The Albanian majority sought to defend its rights under the 1974 constitution, launching demonstrations against Milošević’s amendments; he responded by declaring a state of emergency, enforcing it with large numbers of Serbian security police.
In March 1990, Milošević spearheaded a program designed to increase the power of Serbs in Kosovo at the expense of Albanians by manipulating property rights and sales, helping Serbs acquire houses and work in Kosovo, encouraging a low birth rate among Albanians, and replacing Albanians with Serbs in desirable jobs, including civil service, education, and the professions.
On July 2, 1990, Albanian members of the Kosovo parliament passed a resolution affirming that Kosovo was “an equal and independent entity within the framework of the Yugoslav federation.” This was simply a restatement of its status under the 1974 constitution, but Serb authorities reacted by dissolving the assembly. Two months later, the Kosovar delegates declared Kosovo a “republic” and held elections and a referendum that pronounced overwhelmingly in favor of independence. Out of these activities emerged the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), with Ibrahim Rugova, a pacifist and Sorbonne-educated professor of literature and history, as its leader.
Yet the LDK was unable to stem the tide of nationalism Milošević had inspired. The attraction of violent nationalism in some regions of southeastern Europe illustrates the danger Milošević and ethnic extremism posed to the peace of the region—and the danger of violent ideologies to stability throughout regions of the world. It was not dominoes we needed to be concerned about in the Balkans; it was the contagion of mass murder. The only known antidote to such a crisis is the imposition of law and civilization by direct intervention. That was why, in 1999, NATO finally went to war.
THE 1990S: EVOLUTION OF THE CRISIS
By the time he was elected president of Serbia in January 1990, Milošević had made his priorities clear. He was a Serb nationalist, not a Yugoslav nationalist, and he was determined to “make Serbia whole” and to strip Kosovo and Vojvodina of their autonomy, their votes in the federal presidency, their rights under the federal constitution, their officials, and their constitutions. By abolishing the autonomy of these provinces and taking their votes, Serbia would directly control three of the eight votes in the federal presidency. With Montenegro, whose support he could count on, Milošević would control four votes—clearing his way to pursue his campaign against the Albanians without political opposition.
Milošević was able to pursue his designs on Kosovo throughout the early 1990s largely unchallenged—in large part because of the international community’s hands-off attitude toward the region. In 1991 the Council of Ministers of the European Community appointed France’s former minister of justice Robert Badinter to the Arbitration Commission of the peace conference on the former Yugoslavia. When the newly renamed Badinter Arbitration Commission took on the subject of violence and legal challenges in Yugoslavia and its republics, it concluded that the international community should recognize Yugoslavia and its republics but ignore the autonomous regions. The status of Kosovo and anything that occurred within its borders, such as human rights violations, were considered to be internal issues.2
The Commission’s position was not unique; rather, it was the traditional position held for years, and echoed at the Munich and London conferences on Yugoslavia. At both conferences, concern was expressed about the bleak situation in Kosovo, and “the Serbian leadership” was urged to “respect minority rights” and “refrain from further repression in Kosovo,”3 but that was as far as it went. The only other mention of Kosovo during that time in international forums was during the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Helsinki summit in July 1992, when the Declaration on the Yugoslav Crisis urged “the authorities in Belgrade to refrain from further repression” of Kosovar Albanians. Once again, however, the issue was treated as an internal Yugoslav matter.4 And once again, words did not dissuade Milošević’s plans.
The United States took a distinctly different position. In December 1992, in the so-called Christmas warning, President George H. W. Bush declared, “In the event of conflict in Kosovo caused by Serbian action, the United States will be prepared to employ military force against the Serbians in Kosovo and in Serbia proper.” He was making the point that escalation of violence in Kosovo would be viewed as more than an internal problem.5 This warning was restated at a news conference in February 1993 by the incoming Clinton administration’s newly appointed secretary of state, Warren Christopher, who reiterated Bush’s position: “We remain prepared to respond against the Serbs in the event of a conflict in Kosovo caused by Serbian action.”6
But the strong words of the new administration were not followed by strong actions. Instead, the worsening Bosnian crisis monopolized American and European top officials’ attention, claimed their resources and energy. In the interest of halting the widely publicized mass murders in Bosnia, the Western leaders dropped Kosovo from their immediate agenda.7 Anxious to treat Milošević as a peace broker, they withheld criticism of his treatment of Kosovo, giving the impression that NATO and the Contact Group had no interest in the troubled region.
Meanwhile, by the mid-1990s, Milošević’s treatment of Kosovar Albanians had degenerated into widespread state-sponsored violence. In 1994, the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms in Kosovo recorded “2,157 physical assaults by police, 3,553 raids on private dwellings, and 2,963 arbitrary arrests.”8 Milošević was preoccupied with the so-called Serbian Question in Yugoslavia (his name for the decline of the Serbian population in the province of Kosovo). His campaign of terror drove thousands of Kosovar Albanians to flee to Italy between November 1994 and mid-January 1995 alone.9
After unleashing war in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, and imposing unspeakable misery on the people of these republics, Milošević agreed to the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords under heavy American and European pressure; he partially implemented them, only because they were backed by substantial force. But the negotiations at Dayton neglected to deal with Kosovo; the Western powers never made it an issue, and Milošević was hardly likely to allow democratic self-government for the region or to honor the human rights of the Kosovar Albanians, on his own recognizance. And so, in the late 1990s, he escalated his campaign of violence and ethnic cleansing.
The Serbian government justified its aggression against ethnic Albanians by insisting that its actions were a reaction to increasing violence against the Serbs, but until 1995, Kosovar Albanians had offered only nonviolent resistance to the government in Belgrade. Even after the outbreak of violence in 1998, most Kosovars followed their pacifist leader, the poet and intellectual Ibrahim Rugova.10 Rugova believed that the only way to restore autonomy for Kosovo was through diplomatic pressure from the west. However, as Serb aggression increased, support for the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) also increased. The first violent incidents took place In October 1997, when Serb police assaulted a peaceful protest of two thousand students in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. Later that year, the KLA mounted what the Belgrade news agency Beta called “a series of terrorist actions,” attacking a group of Serbian police.11 In fact, the KLA was a small group of poorly armed and poorly organized rebels. Not until the summer of 1998 did the KLA grow into a force of about one thousand soldiers, capable of resisting Serb security forces and large enough to gain international attention.12
By 1998, less than three years after the signing of the Dayton Accords, the refugee crisis in Kosovo had grown so extreme that it threatened to destabilize neighboring countries. The crisis, which lasted from March 1998 through March 1999, was the culmination of Milošević’s decade of oppression.
Reports of appalling violence came regularly from the region. On March 5, 1998, Serb forces brutally killed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) regional commander Adem Jashari, who had dared to stand up to Serb aggression, along with more than fifty members of his family. Confronted with such atrocities, the Western powers wrestled over the
appropriate response: Americans favored a strong response to Serb aggression, but the Europeans resisted military action, raising the same tired arguments that had been made against the use of force in Bosnia.
The result of the lack of any serious international interest in Kosovo, coupled with the increased Serb abuses of ethnic Albanians, undermined Rugova’s peaceful resistance attempts and stimulated greater violence by the KLA as they fought off the Serbs. By the spring of 1998, the KLA had begun guerilla warfare against the Serb security forces garnering attention. Responding to pressure from the Contact Group, the Council of Europe held debates on the situation in Kosovo. In January 1998, Council of Europe Resolution 1146 expressed concern about the “deterioration of the political situation in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia” and the “serious implications for the stability of the Balkan region.” The Council “condemn[ed] the continued repression of the ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo.”13
As in 1992, this expression of concern from Europe or from any nation did not prevent or deter Milošević from continuing his military campaign against the ethnic Albanian population. Having lost Bosnia, he merely redirected his focus of nationalist passions on Kosovo, which became central to his hold on power.
Government propaganda, a favorite Milošević tool, and the Serb media inflamed the situation, and the Serb security forces took ever more violent action. In February 1998, Yugoslav forces (claiming to rid Kosovo of terrorists) attacked the Drenica region using helicopters and armored vehicles. According to Amnesty International, however, “Between 28 February and 1 March the Serbian police killed 26 ethnic Albanians in the villages of Likosane and Cirez. There was evidence that many of these were unlawfully killed.”14 A subsequent Amnesty International report indicated that the deteriorating security situation in Drenica had led to “hundreds of civilian deaths, many apparently a result of deliberate or indiscriminate attacks” and that the “attacks on civilians have been part of the reason why more than fifty thousand people have fled their homes.”15 These attacks further inflamed an already volatile situation.
Although targeting civilians had long been a policy of the Milošević government, the brutality of the massacre at Drenica upped the level of violence and captured the attention of foreign policy officials in the U.S. government and elsewhere. At a meeting in Rome with Italian foreign minister Lamberto Dini on March 7, 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright addressed the “explosive and worrisome situation in Kosovo.”16 She had dealt with Milošević before—after five years of work on Bosnia as the U.S. ambassador to the UN, she believed that his actions were moral outrages and feared that Milošević could seriously destabilize the region. Moreover, her personal experience of escaping Nazi-occupied Europe left her ideologically opposed to appeasing dictators, for she had direct experience of the deadly consequences when ambitious leaders resort to coercion and violence to achieve their goals unchecked. She knew that Milošević understood only decisive action, and she remained committed to her word that the United States was “not going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer get away with doing in Bosnia.”17 Albright was determined to take serious measures to punish the Belgrade government.
But the division among the allies persisted after years of war in the Balkans, and they had only deepened despite the Dayton Peace Accord. One who shared many of Albright’s views was General Wesley Clark, who had been NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR) since 1997. Clark’s appointment was controversial within the military; his views were more hawkish than those of many in the Pentagon—including Clinton’s second-term secretary of defense, William Cohen, and the service chiefs, who were reluctant to engage militarily in Kosovo. But Clark had experience with Bosnia: having dealt with Milošević in Bosnia and Croatia, and attended the Dayton negotiations, he was aware of Milošević’s penchant for violence.
When Clark attended an inspection of U.S. troops stationed in Macedonia in March 1998, Macedonian president Kiro Gilgorov18 warned him that there would be trouble in Kosovo. Milošević, he said, “likes to use military force. And, though he might say he would negotiate, he does this to complicate situations, so he can seek advantages for himself. In the end, he respects only the threat of military force.”19 Clark’s own experience in Bosnia told him that Gilgorov was right.
President Clinton agreed with Secretary Albright that something would have to be done about Kosovo, and he encouraged her personally to take charge of the situation. She later wrote: “I concluded that we should not be content to follow the consensus on Kosovo, which was going nowhere. The NSC [National Security Council] and Pentagon did not desire to become involved in another war in the Balkans. We warned Milošević repeatedly not to launch a war…. On March 19, we met with the President to review our options. Several of us felt that if we did not confront Milošević now we would have to confront him later.” 20 Clinton agreed, saying, “In dealing with aggressors in the Balkans, hesitation is a license to kill.”21
On their own initiative, Albright and Clark met with the Contact Group on Yugoslavia in London on March 9, 1998.22 The Contact Group gave Milošević ten days to deescalate the conflict, demanding that he agree to political negotiations with ethnic Albanians in Kosovo led by Rugova. The group demanded that he remove the Serb special police from Kosovo and that the Yugoslav government grant full access to the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights. Albright emphasized the need for “action, not rhetoric” as “the only effective way to deal with this kind of violence.”23
Diplomatic Attempts to Check Milošević
Albright’s work through the Contact Group resulted in a UN resolution on March 31, 1998, imposing an arms embargo on Yugoslavia.24 Security Council Resolution 1160 stated that “failure to make constructive progress toward the peaceful resolution of the situation in Kosovo would lead to the consideration of additional measures” by the UN.25 The resolution did not specify what these measures might be; the very fact of mentioning enforcement, however, signaled that the Security Council no longer considered Kosovo a purely internal Yugoslavian matter. Yugoslavia’s ambassador to the UN, Vladislav Jovanovic, denounced the resolution as “an unprecedented interference in internal affairs.”26 The Russian and Chinese delegates joined in, stating that interference in a country’s internal matters “might have wider negative implications.”27
But the denouncements and outrage in New York and the UN resolution had little effect on the situation in Kosovo. Violence pressed forward. Masked Serb forces entered villages and terrorized civilians—killing some, forcing others to leave, separating families, and confiscating property. Many in the targeted villages were marched to train stations and packed onto trains headed toward the Macedonian border.28 In response to pressure from Western Europe and the United States, Milošević held a referendum in April 1998 in which the Serbian people voted against foreigners meddling in their affairs. Empowered by the 95 percent vote of confidence, he stepped up military operations and ethnic cleansing throughout Kosovo.29
The United States responded by pushing for new sanctions, but again the Europeans were not willing to take a tough stand against Serbia. Finally, the United States said it was “prepared to abandon the Contact Group…if the group balks at imposing new sanctions on the Belgrade government when it meets in Rome.”30 The United Kingdom backed the U.S. position, and in the spring of 1998 the Contact Group agreed to freeze Serb and Yugoslav assets and warned that it might block all foreign investment if Milošević did not agree to mediation and to talks with Rugova.31 A month later, the Contact Group imposed an investment ban on Yugoslavia, and the U.S. government sent Richard Holbrooke to Belgrade for the first round of talks.32
To show his personal determination to stop the violence, Clinton visited Kosovo, met with Rugova, and pledged U.S. aid. He asked Rugova to continue negotiations with Milošević, and promised that the disaster of Bosnia “should not be repe
ated and will not be repeated.”33 His support, and Holbrooke’s negotiating skill, led to a U.S.-brokered meeting between Rugova and Milošević on May 27, 1998. But despite this achievement, the refugees continued to pour out of Kosovo. By the end of May, an estimated three hundred people had been killed since the start of Yugoslav operation in February. In addition, approximately twelve thousand refugees had fled into Albania.34 Milošević refused to stop the violence, and Rugova broke off the talks.
At the NATO ministerial meeting in Luxemburg on May 28, chaired by British foreign secretary Robin Cook, the Balkans dominated the agenda. Clark and the German general Klaus Naumann, the head of NATO’s Military Committee, reported to the group on the situation. The Germans and the British agreed with the United States that something had to be done about Kosovo. Klaus Kinkel, German foreign minister, said that “a clear red line must be drawn.”35 Cook pledged that a “modern Europe will not tolerate the full might of an army being used against civilian centers.”36 In June, after another month of violence, Britain’s new prime minister, Tony Blair, declared: “[T]he only question that matters is whether you are prepared to use force. And we have to be.”37 NATO would have to get tough with Milošević. Among all the NATO members, however, only the United States, the United Kingdom, and perhaps Germany were prepared to use airpower at this point, and only Great Britain was prepared to use ground troops.
Making War to Keep Peace Page 29