considerable legal merit. If the international
community is moving to a new doctrine of intervention for humani-
tarian reasons - and taking the UK account of triggering conditions 45
as a logical basis for finding a possible consensus - certain parameters
suggest themselves. In the first place, any intervention must be linked
to massive and independently verified violations of human rights, and
the humanitarian purpose must always govern the action. Consistency
is also a problem, though the difficulty of acting in one egregious case
does not disqualify action in all other cases. The FRY point that the
intervention must be conducted in accordance with the laws of war and
respect for human rights is valid. Human-rights NGOs in particular
have been properly concerned about high-altitude bombing, the use
of cluster bombs and the targeting of civilian objects. 46 For example,
'dual-use' objects (civilian objects put to military purposes) may legiti-
mately be targeted only if, by their nature, location, purpose and
use, they make an 'effective contribution to military action' and their
capture, neutralization or destruction, 'in the circumstances ruling at
the time, offers a definite military advantage'.47 This does not encom-
pass demoralization of the enemy's population. Further, even given
concrete military advantage, attacks are forbidden if the incidental
damage would be excessive!" It is not clear that NATO actions have
52 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

been consistent with the norms of humanitarian law in all respects. A

humanitarian intervention cannot, in short, violate humanitarian
standards. In its disposition of the case for provisional measures
brought by the FRY, the International Court of Justice deemed it
necessary 'to emphasize that all parties appearing before it must act in
conformity with their obligations under the UN Charter and other
rules of international law, including humanitarian law' .49 Finally,
convincing examples of humanitarian intervention should stand as far
as possible on that legal ground. NATO documents in particular give
a mix of justifications, suggesting a doubt as to the legal basis of the
action - hence the need to reinforce the claims by calling in aid Security
Council resolutions. Simma has noted various statements designed to
minimize the 'precedent' value of NATO action in Kosovo. Cassese 50
has written of an emerging legal principle. The combination of diplo-
macy and academe initially suggests that the chrysalis ofhumanitarian
intervention has not yet become a butterfly.

THE DARK CLOUD OF GENOCIDE

In his address to the Commission on Human Rights,5' the Secretary-

General of the United Nations made the following sombre observation:

[T]his last Commission on Human Rights of the twentieth century

is meeting under the dark cloud of the crime of genocide ... Though
we have no independent observers on the ground, the signs are that
it may be happening, once more, in Kosovo ... The vicious and
systematic campaign of 'ethnic cleansing' conducted by the Serbian
authorities in Kosovo appears to have ... one aim: to expel or kill as
many ethnic Albanians in Kosovo as possible.

Among other characterizations of the situation, allegations of geno-

cide have been generally absent from the major NATO documents.
There seems to have been a certain reluctance to employ the term,
despite the words of the UN Secretary General. The NATO Ministerial
Council document gets nearest, referring to war crimes and crimes
against humanity. The Commission on Human Rights resolution on
the Situation of Human Rights in Kosovo 52 does not adopt the Secretary-
General's language, but directs its condemnation at 'ethnic cleansing'.
The UN General Assembly expressed grave concern about 'persistent
and grave violations and abuse of human rights and humanitarian
law in Kosovo'. 53 The Milosevic indictment does not contain a genocide
count, even though genocide is a punishable crime under the ICTY
Statute. Among commentators, Simma - without further explanation
International Law in Kosovo 53

- decides that genocide is not at issue in KOSOVO,54 while noting that

'in the face of genocide, the right of states, or collectivities of states, to
counter breaches of human rights most likely becomes an obligation'.55
Perhaps the reticence can be overcome in the light of Prime Minister
Blair's statement following the suspension of bombing that 'the world
now knows that we will not let racial genocide go on without challenge.
We will not see the values of civilization sacrificed without raising the
hand of justice in their defence.' 56 Paradoxically, the FRY attempted
to engage the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice for an
order of provisional measures by praying in aid the jurisdiction
provisions of the Genocide Convention. This entailed allegations that
the NATO states were engaged in a genocidal campaign, an allegation
described by counsel for the United States as 'cynicism of Orwellian
proportions' and by Canada as 'transparent cynicism'. In rejecting the
Yugoslav case on this point, the ICJ observed that 'the use or threat of
force against a state cannot in itself constitute an act of genocide within
Article II of the Genocide Convention' - the bombing lacked the
element of intent required by the article."
It is not entirely clear why such reticence is maintained, and why
resort to repugnant euphemisms such as 'ethnic cleansing' is pre-
ferred. The Genocide Convention does not as such require a co-
ordinated and systematic plan of extermination, but the evidence of
such planning will be powerful evidence on favour of the allegation of
crime. In case the allegations of mass killings are disputed, it should
be recalled that the Convention also includes a prohibition on 'causing
serious bodily or mental harm to members of the [target] group', and
'deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its destruction in whole or in part'. Genocide is a crime of
intention, namely the intention 'to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such'.58 The Conven-
tion, which, as noted, is a prime candidate for jus cogens status, incor-
porates the undertaking by the Contracting Parties 'to prevent and
punish' genocide. This is sometimes taken as legitimizing positive
action in an unspecific way. However, the modalities for the prevention
of genocide are extremely undeveloped in the Convention; the
emphasis is rather on mechanisms for the punishment of offenders.
The convention as such is not a great help for those who would find
in the commission of genocide, or allegations thereof, a carte blanche
for armed intervention. On the contrary, Article VIII modestly pro-
vides that Contracting Parties may 'call upon' competent organs of the
UN to take appropriate action for the prevention and suppression of
acts of genocide. This takes any intervention back into the UN orbit
and does notjustify extra-UN action. Kosovo does not sharpen up any
further customary principle which would legitimate intervention in
54 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

view of the general reticence on the point, except in the sense that, if
'lesser' violations of international law are deemed to legitimate an
intervention, then a fortiori, they are legitimated by campaigns of
genocide. In any case, it is submitted that Simma and others are too
cautious on the question of genocide; while proof of intent may be
difficult, 'ethnic cleansing' typically encompasses genocidal processes.

BOMBS, SOVEREIGNTY AND RIGHTS: A GENERAL COMMENT

In general terms, the NATO intervention reflects a tension between

principles of international law, which emphasize state sovereignty, and
those which value human rights. From many aspects, there is a growing
tendency to expand the latter at the expense of the former. The
Pinochet affair is a recent case in point, qualifying sovereign immunity
in the name of human rights. In some views, even the territorial
integrity of the state is not 'guaranteed' if segments of the population
face massive violations of human rights by their own government. The
authority for this last proposition is General Assembly resolution
2625(XXV) of 1970 - the Declaration of Principles of International
Law, or 'Friendly Relations Declaration'. The paragraph recognizing
territorial integrity in the case of a government representing the
people of a territory without distinction as to race, creed or colour, is,
however, notoriously ambiguous. In all the Kosovo events, perhaps the
most striking conclusion is that drawn by the UN Secretary-General,59
when he remarked that

Emerging slowly, but 1 believe surely, is an international norm

against the violent repression of minorities that will and must take
precedence over concerns of state sovereignty. It is a principle that
protects minorities - and majorities - from gross violations. And let
me therefore be very clear: even though we are an organization of
member states, the rights and ideals the United Nations exists to
protect are those of peoples ... No government has the right to hide
behind national sovereignty in order to violate the human rights or
fundamental freedoms of its peoples ... This developing inter-
national norm will pose fundamental challenges to the United
Nations.

The words of the Secretary-General were warmly endorsed by UK

Foreign Secretary Robin Cook: 'I share the view that was forcefully
expressed by Kofi Annan that the international revulsion against the
violent repression of minorities will and must take precedence over
International Law in Kosovo 55

concerns of state sovereignty'. 60 The Foreign Secretary does not qualify

that principle by any reference to an 'emerging norm'. Is the assump-
tion that it is already there? The last point of the Secretary-General on
the 'challenges' to the UN is an understatement, in view of the general
perception that the United Nations was bypassed in the rush to action.
On the other hand, the conflict 'ends' with a UN resolution, which
appears to wash over any NATO illegalities like a wave on the beach.
The system appears to be closing in again, reasserting itself, without
any emergence of a 'new order'. There is bitter irony in resolution
1244's 'reaffirmation' of 'the commitment of all member states to the
sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugo-
slavia' - after its 'degradation' by NATO action. This is some attempt
to signal 'no change', as also is the reminder that the Security Council
retains its 'primary responsibility' for peace and security. Simma has
also pointed to claims made to the singularity of the events, that they
should not set a precedent. It will be impossible to control what 'use'
is made of the NATO example by others, although lawyers will insist
and remind us that, in principle, international customary law is made
by the many not by the powerful few. Is it possible that what we witness
is the initiation of a regional customary law for Europe? This could not
be unlike the defunct Soviet system of a special international law
applying among brotherly socialist states, with NATO, to adapt
Rousseau's term, 'forcing states to be free'. It is unlikely to be wider in
view of the prerogatives of the UN and the attachment to the principle
of non-intervention beloved of so many governments. Certainly, the
collisions between the sovereignty 'apologists' and the human rights
'Utopians' will continue, and the consequences of the latter winning
out are difficult to gauge. 51 Perhaps, as suggested above, nothing has
changed, but the system addresses a crisis 'in mysterious ways'.
The modest function of an international lawyer according to
Rosalyn Higgins is to articulate the consensus and dedicate legal skills
to institution-building. 62 What consensus? What institutions? We may
hazard the following minimal propositions from this Kosovo review.

(i) On a positivist frame, there have been violations of international

law all round. However, only some of these have the potential to
contribute to change; others simply deserve and will receive
condemnation.
(ii) It is in the general interest that the ICTY and others will be
dispassionate about all breaches of international law within the
parameters of its Statute.
(iii) Sovereignty is not an excuse for repression, but the prevention
56 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

and control of repression is generally mediated through inter-

national organizations maintained by consent.
(iv) We are witnessing the rapid development of an international law
of humanitarian emergency, where the UN has primary, but not
necessarily exclusive responsibilities.
(v) Responding to such emergencies - genocidal or less than geno-
cidal- is a logical development of the nostrum that human rights
are a matter of international concern.
(vi) There is no bright white line between the internal and the
international.
(vii) Institutions are in place to avoid conflict and maintain civilized
standards - they do not need to be invented. They include respect
for human rights articulated in a vast array of international
instruments including the rights of minorities and other vulner-
able groups.
(viii) The implementation of institutions rests upon the virtues of
good faith and the keeping of promises.

POSTSCRIPT

The author does not see that events subsequent to the NATO inter-
vention would cause us to deviate from the modest conclusions above,
formulated first in June 1999. On the legality of the intervention, there
is strong opinion to the effect that NATO action has not set a prece-
dent. 53 Primary responsibility for international peace and security
continues to rest with the UN Security Council. Presumptively, action
outside the Charter framework violates international law. Siren voices
in the US administration preaching the redundancy of the UN do not
confirm a 'new' doctrine - there is none, only the old doctrine. One
may surmise that the Clinton (or successor US) administration would
not like to see the CIS, or the Arab League, 'adopt' the NATO standard.
Some six months after the commencement of the NATO action, a
counter-example comes from INTERFET - the Australian-led coalition
of forces in East Timor - acting this time with Security Council author-
ization. Much discussion now directs itself to the question of Security
Council reform, to 'investing' in the credibility of global institutions,
reminding us that the process of institution-building is always unfin-
ished. 64 On events in Kosovo, we know that the parties are not recon-
ciled, that Serbs and Roma are the current 'victims'. We learn again
that we need the improving discourse, the long road, the hard graft,
respect for the human rights of all, in the difficult process of installing
peace in the heart of the people, in which respect we pray: 'let not our
naIve labours have been in vain'.55
International Law in Kosovo 57

NOTES

1 Sir John Betjeman in his poem 'Slough'.

2 Article 24.
3 Article 51.
4 Article 53.
5 I.C.]. Rep. 1986, 14.
6 Articles 53 and 64 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.
7 23 and 24 April 1999.
8 Statement issued at the Extraordinary Ministerial Meeting of the North
Atlantic Council held at NATO Headquarters.
9 Strobe Talbott, cited in B. Simma, 'NATO, the UN and the Use of Force : Legal
Aspects', 10 EJ.IL No.1 (1998), text accompanying n. 24 (unpaginated
internet version).
10 Ibid.
11 Foreign Minister Kinkel, in Simma.
12 Cited in The Times, 26 March 1999, p. 8.
13 UN Doc. S/1998/526.
14 Operative paragraph 16.
15 Simma.
16 UN Doc. S/1998/953, annex.
17 UN Doc. SG/SM/99/91, 7 April 1999.
18 Unedited version, 31 May 1999.
19 5 May 1999, cited by German counsel in oral pleadings, Yugoslavia v Germany,
International Court of Justice, 11 May 1999.
20 OSCE Press Release No. 35/99 of20 April 1999.
21 Deemed to be examples of 'good lawyering' by Rosalyn Higgins, in
'International Law in a Changing International System', Cambridge Law
Journal, 58 (1999), 78-95, p. 95.
22 Marc Weller, cited in the Guardian, 25 March 1999. [Marc Weller was a legal
adviser of the predominantly KLA Kosovar delegation at the Rambouillet talks
- eds.]
23 Op.cit.
24 Higgins, p. 94 (italics in the original).
25 Article 1(3).
26 International Court of Justice, 1986.
27 Para. 268.
28 Para. 242.
29 For example, Security Council resolution 794 on Somalia, paragraph 10.
30 FCO Memorandum to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee,
B.Y.I.L., 63 (1992), 825.
31 Parliamentary Papers, 1992-1993, HC Paper 235-111, 85, 92.
32 See note 7 above.
33 Para. 2.
34 Para. 16.
35 Supra.
36 Author's italics.
37 Foreign Minister Fischer, Guardian, 25 March 1999.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Observer, 28 March 1999.
41 Simma, section 2.
42 See Peter Riddell in The Times, 26 March 1999.
58 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

43 24 April 1999, text on the internet at http://www.un.org/icty/indictment!

english/24-05milo.htm
44 Professor Ian Brownlie. The full text may be accessed at the ICl's website:
http://www.ICJ.cij.org.
45 Supra.
46 For example, Human Rights Watch's Letter to NATO Secretary General Javier
Solana, 13 May 1999.
47 Article 52 of Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 1949.
4S Ibid., Article 57.
49 Case Concerning Legality of Use of Force (Yugoslavia v United Kingdom), Order of
2 June 1999, para. 16.
50 Antonio Cassese, 'Ex iniuria ius oritur: Are we Moving towards International
Legitimation of Forcible Humanitarian Countermeasures in the World
Community?', comment on the article by Simma, 10 EJ.I.L, No.1.
51 Supra.
52 Commission on Human Rights resolution 1999/2, 13 April 1999.
53 General Assembly resolution 53/164, 25 February 1999.
54 Simma, text to footnote 4.
55 Ibid., text to footnote 3.
56 Guardian, 11 June 1999.
57 Yugoslavia v United Kingdom, para. 35.
5S Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide 1945.
59 Speech of 7 April 1999.
60 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Edited Transcript of Debate opened by the
Foreign Secretary, House of Commons, IS May 1999.
61 M. Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia (1 9S9).
62 Op. cit., p. S9.
63 M.E. O'Connell, 'The UN, NATO, and International Law after Kosovo',
Human Rights Quarterly, 22 (2000), 57-S9.
64 A.A. An-Na'im, 'NATO on Kosovo is bad for Human Rights', Netherlands
Quarterly of Human Rights, 17, 2 (l999), 229-31.
65 Derek Mahon's poem, 'In a Disused Shed in County Wexford'.
 8. Collateral Damage: The Impact on
Macedonia of the Kosovo War

KYRIL DREZOV

The war over Kosovo and the ensuing geopolitical shift in the Balkans
had serious consequences for the stability of the Republic of Macedonia.
With its 23 per cent Albanian population, Macedonia has the biggest
concentration of Albanians outside Albania and Kosovo. It also has
lengthy borders with both Albania and Kosovo, and most Macedonian
Albanians are concentrated close to these two borders. With Kosovo
under de facto Albanian control after NATO's occupation in June 1999,
Macedonia could become the next object of Albania irridenta.
The main contention in this essay is that NATO's intervention over
Kosovo and NATO's rule in Kosovo have radically diminished the
survival chances of the Republic of Macedonia. Like the proverbial bull
in a china shop, with its actions during and after the bombing NATO
inadvertently destabilized the precarious status quo that since 1991 had
underpinned the survival of an independent state in the former
Yugoslav republic of Macedonia. Similar to many other consequences
of the 1999 war over Kosovo, such a destabilization of Macedonia was
the very opposite of NATO's intentions. Throughout the 1990s concern
about instability in Macedonia had always been a far more important
consideration for Western politicians than concern about the wellbeing
of Albanians in either Kosovo or Macedonia. Over this period Western
politicians spent a lot of diplomatic effort and money to prop up
Macedonia as an essential buffer state in the very centre of the Balkans,
only to have this carefully constructed policy undermined in days by
NATO's Kosovo adventure.

THE ALBANIAN TIME-BOMB

Similar to traditional Serbian concerns about Kosovo, Slav Macedo-

nian politics is defined by fears about the relentless rise of Albanian
numbers. The Albanian population in Macedonia has doubled every
60 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

25 to 30 years since 1945, while the number of Slav Macedonians has

stayed practically constant since 1981.1 This demographic explosion
has led to acute overpopulation in the mostly Albanian areas of western
Macedonia. The average population density in Macedonia is 76 people
per square kilometre but in the valley of Polog (the main Albanian area
in Macedonia) it is as high as 230 people per square kilometre. 2 Given
the much higher Albanian birth rate (the birth rate is close to negative
amongst the Slavs) and generally younger population, it is likely that
in the next 20 years - that is, in a generation - as much as 40 per cent
of the entire Macedonian population could be Albanian.
Similar to pre-war Kosovo, Albanians and Slavs in Macedonia live
largely segregated from each other. This trend has become more
marked since independence in 1991, and previously mixed areas in
the centre of the capital Skopje have become mono-ethnic, with the
River Vardar as an invisible border between majority Slav and majority
Albanian areas. Despite brief relaxation in ethnic relations after the
inclusion of the hitherto radical Democratic Party of the Albanians
(DPA) following the November 1998 parliamentary elections, NATO's
bombing campaign and the refugee influx from Kosovo strained again
the traditionally tense relationship between Slavs and Albanians in
Macedonia.

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF STABILITY 1991-99

Since the early 1990s Macedonia's stability was based on several funda-
mentals: state monopoly in the means of violence, Slav domination of
the state and Western support for this state.
'State monopoly of the means of violence' means that the central
government has maintained effective control over the whole of the
territory of Macedonia, backed by a credible threat offorce. This is the
main reason why Macedonia during 1991-92 did not go the way of
Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the latter the republican leadership could not
prevent the formation of separatist institutions and paramilitary militias.
While separatism was tolerated as ideology of the Albanian parties in
Macedonia even when they participated in government, any violation
of the laws that smacked of separatism was mercilessly stamped out
- with heavy-handed police interventions, arrests and long prison
sentences. In some respects Macedonian policies were even more
draconian than Serbian policies in Kosovo. For example, throughout
the 1990s the Serbs tolerated Albanian higher education in private
houses, but in 1995 Macedonian police bulldozed a private building
earmarked for an Albanian university in Tetovo and imprisoned its
first rector.
The Slavs dominate central governments, and also the police and
The Impact on Macedonia of the Kosovo War 61

the military. Both before and after independence in 1991, very few
Albanians have been allowed into Macedonian institutions of 'national
security' - the police, the military and intelligence. This Slav domina-
tion of the state, however, is tempered by extensive minority rights -
a legacy of the post-1945 Yugoslav period - including entirely Albanian
primary and secondary education in state-financed schools, plus state-
supported Albanian media. Since 1992 Albanian politicians have been
co-opted in central government, and effectively bribed with the promise
of ministerial and diplomatic positions, but the key decision-making
process has invariably remained Slav-dominated. Western efforts to
bring about greater Albanian involvement in Macedonian security
institutions were repeatedly frustrated by Slav foot-dragging and the
separatist rhetoric of Albanian politicians. The main Albanian parties
in Macedonia - the Democratic Party of the Albanians (since the autumn
of 1998 part of the ruling coalition together with VMRO-DPMNE and
the Democratic Alternative) and the Party for Democratic Prosperity
(part of the previous ruling coalition in 1992-98 led by the ex-
communist Social Democratic Alliance of Macedonia) - are officially
committed to the transformation of Macedonia into a bi-zonal feder-
ation, or at least into a state with two official constituent nations. 3 This
is a non-starter for all Slav Macedonian parties.
Western support for the Macedonian state is the third fundamental
for its stability. In the 1990s there was an implicit Western guarantee
of Macedonia's territorial and administrative integrity. Initially Western
governments were more concerned about possible Serbian reabsorp-
tion of Macedonia, but they also took a dim view of Albanian separatist
ambitions. Unlike in Kosovo, Macedonian Albanians have no history
of territorial autonomy, and unlike in Serbia, the separation of Albanian-
inhabited territories could threaten the very existence of the Macedo-
nian state. Albanians form the m<uority in a large swath of territory west
of a line stretching from the town of Struga near Lake Ochrid in the
south-west, to Kumanovo in the north. The capital Skopje, even though
it has a Slav majority, is surrounded by fast-expanding Albanian villages:
in the case of secession at least half of it would be claimed by the
Albanians, who consider it the historical capital ofKosovo. 4 To dampen
both Serbian and Albanian ambitions in Macedonia, between 1993 and
1999, a United Nations' preventive deployment force (UNPREDEP),
which consisted of about 1,000 Scandinavian and US troops, was posi-
tioned along Macedonia's borders with Serbia and Albania (signifi-
cantly, this UN force was not deployed along Macedonia's two other
borders with Bulgaria and Greece). Western countries also gave
economic and diplomatic support to Macedonia. Security co-operation
between the United States and Macedonia was established in 1992, and
since then in the Balkan region the US was perceived as the guarantor
of Macedonia's independence and territorial integrity. 5
62 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

Even before NATO's involvement in the Kosovo conflict, these

fundamentals of Macedonian stability were negatively affected by
at least two factors: the collapse of central government in Albania in
1997, which made weapons easily available to Kosovo and Macedonian
Albanians, and the termination of UNPREDEP in February 1999,
following a Chinese veto after Skopje's recognition of Taiwan. 6 Two
other factors that affected Macedonian stability have followed directly
from the war over Kosovo - NATO's deployment in Macedonia and
the influx of Kosovo refugees.

THE NATO DEPLOYMENT

In February-March 1999, 16,000 NATO troops were deployed in

Macedonia, most of them British; prior to entry into Kosovo on lO
June their numbers had risen to 30,000. 7 The regular Macedonian
army, which numbers about 12,000, was temporarily relegated to
second place. Most of its barracks and other military facilities were
taken over by NATO, together with control over Macedonian air space
and the airport near Skopje. Between February and June 1999 NATO
troops became the largest economic force in the country, spending
an estimated one million Deutsche Marks per day on fuel, food and
entertainment. 8
Most NATO troops were deployed near Macedonia's borders with
Kosovo and Serbia proper. Although the local Albanians were welcom-
ing, the Serbian and pro-Serbian population in the border regions
around Skopje and Kumanovo was hostile from the beginning. A
particular problem was the 20,000 Serbs who live in villages in the Crna
Gora mountains north of Skopje. Since 1991 they have been organized
into local self-defence units and armed with primitive weapons; they
have also developed a tradition of ignoring Macedonian authorities.
NATO soldiers patrolling the border region were regularly stoned and
attacked by local Serbs, and early in the war three US servicemen who
were patrolling the Macedonian-Yugoslav border were taken prisoner
and transported to Belgrade.
NATO's decision to launch air strikes against Yugoslavia fuelled
pro-Serbian and anti-NATO sentiments among the Macedonian Slavs.
On 25 March about 5,000 people rallied in central Skopje for seven
hours, destroyed US and OSCE vehicles, tried to set the US embassy
on fire, and also attacked the German, British and French embassies.
The rally was organized by the Serb minority, but was massively
supported by Slav Macedonian youth. In a televised address, Prime
Minister Ljubcho Georgievski described this explosion of anti-NATO
attitudes as 'the second biggest threat' to Macedonian stability after the
influx of refugees. He also accused the Serbian lobby in Macedonia of
The Impact on Macedonia of the Kosovo War 63

fomenting unrest, and specifically mentioned three television channels

controlled by it.
Mter the beginnings of the air attacks on Yugoslavia, the Macedo-
nian Orthodox Church (ironically not recognized by the Serb
Orthodox Church) declared that the attack on Serbia was an attack on
all Orthodox people, expressed regrets that because of its small size
Macedonia could not fight to support its brothers in Serbia and called
for 'prayers for peace' throughout Macedonia. An unexploded bomb
found in one of Bitola's Orthodox churches, the parish church of
Bishop Jovan, the most outspoken of the pro-Serbian dignitaries,
caused a great deal of speculation about Albanian revenge.
In another sign of popular sympathies for the Serbs, many
Macedonian emigre/guest-worker organizations around the world
openly sided with Milosevic after the beginning of the bombing, and
criticized the pro-NATO stance of the Macedonian government.
The Slav majority in Macedonia was also alienated by the economic
dislocation caused by the NATO air strikes, as trade with Yugoslavia,
which represented about 16 per cent of Macedonia's total trade, was
disrupted. Transit routes through Yugoslavia for Macedonian exports
could no longer be used. Around 90 per cent of Macedonian exports
to EU countries were traditionally transited through Yugoslav terri-
tory, and these had to be redirected on to more costly and lengthy
routes via Bulgaria, Romania and Albania.
The air strikes further divided Macedonian Slavs from Albanians.
While Albanians celebrated the air strikes, the Slavs toasted Serbian
successes (such as the downing of the Stealth bomber and the capture
of the three US servicemen). The massive worldwide propaganda
campaign about the purely humanitarian and impartial character of
NATO's intervention may have been believed by many in the West, but
it failed completely in Macedonia. The bombs that were falling on
Yugoslavia marked NATO as a friend of the Albanians, and as an enemy
of Serbs and Macedonians. On this issue alone there was complete
consensus between Albanians and Slavs, quite irrespective of what
NATO fantasized about itself. The consequences of the war - 'Serbs
out, [Albanian] refugees back, NATO in', in George Robertson's memor-
able phrase - only served to confirm this Albanian-Slav consensus.

THE GREAT REFUGEE FEAR

The fear that well-entrenched Slav domination can be upset lies behind
what was generally seen in the West as a hostile and xenophobic
response by the majority of Slav Macedonians to the arrival of the
Kosovo Albanian refugees. In the period between March and June
1999 Slav Macedonians genuinely feared that some, if not most, of the
64 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

Kosovo refugees would remain in Macedonia. Before the bombing

there were about 20,000 Kosovo refugees in Macedonia, mostly from
villages on the other side of the border, but in the two weeks following
NATO's intervention 70,000 refugees legally entered Macedonia from
Kosovo, another 50,000 are thought to have entered illegally, and yet
another 120,000 were waiting to cross the border.
The Macedonian government tried several times to close the border
to refugees to prevent the massive influx which it feared would
destabilize the country. In particular, it sought to exclude refugees
without identity documents, as these would be refused entry back to
Yugoslavia, and hence would be more likely to settle in Macedonia
permanently. When it failed to keep the border closed, the government
sought to delay the influx of refugees by processing them slowly. The
coalition government was under heavy pressure from both within
and outside the coalition: Albanian ministers from DPA threatened to
withdraw from the government if refugees were not allowed in
speedily and unconditionally, while the opposition SDSM criticized the
government for being too lax in effectively allowing Albanian refugees
to settle in Macedonia and thus alter the ethnic balance. When they
were in power the ex-communist SDSM - supported by President Kiro
Gligorov - had their own plan for a 'refugee corridor' to Albania that
was agreed with the Albanian government under Prime Minister Fatos
Nano, but the VMRO-Ied coalition that came to power after November
1998 scrapped this scheme.
Western countries showed great reluctance to take in refugees,
claiming that this would facilitate ethnic cleansing and delay their
return to Kosovo, and preferred to offer aid for their care inside
Macedonia. In early April Albania offered to accept 100,000 refugees
from Macedonia, thus seemingly reviving the 'refugee corridor' plan.
The UNHCR approved of the scheme, with the caveat that any transfer
of refugees to Albania would have to be voluntary. However, despite
all efforts of humanitarian organizations to convince some Kosovo
refugees to move voluntarily to Albania, where spacious refugee camps
were built near Korca close to the Greek border, the refugees showed
an absolute reluctance to move to Albania, believing that once there
they would become ineligible for resettlement in the West, and would
be press-ganged to enlist in the KLA. Giving up on relying on volun-
teers, the Macedonian authorities managed to transfer by bus 12,000
Kosovo refugees to the camps in southern Albania before being
stopped by UNHCR.
By the end of May there were 250,000 Kosovo refugees in
Macedonia - about 14 per cent of the population of the country - and
despite all the efforts of the Macedonian authorities their numbers
kept rising. Prime Minister Georgievski and other Macedonian officials
tried to make the plight of his country more comprehensible to
The Impact on Macedonia of the Kosovo War 65

Western audiences by likening it to the influx of 20 million Mexicans

to the United States of America in one month. On 7 June (when NATO
troops were poised to enter Kosovo) there were 276,360 refugees in
Macedonia, and of them 150,715 had an official refugee status and
99,645 of them lived in refugee camps; 82,607 refugees were trans-
ferred by air to other countries. 9
All Kosovo refugees - whether living with families or in camps -
settled in areas in Macedonia that already had a sizeable Albanian
presence. The overall Albanian population was temporarily increased
by one-third. Once inside Macedonia, many of the refugees refused to
go to the camps and were instead taken care of by Albanian families,
often with the assistance ofIslamic charities. This led to friction between
the government and the Albanian organizations involved, with the
government concerned that these refugees might 'disappear' within
the large ethnic Albanian community in Macedonia.
Apart from the 100,000 Kosovars in the camps, 51,479 refugees
settled in Skopje, 40,951 in Tetovo, 20,616 in Gostivar, 12,781 in
Kumanovo, 9,521 in Kichevo, 9,189 in Debar and 3,673 in Struga, plus
numerous smaller towns and villages. 10 This exacerbated even further
the Albanian ethnic predominance in western Macedonia and the
already intolerable overpopulation of these areas.
The biggest concern for the government was the refugees who lived
with families (about half of the overall number), because many of them
could not be traced for a return to Kosovo. Another concern was the
activities of the KLA: the Macedonian authorities did not allow recruit-
ment in Macedonia, and Macedonian police had repeatedly uncovered
caches of smuggled weapons. Even more worrisome for the authorities
was the arming of the local Albanians in a climate of worsening
relations between Slavs and Albanians.
Thus the Macedonian government was genuinely relieved to see a
Serbian withdrawal from Kosovo, and the almost complete return of
the Albanian refugees in less than a month after NATO's occupation
of the province. However, by that time the sharp polarization of
opinion created by NATO's bombing had acquired its own dynamic
and could not be undone. The majority of the Slav electorate was seeth-
ing with discontent against its Albanian compatriots and felt alienated
from a ruling coalition that had won an absolute majority in parlia-
mentary elections less than six months previously.

THE 1999 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

The presidential election in 1999 was the most disputed one since the
advent of multi-party politics in Macedonia in 1990. This election
lasted for more than a month, with a first round on 31 October, a
66 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

second on 14 November and a partial re-run on 5 December. The

winning candidate was Boris Trajkovski from VMRO-DPMNE, deputy
Foreign Minister since November 1998 (previously Protestant activist
and foreign policy adviser of Georgievski), against Tito Petkovski
from the opposition Social Democratic Alliance of Macedonia (SDSM).
The election campaign and Trajkovski's victory exacerbated further
the tensions between Slavs and Albanians in many regions of the
country.
The campaign was full of dirty tricks, with the VMRO emphasiz-
ing Petkovski's Yugoslav, Serb and communist connections, and the
SDSM emphasizing Trajkovski's Protestant and Bulgarian ties. In
cartoons and satires the clash between the VMRO and the SDSM was
crudely represented as 'a fight between Bulgaro-fascists and Serbo-
communists', and also as a highly symbolic struggle between 'Boris'
and 'Tito', between Bulgarian and Yugoslav influences. (Many Borises
in Macedonia were named after the wartime Bulgarian king, Boris III,
who briefly united Macedonia with Bulgaria, while all Titos were
named after the Yugoslav president.)
The SDSM based its campaign on depicting the ruling coalition as
a cabal which served foreign interests and which was working for the
partition of Macedonia between Albania and Bulgaria. This high-risk
campaign won Petkovski majority support amongst the Slav electorate,
but at the same time profoundly alienated the Albanian voters.
Petkovski's statement before the first round - to the effect that he did
not want Albanian voters (presumably because of the political price
that would go with them) - came to haunt him in the second round.
While Petkovski emerged as the leading contender in the first round
on 31 October, Trajkovski beat him by 70,000 votes on 14 November.
This shift was overwhelmingly due to the ethnic Albanian vote that
went to Trajkovski. There were noted irregularities in this second
round, again in the Albanian-majority areas, including threats by DPA
activists against SDSM and PDP members, multiple voting and ballot-
box fixing.
The partial re-run ordered by the Macedonian courts confirmed
Albanian support for Trajkovski, but it was similarly marred by
repeated irregularities and also - for the first time - bloody clashes
between SDSM and DPA activists. Throughout western Macedonia
SDSM officials were beaten up and forcibly evicted from Albanian-
majority villages by DPA activists. By midday on 5 December the SDSM
decided to withdraw its representatives from all polling stations and
prepared numerous complaints about the irregularities that had
occurred. However, under intense pressure from Western diplomats,
the SDSM decided not to press these new complaints, thus indirectly
recognizing Trajkovski's victory. At the same time the SDSM leaders
The Impact on Macedonia of the Kosovo War 67

emphasized that for them Trajkovski's election was illegitimate, and

called for mass rallies to force early parliamentary elections.
The election highlighted the rise of the radical DPA in Macedonian
politics. In the first round the DPA definitively replaced the PDP as the
strongest Albanian party (the PDP was dominant amongst the Alba-
nians until the DPA joined the governing coalition after the parliamen-
tary elections in 1998). The DPA's first-round candidate, Muharem
Nexipi, soundly defeated PDP's Muhamed Halili in all Albanian-
majority areas, winning overall three-quarters of the ethnic Albanian
vote. Although in some polling stations the results proved irregular,
this shift reflects a genuine rise in the DPA's influence in Macedonia-
partly because in one year it achieved more for Albanian local control
in municipalities in western Macedonia than PDP did in six years in
government, and partly because ofDPAcontrol (collection of informal
'taxes') over the booming trade and smuggling with Kosovo - which
dramatically improved the financial position of DPA.
The coalition between the VMRO and the DPA was strengthened
by their co-operation in the second round and in the re-run. However,
the DPA was in a stronger position after the completion of the election,
while the VMRO was weakened by the poor results for Trajkovski in
the first round, and then was forced to rely on DPA goodwill in the
second round and the re-run. In comparison with the parliamentary
elections in 1998 VMRO lost about one-third of its supporters (a drop
from 315,000 to 219,000) while at the same time DPA doubled its vote
(from 80,000 to 155,000)."
The most serious consequence ofthe presidential elections was the
solidifying of DPA's informal control over the Albanian-majority areas
in western Macedonia. At the same time VMRO suffered a significant
loss of influence amongst Slav voters, particularly the young, who for
years were the mainstay of the party. SDSM has vowed to force early
parliamentary elections by pressure from below, and this has increased
instability in the country and rising tensions between Slavs and
Albanians.
Although OSCE rubber-stamped the elections despite all the
obvious irregularities, and Western diplomats were fairly open in their
preference for Trajkovski, Macedonia suffered a serious loss of inter-
national prestige due to the flaws in the second round and the re-run.
On 7 December the special representative of the European Commis-
sion in Skopje,] ose Pinto Teseira, bluntly told his hosts that the election
irregularities showed that the EU had been right to include Macedonia
in the 'Western Balkans', together with Croatia, Albania and Bosnia,
and to deny it an association agreement similar to that with the
Vise grad countries, Bulgaria and Romania. 12
The VMRO's candidate Trajkovski won the election, but the
68 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

election process imposed a serious cost on the government: VMRO-

OPMNE was weakened, the OPA dramatically strengthened its position
and the opposition SOSM was both strengthened and radicalized.
Macedonia's ambitions to integrate itself into the EU and NATO
structures looked even further away than before the elections.

CONCLUSION

NATO's 'humanitarian war' on behalf of the Kosovo Albanians led to

a further erosion of the stability of Macedonia - its borders have
become more vulnerable, its ethnic divide has widened and Western
guarantees are no longer taken for granted by the majority population
and Slav Macedonian politicians.
Seen from Skopje, the withdrawal of the Yugoslav army and police
from Kosovo almost doubled the length of the lawless borderland that
the Macedonian army and police are forced to guard heavily. After the
collapse of state structures in Albania in 1997, the Albanian side of the
common border with Macedonia was left practically unguarded, and
the Macedonian police and army reservists have barely been able to
stem the explosion in cross-border movement of smugglers, arms
dealers and drug-traffickers. Since then Macedonian border patrols
have been regularly engaged in skirmishes and exchanges of fire with
well-armed bands that reside on Albanian territory. And since June
1999 UNMIK's unwillingness or inability to patrol Kosovo's border with
Macedonia has created another problematic border for Macedonia's
security forces.
The removal of the legitimacy of the Serbian system of domination
in Kosovo in the Western media and its forcible dismantling by NATO
created ominous precedents for Slav domination in Macedonia, and
radicalized both Slav and Albanian opinion in Macedonia. Unlike
Western politicians who choose to believe their own propaganda about
Macedonia as 'a functioning multi-ethnic democracy', both Macedo-
nians and Albanians know that when push comes to shove there is little
difference between Serbian and Macedonian policies to contain
Albanian separatism. Post-1999 Albanian expectations about NATO
may be false, and Slav fears about it exaggerated, but they are no less
real for that.
The indefinite deployment of NATO troops in Kosovo - whose
primary function is to protect the local Albanians from reassertion of
Yugoslav control and repression - again creates expectations amongst
Macedonian Albanians (and fears amongst Macedonian Slavs) that in
any case of clashes between local Albanians and the Macedonian police
and army, NATO troops would be forced to intervene on behalf of the
The Impact on Macedonia of the Kosovo War 69

Albanians. It does not matter that NATO politicians would not see
such an intervention as favouring the Albanians over the Macedonians.
Any NATO attempt to draw a line between conflicting Albanians and
Macedonians would be perceived locally as victory for the Albanians,
and would mark the end of Macedonia as a nation-state.
In short, the Kosovo war fundamentally destabilized the rules of
the game in the region. After the war, the 'unliberated' Albanians in
both Serbia and Macedonia live in hope, while the Slavs - Serbs and
Macedonians - live in fear.

NOTES

Based on 'Census '94', 14 November 1994, Statistical Office of Macedonia,

Skopje. .
2 Macedonian Times, April 1999.
3 The main parties in Macedonia are:

VMRO-DPMNE (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization-Democratic Party

for Macedonian National Unity) Founded June 1990, considers itself a successor
of VMRO/IMRO founded 1893. At its third post-1990 congress (29-30 May
1999) declared itself a mass people's party with a Christian Democratic orien-
tation. In September 1998, VMRO-DPMNE created the 'For Change' coalition
together with the Democratic Alternative. In the parliamentary elections in
October-November 1998 'For Change' won 62 seats out of 120, and formed
the government. VMRO leader since 1990, and Prime Minister since November
1998 - Ljubcho Georgievski (born 1965). 49 MPs.
DA (The Democratic Alternative) Founded in the spring of 1998, is centred
around the charismatic ex-communist official Vasil Tupurkovski (Macedonia's
representative in the last Yugoslav collective presidency). The latter master-
minded the controversial recognition of Taiwan in early 1999, which led to a
Chinese veto on the extension ofUNPREDEP's mandate. 13 MPs.
SDSM (Social Democratic Alliance of Macedonia) Ex-communist grouping in
power 1992-98. Leader Branko Crvenkovski (Prime Minister 1992-98). 27
MPs.
DPA (Democratic Party of the Albanians) Leader Arben Xhaferi. liMPs.
PDP (Party for Democratic Prosperity) Leader until March 2000 Abdurahman
Aliti, after that Imer Imeri. 14 MPs.
4 Skopje (Shkup in Albanian and Uskub in Turkish) was the centre of the Kosovo
vilayet (province) of the Ottoman Empire until 1912. On the official site of the
Kosovo Liberation Army the historic Kosovo vilayet, with Skopje, is shown as
one of 'the four Albanian vilayets during the Ottoman Empire', on a map that
purports to show 'Albanian populated territory in 1878, compared with today's
borders' (see http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/Track/4165/albanianmap.
html- accessed March 1999 and March 2000).
5 On the establishment of security co-operation in 1992, see Ljubomir
Frchkovski 'Portret: Gligorov', Forum, 19 November 1999. Frchkovski is
the president of the Kiro Gligorov Foundation (founded in March 2000), the
Macedonian Interior Minister 1991-96 and Foreign Minister 1996-97.
70 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

6 Since 1997 the uncovering of caches of weapons smuggled by the local

Albanians has been a regular activity for the Macedonian police.
7 Additional NATO troops were allowed into Macedonia following difficult
negotiations in late May 1999 (see Nova Makedonija, 29 May 1999).
8 'Divided Macedonia: The Next Balkan Conflict?', Strategic Comments, 5, 5 (June
1999).
9 Macedonian Information Agency, 7 June 2000.
10 Ibid.
11 See Start, 12 November 1999.
12 Start, 10 December 1999.
 9. 'Kosovized' Bosnia

ZORAN CIRjAKOVIC

Three years of peace and more than three billion US dollars in aid
failed to start knitting together the war-torn former Yugoslav republic.
The only reason why Bosnia has survived to this day is the presence
of some 30,000 NATO troops.
Bosnia after the September elections of 1998 was very similar to
Kosovo in the years after 1989: division across ethnic lines ruled
supreme, rather than co-operation. Indeed, three years after the end
of the war Bosnia had become thoroughly Kosovized. Today every
Bosnian town is a 'small Kosovo', where a majority ethnic group out-
numbers minorities by at least nine to one. Even Sarajevo, the symbol
of Bosnian multi-ethnicity, reflects Kosovo's ethnic breakdown with an
estimated 88-92 per cent Muslim majority. The Bosnian Croats,
Muslims and Serbs stopped living together from 1992. New genera-
tions are coming of age without having had any contact with members
of the other two ethnic groups. Close ties nurtured by their parents
and grandparents are now a thing of the past.
In September 1998 all three communities in Bosnia voted for
leaders, who more or less openly advocated the platforms that Alba-
nians and Serbs in Kosovo adopted long ago. They wanted to live in
states where they alone would dominate. Bosnia's ethnic groups live
in ethnically compact territories, divided by invisible but impenetrable
walls. Bosnian ethnic boundaries run through mountains and fields,
sometimes cutting through the very hearts of towns.
In December 1997 the opera singer Luciano Pavarotti, and the rock
stars Bono (U2) and Brian Eno (Roxy Music), came to the 'Eastern'
(Muslim populated) part of Mostar, to open the Pavarotti Music Centre.
Mter the opening I spoke with a waiter, a Croat refugee from Sarajevo,
in the Hrvqje restaurant on the Avenue - the main street of 'Western'
Mostar, designated the 'spiritual and cultural' capital of Bosnia's Croats
- only a kilometre away from the new Pavarotti Centre. Like at least
half a dozen other Croats - the exclusive inhabitants of 'Western'
Mostar these days - he had no idea that the event that brought some
72 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

of the biggest stars of the musical world was taking place in a part of
his new hometown. 'Sometimes a kilometre is longer than a thousand
kilometres', the waiter said. 'If I could live with them [meaning the
Muslims] I would have stayed in Sarajevo.' And Mostar is not the only
example.
Bosnia's ethnic map has changed, and so has the language. The
Bosnian Muslims, who arguably remained the most tolerant commu-
nity in post-war Bosnia, are increasingly using Kosovo's discourse of
the 'Other'. Even in Sarajevo one increasingly hears the mantra of
Kosovo's ethnic hatred - that the Other 'stinks'. In the Svijetlost
bookshop on Sarajevo's main street, a middle-aged Muslim woman was
explaining: 'I can tell a Serb in the street. One can always tell the smell
of a Serb.' In a village outside Tuzla, a waitress banished by Serb forces
from her home in Zvornik, Eastern Bosnia, elaborated: 'I would never
serve a Serb. They can never return here. If they do, they'll pay for
everything they did to me.' Most of Bosnia's Serbs and Croats opted
for similar discourse six years ago.
Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo have been using almost exclusively
derogatory words for decades when talking of the 'Other'. For the
Kosovo Serbs an Albanian is always a Siptar, and for Kosovo Albanians
a Serb is a Shkija. Similarly in today's Bosnia, words like Muslim
(Bosniak), Croat and Serb are rarely used to designate the 'Other'. The
ethnic 'Other' can be nothing but a Turk, an Ustasha or a Chetnik.
Bosnians - Croats, Muslims and Serbs - who once spoke the same
language, are increasingly talking in three different languages. A
weekly newspaper is now hefticnik for Muslims, nedeljnik for Serbs and
tjednik for Croats. Even the towns have different names. What is today
Foca for a Muslim is Srbinje for a Serb. Where the map used to say
Skender Vakuf, Knezevo is written now.
In cities in the Muslim-Croat entity with an existing ethnic minority,
young Bosnians are taught in the school system marked by educational
apartheid that has been in place in Kosovo for almost a decade. As yet
there are no concrete walls dividing Bosnian Muslims and Croats in
schools, as they divide Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. Nevertheless
they sit in separate classrooms and are taught another well-known
Kosovo lesson in geography. When a camera of the Sarajevo-based
television entered a Croat classroom in Bugojno, a town that today has
an overwhelming Muslim majority, the students did not shy away from
showing their newly acquired knowledge of ' the real' Balkan geography.
'Our capital is Zagreb and our President is Franjo Tudjman' they
said in one voice. This might not be what is written in the Bosnian
Constitution drawn up in Dayton, but it is imprinted in their minds.
One can only imagine what their peers are being taught in Croat-
controlled Mostar.
'Kosovized' Bosnia 73

There are many unexpected lessons to be learned in the Balkans.

During the war in Bosnia, many Kosovo Albanians were openly saying
that the Bosnian Serbs and Croats were actually waging their war, and
not their Muslim co-religionists. In the same way today the KLA is
fighting for the Bosnian Serb and Croat cause. Albanian leaders in
Kosovo often talk about removing the Balkan 'Berlin Wall' that
separates them from their ethnic brethren in Albania. But in the post-
Dayton reality this is not the only Berlin Wall in the Balkans. There
are now two more similar walls that many would like to see removed.
So, if the Albanians succeed in removing their wall, then the Bosnian
Croats and Serbs can legitimately demand the removal of the walls
separating their ethnically 'clean' territories from their ethnic 'home-
lands' - Croatia and Serbia respectively.
This is a desire not unnoticed by Bosnian Muslims. But the danger
there is that the territorial breakdown (51 :49) - the backbone of Dayton
- will no longer be acceptable. The inter-entity boundary line that
divides the Bosnian Serb entity from the Muslim-Croat Federation,
and the 'unnamed' but clearly charted line that divides the uneasy bed-
fellows in the Federation, were acceptable for the Muslim leadership
in Sarajevo only if they were to disappear over time - not if they were
to cement the results of wartime ethnic cleansing.
In a series of articles, the independent Sarajevo magazine Dani
presented persuasive arguments for the creation of 'Muslimania'.
Bosnian Muslims should start building their own state, it argued, as
there is no viable political force among Bosnian Serbs and Croats that
would support the idea of a multi-ethnic Bosnian state. The advocates
of ,Muslimani a' make no secret that the quarter of Bosnian territory
that is currently under Muslim control would be much too small for
such a state.
A Bosnian Muslim soldier, sitting on a tank, only metres away from
an American military instructor from the 'Train and Equip Program',
had no doubts what he was being trained for. 'We are preparing to take
over Banja Luka when the time comes', he said. The controversial
scheme, financed largely by the US Government, was designed to
balance the armed forces of the former enemies and to strengthen
regional security. It is more likely that the newly acquired war-waging
skills were to be used to redesign the Bosnian ethnic map. Several times
over the past decade the West had de facto recognized the results of
military actions that it had strongly opposed beforehand. Many in
Bosnia recognized that it might take a long time before such a military
action became possible. But still, poorly hidden preparations were well
underway.
In the first half of 1999 almost 100,000 refugees, mostly Muslim,
were sent back from Germany to Bosnia. None of them went to their
74 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

pre-war homes in what is now Republika Srpska. From refugees living

abroad, they were transformed into internally displaced people. Many
were settled in Sanski Most, a town swollen with Muslim victims of Serb
ethnic cleansing even before the deportations from Germany started.
The choice ofa place like Sanski Most can hardly be a coincidence. The
town is a perfectly suited springboard for the next chapter in the never-
ending quest for the 'final solution' of Bosnia's ethnic nightmare. The
nearby towns of Prijedor and Banja Luka are the most frequently
mentioned 'supplements' to the tiny 'ethnic space' that was assigned
to the Muslims by the flawed Dayton map-drawing.
In such a situation the only solution for the survival of the stillborn
'Dayton Bosnia' is the unlimited presence of Western troops. 'We've
spent billions of dollars. We were giving them carrots for three years.
But these people simply don't want to live together', said a Western
diplomat in Sarajevo after the results of the September 1998 elections
were announced. 'If we were to pack up and leave today the war would
start tomorrow. But still, we cannot stay here for ever,' he added. The
results of the September elections - the victory of Serb hardliner Nikola
Poplasen in Republika Srpska, who openly advocates the unification
of the Bosnian Serb entity with Serbia, and similar victories of no less
separatist Bosnian Croat hardliners - inflicted a mortal blow to the
Western 'exit strategy' for Bosnia. The only remaining option was the
one that 'the international community' always dismissed: partition. It
seems that the only alternative to the costly undeclared protectorate,
with no end in sight, is the break-up along ethnic lines of an already
deeply divided Bosnia.
In Bosnia, the people ready to implement the worst nightmare
scenario were never in short supply. Left to their own devices, they are
set to start a new war to avenge past atrocities. But there is a ray of
hope even if the West decides to give up the maintenance ofthe costly
Bosnian truce.
In April 1998 an aide of Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova
told me that 'Drenica is Kosovo's Srebrenica'. The interview took place
on the day when the body-count of killed Drenica Albanians was no
more than 80. The inter-ethnic wall in Kosovo had been erected
decades ago and utter separation was all-encompassing in Kosovo's
parallel worlds. The ethnic 'Other' existed only as evil embodied,
unlike in Bosnia before 1992.
In Bosnian towns people from the three ethnic groups had been
living together for centuries. And some three years ago in Srebrenica,
the only way to prove that the new enemy - often a beloved neighbour
from the other ethnic group - was the dangerous 'Other', was to kill
him. The similarities - deemed necessary to be stamped out - resulted
in the slaughter of 8,000 Srebrenica Muslims.
'Kosovized' Bosnia 75

If Kosovization continues to win over integration in Bosnia at least

the looming war there might be less bloody. The talk of yet another
bloodletting in Bosnia might sound overly pessimistic but the Balkan
record in opting for the greater evil provides little ground for
optimism.
This page intentionally left blank
PART II
This page intentionally left blank
 10. Bombing Yugoslavia: It Is Simply
the Wrong Thing to Do
(written in March-April 1999)

KYRIL DREZOV and B ULENT COKAY

As images of atrocities flicker across our television screens, we are

appalled and shocked by the scenes of human devastation on our
doorstep. The tidal wave of refugees flowing out of Kosovo is causing
an equal tidal wave of sympathy for the sufferers amongst people from
all classes in Western societies. This upsurge of very human and
seemingly noble emotion has so far done precious little for the refugees
themselves, but already has had very beneficial consequences for the
politicians responsible for the NATO decision to bomb Yugoslavia. It
has exonerated them from any personal responsibility about possible
misjudgment ofMiloseviC' s reactions, and has justified, with hindsight,
their decision to bomb Yugoslavia. Whatever the wisdom of it, people
are saying, the present humanitarian catastrophe is so appalling that
it has to be undone by any means possible, and its perpetrators
punished. The escalation of the bombing campaign that we are cur-
rently witnessing quite predictably brings about more misery and more
refugees, and this state of affairs is then used to justify further NATO
escalation, the introduction of ground troops, the creation of safe
havens - the 'liberation' of Kosovo.
There is no doubt that there is something seriously wrong and
vicious with current Serbian policies towards the Kosovo Albanians. In
order to defeat the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army - itself no model
of toleration - the Serbian forces have indiscriminately killed civilians,
and have forced the migration of hundreds of thousands of people.
Such policies have to stop. Bombing Yugoslavia, however, is the wrong
method by which to achieve this desirable objective. It is wrong in
international law, and wrong in practice.
An undeclared war against Yugoslavia sets a bad precedent for
NATO, because it is contrary to the purposes and the historical tradi-
tions of the alliance. It violates both the spirit and the letter of the North
Atlantic Treaty that solemnly commits its signatories to respect the
80 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

Charter of the United Nations (preamble, art. 1, art. 5, art. 7 and art.
12), and to use force only if one of the member states is attacked (art.
5). In the name of such lofty principles NATO members had repeatedly
condemned past Soviet intimidation of small and vulnerable states,
and it was a tribute to NATO's steadfast commitment to these prin-
ciples that all former Soviet satellites have sought to join NATO after
the end of the Cold War.
The decision to interfere with the sovereignty of a European state
by ordering NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia is the first time a
violation of this sort has happened since the Warsaw Pact invasion of
Czechoslovakia more than 30 years ago. Has any Western politician
noticed the dismay that such action is causing amongst both politicians
and ordinary people in Prague? The Czechs know what it means to
receive ultimatums backed by superior force. This is how they were
treated in 1968. They also know what happens when 'the international
community' takes interest in the plight of ethnic groups that are
struggling to secede. This is how the fate of Czechoslovakia was sealed
in 1938: the ethnic group that actively worked for its destruction - the
Sudeten Germans - in the end lost all their rights, their institutions
and their property, and were brutally expelled from a homeland that
they had inhabited for hundreds of years.
The Kosovo Albanians have good reason to reflect what happens
to communities that set themselves maximalist goals that they cannot
win by themselves. They have already paid a heavy price for calling on
NATO to bomb Yugoslavia: in one week they lost their 'parallel state'
with all its institutions - presidency, administration, parties, an edu-
cation system, 20 newspapers and magazines, publishing houses and
an information agency. This impressive infrastructure was built after
the Albanian-dominated institutions of Kosovo were abolished in 1989
and it was entirely maintained by taxes levied on all Kosovo Albanians,
both in Kosovo and in Western Europe. And most importantly, until
the last month this openly secessionist 'parallel state' was tolerated by
Milosevic and the Serbian authorities: its president Ibrahim Rugova
resided in Pristina and travelled abroad on a Yugoslav passport, and
for the last ten years the Albanian newspapers in Kosovo had complete
freedom to write whatever they wanted. This last point is well worth
repeating, because it flatly contradicts the Western propaganda picture
of President Milosevic and his regime: the last daily report circulated
by the 'Kosova Information Center' in Pristina on 24 March (hours
before NATO started the bombing of Yugoslavia) began with the words
of an aide of President Rugova 'NATO Should at Long Last Strike
Serbian Targets'. Not many separatist movements anywhere in the
world have ever enjoyed such freedoms.
There is no doubt that Milosevic is a brutal leader, and that his
Bombing Yugoslavia 81

present policies against the Kosovo Albanians are vicious. But is he so

exceptional? In the name of freedom and Western values, the Anglo-
Saxon powers have backed regimes around the world that have treated
dissident ethnic populations no better than Milosevic. Some of the
NATO countries involved in the 'humanitarian' bombing of Yugoslavia
are themselves engaged in brutal wars with separatist movements. In
Turkey thousands have been killed and nearly three million people
have been displaced in the war between government forces and the
Kurdish equivalent of the Kosovo Liberation Army - the PKK. British
citizens should reflect on all that when they hear Tony Blair solemnly
declare that 'Our side is right, and the other side is wrong'. This
misplaced 'crusader mentality' is already costing Britain dear: the need
to present a united EU front on Kosovo has helped the French to win
a postponement for six years of reform of the Common Agricultural
Policy, with all that that entails: continued waste of money, continued
destruction of the British countryside, yet another postponement of
the eastern enlargement of the European Union. British taxpayers will
also have to support thousands of refugees displaced as a result of ill-
judged decisions by their elected leaders. Defence spending will also
have to go up, no doubt expertly justified with the need to 'contain' a
Russia infuriated by NATO's present policing of Europe.
NATO leaders have started this war by claiming that it was the only
way to halt the violence in Kosovo and to prevent further humanitarian
catastrophe. Precisely the opposite has happened: by inviting NATO
air strikes the Kosovo Albanians transformed themselves into 'fifth
columnists' hated by the vast majority of Serbs, they lost their hard-
earned 'parallel state' in Kosovo and are currently being expelled on
a massive scale while Yugoslavia prepares for further acts of NATO
aggression. Western leaders responded to the fiasco of their initial
policy by sanctimonious denials, intensification of the bombing cam-
paign and rejection of all negotiations with Yugoslavia other than its
outright capitulation to NATO demands. While initially it looked as if
the ground war would be fought only to the last Kosovo Albanian, now
there is talk of the 'liberation of Kosovo' and parallels are sought with
the liberation of Kuwait in the Gulf War. This is a recipe for further
disasters: the moment ground troops start concentrating in Macedonia
(and this can only happen by stealth, by ignoring the strenuous
objections of the Macedonian government and majority population),
Milosevic will have no option but to attempt a takeover of Macedonia
before NATO consolidates its hold over it. He is likely to succeed in
this far better than NATO: there is absolutely no chance that the
Macedonian army and police will shoot at invading Serbs in order to
protect an unwanted NATO springboard for a 'liberation of Kosovo'.
Amongst Slav Macedonians there is no sympathy whatever for the
82 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

Kosovo refugees or for their own separatist Albanians: the appearance

of Yugoslav troops will lead to a mass flight of Macedonia's Albanians,
and this alone will ensure the former an ecstatic welcome by the
Macedonian Slavs. And the effective reintegration of Macedonia in
Yugoslavia will lead to jubilation in Greece, because it will 'solve' the
Macedonian problem in the way most Greeks have always wanted.
There is still a way out of the madness of bombing and further
escalation: a new round of genuine negotiations between the Serbs and
the Kosovo Albanians, brokered by a genuinely neutral mediator under
the aegis ofthe United Nations. The Rambouillet 'negotiations' were
a sham, and the NATO participants there were anything but neutral:
both parties were presented with a plan that was 'non-negotiable',
backed by threats of bombing which applied only to the Serbs, and by
promises to the Kosovo Albanians that their signing of the document
was the only way 'to bomb the Serbs' out of Kosovo. This policy ofulti-
matums and bombs has brought misery on all the parties involved:
hopefully, this experience might have humbled them sufficiently to
give a new chance to peace. Any new negotiations must be conducted
without coercion, and with the same patience and respect for the
parties involved that characterized the negotiations that led to the
Good Friday agreement about Northern Ireland. A similar agreement
on Kosovo should be based on the principles established by the 1975
Helsinki Final Act, which include respect both for the existing borders
in Europe, and for human rights. A third way has to be found between
expulsion and secession: a solution for Kosovo that will combine
Serbian sovereignty with complete freedom for the Kosovo Albanians
to develop and preserve their ethnic identity. As for NATO, it should
return to what it has done best over the last 50 years, namely, to
guarantee the sovereignty of its existing members. Its present policy
of aggression is illegal, immoral, impractical and very dangerous.
 11. Should NATO Bomb Serbia?
(written in March-May 1999)

CHRISTOPHER BREWIN

Two years of indecision and weakness by the Western democracies have

shown the Serb leadership - and any other potential aggressors on this
Continent - that territories can be taken by force and people can be evicted
en masse without any decisive counteraction ... [We have] given the impres-
sion, no matter how untrue, that the Muslim populations of Europe have
less right of protection than their Christian counterparts.
Manfred Worner, NATO Secretary-General, December 1993

More than five years after this statement was made, I find myself
among the people who support the bombing of Serbia. Lacking
ground troops, this bombing from the air may not be decisive but it is
a strong counteraction, and it seems to have the full support of the
Kosovo refugees themselves. However belated, NATO's decision to
implement Richard Holbrooke's threats has been heavily criticized
both as to its aims and because the means chosen are so designed to
avoid casualties among the implementing forces, that the collateral
damage on the ground must be disproportionately great in Kosovo
and in Serbia. Russian opposition to singling out Serbia has made it
impossible to obtain a new UN mandate. The Greek, Italian and
German governments will have to face substantial public opposition to
the bombing. In the UK respected voices from across the political
spectrum have refused to support the action. The Conservative ex-
Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington and Labour's former Defence
Minister Lord Healey can be singled out as examples. I have been
impressed by Noam Chomsky's powerful battery of arguments that
Kosovo is an instance of a general propensity to unjustifiable inter-
vention, partly because I too have been opposed both to the Vietnam
and Gulf wars. It so happened that I was lecturing on NATO in the
week the decision to bomb was announced: a straw vote among the
students present showed an overwhelming majority opposed to the
action. It is because the opposition to this action is so widely based that
84 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

I want to begin by trying to establish a measure of agreement between

opponents and supporters of this devastating bombing in the name of
humanitarianism.
First, we can all agree that there is a tension in international law
between the principle of international respect for established borders
and the principle of international protection of humanitarian rights
where they are undeniably being infringed by deliberate state persecu-
tion of their own citizens within those borders. On the one hand non-
intervention by outsiders in the self-determination and the territorial
integrity of recognized sovereign states has been affirmed in the UN
Charter and in the intellectual justification of European decoloni-
zation. If it was wrong for Hitler to use superior force to impose his
rule on his neighbours, it is wrong for European states to impose their
rule by right of conquest and historic possession. Intervention that is
not backed by a specific mandate from the UN Security Council
requires particularly strongjustification. Inconsistently but realistically
the diplomats who wrote the UN Charter recognized in Article 51 that
it might be permissible for regional security organizations to keep
the peace when a veto from a permanent member precluded action.
NATO planning for intervention against a communist takeover in Italy,
and Warsaw Pact intervention in Hungary and Czechoslovakia were
based on this possibility.
Second, on the other hand, the Nuremberg trials began a process
of developing humanitarian law which implies a duty of states to other
states which limits what they can do within their recognized borders
and in war. Crimes against peace and humanity have become as
important in the international law of human rights as war crimes. In
revulsion at Hitler's attacks on Jews, homosexuals and gypsies, what
states do within their borders in targeting their own citizens for being
of the wrong race, religion, political or sexual affiliation has become a
legitimate concern of other states. This is not to claim that this concern
has generally resulted in bombing. Just war doctrine includes the
criterion that there must be a reasonable prospect of success. Western
European states did not go to war to defend Hungary in 1956 or
Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Since narrowly defined national interest became the dominant
criterion of policy in the post-imperial decades, it has to be admitted
that humanitarian concern has generally been limited to verbal
protest, expulsions from international organizations or economic
boycott. Sweden and the Netherlands protested to the European
Commission of Human Rights on behalf of Greeks who were not their
own nationals. Then all states acquiesced in the Colonels' response of
withdrawing from the Council of Europe. In the case of Cyprus , peace-
keeping forces were sent to keep the warring parties apart, but there
Should NATO Bomb Serbia? 85

was no willingness to take military action either against the Greek

Cypriot non-aligned government for its treatment of Turkish Cypriots
before 1974 or against the Turkish government when its military
intervention went beyond its right as a guarantor to restore the bi-
communal Constitution of 1960. European recourse to the United
Nations, awaiting results from intercommunal talks under the aegis of
the Secretary-General was the accepted substitute for effective but
costly military action.
If we can agree that since 1945 there has been this tension between
recognition of the borders of self-determined states and a novel
international concern for what is done to groups within the borders of
sovereign states, it is also uncontentious to say that this tension is
peculiarly acute in Central and Eastern Europe. This tension goes back
before 1945. Thus the League of Nations supported the creation of
new states according to the principle of self-determination in place
of the historic dynastic claims of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian,
German and Russian empires. For the League the minorities question
was largely focused on Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, despite inter-
national declarations and Soviet suzerainty, it is a hard fact that the
proportion of those belonging to minorities has been substantially
reduced by the wars and population movements of the twentieth
century. Depending on the criteria used, between 1919 and 1989 the
proportion of those belonging to minorities has been reduced in most
of these states from over a third of the population to under a tenth. A
more particular point is that Albania in the twentieth century did not
recover from its repeated failures to incorporate any of the Albanians
left outside its territory in Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia or Greece.
It is also relevant that a nationalist Germany might one day reverse its
present powerful commitment to peaceful relations with its eastern
neighbours by demanding the return of its 1938 frontiers, or of Upper
Silesia or of Konigsberg. If relative power and national interest became
again the dominant criterion of German policy it might even demand
from its western neighbours a reallocation of the postwar territorial
division of the North Sea, made before the discovery there of large
reserves of oil. Since 1989 the member states of the European Union
have considerably increased their commitment to the principle of the
sanctity of existing borders unless changes have won the consent of all
parties.
At the same time the European Union, now more committed to a
multicultural self-image, recognized that there would be dangerous
minority problems of secession and irredentism. Reaffirmations of the
need to respect minorities as well as existing borders were included
along with invocations of the market economy and democratic plural-
ism in EU agreements with all the states of Central and Eastern
86 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

Europe. A doctrine of conditionality was developed as a carrot-and-

stick inducement to good behaviour from ex-communist states. Bilater-
al stability pacts were promoted by the EU to reduce the danger of
state-promoted irredentism by promises of respect for minorities with
kinship allegiance to neighbouring states. These pacts are now the
responsibility of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in
Europe.
For its part, the OSCE has been equally forthright in asserting that
all participating states are concerned in how each treats its minorities.
Politically binding commitments were drawn up in 1990 at Copen-
hagen, and in 1991 at Moscow it was accepted that these are 'matters
of direct and legitimate concern to all participating states, and do not
belong exclusively to the internal affairs of the state concerned'.
Third, we can all agree that this diplomatic activity was not tilting
at windmills. On the one hand, nationalist kith and kin sentiment in
Hungary and Romania does seem to have been constrained by the felt
need to respond positively to this international pressure. On the other
hand the Croat, Serb and Bosnian wars happened. Lord Carrington
was the unhappy British Foreign Secretary who had to agree to the
recognition of Croatia and Slovenia seceding from multi-ethnic Yugo-
slavia without the consent of all parties. U ntiI the United States brought
NATO into the frame, EU negotiators were weakly drawing maps and
making compromises which added up to a betrayal of the principles
on which the EU was supposedly founded.
So, far from inhibiting ethnic cleansing, the EU negotiations could
best be interpreted as recognizing that future order in the Balkans
depended on accepting a forced congruence between ethnicity and
territory. Sanctions hurt Serbia, but not enough to end the military
attacks on Sarajevo. NATO Secretary-General Worner's lament quoted
above expresses the guilt felt by some supposedly well-armed Western
policymakers, a sentiment reinforced by the refusal to intervene in
Rwanda despite knowing the extent and nature of the genocidal Hutu
attacks on Tutsis and dissident Hutus.
Now let us move to the areas of discord, beginning with the Dayton
agreement. Those who favour the present bombing campaign inter-
pret that agreement as a direct consequence of the combination of
NATO air strikes legitimized by a UN Security Council mandate with
a land war between Croatia and Serbia, which forcefully 'cleansed' the
Serbs who had moved into the Krajina. Some, but not all, of those who
oppose the present bombing, object that Holbrooke's strong leader-
ship by-passed the Contact Group and accentuated the unfair stigma-
tizing of Serbia by glossing over the ethnically motivated attacks on
Serbs by non-Serbs in general and Croats in particular. Some argue
Should NATO Bomb Serbia? 87
that by underplaying the Croat role, policy-makers over-estimated the
effect of NATO bombing on President Milosevic.
However we interpret the Dayton agreement, it did nothing to
reward Ibrahim Rugova's non-violent stance in Kosovo, and seems to
have encouraged the Kosovo Liberation Army to believe that attacks
on Serb police and civilians were needed if self-determination for the
Albanian Kosovar majority was to be realized. These attacks seem to
have stimulated an increase from March 1998 in the Serb repression
of Kosovars, which had been the order of the day for the decade fol-
lowing MiloseviC's abolition of Kosovo's autonomy in 1989. American
ambassador Chris Hill estimated that 1,500 Albanian Kosovars were
killed between March and October 1998 and thousands more had fled
their homes. The threat of NATO air strikes in October 1998 was
universally credited with inducing a halt to the violence and the Serb
agreement on 12 October to withdraw some of their forces. Observers
under OSCE auspices were to monitor the cease-fire and to supervise
elections and a census. The massacre at Racak in January was only one
indication of Serb bad faith at the beginning of 1999.
At Rambouillet, international diplomacy attempted to flesh out UN
Security Council Resolution 1199, urging a peaceful settlement.
Ambassadors Holbrooke, Hill, Boris Mayorski and Wolfgang Petritsch
sought Kosovar agreement to the preservation of the territorial integrity
of Yugoslavia for three years. They attempted, under the threat of
bombing, to secure the withdrawal of Serb tanks, the end of physical
attacks on Albanian Kosovars and the concession to Kosovars of a high
degree of self-government monitored by an international presence
with rights of access to Contact Group troops through Yugoslavia. The
breakdown of the Rambouillet talks was followed by a renewed Serb
offensive in Kosovo which drove a further 25,000 Kosovars from their
homes in just a week. The Berlin Summit of EU heads of state and
government estimated that this brought the total number of persons
displaced since March 1998 to 440,000, one-fifth of the population of
the province. I
It was against this background of ongoing aggression that the
US and its European allies decided to carry out the threats they had
made at Rambouillet and in subsequent talks in Belgrade between
Holbrooke and Milosevic. No land army was available - partly because
there was not yet a European army in place and partly because public
opinion in the disparate states of Europe and the United States had
not reached the point of being prepared to risk their own citizens' lives
in Balkan conflicts where there is no threat to their own citizens or
their national interests narrowly defined. No credible alternative was
available. Diplomacy had failed, and the Russians were prepared to
88 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

veto a UN Security Council Resolution. Embargoes on Serbia and

recourse to the Hague tribunal amounted to acceptance of continued
attacks by Serb military and paramilitary forces on an unarmed
Kosovar population. For the past 50 years, NATO deterrence has been
based on air war for which ground troops have only been a tripwire
or delaying mechanism. The credibility of this alliance of 19 nations
could not have been maintained at the moment of its fiftieth anniver-
sary if it had betrayed the Kosovars and rewarded Serb aggression.
Whatever the outcome of NATO bombing, Serbia will pay a high
price for its attempted subordination and expulsion of the over-
whelmingly Kosovar majority of its province. In the short term it is
likely that there will be an increase in the number of refugees displaced
from Kosovo. In the medium term there will be enormous costs in
rebuilding the infrastructure of Serbia and Kosovo. It is likely that
there will be a Greater Albania, as feared by the Former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia and Greece. In the long term, NATO bombing
without the use of ground forces will point up the need for a European
army if aggressive nationalism is to be deterred without resort to the
destruction associated with air war. As America retreats from Europe
the states of Europe will have to go beyond calculations of national
interest to assert a pan-European common interest in a milieu where
both borders and groups are safeguarded subject to changes agreed
by those affected, as in the case of German reunification.
Meanwhile, in conclusion, it is understandable that the Western
European response to the deliberate mistreatment of people for being
of the wrong race, language-group or religion continues to be inde-
cisive. Bombing from 15,000 feet is itself a sign of weakness in that the
purpose is to limit the risk to our pilots' lives when our national interest
is not directly involved. It may not be enough to increase the cost
to nationalists of attempting to eliminate those of other nations. It
may be too much in leading to a Western protectorate as in Bosnia
where the basis of rule - superior force and a degree of impartiality -
is insufficient for legitimate and efficacious rule by the new breed of
'internationals' .
Nevertheless it is sufficiently probable that an air war conducted
by 19 nations will force the Serbs to accept Kosovar autonomy or
to give up Kosovo altogether if their violence to the majority in the
province makes any semblance of Serb rule there intolerable. If Kosovo
is divided to allow Serbia to keep a northern part containing most of
the monasteries and minerals and repopulated by ethnic Serbs, then
this would be to reward aggression. Even if this compromise is the
outcome, the resort to bombing in response to Serb atrocities in their
own province seems to me the minimum necessary for Europeans who
tell themselves that Hitler, Stalin and Leopold of Belgium were wrong
Should NATO Bomb Serbia? 89
to eliminate and subordinate 'inconvenient' peoples. It is not imperial-
ism in the sense of establishing direct or indirect rule for motives of
gain or power politics. It implements the UN doctrine enunciated by
ex-President Galo Plaza of Equador in his 1965 report on Cyprus that
to promote the 'compulsory movement of the people concerned [is]
contrary to all the enlightened principles of the present time'.

NOTE

Part Three of Berlin Conclusions.

 12. Looking Neither Forward Nor Back:
NATO's Balkan Adventure
(written in May 1999)

ANDREW FEAR

'We had to destroy the village to save it.' This observation, uttered in
the Vietnam War, aptly describes the self-defeating futility of NATO's
tactics in Kosovo. No bombing campaign since the Second World War
has achieved the aim of imposing a democratic regime on its victims.
NATO's Kosovo venture looks equally doomed. Mter 50 days of air
bombardment, and disregarding grandiose rhetoric, NATO has
achieved the following:
First, the mass expulsion of Albanians from Kosovo. There is no
doubt that the Milosevic government had a plan to effect this prior to
NATO's intervention; even its name is known, Operation Horseshoe.
However, NATO's bombing has provided the ideal excuse to put this
plan into effect. Prior to NATO intervention, violence in Kosovo, which
we must remember was practised by both sides in the conflict, was on
the level of that found at the time of ' the troubles' in Northern Ireland:
unpleasant enough, but hardly intolerable in terms of world brutality.
The bombing on 24 March served as the catalyst for putting Operation
Horseshoe into action. The world was warned. Milosevic threatened
to behave exactly as he has done. The tragedy is that NATO had the
irresponsibility to act in a way which provoked MiloseviC's actions
without having devised any strategy able to stop them. So far almost a
million people have been forced from their homes and NATO bomb-
ing which provoked this round of ethnic cleansing has shown itself
powerless to stop it. The Bosnian experience suggests that fewer than
a quarter of these displaced people will ever see their homes again.
Second, the destruction of democratic politics in Kosovo. Along
with the expulsion of the Albanians has come the annihilation of their
unofficial 'parallel state'. This was previously tolerated by the Milosevic
regime, but NATO's actions have provided the ideal excuse for its
destruction. With its dismantlement has come the total marginalization
of the only Kosovar politician with a democratic mandate, Dr Ibrahim
NATO's Balkan Adventure 91

Rugova. Given Rugova's opposition to NATO's actions, NATO has

chosen to ignore him and deal instead with the terrorist KIA, a group
with no democratic mandate and ironically having its roots in the
Stalinism of Enver Hoxha. It has no coherent structure and is strongly
linked to organized crime. It is doubtful whether the KIA is in fact
a unitary body at all. All of this suggests that even if NATO were to
drive Serbian forces from Kosovo - something which at present seems
unlikely - the post-war Kosovar political landscape will make unpleasant
viewing, particularly if, as is rumoured, the KIA, or factions ofit, have
been involved in the assassination of moderate politicians it opposes.
Third, the destruction of credible opposition politics in Serbia itself.
The war has provided the ideal excuse for the Milosevic regime to
clamp down on media opposition which was untouchable in the past.
We have seen the closure of the B-92 radio station, and murder in
suspicious circumstances of major opposition newspaper magnate,
Slavko Curuvija. The bombing campaign has forced opposition figures
as diverse as Crown Prince Alexander and the Democratic Party of
Serbia to back, with heavy hearts, the Milosevic regime. One can hardly
expect those whose country is being bombed to welcome the fact. The
result has been that, despite Western rhetoric for the Serbs to 'rise up'
against Milosevic, those who once protested against him are now
standing on the bridges of Belgrade as voluntary human targets. The
gulf between NATO rhetoric and what its policy has in fact produced
could not be wider.
Fourth, the potential destruction of opposition to Milosevic in
Montenegro. President Djukanovic and his liberal regime have long
been a thorn in the side of Milosevic. Now, using the justification of
the war, the Montenegrin government finds itself increasingly under
siege from units of the Yugoslav army and navy operating in its
territory. Leading opposition journalists who once found a haven here
have decided to flee. Belgrade has long wished to bring Montenegro
to heel; NATO has given it the excuse it needs.
Fifth, increasing 'collateral' damage. This has culminated in the
bombing of the Chinese embassy, a product of what has been aptly
called by Alan Clark MP, the 'gung-ho opportunism' of the USAF. Such
damage will increase as the bombardment goes on. There will be fewer
smart and more dumb weapons, and the range of targets they are
deployed against seems to increase daily - the intended target in the
Chinese fiasco was situated in a residential area of Belgrade. Among
the collateral damage has been the truth. An initial NATO pledge not
to attack the Yugoslav media has been reneged on, with fatal results
for non-combatants. It is difficult to see a 27-year-old make-up girl as
a vital part of MiloseviC's war machine. This, along with NATO's verbal
gyrations over its attack on the refugee convoy near Prizren, has left
92 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

many confused and has had the tragic effect of creating the illusion in
many neutral countries that the Western media, eagerly listened to in
the past as the voice oftruth, is merely another source of propaganda.
A reputation lost is not easy to regain.
NATO's campaign therefore has been a manifest failure, bringing
about the reverse of its intentions. How was such a disaster produced?
One clue can be found in another quotation, 'The last thing that a
peacemaker wants to know is the history of the region he is going into.
It complicates the task of mediation'. This comment by Major-General
Lewis MacKenzie shows what might be called the 'Diana-ization' of
foreign policy. First, an abstract 'principle', in this case 'ethnic cleansing
is wrong' is selected. Second, any specific repercussions on the area
where the principle is to be applied are not considered. There must
always be a completely right side and a completely wrong side; other-
wise things become 'complicated'. Finally, there is the urge to do some-
thing, anything, to enforce the selected principle. One supporter of
the war (which of course is not a war, as this would run against another
abstract principle), Peregrine Worsthorne, remarked that we must do
something to allow us to sleep at night. This is a prime example of
Diana-ization. The performer's actions have little reference to their
outcome, but are done to satisfy a personal need to fulfil his commit-
ment to his principles. Such an act is primarily a self-centred one. A
stand is made against ethnic cleansing, and so NATO's political leaders
feel good. The fact that the particular circumstances in which this stand
is made force the Albanians of Kosovo to pick up the pieces is a mere
secondary consideration.
Unfortunately for NATO, history does matter in the Balkans and
NATO is attempting to work against its grain. The NATO bombing
strategy is based on the liberal-capitalist vision of homo oeconomicus and
the hope that the destruction of a man's material assets will soon bring
him to his knees. It is combined with the limited vision of Diana-ism,
the view that one side in the great conflict of principles is entirely
wrong, that it knows this and that castigation will bring it to its senses.
Neither assumption is correct in the present circumstances. The
Serbian vision of history is, in the words of Mark Almond, one of 'self-
pity and self-glorification'. Before we become sanctimonious about
this, we should remember that this makes it similar to a much more
fashionable nationalism, that of the Irish. Like Irish history, Serbian
history is constructed around defiance and heroic defeat, that of the
Blackbird Field in Kosovo being only the most famous example. The
old Serb national anthem contained the lines 'out of the darkness of
the tomb, shines the new glory of the Serbian crown'. To a people with
such a perception of history, the current bombing campaign is merely
one in a sequence of glorious acts of resistance. An apt parallel is with
NATO's Balkan Adventure 93

the Second World War where Stalin shored up a discredited, collapsing

political regime with an injection of Russian patriotism. NATO has
given Milosevic the same opportunity. This problem is reinforced by
the simplistic approach of Diana-ism towards guilt. While it is fair to
say that the Serbs are more sinning than sinned against in the current
Balkan Wars, it is foolish to pretend that they have not suffered. To
deny the plight of the Serbs who have been ethnically cleansed from
the Krajina and Western Bosnia merely adds to the Serbian sense of
grievance. In the end an accommodation must be found with the Serbs,
unless, that is, NATO wishes to brainwash or exterminate an entire
people. The best way to achieve this is to treat the Serbs as people, not
demons. It will certainly not come about by bombing them into
submission, an idea which is creeping into the speeches of NATO
leaders. This will merely leave a sullen people convinced of their unjust
persecution and with a tendency to look to leaders who would make
Milosevic seem whiter than white.
Unfortunately, NATO strategy poses a threat not just to the future
well-being and stability of Kosovo and Yugoslavia, but to the entire
Balkan region and beyond. The most serious threat is that to the
one great success story of the collapse of Yugoslavia, the Republic of
Macedonia. Macedonia was the only constituent republic of the former
Yugoslavia from which the Yugoslav army withdrew without a shot
being fired. Since then its government has fought successfully to keep
a potential ethnic powder keg stable, despite world and EU compla-
cency in the face of an illegal trade blockade imposed against the young
state by Greece. The massive influx of refugees caused by NATO's
action threatens this stability, particularly as the KLA has links with the
Albanian separatists of Western Macedonia many of whom see the
establishment of an independent Kosovo as merely the first stage
towards incorporating Western Macedonia into a Greater Albania.
Ethnic tensions have run high in this area before, and the refugee
influx is bringing them back with a vengeance. The destabilization of
Macedonia would suck Greece, Bulgaria and probably Turkey into the
vortex of violence.
Albania too - hardly a model of stability - is threatened by the
refugee influx which will not only put an intolerable strain on the
financial resources of a poor nation, but also upset both the fragile
political balance of the country (unlike the government, the chief
opposition leader Sali Berisha has no time for the KLA) and the ethnic
balance there between Gheg and Tosk, the two main subdivisions of
the Albanian people.
Other factors extend beyond the immediate region. The destruc-
tion of bridges over the Danube in Serbia is presented as a NATO
triumph, but it is a disaster for those countries who use the river as a
94 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

trade artery. Wages and profit margins are low in these states, already
men are being laid off and discontent is rising. Bulgaria's president
Petar Stoyanov has talked about the West needing to create a democ-
racy of prosperity, not a democracy of poverty. The halting of navi-
gation along the Danube may see the eclipse or near eclipse of
democratic forces over a wide area of the Balkans if this problem is not
addressed soon but NATO, more interested in its own reputation than
local stability, seems oblivious to it.
On an even wider scale, there seems little attention given to the
tension that the NATO bombing has caused in Russia, again a country
with a fragile democracy and one that feels consistently humiliated by
NATO's disregard of its point of view.
This leads to a final point. NATO's leadership constantly talks about
the 'isolation' of Russia and their own championing of the 'inter-
national community'. Such claims sit awkwardly with the fact that no
sanctions for NATO's actions were sought from the United Nations.
There is a simple reason for this; no such sanction would have been
forthcoming. The only hope for international agreements and bodies
is if those with the ability to ignore them take notice of them as well as
those who can be constrained to do so. NATO's marginalization of the
UN is an act in defiance of, not in accordance with, the will of the
international community, the majority of whom are opposed to its
actions. It has set back immeasurably any chance that a distinct inter-
national forum will emerge, in particular one that could make binding
decisions against the self-perceived interests of the USA. We have
moved back to the days of gunboat diplomacy, the only difference
being that the weapons are more powerful, although apparently little
more accurate, than those of the nineteenth century.
The Roman poet Virgil, once advised his countrymen, like NATO,
to 'impose the custom of peace'. Perhaps the last word should be
left to an ancient Briton, Calgacus, who was on the receiving end of
such a Roman 'humanitarian' war. According to Tacitus' Agricola he
characterized the Roman endeavour as follows: 'They make a desert
and they call it peace'. 1 Nineteen centuries later nothing seems to have
changed.

NOTE

The entry of NATO troops in Kosovo in early June, after an agreement was
reached with the Yugoslav government, has been officially called 'Operation
Agricola' - Eds.
 13. Gardening
(written in May 1999)

ALEX DANCHEV

The perils of contemporary commentary are severe. This is perhaps

most acutely the case on wars in progress. One benighted commen-
tator on what might be called the 'pre-Kosovo conjuncture' may serve
to illustrate the point:

The old wars worked, in Anglo-American terms, because there was

an easily identifiable adversary - a bogey - either individually or
ideologically framed. As for Guy Crouchback, so for the special
relationship: 'The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful,
all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the
outcome there was a place for him in that battle.' Hence the pax
anti-Germanica, then the pax anti-Sovietica, and, as brief and bathetic
coda, the pax anti-lraqia. But now the Modern Age is over. The Post-
Modern Age has begun. Where is the enemy? There is dearly
unfinished business in the Balkans (and for that matter in the Gulf),
yet a pax anti-Serbia is a risible proposition. Milosevic and his myr-
midons will be swept away like so much scum on the tide of history
without any need of an international coalition to obliterate Belgrade. I

Risible or not, the pax anti-Serbia has come to pass. What are we to
think?
NATO's action, though unprecedented, has a context. Internation-
ally, there is a change in the air. A Pinochet (a former head of state) can
no longer take tea with impunity in Fortnum and Mason. A Milosevic
(a serving head of state) can be indicted for crimes against humanity-
a deliberate echo of that terrible phrase. There is an International
Criminal Court and a determination to make it work. In this climate
- a healthier moral zone - rethinking the legal and ethical norms of
intervention becomes at once permissible and desirable. Tony Blair has
declared: 'The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to
identity the circumstances in which we should get involved in other
96 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

people's conflicts'.2 The old taboos have been broken. Sovereignty is

the last refuge of the scoundrel. Human beings, as Vaclav Havel has
said, are more important than the state. 3 In a porous world, our
obligations to others cannot be ignored. It is in this context that the
intervention in Kosovo has been explicitly, and rightly, couched in
humanitarian terms. It is a prime example of what the German
sociologist Ulrich Beck calls 'military humanism', and what the British
international relations specialist Adam Roberts calls 'humanitarian
war' - an oxymoron, and now an uncomfortable reality.4
In sketching the outlines of 'a new doctrine of international com-
munity', Tony Blair has proposed five considerations bearing on the
decision to intervene. 5 The analysis is apt for Kosovo. First, in his
words, are we sure of our case? 'War is an imperfect instrument for
righting humanitarian distress; but armed force is sometimes the only
means of dealing with dictators.' We are as sure of our case as we can
reasonably expect to be, I think; and the indictment ofMilosevic makes
us surer.
Second, have we exhausted all diplomatic options? Others will
argue that we have not, and that Rambouillet in particular was a
charade. I hold no brief for that process (nor for the rather fake
'negotiation' with Saddam Hussein). But there is ample evidence over
many years of MiloseviC's hypocrisy - to put it no higher - and no
evidence at all of his willingness to negotiate in good faith or to keep
any agreement that does not suit his cynical purpose.
Third, are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently
undertake? Yes, yet this certainly gives pause for thought. The weapons
may be smarter but the weaponeers may not. At the end of this cratered
twentieth century, high-level strategic bombing remains what it always
has been: no more than an expedient, imprecise and imponderable,
incapable on its own of achieving any strategic result. Bombing is a
perfect illustration of 'virtue by proxy', in Michael Ignatieff's telling
phrase: 'not prudence but escapism'. 6 Paradoxically, prudence counsels
ground troops. The history of the intervention is the passage to that
collective realization and tortuous implementation.
Fourth, are we prepared for the long term? Plainly we are not. But
the intervention itself helps to prepare us - a costly but necessary
learning process.
Finally, do we have national interests involved? Barbara Cartland
and Alan Clark are convinced that we do not. I beg to differ. We have
a national interest in Europe (whatever certain factions within the
Conservative Party may say) - in its stability and its prosperity - not to
mention community and humanity in a fragile world. Morally and
territorially, Kosovo is close at hand.
The intervention so produced is nothing to celebrate. This
Gardening 97

intervention, like all actions of its kind, is wanting in so many ways. It

is picky, tardy, lippy, sticky and, above all, bloody. That is to say, it is
indeed - as the critics charge - selective, late, manipulative, erratic and,
in many cases (too many cases), fatal. We should acknowledge these
shortcomings. But what conclusion should we draw? Not to stop doing
it, I suggest, but to do it better. Needless to say, this is not a comfortable
position. There is no comfortable position on Kosovo.
The columnist William Pfaffhas observed succinctly that, 'the deter-
mination of the previous generation of American policy-makers to
allow "no more Munichs" led to the Vietnam war. The determination
of this generation to allow "no more Vietnams" promises another
Munich.'7 We are navigating half-blind between intervention and
abstention, quagmire and quittance. We can struggle to do the best we
can - and perhaps fall in - or we can give up, like Candide, and cultivate
our garden. The choice is clear and so too are the consequences. As
Havel has said, 'the idea of non-interference - the notion that it is none
of our business what happens in another country and whether human
rights are violated in that country - should .. , vanish down the
trapdoor of history'. 8 Kosovo is a good place to start. This is no time
for gardening.

NOTES

Alex Danchev, 'On Friendship: Anglo-America at the Fin de Siecle', in idem, On

Specialness (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 161, quoting from Evelyn Waugh,
Men at Arms.
2 Tony Blair, speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, 22 April 1999, p. 7.
3 Vaclav Havel, 'Kosovo and the End of the Nation-State', New York Review ofBooks,
10 June 1999.
4 Adam Roberts, 'Humanitarian War: Military Intervention and Human Rights',
International Affairs, 69 (1993), pp. 429-49, originally the first John Vincent
Memorial Lecture at Keele.
5 Blair speech, p. 8.
6 Michael Ignatieff, 'Introduction: Virtue by Proxy', in Alex Danchev and
Thomas Halverson (eds), International Perspectives on the Yugoslav Conflict
(London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. ix-xix.
7 Quoted in editorial, 'A choice that cannot wait', Guardian, 7 May 1999.
8 Havel, 'Kosovo'.
 14. Rational Means to Useful Ends
(written in May-June 1999)

MICHAEL WALLER

I think it is fair to say that the main bone of contention in discussions

on the war over Kosovo has been more one of means than of ends. To
make my position clear at the outset, I should state which of the
multiple aims that have motivated forces outside Serbia I favour. There
are two of them: first, that of promoting the stability of Europe through
the development of democracy and, second, in association with that,
reducing to the minimum human suffering in the struggle to that end.
I hope to show that there has been a remarkable mismatch between
ends and means in the thinking and actions of many of those who
profess to espouse this goal. Drawing some conclusions from a war that
has itself not concluded at the time of writing in June 1999, I shall
argue that the bombing of Yugoslavia will have frustrated those goals
through the response that it invited and duly received; and that a
failure to understand the predicament of the Serbs on the fall of com-
munism in Yugoslavia can only have as one of its effects the slowing-
down of the construction of democracy in the Balkans.
It could indeed be concluded that there has been a far more general
mismatch between goals and means. First, if keeping the dislocation of
people, the burning of their houses and the raping of women to a
minimum was a goal, then the bombing was a singularly badly chosen
means to that end. Taking a second example, if one of the goals was
weakening Milosevic or removing him from power, the worst possible
means for achieving it was to unite the Serb people around him in
collective outrage by the bombing. Each of these cases is included in
the argument of this essay. There is, however, one perspective, and I
think it is the only one, in which ends and means correspond perfectly,
and that is the containment of Russia by weakening Serbia. But in so
far as that has been an aim of the bombing strategy, to cloak it in an
argument from humanitarian considerations sketches out horrendous
scenarios for the future.
The fact that NATO went to war without any clear objective and
Rational Means to Useful Ends 99

with no exit strategy cannot but suggest that the bombers' calculation
was that neither of these things ultimately mattered. Confidence in
military and technical superiority, linked to the absence of inter-
national constraints, meant that Serbia could be drenched in bombs
with impunity, to the extent of collaterally bombing a number of
foreign embassies in Belgrade and even a neighbouring capital city. It
is true that the need for actual ground invasion was avoided - though
it was certainly entertained - and few will believe that that option would
not have been taken had the need arisen. But what is striking in this
story is that total superiority was assumed, and it was equally assumed
that total force would be deployed - and could be deployed free of
major international constraints. The lesson that should be drawn from
the outcome of this assumption is that total force invited, and could
be held to justiry, a total response. We know what that response was -
the expulsion of almost the entire Kosovar population. This is not to
condone in any way the expulsions, let alone the burning of villages
and the rapes. It is to say that if NATO had wished to encourage these
atrocities being pushed to their extreme, it could have found no better
way of setting about it.
The argument against this line of thought is that only bombing
Serbia would ensure that the expelled refugees could return home.
The answer to that counter-argument is that the fewer refugees there
are to be returned the easier the task of returning them will be.
Moreover, as these words are written in mid-June 1999, we have so far
seen only the first half of the results of the chosen strategy. We have
still to witness how the return of virtually the total Kosovar population
- many of them now without documentation - will be managed, in
circumstances of a continuing guerrilla struggle between Kosovar
freedom fighters and Serb irregulars that NATO, with its control of
the towns and the daytime, will be powerless to control in the hills and
at night. It will take years - literally years and not just a long time - to
effect the return of the refugees and to establish a stable order. Nor is
there any reason to believe that, when the bulk of the job has been
done, the residual tensions, and the problems that will face the forces
of protection which will have to remain during the whole of this
process, will last any shorter a time than those that have afflicted, for
example, Northern Ireland.
Those who condemned the bombing must accept that any other
form of response to a deteriorating situation in Kosovo could itself have
resulted in massive expulsions. They may also, as have I, have to accept
that once the bombing had started, with all the misery and confusion
that stemmed from it, it had to be continued alongside diplomatic
moves. The point is simply that it is regrettable that the struggle for
democracy in Balkan countries must go on in the face not only of
100 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

strong-arm internal foes, which is bad enough, but also of external

military forces determined to establish peace by creating a desert.
A second conclusion is unusually open to misinterpretation and to
meet this misinterpretation head on I shall present it in its most pro-
vocative form. It is that with the media reasonably seeking to assuage
a reasonable appetite for sensation, doing nothing at moments of high
tension is no longer an option. It is the 'nothing' that is provocative,
but I can retreat from it at once, because the nothing is always a matter
of simply carrying on with an existing policy. Those who said that
'something must be done' on the eve of the start of the bombing meant
'something must be done beyond what we are doing now', and it was
the latter that was excluded by the media images of burned villages
and of the early - at that point limited - expulsions. The existing policy
meant continuing with the painfully slow and always uncertain process
of diplomacy, acting within the framework of the UN, and keeping in
Kosovo the eyes, ears and cameras of the world community. It might
not have stopped the atrocities but, again, it could not have done
anything worse than the bombing achieved. So it was that the media
coverage required the elected governments of the Western world to
press NATO to 'do something' - that is, to bomb the Serbs - which in
turn gave the Serbs, highly or lowly placed, a justification for indulging
in ethnic cleansing, rape and the settling of scores.
This effect of the media was predictable enough to justify the view
that the bombing was included in MiloseviC's original plans, and was
part of a trap set by him into which NATO obligingly fell. This is sup-
ported by the Serb leadership's evident preparedness for the bombing
through hiding military hardware and by its refraining from an overt
military response. In which case, using the media to determine an
opponent's policies must be counted among the many new ways of
conducting warfare that recent conflicts have produced - along with
the high-level bombing and the instrumental use of populations
through expulsions and rape, so many continuations ofClausewitz by
other means.
The case of Munich is sometimes produced as an example of the
dangers of meeting grave challenges through diplomacy, but this is the
most superficial of comparisons. Vile reptile or nationalist leader,
Milosevic has been leading his people in defending the integrity of the
reduced Yugoslav state from Kosovars who seek independence in
much the same way as have the Basques in Spain, and from foreign
governments who dislike his methods. That they are right in objecting
to his methods must be allowed, but the Serbs are not attempting to
invade and war down other states of Europe. A better parallel is
precisely that with the Spanish leadership in relation to the Basques,
and rather than beg impossible questions analysts would be well
Rational Means to Useful Ends 101

advised to turn to the differences between these two cases. This I shall
now attempt to do - by sketching in the Serb part of the comparison,
on which I have a little more expertise.
Once again I would like to protect myself against being misunder-
stood. My aim is no way to excuse atrocities, which I totally deplore
and fully accept have been taking place, but to contribute to a discus-
sion that will reduce the chances of their recurring in the future and
might lead to the Serbs being brought into a proper communion with
us, their fellow Europeans .
. Students of political science are introduced, normally in their first
or second year, to the way in which European states passed through a
series of crises in the process of their establishment and consolidation.
The first of these crises is that of establishing the relationship between
territory and people, which provides a framework on which a future
legitimacy of government can rest. That turning point once past, there
is an authority on that territory with which the subjects of the state can
identifY or, if need be, can be made to identify. This can take place early,
as in the French, Swedish or Russian cases, it took place a little over a
century ago in the cases of Italy and (in its modern form) Germany,
and the strains of this process of state formation can be held to be still
affecting those states that owe their origin to the settlement at the close
of the First World War.
Among the last, Yugoslavia was a special case. In a way that is too
complex to compress into a brief description, both the inter-war
kingdom and Tito's Yugoslavia gave the Serbs a privileged position but
prevented a clear picture forming of what Serbia would be should the
other components of Yugoslavia go their own ways. This resulted in
an agony of introspection in the 1980s - which incidentally, of course,
was the moment when Milosevic was reassuring the Serbs in Kosovo
that they would not be abandoned, since those Serbs were very
reasonably amongst the most anxious. In a word, the Serbs have been
caught out by history. They have come far too late to their crisis of state
formation, and moreover are attempting to tackle it in circumstances
when the national state can itself be claimed to be becoming an
anachronism.
Other states of Europe were able, in an earlier age, to establish
themselves without having to give an account of the blood shed and
the lives lost. Over the Atlantic, the United States eliminated popula-
tions in the name of a 'manifest destiny'. It is the Serbs' misfortune to
be afflicted with the rather limited sense of a manifest destiny in the
form of rallying their people into a clearly defined state at a time when
such things do not justifY the crimes against humanity that they occa-
sioned in the past. It worries us Westerners that Karadfic in Bosnia,
and Milosevic in Serbia, might feel the call of a 'manifest destiny' to
102 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

lead the Serb community at a critical turning point in its history. It

appals us to think that the Serb community might support that idea
and endorse the leadership's policies. It is not for me, nor I think for
anyone else, to apologize for the fact that the Serb community reacts
in this way. Misha Glenny in his work The Rebirth of Historyl published
as communism fell in Eastern Europe, threw up his hands in despair
at the equally strident nationalism of both Croats and Serbs. It is rather
for the political analyst to despair of the journalist, and for us all to
consider what Lucretius says of Epicurus - that he was fortunate in
being able to know the causes of things.
This is necessarily a patronizing judgment. The Serbs have lessons
to learn that we Westerners have learned already. They must skip
some of the bits of the lesson and get on to the later bits. They must
be educated. Unfortunately, this element of patronization has been
endemic in the discussion of modernization, in which Western develop-
ment has provided the goal to which all modernizing regimes should
tend. Given the horrors that human beings are capable of inflicting on
each other, many would settle for the patronization in the name of
stability and harmony among the nations. But in that case, if education
is what it is all about, let it be an affair of mutual understanding -
indeed of mutual education - and, above all, let the putative educators
not attempt to beat selected pupils into a submission that will prolong
entrenched animosities which in turn will frustrate the goal of democ-
ratization. That is the damage that bludgeoning the Serbs while
claiming to be ousting Milosevic will certainly inflict on Serbia. If this
conclusion appears sentimental or tendentious in the way it has been
put, it can quite well be put in other terms as simply an explanation of
why some Serbs have been behaving in such an atrocious, bloodthirsty, .
ignorant and licentious way.
And so to the mismatch between a goal of doing something about
Milosevic and bombing Serbia as a means to that end. Getting rid of
dictators has all the appeal of abolishing sin, but is by no means a
straightforward matter. It calls, first of all, for an analysis of the dic-
tatorship itself - its causes and its historical embeddedness. It also
requires reflection on the alternatives to any given dictator, and on
whether a system would fall with him or whether the hydra would
sprout further heads. It will be recalled that the etymologically original
dictator of Roman times was thought up as a device to save the state if
it was in peril. The bombers saw Milosevic as an isolated autocrat but,
in so far as he was that, the actual bombing 'Romanized' him.
In terms of historical embeddedness, Milosevic can be seen as just
another of the very many semi-dictators who during the twentieth
century, including the communist years (in fact especially then, and
unlike in the Soviet Union), inside Yugoslavia and outside it, have
Rational Means to Useful Ends 103

proliferated in Europe's backyard constituted by its southern peri-

phery. His style has been termed a 'pasha' form of politics by Ognjen
Pribicevic, himself a leading Serb analyst. What is special in the Serb
case is the conjuncture, and what I have outlined above as the Serb
predicament.
As for alternatives, at the time of writing - as the NATO forces
advancing into Kosovo mark a Serb defeat - the successor, should
Milosevic fall, could well be either his arch-nationalist Vice-President
Seselj or a puppet put and held in place by Western economic power
or political leverage. The totalizing strategy of bombing, among its
other unfortunate results, will in all likelihood turn out to have done
the democratic opposition in Serbia no favours at all.
In sum, whatever agendas lie hidden behind the strategy of
bombing Serbia, the professed aim of promoting democracy and the
kind of stability that can come with it are quite at variance with that
strategy. If the promotion of democracy is indeed to be our aim, it
behoves us to understand Serbia and the Balkans in general, and
to acknowledge the inequalities and marked differences in history
and culture that comprise the complex and still fissile geopolitics of
Europe.

NOTE

Misha Glenny, The Rebirth of History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993).

 15. Kosovo: Why Intervention was Right
(written in May-June 1999)

MATTHEW WYMAN

The slaughter of 45 Kosovo Albanian civilians by Serb irregulars at

Racak seems likely to come to be regarded as a singular moment in
modern world history. It was an event that triggered the breakdown
of a stable set of rules of the game for the international community,
and is leading to a rethink of norms and priorities on the part of many
countries and international organizations. What the massacre at Racak
initially triggered was an abandonment by the United States of its
policy of attempting to preserve stability in the former Yugoslavia, a
policy which had forced the international community to turn a blind
eye to many of the worst atrocities taking place in an exceptionally
violent part of the world. However, this abandonment of neutrality in
the face of evil had many, perhaps unforeseen, knock-on effects.

WHY IT WAS RIGHT FOR NATO TO ATTACK SERBIA

In my view, what Racak crystallized for Western policy-makers was the

peculiar awfulness of official Serb policy towards ethnic Albanians
within Kosovo. By this time, many thousands of Kosovars had already
been forcibly displaced from their homes. However, in order for this
deliberate ethnic cleansing to be completed successfully, intimidation
had to be stepped up. Serb authorities were more than happy for this
to be done through violence and racist murder. They would, of course,
turn an official blind eye to what was happening on the ground,
nevertheless ignoring murder clearly amounts to its condonement.
To justify a military response to this humanitarian outrage, one
clearly needs to be satisfied that all other avenues had been closed off.
While contributors to this volume differ in their views about the
Rambouillet negotiations, my own view is that history will show that,
in the political climate of Kosovo in early 1999, there was never any
chance of a mutually acceptable negotiated agreement being reached.
Kosovo: Why Intervention was Right 105

While the bottom line for Kosovo's Albanians was security arrange-
ments that genuinely protected them from MiloseviC's goon squads,
Serbia inevitably saw any such arrangements as an unacceptable
violation of its territorial sovereignty. For the Serbian government,
the mantras of sovereignty and territorial inviolability, and myths
about Kosovo's centrality to the Serbian nation, as well as the domestic
political climate, made this impossible.
It is also vital to stress that, in other ways, a decision to intervene
was forced by events. Mter ten years of seeking to resist Serb domi-
nation by peaceful means, the patience of Kosovo Albanians was clearly
worn thin. The KLA, which had not made much headway until the
late 1990s, was able to increase recruitment and step up its activities.
The situation was such that civil war was a real possibility even if
Western powers had continued not to intervene.
Critics of military intervention argue that it was the NATO inter-
vention itself that caused ethnic cleansing on the scale that occurred
during the war: hundreds ofthousands were displaced, anything from
10,000 to 100,000 Albanians were killed. In my view, this is a most
confused moral judgment. Who was responsible for the killing of in no-
cent civilians, including women and children? Who was responsible
for the rape camps? Who brought about the deliberate forced expul-
sion of most of the Albanian population? And who can be blamed for
the looting and burning of Albanian homes? If someone is being tried
for murder, does the fact that they were provoked remove their
personal responsibility for their actions? Evidence gathered since the
end of the bombing shows the extent to which removals of populations
were a deliberate, timetabled policy. It also demonstrates the deliberate
targeting by police and paramilitaries of Albanian intellectuals,journal-
ists, teachers, politicians and other members of the community who
are central to creating conditions of civil society and peaceful co-
existence.
Another justification for intervention, in my view, is that in the long
run it will be constructive for Serbia, for Albania and for the whole
Balkan region. This will, of course, be of little consolation to Serb
families whose loved ones were killed. However, military defeat forces
the Serb nation to confront a series of traumatic but crucial questions.
Is it desirable, at the end of the twentieth century, to continue to believe
that land and buildings (monasteries) are more important than the
people who live in your country? Is it any longer appropriate to
continue to believe that Orthodox Serbs are so superior to Muslim
Albanians that any kind of suppression or worse is justifiable? How do
Serbs want to relate to the outside world: as partners working together
for joint goals or as competitors engaged in a brutal struggle for
survival where one country's gain is another country's loss? Do the
106 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

Serbs as a nation want to continue to be led by neo-fascist demagogues

who promise national glory and prestige, but deliver only misery,
humiliation and sacrifice? Some of these questions - in particular about
co-operation versus conflict - apply equally to the Kosovars.
As regards south-east Europe more widely, this conflict represents
a window of opportunity for coming to grips with some of the many
remaining injustices and tensions within the region. The implicit threat
of continued military force may concentrate the minds of political
leaders who would otherwise feel free to act with impunity. While the
minds of the international community are focused on the region, it
is likely that moves will be made to address some of the economic
and security problems that are so hindering the prospects of many
countries.
A further argument against intervention needs to be addressed,
namely that it represents gross hypocrisy on the part of the West to
intervene in Yugoslavia when there exist so many other comparable
conflicts where it does nothing: in Kurdistan, Tibet and East Timor to
name just three. This argument is bizarre. Because you do nothing in
one situation, must you always do nothing? As argued by Alex Danchev
elsewhere in this collection, considerations of achievability and a judg-
ment of the likely after-effects must be a part of one's decision making.
And, given the existence of a range of conflicts involving brutal abuse
of one ethnic group by another, one has to start somewhere. Any
general will tell you that it is sensible to fight only one enemy at a time.
Another criticism of intervention seems to me to be on the verge of
paranoia. This is the view that there were sinister, imperialistic motives
for the American-led NATO intervention. It was suggested that the
war was fought either for territorial gain or to further the interests of
the military industrial complex. What possible national interest could
there be in spending billions of dollars on this war or on committing
troops for peacekeeping indefinitely? Personally, while not under-
estimating the importance or influence of the defence industry in
domestic politics, I find absolutely no evidence that it is the only, or
even the most important, influence on Western governments. Such a
criticism smacks of the blindest kind of knee-jerk anti-Americanism.

THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR

Should action have remained restricted to bombing? Or should

ground troops have been used at an earlier stage? It is tempting to be
wise after the event and say that the decision to restrict action to an
air campaign has been clearly proved to be the right one. Military
historians will no doubt vigorously debate the point for decades to
Kosovo: Why Intervention was Right lO7
come. All that I want to say is that it is only too easy to criticize from
the sidelines. Whichever strategy had been chosen would have been
open to criticism. People criticize the air war as somehow cowardly, and
as increasing the scale of the atrocities on the ground in Kosovo in the
short term.
However, it seems to me that one has to have some sympathy with
leaders who were certainly not elected to send soldiers to their deaths
in the Balkans, who were aware that public opinion in many NATO
countries did not favour the use of ground troops and who were worried
that sending in land forces might well have led to splits within NATO
and the consequent failure of the operation. Which of us would honestly
want to have to make the choice between casualties from among their
own armed forces and a greater number of casualties among Serb and
Albanian civilians? If you decide to go to war, you can be certain that
some of the things for which you are directly responsible will be
difficult to accept. I do not imagine that Bill Clinton or Tony Blair, or
any of the other political leaders involved, feel any pleasure at the
deaths of a thousand Serb civilians, or at the bombing of the Chinese
embassy or at the damage to Serbia's infrastructure. However, like them,
I believe that collective decisions have collective costs. The dominant
hatred and fear towards Albanians and defiance towards world public
opinion have had measurable consequences for the Serbian people.
That said, it is difficult to remain sanguine about some of the things
that happened in the course of the bombing campaign. In particular,
the environmental issues raised by Andrew Dobson elsewhere in this
collection are ones that should not be swept under the carpet. Ex-
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, shortly after the end of military
action called for consideration to be given to banning certain kinds of
actions (such as attacks on nuclear installations) as well as some
weapons (including ones containing depleted uranium). This is
certainly something that should be considered.

THE AFTERMATH

The NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia represents an extra-

ordinary turning point in the modern world, with an outcome possibly
as dramatic as the effects of the collapse of communism in 1989-91.
The full implications are by no means clear, but what is certain is that
international relations, as well as the domestic politics of several states,
will be profoundly altered as a consequence. At global level, a doctrine
at least potentially undermine.d by events in Kosovo is the fatalistic
mantra of non-intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states.
Processes of globalization and increasing interdependence were in
108 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

any case making this monument to cynicism and resignation appear

increasingly anachronistic. The decision to attack Serbia in response
to a deliberate, state-sponsored campaign of ethnic cleansing (or, less
euphemistically, racist murder) sends an unambiguous signal to brutal
regimes elsewhere. In my view, this is a most positive development.
President Clinton, soon after the commencement of hostilities, made
an entirely appropriate parallel with the process of child-rearing.
When a child badly misbehaves, the kindest thing to do is to take action,
not to ignore it. This is particularly true when its actions cause injury
to others. To condone or excuse anti-social behaviour because of its
origins, whether poor parenting or accidents of history, is to miss the
point.
The indicting of Slobodan Milosevic and other senior Serb political
figures for war crimes represents a new departure for the international
community. It raises a number of questions which, although present,
have been ignored for decades. What is the institutional mechanism
for these indictments to be acted on? Will justice be subordinated to
the goal of post-war stability as in Bosnia where indicted war criminals
remain active? Or will the outcome be as unimpressive as the Inter-
national Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which has concluded just five
cases in the period since its establishment in 1994?
On an institutional level, there are also profound global impli-
cations. The Kosovo crisis makes it difficult to ignore weaknesses in the
operation of many of the more important international organizations:
the United Nations and some of its subordinate institutions, NATO
itself, the European Union and pan-European structures such as the
OSCE. It is clear, for example, that, as presently constituted and
organized, the United Nations Security Council is unable to act in
many situations that cry out for global response, because of the
idiosyncrasies of one or more of its permanent members. In Kosovo,
NATO sought for the first time to step into this particular breach.
However, because of the circumstances of its birth and development
during the Cold War, and indeed its post-1989 behaviour, NATO is an
institution that does not engender trust in many parts of the world.
However misconceived one believes, for example, Russian and Chinese
suspicions of it as an organization to be, they can hardly be ignored if
the search for an international system genuinely protective of basic
rights and human dignities is to make progress. The Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) continues to face
difficult questions about its mission. What actually are the mechanisms
- beyond influencing world public opinion - through which it is able
to have an impact on the protection of human rights in member states?
Is it appropriate to keep its mission so limited given that it is one of
the few respected trans-European institutions?
Kosovo: Why Intervention was Right 109

Major strategic questions also emerge for the countries of the

European Union. It is clear that military operations in Yugoslavia
could not have been carried out without the participation of the United
States. The US provided the overwhelming majority, around four-
fifths, of the armaments used to conduct operations in Kosovo. The
structure of most European armed forces remained relatively unre-
formed from the Cold War period, and inappropriate for an operation
involving the projection of force beyond national boundaries. There
was, in other words, no possibility of a European response to a Euro-
pean problem. Thus questions of the level of post-Cold War defence
spending, of the extent of European defence co-operation and of
restructuring of the composition of, and likely missions of, European
armed services have been opened up.
Let us now turn to the implications for some individual states.
Clearly one country whose domestic politics have been very greatly
impacted by events in Kosovo is the Russian Federation. The crisis in
many ways sums up Russia's crisis of identity, captured by the academic
debate about Eurasianism. Should Russia be just another country,
following international norms and codes of conduct? Or should she be
special and do things her own way? A number of points occur. First,
the crisis demonstrates that Russia does have a central role to play in
international relations in some parts of the world. Without the actions
of President Yeltsin's special envoy, Viktor Chernomyrdin, it is unlikely
that President Milosevic could have been persuaded to back down so
soon. Yugoslavia is by no means the only country that feels such ties
with Moscow.
However, second and more importantly, the crisis exposes for
Russia the problems in some of the conceptions driving her foreign
policy. For instance, her continuing great power vanity was exempli-
fied by Yeltsin's anger about being unable to influence the course
of military action, and insistence on Russian participation in peace-
keeping operations. Furthermore, there is still a sense in which Russia
continues to premise actions on the strategic concept of defensive
space, on the creation of a buffer zone between herself and perceived
threats. Hence her continued frustration at the expansion of NATO.
This preoccupation with 'friends' and 'foes' tends to blind her to the
nature of certain states: certainly very little concern was shown within
Russia about the fate of Kosovo Albanians. It also tends to make
genuine co-operation with other countries, these days the best form of
national defence, much harder to achieve.
The institutional organization of Russian policy-making has been
shown up as something of a fiasco in the course of the crisis in Kosovo.
Boris Yeltsin has, for personal and practical political reasons, always
sought to maintain a diversity of views within his administration. This
110 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

has the benefit of meaning that he can effortlessly shift positions in

reaction to various political pressures. But for the outside world, the
effects are infuriating. In dealing with the Russian Federation,just who
is speaking for the Russians with authority and negotiating in good
faith? Yeltsin's successor may want to evaluate whether this deliberate
ambiguity is good for his country's international standing and
influence.
Questions are also raised for elements within the political spectrum
of most Western democracies. For the political right, how prepared are
they to accept a doctrine of humanitarian intervention in the internal
affairs of other countries? The real ambiguity with which the British
Conservative Party, as well as the Republican Party in the United States,
approached the war in Kosovo, illustrates the tension. And for the
political left, again, just exactly when are humanitarian interventions
justified? Having been outraged for years about, for example, the cases
of East Timor or Kurdistan,just why is Kosovo so different from these?
Or is, as many suspect, the driving force of their politics simply the
desire to make the United States wrong for its actions, whatever they
happen to be?
I began by describing the Racak massacre as a singular moment
in modern world history. In physical chemistry, the term 'singular
moment' relates to 'open systems', that is, ones which are open to
continual exchanges with the outside environment, such as some
chemical elements, but equally human societies or the international
system. I Most systems are stable when disturbances do not go beyond
a certain degree of intensity. However, a point can be reached at which
fluctuations and disturbances go so far that the system is pushed out
of equilibrium into a state of 'creative chaos'. Out of this chaos a new
stability and order eventually emerges. There is a considerable amount
of randomness about what the nature of this new order of things will
be. Such is the nature of global politics. Let us hope our politicians are
up to the task.

NOTE

1 See lIya Prigogine, From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical
Sciences (New York: Freeman, 1980), and lIya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers,
Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (London: Flamingo, 1984).
16. So Much Expended for So Little Good
(written in March 2000)

JOHN SLOBODA

My motivations for contributing to this debate are personal, not

professional. Motivations are always mixed, but three strands are clear,
probably in this order of magnitude: outrage, guilt and compassion.
I feel outrage that 19 of the world's richest and most powerful
nations could decide that the acceptable response to a perceived crisis
was, first, to undertake over 20,000 high-altitude bombing raids on
one of Europe's poorest nations, causing massive destruction to life,
property, infrastructure and the environment; second, to institute
punitive economic sanctions against that same nation once it had
capitulated; and third, to set up an occupying administration unable
or unwilling to prevent reverse ethnic cleansing and further wholesale
destruction and desecration of property.
I feel guilt that the opposition to NATO has been so ineffective, and
in particular that the British Peace Movement was caught in disarray
and has to date mounted little effective opposition. This is partly due to
the fact that many people like myself had drifted away from it at the end
of the Cold War, foolishly believing our efforts were no longer needed.
I feel compassion for the people of Serbia, consistently demonized
by the leadership and the media of the West, and now traumatized and
broken by the cumulative effect of all that has happened to them, and
continues to happen as the consequences of this tragic misadventure
unfold. Of course, I feel compassion for the Kosovo Albanians too, but
since the might of the NATO and EU machine is orchestrating 'official'
compassion in that direction, I feel my job is to speak up for the Serbs.
These motivations provide me with three personal aims: first, to help
expose and publicize every failing and negative consequence of the
NATO action; second, to work to obtain reparation and compensation
from the NATO and EU purses in respect of the physical and human
damage done by the bombing campaign; and third, to campaign for a
policy for the future which puts the international community at the
service of the majority non-violent civilian population of the region
rather than treating them as pawns in a superpower chess game.
112 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

So why did NATO bomb? First, NATO made a threat and this logi-
cally had to be carried out to its conclusion. Second, although NATO
comprises some of the best brains around, the primitive dogma that
has surrounded war for thousands of years prevailed. Third, the
strategic interests of NATO and the EU gained the upper hand.

'THREATS MUST BE FOLLOWED THROUGH'

'The only thing a bully understands is the threat of force and the cast-
iron determination to follow it through.' This ancient and unintel-
ligent dogma was at the centre of NATO rhetoric throughout the
Kosovo crisis. Once NATO had issued the threat of force to Milosevic,
and had linked this to specified outcomes in a particular round of
diplomacy (involving the Rambouillet Accord), the die was cast. There
was no apparent way out of starting the bombing campaign and
continuing it until Milosevic gave in. Any notions of proportionality
disappeared after the third day of the bombing when the originally
sanctioned 93 targets were exhausted and no surrender was on the
table. NATO 'had to win' / and so stumbled through another 73 days
of bombing, constantly changing both its targeting strategy and the
rhetoric which justified it. There was actually only one agenda - to
win at all costs: not for the people of the Balkans, but for the credibility
of NATO and its prime mover and funder, the USA. Furthermore, it
had to be won without loss of life on any significant scale for NATO
military personnel. Hence the high-altitude bombing, and all the well-
documented tragedies that this caused. 2 The propaganda issued
during the war is now laughable in the light of known outcomes. For
instance, Prime Minister Tony Blair was quoted in the Sun newspaper
on 29 May 1999 as saying, 'The most ambitious air campaign in mili-
tary history is gradually destroying Milosevic's forces. We are doing it
precisely, carefully - and with overwhelming success.' The data now
available shows that much of the Serbian military capacity survived the
bombing. 3 Civilians bore the brunt of the bombing. The claim that the
bombing was 'careful and precise' is manifestly false. More than 75 per
cent of the bombs dropped by the RAF were free-fall, including the
78,057 cluster bomblets released. 4

POVERTY OF IMAGINATION

The NATO nations contain between them the highest concentration

of highly educated people the world has ever known. They have at
their command untold wealth and technical capacity. There is relative
So Much Expended for So Little Good 113

freedom in the exchange of information and ideas. The capacity

(organizational, financial and intellectual) for flexible and intelligent
problem-solving has never been greater at any time in history. And yet
at times of international tension the same primitive dogmas pre-
dominate which have, in essence, characterized inter-group conflicts
for thousands of years. We know that violent reactions to violent
incidents beget cycles of further violence which solve nothing. Most
military conflicts have ended, not because of any real gain for either
side, but because one or other side runs out of resources or resolve
before their opponent. What is left behind is a legacy of hatred and
destruction which sows the seed for further conflict in generations to
come. We have seen this in Vietnam and Iraq, and we will see it in the
Balkans as undoubtedly Russia will see it in Chechnya. War has no
wmners.
An alarming disengagement of creative human intelligence is
apparent when otherwise responsible people are so ready to believe
that there is 'no other alternative' to violence. There are always alter-
natives. For instance, while the OSCE monitors remained in Kosovo
(together with the world's journalists and cameramen documenting
their every finding), the Serb forces were undoubtedly restrained in
their actions to a considerable extent. As soon as the monitors were
pulled out and the bombing began, the level and scale of atrocities
magnified a hundred fold. Robin Cook, British Foreign Secretary,
claimed that the monitors were pulled out because, 'none of us were
(sic) going back to an unarmed presence which the Serb forces could
bully and intimidate' (War in Europe). Why was a strengthening of
this force not considered? It was probably not entertained in part
because the international community had not put the resources into
the creation, training and alerting of the appropriate numbers of non-
military personnel that could be capable of rapid deployment. There
were, however, highly trained military personnel languishing in bar-
racks, desperate to show off their unused toys.
The international community must invest at least the same degree
of resources to preparing for and maintaining peace as it does cur-
rently to prepare for and wage war. Without this the world has a grim
and short future.

STRATEGIC INTERESTS

NATO and the EU also have wider strategic interests in the Balkans.
In November 1999 the USA finally signed an agreement with Turkey,
Georgia and Azerbaijan, to run a new oil pipeline from the Caspian
Sea to a new Turkish port on the Mediterranean. 5 John Wolf, President
114 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

Clinton's special adviser on Caspian energy issues is quoted as saying,

'This is much more than just an oil pipeline ... It's a contribution to
the strategic vision of a new Eurasian co-operation, and an important
part of the economic and political prospects for the region.' This is
barely disguised economic greed on the part of the USA. Kosovo has
given the USA an excuse to re-insert a huge American military presence
within striking distance of this development, to keep Russia at bay.
Russia's Defence Minister, Igor Sergeyev, accused Washington of trying
to usurp Moscow's traditional influence in the region in the hope of
depriving it of control of the Caucasus and the Caspian basin. 6 Serbia
is probably Russia's last friend in Eastern Europe and this is why the
USA cannot tolerate Milosevic remaining in power. Turkey, whose
human rights abuses equal those of Milosevic, is a friend of the USA,
and so its own brand of ethnic cleansing is largely ignored or condoned
by the Western leadership. The hypocrisy and self-interest is blatant,
and undermines any claim that NATO motives were predominantly
humanitarian. This is about economic and political imperialism.
Turkey is not the only country in the region whose crimes have been
overlooked by NATO. Lord Carrington, former UK Foreign Secretary
was widely quoted as saying, 'I don't think Milosevic is any more of
a war criminal than President Tudjman of Croatia who ethnically
cleansed 200,000 Serbs out of Krajina'.7

DID THE BOMBING DO ANY GOOD?

There are major debates in train about the legality of the NATO action.
There was no specific UN Security Council authorization for the
bombing. It fell outside NATO's core rationale as a purely defensive
alliance. There are serious questions as to whether it fell within
international law, and equally serious questions about the judicial
impartiality of those who might be in a position to deliberate on the
issue and offer a legitimate verdict. There are also major moral issues
at stake. Paramount among these is the issue of proportionality. The
numbers game is by no means over at the time of writing, and will
probably never be resolved totally. It is abundantly clear, even now,
that the estimates of Kosovo Albanians killed by Serb forces were
grossly exaggerated before and during the bombing. US Defence
Secretary William S. Cohen raised the possibility of 100,000 male
Albanian deaths. 8 At the time of writing, forensic teams working in
Kosovo have discovered no more than 2,000 bodies, of all ethnic
backgrounds, whose deaths may have occurred at any time in the
preceding year. 9 The ghastly possibility still remains that NATO killed
more people than the Serbs. However, there are those who might be
So Much Expended for So Little Good 115

prepared to set all these legal and moral grey areas to one side if it
could be demonstrated that the means, however flawed, had produced
significant desired ends. In the context of the humanitarian justifi-
cation of the NATO action such desired ends must relate primarily to
the wellbeing and security of the civilian populations of the FRY and
of surrounding nations.
Whilst the bombing achieved the limited objective of the withdrawal
of Serb forces from Serbia, there is hardly any other positive outcome.
The following consequences are entirely negative:
1 Direct civilian deaths through bombing are estimated at
between 500 and 1,500. 10 Thousands more were injured.
2 The bombing caused at least $50 billion worth of destruction,
with no clear commitment from any party concerning who will
pay for the repair work, or when. II
3 There was a massive increase in deaths consequent on the
bombing, the most harrowing of which relate to miscarriages
and premature births caused by the trauma suffered by preg-
nant women during the bombing. 12
4 Psychological illness was caused on a massive scale among the
civilian population, including post-traumatic stress and depres-
sion. A Human Rights Watch report concludes that in at least
nine cases of bombing there was no conceivable military target
or justification for the action. 13 This is particularly true of the
destruction of bridges in northern Serbia, and the infamous
bombing of the Serb Radio and Television Headquarters in
Belgrade on 23 April. The report concludes that 'around-the-
clock bombing in these and other cases seems to have been part
of a psychological warfare strategy of harassment undertaken
without regard to the greater risk to the civilian population',
pointing out that 'there is almost a complete lack of any public
accountability by any of the national NATO members for mis-
sions undertaken in the NATO alliance's name'.
5 Enormous negative economic consequences have been created
for neighbouring countries that rely on the ability to navigate
the Danube, now blocked by bombed bridges. As long as the
Danube remains unnavigable, billions of dollars are being lost,
particularly in Hungary. 14 Figures submitted to the Internation-
al Danube Commission also show significant losses for Croatia,
Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, the Ukraine and Russia. 15
6 Massive healthcare problems have been created. Hospitals and
psychiatric facilities have been destroyed or damaged, and ren-
dered totally unable to cope with the human aftermath of the
bombing. Sanctions are preventing rapid reconstruction. 16
116 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

7 The democratic opposition to Milosevic has been undermined

and thrown into disarray. Many Serbs who oppose his regime
are now implacably alienated from NATO and the EU. They
claim the sanctions have served only to cement the power of the
Milosevic regime. 17
8 The rate of killings and other atrocities in Kosovo has remained
unchanged during the months after the end of the bombing,
and no different from what it was before the bombing. Only the
ethnic composition of the victims has changed. IS
9 Reverse ethnic cleansing has taken place in Kosovo, which is
now almost free of Serbs, Roma, Jews and other minority
groups. 19
10 There is de facto rule in Kosovo by the KLA, which previously
Madeleine Albright and Robin Cook denounced as a terrorist
group.20 OSCE notes that human rights violations are now being
carried out by the KLA in Kosovo. These 'include executions,
abductions, torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,
arbitrary arrests and attempts to restrict freedom of expression.
House burnings, blockades restricting freedom of movement,
discriminatory treatment in schools, hospitals, humanitarian
aid distribution and other public services based on ethnic back-
ground, and forced evictions from housing recall some of the
worst practices of Kosovo/Kosova's recent past.' 21
11 Serbia now houses the largest concentration of refugees in
Europe since the Second World War. It still hosts about half a
million people who fled from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia.
But the total number of displaced people in the country now
exceeds 700,000 as non-Albanian residents of Kosovo began
fleeing the sou them province since mid -1999. 22
12 NATO's humiliation of Russia after the bombing probably
secured Yeltsin's downfall, and augured a new Cold War.23 NATO
bombing was not the cause of MiloseviC's capitulation; even
NATO's commander in Kosovo, Brigadier Michael Jackson,
admitted that it was Russian diplomacy that ended the war.24 But
NATO then cynically denied Russia the substantial independent
role it has expected in the Kosovo peace force, directly pro-
voking the hugely dangerous confrontation at Pristina airport
- over which General Wesley K. Clark (Supreme Allied Com-
mander Europe, NATO and Commander-in-Chief, US Euro-
pean Command) could have started the Third World War if
Jackson had not faced him down 25 - and indirectly provoking
an escalation in the Russian military action in Chechnya, which
directly copied many of the tactics used by NATO.
So Much Expended for So Little Good 117

13 Deep mistrust concerning the motives of NATO and the EU in

Asia and other parts of the Third World has been created. 'The
message sent is that any regime to which the United States and
the European Union take a dislike is susceptible to American or
NATO bullying - provided it is small enough to be bullyable
without serious risk.' 26
14 Democracy has been flouted in many European countries. The
UK went to war without even cabinet approval, let alone a vote
of parliament. Despite over 90 per cent popular opposition to
the bombing in countries such as Greece, their governments still
participated fully in the war. Since the war, there has been
massive parliamentary support, particularly from France and
Italy, to lift EU sanctions, but to no avail. 27 The perceived
powerlessness of the democratic voice is likely to encourage a
resurgence in violent non-democratic protest. The anti-USA
demonstrations that disrupted last year's World Trade Organi-
zation Summit in Seattle were on the mild side of what we can
expect in the future.
15 There is a complete absence of consensus concerning the next
steps, and near anarchy in Kosovo. 'The NATO allies cannot
agree whether Kosovo should continue indefinitely under UN
administration, move to independence, or return to Serbian
control ... These unresolved issues, all foreseeable, are diplo-
matic landmines, liable to explode at any time. Kosovo (like
Bosnia) has become an intervention without end.'28 At the time
of writing in February 2000, Mitrovica looks set to become one
such flashpoint. This is exacerbated by the failure of NATO and
EU nations to deliver on their promises of personnel and
economic aid. The UN operation in Kosovo is essentially broke,
and some officials have not been paid for months. 29 Paddy
Ashdown, then leader of the UK Liberal Democrats and sup-
porter of the NATO bombing, said the following: 'If history is
generous to us it could well say that the Balkans wars ... came
before Europe was ready - it had not yet prepared the
institutions for dealing with them. We have no such excuse for
not stabilizing the peace ... I remain unconvinced that the unco-
ordinated policies that we follow will deliver a stable peace.' 30

WHY IS THERE SO LITTLE UNDERSTANDING?

The prevailing view of the 'mad bad Balkans' whose peoples are fuelled
by ancient enmities is a myth perpetrated in the West to obscure its
own role in creating the present instabilities. According to Misha
118 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

Glenny, most of the practices and attitudes which dominate Balkan

politics now were acquired as a direct result of the 'fateful imperialist
decisions' taken by the great powers at the Congress of Berlin in 1878
to regulate and control the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The
fragmentation of the Balkans without respect to race, culture or
religion was undertaken to meet the strategic interests of the great
powers. 'From the specific example of Italy and Germany ... the small
circle of Balkan state builders learned one central lesson - force
determines history. And force means a strong state, centralization, and
a powerful army. These were not Balkan traditions, they were Western
traditions.' 31
There is a tragic need for human beings to find some person or
peoples or ideology in whom they can project the embodiment of all
that is evil in the world. It is doubly tragic when the rich and the
powerful project all the evil in the world on to the weak and the
powerless. The vast majority of human suffering in the world is caused
by the economic and political inequalities which concentrate control
of most of the world's resources in the hands of a tiny minority of its
peoples. This places responsibility for these sufferings squarely in the
hands ofthe First World nations, predominantly today those that form
the NATO alliance. Set against the vast backdrop of the global tragedy,
the sufferings of the Kosovo Albanians, real and terrible as they are,
hardly register on the scale. Milosevic and the Serbian people he claims
to represent are pathetically easy targets for the self-righteous slogans
of Western politicians, eagerly amplified by a largely subservient and
corrupt media. The real evil is in our midst. We made the Balkan
people in our own image. We don't like what we see, and so now we
have to destroy our own creation.

NOTES

The British Prime Minister Tony Blair - interviewed in War In Europe, a three-
part television documentary, broadcast on UK's Channel 4, 23 January, 30
January and 6 February 2000.
2 See for instance NATO, Crimes in Yugoslavia: Documentary Evidence, Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, July 1999
(generally known as 'The White Book').
3 So minimal was the damage to Serbian military personnel and weaponry that
the official Ministry of Defence report (Kosovo: An Account of the Crisis - Nato
Air Strikes (at http://www.mod.uk!news/kosovo/account/intro.htm) refuses to
report the Supreme Allied Commander's Battle Damage Assessment, which
also appears nowhere on the NATO website. The report ends with this fatuous
comment: 'In the final analysis a successful military campaign is not just about
material destruction or a numbers game. It is about the impact on the
psychology of an aggressor. How much damage did we do? The answer has to
be "enough".'
So Much Expended for So Little Good 119

4 John Pilger, New Statesman, 24 January 2000.

5 OSCE Summit on European Security held in Islamabad 17-18 November
1999, attended by the heads of 54 nations, including Presidents Clinton and
Yeltsin.
6 Guardian, 16 November 1999.
7 First reported in SAGA Magazine, September 1999, p. 6.
8 On CBS Face the Nation, 16 May 1999
9 See, for instance, John Laughland, 'The Massacres that Never Were', Spectator,
30 October 1999.
10 Civilian Deaths in the NATO Air Campaign, Human Rights Watch, February 2000,
http://hrw.org
11 Jane's Defence Weekly, October 1999.
12 United Nations Population Fund: Interview with spokesperson Corrie
Shanaghan, reported on BBC News, 21 September 1999.
13 Civilian Deaths in the NATO Air Campaign, ibid.
14 Robert Fisk in Independent, 28 November 1999.
15 Business Financial Times Weekend Magazine, 16 October 1999.
16 Red Cross of Yugoslavia, reported in Committee for Peace in the Balkans Newsletter,
House of Commons, November 1999.
17 Independent, 1 November 1999.
18 Amnesty International, report EUR 70/136/99, published 23 December 1999.
OSCE report, Kosovo/Kosova: As Seen, As Told, Part II, December 1999. Inter-
national Crisis Group report Violence in Kosovo: Who's Killing Who?, 2 November
1999.
19 See Human Rights Watch Report Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: Abuses against
Serbs and Roma in the New Kosovo (D III 0), 8 August 1999.
20 John Pilger, New Statesman, 24 January 2000.
21 OSCE, ibid., December 1999
22 UNHCR Federal Republic ofYugolslavia Information Bulletin, January 2000.
23 See How the West Killed leltsin, http://www.stratfor.comlwesternyeltsin.htm
24 Sunday Telegraph, 1 August 1999.
25 Newsweek Magazine, 2 August 1999.
26 David Goodall, 'Is Nato now the world's policeman?', Tablet, 12 June 1999.
27 Agence France Press release, 2 October 1999.
28 Guardian, 2 October 1999, Editorial.
29 UN Wire, 3 February 2000.
30 Hansard, 1 December 1999.
31 Misha Glenny, The Balkans, 1804-1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers
(Granta Books, 1999).
 17. Lessons of Kosovo
(written in December 1999)

MARTIN DENT

Note: What follows is an abridged version ofa paper that was originally written
for the United Nations Religious Advisory Committee.

The bombing campaign is now past history, beyond our power to

alter, and the Kosovo majority are back in their homeland from which
they had been viciously expelled by President Milosevic and his war
machine. However, about 80 per cent of the Serb minority of200,000
have in turn been violently expelled by the Albanian majority. It is
important to approach these issues not as historians, but as people who
think about present duties and future opportunities. In particular, we
do not need to discuss endlessly whether or not NATO should have
undertaken its bombing campaign, and attempt to allocate blame for
the sufferings undergone by many people in the Kosovo crisis. The
whole process is, however, replete with lessons for the future if we take
the trouble to make a proper impartial study.

THE ROLE OF THE UNITED NATIONS

Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the UN, provided an example

of measured response to the war over Kosovo. He made no outright
opposition to the action of NATO, but sought with vigour and wise
diplomacy to bring in an element of UN control and also to involve
the Russians in the peace-making process, through dialogue with all
parties. He realized that the UN could not control the conduct of the
military action, but that it could guide the basic political direction.
This was an essential response to the situation, where armed action
for humanitarian purposes of which the UN approved in general,
could not be undertaken by the forces of the UN itself. The whole
course of the wars resulting from the break-up of Yugoslavia has shown
that at present the UN does not command effective military forces.
Lessons of Kosovo 121

Where it attempts to mount a military operation under its own direct

control, the result can be disastrous, as in the murder by Serb forces
of the Bosnian Muslims in the Srebrenica 'safe haven' which the UN
had promised to protect. Therefore, the enforcement of necessary
measures to put an end to aggression requires the use of the armed
might of NATO or some other coalition. If such a military coalition is
to be effective, the United States, as the most powerful country in the
world, will have to playa key role.
This is a 'piggy-back' situation, where the UN is dependent on
another body to get it across the military river, in order for it to enforce
its policy. This was the case with the NATO action of air and artillery
attacks upon Bosnian Serb forces which put an end to their bombard-
ment of Sarajevo and prepared the ground for the Dayton Peace
Agreement on Bosnia. The important point is to seek ways to ensure
that the policy resulting from this 'piggy-back' action is a good one, and
also one of which the UN approves. In the politics of well-ordered indi-
vidual countries the fighting of wars is generally left to the military, but
the control of the use of armed force and its policy direction remains
in the hands of the representative governments. It must be the same
with the UN on the hopefully rare occasions on which it has to use force.
The eventual establishment of a world order in which war will play
no part, and where swords can be hammered into plough-shares, is a
basic part of the vision ofIsaiah and of Micah, and has been taken into
the teaching of the Christian Church. The Muslim vision also involves,
I believe, the creation of a world of Aman or trustful peace. My own
great-great-great-grandfather Buxton the Liberator remarked, in a
letter to the Bishop of Calcutta in 1844, 'Oh that the Christian king-
doms of the world would combine to outlaw war!'. The same applies
to Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms and to those of no
religious persuasion. This, however, is a long-term goal. In the interim,
we have to be ready, with the support of the UN, to use force, where
necessary, to deter aggression.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF AN EFFECTIVE CIVILIAN

ADMINISTRATION

After their installation in Kosovo in June 1999, UNMIK (United

Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo) and KFOR repeat-
edly found out that an army detachment is not the most efficient means
of dealing with a civil disturbance that is short of outright armed
rebellion. It is certainly most important that the UN should field its
own civilian police force in sufficient numbers, but this may not be
enough. The establishment of an effective civilian administration in
122 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

Kosovo called for district administrators on the ground with a certain

level of competence, given space by their superiors to establish peace,
create relations of trust with both communities and establish essential
justice. Such a task requires political skills and not just the mechanical
following of rules from above; their role must be analogous to that
fulfilled by District Officers in the days of the British Empire. If it is
argued that this places the UN in a more or less colonial situation, one
must reply that this is inevitable for some two or more years. The
important point is to ensure that the UN administers good and not
bad colonial policy in the trusteeship.
The political skills required of UN administrators in Kosovo include
the maintenance of peace and authority by a number of means. One
of these, in the interests of peace and justice, is to go well beyond
the letter of the law or of specific resolutions to indicate to potential
trouble-makers that disorder will bring unpleasant, rather than
pleasant, consequences for them and their cause. Even where it is not
possible to obtain the evidence to prosecute those who actually cause
violence by their own direct action or by advice to their subordinates,
it is essential to let these people know that crime will not pay.
Let me draw on my own experience in a small-scale situation of
threat. In 1958 I was District Officer in Tiv Division in the Middle Belt
of Nigeria. At that time there was great tension between the govern-
ment party, the Northern People's Congress, and the much larger
opposition party among the Tiv, the United Middle-Belt Congress
(UMBC) led by the late ].S. Tarka. I heard from an informant that the
UMBC was planning to instruct its followers to come to the next
market with palm leaves displayed on their persons. The palm leaf was
the symbol of the Action Group-UMBC Alliance. They were then
planning to drive out all the people who were not wearing the palm
leaf, thus making a demonstration of their power among the Tiv.
I realized that if this happened it would be a breach oflaw and order,
but that the presence of a number of police would hardly deter it, nor
catch the culprits, for the market was always a crowded one and the
supporters of the UMBC were many. In the interests of peace and
essential justice I went well beyond my formal powers. I sent for the
local secretary of the UMBC (who owed me a favour since I had
previously used my powers of review to set aside an unjust prison
sentence passed on him by a local court), and told him that I had heard
of this planned act of intimidation of non-UMBC supporters in the
market in three days' time. When he denied any knowledge of this, I
cut him short and said that I knew that the plan had been made, and
that if the proposed intimidation occurred he would find himself in
prison, for I was the District Officer. I asked him if he could stop the
demonstration and he asked me to give him the use of a car. I did this
and also gave him from my own pocket £5 for his subsistence in
Lessons of Kosovo 123

the task. He went round his supporters and on the market day there
was no demonstration of palm leaves and no trouble. Thereafter he
remained a friend of mine. UN administrators also must be tough
when this is required, but must never be pedantic or tyrannical. If a
situation of trust can be created, one's best peacemaking achievements
can often be made unarmed and without escort, as I found in Tiv.

GENERAL ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE

It is an elementary requirement in the setting-up of a new authority,

in an area where former rulers have disappeared, that the new rulers
should create a system of courts to try everyday cases and also provide
a channel for appeal. This was done at a very early stage in the estab-
lishment of authority in properly administered colonial systems, such
as the British. The resolution setting up the UN administration in
Kosovo provided for it to last for a period of 12 months, and gave the
Security Council the power to extend this period. This meant that
Bernard Kouchner and the UN administration had to make thorough
plans for the medium term. At the same time the administration had
to involve the people of Kosovo as far as possible in its structures of
administration, justice and government. Kosovo society has for many
years been a segregated one where Albanians and Serbs use different
education systems, learn different languages and are taught different
versions of history. The consequence of this experience of divided past
history is that there are no inhabitants of Kosovo who think in an
impartial manner; all of them are divided between the Albanian and
the Serb camps.
It will therefore be extremely difficult in the early stages to find
acceptable and impartial local judges. Furthermore it would be an act
of folly to make use of Serbs from Serbia or Albanians from Albania.
They would inevitably be regarded as representatives of one or other
of the two major conflicting groups. However, one could perhaps
copy the common British practice of having a neutral chairman of the
court drawn from the personnel of the administering power and two
assessors, one from each of the two local communities. The difficulty,
of course, will be that the Serb and Albanian populations of the
province are of vastly unequal size and also that the KLA assume that
they are in a sense the victors and thus possess a right to govern
Kosovo. It will need great skill for the UN administrators to win the
co-operation of the KLA at local and central levels without conceding
their perceived right to dictate policy. In the long run, after the end
ofthe UN trusteeship administration, the KLA may well emerge as the
effective holders of political power, but this will have to be through
some process of elections in Kosovo and with luck it will involve a
124 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

measure of coalition with representatives of the Kosovo Serbs, albeit

as junior partners. It must involve also some effective constituent of
judicial limits to executive power.

NEW VERSION OF AUTONOMY

It is difficult to see what participation in the affairs of Kosovo, if any,

there can be from the authorities in Belgrade. The unity of Yugoslavia
may be difficult to retain in any form, despite UN resolutions to this
effect. If it is possible to keep Yugoslavia together, as regards the status
of Kosovo it can only be through a new version of autonomy, which
allows the autonomous province most of the substance of indepen-
dence without the formal status in terms of diplomatic recognition and
membership of the UN. The status of Kosovo, as an autonomous part
of Serbia, should be the mirror image of the status of the Serb part of
Bosnia (Republika Srpska). This implies that a new development of
the federal principle be devised, giving far more autonomy than that
practised in any known federation or confederation. It implies grant-
ing the substance of independence without the formal creation of a
new state. It implies also that the armed forces of the bigger state to
which they are attached will not be allowed access to the territory of
the minority. To allow soldiers of the central government of Bosnia to
go into Pale would be anathema to the Bosnian Serbs, and similarly to
allow the Serbian army to go to Pristina would be intolerable to the
Kosovo Albanians. The presence of Serbian soldiers allowed for in the
peace agreement to guard monasteries and sites holy to the Serbs must
be a very limited one.
The peace agreement seeks to preserve the territorial integrity of
Yugoslavia, but this preservation, so far as the eventual status of Kosovo
is concerned, will have to be largely a symbolic one. It will be more of
a formal genuflection than any admission of effective control. This
is, in a sense, to bring into these exceptional situations something of
the relations of suzerainty, existing before the creation of a world of
territorial states exercising exclusive sovereignty over their own area,
and no powers whatsoever over any neighbouring territory.
In those pre-Westphalian days the ruler of a smaller kingdom would
go to greet the ruler of a neighbouring large entity, make some form
of obeisance to him and offer symbolic presents as form of tribute. He
would not, however, be subject to any direct control by the larger
neighbour. The relations might be confirmed by some sort of friendly
dynastic marriage. One is reminded of the sturdy independence of
Navarre, whose agreement to suzerainty took the form of a declaration:
'We who are just as good as you give allegiance to you, who are no
Lessons of Kosovo 125

better than us'. We need a more modern form of this relation, which
combines a formal declaration of allegiance to a larger state with total
control of its own affairs by the territory concerned.

PREVENTION OF ETHNIC CLEANSING

In the overall UN administration of Kosovo, it is essential to create a

situation where all participant groups can see clearly that ethnic
cleansing will not pay and will not advance their political cause.
Kosovo had experienced a see-saw over the years between periods
of Serbian dominance and those oflocal Albanian superiority over the
Serb minority in the province. President Milosevic had a political goal
in his policy towards Kosovo; he wanted to entrench direct Serbian
control and put an end to the continual claim of the Kosovo Albanians
for autonomy. The simplest and most permanent way to achieve this
seemed to him, and to many of the Serbs in Kosovo, to be to find a way
to drive out the Albanian majority and make them go elsewhere. He
behaved in an international sphere like an intimidating landlord who
seeks to force out a tenant by extra-legal means, so that he can assume
sole ownership and occupancy of 'his' property, since there would be
nobody living there except his own (Serb) family. From his point of
view, this was a perfectly rational, though immoral, action. It should
have been the task of the UN and the international community to make
it crystal clear to him that however many Albanians he induced to leave
the province, this would not increase by one iota his claim for direct
control without autonomy; rather would it be seen to weaken his case.
An exactly similar logic must be applied to the present actions of the
KLA, or of a number of their adherents, who have created conditions
offear, where about four-fifths of the 200,000 Serb inhabitants ofKosovo
have fled from their homes and gone to Serbia or to Montenegro. It
must be made clear to the Kosovo Albanians that if they cannot create
the conditions for the Serbs to return in safety the international
community will have to partition the province and award just under 20
per cent to the Serbs. This 20 per cent should include the site of the
battlefield of Kosovo (1389) and as many as possible of the monasteries.

AN EXPLICIT INTERNATIONAL RULING PROHIBITING ETHNIC

CLEANSING

There is a need for an explicit international ruling prohibiting ethnic

cleansing and providing for effective action (including if necessary
armed action) against any state that practises it in future on a large scale.
126 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

The conflict in Kosovo has caused considerable damage and some

loss oflife. It is important that we should define the point of principle
for which the attack was launched, and which we must aim to establish
in international law and political practice in the future. Only by doing
this can we achieve a substantial gain for the international community
to set against the costs - both human and material - which we have
incurred.
There is an explicit international convention against genocide and
any state which practises it. Such a state knows that it is likely to be
subject to armed intervention from outside, as was the case, for
instance, when the soldiers of the united state of Pakistan unleashed a
murderous attack on the Bengali inhabitants of what was then East
Pakistan, and is now Bangladesh. On that occasion the monstrous civil
rights abuse of the then government of Pakistan was forcibly corrected
by the invasion of the Indian army. This was quickly and completely
successful and resulted in the surrender of the West Pakistani forces
in East Pakistan and the rapid creation of the independent state of
Bangladesh.
In the past, ethnic cleansing has not been rated as a crime com-
parable to genocide. It is now necessary to provide an explicit ruling
that future ethnic cleansing will be regarded as a form of genocide. In
the Kosovo case this ethnic cleansing was accompanied by many
murderous attacks on Kosovo civilians by armed Serb militia, soldiers
and police. However, even if this had not been the case and the
Albanian population had been peaceably ordered into comfortable
buses or allowed to travel in peace to the Yugoslav border, the crime
of ethnic cleansing would still have been committed. It is essential for
the maintenance of peace in international relations to lay down exact
rules, so that those who wish to expel large numbers of people of a
community of which they disapprove may know exactly where they
stand. Wars are usually the result of miscalculation and failure to judge
the response to aggressive actions. General Galtieri assumed that he
would get away with the armed occupation of the Falkland Islands/
Malvinas; President Saddam Hussein assumed that he could invade
and annex Kuwait with impunity; indeed the American Ambassador
in Iraq told him that ifhe invaded Kuwait, the US government would
not be concerned. It may seem amazing that anyone could assume
that they could break the 'rule of the road for sovereign states' which
forbids one state from taking territory from their neighbour. It is
hoped that this principle has at last been established beyond doubt; we
must ensure that it is taught in schools and elsewhere as a basic part
of peace teaching in international relations.
In extending the prohibition to include acts of genocide and ethnic
cleansing, we must make our definitions precise. A single political
murder or even the murder of a few people is highly reprehensible,
Lessons of Kosovo 127

but it is not genocide and would not attract the same sanctions from
the international community as would large-scale killing equivalent to
genocide. To the moralist it may be repugnant to associate the concept
of quantity with the assessment of the nature of crimes against human-
ity. In one sense a single murder is as atrocious as is the murder of
several thousand; however in the field of international relations we
have to take account of numbers and make a distinction between a
single crime and a mass crime; both deserve to be punished, but the
sanctions required against the one are more severe than those against
the other.
Therefore in defining ethnic cleansing we have to limit it to the
forced banishing from the country of a substantial part of the popu-
lation. We could not treat the expulsion of a relatively small community
as ethnic cleansing; we can and should express our profound indig-
nation at the expulsion of gypsies that some states seem to have
committed in recent times, but as long as these expulsions involve a
small percentage of the population of the country, it would not be
practical in political terms to treat them with exactly the same severity
as we must visit on full-scale ethnic cleansing.
Another very difficult area for us to define is that of the time when
the ethnic cleansing occurred. In the past large numbers of members
of the German community have been expelled from territories that
now belong to Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia. It would be
politically disastrous for the international community to seek to reverse
this action. Likewise after the Treaty of Lausanne between Greece and
Turkey, large numbers of Greeks were expelled from Turkey and a
smaller number of Turks were expelled from Greece. Such a solution
to ethnic conflict was far from ideal, but it was the best that could be
achieved at that time.
In the recent conflicts resulting from the break-up of Yugoslavia,
ethnic cleansing has been practised by all three communities, the Serb,
the Croat and the Muslim, though the Muslim community has been
much the least offender in this. It is not quite clear who started this
process, and it may be possible that both the Serb and Croat com-
munities began to drive out members of the other community as soon
as the break-up of the Yugoslav state became a reality. This state,
especially under Tito, had previously held the communities together
in peace, partly through coercion and partly through the common
attachment to the idea of one Yugoslavia. The result of the conflicts
which followed the break-up of Yugoslavia was the expulsion of all or
nearly all of the inhabitants of each area, who were not of the majority
community in that place. Only in the case of the minorities living
among the Muslim community in Bosnia, and in Sarajevo, has it been
possible for minorities to continue to live in their original dwelling
place in substantial numbers. The same is true of parts of the Serb
128 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

republic, such as in Vojvodina, which are inhabited by a majority of

Serb people and a minority ofH ungarians or other peoples. Macedonia
has also achieved a precarious ethnic balance and avoided any ethnic
cleansing.
The final act of massive ethnic cleansing in the war-torn areas of
Croatia was the 1995 invasion of Krajina by the Croatian army of
President Tudjman which resulted in the forced expulsion of almost
all the 200,000 Serb inhabitants. This act oflarge-scale ethnic cleansing
deserves severe condemnation but it is not practical politics to make it
a casus belli. The UN and the international community should use every
form of persuasion short of armed force to induce the government of
Croatia to allow Serbs to return to their homes in Krajina, but it is
doubtful how far we shall succeed. There is need for a continuing
resettlement agency in the former Yugoslavia, under UN control, to
seek to make it possible for expelled people of all communities in
Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo to return. The moral effects of this con-
tinuous pressure will be helpful, but only in Kosovo, where the UN
and NATO have effective military control, are we likely to achieve
large-scale results. The continuing hatreds of the ethnic communities
in the former Yugoslavia for one another are in sad contrast to the
wonderful achievements of Nigeria where the Ibo minority, who were
expelled with such violence at the time of the confrontations of 1966,
have been welcomed back to their homes.
The cases to be covered in this proposed convention against ethnic
cleansing are those occurring from now onwards - that is, future and
not past cases of ethnic cleansing. Now, however, we must also ensure
by effective means that all ethnic cleansing, whether of Albanian or of
Serb inhabitants of Kosovo, is reversed so that all those wishing to
return home can do so in safety. If, however, the Albanian inhabitants
of Kosovo continue to make it impossible for the Serbs to return to
their homes in that province, then the international community and
the major governments of the world acting through the UN, as noted,
will have to establish a partition of Kosovo to create a considerably
smaller area for the Serb minority and a larger area for the Albanian
majority. This would be a second-best solution, but if a situation of the
two communities living side by side in peace cannot be obtained it
would be the most just and also practical arrangement.

RESPECT FOR THE TWO COMMUNITIES IN KOSOVO

There are clearly some very unpleasant and indeed criminal elements
both on the Serb and the Albanian sides. These people have been the
agents of ethnic cleansing and destruction of houses and violence
Lessons of Kosovo 129

against people. Such groups must be dealt with firmly by KFOR and
the UN administration whenever their activities can be found out.
This, however, does not remove the need for a profound respect for
the historical traditions and the identities of both contending com-
munities in Kosovo. The kind of attitude which condemns all the
groups as a whole is fatal to the peace-making process. Reginald
Maudling, when he was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, was
reported to have remarked of the province: 'What a dreadful place this
is!'. He obviously had a contempt for both the Catholic/Republican and
Protestant/Unionist communities. It is not surprising therefore that he
failed to make any progress in peace-making.

The Serbs
The Serbs are a very special national community with their own deeply
felt historical myths and sense of identity. H.A.L. Fisher in his History
of Europe writes: 'Every page of their history shows the Serbs to be a
brave, spirited and temperamental people'. In dealing with such
people one must have understanding as well as firmness. Perhaps the
most important of all the historical myths that have formed the Serb
character concerns their defeat by the Ottoman Sultan Murad in 1389,
at the battle of Kosovo Polje (the Field of the Blackbirds). The Serbs
are obsessed by the memory of the 600 years of Ottoman rule, which
they describe as 'the Turkish night'. Popular culture among Serbs
tends to describe all their Muslim opponents as 'Turks', even when this
is obviously not the case.
The Serbs have a great religious tradition, and believe that they are
called by God to a special role. This is a proper belief which we should
respect, but one must point out, as John the Baptist and Jesus pointed
out to the Jews, that a special calling does not mean an ethnic privilege
and that peoples are called to serve and not to dominate. While sym-
pathizing with the present state of the Serbs we must point out gently
to our Orthodox fellow Christians that 'poisonous weeds have grown
in Holy Serbian soil'. These spring from the desire to dominate. Many
Serbs speak of the need for a 'Greater Serbia', but this must be inter-
preted as 'Serbia of the Heart' and not as the creation of a large
Serbian-dominated area from which others are excluded. It is true that
Patriarch Pavle, the Head of the Serbian Church,joined with the Head
of the Roman Catholic Church in Croatia, Cardinal Kuharic, in
denouncing violence at the beginning of the conflict in Croatia, but as
the battles developed the Serbian clergy, like the Croatians, tended to
be identified with the national aspirations of their flocks. Mter the
debacle in Kosovo, the Serbian clergy has a particularly difficult task,
both in developing their declared opposition to Milosevic, and in
130 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

calling for national repentance for the sins committed against the
Kosovo Albanians in the name of Serbian solidarity.

The Albanians
The enemies of the Albanians make sweeping collective judgments,
describing them as 'bandits' and placing emphasis on the presence of
criminal gangs who practise Mafia-style violence and theft. These
gangs undoubtedly exist in northern Albania, and some of them
have penetrated into Kosovo since the KFOR occupation. However,
throughout the 1990s the main Albanian separatist movement in
Kosovo was pointedly non-violent, and only in 1998-99 was Dr
Ibrahim Rugova's pacifist leadership eclipsed by the newly sprung
armed resistance movement, the KLA.
At one time during the Napoleonic period a champion of Slav rights
used the slogan 'Arise Illyria': by this he implied a united freedom
movement of all southern Slavs ('Yugoslavs') against Austrian and
Turkish rule. Later on, the Albanians in their turn adopted the myth
of regarding themselves as descendants of the Illyrians, who had
played a distinguished role in the Roman Empire and, as soldiers of
the Roman Army, had come as far as Hadrian's Wall in northern
Britain. Whether or not this claim of descent is strictly true, it provides
an inspiring model for the Albanians.
It is tragic that the two vibrant cultures of Serbs and Albanians
should find themselves in such bitter opposition. It is our task to create
the conditions where their interaction can produce cultural creativity
in place of the linguistic apartheid which has characterized so much of
secondary and university education in Kosovo in the past. At the same
time we have to bring Serbia back into the community of nations. Her
football team rightly participated in the early rounds of the European
Cup 2000. It is time that her representatives in other fields were able
to do the same. The UN has rightly condemned Milosevic for war
crimes, but we must make it clear that our quarrel is with him and not
with the Serbian people as a whole.
During their alternating periods of dominance, both the Serbs and
the Kosovo Albanians have discriminated against each other in an
unjust way. It is the task of the UN administration in Kosovo to make
the profound changes necessary to ensure equal justice for both com-
munities. This requires a form of administration that is both firm and
understanding.
 18. The Limitations of Violent Intervention
(written in December 1999)

SOFIA DAMM

The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the debate on whether it was

right for NATO to bomb the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. I will look
first at the background of the conflict between Serbs and Albanians -
because issues such as myths, nationalism and ethnic identity were
perhaps not sufficiently considered by the NATO countries when they
tried to solve the Kosovo crisis. This will subsequently allow for a more
balanced discussion of important questions such as what were the
motives behind the bombings - humanitarian considerations or self-
interest - and whether NATO's air campaign was legal or in violation
of international agreements. But the chief focus of the chapter falls
on whether military intervention was the only way to stop atrocities
or whether the conflict could have been solved in a peaceful and
diplomatic way.

HISTORY AND MYTHS BEHIND THE CONFLICT

The Serbs in particular place an enormous symbolic significance on

Kosovo. This is something that to a certain extent explains why they
were prepared to confront a military intervention by NATO rather
than negotiate over the future of the region. Twentieth-century history
provides clear evidence about the virulence of Serb nationalism - from
the killing of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 to the ethnic cleans-
ing in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s. In this light, the Kosovo
conflict follows a historical pattern: it can be largely explained as a clash
between two national ideologies - Serb and Albanian - with national
myths playing a crucial role.
It is a central idea of nationalism that each nation should have its
own state and its own central political institutions in order to preserve
and safeguard its identity.l This is why conflicts concerning national
ideologies and ethnic tensions are so intractable, since few people are
132 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

willing to negotiate about nationalities, home territories, language,

culture and traditions. For generations the Kosovo region has been at
the centre of territorial disputes between Serbs and Albanians. For the
Serbs, Kosovo is a region of significant historical importance and has
even been referred to as 'the Jerusalem' of the Serbian Orthodox
Church. The Kosovo Albanians, on the other hand, regard themselves
as the descendants of the ancient Illyrians, and therefore as the original
inhabitants of the region. By the 1990s such irreconcilable myths had
helped generate an entrenched conflict between Serbs and Albanians
in Kosovo (see chapter by Aleksandar Pavkovic in Part I above).

FROM RAMBOUILLET TO NATO'S AIR STRIKES

In February 1999 the main Western powers forced both the Serbs
and the Kosovo Albanians to attend negotiations at Rambouillet. The
two camps each came to the negotiating table demanding complete
control of Kosovo. Negotiations stalled, because the most that Western
countries would grant the Albanians was extensive autonomy from
Belgrade with the guarantee of installing a NATO peacekeeping force
in the area - and NATO had yet to convince Milosevic to accept such
a NATO presence on sovereign Yugoslav territory. In March 1999,just
as it seemed as if all attempts would fail, the KLA returned to the
negotiating table to accept the proposals set down in the Rambouillet
Agreement. However, Milosevic stubbornly refused to allow a NATO
military force in Kosovo.
MiloseviC's rejection of the RambouilletAgreement left NATO with
a complicated problem in that after warning that they would take
military action they were forced to carry out their threat or risk losing
NATO credibility. Carl Bildt, a senior European diplomat involved in
Balkan affairs, suggested to White House staff that the 'only alternative
to shooting yourselves [NATO] in the foot is not to do it. The reply
came back: Credibility.' 2 Regardless of the consequences, NATO felt it
had to go ahead.
However, this conclusion could not be stated openly. In his address
to the world's media from the Briefing Room of the White House on
the afternoon that the air strikes on Yugoslavia began, President Bill
Clinton highlighted three key objectives of the bombing:

First, to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO's opposition to aggres-

sion and its support for peace; second, to deter President Milosevic
from continuing and escalating his attacks on helpless civilians ...
and third, ifnecessary, to damage Serbia's capacity to wage war against
Kosovo in the future by seriously diminishing its military capabilities. 3
The Limitations of Violent Intervention 133

In other words, President Clinton was claiming that the military

intervention was driven purely by the humanitarian needs of others,
and not by the strategic or economic interests of NATO'S member
countries.
The issue of credibility does not figure prominently in the state-
ments of NATO leaders, but is emphasized in alternative explanations
about Western involvement in the former Yugoslavia. For example,
Maria Todorova explains that 'the place and future of NATO, the role
of the United States as the global military superpower and especially
its strategic stake in European affairs' were the main reasons for
NATO's involvement in Yugoslavia. 4 She goes on to highlight that these
three reasons can be encompassed by that one word - credibility.
Both sides in the Kosovo conflict insisted that the war in Kosovo
was about the principle of sovereignty, although Misha Glenny argues
that this was to reinforce public support for the position of each side
and disguise less convenient matters. Milosevic sought to use the
conflict and his defiance of NATO to increase his waning popularity,
and NATO used the sovereignty issue to cover up confusion
surrounding their aims and tactics. 5
Supporters of NATO's intervention have consistently argued that
the violent repression of minorities must take precedence over con-
cerns about state sovereignty. However, it still seems strange to many
that NATO should intervene in the Kosovo crisis, but not in other cases
such as, for example, the massacres in Rwanda. Was it because Kosovo
is so close to central Europe? Or perhaps because powerful nations
such as the United States and Germany have large populations that
originated in former Yugoslavia? Glenny, for his part, suggests that
another motive for the bombing campaign was the fact that NATO and
in particular the United States had vital interests in the Eastern
Mediterranean. They could therefore not risk the conflict spreading
beyond the borders of Yugoslavia and having a direct impact on the
Eastern Mediterranean countries. 6

THE LEGALITY OF INTERVENTION

At first glance the argument about legality seems slightly perverse.

The television screens showed daily the systematic destruction of a
whole community, the Kosovo Albanians. Indeed, as the peace talks
stalled there seemed to be a corresponding increase in Serb aggression
towards the Kosovo Albanians. Surely, if NATO believed that all
peaceful means of broke ring a settlement through diplomacy had been
exhausted, then the only available option was to use military force?
How could the protection of the Kosovo Albanians be seen as illegal?
134 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

Opponents of the NATO military intervention stress that the air

strikes were in violation of the UN Charter and other international
agreements. Under international law one nation cannot use force
against another nation unless in self-defence. The single exception to
this rule is when prior authorization is received from the Security
Council because there is a serious 'threat to the peace, breach of peace ,
or act of aggression'.7 Certain countries - in particular Russia and
China - expressed their opinion that NATO had violated the UN
Charter because the bombing was not an act of self-defence and prior
approval had not been received from the Security Council. The
defence of the members of NATO for the bombing campaign was that
their actions were a legally justified intervention since the mission was
undertaken to end a humanitarian catastrophe.

NON-VIOLENT ALTERNATIVES TO THE BOMBINGS

One might argue that no non-violent approach to the situation in

Kosovo could be as effective as NATO's air strikes. However, an article
in theJournal of Peace and Conflict Resolution lists as many as 85 different
non-violent methods that can be used to prevent genocide, with the
previous problems in Bosnia used as a background. s These methods
suggest everything from peace-supervision to create contact and
'psychodramatical' methods such as non-violent aggression.
In another article in the same journal, David Reilly states that
between 1945-91 as many as 690 foreign military interventions
occurred. Most of them were made in an attempt to create peace. The
results, however, were not very impressive. Reilly concludes by saying
that the possibility for civil war increases through external military
intervention. 9 The effect of non-military intervention is completely
different. The Centre for Peace, Non-violence and Human Rights in Osijek,
Croatia, reported on a successful case when the members of this
organization managed to prevent an attempt by the Croatian military
to expel the Serbian population in a city purely through non-violent
interventions. to The Peace Studies Association, an organization based
on volunteers, has systematized this type of intervention through
acting as unarmed bodyguards for threatened people in Sri Lanka,
Haiti, Columbia, Central America - and in the former Yugoslavia.
Robin Crewe - the leader of another volunteer organization, Peace
Brigades International - suggests that every nation in the UN should
create a group of 50,000 non-violent activists.ll He emphasizes,
however, that this would require years of practice and education
because non-violent activities are more complicated and exacting than
military actions. There is, however, knowledge and experience within
The Limitations of Violent Intervention 135

several voluntary organizations already. Some states also have peace

corps, with Argentina's so-called 'white helmets' being one of many
examples. After an examination of all these precedents, the prominent
Swedish Green Party politician Per Gahrton concludes that in March
1999 a better solution would have been to increase the number of
peace-observers in Kosovo rather than withdraw the ones already there.
Different peace organizations made other suggestions during the
NATO air campaign: a pause in the NATO bombings, a UN-supervised
truce, UN rule in Kosovo, peace negotiations mediated by a neutral
state, and long-term support for Kosovo. Supporters of non-violent
actions in Kosovo further ask the question whether it has been
forgotten that almost every dictator has maintained his leadership until
overthrown internally. External attacks bring people together even
around repulsive leaders. When the NATO bombings started the
Serbian people suddenly stood behind their once unpopular leader
Slobodan Milosevic. The political opposition that existed before the
air raids started now to support Milosevic. According to this school of
thought, the original intention ofthe NATO campaign was not realized,
in fact the bombings achieved the opposite effect. The campaign did
weaken Milosevic militarily, but in terms of public support his powers
increased immensely. Maria Ermanno, president of the Swedish Peace
and Arbitration Organization, argues that Slobodan Milosevic,just like
Sad dam Hussein, wants to create an atmosphere of war in order to
remain in power. Consequently, people who believe in peace and
democracy should avoid playing into the hands of such figures. 12

CONCLUSION

This chapter sets out a perspective on whether it was right for NATO
to bomb the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, focusing on the rejection
of non-violent means of addressing the crisis. A glimpse into the history
of Kosovo revealed why control over Kosovo was of such significance
for both the Serbs and the Kosovo Albanians, and why both consider
themselves entitled to control Kosovo. It was, and is, clearly a struggle
that has evolved over a number of generations and something that the
outside world knew very little about until the images of fleeing
Albanians appeared on our television screens. A look at the history of
the conflict allows for a more balanced viewpoint, and for greater
understanding of the problems that both sides have had to endure. In
this light, one can ask whether NATO really considered these factors,
and whether it was right to get involved in an internal struggle that
over the years has seen both Serbs and Kosovo Albanians suffer at the
hands of the other. There is little doubt that NATO politicians believed
136 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

that they were both morally and politically right in bombing Serbia to
put a stop to the Serb actions in Kosovo, but legally they acted beyond
the limitations of international law. NATO contends that they could
not stand by and watch a humanitarian disaster unfold before their
eyes and that if they had not acted when they did the problem would
then have been far greater.
The question of what NATO's true motives for the air strikes
were is, however, more difficult to answer. NATO spokesmen want us
to believe that the alliance felt it had exhausted all possible non-
aggressive means of progress and that it was obliged to start bombing
raids to prevent a humanitarian disaster. Maria Todorova's alternative
point of view is that NATO's credibility was at stake - which means that
even if they had wanted to, NATO leaders could not have cancelled
their threat to bomb Yugoslavia when Milosevic failed to sign the
Rambouillet Agreement. But it can be shown that there were also a
great many non-violent options that could have been investigated
prior to adopting a military approach.
It is difficult to discuss Kosovo in a balanced way because the subject
brings out extremely strong emotions in writers supporting NATO or
Yugoslavia. Use of the images of the conflict only added to the problem,
as both sides graphically highlighted the horrors of the conflict as a
means of propaganda - bombings in the case of the Serbs, and
atrocities against Albanians in the case of the NATO countries. This
prejudiced people's perceptions and necessarily meant that they were
reaching conclusions without being in possession of all the relevant
facts.
That NATO chose to participate in an active way in the Kosovo
conflict, rather than in a passive way - after repression had succeeded
- can be seen as positive. NATO was placed in a truly awkward situation
and found it difficult to stand by and watch what was going on.
However, it is unacceptable that NATO's intervention began without
UN authorization, and at the cost of far too many civilian lives. My
personal opinion, therefore, is that it was wrong for NATO to bomb
Yugoslavia.

NOTES

I. Budge and K. Newton, The Politics of the New Europe (New York: Longman,
1997),p.l03.
2 M. Glenny, The Balkans, 1804-1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers
(London: Granta Books, 1999), p. 657.
3 Remarks announcing airstrikes against Serbian targets in the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, 29 March 1999.
4 M. Todorova,lmagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997),
p.185.
The Limitations of Violent Intervention 137

5 Ibid., p. 659.
6 M. Glenny, The Balkans, p. 656.
7 The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, Justifications'
of NATO's Intervention in Yugoslavia, http://www.transnational.orglforum/meet!
NATOjustificat.html.
8 J.A. Fisher, 'Non-violent Action in Prevention of Genocide: Bosnia in Focus',
journal of Peace and Conflict Resolution, March 1998.
9 D. Reilly, 'Peace Through Coercion: The Effect of Foreign Military Inter-
vention on Democratization and War', journal of Peace and Conflict Resolution,
March 1999.
10 See Per Gahrton, 'Vagra viHd', Aftonbladet, 4 April 1999, http://www.
aftonbladet.se/kultur/9904/04/pg.html.
11 Ibid.
12 Maria Ermanno, 'Vad hander med SFOR efter Kosovo?', Dagens Nyheter, 12
April 1999, http://www.mp.se/politiklartiklar/kosovo2.htm.
 19. The Natural Environment and the
Balkan Conflict
(written in May-June 1999)

ANDREW DOBSON

One of the great untold stories of the Balkan conflict is that of the
environmental damage caused by it. With all the other immediate
catastrophic effects of war, it is understandable - on the face of it - that
the environment occupies the backstage. But there are two reasons
why it should have a higher profile. The first is that some of these
catastrophic effects are themselves caused by environmental damage,
and I shall say more about that below. The second - and more far-
reaching - reason is that the damage caused by environmental
destruction is profoundly insidious. In part this is due to the inherent
unpredictability of environmental responses to disruption. Even in
peacetime, under controlled conditions, it is notoriously difficult to
predict the consequences of environmental change. We need look no
further than the current debates regarding the planting of genetically
modified crops for evidence of this: even controlled planting in
extremely small areas has uncontrolled and uncontrollable conse-
quences. This problem truly is 'writ large' in the context of war.
The insidious nature of environmental disruption is also due to its
effects reaching far into the future. In the immediacy of day-to-day
suffering it is easy to forget that future generations will have to pick
up a bill too. Just as environmental effects are unpredictable in their
detail, we can be pretty sure in general that some of the children now
being carried by their mothers in Serbia, Kosovo and beyond will be
born damaged or deformed for environmentally related reasons.
These considerations are rarely taken into account when the 'col-
lateral' damage caused by the war is being discussed. Environmental
effects travel through time as well as space, and some of the unintended
casualties of the war have yet to be born.
Other unplanned victims live many, many miles from the zones of
the conflict itself. Even in peacetime, environmental pollution has no
respect for national boundaries. It travels through and across the
The Natural Environment and the Balkan Conflict 139

various physical media, turning up in places far away from its point of
origin. As it happens, one of Europe's principal waterways, the
Danube, runs through Serbia. 'Blue' no longer, at least in parts, the
river has been turned into a transmitter of pollution to the lands
through which it passes on its way to the Black Sea. Ten million people
depend on the Danube for drinking water. Oil from bombed refineries
has found its way into the river, and slicks up to 20 kilometres long
have been sighted. At the time of writing there is a danger of an
environmental 'double whammy' here, since as oil flows down the
Danube, there is a possibility that it will find its way into the cooling
system of the Kozloduy nuclear power station in Bulgaria. The
environmental consequences of the conflict are truly international:
Greeks are stockpiling bottled water and canned food against the risks
of contamination. France has warned its population to avoid eating
Greek asparagus.
Airborne pollution is also having uncomfortable effects as the war
progresses. A 22-year-old student from the city of Novi Sad writes that

There has been a fire in the [oil] refinery for five days in a row, and
it cannot be localized due to repeated bombing of the object. Thick
black clouds of smoke are floating above the city. Several of the house
projects have been evacuated. Citizens have been recommended not
to leave their homes if not necessary, and to close all windows.
Breathing is difficult in many parts of the town, and acid rains are
common. Raindrops cause eye infections. The city looks real spooky
in the night, as one part of the sky is full of stars, and the other is jet-
black.

One imagines that this scene is being reproduced all over the area of
conflict and, as ever, it is the young and the old who are most vulnerable
to the respiratory problems that accompany pollution of this sort.
Other pollutants released into the atmosphere include vinyl chloride
monomer (VCM), which can induce vomiting, unconsciousness, liver
and kidney damage, and - at high levels of concentration - cancer. The
bombing has thrown chlorine, soot, nitrogen oxides, hydrofluoric
acids and phosgene into the atmosphere and waterways. All of these
are irritants at best and very dangerous to human, animal and plant
health at worst.
The environmental dimension of the conflict shows that we need
to widen our understanding of what 'collateral damage' means. Very
little has been written about the direct ecological damage caused by
the conflict. Since the NATO bombing started, four out of five National
Parks in Serbia - Kopaonik, Fruska Gora, Sar planina and Tara, as well
as Prokletije, planned to be declared a National Park this year - have
140 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

been directly damaged by projectiles and bombs. Some of the most

valuable natural areas and protected species, found in European and
World Red Lists, as well as endemic and relic species not found any-
where else in the world, have been damaged. Among the plants that
have disappeared altogether is the Kosovo peony (paeonia decora), the
symbol of conservation and the history oflife in Kosovo which had only
recently been reintroduced into its natural habitat. For the record, the
endangering of flora, fauna, ecosystems and biodiversity, which makes
this area one of six European centres of biological diversity, contra-
venes the Bern and Bonn Biodiversity Conventions, signed by Euro-
pean and other countries.
All wars are devastating, but the damage caused by modern
munitions can be catastrophic, with its effects lasting well into the
future. Some people have claimed that the 'smartness' of contem-
porary weapons mitigates the damage caused, in that it can be more
accurately focused. This, however, is doubtful on two counts. First,
military targets themselves - precisely those on which 'smart' weapons
were targeted in the earliest phases of the conflict - harbour substances
whose release into air and water has unpredictable consequences.
Second, whatever gains this 'smartness' might promise in principle are
lost as soon as the range of targets is widened to include civilian targets.
Car factories containing large amounts of asbestos have been targeted,
for example, and this toxic substance has been spread across wide areas
of relatively dense population. As the range of 'legitimate' targets has
been widened, chemical depots and oil refineries have come under
sustained attack, releasing the waterborne and airborne pollutants
referred to above. There is even, at the time of writing, the threat of
the range of targets being widened still further, with potentially lethal
environmental consequences. Persistent warnings of attacks on the
Vinca Institute, Belgrade, have been received. The institute has a small
6.5 megawatt research nuclear reactor.
The nature of modern weaponry itself is almost certainly the cause
of some environmentally related afflictions. In early May, the US
Defense Department finally confirmed that its aircraft were firing
depleted uranium munitions. The effects of depleted uranium on
people in the conflict vicinity are poorly understood, but veterans of
the war in Iraq believe that depleted uranium contributed to Gulf War
syndrome, and there are many reports from southern Iraq of
stillbirths, birth defects and leukaemia in children born since 1991.
Once again, it is a sad certainty that similar stories will emerge from
Serbia, Kosovo and beyond in years to come.
So what does this brief examination of the environmental dimen-
sion of the conflict tell us? Most importantly we need to revise our
understanding of what 'collateral' damage means. This term, part of
The Natural Environment and the Balkan Conflict 141

the 'newspeak' of modern warfare, designed to sanitize the deaths of

civilians, hides a terrible truth: that 'collateral' victims are spread far
and wide in both space and time. Taking an environmental point of
view shows us that such victims are far more numerous than we believe.
They cannot be confined to the tens, or dozens, or even hundreds
that are officially recognized. To these must be added the thousands
of international and intergenerational victims of the environmental
consequences of the conflict.
 Conclusions

THE SEQUEL

On 10 June 1999 President Milosevic capitulated, and the withdrawal

of the Yugoslav army from the province of Kosovo began simultan-
eously with the occupation of Kosovo by forces from the NATO
countries. Map 3 (page 180) shows the division of the territory among
the major NATO allies. The bombing had succeeded to the extent that
it had enabled the NATO allies to place their ground troops through-
out the territory without having exposed those troops to significant
losses through having to fight their way into Kosovo. Although a swift
deployment of troops from Bosnia enabled the Russians to occupy for
a time the airport of Kosovo's capital Pristina, the Russian Federation's
demand to be included in that allocation of responsibilities for a par-
ticular area was successfully resisted by NATO. But from the moment
of the invasion NATO held Kosovo - effectively, if not formally - as a
protectorate, ostensibly in the name of the United Nations although,
as indeed with the decision to bomb, without a clear mandate from that
source.
The sequel can usefully be traced by examining, first, events in
Kosovo itself; second, events in Serbia proper and in the region. First,
in Kosovo itself the refugees returned home from other countries and
from inside the province. At the same time there were other develop-
ments that were less expected or were to take on an unexpected form.
The corollary of the return of the Kosovar refugees under the pro-
tection ofthe NATO forces, for instance, was that the Serb population
started to leave, many of them in the tail of the departing Yugoslav
army. This exodus was followed by a wave of murders and evictions by
returning Kosovo Albanians, often seemingly instigated by the KLA.
This development, which came as a surprise to many (which with
hindsight is itself surprising) left the configuration of forces in play
within Kosovo after the intervention very different from those that had
been in play before it. Having entered the territory to defend the
Albanian Kosovars against Serb oppressors the NATO forces now
found themselves called on to defend Serbs against the returning
Kosovars in circumstances where the KLA was scenting victory for its
Conclusions 143

cause, which was not a cause officially espoused by the occupiers. The
multi-ethnic aspirations of the Western interventionists were shown
to have been badly founded. They expected to be holding the ring
between two communities in a territory whose status would not be
radically different from what it had been before the intervention. In
the event the Serbian withdrawal was perceived on the ground as the
total loss to Serbia of its Kosovo province and a gain to an Albanian
interest in the region - a gain heightened by the exodus of the Serbs
and the eviction of the local Serbs. What that Albanian interest consti-
tuted was highly complex. It could not mean annexation but it did
mean consolidation of the Albanian-speaking community in the region
(and, in the short term at least the consolidation also of numerous
networks of trafficking in drugs and other goods, including people).
For Western eyes and ears the denting of the dual image of the good
Kosovar Albanian and the bad Serb was an important result of NATO's
success. The plight of the Serbs, however, was bound to have less of an
impact given the strength of Western feeling against Serbs and Serbia
in general, with little inclination to make distinctions among the Serbs.
In certain areas, of which the town of Mitrovica emerged as the most
prominent example, enough Serbs remained to create a divided com-
munity - divided geographically by the River Ibar - where whatever
animosities existed before the war were now amplified to a degree likely
to give the occupying forces business for as long as they stayed, and to
leave their successors with a headache of Northern Irish proportions. l
Second, the military occupation was always likely to yield a problem
of civil administration after its completion. Soldiers are not necessarily
politicians, though considerable political skills were at times displayed.
In any case, this was not an indigenous administration but an occupy-
ing force to which either community could and would turn in order
to gain advantage over the other. During the fighting, the military
perspective had obscured consideration of what might follow. Having
engaged in the military operation, the NATO forces were now con-
fronted with the consequences. There was in fact a double problem,
first of policing and then of establishing a local administration. The
NATO forces were prepared for neither of these tasks, and passing
time was to reveal the extent of the problems in both areas. Nine
months after the bombing ceased Denis McNamara, the senior official
of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), pointed 'to the
inadequacy of the local system' which was leading to the perpetrators
of extreme violence going unprosecuted. 2 He was speaking at a press
conference at the moment when Bernard Kouchner, the head of
UNMIK, was presenting his latest report to the UN Security Council,
which made an urgent appeal to member states to provide judges and
lawyers as well as police officers to fill 'a critical gap' in its administration
144 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

of Kosovo. The report stated that by March 2000, 45 countries had

contributed a total of2,361 police officers to UNMIK -less than half
its authorized strength of 4, 718. The urgency of the policing problem
had just been graphically illustrated by an upsurge of violence in
Mitrovica, when eight people had been killed in two days of unrest on
3 and 4 February 2000, since when 'some 5,000 Kosovo Serbs remain
in isolated enclaves in the southern outskirts of the city as well as
approximately 2,000 Kosovo Albanians in northern outskirts'. Com-
menting on this, McNamara described Mitrovica as 'only the visible tip
of the Kosovo-wide problem of violence against minorities: intimi-
dation, harassment, and persecution'.
Already in September 1999 an earlier report, this time from Jift
Dienstbier, the personal envoy from the High Commissioner, had
presented a similar picture of the problems inherent in organizing a
protectorate (though that term was not used in the report).3 In his
concluding observations Dienstbier noted that the situation of the
Serb, Roma and other minority groups since the withdrawal of the
Serb forces had been a painful one: 'Killings, oppression, harassment,
intimidation, expulsion, rape and other violations continue to take
place at an alarming rate, particularly targeting the non-Albanian
communities of Kosovo'. There was a problem of policing and of the
administration of the law. But Dienstbier drew attention to a deeper
problem which was a corollary of the crisis and the way in which it had
been approached: 'There is no government as such to which the inter-
national community can address itself, and human rights special rap-
porteurs and working groups are left to address themselves to the
Special Representative of the Secretary General'. The intervention had
created an administrative vacuum, and was short of the political tools
for filling it.
In Serbia proper, one of the aims of the war eluded the victors, to
the extent that Milosevic did not fall as a direct result of the bombing.
It is true that he was forced from power rather over a year later by
an opposition whom he had robbed of its victory in the elections of
September 2000 and the possibility that he had been weakened by the
NATO intervention has to be considered. However, the surge of oppo-
sition on the streets that led to his acknowledging his defeat in the
elections was a repeat of similar demonstrations held before the NATO
intervention, and Vojislav Kostunica, who emerged as leader from that
confrontation, was very forthright in detaching himself from any notion
that he owed a debt to NATO. If this evidence is not entirely conclusive
there is a further consideration. The evidence suggests that, far from
weakening Milosevic, the bombing at the time actually strengthened
him. When the enemy is at the gates, the policy option of defending
what lies within the gates trumps all others and, when it came to
Conclusions 145

defending Serbia, Milosevic and the opposition necessarily spoke with

one voice, and, indeed, MiloseviC's contribution to that voice had always
had a clear and consistent ring. Certainly, the new leadership under
Vojislav Kostunica was little inclined to hand its predecessor over for
trial at the Hague, and the final result of the bombing and the change
of government was that Milosevic remained on the Serbian political
stage as the leader of a major political party.
In the region as a whole, the sequel to the Kosovo war must
inevitably be seen as a continuation of the wars in Bosnia and, by the
same token, as a harbinger of further conflict, most probably over
Montenegro but also, if the fates and human stupidity have their way,
over Macedonia. If the determined bombing of the Vojvodina was
intended to stir up the large minority of Hungarian origin in that other
province of Serbia it did not succeed, though it was successful in
destroying a large part of the province's significant industrial capacity.
It also destroyed the bridges over the Danube, symbolically separating
Serbia yet further from the heartland of Europe and from the goods
and values that stem from that source.

WHAT CONCLUSIONS ARE WE TO DRAW?

NATO's decision to launch air strikes against Yugoslavia in response

to a perceived Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo was a
cardinal defining moment in the development of the international
order since the end of the Cold War. Some would argue that such a
moment could have come earlier, with the wars in Bosnia in 1984-86,
or in Chechnya in 1994-96, or certainly with the slaughter in Rwanda.
But it did not, and those events became staging posts towards a fuller
definition. While few would go so far as to claim that Kosovo repre-
sented the final consecration of a new unipolar world order, the crisis
and its sequel certainly provided sufficient evidence for us to discern
with reasonable clarity some of the features of the new order that we
inhabit.
Many commentators around the globe questioned the basis for the
NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, though there were few to defend
Slobodan Milosevic, who is generally viewed as the source of the
decade-long tragedy in the Balkans. Among those who opposed the
bombing, some defended Yugoslavia's right to sovereignty within its
state borders; others viewed the bombing as a conspiracy on the part
of the US to ensure a continuation of its hegemony or to divide
Europeans against each other.
This did not start as a war over resources. It was to a considerable
extent about power and its distribution in the new world order. But
146 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

what was most novel was that it was claimed by the leaders of the
Western world to be about moral principle - the protection of human
rights. The defining purpose of NATO's actions was to prevent the
Milosevic regime from engaging in yet another vicious round of ethnic
cleansing in the territory of the former Socialist Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia. The idea that the protection of human rights has a place
in international relations must be welcomed. But it does not mean, for
example, that the actual manner in which NATO assumed the defence
of that cause in Kosovo, and the use that NATO made of it, are beyond
reproach.
What then were the chief issues that the war raised, and what con-
clusions are to be drawn from 'Kosovo'? There are four issues that
emerge with particular prominence: the military attack on a sovereign
state on humanitarian grounds, the means of warfare adopted in that
intervention, the extension to Kosovo of the protectorate installed in
Bosnia in the hands of international bodies, and the implications of
the reduction from two world super-powers to a single one.

HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION

There is ample evidence in the foregoing to support the claim that the
norms justifYing intervention to protect oppressed minorities against
their own governments are shifting, and that Kosovo is likely to go
down in history as a crucial turning-point in this evolution. But there
is evidence also showing this to be a disturbingly uneven process. It
can be argued, as Matthew Wyman argues above, that failures to inter-
vene in earlier and comparable situations - in Rwanda, or on behalf
of the Kurds in Turkey - cannot be used to condemn intervention this
time round. Partisans of this view claim that we must begin somewhere.
The emphasis then necessarily falls on the way in which this cardinal
case of intervention is carried out, on whether the intervening powers
have secured the approval of the most appropriate international
authorities and on whether the action is proportionate to the aims.
These, after all, are two of the six standard conditions for considering
a war just. There is material in the foregoing to give concern in these
respects. NATO went beyond the authority of the resolutions of the
United Nations Security Council and effectively set them aside.
As for the way in which the intervention was carried out, and pro-
portionality with the aim, the details presented and documented
above, perhaps particularly by John Sloboda and Andrew Dobson,
must raise serious doubt about whether what was involved here was
simply a haziness about the norms governing armed intervention.
They suggest that, at the least, the intervening powers took full
Conclusions 147

advantage of whatever haziness there was. Moreover, while partisan-

ship is no doubt endemic in international relations, problems arise
when it translates moral outrage into moral self-righteousness, which
in turn can lead easily to the application of double standards. And while
military intervention can be accepted as a necessary evil when under-
taken to protect vulnerable minorities from the brutality of authori-
tarian regimes, there are always distinctions to be made. There is, after
all, a difference between a one-party state like Iraq and a multi-party
state with regular elections - however manipulated -like Yugoslavia.
Despite approximately 24,000 NATO sorties, which dropped more
than 14,000 bombs on Yugoslavia, NATO failed to prevent a humani-
tarian disaster. On the contrary, it provided easy cover for the Serb
forces in Kosovo to escalate a brutal and indiscriminate campaign into
full-scale ethnic cleansing of nearly a million Kosovar Albanians. In the
process, NATO bombing helped to export a humanitarian disaster to
neighbouring Albania and Macedonia. It killed not a few but hundreds
of innocent civilians, Kosovar as well as Serbian; it destroyed much of
the civilian infrastructure of an entire country; and, in making para-
noid Serbian nationalism even more paranoid, it frustrated its own aims.

THE MEANS OF WARFARE CHOSEN

The question of waging war for humanitarian ends cannot be detached

from the means of waging war, if not in general then certainly in this
particular case. NATO sought to resolve the crisis over Kosovo through
the use of high-level, precision-targeted bombing, designed to resolve
conflict without the commitment of ground troops, although the use
of grounds troops was at all times entertained. This form of warfare,
indicatively entitled Virtual Warfare by Michael Ignatiev, was tested in
the Gulf War, where it had considerable success - a success denied the
US in its intervention in Somalia using more traditional methods of
waging war.4 At first glance, high-level precision bombing seems to
offer a humanitarian way of waging war, since it spares the lives that
might be lost in warfare on the ground, and targets can be selected that
damage goods but not people.
There is no doubt that fewer lives were lost than would have been
had an invasion on the ground been undertaken. That they were kept
to a minimum, however, is belied by independent reports that have
emerged since the bombing. Early February 2000 saw the publication,
by Human Rights Watch, of the most complete analysis of civilian
deaths produced to that point. 5 It recorded the use of cluster bombs
by the British as late as 4 June, although the US restricted use of cluster
bombs by its own forces after one such raid resulted in extensive
148 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

civilian deaths on 7 May. It claims that 90 bombing incidents resulted

in the deaths of 500 Yugoslav civilians. The bombing of the Serb Radio
and Television Headquarters on 23 April, when it was known that
civilians were at work in the building, stands as an example of the thin
borderline that can be drawn between civilian and military targets.
Even a single death is one too many, and these figures are high in
relation to what was stated by the official sources at the time. However,
they are not high in comparison with any other means that might have
been adopted to drive the Serbs out of a province of their republic.
Bombing from a safe height is now a proven method of waging war at
a low cost in civilian and even military deaths. But the issue is not only
one of numbers. Although the bombs that fell on many border areas
in Macedonia and Bulgaria - and indeed on Sofia itself - fortunately
killed no one (the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was not so lucky), that
they were dropped with impunity is startling. When this is added to
the fact that there was doubt about the legitimacy of the bombing in
terms of UN resolutions, the full meaning of policing the world order
in a unipolar world becomes clear. The image becomes less one of a
policeman preserving an established order and using the methods
sanctioned by that order, than of the sheriff of a town where the law
does not reach and who does the best he can to establish order accord-
ing to rough notions of justice and his own judgment of the extent of
force required.
Even if warfare by high-level bombing minimizes actual human
deaths, it is still warfare. For human deaths it substitutes maximum
damage to the enemy's economic infrastructure - or certainly did in
the Kosovo case. As long as human deaths were avoided - we have seen
that they were not, but we can allow that the intention was to avoid
them - no limit was set on the damage that was to be done to Yugo-
slavia's means of creating wealth and maintaining the welfare of the
country's citizens. The aim was expressly to bring down Milosevic by
beggaring the country. In this very real sense the bombing was not
precise but indiscriminate. That it did not bring down Milosevic but
united the Serbs around him is not the issue here. What is at issue is
the question of what is to count as humanitarian and inhumanitarian
action. Saving the lives of one's own citizens while destroying the
livelihood of a whole country, with 500 civilian deaths thrown in, is a
suspect course of action for an international organization that is basing
that action on humanitarian principles, over and above the consider-
ation that it increased rather than mitigated the misery of the refugees.
'Would NATO have been able to sell its Kosovo bombing to the public
if we had known then what we know one year later?', asks one com-
mentator. 'Suppose NATO had announced in advance that it would
hit trains, buses, bridges, domestic heating plants, electricity stations,
Conclusions 149

factories, market places, hospitals, homes, schools. Would this have

been welcomed by liberal commentators as the dawn of a new" ethical"
foreign policy?' 6
In forcing the pace of change by going beyond Security Council
resolutions, and in inflicting such extensive damage on Serbia without
commensurate risk to its own forces, NATO could only lay itself open
to the charge of caring too little for the norms of legitimate armed
intervention and of just war. The action it was taking lay open to the
further charge that behind this carelessness the habits and practices of
past interventions, the motives of which would be held by many to be
more questionable, were being condoned. In the 1980s one William
Walker played a pivotal role in suppressing leftist rebels in El Salvador
while supporting the contra guerrillas against the Sandinista govern-
ment in Nicaragua. In the autumn of 1998 the same William Walker
was imposed by Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, as the
head of the Kosovo Verification Mission ofOSCE which was to monitor
ceasefire violations.' Walker failed to react to Albanian violations (esti-
mated as 80 per cent of the total) and terrorist acts against Serbian
civilians (the latter for 'lack of evidence' that the KLA was involved),
but in January 1999 was quick to attribute a massacre of 45 Albanian
civilians at Rac;ak to MiloseviC's forces, thus triggering the chain
reaction that led to what was effectively a US ultimatum to the Serbs
to come to Rambouillet and 'negotiate' under the threat of bombing,
and finally to the bombing itself.8

ANOTHER PROTECTORATE?

A further conclusion to be drawn from the Kosovo intervention and

its aftermath is that the NATO powers have saddled the United Nations
with another protectorate in south-east Europe, thus extending the
existing protectorate in Bosnia. They have thereby secured for them-
selves, whether it was their intention or not, a long-term commitment.
The historical echoes of an earlier Austrian protectorate in the region
have often been evoked. The parallel is in many senses a fair one. Most
obviously, richer and more powerful states to the north of the Balkans
are indeed exercizing a protectorate over Bosnia and Kosovo. Also?
the interventions are a powerful illustration of the 'return to history'
that has affected the whole of eastern and south-eastern Europe, put-
ting Turkey and Russia back in the geopolitics that preceded the Cold
War. Business as usual; and this revived geopolitics has proved remark-
ably resistant to factors of globalization that have brought the countries
of Europe closer together. But as with so many of the historical parallels
that were drawn during the Kosovo war - between Milosevic and Hitler,
150 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

between Munich and the agreements that the external powers made
with Milosevic at various times - it is misleading. This time the external
powers are acting in greater concert and not using interventions in the
Balkans as an extension of their political and economic rivalries to the
same extent as in the past, and the impact of those rivalries is moder-
ated by common membership in transnational organizations. More
importantly, the increasing integration of western Europe in the Euro-
pean Union and the chances of joining that area of privilege are now
the first preoccu pation of at least three of the Balkan countries, namely,
Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey (another, Greece, having already found
its way into it). A NATO protectorate over two Balkan territories and
the attendant ostracism of Yugoslavia have produced a geopolitics very
different from the days of the good soldier Svejk.
Finally, in imposing its de facto protectorate over Bosnia-Herzegovina
in 1878, Austria was acting as a sovereign state on a definition of sover-
eignty that is now so hedged about in Europe as to render the term
problematic. There is a defensible notion that NATO's protectorate
over Bosnia and now Kosovo is international in a broader sense than
that of simply involving the NATO allies. If there is doubt over NATO's
mandate to conduct that bombing of Yugoslavia, and thus over the
legitimacy of the protectorate - which is not, of course, officially described
as a protectorate - there is general acceptance, in both the Bosnia and
the Kosovo cases, that the UN itself has been entitled to playa deter-
mining role. Moreover, it is possible for the NATO allies to expect to
be sharing their protectorate with an extensive network of inter-
national agencies, the one with perhaps the greatest potential for future
development being the Organization for Security and Co-operation in
Europe. An interesting division of roles has evolved - NATO acts, the
UN confers legitimacy and the other international organizations pick
up the pieces, organizing elections, preparing the territory for its long-
term 'democratization', and so on.

WAR IN A UNIPOLAR WORLD

There can be no doubt that the bombing of Serbia was a particularly

prominent marker of change in the world order that the fall of com-
munism occasioned, following as it did the Gulf War and the inter-
vention in Somalia. While this book cannot concern itself with such
wide issues, it would be incomplete without some acknowledgement
of them.
Since the collapse of the Soviet state and the end of the Cold War,
commentators have frequently referred to a 'unipolar world' in which,
Russia having lost is superpower status, the remaining superpower is
Conclusions 151

able to conduct its diplomacy without significant constraint from its

earlier rival. The wars in Bosnia did not fully evoke this new imbalance.
While the role of the United States in bringing the conflicts to a close
was determinant, Russian influence was not overtly compromised.
With Kosovo it clearly was. The evidence of this was not Russia's
unwillingness to give decisive support to one of its historical Slav and
Orthodox clients in the Balkans; at the time of the bombing the
Russians had troubles enough at home without bringing down on
themselves others from which they would derive little benefit. The
point at which Russian impotence and Russian pride were engaged
was, as noted, in the dispositions made for the governing of Kosovo
after MiloseviC's capitulation - even though this capitulation would
not have happened without Russian engagement. If the dash for the
Pristina airport did in fact contain an element of independent action
by commanders on the ground in defiance of Foreign Ministry prefer-
ences, this can now be seen as a further sign of disquiet in the Russian
armed forces after their effective defeat in Chechnya in 1996. 9 By the
spring of 2000 that defeat had been redeemed and, as far as could at
that time be determined in circumstances of a media black-out, consoli-
dated by atrocities the severity of which seemed to proclaim a Russian
need - or at least a need on the part of the Russian army - to be avenged
for a post-Soviet impotence. But the taking of Grozny in January 2000
could not subtract anything from the fact that the world had become,
at least for the time being, unipolar.
Such considerations raise the question of relations between the US
superpower and the European NATO allies. In the dominant role
played by the USA throughout the war and its prelude, this unipolarity
speaks clearly enough. The Human Rights Watch report, cited above,
has the US commander of NATO air forces in the Balkans saying quite
candidly that he would have preferred the USA to have had unilateral
charge of the whole campaign from the start. If it had he would have
'taken out Belgrade' within the first three days of the campaign. It was
only the 'weak will' of America's European allies that had denied him
victory. Such attitudes must be qualified, however, by the real processes
of consultation and co-operation involved in NATO operations, which
dilute the unipolarity by spreading it among a series ofjunior partners.
But the 'weak will' that might be attributed to the European NATO
allies is not a matter of their junior status. The palpable inability of the
member states of the European Union to confront collectively the
problems following from the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia represents another case of an impotence throwing US
dominance into sharp focus. That is, Kosovo served to emphasize not
only the current weakness of Russia, but also the continuing weakness
of the European Union in the field offoreign policy-making.
152 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

In his contribution to this book Patrick Thornberry quoted some

words of Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General. They bear repeating,
since they encapsulate the central dilemma on which the greatest part
of the debate over NATO's intervention turns:

Emerging slowly, but I believe surely, is an international norm

against the violent repression of minorities that will and must take
precedence over concerns of state sovereignty ... No government
has the right to hide behind national sovereignty in order to violate
the human rights or fundamental freedoms of its peoples ... This
developing international norm will pose fundamental challenges to
the United Nations.

It is the concluding words of this passage that point up the historical

significance of the Kosovo crisis and the responses to it. The logic of
NATO's intervention acknowledged expressly the humanitarian cause
while at the same time tacitly setting aside the existing norms o£ state
sovereignty - and also setting aside also the UN's role in addressing
the fundamental challenge noted by Kofi Annan. It substituted itself
for the United Nations in this regard. There are those who approve
NATO's thus stealing a march on the Zeitgeist. But with hindsight on
the results of NATO's action it can reasonably be maintained that this
unilateral action, reflecting and confirming the unipolar nature of the
post-communist world, has considerably muddied the waters in which
Kofi Annan's challenge must be addressed. The result has been that
NATO's intervention became, as it were, a distorting mirror in which
the professed humanitarian aims were, to say the least, difficult to
discern.
The conclusion to the conclusion of this book must be, however,
that whatever view is taken of the decision to bomb there must be few
- and they are certainly not represented in these pages - who did not
acknowledge the importance of the humanitarian issue. It is an issue
that has had room to establish itself in the new world order that has
come into being with the end of the Cold War. The new order will bring
new norms, and those new norms may be expected to emerge through
tensions between ideas and the interests in play. But at least the
tensions are being played out in a context that stands a chance of giving
humanitarian issues a greater purchase than they have hitherto had.

NOTES

In the BBC's Today programme of 22 February 2000 a British army spokes-

man, commenting on the disturbances in Mitrovica of the preceding days,
claimed that the British contingent performed better than the other European
Conclusions 153

occupying forces in controlling the situation because of their experience in

Northern Ireland. No mention was made that, unlike the French sector round
Mitrovica, the local Serbs in the British sector had been cleansed almost in their
entirety.
2 AFP, 6 March 2000.
3 United Nations, Economic and Social Council, (E/CN.4/2000/10, 27
September 1999).
4 Michael Ignatiev, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (Chatto and Windus, 2000).
5 Le Monde, lO February 2000; http://www.hrw.org.
6 Phil Hammond, 'The Lies Last Time', 26 March 2000 - http://emperors-
clothes.comlarticles/hammond/lieslast.htm (accessed on 28 March 2000). This
is an edited version of a speech to the Committee for Peace in the Balkans
London rally on 24 March 2000. Philip Hammond is co-editor, with Edward
S. Herman, of Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis (Pluto Press,
June 2000).
7 Tom Walker and Aidan Laverty, 'CIA Aided Kosovo Guerrilla Army', Sunday
Times, 12 March 2000.
8 Alan Little, 'Moral Combat', BBC 2,12 March 2000.
9 Stratfor commentary, January 2000, 'How the West Killed Yeltsin', at http://
www.stratfor.comlwesternyeltsin.htm.
This page intentionally left blank
DOCUMENTS
This page intentionally left blank
 The Rambouillet Text, February 1999

APPENDIX B: STATUS OF THE MULTI-NATIONAL MILITARY

IMPLEMENTATION FORCE

1 For the purposes of this Appendix, the following expressions shall

have the meanings hereunder assigned to them:
(a) 'NATO' means the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),
its subsidiary bodies, its military Headquarters, the NATO-led
KFOR, and any elements/units forming any part of KFOR or
supporting KFOR, whether or not they are from a NATO member
country and whether or not they are under NATO or national com-
mand and control, when acting in furtherance of this Agreement.
(b) 'Authorities in the FRY' means appropriate authorities, whether
Federal, Republic, Kosovo or other.
(c) 'NATO personnel' means the military, civilian, and contractor
personnel assigned or attached to or employed by NATO, includ-
ing the military, civilian, and contractor personnel from non-
NATO states participating in the Operation, with the exception
of personnel locally hired.
(d) 'The Operation' means the support, implementation, prepa-
ration, and participation by NATO and NATO personnel in
furtherance of this Chapter.
(e) 'Military Headquarters' means any entity, whatever its denomi-
nation, consisting of or constituted in part by NATO military
personnel established in order to fulfil the Operation.
(f) 'Authorities' means the appropriate responsible individual, agency,
or organization of the Parties.
(g) 'Contractor personnel' means the technical experts or functional
specialists whose services are required by NATO and who are in
the territory of the FRY exclusively to serve NATO either in an
advisory capacity in technical matters, or for the setting-up, oper-
ation, or maintenance of equipment, unless they are: (i) nationals
of the FRY; or (ii) persons ordinarily resident in the FRY.
(h) 'Official use' means any use of goods purchased, or of the services
158 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

received and intended for the performance of any function as

required by the operation of the Headquarters.
(i) 'Facilities' means all buildings, structures, premises, and land
required for conducting the operational, training, and adminis-
trative activities by NATO for the Operation as well as for accom-
modation of NATO personnel.
2 Without prejudice to their privileges and immunities under this
Appendix, all NATO personnel shall respect the laws applicable
in the FRY, whether Federal, Republic, Kosovo, or other, insofar
as compliance with those laws is compatible with the entrusted
tasks/mandate and shall refrain from activities not compatible
with the nature of the operation.
3 The Parties recognize the need for expeditious departure and
entry procedures for NATO personnel. Such personnel shall be
exempt from passport and visa regulations and the registration
requirements applicable to aliens. At all entry and exit points
to/from the FRY, NATO personnel shall be permitted to enter/
exit the FRY on production of a national identification (ID) card.
NATO personnel shall carry identification which they may be
requested to produce for the authorities in the FRY, but oper-
ations, training, and movement shall not be allowed to be impeded
or delayed by such requests.
4 NATO military personnel shall normally wear uniforms, and
NATO personnel may possess and carry arms if authorized to do
so by their orders. The Parties shall accept as valid, without tax
or fee, drivers, licenses and permits issued to NATO personnel
by their respective national authorities.
5 NATO shall be permitted to display the NATO flag and/or national
flags of its constituent national elements/units on any NATO
uniform, means of transport, or facility.
6 (a) NATO shall be immune from all legal process, whether civil,
administrative, or criminal.
(b) NATO personnel, under all circumstances and at all times, shall
be immune from the Parties' jurisdiction in respect of any civil,
administrative, criminal, or disciplinary offenses which may be
committed by them in the FRY. The Parties shall assist States
participating in the operation in the exercise of their jurisdiction
over their own nationals.
(c) Notwithstanding the above, and with the NATO Commander's
express agreement in each case, the authorities in the FRY may
exceptionally exercise jurisdiction in such matters, but only in
The Rambouillet Text, February 1999 159

respect of Contractor personnel who are not subject to the juris-

diction of their nation of citizenship.
7 NATO personnel shall be immune from any form of arrest,
investigation, or detention by the authorities in the FRY. NATO
personnel erroneously arrested or detained shall immediately be
turned over to NATO authorities.
8 NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels,
aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unim-
peded access throughout the FRY including associated airspace
and territorial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to,
the right of bivouac, maneuver, billet, and utilization of any areas
or facilities as required for support, training, and operations.
9 NATO shall be exempt from duties, taxes, and other charges and
inspections and custom regulations including providing inven-
tories or other routine customs documentation, for personnel,
vehicles, vessels, aircraft, equipment, supplies, and provisions
entering, exiting, or transiting the territory of the FRY in support
of the Operation.
10 The authorities in the FRY shall facilitate, on a priority basis and
with all appropriate means, all movement of personnel, vehicles,
vessels, aircraft, equipment, or supplies, through or in the air-
space, ports, airports, or roads used. No charges may be assessed
against NATO for air navigation, landing, or takeoff of aircraft,
whether government-owned or chartered. Similarly, no duties,
dues, tolls or charges may be assessed against NATO ships,
whether government-owned or chartered, for the mere entry
and exit of ports. Vehicles, vessels, and aircraft used in support
of the operation shall not be subject to licensing or registration
requirements, nor commercial insurance.
11 NATO is granted the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports with-
out payment of fees, duties, dues, tolls, or charges occasioned by
mere use. NATO shall not, however, claim exemption from
reasonable charges for specific services requested and received,
but operations/movement and access shall not be allowed to be
impeded pending payment for such services.
12 NATO personnel shall be exempt from taxation by the Parties on
the salaries and emoluments received from NATO and on any
income received from outside the FRY.
13 NATO personnel and their tangible moveable property imported
into, acquired in, or exported from the FRY shall be exempt from
all duties, taxes, and other charges and inspections and custom
regulations.
160 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

14 NATO shall be allowed to import and to export, free of duty, taxes

and other charges, such equipment, provisions, and supplies as
NATO shall require for the operation, provided such goods are
for the official use of NATO or for sale to NATO personnel. Goods
sold shall be solely for the use of NATO personnel and not
transferable to unauthorized persons.
15 The Parties recognize that the use of communications channels
is necessary for the Operation. NATO shall be allowed to operate
its own internal mail services. The Parties shall, upon simple
request, grant all telecommunications services, including broad-
cast services, needed for the operation, as determined by NATO.
This shall include the right to utilize such means and services as
required to assure full ability to communicate, and the right to
use all of the electro-magnetic spectrum for this purpose, free of
cost. In implementing this right, NATO shall make every reason-
able effort to coordinate with and take into account the needs and
requirements of appropriate authorities in the FRY.
16 The Parties shall provide, free of cost, such public facilities as
NATO shall require to prepare for and execute the Operation.
The Parties shall assist NATO in obtaining, at the lowest rate,
the necessary utilities, such as electricity, water, gas and other
resources, as NATO shall require for the Operation.
17 NATO and NATO personnel shall be immune from claims of any
sort which arise out of activities in pursuance of the operation;
however, NATO will entertain claims on an ex gratia basis.
18 NATO shall be allowed to contract directly for the acquisition of
goods, services, and construction from any source within and
outside the FRY. Such contracts, goods, services, and construction
shall not be subject to the payment of duties, taxes, or other
charges. NATO may also carry out construction works with their
own personnel.
19 Commercial undertakings operating in the FRY only in the
service of NATO shall be exempt from local laws and regulations
with respect to the terms and conditions of their employment
and licensing and registration of employees, businesses, and
corporations.
20 NATO may hire local personnel who on an individual basis shall
remain subject to local laws and regulations with the exception
of labor/employment laws. However, local personnel hired by
NATO shall:
(a) be immune from legal process in respect of words spoken or
written and all acts performed by them in their official capacity;
The Rambouillet Text, February 1999 161

(b) be immune from national services and/or national military service

obligations;
(c) be subject only to employment terms and conditions established
by NATO; and
(d) be exempt from taxation on the salaries and emoluments paid to
them by NATO.
21 In carrying out its authorities under this Chapter, NATO is
authorized to detain individuals and, as quickly as possible, turn
them over to appropriate officials.
22 NATO may, in the conduct of the operation, have need to make
improvements or modifications to certain infrastructure in the
FRY, such as roads, bridges, tunnels, buildings, and utility
systems. Any such improvements or modifications of a non-
temporary nature shall become part of and in the same ownership
as that infrastructure. Temporary improvements or modifica-
tions may be removed at the discretion of the NATO Commander,
and the infrastructure returned to as near its original condition
as possible, fair wear and tear excepted.
23 Failing any prior settlement, disputes with regard to the inter-
pretation or application of this Appendix shall be settled between
NATO and the appropriate authorities in the FRY.
24 Supplementary arrangements with any of the Parties may be
concluded to facilitate any details connected with the Operation.
25 The provisions of this Appendix shall remain in force until com-
pletion of the Operation or as the Parties and NATO otherwise
agree.

Source: http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,2763,45928,00.
html (accessed on 6 July 1999).
 Press Statement by Dr Javier Solana,
Secretary-General of NATO,
23 March 1999

PRESS RELEASE (1999) 040

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

I have just directed SACEUR, General Clark, to initiate air oper-
ations in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
I have taken this decision after extensive consultations in recent
days with all the Allies, and after it became clear that the final diplo-
matic effort of Ambassador Holbrooke in Belgrade has not met with
success.
All efforts to achieve a negotiated, political solution to the Kosovo
crisis having failed, no alternative is open but to take military action.
We are taking action following the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
government's refusal of the international community's demands:

• Acceptance of the interim political settlement which has been

negotiated at Rambouillet;
• Full observance of limits on the Serb Army and Special Police
Forces agreed on 25 October;
• Ending of excessive and disproportionate use of force in Kosovo.

As we warned on the 30 January, failure to meet these demands would

lead NATO to take whatever measures were necessary to avert a
humanitarian catastrophe.
NATO has fully supported all relevant UN Security Council reso-
lutions, the efforts of the OSCE, and those of the Contact Group.
We deeply regret that these efforts did not succeed, due entirely to
the intransigence of the FRY government.
This military action is intended to support the political aims of the
international community.
It will be directed towards disrupting the violent attacks being
committed by the Serb Army and Special Police Forces and weakening
their ability to cause further humanitarian catastrophe.
Press Statement by Dr Javier Solana 163

We wish thereby to support international efforts to secure Yugoslav

agreement to an interim political settlement.
As we have stated, a viable political settlement must be guaranteed
by an international military presence.
It remains open to the Yugoslav government to show at any time
that it is ready to meet the demands of the international community.
I hope it will have the wisdom to do so.
At the same time, we are appealing to the Kosovar Albanians to
remain firmly committed to the road to peace which they have chosen
in Paris. We urge in particular Kosovar armed elements to refrain from
provocative military action.
Let me be clear: NATO is not waging war against Yugoslavia.
We have no quarrel with the people of Yugoslavia who for too
long have been isolated in Europe because of the policies of their
government.
Our objective is to prevent more human suffering and more repres-
sion and violence against the civilian population of Kosovo.
We must also act to prevent instability spreading in the region.
NATO is united behind this course of action.
We must halt the violence and bring an end to the humanitarian
catastrophe now unfolding in Kosovo.
We know the risks of action but we have all agreed that inaction
brings even greater dangers.
We will do what is necessary to bring stability to the region.
We must stop an authoritarian regime from repressing its people
in Europe at the end of the twentieth century.
We have a moral duty to do so.
The responsibility is on our shoulders and we will fulfil it.

Source: http://www.nato.int/docu/pr/1999/p99-040e.html
(accessed on 6 July 1999).
 UN Security Council Resolution 1244,
10 June 1999

(ADOPTED BY THE SECURITY COUNCIL AT ITS 4011TH MEETING)

The Security Council,

Bearing in mind the purposes and principles of the Charter of the
United Nations, and the primary responsibility of the Security Council
for the maintenance of international peace and security,
Recalling its resolutions 1160 (1998) of 31 March 1998, 1199 (1998) of
23 September 1998, 1203 (1998) of24 October 1998 and 1239 (1999)
of 14 May 1999,
Regretting that there has not been full compliance with the require-
ments of these resolutions,
Determined to resolve the grave humanitarian situation in Kosovo,
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and to provide for the safe and free
return of all refugees and displaced persons to their homes,
Condemning all acts of violence against the Kosovo population as well
as all terrorist acts by any party,
Recalling the statement made by the Secretary-General on 9 April
1999, expressing concern at the humanitarian tragedy taking place in
Kosovo,
Reaffirming the right of all refugees and displaced persons to return
to their homes in safety,
Recalling the jurisdiction and the mandate of the International
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,
Welcoming the general principles on a political solution to the Kosovo
crisis adopted on 6 May 1999 (S/1999/516, annex 1 to this resolution)
and welcoming also the acceptance by the Federal Republic of Yugo-
slavia of the principles set forth in points 1 to 9 of the paper presented
in Belgrade on 2 June 1999 (S/1999/649, annex 2 to this resolution),
and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia's agreement to that paper,
Reaffirming the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty
and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and
UN Security Council Resolution 1244, 10 June 1999 165

the other States of the region, as set out in the Helsinki Final Act and
annex 2,
Reaffirming the call in previous resolutions for substantial autonomy
and meaningful self-administration for Kosovo,
Determining that the situation in the region continues to constitute a
threat to international peace and security,
Determined to ensure the safety and security of international per-
sonnel and the implementation by all concerned of their responsi-
bilities under the present resolution, and acting for these purposes
under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations,
1 Decides that a political solution to the Kosovo crisis shall be based
on the general principles in annex 1 and as further elaborated in
the principles and other required elements in annex 2;
2 Welcomes the acceptance by the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia of
the principles and other required elements referred to in para-
graph 1 above, and demands the full cooperation of the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia in their rapid implementation;
3 Demands in particular that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia put
an immediate and verifiable end to violence and repression in
Kosovo, and begin and complete verifiable phased withdrawal
from Kosovo of all military, police and paramilitary forces accord-
ing to a rapid timetable, with which the deployment of the inter-
national security presence in Kosovo will be synchronized;
4 Confirms that after the withdrawal an agreed number of Yugoslav
and Serb military and police personnel will be permitted to return
to Kosovo to perform the functions in accordance with annex 2;
5 Decides on the deployment in Kosovo, under United Nations aus-
pices, of international civil and security presences, with appro-
priate equipment and personnel as required, and welcomes the
agreement of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to such presences;
6 Requests the Secretary-General to appoint, in consultation with
the Security Council, a Special Representative to control the imple-
mentation of the international civil presence, and further requests
the Secretary-General to instruct his Special Representative to co-
ordinate closely with the international security presence to ensure
that both presences operate towards the same goals and in a
mutually supportive manner;
7 Authorizes Member States and relevant international organiza-
tions to establish the international security presence in Kosovo as
set out in point 4 of annex 2 with all necessary means to fulfil its
responsibilities under paragraph 9 below;
166 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

8 Affirms the need for the rapid early deployment of effective

international civil and security presences to Kosovo, and demands
that the parties cooperate fully in their deployment;
9 Decides that the responsibilities of the international security
presence to be deployed and acting in Kosovo will include:
(a) Deterring renewed hostilities, maintaining and where necessary
enforcing a ceasefire, and ensuring the withdrawal and preventing
the return into Kosovo of Federal and Republic military, police and
paramilitary forces, except as provided in point 6 of annex 2;
(b) Demilitarizing the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and other armed
Kosovo Albanian groups as required in paragraph 15 below;
(c) Establishing a secure environment in which refugees and displaced
persons can return home in safety, the international civil presence
can operate, a transitional administration can be established, and
humanitarian aid can be delivered;
(d) Ensuring public safety and order until the international civil
presence can take responsibility for this task;
(e) Supervising demining until the international civil presence can, as
appropriate, take over responsibility for this task;
(f) Supporting, as appropriate, and coordinating closely with the work
of the international civil presence;
(g) Conducting border monitoring duties as required;
(h) Ensuring the protection and freedom of movement of itself, the
international civil presence, and other international organizations;
10 Authorizes the Secretary-General, with the assistance of relevant
international organizations, to establish an international civil pres-
ence in Kosovo in order to provide an interim administration for
Kosovo under which the people of Kosovo can enjoy substantial
autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and which
will provide transitional administration while establishing and over-
seeing the development of provisional democratic self-governing
institutions to ensure conditions for a peaceful and normal life for
all inhabitants of Kosovo;
11 Decides that the main responsibilities of the international civil
presence will include:
(a) Promoting the establishment, pending a final settlement, of sub-
stantial autonomy and self-government in Kosovo, taking full
account of annex 2 and of the Rambouillet accords (S/1999/648);
(b) Performing basic civilian administrative functions where and as
long as required;
UN Security Council Resolution 1244, 10 June 1999 167

(c) Organizing and overseeing the development of provisional insti-

tutions for democratic and autonomous self-government pending
a political settlement, including the holding of elections;
(d) Transferring, as these institutions are established, its adminis-
trative responsibilities while overseeing and supporting the con-
solidation of Kosovo's local provisional institutions and other
peace-building activities;
(e) Facilitating a political process designed to determine Kosovo's future
status, taking into account the Rambouillet accords (S/1999/648);
(f) In a final stage, overseeing the transfer of authority from Kosovo's
provisional institutions to institutions established under a political
settlement;
(g) Supporting the reconstruction of key infrastructure and other
economic reconstruction;
(h) Supporting, in coordination with international humanitarian
organizations, humanitarian and disaster relief aid;
(i) Maintaining civil law and order, including establishing local police
forces and meanwhile through the deployment of international
police personnel to serve in Kosovo;
U) Protecting and promoting human rights;
(k) Assuring the safe and unimpeded return of all refugees and
displaced persons to their homes in Kosovo;
12 Emphasizes the need for coordinated humanitarian relief oper-
ations, and for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to allow unim-
peded access to Kosovo by humanitarian aid organizations and to
cooperate with such organizations so as to ensure the fast and
effective delivery of international aid;
13 Encourages all Member States and international organizations to
contribute to economic and social reconstruction as well as to the
safe return of refugees and displaced persons, and emphasizes in
this context the importance of convening an international donors'
conference, particularly for the purposes set out in paragraph 11
(g) above, at the earliest possible date;
14 Demands full cooperation by all concerned, including the inter-
national security presence, with the International Tribunal for the
Former Yugoslavia;
15 Demands that the KLA and other armed Kosovo Albanian groups
end immediately all offensive actions and comply with the
requirements for demilitarization as laid down by the head of the
international security presence in consultation with the Special
Representative of the Secretary-General;
168 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

16 Decides that the prohibitions imposed by paragraph 8 of reso-

lution 1160 (1998) shall not apply to arms and related materiel for
the use of the international civil and security presences;
17 Welcomes the work in hand in the European Union and other
international organizations to develop a comprehensive approach
to the economic development and stabilization of the region
affected by the Kosovo crisis, including the implementation of a
Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe with broad international
participation in order to further the promotion of democracy,
economic prosperity, stability and regional cooperation;
18 Demands that all States in the region cooperate fully in the imple-
mentation of all aspects of this resolution;
19 Decides that the international civil and security presences are
established for an initial period of 12 months, to continue there-
after unless the Security Council decides otherwise;
20 Req,uests the Secretary-General to report to the Council at regular
intervals on the implementation of this resolution, including
reports from the leaderships of the international civil and security
presences, the first reports to be submitted within 30 days of the
adoption of this resolution;
21 Decides to remain actively seized of the matter.

ANNEX 1

Statement by the Chairman on the conclusion of the meeting of the

G-8 Foreign Ministers held at the Petersberg Centre on 6 May 1999
The G-8 Foreign Ministers adopted the following general principles
on the political solution to the Kosovo crisis:
• Immediate and verifiable end of violence and repression in
Kosovo;
• Withdrawal from Kosovo of military, police and paramilitary
forces;
• Deployment in Kosovo of effective international civil and secur-
ity presences, endorsed and adopted by the United Nations,
capable of guaranteeing the achievement of the common
objectives;
• Establishment of an interim administration for Kosovo to be
decided by the Security Council of the United Nations to ensure
conditions for a peaceful and normal life for all inhabitants in
Kosovo;
UN Security Council Resolution 1244, 10 June 1999 169

• The safe and free return of all refugees and displaced persons
and unimpeded access to Kosovo by humanitarian aid organizations;
• A political process towards the establishment of an interim
political framework agreement providing for a substantial self-
government for Kosovo, taking full account of the Rambouillet
accords and the principles of sovereignty and territorial integ-
rity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the other countries
of the region, and the demilitarization of the KLA;
• Comprehensive approach to the economic development and
stabilization of the crisis region.

ANNEX 2

[Agreement between the President of FRY, Slobodan MiloseviL, and EU and

Russian special envoys, Martti Ahtisaari and Viktor Chernomyrdin, of
3 June 1999 - Eds.]

Agreement should be reached on the following principles to move

towards a resolution of the Kosovo crisis:
1 An immediate and verifiable end of violence and repression in
Kosovo.
2 Verifiable withdrawal from Kosovo of all military, police and
paramilitary forces according to a rapid timetable.
3 Deployment in Kosovo under United Nations auspices of effective
international civil and security presences, acting as may be decided
under Chapter VII of the Charter, capable of guaranteeing the
achievement of common objectives.
4 The international security presence with substantial North Atlantic
Treaty Organization participation must be deployed under unified
command and control and authorized to establish a safe environ-
ment for all people in Kosovo and to facilitate the safe return to
their homes of all displaced persons and refugees.
5 Establishment of an interim administration for Kosovo as a part of
the international civil presence under which the people of Kosovo
can enjoy substantial autonomy within the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, to be decided by the Security Council of the United
Nations. The interim administration to provide transitional admin-
istration while establishing and overseeing the development of
provisional democratic self-governing institutions to ensure con-
ditions for a peaceful and normal life for all inhabitants in Kosovo.
6 After withdrawal, an agreed number of Yugoslav and Serbian
170 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

personnel will be permitted to return to perform the following

functions:
• Liaison with the international civil mission and the international
security presence;
• Marking/clearing minefields;
• Maintaining a presence at Serb patrimonial sites;
• Maintaining a presence at key border crossings.
7 Safe and free return of all refugees and displaced persons under
the supervision of the Office of the United Nations High Commis-
sioner for Refugees and unimpeded access to Kosovo by humani-
tarian aid organizations.
8 A political process towards the establishment of an interim political
framework agreement providing for substantial self-government
for Kosovo, taking full account of the Rambouillet accords and the
principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia and the other countries of the region, and
the demilitarization of UCK. Negotiations between the parties
for a settlement should not delay or disrupt the establishment of
democratic self-governing institutions.
9 A comprehensive approach to the economic development and
stabilization of the crisis region. This will include the imple-
mentation of a stability pact for South-Eastern Europe with broad
international participation in order to further promotion of democ-
racy, economic prosperity, stability and regional cooperation.
10 Suspension of military activity will require acceptance of the
principles set forth above in addition to agreement to other, pre-
viously identified, required elements, which are specified in the
footnote below. l A military-technical agreement will then be
rapidly concluded that would, among other things, specify addi-
tional modalities, including the roles and functions of Yugoslav/
Serb personnel in Kosovo:
Withdrawal
• Procedures for withdrawals, including the phased, detailed
schedule and delineation of a buffer area in Serbia beyond which
forces will be withdrawn;
Returning personnel
• Equipment associated with returning personnel;
• Terms of reference for their functional responsibilities;
• Timetable for their return;
• Delineation of their geographical areas of operation;
UN Security Council Resolution 1244, 10 June 1999 171

• Rules governing their relationship to the international security

presence and the international civil mission.

NOTE

Other required elements:

- A rapid and precise timetable for withdrawals, meaning, e.g., seven days to
complete withdrawal and air defence weapons withdrawn outside a 25-
kilometre mutual safety zone within 48 hours;
- Return of personnel for the four functions specified above will be under the
supervision of the international security presence and will be limited to a small
agreed number (hundreds, not thousands);
- Suspension of military activity will occur after the beginning of verifiable
withdrawals;
- The discussion and achievement of a military-technical agreement shall not
extend the previously determined time for completion of withdrawals.

Source: http://www.un.org!Docs/scres/1999/99scl244.html (accessed on

6July 1999).
 Chronology of Events

1st century Be: Roman conquest of Dardanian lands completed.

4th-7th centuries AD: Goths, Huns, Avars, Slavs and Bulgars succes-
sively invade present-day Kosovo, then part of the Eastern Roman
Empire.
Mid-9th century AD: Bulgarian conquest and Slav settlement.
1018: Rule of East Rome (Byzantium) restored.
1081: Albanians on the territory of present-day Albania are mentioned
for the first time in a Byzantine historical record.
1180-1190: Serbian conquest; Kosovo becomes the core of the Serbian
state under the Nemanja dynasty.
1219: St Sava establishes the seat of an autocephalus Serbian Orthodox
Church in Pee.
13th-14th centuries: Kosovo is dotted by Serbian monasteries, the
most famous being Gracanica (built 1321) and Decani (1327-35).
1346: Under Tsar Stefan Dusan the Serbian Orthodox Church is
declared a Patriarchate with a seat in Pee.
1389: A Serbian-led Christian army (including Albanians) suffers a
catastrophic defeat by OUoman forces at the Battle of Kosovo.
1455: Last Serb resistance crushed, the Patriarchate abolished, and
Ottoman conquest of Kosovo completed.
1478: End of Albanian resistance to the OUoman Turks; eventually
about two-thirds of Albanians convert to Islam.
1557: The Serbian Patriarchate at Pee is restored.
1690: The start of 'the Great Migration' of Serbs from Kosovo to
present-day Vojvodina, followed by mass migration of Islamized
Albanians to Kosovo.
1766: The Serbian Patriarchate at Pee is merged with the mostly Greek
Patriarchate of Constantinople.
1833: An autonomous Serbian Principality under Ottoman suzerainty
is established to the north of Kosovo.
Chronology of Events 173

1835: The independent pashas (governors) of Kosovo are crushed and

the Ottoman government divides Albanian-populated lands into the
vilayets of Yanina, Manastir, Shkodra and Kosovo.
1878: Following a Russo-Turkish war, Muslim Albanian leaders meet in
Prizren to form a League in protest against the inclusion of Albanian-
populated territories in neighbouring Slav states, and to demand the
unification of 'the Four Albanian Vilayets' into one administrative unit.
1881: The leaders of the Prizren League and their families are arrested
and deported, and Albanian resistance in Kosovo is crushed.
1889: The Prizren League is re-formed as the League of Peja (Pee);
first Albanian-language school opened in Prizren.
1896: The Orthodox bishopric in Kosovo passes under Serbian control.
1897: Ottoman authorities disband the League of Peja, execute its
leader and ban Albanian language books.
1912: In May the Kosovo Albanians rise against the Ottoman author-
ities and seize Shkup (Skopje); in October the First Balkan War begins,
and Kosovo is occupied by Serbian forces.
1913: In May the Treaty of London establishes Albania as an inde-
pendent state; in December the Protocol of Florence establishes the
present border between Serbian-controlled Kosovo and independent
Albania.
1915: After the defeat of Serbian forces Kosovo is divided up between
Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary.
1918: Kosovo is reoccupied by the Serbian army and joined to the
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia); systematic
Serbian colonization and Albanian immigration follow.
1941: In April, after Yugoslav forces are defeated by Germany, the
largest part of Kosovo is joined to Albania, by then part of Mussolini's
Italian Empire; Serb colonists are expelled and migrants from north-
ern Albania settle in Kosovo.
1943: Following Italy's defection to the Allies, German forces occupy
the whole of Greater Albania; in September a 'Second Prizren League'
declares Albania's independence under German protection.
1944: In October and November Kosovo is reoccupied by Yugoslav
communist forces amidst fierce resistance from nationalist Albanians;
insurrections and fighting continue for the next six months.
1945: In August Kosovo and Metohija (Kosmet) is established as an
autonomous region within the People's Republic of Serbia.
1948: The communist leaders of Albania launch an anti-Yugoslav
174 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

propaganda campaign, cut economic ties and force Yugoslav advisers

to leave; Yugoslav authorities introduce a repressive regime in Kosovo
until 1966.
1968: In August both Albania and Yugoslavia condemn the Soviet-led
invasion of Czechoslovakia which leads to a thaw in relations, and the
establishment of direct contacts between the Albanian-dominated
Kosovo establishment and Tirana; in October-December Albanians
demonstrate with demands about joining all Albanian areas in Yugo-
slavia to Kosovo, republican status, Albanian flag, university and drop-
ping of'Metohija' from the name of the province.
1969: In January the Serbian parliament passes legislation, according
to which Kosovo (Metohija was dropped) is reconstituted as a Socialist
Autonomous Province with its own constitution, parliament, supreme
court and direct representation in federal institutions; Albanians
achieve political and cultural domination (an Albanian university is
founded in Pristina) and the Serb exodus out of Kosovo begins.
1974: A new Yugoslav constitution reaffirms the new status of Kosovo;
autonomous units, including Kosovo, become constituent members of
the federation with the right to veto decisions of Serbian republican
organs.
1981: Mass Albanian demonstrations in Kosovo demand the status of
a republic in Yugoslavia; Yugoslav police and army impose martial law
on the province and cultural links with Albania are discontinued.
1987: In April Serbian party leader Slobodan Milosevic delivers a
speech in Kosovo, identifying with the demands of local Serbs, hence
making Serb nationalism his tool in the search for a new identity to
secure his power base; this catapults him to a leadership position in
the Serbian republic.
1989: The Serbian parliament adopts constitutional changes which
limit the autonomy of Kosovo and subordinate its institutions to
Serbia.
1990: A new constitution of the Republic of Serbia reverses all Albanian
gains after 1966 and restores the name Kosovo-Metohija; Albanian
delegates of the Kosovo parliament declare Kosovo as a full Yugoslav
republic, separate from Serbia; in response Serbian authorities abolish
the parliament and government of Kosovo and take over the state-
owned television, radio and printed media.
1991: In September an Albanian-sponsored referendum is held in
Kosovo and over 90 per cent of the electorate vote for independ-
ence. The Serbian and Yugoslav authorities do not recognize the
referendum.
Chronology of Events 175

1992: In March clandestine elections are organized by Kosovo

Albanians, and Ibrahim Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo wins
the m~ority of votes.
1995: In November the presidents of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-
Herzegovina sign the Dayton Agreement which brings Bosnian wars
to an end.
1997: By March, a sporadic rebellion has broken out in Albania, and
several parts of the country have become virtually ungoverned; army
depots are looted and many weapons find their way to Kosovo. In
November the KLA makes its first public appearance.
1998: On 28 February some 80 Albanians - both KLA fighters and
civilians - are killed in ferocious fighting between the Serbian police
and the KLA in the Drenica region of central Kosovo. Support for the
KLA increases dramatically and by the summer they control about 40
per cent of the territory of Kosovo with a corridor to the Albanian
border. In July-August, a Serbian counter-offensive, using indiscrimi-
nate force, retakes most of Kosovo and the KLA is forced back to the
woods. In September, the UN Security Council calls for an immediate
ceasefire and political dialogue in Kosovo. On 13 October, by threat-
ening NATO air strikes, Richard Holbrooke, architect of the Dayton
Accords, secures a deal with Milosevic whereby Serbian forces in
Kosovo were supposed to be reduced, with unarmed OSCE verifiers
brought in to oversee an armistice between the Serbian forces and the
KLA. The KLA uses the Serbian withdrawal to retake positions that
were lost in the summer and steps up attacks on Serbian police and
civilians.
1999: On 15 January, the bodies of 45 Albanians are found near Racak.
Attributing it to MiloseviC's forces, William Walker, the head of the
OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission, describes this as 'a massacre, a
crime against humanity'. Three days later Madeleine Albright, the US
Secretary of State, suggests that the time has come to threaten Belgrade
with air strikes. This happens in the crisis centre of the White House,
in the presence of NATO generals Wesley K. Clark and Klaus
Naumann. Her plan also envisages for the first time to force Milosevic
to agree to the deployment of NATO forces, which should supervise
the withdrawal of the Yugoslav military in Kosovo and the re-
establishment of partial autonomy. On 29 January, Albright's position
is backed by a collective ultimatum of the leading NATO countries.
During. 6-23 February, indirect negotiations are held between
delegations of the Kosovo Albanians and Yugoslavia in Rambouillet,
France, with US special envoy Christopher Hill shuttling between the
two delegations. Western mediation fails: the Serbs largely accept
Western plans for autonomy but refuse to discuss the deployment of
176 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

NATO troops in Kosovo, while the Kosovo Albanians insist on inde-

pendence rather than autonomy. After the failure ofthese negotiations
Yugoslav troops return en masse to Kosovo in open violation of the
October agreement.
On 15 March, ,negotiations resume in Paris. On 18 March, the
Kosovo Albanian delegation agrees to sign a document which grants
Kosovo wide autonomy backed by 28,000 NATO troops and a refer-
endum on independence in three years' time. The Serbian delegation
refuses to sign this document, and negotiations in Paris end without
agreement. On 20 March, the OSCE verifiers pull out of Kosovo. On
22 March, Richard Holbrooke arrives in Belgrade in a last-minute
effort to convince Milosevic to accept the document signed by the
Kosovo Albanians in Paris. On 23 March, the Serbian parliament
refuses to accept the stationing of NATO peace-keepers in Kosovo.
Holbrooke leaves Belgrade. On 24 March, high-level bombing by
NATO of targets in Kosovo and Serbia proper begins. Mass exodus of
Albanians from Kosovo follows, and from early April NATO dramati-
cally steps up the bombing campaign.
On 5 April, at least five civilians perish and 30 are badly injured
when three cruise missiles, ostensibly aimed at barracks in the southern
mining town of Aleksinac, fall a third of a mile short of their target and
hit a row of houses instead. On 12 April, ten passengers are killed and
16 injured when the train they are travelling in is incinerated by an
air-launched missile as it crosses a bridge that NATO wanted to destroy.
NATO says the pilot of the aircraft that launched the missile had been
so busy flying his aircraft and aiming at the target that he had failed
to notice the train approaching. On 14 April, up to 70 ethnic Albanian
refugees in two convoys are killed by NATO bombs as they flee villages
in western Kosovo. The Alliance says the pilots thought they had been
attacking Yugoslav army units. On 27 April, NATO again misses its
target when attacking a military barracks in Surdulica in southern
Serbia. As in Aleksinac, ordinary homes are hit and at least 16 civilians
killed. On 21 April, NATO bombs the Milosevics' private residence in
the select Dedinje district of Belgrade. Milosevic was not at home. On
23 April, a massive missile attack smashes open the building that
housed Serbian State Television in the centre of Belgrade. At least ten
people die, most of them make-up girls, tea boys and technicians.
On 1 May, at least 23 people die when a NATO missile aimed at the
Luzane bridge, north of Pristina, hits a passenger bus. On 7 May,
NATO bombers drop cluster bombs on to the centre ofNiS, in southern
Serbia. At least 33 people are killed and scores more suffer catastrophic
injuries. Later the same day NATO missiles hit the Chinese Embassy
in Belgrade. Three journalists working for the Xinhua official Chinese
news agency perish. On 13 May, up to 200 Kosovo Albanian civilians
Chronology of Events 177

are killed in one of the worst single incidents of the war when NATO
bombs their refugee convoy at the village of Korisa in south-west
Kosovo. On 27 May, in the Hague the International Criminal Tribunal
for the Former Yugoslavia indicts Milosevic and the Serbian leadership
for war crimes.
On 3 June, following mediation of the EU special envoy, Martti
Ahtisaari, and the Russian special envoy, Viktor Chernomyrdin,
Milosevic and the Serbian parliament approve a peace plan that for-
mally puts the UN in charge of Kosovo, with NATO as the occupying
force. On 9 June, a military-technical agreement between NATO and
the FRY which regulates the Yugoslav withdrawal and the entry of
NATO troops in Kosovo is signed near Kumanovo, Macedonia. On 10
June, the Serbian withdrawal from Kosovo begins. NATO's air strikes
end after 79 days.
 FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF YUGOSLAVIA
Sarajevo

BOSNIA SERBIA Niš

AND
HERCEGOVINA
SA Novi Pazar
ND
ZAK
Mitrovica
(Mitrovice)
MONTENEGRO priština
Peć (prishtina)
(Peje) BULGARIA
CR Podgorica
O
AT
LA
KOSOVO
Prizren

Skopje (Shkup)
Ulcinj
ALBANIA
MACEDONIA
A d r i a t i c Sea
50km

Map 1. Kosovo and its Neighbours.

 S E R B I A R O M A N I A
BOSNIA

His

Sofia
MONTENEGRO
B U L G A R I A
KOSOVO

Skopje
SHKODER
KOSOVA

MACEDONIA
Tiranа

МАNASTIR

Thessaloniki
A L B A N IA

JANINE

G R E E С E
Corfu

A d r i a t i c A e g e a n
Sea Sea
Borders of vilayets Athens 0 100
Present state borders
km

Map 2. The Four Albanian Vilayets during the Ottoman Empire (circa 1878):
Albanian populated territory in 1878, compared with today's borders.
Note: This map reproduces the caption and details of the 'Albanian Map' at the
KLA site on http://www.geocities.comlMotorCityfTrack/4165/albanianmap.
html
 10
20 30 40 50km
0
0
10 20
30ML

prokuplje

Tutin

FRENCH SECTOR

Kosovska
Lebane
Podujeve
Mitrovica
Rozaj Vucitrn
Istok
Vrela
Djurakovac
Sabica Ravna Banja
Vitomirica Obilic
Pristina
Pec V.Belacevac Ogoste
Klina Kosovo Polje
I T A L I A N SECTOR Novo Brdo
Kosovska Kamenica
B R I T I S H SECTOR
Decani Lipljan
Malisevg
Tropoje Gnjilane Dobrcane
Orahovac
Djakovica
Urosevac
G E R M A N SECTOR

Musutiste U.S.SECTOR
Paci
Prizren Vaksince

Krume Zur Kumanove

Kukes
SipkovicaTetovo Skopje

Restelica
National Capital Vrapciste
Regional Capital
Town, Village
International boundary
Gostiver

Republic boundary

Autonomous province
Boundary
KFOR Peacekeeping sectors

Map 3. KFOR Peacekeeping Sectors in Kosovo.

Note: City names in Kosovo on these maps are given III the English forms of
Serbian names in Latin letters (e.g. Pristina).
 Notes on Contributors

Alba Bozo is studying Law and International Politics at Keele U niver-

sity. During the summer of 1999 she worked at the Information Desk
of the Emergency Management Group in Tirana (Albania), and was
responsible for preparing the daily situation reports on the refugee
situation in the country.
Christopher Brewin is a Lecturer in International Relations at Keele
University. His main research interests lie in the development of the
European Union and justice and duties in international relations. He
is the author of The European Union and Cyprus (Eothen, 2000).
Zoran Cirjakovic is reporting for Newsweek from ex-Yugoslavia.
Sofia Damm is studying European Studies at Keele University. She is
interested in the contemporary politics of the Balkans and the role of
non-governmental organizations in conflict resolution, as well as in
Swedish politics and environmental issues.
Alex Danchev is Professor of International Relations and Dean of Social
Sciences at Keele. He is the editor, with Tom Halverson, of International
Perspectives on the Yugoslav Conflict (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), and
most recently, the author of a biography of Basil Liddell Hart, Alchemist
of War (London: Weidenfeld 1998).
Martin Dent is a Fellow of Keele University, having retired from the
Department of Politics where he served as Senior Lecturer from 1963
to 1985. He is also the co-founder of the Jubilee 2000 campaign and
the Chair of the United Nations Religious Advisory Committee. He
has written numerous works on Nigeria, on the crisis of poverty and
debt in the Third World, and on other subjects. He was recently
awarded the Chieftainship title of Asor Tar U Tiv (the One Who Heals
the Land of Tiv, i.e. the Peace-Maker) by the Tiv people in Nigeria,
where he served as District Officer from 1952 to 1961.
Andrew Dobson is Professor of Politics at Keele University. He spe-
cializes in environmental political theory, and his publications include
Green Political Thought (second edition, Routledge, 1995), andJustice
and the Environment (Oxford University Press, 1998).
182 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

Kyril Drezov is a Lecturer in the Politics of South-east Europe at Keele

University and a researcher at the university's South-east Europe Unit.
He has published a number of works on problems of transition,
modernization and nationalism in Bulgaria and Macedonia, and on
the Russian factor in Bulgarian politics. He contributes regularly on
Balkan affairs to Oxford Analytica, Eastern Europe and the BBC World
Service, and his expertise is frequently solicited by the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office and by banking and business concerns with an
interest in Bulgaria and Macedonia.

Andrew Fear is a Lecturer in Classics at the University of Keele. Among

his research interests are the interaction of different cultural and ethnic
groups in antiquity. He is the author of Rome and Baetica: Urbanisation
in Southern Spain (Oxford University Press, 1996) and The Lives of the
Visigothic Fathers (Liverpool University Press, 1997).
Bulent Gokay is a Lecturer in the International Relations of South-
east Europe at Keele University, as well as a researcher at the uni-
versity's South-east Europe Unit. His publications include Turkey and
the New States ofthe Caucasus and Central Asia,joint author with Professor
R.T.B. Langhorne (London: HMSO, 1996), A Clash of Empires: Turkey
between Russian Bolshevism and British Imperialism (London: I.B. Tauris,
1997) and is editor of seven volumes of British Documents of Foreign
Affairs - Turkey, 1923- 39 (University Publications of America, 1997-98)
and The Politics of Caspian Oil (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). His latest
work is Eastern Europe since 1970 (Harlow: Longman, forthcoming).

Tim Judah is ajournalist and author of The Serbs: History, Myth and the
Destruction of Yugoslavia (Yale University Press, 1998) and Kosovo: War
and Revenge (Yale University Press, 2000).
Denisa Kostovicova is a doctoral candidate at the Geography Depart-
ment of Cambridge University. Her publications include Parallel Worlds:
Response of Kosovo Albanians to Loss of Autonomy in Serbia, 1989-1996
(Keele, 1997), and a number of articles on Serbia, Kosovo and the
Balkans. She is a regular contributor to Balkan War Reports of the Insti-
tute of War and Peace Reporting, London.
Aleksandar Pavkovic is Associate Professor at Macquarie University,
Sydney. He is the author ofReasons for Doubt (in Serbo-Croat, Belgrade,
1988), SlobodanJovanovic: an Unsentimental Approach to Politics (New York,
1993) and The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia (London, 1997; 2nd edition
2000). He is an editor of Nationalism and Postcommunism (Aldershot:
Dartmouth, 1995), and The Serbs and their Leaders in the Twentieth Century
(Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1997). His interests are in modern utopias,
including that of a united Europe, and Balkan nationalism.
Noles on Contributors 183

James Pettifer is Visiting Professor at the Institute of Balkan Studies,

Thessaloniki, and Research Fellow at the European Research Institute,
University of Bath. He is a correspondent for The Times, reporting on
the southern Balkans. Of his many books, the most recent are The
Turkish Labyrinth (London: Viking, 1997) and (with Miranda Vickers)
Albania: from Anarchy to a Balkan Identity (London: Hurst, 1997).
John Sloboda is Professor of Psychology at Keele University. He was
founder of Keele Peace Umbrella, a local anti-nuclear campaigning
group which existed from 1980 to 1985. He has published on psycho-
logical aspects of nuclear war (,What do psychologists have to say about
nuclear war?', in J. Hartley and A. Branthwaite (eds), The Applied
Psychologist (Open University Press, 1989), pp. 177-90. He is currently
co-ordinator of the Staffordshire branch of the Committee for Peace
in the Balkans, and is a fund-raiser for Anglo-Yugloslav Medical Aid.
Patrick Thornberry is Professor of International Law at Keele
University and the author ofa number of works in the field of inter-
national law, including International Law and the Rights of Minorities
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Other works include numerous
studies of self-determination, minority rights and rights ofindigenous
peoples. Professor Thornberry is a consultant to the Council of Europe,
the OSCE, the Presidents of the Sami Parliaments and the Maronite
Community of Cyprus, and is a member of the International Council
of the Minority Rights Group.
Miranda Vickers is a political analyst with the International Crisis
Group and author of Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo
(London: Hurst, 1998), The Albanians: A Modern History (London: Tauris,
1995), and co-author (with James Pettifer) of Albania: From Anarchy to
a Balkan Identity (London: Hurst, 1997).
Michael Waller is Professor of European Studies at Keele University.
He is the author of a trilogy of books on communism: The Language of
Communism (Bodley Head, 1972), Democratic Centralism: An Historical
Commentary (Manchester University Press, 1981) and The End of the
Communist Power Monopoly (Manchester University Press, 1993). He
recently co-edited Conflicting Loyalties and the State in Post-Soviet Russia
and Eurasia with B. Coppieters and A. Malashenko (Frank Cass, 1998).
He is co-editor of the Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics
and Environmental Politics.
Matthew Wyman is Senior Lecturer in Russian Politics at Keele U niver-
sity, where he has worked since 1994. He is the author of Public Opinion
in Postcommunist Russia (Macmillan, 1997), as well as a number of articles
and chapters on Russian elections, voters, political culture and party
development. He is currently co-authoring an introductory textbook,
Contemporary Russia, and a book on Russian regional electoral trends.
 Index

AFOR, see Albania Force Bildt, Carl, 132

Agence France Press, 119 Bishop of Calcutta, 121
air strikes: effects of, 63; high-altitude Black Sea, 139
bombing, 51, 88, 96 Blair, Tony, 51-3, 95-7,107,112, 118
Albania, Albanians, viii, 59, 64, 66-7, Bonn Biodiversity Convention, 140
93,123,147,149; myth of origin Bono (U2), 71
3-4,8; crisis of 1997,22,26,68; Bosnia (and Bosnia-Herzegovina), vii,
role in Kosovo crisis, 30-6 6,21,60,67,71-5,86,90,117,
Albania Force, 37-8, 42 142, 145, 146, 150; and ethnic
Albanians, in Macedonia, 60; see also cleansing, 131; Kr~ina and
Kosovar Albanians Western Bosnia, 93; refugees, 73,
Albright, Madeleine K., 116 116, 128
Alexander, Crown Prince, 91 Bosnian Muslims, 71-4, 120
Aliti, Abdurahman, 69 Bosnian Serb forces, 121
Almond, Mark, 92 Briefing Room (of the White House),
Aman, 121 132
Amnesty International, 119 British Peace Movement, III
An-na'im, A.A., 58 Brownlie, Professor Ian, 58
Annan, Kofi, 52, 54-5,120,151, Buddhist kingdom, 121
152 Bugojno,72
anti-Americanism, 106 Bukoshi, Bujar, 28
Argentina, 135 Bulgaria, 66-7, 93-4, 115, 139, 148
Ashdown,Padd~ 117 Buxton the Liberator, 121
Asia, 117
Atlantic (Ocean), 101 Calgacus, 94
Austria, 56 Canada, 53
Austria-Hungary, 11,85, 130 Carrington, Lord, 83, 86, 114
Azerbaijan, 113 Cartland, Barbara, 96
Caspian Sea/Caspian Basin, 113, 114
B92 radio station, 90 Cassese, Antonio, 52, 58
Balkan wars, 117 Catholic/Republican (community of
Bangladesh, 126 Northern Ireland), 129
Banja Luka, 73-4 Caucasus, 114
Basques (in Spain), 100 Ceka, Neritan, 35
BBC (UK), 119 Central America, 134
Beck, Ulrich, 96 Central and Eastern Europe, 83-5
Belgrade, 91, 98, 115, 123, 140, 148 Central Europe, 133
Berisha, Sali, 30-1, 33, 35,93 Centre for Peace, Non-violence and
Berlin Summit, 87 Human Rights (in Croatia), 134
Bern Biodiversity Convention, 140 Channel 4 (UK), 118
besa, 13 Chechnya, 113, 116, 146, 150, 151
Betjeman, Sir John, 57 Chernomyrdin, Victor, 109
Index 185

China, Republic of, 62, 69,134; Democratic Party (Serbia), 91

Chinese embassy (in Belgrade), 91, depleted uranium, 107
107, 148 Dienstbier, Jiri, 144
Chirac, Jacques, 50 District Officer (of British Empire),
Chomsky, Noam, 83 122
Christian Church, 121 Djukanovic, Milo, 91
CIA, 150 Dobson, Andrew, 107
Clark,Alan, 91,96 Drenica, 17,22-3,26,74
Clark, General Wesley, 116 Durres,38
Clausewitz, 100
Clinton, Bill, 107, 108, 114, 118, 132, Eastern Europe, 102, 114
133 East Timor, 56, 106, 110
Cohen, William S., 114 economic costs of the conflict, 93-4
Cold War, 108, 109, Ill, 116, 145, education, 7-8, 16-17; Albanian
150, 152 schooling in Kosovo, 12-20; see also
Columbia, 134 socialization
Commission on Human Rights, 52 elections: in Bosnia, 71, 74; in
Committee for Peace in the Balkans, Macedonia, 65-8
119 EI Salvador, 150
Common Agricultural Policy, 81 Emergency Management Group,
Community ofSt Egidio, 16 38-40
Congress of Berlin (1878), 118 Emmert, Thomas A, 10
Conservative Party (UK), 96, 110 Eno, Brian (Roxy Music), 71
constitutions: Cypriot, 85; Yugoslav Enverists, 21
(1946),5, (1974), viii Epicurus, 102
Contact Group, 87 Equador,89
Cook, Robin, 54, 113, 116 Ermanno, Maria, 135
Council of Europe, 84 ethnic cleansing, 13,52,86
Crewe, Robin, 134 Eurasianism, 109
Croatia, 21, 67,72,86-7, 114, 115, European Commission of Human
116, 128, 129, 134 Rights, 84
Croats, 71-3, 102, 129 European Community Monitor
Crvenkovski, Branko, 69 Mission, 38
Curuvija, Slavko, 91 European Cup 2000, 130
Cyprus, 84-5 European Union, 81, 108, 109,
Czechoslovakia, 80, 84 111-13, 116-17, 145, 151; and aid
Czech Republic, 127 to Kosovo, 117; and sanctity of
borders, 85; Berlin Summit, 87
Danchev, Alex, 97, 106
Danube, 93, 115, 139, 145 Falkland Islands, 126
Dardanians, 8-9 Ferdinand, Franz, 131
Dayton Accords, 21-2, 26, 73-4, 87, Financial Times, 119
121 First World, 118
Debar, 65 First World War, 10 1
Decani region, 23, 25 Fischer, Joschka, 57
DemaCi, Adem, 24, 32-4 Fisher, H.A.L., 129
Democratic Alliance (in Albania), 35 Fisk, Robert, 119
Democratic Alternative, 69 Fortnum and Mason, 95
Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), France, French,49,62,81, 101, 117,
21,25,28,32-3 139
Democratic Party (in Albania), 30 Frchovski, Ljubomir, 69
Democratic Party of the Albanians (in Fretilin, 20
Macedonia), 60-1, 67 Fruska Gora, 139
186 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

Gahrton, Per, 135 Ibar (river), 143

Galtieri, General, 126 Iberdemaj, Rexhe, 35
Genocide Convention, 53 Ibo minority (Nigeria), 128
Georgia, 113 ICTY, see International Criminal
Georgievski, Ljubcho, 62, 64, 69 Tribunal for the Former
Germany, Germans, 57, 62, 83, 85, Yugoslavia
101, 118, 133; Foreign Minister, Ignatieff, Michael, 96-7, 147
46; and humanitarian issue, 50; in Illyria, Illyrians, 6-9, 130, 132
Second World War, 12; and Imeri, Imer, 69
refugees, 73; Sudeten Germans, IMRO, see Internal Macedonian
80, 127 Revolutionary Organization-
Ghegs, 31, 36, 93 Democratic Party for Macedonian
Glenny, Misha, 102, 118, 119, 133 National Unity
Gligorov, Kiro, 64 Independent, The, 119
Goodall, David, 119 India, 126
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 107 INTERFET, 56
Gostivar, 65 Internal Macedonian Revolutionary
Gracanica, 172 Organization-Democratic Party for
Greece, Greeks, 83-5, 88, 93, 117, Macedonian National Unity, 61,
127, 139, 150 64,66-9
Green Party (Swedish), 135 International Court of Justice, 43, 45,
Greenwood, Christopher, 51 49,51-3
Grozny, 151 International Criminal Tribunal for
Guardian, The, 118 Rwanda, 18
Gulf War, 81, 83,140,147, 150 International Criminal Tribunal for the
Former Yugoslavia, 46, 51-2, 55
Hadrian's Wall, 130 International Crisis Group, 119
Hague Tribunal, 88 International Danube Commission, 115
Hahn, Johann Georg von, 10 Iraq, 46-7,113,126,140
Haiti, 47,134 Isaiah, 121
Halili, Muhamed, 67 Islamabad, 118
Halverson, Thomas, 97 Islami, Professor Kastriot, 38, 42
Havel, Vaclav, 96-7 Italy, 83, 117, 118; in Second World
Healey, Lord Dennis, 83 War, 12, 101
Helsinki Final Act, 82
Higgins, Rosalyn, 55 Jackson, Brigadier Michael, 116
high-altitude bombing, see air strikes Jane's Defence Weekly, 119
Hill, Christopher, 87 Jashari, Adem, 22-3, 27
Hindu kingdom, 121 Jerusalem, 132
Hitler, Adolf, 84, 88, 149 Jesus, 129
Holbrooke, Richard, 23,47,83, Jewish kingdom, 121
86-7 Jews (in Kosovo), 116
House of Commons, 119 John the Baptist, 129
Hoxha, Enver, 20 Journal of Peace and Conflict Resolution,
Huld, Martin E., 10 134
humanitarian intervention, 47, 48-52, Juka, S. S., 10
84
human rights, 108 kafak uprisings, 22, 23
Human Rights Watch, 115, 119, 147, 151 Karadzic, 101
Hungary, Hungarians, 84-5, 115, 128, KFOR, see Kosovo Force
145 Kichevo,65
Hussein, Saddam, 96, 126, 135 Kinkel, Klaus, 47
Hutus,86 KLA, see Kosovo Liberation Army
Index 187

Klina,26 Macedonia, 9, 59-70, 81-2, 85, 88, 93,

Koliqi, Hajrullah, 19 145, 147
Konigsberg, 85 MacKenzie, Lewis, 92
Kopaonik, 139 Mahmuti, Bardhyl, 24
Korea, 64 Mahon, Derek, 58
Koskenniemi, M., 58 Majko, Pandeli, 31, 33-5
Kosova, 4-5 Malaqi, Shkelzen, 15
Kosova Information Center, 80 Malvinas, 126
Kosovar Albanians, 47, 99; 1981 crisis, Maudling, Reginald, 129
7, 12; refugees, vii, 37-42, 87; Mayorski, Boris, 87
schooling of, ix, 11-19; in McNamara, Denis, 143, 144
Macedonia, 64-5 media, 28, 91
Kosovo Force (KFOR), 42, 121, 129, Mediterranean, 113, 133
130; history of, 3-7 Metohija, see Kosovo-Metohija
Kosovo Liberation Army (Ushtria Micah, 121
Clirimtare e Kosovi!s), vii, ix, 8, 16, Milosevic, Slobodan, vii, 63,79-81,
31-2,87,105,130,142,149;afier 84,90-3,100,101-3,105,109,
inervention, 116, 123, 125; at 112, 116, 118, 125, 130, 133, 136,
Rambouillet, 132; origins, 20-9, 144,145,146,148,149,150,151;
64,79,90; in Macedonia, 65; and abolishes Kosovo's autonomy
Security Council, 46 (1989),87; aim of removing from
Kosovo-Metohija, 3-5 power, 98, 102, 116, 135;
Kosovo peony (Paeonia decora), 140 capitulation, 142; as dictator, 103;
Kosovo Polje (1389), 6-7, 92,129 in 1988-89,4,7; indictment, 52,
Kosovo Verification Mission, 149 95-6, 108; meeting with Fatos
Kouchner, Bernard, 123, 143 Nano (1997), 34; and Montenegro,
Kozloduy nuclear power station, 139 91; and Orthodox Church, 129;
Kr~ina, 14,86,93, 114, 128 and Rambouillet, 132-3; and
Krasniqi, Jakup (KLA's official responsibility for refugees, 120;
spokesman), 28 signs 1996 educational agreement,
Kuharic, Cardinal, 129 16; and UN resolutions, 47, 50-1;
Kukes, 32, 40 Western image of, 80, 114
Kumanovo, 61, 65 Ministry of Defence (UK), 118
Kurdistan, 106, 110 Mitrovica, 11 7, 143, 144
Kurds, 49, 81 Mjeda,40
Kurti, Albin, 34 Moldova, 115
Kuwait, 49, 81, 126 monasteries, 4-5
Montenegro, 85, 91,145
Lake Ohrid, 61 Moscow, 109, 114
Laughland, John, 119 Mostar, 71-2
Lausanne, Treaty of (1 923), 127 Multinational Advisory Police Element,
Lazar Hrebljanovic, 6; curse of, 7 38
LDK, see Democratic League of Munich,97, 100, 150
Kosovo Murad I (sultan), 6, 129
League of Communists of Yugoslavia Muslim kingdom, 121
(LCY), 5-6, 28 Muslim-Croat Federation, 73
League of Nations, 85 Muslims (of Bosnia), 127
Leopold, King (Belgium), 88 myths, mythology: of Albanians, 1; of
Levizja Popullore e Kosovi!s, see Popular Serbs, Serbia, 4-11; of KLA as 'the
Movement for Kosovo people', 27-9
Liberal Democrats (in the UK), 117
LPK, see Popular Movement for Kosovo Nano, Fatos, 31, 34, 64
Lucretius, 102 Napoleonic period, 130
188 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion
national liberation and dispossession, Peace and Arbitration Organization
11, 16-17 (Swedish), 135
National Parks (in Serbia), 139 Peace Brigades International, 134
Netherlands, the, 84 Peace Studies Association, 134
Newsweek, 119 Petkovski, Tito, 66
Nexipi, Muharem, 67 Petritsch, Wolfgang, 87
Nicaragua, 49, 149 Pfaff, William, 97
Nigeria, 122, 128 Pilger, John, 118
North Atlantic Treaty Organization Pinochet, General August, 54, 95
(NATO), 45, 59, 98-100, 103, PKK (in Turkey), 81
105-8,111-18,120-1,128,131-6, Plaza, Galo, 89
139,142-7,149-50, 151; and Poland,127
Albania, 37; bombing, vii, 25, 37, Polisario, 20
39,60, 79,87; in Macedonia, 62; Polog,59
legality of intervention, 43, 47-8, Poplasen, Nikola, 74
52-8; occupation of Kosovo, 42, Popular Movement for Kosovo (LPK),
68; Statements, 45, 50 21-2
Northern Ireland, 82, 99,129, 143 Prague, 80
Northern People's Congress (Nigeria), Prekaz,23
122 Pribicevic, Ogrtien, 103
Novi Sad, 139 Prijedor, 74
Pristina (Prishtine), 16,21,80, 116,
Obilic, Milos (at Kosovo Polje), 6 142,151; in 1981, 12; Technical
O'Connell, M.E., 58 Faculty of, 18
Operation Horseshoe, 89 Prizren,91
Orahovac, 23 Prizren League, viii
Organization for Security and Co- Prokletije, 139
operation in Europe (OSCE), Protestant/Unionist (community of
37-8,86-7,108,113,116,150;in Northern Ireland), 129
Bosnia, 23; and the Emergency Pulaha, Selemi, 10
Management Group, 38; in
Macedonia, 67; verification role, Racak,87, 104, 110, 149
23,47,116 RAF (Royal Air Force), 112
Orthodox Church (Macedonian), 63 Ramadan Band (Albanian rock band),
Orthodox Church (Serb), 1,63 14
OSCE, see Organization for Security Rambouillet Conference
and Co-operation in Europe (February-March 1999), 24, 28,
Osijek, 134 34-5,81,87,96,104,112,132,
Ottoman, Ottoman empire, vii, 6-7, 136, 149
28,85,129,130 Rankovit, Aleksandar, viii, 4
Red Lists (European and World), 139
Pakistan, 126 Reilly, David, 134
Palestine Liberation Organization Republican Party (in Albania), 30
(PLO),20 Republican Party (US), 110
Pan-European, 108 Republika Srpska, 74, 124
'parallel system (state), in Kosovo Riddell, Peter, 57
(1980s and 1990s), viii, 14-17,32, Roberts, Adam, 96
80-1 Robertson, George, 63
Party for Democratic Prosperity, 61, 67 Rom, Roma, 10,56,116,144
Party for the Democratic Prosperity of Roman, 102
Tetovo, 27 Roman army, 130
Pavarotti, Luciano, 71 Roman Catholic Church (in Croatia),
Pavle, Patriarch, 129 129
Index 189
Roman Empire, 130 Sofia, 148
Romania, 67, 86, ll5 Somalia, 47, 150
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 55 Soviet Union, Soviet, 55, 85, 102, 150,
Rugova, Dr Ibrahim, 14, 16-17, 24, 151
80,90, 130; in relation to Kosovar Spain, Spanish, 100
organisations, 21-2, 25, 28, 32-3; Spectator, The, 119
signs 1996 educational agreement, Srebrenica, 74, 120
17; weakened by Dayton Sri Lanka, 134
Agreement, 26 Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich, 6, 88,
Russian Federation, Russia, 94, 101, 92
109-10,113-16,127,149,150, St Vitus' Day (28 June), 6
151; attitude to NATO Struga, 61, 65
intervention, 81; joint statement Stoyanov, Petar, 94
with FRY, 46; relationship with Sun (British newspaper), 112
Serbia, 109, 114; and Security Sunday Telegraph, 119
Council, 134 Surroi, Veten, 26, 29
Russian Foreign Ministry, 151 Svejk (the 'good soldier'), 145
Rwanda, 86, 133, 145, 146 Sweden,Swed~h,84, 101, 135

SAGA Magazine, 119 Tablet, The, 119

Salihu, Joshar, 22, 24 Tacitus, 94
Sandinista government, 149 Talbot, Strobe, 57
Sanski Most, 74 Tara, 139
Sar~evo, 71-3, 86, 121, 127, 131 Tarka, J. S., 122
Sar planina, 139 Teseira, Jose Pinto, 67
SDSM, see Social-Democratic Party of Tetovo, 60, 65
Macedonia Thaci, Hashim, 24; portrait of, 28-9
Seattle, 117 Third World, 117
Second World War, 92,116 Third World War, 116
Security Council, see United Nations Thornberry, Patrick, 152
Sejdiu, Pleurat, 25 Tibet, 106
Serb Radio and Television Tirana, 41; governments in exile in,
Headquarters, 115, 148 28; see also Albania
Serbian clergy, 129 Tito,Josip Broz, viii, 101, 127
Serbian Orthodox Church, 4, 132 Tiv Division (Nigeria), 122
Sergeyev, Igor, 114 Todorova, Maria, 133, 136
Seselj,103 Tokyo, 149
Shanaghan, Corrie, 119 Tosks, 31, 36, 93
Shatri, Halim Hyseni dhe Bajram, 19 Trajkovski, Boris, 66-7
Shkup, see Skopje Tudjman, Franjo, 72,114, 128
Simma, B., 46, 48, 51-4, 57-8 Tupurkovski, Vasil, 69
Skopje, 60, 62, 67 Turkey, Turks, 81, 93,113,114,127,
slogans and expressions: 'brotherhood 129,146,150
and unity', 5, 10, 12; 'Homeland Tutsis,86
Calling' fund, 22; 'United Serbia!',
4 Ukraine, 115
Slovakia, 115 UNHCR, see United Nations High
Slovenia, 86 Commission for Refugees
Social-Democratic Alliance of United Kingdom, 46, 49, 81,114
Macedonia, 64, 66, 69 United Middle-Belt Congress
Socialist Federal Republic of (Nigeria), 122
Yugoslavia (SFRY), viii, 2, 4-5, United Nations, 85, 99, 108, 117,
12-13 120-5, 128-30, 134-6, 142, 146,
190 Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion

148, 152; General Assembly, 52, Walker, William, 149

54; Resolutions, 46-7, 49,54,88; Warsaw Pact, see Warsaw Treaty
Security Council, 44-50, 55, 84, Organization
86-7,108,114,123,134,143; UN Warsaw Treaty Organization, 80, 84
Charter, 44-5, 47-9, 79, 84, 134 Washington, 114
United Nations High Commission for Waugh, Evelyn, 97
Refugees, 37-41,45-6,64,119 Weller, Marc, 57
United Nations Mission in Kosovo, 68, Western European Union, 38
121,143,144 Westphalia, 124
U nited Nations Populations Fund, 119 White Book, 118
United Nations Religious Advisory White House, 132
Committee, 120 Wilkes, John, 10
United States, 46, 49, 62-3, 94, 101, Wolf, John, 113
104,106,109-14,117,121, World Food Programme, 38
133,145,147,151; Defense World Health Organization, 38
Department, 140; European World Trade Organization, 117
Command, 116 Worner, Manfred, 83
UNMIK, see United Nations Mission Worsthorne, Peregrine, 92
in Kosovo
UNPREDEp, 61-2, 69 Xhaferi, Arben, 69
UN Wire, 119
Upper Silesia, 85 Yeltsin, Boris, 109, 110, 116, 118, 119
Uskub, see Skopje Yugoslavia (Federal Socialist Republic
on, 3-5, 12-13, 102, 104, 120,
Vardar (river), 60 127-8,131-6,144,146-9,151;
VCM (vinyl chloride monomer),139 see also Yugoslavia (Federal
Vickers, Miranda, 26 Republic on
Vietnam, 83, 90, 97, 113 Yugoslavia (Federal Republic on, 3,
Vinca Institute, 140 99, 101, 107, 109, 115, 118, 124,
Virgil,94 131-6 and passim; see also
VMRO-DPMNE, see Internal Yugoslavia (Federal Socialist
Macedonian Revolutionary Republic on
Organization-Democratic Party for
Macedonian National Unity Zagreb,72
Vojvodina, 128, 145 Zeitgeist, 152