NATO's Humanitarian Trigger
by Diana Johnstone
From James Rubin to Christiane Amanpour (CNN), the broad range of
government and media opinion is totally united in demanding that NATO bomb
Serbia. This is necessary, we are told, in order to "avert a humanitarian
catastrophe", and because, "the only language Milosevic understands is force"...
which happens to be the language the U.S. wants to speak.
Kosovo is
presented as the problem, and NATO as the solution.
In reality, NATO is
the problem, and Kosovo is the solution.
After the collapse of the
Soviet Union, NATO needed a new excuse for pumping resources into the
military-industrial complex. Thanks to Kosovo, NATO can celebrate its 50th
anniversary next month by consacration of its new global mission: to intervene
anywhere in the world on humanitarian grounds. The recipe is easy: arm a group
of radical secessionists to shoot policemen, describe the inevitable police
retaliation as "ethnic cleansing", promise the rebels that NATO will bomb their
enemy if the fighting goes on, and then interpret the resulting mayhem as a
challenge to NATO's "resolve" which must be met by military action.
Thanks to Kosovo, national sovereignty will be a thing of the past --
not of course for Great Powers like the U.S. and China, but for weaker States
that really need it. National boundaries will be no obstacle to NATO
intervention.
Thanks to Kosovo, the U.S. can control eventual Caspian
oil pipeline routes between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, and extend the
European influence of favored ally Turkey.
Last February 23, James
Hooper, executive director of the Balkan Action Council, one of the many think
tanks that have sprung up to justify the ongoing transformation of former
Yugoslavia into NATO protectorates, gave a speech at the Holocaust Museum in
Washington at the invitation of its "Committee of Conscience". The first item on
his list of "things to do next" was this: "Accept that the Balkans are a region
of strategic interest for the United States, the new Berlin if you will, the
testing ground for NATO's resolve and US leadership. [...] The administration
should level with the American people and tell them that we are likely to be in
the Balkans militarily indefinitely, at least until there is a democratic
government in Belgrade."
In the Middle Ages, the Crusaders launched
their conquests from the Church pulpits. Today, NATO does so in the Holocaust
Museum. War must be sacred.
This sacralization has been largely
facilitated by a post-communist left which has taken refuge in moralism and
identity politics to the exclusion of any analysis of the economic and
geopolitical factors that continue to determine the macropolicies shaping the
world.
Jean-Christophe Rufin, former vice president of "Doctors Without
Borders" recently pointed to the responsibility of humanitarian non-governmental
organizations in justifying military intervention. "They were the first to
deplore the passivity of the political response to dramatic events in the
Balkans or Africa. Now they have got what they wanted, or so it seems. For in
practice, rubbing elbows with NATO could turn out to be extremely dangerous."
Already the call for United Nations soldiers to intervene on
humanitarian missions raised suspicions in the Third World that "the
humanitarians could be the Trojan horse of a new armed imperialism", Rufin wrote
in "Le Monde". But NATO is something else.
"With NATO, everything has
changed. Here we are dealing with a purely military, operational alliance,
designed to respond to a threat, that is to an enemy", wrote Rufin. "NATO
defines an enemy, threatens it, then eventually strikes and destroys it.
"Setting such a machine in motion requires a detonator. Today it is no
longer military. Nor is it political. The evidence is before us: NATO's trigger,
today, is... humanitarian. It takes blood, a masssacre, something that will
outrage public opinion so that it will welcome a violent reaction."
The
consequence, he concluded, is that "the civilian populations have never been so
potentially threatened as in Kosovo today. Why? Because those potential victims
are the key to international reaction. Let's be clear: the West wants dead
bodies. [...] We are waiting for them in Kosovo. We'll get them." Who will kill
them is a mystery but previous incidents suggest that "the threat comes from all
sides."
In the middle of conflict as in Kosovo, massacres can easily be
perpetrated... or "arranged". There are always television crews looking
precisely for that "top story".
Recently, Croatian officers have
admitted that in 1993 they themselves staged a "Serbian bombing" of the Croatian
coastal city of Sibenik for the benefit of Croatian television crews. The former
Commander of the 113th Croatian brigade headquarters, Davo Skugor, reacted
indignantly. "Why so much fuss?" he complained. "There is no city in Croatia in
which such tactical tricks were not used. After all, they are an integral part
of strategic planning. That's only one in a series of stratagems we've resorted
to during the war."
The fact remains that there really is a very serious
Kosovo problem. It has existed for well over a century, habitually exacerbated
by outside powers (the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, the Axis powers
during World War II). The Serbs are essentially a modernized peasant people, who
having liberated themselves from arbitrary Turkish Ottoman oppression in the
19th century, are attached to modern state institutions. In contrast, the
Albanians in the northern mountains of Albania and Kosovo have never really
accepted any law, political or religious, over their own unwritten "Kanun" based
on patriarchal obedience to vows, family honor, elaborate obligations, all of
which are enforced not by any government but by male family and clan chiefs
protecting their honor, eventually in the practice of blood feuds and revenge.
The basic problem of Kosovo is the difficult coexistence on one
territory of ethnic communities radically separated by customs, language and
historical self-identification. From a humanistic viewpoint, this problem is
more fundamental than the problem of State boundaries.
Mutual hatred and
fear is the fundamental human catastrophe in Kosovo. It has been going on for a
long time. It has got much worse in recent years. Why?
Two factors stand
out as paradoxically responsible for this worsening -- paradoxically, because
presented to the world as factors which should have improved the situation.
1 - The first is the establishment in the autonomous Kosovo of the 1970s
and 1980s of separate Albanian cultural institutions, notably the Albanian
language faculties in Pristina University. This cultural autonomy, demanded by
ethnic Albanian leaders, turned out to be a step not to reconciliation between
communities but to their total separation. Drawing on a relatively modest store
of past scholarship, largely originating in Austria, Germany or Enver Hoxha's
Albania, studies in Albanian history and literature amounted above all to
glorifications of Albanian identity. Rather than developing the critical
spririt, they developed narrow ethnocentricy. Graduates in these fields were
prepared above all for the career of nationalist political leader, and it is
striking the number of literati among Kosovo Albanian secessionist leaders.
Extreme cultural autonomy has created two populations with no common language.
In retrospect, what should have been done was to combine Serbian and
Albanian studies, requiring both languages, and developing original comparative
studies of history and literature. This would have subjected both Serbian and
Albanian national myths to the scrutiny of the other, and worked to correct the
nationalist bias in both. Bilingual comparative studies could and should have
been a way toward mutual understanding as well as an enrichment of universal
culture. Instead, culture in the service of identity politics leads to mutual
ignorance and contempt.
The lesson of this grave error should be a
warning elsewhere, starting in Macedonia, where Albanian nationalists are
clamoring to repeat the Pristina experience in Tetova. Other countries with
mixed ethnic populations should take note.
2. The second factor has been
the support from foreign powers, especially the United States, to the Albanian
nationalist cause in Kosovo. By uncritically accepting the version of the
tangled Kosovo situation presented by the Albanian lobby, American politicians
have greatly exacerbated the conflict by encouraging the armed Albanian rebels
and pushing the Serbian authorities into extreme efforts to wipe them out.
The "Kosovo Liberation Army" (UCK) has nothing to lose by provoking
deadly clashes, once it is clear that the number of dead and the number of
refugees will add to the balance of the "humanitarian catastrophe" that can
bring NATO and U.S. air power into the conflict on the Albanian side.
The Serbs have nothing to gain by restraint, once it is clear that they
will be blamed anyway for whatever happens.
By identifying the Albanians
as "victims" per se, and the Serbs as the villains, the United States and its
allies have made any fair and reasonable political situation virtually
impossible. The Clinton administration in particular builds its policy on the
assumption that what the Kosovar Albanians -- including the UCK -- really want
is "democracy", American style. In fact, what they want is power over a
particular territory, and among the Albanian nationalists, there is a bitter
power struggle going on over who will exercise that power.
Thus an
American myth of "U.S.-style democracy and free market economy will solve
everything" is added to the Serbian and Albanian myths to form a fictional
screen making reality almost impossible to discern, much less improve.
Underlying the American myth are Brzezinski-style geostrategic designs on
potential pipeline routes to Caspian oil and methodology for expanding NATO as
an instrument to ensure U.S. hegemony over the Eurasian land mass.
Supposing by some miracle the world suddenly turned upside down, and
there were outside powers who really cared about the fate of Kosovo and its
inhabitants, one could suggest the following:
1 - stop one-sided
demonization of the Serbs, recognize the genuine qualities, faults and fears on
all sides, and work to promote understanding rather than hatred;
2 -
stop arming and encouraging rebel groups;
3 - allow genuine mediation by
parties with no geostrategic or political interests at stake in the region.
Diana Johnstone was the European editor of
In these Times from 1979 to 1990, and
press officer of the Green group in the European Parliament from 1990 to 1996.
She is currently working on a book on the former Yugoslavia. She is the author
of: The Politics of Euromissiles: Europe's Role in America's
World (Schocken Books,
1985)