A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  Futility

  A second criticism of the intervention was that the violence committed by Albanians in the aftermath of NATO’s victory only confirmed there were “no good guys.” The alleged symmetry of the parties was said to confirm the futility of trying to do a net service to humanity. For a decade prior to NATO’s March 1999 intervention, the Kosovo Albanians had been fired from their jobs, strip-searched, barred from schools, and generally spat upon by armed and unarmed Serbs alike. Just ahead of, and during, the NATO bombing campaign, Albanians watched summary executions, beatings, rapes, and the torching of hundreds of towns. Ninety percent of the Kosovo populace was forcibly displaced from their homes during Serbia’s Operation Horseshoe. Yet when Milosevic surrendered, many idealistic foreigners had fully expected that the Albanians would return home, turn the other cheek, and behave responsibly. As Surroi of Koha Ditore explained, “Morality was your investment here, so you expect morality as your payback.”40

  But when NATO helped bring about a role reversal and empowered Albanians to realize their rights and control their own destinies, many Albanian returnees behaved brutally. In the year after the NATO victory, while some 50,000 NATO troops patrolled Kosovo, Albanian extremists expelled more than 100,000 Serbs from their homes in Kosovo and killed some 1,500. Prominent Albanian media outlets published the names of those they called Serb “war criminals.” Those branded were often gunned down. The Albanian authorities, usually KLA officers who had simply left their uniforms (but rarely their guns) at home, looked away from, actively encouraged, or took part in looting, beatings, and murders. The actual number of Albanian perpetrators of violent acts was quite small, but the general mood among Albanians amounted to “serves them right after what they did.” Serbs were at last getting their comeuppance. Collective guilt of the sort that Lemkin and others attributed to the German people during the Holocaust was all the rage. Those Serbs who remained in Kosovo ended up mostly clustered in the northern part of the province in a kind of militant ethnic ghetto.

  At the same speech in November 1999 where President Clinton drew hearty applause from Albanians for his proclamations about the NATO victory, he broached the tricky subject of Albanian coexistence with Serbs. “You can never forget the injustice that was done to you,” he said, as the Albanians clapped with delight. “No one can force you to forgive what was done to you,” Clinton continued, again earning thundering acclaim. “But you must try,” he concluded, drawing only a sullen silence from the raucous crowd.

  History does not offer many examples of the victims of mass violence taking power from their former oppressors, in large measure because outside powers like the United States have been so reluctant to intervene on behalf of targeted minorities. Unless another country acts for self-interested reasons, as was the case when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, or armed members of the victim group manage to fight back and win, as Tutsi rebels did in Rwanda in 1994, the perpetrators of genocide have usually retained power. Yet the fact that victims have rarely taken over from victimizers has not stopped U.S. policymakers from justifying inaction by claiming an equivalence among all parties to the conflict. “We can’t make these people like one another,” they said. Although “all sides” rarely acted the same when these statements were made, U.S. government officials frequently cautioned that if the victims (Kurd, Tutsi, or Bosnian Muslim) had acquired the capacity and the power, they, too, would turn against those belonging to the perpetrator group. The logic of these claims was that no matter how attractive the prospect of rescue might seem in the short term, it would make no difference in the long term. The people the United States saved and empowered today would sooner or later torment those they had dislodged. Thus, as we have seen, those who believed in the futility of intervention asked, in effect, “Why bother?”

  This futility justification for nonintervention is historically untestable. Holocaust survivor Primo Levi addressed this tendency to equate the perpetrator’s behavior and the victim’s capacity in The Drowned and the Saved:

  I do not know, and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know that the murderers existed . . . and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease of an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth.41

  Levi did not deny that victims could commit evil acts. He conceded that the tendency to be vengeful in the aftermath of terrible suffering was very real—and very understandable. But Levi questioned the assumption that such retribution was inevitable. He also doubted the possibility of equivalence after genocide.

  It is somewhat ironic that it was Kosovo that ended up eliciting the first American anti-atrocity intervention of the century. It may have been the least likely, of all the potentially enforceable “peaces,” to breed reconciliation. Indeed, there was no original conciliation to re do. Albanians and Serbs had cohabitated in the province for generations, but unlike in Bosnia and Rwanda, where an ethnic map once showed intermingled blots and colors reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock painting, the two groups in Kosovo had rarely mixed. Intermarriage was virtually unheard of. This history did not mean that Albanians and Serbs could not live side by side; it just meant that they were unlikely to do so for some time.

  But international agencies and Western governments and publics wanted quick, cheap results. After Serbia’s surrender, the United Nations set up a civil administration in which foreigners decided local tax rates, television news content, school curriculum, and jail sentences. But police were the most crucial ingredient in a province where the legal system had vanished with the overnight departure of Serbian officialdom. UN police were deployed at a snail’s pace, and donors proved parsimonious. German General Klaus Reinhardt, the commander of the NATO-led Kosovo force, noted that the UN budget for Kosovo for the first year was $64 million, “a quarter of that which NATO spent in one day of the bombing.”42 Thousands of foreign aid workers, who became known as “humanitarian imperialists,” set up shop in Kosovo. But they lacked the resources and the ideological comfort level to dictate the pace and parameters of Kosovo’s development. Instead, they tried to leverage their resources to influence local political decisions and to use their money to build local capacity. Because the locals did not yet fully control their own destiny—Kosovo Albanians were left with “substantial autonomy and self-government” but not independence—the people frequently blamed the outsiders for woes of their own making. Nonetheless, after two years of transitional UN rule, when Kosovo Albanian voters went to the polls in October 2000 to elect their own government, they revealed their moderate leanings. Instead of choosing the hard-line KLA to run the country, as many expected, they elected Ibrahim Rugova, a pacifist philosopher who had led the struggle for Albanian autonomy long before the KLA was even formed.

  But outside critics ignored this encouraging sign. Kosovo’s tarnished, bloody peace simply ratified the bystanders’ earlier, self-justificatory notions that parties that portrayed themselves as “victims” would readily transform themselves into abusers once they were allowed to govern. As a result of Albanian repression, American critics were able to charge NATO with producing two bouts of ethnic cleansing. Allied bombing unleashed the Serb expulsion of 1.3 million Albanians from March to June 1999, and it enabled Albanians to expel 100,000 Kosovo Serbs thereafter.43 The sui generis ethnic dynamic among Serbs and Albanians was lost on many foreigners. When American skeptics read about violence in the province, they groaned and concluded, “They’re at it again.” Many of those looking to justify their prior inaction in the face of atrocities in Bosnia began pointing to Kosovo as proof that when “the parties” did not want to live together, there was nothing that foreign, bomb- or checkbook-wielding do-gooders could do about it.

  Perfidy

  A third criticism of the intervention was that as it was going on interested gov
ernments and refugees inflated the extremity of the violence. Critics charged that U.S. officials lied and refugees exaggerated the atrocities, calling them “genocide” and making up huge numbers of murders. They were allegedly doing so in order to stir up support for the bombing.

  The “exaggeration” controversy is rooted in the inescapable difficulty of accurately gauging the scale of atrocities while they are being committed.44 When Madeleine Albright became secretary of state in 1996, she created an Office of War Crimes Analysis at the State Department on the logic that the best way to be sure the bureaucracy would focus on atrocities was to make it the full-time task of one group of U.S. officials. During NATO’s intervention in Serbia in 1999, lawyers in this office worked with officials in the intelligence community to analyze and publicize Serb war crimes as soon as they were discovered. The Clinton administration revealed a deeper commitment to learning about the welfare of missing civilians and refugees than it or any other foreign policy team had done before. Much had changed since 1975, when Cambodian refugees poured into Thailand and found few foreigners awaiting them. When Milosevic deported the Albanian population, the head of the State Department’s new war crimes unit, Ambassador David Scheffer, an international lawyer who had served as Albright’s deputy at the UN during the Srebrenica and Rwanda genocides, immediately flew to Macedonia, where the refugees were arriving. Scheffer conducted fifteen hours of interviews at the border crossing in Blace, Macedonia, speaking with more than 200 refugees. Scheffer’s findings, combined with those of the major human rights groups and journalists, were so disturbing that U.S. officials began debating whether or not the wholesale deportation of the Albanians constituted genocide.

  This was the State Department’s third “g-word” controversy in six years. In crises past, those who opposed U.S. intervention had tended to oppose use of the term. In this case many supporters of the NATO campaign argued against labeling Milosevic’s atrocities genocide. An American humanitarian intervention was warranted by the brutality of Serb ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Why not leave it at that? As one State Department official who fought the application of the term later recalled, “My view was, ‘Why do we need to put the genocide label on it?’ People are being killed. Women are being sexually violated and stabbed to death.” As he put it, “Let’s just look at the facts. The facts necessitate action. This was a systematic attack against a civilian population. That is enough. Everyone is caught up in the ‘Is it or isn’t it?’ We don’t need that debate.”

  Nonetheless, the debate occurred, and Scheffer prevailed. After a century of avoiding the term “genocide,” the State Department authorized its tentative use just ten days into the conflict between NATO and Serbia. At that time U.S. officials feared the Serbs were separating the Albanian men from the rest of the refugees in order to execute them. The Srebrenica precedent chilled those who saw the first refugee convoys crossing into Albania and Macedonia made up mainly of women and children. “What we see unfolding in Kosovo,” Scheffer said at a press briefing, “are war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity. And these are occurring on such a systematic and widespread basis that we have to conclude that we’re witnessing what might be described as indicators of genocide unfolding in Kosovo.”45 Scheffer knew that an authoritative diagnosis of genocide would be impossible to make during the Serb campaign of terror. Nonetheless, he did what Lemkin had long ago urged. Serb expulsions and killings were so widespread and well planned that Scheffer used the phrase “indicators of genocide” to capture what the refugees were describing and what human rights investigators were surmising. He did not deliver a formal finding of genocide but raised the specter of genocide. President Clinton himself also used the term on June 25, 1999, citing fears of “deliberate, systematic efforts at genocide.”46 This was a first for a U.S. president.

  Although Scheffer issued a relatively tentative and—according to the genocide convention—accurate finding of “indicators of genocide,” editorialists, nongovernmental advocates, and others criticized the Clinton team for using the term. They saw that hundreds of thousands of Albanians were being expelled but not murdered. Since most equated genocide with full-scale extermination, they accused the United States of exaggerating the Serb terror in order to justify both the NATO bombing mission and the civilian casualties caused by it. Certainly, some of the frustration with the administration was warranted. It was not a coincidence that having avoided the g-word regarding Bosnia and Rwanda when it wanted to avoid acting, the Clinton administration applied the label proactively only in the one intervention for which it was trying to mobilize support. In this case, a finding of “genocide” would not shame the United States; it would enhance its moral authority. Still, a straight reading of the genocide convention did capture the kind of ethnically based displacements and murders under way. Milosevic was destroying the Kosovo Albanian populace.

  U.S. officials were also faulted for their supposedly exaggerated estimates of the number of Albanians killed. In fact, records reveal that most were cautious about suggesting figures. At a State Department press conference on April 9,1999, reporters pressed Scheffer for a numerical estimate of Albanian deaths. “I think it would be very problematic to speculate at this time on a number,” Scheffer said. “I fear [any estimate] would be too low if I did speculate. I think we have to wait to find what the death count is.”47 On April 19, State Department spokesman James Rubin declared, “There are still 100,000 men that we are unable to account for, simply based on the number of men that ought to have accompanied women and children into Macedonia and Albania.” Rubin reminded reporters of Serb behavior in the recent past. “Based on past practice,” he said, “it is chilling to think where those 100,000 men are. We don’t know.”48 Rubin was right. Nobody could then know.

  Rubin’s formulation became the model for other U.S. officials. Most noted that military-aged men were being systematically separated from refugee columns. They reported concrete cases of mass executions and individual murders, estimated at 4,600. But although they may have assumed the worst, they did not leap publicly to conclusions. They distinguished the number of those Albanians they believed were already murdered and those who were simply unaccounted for. On May 7, 1999, for example, Defense Department spokesman Kenneth Bacon also said:

  100,000 military-age men are missing. We reckon that over 4,600 have been killed in mass executions in over 70 locations. . . . This could well be a conservative estimate of the number who have been killed in mass executions. Some may have been used to dig graves. Some may have . . . been . . . forced to support the Serb military in various ways. We have reports that some have been used as human shields. Some may have died in the hills or working. We just don’t know, and that’s one of the mysteries that won’t be resolved until this conflict is over.

  As reporters continued to grill him, Bacon seemed to lose patience. Sounding like Claiborne Pell during the 1988 Kurdish crisis, he reminded his audience of the obvious: “The fact that they’re missing means that we can’t interview them and find out exactly what’s happened to them.”49 A few days later Secretary Albright told Americans that there would necessarily be many open questions until independent investigators gained full access. “Only when fighting has ended and the people of Kosovo can safely return home will we know the full extent of the evil that has been unleashed in Kosovo,” she said. “But the fact that we do not know everything does not mean we know nothing. And the fact that we are unable to prevent this tragedy does not mean we should ignore it now.”50 Albright was breaking from past U.S. practice by relaying what she thought to be the morbid truth even though she knew it would likely increase the pressure for the United States to intervene with ground troops.

  In the year following Milosevic’s surrender, investigators began digging up mass graves in Kosovo. In September 1999 a Spanish forensic team claimed that it had uncovered war crimes’ victims, but far fewer than it had expected. The chief inspector in a Spanish unit, Juan Lope
z Palafox, declared, “We were told we were going to the worst part of Kosovo, that we should be prepared to perform more than two thousand autopsies and that we should have to work till the end of November. The result is very different. We uncovered 187 corpses and we are already back.” Spanish investigators brought new expectations to their reporting in Kosovo. “In former Yugoslavia,” Lopez Palafox continued, “there were crimes, some of which were undoubtedly horrific, but nevertheless related to the war. In Rwanda we saw the bodies of 450 women and children, heaped up inside a church, and all of their skulls had been split open.”51 The Rwanda genocide had set a whole new, modern standard for genocide. Body counts were compared, and the Kosovo tally was said not to measure up.

  In November the UN war crimes prosecutors announced that some 4,000 buried bodies had been found. Journalists took this “low” figure as proof the U.S. government had lied. “The numbers are significant, but nowhere near what U.S. officials had indicated during the fighting,” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said. “That’s 7,000 short of the 11,000 that had been reported to the U.N. after the war.” Blitzer’s report made no mention of the more than 300 sites that had not been probed at all or of the Serbs’ notorious tampering with evidence. Instead, he quoted a former Bush administration official who described the governmental “temptation to take poetic license with the data.”52