by Noam Chomsky
On March 27, US-NATO Commanding General Wesley Clark declared that it was “entirely predictable” that Serbian terror and violence would intensify after the NATO bombing. On the same day, State Department spokesperson James Rubin said that “the United States is extremely alarmed by reports of an escalating pattern of Serbian attacks on Kosovar Albanian civilians,” now attributed in large part to paramilitary forces mobilized after the bombing.2 General Clark’s phrase “entirely predictable” is an overstatement. Nothing is “entirely predictable,” surely not the effects of extreme violence. But he is surely correct in implying that what happened at once was highly likely. As observed by Carnes Lord of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, formerly a Bush administration national security advisor, “enemies often react when shot at,” and “though western officials continue to deny it, there can be little doubt that the bombing campaign has provided both motive and opportunity for a wider and more savage Serbian operation than what was first envisioned.”3
In the preceding months, the threat of NATO bombing was reportedly followed by an increase in atrocities; the departure of international observers under the threat of bombing predictably had the same consequence. The bombing was then undertaken under the rational expectation that killing and refugee generation would escalate as a result, as indeed happened, even if the scale may have come as a surprise to some, though apparently not the commanding general.
Under Tito, Kosovars had had a considerable measure of self-rule. So matters remained until 1989, when Kosovo’s autonomy was rescinded by Slobodan Milosevic, who established direct Serbian rule and imposed “a Serbian version of Apartheid,” in the words of former US government specialist on the Balkans James Hooper, no dove: he advocated direct NATO invasion of Kosovo. The Kosovars “confounded the international community,” Hooper continues, “by eschewing a war of national liberation, embracing instead the nonviolent approach espoused by leading Kosovo intellectual Ibrahim Rugova and constructing a parallel civil society,” an impressive achievement, for which they were rewarded by “polite audiences and rhetorical encouragement from westem governments.” The nonviolent strategy “lost its credibility” at the Dayton accords in November 1995, Hooper observes. At Dayton, the US effectively partitioned Bosnia-Herzegovina between an eventual greater Croatia and greater Serbia, after having roughly equalized the balance of terror by providing arms and training for the forces of Croatian dictator Tudjman and supporting his violent expulsion of Serbs from Krajina and elsewhere. With the sides more or less balanced, and exhausted, the US took over, displacing the Europeans who had been assigned the dirty work—much to their annoyance. “In deference to Milosevic,” Hooper writes, the US “excluded Kosovo Albanian delegates” from the Dayton negotiations and “avoided discussion of the Kosovo problem.” “The reward for nonviolence was international neglect”; more accurately, US neglect.4
Recognition that the US understands only force led to “the rise of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and expansion of popular support for an armed independence struggle.”5 By February 1998, KLA attacks against Serbian police stations led to a “Serbian crackdown” and retaliation against civilians, another standard pattern: Israeli atrocities in Lebanon, particularly under Nobel Peace laureate Shimon Peres, are—or should be—a familiar example, though one that is not entirely appropriate. These Israeli atrocities are typically in response to attacks on its military forces occupying foreign territory in violation of long-standing Security Council orders to withdraw. Many Israeli attacks are not retaliatory at all, including the 1982 invasion that devastated much of Lebanon and left 20,000 civilians dead (a different story is preferred in US commentary, though the truth is familiar in Israel). We scarcely need imagine how the US would respond to attacks on police stations by a guerrilla force with foreign bases and supplies.
Fighting in Kosovo escalated, the scale of atrocities corresponding roughly to the resources of violence. An October 1998 cease-fire made possible the deployment of 2,000 OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) monitors. The breakdown of US-Milosevic negotiations led to renewed fighting, which increased with the threat of NATO bombing and the withdrawal of the monitors, again as predicted. Officials of the UN refugee agency and Catholic Relief Services had warned that the threat of bombing “would imperil the lives of tens of thousands of refugees believed to be hiding in the woods,” predicting “tragic” consequences if “NATO made it impossible for us to be here.”6
Atrocities then sharply escalated as the late March 1999 bombing provided “motive and opportunity,” as was surely “predictable,” if not “entirely” so.
The bombing was undertaken, under US initiative, after Milosevic had refused to sign the proposals worked out by the NATO powers at Rambouillet in February. There were disagreements within NATO, captured in a New York Times headline that read: “Trickiest Divides Are Among Big Powers at Kosovo Talks.” One problem had to do with deployment of NATO peacekeepers. The European powers wanted to ask the Security Council to authorize the deployment, in accord with treaty obligations and international law. Washington, however, refused to allow the “neuralgic word ‘authorize,’” the New York Times reported, though it did finally permit “endorse.” The Clinton administration “was sticking to its stand that NATO should be able to act independently of the United Nations.”
The discord within NATO continued. Apart from Britain (by now about as much of an independent actor as the Ukraine was in pre-Gorbachev years), NATO countries were skeptical of Washington’s preference for force and annoyed by Secretary of State Albright’s “saber-rattling,” which they regarded as “unhelpful when negotiations were at such a sensitive stage,” though “US officials were unapologetic about the hard line.”7
Turning from generally uncontested fact to speculation, we may ask why events proceeded as they did, focusing on the decisions of US planners—the factor that must be our primary concern on elementary moral grounds, and that is a leading, if not decisive, factor on grounds of equally elementary considerations of power.
We may note at first that the dismissal of Kosovar democrats “in deference to Milosevic” is hardly surprising. To mention another example, after Saddam Hussein’s repeated gassing of Kurds in 1988, in deference to its friend and ally the US barred official contacts with Kurdish leaders and Iraqi democratic dissidents, who were largely excluded from the media as well. The official ban was renewed immediately after the Gulf War, in March 1991, when Saddam was tacitly authorized to conduct a massacre of rebelling Shi’ites in the south and then Kurds in the north. The massacre proceeded under the steely gaze of “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf, who explained that he was “suckered” by Saddam, not anticipating that Saddam might carry out military actions with the helicopters he was authorized by Washington to use. The Bush administration explained that support for Saddam was necessary to preserve “stability,” and its preference for a military dictatorship that would rule Iraq with an “iron fist” just as Saddam had done was sagely endorsed by respected US commentators.8
Tacitly acknowledging past policy, Secretary of State Albright announced in December 1998 that “we have come to the determination that the Iraqi people would benefit if they had a government that really represented them.” Months earlier, on May 20, Albright had informed Indonesian President Suharto that he was no longer “our kind of guy,” having lost control and disobeyed IMF orders, so that he must resign and provide for “a democratic transition.” A few hours later, Suharto transferred formal authority to his hand-picked vice president. We celebrated the May 1999 elections in Indonesia, hailed by Washington and the press as the first democratic elections in 40 years—but without a reminder of the major US clandestine military operation 40 years earlier that brought Indonesian democracy to an end, undertaken in large measure because the democratic system was unacceptably open, even allowing participation of the left.9
We need not tarry on the plausibility of Washington’s discovery o
f the merits of democracy; the fact that the words can be articulated, eliciting no comment, is informative enough. In any event, there is no reason to be surprised at the disdain for nonviolent democratic forces in Kosovo, or at the fact that the bombing was undertaken with the likely prospect that it would undermine a courageous and growing democratic movement in Belgrade, now probably demolished as Serbs are “unified from heaven—but by the bombs, not by God,” in the words of Aleksa Djilas, the historian son of Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas. “The bombing has jeopardized the lives of more than 10 million people and set back the fledgling forces of democracy in Kosovo and Serbia,” having “blasted . . . [its] germinating seeds and insured they will not sprout again for a very long time,” according to Serbian dissident Veran Matic, editor in chief of the independent station Radio B-92 (now banned). Former Boston Globe editor Randolph Ryan, who has been working for years in the Balkans and living in Belgrade, writes that “now, thanks to NATO, Serbia has overnight become a totalitarian state in a frenzy of wartime mobilization,” as NATO must have expected, just as it “had to know that Milosevic would take immediate revenge by redoubling his attacks in Kosovo,” which NATO would have no way to stop.10
As to what planners “envisioned,” Carnes Lord’s confidence is hard to share. If the documentary record of past actions is any guide, planners probably were doing what comes naturally to those with a strong card—in this case, violence. Namely, play it, and then see what happens.
With the basic facts in mind, one may speculate about how Washington’s decisions were made. Turbulence in the Balkans qualifies as a “humanitarian crisis,” in the technical sense: it might harm the interests of rich and privileged people, unlike slaughters in Sierra Leone or Angola, or crimes we support or conduct ourselves. The question, then, is how to control the authentic crisis. The US will not tolerate the institutions of world order, so the problems have to be handled by NATO, which the US pretty much dominates. The divisions within NATO are understandable: violence is Washington’s strong card. It is necessary to guarantee the “credibility of NATO”—meaning, of US violence: others must have proper fear of the global hegemon. “One unappealing aspect of nearly any alternative” to bombing, Barton Gellman observed in a Washington Post review of “the events that led to the confrontation in Kosovo,” “was the humiliation of NATO and the United States.”11 National Security Advisor Samuel Berger “listed among the principal purposes of bombing ‘to demonstrate that NATO is serious.’” A European diplomat concurred: “Inaction would have involved ‘a major cost in credibility, particularly at this time as we approach the NATO summit in celebration of its 50th anniversary.’” “To walk away now would destroy NATO’s credibility,” Prime Minister Tony Blair informed Parliament.
Violence may fail, but planners can be confident that there is always more in reserve. Side benefits include an escalation of arms production and sales—the cover for the massive state role in the high-tech economy for years. And just as bombing unites Serbs behind Milosevic, it unites Americans behind Our Leaders. These are standard effects of violence; they may not last for long, but planning is for the short term.
These are speculations, but perhaps reasonable ones.
The Issues
There are two fundamental issues: What are the accepted and applicable “rules of world order”? How do these or other considerations apply in the case of Kosovo?
There is a regime of international law and international order, binding on all states, based on the UN Charter and subsequent resolutions and World Court decisions. In brief, the threat or use of force is banned unless explicitly authorized by the Security Council after it has determined that peaceful means have failed, or in self-defense against “armed attack” (a narrow concept) until the Security Council acts.
There is, of course, more to say. Thus, there is at least a tension, if not an outright contradiction, between the rules of world order laid down in the UN Charter and the rights articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD), a second pillar of the world order established under US initiative after World War II. The Charter bans force that violates state sovereignty; the UD guarantees the rights of individuals against oppressive states. The issue of “humanitarian intervention” arises from this tension. It is the right of “humanitarian intervention” that is claimed by the US/NATO in Kosovo, with the general support of editorial opinion and news reports.
The question was addressed at once in a New York Times report headed: “Legal Scholars Support Case for Using Force.” One example is offered: Allen Gerson, former counsel to the US mission to the UN. Two other legal scholars are cited. One, Ted Galen Carpenter, “scoffed at the administration argument” and dismissed the alleged right of intervention. The other is Jack Goldsmith, a specialist on international law at Chicago Law School. He says that critics of the NATO bombing “have a pretty good legal argument,” but “many people think [an exception for humanitarian intervention] does exist as a matter of custom and practice.”12 That summarizes the evidence offered to justify the favored conclusion stated in the headline.
Goldsmith’s observation is reasonable, at least if we agree that facts are relevant to the determination of “custom and practice.” We may also bear in mind a truism: the right of humanitarian intervention, if it exists, is premised on the “good faith” of those intervening, and that assumption is based not on their rhetoric but on their record, in particular their record of adherence to the principles of international law, World Court decisions, and so on. That is indeed a truism, at least with regard to others. Consider, for example, Iranian offers to intervene in Bosnia to prevent massacres at a time when the West would not do so. These were dismissed with ridicule (and were, in fact, generally ignored); if there was a reason beyond subordination to power, it was because Iranian good faith could not be assumed. A rational person then asks obvious questions: is the Iranian record of intervention and terror worse than that of the US? And other questions, for example: How should we assess the “good faith” of the only country to have vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to obey international law? What about its historical record? Unless such questions are prominent on the agenda of discourse, an honest person will dismiss it as mere allegiance to doctrine. A useful exercise is to determine how much of the literature—media or other—survives such elementary conditions as these.
When the decision was made to bomb, there had been a serious humanitarian crisis in Kosovo for a year. In such cases, outsiders have three choices:
I. try to escalate the catastrophe,
II. do nothing, or
III. try to mitigate the catastrophe.
The choices are illustrated by other contemporary cases. Let’s keep to a few of approximately the same scale, and ask where Kosovo fits into the pattern.
Colombia. In Colombia, according to State Department estimates, the annual level of political killing by the government and its paramilitary associates is about at the level of Kosovo, and refugee flight primarily from their atrocities is well over a million. Colombia was the leading western hemisphere recipient of US arms and training as violence increased through the ‘90s, and that assistance is now increasing, under a “drug war” pretext dismissed by almost all serious observers. The Clinton administration was particularly enthusiastic in its praise for President Gaviria, whose tenure in office was responsible for “appalling levels of violence,” according to human rights organizations, even surpassing his predecessors. Details are readily available.13
In this case, the US reaction is (I): escalate the atrocities.
Turkey. For years, Turkish repression of Kurds has been a major scandal. It peaked in the ‘90s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital Diyarbakir from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside. Two million were left homeless, according to the Turkish state minister for human rights, a result of “state terrorism” in part, he
acknowledged. “Mystery killings” of Kurds (assumed to be death squad killings) alone amounted to 3,200 in 1993 and 1994, along with torture, destruction of thousands of villages, bombing with napalm, and an unknown number of casualties, generally estimated in the tens of thousands; no one was counting. The killings are attributed to Kurdish terror in Turkish propaganda, generally adopted in the US as well. Presumably Serbian propaganda follows the same practice. Nineteen ninety-four marked two records in Turkey: it was “the year of the worst repression in the Kurdish provinces,” Jonathan Randal reported from the scene, and the year when Turkey became
the biggest single importer of American military hardware and thus the world’s largest arms purchaser. Its arsenal, 80 percent American, included M-60 tanks, F-16 fighter-bombers, Cobra gunships, and Blackhawk “slick” helicopters, all of which were eventually used against the Kurds.14
When human rights groups exposed Turkey’s use of US jets to bomb villages, the Clinton administration found ways to evade laws requiring suspension of arms deliveries, much as it was doing in Indonesia and elsewhere.
Colombia and Turkey explain their (US-supported) atrocities on grounds that they are defending their countries from the threat of terrorist guerrillas. As does the government of Yugoslavia.