The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  Serbia regarded Kosovo as not only an integral party of its territory but also a province whose spiritual and historical significance was core to Serb identity. This the international community recognized. The Dayton accord reaffirmed that Kosovo was part of Serbia. However, a fast-expanding birth rate among its ethnic Albanian Muslim population had taken their proportion to 90 per cent of the province by 1992 where it had been two-thirds thirty years earlier. During the 1970s and 1980s, relations between the ethnic Albanian and Serb inhabitants of Kosovo deteriorated. In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic seized his opportunity to profit from the discontent by leading a rally of more than one million Serbs at the site of the battle of Kosovo Polje on its 600th anniversary (the historic defeat had ensured the Orthodox Serbs were subjected to five centuries of Muslim Ottoman rule). Tito had granted Kosovo a substantial measure of autonomy within Serbia. Milosevic, however, put the process into reverse, clawing back power to Belgrade in the new Serbian constitution of 1989. Like Tito before him, Milosevic ruled out the ethnic Albanians’ aspiration for secession.

  The heavy-handed and repressive treatment of Kosovo’s Albanians marginalized their more moderate politicians. By 1998, a new force had come to prominence – the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The KLA was armed in part from money raised by its émigré community’s involvement with organized crime. Its tactics were not only to confront Serb authority but also to attract international attention and support by deliberately inciting Serb special forces into committing reprisal atrocities. It was an astute assessment, given the ease with which the supposed forces of law and order duly demonstrated their prevalence for acts of extreme thuggery against entire villages and families. These acts generated far more international condemnation than the KLA’s smaller, more cynical, acts of provocation. By May 1998, 40 per cent of Kosovo was in the KLA’s hands and Serb attempts to combat the insurgency created a stream of refugees. Here, it seemed, was a fresh Serb act of ethnic cleansing. Only the threat of NATO air strikes forced Milosevic to permit monitors from the OSCE. In the new year, with revelations of a fresh Serb outrage in the village of Racak in which forty-five fleeing ethnic Albanians were shot and hacked to death, Milosevic and the Albanian Kosovar leadership were persuaded to negotiate at Rambouillet. There, even although the KLA were still refusing to disarm, the Contact Group ordered Milosevic to agree to a referendum in Kosovo within three years (which would all but certainly result in a vote to secede) and to permit NATO troops throughout Serbia. These were humiliating terms. Milosevic was not prepared to accept them. With his refusal, NATO prepared, for the first time in its history, to attack a sovereign country whose boundaries were recognized in international law. The action did not have direct UN sanction.

  On 24 March 1999, Operation Allied Force began with air sorties and missile attacks on Serbia’s air defence and communications structure. Despite the firepower at its disposal, NATO was disadvantaged by having to agree policy between all nineteen member governments. Although military strategists had raised doubts about whether a war could be won by aerial bombing alone, the governments could not agree on invading with their armies. Clinton had publicly pledged that American troops would not be deployed. This may have given Milosevic hope that he could ride out the storm. He also looked to Russian assertiveness to frighten off any decision that did involve a ground invasion. In one respect, the NATO assault played into the Serb nationalists’ hands. Far from preventing their violent harassment of the Albanian Kosovars, the Serbs found that being under attack provided them with a perfect cover to intensify their ethnic cleansing of the province. Within days of Operation Allied Force commencing, Kosovo’s stream of refugees turned into a mass exodus with more than 300,000 being displaced or fleeing from their homes. The numbers swelled beyond 700,000 in the succeeding weeks. Sam Kiley was stationed on Albania’s border with Kosovo where he reported ‘a damburst of people’38 flooding over while Stephen Farrell described similar scenes from his position on the Macedonian border.

  In Wapping, the leader writers had laid out The Times’s own grand strategy the previous June. ‘Only a clear readiness to make a substantial ground deployment before any peace agreement will demonstrate that Nato means what it says’ the editorial warned. ‘The only possible resolution for Kosovo is autonomy within Serbia; any intervention would be to preserve Serbia, not destroy it.’39 The chances of Kosovo remaining thereafter a part of Serbia would, it believed, be better served if Milosevic gave way to a new regime better able to present a more liberal, multi-ethnic future. As the air war gathered momentum, the paper also stated its preference that once victory had been secured, turning Kosovo into an interim international protectorate was a lesser evil than the alternative – partition in which the province would become Albanian save for a few Serb enclaves.40 As for the conduct of the military operation, The Times believed not only in the air war but that the weight of ordnance dropped needed to be stepped up if troops were not to be committed for a ground invasion. It especially despaired of Clinton’s public refusal to contemplate a ground attack. This only convinced the Serbs that they could avoid defeat by sitting out the aerial bombardment, it argued. Throughout the campaign – and especially after the air war showed few signs of achieving victory on its own – The Times repeatedly argued that NATO needed to proceed in a manner that ensured Belgrade took seriously the prospect of a ground invasion. In leading articles written by Rosemary Righter and Tim Hames, the paper also left its readers in no doubt that a ground war was preferable to what might prove the only alternative – a humiliating admission of defeat.41

  For Times journalists on the ground the situation was acutely dangerous. Anthony Loyd was filing from Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, in the last days before the war commenced. The previous week a London-based source had warned him that an ultra-nationalist Serb group in Kosovo had put a price on his head. ‘The threat was vague and unformed, so I stayed on,’ Loyd concluded. Nonchalance was to be one of the war’s first victims. He realized he was in trouble when his potential armed guard turned out to be a plainclothes policeman who had once beaten him up. Loyd slipped away the next morning intending to get behind the KLA’s lines but he was stopped at one of their checkpoints and forced back. On his return journey to Pristina he received a call on his mobile phone warning him that the Serb police were searching for him. In Kosovo in 1999, the police were a licensed death squad, murdering and maiming at will. Heeding the warning this time, Loyd headed off back towards KLA-held territory. He was stopped at a Serb checkpoint. ‘Screaming and with guns levelled’ they encouraged him to retrace his steps. After a further tip-off – ‘the police are after you’ – in Pristina, he drove south towards the Macedonian border. There he found streams of refugees being pushed back by Macedonian guards taunting them that ‘Albania is for the Albanians’. Loyd crossed the border, relieved, but conscious that ‘the difference between me and two million Kosovo Albanians was that I could escape’.42

  The refugees’ plight dominated the news coverage. Some commentators suggested the numbers involved were being greatly exaggerated. It was thus important that, in Janine di Giovanni, The Times had a courageous reporter moving among the tidal wave of dismal humanity. ‘They are coming across the freezing border on bicycles, or walking, pushing babies in prams,’ she filed from Rozaje on the Kosovo-Montenegro border. ‘They’re in their slippers. They wear plastic bags on their heads to shield them from the snow. They carry whatever they can.’ Many had fled from Pec, Kosovo’s second city. One woman was quoted stating, ‘they took all the sick people who were Albanians out of the hospital. My neighbour, a Serb, who I’ve known for years, came and became my enemy. They killed doctors, teachers, anything alive.’ Another man said simply, ‘It is history that has done this.’ In her report, di Giovanni added a note of urgency of her own: ‘These people appear to be left to fend for themselves. As I write this from the mountain-top checkpoint, it is freezing cold and those left outside will not survive the night.’43

 
Janine di Giovanni was an American of Italian descent who had moved to London in 1985. She had reported the Bosnian war for the Sunday Times, meeting her future French husband in the siege-bound journalists’ barracks of the Sarajevo Holiday Inn. She was acclimatized to acute danger. She was also one of the first journalists to get back into Kosovo after the Serb onslaught in the last days of March 1999. Surrounded with two French colleagues on a mountainside by Serb troops, she was marched at gunpoint down the hill and then stopped by other Serb troops who became almost demented with anger when they examined the passports and found an incriminating photograph of di Giovanni’s colleagues working with UN peacekeeping troops. One soldier spoke a little Italian. Di Giovanni attempted to reason with him, mentioning that her parents were Italian. ‘You we arrest,’ he replied, ‘the French we kill.’ She was at a loss to understand what followed. After driving towards Pec for about twenty minutes, the Serbs stopped the car, returned the journalists’ possessions and kissed di Giovanni on the cheek. ‘“Italiana,” they said, “never come back here.”’44

  By April, NATO had taken the war into a yet more serious dimension by hitting Belgrade with cruise missiles. A heavily populated European capital city was now under direct attack. Twelve days later NATO mistakenly hit a train carrying civilians and, two days later, killed up to seventy-five Kosovan Albanian refugees it mistook for a Serb convoy. The longer the air war went on, the more The Times became uneasy about the political resolve supporting it. Far from finding a formula that brought Russia more closely into decision making, the leading article of 7 May argued, ‘The Alliance is nearing the point where Serb forces have been so damaged that Nato troops could be committed at acceptable risk.’ In this assumption, the paper was trusting NATO’s estimates of damage done, when it would have been better believing the Serbs’ assessment. Nonetheless, the leading article continued, ‘It has never been clearer that the best prospect for peace worthy of the name is to give war a chance.’45 Later that day, a NATO missile smashed into the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.

  It was important that The Times did not just print reports filed from those caught up on the KLA side of the lines. The paper also stationed Tom Walker in the Serbian capital where he reported the effects of NATO bombing on a terrified and angry population. He was joined by Eve-Ann Prentice. At the end of May, Prentice was travelling with a small group of journalists in south-west Kosovo when NATO jets hurtled towards her on a mission to bomb a nearby road tunnel. ‘I heard a phenomenal noise and thought it was the last thing I would hear on Earth,’ she recalled. ‘I was thrown to the ground, and was amazed when the thick-grey black smoke cleared to discover that I was still alive.’ One of the cars had been taken out, as had its driver/interpreter. As the next wave of jets thundered in, Prentice scrambled into a water culvert. More bombs exploded all around. She had cut legs and was badly shaken. Eventually she and her remaining companions were rescued by Serb troops and ended up being comforted and given generous hospitality at one of their army bases. She subsequently discovered that the commanding officer had wanted to release her overnight into the sniper infested mountains but Milosevic had personally radioed the camp ordering that the journalists should be well treated. His motives were not necessarily governed by altruism alone.46

  Blair was moving towards seeking a ground invasion but Clinton remained reluctant to perform a U-turn. Meanwhile, the KLA continued in their efforts to secure the province. Janine di Giovanni had not been especially impressed with the martial quality of some of those she had seen at a training camp at Papaj on the Albanian border. She considered them a ‘motley bunch, wearing uniforms donated by Germany and T-shirts provided by the Love Parade, a gay annual celebration in Berlin’.47 By early May, Anthony Loyd was back in Kosare, in southern Kosovo, with the KLA and discovered that their quality as a fighting unit had much improved.48 By mid-May, di Giovanni had advanced with a KLA unit into south-west Kosovo, frequently flinging herself face down in ditches as first NATO jets (by mistake) dropped cluster bombs on them and then the Serbs pinned them down with a relentless bombardment, killing and wounding fighters with whom she found herself sharing every hardship and cigarette.

  In fact, the war was moving towards its endgame not so much because of the tactics deployed as by the fears of what might follow. On 19 May, Clinton’s hostility to a ground invasion publicly softened. Attempts by the Russians to mediate were supplemented by a delegation led by the Finnish President, Martti Ahtisaari. The belief that Clinton was finally moving towards a ground invasion concentrated both Russian and Serbian minds. NATO’s bombing campaign was suspended on 10 June when Milosevic began pulling his forces out of Kosovo. While NATO prepared to dispatch fifty thousand troops to police the peace, Russia asserted its right to involvement by speeding troops stationed in Bosnia over to Pristina airport. With extraordinary recklessness, the NATO commander, General Wesley Clark, ordered the deployment of British paratroopers and Gurkhas to Pristina to confront and repel the Russians. With Tony Blair’s backing, General Sir Mike Jackson, the British commander, refused amid heated talk of risking a third world war.

  As the peacekeeping force, K-For, began to establish itself in Kosovo, the extent of the violence the province had endured became more apparent. Michael Evans, The Times’s defence editor, inspected a torture chamber under a Serb Interior Ministry police station in Pristina. ‘The smell of death and suffering is everywhere. The claustrophobia is overwhelming,’ he wrote. Implements of medieval barbarity lay around. Pornography was strewn about everywhere as were boxes of industrial-strength condoms. There was a metal-framed bed with a restraining leather strap and a mattress riddled with bullet holes. In the main chamber he found on a ledge a baby’s single blue shoe. ‘Is it possible they tortured babies, too, in this hole?’ he wrote in despair.49 There were other discoveries of a different kind. Far from having been pulverized by the NATO bombing, the Serb forces retreated in good order. The claim that 122 tanks had been destroyed was demonstrably false. Three damaged T55s were found while the Serbs admitted another ten had been hit. Around four hundred Serb soldiers (but more than a thousand civilian Serbs) were killed, not much of a return on 11,000 strikes and 29,000 sorties against Serbia. As Eve-Ann Prentice had witnessed and reported at the time, the basic utilities had remained operational in Pristina even after two months of the bombing campaign.50 Milosevic’s will appeared to have crumbled not because of the military success of the aerial bombing but because he feared there would be a ground invasion and that Russia could no longer be counted upon to prevent it. The figure of 100,000 missing (presumed murdered) ethnic Albanian men that had been bandied about during the campaign was also shown to have been without foundation. The Times, at least, had never endorsed such a high figure. With the conflict’s end, the estimate was downgraded to ten thousand and possibly less.

  Three thousand six hundred Russian troops participated in K-FOR. Despite the peacekeeping force’s best endeavours, the future looked bleak for Kosovo. It offered hope for the displaced Albanians to return to the towns and villages from which they had been driven but the prospects for reconciliation and economic revival remained poor. The former KLA continued to act in its dual role of part police force, part local mafia. The level of organized crime was uncontainable. The future for the non-Albanians was dire. Within a year of the end of the NATO air war, 100,000 Kosovo Serbs had fled the region. Tom Walker filed reports that shielded Times readers from none of the horrors perpetrated against them. Nothing was sacred. Monasteries were desecrated, as were nuns. K-FOR found itself having to defend those who remained against the vengeance of Albanians intent on pursuing an ‘ethnic cleansing’ agenda of their own.

  The military occupation of Kosovo, as of Bosnia, was clearly no temporary arrangement. Bosnia-Herzegovina was governed by a myriad different authorities. Given the network of corruption within the country, it was not an obvious magnet for foreign investment. In Ulster, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the ‘peace process’ involved diminishing, rath
er than strengthening, direct accountability in the hope that this reduced the appeal to sectarian partisanship. Political systems of extraordinary complexity were envisaged in order to ensure power sharing. Yet a lack of accountability was not in itself conducive to good government. In Bosnia’s case, effective power rested not with any representative body but with the High Representative, the international community’s viceroy in the region. Kosovo, too, looked certain to remain similarly governed in the years ahead. Being run by foreigners was not in itself the key to a long term solution, but it did curtail the level of violence.

  With his Serb assertiveness, Milosevic had successfully contributed to the ruination of the constituent parts of what had once been Yugoslavia. In so doing, he had also despoiled his beloved Serbia. For most of the previous eight years, Serbia had been subject to economic sanctions. The economy was in a state of collapse. His actions in Kosovo had led to it being occupied by a multinational force and, with the flight of much of its Serb minority, a question mark remaining over its future as even a nominal part of Serbia. The Times had argued that the best hope of maintaining Kosovo within Serbia lay with Milosevic’s removal from power in Belgrade. This proved to be one of the aftertremors of the Kosovo war. On 24 September 2000, Milosevic committed his final act of defiance by refusing to concede defeat to Vojislav Kostunica, the opposition candidate who appeared to have won the presidential election. The consequence was not supine acceptance from a cowed people but mass protests and the beginnings of a general strike. On 5 and 6 October, more than half a million protestors assembled in Belgrade. The Parliament building was set on fire. Milosevic was finally forced out after thirteen years of miscalculation. On 9 October, international sanctions against Yugoslavia were lifted. The following year Milosevic was flown to The Hague to stand trial charged with war crimes before the newly convened International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The new world order was being rebuilt, this time as a legal entity.