Making War to Keep Peace (36 page)

The events in Kosovo, especially in 1998–99, offered further proof of the dangers of wishful thinking and the underestimation of bad actors—in this case, the same bad actor who had been at work in Bosnia. Once again, UN threats were unpersuasive; once again, NATO was divided. In this case, however, the United States was able to coordinate action with NATO and bring the ethnic cleansing to an end—perhaps the Clinton administration's only real foreign policy victory, although it was a long time coming. And the UN has proved useful, after the fact, in peacekeeping and conflict resolution.

BACKGROUND OF THE CRISIS

Soon after the death of Josip Tito on May 4, 1980, rumors spread among the Serbian population of Yugoslavia that Albanians in the southern province of Kosovo were engaged in a plot to eliminate Serbs from the area, and even that they were planning genocide. On September 24, 1986, a “memorandum” from the Serbian Academy of Sciences was published in the mass-circulation paper
Vercernje Novosti
, bitterly attacking Tito's 1974 constitution. That constitution had made Kosovo and Vojvodina autonomous provinces with seats in the federal presidency, had given them a voice and vote equal to those of Yugoslavia's six republics, and had established autonomy in most areas. The destruction of this constitution
became a principal goal of Serb nationalists, and Slobodan Milošević was their chief spokesman.

By the time U.S. ambassador Warren Zimmerman arrived in Belgrade in March 1989, Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević had already made his reputation as an “ambitious and ruthless” (in Zimmerman's words) nationalist leader.
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He used Communist organizational tactics to launch his campaign of repression in Kosovo and extend his personal power in Serbia and Yugoslavia. Wielding populist rhetoric, Soviet-style ruthlessness, and the Communist Party network, Milošević packed meetings and purged opponents in his campaign to create a new post-Communist Yugoslavia. He did not hesitate to use force to make life increasingly difficult for the Kosovars.

Milošević's intentions were already evident in 1989. Soon after being elected president in Serbia, he revoked the Statute of Autonomy for Kosovo. That revocation was the prelude to a campaign of discrimination and ethnic cleansing against the Albanian Muslims who constituted 90 percent of Kosovo's population—a campaign that ultimately drove Yugoslavia to war and the NATO governments to countermeasures.

It was hard for Americans to comprehend how aggressive and persistent MiloÅ¡ević was in the eight years following Tito's death, just as it has always seemed difficult for us to grasp the scope and ambitions of any coercive ideology or personality throughout history. MiloÅ¡ević pressed Serbia's claim to sovereignty over Yugoslavia and Kosovo, and managed to persuade many Europeans and Americans of its justice, even though Serbia had no historic or constitutional right to such sovereignty. He was the “leader” who drove Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina into wars that left millions homeless and tens of thousands dead, the man whose megalomaniacal drive for power reduced the Yugoslav federal state to a fraction of its former size. Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina eventually acquired weapons and won their independence, but not until Croatia and Bosnia had endured brutal ethnic cleansing and war had spread to Kosovo.

From the beginning, Milošević ruled by force and responded only to force, rebuffing the efforts of seasoned diplomats like Cyrus Vance and the United Kingdom's Peter Carrington and David Owen to find peaceful settlements to the conflicts. Milošević was not interested in agreements
that gave minorities equal rights—or any rights. He was not interested in negotiating agreements or implementing agreements that had been negotiated. Peace and stability were not his priorities.

As chairman of the then Central Committee of the League of Communists of the Serb Party, MiloÅ¡ević launched his plan to gain control of the federal presidency and parliament in early 1989, through a series of carefully drafted constitutional “amendments,” imposed arbitrarily by fiat, that progressively restricted and ultimately eliminated Kosovo's autonomy. The amendments deprived Kosovo and Vojvodina of autonomy and gave MiloÅ¡ević a near majority in the federal presidency. MiloÅ¡ević was determined to undermine Kosovar Albanians' political, economic, and social rights, and he used these amendments to seize control over Kosovo's police, courts, and civil defense; its social, economic, educational, and administrative policy; and even over the choice of an official language. He eliminated Albanian language instruction, segregated Albanian schools, and abolished the Academy of Sciences in Kosovo. Ethnic Albanians were fired from state jobs and replaced by Serbs. The names of streets were changed from Albanian to Serbian.

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, MiloÅ¡ević 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, MiloÅ¡ević 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.
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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,”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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, MiloÅ¡ević'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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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