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to Current Controversies: History Behind the Headlines
Humanitarianism
and Military Intervention: NATO in Kosovo
NATO's intervention into the Yugoslavia
province of Kosovo in 1999 ignited furious debate in the United
States and Europe. Once the allied bombing of Yugoslavia ended,
public discussion quieted. Yet for those who teach history at
the secondary and post-secondary levels, the NATO intervention
offers a powerful teaching opportunity. As the first Internet
war, a wide range of sources--from government briefings and independent
news accounts to post-war assessments--are readily available on
the World Wide Web. Drawing on these sources, history students
at the secondary and post-secondary level have a chance to build
the skills characteristic of history as a discipline: the ability
to conduct research, read documents closely and critically, weigh
evidence, and develop logical, well-documented conclusions. Further,
because opinion about the NATO intervention cuts across conventional
partisan and ideological lines, students have the opportunity
to form their own opinions about the conflict's causes, conduct,
and consequences. They must decide for themselves whether the
conflict could have been peacefully resolved through diplomacy;
whether the intervention averted or exacerbated a humanitarian
crisis; and whether the NATO bombing brought stability to the
Balkans or made the region less stable.
The conflict raises a host of
broader ethical questions that are sure to spark student interest:
Under what conditions do the United States and its allies have
the right to intervene in countries that brutally mistreat their
citizens? What tactics are morally appropriate during a humanitarian
intervention? And what are the ultimate consequences of the intervention?
Did the NATO bombing campaign set a precedent for future interventions
by the international community to stop atrocities and prevent
countries from mistreating their own citizens? Or was this a highly
exceptional event?
The Kosovo intervention is especially
useful in teaching students to place contemporary events in historical
perspective. NATO cast its actions as a watershed in foreign affairs:
for the first time, enlightened states waged war to prevent a
sovereign country from abusing its own citizens. Instead of fighting
to assert their narrow self-interest, the Western powers intervened
to defend human rights. One question that students might explore
is whether the Kosovo intervention represented a significant leap
forward in American foreign policy. Should the United States be
prepared to use force to protect the rights of people who are
being abused by their own government? Or would it be a mistake
for the United States to take sides in civil wars, and would it
be better for Americans simply to strive to defuse violence through
diplomacy?
Ethnic Conflict
The end of the Cold War has been
followed by violent ethnic conflicts, particularly in the Balkans,
the Caucasus, and Africa. In recent years, ethnic conflicts have
erupted in Angola, the Balkans, Burundi, Chechnya, Iraq, Israel
and Palestine, Kashmir, Liberia, Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone,
Sri Lanka, and Turkey. Ethnic wars have tended to be especially
brutal and intractable. In many instances, ethnic conflicts have
followed the breakdown of preexisting nation states.
Americans find it difficult to
understand ethnic conflict. Blinded by our society's relative
success in fashioning a multi-ethnic society, many Americans do
not see why other countries cannot learn to appreciate ethnic
pluralism and multiculturalism. One question that history instructors
might want to pose is why the American experience is so different
than that of most other societies.
For more than a century, the prevailing
American attitude toward diversity was that outsider groups needed
to assimilate to the customs of the dominant majority. In reality,
American ethnic groups maintained distinctive religious traditions,
foodways, and cultural practices, and used politics to defend
their interests. Far from simply assimilating, immigrants helped
fashion a hybrid culture, shaped by the mutual influence of cultural
groups. Languages were blended into an apparently uni-ethnic English.
Our music, diet, fashion, and sports all reflect a process of
borrowing and intermixture. Of course, cultural pluralism coexisted
with prejudice, discrimination, and inequality, and a belief that
certain groups could never be integrated into American society.
But however much violated in practice, the ideal of "e pluribus
unum" has become a crucial component of the United States'
national ideals.
Truly multi-ethnic societies like
the United States are rare. Despite an increase in immigration,
85 percent or more of the population in most European countries
comes from a single linguistic, ethnic, and religious group. Across
the world, ethnic conflict has contributed to a rapid proliferation
of new nations. Where there were just 58 members of the United
Nations in 1950, today there are 185. Ethnic minorities in Scotland,
Wales, Quebec, and the Spain's Basque region aspire to nationhood.
In Canada, Northern Ireland, and Rwanda, as well as the Balkans,
ethnic animosities are rooted in the inequitable distribution
of economic and political power. It is a pointed irony that the
rise of globalism has also contributed to the growth of ethnic
politics. Many ethnic groups believe that they need their own
state to effectively compete for resources, investment, and foreign
aid.
The Balkans
The Balkans, it is said, produce
more history than can be consumed locally. Between 1912 and 1999,
eight wars were fought in the region. Located in the mountainous
borderlands of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, the Balkans have
been historically divided by geography, language, religion, and
ethnicity.
There are several opposing explanations
for the ethnic conflicts raging in the Balkans. One view attributes
present-day conflicts to longstanding ethnic enmities that were
temporarily suppressed by Communist, authoritarian, and Cold War
pressures. This was President Bill Clinton's opinion at the beginning
of his presidency. He urged the United States to avoid involvement
in the Balkans because "the enmities go back 500 years, some
would say almost a thousand years." The problem with this
explanation is that it fails to explain the periods in which the
Balkans' inhabitants lived together in peace.
Some scholars blame the region's
ethnic strife on economic stress, competition for scare resources,
and declining living standards. Following Marshall Tito's death
in 1980, real personal income in Yugoslavia fell by a third, unemployment
climbed to over thirty percent, and inflation soared as high as
2,686 percent. Many state industries went bankrupt, and many Yugoslavs
subsisted on less than 100 marks a month. Another economic explanation
focuses on the differing economic prospects of the former Yugoslavia's
provinces in the post-Communist world. Bosnia produced agricultural
crops for exports and had strong trading ties with Islamic nations;
Slovenia was integrated with the Austrian and Italian economies;
and Croatia had high potential as a tourist destination. In contrast,
the Serbian economy was burdened by archaic state industries from
the Communist era and was dependent on coal, lead, and zinc produced
by mines located Kosovo.
Still others argue that ethnic
strife is a product of cynical manipulation by political elites.
In 1986, Slobodan Milosevic accused ethnic Albanians of waging
a reign of terror against the Serbs who lived in Kosovo, their
historic homeland. Milosevic shamelessly exploited Serbian resentment
to in order to develop a base of political support. He justified
abusive policies in the name of defending Kosovo's Serbian minority
from persecution and eliminating a "terrorist" organization,
the Kosovo Liberation Army.
The NATO Intervention
Otto von Bismarck once remarked:
"The Balkans are not worth the healthy bones of a Pomeranian
grenadier." During the early and mid-1990s, the United States
and its European allies shared Bismarck's reluctance to intervene
militarily in the former Yugoslavia. Why, then, did NATO decide
to intervene in Kosovo in 1999? Several factors prompted NATO's
decision. Repression of Kosovar Albanians was certainly an important
factor. This repression began with Kosovo's loss of political
autonomy in 1989, and included prohibitions on the use of the
Albanian language in public schools, and human rights abuses by
the Serb-dominated police force, culminating in the displacement
of up to 60,000 ethnic Albanians in mid- and late 1998, in retaliation
for guerrilla activities by the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Strategic concerns reinforced
humanitarianism. NATO acted to protect the region's stability
of the region and to prevent a flood of refugees. NATO was also
seeking to define a new role in the post-Cold War era and to preserve
its credibility after Yugoslavia refused to accept a Kosovo peace
plan known as the Ramboillet Agreement.
The intervention's critics insist
that NATO actions worsened a bad situation. They argue that most
war crimes and ethnic cleansing occurred in Kosovo occurred after
the NATO bombing began. The intervention's detractors argue that
had NATO addressed Kosovo during the 1995 Dayton peace talks over
Bosnia, or had it threatened to invade the province by land, the
bombing campaign might have been avoided, and mass population
displacement might not have occurred.
One question that students might
wish to debate is whether NATO went to war over Kosovo for humanitarian
reasons or for reasons of national interest. It might then be
helpful for students to compare and contrast the Kosovo intervention
with the American decision to go to war with Spain in 1898. In
1898, the pressure from newspapers to liberate Cubans from Spanish
oppression was intense as were concerns about the stability of
the Caribbean. Another useful comparison was with the United States'
decision in 1965 to launch bombing raids and to commit ground
troops to Vietnam. One major motive for escalation in Vietnam
was to preserve U.S. credibility. Was the same motive at work
in the Balkans?
The Kosovo Intervention and
American and International Law
Under international law, countries
can intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation under
two conditions: first, the nation must be brutally abusing human
rights and second, the intervention must be authorized by legitimate
international authorities. Some critics of intervention question
whether Serbian abuses were sufficiently severe to warranted intervention
and argue that NATO needed to receive authorization from the United
Nations Security Council. Others criticize the selectivity of
the West's moral outrage, citing even worse abuses in Southeastern
Turkey (against the Kurds), the Sudan, Rwanda, and Chechnya.
Some critics of U.S. involvement
in Kosovo contended that the intervention lacked proper authorization,
even under American law. Under Article I of the U.S. Constitution,
only Congress has the power to declare war. In fact, American
presidents have sent forces abroad more than a hundred times,
while Congress has declared war only five times. The 1973 War
Powers Act, passed over a presidential veto, requires a president
to win specific authorization from Congress to engage U.S. forces
in foreign combat for more than 90 days.
Teachers might raise two key questions.
One is whether presidents should need explicit Congressional or
U.N. Security Council approval before taking part in multilateral
humanitarian operations abroad. The other is how extreme must
the human rights abuses be to justify intervention? If a country
violates the rights enshrined in the Geneva Convention, the UN
Charter; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the UN International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; and the UN International
Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, is intervention
justified, even without UN Security Council approval, which would
have been impossible to attain?
The First Casualty
Truth, it is said, is the first
casualty in wartime. The NATO intervention raised a number of
factual disputes that students may wish to investigate. One is
whether a peaceful resolution to the crisis was possible prior
to the bombing campaign. Some observers speculate that the Western
powers intentionally provoked the conflict by making unacceptable
demands on the Yugoslav government. The Rambouillet Agreement,
proposed prior to the outbreak of hostilities, called for deployment
of a NATO military force in Kosovo, withdrawal of the Yugoslav
army into Serbia, and a referendum after three years on Kosovo
independence.
Another dispute is whether ethnic
cleansing of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians was imminent before the
start of NATO's bombing. The Western allies justified the intervention
partly on the grounds that it was necessary to prevent the forcible
displacement of the Kosovar Albanians. During the course of the
air war, some 1.4 million Kosovars were displaced from their homes.
Some observers argue that large-scale ethnic cleansing would not
have taken place with such brutality in the absence of the NATO
bombing.
The most heated factual dispute
involves the number of ethnic Albanians killed by Serbian paramilitary
units during the NATO intervention. On April 19, 1999, the U.S.
State Department announced that 500,000 Kosovar Albanians were
missing and feared dead. Following the conflict, American and
allied intelligence officials estimated that 11,334 ethnic Albanians
were killed by the Serbs. An early count of 195 grave sites (out
of a total of 529) by the International Criminal Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia found 2,108 bodies.
The issue of numbers is not simply
of academic interest. As the historian Michael Ignatieff has argued,
it goes to the question of how severe human rights violations
must be to justify armed intervention. Students might want to
compare the radically contrasting discussions of the number of
wartime deaths in an editorial by Ignatieff ("Counting Bodies
in Kosovo," New York Times, November 11, 1999, Sec. 4, p.
15) and a book review by George Kenney, a former State Department
official (The Nation, December 27, 1999, esp. pp. 27-28). Both
articles are available on-line at http://www.nytimes.com
and http://www.thenation.com
"Morality at 15,000 Feet"
During the 72-day air war, not
a single American soldier or pilot died. One American pilot was
shot down, and three soldiers were taken prisoner. But NATO's
bombing did result in the death of three Chinese journalists and
an unknown number of Yugoslav civilians and ethnic Albanian refugees.
The conflict also left tens of thousands of homes, businesses,
and schools burned, and resulted in attacks on power stations,
oil refineries, factories, roads, bridges television stations,
and water supplies, and sewage treatment plants. Accidents resulted
in serious damage to twenty hospitals, 190 schools, a refugee
camp, a refugee convoy, public housing projects in Nis, Surdelica,
and Cuprija, and the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
During the NATO bombing campaign,
former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger asked whether it
was appropriate for U.S. aircraft to attack civilian infrastructure.
"Pounding away on a civilian population day by day is, in
effect, saying our moral principles stop at 15,000 feet. I find
this very difficult to accept." The columnist Nat Hentoff
(Washington Post, June 19, 1999, A 19) raised an issue that should
provoke intense classroom discussion: Is it proper to inflict
suffering on the civilian population in order to prevent American
and allied combatants from being put in harm's way? During the
Kosovo conflict, the United States sought to minimize American
casualties by relying on cruise missiles and high altitude bombing.
But aerial bombardments and the use of cluster bombs inevitably
exposed civilians to risk.
Two basic principles of the U.S.
Code of Military Conduct are discrimination-observance of a distinction
between combatants and non-combatants-and proportionality-that
military force should be limited to that needed to end a conflict.
An issue that teachers might raise in class is whether the NATO
intervention conformed to these principles, and, equally important,
whether attacks on civilian infrastructure such as oil refineries,
bridges and electrical grids are justified when the alternative
involves prolonging a military conflict. Given internal divisions
within NATO, failure to win a swift victory likely would have
resulted in splits within the alliance. The bombing of civic targets
within Yugoslavia undermined civilian morale and led Yugoslavia
to sue for peace.
Another issue that teachers might
pose involves the responsibility of Serbian civilians for the
atrocities committed in their name. During the preceding decade,
Serbian nationalists had destroyed the Croatian port of Dubrovnik,
shelled the city of Sarajevo, massacred thousands of prisoners
of war in Srebrenica, and engaged in acts of ethnic cleansing.
As the historian Sethuraman Srinivasan, Jr., has noted:
By all accounts, not only did
the Serb public know about all of this, it actively supported
this campaign. Serb political life has been dominated by a national
ideology that emphasized the Serbs' own victimization and justified
destruction of all its enemies, leading to support for these
wars. Although Yugoslavia is not a democratic society, public
support for these wars of aggression was a necessity for their
prosecution, and indeed the wars and the regime's ability to
tap into this ideology of victimization allowed it to survive
despite its rather suspect performance in other areas. The Serb
public also strongly supported the war in Kosovo with its concurrent
destruction of the Albanian population. Protests after the war
complained about losing, not about crimes committed in the name
of Serbia. In this environment, the moral division between attacking
civilians and soldiers seems archaic. After all, who bore greater
moral responsibility for the war, the nineteen-year-old conscript
in Kosovo or the Serb public goading him on? …I think it
is undeniable that the Serb public itself was a prime mover
for the events that followed. It had to realize that it was
beaten before it would allow the atrocities to stop….
Continuity and Discontinuity
in American Foreign Policy
One question that the Kosovo crisis
raises is whether this intervention represents a radical shift
in American foreign policy--in a more altruistic and multilateral
direction--or whether it is in fact a continuation of early tendencies.
Is humanitarian intervention something new, or does the Kosovo
intervention represent a return to Wilsonian self-determination
or to the less idealistic interventions of the early twentieth
century designed to impose order and teach foreigners to "elect
good men"?
A variety of perspectives have
been offered on the issue of whether the Kosovo intervention illustrates
continuity or discontinuity in American foreign policy. One view
suggests that American foreign policy makers have consistently
justified foreign intervention on idealistic grounds. Thus President
George Bush justified American involvement in the Gulf War on
the grounds that it was necessary to protect Kuwaiti democracy
and President Lyndon Johnson justified expanded American intervention
in Vietnam on the grounds that it was necessary to prevent a Communist
takeover of South Vietnam.
A contrary view argues that shifts
in American foreign policy have been driven by popular pressure
from national minorities, such as those in Kosovo and East Timor,
who have become increasingly assertive in demanding their independence.
By making effective use of Western media and sympathizers to popularize
their demands, these groups have succeeded in pressuring the Western
powers to intervene on their behalf.
Was Intervention Worthwhile?
How can we determine whether the
Kosovo intervention was worthwhile? Certainly, the bombing campaign
achieved several of its aims, including the withdrawal of Serbian
forces from Kosovo and the return of Albanian refugees. By December
1999, 810,000 Kosovar Albanians had returned from hastily-built
refugee camps in Albania and Macedonia. The Kosovo Liberation
Army had been disbanded and had turned over more than 10,000 weapons.
Meanwhile, however, over 150,000 Serbs and 90,000 Romany (or Gypsies)
had fled Kosovo. And in the months after NATO peacekeepers entered
the province, rampant ethnic violence in Kosovo had resulted in
348 murders, 116 kidnappings, 1,070 lootings, and 1,106 cases
of arson.
Two reports released by the Organization
for Security and Co-Operation in Europe document the systematic
Serbian expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo after the NATO
air war began as well as the failure of NATO-led peacekeepers
to protect Serbs and Romany after the conflict was over.
In a speech to American troops
in Macedonia preparing to enter Kosovo as peacekeepers, Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright said: "This is what America is
good at, helping people." Her statement raises certain questions
that instructors might ask their students to pursue. What has
been the record of U.S. interventions in improving life in foreign
countries? Should past failures discourage interventions in the
present and future?
Debating the Kosovo Intervention
In the following extract, Sethuraman
Srinivasan, Jr., who teaches history at the University of Houston,
discusses the origins and significance of Serbian nationalism
and argues that NATO intervention was necessary to dissuade other
nation's from seeking to ethnically cleanse their lands by force.
Ask students to read this statement and say whether they agree
or disagree with its point of view and why.
Serb nationalism had been particularly
strong throughout the twentieth century. However, the combination
of unresolved issues from the Second World War and the disintegration
of the Yugoslavian state produced a particularly virulent form
of nationalism. Serbs believed that they had been cheated out
of what was rightfully theirs by the enemies and parasites that
surrounded them. To regain their rightful place, Serbs concluded
that they had to fight to regain their nation. In practice,
this meant using their military superiority to conquer lands
they claimed for Serbia and then using terror to expel any non-Serbs
from those lands. In Croatia, they expelled the non-Serb population
from twenty percent of the country before the Serbs were finally
driven out themselves in 1995. In Bosnia, the Serbs conquered
seventy percent of the country and brutally drove out non-Serb
populations.
Even after their defeat, they
maintained ethnic purity in the forty percent of Bosnia they
retained. In Kosovo, the Serbs carried out a ten-year program
of repression of the Albanian majority before the Albanians
created the KLA to carry out violent resistance. In the winter
of 1998, the Serbs drove out 60,000 civilians before international
pressure forced them to relent on their campaign. When the West
issued an ultimatum to the Serbs to negotiate an autonomy agreement
with the Kosovars (effectively returning to the status quo of
1989 prior to the beginning of the Serb repression), the Serbs
chose instead to drive out additional civilians.... The Serb
pattern of conduct in Croatia and Bosnia suggests that they
planned on doing this regardless of what the Americans did.
Not only was the Serb program
of ethnic cleansing an evil in and of itself, but its potential
effectiveness truly necessitated its defeat. The ability of a
subject population to resist a foreign occupation was one of the
most important deterrents to aggression during the twentieth century.
As Vietnam's war against America showed, if a large portion of
the population of an area denied the legitimacy of a government,
the cost of maintaining an occupation often outweighed its benefits.
European imperialism in Africa and Asia ended (or at least changed
forms, depending on your definition of imperialism) largely because
of this, as subject peoples around the world made imperialism
too difficult to maintain. The Serbian program of ethnic cleansing,
however, provided an easy solution to this problem: if the subject
population might give you trouble, get rid of them. The Serbs
essentially looked back in time to Oliver Cromwell and Andrew
Jackson to solve their ethnic problems. Much like Cromwell and
Jackson, the Serbs stood a very good chance of succeeding. If
they had been able to ethnically cleanse their enemies from Croatia
or Bosnia or Kosovo, the Serbs thus would have provided an example
for the rest of the world to follow. I know in India, Hindu bigots
would have trumpeted a Serb success as a model for what to do
in Kashmir. The Chinese, similarly, would find ethnic cleansing
a very useful tool in Tibet. In the nebulous borders of Central
Asia and Africa, ethnic cleansing similarly would have found a
lot of folks who would have considered it useful. The crisis in
Kosovo, therefore, had broader implications beyond the situation
on the ground in the province. Had the West not acted, who can
tell where others would have taken the lessons of Kosovo.
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