Kosovo Revisited

Before moving on to discuss the Darfur crisis of today I would like to reflect on the Kosovo humanitarian crisis of 1999. This brief reflection will put us in good stead to consider Darfur.

During the 1990’s we in America had encountered countless news stories of unrest in the former Yugoslav states. Seemingly, state after state succeeded from Yugoslavia in bloody battles between ethnic groups we had never heard of. By 1999 the reports on western TV had become climactic: CNN reported mass graves in Kosovo and displayed grim looking pictures of the tyrannical Milosevic. According to the media, the Serbs were the bad guys and the Kosovar Albanians were the helpless oppressed.

The West decided to take action in Kosovo through a NATO bombing campaign, relegating the UN to pointless arguments over what qualifies as genocide.

When Bill Clinton gave US sanction to the NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo I remember how morally gratified I felt. “Finally, someone is standing up and taking action to combat Serbian oppression,” I thought to myself. No more stalling with foolish diplomacy and no more fruitless debates while thousands in Kosovo are ruthlessly raped, tortured and executed. It was time for NATO to bring justice down on the head of Milosevic and his genocidal maniac comrades.

Over two months later the NATO bombing campaign ended with ‘victory.’ Serbia withdrew from Kosovo and ethnic Albanians were going to be able to return home. Again, I remember how morally gratified I felt that the West had finally stood up and taken action.

And this was the way I continued to feel until recently when I listened to Noam Chomsky’s Gifford Lecture series, “Illegal but Legitimate: a Dubious Doctrine for the Times.” During his lecture Noam points out that the vast majority of Serbian atrocities were committed after the NATO bombing campaign began. Noam’s point is simple, military aggression did not prevent the genocide in Kosovo. In fact, the bombings exacerbated the violence. One retired UN Force Commander (Lt Gen Satish Nambiar) very prophetically noted during the second week of NATO’s bombing campaign that the intervention was fatally flawed. He implied that the atrocities being committed during the bombings may have been spontaneous acts of revenge and retaliation by Serb forces against Kosovar Albanians for urging the West to bomb the Serb forces.

Lt Gen Nambiar states that when Western media portrayed the Serbs as 'evil aggressors' and the Kosovar Albanians as 'innocent' it was not only counterproductive but also dishonest. For instance, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) published a sobering human rights account of the atrocities in Kosovo. This report shows that once the NATO bombing had ceased, violence in Kosovo was predominately carried out by the Kosovo Liberation Army (ethnic Albanians) on Kosovo Serbs. Four months after the “successful” bombing by NATO had ended the cycle of violence continued with the 'oppressed' attacking the 'oppressors'. Not much had changed in Kosovo. What had changed most remarkably was that the West had appeased its moral conscience through an expensive but sanitized bombing campaign. Whether or not justice was served or subjugated by NATO is a more complicated picture.