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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 April 1999 Issue No. 424 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 April 1999 Issue No. 424
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters NATO has failed
By Eqbal Ahmad
Bill Clinton, along with NATO's other leaders, may well one day declare -- as they did in 1995 after the signing of the Dayton accord -- that they have pulled off yet another 'achievement' in the Balkans. The media will surely join in the chorus of praise. But in fact, NATO's air raids in Kosovo and their present sequels merely underline the abject failure of American and European policy. The events so far expose the Western powers' pretensions to mastery as devoid of the will to power, and their claims to moral motivation as hollow.
Success entails the attainment of defined objectives. NATO's objectives in starting the raids were two-fold: to induce Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic to sign up to the Rambouillet Peace Plan, thus restoring the autonomy of Kosovo which he had abolished in 1989; and to save the civilians of the province from imminent 'ethnic cleansing', to use the latest euphemism for genocide.
Whatever it 'achieves' in the future, NATO has already definitively failed to achieve these two aims. Within a week of their commencing air strikes, Milosevic had made clear that Rambouillet was a dead letter, and had dramatically escalated his campaign of slaughter and expulsion. As of 1 April, nearly 25 per cent of Kosovo's people had been dispossessed of their homes and forced to embark on the arduous trek into resource-poor Albania and Macedonia. Entire villages and towns were destroyed or emptied of their inhabitants. On 29 March, 60,000 hapless civilians crossed into Albania in a single day; since then, their numbers have been steadily increasing. At the time of this writing Pristina, the provincial capital of Kosovo, was in the process of being "cleansed". By the end of last week, the sole surviving super-power and its alliance partners were locked into the tragedy, while throughout the world newspapers and television screens were replete with images of horror and carnage.
Euro-American leaders acknowledge rather coyly that the plan they were promoting at Rambouillet is already past its sell-by date. As for the Serb assault on the Kosovars, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea declared, "Even we have been shocked by the sheer enormity of what is going on in Kosovo..." His words betrayed the extent to which NATO's leaders had miscalculated Belgrade's will to defy them. The Clinton White House spoke of "genocide" and "abhorrent, criminal action on a massive scale." By the week's end, NATO had extended its bombing targets beyond Kosovo into Serbia. "Political will is building," General Wesley K. Clark, NATO's top commander, told reporters meekly. But is it? "On the seventh day, Serb resilience [sic] gives NATO leaders pause," affirmed the New York Times: "They are struggling to figure out what to do next if the bombing does not work."
An ethnic Albanian flees Kosovo with his children. As NATO airstrikes against Yugoslavia continue, 600,000 Kosovars were forced out of their homeland
(photo:AP)
This failure was, however, entirely predictable, and reveals once again the vulnerability of the contemporary international system to manipulation, aggression and genocide. The first conclusion to be drawn from this fiasco is that "humanitarian intervention" often signals diplomatic negligence and can command only the most feeble of peace-keeping structures. Kosovo offers a text-book case of such an abdication of means. Slobodan Milosevic, by any definition a fascist demagogue, began his climb to power over a decade ago by deliberately inciting ethnic hatred in the province. In 1989 he suspended Kosovo's autonomous status, thus sowing the seeds of the present carnage. Ever since then, diplomats, experts and observers have been pointing to this international powder keg and urging a vigorous effort to defuse the catastrophe that was waiting to happen. But the United States and Europe, which alone control the reins of world power and the working mechanisms of the United Nations, were too busy promoting economic globalisation, encircling Russia, asserting their control over world resources and expanding NATO's reach to attend in any meaningful way to the crisis that was brewing. By the time they woke up to what was happening, it was too late to avert the worst.
No quantity of bombs can compensate for such a lack of seriousness and resolve. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has systematically sought to monopolise the role of Field Marshal to the world. In one sense, this is fair enough, for it is in the nature of power to seek to lead, indeed to dominate. But leadership and domination entail costs which neither the US nor its alliance partners have been willing to incur. During the three months they spent preparing the current attack, they were constantly reminded by analysts that in the past air raids alone have always failed to bring about any significant change in enemy behaviour or capabilities. The deployment of air power only makes sense as support for ground forces, either prior to their engagement or in parallel. If NATO was not prepared to send ground forces into Kosovo, where 90 per cent of the people could be presumed to be friendly, then it was highly unlikely that Serbia would just roll over and capitulate.
Indeed, it was foreseeable that the Serbs would instead seize the opportunity to escalate their inhumane ethnic agenda. Mary Kaldor, an influential British expert, was among those who warned that unless troops were ready to enter Kosovo, aerial strikes alone would "lead to ethnic cleansing on a large scale." But instead of listening to her, on 23 March the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) withdrew its soldiers from Kosovo, thus leaving the people of the province, as Kaldor wrote in the Guardian, "without even the fig-leaf of international protection." NATO wants to play policeman without taking the risk of any injury to itself -- a policy which, to paraphrase Lenin, is rather like wanting to make omelettes without having to break any eggs.
When we evade a decision which circumstances have made necessary, then our original problem is compounded. The one period in modern memory when air strikes might have been effective in discouraging an unjustified act of aggression -- and might thus also have forestalled Milosevic's present brutal rage -- was during the period beginning April 1992. This "window of opportunity" lasted for three and half murderous years. Kamal Kurspahic, then editor of the Bosnian daily Oslobodenje, recalled last week how the Serb artillery on the hills surrounding the city destroyed Sarajevo bit by systematic bit, killing 10,600 inhabitants, among them 1,800 children. The Serb artillery emplacements were sitting ducks. They could easily have been silenced from the air. Yet instead the major powers stood by and looked on, year after year. When confronted with the reality of his own inaction, George Bush, then US president and commander-in-chief, and the man who brought us Desert Storm, would pretend not to understand. Every other day or so, he would ask Brent Scowcroft, his National Security Advisor, "Tell me again what this is all about."
Appeasement nourishes evil ambitions. Bill Clinton came into the White House promising to "lift and strike" -- that is, to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia and launch air strikes against Serbia's artillery emplacements. Yet all he did was dither. It was twelve hundred and sixty days, a quarter of a million lives and an incalculable mass of suffering later -- after a UN safe haven had been overrun, the blue helmets chained to their weapons, and thousands of people massacred in Srebrenica -- that NATO finally intervened. The US then went on to claim great kudos for forging the Dayton accord. Yet this accord was not a document of which anyone could reasonably be proud, for it retrospectively legitimised ethnic cleansing by dividing the Bosnian state up, thus creating a new set of inherently unstable ethnic boundaries. This dubious 'achievement' also enshrined the NATO policy of appeasing Slobodan Milosevic, who deserved then as now to be tried as a war criminal. Yet instead he was indulged. As a result, like Nemesis, he has returned to haunt his benefactors.
Evidence of "good faith" is essential to any credible military intervention. In a recent New York Times article Josef Joffe, a German international relations expert whose views enjoy considerable popularity in the American foreign policy establishment, asserts point blank that this is "a war of conscience, not of interest. The attack on Yugoslavia is aimed at saving lives, and for purely moral reasons." Why it took the West's much vaunted conscience so long to be pricked into action, he does not explain. After all, Milosevic deprived Kosovo of the autonomy which NATO is now attempting to restore in 1989, before he had begun his war with Croatia, and before the systematic aggression and crimes against humanity which he unleashed upon Bosnia. But then, Joffe's claim is just the kind of unsubstantiated assertion which dailies such as the New York Times enjoy printing, and of which they are so reluctant to brook any criticism. It is left to "unpublishable" intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky to demolish this received (and treacherous) wisdom in obscure publications such as Z-Magazine.
In his latest article, Chomsky discusses NATO's intervention in Kosovo with the unsparing logic and empiricism that are his hallmark. He notes a tension between "two pillars of world order": the United Nations Charter prohibits the forceful violation of state sovereignty, while the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the individuals' rights against state oppression. The notion of 'humanitarian intervention' arises out of this tension. Legal scholars differ as to when such intervention is permissible or necessary. A common and reasonable conclusion, however, is that this determination rests on the "good faith" of those who intervene. "Good faith", in turn, is determined not by rhetoric but by the agent's record of adherence to international law. Chomsky follows these uncontroversial premises with a devastating -- and totally accurate -- list of the United States' own violations of international law and the UN Charter. If this is to be the evidence, then he demonstrates conclusively that the required 'good faith' is entirely absent in the present case.
However, Chomsky recognises that his indictment "leaves unanswered" the question: "What to do in Kosovo?" Outside of the UN framework, the legality of NATO's intervention is dubious. The air strikes have merely provided an excuse for the Serb nationalists to augment the already enormous suffering of the Kosovars. Yet, intervention still promises the victim people at least "some protection from a predatory state."
How then should one react to the recent course of events? The dilemma cannot be resolved by mere affirmations or negations. It is not enough to be simply 'for' or 'against' the intervention. What we are witnessing is another tragedy of a world out of balance and without order -- a world system so rigged in favour of the rich and powerful that even such international laws as the Convention on Genocide cannot be enforced unless the enforcement serves the interests of a decisive power or group of powers. It will take a worldwide, militant and visionary anti-imperialist movement to change this inhumane state of affairs.
