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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 April 1999 Issue No. 423 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 April 1999 Issue No. 423
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Interview Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Primacy of
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
NATO over the UN?
I had planned to devote this article to a fascinating conference on Media Power and Responsibility: the role of the fourth estate in the 21st century, sponsored by an academic enterprise, the 21st Century Trust, and held last week at St Edmund's Hall in Oxford. Sir Michael Weir, director of the project, and a former British ambassador to Egypt, invited me to deliver a talk at the conference on the media as defender of democracy. But because the dramatic events in the Balkans were suddenly propelled to the forefront of world news, I find myself compelled to postpone my reflections on the Oxford conference to a future date.
There are obvious similarities between the strikes launched by NATO against Slobodan Milosevic and those that were launched against Saddam Hussein in 1991, with one important difference: prior to the strike against Iraq, no precedent had been set for this type of undertaking. At the time, the Gulf War seemed to be aimed at neutralising the evil policies of a maverick ruler. But the repetition in Yugoslavia of a similar scenario in an entirely different context suggests that attacks of this kind are not determined only by the wayward behaviour of this or that individual ruler, but that they betray loopholes in the world order itself.
The first, and most blatant loophole, is that the intervening party is not empowered to carry out punitive raids against a sovereign state without the authorisation of the United Nations, the only universally recognised and genuinely global organisation backed by international law. Yet it has proceeded to do so and we are entitled to ask why and on what grounds. NATO was first created to oppose the Socialist Camp and its military wing, the Warsaw Pact. When the latter disbanded following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the context from which NATO derived its legitimacy vanished. NATO is not mandated to intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign states, whatever aberrations they may be responsible for.
It is true that in the new context of globalisation national sovereignty is not as immune as it once was. It is also true that Kosovo has witnessed unimaginable atrocities. Because one side, the Kosovar Albanians are Muslim, they enjoy the sympathy of the Arab and Islamic worlds. But the hands of both sides are covered in blood. As Stephen S. Rosenfeld points out in an article carried by the Washington Post of 29 March under the title, 'Resist the temptation to demonise Serbs', 'not so long ago, the Albanians in Kosovo were repressing Kosovo's Serbs and conducting a vile ethnic cleansing." Moreover, although similar atrocities have been and continue to be committed elsewhere in today's world -- in Algeria, Rwanda, Burundi, the Congo and in the confrontation of the Turkish government with its Kurdish rebellion -- they have not prompted a NATO intervention. Why the double standards?
Is it that a civil war in Yugoslavia cannot be allowed to continue unchecked because Yugoslavia is part of Europe and military confrontations are particularly critical in a hot spot where the first spark of World War I was struck? As we are reminded all the time, the war in Serbia is the first to be played out in Europe since World War II. We believe this argument to be dangerous. Whatever the sufferings the Europeans have endured in this century or in previous centuries, they do not qualify for special treatment that other peoples are not entitled to receive.
What is certain is that Europe's specificities do not make NATO's military intervention in Yugoslavia any more legitimate from the standpoint of international law. NATO describes itself, even in the post-Cold War era, as an international alliance for collective self-defence. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger interestingly questions Clinton's right to make "America's military power available to enable every ethnic or religious group to achieve self-determination. Is NATO to become the artillery for ethnic conflict? If Kosovo, why not East Africa or Central Asia?"
Even in the eyes of its Western supporters, NATO is not a global policeman. This role is assumed by the Security Council, which is authorised to order NATO to intervene militarily in a given conflict. And, as we all know, NATO's air intervention in Kosovo's civil war has been vigorously opposed by two of the permanent members of the Security Council, Russia and China (as well as by India, another global actor). Moreover, the Western powers could not invoke the precedents of NATO's military interventions in Iraq in 1991 and in Bosnia in 1995, because in both cases the intervention was authorised by the Security Council. Thus, in terms of international law, NATO's present intervention in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia can only be characterised as outright aggression against a sovereign state.
It is worth noting in this regard that France, which is engaged in the NATO operation against Belgrade, has furnished significant efforts to procure a Security Council approval for the intervention in Yugoslavia, not only to meet the requirements of the UN Charter on the matter, but also to prevent the repeated disregard for Security Council endorsements of NATO interventions in critical crises from constituting precedents for repeat performances in future of interventions by the US (or any other power) without UN approval. Already, and whatever the justification, in the course of one year Washington has intervened militarily in four sovereign states without Security Council backing or even prior knowledge: in Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Serbia.
As Kissinger mentioned, the argument used to justify intervention is the righting of a wrong, represented in the persecution of ethnic or religious groups, what has now come to be described as 'crimes against humanity'. Intervention against such crimes is not only perceived as a right, but even as a duty. What is strange is that differences over intervention 'for humanitarian reasons' are not limited to differences between Left and Right, but have now become subject to hot debates within the ranks of both the Right and the Left. Britain's foreign minister, Robin Cook, made the case for intervention in the name of Britain's New Left in his statement to The Observer: "Milosevic represents a very poisonous brand of politics which is entirely ethnic-based and ethnic-driven. The central core is the assertion of Serb identity, which is expressed by a hatred of other identities and races, even those with which it shares a state. The Milosevic regime is returning to ethnic cleansing and acts which are genocidal with people being murdered simply because of their identity." But this is not what veteran Leftist Tony Benn has to say on the subject: "The strikes have no legitimacy in law; they wrongly assert the primacy of NATO over the UN; they constitute intervention in a civil war within a sovereign state; and they might create a wider Balkan war."
Dismissing the issue of sovereignty opens the door to separatism. Do Europeans want a separatist state in Kosovo? Their situation appears no less ambiguous than that of the Arabs, who oppose separatism and fragmentation in Iraq, but cannot, at a time they are calling for self-determination and statehood for the Palestinians, deny the Kurds the right to some form of autonomy. Arab support for separatism in Kosovo cannot be reconciled with their firm opposition to the fragmentation of Iraq.
Actually, the escalation in the air strikes against the Serbs has encouraged them to escalate their ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo. Far from protecting the Albanians, the NATO strategy is raising the level of ethnic inter-fighting to new heights. Can NATO win in such a confrontation? As the raids against Serbia become more intense, wider sections of the Serb population -- including the various oppositions -- are rallying around Milosevic. Meanwhile, cracks in the Western alliance have already emerged. Italy has expressed serious reservations about the intervention while Greece has openly opposed it. Moscow is coming forward with alternative proposals. All these developments cast serious doubts on NATO's chances of success.
