More about Kosovo

/ kosovo / fallout / reviewed /

Doug Muir has posted a very interesting commentary on an article by William Montgomery, former US ambassador to Serbia and Montenegro. The article is quite frank about the failings of the "International Community" as far as Kosovo is concerned, and confirms what seemed to me pretty obvious at the time, namely that far from being a "solution" to the Kosovo problem, the NATO action turned it into an unsolvable problem. Even worse it turned it into a perpetuating and potentially expanding problem, principally because the attack on Yugoslavia was only ostensibly about Kosovo. In reality it was meant as a display of military resolve for potential "troublemakers" and a roadmap for use of lethal force as a tool for obtaining immediate compliance. Thus the, much less unilateral, diplomatic process was abandoned. And let's not ignore its value as a precedent for ignoring the UN SC, which made the current Iraqi debacle easier to justify (see my comments on Douglas' post for more).

It is also instructive to note that considerations of who's running the show on the Albanian side are missing, as the ambassador's proposal of a decentralization on a city scale would give legal control of much of the countryside to the KLA associated mafias that are thriving in the region - or anyone with enough firepower. It is also instructive to note that considerations of who's running the show on the Albanian side are missing, as the ambassador's proposal of a decentralization on a city scale would give legal control of much of the countryside to the KLA associated mafias that are thriving in the region - or anyone with enough firepower.

...Anyway, nothing of what is happening was not easily predictable. That alone is argument enough for the total wrongness of the war. In September 1999 Lord Carrington was making all the significant observations:

...did Lord Carrington believe that Nato’'s action in Kosovo in the past few months had been mistaken?

“Yes,”

“Why?’

“Well, to start with, it was impossible for Milosevic to accept the Rambouillet agreement because what it asked him to do was allow Nato to use Serbia as a part of the Nato organisation. Sovereignty would have been lost over it. He couldn’'t accept that.

“I think what Nato did by bombing Serbia actually precipitated the exodus of the Kosovo Albanians into Macedonia and Montenegro. I think the bombing did cause the ethnic cleansing.

“I’'m not sticking up for the Serbs because I think they behaved badly and extremely stupidly by removing the autonomy of Kosovo, given them by Tito, in the first place. But I think what we did made things very much worse and what we are now faced with is a sort of ethnic cleansing in reverse. The Serbs are now being cleared out. I think it’s a great mistake to intervene in a civil war.”

Lord Carrington has no liking for President Milosevic but, again, he thinks it was wrong to brand him officially as a war criminal. “I don’t think he is any more a war criminal than President Tudjman of Croatia who ethnically cleansed 200,000 Serbs out of [Krajina]. Nobody kicked up a fuss about that. I think we are a little bit selective about our condemnation of ethnic cleansing, in Africa as well as in Europe.”

Chris Deliso has more about the protectorate and its relation to the Iraqi occupation (plus other worrying stuff).

Me, I can see a real solution emerging only as part of a real democratization process in the area, which can come only after a thorough re-examination by the EU, of the situation in the Balkans and an offer of a total plan for the region (including all minorities and the situation in Bosnia). This should be accompanied by a serious, generous and carefully managed aid/reconstruction programme. Then, Kosovar Albanians could be lured into a federal solution pending an EU date for a much decentralized Serbia and Montenegro (& Kosovo?). This could conceivably work - but is unfortunately a rather unlikely scenario.