By Tomas Valasek
Center for Defense Information November 9, 1998The following is a transcript of a speech given to the Institute for Policy Studies' briefing "Kosovo in Crisis." Other speakers included Cvijeto Job, former Yugoslav Ambassador; Elez Biberaj, Albanian News Service, Voice of America; Albert Cevallos, International Crisis Center, Jim Hooper, Executive Director, Balkan Action Council.
When Martha Honey showed me the list of speakers at today's briefing, I told her that we are in for an interesting briefing because the briefers themselves will disagree on some of the fundamental issues involved. Kosovo has indeed split the NGO community right down the middle. Some groups, especially the relief and human rights organizations called for the West the resolve the crisis with any means at its disposal, which has become a euphemism for sending in NATO. Others, especially the security and defense groups, warned against NATO becoming the stick which the West uses to beat everybody else into compliance. I represent the latter group.Having made the disclaimer, let me start with a very brief history of NATO's involvement in the Kosovo crisis, and then I will make some critical remarks regarding the alliance's role in Kosovo and generally in Europe nowadays.
NATO in Kosovo
As most of you well know, the crisis actually began brewing years ago but escalated with the emergence of the Kosovo Liberation Army earlier this year. As the violence and the number of dead increased, so did the pressure on NATO to step in and somehow put end to the fighting. NATO responded by drafting a plan for a military action. It then proceeded to finalize the plan, then to refine the finalized plan, then to put finishing touches on the refined and finalized plan, and the re-refine the already refined and finalized plan. In other words, NATO nations simply didn't have the political will to act.
Late September -- early October, there was a push coming mainly from Europe to get Kosovo back on the agenda. On October 12 NATO issued an "Activation Order," which means that all nations signed off on the plan of action -- in this case air strikes against the Serbian positions in Kosovo and elsewhere in Yugoslavia. Troops and weapons were moved to the area and the decision to launch air strikes was put in the hands of NATO's top military commander in the area, in this case the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Gen. Wesley Clark. Immediately, however, the order was suspended for 96 hours to give Richard Holbrooke time to complete his agreement with President Milosevic. Three days later, the deadline was extended for another ten days, and when the second deadline expired on October 27, the alliance decided to keep the Activation Order in place but not act on it, which is where we are now.
The current status is that the Activation Order is suspended and the North Atlantic Council, NATO's top decision-making body, would basically have to convene again to order the attack. In the meantime, NATO and the United States are moving troops and people out of the area, and reducing the military buildup from its highpoint around the beginning of November. The USS Eisenhower, an aircraft carrier with about 70 aircraft on board has left the area and is lurking of the coast of Iraq now, B-52 bombers temporarily deployed in U.K. have returned to bases in the United States
But even as the overall numbers are going down, there are signs that some troops are staying, and that for a long time but I will get to that later in the presentation.
That's the history of NATO's involvement in Kosovo in brief, let me now make a few comments regarding NATO's role in Kosovo.
The Constraints of International Law
It is clear that the end of the Cold War brought more wars and violence, and not the peace that was generally expected. The wars of the nineties were primitive, brutish, and often fought between neighbors. NATO may well be the only organization capable of stopping these conflicts once they started. But overzealous use of NATO's firepower can also be detrimental to international security. Let me explain why.
First of all, NATO's intervention in Kosovo would have been a violation of the U.N. charter, clear and simple. Kosovo is a part of Yugoslavia, which anybody in the Administration would be quick to confirm. The U.N. Charter states, and I quote, "ALL MEMBERS SHALL REFRAIN IN THEIR INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS FROM THE THREAT OR USE OF FORCE AGAINST THE TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY OR POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE OF ANY STATE." Obviously, bombing Yugoslavia against its will would constitute a violation of the its territorial integrity.
The only exception to this rule is Chapter VII of the Charter. It says that if actions of one state represent a breach of peace or an act of aggression, as the Serb actions in Kosovo arguable have. In this case, the U.N. Security Council has the right tell U.N. nations to do what they can to restore peace. This is what we had in Bosnia, where the U.N. Security Council passed an "all means necessary" resolution specifically tasking NATO to enforce the Dayton Peace Agreement. Let's also keep in mind that Bosnia, unlike Kosovo, was an independent and internationally recognized country whose legitimate government asked the United Nations and NATO for help.
In case of Kosovo, none of the U.N. Security Council resolutions, and there was a number of them, authorized the use of force against any of the parties to the conflict. NATO airstrikes would have been simply illegal under the existing international law.
NATO as a Global Cop?
Now I hear the critics say, "So what?" "There are people dying over there so why is that important what some piece of paper says?"
It is important because the disregard for the U.N. shows a tendency in NATO to act with no accountability and supervision whatsoever. What is worse, it is happening with active encouragement from some circles in the United States. Let me quote from the just released report of Senator William Roth, which was quoted in yesterday's Washington Post. Senator Roth, who is also the chairman of the North Atlantic Assembly, wrote: "EVEN THOUGH ALL NATO MEMBER STATES WOULD PREFER TO ACT WITH SUCH A MANDATE (meaning a U.N. mandate), THEY MUST NOT LIMIT THEMSELVES TO ACTING ONLY WHEN SUCH A MANDATE CAN BE AGREED" In other words, a U.N. Security Council Resolution would be nice but not really necessary, NATO can act without it.
The report continues, "THE NATO ALLIES SHOULD NEITHER SUGGEST THAT NATO MISSIONS WILL ASSUME A GLOBAL CHARACTER NOR PUT ARTIFICIAL GEOGRAPHIC LIMITS ON SUCH MISSIONS." In other words, NATO actions can be directed against anybody anywhere, possibly even outside the European continent.
Now, in my opinion this is analogous to a police chief in Montana declaring " I don't care what the Constitution or the laws say, I am letting my boys do whatever the hell they want to do, and they only take orders from me. If they feel like taking their show to another county or another state, that's fine with me, too." There is a reason why there are all kinds of checks on law-enforcement agencies in this country, and why they fall under the supervision of the local or federal government. We keep on forgetting that NATO is basically a law-enforcement agency - it is a military alliance - and as such it should be only one piece in the larger security puzzle. It can perform valuable service in deterring or defending against aggression but its role is limited to military operations. Moreover, it represents only 16 out of the many nations in the world, and these 16 powerful industrialized nations have interests very different from the rest of the world. This "free-lance" approach where the alliance embarks on missions that have nothing to do with defense but serve the "western interests" are bound to bring NATO in conflict with other nations. Already, we are seeing strains developing between NATO and Russia, and NATO nations themselves.
NATO Just One Piece of the Puzzle
That brings me to another point - to the extent that NATO is becoming the dominant security organization in Europe and - and possibly in Africa and Asia as well, as we have heard from Senator Roth - that takes away the resources and the attention from other organizations, which could have conceivably helped prevent the conflicts altogether.
This spring I had the good fortune to speak to Ambassador Miroslav Polreich, a former Czechoslovak ambassador to the OSCE - actually, then it was the CSCE, the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He told me of his times as a member of the CSCE delegation to Kosovo in 1992. At that time, three years after their autonomy was revoked, the Kosovars were already withdrawing from the political life of Yugoslavia and frequently clashed with the Yugoslav police. It was during Ambassador Polreich's visit that both sides asked the CSCE to help them find a way out of the trouble. Both the Serbs and the Kosovars felt they must negotiate their way out of the stalemate but also felt that too much happened between them to speak to each other directly. In retrospect, one may doubt the genuineness of this request but the fact is, it was never tested. The delegation returned to Vienna and actually volunteered to go back to Kosovo to mediate but there was no political will among the nations to get involved in Kosovo, and the idea died. It died of lack of resources, lack of enthusiasm, and lack of foresight.
The point is, there are ways to address a conflict before in grows into an open war. There are organization such as the OSCE, which specialize in preventive diplomacy and conflict resolution but act only if the governments of the nations represented in the organization show the will to do so. Unfortunately, our will to act seems to be derived from TV pictures of starving children and massacred families. By that time, of course, it is too late for preventive diplomacy.
Ending, or Delaying Conflicts?
In a way, the Administration has learned a wrong lesson from the Bosnia war. In Bosnia, NATO airstrikes helped stop the shooting. But it would be a mistake to equate the end of fighting with normal, peaceful life. Bosnia is one bitter and divided country, as the recent elections showed. NATO did not make the problem go away, it simply cut the level of animosity and hostility to where it's "acceptable."
This has practical ramifications for NATO and the United States. In order to keep Bosnia and now Kosovo from relapsing to violence, we had to commit to remain in the area indefinitely. The mandate of the NATO force in Bosnia has been renewed twice already, and the last time around the force was simply given an open-ended mandate to avoid the politically difficult renewal procedure. We have now committed to send observers to Kosovo. In order to rescue those observers should fighting break out, NATO is readying to establish a base in nearby Macedonia, with helicopters, armored personnel carriers and other equipment to evacuate the international personnel. The plan is to create the base for one year only but, as one NATO official told me, "there is no sign that things will be any different than in Bosnia."
To sum things up: we should not rely solely on NATO to resolve conflicts in the world. If it comes to the point where NATO must be used to pry fighting parties apart, that means we have missed an opportunity along the way to prevent the conflict altogether. A military alliance has a role to play but it's a limited role, on which it should work in cooperation with other international organizations and within existing law.
