Was Kosovo the Good War?

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 9 W W W. T I K K U N . O R G T I K K U N 51 Was Kosovo the Good War? by David N. Gibbs A s the 1999 NATO war against Serbia reaches its tenth anniversary, it is being recalled with a measure of nostalgia. The Kosovo war is remembered as the “good war”—a genuinely moral military action, which offers a reassuring contrast with the Iraq fiasco. The Kosovo war was undertaken (so the argument goes) only as a last resort, to restrain an unpleasant dictator (Slobodan Milosevic) who would only respond to force. And the war produced positive results, in the sense that Kosovo was freed from Serb oppression and Milosevic was soon overthrown. Now, a decade later, the Kosovo war is recalled as an exemplary case of humanitarian intervention, and is widely viewed as a model for possible interventions in Darfur and elsewhere .IndeedsomeofthekeyfiguresintheObamaadministration ,notablySamanthaPower,haveadvocated that “humanitarian intervention” on the model of Kosovo should be a basic theme of U.S. policy. Given the importance of Kosovo as a model for future military actions, it is importantto understandmorefullywhatactuallyhappenedinthiscriticalcase.NewinformationhasbecomeavailableinrecentyearsfromtheMilosevicwarcrimestrialandotherbasicsources — information that casts the war in a wholly different (and not so positive) light. In what follows, I will review some of these revelations, and how they have discredited widely accepted myths about the “benign” character of the Kosovo intervention. First, a bit of background: Kosovo had long been an “autonomous province” of the Republic of Serbia, initially as part of communist Yugoslavia. Within Kosovo, the population hadbeendividedbetweenanethnicAlbanianmajorityandarelativelysmallSerbminority, whichconstitutedbetween10percentand15percentofthetotalpopulation.Ethnicconflict between these two groups gradually destabilized the province. In 1989, the Republic of Serbia ended the autonomous status of Kosovo and placed it under effective martial law. A highly repressive system of rule was imposed that victimized Albanians in the province, while it favored the Serbs. Albanian efforts to escape this repression formed the basis of the armed uprising in the late 1990s, led by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). These efforts ultimately triggered the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Serbia. After the Serb defeat , an international peacekeeping force occupied Kosovo. With the peacekeepers still present, Kosovo officially seceded from Serbia and achieved full independence in 2008. A AnethnicAlbanianrefugeecries aftercrossingtheKosovoAlbaniaborderinMay1999 . RefugeesflowedintoAlbaniain thefaceofaSerbcampaignof ethniccleansinginKosovo.But todramatizethisasaconflict betweenKosovargoodguysand Serbianbadguys—asthedominantnarrativedoes —servesthe interestsofNATOandamilitaristicapproachtoforeign policymorethanthetruth. AP PHOTO/LUCA BRUNO David N. Gibbs teaches history and political science at the University of Arizona. His previous publications include The Political Economy of Third World Intervention (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991). ThisarticledrawsfromDavidN.Gibbs’s newbook,FirstDoNoHarm:Humanitarian InterventionandtheDestructionof Yugoslavia(VanderbiltUniversityPress, June2009),especiallyfromchapter7. Readersinterestedinobtainingfullsource citationscanfindmostoftheminthebook orrequestthemfromtheauthorat dgibbs@arizona.edu. Politics_1.qxd:Politics 6/16/09 2:42 PM Page 51 majority of the Serb population was ethnically cleansed from Kosovo, shortly after the NATO bombing, although a relatively small number of Serbs still remain in parts of the province. Myth1:NATObeganitsbombingcampaignonlyafterithadmade every effort to avoid war and to achieve its objectives in Kosovo through diplomatic means. The war resulted because Milosevic firmlyresistedadiplomaticsettlement. Inreality,Milosevicwasopentoadiplomaticsettlement,andthispoint is now well established by the very best sources. Specifically, Milosevic signed a series of international agreements in October 1998 that called on the Serbs to withdraw most of their forces from Kosovo and to implement acease-fire.HealsoagreedtothedeploymentofaninternationallyorganizedKosovoVerificationMission ,whichwouldsuperviseimplementation oftheSerbtrooppullback.TheseagreementswerebrokeredbyU.S.diplomat Richard Holbrooke. TheHolbrookeagreementgraduallybrokedown,asfightingcontinued betweenSerbandAlbanianforcesandthenescalatedduringlate1998.At the time, it was widely believed that it was the Serbs who scuttled the agreement. However, we now know that this was not the case. In fact, the Serbs implemented the Holbrooke agreement, and it was the Albanians who caused the agreement to break down. The evidence that the Serb/Yugoslav forces complied with the agreement comes from General Klaus Naumann, a German officer who played an important role in the diplomacy of this period (and who later participated in the 1999 NATO war). In 2002, Naumann appeared at the Milosevictrialasakeyprosecutionwitnessandstatedthefollowing:“The Yugoslav authorities honored the [Holbrooke] agreement … I think one has to really pay tribute to what the Yugoslav authorities did. This was not aneasythingtobring6,000policeofficersbackwithintwenty-fourhours, but they managed.” And General Naumann’s views are supported by the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, which noted in its 2000 report: “Serbia initially...