Commentary:
What Should Have Been Done in Kosovo? John Loretz, Herman
Spanjaard, MD, Victor W. Sidel, MD The crisis in Kosovo developed slowly
and painfully, and everyone in a position to watch the lines being drawn knew
what was coming. Beginning in early 1998, fact-finding teams from Physicians
for Human Rights (PHR), particularly concerned with the brutal treatment of
doctors, other health care workers, and their patients in the former Yugoslavia,
recognized that the stage was being set for one of the most repugnantly named
practices of the late 20th century: “ethnic cleansing.” PHR, Human
Rights Watch, the International
Committee of the Red Cross, the UN
High Commissioner for Refugees, and concerned governments and non-governmental
organizations on the ground spent several desperate months trying to stop the
escalation of a war against civilian populations in Kosovo. Serbian troops
under Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic were amassing their forces in Kosovo
in early 1999 even as negotiators were working around the clock to get the Serbs
and representatives of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to accept the terms of
what would come to be known as the Rambouillet Agreement. When the failure of
the negotiations seemed imminent and ethnic cleansing, if not genocide, loomed
on the horizon, PHR and a coalition of human rights and humanitarian groups called
upon the international community to deploy a force of peacekeeping troops into
Kosovo in order to protect the Kosovar Albanians. When NATO eventually did intervene
it was with a three-month campaign of air strikes that inflicted massive damage
not only on Milosevic’s military assets, but on the civilian infrastructure
and the environment of Serbia, Kosovo, and neighboring countries. Whether
or not the air strikes triggered the ethnic cleansing that escalated over the
next two months, as many opponents of the NATO strategy claimed, they certainly
did nothing to prevent it, as US President Clinton said they were intended to
do. By the time Milosevic capitulated and a ceasefire was declared in early June,
as many as a million Kosovar Albanians had been driven from their homes. More
than three-quarters of a million were living in refugee camps and with host families
in Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro [1]; hundreds of thousands
of others had fled into the mountains as internally displaced persons; tens of
thousands had been evacuated to countries outside the region. Atrocities against
women, adult men, and the elderly, although difficult to document once Kosovo
was sealed off, were widely and credibly reported by refugees as they flooded
over the borders. Given the brutality of Milosevic’s policies, it
is not hard to understand why groups such as PHR and Human Rights Watch, which
had been extremely reluctant to endorse military intervention in the past, would
do so this time, with the failures of Rwanda and Somalia still so fresh in their
memories. What they asked the international community to do in response, controversial
in itself, was a far cry from the form of intervention the US and NATO chose.
The campaign of air strikes was wrong for three principal reasons: - war
in the nuclear age--even a war with an arguably “just” cause--is no
longer a viable option for resolving conflict or dealing with aggression;
- the
means employed by the U.S.-led NATO forces were disproportionate to the stated
ends and, therefore, were unacceptable regardless of the outcome; and
- even
if a multinational peacekeeping force was required to prevent ethnic cleansing,
that force should have been deployed far sooner and under a UN flag, not by NATO.
The
Risks of War in the Nuclear Age Whatever arguments one might choose to
make for the appropriate uses of military force in a just cause--and those arguments
have been made by honorable people--war as an institution became simultaneously
obsolete and potentially catastrophic in the age of weapons of mass destruction.
The world has yet to catch up to that reality, with the result that more than
100 armed conflicts, most of them internal, have taken place since the end of
the Cold War [2]. About 90% of the casualties of these conflicts
have been among civilians [3]. While some of these conflicts--most
notably Chechnya, Bosnia, and now Kosovo--have involved one or more nations armed
with nuclear weapons, the most serious and prolonged conflicts--in the Middle
East, Africa, South Asia, and Europe--have been internal struggles among parties
without weapons of mass destruction. Even so, the means used to pursue these wars,
including landmines, have become increasingly vicious and indiscriminate, though
they are largely incapable of resolving the conflicts that have prompted their
use. Many difficult questions remain unanswered in the wake of this new
reality, in particular the question of how to prevent genocide or its evil cousin,
ethnic cleansing. Nevertheless, the reason for the obsolescence of war is simple:
no nation can be expected to forego the acquisition and use of weapons of mass
destruction if it believes its survival is at stake. This means that in the long
term we must find effective means other than war to respond to these humanitarian
crises and massive human rights violations, or risk the survival of every living
creature on the earth. The problem is that this long term goal does not
help us decide how to act when peacebuilding measures fail, negotiations collapse,
and ethnic cleansing or genocide loom in the immediate future. Supporters
of the NATO air strikes point to the outcome of the war and argue that a massively
armed military alliance, led by the world’s predominant superpower, inflicted
unsustainable damage on a relatively small and isolated non-nuclear nation from
a distance, rightly expecting that eventually it would either surrender or collapse.
Yet one question is only now being asked, though not by those who carried out
and supported the NATO strategy: Would the outcome have been so certain--would
the air strikes have commenced at all--had Milosevic had control of even a small
nuclear arsenal? The lesson other countries may draw is that they could
easily become the next target of NATO cruise missiles, cluster bombs, depleted
uranium weapons. Russia, already upset over NATO expansion and without the resources
to maintain its conventional military forces at Cold War levels, has already backed
away from nuclear arms control and is threatening to rebuild its nuclear arsenals.
Unable to match the larger powers in conventional force, some less powerful countries,
already chafing under the discriminatory implementation of the Non-Proliferation
Treaty, will now find even more reason to acquire a nuclear “deterrent”
of their own. Failing that, they will look to chemical or biological weapons as
alternatives. The military advantage held by the US and NATO obscures this reality
only for as long as that advantage lasts. Clinton and UK Prime Minister
Tony Blair, among others, argued that NATO was compelled to stop Milosevic for
the same reasons that the European allies should have stopped Hitler before 1939.
The analogy fails for many reasons, not the least of which is the credibility
of those making the claim. The US and NATO are seen by an uncomfortable majority
of the world’s people--with some justification--as the principal bullies
of the new millennium. This is certainly true of the Serbians themselves, who
must now become persuaded that they were not the targets of NATO aggression and
that they will not be left defenseless against KLA revenge killings. This negative
view of the US and its allies is doubly sad, since so many Americans and Europeans,
including many serving in the military, seek to uphold a regime of democracy and
human rights. There will be other repercussions, some of them local, some
regional, a few remediable in the short term, others that will reverberate for
years to come: - The failure of NATO to obtain approval by the UN Security
Council to form an international force or, failing that, to call for an extraordinary
meeting of the General Assembly to authorize the intervention, undermined the
authority of the UN and will make it more difficult to obtain timely UN action
the next time it is needed.
- The medical, environmental, and social effects
of the destroyed domestic infrastructure will persist for decades. Unexploded
munitions will continue to claim civilian lives. In the short run, medical care
was made more difficult and the substitution of medical care by an occupying army
is a poor substitute for an indigenous medical care system. An increased number
of cancers and other illnesses can be expected.
- NATO--and the US--failed
to act in other humanitarian emergencies, including those affecting the Kurdish
people of Turkey and the people of Rwanda. This raises serious concerns about
how race, class, and economic factors enter into Western decisions to intervene.
- Many
people in Europe still carry--more than 50 years later--vivid recollections of
World War II. Although international and regional media were mobilized during
the period of the NATO air strikes in an effort to bolster public support for
the bombing, many of those who recalled World War II and who suffered through
40 years of the Cold War suspected NATO’s motives. Many Europeans perceived
this as an attack launched by the West against the East. Media from East and West
gave different versions of the same bombings and Europe was once again divided.
In the long term, the rehabilitation of war as an instrument of foreign policy
is a formula for catastrophe in a world where even a relatively poor government
can acquire the means to cause unprecedented destruction and where many governments
may now feel an obligation to do so. Just Ends Require Proportional
Means One does not have to accept the argument that war is obsolete--as,
indeed, few nation states have--to acknowledge the principle that the means employed
in war must be proportionate to the ends. This principle is embedded in the Geneva
Conventions and in the texts of international humanitarian law and international
human rights law by which all of the NATO countries, the US included, are bound.
The sanitized language used in NATO briefings to describe the campaign of air
strikes against Serbia and Kosovo was designed to shield the public from the human,
economic, and environmental consequences of the bombings. Nevertheless, the effects
of the bombing campaign--and the strategies by which it was pursued--must be scrutinized
carefully. The Geneva Conventions prohibit the intentional targeting of civilian
populations and non-military assets unless there is clear military necessity.
To do so is a war crime and NATO, if it did not cross this line intentionally,
skirted it perilously with each formulaic expression of regret over civilian casualties,
whether among Serbs, foreign nationals, or Kosovars whom NATO forces were supposed
to protect. While a full accounting is not yet available, large numbers
of civilians were killed by the NATO bombings and enormous damage was done to
the economic infrastructure and natural environment of the region [see “UN
to Assess Environmental Damage from Balkans War”]. The
nature of the air strikes raises another ethical issue. To the extent possible,
NATO pursued a no-risk strategy with regard to its own forces. It bombed Serbia
and Kosovo from a distance, explicitly to reduce or eliminate casualties among
its own troops. The strategy succeeded, but was no less immoral for its effectiveness.
Even seasoned military leaders were very uneasy with the notion that they should
be willing to kill for their beliefs, but not risk dying for them [4].
Moreover, this reckless strategy could only be implemented by flying high over
targets, widening the circles of damage, and increasing the casualty rates among
civilians. The humanitarian NGOs that called for the use of military force
to protect the Kosovars did not ask for a protracted campaign of air strikes but
for the insertion of ground troops to stand between the Serbian army and its intended
Kosovar victims. The world will never know whether such a force could have been
configured and employed in such a way to prevent a war and to motivate the Serbians
and Kosovars to negotiate a political resolution to their conflict, or whether
the result would have been a major European war involving Russia. What we got
was an air campaign in which “collateral damage” became a euphemism
for the destruction of two suffering peoples. Noting
that “It is an obligation under international humanitarian law to avoid civilian
casualties as far as possible,” the ICRC worried that “as the air campaign...intensified”
there was “a corresponding rise in the number of Serbian civilian victims
and increased damage to civilian objects...The destruction of industrial installations
has deprived hundreds of thousands of civilians of their livelihood” [5].
Leonard Rubinstein, the executive director of PHR,
in a letter to President
Clinton dated May 21, 1999 said that while NATO may not have been directly
targeting civilians, this rationale “does not justify military operations
that are implicitly designed to minimize harm to NATO soldiers at the expense
of civilians. Indeed, such rules of engagement, under which NATO appears to be
operating, are clearly prohibited under international humanitarian law” [6]. Whose
Responsibility to Intervene? The first casualty of war is the truth, and
the first truth to get buried in the Kosovo crisis, by Milosevic himself, was
the extent of the atrocities being committed by Serbian troops under his authority.
The second was the purpose of the air war as described by NATO. We can take Clinton,
Blair, and the other NATO leaders at their word when they say they wanted to create
the conditions for a safe and secure return of the refugees and internally displaced
people to their homes. But we should not mistake this as NATO’s entire, or
even primary, agenda. The Clinton administration emphasized three goals at the
outset of the air strikes and the President repeated them frequently: defending
the Kosovars, ensuring the stability of Europe in the 21st century, and preserving
the integrity of NATO [7]. That last goal, conditioned in
many respects by the meaning of the second, should give everyone serious pause. Until
the Kosovo crisis became inflamed, NATO found itself in the uncomfortable position
of preparing to celebrate its 50th anniversary as an artifact of the Cold War.
Even with its expanded membership and its attempts to mollify Russia, the reason
for a military alliance on the scale of NATO was becoming increasingly obscure.
The UN, with all its flaws and hampered by a serious lack of financial
support, was gaining stature as the umbrella for multinational peacekeeping operations
under international law, while the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), though underfunded and searching
for its niche, was becoming an attractive alternative model for democratic power
sharing and conflict mediation. NATO, however, has one thing nobody else
has: control (though essentially US control) over the world’s largest force
of conventional and nuclear weapons. The rationale for such forces had become
thinner as the Cold War receded into the past and a united Europe with no serious
external enemies rose on the horizon. So had the rationale for the amount of money
being spent on new generations of high-tech weapon systems. NATO needed a reason
to use all but its nuclear weapons (and to retain those) and Milosevic handed
it one. NGOs with the single noble purpose of preventing ethnic cleansing
or worse came to the tragic conclusion that NATO presented the only effective
means to accomplish this, and so facilitated, like it or not, NATO’s entire
agenda for the war, including its own self-preservation, its unquestioned dominance
as a regional and global military alliance, and its continued ability to bankroll
the military-industrial complex, which has depended on NATO for much of its business.
In the cover article of the New York Times magazine
on March 28, 1999, Thomas Friedman made the role of US and, by extension, NATO
military power transparent. In a world defined by global trade, in which national
governments find themselves schizophrenically catering to the needs of transnational
corporations while doing what they can to protect citizens from the brutalizing
effects of globalization, military forces, in particular those of the one remaining
superpower, have become the “hidden fist” behind the “hidden hand”
of the marketplace [8]. In other words, ensuring a stable
Europe at the beginning of a new century--Clinton’s second goal for the Kosovo
intervention--requires an international police force to remove threats to the
smooth running of global business and financial institutions. Such a prospect
should horrify anyone who cares about peace, disarmament, human rights, self determination,
protection of the environment, democratic values, and civil society. What
Should Have Been Done? Much more effort should have been made to find a
peaceful solution--through the UN, through mediation by Russia and Greece, and
through the OSCE--before military action was begun. Instead of removing the 1,400
OSCE observers in Kosovo 20,000 more should have been added. In an unescalated
situation their safety would have been greater than the safety of soldiers will
now be in an escalated situation. Because there would have been few casualties,
public acceptance would have been obtained. Media support could have been stimulated.
If necessary appropriate UN sanctions --of a far different type than those imposed
on Iraq-- could have been imposed on the Milosevic government. What should
be done in the future to resolve humanitarian emergencies and to avoid illegal
military action? What follow are some suggestions that point toward long term
solutions in a preventive mode, with an understanding that, in the short term,
hard choices will have to be made when situations deteriorate. 1) Ethnic,
racial, and class hatred within nations is in part remediable. Health facilities
are viewed as neutral and can be a bridge to both sides of a conflict. (This was
a difficult issue in Kosovo since for a decade there has been a sharp divide between
the Serbian and ethnic Albanian medical communities, but such an effort may be
successful in other regions.) 2) Conflict based on the vast gap between
rich and poor within and among nations is in part remediable. Funds being spent
for war could be used instead for peaceful purposes, such as health programs.
Local health projects in conflict regions can bring motivated doctors and other
health workers together. To prevent war, a “Marshal Plan” for the main
conflict zones needs to be set in motion, but with the goal of greater equity
relation between rich and poor than is possible with IMF and World Bank funding.
3) The Hague Agenda for Peace
and Justice and the campaigns initiated at the Hague conference in May 1999
offer promise for reducting conflict and preventing war. 4) The media must
be persuaded to carefully balance news coverage of war. Editors should be made
aware of the importance of including coverage of peace and the successes of peacebuilding.
5) Governments, NGOs, and the media must inform the public about the extraordinary
costs of war--in financial resources, in environmental damage, and in loss of
health and life . We should devote comparable resources to disarmament, international
security, just income distribution, conflict mediation, and other methods of avoiding
war. Repairing Progessive Bridges Peace and disarmament
groups largely parted company with human rights and humanitarian groups such as
PHR over how to respond to the Kosovo crisis, calling for a ceasefire and a halt
to ethnic cleansing, but offering no specific non-military strategies for ensuring
the latter. The destruction of the bridge between these two parts of the progressive
movement would be more devastating than the destruction of all the bridges crossing
the Danube by NATO warplanes. In the end there can be no prospect for peace and
disarmament without a guarantee of human rights and respect for humanitarian principles
among parties to conflict. The Geneva Conventions, the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, the Genocide
Convention, all the other texts of international human rights and humanitarian
law, and the International Criminal Court, to which Milosevic must be delivered
as an indicted war criminal, exist for good reason. Unless peace groups
can find common ground with groups such as PHR, which have reluctantly come to
the conclusion that some kind of military force may be required to prevent the
worst assaults on human dignity and security, people who should be natural allies
will find themselves more and more seriously divided over the response to impending
humanitarian crises. In the present state of the world, we should at least be
open to the possibility that armed peacekeepers under a UN flag will not necessarily
perpetuate the war system, but could prepare the way for as-yet-imperfectly-developed
means of effective nonviolent conflict resolution. If the peace and disarmament
groups are willing to participate in the hard collaborative work of developing
real, effective, and not merely rhetorical responses to the actions of a monster
such as Milosevic, the human rights and humanitarian groups may not find it necessary
to turn to US-led NATO forces in the future. References
1. US Agency for International Development. Kosovo
crisis. Fact Sheet #68. Washington, DC: USAID. June 9, 1999. [Return
to text]
2. Department of Peace and Conflict Research.
The conflict data project. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University. 1996. [Return
to text]
3. Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly
Conflict. Preventing
Deadly Conflict: Final Report with Executive Summary. New York: Carnegie Corporation.
1997:11. [Return to text]
4. NewsHour
with Jim Lehrer. Interview with Lt. General Robert Gard (ret.). May 14, 1999.
[Return to text]
5. International
Committee of the Red Cross. The
Balkan conflict and respect for international humanitarian law. Geneva: ICRC.
April 23, 1999. [Return to text]
6.
Physicians for Human Rights. Letter to William J. Clinton. May 21, 1999.
[Return to text]
7. US Department
of State. U.S. and NATO Objectives and Interests in Kosovo. Fact Sheet. Washington,
DC: State Department. March 26, 1999. [Return to text]
8. Friedman TL. What the world needs now. New York Times
Magazine. March 28, 1999:96. [Return to text]
Intervention, the UN Charter, and International Humanitarian Law The
fundamental contradiction in international and humanitarian law that led to the
NATO intervention in Kosovo through the bombing of Serbia, and to the controversy
surrounding it, was in part created three-and-a-half centuries ago. In
Westphalia, a region of what is now northwestern Germany near the Netherlands
border, treaties were negotiated in 1648 that marked the beginning of the modern
nation state. The Peace of Westphalia, as the treaties have been collectively
called, brought only a temporary respite in the wars of Europe. Representatives
of European nations and a few others met 250 years later in the 1899 and 1907
Hague peace conferences to discuss limitations on inhumane methods of waging war.
The League of Nations, founded in 1919, and the United Nations, in 1945, intended
to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” were not surprisingly
based on national sovereignty, with representation of nations rather than of the
people of the world. At the time of the formation of the United Nations,
however, the world was beginning to understand the horrendous series of human
rights violations that had occurred during the 1930s and during the Second World
War. These outrages cut across national borders. The UN
Charter, despite the fact that it was drafted by representatives of nation
states, begins with the words “We the peoples of the United Nations . . .”
and gives as one of the purposes of the UN the determination “to reaffirm
faith in fundamental human rights.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, enumerates a series of human rights
that are intended to be secured for all the people of the world without regard
to the nation in which they reside. The fundamental contradiction in international
law and in the procedures of international organizations is seen in the struggle
to balance guarantees of national sovereignty of with guarantees of the human
rights of all of a nation’s inhabitants. This has led inexorably to the current
problems in implementing intervention for humanitarian purposes. The UN
Charter permits military force to be used only under two conditions: (1) as part
of enforcement action by a United Nations force (Article 42); or (2) self-defense
by an individual nation or a group of nations (Article 51). The use of military
force against a nation by another nation or group of nations in order to protect
the human rights of a group of people within the borders of an offending nation
would therefore only be legitimate under the UN Charter when it is exercised by
an international force authorized by the United Nations. This is of course very
difficult to achieve within the current UN structure. Perhaps more important,
certain types of military force, even if authorized by the UN, are likely only
to exacerbate the destruction of the rights, the lives and the health of the people
of the nations against which military force is used.
JL is the executive editor of Medicine & Global Survival.
HS is President of the NVMP, the IPPNW affiliate in the Netherlands.
VWS is a past co-president of IPPNW, past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility
(US), and is Distinguished University Professor of Social Medicine, Montefiore
Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York.
Address
correspondence to John Loretz, M&GS, 727 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139
USA; e-mail: jloretz@ippnw.org.
© Copyright 1999 Medicine & Global Survival
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