This is one of the best I read about the subject: Nato - US - Europe - the
Balkans.
Regards V.Rott
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Forwarded Message:
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Remarks at CATO (5/18/99)
FYI: the following is the text of my remarks at CATO Institute on
5/18/99
at the conference: "NATO's Balkan War: Finding an Honorable Exit."
Let me state at the outset that my remarks here today do not represent
any Senate office or
member. Rather, I am giving my professional judgment as a policy analyst
and my personal
opinion, for both of which I am solely responsible.
The rationale for U.S. intervention in Kosovo and for assistance to the
Kosovo Liberation
Army is easily stated. It goes something like this:
The current crisis in Kosovo is simply the latest episode in the
aggressive drive by extreme
Serbian nationalism, orchestrated by Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic, to create an
ethnically pure Greater Serbian state. This aggression -- first in
Slovenia, then in Croatia,
and then in Bosnia -- has now come to Kosovo, largely because the West,
notably NATO,
refused to stand up to him. Prior to 1989, Kosovo was at peace under an
autonomy that
allowed the Albanian people a large degree of self-rule. That status quo
was disturbed by the
Serbs by the revocation of Kosovo's autonomy and the initiation of an
apartheid system of
ethnic discrimination. Now, after a decade of oppression by the Serbs,
the Albanians of
Kosovo are faced with a pre-planned program of genocide, similar to that
committed by the
Serbs in Bosnia. The rise of the KLA is a response to this threat.
The United States and the international community first exhausted the
possibilities for a
diplomatic settlement to the crisis, repeatedly offering the Serbs the
opportunity to accept the
Rambouillet agreement, a peaceful solution that would be fair to all
parties. But while the
Albanians, including the KLA, chose the path of negotiation and peace,
the Serbs rejected it.
Accordingly, NATO had no choice but to move ahead with a military
response, namely air
strikes, which in Bosnia forced the Serbs to the peace table. The
campaign is directed
against Milosevic and his security apparatus, not against the Serbian
people.
Unfortunately, as the Serbs moved ahead with their pre-planned program of
genocide the
NATO air campaign could not stop the displacement of hundreds of
thousands of Albanians.
While air power may ultimately bring the Serbs to heel, a just and speedy
solution requires a
ground component. Some advocate a NATO ground offensive, but there are
concerns about
the potential costs. Others advocate a program of arming and training the
KLA the victims of
Serbian aggression and genocide to liberate their own country. In any
case, to fail to achieve
NATO's objectives is completely unacceptable. International stability
would be threatened,
and American and NATO credibility would be destroyed if genocide were
allowed to
succeed in the heart of Europe at the dawn of the 21st Century.
That, in a nutshell, is the case. I have tried to paraphrase as closely
as possible the
arguments of supporters of the Clinton policy. The trouble is: hardly any
part of the
summary justification I just gave is true. Some parts of it are skewed or
exaggerated
interpretations of the facts, some are outright lies. However, as in
Bosnia, the Clinton
Administration's Kosovo policy cannot be justified without recasting a
frightfully complex
conflict, with plenty of blame to go around, as a caricature: a morality
play in black and
white where one side is completely innocent and the other entirely
villainous.
To start with, pre-1989 Kosovo was hardly the fantasy land of ethnic
tolerance the
pro-intervention caricature makes it out to be. Under the 1974 Tito
constitution, which
elevated Kosovo to effective equality with the federal republics,
Kosovo's Albanians
exercised virtually complete control over the provincial administration.
Tens, perhaps
hundreds, of thousands of Serbs left during this period in the face of
pervasive
discrimination and the authorities' refusal to protect Serbs from ethnic
violence. The result
of the shift in the ethnic balance that accelerated during this period is
the main claim ethnic
Albanians lay to exclusive ownership of Kosovo. At the same time,
Albanian demands
mounted that the province be detached from Serbia and given republic
status within the
Yugoslav federation; republic status, if granted, would, in theory, have
allowed Kosovo the
legal right to declare its independence from Yugoslavia. One of the
ironies of the present
Kosovo crisis is that Milosevic began his rise to power in Serbia in
large part because of the
oppressive character of pre-1989 Albanian rule in Kosovo, symbolized by
the famous 1987
rally where he promised the local Serbs: "Nobody will beat you again." In
short, rather than
Milosevic being the cause of the Kosovo crisis, it would be as correct To
say that intolerant
Albanian nationalism in Kosovo is largely the cause of Milosevic's
attainment of power.
Second, in 1989 Kosovo's autonomy was not revoked but was downgraded --
at the federal
level at Milosevic's initiative -- to what it had been before 1974. Many
Albanians refused to
accept Belgrade's reassertion of authority and large numbers were fired
from their state jobs.
The resulting stand-off -- of boycott and the creation of alternative
institutions on the
Albanian side and of increasingly severe police repression on the Serbian
side -- continued
for most of the 1990s. Again, the political problem in Kosovo -- up until
the bombing began
-- has always been: how much autonomy will the Kosovo Albanians settle
for? When I hear
now that autonomy is not enough and that only independence will suffice,
I can't help but
think of Turkish Kurdistan where not only have the Kurds never been
offered any kind of
autonomy but even suggesting there ought to be autonomy will land you in
jail. But of
course we don't bomb Turkey over the Kurds; on the contrary, as a NATO
member Turkey
is one of the countries helping to bomb the Serbs.
Third, while after 1989 there was a tense stand-off in Kosovo, what we
did not have was
open warfare. That was the result not of any pre-planned Serbian program
of "ethnic
cleansing" but of the KLA's deliberate and I would say classic strategy
to turn a political
confrontation into a military confrontation. Attacks directed against not
only Serbian police
and officials but Serbian civilians and insufficiently militant Albanians
were undoubtedly,
and accurately, calculated to trigger a massive and largely
indiscriminate response by
Serbian forces. The growing cycle of violence, in turn, further
radicalized Kosovo's
Albanians and led to the possibility of NATO military involvement, which,
I submit, based
on the Bosnia precedent, was the KLA's real goal rather than any
realistic expectation of
victory on the battlefield. In every respect, it has been a stunningly
successful strategy.
Fourth, the Clinton Administration's claim that NATO resorted to force
only after diplomacy
failed is a flat lie. As I pointed out in a paper issued by the Policy
Committee in August of
last year, the military planning for intervention was largely in place at
that time, and all that
was lacking was a suitable pretext. The Holbrooke-Milosevic agreement of
October 1998 --
to which the KLA was not a party -- mandated a partial Serb withdrawal,
during which the
KLA occupied roughly half of Kosovo and cleansed dozens of villages of
their Serb
inhabitants. Any reaction on the Serb side, however, risked NATO bombing.
Finally, the Rambouillet process cannot be considered a negotiation under
any normal
definition of the word: A bunch of lawyers at the State Department write
up a 90-page
document and then push it in front of the parties and say: " Sign it. And
if you (one of the
parties) sign it and he (the other party) doesn't then we'll bomb him."
And of course, when
they said that, Secretary Albright and the State Department knew that one
of the parties
would not, and could not, sign the agreement. Why? Because -- as has
received far too little
attention from our supposedly inquisitive media -- it provided for NATO
occupation of not
just Kosovo but of all of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) under
Paragraph 8 of
Appendix B: "8. NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles,
vessels, aircraft,
and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access through
out the FRY
[i.e., the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia], including associated air
space 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."
I have it on good authority that one senior Administration official told
media at Rambouillet
(under embargo) "We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to
comply. They need
some bombing, and that's what they are going to get." In short,
Rambouillet was just
Albright's charade to get to where we are now: a bombing campaign. Their
big mistake was,
they thought their splendid little war would have been over long before
now. It's all
happened just as they planned, except the last part: Milosevic has
refused to run up the white
flag.
Fifth, nobody can doubt there are serious atrocities being committed in
Kosovo by
Milosevic's forces -- though the extent and specifics of the reports that
the media (as in
Bosnia) treats as established fact are open to question and have been
characterized by
Agence France Presse (4/31) as on occasion being "confused,
contradictory, and sometimes
plain wrong." For the Administration and NATO, however, it does not
appear to detract
from their propaganda value that "reports coming from NATO and US
officials appear often
as little more than regurgitation of unconfirmed information from the"
KLA. I have in mind,
for example, the report for a time being peddled by Jamie Rubin, among
others, that some
100,000 Albanian men had been herded into the Pristina sports stadium
until a reporter
actually went to the stadium and found it empty. At the same time, we
should not doubt that
a lot more civilians, both Serb and Albanian are being killed by NATO
than we are willing to
admit as the air strikes are increasingly directed against what are
euphemistically called
"infrastructure" -- i.e., civilian -- targets. Some Albanian refugees say
they are fleeing the
Serbs, others NATO's bombs. The Clinton Administration has vainly tried
to claim that all
the bloodshed since March 24 has been Milosevic's fault, insisting that
the offensive would
have taken place even if NATO had not bombed, but I find that argument
unconvincing.
After the failure of the Rambouillet talks and the breakdown of the
October 1998
Milosevic-Holbrooke agreement, a Serb action against the KLA may have
been unavoidable
-- and no doubt it would have been conducted with the same light touch
used by the Turks
against the PKK or by the Sri Lankans against the Tamil Tigers, who, like
the KLA, do not
play by Marquis of Queensberry rules. But a full-scale drive to push out
all or most ethnic
Albanians and unleash a demographic bomb against NATO staging areas in
Albania and
Macedonia may not have been.
Sixth, because of how the Administration's decision to bomb has turned
Kosovo from a
crisis into a disaster, we no longer have a Kosovo policy we have a KLA
policy. As
documented in a paper released by the Policy Committee on March 31, the
Clinton
Administration has elevated to virtually unchallenged status as the
legitimate representative
of the Kosovo Albanian people a terrorist group about which there are
very serious
questions as to its criminal activities particularly with regard to the
drug trade and as to
radical Islamic influences, including Osama bin Ladin and the Iranians.
Advocates of U.S.
assistance to the KLA, such as the Heritage Foundation, point out that
based on the
experience of aiding the mujahedin in Afghanistan, we can use our help as
a leverage for
"reforming" the KLA's behavior. However, I would ask which radical group
of any
description, either in Afghanistan (where we could at least claim the
vicissitudes of the Cold
War justified the risks), or the Izetbegovic regime in Bosnia, or, on the
same principle, the
Castro regime in Cuba or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, or the PLO has
ever genuinely
abandoned its radical birthright for a mess of American pottage.
Seventh, advocates of aid to the KLA suggest that it be contingent on
guarantees that that
organization not attack civilians and not pursue a greater Albania beyond
Kosovo. Given the
pre-1989 history of Kosovo and the KLA's behavior to date, the first
suggestion is
laughable. As for the second, I submit for your consideration a map from
the webpage of
the Albanian American Civic League (www.aacl.com), a pro-KLA group in the
United
States. It visually represents the areas claimed by the KLA, including
not only Kosovo but
other areas of southern Serbia, parts of Montenegro and Macedonia
(including their
capitals), and parts of Greece. When I first saw this map -- which the
webmaster has made
considerably harder to print since I first referenced it in my paper --
it struck a recollection of
some thing I had seen before. It occurred to me that it is quite similar
to one I have (printed
by the State Department in 1947) of interim territorial arrangements
during World War II. I
can understand that there is an element of hyperbole in critics' calling
NATO's air campaign
"Nazi," but I fail to see what interest the United States has in helping
to restore the
Nazi-imposed borders of 1943 or how this helps preserve European
stability.
Eighth, the Clinton claim that we are hitting Milosevic and not the
Serbian people is just
cruel mockery. Politically, this bombing has solidified his position as
he never could have
done on his own. The Clinton Administration repeatedly rebuffed
initiatives by the Serbian
opposition for support against Milosevic, most recently by a direct
meeting with Madeleine
Albright by the Serbian Orthodox bishop of Kosovo, His Grace ARTEMIJE, in
which he
appealed for an initiative that would have strengthened moderate forces
on both sides, begun
genuine negotiations (in place of the Rambouillet farce), and weakened
Milosevic. (I have
copies of this proposal here today.) Predictably, that appeal fell on
deaf ears. But this
Administration cannot say it was not warned.
Ninth, the Administration's "humanitarian" justification for this war the
contention that his is
about returning Albanian refugees to their homes is rank hypocrisy. Many
commentators
have noted that the Administration had turned a blind eye to the
cleansing of hundreds of
thousands of Serbs from the Krajina in 1995. This is not quite accurate.
They did not turn a
blind eye, they actively abetted the Croatian Army's "Operation Storm"
with mercenary
retired U.S. military consultants to provide training and operational
planning under the guise
of "democracy training." Indeed, there is evidence that U.S. assistance
to the eradication of
the Krajina Serbs may have included air strikes and psy-ops, but to my
knowledge no
member of our intrepid Fourth Estate has yet seen fit to look into it.
Tenth, the notion that Milosevic is nationalist bent on creating a
"Greater Serbia" is
nonsense. Milosevic -- unlike the equally thuggish Franjo Tudjman and
Alija Izetbegovic --
is an opportunist, who likely would have been more than willing to sell
out Kosovo as he
did the Serbs of Krajina and parts of Bosnia, if the Clinton/Albright
policy had not been so
completely incompetent as to paint him into corner where he had to stand
and fight. As for
Greater Serbia -- as opposed to Greater Croatia or Greater Albania --
it's all in the
definitions. The only consistent rule in the break-up of Titoist
Yugoslavia is that the Serbs,
the only constituent nationality that gave up their own national state to
create Yugoslavia,
have alone been regarded as having no legitimate interest in how it broke
up. One the one
hand, Serb minorities in other republics were expected to accept as
authoritative Tito's
borders or be regarded as "aggressors" for wishing to remain in the state
in which they had
up until them been living. On the other hand, Kosovo, a region that was
part of Serbia even
before Yugoslavia was created, is up for grabs. The double standard is
breathtaking.
So what are we left with? The Clinton Administration's blunder has done
nothing but harm
American interests and those of everybody else concerned. It has harmed
the Albanian
refugees, making an already bad situation much worse; harmed an unknown
number of
innocent civilians, both Serbian and Albanian, killed or injured by our
bombing; harmed any
prospects of political reform in Serbia that would remove Milosevic from
power; harmed the
U.S. security posture, as our forces around the world have been stripped
down to devote
resources to Kosovo; harmed the already fragile stability of neighboring
states and the
region as a whole; and harmed our relationship with Russia, which should
be among our
first priorities -- having vindicated every lie the Soviet Union ever
told about NATO's
aggressive intentions. And the harm grows worse every day.
The question before us is finding an honorable exit. Some suggest turning
the current
disaster into complete catastrophe by sending in NATO ground troops under
premises as
faulty as those that led to the air war. Arming and training the KLA
would be similarly
ill-advised. That leaves pointlessly extending the air war -- or looking
for a way out, a
diplomatic solution. I will let Rep. Weldon describe his proposal as
outlined in House
Concurrent
Resolution 99 which seems to me the best idea on the table. I would add
only one thing: we
need to stop the bombing as soon as possible. If what you are doing is
making things
worse, stop what you're doing. If you have mistakenly put gasoline on a
fire instead of
water don't pour on more.
Some will suggest that quitting while we're behind would harm American
and NATO's
credibility and would be a victory for Milosevic. But to a large extent,
that damage has
already been done. As for NATO, what has been harmed so far is less
NATO's commitment
to its collective defense mission under Article 5 of the North Atlantic
Treaty which has never
been at stake in Kosovo than what President Clinton has called the "new
NATO" and Prime
Minister Blair a "new internationalism," which is nowhere provided for in
the Treaty. What
would, and should, collapse is the misguided effort to transform NATO
from a defensive
alliance into a regional peacekeeping organization, a mini-U.N. with
"out-of-area"
responsibilities, a certain road to more Bosnias and more Kosovos down
the line. That
mission would lose its credibility, fatally so, and so it should. The
Clinton Administration's
incompetent policy in Kosovo has had one small benefit: it has exposed
fact that last year,
when the Senate gave its advice and consent to expansion of NATO's
membership, it also
approved expansion of NATO's mission. If the Clinton Administration and
NATO are
successful in Kosovo, not only will the principle of state sovereignty in
the face of an
out-of-control international bureaucracy be fatally compromised, we can
expect (and indeed
some observers already have started to set out the case for) new and even
more dangerous
adventures of this sort elsewhere, notably in the Caucasus.
Finally, I have no confidence that the Clinton Administration is ready to
take the rational
way out offered by Rep. Weldon and his colleagues. Indeed, rational
people would not have
committed the blunders to date nor would they have continued to compound
them. All signs
indicate that President Clinton, Secretary Albright, and their "Third
Wave" European cronies
of the Tony Blair stripe are treating this not as a policy problem but as
a political problem.
Their attitude, as it was during the impeachment crisis, is "we'll just
have to win then, won't
we" -- "winning" meaning not a successful policy or even winning the war,
but winning the
propaganda war: an exercise in media spin, polls, and focus groups. As
Madeleine Albright
suggested last year, the leaders of some countries she mentioned, Serbia
among them ... try
to grab the truth and leash it like a dog, ration it like bread, or mold
it like clay. Their goal is
to create their own myths, conceal their own blunders, direct resentments
elsewhere and
instil in their people a dread of change.
However true that description is of Slobodan Milosevic, Madame Secretary
should look in
the mirror. No, this war is not about American interests but about
vindicating the intelligence
of Madeleine Albright and the good word of Bill Clinton.
The door to an honorable exit is clearly marked. The question is how to
induce this
Administration to take it.
--Jim Jatras
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